Music and Opera

It has been my privilege over the past two weeks to sing in the chorus of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under conductor Simon Rattle and director Peter Sellars in a staged production of J.S. Bach’s St John Passion. The experience has been life changing for some of my colleagues; it has certainly been unique. Dressed in black casual clothing, we spend much of the performance sauntering around the stage making abstract gestures intended to highlight certain words and distill the myriad emotions found in the music. Some find this effective; others find it silly. Sellars’s forte as a director is his ability to communicate to his performers

Back when the UK was assumed to be leaving the European Union on 29 March, the Aurora Orchestra was invited to Brussels to participate in Klarafestival: specifically, an evening of words and music ‘celebrating cultural links between Europe and the UK’. And because arts organisations in general (and orchestras in particular) change direction with the agility of a supertanker in pack ice, it went ahead regardless. The cellist Nicolas Altstaedt played John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil with exquisite purity of tone. Ian Bostridge sang Britten’s Les illuminations: brisk, earthy, vividly theatrical. The Aurora Orchestra’s strings, playing standing up, flashed and bristled back at him. Musicians like to talk about the

A few years ago, I hooked up with a BBC team in Berlin to record a programme with Daniel Barenboim. We were shown in to his spartan offices at the Staatsoper and, without preliminaries, I conducted an interview with him across a low table for 45 minutes. When our time was up, Barenboim rose and left. I am not even sure if we shook hands. Knowing him from previous encounters, I was not particularly bothered. What did shock me was the sight of my BBC colleagues, their faces white with stress, their limbs rendered catatonic. No one creates tension in a room like Daniel Barenboim. Last month, seven musicians in

On 29 June 1991, a record called ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’ by Bryan Adams entered the UK charts, at No. 8. At that point, I was blissfully in love with my girlfriend, had just got a first at university and had won a scholarship to a postgraduate journalism course. By the time it departed from the charts, on 14 December — after a run that included a still-record 16 weeks at No. 1 — I had been dumped by my girlfriend, had dropped out of the journalism course, and my dad, who had been poorly when the record entered the charts, was a month away from

Why does it follow that, because an artist or performer is an appalling human being, his work should be banned? Speaking at Oxford in the late 19th century, Paul Verlaine introduced himself thus: ‘Je suis Paul Verlaine — poète, ivrogne, pédéraste.’ His work survived. Yet nearly a century and a half later, Michael Jackson has his music banned by the BBC. This is an extract from Charles Moore’s Spectator Notes, which appears in the forthcoming issue of the magazine, out tomorrow

Keith Flint, the fearsome looking frontman of British electronic dance group The Prodigy, has died at the age of 49. With him, you fear, has gone one of the most important music movements of the last 30 years. The Prodigy is, or was, a strange group, all things considered. They emerged from the rave scene of early 90s Essex, with hits such as ‘Charly,’ ‘Everybody in the Place’ and ‘Out of Space’. The latter became a popular, upbeat, conciliatory anthem the band ended every show with, whilst ‘Everybody’ just missed out on number one. But the group went mainstream with a much darker brand of music than the ‘kiddie rave’ of

It was Stravinsky himself who suggested that, in order to preserve its difficulty, the opening bassoon solo of The Rite of Spring should be raised by a semitone every decade. And it was a performance by Birmingham Royal Ballet in 2005 that convinced me that he wasn’t entirely joking. The audience nattered away over the opening bars; the unlucky bassoonist wobbled and cracked. Clearly, this orchestra was not remotely prepared for what was about to hit it. Rhythms splintered like shrapnel and misplaced entries spattered across every silence. As they hurtled into the final Sacrificial Dance, you could almost hear the prayers of musicians audibly struggling simply to hang on.

