Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Rio, Rio

Stuff I have learnt after two solid weeks watching the Olympics on TV. 1. Tennis and golf shouldn’t be Olympic sports. Yes, I know we won both and Rose’s final chip on to the 18th green was great to watch. But you can see this sort of thing done with a tougher range of competitors at any number of majors all the time. Olympic medals should be there to reward the Corinthian spirit not just an opportunity for millionaires to add something a bit different to their mantelpiece. 2. I still don’t understand the judging system for the diving but had arse quality been included in the women’s events —

Martin Gayford

The Capability controversy

In a piece of light verse from the 1770s ‘Dame Nature’ — out strolling ‘one bright day’ — bumps into the great landscape designer, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. Immediately the goddess lays into him for plagiarism. How, she wants to know, does he have the impudence to show his face? All the items he claims to have created — ‘the lawn, wood and water’ — were made in fact by her. Brown, for his part, is not at all disconcerted. He admits that Nature has provided him with good raw materials. But the beautifying refinements? Those are all his. ‘The swell of that knoll,’ he points out, ‘is mine… the ridges

Kate Chisholm

Super human

‘We think we’re in charge of this stuff but we’re not,’ said Quincy Jones, the composer, arranger, jazz trumpeter, musical genius. He was talking to Julian Joseph at the Montreux Jazz Festival for Jazz Line-Up on Radio 3 (Saturday). ‘It’s divine intervention.’ Jones, who masterminded Michael Jackson’s Thriller as well as countless other hits, film scores (including The Italian Job and The Color Purple) and his own ‘Soul Bossa Nova’, was remarkably sanguine about his extraordinary career. His enormous self-confidence was there from the start. Finding himself in Paris in the 1950s touring with a big band, he decided to stay on so that he could study with Nadia Boulanger

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

Requiem for a designer dream

Threnody. Dirge. Lament. Epitaph. Elegy. Wake. There are so many English terms to describe the passing of people and things that you wonder if introspection about demise might be a national characteristic. All these words are on my (doggedly cheerful) mind as staff have moved out of London’s Design Museum, securing the last open door with a padlock on 30 June and leaving inside cavernous spaces with rusting memories of designer people and designer things. So what was the old Design Museum? It arose from a conversation between Terence Conran and me in 1978. He was the proprietor of Habitat, whose decent, modern merchandise revolutionised popular taste, and I was

James MacMillan

Tartan-ing up the arts

Many years ago an arts spokesperson for the SNP launched an extraordinary attack on Scottish Opera, saying, ‘If push comes to shove, if I were arts minister and had to choose between the survival of Gaelic music and Scottish Opera, I would say rich people could always go to Salzburg for lieder and Sydney for opera.’ With various parties now competing for the class-war-and-grievance vote, I sense a return of this kind of rhetoric in debates on Scottish culture, arts and politics. Scottish Opera routinely invite Scotland’s politicians to their productions and their invitations are routinely ignored. The feeling is that there are votes to be lost in being seen

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Northern exposure | 11 August 2016

As the festival grows, the good acts are harder to find and the prices keep rising to meet the throngs of showbiz refugees who surge north in the belief that the glory, this year, will be theirs. Arriving at my one-star hovel (no breakfast, no towels, shared bathroom), I was given a security key and a disc of see-through soap that I could have hidden beneath a tea-bag. The bill, payable in advance, was a third higher than last year. Glory in this city belongs to the landlord. Marcel Lucont’s Whine List is performed by a suave, self-adoring Frenchman who starts by asking if anyone in the crowd is new

Martin Gayford

Recycling the avant-garde

One overcast afternoon in late July I took a train to Norfolk. It seemed a good time and place to catch up on the state of the avant-garde. My goal was the British Art Show 8, currently spread over several venues in the centre of Norwich and due next month to move on to Southampton, the final resting-point on its slow progress around what remains, for the moment at least, the United Kingdom. Not having caught the exhibition at its previous stopping points, Leeds and Edinburgh, I thought this would be a suitable place to see it since Norwich is a town of art historical pedigree — home to Cotman,

