Various Artists: We Are One - Eurovision Song Contest Malmö 2013
Caro Emerald is the biggest act to arrive on the music scene in Holland for a very long time. Her debut album, 2010’s Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor, stayed at the top of the Dutch album charts for an astonishing run of over seven months, oulasting even Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Her stock is now rapidly rising in the UK, with Deleted Scenes… heading back into the album charts upon the release of her recent single, “Tangled Up”, which isn’t even on it.
The Rijksmuseum is reopening after 10 years. What took it so long? Escalating costs, contractual problems, a protracted battle with the cycling lobby (this is Amsterdam, after all). I’m sure there’s more, but one whole decade’s worth? It’s a long time to go without a national museum that represents the best of Dutch art to the Dutch people, and to the world.
It’s easy to forget what a spectacular Medievalist fantasy the building actually is
There was a time when the art of the Low Countries was considered to be very lowly and base indeed. It was the high art of Italy that counted if you were a person of culture and breeding. Not for you the carousing common folk of Jan Steen, or those watery flatlands of Van Goyen, touched with too much bleak realism. It was the arcadian Campagna of Claude – like Poussin a Frenchman but with the Rubicon flowing through his veins – that you looked to.
Welcome to the latest edition of The Arts Desk Radio Show, originally broadcast live from London's glamorous Dalston last Tuesday on NTS Live. Once again Joe found himself flying solo as Peter was off on his travels – although this time, rather than visiting his usual far-flung destinations he was on the road, driving Malcolm McLaren's Mercedes back from Paris.
The great Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder was instrumental in developing landscape painting as a genre in its own right. Hunters in the Snow, 1565, is one of five surviving paintings (Bruegel painted six) in his cycle depicting The Labours of the Months. Populated by villagers, peasant workers, farmers, hunters and children, each painting is of a panoramic landscape at a different time of year.
The last night Haitink conducted at the Royal Opera House as musical director the staff wheeled on a moped as a leaving present. Ever since, his conducting has been inextricably linked to that mode of transport in my head. With Haitink, music-making has always seemed to be about getting from A to B in the most dependable, unfussy and often uninspiring way possible. For years, I haven't been able to see the point of him at all.
Conversations between artists both verbal and visual are the flavour of the month: the big voice of Picasso is almost but not quite drowning out a septet of British artists over at Tate Britain. Now joining the chorus is a fascinating exploration of the 1930s, in which the Brit Ben Nicholson and his Dutch friend and colleague Piet Mondrian are described by that hotbed of art history, the Courtauld, as "leading forces of abstract art in Europe”.
Dutch director Leonard Retel Helmrich has spent a decade following the everyday lives of Indonesia’s Sjamsuddin family, a working-class clan with their roots in the countryside whose working lives have taken them into the hubbub of the country’s capital Jakarta. Position Among the Stars is the final work of a trilogy, its immediate subject the importance of granddaughter Tari going to college to receive the further education that will give her new opportunities.
Isn’t it strange how national talent goes by subject? Put on a blockbuster exhibition of Dutch painting and the queue will stretch to the Embankment. But can you imagine a festival of Dutch music? Sweelinck (d 1652) and Andriessen (b 1939) more or less sums it up. The BBC brought together three living Dutch composers for this Portrait concert, and one of them wasn’t after all Dutch (“I’ve kept my Swedish passport,” he insisted rather unchivalrously in the pre-concert interview).