Arts
Tarts and Tchaikovsky
What can the Royal Opera House be insinuating about its target audience? No sooner had Anna Nicole closed than Manon…
Murder in the mall
So you’ve just popped down to the supermarket for the weekly shop, toddlers in tow, when the grenades start to…
Culture Buff
He was born into Australian ballet aristocracy but now lives in Houston. Stanton Welch is the son of Marilyn Jones…
Tarts and Tchaikovsky
What can the Royal Opera House be insinuating about its target audience? No sooner had Anna Nicole closed than Manon…
Psycho thriller
I had a fair idea of what I was in for when I went to see The Fall at Brixton’s…
Psycho thriller
I had a fair idea of what I was in for when I went to see The Fall at Brixton’s…
Class of ’73
The death of Christopher Hogwood has deprived the world of the most successful exponent of early music there has ever…
Class of ’73
The death of Christopher Hogwood has deprived the world of the most successful exponent of early music there has ever…
Old master
Juvenilia is the work produced during an artist’s youth. It would seem logical to think, therefore, that an artist’s output…
The new Turner?
What happens to an artist’s reputation when he dies? Traditionally, there was a period of cooling off when the reputation,…
Robo-Tell
Is there a fundamental, insuperable problem with staging Rossini’s Guillaume Tell on a budget, without the resources to conjure up…
Disaster movie
What We Did On Our Holiday is written and directed by Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton, the pair who created…
Culture Buff
It all began in the mid-1960s for the Brilliant Creatures: Germaine, Clive, Barry & Bob, now given de luxe treatment…
Net effect
In the mid-1990s the art world got excited about internet art (or ‘net.art’, as those involved styled it). This new…
A kind of magic
Talking of Rembrandt’s ‘The Jewish Bride’ to a friend, Vincent van Gogh went — characteristically — over the top. ‘I…
Nobs and numbskulls
Suppose Charles were to reign as a meddlesome, self-pitying, indecisive plonker. It’s a thought. It’s now a play, too, by…
Husband and wives
Needless to say, it’s not uncommon to hear single British women in their thirties and forties saying that all the…
Master of alchemy
Martin Gayford talks to a surprisingly jolly Anselm Kiefer about art and metamorphosis
A Cubist in New York
The American Jewish artist Max Weber (1881–1961) was born in Belostok in Russia (now Bialystok in Poland), and although he…
Bach triumphant
A few weeks ago I was at the perfect wedding. My young friend Will Heaven, a comment editor at the…
Bad bad acting
It’s taken a while but here it is. The Play That Goes Wrong is like Noises Off, but simpler. Michael…
Douchebags and dartboards
So how did London’s two big opera companies launch their new seasons last week? Not perhaps in the way you…
Watch that man
Inspired by Justin Bieber’s Never Say Never (2011), Katy Perry’s Part of Me (2012) and One Direction’s This Is Us…
In sickness and in health
Last week on Front Row (Radio 4) the singer Joyce DiDonato recalled the advice she gave the new graduates of…