Harry Mount

Diary – 11 August 2016

Walking along the Brighton seafront, I was struck by posters advertising endless tribute acts; among them Suspiciously Elvis, the Small Fakers and The Kinx. The Edinburgh Fringe is much the same. Shows this summer include Dirty Harry: The Ultimate Tribute to Blondie and Billie Holliday: Tribute to the Iconic Lady Day. Or how about Gary Bland’s Mr Romantic: A Tribute to Johnny Mathis — ‘an insight into Mathis’s career, and how Mathis’s music has been a big part of Gary’s life through love, heartache and laughter’. The theatre at Edinburgh, too, is full of remakes. Fancy Dan Choo-Park’s The Song of Beast (after Hamlet), where the Prince of Denmark is teleported to

Michael Tanner

One of Grimeborn’s most striking rediscoveries: Mozart & Salieri at the Arcola Theatre reviewed

Mozart & Salieri Grimeborn, Arcola Theatre, until 13 August I have been a fairly conscientious reviewer of Dalston’s Grimeborn festival for the last eight years. The name is less suitable now than it was. The Arcola Theatre, where the operas are performed, is now only a stone’s throw from Dalston Square, with its chic apartment blocks and bars and the resplendent C.L.R. James library, and the whole neighbourhood is upwardly mobile. The Arcola itself remains a ramshackle place, and you can expect the usual late start, inadequate provision of programmes, and general air of administrative amateurism. This year’s season began on 23 July, and runs till 8 September. Some of the

Kate Chisholm

Funny is dangerous

‘I’m off now,’ says Michael Heath, signing off from his selection of Desert Island Discs on Radio 4, ‘to go and do a gag about God knows what. I haven’t the foggiest idea.’ You’d think at 80 he might want to stop, or have to give up because he’d somehow lost his touch. But not the cartoon editor of this magazine, and chief creator of wicked skits on the idiocies and affectations of contemporary life. What’s it like working as a cartoonist after the attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo? asked Kirsty Young. ‘It adds a certain frisson to your drawing,’ Michael replies. ‘But I never wanted to be

James Walton

The decade of Delia

Proof that someone has really made it as a TV historian comes, I would suggest, when they join the likes of David Starkey and Simon Schama by getting their name into the programme’s title. So it is that Dominic Sandbrook’s The 70s, from 2012, has now been followed by The 80s with Dominic Sandbrook (BBC2, Thursday), a series that confirms his ability to put across moderately big ideas in a light easy style — and in a parka. Sometimes when watching television, you might be in the mood for a serious history documentary, and sometimes for a show that’ll just wash over you pleasantly. With Sandbrook — and I’m pretty

Michael Tanner

Dorset’s winning formula

Dorset Opera seems to receive far less coverage than the rest of the country-house summer shows, although it is in most respects well up to the standard of any of them except Glyndebourne, which is in a category, social and artistic, of its own. The Dorset productions take place in the Coade Theatre of Bryanston School, and are the result of a brief but what must be an incredibly intense period of preparation, with some big names in the major roles, and the smaller parts and chorus taken by a large collection of young singers who are strenuously trained for the week-long rehearsals. I like going on the last day,

Deborah Ross

Oven-ready

Todd Solondz’s Wiener-Dog is billed as a ‘dark comedy’ although it is far more dark than comic. If pressed to put a number on it, I’d say that, despite the film’s poster, which shows a cute dachshund’s butt, and leads you into thinking cute dachshund thoughts, this is 98 per cent dark, and the sort of film that actually makes you want to come home, draw the curtains, and stick your head in the oven. Life’s a bitch and then you die, it says, literally. There’s every chance you’ll hate it. I’m not convinced I don’t. But this is a film that, once seen, you’ll always know you’ve seen and,

Wednesday

A.J. Goldmann

To call it ‘provincial’ would be an insult to the provinces: Bayreuth Festival’s Parsifal reviewed

