Music and Opera

An opera without singers, a Strauss orchestra of just 16, and an early music ensemble playing Mahler: welcome to the Oxford Lieder Festival, where familiar repertoire is getting a reboot this year thanks to some brilliantly ambitious programming. When it comes to classical music, we’re used to living in a bifurcated world. On the one hand, you have the contemporary ensembles: the orchestras, choirs and quartets performing pretty much everything from Mozart onwards. And on the other the early music groups, whose territory is everything that’s left — Bach, Byrd, Hildegard of Bingen. It’s only fairly recently, and thanks to groups such as the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment,

If two concert pianists are performing a work written for two grand pianos, there are two ways you can position the instruments. They can sit side by side, an arrangement known as ‘twin beds’. Or they can be slotted together so the performers face each other. That’s called a ‘69’. When Martha Argerich and Stephen Kovacevich play together, they opt for twin beds. Appropriately, you might think, since they’re divorced — but really it’s because Kovacevich insists on sitting so low that Argerich can’t see his head if she’s opposite him. With everyone else she prefers a 69, as do most pianists: it’s easier to make eye contact. And that’s

  On the face of it, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds aren’t exactly a natural fit with the O2. Cave’s songs range from the thrillingly cacophonous to the quietly lovely. But with their recurring themes of death, violence and religion, and a muse that rarely leads Cave in the direction of the mainstream, very few have ever seemed particularly arena-friendly. And that was before his latest album, Skeleton Tree, which forms the basis of his current tour — and which Cave completed after his 15-year-old son Arthur died falling from a cliff in Brighton. Cave has warned against seeing the album as a direct response to the tragedy, emphasising

To get a reminder of how strange the 1970s were, there’s no need to plough through lengthy social and political histories. Go instead to YouTube, and watch the public-information films made for schoolchildren. Take Lonely Water (1973), in which Donald Pleasence provides the voice of death, stalking careless children and dragging them to a watery grave. There’s Apaches (1977), in which kids playing on a farm suffer various recondite forms of agricultural death (falling under the wheels of a moving tractor, drowning in slurry). Or try my personal nightmare, The Finishing Line (1977); a school sports day, played out on a railway line, which ends with the traditional sprint through

Much fuss has been made of the title given to Sir Simon Rattle on arrival at the London Symphony Orchestra. Unlike his LSO predecessors — Valery Gergiev, Colin Davis, Michael Tilson Thomas, Claudio Abbado, André Previn — all of whom were engaged as principal conductor, Rattle has been named music director, a position that bears serious administrative responsibilities. As Rattle put it recently in one of a dozen media interviews: ‘Valery wasn’t interested, nor Claudio. Colin loved them to bits, but he made it very clear that he did not want anything to do with the running or the auditions or the personnel… I will be much more involved with

‘We’re going to live for ever!’ declares Robert Powell as Gustav Mahler at the end of Ken Russell’s 1974 biopic. We’ve just had the big reveal (Russell said it ‘out-Hollywoods Hollywood’) in which Mahler admits to his young wife Alma that she inspired the lyrical theme in the first movement of his Sixth Symphony. It’s a tale for which the only source is Alma herself, but hey, over the course of the movie we’ve already had exploding garden sheds, interpretative dance and Cosima Wagner in fetish gear. Russell cues the music, and few film-makers have understood better how to cut to a composer’s emotional core. As the credits roll, the

The two Proms concerts given on consecutive evenings by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra were well planned: a short opening work, and after the interval a long and demanding symphony. Moreover, the big symphonies were by Bruckner and Mahler, to the latter of whom this orchestra has been devoted almost since its foundation. Willem Mengelberg, the orchestra’s chief for 50 years, was the only conductor, Mahler said, that he could trust with his works, and the orchestra has been headed by a succession of distinguished Mahlerians ever since.Bruckner, meanwhile, entered the orchestra’s repertoire in a major way in the 1950s, and has been there ever since. Daniele Gatti, who became the

Schoenberg began Gurrelieder in 1900, but he didn’t hear it until 1913. By then, he’d moved on, and he ostentatiously refused to acknowledge the applause for what (as it turned out) would be the greatest public triumph of his career. Radical artist snubs ignorant masses: it’s a gesture that could stand for much of classical music’s post-1913 history. Even today, you won’t get far into a discussion with contemporary music buffs before someone declares that concertgoers need to be ‘educated’. Which always reminds me of a friend’s account of the night at Reading when Guns N’ Roses decided to play new material instead of the hits that the audience felt

Back in the period-instrument wars of the 1980s and ’90s, when the forces of historically informed performance smashed out of their baroque beachhead and started to annex romantic repertoire, the insurgents split into two factions. Roger Norrington and the London Classical Players were the shock troops: their Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, with its filthy, rasping ophicleide, exploded like a tactical nuke. John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique went in later as peacekeepers, altogether smoother and more reassuring. Norrington’s discs started arguments; Gardiner’s won awards. As an A-level music student drunk on the hot-blooded idealism of Berlioz’s Memoirs, I was certain which one the composer would have preferred. Well,

Two songs in which Sir Michael informs us that he is distressed by both Brexit and Donald Trump. Released with, according to the 70-year-old singer, ‘urgency’: he can see that we are in trouble and was naturally anxious to help us out. The first, ‘England Lost’, is at least redeemed by a soupçon of wit. Jagger explains that he went to see England play football but that they lost, and he got wet in the rain. But it then turns into a sort of state of the nation thing, by the simple addition of an apostrophe and the letter ‘s’. England’s lost, he bemoans, and chucks in an incoherent allusion