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Saturday

Robin Holloway

Return to standard

As if to answer my recent complaints (Arts, 30 October) concerning the dumb deserts of Radio Three between the end of the early-evening concert and the wall-to-wall small-hour tapestry of Through the Night, two weeks in succession have provided high seriousness, requiring committed attention, yielding deep artistic rewards, reminiscent of the great old days (let’s hope this is a trend; not all trendiness need be derogatory!). Both were anniversaries. We live in a culture wherein ‘minority’ interests seem ignitable only by a birthday or deathday.

Andrew Lambirth

The message in the glass

Collecting stained glass seems to have fallen somewhat from fashion. In the first half of the 20th century, acquisition was lively and prices soared as the Big Three — William Burrell, Pierpont Morgan and William Randolph Hearst — vied for possession of the best examples of this essentially Christian artform. (There is no stained glass recorded before the Christianisation of the Roman Empire in the early 4th century. It may have become secularised later, but it was originally intended for purposes of religious instruction and adornment.) After the second world war, tastes changed and stained glass was largely ignored. In recent years, there has been something of a revival of interest, with Sam Fogg a pioneer in the field.

Saturday

Patrick Carnegy

Wild about the dog

What does anyone readily recall of the Two Gents other than the servant Launce and his magnificent dog Crab? Maybe that’s all you need to remember, for it’s really only in Launce’s observations on Crab that the unmistakeable voice of Shakespeare surfaces from the dross of a comedy that may well have been his first. Who but Shakespeare would have had Launce boast that when Crab farted under the Duke’s table he himself owned up and took the punishment on his own back? Hard to escape the feeling that the apprentice Bard was so bored with injecting a semblance of life into a stock tale of lovesick heroes and their ladies that, in a couple of scenes, he mischievously allows a dog to upstage the lot of them.

Selina Mills

Self-taught prodigy

...Over her paint and her colours bentCan paint what it is to be innocent.Life, add thy wisdom, and at length bring usWhere springs the fountain of her genius.Walter de la Mare A few years ago, a couple found a small but elegant drawing of a young girl playing with her pets hanging at an art dealers. Intrigued by the intricate detail of the work, they brought the drawing home. The wife, Leonie Summers, an art-historian, established that their treasure was by an artist called Pamela Bianco, who died in New York in 1994. For a while the story stopped there and searches to identify Bianco through English art books seemed fruitless.

Andrew Lambirth

England’s Michelangelo

The reputation of George Frederick Watts (1817–1904) has not fared well for the past 80 years or so. He was much admired during his lifetime (his friend and fellow-artist Lord Leighton even dubbed him ‘England’s Michelangelo’), and his allegories of repentance and hope were still popular during the first world war, but his stock has slumped since then.

James Delingpole

The right stuff

Dear, lovely but dangerously optimistic and quite often wrong Matthew Parris had a go at me in the Speccie the other week when en passant he mentioned TV critics who don’t like TV. This was terribly unfair. I don’t hate all TV, just about 99.5 per cent of it, which still leaves lots of room for stuff I do like, such as Peep Show (Channel 4, Tuesday and Friday), Line Of Fire (History Channel, Monday) and Blackpool (BBC1, Thursday). Blackpool is so good that I’m sure it’s going to become one of those landmark series that everyone refers back to all the time (cf. The Singing Detective, Our Friends in the North...), thus annoying the hell out of all the people who went, ‘“Comedy musical set up North with David solid-but-dull Morrissey”?

Michael Vestey

Dispiriting age

Someone asked me the other day whether or not I listen regularly to Desert Island Discs on Radio Four. I told her I don’t, and she asked why. All I could say was that quite often I am simply not sufficiently interested in the studio guests to hear about their lives or listen to their choice of music. Occasionally, when I tune in, someone’s life grips me, but not often. Last Friday morning, I forgot that the repeat of the previous Sunday’s programme was on, and thus it was that I found myself listening to the glottal stops of Tracey Emin discussing what she does for a living. I don’t call it art. I’ve long felt there needs to be another name for the rubbish which the art establishment persists in calling modern or contemporary art.

Stuart Nicholson

Coltrane in a new light

Today, the name Coltrane prompts unreasonable expectation of raising the sunken treasures of tenor saxophonist John Coltrane’s legacy. Although he died in 1967, he left in his wake so many imitators it seems as if he has never gone away. Every contemporary saxophonist in jazz reflects Coltrane’s influence to a greater or lesser extent, be it melodic, harmonic or rhythmic. However, the intensity of his solos — part self-inquisition, part spiritual quest — has never been equalled. Coltrane was a charismatic figure who, because he claimed to have been spoken to by God during the recording of his album A Love Supreme in 1964, inspired the formation of St John’s African Orthodox Church in San Francisco.

Ursula Buchan

Improving the soil

In our garden, there is a two-seater, brick-built privy. It hasn’t been used for 40 years or so, but its presence in the garden still has a direct influence on my gardening. Not only does the present paved path follow the direction of the original rough concrete one which led from house to privy but, more importantly, the soil in the borders close by is freer draining and more friable than that to be found anywhere else in the garden. The effect of the annual cleaning-out of the privy — on a moonlit night in August, I am told — and the spreading of the nightsoil (even the word is indicative of its use) on the nearest border was to lighten and make more workable the heavy, claggy, limestone ‘brash’ or clay, which is the naturally occurring soil in this garden.

Saturday

Mark Amory

Behaving badly

There has never been a film of The Merchant of Venice before. This is not surprising. Different Shakespeare plays give trouble to different ages: we are not at ease with Measure for Measure, The Taming of the Shrew or The Merchant because we do not share his views on, respectively, chastity, feminism and anti-Semitism. Also, the star part is neither large nor sympathetic. This is very much Michael Radford’s version. The director, whose work includes White Mischief and Il Postino, has adapted and cut, introducing nothing eccentric but successfully injecting a pace and thrust more suited to a film. Also, much can be done with a glance or a gesture in close-up that would be lost on the stage. All this is immediately apparent.

