Music and Opera

Our curation of music and opera reviews

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Eccentric triviality aimed at 1970s feminists: Orlando, at the Garrick Theatre, reviewed

Orlando opens with a pack of Virginia Woolfs on stage. All wear the same costume of horn-rimmed spectacles, long tweed skirts and woolly cardigans, and they comply with current diversity targets. There’s a white Woolf, a black Woolf, a mixed-race Woolf, an East Asian Woolf, and a male Woolf with a deep voice who seems to have wandered in from Little Red Riding Hood. The pack of Woolfs chat away about how to tell the story of an English aristocrat, Orlando, who was a teenager in the 1590s. He enters the stage dressed like a girl. (Confusion over sexual identity is the show’s big idea.) After an opaque interview with

Graeme Thomson

Not everything Bowie did was genius – he was more interesting than that

I’m generally not a fan of New Year’s resolutions, but one occurred to me recently as the younger members of my family were blasting out a patchy David Bowie playlist: Stand Up Against Revisionism. It’s harder than ever these days not to succumb to printing the myth – reality can be so so-so – but critics have a duty to keep a clear head while others are losing theirs. Even around the dinner table on New Year’s Day. Bowie would have been 76 this week; he was born on 8 January 1947, and died two days after his 69th birthday in 2016. He’s not getting any less popular in posthumous

Richard Bratby

Do conductors have to be cruel to be good?

Playing under the baton of Arturo Toscanini must have felt a bit like fighting in the trenches. There are recordings of him rehearsing in the 1930s or ’40s. The orchestra is bowling along; there’s a low muttering, and then suddenly, out of nothing, the explosion. A scream of rage: a huge, operatic, animalistic roar. There’s a barrage of Italian profanities and what sounds like a fist smashing repeatedly on wood. Bernard Shore, who played under Toscanini in the BBC Symphony Orchestra, witnessed him hurling his baton at a cowering viola section. With the NBC Symphony, Toscanini threw his gold pocket watch to the floor and stamped on it. The players

Friday

James Walton

Irresistible: Sky Max’s Christmas Carole reviewed

What’s wrong with sentimentality? The answer, I’d suggest, could either be: a) its almost bullying insistence on us having emotions disproportionate to anything a particular story has earned; or b) nothing at all. And if you want to see how both of these are possible, two of this year’s big Christmas TV offerings provide handy illustrations. Firmly in category a) is The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, an animated film by Charlie Mackesy, based on his own mega-selling book and with some impressively big-name actors doing the voices. Its methods are established immediately when a boy lost in a snowy wood happens across a cute talking mole

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A cute present for aficionados: The Beach Boys’ Sail on Sailor – 1972 reviewed

Grade: B+ By the time the 1970s had come along – post Altamont and post hope – the Beach Boys were tired of being beach boys and thus became, for a while, just another rather mediocre rawk band. The two albums they released in the first three years of the decade, Carl and the Passions – ‘So Tough’ and Holland, dispensed (largely) with those sumptuous harmonies and the simplicity of teenage anthems to God and gave us unconvincing blue-eyed soul and tinny R&B. Of those two albums, only the lovely ‘Marcella’ (where those harmonies come back) and the commendably ludicrous ‘All This is That’are worth shelling out your hard-earned pennies.

Rupert Christiansen

Like bingeing on cheap chocolate: Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty, at Sadler’s Wells, reviewed

A Christmas revival of New Adventures’ ten-year-old production of Sleeping Beauty stirs up all my nagging ambivalence about Matthew Bourne’s work. I’ve mulled over this in print elsewhere several times, and I feel conscious that if Bourne reads reviews – perhaps he doesn’t – he might be groaning into his Corn Flakes. But his reputation is so securely high (a knighthood, Tonys and Oliviers galore), his popularity so ubiquitous, that an honest doubter can’t do him any harm. Here are the pros. He has invented a recipe of his own, hard to imitate, though many have tried – a mix of Kenneth MacMillan’s sexed-up ballet idiom, Cameron Mackintosh-Andrew Lloyd Webber

Graeme Thomson

Christmas songs that will reduce your gas bills

It’s unlikely that Irving Berlin was pondering the energy price cap when he composed the seasonal standard ‘I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm’ in 1937. ‘I can’t remember a worse December, just watch those icicles form,’ he wrote, a sentiment many of us can surely relate to right now – but wait! ‘What do I care if icicles form,’ he continues. ‘I’ve got my love to keep me warm.’ Good for you, sir. Meanwhile, the rest of us are watching the digits ticking incessantly upward on our smart meter with the murderous fascination of a gun dog fixated on a fox hole. For the first time in my

Richard Bratby

What makes a Christmas song Christmassy?

