Arts Archives

No. 347

Puzzles

White to play. This is a variation from Carlsen-Aronian, Wijk aan Zee 2015. Black has just played his bishop to a3, uncovering an attack on the white queen while also threatening the c1-rook. How can White respond to this double attack? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 3 February or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk or by fax on 020 7681 3773. The winner will be the first correct answer out of a hat, and each week I am offering a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Candy Neubert

Study

Poems

I’d tell you I came back here, that I’m writing in this room, if you had not found another and are happy, I presume. I’d tell you I returned and I have walked to you know where, if it were not to disturb you for so little, seems unfair. I’d tell you I have chosen the exact same spot to lie, and perhaps I’ll never say so or I may do, by and by.

James Walton

Could it be that Wolf Hall is actually the teeniest bit dull?

Television

In January 1958, the British government began working on the significantly titled Operation Hope Not: its plans for what to do when Winston Churchill died. The plans, it turned out, wouldn’t be needed until January 1965 — but the intervening seven years were obviously well spent, because, as Churchill: A Nation’s Farewell (BBC1, Wednesday) made resoundingly clear, the farewell in question was a triumph. London came to a standstill and Big Ben fell silent as huge crowds watched the procession of the coffin from Westminster to the spectacular state funeral in St Paul’s — and its boat journey along the Thames afterwards. For the 50th anniversary, Jeremy Paxman talked us through the day with the aid of some of those who took part.

Kate Chisholm

The man who discovered Ebola

Radio and podcasts

By some quirk of fate, just as news reached the papers that the Scottish nurse who had contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone was now recovered, the guest on that Radio 4 staple Desert Island Discs was the scientist who first identified the virus. This gave a programme that can seem rather outdated and superficial a whole new resonance, providing the back story to the news, adding that frisson of inquiry, of revelation. Did Professor Peter Piot, as a young researcher working at Antwerp’s Institute of Tropical Medicine almost 40 years ago, realise he was seeing something quite new and so dangerous?

Michael Tanner

An artistic crime is committed at the Royal Festival Hall

Opera

In one of the more peculiar concerts that I have been to at the Royal Festival Hall, Vladimir Jurowski conducted excerpts from Das Rheingold in the first half of the programme, and Rachmaninov’s little-known opera The Miserly Knight in the second half. The idea, I gleaned from a pre-concert chat by the conductor and others, was that the first half would shed some light on the second, showing that although Rachmaninov, at one time an industrious operatic conductor, almost certainly never conducted Wagner, he was strongly influenced by him. The point seems academic, unless you are interested in the minutiae of musical history. Anyway, the Rheingold excerpts failed miserably, on their own terms and as a portent.

Deborah Ross

Trash, review: trash by name, trash by nature

Cinema

Trash is the sort of film one desperately wishes to be kind about — heart supremely, if not burstingly, in the right place and all that — but it doesn’t make life easy for itself. Directed by Stephen Daldry, with a script by Richard Curtis, and set amid the kids who work the rubbish dumps of Rio de Janeiro, this aspires to combine (I think) the lively spirit and warmth of Slumdog Millionaire with the hard-hitting social agenda of City of God, but in working both angles, it doesn’t pull off either one. It also culminates in the most implausibly happy ‘feelgood’ ending known to man (and here I am being kind, because I could have added ‘or beast’, but did not).

Ismene Brown

London International Mime Festival review: on juggling, dance and Wayne Rooney’s hair transplant

My Night With Reg at the Apollo Theatre reviewed: a great play that will go under without an interval

Theatre

Gay plays crowd the theatrical canon. There are the necessary enigmas of Noël Coward, like The Vortex or Design For Living, which are slyly aimed at an audience of knowing code-breakers. There are the proud, defiant (and rather tedious) pleas for understanding like La Cage Aux Folles. And the gayest of them all, My Night With Reg, is also the least overtly gay because it dispenses with all homosexual caricatures. There isn’t an interior designer, a flight steward or a hair stylist in sight, let alone a Liberace fetishist, or a Maria Callas wonk. The characters are mainstream yuppies who are exactly like hetero folk, except that they seduce one another with very little encouragement and an enviably high success rate. We’re in the 1980s.

Peter Phillips

Spotify: saint or sinner?

