Culture: Cultural Olympiad | guardian.co.uk
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Welcome to our Culture 2012 blog
It's already shaping up to be a mammoth year for UK arts and culture. Keep up with the latest on the Cultural Olympiad and beyond in our new blog, and tell us what's on your radar
We're just a few weeks into the year, and already you can feel the impact the London 2012 Olympics will have on British culture. David Hockney's bold Yorkshire landscapes have lit up the Royal Academy, and last week director Danny Boyle revealed the first tantalising details of his 27 July opening ceremony (a celebration of the NHS, by way of The Tempest, featuring choreography by Akram Khan and music by Underworld). This is the year when every artist, and every arts organisation in the UK will be showing off their very best work to the world: there will be major exhibitions (Lucian Freud, Gillian Wearing, Damien Hirst), ambitious classical programming (Daniel Barenboim's complete Beethoven symphonies cycle at the Proms, Gustavo Dudamel in Raploch), a wealth of dance (Matthew Bourne on tour, a month-long Pina Bausch season) and theatre (a UK-wide World Shakespeare festival, a Lucy Prebble premiere). Oh, and the Stone Roses have a couple of dates in June.
Some of this will happen under the umbrella of the official Cultural Olympiad; much of it won't. Some of it will work – and some of it will fall short of expectations, the same as any year. But what isn't in any doubt is that 2012 is going to be the biggest, busiest year British culture has seen in decades – which is why we're going to attempt to harness the best of it on this blog. This is where we'll be highlighting the best of our arts coverage, across the art forms, including the latest news, blogs, webchats, interviews and picture galleries – as well as guest blogs, live streams, original artist commissions and more. We'll also be linking out to the best cultural content across the web each day.
And we want to hear from you: are you involved in an event this year, as a performer or producer? What are the challenges you face, and what are you most looking forward to (or worried about)? If you're visiting exhibitions or events, what's in your diary – and what tips would you give other readers? What can you see for free, and where? We want to report on what's happening in different parts of the country: this is the place to tell us about the cultural events taking place near you.
The Olympiad proper got off to a rocky start, as arts correspondent Charlotte Higgins reported in 2009; since then artistic director Ruth Mackenzie appears to have steadied the ship. In December Mark Lawson predicted that the Games will only highlight the existing cracks in British culture, since definitions of both "Britishness" and "culture" are increasingly vexed. Will this be a year to remember? We're about to find out.
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Feelgood art: the pick-me-up to get us through an age of anxiety
British artists used to delight in shocking audiences, but now many are involved in projects intended to cheer people up
Young British artists once rocked the world with a volley of pickled animal cadavers, unmade beds and flicking light switches. But now, against the backdrop of a grim economic climate, some of the movement's biggest stars appear to be concentrating on cheering us all up.
Feelgood artwork is everywhere, from the life-affirming London Underground project of Michael Landy, who has invited commuters to log incidents of kindness, to the uplifting public art commissioned for the top of bus shelters to herald the Olympics.
"There is a second world war kind of thing going on about 'keeping the home fires burning' at the moment; a bit of 'keep calm and carry on' art, if you like," said the Turner prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller this weekend as he prepared for the opening of his retrospective show, Joy in People, on London's South Bank next month. However, his own work, as he explains, is not intended as a simple pick-me-up.
"The title of my show is apparently positive, but the show itself isn't all positive. There is anger and there is frustration too," he said.
Other leading artists, such as Martin Creed and Tracey Emin, who established their careers with work on challenging themes, are now producing art that urges their public to think positive thoughts. "Don't Worry", reads Creed's neon work, while several of Emin's recent neon signs are equally direct, reading "Trust Me" and "I Keep Believing in You". The Turner prize-nominated artist Mark Titchner is one of those to contribute to Bus Tops, a Cultural Olympiad project which has seen inspirational digital commands such as "Act or be Acted Upon" and "If you don't like your life, you can change it" adorning London bus shelters.
