Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Peter Phillips

National treasure

Chopin is a difficult composer to celebrate, at least in the festivals of larger format. Countless piano recitals don’t really fit the bill and the music which includes orchestra is not the best of him. He surely was a miniaturist — perhaps the most compelling there has ever been. Which other composer can set a mood so securely in the very first bar, and then sustain it as a single shaft of thought to the end? He is like a painter who with three strokes of the brush has told you all you need to know about what is to follow, so that what does follow already seems like a

Simon Hoggart

The price of fame

The X Factor is back on ITV, and it’s fascinating, being a paradigm of British life. The X Factor is back on ITV, and it’s fascinating, being a paradigm of British life. Persons of little or no talent are assembled to be jeered. Those who have a modicum of ability are praised as if they had just sung Wagner’s Liebestod faultlessly at Covent Garden. This audience would applaud Beachcomber’s Directory of Huntingdonshire Cabmen if whoever was reading it remembered to tear up around the letter B. Rather like in Nineteen Eighty-Four we have the two minutes of hate followed by a great wave of sentimentality, as if a knickerbocker glory

Kate Chisholm

No easy answers

An unsettling interview with Moazzam Begg, the British Muslim held prisoner in Guantanamo Bay for three years, and with his father Azmat, began with the haunting cry of the muezzin as it rang out across a cityscape, unnamed and unidentifiable, and the clashing of heavy iron gates being shut. Two sounds that perhaps sum up what’s been happening in the world since the events of September 2001. British Muslims, Father and Son (Radio 4, Monday) gave us a refreshingly frank account of Begg’s life before and after his ‘extrajudicial’ imprisonment. He was seized one night in Islamabad, where he was living with his young family, after he answered the door

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Beneath the Fringe

Lloyd Evans joins the hopeful hordes seeking fame and fortune in Edinburgh Wonderful, Edinburgh. Isn’t it magical? The artistic world has descended on Scotland’s magnificent capital for three weeks of self-expression and glorious creativity. Or so everyone wants everyone else to think. When people speak of Edinburgh they reach whoopingly for a peculiar grammatic mode, the puerile tense. Delightful, daring, courageous, uplifting, inventive, risk-taking, inspirational, sublime. Yes, maybe. But take off the kindergarten dolly-goggles and you’ll find other qualities, other adjectives, lurking. Vain, greedy, embittered, jealous, self-obsessed, megalomaniac, drunk, stoned and bankrupt. This is the true Edinburgh. The pilgrims aren’t here to participate in an exuberant outpouring of artistic excellence.

Olivia Glazebrook

Rumble in the jumble

Wayne Hemingway — de-signer, trendsetter and fashion watchdog — was interviewed by the Telegraph before his festival ‘Vintage at Goodwood’ took place over the weekend. He made two claims that inspired me, not a natural festival-goer, to dial the booking hotline: ‘There will be attendants for each toilet so that they are as clean on the last day as they were on the first,’ he said, and then, ‘You’ll probably look a bit out of place if you turn up in shorts and sandals.’ These are the kind of bold assertions that have made him an arbiter of taste. Who could resist such a challenge? Mr Hemingway, sir, a ticket

Laura Gascoigne

Artistic rumblings

Volcano: Turner to Warhol Compton Verney, until 31 October On my desk is a lump of lava, a memento of Vesuvius. It doesn’t look like much, but neither does the volcano from the cinder track that winds around to its summit. From close to, Vesuvius is a giant ash heap; it’s from across the bay that the magic works. Never does distance lend more enchantment to the view than in the case of volcanoes: when they’re exploding they’re plain dangerous, and when not they’re really rather dull. Their allure is as elusive as a rainbow’s, and it was in rainbow colours that Andy Warhol painted Vesuvius in 1985, making it

Andrew Lambirth

Drama in Ipswich

The Saatchi Gallery at Ipswich Art School 1 Upper High Street, Ipswich, until 9 January 2011, Tuesday to Sunday, 10–5 The town of Ipswich is not known for its art. It has a museum and various art galleries, but it is perhaps more celebrated as a port, as the birthplace of Cardinal Wolsey and the home of the cartoonist Carl Giles. It has some beautiful old buildings — examples of exquisite pargeting can still be seen in Butter Market in the town centre — evidence that Ipswich was in the 16th century one of the richest towns in England. Now it has one of Norman Foster’s first important buildings: the

