Music and Opera

Our curation of music and opera reviews

It’s not child’s play

Aldous Huxley observed that ‘Where music is concerned, infant prodigies are almost the rule. In the world of literature, on the other hand, they remain the rarest exceptions.’ This, he believed, was because good literature could not be written without experience of the outside world, while music was the art least connected with reality. ‘Like mathematics,’ he said, ‘it is an almost unadulterated product of the inner world.’ Musicians may dispute the last point, but the fact remains that musical and artistic ability can emerge with dizzying speed. When it does, the question is how best — and how far — to nurture it? Several schools offer a specialised education in

Manon Lescaut is a shambolic opera – but the Met’s production is mainly excellent

Manon Lescaut Met Opera Live Puccini’s Manon Lescaut is his first opera worth seeing and hearing, and marks an astonishing progress from what preceded it. But Puccini had yet to learn how to bully his librettists into producing the well-constructed dramas of his later operas, and for all its delights Manon Lescaut is a shambles. Richard Eyre has updated it to France in 1941, to stress the moral ambiguity of everything there and then, with occupying forces, indecisive leading characters, a general unease. That works reasonably well, though the real problem is that Puccini is uncertain about the motives of his central characters, especially Manon herself, who veers between helpless

Brendan O’Neill

This year’s Oscars was the biggest gathering of smug, self-important asses in living memory

The American comic Toby Muresianu put it best: last night’s Oscars felt like ‘three hours of being told to eat your vegetables’. If there has ever been a more grating gathering of smug, self-important asses keen to educate the TV-watching blob about Serious Stuff, then I’m struggling to remember it. Hollywood has clearly forgotten what its job is: to make us squeal and swoon, not raise our awareness about rape and paedophilia and the heat death of the planet and all the other misanthropic bilge the beautiful people spouted last night. Black people must have been counting their blessings. Sure, being shunned by the 2016 Oscars might have seemed a

Emily Hill

Why I hate Adele’s vapid, deathless ballads

Music never dies, but if Adele makes another record, there is going to be a murder. Probably of me, by me, because I can’t take it any longer. Right now, there is no escaping her. In 2015, 25 was the fastest-selling album, ever, on both sides of the Atlantic. Her single ‘Hello’ was downloaded a million times in a week and was the most-streamed song in Spotify’s history. Last week, despite her meltdown at the Grammys, she swept up at the Brits. Which is stupendous news, if you, like everyone else, love Adele. But I don’t. I can’t. I won’t. I simply hate her. Or, rather, not her. But it

Damian Thompson

Organic chemistry

My old Oxford college, Mansfield, isn’t a famous establishment, though its current principal, ‘Baroness Helena Kennedy’, as she incorrectly styles herself, has raised its profile by lefty networking. (Owen Jones, no less, has lectured there.) The building is pretty, however, and its nonconformist chapel splendid, so long as you avert your eyes from the gruesome stained-glass Reformed divines. The organ was played by Albert Schweitzer and makes a mighty racket. This I know because in the 1980s the chapel was unlocked, which allowed me to creep in after a night on the sauce. I’d pull out all the stops, cackling like Vincent Price in The Abominable Dr Phibes. No pedals,

Sound and fury | 28 January 2016

No one is consulted. No one is held to account. No one has the authority to turn it off. How is it that muzak has slipped through every legal control? The blame, I’d say, lies with those who are frightened of silence — with those who spend more money in shops that buzz to a friendly background hum, and laugh too loudly when all around are mute. To moderate their visceral fear of the quiet they cling to cheaply produced, intellectually demeaning and superficially comforting sub-music. Muzak comes in various forms — piped, performed live, and through other people’s headphones, when you can’t actually hear pitched sounds, only a desiccated,

Damian Thompson

Age concern | 21 January 2016

Daniel Barenboim back at the Festival Hall! Cue The Grand March of the Musical Luvvies Across Hungerford Bridge, a bustling overture by Karl Jenkins in which a trombone farts out the epigrams of Simon Callow and the violas mimic the gentle swing of David Mellor’s shoulder-length bob — modelled, I’m told, on Anna Ford’s barnet c.1982. Jolly fine it looked, too, on Sunday night. Barenboim doesn’t have much hair these days, but baldness suits him. Sixty years after his RFH debut, as a 13-year-old playing Mozart under Joseph Krips, he has the same baby-pink skin as Winston Churchill in old age. He also shares Churchill’s belief in his own indestructibility.

