Arts Archives

I’ve lost patience with podcasts and their presenters

Radio

‘To be recognised and accepted by a peregrine,’ wrote J.A. Baker in 1967, ‘you must wear the same clothes, travel by the same way, perform actions in the same order. Like all birds, it fears the unpredictable.’ Sitting around in the same old clothes, performing chores in the same order, travelling by no way at all, I’ve found comfort in Baker’s assurance that I may at least prove attractive to birds in my slovenly purdah. Sir David Attenborough read The Peregrine beautifully on Radio 4 just before Christmas, but if you were too busy steaming puddings to listen, you may find this a good time for enjoying the series online.

Michael Tanner

Michael Tanner remembers the greatest musical experience of his life

Music

No surprise: the greatest musical experience of my life was Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1962. I thought at the time that I would never again be so moved by a performance of anything. I have kept an open mind ever since, and still it takes me no time or effort to answer the question. Obviously I can’t discuss here why I regard Parsifal as a supreme work, but even if I thought that Wagner had written greater ones, or that some other master composer had — in fact, I do think there are several works by four composers that are as great as Parsifal, though at that altitude rankings and comparisons become absurd — what I experienced in Bayreuth that year was unique and unpredictable.

James Walton

Classic tangled thriller: Sky’s Gangs of London reviewed

Television

There were plenty of TV shows around this week designed to cheer us up. Sky Atlantic’s Gangs of London, however, wasn’t one of them. After decades of desensitisation, it’s not easy for any film or television programme these days to make its screen violence genuinely horrifying. Yet, by my reckoning, Thursday’s first episode managed to do it at least twice before the opening credits had even rolled. By the time they did, it was clear that two terrified Welsh lowlifes from some kind of travellers’ camp had been tricked into carrying out a hit on Finn Wallace (Colm Meaney), London’s most powerful criminal boss — rather than, as they’d fondly imagined, ‘just some paedo’. But that was clear only to us.

Michael Hann

Felt longer than the lockdown itself: BBC1’s One World – Together At Home reviewed

Pop

You have to admire the spirit of the organisers of last weekend’s One World: Together at Home concert. To put on an event that seemed to last longer than lockdown itself is the sort of can-do attitude we love to see. The main event — the really star-studded portion that was shown live on Saturday night on the big three US networks, and then adapted for the UK and shown on BBC1 on Sunday — began only after six whole hours of preamble from slightly lesser turns. Six hours. That’s an awful lot of watching people sit with an acoustic guitar in front of their webcam. Or sometimes not even sit with an acoustic guitar — Jessie J appeared to be doing karaoke with her own CDs and singing over the top of them.

Lloyd Evans

The best theatre of the 21st century

Theatre

Not looking great, is it? Until we all get jabbed, theatres may have to stay closed. And even the optimists say a reliable vaccine is unlikely to arrive before Christmas. As the darkness persists, here’s a round-up of my leading experiences over nearly two decades as a reviewer. There’s been a surge of output. More theatres have opened, especially on the London fringe, and several have created annexes for experimental work. Musicals have proliferated. The rise of the box-set has been excellent for the West End. Global hits such as Game of Thrones have created a host of British stars with enough clout to sell out a three-month run in London. Shakespeare hasn’t fared so well.

16 April 2020

Graeme Thomson

The musical benefits of not playing live

Music

Glenn Gould considered audiences ‘a force of evil’. ‘Not in their individual segments but en masse, I detest audiences.’ He retired from public performance on 10 April 1964, at the age of 31, having given fewer than 200 public recitals. The Canadian classical pianist had longstanding philosophical objections to the ritual of performing live. He found applause automatic and insincere, and often asked spectators not to bother. He even wrote a (partly) tongue-in-cheek manifesto, the Gould Plan for the Abolition of Applause and Demonstrations of All Kinds, in which he called for clapping to be banned. Gould believed that the most useful and honest response to music came following a period of solitary reflection, rather than as instantaneous public display.

Richard Bratby

The marvel of Mozart’s letters

Classical

It’s 1771, you’re in Milan, and your 14-year-old genius son has just premièred his new opera. How do you reward him? What would be a fun family excursion in an era before multiplexes or theme parks? Leopold Mozart knew just the ticket. ‘I saw four rascals hanged here on the Piazza del Duomo,’ wrote young Wolfgang back to his sister Maria Anna (‘Nannerl’), excitedly. ‘They hang them just as they do in Lyons.’ He was already something of a connoisseur of public executions. The Mozarts had spent four weeks in Lyons in 1766 and as the music historian Stanley Sadie points out, Leopold had clearly taken his son (ten) and daughter (15) along to a hanging ‘for a jolly treat one free afternoon’.

