Superstar DJ Van Helden ready for some orchestral manoeuvres in park
The best of the local dance music scene will be celebrated in a special collaboration with the Ulster Orchestra on Saturday night.
Up to 20,000 revellers will enjoy US DJ Armand Van Helden's first gig here as the star turn for Lush! Classical at Belsonic in Ormeau Park.
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The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
Raymond Warren obituary
My friend Raymond Warren, who has died aged 96, was a composer of classical music who taught at Queen's University Belfast and then the University of Bristol. Many of Raymond's pieces were concerned with Christian responses to suffering, but he also wrote music for children and young people. A late success was his charming score for Ballet Shoes, written for the London Children's Ballet, which was performed at the Peacock theatre in London in 2001 and revived by that company in 2010 and 2019. Born in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, Raymond was the eldest child of Arthur, a maths teacher and keen amateur musician, and Gwendoline (nee Hallett), a shorthand typist. He went to Bancroft's school in Woodford Green, east London, and then studied music at Cambridge. After graduating, he began teaching music at Queen's University Belfast in 1955, where he was given a personal chair in composition in 1966, before becoming professor of music there in 1969. By then receiving national attention for some of his compositions – including The Pity of Love, written for Peter Pears and Julian Bream to perform at the 1966 Aldeburgh festival – he became resident composer to the Ulster Orchestra and a key figure in the Belfast festival at Queen's (now known as the Belfast international arts festival) from its inception in 1962. As the political atmosphere in Northern Ireland became increasingly tense, his music became a witness to events: Songs of Unity (1968), a work for children that celebrated ecumenism, was picketed by Ian Paisley at its premiere, and his powerful Second Symphony (1969) reflected the growing sectarian conflict of the time. Collaborations followed in 1970 with the choreographer Helen Lewis (There Is a Time, for double choir and dancers at the Cork choral festival) and with Seamus Heaney (A Lough Neagh Sequence, seven Heaney poems accompanied by Raymond on piano). Heaney also made a recording of his poetry with Warren's music in 2011, shortly before his death. Raymond left Belfast in 1972 to take up a position as chair in music at the University of Bristol, a post he held until retiring from teaching in 1994, although he remained active as a composer for many more years. His wife, Roberta (nee Smith), a textile artist whom he married in 1953, predeceased him in 2022. He is survived by their four children, Tim, Christopher, Ben and Clare, and eight grandchildren.
Graziadaily
2 days ago
- Graziadaily
Lush Just Launched Body Sprays- Including Super Milk
There are ample ways to celebrate your 30th birthday – a private dinner with your nearest and dearest, a a weekend getaway, a spa staycation, or a big bash? But for Lush, turning 30 means offering its loyal fanbase a new way of falling in love with its bestselling ethical beauty buys all over again. To mark a new milestone in the company's history, Lush has concocted a limited-edition range of five body sprays that celebrate the brand's knack for delicious smelling products – let's be honest, you can smell a Lush store from a mile off. 'Fragrance is central to so much of what we do at Lush,' says Lee Howes, fragrance lead at Lush. In fact, the brand boasts three in-house perfumers including Mark Constantine, one of the founders of Lush, as well as Emma Vincent and Alina Gliwinska. 'We're very passionate about how scent can shift, shape and influence the way that we feel and it's a careful consideration in every product at Lush to create a moment, spark a memory, or enhance an emotion. Our Body Sprays have seen huge success the last few years, and we wanted to celebrate this by highlighting some of the key fragrances from across our history in this format as a way to look back on how far we've come in three decades,' adds Howes. Sameeha Shaikh, beauty writer, testing the new Lush Body Sprays While the collection isn't Lush's first brush with body sprays, when cooking up the newest scents Lush looked to its customers to identify the key product fragrances they loved between 1995 to 2025 to encapsulate a specific moment in time. They landed on Super Milk, Blue Skies and Fluffy White Clouds, Karma, Strawberry Feels Forever, and Stormy Weather. Karma, £30, for example, was one of the first perfumes Lush launched in 1995 and has remained a global best seller ever since, while Super Milk, £32, captures the moment Lush's hair primer (the Super Milk Conditioning Hair Primer, £15) launched in 2020 and spread like wildfire on TikTok and beyond. Together, the five body sprays function much like a time capsule of the brand's best moments. Though, Mark Constantine, Lush co-founder and perfumer, assures me that he is most 'proud of us hitting the milestone of raising £100m for grassroots charities across the globe - that was a hell of an achievement.' 