It’s four years since I gave up opera criticism. The pandemic had struck, I had hit a significant birthday, and notched up three decades at the coal face – a quarter of a century at the Telegraph, and an earlier stint at this address. There were other things I wanted to do and after reviewing
In 1916 the Bank of England committed what Nikolaus Pevsner was to call the greatest architectural crime to befall London in the 20th century. It decided to demolish much of its own building, designed by the great Georgian neoclassical architect John Soane. Soane’s lost masterpiece is the subject of the latest series from the essential
Van Gogh owned a copy of Utagawa Kunisada’s woodblock print of the ‘Yoshiwara Poet Omatsu’ (1861), which is currently on display at the Watts Gallery. It depicts the poetess who rose from humble origins in an elegant kimono at her dressing table and was part of Kunisada’s series of paintings titled Biographies of Famous Women,
The other day, I went to see a nouveau riot-girl band called Claire Dance play in a disused factory in Bagnolet on the edge of Paris. They were great: the kind of sonic kick in the nuts I’d been waiting more than a decade for an all-female band to deliver. I half-wondered whether it was
There are certain things that you don’t expect at the opera. Laughter, for example. Proper laughter, that is; not the knowing sort that ripples politely across the auditorium five seconds after the punchline appears in the surtitles. We’re talking unconstrained laughter; laughter that gives you an endorphin rush and sends you straight online to tell
As long ago as the 1960s, the poet Edward James was worried that traditional crafts were dying out. Having frittered much of the family fortune he had inherited, aged five, on supporting struggling surrealists (he commissioned the Mae West lips sofa and lobster telephone from a scuffling Dali) and on backing shows starring his actress
The tree-lined streets of Rotherhithe are an odd place to unveil a West End musical. But this is a suitably odd situation. Graham Linehan – lauded comedy writer turned culture warrior – is about to unveil what he calls ‘a musical that may never be seen’. For much of the past 30 years, the idea
When a major artist releases a new album, the first thing to follow is the onslaught of think pieces. And when Beyoncé released Cowboy Carter earlier this year, the tone of these think pieces – especially on this side of the Atlantic – was one of slightly baffled congratulation. Here, at last, was a pioneer
‘I was one of your original customers in Kensington Church Street,’ I tell the founder of Biba when we meet. ‘Are you coming to complain?’ she shoots back. At 87 and fresh off a flight from Miami, Barbara Hulanicki is as sharp as a tack. The designer was in London for the opening of The
Nobody claims Beryl Cook was an artistic genius, least of all the artist herself. ‘I think my work lies somewhere between Donald McGill [the saucy postcard artist that George Orwell wrote so lyrically about] and Stanley Spencer,’ she once told me. ‘But I’m sorry to say I’m probably nearer McGill.’ She was, as ever, being
The American artist and critic Brad Troemel once pointed out that art galleries have all turned into a kind of adult daycare, and ever since then I haven’t been able to visit a gallery without noticing it. Nearly two decades ago, Carsten Höller installed a set of big aluminium slides in the Turbine Hall at
Bruce Robinson is ramming a huge log into the grate of his ancient fireplace in mud-clogged Herefordshire. He’s 77 and the film for which he is famous, Withnail and I, is about to open as a play. Isn’t it curious it hasn’t happened before, given that the comedy is about two thirsty, unemployed actors and
Tanner, the critic RICHARD BRATBY Michael Tanner (1935-2024), who died earlier this month, had such a vital mind and stood so far above the common run of music critics that it’s hard to believe he’s gone. For a philosopher to concern themself with the inner game of opera is not unknown (think of Friedrich Nietzsche
For centuries no one knew who it was by or even what it was of. The picture that had hung unnoticed in a succession of noble palazzi in the Italian province of Salerno, with its deep chiaroscuro and close-cropped composition, looked like a Caravaggio – but after Caravaggio almost every painting in Naples did. When
This is the second exhibition of mid-century New York street photography at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. The first, in 2022, surveyed the work of Vivian Maier, who at her death left behind a vast quantity of prints and negatives: evidence of a hidden life unsuspected even by those in whose household she lived
Should you visit Malta this spring, you may notice something decidedly weird is afoot. Across the public squares of its capital, Valletta, performance artists are blocking busy thoroughfares and causing havoc on packed café terraces. The Hospitaller and British military forts that dominate the capital’s famous harbour, meanwhile, are full of dysfunctional installation work, while
Roxy Music didn’t make Phil Manzanera rich. Kanye West did. When a guitar phrase from Manzanera’s obscure 1978 solo song, ‘K-Scope’, was sampled in 2012 by West and Jay-Z on their track, ‘No Church in the Wild’, the one-third share Manzanera was given of publishing and sales revenue proved life-changing. The song featured on a
My childhood in Hong Kong was shaped by a particular style of building: market halls with brise-soleils sheltering us from the glare; housing-block stairwells with perforated blockwork letting in dappled light and breeze; classrooms accessed from open-air decks, with clerestory windows cross-ventilating the stale, sticky air. In this sub-tropical ex-British colony, these features defined its
We live in times generally unfriendly to ritual, religious or civic. For 50 years at least, churches have stripped away once-glorious liturgical rituals in order, they say, to render themselves more accessible, even as pews have emptied. On the civic side, great art museums – some would say the cathedrals of our secular age –
Next month in London, they’re celebrating a composer you’ve probably never heard of, but whose work you’re sure to have heard. If you’ve watched much British TV or cinema in the past half century, you’ll already know his music, and better than you think. A quick test of age: do you remember ‘The Right One’
