Arts Archives

By the book

Cinema

I must confess to being completely unmoved by the Harry Potter phenomenon. The books strike me as derivative and bland, and the film versions are, if anything, even worse — faithful adaptations of schlock. Pulp fiction can be transformed into art, but only if the film-makers treat the source material with a healthy amount of disrespect (see The Godfather). The various writers and directors who’ve worked on the Harry Potter franchise behave like Talmudic scholars adapting the Holy Book. Or, rather, seven Holy Books, God help us. Some grudging acknowledgment is due to David Yates, director of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, the latest film in the series.

Michael Tanner

Stunning Cinderella

Opera

Massenet’s late opera Cendrillon brings the Royal Opera’s low-key season to an effervescent if somewhat vapid close. Massenet’s late opera Cendrillon brings the Royal Opera’s low-key season to an effervescent if somewhat vapid close. I doubt whether a better case could be made for it than in this production, imported from Santa Fe. Laurent Pelly, an expert in contriving ingenious and non-stop action, keeps the first two acts, building up to Cinderella’s enforced departure from the ball, bowling along against an appealing background, designed by Barbara de Limburg, of wall-sized pages of Perrault’s tale, which slide away in favour of, usually, scarlet settings.

Peter Phillips

Happy anniversaries

Music

There has been much to celebrate in Barcelona this week for musicians of a certain bent. The Medieval and Renaissance Music Society held its annual international conference there, which gave the delegates the opportunity to celebrate the musicologist Bruno Turner’s 80th birthday, as well as the 20th anniversary of the foundation of Musica Reservata Barcelona and the 400th anniversary of the death of the Spanish composer, Victoria. The city may be more associated with architects (Gaudí) and painters (Dalí and Miró) than with musicians, but it knows how to stage a pachanga when the pressure is on. The only disappointment was that Rafael Nadal, who was born in Majorca and so is a Catalan speaker, did not win Wimbledon.

Deborah Ross

Brutal but brilliant

Cinema

Cell 211 is a brilliantly ingenious Spanish prison drama and I would recommend it even though I didn’t see so much of it. Cell 211 is a brilliantly ingenious Spanish prison drama and I would recommend it even though I didn’t see so much of it. I might even have seen as little as 40 per cent, there are so many head-behind-hands moments. It is packed with Tarantino-style violence, and, I think, even a ear being sliced off — a ear was about to be sliced off and, when I looked up again, it was definitely gone, so I’m pretty sure this is what happened — but the plotting is so fine and the suspense so blinding and the character strokes so masterful I was totally gripped. (Gripped while wishing it was all over, but gripped all the same.

Kate Chisholm

Pursuit of excellence | 16 July 2011

Radio and podcasts

Amid all the chattering about hacking it’s a relief to discover that some things don’t change and yet still, surprisingly in these tainted times, proffer sterling quality. Amid all the chattering about hacking it’s a relief to discover that some things don’t change and yet still, surprisingly in these tainted times, proffer sterling quality. Saturday mornings on Radio 3, for instance, which this week gave us a deconstructed version of Bizet’s L’Arlésienne (or The Girl from Arles) on CD Review. I’ve been listening to this staple of the Third’s diet since long before CDs were even invented. Yet on Saturday somehow I heard it afresh and realised just how much my musical education has depended on this single 45-minute programme.

10 July 2011

Alex Massie

Sunday Morning Country: Gillian Welch and David Rawlings

Sorry for the lack of posts here lately. That's what a trip to London, an 11 hour journey home and a weekend of cricket will do. Anyway, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have a new album out and it is as good as you might expect. Here's a bootlegged clip from a recent gig that a) is swell, b) is vivid and c) reminds one of Rawlings' contribution to the partnership. Yeah, I'll Fly Away....

9 July 2011

Andrew Lambirth

Artistic rebellion

Exhibitions

Vorticism is often referred to as the only British 20th-century art movement of international importance, but the work of the Vorticists — Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth, Gaudier-Brzeska and their associates — has up to now not been widely known. Vorticism is often referred to as the only British 20th-century art movement of international importance, but the work of the Vorticists — Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth, Gaudier-Brzeska and their associates — has up to now not been widely known. However, the Tate’s show has already been seen in Venice at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, making it the first ever Vorticist exhibition in Italy, stronghold of Futurism (Vorticism’s rival), and in America, at the Nasher Museum of Art in North Carolina.

