Arts Archives

Pink Floyd’s new album: it’s not hip – but it is good

Yesterday, I popped into Rough Trade West record store to purchase the new Pink Floyd album. That isn’t something I expected to say in my lifetime, but 20 years after their 14th album The Division Bell, one final album has been added to the band’s canon: The Endless River. Although this laddie does not think of himself as a professional music critic, I like to think I know my Floyd so here is a quick take on their new release. The Endless River is not on a par, and nor should it be, with the following albums: Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, The Wall, The Division Bell or anything else Pink Floyd have released.

10 November 2014

A.S.H. Smyth

A reverend at war

This evening – Armistice Eve – Ben Fleetwood Smyth (no relation) and Hugh Brunt will be putting on their annual British Art Music Series concert: this year, in aid of St Paul’s, Knightsbridge. Narrated by Judith Paris, and interspersed with Victorian and Edwardian music from the BAM Consort and the BAM Ensemble, the event will tell the story of one London community’s life, both at home and abroad, across the full span of the First World War, focussing on extracts from the parish magazines of the time, read by the current vicar, Fr Alan Gyle, and by yours truly.

7 November 2014

Digby Warde-Aldam

Our verdict on the North Korean embassy’s art exhibition: ‘I’ve seen worse’

What’s your favourite of Kim Jong Un’s photo opportunities? I like the pictures of the cuddly psychopath inspecting a lubricant factory. One of them has Kim rubbing his hands with glee as pipes squeeze lube into an oil drum. Classic stuff. As one who keeps a close eye on the Dear Leader’s state visits, I was a bit put out when the Dear Leader of the very, very Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea disappeared for six weeks. There were reports of regime change, gout and epic cheese binges. It was a relief, then, when business returned to usual. This week, Kim appeared in his most impressive propaganda shots to date, walking round an orphanage smoking a fag. The Mail’s coverage identified a Thick of It-style balls up in the official images.

6 November 2014

Ellis Woodman

How Londoners can reclaim the River Thames

Arts feature

Last week, 539 apartments designed by Frank Gehry and Norman Foster were made available for off-plan purchase. This was heralded by simultaneous launches in London and Kuala Lumpur and a press release announcing Sting and Trudie Styler as early buyers. Battersea Power Station has stood unused for more than 30 years but after multiple failed attempts at redevelopment progress is now well under way towards its transformation into one of London’s most desirable addresses. Ultimately due to house 3,400 homes — only 15 per cent of which are set to be affordable — the project is emblematic of a far larger reclamation of London’s waterfront as a site for luxury housing.

Martin Gayford

Egon Schiele at the Courtauld: a one-note samba of spindly limbs, nipples and pudenda

Exhibitions

One day, as a student — or so the story goes — Egon Schiele called on Gustav Klimt, a celebrated older artist, and showed him a portfolio of drawings with the abrupt query, ‘Do I have talent?’ Klimt looked at them, then answered, ‘Much too much!’ One gets an inkling of what Klimt was getting at from the feverishly intense work on show in Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude. From childhood, Schiele drew with manic fluency. His father, a syphilitic stationmaster, was irritated to discover that a sketchbook, a gift to the boy intended to last for months, had been filled in less than a day.

Marcus Berkmann

Is there anything a gospel choir can’t cheer up?

Music

‘I’m starting to think that all of the world’s major problems can be solved with either oyster sauce or backing vocals.’ That was Brian Eno writing in his diary one evening, after a long day’s thinking and maybe a glass or two of something agreeable. I am not entirely convinced by the bivalve mollusc argument, but the second half of his apophthegm makes perfect sense. Last week I was listening to Tim Burgess’s 2012 album Oh No I Love You (OGenesis), a recent and possibly inspired purchase. Mr Burgess is perhaps better known as lead singer and increasingly large face of The Charlatans, the long-serving Midlands indie band who enjoyed a brief spell in the sun during the Britpop horror.

