The audience settles, the house lights dim, ominous music begins to build in the orchestra pit. ‘Opened are the double doors of the horizon/Unlocked are its bolts’, the narrator intones. Welcome to 18th Dynasty Egypt as envisaged by American minimalist composer Philip Glass. You don’t have to be a fully paid-up Glasshead to enjoy the…
Don McCullin
Don McCullin, who has a fair claim to the title of the UK’s greatest living photographer, was born in 1935 in Finsbury Park – a bloody tough area of London before the war, and even more so after, when much of it had been bombed flat. The first photograph McCullin was paid for, in 1958,…
Dior and the Story of the Perfect Dress
In his autobiography Christian Dior tells the story of a fortune teller he met at a 1919 charity event for veterans of the Great War. He was an impressionable, imaginative young man. The fortune teller told him that he would suffer poverty earlier on in his life but that his luck would change and that…
Pierre Bonnard: the Colour of Memory
The art of Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) conjures up images of intimate bourgeois interiors suffused with high key, sun-drenched colour. Another notable feature of Bonnard’s work is the near-ubiquity of his mistress, muse and – eventually – wife, Marthe de Méligny. So omnipresent is Marthe in his paintings, in fact, that Julian Barnes called his…
Love In a Creative Climate
Artistic duos tend not to receive the attention they deserve in art history. We often read about the art movements and the artists who create them. The artist’s partner or lover meanwhile is often overlooked, or simply seen in terms of a muse. An ambitious exhibition at the Barbican, entitled Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy…
The Sound of Silence. Cage and Rauschenberg Take On A New Life With MusicArt.
During the summer of 1952, composer John Cage staged a happening that was going to change the world of music and art forever. At Black Mountain College in North Carolina, in the college dining hall, the audience listened to Cage read from an essay he had written on the relationship between music and Zen Buddhism….
Sax and Jazz. Jean Toussaint Still Has Youth Appeal
Sunday night in Camden. The temperature has plummeted and there are few people about on the high street. Outside the Jazz Cafe however there is a queue forming. I rush to join it and edge my way forwards between the metal barriers to get my wrist stamped. A young man runs alongside us peddling…
Soprano Romaniw Sparkles in Miller’s Revival of La Bohème at ENO
A true star, Romaniw brings further magic to what is already an arresting production.
Britten’s War Requiem finds new life with ENO’s staging
At the Coliseum to watch the first UK staging of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem on its opening night, I was curious to see how Turner prize-winning photographer, Wolfgang Tillmans would tackle this work as set designer. War Requiem’s reputation has soared since 1962, when it was first performed in Coventry Cathedral. As a choral work,…
Edward Burne-Jones at Tate Britain
It feels like the right moment to reacquaint oneself with the work of Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones. In our uncertain times, escapism provides relief and comfort, and when you enter EBJ’s dreamscape world of myth and fantasy, you move beyond the petty preoccupations and ugly politics of our world now. This is the first large show…
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