Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Monday

Kate Maltby

This opera is simplistic and dangerous. So is banning it

My father’s house was razed In 1948 When the Israelis passed over our street I’ve never forgotten the opening lines to John Adam’s 1991 opera, The Death of Klinghoffer. Crisp, elegiac, this  ‘Chorus of Exiled Palestinians’ rises up to a moment of anguished dissonance as it spits out the word ‘Israelis’. It’s beautiful. It’s also the most egregious romanticisation of Palestinian terrorism outside the muralled bunkers of the Gaza Strip. In the Metropolitan Opera’s new production, a chorus of shrouded Palestinian women form a funeral procession as they intone their complaint, eventually parting to reveal a 5-year-old boy, cradled in the arms of his weeping, widowed mother. Marking the start of a libretto

Saturday

William Cook

First look at the new Dad’s Army

Back in the last century, when people still watched television rather than computers, I fulfilled the lifetime ambition of every comedy nerd when I finally got to meet David Croft and Jimmy Perry. Whoever said ‘don’t meet your heroes’ clearly never met any sitcom writers. I was working on a BBC series about the history of British sitcom – since eclipsed by countless cheap clip shows, but actually quite a novelty back then – and though the actors were interesting, it was the writers who really shone. Like Galton & Simpson (Hancock, Steptoe) and Clement & La Frenais (Porridge, The Likely Lads), Croft & Perry were enchanting. Clearly, there’s something

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Rembrandt at the National Gallery: the greatest show on earth

At the opening of Rembrandt: The Late Works at the National Gallery (until 18 January), I met a painter friend of mine in the final room. This was, he said, one of the most magnificent exhibitions he had seen in his entire life, which — considering he is perhaps 70 and a frequent visitor of galleries — was praise indeed (and entirely deserved). Mischievously, I mentioned that he had also been highly enthusiastic about Veronese at the National Gallery a few months ago. ‘Ah, but there is a huge difference between Veronese and Rembrandt,’ he vehemently responded. ‘When you look at a Madonna by Veronese, you see a glamorous model

Ismene Brown

Maya Plisetskaya and Rodion Shchedrin: ‘The KGB put a microphone in our marriage bed’

‘People in the West don’t understand nothing. Even the new Russian generation don’t understand anything at all. You don’t know, and it’s better you don’t.’ Maya Plisetskaya scrutinises me with her beautiful, kohl-rimmed, 88-year-old eyes, a gaze made wary in childhood, when her father was shot as an enemy of the Soviet people, her mother jailed, and her Jewish family broken by persecution. ‘Can anyone understand how if you took a single carrot from the collective farm, just one carrot, you could get ten years’ prison? Who could understand that?’ The Soviet Union’s most iconic, deathless ballerina shrugs, and slips back into the kitchen to renew the tea, the discreet

Stephen Bayley

Frieze Art Fair: where great refinement meets harrowing vulgarity

If you wanted to find a middle-aged man in a bright orange suit, matching tie and sneakers, Frieze is a good place to start looking. I found one. Or maybe he was a limited edition existing in several reproductions. Certainly, he was frequently spotted: conspiratorial of aspect, he was stooped and crouched over a mobile with body language saying ‘serious business’. I overheard: ‘Ah, Corinna. Va bene? How are prices in Zurigo?’ Long before you reach Frieze’s vast tented sites in Regent’s Park there are signs of danger. Extraordinary shoes and statement hair and rucked-up skinny trousers start appearing in a fall-out zone about half a mile away from the

Mark Mason

This new Sherlock Holmes exhibition will have Cumberbitches salivating

Have you ever experienced the joys of Jawohl, meine Herr’n? If not I strongly advise an appointment with YouTube. The song features in the 1954 film Der Mann, der Sherlock Holmes war (‘The Man who was Sherlock Holmes’), and is performed by Hans Albers and Heinz Ruhmann, mainly while soaping themselves in the bath (one each – it’s not that kind of film). Albers and Ruhmann do not, as you might expect, play Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, but rather men pretending to be Holmes and Watson in order to solve a crime. At one point they’re prosecuted for the impersonation, with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (an actor, not the real

Peter Scupham

Winter Words

Calendar pages: one scrumpled day dies in a garden spun to fools’ gold, where wind mews over twigs and bones at an outhouse door, black sky sustains the buoyancy of loss, dried sap knots branch to branch, caging a star whose variable glance is light’s tumult cut to the quick yet cold to the retina as once upon a time, remembered pain.

