Arts Archives

Why imperfect operas like Don Carlo are more interesting than perfect ones

Opera

In the 62 years since I first heard and saw Don Carlo, in the famous and long-lasting production by Visconti at the Royal Opera, my feelings about it have grown ever stronger, both in passionate attachment and in critique. Imperfect operas, like other imperfect phenomena, can be more interesting than perfect ones, because they’re more thought-provoking, more enticing. The libretto, very freely based on Schiller’s play, was by two Frenchmen, and Verdi, eager to make a bigger splash than he had so far in Paris, made too much of one. The first performance, in 1867, ran so late that the members who lived outside central Paris missed their last trains, which were at 12.35 a.m. (Royal Opera and ENO: please take note).

30 July 2020

Deborah Ross

An extraordinary debut: Make Up reviewed

Film

Make Up is the first full-length film from writer--director Claire Oakley, set in an out-of-season holiday park on the Cornish coast where the wind blows, waves crash, rain lashes and gulls screech so you know it’s not a rom-com (foxes shriek in the night too). But while it’s easy to say what it isn’t, it’s harder to say what it is. It’s a thriller but not quite a thriller, and a horror flick but not quite a horror flick, and a psychosexual fantasy but not wholly a psychosexual fantasy… It may be we can settle only on one thing, and the one thing is this: it is very, very good.

Kelvin MacKenzie

The real Rupert Murdoch, by Kelvin MacKenzie

Arts feature

For more than four decades I have been around Rupert Murdoch. In that time he employed me in both London and New York, invested in my business ideas and ultimately fired me. It was always rock ’n’ roll around Rupert and that’s the way I liked it. So you would have thought that when the BBC made its current three-part documentary on him, it might have come to me for my views. Oh no. I presume it didn’t want to take the risk I might say something warm and supportive. It did, however, film Trevor Kavanagh, the Sun’s political columnist, for hours on end. He was warm and supportive. But all that was left on the cutting room floor. The BBC only wanted the bile. Instead, it concentrated its filming on the usual suspects.

Rod Liddle

Fine tunes and spacey, quiet grandeur: Taylor Swift’s Folklore reviewed

Pop

Grade: A- This is worrying — like listening to a speech by David Lammy and finding yourself, against your better nature, agreeing with it. If there’s one thing worse than your favourite artists making a duff album, it’s artists you can’t stand making a good one. I shall have to tell myself that this isn’t a Taylor Swift album at all, but really the work of The National — a fine band, whose Aaron Dessner is a co-writer on nine of these 16 tracks and producer on 11. That may explain the spacey, quiet grandeur of these songs, the background atmospherics, the gradual rise in many to a gentle anthem. This is Taylor Goes Indie.

Richard Bratby

Art tackles social distancing and, for once, actually wins: Philharmonia Sessions reviewed

Classical

First there were the home recitals: musicians playing solo Bach in front of their bookshelves, wonkily captured on iPhones. Next came the Zoom ensembles, and near-infinite quantities of editing time and digital processing power achieved what, for a millennium up until March this year, could be produced instantaneously by putting some musicians in the same room. In June, we had live chamber music relays from empty concert halls. And now, after what might be the longest enforced break many orchestras will ever have taken, we have socially distanced online symphonic concerts: the latest, and let’s hope final, manifestation of this godawful New Normal (you’ll know we’re back to the Old Normal once critics start complaining about grey-haired audiences again).

Lloyd Evans

When theatres reopen they’ll resemble prison camps

Theatre

‘Give us a date, mate!’ That was the sound of Andrew Lloyd Webber begging Boris Johnson to announce when the West End can return to normal. He made his plea at the London Palladium on 23 July, where he was testing a new set of Covid-compliant measures during a one-hour solo show by Beverley Knight. It was the first indoor live performance in the capital since lockdown began. The impresario’s advance preparations had been exhaustively thorough. He arranged for the entire venue to be hosed down with an anti-viral fluid that kills the bug for up to four weeks. Every door handle had been fitted with a special cover that exterminates bacteria with silver ions. The audience were given staggered arrival times and they used a one-way system as they moved around the theatre.

