An Interplay With Phoenix Dance

Phoenix Dance Theatre has embarked on an 18-date UK-wide tour with a brand-new mixed bill, Interplay, bringing together work by internationally acclaimed choreographers Travis Knight and James Pett, Ed Myhill, Yusha-Marie Sorzano, and Phoenix Dance Theatre’s Artistic Director, Marcus Jarrell Willis.

Albums: Gogol Bordello We Mean It, Man!

Now comes their ninth album, We Mean It, Man!, and if the title sounds blunt, that’s because it is. This is Gogol Bordello at their most focused and forceful—a band stripping away the last of their Raggle-Taggle romanticism and tightening their sound into something lean, muscular, and unambiguously defiant.

Albums: Geneviève Racette Golden (Deluxe)

Rather than simply revisiting a previous release, this expanded edition reshapes it. The additional recordings and pared-down arrangements illuminate corners of the songs that may have once lingered in shadow. There is a quiet confidence in these reinterpretations — a sense of an artist returning not to revise, but to rediscover.

Albums: Kadebostany The Outsider

Lead single, Elephant in the Room, perfectly captures this ethos. It’s a quiet rebellion wrapped in sound — understated yet powerful, blending pop immediacy with subtle folk undertones. The track simmers rather than explodes, proving that tension can be just as compelling as release. It’s emblematic of the album’s wider ambition: pop music that challenges without alienating.

World Book Day 2026: The Biggest Celebration Of Reading Yet

Thursday 5th March promises a day of magic, adventure and stories for children across the UK If you've ever wanted to fall in love with books — or help a child do the same — this is your moment.

Classical Music: Elgar The Dream Of Gerontius Huddersfield Choral Society

Few works in the choral canon invite the kind of collector's obsession that Elgar's magnificent oratorio inspires. With nearly every significant recording of The Dream of Gerontius to hand, and the bar raised considerably high over the past few years—not least by Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort, and Nicholas Collon's compelling account with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra—a new release must earn its place on crowded shelves. This one does.

Classical Music: Alexander Malofeev Forgotten Melodies

Now based in Berlin, Malofeev has conceived this album as a meditation on exile and longing, drawing a quietly compelling thread between his own experience of living away from Russia and that of the four composers represented here — all of them born in Russia, all of them dying far from their homeland. Mikhail Glinka died in Berlin in 1857, Alexander Glazunov in Paris in 1936, Sergei Rachmaninoff in Beverly Hills in 1943, and Nikolai Medtner in London in 1951.

Open Air Folk Festival

Góbéfest (go-bee-fest), Manchester's original urban folk music and dance festival, is celebrating a decade of love, lutes and lángos this June. The weekend promises an expertly curated outdoor mix of bands and solo artists, folk dance groups, choirs and more.

Albums: Bruno Mars - The Romantic

If you are a Bruno Mars fan, it pays to be patient – this new album is his first solo album in ten years. Apart from singles with Lady GaGa and Rose, his fans have had to wait for a new solo outing. Was it worth the wait? Undoubtedly.

Opera: Strauss Elektra

This live recording, made in Bergen in December 2023 and released on Chandos, does full justice to that score. The engineering is superb, capturing both the tsunami of orchestral colour and the more intimate moments with equal clarity—the strings are luminous, and the brass and woodwind are vivid in their narrative momentum.

Silver & Gold: Long John Silver Restores His Reputation?

James Hyland is the actor, adapter, director and producer of this spin-off from that much-loved hit called Treasure Island. In this one-hander called Silver & Gold, Hyland takes on the tricky task of reclaiming, or at least re-framing, Long John Silver's appalling reputation. Silver, we are told, was indeed a very bad man.

Cruz Beckham And The Breakers

Back in October, Cruz Beckham suddenly hard-launched his music career.

Setting The Stage: 70 Years Of The Eurovision Song Contest To Open At The National Science And Media Museum This May

2026 marks the 70th anniversary of the Eurovision Song Contest. This new exhibition will explore the technical innovations that led to the Contest becoming a global phenomenon. Wider Setting the Stage programme of events will bring to life themes of performance, music, stagecraft and careers in broadcasting.

Nationwide Hunt For 2026 Best Classical Vocal Talent

A nationwide hunt is now on for the best UK classical vocal talent of 2026. Hosted by the prestigious Northern Aldborough Festival in North Yorkshire, the annual New Voices Singing Competition returns for a fourth year. The competition provides a springboard for emerging talent, offering paid performance opportunities for winners, as well as a £7,000 prize fund.

Sheffield’s The Leadmill Launches Public Crowdfunder To Secure New Permanent Venue

The Leadmill, one of Sheffield’s most influential cultural institutions, has today announced the launch of a public crowdfunding campaign aimed at securing a new permanent home in the city.

James Arthur Living The Impossible Dream On Tour

When James Arthur won the television talent show The X Factor in 2012, few would have dreamt that fourteen years hence the singer would be even more popular and selling out arenas in the process – not just in his home country but in other parts of Europe where Arthur remains successful.

