Arts Archives

You could have built a tent city from all the red chinos: Aci by the River reviewed

Opera

The Thames cruise for which Handel composed his Water Music in 1717 famously went on until around 4 a.m. The boat trip downstream that formed part of the London Handel Festival’s Aci by the River was a bit zippier. We piled onto a chartered Thames Clipper at Westminster Pier, and a quartet of wind players were already huddled in the gangway, playing suitably aquatic Handel favourites. A bassoonist gave an anxious grimace as the captain floored the throttle and the boat lurched forward. If our craft had been wrecked on some enchanted isle, we could have built a tent city from the red chinos You do get to see an older, more Hogarthian city from the river, even if the skies were London-drab rather than the hoped-for Canaletto blue.

Pierre d’Alancaisez

The latest Venice Biennale is ideologically and aesthetically bankrupt

Exhibitions

Last week’s opening of the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale marks a watershed for the art world. In much of the festival’s gigantic central exhibition, curated by the Brazilian museum director Adriano Pedrosa, as well as in many of the dozens of independently organised national pavilions and countless collateral events, it more obviously than ever before didn’t so much matter what was on show, but why. The politics of visibility and representation has been eating away at the arts for at least a decade, most recently under the banner of ‘decolonisation’. The now nearly complete abdication of aesthetic criteria in favour of a decolonial organising principle is here finally exposed as a wholly inadequate rationale for presenting contemporary art.

Daisy Dunn

How to live off the land for a year

Radio and podcasts

Could you live off the land for a year without buying a single thing to eat? This was the challenge a retired journalist set himself on Radio 4 this week. Max Cotton lives on a five-acre smallholding near Glastonbury in Somerset with his wife Maxine, two pigs, two dozen hens and a Jersey-Friesian cross named Brenda. He also has six adult sons who, as far as this project is concerned, ‘prefer to pontificate than help very much.’ Cotton’s hopes for peas by April were even less realistic than I thought Cotton conceded at the outset that he would allow himself to purchase salt as a necessity.

18 April 2024

Richard Bratby and Gerard McBurney

We have lost an unforgettable teacher and one of Britain’s great critics

Arts feature

Tanner, the critic RICHARD BRATBY Michael Tanner (1935-2024), who died earlier this month, had such a vital mind and stood so far above the common run of music critics that it’s hard to believe he’s gone. For a philosopher to concern themself with the inner game of opera is not unknown (think of Friedrich Nietzsche and Roger Scruton). To do it as perceptively and as readably as Tanner is rarer. For two decades, starting in 1996, his weekly Spectator opera column offered as thorough and as stimulating an education in musical aesthetics as one could hope to receive; intellectual red meat served with forensic clarity and a mischievous, subversive smile.

James Walton

Danny Dyer’s new C4 programme is deeply odd

Television

Who do you think said the following on TV this week: ‘I love being around gay men – seeing a group of men expressing themselves the way they do is beautiful’? The answer, perhaps unexpectedly, is Danny Dyer, whose admittedly convincing schtick as the world’s most Cockney bloke was applied to the question of contemporary masculinity in a new programme for Channel 4. The result was a deeply odd mix of the touching, the illuminating, the silly, the thought-provoking, the cheerfully comic, the pensive and the completely confusing. At first, it looked as if the cheerfully comic would predominate. Danny Dyer: How to Be a Man opened with Danny showing us around his man cave and breezily announcing that ‘Channel 4 bunged me a few quid to travel the country talking to geezers’.

Michael Hann

Why garage punk is plainly the apogee of human achievement

Pop

How is it that a group that sounds like the Hives are selling out the Apollo? In a world configured according to expectation, the highlight of their year would be an appearance at the Rebellion punk festival in Blackpool, probably high up the bill on the second stage. They’d headline their own shows at places like the Dome in Tufnell Park to an audience made up of three-quarters old blokes and a quarter skinny young kids, suited and booted like it’s 1966 and Antonioni’s about to shout ‘Action!’. Afterwards, a DJ would play the Sonics and the Electric Prunes and the Chocolate Watchband.

Lloyd Evans

Player Kings proves that Shakespeare can be funny

Theatre

Play-goers, beware. Director Robert Icke is back in town, and that means a turgid four-hour revival of a heavyweight classic with every actor screaming, bawling, weeping, howling and generally overdoing it. But here’s a surprise. Player Kings, Icke’s new version of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, is a dazzling piece of entertainment and the only exaggerated performance comes from Sir Ian McKellen who plays Falstaff, quite rightly, as a noisy, swaggering dissembler. Those who imagine ‘Shakespearean comedy’ to be an oxymoron will be pleasantly surprised Small details deliver large dividends. The tavern scenes are set in an east London hipster bar with chipped wooden tables and exposed brickwork. Richard Coyle’s Henry IV has been costumed to resemble the chain-smoking George VI.

