Front Row - 17/07/2009

Arts news and reviews with Kirsty Lang. Pianist Stephen Hough has taken on a huge challenge for the 2009 Proms: playing all of Tchaikovsky's works for piano and orchestra, starting on the opening night of the festival. He has previously tackled Saint-Saens' five piano concertos, winning the Gramophone Record of the Year in 2001, and was later voted the 'winner of winners' in a poll commemorating 30 years of the award. Kirsty meets him backstage at the Royal Albert Hall to discuss his vision of Tchaikovsky's life and works. 'Eight' is a piece of interactive theatre that was created by 23-year-old Ella Hickson for the Edinburgh festival in 2008. On the way in, audiences choose four out of eight characters (including an upper class prostitute, a 7/7 survivor and an ex-squaddie) to perform their monologues, leaving the remaining four actors sitting at the side of the stage. At Edinburgh, Eight won three major awards and went on to a sell-out run in New York. Ella Hickson discusses the show, which has opened in London. Hundreds of students are graduating from music colleges all over the country with dreams of virtuoso performances at The Albert Hall. Kirsty Lang talks to a selection of them to about the reality of trying to get a job as a musician in recession-era Britain. Two rock gigs are going ahead that were rescheduled from earlier in the year: Morrissey had a throat illness and cancelled his Brixton concert in May, and, as a result of an attack by an eager fan in Toronto, Oasis had to reschedule their Cornwall gig from September 2008. Music writer Neil McCormick considers the honourable rock tradition of bands deciding not to come out to play.