Music and Opera

Our curation of music and opera reviews

Wednesday

Rupert Christiansen

Striking but not altogether successful: ENB’s Our Voices reviewed

Aaron S. Watkin, an affable bearded Canadian, is the new artistic director of English National Ballet. He arrives from Dresden, where he ran a similarly scaled company comfortably subsidised by public funds. Doubtless, he finds what the Arts Council gives ENB meagre to the point of stingy. One may wonder, therefore, what the attraction is, but he certainly inherits from Tamara Rojo a solid organisation and a fine body of dancers, particularly strong on the male side. His inaugural piece of programming is striking but not altogether successful. It starts gloriously with Balanchine’s Theme and Variations, an essay in his grand tsarist style, set to some noble music by Tchaikovsky,

Richard Bratby

ENO’s Peter Grimes shows a major international company operating at full artistic power 

In David Alden’s production of Peter Grimes, the mob assembles before the music has even started – silhouetted at the back, muttering and menacing. Ah, Britten’s mob: simultaneously the source of some of the most electrifying, elemental choral writing since Mussorgsky and a licence for British directors to indulge in premium-strength snobbery. Fully endorsed by the composer, of course: it’s essential to Britten’s artistic schema that we believe the inhabitants of small-town England are only ever one beer away from forming a lynch mob. As their hatred boils over, Alden has them pull out little Union Flags, completely without pretext. There’s no trace of political nationalism anywhere in the libretto

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The real reason you shouldn’t buy Roisin Murphy’s new album

Grade: B The rather wonderful, liberating thing about being a sentient human being, rather than a moron, is that one can agree with Roisin Murphy that giving kids puberty blockers is a kind of child abuse, while at the same time not liking her new album very much. Just as a sentient human being can enjoy watching Michael Sheen pretending to be other people quite well in films, while thinking him an egregious tit. The cancellation of Murphy was, of course, as obscene as it was predictable – but I do not quite swallow the idea that we are required, as a consequence, to buy Hit Parade. The title is

Wednesday

Graeme Thomson

In praise of the Festival Song – the four-minute wonder that can sustain a career for decades

As the sun sets on another too-long summer festival season, let us take a moment to reflect on the Festival Song. This is the one tune by a band that even the most reluctant festival attendee will know. It is the song producers stick on the TV highlights package for bored insomniacs surfing the red button. It can save a set, turn grey skies blue and get old bones shaking. The Festival Song survives the artist’s critical nadir; it is the musical cockroach that emerges unscathed from a commercial apocalypse. It is the cast-iron guarantee to every festival booker in the land that an act can still bring something to

Michael Hann

If you can’t get something out of the songs of Shania Twain, you’re a lost cause

Pop critics routinely make the mistake of assuming the most important acts are the ones copied by the groups they like. So to a generation of writers who grew up listening to 1980s and ’90s indie, the Velvet Underground are the second most important group of all time, after the Beatles. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Velvet Underground, and they are hugely important in rock history. But in reality the second most important group in rock history is Van Halen, because for a decade or so the vast majority of hard-rock bands – who in the 1980s were commercially huge – were trying to imitate them in one

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Cheesy skit: A Mirror, at the Almeida Theatre, reviewed

The playwright Sam Holcroft likes to toy with dramatic conventions and to tease her audiences by withholding key information about the characters. This tinkering seems to scare the critics into praising her scripts even though they feel like clumsily written thrillers or botched sci-fi yarns where the rules keep changing. Her technique appeals to high-minded theatres such as the Almeida because it enables A-level drama students to fill their notebooks with impenetrable guff about ‘metatextuality’ and ‘poly-ironic approaches to narrative’. It could be Noises Off by an author who wants to be Brecht or Pirandello Holcroft’s new satire, A Mirror, opens with a bogus wedding that gets disrupted when a

Richard Bratby

Wagner rewilded: Das Rheingold, at the Royal Opera House, reviewed

In Northern Ireland Opera’s new Tosca, the curtain rises on a big concrete dish from which a pair of eyes gaze down, impassive. Walls of scaffolding tower on three sides of the stage, creaking as they expand under the heat of the stage lights. Point taken: Cameron Menzies’s production (the sets are by Niall McKeever) is a semi-abstract updating. It’s a fairly standard contemporary approach to Puccini’s Napoleonic thriller, though whether you get the full impact that comes with a more period-specific setting – that sense of individuals being crushed beneath the wheels of history – is another question.  When you live on your raw theatrical instincts, you walk a

