Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Hungarian photography, Richard Long, Thomas Struth

As regular readers of this column will know, I am not a great admirer of photography exhibitions, but the current show in the RA’s Sackler Galleries is more enjoyable than most. I have long loved the work of André Kertész and Brassaï, and besides presenting a lavish selection of their photographs, this show offers the context of their fellow Hungarians to further illuminate their achievement. The effect is interesting, if not entirely happy. Nothing seems to diminish Brassaï, but Kertész suffers by comparison. In the company of such relatively unknown photographers as Imre Kinszki, Rudolf Balogh and Erno Vadas, Kertész looks less strikingly original. Although the presence and example of

Ed Rex

Imogen Heap

Imogen Heap, the English songwriter whose gloves let her control her music with hand gestures, has perfected the art of delegation. While most musicians leave it to their labels to sort out a press biography, she forged hers from 1,500 contributions from her Twitter followers; where others endlessly pore over potential concert setlists, she lets visitors to her website choose hers. It’s what the 21st century has termed ‘crowdsourcing’, and Heap is now taking it one step further: she’s co-writing her fourth album with her fans. She’s brought out two songs from the album so far, and both have involved asking the public to contribute ideas: from musical snippets to

James Walton

Simon Hoggart: Chilean Miners

Angus Macqueen is a film-maker whose CV includes The Death of Yugoslavia, Gulag, Cocaine and a slightly odd period commissioning the likes of The Secret Millionaire as Channel 4’s head of documentaries. These days, happily, he’s back making his own stuff — and BBC2’s Chilean Miners: 17 Days Buried Alive was another gem. Commentary was kept to a minimum and the reconstructions were nicely restrained, leaving the heart of Friday’s programme filled by gripping interviews with six of the miners themselves. These proved to be a varied lot, from Mario ‘Perry’ Sepúlveda, a family-loving Jehovah’s Witness, to Samuel Ávalos, a cheerfully foul-mouthed former street-kid, who praised mining as the best

Kate Chisholm

Kate Chisholm on The Reunion

There was a scary moment on last Sunday’s The Reunion when we heard that the derivatives market has ‘exploded’ since the collapse of Barings in 1995. Banking has become more, not less, dependent on the kinds of gambling on future (i.e., virtual) values that brought down Britain’s oldest merchant bank. When Barings fell, just over $1 billion went down the drain. Now, the derivatives market is worth $1.4 quadrillion — a figure that becomes more and more meaningless the bigger it gets, wafting through the ether like a cloud of poisonous gas. Even more alarming (you can tell that I read Cranford at an impressionable age, upon which my knowledge

Michael Tanner

Dorset delight

Dorset Opera dates back to 1974, but I have only just been for the first time. The quality of what I saw and heard was such that I’m annoyed with myself, ashamed even, for not having been before. The annual effort begins each year as soon as the Bryanston School holidays start; everyone involved in the performances lives in the school accommodation: that includes the star singers, the conductors, directors, the chorus, largely consisting of young people from around the country, and the orchestra, freelance professionals; and no doubt many more. They assemble on a Saturday and the – this year – five performances take place during the second half

Chris Ayres

Monkey business

Apes have always made lousy movie stars. They never have front-page affairs with other celebrity animals; there’s no Most Emotional Grunt category at the Academy Awards; and teenage girls don’t lie in bed at night, dreaming of one day meeting the Right Orangutan. That’s why, if you going to make a summer blockbuster named Rise of the Planet of the Apes, with a primate in the starring role, you’d better cast a pretty damn good human foil: an actor of such prodigious handsomeness and talent, the audience will forget it has paid good money to spend two hours in the company of hominoids. Sadly, 20th Century Fox had to make

