Still life in a turbulent time

Right at the heart of the colourful riot that is the Royal Academy of Arts' Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932, in a room devoted entirely to the unique style of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, my eye was drawn to this still life of 1918. I knew several others of his, but not the extraordinary treatment he lends to a herring, a couple of potatoes and a lump of bread - the restricted fare of hard times.

It's the artist's prerogative to lend grace to the ordinary in a nutshell. A parallel struck me the day after seeing the exhibition at a point I reached in Péter Esterházy's Celestial Harmonies - not easy reading, but every page of this discursive take on the author's very famous family deserves to be savoured, and a lightness of touch mitigates the difficulty of grasping such allusice richness. His father, under the straitened circumstances in which the family finds itself under Communism, is making a drama of preparing to attack a bone for its marrow by extracting it from the cooking pot.

'The midnight predators gather for the kill,' our father announced mock-heroically, then sat down at the kitchen table with ceremony, the pot in front of him. We crowded around him, buzzing and craning our necks, so we shouldn't miss anything. 'Take your places,' he said, looking at us with make-believe severity and then, like a chief physician at the operating table (or a priest conducting mass), he raised his two hands. 'The scalpel, sweetheart!' he said to mother, who did and did not take part in the show. She was happy that we were happy, we, her children, and also the man who at that moment was busy pretending that life is beautiful and exciting, and he the master of all he surveys, the benefactor of the small group for whose benefit he was demonstrating that this beauty and excitement is everywhere at all times: just look, even in a bone, a leg of beef!

And perhaps it's not even pretending so much as creating, on both the author's and his father's part. By the same token, Petrov-Vodkin wraps magic around the ordinary in the RA room devoted to his work, an exhibition-within-an-exhibition. Of course there are questions around the stunt as a whole: the plutocrats and the Russian governmental propagandists making the exhibition possible with a stunning array of the best - Moscow and St Petersburg galleries must be bare of their post-revolutionary masterpieces at the moment - as well as the questionable aspects of celebrating a vision that quickly soured. A grim 'Room of Memory' at the end, showing 'criminal' mugshots of many who were murdered under Lenin and Stalin, attempts to make amends.

But surely the point is the unleashing of energy, good or bad, into kinetic art. For, despite the stillness in the leading image, all is movement in this exhibition. And there are some impressive novelties which fit the giant RA rooms so well: the recreation of an El Lissitzky workers' room in the 'Brave New World' gallery, which is more coherent than it looks here

and above all the magnificent attempt at reassembling Malevich's room of his own work for the 1932 exhibition 'Fifteen Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republics'. Not even the recent Malevich show at Tate Modern managed this.

The RA has gathered together most of those original works - with, I think I'm right in saying, only two substitutions - and recreated the models; the effect is very impressive, possibly more so than the original, of which we do have a photograph.

Otherwise, the revelations to me were the Petrov-Vodkin collection, the ceramics and the work of one artist with whom I wasn't familiar, Alexander Deineka - variable, but this one of textile workers fascinated me.

For the rest, it was a bracing reacquaintance with many old friends, and nostalgic memories especially of many hours spent in St Petersburg's Russian Museum - a more essential gallery for the understanding of the native culture, certainly, than the breathtaking Hermitage.

We leaped from one exhibition to another, the David Hockney retrospective at Tate Britain, for an intimate little gathering of 2000 or so folk thinking they were going to get a close audience with the master. Actually we did, since when we arrived the queues to get in to the exhibition proper were enormous, and - diverted by good company - we suddenly found ourselves with only 15 minutes to rush around. So the first two rooms, with pictures of the ilk of 'We Two Boys Together Clinging', which impacted so much on me as a teenager, were empty, and in the third our only companions were Ian McKellen and Neil Tennant, chatting - appropriately enough - in front of the theatrical 'Ventriloquist' canvas.

The whirl wouldn't have worked if we hadn't already been so familiar with many of the canvases, and seen so many in previous exhibitions, but no doubt about it - this would have to be the most impressive in terms of together-hanging, above all in the room of heyday swimming-pool paintings and double portraits.

Then it's on to the exquisite drawings, his best portraits (Auden and mum especially) followed by the photomontages (mum, again, at Whitby Abbey my favourite) and the last room with stuff I really love, the colourful road pictures.

