Arts Reviews Archives

Saturday

10 Apr 2010

Sacrificing art for ideas

Richard Hamilton: Modern Moral Matters Serpentine Gallery, until 25 April This year is the 40th anniversary of the Serpentine Gallery, that most welcoming of exhibition venues — the gallery in the park — with its wide views and well-appointed rooms. Expectation rises as the visitor walks through gardens burgeoning with spring, even if it is raining. To start its anniversary year, the Serpentine has mounted an exhibition of Richard Hamilton’s political work entitled (in homage, presumably, to Hogarth) Modern Moral Matters. The show is a real disappointment: the blinds are down to focus the visitor’s attention inward, which might be acceptable if there were riches to be seen. Instead, the

Michael Henderson

The Master’s voice

Götterdämmerung Salzburg Easter Festival Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety. Rather more than safety, if truth be known. The Salzburg Easter Festival, which concluded on Monday with a performance of Götterdämmerung, topping off a Ring cycle shared with the summer festival in Aix, was an event of considerable beauty. Given the extraordinary prelude to this year’s pageant, with a toxic cloud of scandal hanging over the city amid charges of embezzlement being drawn up against the outgoing director and technical director, it was more than anybody could have hoped for. As well as conducting the last quarter of Wagner’s mighty tetralogy, Simon Rattle led the Berlin

Michael Tanner

Fallen Angel

Angels in America Barbican Angels in America is the latest in the series of contemporary operas which are being mounted at the Barbican by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The others have been semi-staged, this was three-quarter staged, with props, moved around by the performers, and an Angel crashing into the action at the close of Act I. It is the latest opera by the Transylvanian composer Peter Eötvös, whose previous opera Love and Other Demons was premiered at the 2008 Glyndebourne Festival, to no great acclaim. Angels in America, by contrast, has been given very warm welcomes in the various cities in which it has been produced, beginning with Paris

Deborah Ross

No laughing matter | 10 April 2010

The Infidel 15, Nationwide I wish, wish, wish, wish, wish I had liked The Infidel better. I wanted to like it. I longed to like it. And I did think it would be a hoot. It’s written by David Baddiel, a thoughtful, clever and witty writer (usually). It stars Omid Djalili, who has a lovely, big, funny face and is always an engaging physical presence. The premise is neat and brave and topical: it’s about a Muslim who discovers he is adopted and was actually born Jewish. It sounded right up my street, as I do like to laugh at religion. Some days, I am so busy laughing at religion

Lloyd Evans

Triumphant pursuit

London Assurance Olivier, in rep until 2 June Bedroom Farce Duke of York’s, booking to 10 July Trickster nature has been maliciously kind to Simon Russell Beale. It made him the leading actor of his generation and instilled in him a desire to perform Shakespeare’s awesome roll-call of warrior princes. It also built him like a chest of drawers. His physique has always hampered his Shakespearean outings, so it’s a great relief, and a pleasure, to see him on the stage of the National in a role that complements every last bauble in his dazzling thesaurus of effects. London Assurance, a slapstick comedy, was written in 1841 by a 20-year-old

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

3 Apr 2010

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

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

27 Mar 2010

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.