Arts Reviews

Nothing might seem more idyllic than Fragonard’s large, manicured paintings of playful seduction. Executed in the early 1770s for Madame du Barry’s Pavilion at Louveciennes, they celebrate the erotic rituals enacted by aristocratic lovers in the grounds of an opulent estate. The young woman and her equally well-groomed suitor dart, gesticulate and embrace among overflowing flower-beds dominated by classical urns and statues. But by the time Yinka Shonibare has finished with them, in an elaborate and unnerving installation at the new Musée du quai Branly, all their carefree poise is replaced by a macabre alternative. The context provided by this museum, recently created to house some of Paris’s great ethnographic

Opera North’s new production of Janacek’s Katya Kabanova is the most moving I have seen, though it is not the best produced, best sung or most consistently cast. There are two things that make it indispensable to a lover of this wonderful work: the first is the brilliant, perceptive and thought-provoking essays in the programme by Stuart Leeks and, especially, David Nice. The second is the overpoweringly penetrating conducting of Richard Farnes, who shows with every opera he conducts that he is as versatile and deep a conductor as any alive today. What Farnes realises about Katya is that it is the opera in which the two poles of Janacek’s

As the super soaraway Spectator becomes ever more style-conscious and glossy, I like to think of ‘Olden but golden’ as a monthly oasis for the scruffs, drunks and wasters among the readership. It is, of course, possible to be all these things while presenting a glamorous façade to the world. The smart society hostess may well be a secret Janis Joplin fan who in the privacy of her own bedroom drinks Southern Comfort from the bottle and howls drunkenly along to ‘Ball and Chain’. That slick-suited, impossibly rich hedge-fund manager, heading for the City in his chauffeur-driven car, may secretly long to be Keith Richards, not just because Keef is

Yorkshire Sculpture Park is the first and best of the breed in the British Isles. Since 1977 it has activated 500 acres of undulating land between Barnsley and Wakefield in a unique way. A man-made upper and lower lake, with a weir and cascade at the narrow junction between the two, runs through the middle of the Bretton Hall estate â” a widening of the River Dearne at the bottom of a valley. An 18th-century manor house survives. Farming continues in a professional way but as part of another focus, which is, of course, aesthetic. Andy Goldsworthy was YSP’s Artist in Residence in 1987. Since then he has worked and

Holocaust art must be approached with care. There’s a worry that by finding fault you’re somehow failing to take the world’s all-time Number one human rights violation seriously. Kindertransport follows the tale of Eva, a Jewish schoolgirl sent from Nazi Germany to Britain at the close of the 1930s. She’s adopted by a rough-diamond Manchester mum (lovely work from Eileen O’Brien) but when her real mother returns after the war Eva claims she’s been abandoned and stages a complete emotional withdrawal. It’s rather heartbreaking and a touch over-familiar. The best moment comes early on when a sneaky German customs officer rifles through Eva’s bags, steals her money and fobs her

I wish the term ‘ballet-theatre’ had not already been snatched and (mis)used by dance historians, for there is no better way to define Will Tuckett’s art: his creations are to ballet what dance-theatre is to modern and postmodern dance. Not unlike some of the most acclaimed performance makers who specialised in the latter genre, Tuckett has taken a recognisable choreographic idiom and combined it successfully with other expressive/theatrical means. His choice, however, was and still is particularly daring; ballet, after all, is not as malleable as modern and postmodern dance techniques and styles. Yet, acclaimed creations such as The Soldier’s Tale, arguably the best theatre translation of Stravinsky’s work there