Arts Reviews

English Touring Opera’s spring tour reached Cambridge the week after the undergraduates left for the Easter vacation, and, though I realise that enthusiasm for opera among students is fairly uncommon, I think there would have been enough curious ones to make the Arts Theatre less bleakly empty than it was for the second performance of Janacek’s great Jenufa, which, together with Tosca, is being taken to 16 locations over a couple of months. Notwithstanding the rows of unoccupied seats, the performance was of the no-holds-barred kind that the work demands, but that must be quite difficult to deliver to order. It was oddly under-directed by the company’s general director James

There has been a certain amount of controversy about this exhibition, the first Michelangelo show at the British Museum for 30 years. The exhibits are drawn almost entirely from the collections of three museums — the Teylers in Haarlem (where the exhibition was shown last year), the Ashmolean in Oxford and the BM itself. These are three of the greatest repositories of Michelangelo’s drawings, but over-reliance on them does exclude, for instance, the remarkable presentation drawings from the Royal Collection at Windsor. The exhibition has also been attacked on the grounds of authenticity. As the Daily Telegraph’s art critic Richard Dorment points out, ‘Only three of the 80 or so

British gardeners are often accused of being parochial, and we rarely make much attempt to defend ourselves against the charge. We think it is probably true but wonder what anyone expects, considering the advantages of climate, soil and geography we enjoy and how beautiful our gardens can be as a result. It is scarcely surprising if we rarely see much reason to raise our eyes above, and beyond, the horizon. We can rely on nearly 5,000 gardens opening their gates to us, for charity or profit, at least once a year, not to mention our own gardens to enjoy each day. Who can blame us, we say, if we lack

Back yet again in the dentist’s chair last week, where time compresses, yet elongates, into infinite present as if there were no events or memories in-between each visit. No ‘laughing gas’ these days (‘breathe deep: now blow it away — one, two, three’). Consciousness is unbroken, every sense screwed to its highest pitch — the swish of suction is Niagara, the whiff of sulphur in the oral salves, the rubber gloves against the gums, a personal affront, the battering at one’s ivories like Nibelungs at the rockface; and the pain — dull or acute — an amplified sopranissimo saxophone with lasar attachment at the threshold of perception. Thus the foreground.

Since I first became aware of it, I’ve always loved Broadcasting House in Portland Place. The first time I started work there I had to sit in a café down the road and gaze up at its magnificent white Portland stone art deco fa

Deal or No Deal (Channel 4, weekday afternoons and Saturday) is the quintessence of television, in that it is remarkably boring, mildly hypnotic, and stars Noel Edmonds, he of the neatly trimmed beard and the grin that manages to be simultaneously wolfish and ingratiating. Noel Edmonds! He seems like a figure from the mists of television history, like Muffin the Mule or Gilbert Harding. We thought he had vanished decades ago. Had he emigrated? Was he even still alive? Not only is he still alive but he’s back. He wasn’t gone all that long. It just seems that way. Noel’s House Party died of terminal naffness, but just 17 years

Almost everyone who has written about Vaughan Williams’s opera Sir John in Love has defensively insisted that we put all thoughts of Verdi’s Falstaff out of our minds because Vaughan Williams had something quite different in his mind. He knew all the going operatic versions of the play, including Nicolai’s (which is a minor masterpiece, as was demonstrated in Buxton last year), so he must — so the argument goes — have had something special and personal to contribute. We can accept all that, without agreeing that he succeeded in making a valuable addition to the repertoire. The two things that would seem a priori to count against his succeeding

It’s a little cheeky of Christopher Simon Sykes to have chosen a line from Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ as the title of a show of photographs of country houses, but A Richer Dust Concealed does happen to combine the three essential ingredients of his subject: riches, concealment from the outside world and dust. Sykes has an unusual photographic pedigree. He made his reputation with informal pictures of rock aristocracy shot behind the scenes of the Rolling Stones’ 1975 Americas tour, but he grew up at Sledmere House among a different sort of aristocracy, whose houses he has documented in several books. The cream of those photographs has now been collected

Forget for a moment the importation of ‘Gothic’, a term more usually confined to architecture or the novel, and consider the main protagonists. Blake will be familiar to most art-lovers, but what about Fuseli? Born Johann Heinrich F