Listing page content here Here are more than 300 works in yet another mammoth exhibition at Tate Modern. Perhaps the sheer size of it puts people off, though many of those I have spoken to on my travels through the art world hardly knew the show was on. Perhaps the Bauhaus tag puts people off,
Listing page content here Completism has become a maddening obsession these days with the BBC’s Radio Three. Every crotchet of Beethoven given in a week, every demisemiquaver of Webern encompassed within hours, two weeks of wall-to-wall Bach before Christmas, and, most recently, Wagner’s Ring spun into a single day. What’s wrong is that good music
Listing page content here It’s a great relief to see Scottish Opera back on stage again, even if their season consists of only a handful of performances of a couple of operas. I hadn’t realised how sentimental I was until I found my eyes brimming with tears at being in the dress circle of Glasgow’s
Listing page content here At the matinée performance of Donkeys’ Years I attended, Michael Frayn was seated in the row behind me. Seeing this revival of a sex farce he wrote in 1977 must have been an odd experience for him, not least because he more or less single-handedly killed off the genre with Noises
Listing page content here I have read all Raymond Chandler’s books, some of them several times, but if you asked me for a synopsis of any of them I think I’d be stumped. I can remember scenes (the stifling orchid house, the blanketed old man in the wheelchair) and dialogue (‘She’d make a jazzy weekend,
Alain de Botton has done it again and I hate him. A few years ago, I decided to make him my friend as a way of warding off the bitterness and jealousy I might otherwise have felt about his increasingly nauseating success. And for a while it worked. He still is a friend, up to
ENO is having a mini-festival of operas whose plots relate to Greek mythology. Offenbach’s La belle Hélène is in a production from Paris’s (the city) Ch
What a relief it must have been for Hugh Grant when he realised he could relax and play bastards. What torture it must have been to be made housewives’ choice after playing characters so totally unlike himself (Charles in Four Weddings, the nincompoop in Notting Hill, Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility). With what joy
The classic Modernist interior familiar to us all is a white cube, minimally furnished and adorned, the clean geometric lines of the architecture given prominence at the expense of fittings and fixtures. As the visitor steps into the V&A’s homage to Modernism, it’s at once clear that the design of the show will not mirror
In his foreword to the catalogue of John Hubbard’s Spirit of Trees, Duncan Robinson, the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, invokes John Constable. Indeed if Constable were alive today he might be John Hubbard. Although Hubbard is American, he has lived in Dorset for 45 years and although his paintings are far more abstract than
With the government and the opposition flogging peerages to raise money for party funds, Radio Four decided to look back at the 1920s master of this practice, the former Liberal prime minister David Lloyd George, and J. Arthur Maundy Gregory, the crook he used to negotiate prices (The Man Who Sold Peerages, Easter Saturday). Matthew
Nostalgia is not what it used to be, but then in television it rarely is. For example, Dr Who (BBC1, Saturday) is back with David Tennant as the 10th full-time doctor and Billie Piper as his 21st female assistant. The show was first screened the day after JFK was assassinated. Frankly, it’s a bit of
Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is an argument in favour of ordinary life, as opposed to a life ruled by passion and intensity. It’s a kind of anti-Tristan, in which Isolde decides, in the terminology of Act II of Wagner’s drama, to call it a day as far as uniting with Tristan in undying (or unliving) love
According to theatrical lore, no play can be considered an out-and-out masterpiece unless it’s initially rejected. The most famous example is Look Back in Anger, which received a critical mauling in the dailies and was only saved from closure by Kenneth Tynan’s rave in the Observer. The second most famous is The Birthday Party, which
The slightly warmer blustery weather of late March found me en route for Compton Verney, the charming Robert Adam house in 120 acres of Warwickshire park landscaped by Capability Brown. Purchased in 1993 by the philanthropic Peter Moores Foundation, it was sympathetically remodelled and opened to the public as an art gallery in 2004. Among
Really, it isn’t me who decides what TV programmes to review. It’s my wife. Like, the other night I’d started watching Ricky J. Dyer’s fascinating documentary I Love Being…HIV+ (BBC3, Monday) about pozzing up, the disgusting gay underworld perversion of deliberately getting yourself infected with the HIV virus by seeking unprotected sex with known carriers,
I work at the V&A and walk every day through galleries packed with marvellous things, but the other day I was stopped in my tracks by something unique: eight contemporary illuminated manuscript pages, flecked with gold and shimmering with light and colour in their display cases. They are, I discovered, from the Saint John’s Bible,
In a dark corner of the Museum of Natural History in New York there is a diorama of a giant squid caught between the jaws of a whale. It is huge, vivid and quite alarming — two mighty beasts tussling, and never a victor. This is the spectacle which gives this film its curious title:
This year’s Tate Triennial has been so universally panned it seems cruel to add to the chorus of criticism. Still, it’s fair to ask why it’s so dreadfully dreary — and the answer, I think, is a lack of fantasy. Fantasy, as an ingredient of visual art, has fared badly under modernism and postmodernism. Somewhere
The Serpentine Gallery is a pleasure to visit, which makes it all the more frustrating that its exhibition programme in recent years has been so dominated by the modish and ephemeral. Thankfully, from time to time, an exhibition of real worth manages to squeeze past the art censors. American painters seem to have fared better