William Cook

An instinct for comedy

Arts feature

William Cook discovers that the clue to Nicholas Parsons’s enduring success lies in his ability to laugh at himself When I was a kid, watching Sale of the Century on my grandma’s colour telly, Nicholas Parsons used to seem like the smartest man in show business. Meeting him half a lifetime later, in a rooftop restaurant in Kensington, I’m pleased to find that he still looks just as dapper. His blue blazer is neatly pressed, his white shirt is crisply ironed and his bright eyes sparkle like a schoolboy’s. You’d never guess he was in his eighties, with more than 60 years in showbiz behind him. He’s worked with Tony Hancock, Kenneth Williams — all the greats, and he’s outlived the lot of them. He’s a living marvel.

Peter Hoskin

Lampooning the royals

Theatre

After all the splendiferous photographs of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, how about something more subversive? That is what Kew Palace delivers in its exhibition of George III caricatures from the collection of Lord Baker. This is royalty filtered not through the flattering lenses of the modern photographer, but through the sharp nibs of 18th-century cartoonists such as James Gillray. The results are vicious. Delightfully so. The fashion among Gillray and his co-conspirators was to lampoon the King for his interest in agriculture. ‘Farmer George’ is shown as more mouldy peasant than monarch, with billowing lips and the shoulder-heavy gait of an ox. But this is nothing compared with the satirical treatment of his wife, Queen Charlotte.

Marcus Berkmann

Unnecessary tweaks

Radio and podcasts

Is Glastonbury over yet? If not, can it be very soon please? On Jo Whiley’s exciting new evening show on Radio 2, the poor woman can still barely finish a sentence without referring to ‘Glasto’ or ‘the Pyramid Stage’ or whatever it’s called, where everyone who played was brilliant, as everyone always is in Jo’s world. Is Glastonbury over yet? If not, can it be very soon please? On Jo Whiley’s exciting new evening show on Radio 2, the poor woman can still barely finish a sentence without referring to ‘Glasto’ or ‘the Pyramid Stage’ or whatever it’s called, where everyone who played was brilliant, as everyone always is in Jo’s world.

Michael Tanner

Figure of mystery

Opera

What is wrong with Peter Grimes, the central figure of Britten’s eponymous opera? Or should the question be: what is wrong with Peter Grimes? For though there is no question that the opera makes a powerful and disturbing impression in a decent performance, it turns out always to be rather difficult to locate the focus of the work. What is wrong with Peter Grimes, the central figure of Britten’s eponymous opera? Or should the question be: what is wrong with Peter Grimes? For though there is no question that the opera makes a powerful and disturbing impression in a decent performance, it turns out always to be rather difficult to locate the focus of the work.

Lloyd Evans

Electrifying Spacey

Theatre

Was it curvature of the spine? Was it a club foot? Was it just an epic dose of facial acne? We don’t know exactly where, how or in what degree Richard III’s deformities manifested themselves. Was it curvature of the spine? Was it a club foot? Was it just an epic dose of facial acne? We don’t know exactly where, how or in what degree Richard III’s deformities manifested themselves. Nor did Shakespeare. So he just went with a hunch. In Sam Mendes’s modern-dress production, Kevin Spacey offers us Richard as a double paralympian. He has a mini-excrescence, like a junior dinosaur egg, obtruding meekly from the back of his crisply laundered white shirt.

Deborah Ross

Take the plunge

Cinema

Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is his fifth film in 38 years (what a lazybones!) and travels way beyond what I can think about, or any of us can think about, which may be its point. Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is his fifth film in 38 years (what a lazybones!) and travels way beyond what I can think about, or any of us can think about, which may be its point. How are we here? Why are we here? In what way do the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ connect, if they do? I know. Exhausting. And although people say you should not watch a Malick film as you do other films, that you should immerse yourself in it as if it were a meditative experience, I simply don’t know how you are meant to accomplish this. Are there evening classes? Self-help books?

