Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

Enjoy it while it lasts

My friend Mitch rings up. ‘Guess what my album of the year is?’ He is trying to fool me into suggesting Donald Fagen’s Morph the Cat, for Mitch and I are both Steely Danoraks of long standing. But I know he was a little disappointed by the album, and he knows I wasn’t. I can’t give him the satisfaction. ‘Don’t know,’ I say. ‘What is your album of the year?’ ‘The Lily Allen album.’ I am dumbfounded. Mitch is staring down the barrel of 50. Lily Allen could be his daughter or, at the very least, the louche older girlfriend of one of his sons. Which, of course, is the

Michael Tanner

Trivial brilliance

Each time I see Shostakovich’s once controversial opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk I am impressed by what brilliant performances it seems to incite, fascinated by it dramatically and musically, but left unsatisfied by its unevenness and what I think is finally its incoherence. As far as productions go, it is hard to imagine that any could be more compelling than Richard Jones’s at the Royal Opera, and what is amazing is that it has improved considerably since its triumphant first run in 2004. There are probably very few operas which so suit Jones’s temperament, offering him every opportunity to juxtapose the hideous and the tender, the grotesque and the painful,

Peter Phillips

Colour coding

The recently concluded Kandinsky exhibition at Tate Modern was widely appreciated for showing how music influenced the artist’s move towards abstraction. Two concerts featuring seminal compositions by Schoenberg were held alongside talks which explained how abstract forms hit painting and music at about the same time. What was not so fully explored was the blissfully eccentric international movement devoted to synaesthesia, the scientific name for the condition in which the senses are confused with one another, which preceded Kandinsky’s work and gave it a context. The vogue for Colour-Music was thoroughly a child of its time. Like the invention of idealised languages (Volapük in 1879, Esperanto in 1887 and Ido

Saturday

Tom Rosenthal

Light on a master

It’s strange that while Britain has gone fairly mad over Mozart’s 250th anniversary, with vulgarities ranging from Mozart for Babies on Classic FM to Mozart mugs on coffee mugs, etc., we haven’t heard much about possibly his only cultural peer, Rembrandt. The Germans have now put us thoroughly to shame on the artist’s his 400th anniversary. At the Berlin Kulturforum, where the relatively new Gemäldegalerie is just across the road from the home of the Berlin Philharmonic, there are three superb commemorative exhibitions which together will lead up to a high-powered symposium on the latest debates of the Rembrandt Research Project. The main show, over two floors, has more than

Andrew Lambirth

Lines of beauty

Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8–1543) needs no introduction: his vision of kingship in the person of Henry VIII has become part of our national identity, despite Holbein himself being a German whose first taste of success was in Basel. It’s a strange fact that, although endowed with a robust tradition of drawing and linear ornament in England, our great painters tended to be incomers from the Continent, at least until the time of Hogarth. Holbein was the first of these, wafted to Britain on trade winds and the all-pervading breeze of the Renaissance. In search of patronage, he found Sir Thomas More, friend of his first patron the great humanist

Ruth Guilding

Unforgettable fire

Places, like property prices, go up and down. Margate, in the most northerly corner of Kent, is just beginning the uncertain journey upwards again. The county’s largest resort, it has acres of ribbed brown sand and a harbour enclosed by a pier, ending in a lighthouse. Margate thrived when Turner painted there, and London workers arrived by daily packet for a waft of ozone, cockles and jellied eels. There are tall terraced houses in Regency stucco and Georgian brick, and knapped-flint cottages; a gloriously kitsch Winter Gardens, a shell grotto and the Royal Sea Bathing Hospital, sponsored by George III. There is also the wreckage of mass tourism — bingo,

Deborah Ross

Meryl’s movie

So, to cut straight to what you really want to know without having to wade through several paragraphs of plot-rehash followed by the director’s CV and his favourite seasonal vegetable, will you like this film? Hell, how should I know? I don’t know the first thing about you. But I will say this: OK, The Devil Wears Prada is no Pour Toi, Un Bon Morceau de Fromage (André Labourious’s seminal masterpiece about a morsel of cheese drifting aimlessly around Paris in the rain) but it does have its merits. True, when Meryl Streep isn’t in a scene the film tends to die on its arse somewhat, and as a satire

