Music and Opera

Our curation of music and opera reviews

Christopher Hogwood: the absolutist of early music

The death of Christopher Hogwood has deprived the world of the most successful exponent of early music there has ever been, or is ever likely to be. It has also reduced by one the quartet of conductors who have been called ‘the Class of ’73’, a term coined by Nick Wilson in a recent study of the early-music revolution of the 1970s and 80s. It refers to four groups that were founded in that year that are held to have changed the face of modern concert-giving: Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music; Trevor Pinnock and his English Concert; Andrew Parrott’s Taverner Choir; and my own Tallis Scholars. Of these

If the idea of disturbing kraut-punk sung by a troll appeals, you’ll love The Fall

I had a fair idea of what I was in for when I went to see The Fall at Brixton’s Electric last Friday. They’re a middle-aged band from Manchester, just like the Stone Roses, or the various incarnations of New Order. In journalese, this almost makes them ‘Heritage Rock’. I can’t remember when people started using this term, but it’s gone from the repertoire of niche music writing to being A Thing. You can’t go a week without some old beat combo or other announcing their re-formation, and in return they get a sort of protected status. Old rock music has become to the British what films about unfaithful middle-class

David Cronenberg’s Map to the Stars: threesomes, incest, a dead dog and whiny farts

In a scene that sticks from Map to the Stars, David Cronenberg’s Grand Guignol of a Hollywood satire, Julianne Moore, playing an ageing Hollywood never-has-been, sits on the loo in front of her PA, expelling tired whiny farts from her arse, while listing – her trout pout doing its best impression of a quivering anus – the names of the laxatives and prescriptive drugs she needs as if they were old friends. Except she doesn’t have any friends; the only people she knows are casting directors who don’t call back. And it’s no wonder Havana Segrand’s bodily functions have stalled (surely a first for Cronenberg). Not only is she plagued

By all means protest against Exhibit B, but do not withdraw it

Having met with an equal mix of critical acclaim and revulsion at the Edinburgh Festival, Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B – based on the ‘human zoos’ and ethnographic displays of the late 19th century – opens today at the Barbican. I have not seen it yet, but as someone with coloured South African heritage – well aware of the European brutality during the ‘Scramble for Africa’ – I have little desire to. To some, Exhibit B will be racist and needlessly provocative. To others, it will be thought-provoking and poignant. The show ostensibly uses stark, racist imagery to make an anti-racist statement. Is Exhibit B offensive? The 19,000-odd people who have signed the e-petition to have

Damian Thompson

Wedding music lives or dies at the hands of the organist

A few weeks ago I was at the perfect wedding. My young friend Will Heaven, a comment editor at the Telegraph, married the beautiful Lida Mirzaii, his girlfriend since university. The service was in Wardour Chapel in Wiltshire, a neoclassical masterpiece described by Pevsner as ‘so grand in its decoration that it seems consciously to express the spirit of the Catholic ecclesia triumphans’. Most of the guests were in their mid-twenties and doing their best to control their boisterousness. The Oratorian priest wore an antique cope; if it had been a Mass he might have been allowed to borrow the chasuble in the sacristy believed to have been worn by

The secret to a long and happy pop career? Don’t die

As everybody in the world except me seems to have seen Kate Bush’s live shows — against all apparent arithmetical sense — these have been gloomy weeks in the primary Berkmann residence. Even the mother of my children managed to acquire a last-minute freebie, even though she only really likes the first two or three albums and Bush didn’t play those. Admittedly, I would have had more chance of getting tickets if I had applied for some, but no sensible English male turns down the chance to sulk like the teenager he most certainly was when he stuck the poster that came free with Lionheart on his bedroom wall. No

Joan Rivers (1933 – 2014) was the best

Joan Rivers has died from complications resulting from throat surgery. She was 81. For many, she was the best. The funniest, sharpest, most mischievous comic we will ever know. And though she’d hate us for saying it, she was also a true feminist pioneer. Well before it had been settled whether women should be doing stand-up at all, she was not only doing it but shaping it – and subtly shaping society too. Her early routines, like the following 1967 set from the Ed Sullivan show about how crappy the female experience could be, were laying the ground for political feminism: But her radicalism was restless. And when the political tides turned, so did she. Women, gays, 9/11, the Holocaust, Oprah’s weight – nothing was

