Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Language of the heart

John Constable (1776–1837) is the quintessential painter of rural England. If we carry in our hearts an image of unspoilt countryside it will, more often than not, bear the lineaments of what has become known as Constable Country, that stretch of land along the river Stour in Suffolk that includes Dedham and Flatford, and the nearby village of East Bergholt. Magical names, redolent with the history imbuing Constable’s paintings of his native county. He immortalised the area in timeless images of extraordinary freshness and beauty. The Tate’s show of some 65 pictures does intelligent justice to a vision of landscape which continues to refresh the spirit. As its title suggests,

Alan Powers

Popular appeal

Last time it was cows, this time it’s sheep. I’m not talking about an agricultural show, but about the London Architecture Biennale, which begins today when Lord Foster will be herding sheep across the Millennium Bridge towards Smithfield Market. In 2004 it was cows approaching Smithfield from the opposite direction, down St John Street, and, appropriately, across Cowcross Street. Peter Murray, the director of the Biennale, has a knack for eye-catching publicity and, since his earliest student magazine productions in the 1960s, has worked tirelessly to make architecture less boring. It is hard to think of anyone more dedicated to communicating what is still seen as a difficult and unpopular

Roderick Conway-Morris

Sales hype

An ancient Roman sceptic wondered how, when two augurs passed in the street and caught one another’s eye, they managed not to burst out laughing. A Damien Hirst bisected lamb suspended in a glass tank of formaldehyde was sold for $3.37 million at Christie’s in New York early in May. Works by Donald Judd, who did not construct his industrial box productions himself, also, like Hirst, having others to do that kind of thing for him, fetched nearly $10 million. The final take for these and similar pieces was $143 million. What started as a joke in the days of Dada has become big business, and postmodern conceptual art is

Michael Tanner

Russian shenanigans

Opera Holland Park is suddenly fashionable, even people who have never been near it writing about how wonderful they hear it is and vowing to go, while as usual those of us who have been saying that since it started in 1996 ask ourselves what makes us so implausible that we aren’t taken seriously on such matters, if at all. OHP has made a speciality of so-called verismo operas, though what is ‘true’ about Giordano’s Fedora I wouldn’t like to say. Although it ostensibly deals with Russian ‘nihilists’, mention of them obtrudes in the text with grotesque irrelevance.It has become a vehicle for prima donnas in the afternoon of their

Olivia Glazebrook

Smoke signals

Thank You for Smoking is a satirical comedy about the culture of spin, adapted from Christopher Buckley’s 1994 novel of the same name. Its hero is the wolfish Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), chief lobbyist employed by cigarette company ‘Big Tobacco’. It is Naylor’s job to defend the company he works for (and its right to exist), and smokers (and their right to smoke). He is smart, attractive and exceptionally good at his job — more than a match for the saps pitted against him by his arch-enemy, Senator Ortolan K. Finistirre (William H. Macy), who wants cigarette packets labelled with the word ‘Poison’ and a picture of a skull and

Giannandrea Poesio

Courtly celebration

Homage to the Queen is one of two ballets that Frederick Ashton conceived with a special occasion in mind —the other being Birthday Offering. Created in 1953, Homage was a choreographic celebration of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Not unlike the court masques of the 16th and 17th centuries, the ballet draws upon an allegorical pretext: the queens of Earth, Water, Fire and Air pay their tribute to the newly crowned monarch. The concept is typically Ashtonian, for it combines his great passion for, and knowledge of, past performing practices with his unique modern approach to classical ballet. Each of the six sections of the work — representing the

Simon Hoggart

Trophy tales

The World Cup, and once again people who don’t watch football from one quadrennium to the next manifest an interest in all those surreal pairings: Ecuador v. Poland, Iran v. Mexico, Togo v. Switzerland. I (and many others) have been disobliging about John Motson in the past, but he is perfect for these events, assuming no prior knowledge in his listeners, making you half-imagine that every match is the first he has ever attended. ‘Nice move!’; ‘Oh, Lampard there’; ‘England finding themselves on the back foot now…’ Real football aficionados hate all this wide-eyed simplicity; they get cross, just as trainspotters would at Crewe if crowds of housewives elbowed them

