Music and Opera

On 8 March 2013, Gustavo Dudamel stood by the coffin of the Marxist autocrat Hugo Chavez and conducted the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra in the Venezuelan national anthem. He assumed, like everyone else, that the coffin contained a fresh corpse: the president of Venezuela was reported to have died from cancer on 5 March at the age of 58. Not so, it is now claimed. According to his former head of security, Chavez died on 30 December 2012. The news was kept secret while his lieutenants panicked. The funeral — covered with ludicrous sycophancy by the BBC — was, at least in part, a masquerade. Whatever the truth, Dudamel —

Only a fool would mess with James Blunt. As his Twitter followers know, he has a sharp wit, and, as befits a former officer in the Life Guards, he is always ready for a fight. Indeed, the grievous suffering around the world caused by his greatest hit, ‘You’re Beautiful’, has been offset to some extent by his snappy tweets, several widely disseminated photographs of him looking a prawn, and a general sense that he can take a joke. Not long ago someone else tweeted as follows: ‘If you receive an email with a link to the new James Blunt single, don’t click on it. It’s a link to the new

After Mr S revealed that Chris Bryant has broken two ribs getting out of bed, speculation is rife that his nemesis James Blunt could be to blame for the incident. The duo fell out after the Labour MP claimed that British culture should not be dominated by the likes of privately educated crooners such as Blunt. The You’re Beautiful singer swiftly replied in an open letter in which he called Bryant a ‘classist gimp’. Keen to avoid any confusion about the cause of his injury, Bryant took the opportunity at a mock leader election debate at King’s Place to clear the singer’s name: ‘Just to clarify – James Blunt played no part in

We have all read about the current woeful state of the CD industry — how it is 28 per cent down on last year, which was 25 per cent down on the previous year, and so on — but do we know why? Is it the endless financial crisis? Or is it that CDs, as a concept, are knackered? And this is despite the fact that more people are taking an interest in recorded music than ever before. The villain of the piece is of course the internet. Where previously the music one wanted was not available without going into a shop and buying it, now there is every chance

After Sarah Vine revealed that her husband Michael Gove’s ringtone that infamously disrupted a cabinet meeting was the latest Beyoncé hit, David Cameron has thrown doubt on this version of events. Speaking to LBC this morning, the PM was tackling the big issues. When host Nick Ferrari played a series of Beyoncé tunes, Call Me Dave seemed confused: ‘I don’t think it was any, my memory is it sounded like something from the sort of chillax playlist on Spotify. It wasn’t… that’s all a bit more you know sort of hip-hoppy and I don’t think it was that. But I mean it didn’t last very long. So we weren’t playing beat the

I’ve never been into shoplifting, though I once had a friend who was. And, no, before you ask, I’m not using that old ‘friend’ device to hide my own identity. She was a girl I met at university. Bookshops were her hunting ground. I’m assuming she was driven by some sort of compulsion because she couldn’t enjoy the books she nicked and — she assured me — God would always punish her by making a contact lens drop out of her eye within hours of the crime. I wouldn’t enjoy a stolen book, either. But if I listened to classical recordings illicitly downloaded from the internet, would my conscience drain

From ‘Music and the War’, The Spectator, 16 January 1915: The war, so far, has not thrown up any supreme musical product. It would be an affectation to pretend that the taste of the average British soldier is elevated. As in the Boer War, his repertory is confined to music-ball tunes and songs of an extreme and lugubrious sentimentality. The average “Tommy ” does not sing folk-songs or graceful chansons populaires, e.g., Meunier tu dors, Ton moulin va trop vite, like our allies, but at least he does not submit to dictation from above: he chooses for himself. The curious fact about “Tipperary,” a marching song of a mild ragtime

