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HOUSE STYLE FOR STUFF: We don't have a house style for stuff. As James Thurber said, "Don't get it right, just get it written" (The Sheep in Wolf's Clothing in Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated). Except maybe for spelling and punctuation, for which we are a stickler, we won't edit your stuff, so skip the genteelness and elucidate, if you can, what you really think. Please don't use any special characters like smart quotes and accents. If posting a review, please fully inform the reader about what event you attended, where it was, how long it'll be there, how much it cost, and (if the event involved people) who the people were. Thanks!

FAMG Review
ESO Winds: Concert at St Mary's, Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, April 11, 08
Derek Smith

ESO Winds, from the English Symphony Orchestra, were conducted by Derek Smith in a substantial programme of music for eight, nine or ten winds plus doublebass. The programme consisted of golden oldies such as the Gounod Petite Symphonie with its plangent solo flute (the admirable Laura Jellicoe) and new music including a delightful Smith arrangement of a Haydn Notturno which sounded at one and the same time both original and idiomatic.

Perhaps most arresting was Smith's own composition Bachorales which was a cunning collage of Bach organ pieces orchestrated and arranged as the elements of a sonata-rondo journey from the key of A flat to E flat. Described by the composer as a "concerto" for winds, the music was both demanding and rewarding in helping Bach's jewels to scintillate in a novel setting. At this the second performance, following a premiere at Ledbury in February, ESO Winds more than rose to the occasion showing what an accomplished body of players they are. This new piece came over as not just clever but also cogently argued and throughly enjoyable.

Still it is no discourtesy to award the palm for the evening's performances to Mozart's Serenade in C minor KV388, arguably the supreme masterpiece of the wind repertoire. Smith secured outstanding playing in a well-paced performance which concentrated on long-line phrasing, particularly in the tumultuous first movement. Following a lyrical Andante with scrupulous attention to dynamics, the Menuetto and Trio, both in canon, came off particularly well as voices deferred to one another rather than competing strenuously for attention. Paul Arden-Taylor's stylish oboe solo heralded the variations of the Finale which were perfectly contrasted and given proper room to breathe.

St Marys has almost perfect acoustics for this sort of concert and a happy audience expressed its approbation in an ovation, earning itself more sprightly Haydn by way of encore. Altogether a splendid evening and well worth the rather fraught journey west out of London late on a Friday!


FAMG Review
Modern Painters (The Camden Town Group) and Peter Doig
Tate Britain
Andrew Aarons

I've been meaning to see these two shows since they opened in February and haven't had time until now for numerous reasons. The delay in getting to them had heightened my expectations and I walked in to the Camden Town show on Saturday 12 April feeling very positive.

The Camden Town Group
As I journeyed through the eight rooms of this quite extensive exhibition and looked at many familiar paintings, I became more and more annoyed and depressed. The annoyance was aimed mostly at the curator Robert Stone, and his little bits of fatuous information on the title cards beside the paintings. Perhaps he didn't write them himself and allowed a recently graduated Art History student to do the job. I hope so, because very little is written about the paintings as objects of significance. An example of what I mean is a silly statement about a painting being inspired by one of van Gogh's paintings because the subject matter was the same, a bridge, and because blue and yellow had been used as in the van Gogh. Actually there was very little blue and yellow and they were not the same blue and yellow as van Gogh's at all. It may well be that van Gogh's bridge did inspire this painting, but the writer should not try to confuse us by saying a colour is there when it clearly isn't.

There are a few really good paintings in the show. Harold Gilman's portrait of his landlady Mrs Mounter is very fine and numerous pieces by Walter Sickert are exceptional paintings and almost old friends. His use of vibrant red against a dull brown is wonderful and creates an unreal glow. I was disappointed by Charles Ginner's work which I know mostly from reproduction. They are far better in that form than in actuality; while William Ratcliffe's townscapes are so much better in real life than in reproduction.

Overall my impression of the exhibition is of seeing some good English paintings but nothing of a truly international standard. Nothing great. I think I now understand why the Camden Town Group was not popular outside England. Just think, at the same time, only a few miles south across the English Channel, are Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, Chagall and Duchamp turning out their masterpieces.

Peter Doig
I am not familiar with this painter's work though I have seen a little of it in reproduction. It is uplifting and excellent painting. There is an instant familiarity and recognition in his landscapes. He is saying something true. Saying is the wrong word when one is talking about images but I don't have a better one.

Many of the paintings in the show are very big. I don't believe that this is done simply on a whim. They need to be big to express the landscape he is painting. His origins are Canadian and he is a fine descendant of the Group of Seven.

I do recommend this exhibition of paintings because it does prove that landscape painting is far from dead and no other medium, not photography nor film, could do what painting does in Peter Doig's hands.

