More from Arts

Saturday

Kate Chisholm

News values

The death of Nick Clarke, The World at One, Any Questions and Round Britain Quiz presenter, jolted many commentators — and listeners — to bewail the loss of a news broadcaster noted for his courtesy, his integrity, his ability to ferret for ‘the truth’ without being provocative or volatile. It says a lot about how much the world of broadcasting, and news reporting in particular, has changed that these qualities are now deemed so unusual. This is not to denigrate Nick Clarke’s achievement — he was an endearing broadcaster, with a wonderful ‘radio’ voice that was bold and authoritative and yet also easy-on-the-ear. You felt that he was talking directly to you, not at you. I don’t think I ever heard him bellow down the microphone.

Simon Hoggart

After the tsunami

There was much pre-publicity around Tsunami — The Aftermath (BBC1, Tuesday) implying that the second anniversary of the disaster was a little early to turn it into drama, and that the film would be distressing and demeaning for the victims’ families. I could see the point, though what struck me most was that with more than a quarter of a million people dead, there were enough tragic stories available without having to invent more. It was as if the producers had thought, well, there is plenty of grief and anguish out there, but it’s not quite the grief and anguish we’re looking for. Let’s bring in some scriptwriters to give us tailor-made grief and anguish, neatly trimmed to fit into our format and make the best use of our expensive cast.

Saturday

Laura Gascoigne

Who needs prizes?

This week the Painters’ Hall in the City of London opened its doors for the second time to The Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize, launched last year by the Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers and the Lynn Foundation to promote the art of representational painting. The exhibition (on view until 2 December) is the newest addition to a growing list of prizes set up since the 1980s by interested parties to reverse the decline in specific areas of art. Some have been conspicuously successful: the BP Portrait Award, now the National Portrait Gallery’s most popular annual show, has played a major role in reviving the interest of younger artists in the genre of portraiture, as has the Singer & Friedlander/Sunday Times Watercolour Competition in the medium of watercolour.

Andrew Lambirth

Eminent Victorians

At Leighton House in Holland Park, one of the most delightful of London’s museums, is currently an exhibition of drawings by the master of the house himself, Lord Leighton (1830–96). It’s the culmination of a major programme of cataloguing and conservation, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, and is on the first leg of a national tour lasting until spring 2008. The show consists of 55 drawings with a handful of paintings and is accompanied by an excellent catalogue (£15 in paperback). Leighton was unusual in placing a high value on his drawings and keeping virtually every one he made (amounting to 1,650 by the time of his death), though they were subsequently sold off mostly for small sums, from five shillings to 15 guineas.

Sheridan Morley

Brits on Broadway

The tills of the West End may be alive with the sound of musicals new and old, but the Brits on Broadway are remarkably well represented at a time when theatre in New York is still suffering a delayed downturn from the after-effects of 9/11. It is indeed some indication of a renewed faith in Broadway, and a reborn interest in straight plays which we could do well to copy, that David Hare is about to première his The Vertical Hour (with Julianne Moore and Bill Nighy, as directed by Sam Mendes) in New York rather than London, having recently triumphed there with his Iraq talkfest Stuff Happens.

Toby Young

Desperately seeking stardom

Connie Fisher, the winner of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s search-for-a-star reality TV show, hits the ground running in The Sound of Music. Indeed, she’s so high energy, it’s as if she’s starring in an infomercial rather than a West End musical. She overdoes everything, right down to the smallest hand gesture. As contestants in reality shows are fond of saying, she gives it ‘one hundred and ten per cent’. I imagine this is exactly what Lloyd Webber was hoping for when he came up with How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?

Patrick Carnegy

Raising the dead

In his late ‘romances’ Shakespeare reaches out for happy endings in which sinners are forgiven and the unjustly dead restored to life. This, plainly enough, is territory more problematic than his worlds of tragedy and comedy. For Cymbeline, the RSC’s Complete Works cycle ordered up a rewrite from the Cornish Kneehigh troupe and for The Tempest exiled Prospero to the Arctic. Pericles and The Winter’s Tale it handed to Dominic Cooke, who now subjects both plays to trial by promenade performance. Cooke has cleared out the stalls, thereby creating as large a playground for actors and standee spectators as the Swan will allow. Your £15 ticket buys you a  participatory role in the show, though the proportion deducted by Equity is not  disclosed.

