Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Misinterpreting Strauss

For its final operatic offering, this year’s Edinburgh Festival presented what it billed as ‘World première of a new production’ of Richard Strauss’s last opera Capriccio. I suppose every new production is a ‘world première’ but they don’t need to say so. Anyway, this turned out to be a dismal affair, part infuriating and part just inadequate, the only redeeming feature being the conducting of Markus Stenz and the playing of the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne. As soon as anyone mentions this inspired product of Strauss’s old age they seem to need to carry on at length about its relation to the time and place in which it was written, Germany

Peter Phillips

Tale of two cities

Eternal though they may seem, the Proms and the Edinburgh Festival are susceptible to change. Roger Wright will take over the former next year and Jonathan Mills has just assumed responsibility for the latter. New appointments do not necessarily mean that anything more up-to-date will happen, nor that the change will be for the better — the Bath Festival seems to have been all but destroyed by a recent and tactless overdose of innovation; but the signs from the two capitals are encouraging. The Edinburgh Festival has traditionally been hostile to what is still called ‘early music’, the received wisdom being that the people of Scotland would not come to

Deborah Ross

Losing heart

There has been such a lot of fuss and hype around this adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel — as if this is all anybody has ever been waiting for — that I did wonder if I had anything new or useful to say. But then I realised: 1) it’s never stopped me before and 2) it’s never stopped me before and 3) it’s never stopped me before. So, in short, if it’s never stopped me before, why stop now? Shall we proceed, now we’ve decided we are not stopping? Good. What I am saying, I think, is that you will probably have a sense of Atonement already, considering it’s

James Delingpole James Delingpole

General grumble

Sorry, I’m in Sardinia at the moment and I couldn’t find any preview tapes that really grabbed me before I went away so if you don’t mind I thought I’d just have a general grumble about the state of TV. First, Weekend Nazis (BBC1, Monday), whose undercover team made the truly cataclysmic discovery that one or two members of Second Battle Group — a British second world war re-enactment outfit which specialises in portraying German Waffen SS soldiers — may have neo-Nazi sympathies. Well, knock me down with a feather. Perhaps next week this same crack team will manage to infiltrate the Vatican and emerge with the shock horror revelation

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The end of the ‘noddy shot’ is a ray of hope for television

Nobody much likes television, especially not the people who work in it. They think it’s a cretinous medium, a sort of institutionalised con-trick, the cultural equivalent of a McDonald’s Happy Meal — processed excrement which everybody, including the consumer, knows to be dumb and bad for you. I suspect that this has always been true. It wouldn’t surprise me if John Logie Baird was gripped by a feeling of revulsion and self-disgust shortly after transmitting images of his fingers wiggling up and down back in the 1920s, the first ever TV show — and, you have to say, a suitably banal and metaphorically appropriate debut for the medium. Television: a

Friday

The Spectator

What you should do if you can’t see Atonement this weekend

Cinema goers will all be planning to go to see Atonement this weekend: I know I am. But if you are defeated by the queues, which threaten to be of English Patient/Shakespeare in Love proportions, do go and see Knocked Up instead. If ever a film was let down by its title it is this one. Clearly marketed for the audience that loved American Pie and US gross-out comedy, this is actually a very sophisticated film which brilliantly explores the gender gap and uses an old and unremarkable plotline – beautiful woman falls pregnant by unattractive male – as a sturdily reliable framework over which to drape the most delicate

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Luciano Pavarotti, 1935-2007

Opera Chic has all you need to know about Luciano Pavarotti’s death, including a collection of terrific YouTube clips. If only the Washington National Opera’s forthcoming Boheme could feature a voice such as this… But, of course, the point is that it can’t.

Wednesday

The Spectator

The greatest living Englishman

Last night’s GQ Men of the Year Awards were, as ever, a glittering occasion and a tribute to the talents of the magazine’s editor, Dylan Jones (whose most recent Spectator Diary you can read here). Plenty of excellent choices for the 10th annual ceremony, including the editor of the year, Will Lewis, editor in chief of our stable mate Telegraph titles. I finally got to meet Michael Caine, who was given a Lifetime Achievement award and rewarded with a thunderous standing ovation at the Royal Opera House. He is almost certainly the Greatest Living Englishman. Why? Because, in the end, it is more fun to be Harry Palmer, a spy

Saturday

Charles Spencer

All that jazz

I’m just back from Edinburgh, my 20th successive year at the festival for the Daily Telegraph, which makes me feel very old indeed. How times have changed. When I started going, the paper put us up in the luxurious Sheraton Grand and no questions were asked about the size of your bar bill, which in my case was invariably eye-wateringly large. I also remember becoming bored of eating smoked salmon and Aberdeen Angus steak every day and often feeling desperately lonely in my huge, superbly appointed but utterly soulless room. But for at least a decade now Telegraph hacks have been lodged in communal flats, like students, with some of

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Mutual loathing

Dublin. Terrific to write about, terrible to experience. This was the verdict of Patrick Kavanagh, poet, alcoholic and failure, born in 1904 and now brought back to life in Russell Kennedy’s enjoyable show at the Old Red Lion. Kavanagh’s assessment of Dublin would be better applied to himself. He cuts a shambolic, repellent figure in his knackered spectacles, squelching shoes and moths’ nest jumper, as he shuffles about the city’s pubs cadging drinks, lusting after female students and cursing the reputations of greater talents than his own. A particular hatred was aimed at Brendan Behan who ardently requited Kavanagh’s feelings. With the perspective of 50-odd years it’s the similarities between

