Music and Opera

Our curation of music and opera reviews

Thursday

Rupert Christiansen

A spectacular failure: Royal Ballet’s MaddAddam reviewed

Adapting ballets out of plot-heavy novels set in fantasy locations and populated with multiple characters is a rubbish idea. The profound truth of such a proposal is forcefully borne out by the wretched muddle of Wayne McGregor’s MaddAddam, an over-inflated farrago drawn from a triptych of visionary fictions by Margaret Atwood. McGregor – hugely talented and energetic as he is – needs to calm down and slow down and think small Where to start? Apocalyptic themes – political, environmental and ‘societal’ – are evoked in images and spoken narration without McGregor having any means in his hyperactive choreographic vocabulary to translate them meaningfully into dance. Only those who are already

Graeme Thomson

What a remarkably bad electric guitar player Bob Dylan is

Finally, a taste of the authentic Bob Dylan live experience. On the two previous occasions that I’ve seen Dylan, in the early 2000s and again two years ago, he was disappointingly well-behaved for a man with a reputation for operating a scorched-earth policy towards his catalogue. Once upon a time, seeing Dylan live was a high-wire activity. Those days are long gone, but on the second night of two shows in Edinburgh, some little wildness crept back in. During the opening pair of songs, which were gradually revealed to be on nodding terms with ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’, it was like watching an old bar

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Dazzling: Marc-André Hamelin’s Hammerklavier

Grade: A When Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata was published in 1818, pianists were confronted with a mixture of ‘demonic energy and a torrent of dissonances’, as Charles Rosen put it. Only the most freakishly gifted virtuosos could tackle it. The first recording was by Artur Schnabel, whose heroic assault on the finale sent wrong notes scattering in all directions. Today, technique has improved so dramatically that most students can steer Beethoven’s juggernaut without obvious mishaps. Even so, some great masters wait decades before taking the plunge. In this sonata above all, getting the notes in the right order is no guarantee that you have anything to say. Marc-André Hamelin is now

Wednesday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Why is Fauré not more celebrated?

It is 100 years since the death of Gabriel Fauré, a composer whose spellbinding romantic tunes emerge from harmonies and rhythms that nudge us towards the future. No other composer deploys such subversive mastery of the conventions of French music: again and again, if we look underneath the arches of his melodies, we find ambiguous chromatic shifts or disorientating spiralling arpeggios. For some critics, the musical argument of Fauré’s late chamber work is so understated it evaporates And – see above – no other French composer is so hard to describe without falling into a purple puddle. I’ve already used up spellbinding, subversive and ambiguous, but that still leaves subtle,

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A flop: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, at Ambassadors Theatre, reviewed

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button carries a strap-line, ‘an unordinary musical’. Perhaps the word ‘extraordinary’ is simply too banal to capture the outstanding qualities of this unique show. The year is 1918 and a miraculous birth occurs in a remote Cornish fishing village. The newborn is not a baby but an adult pensioner, Benjamin, who emerges from the  womb wearing a three-piece suit, a pair of spectacles and a bowler hat. His shame-faced mother hastens away from the family home and takes a walk along the cliffs, which results in her death. Suicide, perhaps. And Benjamin’s angry father locks him in the attic and refuses to let him out.

Richard Bratby

Fails to ignite: Royal Opera’s Tales of Hoffmann reviewed

I couldn’t love anyone who didn’t love Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. Everything – everything – is stacked against this opera. Offenbach left the score unfinished when he died, tormented with gout and pilloried by bores, at the age of 61. Some of its best-loved numbers were upcycled from his earlier hits, and at least one isn’t by him at all. Yet somehow, it lives. More than that, it soars: a tale of disillusion that glows with wonder and hope; a hymn to the sweetness of life and the miracle of art, held together against all logic by the sheer charisma of a composer who shot for the moon and

Deborah Ross

Is it meant to be a comedy? Gladiator II reviewed

It’s nearly 25 years since Ridley Scott’s Gladiator came out and you’ve probably been wondering what happened to the little boy in that film. I know I have. I can’t say it’s kept me up at night, but at the back of my mind it’s always been: where is Lucius, son of Maximus, nowus? Well, Lucius, son of Maximus, is nowus a strapping lad with thighs of steel who has been forced to become a gladiator and fight for his life just like his pop. This film borrows heavily from the first instalment. True, it does have some new elements. It has Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington, monstrous man-eating baboons, sharks,

