Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Sheer perfection

L’Heure espagnole; Gianni Schicchi; Ariodante The trouble with perfection, on the extremely rare occasions one encounters it, is that it leaves one discontented with anything less. Now that I have seen Ravel’s L’Heure espagnole in Richard Jones’s new production at the Royal Opera, I only want to see these singers under this conductor repeating it. There aren’t many chances to see this opera, and when I have seen it in the past I’ve felt it to be a bit of a long-winded joke, with too-discreet music, demanding a lot from its performers, without big rewards. From the opening bars, massaged by the conductor Antonio Pappano to charming effect, the score

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Narcissistic posturings

Too much artist and not enough art. That’s one problem with Total Eclipse, Christopher Hampton’s play about the titans of French 19th-century poetry. Another is presentation. The show is done ‘in the round’ on a raised slipway between two banks of seats irradiated by the glare reflected from the stage. This is bonkers. The reason house lights are dimmed during a show is to create an atmosphere of anonymous intimacy in which every member of the audience can half-imagine that they’re watching the play alone. Doing it in the round kills that subtlety. You have to stare, through the shapes of the perambulating actors, at a wraparound panorama of unfamiliar

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Vicious propaganda

The thing I really don’t get at all about The Mark of Cain (Channel 4, Thursday) is how the people involved could bring themselves to do it. I mean, I’m quite skint at the moment and in need of attention and acclaim and a better career. But I promise — no matter how much they paid me or how many column inches I might expect to generate or Baftas I might hope to win — that never in a zillion years would I do what this documentary has done to the British army. I’m not saying it wasn’t gripping viewing. Artistically, you could scarcely fault it. Militarily, I wasn’t quite

Saturday

Celia Walden

‘Drink white wine in the morning’

‘Probably best to do the interview before lunch,’ says a spokesman for Gérard Depardieu, France’s best-known export and highest-paid actor. This made sense. The last time I was due to meet Depardieu, at the UK launch of his cookbook two years ago, he failed to make it to the lavish party thrown in his honour, after drinking too much of his own fine wine and falling asleep upstairs. I’m expecting a partial recluse with Cyrano de Bergerac’s anti-social nature, a Jean de Florette-style curmudgeon with Obelix’s endearing clumsiness. But Depardieu is none of those things. Grumpy and deliberately obtuse, with a disappointing tendency to default to whimsical thespianisms on any

Bryan Rostron

Chasing Getty’s ‘Youth’

In August 1964, after a series of severe storms, Italian fishermen dragging nets along the bottom of the Adriatic hauled out a life-sized bronze statue encrusted with nearly 2,000 years’ worth of barnacles. Thirteen years later, after a labyrinthine trail of greed, betrayal and smuggling, the masterpiece, ‘Statue of a Victorious Youth’, was bought by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles for $3.98 million, then the highest price ever paid for a statue. Now this saga has erupted again. Last November negotiations broke down between the Italian government and the J. Paul Getty Museum over the possible return of 52 objects, among them the statue. The Museum announced that it

Andrew Lambirth

Boundless curiosity

A New World: England’s first view of America; Italian Prints 1875–1975 John White is one of the mysteries of English art. We don’t know exactly when he was born or died, we have no portrait of him and his name was a sufficiently common one to cause problems of identification in the surviving documents of the period. Yet we have an incomparable wealth of paintings by him, all 75 of which reside in the British Museum and which form the core and justification for this fascinating new exhibition. Being watercolours they are fragile, so get shown only once every 30 or 40 years. White was a gentleman adventurer who was

Michael Tanner

Rare delight | 31 March 2007

Camacho’s Wedding; Poro An opera by Mendelssohn? It sounds unlikely, but not because you can’t imagine him writing one, as you can’t with Bruckner or Brahms. You’d expect someone with Mendelssohn’s particular gifts to be able to write fine operas, but you’d also expect to have heard about them. And now it turns out that he did write at least one most attractive piece, which has acquired a small reputation as being a mistake. It took University College Opera to put us right about that. They staged four performances of Camacho’s Wedding, a full-length Singspiel, that is to say sung numbers separated by spoken dialogue. Mendelssohn created it when he

