Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Harry Mount

Catherine the Great’s purchases returned to Houghton Hall

When the Marquess of Cholmondeley inherited Houghton Hall, the Palladian palace by Colen Campbell and James Gibbs, he started rootling through the cupboards and drawers. In one drawer, he found a treasure map — the original picture-hanging plan for the house, as built by his ancestor Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister. The only problem was, he didn’t have the pictures any more — Walpole’s cash-starved grandson had flogged them to Catherine the Great in 1779, in a sale arranged by James Christie, founder of the auction house. Now the best pictures have been brought back, mostly from the Hermitage, in a show (until 29 September) that is less

Kate Chisholm

Radio review: The Truth about Mental Health, Yes, Nina Conti Really Is on the Radio

‘Grief is work,’ said one of the parents of the teenagers killed by Anders Breivik on the island of Utoya in Norway. ‘To deal with grief — that’s work from the moment you wake up till the moment you fall asleep. And even then many people struggle with their grief when they sleep.’ His frank, no-nonsense approach was striking given that he had experienced probably the worst thing that could happen: to lose a child and in such a terrible way. He was talking to Claudia Hammond for her new World Service series, The Truth about Mental Health (Fridays). The six programmes take us on a global tour of the

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Why watching Britain’s Got Talent is like giving yourself a lobotomy

The kids are back for half-term so we’re having to watch absolute crap again on TV. Monday night, I wanted to watch The Fall (BBC1). But I couldn’t, obviously, because Britain’s Got Talent (ITV1) was on. ‘Dad! Dad! You’ve got to see this!’ So I come in to see what I’ve got to see and it’s a man called Aaron Crow whose unique and remarkable skills are that he never speaks, he has an interesting haircut, and he does mildly scary magic tricks which aren’t quite as good as Dynamo’s. Also he pronounces his name ‘Aran’ — as in sweater. Is this some other annoying new trend I didn’t know

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Theatre review: Relatively Speaking, Disgraced

Here are your instructions. Relatively Speaking by Alan Ayckbourn is a comedy classic so you’d better enjoy it or else. The play dates from 1967 when Ayckbourn was working as a sketch writer for Ronnie Barker. It was his first hit. Notes in the programme testify to the play’s excellence. A telegram sent to Ayckbourn by Noël Coward is quoted twice.  ‘Congratulations on a beautifully constructed and very, very funny play.’ Take the Master’s kindness with a pinch of salt. The script is ingeniously strung out from a rather threadbare premise. Two couples, both with infidelity problems, meet and talk at cross-purposes for an afternoon. The action opens in a

Deborah Ross

Gemma Arterton’s new vampire flick, Byzantium, is melancholia at its most trying

Neil Jordan’s Byzantium may well be stylish and moody — so moody, in fact, I wanted to send it to its bedroom with the instruction it could only come down again when less sulky — and Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan may well be fine actresses, but yet another vampire film? Really? True, it plays with the tropes a little. There’s a mother and daughter twist. There are no pointy teeth, just pointy thumbnails. But that thing vampires do, after they’ve sucked human blood and then look up, with blood-smeared lips and chin? That’s here, plentifully, and it always makes me wonder why vampires have such bad table manners. Weren’t

William Cook

Le Corbusier was ashamed of the house he built

On the outskirts of La Chaux-de-Fonds, an industrial town in the Swiss Jura, stands one of the most beautiful houses I’ve seen. Elegant and understated, La Maison Blanche is the kind of house you dream of living in. Wide windows overlook a wooded valley. The rooms are bathed in silver light. The ambience is serene and timeless, more like a temple than a townhouse. You’d never guess the man who built it was the bogeyman of modern architecture — the man who began a movement that replaced terraced streets with tower blocks. In this lovely house, and the art-nouveau villas he built beside it, you can see the traditional architect

Michael Tanner

Ariadne auf Naxos at Glyndebourne – how can an opera go so wrong?

Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos should be the perfect Glyndebourne opera, not too long, not too demanding, a unique and cunning mixture of seriousness and comedy, plenty to think about if you’re inclined to do that, nothing to oppress you, almost no longueurs — though I might take that back later; and a giddy ending. So it is quite a coup to come up with an account that offers almost no pleasure, whether from the pit, from the voices, from the stage; which seems empty and pretentious in a way quite different from what Strauss can all too often manage; where the humour is leaden and the seriousness has been

Giannandrea Poesio

Dance review: Raven Girl, Symphony in C

Last Friday, ballet’s overcrowded aviary welcomed a new addition: Raven Girl.  Sexy, sleek, troubled and troublesome, she is the creation of the bestselling author Audrey Niffenegger and Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer Wayne McGregor.  Expectations were high, as McGregor is not a choreographer one would normally associate with balletic storytelling. The work, with stunning designs by Vicki Mortimer, splendid lighting by Lucy Carter, great video design by Ravi Deepres and a lusciously seductive score by Gabriel Yared, enthrals the senses and sits perfectly with McGregor’s vision of a creatively synergetic unity of the arts. It’s a pity that neither the choreo-graphy nor the dramaturgy were as impressive. The problem, a typical

Julian Flanagan

From Harvey and the Wallbangers to Covent Garden: Christopher Purves interviewed

One of ‘the great operatic artists of the present’ sips coffee in his quiet Oxford kitchen. The artist is Christopher Purves, the description Michael Tanner’s (Arts, 13 March). In recent years, Purves’s fluid, eloquent baritone and considered acting have received rolling acclaim: Glyndebourne, La Scala, Teatro Real Madrid; Falstaff, Mephistopheles, Beckmesser and more. This year has seen his psychotic Protector in Written on Skin at Covent Garden, and now Walt Disney in Philip Glass’s The Perfect American at English National Opera. But first we talk about his children, whose pictures mosaic the kitchen cabinets, and mine. Purves is my cousin Edwina’s husband, and my son Benedict’s godfather. Over 20-odd years,

Nick Robinson

BBC’s Nick Robinson: why I said sorry for my ‘Muslim appearance’ remark

It was my first taste of free love — for the brain. A first visit to what Bill Clinton dubbed the ‘Woodstock of the Mind’. With just one afternoon at the Hay festival, I rolled up at the first thing that caught my eye — a distinguished prof talking about nanotechnology. Bear with me here. I was soon learning that making things nano-sized changes their essential properties. Surfaces can be made which repel water. A single drop can be made bouncier than a children’s rubber ball. So what, you ask. Well, we’ll all soon have mobile phones which we can drop in the bath, which raises the exciting — if, perhaps somewhat distasteful,

Adam Taylor

Night-fishers

They might almost be bushes, boulders, they sit so still. Night floods the meadow at their shoulders, brims the canal, and renders rod and line invisible. Traffic on the by-pass sighs as if asleep. A mallard claps derisively and flies. Cows rip the grass. Its being chosen makes the silence deep. The rooms that penned them flicker in synaptic light; eyes gaze at screens; ears buzz with din; the mirror that enchants these fishermen is lost to sight. Upon it, jobs, debts, children, wives leave not a mark; its stillness underlies their lives and raises wordless thoughts, as shy as fish, out of the dark.

Stewart Conn

Wellcome

My plans exist in my mind like a jigsaw puzzle … and gradually I shall be able to piece it together(Sir Henry Wellcome, 1853-1936) As though a neolithic arrowhead he’d unearthed at the age of four had entered his bloodstream, its sliver of flint sparking an obsession, the items he acquired over the years ranged from Darwin’s whalebone walking-stick, Napoleon’s toothbrush and a pair of Florence Nightingale’s mocassins to shrunken heads and tons of ancient armour. But despite all his squirrelling, the museum to house them remained illusory. Picture him, his explorer’s garb and trappings laid aside, increasingly hemmed in, until overwhelmed by the mouldering mountain, moth-eaten, worm-ridden, filling his

Friday

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Spectator Play: what’s worth watching, listening to or going to this weekend | 24 May 2013

This Saturday’s Eurovision contest was never going to be a triumph for the UK, that much was for certain. What was slightly surprising, however, was the Danish victory with their song Only Teardrops The song might have been one of the favourites to win, but the triumph of what Fraser Nelson described as a collaboration between ‘one of Scotland’s world class folk musicians’ and ‘the voice of a rising star of the Danish folk scene’. In this week’s arts lead Emma Hartley interviewed Eurovision winner Emmelie de Forest’s mentor, Fraser Neill, about the making of a very Scottish performer. Here’s a video of the two of them performing Anne Boleyn

Douglas Murray

Drummer Lee Rigby

Might I urge people to watch the following video? In recent days the press has inevitably focussed most attention on the perpetrators of the Woolwich attack. Here is a video from earlier today of the wife and step-father of Drummer Lee Rigby speaking about him and their love for him.

