More from Arts

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Test of stamina

William Hogarth (1697–1764) was a rambunctious figure, controversial and quarrelsome by nature, but the first British artist to achieve worldwide recognition. He did this not through his paintings but through his prints, which were easier and cheaper to obtain, distinctly portable and offered a clear indication of his ideas. For Hogarth was a man of ideas and strongly held opinions, who not only designed and painted several series of unforgettable images, such as ‘A Harlot’s Progress’ and ‘A Rake’s Progress’, but also devised the stories which they so superbly illustrated. No scriptwriter or collaborator for him.

Michael Tanner

Patience rewarded

Agrippina is widely agreed among Handelians to be his first major opera. Constituted, to a large extent, of arias from pre-existing works, it does have a strongly distinctive character, and is as precocious a work as any operatic composer has achieved by the age of 24. What makes it still more striking is that it is pitilessly satirical, a portrayal of relationships among the ruling class of ancient Rome showing them to be determined by gross ambition, with long-term ends even further from its characters’ minds than one expects from politicians, and instant sexual gratification vying with vengeance as the leading motive for action.

Kate Chisholm

The third way

By the time you read this, the new Radio Three schedule will be up and running — more jazz, more words, fewer ‘live’ broadcasts (as opposed to live recordings) and Choral Evensong switched from Wednesdays, where it has been for decades, to Sundays. There was a terrible hoo-ha at the time these changes were announced back in the autumn, from the listening press as well as from the station’s cohort of Friends. ‘A bullet through the heart of Radio Three,’ warned the Daily Telegraph. But where’s the victim?

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

‘Time is eating away at one’s life’

I’m talking to Maggi Hambling in the downstairs studio of her south London home, because her beautifully light upstairs painting space is being given a new coat of white paint, the first for years. She always says that if she ever comes to sell this house the agents can market it as having ‘four reception rooms, two bathrooms and a ballroom. No bedrooms’. It’s a misleading description of the Hambling lifestyle: work is the order of the day, not partying, and the ballroom is of course the main studio. Hambling is not out on the tiles every night, but is more likely to retire to bed early in order to rise before dawn.

Henrietta Bredin

Poetry and music

The great lyric poets of the English language wrote — and, I hope, are still writing — words which have their own melodic quality, cadences which lure composers to add music to them. Shakespeare, Herrick, Blake, Tennyson, Burns, Yeats have been set to music by numerous composers, creating a lasting heritage of English song. A smaller but intriguing category is poetry that is not turned into song but is spoken to music. Grand master of this compositional genre is Jim Parker. ‘I was an orchestral oboe player,’ he says, ‘but I was always wanting to get away from that and do something a bit more creative so I joined the Barrow Poets, as an oboist and possibly to do some arranging. It developed from there when I started composing music specially for them.

Marcus Berkmann

Follow your muse

How pleasant it has been to hear songs from the new Norah Jones album on the radio these past few weeks. Soft, deftly performed, vaguely jazzy in that way that everyone likes, these latest songs sound almost completely indistinguishable from the songs on her first two albums. And why not? Those first two albums sold 31 million copies between them. She might have recorded a thrash-metal album this time round, or a symphony for banjo and orchestra, but fortunately for EMI, whose share price depends almost wholly on the performance of this record, Norah has her shtick and she has stuck with it. Each new song wafts through your head like a warm summer breeze after half a bottle of wine on an empty stomach, and when it ends you suddenly wake up, feeling a bit sick.

Michael Tanner

Double riches

I had the unusual opportunity of seeing two productions of Il Trovatore in one day last week, the circumstances of them about as contrasting as could be when they were within a couple of miles of one another. Both were richly rewarding, though naturally in quite different ways. The first, at lunchtime, took place in Brady Community Centre in Tower Hamlets, the annual production of the Children’s Music Workshop. It was attended by about 50 Bangladeshi schoolchildren, aged ten or so. They had been primed in the story and to some degree the music, and were encouraged to join in the choral sections.