Temperature records for Los Angeles in the summer of 1945 are patchy, but 90 in the shade seems to have been the norm. It was during one such scorcher, presumably, that the songwriters Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn pulled up at a red light on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Cahn suggested going to the beach. Styne had a better idea: ‘Let’s go write a winter song.’ Driving over to the offices of their publisher Edwin H. Morris, Cahn commandeered a typewriter, glanced out the window and typed the exact opposite of what he saw: ‘The weather outside is frightful.’ The Great American Songbook had acquired another Christmas classic.

Wednesday

Richard Bratby

If Ravel’s Boléro makes you yawn, you’re not really listening

Only boring people are bored by Ravel’s Boléro. True, the composer – the slyest of wits – left his share of booby traps for the uncomprehending; take his comment, in a letter to Paul Dukas, that ‘I have written only one masterpiece, Boléro. Unfortunately there is no music in it.’ Yet Ravel was a sublime colourist; a master of the instrumental palette who makes Stravinsky’s orchestration sound coarse by comparison, and Boléro is one long twist of a fabulous kaleidoscope. Even its notorious repetitions are a red herring. Take the full score as a whole and you’ll struggle to find two bars that are identical (there are a couple at

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

I’m very touched that Christine and the Queens has changed her name to Redcar

Grade: B+ We are all very touched, up here, that the esoteric French artist formerly known as Christine and the Queens has changed her name to Redcar, in honour of our once vibrant beachside steel town. Perhaps she was impressed by the newish ‘vertical pier’, or enjoyed a nutritious meal in the Light of Asia. Or, better still, maybe she is planning to adopt a whole bunch of East Cleveland nom de plumes and will next call herself Liverton Mines, or Boosebeck. She may, of course, just mean a red car. Héloîse Letissier (her born name) is very good at simple, naggingly catchy, woebegone synth pop. The simpler the better

Oliver Basciano

‘What happened in Russia can happen anywhere’: Pussy Riot interviewed

As she recalls a decade of infamy, Maria Alyokhina wanders one of the many anonymous apartments she has lived in since escaping Russia six months ago. ‘We didn’t expect a criminal case, we didn’t expect imprisonment, we didn’t expect international attention. We didn’t expect how many people would support Pussy Riot, would go to the street in balaclavas. We could never have predicted that.’ Alyokhina and Pussy Riot, a loose feminist collective who perform in brightly coloured balaclavas, came to international attention in February 2012 with their ‘punk prayer’, a guerilla music performance in Moscow’s orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Plugging in an electric guitar to an amp, they

Wednesday

Michael Hann

Why I love Rod Stewart

Reader, I let you down. But I did so for the right reason: for love. On a night when all of London’s music critics were at the Royal Festival Hall for Christine and the Queens, I deserted my duty. But, honestly, I don’t regret it. The reports back from the RFH suggested some baffling melange of performance art, am dram, experimental pop and gender identity, wrapped up in a concept piece about red cars. Not me. I’ll stick with Rod, a man so comfortable with his gender identity that he’s a byword for male libido. Rod is a man so comfortable with his gender identity that he’s a byword for

Richard Bratby

The sonic equivalent of a Starbucks Eggnog Latte: ENO’s It’s a Wonderful Life reviewed

Whoosh! A digital starburst, a sweep of orchestral sound and the stage of the Coliseum is alive with dancing, whirling snowflakes. Floating in the heavens is the soprano Danielle de Niese; below her in the darkness, the truss bridge that we all know – because we’ve all seen It’s a Wonderful Life – is where the turning point of the story will occur, a couple of hours from now. That being the case, the only question is how composer Jake Heggie, librettist Gene Scheer and director Aletta Collins are going to close the circle and get us there. It’s evident from the off that they’re not going to stint either

Wednesday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Carries the whiff of a hotel-lounge pianist: Vikingur Olafsson’s From Afar reviewed

Grade: B+ The 38-year-old Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson has an almost unique ability to make counterpoint sing, as his astonishing 2018 Bach recital for DG revealed. But his Proms debut last year in Mozart’s Piano Concerto K491 seemed over-thought, verging on the fussy. Now he’s been allowed the luxury of a concept double album, From Afar, in which he plays an eccentrically curated mixture of small pieces twice, once on a Steinway grand and once on an upright. It’s a revelation, though not perhaps the one Olafsson intended. He says the two instruments call for different approaches to his menu of Bach transcriptions, Schumann, Brahms and snippets of Bartok, Kurtag

