Arts Archives

A load of Balls

Let's rewind back to this morning, and Ed Balls' appearance on the Today progamme. It was such a classic demonstration of distortion and buck-passing, that we've decided to give it a fisk, Coffee House style. Here's the transcript, with our thoughts added in italics: James Naughtie: Talking about bad behaviour, there’s been a bit of it going on in government, hasn’t there? Ed Balls: Well, I’ve, um, seen the reports in the Sunday Times on Sunday and I think those emails were vile, horrible, despicable. I think there’s no place in politics for that kind of stuff. I think it’s awful. Fraser Nelson: Balls is shocked, shocked to find it going on. JN: You must feel this quite, er, personally.

Ursula Buchan

Growing your own

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It is, at present, almost impossible to open a garden magazine, or the gardening pages of a national newspaper, without coming across an article on how we are all now kitchen gardeners and allotmenteers; the theme is that the uncertain economic conditions have turned us back to our gardens, to grow comestibles and thereby ensure that we eat well, now that lack of the readies has reconnected us with our cookers. So far, so unexceptional, even trite. I have written such pieces myself. However, the difficulty for me comes when the writer gets over-excited and starts claiming that we can save enough money to make a difference to our circumstances by ‘growing our own’. Really?

11 April 2009

Henrietta Bredin

Dido’s life on camera

Arts feature

Katie Mitchell explains to Henrietta Bredin how she is creating a parallel film world with Purcell’s opera It is 350 years since Henry Purcell was born and his music is, gloriously, being played and sung all around the country. And there are a lot of different Didos about: Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage at the National Theatre; Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas pretty much all day on BBC Radio Three a couple of weekends ago; at the Royal Opera House in a joint venture by the Royal Opera and the Royal Ballet directed and choreographed by Wayne McGregor (see review page 38); and, in another joint venture, by English National Opera and the Young Vic, as After Dido, directed by Katie Mitchell.

Lloyd Evans

Promises, promises

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Parlour Song Almeida Tusk Tusk Royal Court Back in 1995 Jez Butterworth got tagged with the ‘Most Promising Playwright’ beeper and he still hasn’t shaken it off. Butterworth is an excellent second-rate writer, he has a wonderful knack for quirky comic dialogue but he wants to be a Great Artist too. A pity. All a playwright should aim to be is an entertainer. Butterworth’s new play, Parlour Song, is set in an estate full of suburban semis and it opens with two male pals joshing aggressively in a sitting-room. Andrew Lincoln’s sleek young Dale runs a car-wash business and complains of ‘pruney fingers’. Toby Jones’s squat, balding Ned works in demolition and wields Zeus-like powers of life and death over huge industrial buildings.

Peter Phillips

When is it acceptable?

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Someone needs to write a history of vibrato. Clearly this should be Roger Norrington: to judge from his words on Radio Three recently he has given the topic much thought and come up with some historically-based conclusions. I suspect he isn’t going to do it, though, because, like me, he is too busy chiselling out a new -ism on the back of his research, by which he hopes to effect yet another revolution in performance practice. But the bare bones of the story are straightforward enough. Vibrato, both in orchestral playing and in singing, became acceptable in classical music-making no earlier than 1920. It had existed before this in more vulgar circumstances, but was resisted at the most serious level as being a cheap trick.

Deborah Ross

Power to disturb

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Tony Manero 18, Key Cities This is a Chilean film of the kind that is probably only showing at an independent cinema quite far from you until last Thursday but that is life, so get over it. Also, the only Easter alternative seemed to be a big action flick starring Vin Diesel whom I have nothing against personally, but whose performance in The Pacifier I did not admire particularly. (I also felt Arnold Schwarzenegger had rather got in first as the big, tough guy who comically does babysitting in Kindergarten Cop, but that may be just me.

Kate Chisholm

Our island story

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‘Radio is a way of binding people together,’ says Lesley Douglas, former Controller of Radio 2 in a Guardian magazine cover-story this week celebrating the richness of British radio. ‘Radio is a way of binding people together,’ says Lesley Douglas, former Controller of Radio 2 in a Guardian magazine cover-story this week celebrating the richness of British radio. It could be the answer to our editor’s quest for what it means to be British, since 90 per cent of us are supposed to listen at some time to a radio station of some kind, whether it be local and illicit or the behemoths created by the BBC. Douglas was writing about what it takes to be a radio presenter.