Peter Phillips

Tales from Trinity

It seems that the fuss which surrounded the appointment of Stephen Layton as organist and choirmaster of Trinity College, Cambridge some 15 months ago has not gone away. Rumour and Lunchtime O’Boulez have it that some of the fellows of Trinity itself have finally become queasy at the high-handedness of their colleagues, to the extent that they want to ‘roll back’ the terms of Layton’s employment. One wonders how the legality of such a move might play out, but then the whole point of this story is that Trinity gets what it wants in every situation, because it is stinking rich.

Deborah Ross

The case for Guest

As far as I can tell, Christopher Guest’s latest film, For Your Consideration, pretty much bombed in America, which must be a recommendation, surely. Listen, I’m only kidding. I have nothing against America. Sometimes, I even think it’s quite the nicest country anyone ever stole and, as for Americans, utterly, utterly charming. Quite fat and quite stupid and always waddling off to amusement parks — I’m not busy today; I know, I’ll ask someone to strap me upside-down and spin me around until I puke — but aside from that, utterly, utterly charming.

Saturday

Mark Glazebrook

‘Culture’s still a low priority’

For a hundred years or so, the director of the Tate Gallery has normally been a major figure in the art world. Sir Norman Reid, director in a dynamic period between 1964 and 1979, increased the Tate’s exhibition space and acquired, for example, an important group of paintings by Mark Rothko. Sir Alan Bowness (1980–8) made many significant additions to the collection. He helped father both Tate Liverpool (a precursor of Tate St Ives) and the Clore Gallery at Millbank. He also initiated the Turner Prize. A comparatively minor figure was the bibulous bohemian J.B. Manson, theoretically responsible between 1930 and 1938.

Andrew Lambirth

Charming the aristocracy

Canaletto is one of the best-loved of foreigners who visited these shores and attempted to capture the English spirit through depictions of our countryside and buildings. London was the magnet, inevitably, when commissions began to run short in his native Venice. Canaletto had sold a great deal of work to the English aristocracy as they called in on Venice during the obligatory Grand Tour of the wonders of Europe. Now war had curtailed the influx of visitors, and Canaletto felt the pinch. He may also have seen the wisdom of attempting a new subject, rather than continuing to flood the market with versions of Venetian views already mastered. In 1746 he arrived in England, at the start of a nine-year sojourn, which was interrupted by only one trip home in 1750–1.

Charles Spencer

Ten for the road

Back in November, I wrote about the sad death of my old VW Passat on the way down to Dorset. It was gloomily pronounced on all sides to be irreparable, and the poor old thing languished in the car park outside Netherbury Village Hall before Andy, the local garage man, managed to dispose of it for, as he put it, ‘the price of a drink’. With 127,000 miles on the clock I could hardly complain. Until its death rattle at the midnight hour on the A303, it had been a good and faithful servant. I now have a new car, another Passat, for we Spencers are creatures of habit, though I checked in the Top Gear magazine, and the model I’ve chosen received a glowing four-star review.

Michael Tanner

All-purpose affair

The Royal Opera’s new Carmen, which opened last month, is back with different singers in all the most important roles.  The balance among the principals has changed and, rather surprisingly, though Carmen is now clearly the central figure, as she wasn’t in the first run, that hasn’t turned out to the benefit of the show overall. The Hungarian Viktoria Vizin is a considerable improvement on her predecessor, with a richer, sexier voice and persona. There is nothing much individual about her interpretation, but that goes with the general tendency of the production, an all-purpose affair with no intention of making us reconsider to the smallest degree our stereotyped views of a work which has, to adapt Adorno’s phrase, become a series of quotations of itself.

