Arts
Ernani at Teatro all Scala
The Opera is coming back! Unable to perform for nine months, the company has suffered great financial loss, forcing substantial…
Kitchen-table opera
Covid has been many things to the arts — most of them unprintable. A plague, a scourge, a disaster from…
No more Mr Nasty
‘I used to be Mr Nasty! That was good! Mr Nasty was easy!’ Jeremy Paxman bellows at Michael Palin on…
Respighi’s Roman Trilogy: Sinfonia of London/ John Wilson
Grade: A The strings rear up, there’s a flash of steel from the trumpets, and ten seconds into Respighi’s Feste…
Whiplash
Hillbilly Elegy is an adaptation of the best-selling memoir, published in 2016, by J.D. Vance and it’s quite a story.…
Great Scott
Ronnie’s: Ronnie Scott and His World-Famous Jazz Club was like the TV equivalent of an authorised biography: impressively thorough, often…
Return to gender
Emilia is a period piece about Emilia Bassano who may have been the ‘dark lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The writer,…
Vital signs
Laura Gascoigne meets Margaret Calvert, the designer who dragged British signposting into the modern era
The Undoing
It’s a strange prospect for strange times, the young violinist Freya Franzen on the stage of Melbourne’s Concert Hall playing…
Arthur Streeton Land of the Golden Fleece 1926
In February 1922, Princess Mary, the only daughter of King George V and Queen Mary, was married in the first…
Power play
Praising the grand old maestri of the podium isn’t a good look, as they say on Twitter. Conductors such as…
The outsiders
Tanya Gold on the journalists who scripted the golden age of Hollywood
Thank god for lockdown
Death of England: Delroy is a companion piece to Death of England, which ran in February at the NT and…
Hello, goodbye
Ballet lovers driven square-eyed by a drip feed of livestreaming and archive footage have been pining for the patter of…
Disco: Kylie Minogue
Grade: B– Uh-oh. Might have to be careful here, pull my punches a little bit. The editor is a big…
Concrete poetry
Since technology is developing at such light-speed pace, why does it feel so strangely slow? There is a sense that…
Marriage of inconvenience
‘We have to stop it now!’ says Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter), smoking another cigarette, obviously. She’s talking about the…
Blue notes
This documentary about Billie Holiday is transfixing. Not just because it’s about Billie Holiday — I am not into jazz…
Sean Connery
Sean Connery outlived all of them, those great British actors who came to such prominence in the early Sixties: Richard…
Simon Fieldhouse Mozart Statue, Vienna
Simon Fieldhouse is a Sydney- based artist who has developed a very particular area of expression. Typically, he uses watercolour…
Painting vs sculpture
In an extract from their book, Antony Gormley tells Martin Gayford that the 3-D will always trump the 2-D
An ego the size of Botswana
It’s touch and go whether the theatre will survive this latest assault. Some venues have pushed back their entire programme…
Trick or treat
The timing couldn’t be better. Just as the gates clang shut on another national lockdown, trapping us all indefinitely with…
Lamb to the slaughter
The Slightly Foxed podcast, like the quarterly and old bookshop of the same name, is almost muskily lovely. It’s the…
Rhapsody in blue
When Carlos Acosta was named artistic director of Birmingham Royal Ballet in January of this year, he announced ambitious plans…