Michael Tanner

Sabotaging Tchaikovsky

Eugene Onegin Bolshoi, Royal Opera House  La bohème Soho Theatre, until 4 September Rule 1 for the sophisticated contemporary opera-goer: complain about the poor diction of singers, especially as compared to 50 years ago, and lay most of the blame on surtitles (actually the connection between the two phenomena is unclear). Rule 2: be astonished at the naïveté of anyone who is bewildered by contradictions between what is said (sung) and what is happening. To judge from the Bolshoi Opera’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Russian directors are cottoning on to modern trends. The whole thing is set in a vast dining room, with a big table round which the

Lloyd Evans

Playing it straight

The Sun Also Rises Royal Lyceum The Cage Pleasance Borderline Racist The Canons’ Gait The Edinburgh International Festival, respectable elder brother of the drop-out Fringe, takes its art very seriously indeed and expects the audience to do the same. It gives us the exotic, the challenging, the eclectic, the mesmeric. It gives us, in a word, the Mickey Finns. Usually we get Palestinian ghost-lore or Slovakian puppet-theatre or sub-Saharan tribal epic or Lesotho revenge drama or Apache creation myth. Sometimes we get all five, in Finnish, with subtitles and video projections, and an on-stage bongo squadron to keep us from our slumbers. But this year, in a stunning reversal of

Giannandrea Poesio

Steps in time

Cinderella English National Ballet’s 60th birthday London Coliseum The post-second world war decade saw a flourishing of independent ballet companies all over Europe. Those that strove to emulate the Ballets Russes provided an alternative to the companies that aimed at nurturing home-grown talent — such as the Ballet Rambert and what became the Royal Ballet in the UK. It was in this context that English National Ballet (formerly Festival Ballet, London’s Festival Ballet and London Festival Ballet) held its first performance 60 years ago last Saturday. A significant anniversary indeed, particularly because none of the other independent European companies created around the same time has managed to survive so long.

James Delingpole

Battered but triumphant

Big River Man (part of More 4’s ‘True Stories’, Tuesday) was one of the most gripping and brilliant, infuriating and disappointing documentaries I’ve ever seen. Big River Man (part of More 4’s ‘True Stories’, Tuesday) was one of the most gripping and brilliant, infuriating and disappointing documentaries I’ve ever seen. It was gripping and brilliant because the story it told with tremendous verve, wit, imagination and style was so extraordinary. Martin Strel, 55, a hideously overweight Slovenian drunkard and gambler, addicted to red wine and horse burgers, also happens to be the world’s greatest endurance swimmer. He’d already done the Danube, the Mississippi and the Yangtse. Now he was taking

Kate Chisholm

Lights out

It’s not always a good idea to revisit poems or stories once loved as children. It’s not always a good idea to revisit poems or stories once loved as children. The magic and mystery can dissolve all too rapidly when refracted through adult eyes. Late on Saturday night, the poet Kenneth Steven did for me with his careful probing of the true story behind Wilfrid Gibson’s 1912 poem, ‘Flannan Isle’. Gibson retells in eerie, doomy verse the story of the disappearance of the three keepers of the Flannan lighthouse on the afternoon of Saturday 15 December 1900. As children listening to Schools Radio, we relished the horror of the tale

Saturday

Ben West

Space invaders | 14 August 2010

Ben West investigates the growth in unusual exhibition venues — from brothel to butcher’s shop The economic downturn has forced many of us to rethink how we operate. This is especially so in the arts, an area that has always struggled for funding, and where cuts are inevitably huge considering all the hospitals and schools we need to keep afloat — not to mention a sparkling new Olympic village to complete. Last month the government announced that it wishes to make cuts to the arts of 25 per cent over the next four years. However, in many areas, until now at least, tightened budgets have not been overly discernible: for

