Music and Opera

About 200 million people tuned in to the Eurovision Song Contest last night, and will have seen Britain finish third-last. The country of Adele, Ed Sheeran, the Mumfords and The Beatles was defeated by countries with a twentieth of our population (and musical talent) – so what’s going wrong? The answer is fairly simple: the UK entry is controlled by the BBC. Asking it to choose a Eurovision Song Contest winner is like asking the Parliamentary Culture Committee to choose a Christmas No1. I’m a huge fan of the BBC and its Eurovision coverage is generally first class, as are Paddy O’Connell and Graham Norton. But choosing a winning musical act is a

There aren’t too many things I have in common with Zayn Malik, but as of this week, we do at least now have a shared enemy: Azealia Banks, the American rapper and part-time witch. She took to Twitter on Wednesday to send racist tweets to the former One Direction star, including one in which she called him a ‘curry scented bitch’. The think pieces have not stopped since. This is not a think piece from an outsider though, but from one of Miss Banks’ other victims. I first came into contact with her last month when she threatened on Twitter to kill a friend of mine’s mother using a voodoo curse,

One of the greatest choral symphonies of the 20th century, entitled Das Siegeslied (Psalm of Victory), has been heard only three times since it was composed in 1933. The last performance took place in Bratislava in 1997. The text is a German translation of words from Psalm 68: ‘…as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God’. One critic has described Das Siegeslied as ‘a shattering, armour-plated juggernaut of a symphony’, whose huge orchestra marches in a frenzy across ‘voice parts conceived wholly in terms of the harsh consonants and barking vowels of German’. Yet there is also captivating beauty: the lapping of harps

Prince’s vast archive of unreleased music is legendary. The ‘vault’ in Paisley Park, the late musician’s home-cum-studio complex in suburban Minneapolis, contains thousands of hours of recordings that have never seen the inside of a tape deck. The unpublished music tells a story. Material was shelved when band members left, after the tragic death of his newborn son, and at the end of his first marriage. Some projects were cancelled for more prosaic (commercial and legal) reasons. The Black Album, which was abandoned in mysterious circumstances a week before it was due to be released, became one of the most bootlegged records of all time. Because so much of the

This, my 479th, is to be my last contribution as a regular columnist to The Spectator. I have written here for 33 years and 4 months, a way of life really, and one I have greatly enjoyed. I thank Auberon Waugh in absentia for suggesting me to Alexander Chancellor in the first place; and Charles Moore for keeping me on in the early years, once we were up and running. I also thank three quite exceptional arts editors: Gina Lewis, Jenny Naipaul and the doyenne of these pages, Liz Anderson. Things have moved on from my habitual think pieces, outraged rants, ad hominem demolition of palpable idiots written in the

I saw Prince play once. I was bored rigid but couldn’t mention this to the girls I’d gone with: as far as they were concerned, watching the purple sex dwarf (he was 5ft 2in) masturbating with and fellating his guitar and generally getting off on his sublime pixieness was like experiencing the second coming. Me, I could have done with a few more tunes. I like ‘When Doves Cry’ a lot: the keyboard hook, the demonic guitar, the naggingly catchy tune, the otherworldly vocals that make him sound like some kind of lascivious reptile from Venus. Whenever I hear it, though, I’m reminded of my fundamental problem with Prince: he

The most restless, resilient, rapacious rock & roll group in the world is on the move again. Less than two weeks after finishing a routinely Herculean tour of Latin America with an epochal show in Cuba, the Rolling Stones were back in their London hometown, disrupting traffic on the King’s Road as Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood glad-handed a media scrum at a red carpet event to mark the opening of their latest project, Exhibitionism at the Saatchi Gallery. Towards the start of this ‘immersive’ odyssey, you find yourself in a room that looks like the set of a Harold Pinter play. Grease-plastered dishes are piled

The intransigence of Maxwell Davies, Boulez and Stockhausen is coming home to roost. Here were three composers, famous if not exactly popular, who called many shots by the time they died yet whose works were little loved in their lifetimes by the concert-going public and stand little chance of performance now they are dead. How was such imbalance possible? The intransigence had a lot to do with it. People thrill to a bold stance, and they don’t come much bolder than Boulez and Stockhausen in the Sixties. To be fair, Max was a very British version of this attitude. When Boulez died, the French press focused on a national hero

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thespectatorpodcast-politicalcorrectness-budget2016andraves/media.mp3″ title=”The Spectator Podcast: The end of raving” startat=1080] Listen [/audioplayer]At 19, I dropped out of university to pursue a career as a rave promoter. I went into business with a schoolfriend. We rose through the ranks of party promotion, founded a record label, and started an annual dance music festival. After more than ten years, though, we’ve regretfully decided to close down. And here’s why: young people these days just don’t know how to rave. They are too safe and boring. Rave, like all youth movements, was meant to be about freedom, rebellion and pissing off your parents. Generations before us had alienated their elders with the help

