Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Charles Spencer

Social outlaw

It’s the morning of 2 January as I write, and I’m gloomily contemplating my New Year’s resolutions. Actually, gloomily is hardly the mot juste. I’m having a complete jelly-livered panic attack about them. It’s our family custom to go to the Pilot Boat pub in Lyme Regis for lunch on New Year’s Eve, and to discuss the coming 12 months. It was at the Pilot Boat that we first decided to get a cat, and I now can’t imagine life without Nelson. He’s just greeted me on my solo return from Dorset with a combination of excitement, purring affection and just a suspicion of reproach in his eyes that moved

Andrew Lambirth

Grand tour of Venice

Andrew Lambirth on the splendour of the Canaletto exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery Magnet for tourists as it is, Buckingham Palace is the perfect setting for Canaletto in Venice, an exhibition devoted to the grandest producer of tourist art of the 18th century focusing exclusively on a city which had already become one of the world’s leading tourist destinations. Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697–1768) was known as Canaletto to distinguish him from his father, a successful painter of theatrical scenery. Young Giovanni trained in Venice in the family business, before branching out on his own in the early 1720s and painting views of Venice for the rich nobles undertaking the Grand

Saturday

Michael Vestey

Mercy killing

The good end-of-year news was that Home Truths on Radio Four (Saturdays) is to be taken off the air in the spring. Unfortunately, it seems likely to be replaced by something similar. The new show, says Mark Damazer, the network controller, ‘will continue to feature the sometimes extraordinary experiences of its listeners’. Damazer explained that the late John Peel’s ‘unique personality’ was bound up with Home Truths and now it was time to look for a different programme. I must say I hated it when Peel presented it and I don’t feel any differently now. The only good thing about it for me was that it was sheer bliss not

Robin Holloway

A First for skill

Memory Lane circa 1900, revisited by moonlight without cars, let alone speed cameras: not since Thorsten Rasch’s hommage to late-romantic/early-modern idioms admiringly described in this column a couple of years ago have I encountered so thoroughgoing an exercise in pastiche as the gigantic string quartet that occupied most of a recent evening on Radio Three. ‘Exercise’ is the prevailing term. Except in its vast length and pretensions, Alistair Hinton’s work reminded me of nothing so much as the ‘portfolio of tonal compositions’ submitted by every music student in their second year at Cambridge. Marking these down the decades, I’ve been stirred by even the duffest efforts (no doubt reluctantly undertaken)

Saturday

Giannandrea Poesio

Magical touch | 17 December 2005

Oh joy, oh bliss, it is Nutcracker season again! Hordes of overdressed and overexcited children invade our theatres, much to the despair of those who know that the kids’ excitement and attention will fade as soon as they realise that neither the Mouse King nor the Sugar Plum Fairy can be incinerated by one of Lord Voldemort’s spells. Indeed, a Harry Potter-esque version of the unsinkable classic could be an appropriate addition to the long series of radical, humorous, gothic and psychoanalytical versions of the 1892 ballet that we have seen in the past years. Yet, London balletomanes will find no such thing, nor any other new Nutcracker in their

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

All in the mind | 17 December 2005

On Ego is a lecture that turns into a nightmare. An amiable young neurologist, Alex, strolls on stage and addresses us on the subject of mind. He has a lab technician Derek (Robin Soans wearing a white coat and a lost gaze), who presents him with a bucket containing a brain. Alex picks up the dripping ‘lump of meat’ and uses it to illustrate Francis Crick’s observation that ‘Conscious experience is not caused by the behaviour of neurons. It is the behaviour of neurons.’ The show then evolves, by a series of sudden shifts and jerks, from a monologue into a drama. Derek the lab assistant turns out to be

Michael Tanner

Irresistibly moving

English National Opera’s production of Billy Budd originated in Wales seven years ago, and is also shared with Opera Australia. Neil Armfield is the producer, and the set design is by Brian Thomson. It is an hydraulic platform, which in Cardiff occupied the whole stage, but at the Coliseum leaves a lot of surrounding space unused, and induces less claustrophobia in the audience, though it could well, in its restless heaving, cause motion sickness. It is highly unspecific, so serves, with one or two props, all the purposes it needs to and leaves the creation of atmosphere mainly to the music and the singers, so that is in good hands.

