The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Earlier this month the Wigmore Hall was sold out for a Schubert recital by a concert pianist whose only solo recordings consist of two volumes of the Mozart piano sonatas. That would be understandable if he were 23 years old and the next big thing. But he’s 65. Though he may indeed be the next
Yeah, Bob, they know The answer to the rhetorical question posed by the Band Aid single, ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’, is broadly yes. Christmas Day is a public holiday everywhere in Africa except Mauritania, Western Sahara, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Somalia, although countries have widely differing customs associated with the event. — In
Anyone listening to the BBC this week could be forgiven for thinking that the musician Bob Geldof had just emerged from Africa, like a latter-day Dr Livingstone, the first westerner with news of a deadly new virus. He and his makeshift band of celebrities have adopted Ebola, their song blazing from the radio while Geldof
In this week’s Spectator, out tomorrow, our leading article looks at the Band Aid 30 single and why it’s time for Bob Geldof to pack Band Aid in. Pickup a copy tomorrow or subscribe from just £1 here. Anyone listening to the BBC this week could be forgiven for thinking that the musician Bob Geldof had just emerged
Yesterday, I popped into Rough Trade West record store to purchase the new Pink Floyd album. That isn’t something I expected to say in my lifetime, but 20 years after their 14th album The Division Bell, one final album has been added to the band’s canon: The Endless River. Although this laddie does not think of himself as a professional
This evening – Armistice Eve – Ben Fleetwood Smyth (no relation) and Hugh Brunt will be putting on their annual British Art Music Series concert: this year, in aid of St Paul’s, Knightsbridge. Narrated by Judith Paris, and interspersed with Victorian and Edwardian music from the BAM Consort and the BAM Ensemble, the event will tell
‘I’m starting to think that all of the world’s major problems can be solved with either oyster sauce or backing vocals.’ That was Brian Eno writing in his diary one evening, after a long day’s thinking and maybe a glass or two of something agreeable. I am not entirely convinced by the bivalve mollusc argument,
A spoof in the Israeli Daily recently had Eminem planning to convert to Judaism and move to Tel Aviv. But I don’t think we’ll be seeing that any time soon – he’s not really waiting for the Messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy. Still, stranger things have happened. I was very amused by the
We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how good they are at business, perhaps finding the prospect of them rushing into our world rather daunting. However, a part of this process has been the sudden curiosity there for western art-forms. Not long ago
Would musical history have turned out differently if Alexander Glazunov hadn’t been smashed out of his wits when he conducted the first performance of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 1 in D minor? The best of Glazunov’s own neatly carpentered symphonies hover on the verge of greatness. Perhaps if he hadn’t been such a toper — swigging
Classical music has a few certainties: Götterdämmerung will always be that little bit longer than you remember, it will reliably rain if you pack a Glyndebourne picnic, and if Cecilia Bartoli invites you to a party, you drop everything and go. Which is why I found myself in Paris earlier this week, along with most
My favourite comment about the Scottish referendum came from the eminent comedian and novelist David Baddiel. ‘What if Yes wins, but due to a typographical error, the prog-rock band gets in and Jon Anderson becomes First Minister?’ You probably had to be there to find this funny, and in this case ‘there’ is the early
The death of Christopher Hogwood has deprived the world of the most successful exponent of early music there has ever been, or is ever likely to be. It has also reduced by one the quartet of conductors who have been called ‘the Class of ’73’, a term coined by Nick Wilson in a recent study
I had a fair idea of what I was in for when I went to see The Fall at Brixton’s Electric last Friday. They’re a middle-aged band from Manchester, just like the Stone Roses, or the various incarnations of New Order. In journalese, this almost makes them ‘Heritage Rock’. I can’t remember when people started
In a scene that sticks from Map to the Stars, David Cronenberg’s Grand Guignol of a Hollywood satire, Julianne Moore, playing an ageing Hollywood never-has-been, sits on the loo in front of her PA, expelling tired whiny farts from her arse, while listing – her trout pout doing its best impression of a quivering anus