Robin Holloway

Chez Chausson

Every eager collector of books and scores has their special searcher, primed to keep an eye open for long out-of-print rarities at reasonable prices. Mine, like Jesus’ blood, ‘never failed me yet’. Her latest triumph is to have procured a copy of Ernest Chausson’s opera Le roi Arthus, posthumously produced in 1903, four years after his death at 44; never yet staged in this country, though there was a memorable concert performance at the Edinburgh Festival a few years ago. I’d been on the lookout for the music for ages, and its eventual arrival brought down from the shelf the fraying tape of a previous recording dating back to 1987,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A touch of magic

As soon as she arrives everything falls apart. Dame Maggie Smith’s appearance in Edward Albee’s 1980 play The Lady From Dubuque marks the point when it all goes wrong. This isn’t her fault. She’s the most watchable and effective thing on stage and even now, on the fringes of old age, her lazy twangy sexy drawl still has a touch of magic. But her part is a dud cheque. We’ve spent the first act watching a group of drunken sophisticates swapping caustic banter. Sam’s wife Jo is suffering from some lethal disease which frees her from all social constraint and prompts an enjoyable, if undemanding, hour of drawing-room comedy. Enter

Kate Chisholm

Behind the scenes

It sounds like a really bad idea — Lenny Henry, the black comedian, devising a set of radio sketches to celebrate (oops, I should have said ‘commemorate’) Abolition. You can imagine the scene. Early one morning in late November 2006. An emergency Radio Four planning meeting high up in Broadcasting House on Portland Place. Big table. Lots of coffee. A group of worried-looking producers, scriptwriters, the sound-effects team, all wielding spring-clip noteboards covered with last-minute scrambled ‘ideas’. ‘Tony Blair’s just reminded us that we’ve got this 200-year anniversary coming up next March. It’s going to be really big. A march from Hull. Questions in Parliament. A service in Westminster Abbey. Mansfield

Saturday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

High-table comedian

Rory Bremner is in a hurry. The controversial impersonator surges into his production office a few minutes late for our meeting. ‘So sorry. Did they tell you? We overran,’ he says in his light, energetic voice. ‘Won’t be a sec. Got to go to the loo. Ooh! Too much information.’ A few minutes later he reappears and sits patiently while I fiddle with the wrong buttons on the tape machine. ‘Quick soundcheck?’ ‘Testing, testing,’ he says helpfully. And we begin. I’m keen to talk about comedy, politics, his work as a satirist, the infamous Margaret Beckett tapes — about absolutely anything other than our designated topic, Bertolt Brecht, whose earliest

Andrew Lambirth

Scraping the barrel

Here are two of the big hitters of Impressionism, both represented by shows which only investigate very particular aspects of their work. Monet and Renoir are names guaranteed to provide good box-office returns, but will the public be satisfied by the choice of work attached to their brand labels? Of course the RA and NG need to generate income from exhibitions in these increasingly expensive times, though both have managed to secure sponsors to help defray the costs of their shows. The RA exhibition comes with a vast doorstop of a catalogue, stuffed full of worthy scholarship, making the art-historical case for the importance of Monet’s hitherto largely unknown pastels

Richard Cork

Shock and awe

At the age of only ten, Leon Kossoff undertook a momentous journey across London on his own. He travelled from his family home in the East End to Trafalgar Square and, having mounted the steps, entered the National Gallery. At first, the early Christian art he encountered inside filled the boy with fear. But after a while, trepidation gave way to awe. Discovering the existence of paintings was a total revelation, and he subsequently ensured that the works displayed there became an indispensable part of his life. Today, 70 years after that initial childhood visit, the National Gallery is saluting the intensity of Kossoff’s commitment. For he has made hundreds

