Arts Archives

Oops! he did it again

Exhibitions

‘It’s odd,’ Picasso once mused, ‘but you never see Modigliani drunk anywhere but at the corners of the boulevard Montmartre and the boulevard Raspail.’ He obviously suspected his friend of being a stage bohemian. There is, indeed, a touch of Puccini about Modigliani’s life — the poverty, his film-star good looks, the drink and drugs and poignant early death, all set against a picturesque Parisian backdrop of Montmartre and Montparnasse. It’s La bohème but with the painter himself, surely a tenor role, taking the place of the tragic, tubercular Mimì. Whether or not he lived out a cliché, Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) certainly painted to a set recipe — even if it was one largely of his own devising.

Guy Dammann

Coming up for air | 30 November 2017

Music

The musicians of Ensemble Grizzana are arranged in the usual way for their concert at St Paul’s Hall in Huddersfield. Another player, the percussionist Dmitra Lazaridou Chatzigoga, sits among them. The table beside her holds a small and rather beaten-up zither and a tray of the kind of objects you might find at the back of a spare kitchen drawer: two filter baskets from stove-top espresso machines, a tea-strainer, letter opener, a cog, a nut and bolt. Visitors to Huddersfield’s annual contemporary music festival, now in its 40th edition, are used to eccentricity. The presence of such a tray on the Wigmore Hall stage would raise eyebrows well beyond their usual range, but here it’s pretty much business as usual.

Jasper Rees

When things fall apart

Cinema

The films of Michael Haneke wear a long face. Psychological terror, domestic horror, sick sex, genital self-harm — these are the joyless tags of his considerable oeuvre. Such an auteur is not the obvious sort for sequels: The Piano Teacher 2 or Hidden — Again! aren’t destined for your nearest multiplex. And yet his new film is an intriguing knight’s move away from his last. Amour (2012) was a hot-button portrait of dementia in which an elderly husband watched his wife’s mind drift away as if on an ice floe. Eventually, he smothered her with a pillow. In Happy End, the widower is back, and this time he’s out to kill himself (although the strapline on the poster is not so jaunty). Haneke has widened the canvas to include the whole family.

Lloyd Evans

Dancing queen

Theatre

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie opened at the Sheffield Crucible in February for a standard three-week run. The show is based on a BBC documentary, Jamie: Drag Queen at 16, about a working-class lad who attended his school prom in a scarlet frock. Director Jonathan Butterell saw the potential to create a replica Billy Elliot and he brought in two co-writers to turn the material into a comic musical. Word of mouth was excellent and the show received immediate offers for a West End transfer. The action starts in a Sheffield comp where a class of 16-year-olds are being given career advice by a computer. Blond misfit Jamie is encouraged to train as a forklift-truck driver. But he has other ideas. With his mum’s help he sets off in search of his inner self as a gender-fluid diva.

James Walton

Living dolls

Television

This week on Channel 4, we watched a cheery 58-year-old American engineer called James going on a first date. He was meeting Harmony, an extravagantly shapely blonde who was obliging enough to be wearing a low-cut crop top and tiny shorts, and who greeted him with a charming smile. After a spot of small talk and a dumb-blonde joke, she then alternated between assuring him how great he was and inviting him to masturbate over her. ‘You’re awesome,’ a visibly smitten James declared — apparently not at all bothered that Harmony was a robot.

Kate Chisholm

Sound of the Gods

Radio and podcasts

At the launch of the Christmas radio schedules last week, James Purnell, director of radio (and much more) at the BBC, stressed repeatedly the need for radio to be ‘reinvented’ for this new digital age. But what did he mean by reinvent? Was he hinting at the need for a new, leaner radio, the sound-only stations running up cheaper bills for the corporation? Or was he envisaging a translation of the existing radio networks into something more than just audio, focusing not so much on what goes on in the studio but on the new digital future, visualised and captured online.

Rod Liddle

Björk: Utopia

More from Arts

Grade: A A dimbo pop reviewer for one of our national newspapers suggested that on this album, her ninth, Björk was ‘continuing her exploration of structurelessness’. It doesn’t sound wildly enticing, does it? Do go on, etc. It is true that on Utopia there is nothing that has the glorious, simple, pop sheen, and hook, of ‘Venus As A Boy’ from all those years ago. It is true, too, that she looks like a mental on the album cover and cavorts in her videos like a member of the smafolk — dwarfish and ethereal winged creatures from Scandinavian folklore. But then she was never going to act like Bachman-Turner Overdrive, or Kasabian, was she? This is Björk, as she always was.