Tate Britain until 5 May and 27 April respectively. Modern Painters £9 admission. Peter Doig £8 admission. Joint ticket £12.


FAMG Review
Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth
Tate Modern
Andrew Aarons

This work in the Tate's vast Turbine Hall is another in the Unilever series.

The word 'shibboleth' has two meanings. The first: a belief or custom that is no longer considered as having the importance or value that it once had. The second: the knowledge of a word, phrase, custom, etc. which denotes membership of a group. Lack of such knowledge then obviously denotes a foreigner, an outsider. I am sure it is the second meaning which Doris Salcedo is using for this work. At least the verbiage published by the Tate, and all the reviews of the work that I have read so far, seems to imply that this is the meaning we are expected to take from the work. The writings say that the work is about the divisions in society, the otherness of immigrants, and I assume, it is about the value that the Tate puts on art made by women.

I was disappointed. Why? Well, with all the hyperbole about the crack in the floor 'striking the very foundations of the museum', I was prepared for something extraordinary. It wasn't. Unless I read what the curators said the work had no more meaning for me than my eight and twelve year old grand-daughters comments, 'How could someone have hurt themselves, the crack's not wide enough?' or 'Why is this art?'

After visiting the exhibition, in great anticipation, I came away thinking that the first definition of 'shibboleth' was the best for this work. The work does nothing for me. I'm not smitten by its beauty or its skill, nor by its power, or even by its implied violence. Without the words it doesn't have any more importance than any other crack in the ground and we see many of those on the pavements in London.

I'm not suggesting for a moment that what the Tate has written about the divisions in our society are not so. They are indeed important and perhaps one day someone will produce a great work that does truly deal with these issues visually. I suppose that I expect a piece of visual art to be able to convey something without my having to read about it. I don't have to be Christian or even religious, in fact I'm neither, to feel the power of the Sistine Chapel ceiling; nor do I need to read the creation myth to get something from the painting.

An artist has to ask her/him self this question: when there is no longer anyone who can talk about or write about this work I'm now making, and all the politics are forgotten, and all my other pieces are lost or destroyed, will this have any meaning?


FAMG Review
Mozart: Cosi fan tutte
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, July 20, 07
Richard J. Astor

Director Jonathan Miller; conductor Colin Davis; Fiordiligi Dorothea Roschmann; Dorabella Elina Garanca; Ferrando Matthew Polenzani; Guglielmo Lorenzo Regazzo; Despina Rebecca Evans; Don Alfonso Thomas Allen

Musically, nothing about this opera justifies its alleged popularity. The overture is worthless. In more than three hours, there is not one memorable tune.

The singing, some of which was delivered lying down, was all pitch perfect, perfectly synchronised, perfectly immaculate, perfectly superb -- as one has the right to expect for £30 (upper amphitheatre) -- and remorselessly bland. I was bored rigid throughout. Apart from two 'moments' in the first Act, the performance entirely lacked magnetism or originality. Garanca aside, not one singer had any star quality, or even presence. The conductor looked bored. It was a hack job.

Novelly for an opera singer, Garanca sang well and acted plausibly, with no obsolete grotesqueries. Her body was supple, lithe and fluid. She was not tense and so relaxed her audience. She produced the novel, mystifying impression of not singing at all. One wondered who really was singing her part. All one consciously noticed was an attractive, rationally cast actress and a powerful, perfect voice coming from somewhere. One was amazed how easily she filled the hall without appearing to draw breath. She was fascinating and pleasurable to hear, listen to and watch. The restrained applause for her was a disgrace.

Roschmann's 19th century delivery -- body paroxyms, shoulder surges, arm freezes, neck locks, St Vitus Dance contortions, bizarre frowns, scowls, pouts and grimaces -- was a most offensive, badly judged, embarrassing, perplexing and inculpatory juxtaposition. A blacklist, not a paying audience, befits the opera singer who determinedly acts as if she has had a hand transplant, is giving birth, is massaging her breasts (unless she means to do so), is applying sulphuric acid lipstick, or is about to vomit -- however much such meticulous, fastidious crassness may impress an inveterate imbecile. Her antiquated, ludicrously derivative antics, unrelieved by even one apparent original idea or independent thought, were a decisive nail in a worm-eaten coffin of a production. Nothing about her, her singing or her acting justified the sheepish fawning, smugly received, from what appeared to be a claque in the stalls.