Kate Chisholm

World class

Next time you’re bemoaning the TV licence fee, check out the BBC’s World Service. Next time you’re bemoaning the TV licence fee, check out the BBC’s World Service. A different quality appears to prevail in their making of radio documentaries — more time spent on research, less on presentation. No tricks, no smoochy music. Just experts sharing with us their enthusiasm and knowledge. Trouble is, you need an advanced degree in electronics and time management to find the station and what’s on when. A lot of fuss was made a fortnight ago when Vladimir Putin put a stop to the FM transmission of the BBC World Service in Moscow, although

Wednesday

Daniel Sparrow

The spirit of Almod

In the theatre programme notes for the new play based on Pedro Almodóvar’s film, All About My Mother, the playwright Samuel Adamson observes that the play’s protagonist, Manuela, is drawn towards the world of theatre by an unexpected event. Back in 1999, although I didn’t know it at the time, my own life was about to imitate Almodóvar’s art. Perhaps calling a simple trip to the cinema ‘an unexpected event’ might itself seem a touch theatrical, but little did I expect that catching a flick on a Friday night in Sydney would spark the beginning of a journey that (not unlike Manuela’s) would draw me to the world of theatre,

Andrew Lambirth

True colours

Exhibition; Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour How diminished our lives would be if suddenly we could only see in black and white. ‘Colour is the first revelation of the world,’ exclaimed Hélio Oiticica (1937–80), a Brazilian artist with a mission to liberate colour and help it to embody itself in other guises. He thought of colour as a dimension, like space or time. How far would he have travelled if his tragic early death had not stopped short his career? He had already gone beyond helping colour to escape from the imprisoning rectangle of the picture frame and move into three-dimensions; he had even given it human locomotion and

Simon Hoggart

Shocking cheats

The most egregious example of cheating in wildlife photography was the 1958 Disney film Wild Wilderness. They wanted footage of lemmings throwing themselves off cliffs into the sea — heaven knows why, since lemmings do no such thing. Since the crew were in Alberta, where neither sea nor lemmings can be found, they bought the little creatures in from Manitoba, and filmed them on a giant turntable, so it looked as if there were thousands instead of dozens. Then they chucked them into a river, which slightly resembled the sea, and there they drowned. The makers of wildlife programmes had a more robust attitude to their subjects then. In Bill

Tuesday

The Spectator

What to see this Autumn

If you want to know what’s coming up in the arts this autumn a good place to look is today’s G2, where critics have chosen the ‘50 hottest acts’. The film Atonement, based on Ian McEwan’s novel, with Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, opens on 7 September (I’ve seen a preview and loved it). Other recommendations include: the Royal Opera House’s Iphigénie en Tauride (with Simon Keenlyside and Susan Graham); lots of Sibelius in Manchester and London; Millais at Tate Britain and Renaissance Siena at the National Gallery; and Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse at the National Theatre.

Saturday

The Spectator

Naipaul on Walcott

V.S. Naipaul’s essay on Derek Walcott, the great St. Lucian poet, in today’s Guardian review is as eloquent and insightful as one would expect. What caught my eye is a point that Naipaul makes about the whole idea of the  Caribbean as an island paradise. As he writes, that idea of the beauty of the islands (beach and sun and coconut trees) was not as easy as the poet thought. It wasn’t always there, a constant. The idea of beach and sun and sunbathing came in the 1920s, with the cruise ships. (Consciously old-fashioned people, like the writer Evelyn Waugh, born in 1903, refused to sunbathe.) So the idea of island

Matthew Dancona

Rock of ages

Forty years after his first drug bust in 1967, Keith Richards is still testing the limits of the law. But, as one would expect of a 63-year-old, the substances in question have changed over the years. So it was that, before an enraptured audience at the O2 Centre on Tuesday night, the pirate-captain of the Rolling Stones smoked a cigarette. Now that’s what I call rock’n’roll. In an unforgiving light, the Stones of 2007 can look like a collision between delivery vans from a wig shop and a latex factory. But that’s not bad for a quartet with a combined age of 253. When the band formed in 1962, Harold

Robin Holloway

Festival spirit

Perhaps unwisely, the museum at Gloucester prominently displays a large aerial photograph of the city, revealing in one what the shocked pedestrian discovers slowly on foot: the huge proportion of the centre flattened for ghastly car parks, more devastating in their seeming permanence than the recent flooding, of which little trace remained on my four-day visit, so rapid and efficient the cleaning-up. By my third day, domestic tap water was declared safe to drink, restaurants and pubs were operating normally, and the millions of plastic bottles had served their purpose. Most efficient of all was the rescue of this year’s Three Choirs Festival, every event in place (with some changed

Giannandrea Poesio

Speed and panache

A few years ago, the director of a London-based ballet company publicly challenged the way ballet is taught in Britain. More recently, additional havoc was caused by an article by an equally prominent journalist who lamented our schools’ apparent inability to produce first-rate stars. In each instance, British ballet teachers and directors of prestigious ballet schools professed themselves outraged, and replied with vitriolic, though often narrow-minded, letters to the editor and lengthy articles. The lesson to be learnt was clear: stay away from commenting on dance-training in this country if you do not want to open the proverbial can of worms and fall into the (again) proverbial snake-pit. Still, considerations

Patrick Carnegy

Blood and dust

Shakespeare, as we all know, served up English history as entertainment and instruction for the Elizabethans. Factual accuracy was subservient to a view of the jungle truths of sovereignty and political ambition that was as uncomfortable and relevant then as it remains today. The eight major Histories from Richard II to Richard III have been well served by the RSC in recent years. Its millennial sequence began with Samuel West in a wonderfully spare Richard II (directed by the much lamented Steven Pimlott) and concluded with the Henry VIs and Richard III, brilliantly directed by Michael Boyd. This latter tetralogy has become the foundation of the new sequence in the