Arts Reviews

A rush of air. A mighty whooshing. That was the noise that filled my ears during the opening five minutes of On the Ceiling. It was the horrid turbulence of weighty ideas being picked up and flung earthwards to no good effect. Nigel Planer’s new comedy has such a brilliant and simple theme that you wish it’d been thought up by anyone other than him. We’re in Rome at the height of the Renaissance. Michelangelo is engaged in the greatest mission of his life, the painting of the Sistine ceiling. Two assistants, awaiting their absent employer, idle away the hours discussing the maestro’s abilities, his character and his place in

The Royal Opera’s new season began with a nice big surprise: Donizetti’s last opera, Dom Sébastien, roi de Portugal, written for Paris in 1843, shortly before his fatal syphilitic illness set in. Far from there being any traces of failing powers, it strikes me as the strongest serious opera he wrote, even though it has a ramshackle libretto by Scribe which means that it is one of those works whose plots are best unravelled after you’ve listened to it — the Royal Opera, as has become its habit, did its first opera in concert form only which, all things considered, was probably a good idea. A magnificent cast had been

Interesting news from the world of conjuring. Magicians don’t believe in magic any more. Marc Salem, one of the new breed of sceptical illusionists, isn’t a clairvoyant or a mind-reader but a ‘professor of non-verbal communications’. And he boosts his university income by sitting in on CIA interviews to help the spooks decide when a suspect is lying. I certainly wouldn’t like to face him across the interrogation room. He’s as wide as he is tall, and he wears a black frock-coat which makes him look like a cross between a mad rabbi and a Victorian undertaker. His beard is unnervingly neat, he has shrewd little I-can-see-through-you eyes, and his

The Document series on Radio Four is often an absorbing pursuit of information triggered by the discovery of one document which leads to another. The sleuthing involved can be revealing about an historic event and occasionally is of some importance. But not always, it seems to me. This week’s programme, A Right Royal Affair (Monday) — the second in the current series of four — began without a document, namely the will of the Queen Mother, who died three years ago. The Queen succeeded in having her mother’s will sealed, its contents remaining a secret. This puzzled the presenter of Document, Mike Thomson, who told us that he’d always understood

I am always thrilled by a good performance of Giselle, especially when it is informed by choreographic consistency, dramatic fluidity and historical accuracy. That is why, last Friday, I left Sadler’s Wells in a jolly good mood. Indeed, Ballet Nacional de Cuba’s Giselle benefits greatly from the insight of its artistic director Alicia Alonso, a living legend and one of the 20th century’s greatest interpreters of the title role. Alonso’s acute sensitivity to the subtle nuances that underpin the classic does not stem solely from her dancing experience, but also draws clearly on historical research into the choreographic and performing formulae of the Romantic era. Attention to historical detail was

It was an odd oversight, or possibly it was ignorance, which led Auden not to include Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina in his list of ‘anti-operas’, for it lacks to an extraordinary degree many of the chief constituents which people associate, and rightly, with opera, while even more conspicuously including, often seeming largely to consist of, elements which virtually defy operatic treatment. It may be unfair to describe it, as one eminent conductor did, as ‘Sarastro meets Gurnemanz when both of them are having an off day’, but one sees what he meant. A disproportionate number of the characters are sung by basses, and when they meet — and they do tend to