Music and Opera

A reliable metric for measuring pop success is hard to find these days, as Michael Hann noted in these pages recently. Massaged figures for sales and streams are so opaque as to be almost meaningless. The charts are old news; social media reach wildly distorting. Bon Iver have won Grammys and released platinum-selling albums, but that was a decade ago. Such accolades feel oddly old–fashioned now. Perhaps the most assured barometer is the traditional one of bums on seats – by which gauge Bon Iver appear to be doing just fine. Yes, they are a band lacking any semblance of a song your postman could whistle. And yes, they are

Oh, nostalgia – so much better than it used to be! You’d never have guessed pop music was once the preserve of teenagers had you been visiting the Greenwich peninsula last week – not from the crowds, or from the artists. Here were Roxy Music, whose four core members boast a combined age of 295, playing what might be their last ever show. Here were the Tops and the Temps, bands each with just one original member left – 86-year-old Duke Fakir of the Tops, 80-year-old Otis Williams of the Temps. And here was the absolute youngster of the lot, Robbie Williams, a stripling of 48, but 32 years into

It was so dark, my friend noted, you could have had sex or done a Hitler salute. No stage lights, no stair lights, no desk lights, no door lights, no usher lights, no exit signs. The few wisps of illumination that did steal in created colossal shadows, giants freeze-framed on the walls. In these snatches the wooden ribcage interior of the Barbican Hall looked demonic. A few photons lit up the Autechre boys, Rob Brown and Sean Booth, who flickered like blue flames rising from a hob. A few more nudged into view the ceiling that had become a vast charcoal grisaille. When, occasionally, someone left, the tiny glowing portal

Lindsey Buckingham, at 72, still has cheekbones that cast shadows. He has the upright shock of hair, too, though now it makes him look less like the kohl-eyed pop god of 1980 and more like Malcolm Gladwell’s cooler, angrier brother. He still has fire, too. A couple of solo renditions of Fleetwood Mac songs won the crowd over, but it was the following run of three numbers from his newest album, played with his three-piece band, that put the spark to the show. It proved he’s not yet a heritage act. He had no choice, really, but to forge ahead. In 2018, he was booted out of Fleetwood Mac, for

Leos Janacek disliked long operas, and the first act of The Makropulos Affair is a masterclass in how to set up a drama without an ounce of fat. There’s a prelude: driving motor-rhythms, surges of emotion, and somewhere in the distance – far away (or long ago) – the sound of trumpets. The curtain rises and we’re tipped brusquely into a lawyers’ office in the early 20th century. The lawsuit they’re discussing is long-winded and complex: aren’t they always? No matter. By the end of the act, these blustering professional men have been interrupted by the magnetic and imperious diva Emilia Marty, who knows things about the century-old case of

Pity Arts Council England, least loved of our NGOs, understaffed and under-resourced, its arm’s-length status gnawed to the shoulder by DCMS ukases, the stinginess of the Treasury and the government’s (in some respects, welcome) indifference to our higher culture. In return for its annual grant-in-aid (currently £336 million), it is obliged to cheer-lead policies of inclusivity and diversity and step gingerly over the eggshells of elitism, racism, gender politics and decolonisation. Its hands are further tied by the requirement to operate as extensions of the social services. The diktats of Levelling Up have to be honoured. The disabled and the disadvantaged, the young and the old are all crying out

Moonage Daydream is a music documentary like no other, which is fitting as the subject is David Bowie. If it’s David Bowie, make it special or just don’t bother. And this is special. It’s an immersive, trippy, hurtling, throbbing two hours and 15 minutes. If Disneyland did a Bowie ride, this would be it. Yet it isn’t shallow. There are some real insights. Bowie was cool and sexy and beautiful, but also somehow aloof and otherworldly, an enigma, never everyday. I can imagine Paul McCartney at home and I can imagine Mick Jagger at home. But I have never been able to imagine David Bowie at home, turning to Iman

One swallow might not make a summer, but it certainly helps rounds the season off. ‘Perhaps, like the swallow, you will migrate towards a bright land, towards love,’ sings the poet Prunier to Magda, the heroine of La Rondine, but love itself is the real bird of passage in Puccini’s gorgeous Viennese operetta-manqué. Magda trades in her old lover for a younger, cuter model and after a summer of happiness leaves him too, without undue regret. That’s basically it. No death leaps from battlements, no ritual disembowelling; none of that stuff that we’re meant to find so regressive and problematic in an opera house, and so visceral and cool in