Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Birtwistle’s brilliance

The Minotaur Royal Opera For the first time in the 12 years that I have been reviewing opera weekly, I have been to the first performance of a masterpiece. The Minotaur, so far as I can tell from one intense experience, has all of Harrison Birtwistle’s strengths and none of his weaknesses. He likes to take on big themes, and that leads him to mythology, whether domestic, as in the brilliant early Punch and Judy, or cosmic, as in The Mask of Orpheus and Gawain. Though both those operas have great passages, the former is sunk by prolix pretentiousness, the latter is damaged by diffuseness, even in its revised version.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The big sleep

Small Change Donmar War and Peace, I and II Hampstead Oh my God. Did that really happen? I knew nothing about Peter Gill’s 1976 play, Small Change, before arriving at the Donmar to see this revival under the author’s own direction. It’s a love letter, an immensely detailed and spectacularly superficial account of the working-class experience as related by four dimwits living and whingeing in south Wales. It may be a script but it isn’t a drama. Screeds of Dylanesque poetic observation are interrupted by shouting matches. There’s no story, nothing at stake for the characters, no suspense at all, just a pair of brainless rowdies and their battleaxe mums

Kate Chisholm

Talking too much

Something so weird has happened to the way we live now that Radio Two has decided it needs to dedicate a week’s programming to Let’s Talk About Sex. It’s designed, says the billing in Radio Times, ‘to encourage parents to speak more freely to their children about sex and relationships’. But there’s already so much ‘talk’ about sex on film, on TV, in the adverts, do we really need any more? And in any case what teenager with any sense of rightful pride would welcome a ‘conversation’ with The Parent about it? I can just imagine the scene: teenage boy in kitchen, just off the soccer field and starving hungry

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Self styled

Whitechapel at War: Isaac Rosenberg and his circle Ben Uri Gallery, 108a Boundary Road. London NW8, until 8 June It seems that Isaac Rosenberg thought of himself as a poet rather than as a painter, but that is to undervalue his distinct dual contribution as an artist. Although he exhibited little in his short lifetime, he trained at the Slade and was actually an artist–poet in the English Romantic tradition of William Blake. Remarkably, this is the first exhibition to examine his achievement solely as a painter in the context of his peers. Although there is not a great deal to see, the quality of the work assures Rosenberg’s place

Deborah Ross

Too black and white

Persepolis 12A, London and key cities Persepolis, an animated feature about coming of age in Iran, is kind of interesting and is kind of original but its telling moments are told so often it’s like going out to dinner and being served the same course over and over. You’ll look at it coming and think, ‘Oh, no, not that again.’ Actually, this is not entirely true, and possibly unfair. There are some delicious, intensely enjoyable morsels to be had here and there, plus it probably features the best Iranian grandma you’ll see in an animated film about Iran this year. In fact, I’d bet my life on it. But it’s

Robin Holloway

Ill Met by moonlight

Nothing is sacred or unchanging. One of Radio Three’s most reliable sources of musical pleasure, the weekly Saturday opera relay from the Metropolitan in New York, has recently rendered itself all but unbearable. Not in performance standards, which continue a norm of decency and are at best superlative — casting just about the best money can buy, distinguished conducting, wonderful orchestra — but by a surrounding framework of ‘presentation’ so Philistine, vulgar, moronic, as to nullify, even destroy, the essence of what the whole effort purports to convey. I’ve dipped into most of the current season’s repertoire and been so put off as not to survive the course complete; and

Ursula Buchan

Art in Kew

In the 19th century, the painting of flowers was mainly the preserve of maiden ladies with too much time on their hands, whose watercolours would be framed by indulgent brothers, and hung on bedroom walls. Scientific botanical painting was left to talented, poorly paid artists, whose work was reproduced in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine and other learned journals, or hidden in the fastnesses of botanic gardens, where it was studied by scientists in search of answers to plant taxonomic questions. Despite the rise in its status and visibility in recent years, even now there are people who believe that botanical art is an oxymoron; that the requirements for scientific accuracy inevitably

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A Wordsworth Day

In honour of the nicest day of the year so far: I wander’d lonely as a cloudThat floats on high o’er vales and hills,When all at once I saw a crowd,A host, of golden daffodils;Beside the lake, beneath the trees,Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. This afternoon, at home. Though since we’re at the foot of the Yarrow valley, this poem is almost as appropriate.

