Music and Opera

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there – and opera directors really, really wish they didn’t. The problem is particularly acute if, like the Royal Opera’s Oliver Mears, you believe in staging Handel’s concert works as if they were operas. Broadly speaking, Handel’s oratorios affirm the moral and political consensus of Hanoverian England – Protestantism, marriage, loyalty to Church and Crown. All deeply uncool now, of course, so when Mears staged Jephtha in 2023 he duly inverted its central premise. The good guys became the bad guys. Unfortunately, Handel missed that production meeting and the result was as incoherent as it was dour. Semele is a

We all know, at heart, that economic theories of rational behaviour are rubbish. And that their application ruins so many areas of life. Football supporters, for example, are not ‘customers’; they are supporters. They are at the club before a new owner arrives, they remain there after that owner leaves. In the meantime, they do not make rational decisions. They do not, when QPR are rubbish, pop across west London to support Chelsea, though it might be the economically rational thing to do. Same with pop. I’m a music fan more than I am a customer. The other week, immediately after filing my review of Bruce Springsteen, which was tinged

Evita, directed by Jamie Lloyd, is a catwalk version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. The actors perform on the steps of a football stadium where they race through an effortful series of dance routines accompanied by flashy lights and thumping tunes. It’s more a drama-school showcase than an epic human tragedy. There are no interiors, no furnishings and no props – not even a suitcase for ‘Another Suitcase in Another Hall’. Rachel Zegler plays the lead in black pants and a bra from M&S. In Act Two, she changes into a new bra and pants. White this time, with silvery spangles. She looks like a majorette. Why no proper

Everyone who wasn’t at Glastonbury this year knows exactly what it was like: a seething mass of hatred and rabid leftiness, characterised by an angry punk duo named Bob Vylan calling for the death of the IDF. But that’s just the tabloid hysteria talking – betraying also maybe a hint of envy towards those lucky enough to have bagged one of the £400 tickets. The truth is, the political climate was not especially febrile. Sure, the jaunty red, white, green and black of the Palestinian flag was very en vogue, but a few years back it was the blue and yellow of Ukraine and the EU. A few decades before

It’s all very well for people like me to sneer at dance makers for drawing on classic rock as a quick way of pulling in the punters, but the trick clearly does the business. Sadler’s Wells was pretty well full on the night I saw Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia, a concept album that has endured several iterations and rewrites since the recording was first released on vinyl by the Who in 1973. An audience of all shapes and ages seemed to be having a good time, but although there’s nothing disgraceful about the show that director Rob Ashford has overseen, it seemed to me depressingly corny and laboured – a bumpy

King Arkel, in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, is almost blind, and he rules over a kingdom of darkness. Debussy’s score is so luminous that it’s easy to forget just how dark it supposedly is, this mythical realm of Allemonde – even despite the libretto’s references to gloomy caves, shadowy castles and forests that block out the sunlight. Many productions take their visual cues from the music rather than the words, providing endless opportunity for shimmering effects and the subtle play of light and shade. Jenny Ogilvie’s staging for Longborough Festival Opera doesn’t just embrace the darkness; it goes all in. Shadows texture the huge, brutalist wall of Arkel’s castle and

Grade: B+ These are gloomy days, so here’s a burst of melody and colour to cheer you up. Back in the LP era it wasn’t unusual for classical recordings to be put together like a concert that you might actually want to hear: a sequence of works by different but complementary composers, offering the possibility of a happy discovery. Come for the Strauss, stay for the Reznicek – that sort of thing. This lively new disc from the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic adopts the same principle. The unifying theme is early-20th-century eastern European nationalism – the folksong-collecting variety, not the Archduke-assassinating kind. But it’s the opposite of monotonous. The Bartok is

For bands of a certain vintage, the art of keeping the show on the road involves a tightly choreographed dance between past and present, old and new, then and now. It’s not a one-way transaction: there should be some recognition that the people you are playing to have also evolved since the glory years of the indie disco and student union. Halfway through the first date of Pulp’s UK tour following the release of More, their first album in 24 years, I started thinking about Withnail & I. Watching the film repeatedly as a young man, the booze-soaked antics of the dissipated ‘resting actor’ and his addled supporting cast seemed

These days the heart sinks when Deutsche Grammophon announces its new releases. I still shudder at the memory of Lang Lang’s 2024 French album, in which he drooled over Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte; when I reviewed it I suggested that if the poor girl wasn’t dead when he started, then she certainly was by the time he’d finished. Now she’s been killed again, this time by the guitarist Robin Scherpen, whose Ravel Reimagined offers us ‘a peaceful and serene soundscape’. Then there’s Rêverie from Nemo Filou, a trio whose cocktail-lounge noodling allows ‘the listener to drift off into bliss’, and Sleep Circle, a ‘re-recorded version of the 2012