James Delingpole

No debate

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On the posters in the Tube at the moment are these adverts for Argumental, which is the Dave channel’s first self-generated panel show. On the posters in the Tube at the moment are these adverts for Argumental, which is the Dave channel’s first self-generated panel show. I don’t want to knock Dave too much because it’s generally a good thing: the reliable stand-by you end up with if there’s nothing on the terrestrial channels, BBC4, BBC3, Sky One or the Military History channel. It’s got repeats of Top Gear. It has repeats of QI. What’s not to like? Well, Argumental would be my slight problem. Take those poster ads.

7 April 2009

Andrew Lambirth

Beyond ‘face-painting’

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Constable Portraits: The Painter & His Circle National Portrait Gallery until 14 June Sponsored by British Land The portrait was the dominant form in British painting up to the end of the 18th century, principally because this was what patrons wanted. Landscape painting was really the invention of Richard Wilson (1713–82), who inaugurated this particular branch of nature-worship. Constable, with his great gift for naturalness and observation, developed it further than any artist, except Turner. And it is as a landscape painter that we think of Constable, though he also painted about 100 portraits. These have tended to be overshadowed by his nature studies, and the current show at the NPG is the first to concentrate on his portraits. It is something of a revelation.

Michael Tanner

Second helpings

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I Capuleti e i Montecchi; Dido and Aeneas; Acis and Galatea Royal Opera House There has been a three-week gap between the opening and closing sets of performances of the latest revival of Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi at the Royal Opera. Smitten by migraine on the first night, I had to leave in the interval. Returning this week for the whole work provided me with an evening of almost unmitigated pleasure, even jouissance. One can quibble with some of the production, and the secondary singers are not great, but overall it makes for as intense an experience of Bellini’s early masterpiece as one could ever expect to see.

4 April 2009

Alex Massie

A song for the weekend

The super-talented Lisa Hannigan and her band gather in Dick Mac's pub in Dingle, Co Kerry for a charming wee session that is just the ticket for a lovely spring weekend...

Ariane Bankes

Virtual trip to the opera

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‘Having every best seat in the house’ is how some describe seeing opera live on screen, and recently we’ve had the opportunity of seeing the nuts and bolts backstage, too. It was a bold initiative of English National Opera and Sky Arts to take the cameras behind the scenes on the first night of Jonathan Miller’s new production of La bohème for Sky Arts 1, while simultaneously broadcasting the opera itself live on Sky Arts 2, and it was quite a challenge for the backstage crew: how do you keep your audience gripped for two and a half hours when all the real action is happening the other side of the set?

Andrew Lambirth

Master of print

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Kuniyoshi From the Arthur R. Miller Collection Royal Academy, until 7 June Sponsored by Canon The Royal Academy is making something of a reputation for staging exhibitions of Japanese printmakers: the current Kuniyoshi show follows on neatly from Hokusai (1991–2) and Hiroshige (1997) and adds considerably to our understanding of the genre. There hasn’t been a major Kuniyoshi show in England for nearly 50 years, and he is certainly one of the less well-known of the great Japanese print artists. Master of an unexpected versatility and variety of subject, Kuniyoshi was also possessed of an originality that stands out even among such talented contemporaries.

Lloyd Evans

Thwarted desire

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Dido, Queen of Carthage Cottesloe The Overcoat Lyric Hammersmith Simple plays can be the hardest to get right. James Macdonald has made a dogged assault on the earliest work of Christopher Marlowe. The story is lifted wholesale from Virgil. After Troy’s fall Aeneas arrives in Carthage where Dido promptly falls in love with him. When destiny compels Aeneas to leave for Italy the despairing queen sets fire to herself, and her palace, in a humungous health-and-safety fiasco. Marlowe’s underdeveloped grasp of personality weakens the script.

Michael Tanner

Marital bliss

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Die Feen Châtelet, Paris Ernest Bloch’s Macbeth Bloomsbury Theatre Wagner wrote his first opera Die Feen (The Fairies) when he was 19 and 20. It was never staged or performed at all in his lifetime, and first performed in Munich in 1888, Richard Strauss having conducted the rehearsals. It was a big success, but has only been revived rarely, and the production which I saw at the Châtelet in Paris last week, of which there are five performances, was the first I have seen. It was rapturously received, and rightly so. Wagner thought little of it, gave the score to Ludwig II for Christmas in 1865 — the only score of it then in existence — and Cosima records the composer’s deprecatory remarks about it in her diary.

