ARTS AND MINDS - JOURNALS OF AN ARTS ADDICT 2007-13

Episode 21 Jan to March 2011

ARTS AND MINDS JOURNALS OF AN ARTS ADDICT 2007-13

JOHN TUSA EPISODE 21 Jan to March 2011

Derek Jacobi magnificent in “King Lear”. Dutch theatre group try to transform Antonioni’s classic films into theatre and fail, horribly. Contemporary string quartets totally defeat us - and some musicians too. I lash the BBC Trust for attacking Radio Four for doing its job too well. Dixon/Jones’ vision for arts in St Petersburg. Mark Antony Turnage’s brilliant new opera, ”Anna Nicole”; Joby Talbot’s banal new ballet, “Alice in Wonderland”. William Hague lauds Afghanistan as a nation - but it’s a collection of warring tribes. Modern British Sculpture undermined by critical theory. “Watercolours” at Tate Britain – unfashionable but a revelation. Susan Hiller and “Completism” as art form - it’s just a catalogue.

Friday, January 28. Evening to see Derek Jacobi’s “Lear” at Donmar in Michael Grandage’s production. Grandage takes it straight, the play is the play, look to the words, follow them and you can’t go wrong. And this the cast, Derek leading, do wonderfully. Derek is magisterial though beset with vast irrational rages in the first half, then tenderly, poignantly mad in the second. He gets nothing wrong. Afterwards we fall into one another’s arms with joy and gratitude. How does he do 8 performances a week?? Never mind an eight week tour?: “ Oh the body is fine but I have to watch the voice!”

Wednesday, February 2. A really poor evening at the Barbican. The experimental Dutch group Der Tonneel do “The Antonioni Project”. A confused, multi-media reworking of the great Antonioni film trilogy with live action, that action seen in huge blow up on stage tv screens. Does it capture Antonioni’s atmosphere of desperate alienation, the intensity of his action, the beauty of the acting, the elegance of his composition ? No, never, how could it? Poorly acted, over elaborate, we leave at the interval.

Thursday, February 3. Hard pounding at the Wigmore! The Arditti Quartet play an all out modernist programme, getting a 70% house for it, no mean achievement. Frankly we do not understand this modernist musical language especially that of Brian Fernheyhough but nor do many critics and musicians. It does make Ligeti, say, or Kurtag seem simple or at least familiar. I ask various people if they can make head or tail of Fernyhough? Graham Sheffield: “ Oh, him and Michael Finnissey, they are so up themselves it is hardly true! The point of a Fernyhough score is that it looks beautiful on the page!” So why bother to play it? Stephen Kovacevich, the pianist: “ I can’t understand it at all!” Very few claim to be able to do so. Is it a bit like not understanding the language of most contemporary dance?

Friday, February 4. Talk to Jeremy Dixon and Ed Jones, of Dixon/Jones Architects of Covent Garden, about a huge St Petersburg project they are invited to tender for. It is a large former military hospital/prison on a triangular city/island site – ie surrounded by St Petersburg canals – with two long brick built blocks, like a chevron, which Roman Abramovich has bought for his art loving wife, Dasha Zhukova. Her ultra modern art “Garage” gallery in Moscow is losing its lease and they want to relocate to St Petersburg. One side of the new site is clear so that is where the new-build “Garage” gallery will go. My suggestion is to create an outward looking organisation that makes itself available to artists, innovators, and such like offering a hierarchy of increasingly finished facilities right up to various size commercial galleries. A plural, diverse, open community providing the pyramid of activity at which Zhukova’s new “Garage” stands at the summit.

Wednesday, February 9. My final Wigmore Board as Chairman. The financial numbers are great and things are as good as they ever have been. We drink a glass of champagne – they toast me, I toast the Hall. I say that the Hall has come from being a distinguished but hermetic, rather private place in Wigmore Street to an organisation with contacts across the world, with local communities, with more artists, wider repertoire and broader audiences. Quality is paramount.