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Orchestrated explosions

This small but telling retrospective at Tate St Ives is one of a number of Hoyland exhibitions timed to coincide or overlap this summer. There have already been a couple of commercial shows of recent and older work in London, and another has just opened at the Lemon Street Gallery in Truro (until 24 June). At the age of 72, John Hoyland is experiencing a resurgence of interest in his work which is entirely justified. Since the 1960s he has been an international figure in the world of art, an inventive and uncompromising abstract painter who has continued to take the most extreme risks in his work, and to develop

Olivia Glazebrook

A bloodless horror

Someone once had an excellent idea for a film to scare the pants off us: what if Gregory Peck (who represented nothing but good sense and respectability) adopted a baby boy, and that cute ickle shock-headed newborn turned out to be Satan? And Satan wanted Mummy and Daddy dead, so he could inherit everything they had — in fact ultimately inherit the earth and bring about his true aim, which we call Armageddon? What if the only thing Peck could do, to stop him, would be to murder him — or try to? Wouldn’t that be a great movie? Well, yes, it would and it was. The Omen has been

Ursula Buchan

Pursuit of excellence

There was an unexpected outbreak of common sense at Chelsea Flower Show this year. I looked hard for the usual silliness to laugh at, but I was hard-pressed to find much. (There were the celebrities who clutter up the place on Press Day, obviously, but the general public who visit Chelsea are mercifully spared those.) There was much sober purposefulness and little evident desire to épater le bourgeois. Most emperors had obviously decided that the weather warranted them wearing their oldest and warmest clothes. Was it the absence from the show of Diarmuid Gavin and his contrived spats, perhaps, or the fact that the show’s sponsor was Saga Insurance for

Michael Tanner

Marital mayhem

Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is proving to be one of the enduring operas of the 20th century, despite its inconvenient length, or brevity, and thus the problem of what to pair it with for a full evening. I have always tended to think of it as a work of extreme orchestral sumptuousness, which provides a background to the ritual-cum-drama being worked out between Bluebeard and his latest wife Judit, ending, as it begins, in tears. Their mode of communication, Judit a kind of mythic nag, Bluebeard stonewalling, is almost elevated chanting, which gives an emotional distance to the incidents we watch, and means that, however much we register the pain

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Beyond the fringe

Listing page content here Surrealism is in the air, what with the Hayward and Max Ernst shows (reviewed in these pages last week), and it’s been lurking around in a different guise since April in an enthralling show at the Whitechapel which focuses on Outsider Art. Outsider Art, or Art Brut as Dubuffet originally termed it, is art made by ‘people free of artistic culture’; in other words, not artists, though the categories are increasingly blurred. It’s often the product of the mentally disturbed, of those beyond the fringes of society, who make drawings or paintings, sculpture or embroidery, which deal directly with their obsessions. They may not intend to

Michael Tanner

Uplifting thrills

Listing page content here Fidelio, Beethoven’s simple and sublime opera, presupposes a belief in a set of values and their connection with action which it is hard for most of us to accept, possibly even to take seriously. Yet a great performance of Fidelio is inspiring enough to make you reconsider your scepticism, and that is what we had at the Barbican last week, in concert, with distinguished soloists and the London Symphony Chorus and Orchestra under Colin Davis. He has always been a great exponent of the opera, and it’s odd that he has never before recorded it — these two performances will yield a recording on the LSO’s

