Music and Opera

Those who cherish the notion that the current prime minister really is ‘electoral Viagra’ should have paid a visit to Brixton last Friday evening to see what actual young people think about him. Before Slowthai — the young rapper from Northampton who ignored complaints about the toxification of political discourse by brandishing a dummy of Johnson’s severed head at this year’s Mercury Prize ceremony — even took to the stage, the 5,000 or so kids took up a chant of their own volition: ‘Fuck Boris! Fuck Boris!’ The Britain of Slowthai and his fans is not one in which anything can be overcome with a bit of Dunkirk spirit. The

Never meet your heroes, they say. But if you grew up with classical music in the 1980s, there was fat chance of that. Stravinsky, Britten, Shostakovich, Walton: you’d just missed them. Which is why, in 2001, and finding myself duty-managing an 80th birthday concert for Sir Malcolm Arnold, I inched past his minders and delivered a few trite, polite but entirely sincere words of gratitude and admiration. No response: Sir Malcolm stared blankly ahead. Then he gripped my hand, and started shaking. And kept shaking, faster and faster, his grip tightening like a vice. Raising his head slightly, and pumping my hand with increasing force, he growled: ‘I’m not letting

Grade: A– The outlaw country genre has shifted a little over the decades since Waylon and Willie, with each proponent trying to out-badass each other, the guitars getting louder, the lyrics either more obtuse or (in the case of David Allan Coe) more obscene. This takes it all one stage further. I don’t think Sound & Fury would go down too well at the Grand Ole Opry: it is more Seattle than Nashville, 40 minutes of howling rawk guitar, ferocious boogies and cheap synths. It sounds, at times, like ZZ Top stuck in a lift with Gary Numan. Grunge, blues, heavy metal, all rendered darkly as if Mark Lanegan were

‘Laws bow down before the desire to rule…’ Centuries before ‘proroguing’ had entered British breakfast-table vocabulary there was Handel’s Agrippina, and centuries before that there was the woman herself. Sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius (who she may or may not have poisoned) and mother of Nero (by whom she was eventually executed), Agrippina was a true political animal: instigator, manipulator, machinatrix and far more. It’s a heady story in prose, so add a bit of poetic licence and a score by the 24-year-old Handel and you have a spicy blend of politics, satire and sex — Succession with a Roman accent. Let’s pass over the bewilderment that it has

Grade: D+ Pleasant memories — of hearing ‘Raw Power’ for the first time and later the amiably shambolic chug of ‘The Passenger’. And of watching my daughter, aged ten, dragged along to some open-air concert where she danced, an ingenue, to ‘Cock In My Pocket’. At least I hope she was an ingenue. All gone. Iggy has been reconditioned. No longer a mentalist drug fiend from Detroit, which was how we liked him, he is now a godforsaken rock institution for the hip middle-class twats who hated him first time around. James Newell Osterberg Jr is an agreeable interviewee and hosts a decent radio show. But sadly someone has told

‘Butterflies and Hurricanes’ by Muse was on heavy rotation on MTV at a time, 15 years ago, when my infant son could be magically coaxed away from tears and back to sleep by pop videos. The only lasting effect of this proved to be my developing a deep and lasting aversion to Muse, because I saw that video what felt like 160 times a day for three months. Having watched them at the O2, I wish to apologise. Muse, my disdain was misplaced. You really are terrific. I’m still not sure I would want to listen to an unadulterated diet of their albums — a Christmas dinner of prog, glam

It’s entirely possible for a band to be quite the most brilliant thing in existence for the briefest of times, and for them to leave almost no trace on the world. The writer Jon Savage has been known to say that Vic Godard and the Subway Sect were the best band in the world for a few months in 1977, but that year’s mythology celebrates the Sex Pistols and the Clash. In the late 1980s, after seeing a handful of extraordinary, incandescent shows, I truly believed the House of Love would dominate rock music for the next decade. The House of Who? Quite. But I wasn’t wrong about how great

Grade: B+ Get the razor blades out, Ms Misery is back. Only the truly affluent can immerse themselves in such morose and earnest introspection. Listen to the music of Africa’s most benighted countries and, on the whole, you will hear very cheerful fellows. Not so with the USA. Lana, a middle-class New Yorker of some talent, doesn’t actually tell you in every song that she’s about to top herself, as does, say, Billie Eilish. But you get the suspicion the thought is always hanging around her pretty head. This is her sixth album and what you get is the usual string- and synth-drenched chamber pop, plangent minor-key piano chords or

Grade: B+ I’m not sure about ‘Projects’. Aren’t those what ageing rockers produce, in a haze of sedatives, when their ego finally outgrows their talent? In classical music, there’s something unseemly about the idea of Maestro X condescending to bestow their attention upon music that is — or should be — bigger than they’ll ever be. Still, the conductor here is the Russian-born Semyon Bychkov, unambiguously one of the good guys, who, after decades spent paying his dues, has recently hit the sweet spot where every note speaks, every gesture ignites, and — crucially — critics actually notice. This Tchaikovsky box celebrates his relationship with the Czech Philharmonic, an orchestra

All symphonies were sacred symphonies, once. Haydn began each day’s composition with a prayer, and ended every score with the words ‘Laus Deo’. ‘These thoughts cheered me up,’ he told his biographer Albert Dies. Haydn, like Mozart, was a lifelong Catholic, and the Swiss theologian Hans Küng has suggested that the daring, exuberance and glorious wholeness that characterises even Mozart’s secular music comes from a specifically Catholic understanding of the universe: of salvation perceived not as an object of struggle, but as an unshakable, all-embracing certainty. Sir James MacMillan’s Fifth Symphony concerns itself with the Holy Spirit, but he struggled to find an English phrase that did the job, so