Showtime

Being in London for two nights gave us plenty of time to see exhibitions (on Friday). First, we went to Cork Street, to look at the amazing "hyperphotos" by Jean-François Rauzier. The best of these were landscapes with a difference - a seamless stitching together of many images of extreme detail to form a large-scale composition. I was less convinced by the stage-set interiors, especially those with women lying (dead, one supposed) in the foreground. Not my sort of photography, but worth a visit.

On to a packed Royal Academy, the courtyard of which at present sees Reynolds confronting a massive array of silver profiteroles, the work of Anish Kapoor. What a delightful contrast to the drear Anthony Caro sculpture, dominating that space on my last visit!

I didn't in fact get to the big Kapoor show inside, which Caroline much enjoyed. Instead, I lingered over the three sculptors on display in the Sackler Wing, Gill, Epstein and the hard-to-pronounce Gaudier-Brzeska. Of the three, I particularly admired Gaudier-Brzeska's work. Though his life was the shortest, his work seemed the most radical.

From "Wild Thing" I moved on to "Hard Rain" on the railings at St Martin's-in-the-Fields. This is an extremely striking and accessible series of photographs to illustrate the words of the Dylan song, and accompany the build-up to Copenhagen. Well done St Martin's, which, in its much-transformed state, as I felt on a previous visit is fast becoming a centre of vision for this most central point in the West End.

Finally, to the National Gallery for "The Sacred Made Real". I had been urged to visit this show by a number of different people, and wish I'd left more time for it: though it's not a large exhibition, the work is of great intensity, beautifully curated and lit. Such a contrast between Gill's attenuated stone Christ Crucified at the Academy in the morning, and the painted wooden images here!

As always for me, the pieces by Velázquez seemed to shine out, and in particular Mother Geronimo. What a master!

Lost in translation

Opera in English - save when that's the composer's language - perturbs me. The more so now that surtitles have become commonplace. Caroline and I were at the London Coliseum on Monday. Some magnificent orchestral playing - and singing, from principals in demand to sing their roles the world over. Was it "The Knight of the Rose" we saw? No. According to the programme, and as common sense dictates, it was Der Rosenkavalier. So why make someone as distinguished as a Sarah Connolly or a John Tomlinson learn their roles in English, rather than letting them and the rest of the cast sing in the original German? Is it really so as to make opera more accessible? We were very kindly given tickets, but with prices as they are, I really doubt whether the language factor is what brings a wider range of the public in. (Does the film industry dub foreign films? No, it surtitles them.) Is it so as to draw a line between ENO and Covent Garden? Why not just allow them to compete on musical and dramatic excellence? It can't surely be anything to do with the name "English National Opera"! Do Welsh National sing in Welsh? The late Alan Blyth's essay in the ENO programme book itself squishes any argument for performing Der Rosenkavalier in English: Hofmannsthal sets "standards of... literary excellence never before achieved... The text was written in an imaginary parlance... something inevitably lost in translation."

On the way to the Coliseum, we popped in to the recently reopened St Martin-in-the-Fields. Those short-listed for the commission for a new East window were asked to "animate the light" by a work which harmonised with the clear glass of the other church windows. I hope my photograph illustrates how nothing seems to have been lost by Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary in translating this brief.