More from Arts

It’s a comfort that the creation of a new ballet inspired by French court entertainment can still happen in the amnesiac ballet country that Britain has become. The idea of making a modern-day meditation on the first ballet — Louis XIV’s 12-hour epic Le Ballet de la nuit (1653) — is as intellectual as Wayne McGregor’s roping in of cognitive science as source material. It faces many of the same traps when it comes to capturing that elusive necessity: theatricality. Only David Bintley could do this, deploying his artistic authority as the 20-year director of Birmingham Royal Ballet as any French despot would. The scheme’s theatricality is innate. Le Ballet de la nuit starred the 14-year-old Louis.

I often regret that I’m writing in the past tense here, but never more than about milonga. It is such a smash show in every way that by rights it would be having a six-month run where everyone can see it, rather than five measly days at the elite Sadler’s Wells dance theatre where people aren’t put off by a choreographer’s tripartite name that takes several goes to pronounce. Tango has a way of curdling in show presentation — just to say ‘thrusting loins and stiletto toes’ is already a Strictly-type parody. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is something of an expert cook, however.

For anyone who has been interested in classical vocal music since the middle of the last century, whether choral, operatic or solo, there has been one inescapable name and voice: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. His repertoire was gigantic, surely larger than that of any singer ever. He began public concerts and recordings in the late 1940s and only gave up in the 1990s, when he took to conducting and narrating, as well as painting, writing a large number of books about German composers (including a ridiculous one on Wagner and Nietzsche) and of course coaching young singers.

There’s been a clutch of middle-aged danseuses taking leave of life in one way or another recently. We’ve seen the abject (Mariinsky star Diana Vishneva’s solo show at the Coliseum) and the magnetic (Alessandra Ferri mournfully channelling Virginia Woolf at the Royal Ballet). A fortnight ago, the Paris Opéra’s aristocratic Aurélie Dupont retired from the stage in one of her great roles, as did American Ballet Theatre’s stellar women Paloma Herrera and Xiomara Reyes in New York. For top ballerinas and their fans it’s a harsh act of killing, a flower cut off in its fullest bloom. Darcey Bussell has said she sank into depression when she retired at 38, which lifted only when she returned to showbiz and telly.

The ‘revelations’, 50 years after he drowned, that Le Corbusier was a ‘fascist’ and an anti-Semite are neither fresh nor startling. Indeed they’re old hat. And it defies credibility that the authors of three recent books about this tainted genius were ignorant of what anyone with even the frailest interest in architects’ foibles and tastes has been aware of for years. Not that this has deterred them; nor has it deterred newspapers from filleting the books for supposedly sensational titbits. What next? The hot news that the cuckold Carlo Gesualdo murdered his wife and her lover? That Jean Genet has been discovered to have been, you know, on the light-fingered side?

I love Shakespeare. But when he pulls on his wellies and hikes into the forest I yearn for the exit. A Midsummer Night’s Dream has a moonlit, sylvan location populated by a syrupy crew of hectic fairies, humourless bumpkins, panting maidens and swooning aristocrats in disguise. Shakespeare wrote it during his apprenticeship and he had yet to learn that several romances are far less interesting than just one. The result is a cloying, over-busy fantasy whose highlight is a love potion that makes a sprite called Titania fall in love with a donkey called Bottom. If you find the passion that flowers between a Sloane-y dryad and a pack animal hilarious then poor you.

In dance, it’s usually the moment the boys start fighting that challenges your suspension of disbelief. Synchronised fencing (MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet), unison goosestepping (Grigorovich’s Spartacus), even the Sharks and Jets in Robbins’s West Side Story, are formation set-pieces designed to arouse us. Last year there was a bunch of ballets made by British choreographers to mark the first world war centenary, which artfully focused on sorrow. But high tension, apprehensiveness, emotional denial — what’s really in the fighter’s head — these are physically antipathetic to dance’s expansive language. This is why Rosie Kay’s 5 Soldiers: The Body is the Frontline is so powerfully striking and bold a dance work.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner is talented almost beyond measure. His Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists and stupidly named Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique have notched up one triumph after another over the decades: benchmark recordings of the Monteverdi Vespers and Bach B minor Mass, the finest period-instrument Beethoven symphony cycle and a cantata pilgrimage of live performances of all the Bach sacred cantatas. His recordings of Mozart operas are dazzling. At 72, Gardiner is at his artistic peak. His live re-recordings of the Beethoven Fifth, Seventh and Missa Solemnis eclipse their predecessors and in its second account of the Bach motets the Monteverdi Choir sings with such eerie precision, infused with the spirit of dance, that its rivals must despair.

As a purveyor of lairy souvenirs Venice outdoes even Lourdes. The scores of shops and booths that peddle this lagoonal kitsch are manned by graduates of hard-sell whose market-barker schtick does not need to include descriptions as their goods are self-explanatory. Every other year they coexist with a different sort of operation: the galleries, ateliers, showrooms and studios of the Biennale. And with them an ever-burgeoning cadre of soft-sell operatives, who compose the hieratic order of the curatocracy. There is no piece of approximate art or workshopped event that cannot be curated just as there is no foodstuff that cannot be sourced. At a recent ‘ideas festival’, I was enjoined to participate in a curated walk round a small town.

For fans of the franchise who remain unconvinced by Daniel Craig’s time on her majesty’s secret service, the stories leaking from the production of the latest film Spectre are further evidence that the time has come to hand 007 a glass of scotch and a revolver. Craig’s Bond always had less of an air of an expense-account gentleman spy and more the demeanour of a spornosexual plumber. This is a Bond who’d sooner take photographs of his abs in the bathroom mirror than go bird-watching. Stumbling after the surefooted remake of Casino Royale, there is no disguising the tedious drivel that was Quantum of Solace, nor that Skyfall borrowed heavily from the Home Alone franchise.

I’ve never been terribly keen on actors. I prefer hairdressers and accountants. And teachers and builders and lawyers. I may even prefer politicians and footballers to actors. It’s a modesty thing. No profession demands more attention. And no attention is less warranted. Everywhere you look, there they are pouting and grimacing on billboards and TV screens, like oversized teenagers. How have we come to this? These people dress up and pretend to be other people — for a living! It wouldn’t be quite so bad if that were all they did. But these days actors are taking over our public space in a way that is unsettling and impossible to ignore.

My moment of the week was stumbling into the shocking, fantastical Cabinet of Curiosities in the Alexander McQueen show at the V&A. On the walls were tier upon tier of dresses, shoes and headdresses, feathered, leathered, beaded, painted, razored, or tenderly embroidered with a fairy needle. Rotating at the centre of the room was the Spray Paint Dress that a dazed Shalom Harlow wore while robots ejaculated paint over her in 1998. What could be more sinisterly resonant of classical ballet’s erotic world? McQueen made his one and only ballet working with Sylvie Guillem 18 months before his suicide — remember her as the cross-gender Chevalier d’Eon in Eonnagata? But fashion was a vastly more permissive (and richly resourced) playpen for his darkling artistry.

Things have not been happy at Tate Britain for some time. Last year Waldemar Januszczak wrote an article culminating with this cri de coeur: ‘Curtis has to go. She really does.’ The meat of the argument against Tate Britain’s director was that she had presided over a run of misconceived exhibitions disliked as much by critics and scholars as by the public. In her defence, these were not the blockbuster shows but the low-cost fillers that UK museums must put on when the coffers are low. As such they tend to be long on ideas and short on jaw-dropping loans. It is not much of a defence. The massive unseen collections of the Tate present plenty of opportunity to mount extraordinary exhibitions. Now, however, she has presided over a stinker of a blockbuster.