Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Was Elgar really a snob?

There’s not much point pretending to be an expert on Elgar (or so The Bluffer’s Guide to Music assures us) because everyone already thinks they are. And there’s definitely no point getting hung up on the historical accuracy (or otherwise) of Alan Bennett and Nicholas Hytner’s new film The Choral. It’s set in a West Riding mill town during World War One and the plot pivots around the local choral society’s performance of The Dream of Gerontius. This being Bennett, of course, there’s rather more to it than that, but in any case – spoiler alert, and there’ll be more – Sir Edward himself makes a cameo appearance: Simon Russell

Calvin Po

Labour's war on heritage

Britain’s heritage is slowly going up in smoke. Medlock Mill was Manchester’s oldest standing textile mill until it burnt down in June. It joins Grade I-listed Woolton Hall – destroyed by a catastrophic fire in August. But it’s not just the buildings that are under threat, but the entire system designed to protect them. Prior to the disaster, the architect Stephen Hodder had proposed gutting the mill and converting it into a 37-storey block of student flats. A coalition of concerned citizens and conservation charities fought for a stay of execution by applying for the mill to be listed. After reviewing new archaeological evidence, Historic England concurred and recommended it

Rod Liddle

There's a lot to like in Rosalia's new album

Grade: A Welcome to the Andalusian cadence, the minor fall and the major lift, the descent from Am through G and F to E. Welcome also to Rosalia Vila Tobella, who is not Andalusian, but Catalan, but uses that cadence an awful lot, much as Status Quo prefer to stick to C, F, G. She has been much praised for the depth and ambition of her compositions – and commercially much rewarded when those compositions, sometimes appended to fairly straightforward EDM, get the kind of downloads you would more usually expect from Ariane Grande. Though I find a good few of the compositions comparatively slight, there is no doubting the

Richard Bratby

In defence of Katie Mitchell

Janacek’s The Makropulos Case is a weird and very wonderful opera, but its basic plot isn’t hard to follow. Still, it seems to send directors into a tailspin. One recent production (since revised) had a cast member break character and pull out a flipchart to recap the story so far. Katie Mitchell’s new staging for the Royal Opera takes the more familiar route of updating the action to the present, and it’s always fascinating to see what opera directors think we’ll find relatable. Luxury hotels, recreational heroin use, Tinder hookups with locally sourced hotties: no, me neither. How the other half live, eh? In short, it’s a bit like Mitchell’s

Hermione Eyre

This exhibition made my companion gasp

Numerous research academics have contributed to this highly cogent show celebrating the craftspeople of Ancient Egypt. My pre-teen companion, though a big fan of Egypt, was still slightly hesitant about whether this would be the most interesting angle. It began with a 4,000-year-old stele, or tombstone, on loan from the Louvre, praising the sculptural and painterly skills of an artisan called Irtysen, about whom, of course, nothing more is known. The perennial problem. General information, however, came thick and fast. We learned that a cooperative of skilled workers was a hemut, and a singular skilled worker a hemu. We came face-to-face with a cubit (a measuring stick six palms in

James Walton

Bleak but gripping: Channel 4's Trespasses reviewed

Yeats famously summarised Ireland in the four words, ‘Great hatred, little room’. But, as Louise Kennedy’s 2022 debut novel Trespasses showed, in 1970s Northern Ireland the hatred had grown even greater and the room even littler. Channel 4’s faithful adaptation began – as it would continue over its four parts this week – with the suffocating omnipresence of sectarianism. As 24-year-old Cushla (Lola Petticrew) drove through her small town, everything she saw screamed Catholicism or Protestantism: the graffiti, the flags, the ash on children’s foreheads at the start of Lent. By night, Cushla worked in a bar where the punters were either nervously or aggressively aware of each other’s religion.

Deborah Ross

Mrs Göring is far too sympathetic: Nuremberg reviewed

Nuremberg is one of those films that falls short on everything it wants to be and everything it could be. It’s a historical drama, set just before the trials, where an American psychiatrist (Rami Malek) is charged with assessing whether Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), Hitler’s second in command, is fit to stand trial and to ascertain what his defence might be. This should be electric and terrifying and take us inside the Nazi mind. In other words, I had expected a tense two-hander. But it’s serviceable rather than inspired, plodding rather than tense, its running time (two and a half hours) trying. (Keep a Red Bull to hand.) It also

Daisy Dunn

Was Queen Victoria's doctor the first psychoanalyst?