Graeme Thomson

Like A-ha after an extensive rewilding process: Sigur Ros, at Usher Hall, reviewed

Plus: it’s quite clear that MUNA are going to be huge What is it with Icelanders and mushrooms? Just weeks after Bjork releases a fungal-themed album, Fossora, Sigur Ros appear on stage with dozens of sporey lights illuminating the gloom. It’s boom time for mycophiles, but with Sigur Ros the link makes a certain kind of sense. Their aesthetic is not so much post-rock as glacial. For almost three decades the Icelandic quartet have been making large-screen, epically elemental music: celestial choral pieces, art-house concert films, ambient soundscapes and the occasional relatively conventional rock and pop song. Whether aware of it or not, you will have heard ‘Hoppipolla’ on numerous

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Rebecca Humphries is dynamite – pity about the play: Blackout Songs, at Hampstead Theatre, reviewed

Viewers watching a good romcom need to fall in love with three things. The boy, the girl and the affair itself. The new Hampstead melodrama, Blackout Songs, scores just one out of three. Rebecca Humphries is adorably chic and sexy as the Soho seductress who drifts from bar to bar, picking up men. Her toyboy is a disappointment, a teenage deadbeat who has none of her louche gusto. And his character is a puzzle when it ought to be crystal clear. At the start of the action he wears a neck-brace and speaks with a stammer. In the next scene, his neck has healed and his stammer has vanished as

Richard Bratby

Hugely entertaining: Royal Opera’s Alcina reviewed

A hotel bellboy, the story goes, discovered George Best in a luxury suite surrounded by scantily clad lovelies and empty champagne bottles. ‘George, George’, he sighed. ‘Where did it all go wrong?’. It’s the same deal, essentially, with Ruggiero, hero of Handel’s Alcina. As the curtain rises he’s in the boudoir of Alcina, a smokin’ hot love-witch who lives on a paradise island with her minxy little sister, Morgana, and whose only serious failing – and who are we, really, to judge? – is a fondness for transforming her enemies into animals. This being an epic tale of chivalry, and this being 1735, it’s universally understood that having this much

Rupert Christiansen

Exhilarating: English National Ballet triple bill, at Sadler’s Wells, reviewed

Headed for San Francisco, Tamara Rojo bows out of her directorship of English National Ballet with an exhilarating triple bill demonstrating her success in expanding the repertory and raising technical standards. If only the company could tour this class of work outside London.  The climax of the evening was a new version of The Rite of Spring by Mats Ek – his second stab at dramatising music so graphically vivid and violently aggressive that choreographers since Nijinsky have struggled to find imagery and movement to match its primal energy. Even Kenneth MacMillan and Pina Bausch didn’t quite hack it for me. Ek has avoided the clichés: nobody stomps about plastered

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

What’s the point of these soul covers? Bruce Springsteen’s Only the Strong Survive reviewed

Grade: B What’s the worst-ever cover version (after Madonna’s hilarious stab at ‘American Pie’)? I reckon Creedence Clearwater Revival’s interminable mangling of ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’, or maybe the J. Geils Band stamping over ‘Where Did Our Love Go’ in hobnail boots – two bands I otherwise adore. Jeff Beck boring his way through ‘Superstition’? The Stranglers wrecking ‘Walk on By’? All Saints ripping the guts out of ‘Lady Marmalade’? I think you catch my drift, because the lesson is pretty clear: no, really, do not play that funky music, white boy. Brucie gets away with this album of familiar, but in the main not over-familiar, soul covers

Michael Hann

Odd, rich and adventurous: Erykah Badu, at the Royal Festival Hall, reviewed

You couldn’t call Erykah Badu one of the world’s most productive artists: it’s 12 years since her last album, and she’s released just five of them in 25 years, plus a couple of mixtapes. You’re more likely to see her name in the papers for something stupid she’s said – that she can see the good in everybody, even Hitler, because he was ‘a wonderful painter’, for example – than because she’s done something musical. Which is a shame because like her equally unproductive neo-soul contemporaries (Maxwell – five albums in 26 years; D’Angelo – three in 27 years), the music still sounds extraordinary. A key influence on neo-soul was