Music and Opera

A few years ago, I asked the young American soul singer Leon Bridges — a latter-day Sam Cooke, with the old-fashioned song arrangements to match — if he ever pondered the incongruity of being a black man, backed by a white band, playing music in the African-American tradition to audiences that (in the UK at least) were almost entirely white. ‘I have a song called “Brown Skin Girl”,’ he replied, ‘and I ask “Where my brown-skinned girls at?” And there’s maybe one or two in the crowd. It’s a little awkward sometimes.’ His words came to mind watching Adia Victoria. Despite her being an African-American woman signed to a major

In every respect bar its austere pews, the Union Chapel is one of the best venues in London: beautiful and atmospheric, it encourages concert-goers to listen rather than chat. There’s no bringing in booze from the bar, so you’re not disturbed by people going hither and thither (though the couple next to me had smuggled in a thermos of tea and a pack of Choco Leibniz). It suited the Delines, from Oregon, down to the ground. Though they released their first album only five years ago, the Delines are hardly a young band. They’re middle-aged and their songs are middle-aged: sad and weary laments for lives that have slipped out

Grade: B– Deutsche Grammophon have decided that Daniil Trifonov’s new Rachmaninov piano concertos with the Philadephia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin are a railway journey. The video trailer offers no explanation — but, boy, they certainly threw some cash at their conceit. The pianist is dressed like a Russian anarchist, wandering wild-eyed through a railway carriage. Is he fleeing a ticket inspector? Apparently not, because later he’s playing on the train, presumably in the compartment reserved for grand pianos. Those were the days! Last year we had the second and fourth concertos, entitled Destination Rachmaninov: Departure. Now it’s Arrival — the first and third. According to Nézet-Séguin, Trifonov’s playing is ‘beyond

Grade: B- Horribly woke boilerplate slogans welded inexpertly to the usual incompetent Crazy Horse grunge. Young and his pick-up band of now 50-years standing usually work well together — as on Zuma, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and even Ragged Glory. But that’s when there were a few decent songs in the mix, stuffed with compelling ideas and interesting imagery. That sort of thing is in terribly short supply here. ‘She Showed Me Love’ staggers along for an unendurable 13 minutes: ‘I saw old white guys trying to kill mother nature.’ Just old white guys? How about you check out the Indonesian and Brazilian loggers for a second? Then the

There’s nothing like a good piano concerto and, sad to relate, Thomas Adès’s long-awaited first proper attempt at the genre is nothing like a good piano concerto. Not in the version we heard at its UK première in the Royal Festival Hall, anyway. What a disappointment! Perhaps Adès can rescue it, but he’d have to hack away at the score as ruthlessly as Bruckner dismantling his Third Symphony. That work wasn’t necessarily improved by its revisions but, honestly, almost anything would be an improvement on the first two movements of the 21-minute concerto performed by Kirill Gerstein and the LPO conducted by the composer. You knew there was something wrong

Those who cherish the notion that the current prime minister really is ‘electoral Viagra’ should have paid a visit to Brixton last Friday evening to see what actual young people think about him. Before Slowthai — the young rapper from Northampton who ignored complaints about the toxification of political discourse by brandishing a dummy of Johnson’s severed head at this year’s Mercury Prize ceremony — even took to the stage, the 5,000 or so kids took up a chant of their own volition: ‘Fuck Boris! Fuck Boris!’ The Britain of Slowthai and his fans is not one in which anything can be overcome with a bit of Dunkirk spirit. The

Never meet your heroes, they say. But if you grew up with classical music in the 1980s, there was fat chance of that. Stravinsky, Britten, Shostakovich, Walton: you’d just missed them. Which is why, in 2001, and finding myself duty-managing an 80th birthday concert for Sir Malcolm Arnold, I inched past his minders and delivered a few trite, polite but entirely sincere words of gratitude and admiration. No response: Sir Malcolm stared blankly ahead. Then he gripped my hand, and started shaking. And kept shaking, faster and faster, his grip tightening like a vice. Raising his head slightly, and pumping my hand with increasing force, he growled: ‘I’m not letting

Grade: A– The outlaw country genre has shifted a little over the decades since Waylon and Willie, with each proponent trying to out-badass each other, the guitars getting louder, the lyrics either more obtuse or (in the case of David Allan Coe) more obscene. This takes it all one stage further. I don’t think Sound & Fury would go down too well at the Grand Ole Opry: it is more Seattle than Nashville, 40 minutes of howling rawk guitar, ferocious boogies and cheap synths. It sounds, at times, like ZZ Top stuck in a lift with Gary Numan. Grunge, blues, heavy metal, all rendered darkly as if Mark Lanegan were

‘Laws bow down before the desire to rule…’ Centuries before ‘proroguing’ had entered British breakfast-table vocabulary there was Handel’s Agrippina, and centuries before that there was the woman herself. Sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius (who she may or may not have poisoned) and mother of Nero (by whom she was eventually executed), Agrippina was a true political animal: instigator, manipulator, machinatrix and far more. It’s a heady story in prose, so add a bit of poetic licence and a score by the 24-year-old Handel and you have a spicy blend of politics, satire and sex — Succession with a Roman accent. Let’s pass over the bewilderment that it has

Grade: D+ Pleasant memories — of hearing ‘Raw Power’ for the first time and later the amiably shambolic chug of ‘The Passenger’. And of watching my daughter, aged ten, dragged along to some open-air concert where she danced, an ingenue, to ‘Cock In My Pocket’. At least I hope she was an ingenue. All gone. Iggy has been reconditioned. No longer a mentalist drug fiend from Detroit, which was how we liked him, he is now a godforsaken rock institution for the hip middle-class twats who hated him first time around. James Newell Osterberg Jr is an agreeable interviewee and hosts a decent radio show. But sadly someone has told

‘Butterflies and Hurricanes’ by Muse was on heavy rotation on MTV at a time, 15 years ago, when my infant son could be magically coaxed away from tears and back to sleep by pop videos. The only lasting effect of this proved to be my developing a deep and lasting aversion to Muse, because I saw that video what felt like 160 times a day for three months. Having watched them at the O2, I wish to apologise. Muse, my disdain was misplaced. You really are terrific. I’m still not sure I would want to listen to an unadulterated diet of their albums — a Christmas dinner of prog, glam