Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Matthew Stadlen

How conductors keep getting better at 90

‘It’s a bad week. I gather we’ve lost one.’ Sir Neville Marriner, himself a huge name, is talking about the death of one of the world’s top conductors. Lorin Maazel, who died at home in Virginia at the age of 84, had led orchestras including the New York Philharmonic. He was still conducting this year. Last month, the Spanish conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos died in Pamplona at the age of 80. Only a week earlier he had announced he had cancer and would have to retire. Conductors, it is no secret, enjoy long working lives — some have even passed away mid-performance. But what’s their secret? This summer’s BBC

Angus Wolfe

The Lunchbox: a love story based on food and free postage

Was Kate due a grounding after the awards extravaganza of Revolutionary Road and The Reader? Because Labor Day (12A) slipped into cinemas in March and slipped out again almost unnoticed. With the DVD release this is a good time to reappraise her contribution to a film that deserves to be seen. Directed by Jason Reitman, the man who made Juno, it is no soft-centred love story aimed at lonely middle-aged dreamers. It has a tension that burns. Winslet plays the depressive mother of a 12-year-old boy, divorced after her worse half legged it with a lady down the road. She lives in a large, messy house in Massachusetts, surrounded by

John Fuller

My Future

I am your memories. They are not me. So it feels strange to be remembered by These relics of my personality. Although you mourn me, is it really me You mourn, or thoughts of me that make you cry? I am your memories. They are not me. Ridiculous, such immortality! To live like this, to hope they might not die, These relics of my personality. To be inside your head, where things you see Are seen the way I saw them. Where I sigh: ‘I am your memories. They are not me.’ They are not me and so can’t ever be Other than what they are, much as they try,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

When Mr and Mrs Clever-Nasty-and-Rich met Mr and Mrs Thick-Sweet-and-Poor

Torben Betts, head boy at Alan Ayckbourn’s unofficial school of apprentices, has written at least a dozen plays I’ve never seen. Invincible, my first encounter with the heir apparent, is a sitcom that pitches London snobs against northern slobs. The script is fascinating because it demonstrates, in concentrated form, the limitations of the Ayckbourn method and the narrowness of his psychological palette. The characters are emanations of tribal prejudices rather than flesh-and-blood human beings. The plot begins with two earnest Islington prigs moving ‘up north’ after losing money in the recession. Where exactly ‘up north’ is unclear but the accents suggest Blackburn. The pair could win prizes for ghastliness. He’s

Hugo Shirley

I can’t see the point of Glyndebourne’s La traviata

One of the highlights of last year’s Glyndebourne Festival was the revival of Richard Jones’s Falstaff, spruced up and invigorated by Mark Elder’s conducting of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and a beautifully balanced cast. Elder is also in charge again for the festival’s third new production of this year, Tom Cairns’s La traviata, although with the London Philharmonic this time. His conducting is extremely fine once more, managing to be lucid and intelligent, thrillingly dramatic and lovingly shaped. The playing of the LPO is of supremely high quality throughout, while the cast features a genuinely exciting leading couple. Venera Gimadieva and Michael Fabiano, as Violetta and Alfredo,

Deborah Ross

The problem with Believe is you simply won’t believe any of it – unless you’re a child

The trouble with Believe is that, unless you are ten years old or under, which I’m assuming you are not, you won’t believe. Not for a second. Not for a minute. Not a word of it. This doesn’t see itself as a children’s film and isn’t being marketed as a children’s film, which means I can’t be kind and generous about it, as I might be about an actual children’s film, if I were in a charitable mood. (Rare, but it can happen. Or at least I think it did happen, once.) The film had been ‘inspired by actual events’, or so I’d read, and follows Sir Matt Busby, the

James Delingpole James Delingpole

In which James Delingpole gets down with the kids, finds they’re sex-obsessed…

If there’s one thing everyone knows about BBC comedy it’s that it’s going downhill. According to Danny Cohen, now Director of BBC Television, it’s too white and middle class; according to producer John ‘Blackadder’ Lloyd, it’s run by idiots like the bureaucrats in the BBC satire W1A who don’t understand what comedy is; according to the gag-inducingly PC Dara O’Briain, it’s too gag-inducingly PC (he means the quota system they’re trying to introduce whereby every comedy panel show must have a token female); according to John Cleese, it’s never been the same since John Cleese left; etc. Probably they’re all right. I hardly ever watch comedy series any more because

Kate Chisholm

Does Radio 3 need a new controller?

