More from Arts

Wednesday

Kate Chisholm

Absolute focus

You can almost hear the whispering through the ether. A whole weekend devoted to Chopin? Whatever was Roger Wright, Radio Three’s controller, thinking of? The Polish-born composer was only 39 when he died of TB in 1849. And he only ever really wrote for the piano. Surely there’s not enough music to fill 24 hours, let alone 48. His Preludes, Etudes, Barcarolles and Mazurkas are performed by every aspiring concert pianist, and rehashed for any promotion that demands a slushy, sentimental underscore. Do we really need a Radio Three Chopin Experience? But Wright’s on a mission. His station is evolving away from a more rigid kind of scheduling to a broader blend of musical genres with some stunningly effective speech radio.

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Sister act

Caramel PG, Key cities Caramel is a lovely and engaging film and just what we all need right now. You may well ask: how do I know what you need? Have I canvassed your friends? Your family? Of course. And what they all say is: yes, this is just the sort of film you need right now. You may choose to see it, then again you may not — that is ultimately up to you — but after all the canvassing I’ve put in, don’t tell me I don’t know what you need. (You also need to cut down on the cheese, but we can save that for another day.) This is a Lebanese film, set in Beirut, but there is no war and no mention of war, just as there are no bombs, no killings and no captives with bags over their heads and hands tied behind their backs.

Lloyd Evans

The old problem

King Lear Globe That Face Duke of York's Beau Jest Hackney Empire Every time I see Lear I discover something old. It must be at least two centuries since somebody first noticed that one of the many factors that make this titanic play unplayable is that the great speeches are delivered by a bearded geriatric in acute distress crawling about on his knees like a stricken bison. This rather affects the actor’s vocal projection. How he must wish, as he sobs his anguish into the boards, that he were playing Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello or Antony and were free to stride about the stage flinging the poetry to the back wall with measured passion and full-throated athleticism. Dominic Dromgoole’s decent, handsomely dressed production opens on a jarring note of humour.

Giannandrea Poesio

Lyrical lack

Royal Ballet Triple Bill Royal Opera House There was a time when dancers were very often given the means to gain a deep understanding of what they were supposed to be interpreting on stage — the well-known story of Ninette de Valois taking her artists to see William Hogarth’s paintings while creating The Rake’s Progress is but one of many examples. There was also a time — long before ballet-training turned into a money-churning business of marketable diplomas — when the rudiments of artistic interpretation were embedded in the blossoming dancers’ daily routine. Today, little or no significance seems to be bestowed upon the artistic side.

Michael Tanner

Moving and magical

Roberto Alagna Barbican Simon Boccanegra Royal Opera House The Merry Widow Coliseum Roberto Alagna gave a recital of Verdi arias in the Barbican last week, his first appearance in the UK since his wounding experience at the hands of the hooligans who call themselves connoisseurs at La Scala Milan. It was a most enjoyable occasion, and after the first number the singer said quietly, ‘It’s very nice to be here,’ a touching tribute to the greater taste and better manners of London audiences.

James Delingpole

Faking it | 17 May 2008

As budgets fall and standards slip, it’s inevitable that TV is going to get worse and worse and that the job of the TV critic in trying to shame the bosses into arresting this decline will become more important than ever. But this doesn’t make me feel happy. It just — like so many things in the modern world, from biofuels to ‘best practice’ — makes me want to kill myself. I mean, I’d much rather have wall-to-wall brilliant TV and a near-meaningless job function than rubbish TV and a vital corrective role. After that portentous start, you’re probably expecting me to have found something truly abysmal to review. But I haven’t.

Wednesday

John Spurling

Big space, small space

Liliane Lijn: Stardust Riflemaker, 79 Beak Street, London W1, until 5 July Liliane Lijn has always made ‘far-out’ sculpture, innovative, adventurous and aesthetically exhilarating. Her imagination fires on three cylinders: light, movement and the use of new and untried materials — untried, that’s to say, in art, though already in use for industrial or scientific purposes. Among her early works are the beautiful ‘Liquid Reflections’ (1967, now in the Tate), made of a hollow, revolving acrylic disc containing oil and water, over which roll two transparent plastic balls, and the ‘Poem Machines’ — cones inscribed with poems which, as the cones turn at different speeds, are transformed into purely visual patterns.

