Music and Opera

The golden age of pop music may be long gone, but the golden age of pop musicians’ obituaries is definitely with us. Soon I shall have to start apologising for returning to this subject with such regularity, but barely a week now seems to pass without some rock legend turning his or her eminent toes up. Last week it was John Renbourn, gruff beardy guitarist for Pentangle, and the week before Daevid Allen, who founded Soft Machine and about 73 different manifestations of Gong. On social media Nick Hornby asked us to name which dead people we had seen live (when they were alive, obviously). His list included Bobby Womack,

In the magazine this week I’ve written about spectacular new advances in the art of remastering vintage classical recordings. Many restoration engineers are removing hiss and correcting pitch so that historic performances are no longer muffled or distorted. But one of them stands out from the rest: Andrew Rose, whose Pristine Classical label is more interventionist than others. In particular it uses something called ambient stereo to spread the mono output between speakers. This yields a more lifelike sound than the original microphones were able to capture. In many cases the results are astonishing. The Spectator and Pristine have put together a terrific offer for our existing and new subscribers – visit new.spectator.co.uk/pristine and log in with your web ID

Songwriting credits are, as we know, not always to be trusted. Since the dawn of music publishing, there has always been a manager or an agent or a well-connected representative of organised crime willing to take a small cut of a song’s royalties, in return for services rendered or threats not carried out. Who actually wrote any song? Well, we know that Bob Dylan wrote ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, but after that it gets a little murky. Lennon/McCartney songs, after the first couple of albums, were written by Lennon or McCartney but rarely by Lennon/McCartney. The Verve’s ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’, notoriously, sampled more of Andrew Loog Oldham’s orchestral version of ‘The

This is a blog written after the first screening of Måns Zelmerlöw’s Heroes, which went on to win the Swedish nomination and the 2015 Eurovision Song Contest. The world’s most-watched cultural event is some time away, but for Eurovision affectionados the entertainment has started already. Britain and Sweden are the continent’s two greatest exporters of pop music, but the UK Eurovision contestant is annointed by the BBC whose institutional snobbishness and soft xenophobia prevents it from understanding the contest. Sweden asks Swedes to choose from one of 28 entries in a six-stage event called Melody Festival, now in full flow. For MelFest, a song starts with songwriters. They’re celebrated, and shown on camera before the performer gets going. A song that wins Eurovision

Go on, admit it, you laughed, didn’t you? When Madonna was yanked off the stage by a dancer pulling her cloak during her finale performance at the Brit Awards, you gasped in horror for one brief moment and then… you laughed out loud. Then you pressed ‘rewind’ and watched it again. And then once more for luck. Because it’s not often we get to watch a celebrity fall flat on their face – or in Madonna’s case, flat on her back. The fact that we were watching a 56-year-old mother of four fall downstairs and smash to the ground – that this was not normally something we would or should find funny

Birdman soared past longtime favourite Boyhood at the 87th Academy Awards, as Alejandro González Iñárritu’s hilarious Hollywood satire unexpectedly took both of the top prizes – best picture and director – and joint top number of awards overall, in a slightly awkward ceremony where many of the host’s razor-edged jokes drew clear disapproval from the audience. While many were predicting a slightly irreverent evening, Neil Patrick Harris, a veteran host of the Tony Awards, arguably took his jokes at the podium too far. Following a punchy opener chastising the Academy for the lack of ethnic diversity among this year’s nominees (the 20 acting nominations all went to white actors for

On 8 March 2013, Gustavo Dudamel stood by the coffin of the Marxist autocrat Hugo Chavez and conducted the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra in the Venezuelan national anthem. He assumed, like everyone else, that the coffin contained a fresh corpse: the president of Venezuela was reported to have died from cancer on 5 March at the age of 58. Not so, it is now claimed. According to his former head of security, Chavez died on 30 December 2012. The news was kept secret while his lieutenants panicked. The funeral — covered with ludicrous sycophancy by the BBC — was, at least in part, a masquerade. Whatever the truth, Dudamel —

