Music and Opera

Our curation of music and opera reviews

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Northern Ireland Opera have a hit: Follies reviewed

Never judge a musical by its score alone. Even more than with opera, the music is only ever half the story and if you judge a classic show from the cast recording, you might get a shock when you see it staged. Leonard Bernstein’s Candide is generally reckoned to be one of the fizziest, funniest Broadway scores ever composed. But in the theatre, the storyline is so intractable that the combined efforts of Richard Wilbur, Lillian Hellman, Stephen Sondheim and even (it’s said) Dorothy Parker haven’t succeeded in establishing a definitive, stageable version.  No such problem with Sondheim’s own Follies: you’d be hard put to find a smarter piece of

Angus Colwell

Kate Moss’s new Bowie podcast is far too safe 

In January, it will be ten years since David Bowie died. I remember Bowie songs playing out of every London orifice that day. People who only knew ‘Life on Mars’ went down to the Brixton mural and cried. And then, for a whole year afterwards, the BBC’s arts coverage consisted entirely of salt-and-pepper fatties sitting in studios, in the mandatory uniform of T-shirt and blazer, all of them finding different ways to wheeze: ‘Day-vid Bow-ie chay-nged everyfing.’ As we approach the anniversary, the BBC is having another go – except this time with Kate Moss. ‘This is David Bowie Changeling’, Moss purrs, inaugurating a nine-parter on BBC Sounds and Radio

Rupert Christiansen

Michael Keegan-Dolan’s How to be a Dancer is worthy of Flann O’Brien

Michael Keegan-Dolan’s show doesn’t even pretend to live up to the arresting proposition in its title – anyone hoping to glean a few useful tips on becoming a dancer would come away bitterly disappointed. What the Irish choreographer offers instead is a witty and touching exercise in autobiography in which he is ably abetted and illustrated by his resourceful wife, Rachel Poirier.  Born into a large and unlettered working-class family in north Dublin, Keegan-Dolan grew up jiving to Talking Heads and emulating Gene Kelly. Pigeon toes hobbled his four gruelling years in ballet training and as a performer he didn’t make it beyond the chorus line in West End musicals.

Deborah Ross

Emma Thompson is surprisingly convincing as the star of this action thriller

Dead of Winter is an action thriller starring Emma Thompson and you have to hand it to her. Has such a thoroughly ordinary, sixty-something-year-old woman (no superpowers) ever carried an action thriller before? Not that I can think of. That’s not to say it’s devoid of clichés. I think we all know that it’s best to steer clear of cabins miles from anywhere. But it’s well made, tense, fun, and if you’ve longed to see an ordinary, sixty-something-year-old woman brandish a gun or put a claw hammer through someone’s foot you will not be disappointed. Directed by Brian Kirk, from a script by Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb, it’s set

Graeme Thomson

Uplift from an odd couple: James Yorkston & Nina Persson reviewed

Let’s hear it for the odd couples of popular music: Bowie and Bing. Shaggy and Sting. Metallica and Lou Reed. Nick Cave and Kylie. U2 and Pavarotti. The ongoing collaboration between James Yorkston and Nina Persson isn’t quite so wildly unlikely as any of these but still seems intrinsically counter-intuitive; until, that is, the realisation dawns that each has a stakehold in the other’s natural territory. Yorkston is a fifty-something Scottish folkie with the honed melodic instincts of a pop aficionada. Persson is a former rock star from Sweden whose voice has the controlled command found in the best traditional singers. Which perhaps explains why a pairing that makes little

Thursday

Michael Hann

Suede turn their fine new record to mush at the Southbank

I think a lot about Wishbone Ash. A disproportionate amount. Partly because I have had to listen to them for around ten hours while researching a book. Partly because when I was a kid, I always found it curious that Wishbone Ash were advertised in the weekly music press but never reviewed. Back then, broadsheets barely covered rock, so there was no room for their gigs and albums there. But they were never on Top of the Pops or The Tube or even Whistle Test  either. Perhaps Tommy Vance occasionally gave them a spin on the Friday Rock Show, but other than that they were not on Radio 1. They

