Might this be a defining artistic collaboration of the year? Or the next decade? The squad of theatrical innovators marching off with Wagner's tragedy includes director Peter Sellars, Los Angeles Philharmonic musical director Eda Pekka Salonen, the new artistic director of the Paris Opera, Gerard Mortier, and the video artist Bill Viola. When, at the end of last year, Sellars launched the opera in workshop form with the LA Philharmonic, LA Times critic Mark Swed remarked: "If the 'Tristan Project' is not the greatest moment in the orchestra's history, I can't imagine what was." Sellars plans to develop his "project" over the next ten years as an exploration into desire, identity and consciousness. No concept seems too high; no risk of hubris is being shunned. As set designer for Tristan und Isolde, Bill Viola is making what is surely the longest music video ever. It will be a stage set in constant motion, drawing imagery equally from German romantic painting and haunting abstracts—a tumultuous vision of crashing waves, moonlit trees, the lovers merging into silvery ether and walls of flame, all to be played out on an enormous suspended screen. The opera premieres in full in Paris on 12th April. Could be worth a wee peek.
The Baltic in pieces
Remember the City of London's rather grand Baltic Exchange building, damaged by an IRA bomb in 1992? Well, it's for sale—and for only £750,000. But there's a catch. It will need reconstructing from the pieces, currently in crates in a Canterbury barn. This could be pricey; it cost £4m to dismantle it. The buyer would also need somewhere to put it; its old site being taken up by Norman Foster's erotic gherkin. Still, the pieces are in pretty good nick; only the foundations were damaged by the IRA. Heritage consultants Pavilions of Splendour are marketing it as "perfect for phenomenally wealthy jigsaw enthusiasts" and hoping to find a rescuer for the 1903 building. "It could be reconstructed," they say. "Bill Gates could put it in his back garden and have it as a folly." If Mr Microsoft did buy it, he would have no heritage quangos cramping his style; the building is no longer listed, because officially it no longer exists. He could reassemble it any way he wished.
And more pieces
It's obviously in the air, this business of selling things in bits. Turner prize-nominated artist Tomoko Takahashi closes her show at the Serpentine Gallery on 10th April with a public dismantling when members of the public will be invited to take away pieces of the work. But since this is a monumental pile of junk, over 7,000 objects cadged from skips, toy libraries and the royal parks storage depot, it's not quite as grand as parcelling out the Baltic.
David Mitchell: Is the Richard & Judy effect bigger than a Booker?
A big thumbs up for the Bath literature festival: lovely town, good line-up, and the authors buy you lunch. Come again? Well, OK, maybe only David Mitchell does. After his event at the festival, the author of Cloud Atlas whipped out the plastic in All Bar One. "Peace," spake Mitchell, hushing the protests (for he's quite prophet-like), "this is on Richard and Judy." The week before, Cloud Atlas had been the focus of Richard and Judy's book club, British daytime television's emulation of Oprah Winfrey's sales-boosting idea. Within a week, Mitchell's complex colossus of a novel had overtaken Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code in Waterstones, gone from number seven to number two on Amazon, and hopped from number ten to number five on the Sunday Times bestseller list. While Mitchell's earlier Man Booker-shortlisted novel Number9Dream sold 30,000 copies in paperback, 150,000 copies of Cloud Atlas went out to bookshops. It can't have hurt that it was Mitchell's second Booker nomination. But an interesting test is imminent. The actual winner, Alan Hollinghurst's Line of Beauty, is out in paperback on 2nd April. If that doesn't catch up with Cloud Atlas, might it mean that the Richard and Judy treatment is bigger than the Booker?