Bryan Appleyard

The bleak brilliance of Hud

Film

Hud is a film that has haunted me for decades. I was never sure why. It seemed to be something about the bleakness of the setting and the story but also the extravagance of the hero and his car. I recently watched it as research for a book, and then, immediately, I watched it again. It is that good. There are two stars of Martin Ritt’s movie: Paul Newman and a 1958 Cadillac Series 62 Convertible. Out there in the ranchlands of the Texas Panhandle Newman looks just fine — big hat, jeans, cowboy shirt and boots — but the car looks all wrong. It is long, low and wide with an absurd pair of tailfins. Moreover it is pink. Though the film is in black and white, the Caddy’s pinkness is mentioned twice in the dialogue.

James Delingpole

The Amazon Prime doc that will convert anyone to cricket

Television

Imagine rooting for the Australian cricket team. If you’re Scottish, Welsh or Irish — or Australian obviously — it might not be such a stretch. But for an Englishman, I suspect, it’s nigh on impossible. It would be like supporting Germany in the (football) World Cup. Or yearning for the All Blacks to win the rugby. We invented cricket, after all. And in that particular sphere, Australia is our natural enemy. They burned our bails in 1882 — ‘the Ashes of English cricket’ — and quite properly we have never forgiven them. But if that’s how you feel — and I really don’t blame you — then you should treat yourself to the marvellous Amazon Prime series The Test: A New Era for Australia’s Team.

Robert Jackman

The genius of Joe Rogan

How to succeed in sculpture (without being a man)

Strangely absorbing: the first lockdown dramas reviewed

Theatre

High Tide got there first. The East Anglian theatre company has produced a series of lockdown mini-dramas, Love in the Time of Corona, made up of five filmed reflections on self-isolation. ‘Rainbows’ by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm is narrated by a woman on the edge teaching her kids to decorate the windows with coloured paints. ‘Child Two is crying and Child One is giving me the finger.’ Outside, as she takes a photograph, she suffers an anxiety attack. ‘The gurgling panic in the base of my gut, the pain in my chest. Not virus, all fear.’ She decides to flee. But will her children survive without her? Convincingly performed by Katie Lyons, this is a simple, well-made tale with a dilemma, a turning point and a resolution.

15 April 2020

Slavoj Žižek

The future will not follow any of the already imagined Hollywood movie scripts

We often hear that what we are going through is a real life case of what we used to see in Hollywood dystopias. So what kind of movie are we now watching? When I got the message from many US friends that gun stores sold out their stock even faster than pharmacies, I tried to imagine the reasoning of the buyers: they probably imagined themselves as a group of people safely isolated in their well-stocked house and defending it with guns against a hungry infected mob, like the movies about the attack of the living dead. (One can also imagine a less chaotic version of this scenario: elites will survive in their secluded areas, as in Roland Emmerich’s 2012 where a couple of thousand selected survive – with the admission price of $1 billion per person.

9 April 2020

William Cook

Welder, banjo player, comedian, actor, and now artist – Billy Connolly interviewed

Arts feature

We are in a basement gallery in London’s West End, and Britain’s greatest comedian is doing what he does best — sharing his delight at the daft absurdities of daily life. He remembers seeing a little boy wading into the freezing waters at Aberdeen. ‘You make a certain noise when the wave comes up. It’s a noise that you can only repeat by shoving a hot potato up a donkey’s arse.’ He is making this empty gallery feel as though it’s full of people — and a bunch of strangers laugh like old friends. ‘A lot of my stuff doesn’t have punchlines’. He doesn’t need them. ‘It’s lovely just making a big picture, and saying, “I was there, and I’d like to invite you to share it with me.

Michael Tanner

Why do Radio 3 presenters adopt the tone stupid adults use when addressing children?

Radio

Anyone who has listened regularly to Radio 3 over the decades — not to mention the Third Programme, which Radio 3 replaced in 1967, and which provided an incomparable musical education for many of us — can’t have failed to notice the change in style and standard of presentation. Listening to any radio announcer from 50 years ago is bound to cause hilarity: carefully read scripts, un-emotional delivery; all told, quite like the Queen’s Christmas broadcast. It would be ridiculous to expect no change in the way that the music, and the occasional talks, not to mention the regular poetry programme — a northern camp Thursday-night regular — are presented.

