Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Beating around the Bush

W 15, Nationwide W, which should be pronounced ‘dubya’, the Texan way, as in George ‘Dubya’ Bush — but never as in, for example, Dubya. H. Smith — is Oliver Stone’s dramatised portrait of the 43rd American President and it’s pretty much neither here nor there; neither sympathetic enough to be one thing nor, alas, deadly enough to be the other. I don’t know what held Stone back, why he beats around the Bush, why he didn’t just grab an iron bar and thrash the living daylights out of whatever is in there. What is in there? If there is something, this film doesn’t tell us, and if there isn’t,

Giannandrea Poesio

Taste for the unusual

Overture 2012: Power and Passion Royal Albert Hall Julie Gilbert/Jean-Baptiste André The Place Triple Bill Royal Opera House I have to confess that the idea of 120 children and teenagers dancing to Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony did not sound particularly appealing. I have nothing against children, but their performances bore me to death. The problem is also that when it comes to children one can never say what he/she really thinks; last time I did so, I had to hide from irate parents and relatives calling me an ogre and wanting me burnt at the stake. Still, the fact that Royston Maldoom’s Overture 2012: Power and Passion had been included in

Simon Hoggart

Extreme measures

I watched Russell Brand’s Ponderland (Channel 4, Thursday) if only so that you don’t have to. It’s rather lazy, like the unpleasant message he and Jonathan Ross left on Andrew Sachs’s answerphone and then broadcast on Radio Two. You’d think that if they were going to be offensive to a well-loved old thespian gent they would have laced it with wit — some tonic and lemon to go with the gall. In a gruesome way, what made it even more awful was the fact that Brand really did sleep with Sachs’s granddaughter. In the old days, a gentleman never bandied a woman’s name about. Now you can boast to her

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Intimate moments

From Sickert to Gertler: Modern British Art from Boxted House Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, Suffolk, until 13 December Private collections of art are fascinating, both for the light they shed on the tastes and preoccupations of their owners, and for the otherwise often hidden network of associations they can reveal. Paintings and sculptures made on a domestic scale exert a subtly different appeal than the products of public or museum art. The intimacy of the home setting often awakens a resonance in the art which the de-personalised aura of a gallery can stifle or deny. However, few collections, apart from the grandest, are maintained in the houses for which they were

Lloyd Evans

Voices of reason

To Be Straight With You Lyttelton American Briefs Above the Stag, 15 Bressenden Place, SW1 It’s been said that the Catholic Church has always known how to deal with extremists. It also knows — or used to know — how to deal with homosexuals. Monasteries populated by ‘celibate’ bachelors, nunneries teeming with wimpled lesbians, these were the discreetly sanctioned gay playgrounds which gave the Church licence to exploit a talent pool it would have lost had it rigorously pursued the technical prohibition against homosexuality. In fact, the Old Testament God isn’t a particularly virulent homophobe. Cattle-rustlers and liars are mentioned in the Ten Commandments. Gays aren’t. And you have to

Michael Tanner

A fine romance

I Capuleti e i Montecchi Of Thee I Sing Opera North, Leeds Slightly perversely, Opera North has been running a series of ‘Shakespeare operas’ ending with Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi, which means that the programme book consists largely of articles explaining that the story doesn’t derive from Shakespeare at all. So what? I am inclined to ask, but themed series are ‘in’, though why anyone seeing Falstaff a year ago might feel more like going to Bellini’s great work I don’t see. The main thing is that Capuleti has indeed been done, and very finely. Musically it is virtually flawless and, if scenically it is wayward, the action

Peter Phillips

Breaking the mould

The election of Professor Sir Curtis Price as the next Warden of New College, Oxford, is remarkable in two respects: he is (or was) American and he is a musician. The American side of it is just one of those things. Sir Curtis has lived and worked in the UK since 1981 and has been Principal of the Royal Academy of Music since 1995. His period of tenure there is hailed as having been one of sustained growth which, believe me, is no mean achievement. One notices that the same thing is not being said about the Royal College over the same 13 years. Evidently a signing of the necessary

Kate Chisholm

What is freedom?