The absence of personality was not the only feature of the performance betokening the pathological substantive and procedural mediocrity with which we are all now deluged and to which the English ferociously retain an obsessional commitment. So too was the modern stage setting. And so it proved. Thomas Allen's monotonous plate prop, laboured wholly unvaried throughout the First Act, was a major irritation after the first minute. His monotonous sartorial narcissism, sustained wholly unvaried throughout both Acts, wore thin after the first thirty seconds. The mobile phones prop at the girls' first appearance was tediously predictable after the first few moments. Garanca's tightrope walk business in the first Act was excruciatingly gauche, incongruous, pointless, witless, irritating, distracting and demeaning.

One in 70s hippy disguise, the other in 80s heavy metal -- even the costume department couldn't stretch to two authentic beatniks -- Polenzani and Regazzo exhausted the amusement and dramatic value of their two-dimensional wooden poses after a few minutes. When they re-appeared in the Second Act with the identical costumes, attitudes, gestures and the First Act's other lame, weak, pompous, viscid, insipid attempts at wit without even microscopically perceptible development, there was deep anti-climax, disappointment, boredom, dullness, waste of dramatic opportunity, and a sense of insult to both audience and singers. Polenzani's and Regazzo's worn array embodied a threadbare production.

Through the easy manipulations of the insufferable loser Don Alfonso -- naturally conceived by the director, rightly, as a congenitally dysfunctional upper-class English weirdo -- the natural Dorabella is quickly and guiltlessly unfaithful to Ferrando with, unwittingly, the serpentine, disloyal, hypocritical Guglielmo, and properly forgets Ferrando (more should have been made of her re-appearance post-seduction). Fiordiligi quickly, unwittingly, falls in love with the hypocritical, disloyal, serpentine Ferrando while at the same time claiming to still love Guglielmo. Fiordiligi's deviousness, and potential emotional and sexual energy, are attractive, if only she would let herself enjoy them, but Roschmann's incorrigibly bad acting -- sometimes approaching (apparently oblivious) self-parody -- kills it.

On being inequitably exposed, each girl, from moral cowardice and lack of education -- the surtitle 'innocent' was of course a mistranslation for 'pathologically naive' -- promptly and uncritically invites her hypocritical, disloyal, dishonest, vapid, fatuous fiancé to kill her. At the end it is not clear who is supposed to be reconciled to marrying whom, or why, except that all four lovers seem stifled and frustrated; no-one shows the slightest character, especially in dealing with Don Alfonso. In this production, Dorabella rightly stalks off, disgusted with herself and everyone else, in a belated access of self-emancipation.

The libretto is deeply flawed, the plot is ludicrous, the music is fifth-rate and the characters are moronic. Yet their tragic superficiality, and the experience as a whole, resonate resoundingly with an English audience, with its incorrigible affinity for hypocrisy, vapidity, self-abasement and intellectual cowardice.

In the fetishistic re-creation of the Middle Ages that is present-day England -- where the practice of bubonic stupidity is an aspiration, where artificiality is a visceral ideology, and where those who might most benefit disdain moisturiser, cosmetic dentistry, diet, exercise and a genuine education -- vassals compete for the most ridiculous accent and few interactions are honest or unaffected. Consumed by hierarchy, appearances, emotional retardation and peer-fear, the hyperventilating Englishman's most basic instinct is to put on an act -- usually someone else's -- in order to create and sustain a wholly false impression. With an English phoney of any class, you never know exactly where you stand, but know, discomfortingly, exactly where you are. At least among the minutely calculating smart set, romance is a pretext for condescension -- glacial or gushing depending where you are in Kensington -- and sex probably closely resembles the changing of the guard or a display at Madame Tussaud's. Dank, drab, dull, depressing, demoralising, the place is a cross between a criminally badly designed Victorian tenement, an open-air lunatic asylum, Planet of the Apes, Crufts and a historical re-enactment village. Despair, clenched teeth, violence and urine are in the alcohol-sodden air. Some people have no originality, intellect or integrity at all. Their prurient self-importance is unredeemed by any meaningful attempt at conscientiousness or competence. Inmates and visitors alike are entirely safe, at every level, in every transaction, from ready exposure to any natural, genuine, unaffected, enlightened, uplifting, efficient, logical, intelligent or characterful behaviour. Crushed, cringeing and congested, the English die pining for a personality, choking on their own mawkish ineffectuality. Maybe all the normal folk really did get out on the Mayflower.

This structurally, intellectually, emotionally and musically decrepit opera, with its bizarre plot and half-wit characters, obviously finds immediate and enduring favour with an English audience saturated in the idiotic and the fake. Don Alfonso is indeed a timeless drivelling pathological English poseur. Delivery to local tastes was perfected by a stale, hollow, shallow, pretentious, vacuous pittance of a production, devoid of a single sustainable good idea and unscrupulously stuffed with many a bad one. It was a very English evening. But there was a positive side. I discovered Dorabella and Garanca.