Stephen Pettitt

Festive spirit

Each year the same thing happens. Each year we’re expected to suspend for a month the exercise of sound musical judgment as we’re engulfed, willingly or otherwise, in a deluge of Christmas Music. All of a sudden, banality in various guises becomes completely acceptable. Every church in the land that hasn’t descended to the satanic realms of happy-clappy mass hysteria and which has a half-decent choir offers its own version of King’s College’s Nine Lessons and Carols in cosy, twinkly, feelgood candlelight, pretending that all is well in the world. All the major concert halls in every large city offer Christmas concerts of various hues, swelling the coffers of entrepreneurs

Andrew Lambirth

Christmas round-up

A Christmas spirit hovers over Art of the Middle Ages at Sam Fogg (15d Clifford Street, W1, until 12 January), visible particularly in the Three Kings bearing gifts in the tiny 14th-century French ivory diptych, and in the green-winged stained-glass angel probably from the glazier who worked at Sées Cathedral, Orne in Normandy, around 1270–80. This high standard is maintained in the stucco relief of the ‘Virgin and Child Enthroned’ of c.1420, by Michele da Firenze, a kneeling wooden king from an Austrian ‘Adoration of the Magi’, and a remarkable Bavarian limewood Jesse figure. Other treasures include illuminated manuscripts, miniatures and Romanesque architectural sculpture. Here are gifts indeed to impress

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Challenge accepted

Verdi’s Falstaff is an opera which I have usually found it easier to admire than to love, but English Touring Opera’s production, which has been going round the country since October, is exceptionally endearing. I hope that they might keep it in their repertoire — so many of the best things this company has done have disappeared, while I’m sure that many people who have seen them once would be happy to go to a repeat performance a few years later — what happened to their wonderful Fidelio, for instance? Falstaff is probably the biggest challenge to date, demanding the utmost in precision from the performers, while needing never to

Toby Young Toby Young

Change of heart

When I started writing this column in 2001 I didn’t have much time for the theatre. As a child of the Thatcherite Eighties, I regarded state funding of the arts as a ruse cooked up by the liberal intelligentsia to obtain cheap tickets, and thought of theatre people as effete intellectual snobs who spent their time congratulating each other on being so much more cultured and intelligent than the rest of us. Whenever Jonathan Miller appeared on television, I turned it off. Four years later, I’ve had such a complete change of heart that I felt like one of the luckiest men alive as I sat in an abandoned factory

Saturday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Orgy of confusion

Take a pile of bilge, add a bucket of drivel, stir in a few dead babies’ heads and you’ve got Coram Boy. The Olivier’s big Christmas production is a version of a kids’ book about abducted orphans in the 18th century. It’s certainly lavish. A huge cast, acres of costumes, enough lights to land the Shuttle, and an orchestra on stage. What for? An orgy of confusion and tedium, a choppy text and a gang of flouncing show-offs striding about the stage delivering ‘Egad, sir’ dialogue and occasionally breaking into a burst of Handel. Coram Boy, beware, is a curriculum text. The stalls are filled with parping, snickering, beeping teenagers

Giannandrea Poesio

Aural padding

There seems to be a problem with the way some modern-day dance-makers deal with music. Twice in a fortnight, I have been confronted by works in which the score had no relevance to the choreography, and performers seemed to dance to a different tune. I am referring to Rafael Bonachela’s Curious Conscience, reviewed last week, and to Alastair Marriott’s Tanglewood, given its première last Monday by the Royal Ballet. In line with the assumption that ‘50 per cent of a ballet’s success stems from the right music’, Marriott has opted for an intriguing score, Ned Rorem’s Violin Concerto. As the composer explains in a captivating programme note, this is no

