Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Friday

Simon Hoggart

First impressions

I greatly enjoyed The Impressionists (BBC1, Sunday) in spite of clunky lines such as ‘This is Paris, in 1862,’ and ‘Cézanne! Do you know everybody?’ There are the scenes where they are painting their actual paintings, when Rolf Harris seems to have been parachuted into an episode of ’Allo, ’Allo! There was an unconsciously funny moment when Renoir is injured by a discus hurled by the English discus champion — who just happens to be training in the Forest of Fontainebleau, an activity which seems only marginally less stupid than practising the shot put on a mud flat. But the series charges along, helter-skelter, artists-behaving-badly, no pause for reflection except

Stephen Pettitt

Orchestrating support

I am in Raleigh, North Carolina, unexpectedly invited here by my old friend Grant Llewellyn, who is in his first season as music director of the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra and enjoying both the challenge and the celebrity status it gives him in the university- and technology-rich region known as The Triangle. Llewellyn has been treating his audiences to a mini-festival of contemporary American and British music. I am about to hear what turns out to be a fine concert in the orchestra’s handsome new Meymandi Hall of works by George Benjamin, Robin Holloway, Nicholas Maw and James MacMillan. According to your point of view, the United States of America

Andrew Lambirth

Mixed company | 19 May 2006

The pre-eminent Italian still-life painter Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) is frequently called an artists’ artist, which is usually taken to indicate that his extreme formality or painterliness (depending on who is arguing the case) appeals more to those in the know than to the man in the street. Morandi undoubtedly does have a deep and lasting appeal to artists, as this exhibition reminds us, but his profoundly unassuming and contemplative pictures also speak directly to a wider public, if the context is congenial. Morandi’s work is quiet, concentrating on groups of jars and bottles or odd corners of landscape, and in the bustle and cacophony of a mixed exhibition they can

Olivia Glazebrook

Chaos theory

A model couple, Alain and Bénédicte, live a perfect life in a clean white suburban house. A model couple, Alain (Laurent Lucas) and Bénédicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg), live a perfect life in a clean white suburban house. Alain is an engineer who is developing a way of protecting the home by remote control, using a minute helicopter which carries a camera and can download its images on to a laptop. Even from afar, Alain tells his audience during a presentation, you can limit damage to your home. Alain and Bénédicte invite Alain’s boss Richard Pollock (André Dussollier) and his wife Alice (Charlotte Rampling) to dinner, and as Bénédicte washes the salad

Michael Tanner

Expensive silliness

On 5 August 1993 Sviatoslav Richter wrote in his notebook, after listening to a recording of Götterdämmerung (the Rome Radio recording under Furtwängler, made in 1953): ‘What can you say about this music? You can only throw yourself on your knees and offer up your thanks. For me, personally, this is the supreme masterpiece.’ An adequate performance of Götterdämmerung should make anyone feel like that, at least temporarily. Even a seasoned opera-goer feels awe at the prospect of sitting through this richest product of Wagner’s genius, in which strands from the previous three dramas of the Ring cycle, and a surprising number of new elements, too, both musical and dramatic,

Toby Young Toby Young

Clash of cultures

The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Peter Shaffer’s 1964 play about the conquest of the Incas The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Peter Shaffer’s 1964 play about the conquest of the Incas, contains one of the most famous stage directions in modern drama: ‘They cross the Andes.’ On the face of it, these four words are completely preposterous. How could a theatre company possibly create the illusion that a 4,000-strong army is crossing a mountain range? Yet there was method in Shaffer’s madness. By including a stage direction that was impossible to follow naturalistically, he was forcing directors, actors, set designers, and so on to fall back on their ingenuity.

