John Legend will return to the UAE next month, to perform a special show at Louvre Abu Dhabi.
The singer will play at the Louvre Abu Dhabi Grand Festival on November 12, in celebration of the museum's fifth anniversary. Tickets are on sale now, priced from Dh295.
Legend is an EGOT winner, having won all the major entertainment awards — the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony — during his career. He is best known for his soulful RnB ballads such as Ordinary People, All of Me and Love Me Now.
The gig announcement comes soon after the release of the singer's eighth studio album, Legend, released last month.
In 2020, he performed at Dubai's Coca-Cola Arena as part of the Dubai Shopping Festival, singing all his hits from his near two-decade career.
Legend belted out all the classics — including Used to Love U, Stay With You and Ordinary People from his 2004 Grammy Award-winning debut album, Get Lifted. There were plenty of other crowd-pleasers, from Tonight (Best You Ever Had) to Penthouse Floor and Green Light, a favourite from his 2008 studio album Evolver.
"Suave, smooth and endlessly uplifting, Legend has clearly developed a tried-and-tested formula that works. He didn’t stray too far from it last night, but, still, much love," wrote The National in a review of the gig.
The Louvre Abu Dhabi Grand Festival will take place from November 11 until November 13.
The weekend’s line-up also includes performances by Majid Al-Muhandis and Omar Khairat.
More information and tickets are available at abu-dhabi.platinumlist.net
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Gertrude Bell's life in focus
A feature film
At one point, two feature films were in the works, but only German director Werner Herzog’s project starring Nicole Kidman would be made. While there were high hopes he would do a worthy job of directing the biopic, when Queen of the Desert arrived in 2015 it was a disappointment. Critics panned the film, in which Herzog largely glossed over Bell’s political work in favour of her ill-fated romances.
A documentary
A project that did do justice to Bell arrived the next year: Sabine Krayenbuhl and Zeva Oelbaum’s Letters from Baghdad: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Gertrude Bell. Drawing on more than 1,000 pieces of archival footage, 1,700 documents and 1,600 letters, the filmmakers painstakingly pieced together a compelling narrative that managed to convey both the depth of Bell’s experience and her tortured love life.
Books, letters and archives
Two biographies have been written about Bell, and both are worth reading: Georgina Howell’s 2006 book Queen of the Desert and Janet Wallach’s 1996 effort Desert Queen. Bell published several books documenting her travels and there are also several volumes of her letters, although they are hard to find in print. Original documents are housed at the Gertrude Bell Archive at the University of Newcastle, which has an online catalogue.
