A Plethora of Arts

Musically, last year went out, not with a whimper, but with a bang. The sad story of Orpheus and Eurydice was given, in Gluck's version, at the English National Opera, and in Haydn's at the Royal Opera (where it was named L'Anima del Filosofo). In spite of the performance by the lovely Cecilia Bartoli I found the ENO production the most enjoyable.

As a coda to Verdi's centenary, the Barbican Cinema gave us 10 lovely Sunday afternoons with operas on film from Salzburg, La Scala, New York's Met and London, with a plethora of stars?Placido Domingo, Kiri Te Kanawa, Teresa Stratas?and conductors like Karajan, Solti and James Levine. When you can get electronic reproductions with the batons held by departed maestros I am often tempted to avoid live audiences with chattering stockbrokers, and just turn on my hi-fi at home. I would be wrong. Jurowski, the new music director at Glyndebourne, gave a spirited interpretation of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress at the ENO. Simon Rattle led Stig Andersen in a musically wonderful and visually painful performance of Parsifal at the Royal Opera. I hear he will conduct the full Ring cycle in Aix-en-Provence in 2005. Now there's something to stay alive for!

Also at Covent Garden von Dohnanyi gave a less energetic lead to the wonderful orchestra and a brace of giant kraut ladies in Strauss' rarely performed Die Frau Ohne Schatten. Jane Henschel was particularly seductive in Cruella De Vil maquillage, and I loved seeing the David Hockney sets again. The ENO were probably inviting unfair comparisons, when, after last year's spectacle in a visit by the Kirov Opera, they also chose to produce their own parsimonious version of Prokofiev's War & Peace. As a finale to the year I heard Haitink with his old Amsterdam Concertgebouw in an unforgettable rendering of Mahler's Symphony No. 6, and, as a contrast, a 14-year-old girl, Nicola Benedetti, with her very own Guarnieri violin. Apparently a present from her daddy! After the latter performance I broke bread (and a bottle) with a truly inspiring old lady, Milein Cosman, who came here as a refugee from Vienna and married Hans Keller, the music scholar. Some refugees brought us the atom bomb, others enriched us with their music and art.

The most strenuous exercise I take is walking to museums and then around their galleries to see what is on. At the National Gallery there was an exhibition devoted to Pisanello. Since he is such an influential, yet very rare, artist, one had to be content with lots of numismatics, beautiful bronze medals with the portraits in profile of his principal benefactors, some drawings, largely from the Louvre and the British Museum, and finally four canvases, which were well known since they were part of the National Gallery's own collection.

Next door at the National Portrait Gallery one could admire "Painted Ladies," all the beauties from the court (and the boudoir) of Charles II, with their evocatively drooping eyelids and their pert bosoms frequently popping out of their décolleté dresses. This was a good Royal Stuart curtain-raiser to the huge exhibition of uninspiring "Victorian Nudes" at the Tate Britain. I was happy to learn that Queen Victoria, and indeed her consort, were very fond of nudes, but the lustrous acres of frequently mythological flesh, expertly painted by Alma-Tadema, Lord Leighton, Burne-Jones and Millais, failed to arouse me.

I must, however, praise the renovation of the Tate Britain, and the fact that they have now abandoned their much criticized project of hanging pictures of whatever school or chronological era in invented "theme" rooms. One room, I remember, was the "Beef" room, just juicy carcasses. Not a great success when the mad-cow disease was followed by the foot & mouth epidemic.

The old, dusty Victoria & Albert has had a wonderful facelift from the bits of the lottery fund that the government hasn't snitched for less "elitist" causes than the arts. The V&A's huge and state-of-the-art new British galleries are worth many visits. Some of the highlights are the gilded Music Room from Norfolk House, the huge Great Bed of Ware (room enough for a round dozen) and the agreeably round marble Half-Dozen: I am referring to Canova's Six Buttocks, generally known as the Three Graces. The poor girls were saved from export to the rapacious Getty where they could have enjoyed the California sunshine.

The Iveagh Bequest at Kenwood in Hampstead is currently giving hospitality to the Cobbe collection from Ireland, entitled "Clerics & Connoisseurs," nearly three centuries of one civilized family's pictures, Titian, Van Dyck and a Hobbema, brought back from the National Gallery in Washington.

At the Hayward Gallery I saw "Facts of Life," Japanese photography and art at its most bestial, and at the Royal Academy one could marvel at "The Dawn of the Floating World," Japanese paintings on loan from Boston and of great beauty. The Imperial War Museum had a very evocative exhibition entitled "The Spanish Civil War." All the "good guys," poets and artists from every country, fought against dictators and fascism and therefore got in bed with Stalin. Where were you, Daddy, in the Good War?