Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Lovers’ tangle

Elegy for Young Lovers Young Vic, in rep until 8 May Albert Herring Blackheath Halls Hans Werner Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers, with a libretto by Auden and Chester Kallman, is less familiar than one might expect. Never recorded complete, it has rarely been performed in the UK since Glyndebourne staged it in 1963. Yet in the excellent new production at the Young Vic, the concentration awarded by the audience was instantly apparent, and maintained throughout the three hours the piece lasts. ENO has got Fiona Shaw to direct, and one of the results is that the performers behave like human beings rather than opera singers, and even speak their

James Delingpole

Money well spent

Science, you may have noticed, has been getting a bad press of late. Scientists losing raw data, scientists withholding data, scientists cherry-picking data, scientists torturing the evidence till it says what they want it to say, scientists acting more like political activists than scientists. And, of all the world’s media institutions, none has been quite so shameless in justifying, excusing or covering up this appalling behaviour than that supposed bastion of neutrality and authority, the BBC. Still, the BBC can’t get everything wrong all the time, and its new series The Story of Science is a case in point. Within five minutes, the presenter Michael Mosley was at the court

The battle continues

It sounded as if a World Heavyweight Championship was just about to begin. The roaring mob. The pent-up energy. The buzzing excitement at the prospect of an upset, a defeat, a knockout blow. The tension was palpable, seeping through my study, as the contenders squared up to each other for Round Two. I don’t have Sky and wanted to experience The Prime Ministerial Debate live, as it was happening, rather than wait up until 11.30 last Thursday night to watch it on BBC2, so I had no alternative but to listen to Gordon, Dave and Nick thrashing it out on Radio 4 instead of watching them on screen. I must

Brutal beauty

William Cook takes us on a tour of 2010’s unlikely European Capital of Culture ‘And the European Capital of Culture in 2010 will be …the Ruhr.’ When I first heard the announcement, it sounded like a particularly unfunny German joke. The Ruhr, after all, is Europe’s biggest rust belt — a vast swathe of mines and factories, many now derelict or redundant, which stretches across north-west Germany like a huge unsightly rash. It’s hard to imagine a less likely cultural capital, and normally I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near it had it not been for a fond memory of one of the nicest afternoons I’ve ever spent. A few years

Arboreal glory

Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain, a Bicentenary Exhibition Royal Academy, until 13 June As Paul Sandby’s dates 1731—1809 suggest, last year was his bicentenary, when this exhibition started out in Nottingham. Sandby lived in that illustrious city before heading north to Edinburgh, when he was appointed draughtsman to the Military Survey of North Britain in 1747. It is therefore most appropriate that this exhibition travelled from Nottingham to Edinburgh before coming south to the RA. It follows Sandby’s own trajectory in this. He moved to London in 1751, to stay with his elder brother Thomas at Windsor and in Soho, and became involved in the St Martin’s Lane Academy. He began

An insider’s view

A Critic’s Choice Selected by Andrew Lambirth Browse & Darby, until 7 May The bravest thing an art critic can do is to show their own work; the next bravest is to mount a show of the artists they admire. Publishing one’s critical opinions in print is one thing; hanging up the physical evidence in public is quite another. One normally fearless critic of my acquaintance, when invited to do it, declined with a shudder and a quote from ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. Cork Street didn’t feel like the Valley of Death when I visited Andrew Lambirth’s Critic’s Choice last week. Lambirth has a long association with Browse

Lloyd Evans

Porn and propaganda

Porn — The Musical Theatre 503, until 1 May Posh Royal Court, until 22 May Here’s the rule. Provocative title equals lousy show. The playbill Porn — The Musical filled my heart with misgivings as I made the long trek south of the Thames to a venue at a Battersea boozer. The room above the pub was huge and empty, but the theatre wasn’t here but higher up, via a trapdoor, wedged in under the beery roof-eaves. A fug of lavender and sawdust hung over the creaking benches and the stage was the size of a card-table. As I took my seat, a furry insect expired in midair and landed

Suffering for art

Great bafflement during a recent week in Berlin, city of bleak exteriors, whose human and cultural rewards are almost wholly indoors — in its wealth of concert halls, opera houses and museums. Great bafflement during a recent week in Berlin, city of bleak exteriors, whose human and cultural rewards are almost wholly indoors — in its wealth of concert halls, opera houses and museums. Museums are, 20 years after reunification, ever-reliable. The music scene is passing and evanescent. I had hoped to find, over the Easter period, seasonal relevance of the most exalted kind — a St Matthew Passion or Parsifal on or around Good Friday itself. But schedules were

Jarring Janacek

The Adventures of Mr Broucek Edinburgh Festival Theatre Prima Donna Sadler’s Wells There is no composer to whose works my reactions fluctuate so much as Janacek. I don’t mean the various compositions in his output, I mean specific works on different occasions. When I saw a concert performance of his comic opera The Adventures of Mr Broucek at the Barbican in 2007, conducted by Jiri Belohlavek, I became an instant, passionate convert to a piece that I had previously thought was mostly a dismal flop. And I felt the same when the CDs of that performance were issued. Then, last October, when it was staged in English by Opera North

