Arts Archives

I can’t take Sugar

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The other day I had to address a group of media students from Michigan State University on the purposes of TV criticism. I came up with about five, the last of which was: always impress on your audience what a massive waste of life almost all TV-watching is because it’s mostly rubbish, it sucks out your brain and you’re far better off with a book or the wireless. Possibly they thought I was joking but you all know I wasn’t. It’s a variation on an argument I have every week with the Fawn over The Apprentice (BBC1, Wednesday). She thinks it’s antisocial the way I read the newspaper through the longueurs and then head for an early bath rather than wait to find out who got fired.

15 June 2007

The Spectator

The delights of summer opera

Garsington Opera on a warm, damp Thursday evening. I've been chairing a pre-performance talk on La donna del lago between the conductor David Parry and Rossini scholar Philip Gossett, and now I've been given a seat in the orchestra pit to watch the show, as the auditorium is completely sold out. Somewhere behind me, out of view, David Mellor is having a good time - we know this as he says so, boomingly and often, during the interval. Jack Straw is less forthcoming. Down in the engine room you get a thrilling, if very skewed view of what’s going on. The stage is above you and extremely close, the singers looming overhead. I’ve moved from the brass section, fearing for my ears, and am now in with the string players.

9 June 2007

Paul Johnson

A very parfit gentil knight of music

Any other business

One of the many things which makes me love Edward Elgar is that both the man and his music are so tremendously unfashionable. No wonder tax-funded quangos set up to ‘promote culture’, and run by New Labour bureaucrats, are refusing to mark his 150th birthday. He does not correspond with their criteria of approval at any point. He was white. He was English. He was middle class. He was a patriot, he loved his country and revered its monarchy: his second symphony was dedicated to Edward VII, who was kind to him and chose him as the first musician to receive the Order of Merit. He found the appalling losses we suffered in the first world war unbearably painful, and his agony is reflected in his music, notably the tragic cello concerto, to my mind his finest work.

Andrew Lambirth

Lust for life | 9 June 2007

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Gillian Ayres and David Bomberg: two painters with markedly different visions of the world, but united in excellence. Interestingly, there is a period of Bomberg’s work — the Spanish paintings of 1929 — when his paint surfaces seem to resemble Ayres’s of the late 1970s and early 1980s in their impacted intensity. But apart from a shared interest and dexterity in paint-handling, in the glorious materiality of the medium, their courses are widely divergent, never more evident than in the extraordinary joyfulness of Ayres’s new paintings. Her current exhibition at Alan Cristea marks a high point in a career dedicated to the celebratory nature of abstract form.

Robert Gorelangton

Thrilling stuff

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This season’s they-don’t-make-’em-like-that-any-more offering at the Old Vic is Gaslight. The chief reason for going to see it is that it stars the talented young actress Rosamund Pike. Time spent gazing at the astoundingly beautiful Miss Pike is never wasted. But Gaslight has other attractions as an entertainment. It’s a 1938 three-act thriller set in murky Victorian London, with a married couple, servants, horsehair furniture and a nice juicy vein of psychopathic sadism. Most of us know it from the 1944 film version in which Ingrid Bergman went mildly bonkers and won an Oscar for rolling her eyes. When you read the play, it is startling how unfaithful are the two Gaslight films (an earlier screen version starred Anton Walbrook).

Charles Spencer

Telly addict

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Until recently I was one of those insufferable prigs who proudly announces, ‘Oh, I never watch television, it’s all rubbish these days.’ But there was little virtue in my self-restraint, and I had no idea whether there was anything worth watching or not. The fact is that when you are out at the theatre four, five and sometimes, curse it, six nights a week, watching stuff begins to feel like work. My smoking habit also meant that whenever I did want to watch something I’d have to keep nipping out for a quick drag, Mrs Spencer having instituted draconian smoking bans long before the Labour government.

Michael Tanner

Exalted by Beethoven

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Fidelio is so full of wonderful music, and its subject matter is so stirring and so perennially relevant, that it should be a frequent feature of any opera house’s repertoire. In fact it is rather rare, and this new production is the first time it has been seen at the Royal Opera for 14 years. To my joy and relief, and a little to my surprise, it is largely a success, and the things that are wrong with it are remediable without drastic alteration — and the cast needs no alteration at all. This production was first seen in New York in 2000, and is by the director of the Salzburg Festival, Jürgen Flimm. That name struck a chill in my heart, but the worst that can be said is that it is mildly eccentric.

