UFO Info Week-End

It’s an exhibition about artists and models in Britain from the mid-

It’s an exhibition about artists and models, in Britain, from the mid- 19th to the mid-20th century. Perhaps a little history will be interesting.”The Artist’s Model: Etty to Spencer” isn’t exclusively about nakedness. “Nudity in Contemporary Art” would be a funny-sounding exhibition rubric, but there would be thousands of potential candidates. However slim the pretext, you don’t go “oh, look, goodness, somebody with nothing on” And this isn’t a recent development either. The world of art is a kind of nudist colony, in which the undraped figure may be expected at any turn.
It’s true even today. The life class is hardly a thriving part of art education, and the conventions are thoroughly whacked (“a naked lady of uncertain age sitting on a kitchen chair” went a once-famous put-down, cheap but devastating).

But the time-honoured association between art and the taking-off of clothes remains unbroken. I mean that in life, in the life of this bit of the world, anyway, except in rather restricted circumstances, nakedness is a surprise. You don’t expect to meet it in the street, in shops, the workplace, most bars, or while visiting friends – and this isn’t a recent development. But in pictures, nakedness, as such, is practically never a surprise. Nakedness in pictures is like murder in fiction: a regular fixture and strangely normal. In Vasks’ music, it took the form of a creative contrast between the ugliness of the external world and an idyllic inner sanctum where man can rediscover his spirituality.His Second Symphony, lasting almost 40 minutes, exploits these contrasts on a large scale.

Against his representation of our harsh temporal existence, for which Vasks unleashes the full orchestra, he sets islands of sorrowful calm, illuminated by music of rare beauty, with long, expressive string lines and delicate woodwind writing – all with a direct emotional impact that brought the audience flocking to shake his hand in gratitude.Martin Anderson. Like so many artists with a conscience, Vasks suffered under the Soviet occupation, and was driven into the private expression of resistance. This one can expect to become a major addition to the repertoire.Proms commissions rarely enjoy an audience reaction of the sheer warmth earned the following night by the Latvian composer Peteris Vasks, now 53, when Yakov Kreizberg and his Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra gave Vasks’ Second Symphony the kind of first performance that composers dream about. Two brief choruses – settings of the Whitsun hymn “Know Ye Not” and of Psalm 42 – showed the nobility and strength of Tobias’s post-Brahmsian language.

Maybe one day the Proms will give us his masterpiece, the oratorio The Mission of Jonah. The market will need some softening up first, and these powerful miniatures made an obvious starting-point.
At the centre of Jarvi’s concert was Aerial, the new trumpet concerto by HK Gruber, just the mixture of sly wit and Austrian obliquity you would expect from this archetypically Viennese composer – and a metrical nightmare for the conductor, Jarvi meticulously beating Gruber’s wrong-footing seven- beat bars while the soloist, Hakan Hardenberger, swept effortlessly through the orchestra’s kaleidoscopic textures. Two cheers to the performance, though: want of brightness in the choral sound and lagging tempi took away some of the fizz. Where Jarvi scored unequivocally was with a first hearing in Britain of music by his fellow Estonian, Rudolf Tobias, still the greatest Estonian composer, who died in 1918 aged 45. Those melodies should be part of everyone’s armoury of tunes, but the work is heard so rarely that we don’t get a chance to start whistling them – so three cheers to the Proms for giving it an outing.

It’s one of those works that makes your soul leap; the life-affirming quality that informs all of Nielsen’s music springs from every bar. Neeme Jarvi broke the ice with Springtime on Funen, an enchanting cantata that dances with buoyant, folklike melody as Nielsen recalls his country childhood. THE PROMS took a splash in northern waters this weekend, beginning with the first two pieces of this year’s featured composer, the Dane Carl Nielsen. But deciding to go public was also an admission that they had failed to trace the bullet’s owner. The timing of the press conference was also interesting; it neatly took the sting from criticism in that evening’s Tonight With Trevor McDonald that Scotland Yard had failed to give regular press briefings.But if the Dando case is to be solved, it looks increasingly as if the breakthrough may come via a member of the public reading a newspaper or watching television, rather than by a great feat of detection.The writer is crime correspondent of `The Independent’. One major city force in England has a virtual “no comment” policy on any issue.And so we come to last Thursday’s news conference. In one sense the police were using one of their few trump cards; the indentations on the cartridge made headline news.