Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Alfred Brendel was peerless – but he wasn’t universally loved

In middle age Alfred Brendel looked disconcertingly like Eric Morecambe – but, unlike the comedian in his legendary encounter with André Previn, he played all the right notes in the right order. OK, so perhaps I’m selling the maestro a bit short: I do think Brendel, who died on 17 June at the age of 94, was a peerless interpreter of the Austro-German repertoire, and for a time in the 1970s had a better claim than any other pianist to ‘own’ the Beethoven and late Schubert piano sonatas. But some of the media tributes have been embarrassingly uncritical, implying that Brendel was universally loved. He wasn’t, and he didn’t want

Daisy Dunn

Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? The BBC, it seems

‘What a lark!’ I thought to myself as I rose on a hot June morning to listen to a documentary on Mrs Dalloway. A century has passed since Clarissa bought flowers for her midsummer party, and Radio 4 has commissioned a three-parter, with actress Fiona Shaw presenting. ‘What a plunge!’ The first programme had been playing for all of two minutes before my hopes began to wilt like a delphinium. ‘Her face adorns tote bags and internet memes,’ says Shaw of Woolf in the preamble, which sounds as though it has been lifted directly from the series pitch to the BBC. ‘I’ll be asking what… Virginia Woolf has to say

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The Ministry of Lesbian Affairs is as sweet and comforting as a knickerbocker glory

The Ministry of Lesbian Affairs is a comedy that feels as sweet and comforting as a knickerbocker glory. The show is set in a leaky scout hut where a bunch of lesbians meet to perform choral music. The conductor, Connie, has the bluff, good-natured energy of an RAF squadron leader. ‘Snippety-snap,’ she calls as she encourages the ‘ladies’ to warm up. Correct pronoun usage doesn’t interest her. Nor does non-binary language. She’s an OWL (older wiser lesbian) and she runs the choir like a drop-in centre for strays, fugitives and sexual rejects in need of a substitute family. The newest arrival, Dina, is a Qatari princess who lives in a

Richard Bratby

I’ve rarely seen a happier audience: Grange Festival’s Die Fledermaus reviewed

‘So suburban!’ That’s Prince Orlofsky’s catchphrase in the Grange Festival’s new production of Die Fledermaus, and he gets a lot of wear out of it. You couldn’t really describe the Grange Festival as suburban – it’s hard to imagine a corner of the Home Counties that’s more remote from urban civilisation. No, if the vibe at Garsington is plutocratic, and West Horsley is pure Stockbroker Belt, the Grange Festival is definitely county, in a comfy, faded, Aga-and-chintz sort of way. The picnic takes precedence over the opera, and you’ll see evening wear that was new around the time that Alan Coren retired from Punch. Anyway, this lively Die Fledermaus knows

Stuart Jeffries

The architects redesigning death

Unesco doesn’t hand out world-heritage status to absences, but if it did, there would be memorials all over the western world to our genius in erasing death from our consciousness. We have airbrushed the deceased from our lives with a ruthless efficiency, banishing them to suburban cemeteries where they can spend eternity unvisited. Burials and cremations are today spiritless, functional affairs, death rituals perfunctory, public grieving rare, graves unworthily negligible or unspeakably vulgar, our wakes pretexts to get drunk and obliterate the memory of what just happened. I exaggerate, but not much. The Maltese architect Anthony Bonnici wants to change all that. He wants to design death anew, create a

James Walton

None of Mitfords sounds posh enough: Outrageous reviewed

There aren’t many dramas featuring the rise of the Nazis that could be described as jaunty, but Outrageous is one. Oddly, this seems to be the first ever TV drama about the Mitford sisters – and, faced with the choice between playing it for laughs, going for a big historical soap opera or exploring the increasingly dark politics of the 1930s, the show’s writer Sarah Williams has, perhaps wisely, opted for all three. At times, admittedly, the clash of tones can be jarring, but generally in a way that feels like an authentic reflection of a story that remains irreducibly weird. The show also strikes a neat balance between acknowledging

Sam Kriss

The vicious genius of Adam Curtis

In an interview back in 2021, Adam Curtis explained that most political journalists couldn’t understand his films because they aren’t interested in music. Having known a fair few political journalists, I can say with some certainty that he was right. Most politically motivated types are – not to be unkind, but it’s true – total losers. This cuts across left and right, all ideologies and tendencies, from Toryism to anarchism to Islamism and back: whatever you believe, if you believe it too strongly you were probably a weirdo at school. The other kids went out clubbing; you stayed at home, drawing pictures of Lenin or von Mises on your satchel.

