The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
It’s the Spectator’s 190th birthday this year and we celebrated with an end-of-summer drinks party in the garden for the writers and cartoonists who make the magazine what it is. In keeping with Fleet Street tradition, there was no food and plenty of booze – and everyone was kept entertained by great music from Charlie
Did Ashraf Marwan jump, or was he pushed? Not his fall off the balcony of his luxury apartment in London in July 2007, which is how Marwan, an Egyptian diplomat turned billionaire, met his unexplained and highly suspicious death, but his tumble into the arms of the Mossad, into whose tender embraces he slipped in
‘I feel I have learned lots about what not to write for the theatre…’ There’s a prevailing idea that the ever-precocious Benjamin Britten was an operatic natural — a composer whose gift sprang fully formed with the première of Peter Grimes in 1945. But that’s not strictly true. Go back just a few years to
I was at a funeral the other day at which the music was so inspiring that I struggled to feel sad. That’s fair enough, you may think — but the person in the coffin was my own mother. This is a difficult point to explain in cold print, but there are reasons why I wasn’t
Jazz may be an egalitarian, collaborative music, but jazz musicians honor their best with the laurels of hierarchy. Everyone knows the royal monikers of ‘Duke’ Ellington and ‘Count’ Basie, and most people know that Billie Holiday was ‘Lady Day’. But there’s also a whole aristocracy of hip name-drops: ‘The Baron’ (Charles Mingus), ‘Pres’ (Lester Young),
‘I could still be a pop star,’ says Lawrence, sitting on a footstool in his council flat, high up in a tower block above London EC1. ‘I know I’m not going to be a person who has a million hits on the internet. Do they call them hits? Views, or streams, whatever they are. I’m
The lady behind me on Kensington Gore clearly felt that she owed her friend an apology: ‘It’s Bruckner. I don’t know how that happened.’ I felt for her. ‘It’s Nézet-Séguin and the Rotterdam Phil,’ I’d told a succession of my own musical friends. They’d seemed interested. Since the youngish Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin took over
Grade: C+ Mumrock. A lucrative genre, dating from the beginning of the 1970s, when Mums suddenly wanted something a little bit hip. My own mother briefly succumbed to the inane imagery and kindergarten melody of ‘Song Sung Blue’, sometime in 1972, before she moved on to more sophisticated stuff (Gilbert O’Sullivan, as I recall). This
Looney Tunes was always at its best when soundtracked by a Hungarian gypsy dance. (Watch ‘Pigs in a Polka’ if you don’t believe me.) It’s music that was made to chase small cartoon animals — and terrify conductors. The gunshot syncopations. The hand-break turns in tempi. The banana-skin portamenti and rubato ravines… Musical tripwires everywhere.
Robert Carsen’s new updating of The Beggar’s Opera is a coke-snorting, trash-talking, breakdancing, palm-greasing, skirt-hiking, rule-breaking affair — and every bit as wearyingly tedious as that sounds. Leaving behind the work’s original 18th-century setting, Carsen sets out boldly for present-day London (where the streets are paved with Brexit-related comedy gold), but in Ian Burton’s rewrite
Still got your record player? Dig it out. The crunchier the music, the better it sounds on vinyl: a broader noise, bigger than you get from a CD and many times fuller than what you’d hear from an execrable mp3 player. Technology does not always improve stuff. Five Teenage Fanclub albums have been re-released on
There’s one big problem with Wagner’s Siegfried, and the clue’s in the name. None of Wagner’s mature works hangs so completely upon a single individual. The character himself isn’t really the issue either, however troublesome he might superficially appear (a ‘randy overgrown schoolboy’, if you believe the misguided programme note for this Usher Hall performance).