Enough ‘themes’ at festivals

One might have expected the streets of Edinburgh, especially at festival time, to bear some evidence of the political struggle currently engulfing our nation, but in fact there was none at all. Apparently, the arguments for and against independence have to be traded on the doorstep and not in the street, which, to those visitors who anticipated fireworks, almost amounted to a vacuum. However, it meant that the streets could be made over to the customary bewildering number of stand-ups, advertisements, students handing out leaflets (they come at you these days on roller-skates, pirouetting as they approach), and thespians of every type. The most decorated stand-up of the moment is

Kate Bush Hammersmith Apollo review: Still crazy after all these years

It says something about Kate Bush’s standing in the music world that, perhaps uniquely in the history of long-awaited live comebacks, nobody has suggested — or possibly even thought — that her motives might be financial. After all, this is a woman who’s stuck to her artistic guns ever since, aged 19, she defied EMI by insisting that her first single should be the abidingly peculiar ‘Wuthering Heights’. So, a famous 35 years after her last stage appearance, how on earth could she live up to such a fiercely idiosyncratic career, now regarded with almost universal awe? Well, at first the answer seemed to be by doing the most unexpected

Kate Bush Hammersmith Apollo review: still crazy after all these years

It says something about Kate Bush’s standing in the music world that, perhaps uniquely in the history of long-awaited live comebacks, nobody has suggested — or possibly even thought — that her motives might be financial. After all, this is a woman who’s stuck to her artistic guns ever since, aged 19, she defied EMI by insisting that her first single should be the abidingly peculiar ‘Wuthering Heights’.  So, a famous 35 years after her last stage appearance, how on earth could she live up to such a fiercely idiosyncratic career, now regarded with almost universal awe?  Well, at first the answer seemed to be by doing the most unexpected

The Spectator at war: Bayreuth on the eve of war

The Spectator, 22 August 1914: Inter arma silent Musae; but Bayreuth on the eve of the war showed very few signs of the coming cataclysm. It is true that on the presentation of the Austrian ultimatum to Servia a good many Austrian visitors departed, and the Fürsten-galerie was not so crowded towards the end of the first cycle as it was at the performance of Parsifal. The military were more and more in evidence in the streets: knots of officers were seen in animated conversation; groups of people circled round the newspaper offices and other places where bulletins were posted up, and, to judge from the nocturnal voces populi, a

Damian Thompson

‘Ashtray’ Annie Fischer was a piano giant. Why didn’t more people realise this?

This year marks the centenary of a pianist whom London orchestral players nicknamed ‘Ashtray Annie’. Only at the keyboard did she have a cigarette out of her mouth. Annie Fischer (1914–1995) was one of those female pianists who, despite their spinsterish appearance, possessed far richer imaginations than splashy male virtuosos. Clara Haskil and Marcelle Meyer also come to mind. Of the three, only Haskil — a physically frail Romanian celebrated for her purity of line — is today given the recognition she deserves: Pope Francis recently named her as his favourite Mozart pianist. Meyer, who as a young woman played for Debussy, had a technique of such refinement that she

I’d like to share my favourite violent pop video with you

This week has seen the Prime Minister playing Mary Whitehouse again. On Monday he announced that, as of October, music videos on sites like YouTube and Vevo are to carry age classifications similar to those already in place for feature films. You can read the subtext on his ‘deeply concerned’ brow: ‘if this is what it takes to get a majority…’ In principle, it’s hard to object too much. CDs (if anyone still buys them) carry parental guidance stickers, and a lot of comic books have a ratings system. Video games and DVDs follow the same British film classification board traffic-light system as cinema releases. Unless you take particular issue