Michael Hann

Dua Lipa sparkles at Wembley – but her new album is pedestrian

If, as is said, there are only seven basic narratives in human storytelling, then there should be an addendum. In rock and pop there is only one: the dizzying rise, the imperial period, the fall from grace (either commercial or ethical, sometimes both), and the noble return (historically prefigured with a glossy music mag cover proclaiming: ‘Booze! Fights! Madness! How Rubbish Band went to hell – and came back’). All three were on view in London this past fortnight. Waxahatchee was the one on the way up: this was, Katie Crutchfield announced proudly from the stage, the ensemble’s biggest-ever show. Dua Lipa was the one entering her imperial phase –

Friday

Owen Matthews

Owen Matthews, Bijan Omrani, Andrew Hankinson, Laurie Penny & Andrew Watts

29 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Owen Matthews says that Venice’s residents never stop complaining (1:11); Bijan Omrani reads his church notebook (7:33); Andrew Hankinson reviews Tiffany Jenkins’s Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life (13:54); as 28 Years Later is released, Laurie Penny explains the politics behind Alex Garland’s film franchise (18:25); and, Andrew Watts provides his notes on Angel Delight (25:09).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Laurie Penny

The politics of horror

Everyone forgets the actual opening scene of 28 Days Later, even though it’s deeply relatable, in that it features a helpless chimp strapped to a table and forced to watch doomreels of ultraviolence until it loses its little monkey mind and eats David Schneider. But it’s eclipsed by the famous sequence that follows where Cillian Murphy wakes in a hospital bed to find that he has slept through a deadly pandemic and the ensuing collapse of civilisation. As Murphy drags his not-yet-world-famous cheekbones through an eerily abandoned metropolis, we see Piccadilly plastered with the names and faces of the missing and the dead. Audiences in 2002 were reminded of the

Rupert Christiansen

The cheering fantasies of Oliver Messel

Through the grey downbeat years of postwar austerity, we nursed cheering fantasies of a life more lavishly colourful and hedonistic. Oliver Messel fed them: born into Edwardian privilege, the epitome of well-connected metropolitan sophistication, he doubled up as interior decorator and stage designer, creating in both roles a unique style of rococo elegance and light-touch whimsy that sweetened and consoled – ‘a gossamer world of gilded enchantment’ as Roy Strong soupily put it. ‘Marie Antoinette would have felt at home in any of his settings.’ Like his rival Cecil Beaton, Oliver Messel sums up an era Posterity has not been kind to Messel. Only a little of his art has

Digby Warde-Aldam

London’s best contemporary art show is in Penge

If you’ve been reading the more excitable pages of the arts press lately, you might be aware that the London gallery scene is having one of its periodic ‘moments’. A fair few spaces, mostly concentrated around Fitzrovia, have sprouted up since the pandemic, notable for their bacchanalian openings and tantalisingly gnomic Instagram posts. Their online presence is at best spectral: the most hyped of the bunch, a Smithfield gallery called Ginny on Frederick, has a holding page in place of a website. Still, I like a scene, and London Gallery Weekend, an annual June event, presented a good opportunity to investigate. Niso gallery, on New Cavendish Street, has put on

Richard Bratby

If you think all orchestras sound alike, listen to this recording

Grade: B+ These are gloomy days, so here’s a burst of melody and colour to cheer you up. Back in the LP era it wasn’t unusual for classical recordings to be put together like a concert that you might actually want to hear: a sequence of works by different but complementary composers, offering the possibility of a happy discovery. Come for the Strauss, stay for the Reznicek – that sort of thing. This lively new disc from the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic adopts the same principle. The unifying theme is early-20th-century eastern European nationalism – the folksong-collecting variety, not the Archduke-assassinating kind. But it’s the opposite of monotonous. The Bartok is

