Boyd Tonkin

United Kingdom

Writer, Journalist and Literary Critic at Freelance

Chair @TheOrwellPrize fiction 2023; Benson Medallist @RSLiterature; words @FTLifeArts @TheEconomist @WSJ @TheTLS; '100 Best Novels in Translation' @Galileobooks

Articles

Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists, Suzuki, St Martin-in-the-Fields review - the perfect temperature for Bach

1 week ago | theartsdesk.com | Boyd Tonkin

In the Saxony of 1725 – still in the grip of Europe’s “Little Ice Age” – Bach and his musicians would seldom have had to deal with the sort of midsummer sauna that enveloped Trafalgar Square last night. Yet, at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Masaaki Suzuki, the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists managed to beat the heat with an exhilarating shirt-sleeved journey through the cantatas that Bach wrote exactly three centuries ago for the Thomaskirche in Leipzig.
Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists, Suzuki, St-Martin-in-the-Fields review - the perfect temperature for Bach

1 week ago | theartsdesk.com | Boyd Tonkin

In the Saxony of 1725 – still in the grip of Europe’s “Little Ice Age” – Bach and his musicians would seldom have had to deal with the sort of midsummer sauna that enveloped Trafalgar Square last night. Yet, at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Masaaki Suzuki, the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists managed to beat the heat with an exhilarating shirt-sleeved journey through the cantatas that Bach wrote exactly three centuries ago for the Thomaskirche in Leipzig.
Aldeburgh Festival, first weekend - dance to the music of time

1 week ago | theartsdesk.com | Boyd Tonkin

This year’s Aldeburgh Festival – the 76th – takes as its motto a line from Shelley‘s Prometheus Unbound. The poet speaks of despair “Mingled with love and then dissolved in sound”. With or without words, music shapes and voices feelings that would otherwise lie beyond expression. Shelley’s high-flying Romantic ideals may feel abstruse but, as the Festival’s opening weekend showed, music’s power not just to charm but to heal and reveal can have striking, and practical, real-world effects.
Così Fan Tutte, Nevill Holt Festival/Opera North review

2 weeks ago | theartsdesk.com | Boyd Tonkin

Marianne Moore once famously defined poems as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”. Operas also fill, or anyway should fill, their artificial horticulture with genuine beasts – and flowers. And no work demands the population of a fanciful landscape with authentic passion more urgently than Così fan tutte.
Così Fan Tutte, Nevill Holt Festival/Opera North review - re-writing the script

2 weeks ago | theartsdesk.com | Boyd Tonkin

Marianne Moore once famously defined poems as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”. Operas also fill, or anyway should fill, their artificial horticulture with genuine beasts – and flowers. And no work demands the population of a fanciful landscape with authentic passion more urgently than Così fan tutte.
The Flying Dutchman, Opera Holland Park review - into the storm of dreams

1 month ago | theartsdesk.com | Boyd Tonkin

Thankfully, Julia Burbach’s version of The Flying Dutchman for Opera Holland Park doesn’t try to be one of those concept-laden productions that banishes all sight of the sea. Because last night the ocean – or rather its typical weather – came to us. A stiff south-westerly punched for hours across the awnings of the semi-open theatre’s canopy.
The Flying Dutchman, Opera Holland Park review - into the storm of dreams

1 month ago | theartsdesk.com | Boyd Tonkin

Thankfully, Julia Burbach’s version of The Flying Dutchman for Opera Holland Park doesn’t try to be one of those concept-laden productions that banishes all sight of the sea. Because last night the ocean – or rather its typical weather – came to us. A stiff south-westerly punched for hours across the awnings of the semi-open theatre’s canopy.
Do Ho Suh at Tate Modern

1 month ago | the-tls.co.uk | Judith Flanders |Boyd Tonkin |Gabriel Josipovici

Do Ho Suh’s childhood home was a reproduction hanok, a traditional-style Korean residence commissioned by his father, Suh Se-ok, himself a noted artist, in response to the levelling of many similar houses in favour of 1960s- and 1970s-style apartment blocks in modern Seoul.
I Found Myself . . . The Last Dreams by Naguib Mahfouz — reveries from Cairo

1 month ago | ft.com | Boyd Tonkin

Sleep, it seems, may whisk even Nobel laureates into the same sort of fantasy realm as ordinary folk.
Girl, 1983 by Linn Ullmann — illuminating the shadows of the past

1 month ago | ft.com | Boyd Tonkin

In the depths of winter, a thin girl — barely 16 — flies alone from New York to Paris.