Music and Opera

Playing under the baton of Arturo Toscanini must have felt a bit like fighting in the trenches. There are recordings of him rehearsing in the 1930s or ’40s. The orchestra is bowling along; there’s a low muttering, and then suddenly, out of nothing, the explosion. A scream of rage: a huge, operatic, animalistic roar. There’s a barrage of Italian profanities and what sounds like a fist smashing repeatedly on wood. Bernard Shore, who played under Toscanini in the BBC Symphony Orchestra, witnessed him hurling his baton at a cowering viola section. With the NBC Symphony, Toscanini threw his gold pocket watch to the floor and stamped on it. The players

What’s wrong with sentimentality? The answer, I’d suggest, could either be: a) its almost bullying insistence on us having emotions disproportionate to anything a particular story has earned; or b) nothing at all. And if you want to see how both of these are possible, two of this year’s big Christmas TV offerings provide handy illustrations. Firmly in category a) is The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, an animated film by Charlie Mackesy, based on his own mega-selling book and with some impressively big-name actors doing the voices. Its methods are established immediately when a boy lost in a snowy wood happens across a cute talking mole

Only boring people are bored by Ravel’s Boléro. True, the composer – the slyest of wits – left his share of booby traps for the uncomprehending; take his comment, in a letter to Paul Dukas, that ‘I have written only one masterpiece, Boléro. Unfortunately there is no music in it.’ Yet Ravel was a sublime colourist; a master of the instrumental palette who makes Stravinsky’s orchestration sound coarse by comparison, and Boléro is one long twist of a fabulous kaleidoscope. Even its notorious repetitions are a red herring. Take the full score as a whole and you’ll struggle to find two bars that are identical (there are a couple at

Reader, I let you down. But I did so for the right reason: for love. On a night when all of London’s music critics were at the Royal Festival Hall for Christine and the Queens, I deserted my duty. But, honestly, I don’t regret it. The reports back from the RFH suggested some baffling melange of performance art, am dram, experimental pop and gender identity, wrapped up in a concept piece about red cars. Not me. I’ll stick with Rod, a man so comfortable with his gender identity that he’s a byword for male libido. Rod is a man so comfortable with his gender identity that he’s a byword for

Grade: B+ The 38-year-old Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson has an almost unique ability to make counterpoint sing, as his astonishing 2018 Bach recital for DG revealed. But his Proms debut last year in Mozart’s Piano Concerto K491 seemed over-thought, verging on the fussy. Now he’s been allowed the luxury of a concept double album, From Afar, in which he plays an eccentrically curated mixture of small pieces twice, once on a Steinway grand and once on an upright. It’s a revelation, though not perhaps the one Olafsson intended. He says the two instruments call for different approaches to his menu of Bach transcriptions, Schumann, Brahms and snippets of Bartok, Kurtag

Viewers watching a good romcom need to fall in love with three things. The boy, the girl and the affair itself. The new Hampstead melodrama, Blackout Songs, scores just one out of three. Rebecca Humphries is adorably chic and sexy as the Soho seductress who drifts from bar to bar, picking up men. Her toyboy is a disappointment, a teenage deadbeat who has none of her louche gusto. And his character is a puzzle when it ought to be crystal clear. At the start of the action he wears a neck-brace and speaks with a stammer. In the next scene, his neck has healed and his stammer has vanished as

The screw may twist and the rack may turn: the Tower of London, in Jo Davies’s new production of The Yeomen of the Guard, is a dark place indeed, and that’s as it should be. ‘Men may bleed and men may burn,’ intones Dame Carruthers, as she delivers a magic lantern show about the history of the Tower, complete with colour slides of famous beheadings. In The Mikado Gilbert uses capital punishment as a particularly spiky punchline, but in The Yeomen of the Guard, sentence of death has been passed before the curtain has even risen. The shadows are lengthening from the off, and even Sullivan’s cheeriest melodies have a