The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
I was listening the other week to a solo album by an ageing rock guitarist, once terrifically famous. It was really very good, but I couldn’t bring myself to care about it because it clearly didn’t matter: this man’s career is static and it is likely to remain so. The album will make no impact
Lightning sometimes strikes twice. English Touring Opera hit topical gold last spring when, wholly by coincidence, they found themselves touring with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian anti-war satire The Golden Cockerel. Now the company’s general director Robin Norton-Hale insists that their current tour of Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims – written in 1825 to celebrate the coronation of
Fulfilling its sacred duty to serve regions that higher culture tends to avoid, Birmingham Royal Ballet made a midweek visit to the troubled city of Peterborough. Its New Theatre holds about 1,200 and is normally focused on tribute bands and stand-ups; I would guess that for Carlos Acosta’s Classical Selection only about 60 per cent
Sir Hubert Parry was upgraded from knight bachelor to baronet by King Edward VII in 1902, and my goodness he earned it. His anthem for Edward’s coronation, I was Glad when they Said Unto Me, begins with a thrilling brass fanfare – or it has done since George V’s coronation in 1911: Parry’s original introit
Whether by accident or design, the mathematical theme of Ed Sheeran’s previous album titles (+, ×, ÷ and = respectively) resolves rather neatly with – (Subtract). I interviewed Sheeran around the time of × and found him likeable enough but a bit out of reach. Multiplication did indeed seem to be foremost on his mind.
As stage directions go, the The Magic Flute opens with a zinger. ‘Tamino enters from the right wearing a splendid Japanese hunting costume.’ That’s right, a Japanese hunting costume. What does that even look like? More to the point, what would a Viennese theatrical costume designer in 1791 have thought it looked like? Surviving evidence
A user’s guide to how pop music works in the 21st century. Step one: you see a great new band. Step two: you tweet about them being very good. Step three: you get told by people that they are clearly nepo babies, denying crucial exposure to other bands. Step four: you discover that newspaper articles
Grade: B– Chugga-chugga, grawch, chugga-chugga. Never mind 72 seasons, it’s actually been a little over 500 seasons since Metallica first started bestowing their peculiarly Los Angeles brand of heavy metal – shiny, taut and smooth – on a grateful audience of dispossessed lower-middle-class white incels. And nothing very much has changed. They have got better,
If being asked to write music for the coronation of a king is an honour, then doing it for an emperor is even more so, you might think. That was certainly the view of Jean-François Le Sueur (1760-1837), an opera composer who was made director of music at Notre-Dame by Napoleon. At the self-coronation of
Once upon a time, rock bands wished for nothing more than to look as though they posed a clear and present danger to your children. Though a few true believers still hold to this honourable creed, nowadays most groups are comprised of the kind of people one might expect to be grading your offspring’s dissertation
If you live in London, you may well have spotted Shen Yun’s enormous candy-coloured posters on the Underground, endorsed by puffs from authorities proclaiming the show to be ‘very, very on top’ and ‘an exemplary display of excellence’. This primitive advertising strategy seems to have worked: on the night I went, the Hammersmith Apollo (capacity
Haydn’s The Creation is Paradise Lost without the Lost. True, the words aren’t exactly up there: translated into German by Haydn’s pal Baron van Swieten and subsequently retro-translated into some of the clumsiest, most endearingly rococo English ever set to music. But you get the idea. Near the start some demons get consigned (very efficiently)
Elton John has now been retiring for nearly five years. The Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour began in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in September 2018. Why there? Because it’s a hop and a skip from the small town of Lititz in Amish country, where scores of the big arena shows are built – it’s the real rock’n’roll
It must be 20 years since I first saw Akram Khan dance, and I will never forget the impression he made in a brief impassioned solo; here was a master of the Indian kathak school who had seen how its traditional vocabulary could be related to the less constricted realms of modernism. Since then he
