More from Arts

Wednesday

Ursula Buchan

Pursuit of excellence

There was an unexpected outbreak of common sense at Chelsea Flower Show this year. I looked hard for the usual silliness to laugh at, but I was hard-pressed to find much. (There were the celebrities who clutter up the place on Press Day, obviously, but the general public who visit Chelsea are mercifully spared those.) There was much sober purposefulness and little evident desire to épater le bourgeois. Most emperors had obviously decided that the weather warranted them wearing their oldest and warmest clothes. Was it the absence from the show of Diarmuid Gavin and his contrived spats, perhaps, or the fact that the show’s sponsor was Saga Insurance for the first time, or did the chill breeze of current commercial reality wither any desire for wackiness? I cannot say.

Michael Tanner

Marital mayhem

Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is proving to be one of the enduring operas of the 20th century, despite its inconvenient length, or brevity, and thus the problem of what to pair it with for a full evening. I have always tended to think of it as a work of extreme orchestral sumptuousness, which provides a background to the ritual-cum-drama being worked out between Bluebeard and his latest wife Judit, ending, as it begins, in tears. Their mode of communication, Judit a kind of mythic nag, Bluebeard stonewalling, is almost elevated chanting, which gives an emotional distance to the incidents we watch, and means that, however much we register the pain on both sides, we aren’t much moved by it. That, anyway, is how I have usually responded.

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Beyond the fringe

Listing page content here Surrealism is in the air, what with the Hayward and Max Ernst shows (reviewed in these pages last week), and it’s been lurking around in a different guise since April in an enthralling show at the Whitechapel which focuses on Outsider Art. Outsider Art, or Art Brut as Dubuffet originally termed it, is art made by ‘people free of artistic culture’; in other words, not artists, though the categories are increasingly blurred. It’s often the product of the mentally disturbed, of those beyond the fringes of society, who make drawings or paintings, sculpture or embroidery, which deal directly with their obsessions. They may not intend to make art, but their work is collected and often displayed as art.

Michael Tanner

Uplifting thrills

Listing page content here Fidelio, Beethoven’s simple and sublime opera, presupposes a belief in a set of values and their connection with action which it is hard for most of us to accept, possibly even to take seriously. Yet a great performance of Fidelio is inspiring enough to make you reconsider your scepticism, and that is what we had at the Barbican last week, in concert, with distinguished soloists and the London Symphony Chorus and Orchestra under Colin Davis. He has always been a great exponent of the opera, and it’s odd that he has never before recorded it — these two performances will yield a recording on the LSO’s own label.

Charles Spencer

Young triumphs

Listing page content here This column is in disgrace. Last month, with both the deadline and a flight to New York looming, I found myself in the position of the rabbit staring at the headlights of the oncoming lorry. Completely frozen, unable to think, unable to write. I’d been listening to loads of music all month but couldn’t find a word to say about any of it. So I found myself writing about the dead pets of my childhood, filed the copy and caught the plane before anyone could track me down to ask for a rewrite. My wife gave it a glance just before the taxi arrived to whisk me away. ‘If you were writing a column called “My family and other animals” it would be just the ticket,’ she said. ‘As a column about music it’s an absolute joke.

Olivia Glazebrook

Past tense

Listing page content here As I’m sure you are aware, United Airlines’ Flight 93 was the fourth plane hijacked on 9/11 — the one that did not reach its target. I shall ignore the internet-based argument over what happened to United 93 in its final minutes (did it crash into the ground or explode in the air?) since this film is a telling rather than an investigation. We may ask questions when we emerge from the cinema, but no one is asking questions in the film. In fact, names you will not hear mentioned during the course of the film include Osama bin Laden, al-Qa’eda, Saddam Hussein, Iraq, Afghanistan. No one but the hijackers has any idea what’s going on; the attack, quite literally, falls out of the sky. ‘A hijacking?

Peter Phillips

And the choir sings on

Listing page content here Killing time in Beverley Minster the other day I caught sight of the list of past organists painted up on a board. Within the past 200 years this magnificent building, which has no choir-school of its own, has played host to John Camidge, A.H. Mann and H.K. Andrews. All three went from there to the very top of the cathedral organists’ ladder: Camidge to York Minster; Mann to King’s, Cambridge, where he presided over the first broadcast of Nine Lessons and Carols in the Twenties; and Andrews to New College, Oxford, where he pioneered the music of Byrd (and died a famous death while giving the inaugural recital on the new organ at Trinity).

Patrick Carnegy

First and last loves

Listing page content here In my first report (13 May) from the front line of the RSC’s Complete Works festival, I praised a visiting German company’s take on Othello, making unfavourable comparison between its radical daring and the RSC’s own often disappointing response to the big S in its title. If that was an unkind generalisation, it’s time to get down to specifics in two of the resident company’s early contributions to the festival. In the Swan there’s a starrily cast Antony and Cleopatra directed by Gregory Doran, while in the main theatre Nancy Meckler takes on Romeo and Juliet.

Thursday

Michael Tanner

Indestructible Janacek

Listing page content here Janacek’s The Makropulos Case remains a bewildering work, as in fact almost all his operas after Jenufa, and with the exception of The Cunning Little Vixen, are. Capek’s play from which Janacek made his libretto is called a comedy, but the opera, though it has a few jokes, is mainly a painful and even tragic-seeming work, with an enormous, perhaps unique, amount of the paralysingly prosaic. The plot is grotesquely and designedly complicated, all its elaborations being cut through by the shattering central donnée, that its heroine is 337 years old, still the most glamorous and adored opera diva in the world.

