Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Michael Tanner

Scottish highs and lows

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny Usher Hall Ysaye Quartet Queen’s Hall The Two Widows Edinburgh Festival Theatre The Edinburgh International Festival got off to a soggy start this year. The Usher Hall, where as always the opening concert took place, is heavily shrouded, while Stage Two of a renovation process which will make it even more of a ‘centre of Creativity and Inspiration’ (isn’t it time those two had a rest?) is completed, but once you find the temporary entrance the interior is reassuringly familiar, and we began with a large-scale piece for big forces, Brecht–Weill’s most ambitious collaboration, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.

Roderick Conway-Morris

Lost and found

Josef Maria Auchentaller (1865-1945): A Secessionist on the Borders of the Empire Palazzo Attems-Petzenstein, Gorizia, Italy, until 30 September The story that unfolds in this fascinating exhibition is a strange and poignant one. The Viennese-born Auchentaller was a contributor to the Munich Secession of 1892 and a key player in the Vienna Secession of 1897, two of the most important fin-de-siècle revolts against the conservatism of the artistic establishment. Along with Klimt, he was one of the editors of Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring), the official voice of the Vienna Secession, and in 1901 an entire issue was devoted to Auchentaller’s work in various media. His life was long and artistically

Peter Phillips

Late-night line-up

Lecturing on a course in Seattle has taken me away from London in recent days, and therefore from the excitement of Roger Wright’s first Prom season. As Wright himself said in a preliminary interview, if the season goes well he will claim it as his first; if it goes badly he can reasonably say that this is Nick Kenyon’s last, since Kenyon planned much of it. I suspect Wright is now counting his tenure from this season. There has been a change of style. Experiments both with the repertoire and with the staging have been apparent, which meant taking risks not least with audience numbers. This may not have been

Simon Hoggart

The fast and the furious

It’s three in the morning and a BBC executive is home in bed. Suddenly he wakes up, sweating. ‘What is it, darling?’ asks his solicitous wife. ‘I had a nightmare,’ he replies; ‘I dreamed that one of our viewers was bored. Bored! Just for a moment, but, my God…’ It’s the only explanation for some of the Corporation’s programming. It seems to believe that we can’t cope with anything more than five seconds long. If it doesn’t provide us with new excitements in a constant, hectic flow, then we will — the ultimate horror — switch to another channel. Take The One Show, which goes out on BBC1 at 7

Ursula Buchan

Holiday reading

I have always been reticent about recommending gardening books for anyone short of something to read on holiday. After all, gardening books are often heavy and unwieldy, their appearance is not improved by contact with sand or sangria, and they make you terribly homesick for your own garden. But, since reading Keith Simpson’s suggested summer holiday reading list for Tory MPs (and by implication the rest of us who are interested in politics), I feel less timid. After all, anyone who has managed to get through Terror and Consent — The Wars for the Twenty-First Century or A Stranger in Europe: Britain and the EU from Thatcher to Blair will,

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The Streets of Baltimore

If you like The Wire you should definitely read this piece in the Washington Monthly. And if you don’t like The Wire that must be because you haven’t seen it yet. If that’s the case, you have a treat in store: 60 odd hours of the best television series ever made. I mean this sort of thing is horrific. Yet also horrifically compelling: What would become the fifth and final murder charge in the case of Willie Mitchell and his cohorts took place two months later. This time, only Mitchell’s friend Shawn Gardner was directly involved. It began with a man named Darius Spence, who had found out that his

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Edinburgh’s cultural jamboree

Lloyd Evans on the esotericism of the Festival and the ragamuffin risk-taking of the Fringe Here we go again. Like some vast, hairy, attention-seeking arachnid, the Edinburgh Festival has settled its gross and gorgeous shape in the shadow of Arthur’s Seat. Ever since its inception in 1947 the Festival has grown steadily and spawned a rowdy litter of symbiotic events. Comedy, literature, classical music, film, ballet, modern dance, jazz and blues and even ‘spirituality and peace’. All are represented. But the Festival’s heart, its alpha and omega, is the theatre. Whenever I flip through the International Festival brochure I’m staggered and slightly alarmed by its strenuously esoteric contents. Daring. That’s

