Arts Reviews

Exactly ten years ago I visited Battersea Arts Centre to see eight short operas performed by Tête à Tête. Exactly ten years ago I visited Battersea Arts Centre to see eight short operas performed by Tête à Tête. It was a memorable evening, and showed what a good idea it is to encourage young composers to write quarter-hour-long pieces, instead of making a whole evening of their first attempt at opera. Inevitably, of course, there is a workshop aspect to these occasions, and anyone who feels understandably suspicious of workshops is likely to give them a wide berth — and thereby to miss a good deal of hit-and-miss pleasure. There

I watched Tunes of Glory again last night. It’s one of my favourite films*. During it, Basil Barrow, the newly-arrived Colonel of the battalion, played by John Mills, mentions his experiences in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during the Second World War: Oh they gave me time, all right. Again and again. When I was in the prison camp, they nearly drowned me, then they brought me round. Then they put a wet cloth over my mouth and kept it wet until I nearly drowned again. And the only thing that pulled me through was the thought that one day I’d come back and sit in the middle of

It’s a bank holiday weekend, so what better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than by watching Zulu one more time? Granted, the movie is riddled with historical inaccuracies but so what? ‘Tis grand, stirring stuff. And the “sing-off” between the Zulus – “Well, they’ve got a very good bass section, mind, but no top tenors, that’s for sure” – and our Welsh heroes is splendid, ranking behind only the superb rendition of the Marseillaise in Casablanca. Here it is:

Roderick Conway Morris talks to Peter Greenaway about creating a ‘painting with a soundtrack’ Peter Greenaway is standing against the backdrop of Paolo Veronese’s enormous ‘The Wedding at Cana’ in the Palladian refectory of the Venetian monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore and is in rhetorical mode: ‘When we put art and cinema in the balance, what do we have? At least 8,000 years of painting and a miserable 114 years or so of cinema. Nothing in cinema has not already been essayed in still images in painting at one time or another. So I think it a very good idea to have a dialogue between painting and cinema.’ The occasion

J.W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite Royal Academy, until 13 September Supported by Champagne Perrier-Jouet Just what is it that makes John William Waterhouse (1849–1917) so different, so appealing? (As Richard Hamilton might put it.) And in what way is he so modern? It certainly isn’t an off-putting or radical modernity, for the exhibition in the Sackler Galleries has been doing brisk business, and the day I visited it was scarcely possible to view the pictures for the crowds. The shires must be empty these days, and indeed I hear that the only place to recapture the old peaceful museum experience of actually being able to see art in a public

Henrietta Bredin talks to David Pountney about running the Bregenz Festival Back in the days when David Pountney was director of productions at English National Opera, his so-called office was a tiny broom cupboard of a space carved out of a backstage cranny of the London Coliseum, with a single grubby window overlooking a narrow passageway known as Piss Alley for obvious and strongly smelling reasons. He now, as artistic director of the Bregenz Festival in Austria, occupies a lavishly appointed sort of control tower, with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out across Lake Constance and giving a direct hawk’s-eye view of the stage built out into the lake, which is the

Perhaps you’ve already seen Kseniya Simonova’s performance on Ukraine’s Got Talent. But if you haven’t, watch how she recounts the horrors of Ukraine’s experiences during the Second World War. With sand. It’s one of the most remarkable, moving, beautiful pieces I’ve seen in ages. Since the video has already been seen 900,000 times  I suppose she counts as a “Youtube sensation” but that term seems absurd and cheap when applied to this sort of thing. So too does any comparison with our own Susan Boyle. Take eight minutes from your day and watch this. You won’t regret it. The final words mean, I gather, something like “You are always with

Sir Muirhead Bone: Artist and Patron The Fleming Collection, 13 Berkeley Street, W1, until 5 September The Fleming Collection mounts loan exhibitions of artists represented in its permanent collection, its focus on Scottish artists a strength rather than a limitation. (Would there were an institution in London which just showed American artists. Perhaps then we’d get decent exhibitions of Wayne Thiebaud, Nancy Graves or Martin Puryear.) In recent years the Fleming has shown James Pryde and Joan Eardley to good effect, and now the great etcher Muirhead Bone is given the same treatment. The chronological survey begins in the downstairs gallery, where a fine drypoint portrait of Bone by his

Lloyd Evans goes in search of culture on the rain-soaked streets of Edinburgh The crunch. That damn credit crunch. It hurt Scotland hardest of all. A worldwide reputation as a financial powerhouse? Gone. Dreams of independence? Severely truncated. Last year the Edinburgh Festival bore prophetic signs of imminent poverty, of homelessness, of doom. Free shows abounded. Bribes of wine, whisky and sandwiches were being proferred to choosy punters. This year I’m here on an austerity awayday, a recession quickie, a pared-down and stripped-back three-day in-and-outer. My accommodation meets the brief superbly. I’m in a dive, of the deep-sea variety. You have to hold your breath. The showers are communal. So

Janet Boulton: Remembering Little Sparta Edinburgh College of Art, until 30 August Janet Boulton (born 1936) is an artist of integrity and dedication, whose principal subject is still-life. She paints in watercolour, that most demanding of media, and eschews drama of subject or treatment. She has chosen a difficult path, and one which attracts little attention, particularly in an art world dominated by sensationalism. Boulton’s is a quiet art, its aim residing in the subtlest differentiations of tone and placing. She paints exquisite compositions of glass vessels, making of their reflective surfaces a fitting subject for contemplation, a modern vanitas. She is also a passionate gardener, and one of her