It was an odd oversight, or possibly it was ignorance, which led Auden not to include Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina in his list of ‘anti-operas’, for it lacks to an extraordinary degree many of the chief constituents which people associate, and rightly, with opera, while even more conspicuously including, often seeming largely to consist of, elements which
There has been a great deal of media coverage of this exhibition of new paintings by Cecily Brown (born 1969) at the curiously named Modern Art Oxford. (It’s actually an Arts Council-funded public gallery.) Brown, though a Londoner, has lived in New York since 1994 and has made a substantial name for herself there and
When questioned for the 1891 census, Betsy Lanyon, an 84-year-old widow from Newlyn, decided she had better register a late change of career. She told her inquisitors that she was no longer a ‘fishwife’ — her new occupation was ‘artist’s model’. In the decades around the turn of the last century, Newlyn, a fishing port
A couple of years ago I was invited to tour Compass Point Studios just outside Nassau in the Bahamas. Apart from its historical significance — this was once the home of Island Records, where Bob Marley recorded all his great hits — the experience was very illuminating. Compass Point is a state-of-the-art studio and I
The Edinburgh Festival started in 1947 as essentially a music festival, the brainchild of Glyndebourne’s John Christie. The capital was soon turned into a magnet for fringe theatre and other events. It is said that dour natives fearing success left town in a hurry in order to escape the culture-tourist influx. Meanwhile public and private