Much of this work is tongue-in-cheek, or at least invites a few questions, but the overall effect is to emphasise the better things about human existence.
"When times are difficult, values are going to be questioned," said Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery. "You look again at what's important and at what's less important in life. It is usually a time when culture and art can play an important part, whereas in a boom period there is too much focus on the hype around the boom and on all the alluring baubles it holds out before us."
Rugoff, who is staging the Deller show and an exhibition of the wry sketches of David Shrigley, is clear that art should not be regarded as "a nice sedative we can take together … What it can do, though, is function as a catalyst and bring people together. Art can connect them in new ways."
On Tuesday, a group of artists including Gillian Wearing, Antony Gormley, Yinka Shonibare and Jonathan Yeo are to launch a more practical response to the financial slump. The group are staging a major exhibition in London this spring that will raise money for the homelessness charity Crisis. "Art reflects on situations in ways that cold hard facts can't," said Wearing, who won the Turner prize in 1997. "It tries to make sense of the world subjectively, whereas facts tend to ignore our subjectivity."
Her partner is Landy, and she explains that the idea behind his Acts of Kindness on the London Underground came to him before the financial crisis took hold. "For me it was powerful that an artist was working with kindness, something that we easily overlook," she said this weekend. "It actually inspired some works of mine, including the one for the Crisis Commission, where I wanted to look at people who have overcome difficulties in life and have become heroes."
But on the weekend when film-maker Danny Boyle, director of the Olympics opening ceremony, announced his Isle of Wonders theme, Deller for one is decidedly grumpy about the pressure to be jolly in preparation for the summer. "The Olympics, of course, is something that will attempt to brainwash artists into expressing positive things," he said. "Some will. But I am the kind of person who will try and do the opposite. I find these big cultural and sporting events unbearable."
In 2009 Deller invited London Underground staff on the Piccadilly Line to help him produce a booklet of quotes called What is the City But People. The booklet aimed "to generate a more positive atmosphere during peak times", but his best known work also tackles the violent 1984 confrontations between striking miners and police and the Iraq war. His recent work What It Is, the remains of a car destroyed at Al-Mutanabbi book market in Baghdad, will be in the new exhibition.
"Historically, art began by giving people what they needed, as it was tied up with religion. Now it is much more fragmented and it can be about how miserable and rotten things are," he said. His own collaborative work with the public is born of the fact that he is not traditionally trained, Deller suggests, as much as it is due to his belief and interest in people.
"At its simplest, I would say art is another way of looking at life, or perhaps another way of dealing with it."
Deller points out that BritArt started under a Conservative government "in difficult times" and was later "appropriated by the Blair regime".
"At that point it did all become a bit celebratory," he said.
For several young artists the benevolent act of making communal art has become part of the reason for doing it. Max Dovey, 23, is one of the artists featured in the 2012 Catlin guide to the 40 most promising art school graduates. "Apart from one or two notable exceptions, the response by new artists to the recession hasn't been as political or aggressive as one might have expected," said Justin Hammond, who wrote the guide. "Looking at the selected artists, there's a lot of humour running through the work though, and Max Dovey's work is very much about encouraging communication and embracing the idea of community."
"The Emotional Stock Market, which was the piece I did last year, was about trading well-being as a commodity like shares," said Dovey, who is from Bristol and lives and works in south London. "There was a lot of political talk about moving away from gross domestic product to valuing how people were feeling, and my piece was a satire or a comment on that. We tracked the levels of well-being by looking at status updates on Facebook and at Twitter to see how many were happy or sad, and then we traded them in live performance."
Dovey argues that there is a new growth of "careful art" among contemporaries who are making community projects. "Artists don't want to shock or upset. There is more interest in how art makes people feel and the experience of art has become at least as important as the practice of it."