Patrick Carnegy

Power games in Stratford

There’s something decidedly odd in being part of a largely grey-haired audience sitting respectfully through a play about the discomforts of a cantankerous old butcher’s ménage consisting of a chauffeur, pimp, demolition worker and, ah yes, a professor of philosophy incomprehensibly returning from his American campus to the bosom of his dysfunctional family. This revival of The Homecoming is also Harold Pinter’s return to the RSC after a long absence and it’s part of the company’s celebration of its 50th birthday. In 1965, the premiere of The Homecoming was a landmark of Peter Hall’s early years as founder-director of the RSC. The play was then as iconoclastic as Waiting for

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Pushy mothers

Weird experiments in stone and glass clutter the South Bank opposite the Tower of London. The near-spherical City Hall looks like a speeding squash ball photographed at the moment of impact with a racquet. Around it stretches an acre of sloping flagstones, ideal for freestyle biking and skateboarding. (Sure enough, both activities are vigorously suppressed by patrols of scowling guards.) Nearby, the Scoop is a roofless amphitheatre fashioned from a crater of layered granite. It’s an eerie and compelling sight, as if a divine whirlwind had ripped deep spirals out of a barren moonscape to produce a huge grooved funnel. As I took my place on a freezing seat, I

Giannandrea Poesio

Mariinsky Ballet | 13 August 2011

It’s somewhat surprising that there are many people who are still amazed by the Mariinsky Ballet’s sparkling response to the choreography of George Balanchine. After all, it is well known that the father of modern American ballet, born Georgi Melitonovic Balanchivadze, had been trained at the Imperial Ballet School, from which developed the artistic principles that have long informed the Mariinsky Ballet’s tradition. It is true that once in the United States Balanchine reworked those principles with movement ideas that were typical of the Americana he felt so attracted by. Yet all his creations remained unmistakably rooted in the old Russian school. Such historical/artistic affinity has been central to the

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Cy Twombly and Poussin

When a major artist dies while an exhibition of his or her work is up and running, there is inevitably a surge in visitor numbers. Consequently, the death of Cy Twombly at the beginning of last month has sent along to Dulwich a number of people who didn’t know his work to find out what all the fuss was about. Others, the long-standing admirers of Twombly, will visit Dulwich with sadness in their hearts that this delightful and surprising artist, this genius of the wayward mark, will make no more new work. Dulwich is not the easiest of London galleries to get to, but I recommend this show, not just

Andrew Lambirth

John Hoyland – an appreciation

It’s difficult to believe that John Hoyland is dead. He was a man so full of life, with such appetite for living, that his absence from our midst makes no sense. Even when grievously ill in the past months, he was more likely to engage in anecdote and tell jokes than complain of his increasingly frail condition. The spirit of the man continued to shine brilliantly despite the adverse circumstances. His last exhibition, all new paintings, opened at the Beaux Arts Gallery in Cork Street in April. At the private view, Hoyland, although already much reduced physically, sat in the midst of his vividly coloured and exhilarating work, and accepted

Laura Gascoigne

In Monet’s garden

We owe Giverny to the generosity of Americans Whoever coined the famous aphorism ‘When good Americans die, they go to Paris’ didn’t tell the full story. For American plein-air painters, Paris was never more than limbo. Heaven, they eventually discovered, was Giverny, presided over by the Impressionist deity Monet. It was 1887 when the first American scouts came to reconnoitre the small Normandy village 80 kilometres down the Seine. They reported back to Paris, and within a few summers Monet’s rural retreat was infested with artists’ studios and the fields around were sprouting clumps of painters’ white umbrellas. The locals, who regarded Monet— a middle-class Frenchman from the wrong end

Michael Tanner

A hole-hearted Siegfried

Everything is there – except the central character English Wagnerians really can’t complain about what they’ve been offered this year, so long as they can get around the country, and particularly around the countryside. In London we have only had ENO’S Parsifal, but that was musically magnificent. Many of us found Glyndebourne’s Meistersinger tremendous both musically and as a production, and in the north there have been acclaimed performances, with more to come, of Das Rheingold in concert, a treat I have still in store; and a memorable Walküre, also in concert, in Manchester three weeks ago, which introduced a potentially great Wotan, Egils Silins. Just before that there was

