The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Lionel is a king of the New York art scene. An internationally renowned connoisseur, he travels the world creating and destroying fortunes. He anoints a masterpiece, here. He defenestrates a forgery, there. He visits the Californian city of Bakersfield (code in America for Nowheresville) to determine the authenticity of a Jackson Pollock bought for three
Forget the pedantic classifications of genres, styles and schools. When it comes to dance performances, it all boils down to two kinds: those that make one think and those that entertain. Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker is a veteran of the first category. Since 1983, the year she founded her company Rosas, she has used the
Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites is an audacious work, much more so than many others that advertise their audacity. It deals with Love and Death, the central topics of opera, but the love is that of God; and death, rather than being a romantic consummation or a stirring tragedy, is something to be terrified of. The
Grace of Monaco, the Grace Kelly biopic starring Nicole Kidman, is an absolute joy, and I highly recommend it. Unless you live under a rock, which I think I might envy (dark, quiet, peaceful, but maybe dank?), you’ll know it was savaged at Cannes, but don’t let that put you off, as this isn’t just
When I was first learning about classical music, 50 years ago, the scene was more streamlined than it is now. Beethoven was king, with Brahms and Mozart next in line, and Haydn slowly establishing himself. Mahler was the new kid on the block; Bruckner was largely unknown and mistrusted. If one wanted the full symphony
When the rains continued the rivers rebelled, the swans moved inland and even the bank was sandbagged and we saw images of villages cut off and deserted schools and people being carried out of old folks homes and the cathedrals that somehow began to look like galleons; and as each day drenched we began to
Beyond the measured stretch of lawns and hedges are cultivated rows where snug plastic tunnels creep. Indoors, the fantastic spores fluff up on jelly: fungus rages under glass and germination bristles. In a sealed hot-room, in tanks lined with foil predators quietly chew and scrat; aphids suck their fill of sap. A forest of corn
Here’s a question for those of you old enough to remember 1980s television: did we realise at the time how crap it was, or did we simply not know any better? I’ve been struggling with my own answer to this, ever since watching Danny Baker’s World Cup Brush Up on BBC4 the other night. Yet
London’s opera critics have been roundly condemned for suggesting that a female singer’s personal appearance could make her unsuitable for a role. The singer in question is Tara Erraught, a young Irish mezzo-soprano based in Germany, who has just made her British debut in the new Glyndebourne production of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. She takes
Lynn Chadwick was born 100 years ago in London, and died in 2003 at his Gloucestershire home, Lypiatt Park, where he is buried in the Pinetum. He was one of the great names of 20th-century sculpture, not just in England but recognised and celebrated internationally, too. He first came to prominence in the 1950s, and
I watched the new DVD of Gregory’s Girl on the train from London up to Edinburgh. I hadn’t seen Bill Forsyth’s school-yard comedy in more than 30 years. Incredibly, it hasn’t dated in the slightest. When I saw it in the cinema, in 1981, as an acne-ridden adolescent, this tender romance was a revelation —
Tracey Emin’s bed is to be sold at auction this summer with a guide price of £800,000 to £1.2 million, although the man who sold it to Charles Saatchi has said it’s priceless. Emin was part of the British art movement in the ‘90s that gave Richard Dorment trouble at dinner parties; this scene is
Admit it. Say it! ‘My name is Blah and I am a boxaholic.’ Life on hold, marriage in bits, job swinging from a rusty nail, the box-set fanatic grabs every available minute to feed an addiction. I mean, you can’t leave, can’t breathe until you find out whether Jesse and Walter make it up before
If a gang of knife-wielding toddlers ever presses you for the name of the best Disney film, Sleeping Beauty (1959) is a pretty good answer. It has everything you expect from those features animated during Walt’s life: a simple story translated from a fairy tale; beautifully painted castle and forest scenes; a baddie that you
On Harry and Paul’s Story of the Twos (BBC 2, Sunday), there was a particularly cruel sketch in which Paul Whitehouse gave Harry Enfield a Paxman-style grilling as to whether he felt bitter that his comedy series had never won a Bafta award whereas its big rival The Fast Show (featuring, inter alia, one Paul
