More from Arts

Saturday

Simon Hoggart

History on the fly

Norma Percy’s latest documentary, Israel and the Arabs: Elusive Peace (BBC2, Monday), was another remarkable production from Brook Lapping, a company that specialises in catching history on the fly, as it whizzes past. The first episode (of three) covered 1999 and 2000, when Bill Clinton became the latest US president to imagine that he could do some good. He was wrong, but you had to admire him for trying, with bravery, optimism and that slightly alarming secret smile of his. The Brook Lapping style only works if you have the main players on camera, telling exactly what happened, and by some miracle they had managed to get them all. Except for Yasser Arafat, of course, though they had library film of him, too.

Interconnect

The Hallé’s progress

The Hallé Orchestra launched its new season last week in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, with a rich programme featuring works by two late Romantic masters. They played Elgar’s Enigma Variations as well as one would expect of a band that enjoys an unparalleled relationship with that composer, and they performed Death and Transfiguration, one of Richard Strauss’s early masterpieces, with no less colour. In fact it could be said that, under Mark Elder, whose music directorship is entering its sixth year, the Hallé has won its colours back. When he succeeded Kent Nagano in 2000, Elder said, in a phrase that is damning for being so understated, that he found a group of players who were ‘competent, but not involved’.

Saturday

Patrick Carnegy

Burning issues

Farewell to Bonfire Night, farewell to the heedless celebration of ‘gun- powder, treason and plot’. Events since 9/11 have branded us all with the grim reality of religiously inspired terrorism. Play after play now seeks to dramatise the underlying causes. Who’s to say that the theatre doesn’t stand at least as good a chance as psychologists, sociologists and the rest of the pack of casting a glimmer of light in the dark? My critical colleagues certainly felt this of Edward Kemp’s treatment of the Guy Fawkes conspiracy, 5/11, a hit at this year’s Chichester Festival, and which I’m truly sorry to have missed.

Michael Tanner

Powerful Verdi

Welsh National Opera’s Don Carlos is a magnificent achievement, despite a fair number of more or less serious shortcomings. It establishes, at any rate, that this is by far the most probing and powerful of Verdi’s operas, while being, whichever rich selection of scenes is chosen, far from perfect. Despite its Wagnerian length, almost four hours of music at Cardiff, there is a bewildering number of loose ends and implausibilities, as well as a failure to bring the figure of Carlos himself into focus. He has some wonderful music (especially in this five-act French version), he is passionate, impulsive, idealistic, yet, with far less to sing, his comrade Rodrigue is more intelligible and more moving.

Andrew Lambirth

Mixed company

The visitor to the depressing subterranean galleries of Tate Britain might be forgiven for feeling a trifle bewildered in the first room of an exhibition unashamedly titled Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec. To the left is James Tissot and to the right a vast canvas of Paddington Station by the little-known Sidney Starr (1857–1925), who departed these shores for America in 1892, and perhaps made good. (Certainly, his dreary expanse of platform could profitably have been left undisturbed in Durban Art Gallery, rather than shipped over specially for this exhibition.) There’s even a large George Clausen in this first room, but where are the brand leaders?

Alan Powers

Triumph of tenacity

If you are driving along the A14 coming west towards Cambridge, the tower of Bury St Edmunds cathedral suddenly pops up on the skyline at a bend in the road. I saw it this way in March, when the pinnacles, battlements and ogee windows first emerged from plastic sheeting and scaffolding. By June, the whole thing was stripped down to the golden stone. If you didn’t know, you might imagine that this was an over-thorough conservation job on a late mediaeval building, rather than something constructed in the past six years. The new work at the cathedral, which includes much besides the tower, looks so natural and right that, once it has weathered, it will probably be mistaken for something 500 years older.

James Delingpole

Kung-fu punctuation

Now that my children attend a state primary, I naturally have more of a vested interest in the future of our education system than I did in that brief moment of idiocy when I allowed my wife to persuade me that I could afford to send them private. I haven’t read what either of the two Daves or Fatty Clarke have to say in their campaign manifestos on the subject, but, whatever it is, I’m quite sure it isn’t radical enough. (I’m rooting for my old Oxford mucker Dave Cameron all the way, incidentally: I had my initial doubts about his touchy-feely tendencies but I went to his launch and his performance blew me away. He’d rescue the country if only we’d let him.

