Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Angela Summerfield

Luminous landscapes

Oleg Vassiliev: Recent Works Faggionato Fine Arts, 49 Albemarle Street, London W1, until 23 January 2009 The septuagenarian Russian artist Oleg Vassiliev is exhibiting for the first time in London. Vassiliev was born in Moscow, in 1931, and studied graphic art at the Surikov Art Institute (Moscow State Art Institute), a training which provided him with both an extraordinary technical understanding of the use of pencil, and the means of a livelihood as a book illustrator in Soviet Russia. In the spring and autumn months Vassiliev was able to explore the landscape immediate to Moscow with fellow artists, as well as ideas as to what constituted art. The resultant paintings,

Mark Glazebrook

Treasure trove

Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art Islamic art is a fast growing subject of study. Too many countries are involved for it to be categorised like French or Japanese art. In New York and London Islamic art tends to be confined to a section of an institution such as the Met, the British Museum or the V&A. Similarly, in the capital of United Arab Emirates, the Louvre Abu Dhabi will show art from all eras and regions, including Islamic art, when it opens in 2012. Meanwhile in Qatar, the peninsular state further up the gulf to the west and north of UAE, a more specialised institution has just opened its doors

Tiffany Jenkins

A rich legacy

The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions Metropolitan Museum, until 1 February 2009 Philippe de Montebello retires from the position of Director at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, after 31 years of service, at the end of this year. A forum of curators has organised an exhibition of around 300 great works of art and artefacts (chosen from over 84,000) acquired under his watch, to honour his contribution. The Philippe de Montebello Years is the result. It is an exhilarating and eclectic display that crosses the centuries from ancient prehistory to the present. Spanning the globe from Europe to Asia, Africa and Latin

Marcus Berkmann

Crumblies’ gig

It all started earlier this year, when my friend Chris managed to get four tickets for the first Leonard Cohen concerts at the O2. ‘There’s one for you if you want it,’ he said. Well, obviously I wanted it, but cash was a little short at the time — in fact, not so much short as entirely absent, avoiding me as though I’d said the wrong thing. And I do have an ongoing tinnitus problem, the result of reviewing too many awful Tin Machine gigs for a certain crazed mass-market newspaper in the early 1990s. Earlier this year I went to a friend’s book launch held in a seedy West

Michael Tanner

Flights of fancy | 3 December 2008

Les Contes d’Hoffmann Royal Opera Der fliegende Holländer Barbican Astonished delight was the first reaction, of everyone, I think, at the Royal Opera’s latest revival of John Schlesinger’s production of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann: astonishment that Rolando Villazón seems not only to have overcome his vocal and possibly other crises, but to be, in all respects, in finer fettle than ever before. He acted with a nonchalant spontaneity, walking casually and unharmed backwards off tables when drunk, tireless in his surmounting of William Dudley’s copious, cluttery sets, and using every limb to express his hopeless ardours, while maintaining a glorious stream of tone which — it is no disrespect to

Selina Mills

Bad neighbours

Lakeview Terrace 15, Nationwide Summer 15, Key Cities Lakeview Terrace is one of those menacing, neighbour-from-hell type thrillers with Samuel L. Jackson playing Abel Turner, an LAPD cop who bristles with hostility from the moment Chris and Lisa, an interracial couple — he’s white, she’s black — move in next door. This is a movie that inverts Hollywood’s usual racism shtick as, here, the bitter racist is the white-hating black rather than the black-hating white, although why any black might hate a white beats the hell out of me. I’m white and quite lovely. Ask anyone. Anyway, the film opens with Chris Mattson (Patrick Wilson) and his wife, Lisa (Kerry

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Relative values

The Family Reunion Donmar Chicken Hackney Empire August: Osage County Lyttelton T.S. Eliot was in his fifties when he turned to the theatre. What’s amazing about his 1939 play, The Family Reunion, is its experimental verve and nonchalant risk-loving energies. Harry, a country squire, returns from eight years abroad to take possession of his estate. His wife has died in a mysterious cruising accident and Harry astounds his family by announcing that he shoved her overboard. Did he? Or is he in the grip of morbid fantasies? Eliot wants to marry several genres here, Gothic horror, country-house whodunnit, Greek tragedy and absurdist sketch-comedy and not all the play’s combinations are

