The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
There are composers who are known for a single opera, and there are operas that are known for only a single aria. But to be a 19th-century Italian opera composer and to be remembered solely for your ballet music – well, that’s a bit special. As the orchestra tiptoed into the ‘Dance of the Hours’,
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
Grade: B There has always been a seriousness and intelligence about Nick Cave quite at odds with that which usually attends to the rancid, tottering, old tart that is rock music, so there should be no surprise that he’s left it completely behind. This is a collection of seven spoken word prayers to that entity
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
A few years ago, I spoke to Mick Jagger and asked him which of the (relatively) new crop of rock groups he rated. It was a short list, I recall, and not hugely inspiring, but Kings of Leon made the cut. ‘They have a kind of Texas weirdness that you don’t find in a lot
When Motown first packaged up a roster of artists and songs that could be embraced by a non-black audience, no new act – not Smokey Robinson or Marvin Gaye or Little Stevie Wonder or Martha and the Vandellas or the Temptations – crossed over into the bosom of Middle America as easefully as the Supremes.
‘Well, it’s just not Glastonbury, is it?’ said my daughter aggressively, when told that our yurt featured an actual bed, wardrobe with hangers and electric points, and hot showers just around the corner. Our excuse was this was my and my partner’s first Glastonbury and we had a combined age of 125. ‘Anyway, why are
The Yeomen of the Guard has been called the ‘English Meistersinger’ but the more you think about that, the dafter it gets. It’s not just the very obvious difference in scale and means between Wagner’s five-hour national epic and Gilbert and Sullivan’s sprightly opéra comique. Wagner’s whole drama builds to a collective affirmation of German
Sir David Pountney, it appears, has been to Prague. He’s booked himself a mini-break, he’s EasyJetted out, and after (one assumes) necking a couple of pints of unfiltered Pilsner, he’s splurged the entire design budget for Janacek’s The Excursions of Mr Broucek on the loudest tourist tat that the Mala Strana has to offer. Scale
I’ve always felt uncomfortably ambivalent about the work of Matthew Bourne. Of course, there is no disputing its infectious exuberance or its enormous appeal to a broad public beyond the ballet club. I suppose its eclectic mix of Ashton and MacMillan, camp jokiness, Hollywood movies and Broadway razzmatazz is quirkily unique too – at least
‘Version’ is an old reggae term I’ve always loved. It refers to a stripped-down, rhythm-heavy instrumental mix of a song, traditionally dubbed onto the B-side of a single. On paper the concept sounds throwaway, and often it was. Over time, however, using reverb and a fair degree of ingrained madness, pioneering Jamaican producers such as
When Parsifal finally returns to Montsalvat, it’s Good Friday. He’s trodden the path of suffering but now the sun is shining. Confused, he turns to the aged and broken Gurnemanz: why, on this day of utmost grief, does not the whole of nature mourn? Gurnemanz gestures at the woods and meadows, glowing, as Wagner tells
Harry Hill’s latest musical traces Tony Blair’s bizarre career from student pacifist to war-mongering plaything of the United States. With co-writer Steve Brown, Hill has created a ramshackle, hasty-looking production that deliberately conceals the slickness and concentrated energy of its witty lyrics, superb visuals and terrific music. The last thing it wants to seem is
When Erich Wolfgang Korngold completed his third opera, Die tote Stadt, in August 1920, he’d barely turned 23. Yet such was his reputation that what followed was practically a Europe-wide bidding war for rights to the première. The young composer had his pick of companies and conductors (the Vienna State Opera tried and failed). In
How much weight of plot can dance carry? Balanchine famously insisted that there are no mothers-in-law in ballet, and masters such as Fokine, Massine and Ashton largely confined the dimensions of their narratives to the back of a postage stamp. Yet in A Month in the Country Ashton also proved that ballet can communicate delicate
One of the biggest talking points in pop these past couple of years has been how successful old musicians have become at making money. Swathes of stars have simply auctioned off their past: rather than collecting the royalties on their publishing and their recordings year by year, they have just sold the whole lot. Last
At the turn of this century, looking back on the late 1980s when the Pet Shop Boys could do no wrong and everything they touched turned to platinum, Neil Tennant coined the concept of a musician’s ‘imperial phase’. You can be hugely popular at other times in your career – you can sell just as
I was never into the blues that much. I listened to a bit of Roy Buchanan and Rory Gallagher but only as accidental overspill from rock. I knew the Rolling Stones’s sound came out of their love of the blues but what they added was more important (to me) than what they took. And then
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
Rambert ages elegantly: it might just rank as the world’s oldest company devoted to modern dance (whatever that term might mean nowadays), but as it approaches its centenary, it’s still in great shape. Lean and hungry, open-minded and light-footed, it’s been lucky over the past 40 years to have enjoyed a stable succession of excellent
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
Twice during the Eurovision Song Contest our television lost the signal and the set went blank – once, mercifully, during the performance of a hirsute, gurning, cod-operatic bellend from that patently European country Azerbaijan. ‘Putin’, my wife and I both reckoned, seeing as Russian hacker groups favourably disposed towards their country’s leader had promised that
Every so often, Jason Pierce drifts into focus. It happened at the end of the 1980s, when his then group Spacemen 3 (motto: ‘Taking drugs to make music to take drugs to’) suddenly and briefly went from being those weirdos from Rugby to one of the defining groups of English alternative rock thanks to their
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
‘I fink I doan luv yew any maw.’ A marital bust-up drama at the National Theatre opens with a whining Cockney, Maggie, telling her City whizzkid husband Gary that their relationship is over. Gary and Maggie are aspriring underclass types who’ve achieved bourgeois prosperity: John Lewis kitchen, vintage wine rack and a ceramics collection. They
Drummers are patient chaps, in the main. Think of Ringo in Peter Jackson’s recent Beatles docuseries, Get Back. Lolling around peaceably for days on end as Lennon and McCartney bash about, looking for clues. Drummers twiddle their thumbs behind their kit while the musos fret over chords and key changes, waiting for the moment when
Dua Lipa’s second album, Future Nostalgia, was released at the least promising moment possible: 27 March 2020, the day after the first lockdown came into force in the UK. Just as a pandemic swept the world, she was releasing a maximalist pop album that, surely, was designed for the communal experiences no one was having.
The title of the Donmar’s new effort, Marys Seacole, appears to be a misprint and that makes the reader look twice. Good marketing. The show is a blend of Spike Milligan-esque sketches and indignant speeches about race but it starts as a straightforward historical narrative. Mary Seacole enters in Victorian garb and introduces herself as
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