Music and Opera

How salutary to encounter the cool cerebral elegance of Merce Cunningham’s choreography again. A figure at the heart of the abstract tendency in post-war American culture, the lover and collaborator of John Cage, Cunningham emptied barefoot dance of ideology, symbolism, plot, personality, pretension: instead it became purely an exploration of bodies in movement, responsive to chance, sound and light. Perhaps Cunningham’s language has been so deeply absorbed into the lexicon of modern dance that it no longer shocks or surprises. But its chaste beauty remains inviolate. Lyon Opera Ballet – France’s equivalent to Rambert – has made a speciality of performing Cunningham, who died in 2009 at the age of

Puccini’s Turandot is back at the Royal Opera in the 40-year old production by Andrei Serban and… well, guilty pleasure is an unfashionable notion these days, but I still feel a batsqueak of shame at enjoying it so much. It’s not the chinoiserie – anyone who believes that an opera based on an 18th-century Italian pantomime should be taken literally is probably beyond help. No, it’s a Spectator headline from years back that still nags. ‘Turandot is a disgusting opera that is beyond redemption’ was the gist of a review of this same staging by the late Michael Tanner, and if it was anyone else you’d put it down to

My Neighbour Totoro is a hugely successful show based on a Japanese movie made in 1988. The setting is a haunted house occupied by two little girls who encounter various creatures rendered on stage by puppets. The story has no action, danger or jeopardy so it’s likely to bore small boys and their dads. Perhaps mums and daughters will appreciate it more. The big selling point is the puppetry whose quality varies. The naturalistic animals are done well. Cute yapping dogs, fluffy chickens scampering about, mischievous goats that steal maize from unguarded fields. The silliest creature is an orange latex cat equipped with 12 spindly legs that don’t work. It

Touring’s not what it used to be. When I were a lad, even big bands would do 30 or 40 shows around the UK to promote their new albums, stopping in places such as Chippenham Goldiggers, Hanley Victoria Hall, Ipswich Gaumont, Preston Lockley Grand Hall that would only see a major act today if they happened to need a local motorway services. Those days are gone. If you’re a superstar, you’ll do a handful of arenas in a few big cities. And if you are not a superstar, you might not even tour your new album at all, at least not in the old sense. Rather than playing 20 different

Disney’s new Snow White is a live-action remake of the beloved 1937 classic that was cinema’s first full-length animated feature and is still regarded as Walt’s greatest masterpiece – even if fans of The Jungle Book will always have something to say about that. It stars Rachel Zegler, which set the cat among the pigeons, as she is Latino so doesn’t have ‘skin as white as snow’. However, because I’m not a stickler for ‘historical accuracy’ when it comes to fictional characters in fairy tales, this didn’t bother me. The problem with the film isn’t that it’s gone ‘woke’, it’s that it contains workaday narrative, blandly generic characters and a

Last week, Barbara Hannigan conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in Haydn, Roussel, Ravel and Britten, though to be honest she had me at Haydn. It’s still relatively unusual to encounter him in a symphonic concert, and more than one promoter has told me that Haydn is ‘box office poison’, which is a shocking description of such life-enhancing music. Perhaps it’s down to sonic overkill. Bingeing on Shostakovich and Mahler has left our emotional reflexes distended and coarsened, and now we feel short-changed if every inch of the concert platform isn’t crammed with extra brass and percussion. Still, it didn’t seem to have deterred the LSO’s audience – or for that