Music and Opera

Our curation of music and opera reviews

Saturday

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Sound and vision | 19 November 2011

The 20th century was a century of musical revolutions. One of the last and most audacious ignited 50 years ago on the east and west coasts of America. And in a small but significant way The Spectator played a part in fanning the flames. In 1968 a young critic and early-music specialist by the name of Michael Nyman was sent out by the magazine to review a new work by Cornelius Cardew, a little-known British maverick. What struck Nyman about Cardew’s new piece, The Great Learning, was how different the musical language was from that of the complex and angsty European avant-garde. ‘It was very gentle, it was very modest,

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

Pump up the volume

It occurs to me sometimes that this column is, essentially, one long and painful confessional. I admit to enjoying all this unfashionable and uncool music so others don’t have to. ‘Ah, the man who likes Supertramp,’ someone once said to me at a party, just before he was stabbed by an unknown assailant. No one would say anything so sneering or discourteous to an actual member of Supertramp, current or former, which suggests that their fans must suffer on their behalf. My own suffering includes the purchase of their double live album, Paris, in or around 1980. In this they play note-perfect renditions of their hits, with added applause. If

Sunday

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Spotify Sunday: Going underground with The Jam

The Jam were once described as the ‘last great English singles band’. For a group that released such classic chart-toppers as ‘Going Underground’ and ‘Town Called Malice’ that might seem fair enough, but it grievously underestimates their musical canon. The quality of their output on LPs, B-sides and even on recordings that were never released while the band existed is stunning.   So today I wish to take you beyond the obvious Jam anthems, glorious though they are, and present some neglected gems.   Away From The Numbers The finest song on the debut In the City album sees the 18-year-old Weller ponder one of the major themes of his

Saturday

Alan Blackwood

What’s in a name? | 5 November 2011

There was a time when ‘classical music’ meant something you could put your finger on. It denoted the musical period between roughly 1750 and 1800, when Haydn, Mozart and many others wrote symphonies, concertos and instrumental pieces with a sense of form and grace that were likened to the art and architecture of Classical Greece and Rome. And it sat happily between two other important musical periods, the Baroque and the Romantic. Everybody knew where they stood. Not any more. Nowadays, for some people, ‘classical music’ probably means the same as ‘highbrow music’ — something that’s not for them. Otherwise it has become a catch-all phrase or term that nearly

Saturday

Michael Henderson

Let’s hear it for elitism

Last month, on the most glorious of autumnal days, the world of music paid its last respects to Robert Tear. St Martin in the Fields was packed and the singing, as you can imagine, was magnificent. Sir Thomas Allen gave us Kurt Weill’s ‘September Song’, Sir John Tomlinson contributed Sarastro’s aria from Zauberflöte, and Dame Janet Baker read a poem by Emily Dickinson. It was some send-off. Bob deserved no less. As well as being one of the finest tenors of the past half-century, he was a man of many accomplishments, not the least of which, as his agent Martin Campbell-White said in a splendid address, was being ‘effortlessly friendly’.

Saturday

Charles Spencer

Box of delights | 22 October 2011

I don’t know about you but I have to steel myself these days to turn on the Today programme in the morning. There is always the terrifying prospect that an infuriatingly overexcited Robert Peston will come on, barely able to contain his glee as he reports that one’s own bank or pension fund has just gone spectacularly bust. And when that dire day comes, as I increasingly fear it will, Peston will doubtless be followed by a sanctimonious government minister who will inform us that we are all going to have to work until we are 80 before we can receive our meagre state pensions. What’s scariest of all, I

Rebecca Newman

Bewitched

The Biophilia live show at Harpa, Reykjavik is another cog in the complex wheel that makes up Björk’s eighth album, which is not simply a collection of nice songs, but a concept record about nature, a series of educational apps and a showcase for its specially created instruments. The performance is, however, where it all comes to fruition, with the extensive thinking behind it distilled into the joy of putting on a show. Björk is the star attraction of the Iceland Airwaves annual music festival, and there’s a particular magic at seeing her not only perform in her home town, but her 20-strong girls’ choir, too, who add a dance

Saturday

Peter Phillips

Ideal marriage

In all the heavier-duty excitement of Liszt’s anniversary I had failed to register that W.S. Gilbert expired 100 years ago; and, perhaps just as significant, the copyright of the D’Oyly Carte opera company expired 50 years ago. I am old enough to remember the fuss which that moment provoked — the highbrows hoping to kill off the whole dreadful phenomenon there and then; the not so high, including Harold Wilson and Spike Milligan, trying to extend it. The company muddled through to 1982, but finally the Arts Council had had enough, and a lot of well-educated people heaved a sigh of relief that the Savoy Operas had finally passed into

