Spending pleasurable hours looking for books is not like drilling for oil. Recently, however, while browsing in the excellent Slightly Foxed bookshop in Gloucester Road, the black stuff spewed out like a geyser. A hardback collection of Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings was on offer for £40. It wasn’t a first edition from 1964, which
True, we’d have lost some nice songs. But we might also be free of a great deal of today’s fatuous pop-star posturing Had he been spared a madman’s bullet in December 1980, as he left his apartment in New York, John Lennon would have turned 70 last week, a hypothetical event that was celebrated at the
The world’s greatest festival of music continues to grow under the splendid stewardship of Roger Wright, but there is always plenty of missionary work to do, for the world will never run short of grouches. The world’s greatest festival of music continues to grow under the splendid stewardship of Roger Wright, but there is always
The Ninth is not necessarily Beethoven’s greatest symphony. The Ninth is not necessarily Beethoven’s greatest symphony. That honour is surely shared by the Eroica, in which the composer changed the course of orchestral writing after two prentice works (and what works they were!), and the Seventh. Beethoven’s last symphony, known in the English-speaking world as
Are great sportsmen born with high talent, or do they win prizes through years of application? That question, as old as sport itself, forms the basis of this book, which tries to inform readers ‘how champions are made’. Are great sportsmen born with high talent, or do they win prizes through years of application? That
Götterdämmerung Salzburg Easter Festival Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety. Rather more than safety, if truth be known. The Salzburg Easter Festival, which concluded on Monday with a performance of Götterdämmerung, topping off a Ring cycle shared with the summer festival in Aix, was an event of considerable beauty. Given the
Anatole France described his literary criticism as ‘the adventures of my soul among masterpieces’. We cannot all be critics, in the sense that France was, but he surely spoke for everybody, reviewer or not, who takes reading seriously. Books do furnish a room, and the best books decorate a life. Although reading is an interior
Sport, say those who write about it, is only the toy department of daily journalism. They don’t really mean it. Some of the finest wordsmiths in what may still be called Fleet Street earn a crust by writing about games, and the people who play them. In some cases — the late Ian Wooldridge comes
For a man who was told by Neville Cardus not to bother leaving Australia to find his true voice in Europe, Charles Mackerras has prospered to a degree that must have been unimaginable when he was growing up playing the oboe in Sydney. A knight of the realm, a Companion of Honour, and a recipient
Hear the one about the ‘professional Southerner’? Of course not, says Michael Henderson, so why does the media keep trotting out this tired old cliché about Northerners? John Prescott is at it again. Embold-ened by his first assault on television, an ‘examination’ of social class that was unaccountably aired by the BBC last year, the
Michael Henderson has been to 100 operas by Wagner. He wasn’t always an admirer of the music When sceptics ask how I ‘found’ the music dramas of Richard Wagner there is an obvious, contrary answer: I didn’t; he found me. As a young music-lover I was certainly no Wagnerian in the making. Although I had
Michael Henderson remembers the passion for cricket that underpinned his friend’s genius as a playwright, and an unforgettable day at Lord’s The public face of Harold Pinter, who died on Christmas Eve after a long illness, was rather daunting. At the Edinburgh Book Festival a few years ago he acknowledged as much when he admitted
Fifty People Who Buggered Up Britain, by Quentin Letts As readers of the Daily Mail know, Quentin Letts leaves no turn unstoned. His withering parliamentary sketches have left the blood of wounded politicians over the walls of Westminster. Wearing his theatre critic’s hat, he swims against the prevailing tides to tease dramatists and directors, and
Theatre It promises to be a wonderful autumn for London’s theatre-goers. Ivanov, Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Chekhov’s early play, has opened the ‘Donmar at Wyndham’s’ season, to superb reviews. Joining it in a quest to bring the increasingly dowdy West End into repute is No Man’s Land, Harold Pinter’s 1975 masterpiece, revived at the
One of the most gilded careers in our post-war musical life ends next week when Robert Tear sings in public for the last time. At least he thinks it will be the last time. ‘There’s nothing in the diary,’ he says. ‘But I’m not disappointed. After 50 years it is wonderful to be relieved of
This weekend, as the orchestras of England celebrate the 150th anniversary of this country’s most celebrated composer, is an appropriate time to review the national monument that is Sir Edward Elgar. Does he continue to speak of and for England? Or was he merely a late-romantic nostalgic, whose music was hopelessly outdated when he died
For a man whose appearances at London’s concert halls and opera houses are rarer than golden eagles above Highgate, Norman Lebrecht has a lot to say about the state of orchestral music. His first book on the subject, The Maestro Myth, had the merit of revealing certain facts (the huge salaries of conductors, for instance)
So far as Robert Craft is concerned, Stravinsky represents a mine of limitless resource. Having spent the last 23 years of the composer’s life serving him as fan, friend, conductor, associate and general reviver of spirits, virtually as a member of the family, he remains the most loyal of servants, righting every wrong, fighting every
There was a unique event in Amsterdam last week, and the music-lovers who heard it felt a special glow. Bernard Haitink returned to the Concertgebouw, the orchestra with which he will forever be associated, and which he first conducted 50 years ago, to celebrate his ‘golden anniversary’ of music-making with a pair of symphonies by
More than 50 years after his debut, the Squire of Knotty Ash plays 120 shows a year, each lasting five hours. He tells Michael Henderson what comedy is — and quotes Aristotle There are certain goals in life that one might accomplish, given the time and the will: climbing the Matterhorn, say, or sitting through