Culture

Welsh National Opera’s new production of La Bohème, which I saw last week in Birmingham, is striking in a variety of ways, but its outstanding feature is the conducting of Carlo Rizzi. One tends to think that of all operas Bohème can look after itself, and up to a point that is true. Bashed out metronomically on a pub piano, or dispersed underneath the arches at Waterloo, or most absurdly of all made into a DVD and set in ‘real’ locations, with actual snow falling, it remains inviolate, though that isn’t perhaps the first word to use in connection with anything Puccinian. Yet every now and then it gets the royal treatment, and how much more satisfying it is when it does.

Now, here’s a question. Should Gary Barlow be stripped of his OBE? There are a number of possible answers, including who the hell is Gary Barlow? Well, he was, or is, part of the useless singing ensemble known as Take That. And second, another question in response to the question: why did we give the idiot an OBE in the first place? He’s hardly Lennon and McCartney, is he? If we give Take That honours for their services to music then you might just as well give one to that chap who, a few years ago, was able to fart Jerusalem. But it seems that Barlow got his at least in part for services to charrriddeeeeeee.

In 2011, the Southbank Centre hosted the Festival of Britain to mark its fiftieth anniversary. Not wanting to be outdone this year, they are staging the Festival of the World. Last night, Westminster’s arty crowd crossed the bridge to toast this ambitiously titled project.  The evening was worth the walk, with flowing Pol and also a impromptu compulsory poetry reading. Simon Armitage informed ex-ministers (like Tessa Jowell) and Lib Dem wannabes (like Don Foster) that poets were the real lawmakers with the ‘constituency of the heart, the chief whip of the head and constitution of imagination.’ Foster shut his eyes and even swayed slightly to take in the words.

Sad to hear of the death of Ray Bradbury, although he enjoyed a good long life. He was a wonderful writer. Rather better, I think, than the more fashionable Philip K. Dick — certainly Bradbury was the superior story teller, and his fiction was as much about what it is to be human as the mildly sci-fi weirdnesses which I suppose gave him his early fame. Between the ages of 15 and 18, when I was besotted with US literature, he was one of my three favourites — along with Updike and Sinclair Lewis. An odd threesome, I suppose. Oddly, it wasn’t Bradbury’s acclaimed masterpiece, Fahrenheit 451, which captivated me; I thought that sorta dystopian stuff had been done better by Orwell, Zamyatin and Huxley. It was the short stories, full of menace, wonderfully atmospheric.

This picture, to me, sums up today’s Jubilee flotilla: drenched Royal College of Music students cheerfully singing Land of Hope and Glory at the end of a spectacle attended by over a million people. The rain, far from ruining the event, made it even more memorable and didn’t seem to deter the crowds. As the choir’s conductor put it: 'freezing cold, wind, and rain but euphoric and unforgettable'. Sky News captured the spirit by covering its real source: the onlookers. 'Even on the train down, people were talking to each other,' a member of the public said. 'It’s been amazing seeing the princess and the queen, I loved it,' said a four year old. Sky seemed to have mobilized its entire staff, from every point on the Thames to street parties in (sunny) Devon.

Gustav Klimt first came to Venice in the spring of 1899, in pursuit of Alma Schindler, the young stepdaughter of his friend and fellow artist Carl Moll. The nascent love affair between the artist, who was then in his late thirties, and the 19-year-old Alma was brought to an abrupt end when the girl’s mother read her diary and Klimt was asked to leave. Three years later she married Mahler. But before Klimt departed from Venice, Klimt and Alma had visited San Marco where, as Alma recorded, the Basilica’s mosaics, glittering in the half-light, made a profound impression on him.