Robin Holloway

German gems

Listing page content here It is hard to embrace Max Reger. For a start, he is surely the physically ugliest of all composers, surpassing even Prokofiev, or Zemlinsky, whose repulsiveness actually inspired an opera libretto. Reger’s slobbish face, plus pince-nez and thick sulky lips, already anticipates the music’s mix of shortsighted with greedy grossness. Still more suggestive, the notorious address to a hostile critic from the throne of his villa’s smallest room — ‘Sir, your notice is before me; in a moment it will be behind me’ —confident arrogance and asinine coarseness memorably conjoined. E.J.

Toby Young

Double identity

Listing page content here I can’t make up my mind about Shared Experience. Since 1988, this company has been adapting classic works of literature, transforming some of the greatest books in the Western canon into visceral pieces of physical theatre. The results are distinctly mixed. On the one hand, the plays are rarely more than crude summaries of the original novels, almost as if they’ve been designed to help GCSE English students revise for their exams. But on the other, they’re undoubtedly theatrical, retelling these famous stories on stage in ways that are often very imaginative. Jane Eyre, which is the most famous example of Shared Experience’s work, is a case in point.

Giannandrea Poesio

Company celebrations

Staging the 1890 classic The Sleeping Beauty in the 21st century is not an easy task. Recent studies, discoveries and even philological reconstructions have heightened historical and stylistic awareness among dance-goers, thus generating expectations that cannot be easily overlooked. Yet philology and historical accuracy alone turn any work into a dead museum exhibit, at the expense of its vibrant theatricality. New ideas must thus be sought to enliven the old text and to make it viable for contemporary audiences.

Michael Vestey

The good things in life

Listening to The Archive Hour: Down Your Way Revisited on Radio Four (Saturday) made me wonder why the network got rid of the programme in 1995. It had been running since 1946, with a simple formula of interviews and music, the idea of a producer called Leslie Perowne. It visited towns and villages across the country, and in its heyday attracted an audience of ten million a week. It avoided controversy and looked for the good in people and places, and while some thought it bland and cosy, most liked it. It occurred to me that when the awful Home Truths on Saturday mornings is eventually replaced, Radio Four could do worse than reviving it.

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Destabilising forces

‘Picasso, Miró, Masson and the vision of Georges Bataille’ is the subtitle of the latest extravaganza at the Hayward Gallery. Georges Bataille (1897–1962) is one of those buzz figures, beloved of the moment, without a quote from whom no contemporary art-speak catalogue introduction is complete. He has been influential as a philosopher as well as a writer (he penned a minor cult classic called Story of the Eye), and as a worthy opponent of André Breton, the self-styled Pope of Surrealism. Between 1929 and 1930 Bataille edited a radical surrealist magazine called Documents, which offered a heady mix of art and archaeology, ethnography and popular culture.

Henrietta Bredin

Trusting to instinct

This year is Opera Holland Park’s tenth anniversary season, and to my great shame I have never attended a performance, despite having had the best intentions of doing so for roughly the past ten years. If I don’t turn up this summer, I get the feeling I’ll be in serious trouble with the two men who were sitting on the other side of the lunch table from me a few days ago, Michael Volpe and James Clutton. At least I will be if I survive the fusillade of their rattle-attack enthusiasm without slumping into my salad, lethally punctured by a hail of conversational bullets.

Olivia Glazebrook

No messing with redheads

The X-Men trilogy has been a superior translation of comic book to big screen (although I wouldn’t bet money on this being truly ‘The Last Stand’; probably more like ‘The Second Last Stand’, given its ambiguous closing shot). Part of its charm has been the willingness of the writers to handle the metaphor of the comics: that the mutants are representatives of society’s minorities and outsiders. Most explicitly, its homosexuals. This instalment presents its subtext more baldly than ever. Its bang-crash  storyline, i.e., the one that causes maximum kerfuffle, is intriguing. What the (evil, conservative) government likes to call a ‘cure’ for mutants is discovered in the near-future.

Russell Chamberlin

Special relationship | 24 May 2006

In 1990 I published a lengthy article on Sicily — and was astonished by the response from English readers who had connections with the island, in some cases going back 200 years and more. All, with one exception, were nostalgic. The exception was an evidently elderly Englishman who was born in Sicily, but never returned after the war, ‘my frequent clashes with the fascists being a rather unpleasant reminder and cause of my reluctance to revisit the place’. But even his criticism was qualified. ‘I have always been proud of being loosely associated  with these past historical events in Sicily.’ All other correspondents looked back as to a golden age, as though exiled from Shangri-La.

Monday

Andrew Lambirth

Reassuring period pieces

Here in London are two historical exhibitions which treat more of human identity, national and individual, than they do of pure painting. Each one showcases art, but in the wider context of the artefacts of a particular period. For a nation which loves to visit country houses (courtesy of that great institution, the National Trust), both exhibitions should prove reassuringly familiar in format and content. Searching for Shakespeare, at the National Portrait Gallery (until 29 May, sponsored by Credit Suisse), celebrates the 150th anniversary of the NPG appropriately, given that the very first painting presented to the gallery in 1856 was the famous ‘Chandos’ portrait of Shakespeare.

Peter Phillips

American demands

Listing page content here The war on terror means little to a lot of people, but to the itinerant musician at an airport it means ever-increasing hassle, rough treatment and delay. In case you didn’t know, the Americans have just invented a new queue the traveller must stand in: in addition to being photographed and fingerprinted on the way into the US, you are now required to be photographed and fingerprinted on the way out of it as well. I won’t claim that this is the last straw, because there can be no last straw. We have to make part of our living in the US, therefore we must negotiate all the procedures it throws at us.