Deborah Ross

Dench on top form

Notes on a Scandal is a fairly nasty book and this is a fairly nasty film — very Patricia Highsmithian is the nearest I can get to it — but this does not mean you should deny yourselves the very great pleasure of it. In fact, don’t, unless you aren’t keen on seeing Dame Judi Dench at the top of her game, in which case I only have this to say to you: you are mad and not worth tuppence and go see something  with Jennifer Aniston in it, why don’t you? Possibly, there are roles Dame Judi couldn’t pull off convincingly — a bedside table, perhaps, or a piece of cheese — but, with material like this, she’ll knock your socks off so long as they aren’t still in Sheffield.

Simon Hoggart

Something for nothing

I caught The Antiques Roadshow (BBC1, Sunday) almost by accident the other day. It was one of those moments when you’re too lazy to turn the television off, you flip through the numbers on the remote, and there it is. Comfort viewing for Sunday evenings. It is 28 years old now, almost an antique itself. ‘You can just see where someone has added a new presenter, but it’s an Aspel, so it’s in keeping with the period. And look at the workmanship on those camera angles. You don’t often find quality like that on television these days...’ The programme became iconic 11 years after it began, when the BBC took it off to show Nelson Mandela leaving prison. The switchboard was overwhelmed.

Saturday

Robert Gorelangton

‘Call me Larry’

Fifty years ago, the Royal Court theatre detonated its second H-bomb. The first had been Look Back in Anger, in 1956. The next was The Entertainer, John Osborne’s follow-up play, which opened 50 years ago in April. Out were blown the West End play’s French windows and in came the kitchen sink. The memorable first line of the play — ‘Bloody Poles and Irish! I hate the bastards’ — set the tone for an unsavoury evening which ushered in a whole new drama movement. Noël Coward loathed it. The shock back in 1957 was perhaps not so much the play itself but Laurence Olivier’s part in it.

Andrew Lambirth

Gaudier’s genius

When Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in 1915 while fighting for the French, he was only 24. It’s hard to believe that so young a sculptor could have done as much or left as large an imprint on art history. When Gaudier’s partner, the mercurial Zofia Brzeska, died intestate in 1925, it was indeed fortunate for his posthumous reputation that his entire estate arrived for assessment at the office of Jim Ede, then working at the Tate Gallery. Ede bought most of it himself, and eventually bequeathed it, the rest of his extended collection of Modern British art, and the building which housed it, to the University of Cambridge.

Giannandrea Poesio

Danish delight

Johan Kobborg’s staging of La Sylphide is one of the Royal Ballet’s super hits. It is thus a good and glorious thing that it is back on stage. This time, too, the brief two-acter is aptly coupled with a short piece: Frederick Ashton’s Rhapsody on some evenings and Kobborg’s Napoli Divertissements on others. While the former foreshadows La Sylphide’s tragic mood with its 20th-century dark, neo-Romantic undertones, the latter is, in my view, a more pertinent coupling. After all, Napoli and La Sylphide are the two most internationally known works by the French-born August Bournonville, the dance-maker who in 19th-century Denmark developed a unique response to the dominating modes of French Romantic ballet.

James Delingpole

Swivel-eyed eco-loons

In the last ten years there has been (a) an alarming rise (b) a slight but significant rise or (c) no statistically significant change in global mean temperature. Actually, the answer is (c) but if the one you gave was (a) or (b) I’m hardly surprised. How could it not be when pretty much all they show on TV are programmes with titles like Climate Change: Britain Under Threat (BBC1, Sunday) and Should I Really Give Up Flying? (BBC2, Wednesday). Climate change is happening, on this almost everybody agrees.

Saturday

Henrietta Bredin

A two-way deal

The phrase ‘English song’ is often met with suspicion, bringing with it a whiff of the morris dance, the come, follow follow and the hey nonny no — and the work of Roger Quilter, composing in the first half of the 20th century, is no exception to this reaction. However, for those with ears to hear and prejudices to shed, there are rare treasures to be  found when a new recording of his complete songs for solo voice and piano is released at the end of February, sung  by baritone Mark Stone, accompanied by the composer and conductor Stephen Barlow. ‘Quilter and I go back a long way,’ says Stone. ‘Three of his Shakespeare songs were some of the first things I ever learnt.