DORSET is blessed with great food, gorgeous scenery and some wonderful hotels and restaurants where you can enjoy the best of both. There are few that can compare with Summer Lodge at Evershot, an 18th country house which is one of the region’s finest hotels, set in one of the loveliest parts of West Dorset,…
Celebrating 30 years of a unique ceilidh band TELEVISION brought millions of people to Lark Rise To Candleford, Flora Thompson’s stories of growing up in a remote rural village at the turn of the 19th century. In 1978-9 a previous generation of theatre-goers had enjoyed an inventive adaptation with music at the National Theatre, followed…
FOR pushing 30 years now, Andy Cresci has been a familiar presence in the back row of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra with his trademark tuba. Having served under principal conductors Rudolph Barshai, Andrew Litton, Yakov Kreizberg, Marin Alsop and Kirill Karabits, he is in as good a position as any to assess where the orchestra…
Vadim Gluzman, the Israeli virtuoso violinist, recently visited Poole for two performances of Glazunov’s Violin Concerto with Kirill Karabits conducting the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. Between concerts he met Paul Jordan, the FTR’s Classical Music reviewer. VADIM Gluzman is firmly up there amongst the elite group of international violinists. Now in his early forties, he is in…
MOST of us would hesitate about welcoming thousands of people on to our land every year. But television star and animal lover Martin Clunes opens fields at his farm at Beaminster every August for Buckham Fair, a one-day country show which has become a firm favourite with visitors and people from across the region. Now…
ONCE upon a time, poet Brian Patten was walking on Dartmoor and, squinting into the sun, saw a cairn of stones in a different light. “What if the stones were books, and the books were the library of a giant,” he thought. And so The Story Giant was born – a book that weaves folk…