Deborah Ross

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is anything but

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is, I have to tell you, anything but. I should have trusted the trailer. When I caught this, my first thought was ‘heck, that looks bad’. Stupidly, I was not put off. The film is written by Seth Reiss (co-writer of The Menu) and directed by Kogonada (if you haven’t seen After Yang, more fool you). And it stars Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell. It can’t be that bad, surely? Reader, I swear to you, it is. The direction is prosaic and sentimental while Robbie and Farrell have zero chemistry, not a squeak It’s a romantic fantasy about two people who have resolved to stay

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

No, Big Thief’s Double Infinity is not the greatest folk album ever

Grade: B- ‘I feel within myself a constant dialogue between my masculinity, my femininity and the part of me that is neither of those things. I’m just trying to talk about it because I feel like I’m something that is very ambiguous,’ explains lead singer and songwriter Adrianne Lenker. This may explain why the first song on the new album from this New York indie-ish folk-rock band is called ‘Incomprehensible’, a title which could easily be appended to a good 60 per cent of the lyrics on an album which, given its heralding as the greatest folk album ever, is something of a let-down. It ain’t quite John Prine, let

Monday

Philip Clark

The very essence of jazz: Mingus In Argentina reviewed

Grade: B Charles Mingus arrived in Buenos Aires at the start of his 1977 Argentinian tour with aching joints, an ominous first sign of the muscle-wasting Lou Gehrig’s disease that would claim his life two years later. Musically, he was at a musical crossroads too. His record label, Atlantic, had insisted on adding electric guitarists John Scofield and Larry Coryell – associated with lucrative jazz-rock fusion – to his latest album Cumbia & Jazz Fusion, while his once stable touring quintet had become more of a revolving door. Jazz has often been written up as a sequence of landmark recordings and concerts captured at prestigious venues, but the value of

Thursday

James Walton

Lower your expectations for Spinal Tap II

This Is Spinal Tap is now such a deserved comedy behemoth that it’s easy to forget how gradual its ascent to generally agreed greatness was. Only over the years did so many lines and scenes from a low-key 1984 mockumentary about a heavy-rock band (amps that ‘go to 11’, a tiny Stonehenge, a classically inspired piece called ‘Lick My Love Pump’) become part of our lives. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, by contrast, comes amid a loud fanfare – which may be part of the problem, because the result certainly doesn’t live up to expectations that are inevitably sky-high. Then again, the sad truth is that it mightn’t have

Wednesday

Richard Bratby

Why are there so few decent French symphonies?

Grade: B Here’s a blind-listening game for you: spot the difference between proficiency and genius. Kazuki Yamada and his Monte-Carlo orchestra have recorded three first symphonies by three 19th-century French composers. With a few barnstorming exceptions (I’m looking at you, Berlioz), the French never really got the hang of the romantic symphony. Berlioz recounts with horror how Parisian editors picked through the scores of Beethoven’s symphonies, meticulously correcting Big Ludwig’s supposed errors.  The kindest thing to say about the first symphonies of Gounod and Saint-Saëns is that they sound like Beethoven with the inspiration snipped out. Bright, polite and completely harmless, they’re both blown out of the water by the

Rupert Christiansen

Both thin and overblown: Royal Ballet’s A Single Man reviewed

A common flaw in narrative ballet today is the attempt to tell stories that are too complex and ramified for the vocabulary of dance to convey. With Jonathan Watkins’s adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s slim novella A Single Man, the flaw is the opposite. George, a middle-aged prof, is traumatised and in mourning for his recently killed lover Jim. The consolations of ordinary life fail, but he feels the twinge of desire returning for one of his students. After they spend an erotically charged night together, he can move on. There’s just not enough in this fable to sustain 100 minutes of dance drama. To fill this scenario out, Watkins introduces

Graeme Thomson

The problem with Chappell Roan

There is a downside to being fast-tracked into the position of this season’s newest pop sensation, and it became more and more obvious the longer Chappell Roan’s self-proclaimed ‘biggest ever show’ went on. A freshly risen pop star promoting their debut album should, by law, be performing a 40-minute hit-and-run set in a sweaty club, showcasing the absolute cream of their catalogue. Bang, bang, bang. Over and out. But the fast-track these days moves at positively breakneck speed. Barely a year after her first hit, Roan found herself playing to an audience of some 100,000 fans, convening over two nights on an ugly plot of land adjacent to an airport