Hit Musical Show Costumes On Show In Leeds

The Leeds branch of John Lewis, in partnership with the UK and Ireland tour of TINA – The Tina Turner Musical, is delighted to showcase costumes from the production ahead of its arrival at Leeds Grand Theatre, where it will play from Tue 17 March – Sat 4 April 2026.

Maximo Park Apply Some Pressure In Leeds

Over twenty years ago Paul Smith, lead singer with Maximo Park, arrived on stage at Leeds Town Hall wearing a trilby hat and reading a book as the band supported Kaiser Chiefs. The book might have gone; however, the hat, smart suit and stage presence were still intact as the northeast band arrived on stage at the O2 Academy in Leeds.

Poem Of The Week: The Only English Kid By Hannah Lowe

The Only English Kid When the debate got going on ‘Englishness’, I’d pity the only English kid – poor Johnny in his spotless Reeboks and blue Fred Perry.

Albums: Now Yearbook 85-89 - The Final Chapter

The period also saw the arrival of a more sophisticated style of pop that mixed jazz tendencies, as heard in Is It a Crime by Sade, Twilight World by Swing Out Sister, and Blow the House Down by Living in a Box.

Albums: Gorillaz - The Mountain

After celebrating 25 years of animated genre-hopping with anniversary celebrations, Gorillaz could have opted for caution. Instead, Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett have made something reflective and quietly ambitious. The album is shaped by personal loss—Albarn's father passed away, as did members of Hewlett’s family—and its emotional core is filtered through Indian musical traditions and spiritual ideas. Albarn’s trip to Varanasi to scatter his father’s ashes hangs over the record, giving it a searching, inward pull.

Albums: Leigh-Anne My Ego Told Me To

Sonically, the record is panoramic. Caribbean rhythms ripple through its foundations, not as aesthetic garnish but as lineage. Her Bajan and Jamaican heritage informs the album’s heartbeat, shaping grooves that lean toward dancehall, reggae, and afrobeats without sacrificing pop precision. There’s warmth in the percussion, elasticity in the basslines, and a looseness that suggests an artist finally exhaling.

Albums: Hilary Duff Luck…Or Something

Where Duff’s early work traded in fairytale optimism, Luck…or Something leans into emotional realism. The production still carries flashes of sunlit, early-2000s pop — buoyant hooks, polished synths, melodies that feel instantly familiar — but there’s a lived-in quality to both the songwriting and her delivery. She sounds grounded. The voice that once narrated teenage longing now moves through marriage, motherhood and self-doubt with steadier footing.

Classical Music: Harbingers Of Exile: Songs From The In-Between

The final word belongs to Korngold's Unvergänglichkeit—Imperishable—a title that feels less like a conclusion than a quiet statement of intent. I would travel to hear these two perform. This is bliss: warm, sensitive, simply delectable, and a wonderful choice of repertoire recorded superbly. As that last song intimates, it is enduring.

Mebrakh Haughton-Johnson – A Rising Star Of The Clarinet

A graduate of both the Royal College of Music and the Juilliard School, Mebrakh Haughton-Johnson is a multi-instrumentalist who, as well as being a talented clarinettist, can also play the flute, oboe and piano. He is performing as part of the Harrogate International Sunday Series on March 1, when he will be joined by award-winning pianist Kumi Matsuo.

Classical Music: Beethoven The Last Three Sonatas

Coming to these works later in life, she writes, the joys and riches presented themselves "with much more vivid colours" than might have been possible in younger, more turbulent years. That same crystalline clarity of intention attended her eventual embrace of the Diabelli Variations in her sixties, and the evidence is all here, on record, to confirm it.

Classical Music: Olivia Belli Daimon

Greek mythology has long exerted a powerful hold on composers, and the Italian pianist and composer Olivia Belli is no exception. Her debut piano concerto, Daimon, takes Homer's Odyssey as its imaginative springboard, and what emerges is a poetic work that blends classical tradition with her own unmistakably personal musical signature.

Iron Maiden Announce EDDFEST A Two-Day Fan Extravaganza At Knebworth Park

Iron Maiden are to headline a specially created festival event at Knebworth Park this year, promising fans what the band are calling "a Maiden World" built around their 50-year career.

Leeds Song Appoints Michael Chance CBE As Chair Designate

Leeds Song has announced the appointment of Michael Chance CBE as a new Trustee and Chair Designate of the charity. Chance will succeed Kathleen Evans BEM as Chair after the 2026 festival comes to a close.

"I Had Everything to Prove": The Flutist Who Overcame Adversity, Returned to the Stage at 46, and Is Now Turning Heads Across the Classical World

Jen Townsend (47), from York, is a musician who has returned to performing after a 25-year break from music. Jen began the flute when she was 7 years old, and it was her life until she was 21. After spending many years working as a midwife and having a family, Jen returned to the flute at age 46 to fulfil her lifelong dream of becoming a flute soloist.

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