Let’s focus for a change on what the BBC does best. Take, for instance, a short half-hour programme on Radio Four, buried in the schedules, mid-evening on a Monday, in which the German historian Rainer Schulz took us behind a bit of actualité to expose an otherwise unheard, unseen aspect. In Belsen after Belsen (produced by Mark Burman) we heard the story of the thousands of Jews who lived in the camp after its liberation from the Germans on 15 April 1945. All the former captives wanted was to start getting on with their lives again. But where could they go? So many died on liberation, as if they had

Saturday

Toby Jones

Playing a public enemy

Toby Jones, Karl Rove in the film W, explains his character’s relationship with President Bush Condoleezza Rice’s teeth lie discarded beside her bottle of water. Colin Powell’s wig needs adjustment. Across the table, Scott Glenn removes Donald Rumsfeld’s steel-rimmed spectacles and continues his description of the seven months he spent in the Philippines shooting Apocalypse Now. Behind him a video monitor tees up background footage for the next take: weapons inspectors trudging through the desert, zooming backwards and forwards until they are paused flickering at a trench. We are shooting the longest scene in Oliver Stone’s film, W (released in the UK on 7 November), perhaps the longest scene I

Marcus Berkmann

Timely resprouting

No one quite believes it, but the new Guns N’ Roses album is finally coming out. Axl Rose has been working on it for 17 years, demonstrating, as rarely before, the fine line between perfectionism and padded cell. It is a reminder, though, that in these busy times quite a few acts have gone missing in action. The stories about Gerry Rafferty, who checked into a London hospital in August for tests on his liver, did a runner, and was spotted several weeks later buying whisky in Harrods, reminded those few of us who used to buy all his records that he hasn’t exactly been at his most productive recently.

Deborah Ross

Cold comfort

Quantum of Solace 12A, Nationwide Quantum of Solace is the latest James Bond movie, which I thought I would make clear from the start. These films arrive with such little pre-publicity and hoo-ha they can often slip by quite unnoticed. (As one regular cinema goer told me, ‘I’d have at least liked the chance to win his watch.’ And as another said, ‘I’d like to dress like him, so why doesn’t anyone ever write about the clothes?’) Anyway, what’s it like? Well, although it’s not the most crushing disappointment of all time — finding you have won the lottery but lost the ticket is probably more crushing, I imagine —

James Delingpole

Dickens delivers

About 25 years ago, during a particularly bad acid trip, I had my soul stolen by Mister Migarette, an evil glowing man with a huge hat, like the mad hatter’s, who lived in the ash on the end of my cigarette. It put me off smoking for a while and I considered giving up. But then I realised, ‘If you’re not careful, you’re going to do a Syd Barrett. Only by keeping your routines as close as possible to pre-bad-trip normality can you ever hope to arrest your slide down the slippery slope to madness.’ And see! It worked totally! But that wasn’t the point of the anecdote. I mention

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Portrait of the artists

Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian National Gallery until 18 January 2009 When people think of the Renaissance, it’s to Italy that their thoughts immediately turn. The names of Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo and Michelangelo spring to mind, although the Renaissance in northern Europe was of equal importance, as a glance at Dürer, van Eyck or Holbein will at once confirm. Yet it remains the case that the Renaissance and the Mediterranean are somehow connected in the popular understanding, perhaps because Italy produced so many great masters in this period, and so comparatively few thereafter. So it’s rather good to have a new exhibition which offers a corrective to this partial