Tanya Harrod

Surprise tactics

Suddenly the word craft has resonance. While not exactly on everyone’s lips, it has certainly won unexpected allies. Take the fashionable sociologist Richard Sennett. In his book Respect: the Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality (2003) Sennett seizes on what he calls ‘craftwork’ as a defence against a world dominated by audits and assessments in which comparatively few are singled out for recognition. By ‘getting the act right in itself…the craftsman can sustain his or her respect in an unequal world’. But the term is a slippery one. Craft is being embraced by the art world in the form of DIY of the homeliest kind. Grayson Perry’s evening-class

Angela Summerfield

A very British medium

Watercolour, that quintessentially British medium and form of expression, is currently enjoying a revival of interest among contemporary artists and academics alike. Following on from Tate Britain’s riveting Thomas Girtin exhibition and Hockney’s forays into the Nordic and Yorkshire landscapes come two exciting and enchanting shows, a short bus journey between the two. Both offer a rare opportunity to see in London otherwise inaccessible works. At Messum’s, the show of north Yorkshire artists includes small-scale atmospheric watercolours and mixed-media works, of the dales, by Peter Hicks. In Len Tabner’s small- and large-scale works, one can see how the thick handmade paper has been flooded with watercolour to create dramatic tensions,

Andrew Lambirth

Unalloyed delight

André Derain (1880–1954) has a somewhat mixed reputation. He is widely praised for his early paintings, done when he worked alongside Matisse and Vlaminck and they took the art world by the throat with their Fauve extremism, but his later work is largely dismissed. To quote the Yale Dictionary of Art & Artists, it ‘combined traditional modes with modern sketchiness attractive to those who seek academic assurances in new art’. Fairly slighting, but, in some cases at least, justified. Derain’s post-war work was certainly unadventurous, but then he had determined to be the solid classical reactionary. What we need now is a well-chosen retrospective of his entire career to highlight

James Delingpole James Delingpole

. . . but make up your own mind

My favourite programmes this week were Cold Steel: Ray Mears’s guide to the knife-fighting techniques of Anders Lassen VC (Channel 4, Monday); Das Reich: From Poland to the Ardennes with 2nd SS Panzer Division (BBC2, Wednesday); Richard Holmes’s Kohima and Imphal: the Untold Story (Channel 4, Thursday); and Götterd

Charles Spencer

Jazz riches

I’m still trying to get on with the blasted novel, over which I have been procrastinating for several years now. Though there are occasional exhilarating hours when it proceeds apace, there are others when I sit at my desk, drinking cold coffee and smoking roll-ups, when I conclude that, on balance and all things considered, I’d rather slash my wrists than try to write another bloody word. Never believe anyone who says they love writing. It’s mostly horrible. After 30 years on the job, I still think I’m going to be found out with every review I write, still feel the terror of what was once the blank piece of

John Spurling

Uneasy encounters

Now that Georgia is independent again — it was annexed by Russia in 1801 and broke free from the Soviet Union in 1990 — it is keen to reassert its identity and encourage visitors. But there is a PR problem with its three best-known celebrities: in ancient times the murderous Medea and in modern times Stalin and his hatchet-man Lavrenti Beria. On a recent trip organised by the Georgian Department of Tourism, with a direct flight with BMED from Heathrow, I and three other British journalists were driven to and from an ancient cave city, passing through the town of Gori. Were we not going to stop in the birthplace

Saturday

Giannandrea Poesio

Escapism at its best

More than a year since its re-emergence from oblivion, Frederick Ashton’s Sylvia keeps eliciting thunderous ovations. Not surprisingly, one might add. The restored three-acter is not just a shimmering tribute to Ashton’s genius; it is sheer fun, too. Indeed, ‘fun’ more than ‘artistic pleasure’ is what should be expected, for Sylvia is not one of those monoliths of ballet culture we normally attend in religious awe and contemplation. Originally created in 1876 in Paris, the work mirrored the crisis that underscored French choreography at that time. Little had survived of the golden epoch of the French Romantic ballet, and French theatre dance of the post Franco–Prussian war period suffered greatly