Arts Reviews

Irresistible, the allure of a snatched weekend in Paris to catch a rare, adored opera, Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui. Irresistible, the allure of a snatched weekend in Paris to catch a rare, adored opera, Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui. This glorious cornucopia of intoxicating invention has ‘enjoyed’ a history of bad luck: the delirious imbecility of the plot — ‘a negative tour de force, to invent such a confusing story with so few characters’ — has occasioned two comprehensive overhauls (most recent the brave rewrite mounted by Opera North in the mid-1990s). Maybe to revert to the original, embrace the absurdities, and enjoy the music for all it’s worth,

Falstaff Glyndebourne There was an interesting, startled article in the Independent a couple of weeks ago in which the writer recorded that, contrary to the expectations of everyone in ‘the media’, as the credit crisis squeezes harder, its victims, instead of turning to ever more feather-brained sources of enjoyment and consolation, are bewilderingly trying an escape into seriousness, with ‘heavy’ plays and operas, long taxing books, etc., being what they are headed for, rather than the jolly irrelevant frolics that they might have been expected to favour. Really that should have come as no surprise, since seriousness or anyway a plausible imitation of it is so much more absorbing, and

Get home from the theatre to find my laptop flashing a notice at me saying: ‘Godot: overdue’. Which indeed he was, patiently, achingly, endlessly waited for in an extraordinary performance by Messrs Stewart, McKellen, Callow and Pickup. Difficult to single out particular moments but possibly the best piece of advice for all of us in these topsy-turvy times is Pozzo’s: ‘Dance first, think later; that’s the natural order of things.’

Stephen Pettitt on how Sir Roger Norrington and others started the debate about ‘authenticity’ In the late 1970s, the conductor Sir Roger Norrington, at the time in charge of the late and lamented Kent Opera, created the London Classical Players. With this act Norrington, who has just turned 75, joined a small group of musicians regarded by the wider profession as, to put none too fine a point on it, rather nutty. They included his British colleagues Christopher Hogwood and Trevor Pinnock, the Dutch harpsichordist Ton Koopman and recorder player Frans Bruggen, the Belgian Sigiswald Kuijken, and, from a slightly older generation, the iconoclastic Austrian conductor and viola da gamba

The Intimate Portrait: Drawings, Miniatures and Pastels from Ramsay to Lawrence British Museum, until 31 May In Room 90 at the BM is one of the free exhibitions the Department of Prints and Drawings do so well. This one has been organised in collaboration with the National Galleries of Scotland and was first seen at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery at the end of last year. It focuses on informal portraits made between the 1730s and the 1830s, the period often thought of as the heyday of British portraiture. There are no grand public statements: the emphasis is on private images. Here are the love tokens and the personal mementoes,

Dan Jones on how the Armada tapestries, destroyed by fire, are being recreated Anthony Oakshett points to a palette and shows me a colour called ‘sea-monster grey’. The tall and genial artist is guiding me around his cool, airy temporary studio in an outhouse at Wrest Park, the Bedfordshire country house. Around us stand six vast canvases depicting scenes from the failed attack of the Spanish Armada in 1588. There are indeed a number of sea monsters in various stages of completion, their terrible mouths yawning and their tails thrashing as English and Spanish ships give battle around them. Oakshett is the artist leading a two-year project to recreate the