Wot, no prize? Nottingham Contemporary art gallery is this year's standout building
MUSIC
The Bootleg Series Volume 9: The Witmark Demos 1962-1964by Bob Dylan (Columbia)
Like sketches, jottings and discarded Polaroids, demo recordings can reveal much about an artist’s intentions. In rare cases they can equal or better the finished work. Since 1991, Columbia Records has released eight volumes of Bob Dylan rarities, including out-takes, live recordings and demos, many of which have arguably outshone “definitive” versions. This latest volume in the Bootleg Series collects the first demos Dylan made as an original songwriter, recorded for his publishers Leeds Music and M Witmark & Sons in New York City. Many of the songs, like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Boots of Spanish Leather,” were destined for the LPs The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and The Times They Are A-Changin’ which shot the young troubadour to fame. But others, such as “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” a satire on the commie-hating, hard-right establishment of America in 1963, failed to make the cut and were judiciously shelved.
Fifteen previously unreleased songs appear on The Witmark Demos, further illuminating the flight Dylan made from the reluctant folk hero to the herald of the psychedelic era, in which the more abstract and benign imagery of songs like “Mr Tambourine Man” work their influence. Collectors have illegally circulated the Witmark demos for years, but this official release will at last grant them the recognition they deserve.
Nick Crowe is a music writer
ARCHITECTURE
Nottingham ContemporaryDesigned by architects Caruso St John, Tel: 0115 948 9750
On 2nd October, the Royal Institute of British Architects will award the Stirling prize to what it says is the best building of the year, but often isn’t. This year an outstanding contender, the Nottingham Contemporary art gallery by Caruso St John, didn’t even make the shortlist. So if you want a personal salon des refusés moment, you could do worse than to go there.
Inside, it has the judgement and restraint that are the routine virtues of modern art galleries, but what makes it good are its risky moves, most obviously the choice of green concrete to clad it, lace-patterned in honour of the city’s most famous industry. With a top gold-clad like an old cinema, it flirts with kitsch but is so beautifully and intelligently designed, and also so palpably serious, that it is instead something less easy to pin down. You don’t get it in one go but have to move round it and into it to appreciate the totality of building, city and art.
It also works with a steeply sloping site, connecting the many-levelled interior with streets and public steps on the outside. It restores a little faith in that much-embattled concept, the civic.
Rowan Moore is architecture critic of the Observer THEATRE
Tribes by Nina Raine, dir Roger Michell, Royal Court, London 14th October-13th November
With two new plays on the way (the second, Tiger Country, set in a London hospital, is at the Hampstead Theatre in the new year), the moment has come for Nina Raine to fulfil her promise. Her first play, Rabbit, about a 29th birthday party full of bad behaviour and girlie sex talk, won her two “most promising” awards in 2006.
Tribes is a study of an unconventional family, playing by its own rules and with its own private language and jokes, like a modern equivalent of Noël Coward’s self-absorbed Bliss family in Hay Fever. But the stakes are a bit higher, as a struggle of love and possession develops over young Billy, who is deaf. Billy is the one person who really listens, and a chance encounter makes him finally want to be heard.
Raine’s father is the poet Craig: she has inherited a perfect ear for acute observation, nuanced point-scoring and sexual one-upmanship; and she could emerge as the most elegant dramatic wordsmith on this stage since Christopher Hampton. It will be intriguing, too, to see how artistic director Dominic Cooke’s restoration of the middle classes develops. Tribes is directed by Roger Michell, who started out as an assistant to John Osborne and Samuel Beckett at this theatre; and a fine cast includes Kika Markham, Stanley Townsend, Michelle Terry and Harry Treadaway.
Michael Coveney is chief theatre critic of Whatsonstage.com
FILM
Made in Dagenham On release from 1st October
Economic strife has provided a gritty backdrop for notable Britflick hits The Full Monty (redundant steel workers) and Billy Elliot (the miners’ strike). Audiences evidently like their feel-good self-empowerment comedies with a side order of social relevance.
At first sight, Paramount’s Made In Dagenham, from Calendar Girls director Nigel Cole, is another twist on the formula: wife, mother and car-seat upholsterer Rita (Sally Hawkins) achieves personal growth when she enters the fractious realm of late-1960s industrial relations. The surprise is that the workplace dispute is no mere backdrop. The film really is about the strike at the Dagenham Ford car plant in 1968 that sparked the battle for equal pay for women in this country.
For this reason some of the giddier commercial projections may prove over-optimistic (not that we should worry about Paramount’s bottom line). But respect is due to the filmmakers and investors for a history lesson that doesn’t demean its characters or audience. Likeable Hawkins, who in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky rendered endearing one of the most irritating protagonists ever devised for the big screen, hits the ball out of the park with Rita, whose journey takes her from sewing machine to tea with Barbara Castle (Miranda Richardson). No stripping, though—perhaps it’s for the best they ditched the original title, We Want Sex.