Aldous Huxley observed that ‘Where music is concerned, infant prodigies are almost the rule. In the world of literature, on the other hand, they remain the rarest exceptions.’ This, he believed, was because good literature could not be written without experience of the outside world, while music was the art least connected with reality. ‘Like mathematics,’ he said, ‘it is an almost unadulterated product of the inner world.’ Musicians may dispute the last point, but the fact remains that musical and artistic ability can emerge with dizzying speed. When it does, the question is how best — and how far — to nurture it? Several schools offer a specialised education in

Manon Lescaut Met Opera Live Puccini’s Manon Lescaut is his first opera worth seeing and hearing, and marks an astonishing progress from what preceded it. But Puccini had yet to learn how to bully his librettists into producing the well-constructed dramas of his later operas, and for all its delights Manon Lescaut is a shambles. Richard Eyre has updated it to France in 1941, to stress the moral ambiguity of everything there and then, with occupying forces, indecisive leading characters, a general unease. That works reasonably well, though the real problem is that Puccini is uncertain about the motives of his central characters, especially Manon herself, who veers between helpless

The American comic Toby Muresianu put it best: last night’s Oscars felt like ‘three hours of being told to eat your vegetables’. If there has ever been a more grating gathering of smug, self-important asses keen to educate the TV-watching blob about Serious Stuff, then I’m struggling to remember it. Hollywood has clearly forgotten what its job is: to make us squeal and swoon, not raise our awareness about rape and paedophilia and the heat death of the planet and all the other misanthropic bilge the beautiful people spouted last night. Black people must have been counting their blessings. Sure, being shunned by the 2016 Oscars might have seemed a

Music never dies, but if Adele makes another record, there is going to be a murder. Probably of me, by me, because I can’t take it any longer. Right now, there is no escaping her. In 2015, 25 was the fastest-selling album, ever, on both sides of the Atlantic. Her single ‘Hello’ was downloaded a million times in a week and was the most-streamed song in Spotify’s history. Last week, despite her meltdown at the Grammys, she swept up at the Brits. Which is stupendous news, if you, like everyone else, love Adele. But I don’t. I can’t. I won’t. I simply hate her. Or, rather, not her. But it

John Humphrys gave Today show listeners cause to splutter into their cornflakes this morning. The BBC anchor attempted to rap to grime music, following a segment on the Brit awards: Mr S suspects he ought to stick to the day job.  

My old Oxford college, Mansfield, isn’t a famous establishment, though its current principal, ‘Baroness Helena Kennedy’, as she incorrectly styles herself, has raised its profile by lefty networking. (Owen Jones, no less, has lectured there.) The building is pretty, however, and its nonconformist chapel splendid, so long as you avert your eyes from the gruesome stained-glass Reformed divines. The organ was played by Albert Schweitzer and makes a mighty racket. This I know because in the 1980s the chapel was unlocked, which allowed me to creep in after a night on the sauce. I’d pull out all the stops, cackling like Vincent Price in The Abominable Dr Phibes. No pedals,

No one is consulted. No one is held to account. No one has the authority to turn it off. How is it that muzak has slipped through every legal control? The blame, I’d say, lies with those who are frightened of silence — with those who spend more money in shops that buzz to a friendly background hum, and laugh too loudly when all around are mute. To moderate their visceral fear of the quiet they cling to cheaply produced, intellectually demeaning and superficially comforting sub-music. Muzak comes in various forms — piped, performed live, and through other people’s headphones, when you can’t actually hear pitched sounds, only a desiccated,

Daniel Barenboim back at the Festival Hall! Cue The Grand March of the Musical Luvvies Across Hungerford Bridge, a bustling overture by Karl Jenkins in which a trombone farts out the epigrams of Simon Callow and the violas mimic the gentle swing of David Mellor’s shoulder-length bob — modelled, I’m told, on Anna Ford’s barnet c.1982. Jolly fine it looked, too, on Sunday night. Barenboim doesn’t have much hair these days, but baldness suits him. Sixty years after his RFH debut, as a 13-year-old playing Mozart under Joseph Krips, he has the same baby-pink skin as Winston Churchill in old age. He also shares Churchill’s belief in his own indestructibility.

For almost two decades, Britain has failed dismally at Eurovision – and deservedly. Our entries have been so bad as to represent a passive-aggressive insult to an entire continent. You can blame the BBC: it picks the song, and just doesn’t understand Eurovision. It seems to think it’s the equivalent of a musical bad taste party, where the aim is to send in cheesy songs. You Europeans have awful taste, the BBC seems to say, so here’s a song so crap that you’ll love it! They tend not to. Today, the BBC has announced that the public will choose the song. Its musical politburo won’t. This is a step forward, but it

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/projectfear/media.mp3″ title=”Rod Liddle and Kaite Welsh discuss David Bowie’s legacy” startat=678] Listen [/audioplayer]I was desperately worried that you hadn’t read or heard enough platitudinous drivel about David Bowie — and therefore felt compelled to weigh in with my own observations. In all honesty I haven’t heard so much repetitive, imbecilic guff since Mandela shuffled off this mortal coil. It was even worse than the confected sobfest that greeted the passing of the charming and likeable Lou Reed. The eulogies for Lou were simply a case of the BBC telling everybody that they are dead hip and edgy, really enjoyed ‘Perfect Day’ and once knew someone, back in uni, who