Martin Greenland: Arrangements of Memory Art Space Gallery, 84 St Peter’s Street, London N1, until 10 October ‘In Painting there must be something Great and Extraordinary to surprise, please and instruct, which is what we call the grand Gusto. ’Tis by this that ordinary things are made beautiful and the beautiful sublime and wonderful,’ wrote
Watercolour: only a medium but what a medium! It’s so versatile, and when painting the landscape it can respond with lightning speed to changes in the weather. Watercolour: only a medium but what a medium! It’s so versatile, and when painting the landscape it can respond with lightning speed to changes in the weather. The
Le Grand Macabre English National Opera Don Carlo Royal Opera House Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre has opened the season at ENO in a production of spectacular, amazing brilliance. Every aspect of the piece, visual, musical, dramatic, is dispatched with such panache that it seems a pity to enter any reservations at all, and for
The Soloist 12A, Nationwide The Soloist is ‘based on a true story’ and the book by LA Times columnist Steve Lopez entitled: The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music, which is exactly the sort of thing I’d race past in Waterstones. (Well, dawdle past, but while picking up
Away We Go 15, Nationwide Away We Go is a comic drama directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Revolutionary Road) and it’s sweet, I suppose, but it’s also oddly inconsequential, fake and annoying. It’s a sort of road movie, following the journey of an expectant couple who travel the US in search
Linda di Chamounix Royal Opera Così fan tutte Opera North Four years ago the Royal Opera opened its season with concert performances of Donizetti’s Dom Sébastien, which came as a near-revelation to many of us, and subsequently appeared on Opera Rara. This year it opened with the scarcely better-known Linda di Chamounix, which was no
All my adult life I have wondered how people write about music, and how their efforts are received by the public. It has always struck me as being an uncertain business, more miss than hit, and more miss than writing about other artistic endeavours. It seems to be more difficult for a writer to find
If Dr Johnson, who was born 300 years ago on Friday (at least according to the post-1752 Gregorian calendar, which overnight lost 11 days from British life), had been around today he would most probably have been a radio star, and been paid a fortune for it, unlike the pittance he earned as a writer.
Mary Wakefield talks to Angus Jackson about directing David Hare’s latest play If I’m never quite content with a glass of water in an interview again, it’s Angus Jackson’s fault. There we were in a soundproofed meeting room on Friday evening, the National Theatre a whirl around us: jazz in the foyer, gossip in the
Punk Rock Lyric Hammersmith Judgment Day Almeida In rolls another bandwagon. And who’s that on board? It’s Simon Stephens, the playwright and panic profiteer, who likes to cadge a ride from any passing controversy. His latest play is about a teenage psycho who enacts a gory shoot-out at his local school. What a strange choice.
This month sees the 25th anniversary of my first ‘Gardens’ column for The Spectator. This month sees the 25th anniversary of my first ‘Gardens’ column for The Spectator. This is an event more interesting to me than to you, dear reader; indeed, if asked, you might well have said 40, 20, or five years. It
Utmost Fidelity: The Painting Lives of Marianne and Adrian Stokes Penlee House, Penzance, 19 September– 28 November, and the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro, 19 September–21 November The first thing that needs pointing out is that the artists reviewed here were a husband-and-wife team painting around the turn of the 20th century, with no connection to
The Rake’s Progress; Il signor Bruschino Peacock Theatre Just before the opera season gets under way each year, British Youth Opera puts on a couple of operas, or this year three, with three performances each, at the newly comfortable Peacock Theatre, off Kingsway. Few people go, since BYO treats the enterprise as a jealously guarded
Busy, busy, busy! What an amazing few days it has been for pop fans. On Wednesday, the remastered Beatles albums were finally released, and everyone appears to have fallen in love with them all over again. And just as the whoops of acclaim were reaching orgasmic intensity, Oasis threw in the towel as if realising
I do wish English National Opera would remember what it’s called and, mindful of its status as the only English-language opera company we have, translate opera titles into English as well as singing them in that language. There was no reason for Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin not to be given as Love from afar,
Transfiguration Guildhall Art Gallery, until 4 October Transfiguration Guildhall Art Gallery, until 4 October Complaining the other day in these pages about the crowded nature of public exhibition spaces in London, I had momentarily forgotten the secret charms of the Guildhall Art Gallery. This museum, specialising in London subjects, receives scant attention in the press,
Fathers Inside Soho Too True to be Good Finborough Oh, great. It’s one of those. Fathers Inside is a workshop-based outreach project directed by an actor/facilitator. Those last nine words encircle my heart like the clammy fingers of death. But the play is a surprise and offers a big, warm, manly handshake. It starts quietly.
Julie & Julia 12A, Nationwide Fish Tank 15, Nationwide If you love food, as I do — I even get excited about the meal trolley on planes, and count the number of aisles before it is going to get to me — and if you love Meryl Streep, as anyone in their right mind should,
You wouldn’t necessarily have guessed this from the quality of commemorative programming on TV this week. You wouldn’t necessarily have guessed this from the quality of commemorative programming on TV this week. But just recently, we’ve marked the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of an event that used to be considered quite important and interesting.
Igor Toronyi-Lalic talks to Sir Peter Maxwell Davies as he celebrates his 75th birthday A month ago, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies shuffled on to the Royal Albert Hall stage to a wall of sweet applause after a performance of one of his works. It wasn’t always so. Rewind to the 1960s when etiquette dictated that