Rupert Christiansen | The Spectator columnists & writers

Exhilarating: English National Ballet triple bill, at Sadler’s Wells, reviewed

Headed for San Francisco, Tamara Rojo bows out of her directorship of English National Ballet with an exhilarating triple bill demonstrating her success in expanding the repertory and raising technical standards. If only the company could tour this class of work outside London. The climax of the evening was a new version of The Rite of Spring by Mats Ek – his second stab at dramatising music so graphically vivid and violently aggressive that choreographers since Nijinsky have struggled to find imagery and movement to match its primal energy. Even Kenneth MacMillan and Pina Bausch didn’t quite hack it for me. Ek has avoided the clichés: nobody stomps about plastered in scary face paint. I wonder if his scenario was inspired by Ari Aster’s elegant horror film Midsommar? A community in elegantly cut white kimonos and tunics have selected not a sacrificial virgin but a girl and a boy to mate.

One long moan of woe: Crystal Pite’s Light of Passage, at the Royal Opera, reviewed

I was moved and shaken by Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern when I first saw it in 2017. In richly visualised imagery, it proposed two ways of interpreting the horrific footage of the refugee crisis of 2016: either as a matter of anonymous, voiceless masses, portrayed as a body of dancers moving across the stage like a skein of migrating swallows beyond reason or control; or as a ragtag of desperate, furious individuals with every dignity and possession taken from them – somebody’s husband or wife, somebody’s daughter or son, fighting for survival – a plight conveyed in the impassioned dancing of Marcelino Sambé and Kristen McNally. Five years on, Pite has returned to flesh out this fierce and powerful half-hour work with two further sections: one focused on the young, the other on the elderly, and a note of sentimentality has crept in.

A solid evening’s entertainment: Rambert’s Peaky Blinders ballet reviewed

Being of a squeamish sensibility and prejudiced by a low opinion of recent BBC drama, I can claim only a superficial acquaintance with Peaky Blinders. So my response to The Redemption of Thomas Shelby, a new ballet drawing on the popular television series about gangland Birmingham during the 1920s, is that of a rank outsider. Produced by Rambert (in association with Birmingham Hippodrome), it represents the company’s admirable attempt to find a broader audience and move out of the modern dance ghetto – hence presenting the show at the new Troubadour Theatre in Wembley Park rather than Sadler’s Wells. A spot check on the demographic suggests that it succeeded: but will this crowd come back when the programme is more demanding? With a plot line devised by the show’s originator, Steven Knight, and staging by Rambert’s director Benoit Swan Pouffer, the material is basically a fantasia on characters and episodes from the series, efficiently choreographed in a West End idiom and executed with rock-concert panache.

Why the Arts Council should kill off ENO and ENB

Pity Arts Council England, least loved of our NGOs, understaffed and under-resourced, its arm’s-length status gnawed to the shoulder by DCMS ukases, the stinginess of the Treasury and the government’s (in some respects, welcome) indifference to our higher culture.In return for its annual grant-in-aid (currently £336 million), it is obliged to cheer-lead policies of inclusivity and diversity and step gingerly over the eggshells of elitism, racism, gender politics and decolonisation. Its hands are further tied by the requirement to operate as extensions of the social services. The diktats of Levelling Up have to be honoured. The disabled and the disadvantaged, the young and the old are all crying out to be championed.

Exhilarating, frightening and hilarious: Made in Leeds – Three Short Ballets reviewed

Nureyev deserves better: Nureyev – Legend and Legacy, at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, reviewed

I was never Rudolf Nureyev’s greatest fan. I must have seen him dance 30 or 40 times, starting with a Bayadère in the mid-1960s, and while his sheer presence remained so potent that he was always exciting to witness, I became increasingly aware of how fiercely willed his dancing was – a struggle with or against his own body, almost self-punishing (he believed that he performed at his best when he was totally exhausted). His final appearances, when he was showing symptoms of the Aids that killed him in 1993, were truly painful to watch on that score. He really had nothing left to give, but the compulsion remained. Closer to my heart was his near-contemporary Anthony Dowell, with his noble modesty and feline beauty of line; and then came his younger compatriot Mikhail Baryshnikov, whose technique was far superior and whose art was infused with a joyful insouciance more appealing to me than Nureyev’s ferocious Tartar intensity.

