More from Arts

Saturday

Stephen Pettitt

Festive spirit

Each year the same thing happens. Each year we’re expected to suspend for a month the exercise of sound musical judgment as we’re engulfed, willingly or otherwise, in a deluge of Christmas Music. All of a sudden, banality in various guises becomes completely acceptable. Every church in the land that hasn’t descended to the satanic realms of happy-clappy mass hysteria and which has a half-decent choir offers its own version of King’s College’s Nine Lessons and Carols in cosy, twinkly, feelgood candlelight, pretending that all is well in the world. All the major concert halls in every large city offer Christmas concerts of various hues, swelling the coffers of entrepreneurs like Raymond Gubbay.

Andrew Lambirth

Christmas round-up

A Christmas spirit hovers over Art of the Middle Ages at Sam Fogg (15d Clifford Street, W1, until 12 January), visible particularly in the Three Kings bearing gifts in the tiny 14th-century French ivory diptych, and in the green-winged stained-glass angel probably from the glazier who worked at Sées Cathedral, Orne in Normandy, around 1270–80. This high standard is maintained in the stucco relief of the ‘Virgin and Child Enthroned’ of c.1420, by Michele da Firenze, a kneeling wooden king from an Austrian ‘Adoration of the Magi’, and a remarkable Bavarian limewood Jesse figure. Other treasures include illuminated manuscripts, miniatures and Romanesque architectural sculpture. Here are gifts indeed to impress loved ones.

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Challenge accepted

Verdi’s Falstaff is an opera which I have usually found it easier to admire than to love, but English Touring Opera’s production, which has been going round the country since October, is exceptionally endearing. I hope that they might keep it in their repertoire — so many of the best things this company has done have disappeared, while I’m sure that many people who have seen them once would be happy to go to a repeat performance a few years later — what happened to their wonderful Fidelio, for instance? Falstaff is probably the biggest challenge to date, demanding the utmost in precision from the performers, while needing never to lack spontaneity and tireless zest.

Toby Young

Change of heart

When I started writing this column in 2001 I didn’t have much time for the theatre. As a child of the Thatcherite Eighties, I regarded state funding of the arts as a ruse cooked up by the liberal intelligentsia to obtain cheap tickets, and thought of theatre people as effete intellectual snobs who spent their time congratulating each other on being so much more cultured and intelligent than the rest of us. Whenever Jonathan Miller appeared on television, I turned it off. Four years later, I’ve had such a complete change of heart that I felt like one of the luckiest men alive as I sat in an abandoned factory in Southwark watching a production of Sunday in the Park With George, a Stephen Sondheim musical that even Sondheim aficionados regard as difficult.

Andrew Lambirth

Beguiling visionary

This year is the bicentenary of Samuel Palmer’s birth, and the British Museum, in partnership with the Metropolitan Museum in New York (where the exhibition can be viewed 7 March–29 May 2006), have pulled out all the stops in mounting this glorious show. Palmer is close to the art-lover’s heart for two main reasons besides his intrinsic aesthetic appeal: for being the subject of unworthy forgery by that old rogue Tom Keating, and for his benign influence on a generation of interwar British artists and poets. Notable among those Neo-Romantics are Graham Sutherland (whose work was shown to such good effect earlier in the year at Dulwich Picture Gallery), John Minton and John Craxton.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Orgy of confusion

Take a pile of bilge, add a bucket of drivel, stir in a few dead babies’ heads and you’ve got Coram Boy. The Olivier’s big Christmas production is a version of a kids’ book about abducted orphans in the 18th century. It’s certainly lavish. A huge cast, acres of costumes, enough lights to land the Shuttle, and an orchestra on stage. What for? An orgy of confusion and tedium, a choppy text and a gang of flouncing show-offs striding about the stage delivering ‘Egad, sir’ dialogue and occasionally breaking into a burst of Handel. Coram Boy, beware, is a curriculum text.

