Arts Archives

Caravaggio the confessor

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Caravaggio’s paintings were inextricably bound up with his life and provide a virtual narrative of his turbulent development, a story fraught with ambiguities and alternative readings. Caravaggio’s paintings were inextricably bound up with his life and provide a virtual narrative of his turbulent development, a story fraught with ambiguities and alternative readings. This almost confessional aspect of his works, along with the immediacy and extraordinary power of their emotional impact, have surely contributed to his current popularity. His documented career spanned only about 15 years, ending with his lonely death on the seacoast at Porto Ercole on 18 July 1610.

Harry Mount

Classic treasure

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The Greek and Roman Collections Sculpture Promenade 2010 Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 28 January 2011 Virgil was wrong — don’t be afraid of Greeks bearing gifts, particularly if you’re a British regional museum. While our government has cut its grant to the Fitzwilliam by two per cent, Greek zillionaires have stepped admirably into the breach to subsidise the renovation of Cambridge’s heart-stopping Greek and Roman gallery, untouched since the Sixties. The Greek Ministry of Culture has chipped in, too; it may want the Elgin Marbles back but it’s happy to pay for Cambridge’s classical treasures to stay put, even while the Greek economy is on the skids. Its prized euros have been well spent.

John McEwen

Scottish clash

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Highlands and Islands: Paintings and Poems Fleming Collection, 13 Berkeley Street, W1, until 5 June Pictures are usually exhibited with closed-shop segregation from the other arts, so it is a joy to find the bounds broken by this exuberant celebration of one of the oldest and most beautiful places on earth. The show announces the publication of Highlands and Islands (Eland, £8.99), a poetry anthology (mostly 20th-century, not all by Scots) from Beccan mac Luigdech of Rum (died 677) to the present, selected and annotated by Mary Miers, the architectural historian and authority on Highland and Island culture. Her family home is on South Uist, so she brings a native passion to her subject.

Michael Tanner

Elegant evening

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Juan Diego Flórez Barbican It was an ideal way to spend the evening after Polling Day: a relaxed recital, undemanding and not too long, by one of the most individual of present-day singers. At the same time there was an element of risk: Juan Diego Flórez, the young Peruvian who created a stir singing the comparatively small role of Rodrigo in Rossini’s Otello at Covent Garden, and has since achieved enormous popularity there in bel canto roles, performed a series of songs and arias from the 18th and 19th centuries, with only one solo from his accompanist Vincenzo Scalera. The risk was in exposing the limitations of his voice and of his stage personality.

Lloyd Evans

Harmless fun

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Dirty White Boy: Tales of Soho Trafalgar Studio 2, until 22 May Holding the Man Trafalgar Studio 1, until 3 July Blogs and blogging, bloggers and bloggery. What’s it all about? At first sight blogomania looks like an entirely new literary form. A second glance reveals that it’s the oldest genre of the lot: oral history. A few years back, Clayton Littlewood opened a menswear shop in Soho and when business was slow he amused himself by writing an internet journal about the loafers and oddballs who popped in for a cigarette and a moan. Blog became book. Book became play. The material is rather like the novelty jockstraps Littlewood sells to passing woofters: it’s harmless fun and there’s not much of it. The characters preen and mince in predictable fashion.

Giannandrea Poesio

Contemporary crackers

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Triple Bill Royal Opera House, last perf. 15 May There was a time when the thrill of a ballet première could be sensed the moment you entered the theatre. Today, the disillusioned public, tired of the high percentage of choreographic garbage it is frequently subjected to, takes little or no notice. It’s a pity, for I think that Liam Scarlett’s Asphodel Meadows deserved a buzzier atmosphere than the one that greeted its opening last week — even though there were a good number of ovations and calls at the end. Set to Poulenc’s bubbly Concerto in D minor for two pianos and orchestra, the new ballet is a visually enticing example of outstanding choreographic composition, in which the classical idiom is cogently manipulated, though never betrayed.

Kate Chisholm

Word power

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It’s like entering another country, listening in to the BBC’s World Service, and such a relief to escape for a while the interminable chattering about what’s going to happen in Westminster. It’s like entering another country, listening in to the BBC’s World Service, and such a relief to escape for a while the interminable chattering about what’s going to happen in Westminster. On the half-hourly news bulletins, the Eurozone, elections in the Philippines, a mass grave in Serbia take the lead, while our very own British muddle almost disappears. On The Strand this week, the daily arts programme, Harriet Gilbert introduced us to the new Writer in Residence at Bush House, the World Service’s centre of operations in the heart of London.

