As frontman and lyricist of US rockers The Hold Steady, Craig Finn specialises in vivid storytelling featuring larger than life characters. It’s a writing style that he has carried with him into his solo work too even if, as he says, the stories are “more vulnerable and maybe a little more personal” than fans of his other band may be used to.

There's something about the very opening of a Mahler symphony which gives you an idea of how the rest of the performance will go. In the case of the Second, the inescapable "Resurrection", it's the ferocity behind the upper string tremolo and the wildness of the uprush from cellos and basses.

Fiftieth anniversary? It seems incredible but also so exhilarating not least because these times we live in now seem to me to be a golden age for music of all kinds and in particular for what we label so inadequately classical music.

Charles Hazlewood (b. 1966) has worked across the gamut of orchestral music, his career showcasing the multitude of ways it can be perceived and enjoyed.

Over the past four decades Martin Gayford, The Spectator’s art critic, has travelled the world, been published in an amazing range of print and digital publications and written more than 20 books, many of them involving his fascination not only with looking at art, but also its making.

Several, including Looking at Pictures, have been collaborations with David Hockney. Man in a Blue Scarf, his account of sitting 250 hours for his portrait by Lucian Freud, is a classic. He has also published books on Michelangelo, Constable, and Van Gogh. 

A robe can be many things. Sure, it’s a garment, but it can also be cover, a disguise, a costume or a uniform. It’s also something composed of many different threads woven together to create something much bigger. It’s these kinds of layers of multiplicity which form the basis of the inspiration for Scottish composer Alastair White’s new opera, ROBE, premiering at this year’s Tête à Tête opera festival. Scored only for piano, flute and four female voices, the opera creates a layered matrix of worlds within worlds, exploring complex networks between stories, history and experiences.

Lia Williams is not an actor who looks for easy options. Twice she has played two characters in the same production, switching between them for different performances. In Pinter's Old Times in 2013 she and Kristin Scott Thomas alternated Anna with Kate, dancing competitive rings around Rufus Sewell's Deeley, and in Mary Stuart at the Almeida  she and Juliet Stevenson flipped a coin to decide, minutes before the play began, which of them would play Elizabeth or Mary.

As Martin Scorsese’s new feature film, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, hits Netflix and cinemas, and a new 14 CD boxed set enters the official Bootleg Series, theartsdesk talks exclusively to Scarlet Rivera, the

Visits from major foreign ballet companies are always news, but a two-week London season by one of America’s “big three” is something to get excited about. San Francisco Ballet doesn’t rest on its laurels. Eight of the 12 pieces offered in the coming Sadler's Wells season were premiered by the company only last year.

Martial arts mayhem, Shaolin philosophy, a tribe of masked hip hop warriors emerging from the mist of Staten Island, a Funkadelic-Parliament collective sprawling through the music industry in the age of black mass incarceration: the Wu-Tang Clan were all these things, immediately.