Wednesday, February 9. The “BBC Question” rears its head again, this time in the shape of a BBC Trust Report about Radio Four telling it not to be so white/middle class/ politically driven and southern! (Not to mention successful, popular and much loved by its devoted audience!) When the “Daily Telegraph” phone me to comment, I am happy to let rip at the intellectual cowardice behind the report’s assumptions. “Does BBC Radio Four enjoy big audiences? Yes, ten million a week. Not good enough, says the BBC Trust: they are the wrong audiences, too old, too white, too middle class.” Is BBC Radio Four a national broadcaster? Perhaps says the BBC Trust but why is it not listened to more in the north and north west? Does BBC Radio Four cover the great news stories and political issues of the moment? Yes, says the BBC Trust but why does its output involve “so many stories emanating from London, particularly politics and international affairs.” So that is the sum of the BBC Trust’s charge sheet against Radio Four: “It broadcasts the wrong kind of programmes to the wrong kind of people in the wrong places from the wrong centre. And by the by, it is too intelligent. The Trust is awfully hard to please.” I sum up: “As a wrong-headed analysis of what is right with BBC Radio Four it could hardly be bettered. If this is a report intended to help BBC Radio Four, perhaps the BBC Trust should let us know when it is being deliberately critical.”

Wednesday, February 16. A final revival of the 1999 production of Wagner’s “Parsifal” first produced under the Nicholas Payne regime at English National Opera. It was a traumatic time on the ENO Board because the production was coming in way over budget and each time Nicholas would describe how the production and sets were being shaved pound by pound! In other words, the final sets were a considerable compromise on the director’s vision. Now they are greeted as a classic, the production lauded as good as any Wagner production over the last two decades and much else. The whirligigs of time! Of course, a head start with John Tomlinson as Gurnemanz; he is noble, massive, emotionally gripping; Ian Patterson as Amfortas and Stuart Skelton as Parsifal are also outstanding; the orchestra has never sounded better for a decade or more. The redemption/forgiveness/bleeding wound mythology is hard to take, Wagnerian Christianity mixed with Teutonic myths in a heady (confused? rancid?) combination. But a distinguished ENO evening.

Friday, February 18. Graham Sheffield, my Arts Director at the Barbican for 12 years, has got the British Council arts director job! What a journey. During his psychometric test interview he was asked: “What single one of your characteristics would John Tusa want to change?” That is one for me to think over before we meet next week. He in turn was asked: “Which of John Tusa’s characteristics would you most like to change?”. It would probably be to be less irritable, less “Victor Meldrew-ish”, a charge he often levelled at me at the Barbican. My answer was – and is - that I was irritated when things were not done quickly enough or well enough or not done at all and only my irritation kept things moving!

Evening to Mark Anthony Turnage’s new opera “Anna Nicole”. Packed Covent Garden, though there are some younger people it still looks much like the trad opera audience. So! A tremendous stage piece, a “super musical” in idiom though, let’s be clear, far superior to a musical. A paean of hate to the American dream, to the corruption of US society, to its obsession with fame, its belief that money buys everything, to the vulture like attentions of US television, the tv-camera-headed-black-clothed dancers look like Egyptian dog headed gods. Mark’s music, jazzy, brilliant, spikey is constricted by the tightness of Richard Thomas’s libretto – in Act 1 in particular it is so thick, so rhymingly intense that Mark’s music can’t breathe; Act 2 is far more liberated and lyrical. Stunning performances especially by Eva Marie Westbroek, usually a tremendous Sieglinde! She carries off Anna Nicole’s grotesque prosthetic “improvements” with bravura. At the interval, the pianist, Malcolm Martineau, says Westbroek would love to give a Wigmore Hall recital. Annie enquires what she would sing? Malcolm: “ Oh, Wagner ‘Wesendonck’ Lieder and some Duparc!” I immediately pass it on to John Gilhooly.

Tuesday, February 22. Russell Twisk rings from the “Times” to ask for some thoughts on my upcoming birthday for his little birthday snippet in the paper’s birthdays feature. “What is it like to be 75?” he enquires. I reply in order: “I’m very lucky”. Later I think, “So far so good!” Then “I’m rather surprised”! Basically I neither believe nor feel 75 but perhaps that is one of the many delusions of old age.

Tuesday, March 1. Graham Sheffield gets an Honorary Fellowship from Barry Ife, head of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, our neighbours and colleagues in the Barbican complex. Both the presentation and the celebration take place in “Searcy’s” restaurant at the Barbican over lunch. We say the award is for “services to lunching”. Graham says he wants the position of “Honorary Vintner to the Honorary Fellowship of the Guildhall School”! Ie he chooses the wines, they pay!