Gerald Kaufman

New Sondheim: enjoy it while stocks last

A Sondheim premiere in New York! Besotted fans of one of the four greatest-ever Broadway composer-lyricists (the others being Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser and Cole Porter, all, regrettably, dead) were resigned never to seeing another. I feared that we were going to have to make do, perpetually, with repeated, indeed incessant, revivals of Sweeney Todd, and those anthologies, such as Side by Side by Sondheim and Putting It Together, which started out as such fun but became funerary lamentations for the lack of something novel, exciting and, most of all, unknown. Yet now, 14 years after Passion, Sondheim’s adaptation of an Italian film about an embarrassingly neurotic love affair, comes

Saturday

Carolyn Bartholomew

Out of the ordinary

Carolyn Bartholomew talks to Tilda Swinton, an actor who has made a career out of being unconventional Tilda Swinton is undoubtedly one of the great artists of her generation, although it is only relatively recently that she has become more conspicuous with mainstream films such as The Chronicles of Narnia and Michael Clayton (for which she won an Oscar for best supporting actress). But Swinton has been in the profession for an unbelievable 23 years, embracing all aspects of film-making. She is highly regarded for her arthouse films of the Eighties and Nineties, initially in collaboration with the great Derek Jarman. She is an exceptional human being who challenges convention

Robin Holloway

Let down by Britten

Caught by chance on Remembrance Sunday, the broadcast of the composer’s celebrated recording of War Requiem kept me hooked, listening with half an ear, half fascinated, half repelled, for the whole duration of a trip down memory lane, recalling the wave of patriotic fervour and heart-on-sleeve emotion surrounding the work’s première, 1962, in the new Coventry cathedral. Caught by chance on Remembrance Sunday, the broadcast of the composer’s celebrated recording of War Requiem kept me hooked, listening with half an ear, half fascinated, half repelled, for the whole duration of a trip down memory lane, recalling the wave of patriotic fervour and heart-on-sleeve emotion surrounding the work’s première, 1962, in

Deborah Ross

Sting in its tale

Changeling 15, Nationwide Changeling, produced and directed by Clint Eastwood, is a most melodramatic melodrama starring Angelina Jolie and her totally amazing, bee-stung lips. (I was stung by a bee once, but on the eyelid; it didn’t look so great.) Anyway, based on a true story, it’s set in Los Angeles in 1928 and is about a single mother, Christine Collins (Jolie) whose nine-year-old son, Walter, goes missing and when returned by the police five months later, turns out not to be him at all. The police insist the boy is Walter, and insist Christine accepts him as Walter, but Christine knows he is not, just as any mother knows

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Apocalypse now

The TV programmes you watched as a child are like acid flashbacks. You never fully understood them at the time and you understand them even less now that you’ve forgotten most of the context and detail. But by golly, don’t they half haunt the imagination ever after? Terry Nation’s late Seventies series Survivors had just this effect on me. It was about the aftermath of a killer virus which wipes out virtually the entire human species leaving just a handful of survivors to roam the earth, scrape by without TV or electric lights or hot showers, and generally rediscover the old agrarian ways before we became so dependent on technology.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The fall guy

Break out the bunting. Crack open the champagne. Spit-roast the capon and prepare to party. Or, come to think of it, don’t bother. Break out the bunting. Crack open the champagne. Spit-roast the capon and prepare to party. Or, come to think of it, don’t bother. The fourth centenary of John Milton, which falls on 9 December, is unlikely to be greeted by an outburst of joyful carousing. Of all the great English writers (and he ranks among the half dozen greatest poets in all literature) Milton is the least cherished, the most lacking in glamour, the hardest to adore. His peculiar misfortune is to have been always out of