28 November 2017

Damian Thompson

How the music of Bach can teach us how to die

Imagine if we had access to over a hundred Shakespeare plays in which the Bard was at or near the top of his game – but we didn't bother to watch them and couldn't even remember their names. Bach has as good a claim as any composer to be the Shakespeare of music, yet a vast proportion of his work is little known even by music-lovers. He left us more than 200 sacred cantatas (many more are missing), most of which are miraculously inspired. So, why their neglect? Is it their supposedly dour and frightening Lutheran theology? The latest Holy Smoke podcast suggests that, if we take the plunge, the music and texts of the cantatas help us address the central questions of existence – even if we're not Christians.

Richard Bratby

Inviting Jansons to the Barbican was like pouring vintage Pol Roger into a throwaway plastic cup

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra / Mariss Jansons Barbican NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover / Andrew Manze Symphony Hall At the end of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony Mariss Jansons asked the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra to stand up, and they refused. That’s not something that occurs in every concert; in fact, you might never see it happen. But this act of low-key mutiny is about the highest tribute an orchestra can pay to a conductor – to decline credit for the applause, handing it over in its entirety to the old maestro standing in their midst, looking shattered. A few moments later, Mitsuko Uchida presented Jansons with the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society, but that gesture from the band was the real accolade.

23 November 2017

Deborah Ross

Ladies first

Cinema

Battle of the Sexes recreates the famed, culture-changing 1973 tennis match between 55-year-old Bobby Riggs, a self-proclaimed chauvinist, and 29-year-old Billie Jean King, the world’s top female player who was out to liberate women and herself. (She was just discovering her true sexuality at that time.) Unless you happen to identify with Bobby — ‘Don’t get me wrong. I love women in the bedroom and in the kitchen, but these days they want to be everywhere!’ — this is certainly a great comeuppance film of the kind that will amply satisfy all your comeuppance needs. No complaints, comeuppance-wise.

Michael Tanner

Passion killer

Opera

The late arch-Rossinian Philip Gossett regarded Semiramide as a neoclassical work, vaguely and alarmingly suggesting to me a musical equivalent of Canova, a sculptor I detest. Actually, I don’t think the terminology is helpful. Nor is Semiramide monumental in the way that the programme book suggests. There is a notable lack of ensembles and of anything except accompanied recitative and arias. The duets are as rare as in Handel, and come as just as great a relief. The culminating duets in Act Two are as balm to the soul. They even remind one that there is such a thing.

Norman Lebrecht

The Chinese are coming

Music

On a bullet train out of Shanghai, a nuclear family catches my eye. The father, weather-beaten and wearing an ill-fitting suit, is clearly a working man. His wife, younger and city sleek, is dressed to impress. Their son, an only child, is four or five years old. Curious, I get talking and discover they are from a northern city, near the Russian border. What were they doing in Shanghai? Entering the boy in a piano competition. The number of children learning to play the piano in China varies from 40 to 60 million, depending on who you ask. Walk through a tower-block residential area in Shanghai at five in the afternoon and you can hear the clangour of many hands playing scales.

James Delingpole

Family favourites | 23 November 2017

Television

It’s a weird sensation getting your child back for an extended period when for the previous decade you’ve been packing him off every few weeks back to boarding school. Obviously, it’s quite pleasant, amusing and enlightening to study at close hand and at length this alien thing that you’ve bred. At the same time, though, they don’t half become a discombobulatingly overbearing presence. For example, in the old days I would definitely have reviewed Howards End, even though I can’t stand E.M. Forster or the ghastly pinko Schlegel sisters. But now that the Fawn and I no longer have the house to ourselves, we have to fall in with Boy’s viewing schedule, which is largely comprised of quiz shows. Any quiz show, pretty much.

Lloyd Evans

Net effect | 23 November 2017

Theatre

The inexplicable popularity of Ivo Van Hove continues. The director’s latest visit to the fairies involves an updated version of Network, a creaky and over-rated news satire from 1976. Van Hove appears to be unconstrained by thrift or self-discipline and he fills the Lyttelton stage with expensive clobber. It’s like a hangar full of half-tested prototypes. Centre, a TV studio featuring three cameras and an anchor man’s desk the size of a lifeboat. Behind it, a controller’s gallery with lots of TV monitors shielded by wobbly glass. Stage-rear, a vast flat-screen telly that relays the action as it happens but with an irritating quarter-second delay.

