Arts Reviews

During my opera-going lifetime the most sensational change in the repertoire has, of course, been the immense expansion of the baroque repertoire, with Monteverdi, Rameau and above all Handel being not only revived but also seen now as mainstays in most opera houses. To think that only 50 years ago it was regarded as daring for Glyndebourne to mount L’incoronazione di Poppea, even in Raymond Leppard’s abbreviated and sumptuous version, which has been most unfairly denigrated in recent years. Yet just as remarkable, though hardly ever remarked on, has been the instatement of Puccini (who never needed reviving, since after initial scandals and flops he has always been more or

As so often, no one put it better than Papa. Here is Ernest Hemingway talking of all the movies made from his novels and short stories: ‘The only two I could sit through were The Killers and To Have and Have Not — I guess Ava Gardner and Lauren Bacall had a lot to do with it.’ Mr S can’t say fairer than that of Lauren Bacall, who has died at the age of 89. Bacall was, however, rather more than a husky voice and a sultry look. In 1981 she starred in The Fan, in which she played a middle-aged film star idolised by a demented fan (played by

And they’re off. The mighty caravan of romantic desperadoes, radical egoists, stadium wannabes, struggling superstars and vanity crackheads is on its way to Edinburgh. This year’s Fringe sponsor is Virgin Money, which must be some kind of in-joke because most performers spend August watching their life savings being ritually despoiled by landlords, press agents and venue owners. Five years back the Fringe was ready for a gastric band when it grew to more than 2,000 productions. This year it glides past the 3,000 mark and it seems determined to maintain its place as the most cluttered congregation of twits and pipe-dreamers on the planet. It’s also, of course, the world’s

Ever since Mr Blair’s New Dawn of 1997, the dominant idea in public policy towards public collections has been ‘access’. The doctrine is more than half-right: art, antiquities etc paid for by the public are not doing their work unless we can see them. But it has promoted the heresy that the person chosen to run every museum must be a communicator rather than a scholar. Actually, both is best. True, some learned persons are interested only in objects and cannot communicate with the human race, but the best evangelisers for a museum or gallery are the people who really know its contents. The best-known current example is Neil Macgregor,

At the end of his performance at the Barbican with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Wynton Marsalis made a little speech. The next piece, he announced, was a number that Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers used to play. Marsalis then recalled how he himself had played with the Jazz Messengers as an 18-year-old trumpet prodigy. He described how much he had learned from the drummer, who was then approaching 60, and especially about ‘the sacrifices you have to make to play this music’. Then the band roared into ‘Free for All’ by Wayne Shorter. A couple of days before, I had met Marsalis for a chat — it wasn’t precisely