Music and Opera

Manon Lescaut Met Opera Live Puccini’s Manon Lescaut is his first opera worth seeing and hearing, and marks an astonishing progress from what preceded it. But Puccini had yet to learn how to bully his librettists into producing the well-constructed dramas of his later operas, and for all its delights Manon Lescaut is a shambles. Richard Eyre has updated it to France in 1941, to stress the moral ambiguity of everything there and then, with occupying forces, indecisive leading characters, a general unease. That works reasonably well, though the real problem is that Puccini is uncertain about the motives of his central characters, especially Manon herself, who veers between helpless

The American comic Toby Muresianu put it best: last night’s Oscars felt like ‘three hours of being told to eat your vegetables’. If there has ever been a more grating gathering of smug, self-important asses keen to educate the TV-watching blob about Serious Stuff, then I’m struggling to remember it. Hollywood has clearly forgotten what its job is: to make us squeal and swoon, not raise our awareness about rape and paedophilia and the heat death of the planet and all the other misanthropic bilge the beautiful people spouted last night. Black people must have been counting their blessings. Sure, being shunned by the 2016 Oscars might have seemed a

Music never dies, but if Adele makes another record, there is going to be a murder. Probably of me, by me, because I can’t take it any longer. Right now, there is no escaping her. In 2015, 25 was the fastest-selling album, ever, on both sides of the Atlantic. Her single ‘Hello’ was downloaded a million times in a week and was the most-streamed song in Spotify’s history. Last week, despite her meltdown at the Grammys, she swept up at the Brits. Which is stupendous news, if you, like everyone else, love Adele. But I don’t. I can’t. I won’t. I simply hate her. Or, rather, not her. But it

John Humphrys gave Today show listeners cause to splutter into their cornflakes this morning. The BBC anchor attempted to rap to grime music, following a segment on the Brit awards: Mr S suspects he ought to stick to the day job.  

My old Oxford college, Mansfield, isn’t a famous establishment, though its current principal, ‘Baroness Helena Kennedy’, as she incorrectly styles herself, has raised its profile by lefty networking. (Owen Jones, no less, has lectured there.) The building is pretty, however, and its nonconformist chapel splendid, so long as you avert your eyes from the gruesome stained-glass Reformed divines. The organ was played by Albert Schweitzer and makes a mighty racket. This I know because in the 1980s the chapel was unlocked, which allowed me to creep in after a night on the sauce. I’d pull out all the stops, cackling like Vincent Price in The Abominable Dr Phibes. No pedals,

No one is consulted. No one is held to account. No one has the authority to turn it off. How is it that muzak has slipped through every legal control? The blame, I’d say, lies with those who are frightened of silence — with those who spend more money in shops that buzz to a friendly background hum, and laugh too loudly when all around are mute. To moderate their visceral fear of the quiet they cling to cheaply produced, intellectually demeaning and superficially comforting sub-music. Muzak comes in various forms — piped, performed live, and through other people’s headphones, when you can’t actually hear pitched sounds, only a desiccated,

Daniel Barenboim back at the Festival Hall! Cue The Grand March of the Musical Luvvies Across Hungerford Bridge, a bustling overture by Karl Jenkins in which a trombone farts out the epigrams of Simon Callow and the violas mimic the gentle swing of David Mellor’s shoulder-length bob — modelled, I’m told, on Anna Ford’s barnet c.1982. Jolly fine it looked, too, on Sunday night. Barenboim doesn’t have much hair these days, but baldness suits him. Sixty years after his RFH debut, as a 13-year-old playing Mozart under Joseph Krips, he has the same baby-pink skin as Winston Churchill in old age. He also shares Churchill’s belief in his own indestructibility.

For almost two decades, Britain has failed dismally at Eurovision – and deservedly. Our entries have been so bad as to represent a passive-aggressive insult to an entire continent. You can blame the BBC: it picks the song, and just doesn’t understand Eurovision. It seems to think it’s the equivalent of a musical bad taste party, where the aim is to send in cheesy songs. You Europeans have awful taste, the BBC seems to say, so here’s a song so crap that you’ll love it! They tend not to. Today, the BBC has announced that the public will choose the song. Its musical politburo won’t. This is a step forward, but it

Everyone is paying tribute to David Bowie’s musical feats, as well they should. Seldom, if ever, has one man made such a massive, beautiful dent on pop music and pop consciousness. A gender-bending, genre-hopping genius, deserving of all the accolades coming his way today. But I want to pay tribute to another of Bowie’s feats, which strikes me as quite extraordinary: the fact that he kept his cancer private, or ‘secret’, as the press insists, for 18 months. This, more than anything, has blown me away today. In this era of too much information, when over-sharing is virtually mandatory, Bowie’s decision to suffer away from the limelight, among those closest

The allure of Carlo Gesualdo, eighth Count of Conza and third Prince of Venosa, has been felt by music-lovers from the humblest madrigal singer to the likes of Stravinsky, Boulez and Werner Herzog. Now, just three years after celebrating the 400th anniversary of his death in 1613, his birth in 1566 gives us a second chance to remind ourselves of that heady mix of murder and chromaticism that so famously characterises his life and work. For most classical composers the music is the way into the biography. Beethoven’s deafness becomes interesting once one has got to know the Missa Solemnis. Enquiry into the circumstances that surrounded Mozart’s death begins with

Lemmy is what happens when a small slice of 1960s counterculture just keeps on going, oblivious to the changing world. He was a national treasure: a Methuselah of the British music scene, and one of its more thoughtful members. His driving forces remained a unique collision of baby boomer passions: jitterbug, skiffle, swing, rock’n’roll, and a lot of amphetamines. He was playing chirpy Mersey Beat numbers in a suit, a tie, and a smile with the Rocking Vicars when most televisions were still black and white. When the world changed, so did he. In the late 1960s he roadied for Jimi Hendrix, and later even had the patience to show

For the Spectator’s Christmas survey, we asked for some favourite seasonal rituals – and what to avoid at Christmas. Niall Ferguson Every Christmas — or, to be precise, every Hogmanay — all the members of the jazz band I played in at university gather together with their families at our place in Wales. We eat and drink gargantuan amounts and play music with steadily deteriorating precision. It is a wonderful way to see in the new year. Annie Nightingale My favourite ritual is visiting people, and I have some rules. A bottle of bubbly to each. Be charming, be fun, but be brief. Quit while you’re still popular. Then you can book a cab