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Future generations of film historians should adore the Harry Potter series. Featuring the same core cast in the same few settings, the eight movies provide an unrivalled chance to play compare-and-contrast. In essence, episodes two to eight are all remakes of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” (2001). Students of digital effects will be able to note how those house elves were a little more lifelike on every outing. Trainee fashion gurus can catalogue a decade of adjustments to Harry’s school uniform, while proponents of the auteur theory can measure the impact of four different directors on almost identical material.  read more »

With its haut-boho vibe, the Port Eliot Festival in Cornwall has become one of Britain’s most colourful artistic gatherings. Run by the Earl and Countess of St Germans, with a medieval priory and a Humphrey Repton park as its backdrop, it finds room for wild swimming, cookery demos, a fashion zone and a flower show alongside cultish bands such as British Sea Power.

New this year is an outdoor cinema with Martin Scorsese choosing a double bill each night at dusk, plus a Poetry Takeaway offering “free, made-to-order” poems. The authors appearing include Edmund de Waal, A.C. Grayling, Gillian Slovo and the writers of “Peep Show”, while Martin Parr holds an instant photography exhibition. “We wanted to create a place where anything goes,” says Catherine St Germans, once a columnist on this magazine. “We can’t offer artists a lot of money, but we can offer carte blanche—which is a rare thing in this day and age. We were told that to succeed a festival must be either literary or musical, but that’s proved to be wrong.” 

Port Eliot Festival  July 21st to 24th 

~ ANTHONY GARDNER

Anne-Sophie Mutter’s career as a violinist has been governed by the guru-pupil principle. In 1976, as a teenager, she was taken under the wing of Herbert von Karajan; in 1997, she created her own foundation, which nurtures brilliant young string players from all over the world.

The best of the current bunch will be at the Verbier Festival (July 27th) as Mutters Virtuosi, playing both on their own and with Mutter herself. She also gives a Prom at the Albert Hall, London, on September 6th, and in the winter she will have her own mini-season at the Barbican, joining the LSO to perform works including one written for her by Sofia Gubaidulina and another by the man she calls her “in-house composer”, André Previn. Which is a sweet way of saying that she was until recently the fifth Mrs Previn. Before that she had been married to a lawyer (who died of cancer) much older than herself: journalists have long feasted like vultures on her dramatic private life. Hence her hatred of press intrusiveness and her rigid control of her own publicity. But that control is constitutional, and underpins her commanding authority on stage. Her artistry, whether in Mozart and Beethoven or in the music of the contemporary composers she champions, is perfection incarnate: this youthful 48-year-old seems to live in a permanent golden age.

Verbier Festival Switzerland, July 15th to 31st.

It has become a trend for big exhibitions to feature more than one artist, so they sound like arty advertising agencies—"Matisse Picasso", "Turner Whistler Monet", "Duchamp Man Ray Picabia". Mostly the artists shared techniques or palettes, schools or circles. Not so the latest combo: Twombly and Poussin.

One is an American abstract expressionist, the other a classical French painter, and three centuries separate them. The paintings of Nicolas Poussin are luxuriously detailed, with a rich Titian-like intimacy (above: Rinaldo and Armida, c.1630). Cy Twombly, who died on July 5th, aged 83, painted work that is bold, energetic and challenging. So why put them together?

Well, both moved to Rome at 30 or so, and spent most of their lives there. And Twombly did once say, I would have liked to have been Poussin. If the curators are placing a lot of weight on that line, these two giants do have some things in common. Both are gripped by classical myth, Renaissance painting and Arcadia; both have painted the four seasons. Poussins work is allegorical, full of intellectual rigour, while Twomblys is textual, a kind of écriture

This exhibition, one of a series marking Dulwich's bicentenary, manages to find six mutual themes. Whether it answers the niggling doubts will be fascinating to see.  read more »

Summer means festivals, and Britain does them very well. Glastonbury (Somerset, June 24th to 26th) is still the big one, and it is taking a break next year, so all the more reason to follow it on the BBC. It has hefty headliners—U2, Coldplay and Beyoncé (right), plus the headline-worthy Elbow—supported by the usual cornucopia. This may be the first bill to embrace Paul Simon and Big Boi, Robyn Hitchcock and Robyn the Swedish Madonna, plus Jimmy Cliff and Rastamouse.

Latitude (Suffolk, July 15th to 17th) has less wattage—headliners are the brooding The National, the likeable Paolo Nutini and the flimsy Suede—but its lower ranks are teeming with talent. Look out for theatrical pop from Anna Calvi, warm soul from The Duke & The King, and many distinguished authors, all struggling to find the right outfit.  read more »

Trying to define a theatre’s policy is usually like nailing jam to a wall, but the Tricycle’s aim in life is clear: it is to turn punters into citizens.