Alex Massie

Opening Proceedings

James Hamilton is quite right to suggest that there’s no way London can compete with Beijing’s spectacular and often beautiful (if also, as he says, “frenziedly gauche”) opening ceremony. And he’s correct to argue that we shouldn’t try to. In any case, opening ceremonies tend towards the vulgar. When they are not bafflingly abstract they’re unnecessarily, if revealingly, boastful. Hey, look at us! Hosting the games should be enough in and of itself, without any need for this rather naff sort of preening. Now admittedly an absence of preening is itself a form of preening. But there you have it. My suggestion for the London 2012 games would be for

Michael Tanner

Monteverdi marathon

L’Incoronazione di Poppea The Proms Glyndebourne’s visits to the Proms are usually highly successful, which can seem odd considering that the home auditorium is so comparatively intimate, not to mention comfortable and air-conditioned, with fantastically good acoustics; while the Albert Hall is celebrated for its large-scale lack of any of those qualities. And Monteverdi’s last opera L’Incoronazione di Poppea, though it is about imperial power and every kind of domination, is for most of its length a work that takes place in what one imagines to be small rooms, or at least settings where intensely private carryings-on of one or another kind are conducted. Poppea turned out to be no

Kate Chisholm

Special traits

It’s a topsy-turvy world at the moment, with New Labour tearing each other apart like Old Tories, and brothers Will and Ed transmogrifying into each other on The Archers. Even Radios Two and Four have been caught up in this changing-character business, with programmes you’d normally expect to find on Four’s schedule popping up on Radio Two, and vice versa. On Saturday morning I thought I must have pushed the wrong button by mistake when I heard Leonard Cohen girning away at ‘So long, Marianne’ on what I thought was Radio Four but then began to think must be 88 to 91 degrees FM. But no, as I continued to

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Andy Warhol was born 80 years ago today

It’s 80 years since the birth of Andy Warhol – an occasion which I feel shouldn’t go unmarked.  To be honest, though, my reaction to his work oscillates wildly.  Sometimes it seems warm and inclusive, and I enjoy it.  At others, it’s too arch and mechanstic, and I don’t.  But I guess that’s Warhol’s allure.  His very indeterminateness is an artform in itself. P.S. What better occasion to dust off this article from the Spectator archives?  It’s the incomparable Taki, with his personal recollections of Warhol’s Studio 54 scene. P.P.S. One recommendation: Warhol’s 1966 film Chelsea Girls.  It’s quite hard to get hold of, on DVD or otherwise.  But well worth

Andrew Lambirth

Master of interior space

Vilhelm Hammershoi: the Poetry of Silence Royal Academy, until 7 September The poet Rilke cautioned that ‘Hammershoi is not one of those about whom one must speak quickly. His work is long and slow…’ It is certainly muted, being composed mostly in shades of oatmeal and grey. Interiors and the fall of light were favourite subjects, together with buildings and the occasional landscape. He also had a taste for painting portraits of the back of the head, a theme developed by the surrealists (think of Magritte’s portrait of Edward James) and still popular with some artists today. Hammershoi frequently used his wife as model (rather like Hopper, whose work his

Giannandrea Poesio

Chinese wonders

National Ballet of China: Swan Lake Royal Opera House My first article for The Spectator was a slightly long-winded analysis of the state of Swan Lake on the eve of the ballet’s centenary. It followed a far more pedantic four-part essay in the specialist magazine Dancing Times, of which the late Frank Johnson, my first editor, was an avid reader. Although those writings were a passport to what has so far been a pleasant journalistic stint in the UK, they were also a curse in disguise. Since their publication, a few friends and readers have (wrongly) considered me to be the ultimate authority on the wretched 1895 ballet, and every