Graeme Thomson

Jarvis Cocker still has the voice – and the moves

For bands of a certain vintage, the art of keeping the show on the road involves a tightly choreographed dance between past and present, old and new, then and now. It’s not a one-way transaction: there should be some recognition that the people you are playing to have also evolved since the glory years of the indie disco and student union. Halfway through the first date of Pulp’s UK tour following the release of More, their first album in 24 years, I started thinking about Withnail & I. Watching the film repeatedly as a young man, the booze-soaked antics of the dissipated ‘resting actor’ and his addled supporting cast seemed

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Astonishing ‘lost tapes’ from a piano great

These days the heart sinks when Deutsche Grammophon announces its new releases. I still shudder at the memory of Lang Lang’s 2024 French album, in which he drooled over Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte; when I reviewed it I suggested that if the poor girl wasn’t dead when he started, then she certainly was by the time he’d finished. Now she’s been killed again, this time by the guitarist Robin Scherpen, whose Ravel Reimagined offers us ‘a peaceful and serene soundscape’. Then there’s Rêverie from Nemo Filou, a trio whose cocktail-lounge noodling allows ‘the listener to drift off into bliss’, and Sleep Circle, a ‘re-recorded version of the 2012

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Style, wit and pace: Netflix’s Dept. Q reviewed

Can you imagine how dull a TV detective series set in a realistic Scottish police station would be? Inspector Salma Rasheed would have her work cut out that’s for sure: the wicked gamekeeper on the grisly toff’s estate who murdered a hen harrier and then blamed its decapitation on an innocent wind turbine; the haggis butcher who misgendered his vegetarian assistant; the Englishman who made a joke on Twitter about a Scotsman going to the chippy and ordering a deep-fried can of Coke… It would get lots of awards, obviously, but I doubt it would do that well in the ratings. As with Slow Horses, this is about enjoying the

Rupert Christiansen

The artistic benefits of not being publicly subsidised

Paralysed rather than empowered by the heavy hand of Big Brother Arts Council, the major subsidised dance companies are running scared and gripped by dismally risk-averse and short-termist attitudes. Free from the deadening metrics of diversity quotas and targeted outcomes, smaller more independent enterprises – London City Ballet and New English Ballet Theatre among them – can be lighter on their feet: they have inherited something of the pioneering spirit of Marie Rambert and Ninette de Valois a century ago and they deserve support. Another such is Ballet Nights – a series of one-off galas masterminded by Jamiel Devernay-Laurence, who doubles up as an embarrassingly brash compère, introducing each performer

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Superb: Stereophonic, at Duke of York’s Theatre, reviewed

Stereophonic is a slow-burning drama set in an American recording studio in 1976. A collection of hugely successful musicians, loosely based on Fleetwood Mac, are working on a new album which they hope will match the success of their previous number one smash. This is an absolute treat for anyone who appreciates subtle, oblique and quietly daring theatre The studio could almost be an orphanage because the characters keep squabbling and bickering like siblings in need of a parent. The self-appointed leader is Peter (Jack Riddiford) who dresses in classic hippy mode with a kaleidoscopic shirt and a droopy moustache. But he rules the studio with a rod of iron.

Deborah Ross

Magnificently bloodthirsty: 28 Years Later reviewed

First it was 28 Days Later (directed by Danny Boyle, 2002), then 28 Weeks Later  (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007) and now Boyle is back at the helm with 28 Years Later, which is, as I understand it, the first in a new trilogy. This post-apocalyptic horror franchise could go on for ever. As the last film was generally (and rightly) regarded as a desultory cash grab, there is much riding on this one. The verdict? It’s entertaining but not outstanding. The biggest surprise is its tonal swerve into sentimentality. Jodie Comer and Ralph Fiennes, however, bring character and heft and, just to put your minds at rest, yes, it’s as

Thursday

Philip Clark

The Renaissance master who rescued polyphonic music

Last month I watched conductor Harry Christophers blow through what sounded like an arthritic harmonica but in fact was a pure-toned pitch pipe, which handed the singers of his vocal group the Sixteen their starting notes. Then the Kyrie from Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s Missa Regina coeli unfolded inside the resonant splendour of St James’s Church in Mayfair and, 500 years after his birth, I grasped why Palestrina, maestro di cappella of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome from 1551-5, still has the capacity to surprise. Christophers and the Sixteen are celebrating this greatest of the late Renaissance composers in his anniversary year with three concerts promoted by the Wigmore Hall