Thursday

Emma Hartley

Meet Fraser Neill, the Scots folk musician behind Eurovision’s Emmelie de Forest

To be a folk music fan in Britain today is to be jangling the keys to a cultural palace. For a variety of reasons, we seem to have produced the most brilliant young musicians in decades — but the rest of the world has always seemed rather more excited about the fact than we are. We have started to export musicians, from Spain to Novia Scotia, who go on to musical achievements that are seldom recognised, let alone celebrated, back home. Of the ten million Brits who tuned into the Eurovision song contest, not many would have guessed that the Danish winner was yet another young protégée of a British

Andrew Lambirth

Exhibition review: Saloua Raouda Choucair, Shanti Panchal

Forgive my ignorance, ladies and gentlemen, but I must confess that I had never heard of Saloua Raouda Choucair before the advance publicity of the Tate’s exhibition. She’s not in the Yale Dictionary of Art & Artists (always a useful reference book, but by no means infallible) and I don’t believe I’d ever seen her paintings or sculptures before this show. But I may have overlooked one somewhere in a mixed exhibition, for her work does resemble that of a dozen other artists of international Modernism, and even of a number of the British variety. So why does Tate Modern now devote a solo show to her? Could it be

Alasdair Palmer

Exhibitions: Tiziano

‘When Titian paints eyes,’ observed Eugène Delacroix, who spent a lifetime admiring, studying and copying the Venetian artist, ‘they are lit with the fire of life.’ The truth of Delacroix’s aphorism is on striking display in the magnificent exhibition of Titian’s paintings at the Scuderie of the Quirinale Palace in Rome. The exhibition does not pretend to be a comprehensive collection of Titian’s works. It is merely a selection of some of his greatest masterpieces. The gorgeous young woman known simply as ‘La Bella’ looks at you with a penetrating, unblinking gaze, her eyes so hot with the fire of life that you feel sure that, in just one moment,

Clarissa Tan

‘Bankers’ was not a documentary. It was a BBC hit job

I like bankers. They’re an honest lot. All of us like money, but only they are upfront about it. I once witnessed a conversation between three financiers that started with them comparing their cars, then their houses, then their helicopters. None of the shilly-shallying you find at a society cocktail party, where people slyly suss out your income on the basis of your profession, your postcode, your accent and the school you went to — these bankers went straight to unvarnished one-upmanship. Such frankness can be refreshing. I like bankers because, these days, somebody has to. The second episode of Bankers (Wednesday), the BBC2 three-part documentary that’s just ended, started

Polly Walshe

Cataclysm

It came at last, the letting-go, Up over the hill and down our street — The end of time had, finally, been reached. There was comfort in it, the worst happening And it being of no consequence, since we were done for. What did it matter if our digital photo frames were lost, Our data-carrying devices? There was to be no cost Since we were going under. Two strange things: the dead were not truly dead — When our backs were turned they danced among the trees — And the tide kept battering the beach. ‘This is it,’ you said As waters took the Co-op, ‘Drop everything. Why not get

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Culture notes: The glory of the Flaming Lips

Man, I love the Flaming Lips. Psychedelic rock sublimity. They movingly address the deepest human concerns without a whiff of irony, while also seeing the point of confetti cannons, dancing penguins, having the lead singer surf the crowd in a giant plastic bubble, and so on and so forth. This week, mind you, they played the Camden Roundhouse the day after a tornado killed 24 people in their hometown and (in other news) they had to cancel a gig because singer Wayne Coyne had so bad a cough he couldn’t speak. No wonder they weren’t entirely bouncy. The material from their new album The Terror saw their usual ecstatic lift