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Episode details

Radio 4,23 Nov 2023,42 mins

Maestro, reality TV Squid Game, Brutalist architecture

Front Row

Available for over a year

Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic nose has attracted a lot of media attention for Maestro, his portrayal of the composer Leonard Bernstein. Tom Sutcliffe asks music critic Nicholas Kenyon and writer and cultural commentator Zoe Williams what they thought of Cooper’s directorial debut – which he spent years preparing for, studying his speech patterns and copying how he conducted Mahler symphonies. They also review Netflix’s Squid Game: The Challenge – a new reality TV spin-off of the hit Korean drama. Love it or hate it, Brutalism is an architectural form which could get its own museum – in a school assembly hall in north London. Architectural designer Ben Pentreath who works in traditional and classical styles and Catherine Croft, Director of the Twentieth Century Society assess its impact.

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