Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Hello – and goodbye

Poulenc’s La voix humaine is a brief, powerful piece, and it’s a matter for gratitude that Opera North has staged a new production of it. It’s a matter for ingratitude, though, that it’s been put on by itself: not just because at 45 minutes it makes for a short evening, but because it would have been so satisfying to couple it with Poulenc’s first opera, Les mamelles de Tirésias, which is only slightly longer, and which is even less well known. It’s not as if La voix humaine is so shattering that one wouldn’t have any resources for anything else, though the other thing would clearly have to precede it.

Kate Chisholm

Grim thoughts

‘The medium needs glitz, it needs glamour, it needs an ego,’ read an ominously worded column in this week’s Radio Times, accompanied by a glamorous head-shot of its author, the director of Channel 4’s new online-only radio station. A shiver ran down my spine. If we in radio want to compete with TV, says Nathalie Schwarz, then we need to start loving ourselves. Anxious to find out what this group hug might involve, I rushed to my laptop and attempted to sign on to www.channel4radio.com. But my antiquated telephone line was unwilling to make a connection with this ‘edgy, bold, mischievous’ medium and refused to log me in. Even if

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Triangle of death

‘Dad, Dad, we watched this really funny video at Ozzie and Ludo’s called Dick or Treat. Dad, dad. Daaad? Can I show you, Dad, can I?’ says Ivo, eight, while I’m trying to work on my computer. To make him go away, I try looking up the video at the web address he gives me, but it doesn’t work for some reason, so instead, I half listen, half work while he gabbles away as children do about this really funny video he’s seen. ‘Well, this Frankenstein monster comes to a girl’s house and says “Trick or treat” but she hasn’t got a treat, so he gets his willy out and

Saturday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Hotchpotch of unshapely grottoes

The luvvies are in uproar. Just listen to the din. ‘Horrified,’ says Dame Judi Dench. ‘Disgraceful,’ spits Sir Peter Hall. Equity’s spokesman is officially ‘astonished’ and Sir Donald Sinden calls it ‘absurd’. They’re talking about the imminent closure of the V&A’s Theatre Museum in Covent Garden. The museum has been open since 1987 and it houses a vast collection of costumes, scenery, photographs, scripts and theatre paraphernalia from the past three centuries. But the space is in need of a major overhaul. Two attempts to cadge a multimillion pound grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund have failed, and now the V&A has decided it’s had enough. In January it will

Andrew Lambirth

Glories of paint

This is an example of the kind of exhibition which flourished for a while in the 1950s and 60s, and has sparked up occasionally since, like a partially active volcano — a show of work selected by a critic because he or she cares passionately about it. There was a famous series of Critic’s Choice exhibitions in the 1950s when the likes of Herbert Read and David Sylvester chose the paintings and sculptures of Henry Moore, Francis Bacon and such newcomers (then) as Frank Auerbach, for mixed shows at the commercial dealership of Tooth’s in Bruton Street, W1. It was recognised that critics needed the chance to explore and air

Roderick Conway-Morris

Fear of failure

The ‘Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, Painter, Sculptor and Architect’ of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, the only living artist to be included in this compendious work, at one time or another denied he was any of the above, except ‘Florentine’. The only formal training he ever received was as a painter. But when Julius II called on him to fresco the Sistine chapel ceiling, the self-taught sculptor claimed he was unqualified for the task, recommending Raphael. When in 1546 Paul IV sought his advice on the Vatican’s defences, we find the artist maintaining that, while he ‘knew little of sculpture or painting’, fortifications were indeed very much his occupation. This bizarre affectation of

Michael Henderson

In praise of Haitink

There was a unique event in Amsterdam last week, and the music-lovers who heard it felt a special glow. Bernard Haitink returned to the Concertgebouw, the orchestra with which he will forever be associated, and which he first conducted 50 years ago, to celebrate his ‘golden anniversary’ of music-making with a pair of symphonies by the ‘house’ composer, Gustav Mahler. Since orchestral life became organised 150 years ago, and the conductor assumed a more prominent role than mere time-beater, no person has worked with an ensemble for 50 years, so it really was a celebration. The programme Haitink conducted in November 1956, when he stood in for Carlo Maria Giulini,

