The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions
Michael Tanner calls it a ‘neglected near-masterpiece’. So what is ‘it’? Answer: Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, a one-act opera about a blind princess, which is now on at Opera Holland Park. I was lucky enough to see it yesterday evening, and was completely enchanted by the entire production. Michael’s review will be on the website tomorrow. Do check it out.
Robert Gore-Langton talks to Ronald Harwood about musical life in Nazi Germany Nazis in the theatre liven things up no end. They provide the hilarity in The Producers, the creepiness in Cabaret. And when you can’t take any more bright copper kettles or warm woollen mittens in The Sound of Music on comes the SS, arguably the best moment in the show. Now there’s a new play about music in Nazi Germany, a sobering reminder of just how seriously the Third Reich took its music and music-makers. Collaboration is about Richard Strauss and his relationship with the Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, who together wrote an opera in the 1930s while
One had confidently anticipated (‘The sex is better than ever!’ he burbled in excited undertone when I last met him a few years ago at a York University concert) that Wilfrid Mellers would make his centenary. His death this May at only 94 doesn’t sadden, however, so much as joyfully recall the wacky life force that invigorated and enhanced writing on music in this country (so often lacklustre) for some six decades. Since his death I’ve reread his half of the co-authored Man and his Music (1962 — even back then Wilfrid would surely wish to instate Woman into this title!). It covers the Classical style, Romantics early middle and
Zorro Garrick The Tailor and Ansty Old Red Lion Is Zorro any good? Forget the show for a second, look at the marketing. The stars are English, the story is American and the music, by the Gypsy Kings, is French with a strong Spanish flavour. That’s half the Western hemisphere covered. Nice work, everyone. Things start uneasily with a crowd of Romany dancers on stage performing a heel-bashing number that doesn’t do much more than rattle your fillings. Next the show hurtles from California to Barcelona and back, establishing the complex background of the central figure, Diego, a renegade cavalry officer who must wrest the Spanish colony of Los Angeles
Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging 12A, Nationwide Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging is a teen movie as may be rather obvious from the title — come on, it was hardly going to explore the terrible reality of Bosnia’s post-war traumas; get a grip — and we are all for teen movies, aren’t we? A teen movie may at least get a teen out of the house. The boys are OK. They sleep most of the day and then go on the internet. But the girls! They can’t go anywhere if their hair isn’t right and it’s no good saying, ‘It looks perfectly all right to me,’ because then it’s, ‘What
Hansel und Gretel Glyndebourne La bohème Royal Opera House The two operas I saw last week were premièred just over two years apart, Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel at Christmas 1893, Puccini’s La Bohème in February 1896. Both of them deal with deprivation and poverty and very different life-destroying forces, and ways of coping with them. They each, of course, stand as squarely as possible in their respective national operatic traditions. One wouldn’t want to press parallels or dissimilarities too far, but when I realised how close they are in time yet what utterly different worlds they evoke it gave me pause. Partly it’s a matter of Hansel being so wholly
Colin Self: Art in the Nuclear Age Pallant House Gallery, Chichester until 12 October David Tress: Chasing Sublime Light Petworth House, West Sussex, until 29 July Colin Self (born 1941) is one of the unsung talents of the English art world, a maverick who made intensely original Pop art in the 1960s and then rusticated himself in Norfolk, where he continues to make all manner of art from the satiric to the pastoral. He is not the easiest of characters, and the last time a major museum exhibition of his work was planned, he cancelled it at the last moment. So Pallant House must be congratulated on achieving such a
The Proms (BBC Radio 3); Latitude Festival (BBC Radio 4); A tribute to Charles Wheeler (BBC Radio 4) It was totally over-the-top, the first-night concert of this year’s Proms season, the 114th since Henry Wood set out in 1895 to educate the musical palate of the nation. It was almost as if the programme was designed by the new Proms director, Roger Wright, to confound the critics with its weird retrievals from the musical archives and mélange of titbits from Messiaen and Elliott Carter, composers who are to be specially featured this season. But it was wonderfully, gloriously celebratory, and also entirely in keeping with the Victorian roots and setting of this
This is how you do not interview Hollywood actresses. Newsweek meets Gillian Anderson: I’ve got to confess. I don’t know anything about “The X-Files.” OK. Why is it such a big deal? Ohmygod. You’re not going to do this to me, are you? Tell me you’re not going to do this. Oh come on! It’s been such a long time. Hire somebody that knows enough that we don’t have to explain this again. [Hat-tip: Andrew]
Matthew Yglesias, libertarian? Well, sort of. (He’s right of course.)
