Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra/Dudamel review – epic Mahler is exhilarating but overwhelming

Say what you will about El Sistema (and controversies continue over the political status and inner workings of the 50-year-old youth music programme), but one thing remains unequivocal: the ferocious energy of its flagship Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela. For the first of two performances at Barbican as part of an anniversary European tour with its music director Gustavo Dudamel, the stage was as packed as the auditorium. Mahler’s Symphony No 3 is his longest work, scored for a massive orchestra and its musical ambitions sprawl weightily.In the orchestra’s hands, the score quivered and growled from the get-go. The string sound was almost airless in its density

‘The loom has a beauty and rhythm’: textile artist Diedrick Brackens on making poetry out of yarn

It is tempting to see it as a happy ending. In Diedrick Brackens’s Towards the greenest place on earth, two Black men in the artist’s signature silhouette form throw an arm about each other’s waists, while holding opposite ends of a broom. Perhaps they’re about to enact the wedding folk ritual and jump backwards over the besom, or fly away on it like witches. One of four large textile works in the US artist’s first UK show, Woven Stories, at the Holburne Museum in Bath, its companion pieces are somewhat less bucolic: suggestively mythic tableaux with hints of violent ritual.Talking to the artist via Zoom from his studio in Los Angeles, however, it becomes clear the tender scene is at most a moment of reprieve

‘The ghosts are everywhere’: can the British Museum survive its omni-crisis?

The British Museum is everybody’s idea of a museum, but at the same time, it is hardly like a museum at all. It is more like a little state. The rooms you visit on a day out are the least of it: the museum is not the contents of its display cases. It is an embassy, a university, a police station, a science lab, a customs house, a base for archaeological excavations, a place of asylum, a retail business, a publisher, a morgue, a detective agency. “We’re not a warehouse, [or] a mausoleum,” its chair, the UK’s former chancellor George Osborne, told guests at the museum’s annual trustees’ dinner in November

Tony Slattery obituary

Tony Slattery, who has died of a heart attack aged 65, showed his great talent for improvisational comedy on the Channel 4 show Whose Line Is It Anyway? He often appeared as one of the four performers creating characters, scenes and songs based on suggestions by its host, Clive Anderson, or the studio audience.“Whose Line is just four people and a couple of stools,” Slattery enthused. “It’s just a brilliantly simple idea. The audience love to see you thinking on your feet.”Those audiences warmed to Slattery’s outrageous patter

Stephen Colbert on Trump’s legal immunity: ‘A president should be bound by the same laws as everyone else’

Late-show hosts talk Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing, Donald Trump’s upcoming inauguration and the latest developments with the Los Angeles wildfires.On Tuesday evening, Stephen Colbert celebrated the release of special counsel Jack Smith’s report on Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “Boom! When people find out what Trump did, his chances of being re-elected two months ago are going to be pretty slim,” The Late Show host quipped.According to Smith’s report, the justice department would have ample evidence to convict Trump, had he not won the election last November. “All true, and you can see it in the new Marvel series What If

Chimney sweep whose death changed child labour laws honoured with blue plaque

An 11-year-old chimney sweep whose death after getting stuck in a flue led to a change in Victorian child labour laws is to become the youngest British person to be honoured with an official blue plaque.George Brewster, a “climbing boy”, died in 1875 after getting jammed while cleaning the inside of a chimney at the County Pauper Lunatic Asylum in Fulbourn near Cambridge.According to a contemporary report in the Cambridge Independent News, George was told by the master sweeper, William Wyer, to remove his clothes and enter a flue measuring 12in by 7.5in. Fifteen minutes after beginning work, George became stuck