Every music-lover loves Hyperion Records; our debt to this company is difficult to quantify or to overestimate. From its pioneering days in the Eighties right up to the present (for the future, read on) it has quintessentialised a mix of imaginative repertory, inspired performances, flawless technical standards, generous accompaniment of notes and texts, and (last,
Occasionally, one stumbles across something delightfully quirky on Radio Four that one knows would never be aired anywhere else; such was the case with The Reichsmarschall’s Table, produced by Dennis Sewell and tucked away on Monday evening last week. The table in question was for the Nazi general Hermann Goering in the 1930s and 40s
Richard Harries reflects on how Christ’s crucifixion has been depicted over the ages The first depiction of Jesus on the cross, on a small ivory panel in the British Museum dating from 420, shows him upright, arms outstretched, eyes open and very much alive. This is Jesus victorious on the cross. The Western Church never
Fox Talbot invented his ‘photogenic drawing’ process in 1834 and ten years later published The Pencil of Nature, the first book to be illustrated with photographs. There is nothing like Elisabeth Vellacott’s drawings to make you impatient with Fox Talbot’s terms. Photography, which freezes an instant in an instant, is neither nature’s pencil nor any
When Henry Moore wanted to make clear that he thought Eric Gill’s sculpture dull and unadventurous, he compared it to knitting. Times have changed, and knitting has become worryingly fashionable, hence the Crafts Council’s delightful exhibition Knit 2 Together. There is, however, a strange feeling of déjà vu about all this. Remember the barefoot California
On the whole, Radio Four has had some good controllers over the years, the better ones being those who introduced gradual change. The two who were the least successful in my view both tried to rearrange the furniture after moving in; I’m thinking of Ian McIntyre in the late 1970s who, one felt, wanted to
We still aren’t sure why, two summers ago, Dr David Kelly killed himself. I don’t believe for one moment he was murdered — cui bono? And, for example, I have no doubt the mysterious men in black near the scene really were policemen. Yet it does remain puzzling. The general view seems to be that
John Virtue (born 1947) is the sixth National Gallery Associate Artist. A great deal of fuss is being made of the exhibition which marks his two-year period in residence in a basement studio. On display are the 11 new paintings he has made, several of them vast, and the show spills out from the Sunley
Monteverdi’s last and greatest secular masterpiece, L’Incoronazione di Poppea, is an opera we get far too few chances to see. The last time it was performed on stage in London was in the largely brilliant ENO production of 2000, which has never been revived. That does have the consequence, however, that one is always pleasurably
Unlike Giselle, Coppelia, The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, the romantic ballet La Sylphide does not boast a memorable score. Neither the music, composed by Schneitzhoeffer for the original 1832 Parisian version, nor that composed by Lovenskjold for Auguste Bournonville’s 1836 Danish staging — arguably, the best-known today — have the luscious musical
A good many years ago I wrote a short article about the recent work of an artist (who shall remain nameless), and characterised it — in a very positive way — as ‘decorative’. This did not go down at all well, and I was asked to change what I had written and remove this offending
Apart from its size, perhaps, there’s nothing much about the house to distinguish it from its neighbours — one of the countless, vaguely Gothic, Victorian seaside villas that fringe the coast of the Isle of Wight. Even its name, Dimbola Lodge, seems like that of a respectable boarding house, which, indeed, was what it became
On a mild, wet, early morning last autumn, I came across two earthworms (Lumbricus terrestris) mating on the lawn. At the vibration of my tread, they split apart and, though I try not to anthropomorphise animals (I could never have gone fox hunting if I had), such behaviour did look shifty, as if I had
I’ve long been intrigued by the language of EU-fanatics, particularly when they ascribe motives to those opposed to the EU constitution and the euro. There’ve been some fine examples on the radio recently. On Today on Monday morning, for example, Roger Liddle, a former Tony Blair adviser now working for Peter Mandelson in Brussels, suggested
The programme I’m enjoying most at the moment is The Apprentice (BBC2, Wednesday), in which teams of men and women, all of whom have supposedly resigned from their high-powered jobs for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, take part in various business-related competitions and are whittled down week by week until there is only one survivor. His prize
The Mariinsky Theatre of St Petersburg paid a concentrated visit to the Barbican last week, performing four theatre pieces on three evenings. I failed to see the first, a concert performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s meretricious opera The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, so my palate was clear for the second evening, a double bill
In Michael Keegan-Dolan’s Giselle for Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre there are no pretty peasants on pointes and no picturesque rustic cottages. What you get instead is a small Irish rural community thriving on poisonous gossip, petty jealousy and highly repressed sexual urges. The heroine, too, is not the quintessential embodiment of any Romantic female ideal.
This brace of exhibitions takes up the whole of Level 4 (aside from the coffee bar and souvenir shop) of Tate Modern; I say ‘take up’ rather than fill because the Strindberg is stretched so thin it almost achieves invisibility, while the Beuys needs a lot of room to ‘breathe’. In the case of the
Towards the end of his Diaries, Kenneth Tynan complains that the older he gets, the more estranged he feels from his glamorous persona. In a sense, this is a rift that still exists today. Tynan’s posthumous reputation grows ever more glorious with each passing year, yet if you bother to read anything he wrote —
It will be interesting to see if next week’s full-scale Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) exhibition at Olympia will help, as previous Olympia shows have done, to cement the artist’s reviving reputation. Certainly the timing is good in relation to last month’s scholarly symposium and the excellent recent exhibition concentrating on his works on paper, both at