Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Kate Chisholm

Sweet singing in the choir

You won’t yet have made your New Year resolutions but one thing you might want to add to your list is Join a Choir. It’ll be much cheaper and so much less boring than going to the gym, and yet all that hard work breathing in the right places and struggling to hit top C or gravelling about in bottom G will pump up your cardiovasculars just as effectively. There’ll be no need to sign up for a post-Christmas diet because instead you’ll be learning how to strengthen your diaphragm (and what flops over it). And the challenge of hitting all those notes dead-on while standing in front of an

Tim Walker

‘I have kept a sense of wonder’

One night early in the run of Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, Claire Bloom tripped on the stage of the Haymarket theatre in the West End and fell flat on her face. ‘I managed to get up and the audience was kind enough to applaud,’ she says in that impeccable Received Pronunciation that is her trademark. ‘I bowed and then I just got on with it.’ The story is a perfect metaphor for the actress’s eventful life. Even after her worst falls — one thinks of the end of her youthful, passionate relationship with a married Richard Burton (‘my greatest love’), and the more recent, acrimonious divorce from the

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Rooms and rituals

Another major show at the V&A, this time devoted to the more distant past, and thus inevitably of less general interest than a survey of, say, Modernism. It’s not always easy to bring to life a period so different from ours as the courtly and sophisticated Renaissance, though the mix of civilisation and barbarity that fuelled society then is familiar enough today. This display calls itself an exhibition of rooms and rituals, and its intention is to recreate the experience of living in the more affluent of Italian Renaissance homes. Focusing on the trinity of reception room, study and bedroom, and packing the galleries with pictures, furniture, textiles and various

Toby Young Toby Young

Chorus of disapproval

In the five years that I’ve been The Spectator’s drama critic, one of the nicest afternoons I’ve spent was in the company of my fellow critics. No, not at a matinée, but at a lunch for John Gross, who was retiring as the Sunday Telegraph’s man in the stalls after 16 years. Charles Spencer made a speech in which he quoted Bernard Levin describing John as ‘the nicest man in London’ and, afterwards, John got up and said the thing he’d enjoyed the most about the job was ‘getting to know you lot’. I’m now retiring myself, but I can’t say that getting to know my colleagues has been the

Henrietta Bredin

Christmas cheer

Puccini’s Bohemians really knew how to have a good time at Christmas. Huddled in a freezing cold Parisian garret, Rodolfo is reduced to burning his own play for warmth and has just consigned the final act to the flames when Schaunard bursts in and flings on to the table a shower of coins he has earned from giving music lessons to an eccentric Englishman. Along with Marcello and Colline they manage to get out of paying the quarter’s rent they owe and head off to the Café Momus to celebrate Christmas Eve with a blow-out dinner. Act Two of the opera is a sort of self-contained festive explosion, with conspicuous

Prue Leith

A Cook’s Christmas

The opening scene in Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It has our heroine distressing supermarket mince pies with a rolling pin in the hope that other parents at the school carol concert will presume them home-made. I loved her for that, just as I did the Calendar Girl who wins the cake competition with an M&S sponge. It’s years since I made a mince pie. And a fair few since I boned the turkey, stuffed it with ham and chestnuts and got up at dawn to set the pudding boiling. For donkey’s years I did all that, and pressganged friends and family into hanging the Christmas tree

Olivia Glazebrook

Screen savers

There is a strange kind of amnesia that overtakes me in certain shops: bookshops, DVD shops, CD shops. I stare hopelessly at the rows of titles, usually becoming desperate to spend a penny within a matter of seconds, before buying something I’ve never heard of, or have read/seen/heard already, and rushing out to find a lavatory. At this time of year every magazine carries lists of recommended books — but what of films? Don’t we all watch films at Christmas? And, if we don’t, we should: what better way to let the love back into the home, after the over-indulgence and the disappointments that make up Christmas, than a couple

Lucy Beresford

On the couch

Yes, it’s that time of year again. Living rooms up and down the country will reverberate to the sound of families rowing, and the television being turned on to provide distraction. But whereas a generation ago the nation could be united by watching the only film on offer, The Sound of Music on BBC1, today’s British viewing habits, like so much else in modern life, are fragmented. Videos, DVDs, umpteen movie channels on satellite, by and large you will choose the films you watch this Christmas — and your choices will say more about you than you think. Many people choose films they have already seen. Ritual is very important

Michael Tanner

How comic is it?

Monteverdi’s last opera, L’Incoronazione di Poppea, is an excellent choice for one of the music colleges to put on, containing as it does a fairly large number of characters, none of them with extremely demanding parts, though they all need to be as good actors as they are singers. The RCM’s cast that I saw, the first, but in its second performance, was mainly as impressive as I have come to expect. What was startling, though, was the hideously out-of-tune playing of the orchestra in the introduction, the cornets especially. Fortunately when the action began the playing improved, though there was less certainty in the performance, under the experienced Michael

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A gift for rhetoric

It’s always puzzled me that so few theatre critics are involved in making (rather than interpreting, dissecting and sometimes destroying) theatre. Hats off to Time Out reviewer Robert Shore, who’s quitted the breaker’s yard for the production line. Anxious about this new departure, he admits he ‘finds criticism almost impossible to bear’, although he ‘doesn’t mindpointing out problems with other people’s work’. Yeah, I know the feeling. In his new play, The Critic, a sneering old-school reviewer (bow tie, goatee, crimson dressing-gown) is ambushed in his house by two actors whose performances he has rubbished. Nice idea. Shore relies heavily on his gift for rhetoric and he brilliantly articulates the

