Music and Opera

Our curation of music and opera reviews

In defence of Mahan Esfahani

Seven years ago I ripped the CD off the front of a music magazine and found myself in the thick of a Poulenc concerto that was being played as if life depended on it. Now Poulenc is the acme of laid-back and the solo instrument, the harpsichord, had been consigned to the junkshop before young Brahms was running errands for ladies of the Reeperbahn. This recording was, for me, an act of instrumental resurrection. So I tracked down the harpsichordist, Mahan Esfahani, by name, and took him to breakfast. He turned out to be young, gay, Iranian, Presbyterian, Stanford-educated, restlessly intellectual and altogether full-on. What’s not to like? In a

Rod Liddle

PWR BTTM: Pageant

How about some queercore garage punk? PWR BTTM — the name means something empowering to do with buggery — are a young, gay, two-piece band from New York State who live apparently hectic lives. Their new album, Pageant, was released last week and a couple of days later they were kicked off their record label and current tour after allegations of sexual predation were made against the pantomimely camp singer, Ben Hopkins. The greatest surprise was that the complaints came from a woman. Their career is now in limbo. Hopkins denies the allegations, of course, claiming that he is a consensual and democratic kind of chap. But it’s all rather

Around the horn

The concert began with a flourish and a honk. Well, of course it did. Telemann wrote his last Ouverture-Suite in F major for the Landgrave of Darmstadt. The Landgrave loved hunting, and in the 18th century hunting meant horns. And horns mean honks. If you’ve ever played the horn — applied 12 feet of coiled metal tube to your face and tried, through a combination of lip muscles and willpower, to make the damn thing sing — you’ll know that no amount of hoping, praying or practice can prevent the occasional squawk. The two excellent players in Florilegium’s concert at St John’s Smith Square, moreover, were using 18th century-style horns

Damian Thompson

Period drama

Harpsichordists are supposed to make love, not war: Sir Thomas Beecham famously compared the sound they make to ‘two skeletons copulating on a tin roof’. But now two masters of the instrument, the Iranian-American Mahan Esfahani and the German Andreas Staier, are locked in mortal combat. For connoisseurs of finely tuned insults, it’s riveting stuff. For their colleagues it’s a wretched business, because one of the two musicians is setting fire to his own reputation. Also, a third harpsichordist — a gifted young Frenchman, Jean Rondeau — has been cruelly dragged into the feud. It goes without saying in period instrument circles that Esfahani picked the fight. The 33-year-old has

Rod Liddle

Blondie: Pollinator

Ah, Blondie. Those happy days of glorious power pop, chilly disco and rich, fruity vocals — Debbie Harry yearning away like a very bad alleycat on heat. ‘X Offender’, ‘In the Flesh’, ‘Picture This’ and that one where she’s in the phone booth, apparently gagging for it. People knock it, but the late 1970s wasn’t a bad time to be a teenager. And while Blondie may have been a rather calculating act, cleverly positioned on the fringe of punk and the fringe of pop and the fringe of disco and later even rap, they were at least likeable and the tunes were, largely, effortlessly and simplistically terrific. And then there

Bingeing on Bach

Coined in 1944, ‘completism’ is a modern term for a modern-day obsession. What began as a phenomenon of possession — whether of comic books, records or stamps — has evolved in the age of Spotify, Netflix and cloud computing. No activity defines current cultural trends better than binge-watching, completism taken to its logical extreme: art turned extreme sport. It’s an attitude that has found a natural home in the concert hall and opera house (what is Wagner’s Ring Cycle, after all, if not the original box set?) where length has long been fetishised and endurance accepted. But just as new media has changed the way we make art, so new

Secrets and spies

Spare a thought for Emil Gilels, still revered today by Russians as the foremost pianist of the Soviet era. The first to win a competition abroad (Brussels, 1938), Gilels was also first to be let out after Stalin died to reconnect cultural ties and earn hard dollars for the state coffers, of which he got back a few cents. Universally acclaimed, Gilels made countless recordings, among them an unsurpassed pair of Brahms concertos on Deutsche Grammophon and a transcendent set of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, a performance so revelatory I use it to demonstrate the inexpressible difference between an interpreter of genius and all the rest. Gilels, abroad, played the role