Music

We have all read about the current woeful state of the CD industry — how it is 28 per cent down on last year, which was 25 per cent down on the previous year, and so on — but do we know why? Is it the endless financial crisis? Or is it that CDs, as a concept, are knackered? And this is despite the fact that more people are taking an interest in recorded music than ever before. The villain of the piece is of course the internet. Where previously the music one wanted was not available without going into a shop and buying it, now there is every chance that there will be a version of it somewhere on the net, which you can listen to for nothing. If it happens to be on YouTube, you may get visuals as well, or a score to follow.

John Gohorry

Persuasions

27 January 2015

Steerpike

Cameron reckons Gove prefers a ‘chillax playlist’ to ‘hip-hoppy’ Beyoncé tunes

After Sarah Vine revealed that her husband Michael Gove's ringtone that infamously disrupted a cabinet meeting was the latest Beyoncé hit, David Cameron has thrown doubt on this version of events. Speaking to LBC this morning, the PM was tackling the big issues. When host Nick Ferrari played a series of Beyoncé tunes, Call Me Dave seemed confused: 'I don’t think it was any, my memory is it sounded like something from the sort of chillax playlist on Spotify. It wasn’t... that’s all a bit more you know sort of hip-hoppy and I don’t think it was that. But I mean it didn’t last very long. So we weren’t playing beat the intro. We were trying to have a cabinet meeting let’s be clear.' The mystery continues...

23 January 2015

Ismene Brown

What happened to virtuosity in dance?

I was watching the Cirque du Soleil’s Kooza at the Royal Albert Hall last week, thinking how much base, uncomplicated enjoyment can be had away from dance. Such relief to watch contortionists, trapezists, high-wire cyclists and crazed men skipping on the Wheel of Death, such relief just to be amazed. If they didn’t make my palms pour sweat with fear, my jaw drop with disbelief, I’d feel dreadfully let down. I wonder what happened to being amazed in dance. I was talking with a friend last week about the lack of amazement offered by the bulk of ballerinas in current productions of the 19th-century warhorses Don Quixote (Royal Ballet) and Swan Lake (English National Ballet).

22 January 2015

Martin Gayford

How will the British public take to Rubens’s fatties?

Arts feature

This week a monumental exhibition, Rubens and His Legacy, is opening at the Royal Academy. It makes the case — surely correct — that the Flemish master was among the most influential figures in European art. There are few painters of the 18th or 19th century — from Joshua Reynolds to Cézanne, Watteau to Constable — who were not affected by his work. It will be interesting, however, to discover what the London art public feel about Rubens himself. The British have had a complicated relationship with the great man. Its apex is represented by his residence in London — admittedly for a brief nine months in 1629–30 — his knighthood and the pleasure expressed by Charles I at meeting ‘a person of such merit’.

Barnaby Rogerson

Mohammed — in pictures

Arts feature

Two months ago I was sitting beside the tomb of a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, telling a story about the last week of the Prophet’s life. It was detailed enough to paint an imaginary portrait of him and included a mildly ribald joke from one of his wives, told to him on his deathbed when he was racked with fever. This kind of story often perplexes my rationalist friends back home. ‘Why can you describe the Prophet but not draw him?’ ‘Why can you make jokes but not draw cartoons?’ Where does this idea that it is forbidden to represent the Prophet come from? There is no line in the Koran that forbids it.

Kate Maltby

Wolf Hall, BBC Two, review: ‘actually rather good’

It starts in darkness. And no, it’s not a metaphor for the crooked timber of the human heart, it’s just bad lighting. Stanley Kubrick sourced his cameras from NASA in order to capture candlelight in his eighteenth-century epic Barry Lyndon; director Peter Kosminsky’s techniques in Tudor drama Wolf Hall seem decidedly sublunary by comparison. And it’s not just the odd interior scene: twilight, candlelight, or moonlight, a nation of viewers tuned into learn about Henry VIII’s Great Matter and instead spent the opening credits frantically ascertaining how to adjust our TV dials.

Richard Lambert

The Deer

Poems

In the summer fields your life left you. She ran out from under the hood of your heart and tottered across tarmac on clippy-cloppy hoofs like a teenage girl in heels. No time to notice the strange evening light, the sun low down on the green high crops, only time to brake and watch her go first one way then the other, undecided at the sight of your wide, loud car; alien, yes, off-white and wild; you glimpsed her on a patch of burned waste ground a farmer must have scorched for a reason, and passed.

