Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

Save 6Music

Much — possibly too much — has already been written about the BBC’s plans to close down its digital stations, 6Music and the Asian Network, in a customarily pathetic attempt to placate its political enemies. Much — possibly too much — has already been written about the BBC’s plans to close down its digital stations, 6Music and the Asian Network, in a customarily pathetic attempt to placate its political enemies. My first thought, when the plans were leaked and then announced officially, was, how very clever. No one in their right mind would close 6Music, which is a terrific little station and costs buttons. The cutbacks to the BBC website,

Simon Hoggart

Modern living

The sublime Outnumbered (BBC1, Thursday) is back. It’s customary to compare it favourably to The Life of Riley, another BBC family sitcom, from this week shown on the previous night. I have declared an interest before: the onlie begetter of Riley is Georgia Pritchett, who years ago nannied for us. So I’m disposed to like it. And it’s wrong to write it off as just another bland comedy with sassy kids and put-upon parents. It’s about life as lived in the real modern world, with teenagers so old beyond their years that they’re not even rude to their parents, families reduced to communicating through post-it notes, and mean-spirited, bottom-line-obsessed employers.

Kate Chisholm

Persecuting Christians

It’s all in the voice. It’s all in the voice. Some presenters have it. Others just don’t quite draw you in; the voice is too abrasive, too knowing. Edward Stourton definitely has it. A quiet authority, a questing intelligence, but more than that a willingness to share, to enter into a conversation with those whom he hopes will be listening. On Tuesday he took us to Iraq, and to yet another unforeseen consequence of the 2003 invasion. The Archbishop of Canterbury had already touched upon this in Easter Monday’s controversial edition of Start the Week from Lambeth Palace, when he began by reminding us that many Christians in the world

Alan Judd

Watch that band

Further unpleasant surprises for motorists this month as the government seizes yet more money from us under threat of criminal sanction (what Gordon Brown calls ‘asking’) to help replace money wasted from earlier seizures. Further unpleasant surprises for motorists this month as the government seizes yet more money from us under threat of criminal sanction (what Gordon Brown calls ‘asking’) to help replace money wasted from earlier seizures. This time it takes the form of car tax (VED) increases. If your new car is in the new band M (255g/km CO2) you’ll pay £950 for your tax disc instead of £405. This will clobber not only British-built exotics such as

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Time for thought

Andrew Lambirth on how a powerful Easter message can be found in images of the Crucifixion Easter is not just a time for bonnets and bunnies, but also for reexamining the fundamentals of life and faith. In the self-denial of Lent, whether we’ve given up chocolate or alcohol, or something even more difficult, we are offered the opportunity of facing and considering temptation, without the usual pretence that it’s not happening to us. Taking the easy way out is perhaps our most constant temptation, particularly rife in a society which dislikes rules and moral restraints, but Lent gives us the chance to confront that insidious habit. Also the chance to

Alexander Chancellor

After the Anna Nicole Smith opera, whose turn is it next? David Beckham’s?

So Anna Nicole Smith — the poor, talentless Texan girl who by virtue of the most enormous bosom became a stripper in a Houston clip joint and married one of its regular customers, a wheelchair-bound oil billionaire 63 years her senior — is to be the subject of a new opera that will receive its first performance at the Royal Opera House next year. The opera is an all-British effort, with music by Mark-Anthony Turnage and libretto by Richard Thomas, one of the creators of Jerry Springer: The Opera. Springer, widely attacked as blasphemous, was a sprightly satire on American trash culture, which ended with God and the Devil battling

Charles Spencer

Eclectic top ten

That splendid old bruiser Michael Henderson, no stranger to Spectator readers, and as passionate about music and poetry as he is about cricket, has, as so often, a bee buzzing in his bonnet. Responding to last month’s winning entry in the ‘Olden but golden’ all-time top-ten competition, he notes that Roy Beagley included Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte on his list. But which recording? huffs the mighty Hendo. ‘There are dozens, probably hundreds of Flutes. Surely the challenge you set was to select ten favourite recordings, not ten favourite pieces of music.’ Hendo is right, of course, when it comes to anoraks like me and him. The search for the best of