Lloyd Evans

An inept dud penetrates the Park Theatre’s dross-filters – and I blame Beckett

Theatre

Jonah and Otto is a lost-soul melodrama that keeps its audience guessing. Where are we? The Channel coast somewhere. Indoors or out? Not sure. Near a church maybe? Violence barges in. Jonah, a mouthy scruff, shoves a knife in the face of Otto, a dignified old gent with Big Ears whiskers and a dark, elegant suit. This strange assault is followed by further peculiarities. Rather than calling the cops, Otto seeks a rapprochement with Jonah and they start a rambling, off-beat friendship. Later we discover that Otto, a Cambridge-educated vicar, has an adult daughter who was crippled in childhood by a road accident, and this detail lends credibility to his desire to befriend and redeem his mugger. But the relevant information arrives far too late.

Stephen Walsh

Mariinsky’s Boris Godunov – a revelation

Opera

Anyone who thinks opera singers and orchestral players are overworked should spare a thought for the Mariinsky Opera on its trek round England and Wales this week. After Prokofiev’s Betrothal in a Monastery in Cardiff on Sunday, the whole caravan rolled up at the Barbican in the shorter — but not exactly lightweight — first version of Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov. And by the time you read this it will have added Shchedrin’s The Left-Hander and (in Birmingham) the first two instalments of Wagner’s Ring, plus, for the chorus (not required in The Ring till Sunday’s Götterdämmerung), two concerts of Russian sacred music in London and Cardiff.

Deborah Ross

Interstellar: like Star Trek – but dumber and more tiring

Cinema

Christopher Nolan’s futuristic epic Interstellar isn’t a clever film, or even a dumb film with a clever film trying to get out. Instead, and no matter what the hype may say, this is a dumb film with an even dumber film trying to get out. Even the tag line, which is also the basic premise, is super-dumb. It goes: ‘Mankind was born on earth. It was never meant to die here.’ Who says? How can anyone know what nature’s intentions might be? What did it intend for dinosaurs, for example? The golden toad? The use of ‘mankind’, rather than ‘humankind’, is also telling, as this is very much in the tradition of the alpha-male American superhero who single-handedly saves us (ladies too!; thanks!

Kate Chisholm

Many more Germans were displaced in 1945 than Indians during partition

Radio and podcasts

What Radio 3 needs is a musical version of Neil MacGregor. The director of the British Museum and now a stalwart of Radio 4 is an intellectual powerhouse but his talks on radio are so clear, so crisp, so deceptively easy to follow that he draws you in and makes you feel that you too can understand the world in the way he does, with his enormously broad vision and his deep understanding of the way things connect.

Polly Walshe

To my father, solicitor to the landed gentry

Autumn Shades

3 November 2014

Ismene Brown

What happens to male ballet greats when they retire?

What happens when a torrent of exceptional male stars leave the stage and flood the jobs market? Especially in a world when classical ballet appears to be becoming less fashionable, eclipsed by contemporary fashions and nervousness about audiences? The titan of the Royal Ballet and Bolshoi, Irek Mukhamedov, was renowned at Covent Garden in the Nineties for his unique combination of muscle and gentlemanly manners, and if English National Ballet’s men are looking particularly refined on their winter tour of Swan Lake and Coppelia it may well be the result of his stellar coaching last month. ENB’s director Tamara Rojo invited him over from Slovenia, where he has been running the national ballet, to hand on some of his precious knowhow to her young team of new male soloists.

Julie Burchill

Pop stars at prayer – from Madonna to the Beatles, and jihadist Cat Stevens

A spoof in the Israeli Daily recently had Eminem planning to convert to Judaism and move to Tel Aviv. But I don’t think we’ll be seeing that any time soon - he’s not really waiting for the Messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy. Still, stranger things have happened. I was very amused by the Reverend Richard Coles recently; when asked if he is the only vicar who has ever topped the British pop charts, he said 'Yes, but I met the vicar of Hitchen the other day and I said 'We've met, haven't we? Was it through the church?"' Apparently the vicar of Hitchen replied 'No, I was in Pigbag in the 1980s!

