Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Stark vision

English Touring Opera’s spring tour reached Cambridge the week after the undergraduates left for the Easter vacation, and, though I realise that enthusiasm for opera among students is fairly uncommon, I think there would have been enough curious ones to make the Arts Theatre less bleakly empty than it was for the second performance of Janacek’s great Jenufa, which, together with Tosca, is being taken to 16 locations over a couple of months. Notwithstanding the rows of unoccupied seats, the performance was of the no-holds-barred kind that the work demands, but that must be quite difficult to deliver to order. It was oddly under-directed by the company’s general director James

Andrew Lambirth

Spiritual journey

There has been a certain amount of controversy about this exhibition, the first Michelangelo show at the British Museum for 30 years. The exhibits are drawn almost entirely from the collections of three museums — the Teylers in Haarlem (where the exhibition was shown last year), the Ashmolean in Oxford and the BM itself. These are three of the greatest repositories of Michelangelo’s drawings, but over-reliance on them does exclude, for instance, the remarkable presentation drawings from the Royal Collection at Windsor. The exhibition has also been attacked on the grounds of authenticity. As the Daily Telegraph’s art critic Richard Dorment points out, ‘Only three of the 80 or so

Ursula Buchan

Lessons from abroad

British gardeners are often accused of being parochial, and we rarely make much attempt to defend ourselves against the charge. We think it is probably true but wonder what anyone expects, considering the advantages of climate, soil and geography we enjoy and how beautiful our gardens can be as a result. It is scarcely surprising if we rarely see much reason to raise our eyes above, and beyond, the horizon. We can rely on nearly 5,000 gardens opening their gates to us, for charity or profit, at least once a year, not to mention our own gardens to enjoy each day. Who can blame us, we say, if we lack

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Bath time | 25 March 2006

Three fine exhibitions are currently gracing the public galleries of Bath, and even though the new spa is shamefully late in opening, art-lovers are spoilt for choice. In fact, these shows are well worth a day trip from London if you live in town. Bath is a relatively easy hour-and-a-half’s journey from Paddington, and the rewards are considerable. Apart from the distinguished beauty of the city itself, all mellow Bath stone rising in proud tiers on the surrounding hills, this trio of shows provides an uncommon range of visual stimulation and entertainment. For those interested in the contemporary, the etchings and lithographs of Paula Rego make compulsive viewing, while a

Robin Holloway

Painful listening

Back yet again in the dentist’s chair last week, where time compresses, yet elongates, into infinite present as if there were no events or memories in-between each visit. No ‘laughing gas’ these days (‘breathe deep: now blow it away — one, two, three’). Consciousness is unbroken, every sense screwed to its highest pitch — the swish of suction is Niagara, the whiff of sulphur in the oral salves, the rubber gloves against the gums, a personal affront, the battering at one’s ivories like Nibelungs at the rockface; and the pain — dull or acute — an amplified sopranissimo saxophone with lasar attachment at the threshold of perception. Thus the foreground.

Michael Vestey

House proud

Since I first became aware of it, I’ve always loved Broadcasting House in Portland Place. The first time I started work there I had to sit in a café down the road and gaze up at its magnificent white Portland stone art deco fa

Simon Hoggart

Noel appeal

Deal or No Deal (Channel 4, weekday afternoons and Saturday) is the quintessence of television, in that it is remarkably boring, mildly hypnotic, and stars Noel Edmonds, he of the neatly trimmed beard and the grin that manages to be simultaneously wolfish and ingratiating. Noel Edmonds! He seems like a figure from the mists of television history, like Muffin the Mule or Gilbert Harding. We thought he had vanished decades ago. Had he emigrated? Was he even still alive? Not only is he still alive but he’s back. He wasn’t gone all that long. It just seems that way. Noel’s House Party died of terminal naffness, but just 17 years

Saturday

Toby Young Toby Young

Under the influence | 18 March 2006

Has Harold Pinter become too dominant a figure? I’m not just talking about the trophies he’s picked up in the past 12 months — the Wilfred Owen prize, the Franz Kafka prize, the Nobel prize, the Europe Theatre prize — but, more worryingly, the fact that so many new British playwrights seem content to ape Pinter’s idiosyncratic style. There was a time, not so long ago, when a writer wouldn’t be regarded as having arrived until he’d discovered his own voice. Typically, this process would involve him in an Oedipal struggle with the most important writers of his age, a phenomenon famously documented in The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom’s

Michael Tanner

Good-natured glow

Almost everyone who has written about Vaughan Williams’s opera Sir John in Love has defensively insisted that we put all thoughts of Verdi’s Falstaff out of our minds because Vaughan Williams had something quite different in his mind. He knew all the going operatic versions of the play, including Nicolai’s (which is a minor masterpiece, as was demonstrated in Buxton last year), so he must — so the argument goes — have had something special and personal to contribute. We can accept all that, without agreeing that he succeeded in making a valuable addition to the repertoire. The two things that would seem a priori to count against his succeeding

Laura Gascoigne

An inside view

It’s a little cheeky of Christopher Simon Sykes to have chosen a line from Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ as the title of a show of photographs of country houses, but A Richer Dust Concealed does happen to combine the three essential ingredients of his subject: riches, concealment from the outside world and dust. Sykes has an unusual photographic pedigree. He made his reputation with informal pictures of rock aristocracy shot behind the scenes of the Rolling Stones’ 1975 Americas tour, but he grew up at Sledmere House among a different sort of aristocracy, whose houses he has documented in several books. The cream of those photographs has now been collected

