The Royal Opera’s new season began with a nice big surprise: Donizetti’s last opera, Dom Sébastien, roi de Portugal, written for Paris in 1843, shortly before his fatal syphilitic illness set in. Far from there being any traces of failing powers, it strikes me as the strongest serious opera he wrote, even though it has
The second half of Harvest, Richard Bean’s new play about four generations of a Yorkshire farming family, opens with the main character, William Harrison, sitting by himself and listening to the wireless. Suddenly, we hear the opening theme music of The Archers and, without hesitating, he leans over and switches it off. Harvest is full
A publisher has just reprinted, in time for its centenary, H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story (Galore Park, £19.99), which in its day was the immensely successful ‘History of Britain for Boys and Girls, from the Romans to Queen Victoria’. I’m old enough to remember this from first time round — it went through many editions
All my working life, I have been adapting to climate change. As an apprentice in a garden near Antwerp in the summer of 1976, I spent the early mornings and evenings (we could not work in the day since the temperatures topped 40?C) trying to save the languishing, but famous, collection of rhododendrons, by watering
Much trumpeted as the first exhibition to explore together the lives of Horatio Nelson and Napoleon Bonaparte, Nelson & Napoleon at once raises the double question of was it a good idea and does it work? This crowded display is a qualified success, with an audiovisual presentation which re-enacts the Battle of Trafalgar every five
Interesting news from the world of conjuring. Magicians don’t believe in magic any more. Marc Salem, one of the new breed of sceptical illusionists, isn’t a clairvoyant or a mind-reader but a ‘professor of non-verbal communications’. And he boosts his university income by sitting in on CIA interviews to help the spooks decide when a
British Youth Opera is an institution which I have somehow not come across until now, to my loss. They, or it, are at the Peacock Theatre until 11 September, alternating Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette and Mozart’s Cos
The Canadian painter David Milne (1882–1953) is not known in this country. His name is shamefully overlooked by the Yale Dictionary of Art & Artists, and there has never before been a show of his work here. The fact that there is one now is largely due to the vision and enthusiasm of Frances Carey,
You were probably expecting me to watch Celebrity Shark Bait (ITV1, Sunday) but I didn’t because I was feeling a bit ‘been there, done that’ and, short of filming the celebrities actually being eaten, I couldn’t see how they could possibly have made it exciting. I expect there was lots and lots of build-up as
The revival of interest in what was called ‘early music’ in the 1970s and 1980s was a cultural event which went beyond a new way of making sounds. There was, for example, the dress code and the eating habits which were said to go with it. There was even a political resonance: Thatcher and Reagan
Venice must be the most painted city in the world. Keith Holmes is among the latest in the long line of artists who have made their way there since Canaletto defined our image of it. Canaletto’s Venice was the Grand Canal, San Marco and the rest of the famous sights. In the 19th century, Turner,
The Document series on Radio Four is often an absorbing pursuit of information triggered by the discovery of one document which leads to another. The sleuthing involved can be revealing about an historic event and occasionally is of some importance. But not always, it seems to me. This week’s programme, A Right Royal Affair (Monday)
Towards the end of his life, John Betjeman was asked during a television interview if he had any regrets. Ravaged by Parkinson’s disease he tremblingly replied, ‘Not enough sex.’ The effect was at once comic, touching and desperately sad — like his best poems, in fact — and his words have haunted me ever since.
Andrew Lambirth on an artist’s relationship with the Llanthony Valley in south Wales On a warm but dampish day a month ago, I set off for the wilds of south Wales to explore the Llanthony Valley in the Black Mountains. The train takes the visitor as far as Abergavenny, after which you’re somewhat reliant on
I am always thrilled by a good performance of Giselle, especially when it is informed by choreographic consistency, dramatic fluidity and historical accuracy. That is why, last Friday, I left Sadler’s Wells in a jolly good mood. Indeed, Ballet Nacional de Cuba’s Giselle benefits greatly from the insight of its artistic director Alicia Alonso, a
The Bloomberg Space on the edge of Finsbury Square is a fine ground-floor gallery with rocketing ceilings that exudes wealth and sophistication. It’s a rare and pleasantly civilised experience to walk in off the street and not only be welcomed but also handed a complimentary catalogue of the exhibition. The catalogue is a modest illustrated
I spent most of last Sunday evening yelling insults at my TV screen. ‘Berk!’ I shouted. ‘Twat!’ Then later, ‘Oily creep!’ ‘Traitor!’ ‘Tosser!’ The first person to draw my ire was Franklin D. Roosevelt. He hadn’t hitherto been that high on my list of historical hate figures — poor old dying polio bloke with his
It was an odd oversight, or possibly it was ignorance, which led Auden not to include Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina in his list of ‘anti-operas’, for it lacks to an extraordinary degree many of the chief constituents which people associate, and rightly, with opera, while even more conspicuously including, often seeming largely to consist of, elements which
There has been a great deal of media coverage of this exhibition of new paintings by Cecily Brown (born 1969) at the curiously named Modern Art Oxford. (It’s actually an Arts Council-funded public gallery.) Brown, though a Londoner, has lived in New York since 1994 and has made a substantial name for herself there and
When questioned for the 1891 census, Betsy Lanyon, an 84-year-old widow from Newlyn, decided she had better register a late change of career. She told her inquisitors that she was no longer a ‘fishwife’ — her new occupation was ‘artist’s model’. In the decades around the turn of the last century, Newlyn, a fishing port