30 October 2014

Andrew Lambirth

The pop artist whose transgressions went too far – for the PC art world

Arts feature

Allen Jones (born 1937) has been demonised. In 1969 he made a group of three sculptures of scantily-clad female figures. They were slightly larger than life and arranged in positions that enabled them (with the addition of a glass top or padded seat) to be turned into a table, a chair and a hat stand. These super-mannequins were highly modelled, wigged and leather-booted, and unavoidably realistic. When first exhibited in 1970 they provoked outrage among the feminist community. Jones’s 1978 retrospective of graphic art at the ICA caused a near riot even though the sculptures weren’t shown. In 1986, when the chair went on display, it had acid thrown over it by an incensed extremist.

Martin Gayford

The secret world of the artist’s mannequin

Exhibitions

A 19th-century London artists’ supplier named Charles Roberson offered imitation human beings for sale or rent, with papier-mâché heads, soft leather skin and flexible, jointed limbs. The top-of-the-range article — described in Roberson’s catalogue as ‘Parisian stuffed’ — was pricey. Nonetheless, painters often felt they just had to have one whatever the cost. Many such creatures inhabit Silent Partners: Artist & Mannequin from Function to Fetish, a pioneering exhibition at the Fitz-william Museum, Cambridge. There are also distinguished paintings on view. But it is the figures themselves — slightly comic, a touch eerie, hard to classify — that are the real stars of the show.

Ismene Brown

Russians made the theatre space the most liberating imaginative device ever invented

Exhibitions

You have to hand it to the Russians. They beat us into space, beat us to sexual equality, and a small display of early Soviet avant-garde theatre and film design, tucked away in the V&A’s ‘Performance’ area, proves that they beat us hollow in matters of the dressing-up box too. When you arrive (that is, if you arrive — it is a labyrinthine trek to find it) at Russian Avant-Garde Theatre, you should make straight for the little screen. It shows the amazing 1924 sci-fi film Aelita, in which an engineer living under ‘Military Communism’ builds a spaceship and flies to Mars where he falls for Aelita, Queen of Martians.

Fisun Güner

How Rothko become the mythic superman of mystical abstraction

Exhibitions

Mark Rothko was an abstract artist who didn’t see himself as an abstract artist — or at least not in any ‘formalist’ sense. If a critic called him a ‘colourist’, he would bristle; if they admired his sense of composition, he would complain that this was not what he was about at all. His was an art of deep content, his subject an invocation of the religious, the tragic, the mythic. ‘The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them,’ he once famously said. ‘And if you, as you say, are moved only by their colour relationships, then you miss the point.

Tom Cook

The Seabirds

Poems

Out on the crumbling landscape’s farthest edge, Their winter journey starts, and while I know Some names, I can’t recall from stripe of wing Or sobbish cry which honours which. And so This panic by a fading coastal ledge Is all that’s left — an urgent need to bring Old screams back round in one last salt-sprayed plea, Reminiscence crashing up the sand: The wave-break when you pushed away my hand Eroding me down to an enemy, Beginning our migration with your words.

Deborah Ross

Mr Turner: the gruntiest, snortiest, huffiest film of the year – and the most beautiful too

Cinema

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/apollomagazine/Apollo_final.mp3" title="Tom Marks, editor of Apollo magazine, talks to Mike Leigh"] Listen [/audioplayer]Mr Turner may be the gruntiest film of the year, possibly the gruntiest film ever. ‘Grunt, grunt, grunt,’ goes Mr Turner (Timothy Spall) as he sketches, paints, gropes his housekeeper, woos a Margate landlady, winds up John Constable something rotten. But what I now know is that when you have Spall doing the grunting, and Mike Leigh at the helm, as both writer and director, such gruntiness can be quite sublime, as can snorting and huffing. This is a biopic of the painter J.M.W. Turner, ‘master of light’, and the greatest painter that ever lived according to many, but it is not a regular biopic.

James Delingpole

James Delingpole falls in love with Grayson Perry – and almost comes round to Chris Huhne

Television

I love Grayson Perry. You might almost call him the anti-Russell Brand: a genuinely talented artist who also has some very interesting stuff to say — as he’s demonstrating yet again in his highly entertaining new series Who Are You? (C4, Wednesdays). It ought to be ghastly and it ought to be pretentious: a trendy ceramicist known at least as much for his transvestism as for his wackily decorated, hugely fashionable pots meets up with people from diverse backgrounds so that he can explore the theme of identity and then exhibit creations inspired by them at the National Portrait Gallery.