Damian Thompson

Confessions of an illegal downloader

Music

I’ve never been into shoplifting, though I once had a friend who was. And, no, before you ask, I’m not using that old ‘friend’ device to hide my own identity. She was a girl I met at university. Bookshops were her hunting ground. I’m assuming she was driven by some sort of compulsion because she couldn’t enjoy the books she nicked and — she assured me — God would always punish her by making a contact lens drop out of her eye within hours of the crime. I wouldn’t enjoy a stolen book, either. But if I listened to classical recordings illicitly downloaded from the internet, would my conscience drain the music of colour? That’s easy to answer.

Lloyd Evans

Young Vic’s Bull, review: a new Mike Bartlett play to bore you into catalepsy

Theatre

A knockout show at the Young Vic. Literally. The stage has been reconfigured as a boxing ring to make Mike Bartlett’s play, Bull, feel like a sporting fixture. This is a common conceit, even a cliché, but here it’s done superbly. The auditorium floor is squash-club yellow and the stage is surrounded by a casual standing area that creates the ragged informal atmosphere of a training arena. Excellent stuff. The play is a wordy, tricky, shifty, nasty, faithless thing. The characters lie about their backgrounds so it’s hard to know who, or what, to latch on to. More problematically the plot is infertile. Nothing grows or develops. At curtain-fall the position is the same as at curtain-rise. We’re in a workplace.

Deborah Ross

A Most Violent Year, review: mesmerising performances – and coats

Cinema

A Most Violent Year is a riveting drama even though I can’t tell you what it’s about, or even what it actually is. (What’s new?) Set in New York City in 1981, against the improbable background that is the heating oil business (it’s sexier than you’d think), this isn’t quite a gangster film and it isn’t quite a thriller and it isn’t quite a morality play and it isn’t quite an exploration of the American Dream and it isn’t one of those parables about the evils of capitalism either. This is discombobulating, initially. We are used to the familiarity of well-defined genres. ‘Where is this going?’ you will keep asking yourself, whereas your best bet is simply to go with it, while admiring the coats.

James Delingpole

Broadchurch, review: ‘unwatchable’

Television

Probably the two greatest advances in western culture in my lifetime have been the Sopranos-style epic serial drama and the advent of TV on demand and/or the DVD box set. I don’t think I’m saying anything weird or contentious — or indeed original — here. For example, I’m writing these words at the end of a week with the Fawn in the Canaries, a holiday which I just know wouldn’t have been half as pleasurable if we hadn’t been able to retire to our room every evening after another hard day’s beach work to the solace of two more episodes of the Nordic miseryfest that is The Bridge.

Kate Chisholm

Radio 4’s War and Peace: almost as good as the book

Radio and podcasts

To have listened to Radio 4’s marathon ten-hour adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace as it was being broadcast on New Year’s Day must have been both wonderful and a bit weird. Like soaking in an ever-replenishing warm bath, indulgent, luxuriant, all-absorbing. Yet at the same time I imagine it was quite hard by the end to step back into your own world after being so taken over by the fictional cares of the Rostov, Bolkonsky and Bezukhov families. Needless to say, I caught barely one episode on that day (how many, I wonder, did listen all the way through?). Fortunately, there’s a chance to catch up in the old-fashioned way, week by week, on Saturday nights (or to download and listen whenever you choose). This, though, is a different kind of listening experience.

21 January 2015

Edward Seckerson

Andrea Chénier, Royal Opera House, review: like a Carry On – but without the jokes | 21 January 2015

Andrea Chénier Royal Opera House, in rep until 6 February Who on earth could have predicted that a hoary old operatic melodrama set in revolutionary France would find resonance in the present where the pen as a weapon against bigotry and hypocrisy has suddenly achieved iconic status. But hold up, let’s not get carried away. We’re talking about Giordano’s Andrea Chénier. Though its eponymous poet does indeed extol free expression at the service of love, the sentiments — the voices of reason in a time of high anxiety — don’t run too deep. And so we’re back where we started, with a hoary old melodrama.

