Classical music

In Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film, the ‘exterminating angel’ of the title is a mystery illness. A debilitating virus — much worse even than man flu — that attacks the social immune system and shuts down your ability to act, to think, to be. It prevents you from remembering how to behave at middle-class dinner parties. You arrive at a friend’s house twice. You forget to leave. Open doors become terrifying, impassable geometric objects. Your handbag contains not keys but feathers and chicken legs. Occasionally it kills. The bug is Buñuel’s metaphor for a society gripped by cowardice. Composers can catch it. Not Thomas Adès, though. There is bravery (insanity?) in

Scriabin once suggested that the audiences for his music should be segregated according to their degree of personal enlightenment, with the ‘least spiritually advanced’ in the worst seats. Unsurprisingly it didn’t happen. But perhaps the Southbank Centre should take up the challenge. For its 2016–17 season, the centre has devised a series of concerts and talks entitled Belief and Beyond Belief. This ‘festival’, as it grandly styles itself, could have been an exploration of the enormous and neglected influence of faith on the great composers. Could have been — but, predictably, won’t be. Instead, the Southbank has chosen to subsume religious faith into ‘belief’, whatever that is, and then tacked

A decade ago, the French pianist and poly-math Pierre-Laurent Aimard announced that he was ‘very bored to live in a world that contains so much music that wants to please the masses’. It was a remark that might have dropped from the lips of the late Pierre Boulez, the part-pseud, part-genius who presided over an aristocracy of the avant-garde lavishly funded by the French government. Aimard was still in his teens when he was appointed pianist of Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain in 1976. He made his name performing ruthlessly atonal music. In 2009 he was a surprise choice as director of the Aldeburgh Festival, where he devoted a series to the

For years I have been telling people that they should listen to, in the absence of staged performances, Enescu’s opera Oedipe, preferably in the marvellous EMI recording from 1990, still available. It only occurred to me when I was preparing to go to the Royal Opera’s new production that I haven’t actually listened to a recording for many years — it seems to belong with its contemporary Busoni’s Doktor Faust as something more admired in the breach than the observance. My feelings now, after seeing the production by La Fura dels Baus, are mixed. There is a lot of lovely music here, and some strong drama. I’m not sure that

When the Fat Lady Sings, everyone is primed to chortle, even if she is Montserrat Caballé and doing it wonderfully well. Hergé’s cartoon creation of Bianca Castafiore embodies the type: with her flaxen plaits and heaving embonpoint, she is a ridiculously bad fit for the simpering virginal heroine of Gounod’s Faust, particularly when carolling her Jewel Song at such a pitch that an agonised Tintin and Captain Haddock are forced to cover their ears. But at least Madame Castafiore has a brilliant international career: what about the Fat Lady who Can’t Sing — the diva deluded into thinking she is a nightingale when in fact she is nothing but a

BBC Proms 2016 is about as exciting as my sock drawer. But it’s unclear who exactly is to blame. The new head David Pickard claims only half the stalest socks are his — the rest inherited. The festival enjoys an incredibly privileged position. Some might even say it’s dangerously spoilt. Free from commercial pressures, free from government interference, an entire TV and radio network at its propagandistic disposal, the two-month summer blowout is a mighty musical monopoly. It can do what it wants with pretty much whomever it wants. Last year it dedicated a night to Eric Whitacre, the Noel Edmonds of contemporary music, and hosted an Ibiza prom 20

Hurrah for Radio 3 and its (long-overdue) efforts to give us music not just performed by women but composed, and conducted, by them too. Last year’s innovative day of programming for International Women’s Day introduced us to composers many of us had never heard of, such as Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre and Barbara Strozzi, Charlotte Bray and Anna Clyne. Yet to the surprise of even the most sceptical critics, the day was a huge success, proving that some of this music is really good. As Edwina Wolstencroft, producer last year and responsible for this year’s celebration of women in music, says, ‘We know that as many as 6,000 women

There are some operas, as there are some people, that it is impossible to establish a settled relationship with, and in my case Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande is one of them, in fact by far the most pressing one. I never know in advance how I’m going to react to it, and to some extent the actual performance I see is not the determining factor. I’d like, just once, to see the play and find out how I reacted to that. For Debussy offers such a vivid and sometimes perplexing counterpoint to Maeterlinck’s words that one’s reactions to the characters and their actions are always in flux — at least

Time was when early music was a 6 p.m. concert, Baroque began with Bach and ended with Corelli’s Christmas Concerto, and speeds were so portentously slow that you’d have to start the B Minor Mass shortly after lunch in order to make it home in time for bed. Those dark days — caught between Baroque and a hard place — are over now. Period ensembles have never been better or more numerous, Handel and Monteverdi are a staple of operatic programming, and even Vivaldi, Cavalli, Cesti and Steffani are making their mark. Baroque is back, and this time it’s here to stay. One of the biggest success stories of recent