I’m not a natural lender. I’m a reasonably soft touch when it comes to money, but regarding the important things in life – books, music, pens – I loan with a gently thrumming underscore of anxiety. While I’ve weaned myself off my mother’s habit of writing her name in every book she buys, I still
Since its première in 1984, Andrei Serban’s production of Puccini’s Turandot has been revived 15 times at Covent Garden, not counting excursions to Wembley Arena. The current revival has been running (by all accounts, to capacity houses) since 10 March. The compelling reason for reviewing such a well-worn revival mid-run is that this performance featured
Grade: A– No, Lana, I didn’t, thank you – all cleared up. The most extravagantly talented of that lachrymose, self-harming genre, miserycore, returns with an album described by critics as ‘heavy’, as if we might have expected Mungo Jerry or the Venga Boys. The difference between Del Rey and the rest of those dispossessed chicks
Berlusconi: A New Musical, an excellent title, has opened at a new venue in south London, Southwark Playhouse Elephant. The show begins with the former Italian prime minister preening triumphantly on a white marble set that resembles the Capitol in Rome where Caesar was murdered by rivals who’d grown sick of his power lust. Berlusconi
Despite its widespread rating as one of his masterpieces, Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella is chock full of knots, gaps and stumbling blocks – all of which the Royal Ballet’s new production throws into relief. Ashton isn’t altogether to blame: Prokofiev’s graphic score dictates an excessive amount of time given over to knockabout for the Ugly Sisters
Recently in these pages, ruminating on the ghastly Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I wrote that music does not conform to any equation. I should have added: except, of course, for the occasions when it does. One tried-and-true formulation is that ‘super-groups’, those bespoke vehicles bringing together artists best known either for working alone
English National Opera has arrived at the Dead City, and who, before Christmas, would have given odds that this new production of Korngold’s Die tote Stadt would ever make it this far? This is late-Romantic music-drama on an exuberant scale; it simply doesn’t lend itself to pubs and car parks (even the reduced version staged
Think of pop music as being like the parable of the sower. These days the seed falling on stony ground comes from the young rock bands, while the stuff that’s finding fertile earth is on the edges of R&B where it shades into other styles, especially psychedelia. It works from both ends: the Australian group
It does no harm, once in a while, to assume that the creators of an opera actually know what they’re doing. Puccini was clear that he wanted the three one-act operas of Il trittico to be performed together and in a particular order. Promoters and directors have had other ideas, and between the wars it
The German composer Max Reger, born 150 years ago next week, is mostly remembered today for countless elephantine fugues and one piece of lavatory humour. When he was savaged by the Munich critic Rudolf Louis, he wrote back to him: ‘Sir, I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review
Further than the Furthest Thing is an allegorical play set on a remote island populated by English-speakers from all over the world. Dialect experts will have a ball unscrambling the set-up. First we meet Auntie Mill, a white Scotswoman whose husband, Uncle Bill, is a black fisherman with a West Country accent. Their nephew, Francis,
There are several reasons why Young Fathers currently feel like the most exciting live band in Britain, but for now let’s concentrate on effect rather than cause. The Edinburgh trio have somehow managed to dispense with all the froth and blather of concert-making – gratuitous chat; choreographed audience interaction; the fat and gristle – to
The death last week at the age of 83 of the sublime Lynn Seymour – muse to Ashton and MacMillan, the creator of roles in Romeo and Juliet and A Month in the Country among many others – set me thinking gloomily about the current dearth of ballerinas with her questioning intelligence and free spirit.
Hector Berlioz dismissed Handel as ‘that tub of pork and beer’ but it wasn’t always like that. Picture a younger, sexier Handel, rocking into Rome aged 22 and challenging Scarlatti to a keyboard duel. The Italian elite couldn’t get enough of Il caro Sassone, ‘the darling Saxon’, and he repaid them with 80-odd short Italian
Years ago, I asked Robert Plant what he felt about the world’s love of ‘Stairway to Heaven’. He said he no longer really knew what the song was about, and it didn’t mean an awful lot to him. But, he added, that didn’t really matter because the people who loved the song had given it