Film
This Sporting Life
Directed by Lindsay Anderson, on general release from 5th June
Q&A with screenwriter David Storey at London's ICA, 3rd June
A bookmaker would give long odds against This Sporting Life looking good now. Northern realist movies—a genre for which Lindsay Anderson's 1963 version of David Storey's novel was a cheerleader—risk seeming dated because they came from a precise moment of change in society and culture, and clichéd because they spawned so many imitations. In this case, there's also the hurdle that sporting action is difficult to simulate dramatically.
It may be easier for actors to portray rugby league players than Association footballers—because speed and sleek physiques are less important in the pointy-balled code—but, even so, the match sequences are viscerally credible and impressive, while Anderson's switches between sporting and romantic grappling are slickly handled: held together by the recurrent motif of a head falling back onto a pillow through injury, ecstasy or illness.
The parodies of flat-cap working-class drama should not distract from the fact that This Sporting Life is as great a film about sport and life as Raging Bull.
Mark Lawson presents Radio 4's Front Row
Exhibition
Richard Long: Heaven and Earth
Tate Britain, 3rd June-6th September
Back in the 1980s, Richard Long (born 1945) was one of Britain's best known artists. He and fellow British outdoor-ist Ian Hamilton Finlay pioneered the idea of the walk-as-work-of-art. They were backed up by a theory of "strollology" elaborated in books and classes (sadly no longer taught) by the University of Kassel philosophy professor Lucius Burckhardt. Long walked all over the world, making work by upending nice stones, flattening grass in straight lines, and just walking. In those days no British contemporary art show was complete without one of his walk texts listing where he'd gone or what he'd come across. In other less strenuous pieces, Long splashed mud on gallery walls and arranged gorgeous bits of flint or pebbles in circles and lines, borrowing the simple geometry of American minimalism and applying it to nature.
Since the end of the 1980s, Long has somewhat faded from view. Even if his work has remained popular in corporate lobbies and German Kunsthalles, it lost its bite, looking a bit twee compared to both the enormous land-art of Americans like Robert Smithson and the pop bravado of the yBas. He seemed to commit the crime of so many big British 20th-century artists—including Henry Moore and Damien Hirst—of sentimentalising European and American contemporary styles. Yet now, one senses, the timing may be right to revise up the verdict. Long's work is lyrical, modest and precise, particularly with its understanding of local British geographies. Following his 2007 retrospective in Edinburgh—Long's first survey in Britain since 1991—he is getting the veteran's treatment at Tate Britain, featuring over 80 works from the 1970s onwards. In the age of the hybrid car, 5p plastic bags and the BBC series Coast, he may well be seen as one of the important, pioneering ecological artists of the late 20th century.
Ben Lewis is an art critic
Concert
Harrison Birtwistle at 75
Aldeburgh Festival, 12th–28th June, 01728 687110, www.aldeburgh.co.uk
Bath Festival, 22nd May-6th June, 01225 463362, www.bathmusicfest.org.uk
Harrison Birtwistle—"Harri" to his friends —is 75 this year. He's Britain's reigning modernist, the only one of our senior composers who's welcomed in the citadels of the European avant-garde. And yet he doesn't sit comfortably alongside equally intransigent peers such as the German Helmut Lachenmann. His lifelong quest to reinvent the primordial stuff of music—pulse, drone, counterpoint—seems echt modernist. But his method is empirical and instinctive, and entirely unsystematic. Birtwistle is a man who feels his way towards radical ideas with slow deliberateness rather than ostentatious brilliance. It's one of the things that makes him a very English figure, along with his fondness for archetypal symbols of Englishness like the Green Man and Sir Gawain.
To mark his birthday, two summer festivals are making a feature of his music. Aldeburgh's celebration is the most eye-catching of them, with its double-bill of brand new works. One of them is an arrangement of songs and pavanes by John Dowland, whose introverted melancholy has always had a special resonance for Birtwistle. The other, a music-theatre work entitled The Corridor, re-examines the Orpheus legend which has haunted Birtwistle's imagination for nearly 40 years. There's plenty more of his music dotted throughout the festival, including the astonishing Chronometer, an exuberant assemblage of recorded clock sounds.