Laura Gascoigne

How flabby our ideas of draughtsmanship have become

Exhibitions

The term drawing is a broad umbrella, so in an exhibition of 120 works it helps to outline some distinctions. A good place to start is to ask what drawings are for, and that is what Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum has done with its current show of sketches by Flemish masters – staged in collaboration with Antwerp’s Museum Plantin-Moretus – dividing them into studies, designs and stand-alone finished works. Van Dyck’s teenage studies are a measure of how flabby our ideas of draughtsmanship have become If you’ve ever had the chance to visit it, you’ll know what a special place the Plantin-Moretus is.

Deborah Ross

Should beautiful actors be allowed to play those with plain faces?

Cinema

Sometimes I Think About Dying is one of those titles you want to shout back at – what? Only sometimes? It is co-produced by, and stars, Daisy Ridley from the Star Wars franchise who, in going from a blockbuster to an interesting independent film, is taking the opposite of the usual career trajectory. Perhaps you can only fight the Dark Lords of the Sith for so long? But it has paid off, as this is an understated little gem. It is directed by Rachel Lambert and written by Stefanie Abel Horowitz, Katy Wright-Mead and Kevin Armento. It’s hard to say what it is exactly. A dour, deadpan romantic comedy probably gets nearest. Ridley stars as the thirtysomething Fran. Fran works in a small office in a small coastal town in Oregon and she is drab.

Richard Bratby

Baffling and vile: ETO’s Manon Lescaut reviewed

Classical

In 1937, John Barbirolli took six pieces by Henry Purcell and arranged them for an orchestra of strings, horns and woodwinds. Nothing unusual about that: arranging baroque music for modern symphony orchestras was what famous conductors used to do. Beecham and Hamilton Harty re-upholstered Handel. Mahler did something similar with Bach, then directed the result from a grand piano, and wouldn’t you give anything to have heard him? All good clean fun in those innocent days before the advent of historically informed performance. ‘Can you tell me what was happening?’ asked a woman on the way out It’s unusual to hear these things revived now, and curiouser still when the person doing the reviving is Thomas Adès, currently artist in residence with the Hallé.

Sam Leith

Entirely pointless and extremely pleasant: House Flipper 2 reviewed

17 April 2024

John Coulton

A teacher like Michael Tanner would never survive in today’s university climate

I came up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on a rain-sodden October evening in 1976. I'd flown from spring sunshine in South Africa to this misery – the weather having turned abysmal after the best summer of the century, just as one would expect. I didn't know what a Cambridge porter was meant to do as I plonked down my bags at the lodge, anticipating assistance. The porter, a stocky, tough military type, hardly gave me a glance, saying 'Pick 'em up and follow me'. This, I was soon to find out, was the legendary Jaggard, the porter with the most fearsome reputation in the university, upon whom Tom Sharpe's Skullion in Porterhouse Blue was based.

11 April 2024

Pete Williams

Pop musicians, be proud of your middle-class upbringings

Tracey Thorn’s was ‘by no means luxurious.’ Brett Anderson had a ‘small, very small’ one. Miki Berenyi’s was ‘shabby and dirty.’ The unwritten rule that the best rock music comes from the street can create a challenge for edgy post-punk musicians writing their memoirs. What if you grew up in comfortable circumstances or had a boring childhood? Downplaying the state of the house you lived in is one approach – but others are available. Take Brett Anderson’s Coal Black Mornings (2018). Anderson can reasonably claim to have come from a social position below the rest of his band, Suede. His parents were arty but they did, undeniably, live in a council house.

Laura Gascoigne

The tumultuous story behind Caravaggio’s last painting

Arts feature

For centuries no one knew who it was by or even what it was of. The picture that had hung unnoticed in a succession of noble palazzi in the Italian province of Salerno, with its deep chiaroscuro and close-cropped composition, looked like a Caravaggio – but after Caravaggio almost every painting in Naples did. When it entered the collection of the Banca Commerciale Italiana in 1973 it was attributed to Mattia Preti, a Calabrian Caravaggista of the next generation who had caught the tenebrist bug. But in 1980, a letter discovered in the Naples State Archive changed the picture. Written on 11 May 1610 by Lanfranco Massa – the Naples agent of the Genoese nobleman Marcantonio Doria – it explained a delay in the transportation of a painting of Saint Ursula to Genoa.

Lloyd Evans

Why has the National engaged in this tedious act of defamation of the Brontës?

