For centuries no one knew who it was by or even what it was of. The picture that had hung unnoticed in a succession of noble palazzi in the Italian province of Salerno, with its deep chiaroscuro and close-cropped composition, looked like a Caravaggio – but after Caravaggio almost every painting in Naples did. When
Grade: A Rejoice! A glorious symphonic cycle by a British composer has been issued as a set for the first time. George Lloyd (1913-98) was treated with lofty condescension by the musical establishment because his twelve symphonies contain barely a single dissonance. They’re sprinkled with jaunty tunes that have the feel of an Ealing Comedy
The Divine Mrs S is a backstage satire set in the year 1800, when flouncy costumes and elaborate English prose were common cultural ornaments. On press night the venue was full of resting actors and theatrical hangers-on who adored the show’s in-jokes and rehearsal-room wisecracks. Titus Andronicus is ‘an experimental play about a pie’, says
If you’ve spent any time gawping at Netflix over the past half-decade or so, you’ll already know that human culture has reached its final, perfect form. We made a good effort with cave paintings, epic poetry, theatre, literature and the rest of them, but the apex of culture is the bingeable, episodic rabbit-hole Netflix documentary
When the trailer for Sam Taylor-Johnson’s biopic of Amy Winehouse, Back to Black, first landed, her fans were gracious. ‘This,’ they said, ‘is going to be terrific.’ I’m winding you up. They were horrified. It’s too soon, they said. It’s exploitative and trashes her legacy, they concluded, from having watched two minutes of footage. I
One of the joys of listening to archive BBC interviews with pop stars is the chance to hear long-discarded hipster jargon served up in its original setting. Near the beginning of Radio 2’s ABBA at the BBC, marking 50 years since the group won Eurovision with ‘Waterloo’, a prime example was unearthed from the immediate
On the same night Underworld played the second of two shows at the Usher Hall, next door at the Traverse Theatre, This is Memorial Device was midway through a short run. Seeing both within a matter of hours, I felt an exchange of currents, a renewed awareness of the short distance we travel between euphoria
On the train home from the Royal Festival Hall I learned of the death of Michael Tanner, who wrote this column from 1996 to 2014 and beyond. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment had been playing Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, and it’s not strictly true to say that the news made me wonder about his
It’s curious to consider what a venerable old thing noise music is. That this most singularly untameable of musics – the place where melody, harmony and pulse all go to die – is an Edwardian invention. It first arrived in this country 110 years ago when futurists Filippo Marinetti and Luigi Russolo set up camp