Kate Chisholm

Where have all the flowers gone?

Radio and podcasts

My favourite fact of the week is to have discovered that in the UK there are 2,500 species of eyebright, 2,500 different varieties of that dainty, slender-stemmed flower, with its bright white trumpet. It’s so small and yet always stands out, demanding to be noticed. You can tell it’s a plant that’s determined to survive no matter how much we might try to stamp it out. At this time of year you can see them, tiny but dazzling dots of white, on grassy roundabouts and roadside verges and in your own lawn, if you’re lucky.

8 July 2011

Kate Maltby

Dream Stories

It’s a slightly surreal time to be a theatre-goer in London. Two of the most exciting productions running at the moment both trace descents into the more disconcerting reaches of human fantasy. But, while Richard Jones’s production of The Government Inspector at the Young Vic turns Gogol’s political satire into the blithest of comic capers, the absurdist nightmare of a somnolent, small town, small time bureaucrat, Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story, at the Gate is an altogether darker take on the boundaries of sexual pathology. In The Government Inspector, a group of corrupt town bureaucrats discover that St. Petersburg is sending an incognito inspector to check up on them.

2 July 2011

Andrew Lambirth

A feast of visual delight

Exhibitions

There are just 26 drawings and watercolours in the magnificent exhibition at Lowell Libson, but they are all of such quality and interest that the show is a feast of connoisseurship and visual delight. Selected by Libson and Christopher Baker from the National Gallery of Scotland, the range of work gives a distinct flavour of the museum’s holdings, from major watercolours made for exhibition to more informal studies. Here are the big names (Turner, Constable, Blake) and the lesser-known (William Callow, John Webber). Most deal with travel or landscape, but there are figure studies and visions, too. The variety within such a small compass is impressive. For pure pleasure, this show is hard to beat.

Niru Ratnam

Whose art is it anyway?

Arts feature

Niru Ratnam tackles the thorny question of what constitutes British — or should that be English? — art In the past few months there have been two large-scale exhibitions showcasing British art. The first was the British Art Show at the Hayward Gallery; the second Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy. On show at the former were an elegant suite of works by Wolfgang Tillmans (born in Germany), a tapestry by David Noonan (Australia), the much-lauded film ‘Clock’ by Christian Marclay (America) and the delicate paintings of Maaike Schoorel (Netherlands).

Alex Massie

Saturday Morning Country: Dwight Yoakam

Been a while since the standard-bearer of the modern Bakersfield sound was featured here. Time to make amends for that prolonged absence. So here's the man himself with a fine rendition of his lovely, mournful song I Sang Dixie. Pure class.

Harry Mount

St Oscar of Oxford

The ultimate challenge

Opera

Tristan und Isolde is one of the greatest challenges that an opera house can take on, in some ways the greatest of all. So it is wonderful to be able to report that at Grange Park it has been mounted with a large degree of success, and that most of the things that are wrong with it could easily be righted, though they won’t be. The most remarkable thing about it is the level of singing, almost uniformly high, and certainly with no weak link. Isolde is Alwyn Mellor, Longborough’s Brünnhilde, and also scheduled to sing that role for Opera North and for Seattle.

Lloyd Evans

Nothing earned or learned

Theatre

Sir Tom and Sir Trevor — Stoppard and Nunn — have teamed up to realise Sir Trevor’s ‘40-year dream’ of bringing Sir Tom’s breakthrough play to the West End. Sir Tom and Sir Trevor — Stoppard and Nunn — have teamed up to realise Sir Trevor’s ‘40-year dream’ of bringing Sir Tom’s breakthrough play to the West End. I couldn’t make the opening night and Sir T (x 2) had restricted press seats to that performance only so I had to make my own arrangements. What a bunch of highwaymen those ticket agencies are! (I’ll get to the play in a second.) You have to pay for the privilege of paying for the privilege. The fee amounted to 20 per cent of the entire outlay.