It's impressive, but the Bath Festival's Birtwistle celebration is more approachable for the novice, as the music is grouped under perennial Birtwistle themes such as "Ritual and Theatre" and "Pianos, Clocks and Elegies." It's curated by the maverick pianist Joanna MacGregor, who also plays the marvellous set of piano pieces Birtwistle composed for her entitled Harrison's Clocks. Alongside them are Birtwistle's rarely heard re-compositions of medieval music, and the immense percussion piece from the 1960s mysteriously entitled For O, for O, the Hobby-Horse is Forgot.
Ivan Hewett is the Telegraph's music critic
Play
Phèdre
By Jean Racine, trans Ted Hughes,
dir Nicholas Hytner. National Theatre from 4th June, 020 7452 3000
Since she last appeared nearly six years ago at the National Theatre in Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, Helen Mirren has accepted a damehood and played the Queen on screen, so she needs no prompting in the regal department as she takes on Racine's doomed monarch, frying to death in the heat of an incestuous passion.
Mirren's Cleopatra (her third) at the National was not a success, but the O'Neill performance was a triumph of lugubrious sensuality, and she should rise to the challenge of Ted Hughes's version, made for Diana Rigg at the Almeida ten years ago, which adopts the usual English iambic pentameter—though they are no real substitute for Racine's rolling alexandrines.
History will be made on 25th June when the production—which also stars Margaret Tyzack as the old nurse Oenone and Dominic Cooper (of The History Boys and Mamma Mia!) as Hippolytus, the object of Mirren's tragic desire—goes out live on cinema screens nationwide.
Live performances have already been transmitted by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and our own Royal Opera House, but this is a theatre first, with six high definition cameras roaming the NT's Lyttelton auditorium and director Hytner sitting in the OB van calling the shots.
All cinema tickets are priced at £10 in arts centres and independent picture houses from Bath to Bradford, Guildford to Galashiels, and the idea is not to "film" a production, but to broadcast a live event, the first of four such occasions in a pilot season sponsored by Coutts.
Michael Coveney is a theatre critic for whatsonstage.com
CD
Neil Young: Archives, Vol. 1: 1963-1972
Reprise Records, 2nd June
Musical boxed sets are something of a curiosity in this age of file sharing. Neil Young's audio-biography, however, has redefined the format, claiming to be "the most innovative compilation ever assembled." The ten-disc, Blu-ray edition, priced at £230 (cheaper versions are available), contains material from Young's first and probably most enduring decade as a songwriter, including previously unreleased songs from his Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and Crazy Horse days. It also boasts interactive features such as a click-on timeline replete with lyrical jottings, photos and other memorabilia. The music, meanwhile, is mastered in a heavyweight 24-bit/192 kHz stereo, leaving MP3 files sounding like mere gramophone records.
Gimmicks aside, releasing the Archives is a milestone for Young, having spent the last 20 years assembling the material himself. As one of rock's most energetic and uncompromising figures it is reassuring that, at last, we too can look back over the near half-century of his career. With a new album, Fork in the Road, released in March, and headline slots at Glastonbury and Isle of Wight festivals in the summer, this is surely Neil Young's year.
Nick Crowe was the drummer for Gay Dad
Also recommended
The Solitude of Prime Numbers
By Paolo Giordano (Doubleday, 4th June, £12.99)
Since publication in Italy this book has sold over 1m copies in 34 countries and won five awards, including the Premio Strega (Italy's equivalent of the Booker). At 26, Giordano is the youngest author to have received this prize, placing him alongside previous winners Primo Levi and Umberto Eco. An elegant fable about a retired maths professor for whom numbers are as mysterious as relationships, its recurring themes of loneliness and longing shimmer through trim and supple prose.
