Music

Stephen Sondheim’s Follies takes a huge leap into the past. It’s 1971 and we meet two middle-aged couples who knew each other three decades earlier at a New York music hall. The building faces demolition and the owner is throwing a party for his old dancing-girls. Dominic Cooke’s lavish production of this vintage musical boasts 58 performers, 160 costumes and 200 production staff. Yet it’s a curiously small show that could be performed, with a few cuts, in a pub theatre. There are four main characters and a smattering of cameos. Phyllis and Ben are rich New York grandees, unhappily married. Their chums Bud and Sally are also wealthy and

‘First performance: Vienna, October 3, 1880’ declares the programme for Opera della Luna’s new production of Johann Strauss’s The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief. ‘First British Performance: Wilton’s Music Hall, London, August 29, 2017’. They’re not joking: this really is the first full UK staging of the Waltz King’s single most successful (in his lifetime, anyway) operetta. It’s a major event, and the director Jeff Clarke duly follows up with one of those quasi-academic articles that you get in programme books at big opera houses explaining how La bohème predicted Mussolini, or whatever. Still kept awake at night by the liberal reform agenda of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary? Well, hold tight,

In 1987, the art of opera changed decisively. John Adams’s opera Nixon in China was so unlike the usual run of new operas in its concept that many people, on first hearing about it, assumed it had to be a joke of some sort. Turning the preposterous and reviled figures of Richard and Pat Nixon and Henry Kissinger into operatic heroes — they were all still alive in 1987 — seemed preposterously at odds with the dignity of the form. It was entirely serious. Though the concept was in part that of Peter Sellars, the opera director, the exquisite refinement of treatment was that of the librettist, Alice Goodman. Unlike

In 1988–9, British youth culture underwent the biggest revolution since the 1960s. The music was acid house, the drug: Ecstasy. Together they created the Second Summer of Love — a euphoric high that lasted a year and a half and engulfed Britain’s youth in a hedonistic haze of peace, love and unity. At the end of a decade marked by social division and unemployment, acid house transcended class and race, town and country, north and south. Amid the smoke and lasers, an entire generation came up together. How did it happen? The story starts in Ibiza, which by the mid-1980s had outgrown its roots as a hippie commune and was

Randy Newman is already struggling to keep up with himself. His dazzling new album, Dark Matter, was written before the changes of the last year, and no matter how pointed and current some of it is, there’s something missing. ‘There was a newspaper article that said Donald Trump is like a character in a Randy Newman song,’ he says. ‘I didn’t think there were any real people like the guy in “Political Science” or “My Life Is Good”. But he’s close.’ He’s had a bash at something for the Potus. ‘I just had an idea for a Trump song,’ he says, sounding rather like Yogi Bear’s rather smarter brother. ‘But

When brass instruments with button-operated valves were introduced in the first half of the 19th century, music-making changed. Once requiring a semi-professional approach, it could now be quickly mastered by large groups of working people. A noisy result were Britain’s colliery bands: but a more spirited upshot was Serbia’s trumpet tradition. Like the colliery bands, Serbian brass music had a political imperative — re-weaving national identity after 500 years of Turkish occupation. The leader who first hit on trumpets as a vehicle for this joie-de-liberté was Prince Milos Obrenovic, who created the first Serbian brass ensembles in 1831. They took swift hold, providing an outlet for everyday south Slav exuberance. The

If you’ve never heard the John Wilson Orchestra, it’s time to experience pure happiness. Buy their 2016 live album Gershwin in Hollywood — seriously, just do it. Play the first track: a medley arranged by Ray Heindorf for Warner Brothers’ 1945 Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue. One by one the great melodies glide past and you’ll already know them, of course: ‘Swanee’, ‘Embraceable You’, ‘I Got Rhythm’. There’s something different, though, about the way they sound here. The brass swaggers; the strings melt and swoon. It’s a sound that most of us have only ever heard through the crackle of a vintage-movie soundtrack, or on a Capitol-era Sinatra LP. But