Music and Opera

Brahms didn’t always have a beard. The picture in the London Symphony Orchestra’s programme book showed him clean-shaven, and rightly. The beard didn’t reach its final imposing form until 1878, around the time Brahms started sketching his Second Piano Concerto. (‘Prepare your wife for the grisly spectacle,’ he wrote to his friend Bernhard Scholz, ‘for something so long suppressed cannot be beautiful.’) But this concert opened with the First Piano Concerto, premièred in January 1859 when the composer was still a few months short of his 26th birthday. Younger, in fact, than tonight’s conductor — the 26-year-old Alpesh Chauhan — and not much older than the soloist, Benjamin Grosvenor. Age

It used to be said that Bruckner composed the same symphony nine times, whereas, thanks to the comparative frequency of performances now, we know that his nine numbered symphonies are as different from one another as Beethoven’s nine. Nothing could make that clearer than the performances of the Fifth and the Ninth given by the Philharmonia Orchestra under Andris Nelsons, three days apart, at the Royal Festival Hall. The Fifth, as befits its stature and length, was given alone. It is Bruckner’s most demanding symphony both to listen to and to conduct. Nelsons is still, I think, at an early stage in his Brucknerian pilgrimage, and his account of the

The xx is a trio of Londoners whose eponymous first album, released in 2009, has defined the way pop music sounds today. I remember knowing, when it came out, that I was listening to something both distinctive and familiar, which is usually an indicator of success. The schtick was to plunder various music canons which they were way too young to have heard first hand — Nineties house and rave, lachrymose mainstream Eighties synth-pop, angst-ridden shoegazing — strip it down and mix it all up with very clever beats, provided by the genuine talent of Jamie Smith. ‘Radically pleasant’ is what I thought at the time, a little sniffily, and

Amid the flurry of famous deaths during 2016, one particular passing has been more or less forgotten. Peter Cook’s third and final wife, Lin Cook, died on the eve of Advent, at the age of 71, shortly after the BBC broadcast Victor Lewis-Smith’s new documentary about Peter, for which Lin gave a rare interview. I got to know Lin in the Noughties, while compiling two biographical collections of her late husband’s work. It was an intriguing insight into the world of that strange showbiz phenomenon, the celebrity widow. Celebrity widows are a paradox – ostensibly public people, they’re actually intensely private. Lin personified this odd breed. Although I was in

I bought a record in a second-hand shop in the summer of 1981. A double album. I made sure nobody was looking when I handed over my money, and kept the purchase hidden in its brown paper bag all the way home. Back in my room, I locked the door to make sure my house-mates couldn’t surprise me — and plugged in my headphones. What followed was more than an hour of dirty bliss, a guilty pleasure before the term had been invented. What I was listening to was a compilation album of Status Quo’s singles and most popular album tracks. I can’t remember what it was called — ‘Again

A couple of weeks ago, George Michael announced he was collaborating with another songwriter, Shahid Khan, and for his fans (myself included) it was set to be a highlight for 2017. The strange thing about his music was that it just got better, even if his newer releases had only a fraction of their earlier profile. Some of his greatest songs (like Waltz Away Dreaming with Toby Bourke, above) are hardly known at all. He’d go through quiet phases, followed by an creative bursts and he might well have managed one again. But about an hour ago, it was announced that he has died, aged just 53. George Michael’s voice could be recognised, instantly, anywhere.

We’re closing 2016 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 9: James Woodall on celebrating the musical contribution made by the forgotten Beatle: Ringo Starr ‘He was the most influential Beatle,’ Yoko Ono recently claimed. When Paul and John first spotted him out in Hamburg, in his suit and beard, sitting ‘drinking bourbon and seven’, they were amazed. ‘This was, like, a grown-up musician,’ thought Paul. One night Ringo sat in for their drummer Pete Best. ‘I remember the moment,’ said Paul, ‘standing there and looking at John and then looking at George, and the look on our faces was like …what is this? And that

They will be sitting there right now, listening tearfully to the song for one last time on their dinky little iPods, before deleting it for ever. ‘-Heathcliff — it’s me, Cathy, I’ve come home, so co-wo-wo-wold, let me into your window.’ No, Kate. You are never coming in through our windows again. What about the cuts? What about the refugees? What about Brexit? How could you? The window is closed, double-glazed and with a mortice lock. ‘Wuth-ering Heights’ — which once I loved — is dead to me. Also that one about going up a hill or something. That’s gone too. Die, Bush, die. They are strange people, and perhaps