Fraser Nelson

Public will now choose UK’s Eurovision entry – but should we trust the BBC with the shortlist?

For almost two decades, Britain has failed dismally at Eurovision – and deservedly. Our entries have been so bad as to represent a passive-aggressive insult to an entire continent. You can blame the BBC: it picks the song, and just doesn’t understand Eurovision. It seems to think it’s the equivalent of a musical bad taste party, where the aim is to send in cheesy songs. You Europeans have awful taste, the BBC seems to say, so here’s a song so crap that you’ll love it! They tend not to. Today, the BBC has announced that the public will choose the song. Its musical politburo won’t. This is a step forward, but it

Rod Liddle

Bowie once praised Adolf Hitler… but he was always changing his tune

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/projectfear/media.mp3″ title=”Rod Liddle and Kaite Welsh discuss David Bowie’s legacy” startat=678] Listen [/audioplayer]I was desperately worried that you hadn’t read or heard enough platitudinous drivel about David Bowie — and therefore felt compelled to weigh in with my own observations. In all honesty I haven’t heard so much repetitive, imbecilic guff since Mandela shuffled off this mortal coil. It was even worse than the confected sobfest that greeted the passing of the charming and likeable Lou Reed. The eulogies for Lou were simply a case of the BBC telling everybody that they are dead hip and edgy, really enjoyed ‘Perfect Day’ and once knew someone, back in uni, who

Starman

The DJ and sage Mark Radcliffe once said that he didn’t think he could ever like anyone who didn’t love David Bowie’s song ‘Heroes’, and while that might be going a bit far, I can see what he means. As it happens, ‘Heroes’ is still my favourite Bowie song, and Low and Heroes are still my favourite albums, slightly more than 38 years after they were first released. No one told us when we were teenagers that our barely formed music tastes would stay with us for the rest of our lives, but if we didn’t even suspect it then, we know it for certain now. If you do have

Boulez est mort

Pierre Boulez, who died last week at the age of 90, would have been the last person, one hopes, to want a unanimous chorus of praise to surge from the media, to an extent that has not been seen at the death of any other classical musician — certainly not at Stravinsky’s, to mention one far greater figure. His fellow musicians have been among the most fulsome: ‘He taught us how to listen, he gave us new ears,’ said Sir Simon Rattle, and on the many specially devised programmes others have made similar claims, if less succinctly. They really ought to know better. That kind of remark shows the same

Brendan O’Neill

David Bowie’s dignified death is a reminder of the sanctity of private life

Everyone is paying tribute to David Bowie’s musical feats, as well they should. Seldom, if ever, has one man made such a massive, beautiful dent on pop music and pop consciousness. A gender-bending, genre-hopping genius, deserving of all the accolades coming his way today. But I want to pay tribute to another of Bowie’s feats, which strikes me as quite extraordinary: the fact that he kept his cancer private, or ‘secret’, as the press insists, for 18 months. This, more than anything, has blown me away today. In this era of too much information, when over-sharing is virtually mandatory, Bowie’s decision to suffer away from the limelight, among those closest

Julie Burchill

Please spare us the sob signalling over David Bowie

By 9am this morning, I’d turned down two offers from two newspapers to write about the freshly-dead David Bowie. I told both plainly what I felt: ‘I haven’t been a fan since I was a teenager, when I worshipped him, and I don’t want to add to the chorus of people with nothing to say, but who’ll say it anyway, for a fee.’ However, humour is always the exception to the rule. By 10am I’d posted this (totally true) status on Facebook: ‘To illustrate how odd my voice is (accent and speed) I just spent five minutes waking up my husband Dan and telling him that David Bowie had died. I told him that

