The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The Bolshoi Opera’s production of Boris Godunov, which they brought to Covent Garden last week, is in almost all respects in a time warp, though it turned out to be a most agreeable one. For the first time in many years, we were able to hear Rimsky-Korsakov’s version of the opera, which has been so
I’m such a dunderhead. Everyone told me that Miami Vice would be rubbish, and I kept replying, ‘No, no it won’t; you see, it’s directed by Michael Mann and he’s brilliant. He made Manhunter, Heat, The Insider and Collateral…it’s going to be great.’ People said, ‘But it’ll be naff and embarrassing, with spivvy hairdos and
It must be a nightmare when you spend weeks making a current-affairs programme only to find that days before it’s broadcast the subject you’ve been exploring is turned upside-down. That’s what happened to Radio Four’s Inside Money, the sister programme to the excellent Money Box, almost a fortnight ago (Saturday, repeated Monday last week). The
Satire is one of the great British traditions, closely associated with the notions of personal liberty, readiness to express opinion and our much-vaunted freedom of thought. The English appetite for satire has long set standards of democratic licence unequalled in the rest of the world: the lampoon is sacrosanct in our culture, a guarantee of
In an interview with David Frost only three years ago, Trevor Nunn said that the highlight of his career was doing Nicholas Nickleby for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych in 1980. Now, 26 years later, Chichester Festival Theatre has revived the play, with Jonathan Church and Philip Franks directing. The original staging ran
Summer Festival Time: when the music-loving British populace flocks or straggles to concerts in a variety of unsuitable venues, all the way from mighty monuments like (dare one say) St Paul’s or the Albert Hall to Little Bethel and the Quaker Meeting House, the Old Forge, the Stately Home, ex-quaysides and industrial structures, parks, squares,
Within the expanding aquatic metropolis that is Istanbul, two late-20th-century bridges straddle the continents of Europe and Asia. These traffic-laden steel bridges, spanning high above the ferries and other boats which ply the busy waters of the Bosphorus below, are visibly useful links between two civilisations. They are also symbols, perhaps, of the noble dream
Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) is one of the great figures of Modernism, a pioneer of abstraction, whose works are known in this country mostly from reproduction. The Tate has now gathered some 60 key paintings from important international collections (a significant portion come from Kandinsky’s native Russia) and put together a superb exhibition which it’s difficult
The enlarged, updated and now undivided Sainsbury Centre has reopened with the most comprehensive selection of Polynesian art ever assembled; and yet, shamefully, it has received not a single review. It would be a waste of space to wonder why, better to state that the stunning Pacific Encounters, curated by Dr Steven Hooper of the
PUSH! is the first opera about childbirth, so Tête à Tête claims, and I’m sure rightly. Opera usually likes to concentrate on the other end of life, audiences much preferring to see people leaving than arriving. It would be absurd to make very large claims for PUSH!, and I’m sure Tête à Tête wouldn’t want
On a perfect summer’s day by the Avon it was the turn of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater to take the stage at the Swan It was really rather a surprise to stumble across Shakespeare in his native tongue after the revelatory pleasures (I do not jest) of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a cornucopia of
Hard on the heels of the National Gallery’s show Rebels and Martyrs, about the changing perception of the artist, comes this exhibition of Modigliani’s paintings. The title makes a shameless and immediate reference to the myth of the decadent bohemian surrounded by lovers. This may serve to attract the punters, but it doesn’t help us
I sat behind the bicycle shed of Winchester’s Historic Resources Centre, holding a fragment from what was probably the coffin of the greatest of all our monarchs, the king who founded our nation and gave it a moral purpose and direction: Alfred, surnamed by posterity the Great. Labled ‘HA99 22041’, the fragment was visually unimpressive:
The highlights of Brecht’s Life of Galileo are packed into the opening hour. As the astronomer glimpses new worlds through his telescope, we get a palpable sense of his wonder and astonishment. The effect of these revelations on the mediaeval mind comes through in simple, thundering utterances. ‘The moon has no light of its own.’
