Music and Opera

I was sceptical when the lady on the bus to Reading town centre told me that her father knew Liszt. Who wouldn’t be? This was a long time ago, mind: probably 1980, and I was on my way into school. I think our conversation started because I was reading a book about music. She was old and tiny, wearing a luxuriant wig. She introduced herself as Mrs Ball but her accent was unmistakably German. Even so, Liszt had been dead for nearly a century. Could it be true? ‘Oh, my father knew everyone,’ she said. ‘Richard Strauss was a great friend. And dear Bruno Walter. He lived in our house,

Opera North has begun 2023 with a couple of big revivals, and it’s always rewarding to call in on these things and see how they’re holding up. The long-lived, endlessly revived classic production is one of the quirks of operatic culture. It actually feels disconcerting, as a regular operagoer, to go to the conventional theatre (you know, the vanilla kind where they don’t sing) and discover that they’ve started again from scratch. A completely new Tempest? What was wrong with the 2016 staging? Possibly it’s to do with the financial realities of an art form that needs to keep a full orchestra and chorus on the payroll. A Year Zero

Sound of the Underground is a drag show involving a handful of cross-dressers who spend the opening 15 minutes telling us who they are. Then, rather ominously, they announce: ‘We’ve written a play.’ But they haven’t really. The scene shifts to a kitchen where the drag queens meet to discuss their pay and conditions, and the show turns into an advertisement for their woes. Drag is facing a crisis, we hear, caused by its sudden popularity. Drag queens are in demand from TV bosses and corporate executives but the artistes feel dismayed and traduced by this surfeit of opportunity. They loathe RuPaul, a cross-dresser favoured by the BBC, and they

The great country singer George Jones was famed not just for his voice, but also for his drinking. Once, deprived of the car keys, he drove his lawnmower to the nearest bar. In the very good Paramount+ drama about Jones and Tammy Wynette – entitled George and Tammy, so there’s no excuse for forgetting – Michael Shannon, playing Jones, is asked time and time again why he keeps on making such a mess of his life and his career. ‘That’s what the people want from me,’ he shrugs in reply. That came to mind watching the 1975’s return to British arenas, in a tour grandiosely and amusingly billed as ‘In

‘The rays of the sun conquer the night’ sings Sarastro, at the end of Mozart and Schikaneder’s Die Zauberflöte. It was the Royal Opera’s first performance of January 2023 and there’s something profoundly consoling about seeing this of all operas at the midnight of the year. The lights dim; five chords ring out and that first triplet from the violins falls quietly into place as Mozart engages the gears and together we move off on our long, sweet journey towards light. In David McVicar’s staging, robed figures process down the auditorium bearing glowing orbs, while Tamino, in late 18th-century frock-coat and knee-boots, clambers out from the boxes and vanishes through

On 3 February 2003, the emergency services in Los Angeles received a call. ‘I’m Phil Spector’s driver,’ a voice told them. ‘I think my boss killed somebody.’ This was the inevitable yet still extraordinary starting point for Spector – a new four-part documentary on a man who, in the face of fierce competition, might well be the strangest figure in pop history. By that stage, he perhaps deserved the description of him in one news report as ‘a ghost, a phantom, a half-forgotten rock genius’. Except that – whether by coincidence or something more sinister – he’d recently granted his first interview for decades to the British journalist Mick Brown.

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

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