Laura Gascoigne

Defying definition

In 1888, visitors to Earls Court were treated to the novel sight of an exhibition of avant-garde art from Italy. The show was mounted by the Milanese Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, the art-dealer son of an impoverished Hungarian baron. A follower of the Paris art scene and a convert to the optical theories of Ogden Rood, Grubicy was training up a stable of young artists — most of them graduates of the Brera Academy — in the principles of optical mixing pioneered by the Pointillists. He dubbed his modern art movement Divisionism — not a school, he said, but ‘a technical means for reproducing, with colouring materials, the luminous vibrations which go to make up light’.

Peter Phillips

Spiritual heaven

The English choral tradition comes in various shapes and sizes. The largest manifestation of it is on display at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, with its 18 men and ranks of boys. The smallest, a kind of pocket-battleship affair, is the choir of the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace, with its six men and precisely ten boys. These greatly differing sizes are reflected in the dimensions of the buildings which the two choirs serve: St Paul’s is one of the largest religious spaces in the world, with acoustics to match; the Chapel Royal is smaller than many Oxbridge chapels, with choirstalls so compact that it is physically impossible to squeeze any more singers into them. This building also has acoustics to match.

Kate Chisholm

BBC as saviour

While the TV chiefs squirm with embarrassment, exposed for misleading the public in the phone-voting scandals, radio has had a brilliant week. Not just an announcement that 34.22 million listeners have been listening each week to BBC radio (let alone all the commercial radio stations, digital and online) but also endorsements from two people not normally mentioned in the same breath. Pete Doherty, the badly behaved rock star, told reporters on leaving Wormwood Scrubs that he’d spent the last few weeks with ‘a lot of gangsters and Radio Four’. Radio Four? Not Radio One? Or BBC6? What a coup for Mark Damazer, Four’s Controller (and his station’s just won Gold at the Sony Awards, radio’s Oscars).

William Feaver

‘Seeing by doing’

William Feaver explains how his book ‘Pitmen Painters’ inspired a new play at the National ‘It means knaaing what to de.’ This is Jimmy Floyd speaking, his Ashington accent spelt out, his words — more dialect than dialectic — written by Lee ‘Billy Elliot’ Hall. In Hall’s The Pitmen Painters, newly transferred from Live Theatre, Newcastle, to the National Theatre, the ‘Jimmy Floyd’ character is more canny, more droll, than the man I remember from 37 years ago when I first came across the Ashington Group. The actual Jimmy, retired after 60 years down the pit, had a perky air and a slight speech impediment. ‘One time I used to paint drab sort of pictures,’ he told me. ‘But now I like a bit colour in them.

Andrew Lambirth

Presentation over content

Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book V&A, until 29 June The partnership between the written word and the visual image has a long and distinguished history. Leaving aside the pictographic tradition and the fertile area of calligraphy, the first artists’ books must date from the modern period when artists began to grow ever more independent and self-confident. Although it could never be said that Leonardo or Piero della Francesca lacked self-confidence, it should be remembered that they functioned within a culture which recognised the position of artists primarily as craftsmen who were employed to fulfil a need — mostly in the domain of religious imagery, and increasingly in that of secular portraiture.

Mark Glazebrook

City revival

‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’ an inquisitive adult asked during the break for tea at a tennis party given by my parents in the Vale of Clwyd, North Wales, c.1948. ‘A cotton broker,’ I replied, wishing to follow in the ancestral footsteps. Then my father’s head shook from side to side, slowly, silently and solemnly at the head of the table. And so it came to pass that I joined the postwar Liverpool diaspora — to London, in my case — while remaining proud that both my father and grandfather had been presidents of the Liverpool Cotton Association, the latter about 100 years ago when more cotton came to Liverpool than to any port on earth.