Steerpike

Jan Moir predicts a ch-ch-change to David Bowie’s peace of mind

This morning the nation has gone into Twitter mourning after news broke that David Bowie had passed away following a battle with cancer. As hacks and fans rush out messages of sincere condolences, Jan Moir may well be regretting the timing of a feature she has had published in today’s Mail. In the article — entitled ‘the bitterness of Mrs Bowie’ — Moir speaks to Bowie’s first wife Angie. In the piece, Angie hits back at Bowie in ‘viciously indiscreet style’ — leaving the ever-insightful Jan Moir to note: ‘Dear old Angie has been quiet for years, but her painfully discreet ex-husband can expect some big ch-ch-changes to his peace of

David Bowie, 1947 – 2016: the only Englishman to have landed on the moon

David Bowie has died at the age of 69. In 1972, Duncan Fallowell was quick to highlight his merits in The Spectator’s pop column: I am writing about David Bowie, and had originally intended to do so by jotting down on pieces of paper all the appropriate epithets and phrases, putting them into a silver top hat, shaking it all about, you know, selecting them at random and typing out the results with a dash between each. It began as follows: Deciduous/carnivorous — sleeve as tattooed prophylactic — erectile lyric, retractile music — car mechanic catamite — henna in the works — lurex (that word contains everything) — butch drag

Murder, he wrote

The allure of Carlo Gesualdo, eighth Count of Conza and third Prince of Venosa, has been felt by music-lovers from the humblest madrigal singer to the likes of Stravinsky, Boulez and Werner Herzog. Now, just three years after celebrating the 400th anniversary of his death in 1613, his birth in 1566 gives us a second chance to remind ourselves of that heady mix of murder and chromaticism that so famously characterises his life and work. For most classical composers the music is the way into the biography. Beethoven’s deafness becomes interesting once one has got to know the Missa Solemnis. Enquiry into the circumstances that surrounded Mozart’s death begins with

Lemmy was a national treasure – a unique collision of swing and amphetamines

Lemmy is what happens when a small slice of 1960s counterculture just keeps on going, oblivious to the changing world. He was a national treasure: a Methuselah of the British music scene, and one of its more thoughtful members. His driving forces remained a unique collision of baby boomer passions: jitterbug, skiffle, swing, rock’n’roll, and a lot of amphetamines. He was playing chirpy Mersey Beat numbers in a suit, a tie, and a smile with the Rocking Vicars when most televisions were still black and white. When the world changed, so did he. In the late 1960s he roadied for Jimi Hendrix, and later even had the patience to show

Christmas tips from Niall Ferguson and Annie Nightingale

For the Spectator’s Christmas survey, we asked for some favourite seasonal rituals – and what to avoid at Christmas. Niall Ferguson Every Christmas — or, to be precise, every Hogmanay — all the members of the jazz band I played in at university gather together with their families at our place in Wales. We eat and drink gargantuan amounts and play music with steadily deteriorating precision. It is a wonderful way to see in the new year. Annie Nightingale My favourite ritual is visiting people, and I have some rules. A bottle of bubbly to each. Be charming, be fun, but be brief. Quit while you’re still popular. Then you can book a cab

Musical maestros and football managers have more in common than you think

You don’t have to be a follower of Liverpool Football Club, or football at all, to spot the difference. Two months ago the Reds were running about headless as a newly wrung chook; today they are putting the fear of perdition into the best teams in the land. Or take Leicester City. Last season they were locked in an epic, desperate small-town struggle for Premiership survival. Today, they are top of the League. What changed? Both teams have the same players as before, same strip, roughly the same formation. The only new face is the manager’s. Change the boss and — presto — the mood picks up, tempi get faster,