Michael Hann

Britain’s loveliest, most thoughtful festival

The last weekend of August is my favourite of the year. That’s when I pootle down to Cranborne Chase to the loveliest, most thoughtful festival in the UK. End of the Road is a festival for those who look at TV coverage of Glastonbury and see only the size and the heaving crowds and come out in a cold sweat. It’s lovely because it’s small – around 15,000 people. You can walk from the furthest campsite to the furthest part of the festival area in 25 minutes or so. If you’re not enjoying what you’re watching, you’ll be able to find something else within five minutes’ walk, via an array

Alexander Larman

‘Modern pop makes me want to kill myself’: Neil Hannon interviewed

Search for a successor to Tom Lehrer, and you’ll be hard pressed to find any decent candidates. One of the  few, however, who can match the wit and sophistication of the late musical satirist is the Northern Irish musician Neil Hannon. The 54-year-old is the sole permanent member of his band the Divine Comedy, and his elegant records mix Lehrer-esque wordplay with swooning orchestral pop that is in equal measure Dusty Springfield, Scott Walker and Michael Nyman. But matters have darkened somewhat on his newest LP, Rainy Sunday Afternoon. Here, we are far from the cheeriness that many will remember on his 1990s records Casanova and Fin de ​Siècle. The

Thursday

Richard Bratby

The man who can save classical music

John Gilhooly is sick of talking about the Arts Council of England. ‘Please tell me you’re not going to ask about that,’ he groans. ‘I walked into an interview last week where it was only about that, and if I’d known I would’ve declined. There have got to be broader things now.’ That’s awkward; because in the (admittedly grey) world of UK arts funding, Gilhooly’s announcement in March that he was taking the concert hall he manages – the Wigmore Hall – out of the Arts Council’s funding portfolio has been the story of the year. He’s dead right, though. We’re sitting in one of the world’s great music venues:

Deborah Ross

I could never sit through it again: The Cut reviewed

What set this apart, I would suggest, is its deep and unremitting unpleasantness The Cut stars Orlando Bloom as a boxer who comes out of retirement for one last shot at glory. You may be wondering: how does this film about a boxer coming out of retirement for one last shot at glory differ from all the others? It’s a story that’s been told umpteen times but what set this apart, I would suggest, is its deep and unremitting unpleasantness. If I were given the choice of having to sit through it again or losing one of my limbs I would need to put some serious thought into that. Bloom

Richard Bratby

Huge Fun: Le Carnaval de Venise reviewed

Summer’s lease hath all too short a date, but there’s still time for one last opera festival. Vache Baroque popped up in 2020 during that weird first release from lockdown, but to be honest, if you were starting a new festival, late August is probably the best part of the calendar to colonise. The big boys (even Glyndebourne) have left the stage, Edinburgh is done and the Proms are the only game in town. And the place to do it would be within easy reach of the capital: in this case, a fold of the Chilterns just off the rural top end of the Metropolitan Line. Anyway, Vache Baroque seems

Graeme Thomson

Shambolic, spontaneously chaotic and combustible: the Lemonheads at SWG3 Galvanizers reviewed

I enjoyed watching the Lemonheads fall apart on stage more than perhaps I should have Nowadays, when the default setting for live music is ruthlessly choreographed efficiency, there is a queasy kind of thrill in watching a performance forever teetering on the edge of pure unprofessional pandemonium. Which is to say, I enjoyed watching the Lemonheads fall apart on stage more than perhaps I should have.  The Lemonheads are and always were Evan Dando fronting whatever revolving cast of associates are willing to put up with him. This is both the band’s great superpower and its eternal Achilles’ heel. Dando is a fine and heartful singer, songwriter and interpreter. He

Thursday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The problem with psychiatrists? They’re all depressed

Edinburgh seems underpopulated this year. The whisky bars are half full and the throngs of tourists who usually crowd the roadways haven’t materialised. There’s a sharp chill in the air too. Anoraks and hats are worn all day, and anyone eating outdoors in the evening is dressed for base camp. Perhaps tourists don’t want to travel because they’re too depressed. That’s the specialism of Dr Benji Waterhouse, an NHS shrink, who writes and performs comedy about his patients. Dr Benji is an attractive presence on stage with his crumpled Oxfam clothes and his dreamy, half-shaven look. He could be the guy who tunes up U2’s guitars. His act is very