Igor Toronyi-Lalic is arts editor of The Spectator
Art is under attack. Another week, another expensive poke in the eye. Last Sunday, Miami artist Maximo Caminero destroyed a $1 million vase by Ai Weiwei in protest at the museum ignoring the work of local artists. Before this, there was Wlodzimierz Umaniec’s defacement of a Tate Modern Mark Rothko in the cause of ‘Yellowism’,
Film critic Armond White has been booted out of the New York Film Critics Circle. Officially it was for heckling Twelve Years A Slave director Steve McQueen at a press conference. But they can’t have liked him telling the truth about the movie. Namely, that it’s crap. We should listen to hecklers. Especially when they’re
The 20th century was a century of musical revolutions. One of the last and most audacious ignited 50 years ago on the east and west coasts of America. And in a small but significant way The Spectator played a part in fanning the flames. In 1968 a young critic and early-music specialist by the name
How will the arts world plug the funding gap? Igor Toronyi-Lalic investigates It’s an idea so simple in concept, so elegant in execution, so bursting with potential, that you kick yourself for not thinking of it yourself. ‘You put your project here,’ explains 28-year-old solicitor and budding internet entrepreneur Michael Troughton, scrolling down the front
The ‘poet of the piano’, Murray Perahia, talks to Igor Toronyi-Lalic about being championed by Horowitz, his rise to fame and how his injury taught him what to play Murray Perahia was 17 when Vladimir Horowitz, perhaps the finest pianist of the 20th century, knocked on the door of his family house in the Bronx.
Old operatic conventions will no longer do, says Igor Toronyi-Lalic: no more parking and barking Caricatures are often instructive. Those that acquire legs will offer a crystallised version of the truth. The hoary send-up of opera, for example — the lardy singers, the stilted poses, the outstretched arms — is representative of a historic reality.
Igor Toronyi-Lalic talks to Sir Peter Maxwell Davies as he celebrates his 75th birthday A month ago, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies shuffled on to the Royal Albert Hall stage to a wall of sweet applause after a performance of one of his works. It wasn’t always so. Rewind to the 1960s when etiquette dictated that
Igor Toronyi-Lalic looks back to the early 20th century when organs were in their heyday ‘As in England, in America the organ is King,’ wrote the French organ-composer Louis Vierne in 1927, following a phenomenally successful three-month tour of America and Canada. His 50 recitals had drawn in around 70,000 obsessed fans, including some 6,000
Igor Toronyi-Lalic on the power of animation to subvert and propagate ideas The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the American army, on one of its first assignments, requisitioned Disney Studios and remained there for eight months. It was the only studio to suffer that fate but Walt Disney, ever the patriot,
Igor Toronyi-Lalic on the important role opera played in the early days of cinema In 1978, the Swiss impresario Rolf Liebermann picked the veteran American director Joseph Losey to direct a film adaptation of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. At that point they hadn’t yet met or spoken but Liebermann, having passed over Franco Zeffirelli and