Michael Hann

The people who were idiots at gigs in early March are still idiots

Pop

Is the world ready for the return of live rock music? On the evidence of the first gig in London since lockdown, no. The people who were arseholes at gigs in early March are still arseholes at gigs, but there’s rather more than an obstructed sightline at stake now. Miles Kane was the guinea pig for the experiment, playing to 150 people who’d applied for tickets and who stood in a summer downpour watching him play acoustically. More on Kane later, but his presence was the least important thing here. The gig was the first in a series of small shows in Camden Market, and the organisers had taken care: masks were compulsory and the ground was marked with green dots to ensure everyone stood where they were supposed to.

James Walton

Sumptuous and very promising: A Suitable Boy reviewed

Television

Nobody could argue that Andrew Davies isn’t up for a challenge. He’d also surely be a shoo-in for Monty Python’s Summarise Proust competition. After turning both War and Peace and Les Misérables into satisfying, unhurried six-part drama series, he’s now taken on Vikram Seth’s 1,300-page novel A Suitable Boy. The first episode started with a wedding that immediately established the programme’s visual sumptuousness, while also serving as a handy introduction to the main characters. The groom’s rebellious brother Maan, for example, chafed at the idea that he was supposed to be next.

23 July 2020

Richard Bratby

Model villages aren’t just for kids

Arts feature

When you leave Bekonscot, the world looks different. The semis and grass verges of suburban Beaconsfield seem slightly wrong: too large, too assertive. It takes a minute or two to adjust your perspective — to size yourself up, or bring the surrounding houses down. In that moment, you experience the sensation described by Will Self in Scale, his morphine-addled hymn to Britain’s most celebrated model village: ‘Some people lose their sense of proportion; I’ve lost my sense of scale.’ Well, supply your own lockdown metaphor.

Laura Gascoigne

The artistic response to the pandemic has so far been mind-numbingly banal

Exhibitions

Travelling around Latin America three years ago, Stephen Chambers was attracted by pharmacy signs with pictograms advertising treatments to illiterate customers, and on his return he painted a series of serio-comic pictures of fatal diseases from the plague to bird flu. Could he get a gallery to show them? Could he hell. They all complained that they weren’t ‘cheery’ enough. Art is particular: loves death, hates sickness. Look at the first world war: an inspiration to cubism, futurism, vorticism, expressionism and dada. And the Spanish flu? Forgotten. In the face of death from disease, the avant-garde that sharpened its cutting-edge on conflict retreated.

Deborah Ross

Worth catching the virus for: Saint Frances reviewed

Film

Two films about young women this week, one at the cinema, if you dare, and one to stream, if you don’t. Saint Frances requires the daring and I’d dare, if I were you, as it’s splendid and funny and tender and involving and taboo-busting, and if you do contract a deadly virus, it’ll be worth it. Only kidding. Of course it won’t. But, on the other hand, the government is currently encouraging us to venture into town to save Pret A Manger and I think this has more to say than a baguette. Or one of those pricey salads.

James Delingpole

Why I love French telly

Television

There’s a scene in the French espionage series The Bureau — about the DGSE, France’s equivalent of the CIA or MI6 —where one of the characters loses a limb while on active service. ‘Excellent,’ jokes the station boss on his return. ‘This will greatly improve our diversity quota for disabled employees.’ This is why I prefer foreign language dramas to homegrown ones. You can’t imagine a joke like that making it into a BBC drama, can you? When, in 2015, the first season of The Bureau was shown to members of the real DGSE (Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure) they gave it a standing ovation.

John Phipps

Louis Theroux’s podcast reveals a master at work

The problem with livestreaming heavy metal? No moshpits

Pop

There was only so long anyone could put up with the live musical performances of the early days of lockdown: musicians in their living rooms, performing stripped-back versions of their songs in broadcasts that froze or stuttered. The time would come, inevitably, when everyone wanted more. Viewers would want something more closely approximating a full show; musicians would want to be paid. Laura Marling was early through the gates: last month, she promoted her latest album with two concerts at the Union Chapel in London, played to an empty hall but streamed for UK and US audiences.

Lloyd Evans

RSC’s Merchant of Venice is full of puzzling ornaments and accents

Theatre

The BBC announces Merchant of Venice as if it were a Hollywood blockbuster. ‘In the melting pot of Venice, trade is God.’ The RSC, which staged the show in 2015, calls it ‘a thrilling, contemporary interpretation’. Each element in Polly Findlay’s production looks fine. Jacob Fortune-Lloyd and Patsy Ferran (Bassanio and Portia) are as cute as a pair of Love Island hotties. But the costumes are hard to decipher and they seem attached to no particular era. Most of the characters wear chic, well-tailored outfits except for Antonio (Jamie Ballard) who sports a T-shirt and seems close to tears most of the time. He and Bassanio are presented as openly gay even though this weakens the character of Portia.