The company has a hit on their hands: Scottish Ballet’s Coppélia reviewed

With the major companies largely on their summer breaks, the Edinburgh International Festival struggles to programme a high standard of dance (though, having said that, I have memories of being taken in short trousers to the 1967 festival and seeing New York City Ballet during its glorious prime). The dearth tends to be masked by falling back on what used to be called ‘ethnic’ product and that peculiarly French phenomenon, the multimedia event spanning circus, mime, video and spoken text, usually sewn up with some thread of an over-arching theme thrown in. This year it’s the turn of something called Room, presented by La Compagnie du Hanneton, whose chief cook and bottlewasher is James Thierrée, formerly of the whimsically charming Le Cirque Imaginaire.

I feel sorry for those stupid enough to believe that ballet is racist or transphobic

Sick though one may be of the way that the poison dart of ‘woke’ is lazily flung at what is a real and complex set of problems, I fear that it’s deservedly winging its way towards Leeds’s Northern School of Contemporary Dance. Last month it announced that it would no longer require a competence in ballet for its auditions on the grounds that it is ‘an essentially elitist form’ built around ‘white European ideas and body shapes that are often alienating’. Stifle your groans for a moment, and let me unwrap this and offer some context. First of all, it is not uncommon for schools specialising in contemporary dance to make ballet class optional. There are several other respectable and effective systems of technique – Martha Graham, Laban, jazz and tap, for example – that follow principles eschewing the turned-out feet and concepts of graceful line on which ballet is grounded.

Paris’s glittering new museums

How do you manage a dictatorship? By producing ‘a succession of miracles’, according to Louis-Napoléon, that ‘dazzle and astonish’. In 1852 he inaugurated his Second Empire regime with a strategy of soft power predicated on the assumption that the loyalty of politically volatile Paris was to be won not by violent repression but by visible magnificence and grand designs. This wasn’t an original idea: it followed the policies of le Roi Soleil and Bonaparte, not to mention the Roman emperors. It worked again for Louis-Napoléon because, as well as such jaw-dropping follies as Charles Garnier’s extravagant opera house, it extended to Haussmann’s lavish investment in socially useful boulevards, sewers, housing and parks.

Leave Bizet’s Carmen alone

I’ve always felt uncomfortably ambivalent about the work of Matthew Bourne. Of course, there is no disputing its infectious exuberance or its enormous appeal to a broad public beyond the ballet club. I suppose its eclectic mix of Ashton and MacMillan, camp jokiness, Hollywood movies and Broadway razzmatazz is quirkily unique too – at least sui generis, inasmuch as nobody seems to imitate it with his degree of commercial success. And Bourne’s house designer Lez Brotherston always gets it just right: the shows invariably look great. Yet there’s also a relentless brashness to them, an absence of psychological nuance and aesthetic restraint. I take a deep breath and try to go with its flow; I end up winded and exhausted.

I suspect this was a rush job: Like Water for Chocolate reviewed

How much weight of plot can dance carry? Balanchine famously insisted that there are no mothers-in-law in ballet, and masters such as Fokine, Massine and Ashton largely confined the dimensions of their narratives to the back of a postage stamp. Yet in A Month in the Country Ashton also proved that ballet can communicate delicate nuances of psychology; MacMillan’s Mayerling has a complex historical-political setting that fascinates; and Matthew Bourne has devised a cartoon-ish mode of silent tale-telling that has proved very popular and effective. Although one could multiply these examples, the fact remains that plot-driven ballet is a tricky business: stories develop more naturally through words than images and too often dance doesn’t provide enough compensation for their absence.

Touching, eclectic and exhilarating: Rambert Dance is in great shape

Rambert ages elegantly: it might just rank as the world’s oldest company devoted to modern dance (whatever that term might mean nowadays), but as it approaches its centenary, it’s still in great shape. Lean and hungry, open-minded and light-footed, it’s been lucky over the past 40 years to have enjoyed a stable succession of excellent artistic directors – Richard Alston, Christopher Bruce, Mark Baldwin and now the French-American Benoit Swan Pouffer – as well as policies that have healthily prevented it from becoming fixated on one choreographer or aesthetic. It keeps moving. The current ensemble of 17 dancers makes a crack team, offering a broad range of body types and plenty of strong, fearless personalities.

