Classical music

The blurb accompanying the Radio 3 series World of Classical, inviting us to ‘join the dots between classical music traditions of the world’, suggests an introduction to the field of comparative musicology. Such a noble venture – searching for commonalities in melodies, ornamentation, rhythms, use of instruments, vocal styles and techniques and so on – would once have been a vital part of Radio 3’s continued adherence to the Reithian ideals of informing and educating as well as entertaining. Jon Silpayamanant’s series however resembles more a series of episodes of Late Junction, married to a moralising and historically unbalanced commentary. Music is used to illustrate a particular view of world

One legacy of lockdown in the classical music world has been the sheer length of the 21-22 season. In a typical year, most orchestras and urban opera companies would be winding down by mid-May. Not this time: after two years of postponements, and with lost income to recoup, seasons are stretching out like the finale of Dvorak’s Cello Concerto. Rumour maintains that audiences are being stretched too thinly, and although it’d be naive to infer anything fundamental from a smattering of vacant seats, it did feel surprising to see empty patches for the first night of the Royal Opera’s Cav and Pag. Absent Kaufmaniacs, disappointed by Jonas’s latest no-show? (He

On Tuesday night I was at the world première of a motet by Sir James MacMillan and I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more haunting piece of music. It begins in half-light, with pinpricks from the organ so widely spaced that you could be listening to a forbidding tone row from the Second Viennese School. A four-part choir enters in close harmony and you realise that those apparently unrelated notes hint at austerely beautiful chords encircling the melody. In Carmel’s Shade is one of the smallest but brightest jewels in the MacMillan collection There are moments when we could be listening to Palestrina, to César Franck, to Benjamin Britten

April is the cruellest month, but May is shaping up quite pleasantly and the daylight streamed in through the east window of St Martin-in-the-Fields at the start of I Fagiolini’s latest concept-concert, Re-Wilding The Waste Land. The centenary of Eliot’s poem is the obvious hook. But whether you’re counting from the Rite of Spring riot in 1913, Schoenberg’s Skandalkonzert the same year, or further back to Strauss’s Salome or Debussy’s Faune, music’s modernist moment occurred some time earlier. Which is helpful, in a way, because it freed the group’s director Robert Hollingworth from the limitations of chronological programming and gave him scope to do something a bit more interesting, and

Imagine growing up with a whole orchestra as your plaything. Richard Strauss’s father was the principal horn of the Munich Opera, and doting relatives funded publication of the teenage Richard’s earliest compositions. At the age of 19 he was assistant conductor of the Court Orchestra in Meiningen, and had rather got used to having world-class musicians at his command. It was the spirit of the age in fin-de-siècle Central Europe, a time and a place where it was perfectly normal for an opera house to have 16 spare horn players hanging around to play offstage effects, where conductors derived their authority from royalty and if (as Alma Mahler describes) the

There are many things to enjoy in the Royal Opera’s revival of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, but perhaps the most surprising is that the director plays it straight. This was my first encounter with Damiano Michieletto’s newish (2019) staging, and the plan was to approach it without preconceptions. (If we’re about to experience, say, a Bold Feminist Re-Imagining, I’d prefer to deduce it from the evidence on stage.) But for an opera premièred in 1843, Don Pasquale is distinctly old-school, with all its commedia dell’arte assumptions intact and whirring away like clockwork. The elderly miser Don Pasquale disinherits his lovelorn nephew and marries a compliant young bride who instantly becomes an

With the passing of Sir Harrison Birtwistle last month we are witness to a changing of the guard in new classical music. For 70-odd years contemporary music in the West was dominated by a highly exclusive atonal mode of thought that produced works that were hostile to the wider music-loving public and written for a small but highly subsidised cultural circle. If it was spontaneous when it began, the atonal idiom – meaning a highly dissonant style – quickly ossified into a kind of luxury backwater of music, so obscure it couldn’t even be questioned, yet endlessly backed by public subsidy which the public could nevertheless never challenge. It became

Music and politics don’t mix, runs the platitude. Looks a bit tattered now, doesn’t it? For Soviet musicians, of course, it wasn’t a question of whether you were interested in politics. Politics was unambiguously interested in you. Shostakovich wrote his 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano between 1950 and 1951, in the teeth of Stalin’s postwar crackdown, and in adopting the model of Bach, he seems to have been looking for a safe path forward: music that was politically neutral. He dedicated the Preludes and Fugues to the pianist Tatyana Nikolayeva, whose surprise victory at the 1950 Bach competition in Leipzig had been exploited by state propagandists. Bach himself was

Blame it on Serge Diaghilev. Rimsky-Korsakov died in 1908 and never saw the première of his last opera, The Golden Cockerel. When the great showman finally presented it in Paris in 1914, it was as Le Coq d’Or: a spectacular opera-ballet hybrid, with colourful, folk-inspired designs by Natalia Goncharova that came to define the Ballets Russes in its imperial phase. That was the form in which it came to Britain, where the Evening Standard described it as a ‘farrago of love-making, black magic and ingenuous inconsequence’ before turning to the real news – the costumes. And that’s the basic impression – a fabulous but flimsy slice of Slavic exotica –