Giannandrea Poesio

Provoked and dazzled

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Stylistic accuracy is one of the most problematic aspects of restaging dance works. ‘Style’ is a fluidly ambiguous notion encompassing a multitude of factors: the training of the choreographer and dancers, particular aesthetic trends, interpretative choices, and so on. Hence the difficulty of getting it right. Stylistic appropriateness goes far beyond any detailed reproduction of mere technicalities and so it also requires an in-depth understanding of the context within which the works were originally created. Alas, this was not the case with the first performance of the new Royal Ballet’s triple bill last Saturday.

Patrick Carnegy

McKellen’s masterly Lear

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The best way to get serious press coverage for your big show is to provoke the hacks by shutting them out from the first night. It’s a high-risk strategy but in the case of the now famous King Lear with Ian McKellen it’s worked a dream. The director Trevor Nunn and the RSC chief Michael Boyd took a fearful caning for slamming the door, but who were they to worry when the show was already sold out? They’re wily enough to know that good publicity has precious little to do with good reviews. If there wasn’t enough mileage in the sad story of the fall from her bike of Frances Barber (Goneril) which caused the closure, there was more than enough in Germaine Greer’s diatribe in the Guardian.

Simon Hoggart

Tasteless memorial

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Channel 4’s Diana: The Witnesses in the Tunnel (Wednesday) was, as promised, pretty tasteless stuff, though not for the reasons we were told. There are those who still believe the princess’s death was not an accident, and that the royal family, Lord Stevens and both French and British governments are part of a huge conspiracy to cover up the fact that this lovely, innocent woman was coldly done to death to prevent her from marrying a Muslim. Absolute nonsense, of course. I’ve done some work on why people come to believe irrational but beguiling theories. What these wacky beliefs have in common is an enormous amount of data, a cascade of facts and quasi-facts.

8 June 2007

The Spectator

Rivers of reality

I have yet to capitulate to this series of Big Brother, which is not to say that I won’t. But it does seem very striking to me that the reality TV show seems to have become the canvas upon which we observe the nation’s residual bigotries and (in the case of Shilpa’s victory) our desire to conquer them. Funnily enough, the politician who best understands the power of such shows is Gordon Brown, who has often said that we should ask what programmes such as The Apprentice and Pop Idol tell us about aspiration. Meanwhile, BB is once again KKK. Enoch to the Diary Room….

7 June 2007

The Spectator

Am I the only person who hated Glastonbury?

Reading James Delingpole’s fine piece about ‘the best music festival in the universe’ brought it all flooding back. Twenty years ago, buoyed by rave reviews such as James’s, I headed for Glastonbury full of starry-eyed hope and excitement. What followed were three days of unremitting misery, memories of which haunt me to this day. Torrential rain, swamp-like conditions, a pathetically inadequate tent, perpetually damp clothes, greasy burgers of dubious provenance, some ‘colourful’, frankly scary characters and unspeakable loos all conspired to make it an experience I vowed never to repeat. Even watching the Cure against a backdrop of forked lighting-scarred skies failed to numb the pain.

2 June 2007

Michael Henderson

Arousing a love of England

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This weekend, as the orchestras of England celebrate the 150th anniversary of this country’s most celebrated composer, is an appropriate time to review the national monument that is Sir Edward Elgar. Does he continue to speak of and for England? Or was he merely a late-romantic nostalgic, whose music was hopelessly outdated when he died in 1934, and which now offers even less value — or ‘significance’, in the weedy, trivia-obsessed language of our age? If one takes notice of the public pronouncements, it hasn’t been a good year for Elgar. When in March his profile was replaced on the £20 banknotes by that of Adam Smith, some people rejoiced.

Andrew Lambirth

Gormley spotting

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I have been dipping into the Modern Sculpture Reader, edited by Jon Wood, David Hulks and Alex Potts, an invaluable compilation of texts produced by the Henry Moore Institute at £20. It’s a hefty paperback tome determined to give sculpture its rightful place in the anthology stakes — so often dominated by painting — and in doing so it tracks the nature and status of the art object in the modern world. It ranges from Adolf von Hildebrand writing in 1893 on the problem of form, to Susan Hiller in 2003 discussing the sculptural legacy of H. Moore himself. In between it stops at many stations from Rilke to Acconci, by way of Eric Gill, Michel Leiris, Tatlin, Gabo and Sartre.

