Young Woman Reading 1880 by Osman Hamdi Bey Reading the British Museum press release of Inspired by the East: How the Islamic World Influenced Western Art, I was preparing myself for a big show. The exhibition was promoted as “Covering five centuries of artistic interaction”, and since it was a paying show for the…
Category: review
Bridget Riley retrospective mesmerises and excites at Hayward Gallery
I still remember the first time I saw Bridget Riley’s vivid, abstract paintings. It was at a provincial gallery, Wolverhampton or somewhere similar, in the mid-1970s. Coloured stripes and shapes shimmered and bounced, their contrasting yet consonant colours jostling and vibrating on the large canvasses. I was fascinated by the rhythm and energy of these…
Pietà Power at the Cadogan Hall
Saturday night, late October, and there’s a chill in the air, and it’s not all down to weather! Brexit dramas, political deadlock, dire economic and climatic warnings have filled the day. I’m relieved to put those eerily dark streets off Sloane street behind me, and to step into the warmly lit Cadogan Hall. I’ve come…
Intimate, personal and autobiographical: new releases of piano music by Schumann and Schubert
R. Schumann – Works for Piano / Joseph Tong This new release by British pianist Joseph Tong on the Quartz label contains some of Schumann’s most intimate and autobiographical music, notably the Fantasie in C, Op 17. Never one for disguising his emotions, Schumann described it as “perhaps the most impassioned music I have ever…
Trouble in Rice’s Underworld
Emma Rice’s ENO staging of Orpheus in the Underworld has been much maligned in the traditional press recently, much to my dismay. Her efforts to update this nineteenth century operetta to suit the modern zeitgeist and ‘me too’ sensibility have been frowned upon by those supposedly in the know, who see her efforts to…
Gauguin Portraits at the National Gallery
Would you have left your teenage daughter alone with Paul Gauguin? If the expression on her face in Gauguin’s portrait (above) is anything to go by, Thérèse-Josephine de Nimal was none too happy at the prospect. Actually, I presume she was chaperoned but even so, the studio must have been positively crackling with electricity…
Into the Night at the Barbican
Shadow Theatre at Le Chat Noir, Paris. I always look forward to the Barbican Gallery’s exhibitions. Theme-based with enticing titles, they always manage to capture the imagination. The last show I covered there, entitled Art, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde (see here LOVE IN A CREATIVE CLIMATE) in January of this year, had been riveting. With the…
‘Rembrandt’s Light’ lights up Dulwich
A new show has opened for autumn at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. It’s called Rembrandt’s Light. It’s intelligent, empathetic, surprising and at one point breathtaking, and I urge you all to go and see it as soon as possible. Dulwich, the UK’s earliest purpose-built public picture gallery (it was founded in 1811), was designed…
McGregor’s Dance in ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ Gets the Youth Backing
Dancers in the Underworld. Company Wayne London was in the eye of a rainstorm on the opening night of Orpheus and Eurydice at the ENO so I was relieved to step into the Colosseum’s warm, crimson interior and bound up the stairs to my seat. In the dress circle, people were filming the grand…
Benjamin Britten and the Challenge of Singing
Portrait of Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten by Kenneth Green 1943 The voice is an extraordinary thing. Air pumped from our lungs, passes over the fleshy folds in our throat, to emit a full spectrum of sounds. Some more pleasing than others. Last weekend I shouted and screamed so hard at a football…
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