Arts Reviews Archives

Saturday

9 Dec 2006

Bird’s-eye views

Georg Gerster (born 1928) is a Swiss photographer who specialises in shooting from above. For more than 40 years he has been taking aerial photographs, and has flown over 111 countries. Concentrating on archaeological and heritage sites, Gerster has made what might accurately be called an ‘overview’ that has greatly enhanced our archaeological understanding. His pictures have been reproduced in National Geographic and used on Swissair posters and calendars. He is what you might call a popular photographer, and a very fine one. The current exhibition of his work at the British Museum presents his photographs in a very low-key way: blown-up and unframed, they resemble illustrations from a magazine

Laura Gascoigne

Going wild

In November 1905, in the Galerie Ernst Arnold, four young architecture students from the Dresden Technical School had their first encounter with Vincent van Gogh. Only six months earlier, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl had formed an avant-garde artists’ group, Die Brücke (The Bridge), to represent ‘all who express directly and truthfully what urges them to create’. At the sight of 54 paintings by van Gogh, remembered a teacher, they ‘went wild’. The extraordinary impact of one man’s singular vision on the birth of modern art in Germany and Austria is the subject of an ambitious new exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Vincent

Michael Tanner

Supreme challenge

Any article about a production of Wagner’s Ring cycle has to begin by saying that it is the supreme challenge a company can face, and how much more so when the company is based in a remote foreign city, and flies in to mount the tetralogy a few hours after it has been performing something else in its home base. Wagner’s great epic is usually performed, even in Bayreuth, with two breaks of a day each between the second and third and the third and fourth parts. The Mariinsky Theatre of St Petersburg, however, arrived last week in Cardiff to perform the Ring on four consecutive evenings, as Wagner originally

Peter Phillips

Stormy waters

Periodically, Radio Three sails into stormy waters, a section of its listeners taking a dislike to some new policy intiative and crying ‘dumbed down’. Off the top of my head, I can remember the phasing out of the old talks department; the threat to the regional BBC orchestras; the greater emphasis on jazz; the general move from informing people to entertaining them; the retirement of Patricia Hughes. Long gone are the days of 26-part series specialising in music written for the court of Cyprus. But hanging over almost all of these debates has been the question of how much of the music which is broadcast should be live, as opposed

Toby Young

Cultural debate

Some playwrights mellow with age, but not David Hare. His sense of righteous indignation knows no bounds. According to press reports, the reason he decided to open his latest play on Broadway is that he still bears a grudge against Nicholas Hytner for refusing to schedule more performances of Stuff Happens at the National. Alas, The Vertical Hour got a fairly lukewarm review in the all-important New York Times, though it remains to be seen whether Hare will publicly attack the critic concerned, as he did when Frank Rich gave The Secret Rapture the thumbs-down in 1989. Hare’s irascibility is on full display in Peter Hall’s revival of Amy’s View,

Charles Spencer

Past perfect

It was one of those perfect New York days that make you feel grateful to be alive. I’d eaten my favourite breakfast — pancakes with maple syrup and crispy bacon — then salved my conscience with a huge bowl of fresh fruit, and was now taking a post-prandial walk in Central Park. The sky was an eggshell blue, the air was crisp, there were skaters on the ice rink, and squirrels were chasing each other across the branches of the trees like a scene from Beatrix Potter. With that extra spurt of energy Manhattan so often provides, I decided to walk up to the reservoir, further than I’d ever gone

James Delingpole

Funny girls

There’s a programme I sometimes do on the right-wing guerilla media website 18 Doughty Street which I think you might enjoy. It’s called Culture Clash, presented by Peter Whittle, and it’s a bit like Newsnight Review would be if you took away the pseudery, the left-liberal cant and Ekow Eshun. Obviously, the production values are a lot ropier than you get on proper TV, and because the guests are generally less media-exposed there’s quite a lot of ‘you know’ and ‘I mean’. But what’s good about it is that everyone feels free to say what they actually think about the films, books and TV programmes they’re reviewing rather than going

Saturday

2 Dec 2006

The Spectator

Grade expectations

A television channel has reached a sorry state when the structure of its ownership is more exciting than what it broadcasts. Yet this is precisely what has happened to ITV, whose appalling programming schedule has become a low-rent joke, making real the parodies of the BBC’s Little Britain. The problem is not that ITV strives for popularity and entertainment: so it should. But at present it is achieving neither. The best ITV offering in the pre-Christmas schedule is not one of its own creations, but the sensational battle for control of the network between the two tycoons, Sir Richard Branson and Rupert Murdoch. Michael Grade’s return to commercial terrestrial broadcasting

Henrietta Bredin

Flying high with music and words

The titles of Jonathan Dove’s musical works — Flight, Tobias and the Angel, Palace in the Sky, The Little Green Swallow, Man on the Moon — might lead one to consider his winged surname a highly appropriate one. However, while the composer undoubtedly possesses a soaring imagination, it is allied to a refreshingly pragmatic, earthbound streak, and he is also the author of the more prosaically titled Pig, Greed and An Old Way to Pay New Debts. ‘I don’t work to an inner manifesto but I suppose that, in my operatic writing, I am always exploring something about where the boundaries of opera are, opera and theatre. I’m trying to