Michael Tanner

Met Opera Live’s Macbeth: Netrebko’s singing stirred almost as much as her décolletage

Opera

This season of live Met relays got off to a most impressive start, with an electrifying account of Verdi’s tenth opera and first really great, though uneven piece, Macbetto (as I think it should be called; that’s what the central figure is called throughout). Fabio Luisi showed that he is far more at home conducting Verdi than Wagner — though his Bruckner performances are also magnificent. What made this the most stirring performance of Macbetto that I have seen was the strength of Željko Lucic’s performance in the title role.

Peter Phillips

Peter Phillips is mugged by a gang of Praetorius-loving six-year-old girls in China

Music

We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how good they are at business, perhaps finding the prospect of them rushing into our world rather daunting. However, a part of this process has been the sudden curiosity there for western art-forms. Not long ago the idea of a tour of China by a European early music group would have seemed completely fantastical. What space was there in a country which for many years had allowed only eight ‘model plays’ to be publicly staged — all of them about the achievements of the army — for the votive antiphons of Tallis, or the Passions of Bach? Not everyone in that vast country is ready for such delicacies yet, but a light has begun to shine.

Ismene Brown

Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Royal Ballet battle for the heart of English dance

The only way is Essex University

Neville’s Island: a play from the era of Men Behaving Badly – when women were seen as exotic excrescences

Theatre

Start with a joke. Neville’s Island. Get it? Laughing yet? Are your ribs splitting into pieces? It’s a cracker, isn’t it? Well it’s a pun, at least, on Devil’s Island. Tim Firth’s play, regarded as a modern classic, premiered 22 years ago in Scarborough: Ayckbourn country, and it shows. Four corporate numbskulls on a team-building exercise get stranded on a remote islet with no hope of rescue. Their Alcatraz is located in the Lake District, which is known to millions as a dead-safe holiday habitat, and this seems to have unsettled Firth so he crams in extra snags to convince us the castaways’ predicament is genuine. Their skiff has capsized. Killer pike throng the lake-waters. Food supplies are limited to a sausage.

Kate Chisholm

Kate Chisholm on what makes the BBC World Service so special

Radio and podcasts

‘Don’t take it for granted,’ she warned. ‘It’s one of the few places where you can hear diverse voices, different points of view; where you can understand that the world is infinitely complex.’ Alana Valentine, an Australian writer, was talking about the BBC World Service with such passion it was inspiring. You might think she would say this, wouldn’t she. After all, Valentine was giving her acceptance speech having just won first prize in the World Service’s International Radio Playwriting Competition for her radio drama The Ravens. Yet what she said was striking because you could tell she really meant it. These were not just platitudes.

29 October 2014

Digby Warde-Aldam

Are bowls of pasta Blairite?

If Thatcher was Britain’s Bonaparte, then Blair was most certainly our Louis-Philippe. It was during the reign of the latter that the bourgeoisie came to dominate the status quo in France, and they needed somewhere to gather. Not for them the salons of the aristocracy – instead, they invented the destination restaurant, imitations of which sprung up all over Paris to cater for the wannabes. Blair was undoubtedly our most haut-bourgeois leader. But what of his gastronomic legacy? Does it survive, or does it, like some ruined Empire man in a Balzac novel, limp around dressed in the tattered remains of its pomp? What, more to the point, is a Blairite restaurant? The answer is: ASK Italian.

27 October 2014

Kate Maltby

This opera is simplistic and dangerous. So is banning it

My father’s house was razed In 1948 When the Israelis passed over our street I’ve never forgotten the opening lines to John Adam’s 1991 opera, The Death of Klinghoffer. Crisp, elegiac, this 'Chorus of Exiled Palestinians' rises up to a moment of anguished dissonance as it spits out the word 'Israelis'. It’s beautiful. It’s also the most egregious romanticisation of Palestinian terrorism outside the muralled bunkers of the Gaza Strip. In the Metropolitan Opera’s new production, a chorus of shrouded Palestinian women form a funeral procession as they intone their complaint, eventually parting to reveal a 5-year-old boy, cradled in the arms of his weeping, widowed mother.