Deborah Ross

Project Nim

Project Nim is a story about man and chimp in which chimp comes out of it well, man does not and, I’m warning you, it’s fascinating, but not pretty. The starting point is an Oklahoma lab in 1973 when Nim, a male baby chimp, is taken from his mother at a fortnight old and sent to be raised by a human family as part of an experiment to discover if another species can learn to communicate with us. We follow Nim all the way, from the moment he is wrenched from his mother’s arms, through Seventies’ academia — a peculiarly hilarious time; Nim is fond of the odd spliff —

Giannandrea Poesio

Mariinsky Ballet

It is 50 years since what was formerly known as the Kirov Ballet — now Mariinsky Ballet — paid its first, legendary visit to London. Thanks to the commendable efforts of Viktor Hochhauser, the impresario who made that first visit possible, the company has become a familiar focal point of the London summer dance season. This year is no exception, with a rich programme of both classical and modern ballets. For its opening last week, the celebrated Russian company chose the work it is traditionally associated with: Swan Lake. Konstantin Sergeyev’s 1950 production might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it remains a classic in the ballet’s performance history.

Kate Chisholm

Sporting Witness

It took just ten minutes for the secret of Nadia Comaneci’s extraordinary success at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal to be revealed. Comaneci achieved the first-ever perfect score when she was given a clean sweep of 10s from all the judges for her performance on the uneven bars. ‘What I remember is the dead silence in the stadium,’ recalls Vera Atkinson, a champion gymnast herself who was reporting on the Games for Bulgarian national television. ‘She flew between the bars, performing so many different things with the human body, before landing perfectly still…Yet the routine took barely 30 seconds.’ Comaneci’s feat of perfection was so unusual and so unexpected

Victoria Lane

Dare to be dull

After rootling in the BBC archives on the internet recently I started thinking, wouldn’t it be good if more programmes from the past were shown in full? The online archive contains less than a tenth of the total footage stored by the BBC (which would amount to nearly 70 years of TV if you watched non-stop), and only a few hundred complete shows out of so many thousands. The same thing occurred to me again while watching Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words, the first in a series of three, which went out on BBC4 on Monday. There is a segment of the episode devoted to a Horizon presented by

George Hull

Culture notes: The Beauty Queen of Leenane

Take one chip pan full of cooking oil, one crippled old lady and one strong-framed Irishwoman in her prime. Let the younger one heat the oil till it’s scalding, and pour it on to the older one’s trapped hand so she screams and screams (make the older one her mother, for good measure…). When she has the information she needs, have the torturer casually toss the remaining oil in her victim’s face and walk away. Now get every soul in the auditorium rooting for the daughter. Not possible? Go to see The Beauty Queen of Leenane (Young Vic, until 3 September) — and think again. In Martin McDonagh’s tightly woven

Sunday

Adrian Hilton

A new ending

“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” lamented Wilfred Owen in his Anthem for Doomed Youth. When RC Sherriff wrote his play Journey’s End just a decade after the Great War, he never set out to answer this haunting question or justify what he had witnessed at Passchendaele. But he was the first to bring the horrors of trench warfare to the stage, and by so doing he spawned a genre that would be satirised and appear a generation later as Oh, What a Lovely War!, and a generation after that as Blackadder Goes Forth. With their “simply topping” humour, “ra-ther” eccentricity, and “thanks most awfully” irony, they serve

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Show of wonders

One of the art books purchased in recent months that I’ve most enjoyed has been Arthur Boyd: Etchings and Lithographs, published in 1971. Boyd was an Australian painter, potter and printmaker, born in 1920 in Melbourne, who came to England in 1959 and made his home in this country. A deeply interesting image-maker, he came from a dynasty of artists, was largely self-taught, and evolved a powerful style that owed much to surrealism and expressionism, but was entirely his own vision. Boyd created a beguiling world of mythical beasts and figures, many of them involved in events of unusually potent religious or sexual drama. At one point we saw a