Deborah Ross

Unlikely superhero

Kick-Ass, 15, Nationwide Kick-Ass is a comic-book adventure that has already upset the Daily Mail — would you believe? — with its extreme violence and the fact that a 12-year-old girl uses the word that is See You Next Tuesday although, if you can’t make Tuesday, I’m thinking Thursday would also be fine. But is this film anything to get all het up about? I don’t know. I can only tell you that my own het wasn’t upped. I keep my het in my socks and when I checked after the screening it was at exactly the same level as before. The violence and language are so deliberately outlandish, so

Michael Tanner

Janacek revealed

Cunning Little Vixen Royal Opera House, in rep until 1 April Perhaps the most heartening feature of the British and especially the London operatic scene is the frequency with which Janacek’s operas are mounted now. His progress in that respect is comparable to that of Mahler, with whom he otherwise has mercifully little in common. Mahler’s symphonies soul-search, despair, exult, usually unconvincingly, or peter out, much more convincingly, in resignation and acceptance. Janacek has no more rosy a view of the world, specifically the human world, than Mahler, and in writing operas, which Mahler not only didn’t do but one can’t imagine his doing, he portrays individuals behaving in an

Giannandrea Poesio

MacMillan magic

Royal Ballet Triple Bill Royal Opera House, in rep until 15 April The Royal Ballet’s new triple bill is a rare example of artistically enlightened programming. It is devoted to Kenneth MacMillan’s creative genius, and highlights his most distinctive and seminal choreographic aesthetic through a masterly game of contrasts. Concerto, created in 1966, provides a unique insight into how MacMillan dealt with the notion of plotless or ‘abstract’ ballet set to non-dance-specific music. Shostakovich’s sometimes infectious, sometimes emotionally intense score is translated into what could be referred to as softly toned, spirited choreography. The vibrant, eye-catching intricacies of the first and third movements never give in to flashy ideas or

Kate Chisholm

Beyond our ken

It seems only right to tune in to programmes about Belief in the week leading up to Easter Day, the holiest day in the Christian calendar. Whether or not you have faith, there’s some point in reflecting on matters of conscience once a year, if only to give your inner self an annual spiritual check-up. It’s a chance to pause and reflect on matters other than the bank balance, the state of the garden, or that irritating person who’s blighting your life at work. For her late-night Radio 3 series this week, Joan Bakewell has been talking to a Catholic, a Muslim, a Druid, an atheist and an Anglican Bishop.

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Trouble upriver

Three reasons why I hardly ever review TV drama: 1) the length, 2) the politics, 3) sheer bloody laziness. I suppose the last one is the main reason but the others aren’t just excuses. It really is too depressing when, three hours into one of those Sunday and Monday two-part dramas, you suddenly realise that you’ve already wasted one evening and you’re about to waste another, but that you can’t bail out now because you’re in too deep — and what if something good and exciting suddenly happens? Almost all TV drama is too long and the reason for this is that the more screen hours you fill the bigger

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Round the galleries

I admire J.G. Ballard, who died last year, but much of his writing leaves me cold — as if abandoned in one of the lunar jungles or deserts that Max Ernst’s paintings so often depict. I admire J.G. Ballard, who died last year, but much of his writing leaves me cold — as if abandoned in one of the lunar jungles or deserts that Max Ernst’s paintings so often depict. It’s a deep chill of the psyche, a numbing of the human warmth that makes life bearable, and Ballard rightly identified it as taking over our culture. He wasn’t really a science fiction writer so much as a social commentator,

