Music and Opera

One of the few indisputably great ballerinas of her generation, Natalia Osipova is a magnificent exemplar of the Russian school, her training at the Bolshoi furnishing her with a steely security of technique, powerful stage personality, and spirit of dauntless daring. Happily based at the Royal Ballet since 2013, she’s now also one of ours. As popular inside the company as she is with audiences, and much missed while she recuperated from an ankle operation last summer, she returned as the focus of a ‘curated’ evening in the intimate environment of the Linbury Theatre. First came a revival of a modernist classic: Martha Graham’s Errand into the Maze dates from

Progressive rock never died. Whenever some grizzled punk soldier next appears on a BBC4 documentary relaying their version of that beloved old fairytale, the Sex Pistols’s Slaying of the Dinosaurs, it’s worth remembering that nothing of the sort occurred. The big beasts of the 1970s – Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes – thrived into the 1980s and beyond, albeit in somewhat sleeker form. In turn they begat the likes of Marillion, Ozric Tentacles, Dream Theater, Talk Talk, Muse, Radiohead and Lankum, all of whom had or have familial ties to prog. Porcupine Tree, the project founded by Steven Wilson in the late 1980s, is a case in point. Doggedly unfashionable, Porcupine

Punk rock, packaged, parcelled, and boxed up as a treat for nostalgic wrinklies. That’s the deal with Punk Off!, a touring show that recently completed a lap of the country at the Dominion Theatre. Most of the audience were there to recall their rebellious heyday. ‘It’s about to get really, really loud,’ announced the compère, Kevin Kennedy, as the four-piece band hammered out ‘Sheena Is A Punk Rocker’ ‘and ‘If the Kids Are United’. Both hits sounded eerily unfamiliar. Why? Those raucous, pulsing rhythms can’t be turned into elevator jingles or a background drone at a shopping mall – so we rarely hear them. Just as well. Kennedy rattled through

I saw the world end in a Bethnal Green leisure centre. Regents Opera’s Ring cycle, which began in 2022 in Freemasons’ Hall in Covent Garden, has found its culmination and completion at York Hall, a rundown public bath better known for championship boxing. Tower Hamlets security staff scan you for concealed weapons on the way in, which is not exactly typical at the opera. Still, the Ring is not a typical opera – and isn’t art supposed to feel dangerous? But once you’re inside – and as long as you’re not seated within earshot of the bar staff, who clatter and chatter throughout – Caroline Staunton’s scaled down production transfers

There are nights when one realises quite how much effort the business end of showbusiness must be. On a bitterly cold Monday night in Philadelphia, Lauren Mayberry – over from Glasgow, and halfway through a month of criss-crossing the USA – took to the stage to survey a crowd of maybe 500 people, in a venue that holds 1,200. A good proportion of those 500 people were just like me: middle-aged men. We have every right to be there, of course, and one suspects Mayberry was glad they bought tickets. But I bet she was disappointed some of the remaining 700 or so tickets had not been bought by young

My patience with the cult of Pina Bausch is wearing paper thin. She was taken from us 16 years ago, and I had hoped that the aura of divinity around her memory might now be fading. But no, it only burgeons and having joined with Terrain Boris Charmatz to honour her creations, the official keepers of her flame Tanztheater Wuppertal are back in town to present one of her later works, Vollmond (‘Full Moon’), to ecstatic standing room-only congregations in her temple at Sadler’s Wells. What a bad, bad influence the Blessed Pina has had on dance, providing inspiration for hundreds of her imitators to pull the wool over our