This Sporting Life
Directed by Lindsay Anderson, on general release from 5th June
Q&A with screenwriter David Storey at London's ICA, 3rd June
A bookmaker would give long odds against This Sporting Life looking good now. Northern realist movies—a genre for which Lindsay Anderson's 1963 version of David Storey's novel was a cheerleader—risk seeming dated because they came from a precise moment of change in society and culture, and clichéd because they spawned so many imitations. In this case, there's also the hurdle that sporting action is difficult to simulate dramatically.
It may be easier for actors to portray rugby league players than Association footballers—because speed and sleek physiques are less important in the pointy-balled code—but, even so, the match sequences are viscerally credible and impressive, while Anderson's switches between sporting and romantic grappling are slickly handled: held together by the recurrent motif of a head falling back onto a pillow through injury, ecstasy or illness.
The parodies of flat-cap working-class drama should not distract from the fact that This Sporting Life is as great a film about sport and life as Raging Bull.
Mark Lawson presents Radio 4's Front Row
Exhibition
Richard Long: Heaven and Earth
Tate Britain, 3rd June-6th September
Back in the 1980s, Richard Long (born 1945) was one of Britain's best known artists. He and fellow British outdoor-ist Ian Hamilton Finlay pioneered the idea of the walk-as-work-of-art. They were backed up by a theory of "strollology" elaborated in books and classes (sadly no longer taught) by the University of Kassel philosophy professor Lucius Burckhardt. Long walked all over the world, making work by upending nice stones, flattening grass in straight lines, and just walking. In those days no British contemporary art show was complete without one of his walk texts listing where he'd gone or what he'd come across. In other less strenuous pieces, Long splashed mud on gallery walls and arranged gorgeous bits of flint or pebbles in circles and lines, borrowing the simple geometry of American minimalism and applying it to nature.
Since the end of the 1980s, Long has somewhat faded from view. Even if his work has remained popular in corporate lobbies and German Kunsthalles, it lost its bite, looking a bit twee compared to both the enormous land-art of Americans like Robert Smithson and the pop bravado of the yBas. He seemed to commit the crime of so many big British 20th-century artists—including Henry Moore and Damien Hirst—of sentimentalising European and American contemporary styles. Yet now, one senses, the timing may be right to revise up the verdict. Long's work is lyrical, modest and precise, particularly with its understanding of local British geographies. Following his 2007 retrospective in Edinburgh—Long's first survey in Britain since 1991—he is getting the veteran's treatment at Tate Britain, featuring over 80 works from the 1970s onwards. In the age of the hybrid car, 5p plastic bags and the BBC series Coast, he may well be seen as one of the important, pioneering ecological artists of the late 20th century.
Ben Lewis is an art critic
Concert
Harrison Birtwistle at 75
Aldeburgh Festival, 12th–28th June, 01728 687110, www.aldeburgh.co.uk
Bath Festival, 22nd May-6th June, 01225 463362, www.bathmusicfest.org.uk
Harrison Birtwistle—"Harri" to his friends —is 75 this year. He's Britain's reigning modernist, the only one of our senior composers who's welcomed in the citadels of the European avant-garde. And yet he doesn't sit comfortably alongside equally intransigent peers such as the German Helmut Lachenmann. His lifelong quest to reinvent the primordial stuff of music—pulse, drone, counterpoint—seems echt modernist. But his method is empirical and instinctive, and entirely unsystematic. Birtwistle is a man who feels his way towards radical ideas with slow deliberateness rather than ostentatious brilliance. It's one of the things that makes him a very English figure, along with his fondness for archetypal symbols of Englishness like the Green Man and Sir Gawain.
To mark his birthday, two summer festivals are making a feature of his music. Aldeburgh's celebration is the most eye-catching of them, with its double-bill of brand new works. One of them is an arrangement of songs and pavanes by John Dowland, whose introverted melancholy has always had a special resonance for Birtwistle. The other, a music-theatre work entitled The Corridor, re-examines the Orpheus legend which has haunted Birtwistle's imagination for nearly 40 years. There's plenty more of his music dotted throughout the festival, including the astonishing Chronometer, an exuberant assemblage of recorded clock sounds.
