Music and Opera

Some conductors conduct from the fingers — think of Gergiev’s convulsive gestures, flickering up and down the keyboard of an invisible piano in the air — while for others (check out footage of an elderly Richard Strauss) it all comes from the wrist: graceful, fluid and utterly detached. You could cut off Toscanini and poker-down-the-back-of-his-tail-coat Karajan (famously dismissed by fellow-conductor Fürtwangler as ‘just a time-beater’) at the waist and lose nothing from their precise gestures; but try the same trick with the irrepressible Dudamel or Kristjan Jarvi and the life-force of movements that start from the feet and shudder up through the entire body would be gone. With Teodor Currentzis

Early in 1987, a middle-aged woman approached me on the record counter of the Slough branch of Boots. ‘What do you have by Ladysmith Black Mambazo?’ she demanded. Nothing. Boots in Slough wasn’t big on South African isicathamiya choral music. ‘Well,’ she suggested, ‘you really ought to get their records in. They’re going to be huge.’ She was wrong, but I knew why she was so sure. Ladysmith Black Mambazo had been among the standout guests on Paul Simon’s Graceland, released a few months before. Graceland made Simon, by my reckoning, the first pop star who had emerged from the rock’n’roll era to make a major cultural impact across three

Rafael Kubelik is watching Wimbledon when I enter his suite at the Savoy. ‘Tennis fan?’ I ask, slightly surprised. He shakes his head. ‘No. Just her.’ It is 1983, the high summer of Martina Navratilova. ‘She will win,’ says Kubelik in the decisive tone that conductors use to save rehearsal time. ‘And one day my country will be free.’ He had flown out of Prague in February 1948 not daring to tell his wife and son until they landed in London that the communists had seized power and they could never return home. Sir Adrian Boult, a gent among time-beaters, offered to hand Kubelik his job with the BBC Symphony

Imagine living Taylor Swift’s life. She has been staggeringly, life-dominatingly famous since she was 17. Not for a single moment in her entire adulthood (she’s now 28) has she been able to do any of the everyday things the rest of us take for granted. No wonder, then, that so much of what surrounds her seems so peculiar. No wonder her last two albums (2014’s fabulous 1989, last year’s rather less fabulous Reputation) have been dominated by songs about how other people perceive her life: every thing she does, as she is well aware, goes through a filter. She sings not about her love life — her relationships with the

A young Korean, 22 years old, won the Dublin International Piano Competition last month. Nothing unusual about that. Koreans and Chinese, raised in a school of hard knocks and rounded off in western conservatories, are winning most prizes. A few — like the phenomenal Lauren Zhang who made child’s play of Prokofiev’s second piano concerto in the BBC Young Musician of the Year — are prodigious talents with bright futures ahead. Dublin’s winner Sae Yoon Chon is probably not one of them. His Prokofiev, an effortful shadow of Zhang’s electrification, trundled along at pedestrian pace with one or two stumbles. I was therefore surprised to see that Chon won. I

The picnic hamper’s open, the bubbly is chilled, and country house opera is starting to eat itself. When you arrive at the Wormsley Estate you enter a fantastic, baffling world. Figures in black tie stroll between topiary hedges in obedience to unstated rules, while serving staff hover a few paces behind, gliding silently in to reassert neatness and order. Children dressed in red (they’re from a local Scout group) pop up to help and guide. Then the new production of Die Zauberflöte begins and with a deft, surreal spin, the director Netia Jones bowls it all straight back at you. That’s a big part of the fun here. Jones has

Grade: B Another load of SJW moppets keening over 1980s synths. ‘It only takes two seconds to say: I don’t agree with white supremacy,’ they told the Guardian. Chvrches, a Scottish trio relocated to New York, are led by the elfin and relentlessly concerned Lauren Mayberry. The Eurythmics fronted by Owen Jones, then, kind of. Just what you wanted, isn’t it? Chvrches have never had a hit but they do have a presence and reputation, acquired through endless gigging. They haven’t had a hit because their songs are not very good, if we’re honest. With this new album they have tried very hard indeed to change that by bringing in

No wonder we have a problem with classical music in this country. The week started in celebration. The stats are in and it turns out that Radio 3’s breakfast show has enjoyed a rise of some 64,000 listeners — a not-to-be-sniffed-at11 per cent increase on last year. Meanwhile Classic FM’s listenership is also up significantly, including a startling 43 per cent rise in under-25s. Champagne (or perhaps something a little less effervescently elitist) all round. Why are all these new people tuning in? Musical diversity, apparently. That and a preference for music over chat, for radio that offers an escape from the emphatic, combative everyday of John Humphrys and his

Grade: B+ Oh, terrific — a concept album about a 1970s hotel somewhere in space, plus an attack on our over-technologised world. Just what I wanted. There is no restraint on self-indulgence if you have a sufficiently remunerative back catalogue. This is also a Bowie tribute album, which fits in nicely with all that outer-space business. I have never heard any performer clamber so comprehensively into the skin of a dead rock star as Alex Turner does with Bowie here, in the writing and even more so in the mannered singing with its characteristic falsetto swoops. This is pure Bowie from the era between The Spiders of Mars and David

Apparently it’s called ‘expectation management’. Pollux, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s new work for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, takes its name from Greek myth. But as Salonen explains in his programme note, there’s more: lots more. It’s intended to form a diptych with a second piece called (naturally enough) Castor. It’s also part-inspired by Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, and an image (Salonen compares it to Salvador Dali) of a tree growing out of an ear. And finally there’s a ‘mantra rhythm’, which Salonen heard played by a post-grunge band ‘during dinner in a restaurant in the 11th arrondissement of Paris’, which all sounds very civilised. Still, that’s a lot of concepts for