Queen Victoria began to experience dark visions after giving birth to her second child. Concerned that she might have inherited the madness of her grandfather, George III, Prince Albert summoned her doctor. Robert Ferguson was not the obvious man for this scenario – he was an obstetrician – but the doughty queen had heard that he ‘paid much attention to mental disease’, and willingly consulted him. It wasn’t until 2009 that the precise nature of Victoria’s ‘mental disease’ came to light. Dr Ferguson’s diaries, formerly kept in private hands, came up for auction that year and entered the collection of the Royal College of Physicians. Their contents made for sad

Michael Hann

The rise of psychedelia

On YouTube – and I urge you to look it up – there is a magnificent piece of footage from German TV, in which big band leader James Last leads his orchestra into a medley of hard rock hits, opening with Hawkwind’s deathless space-rock drone ‘Silver Machine’. And damn it if they don’t nail it. The members of the band with electric instruments play it just as Hawkwind did: the whooshing synth, the thudding bass, the fuzzing guitar. But instead of Lemmy growling out the topline melody, there is a huge rush of brass from the band, the brightness cutting unexpectedly through the murk. It is, unironically, brilliant. I have

Lloyd Evans

This Othello is almost flawless

Othello directed by Tom Morris opens with a stately display of scarlet costumes and gilded doorways arranged against a backdrop of black nothingness. This is Venice at night with no hint of sea or sunshine. Crimson-robed senators gather to discuss Othello’s alleged abduction of Brabantio’s daughter. And here he comes, David Harewood as the Moor, wearing a gauche two-tone suit like a tasteless guest at a wedding. The scene is stiff, arid and over-ornate but the show opens up when the location shifts to Cyprus. Warmth and light fill the stage and the costumes improve. Othello and his men wear creamy white battle fatigues that look stylishly and subtly masculine.

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Del Toro's Frankenstein offers nothing new

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein stars Oscar Isaac (Baron Victor Frankenstein) and Jacob Elordi (‘the creature’) and retells the basics of Mary Shelley’s story – man creates monster, man rejects monster, monster goes off on one – with high-camp sumptuousness. Del Toro’s spin is to include a redemptive arc, plus he throws in some invented characters. ‘The creature’, meanwhile, is portrayed with great sympathy, as a soulful, mistreated innocent. In other words, there’s no Boris Karloff lumbering around in that blazer a size too small with a bolt through the neck. It opens with a Danish expedition-ship stuck in the Arctic ice and the crew rescuing an injured Victor. They are

Damian Thompson

My unofficial music teacher

In the early 1970s my father moved offices and I was plucked out of my cosy prep school in Surrey to land in the eccentric surroundings of Presentation College. My new school’s modern block was surrounded by decaying Edwardian villas occupied by Irish teaching brothers with impenetrable accents. There was a broken aeroplane on one of the lawns; I never found out how it got there. Talk about a culture shock. Already I was besotted with classical music; to say that the brothers didn’t share my enthusiasm is putting it mildly. There wasn’t a flicker of interest in eight years – something that puzzled me until I read Thomas Day’s

Richard Bratby

Violin concertos from two Broadway legends

Grade: B+ The 20th century, eh? What a lark that was. Vladimir Dukelsky studied in Kiev under Glière and looked set to be one of the smarter Russian composers of his generation. He even wrote a ballet for Diaghilev. Then communism happened and Dukelsky ended up in the USA where to the bemusement of his friend Prokofiev he reinvented himself as Vernon Duke, Broadway songsmith. ‘Autumn in New York’ and ‘Taking a Chance on Love’ are both by Duke; classic Americana by way of Tsarist Ukraine.  Duke’s Violin Concerto (1943) is recorded here alongside the 1941 concerto by Robert Russell Bennett – better known as the king of Broadway orchestrators;

