The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
It was as if Andrew Marr and his guests on Start the Week on Monday morning were standing on the edge of a precipice with no idea how far they would fall if they strayed too near the edge. Their conversation this week, Marr told us, would not, as usual, be a live discussion but
I am not ready for the temple but neither am I ready for the market. Leave me, I pray, a little longer amongst my icy candles that light my bitter lonely rooms. When spring comes (and the seasons follow no order) you’ll find me heading all queues of worldly bravery. Just give me a few
They’ve already found a cure for the common cold. It’s called Technicolor. My first dose of it came during the Christmas holidays when I was about 12. There I was, ailing and miserable, when The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) came on the television at the end of my bed. Nothing had prepared me for
One day, in October 1930, Alexander Calder visited the great abstract painter Piet Mondrian in his apartment in Paris. The Dutch artist had turned this small space on rue du Départ, which also doubled as his studio, into a walk-in work of art. Even his gramophone, painted bright red, had become a note of pure
When George Osborne travelled to China in September, he took with him gifts of British artistic and cultural enterprise. He announced major projects on Shakespeare, Hockney and British landscape painting. It is British creative talent that appeals to China and the world. For how long will the Chancellor and his successors be able to do this?
One of the challenges of art is to know the difference between innovation and error. I wonder sometimes if the Royal Court realises such a confusion can arise. Its new production, RoosevElvis, has been hailed as a thesaurus of fascinating novelties but to me it looks like a classic case of ineptitude posing as originality.
Steve Jobs is a film about a man in whom I have little interest, but for 120 minutes I was at least quite interested, which is a result. But this doesn’t make it a great film, and in many ways it isn’t. It never quite pins Jobs down. It never quite works out what it
The main problem with being a TV critic, I’ve noticed over the years, is that you have to watch so much TV. It’s not that I’m against it in principle: I like my evening’s televisual soma as much as the next shattered wage slave with no life. But the reality is that you end up
It’s just not what you expect to hear on Radio 3 but I happened upon Music Matters on Saturday morning and after playing us a clip from the opening chorus of St Matthew Passion Tom Service pronounced, ‘Bach is a tasteless and chaotic composer.’ I felt as if my ears had been syringed. Service was
The Force of Destiny, ENO’s latest offering to its ‘stakeholders’, as its audiences are now called thanks to Cressida Pollock, the new CEO, is perhaps Verdi’s most interesting failure. It’s an opera with too much fine, even magnificent, music to be neglected, but it doesn’t add up to a satisfactory experience. Even epics, which Force
In a drab residential street in foggy, damp Minsk, four students are at work in a squat white building that was once a garage. They vocalise sequences of letters, clap their hands, throw their arms in the air, discuss their actions. Each — three girls, one boy — is elegant, light of limb, fiercely concentrated.
‘Surely,’ mused the Dutch artist M.C. Escher, ‘it is a bit absurd to draw a few lines and then claim: “This is a house.”’ He made a good point. That is what almost all artists since the days of Lascaux have done: put down some splodges of paint or a line or two and proclaimed,
There’s no better way to view Soho than from Jeffrey Bernard’s former council flat overlooking Berwick Street Market. For many, Bernard is remembered as a notorious writer and alcoholic – a close friend to many of the more famous artists, actors and personalities who inhabited ‘The Crooked Mile’. To produce this small film, we initially
If you’re anywhere near New York soon, don’t miss the exhibition of Picasso’s sculptures at the Museum of Modern Art. It has restored my love of the great magician. As a teenager I had eyes for no one else. He was the obvious god of modern art. Almost all previous art looked boring, and not
Since I decided to accept this quiet corner of the garden as my undeserved Elysium and to make the birdsong and the flowers stand for the rightness of everything, I find I have no need to show how many pieces the world is in, how better and worse it always is; where motivated reason and
The love that asks no questions, the love that pays the price… The amount of unconditional love sloshing about at the Royal Ballet for choreographers and dancers is making this autumn in Bow Street a test of loyalty. At his season press conference Royal Ballet artistic director Kevin O’Hare smilingly promised us that the 2020
What is Glyndebourne? A middle-aged Bullingdon. That’s a common view: a luxury bun fight for past-it toffs who glug champagne, wolf down salmon rolls and pass out decorously on the lawn. But the reality is that it caters to those of my class (lower-middle) who want to boost their pedigree with an eye-catching essay in
Brooklyn is a wee slip of a thing compared to the Bond film, Spectre, and cost $12 million, as opposed to $300 million, but what it lacks in length, budget, pre-title stunt sequences, theme songs, sports cars, exotic locales, babes in stages of undress, villains with master plans, Omega watches, rooftops chases, speedboats and exploding
Chords as bright and sweet as pomegranate seeds burst and spill in Turandot, a splinter of bitterness at their centre. Left incomplete at Puccini’s death in 1924, the opera is his most radical and most cruel. You can taste something of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in the instrumentation, a musky roughness that rubs against the
In this exciting new era of Spectator cruises I have been put in mind of a dream event long in the planning: to hear Allegri’s Miserere on ice, specifically on the ice of Antarctica. A number of things came together to put this on my bucket list, from the thought of dressing up like penguins
There’s been a lot of fanfare and trailers about BBC Radio’s new ‘online first’ facility. We can now get hold of programmes and listen to them before they go out on air, or download the series and listen to the whole lot in one go. Nothing so strange about that, given the powers of digital,
The first episode of Let Us Entertain You (BBC2, Wednesday) definitely couldn’t be accused of lacking a central thesis. Presenter Dominic Sandbrook began by arguing that, since its industrial heyday, Britain has changed from a country that manufactures and exports things into one that, just as successfully, manufactures and exports popular culture. He then continued
Loping through thick snow, fur matted with ice, they have lost the trace that led them long ago from a legendary tale to this blank page of survival. Their warm breath freezes at the touch of air as they huddle here with sharp, bewildered faces grown solemnly pale and howl and howl and howl.
Tuesday morning. The Chopin of golden syrup is going to perform his Breakfast Fantaisie for teaspoon and dessertspoon. Such a treat to see those thin arthritic fingers pose a moment over the tranquil creamy surface. The oats lie quiet, possibly getting cold. But on the left a deep and mellow chord lands in the centre
This time of year features my two least favourite festivals, Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night, but the build up to Remembrance Day gives it a run for its money. I don’t mind Halloween being commercial, pagan, fake, foreign and likely to increase diabetes levels, so long as it’s for children; I just don’t know when October
This was a superb, thrilling performance, chiefly thanks to James Levine and his amazing orchestra – he got a tremendous reception before the opera started, an expression of the admiration and affection of the audience; but he and we in the cinema should be spared the sight of his conducting, now a matter of limited
Over the stupefyingly long course of Egyptian history, gods have been born and they have died. Some 4,000 years ago, amid the chaos that marked the fragmentation of the original pharaonic state, an incantation was inscribed on the side of a coffin. It imagined a time when there had been nothing in existence save a
Modern Scottish Men, a new exhibition celebrating the achievements of male artists in the 20th century, opens next month in Edinburgh. Men only; no women. Bold! Only joking. That show would never happen today. How could it? Where would an exclusive, specifically male-only exhibition be tolerated these days? A women-only show, on the other hand,
Peter Mandelson, in his moment of pomp, had his portrait taken by Lord Snowdon. He is sitting on a fine modern chair. Mandy would no doubt have been aware of the ancient historic associations, through bishoprics and universities, that chairs have with power. Since it is a chair much admired by architects, Mandy also looks