1. Lush Super Milk Body Spray What the brand says: 'A moreish, irresistible blend of candy-coconut scents with biscuity citrus and almond. An incredibly popular fragrance taken from our viral sensation and award-winning hair conditioning spray of the same name. We're just a little bit proud of this one…' What we know: If you loved the Super Milk Conditioning Hair Primer, £15, as much as we (and the whole of the internet) did, you will likely fall for the body spray iteration, too. Loaded with a candy-sweet scent, creamy vanilla, almond and tonka, this moreish scent is just asking to be laced all over. Lee Howes, fragrance lead at Lush, says: 'The viral hair primer first launched in 2020 as part of a wider focus on afro hair care, and in recent years has really boomed to become one of our most popular products. It's fresh and sweet with a slight creaminess, and is consistently the product scent that gets most requested in a wearable fragrance. We're always incredibly thankful for the people who shop with us and really enjoy our products. This is for them!' Pros Easy spray all-over nozzle Viral scent Cons Sameeha Shaikh is Grazia's beauty writer, covering all categories to bring you insights on the latest trends, industry news and the products you need to know about, viral or not (most probably viral).
The Guardian
20-07-2025
- The Guardian
Sir Roger Norrington obituary
Roger Norrington, who has died aged 91, was one of the great pioneers of the early music revival. With his acute sense of cultural history and performance tradition, he was one of a handful of conductors who radically redefined the realisation of music of earlier periods. Launching his career with the Schütz Choir, dedicated to the promulgation of the 17th-century German master Heinrich Schütz, he gave attention to principles of performance practice. Similar principles were then applied to the classical repertoire when he founded the London Classical Players in 1978, though gradually the ensemble encroached on later and later repertoire, bringing historical informed performance to music of the 20th century. More recently Norrington worked with modern ensembles such as the Orchestra of St Luke's (in New York), the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, Camerata Salzburg, and occasionally the Vienna Philharmonic, exhorting them to adopt the principles, if not the instruments, of the period with regard to the music they played. It is a measure of his success that much of what originally seemed controversial is now taken for granted. Born in Oxford, Roger was the son of Edith (nee Carver) and Sir Arthur Norrington, the vice-chancellor responsible for the Norrington league table of Oxford colleges, and began his studies at the Dragon school in the city, where he took the lead role in a production of Iolanthe, and Westminster school, London. After national service as an RAF fighter controller in Bournemouth, he studied English at Clare College, Cambridge (1954-57), subsequently taking a job at Oxford University Press publishing religious books. His musical activities were of an amateur nature: singing, playing and a little conducting. Then, in 1962, came the landmark London concert with the Schütz Chorale, which he had just formed along with the amateur Heinrich Schütz Choir. (The chorus was relaunched in 1972 as the Schütz Choir of London, later tackling 19th-century and contemporary music.) So successful was that 1962 concert that after a six-month secondment to Africa on behalf of OUP, he decided to devote his career to music. At the Royal College of Music in London, he studied conducting under Sir Adrian Boult, percussion, composition and the history of the orchestra. From 1969 to 1984 he was musical director of Kent Opera, bringing stylistic acumen and flair to an extensive repertoire – 30 different works, ranging from Monteverdi (including his own edition of L'incoronazione di Poppea) to Britten and Tippett. He also undertook engagements at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, English National Opera and many houses in mainland Europe. In 1978 he founded the London Classical Players, remaining its musical director until it was disbanded in 1997. These were to prove years of trailblazing musical discovery. One major enterprise was the complete cycle of Beethoven symphonies recorded for EMI (1987–92). For Norrington the crucial aspects of their performance were not pitch or orchestral size, but tempi, note-lengths, bowing and phrasing. His concern for Beethoven's own metronome markings – a preoccupation that was to become an article of faith – led to sometimes hair-raisingly swift tempi, but there was no denying the drama he brought to these works. In the Ninth Symphony he was determined to confront the paralysing monumentality of the late Romantic tradition, restoring the work to the 'human, quicksilver