Giannandrea Poesio

Sparkle-free birthday

I have always loved Rambert’s artistic eclecticism. The dancers’ ability to adapt to different choreographic styles and demands goes far beyond mere technical bravura and adds greatly to their usually captivating performances. Yet superb technical skills and powerful drive alone cannot secure the success of an evening, especially when the choreography is as unexciting as that of the new mixed bill. The programme I saw started with a cleverly paced short work. Set to the irresistible final movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Martin Joyce’s Divine Influence is a visually pleasing duet, though hardly ground-breaking or provocative.

Michael Tanner

Hello – and goodbye

Poulenc’s La voix humaine is a brief, powerful piece, and it’s a matter for gratitude that Opera North has staged a new production of it. It’s a matter for ingratitude, though, that it’s been put on by itself: not just because at 45 minutes it makes for a short evening, but because it would have been so satisfying to couple it with Poulenc’s first opera, Les mamelles de Tirésias, which is only slightly longer, and which is even less well known. It’s not as if La voix humaine is so shattering that one wouldn’t have any resources for anything else, though the other thing would clearly have to precede it. In fact one of the things that makes Voix a striking work is that it’s only moderately upsetting.

Kate Chisholm

Grim thoughts

‘The medium needs glitz, it needs glamour, it needs an ego,’ read an ominously worded column in this week’s Radio Times, accompanied by a glamorous head-shot of its author, the director of Channel 4’s new online-only radio station. A shiver ran down my spine. If we in radio want to compete with TV, says Nathalie Schwarz, then we need to start loving ourselves. Anxious to find out what this group hug might involve, I rushed to my laptop and attempted to sign on to www.channel4radio.com. But my antiquated telephone line was unwilling to make a connection with this ‘edgy, bold, mischievous’ medium and refused to log me in.

James Delingpole

Triangle of death

‘Dad, Dad, we watched this really funny video at Ozzie and Ludo’s called Dick or Treat. Dad, dad. Daaad? Can I show you, Dad, can I?’ says Ivo, eight, while I’m trying to work on my computer. To make him go away, I try looking up the video at the web address he gives me, but it doesn’t work for some reason, so instead, I half listen, half work while he gabbles away as children do about this really funny video he’s seen. ‘Well, this Frankenstein monster comes to a girl’s house and says “Trick or treat” but she hasn’t got a treat, so he gets his willy out and she bends over and he puts it...!’ WHAT?

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Hotchpotch of unshapely grottoes

The luvvies are in uproar. Just listen to the din. ‘Horrified,’ says Dame Judi Dench. ‘Disgraceful,’ spits Sir Peter Hall. Equity’s spokesman is officially ‘astonished’ and Sir Donald Sinden calls it ‘absurd’. They’re talking about the imminent closure of the V&A’s Theatre Museum in Covent Garden. The museum has been open since 1987 and it houses a vast collection of costumes, scenery, photographs, scripts and theatre paraphernalia from the past three centuries. But the space is in need of a major overhaul. Two attempts to cadge a multimillion pound grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund have failed, and now the V&A has decided it’s had enough.

Andrew Lambirth

Glories of paint

This is an example of the kind of exhibition which flourished for a while in the 1950s and 60s, and has sparked up occasionally since, like a partially active volcano — a show of work selected by a critic because he or she cares passionately about it. There was a famous series of Critic’s Choice exhibitions in the 1950s when the likes of Herbert Read and David Sylvester chose the paintings and sculptures of Henry Moore, Francis Bacon and such newcomers (then) as Frank Auerbach, for mixed shows at the commercial dealership of Tooth’s in Bruton Street, W1. It was recognised that critics needed the chance to explore and air their preferences in public, to nail their colours to the mast.

