Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Michael Tanner

Universal truth

Duke Bluebeard’s Castle English National Opera Swanhunter Opera North Bartok’s only opera, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, shouldn’t be a difficult work to stage, to sing and to play, yet most of my worthwhile experiences of it have been listening to recordings — where it has done notably well. Though the plotline is as simple as can be, and the music matches it in urgency and directness, or rather because of these facts, it is a piece that invites and certainly receives the attentions of meddling producers who ignore what it is about and invent more or less elaborate dramatic situations which it could have been about. Daniel Kramer, who produced the

Kate Chisholm

Great escapes

It’s been difficult enough in this age of instant Googlification to wait even 24 hours until the next instalment of Radio Four’s latest Dickens serial, Our Mutual Friend, is given its 15-minute airing. It’s been difficult enough in this age of instant Googlification to wait even 24 hours until the next instalment of Radio Four’s latest Dickens serial, Our Mutual Friend, is given its 15-minute airing. So how did Dickens’s Victorian readers survive a whole month before the next instalment was published and they could at last discover the fate of Eugene Wrayburn? Or the truth about John Rokesmith? Mike Walker’s latest adaptation into 20 compressed episodes is a masterpiece

Ursula Buchan

Spring promise

Last autumn, I issued a self-denying ordinance. I would not allow myself to plant a single solitary tulip in the garden, except in the large terrace pots. This was because the varieties planted in the open ground had become hopelessly muddled over time, so I wanted to clear the borders of them. We are often told that bulbs are envelopes of secret spring promise buried in autumn, or some such thing; however, the adamantine imperative of a spring-flowering bulb’s requirement for a period of dormancy in summer means you cannot, to save your life, find them in July or August, when you need to dig them up. (The old advice

Andrew Lambirth

Word pictures

Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting Hayward Gallery, until 10 January 2010 Apparently, Ed Ruscha (born 1937 and pronounced Rew-shay) is widely considered one of the world’s most influential living artists. American, he has been based in Los Angeles all his working life, and is much indebted to the strategies and formal devices of film-making. Reference books tend to call him a Pop artist, in recognition of his interest in popular culture, and his exploitation of branding and presentation. (An early painting features one of those distinctive red boxes of raisins smashed flat to the picture plane.) His admirers want to distance him now from the Pop label and talk

Saturday

Henrietta Bredin

Dallas bucks the trend

Henrietta Bredin talks to Spencer de Grey, architect of the new opera house in Texas There can’t be a gesture much more brave and defiant than building a new opera house in the current doom-laden financial climate. Deep in the heart of Texas, in the centre of its freshly revamped arts district, Dallas has done exactly that. The project was awarded to Foster and Partners and has been the brainchild and chief responsibility of Spencer de Grey, whose previous work includes the Great Court at the British Museum and the Sage music centre in Gateshead. It is of course possible for an architect to design a law faculty (as de

Deborah Ross

Male power

The White Ribbon 15, Nationwide Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, which won the Palm d’Or in Cannes, is coldly manipulative and, in a way, probably quite facile but, God, it is good. It is so powerfully intriguing that, for 143 minutes, I did not shift in my seat, yawn, sigh, strain to read my watch or even drift into thinking what we might have for dinner (I’d already decided, anyhow; chops). It is set in a small village in Protestant northern Germany just before the first world war and, like Haneke’s other work — Hidden (Caché, 2005); The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste, 2001); Funny Games (er…Funny Games, 1997) — it’s

Peter Phillips

Words are not enough

Stravinsky once said that music was powerless to express anything at all. Leaving aside the niceties of whether a rising scale can at least represent something hopeful or aspiring, his music, like so much music, does nonetheless have the capacity to express the spirit of an age. Since this is a much vaguer undertaking than trying to depict a concrete verbal image in sound — like bird song, or a drunken man, or climbing a ladder — it is surprising how successful composers have been at it. Unwittingly successful, I guess, since how would you deliberately set about writing a piece to capture 2009? I became aware of this while

