The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Hadrian: Empire and Conflict The British Museum, until 26 October Sponsored by BP After last week’s Hadrian supplement in The Spectator, readers will be well-informed about this prince of emperors, so I will confine my remarks to a personal response to the exhibition. I must say immediately that it looks very impressive and that Sir
Mikhailovsky Ballet London Coliseum It is somewhat refreshing that the 2008 summer ballet season in London is not monopolised by either the Bolshoi or the Kirov/Mariinsky ballet companies as it has been for the past few years. The presence of two rarely seen formations, such as the Mikhailovsky Ballet and the National Ballet of China,
La Gioconda; Pulcinella; Iolanta Opera Holland Park On a hot fine evening in London there can’t be anywhere more delightful for an opera-lover than Opera Holland Park, which is now so comfortable, and has such high standards of performance, that to see a rarely performed work there is in all respects at least as enjoyable
The X-Files: I Want to Believe 15, Nationwide OK, straight to the point, because we are busy people, right? And when we are not busy we are pretending to be busy, right? So, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, worth your time? No. As it is, it’s 104 minutes that I won’t be getting back.
Marcus Berkmann on Travis Elborough’s nostalgia for LP records There’s a rather wonderful new book out by a man named Travis Elborough, which sounds a bit like one of those dead Dorset villages where every second house is a holiday rental. Mr Elborough’s previous book was a great thundering roar of nostalgia for the Routemaster bus,
Early mornings on Four have seen a miraculous appearance in the past fortnight with the emergence of the Evan and Nick Show. Not for years has there been a genuine double act on the Today programme; not since Brian Redhead and John Timpson in the 1980s when the Queen tuned in at ten past seven
A three-part series called Expedition Guyana was hurriedly retitled Lost Land of the Jaguar (BBC1, Wednesday) possibly in the hopes that viewers might think it was a spin-off from Top Gear, more likely because a BBC suit suddenly realised that the name ‘Guyana’ wouldn’t pull in viewers. No doubt someone else wanted to call it
OK, so I’m back. I can confirm that anyone wishing a delightful week, free of the grimey concerns of everyday life, could do an awful lot worse than spend it aboard a yacht pottering around the Ionian Sea. Blissful. Alas, it could not last. and so here we are: returned to Scotland, wet and grey
This is really rather splendid: starting next month, George Orwell’s diaries will be published on the web, one day at a time, 70 years after they were written. Harry’s Place has more. [Via, Andrew]
Michael Tanner calls it a ‘neglected near-masterpiece’. So what is ‘it’? Answer: Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, a one-act opera about a blind princess, which is now on at Opera Holland Park. I was lucky enough to see it yesterday evening, and was completely enchanted by the entire production. Michael’s review will be on the website tomorrow. Do check it
David Crow says the record industry’s attempt to clamp down on illegal downloads is belated and befuddled — but the good news is that live music is thriving again Back in the late 1990s when the music download revolution was gathering pace, sentimentalists predicted the death of music. Those who spent their youth in rented
Robert Gore-Langton talks to Ronald Harwood about musical life in Nazi Germany Nazis in the theatre liven things up no end. They provide the hilarity in The Producers, the creepiness in Cabaret. And when you can’t take any more bright copper kettles or warm woollen mittens in The Sound of Music on comes the SS,
One had confidently anticipated (‘The sex is better than ever!’ he burbled in excited undertone when I last met him a few years ago at a York University concert) that Wilfrid Mellers would make his centenary. His death this May at only 94 doesn’t sadden, however, so much as joyfully recall the wacky life force
Zorro Garrick The Tailor and Ansty Old Red Lion Is Zorro any good? Forget the show for a second, look at the marketing. The stars are English, the story is American and the music, by the Gypsy Kings, is French with a strong Spanish flavour. That’s half the Western hemisphere covered. Nice work, everyone. Things
Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging 12A, Nationwide Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging is a teen movie as may be rather obvious from the title — come on, it was hardly going to explore the terrible reality of Bosnia’s post-war traumas; get a grip — and we are all for teen movies, aren’t we? A teen
Hansel und Gretel Glyndebourne La bohème Royal Opera House The two operas I saw last week were premièred just over two years apart, Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel at Christmas 1893, Puccini’s La Bohème in February 1896. Both of them deal with deprivation and poverty and very different life-destroying forces, and ways of coping with them.