Robert Turnbull

The rise of Chinese pianists

The Chinese city of Shenzhen is vying with its rival Shanghai for cultural and economic supremacy. With 8 per cent of its population dollar millionaires, Deng Xiaoping’s showpiece economic zone now boasts a vast museum, sports complex, a state-of-the-art concert hall — and China’s first ever Piano Concerto Competition. As a keen observer of Asia’s infatuation with Western classical music, I had to be there. The competition, which has prize money worth $30,000 plus the promise of concert engagements with the Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra, is the brainchild of Dan Xiaoyi, the city’s foremost piano professor. He’s become something of a local hero in that his students have been scooping up

Melissa Kite

Meet the funniest man on the planet

Karl Pilkington stares balefully at my tape recorder. ‘How long have you got on it? Six hours! Bloody hell.’ The unexpected star of The Ricky Gervais Show is fretting about why The Spectator wants to interview him. ‘I don’t understand why I’m in it. I normally read magazines which do things in little bite-size bits, like, how they’re making cows with more muscle. Bits of info like that that might come in handy. ‘I like to learn stuff cos I didn’t do well at school. I think it’s better this way round cos when you’re a kid you want to play out on your bike.’ If Karl Pilkington did not

Michael Tanner

Stirred but not shaken

Tchaikovsky was interested in states of mind, but not in the people who have them, at least in his operas. That was what I came to feel as I thought about why his most fascinating operas are in some respects so absorbing and in others not, why I tend to be moved by them at various points, but not cumulatively, as I am in the operas of the great masters. It was also the result of wondering why the Royal Opera’s revival of Queen of Spades, while superb in nearly every way, still didn’t leave me shaken. The thing that isn’t superb about it is Francesca Zambello’s production, first seen

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Wayward approach

Always recommended is the Arts Theatre, one of the West End’s loveliest venues. Being a small-scale joint, it’s not much of a cash-mine and its crusty fabric is in urgent need of a refit. The place keeps closing for repairs and then reopening a year later completely untouched. I like that. The bar is pricey but bright and spacious, and you can walk in off the street for a drink. The louche underlit auditorium has an air of cosy intimacy because the stalls have no central aisle and are arranged, church-hall-style, in one big square slab. The seats themselves are like old armchairs and as you sink into the bald

Simon Hoggart

Genuine knowledge

New Hall women always struck male Cambridge undergraduates as being a bit otherworldly, living in their weirdly designed college where the staircases had alternate steps for left and right feet, which ought to work but doesn’t. Possibly few of them had ever watched television, which is why only five — the minimum of four players and a spare — turned up for the college’s University Challenge audition, whereas the rest of us would have swapped our degrees for a chance to appear. No wonder they scored 35 points, the record lowest, having been on a minus score for most of the quiz. University Challenge — the story so far (BBC2,

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Siegfried turns Russian

Michael Tanner looks forward to the Mariinsky Theatre’s Ring cycle in Cardiff A complete production of Wagner’s Ring cycle is always a major cultural event, especially if it is done on four consecutive evenings, so that the great vision of the work takes possession of the spectators’ consciousness as well as of their waking time — though even the slowest performances of it only last for 15 hours, and not the 19 which is being put about as its length by the propaganda of the Wales Millennium Centre. For it is there that the Mariinsky Theatre of St Petersburg will be performing the Ring, one cycle only, on the last

Andrew Lambirth

Forging ahead

‘I am going to work to the best of my ability to the day I die, challenging what’s given to me,’ the American artist David Smith told an interviewer in 1964. Tragically he was killed in a car crash the following year, and one of the most original and inventive of 20th-century sculptors was lost, at the height of his powers. (Of course, Providence may have known what it was up to — one of his friends claimed that Smith was planning a mile-high sculpture when he died, as well as things the size of railway trains. Such megalomania would have forfeited the human scale on which he habitually worked,

