Midsummer Marriage at the Royal Opera House

The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden for Tippett's Midsummer Marriage. Lyrically daft, musically brilliant. Not quite as bad as Robert Thicknesse, The Times, would have you believe: yes, at little short of four hours it is a "story going nowhere very, very slowly", and the chorus do indeed look like they are on a "middle-aged Hampstead Heath community picnic", but it is hard to see how it could have broken out of the straight-jacket of Tippett's libretto. All that Jung-meets-Eliot filtered through a Powell and Pressburger sensibility is tiresome and dated (as preposterous as a tweed clad Prince Charles quoting Laurens van der Post), and at times you wished they were singing in German (at least it might then have sounded profound), but surely this work is worthy of a revival in that it connects us to an age when post-war English art was manfully struggling to fuse it's English idyll romanticism to a modernist style. Tom Service veers too far in the opposite direction in The Guardian, giving little more than a summary of the opera.

Samuel Palmer at the British Museum

Samuel Palmer at the British Museum, 21 October - 21 January. Andrew Motion is impressed with Samuel Palmer's "longing for transfiguration with a deep human involvement with life-things. Work-things. Ecology-things." An "exhilarating vision of archaic beauty" according to Simon Jenkins, also in The Guardian. "A joy from start to finish" is the verdict of Richard Dorment in The Daily Telegraph. See works by Palmer, Edward Calvert and Blake's beautiful Virgil's Pastoral engravings at the (relatively) new Corners of Paradise gallery at the V & A. Also be sure to visit the exquisite collection of neo-romantic prints in the Spirit of Place gallery next door. Spirit of Place is also the title of an excellent book on the Neo-Romantic movement in British art in the 1920's and 30's by Malcolm Yorke. Occasionally to be found in remainder bookshops.

Munch at the Royal Academy

Edvard Munch at the Royal Academy. Mixed exhibition of Munch's obsession with portraying his angst on canvas. A subject made cliched by a billion reproductions of The Scream. In fact the scream followed me around the exhibition in the form of a small child. Of particular interst were the early works, especially the woodcuts (Self portrait facing left) and lithographs. The later work, with a similar palette to Bloomsbury (Matisse filtered through the long northern European winters) is a relief if only because you leave the familiar Munch behind. The overiding impression of the later work is that he is painting portraits, not self-portraits: the dishevelled, bearded man on the canvas in front of you is more a stranger to Munch than the self confident early portraits of the ambitious young painter.
Illustration:
Anxiety, woodcut, 1896.

Twentieth Century British Art at the Fine Art Society

Fine Art Society, New Bond Street. The Twentieth Century exhibition of British art. Some outstanding work on display, with the pick of the bunch being Sutherland's later Picton, Ben Nicholson's linocut textile Princess, linocut Abstract with a Red Circle (right), David Jones' Sheep and Birds in the Park, as well as Ravilious and Paul Nash. Of particular interest to me was seeing another version of Edward Bawden's huge linocut Brighton Pier, this version (1957) differs slightly from the one at the Fry Gallery in Saffron Walden (1977), although I don't know if it is of the same series as the one at the V & A. Also impressed by the work on show of John Cecil Stephenson (Funghi, 1933).

My Name is Rachel Corrie at the Royal Court

My Name is Rachel Corrie, Royal Court Theatre. Uncomfortable viewing, especially given the location of the Royal Court in Sloane Square where Corrie look-a-like gap year students traipse from one overpriced designer shop to another. Whatever your political position there is no doubting Corrie's humanity and her powerful writing, brought to life through a tour-de-force perfomance by Megan Dodds. Also see.

Elisabeth Frink at Sherborne House

Elisabeth Frink, Sherborne House. Interesting exhibition of Frink's graphic work. Outstanding screenprints of green men (left), horses and heads. The looseness of the drawn line and the colouring, as well as the monumental size of the stylised heads is both disconcerting and impressive.