Susan Moore

Rich pickings

Forget London, Paris and New York. For any serious collector of art and antiques there is just one unmissable event: The European Fine Art Fair at Maastricht. No one could have predicted 20 years ago that this once modest fair in a small Dutch town few had heard of before the eponymous treaty would become the greatest art and antiques fair in the world. Against all the odds — not least the unbeguiling ring-road venue of the town’s conference centre (not a natural habitat for the international über rich) — it has established itself as the pre-eminent professional marketplace. Unlike all its glamorous counterparts, this event has nothing to do

Deborah Ross

Sex and slaves

I Want Candy is a British sex comedy, which should already sound alarm bells, but I will plough on heroically, as is my nature. It’s about two lads from Leatherhead — wannabe producer Joe (Tom Riley) and earnest auteur Baggy (Tom Burke) — who are still at film school yet are desperate to break into the big time. Frustrated by their arty film teacher (Mackenzie Crook) they head to London to sell their script, Love Storm. Eventually, they encounter a porn producer (Eddie Marsan) who says, OK, I’ll give you the money so long as you up the hard-core element and get porn queen Candy Fiveways (Carmen Electra) for the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Something nasty

‘I’m not a snob. Ask anyone. Well, anyone who matters.’ The author of this self-knowing gem is Simon LeBon and I read it on a freesheet discarded on the bus that took me to see Martin Crimp’s state-of-the-nation play, Attempts on her Life. Amazingly, this tossed-aside gag was the high point of my evening. Mr Crimp, a busy playwright with the resources of the National Theatre at his disposal, failed to produce anything as perceptive or entertaining as LeBon’s throwaway quip. Crimp’s play is a restless self-important plague of words and video-images, scruffy, impressionistic, ill-shaped and rambling, rather like this sentence, going everywhere and nowhere in particular. Katie Mitchell directs,

Michael Tanner

Intense emotions

The first revival of Thomas Adès’s The Tempest showed that, impressive as the first series of performances had been, three years ago, they were sketchy compared with what we see and hear at Covent Garden this time round. Certainly it sounded far more exciting this time: the opening deluge of sound was both more overwhelming and more interesting in its details, and led more naturally, after the opening cry from the shipwrecked Court, into the scene between Miranda and Prospero. One of the few changes of cast from the first run is the recasting of Miranda. Excellent as Christine Rice was last time, Kate Royal has a more suitable voice

Giannandrea Poesio

Fire and water

It is not surprising that Baroque operas have long attracted the interest of contemporary choreographers. Apart from the numerous dance passages that punctuate these works, their classically inspired plots, rife with political, cultural and social metaphors, are inexhaustible and stimulating sources of inspiration for any modern-day artist. Not to mention the fact that a radical and often intentionally irreverent take on much-revered ‘important’ masterworks is a well-established trait of post-modern dance-theatre making. Sasha Waltz’s 2005 staging of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is one of the most recent additions in the long series of choreographic translations of early operas and oratorios. And it is a daring choice, too, for Purcell’s masterwork

Kate Chisholm

Acoustic journey

I wonder whether Cameron and co. in their attempts to stir up worries about climate change, carbon emissions and the future of the planet ever spend much time listening to nature in the raw. Of course, to understand what’s happening on a global scale might well require expensive flights to the far reaches of the planet. But there are other, cheaper ways of appreciating and understanding what’s going on in what’s left of our green and verdant land. A few hours doing nothing, absolutely nothing, in the company of warblers and wigeon, pike and teal, godwits and hairy dragonflies, just watching the weather and tuning in to the antics of

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Gruesome twosome

A courier staggered up the stairs to my flat bearing Gilbert & George: The Complete Pictures with an essay by Rudi Fuchs (Tate Publishing, 1,200 pages, 1,500 full-colour illustrations, £39.99). It’s a two-volume hardback which comes in its own carrying case, but I was glad not to have to bring it home myself as it weighs over a stone on the bathroom scales. It is the season of G&G overload, for that much-exhibited, much-publicised and over-played pair have been given the signal honour of a grand exhibition of 18 galleries at Tate Modern. A whole floor is devoted to their asininities, which is nothing short of a disgrace. Never have