In June, a 20-year-old man called Jahseh Onfroy was murdered after leaving a motorcycle dealership in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Onfroy was a rapper, who recorded under the name XXXTentacion, and he had become extraordinarily successful — his two albums had reached No. 2 and No. 1 in the US, despite moderate sales, because of the
Some conductors conduct from the fingers — think of Gergiev’s convulsive gestures, flickering up and down the keyboard of an invisible piano in the air — while for others (check out footage of an elderly Richard Strauss) it all comes from the wrist: graceful, fluid and utterly detached. You could cut off Toscanini and poker-down-the-back-of-his-tail-coat
Early in 1987, a middle-aged woman approached me on the record counter of the Slough branch of Boots. ‘What do you have by Ladysmith Black Mambazo?’ she demanded. Nothing. Boots in Slough wasn’t big on South African isicathamiya choral music. ‘Well,’ she suggested, ‘you really ought to get their records in. They’re going to be
I’ve been trying to pinpoint the exact moment when it became impossible to take Mascagni’s Isabeau seriously. It wasn’t when the scenery jammed, leaving half the cast briefly trapped inside a revolving tower. These things happen, after all: you simply suppress thoughts of Spinal Tap and re-suspend disbelief. I don’t think it was the entry
Rafael Kubelik is watching Wimbledon when I enter his suite at the Savoy. ‘Tennis fan?’ I ask, slightly surprised. He shakes his head. ‘No. Just her.’ It is 1983, the high summer of Martina Navratilova. ‘She will win,’ says Kubelik in the decisive tone that conductors use to save rehearsal time. ‘And one day my
190 years of The Spectator 14 December 1996 The Spice Girls were at the time the biggest girl group in the world, their debut album selling 23 million copies. The interview brought the magazine its highest sales figure for a generation Interview the Spice Girls, I thought. But the Spice Girls are interviewed
Grade: B+ Here we go again, then, I thought — another gobbet of self-referential, breast-beating respec’ me bro sputum against a backdrop of the usual overproduced r&b pop schlock. What used to be called ‘indie’ singer-songwriters are always moaning about how utterly useless they are, taking Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ as a kind of self-flagellating worldview. Chart
All my life I’ve wanted to compose music, and now I’ve done it. I’ve written a sonata for solo flute that boasts two highly original features; it’s five hours long and must be performed by a badger. Though it took me only five minutes to write, my opus one is guaranteed to get through to
Imagine living Taylor Swift’s life. She has been staggeringly, life-dominatingly famous since she was 17. Not for a single moment in her entire adulthood (she’s now 28) has she been able to do any of the everyday things the rest of us take for granted. No wonder, then, that so much of what surrounds her
A young Korean, 22 years old, won the Dublin International Piano Competition last month. Nothing unusual about that. Koreans and Chinese, raised in a school of hard knocks and rounded off in western conservatories, are winning most prizes. A few — like the phenomenal Lauren Zhang who made child’s play of Prokofiev’s second piano concerto
Grade: A+ While the young bands plunder the 1980s for every last gobbet of tinny synth and hi-hat, the singer-songwriters remain happily anchored in that much more agreeable decade which came directly before. The 1970s was the era of the introspective, self-pitying, prolix, hairy and winsome singer-songwriter — both the good ones (Young, Martyn, Buckley)
The picnic hamper’s open, the bubbly is chilled, and country house opera is starting to eat itself. When you arrive at the Wormsley Estate you enter a fantastic, baffling world. Figures in black tie stroll between topiary hedges in obedience to unstated rules, while serving staff hover a few paces behind, gliding silently in to
‘Is there an end [to this opera] that is not trivial?’ asks the Countess in her final bars of Richard Strauss’s last opera Capriccio. Given the previous two and a half hours, the answer would seem to be a decided no. It is a frothy confection even by the standards of his later operas, the
Grade: B Another load of SJW moppets keening over 1980s synths. ‘It only takes two seconds to say: I don’t agree with white supremacy,’ they told the Guardian. Chvrches, a Scottish trio relocated to New York, are led by the elfin and relentlessly concerned Lauren Mayberry. The Eurythmics fronted by Owen Jones, then, kind of.
One by one, cathedrals have succumbed to the inevitable. In blazes of publicity, with front-page photographs of girls in cassocks in the cloisters, most deans and chapters have signalled their drive for equality of opportunity by inaugurating a girls’ choir to run alongside the boys’ one. So now, at the vast majority of our cathedrals,
No wonder we have a problem with classical music in this country. The week started in celebration. The stats are in and it turns out that Radio 3’s breakfast show has enjoyed a rise of some 64,000 listeners — a not-to-be-sniffed-at11 per cent increase on last year. Meanwhile Classic FM’s listenership is also up significantly,
Grade: B+ Oh, terrific — a concept album about a 1970s hotel somewhere in space, plus an attack on our over-technologised world. Just what I wanted. There is no restraint on self-indulgence if you have a sufficiently remunerative back catalogue. This is also a Bowie tribute album, which fits in nicely with all that outer-space