On paper, Moses und Aron might seem intractable and abstract: a 12-tone score setting a libretto that meditates on God, faith, the essential inadequacy of language to express the ineffable, and a great deal more. Put it in the theatre, as Welsh National Opera has done as the first part of its ‘Faith’ mini-season, and
Much praise has been lavished on Radio 2’s 500 Words short-story competition, the winners to be announced on Friday’s Chris Evans show, live from the Hay Festival. Quite right, too. It’s a brilliant way to encourage children aged 13 and under to explore their potential by inviting them to write stories. But you’d think that
Joan Littlewood’s greatest disservice to the theatre was to champion ‘the right to fail’, which encouraged writers and directors to inflict a thousand shades of bilge on play-goers for many decades. But she deserves a place in the pantheon for an inspired decision taken in 1959. Offered a new play about Soho’s underworld, written by
Eighty-seven Hackford Road, SW9, is unremarkable but for a blue plaque telling the world that Vincent van Gogh once lived there. The building has been empty since 2012 but now the Dutch artist Saskia Olde Wolbers has filled it with voices. ‘Yes, these Eyes are the Windows’ (until 22 June) is an Artangel-commissioned installation that
When first they ushered me into that hall To take my place on a cheap fold-out seat, My eyes clamped shut, and so missed all The conjured stillness of the school: young feet Unshuffled, heads dropped down in donned respect, And teachers, too — attendant, cramped in rows Of less observant hush. A time to
In Hilary Mantel’s Tudor England, it never stops raining. As she writes in her evocative programme note for the RSC stage adaptation of Wolf Hall, she first envisaged the life of Henry VIII’s political fixer, Thomas Cromwell, as ‘a room: the smell of wood smoke, ink, wet dogs and wet wool, and the steady patter of
It really is rotten luck, and also cruelly ironic. Just as Glasgow was done debating how best to demolish its hideous Red Road flats, its most beautiful building, Glasgow School of Art, goes up in smoke. No one hurt, apparently, which is a relief, but an awful lot of artwork lost, a unique archive and
Should fat be an issue in opera? Are our opera critics overgrown schoolboys with a body fixation? To judge from reports and editorials in print and online over the last two days, you can answer ‘no’ and ‘yes’ respectively. Simple? No, not really. On Monday morning, the critics of various national newspapers published reviews of Glyndebourne’s new production of Der Rosenkavalier. These reviews
P.J. O’Rourke’s chickens are giving him trouble. ‘Two of them aren’t laying eggs right now,’ he explains. But he doesn’t know which ones. ‘I’m not sure who’s the guilty party.’ We’re driving to the field where his trees are harvested for timber and where he and his father-in-law have built a one-hole golf course. ‘How
I spend an hour with the theatre director Polly Teale. She’s 50ish with a tall, willowy physique and strong, aquiline features. Her hair is arranged in a combed bob whose flicky fringe overhangs her bright, deep-set eyes. She’s easy-going and so good-natured that at one point she asks me about myself — a courtesy few
Josef Albers (1888–1976) is best known for his long engagement with the square, which he painted in exquisite variation more than a thousand times. A German–American painter, he trained in Berlin and Munich before enrolling at the Bauhaus (the leading modernist art and design school) in 1920. He was a student there for three years
In Venice, around 1552, Titian began work on a series of six paintings for King Philip II of Spain, each of which reinterpreted a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The resulting work proved to be the apogee of his career and became what may be the most influential group of paintings in post-Renaissance European art. Studied,
We’re now on day three of the Chelsea Flower Show, and this year the BBC have taken their coverage to the max. As well as the quotidian hourly slot with Monty Don, Joe Swift and newcomer Sophie Raworth, in the week preceding the show we were also treated to the daily Countdown to Chelsea. What
Oskar Morgenstern grew up in Vienna, John von Neumann in Budapest. Clearly the same Austro-Hungarian intellectual spirit which gave rise to Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele and their seminal joint work Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour is still alive in that part of the world, because the Austrians chose a bearded transvestite to represent them