Lloyd Evans

One of the best plays about the 1980s ever staged

Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty has been turned into a stage show directed by Michael Grandage. We’re in the early 1980s and Nick has just left Oxford with a literature degree. He lodges with his wealthy friend, Toby Fedden, in their family home and he offers to keep an eye on Toby’s troubled sister, Cat, who suffers from depression. Despite her disorder, Cat is a rebellious type who quizzes Nick about the intimate details of his casual flings with men. Her father, Gerald, wins a safe Tory seat and persuades Mrs Thatcher to attend a ball at their mansion in the country. The prime minister’s arrival throws the Feddens

Rupert Christiansen

What a joy La Fille mal gardée is

The winter nights may be drawing in and everyone is down with stinking colds as the civilised world inexorably disintegrates, but in La Fille mal gardée, it’s sunlit springtime and young love is busting out all over. Frederick Ashton’s bucolic masterpiece, revived by the Royal Ballet, manages to be both child-like in its innocence and wickedly sophisticated in what it demands of the dancers – it looks so artless, so easy, and it just isn’t. Of Ashton’s supreme genius in the devising of it all there can be no doubt, but John Lanchbery and Osbert Lancaster deserve credit too – Lanchbery’s pasticcio score is a chocolate box filled with toe-tapping

James Delingpole

Film and TV are run by satanists

I once came up with a brilliant idea for a children’s Sunday-evening TV series. It would follow the adventures of young Jesus in Britain, circa AD 16, and his rich, tin-trading great uncle Joseph of Arimathea. There’d be dragons and giants and lots demonic figures, all trying to kill the boy Messiah before He achieved his true purpose. And young Jesus would continually be constrained from using any of His real powers because it was all a secret and His time had not yet come. If you’re clever, you can probably guess the title. But it’s never going to get made because a) I haven’t written it and b) the

Wednesday

Hermione Eyre

The Two Roberts drank, danced, fought – but how good was their art?

The Two Roberts, Robert MacBryde (1913-66) and Robert Colquhoun (1914-62), are figures of a lost British bohemia. Both born in Ayrshire, they met on their first day at the Glasgow School of Art, becoming lifelong partners and painters. Well-connected in louche literary London, their conversational barbs were recorded by Julian Maclaren-Ross, their jig-dancing antics noted by Joan Wyndham, their drunken fights observed by Anthony Cronin – so that one sometimes forgets what sort of art they made. This show, staged in a former municipal building in Lewes, is a reminder. The work is haunted, unbeautiful British neo-romanticism, second cousin to Piper and Sutherland. They established this angsty, angular modernist style

Tiffany Jenkins

Lice combs, vaginal syringes and cesspits: at home in 17th century Holland

The room is dark, the lighting deliberately low. At its centre stands a solitary object: a yellow and green earthenware vessel decorated with biblical symbolism. It’s a fireguard – or ‘curfew’ – used to keep households safe as peat fire embers smouldered through the night. Around it is a mocked-up fireplace, conjuring up that liminal moment when everyone is still asleep and the day has yet to stir. Ths scene is set, the world outside silenced. This is how Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum has chosen to answer one of its most frequently asked questions: what was daily life really like? Rather than mounting the usual parade of paintings and fine furniture, curators

Richard Bratby

The melancholy genius of Joseph Wright of Derby

If you lived in the 1760s and were affluent enough – and curious enough – science could be a family affair. The instrument maker Benjamin Martin actually marketed scientific equipment for amateurs, complete with an instruction manual listing simple, edifying experiments for home enjoyment. And so in 1768, in ‘An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump’, Joseph Wright (1734-97) painted a group of family and friends attempting Experiment 42 in Martin’s manual. You’re sure to have seen it: a darkened room with a white bird wilting in a glass bulb while the faces of the participants – a magus-like scientist, a fashionable couple, a frightened little girl burying

Monday

Nicholas Cranfield

Remembering The Spectator's chief art critic Laura Gascoigne (1950-2025)

Readers of this journal will be shocked at the death of Laura Gascoigne, the brilliant chief art critic at 22 Old Queen Street for five years (2020-24), in succession to Martin Gayford. She contributed over 200 articles to The Spectator between 2001 and 2024 that would well deserve being reprinted in a compendium of art criticism. She wrote widely, with care and discrimination, for Apollo, the Tablet, and the Daily Telegraph among other papers. First and foremost, she regarded herself as a writer who loved stories and loved the telling of them, but who also happened to know a lot about art. You could see her talent for drawing in

Laura Gascoigne in 1967. Image: Laura Gascoigne