Where next for Radio 3? Last Friday was the First Night of this year’s Proms season but it was the last night at the Proms for Roger Wright, who for 15 years has masterminded the station and for seven of those 15 the summer concert programme as well. Rather surprisingly, and you might think ominously, no successor has so far been named to steer this most elegant yet vulnerable station into the digital challenges of 2015 and beyond. Could this be anything to do with the fact that earlier in the year a new post — Head of BBC Music — was created? Will Wright’s tenure be the last time

Roderick Conway-Morris

Alexander Pope, inventor of celebrity

‘The Picture of the Prime Minister hangs above the Chimney of his own Closet, but I have seen that of Mr Pope in twenty Noblemen’s Houses,’ wrote Voltaire in 1733. Alexander Pope’s start in life was not promising. A crippled hunchback, suffering chronic ill-health, he was, as a Catholic, excluded from Court, allowed to live no closer to Westminster than Chiswick. His ‘Rape of the Lock’, a mock epic satirically inflating a ludicrously minor incident in polite society, became the first bestseller after the 1710 Copyright Act, but brought him a mere £22.15s. Yet the poet who, according to Samuel Johnson, ‘never drank tea without a stratagem’, knew how to

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

The home of Holland’s celebrity paintings gets a makeover

If things had turned out differently for Brazil — I don’t mean in the World Cup — Recife might now be known as Mauritsstad. But when the Portuguese expelled the Dutch in 1654, the name of the new capital of Pernambuco built by governor Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen was lost to history. Today Johan Maurits is remembered for a house, not a city: the splendid private mansion he had built for himself in The Hague right next to the Dutch parliament in the Binnenhof. Designed by the architect Jacob van Campen, the Mauritshuis is a Dutch Classicist doll’s house of a palace that took 11 years to build and was

Andrew Lambirth

Had Hollywood not lured him away, Dennis Hopper could have made his name as a photographer

In an age when photographs have swollen out of all proportion to their significance, and are mounted on wall-sized light boxes the better to show off their high-resolution colour, it’s a relief to see an exhibition of small photographic prints in good old black and white. Dennis Hopper (1936–2010) is best known as an actor and hell-raiser, but he was also an artist who worked in various media. ‘I am an Abstract Expressionist and an Action Painter by nature,’ he insisted, but in the Sixties he took thousands of photographs, a group of 400 of which are now on display in the Academy’s Burlington Gardens galleries. Because they are relatively

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Gilbert and George have lost their bottom over the burka

Let’s brood, shall we, on the following report in the Evening Standard about an exciting new departure by the winsome duo, Gilbert and George, on the back of their new exhibition, called ‘Scapegoating Pictures’ for London which opens tomorrow at the Bermondsey White Cube Gallery: ‘The artists Gilbert and George feature women in burkas in their new exhibition reflecting the changing face of the East End, their home for decades.  The veiled figures feature in giant photomontages demonstrating the artists’ long-standing hostility to all religions which they believe “terrorise” people.  They appear alongside images of the artists themselves and a string of typically foul-mouthed slogans urging “molest a mullah” and

Claudia Massie

A celebration of Scottish artistic success over the past 25 years

Since spring this year, art venues across Scotland have been dedicating themselves to a gigantic project called Generation. Involving more than 100 artists and 60 venues, the programme is a celebration of Scottish artistic success over the past 25 years, a multifaceted retrospective that recreates lauded exhibitions of yore and puts together new ones by old faces. The scale and ambition are impressive. There are fine artists involved and a clutch of Turner champions, too. But this is an event that demonstrates there’s more to Scottish art than the ‘Glasgow Miracle’ and lays out its case all across the country. Generation coincides with the Commonwealth Games in a kind of

Kate Chisholm

The two men who walked barefoot to the capitals of the four nuclear powers on a peace pilgrimage