Deborah Ross

Winning ways | 16 December 2006

This Bosnian film about the devastating emotional consequences of war has all the things you might expect from a Bosnian film about the devastating emotional consequences of war: suffering; pain; Soviet-style concrete estates with stinking stairwells; drab little apartments; dreary knitwear; hard-faced people tramping wearily though the slush and the snow; more suffering; more pain, more slush, more snow. But if this sounds like bad news let me tell you the good: there isn’t a single tap-dancing penguin in it. And here is the even better news: this is a gem of a movie. Or at least I think it is a gem of a movie. I’m a little worried

Marcus Berkmann

For portly old hippies

I have been listening a lot to David Gilmour’s album, On An Island (EMI). We must now call him David, as he is a portly gent of a certain age who will probably get a knighthood the next time a Pink Floyd fan moves into No. 10. Obviously, though, we think of him as Dave, just as Jimmy Page will never be James Page and Robbie Williams will be Robbie Williams when he’s 95 and gaga. Many reviewers objected to the Dave…sorry, David Gilmour record because it’s unmistakably autumnal in theme and texture. The songs are quieter and slower, in the main, than even Pink Floyd fans are accustomed to,

Kate Chisholm

The young ones

I wonder whether Tony (‘Education, education, education’) Blair or any of his cohorts in the Education Department were listening to the BBC World Service’s School Day 24 last week. Children from around the world were brought together in live link-ups as part of the BBC’s Generation Next week of programmes designed to give young people, aged from 12 to 18, the chance to air their views, dominate the agenda, talk to each other across religious and ethnic frontiers. Mr Blair might have questioned the success of those ‘literacy hours’ after hearing the kids from a school in north London alongside those from New Delhi and Dar es Salaam. It was

Simon Hoggart

Powerful but grim

This being the Spectator’s bumper Christmas issue, we asked the television companies for a few seasonal preview discs. There wasn’t much ‘ho, ho, ho!’ about any of them. Some were merely grim: Three Kings at War (Channel 4, Thursday), for example, chronicled how three cousins — George V, Czar Nicholas and Kaiser Bill — helped, through their own stupidity, to bring about the death of millions. Channel 4 also offered a three-part set — The True Voice of Rape (Monday), The True Voice of Prostitution (Tuesday) and The True Voice of Murder (Wednesday). Uncork the eggnog now! To be fair, The True Voice series contained powerful material. The problem was

Saturday

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Objects of affection

Mary Wakefield talks to Craigie Aitchison about Bedlingtons — and about his painting By five o’clock last Thursday evening, Craigie Aitchison and I had been talking about dogs for nearly an hour. It was grey outside but, inside, the pink walls of Craigie’s sitting room glowed in the orange light of an electric fire, and I glowed, too, warmed by whisky and by the pleasure of a shared obsession. Mostly, we discussed Bedlingtons, the woolly, lamb-like terriers Craigie has owned and painted for more than 35 years, but Cairn terriers got a look in (‘My parents had them, but I never really liked them’) as did beagles (‘They make beagles

Andrew Lambirth

Bird’s-eye views

Georg Gerster (born 1928) is a Swiss photographer who specialises in shooting from above. For more than 40 years he has been taking aerial photographs, and has flown over 111 countries. Concentrating on archaeological and heritage sites, Gerster has made what might accurately be called an ‘overview’ that has greatly enhanced our archaeological understanding. His pictures have been reproduced in National Geographic and used on Swissair posters and calendars. He is what you might call a popular photographer, and a very fine one. The current exhibition of his work at the British Museum presents his photographs in a very low-key way: blown-up and unframed, they resemble illustrations from a magazine

Laura Gascoigne

Going wild

In November 1905, in the Galerie Ernst Arnold, four young architecture students from the Dresden Technical School had their first encounter with Vincent van Gogh. Only six months earlier, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl had formed an avant-garde artists’ group, Die Brücke (The Bridge), to represent ‘all who express directly and truthfully what urges them to create’. At the sight of 54 paintings by van Gogh, remembered a teacher, they ‘went wild’. The extraordinary impact of one man’s singular vision on the birth of modern art in Germany and Austria is the subject of an ambitious new exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Vincent

Michael Tanner

Supreme challenge

Any article about a production of Wagner’s Ring cycle has to begin by saying that it is the supreme challenge a company can face, and how much more so when the company is based in a remote foreign city, and flies in to mount the tetralogy a few hours after it has been performing something else in its home base. Wagner’s great epic is usually performed, even in Bayreuth, with two breaks of a day each between the second and third and the third and fourth parts. The Mariinsky Theatre of St Petersburg, however, arrived last week in Cardiff to perform the Ring on four consecutive evenings, as Wagner originally

Peter Phillips

Stormy waters

Periodically, Radio Three sails into stormy waters, a section of its listeners taking a dislike to some new policy intiative and crying ‘dumbed down’. Off the top of my head, I can remember the phasing out of the old talks department; the threat to the regional BBC orchestras; the greater emphasis on jazz; the general move from informing people to entertaining them; the retirement of Patricia Hughes. Long gone are the days of 26-part series specialising in music written for the court of Cyprus. But hanging over almost all of these debates has been the question of how much of the music which is broadcast should be live, as opposed

Toby Young Toby Young

Cultural debate

Some playwrights mellow with age, but not David Hare. His sense of righteous indignation knows no bounds. According to press reports, the reason he decided to open his latest play on Broadway is that he still bears a grudge against Nicholas Hytner for refusing to schedule more performances of Stuff Happens at the National. Alas, The Vertical Hour got a fairly lukewarm review in the all-important New York Times, though it remains to be seen whether Hare will publicly attack the critic concerned, as he did when Frank Rich gave The Secret Rapture the thumbs-down in 1989. Hare’s irascibility is on full display in Peter Hall’s revival of Amy’s View,