16 July 2020

Deborah Ross

Held me so fast I was outbid on eBay: Clemency reviewed

Film

Clemency stars Alfre Woodard as a prison warden on death row whose job is beginning to take its toll, and if you think it sounds like a tough watch, you’d be right. But it is also a masterwork, won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance, and doesn’t at any juncture call on the uplifting, healing power of cake — see: Love Sarah — so it has that going for it too. This film held me so fast I was outbid on eBay on a vintage sideboard I’d had my eyes on for ages It’s yet another film that you’ll have to stream digitally. (July was meant to be the month new films began opening in cinemas but at the moment it feels as though we’re waiting to see which of the major film companies will blink first and take the risk.

Tanya Gold

Drive-in cinemas are back – but for how long?

Arts feature

Pandemic creates the oddest phenomena: here, for instance, is a British drive-in cinema. They exist for people who won’t go to a conventional cinema for fear of infection, which sounds like a film in itself. But that is the charm: attending a drive-in cinema feels like living inside a film, because every British drive-in cinema until now has failed.

Stuart Jeffries

The guileful, soulful art of Khadija Saye

Exhibitions

Gwyneth Paltrow has a new neighbour. On the same block in Notting Hill as Gwynie’s Goop store, with its This Smells Like My Vagina scented candles and must-have child-calming essential oil sprays, a shopfront has been taken over to display a poignant series of self-portraits by a rather different woman. Khadija Saye died three summers ago with her mother in the Grenfell Tower fire. Much of the 24-year-old artist’s work was destroyed in the blaze, including three tintype images from a series of nine called ‘in this space we breathe’. The other six were displayed that summer in the Diaspora Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in Saye’s first major international exhibition.

Damian Thompson

Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas were his musical laboratory – here are the best recordings

Classical

If you want to understand Beethoven, listen to his piano sonatas. Without them, you’ll never grasp how the same man could write the hummable, easy-listening Septet of 1799 and the scraped dissonances of the 1825 Grosse Fuge, which even today scares Classic FM listeners. It’s the 32 sonatas, not the nine symphonies or 16 string quartets, that join the dots. The symphonies are monuments rather than a guidebook. For example, the Second doesn’t warn you that the Eroica is about to explode in your face. The quartets, meanwhile, jump from the six of Opus 18, in which Beethoven essentially pours new wine into old bottles, to the three Razumovskys of Opus 59, by which time he has moved to another planet.

James Walton

Michaela Coel’s dazzling finale reminds me of Philip Roth: I May Destroy You reviewed

Television

It might seem a bit of a stretch to see deep similarities between Michaela Coel (young, female, black and currently very fashionable indeed) and the late Philip Roth (increasingly discredited as an embodiment of all those phallocentric white guys who once ruled American fiction merely because they were great writers). Nonetheless, this week’s television made it hard not to. On Tuesday night, as an adaptation of Roth’s The Plot Against America began on Sky Atlantic, Coel’s I May Destroy You was serving up a dazzling final episode that confirmed how Rothian the series has been.

Lloyd Evans

James Graham’s small new drama is exquisite: BBC Four’s Unprecedented reviewed

Theatre

Let’s face it. Theatre via the internet is barely theatre. It takes a huge amount of creativity and inventiveness to make anything remotely like a theatrical drama in the digital sphere. The BBC’s Culture in Quarantine team have invited some talented writers and actors to try and crack it. Unprecedented begins with ‘Viral’, by James Graham, in which three 18-year-old lads enjoy a Zoom chat from their bedrooms. The craftsmanship in this small script is exquisite. The characters are united by a common purpose — creating a globally popular video clip — while each has to grapple with a personal crisis. One has a dying granny, one is coming to terms with his bisexuality, the third has a crush on his mate’s sister.

Daisy Dunn

The best podcasts for all your corona-gardening needs

9 July 2020

Sophie Haigney

The weird and wonderful world of hotel carpets

Arts feature

Consider the carpet. In all likelihood, you usually don’t. It’s simply something beneath your feet, soft or scratchy, bright or beige, thick or thin. But in a new book, Bill Young asks you to pause and really look at a particular genre of floor-padding: the carpets in the hotels around the world. In Hotel Carpets, the long-neglected designs pop from the pages. Young, a corporate pilot, would often send pictures of hotel carpets to his wife and daughter while he was travelling. ‘Because I spend most of my life in hotels, that’s just one thing that was sticking out,’ Young says, in a video interview from his home in Dallas, where he’s been mostly grounded of late, due to the pandemic.