Parsifal Bayreuth Festival, until 28 August In the days leading up to this year’s Bayreuth Festival, Bavaria was rocked by a spate of violent attacks. Security measures ran high for the premiere of a new Parsifal rumoured to be awash in Islamic symbolism. Such reports proved true, with the production set in a contemporary Middle Eastern country under threat, possibly from Isis. Far from being lauded as avant, however, the staging by Uwe Eric Laufenberg was instantly dubbed ‘Provinztheater‘, or ‘provincial theater’, the worst insult that the well-heeled festival audience could come up with. I disagree. Calling Laufenberg’s dull and confused staging ‘Provinztheater’, is an insult to the country’s provincial theatres, where

Tuesday

Ismene Brown

Remembering Rosemary Butcher – the choreographer who changed the way I see dance

My ancient Liddell and Scott Greek dictionary of 1849 defines choreia as ‘a dancing, especially with joy’. The word choros has a more technical definition: a round dance, or a dance accompanied with song (hence the word chorus). From whichever word ‘choreographer’ is declared to derive, the British dancemaker Rosemary Butcher, who died last month at 69 after a career barely visible to the public, embodied the first idea in a way that I see with hindsight changed my eyes emphatically in realising the marvellous range of ways to enjoy dance-going. Choreia: ‘a dancing’ – an act of dancing, a piece of activity, rather than the choros, a dance creation.

Thursday

Philip Hensher

Visions of suburbia

Art is aspiring; hungry; acutely aware of what it could become, and of what it could lack; longs for safety and reaches out in speculative attempts to do something new; exists on the outer edges of lives, looking inwards with hopes, some day, to be more essential. Art, literature and music are, in short, suburbs to the grands projets of our lives at their most significant. Over the next year the Architecture Foundation will present new films, walks, talks and another instalment of the Doughnut Festival, to contemplate the transformation of London’s outer ring. It’s an interesting moment. The capital is not physically expanding, but the relationship between inner and

Martin Gayford

Beauty and the banal

In 1965 William Eggleston took the first colour photograph that, he felt, really succeeded. The location was outside a supermarket in Memphis, Tennessee; the time — to judge from the rich golden light and long shadows — late afternoon. Eggleston’s subject — a young man with a heavily slicked, early Elvis hairstyle stacking trolleys outside the shop — was as ordinary as he could be. But the result was a photographic masterpiece. It is included in the exhibition William Eggleston: Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, although, by most definitions, it is not a portrait. Indeed, it is as hard to say just what it is as it is to

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Greenhouse or group hug?

The unacknowledged subtitle of Channel 4’s new reality series Eden (Mondays) is Die, Hippies! Die! Obviously they’re not going to admit this because that wouldn’t be right. But I’m sure Channel 4 is hoping that a terrible Lord of the Flies-type scenario will unfold for the 23 victims who’ve volunteered to get back to nature on a remote Scottish peninsula for 12 months, in which they hunt one another down with sharpened sticks, with hideously watchable consequences. In episode one, my money would have been on Anton as chap-best-placed-to-survive. Middle-aged, stroppy and northern, an adventurer by trade, Anton very quickly decided that he absolutely could not cope with the bunch

Kate Chisholm

Far from Naples

It’s a brave dramatist who would seek to adapt for radio the hit novels of the Italian writer Elena Ferrante. As soon as her quartet of novels set in Naples from the 1950s onwards began appearing in English translation a few years ago they created a bestselling stir because of the unusually bold flavour of the writing and the brutal honesty with which Ferrante is prepared to expose the dark underside of female friendship and motherhood, its jealousies and bitterness, the betrayals and self-centredness. It was even rumoured that Ferrante must be a man (she has never given an interview) because no woman, surely, would be so critical of her

Ismene Brown

Poetry in motion | 4 August 2016

For almost 60 years, whatever the political weather, Russia and Britain have maintained mutually assured respect as far as ballet is concerned. In October 1956, the Soviet Union finally allowed its Bolshoi troupe to appear in the west, in London, a state cultural exchange that should have entailed the debut of the comparatively green Sadler’s Wells Ballet in Russia within weeks. Owing to the inconvenient appearance of Soviet tanks in rebellious Hungary, it wasn’t until 1961 that the renamed Royal Ballet turned up in Moscow. (Khrushchev gushed admiringly, ‘Look at those girls — they might be Russian!’) I looked up The Spectator’s October 1956 review of that Bolshoi debut: some