Benjamin Britten was adamant that he did not want any memorial sculpture of himself in Aldeburgh, the Suffolk coastal town where he lived for 30 years. He died in 1976 and he is remembered there by the Britten-Pears music school and Snape Maltings concert hall, by John Piper’s magnificent window in the church, and at the Red House, where Britten lived, which contains his entire library, art collection and musical archive. A bronze bust standing on the seafront was neither needed nor wanted. But the Suffolk artist Maggi Hambling was greatly inspired by Britten’s music, and especially his opera Peter Grimes, and in 2002 she had the idea of designing

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of approach to performing Schubert’s Winterreise, though sometimes there’s doubt or dispute about which one a given performer has taken. According to Jonas Kaufmann, Hans Hotter, for me the greatest of all performers of the cycle, as of so much else, insisted that the performer should be a narrator, not the Wanderer himself. But Kaufmann rightly insisted that Hotter’s various recordings are dramatic, with Hotter enacting, not narrating the monodrama. So it’s not always easy to tell. There was no doubt, though, in Christian Gerhaher’s recent performance of the cycle at the Wigmore Hall, with his long-time accompanist Gerold Huber, that we were witnessing

The Guardian last week published a ‘we, the undersigned’ letter from 50 ‘artists of conscience’ urging the BBC to boycott this year’s Eurovision Song Contest because it’s taking place in Israel. ‘Eurovision may be light entertainment,’ they wrote, ‘but it is not exempt from human rights considerations — and we cannot ignore Israel’s systematic violations of Palestinian human rights.’ The signatories included such luminaries as Julie Christie, Peter Gabriel, Roger Waters, Vivienne Westwood and Ken Loach. Ken’s inclusion will have come as a surprise to those Israelis who saw his film I, Daniel Blake in Tel Aviv a couple of years ago. Ken’s hypocrisy was pointed out when he chastised

Grade: A– I’m here to make you feel old. It’s now nearly 20 years since the pleasing, laconic, Stones pastiche of ‘Bohemian Like You’ hit the charts, the breakthrough song of these faux-indie Portland slackers. They were ever a little despised, even then, partly for their pop sensibilities and partly because there is indeed something supremely irritating about them. Courtney Taylor-Taylor’s confected, ironic vocals, for a start. Courtney Taylor-Taylor’s name, for a second. Everything was a knowing pastiche, the catchy slabs of krautrock, the electronic noodling, the interminable hippy mantras. But they could write songs, at least — and they were cutely inventive with noise. Not much has changed —

Like Theresa May with her thrice-spurned deal, the London Symphony Orchestra is pressing ahead with plans for a concert hall to be achieved at a price that no-one believes and for which it has no visible resources. Like Mrs May, the LSO is relying on friendly journalists to distract the public’s attention from the huge black holes in the plan, hoping against hope that momentum alone will carry the day against all reasonable logic. You can see why they keep trying, though. The LSO promised Sir Simon Rattle it would build him a new hall if he signed on as music director. Its players know that the dismal Barbican acoustic

The teenage girls are often right. They were right about Sinatra and they were right about Elvis. They were right about the Beatles and the Stones. They were right, too, about the 1975, whose emergence in 2013 playing tuneful and accessible pop-rock with unusually self-questioning lyrics was driven by a large and voluble following among those teenage girls. Naturally, that led a swathe of male critics to write them off. One dismissed them on the baffling grounds that their songs were ‘ridiculously catchy’, as if that were a bad thing; the NME proclaimed them the worst band in the world Six years on, the critics have caught up. The 1975’s

We increasingly accept the collision between life and art. Whether we’re puzzling over the real identity of Elena Ferrante, choosing our own adventure in Bandersnatch, or boycotting the latest Polanski film, we’re buying into culture that’s more mirror than window. But wasn’t it ever thus? It’s a case Barbara Strozzi would certainly argue. The most-published Italian composer of her age, a musician whose work could stand alongside Cavalli, Rossi, even Monteverdi, was caught throughout her career in the double-bind of biography. You have only to look at her famous portrait — gazing insolently out at the viewer, breast bared — to see the erotics of performance at work. But whether

Won’t somebody think of the Woolwennials this weekend? Precisely one decade has passed since Britain lost the true hero of the high street. And for those aged over 24, whose childhood weekends were wasted in its labyrinth of kitsch, this Woolworths anniversary stirs up communal grief. So spare a knowing nod to fellow rustlers of the DVD bargain-bucket, a reassuring squeeze to the hand clutching the cola-bottle scooper, and a sympathetic cheek-stroke to the vacant-eyed browser of discounted superhero pyjamas. Together, somehow, we’ll muddle on. Nostalgia, like love, is blind – and the world is filled with hackneyed wasn’t-it-wonderful articles of bygone Britain. And, yes, Woolworth worship is the very