Giannandrea Poesio

Past the postmodernist

Come off it, Tom

Cinema

Larry Crowne is horrible, just horrible, and I urge you to avoid it like the plague. It’s a ‘rom-com’ starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts and if you thought you can’t go wrong with Hanks and Roberts, two of the greatest screen presences alive, here is proof that you can. This is stilted, lifeless, bears absolutely no relation to how real people talk or behave, and is offensively sexist, or at least I found it so. Tom Hanks directs himself in this, and also wrote the original script, so if you ever thought you can’t have too much Hanks here is something else to blow your mind: you so, so can. OK, Larry Crowne is a middle-aged man who used to be a cook in the navy but now works in a Walmart-type store.

Kate Chisholm

The inspirational Suu Kyi

Radio and podcasts

‘To be speaking to you through the BBC has a very special meaning for me. ‘To be speaking to you through the BBC has a very special meaning for me. It means that once again I am officially a free person,’ says Aung San Suu Kyi at the beginning of the first of her Reith Lectures on Radio 4 (Tuesday mornings). That connection between the BBC and the powerful, emotive word ‘freedom’, made by one of the most influential figures of the 21st century, has finally broken through to the politicians who are deciding on the fate of the World Service.

28 June 2011

Kate Maltby

A Superbly Accessible Introduction

The text that codified the old legend of the learned man who sells his soul to the devil, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is one of the most influential plays in English history. It’s also one of the worst, from the point of view of the director. Scenes of intense religious struggle are intercut with the crudest of groundling comedy skits, in the most incongruous of juxtapositions. It may be Marlowe’s way of emphasizing that, under his silks, Faustus is as ineffectual and decayed as the world he inhabits, but it doesn’t do much for narrative flow.

25 June 2011

Andrew Lambirth

Lautrec’s dancing muse

Exhibitions

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), diminutive aristocrat and radical artist, was roundly travestied in John Huston’s 1952 film Moulin Rouge, and at once entered the popular imagination as an atrociously romanticised figure doomed for early death. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), diminutive aristocrat and radical artist, was roundly travestied in John Huston’s 1952 film Moulin Rouge, and at once entered the popular imagination as an atrociously romanticised figure doomed for early death. In fact, Lautrec was a tough and original artist, incisive and unsparing in his observation though also compassionate of the human comedy, a perfect painter of what then passed for modern life.

Tiffany Jenkins

Viewpoint – Valuing culture

Arts feature

How should we measure the value of a work of art? Let’s take, for example, Michelangelo’s statue of David in the Accademia in Florence. How should we measure the value of a work of art? Let’s take, for example, Michelangelo’s statue of David in the Accademia in Florence. The 17ft marble figure attracts a huge number of visitors from all over the world, so the box denoting popularity gets a tick. The revenue box gets ticked as well because of the gallery’s entrance fees and the money spent on accompanying T-shirts and postcards. And also to be considered is the amount this piece would fetch in a hypothetical sale.

Michael Tanner

Growing old gracefully | 25 June 2011

Arts feature

Michael Tanner says that the Wigmore Hall, celebrating its 110th birthday, combines Edwardian grandeur with contemporary appeal The Wigmore Hall is so expert in advertising itself with taste and discretion that it manages to give the impression, simultaneously, of belonging to a previous era and thus having all the charm of the Edwardian age at its most appealing, while also showing its adaptability to contemporary technology and, at least as important, to contemporary music. Even its website contrives to have a winningly traditional air, while of course being completely up-to-date. Certainly the building itself, especially as you approach it, evokes the age in which it was constructed, 110 years ago, with its pointed glass canopy and its lengthy, narrow, mahogany-lined entrance hall.

Daisy Dunn

Keeping an eagle eye

Exhibitions

The resident ravens of the Tower of London seem to croak a little louder these days. A few yards from their gathering spot, a golden eagle, traditional symbol of power and kingship, perches on a military standard, keeping watch. It is one of several exhibits on display at the newly refurbished Fusilier Museum in the Tower of London. The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers is a British infantry regiment named after the Fusil musket and raised at the Tower in 1685. In 1809, having routed the French in Martinique, the Fusiliers carried off the eagle insignia, which had originally belonged to the 82nd Regiment of the French Line, serving under Napoleon.