Theatre

The Divine Mrs S is a backstage satire set in the year 1800, when flouncy costumes and elaborate English prose were common cultural ornaments. On press night the venue was full of resting actors and theatrical hangers-on who adored the show’s in-jokes and rehearsal-room wisecracks. Titus Andronicus is ‘an experimental play about a pie’, says an actor. Another thesp demonstrates how to enliven a dreary line by pretending that one’s character is in love. This tedious act of defamation belongs in the bin. Or the Radio 4 early-evening comedy slot The production looks immensely stylish and the company are clearly having a ball, but the ordinary punter may find it tiresome. A few minutes of pastiche is amusing but this lasts well over two hours and it takes nothing seriously.

Richard Bratby

What would Tanner say?

Classical

On the train home from the Royal Festival Hall I learned of the death of Michael Tanner, who wrote this column from 1996 to 2014 and beyond. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment had been playing Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, and it’s not strictly true to say that the news made me wonder about his likely reaction to their performance, had he been able to hear it. But that’s only because, for anyone who came of age reading his criticism, asking ‘What would Michael say?’ is already a reflex – and will be for as long as we think or write about music.

Jenny McCartney

I’m ashamed that I used to think ABBA wasn’t cool

Radio and podcasts

One of the joys of listening to archive BBC interviews with pop stars is the chance to hear long-discarded hipster jargon served up in its original setting. Near the beginning of Radio 2’s ABBA at the BBC, marking 50 years since the group won Eurovision with ‘Waterloo’, a prime example was unearthed from the immediate aftermath of their success. ‘If you were one of the 500 million Eurovision viewers, you may be wondering which was more important in getting the song through to number one,’ said the host. ‘Was it the music or the way-out gear?’ I think we can safely conclude that it was the music, although the sight of Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Faltskog in spangled velvet can’t have hurt.

Sam Kriss

Grey, gloomy, and utterly joyless: Ripley reviewed

Television

If you’ve spent any time gawping at Netflix over the past half-decade or so, you’ll already know that human culture has reached its final, perfect form. We made a good effort with cave paintings, epic poetry, theatre, literature and the rest of them, but the apex of culture is the bingeable, episodic rabbit-hole Netflix documentary about a sociopathic liar. Maybe we love con artists because they’re the only people still selling something new There have been so many of these now that it’s difficult to tell them apart. There was the one about the man who matched with women on dating websites by pretending to be the playboy scion to an Israeli diamond fortune – but who was really just spending the money he’d conned out of his previous girlfriend.

Deborah Ross

Better than expected (but my expectations were low): Back to Black reviewed

Cinema

When the trailer for Sam Taylor-Johnson’s biopic of Amy Winehouse, Back to Black, first landed, her fans were gracious. ‘This,’ they said, ‘is going to be terrific.’ I’m winding you up. They were horrified. It’s too soon, they said. It’s exploitative and trashes her legacy, they concluded, from having watched two minutes of footage. I can only say that, one, fanatical fans are like that whatever you do, and two, this is better than I expected (although my expectations were low). It does seem softened at the edges, and one can never forgive a falling-in-love montage set at London Zoo – ever – butI (mostly) didn’t cringe and it is respectful, if painful.

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

In defence of noise music

Classical

It’s curious to consider what a venerable old thing noise music is. That this most singularly untameable of musics – the place where melody, harmony and pulse all go to die – is an Edwardian invention. It first arrived in this country 110 years ago when futurists Filippo Marinetti and Luigi Russolo set up camp at the London Coliseum a month before the start of the first world war and, over ten consecutive nights, blasted the West End audience with their ‘noise-tuners’ or intonarumori, alongside diverse variety acts. I say blasted but making a decent racket was the one thing these homemade instruments were incapable of doing. ‘It could have been drowned easily by a good tympanist,’ noted the Musical Times. The artist C.R.W.

Damian Thompson

The greatest British symphonist you’ve never heard of

The Listener

Grade: A Rejoice! A glorious symphonic cycle by a British composer has been issued as a set for the first time. George Lloyd (1913-98) was treated with lofty condescension by the musical establishment because his twelve symphonies contain barely a single dissonance. They’re sprinkled with jaunty tunes that have the feel of an Ealing Comedy – heresy! Also, it didn’t help that for decades Lloyd made his living as a mushroom farmer in the West Country. But he was no amateur: he could write perfect fugues as a teenager and by his early twenties had a fine opera under his belt. Then in 1942, the ship on which he was serving as radio engineer was hit by a torpedo. Lloyd nearly drowned in oil; shell shock ruined his health and he and his wife retreated to their smallholding.

Graeme Thomson

The mayhem ‘Born Slippy’ provoked felt both poignant and cathartic: Underworld, at Usher Hall, reviewed

Pop

On the same night Underworld played the second of two shows at the Usher Hall, next door at the Traverse Theatre, This is Memorial Device was midway through a short run. Seeing both within a matter of hours, I felt an exchange of currents, a renewed awareness of the short distance we travel between euphoria and sorrow when we start mixing music and memory. The short play, adapted and directed by Graham Eatough from the novel by David Keenan, concerns the brief, wayward life of a (fictional) 1980s cult band from Airdrie. We see how the group’s complicated yet charismatic personal dynamic, intense improvised music and quasi-occult power was once revered by a handful of diehards.

