Music

Surely charity is about helping others, not massaging your own ego? Ed Sheeran’s boycott of Band Aid is yet another example of putting virtue-signalling above doing actual good. I thought of delicate petal Ed when I was asked to join some media friends to record a cover version of ‘All You Need Is Love’ to raise money for Great Ormond Street Hospital, which is building a children’s cancer centre. Our group – shamelessly called The Celebs – included Christopher Biggins, Frank Bruno, Anne Hegerty, the terrifying star of the quiz show The Chase, and a clutch of actors. It was my first time singing in public since I leapt to my feet,

Years ago Lord Patten of Barnes – Chris – was our guest for my Great Lives programme on BBC Radio 4. He championed the life of Pope John XXIII, a mid-20th-century pope from humble origins who (his admirers would say) did much to bring the Roman Catholic Church into the 20th century. He had his detractors too, Evelyn Waugh for instance: ‘Easter used to mean so much to me before Pope John and his council… I have not yet soaked myself in petrol and gone up in flames, but I now cling to the faith doggedly without joy.’ The muscle memory of today’s pop-musical taste is half a century long

We expect Ryanair tickets to cost more on holiday Saturdays than term-time Tuesdays and Uber fares to surge in the rush hour. When bidders drive an Old Master painting into the millions, we praise the skill of the auctioneer. And of course dynamic prices can go down as well as up. These are market mechanisms to match supply and demand, recognising that some buyers will pay more than others for desirable scarce goods. So why the hoo-hah about ticket prices for Oasis’s reunion tour, which doubled as supply dwindled for those towards the end of the online queue? Labour ministers, Brussels bureaucrats and US justice officials have all declared that

Summer study courses for young composers have been popular for a few generations. After the second world war, up-and-coming experimental composers started flocking to places like Darmstadt in Germany for the Internationale Ferienkursen für Neue Musik. Olivier Messiaen taught there in the late 1940s and 1950s, when among his students were Stockhausen and Boulez. Attending the 1980 course as an undergraduate, I benefitted from a lesson with Brian Ferneyhough and conversations with Wolfgang Rihm, who died last week and was described in one obituary as ‘the last great German composer’. In the US, the summer activities at places such as Tanglewood and Aspen have become part of the learning process

There are two faces of the BBC Proms. The faces are somewhat at odds with each other. The one that everyone knows, whether they have an interest in music or not, is the Last Night of the Proms. It’s a concert consisting of a series of small musical items, or ‘lollipops’ as Sir Thomas Beecham used to call them. It culminates in a sequence of sea shanties, ‘Rule, Britannia’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘Jerusalem’. Classical music has gone from being a supreme cultural statement to just another curious musical genre The other face, much more substantial, is the series of concerts that precede that last one, from mid-July

I had the sudden suspicion, at about ten o’clock on Saturday night, that I was the only straight male in the United Kingdom watching the Eurovision Song Contest. Or perhaps the only one watching it voluntarily. A little later a Dutch presenter, when reporting her country’s scores, said: ‘Hello girls and gays.’ It wasn’t a slip of the tongue but an accurate summation of the audience – the one in Liverpool and the rest of us, sitting in front of our televisions. There was a merciful absence of all faux-seriousness and any song which got political didn’t do well Eurovision, like Crufts, has been a gay domain for the best