It's impressive, but the Bath Festival's Birtwistle celebration is more approachable for the novice, as the music is grouped under perennial Birtwistle themes such as "Ritual and Theatre" and "Pianos, Clocks and Elegies." It's curated by the maverick pianist Joanna MacGregor, who also plays the marvellous set of piano pieces Birtwistle composed for her entitled Harrison's Clocks. Alongside them are Birtwistle's rarely heard re-compositions of medieval music, and the immense percussion piece from the 1960s mysteriously entitled For O, for O, the Hobby-Horse is Forgot.
Ivan Hewett is the Telegraph's music critic
Play
Phèdre
By Jean Racine, trans Ted Hughes,
dir Nicholas Hytner. National Theatre from 4th June, 020 7452 3000
Since she last appeared nearly six years ago at the National Theatre in Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, Helen Mirren has accepted a damehood and played the Queen on screen, so she needs no prompting in the regal department as she takes on Racine's doomed monarch, frying to death in the heat of an incestuous passion.
Mirren's Cleopatra (her third) at the National was not a success, but the O'Neill performance was a triumph of lugubrious sensuality, and she should rise to the challenge of Ted Hughes's version, made for Diana Rigg at the Almeida ten years ago, which adopts the usual English iambic pentameter—though they are no real substitute for Racine's rolling alexandrines.
History will be made on 25th June when the production—which also stars Margaret Tyzack as the old nurse Oenone and Dominic Cooper (of The History Boys and Mamma Mia!) as Hippolytus, the object of Mirren's tragic desire—goes out live on cinema screens nationwide.
Live performances have already been transmitted by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and our own Royal Opera House, but this is a theatre first, with six high definition cameras roaming the NT's Lyttelton auditorium and director Hytner sitting in the OB van calling the shots.
All cinema tickets are priced at £10 in arts centres and independent picture houses from Bath to Bradford, Guildford to Galashiels, and the idea is not to "film" a production, but to broadcast a live event, the first of four such occasions in a pilot season sponsored by Coutts.
Michael Coveney is a theatre critic for whatsonstage.com
CD
Neil Young: Archives, Vol. 1: 1963-1972
Reprise Records, 2nd June
Musical boxed sets are something of a curiosity in this age of file sharing. Neil Young's audio-biography, however, has redefined the format, claiming to be "the most innovative compilation ever assembled." The ten-disc, Blu-ray edition, priced at £230 (cheaper versions are available), contains material from Young's first and probably most enduring decade as a songwriter, including previously unreleased songs from his Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and Crazy Horse days. It also boasts interactive features such as a click-on timeline replete with lyrical jottings, photos and other memorabilia. The music, meanwhile, is mastered in a heavyweight 24-bit/192 kHz stereo, leaving MP3 files sounding like mere gramophone records.
Gimmicks aside, releasing the Archives is a milestone for Young, having spent the last 20 years assembling the material himself. As one of rock's most energetic and uncompromising figures it is reassuring that, at last, we too can look back over the near half-century of his career. With a new album, Fork in the Road, released in March, and headline slots at Glastonbury and Isle of Wight festivals in the summer, this is surely Neil Young's year.
Nick Crowe was the drummer for Gay Dad
Also recommended
The Solitude of Prime Numbers
By Paolo Giordano (Doubleday, 4th June, £12.99)
Since publication in Italy this book has sold over 1m copies in 34 countries and won five awards, including the Premio Strega (Italy's equivalent of the Booker). At 26, Giordano is the youngest author to have received this prize, placing him alongside previous winners Primo Levi and Umberto Eco. An elegant fable about a retired maths professor for whom numbers are as mysterious as relationships, its recurring themes of loneliness and longing shimmer through trim and supple prose.