Rod Liddle

Ranges from the slight to the first-rate: Neil Young’s Homegrown reviewed

Pop

Grade: B+ Neil Young has been mining his own past very profitably for a long time now, disinterring a seemingly endless catalogue of stuff which, at the time it was recorded, failed to see the light of day. And people like me fork out each time. I remember looking forward to this album in 1975 — but just before the release date he shelved it in favour of Tonight’s the Night, easily the finest rock album of the 1970s (or, to my mind, since). This doesn’t come close but, as it’s from Young’s most rewarding period, it holds a certain interest. Five songs have been released elsewhere, including the lovely ‘Star of Bethlehem’ (on Young’s underrated American Stars ’n’ Bars).

Richard Bratby

Portrait of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic – Britain’s oldest and ballsiest orchestra

Classical

Liverpool’s last ocean liner lies half a mile inland, on the crest of a hill. The Philharmonic Hall, home of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, sits between two cathedrals on Hope Street, its towers jutting over the city like twin prows. It’s an unavoidable metaphor: when you enter the Hall on a concert night, the first thing you see is a bronze memorial to the musicians of the Titanic. Everything about the Hall — the grand staircase; the long curving corridors; the art deco auditorium that looks like something from Alexander Korda’s Things to Come — suggests that you’re about to steam off on some fantastic voyage. I’ve heard concerts all over the world, but when I dream about music, it’s always at the Liverpool Phil.

Deborah Ross

I want to support cinema but I have my work cut out with Love Sarah

Cinema

Some cinemas have reopened, with the rest to follow by the end of the month, thankfully. But the big, hotly anticipated films — Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, for example, or A Quiet Place II — won’t be out for a while yet, as opening schedules are adjusted. However, there is a new film that is cinema-only: it’s British, and it’s called Love Sarah. It stars Celia Imrie and is about three generations of women who seek to overcome grief by founding a bakery in London’s Notting Hill rather than running away to join Isis, say. (Is it always a bakery in Notting Hill or does it just feel like that?) I want to be kind as I want to support cinema. But I have my work cut out here.

Lloyd Evans

Not even a genius could make Much Ado About Nothing funny

Theatre

The RSC’s 2014 version of Much Ado is breathtaking to look at. Sets, lighting and costumes are exquisitely done, even if the location is not established with absolute clarity. The date is Christmas 1918 and we’re in a stately home that has been converted into a billet, or a hospital, for returning soldiers. The prickly Beatrice (Michelle Terry) seems to be an unemployed aristocrat working as a volunteer nurse. She fusses around the ward making discreet enquiries about an old flame, Benedick, whose memory she can’t shake off. Enter Benedick played by Edward Bennett and the fun starts. These two absolutely get inside the skins of their characters. Terry’s portrait of spiky seductiveness is riveting to watch and Bennett has an amazing range of effects at his disposal.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Britain’s choirs are facing oblivion

Music

Britain’s choirs are facing oblivion. Yet they’re also terrified of returning. One story explains why. Picture this innocent choral-society scene in Skagit County, Washington State, on the evening of 10 March. One-hundred-and-twenty singers, most of them elderly sopranos, gathered in the Presbyterian church to rehearse for two hours, their chairs 15cm apart. At half-time they took a break for shared snacks, and at the end the helpful ones stayed to stack the chairs. Fifty-two of those singers came down with Covid-19, supposedly through the release of aerosol droplets in the ether. Thus began the swirling of rumours across the world about the grave dangers of singing.

Martin Gayford

The joy of socially distanced gallery-going

Exhibitions

Not long after the pubs, big galleries have all started to reopen, like flowers unfolding, one by one. The timing reminded me of an anecdote that Lucian Freud used to tell about a Soho painter friend he took into the National Gallery after it had shut (as some senior artists are entitled to do). They arrived after closing time in the drinking holes of Soho, and the painter friend was staggering and swaying so much that Lucian — who was not easily rattled — became alarmed that he was going to put one of his flailing arms through a Rembrandt. I wonder how those art-lovers of yesteryear would have coped with socially distanced visits. I think they may be an improvement, at least in some respects.