Impressive interpretations marred by cuts: Scottish Ballet’s The Scandal at Mayerling reviewed

Sneer all you like at its prolixities and vulgarities but Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling remains a ballet that packs an exceptionally powerful emotional punch. Weathering a grapeshot of adverse criticism at its Covent Garden première in 1978, it has comfortably stood the test of time and entered the international pantheon. With a plushly throbbing score culled from Liszt’s oeuvre and an intriguing historical setting (the gratin of Habsbsurg Vienna in the 1880s), it’s a gift to large companies in search of full-length romantic drama beyond the rut of Swan Lake and Giselle. Because a production requires resources beyond the reach of medium-scale troupes, MacMillan’s widow Deborah has now sanctioned Scottish Ballet to prepare a slim-line version.

A fitting swansong from Tamara Rojo: The Forsythe Evening reviewed

One wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of Tamara Rojo. The most fearsome figure on the British dance scene since the authoritarian reign of Ninette ‘Madam’ de Valois, she has capped a brilliant international career as a prima ballerina with a formidable decade as artistic director of English National Ballet (as well as the award of a PhD, the patented invention of an anti-bunion device and the birth of her first child at the age of 46). She is now about to move on with her dancer husband Isaac Hernandez, 16 years her junior, to a similar position in San Francisco. The Bay Area doesn’t know what a tornado is on its way. How does her achievement at ENB stack up? Her managerial style has been, er, forceful, and it has yielded results.

Why is dance so butch these days?

For an art form that once boldly set out to question conventional divisions of gender, ballet now seems to be retreating towards the butch – ironically, just as the rest of the world is moving obsessively to the femme. Scroll back a century or so and Nijinsky cross-dressed at masked balls, danced on pointe and covered himself in petals as le spectre de la rose; in Les Biches, his sister Nijinska shamelessly choreographed all manner of sexual indeterminacy and suggested that girls could also be boys. Then came the Carry On stereotype of limp-wristed ephebes in pink tights with an ominous bulge – every mother’s nightmare in the homophobic post-war era, and perhaps still a source of psychotic contempt among certain sections of society.

Liam Scarlett’s enduring legacy: Royal Ballet’s Swan Lake reviewed

Without fanfare or apology, the Royal Ballet appears to have rehabilitated Liam Scarlett, but what a tragic balls-up it has been. In 2019, having been accused of unspecified sexual misconduct, the choreographer and his work were cancelled both at Covent Garden and abroad. An internal report into his activities has never been published, so rumours and allegations persist, but the official line exonerated him without explanation. Shockingly, Scarlett killed himself last April. Now he has been restored, smilingly pictured without mention of any unpleasantness in the programme book for the Royal Ballet’s current revival of his production of Swan Lake. There’s been a chaotic cover-up, and it’s just not good enough.

The first patrons of Modernism deserve much sympathy and respect

If Modernism is a jungle, how do you navigate a path through its thickets? Some explorers — Peter Gay and Christopher Butler among them — have been fool-hardy enough to attempt an overall map, identifying factors common to a half century of music, art and literature. But the borders remain disputed and light cast on one area only leaves another consigned to the shadows. Philip Hook, however, has been less ambitious, confining himself to one patch of special interest: the painting and sculpture of the decade preceding the first world war. Although this may sound like familiar territory, it’s widely regarded, in Hook’s words, as ‘quite possibly the most important in post-Renaissance art history’, and thus always worth revisiting — particularly when one’s guide is someone as erudite and amusing as this former bigwig at both Sotheby’s and Christie’s, familiar to many from his urbane appearances on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow.

Master of the grand spectacle

Should the man on the Clapham omnibus ever turn his mind to ballet, he is bound to envisage the work of Marius Petipa. The ballerina holding an arabesque on pointe shoes was his creation, as were The Sleeping Beauty, La Bayadère, Don Quixote, most of Swan Lake, the concept of The Nutcracker and aspects of La Sylphide, Giselle and Coppélia — this being merely the cream of a vast oeuvre dreamed up over the half century he spent based in St Petersburg. When he died in 1910, one obituary claimed (in reference to Louis XIV’s view of l’état) that ‘with just reason, he could have said —“Russian ballet is me”’. If this wasn’t precisely true — he had several estimable predecessors — it is indisputable that this fractious and pompous Frenchman left a legacy that has continued to form the bedrock of the classical repertory worldwide.

