Arts Reviews

With diffidence, I differ from my esteemed opera colleague. But I think Michael Tanner has got the new Covent Garden Lulu (Arts, 13 June) upside down. Catching it by chance a few nights ago, I’ll take the opportunity for an alternative opinion. First, for where we don’t differ. Singing is always adequate, sometimes outstanding, and the orchestral playing and direction quite marvellous. MT had bad luck with Agneta Eichenholz’s heroine: I found her in the entire range between coquetry and anguish fully up to the role’s exorbitant demands. From her succession of admirers, lovers, husbands, clients, Jennifer Larmore’s Countess Geschwitz stood out for touching presence and beauty of voice, Michael

Famous, Rich and Homeless (BBC1) Psychoville (BBC2) Famous, Rich and Homeless, made by Love Productions for BBC1, and shown over Wednesday and Thursday nights, was a mess. It almost worked, but in the end it failed. For one thing, the five participants in the experiment were not particularly famous, and I doubt if any were rich except for the Marquess of Blandford, who legged it as soon as he cottoned on. So the producers were left with a bunch of people you had vaguely heard of: a former newspaper editor, a former tennis player, a former soap star and a broadcaster. Yet the voice-over kept telling us how rich and

A curious programme on the World Service on Friday reminded us that although we’re now embarking on a new kind of technological revolution, dominated by twittering, downloading, waking up to John Humphrys not in BH but Karachi, we’ve not quite lost our connection with the mindset of the Middle Ages. On Blood and Lava Malcolm Billings joined the Procession of San Gennaro in Naples. It’s an annual festivity, when the ornate silver bust of the saint and his Holy Blood, in two sealed glass bottles, is carried from the cathedral to the monastery of Santa Chiara. Once there it is supposed magically to transform itself from a dried powder into

The Winter’s Tale Old Vic Phèdre Lyttelton I seem to be alone in feeling great waves of pity for anyone involved in an assault on The Winter’s Tale. This strange dud of a text remains mystifyingly popular with theatre folk. It’s two plays shunted together. Act one is a mawkish palace tragedy, act two is a pastoral operetta with lots of songs and larky rhetoric and a silly happy ending. The play’s central character, Leontes, is a sexual paranoid who accuses his best friend of adultery, slings his pregnant wife in jail and sends their newborn baby into exile. Later he finds out he was mistaken. They’re all innocent. Contrition

Telstar 15, Key Cities Telstar is a biopic about the ‘ground breaking’ 1960s song writer and independent record producer Joe Meek, but unless you know a lot about Joe already — and, I confess, I didn’t — you’re never that clear about what ground he broke exactly. If you fancy seeing this film, I would even recommend you look up Mr Meek on Wikipedia before you go. Some people distrust the site but I don’t. As it is, it currently has me down as a journalist and a part-time lingerie model, and you know what? I am a part-time lingerie model. Generally, I don’t like to talk about it, as

In the current anniversary-fest the musical world has awarded itself there is an omission which dwarfs the lot of them. This is the invention of what many people still call ‘modern music’. For it was in 1909 that Schoenberg wrote his Five Orchestral Pieces and the monodrama Erwartung. These were early atonal works which used such a fantastic variety of harmony, rhythm, and colour, and took place at such an intense emotional level, that they first justified the use of the term ‘expressionist’. Roger Fry had just coined this term, also in 1909, in order to establish a contrast with the passivity of Impressionism. The term modern music is still

Lulu Royal Opera House It’s not often that I have felt so disinclined to write a piece about the past week’s opera-going, especially when it was an occasion I had looked forward to so much: Berg’s second opera Lulu, one of the strangest works in the repertoire, but even if not a masterpiece — it’s very hard to say what it is — a work of enduring fascination. However, if you had the misfortune to encounter it for the first time in the Royal Opera’s new production by Christof Loy you would be entitled to wonder whether it was a work of any fascination at all, and not just a

Like most addicts I have become accustomed to smuggling stuff into my own house. In the old days it was bottles of Scotch or wine. More recently it has been a couple of hundred quid’s worth of CDs after a binge in HMV.  The trouble with CDs is that they take up so much space. Wandering round Cargo in Wimbledon the other Saturday I noticed a splendid chest of drawers for a mere £40 that would offer safe and stylish storage for some 400 discs. It was the work of a moment to snap it up and put it in the car. It was only when I arrived home that

‘Hi, my name is Kröd Mändoon, and I’ll be your liberator this evening!’ says the hero of Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire (BBC2, Thursday) as he bursts into a dungeon. ‘Hi, my name is Kröd Mändoon, and I’ll be your liberator this evening!’ says the hero of Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire (BBC2, Thursday) as he bursts into a dungeon. It’s a funny line, imposing the formulaic talk of an American waiter on to a medieval, fantastical, witches and warlocks ersatz epic of the type dreamed up by lonely schoolboys in their bedrooms. I laughed, or chuckled inwardly. But it didn’t quite work. The