The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
There are some things the French do better than everyone else. Cheese, military defeats and extra-marital affairs are a given, but what about opera? English Touring Opera’s autumn tour sets out a tasting plate of the nation’s Romantic finest, hoping to persuade audiences that there’s more to France than just Carmen. Debussy’s delicate tragedy Pelléas
No sooner had I stepped into the private view of Frank Auerbach’s exhibition at Tate Britain than I bumped into the painter himself. Auerbach was standing, surrounded by his pictures of 60 years ago, but he immediately started talking instead about Michelangelo. Of course, it is generally safe to assume that when artists talk about
Even the most down-to-earth people get emotional about Bill Viola’s videos. Clare Lilley of Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) seems close to tears as she takes me round his new show. Lilley is the show’s curator. She’s usually so matter-of-fact, but when she talks about Viola her eyes light up. When she took her two teenage
You lie so quiet on your bed, You hear the sound and turn your head. I wait and hope, perhaps a chance, The faintest smile – I hold your glance But no – no hint of recognition. I press your lips and take your hand And move aside a greying strand – You seem surprised
‘Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance… Those Greeks were superficial — out of profundity [Nietzsche’s own italics].’ Thus said Nietzsche in the preface to The Gay Science. I expect Richard Strauss knew the passage.
At the entrance to Marylebone railway station is an old piano that anyone can play. Unfortunately, whoever had this sweet idea can’t be bothered to fix the broken notes. Even so, about once a fortnight, on my way back from visiting my mother in Gerrards Cross, I put down my shopping bag and bash out
The Father, set in a swish Paris apartment, has a beautifully spare and elegant set. The stage is framed by a slender rectangle of dazzling white dots which impart an air of incalculable and almost intimidating opulence to the show. I felt I was lucky to be there. Here’s the plot. Kenneth Cranham plays a
The Program, as directed by Stephen Frears, is a biopic of Lance Armstrong, the American cyclist and ‘sporting hero’ who came back from cancer to win the Tour de France seven times before he was exposed as a drugs cheat. It is a thrilling fall-from-grace story, the sort that brings you out in goosebumps just
English has all sorts of emotive metaphors for how we feel about the ground. We’re floored. Or well grounded. Or earthbound. Life’s a minefield, so watch where you step. Stay on your toes. One moment we’re walking on air, next brought down to earth. Which is not at all the same as being down-to-earth. We
Television used to employ entertainers to entertain the public. Back then you could count the channels on the fingers of one hand and still have a thumb left over to stick aloft in praise of the nightly parade of talent. That was decades ago, before every housing estate in the land pointed supplicatory dishes at
Imagine what Brennig Davies must have felt like just before 11 o’clock last Tuesday evening. The 15-year-old was about to hear Ian McKellen reading his prizewinning short story nationwide on Radio 1. The voice of Gandalf broadcasting words that have emerged from your own head must have been a spooky moment for Davies, whose story
‘Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions to all musicians, appear and inspire…’ Auden wrote his words for the young Benjamin Britten, who was born on St Cecilia’s Day, and who set them to music, but his poem would also be a tribute to the composer that Britten admired above all others except Mozart. Franz Schubert was
So, it isn’t only the hammer-wielding nutters of Isis who destroy ‘immoral art’. So do we, in supposedly civilised Britain. A judge’s order that the artworks of convicted child abuser Graham Ovenden be destroyed, on the basis that they do not reach our ‘standards of propriety’, is an act of medievalism to match any of the statue-smashing
Watch a child draw. See how she scrawls with abandon, jabs the felt tip at the paper, colours an eye so deeply the pen drives a hole through the paper. Look as she concentrates on the action of the subject, strips out unnecessary detail, toys with scale. This is pure drawing, instinctive, expressive and truthful.
