Arts Reviews

There are artists you admire and there are artists you love, and for me Bob Dylan has long fallen into the former category. I have been listening to him, sporadically, since I was a schoolboy, when his rebellious stance and imagistic, freewheeling lyrics had an obvious appeal to a bolshie adolescent at a boy’s boarding school who fancied himself as a poet. But while I can appreciate that such albums as Blonde on Blonde, Highway 61 Revisited and Blood on the Tracks are compelling and lyrically profound, it would be dishonest to pretend that I listen to them often. Looking at my shelves I’m astonished to discover that I own

Rosmersholm Almeida Love — The Musical Lyric Fat Pig Trafalgar Studio A Norwegian melodrama about suicide, socialism and thwarted sexual passion. If you saw that on the poster would you be tempted? Nor me. Add the authorship of Ibsen and you might change your mind but you’d be unwise. Rosmersholm is a clumsy, unengaging late play with ghastly characters and weird, wonky relationships. Rosmer, a former priest, shares his house with a blonde sex bomb Rebecca, who was the best friend of his mad wife who drowned herself in a pond. Instead of enjoying a summer of love, the priest and the blonde live a life of irritating and blameless

Margaret Thatcher – the Long Walk to Finchley (BBC4)  You don’t have to look very hard for signs that the Tories are going to romp home in the next general election. There was another one on TV this week: a drama showing Margaret Thatcher as an achingly sexy young woman who made fantastic speeches and whose hard-won victory, after numerous setbacks, in gaining the Tory candidacy for the Finchley seat had you weeping tears of joy. Imagine the BBC commissioning something like that ten years ago. Or even two years ago. It just wouldn’t have happened. The Thatcher brand was so badly contaminated you simply weren’t allowed to admit that

Robin Holloway on César Franck Once so sure in the pantheon, esteemed by composers and critical taste, beloved by players and audiences, César Franck appears nowadays to be almost universally reviled. Of the late handful of indubitable masterpieces, only the Violin Sonata still enjoys the affection, admiration and performances previously accorded the Piano Quintet, the Symphony, the Symphonic Variations for piano and orchestra, and the two sizable cycles for piano alone. Organists still adhere to the Chorales and other sticky products of this master of the instrument, the sole composer since Bach to give it a genuine œuvre, till joined by his successor Messaien. There was never much of a

L’incoronazione di Poppea (Glyndebourne), Der Rosenkavalier (English National Opera) Monteverdi’s last opera L’incoronazione di Poppea was the first opera I saw at Glyndebourne, in 1962. I saw it there again in 1984, once more ‘realised’ by Raymond Leppard, but in a version more complete and somewhat more austerely orchestrated than the first time. And now it has its third production, with Emmanuelle Haim conducting (presumably she is responsible, too, for the fairly lavish orchestration) and Robert Carsen directing. In 1962 the opera itself was a revelation, one of the most thrilling evenings I have spent in an opera house. In 1984, with Peter Hall indulging his wife Maria Ewing, and

The light pollution at Chequers can’t be that bad in semi-rural Bucks, so perhaps someone should suggest to our troubled PM that next time he has a weekend off he should take a look upwards to the night sky. It might help him to realise that the petty squabbles and ambitious pretensions of his Cabinet colleagues are as nothing in the big scheme of things. Or perhaps he should tune in every weekday afternoon to Cosmic Quest, the latest long-running documentary series on Radio Four. For six weeks, Heather Couper will be leading us on a journey through the history of our knowledge of the universe, from the earliest-known attempts