James Delingpole

Tales of the unexpected | 15 May 2010

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The closest I’ve come to seeing a ghost was a few months ago when we went to stay in a haunted house. The closest I’ve come to seeing a ghost was a few months ago when we went to stay in a haunted house. We had a deeply uncomfortable night during which it was cold and hard to sleep, and in the small hours my wife was awoken by a mysterious pressure on her chest, almost as if she was suffocating, and which may have been the tortured spirit of whoever it was who had died horribly there or which might have been the heavy quilt. Dunno. Couldn’t say. I’m itching to have a 100 per cent, cast-iron ‘Yes I saw a ghost and it was definitely a ghost’ experience, but this wasn’t it. Otherwise, this intro would have been more exciting.

8 May 2010

Robert Gorelangton

Two men in a boat

Arts feature

Robert Gore-Langton on a stage adaptation of the Erskine Childers classic Riddle of the Sands The Riddle of the Sands was published in 1903. It was an instant bestseller and has never been out of print since. It’s the story of two young Englishmen who, while sailing off the German coast, unearth a fiendish plot to invade Britain. The book is often cited as the first ‘factional’ spy story, one that launched a genre. With its mass of authentic, verifiable detail it set the trend for Fleming, le Carré and the rest. The book includes maps, charts and tide timetables.

Michael Tanner

Out of time

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Aida Royal Opera House, in rep until 16 May Powder Her Face Linbury Studio, in rep until 12 May In the programme for the Royal Opera’s new production of Aida, George Hall tells us that ‘the total number of complete or substantially complete recordings of Aida, made either live or in the studio, currently stands at over 250’, a statistic that shook me, hardened discomaniac as I am. There can’t be more than one or two other operas which achieve such a tally. What adds to my surprise is that Aida is so far from being Verdi’s finest opera, and that it does urgently need seeing as well as hearing.

Marcus Berkmann

Air head

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As fashions change in music, so does the vocabulary. There are no groups any more, only bands. Even boy bands call themselves bands, although they don’t play any instruments. Come to think of it, are there boy bands any more? Take That look like newly retired footballers. When I started this column a thousand years ago, I wanted it called ‘pop’ music rather than the then-standard ‘rock’: a prescient move, it turns out, as ‘rock’ now sounds hopelessly sweaty and arthritic. In dance music the terms change so quickly that you haven’t even found out what they mean before they have gone, which at least saves you the bother of finding them out in the first place. One thing I do know, though: no one uses the word ‘chillout’ any more.

Andrew Lambirth

A world apart

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John Tunnard: Inner Space to Outer Space until 6 June St Ives and Beyond until 31 May Pallant House Gallery, Chichester John Tunnard (1900–71) is one of that shamefully extensive body of distinguished 20th-century British artists whose work is largely unfamiliar today. For reasons best known to itself, the Tate doesn’t see it as its duty to bring such artists before the public for reassessment, so the job is left to others. Thankfully, there are smaller museums in this country with the necessary initiative and interest, notably Pallant House in Chichester, currently mounting the first museum show of Tunnard in more than 30 years.

Lloyd Evans

Tangled threads

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Women Beware Women Olivier, in rep until 4 July Hair Gielgud, booking until January 2011 Women Beware Women deserves a subtitle: spectators beware seldom revived classics. Thomas Middleton’s 1622 play is set in the duke’s court at Florence, where greed, lust, incest and the hunger for power are running rampant. Middleton is much admired, little adored. He’s one of those dramatists who sends actors, directors and literary professors into rhapsodies but who doesn’t attend to the basics of entertainment. There’s no central character in this play just a grand human theme, corruptibility. He wraps up the script in great cobwebby entanglements of interrelated storylines.

Simon Hoggart

Leaders of the pack

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Two programmes about singing this week, and they could scarcely have been more different. I’m in a Rock’n’Roll Band! (BBC2, Saturday) was the first in a series about groups, and it kicked off with lead singers. Thank heavens, they skipped most of the ponderous, portentous, pretentious nonsense that is often spouted about rock bands. You can’t get rid of that altogether when Sting is around (he identified the main qualities of the lead singer as ‘arrogance and immense courage’, which is 24-carat luvvie-talk — ‘For God’s sake, the sheer guts it takes to go out in front of an audience gasping for you to be Lady Teazle!’) but for the most part people were pleasingly direct.

Kate Chisholm

Reality check

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What Gordon needs now (whatever happened on Thursday night and Friday morning) is a bit of radio therapy. I don’t suppose he had time to listen to The Vote Now Show (Radio 4) in the rumbustious run-up to the election, but he’d have done well to tune in for a bit of a laugh and a health-inducing reality check. Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis’s nightly paean to the political shenanigans of the previous 24 hours took us back to the heyday of Week Ending, before the PC Brigade and/or Russell Brand made it so difficult to be funny, decent and pertinent all at the same time.