Giannandrea Poesio

Clash of cultures | 4 April 2009

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Swan Lake American Ballet Theatre, London Coliseum A complex, somewhat troubled history has turned Swan Lake into the most manipulated ballet ever. The lack of strict historical constraints has frequently led ballet directors, repetiteurs and choreographers to feel more or less free to intervene in the text, often twisting its narrative and altering the traditional, though not original, choreography. Take, for instance, Kevin McKenzie’s production for American Ballet Theatre, which strives to make the most of the ballet’s performance tradition while at the same time peppering the work with not so stylistically and dramaturgically appropriate additions.

Marcus Berkmann

A critic bites back

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‘All critics are failed writers,’ someone with a New Zealand accent said on Desert Island Discs the other day. ‘All critics are failed writers,’ someone with a New Zealand accent said on Desert Island Discs the other day. Obviously I have completely blanked out who it was, but I do know she was talking out of her fundament. Most of us become critics not just because we need the money (please send all cheques payable to me c/o The Spectator) but because we love the subject of which we write, and obviously because other critics drive us potty. The Pet Shop Boys have a new album out, which I haven’t yet heard, but I have read some of the reviews, one of which floated the iconoclastic notion that the Pet Shop Boys are electropop’s Ramones.

Kate Chisholm

Dying well

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Since the demise of Socrates in 399 BC, killed by the hemlock he was forced to drink on sentence from the state for corrupting the minds of Athenian teenagers, the Good Death has been deemed possible. According to Plato, his pupil, Socrates died with his senses intact, surrounded by those he loved and who loved him, and in control until the last moment, his body numbed but not distorted by that toxic drug. It’s a myth, of course. We know, as must Plato have known, that hemlock produces dreadful cramps, vomiting, convulsions; it would not have been possible for Socrates to remain calm, thoughtful, prescient while in such agony.

Simon Hoggart

Ubiquitous Branson

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Television often throws up unpleasant images to surprise you, like finding an earwig in the sugar. The BBC has got the transmission rights for Formula One motor racing, and they were lucky in that the Australian Grand Prix (BBC1, Sunday), which opened the new season, proved a very exciting race, and was won by a Brit. There were lots of crashes, nobody was hurt, and that’s the way we like it.

Alan Judd

Getting it right

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I tested the old Freelander when it first came out, taking it up the M6 into the Shropshire hills and returning with backache. That apart, I thought it a good car in four-door form, as did plenty of others — it became Europe’s best-selling smallish 4x4. But I and they were wrong: a component that would have cost a few pence to improve in manufacture meant that the majority of petrol versions had coolant problems requiring new engines at some stage (one dealer I know replaced 60), while build quality of petrols and diesels alike meant that the trim disintegrated around you. For Land Rover lovers such as me, they were an embarrassment. Will I be as wrong about the new version, Freelander 2, tested last week?

31 March 2009

Martin Bright

Nick Cohen, George Orwell and Me

I can't stay silent on the issue of Nick Cohen's intervention at the Orwell Prize shotlisting event earlier this week. But I can't really say too much either as Nick, in an act of over-extravagant loyalty, claimed it was a travesty that I had not made it from the longlist to the shortlist. I have already thanked Nick in person for his kind words. I have to say it was an honour to be nominated at all and congratulations to all those that made it to the shortlist (including Peters Hitchens and Oborne). But I was disappointed for my fellow former-New Statesman writers Michela Wrong and Lindsey Hilsum who really did deserve to go further.

28 March 2009

Andrew Lambirth

Power of the pencil

Arts feature

Andrew Lambirth talks to Paula Rego about the new museum dedicated to her and the politics behind her work Paula Rego is an artist working at the height of her powers, internationally celebrated and with a museum dedicated to her about to open in her native Portugal. It’s been a long climb to this pinnacle of success, and Rego has worked exceptionally hard to reach it. Born in Lisbon in 1935, she grew up largely in the care of her grandparents while her father, an electrical engineer, took a job in England with Marconi. His anglophilia was responsible for Rego herself going to London to study art.

