Arts & Ideas Folgen

The singers Enrico Caruso and Elsie Houston, a new opera at ENO and links between musical and artistic traditions in Latin America, Europe and New York are explored by the academics Ditlev Rindom and New Generation Thinker Adjoa Osei. Plus the baritone Peter Brathwaite has an exhibition of lockdown photographs in which he recreates the poses of black people portrayed in paintings from the last 800 years opening in Bristol (the photographs have also been published in a book) and has a musical work in progress, shown at the ROH, which explores his family's Barbadian history. Shahidha Bari hostsBlue runs at English National Opera from April 20th - May 4th Adjoa Osei is organising a conference at Trinity College, the University of Cambridge on April 28th called Performing Black Womanhood Dr Ditlev Rindom is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at King's College, London currently finishing his first book, Singing in the City: Opera, Italianità, and Transatlantic Exchange, 1887-1914 Peter Brathwaite's Insurrection: A Work in Progress was performed at the Royal Opera House and you can hear more about his research in this Sunday feature for BBC Radio 3 Rebel Sounds: Musical Resistance in Barbados https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hg3t An exhibition of his photographs Rediscovering Black Portraiture is at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery from April 14th to July 16th. A book accompanies the show. You can find his Essay series about the portraits on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000nbrlProducer: Torquil MacLeod

From nature as "a living whole" in the ideas of Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt to the "Blood and Soil" ideas of Nazi Germany: New Generation Thinker Jim Scown, from Cardiff University, traces the links between ideas about the order of nature to more troubling views about links with the land that led organic pioneer Jorian Jenks to refer to "alien hands" tilling "British soil".Producer: Torquil MacLeod

‘Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did but backwards and in high heels’ said cartoonist Bob Thaves. Matthew Sweet is joined by Lucy Bolton, Pamela Hutchinson, David Benedict and Miles Eady to look at her life (1911-1995) and a film career that stretched far beyond the 10 movies she made with Astaire, including an Oscar winning performance in Kitty Foyle.Producer: Torquil MacLeodThe BFI season runs to the end of April Many of Ginger Rogers' RKO films are available to watch on iPlayer, including Primrose Path, Kitty Foyle, Vivacious Lady, Carefree and The Gay Divorcee. You can find a whole series of episodes of Free Thinking devoted to film stars including Asta Nielsen, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.