Roland Barthes was a fan of Sister Sledge – and I can see why

Disco, the tackiest of music subcultures, is the nostalgia choice de nos jours. The sudden revival is a sort of pop gentrification. You want proof? They play Baccara’s ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’ in Pret A Manger. Sister Sledge, too. Sledge were never the naffest of the movement’s megastars, but that’s not saying much. Roland Barthes was a fan, whatever that implies. ‘How many people do you think are here as an ironic statement?’ a friend asked as we stood in Camden’s Jazz Cafe waiting for the Sledge to take the stage. It was a good question. Who actually comes to a disco revival gig? And can such a thing exist outside

My daughter wants to know why you haven’t heard of the Jayhawks

One of the many delightful aspects of having children is that you can get them to do things you are too old, lazy or important to do yourself. My disinclination to attend any sort of music festival, owing to a distaste for tents, chemical lavatories, mud and other people, has happily not passed down to my daughter, aged 15. Last month she went with a group of like-minded 15-year-olds, and large quantities of cider, to Latitude, which everyone says is much nicer than Glastonbury, if only because it doesn’t sprawl across several counties like a giant upper-middle-class shantytown. (The Guardian published an aerial photo of Glastonbury this year. It looked

Was Elgar’s The Kingdom an attempt to write a religious Ring Cycle?

To go from the second day of the England v. India Test match at Lord’s to the Albert Hall for the opening night of the Proms was to make a journey that a chosen few might find enviable. Nonetheless, different though the two activities are, there were some similarities. For example, the arena at the Albert Hall, where the Promenaders stand, fills up more or less to capacity before the seats around it attract a single occupant, these seats being taken at the last possible minute before the start of the concert. Exactly the same thing happens at Lord’s: the pavilion is filled while the rest of the ground remains

Has Morrissey finally recorded a decent album?

Time was when the former Smiths singer surfaced only once every five years or so to do the Carry On Morrissey routine. But the more you ignore him, the closer he gets. Barely half a year after he colonised the books pages, he’s back. Is that a collective groan I hear? The release of a new Morrissey record really shouldn’t be a big deal. Since the mid-90s, his albums have worked to a formula that bolted sanctimonious, self-pitying lyrics to sub-Oasis guitar fluff. In his Autobiography, he repeatedly blames conspiratorial suits for keeping him from the top of the charts. This is sweet, but just not true. The problem, alas, was

Damian Thompson

Is Handel’s Messiah anti-Semitic?

The Hallelujah Chorus crops up in the most unexpected places, says Michael Marissen in his new book about Handel’s Messiah. For example, it’s used in a TV ad ‘depicting frantic bears’ ecstatic relief in chancing upon Charmin toilet paper in the woods’. That’s an amusing detail: it lingers in the mind. But, as you can work out from the title, Tainted Glory in Handel’s Messiah isn’t intended to be a fun read. Marissen, an American specialist in baroque music, has been taking a long, hard look at the oratorio’s libretto, adapted from the Old and New Testaments by Charles Jennens, a gentleman scholar. He has uncovered a disturbing subtext —

Three cheers for being miserable

I prefer the music and lyrics of Pharrell Williams’s Happy to Morrisey’s Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now (because I loathe the smug insincerity of Morrisey more than anything else) but – in case you haven’t noticed – I’m still a miserabilist. Being a glass-half-full-and-cracked-and-laced-with-poison type of gal, I can’t abide the influx of positivists that appear to have popped up in recent years. A positive attitude is supposed to cure cancer, bring about world peace and end starvation. Being negative, as I am (by way of avoiding chronic, daily disappointment), is treated with distain, disgust and derision. I’m blamed anytime I get ill by fake gurus for bringing it about myself

How do you like your pop: clean, dirty or downright soap-shy?

I am still listening to the new Coldplay album, and liking it more and more, and not just because everyone keeps telling me how terrible it is. There is perversity in all enthusiasm, for sure, but the unanimity of critical disapproval in this case seems to have mixed with popular ennui to create a bracing cocktail of contempt and contumely. It just makes me want to play the damn thing even louder. Ghost Stories (Parlophone) is the Millwall of break-up albums. If you don’t like it, it doesn’t care. Maybe it’s because break-up albums are supposed to be dogged, downbeat affairs, recorded in one take in some grotty old studio