Music and Opera

‘What advice would you give to your younger self?’ has become a popular question in interviews in recent years. It’s meant to generate something profound but, musing privately, I always find it a puzzler. Sometimes I think that maybe I shouldn’t have wasted so much of my twenties talking nonsense in pubs, but on the other hand I really enjoyed it. So I usually settle on: ‘Don’t buy a sofa bed, especially not the kind with a concealed metal frame that you pull out.’ Unbelievably, I’ve done this twice. These vast, unwieldy contraptions cost a bomb, weigh a ton, make a terrible sofa and an uncomfortable bed. If you’re 16

Over the past few years, the National have become the most important band in modern rock music. The strange thing is that this has happened at a point when their own work has perhaps lost a little of its earlier intensity. They’ve become important because they have come to represent something to other artists: a kind of adventurous but accessible integrity. The brothers who are the musical core of the band – guitarists Aaron and Bryce Dessner – have been so in demand that they have worked with, between them, (deep breath) Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Michael Stipe, Sharon Van Etten, Bon Iver, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Paul Simon, Sufjan

Aaron S. Watkin, an affable bearded Canadian, is the new artistic director of English National Ballet. He arrives from Dresden, where he ran a similarly scaled company comfortably subsidised by public funds. Doubtless, he finds what the Arts Council gives ENB meagre to the point of stingy. One may wonder, therefore, what the attraction is, but he certainly inherits from Tamara Rojo a solid organisation and a fine body of dancers, particularly strong on the male side. His inaugural piece of programming is striking but not altogether successful. It starts gloriously with Balanchine’s Theme and Variations, an essay in his grand tsarist style, set to some noble music by Tchaikovsky,

As the sun sets on another too-long summer festival season, let us take a moment to reflect on the Festival Song. This is the one tune by a band that even the most reluctant festival attendee will know. It is the song producers stick on the TV highlights package for bored insomniacs surfing the red button. It can save a set, turn grey skies blue and get old bones shaking. The Festival Song survives the artist’s critical nadir; it is the musical cockroach that emerges unscathed from a commercial apocalypse. It is the cast-iron guarantee to every festival booker in the land that an act can still bring something to

At the beginning of the 1980s a former ice-cream salesman called Ted Perry drove a London minicab to raise money for his dream project: the world’s most smartly curated classical record label. For the first time these magnificent recordings are arriving on Spotify, Apple Music and other platforms He called it Hyperion, after the Greek sun god, and by the time he died in 2003 it had acquired its own mythology. The Hyperion catalogue contained all of Schubert’s songs, sung by legendary artists accompanied by the scholar-pianist Graham Johnson; all Bach’s organ music, played with bouncy precision by Christopher Herrick; the complete sacred music of Monteverdi, Purcell and Vivaldi, directed

Grade: A– The point of a sudden, abrupt change in the time signature and instrumentation of a song is to surprise the listener and undermine his or her expectations. If, however, you do it in every song, then the point is lost, and the listener finds himself actually waiting for the weirdnessto begin. So it is with Being Dead – and it’s about the only thing I have to carp about, because overall When Horses Would Run is a lovely album, full of often complex but always catchy melodies and imbued with an agreeably surreal sense of humour. The band is comprised of Falcon Bitch, Gumball and Ricky Moto and