Having met with an equal mix of critical acclaim and revulsion at the Edinburgh Festival, Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B – based on the ‘human zoos’ and ethnographic displays of the late 19th century – opens today at the Barbican. I have not seen it yet, but as someone with coloured South African heritage – well aware
A few weeks ago I was at the perfect wedding. My young friend Will Heaven, a comment editor at the Telegraph, married the beautiful Lida Mirzaii, his girlfriend since university. The service was in Wardour Chapel in Wiltshire, a neoclassical masterpiece described by Pevsner as ‘so grand in its decoration that it seems consciously to
As everybody in the world except me seems to have seen Kate Bush’s live shows — against all apparent arithmetical sense — these have been gloomy weeks in the primary Berkmann residence. Even the mother of my children managed to acquire a last-minute freebie, even though she only really likes the first two or three
Joan Rivers has died from complications resulting from throat surgery. She was 81. For many, she was the best. The funniest, sharpest, most mischievous comic we will ever know. And though she’d hate us for saying it, she was also a true feminist pioneer. Well before it had been settled whether women should be doing stand-up at all, she was not only doing it but shaping
One might have expected the streets of Edinburgh, especially at festival time, to bear some evidence of the political struggle currently engulfing our nation, but in fact there was none at all. Apparently, the arguments for and against independence have to be traded on the doorstep and not in the street, which, to those visitors
It says something about Kate Bush’s standing in the music world that, perhaps uniquely in the history of long-awaited live comebacks, nobody has suggested — or possibly even thought — that her motives might be financial. After all, this is a woman who’s stuck to her artistic guns ever since, aged 19, she defied EMI
It says something about Kate Bush’s standing in the music world that, perhaps uniquely in the history of long-awaited live comebacks, nobody has suggested — or possibly even thought — that her motives might be financial. After all, this is a woman who’s stuck to her artistic guns ever since, aged 19, she defied EMI
The Spectator, 22 August 1914: Inter arma silent Musae; but Bayreuth on the eve of the war showed very few signs of the coming cataclysm. It is true that on the presentation of the Austrian ultimatum to Servia a good many Austrian visitors departed, and the Fürsten-galerie was not so crowded towards the end of
This year marks the centenary of a pianist whom London orchestral players nicknamed ‘Ashtray Annie’. Only at the keyboard did she have a cigarette out of her mouth. Annie Fischer (1914–1995) was one of those female pianists who, despite their spinsterish appearance, possessed far richer imaginations than splashy male virtuosos. Clara Haskil and Marcelle Meyer
This week has seen the Prime Minister playing Mary Whitehouse again. On Monday he announced that, as of October, music videos on sites like YouTube and Vevo are to carry age classifications similar to those already in place for feature films. You can read the subtext on his ‘deeply concerned’ brow: ‘if this is what
Disco, the tackiest of music subcultures, is the nostalgia choice de nos jours. The sudden revival is a sort of pop gentrification. You want proof? They play Baccara’s ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’ in Pret A Manger. Sister Sledge, too. Sledge were never the naffest of the movement’s megastars, but that’s not saying much. Roland Barthes was
One of the many delightful aspects of having children is that you can get them to do things you are too old, lazy or important to do yourself. My disinclination to attend any sort of music festival, owing to a distaste for tents, chemical lavatories, mud and other people, has happily not passed down to
To go from the second day of the England v. India Test match at Lord’s to the Albert Hall for the opening night of the Proms was to make a journey that a chosen few might find enviable. Nonetheless, different though the two activities are, there were some similarities. For example, the arena at the
Time was when the former Smiths singer surfaced only once every five years or so to do the Carry On Morrissey routine. But the more you ignore him, the closer he gets. Barely half a year after he colonised the books pages, he’s back. Is that a collective groan I hear? The release of a