Robin Holloway

Dream again

Pointillisme — impressionism by numbers Pointillisme — impressionism by numbers: stand back, let the dots join up all by themselves, and the image judders into focus whatever the subject or lack of. In a month of volatile mobility I can offer no more than a stipple of blobs, musical moments snatched at or accidentally impinging, as Alice grabs at the marmalade, or thinks of Mabel, in the plunge down the chute that precipitates her Adventures. Mine come mainly at the arbitrary press of a knob into the daily tapestry of Radio Three, less loose-woven than usual these past weeks in its concentration of epic sagas — Wagner’s Ring complete on

Michael Vestey

Office politics

The slot at the end of The Westminster Hour on Sunday evenings (repeated Wednesdays) is rarely dull and often quite informative. The last two maintained the consistency — the first, ‘The Gentleman Usher’, had an interview with a former Black Rod, Sir Edward Jones, explaining the nature of his work; and last Sunday’s, ‘The Lloyd George Papers’, presented by Trevor Fishlock, took a two-part look at the letters of Lloyd George. The office of Black Rod, by its traditional nature, seems to irritate many people, particularly those who hate the past or who are ignorant or unappreciative of history. Jones, a retired army officer, as most office holders appear to

Wednesday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A big thank you to Guy Goma: the wrong man in the right place

This year’s most compulsive television viewing came on BBC News 24 last week, when they interviewed the wrong man. They were doing a story about the legal battle over registered trademarks between the computer company Apple and the Beatles’ record label, Apple Corps. They intended to speak to an acclaimed information technology expert, Guy Kewney, but some hapless researcher went to the wrong reception area and somehow brought into the studio Guy Goma, a Congolese business graduate with an extremely limited grasp of the English language. One of those identikit, bloodless and chirpy News 24 anchor babes carried out the interview regardless: Mr Goma’s answers were wonderfully uninformed and, because

Neil Macgregor

Spreading the word

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Read in the name of your Lord Who created. Read and your Lord is Most Honourable, who taught to write with the pen, taught man what he knew not. Two texts from the Middle East, St John’s Gospel and the Holy Qur’an both proclaim the primacy and authority of words. The Evangelist’s Word is the eternal creativity of God which, in Jesus, became flesh: the Word Incarnate. In the passage from the Qur’an — the first of the Prophet Mohammed’s revelations — God announces his intention to use the written word to spread

Martin Gayford

Bones of contention

All over the world, scholarly folk look to Neil MacGregor — who writes opposite — to hold the line. All over the world, scholarly folk look to Neil MacGregor — who writes opposite — to hold the line. If the British Museum gave in and sent the Elgin Marbles air freight to Athens, a massive wave of demands for restitution would descend on the museums of the Western world. The sad fact is that very large numbers of antiquities reached our cultural institutions by means that were highly dubious. In recent decades, many have been illegally excavated and smuggled on to the art market. An ex-antiquities curator at the Getty

Andrew Lambirth

Lighten our darkness

Lately I have adopted Word from Wormingford by Ronald Blythe as a bedside book. Composed of weekly bulletins from a Suffolk village, it combines observations on the countryside with reports on the spiritual welfare of Blythe’s parish. In its gentleness and generosity, it is the perfect antidote to the strain of London life, and cools the mind after anxiety-ridden days. (In this, it has the same welcome effect as the glorious novels of Alexander McCall Smith.) Cools the mind but doesn’t dim it, for Blythe mixes in comments from his wide reading with a deft hand, and leavens the brew with the wisdom garnered from a long life devoted to

Mark Glazebrook

Lest we forget

Visitors to the once devastated but now completely reconstructed and rather charming little town of Ypres will find themselves bowing the head to 54,896 dead soldiers of the Salient, as the front-line arc became known. These men fought for our freedom but have no graves. Their names are inscribed on the inside walls of the Menin Gate of 1927, the classic Roman memorial arch, designed by the traditional English architect Sir Reginald Blomfield. The fundamental message of John McCrae’s poem, which begins In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row… is that we must not break faith with the dead. I looked especially hard at the