1 May 2010

Andrew Lambirth

Decorative magnificence

Exhibitions

The Indian Portrait: 1560-1860 National Portrait Gallery, until 20 June Mark Shields: Here and Elsewhere Grosvenor Gallery, 21 Ryder Street, SW1, until 14 May I suspect that the first thought in many people’s minds to be associated with the Indian portrait is of the delicately detailed miniatures produced at the Mughal court in the 16th and 17th centuries. This is indeed the beginning of Indian portraiture as we know it, and the point at which this fascinating exhibition commences. Here is the portrait not just as likeness, but also as propaganda and official chronicle. The exhibition design in the Porter Gallery is constructed to steer the visitor clearly round the exhibits. A long curving wall with a large aperture commands our progress: we enter the gallery and go left.

David Vick

Kurt’s my man

Music

This week I am handing over the column to David Vick, who has contributed what I regard as the best (so far) of all the Top Tens I have received. Sound in judgment and admirably wide-ranging, Vick has in particular introduced me to Kurt Elling, an amazing jazz vocalist, still only in his early forties, of whom I had never previously heard. Having checked Elling out on Spotify, it’s clear that he is a superb artist, and I have now ordered several of his CDs. Trust me, trust David Vick. This guy is sensational and I cannot understand why he is so little known. Now, over to you, Mr Vick. Charles Spencer First up must be, of course, Dylan. He and I have been, in the words of his latest album title, together through life. The man is, quite simply, the greatest genius of our generation.

Lloyd Evans

Send in the clowns

Theatre

Counted? County Hall, until 22 May The Real Thing Old Vic, until 5 June Voting is so irrational as to qualify as an act of religious devotion. The process involves a fabulous confluence of approximations. Candidates offer a pattern of promises. Voters select the pattern that most closely meets their needs. And though there may be only the barest overlap between the needs and the promises, the voters maintain a belief that their choice carries influence even after it’s been diluted in the choices of millions of others. It’s a miracle anyone votes at all. A new verbatim play, Counted?, examines our attitudes towards the process.

Patrick Carnegy

Nightmare in Verona

Theatre

Romeo and Juliet Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in rep until 27 August Rupert Goold’s new staging of Romeo and Juliet will rocket you into a state of renewed excitement with the play. He returns to the RSC for the first time since conjuring Patrick Stewart as a magus of the frozen north in The Tempest (2006). Ever inventive as a directorial travel agent, Goold now transports the star-crossed lovers from the land where the lemon trees blossom into a Stygian underworld, illuminated by flickering flames, spurts of steam and sudden pyrotechnic eruptions. Why, this is hell, nor are the lovers out of it.

Michael Tanner

Lovers’ tangle

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Elegy for Young Lovers Young Vic, in rep until 8 May Albert Herring Blackheath Halls Hans Werner Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers, with a libretto by Auden and Chester Kallman, is less familiar than one might expect. Never recorded complete, it has rarely been performed in the UK since Glyndebourne staged it in 1963. Yet in the excellent new production at the Young Vic, the concentration awarded by the audience was instantly apparent, and maintained throughout the three hours the piece lasts. ENO has got Fiona Shaw to direct, and one of the results is that the performers behave like human beings rather than opera singers, and even speak their lines — there is a considerable amount of spoken dialogue — naturally.

James Delingpole

Money well spent

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Science, you may have noticed, has been getting a bad press of late. Scientists losing raw data, scientists withholding data, scientists cherry-picking data, scientists torturing the evidence till it says what they want it to say, scientists acting more like political activists than scientists. And, of all the world’s media institutions, none has been quite so shameless in justifying, excusing or covering up this appalling behaviour than that supposed bastion of neutrality and authority, the BBC. Still, the BBC can’t get everything wrong all the time, and its new series The Story of Science is a case in point.

Kate Chisholm

The battle continues

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It sounded as if a World Heavyweight Championship was just about to begin. The roaring mob. The pent-up energy. The buzzing excitement at the prospect of an upset, a defeat, a knockout blow. The tension was palpable, seeping through my study, as the contenders squared up to each other for Round Two. I don’t have Sky and wanted to experience The Prime Ministerial Debate live, as it was happening, rather than wait up until 11.30 last Thursday night to watch it on BBC2, so I had no alternative but to listen to Gordon, Dave and Nick thrashing it out on Radio 4 instead of watching them on screen. I must admit I wasn’t looking forward to it.