Charles Gant is film editor of Heat magazine
OPERA
Radamisto Dir David Alden, ENO, 7th October-4th November
You can spot a David Alden production a mile off: real singing actors giving performances of true emotional intensity on boldly designed stages. Old school “stand and deliver” practice—singers rooted to the spot, devoted solely to flawless vocals, usually to soporific effect—is, mercifully, banished. His transfixing ENO production of Handel’s Ariodante has been revived countless times and he’s returning with a new production of Handel’s Radamisto. Not so much rarely as barely performed, Radamisto, written in 1720, features a typically Handelian cast of intertwined, dynamic characters at war with one another, in this case literally, with the title character saving his lusted-after wife from the tyrant besieging his city. As with his recent electrifying Peter Grimes, Alden’s hallmark is expressionism. Subtext comes to the fore and passions not only seethe but are shown in high contrast in every sense. Not for nothing is he working with leading lighting designer Rick Fisher.
Opera audiences, more populated by arch traditionalists than any other form, haven’t always embraced Alden. His introduction of a chainsaw into Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa made him notorious. But his revelation and dramatic amplification of motive and idea always derive not just from the libretto but also from the score. With Handel specialist Laurence Cummings conducting the latter, the music-drama could not be in better hands.
David Benedict is the chief London critic for Variety ART
Gauguin: Maker of Myth Tate Modern, 30th September-16th January 2011
It was the financial crisis of 1882-83 that propelled Paul Gauguin out of his job as a stockbroker and into full-time pursuit of art. He chased his muse—abandoning his wife and five children—from France to Copenhagen, from Panama to Martinique, and from Brittany to Arles (with his tormented friend, Van Gogh), although it was his Tahitian refuge that we most associate with him: those dark dreaming women, ripe falling fruit and rampant spiritual syncretism. But this, the first major exhibition of Gauguin’s work in London since 1955, will argue that, rather than the south seas liberating a hidden and repressed Gauguin, the seeds of his break with impressionism and bold experiments with colour, plane and subject were there from early on. Gauguin’s plundering of art history and penchant for self-mythologising have made him a complex figure to love or interpret. His restless exploration of sculpture, ceramics, drawing and painting and prolific production of letters, memoirs and journalism, make tracing the courses of his imagination particularly arduous. But this show at Tate Modern (he becomes the earliest artist yet to have been so honoured) aims to establish his radical originality. Expect queues round the block. Emma Crichton-Miller is an arts writer
MUSIC
The Bootleg Series Volume 9: The Witmark Demos 1962-1964by Bob Dylan (Columbia)
Like sketches, jottings and discarded Polaroids, demo recordings can reveal much about an artist’s intentions. In rare cases they can equal or better the finished work. Since 1991, Columbia Records has released eight volumes of Bob Dylan rarities, including out-takes, live recordings and demos, many of which have arguably outshone “definitive” versions. This latest volume in the Bootleg Series collects the first demos Dylan made as an original songwriter, recorded for his publishers Leeds Music and M Witmark & Sons in New York City. Many of the songs, like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Boots of Spanish Leather,” were destined for the LPs The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and The Times They Are A-Changin’ which shot the young troubadour to fame. But others, such as “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” a satire on the commie-hating, hard-right establishment of America in 1963, failed to make the cut and were judiciously shelved.
Fifteen previously unreleased songs appear on The Witmark Demos, further illuminating the flight Dylan made from the reluctant folk hero to the herald of the psychedelic era, in which the more abstract and benign imagery of songs like “Mr Tambourine Man” work their influence. Collectors have illegally circulated the Witmark demos for years, but this official release will at last grant them the recognition they deserve.
Nick Crowe is a music writer
ARCHITECTURE
Nottingham ContemporaryDesigned by architects Caruso St John, Tel: 0115 948 9750
On 2nd October, the Royal Institute of British Architects will award the Stirling prize to what it says is the best building of the year, but often isn’t. This year an outstanding contender, the Nottingham Contemporary art gallery by Caruso St John, didn’t even make the shortlist. So if you want a personal salon des refusés moment, you could do worse than to go there.
Inside, it has the judgement and restraint that are the routine virtues of modern art galleries, but what makes it good are its risky moves, most obviously the choice of green concrete to clad it, lace-patterned in honour of the city’s most famous industry. With a top gold-clad like an old cinema, it flirts with kitsch but is so beautifully and intelligently designed, and also so palpably serious, that it is instead something less easy to pin down. You don’t get it in one go but have to move round it and into it to appreciate the totality of building, city and art.
It also works with a steeply sloping site, connecting the many-levelled interior with streets and public steps on the outside. It restores a little faith in that much-embattled concept, the civic.