thought-world of the classical period'. Sonority was as important here as tempo: the timpani, beaten with hard sticks, should sound 'as if they have come straight from the field of Waterloo', in Norrington's vivid phrase. Another major project was the recording, also for EMI, of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (1991). Firmly grounding the conception in the tradition of 18th-century Singspiel, Norrington was intent on replacing all pomp and pretension with an approach that was humorous and specifically lightweight. Thus the singers chosen were young, light and agile, and a modest-sized chamber orchestra, gentler in timbre than is the norm today, was positioned in such a way as to encourage a close rapport with the singers, the conductor (Norrington) seated in the middle of the orchestral forces as a member of the team. Tempi were fleet, with easy Andantes, liberating the dance and folksong inspiration of the work. In 1985 Norrington inaugurated an occasional series of weekend 'experiences', examining the interpretation and performance of a particular composer in depth through concerts, lectures, panel discussions and exhibitions. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz and Brahms were among the composers illuminatingly treated. As the London Classical Players progressed through the 19th century, so the principles of historically informed practice cast revealing new light on Romantic repertoire. If Norrington's renderings of the Preludes to Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger – the former a flowing two-in-a bar, the latter a brisk canter to undermine all pomp and pretension – raised Wagnerian eyebrows, each interpretation was founded on historical evidence. That indeed was always Norrington's yardstick. His practice was to establish the composer's intention and then find a musical way of realising it. It was an approach that could lead to dogmatism, but more often to thrilling artistic experiences. His work with modern-instrument orchestras, notably with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra (principal conductor 1998–2011, returning in 2016 to conduct the orchestra's final concert, at the BBC Proms) and the Zurich Chamber Orchestra (chief conductor 2011–16), took the battle into new territory. The most controversial topic proved to be that of vibrato, to which Norrington developed an ideological, almost pathological aversion. Arguing that vibrato was applied systematically in orchestral playing only in the 1930s, he exhorted orchestras to desist. While the furore over the notion of Land of Hope and Glory being delivered with no vibrato when he conducted the Last Night of the Proms in 2008 had an element of manufactured alarm – Norrington denied that he had ever advocated it – there was a somehow symbolic sense of a last bastion being stormed. Knighted in 1997, Norrington lived near Newbury, Berkshire, moving in 2014 to Exeter, Devon. He took his final bow as a conductor in 2021 with the Royal Northern Sinfonia at the Sage Gateshead (now The Glasshouse), making his final recordings, of Mozart's five violin concertos, with Francesca Dego, in 2019 and 2021 (released 2021-22). The last years of his life were, however, overshadowed by illness. In the early 90s Norrington was diagnosed with skin cancer and a brain tumour. With the help of an American specialist the malady was kept under control, but the physical strain and heavy medication left their mark. Where he had been in earlier years a dynamic, athletic presence on the podium, he mellowed into a leisurely facilitator. True, the collegial approach had always been central to Norrington's aesthetic. The tyrannical figure of the conductor, embodied in, say, Toscanini or Fritz Reiner, was long banished in favour of a creative fellowship of like-minded individuals. And yet some of the later performances lacked the earlier drive. Not that in intellectual terms he became any less messianic. He referred to his non-vibrato campaign as his 'last hand grenade', typically advocating it not because it was authentic but because it made the music, in his opinion, more 'beautiful, expressive and exciting'. In a 2007 interview when his recording of Mahler's Second Symphony with his Stuttgart orchestra was released he asserted: 'So if, on the day I die, the world is playing without vibrato, of course I will be delighted. But even if they aren't, I'll still be delighted because at least I did.' In matters of vibrato the world has not yet come round to universal acceptance of his ideas. But Norrington will be remembered for his groundbreaking initiatives and truly radical spirit: as a man who helped change received ideas about the performance of music. In 1964 he married Susan McLean May, and they had two children, Ben and Amy. They divorced in 1982, and four years later he married the choreographer Kay Lawrence, with whom he had another son, Tom. Kay died last year, and he is survived by his children. Roger Arthur Carver Norrington, conductor, born 16 March 1934; died 18 July 2025