Sara Veale

Watching dance online is an advantage, not a concession: BalletBoyz – Deluxe reviewed

Dance

Another day in isolation, another bid to find joy in my lone state-sanctioned walk. (Pro tip: stay out longer than is interesting or comfortable to brighten the prospect of another 20-plus hours indoors.) For dance critics, the C-19 crisis and its mass theatre shutdown has triggered some major thumb-twiddling. Like our exercise classes and therapy sessions, it’s time to go digital. Ballet DVDs and cinema broadcasts have been in the mix for a while, but it’s taken the abolition of live performances to spike serious interest in dance streaming.

Laura Freeman

The life of Artemisia Gentileschi is made for Netflix, but it’s the art that really excites

Exhibitions

‘It’s true, it’s true, it’s true.’ Over and over she said it. ‘E vero, e vero, e vero.’ It’s true he raped me. It’s true I was a virgin. It’s true all I say. Even under judicial torture, even with cords wrapped around her fingers and pulled tight, she did not waver. ‘E vero.’ These words, spoken by the 17-year-old Artemisia Gentileschi, have come down to us in a trial transcript of 1612. This haunting document, never seen outside the state archives in Rome, will be shown for the first time in the National Gallery’s forthcoming Artemisia exhibition. Artemisia ought to have opened this month. Curator Letizia Treves has been through hell and high water. Italy in lockdown. American flights suspended.

Alexandra Coghlan

The best recordings of my favourite Passion

Music

In the autumn of 1632, a man called Kaspar Schisler returned home to the small Bavarian town of Oberammergau. He didn’t walk through the gates in daylight, but waited until night, sneaking in past the tower guards. A few days later he was dead from the plague that was swelling and blistering its way across Europe — a plague which, until that point, strict quarantine had kept out. Within a year it had killed a quarter of the town. The remaining residents gathered together and made a vow: if they were spared, they would stage a play of the life and death of Jesus, and would continue to do so every ten years in perpetuity.

Lloyd Evans

Absorbing and meticulously researched play about Partition: Drawing the Line reviewed

Theatre

Theatres have taken to the internet like never before. Recorded performances are being made available over the web, many for free. Getting Better Slowly is about a dancer, Adam Pownall, who spent two years fighting Guillain-Barré syndrome. This lucid and enjoyable show (recorded at Lincoln Drill Hall) now looks horribly topical. A young artist, paralysed by a mysterious disease, refuses to surrender and eventually reclaims his vigour and his ability to communicate. That could stand for the profession as a whole. Hampstead Theatre offers a slate of three recorded plays. (Wild and Wonderland were reviewed in The Spectator on 30 June 2016 and 12 July 2014 respectively).

Jenny McCartney

The perfect film for family viewing: Belleville Rendez-Vous revisited

Film

The selection of a film for family viewing is a precise and delicate art, particularly with us all now confined to quarters in intergenerational lockdown. Should the film-picker misjudge the terrain on ‘scenes of a sexual nature’, the entire family will be condemned to sit, agonised, through the dreaded onset of rhythmic heavy breathing and beyond, until finally someone cracks and mumbles ‘this is a bit racy’ while reaching for the fast-forward button. On the other hand, some of the full-throttle kids’ films seem designed to test adult sanity to its limit.

James Walton

An extraordinary tale: BBC2’s The Countess and the Russian Billionaire reviewed

Television

There can’t be many programmes that bring to mind quotations from both Henry Kissinger and Boney M., but BBC2’s The Countess and the Russian Billionaire was one of them. While Kissinger’s idea that ‘power is the ultimate aphrodisiac’ may be a little out of fashion in the #MeToo age, it was hard not to think it played a part in the eye-popping events that Wednesday’s documentary laid out with some relish. As for Boney M., rarely has ‘Oh, those Russians’ from ‘Rasputin’ felt so penetratingly insightful. The programme began filming in 2015, with the apparent aim of providing a ringside seat at a fight between an excitingly wealthy British-based couple and the Russian government.

Rod Liddle

Haunting and beautiful: Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus’s Songs of Yearning reviewed

The Listener

Grade: A It has taken 33 years — during which time this decidedly strange Liverpool collective have put out only three albums and done virtually no interviews — for the Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus to become sort of au courant. Which is perhaps why they have suddenly, in a wholly unforeseen bout of activity, put out two in the same week. The other is the limited edition Nocturnes. Given our current predicament, the simple iron church bell that tolls here and there on this album should be resonant enough. But musical fashion has swung around a little to this band, too.