FAMG Review
Rodin
Royal Academy, Piccadilly
Jacqueline Crofton

This extraordinary exhibition amazes from the start, with the massive and powerful Gates of Hell (1880-1917). An obsession inspired by Dante's Inferno, each figure evolves into eloquent sculptures.

The Thinker: powerfully wrought, every muscle and sinew vibrating with intensity, the back a concert of anatomical virtuosity. The same immense male figure in The Kiss now tender and sensual. Rodin transforms his subjects and we are transfixed. Nowhere is Rodin's immense gift more apparent than in the sombre, poignant Burghers of Calais his hymn to man's devotion.

Bronze Age: a lyrical, perfect, beautiful rendition modelled by a young soldier -- ridiculed by Rodin's critics when first shown. Astonishingly realistic, it was thought that he must have cast the statue from the model, an occurrence now commonplace when most sculptors have lost the art of anatomical observation.

Walking Man, headless so as not to distract, the form an inverted Y, its right leg too long to be planted so firmly on the ground. Extraordinary in its perception of gait, complete in its incompleteness.

Balzac, a great figure with protuberant swollen belly. Lucien Freud was apparently influenced by it in painting Leigh Bowery. To be sure, Rodin's influence on modern art can be seen throughout this retrospective. The faces of Matisse, the form of Degas, the elusive contours of colourists such as Dufy, the Impressionists and even Van Gogh.

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) was a thickset and heavily bearded man likened to Michelangelo's Moses. Women flocked to his studio desirous of being as modelling clay in his hands. It is said that all about him a multitude of female models spent hours in various states of undress and in numerous naturalistic and liberal positions so that he could obsessively sketch and observe them. They were his muses, his models, and often his lovers. Gwen John the painter of pallid girls can be found transformed as the erotic Crouching Woman, a pose compelling in its uncensored abandon. Their relationship foundered and she resorted to stalking him. Another lover was Camille Claudel, a talented sculptress in her own right. Immortalised by Rodin, she died in a mental institute. Rodin clearly loved women, their minds, their bodies, and their sexuality. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the exquisite selection of intimate sketches and watercolours here to savour with delight.

When Rodin first exhibited in Paris at the time of the 1900 World Fair, howls of indignation greeted his work. The public was horrified by his stark, avante garde reality. He was called a butcher. A reminder perhaps that great artists are often beyond their time. Nowadays with our modern sensibilities we can comprehend the beauty of the NonFinito, the expressiveness of his Fragments and his superb rendition of distortion and mutilation that reveal a sensitivity and passion not seen since Michelangelo.

Each sculpture and drawing deserving of quiet contemplation, this important retrospective is brilliantly curated, seamlessly ordered and entirely fitting.

RODIN continues at the Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London until January 1, 2007. 020 7300 8000. 10am-6pm every day except Friday (last admission to galleries 5.30pm). On Fridays, 10am-10pm (last admission to galleries 9.30pm). Tickets £2.80-£11


FAMG Review
Leonardo da Vinci drawings
V&A
Andrew Aarons

You will find the new Leonardo exhibition revealing and rewarding if you're willing to put in the effort. The exhibition is small; an ante-room with four large photographs, one each of Milan and Florence and two of Amboise where Leonardo is buried. The main exhibition is just one room with projected images of his drawings above the actual drawings which are easily seen behind protective glass.

The drawings are surprisingly well lit with informative and interpretive text, but my eyes were nonetheless quite tired by the time I had gone around the room. The projected images are beautifully animated. They are amusing and help enormously to understand Leonardo? drawing and thinking process.

The drawings are in ink, and sometimes brown chalk, on pages from his notebooks. They range widely in subjectmatter. There are studies of light on a face, anatomy of an ox heart, movement of water, dissection of an eye, etc. Everything that he saw intrigued him, and demanded of him that he must investigate it in order to understand how it worked. His method of investigation was always through drawing. Everything is observed with wonder. Some drawings are even clumsy (panel 8 drawing of a finger), proof that he was human.

It is obvious that these were not made as art. What is shown here is the real work of an artist; to reveal the truth. We see in panels 33 and 34 tiny drawings of men working; digging, carrying, hammering, all nude, so that Leonardo could understand how the human body worked. Here we see the true value of life drawing, sadly and disastrously dropped from the art college curriculum to be replaced by the doodles of those who will enter and no doubt win the Turner Prize.

If you like collecting catalogues of exhibitions you'll enjoy this one, but like so many today it's very heavy. If you prefer something lighter, I suggest a beautiful little hard cover book entitled Leonardo da Vinci, The Complete Works, published by D&C and also on sale at the V&A bookshop. The reproductions are excellent, and it fits in the hand wonderfully.

Leonardo da Vinci, Experience, Experiment and Design continues at the V&A until 7th January 2007.