Andrew Lambirth

Picasso magic

Picasso: The Mediterranean Years (1945–61) Gagosian Gallery, 6–24 Britannia Street, WC1, until 28 August The Gagosian Gallery has been remodelled for this exhibition by the architect Annabelle Selldorf, who has translated the normally looming white spaces into a succession of more sympathetic but nonetheless dramatic rooms. The expectant visitor enters via a black door to be confronted by a large but standard earthenware vase that Picasso has transformed by painting it with a brief yellow bikini. Vase becomes woman, as Picasso reinvigorates the old cliché of womanly hips looking like a vase, and effortlessly renews the metaphor. The humour and playfulness that characterise his work are at once in evidence,

Lloyd Evans

Rural targets

The Great British Country Fête Bush, until 14 August The Great Game: Afghanistan, Part 1 Tricycle, until 29 August Russell Kane, a rising star of stand-up, has penned a musical satire with an inflammatory theme. His play opens in a Suffolk village where the locals have risen up against Tesco’s attempts to blight the community with a thumping new shopping hub. Excellent subject! Rabid, thoughtless expansionism by supermarkets inspires rage in every corner of the country (apart from London, which couldn’t care less). After this superb set-up, the show goes wrong immediately and stumbles off in search of easy targets, facile rustic caricatures — the randy vicar, the gay farmer’s

Michael Tanner

Rare outing

Francesca da Rimini La forza del destino Opera Holland Park, in rep until 14 August Tristan und Isolde Act II Royal Albert Hall Opera Holland Park makes a speciality of reviving Italian operas of the early 20th century, often absurdly and lazily dubbed ‘verismo’. Its latest, and possibly most courageous effort on this front, is Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini, which, far from conforming to the aesthetic brilliantly outlined in the sung Prologue to I Pagliacci, takes a subject very far removed from quotidian life, and decked out in the almost fatally pretentious language of D’Annunzio. The story is taken from Canto V of Dante’s Inferno, with the adulterers, a wholly

Giannandrea Poesio

Long voyage

Le Corsaire, Don Quixote Bolshoi Ballet, Royal Opera House For many years in the West, Le Corsaire was just a pas de deux, a dazzling bravura number historically associated with male ballet legends such as Rudolph Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Then, in the mid-Eighties, the Kirov Ballet, now Marijinsky Ballet, came along with a fast-paced, colourful and highly entertaining complete version, loosely based on the much-interpolated 19th-century original. Since then, a few more versions have cropped up here and there, including the 2007 one signed by Alexei Ratmansky and Yuri Burlaka, respectively the former and current artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet. Entertaining as it might be, Le Corsaire is

Marcus Berkmann

Missing link | 14 August 2010

I had a crafty look at my neighbour’s CD collection the other day. I was supposed to be watering his plants, and obviously I fulfilled that task with my characteristic attention to detail, miraculously failing to kill any of them in the ten days he was away. I had a crafty look at my neighbour’s CD collection the other day. I was supposed to be watering his plants, and obviously I fulfilled that task with my characteristic attention to detail, miraculously failing to kill any of them in the ten days he was away. But I was drawn to the music shelves as a wasp is to jam. He receives

Robin Holloway

Touched by Schumann

Schumann is probably the most lovable of the great German masters, simply because his music is inextricably involved in first impressions: many children learning the piano will encounter early the pretty little pieces from his Album for the Young, moving on with enhanced delight to the easier numbers in Scenes from Childhood. Then, after headier teenage intoxications, the taste recoils to discover his two greatest contributions to the world hoard — the body of solo piano works with which he began, and the body of songs that overlapped then wholly took over. The 24 piano works present a cavalcade of dancing, dreaming fantasy, peopled by lovers real or imagined, heroes

Kate Chisholm

Unsung talent

So why are we all becoming radio addicts, listening to an ever-greater variety of stations for more minutes each day? Could it be a yearning for something simpler, more direct, less tricksy than the constant visual stimuli that persist in assaulting us wherever we are, via the internet, TV, DVD and cinema? It’s the immediacy and the fact that you don’t have to wait those endless seconds while the wretched machine boots itself up, ready to perform, which make radio so much more appealing. With a soon-to-be-abandoned analogue set (though not, alas, my smart new digital boxes) all you have to do is press your preset button and be taken