Laura Gascoigne

View from a room

Without from Within Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham, until 3 May In 1935 Magritte painted a picture called ‘La Condition Humaine’ showing a mountain landscape seen from inside a cave. In the mouth of the cave an easel with a see-through canvas perfectly frames the view of a distant castle, while a fire burning inside reminds us of Plato’s famous allegory of human knowledge, comparing us to prisoners in a cave whose only perception of reality is based on shadows thrown by firelight on the walls. Painting, Magritte implies, is similarly partial (although presumably an advance on shadows for a cave-dweller). Magritte’s picture hangs at the centre of Without from Within,

Alan Powers

Gothic dream

Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill Victoria & Albert Museum, until 4 July ‘I waked one morning at the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate.’  Thus Horace Walpole related the origin of the first ‘Gothic’ novel, The Castle of Otranto, published in 1765.

Susan Moore

The hard sell

For all the billion-dollar turnovers and glamorous, high-profile sales in New York, London, Hong Kong and Paris, the top level of fine-art auctioneering is a notoriously high-overhead, low-profit business. At times, it is even a no-profit business (Sotheby’s made a loss last year). How the Big Two auction houses have grappled to respond to this uncomfortable fact has shaped recent saleroom history. First came collusion and price-fixing, which resulted in damaging — in every sense of the word — antitrust litigation in the US, and then brave but initially unsuccessful attempts to harness the internet revolution, with sothebys.com. Most recently, the duopoly’s response to the profit problem has been to

Robin Holloway

Corrective to a fault

Glenn Gould called it ‘the greatest song cycle ever written’, entitling his notes on the two versions of Paul Hindemith’s masterpiece ‘A Tale of Two Marienlebens’. Glenn Gould called it ‘the greatest song cycle ever written’, entitling his notes on the two versions of Paul Hindemith’s masterpiece ‘A Tale of Two Marienlebens’. Stravinsky had already insinuated ‘Last Year at Marienleben’. And my pupils recently produced a better wordplay: asked what the name meant, they shyly volunteered ‘Married Life…?’ Copies of both versions have been lying about my rooms over the past few weeks, as I’ve tried to come to terms with what must surely be the most extreme instance of

Deborah Ross

Sentimental journey

The Blind Side 12A, Nationwide The Blind Side — or ‘The Blahnd Sahd’, as they would say in Tennessee — is so ghastly and annoying and creepy I implore you to steer well clear. I know, I know, it’s based on a true story, Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for her performance, and it’s already made $265 million at the US box office, so why should you listen to me? No reason. No reason at all. Mostly, I don’t listen to me and I am me! But I do think you should know this: beneath the swelling music and push-button, Hallmark-style sentimentality, this film is basically about a rich, white,

Michael Tanner

Missing spark

Katya Kabanova ENO, in rep until 27 March Katya Kabanova is Janacek’s grimmest opera, perhaps the grimmest opera ever written, but it is flooded with radiant music, which is decisively stamped out in the last few moments. With Katya having drowned herself, and the happy young lovers Kudrjas and Varvara having taken their most unChekhovian leave for Moscow, what hope is there for this community, whose senior figure, the Kabanicha, sees Katya’s suicide as the vindication of her moral stance? Her son Tikhon is a pathetic wretch, Katya’s lover Boris feels he had better leave her to her fate and clears off, and his uncle Dikoy is a superstitious lout

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Losing the plot

The Sanctuary Lamp Arcola, until 3 April Eigengrau Bush, until 10 April Furore fever still obsesses Irish playwrights. In Edwardian times there was nothing like a good old riot at the Abbey Theatre to get a new work established as a classic. Luvvie lore is replete with tales of mass walkouts and punch-ups at Dublin premières where the fisticuffs invariably end with the house being stormed by Sinn Fein while W.B. Yeats leaps on to the stage to appeal for calm and the Polish ambassador gets stabbed with a hat pin. Tom Murphy’s 1975 drama, The Sanctuary Lamp, seeks the rowdy affirmation of this tradition. Murphy has read deeply and