Marcus Berkmann

Staying cool

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It’s always a problem, comparing a new band with others who have gone before. Critics have to do it, defining the new in terms of the old, because there has to be some way of describing the indescribable. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been caught, having read somewhere that someone was the new Squeeze or XTC or Nick Drake or Electric Light Orchestra or any of several others. Gullible fool that I am, I believe every word. You buy the CD without pausing to listen to the little 30-second snippet of each song they offer you on Amazon (because you know they never sound right and will only put you off), the CD arrives, you tear it open in a frenzy and it’s just the usual underwritten indie sludge that sounds a bit like The Velvet Underground.

Michael Tanner

Greeting Death with joy

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At last ENO has come up with a production which can be greeted almost without reservation, and of a treacherously tricky opera, Britten’s last and for many his greatest, Death in Venice. After a gruelling two weeks in which I have seen major works manhandled beyond bearing at the Royal Opera and at Glyndebourne, I was almost shocked to see a production which couldn’t be faulted in its concentration on realising the composer’s vision with economy, imagination and concentration. When a work is as complex as this, the production team’s first duty is lucidity, and that is exactly what Deborah Warner, with her set and lighting designers Tom Pye and Jean Kalman, has achieved.

Richard Cork

Private passion

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Right until the end of his life, Euan Uglow remained one of the most elusive English painters. An intensely private man, known only to a small circle of devoted artists, critics, models, collectors and former students, he disliked promotional exposure and the celebrity cult. His reputation has always been high, but it was largely confined to those familiar with his work from group exhibitions or visits to his studio. Uglow saw no reason to submit himself to the public gaze. Utterly absorbed in his own work, he thrived on solitude and the quiet life. But interest in his achievement keeps on growing. Now that figurative painting is no longer regarded as a hopelessly obsolete pursuit, his steadfast commitment to working from life is arousing a great deal of renewed curiosity.

Deborah Ross

Wishy washy

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Water opens with a beautiful little Indian girl sitting on the back of a cart joyously chewing on sugar cane. She has luscious hair, pinchable cheeks, dark eyes, a nose-ring and tinkling silver anklets. (So cute; Madonna would kill for her.) A middle-aged man is on the cart, too, lying on his back and groaning. He is her husband and he dies. We don’t know how long she has been married for, or even if she’s had time to register that she is actually married, but now she is a widow and, as her father tells her, she must now lead a widow’s life. ‘For how long?’ she asks. She is eight years old. She has no idea that she is about to be cast off into the most excruciating, lifelong limbo.

James Delingpole

History distorted

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Very sadly I couldn’t get hold of Sea of Fire (BBC2, Friday), the (reportedly superb) drama documentary about the destruction of HMS Coventry in the Falklands War, because tapes weren’t available till just before broadcast. But not to worry. I think I can still tell you with some confidence how it went. The first thing I know is that it was artfully shot, beautifully acted, had an authoritative voiceover and looked very realistic, for these BBC drama docs always are. The second thing I know is that, also like all BBC exercises in this vein, it made you feel dreadfully ashamed to be British.

1 June 2007

The Spectator

It was forty years ago today…

Sergeant Pepper always cheers me up because – aside from its musical brilliance – it is slightly older than I am. Today’s papers are full of readable celebrations of the album’s anniversary, including a Guardian leader and a “where is she now?” piece in The Times on the Lucy of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”. My favourite track, by a whisker, is still “She’s Leaving Home”. What do other Coffee Housers think?

31 May 2007

Toby Young

A cunning apprentice

I'm becoming increasingly intrigued by Katie Hopkins, the contestant on The Apprentice who has emerged as a national hate figure. (See Richard Curtis's aside during his Bafta Fellowship speech.) On last night's show, in which the six remaining contestants had to sell merchandise on a home shopping channel, Katie was so outrageously snobbish about the channel's typical customer -- whom she dubbed "Mavis" -- it seems clear that her whole appearance on the show is some kind of publicity stunt. Another reason for thinking this is that she seems too intelligent -- too essentially competent -- to be bothering to jump through all these hoops merely to secure a job with Alan Sugar. What kind of publicity stunt, though? Option one is that she's just a freelance publicity-seeker.

26 May 2007

Mary Wakefield

Inspiration to young artists

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How do you react to the news that Kay Hartenstein Saatchi, ex-wife of Charles, the woman who helped to discover (or invent) the original Brit Art brat pack, is putting on a exhibition of London’s best young artists this week? Perhaps your eyes have already begun to widen with excitement? Perhaps you feel a sudden predatory stillness, as I did, as greed, the 21st-century’s answer to aesthetic appreciation, steals across your soul? Well, then, if you’d visited the One One One gallery in London’s West End last Friday as the show, Anticipation, was being hung, you might have felt, as I did, a little chastened by the almost alarming absence of commercialism.