Michael Hann

Perfectly imperfect: Evan Dando, at Islington Assembly Hall, reviewed

‘Can I have a photo with you, please?’ It’s the most embarrassing question you can ask of someone you’re interviewing. But I had to. Not only because Evan Dando is one of my favourite songwriters. But also – vainly – because years of on-off drug addiction (mostly on) mean Dando is no longer quite the beautiful young man he was when he became famous in the early 1990s. Back then, I’d have looked like a troll standing next to him. Now, not so much. It was a night of beautiful imperfection – the kind that feels truer than a thousand arena shows He still, however, looks better than he has

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Goodbye to MC5, the holiest of rock’s holy cows

Grade: D+ Ah, the original Linkin Park, except even more spavined. MC5 came outta Detroit in the mid 1960s and their shrieking blues metal ur-punk was afforded unnecessary respect because of their agitprop politics. Sucking up to the Black Panthers and running a bit foul of the law can do wonders for a slightly below-average blues band whose songs had energy and attitude – but nothing else. Here they are, back with their first studio album in 53 years: thanks for the merciful interregnum, if nothing else. When I say ‘they’, I mean the half-decent guitarist Wayne Kramer and, on one or two tracks, their original drummer, Dennis Thompson. Both

Wednesday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

An audacious and daredevil band: the Surfrajettes reviewed

For most people – once Brian Wilson had turned his back on the sea and started off down the lonely road to genius – surf music means either (or both) of two things: the Surfaris’ ‘Wipeout’ or Dick Dale’s ‘Misirlou’. Punchy, propulsive tunes, in other words, that make you feel like you’re on your way to the toughest party in town, or at least very much on your way to something – always driving forward, fast. The Surfrajettes are like that; their version of the Spice Girls’ ‘Spice Up Your Life’ is a revelation, turning an inoffensive (if admittedly banging) global dancefloor-filler into something that could plausibly soundtrack a rumble

Richard Bratby

One beauty – one turkey: Wexford Festival Opera reviewed

‘Theatre within Theatre’ was the theme of the 2024 Wexford Festival and with Sir Charles Villiers Stanford’s The Critic, that’s exactly what you get. Conor Hanratty’s production showed the interior of an 18th-century theatre, viewed from the stage. In the second act it flipped around to reveal the audience’s perspective. Were we now the audience? Clearly we were; which was awkward because where does that leave a critic? Obviously, one can’t be the critic because there’s already one on stage (the clue’s in the title), and as it turns out, The Critic isn’t really about critics, at all. Whatever – you get the picture. It’s all very meta; and more

Graeme Thomson

Terrifically good value: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds reviewed

A few years ago, I received an early morning phone call from Nick Cave’s former PR, berating me for not crediting his band the Bad Seeds in an album review. She was quite right. As Cave says, with a hint of paternal pride, during this powerhouse Glasgow show: ‘This band can do anything.’ It’s not just that the Bad Seeds’s task ranges from delicately enhancing the most nakedly exposed ballads to unleashing a raging firestorm of noise. It’s that supporting a performer as mercurial as Cave takes oodles of nous and empathy. He’s a wild thing, but they never once lose him. Cave brings to mind that volatile drunk left

Richard Bratby

The striking musical world of Welsh composer Grace Williams

Grade: A- There are neglected composers, and then there are Welsh composers. It’s just a question of geography. When Grace Williams’s Fairest of Stars was played at the Proms a few years back, it was hailed as a major rediscovery. That raised a few eyebrows in the Principality, where her music has long been standard repertoire. I grew up 20 minutes from the border and I’d played three of her orchestral works before I turned 30. Still, there’s always more to discover, and this new disc breaks over you with the force of a Snowdonia rainstorm. The BBC Philharmonic lives up to its reputation as the most brilliant of the

Friday

Max L. Feldman

How Arnold Schoenberg became the poster boy for the Viennese cultural-heritage industrial complex