Laura Gascoigne

Stone jewels

Sheffield seems to be in a constant state of redevelopment. Last time I went, the Millennium Galleries had just opened; now they’re already history, overtaken by newer developments that have turned the walk from the station into a rat maze of roadworks. But the maze is worth negotiating for the reward of Art at the Rockface, the Millennium Galleries’ latest exhibition. A joint venture with Norwich Castle Museum, Art at the Rockface is a literal blockbuster — an exhibition exploring art’s fascination with stone. Its scope is extraordinarily ambitious: its 200 ‘rock samples’ range in scale from the Crown Jewels in a Beaton photograph of The Queen to Mount Fuji

Roderic Dunnett

Picture this

The title of this absorbing, stylishly laid-out exhibition is possibly a misnomer. Extensive it is, but photo-journalism is largely excluded. Thus, except for Henryk Ross’s startling snapshots of a 1940s Polish ghetto and Emmy Andriesse’s stark conspectus of famine-ravaged wartime Amsterdam, plus uneven forays into Berlin or late Soviet Russia, the exhibition touches on politics mainly by inference. André Kertész’s tame Austro–Hungarian army snaps cannot match dramatic newsreel of key events — D-Day or Vietnam, Budapest 1956 or the fall of the Ceausescus — which featured in previous Barbican photographic exhibitions. Rather, this is a thoughtful, slightly quirky social document, which offers an idiosyncratic sprinkling of more than 20 of

Tom Rosenthal

Mixed blessing | 11 November 2006

The subtitle ‘Artist, Author, Word and Image in Britain 1800–1920’ sets out the aim of one of those curator-inspired delvings into the vast stock of a great and fairly ancient museum. It repays several hours of study as the devil, as so often, is in the detail. The Fitzwilliam — unlike many other, larger art museums — is particularly strong in rare books and literary manuscripts, which provide some of the most pleasing exhibits. For those who find many of our museums a little po-faced, the visitor could do worse than start with the last section ‘Where’s the Joke?’ There are superb cartoons by Beerbohm, Bateman and du Maurier (full

Harry Mount

House of misery

You won’t find a grander monument to failed marriage than the Mount, the New England picture-book palace built by Edith Wharton a century ago. Wharton was a house and garden designer first, a novelist second. She wrote The Decoration of Houses in 1897, almost a decade before she embarked on the novels. Belton House in Lincolnshire, a Christopher Wrenesque gem built in about 1685, was Wharton’s model for the Mount. With its accentuated centre bays and wings, dormer windows and cupola, Belton is the inspiration for the brown country-house symbol on motorway signs. Wharton kitted out this distinctly English house with French shutters and awnings to keep the Massachusetts sun

Marcus Berkmann

Good time twangery

The journalist and broadcaster Danny Baker recently admitted that, getting on in years, he listens to almost nothing these days other than country music. I can see the appeal. If the relentless artifice of most pop music doesn’t wear you out, its sheer unbridled energy is sure to. Fortunately, the term ‘country’ now embraces a remarkable variety of performers and writers, not all of whom customarily wear enormous hats. Instead both country and, in these islands, folk have become traditions on which people can draw while creating something new and distinctive of their own. Looking at my own playlist of the past few months, I see that I am starting

Ursula Buchan

Best in show

Just as embroiderers working in the late 11th century will not have appreciated the achievement that was the Bayeux Tapestry until they stood well back at the finish, so garden writers are usually too caught up with describing the details of individual gardens to consider the overall magnificence of ‘the English garden’. It was not until I really considered the matter, when writing a book on the subject, that I began fully to appreciate what a tremendous collective achievement it is. English domestic gardens (i.e., those connected to a house, however big) are as much a product of society and culture as of the individual taste and inclinations of their