24 April 2010

William Cook

Brutal beauty

Arts feature

William Cook takes us on a tour of 2010’s unlikely European Capital of Culture ‘And the European Capital of Culture in 2010 will be ...the Ruhr.’ When I first heard the announcement, it sounded like a particularly unfunny German joke. The Ruhr, after all, is Europe’s biggest rust belt — a vast swathe of mines and factories, many now derelict or redundant, which stretches across north-west Germany like a huge unsightly rash. It’s hard to imagine a less likely cultural capital, and normally I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near it had it not been for a fond memory of one of the nicest afternoons I’ve ever spent. A few years ago I was in this part of Germany on business and ended up in Essen, one of the biggest cities in the Ruhr.

Matthew Parris

Listening to Schumann’s Romance in F Sharp Major and musing on piano wheels

Columns

In the unlikeliest situations the mind can tear off enthusiastically in unaccountable directions. In the bath, or in the watches of the night, or when almost too exhausted to stand, ideas can suddenly start coming at us, fast and furious. It can happen listening to music, too, as I found out last week. We were at the Wigmore Hall in London, listening to the Swedish pianist Bengt Forsberg play Bach, Schumann and Fauré with artistry and intelligence, when I found myself staring at the wheels of the big black grand piano. And slowly I realised how ball-bearings work. It took me the whole of Schumann’s Romance in F sharp major Op. 28 No. 2, but the engineering discovery was a revelation — and a reproach, too, for never having thought about it before.

Andrew Lambirth

Arboreal glory

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Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain, a Bicentenary Exhibition Royal Academy, until 13 June As Paul Sandby’s dates 1731—1809 suggest, last year was his bicentenary, when this exhibition started out in Nottingham. Sandby lived in that illustrious city before heading north to Edinburgh, when he was appointed draughtsman to the Military Survey of North Britain in 1747. It is therefore most appropriate that this exhibition travelled from Nottingham to Edinburgh before coming south to the RA. It follows Sandby’s own trajectory in this. He moved to London in 1751, to stay with his elder brother Thomas at Windsor and in Soho, and became involved in the St Martin’s Lane Academy.

Laura Gascoigne

An insider’s view

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A Critic’s Choice Selected by Andrew Lambirth Browse & Darby, until 7 May The bravest thing an art critic can do is to show their own work; the next bravest is to mount a show of the artists they admire. Publishing one’s critical opinions in print is one thing; hanging up the physical evidence in public is quite another. One normally fearless critic of my acquaintance, when invited to do it, declined with a shudder and a quote from ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. Cork Street didn’t feel like the Valley of Death when I visited Andrew Lambirth’s Critic’s Choice last week.

Lloyd Evans

Porn and propaganda

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Porn — The Musical Theatre 503, until 1 May Posh Royal Court, until 22 May Here’s the rule. Provocative title equals lousy show. The playbill Porn — The Musical filled my heart with misgivings as I made the long trek south of the Thames to a venue at a Battersea boozer. The room above the pub was huge and empty, but the theatre wasn’t here but higher up, via a trapdoor, wedged in under the beery roof-eaves. A fug of lavender and sawdust hung over the creaking benches and the stage was the size of a card-table. As I took my seat, a furry insect expired in midair and landed in the retro hairstyle just ahead of me. A moth in a beehive. Then the show began and everything perked up.

Peter Hoskin

Blood and guts

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Centurion 15, Nationwide You know how it is. There are two sword-and-sandal films opening in cinemas, and you just can’t decide which one to see. Will it be Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora, which looks poised, if a little sterile? Or will it be Neil Marshall’s Centurion, which is all about the action, action, action? So you do as I did, and reach for a coin in your pocket. Heads, it’s Agora; tails, Centurion. You throw. The coin somersaults in the air, plunges back towards your hand, and... Centurion is Marshall’s fourth feature, and it remains faithful to the horror-cum-comic-book stylings of his previous three. In Dog Soldiers (2002), it was soldiers versus werewolves. In The Descent (2005), it was potholers versus subterranean monsters.

Robin Holloway

Suffering for art

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Great bafflement during a recent week in Berlin, city of bleak exteriors, whose human and cultural rewards are almost wholly indoors — in its wealth of concert halls, opera houses and museums. Great bafflement during a recent week in Berlin, city of bleak exteriors, whose human and cultural rewards are almost wholly indoors — in its wealth of concert halls, opera houses and museums. Museums are, 20 years after reunification, ever-reliable. The music scene is passing and evanescent. I had hoped to find, over the Easter period, seasonal relevance of the most exalted kind — a St Matthew Passion or Parsifal on or around Good Friday itself. But schedules were bare, if not literally barren.