MARCH ARTS DIARY

A monthly selection of forthcoming events recommended by The Spectator's regular critics

OPERA

La Favorite, New Theatre, Cardiff (0222 394844), 6 March, then touring. Welsh National Opera's interesting choice of one of Donizetti's more refined works. Set in 14th-century Spain, it centres on the plight of the mysterious Leonor, secret mistress to the King of Castile. Bernadette Cullen sings the title role, Carlo Rizzi conducts.

La Damnation de Faust, Covent Garden (071 240 1200), from 8 March. More oratorio than opera, perhaps, but still a superbly vivid dramatic scenario, fired by some of Berlioz's most glowing and inspirational melodies. Samuel Ramey, Olga Borodina and Jerry Hadley lead a strong cast, and Berlioz expert Sir Colin Davis conducts; Harry Kupfer produces.

Cosl fan tutte, English Touring Opera (071 820 1131), touring Barnstaple, Crawley, Brighton, Poole and Swindon. The great potential interest of this production of Mozart's sublime tragi-comedy will be the staging of Clare Venables, whose brilliant Albert Herring for this company was so admired last year. Ivor Bolton conducts a young cast.

Rupert Christiansen

CINEMA

Sally Potter's adaptation of Virginia Woolf s Orlando (PG), starring Tilda Swinton, opens in London on 12 March.

Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein is a tongue-in-cheek film biography concentrating mostly on years spent at Cambridge with Bertrand Russell, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Maynard Keynes.

Directed by Danny De Vito, Hoffa stars Jack Nicolson as Teamsters Union boss Jimmy Hoffa.

The National Film Theatre starts a programme of films by the French illusionist Georges Melies, including Les 400 Farces du Diable and the famous Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902), in which a spaceship crashes into the eye of a pastry-faced moon.

Vanessa Letts

EXHIBITIONS

W.H. Paton 1828-1895, Bourne Fine Art, Edinburgh, till 13 March. Prolific Scottish landscapist influenced by Pre-Raphaelites luckily not to excess.

Susanna Solano, Whitechapel, El, from 12 March. Grim works by Spanish sculptor, oddly evocative of indoor air-raid shelters from the last war.

Tony O'Malley: Works from the 1960s, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, till 21 March. Poetic but unstructured paintings by St Ives's resident Irishman.

Adrian Berg: A Sense of Place, Concourse Gallery, Barbican Centre, EC2, from 8 March. Lurid landscapist famous for renditions of

Regent's Park. Giles Auty

GARDENS

The Philadelphia Flower Show, probably the nearest thing there is to a New World 'Chelsea', is to be held this year from 7 to 14 March at the Philadelphia Civic Center, 34th Street and Civic Center Boulevard. One of the major attractions is a display staged by the National Trust for Scotland, which includes a replica of the parterre at Pitmedden. Show hours are Sunday, 10-6, other days 10-9.30. Tickets cost $11.50; $5.75 for children.

Ursula Buchan

CRAFTS

Clive Bowen: Ceramics, Crafts Council Sbop, V & A, from 9 March. Handsome wood-fired slip- decoratedoearthenware — an imaginative continuation of the country pottery tradition.

Also at the V & A, Ceramic Contemporaries: New Work by Young Ceramicists, 10-31 March. Over 200 works by young potters fresh from arts school. Be generous- spirited.

'skaiehund; 1992 by Craig Mitchell

Ain't We Got Fun: Textiles from the 1920s, Foyer Galleries, Royal Festival Hall, from 11 March. Awful title but this charts a high point in textile design — inspired by African and Oriental art and the shapes and activities of modern life.

Ideal Homes, Design Museum, from 9 March. Appraisal of the past 70 Ideal Home Exhibitions for an overview of popular design and architecture this century.

Tanya Harrod

DANCE

Laurie Booth & Company, Queen Elizabeth Hall (071 928 8800), 27 and 28 March. New show, River Run, created in collaboration with sculptor Anish Kapoor and sound artist Hans Peter Kuhn.

The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs, Tramway, Glasgow (041 227 5511), 17-21 March; Haymarket Theatre, Leicester (0533 539797), 22 March. Lea Anderson's sister and brother troupes join forces for Precious,

Anderson's latest work, inspired by the processes of alchemy.

Roses, Granby Halls, Leicester (0533 554854), 19 and 20 March. UK premiere of Erts, a piece for 13 dancers created by Flemish choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and set to music by Beethoven, Webern and Schnittke.

Sophie Constanti

POP MUSIC

Boney M, touring, 23 March-13 April. As the Seventies nostalgia boom rolls on, even the creakiest old disco groups are emerging from obscurity to breach all previously agreed boundaries of taste and quality. No one else has ever written a lyric quite like 'Ra-ra- Rasputin, Russia's greatest love machine', so for historical reasons alone their return is welcomed.

Also recommended: Eric Clapton , Royal Albert Hall, 1-3, 5-7 March; the very excellent Tasmin Archer, touring, till 12 March; a revivified Sting, Royal Albert Hall, 8, 9 March; and, needless to say, Barry Manilow, Royal Albert Hall, 27-30 March, 1-4 April.

Marcus Berkmann

THEATRE

Crazy for You, Prince Edward (071 734 8951), 3 March. The old 1930s Gershwin Girl Crazy made over into a new Broadway hit.

The Importance of Being Earnest, Aldwych (071 836 6404), 9 March. Maggie Smith back in the West End for the first time in five years and her first Lady Bracknell.

Chatsky, Almeida (071 359 4404), 16 March. Anthony Burgess's new verse translation of one of Russia's most popular 19th-century satires. With Dinsdale Landen, Jemma Redgrave, Colin Firth.

City of Angels, Prince of Wales (071 839 5972), 30 March. From New York, the best of the new Broadway musicals of the Nineties, set in film- noir Los Angeles after the war. Michael Blakemore directs.

Sheridan Morley

MUSIC

All four of Tippett's symphonies are to be given for the first time as a series, played by the BBC SO under Andrew Davis at the Barbican Hall on 2, 9, 19 and 23 March. Alongside the symphones will be featured the first four piano concertos of Beethoven, to whom Tippett has always paid tribute as the leading influence on his symphonic writing.

Also in the Barbican Hall this month is The Yuri Bashmet Series, featuring the Russian viola player: on 25 March he will play the Bartok and Schnittke concertos and on 28 March the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante and the Walton Concerto. Peter Phillips