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Lost treasure

  Duality, yin and yang, twin-tub theatre. Call it what you like, a Christmas show must straddle the generations and please both kids and adults at once. Casting Keith Allen as Long John Silver in Treasure Island was clearly intended to achieve this double-barrel effect. To kids he’s Lilly Allen’s dad while adults know him as the author of various nuisances in his own right. But no matter how hard he tries, he can’t inject any humour or vitality into this glib and curiously sluggish production. He’s one of those strong-arm acts (Ray Winstone is another) whose air of volatile menace suits the small screen but doesn’t translate well into

Kate Chisholm

Life lessons

Talking to my dentist, as one does, we discover a mutual enthusiasm for Radio Three’s Composer of the Week (Monday to Friday) and especially its presenter, Donald Macleod. Talking to my dentist, as one does, we discover a mutual enthusiasm for Radio Three’s Composer of the Week (Monday to Friday) and especially its presenter, Donald Macleod. How does he do it? we both exclaimed. Each and every week he comes up with five hours of elegant, informative, entertaining script, interspersed with carefully chosen nuggets of music from major and minor figures in the classical world. It’s like listening to an audio encyclopaedia. But Macleod doesn’t just give us a catalogue

Andrew Lambirth

Forgotten wonders

Byzantium 330-1454 Royal Academy, until 22 March 2009 In his excellent book Portrait Painters, written more than half-a-century ago but still full of wisdom and stimulating observations, Allan Gwynne-Jones includes a note on the character of English art. He has been discussing the great glories of the medieval school of manuscript illumination in Britain, often forgotten when an assessment is made of our contribution to the visual arts. Yet between 1000 and 1300 the English school was the finest in Europe without a doubt. Gwynne-Jones writes: ‘In order to understand English art one must study its source. English art is Byzantine in root, the Byzantine tradition having found its way

Stephen Pettitt

A perfect cadence

This year, on 11 December — and I wish more people knew about it than actually do — the American composer Elliott Carter celebrates his 100th birthday. This year, on 11 December — and I wish more people knew about it than actually do — the American composer Elliott Carter celebrates his 100th birthday. At a time when far too many composers — more anxious about audience numbers than they are about the quality of the music they produce — have often compromised themselves in the cause of immediacy and accessibility, Carter has remained true to himself and to the tough, multilayered, multitextured, multicoloured language in which he writes, investing

Saturday

Selina Mills

Mystery of the missing tapes

Selina Mills on how some newly discovered tapes give us a glimpse into the life of Agatha Christie One hot summer’s afternoon in London, when I was five or six, I was sent to the garden of our house in Chelsea, rather than attending a birthday party, to contemplate a naughty deed. I can’t remember my crime, but I can remember swaying too violently on a vivid orange hammock, and falling on my head with a thump. Before long, a smart old lady with ropes of pearls rushed over from next door and calmed my howling. We had a nice little chat about the merits of hammocks on hot sunny

Giannandrea Poesio

Depth to the dynamics

Triple Bill Royal Opera House According to a tacitly shared, unwritten code of common professional practice, critics ought not to divulge their opinion before being published. Which is why I felt terribly guilty when, at the end of Wayne McGregor’s Infra, I gave my first impressions to a BBC interviewer. True, I did not say that much. Surprised by the camera, I waffled. The sole cogent thing I managed to utter was ‘visually stunning’. Which it was. McGregor is indeed an intriguing figure of modern-day dance-making. Unlike some of his contemporaries, who are mainly preoccupied with challenging the ballet idiom, he prefers to focus on how the five-century-old art can

Kate Chisholm

Here’s an idea . . .

I really, really wish I could change places this week and become a TV critic. Nothing on radio has quite matched the drama of that extraordinarily necessary BBC2 documentary, The Fallen, which in three long hours commemorated each and every one of the British soldiers who have died in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Or, in fabulous contrast, the sheer laugh-ability of John Sergeant on Strictly Come Dancing. The SCD factor is a throwback to an earlier era, a sequinned equivalent of the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum. It takes families back to the Ovaltineys, when parents and children were pictured sitting round a shiny brown box in