Music and Opera

The award of a knighthood to the composer James MacMillan will have ruined last weekend for lots of unsavoury people: the Guardian arts desk, which decided he’d lost his mojo as soon as he turned his back on the left; Kirsty Wark, whose squawking is mimicked in MacMillan’s Scotch Bestiary; the SNP, which he detests; and, most of all, the Nats’ religious front organisation, the Scottish Catholic Bishops’ Conference. OK, enough point-scoring. MacMillan has been honoured because he turns out glorious music. He’s also rare among living composers in having worked out an answer to the question raised when John Cage pushed sound to the point where nothing short of

Like a lot of essentially cautious people, I like my music to take some risks, play with fire and damn the consequences. In truth, of course, most musicians are every bit as conservative as the rest of us: they do whatever it is they do and if it sells, they keep on doing it until they drop. Three small cheers, then, for Mumford & Sons, who with their recently released third album took a completely unexpected swerve away from the phony banjo-intensive folk that had made their name and their fortune, into the stadium rock’n’roll they have obviously always wanted to play. As may have been gently hinted at in

‘I can’t tell you what a thrill it is to get this chance in life,’ said Christine McVie, as the opening jangle to ‘Everywhere’ rang out. Judging by their ecstatic reaction, the audience felt much the same way. Look, I’ll be honest. I’m not going to give you a dispassionately critical review of Fleetwood Mac, together again in their classic line-up — Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and, for the first time in 16 years, Christine McVie. But then, who would give you that? A puritan arrived on a time machine from the 16th century? A shadow minister for work and pensions? Who could possibly be so

Can you ballet-dance to words? How can choreography make any seriously worthwhile addition to a piece of music like Mahler’s vocal symphony Das Lied von der Erde? Kenneth MacMillan’s 1965 ballet Song of the Earth, currently on at Covent Garden, is frequently hailed as a masterpiece, but just as often you read comments by people baffled by it, lost in its length and orchestral density, and in their incomprehension of the German/Chinese verses that provided both composer and choreographer with their narratives. The Royal Opera House authorities believed the exercise shouldn’t be attempted at all, and MacMillan, fresh in 1965 from the huge success of his new Romeo and Juliet

The morning after the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra failed to elect a music director, I took a call from Bild-Zeitung, Berlin’s most popular tabloid, seeking analysis. Later, they asked me to write a full-page op-ed. Now shut your eyes a moment and try to imagine any circumstance in which the Sun would ever shine an inch of space on an orchestral conductor — unless, of course, he or she was snapped pants down by paparazzi in an M4 layby. Nothing will ever convince British tabloids to overcome their class-based scorn for art and, while we may think of German media as less counter-elitist, Bild readers consume no more Beethoven per head

Where were you when you heard that Zayn Malik had left One Direction? No, me neither, but as my teenage daughter reports, an entire generation of female youth appears to have been traumatised by the event. Not that she gives a monkey’s herself, of course, but she says that everyone she knows knows someone who knows someone who really cares, sometimes to the point of genuine distress. We can laugh, and indeed we have laughed, rather a lot, but for these sufferers, the flavour of life itself has been tainted and a Lake Baikal of tears has been shed. One Direction, once the perfect five, are now an eroded four.

Alfred Cortot (1877-1962) was in my opinion the greatest pianist in recorded history. If I had to give one reason – and there are many – it would be the spontaneity of his playing. Above all you hear it in Chopin. His twists of rubato and infinitely subtle shading of phrases sound as if they’ve just occurred to him. There’s no better demonstration of that art than the first few minutes of his 1935 Chopin Second Piano Concerto with an uncredited orchestra (probably the LSO) and John Barbirolli. Not only is Cortot on top form, but the orchestra plays a delicious but naughty trick – at one point the violins decorate

Tours that start in Mexico have a nasty habit of repeating on one. Of all the British groups touring in the United States at the moment, we were the only one to launch our efforts there. But the upshot is that, two weeks later and safely in New York, I am still directing a sea of unnaturally white faces. I am often asked what happens when someone falls ill on stage. The answer is that they leave it, while trying to give the impression that this is all part of the evening’s entertainment. The resulting sense of unease can be felt by everyone in the room, but is perhaps worst

The golden age of pop music may be long gone, but the golden age of pop musicians’ obituaries is definitely with us. Soon I shall have to start apologising for returning to this subject with such regularity, but barely a week now seems to pass without some rock legend turning his or her eminent toes up. Last week it was John Renbourn, gruff beardy guitarist for Pentangle, and the week before Daevid Allen, who founded Soft Machine and about 73 different manifestations of Gong. On social media Nick Hornby asked us to name which dead people we had seen live (when they were alive, obviously). His list included Bobby Womack,

In the magazine this week I’ve written about spectacular new advances in the art of remastering vintage classical recordings. Many restoration engineers are removing hiss and correcting pitch so that historic performances are no longer muffled or distorted. But one of them stands out from the rest: Andrew Rose, whose Pristine Classical label is more interventionist than others. In particular it uses something called ambient stereo to spread the mono output between speakers. This yields a more lifelike sound than the original microphones were able to capture. In many cases the results are astonishing. The Spectator and Pristine have put together a terrific offer for our existing and new subscribers – visit new.spectator.co.uk/pristine and log in with your web ID

Songwriting credits are, as we know, not always to be trusted. Since the dawn of music publishing, there has always been a manager or an agent or a well-connected representative of organised crime willing to take a small cut of a song’s royalties, in return for services rendered or threats not carried out. Who actually wrote any song? Well, we know that Bob Dylan wrote ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, but after that it gets a little murky. Lennon/McCartney songs, after the first couple of albums, were written by Lennon or McCartney but rarely by Lennon/McCartney. The Verve’s ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’, notoriously, sampled more of Andrew Loog Oldham’s orchestral version of ‘The

This is a blog written after the first screening of Måns Zelmerlöw’s Heroes, which went on to win the Swedish nomination and the 2015 Eurovision Song Contest. The world’s most-watched cultural event is some time away, but for Eurovision affectionados the entertainment has started already. Britain and Sweden are the continent’s two greatest exporters of pop music, but the UK Eurovision contestant is annointed by the BBC whose institutional snobbishness and soft xenophobia prevents it from understanding the contest. Sweden asks Swedes to choose from one of 28 entries in a six-stage event called Melody Festival, now in full flow. For MelFest, a song starts with songwriters. They’re celebrated, and shown on camera before the performer gets going. A song that wins Eurovision

Go on, admit it, you laughed, didn’t you? When Madonna was yanked off the stage by a dancer pulling her cloak during her finale performance at the Brit Awards, you gasped in horror for one brief moment and then… you laughed out loud. Then you pressed ‘rewind’ and watched it again. And then once more for luck. Because it’s not often we get to watch a celebrity fall flat on their face – or in Madonna’s case, flat on her back. The fact that we were watching a 56-year-old mother of four fall downstairs and smash to the ground – that this was not normally something we would or should find funny

Birdman soared past longtime favourite Boyhood at the 87th Academy Awards, as Alejandro González Iñárritu’s hilarious Hollywood satire unexpectedly took both of the top prizes – best picture and director – and joint top number of awards overall, in a slightly awkward ceremony where many of the host’s razor-edged jokes drew clear disapproval from the audience. While many were predicting a slightly irreverent evening, Neil Patrick Harris, a veteran host of the Tony Awards, arguably took his jokes at the podium too far. Following a punchy opener chastising the Academy for the lack of ethnic diversity among this year’s nominees (the 20 acting nominations all went to white actors for

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 —