Giannandrea Poesio

Bare essentials

Triple Bill The Royal Ballet Although George Balanchine’s 1957 ballet Agon is not based on a Greek myth, it is traditionally regarded as the third instalment of the ‘classical antiquity’ series, following Apollo (1928) and Orpheus (1948). Inspired by the competitive displays of physical bravura that were so popular in ancient Sparta, Agon marked a significant stage in the development of Balanchine’s choreographic aesthetic. It is in Agon, in fact, that the dance-maker’s ‘stripped-to-the-essential’ formula found its most vivid first expression. Visually unhindered by costumes and sets — the action takes place against a monotone backcloth and the dancers wear T-shirts and leotards — the enthralling complexities of the choreographic

Charles Spencer

Peel appeal

If someone had asked me last month when it was that the revered Radio One DJ John Peel had died, I’d have said a couple of years ago. If someone had asked me last month when it was that the revered Radio One DJ John Peel had died, I’d have said a couple of years ago. In fact he died in Peru on 25 October 2004, while on a trip for the Telegraph’s travel pages. This is one of God’s many cruel tricks on His creation. As one grows older, time passes more quickly. Just when you want each day to last longer, it becomes shorter, until you feel that

Kate Chisholm

Quiet courage

‘Listeners may find some of the content disturbing,’ said the announcer before the programme began (a warning that was also given in the Radio Times). ‘Listeners may find some of the content disturbing,’ said the announcer before the programme began (a warning that was also given in the Radio Times). You’d have thought we were about to hear a particularly raunchy play, or some horrific accounts of death by torture, murder or old age. Behind Enemy Lines (Radio Two, Saturday) was shocking at times, and needed to be. That was the point. John McCarthy, the Beirut hostage who was held captive by Islamic Jihad for almost five years, talked to

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Risqué associations

Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill Royal Academy, until 24 January 2010 Supported by BNP Paribas and The Henry Moore Foundation It’s an unlikely grouping, this alliance of Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska and Gill. In many ways, this should be an Epstein solo show, or possibly an Epstein and Frank Dobson show (to link two key modernist sculptors who currently deserve reassessment), but neither of those interesting permutations would have pulled in the crowds. The popular appeal in Wild Thing is Eric Gill’s unorthodox sex life and the fact that the young rebel Gaudier died so romantically fighting ‘pour la patrie’ in the first world war (currently very fashionable). It helps that Epstein

Michael Tanner

Top of the class

L’assedio di Calais Guildhall School of Music and Drama This is the time of year, before the long hibernation of opera companies sets in, when there is sometimes a choice of several operas per night, many of them performed by the schools of music, which often seem to adopt the unintelligent course of having their performances on in the same week. This year, however, it is possible to go to the Guildhall School this week, the Royal Academy next week, with Semele conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras, and the Royal College the week after that to see The Magic Flute. The Guildhall School’s choice of Donizetti’s L’assedio di Calais was

James Hamilton

Present, conserve, explain

‘Thank you. It’s magnificent,’ said Philip Pullman as he opened the new extension at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in Oxford at the end of October. ‘Thank you. It’s magnificent,’ said Philip Pullman as he opened the new extension at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in Oxford at the end of October. And magnificent it certainly is, a triumphant reinvention of the Ashmolean, with 39 new galleries being added in this inspired development designed by Rick Mather Associates. The orientation of the museum has been radically altered, bringing archaeology and antiquity into the foreground. Given the roots of the Ashmolean, founded in 1683 with the Tradescant

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Darwin revisited

Origin of Species Arcola Seize the Day Tricycle Oh, not again. Yup, I’m afraid so. I had no wish to return to the vexed topic of Darwinism but a much-praised show in east London tempted me out on a frosty night to the Arcola theatre. Bryony Lavery’s new play has a storyline that’s as nutty as a Christmas cake in Broadmoor. Molly, an archaeologist working in Africa, smuggles the skeleton of a female hominid back to her home in the Yorkshire Dales. The unearthed Neanderthal springs to life and Molly proceeds to school her in the amazing truths of evolution. The characters in this bizarre educational farce are symbolic rather