Colin Self: Art in the Nuclear Age Pallant House Gallery, Chichester until 12 October David Tress: Chasing Sublime Light Petworth House, West Sussex, until 29 July Colin Self (born 1941) is one of the unsung talents of the English art world, a maverick who made intensely original Pop art in the 1960s and then rusticated
The Proms (BBC Radio 3); Latitude Festival (BBC Radio 4); A tribute to Charles Wheeler (BBC Radio 4) It was totally over-the-top, the first-night concert of this year’s Proms season, the 114th since Henry Wood set out in 1895 to educate the musical palate of the nation. It was almost as if the programme was designed by
This is how you do not interview Hollywood actresses. Newsweek meets Gillian Anderson: I’ve got to confess. I don’t know anything about “The X-Files.” OK. Why is it such a big deal? Ohmygod. You’re not going to do this to me, are you? Tell me you’re not going to do this. Oh come on! It’s
Matthew Yglesias, libertarian? Well, sort of. (He’s right of course.)
Tiffany Jenkins talks to James Cuno about looting, exporting and owning antiquities James Cuno is a busy man. I pin him down between two projects: promoting the new Modern Art Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago, opening next year, where he is president and director, and the launch of his new book Who Owns
It’s easy to see the way opera Inszenierung is going. We are in for a spate of US-located productions, just as we emerge from 19th-century industrial locations and nondescript car parks. Hollywood, Las Vegas, the prairies, Texas oilfields and the omnipresence of TV, something we are hardly likely to forget, are where Poppea, Giulio Cesare,
WALL.E, the latest CGI animation from Pixar in collaboration with Disney, has already been hailed as a ‘modern masterpiece’ — in America, at least — but I’m not so sure. It has a cracking, enthralling, wonderfully dystopian first half, but after that it appears mostly concerned with hurtling towards one of those predictable endings that
The Royal Court’s search for new scripts has gone global. Its tireless talent scouts, assisted by the British Council, fan out across France, Spain, Russia, Nigeria, Syria and Mexico laying on seminars, workshops and ‘residencies’. They go to India, too, although quite why the Court spends energy nurturing dramatists in a country with the world’s
Art Nouveau, or Jugendstil as it was called in Germany, came rather late to Austria, where it was sometimes called Sezessionstil. Gustav Klimt was a leading light in the breakaway Austrian Secession movement founded in 1897. Only a fool would deny that he was an exceptionally gifted artist. He absorbed in turn 19th-century Realism, Symbolism
Before getting down to a discussion of Wyndham Lewis and an exhibition I’ve been looking forward to for months, I want to register a protest about this year’s recipient of the Wollaston Award at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. This prestigious prize is worth £25,000 and thus ranks with the Turner Prize as a top
IT would have been fun to be at the planning meeting for Harley Street (ITV, Thursday), the new medical drama series about a group of stunningly good-looking doctors in private practice. ‘Look, we get all the bloody bits, the emotional traumas, and the scenes where someone’s pushed down a hospital corridor on a trolley at
How far will the proposed road tax changes influence what we actually buy in the new car market? Not as much, perhaps, as the government likes to think. After all, if you want something like the admirable Fiat Panda you are never going to look at the (differently admirable) Audi A8 anyway. It’s those in
If your ears go back, like a frightened horse, at the word ‘conceptualism’ when applied to modern art, you may not be very pleased to know that this is a hot topic in landscape design at the moment. If your ears go back, like a frightened horse, at the word ‘conceptualism’ when applied to modern