Culture

Chopin is a difficult composer to celebrate, at least in the festivals of larger format. Countless piano recitals don’t really fit the bill and the music which includes orchestra is not the best of him. He surely was a miniaturist — perhaps the most compelling there has ever been. Which other composer can set a mood so securely in the very first bar, and then sustain it as a single shaft of thought to the end? He is like a painter who with three strokes of the brush has told you all you need to know about what is to follow, so that what does follow already seems like a familiar and longed-for friend. Of course this kind of writing doesn’t work very well in a building the size of the Albert Hall.

The X Factor is back on ITV, and it’s fascinating, being a paradigm of British life. The X Factor is back on ITV, and it’s fascinating, being a paradigm of British life. Persons of little or no talent are assembled to be jeered. Those who have a modicum of ability are praised as if they had just sung Wagner’s Liebestod faultlessly at Covent Garden. This audience would applaud Beachcomber’s Directory of Huntingdonshire Cabmen if whoever was reading it remembered to tear up around the letter B. Rather like in Nineteen Eighty-Four we have the two minutes of hate followed by a great wave of sentimentality, as if a knickerbocker glory packed with cream and raspberry sauce had been laced with castor oil.

The Sun Also Rises Royal Lyceum The Cage Pleasance Borderline Racist The Canons’ Gait The Edinburgh International Festival, respectable elder brother of the drop-out Fringe, takes its art very seriously indeed and expects the audience to do the same. It gives us the exotic, the challenging, the eclectic, the mesmeric. It gives us, in a word, the Mickey Finns. Usually we get Palestinian ghost-lore or Slovakian puppet-theatre or sub-Saharan tribal epic or Lesotho revenge drama or Apache creation myth. Sometimes we get all five, in Finnish, with subtitles and video projections, and an on-stage bongo squadron to keep us from our slumbers. But this year, in a stunning reversal of tradition, we’ve got a straight play adaptated from a bestseller by a well-known author.

Cinderella English National Ballet’s 60th birthday London Coliseum The post-second world war decade saw a flourishing of independent ballet companies all over Europe. Those that strove to emulate the Ballets Russes provided an alternative to the companies that aimed at nurturing home-grown talent — such as the Ballet Rambert and what became the Royal Ballet in the UK. It was in this context that English National Ballet (formerly Festival Ballet, London’s Festival Ballet and London Festival Ballet) held its first performance 60 years ago last Saturday. A significant anniversary indeed, particularly because none of the other independent European companies created around the same time has managed to survive so long.