Last night BBC staff and musicians alike assembled at Portcullis House to back UK Music’s Let it Beeb campaign. As guests including Lord Hall, Sandie Shaw and Anneka Rice raised a glass to the campaign which aims to protect BBC music services from the threat of charter renewal, MPs including Ed Vaizey and Jess Phillips made
Sometimes, contrary to a widespread suspicion, critics do get it right. On 17 August, 1798 an anonymous contributor to the Diario de Madrid, reviewing an exhibition at the Royal Spanish Academy, noted that Goya’s portrait of Don Andrés del Peral was so good — in its draughtsmanship, its freedom of brushwork, its light and shade
This is my 345th and last monthly column about pop music for The Spectator. I believe I might be the third-longest continuously serving columnist here, after Taki and Peter Phillips. Others have been writing for the magazine for longer, but have occasionally been given time off for good behaviour. You may be astounded to learn
What a fate it is to be hung next to the most famous painting in a gallery. To be overlooked, a framing device, just out of shot of every selfie taken in front of ‘The Ambassadors’ or ‘Mona Lisa’. The painting immediately to the left of Johannes Vermeer’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ in the
That cinema is having another Ballardian moment will surprise few fans. J.G. Ballard, who died of cancer in 2009 at the age of 78, was one of the darkest, most unsettling of post-war British novelists. In a career that spanned half a century from his debut as a science-fiction writer in the mid-1950s, his surreal
Opera North’s new production of Cole Porter’s masterwork Kiss Me, Kate has been so widely and justly praised that I wonder whether there is much for a week-later reviewer to add. It’s not as if the work needs much exegesis or critical commentary, though it may be worth pointing out that what we hear in
Philippe V was a Bourbon prince who secured the throne of Spain using his family connections. Claire van Kampen is a writer who relied on the same method to secure a West End opening for her play about Philippe. It stars Mark van Kampen (aka Mark Rylance) as the charmingly dotty Frenchman. Philippe was a
It’s probably blasphemous to admit that I’ve never thought very much of John Lennon’s music. Common sense tells me it must be good but it’s never made much of an impact on me no matter how hard I’ve tried to appreciate it. If I like a Beatles song, I usually discover it’s by George. But
Close to the Edge (BBC4, Tuesday) feels very much like an idea conceived during a particularly good night in the BBC bar. Why not take the ‘scripted reality’ methods of such youth hits as The Only Way Is Essex and apply them to a group of over-65s living in Bournemouth? So it is that the
The Met in HD series got off to an exciting start this year with Il Trovatore, an opera I adore but have never seen a satisfactory performance of, until this one. The production by Sir David McVicar is in his now traditional style, with a reasonable number of very solid-looking props designed by Charles Edwards,
I suppose you can look at it two ways. Glastonbury, and rock festivals generally, were once patronised by music obsessives; largely male and probably some distance along the autistic spectrum, in many cases. People like me, in other words, when I was younger. Oh yes – and that’s another thing. Age. They used to be
Here are some fur coats reclaiming the design canon for the sisterhood. They are draped over the back of tubular steel chairs. In this daring arrangement, they subvert the established patriarchy by partially obscuring the ‘autograph design object’ of the chair, something that represents the historic subsuming of all female creativity under male dominance. While
Brian Sewell, who died last month, was not popular with his fellow critics. He accused them of kowtowing to power, of puffing up every trendy artist put forward by the galleries and collectors. Of ‘arse-licking’, to be precise (see for example this exchange with Matthew Collings). They could brush off this charge easily enough: Sewell just
Next week Frank Auerbach will be honoured by the British art establishment with a one-man show at Tate Britain. It’s a fitting tribute for an artist who’s widely (and quite rightly) regarded as Britain’s greatest living painter. Yet although Auerbach has spent almost all his life in Britain, what’s striking about his paintings is how
The artist, according to Walter Sickert, ‘is he who can take a piece of flint and wring out of it drops of attar of roses’. In other words, whatever else it is — and all attempts at definition tend to founder — art consists in making something rare and memorable out of not very much.