Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Scratching the surface

Così fan tutte; Summer ConcertRoyal Opera House The Royal Opera, for its last revival of the season, got Jonathan Miller to make over his 1995 production of Così fan tutte, everyone’s favourite Mozart opera these days, owing to its sceptical view of sexual relationships, combined with a subtle acknowledgement of how painful we often find it to be as fickle as we are, how unwilling we are to be so much at the mercy of our impulses. Mozart’s own mixed feelings on the matter are shown by the interestingly different attitudes of his two spokespersons Don Alfonso and Despina to the same phenomenon: she is hard-bitten, resolutely superficial and mercenary,

Andrew Lambirth

Going Dutch | 28 July 2007

Andrew Lambirth delights in the National Gallery’s exhibition of a Golden Age I’ve been reading Still Life with a Bridle by the poet Zbigniew Herbert in preparation for Dutch Portraits: The Age of Rembrandt and Franz Hals at the National Gallery. It’s a fascinating collection of essays which examines and pays tribute to the Golden Age of Dutch art and the society that produced it. Packed with unusual and stimulating perceptions, not to mention poetic inventions, the book only increases one’s sense of wonder at such an efflorescence of talent concentrated in one unprepossessing place over a relatively short period. (This exhibition covers the years 1599–1683 and runs until 16

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

James Bond vs. Jason Bourne

Peter Suderman and Isaac Chotiner each highlight an interview with Matt Damon (who is promoting the latest Jason Bourne thrilla, The Bourne Ultimatum). I like Damon. He’s an increasingly interesting actor and his excellent performance in The Good Shepherd last year was every bit as under-rated as the movie itself. Nevertheless, he’s also an ass. Evidence for the prosecution? Matt Damon’s amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne shares initials with another notorious screen operative. But other than that, Damon doesn’t see any similarities between Bourne and James Bond. Bond is “an imperialist and he’s a misogynist. He kills people and laughs and sips martinis and wisecracks about it,” Damon, 36, told The

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Shambo RIP

It’s official. A nation mourns. Mr Eugenides strikes a mournful, plangent note: Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy T-bone,Silence the tambourines and with muffled drumsBring out the burger buns, let the ketchup come. Let cattle trucks circle moaning round the barnScribbling in the dirt the message, Shambo Is Dead,Put mournful garlands round the white necks of the temple monks,Let the government veterinarians wear black rubber gloves…

Wednesday

Saturday

Simon Hoggart

The good and the bad

These are difficult times for the BBC. The fine for the Blue Peter phone-in fraud was, in its way, as big a shock as the famous vandalising of its garden. The silly Crowngate affair in which what they claimed was the Queen staging an angry walk-out turned out to be her staging an angry walk-in. And some ratings have been very poor. The drama True, Dare, Kiss broadcast last week got a miserable 3.2 million viewers, one of the smallest ever Thursday peak-time audiences on BBC1. Over on BBC2, Alastair Campbell’s diaries rose from 1.3 million viewers on Wednesday to a hardly impressive 1.5. It all implies a nervous institution

Kate Chisholm

A life examined

Back in the US in the Fifties, just as atomic fear was gripping the American nation and the McCarthyite witch hunts were at their most vicious, a rather extraordinary radio programme was created by the journalist Edward R. Murrow and his production team at CBS radio. This I Believe presented ‘The living philosophies of thoughtful men and women in the hope that they may strengthen your beliefs so that your life may be richer, fuller, happier.’ With a title taken from Murrow’s Quaker upbringing, the idea that sustained the programme was that by examining and revealing the things which make us tick, the beliefs by which we operate our daily

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Water torture

Glass Eels / Love’s Labour’s Lost / Saint Joan Squelchy trotters up in Hampstead. Nell Leyshon’s new play is set on a Somerset flood plain where a family of bumpkin farmers are coping with a suicide. Before the action commences Mum has done a Virginia Woolf in the nearby river and her premature submersion furnishes the play with its central motif. During the action, the stage gradually fills with water. OK, fills. What happens is that a super-slow trickle very nearly covers the actors’ ankles. It doesn’t help that this liquid is the pure and pristine variety piped in by Thames Water (see website for details) while the script refers

Deborah Ross

Super-size fun

This film is fun. It is fun, fun, fun, fun, fun. It might be the most fun you can have with your clothes on or, if you have been married a good while, then with them off. John Travolta as Mrs Edna Turnblad is fun. Christopher Walken as Mr Wilbur Turnblad is riotous fun. Newcomer Nikki Blonsky as Tracy Turnblad, the big girl with the big hair and the big heart, is fun and she’s a terrific dancer. From its opening number — the pounding showtune ‘Good Morning Baltimore’ — this film leaps at you with such joy and vigour and generosity you cannot reject it. It pins you down

Michael Tanner

Bach wins through

Bach’s St Matthew Passion doesn’t seem an obvious ‘Glyndebourne opera’, except from the point of view of the non-Londoner having to use public transport to get there, who might well regard the whole outing as a penitential pilgrimage. At the third performance the atmosphere did seem unusually hushed. What we were offered was an almost entirely silent play within which a performance of Bach’s masterpiece took place. The idea, a notably bad one of the producer Katie Mitchell’s, is that in a school somewhere in Europe there has been a shooting, with many children, whose photographs we are shown, killed. Four travelling players come and console the mourners, enlisting the

Giannandrea Poesio

Summer treats

The summer ballet season in London, with the traditional arrival of illustrious foreign guests, has a well-established historical tradition. It was during the summer months that, in the 19th century, famous and not-so-famous foreign ballet stars appeared on the stages of theatres such as the Her Majesty’s, the Alhambra and the Empire. Later on, renowned ballerinas such as Lydia Kyasht, Olga Preobrajenska and the legendary Anna Pavlova came to London in summer with small companies or groups, leading the way for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the quintessential ‘visiting’ ballet company of the first half of the past century. Since then, the summer ballet season in London has provided dance goers with

Andrew Lambirth

Bringing peace to the spirit

Hockney on Turner Watercolours at Tate BritainAnnely Juda — A Celebration at Annely Juda Fine Art If you enter Tate Britain via the side entrance on Atterbury Street, you will find five large new landscape paintings by David Hockney hanging above the stairs to the main galleries, to celebrate his 70th birthday. Each painting is composed of six canvases in two layers of three. All depict the same stretch of woodland in east Yorkshire, seen at different times of year. I am not an admirer of Hockney’s recent landscape paintings, finding the colours insensitive and the drawing surprisingly inexact. His purples and oranges are not quite wild enough, while his

Stephen Pettitt

A fine balance

The word ‘virtuoso’ is often bandied about. Stephen Pettitt explains what it means to him Serious music critics — and I do not except myself from the breed — have many tendencies that mark them out from the rest of society. One of them is the habit of bandying around the word ‘virtuoso’. We know what it means, or at least we think so. A virtuoso is a musician who can play with panache a score of seemingly impossible technical difficulty. A virtuoso performance — for, yes, our word can be used adjectivally — is one in which said virtuoso, or ensemble of virtuosi, has succeeded in demonstrating that panache.

Saturday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Global scepticism

Great news, guys. Thanks to Live Earth (BBC1 and BBC2, most of last Saturday), recycling is up by almost 6,000 per cent, the icecaps are regenerating, Kilimanjaro has got its snow back and polar bear experts are reporting that the latest batch of cubs are whiter, cuter and fluffier than at any time since records began. Furthermore, no fewer than 98.8 per cent of 15- to 24-year-olds now agree with the statement: ‘Man-made global warming is the greatest threat to humanity ever and if my parents disagree I promise to chop them to pieces with sharp knives like the fascist, Gaia-raping pigs they are.’ Actually, I can think of two

Marcus Berkmann

People power | 14 July 2007

If this column has any overarching theme, it’s that critics know nothing and shouldn’t be trusted. (Which obviously applies to me as much as to anyone.) But this intransigent suspicion of mine does create difficulties. In the never-ending search for the next fantastic record I didn’t know existed, I will look anywhere and consult anyone for advice, which in practice often means scouring the reviews by punters on Amazon. Book reviews on this website, as all writers know, are usually contributed by our friends, our rivals, our enemies and our agents, but the record reviews are much more varied and informative. Fans write in crazed superlatives, or occasionally in rueful

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Blood wedding

Theatre people know why America invaded Iraq. To secure the West’s supply of angry plays. Here’s the latest, Baghdad Wedding, which opens with a US pilot mistaking a nuptial party for a column of enemy tanks and — whoopsidaisy — opening fire. Bride and groom are wiped out. Their relatives go into mourning. Then the groom reappears as a ghost in a ripped suit. This isn’t a welcome surprise. Alive, the man was already quite annoying: a tall, dark, handsome, well-connected, womanising alcoholic millionaire who’d just published a critically acclaimed best-selling novel about sodomy. Dead, he’s worse. ‘I’m dead,’ he says at one point, ‘so I can say what I

Kate Chisholm

Blunt edges

I’m not quite sure which of the political weeklies has been the inspiration for His Master’s Voice, the new comedy series on Radio Four (Wednesdays) set in the offices of a true blue magazine, but I can assure you that life at The Blue Touch bears little resemblance to The Spectator. No one at Blue Touch ever seems to do any real work putting the magazine together — there’s no cursing about useless computer systems, no panicky ‘Hold the Front Page’ moments, no heated rows about headlines and cover images, and whether or not it’s OK to be quite so tacky about certain celebrities. The only thing I recognised was

Deborah Ross

Danger, baddie, magic…

Don’t care about Harry Potter. Don’t care about the children who love him. Don’t care about the middle-aged weirdos who read the books on the Tube. (Some muggles are too dumb for shame, even.) Don’t care about J.K. Rowling, although I will ask this about her: why does she always look so miserable? If you were worth £600 million would you look so miserable? Maybe she just pretends to look miserable, so we don’t feel more envious than we already are. Perhaps once she closes her front door behind her she dances down the hall exclaiming, ‘I’m so rich it’s unbelievable; I’m so rich it’s unbelievable’, before snacking on ground-diamond

Michael Tanner

Musical nonsense

My first visit to the made-over Royal Festival Hall was to see a semi-staged production of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. It wasn’t an artistic success, as could be judged from the extravagantly genial response of the audience, roaring with laughter that had no trace of nervousness, and applauding one number after another. Sweeney is a failure if it doesn’t alarm you and also lead you to empathise with Sweeney even in the act of slitting throats. At the Festival Hall we had merely another show, and the confused and irritating article in the programme, as to whether it’s an opera or a musical, was rendered redundant by the shallow entertainment it

Laura Gascoigne

Out of this world | 14 July 2007

Masquerade: the work of James Ensor (1860–1949) It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely place for a James Ensor exhibition than the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, the squeaky-clean temple to Edwardian taste in art founded by Viscount Leverhulme on the profits of soap. Among the fragrant creations of Millais, Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones, Leighton, Waterhouse and co., the dark imaginings of this Belgian proto-Expressionist look like dirty laundry tipped on to a parlour floor. ‘I feel more English than most of the English artists now slavishly imitating the early Italians,’ Ensor declared in 1900; now here he is holed up with this slavish crew — and to rub