Arts Reviews

Amidst the interminable tundra of centennial Shostakovich the very thought of an ‘Igor Fest’ is refreshing. And Birmingham’s four-year plan to play every note by the 20th century’s representative composer got off to a marvellous start last month with the CBSO under Sakari Oramo. A major positive about Stravinsky is just what his detractors used to pounce upon as a defect: he’s always doing something different. Even through the 30 years of common-practice ‘neoclassicism’ from the early 1920s culminating in the late 1950s with The Rake’s Progress, the variety is astonishing, embracing the wit and cheek of the Octet, the graceful suavity of Apollo and the sober seriousness of Orpheus;

It’s rare that both of Ravel’s operas appear in one programme, indeed that they appear at all. The RCM, as one might expect, did the fullest justice to both of them, and made clear how immeasurably superior the second, L’enfant et les sortilèges, is to the first, L’heure espagnole. L’heure is entirely a comedy of situation, with a libidinous woman coping with an embarrassing superfluity of importunate lovers by having a muleteer carry them upstairs and down in grandfather clocks, until she realises, with her husband’s acquiescence, that it’s the dumb muleteer himself who is the goods. The music is often merely illustrative, and reveals too fully Ravel’s fascination with

Back at church after a few weeks’ absence, I found the vicar in a terrible state. ‘Oh my dear chap, we’ve all been thinking of you. Is it true?’ he said. ‘What?’ I said. ‘What you said in The Spectator about getting divorced,’ he said. ‘You must never take the nonsense I write seriously,’ I said. And all down the aisles, as the news spread (‘We’d been praying for you,’ one woman said), I could see waves of relief spreading through the church, and I thought, ‘How lovely. People actually care!’ But there are some things that are far, far too important to make jokes about, and one of them

An ancient Roman sceptic wondered how, when two augurs passed in the street and caught one another’s eye, they managed not to burst out laughing. A Damien Hirst bisected lamb suspended in a glass tank of formaldehyde was sold for $3.37 million at Christie’s in New York early in May. Works by Donald Judd, who did not construct his industrial box productions himself, also, like Hirst, having others to do that kind of thing for him, fetched nearly $10 million. The final take for these and similar pieces was $143 million. What started as a joke in the days of Dada has become big business, and postmodern conceptual art is

Opera Holland Park is suddenly fashionable, even people who have never been near it writing about how wonderful they hear it is and vowing to go, while as usual those of us who have been saying that since it started in 1996 ask ourselves what makes us so implausible that we aren’t taken seriously on such matters, if at all. OHP has made a speciality of so-called verismo operas, though what is ‘true’ about Giordano’s Fedora I wouldn’t like to say. Although it ostensibly deals with Russian ‘nihilists’, mention of them obtrudes in the text with grotesque irrelevance.It has become a vehicle for prima donnas in the afternoon of their

Thank You for Smoking is a satirical comedy about the culture of spin, adapted from Christopher Buckley’s 1994 novel of the same name. Its hero is the wolfish Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), chief lobbyist employed by cigarette company ‘Big Tobacco’. It is Naylor’s job to defend the company he works for (and its right to exist), and smokers (and their right to smoke). He is smart, attractive and exceptionally good at his job — more than a match for the saps pitted against him by his arch-enemy, Senator Ortolan K. Finistirre (William H. Macy), who wants cigarette packets labelled with the word ‘Poison’ and a picture of a skull and