I am daunted. Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony is a work that I regard with love, awe and even anxiety. I always wonder whether I’ll be able to cope with such large and deep demands on me and, if I hear a performance or recording that doesn’t disappoint me, be able to articulate why I find it
No surprise: the greatest musical experience of my life was Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1962. I thought at the time that I would never again be so moved by a performance of anything. I have kept an open mind ever since, and still it takes me no time or effort to answer the question. Obviously
Glenn Gould considered audiences ‘a force of evil’. ‘Not in their individual segments but en masse, I detest audiences.’ He retired from public performance on 10 April 1964, at the age of 31, having given fewer than 200 public recitals. The Canadian classical pianist had longstanding philosophical objections to the ritual of performing live. He
In the autumn of 1632, a man called Kaspar Schisler returned home to the small Bavarian town of Oberammergau. He didn’t walk through the gates in daylight, but waited until night, sneaking in past the tower guards. A few days later he was dead from the plague that was swelling and blistering its way across
‘People may say I can’t sing,’ said the soprano Florence Foster Jenkins, ‘but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.’ There were groans of dismay as an official walked out before the start of the Royal Opera’s new Fidelio: Jonas Kaufmann was not feeling on top form, but he was going to perform the
Grade: B The old axiom no longer applies. In modern popular music, it is possible not only to gild a turd, but to gild it so copiously that consumers scarcely catch a whiff of the ordure underneath. The studio is everything: you no longer need to be able to sing, write a tune or play
It’s a sweltering night in Manhattan, circa 1947, and on the doorstep of a brownstone tenement three women are waiting for their menfolk to return. There’s plenty to gossip about. The Hildebrands upstairs are being evicted tomorrow, and the Buchanans are expecting a baby. And what’s the deal with Mrs Maurrant and Steve the milkman?
Grade: D– For my first review of popular music releases in 2020 I thought I’d deposit this large vat of crap over your heads. This is the fifth album from Canada’s androgynous, tattooed bratlette — purveyor of corporate trap dross to the world’s pre-pubescent thots, skanks and wannabe hos. Trouble is, even for the dumbest
Come January, when the proper pop stars are all in the gym working off the pounds before they emerge, blinking and svelte, into the watery winter sun, the small venues of London attempt to pack in the curious by filling their schedules with seasons of up-and-coming artists. In east London this past week, the excellent
In childhood, the theme tune to The Box of Delights was the sound of Christmas. The melody was ‘The First Nowell’ but that wasn’t what cast the spell. It was the way the harp glinted and pealed, and the eerie wisp of the ‘Coventry Carol’ that drifted through on muted violins: a masterclass in orchestration
How does one account for the phenomenon that is the Chemical Brothers, a quarter of a century on from their first records, just getting bigger and bigger? Only now are they touring the arenas of the UK for the first time. They’re nominated for a Grammy. Their current album, No Geography, is a top-five hit.
Freud knew something about fear. Not the sudden shock of terror, but the creeping, sickening, slow-burn horror of the uncanny. A haunted house might make us jump, but how much more pervasive is that fear when the house is our own home, the monsters our own family, our own self even? It’s when the familiar
If you’ve ever felt that poor Madama Butterfly had a bit of a raw deal, then you really, really don’t want to know what happens in Mascagni’s Iris. Take that as a spoiler alert: our Japanese heroine is so young that as the opera opens, she’s playing with a doll. She’s abducted, installed in a
A few years ago, I asked the young American soul singer Leon Bridges — a latter-day Sam Cooke, with the old-fashioned song arrangements to match — if he ever pondered the incongruity of being a black man, backed by a white band, playing music in the African-American tradition to audiences that (in the UK at
Premièred within two years of each other, Luchino Visconti’s film and Benjamin Britten’s opera Death in Venice both take Thomas Mann’s novella as their starting point. But from shared beginnings the two works diverge dramatically. The cloying visual beauty of the film, its pink-and-grey vision of Venice swaddled in Mahler strings, couldn’t be further from
In every respect bar its austere pews, the Union Chapel is one of the best venues in London: beautiful and atmospheric, it encourages concert-goers to listen rather than chat. There’s no bringing in booze from the bar, so you’re not disturbed by people going hither and thither (though the couple next to me had smuggled
Billy Wilder, asked for his opinion of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version of his movie Sunset Boulevard, famously replied: ‘Those boys hit on a great idea. They didn’t change a thing.’ I don’t think you could say exactly that about Netia Jones’s new staging of Philip Glass’s Orphée, a piece that takes the script of
There’s a book about musicals that every opera lover should read. Not Since Carrie by Ken Mandelbaum is a history of musical theatre’s greatest flops: a comprehensive study of the thousand ways in which a collaborative artform can crash and burn. It’s unbelievable stuff. The Broadway cast of 1961’s Kwamina participated in a voodoo ritual
In the unlikely event that Bruce Hornsby and Morten Harket, A-ha’s singer, ended up featuring in the Daily Mail for, I don’t know, getting into a fight in a supermarket over the last luxury Scotch egg, they would be described as ‘“The Way It Is” hitmaker’ and ‘the “Take on Me” star’. In neither case,
Squeeze and Hot Chip are both great British pop groups. But they never defined a scene. Their ambitions extended further than being hailed by a few hundred people in bleeding-edge clubs. Squeeze piggybacked on punk, but they were quite evidently never a punk group, even if they dressed up as one. They were of the