Lloyd Evans

Taking liberties

Her Naked Skin Olivier Elaine Stritch At Liberty Shaw In 2004 Rebecca Lenkiewicz got the black spot from the Critics’ Circle. Sorry, I mean she was voted ‘most promising playwright’. Less a gong, more a millstone. Praising writers for what they’ve done is fine. Praising them for what they may do in future is like congratulating a pregnant woman on her foetus’s A-levels results. Lenkiewicz’s latest work about the suffragette movement arrives with fresh honours. The programme grandly announces that Her Naked Skin is ‘the first play by a living woman writer on the Olivier stage’. How aristocratic. It demands respect on account of its status at birth. The setting

Deborah Ross

Worshipping perfection

Elegy 15, London and Key Cities Elegy is about an ageing professor (Ben Kingsley) and a beautiful young woman (Penelope Cruz), and it is based on the Philip Roth novel The Dying Animal, which, in turn, takes its title from Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, in which the poet describes his soul as ‘sick with desire/and fastened to a dying animal’. Elegy. Ageing. Roth. Dying. Sick. And yet this movie is such fun! Hats off to the director, Isabel Coixet, for infusing it with candy colours and setting it to a kitsch yet funky Seventies pop soundtrack. OK, only teasing. This is gloomy. In fact, I cannot remember the last time

Charles Spencer

Tortured genius

Mrs Spencer and I are just back from a few days in Tuscany where I was bullied into as punishing a round of culture-vulturing as I have ever endured. The temperature may have been just a degree or two short of 100°F in Florence, but a small matter like heat exhaustion wasn’t going to stop the missus in her tracks. Give her a guidebook, and she becomes a woman obsessed. We were up at dawn to queue for the Uffizi, outside the doors of the Medici chapel before they opened at 8.15 a.m. And in fact, though I grumbled, I must admit I enjoyed it almost as much as she

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Corruption, celebrity and confidence

Lloyd Evans talks to Matthew Bourne about his new ballet Dorian Gray and co-directing Oliver! Matthew Bourne is a whirlwind. He’s a dynamo, a powerhouse, a force of nature. He has created the busiest ballet company on earth and turned Britain into the world’s leading exporter of dance theatre. His breakthrough came in 1995 with an all-male production of Swan Lake which won awards in London, New York and Los Angeles. Since then he has updated the Nutcracker, re-imagined Carmen as The Car Man, and created a dance version of Edward Scissorhands, which has toured more or less constantly since opening in 2006. But in person the whirlwind is remarkably

Andrew Lambirth

Emperor’s vision

Hadrian: Empire and Conflict The British Museum, until 26 October Sponsored by BP After last week’s Hadrian supplement in The Spectator, readers will be well-informed about this prince of emperors, so I will confine my remarks to a personal response to the exhibition. I must say immediately that it looks very impressive and that Sir Robert Smirke’s round Reading Room is the perfect setting for a display that also focuses on the architecture of the Pantheon. (Smirke based his dome directly on that great classical exemplar.) But this is not another Terracotta Army blockbuster: it is, in effect, an exhibition of busts and architectural models. If you’re interested in the

Giannandrea Poesio

Spectacularly disappointing

Mikhailovsky Ballet London Coliseum It is somewhat refreshing that the 2008 summer ballet season in London is not monopolised by either the Bolshoi or the Kirov/Mariinsky ballet companies as it has been for the past few years. The presence of two rarely seen formations, such as the Mikhailovsky Ballet and the National Ballet of China, has caused a nice stir in the sleepy world of ballet, and flocks of international balletomanes have converged on London. I am not sure that opening the former’s season with a new production of Spartacus was a good idea, though. Spartacus is to Russian ballet what Aida is to 19th-century Italian opera: brassy, spectacular, colossal,

Michael Tanner

Three in the park

La Gioconda; Pulcinella; Iolanta Opera Holland Park On a hot fine evening in London there can’t be anywhere more delightful for an opera-lover than Opera Holland Park, which is now so comfortable, and has such high standards of performance, that to see a rarely performed work there is in all respects at least as enjoyable as it would be anywhere. The admirable policy of mixing conventional fare with rather out-of-the-way things seems to work well, since I get a strong impression that many of the audience go for the experience of being there, rather as one used to go to ‘the pictures’ once or twice a week, and hope something