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 28 March 2009

Any other business

Richard Strauss died 60 years ago this year. Not only is he one of my top ten favourite composers, he is also the one I would most like to be cast away with on an island so that I could pluck out the heart of his mystery. His subtleties are infinite, especially his constant, minute innovations, always designed to improve existing models but rejecting crude revolutions, so noisily intrusive in his time. I would like to explore his early works, like the tone poem Macbeth and his symphonies, Brahmsian exercises never performed today, and get to know all his operas including the weird Guntram (1892) and his last great masterpiece Capriccio, written 60 years later. But plucking that complex heart requires a knowledge of German.

Mary Wakefield

Meet Gordon’s Pet Shop persecutors

Features

Mary Wakefield meets the successful pop duo the Pet Shop Boys, and finds them eloquent critics of New Labour, staunch defenders of civil liberties — and fans of Vince Cable Through the woods, the trees And further on the sea We lived in the shadow of the war Sand in the sandwiches Wasps in the tea It was a free country In a West End town in a dead end world — OK, no: in a nice Georgian townhouse in central London, on the top floor where once boot boys bedded down, the Pet Shop Boys are revisiting their past. ‘The Britain of my childhood?’ Neil Tennant, the singing half of the most successful pop duo of all time reclines on a chaise longue and thinks his way back to North Shields (near Newcastle) in the late Fifties.

Laura Gascoigne

Under the stars

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Van Gogh and the Colours of the Night Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam until 7 June Remembering his former teacher Vincent van Gogh, the painter Anton Kerssemakers described a walk one evening in 1884 from Nuenen to Eindhoven when Vincent suddenly stopped before the sunset, framed it in his hands and, half closing his eyes, cried out, ‘My God, how does such a fellow — whether God, or whatever you want to call him — how does he do that? We must be able to do that too!’ The hours of sunset, dusk and darkness — outdoors and in — always fascinated van Gogh.

Alan Powers

Halfway to heaven

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When some 700 people throng the auditorium at Earl’s Court to hear a debate about whether eco houses are ugly, then a frustrated tree-hugger like myself may feel that we are halfway to heaven, not that I plan to share my Elysium with Germaine Greer in ranting mode if I can avoid it. When some 700 people throng the auditorium at Earl’s Court to hear a debate about whether eco houses are ugly, then a frustrated tree-hugger like myself may feel that we are halfway to heaven, not that I plan to share my Elysium with Germaine Greer in ranting mode if I can avoid it.

Michael Tanner

In the extreme

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Verdi’s Requiem Royal Opera House Carmen Sadler’s Wells Every time there’s a performance of Verdi’s Requiem the issue of whether it is a liturgical or theatrical work gets solemnly discussed, as if it couldn’t be both. If you take the Creator to be the figure described or invoked in the Bible, then He clearly has a taste for highly dramatic effects. As Auden put it, ‘When God said “Let there be Light” He must have realised that He was being extraordinarily pretentious,’ and the promise that the Day of Judgment will be heralded by trumpets indicates a thoroughly operatic imagination.

Robin Holloway

A sum of all parts

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Most attractively packaged, these four CDs comprising the new survey of British songwriting are issued by NMC recordings to mark the 20th anniversary of its indispensable activities; poetically evocative photographs of the initial letters, drawn from pubs, floral clocks, blue heritage plaques, transport directions, shops, warehouses, fruit barrows, etc., spell out the salient words, and promise a rich and sparky diversity of contents amply fulfilled when one knuckles down to listen. Vital statistics: the total of 110 items is slightly deceptive because 12 are partial arrangements, by NMC’s presiding begetter Colin Matthews, of a galliard by the eminent Jacobean, Thomas Morley (a 13th presents the entire dance in all its ceremonial majesty).

James Delingpole

It’s so unfair

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Is it really a six-figure salary? Only, this time last year it wouldn’t have seemed worth it, but now it’s looking almost as attractive as a job in the public sector. I think I might have to go for it. ‘Step up to the plate,’ as I must learn to say, if I’m to stand any chance whatsoever. There’s a place going spare at the moment, too, so it’s not totally unfeasible. I could actually be Sir Alan’s new Apprentice. Then again, no. For a man of such tremendous supposed business acumen and shrewd character judgment, Sir Alan has never been much cop at picking the right candidate. He’s unhealthily drawn to spivvy chancers like Michael Sophocles, and rough diamonds like the CV-tweaking Neanderthal who won the last series.