Cookery class

The other day there were four cookery programmes in prime time on the terrestrial channels. Why? What on earth makes this subject of such relentless fascination? At least on the similarly ubiquitous antiques shows you can look at the antiques. But so far you can’t taste the food, though no doubt they’re working on that as the next big thing after 3D. Instead of buying HD-ready televisions, we’ll get oven-ready sets. ‘Press the red button for venison in a raspberry coulis, or the blue button for turbot in a beurre blanc…’ The latest is Out of the Frying Pan (BBC 2) in which contestants who didn’t quite make it on

Wild at heart

On the face of it, the phrase ‘forest garden’ is a contradiction in terms, since trees in mature forests do not allow enough sun through the canopy for satisfactory gardening. On the face of it, the phrase ‘forest garden’ is a contradiction in terms, since trees in mature forests do not allow enough sun through the canopy for satisfactory gardening. But it is meant simply as a shorthand for ‘a garden of useful plants (trees, shrubs and perennial vegetables) in an environment similar to a young natural woodland’ — which, if not exactly snappy, is certainly an interesting concept whichever way up you hold it. Indeed, ‘forest garden’ is likely

In the firing line

Henrietta Bredin goes backstage at the Royal Opera House and finds a stash of weaponry I am standing outside a heavily reinforced metal door somewhere in the furthest flung recesses of the labyrinthine corridor-tangle backstage at the Royal Opera House. A painted shield has the word Armoury picked out on it in gold lettering and next to a no smoking warning is a sign saying ‘No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again’. The door swings ponderously open to reveal the possessor of this somewhat macabre sense of humour, chief armourer Rob Barham. He is not a small man and his lair seems to fit around him

Hypermanic Rossini

Il Turco in Italia Royal Opera, in rep until 19 April Commentators on Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia tend to take a defensive line, comparing its absence from the repertoire for many decades with that of Così fan tutte, and even comparing the two works directly, as well as pointing out that Mozart’s great opera was playing in Milan at the time that Rossini was composing Turco. And Gregory Dart, in his essay in the programme of the Royal Opera’s production, first seen in 2005 and now revived for the first time, quotes Stendhal, a passionate admirer of both composers, writing that ‘Rossini is always amusing, Mozart never; Mozart is

Sound effects | 17 April 2010

The Tallis Scholars’ 50th concert in New York City — the first was in 1988 — took place in St Bartholomew’s Church, Park Avenue, on 26 March. The Tallis Scholars’ 50th concert in New York City — the first was in 1988 — took place in St Bartholomew’s Church, Park Avenue, on 26 March. Since we have sung now in 15 different spaces in NYC — more than in any other city in the world and including the Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art — this was an unusual choice of venue for a celebration. St Bart’s is famous for a number of things, but since reverberant acoustics

Lloyd Evans

Rotten truth

The Empire Royal Court, until 1 May Polar Bears Donmar, until 22 May The Royal Court’s stuffy little upstairs theatre is hosting a new play about cultural imperialism. D.C. Moore sets his scene in Helmand where a young English corporal finds himself morally compromised by his desire to torture a Taleban prisoner. The twist is that the prisoner is a norf-Lunnin geezer, of Asian extraction, claiming to have been kidnapped by insurgents while ‘holidaying’ in Kandahar. This device neatly brings the war back home and turns the play into an examination of the competing religious factions in Britain. And though the script is never less than absorbing, and often very

Spell bound

Cinderella Royal Opera House, in rep until 5 June I know that old fairy tales are not popular or fashionable any more. But last Saturday, at the opening of the Royal Ballet’s new run of Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella, I was shocked to overhear two nicely behaved children ask their grandparents why the good fairy had asked Cinders to fetch a pumpkin and why there were dancers dressed as white mice pulling her coach. It’s true that, in Ashton’s superb choreographic adaptation of the old story, the transformation scene is not as graphic as it is in Walt Disney’s animated film. Yet the youngsters’ questions were symptomatic of the cultural, psychological

Missing humour

After listening to an advance copy of tonight’s Archive on 4 I’m almost beginning to look forward to the general election of 2010. After listening to an advance copy of tonight’s Archive on 4 I’m almost beginning to look forward to the general election of 2010. A Night to Remember looks back over 60 years of Election Night Specials, guided by the curiously comforting voice of Anthony Howard, whose reflections and rummaging through the archives make dusty, devious politics begin to sound quite exciting. His programme is a useful reminder that what happens on the night of 6 May might actually make a difference. And, even if it doesn’t, the

Alive and kicking | 10 April 2010

Marianne Gray talks to Debbie Reynolds, one of the last of Hollywood’s Golden Era Debbie Reynolds is the first to admit she’s no longer Tammy. At 78, she’s more like the Unsinkable Molly Brown as she tours Britain this month in her one-woman show, Alive and Fabulous. ‘You people in England probably think I died years ago but I’m still kicking,’ she says, laughing. ‘I know that a lot of young people don’t know who I am unless they’ve noticed me as Grace’s mother, Bobbi Adler, in the sitcom Will & Grace, but I’ve never stopped working. I’m an Aries and it’s in my nature to be a performer. ‘I’ve