Michael Kennedy, who died on New Year’s Eve, was the Sunday Telegraph’s music critic when I was for a while assistant arts editor there about 20 years ago. He was of course musically knowledgeable beyond reproach, but his writing had the compulsive readability of a man who was always a journalist, a storyteller. He was elitist in his taste but populist in his communicative instincts, something that I rapidly absorbed as I subedited his copy. Critics are usually obsessively protective of their work, often wounded by disagreement rather than stimulated. Kennedy was an exception, robustly open to the possibility of others improving and developing work he could get nowhere with. One Sunday in

One of the most complete bars to the authentic performance of both baroque opera and some renaissance polyphony is the current unavailability of castrati. There isn’t much to be done about it of course, but we might regret that we can no longer hear a sound which, at its best, fascinated all who did hear it. And we don’t know what that sound was. The two famous and unique recordings of Alessandro Moreschi, made in old age in 1902 and 1904, give us some clues, but can hardly represent the sound of the greatest 18th-century practitioners. There are some pointers in contemporary reports. Gounod went to the Sistine Chapel in

1. Khovanskygate A typically brilliant and wayward production by the Birmingham Opera Company of this unfollowable opera, with stupendous choral singing by local inhabitants. 2. Dialogues des Carmélites The Royal Opera did Poulenc’s gamey masterpiece proud, in a direct and intense account, with ideal all-round casting. 3. Götterdämmerung Opera North, under the inspiring leadership and baton of Richard Farnes, brought the greatest enterprise that a company can undertake to a stupendous close, and in two years’ time will be performing the entire Ring cycle. 4. Macbetto The live relays from the New York Met. continue to be the most reliable operatic occasions, and Verdi’s opera which led off the current season verged on the

1. My top gong would be shared by June Spencer and Patricia Greene for their brilliant character acting on Radio 4’s The Archers, creating in Peggy and Jill two resilient women of their time yet also strong-minded, decisive, fiercely independent and in Jill’s case always game for a laugh. 2. Not far behind is Neil MacGregor for creating another superb series for Radio 4, Germany: Memories of a Nation, encouraging us to think about what the world might look like from a German point of view in 25 bite-sized insights. 3. Radio 3’s most heart-stopping moment on air was Zoe Norridge visiting the technical school in Murambi where thousands of

Joe Cocker died yesterday, just 70 years old, from lung cancer. He was one of a handful of rock singers whose voice was instantly recognisable, adding a new dimension to any song he sang. And perhaps this is why his cover versions worked so well – they did sound completely different, and yet still thrilling and authentic. He could take a well-loved song, and transform it in a way that was loved by those who loved the original. To me, Cocker was the only person to improve a Beatles song. His 1968 With A Little Help From My Friends is unforgettable, right off from the intro. It sounds like a completely different song, shooting off

Some songs are hits — No. 1 for a couple of weeks. Some songs are standards — they endure decade after decade. And a few very rare songs reach way beyond either category, to embed themselves so deeply in the collective consciousness they become part of the soundtrack of society. They start off the same as all the other numbers, written for a show or a movie, a singer or an event, but they float free of the writer, they outlast the singer, transcend the movie, change the event. And Irving Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’ is perhaps the song that transformed American Christmas. There are a couple of what we now

One of the growth areas of contemporary music is in setting sacred texts. It might be thought that I had a special interest in claiming this, but in fact what I am about to describe represents a sea change in recent practice. Where there was once ‘squeaky gate’ (or ‘dripping tap’) music — as very dissonant writing used to be called — many leading composers are now writing in a style that is at least tonal and can occasionally seem almost naïve. There was a time when the first performance of a recent commission struck fear into the most broad-minded listener. We used to brace ourselves for horror and were

Earlier this month the Wigmore Hall was sold out for a Schubert recital by a concert pianist whose only solo recordings consist of two volumes of the Mozart piano sonatas. That would be understandable if he were 23 years old and the next big thing. But he’s 65. Though he may indeed be the next big thing. Christian Blackshaw started big, faded into obscurity, then burst back at around the time he qualified for Boris’s Freedom Pass. Whether he owns one I can’t say. I wouldn’t dare ask, since he can be a bit prickly. In fact, he’ll probably take offence at that, so let’s note immediately that he doesn’t