Music and Opera

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

In this week’s Spectator, out tomorrow, our leading article looks at the Band Aid 30 single and why it’s time for Bob Geldof to pack Band Aid in. Pickup a copy tomorrow or subscribe from just £1 here.  Anyone listening to the BBC this week could be forgiven for thinking that the musician Bob ­Geldof had just emerged from Africa, like a ­latter-day Dr Livingstone, the first westerner with news of a deadly new virus. He and his makeshift band of celebrities have adopted Ebola, their song blazing from the radio while Geldof himself has been in every studio exhorting people, with his usual stream of expletives, to buy it. Unless you have

Yesterday, I popped into Rough Trade West record store to purchase the new Pink Floyd album. That isn’t something I expected to say in my lifetime, but 20 years after their 14th album The Division Bell, one final album has been added to the band’s canon: The Endless River. Although this laddie does not think of himself as a professional music critic, I like to think I know my Floyd so here is a quick take on their new release. The Endless River is not on a par, and nor should it be, with the following albums: Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, The Wall, The Division Bell or anything else Pink Floyd have released. Firstly because it is nearly all instrumental, secondly

This evening – Armistice Eve – Ben Fleetwood Smyth (no relation) and Hugh Brunt will be putting on their annual British Art Music Series concert: this year, in aid of St Paul’s, Knightsbridge. Narrated by Judith Paris, and interspersed with Victorian and Edwardian music from the BAM Consort and the BAM Ensemble, the event will tell the story of one London community’s life, both at home and abroad, across the full span of the First World War, focussing on extracts from the parish magazines of the time, read by the current vicar, Fr Alan Gyle, and by yours truly. The Rev Wilfrid Hannay Gibbins is my guy: a St Paul’s assistant

‘I’m starting to think that all of the world’s major problems can be solved with either oyster sauce or backing vocals.’ That was Brian Eno writing in his diary one evening, after a long day’s thinking and maybe a glass or two of something agreeable. I am not entirely convinced by the bivalve mollusc argument, but the second half of his apophthegm makes perfect sense. Last week I was listening to Tim Burgess’s 2012 album Oh No I Love You (OGenesis), a recent and possibly inspired purchase. Mr Burgess is perhaps better known as lead singer and increasingly large face of The Charlatans, the long-serving Midlands indie band who enjoyed

A spoof in the Israeli Daily recently had Eminem planning to convert to Judaism and move to Tel Aviv. But I don’t think we’ll be seeing that any time soon – he’s not really waiting for the Messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy. Still, stranger things have happened. I was very amused by the Reverend Richard Coles recently; when asked if he is the only vicar who has ever topped the British pop charts, he said ‘Yes, but I met the vicar of Hitchen the other day and I said ‘We’ve met, haven’t we? Was it through the church?”‘ Apparently the vicar of Hitchen replied ‘No, I was in

We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how good they are at business, perhaps finding the prospect of them rushing into our world rather daunting. However, a part of this process has been the sudden curiosity there for western art-forms. Not long ago the idea of a tour of China by a European early music group would have seemed completely fantastical. What space was there in a country which for many years had allowed only eight ‘model plays’ to be publicly staged — all of them about the achievements of the army — for the votive antiphons of

Would musical history have turned out differently if Alexander Glazunov hadn’t been smashed out of his wits when he conducted the first performance of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 1 in D minor? The best of Glazunov’s own neatly carpentered symphonies hover on the verge of greatness. Perhaps if he hadn’t been such a toper — swigging from bottles of spirits during lectures at the St Petersburg Conservatory, where he was director — they would do more than hover. Unfortunately, his drinking didn’t just screw up his own career. The 23-year-old Sergei Rachmaninov had spent two years working on his first symphony, whose climaxes erupt from melodic cells borrowed from Orthodox chant.

Classical music has a few certainties: Götterdämmerung will always be that little bit longer than you remember, it will reliably rain if you pack a Glyndebourne picnic, and if Cecilia Bartoli invites you to a party, you drop everything and go. Which is why I found myself in Paris earlier this week, along with most of the record industry, prepared for serious music and some even more serious thrills at the launch of Bartoli’s new disc St Petersburg. There are times when only a palace will do. For most of us those times are few and far between, but if you’re mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli – ‘La Gioiosa’, a classical music

The death of Christopher Hogwood has deprived the world of the most successful exponent of early music there has ever been, or is ever likely to be. It has also reduced by one the quartet of conductors who have been called ‘the Class of ’73’, a term coined by Nick Wilson in a recent study of the early-music revolution of the 1970s and 80s. It refers to four groups that were founded in that year that are held to have changed the face of modern concert-giving: Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music; Trevor Pinnock and his English Concert; Andrew Parrott’s Taverner Choir; and my own Tallis Scholars. Of these

In a scene that sticks from Map to the Stars, David Cronenberg’s Grand Guignol of a Hollywood satire, Julianne Moore, playing an ageing Hollywood never-has-been, sits on the loo in front of her PA, expelling tired whiny farts from her arse, while listing – her trout pout doing its best impression of a quivering anus – the names of the laxatives and prescriptive drugs she needs as if they were old friends. Except she doesn’t have any friends; the only people she knows are casting directors who don’t call back. And it’s no wonder Havana Segrand’s bodily functions have stalled (surely a first for Cronenberg). Not only is she plagued

Having met with an equal mix of critical acclaim and revulsion at the Edinburgh Festival, Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B – based on the ‘human zoos’ and ethnographic displays of the late 19th century – opens today at the Barbican. I have not seen it yet, but as someone with coloured South African heritage – well aware of the European brutality during the ‘Scramble for Africa’ – I have little desire to. To some, Exhibit B will be racist and needlessly provocative. To others, it will be thought-provoking and poignant. The show ostensibly uses stark, racist imagery to make an anti-racist statement. Is Exhibit B offensive? The 19,000-odd people who have signed the e-petition to have