Music and Opera

Grade: A- One of the best one-liners attributed to Sir Thomas Beecham refers to the stridently avant-garde Karlheinz Stockhausen: ‘I’ve never conducted his music, but I once trod in some.’ It’s almost certainly apocryphal, but the implied verdict is widely shared. Stockhausen played up to the caricature of the self-obsessed ‘squeaky gate’ composer, though his capacity to create painful noises went way beyond squeaks: only he could have written a string quartet in which each player is recorded in a separate helicopter. So I’m sticking my neck out when I suggest that some of Stockhausen’s works are masterpieces that can be enjoyed even – or especially – if you steer

On Saturday, Made in Korea: The K-pop Experience began by hailing K-pop as ‘the multi-billion-pound music that’s taken the world by storm’. Unusually, this wasn’t TV hype. Last year, nine of the world’s ten bestselling albums were by Korean acts (the sole westerner being Taylor Swift). Even odder for people over 40, according to such reliable sources as Richard Osman on The Rest is Entertainment podcast and my children, South Korea has replaced America as the cultural centre of the Earth for many British teenagers. Korean youngsters are trained for pop stardom on an industrial scale But this global domination hasn’t come about by chance. Korean youngsters are trained for

Towards the end of Declan McKenna’s snappy, enjoyable 90-minute set at the Edinburgh International Festival, something quite powerful occurs. The English singer-songwriter returns alone to the stage for the encore and proceeds to play a version of ABBA’s ‘Slipping Through My Fingers’ with only his electric guitar as accompaniment. It becomes a strange, emotionally layered moment. A young musician singing from the perspective of a parent ruefully reflecting on their child growing up, away and beyond reach; a predominantly teenage crowd singing those words back to him; and the older members of the audience, many attending with their own kids, staring blurrily into the middle distance. The first song is

Remember when we all knew what indie meant? Indie was what John Peel played. It was music that was recorded, manufactured and distributed independent of the major labels. In practice, that tended to be music played by young white people, usually more in hope than expectation of either competence or success. As the years passed it came to be applied particularly to a kind of whey-faced, solipsistic music, played on guitars by people who were either too clever by half or too wimpy by half. By dusk, what had not long before looked like the seventh circle of hell had transformed These days, though, indie means whatever you want it

The Proms have started but there is a world elsewhere, and in Worcester Cathedral the 296th Three Choirs Festival set sail with a concert that couldn’t have happened anywhere else. A few years back I caused grave offence when I described the Three Choirs as a ‘home of lost causes’; as if, coming from The Spectator, that could ever be anything but a compliment. In truth, there’s still no classical music festival that provides such a sense of being plugged into a vital and ancient tradition – of being so close, as Elgar put it to ‘the living centre of music in Great Britain’. So here we were with the

There are certain long-established rules for describing Patti Smith. Google her name and the words ‘shaman’ and ‘priestess’ and you’ll see what I mean. For the best part of 50 years she’s been treated as though she’s a mystical object, a human convergence of ley lines, as much as a rock singer. In the courtyard at Somerset House, she didn’t exactly discourage the clichés. There was a long lecture on the power of the full ‘buck’ moon, which was hidden by clouds but still prompted the people in front of me to pull out their phones to check astronomy apps. There was a lengthy hymn to William Blake that concluded:

There’s nothing quite like the drama of a prodigal’s return. ‘I’ve been singing in this venue since I was ten years old,’ announces Shirley Manson, staring down nearly half a century of personal history at Edinburgh’s ornate Usher Hall. The fact that Garbage’s lead singer made the United States her primary residence many years ago lends this homecoming concert added potency. There are shout-outs to her dad, a ‘Happy Birthday’ serenade for her sister and what looks like a tear or two at the start of the encore. A ‘badass’ attitude is so sleekly applied it seems like a Che Guevara T-shirt in the racks at M&S For all the