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Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson - review
'It is a book of secrets which only get revealed at the end - it's like opening a treasure box'
I cried all night after this one. This is the most brilliant tragi-comedy, constantly developing. It spans quite literally the centuries, from the 1990s to the 1800s. It combines a thousand threads of stories, all centring around one family, certainly the most complex one I've ever heard of it. And it wraps these threads up perfectly. It is wonderful.
It is basically about Ruby. Youngest in the family, which consists of her mother, father and two sisters. I say two, but - Oh, I couldn't possibly give that away! She narrates the book (I'm going back to Ruby here) and most of it is about her, growing up and maturing. The rest of it is told in flashbacks, about her nearest ancestors – going back to her great grandmother. It sweeps through World War One and Two with grace. I can't really say much more, because it is a book of secrets. These only get revealed at the end, and it's like opening a treasure box of – dare I say it – pearls.
This was, amazingly, Kate Atkinson's debut novel, although she has written other books since then, notably Case Histories. I have read all of them, and although Human Croquet follows a reasonably similar format – though it is a world apart – I think this is her best one.
In Case Histories, she tied multiple people together in a more obvious way – only obvious once read, of course – but links between the parade of characters in Behind The Scenes are a joy to read. It is definitely an adult book, not just because its complexity but also due to its content, but if you're over, say 12 or 13, you'll be fine. And no condescension meant. Just have a peek at the name of the first chapter and you'll get what I mean.
It is heart-breaking, but flashes of humour throughout make it easy to read. You're just picked up and carried along. Make sure there are batteries in your torch, because it's incredibly hard to stop reading. Admittedly, the writing style takes a few pages to get used to, but be open minded. Please. You'll be missing a trick if you don't.
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Los Angeles to porn industry: wear a condom
LA city councilors approved an ordinance that makes the use of condoms in porn mandatory, but the industry claims it is unnecessary and will cost them jobs
Actors in the pornographic film industry could be forced to cover up on set, after Los Angeles city councillors approved an ordinance that makes the use of condoms mandatory.
The measure – which was nodded through on a 9-1 vote – will require the producers of adult films to sign up to stringent rules regarding prophylactic use, and pay a fee to offset the cost of spot checks.
Healthcare activists have welcomed the news, but many in the porn business are bitterly opposed to the move, stating that it is a government overreach that could drive the industry out of its spiritual home.
The Los Angeles city council provisionally agreed to adopt the measure in an 11-1 vote last week.
Following the latest showing of hands, the ordinance will be handed over to the city mayor to sign into law within 90 days.
The Free Speech Coalition (FSC), a lobbying body for the porn industry, said the insistence on condom use would impact on the lives of about 1,500 adult film stars.
It has been suggested that about 90% of legally distributed pornographic movies are produced in studios based in LA's San Fernando Valley.
The fear in the porn community, which has already been hit hard by piracy and the economy, is that the insistence on condom use will drive many jobs out of the region.
"What will happen is productions affected by this ordinance will have to move outside the city limits," said Joanne Cachapero, spokeswoman for the FSC. "People can get adult movies without condoms in them from around the world and the only thing they are doing is putting the Californian industry at a disadvantage."
Porn producers say the industry has successfully self-regulated itself for many years by means of regular testing for sexually transmitted diseases.
Under a voluntary code of conduct, stars of erotic films must undergo a sexual health screening every month. Proof of a negative result is needed before an actor can take part in a sex scene.
The FSC claims that the policy works, and has helped prevent the spread of HIV after actors were diagnosed in 2004, 2009 and 2010.
But health campaigners have pointed at the occasional outbreak of cases in the porn community as proof that more needs to be done.
Darren James is one of those pushing for more stringent rules. The former porn star became infected in 2004, triggering a temporary industry shutdown.
At the height of his career, James was appearing with up to 15 women a week in hardcore scenes that often included anal sex.
But despite the risks involved, he was never encouraged to use protection.
"Condoms were never brought up, they just wanted to get the scene done and move on," he told the Guardian.
