Music and Opera

It’s rare nowadays to see a new opera production that’s set in the period that the composer and librettist intended, but they do occasionally come along. In the case of Leonard Bernstein’s operas Trouble in Tahiti and A Quiet Place, the time and place are basically the whole plot. Trouble in Tahiti dates from 1951; a sassy little one-act satire on America’s postwar consumer idyll. It’s practically perfect. A Quiet Place is from 1983 and it’s a sequel, set 40 years later – post-Vietnam and post-Woodstock, with the nuclear family in full meltdown. These performances, and this production, provoke thoughts that might rob you of sleep It’s a bit of

It doesn’t matter which dictionary you consult, they all agree on what a song is: words, set to music, that are sung. Yet it’s also an entirely inadequate description, since there are so many types of song. Take David Gilmour and Neil Finn, both men of passing years who like to switch between electric and acoustic guitars, both backed by plenty of singers and kindred instrumentation (though Finn didn’t have a pair of harps on stage with Crowded House), both playing music largely rooted in the late 1960s, both offering lightly mind-bending songs. Yet this misses something crucial. Because, of the 23 songs that Gilmour performed – from both his

I think I’m through with Hofesh Shechter, and that’s a pity, because earlier work of his such as Political Mother thrilled me with its unedited passion and energy. But after several duds and misfires, I feel that with Theatre of Dreams he’s run out of ideas and hit a dead end. The title suggests what’s gone wrong: labelling something Theatre of Dreams gives you licence to go crazy and do what the hell you like, without any purpose or structure, rhyme or reason. And that’s what has happened here. Over 90 uninterrupted minutes, curtains close and open to reveal a hundred or so snapshot tableaux of 13 dancers doing nothing

In advance, Ludwig sounded as if it was aimed squarely at the Inspector Morse market. Set among spires of impeccable dreaminess (in a cunning twist, those of Cambridge), it has a main character who solves crimes and cryptic crosswords with equal efficiency. Once the series began, though, it was clear that its sights were set a little lower than that. Instead, the show seems content to take its place as the latest proof that plausibility is out of fashion in TV drama these days. (In my last column I reviewed Nightsleeper, which had no time for it at all.) One reason this detective feels like the traditional fish out of

There is no better cultural weather vane than pop. It’s not that pop singers possess incredible analytical skills – they don’t. It’s more that it’s in their interests to reflect some prevailing mood. And what people call a vibe shift can often be gleaned by comparing two artists. Take those featured this week: one very much au courant, the other regarded as a searing commentator on 1980s Britain. It’s a very good album, one for sitting down and listening to rather than standing in a vast shed to hear Over the past couple of years, Raye – a 26-year-old Londoner – has become rather a star. You may remember that

At the BBC Proms this year, an Icelandic pianist dressed like a Wall Street broker played a slow movement from a Bach organ sonata that had the audience first gasping and then stamping their feet. This was an encore to a performance of the Schumann Piano Concerto that neither milked the poetry nor romped thrillingly through the finale – and that, too, nearly had the Prommers throwing their underwear at the shy soloist. How do you explain the phenomenon of Vikingur Olafsson? At first glance, he fits the mould of the bespectacled scholar-pianist who recoils from vulgarity – a young Alfred Brendel or Richard Goode, say, whose Beethoven or Schubert

‘At the record company meeting/ On their hands – at last! – a dead star!’ Back when Morrissey was more concerned with writing a decent lyric than sour internet tirades, ‘Paint a Vulgar Picture’ by the Smiths summed it all up rather neatly: a living pop star is all well and good, but a dead one is far less troublesome – and considerably more profitable. Some artists only really get going once they’re dead. Commercially speaking, Eva Cassidy’s entire career has been posthumous; the Van Gogh of the lustreless Radio 2 ballad. The motive feels pure: a family’s wish to keep their sibling alive through her art Death has been

Grade: B+ Anton Bruckner wrote 11 symphonies – Numbers One to Nine plus a student exercise and the formidable rejected symphony endearingly known as ‘Number 0’, actually finished between the First and Second. So why does this 200th anniversary cycle conducted by Markus Poschner, divided between the Bruckner Orchester Linz and the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, run to 18 CDs? The answer is that it gives us two versions of Numbers One, Two and Eight, and three of Numbers Three and Four. The composer, generally agreed to have been ‘on the spectrum’, was hypersensitive to criticism and compulsively rewrote his symphonies in an attempt to tighten them up and silence

It’s a critic’s job to pick holes in the dafter aspects of opera productions, but in truth audiences are usually capable of detecting nonsense when they see it. ‘She must be at least 150,’ commented the gentleman sitting behind me, referring to the wheelchair-bound old lady who was trundled on stage at the start of Northern Ireland Opera’s new production of Eugene Onegin, and then parked there, pretty much for the duration. It really buzzed along, even if the set resembled a public lavatory (urinal chic seems to be an emerging trend) He had a point. Was she meant to be an elderly Tatyana? Then why was she dressed in