Michael Hann

Man and boy | 23 November 2017

Music

In the last week of October, the middle-aged Baxter Dury and the boy Baxter Dury were brought together. The 45-year-old man released his fifth album, Prince of Tears, his best so far. The five-year-old boy, meanwhile, appeared on the cover of New Boots and Panties!!, by his father Ian Dury, released in 1977, but re-released in a bells-and-whistles deluxe edition the same day Prince of Tears came out. You wouldn’t listen to Prince of Tears and conclude that Baxter was Ian’s son, but once you know they are related it becomes hard not to hear generational echoes. The opening song, ‘Miami’, is the kind of wrong-un character study that the elder Dury used to engage in, but updated for a colder age, in which the drugs and the delusions have changed.

Damian Thompson

Fighting talk | 23 November 2017

More from Arts

There’s a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie in which Tippi Hedren is emptying a safe while a cleaning lady silently drags her mop towards her. Can Hedren, playing the disturbed Marnie, slip down the stairs before the woman turns her head? I felt a twinge of the same panic last week interviewing the composer Nico Muhly, whose opera Marnie — based more closely on Winston Graham’s novel than on Hitchcock’s film — was given its world première by English National Opera last Saturday. Would I make it out of the room without asking the Wrong Question? Muhly, who made his name as the cherubic, prodigiously gifted but prickly protégé of Philip Glass, is scary to interview. This is well known in New York.

20 November 2017

Seth J. Frantzman

The Louvre Abu Dhabi: the best – and worst – of globalisation

The headlines announcing the opening of the dome-shaped Louvre Abu Dhabi are a cornucopia of superlatives. 'Spectacular palace of culture shimmers in the desert' and 'a cultural cornerstone where East meets West' were two of the most laudatory. 'East meets West' is the frequently used cliché. However the new museum, which cost around $1 billion to construct over ten years and is a centrepiece of Abu Dhabi’s attempt to position itself as a cultural hub in the Middle East, is not an example of East meeting West, it is symbol of the post-EastWest era we live in. French President Emmanuel Macron flew in for the grand opening of the 55-room art collection on 8 November.

Michael Tanner

Wholly gripping: Glyndebourne on Tour’s Hamlet reviewed

Hamlet Theatre Royal, Norwich, and touring until 1 December I had mixed feelings about Brett Dean's Hamlet as I went into the Theatre Royal in Norwich and mixed feelings when I came out of it: unfavourable, largely, on the way in and favourable, largely, on the way out. I am still left wondering why a composer would want to set this amazing, flawed and most memorable of tragedies to music, but more than one hundred have, so presumably they must feel they can add something, or alter something, or even improve it in some way.

Brendan O’Neill

Morrissey’s Brexit love affair makes him the last true rock’n’roll rebel

Morrissey, Smiths frontman turned solo crooner turned novelist, has long taken pleasure in rattling the establishment. From mocking the monarchy on the 1986 Smiths album The Queen is Dead, to his lovely ballad about how much he wanted Margaret Thatcher to die, to his frequent foot-stomping over the meat industry, the music industry and industry in general, this Mancunian contrarian, this gobby quiff-sporter, has never been shy about shooting off his mouth at powerful people who irritate him. Now he’s at it again. Only this time he’s saved his ire for the new establishment: the PC, sex-panicking, Brexitphobic bores who make up the 21st-century chattering class.

16 November 2017

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Talking heads | 16 November 2017

Exhibitions

Under the central dome of UCL — an indoor crossroads where hordes of students come and go on their way to lectures and lunch — there’s an intriguing exhibition on at the moment about death. ‘Human remains are displayed in this exhibition’, it says in white lettering on the floor atall four entrances, to warn any passing snowflakes. The real head of Jeremy Bentham, who died in 1832, glass eyes staring out at you from behind a vitrine, is indeed a bit queasy-making. This is the central object of the exhibition. Bentham still has his long dark-grey hair at the back and sides of his bald pate, and his whole head is leather-brown from the tanning treatment after his death. He looks as if he’s grinning or grimacing.

Laura Freeman

Worse for wear

Exhibitions

Erté was destined for the imperial navy. Failing that, the army. His father and uncle had been navy men. There were painters and sculptors on his mother’s side, but they were thought very frivolous. Romain de Tirtoff (‘Erté’ came from the French pronunciation of his initials) was born in 1892 at the St Petersburg Naval School where his father Pyotr was inspector. When he was a little boy, his aunt bought him a set of wooden soldiers. Instinctively, he hated war, violence and, above all, uniforms. He burst into tears and threw the box out of the window. What he liked best was to play with his mother’s old perfume bottles, which he dressed in scraps of lace to make ballerinas.