STDs such as chlamydia were common, but porn actors would self-medicate and sweep news of the infection under the carpet, he said.
"If you are going to work in porn, you are going to catch something, anyone who says they never contract anything is a liar," added James, 44.
Even so, his 2004 diagnosis of HIV came as a surprise to him, and sent shockwaves through the industry, especially after it was discovered that three US actresses had been infected.
"The industry attacked me, but I didn't know where I got it from. All I knew was that four other women I worked with had come down with it," he said.The former adult film star now works as a HIV/Aids counsellor and supports the work of the LA-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF).
It is the foundation that pushed the issue of condom use on the city council.
Last year, the AHF submitted a petition over the issue, with enough signatures on it to force the authority into a public ballot.
Tuesday's 'yes' vote by the city council will scrap the need for a referendum over the issue, saving Los Angeles in the region of $4m.
Ged Kenslea, AHF director of communications, said the new ordinance merely gave city authorities the power of policing what was already on the statute book.
"It is already law that producers need to use condoms, this just provides another mechanism for enforcement as there hasn't been a huge amount of compliance from the industry to date," he said.
But the porn industry – much of which is gathered in Las Vegas for the industry's equivalent of the Oscars – is unlikely to let the matter lie.
"The regulations imposed are without any input from the stakeholders most impacted – adult performers and producers," said FSC executive director Diane Duke. "Mandatory condom regulation will not increase performer safety, it will diminish the successful standards and protocols already in place and compromise performer health.
"Government regulation of sexual behavior between consenting adults is, and has always been, a bad idea. The government has no business in our bedrooms, real or fantasy."
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A Room for London - in pictures
A small vessel perched on top of the Southbank Centre has become London's most coveted hotel room
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A Room for London – review
A small vessel perched on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall has become London's most coveted hotel room
The river Thames has a way of defeating plans for its jollification. For decades architects have looked on its great, tempting emptiness and felt an irresistible urge to propose beaches, inhabited bridges, lidos, zones for festivals fluttering with pennants and balloons, places to promenade as if it were the edge of the Mediterranean. In the 1980s Richard Rogers imagined an archipelago of pleasure, with the forms and construction methods of oil rigs remade into towers and pinnacles of fun. Most recently, the architects Gensler proposed the floating hospitality suite they called the London River Park.
Mostly these plans don't happen. The river flows on, lugubrious and imperturbable, which is possibly because, as Joseph Conrad observed, it is not really a fun sort of thing. "And this also," he wrote in Heart of Darkness, "has been one of the dark places of the earth," as he embarked on that book's journey into forms of savagery that lay beneath a veil of civilisation. For him it was the "sleepless river" of a "monstrous" and "brooding" city. "What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river," he also wrote, "into the mystery of an unknown earth!"
One Thames project that has happened is A Room for London, a boat-like object perched high on the roof of the Queen Elizabeth hall at the Southbank Centre, as if stranded there by a receding deluge. Where many Thames proposals want to put things of land on to water, this puts something riverine – a boat – on to land. It is a temporary structure, a cross between building and sculpture, by the architect David Kohn and the artist Fiona Banner. It contains a single hotel room which anyone can in theory book, if with rather more difficulty than Olympic tickets. When nights for the first six months were made available they sold out in 12 minutes; the next batch goes on sale on Thursday (at £120 a night).
This little space is the production of an impressive array of cultural impresarios: the Southbank Centre, Artangel, and Living Architecture, the organisation set up by the writer Alain de Botton to build beautiful new houses which can be rented for holidays. It comes, like many cultural projects in 2012, with an Olympic tag, being officially part of the cultural Olympiad. As well as paying guests, writers, artists and musicians have been invited to stay there, and be creative.
