Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Ursula Buchan

The importance of being red

Hooray for anthocyanin. Where would we be without it? It has long been my favourite water-soluble, vacuolar, glucosidic pigment, and I feel that this autumn has justified my preference. True, chlorophyll is more important until then, being essential for photosynthesis, so we should all be in dead trouble without it; and the carotenoids, carotene and xanthophyll, are often more obvious to us, because of the delicious golden yellow to which many native shrubs — field maple, elm suckers, and blackthorn — turn in autumn. However, even at that time of year, anthocyanin just gets my vote, because it produces the most beautiful of crimson-lake and purple tints in aging leaves.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Department of Calumny

Patrick Appel, standing in for Andrew while the Boss Man takes a break, has the audacity to nominate Terry Teachout for one of Mr Sullivan’s “Poseur Alert Nominee” awards. Yikes! What has the urbane Mr Teachout written to deserve such teasing? Why only this: “I know how it feels to see the design for the dust jacket of a book that I’ve written, but that’s different: the cover is not the book. An opera, on the other hand, truly exists only in performance, and must be created anew each time it is produced: the score is not the show. As I saw how Hildegard had transformed my libretto into a

Andrew Lambirth

Forgotten gems

A Countryman in Town: Robert Bevan and the Cumberland Market Group Southampton City Art Gallery, until 14 December The Women’s Land Army — A Portrait St Barbe Museum, New Street, Lymington, until 10 January The recent Camden Town exhibition at the Tate was a useful reminder of the originality of one of the few significant radical groups of modern British artists. It’s often said that the English aren’t joiners, but at the beginning of the 20th century when the Royal Academy dominated the London exhibiting scene, there were a number of rebel coalitions organised to provide mutual support and venues in which to show avant-garde work. The Camden Town Group

Deborah Ross

A dog’s life

Dean Spanley U, Nationwide  Dean Spanley is a family film and a sweet film and a kindly film with the most delicious cast (Peter O’Toole, Jeremy Northam, Sam Neill, Judy Parfitt) but it is also a slow film — the first hour is almost unbearably uneventful — which could do with a bit of a rocket up its backside, not that I am volunteering to do it. Hell’s bells, it’s nearly Christmas! I don’t have time for rockets and backsides! As it is, I’m waking nightly at 4 a.m. thinking, ‘Brandy butter; what’s all that about, then?’ Rockets and backsides! You do it, if it means so much to you,

Michael Tanner

Resigned despair

Riders to the Sea Coliseum Ascanio in Alba King’s Place Vaughan Williams’s short opera Riders to the Sea was to have been conducted by Richard Hickox, but in the sad event it was played as a tribute to him, and conducted by Edward Gardner. It had a kind of appropriateness, but my own abiding memory of Hickox will be his wonderful, inspired conducting of the same composer’s The Pilgrim’s Progress at Sadler’s Wells a few months ago, which was revelatory for many of us. This setting of Synge’s grim little play is austere to a degree, but not as austere as it became at ENO. I came home rather bored

Lloyd Evans

Diffident misfits

In a Dark Dark House Almeida I Found My Horn Tristan Bates Maria Friedman: Re-Arranged Trafalgar Studios What, already? Another Neil LaBute play? Here we go again then. This time his close-knit group of eloquent and stylishly tormented yuppies (he doesn’t do other types) are haunted by the aftermath of a child abuse episode. As kid brothers, Terry and Drew were interfered with by a friend of the family and now, years later, Drew has been charged with drunkenly crashing his car. He persuades Terry to appear in court as a character witness and to mention the abuse in order to soften up the judges before sentencing. The ruse works,

Peter Phillips

Russian resolve

Over the years I have met some unusual obstacles to my self-appointed task of spreading interest in unaccompanied singing around the globe. The main one is that music without instruments doesn’t have any ‘musicians’ in it and therefore cannot be taken seriously. Another is that church music which is not by Bach falls into a different, less professional category from normal concert music and therefore cannot be taken seriously. But in Moscow last week I met a new problem: all the current professors at the Conservatoire who might be involved in teaching unaccompanied singing were trained in the Soviet period, when the only acceptable music in this genre was patriotic