Deluded divas

When the Fat Lady Sings, everyone is primed to chortle, even if she is Montserrat Caballé and doing it wonderfully well. Hergé’s cartoon creation of Bianca Castafiore embodies the type: with her flaxen plaits and heaving embonpoint, she is a ridiculously bad fit for the simpering virginal heroine of Gounod’s Faust, particularly when carolling her Jewel Song at such a pitch that an agonised Tintin and Captain Haddock are forced to cover their ears. But at least Madame Castafiore has a brilliant international career: what about the Fat Lady who Can’t Sing — the diva deluded into thinking she is a nightingale when in fact she is nothing but a crow? Two recent films explore this tragicomic syndrome. Both are based on the case of Florence Foster Jenkins, an American soprano of the interwar years whose dreadful recordings of classic songs and arias have been cult bestsellers for 70 years.

Memoirs of a Leavisite, by David Elllis - review

As the author of this wise, patient and delightful book wryly reminds us, Stephen Fry — who, of course, knows everything — has recently written F.R. Leavis off as a ‘sanctimonious prick’. The phrase is probably typical of the way that today’s literary intelligentsia caricatures this tragically lonely, embattled and complex figure. ‘Hairshirt paranoiac’ I’ve also encountered somewhere: it does the trick equally well. Does any academic under the age of 50 now treat Leavis’s map of English literature, let alone his values and judgments, as pedagogically viable forces? Most probably not: his enterprise as critic, teacher and editor of Scrutiny is now strictly a matter for the historians (Christopher Hilliard’s authoritative English as a Vocation being a recent and distinguished study), leaving ideas such as the organic community, the Great Tradition and technologico-Benthamitism, once considered dangerously radical, mere shibboleths obscurely niched in the pantheon of academic delusions.

Bookends: Byronic intensity

A year before he died from emphysema in 1990, the composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein agreed to be interviewed by the music journalist Jonathan Cott for Rolling Stone. Dinner with Lenny (OUP, £16.99) is the transcription of their 12-hour conversation, in which Bernstein’s frenetic energy — ‘Byronic intensity’ is how Cott puts it — is as vividly evident as his relentless egocentricity and unctuous if irresistible charm. Topics range from Beethoven’s Seventh to West Side Story via Mahler and Glenn Gould, but although Cott poses deft and intelligent questions, little emerges in the way of sustained musical analysis or original insight, and Bernstein proves much more engaging and illuminating when he is talking generally about his ‘quasi-rabbinical instinct’ for teaching and communicating his enthusiasms to the young and uninitiated.

The music man

When Humphrey Carpenter published the first major biography of Benjamin Britten in 1992, many of the composer’s associates were still alive and breathing down his neck. Carpenter’s knowledge of the music wasn’t intimate, nor did he have available to him the primary source of the superb edition of Britten’s correspondence, now completed with a sixth 800-page volume covering the decade before his death in 1976: deadly dull though these letters intrinsically are, the magnificent accompanying annotation and detailed apparatus make them richly revealing. Thus hobbled, Carpenter’s effort amounts to a broad-brush portrait and a gripping narrative, but also something of a rushed and unpolished job — unbalanced and half-digested, peppered with small errors and marred by a rather crude psychological portrait of a man obsessed with his mother and bewitched by pubescent boys.

Hall of mirrors

After the Nazi occupation of Paris was over, Sartre famously said — somewhat hypocritically, given his own slippery behaviour — that the only possibilities had been collaboration or resistance.After the Nazi occupation of Paris was over, Sartre famously said — somewhat hypocritically, given his own slippery behaviour — that the only possibilities had been collaboration or resistance. Alan Riding’s new study of the episode forcefully reminds one that it was never that simple: objectively researched and soberly balanced though the book is, navigating its moral maze leaves one queasy with mixed feelings. Where should the line be drawn, what constitutes collaboration or resistance, were the Pétainistes craven defeatists or merely right-wing nationalists — and would our own intellectuals and artists have done any better? There are no clear answers, as the tragic farce of the post-war épuration and its attempt to apply some judicial measure to the chaos of unverifiable accusation and counter-accusation miserably proves.