Melanie McDonagh

Dark side of the Moomins

Exhibitions

Tove Jansson, according to her niece’s husband, was a squirt in size and could rarely be persuaded to eat, preferring instead to smoke fags and drink whisky. And when she did eat, it was usually salted cucumbers — to go with the drink. You know, this late in life, I may have encountered my role model. We were at the launch of an excellent edition of four books in her Moomin series at the Finnish embassy. London is in the grip of a kind of Moomin madness right now, what with the books, a Moomin event at the South Bank and a new exhibition of Tove Jansson’s artwork at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Which is good news for Finland, on account of the Moomins being one of its two big cultural exports — the other being Santa Claus, who obviously lives in Lapland.

Kate Flint

Darkness visible | 16 November 2017

Arts feature

All photography requires light, but the light used in flash photography is unique — shocking, intrusive and abrupt. It’s quite unlike the light that comes from the sun, or even from ambient illumination. It explodes, suddenly, into darkness. The history of flash goes right back to the challenges faced by early photographers who wanted to use their cameras in places where there was insufficient light — indoors, at night, in caves. The first flash photograph was probably a daguerreotype of a fossil, taken in 1839 by burning limelight.

Hannah Zafiropoulos

The play’s the thing | 16 November 2017

More from Arts

‘It’s all wizards and elves, right? Dungeons & Dragons stuff?’ Such is the general response when you mention larp, or live-action role-play — the peculiarly Scandi pastime that conjures up images of people dressed up in the forest play-fighting with sticks. Well, they wouldn’t be completely wrong. It’s a weird world and with the help of artists it’s becoming even weirder. In the past few years, larp has become more visible in mainstream culture. And in Britain, it has noticeably begun to infiltrate the art world, becoming popular among artists interested in the potential of play.

The Spectator

Books and Arts – 16 November 2017

Richard Bratby

Talking down to God

Music

‘There is something enviable about the utter lack of inhibition with which Leonard Bernstein carries on,’ wrote the critic of the Boston Globe after the US première of Bernstein’s Third Symphony, Kaddish, in February 1964 — and looking at the forces arrayed at the Barbican, he had a point. In addition to the full LSO there was the London Symphony Chorus, a narrator, a solo soprano and the Tiffin Boys’ Choir. It barely fitted on stage. And if you thought the set-up was extravagant, a glance at Bernstein’s self-written text would probably have sent you screaming from the hall. ‘Lenny’ was classical music’s original bleeding-heart superstar: the man for whom Tom Wolfe coined the phrase ‘radical chic’.

Deborah Ross

Golden oldie

Cinema

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is plainly wonderful, and stars Annette Bening, who is plainly wonderful, as Gloria Grahame, a one-time Hollywood movie star who in later life hits on hard times — ‘a big name in black and white. Not doing too well in colour,’ comments her landlady at one point — and embarks on a romance with a young English actor who is 30 years her junior. It is based on a true memoir. It is a love story, told tenderly, bravely, smartly, movingly. And believably. Older women, it seems, can be interesting, complicated, vital, attractive and sexual. Who knew? (But don’t spread the word, or they’ll all want to be like that, and won’t take the shitty bit-parts any more.

Louise Levene

Ill wind

More from Arts

A kindly cowboy, an East Coast bride, adultery, murder and madness. The Wind, Dorothy Scarborough’s 1925 Texas gothic novel (and Sjöström/Gish movie), offers rich pickings for dance narrative and was selected by Arthur Pita for his Covent Garden main stage debut. What could possibly go wrong? Pita has made some terrific dance dramas — notably 2011’s Metamorphosis for a treacle-glazed Edward Watson — but The Wind is a massive disappointment, looking thin and underwritten despite hefty production values. A miniature railway dollies pointlessly around the stage perimeter and the wind of the title is supplied in tedious abundance by two custom-built threshing machines (the cold front could be felt in the upper circle).

Rod Liddle

Disappearing act

Features

There are many wonderful scenes in the film version of David Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross, but my favourite comes towards the end, between the broken and desperate real estate salesman Shelley ‘The Machine’ Levene, played by Jack Lemmon, and his vile manager John Williamson, played by Kevin Spacey. Levene, facing not merely the sack but probable imprisonment, is pleading for help, cringing and cowering. But he has gone to the wrong man. When he asks Williamson why he won’t help, the manager replies with a magnificent finality: ‘Because I don’t like you.’ And Spacey’s face, almost deadpan for most of the film as he suffers the abuse thrown at him by his salesmen, is now writhed in contempt.