You might (if you’re over a certain age) still think it pretty amazing that TV not only allows you to watch Mario Götze put in that amazing goal, live, as it happened, in Rio de Janeiro’s Estádio Maracanã, but also that you can witness so immediately and tangibly the passion, the drama of that moment — you on your sofa in twilit Surrey, Somerset or deepest Sutherland watching those emotions fleeting across the individual faces of traumatised Argentinians as they come to terms with bitter defeat. The impact of that extraordinary connection across the continents is nothing, though, when compared to the intimacy and immediacy of radio; the way a

James Walton

The quest for the perfect guitar riff is a noble one – if not quite the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe

A few weeks ago, my eight-year-old son, who’s taken up the guitar, announced that he’d learned something new. He then played a sequence of chords — approximately, Duh-duh-duuh, Duh-duh-da-duuh — that I’ve been hearing from all guitarists since I was about eight myself. ‘It’s called “Smoke on the Water”,’ he informed me, unnecessarily. Of course, any sign that the world hasn’t changed as much as we thought is always welcome to the middle-aged man. Yet when I showed him Deep Purple performing the whole track on YouTube, he was both slightly bored and rather mystified. Not only had he no idea that ‘Smoke on the Water’ came with a song

Deborah Ross

How did a New York nanny become one of the great photographers of the 20th century?

Finding Vivian Maier is a documentary about the American nanny who led a wholly secretive life as a photographer and who, posthumously, has been described as ‘one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century’. It’s a good story, which is well told here, and told breezily (83 minutes), which we like. But I’m not convinced the quote from Michael Moore on the poster — ‘Amazing…this should be seen with other people, in the dark, on a big screen’ — is necessarily true. Ms Maier has already been the subject of Alan Yentob’s Imagine strand on the BBC, and this film could just as happily be viewed on TV as

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Richard Bean doesn’t believe in humans – just weasels, snakes, rats and vultures

Mr Bean, one of our greatest comic exports, has an alter ego. The second Mr Bean, forename Richard, is the author of One Man, Two Guvnors, which thrilled audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. His latest play, Great Britain, dissects the corruption of power in parliament and beyond. The inevitable comparisons with The Duck House, which mocked the expenses scandal, are a little unfair, since the temperament and the intention of the two shows are vastly different. The Duck House was a delicious slice of theatrical levity about a Home Counties couple drawn into criminality by the culture of parliament. And being a family comedy, it had reserves of

Olivia Cole

‘Artmaking is a drug’ – interview with poet Paul Muldoon

A fellow festival-goer at the recent Calabash literary festival in Treasure Beach, Jamaica, enjoyed chatting to a gentle Irish poet called Paul. He told her he ‘dabbled’ in poetry, and she was seconds from asking if he was planning on reading any of his work at the open-mike session. When Paul Muldoon, the poet in question, came to give his reading, it was soon quite clear that he is, in fact, a famous poet. He opened with ‘Comeback’, a poem about a washed-up rock band for ever on the brink of their next great hit: ‘We’d pay in cash/For a kilo of Khartoum/And come back to trash/Another hotel room/And make

Hugo Shirley

Buxton Festival sticks its neck out with two rarities by Dvorak and Gluck

Dvorak’s The Jacobin and Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, the two operas that opened this year’s Buxton Festival, are both relative rarities today, but their creators’ fortunes tell an interesting story. Dvorak’s operas — or at least Rusalka — joined the repertoire around the same time, during the 1980s, that Gluck’s arguably starting slipping from the stage, to the extent that now means the UK’s main companies are all but ignoring the composer’s 300th anniversary this year. Both works, in their different ways, also explore the power of music. Orpheus is the archetypal musician in art, whose power as singer enabled him to bring back Eurydice from death — temporarily in

Thursday

Robert Gorelangton

Indiscretions from two veteran producers

Stars, playwrights and even set designers are constantly being lionised in the papers. But why not producers? They, after all, are the ones who choose the plays, the stars, and then make it all happen. Duncan Weldon and Paul Elliott are two veteran cigar chompers who’ve been in the business for 45 years. They’ve made and lost a packet, over and over again. They never seem to learn. Like all producers, they love their wives almost as much as they love a hit. Over lunch in the West End, I discussed the knack of being and staying a producer. Great exponents such as Cameron Mackintosh and Bill Kenwright have always