James Delingpole

The body politic

If I had been given a monkey for every time someone had told me knowledgeably that Boris Johnson was a comical buffoon unfit for high office, I’d be able to open a very large ape house. It annoys me not just because it’s not true but also because of what it says about the stupidity of the chattering classes and the potency of received ideas. Gordon Brown: prudent economist. Ken Livingstone: lovable, cheeky-chappy newt fancier. Islam: religion of peace. Etc. Most of the people who believed –— or even continue to believe — in these memes have votes, and this ought to worry the rest of us greatly. The idiots

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Not just a soggy old cloth cat…

You know you’re getting old when the people who made the TV programmes you liked as a kid start dying. So, farewell, Oliver Postgate, creator of Ivor the Engine and, of course, the immortal Bagpuss. I suppose those of us born in the mid-1970s (post-Clangers then) were the last for whom Postgate’s work was a central part of their childhood TV experience.I assume today’s kids would be entraced by the subtle, wry joys of Bagpuss but I’m not sure I’d want to test that thesis. From the Telegraph’s obituary: The worlds constructed by Postgate and his long-time collaborator Peter Firmin were the products of a kindlier age, informed by Postgate’s

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Poles apart

Saul Steinberg: Illuminations Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 15 February 2009 Cartoons & Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster The Wallace Collection, until 11 January 2009 Saul Steinberg (1914–99) was born in Romania and studied architecture in 1930s Milan. His first cartoons appeared in 1936 and he began to build a reputation, despite the threat of war. In 1941 he was interned briefly, then fled Italy to the Dominican Republic, while applying for American citizenship. His first cartoon for the New Yorker appeared in 1941, and by 1942 he was in the States. Registering for the draft, he worked in propaganda for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in North Africa

Simon Hoggart

Food for thought | 6 December 2008

My favourite programme last week was France on a Plate (BBC4, Sunday) in which Dr Andrew Hussey investigated the link between gastronomy and la gloire; French glory and destiny. He began with a recreation of François Mitterrand’s last meal, which climaxed with the illegal consumption of ortolans, an endangered songbird which is blinded then boiled in Armagnac. Yum! As you crunch the creature whole, its tiny head dangling from your lips, you wear a napkin over your head which keeps the flavour in, and emphasises the sacerdotal significance of the act. Just as pre-revolutionary kings ate vast banquets while the peasants starved largely to prove they could, so Mitterrand feasted

Wednesday

Henrietta Bredin

In perfect harmony

It is worth remembering that the BBC, despite its recent, excessively well-aired problems, gives us a great many stimulating, well-made programmes, on both radio and television. Rather surprisingly, given its format and the yawning, ever-present potential for dumbed-down disaster, the BBC2 Maestro series, aired in August/September this year, turned out to be all of those things. How could this be? A talent contest for ‘celebrities’, in which they were required, with no previous experience, to conduct a full symphony orchestra? It could hardly fail to trivialise a skill which takes years to acquire and which even musicians find hard to analyse or describe. What actually happened was fascinatingly revealing. Although

Angela Summerfield

Luminous landscapes

Oleg Vassiliev: Recent Works Faggionato Fine Arts, 49 Albemarle Street, London W1, until 23 January 2009 The septuagenarian Russian artist Oleg Vassiliev is exhibiting for the first time in London. Vassiliev was born in Moscow, in 1931, and studied graphic art at the Surikov Art Institute (Moscow State Art Institute), a training which provided him with both an extraordinary technical understanding of the use of pencil, and the means of a livelihood as a book illustrator in Soviet Russia. In the spring and autumn months Vassiliev was able to explore the landscape immediate to Moscow with fellow artists, as well as ideas as to what constituted art. The resultant paintings,