Michael Tanner

Lessons from Tristan

It’s more than three years since there was a production of Wagner’s ultimate masterpiece, Tristan und Isolde, in the UK, and I have been looking forward eagerly to Welsh National Opera’s revival of the one they share with Scottish Opera. Yannis Kokkos, who was the original designer and director, pays tribute in the programme to the great Swiss designer Adolphe Appia, and his sets, spare, concentrating the action and suggesting a lot that isn’t to be seen on stage, are rather similar to the ones that Toscanini used in La Scala in 1923. For me, they are virtually ideal, lovely to look at and enabling the singers to move freely

Simon Hoggart

Bare cheek

Normally I detest people who use laptops on crowded trains, but if you’re watching a DVD your elbows aren’t flying, and with earphones you’re no more of a nuisance to your neighbours than you would be reading a paper. So on a train crawling towards Bournemouth for the Tory conference, I set up the machine and popped in a preview disc of Trinny & Susannah Undress (ITV, Tuesday). At roughly the point where the couple they were bullying got naked and slipped behind a screen, an elegant middle-aged Frenchwoman took the seat next to me. The camera then went behind the screen and we saw the couple rubbing, stroking and

Michael Henderson

Ken Dodd: still happy at 78

More than 50 years after his debut, the Squire of Knotty Ash plays 120 shows a year, each lasting five hours. He tells Michael Henderson what comedy is — and quotes Aristotle There are certain goals in life that one might accomplish, given the time and the will: climbing the Matterhorn, say, or sitting through the Ring cycle in a week (both need a head for heights). There are other things one might do in dreams, like scoring a century at Lord’s. But one thing every person sound of mind and body can and should do before they die is catch Ken Dodd, the once-and-forever king of comedy, working his

Saturday

Christopher Frayling

Pushing the boundaries

Like myself, both the Arts Council and the Arts Council Collection are celebrating their 60th birthdays this year. I was born just as the modern concept of the welfare state was being incubated, which is why I find so moving that moment in Humphrey Jennings’s film Diary for Timothy (1945) when E.M. Forster’s commentary asks whether or not Timothy will be able to make all these post-war dreams come true. As part of this year’s celebrations, the Hayward Gallery’s current exhibition, How to Improve the World: 60 Years of British Art (until 19 November), features a selection of works from the collection, exploring what I believe to be one of

Andrew Lambirth

Overwhelming legacy

What a spectacle at the Royal Academy: the main galleries packed with the sculptures of Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), in a massive show which dazzles with its vehement and emotional handling of materials. Here is a giant of an artist, but the paying public is overloaded with visual stimulus. It is simply impossible to take in so much at one time. How many visitors will return? How many have the time or will spend the money? (Admission is £10.) And yet this is work of central importance to the development of Western art in the last century and a half, not some petit maître like Modigliani, who is being given his

Deborah Ross

Exercise in patriotism

Honestly, first it’s restaurant reviews and now it’s films, too, which does make me think: what next? Deborah, when you get a minute, would you mind changing the toner in the photocopier? Deborah, would you make sure to empty the bins before you leave? Doesn’t anyone else at The Spectator do any work at all? Oh, all right, I’ll do it. I seem to do everything else, so why not? I’ll just empty the bins, change the toner, and then get to it, OK? So, what is my brief, then? My brief, it appears, is to see the films ‘ordinary punters’ are likely to see rather than, say, Les Soupes

Patrick Carnegy

Love all

Michael Boyd’s Complete Works festival may not have over-garlanded Stratford with bunting and flags, but it’s made the town a much more buzzy place. Boyd is not only bringing back some of the best Shakespeareans of the older generation — including Patrick Stewart as Antony and Prospero, and Ian McKellen as Lear — but also nurturing a wonderfully talented younger generation. Tamsin Greig and Joseph Millson light up the stage as Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado, both starring also in King John alongside Richard McCabe’s arresting performance in the title role. For Much Ado, director Marianne Elliott goes to the pre-Castro Cuba of the 1950s, opening the way for