Simon Hoggart

Spectator sport

The X Factor (ITV, Saturday and Sunday) is the most popular show on television at the moment. I felt I should watch it so that you don’t have to. It’s very loud. There is a lot of clashing and banging and whooping and whooshing. A voiceover booms at you, and the presenter shouts at everyone. The audience sounds as if it’s on something which might not trouble Professor Nutt but could cause grief to Alan Johnson. The slightest remark makes them cheer or boo irrationally. It’s very camp and ironic. The two male judges — Simon Cowell and some Irish bloke called Louis — constantly niggle at each other, but

Saturday

Kate Chisholm

Sharp as an arrow

Four couples but only three available bedrooms is the brilliant stratagem devised by Alan Ayckbourn for his 1975 relationship comedy Bedroom Farce. Four couples but only three available bedrooms is the brilliant stratagem devised by Alan Ayckbourn for his 1975 relationship comedy Bedroom Farce. It’s being revived at the Rose Theatre in Kingston in repertory with a rather different take on coupled life, Strindberg’s Miss Julie, for an aptly named season, ‘Behind Closed Doors’. The three separate bedrooms fill up the unusually wide lozenge-shaped stage of the new Rose (modelled on the Elizabethan original) as our four couples writhe and wrangle under the spotlight of Ayckbourn’s all-seeing, all-knowing wit. Ernest

Giannandrea Poesio

Bad boys

Mark Morris Dance Group Sadler’s Wells Michael Clark Company The Barbican Sleeping Beauty Royal Opera House Last week, the 2009 Dance Umbrella season rolled merrily towards its end with performances by two former ‘bad boys’ of the choreographic world. Luckily, neither event looked anything like those boyband comebacks the music industry thrives on these days. After all, Mark Morris and Michael Clark never cease to amaze and enthral audiences, thus remaining, Peter Pan-like, ‘bad boys’ for much longer than actual boyhood. Interestingly, they both presented recent works that allowed seasoned dancegoers to take the pulse of their current artistic creativity. Those who love Morris’s tongue-in-cheek reading of illustrious scores might

Michael Tanner

Glorious Gershwin

Porgy and Bess Royal Festival Hall Artaxerxes Linbury Studio Cape Town Opera has been on tour in the last ten days, taking its production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess to Cardiff, the Southbank Centre and Edinburgh. I went to the first of the two London performances, staged but without scenery. The action took place behind some of the orchestral players, with the rest either side. That is not an ideal situation, but nevertheless Gershwin’s finest score came across with enormous impact — in fact, I was freshly astonished at how much finer this work is than anything else he wrote. Whereas, I gather, the production is set in Soweto, at

Deborah Ross

Deprived of emotion

Bright Star PG, Nationwide The most curious thing about Jane Campion’s Bright Star is that I did not cry, even though I was certain I would. I always cry in films. I cry at the drop of a hat. I cry when it only looks as if a hat might drop. I am continually alert for all hat-dropping possibilities. I cried when Rachel returned to Ross in Friends, and that’s an American sitcom. On TV! And this is about the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, which began when he was 25 and she was 18, and finished with his death from tuberculosis at 25. This story is

Marcus Berkmann

Mythic quest

An old friend of mine has a list of books he wants to buy. It’s very long and he is very disciplined (so he tells me), so when he goes into a bookshop and sees something else he wants, something that isn’t on his list, he doesn’t buy it, as anyone else would. No, he writes down the title of the book on a piece of paper, goes home, adds it to the bottom of his ‘master list’ and when the book reaches the top of his ‘master list’, he goes out and buys it, even though, by this time, the book is long out of print and he has