Arts Reviews

Ariadne auf Naxos Royal Opera House The Pilgrim’s Progress Sadler’s Wells One of the odd things about the Strauss–Hofmannsthal collaboration is that while the literary half was endlessly aspiring, writing works which might serve the high function which Wagner saw for music–drama, even if Hofmannsthal didn’t much care for Wagner’s works, the musical half was the most perfect embodiment of the homme moyen sensuel in the history of music, most at home when he was at home, astonishingly industrious yet seeming to celebrate above all the virtues of a relaxed domestic existence. Their correspondence shows how ill-suited they were to one another in crucial ways, and it can’t exactly be

Lloyd Evans on the perils of being both playwright and critic ‘No man sympathises with the sorrows of vanity.’ Dr Johnson was speaking of a poet who looked to his friends for solace after his verses had been savaged in the press. He got none. That’s the risk all artists take. I’ve been through this experience myself (and I’m about to submit to the ordeal once again), and though I found it hurtful and humiliating to have my work trashed in public, it also enriched my understanding of the theatre and assisted me as a professional critic. In 2005 Toby Young and I collaborated on a sex farce, Who’s the

Boucher and Chardin: Masters of Modern Manners The Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, W1, until 7 September Alan Green: Joan Miro Annely Juda Fine Art, 23 Dering Street, W1, until 18 July  I can never visit the Wallace Collection without lamenting the filling of the erstwhile courtyard with an airless restaurant which scarcely does justice to the noble proportions of Hertford House. Meanwhile, temporary exhibitions are crammed into two smallish rooms in the basement, which just goes to show that apparently we value our stomachs over our hearts. Luckily, the Wallace regularly mounts high-quality exhibitions in its subterranean galleries (rather as the National Gallery occasionally does), and the current one is no

Good grief. This is a terrific, amazing story. Congratulations to Rachel Stevenson and Harriet Grant. It’s almost like an Ealing comedy except, of course, you know, serious. And, I think, really rather wonderful: At first sight, the Kingsway seems an unwelcoming place. Wind whips around the 15-storey tower blocks, the windows in the lobby doors are broken, the corridors are gloomy and bare. Remnants of police incident tape flicker from lampposts and prominent surveillance cameras add an air of menace to its pathways. There is little to dispel the sense that this is one of Britain’s forgotten pockets of poverty. But when hundreds of asylum seekers were placed there to

Henrietta Bredi joins in the preparations for Vaughan Williams’s ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ ‘Come, thou blessed of the Lord’ sing the sopranos and altos, and now the tenors and basses are joining them, with a wondrously layered swelling of sound. The hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end — this is the first rehearsal and the first music I’ve heard from Vaughan Williams’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, which will be given two performances at Sadler’s Wells, on 20 and 22 June. VW, as some people matily refer to him (personally, I wouldn’t dare), died 50 years ago, and celebrations of his life and work are abounding. One of

We’ve just uploaded a new set of culture picks from our arts editor, Liz Anderson.  You can access them here.

Don Carlo Royal Opera House Verdi’s Don Carlo is as much of an obsession for me as one of my favourite operas. Though it isn’t perfect, and can’t be made perfect, whatever you include or eliminate from the extraordinary number of options available (including two languages), it has so many prolonged scenes of incontrovertible greatness, and their density increases as the opera proceeds, so that the last 80 minutes or so are all magnificent (ignoring the perfunctory endings of both the last two acts), that it seems to me obvious that it ranks with the Requiem as Verdi’s finest work. Yet this richness brings the inevitable problem of casting a