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
‘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
‘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,
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
‘I am going to work to the best of my ability to the day I die, challenging what’s given to me,’ the American artist David Smith told an interviewer in 1964. Tragically he was killed in a car crash the following year, and one of the most original and inventive of 20th-century sculptors was lost,
Sheffield seems to be in a constant state of redevelopment. Last time I went, the Millennium Galleries had just opened; now they’re already history, overtaken by newer developments that have turned the walk from the station into a rat maze of roadworks. But the maze is worth negotiating for the reward of Art at the
The title of this absorbing, stylishly laid-out exhibition is possibly a misnomer. Extensive it is, but photo-journalism is largely excluded. Thus, except for Henryk Ross’s startling snapshots of a 1940s Polish ghetto and Emmy Andriesse’s stark conspectus of famine-ravaged wartime Amsterdam, plus uneven forays into Berlin or late Soviet Russia, the exhibition touches on politics
The subtitle ‘Artist, Author, Word and Image in Britain 1800–1920’ sets out the aim of one of those curator-inspired delvings into the vast stock of a great and fairly ancient museum. It repays several hours of study as the devil, as so often, is in the detail. The Fitzwilliam — unlike many other, larger art
You won’t find a grander monument to failed marriage than the Mount, the New England picture-book palace built by Edith Wharton a century ago. Wharton was a house and garden designer first, a novelist second. She wrote The Decoration of Houses in 1897, almost a decade before she embarked on the novels. Belton House in
The journalist and broadcaster Danny Baker recently admitted that, getting on in years, he listens to almost nothing these days other than country music. I can see the appeal. If the relentless artifice of most pop music doesn’t wear you out, its sheer unbridled energy is sure to. Fortunately, the term ‘country’ now embraces a
Just as embroiderers working in the late 11th century will not have appreciated the achievement that was the Bayeux Tapestry until they stood well back at the finish, so garden writers are usually too caught up with describing the details of individual gardens to consider the overall magnificence of ‘the English garden’. It was not
Before I go on, can I just ask: do any readers share my concern about the scrawny bum on the girl on the new Nokia billboard poster ad? For those of you who haven’t seen it, it shows a naked couple running, carefree, through the surf along a long, empty Atlantic-style beach. The chap’s backside