Saturday

Giannandrea Poesio

Mixed bag

The 2005 Dance Umbrella season kicked off last week with the London debut of the Forsythe Company, created after William Forsythe’s longstanding and successful collaboration with Frankfurt Ballet ended for debatable administrative and artistic reasons. The event attracted an audience of electrified Forsythe diehards, but was not memorable. The oddly mixed programme started with two recent (2002) and complementary creations, The Room As It Was and N.N.N.N. Each work focused on an in-depth study of how movements, be they large or minute, are generated in one body and can then transfer, with variations, repetitions, additions and reactions, to other bodies. The resulting action was frenziedly seamless.

Michael Tanner

Glamour and wit

The production of Carl Nielsen’s comic opera Maskarade at the Royal Opera is the most brilliant we have seen there for a long time, spectacularly so. It’s a pity that the opera itself doesn’t live up to the treatment it receives, but it’s just about good enough not to let the production down badly. Maskarade seems to draw inspiration from the three great operatic comic ‘F’s, Figaro, Falstaff, Fledermaus. From Figaro we get the figure of the resourceful and agreeably socially disruptive servant, Henrik, performed extremely well by Kyle Ketelsen. From Falstaff we get an intransigent and morose oldster determined that the younger generation shall do what he wants and thus be as miserable as he is.

Toby Young

Below par

Mike Leigh’s new play, Two Thousand Years, isn’t quite up to his usual standard. It’s not terrible, but it feels as though it was yanked from the director’s improvisatory workshop when it was still in the development stage. It’s about a family of secular north London Jews, and, from the first, everything about them is slightly wrong. Their accents are too adenoidal, almost as if they’re extras in an am-dram production of Fiddler on the Roof, and they use so many Yiddish words you get the impression that each member of the cast has swallowed a Yiddish–English dictionary. (My wife, whose father is a secular north London Jew, was as unfamiliar with these words as the rest of the audience.

Andrew Lambirth

Twilight of despair

The Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863–1944) is best known for ‘The Scream’, that unforgettable image of the tortured self in the grip of alienation, loss and fear. Munch is the great Symbolist and precursor of Expressionism, the artist as poetic visionary who valued imagination over knowledge, and the urge to self-expression beyond the need to enlighten or inform. He takes us into a twilight existence of gloom and psychosis. In a God-less universe, man was left to his own devices, and it’s not a pretty sight. Munch was manically overproductive, and on his death left more than 20,000 works to the city of Oslo, which took 20 years to establish the Munch Museet to house it all.

Michael Vestey

Bush bashing

America, more than any other country I can think of, encourages such extreme opinions that it’s sometimes difficult to analyse why such views are held. There are rigid anti-Americans, of course, who variously dislike its capitalist and free-market system, its silent majority’s lack of sophistication, or its military and technological might. Much of this is just plain envy. Others define the country through its president. At the moment Bush-haters are in the ascendancy, hence the gloating tone of much of the broadcasting coverage of Hurricane Katrina. It was, as the mad Michael Moore put it, all the fault of George W. himself. I dare say Moore is already finding ways of blaming Bush for the Ice Age.

Simon Hoggart

Uphill struggle

I tried hard to love Elizabeth I (Channel 4, Thursday) because such work and effort had gone into it, but it was an uphill job. The opening scene, of a doctor examining our heroine’s vagina, was no doubt meant to be challenging and attention-grabbing, but it felt unnecessarily gynaecological. As Barry Humphries would have said, the doctor was just keeping his hand in. The other problem is that we have seen so many depictions of these people and this era that they all echo round each other, with, for some reason, Blackadder the loudest. The Duke of Anjou (Hugh Laurie with a comedy French accent): I muzz ask you ziss; are you minded to tek me as a ‘usban’, in all seriousness?

Robin Holloway

Winning ways

Wild Wales; Land of Song; Green Valleys: the clichés cluster. The Vale of Glamorgan Festival fulfils most if not all, in a wholly uncliché’d way. Subtitled ‘a celebration of living composers’, it could be forbiddingly severe, courting box-office disaster. But its chosen living composers are far removed from the erstwhile compulsory rebarberation, wilfully inaccessible to all but the chosen few; and its venues are mainly modest, ensuring full attendance without dispiriting areas of empty seats. Audiences are keen, loyal, manifestly satisfied, indeed delighted, with what they’ve come for, however unfamiliar, without its needing palliation by Trout Quintets and other such standards. Venues modest: but only in size and resource.

