A family affair: Rufus Wainwright will play the Royal Opera House over five nights, including shows featuring his father and sister
CLASSICAL MUSIC
BBC Proms15th July-10th September, Tel: 0845 401 5040
We know how the Proms will end. But where to start? Roger Wright’s brilliantly diverse Proms season is rich with opportunities. First off is a concert version of Rossini’s William Tell on 16th July, his final opera, sung in French. Everyone knows the overture. But what about the other three hours? Covent Garden’s Antonio Pappano conducts his “other orchestra,” the Santa Cecilia from Rome, with a strong cast.
The following night brings the obscurity of all obscurities. Havergal Brian’s “Gothic” symphony lasts nearly two hours and has only been fully performed five times in the 84 years since it was written. Possibly, one suspects, for reasons beyond the difficulty of assembling the gargantuan orchestral and choral forces it requires. But the BBC has intermittently tried to do right by Brian and this performance under Martin Brabbins is its largest act of faith yet. Without doubt an “I was there” moment.
Nights like these embody one of the unique virtues of the Proms—one-off performances of works that would not be commercially sustainable otherwise. But the opening fortnight is rich in the familiar too, with chamber music at the Cadogan Hall as well as the orchestral repertoire at the Albert Hall. Beethoven’s triple concerto played by Martha Argerich and the Capuçon brothers stands out in week one; Elliott Carter’s flute concerto, written when he was 99, in week two. All on the radio too, and 1,400 tickets available on the night.
Martin Kettle
THEATRE
Mongrel IslandDir Steve Marmion, Soho Theatre, 14th July-6th August, Tel: 020 7478 0100
This summer may be make or break for the lively Soho Theatre in Dean Street, where talented new artistic director Steve Marmion has launched an ambitious programme fusing new writing, comedy and cabaret in three venues under one roof.
Mongrel Island is by up-and-coming writer Ed Harris, whose last play received praise from critics as well as the actress Kathy Burke, who said, “It’s like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil meets The IT Crowd.” The new play stars another rising star, Robyn Addison, last in Sheridan’s The Rivals in the west end, and on television in the BBC’s Survivors. She plays Marie, an office worker trying to cope with an endless pile of files and the same people saying the same things every day. She discovers a twilight world, and a chance of saving her sanity, in the fluorescent lights of the office after dark.
The play is sandwiched between an upstairs programme of readings and, downstairs, the improvisation group, The School of Night (20th-23rd July). The new basement venue, which replaces a former Indian restaurant, has a small hours drinks license and waiter service, and comedy and cabaret galore. Post-punk pioneers The Tiger Lilies (from 18th July) will be offering some specially commissioned low-life lullabies for Soho.
Michael Coveney
FESTIVAL
LatitudeHenham Park, Suffolk, 14th-17th July, Tel: 020 7009 3001
With its multicoloured sheep, amphibious catwalks and floating stages, Latitude is the quirky outcast of the mainstream music festival circuit. While such cultured eccentricities, coupled with the bourgeois family audience they attract, have invited the mocking moniker “Lattétude,” the bucolic Henham Park setting is a welcome break from the familiar festival vista of fetid Portaloos and fast food outlets.
Latitude is, after all, “more than a music festival,” and its claims to a distinctive, eclectic identity go beyond the superficial. This year’s programme promises readings from poets Simon Armitage and Luke Wright, performances by English National Ballet and the Bush Theatre, and laughs with comedians Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan. The crowd-pulling music line-up, including Iron & Wine, Deerhunter and Gold Panda, manages once more to indulge popularity and reward innovation. Even MPs get a look in, with David Davis, Jon Cruddas and Don Foster fighting it out over “cuts, wars and weddings” in this year’s Instigate Debate: “a rock ‘n’ roll version of Question Time.”
Ollie Cussen
ART
Structure & MaterialSpike Island, 9th July-4th September
Spike Island is the contemporary art power house on the Bristol docks. Once a Brooke Bond factory, the building was recently redesigned by architects Caruso St John to incorporate the largest exhibition spaces in the southwest and over 70 artists’ studios.
This summer it hosts the great contemporary sculpture show, “Structure & Material,” which opened at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in March. Drawn from the Arts Council’s threatened collection, it puts three of Britain’s most interesting sculptors together. Karla Black, Turner prize nominee and Scotland’s representative at the Venice Biennale, produces work of diaphanous beauty out of sheets of cellophane, tissue paper, ribbon, soap, toothpaste and powdered plaster. Claire Barclay juxtaposes quasi-industrial structures—doorways, shelving, window frames—with soft textiles. Becky Beasley combines photography and carpentry, making furniture to the measurements of her parents’ bodies that is indefinably unsettling.
Two other shows run simultaneously. Richard T Walker, born in England and living in San Francisco, makes disarmingly romantic video installations in which he stands in front of vast American landscapes, back to the viewer, bemoaning the inadequacies of language to reach this beauty. Alongside, Sara Mackillop’s salvaged paper will gently fade—about as simple a material exposition as you can find.
Emma Crichton-Miller
CONCERT
House of RufusRoyal Opera House, 18th-23rd July, Tel: 020 7304 4000
With typical audacity, Rufus Wainwright is taking up residence at the Royal Opera House for five nights. The first evening and the fourth will see the Canadian-American re-enact Judy Garland’s 1961 Carnegie Hall concert. American audiences salivated over Rufus’s “Over the Rainbow” in his “Rufus Does Judy” show in New York in 2006.
The second night should be just as theatrical, and more personal. Wainwright will be joined by his sister Martha, who in her solo concerts has shown an astounding ability to switch from deep, lush vocals to fierce yelps. The siblings are both Edith Piaf devotees, so a Piaf duet or two may be on the bill. Loudon Wainwright III, their father, is Rufus’s guest on night three. Rufus has written songs about how he felt abandoned when veteran blues and folk singer Loudon divorced his mother, the late Kate McGarrigle, and left the family home when Rufus was three. Rufus has been known to cry when he plays these songs; expect some tender moments.
Upping the pace, the final night will be a concert version of Prima Donna, Rufus’s first opera, about a singer trying to make a comeback in 1970s Paris. Purists who saw the production at the Manchester International Festival in 2009 were not keen, but his effort won him popular acclaim. Rufus will close the night with some of his baroque pop. He says his new material is “danceable.” Dancing at the Opera House—now that would be worth seeing.
Laura Silverman
TELEVISION
The BorgiasSky Atlantic, July
BSkyB’s import channel, Sky Atlantic, will soon commission content with the aim of rivalling BBC2. In the meantime it continues with US cable shows. Starting in July is The Borgias, from Showtime, which it calls “lavish, sexy, scandalous.” That would be a mild way of describing the corrupt and violent reign of Rodrigo Borgia as Pope.
There have been a few attempts to film the Borgia saga, from the disastrous and unintelligible 1980s BBC series to Mike Figgis’s high-nipple-count videos for ENO’s Lucrezia Borgia earlier this year. Here Jeremy Irons plays the Pope. Casting a thin-faced Brit as the villain is obligatory in the US, even though Rodrigo was bald and fat.
Will they feature the five asses laden with gold he used to bribe the Papal conclave? Or his battle with the Florentine heretic, Savonarola, whom Rodrigo threatened with “a seat prepared in hell”? Watch and see. At least this got broadcast by its commissioning channel, unlike the story of another morally questionable family, the Kennedys, which The History Channel recently declined to schedule (it is now being screened on BBC2).
Peter Bazalgette