Laura Gascoigne

Talent to amuse

The restaurant at Tate Britain is famous for two things — its wine list and its mural. The restaurant at Tate Britain is famous for two things — its wine list and its mural. Hamish Anderson, compiler of the former, began with the advantage of a famous cellar; Rex Whistler, creator of the latter, began with the blank walls of a dingy basement previously referred to as a ‘dungeon’. Whistler was only 20 and still a student at the Slade when he won the restaurant commission in 1926. His rare gifts of draughtsmanship and imagination had persuaded Henry Tonks he was the man for the job, and the Professor’s faith

Peter Black

Portrait power

Tate Liverpool is the first venue for a memorial exhibition of the painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (born Vienna 1906, died London 1996). Motesiczky was from a wealthy and cultivated Jewish background. She was a friend (from 1920) and pupil of Max Beckmann in Frankfurt (1927–8). She left Austria in 1938, settling in London, where she lived an isolated life. It is not that it was lonely. In fact, she had a very rich existence socially, especially after her move to Hampstead, but German art was little regarded in post-war England. Her training added independent study, in Paris and elsewhere, to a few terms at Frankfurt with her master, Beckmann. He

Michael Tanner

Worthy farewell

Franco Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac may not be a masterpiece, though I would claim that it is a first-rate second-rate work, to use a handy taxonomy of Richard Strauss. Franco Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac may not be a masterpiece, though I would claim that it is a first-rate second-rate work, to use a handy taxonomy of Richard Strauss. Yet the altogether superb production of it which the Royal Opera has mounted jointly with the Met has been received with very ill grace. It seems that no Italian composer of the early part of the 20th century can hope for a fair hearing, with even Puccini being tolerated only because it

Giannandrea Poesio

High fives

There is no doubt that BareBones’ The 5 Man Show will stay vividly in the memory of any dance-goer There is no doubt that BareBones’ The 5 Man Show will stay vividly in the memory of any dance-goer — and for a long time, too. This fizzy, moving, hilarious, corrosive triple bill is an ideal celebration of the company’s fifth year. Its five artists — numerologists would have a field day with such a recurrence of ‘fives’ — hypnotise the audience from their very first appearance, taking each viewer through a cogently formulated rollercoaster of emotions and vibrating theatre images. More significantly, the whole programme restores the long-lost faith in

Olivia Glazebrook

Holy smoke

So it’s here at last, the big hitter: The Da Vinci Code. So it’s here at last, the big hitter: The Da Vinci Code. Ron Howard (Cinderella Man, A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13) directing, Tom Hanks (you know the one) starring, Akiva Goldsman (Cinderella Man, A Beautiful Mind, Batman and Robin) adapting the book by Dan Brown. Millions of people have read the book; millions will see the film. Millions have been spent; millions will be made. It’s a serious business. The plot, in case you’ve just dropped in from Mars, concerns an American symbologist named Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) who happens to be lecturing in Paris when a murder

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Following Chekhov

When he wrote Enemies, Gorky was in love. The object of his desire was the artistry of Chekhov and this 1906 play is his attempt to emulate the master’s theatrical style. Copying from geniuses is risky. Any attempt is doomed, so it’s remarkable that Gorky fails so successfully. He reproduces Chekhov’s entire theatrical caboodle, the bubbling samovars, the smocked peasants, the candles glimmering through the silver birches, the bickering, lounging, drunken toffs, and to all this he adds an element of revolutionary prophecy. A local factory-owner stands up to Marxist agitators, but when he closes down the factory he is murdered by a mob. The assassin goes into hiding, the

Simon Hoggart

Walking on eggshells

I went to train in Manchester a year or so after the Moors murders, and they continued to hang over the city like an old-fashioned smog, sickening and inescapable. Reporters who had covered the trial in Chester and heard the tape of Lesley Ann Downey pleading for mercy and begging for her mother said that they used to lie awake at night hearing the little girl’s screams. The sense of a horror that existed on the fringe of normal life, yet hovered unnervingly nearby, was made worse by the moors themselves. These are not the cosy landscapes of the Peak District but are desolate and displeasing; the kind of scenery