4 April 2020

Laura Freeman

The art of the hermit

Arts feature

Late in the afternoon on Valentine’s Day, I walked through an almost empty Uffizi. Coronavirus was then a Wuhan phenomenon. Our temperatures had been taken at the airport, but there were no restrictions on travel and those wearing masks looked eccentric. I congratulated myself on finding Florence so quiet. Off-season, I thought smugly. That’s the way to do it. Heaven knows it’s empty now. The painting that caught my eye on that distant-seeming visit was a long, low cassone-shaped painting on the theme of the Thebaid attributed to Fra Angelico (c.1420). The Thebaid is a collection of texts telling of the saints who in the first centuries of Christianity retreated to the barren lands around the Egyptian city of Thebes.

Richard Bratby

The joy of Haydn’s string quartets – here are the best recordings

Classical

As Joseph Haydn was getting out of bed on the morning of 10 May 1809, a cannonball landed in his back garden. Napoleon’s armies were closing on Vienna, and Haydn’s suburban home was in the line of fire. His valet recorded that the bedroom door blew open and every window in the house rattled. Shaking violently, the 77-year-old composer’s first thought was for his household, which at that point comprised six servants and a talking parrot who addressed him as ‘Papa’. ‘Children, don’t be afraid, for where Haydn is, nothing can happen to you,’ he shouted. This was nothing particularly new. Over a long life Haydn survived smallpox, saw his house burn down (twice) and narrowly escaped castration at the hands of an overenthusiastic choirmaster.

James Delingpole

A Formula 1 doc for people who hate Formula 1

Television

Some years ago I was invited to the British Grand Prix at Silverstone courtesy of a watch manufacturer. As freebies go it was one of the best: endless champagne, overnight in a posh hotel near the track (wife invited too), then a trip by helicopter so as to avoid all the frightful traffic jams. All was going swimmingly until the actual race… God, it was boring. Noisy too. You’re stuck in an elegant marquee with endless booze and as many gold-plated, jewel-encrusted lobsters as you can force down your gullet, but it’s impossible to relax or chat or enjoy yourself because screaming endlessly in your lughole is the ‘neeaaawwww’ noise of those stupid bloody racing cars.

Lloyd Evans

Ill-disciplined and self-indulgent: The Guilty Feminist podcast reviewed

Radio

With theatres shut, radio must lighten the darkness. The Guilty Feminist is a wildly popular podcast performed by Deborah Frances-White and guests. In the episode of 23 March, the presenter hoped the superbug would cure our mania for business trips to ‘Philadelphia for a meeting about key performance indicators… Don’t fly to see people you hate. Fly to see people you love.’ She was probably unwise to dabble in medical predictions. ‘I hope Boris catches coronavirus so badly he needs to be sequestered on a desert island with no loo roll.’ Her co-presenter, Sindhu Vee, mocked her children’s frailties and her own. One of her young daughters announced her intention to become a feminist lawyer while the other said she wanted to be a mermaid.

Michael Hann

Taylor Swift is fascinating – but you really wouldn’t want to be her

Pop

There had been some question about whether Taylor Swift’s Netflix special would actually appear. Last year it seemed that the ownership of her old songs by her previous record label would scupper it. But no, Ms Swift is not to be resisted, and lo, Miss Americana is available right now on Netflix, one of its two big music documentaries for the spring. Many older men seem to have a visceral distaste for Ms Swift. If you share that distaste, then I’m sorry, it’s your loss, because she’s a fascinating figure (who has also made three truly terrific albums in Fearless, Red and 1989), and Miss Americana is well worth watching.

Martin Gayford

Are there ways in which virtual exhibitions are better than real ones?

Perfectly serviceable – at points even charming: Four Kids and It reviewed

Television

This film contains flying children, time travel and a sand monster that lives under a beach — yet the most incredible thing of all is that a family get to go on holiday. They actually leave their house, drive down an actual motorway, rent an actual seaside cottage and go for actual walks, passing well within two metres of actual other people! And not once do Derbyshire police film them with a drone, then post intimidating footage of it on the internet. The movie’s producers couldn’t have known they’d be releasing their creation into a locked-down world, but now that they have, who’s to say more people won’t watch it at home than would have watched it at the cinema? We are literally a captive audience.