Arts Reviews

English National Opera has arrived at the Dead City, and who, before Christmas, would have given odds that this new production of Korngold’s Die tote Stadt would ever make it this far? This is late-Romantic music-drama on an exuberant scale; it simply doesn’t lend itself to pubs and car parks (even the reduced version staged – superbly – at Longborough last summer used an orchestra of some 60 players). Korngold deals with strong emotions (grief, delusion and obsessive love) with a melodic generosity that has historically provoked the prissiest instincts of the British operatic establishment. The Royal Opera held its nose and staged a brief run in 2009, before sweeping

Getting the words ‘impressionism’ and ‘modern art’ into one exhibition title is a stroke of marketing genius on the part of the National Gallery, but is it too much for a single blockbuster? Symbolism, cloisonnisme, pointillism, expressionism, cubism, abstraction: if impressionism was a watershed in modern art, the streams that flowed from it were many and various. By setting a time frame of 1886 to 1914 – from the last impressionist exhibition to the first world war – After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art narrows its options only to widen them by expanding its focus beyond Paris to Brussels, Barcelona, Vienna and Berlin. In the closing decades of the 19th century,

Conjure up before your mind a vision of ‘Dickensian’ London, and as likely as not you will see in your imagination a street filled with yellow fog, dimly illuminated by a gas-lit street lamp. The classic ‘pea-souper’ was caused by a natural winter fog in the Thames basin, turned yellow by the coal fires and industrial chimneys of the Victorian city and held in place for days by the phenomenon of ‘temperature inversion’, when a layer of warmer air traps the cold, damp and increasingly impenetrable atmospheric mix in the streets below. Charles Dickens was probably more responsible than anyone else for the association: most famously, of course, in the

There are several reasons why Young Fathers currently feel like the most exciting live band in Britain, but for now let’s concentrate on effect rather than cause. The Edinburgh trio have somehow managed to dispense with all the froth and blather of concert-making – gratuitous chat; choreographed audience interaction; the fat and gristle – to deliver a show that is all attack. Every minute is a prime lean cut, direct and thrilling. They don’t mess about during the first of two sold-out Glasgow shows, but then brevity appears to be a kind of manifesto. The new album, Heavy Heavy, their fourth and not quite their best, lasts barely 30 minutes.

One of the lesser-known schools of modern philosophy is the Philosophy of Moomin. Like Cynicism or Epicureanism, it is difficult to pin down precisely, but subscribers speak of the importance of the individual, of liberalism and acceptance, and of the life-affirming joy of feeling. In the words of Moominpappa: ‘Just think, never to be glad or disappointed. Never to like anyone and get cross at him and forgive him. Never to sleep or feel cold, never to make a mistake and have a stomach-ache and be cured from it, never to have a birthday party, drink beer, and have a bad conscience… How terrible.’ Within this philosophical school, Moominpappa’s wife,

The death last week at the age of 83 of the sublime Lynn Seymour – muse to Ashton and MacMillan, the creator of roles in Romeo and Juliet and A Month in the Country among many others – set me thinking gloomily about the current dearth of ballerinas with her questioning intelligence and free spirit. So much technical proficiency around, so many elegant gymnasts, Dutch dolls and Sugar Plum Fairies, but so little distinctive personality or temperament. Where is the mystique, the grandeur, the ability to ambush our emotions? Her clarity of articulation is bobby-dazzling, her energy apparently inexhaustible Tiler Peck is among the best of the new breed. Star