The wow factor

‘Nothing succeeds like excess,’ quipped Oscar Wilde, and Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Aida at La Scala, Milan in 2006 bears him out: for sheer jaw-dropping, applause- garnering theatrical bling, I have never seen anything like it and I doubt I ever will.‘Nothing succeeds like excess,’ quipped Oscar Wilde, and Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Aida at La Scala, Milan in 2006 bears him out: for sheer jaw-dropping, applause- garnering theatrical bling, I have never seen anything like it and I doubt I ever will. People talk of empty spectacle, but this was full, full to the brim, exploding with colour, glittering with gilt, and jam-packed with near-naked extras. Astonishingly, it didn’t collapse into a ghastly mess: each tableau was organised and marshalled with military precision, and the stage was left clear for the principals when the story needed to proceed.

Dancing in the dark

Kenneth MacMillan was once described as ‘the Francis Bacon of ballet’ — not an analogy that gets one very far, but there’s something in it.Kenneth MacMillan was once described as ‘the Francis Bacon of ballet’ — not an analogy that gets one very far, but there’s something in it. His obsession with victims, outsiders and extreme psychological states reflects the panic in his own tortured and alienated psyche. His choreography contains a lot of silent screaming: it brutalises the human body as much as it beautifies it. Sex in his work is presented as a violent compulsion — often a rape — rather than an ecstatic release or an expression of love. Dark and destructive human impulses have more reality to him than hopeful or humane ones.

A monumental achievement

Like virtually everyone middle-aged and middle-class in this country, I am a beneficiary of the cult of Civilisation — Kenneth Clark’s ‘personal view’, stretching in 13 episodes from the Vikings to Van Gogh, which was broadcast on BBC2 in 1969 and on BBC1 two years later, as well as appearing as a sumptuously illustrated, best-selling book.Like virtually everyone middle-aged and middle-class in this country, I am a beneficiary of the cult of Civilisation — Kenneth Clark’s ‘personal view’, stretching in 13 episodes from the Vikings to Van Gogh, which was broadcast on BBC2 in 1969 and on BBC1 two years later, as well as appearing as a sumptuously illustrated, best-selling book.What was the source of the programme’s magic? Clark’s cool but kindly, faintly weary tone of patrician sweet reasonableness, his lightly worn but deeply experienced fund of knowledge, his ability to compare and contrast across a wide spectrum.

But where is Colonel Blimp?

The Triumph of Music, by Tim Blanning This is an often entertaining, occasionally illuminating, but cur- iously unsatisfying book, written by a distinguished historian of early modern Europe. Subtitled ‘Composers, Musicians and their Audiences, 1700 to the Present’, it purports to be a study of the ways that the art of music has increasingly come to dominate western culture. ‘Triumph’ is not, I think, the mot juste here; something more like ‘increasing ubiquity’ would be more apt.Professor Blanning is never dull or dryasdust: he writes with lucidity, grace and wry wit, and he clearly has a passionate enthusiasm for music. But given the vast scope of his subject, it is inevitable that much of the material amounts to little more than a breezy skimming of the surface, in which major figures and issues are sketched in a summary or introductory fashion.

Highs and lows of a musical career

Handel: The Man and His Music by Jonathan Keates Since 1985, when Jonathan Keates first published this exhilarating critical biography of Handel, there have been enormous advances in the study of the composer and his oeuvre — not least the publication of two major volumes by the doyen of Handel scholars Winton Dean — and the establishment of the Handel Institute. Such developments, along with a continuing increase in the public’s appetite for his music and the 250th anniversary of his death next year, more than justify this substantially revised edition of Keates’ book. For the paid-up Handel fan — and those like me who sometimes still need persuading — the result is an 18th-century mix of pleasure and instruction.

A gift for friendship

This magnificent edition of Benjamin Britten’s letters reaches its fourth volume under the auspices of a new publisher, the Boydell Press (despite subsidy, Faber simply couldn’t make it pay), and the first thing to say is that the standards of production, design and copy-editing have not suffered (misspellings of names such as John Lanigan, Roderic Dunnett and Geoffrey Willans were the only errors that I picked up), while the scholarly quality of the annotation continues to be quite superb — meticulous, imaginative, and illuminating. Here we are taken through five important years, marked by the birth of the masterpieces Gloriana, Winter Words, The Turn of the Screw and Noye’s Fludde as well as the most significant flop of Britten’s maturity, the ballet The Prince of the Pagodas — a score over-weighted by the influence of the Balinese gamelan, which he had encountered on a long holiday in Asia in 1956.

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