Tiffany Jenkins talks to James Cuno about looting, exporting and owning antiquities James Cuno is a busy man. I pin him down between two projects: promoting the new Modern Art Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago, opening next year, where he is president and director, and the launch of his new book Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle over Our Ancient Heritage (Princeton University Press, £14.95), which is provoking controversy on both sides of the Atlantic. He was prompted to write it, he tells me, ‘as an intervention into the war, or should I say “discussion”, between museums, archaeologists and nation states, about who can acquire antiquities’. The
It’s easy to see the way opera Inszenierung is going. We are in for a spate of US-located productions, just as we emerge from 19th-century industrial locations and nondescript car parks. Hollywood, Las Vegas, the prairies, Texas oilfields and the omnipresence of TV, something we are hardly likely to forget, are where Poppea, Giulio Cesare, Die Zauberflöte, Norma, all of Verdi and Wagner, Peter Grimes will find themselves next. Within a week two such disparate pieces as Candide and The Rake’s Progress have received broadly similar treatment, the locations dictating, to a large extent, the kind of characters and the range of their motivations. Absurd in Candide, this was wholly
WALL.E, the latest CGI animation from Pixar in collaboration with Disney, has already been hailed as a ‘modern masterpiece’ — in America, at least — but I’m not so sure. It has a cracking, enthralling, wonderfully dystopian first half, but after that it appears mostly concerned with hurtling towards one of those predictable endings that are just too CUTES·E (hey, anyone can interpunct, you know) and DISN·E (see?) for words. WALL·E is exceptionally good, just as Toy Story was, and The Incredibles, but not Cars or Ratatouille — too heavy-handed — but a masterpiece? I’m thinking a ‘masterpiece’ should ultimately take you somewhere surprising, somewhere you didn’t expect, into something
The Royal Court’s search for new scripts has gone global. Its tireless talent scouts, assisted by the British Council, fan out across France, Spain, Russia, Nigeria, Syria and Mexico laying on seminars, workshops and ‘residencies’. They go to India, too, although quite why the Court spends energy nurturing dramatists in a country with the world’s largest film industry isn’t entirely clear. Good Indian writers don’t need foreign aid. Bad ones don’t deserve it. Free Outgoing by Anupama Chandrasekhar is a harmless slice of Chaucerian parody which has arrived in Sloane Square from Madras. Like a migrant with the wrong papers, it hid in the Theatre Upstairs for a few months
Art Nouveau, or Jugendstil as it was called in Germany, came rather late to Austria, where it was sometimes called Sezessionstil. Gustav Klimt was a leading light in the breakaway Austrian Secession movement founded in 1897. Only a fool would deny that he was an exceptionally gifted artist. He absorbed in turn 19th-century Realism, Symbolism and Impressionism. He drew so beautifully that only prudes will be shocked by his sensuality. (Indeed, it is to be hoped — or hoffentlich as they say locally — that his erotic images of ladies pleasuring themselves, rendered in soft and not so soft pencil, may have educated and liberated Freud’s neurotically uptight Viennese patients.)
Before getting down to a discussion of Wyndham Lewis and an exhibition I’ve been looking forward to for months, I want to register a protest about this year’s recipient of the Wollaston Award at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. This prestigious prize is worth £25,000 and thus ranks with the Turner Prize as a top art world award, and yet it receives very little publicity. Deserving past winners have included Robert Medley, John Hoyland and R.B. Kitaj, but this year it has gone to Jeff Koons. In my review of the summer show I pointed out that Koons should not be taking up space which could be more profitably used
IT would have been fun to be at the planning meeting for Harley Street (ITV, Thursday), the new medical drama series about a group of stunningly good-looking doctors in private practice. ‘Look, we get all the bloody bits, the emotional traumas, and the scenes where someone’s pushed down a hospital corridor on a trolley at about 40mph while the doctor yells incomprehensible instructions — plus money! And fabulously beautiful settings!’ ‘Yurss, problem is, people love the NHS. They suspect Harley Street is for hedge fund managers and diplomats from corrupt tyrannies. They’re not going to identify.’ ‘So, we make the doctors deeply caring. One of them is black — ticks
How far will the proposed road tax changes influence what we actually buy in the new car market? Not as much, perhaps, as the government likes to think. After all, if you want something like the admirable Fiat Panda you are never going to look at the (differently admirable) Audi A8 anyway. It’s those in the middle where an additional hundred or two a year in tax might count, especially where you have different tax bands for different versions of the same model, as with the Ford Mondeo. Even here, though, the increase in fuel prices is likely to have — is already having — a much greater effect. Which
If your ears go back, like a frightened horse, at the word ‘conceptualism’ when applied to modern art, you may not be very pleased to know that this is a hot topic in landscape design at the moment. If your ears go back, like a frightened horse, at the word ‘conceptualism’ when applied to modern art, you may not be very pleased to know that this is a hot topic in landscape design at the moment. Before you gallop off round the paddock, however, I should point out that we could all be beneficiaries, if the result is brighter, more interesting public (and private) spaces. After all, there cannot be
In response to this post, a reader asks how did I like the Fry and Laurie TV adaptations? Well, only up to a point is my answer. They are, probably, as good an effort as television can muster but they still, to my mind, fail to cut the mustard. An honorable failure, then. Or rather, to put it more charitably, they were closer to being a success than anyone had ay right to hope they would be. Fry was, I always thought, rather too oleaginously piscine as Jeeves while Laurie played Bertie as – hard though this may be to believe – too much of a fat-headed ass. They got