Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Michael Tanner

Great expectations | 19 July 2006

PUSH! is the first opera about childbirth, so Tête à Tête claims, and I’m sure rightly. Opera usually likes to concentrate on the other end of life, audiences much preferring to see people leaving than arriving. It would be absurd to make very large claims for PUSH!, and I’m sure Tête à Tête wouldn’t want to. It is a brilliantly entertaining and in two prolonged scenes moving piece, with a dazzling text by Anna Reynolds and effective music by David Bruce. The action takes place in a delivery room, five women giving birth, interspersed with a couple of cleaners mopping up, and finally and triumphantly the female cleaner herself gives

Patrick Carnegy

Prince Hal goes to Chicago

On a perfect summer’s day by the Avon it was the turn of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater to take the stage at the Swan It was really rather a surprise to stumble across Shakespeare in his native tongue after the revelatory pleasures (I do not jest) of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a cornucopia of Indian languages and of Titus Andronicus in a phenomenally eloquent guttural Japanese. On a perfect summer’s day by the Avon it was the turn of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater to take the stage at the Swan for its contribution to the RSC’s international exploration of the complete works of the bard. My only previous experience

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Easy on the eye

Hard on the heels of the National Gallery’s show Rebels and Martyrs, about the changing perception of the artist, comes this exhibition of Modigliani’s paintings. The title makes a shameless and immediate reference to the myth of the decadent bohemian surrounded by lovers. This may serve to attract the punters, but it doesn’t help us take the art more seriously. Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) was a middle-class Italian Sephardic Jew, born in Livorno, who left home for the bright artistic lights of Paris in 1906, and tragically never found success there. As an artist he has been ill served by the legend that grew up around him, the misplaced glamour of

Russell Chamberlain

In search of Alfred

I sat behind the bicycle shed of Winchester’s Historic Resources Centre, holding a fragment from what was probably the coffin of the greatest of all our monarchs, the king who founded our nation and gave it a moral purpose and direction: Alfred, surnamed by posterity the Great. Labled ‘HA99 22041’, the fragment was visually unimpressive: no inscription, no painting, simply a small piece of light-coloured stone, evidently broken from a larger mass. But it had solved a centuries’ old mystery, for it told us where Alfred had finally been buried. Alfred died in 899 and was buried, together with his wife and son, in the Old Minster in the heart

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Distaste for authority

The highlights of Brecht’s Life of Galileo are packed into the opening hour. As the astronomer glimpses new worlds through his telescope, we get a palpable sense of his wonder and astonishment. The effect of these revelations on the mediaeval mind comes through in simple, thundering utterances. ‘The moon has no light of its own.’ ‘The earth is a star like any other.’ ‘Heaven has been abolished.’ It’s thrilling to see aeons of Aristotelian tradition being shattered and remade in the space of a couple of cloudless evenings on an Italian hillside. But the play drags once Galileo comes into conflict with the Church. The Faith versus Reason ding-dong becomes

Marcus Berkmann

A lost cause

Wailing and gnashing of teeth appear not to have greeted the news that Top of the Pops is to end after 42 glorious years. Indeed, as far as I can see, no one gives a monkey’s. I have to admit, I am disappointed. Of all those newspaper columnists with nothing to write about, you would have thought at least one would have embraced the cause. And where are the elderly pop-pickers hoisting banners outside Television Centre and brandishing tear-stained photos of Jimmy Savile? Instead, public reaction has been muted and resigned, and possibly tempered by surprise that the show was still going on at all. BBC2, did you say? Early

Wednesday

Laura Gascoigne

Carpenter of colour

On Monday 15 October 1906, Paul Cézanne was painting on the hillside above his Les Lauves studio on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence when he was caught in a violent rainstorm. Having sacked his coachman the week before in a row over money, the 67-year-old painter was on foot, and by the time he was picked up by a passing laundry cart and driven home to his house in Aix he was soaked to the skin. On the Tuesday, after rising at dawn to continue work on a portrait of his gardener Vallier, he collapsed into bed, and on the following Monday his wife and son were summoned from Paris. They

Andrew Lambirth

Creative struggles

An examination of the artist’s image is an excellent idea for an exhibition, and it has been thoroughly and effectively realised in this new show of some 70 exhibits at the National. Brainchild of Alexander Sturgis, who has written much of the useful catalogue (£25 in paperback), it explores the ways in which personality and originality have been bound up together in the art of the past 200 years. We are all familiar with the romantic idea of the starving but ennobled artist in the garret; this exhibition questions the plausibility of that myth. As you enter the subterranean galleries of the Sainsbury Wing, you are greeted by a magnificent

Robin Holloway

Always different

Amidst the interminable tundra of centennial Shostakovich the very thought of an ‘Igor Fest’ is refreshing. And Birmingham’s four-year plan to play every note by the 20th century’s representative composer got off to a marvellous start last month with the CBSO under Sakari Oramo. A major positive about Stravinsky is just what his detractors used to pounce upon as a defect: he’s always doing something different. Even through the 30 years of common-practice ‘neoclassicism’ from the early 1920s culminating in the late 1950s with The Rake’s Progress, the variety is astonishing, embracing the wit and cheek of the Octet, the graceful suavity of Apollo and the sober seriousness of Orpheus;

Michael Tanner

Stirred by Ravel

It’s rare that both of Ravel’s operas appear in one programme, indeed that they appear at all. The RCM, as one might expect, did the fullest justice to both of them, and made clear how immeasurably superior the second, L’enfant et les sortilèges, is to the first, L’heure espagnole. L’heure is entirely a comedy of situation, with a libidinous woman coping with an embarrassing superfluity of importunate lovers by having a muleteer carry them upstairs and down in grandfather clocks, until she realises, with her husband’s acquiescence, that it’s the dumb muleteer himself who is the goods. The music is often merely illustrative, and reveals too fully Ravel’s fascination with

