With the death of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies from leukaemia at the age of 81, the UK has lost the most prolific composer of his generation, as well as one of the most passionate advocates for art music.
For some musicians operating on the leftfield, achieving accessibility or commercial success means compromising their unique vision. Not so with Los Angeles singer-songwriter-producer Julia Holter. Her first three albums – four, if you include 2009's home-burned CDR Celebration – were intriguing, if blurry, windows into a complicated inner world, within which intensely felt dreams and extraordinary erudition tangled up into constantly moving patterns, but the haze rarely revealed any distinct shapes.
From weaselly shyster to spineless drip, the biographies of Goya’s subjects are often superfluous: exactly what he thought of each of his subjects is jaw-droppingly evident in each and every portrait he painted. Quite how Goya got away with it is a question that will continue to exercise his admirers indefinitely, but it is testament to his laser-like insight that he flattered his subjects enough that they either forgave or didn’t notice his damning condemnations in paint.
On this dark, silent night as the world holds its breath in anticipation, everything is still but for the occasional whisper of a breeze ruffling the curtains. It is so quiet that a deer, that most nervous of creatures, has tiptoed all the way up to the window, gazing beyond us to a point further inside the room. The mirror on the dressing-table allows us to share the view into the room behind us, and there is a glimpse of a cot, the Christmas rose that hangs over it symbolising the Virgin Mary. And yet, something is wrong.
David Jones’ black and white drypoint – a drawing made by incising lines on a copper plate with a diamond-tipped needle and then printing from the plate – is a view of the nativity which is fresh, full of wonder and a highly intelligent naïveté. It shows all the sophistication of an artist who has looked at the art of the past but is also fully aware of modernism’s confusions of perspective, able to deploy them even when depicting recognisable scenes.
Art collectors are rarely what one might expect. Everyone has their particular enthusiasms, quirks and foibles, which make their collections unique and reflective of their tastes. In my career as a curator I have learnt never to have preconceptions when visiting collectors. The best pictures can often be found in the most modest of homes. Nothing can beat the buzz of encountering an iconic artwork in the most unlikely of settings. It is a lesson in how important it is not to make judgements about individuals before meeting them properly.
The New Yorker Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) was the classic poor little rich girl: insecure, a woman with scores, perhaps hundreds of lovers, longing for love, the writer of tell-all memoirs. What sets her apart is that she was also the creator of one of the world’s greatest collections of modern and contemporary western art.
With real live birds fluttering across the stage, and a sweetly happy ending – hurrah for young love! – Frederick Ashton's 1961 The Two Pigeons can look like mere frothy fantasy, precisely the kind of trivial, uncomplicated ballet plot that the young Kenneth MacMillan was reacting against in his own work in the early 60s. Is its return to the repertoire after an absence of 30 years just the Royal Ballet pandering to the escapist fantasies of its audiences – who, director Kevin O'Hare reveals, have been clamouring for this revival?
What dancemaker wouldn't want to tackle Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) at some point? Just as the Stravinsky score changed music, the original Ballets Russes production changed dance - and was then, conveniently, so completely forgotten that no master-text exists. Everyone is free to take the Stravinsky and run. Or rather, dance: as Michael Clark has observed, one of Sacre's gifts to a choreographer is the in-built necessity of dance to the scenario, in which a victim is chosen by a crowd and forced to dance to his or her death.
Switching between the orderly and the chaotic, David Jones’ depiction of Noah’s family building the ark immerses us in the drama of the moment while simultaneously holding us at some point out of time, to emphasise the story’s ancient roots.