More from Arts

So which pop radio station do you listen to? It’s a question people who run pop radio stations often feel compelled to ask, without really wanting to hear the answer. So which pop radio station do you listen to? It’s a question people who run pop radio stations often feel compelled to ask, without really wanting to hear the answer. Most of their friends and contemporaries listen to Radio Four, and so do mine. But I need music to work to, and to wash up to, and Radio Two has come to occupy a significant place in my life. Ah, Radio Two. Once old, fuddy and duddy, more recently it has been home to Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, and still it’s the most popular radio station in the country. Maybe the most hated, too.

Per Kirkeby Tate Modern, until 6 September Last chance to see this intriguing exhibition of paintings and sculptures by one of Denmark’s most original artists. Per Kirkeby (born 1938) is little known in this country, though his work was included in the seminal 1981 survey A New Spirit in Painting, and there were shows at the Whitechapel in 1985 and the Tate in 1998. Back in the Eighties, I was fortunate to know someone who owned a Kirkeby painting, and that first sparked my interest. Now there’s an opportunity to see a large exhibition of his work, laying out the principal areas of his achievement. It’s an impressive experience.

Fidelio; Samson The Proms The visits to the Proms of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra under their co-founder and conductor Daniel Barenboim have become, already, something more than an artistic event — or, this year, four artistic events in two days. It is immensely moving to see young people from endlessly embattled states making music together, and doing it with such panache and precision. By the time of the last concert, an unstaged performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio, with a starry cast of soloists, it was possible to feel, however, that Barenboim’s hyper-Gergievean rate of work was taking a toll, both on him and on his orchestra.

J.W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite Royal Academy, until 13 September Supported by Champagne Perrier-Jouet Just what is it that makes John William Waterhouse (1849–1917) so different, so appealing? (As Richard Hamilton might put it.) And in what way is he so modern? It certainly isn’t an off-putting or radical modernity, for the exhibition in the Sackler Galleries has been doing brisk business, and the day I visited it was scarcely possible to view the pictures for the crowds. The shires must be empty these days, and indeed I hear that the only place to recapture the old peaceful museum experience of actually being able to see art in a public gallery without being jostled and shunted is outside London.

Katya Kabanova Opera Holland Park The Mask of Orpheus, Act II Proms I took yet another amazed Londoner to the Opera Holland Park production of Janacek’s Katya Kabanova — he was amazed not only by the pleasant comfort of the place, but also by the standard of the performance, which would have been a credit to any opera house in the world. Why are opera-goers so uninquisitive? It’s an inevitable but useless question. It isn’t that one sees empty seats at OHP, but the audience strikes me as being, to a large extent, composed of people who wouldn’t normally go to opera, but rather are having an evening out.

Sir Muirhead Bone: Artist and Patron The Fleming Collection, 13 Berkeley Street, W1, until 5 September The Fleming Collection mounts loan exhibitions of artists represented in its permanent collection, its focus on Scottish artists a strength rather than a limitation. (Would there were an institution in London which just showed American artists. Perhaps then we’d get decent exhibitions of Wayne Thiebaud, Nancy Graves or Martin Puryear.) In recent years the Fleming has shown James Pryde and Joan Eardley to good effect, and now the great etcher Muirhead Bone is given the same treatment.

The Girlfriend Experience Young Vic Helen Globe Who exploits prostitutes? Men, of course. And women, too. In particular those feminist politicians, always at panic stations, always posing as moral redeemers, who promote the myth that there’s only one type of hooker in this country — the crackhead Albanian rape-slave living in an airing cupboard — and that her only hope of rescue is a No. 10 policy statement. The truth is more complex and less alarming. Alecky Blythe’s verbatim piece gives us the authentic low-down on the skin trade. ‘Verbatim’ means Blythe spent weeks recording live testimony from a group of aging prostitutes which she then shaped into a dramatic text.