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

Giving it some Elbow

What with one thing and another, I had rather lost track of what Sting was up to. Still on the lute? Moved on to nose flutes? Thrash metal rereadings of back catalogue? It turns out that he has taken to the road with an orchestra, in a heroic stand against the bitter frugality of these gloomy times. Drummers don’t cost much, and bassists come cheapest of all, but a whole orchestra has to be fed and watered, housed in very nearly sanitary conditions, transported by lorry from one location to the next and, apparently most tiring of all, listened to, as none of them ever stops talking. Sting obviously has

James Savagehanford

All that jazz | 8 October 2011

The human voice has always been celebrated as one of the most direct forms of musical and personal expression. This is especially true in jazz, where improvisation is such a key element. We so often listen to singers ‘baring their soul’, revealing something ‘deep within’. The human voice has always been celebrated as one of the most direct forms of musical and personal expression. This is especially true in jazz, where improvisation is such a key element. We so often listen to singers ‘baring their soul’, revealing something ‘deep within’. And Georgia Mancio (above), jazz singer and curator of the ReVoice! Festival (Pizza Express Jazz Club, 10 Dean Street, Soho,

Saturday

Ed Rex

Classical affair

Before Stephen Fry walked on to the stage at the Barbican on Monday to take part in a discussion on the place of classical music in today’s society, he asked his Twitter followers to suggest new names for what he sees as an off-putting label, ‘classical’. The replies that flowed in were typically informed and astute: ‘shit, outdated, irrelevant, dead’. ‘This is the scale of the problem we face,’ he lamented. James Rhodes (above), the concert pianist with a knack for shunning the stereotype of the straight-backed, tailcoated performer, put it another way: ‘Walk into HMV (if you can find one), and if you ask for classical music, they shunt

Sunday

Charlotte Gore

I know it’s over and it never really began

Teenage obsessions are a strange and terrible thing. How, exactly, does an album – which is, after all, nothing more than a recording of some music – seem to embed itself so completely into our identity? How does it become something so crucially important that we can’t imagine our world without it? With hindsight I feel rather embarrassed about the effect that Nevermind had on me. I was 14 when it came out. Back then, kids were divided into “Moshers” – those who liked rock –  and “Ravers” – those who liked dance music –  and I was, at best, a fledgling mosher flirting with bands like Guns ’n’ Roses

Saturday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Understanding Boulez

What was it Sir Thomas Beecham said about Stockhausen? ‘I’ve never conducted any of his music, but I once trod in some.’ So far as I know, Beecham never commented on the work of Pierre Boulez, but I’m sure his verdict would have been the same. Both composers adopted a modernist language that is politely described as ‘uncompromising’. Until his death in 2007, Stockhausen stoutly maintained this refusal to compromise (except on the question of accepting subsidies, always a flexible principle for the avant-garde). His projected opera cycle Licht would have taken about a decade to perform and swallowed the entire German GDP, and so it remained unfinished — actually

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Metal head

CNN recently referred to Birmingham as ‘the unlikely birthplace of heavy metal’. The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery is hosting an exhibition entitled Home of Metal (until 25 September). All the gnarly-mouthed, guitar-thrashing kings of metal hail from the Black Country: Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Napalm Death. Walsall boy Noddy Holder, lead singer of semi-metal band Slade, thinks it is because, in the Sixties, many Black Country men worked in sheet metal. ‘The pounding of machinery contributed to the atmosphere of what became metal,’ he says. As for that distinctive wail, Holder says it’s down to the ‘smoke and soot’ that makes the Black Country black. ‘That must have given

Saturday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Saturday Morning Country: Steve Earle | 17 September 2011

Here’s an improbably, even impossibly, young Steve Earle jamming with a bunch of great old boys at Guy Clark’s place way back in the day. It’s a groovy side of country and, you’ll observe, one fuelled by ample quantities of booze, tobacco and dope. Quality all the way. And, blimey, Steve’s just a kid singing the Mercenary Song…

Saturday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Saturday Morning Country: Johnny Cash

Actually, this is in memory of the Man in Black’s life-support machine Marshall Grant who died this week. But here are the boys at San quentin with I Walk the Line, a tune Cash wrote in 1956 that, it is said, was inspired by Grant:

Marcus Berkmann

Lucky charms

I have just finished a book (writing one, not reading one, you fool) and, as ever, I am hoping that it’s good enough and people will like it. Can you ever know? In this respect, and in quite a few others, it’s a little like a band putting out a new album, which they may have been working on for years, which they feel they have put their whole life into, and which goes out there to be judged by others who (let’s be entirely frank here) may not have their best interests at heart. This must apply particularly to someone like Bryan Ferry, who works obsessively for years and

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Inspired by Mahler

The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra will be giving the concluding two concerts of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival under its chief conductor Jonathan Nott. The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra will be giving the concluding two concerts of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival under its chief conductor Jonathan Nott. The programmes aren’t what you might expect from one of Germany’s leading orchestras, but then very little is typical about the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra. It will be performing Messiaen, Bartók and Ravel.   A few weeks ago I went to watch the orchestra rehearsing in its home concert hall, and moved on with it to Baden-Baden where it gave a performance in the Festspielhaus