Music and Opera

Raise your glass on 21 August to wish a happy 80th birthday to one of the greatest singers and singing actresses this or any other country has produced — Dame Janet Baker, the mezzo-soprano from Yorkshire, who never went to a music college and won the hearts of her audiences in a career spanning 35 years. Joining us in our toast will be some shades from the past who have much for which to thank and applaud her. Make way for Bach, Handel, Elgar, Monteverdi, Britten, Mahler, Strauss, Purcell, Schubert, Berlioz, Schumann and Wolf, all of whose music she has sung with penetrating insight. In the concert hall and the

‘I don’t really like most of the music you play,’ said the tall blonde woman with whom I share my life. ‘There are no tunes. Where are the tunes? A lot of it sounds like the sort of thing you’d hear in Topshop.’ I was outraged. Admittedly, the song playing at that moment — a droll little thing called ‘Boring’ by The Pierces — didn’t exactly boast a killer melody, but even so. Like any music obsessive worth his salt, I pride myself on my ability to spot a decent tune from 40 paces, even if many of them are couched within the acoustic, minor-key, vaguely melancholy textures I tend

‘Benvenuti alla Small Cluster Band!’ And about time, too. We had been sitting in the Castello in Castellabate for half an hour watching an empty stage, while members of La Small Cluster Band stood around eating slices of pizza from takeaway boxes. ‘They’re on Italian time,’ I told my mother, as she sat in her place wearing an expression communicating polite but profound dissatisfaction. It had been my idea to spend an evening in the historic hilltop town of Castellabate listening to La Small Cluster Band playing ‘Concerto Swing’ after seeing a poster advertising the event on a wall. What could be more sophisticated, I thought, than an evening of

When I was in my late twenties I discovered the joy of drinking alone. Well, perhaps ‘joy’ is putting it too strongly. I’d been thrown out of the flat I shared with one of my closest friends from university after a series of drunken rows about his social-climbing girlfriend. I was living in a converted gardener’s cottage in west London. It was painted pink, for some reason (‘a pink cottage — just right for you,’ harrumphed my ex-flatmate), and furnished so miserably that it didn’t seem worth the effort to throw out the empty wine bottles or bother with ashtrays. Now I could binge-drink and, just as important, binge-listen. The

Don’t worry, I’m not going to go on about Glastonbury. I wasn’t there, I never have been and, unless forced at gunpoint, I never will be. It has been a source of great comfort to discover that rock critics far more professional than I detest festivals as much as I do. My friend Andrew Mueller tells the story of his appearance on Sky News as a token anti-Glastonbury grouch, doing a two-way with some idiot in a stupid hat standing in knee-deep mud (these are his words). The festival-goer went first, and talked of community and spirit and laughter in the face of adversity. The presenter turned to Andrew and

It sounds like a dream job — being in charge of what is now regarded as the greatest classical music festival in the world. But most of us would quail at the challenge. Quite apart from needing enough musical imagination to come up with 75 nightly programmes, it must surely be a logistical nightmare, corralling 300 musical artists and 315 works into a two-month season? Roger Wright, director of the BBC Proms since 2008 (as well as Controller of BBC Radio 3), obviously relishes the task. ‘I don’t do sitting in the chair dreaming about what we might put on,’ says Wright. ‘Nor is every single thing my personal choice.’

I suppose this will seem churlish, but I’d just like to add my support to the grime rapper Wiley who, upon arriving at the Glastonbury festival, tweeted to Michael Eavis: ‘Fuck you and your farm.’ I’m not sure what motivated this annoyance but credit where it’s due, it’s roughly what I’ve felt about this bloated middle class smugfest for the last fifteen years. If it persuades the badger-strangling but otherwise impeccably PC post-hippy Eavis to call it a day, so much the better. Why in Christ’s name would anyone wish to attend a music festival in which the headline acts are almost double the ages of the cabinet (and slightly

I am suffering, as we all do from time to time, from a shortage of decent new tunes. Of course, ‘suffering’ may be a slight exaggeration here. Very little physical pain has been involved. But research has shown that music obsessives need a constant upgrade of their personal tunebanks in order to perform at full capacity. It’s all very well going back and playing the Electric Light Orchestra’s Out of the Blue at top volume and singing along to every vocal harmony, as I might have done once or twice this past week, but a long-term solution it is not. It’s where to find these new tunes that has become

Christopher Purves began his musical career playing doo-wop and rock and roll with the band Harvey and the Wallbangers . These days however, the stages of Glyndebourne and La Scala are his new stomping ground. In this week’s magazine, Julian Flanagan chats to the baritone about his transition from pop to opera, the pivotal events of his opera career, and the ambitions he has yet to fulfil. In his latest role, Purves plays Walt Disney in Philip Glass’s The Perfect American at the ENO, which has proved to be a physical challenge for the singer. But ‘I’ve never gone for the easy life’, he tells us. His career path so far

Last weekend my iPad sucked me deeper into Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony than I thought possible. Deutsche Grammophon and Touch Press have released an app devoted to the work that rendered me slack-jawed with wonder, like a Victorian on his first visit to a cinema. The app gives you four complete performances of the Ninth: by Ferenc Fricsay with the Berlin Philharmonic (1958); Herbert von Karajan with the same orchestra (1962); Leonard Bernstein with the Vienna Philharmonic (1978); and Sir John Eliot Gardiner with his preposterously named Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (1992). Icons for the performances are next to each other, and the gentlest touch will transport you to and fro.

Last night’s Eurovision was, as always, a collision of music, culture and politics. As always, the official British entry was dire – but, as always, the invisible hand of Britain’s world-class musicians lay behind many acts that did well. So it was with Denmark’s winner, Emmelie de Forest, whose song Only Teardrops won by quite a margin. For CoffeeHousers who didn’t catch last night’s awards, here it is. From the first note, you can tell something is up. If this is a Danish entry, why the Celtic flute? It wasn’t a homage to Belfast Child. Ms de Forest has, since the age of 14, been learning from and performing with

Every new product, whatever it is, needs a bit of ‘buzz’, and indeed vast numbers of people around the world make a decent living trying to generate that ‘buzz’, while the rest of us spend much of our time trying to ignore it. Last week, though, much chatter was to be had in music-loving circles about the new single from Daft Punk, a French duo who make dance music and dress up as robots whenever they play live. I bought their 2001 album Discovery, which was awash with references to old soft-rock hits of the late 1970s, and was so influential you could hear blatant steals from it on countless

Being an English pianist must be a lonely calling at times. There is no native tradition like the ones that, say, German or Russian musicians are heir to, so many superb pianists have been unjustly overlooked. It used to be said of John Ogdon that, had he been born Ogdonski, in Minsk rather than Mansfield, his profile would have been greater. Perhaps; but would he have been a finer musician? If you were born in Huyton, the son of a docker, the odds against gaining international recognition are greater still. Yet, in his 42nd year, that is where Paul Lewis stands today as he approaches the final furlong of a