James Delingpole James Delingpole

In the line of duty

Back at church after a few weeks’ absence, I found the vicar in a terrible state. ‘Oh my dear chap, we’ve all been thinking of you. Is it true?’ he said. ‘What?’ I said. ‘What you said in The Spectator about getting divorced,’ he said. ‘You must never take the nonsense I write seriously,’ I said. And all down the aisles, as the news spread (‘We’d been praying for you,’ one woman said), I could see waves of relief spreading through the church, and I thought, ‘How lovely. People actually care!’ But there are some things that are far, far too important to make jokes about, and one of them

Michael Vestey

Personal rapport

What really goes on between world leaders at summits? Sir Christopher Meyer, former press secretary to John Major and later ambassador to Washington, told us in How to Succeed at Summits (Sundays, repeated Wednesdays), an entertaining two-part series on Radio Four. Meyer told us that, for example, when President Bush made a jokey reference to Tony Blair using Colgate toothpaste at Camp David, assembled journalists wondered how on earth he knew: did they share a bathroom? In fact, Meyer knew that all the bathrooms there were supplied with this particular brand because he was part of the entourage. Summits remain a secret world because quite often two world leaders will

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Dazzled by colour

The gallery walls of the Level Two temporary exhibition space at Tate Britain are currently aflame with colour. The gallery is playing host to the first exhibition ever to span the entire career of Sir Howard Hodgkin (born in 1932), though there have been plenty of other shows of his work over the years. (Notable among them being displays at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 1990 and 2002, the Hayward Gallery in 1996 and the Whitechapel in 1985, not to mention numerous commercial shows in between.) Despite the dazzling white surfaces of the studio in which he works, Hodgkin often exhibits his paintings on coloured walls, and

Charles Spencer

Jazz bender

This is the way addiction works. A nice man offers you a generous taste at a ridiculously low price; you love it, you go back for more but now the price has risen. But still you go on paying because you like it so much. Soon you find you’re not just liking it, but needing it, and, what’s worse, needing it in ever-larger quantities. That’s certainly been my experience with jazz, so many of whose greatest exponents died young and horribly because of their addiction to far more dangerous narcotics than music. It was back in December 2005 that I wrote here about the amazing offer at the MDC music

Michael Tanner

Fulfilling Mozart

The Royal Opera has revived David McVicar’s production of Le Nozze di Figaro after only five months, but already with a ‘revival director’, Stéphane Marlot, who has modified a fair number of details, but not, unfortunately, the over-busyness of some of it, including the Overture, during which we see huge numbers of servants bustling and indulging in very McVicarish horseplay. However, since Colin Davis is conducting, the obvious thing is to close your eyes for four minutes and hear that hyper-familiar piece delivered with incomparable verve and an underlying threat of insurrection. It is wonderful how, throughout, Davis illuminates the opera without any nudging, gear-changing, strange emphases. He has reached,

Patrick Carnegy

Masks of the Orient

Titus Andronicus is the Shakespeare shocker of the moment. At the Globe in London the groundlings have made Page Three news by fainting away in droves as limbs are lopped and tongues excised in Lucy Bailey’s staging (which I regret I haven’t seen). In the Daily Telegraph Charles Spencer rates it the hottest, goriest ticket in town. Arriving in Stratford-upon-Avon from Japan, Yukio Ninagawa’s extraordinary company eschews the buckets of stage blood in favour of fountains of exploding red ribbon. Ninagawa’s previous venture with the RSC — an Anglo-Japanese Lear with Nigel Hawthorne uneasily in the title role — fell between the two cultures. With Titus Ninagawa is once again

Simon Hoggart

Cartoon criminals

Coup! (BBC2, Friday) was quite a brave programme. It was the story of the failed mercenary coup in Equatorial Guinea, a tiny but oil-sodden tyranny on the west coast of Africa. This was led by an adventurer called Simon Mann (I have often said it is a great mistake to trust anyone called Simon, unless, possibly, they are in hairdressing) and supported by Mark Thatcher. It would have been easy to run this as a grim, heart-of-darkness drama, with lessons for us all about the evil nature of imperialism, or the vile conspiracies of multinational corporations. Instead, they played it boldly, to a large extent, for laughs. The clue was

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

The usual suspects

The Summer Exhibition is like a leviathan, a monster from the deep, that every now and again shows itself to general outcry and occasional consternation. Unfortunately, however, it’s not actually the stuff of myth and legend, but all too often of rather dismal reality. This, the 238th Summer Show, is co-ordinated by the architect Peter Cook and the sculptors David Mach and Alison Wilding, and revels in a theme which, though not ‘compulsory’, was optimistically expected to inspire those non-RA artists blessed with sufficient temerity to submit work. The chosen subject was ‘From Life’, which is unspecific enough not to make the slightest difference to anyone. The biggest innovation this

Olivia Glazebrook

Vicious circle

Ken Loach won the Palme d’Or in Cannes last month with The Wind that Shakes the Barley and has since been the object of several abusive articles in the British press. He will be unsurprised (and probably untroubled) — his films usually cause a rumpus. This one is set in Ireland in the 1920s, and it is, shall we say, a partial history. The film’s hero is Damien (Cillian Murphy), a young Irish doctor who takes the oath of the Irish Republican Army after witnessing two brutal attacks by the Black and Tans — one the murder of a close friend, the other the beating of an elderly train guard.

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,