From the outside the jaunty vessel seems to fall within the "fun" category of Thames projects. It juts perkily into the void, and three little wind turbines, like displaced propellers, whirr on the top of a triangular rig. It is a toy, palpably and deliberately incongruous. It is a folly. But it turns out that its makers also had Conradian ambitions. The boat is called the Roi des Belges, after the vessel in which Conrad himself sailed up the river Congo, in the journey that would inspire Heart of Darkness. Inside there is a cabinet containing old maps of the Thames and the Congo, in reference to the parallels that Conrad made between the two rivers. An octagonal table and a box of dominos echo similar objects described in the master's novels.
There are other inspirations. The intricate house and museum of the architect Sir John Soane is cited by David Kohn as a help in designing the "episodic" sequence of small spaces that are inside the boat, as you progress from a little vestibule to a galley, to a bedroom that opens up to penthouse views of the river, bracketed by the Palace of Westminster to the left, and St Paul's Cathedral to the right. Alongside the river maps there is a copy of a drawing by Soane's collaborator JM Gandy that shows Soane's Bank of England as if it were a Roman ruin, and which might be taken as a comment, if desired, on financial calamity, or on the fragility of civilisation described by Conrad. Kohn also mentions the baroque architect Nicholas Hawksmoor as an influence, even though his heavy white stone churches would come top of most lists of Structures Least Likely to Float. The spire-like superstructure of A Room for London refers to these churches, and to the spires of London in general.
The main point, says Kohn, is to combine the intimate and the epic, in a way not unlike the relation of domesticity to vastness that you get in boats. "The interiors feel comfortable and you know what to do there, but it's not just an easy or twee kind of comfort. You are connected to the Thames, to a wider world, also to what one thinks of the world. You have a relationship to disputed, uncertain territory."
In all this the intention was to avoid kitsch and creating a one-line joke. The timber-lined interior, stained in places in rich pinkish-red, is not pushed to the point where it is literally boat-like in every detail, but rather seeks other architectural qualities, which is where the influence of Soane comes in. It was also important to Kohn and Banner that the structure was exactingly well made, by the specialist company Millimetre. "It is solid; it has a kind of earnestness," says Kohn, which keeps it away from being a stage set.
And so the lucky purchasers of nights in the hotel room, the intellectual aesthete's equivalent of Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket, will be able to contemplate the "venerable stream" much as Conrad's characters did in the cruising yawl Nellie. At sunset they will be able to watch the gloom "become more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun". They can, should they want to, think their thoughts about the world and their place in it.
A Room for London is small, and temporary, and will only be fully enjoyed by a few people. It is not a prototype for future Thames-side development, and offers no solutions to the problems of urban regeneration. It may, even, not quite match the fathomless profundity of its inspirations, being rather an enjoyable and well-made jeu d'esprit. But I have a feeling it will give satisfactions that other Olympic projects will not match: it is intelligent, witty, pleasurable, and is based on observing its surroundings as they actually are, rather than imposing a bombastic idea of what they should be.
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RSC grants amateur dramatics starring role in the Cultural Olympiad
Royal Shakespeare Company project applauds contribution to the arts of a peculiarly British institution
On a stage in Windsor two rival groups will compete for a new national title intended to celebrate one of the country's favourite pastimes – amateur dramatics. It is an enduring British obsession that will be the spotlight as never before in 2012.
Well ahead of the September screening of SkyArts' amateur dramatics bonanza, Stagestruck, a television talent contest, volunteer theatre groups across the country are now busy rehearsing the role they are to play in the coming Cultural Olympiad. The arts festival that will run in parallel with the London Olympics has offered AmDram enthusiasts an unprecedented platform, befitting its status as a peculiarly British cultural pursuit.
"The best King Lear I have ever seen was in an amateur production, and he did not go on to become a professional actor," said Michael Boyd, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and organiser of this year's World Shakespeare Festival. "While it is fine to say you sing in a choir, people are often reluctant to talk about their work in amateur productions. Yet we have a thriving tradition of community acting in this country, of an incredible variety and high standard."
Boyd hopes that by opening up his auditoriums in Stratford-upon-Avon this summer and giving amateur groups access to experts in a project called Open Stages, he can break down these prejudices and find an unconventional way to mark the quality of British theatre.
