Laura Keeble’s “I’d Like to teach the world to sing!” shortlisted for the John Moores painting prize at the Liverpool Biennial
Art
Starts 15th September
The Liverpool Biennial, founded in 1998, has become the largest contemporary art festival in the country, commissioning new work from artists from all over the world and invading unexpected buildings and public spaces in the city. This year the great American artist Doug Aitken is creating a video installation on Albert Dock, just outside Tate Liverpool, in a temporary structure designed in collaboration with the British architect David Adjaye.
Other highlights include a commission by the Argentine artist Jorge Macchi, and the premier, in Liverpool Cathedral, of a new concerto, A Crimson Grail, by the American composer Rhys Chatham requiring 100 volunteer electric guitarists. The famous Cunard Building will be opened for part of the city-wide group show, The Unexpected Guest, while a former Royal Mail sorting office hosts two shows—City States and Bloomberg New Contemporaries. Not every work in every exhibition will blow your mind—but the energy of the whole is impressive.
Emma Crichton-Miller
Ballet
Sadler’s Wells, 14th to 23rd September
San Francisco Ballet, the oldest professional ballet company in America, makes a rare journey to the UK. A pair of triple bills and a quadruple bill include work by George Balanchine (Divertimento No 15), Christopher Wheeldon (Ghosts, Number Nine), Edwaard Liang (Symphonic Dances) and the company’s resident choreographer Yuri Possokhov (Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony and the multi-media dance work RakU).
Founded in 1933 as The San Francisco Opera Ballet, the company is one of America’s “Big Three” ballet companies, easily holding its own against New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre. Renowned for its passion and commitment, the company also has a reputation as “The Starship Enterprise” of dance, boldly going where none have been before. They were the first company to deliver an American production of Swan Lake as well as extending their repertoire into the outer limits of contemporary ballet. Under the regime of longstanding artistic director/choreographer Helgi Tomasson, the company has become a powerhouse of creativity and their arrival in the UK is hotly anticipated.
Neil Norman
Exhibition
The Ashmolean, Oxford, from 20th September
Literary conspiracy theorists set a lot of store by pedigree. Last year, the film Anonymous dusted off the claim that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Queen Victoria trumps Tennyson (a mere Lord) as the author of In Memoriam. Edward Lear tried to quash rumours that it was really his patron the Earl of Derby who wrote his nonsense verse.
It must have been a tempting theory: Lear was known for most of his life as a serious landscape painter, who travelled through the Mediterranean, Egypt and India making sketches. The Ashmolean’s collection includes his oils of the plains of Lombardy, and a sweeping view of the pass of Thermopylae. As a young man, he published a book of watercolours of parrots, which had the distinction of being the first collection drawn entirely from nature rather than stuffed birds. Yet seen alongside his illustrated poems, the idea that they aren’t by the same person seems nonsensical. Even if his “Old Man of Thermopylae / Who never did anything properly” has outlived the majestic scenes he painted.
Laura Marsh
Theatre
Donmar Warehouse, 27th September to 24th October
Rigorous and radical, Racine’s tragedies pose a challenge to audiences and translators alike: how to negotiate both the passions of such distant, regal characters, and the sedate eloquence of their verse, delivered in the heavy rhyming tread of the twelve-syllable metre? In this new version, Alan Hollinghurst—no stranger to the exquisite agonies of sexual obsession in his novels—is opting for the usual English compromise of the ten-syllable metre.
Bérénice is more difficult even than Phèdre, but Anne-Marie Duff is probably the right actress to have a go. She’s a wonderfully expressive Irish firebrand who sounded the depths as Shaw’s Saint Joan at the National and Rattigan’s Alma Rattenbury at the Old Vic. She follows two other formidable blondes, Sheila Gish (1982) and Lindsay Duncan (1990), in the role of the Queen of Palestine, who’s seething with desire for Titus. Titus groans, suddenly too busy to notice: he’s just starting a new job as Roman emperor. So he sends along his best friend, Antiochus, to comfort her. Not a good idea.
Michael Coveney
Concert
Royal Albert Hall, 6th September
Customised tricycles and an electric lute fashioned from a tin can: it’s not standard tour equipment but it’s served Staff Benda Bilili perfectly well in their strange journey from Kinshasa street band to international music phenomenon. Returning to London this month are the four singer/guitarists (all disabled by polio in their youth) and their rhythm section—a group of street kids they met in the grounds of Kinshasa Zoo.
The Democratic Republic of Congo puts out some of the most diverse music in all Africa: you’ll hear rhythm and blues in the squealing solos of their 21-year-old frontman, while the main ingredient here is rumba—white hot, Cuban-tinged harmonies and syncopation. They do very well for themselves now—they were the subject of an award-winning film in 2010—but it was a long road to recognition. Their song “Let’s Go And Vote,” produced by a UN mission, was played incessantly on radio and TV in the lead up to 2006’s historic elections, and was credited for the country’s 70 per cent turnout.
Kate Mossman