Robin Holloway

Unfinished business

Mozart is full of loose ends and extremes. One-off miniatures, contextless and unparalleled, of singular profundity and perfection — the A-minor rondo and B-minor adagio for piano, the pieces for glass harmonica and mechanical organ, the Masonic Funeral Music; and four of his most ambitious-scaled monuments — two quasi-religious operas, Idomeneo taking seria into realms of extraordinary sublimity, Zauberflöte adding to these a further range of humanistic sentiment, comedy, pathos, slapstick; and two quasi-operatic religious works, both unfinished, the C-minor Mass and the D-minor Requiem, which equally take him into otherwise untried realms. Both were unwontedly personal, if hardly in a Romantic sense: the Requiem widely seen as his own

James Delingpole

Why I’m me

It’s only since watching Stephen Fry’s brilliant Secret Life of the Manic Depressive (BBC2, Tuesday) that I’ve begun properly to understand why I am the way I am. Lots of people have suggested to me at one time or another that I should see a psychiatrist. ‘You’re so successful,’ they say. ‘How can you possibly think your life sucks?’ But in the past I’ve always put this down to their pitiful underestimation of just how much success I deserve. Now, though, I’m prepared ever so slightly to concede that maybe, yes, I do have a mild form of mental illness which on some days gives me wildly inflated expectations of

Saturday

Robin Simon

On the trail of Hogarth

‘All gilt and beshit’. That was Hogarth’s crisp verdict on French interiors when he visited Paris in 1748. As an image it is hard to fault, conjuring up gilded boiseries and the bird-droppings of rococo plasterwork. ‘In the streets [of Paris],’ the eye-witness report continued, ‘he was often clamorously rude.’ Hogarth sounds like a modern-day football fan. And he characterised the French in his pictures, if not as cheese-eating surrender monkeys, then as scrawny frog- and fish-fed skeletons, victims alike of a tyrannical monarchy and a grasping Roman Catholic Church. In contrast, as a proud member of the Society of Beef Steaks (motto, ‘Beef and Liberty!’; song, ‘O The Roast

Stephen Pettitt

Making arrangements

Recently I found myself lured for the second time in as many years to what is surely one of the most alluring music festivals in the world, the Handel Festival in Göttingen, Germany, which has survived — nay, flourished — for more than 80 years now, come hell, high water and Hitler. It’s alluring in the first place because of Handel, of course. No music makes one feel more glad to exist than Handel’s, and that, let me assure you from personal experience, comes in handy at difficult times. But it’s also alluring because one really does feel that one is present at a festival, an occasion for celebratory feasting,

Laurence Llewelynbowen

Brave knight

It all sounds very kinky, really, bringing together the two Sir Johns under one roof; Sir John Betjeman, so amiable, house-trained and telly-friendly, and Sir John Soane, so arcane, Dumbledore-ish and stridently innovative. But I have to say I think it works rather well since, in such close proximity, each of the knights brings out the best in the other. There’s a marvellous feeling of being in a burrow in the way the exhibition is done. Left, right and then a breakneck turn into the cursed forest of blasted architectural fragments leads you to a warm and cosy Bag End painted some shade of Farrow & Ball or other. Display

Laura Gascoigne

Another country

There’s something different about Tai-Shan Schierenberg’s new show at Flowers Central: it has a title, Myths. This may not sound like much — and Schierenberg shrugs it off — but when an artist abandons the neutrality of New Paintings for a title with so much historical baggage you suspect something is afoot. And when you enter the gallery and find paintings of the Black Forest intermingled with his usual English subjects, you can guess what it is. Despite his name — his mother was Chinese and his father is German — Schierenberg has passed until now for an English painter. A product of St Martin’s and the Slade, since he