The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Bob Dylan has always toyed with audiences. He plays what he wants, how he wants, letting his mood dictate tempo and often key (sometimes switching songs to the minor). On Dylan’s return to London for the first time in five years, he summed it up early. ‘I ain’t no false prophet/ I just know what
A reliable metric for measuring pop success is hard to find these days, as Michael Hann noted in these pages recently. Massaged figures for sales and streams are so opaque as to be almost meaningless. The charts are old news; social media reach wildly distorting. Bon Iver have won Grammys and released platinum-selling albums, but
You wouldn’t like Tamerlano when he’s angry. ‘My heart seethes with rage,’ he sings, in Act III of Handel’s opera – spraying coloratura about the stage like Silly String on a 1980s kids’ TV show. That’s the deal with baroque opera: the emotional register is extreme and you’re either in the moment or you might
Oh, nostalgia – so much better than it used to be! You’d never have guessed pop music was once the preserve of teenagers had you been visiting the Greenwich peninsula last week – not from the crowds, or from the artists. Here were Roxy Music, whose four core members boast a combined age of 295,
Imagine a folk dance without music. Actually, you don’t have to: poke about on YouTube and you’ll find footage from 1912 (there’s music dubbed on, but it’s a silent film) of Vaughan Williams’s friend George Butterworth in full Morris fig, going through the moves with Cecil Sharp and a pair of pinafore-wearing gals. Note the
Being of a squeamish sensibility and prejudiced by a low opinion of recent BBC drama, I can claim only a superficial acquaintance with Peaky Blinders. So my response to The Redemption of Thomas Shelby, a new ballet drawing on the popular television series about gangland Birmingham during the 1920s, is that of a rank outsider.
It was so dark, my friend noted, you could have had sex or done a Hitler salute. No stage lights, no stair lights, no desk lights, no door lights, no usher lights, no exit signs. The few wisps of illumination that did steal in created colossal shadows, giants freeze-framed on the walls. In these snatches
The definition of ‘pop star’ in the Collins English Dictionary is unambiguous: ‘A famous singer or musician who performs pop music.’ Well, that seems fairly self-explanatory, doesn’t it? It also seems way wide of the mark, because being a pop star (or a rock star, its longer-haired cousin) encompasses a great deal more than being
Lindsey Buckingham, at 72, still has cheekbones that cast shadows. He has the upright shock of hair, too, though now it makes him look less like the kohl-eyed pop god of 1980 and more like Malcolm Gladwell’s cooler, angrier brother. He still has fire, too. A couple of solo renditions of Fleetwood Mac songs won
Grey. More grey. So very, very grey. That’s the main visual impression left by Robert Carsen’s new production of Verdi’s Aida. Possibly a few older operagoers still think of Aida as a fabulous spectacle: horses, temples, caparisoned elephants and all the gilded splendour of the Pharaohs. But if you cut your opera-going teeth more recently
Leos Janacek disliked long operas, and the first act of The Makropulos Affair is a masterclass in how to set up a drama without an ounce of fat. There’s a prelude: driving motor-rhythms, surges of emotion, and somewhere in the distance – far away (or long ago) – the sound of trumpets. The curtain rises
It would be easy to be a little dismissive of George Ezra. A wholesome late twentysomething hailing from the rock and roll badlands of Hertfordshire, Ezra is the kind of pop star you could happily take home to meet your grandparents. A graduate of the British and Irish Modern Music Institute, good-looking in that long,
Pity Arts Council England, least loved of our NGOs, understaffed and under-resourced, its arm’s-length status gnawed to the shoulder by DCMS ukases, the stinginess of the Treasury and the government’s (in some respects, welcome) indifference to our higher culture. In return for its annual grant-in-aid (currently £336 million), it is obliged to cheer-lead policies of
Few forms of music have colonised the world like metal and hip-hop. Wherever you go you will find these two alchemising with local genres. A few years back, I took a trip to Kathmandu to visit a Nepali festival, where I saw bands from all over south Asia blasting through the beats, and in the