Saturday

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Under cover of absurdity

Igor Toronyi-Lalic on the power of animation to subvert and propagate ideas The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the American army, on one of its first assignments, requisitioned Disney Studios and remained there for eight months. It was the only studio to suffer that fate but Walt Disney, ever the patriot, was more than obliging. By 1942, 93 per cent of his output (which was by now the largest of any Hollywood studio) was under government contract. He produced propaganda cartoons, such as the 1943 anti-Nazi film Education for Death, a series of animated instructional films — including, quite improbably, A Few Quick Facts about Venereal

Susan Moore

Cult of the masterpiece

Location, location, location. On the morning that Christie’s prepared to launch the art market’s latest high-profile, big-buck season of Impressionist, modern and contemporary sales in New York — a series beadily scrutinised by the throng of art-world Jeremiahs who have long predicted the end of this particular art-market bubble — the auction house announced that it was offering by private treaty sale one of the most highly valued works of art of this or any season — a colossal $120 million Warhol portrait of Chairman Mao. Not in New York but in Hong Kong. The announcement speaks volumes about the nature of today’s newly truly global art market. Most obviously

Stephen Pettitt

Drama at the opera

Stephen Pettitt celebrates the new wave of masterful British productions Samuel Johnson famously defined opera in his A Dictionary of the English Language as ‘an exotic and irrational entertainment’. It’s possibly the most overquoted quotation concerning the subject, but in 1755, when the dictionary was published, he probably had a point. Opera, which for some time had not exactly been all the rage in London anyway, was still dominated by the Italians and was still centred around the singing. The leading sopranos and castrati were every bit as much the idols of audi- ences as the Callases and Domingos. Yet there were signs of hope, however, for those who liked

Peter Hoskin

Pete suggests | 19 April 2008

BOOKS If you’re looking to keep up-to-speed with all things Web 2.0, then you could do worse than read Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody.  Like, say, Wikinomics, it’s replete with information about the power of the internet and mass-collaboration.  However, it also pays attention to the problems of the new, social dynamics.  Perhaps the key text on all of this.  MUSIC It’s been out for a month-or-so now, but Muse’s live album Haarp is still a frequent port-of-call on my iPod. Like marmite, the Devonshire three-piece are a love-hate thing – their angsty, bombastic, cosmic-rock just isn’t for everyone. For the initiated, though, this album showcases the energy of their rightly-renowned live shows,

Michael Tanner

Won over by Golijov

Ainadamar Birmingham Symphony Hall Der Rosenkavalier Royal Festival Hall In a series of concerts in Symphony Hall with the perhaps unlikely title Passion from Birmingham, Osvaldo Golijov’s opera Ainadamar was given a semi-staged performance with the cast that made the bestselling DG recording three years ago. It’s repeated at the Barbican. With few genuine expectations and a fairly large dose of prejudice, I have to admit that the 80 minutes the piece takes were mesmerising, though I suspect that that might not happen a second time. The Argentinian composer operates in what is invariably called an eclectic idiom, and uses it to serve a strongly political and humanitarian agenda, with

Wednesday

Matthew Dancona

A chilling masterpiece

Sometimes music speaks not only to your mind and heart, but grabs at your very viscera in the most primal way imaginable. Such was the experience of last night’s world premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s The Minotaur at the Royal Opera. Demanding and disturbing, the overture, played against the backdrop of dark and menacing waves, warned us of darkness to come. This was no idle threat, either. Rape, massacre and the consumption of the Minotaur’s half-dead sacrificial victims, the Innocents, by the greedy Keres, vulture-like harpies: all were to follow. The mission of Theseus to enter the Cretan labyrinth, slay the beast and whisk Ariadne back to Athens provides the opera

