The allure of the British cellist Jacqueline du Pré (1945–1987) is the subject of this article, which examines the spectacle of her playing and the drama of her biography. What motivated the popular and critical responses to du Pré as a performer? What can accounts and depictions of her tell us about how the public personae of classical musicians, and especially female classical musicians, have been constructed? Du Pré’s career and legacy provide insight into multiple discourses including celebrity, classical music, gender, social propriety and disability. I query the operation of apparently ‘extra-musical’ significations that become attached to musicians and affect how they are perceived and understood, both in their lifetimes and afterward. I correlate various accounts of du Pré, drawing on newspaper reviews and magazine articles, observations made by those who knew her, audio-visual documentation and dramatizations of her life – principally the biopic Hilary and Jackie, directed by Anand Tucker (1999). I analyse how du Pré was characterized in dramatic form and portrayed on film. I argue that her persona is multi-layered, collectively authored, and informed by her gender, performance style, and artistic interpretations (or distortions) of her biography. Furthermore, I propose that du Pré’s allure highlights the fascination and anxieties the cello can provoke as a potentially sensual, erotically charged musical instrument.

In the past decade the National Theatre has presented two restagings of earlier productions, now featuring an onstage orchestra (the Southbank Sinfonia) that has been choreographed and made a key part of the spectacle: Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, by Tom Stoppard, with a musical score by André Previn, performed in 2009 and 2010, and Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, performed in 2016 and 2018. Contemporaneously, a vanguard of British orchestras has begun to explore how concerts can be presented in ways that are more theatrically sophisticated than the standard concert format. Here Adrian Curtin investigates ‘orchestral theatre’ as an aesthetic proposition by examining the collaborations between the Southbank Sinfonia and the National Theatre, and their legacy in a series of experimental concerts staged by the Southbank Sinfonia entitled #ConcertLab. He aims to identify the artistic and cultural significance of these collaborations and #ConcertLab so as to better understand contemporary efforts to present orchestras (and, more broadly, classical music) in a theatrically innovative manner. Adrian Curtin is a senior lecturer in the Drama Department at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (Palgrave, 2014) and Death in Modern Theatre: Stages of Mortality (Manchester University Press, 2019), and principal investigator of the AHRC research network ‘Representing “Classical Music” in the Twenty-First Century’.

is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave ® and Macmillan ® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Curtin, Adrian, 1980-Avant-garde theatre sound : staging sonic modernity / by Adrian Curtin. pages cm. -(Avant-gardes in performance) Includes bibliographical references and index.

This article examines the sonic elements of Antonin Artaud's 1935 production of Les Cenci, Artaud's infamous attempt to realize his proposed 'theatre of cruelty'. The aim is to qualify the critical opinion that Artaud was a failed theatre practitioner by analysing the conceptual complexity and potential effectiveness of the sound design for this production. Artaud utilized new sonic technologies and an aesthetic arguably derived in part from Balinese gamelan music to affect audience members on a physiological level, prefiguring the vibrational force and ultrasonic ambitions of modern sonic warfare. This analysis engages a range of primary and secondary materials, including an extant recording of music and sound effects used for the production, and is situated with reference to an estimated acoustic 'horizon of expectations' of Artaud's audiences and to neuroscientific conceptions of how the brain processes auditory input.

I n his essay "Dream Textures: A Brief Note on Nabokov," W. G.Sebald comments on the metaphysical quality of the work of Vladimir Nabokov : the observance of unusual phenomena; the mysterious coincidences and chance meetings that occur; and especially, the invisible observers that haunt his narratives-"fleeting, transparent beings of uncertain provenance and purpose" (Campo Santo 147). The invisible observer in Nabokov's fiction, Sebald writes, may be an emissary of some other world, and appears to have a better view not only than the characters in the narrative but than the narrator and the author who guides the narrator's pen. It is curious, then, and quite revealing, that Sebald should employ a similar figure in his second work of prose fiction, Die Ausgewanderten (1992, Eng. tr., The Emigrants 1996), 1 and that this figure should prove to be Nabokov himself, who turns up in the guise of the "man with the butterfly net"-a spectral, rather than an invisible, observer. Sebald's text is composed of four tales, each of which depicts the life of an émigré who has been affected in some way by the calamities of the Second World War. The Emigrants, like Sebald's other work, problematizes the concept of genre by blurring the lines between fiction, biography, travelogue, memoir, intellectual speculation on history and architecture, and photographic journal. The characters whose lives Sebald documents in each of the four stories-the retired country doctor, Henry Selwyn; the schoolteacher, Paul Bereyter; the butler and valet, Ambros Adelwarth; and Max Ferber, the exiled Jewish-German painter-are all based on real life people, only Sebald has intervened in the telling of the tales and has subtly altered the details. 2 Into this intricate arrangement of the fictional and the factual flits the man with the butterfly net, who crosses paths with two of RELIGION and the ARTS 9:3-4 (2005): 258-283.