Beyond comprehension

The London Philharmonic Orchestra’s ‘Belief and Beyond Belief’ season is drawing to a close, without making it in any degree clearer what it was supposed to be about. Many major works have been played, and the season will end with Eschenbach conducting Beethoven’s Ninth. But then any series of concerts with a pretentious name ends in that way; in fact, I have devised several imaginary series of that kind myself, and will gladly forward the details to any orchestra looking for a grandiose rubric. I would be grateful if whoever devised the name of this current season would tell me what ‘Beyond Belief’ means. There is no need to find

Rod Liddle

Ray Davies: Americana

There is some surprise that after all these years Ray Davies has turned his attention to America. He is the most quintessentially English of pop musicians, a witty and acute observer of the British way of life whose best tunes were drawn from music hall and calypso — even while, with his brother Dave, he was inventing that most doggedly, turgidly, horribly English of genres, heavy metal. And yet The Kinks most famous hit, ‘Lola’, had a real American swagger about it, in the wonderful rolling rhythm, as Davies expressed his profound confusion at meeting a transgendered lady in a Soho bar. It was the first record I ever bought,

Damian Thompson

Mission impossible?

Just before Peter Donohoe played the last of Alexander Scriabin’s ten piano sonatas at the Guildhall’s Milton Court on Sunday, the autograph score of the piece was beamed on to the wall behind him. It was just a glimpse —- but enough to show us that Scriabin had the most beautiful musical calligraphy of any composer since Bach. On the face of it, that’s surprising. You would expect the Cantor of St Thomas’s to inscribe neatly — and indeed baroque musicians often play Bach straight from his own manuscripts, preening as they do so. But Scriabin is often regarded as a messy composer, in thrall to the mystical fads of

Passion indeed

‘The dripping blood our only drink/ The bloody flesh our only food…/ Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.’ In spite of that. Anglo-Catholic convert T.S. Eliot knew a thing or two about Easter. The Passion story might end with resurrection and redemption, but it’s a celebration that we achieve in spite of agony, torture and abandonment, a tale whose root lies in the Latin ‘passio’, meaning suffering. Musical Passion settings are no different — or shouldn’t be. A performance of Bach’s St John or St Matthew Passion should disquiet, even distress, as much as it consoles. But concert performances have become a comfortable festive tradition to

The decade the music died

For much of the past half-century, London has been the world’s orchestral capital. Not always in quality, but numerically without rival. Five full symphony orchestras and twice as many pint-sized ones kept up a constant clamour for attention. Each month brought new recordings with premier artists. Every orchestra had its own ethos, history and thumbprint. The Philharmonia was moulded by Karajan and Klemperer, the London Philharmonic by Boult and Tennstedt, the Royal Philharmonic by Beecham, the BBC by Boulez and the London Symphony Orchestra by its high spirits. Tales abound of maestros departing with a punch on the nose and beer bottles rolling in rehearsal. All of which added greatly

Rod Liddle

Bob Dylan: Triplicate

Having seen Bob Dylan play live a few years ago, I’m pretty sure he is not the first person I would choose to cover three albums’ worth of American jazz-age standards. The sound which came out of his mouth on that occasion resembled that of a demented, elderly dog. ‘Just Like A Woman’ had a chorus which went: ‘Grassum, grassum — rassum rassum rassum’, a neat twist on the original lyrics. It was joltingly inhuman. However, he has been on the Benylin, I think, because his voice here is not quite so gratingly hilarious. Now he sounds like a pissed-up and very persistent old gadgie at a karaoke machine in