Giannandrea Poesio

Aural padding

There seems to be a problem with the way some modern-day dance-makers deal with music. Twice in a fortnight, I have been confronted by works in which the score had no relevance to the choreography, and performers seemed to dance to a different tune. I am referring to Rafael Bonachela’s Curious Conscience, reviewed last week, and to Alastair Marriott’s Tanglewood, given its première last Monday by the Royal Ballet. In line with the assumption that ‘50 per cent of a ballet’s success stems from the right music’, Marriott has opted for an intriguing score, Ned Rorem’s Violin Concerto. As the composer explains in a captivating programme note, this is no traditional violin concerto.

Tanya Harrod

Surprise tactics

Suddenly the word craft has resonance. While not exactly on everyone’s lips, it has certainly won unexpected allies. Take the fashionable sociologist Richard Sennett. In his book Respect: the Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality (2003) Sennett seizes on what he calls ‘craftwork’ as a defence against a world dominated by audits and assessments in which comparatively few are singled out for recognition. By ‘getting the act right in itself...the craftsman can sustain his or her respect in an unequal world’. But the term is a slippery one. Craft is being embraced by the art world in the form of DIY of the homeliest kind.

Angela Summerfield

A very British medium

Watercolour, that quintessentially British medium and form of expression, is currently enjoying a revival of interest among contemporary artists and academics alike. Following on from Tate Britain’s riveting Thomas Girtin exhibition and Hockney’s forays into the Nordic and Yorkshire landscapes come two exciting and enchanting shows, a short bus journey between the two. Both offer a rare opportunity to see in London otherwise inaccessible works. At Messum’s, the show of north Yorkshire artists includes small-scale atmospheric watercolours and mixed-media works, of the dales, by Peter Hicks.

Andrew Lambirth

Unalloyed delight

André Derain (1880–1954) has a somewhat mixed reputation. He is widely praised for his early paintings, done when he worked alongside Matisse and Vlaminck and they took the art world by the throat with their Fauve extremism, but his later work is largely dismissed. To quote the Yale Dictionary of Art & Artists, it ‘combined traditional modes with modern sketchiness attractive to those who seek academic assurances in new art’. Fairly slighting, but, in some cases at least, justified. Derain’s post-war work was certainly unadventurous, but then he had determined to be the solid classical reactionary. What we need now is a well-chosen retrospective of his entire career to highlight its undoubted strengths, rather than dwell upon its weaknesses.

James Delingpole

. . . but make up your own mind

My favourite programmes this week were Cold Steel: Ray Mears’s guide to the knife-fighting techniques of Anders Lassen VC (Channel 4, Monday); Das Reich: From Poland to the Ardennes with 2nd SS Panzer Division (BBC2, Wednesday); Richard Holmes’s Kohima and Imphal: the Untold Story (Channel 4, Thursday); and Götterd.

Charles Spencer

Jazz riches

I’m still trying to get on with the blasted novel, over which I have been procrastinating for several years now. Though there are occasional exhilarating hours when it proceeds apace, there are others when I sit at my desk, drinking cold coffee and smoking roll-ups, when I conclude that, on balance and all things considered, I’d rather slash my wrists than try to write another bloody word. Never believe anyone who says they love writing. It’s mostly horrible. After 30 years on the job, I still think I’m going to be found out with every review I write, still feel the terror of what was once the blank piece of paper and is now the blank computer screen. And with a novel, the horrors are multiplied a hundredfold.

John Spurling

Uneasy encounters

Now that Georgia is independent again — it was annexed by Russia in 1801 and broke free from the Soviet Union in 1990 — it is keen to reassert its identity and encourage visitors. But there is a PR problem with its three best-known celebrities: in ancient times the murderous Medea and in modern times Stalin and his hatchet-man Lavrenti Beria. On a recent trip organised by the Georgian Department of Tourism, with a direct flight with BMED from Heathrow, I and three other British journalists were driven to and from an ancient cave city, passing through the town of Gori. Were we not going to stop in the birthplace of Stalin?

