Arts & Culture

Her avant-garde choreography baffled the older critics but thrilled the students.

At only nineteen, she's already regarded as a virtuoso on the cello.

Baroque concertos make up a large part of the orchestra's repertoire.

The string ensemble played with remarkable precision and warmth.

The museum is mounting a major retrospective of her forty-year career.

This novel stands out within her oeuvre as her most personal book.

Only a true connoisseur would notice that the brushwork wasn't his.

The juxtaposition of industrial steel and soft fabric gives the sculpture its tension.

Her prose is wonderfully evocative of a childhood by the sea.

After years of abstraction, he returned to figurative painting.

The rose is a recurring motif throughout the whole novel.

His late paintings use a much darker, more muted palette.

The composition draws your eye straight to the figure in the corner.

The sky in the painting shifts from a pale gold to a deep crimson hue.

The chapel's fresco took the artist nearly four years to finish.

He's better known for his etchings than for his oil paintings.

A medieval tapestry depicting a hunt covers the entire far wall.

The Roman mosaic on the floor is astonishingly well preserved.

The composer wrote the music, but a poet supplied the libretto.

Jazz musicians improvise around the basic melody every time they play it.

The whole solo was pure improvisation; he'd never played it that way before.

The crowd kept clapping until the band came back for an encore.

The overture introduces all the main themes you'll hear later.

She took the second movement at a surprisingly brisk tempo.

The piece is full of deliberate dissonance that never quite resolves.

The lead role is written for a soprano with real power at the top.

He raised his baton, and the hall fell silent.

The orchestra rose to applaud the maestro as he entered.

The protagonist is an ageing actor looking back on his career.

The antagonist is far more interesting than the hero.

The novel works as an allegory for the collapse of the empire.

The whole poem rests on a single extended metaphor of the sea.

The play is a sharp satire on the art world and its egos.

The film abandons a linear narrative for a series of fragments.

Her early stories appeared in an anthology of new writing.

He wrote a sonnet for her every year on their anniversary.

Her memoir of life backstage at the opera became a surprise hit.

The prologue is set thirty years before the rest of the story.

The denouement ties up every loose thread a little too neatly.

She published her first three thrillers under a male pseudonym.

He was extraordinarily prolific, writing nearly fifty plays.

The title is an allusion to a line from an old ballad.

The dramatic irony is that we know the letter never arrived.

She made her debut at the opera house at just twenty-two.

Her closing monologue left half the audience in tears.

In his soliloquy, the prince weighs life against death.

When the lead fell ill, her understudy went on and stole the show.

Local artisans still weave the cloth on wooden looms.

Her paintings draw heavily on the folklore of her village.

The dance is part of an ancient harvest ritual.

The exhibition celebrates indigenous art from across the Pacific.

For decades her novels were left out of the literary canon.

The film somehow captured the zeitgeist of the late nineties.

Some dismiss his paintings as pure kitsch, but they sell for a fortune.

A whole team works behind the scenes to make the festival run smoothly.

Few pop songs stand the test of time the way these old ballads have.

Restoring the old theatre was a labour of love that took them a decade.

A marble bust of the composer stands in the foyer.

The conductor barely glanced at the score all evening.

The strings build to a thunderous crescendo in the final bars.

A travelling troupe performs the play in village squares all summer.

We grabbed a drink at the bar during the intermission.

After years in the limelight, she quietly retired from the stage.

We went backstage after the show to congratulate the cast.

A child actor in a tiny role completely stole the show.

Restoring the old theater's murals was truly a labor of love for the volunteers.

Restoring the old theater's murals was genuinely done out of devotion, not for money.

We bought ice creams during the interval before the second act began.

We bought ice creams during the break before the second act began.