The Glyndebourne season began this year in a striking fashion, with a new production of Verdi’s Macbeth which treats it as a broad comedy — and naturally, from this audience, gets the laughs it is begging for. The production is by Richard Jones, as anyone who has seen one or two of his other operatic
It’s your last chance this afternoon to catch one of the best programmes on Radio Four, guaranteed to come up each week with something a bit different: an unusual voice or opinion or insight. For the last couple of years it’s been infuriatingly easy to miss, broadcast at 5.30 on a Saturday afternoon when you’re
An estimated one in three of the world’s six billion people will watch the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games. How will Britain fare in that global spotlight? Having committed more than £600 million to prepare our athletes and competitors, there’s not much more that the government can do on the haul-of-medals front. The
Sir Peter Blake is much in demand. A popular figure since he rose to fame with his unforgettable design for the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album (1967), he has long been a spokesman for his generation and for the arts. His knighthood in 2002 brought a whole host of new requests and obligations, much of it
Having spent a chunk of my life living, mentally, in 1888 with Vincent van Gogh in Arles I find that I still have not completely left that place. The book is published, the paperback is out, my surrogate literary life is in another country and a different time — with John Constable and his wife-to-be
Given his interest in the merging of blue with green, David Cameron would presumably feel at home in the United Arab Emirates while Sharjah’s 8th Biennial is on. The Biennial’s title and theme is Still Life: Art, Ecology and the Politics of Change. I imagine that the first two words refer not only to the
‘It is a compelling moment in the art world,’ says Robin Woodhead, Sotheby’s executive vice president and chief executive, Europe and Asia. ‘There has been a fundamental change in the market worldwide. Growing numbers of people have begun to take an interest in art, and we see continuing effective economies and new emerging markets —
Is the National Theatre a cemetery? Its administrators seem to think so. Last week they decided to cover the Lyttelton fly-tower with a sort of vertical putting green which gives the NT bunker a completely new look: no longer a stone-circle of squatting oblongs and failed turrets laminated with slow-drying cow-dung. It now resembles a
Second Movement: Triple Bill; Angela Gheorghiu; Pelléas et Mélisande Second Movement is a young opera company which gives singers who have graduated from their college but are not yet on the opera house circuit a chance to demonstrate their gifts, and in unusual repertoire. Since standards at Second Movement are evidently very high, it also
There’s a really horrible stage you go through as a writer when you’re working on a new novel, and I’m in the middle of it right now. It’s called the ‘research and planning’ stage and what you do is spend lots of time reading relevant books, watching documentaries, visiting museums, travelling abroad, interviewing interesting people,
You may have caught an extraordinary programme of interviews with Peckham’s Lost on Radio Four a couple of weeks ago. Winifred Robinson (of You and Yours) went to meet some of the teenagers of that notorious south-east London parish, and also their parents. At one point she found herself talking to the father of the
Sometimes you absolutely know, beyond the gentlest breath of a doubt, that you’re not going to like a person; something you’ve heard, or read about them, has tipped you over into a flinty conviction that they’re not your type. I took a preconception of this sort with me to meet the cult film-maker Julien Temple.
With the Grain: Wood Sculpture by David Nash; Jeffery Camp — Rubicon In the foyer of Lewes Town Hall is a sculpture by David Nash called ‘Shrine’, made from American Redwood, a lapped and sheltering piece half-turned in on itself, as if in meditation. It’s placed here to welcome the visitor and to signpost the
Nothing might seem more idyllic than Fragonard’s large, manicured paintings of playful seduction. Executed in the early 1770s for Madame du Barry’s Pavilion at Louveciennes, they celebrate the erotic rituals enacted by aristocratic lovers in the grounds of an opulent estate. The young woman and her equally well-groomed suitor dart, gesticulate and embrace among overflowing
Opera North’s new production of Janacek’s Katya Kabanova is the most moving I have seen, though it is not the best produced, best sung or most consistently cast. There are two things that make it indispensable to a lover of this wonderful work: the first is the brilliant, perceptive and thought-provoking essays in the programme
As the super soaraway Spectator becomes ever more style-conscious and glossy, I like to think of ‘Olden but golden’ as a monthly oasis for the scruffs, drunks and wasters among the readership. It is, of course, possible to be all these things while presenting a glamorous façade to the world. The smart society hostess may
Now and again someone recommends a programme, and you’re very glad they did because it’s the kind of show that television ought to make often and only rarely does. I Believe in Miracles (BBC2, Tuesday), a This World documentary, was like that — just the right length at 40 minutes, and as packed with good
The Spectator’s pop critic looks back on 20 years It suddenly occurs to me, with a jolt, that I have been writing about pop music for The Spectator for 20 years. This makes me the fifth (or possibly sixth, since I am bound to have forgotten someone) longest continuously serving columnist on the magazine, which
Marylebone is the pleasant departure-point if you’re taking the train to Aylesbury from London, and what better way to spend a spring day than an outing to the gentle Buckinghamshire countryside to see a celebration of its merits by fine artists. Upstairs at the Bucking-hamshire County Museum, near St Mary’s Church, is an excellent small
Yorkshire Sculpture Park is the first and best of the breed in the British Isles. Since 1977 it has activated 500 acres of undulating land between Barnsley and Wakefield in a unique way. A man-made upper and lower lake, with a weir and cascade at the narrow junction between the two, runs through the middle