Music and Opera

Grade: A The future, then. The sound of pop eating itself, throwing up into a bag and then getting a spoon and digging in. A mash-up of everything — largely very sickly EDM, but also trance, house, power ballads, industrial techno, soft rock, winsome acoustic guitar. Meticulous to the point of almost derangement, endlessly inventive both musically and rhythmically, full of arch puns. Such as the album’s title here — Apple. Mr Cook is the boss of the record label PC Music. Geddit? Sides splitting? That’s the other thing — the future also promises to be very irritating. What you cannot doubt is A.G. Cook’s nerdish attention to detail, nor

Grade: B– Time has been kind to Cat Stevens’s reputation — his estrangement from the music business and rad BAME credentials bestowing upon him an edginess which his mimsy fragile-voiced soft rock never really deserved. It’s the kind of retrospective benediction usually only death from some bad skag at the age of 27 can provide. Never mind anything else, I’d have barred him entry to the US just for calling an album Teaser and the Firecat. This one, meanwhile, is described as ‘his 1970 masterpiece’. Really? I don’t think so, although in its original incarnation it was pleasant enough on the ears, tinkling away on the turntable in the infant

The Last Night of the Proms came and went, and it was pretty much as anyone might have predicted, if they’d given it a moment’s thought. A sprinkling of popular classics, a pair of unthreatening premières, the familiar landmarks tastefully and affectionately done, and some show tunes and arias, sung by the soprano Golda Schultz with a generosity and warmth that couldn’t have been more potent if she really had been singing to a packed and cheering Royal Albert Hall, rather than TV cameras and emptiness. It was recognisably a Last Night of the Proms: celebratory in that slipper-wearing BBC way, without ignoring the unavoidable truth that you can’t have

Our college choirmaster had a trick that he liked to deploy when he sensed that we were phoning it in. He ordered us out of the choirstalls and positioned us at random all over the chapel. It was sadistic but effective. With nowhere to hide, there could be no quiet fudging of that awkward leap in ‘O Thou the Central Orb’, and no waiting until after a more confident neighbour had begun their note before scooping hastily (and hopefully unnoticeably) upwards to match their pitch. Every singer became a reluctant soloist. The result was usually either mutiny, or an immediate and dramatic improvement in tone, tuning and ensemble. Apply that

The Royal Albert Hall, as Douglas Adams never wrote, is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. Which is great if you want a colossal audience; less great as a venue for classical music. True, sound engineers have brought us a long way from the 19th century, when one critic (it might have been Bernard Shaw) described a Weber overture wafting around that cavernous acoustic like a feather caught in a draught. If you tune in to Radio 3 — which is how most listeners have always heard the Proms — it sounds fine. But it wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice of venue

Q: ‘How would you define transcendence?’ A: ‘Well, how would you define it?’ I interviewed Van Morrison last year. (I’m fine now, thanks.) While the exercise wasn’t quite the near-death experience of industry legend — he was polite and accommodating, if not always exactly forthcoming — it got sticky at times, as the above exchange illustrates. Let’s call it a solid 6.5 on the Lou Reed Scale. Morrison, who turns 75 on the last day of this month, was formed in an age when a people-pleasing public persona wasn’t essential for musical success. In rare interviews, he engages with informed questions about music but refuses to indulge in the game

There’s a scene early on in A Song to Remember — Charles Vidor’s clunky Technicolor film of 1945 — in which the young Frédéric Chopin (Cornel Wilde) provides background music for a banquet hosted by Count Wyszynska in his Warsaw palace, plates of rubbery pig and candy-coloured vegetables in heady supply. Chopin plays his own Fantaisie-Impromptu, five years or so before composing it, and then, having insulted the Russian governor of Poland (‘I do not play for tsarist butchers!’), he avoids arrest by hastily rowing to Paris, so it seems, dressed like a military cadet. Our real-life hero has borne an awful lot since his premature death in 1849, though

The first time Alpesh Chauhan conducted Birmingham Opera Company, he was surrounded by rats: six-foot tall rats, singing Shostakovich at the top of their voices. There were singing cops, too, and a marching band wearing bloodstained wedding dresses, and this was all happening in a derelict Edgbaston dance hall best known as a location for the 1980s Central TV drama Boon. Well, of course it was. BOC is the company that staged Mussorgsky in a circus tent and Stockhausen in an abandoned chemical warehouse; its whole point is to upend traditional assumptions about opera. The big difference in its production last year of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk came from the

In the 62 years since I first heard and saw Don Carlo, in the famous and long-lasting production by Visconti at the Royal Opera, my feelings about it have grown ever stronger, both in passionate attachment and in critique. Imperfect operas, like other imperfect phenomena, can be more interesting than perfect ones, because they’re more thought-provoking, more enticing. The libretto, very freely based on Schiller’s play, was by two Frenchmen, and Verdi, eager to make a bigger splash than he had so far in Paris, made too much of one. The first performance, in 1867, ran so late that the members who lived outside central Paris missed their last trains,

Grade: A- This is worrying — like listening to a speech by David Lammy and finding yourself, against your better nature, agreeing with it. If there’s one thing worse than your favourite artists making a duff album, it’s artists you can’t stand making a good one. I shall have to tell myself that this isn’t a Taylor Swift album at all, but really the work of The National — a fine band, whose Aaron Dessner is a co-writer on nine of these 16 tracks and producer on 11. That may explain the spacey, quiet grandeur of these songs, the background atmospherics, the gradual rise in many to a gentle anthem.

There was only so long anyone could put up with the live musical performances of the early days of lockdown: musicians in their living rooms, performing stripped-back versions of their songs in broadcasts that froze or stuttered. The time would come, inevitably, when everyone wanted more. Viewers would want something more closely approximating a full show; musicians would want to be paid. Laura Marling was early through the gates: last month, she promoted her latest album with two concerts at the Union Chapel in London, played to an empty hall but streamed for UK and US audiences. There was a certain excitement about it all: here was a way for