"The term amateur dramatics smacks of the village hall, I know," said Nigel Lawson Dick, Chairman of the Wokingham Theatre group, who is painting scenery this weekend for a production of Alan Ayckbourn's Woman in Mind. "I don't really like the term. I tend to say non-professional instead. A lot of the cracking actors we have on our stage are people who have successful professional careers in other areas and just want to perform as well."
There is a level of embarrassment about belonging to an amateur dramatics club that Boyd agrees is outdated and unhelpful. Other hobbies once thought of as unfashionable, such as family history research, have now been recognised as an important way to understand society. Boyd and his colleague at the RSC, Ian Wainwright, believe it is time for professional actors and theatre audiences to acknowledge the work of amateurs.
"Amateur theatre is a huge industry in the UK with hundreds of thousands of people taking part every year. For most, it's a hobby – like Sunday football – but for some it can act as a springboard into the profession, and the standards can be impressively high," said Alistair Smith, deputy editor of The Stage.
"Perhaps historically there has been a bit of a garlic-and-cross relationship between the professional theatre and amateurs, but over the last decade or so – with the increased prominence of community work – professional companies have become more willing to work with amateurs. Now, large professional companies like the RSC are quite keen to work with amateurs for artistic rather than financial reasons."
The Open Stages project, comprising 263 separate amateur shows, will be in full swing this May as another major community production is launched in London. Babel, to be performed outdoors at a city landmark, has been billed as "a theatrical experience of truly epic proportions" and will feature a cast of 500 amateur and professional actors. The show, directed by WildWorks and Battersea Arts Centre in collaboration with the Lyric Hammersmith, Theatre Royal Stratford East and the Young Vic, has been put together over two years and tells the story of a gathering of tribes.
WildWorks, a company based in Cornwall, made its name by mounting large-scale theatrical spectaculars, including the Port Talbot Passion, in which Welsh actor Michael Sheen and a cast including local amateurs and hundreds of volunteers re-enacted the Crucifixion over the Easter Weekend last year.
"Our mission is to invent the future of theatre," said Battersea's joint artistic director David Micklem, announcing Babel. "We think WildWorks is one of the most exciting theatre companies committed to the same ambition."
If anything, Boyd and Wainwright are making an even bolder committment in Stratford. In fact, opening up to the amateur community was key to Boyd's approach to the Cultural Olympiad and to his final year with the company. He admits he met early resistance among some professionals, wary of sharing their stages and their techniques with amateurs. But all that dissolved, he said, when actors and stage crew realised how refreshing it was to work with those outside "the business".
The RSC team now believe a supportive attitude to amateur work is no threat to struggling fringe theatre or professional companies. In the last decade "site-specific" performances have been in vogue, with shows mounted in disused warehouses and on station platforms.
"These are not people who are all hoping to be discovered or who want to have a career on stage," explains Wainwright. "We may well find some great talent during our work this year, but that is not the point. The point really is that people enjoy putting on plays in their spare time and they always have done."
Boyd echoes Wainwright's claim that Open Stages is not about searching for new stars, however high the standard of work that emerges. In fact, for him, the RSC festival of amateur work will be a useful way of moving away from an emphasis on celebrity casting.
The oldest Open Stages participant so far is 90, while the youngest is six. Wainwright and his team are marshalling 174 productions of Shakespeare's work, with certain plays coming out as clear favourites. There are to be 19 productions of Macbeth, 18 of a Midsummer Night's Dream, 13 of The Tempest, and 12 of Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night. One of the adaptations of Romeo and Juliet will pit Capulet against Montague using actors drawn from communities living on either side of a dual carriageway. Another Midlands company is producing an English/Polish version of the love story. There will be an all-female Hamlet from Milton Keynes and a sci-fi Twelfth Night in Huddersfield. Macbeth will be performed by torchlight in Coventry cathedral, while the Royal Navy's own theatre society, run by serving sailors, officers, and marines, will perform Much Ado About Nothing at the Naval base in Portsmouth harbour.
