Hepworth; Greenwich; English Touring
Opera – an Autumn Miscellany
Tate Britain – Barbara Hepworth
Tate Britain on a rainy
Monday is not crowded, even when it is hosting a fairly prestigious exhibition
of works by Barbara Hepworth. The clientele, if that’s an appropriate word, are
pretty homogenous – or, to be precise, fall largely into one of two homogenous
groups. One group comprises art students, A Level students I should guess at
the time of my visit, equipped with sketchpads. They had a tendency to block
access to one side of sculptural exhibits by standing immobile, absorbed in
drawing.
The other group comprises people of late middle age and upwards –
mostly persons no longer, or perhaps never, in work. They politely shuffle
about in considerate fashion.
Conspicuous by their absence
are the young foreign tourists who throng some of the “blockbuster” art shows,
such as Matisse, and whose backpacks often sideswipe one, and whose
me-in-front-of-a-famous-painting selfies (where allowed) often cause one to
give up hope of viewing.
I mostly know of Barbara
Hepworth from her large public sculptures, usually highly abstract forms. There
are plenty of examples of this style on display, all intriguing, many beautiful
(the sculpted trunk sections of huge and strange African trees (Guarea) especially so). Thus the
beginning of the exhibition is somewhat unexpected: early figurative sculptures
in stone, marble or wood, juxtaposed with similar pieces by contemporaries such
as Jacob Epstein. This early work is charming. A generous showing of paintings
by Ben Nicholson, Hepworth’s pre-war lover (later husband) and artistic
collaborator increase the charm. For the most part these paintings are, like
the sculptures they accompany, both abstract and figurative (the figure being
Hepworth) and, overall, deeply personal.
Uplifted, and unjabbed by art
students’ elbows, next stop is fairly new Tate Members’ area in the restored
Cupola of the building. It is a space both impressive and welcoming, with many
niches for tables and seating. It is much less stressful than the ever-crowded
room at Tate Modern, and is a place to linger over a drink, snack or meal
without the feeling that one must hurry up and move on and give someone else
one’s seat.
The Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, by Boat
One of the pleasanter
additions to London’s public transport in recent years has been, not the retro
Routemaster-style buses, but the regular catamaran riverbus service between
Embankment/London Eye and Woolwich, via the central London riverside tourist
and business stops, Canary Wharf, Greenwich and the O2 Arena.
The Catamarans are pretty
big, enclosed with somewhat murky Perspex but with an outside area at the
stern. They have a small bar.
It is pleasure to watch the
efficiency of the mostly young crew (men and women) at mooring to, and casting
of from, the stopping points. It is interesting to pass under the decks and
guns of HMS Belfast and the intricate structures of Tower Bridge.
Whether your spirits are
depressed or raised by the bankers’ towers of Canary Wharf depends to some
extent, I suppose, on your ideological point of view. However, the actual point
of view one has of that forbidding cluster is rather remarkable. As the boat
approaches, it appears that Canary Wharf keeps moving about, now seen to the
left (or port) and then to the right (or starboard), and then again straight
ahead. A similar effect happens as the towers recede behind the boat when it
ploughs on downstream. These disconcerting shifts are the result of the huge
oxbow bend in the Thames through the east of London; a bend of which, because
of the size of the river below Tower Bridge, one is not very sensible when
travelling on the river itself.
The visual tricksiness of
Canary Wharf apart, what one notices sailing eastwards are the riverside
apartments, new builds or former warehouses, stretching endlessly along either
bank.
The industrial Thames has
been converted into loft living. London may be grateful for the new homes; but
the building/conversion drive has done little for the sightlines of the Thames
banks on the way east, apart from a few preserved houses and pubs in the
Stepney area.
So, when Greenwich comes into
view there is a quickening of spirits. Here, once more, are noble buildings –
and a noble ship, the Cutty Sark,
although these days strangely semi-entombed in a glass structure, as if it were
a giant ship-in-a bottle which has burst through its container.
The Old Royal Naval College
dominates the riverbank at Greenwich with its elegant 17th-18th
centuries quadrangles, separated into blocks by a large space, the Grand
Square. The Square is the site of the Tudor Palace that once stood here (a
favourite residence of Henry VIII).
