Culture

As the 414 bus swings left from the Edgware Road at Marble Arch you avert your eyes, hoping you won’t have to look at the thing looming up in front of you for a single second longer than you have to. Even so, you know it’s there — a blot on the sky, a gulp of polluted air. I’m talking about a 33-ft-high bronze sculpture in the form of a decapitated horse, muzzle pointed downwards, in the middle of Marble Arch. The epitome of ghastly good taste, it looks like an expensive knick-knack from Harrods blown up to a size that would have appealed to Saddam Hussein. When the thing arrived, the Evening Standard assured us that it would be on view for only one month.

Whereas Don Giovanni seems, for assorted reasons, to be unfloatable at present, The Marriage of Figaro is virtually unsinkable, with Così somewhere between. In general it seems that comedies go in and out of favour and fashion more than tragedies or ‘straight’ works, though Figaro may be a glorious exception, like Die Meistersinger. It is horrible to contemplate the possibility of a world which was indifferent to their charms and profundities. Even so, the new production of Figaro at ENO gives some cause for alarm. Fiona Shaw, who has not previously produced a classic opera, sees the work as a maze, a harmless enough notion unless you take it that in the middle of a maze there must be a Minotaur, the only candidate for that in Figaro being the Count.

Those BBC refuseniks will rue the day they passed up the chance to relocate to Salford, England’s new cultural capital, says William Cook Standing on the roof of Daniel Libeskind’s Imperial War Museum North, staring at the shiny new buildings down below, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Hamburg or Berlin. There’s the same futuristic skyline, the same glint of glass and metal. There’s even a sleek modern tram, snaking between the shops and cafés along the quay. But this isn’t a continental conurbation — this is Salford. The improbable renaissance of this unloved city sums up England’s biggest schism, not between black and white or rich and poor, but between north and south.

  Street Scene may well be Kurt Weill’s most successful work from his American period, but seeing it in as good a production as the Opera Group’s at the Young Vic was cause for both enjoyment and reservations. In the next couple of weeks it will be touring to Basingstoke, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Hull, so plenty of people will have and should take the chance of seeing it. I’d go again if I were nearer one of those places, for Weill is always at least interesting, though not always quite in the way that he wanted to be — he intended, like Brecht, that we should be filled with indignation about many of the scenes he presents, but we’re much more likely to be beguiled by catchy melodies.