Interconnect

Wounded Wanderer returns

‘If anybody had made a film of my year,’ says John Tomlinson, our latest musical knight, as he lolls on a sofa on the top floor of the Royal Opera House and enjoys a gentle chuckle, ‘I suppose it would have been called My Left Knee!’ It has been a memorable year for the world’s greatest Wagner bass, who returns to Covent Garden on Sunday to sing Wanderer (Wotan, by any other name) in Keith Warner’s new production of Siegfried. He received the knighthood in July, and last month saw the release by Warner Classics of a four-CD set featuring Tomlinson in various celebrated roles.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Sistine sitcom

A rush of air. A mighty whooshing. That was the noise that filled my ears during the opening five minutes of On the Ceiling. It was the horrid turbulence of weighty ideas being picked up and flung earthwards to no good effect. Nigel Planer’s new comedy has such a brilliant and simple theme that you wish it’d been thought up by anyone other than him. We’re in Rome at the height of the Renaissance. Michelangelo is engaged in the greatest mission of his life, the painting of the Sistine ceiling. Two assistants, awaiting their absent employer, idle away the hours discussing the maestro’s abilities, his character and his place in the history of art. Serious and fascinating material which Planer transforms into an unserious, anti-fascinating mess.

Alasdair Palmer

Small is beautiful

The Cambridge Illuminations, the Fitzwilliam Museum’s exhibition of mediaeval manuscripts, wasn’t very crowded when I visited last Sunday. The show comprises principally images of devotion, damnation and prayer, conceived and produced by men devoted to poverty, chastity and obedience. That background seems to put a lot of people off. Poverty, chastity and obedience ...how much more remote from present-day values can you get? And yet, on closer inspection, The Cambridge Illuminations turns out to be a kind of miracle — a breathtaking collection of stupendous paintings that will delight anyone who loves beautiful things. The art here is not only gorgeous, and executed with an exquisite delicacy rarely equalled anywhere; it is also much less alien than might be expected.

Russell Chamberlain

Far from barbarians

Some years ago, just before the Shah went into exile, I was touring the archaeological sites of Iran as a guest of the then Imperial Ministry of Culture. I wanted to see the extent to which archaeology was now acting as a means of establishing national identities. Near Hamadan there was a modern bridge over a ravine, whose sole purpose was to bring the visitor to two large cuneiform inscriptions in which Darius and his son Xerxes rather touchingly gave thanks to God for his gift to them of the land of Iran. With Iran’s chaotic history over the past two millennia in mind, I turned to my guide, a young graduate of Tehran University. ‘Do you regard these people as your ancestors — your father’s father’s father’s people?’ ‘Yes,’ she said.

Andrew Lambirth

Shades of Gray

Although marginalised or ignored for much of her long life, the designer and architect Eileen Gray (1878–1976) is now a hugely admired and influential figure, celebrated in the same breath as Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto and Charles Eames. I was first aware of her as the aunt of the distinguished painter Prunella Clough (who looked after Gray in her declining years), and acquainted with her work mostly through illustrations in books and catalogues. So this retrospective of her work was eagerly awaited, even though the Design Museum seems so often to be hamstrung by limited budgets. In the event, the exhibition is quietly exciting, though it leaves the visitor with the appetite stimulated rather than appeased.

James Delingpole

Character is destiny

I’ll be honest. I’ve watched less than bugger-all TV this week. The three bridge evenings (one of them, get this, tutored by the legendary Susanna Gross) didn’t help, nor yet did the parents’ barbecue evening at our kids’ new school, and Wednesday night is Pilates night so obviously that’s no good, and you wouldn’t seriously expect me to waste time watching preview tapes during my actual working day. But I did catch a bit of 49 Up (ITV1, Thursday) — will that do? Yes. We find this series especially intriguing in my family because one of the children whose fortunes the film has been following every seven years of his life is my wife’s cousin John Brisby.