And these two of still lives - only connect - by the sea; I didn't know them. I hope these people will forgive their featuring in my general impression.

On to the English nature pictures, the paint rather gauchely applied IMO,

and to the less interesting final rooms. As Hockney's old pal and ours (of lesser years) Jonny Brown observed, it must have been the artist's choice not to include his (again IMO) terrible later portraits (the National Gallery wardens must be the worst). Here's Jonny with the ever-amazing wise young bird Thierry Alexandre by Millais' Ophelia

in the dreadfully-hung and badly-lit Tate Britain room mixing Pre-Raphaelites with really superior stuff like several of Whistler's Nocturnes. And Thierry allows me to transition to something I should have written about months ago, beloved artist Paul Ryan's show on the impact of InterRailing at Europe House's 12 Star Gallery. Here's the diva/o's back, in the first of the portraits here taken by the 12 Star's resident photographer,

and further portraits in front of some of the exhibits: the artist flanked by myself on the left and dear Chris Gunness with my goddog (by which I mean I am his godfather) Teddy on the right,

the great Jeremy Deller alongside his InterRail exhibit,

composer David Sawer with the manuscript of an early work written in the wake of an InterRailing experience,

and Lady C with her dog - I had to leave for Richard Jones's production of Once in a Lifetime so didn't get to meet them - in front of hers.

It all brought back memories of happy days in which I discovered the joys of independent travel - first under the organisational aegis of Christopher Lambton, who worked out our train journey to Istanbul and back, with a further loop by other transports in the wake of the military coup around the west coast, in 1981; and then, the following summer, the revelation of how good it was to travel alone, and feel completely free, after I left friend Simon at Ravenna and travelled on to Padua, Venice and Vienna with Bertrand Russell's The Pursuit of Happiness confirming the source of my joy.

Parallel rakes

Surprising results from a two-day Glyndebourne stint. I was there to give a talk before the opening performance of The Rake's Progress, and stayed on not just for the show but also for this season's new production of Don Giovanni the following day - an extended treat for the diplo-mate's birthday. He, of course, has fond memories of what, for better or for worse, has become known as 'the Hockney Rake' from the Glyndebourne tour of 1992. He permits himself to appear below in yet another disguise as a chorene whose make-up increasingly came to resemble something from Cats. His 'wife' (his jest?) is the redoubtable Rachel Tovey, currently wowing 'em in Stockholm as Brunnhilde and in Bonn as Turandot.


Was expecting much from Topi Lehtipuu's Tom Rakewell (pictured up top with Matthew Rose's Nick Shadow for Glyndebourne by Alastair Muir, who took the other Rake pics below) and somewhat less from Gerald Finley's Giovanni (in the grips of another bass, Alastair Miles as a Hammer-horror Commendatore, as photographed by Bill Cooper, responsible for more Mozart shots here).

In the end, the expectations were reversed, at least as far as the overall castings went. Ed Seckerson has put his finger on most of the problems I had with this Rake revival in his Arts Desk review. Yes, the scene changes are intolerable, when each 3x3 act is supposed to fly past unbroken; how odd that Hockney should have gone for the illusion of a recomposed 18th century and not availed himself of the machinery which in Mozart's time could have flown drapes and flats in and out. All this was compounded by a restless, bangle-jangling and sweet-unwrapping crowd around us, who took every orchestral prelude played before the drop-curtain as a cue for chatter, ballet-audience style, and then oohed and aahed every time the curtain rose, fatal for the essential stillness of the Bedlam scene. Still, it does look handsomer than ever; I gather major work has been undertaken on sets, lighting and costumes, now officially 35 years old.

And the accents: a slight tinge of Finnish and Swedish would matter less in a more straightforwardly-inflected setting of Auden and Kallman. But Stravinsky knew what he was doing in making all things lopsided. Lehtipuu and the usually adorable Miah Persson, struggling with her upper range now, didn't quite grasp or project the subtler kinks. She did apply the lovely purity it needs to Anne's miraculously simple lullaby to the mad Tom in Bedlam, accompanied by two flutes only, though it's probably the only time I've sat through the restrained heartbreak of the final scene dry-eyed.