Giannandrea Poesio

Feet of endurance

Entity Random Dance, Sadler’s Wells Paradoxical as it might sound, ballet’s rebirth is happening thanks to (and within) modern and postmodern choreography. Over the past 20 years, classical dance, considered by many to be a dead art, has attracted the interest of many non-classical dance-makers. While some have successfully revised and reinterpreted the narratives of the classical repertoire, others have opted to tackle more directly the classical vocabulary, which remains a fertile and apparently inexhaustible source of inspiration and choreographic material. The British dance rebel Wayne McGregor belongs to the latter category, even though both his approach to and uses of the classical idiom differ greatly from those of William

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Foreign folly

Wedding Day at the Cro-Magnons Soho The Internationalist Gate The Black and White Ball King’s Head You can tell when a culture has lost its way because it starts handing out awards. There’s a small club of annual prizes that have some legitimacy. Oscar, Bafta, Booker, Olivier, Nobel — all provide worthwhile verdicts on the disciplines they attach themselves to. But adding to their number cheapens the entire enterprise. Like prophets and fire drills, the more awards there are the more they get ignored. Little surprise, then, that the Lebanese playwright Wajdi Mouawad has collected so many trophies that he has to scramble over heaped ramparts of silverware every time

Kate Chisholm

Jet set

You might think that the revival of the 1950s radio classic Journey into Space was a desperate move by Radio Four to cash in on the success of the new Dr Who. Even the title sounds incredibly dated. Who now cares about space? But when the serial first hit the airwaves via the Light Programme, millions were immediately drawn in to the adventures of Captain Jet Morgan and his ‘stratoship’, and it became compulsive listening, not just in the UK. Journey into Space tapped into something, a feeling, a spirit, a quest, which sent its vibrations around the world (the programme was translated into 17 languages). Space exploration was then

Andrew Lambirth

Sculptor of vision

Nigel Hall: Sculpture + Drawing 1965–2008 Yorkshire Sculpture Park, until 8 June As you drive into the 500 acres of 18th-century parkland which provide the magnificent setting for this retrospective of Nigel Hall’s work, you are met by a tall sentinel-like sculpture, which stands near the entrance. Called ‘Crossing Vertical’ (2006), it’s a dynamic column of arcs and perforations, an excellent introduction to the prevailing interests of this artist, whose chief aim is to animate and reveal to us anew the space we inhabit and so often take for granted. This sculpture has a companion piece, ‘Crossing Horizontal’, which currently reclines in front of the main galleries further into the

Laura Gascoigne

Honest observer

Laura Knight at the Theatre Lowry Galleries, until 6 July Ascot racegoers whose binoculars wandered from the track in 1936 might have spotted something unusual in the car park: a Rolls-Royce with its back door open and an artist working at an easel inside. Odder still, the artist was a woman — Laura Knight — and unlike her friend Munnings she wasn’t painting the horses. Her subjects were the gypsy fortune-tellers who worked the race crowds as alternative tipsters. In 1936 Dame Laura Knight (1877–1970) was a household name, newly elected as the only woman member of the Royal Academy seven years after being created DBE. Having made her name

Saturday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

In Scarlett’s shoes

Lloyd Evans on the extraordinary story behind Trevor Nunn’s ‘Gone with the Wind’ The heart sinks, almost. The brow droops, a little. A yawn rises in the throat and dies away. Another musical has opened in the West End and, yes, it’s based on a blockbuster movie and, yes, that too was based on a million-selling novel. Those of us who want more new straight plays in the capital and who tire of these revivals-of-revivals are bound to feel a twinge of despair that a song-and-dance version of Gone with the Wind has opened at the New London theatre. Directed by Trevor Nunn too. What could be more tediously predictable?