Tina Swain, manager of the St Albans theatre group based at the Abbey Theatre, which will also be staging Much Ado About Nothing, said: "Some of our members went along to one of the open weekends run by the RSC and they loved it. People may think that we are all eccentric or luvvies, but our company has members across the generations and is a real part of our community."
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NYO/Daniel – review
Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool
A piece for orchestral players but with no instruments sounds like a perplexing contradiction in terms. Such, however, is Anna Meredith's HandsFree, one of the New Music 20x12 commissions to mark this year's Cultural Olympiad, and given its premiere in Liverpool by the National Youth Orchestra. Pitched somewhere between classical and performance art, it's essentially a work about body percussion, fantastically planned and choreographed.
The players clap, stamp, shuffle, shout and sing. The rhythmic sound patterns are mirrored by platform routines of considerable complexity. Meredith throws in a few Ligeti-like ululations to form points of stasis or relaxation, but the overwhelming impression is one of mounting exhilaration. It's a tour de force for the NYO, who performed it from memory and were greeted with a standing ovation, richly deserved.
The rest of the concert was less iconoclastic. Paul Daniel conducted: the programme flanked Elgar's Cello Concerto with Turnage's Hammered Out and Walton's First Symphony. Hammered Out, which rings changes on Beyoncé's Single Ladies, finds Turnage in bad boy mode with a classical/R&B fusion. The orchestration is unvarying, though the playing was classy. Natalie Clein, meanwhile, was the declamatory yet lyrical soloist in the Elgar, a performance that was admirably unsentimental if a bit deliberate and over-controlled.
The Walton, though, was wonderful. Like HandsFree, the piece is rooted in rhythmic complexity, and the performance generated a comparable sense of edge-of-your-seat excitement. Daniel shaped it superbly well, and the playing was outstanding, with some beautifully honed woodwind and brass solos, and a real sheen in the strings. The NYO's practice of doubling and trebling parts has occasionally led to a sense of overload in the past. Here, everything just sounded admirably clear and spacious.
Rating: 4/5
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2012 in the arts: will it be a cultural triumph or a gloriously British disaster?
While 2011 was all about cuts, the arts community puts its best foot forward in 2012 as the Olympics come to London
The arrival of the Olympics in London will mean that British culture is on show like never before. Commentators will be poring over what these headline events say about us as nation, whether they were planned to tie in with the Games or not.
The Olympics opening ceremony
Directed by Danny Boyle, in November this extravaganza had its budget doubled to more than £80m – either an encouraging sign or an extremely bad one. It was thought impossible to top Beijing's opening ceremony, but the ballooning costs have raised the stakes vertiginously. Could either be a triumph, or that most British of things – a glorious disaster.
Indie's past comes back to haunt it
It's a landmark year for three indie institutions. In April, NME is 60. Three months later, the music weekly is scheduled to meet with Morrissey in the high court over claims that a 2007 interview smeared him as a racist. Light relief will be provided by the almost simultaneous reappearance of some other Mancunian music heroes, the Stone Roses – their gigs will be the pop events of the summer, especially in the absence of Glastonbury.
A big year for Britart
This year involves major shows from the UK's most famous artists. David Hockney kicks things off in January with a selection of massive landscape paintings at the Royal Academy in London and around Yorkshire, his home county. Tate Modern's Damien Hirst retrospective will feature his most talked-about work, from the shark to the diamond skull. Elsewhere, exhibitions of work by Lucien Freud, Jeremy Deller and JMW Turner will stake a claim for Britain's mastery at the installation and easel – or at least our enduring flair for subversion and self-mockery.