Matthew Dennison

Distinctive vision

Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision Manchester Art Gallery, until 11 January 2009 Needlepoint nose-dived during the 19th century. This came about, like so many errors of taste, through a process of democratisation. The ladylike pursuit of the leisured classes penetrated the parlours of the many. In place of hand-drawn designs devised by the stitcher, mass-produced penny pattern sheets overflowed the haberdasher’s stall. Berlin woolwork planted its beefy cabbage roses across a nation’s bell pulls and tea cosies. Facilitated by new synthetic dyes, it did so in a dazzlingly gaudy palette. In his vigorous love of colour and determined Pre-Raphaelite focus on every leaf and bud of nature, William Holman

Michael Tanner

Rossini rarity

Matilde di Shabran Royal Opera House Aida English National Opera Iolanta Royal Festival Hall Matilde di Shabran is one of Rossini’s least performed operas, and having seen the Royal Opera’s production, which derives from the Pesaro festival of 2004, I understand why. Broadly speaking, it is a comedy without jokes or other humour, and in well over three hours of music there is not a single memorable tune, quite a feat for this composer. It was written in a great hurry, of course, and for its second production Rossini provided music that had for the first been written by a kind friend but undistinguished composer, Pacini. The plot concerns the

Saturday

Martin Gayford

Worshipping a golden calf

Martin Gayford considers whether we are in the final, pre-popping stages of an art bubble Journalists arriving for the press view of Renaissance Faces at the National Gallery last week were greeted by placards. Why, the slogans asked — you might think reasonably enough — could that institution not pay its staff a little more, given that it was contemplating paying £50 million each for a couple of Titians? They raised a point that troubles many people, including quite a few in the art world. In the early 21st century, the sums paid for works of art have climbed from the amazing, to the preposterous and finally reached the surreal.

Tom Sutcliffe

Wexford winner

The Irish government has spent €27 million on a stunning new opera house in Wexford, which is having a flawless and crisis-free baptism in the current opera festival there. The old Theatre Royal was knocked down in November 2005, and the money the festival managed to raise was just €6 million of the €33 million total building cost. But the architects Ciaran McGahon, from the Irish Office of Public Works, and the British theatre specialist Keith Williams have squeezed an almost 800-seat house on to the old site — expanded by the addition of the neighbouring area formerly occupied by the Wexford People newspaper printworks. So the theatre is still

Giannandrea Poesio

Context unbecoming

Mariinsky Ballet Sadler’s Wells Tiago Guedes: Various Materials The Place: Robin Howard Dance Theatre I know I am not alone in thinking that an all-Forsythe programme was not an ideal choice for the Mariinsky Ballet’s opening night in London. As the man who dared successfully to manipulate ballet’s centuries’ old principles, William Forsythe is regarded by many as the initiator of a long-awaited and much-needed artistic revolution. It is no surprise, therefore, that a few years back he was invited to stage his most controversial creations for the Kirov Ballet — which is how the Mariinsky Ballet was formerly known — as part of a modernisation campaign aimed at shedding

Robin Holloway

Chamber charm

Further thoughts on the ever renewed quest for the perfect acoustic for performance and audition of music. Over the past five months I’ve heard one of my string quartets given five of its six première performances in exceedingly diverse and discrepant venues, so much so as (sometimes) to make almost a different piece of it.   The official première was in the equivalent of London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, in the newish concert-complex in Madrid. András Schiff, playing simultaneously in the large hall, was a dangerous rival; nevertheless the smaller was substantially filled for the chamber event, one in a two-year-long series celebrating next year’s bicentenary of Haydn’s death with his

Deborah Ross

Too much of a good thing

Ghost Town 12A, Nationwide Ghost Town stars Ricky Gervais in his first leading Hollywood role, and how much you like this film will probably depend on how much you like Gervais — what? You expected him to turn in a Daniel Day-Lewis-type performance? — and how much Gervais you can take at one sitting; the two not being the same at all. I like Gervais but now realise there is only so much I can take at the one sitting. Bubbles likes Gervais but says there is only so much he can take at the one sitting. Meanwhile, Bubbles’s fiancée, Goldie, says, ‘I haven’t been exposed to a lot of