Richard Bratby

When it comes to the opening of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, Mark Twain probably put it as well as anyone: ‘Out of darkness and distance and mystery soft rich notes rose upon the stillness, and from his grave the dead magician began to weave his spells about his disciples and steep their souls in his enchantments.’ As at Bayreuth, so in Dalston. At the start of Julia Burbach’s production for Grimeborn, a man stumbles into a back  alley and, rummaging through discarded boxes, finds a pair of headphones. And there it is: that deep, eternal E flat. Don’t some people say they can hear an all-pervading global hum? Wagner’s world is turning, and for good or for evil the old sorcerer is weaving his spell again.

Of all the daft notions about the classical music business, the daftest is that it’s a business at all. Seriously: an industry that’s structured to make a loss, unable to survive without subsidy? If you enjoy conspiracy theories, classical music’s façade of white-tied affluence, combined with fading memories of Herbert von Karajan’s private jet, might imply the existence of some vast global musical-industrial complex. Perhaps it even existed, once. But the modern reality is a fragile network of (to quote Sir James MacMillan) cottage industries: ensembles, promoters, boutique record labels, all heads down in their silos, sweating away at whatever it takes for their own corner of this unsustainable ecosystem to break even.

‘Tutto nel mondo e burla’ sings the company at the end of Verdi’s Falstaff — ‘All the world’s a joke’ — and how much you enjoy this opera probably depends upon how far you accept that truth. The 79-year-old Verdi coming out of retirement for one last laugh, finding in Arrigo Boito a librettist who could remake Shakespeare in the sun-kissed Italian of Boccaccio and Petrarch, and then composing a score that saves its deepest compassion for old fools and young lovers, its sweetness (according to Boito) ‘sprinkled across the comedy as one sprinkles sugar on a tart’: seriously, what right-thinking opera-lover, experiencing all of that, wouldn’t want to clink glasses with Sir John Falstaff?

In Oliver Soden’s new biography of Michael Tippett, he describes how Tippett wanted to open his Fourth Symphony with the sound of breathing: ‘as if the orchestra itself had lungs.’ Tippett had no idea how to achieve this effect, and at the première in 1977 they used an orchestral wind machine — a canvas band rubbing against a wooden drum. It proved about as convincing as it sounds, so at later performances a musician exhaled down a microphone. The effect, writes Soden, was reminiscent of an obscene phone call.

‘I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all,’ wrote Stravinsky in one of his more honest moments, and when it comes to humour the old fox had a point. Strip away words, visuals, parody and extra-musical associations (the flatulent bassoon; the raspberry-blowing trumpet) and Orpheus, unaided, doesn’t have much left in his comic armoury. Two concerts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall could almost have been test cases. Geoffrey Paterson conducted the London Sinfonietta in the UK première of No. 50 (The Garden) by Richard Ayres, a composer whose playful, surreal sensibility cheerfully jettisons any idea of music as an end in itself.

‘When a man takes it upon himself to write an oratorio — perhaps the most gratuitous exploit open to a 19th-century Englishman — he must take the consequences,’ wrote George Bernard Shaw, reviewing Parry’s oratorio Judith in 1888. The consequences for Judith seem to have been unusually drastic. Premiered at the Birmingham Triennial Festival, it was a major success: if not quite on the scale of its obvious model, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, then certainly not far behind it. And then it vanished. The most recent UK performance seems to have been in 1951, and while enterprising record labels have blown the dust off Victoriana ranging from Sullivan’s Kenilworth to Ethel Smyth’s Mass in D, there’s no recording of Judith.

Back when the UK was assumed to be leaving the European Union on 29 March, the Aurora Orchestra was invited to Brussels to participate in Klarafestival: specifically, an evening of words and music ‘celebrating cultural links between Europe and the UK’. And because arts organisations in general (and orchestras in particular) change direction with the agility of a supertanker in pack ice, it went ahead regardless. The cellist Nicolas Altstaedt played John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil with exquisite purity of tone. Ian Bostridge sang Britten’s Les illuminations: brisk, earthy, vividly theatrical. The Aurora Orchestra’s strings, playing standing up, flashed and bristled back at him. Musicians like to talk about the power of their art to unite and heal.