Charles Spencer

Young triumphs

Listing page content here This column is in disgrace. Last month, with both the deadline and a flight to New York looming, I found myself in the position of the rabbit staring at the headlights of the oncoming lorry. Completely frozen, unable to think, unable to write. I’d been listening to loads of music all month but couldn’t find a word to say about any of it. So I found myself writing about the dead pets of my childhood, filed the copy and caught the plane before anyone could track me down to ask for a rewrite. My wife gave it a glance just before the taxi arrived to whisk

Olivia Glazebrook

Past tense

Listing page content here As I’m sure you are aware, United Airlines’ Flight 93 was the fourth plane hijacked on 9/11 — the one that did not reach its target. I shall ignore the internet-based argument over what happened to United 93 in its final minutes (did it crash into the ground or explode in the air?) since this film is a telling rather than an investigation. We may ask questions when we emerge from the cinema, but no one is asking questions in the film. In fact, names you will not hear mentioned during the course of the film include Osama bin Laden, al-Qa’eda, Saddam Hussein, Iraq, Afghanistan. No

Peter Phillips

And the choir sings on

Listing page content here Killing time in Beverley Minster the other day I caught sight of the list of past organists painted up on a board. Within the past 200 years this magnificent building, which has no choir-school of its own, has played host to John Camidge, A.H. Mann and H.K. Andrews. All three went from there to the very top of the cathedral organists’ ladder: Camidge to York Minster; Mann to King’s, Cambridge, where he presided over the first broadcast of Nine Lessons and Carols in the Twenties; and Andrews to New College, Oxford, where he pioneered the music of Byrd (and died a famous death while giving the

Patrick Carnegy

First and last loves

Listing page content here In my first report (13 May) from the front line of the RSC’s Complete Works festival, I praised a visiting German company’s take on Othello, making unfavourable comparison between its radical daring and the RSC’s own often disappointing response to the big S in its title. If that was an unkind generalisation, it’s time to get down to specifics in two of the resident company’s early contributions to the festival. In the Swan there’s a starrily cast Antony and Cleopatra directed by Gregory Doran, while in the main theatre Nancy Meckler takes on Romeo and Juliet. Doran gives us pretty much heritage Shakespeare, with Meckler updating

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 27 May 2006

Here, in full, is the current newspaper advertisement for the coming programmes on ITV1: ‘THIS SUMMER  Ant and Dec will give away £1,000,000. Famous faces will face the music (and Simon Cowell). David Beckham will bare his soul to the nation. A man will be drowned alive. Robbie Williams will support Unicef. Gazza will support Robbie Williams. Celebrities will be marooned on Love Island. The Beckhams will throw a World Cup party. Dinosaurs will be saved from extinction. Oh… and then there’s that WORLD CUP footie thing too. ONLY ON ITV1.’ This seems an almost complete summary of things that I do not want to see. Or so I thought.

Taki

No Cannes do

Cannes If the truth, space and good taste allowed it, the heading of this column would be ‘My Cannes night of lust with Halle Berry’. Before her agent reaches the offices of Sue, Grabbit & Run, the Oscar-winner and I did not, alas, hit it off in bed, and it was mostly her fault. But before I go on, a few words about Cannes and the 59th Film Festival. During the festival, the population of Cannes, normally around 68,000, doubles. The Cannois, not a bad lot, are quite proud of their festival, because in the ridiculous, celebrity-worshipping world we live in, Cannes is the centre of the world for 11

Thursday

Robin Holloway

German gems

Listing page content here It is hard to embrace Max Reger. For a start, he is surely the physically ugliest of all composers, surpassing even Prokofiev, or Zemlinsky, whose repulsiveness actually inspired an opera libretto. Reger’s slobbish face, plus pince-nez and thick sulky lips, already anticipates the music’s mix of shortsighted with greedy grossness. Still more suggestive, the notorious address to a hostile critic from the throne of his villa’s smallest room — ‘Sir, your notice is before me; in a moment it will be behind me’ —confident arrogance and asinine coarseness memorably conjoined. E.J. Dent, Italophile and champion of Mozart, would mock the heavy Hunnishness of the German genius