20 January 2015

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Blunt is right. Being posh in the arts is career suicide

Yesterday saw Labour's shadow minister for the arts, Chris Bryant MP, amusingly and justly savaged by the pop star James Blunt for some ill-advised remarks about the predominance of public school boys in the arts: he cited both the Old Harrovian Blunt and the Old Etonian Eddie Redmayne as evidence of a lack of diversity. Now, I am sure the multi-award-winning, multi-platinum-selling former Captain Blunt can look after himself, and during awards season, the Oscar-nominated Redmayne has other things on his plate, but it reminds this former actor of how narrow the arts really are.

19 January 2015

Michael Tanner

Met Opera Live’s Merry Widow, review: kitsch, glorious kitsch

The Merry Widow Met Opera Live 'Even today, at 75, the waltz from The Merry Widow sends me into a fit of rage,' wrote Richard Strauss to his close collaborator Clemens Krauss in 1940. In a brilliant piece in his book Essays and Diversions Robin Holloway discusses why that waltz, and indeed the whole of Lehar's masterpiece infuriated Strauss so much, and mainly concludes that Strauss was jealous of the man who could write the 'deathless' tunes of The Merry Widow. Five years before, Strauss had complained 'to think that one must get to be 70 years old to discover that one's best gift is for kitsch!'But that only shows that there is kitsch and kitsch.

William Cook

How Kraftwerk did more to shape modern music than anyone since the Beatles

Normally, few things in life are quite so tedious as listening to a bunch of academics discussing pop music. However this week’s Kraftwerk Konferenz at Aston University may be the chinwag that refutes this rule. Why so? Well, speakers includes former Kraftwerk member Wolfgang Flur, plus Stephen Mallinder from Cabaret Voltaire and Rusty Egan of Visage - remember them? OK, so these real-life pop stars are still outnumbered by a host of earnest academics, delivering lectures with mind-numbing titles like ‘Kraftwerk and the Issue of Post-Human Authenticity’ and ‘Kraftwerk and the Cultural Studies of Cycling’. However if any band can withstand two days of pointy-headed discourse, it must be Kraftwerk.

15 January 2015

Jasper Rees

Shirley Williams: Saving my mother from the scriptwriters

Arts feature

Shirley Williams sits at the head of a table in a large conference room in Lib Dem HQ. She will be 85 this year, but still has a finger in many a pie, most of which we’re not to talk about here, including the predicted wipe-out of a generation of her party’s MPs at this year’s election. It’s one of the reasons she never made it to see the Tower of London poppies. Too busy. She also had to dash to Russia where she is on the board of the Moscow School of Political Studies. ‘It is all about teaching people about democracy and has fallen under the frown of Mr Putin, which is why I had to go.

Martin Gayford

Geometry in the 20th and 21st centuries was adventurous – and apocalyptic

Exhibitions

Almost a decade ago, David Cameron informed Tony Blair, unkindly but accurately, ‘You were the future once.’ A visitor to the Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibition, Adventures of the Black Square, might mutter the same words in front of the first exhibits. It is now a century since Kazimir Malevich painted the starkest abstractions in the history of art: one simple geometric shape painted on a background of another colour. It was not, one might have thought, an idea with much mileage. Yet those early geometric abstractions had the compressed power of revolutionary manifestos. For good or ill, there has followed 100 years of modernist, post-modernist, and now post-post-modernist geometry in art. This is the theme of the exhibition.

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: War music

From ‘Music and the War’, The Spectator, 16 January 1915: The war, so far, has not thrown up any supreme musical product. It would be an affectation to pretend that the taste of the average British soldier is elevated. As in the Boer War, his repertory is confined to music-ball tunes and songs of an extreme and lugubrious sentimentality. The average "Tommy " does not sing folk-songs or graceful chansons populaires, e.g., Meunier tu dors, Ton moulin va trop vite, like our allies, but at least he does not submit to dictation from above: he chooses for himself.

Paul Deaton

Bike

Poems

I sold the sleek black bike you said I should buy. My special treat, in the shop, on my own, I couldn’t fulfil. It took your love, your woman’s will to tutor me in the art of self-giving and not to fear the gifts that feed. My self-denial father’s handed down creed. Cycling was the emblem of our in-love-fun. We headed out evenings after work, met near the deer park, rode out that summer to an unending, un-setting sun. What now our love is done?