4 April 2024

Deborah Ross

You’ll want to claw your face off: Scoop reviewed

Film

Scoop is a dramatised account of the events leading up to the BBC’s 2019 Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. The one he imagined would allow him to put Jeffrey Epstein behind him, but instead put Pizza Express (Woking) on the map, made us want to claw our own faces off with the horror of it, and led to the Queen stripping him of all his royal and military titles. (I think you know you are in trouble with Mummy when this happens.) Although billed as a ‘film’, this isn’t especially cinematic. It’s more like a bonus episode of The Crown but it is phenomenally cast (Rufus Sewell is a revelation) and you do get to claw your own face off all over again. If, that is, you have any face left.

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Wise, passionate and soul-stirringly withering: remembering the great Michael Tanner (1935-2024)

Michael Tanner, who died yesterday at the age of 88, lived two parallel lives. To many Spectator readers, he was the magazine's peerless opera critic: wise, passionate, thrillingly disputatious, intensely funny, extremely generous with the Semtex. Essential reading. He wrote The Spectator's weekly opera column from 1996 to 2014 and continued to review – and raze to the ground where necessary – concerts, books, albums and opera, whatever we flung at him, right up until 2022. To countless others, however, he was one of the great philosophical scholars.

Paul Keegan

The quiet brilliance of street photographer Saul Leiter

Arts feature

This is the second exhibition of mid-century New York street photography at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. The first, in 2022, surveyed the work of Vivian Maier, who at her death left behind a vast quantity of prints and negatives: evidence of a hidden life unsuspected even by those in whose household she lived and worked for four decades. There are continuities between Maier and the subject of the current show, Saul Leiter. They were contemporaries, loners who lived into their eighties (Leiter died four years after Maier, in 2013), prolific but uninterested in recognition, their reputations largely posthumous. Leiter was born in 1923 in Pittsburgh, like Andy Warhol and, like Warhol, he got out.

Digby Warde-Aldam

Impressionism is 150 years old – this is the anniversary show to see

Exhibitions

The time that elapsed between the fall of the Paris Commune and the opening of the first proper impressionist exhibition amounted to less than three years. Over the course of that period, the city had witnessed the collapse of the Second Empire, suffered a siege at the hands of the Prussian army and seen vicious house-to-house fighting between the troops of the Versailles government and thescrappy citizen-army of Paris proper. All Parisians would recall the rivers of blood running down the city’s ritziest shopping streets, zoo animals being butchered for restaurant fodder, and the mass slaughter of rebel prisoners across the public squares of the city’s eastern faubourgs.

Michael Hann

Never admit that your band is prog – it’s the kiss of death

Pop

Sensible prog-rock bands try to ensure no one ever realises they play prog. What happens when you are deemed a prog band is that you are condemned to the margins – little radio airtime, few TV appearances, barely any coverage in the mainstream press – because it has been decided you exist solely for the delectation of a tribe that baffles the rest of the world. Once non-proggers have decided you are prog, that’s it. There is no way back for you. Just collect your Campaign for Real Ale membership card, go home and practise your drum solos. Once non-proggers have decided you are prog, that’s it. There is no way back for you Hence Radiohead – absolutely, indubitably a prog band, right down to the tricksy time signatures – don’t bang on about Tales From Topographic Oceans.

Rupert Christiansen

Choreographers! Enough with the reworkings of Carmen and Frankenstein!

Dance

Carmen and Frankenstein are without a doubt two of the most over-worked tropes in our culture, the myths of the evasively seductive gypsy and the human monster machine being lazily recycled and plundered and vulgarised in various forms to the point at which their authentic primal power has been altogether deflated. So it was with a heavy sigh that I anticipated their two latest danced iterations. No surprises were likely, and none were delivered.

Lloyd Evans

Exhilarating: MJ the Musical reviewed

Theatre

If you’ve heard good reports about MJ the Musical, believe them all and multiply everything by a hundred. As a music-and-dance spectacular, the show is as exhilarating as any Jackson produced while he was alive. The sets, the costumes, the choreography and the live band deliver an amazing collective punch. When he removes his black trilby he looks like Rishi Sunak at a karaoke bar The script, by Lynn Nottage, takes us into Jackson’s twisted personal history. He was one of ten children raised in a four-room shack in Gary, Indiana, by weirdo parents. His mother was a Jehovah’s Witness who refused to celebrate birthdays or Christmas.