Lopsided, too, is Stravinsky's perception of what WHA & CK thought of as recitatives. Fine for the way Glyndebourne's supertitling has chosen to handle them if they were all with harpsichord. But there are numbers within numbers, and some rather thickly scored passages. By cutting out the text at these points, Glyndebourne is bound to puzzle anyone unfamiliar with the piece.

What worked? Well, above all, the most deliciously thick-accented of them all, Russian Elena Manistina as the most exotic Baba the Turk I've ever seen or heard, just superb. And apt, of course, for the authentic exotic of St Giles's Fair.


Graham Clark's bumptious, camp auctioneer set an example in diction; and some of Jurowski's crisp tempi, graced by a superlative LPO trumpeter, worked well. I can understand he wanted to get a move on in the difficult early scenes, but a conductor who really lets the cantabile woodwind sing as did Martyn Brabbins at Aldeburgh can show us more readily how emotional Stravinsky's score really is. But this wasn't Jurowski's aim.

Where I do bow to him in awe is for all the work he's so evidently put in to a crackling but not consistently hasty Don G. By the time we saw it, he'd handed over the baton to Brno-born whizzkid Jakub Hrusa, new Glyndebourne On Tour director. Golden days begun under Ticciati are bound to continue with Hrusa. From where we were sitting, we could see his hyper-alert, immaculate manner. Hard to say what was Jurowski's Giovanni and what Hrusa's, but I was impressed by the way the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment on absolutely top form suddenly pulled all the tragic-dramatic stops out for the recit leading up to Donna Anna's 'Or sai che l'onore'. Compelling, too, the small string group around the cello obbligato of Zerlina's 'Batti, batti' - double-bassist Chi-Chi Nwanoku as mobile as ever - and the consummate artistry of mandolinist James Ellis in the Serenade.

At points like these I was distracted away from the perfectly decent singing of Gerald Finley and Anna Virovlansky. Finley is a keenly-inflected protagonist, but he never emanates sex or threat; in those respects, the superlatively adaptable Leporello, Luca Pisaroni, and the charismatic Masetto, Guido Loconsolo, would probably have served the part better. Here's Pisaroni on the right with Finley's Mastroiannish Giovanni and Kate Royal's nervy Elvira.


Royal came into her own for a stunningly fluid 'Mi tradi'. But the show's true royals were Anna Samuil's Donna Anna and William Burden's Don Ottavio. Here they are to the right in an especially glorious Act Two sextet (Virovlansky left, Pisaroni spinning lines of gold, Royal in the red dress and Loconsolo complete the line-up).


Samuil shone in the astounding Salzburg production of Eugene Onegin by Andrea Breth, and here she shows all the gleam of a proto-heroic soprano with total flexibility: I've never heard the runs at the end of 'Non mi dir' more flawless, on stage at least. And she's beautiful, a wonderful actress and an intelligent musician given the freedom to do what she needs by Hrusa. Found the aria performed by her on YouTube, with Michael Schade and the 'VFO' (would that be the Vienna Festival Orchestra - and who's the conductor?)



Burden brought real Italianate touches to 'Dalla sua pace' as well as sensitivity; what a shame the Vienna version deprived him of 'Il mio tesoro' and all the lovely stuff in the centre of the final ensemble (is that a Vienna thing? Or just impatience with the good guys on conductor's or director's part?)

This was the best production I've seen from Jonathan Kent, and I'm not usually a fan. The definition of the Italian 1950s setting was a bit loose, the Act 1 finale a confusion throwing away Mozart's gift of the three dance bands, the class distinctions uncertain. Nothing, it's true, as novel as some of the ideas in Dmitri Tcherniakov's Aix family saga, but nothing as crass as Zambello's attempt to put on a show at Covent Garden.

And a show this certainly was, dominated by Paul Brown's amazingly complicated set - all elegant opening boxes and marbled spaciousness in Act One, all steep rakes and decay in Act Two. The graveyard and guess-who's-coming-to-dinner scenes really worked; the brilliant ensembles carried all the bigger numbers. All things considered, the best Don Giovanni I've seen on stage, if not as thoughtful a concept as Deborah Warner's last-but-one Glyndebourne production. And what incredible futures all these singers have.