Music and Opera

May was a cruel month for those middle-aged liberals who treasure their old alternative rock heroes. There was Morrissey, appearing on American TV wearing a For Britain badge. There was XTC’s Andy Partridge tweeting that ‘the holocaust is not holy writ, it isn’t a religion, it can be historically revised’. And there was Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream — the idiot inter pares of rock stars who foment revolution from the gates of their kids’ private school — appearing on Newsnight to say Madonna was ‘a total prostitute’ for performing at the Eurovision Song Contest in Israel (has he said the same to his friend Nick Cave, who has played

At the Wigmore Hall last Friday, the Takacs String Quartet and Garrick Ohlsson played a piano quintet that was once revered as a masterpiece but then fell out of fashion and wasn’t heard for decades. It’s by Amy Beach, a name which always makes me smile because it looks so incongruous underneath her photograph. ‘Amy Beach’ sounds like an old hippie who sells ethnic tapestries and hogs the limelight at her women-only Seattle book club. But the photos show a Bostonian society hostess straight out of Henry James: unsmiling, with eyes peeled for a social climber who picks up the wrong knife at dinner. The 21st-century musical establishment portrays Beach

Being old is big business in live music nowadays, in a way it wasn’t even 25 years ago. When Take That were still a boy band in the early 1990s, as opposed to a man band, the idea that in middle age they would be one of the most successful live groups in Britain would have been laughable. Yet here they are, playing eight nights at the O2 Arena, making it a total of 34 shows they have played there since it opened, more than any other act. Just as fanciful would have been the idea that Pink Floyd’s drummer could put together a group featuring Gary Kemp of Spandau

The Times prides itself as being the newspaper of record, but today it made an uncharacteristic blunder in its obituary of American actress and singer Doris Day. In the obituary, it featured a reference to the actress’ role in the 1965 film How to Murder Your Wife, saying: ‘She starred in a couple of dreadful films, with titles such as How to Murder Your Wife.’ Unfortunately, it seems that something went awry in the Times’ research, as Day in fact never appeared in the American satire, which instead features Virna Lisi. Mr Steerpike notes that as well featuring in ‘a couple of dreadful films’, the late Mrs Day can now add

Grade: B– One of the things not to like about Vampire Weekend, other than their cloying preppiness, Ezra Koenig’s ingratiating voice, the bizarre cultural appropriation that never gets called out and the Upper West Side archness of the lyrics, is the fact they rarely put more than two decent songs on an album. That’s true right back to their very first: does anyone remember any song other than ‘Oxford Comma’ (their best by a mile) and ‘A-Punk’? This latest is a double album, so, faithfully sticking to the template, you get four decent songs. Much of it, actually, is pleasant in a slightly insipid Paul Simon kinda way. Very little

The climactic central scene of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd ends unexpectedly. The naval court has reached a verdict of death, and Captain Vere must depart to tell Billy his fate. Voices fall silent, the stage empties, and for two whole minutes the unseen drama is distilled into just 34 chords. And not sprawling elbowfuls of notes either, but plain old triads — the child’s building blocks of harmony. It’s wilfully, maddeningly ambiguous and utterly inspired. It’s also a touchstone for any performance — the moment the opera reveals itself either as a parable, groping gradually but surely towards redemption, or a darker tale of the indiscriminate cruelty of fate. Deborah

‘I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all,’ wrote Stravinsky in one of his more honest moments, and when it comes to humour the old fox had a point. Strip away words, visuals, parody and extra-musical associations (the flatulent bassoon; the raspberry-blowing trumpet) and Orpheus, unaided, doesn’t have much left in his comic armoury. Two concerts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall could almost have been test cases. Geoffrey Paterson conducted the London Sinfonietta in the UK première of No. 50 (The Garden) by Richard Ayres, a composer whose playful, surreal sensibility cheerfully jettisons any idea of music as an end in itself.

Last autumn, anyone who a) has an interest in pop music, and b) reads the weightier end of the press, would have come to the conclusion that the world was shortly to enter some kind of musical singularity, in which all of civilisation would be transformed by the 39-year-old Swedish pop singer Robyn. ‘After more than a half-decade of psycho-analysis, a relationship meltdown, the death of one of her closest collaborators and four years spent working on her masterpiece… a new Robyn is ready to return,’ a profile in the New York Times solemnly pronounced, ahead of Honey, her first album for eight years. The Guardian devoted 6,000 words —

‘I’m still warmed up from last night,’ said Sophie Bevan early on a Sunday morning in the practice-room behind the presbytery of St Birinus Catholic Church in the charming village of Dorchester-on-Thames, Oxfordshire – a tiny Pugin-esque gem dwarfed by the enormous Anglican abbey up the road. She and the other four members of the Davey Consort (two of them her cousins from the musical Bevan clan) were running through a Renaissance polyphonic mass, with Sophie’s husband, the composer and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, directing from the practice harpsichord. Bevan had been the soprano soloist in Beethoven’s Ninth at the Festival Hall the previous evening, and tomorrow she and her husband

Grade: A– If your 12-year-old daughter’s a bit thick, she probably likes Ariana Grande. Come on, dads — you’ve got to face up to this stuff, you’ve got to JUDGE. Be ruthless. If, however, she’s a bit smarter, but also sullen, lazy and probably prone to self-harming, she’ll be a big Billie Eilish fan. Only just 17, from Los Angeles, Eilish is kind of sparse and woke emo electropop misery, very self-consciously ‘edgy’. An agreeably large number of her songs seem to be about killing herself, or just ceasing to exist. The rest are a little darker, and terminally angst-ridden. She has a very pretty voice, usually deployed as a

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