More from Arts

Martin Greenland: Arrangements of Memory Art Space Gallery, 84 St Peter’s Street, London N1, until 10 October ‘In Painting there must be something Great and Extraordinary to surprise, please and instruct, which is what we call the grand Gusto. ’Tis by this that ordinary things are made beautiful and the beautiful sublime and wonderful,’ wrote Roger de Piles in his Art of Painting, translated into English in 1706, extending the notion of the sublime from literature to painting and opening the road to Romanticism. Martin Greenland’s large, skilful, traditionally painterly landscapes bring us smack back from what Reynolds called ‘the little elegancies of art’ to the sublime.

Away We Go 15, Nationwide Away We Go is a comic drama directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Revolutionary Road) and it’s sweet, I suppose, but it’s also oddly inconsequential, fake and annoying. It’s a sort of road movie, following the journey of an expectant couple who travel the US in search of the perfect place to put down roots and raise a family. And what does this journey teach them? According to my press notes, they ‘realise they must define home on their own terms’, which has to be good. I mean, imagine if they hadn’t realised that, and had defined it on Gilbert & George’s terms, and what a scatological nightmare that would be.

Punk Rock Lyric Hammersmith Judgment Day Almeida In rolls another bandwagon. And who’s that on board? It’s Simon Stephens, the playwright and panic profiteer, who likes to cadge a ride from any passing controversy. His latest play is about a teenage psycho who enacts a gory shoot-out at his local school. What a strange choice. Stephens frets vociferously in the programme notes about Britain’s ‘distrust’ and ‘marginalisation’ of its youngsters. With an episcopal air, and a peculiar turn of phrase, he asserts his ‘continuing faith’ in the young. ‘They get stuff. Sometimes they may lack the vocabulary always to articulate that which they understand but I have faith that they often understand it.’ (He used to be a teacher.

The Rake’s Progress; Il signor Bruschino Peacock Theatre Just before the opera season gets under way each year, British Youth Opera puts on a couple of operas, or this year three, with three performances each, at the newly comfortable Peacock Theatre, off Kingsway. Few people go, since BYO treats the enterprise as a jealously guarded secret, and makes sure that you need detective skills to discover what and when, and never tells you, even if you’re as well disposed a critic as I am. This year the show which is really outstanding is their production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, at least the equal of any that I have seen of this problematic work, and in some respects superior.

I do wish English National Opera would remember what it’s called and, mindful of its status as the only English-language opera company we have, translate opera titles into English as well as singing them in that language. There was no reason for Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin not to be given as Love from afar, nor for Donizetti’s Lucia to be ‘of’ rather than ‘di’ Lammermoor. Ligeti’s Le grand macabre is, admittedly, harder to render and may perhaps be allowed as an honourable exception, along with the untranslatable Così fan tutte.

Igor Toronyi-Lalic talks to Sir Peter Maxwell Davies as he celebrates his 75th birthday A month ago, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies shuffled on to the Royal Albert Hall stage to a wall of sweet applause after a performance of one of his works. It wasn’t always so. Rewind to the 1960s when etiquette dictated that half the audience would walk out or boo whenever his shock of hair bobbed into view. But the Master of the Queen’s Music has come a long way. He’s now an obedient courtier — a very convincing, plummy one with an aristocratic stoop, and, though one can catch something every now and again in his mad blue eyes, the radical charge has by and large gone both from his demeanour and his musical language.