Wailing and gnashing of teeth appear not to have greeted the news that Top of the Pops is to end after 42 glorious years. Indeed, as far as I can see, no one gives a monkey’s. I have to admit, I am disappointed. Of all those newspaper columnists with nothing to write about, you would
On Monday 15 October 1906, Paul Cézanne was painting on the hillside above his Les Lauves studio on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence when he was caught in a violent rainstorm. Having sacked his coachman the week before in a row over money, the 67-year-old painter was on foot, and by the time he was picked
An examination of the artist’s image is an excellent idea for an exhibition, and it has been thoroughly and effectively realised in this new show of some 70 exhibits at the National. Brainchild of Alexander Sturgis, who has written much of the useful catalogue (£25 in paperback), it explores the ways in which personality and
Amidst the interminable tundra of centennial Shostakovich the very thought of an ‘Igor Fest’ is refreshing. And Birmingham’s four-year plan to play every note by the 20th century’s representative composer got off to a marvellous start last month with the CBSO under Sakari Oramo. A major positive about Stravinsky is just what his detractors used
It’s rare that both of Ravel’s operas appear in one programme, indeed that they appear at all. The RCM, as one might expect, did the fullest justice to both of them, and made clear how immeasurably superior the second, L’enfant et les sortilèges, is to the first, L’heure espagnole. L’heure is entirely a comedy of
Back at church after a few weeks’ absence, I found the vicar in a terrible state. ‘Oh my dear chap, we’ve all been thinking of you. Is it true?’ he said. ‘What?’ I said. ‘What you said in The Spectator about getting divorced,’ he said. ‘You must never take the nonsense I write seriously,’ I
What really goes on between world leaders at summits? Sir Christopher Meyer, former press secretary to John Major and later ambassador to Washington, told us in How to Succeed at Summits (Sundays, repeated Wednesdays), an entertaining two-part series on Radio Four. Meyer told us that, for example, when President Bush made a jokey reference to
The gallery walls of the Level Two temporary exhibition space at Tate Britain are currently aflame with colour. The gallery is playing host to the first exhibition ever to span the entire career of Sir Howard Hodgkin (born in 1932), though there have been plenty of other shows of his work over the years. (Notable
This is the way addiction works. A nice man offers you a generous taste at a ridiculously low price; you love it, you go back for more but now the price has risen. But still you go on paying because you like it so much. Soon you find you’re not just liking it, but needing
The Royal Opera has revived David McVicar’s production of Le Nozze di Figaro after only five months, but already with a ‘revival director’, Stéphane Marlot, who has modified a fair number of details, but not, unfortunately, the over-busyness of some of it, including the Overture, during which we see huge numbers of servants bustling and
Titus Andronicus is the Shakespeare shocker of the moment. At the Globe in London the groundlings have made Page Three news by fainting away in droves as limbs are lopped and tongues excised in Lucy Bailey’s staging (which I regret I haven’t seen). In the Daily Telegraph Charles Spencer rates it the hottest, goriest ticket
Coup! (BBC2, Friday) was quite a brave programme. It was the story of the failed mercenary coup in Equatorial Guinea, a tiny but oil-sodden tyranny on the west coast of Africa. This was led by an adventurer called Simon Mann (I have often said it is a great mistake to trust anyone called Simon, unless,
The Summer Exhibition is like a leviathan, a monster from the deep, that every now and again shows itself to general outcry and occasional consternation. Unfortunately, however, it’s not actually the stuff of myth and legend, but all too often of rather dismal reality. This, the 238th Summer Show, is co-ordinated by the architect Peter
Ken Loach won the Palme d’Or in Cannes last month with The Wind that Shakes the Barley and has since been the object of several abusive articles in the British press. He will be unsurprised (and probably untroubled) — his films usually cause a rumpus. This one is set in Ireland in the 1920s, and
John Constable (1776–1837) is the quintessential painter of rural England. If we carry in our hearts an image of unspoilt countryside it will, more often than not, bear the lineaments of what has become known as Constable Country, that stretch of land along the river Stour in Suffolk that includes Dedham and Flatford, and the