Roderick Conway-Morris

Fear of failure

The ‘Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, Painter, Sculptor and Architect’ of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, the only living artist to be included in this compendious work, at one time or another denied he was any of the above, except ‘Florentine’. The only formal training he ever received was as a painter. But when Julius II called on him to fresco the Sistine chapel ceiling, the self-taught sculptor claimed he was unqualified for the task, recommending Raphael. When in 1546 Paul IV sought his advice on the Vatican’s defences, we find the artist maintaining that, while he ‘knew little of sculpture or painting’, fortifications were indeed very much his occupation.

Michael Henderson

In praise of Haitink

There was a unique event in Amsterdam last week, and the music-lovers who heard it felt a special glow. Bernard Haitink returned to the Concertgebouw, the orchestra with which he will forever be associated, and which he first conducted 50 years ago, to celebrate his ‘golden anniversary’ of music-making with a pair of symphonies by the ‘house’ composer, Gustav Mahler. Since orchestral life became organised 150 years ago, and the conductor assumed a more prominent role than mere time-beater, no person has worked with an ensemble for 50 years, so it really was a celebration. The programme Haitink conducted in November 1956, when he stood in for Carlo Maria Giulini, featured, somewhat improbably, a Cherubini Mass and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

Robert Turnbull

The rise of Chinese pianists

The Chinese city of Shenzhen is vying with its rival Shanghai for cultural and economic supremacy. With 8 per cent of its population dollar millionaires, Deng Xiaoping’s showpiece economic zone now boasts a vast museum, sports complex, a state-of-the-art concert hall — and China’s first ever Piano Concerto Competition. As a keen observer of Asia’s infatuation with Western classical music, I had to be there. The competition, which has prize money worth $30,000 plus the promise of concert engagements with the Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra, is the brainchild of Dan Xiaoyi, the city’s foremost piano professor. He’s become something of a local hero in that his students have been scooping up top awards for their performances around the world.

Michael Tanner

Stirred but not shaken

Tchaikovsky was interested in states of mind, but not in the people who have them, at least in his operas. That was what I came to feel as I thought about why his most fascinating operas are in some respects so absorbing and in others not, why I tend to be moved by them at various points, but not cumulatively, as I am in the operas of the great masters. It was also the result of wondering why the Royal Opera’s revival of Queen of Spades, while superb in nearly every way, still didn’t leave me shaken. The thing that isn’t superb about it is Francesca Zambello’s production, first seen in 2001. For a fair amount of the time it is decent and straightforward, but it is handicapped by the absurd set designs of Peter J.

Lloyd Evans

Wayward approach

Always recommended is the Arts Theatre, one of the West End’s loveliest venues. Being a small-scale joint, it’s not much of a cash-mine and its crusty fabric is in urgent need of a refit. The place keeps closing for repairs and then reopening a year later completely untouched. I like that. The bar is pricey but bright and spacious, and you can walk in off the street for a drink. The louche underlit auditorium has an air of cosy intimacy because the stalls have no central aisle and are arranged, church-hall-style, in one big square slab. The seats themselves are like old armchairs and as you sink into the bald velvet upholstery the rusty springs bleat pathetically back at you.

Simon Hoggart

Genuine knowledge

New Hall women always struck male Cambridge undergraduates as being a bit otherworldly, living in their weirdly designed college where the staircases had alternate steps for left and right feet, which ought to work but doesn’t. Possibly few of them had ever watched television, which is why only five — the minimum of four players and a spare — turned up for the college’s University Challenge audition, whereas the rest of us would have swapped our degrees for a chance to appear. No wonder they scored 35 points, the record lowest, having been on a minus score for most of the quiz.

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Siegfried turns Russian

Michael Tanner looks forward to the Mariinsky Theatre’s Ring cycle in Cardiff A complete production of Wagner’s Ring cycle is always a major cultural event, especially if it is done on four consecutive evenings, so that the great vision of the work takes possession of the spectators’ consciousness as well as of their waking time — though even the slowest performances of it only last for 15 hours, and not the 19 which is being put about as its length by the propaganda of the Wales Millennium Centre. For it is there that the Mariinsky Theatre of St Petersburg will be performing the Ring, one cycle only, on the last day of November and the first three of December.