Michael Tanner

Problem piece

Like many artists, Puccini seems happiest when creating beings whom he can proceed to subject to torture, while encouraging compassion and grief on the part of spectators. In this respect he is most like the God whom he had been brought up to believe in. Happiness, for him, is always the temporary condition which makes pain more vivid. He is good at creating fleeting comedy, so that when the mood darkens we sense how much deeper he is being. In Gianni Schicchi he makes us laugh all the way to the end only because of an omnipresent corpse, so that the piece is macabre as much as it’s merry.

Seamus Sweeney

Virtuous living

Penguin Classics uses details from the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich to illustrate the covers of some of its Nietzsche volumes (for instance, ‘Riesengebirge’, on display here, features on the cover of its Nietzsche Reader). Walking around this exhibition, one gets the same heady, slightly giddy feeling one gets from reading a lot of the philosopher in one sitting. What seems, on later reflection, slightly hysterical in philosophy works much better as visual art. Heated religiosity, the towering figure of Goethe, nationalist fervour, hatred of Napoleonic domination of Europe, a longing for an imagined mediaeval world of chivalry and heroism — all were part of the cultural mix that led to the German Romantic movement.

Laura Gascoigne

Last pearl

In the official account of British 20th-century art, the big names belong to the international players whose universal vision won them a place in the annals of world art. This is understandable. What is harder to explain is the official version’s almost total neglect of those native artists who kept alive, through this century of global change, the peculiarly English tradition founded by Hogarth. Carel Weight, Ruskin Spear, Richard Eurich — names virtually unknown to the general public — all played a part in this unwritten history, as did the David Hockney of A Rake’s Progress before defecting to America. Another key figure was James Fitton (1899–1982), whose reputation is up for reassessment in a show of paintings at Crane Kalman.

Andrew Lambirth

Master of invention

The very fact that this exhibition’s subtitle has to explain who Nicholson is stands as a blatant admission of his supposed obscurity. The Academy is surely faint-hearted here — does it underestimate the intelligence of its audience? How many visitors might, without benefit of subtitle, have naturally assumed that Nicholson was an Iranian swordsmith? I have no doubt that a good percentage of the Academy’s core support group will be acquainted with Nicholson’s work or with his secondary role as father of the more-famous Ben. After all, people become Friends of the RA because they’re interested in art, and have some knowledge of that world.

Simon Hoggart

Who dares wins

Two programmes this week made the case that popular music has taken over the tradition of the great classical composers. In Howard Goodall’s Twentieth Century Greats (Channel 4, Saturday) the composer told us that modern ‘serious’ composers had abandoned the Western musical traditions of melody and harmony. By going on their journey to nowhere, they had forfeited their claim to the public taste. In contrast, Lennon and McCartney followed the paths cut by Bach, Beethoven and the rest. No wonder, and I paraphrase, that ‘Sergeant Pepper’ was more popular than Harrison Birtwistle. This was far from the usual dumbed-down, relativist, ‘it’s all a matter of what you like, innit?’ attitude behind so much television. Quite the opposite.

Peter Phillips

Horses for courses

I wonder how many people are in my position, wanting the BBC to be seen to represent their own special interest, quick to belabour the authorities with their righteous indignation when they feel left out. It is too easy to expect a service which is publicly owned and paid for in effect by us all to play ‘my kind of music’ with the prominence it affords other repertoires, the desired prominence reflecting our private opinion of its worth. Incidentally, I still think that since Josquin was as great a genius as Beethoven he deserves more air-time, but I’ve said this before. Perhaps there are people complaining that the symphonies of Franz Schmidt or George Lloyd or even of Karol Szymanowski are under-represented.

Sheridan Morley

Irish tale

It must have been some time in 1967: I was fresh (well, freshish) out of Oxford and had, rather to my amazement, been invited by Sir No.

Russell Chamberlin

Moor pride

The province of Extremadura is as different from the brochure-bright picture of tourist Spain as it is possible to be. Stretched along the Portuguese frontier, it has a sombre, restrained dignity, with mile upon mile of grassland like vast lawns studded with evergreen holm oak and cork trees, each handsome, solemn, monochrome in its private space. And every so often there is a jewel-like city embedded, almost unchanged, in a modern development.

Saturday

Giannandrea Poesio

Magical touch

Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut occupies a special place in the history of ‘alternative’ versions of The Nutcracker. Created in 1991, it is an outstanding, wittily irreverent and thought-provoking example of choreographic revisitation. Without departing too radically from the familiar narrative of the 1892 ballet classic, Morris moved the action to the mid/late 1960s and adjusted the fairly silly original libretto, creating a tighter link with the E.T.A. Hoffmann story on which it was originally based. Hence a bemusing sequence in which the tale of the Hard Nut and Princess Pirlipat is enacted in Act II to entertain a flu-ridden version of the ballet’s young heroine, Marie.

Mark Amory

The balloon goes up

Enduring Love by Ian McEwan has the most memorable opening of any modern novel. This might be thought to be a virtue but it is more of a problem. It is intensely visual, which again might seem to be helpful but again is not. Every reader, and there were many, carries a vivid version of how it should look and will be irritated by any variation. It is a perfect summer day in the country. Birds twitter, the sun shines on the fields and woods, sheep graze. As the man is opening champagne, the woman actually says, ‘This is bliss.’ Then a hot-air balloon suddenly bumps to the ground, drags, is clearly in trouble. The man runs to help, as do others we have not seen before.