Elvis Aron Presley departed this world on 16 August, 1977. Even if you delight in conspiracy theories and believe the film Elvis Found Alive was a documentary, he is currently unavailable for personal appearances. So his presence at the O2 Arena and five other UK cities in November was confined to giant screens. Actually present on the stage beneath was the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra under conductor Robin Smith plus a rhythm section and three backing singers. It’s not the first time something like this has been done — former members of Presley’s band took a similar show around the world and it worked surprisingly well. A friend suggested that

Last week, my 13-year-old daughter Sasha and her friend Tess were taken by her god-father, Sean, to see Catfish and the Bottlemen at the Wembley Arena. I bought the tickets myself on Viagogo, one of the biggest secondary ticketing websites, and had no reason to think they wouldn’t be valid. As a QPR season-ticket holder, I’ve used Viagogo in the past to resell tickets to home games and it’s worked fine. Not on this occasion. I knew some-thing was wrong when I received a message from Sean asking me to email him a picture of my driving licence. The concert organisers were refusing to admit anyone who’d bought their ticket

For millions of people around the world the shock of the US election results will be enormously magnified by news of the death of Leonard Cohen, 82, a singer poet icon who had long sung about his own impending death. Thin and frail he died in Los Angeles in the early morning hours of November 8 — the day of the US elections — according to sources close to the family. A Canadian by birth he had long said that he wanted to be buried in his hometown of Montreal in the family graveyard lying alongside his Jewish forefathers, before any public announcement of his death was made. The formal

Everyone has a special place in their heart for the late Leonard Cohen – from his 80-something contemporaries to middle-aged musos to teenage girls. The last – quite unusual for an artiste of Cohen’s generation, especially one so apparently glum, uncommercial and downbeat – is largely thanks to his composition ‘Hallelujah’, which was what Alexandra Burke sang to win the X-Factor final in 2008.  It was memorably covered for Generation X by the doomed Jeff Buckley in an angelic rendition on his 1994 album Grace. Oh and also it appears in a very sad moving scene in Shrek. And it’s not even Cohen’s best song. Cohen himself thought little of it

Years ago, when I met a famous concert pianist, I was surprised when he greeted me in a northern accent. A soft one, mind you, but completely intact. I’d assumed that, by the time a conductor or soloist reached a certain level of fame, the northern vowels would have been erased by Received Pronunciation or some painful mid-Atlantic hybrid. I was such a little snob in those days, affecting a languid drawl that had my old schoolfriends in Reading rolling their eyes. But my social climbing had at least given me a good ear for other people’s doctored accents. London was crawling with northern choirmasters and music critics whose self-taught

So RIP Pete Burns, transgendered Scouse popstar. His indescribably awful song ‘You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)’ — clever allusion, no? — reached number one in 1985 and, as part of the band Dead Or Alive, he had a couple of minor follow-up hits. When David Bowie died in January of this year, a lot was made of his supposed pioneering androgyny. I said here at the time that Bowie was deservedly famous for having written many melodically clever songs, rather than being at the forefront of the LGBT liberation movement, which he emphatically was not. Bowie may have been fashionably androgynous — so were Mick Jagger and even

There’s a folder in my computer’s external hard drive in which you’ll find 24 complete recordings of the Bach Cello Suites, 100 recordings of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, 97 of his Sixth, 107 of his Seventh, 65 of Bruckner’s Seventh, 26 of Debussy’s La Mer, 44 Fauré Requiems, 25 Mozart Requiems, 79 Mahler Sixths and 45 Rachmaninov Second Piano Concertos. That sounds as if I’ve moved beyond anorak collecting to compulsive hoarding; or maybe I have delusions of presenting Building a Library on Radio 3 (‘… but only Tennstedt, with his impulsive diminuendo, grasps that the second subject is tragically compromised by the shift to C sharp minor’). Actually, I didn’t

Tristan und Isolde Met Opera Live I am sick to death of productions of Tristan und Isolde which leave me bewildered, alienated, distracted from the work and its significance, unable to concentrate on the music. I haven’t seen a Tristan which didn’t do all these things for many years, and had vowed never to go to another, until the Met advertised its new production, with a starry cast and with Simon Rattle, a conductor who at his best, as he has been recently, is quite wonderful, even revelatory. My hopes were soon dashed. Musically, because the Prelude was so restrained, and turned out to set the tone for the whole

Music likes to tell the same story over and over again. This is part of its tradition but even individual composers can be drawn back to the same models in attempts to reclothe and reinterpret musical forms and structures and settings of classic texts. This is especially the case with the Crucifixion narrative. Bach is revered for his two Passions — St Matthew and St John — but there have been other ways for composers to relate this story in sound. The Seven Last Words from the Cross is a now defunct liturgical form which attracted the attention of Lassus, Schütz, Haydn, Gounod and César Franck. The liturgy of Tenebrae