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TUESDAY NIGHT
* This weekend the Manchester Art Gallery re-opens after a £35 million renovation. The available gallery space has doubled and displays a permanent collection which includes Henry Moore's Mother and Child and works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Pisssaro, Turner, Gainsborough, Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud. A new gallery for special exhibitions at the top of the gallery opens with Inhale / Exhale by Michael Craig-Martin in which huge representations of everyday objects are painted on the wall as if thrown from a canvas opposite.
Manchester Art Gallery opens Saturday May 25. Michael Craig Martin's Inhale/Exhale is on show until June 30.
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* A reviewer of a new CD of Elgar's 2nd Symphony pointed out that the recording was nine and a half minutes longer than the version performed under Elgar himself in 1927. Conversely, opponents of the move towards performances of Beethoven and other composers on period instruments often complain that these interpretations move at too great a pace. Front Row looked at the problem of contemporary tempi, beginning with examples of orchestras two-timing Elgar
Elgar's Symphony No 2 conducted by Sir Colin Davis is on the LSO Live label.
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* The best-selling American writer and scientist Stephen Jay Gould died of cancer yesterday aged 60 (20 May 2002). A noted populariser of geology, palæontology and evolutionary theory in books including The Panda's Thumb and Wonderful Life, he also represented a personal defiance of biology. Diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of 40, he outlived his doctors' worse predictions by 20 years. To talk about the life and work of Stephen Jay Gould, Front Row was joined by the geneticist and writer Professor Steve Jones.
Gould's most recent books were Rock Of Ages and The Structure Of Evolutionary Theory.
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* Because advertisers are keen to attract the young television is often accused of ignoring the old. But - either because of coincidence or guilt - two programmes on Channel 4 this week address the issue of TV and the elderly. In Old, award-winning documentary makers Kate Blewitt and Brian Woods focus on the financial and psychological OAPs in Britain. And in Working With Dinosaurs people take on jobs for which they are officially regarded as too old.
Working with Dinosaurs is at 8.00pm on Channel 4 on 21 May Old is on the same channel at 9.00pm on 23 May.
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* Reports that the Duchess Of York plans to write a series of children's books about Little Red - a charity doll she popularised - have brought complaints from groups representing the victims of the September 11th atrocities. The controversy is because the doll became associated with what Americans call 9/11 after one of the toys was found in the rubble of the World Trade Center. Because the Duchess has indicated that she will receive personal royalties from the books, she has been criticised for benefiting from tragedy. Yet newspapers and broadcasters have not been similarly censured. Is it ethically wrong for writers to make money from stories linked to September 11th?
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ON WEDNESDAY'S PROGRAMME
Francine Stock will be talking to the novelist Linda Grant, reviewing a film about the life of the painter Jackson Pollock and looking at translating French into English with the writers Christopher Hampton and Julian Barnes
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RELATED LINKS
Manchester Art Gallery - official website
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