Andrew Lambirth

Hotchpotch of a show

Forget for a moment the importation of ‘Gothic’, a term more usually confined to architecture or the novel, and consider the main protagonists. Blake will be familiar to most art-lovers, but what about Fuseli? Born Johann Heinrich F

Michael Vestey

Fighting talk

Radio Four listeners have been complaining about the John Humphrys ‘interview’ with David Cameron on Today a fortnight or so ago. So they must have been even more irritated to hear the programme’s deputy editor, Gavin Allen, defending the encounter on Feedback last week (Friday, repeated Sunday), even going so far as to describe it as a successful interview in which he thought Humphrys didn’t interrupt too much. The presenter, Roger Bolton, put it to him that according to the head of radio news even Humphrys didn’t think the interview had gone as he intended. Allen doggedly stuck to his line that he wasn’t at all disappointed by it. Obviously,

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Guile and determination

One reason I find most TV thrillers such a huge waste of life is that the bad guys so often turn out to be evil capitalists, corrupt Tory MPs or sinister right-wing terrorist organisations. This owes more to the wishful thinking of instinctively bien-pensant scriptwriters than to reality. Since the war — or even before the war, if you accept that the Nazis were National Socialists — all the greatest threats to our existence and civilisation, from the IRA to militant Islam, from rampant trade unionism to communist imperialism, have come from the extreme Left, not the Right. Until watching The Plot Against Harold Wilson (BBC2, Thursday), I was inclined

Saturday

Giannandrea Poesio

Phoenix rising

Phoenix Dance Theatre is ‘25 years young’, as a filmed documentary shown halfway through last Thursday’s performance reminded us. The notion of youth is a relative one, particularly in the performing-arts world, where a quarter of a century is often regarded as a respectable old age, synonymous with a well-established reputation, a sound history and, arguably, a string of successes. Indeed, 25 years down the line, Phoenix remains a vibrant dance company that thrives on the collaboration with cutting-edge performance-makers. I was not surprised, therefore, to attend a programme, intriguingly entitled Stories in Red, that encompassed a wide variety of styles, techniques and forms; after all, artistic eclecticism has long

Patrick Carnegy

Demons within and without

At its première just over 50 years ago, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible was, at least in part, a sane man’s strike against America’s McCarthyite paranoia about communism. Miller’s cover for his protest was, of course, the infamous Salem witch-hunts conducted by the New England Puritans in 1692. In resurrecting the play as its tribute to Miller, who died just over a year ago, the RSC is plainly aware that the piece is now tested against new terrors confronting the liberal world. Extraordinary that Miller, four years after the play’s première, should have admitted that at the time of writing The Crucible he didn’t conceive ‘that there are people dedicated to

Michael Tanner

Betraying Berg

When Berg’s great tragic masterpiece Wozzeck opened at the Royal Opera in 2002 in Keith Warner’s production, I was more angry and depressed than I have ever been in an opera house. The utter betrayal of everything that Berg, who included in his score extremely detailed specifications as to how it should be staged, indicated, to convey the intense pain of his vision of degradation, made me feel that it should be possible to instigate criminal proceedings on behalf of works and composers subject to such gross abuse. Warner, I felt, treated Wozzeck just as everyone in the opera treats Wozzeck, but whereas Berg writes an overpowering elegy for him,

Laura Gascoigne

Through the eyes of a tourist

In the summer of 1811 the 37-year-old Turner packed his sketchbooks, paints and fishing rod and headed west for his first tour of Devon and Cornwall. The purpose of his trip — from Poole in Dorset around Land’s End and back along the Bristol Channel to Watchet in Somerset — was to gather material for a series of Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England to be published as engravings by the Cooke brothers. On the bone-rattling roads of the day the tour will have taken eight weeks, but Turner was an enthusiastic traveller, ‘capable of roughing it in any mode the occasion might demand’, according to one local

Andrew Lambirth

Going Dutch

The Sackler Wing of the Royal Academy is currently in deep-green livery to conjure up a rus in urbe setting for the grandest of the Dutch landscape painters of the 17th century — Jacob van Ruisdael. The first impression is a dark one — storm-tossed seas and forests, cloud-filled skies: the untamed might of nature and plenty of lush verdure. The painted green of the gallery walls is here and there relieved by pale-grey partitions, like silver birches in a conifer wood, upon which smaller works can be hung. (There’s an excellent sampling of Ruisdael’s powerful black chalk drawings made from direct observation.) The screens provide extra wall space for

Simon Hoggart

Truth and reconciliation

I caught the last Facing The Truth (BBC2, Saturday–Monday) in which Desmond Tutu moderated a meeting between the widow of a Catholic killed in the Ulster troubles and Michael Stone, the Milltown cemetery killer, who was behind her husband’s murder by loyalist gunmen. It was slightly less moving than expected — at least before the startling finish. At the risk of being forced to go to Belfast and apologise, like the previous editor of this magazine in Liverpool, Northern Ireland people do grief well — they have what would now be called the ‘grammar’ of grief; they know what’s expected, they have the tone of voice, they have lists: how

Mark Glazebrook

Mismatch of two masters

I hope that I am second to none in my fondness for Dutch art galleries — normally, at least. A candlelight evening in the Franz Hals museum, over 40 years ago, memorably transported me straight to 17th-century Holland — or so I imagined. The unmissable Vermeer exhibition in The Hague in 1996 reinforced this magical experience. Just over ten years ago, reviewing a Hockney exhibition in Rotterdam, I discovered that the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen had organised a race for ‘teckels’ (the Dutch for dachshunds) in honour of the artist’s famous pets. Simultaneously, vodka, samovars, blinis, borscht and waitresses in colourful Russian costumes were laid on in the museum’s restaurant