Saturday

Giannandrea Poesio

Escapism at its best

More than a year since its re-emergence from oblivion, Frederick Ashton’s Sylvia keeps eliciting thunderous ovations. Not surprisingly, one might add. The restored three-acter is not just a shimmering tribute to Ashton’s genius; it is sheer fun, too. Indeed, ‘fun’ more than ‘artistic pleasure’ is what should be expected, for Sylvia is not one of those monoliths of ballet culture we normally attend in religious awe and contemplation. Originally created in 1876 in Paris, the work mirrored the crisis that underscored French choreography at that time. Little had survived of the golden epoch of the French Romantic ballet, and French theatre dance of the post Franco–Prussian war period suffered greatly from a sterile regurgitation of trite formulae.

Michael Tanner

Two out of three

Glyndebourne on Tour has discovered outreach and access, etc. In an attempt, which I desperately hope will be vain, to ingratiate themselves with young audiences, they have conceded, in their mendacious publicity, that ‘traditional’ opera is a matter of fat ladies singing, drawn-out death sequences and the rest of the anti-elitist claptrap, and state that ‘dispelling the myth of these stereotypes has long been a priority for Glyndebourne’. So how do you dispel the myth? Commission an opera which deals with contemporary life, involving back-packers, terrorists, drug-dealing and people-trafficking, and set it to music which could easily be mistaken (by elitists) as an unwelcome resurgence of minimalism, advertise it with sexy posters and hope for the best.

John Spurling

Politics of patronage

‘The state is ruined, but mountains and rivers remain,’ wrote the Chinese poet Du Fu in the 8th century AD during a rebellion that temporarily overthrew the Tang Emperor. Four centuries later, ‘Give us back our mountains and rivers!

Andrew Lambirth

From horror to the sublime

It was towards 11 o’clock on the 11th that I approached Paul McCarthy’s exhibition. The Two Minutes’ Silence caught up with me on Monument station and was properly observed apart from the distant wailing of a busker in one of the tunnels and the giggling chatter of a couple of youths. But as I walked into the welcoming and well-lit ground-floor space of the Whitechapel Gallery, I wondered what I had let myself in for. In the centre of the room was a group of small sculptures on plinths, mostly in chocolate or faecal brown. Around the walls was a series of large drawings, some with collage elements. The subjects seemed to be exclusively sex and violence, rendered with a mocking savagery which accorded ill with the children’s storybook approach.

Michael Vestey

Anything goes

Concern for the English language is one thing but diehard pedantry is another. It seems that Stephen Fry has started shouting at the radio when Radio Four listeners write to or email Feedback to complain about grammatical errors and solecisms they’ve heard on the network. There are certainly more mistakes than there used to be, particularly in news. Fry has a point about absolute pedantry but he gives the impression that for him anything goes — which for someone who speaks and writes impeccably is rather strange.

Alan Powers

Regency revival?

W.S. Gilbert’s parody of Oscar Wilde, Reginald Bunthorne, wanted to make a minor scandal with his belief that ‘art stopped short in the cultivated court of the Empress Josephine’. In 1881 he was prophetic, although taste took at least 50 years to catch up. The English equivalent of Empire, the Regency period, has exerted a fascination that peaked in the period 1935–55, and has never completely faded. The Bunthornes of Bloomsbury in the 1980s, as noted by John Martin Robinson and Alexandra Artley in The New Georgian Handbook 20 years ago, were busy swagging their curtains, Egyptianising their cat flaps and faking ormolu in their reclaimed rooming houses. Dr Robinson has now provided the book that would have been a compulsory accessory in those far-off days.

Andrew Roberts

Underneath the arches

Andrew Roberts on Feliks Topolski’s dramatic work of art, which is in desperate need of repair Adjacent to the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank under Hungerford Bridge are some Victorian railway arches which house one of the strangest, largest, most dramatic and most moving works of art in London, a painting that is moreover in immediate danger of disintegration and possible loss. Feliks Topolski’s ‘Memoir of the Twentieth Century’ is 600 feet long and between 12 and 20 feet high. Part autobiography, part historical narrative, part tribute, part satirical reproach, it is as enormous a statement on the last century as it is a vast physical entity itself.