[contextly_auto_sidebar] Bhupen Khakhar: You Can’t Please All Tate Modern until 6 November 2016 Tate Modern is holding the first international retrospective of the interesting Indian artist Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003). Their publicity says something that is obviously true, that this painter “played a central role in modern Indian art,” but also makes the larger claims that … [Read more...]
Archives for 2016
Country House Opera: Music and the Love of Food
[contextly_auto_sidebar] With its large orchestra and very large chorus, Eugene Onegin is Garsington Opera’s most ambitious production in its twenty-eight seasons. Conducted by the company’s artistic director, Douglas Boyd, and directed by Michael Boyd (no relation), artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 2002-2012, and with large-scale sets by Tom Piper, also a veteran of the … [Read more...]
Despite AA – Don’t Avoid People, Places & Things
The National Theatre and Headlong’s production of Duncan Macmillan’s new play, People, Places & Things, has got a well-merited transfer to the West End at Wyndham’s Theatre, with a stunning central performance by Denise Gough that has got the never superlative-shy London critics over-excited. It is a gruelling role, with Ms Gough scarcely off stage for two and a half hours and even, … [Read more...]
Towards the Perfect Identification of Matter and Form, but More Myth than Man?
"He is typical of that aspiration of all the arts towards music," wrote Pater of Giorgione. “In the Age of Giorgione” at the upstairs Sackler Gallery of the Royal Academy (until 5 June) is a specific view of Venetian Renaissance painting and drawing (excepting one relief sculpture) in the first decade of the sixteenth century, limited (mostly) to works that have sometimes been … [Read more...]
Juggling with monotheism – Akhnaten makes a spectacle of himself
For all the thunder that surrounds his productions, Philip Glass is undersung and underpraised. His superb memoir, Words without Music, recounts how he entered the University of Chicago, aged 16, without having finished high school. He left, I think, in 1956, three years before I entered U of C as a first-year undergraduate. He left a few traces of himself behind, and much later I discovered that … [Read more...]
Don lovable (but three-quarters mad)
By a coincidence that is actually no such thing, but accidents of calendar-changing and record-keeping, on April 23rd this year we mark the 400th anniversary of the deaths of two giants of literature, William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes. It is both wonderful and somehow generous of the Royal Shakespeare Company to have marked the occasion by commissioning a new adaptation of Don … [Read more...]