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

Capricious buyers

It’s tough out there in the crazy world of pop. Two years ago The Feeling were the most played act on British radio. Their debut album, Twelve Stops and Home — almost certainly the only album in history to be named after a late-night Tube journey from Leicester Square to Bounds Green — sold 1.5 million copies and inspired several other bands to start playing plinky-plink 1970s pop. In turn, as previously discussed here, this has provoked Radio One into announcing that Rock Is So Over and shifting its entire daytime programming policy in a plinky-plinky popward direction.

Patrick Carnegy

Perchance to dream

The Taming of the Shrew; The Merchant of Venice Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon While the RSC’s Histories sequence is rightly grabbing critical and popular acclaim in London, what’s left for visitors to Stratford over the summer? To The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice will shortly be added a revised revival of Gregory Doran’s Midsummer Night’s Dream from 2005, followed by Hamlet with David Tennant in August and Love’s Labour’s Lost in October. All this in the temporary Courtyard Theatre while the alarmingly ruinated fragments of the old theatre by the river await their transformation. There’s good news and bad in the season’s openings.

Michael Tanner

Iron Lady

Macbeth Opera North Punch and Judy Young Vic The Minotaur Covent Garden Don Giovanni English Touring Opera, Cambridge In a hectic and heterogeneous operatic week, three out of four of the things I saw were successful or even triumphant, so you couldn’t call it typical. Opera North’s new production of Verdi’s Macbeth largely erased memories of last year’s deplorable effort at Glyndebourne, and was therefore a matter for gratitude. Unlike that production, it wholly de-tartanised the opera, which is all to the good. Tim Albery presented it as a study in the pathology of political ambition and of the guilt to which acting on ambition leads. If that left quite a lot of the opera dangling, I think that is more Verdi’s than Albery’s fault.

Charles Spencer

Impressions of England

I’m writing this on the May Day bank holiday, with birds singing outside, probably in terror as the cat Nelson is on the prowl, searching for some luckless fledgling to kill and devour on our doorstep. He will then roll on his back, wave his legs in the air and look cute, expecting to be congratulated on his brutality. Tennyson knew what he was about when he wrote of nature red in tooth and claw. Serial killing aside, it has been the most beautiful of springs. You’ll probably riposte that it has been mostly wet and cold but that’s my point. The weather seems to have slowed down spring. Most years the season seems to pass in a flash, before you have properly appreciated it. This year it has taken its time. The primroses in the lanes of Dorset lasted for many weeks.

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Curiosity unsatisfied

Mari Lassnig Serpentine Gallery, until 8 June Alison Watt: Phantom National Gallery, until 29 June When I first saw the card for Maria Lassnig’s show I thought it was just another young or middle-aged artist trying it on. Then I discovered that Lassnig was born in 1919, and I wanted to know more. Had she always painted with this level of crude energy? Was her naive expressionist brushwork developed and refined over a lifetime? Unfortunately, it’s impossible to tell from her current solo show (the first of her work in Britain). Far from being anything like a retrospective survey — or indeed an introduction to an unknown artist — the work has been restricted to paintings produced in the past eight or nine years.

Roderick Conway-Morris

Brave new world

All empires eventually bite off more than they can chew. Rome and the Barbarians, the latest exhibition under the new management at Palazzo Grassi in Venice, suffers from the same syndrome. It aims to cover the entire first millennium of the Christian era by displaying more than 2,000 artefacts, from 200 collections in 23 countries, the material remains of Greeks, Romans and scores of barbarian peoples, from the Alamanni, Avars, Franks and Huns to the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals and Vikings.

Lloyd Evans

Where are we?

Tinderbox Bush The Year of Magical Thinking Lyttelton If you aren’t sure what to make of the present, try shoving it into the future. This trusted device is employed by Lucy Kirkwood (who writes for Channel 4’s admired show Skins), in her first stage play, Tinderbox. We’re in a nightmarish England, seared by Saharan heat, shrunk by global warming and torn apart by gang warfare. Cockney Saul has moved from drowned London to hilly Bradford where he runs a meat delivery business with his sweet cowed wife Vanessa and their new Scots apprentice Perchik. Gosh, it’s hard to follow this muddled, mapless future. We don’t even know what year we’re in. Instead the script uses valuable time telling us what to think of Saul.