Tuesday, March 1. Big BM rout for the opening of the “Afghan Treasures”, another BM “foreign policy” initiative.( Are they the only institution deploying ‘soft power’?) President Ahmed Karzai gives a speech so does William Hague. There is a fundamental flaw in what they say: “Afghanistan is a great nation and we are helping to restore it to its greatness!” Or some such. Yet the whole exhibition speaks of Afghanistan as the great crossroads of the heart of Asia being formed by myriad influences. It is not a unity but a complexity shaped by those influences. Add the fact that the heartland is inaccessible mountain, that the main road runs around this heartland like a great orbital ring, that the Pashtuns in the south, the Uzbeks in the north, the Tadzhiks and others are very distinct racial and linguistic tribes and the notion of a coherent Afghan national unity is a diplomatic fantasy rather than a merely distant dream. Nicholas Kent is there after the triumphant tour of his Tricycle Theatre “Afghan Trilogy” in US. Triumphant at the Pentagon, though as many US military said to him afterwards: “Why didn’t we know this before!” Not triumphant in New York where, I guess, the smart New Yorkers did not like having the ugly truth rammed in their faces by a bunch of lousy Brits!

Thursday, March 3. After a last minute appeal to Tony Hall, the Covent Garden Director, we get two returns for “Alice in Wonderland” through his office. We have not been to the “ballet” for decades. What will we make of it? We do miss the words as the action is hard to follow and often non-existent. We do miss the music – eh? Didn’t Joby Talbot write the score? Yes, but so flaccid, formulaic, so derivative, uninteresting it is hard to believe. The choreography is by golden boy Christopher Wheeldon. Even we can see that there is not an ounce of originality in his movements, his lifts, his use of crowds and so on. To call it formulaic is to bad mouth formulas. It is also ultimately, actually from quite early on, rather boring. So why did it get the (generally) good reviews it did? Solidarity, yes; and perhaps this does count as a good evening out for ballet lovers. At the interval, we run into Candace Allen, an American friend. She is so incensed by Turnage’s opera “Anna Nicole,” “its sexism, its misogyny, its anti-Americanism!” that she is enjoying “Alice”. Annie says: “Maybe but what’s the point of it?” By the end Candace agrees that she cannot answer the question. London is oddly divided between those who hated “Anna Nicole” and those who loved “Alice”. They are not easily predictable. Both are “new” and in their very different ways ambitious productions. To our eyes, ears and minds, “Anna Nicole” is trying to take opera conventions and subject matters forward while “Alice” is wholly backward looking intellectually and emotionally inert.

Friday, March 4. To the Royal Academy to see the (much criticised) “Modern British Sculpture” show curated by the Penny Curtis, director of Tate Britain. Well! Room 1 is filled with fine British 1930s pieces side by side with ancient and archaic pieces from the BM from which those sculptors are said to have learned. Fine but the notion that the BM might hold works from world civilisations is bedevilled by ideas of “theft” and “appropriation” and similar “curator speak” concepts. The thought that collections might reflect curiosity , interest, open-mindedness, scholarship, love and many such other ideas is simply not contemplated in what is surely a Marxist-led jargon world. The show collapses rather quickly, including a replica of the bench seat – yes, the bench seat - which was used in a Whitechapel Gallery show 25 years earlier. The gaps in the show become more glaring. Apart from a superb Tony Cragg of compressed wood and material there is the dullest Richard Long ever, no Rachel Whiteread, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor etc etc. In their place, some drear “concept pieces” backed (sic) by curator-speak texts of unutterable vacuity where it seems that the paragraphs might make sense but three sentences further in the meaning has vanished. Very stimulating to go round a show having an active argument with the curator’s philosophy.

