Arts Reviews

Adelson e Salvini Barbican First operas by composers who later became great or anyway expert in writing them tend to be at best of biographical interest, to be revived mainly for people who are interested to hear premonitions of the achievements that lay ahead. Up to a point that is the case with Bellini’s Adelson e Salvini, which he wrote in his early twenties, and which at the time was a big local success, being performed every Sunday for a year. Performances since bel canto operas came back into fashion have been extremely rare, and the company Opera Rara’s name has never been more appropriate than when it gave a

‘Dancer sees red at critic’s ginger jibes’ was the Times headline on Tuesday. You can call the Royal Ballet dancer Ed Watson many things, apparently, including awkward, freakishly flexible, melodramatic, but just don’t call him ginger. Watson, who has brightened Covent Garden for 20 years in psychologically contorted acting roles and double-jointed dancing ones, is a favourite performer for many critics in many aspects (including me, quite often), but not at all to Alastair Macaulay, a distinguished figure who sharpened his teeth on the Financial Times before moving to the New York Times. Macaulay professes little time for Watson’s ‘problematic, weak’ dancing (‘He’s simply lovely when not dancing,’ he told

With its loud guitar riffs and even louder fashion, heavy metal has always been ripe for ridicule. In its mid-1980s heyday, it was epitomised by the fictional rock group Spinal Tap prancing on stage next to an 18-inch polystyrene model of Stonehenge while clad in ball-crushingly tight trousers and floor-length capes. In some parts of the world, however, metal is no laughing matter. In the Middle East, for instance, the potential punishment for wearing all black while wielding an electric guitar is death. These days, against a backdrop of authoritarian suppression in countries such as Iran and China, heavy metal’s trademark theatrics and widdly guitar solos have become less an