Mark Glazebrook

Treasure trove

Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art Islamic art is a fast growing subject of study. Too many countries are involved for it to be categorised like French or Japanese art. In New York and London Islamic art tends to be confined to a section of an institution such as the Met, the British Museum or the V&A. Similarly, in the capital of United Arab Emirates, the Louvre Abu Dhabi will show art from all eras and regions, including Islamic art, when it opens in 2012. Meanwhile in Qatar, the peninsular state further up the gulf to the west and north of UAE, a more specialised institution has just opened its doors

Tiffany Jenkins

A rich legacy

The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions Metropolitan Museum, until 1 February 2009 Philippe de Montebello retires from the position of Director at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, after 31 years of service, at the end of this year. A forum of curators has organised an exhibition of around 300 great works of art and artefacts (chosen from over 84,000) acquired under his watch, to honour his contribution. The Philippe de Montebello Years is the result. It is an exhilarating and eclectic display that crosses the centuries from ancient prehistory to the present. Spanning the globe from Europe to Asia, Africa and Latin

Marcus Berkmann

Crumblies’ gig

It all started earlier this year, when my friend Chris managed to get four tickets for the first Leonard Cohen concerts at the O2. ‘There’s one for you if you want it,’ he said. Well, obviously I wanted it, but cash was a little short at the time — in fact, not so much short as entirely absent, avoiding me as though I’d said the wrong thing. And I do have an ongoing tinnitus problem, the result of reviewing too many awful Tin Machine gigs for a certain crazed mass-market newspaper in the early 1990s. Earlier this year I went to a friend’s book launch held in a seedy West

Michael Tanner

Flights of fancy | 3 December 2008

Les Contes d’Hoffmann Royal Opera Der fliegende Holländer Barbican Astonished delight was the first reaction, of everyone, I think, at the Royal Opera’s latest revival of John Schlesinger’s production of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann: astonishment that Rolando Villazón seems not only to have overcome his vocal and possibly other crises, but to be, in all respects, in finer fettle than ever before. He acted with a nonchalant spontaneity, walking casually and unharmed backwards off tables when drunk, tireless in his surmounting of William Dudley’s copious, cluttery sets, and using every limb to express his hopeless ardours, while maintaining a glorious stream of tone which — it is no disrespect to

Selina Mills

Bad neighbours

Lakeview Terrace 15, Nationwide Summer 15, Key Cities Lakeview Terrace is one of those menacing, neighbour-from-hell type thrillers with Samuel L. Jackson playing Abel Turner, an LAPD cop who bristles with hostility from the moment Chris and Lisa, an interracial couple — he’s white, she’s black — move in next door. This is a movie that inverts Hollywood’s usual racism shtick as, here, the bitter racist is the white-hating black rather than the black-hating white, although why any black might hate a white beats the hell out of me. I’m white and quite lovely. Ask anyone. Anyway, the film opens with Chris Mattson (Patrick Wilson) and his wife, Lisa (Kerry

Lloyd Evans

Relative values

The Family Reunion Donmar Chicken Hackney Empire August: Osage County Lyttelton T.S. Eliot was in his fifties when he turned to the theatre. What’s amazing about his 1939 play, The Family Reunion, is its experimental verve and nonchalant risk-loving energies. Harry, a country squire, returns from eight years abroad to take possession of his estate. His wife has died in a mysterious cruising accident and Harry astounds his family by announcing that he shoved her overboard. Did he? Or is he in the grip of morbid fantasies? Eliot wants to marry several genres here, Gothic horror, country-house whodunnit, Greek tragedy and absurdist sketch-comedy and not all the play’s combinations are

Gerald Kaufman

New Sondheim: enjoy it while stocks last

A Sondheim premiere in New York! Besotted fans of one of the four greatest-ever Broadway composer-lyricists (the others being Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser and Cole Porter, all, regrettably, dead) were resigned never to seeing another. I feared that we were going to have to make do, perpetually, with repeated, indeed incessant, revivals of Sweeney Todd, and those anthologies, such as Side by Side by Sondheim and Putting It Together, which started out as such fun but became funerary lamentations for the lack of something novel, exciting and, most of all, unknown. Yet now, 14 years after Passion, Sondheim’s adaptation of an Italian film about an embarrassingly neurotic love affair, comes