Cita Stelzer

Talent show

The National Gallery of Art in Washington presented a feast for the eyes this week. Three feasts, in fact. To celebrate Rembrandt year, the NGA organised the largest exhibition of his drawings, etchings and prints ever assembled in the United States. In an adjoining gallery, the NGA has rehung its celebrated Woodner collection of hundreds of master drawings, including three stunning Ingres. And if that is not enough to tempt you to take your next break in Washington, consider the somewhat more surprising exhibition that has just opened: The Artist’s Vision: Romantic Traditions in Britain. In order to compare differing Romantic ideals and visions, the curator, Stacey Sell, has brought

Tom Rosenthal

Playing with the past

Louis le Brocquy is 90 this year and his new show at Gimpel’s is merely one of four current celebratory exhibitions. (The others are at Tate Britain, The National Gallery of Ireland and Galerie Jeanne-Bucher in Paris.) He once wryly observed: ‘I’m aware that my age and vulnerability could be mistaken for some kind of authority.’ While the Gimpel show of his latest work does not in any way claim authority it also fails to exhibit any vulnerability. The whole subject of homage versus imitation could spark a book and here he gives us four homages to Manet’s ‘Olympia’ — which after all is not only an independent masterpiece but

Andrew Lambirth

Heaven and hell

Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) and Francis Bacon (1909–92) were near contemporaries but their work holds little in common. Although both are painters of crisis and intensity, their very individual achievements may be said to embody diametric opposites — the heaven on earth of Spencer’s beloved Cookham, and the ‘hell is others’ Grand Guignol of Bacon. Distinguished by a taste for physical deformity and duress, Bacon’s art is obsessed with brute facts. Spencer — who memorably wrote in his notebooks: ‘If I am called upon to worship…then I will begin with the lavatory seat’ — had an equally earthy approach to the human animal, but saw him as capable of redemption. An

Deborah Ross

So-so, actually

Honestly, before I took up this beat I had no idea how many new movies aren’t that great and aren’t truly terrible but are simply so-so and when it comes to so-so Stranger Than Fiction is just so so-so, which is a shame because: a) I’d been looking forward to it and b) I have better things to do with my time, like buy goats for people for Christmas and then figure out how to wrap them. I’d been looking forward to it not only because the conceit sounded wonderfully neat (it’s about a guy who hears his life being narrated to him) but also because it’s got Emma Thompson

Michael Tanner

Vintage year

Glyndebourne on Tour is having a vintage year, and that’s not counting its Die Fledermaus, which, favourite work of mine as it is, I couldn’t bear to see again in that production. Così fan tutte, on the other hand, I couldn’t bear not to see, having been at the first night in Glyndebourne last May, and felt there that, in the face of the hottest competition, it was the finest production of this infinitely subtle and probing comedy that I have ever seen. Not only did Glyndebourne on Tour match the home team, all told it surpassed it, and the result was an evening of simply unparalleled satisfaction — whether

Kate Chisholm

News values

The death of Nick Clarke, The World at One, Any Questions and Round Britain Quiz presenter, jolted many commentators — and listeners — to bewail the loss of a news broadcaster noted for his courtesy, his integrity, his ability to ferret for ‘the truth’ without being provocative or volatile. It says a lot about how much the world of broadcasting, and news reporting in particular, has changed that these qualities are now deemed so unusual. This is not to denigrate Nick Clarke’s achievement — he was an endearing broadcaster, with a wonderful ‘radio’ voice that was bold and authoritative and yet also easy-on-the-ear. You felt that he was talking directly

Simon Hoggart

After the tsunami

There was much pre-publicity around Tsunami — The Aftermath (BBC1, Tuesday) implying that the second anniversary of the disaster was a little early to turn it into drama, and that the film would be distressing and demeaning for the victims’ families. I could see the point, though what struck me most was that with more than a quarter of a million people dead, there were enough tragic stories available without having to invent more. It was as if the producers had thought, well, there is plenty of grief and anguish out there, but it’s not quite the grief and anguish we’re looking for. Let’s bring in some scriptwriters to give

Saturday

25 Nov 2006

Sheridan Morley

Brits on Broadway

The tills of the West End may be alive with the sound of musicals new and old, but the Brits on Broadway are remarkably well represented at a time when theatre in New York is still suffering a delayed downturn from the after-effects of 9/11. It is indeed some indication of a renewed faith in Broadway, and a reborn interest in straight plays which we could do well to copy, that David Hare is about to première his The Vertical Hour (with Julianne Moore and Bill Nighy, as directed by Sam Mendes) in New York rather than London, having recently triumphed there with his Iraq talkfest Stuff Happens. Additionally, Tom

Toby Young

Desperately seeking stardom

Connie Fisher, the winner of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s search-for-a-star reality TV show, hits the ground running in The Sound of Music. Indeed, she’s so high energy, it’s as if she’s starring in an infomercial rather than a West End musical. She overdoes everything, right down to the smallest hand gesture. As contestants in reality shows are fond of saying, she gives it ‘one hundred and ten per cent’. I imagine this is exactly what Lloyd Webber was hoping for when he came up with How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? Fisher is a non-professional who has been given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so, of course, she’s going to act

Giannandrea Poesio

Sparkle-free birthday

I have always loved Rambert’s artistic eclecticism. The dancers’ ability to adapt to different choreographic styles and demands goes far beyond mere technical bravura and adds greatly to their usually captivating performances. Yet superb technical skills and powerful drive alone cannot secure the success of an evening, especially when the choreography is as unexciting as that of the new mixed bill. The programme I saw started with a cleverly paced short work. Set to the irresistible final movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Martin Joyce’s Divine Influence is a visually pleasing duet, though hardly ground-breaking or provocative. Its outstanding quality is, arguably, its brevity, for the fast-paced sequence leaves no time

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.