Rowan Moore is architecture critic of the Observer THEATRE
Tribes by Nina Raine, dir Roger Michell, Royal Court, London 14th October-13th November
With two new plays on the way (the second, Tiger Country, set in a London hospital, is at the Hampstead Theatre in the new year), the moment has come for Nina Raine to fulfil her promise. Her first play, Rabbit, about a 29th birthday party full of bad behaviour and girlie sex talk, won her two “most promising” awards in 2006.
Tribes is a study of an unconventional family, playing by its own rules and with its own private language and jokes, like a modern equivalent of Noël Coward’s self-absorbed Bliss family in Hay Fever. But the stakes are a bit higher, as a struggle of love and possession develops over young Billy, who is deaf. Billy is the one person who really listens, and a chance encounter makes him finally want to be heard.
Raine’s father is the poet Craig: she has inherited a perfect ear for acute observation, nuanced point-scoring and sexual one-upmanship; and she could emerge as the most elegant dramatic wordsmith on this stage since Christopher Hampton. It will be intriguing, too, to see how artistic director Dominic Cooke’s restoration of the middle classes develops. Tribes is directed by Roger Michell, who started out as an assistant to John Osborne and Samuel Beckett at this theatre; and a fine cast includes Kika Markham, Stanley Townsend, Michelle Terry and Harry Treadaway.
Michael Coveney is chief theatre critic of Whatsonstage.com
FILM
Made in Dagenham On release from 1st October
Economic strife has provided a gritty backdrop for notable Britflick hits The Full Monty (redundant steel workers) and Billy Elliot (the miners’ strike). Audiences evidently like their feel-good self-empowerment comedies with a side order of social relevance.
At first sight, Paramount’s Made In Dagenham, from Calendar Girls director Nigel Cole, is another twist on the formula: wife, mother and car-seat upholsterer Rita (Sally Hawkins) achieves personal growth when she enters the fractious realm of late-1960s industrial relations. The surprise is that the workplace dispute is no mere backdrop. The film really is about the strike at the Dagenham Ford car plant in 1968 that sparked the battle for equal pay for women in this country.
For this reason some of the giddier commercial projections may prove over-optimistic (not that we should worry about Paramount’s bottom line). But respect is due to the filmmakers and investors for a history lesson that doesn’t demean its characters or audience. Likeable Hawkins, who in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky rendered endearing one of the most irritating protagonists ever devised for the big screen, hits the ball out of the park with Rita, whose journey takes her from sewing machine to tea with Barbara Castle (Miranda Richardson). No stripping, though—perhaps it’s for the best they ditched the original title, We Want Sex.
Charles Gant is film editor of Heat magazine
OPERA
Radamisto Dir David Alden, ENO, 7th October-4th November
You can spot a David Alden production a mile off: real singing actors giving performances of true emotional intensity on boldly designed stages. Old school “stand and deliver” practice—singers rooted to the spot, devoted solely to flawless vocals, usually to soporific effect—is, mercifully, banished. His transfixing ENO production of Handel’s Ariodante has been revived countless times and he’s returning with a new production of Handel’s Radamisto. Not so much rarely as barely performed, Radamisto, written in 1720, features a typically Handelian cast of intertwined, dynamic characters at war with one another, in this case literally, with the title character saving his lusted-after wife from the tyrant besieging his city. As with his recent electrifying Peter Grimes, Alden’s hallmark is expressionism. Subtext comes to the fore and passions not only seethe but are shown in high contrast in every sense. Not for nothing is he working with leading lighting designer Rick Fisher.
Opera audiences, more populated by arch traditionalists than any other form, haven’t always embraced Alden. His introduction of a chainsaw into Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa made him notorious. But his revelation and dramatic amplification of motive and idea always derive not just from the libretto but also from the score. With Handel specialist Laurence Cummings conducting the latter, the music-drama could not be in better hands.
David Benedict is the chief London critic for Variety ART
Gauguin: Maker of Myth Tate Modern, 30th September-16th January 2011
It was the financial crisis of 1882-83 that propelled Paul Gauguin out of his job as a stockbroker and into full-time pursuit of art. He chased his muse—abandoning his wife and five children—from France to Copenhagen, from Panama to Martinique, and from Brittany to Arles (with his tormented friend, Van Gogh), although it was his Tahitian refuge that we most associate with him: those dark dreaming women, ripe falling fruit and rampant spiritual syncretism. But this, the first major exhibition of Gauguin’s work in London since 1955, will argue that, rather than the south seas liberating a hidden and repressed Gauguin, the seeds of his break with impressionism and bold experiments with colour, plane and subject were there from early on. Gauguin’s plundering of art history and penchant for self-mythologising have made him a complex figure to love or interpret. His restless exploration of sculpture, ceramics, drawing and painting and prolific production of letters, memoirs and journalism, make tracing the courses of his imagination particularly arduous. But this show at Tate Modern (he becomes the earliest artist yet to have been so honoured) aims to establish his radical originality. Expect queues round the block. Emma Crichton-Miller is an arts writer