Rued awakening

It’s always promising when the orchestra won’t fit on the stage. For the UK première, some 97 years after it was written, of the Danish composer Rued Langgaard’s Sixth Symphony (The Heaven-Rending), the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra filled every available inch of platform space, with four additional trumpeters perched in the choir seats. Everything was set for what the conductor Thomas Dausgaard described, pre-concert, as a ‘cosmic struggle between good and evil’. And god knows, it certainly made a fantastic noise. In a venue as compact as Glasgow City Halls, the onslaught of two sets of timpani had an almost physical impact. You felt the air wobble. Dausgaard had clearly

Damian Thompson

All’s well that ends well | 23 March 2017

There’s a moment in the finale of Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata when the frenzied piano writing turns unexpectedly jolly. The late Antony Hopkins described it as a bit of an anticlimax, ‘a little too near to the traditional Gypsy Dance that appears so often in the less probable 19th-century opera’. I’m not sure whether I agree — but one thing I can tell you is that this is the perfect moment to tap the Uber icon on your phone if you want to be whisked away during the first burst of applause, before the pianist has had the chance to play an encore. That’s the effect Maurizio Pollini’s playing has on

Rod Liddle

Why wasn’t Chuck Berry eulogised as much as David Bowie? I think I know…

Belatedly, goodnight to Chuck Berry. Almost everything that has been worthwhile in rock music for 60-odd years has derived from his clever, knowing, mix of cracker-country and black blues. Most of the guitar solos you ever heard had their roots in that raucous and effective two string – E and b – chiming of Chuck’s: ‘like he was ringin’ a bell.’ I can’t think of anyone who was more influential within the confines of that most conservative of mediums, rock n roll. Dylan, maybe, later, I’d grant you. Berry took the best riffs from the dead old blues giants and made them effervesce, allied them to a country bass motif

Susan Hill

Cheltenham Festival 2017: Susan Hill’s betting tips

For 23 years I lived in the North Cotswolds, heart of National Hunt racing country, where March comes round with a quickening of hearts. From Monday night of Gold Cup Week, helicopters bringing racegoers clattered over my chimney pots, en route to the hotel on the hill. Those were the days when the independent bookie, Simon, of Roughley Racing in Chipping Campden, wore a sports jacket and a flower in his button hole. Sadly, his friendly little betting shop was swept away by the rise of the internet and the demise of a lot of old boys who hung out every day for hours, watching the races on his TV and

Sound storms

Nothing pleased Iannis Xenakis more than a great big rattling storm. The sound of a thunderclap would have him running out of his home half naked to join the elements. If he was at sea, he’d sniff out any lightning and sail his yacht directly at it. The Greek composer was what we might call a hard bastard — a musical Ray Mears. As part of the Greek resistance during the war — battling first the Nazis then the British — Xenakis lost an eye to shrapnel. His compositions betray the same traits: those of the adrenalin junkie, the adventurer, the kamikaze. What would happen if I composed a piece

Let’s not dance

Why will people simply not believe you when you tell them that you don’t want to dance? Their reactions mimic the classic pattern of grief: first confusion, then denial, then anger. They tug at your arm like they’re trying to pull it from the socket. ‘Come on, you have to dance!’ ‘No I don’t.’ ‘Oh come on! You want to really.’ ‘No I don’t.’ ‘Yes you do! Of course you do! Everybody likes dancing!’ It’s at this stage that I sometimes get all dark on them, losing the smile, injecting a note of firmness or perhaps even menace, and pointing out that if I wanted to dance I would be

Drake’s progress

Those poor Canadian rappers. Hailing from a country with a functioning benefits system, sensible firearms restrictions and relatively harmonious race relations, it must be a job convincing people of their authenticity. Aubrey Drake Graham, however, has risen above this cruel accident of birth — in Toronto, to a white Jewish mother — to become not only one of the world’s most respected rappers, but its biggest pop star too. For a man with the world at his feet, Drake manages to find an impressive number of things to complain about in his lyrics, from fickle friends to the administrative headache of paying two mortgages. But if the approval of others