We watch the repeat of Tony Palmer’s famous “Maria Callas” programme. (I am now part of the historical archive). Towards the end as her career and voice are in decline she does a farewell tour with the Italian super-tenor, Guiseppe di Stefano, where he was widely regarded as exploiting Callas’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities. By 1982/3, Ariana Stasinopoulos wrote a book heavily criticising di Stefano over this tour. “Newsnight” gets them both in for a discussion on a night when I was presenting. As they sit down in the studio, with seconds to go, I run through the programme’s opening titles: “Stasinopoulos accuses Di Stefano of such and such, Guiseppe di Stefano defends himself against her accusations!” Harmless enough. I am aware that Di Stefano is standing up and looking as if he is going to walk out. “ You offend my ‘Hon-orr’! I do not defend myself. It is my ‘Hon-orr!’” I forget what I said to get him to stay seconds before the titles rolled and the programme began. But there are the exchanges from my “Newsnight” interview in the middle of Palmer’s film. Thirty years ago, I must have been two stone lighter. Annie says, “You look positively slight which you never were!”

Saturday, March 5. Radio Four’s “Today” ask me on at 0830 to opine on how arts/academic organisations deal with shady or unscrupulous rich backers all apropos the LSE’s disaster over Libya which has led to Howard Davies’ speedy – and honourable – resignation from the LSE. Naughtie and Humphrys are on duty, Humphrys saying - off mike – what a disaster it was that I wasn’t appointed BBC Chairman. I have prepared some thoughts re Ghaddafi, mainly old sayings: “If you sup with the Devil, use a long spoon”. Tony Blair probably had to talk to Ghaddafi but he should not have grinned with such glee as if he was really delighted to be at the same table as the Devil. Old saying Number Two: “Leopards don’t change their spots!” Why should anyone believe that Ghaddafi’s son, should suddenly be consumed with the desire to get an LSE PhD, one that he seems to have plagiarised? I am on a roll. ”Would you like another saying” I ask innocently? Naughtie nods vigorously! Humphrys says ”Yes”. So I say: “ My Granny always said that ‘if a deal looks fishy and smells fishy the chances are that it is fishy’! Today, management consultants call it ‘risk analysis’ but Granny was there earlier and she was right”.

Humphrys asks how I would assess a potentially “dodgy deal”? I say: “Will it undermine your reputation or values? Will it compromise your intellectual principles? How much will you get? Is the source of money seriously compromised? How much will you have to commit yourself? If the answers to all these boxes are clean then you can talk seriously”. I say we do have to talk to all kinds of donors, sponsors and governments, “or if we insist only in talking to governments that are as pure and perfect and pure as we are, we will end up in a position that is unrealistic and finally ludicrous!” Humphrys comes out of the studio with me and wrings my hand warmly.

Saturday, March 5 . Major show at Tate Britain of ”Watercolours”. Yes. How unfashionable! The critics all had to go through the “isn’t water colour wet (sic), too genteel, too English, too unradical” etc before, to be fair, usually knocking that thought down. They then complained that all the works were from national collections. Yes, but when had they last – or ever – seen these works, still more when had they last seen them put together in this way? Or seen Turner’s actual water colour palette; or Queen Victoria’s water colour bag? Or amazing paintings of plants including by a C17 English woman, or a painting of rare seeds done – contemporaneously - by a commission from Kew Gardens? Above all a room of paintings from war with three by Edward Burra, the darkest ever by Paul Nash, and one from the Crimea of a cannon ball with a butterfly perched on it? And a painting of bodies from Belsen. Eye openers to all but the purblind.

I insist on looking in on the Susan Hiller show, upstairs at Tate Britain. She is American but has lived in Britain for many years. You would not guess it. She is a “completist” and banal with it! A big compilation of English seaside postcards with waves battering the village, town or coast line. Her impulse to collect them, hundreds of them, was what she described as the “strange” English obsession with stormy weather over the sea or such like. It is not strange – the English live in small scale, undramatic but lyrically beautiful miniature countryside and landscape. Stormy weather counts as a significant diversion, a stirring up of the senses. It is not in the least surprising but very obvious to anyone in the country – except her.

“Completism”. There are, she tells us, 303 streets, roads, sites in Germany named after the Jews – “Judengasse” etc. Hold on. She has visited and photographed them all and put the images together in a 64 minute video. Hats off for persistence but does she tell us anything about the deep influence of Jews in Germany that everyone but her knew already?

Hiller signs up to every modish notion of creativity including “automatic” writing, dream interpretation by getting friends to sleep within “fairy circles” (yes, I kid you not) and recording their dreams afterwards, and the thought that people do see ghosts on their tv screens once they are switched off. To deny the possibility of this happening is to “deny human imagination!”

3,253 words 10 June 2025