Gorecki singer makes it despite volcanic ash

tad_wos_joanna Joanna Wos (left, no relation to Jonathan Ross) put in a stellar performance last night singing in Gorecki's Third Symphony at the Royal Festival Hall with the LPO, singing the part made famous on the million-selling recording by Dawn Upshaw. To get there, she drove for three days and nights from Poland arriving yesterday afternoon. What a trouper. It would be unfair to judge her against Upshaw in the circumstances. But I will. She didn't quite have Upshaw's power, but she was splendidly expressive. She even reminded me, strangely, at times of Victoria de los Angeles. And the LPO seemed slightly on automatic for the first section but then burst into life for the latter movements.

4.48 Psychosis, Barbican Theatre

Disappointing version of Sarah Kane’s famous study of psychological breakdown

Sarah Kane’s last play is the stuff of legend. Since its first production some 18 months after her suicide in 1999, it’s become a favourite with black-attired drama students, nostalgic in-yer-face drama buffs and mainstream theatres all over mainland Europe. But it is rarely performed in big spaces in this country – apparently because artistic directors feel it would empty their venues. So this version, directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna of Poland’s TR Warszawa on the Barbican's main stage, is a good chance to see what we’ve been missing. Or is it?

Krystian Zimerman, RFH

Polish celebrant of Chopin's birthday can be poetic when he's not in his speedboat

Beware of Zimermania - or, for that matter, of idolising any pianist as the Greatest Living Interpreter of Chopin. Our birthday boy, 200 years old last night (and not on 1 March), as a crucial baptismal register now seems to prove, is too big for any one artist to dominate. He looks to his French heritage for sensuality, to the Polish maternal line for Slavic weight and thoughtfulness. If a sometimes impatient Krystian Zimerman inclined more to the former in yesterday's big celebration, that's not to deny he was a worthy choice of golden-toned celebrant. It was just a pity that it all had to be such a circus, and that the human zoo around the lone figure on the Festival Hall platform took so long to settle.

Poles 'ape-shit' over Chopin film

Tony Palmer snubbed by Polish daily in anti-semitism row

According to award-winning film-maker Tony Palmer, the London Polish Daily newspaper has gone "ape-shit" over the re-release of his dramatised Chopin film, The Strange Case of Delfina Potocka, accusing it of maligning the good name of Chopin/Poland/The Polish Daily. They were planning to interview him tomorrow but cancelled, accusing him of "more or less anything you can think of", Palmer tells me.

Our Class, Cottesloe, National Theatre

Harmless people become fiends in a factual drama that misses a killer instinct

Nine years ago, historian Jan T Gross published a book called Neighbours. It chronicled, and tried to analyse the reasons for, the massacre of 1,600 Jews in a north-eastern Polish village, Jedwabne, in July 1941. That was a month after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, into which, in 1939, this bit of Poland had been absorbed by Stalin. The unexamined historical assumption had been that, like so many similar east European communities, Jedwabne simply fell victim to the by then efficiently exercised Nazi lust for Jewish annihilation.
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