Andrew Lambirth

Destroying the past

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Futurism was originally an Italian manifestation in art and literature, a cult of speed and movement, triumphantly urban and dynamic, a sort of souped-up Cubism, which lasted from 1909 until its deathblow in the first world war and final dissolution in the 1920s. It was pretty much invented by the poet Filippo Tomasso Marinetti (1876–1944), who liked to call himself ‘the caffeine of Europe’, and was actor-manager and travelling salesman for the group. The first international agent provocateur of modern art, expert promoter and publicist, he was for ever on the road organising confrontational meetings masquerading as art and guaranteed to grab the headlines.

Lloyd Evans

Surtitle fatigue

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Strange business walking into the Three Sisters at the Barbican. A vast new temporary seating complex has been built over the auditorium, and as you wander along the reverberating walkways you can peer down through the gaps and make out the familiar opulent cushions of the stalls below you, all shadowy and deserted. It’s like glimpsing the Titanic from a bathoscope. The new seating is supposed to make the Barbican’s overlarge space feel more like a theatre and less like the Nuremberg stadium. But even with fewer seats, the stage is still as large as an aircraft hangar.

Michael Tanner

Laughter unbecoming

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The Glyndebourne season began this year in a striking fashion, with a new production of Verdi’s Macbeth which treats it as a broad comedy — and naturally, from this audience, gets the laughs it is begging for. The production is by Richard Jones, as anyone who has seen one or two of his other operatic operations would soon realise. There is the obsession with cardboard boxes — in the Ring the end of the world consisted of piles of them collapsing; here, instead of Banquo’s ghost, we get a box with a smiley painted on it, jerking on to the stage and frightening Macbeth, as it would. When the curtain falls on that scene, a curtain is lowered inscribed with a much larger smiley.

Kate Chisholm

End of the world

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It’s your last chance this afternoon to catch one of the best programmes on Radio Four, guaranteed to come up each week with something a bit different: an unusual voice or opinion or insight. For the last couple of years it’s been infuriatingly easy to miss, broadcast at 5.30 on a Saturday afternoon when you’re either too exhausted by a week’s worth of chores to listen to anything other than Mantovani (or Monteverdi, depending on your taste) or too busy revving up for a night out to pay attention to something so densely packed with information.

25 May 2007

The Spectator

Time for Elgar to go global

One of the guests at our third Elgar concert at The Spectator's offices in Old Queen Street last night shrewdly pointed out the oddity that the great composer does not seem to travel as well as, say, Vaughan Williams. Listening to Madeleine Mitchell (violin) and Nigel Clayton (piano) perform the sublime Violin Sonata (Op. 82) one could only agree that, on his 150th birthday, "E.E." deserves to go global. There's an excellent piece which makes the same point in today's Guardian.

23 May 2007

The Spectator

Why Rocky rocks

DVD release of the week is Rocky Balboa, the sixth and final instalment of the boxing saga. Yes, I know the idea of the 60-year-old Sylvester Stallone climbing into the ring again is innately absurd, but all of the Rocky movies, including the first which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1976, have been completely ridiculous. That has been their popcorn magic, a classic example of the American Dream told in comic book idiom. Any film that includes lines like “what we'll be calling on is good ol’ fashion blunt force trauma” and “let's start building some hurtin' bombs!” has my vote. Rocky Balboa has the added attraction of declaring that the Saga generation are not above giving young upstarts a serious pasting when the fancy takes them.

22 May 2007

Matthew Dancona

Poetic news

Tomorrow, I am taking part in the launch of Pass on a Poem, a terrific campaign to encourage the reading and enjoyment of poetry at the Oxfam Bookshop, 170 Portobello Road, London W11. Lots of other readings are set to take place around the country, but this one will feature such luminaries as P.D.James, Jon Snow, Richard Dawkins, Alex James, Joan Bakewell, and Mariella Frostrup – with yours truly making up the numbers. I have to admit that I haven’t decided which poem to read yet, but I’m down to a shortlist of two (Ted Hughes versus Emily Dickinson, ten rounds, two falls or a submission.) Entry is free but they’ll be taking donations for Darfur and Chad. For details phone 0207 727 2907 or 0207 229 9152.