Divvying up arts pie on screen

By WILLIAM DART

Despite a few operatic offerings on Good Friday, the arts are not well served on free-to-air television.

The new Arts Channel, which was free-to-air last month and is now available for $2.95 a week, means to put things right.

Now there seems to be only one question to be answered: how can we, to rework the words of the great Abraham Lincoln, please all of the people all of the time?

Some may want wall-to-wall opera and ballet. I'd say "no thanks" if there were many items like the Bolshoi's 1991 Spartacus, 132 minutes of it, which means a lot of Khachaturian in one sitting. Roman warriors hop-skip-and-goose-stepping like refugees from a Mel Brooks movie are scant compensation.

Dance fares better in Adrian Maben's documentary on the Royal Ballet of Cambodia, revealing young dancers with the grace of centuries who are still hip to walkman culture.

Opera is at its best in David Pountney's postmodern Macbeth with a Lady Macbeth in Paoletta Marrocu to chill the soul; or the Baroque fancies of Rameau's Les Boreades, combining offbeat dancing, elegant music and more autumn leaves than you'd see in 10 Douglas Sirk movies.

Some documentaries afford backstage revelations. In Sing Faster, San Francisco Opera stagehands get the company's Ring rolling and sum it up as 17 hours of singing before the Rhinemaidens get their gold back. In general the American documentaries about music making (Orpheus in the Businessworld, Playing for Real) are enlightening.

You might squirm when Bach around the World announces musicians from the US to Japan and everywhere between, but you're grateful for a few brief moments of cellist Anner Bylsma. Perhaps, you decide, it's better to stay in the one setting and let oneself be swept away by the obvious exhilaration of the Berlin Philharmonic musicians as they tackle Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique under Mariss Jansons.

Music often irritates me when relegated to the background. Bach provides the main source of supply for Robert Gardner's Elie Wiesel: First Person Singular, but the Italian Concerto, combined with Auschwitz photographs and William Hurt reading the Jewish writer's texts makes for cultural overload.

Todd Boekelheide's sub-Copland effusions are a liability in Coming to Light, Anne Peacemaker's introduction to the work of Edward Curtis photographing America's First Nations.

Some of the visual arts programmes lecture us - with Van Gogh and Monet it feels like a test is coming later in the week - but Adrian Maben's Hieronymous Bosch: The Delights of Hell enjoys itself more. Present-day carnivals parallel the painter's bizarre visions and, for trivia enthusiasts, it is revealed at one point that Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands is a descendant of the painter. (I spend the rest of that scene trying to work out how the monarch, in her brilliant cornflower blue outfit, might blend into a Bosch vision.) Silly? Well not half as daft as the Canadian Requiem for Fanny, featuring Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn in passionate pas de deux, dancing to a string quartet out on the patio.

Warm fuzzies are always welcome when one meets the likes of the Amato Opera Company in its tiny theatre, serving pasta and meatballs between Puccini and Verdi. In another genre, Melanie McDaniel's film about jazz singer Jimmy Scott documents his struggles against discrimination, and is chock-full of sharp and uncredited interviews (the snappiest has Ruth Brown in her kitchen relating the irony that she and her colleagues had to accept crumbs from the musical loaf that they themselves had baked).

I encounter two local offerings. A stilted publicity short for the Auckland Philharmonia includes 30 precious seconds of Patricia Wright and Helen Medlyn camping it up in Rossini's Cat Duet. I immediately want to see the whole thing.

The next day Michael Hurst and George Henare discuss the art of Goldie as a preview for the ATC production of Peter Hawes' play. After a few minutes of "art" it's payback time, with Hurst spieling for the sponsor, agency style, with the skill of a seasoned actor.

Our artists need the likes of the European and American film-makers to catch their art and tell their stories. A platform is needed and perhaps, not too far away, the Arts Channel might just be that.