I think it was when she leaned forward and balanced on one leg that Barbara Hannigan jumped the shark. It wasn’t just a question of physical agility, although that was impressive enough. Hannigan performed her on-the-spot acrobatics while singing; the results were projected on to a big screen by three remote-controlled cameras, which zoomed in on her eyes, merged blurry images of her face and occasionally froze, meaningfully, on a particularly arresting posture. She did all this at the same time as conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in Poulenc’s one-woman opera La voix humaine, though that wasn’t really what this was about; at least, not by the time she was

This year is the centenary of the birth of Iannis Xenakis, the Greek composer-architect who called himself an ancient Greek stuck in the contemporary world. His instrumental music at times suggests an alien species trying to communicate with us through our musical instruments, his electronic music a distressed animal on the receiving end of amateur dentistry. For his part, Xenakis said that music ‘must aim… towards a total exaltation in which the individual mingles, losing his consciousness in a truth immediate, rare, enormous and perfect’. Of all the post-war European firebrands, Xenakis remains the most influential today. ‘Xenakis opened many fields of inquiry that are still vital, undiscovered, and brimming

To look at a picture of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like contemplating an image of a mountain. Not the elegant, keen-eyed Edwardian intellectual whom we sometimes glimpse on CD sleeves or in concert programmes; I’m thinking of the portraits from the last decade of his long life. By the 1950s ‘RVW’ had been the father of British music for so long that he already seemed like part of the landscape, and he looked it too. The craggy jowls, the weathered thatch of grey hair; that questioning gaze — and beneath it all, those great, tumbling scree slopes of rumpled tweed. In his 150th anniversary year he’s still there, towering in

Nabucco, said Giuseppe Verdi, ‘was born under a lucky star’. It was both his last throw of the dice and his first undisputed hit, composed after the failure of Un giorno di regno and the death of his young wife and two children had driven him to abandon music outright. The story (at least, as Verdi told it) was that the director of La Scala had forced him to accept a libretto on the Biblical story of Nebuchadnezzar, and that when a page fell open on the chorus ‘Va, pensiero’ the muse returned. Citation needed, possibly, but there’s no question that the ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’ is one of

Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra began the year with a world première. Unsuk Chin’s Second Violin Concerto opened with the soloist, Leonidas Kavakos, completely alone in front of a silent orchestra, playing phrases that rocked back and forth until, suddenly, they were striking sparks. As well they might; Kavakos, after all, is the reason that the concerto exists — the violinist whose ‘burningly intense’ (the composer’s words) artistry has prompted Chin to break her self-imposed rule of writing only one concerto for any given instrument. She explained in the programme notes that ‘the solo violin part forms the foundation of the whole score, the soloist triggering all

It’s 2022 and classical music is, again, dead. It’d be surprising if it wasn’t. In 2014 the New Yorker published a timeline by the industry analyst Andy Doe showing the precise chronology of the decline and fall. Ageing audiences in the 21st century, the gramophone in the 20th, the dangerous new technology of the pianoforte in the 1840s: all, in their time, were considered proof that the rot was terminal. Doe traced the root of the problem back to a papal bull in 1324, giving new potency to Charles Rosen’s remark that ‘the death of classical music is perhaps its oldest continuing tradition’. Anyway, the fatal blow this time is

By all accounts, Tchaikovsky struggled to compose The Nutcracker. It wasn’t his idea of an effective ballet scenario, and he was unimpressed with the choreographer Marius Petipa’s prettified storyline. Mid-composition, he learned of the death of his younger sister Alexandra. ‘Even more than yesterday, I feel absolutely incapable of depicting the Kingdom of Sweets in music,’ he wrote. But inspiration can be counterintuitive. On a good day, Tchaikovsky could write as fluently as any Victorian serial novelist, churning out forgettable piano pieces (as he put it) ‘like batches of pancakes’. Projects like The Nutcracker put him through purgatory but the result, with hindsight, was nothing less than the sound of

 Grade: B It must have been an interesting day in the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s press office when Blair Tindall’s memoir Mozart in the Jungle hit the bookshops in 2005. ‘He sat in the desk chair, pushed aside the first oboe part of Rossini’s Italian Girl in Algiers and tapped a pile of cocaine on the glass’ runs a typical anecdote. Even in 2005, it wasn’t really what anyone expected to hear from a former member of Orpheus — a youthful, conductor-less New York outfit who used to pose for album covers dressed in spotless white. For a brief moment during the 1980s CD boom, Orpheus was going to save classical

That strain again… it’s the morning after the concert and one tune is still there, playing in the head upon waking, running around and around on an unbreakable loop over breakfast. I’ve never liked the term ‘earworm’. It suggests an alien parasite, an aural violation, when in fact some part of the musical brain is clearly in love with this scrap of melody, and getting a microgram of a dopamine hit every time it presses ‘repeat’. It’s consensual, even pleasurable. Why fight it? There’s an Arthur C. Clarke story about a scientist obsessed by the finale of Sibelius’s Second Symphony. He invents an algorithm for musical catchiness and promptly starves