Author Archive: Peter Jakobsen
Everything is Happening
(by Michael Jacobs, with an introduction and coda by Ed Vulliamy) (2015) Diego Velázquez (Summer 1599 – 6 August 1660), one of Spain’s greatest painters, created Las Meninas (“The Ladies in Waiting” or “Maids of Honour”) in 1656. A large work, a masterpiece of High Baroque, it seems to be the painter casting his patrons (King Philip IV and Queen Mariana) as a camera, they surveying the room in which Diego is painting them, with its royal domestic scene. With brilliant use of light and shade, peerless brushwork and tasteful use of colour, Velázquez provides a series of highlights that float around the…
Continue Reading →Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink
(By Elvis Costello) (2015) We’ve been admiring EC from afar and occasionally up close, for a very long time. So we come to his autobiography with relish and trepidation. It is not as good as Speak Memory, the greatest autobiography ever penned, but it is hugely impressive – more a dense memory-book than a straight auto-biog, and much more concerned with music and music people than his own ego. He is obviously and rather charmingly challenged by autobiography, preferring the more oblique method of song lyrics and anecdotes, and saying of the process: “I don’t much care for the subject.”…
Continue Reading →Gaudí
(Biography by Gijs van Hensbergen) (2001) Before the New Brutalism (described as the ‘Screw You Style of Architecture”), there was Antoni Gaudí (1852 – 1926) who dazzled the world with his innovative, modern, rococo buildings in Catalonia and Barcelona. Le Corbusier recognised his daring and complex designs, so it is a pity he declined to follow his example. His simple grandeur evokes late mannerism, coupled with swirls and rounded features that return to classicism as well as recalling some Moorish structures. Who else could have designed the Arcadia-meets-Disneyland that is the Park Güell? (see above and below). He said that…
Continue Reading →One More For the Road
(Frank Sinatra, December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) Francis Albert Sinatra, of Hoboken, New Jersey, is 100 today. Fly him (who created the American songbook) to the moon! His presentation of torch songs was stoic but sad. (Imagine a gambler whose girlfriend – Ava Gardner, say – has walked out on him). He’d come on and spill his heart over the stage, then pick himself up and get back in the race, as if to say ‘That’s life – rise above it.’ For example, at “The Sands”, with Count Basie on piano, he has a full-to-bursting room silent and rapt with a drunk…
Continue Reading →Tannhäuser
The naughty knight with Venus (Otto Knille, 1873)
(Richard Wagner) (1845) (Met, December 2015) An old-fashioned, rollicking and surprise-free production, beautifully sung and shockingly acted (Johan Botha can’t even manage to convincingly strum the symbolic lyre) with James Levine leading the orchestra (James Jorden in The Observer rudely suggesting that he “flapped his baton like a wounded bird”). Terrific early Wagner, with a stark and invariably crass look at a medieval gallant’s perennial struggle twixt sacred and profane love – the orgasmic overture leading on to the writhing, wriggling Venusberg – replete with smudged borders between high church and low conduct, and a fairly unsatisfying denouement. Leaves on a staff? …
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