The Square also provides an
uninterrupted vista of the Thames from the Queen’s House, which stands on the
edge of Greenwich Park. The House was built in Stuart times, and at first was
an addition to the Tudor Palace complex (one curious function of its design was
that it provided a bridge between the Palace grounds and the Royal Park,
spanning a public road between Greenwich and Woolwich).
On opposite sides of the
Grand Square, both integrated into quadrangles, are two Baroque masterpieces:
the Painted Hall and the Chapel. They are free to visit (but sometimes closed
for private events – there is an online calendar).
The Chapel was finished,
after a fire, in the late 18th century. It is a dazzle of gilt and
carving. But what might draw your notice in particular are the sombre naval
monuments in the vestibule, especially to Sir John Franklin and the crews of
his two ships, all of whom perished in the doomed attempt to find the Northwest
passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific, around the arctic north of
Canada, in the mid 19th century.
The Painted Hall, designed by
Wren and Hawksmoor, is a gorgeous riot of painted murals and ceilings. The vast
undertaking took the artist, James Thornhill, 19 years to complete in the early
18th century. It is an unashamed visual hymn to nascent imperialism-
or, should one say, Peace, Liberty, Prosperity and of course Monarchy, all
underpinned by naval might.
There is even a bit of wit.
The far, western, wall has a self-portrait of the smiling artist gesturing
towards his somewhat pompous allegories of regal virtues, while in the
background an ungrounded St Paul’s Cathedral floats, like some prototype
Tardis, in tribute to Wren.
It was raining for the return
river journey. Travelling west gives the better uninterrupted view of the Shard
– or some of it: low clouds covered it pinnacle. I find the Shard is a
structure to be admired at a distance. Close up, it seems monstrously out of
place in in Victorian Southwark. And it can scarcely be looked at without risk
of neck injury.
English Touring Opera at the Royal College of Music
Behind Imperial College,
loomed over by the bulk of the Albert Hall, is the Royal College of Music. It
has its own auditorium, the [Benjamin] Britten
Theatre, a small, classically styled opera theatre. It is the main London
venue of the estimable English Touring Opera.
Twice a year, the ETO puts
together a company of singers and musicians, which tours English towns with a
repertoire of three operas for each tour.
The three operas premiered at
the Britten for the ETO’s 2015 autumn season were: Pelleas et Melisande (Debussy), Werther
(Massenet) and The Tales of Hoffman (Offenbach).
The singing and playing were,
to my very amateur ear, of excellent quality. I do not attempt further musical
insights. However..
The Offenbach piece, which
was produced as an over-the-top gothic extravaganza, was the most accessible to
the non-purist modern audience. It is easily appreciated as an early progenitor
of a familiar line of surreally macabre plays and films.
By contrast, Werther was the most difficult to relate
to. The opera is based on Goethe’s 1774 novel, celebrated for launching, or at
least accelerating, the Romantic movement, and for causing, throughout Europe,
a lot of copy-cat suicides among impressionable young men.
It is the story of an
intolerably sensitive man who falls in love with a priggishly virtuous girl,
who is engaged to, and later marries, another. In short, there is no way to
resolve the triangle except by death. Being a noble young man, Werther
determines that it is he who must die; and so shoots himself with the husband’s
pistol.
A modern audience might,
whilst enjoying the music of the later opera, feel some irritation with the
protagonist: why didn’t he just cut his losses? What effect did he think that
his killing himself would have on the future life of his alleged beloved?
The audience at the Britten
is refreshingly mixed (you can get the best seats for under £25 if you book to
see all three operas). There is a fair number of Royal College and other
students leavening the usual opera crowd of the middling to elderly. Dress is
casual, although there are a tolerably small number of “Suits” (it is not a
corporate entertainment venue- the facilities are too rudimentary). But I saw
something you rarely come across these days – soft-fleshed, pinkish young City
types (think podgier Cameron). I had thought them to be an extinct tribe in the
modern era of gyms, running and high-end triathlon bicycles.
Bus Jumping
I also learned something of
very practical use from the trips to South Kensington. By using of one of the
available smartphone apps giving live bus times, it is possible to intercept
bus after bus in a timely manner until one reaches the “home” bus route. It is
swinging digitally through the urban jungle from TFL branch to TFL branch.
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