Its course was set 27 years ago with the arrival of its artistic director Nicolas Kent, one of theatre’s unsung heroes, forfeiting celebrity by sticking to a chosen path. The son of a German-Jewish button merchant, Kent was on to colour-blind casting as a Cambridge undergraduate, and put on his first verbatim text at the Oxford Playhouse in the 1970s—a legally risky staging of the “Romans in Britain” obscenity trial. Also at Oxford, he directed “Playboy of the West Indies”, Mustapha Matura’s Trinidadian reworking of J.M. Synge’s comedy, which became an early success at the Tricycle, together with “The Great White Hope”, Howard Sackler’s tragic portrait of the heavyweight champion Jack Johnson.  read more »

When Carl Davis premiered his orchestral score for Abel Gance’s restored silent epic “Napoléon” in 1980, few in the audience knew they were assisting at the birth of an art form. Until then, silent films meant club performances with piano accompaniment; the silent classics Davis went on to score—Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin—laid the foundations for a global industry.

Now Davis is celebrating his 75th birthday with a burst of conducting engagements in Europe, culminating in a premiere of his symphonic work “Ballade for Cello”, alongside Chaplin’s seldom screened “The Pilgrim”. This is just one facet of this amiable New Yorker’s productivity. He is a prolific composer for ballet, feature films and television: his scores have done for the small screen what Prokofiev and Shostakovich did for the big one. And the secret behind the showmanship is an incorruptible seriousness.

But he may still endure the fate of the composer whose work he celebrated with his soundtrack for Mike Leigh’s film “Topsy-Turvy”: Arthur Sullivan too wrote symphonies, but fun is what he’s remembered for.

Chaplin’s The Pilgrim/Ballade for Cello  Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, April 30th

~ MICHAEL CHURCH

It’s very Nineties, this story of attractive, educated young people sharing a house and falling in love. Friends and lovers, lovers and friends, students and interns. It’s as much a staple of the middle-class youth experience in the West as gap year. The lucky end of middle-class, granted, but still widely identified with, and—as screen fiction—universally watched.

The on-off story of Prince William and Kate Middleton, set against delicious, isolated St Andrews and Anglesey, is very Richard Curtis. His friends, her friends, their friends, in all their twenty-something configurations. His nights out, their nights in, snow and roaring log fires. The absolute certainty that the prince has seen Miss Middleton in her nightie.

All this is a long way from the weirdness of previous royal matings, and from the Euro-royal style, whereby the princesses’ PT-instructor boyfriends get promoted to princes overnight and then dragged into that Hello! magazine Ruritanian fantasy of massed sash-wearing. If the couple’s back-story allows the rom-com audience to identify with them (and what a shrewd deal with the press it was that allowed the affair to develop in private), they’ve started well. But since, apparently, one in ten St Andrews students marry each other, there’s something we need to know: what happened to the other pair in that house? 

The royal wedding  Westminster Abbey, London, April 29th, and live on a news channel near you. 

~ PETER YORK

Being a Paul Simon fan can be a frustrating business. The bubbling natural talent that brought forth nine LPs in 11 years from 1964, either with Art Garfunkel or solo, long ago slowed to a trickle: Simon’s going rate now is about two albums a decade. But they are always rewarding, and here he comes again, nipping in before his 70th birthday with another one: “So Beautiful or So What”. He has reached the stage of harking back. The co-producer is Phil Ramone, who worked on many Simon classics of the Seventies. The sound is crisp and guitar-led, with a tinge of the gleaming Afro-pop of “Graceland”. The tunes are artful. And the lyrics, always philosophical, now have rhymes again, after a period in which Simon felt rhyming was dated. “Then a voice from above / Sugarcoated with love / Said ‘let us begin’,” he sings on “The Afterlife”. It may be the best song on the subject since Talking Heads’ “Heaven” in 1979.

So Beautiful or So What  will be released over the summer.

~ TIM DE LISLE

In the Oscars of the art world, Manet would prove an ideal nominee for Artist in a Leading Role. Like many Hollywood hotshots, he led a theatrical private life fuelled by outlandish affairs. His colleagues admired him but they were envious of his public success. He was rebellious and rejected long before he was accepted. He was well groomed, well known and savvy, while always remaining something of an enigma.

Manet is widely described as the father of the Impressionists, yet he obstinately kept his distance from his classmates, Renoir, Sisley, Monet and Degas. He refused to exhibit with them in order to pursue his own move towards modernity.

Now he is getting an even bigger credit: the Musée d’Orsay’s forthcoming show, his first big one in France since 1983, is called “Manet, the Man who Invented Modern Art”. It  is more than a formulaic retrospective. Lately our understanding of French painting from 1840 to 1880 has come on leaps and bounds. It has been refined and liberated and a new image of Manet and his peers has emerged. This show is structured around a set of historical themes. It focuses on the teaching of Thomas Couture, the influence and support of Baudelaire and Manet’s relationships with Berthe Morisot and Eva Gonzalès.  read more »