Robin Ashenden

The dazzling classic The Red Shoes has several unfashionable lessons for us today

The Red Shoes, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 film about a ballet and its company, is 75 this month, and its birthday is being marked with great fanfare. From October to December, the BFI is putting on a major retrospective of the films of Powell and Pressburger, with an accompanying exhibition and nationwide screenings of The Red Shoes itself. A companion book to The Red Shoes by Pamela Hutchinson – stuffed with insight and background – is being published, as well as a lavish volume, The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger, complete with pictures and essays (almost love letters) about the late filmmakers from artists such as Tilda Swinton

Wednesday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Rejoice that Hyperion’s impeccable back catalogue is finally available to stream 

At the beginning of the 1980s a former ice-cream salesman called Ted Perry drove a London minicab to raise money for his dream project: the world’s most smartly curated classical record label. For the first time these magnificent recordings are arriving on Spotify, Apple Music and other platforms He called it Hyperion, after the Greek sun god, and by the time he died in 2003 it had acquired its own mythology. The Hyperion catalogue contained all of Schubert’s songs, sung by legendary artists accompanied by the scholar-pianist Graham Johnson; all Bach’s organ music, played with bouncy precision by Christopher Herrick; the complete sacred music of Monteverdi, Purcell and Vivaldi, directed

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Watch three irascible women screaming at each other: Anthropology, at Hampstead Theatre, reviewed

Anthropology is a drama about artificial intelligence that starts as an ultra-gloomy soap opera. A suicidal lesbian, Merril, speaks on the phone to her kid sister, Angie, and they discuss Merril’s beautiful ex-girlfriend. After ten minutes, we learn that Angie’s voice belongs to a robot, Digital Angie, created by Merril to replicate the real Angie who vanished a year earlier in unexplained circumstances. Then another surprise. Digital Angie becomes self-aware and turns into a detective who offers to help Merril investigate Angie’s disappearance and to find out if she’s still alive. Angie then turns into a third character who tries to interfere with Merril’s social life. This digital bully sends

Rupert Christiansen

A haunting masterpiece: Northern Ballet’s Adagio Hammerklavier reviewed

One could soundly advise any choreographer to avoid music so transcendentally great in itself that dance can add nothing except banal images. Only a handful of exceptions sneak past the rule: MacMillan’s setting of Song of the Earth, perhaps, and also Hans van Manen’s Adagio Hammerklavier, his audacious attempt to visualise the infinitely slow movement of Beethoven’s epic piano sonata Op. 106. No individuals stand out; this is an ensemble with a collective identity that rejects the concept of stardom Northern Ballet has honourably revived this haunting masterpiece as part of its autumnal triple bill, and its impact overshadows the two novelties that frame it. What is its secret? Van

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Mildly pleasant 1980s hard rock: ‘Angry’, by the Rolling Stones, reviewed

The new Rolling Stones single, supposedly their best in many a decade, is called ‘Angry’. And while on the surface it seems to be about the millionth anguished plea from Mick Jagger to some unseen woman to give him a shag, it reportedly stems from Mick’s mystification as to why everybody is angry these days. I suppose he is forgetting that youth has always been in a more or less perpetual state of pre-rational, pettish fury – a fury which, back in the day Mick was canny enough to take advantage of. You may remember his incandescence at being unable to attain any satisfaction, for example, or at the unwanted

Wednesday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The best new album I’ve heard this year: Being Dead’s When Horses Would Run reviewed

Grade: A– The point of a sudden, abrupt change in the time signature and instrumentation of a song is to surprise the listener and undermine his or her expectations. If, however, you do it in every song, then the point is lost, and the listener finds himself actually waiting for the weirdnessto begin. So it is with Being Dead – and it’s about the only thing I have to carp about, because overall When Horses Would Run is a lovely album, full of often complex but always catchy melodies and imbued with an agreeably surreal sense of humour. The band is comprised of Falcon Bitch, Gumball and Ricky Moto and

Michael Hann

The Strokes are always terrible – why do I keep going back to see them?