Deborah Ross

Fury: the men blow stuff up, then Brad Pitt takes his top off

Fury is a second world war drama that plays with us viscerally and unsparingly — I think I saw a head being blown off; I think I saw a sliced-off face, flopping about — but is still just another second world war drama. That is, Americans good, Nazis bad, and a man doesn’t become a man until he has abandoned all mercy and learned how to kill. ‘It’s Saving Private Ryan, but with tanks,’ I heard someone say as I left the screening, and although I would never steal someone else’s opinion, it is Saving Private Ryan, but with tanks, and also sliced off faces. I added that last bit

Alexandra Coghlan

Glyndebourne’s Turn of the Screw: horrors of the most innocent and creepy kind

We all know that ‘They fuck you up your mum and dad’, but nowhere is this more reliably (and violently) true than in the opera house. If you have the misfortune to be born into an operatic family you can expect to be murdered by your own mother (Médée, Lucrezia Borgia), killed by your grandmother (Jenufa), or even bumped off by a hitman hired by your father (Rigoletto). Perhaps most insidious, however, are the crimes not of violence but of absence, neglect rather than active cruelty. Productions of Verdi’s I due Foscari and Britten’s The Turn of the Screw whispered some of the darkest unspokens of parent-child relations, conjuring nightmares

Kate Chisholm

What it’s like being a scarily talented teenager

It was when she said how she loved ‘watching the computer do exactly what you wanted it to do’ that I realised how exceptional she must be. To be so young, just 19, and so at home with technology that you can control it rather than be in awe of its complexity. By the age of 11 Brittany Wenger was teaching herself computer coding, after being inspired by a course at primary school in ‘Futuristic Thinking’. She didn’t find it easy, but she found it ‘a lot of fun’, which says a lot about her. First she persisted in spite of the difficulty, and second she found amusement in that

James Walton

Hooray for Homeland – Carrie’s back blasting America’s enemies to pieces with drones

One of the more welcome and surprising things about television at the moment is that Homeland (Channel 4, Sunday) is good again. As I’m not the only person to have pointed out, the first series was great. After that, though, the show suffered badly from the diminishing returns which so often afflict a deserved American hit that’s obliged for financial reasons to just keep on going — usually by serving up increasingly minor variations on a theme. (Exhibit A: Lost; exhibit B: most of mid-period 24.) Fortunately now that Damian Lewis’s Brody is dead, Homeland no longer has to think up any more ways to make us wonder which side

Lloyd Evans

Is London’s West End Jewish enough for David Baddiel’s musical The Infidel?

David Baddiel has turned his movie, The Infidel, into a musical. The set-up is so contrived and clumsy that it has a sweetness all its own. A golden-hearted London cabbie, named Mahmoud, discovers that he was adopted at birth and that his real parents were Jewish. This strikes him as intriguing rather than alarming, and he starts to investigate Judaism with the sort of disinterested curiosity of a man taking up astronomy after inheriting a telescope and a star-chart from an eccentric uncle. Mahmoud wants an easy life so he keeps his secret from his wife, Saamiyah, and from his son, Rasheed, who plans to marry a girl named Ji-Ji

Rod Liddle

Wear a veil if you like – but don’t treat women like that

What sort of clothing do you wear when you go to the opera? I assume some of you do go to the opera, otherwise the Royal Opera House could be turned into a giant Wetherspoon’s pub. I have never been. Given a choice I would rather browse through a collection of photographs of Brooks Newmark MP’s penis, or indeed gnaw off my right leg. If I were somehow coerced into attending, then without question the costume of choice for me would be a niqab. Then I could sleep without being noticed. Or listen to something more interesting on headphones, such as a collection of Danny Alexander’s speeches or a greatest

Wednesday

Kasia Maciejowska

The best of Frieze Art Fair was free

Frieze and its ever-multiplying layers – some fantastically rich, others disappointingly dry – has expanded into a millefeuille so dense that you wonder whether organisers Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp have ever heard of museum fatigue. Today, 30 to 45 minutes is apparently the concentration cap – the point at which you can no longer bring yourself to give a shit yet keep walking past the frames. Knowing this, the majority of London’s public might feel they had been spared the ordeal of entering the tents in Regent’s Park, where half an hour will get you through almost nothing of the fair. By some freak of programming the best of the works

Pádraig Belton

Postcard from Ukraine – meet the artists in exile from the People’s Republic of Donetsk

It was Orthodox Trinity Sunday when Luba Michailova received word that separatists would soon occupy the premises of the Donetsk art centre she founded. She was in Kiev at the time, and recalls now that her first response was religious: ‘Any difficulties in life you get, it’s for your good, and for testing you.’ The following morning, at 8 o’clock, several staff were at work cleaning when 15 men in balaclavas appeared, firing Kalashnikovs into the air. Michailova tells me, ‘So when it happened, I knew it would happen, but I never thought it would be so painful.’ Donetsk now is in the hands of the masked separatists who brought

Thursday

Hermione Eyre

Mike Leigh interview: ‘A guy in the Guardian wants to sue me for defamation of Ruskin!’

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/apollomagazine/Apollo_final.mp3″ title=”Tom Marks, editor of Apollo magazine, talks to Mike Leigh”] Listen [/audioplayer]Mike Leigh is in a cheerfully bullish mood when I meet him at the Soho Hotel. ‘Have you read today’s Guardian?’ Dammit — I should have seen that coming. ‘A guy in G2 would like to sue me for defamation of Ruskin!’ He seems almost pleased. His characterisation of the great critic as silly and effete in his new film, Mr Turner, does seem a little ungenerous. Ruskin did more for Turner than anyone. ‘That’s true,’ says Leigh. ‘Working with the brilliant young actor Joshua McGuire, I started to think how Ruskin was incredibly spoiled and cosseted

William Cook

Tate Modern’s latest show feels like it’s from another planet

‘Some day we shall no longer need pictures: we shall just be happy.’ — Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, 1966 Who says Germans have no sense of humour? OK, so their writers tend to be a pretty gloomy bunch — but like loads of other German artists, from Otto Dix to Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke’s paintings are illuminated by a dry, mordant wit. It’s encapsulated in an early doodle called ‘Mona Lisa’ (1963), which hangs near the entrance to this hugely enjoyable retrospective — the first comprehensive survey of his eclectic, eccentric work. ‘Original value $1,000,000,’ reads the handwritten caption. ‘Now only 99c, including frame.’ That Polke’s pictures now sell

Peter Scupham

Monsieur Clermont

That August, in La France Profonde, the frelons were out in force, honey-gold cruisers of late summer air, their poigniards sheathed. The heat lapped at a sticky terrace table, our observation post for village fictions — Jean, his bench-saw snoring to the hornets, a girl scraping her pans out to the hens, that old man in his garden chair — le petit vieux. We smiled, as if our smiles could throw a tremulous lifeline to one who seemed to have no need of saving, a kindly ghost, a dream of summer silence, the gentle answer to our drift of questions. That last day, when Jean came for the keys —

Kate Chisholm

Can Radio 3 escape the digital squeeze?

The new controller of Radio 3 has at last been appointed. Alan Davey (not to be confused with the former bassist from Hawkwind) comes to the BBC from the Arts Council and a career in the Civil Service. This will be his first job in broadcasting, and will be no small challenge. These are tough times for Radio 3, squeezed between the commercial charms of Classic FM and the trendy allure of BBC’s 6 Music, and, worryingly, in the last quarter its audience numbers went below 1.9 million for the first time since 2010. The BBC’s home of classical music and ‘culture’ is often criticised for being too off-putting, too

James Delingpole

Fellow saddoes rejoice: BBC4 has made a comedy-drama about metal detecting

Detectorists (BBC4) is a sad git’s niche comedy that would never have been commissioned if it hadn’t been written and directed by Mackenzie Crook (who sort of counts as a Hollywood star, now, because after making his name in The Office he went on to appear in the Pirates of the Caribbean series). But I’m glad it was because I’m one of the sad gits it’s targeting: desperate blokes who spend their every spare weekend at this time of year scouring ploughed fields for non-existent treasure. We’re a fairly eclectic bunch, we detectorists. Simon Heffer is one; Rolling Stone Bill Wyman is another; so, too, is Mackenzie Crook himself, which