Front Row - 05/02/2009

Presented by Kirsty Lang. Music critic Helen Wallace reviews the production of La Boheme which marks Jonathan Miller's return to the English National Opera. Kirsty talks to celebrated South African novelist Andre Brink about his latest work, A Fork In the Road. The book is a memoir, but by no means a conventional autobiography, for Brink has always experimented with literary form. Film critic Gaylene Gould reviews Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the new comedy by Woody Allen. It stars Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson as two young American women who visit Barcelona and become romantically entangled with the same artist. The Manchester Museum is advertising a job with a difference. They are looking for an artist-in-residence to help develop a project on environmental issues; the catch is that they want this person to live as a hermit in the gothic Victorian tower of the museum. Dr Nick Merriman, director of the museum, explains the project to Kirsty. Music journalist David Hepworth muses on the problem of people talking at gigs and suggests ways venues can deal with it.