Only a fool would mess with James Blunt. As his Twitter followers know, he has a sharp wit, and, as befits a former officer in the Life Guards, he is always ready for a fight. Indeed, the grievous suffering around the world caused by his greatest hit, ‘You’re Beautiful’, has been offset to some extent by his snappy tweets, several widely disseminated photographs of him looking a prawn, and a general sense that he can take a joke. Not long ago someone else tweeted as follows: ‘If you receive an email with a link to the new James Blunt single, don’t click on it. It’s a link to the new

After Mr S revealed that Chris Bryant has broken two ribs getting out of bed, speculation is rife that his nemesis James Blunt could be to blame for the incident. The duo fell out after the Labour MP claimed that British culture should not be dominated by the likes of privately educated crooners such as Blunt. The You’re Beautiful singer swiftly replied in an open letter in which he called Bryant a ‘classist gimp’. Keen to avoid any confusion about the cause of his injury, Bryant took the opportunity at a mock leader election debate at King’s Place to clear the singer’s name: ‘Just to clarify – James Blunt played no part in

We have all read about the current woeful state of the CD industry — how it is 28 per cent down on last year, which was 25 per cent down on the previous year, and so on — but do we know why? Is it the endless financial crisis? Or is it that CDs, as a concept, are knackered? And this is despite the fact that more people are taking an interest in recorded music than ever before. The villain of the piece is of course the internet. Where previously the music one wanted was not available without going into a shop and buying it, now there is every chance

After Sarah Vine revealed that her husband Michael Gove’s ringtone that infamously disrupted a cabinet meeting was the latest Beyoncé hit, David Cameron has thrown doubt on this version of events. Speaking to LBC this morning, the PM was tackling the big issues. When host Nick Ferrari played a series of Beyoncé tunes, Call Me Dave seemed confused: ‘I don’t think it was any, my memory is it sounded like something from the sort of chillax playlist on Spotify. It wasn’t… that’s all a bit more you know sort of hip-hoppy and I don’t think it was that. But I mean it didn’t last very long. So we weren’t playing beat the

I’ve never been into shoplifting, though I once had a friend who was. And, no, before you ask, I’m not using that old ‘friend’ device to hide my own identity. She was a girl I met at university. Bookshops were her hunting ground. I’m assuming she was driven by some sort of compulsion because she couldn’t enjoy the books she nicked and — she assured me — God would always punish her by making a contact lens drop out of her eye within hours of the crime. I wouldn’t enjoy a stolen book, either. But if I listened to classical recordings illicitly downloaded from the internet, would my conscience drain

From ‘Music and the War’, The Spectator, 16 January 1915: The war, so far, has not thrown up any supreme musical product. It would be an affectation to pretend that the taste of the average British soldier is elevated. As in the Boer War, his repertory is confined to music-ball tunes and songs of an extreme and lugubrious sentimentality. The average “Tommy ” does not sing folk-songs or graceful chansons populaires, e.g., Meunier tu dors, Ton moulin va trop vite, like our allies, but at least he does not submit to dictation from above: he chooses for himself. The curious fact about “Tipperary,” a marching song of a mild ragtime

Michael Kennedy, who died on New Year’s Eve, was the Sunday Telegraph’s music critic when I was for a while assistant arts editor there about 20 years ago. He was of course musically knowledgeable beyond reproach, but his writing had the compulsive readability of a man who was always a journalist, a storyteller. He was elitist in his taste but populist in his communicative instincts, something that I rapidly absorbed as I subedited his copy. Critics are usually obsessively protective of their work, often wounded by disagreement rather than stimulated. Kennedy was an exception, robustly open to the possibility of others improving and developing work he could get nowhere with. One Sunday in

One of the most complete bars to the authentic performance of both baroque opera and some renaissance polyphony is the current unavailability of castrati. There isn’t much to be done about it of course, but we might regret that we can no longer hear a sound which, at its best, fascinated all who did hear it. And we don’t know what that sound was. The two famous and unique recordings of Alessandro Moreschi, made in old age in 1902 and 1904, give us some clues, but can hardly represent the sound of the greatest 18th-century practitioners. There are some pointers in contemporary reports. Gounod went to the Sistine Chapel in