Despite its prestige, Vienna can seem parochial. This is as true today as it was during its turn-of-the-century golden age, when it incubated a generous welfare state – that is still with us – and all those Austro-Hungarian Empire weirdos: glowering hypnotist astrologers in full metal evening dress, hysterical socialites howling at the help from threadbare chaises-longues, fiendish necromancers summoning racial purity in front of frothing cauldrons of goulash. Before 1938, Vienna also had a cosmopolitan intellectual culture. Its notables, often – but not all – Jewish, included Freud and Wittgenstein, radical figures in their own fields who became well-known beyond them. Arnold Schoenberg, the ‘emancipator of dissonance’ in music,

Wednesday

Angus Colwell

Nick Cave’s right-hand man Warren Ellis on AI, Gorecki and staying young

In the next few days Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play Leeds, Glasgow, Manchester and London. There are still some tickets left. The price is reasonable but the price doesn’t matter when the band are unequivocally one of the finest of live acts. By whatever means you can, go. When you get there, enjoy Nick Cave himself, of course. Prepare to be awed by ‘Tupelo’, converted by ‘Into My Arms’. Prepare to cry to ‘Girl in Amber’ and dance to ‘Stagger Lee’. Get ready to experience an assault on every one of your orifices by the impossibly loud and dark ‘Jubilee Street’. ‘I think you feel like you’re a

Michael Hann

The joy of Chris Stapleton

Chris Stapleton is a barrel-chested man of 46, who hides his face beneath a beard that must have taken years to grow, hair that tumbles down past his shoulders and a hat that could probably accommodate rather more than ten gallons. He sings songs about being imperfect, with a band behind him making a sound that one might have heard in 1972. He is so purely, absolutely and definitely American he might as well have petrol for blood and ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ on a permanent loop in his head. Stapleton is so purely, absolutely and definitely American he might as well have petrol for blood Still, 40,000 people came to

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Is Coogan’s Dr Strangelove as good as Sellers’s? Of course not

Stanley Kubrick’s surreal movie Dr Strangelove is a response to the fear of nuclear annihilation which obsessed every citizen in the western world from the end of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The play’s co-adaptors, Sean Foley and Armando Iannucci, are old enough to recall that fear – but they’ve omitted any sense of collective anxiety from their adaptation. It’s a just a larky tribute to the movie, like a sketch show. Daft not disturbing. It turns out Dr Strangelove is like Father Christmas – more potent as a mythical abstraction than as a reality The story starts with an

Richard Bratby

A lively and imaginative interpretation of an indestructible Britten opera

Scottish Opera’s new production of Albert Herring updates the action to 1990, and hey – remember 1990? No, not particularly, and I suspect that’ll be a common reaction if you were actually around back then. The director Daisy Evans was a toddler at the time and she imagines a gaudy, tawdry small-town world of bum-bags, WeightWatchers and decrepit gas heaters. Loxford Village Hall looks like it hasn’t been redecorated since the year the opera was composed, 1947, and that certainly rings true. Blancmange for the May Day feast, though? I’m pretty sure that even under John Major, blancmange was a throwback. But Evans has a show to put on after

Rupert Christiansen

Demanding but exhilarating: Royal Ballet’s Encounters reviewed

After opening its 2024/5 season with a run of Christopher Wheeldon’s candy-coloured, kiddie-friendly Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Royal Ballet gets down to business with a demanding but exhilarating programme of new work. Newish, to be accurate; the evening’s only previously unseen piece is Joseph Toonga’s Dusk. Crystal Pite’s The Statement is eight years old and was previously seen at Covent Garden in 2021; Kyle Abraham’s The Weathering followed a year later; and Pam Tanowitz’s Or Forevermore has developed out of a duet that originated during the pandemic. Dusk and The Weathering call for little comment. Both are well-crafted and safely generic, elegiac in mood and unassertive in theme. Dusk

Wednesday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Less Riot Grrl than Riot Lladies Who Lunch: Sleater-Kinney’s Little Rope reviewed

Grade: B- Given that Carrie and Corin are now in their fifties and one of them has settled down with a nice man, this is perhaps less Riot Grrl than Riot Lladies Who Lunch. You cannot expect fury to sustain itself for 30 years, not least when your band has long since ceased being an upstart revolution to the patriarchal rock order and has become instead a kind of indie heartland rock institution. This is Sleater-Kinney’s 11th take on that curiously bloodless American version of punk, a genre which is now comfortably mainstream. They never had quite the cuteness or pop sensibilities of, say, Veruca Salt: what marked them out