Shakespeare in the streets and cinemas
Hammering home the point that Britain is the home of the Bard, this year will showcase almost everything he ever wrote staged at the UK-wide World Shakespeare Festival. There will be Shakespeare in the nation's living rooms, too, with Sam Mendes overseeing big-budget productions of the plays for the BBC. The hottest ticket will be Mark Rylance's return to London's Globe theatre in Twelfth Night and Richard III. He and 50 other actors also promise to ambush unsuspecting passers-by with bursts of Shakespeare on the street or tube, which should confuse a few tourists – and indeed natives. Coincidentally, Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus also hits cinemas in January.
Smoke and bells
Two Cultural Olympiad projects should reaffirm the UK's reputation for eccentricity. At 8am on 27 July, the first day of the Olympics, artist Martin Creed hopes the whole country will sound doorbells, church bells and wind chimes for his self-explanatory Work No 1197: All the Bells in a Country Rung As Quickly and As Loudly As Possible for Three Minutes. It's already been denounced by the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers, who believe that 8am is "not the right time for bell ringing". Over on Merseyside, a plume of mist will rise from Wirral Waters, created by New York-based artist Anthony McCall and visible from 60 miles away.
Classical music, cultural exchange
At the Proms in July, Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra will perform all nine of Beethoven's symphonies, starting on the first day of the Games.
Covent Garden stages Wagner's Ring Cycle in September for the first time in three years. However, the performance with most lasting impact is set to be in Scotland. Since 2008, children in the deprived estate Raploch in Stirling have received intensive tuition in a classical music education programme based on the famous Venezuelan El Sistema.
In June, El Sistema's conductor Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, will spend four days working in Raploch with their orchestra Big Noise, culminating in an unmissable performance at Stirling Castle.
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Puppet Lady Godiva takes first steps in Coventry
One of the major public arts commissions to celebrate the London Olympics is being built on a Midlands industrial estate
In Coventry Godiva has woken, taken her first cautious steps, blinked her enormous blue eyes, closed them, and gone back to sleep again.
The giant puppet of Coventry's most famous resident, is gradually taking towering shape in an industrial estate on its outskirts.
When she stands up she is already an impressive sight – her full appearance will be kept a secret until July – which presented the engineering team, led by John Owen of Coventry University and Roger Medwell of NP Aerospace, with their first major challenge.
The 10m tall puppet will be the centrepiece of a carnival in Coventry, before she sets off down the A5, seated on a horse propelled by 100 cyclists, reaching London and the Olympics a week later.
She will be far too tall to fit under any of the bridges spanning the road, and so her throne and steed have been designed to squash down to a travelling height, and then rise up when she arrives at an overnight stop.
A separate machine takes over, a confection of bits of old cars, bicycles, a school desk, the chrome head lamps from a vintage lorry, and most of a fork lift truck, when she wants to stand up and walk on feet the size of sofas.
Unlike the lady of legend, who rode naked through Coventry covered only by her flowing locks to protest against unjust taxes, this Godiva has short hair and will be spectacularly clothed.
While a river of hand printed gold silk pours across the warehouse floor to be cut into her coat, she is wearing a size 54 dressing gown — so big that the buttons are made from cloth covered beer mats.
The puppet was designed by Imagineer Productions working with local engineers, mechanics, academics, metal workers, fabric printers, and the designer Zandra Rhodes who is working with Coventry University students on creating a hand embroidered dress and iron corset.
Godiva Awakes is part of the Arts Council backed Artists Taking The Lead series of 12 major public arts commissions across the UK to celebrate the Olympics. The project already involves up to 1,000 people, including the cyclists and a choir of 150 rehearsing the music composed by Ilona Sekacz.
Medwell takes a pragmatic view of Godiva's undoubted beauty: he hopes students will look at the lovely rods and gears behind her fibreglass knees, the gorgeous ball joints of her huge wrists, and be inspired to study engineering and revive the Midlands' heritage of design and manufacturing genius.
"We've got to inspire young people to want to make things again," he said fiercely, "real skills, real things — or we're finished."
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