Quite when the concept of coolness became a thing is uncertain, even to etymologists. As early as 1884, an academic paper noted the expression ‘Dat’s cool!’ among African-Americans. But it’s about 100 years since ‘cool’ entered the lexicon as an unambiguous description of something to aspire to (via jazz, inevitably), and it’s still a crucial concept in the world of pop: it’s being cool that meant the Strokes could attract 50,000 or so people to east London, even though most of those present were at primary school when the band released their two first two albums, which are the two on which their reputation rests, and songs from which comprised

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Every crumb of Kurtag’s music is a feast: Endgame, at the Proms, reviewed

The fun starts early in Beckett’s Endgame. Within minutes of opening his mouth, blind bully Hamm decides to starve his servant. ‘I’ll give you just enough to keep you from dying,’ he tells Clov. One biscuit and a half. Which feels positively lavish compared with what composer Gyorgy Kurtag feeds us musically in the first 20 minutes of his operatic adaptation (receiving its British première at the Proms). Crumbs, we get. One single lonely tone, from one instrument, every few seconds, all so spaced out that it almost sounded like the orchestra was on tiptoe, glutes clenched, attempting a heist perhaps, trying to half-inch some notes from somewhere. Every crumb

Richard Bratby

A euphoric meat-and-two-veg programme: Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich/Paavo Jarvi, at the Proms, reviewed

We used to call it a ‘meat and two veg’ programme, back in my concert planning days: the reliable set menu of an overture, a concerto and a symphony. It was an unfortunate term. No artistic planner likes to feel that they’re playing it safe, still less (and sources report that this goes double at the BBC) that they’re giving the public what they want. Traditional formats, familiar warhorses, dead white males: yawn! Then Paavo Jarvi and the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich rock up at the Proms with a Beethoven overture, a Tchaikovsky concerto and Dvorak’s New World symphony and what do you know? The Royal Albert Hall was packed.  We got

Adam Sweeting

‘People thought I was insane’: Graham Nash on the birth of Crosby, Stills and Nash

Graham Nash always seemed like the reasonable, peace-making one among his famously fractious compadres, David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Neil Young. But he didn’t get to where he is today by being plagued with doubt or false modesty. Even talking remotely over a Zoom connection, he still radiates a kind of unshakeable certainty. ‘I just trust that the universe loves me enough to support what I’m doing,’ he declares. ‘I don’t seek my life, my life happens to me and I’m perfectly content to let it. Look what I’ve done in my life… Pretty nice!’ ‘Joni was the only witness to that sound and it was created in less than

Wednesday

Richard Bratby

Doesn’t get better than this: The Threepenny Opera, at Edinburgh International Festival, reviewed

It’s the Edinburgh International Festival, and Barrie’s back in town. Once, Edinburgh was pretty much the only place that you could see Barrie Kosky directing in the UK; there was a satisfyingly transgressive thrill about an opera director whose priorities were so self-evidently about the whole art form that he’d happily stage Monteverdi as a tango-powered revue. In recent years, Baz the Knife has supplied increasingly rare moments of discovery amid the EIF’s all-you-can-eat buffet of touring orchestras and reheated prestige productions. But he’s not the rare bird he was. In fact, with a Carmen in rep at Covent Garden and a new London Rheingold coming soon after his Dialogues

Angus Colwell

A 50-quid, hour-and-a-bit troll: Aphex Twin, at Field Day, reviewed

Forty per cent of London is green space. And what we do with all that grass – all that potential – is pave it with music festivals. This year, Hyde Park hosted Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen. Gunnersbury Park had Boygenius. Finsbury Park welcomed Pulp and Travis Scott. Field Day is a staple of the season. Always falling on a Saturday in late August, the day is wholly reserved for electronic music. Reams of twentysomethings make the pilgrimage: set off from wherever, change at Bank, District Line to Mile End, 15-minute walk, enter, set aside £7.50 for a can of warm Red Stripe. Everything is very clean: the organisers don’t

Graeme Thomson

Invention and irreverence: Lankum, at The Queen’s Hall, reviewed

In a few days, Lankum will most likely win the 2023 Mercury Music Prize for their fourth album False Lankum – but don’t let that put you off. Increasingly, the Irish quartet feel like they belong to the lineage of artists who have wreaked radical and lasting change upon British and Irish folk traditions, from Davey Graham, Fairport Convention and Pentangle to Steeleye Span, the Pogues and Lau. The kind of artists who burrow deep into the forest of tradition in order to plant dynamite within the heartwood. At times, we might have been below deck on a ship heading for Ellis Island Appearing at the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF),