Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Marcus Berkmann

Recent loves

And so to the records of the year. I usually do this piece in December, but as all sensible shoppers know that’s the worst month in the year to buy anything for yourself — particularly music, in what is very much a buyer’s market. Amazon’s prices, normally comfortingly low, lurch up into realms of profitability during December, to catch out unwary parents and relatives who don’t buy things there for £4.98 every day of the week. In mid-December I wandered through a branch of Zavvi, the doomed rebrand of Virgin Megastores. I was there, and some tumbleweed, and a couple of sad teenagers in shabby Zavvi uniforms, who may have

Kate Chisholm

Community living

Phew! Normal service has been resumed. No more panto; no more guest editors forcing Evan, Jim, Ed and Sarah into embarrassingly coy interviews with Karl Lagerfeld et al.; no more year-end reviews of the year behind and portentous glimpses of the year ahead. I don’t know why every year we have to go through this rigmarole. Does anyone really want, or dare, to look back even for a moment? As for the future, for once I’m really intrigued and even excited by what lies ahead. No one can say where this economic downturn might lead, or how long it will last. All the experts are just as baffled as us

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Dates for your diary

Andrew Lambirth looks forward to some great exhibitions in the year ahead There’s a very full year’s viewing ahead to cheer the eye and gladden the heart however bleak the financial prospects. For a start, the National Gallery is mounting a major exhibition focusing on the fascinating relationship that Picasso had with the art of the past. His reworkings of Goya, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Chardin and Delacroix, together with responses to more contemporary masters such as van Gogh and Gauguin, provide a riveting dialogue of minds. Picasso: Challenging the Past (25 February to 7 June) will offer new ways to look at the Old Masters as well as a different take

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Good intentions

If you don’t mind — yeah, like you’ve any choice in the matter — what I thought I’d do for this New Year column is to do just enough TV for the editor not to want to sack me, then move swiftly on to the stuff my hardcore fans prefer, namely the rambling and shameless solipsism. If you don’t mind — yeah, like you’ve any choice in the matter — what I thought I’d do for this New Year column is to do just enough TV for the editor not to want to sack me, then move swiftly on to the stuff my hardcore fans prefer, namely the rambling and

Monday

Michael Henderson

Pinter told me his favourite line from literature

Michael Henderson remembers the passion for cricket that underpinned his friend’s genius as a playwright, and an unforgettable day at Lord’s The public face of Harold Pinter, who died on Christmas Eve after a long illness, was rather daunting. At the Edinburgh Book Festival a few years ago he acknowledged as much when he admitted that he could sometimes be ‘a pain in the arse’. But those who knew him well, or came across him occasionally, saw a different man: intolerant of imprecision, of course, but also warm, amusing, and — this may surprise those critics who never met him — capable of self-mockery. ‘I once flew into New York,’

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Enchanted evening

Twelfth Night Wyndhams Loot Tricycle Another stunna from Michael Grandage. His production of Twelfth Night is an excellent and often beautiful frivolity and if you’re a fan of the play it’s a must-see event. I can’t stand the thing, I’m afraid, and even this fine production doesn’t mask the script’s shortcomings. The ploy involving Olivia’s counterfeit passion for Malvolio is far too heavily signalled to work. The yellow stockings, the ‘cross-gartered’ business, the smiling. Has that ever really tickled the stalls? I doubt it. The fuse of surprise, vital to any comic detonation, is missing. Once the plotters’ trap is set it comes off with perfect success which isn’t just

Michael Tanner

Wagner treat

Tristan und Isolde Royal Festival Hall Hänsel und Gretel second cast Royal Opera House There have been few treats for lovers of Wagner in London in the past few years, but handsome amends were made in a concert at the Royal Festival Hall, with Vladimir Jurowski conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra and adequate soloists in an incandescent account of Act II of Tristan und Isolde. That was preceded by the Adagio from Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, an acutely expressive performance, mainly chamber-like in texture, apart from the apocalypse near the conclusion. But it was a downer, as, alone, it is bound to be. Wonderful to return after the interval and to

Saturday

Ronald Blythe

A bucolic paradise

Ronald Blythe examines William Blake’s influence on the work of the 19th-century artist Samuel Palmer Samuel Palmer was in his early twenties when he wrote in his notebook, ‘The Glories of Heaven might be tried — hymns sung among the hills of Paradise at eventide…’ As a subject for a painting he means. Just before this he discovered his paradisal hills at Shoreham on the Kentish coast. And that very same year, 1824, he had also discovered how to paint them, for John Linnell, his future father-in-law, had taken him to visit William Blake. This meeting was profound. Blake was near death and living with his wife in a grubby

Peter Hoskin

Pete suggests | 20 December 2008

Books I’m just coming to the end of Ahmed Rashid’s compelling book on the conflict in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, Descent into Chaos.  It’s an essential brew of fine research, persuasive analysis and lively prose – all in all, it feels definitive. The best work of fiction I’ve read and re-read this year – John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra – is a great Christmas book, set as it is over the Festive Season.  I have a habit of evangalising about O’Hara’s work, so – to spare you – I’ll just point you towards my comments on the novel for the Spectator Book Club’s Christmas Book List. Film There’s not too

Robin Holloway

Carter surprises

By the time you read these words, Elliott Carter — save for a wry ‘act of God’ — will have passed his 100th birthday, in full productive spate as he enters a second century. As Stephen Pettitt remarked (Arts, 29 November), every new Carter work appeared to be summatory; but there’s always been more. And further surprises: What Next?, the title of the first foray into opera (at the age of 90), has come to stand for everyone’s expectant attitude. Perhaps most surprising of all in the late spate (nine new works last year, 11 this, the so-far high tide of an acceleration consistent since the mid-Eighties), is the virtual

Kate Chisholm

Music matters

While Ian Hislop went in search of the Three Kings for Radio Four, and surprise, surprise, came up with an English solution to the enigma of the merchants of gold, frankincense and myrrh, World Routes on Radio Three took us to Nazareth to experience the music that might have been heard by Mary and Joseph as they watched their small child grow up. The oud, a long-necked string instrument with a pear-shaped bowl, much like a lute, has been played in the Near and Middle East for about 5,000 years. It sounds sometimes like a guitar, at others like a harpsichord, but always gives off a haunting, meditative air that

Alan Judd

Journey’s end

It has been a good motoring year, save in two respects, and even if this proves to have been the last such on earth and next year we’re back to 1209 and riding Shanks’s pony, memory will sweeten privation. First among the highlights was driving a Routemaster bus (Spectator, 24 May). What a creation they were (and shall be again — Boris?). Like Harry Ferguson’s tractors and traditional English shotguns, they were a thing so perfectly fashioned to their use, with such economy of design and consideration for the user, that their very utility became their aesthetic. The Routemaster is superbly comfortable to drive — all right, you can’t hear

Sunday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Spirit of the Season

Time for another occasional series. And since it’s Christmas, how better to honour the true spirit of the season than by recalling some classic TV advertisements from the past? Come to think of it, that’s what Gordon Brown and his cronies would want you to do: nothing like a spot of stimulus spending is there? This being so, I think this classic – two minutes long! We had an attention span back then! – McEwan’s Lager ad from 1988 rather sums up the way plenty of people are feeling at the moment, don’t you?

Saturday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Music and emotion

Damian Thompson says we can learn a lot about Beethoven if we look beyond the symphonies Beethoven Unwrapped is the title of the year-long musical celebration marking the opening of Kings Place, the new ‘creative centre’ at King’s Cross. But does Beethoven, of all composers, need unwrapping? The answer is yes, more than ever, if the process allows us to examine his music without constantly genuflecting in front of the symphonies. The Kings Place festival includes only one live Beethoven symphony: the First, played by the Avison Ensemble next March. That’s fine by me. A full cycle would have distracted attention from performances of the complete piano sonatas, violin sonatas,

Giannandrea Poesio

Alive and kicking

The Sleeping Beauty English National Ballet, Coliseum Forgive me the lame pun, but although The Sleeping Beauty is performed worldwide, there are not that many great Beauties around. One exception is, arguably, the one staged under Kenneth MacMillan’s supervision, first seen in Berlin in the Sixties, then reworked for American Ballet Theatre in 1986 and now performed impeccably by English National Ballet. Unlike some 20th-century stagings of the celebrated classic, MacMillan’s relies on a profound respect for performance tradition and, at the same time, a choreographically and dramaturgically vibrant reading of the old text. As such, it remains one of the clearest, most immediate and most enjoyable versions of the

Charles Spencer

Present ideas

We have a super-efficient friend who has all her Christmas shopping both purchased and wrapped by the end of the summer holidays. It drives Mrs Spencer — who regards the approach of Christmas with the panic-stricken horror of a hedgehog who spots an oncoming truck — almost mad with jealous rage. In an attempt to calm her down, I always say that we should just buy each other a small token (chocolate peppermint creams for her, Australian soft-eating liquorice for me), so she has one thing less to worry about as she does the rounds for her relatives, friends and colleagues. Then I find myself loafing in the West End

Kate Chisholm

Positive thinking

It’s not a job I could do now that I’m supposedly mature, let alone when I was in my twenties. To take charge of a prison full of angry young men plus a team of disgruntled, de-motivated staff officers. But on Radio Four this week and next we heard from four prison governors, most of whom are yet to reach their thirties. In Young Governors Take Control (Monday), produced by Deborah Dudgeon, Clare English revisited four graduates of the Intensive Development Scheme (IDS) run by HM Prison Service whom she first interviewed for Radio Four three years ago. How were they doing now that they had left behind their control

Friday

Deborah Ross

The wrong question

The Reader 15, Nationwide (2 January) The Reader is based on the novel of the same name by Bernhard Schlink which, in turn, is one of those books that’s been read by about a zillion people in a billion countries proving that, sometimes, a great many people can be entirely wrong in all the languages you can think of. Only kidding. I haven’t actually read it. However, I did once try to read Paul Coelho’s The Alchemist, another of those books that’s been read by about a zillion people in a billion countries, and it was such twaddle it totally put me off books of this kind. Perhaps The Reader

Thursday

Andrew Lambirth

Christmas round-up

A major new exhibiting space is always welcome in London, and the multi-purpose venue at Kings Place, 90 York Way, N1, comes with the added attractions of restaurants and concert halls. It’s a conference centre as well as the home of the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and the new HQ of the Guardian and Observer newspapers. It also houses Pangolin London, a dedicated sculpture gallery currently showing works in silver by the likes of Antony Gormley, Ann Christopher and Lynne Chadwick (until 18 January), and Kings Place Gallery, where a show of Bert Irvin’s vibrant abstracts lights up the inner walkways and balconies of

Michael Tanner

Beware the Witch

Hänsel und Gretel Royal Opera House Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen Ardente Opera The Royal Opera’s new production of Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, has two completely different casts and two conductors. For that matter, it has two producers, too, but they are both involved in the same production: Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser, with their usual attendant designers, etc. As usual, too, the production this pair has come up with is in most respects unremarkable, until Act III. Act I is set in the children’s bedroom, a diagonal affair with a two-dimensional forest surrounding it. Act II is the two dimensional forest itself, with a recess where one sees more trees;