The first night of the new season at Covent Garden was cancelled when the solemn news came through. The second opened with a short, respectful speech from Oliver Mears, the director of opera, and a minute’s silence in which the houselights were lowered and we could gaze at the curtains, from which the huge gold-embroidered
Good, better, best was the satisfying trajectory of Northern Ballet’s terrific programme of three original short works, which moves south to the Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House at the beginning of November. The company has a new director in the amiable Federico Bonelli, formerly a principal with the Royal Ballet, and he has
Moonage Daydream is a music documentary like no other, which is fitting as the subject is David Bowie. If it’s David Bowie, make it special or just don’t bother. And this is special. It’s an immersive, trippy, hurtling, throbbing two hours and 15 minutes. If Disneyland did a Bowie ride, this would be it. Yet
Listening to BBC Radios 3 and 4 over the past week has been like meeting an old friend who, after decades of squeezing into age-inappropriate designer clothes, has suddenly reverted to a sensible wardrobe. It’s a pity that it took the death of our beloved Queen for this to happen, but I’ve been enjoying it
One swallow might not make a summer, but it certainly helps rounds the season off. ‘Perhaps, like the swallow, you will migrate towards a bright land, towards love,’ sings the poet Prunier to Magda, the heroine of La Rondine, but love itself is the real bird of passage in Puccini’s gorgeous Viennese operetta-manqué. Magda trades
Let me introduce you to the two poles in pop and rock. One is marked by authenticity, musicianship, a certain traditionalism. This is the pole that in critics’ discourse is called ‘rockism’ – the assumption that rock (or, at least, real people playing real instruments) is the normative state of music. The other is artificiality,
I was never Rudolf Nureyev’s greatest fan. I must have seen him dance 30 or 40 times, starting with a Bayadère in the mid-1960s, and while his sheer presence remained so potent that he was always exciting to witness, I became increasingly aware of how fiercely willed his dancing was – a struggle with or
‘Germany’s greatest artistic asset, its music, is in danger,’ warned The Spectator in June 1937. Reporting from the leading new-music festival in Darmstadt, the correspondent mentioned only one première of the two dozen on offer: ‘The most important achievement was the scenic cantata Carmina Burana by Carl Orff, a piece that would have been impossible
The American Whine is one of the key vocal registers in rock and roll. You can trace that thin disaffected quaver through the decades from the Shangri-Las to Lou Reed, from Jonathan Richman to Neil Young. Inveigling, needy, smart-assed, it’s as vital a part of the DNA of the medium as a black leather jacket
In the Rodgers and Hart musical On Your Toes, a Broadway hoofer is forced to work at a community college, teaching classical music like some kind of square. He picks out a melody on the piano: ‘Whom was this written by?’ ‘By Caesar Frank!’ chorus the students. ‘Pronounce it Fronk,’ he corrects them; and the
William Orbit is an electronic musician living a jazz life. ‘I like to make it up as I go along,’ he says. ‘It’s one long improv session.’ For most of his 65 years, the music skipped along well enough. In the late Nineties, Orbit was the man with lightning at his fingertips. He co-produced (and
One learns the strangest things at festivals. That, for instance, this summer has been a bit of a blackcurrant disaster in the UK because the extreme heat caused all the different varieties to ripen at the same time and fall from the bushes before they could be properly harvested. That fact came from a retired
‘Human beings are in trouble these days,’ says Herbie Hancock, chatting to us between songs. ‘And do you know who can fix it?’ ‘Herbie!’ comes the instant reply, shouted from somewhere in the stalls. Hancock might be a jazz legend, but he’s not quite the Saviour. Kicking off this year’s excellent contemporary music programme at
The first part of the adventure was getting there. Out of the subway, past the tower blocks and under the motorway flyover. A quick glance at Google Maps and into a patch of litter-blown scrub. Someone bustles up alongside me: ‘Are you looking for the opera?’ I am, yes: and my guess is that the
One morning in the 20th century, Thérèse wakes up next to her husband and announces that she’s a feminist. Hubby, who’s been in either of two world wars, just wants his bacon for breakfast. Too bad: declaring herself male, Thérèse has already detached her breasts and hurled them spinning into the middle-distance. But they keep
