Music

Thursday

Ivan Hewett

Could a piece with no singing be the future of opera?

Nowhere are human beings so magnificently self-assertive as in opera.  Everything about operatic characters is outsize; their bodies, their flowing gowns and capacious cloaks, and their desires. No sooner has the hero set his eyes on the leading lady than he trumpets his desire to possess her; when the villain spots his victim, he tells us how he longs to send him to hell. All this fervent emotion is channelled through those great ringing voices, aided and abetted by the orchestra’s surges and swells. It’s exhilarating to behold, partly because we envy these creatures their unbuttoned emotional life. We, by contrast, are held back by a thousand scruples and doubts.

Thursday

James Walton

Voices of St Joan

I don’t know if this counts as name-dropping, but I recently interviewed a boyhood friend of Elvis Presley’s in Tupelo, Mississippi. The interview required a bit of patience, because his memories of the young Elvis appeared only intermittently amid a lengthy ramble through more or less anything that crossed his mind. But, as it turned out, it was also good preparation for reading Stop the Clocks. Joan Bakewell published her autobiography in 2003 and this, as the subtitle suggests, is intended to be a far looser set of reflections. Nonetheless, it soon proves so loose as to present a reviewer with the kind of dilemma that could feature in the

Thursday

Paul Keegan

Roaming in the gloaming

One of the epigraphs to Peter Davidson’s nocturne on Europe’s arts of twilight is from Hegel: ‘The owl of Minerva begins to fly only at dusk’, an image of philosophy as posthumous, able to explain things only after we have experienced them. Or an image of dusk as threshold, the blue hour when light transforms itself, and other worlds become possible. The Last of the Light is a cultural companion to such notions. A cabinet of curiosities — paintings, poems, music — framed by the idea of Europe as an archipelago of regret, many of whose most vital artefacts have dealt in echo and obscure longing, translated into a feeling

Thursday

Peter Phillips

Sound and fury | 28 January 2016

No one is consulted. No one is held to account. No one has the authority to turn it off. How is it that muzak has slipped through every legal control? The blame, I’d say, lies with those who are frightened of silence — with those who spend more money in shops that buzz to a friendly background hum, and laugh too loudly when all around are mute. To moderate their visceral fear of the quiet they cling to cheaply produced, intellectually demeaning and superficially comforting sub-music. Muzak comes in various forms — piped, performed live, and through other people’s headphones, when you can’t actually hear pitched sounds, only a desiccated,

Thursday

Marcus Berkmann

Starman

The DJ and sage Mark Radcliffe once said that he didn’t think he could ever like anyone who didn’t love David Bowie’s song ‘Heroes’, and while that might be going a bit far, I can see what he means. As it happens, ‘Heroes’ is still my favourite Bowie song, and Low and Heroes are still my favourite albums, slightly more than 38 years after they were first released. No one told us when we were teenagers that our barely formed music tastes would stay with us for the rest of our lives, but if we didn’t even suspect it then, we know it for certain now. If you do have

Michael Tanner

In two minds

There are some operas, as there are some people, that it is impossible to establish a settled relationship with, and in my case Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande is one of them, in fact by far the most pressing one. I never know in advance how I’m going to react to it, and to some extent the actual performance I see is not the determining factor. I’d like, just once, to see the play and find out how I reacted to that. For Debussy offers such a vivid and sometimes perplexing counterpoint to Maeterlinck’s words that one’s reactions to the characters and their actions are always in flux — at least

Michael Tanner

Boulez est mort

Pierre Boulez, who died last week at the age of 90, would have been the last person, one hopes, to want a unanimous chorus of praise to surge from the media, to an extent that has not been seen at the death of any other classical musician — certainly not at Stravinsky’s, to mention one far greater figure. His fellow musicians have been among the most fulsome: ‘He taught us how to listen, he gave us new ears,’ said Sir Simon Rattle, and on the many specially devised programmes others have made similar claims, if less succinctly. They really ought to know better. That kind of remark shows the same

Thursday

Philip Clark

More terrible beauty

At some point during your reading of this book the realisation might dawn, if you didn’t already know about his creative double life, that Richard Skelton demonstrates an unusual sensitivity to sound. Barbed wire unfolds over a dry-stone wall, an image which he reimagines as a mutant stringed instrument. ‘What harmonies would result if all were sounded in unison?’, Skelton asks — a question which he is uniquely placed to answer. Beyond the Fell Wall is a graceful meditation upon the relationship between landscape, language and sound, written by the most strikingly original composer of electronic music currently working in the UK — a man who spends his days exploring

Thursday

James Walton

Beyond a joke | 3 December 2015

Let’s start this week with a joke: ‘You know Mrs Kelly? Do you know Mrs Kelly? Her husband’s that little stout man, always on the corner of the street in a greasy waistcoat. You must know Mrs Kelly. Well, of course if you don’t, you don’t, but I thought you did, because I thought everybody knew Mrs Kelly.’ No, I can’t claim my sides are entirely split either. Yet, according to the first episode of What a Performance! Pioneers of Popular Entertainment (BBC4, Thursday), this sort of material by the Victorian music-hall star Dan Leno marked the birth of stand-up comedy as we know and are perhaps overburdened by it

Thursday

Peter Jones

True dedication

Benjamin Clementine, who won the 2015 Mercury Music Prize for his debut album At Least For Now, received his cheque for £20,000 and the trophy and, breaking down in tears, ‘dedicated his award to the victims of the Paris terror attacks’. One may be given leave to doubt it. In the ancient world, people of all backgrounds made dedications, from soldiers thanking gods for their escape from a nasty situation in battle to those who had had a threatening dream or wished to demonstrate their piety. Often people made ‘votive’ offerings (votum, ‘vow’), i.e. after vowing to the god that if they e.g. escaped a storm, they would make a

Alexandra Coghlan

Has there ever been a better time to be a lover of Baroque opera?

Time was when early music was a 6 p.m. concert, Baroque began with Bach and ended with Corelli’s Christmas Concerto, and speeds were so portentously slow that you’d have to start the B Minor Mass shortly after lunch in order to make it home in time for bed. Those dark days — caught between Baroque and a hard place — are over now. Period ensembles have never been better or more numerous, Handel and Monteverdi are a staple of operatic programming, and even Vivaldi, Cavalli, Cesti and Steffani are making their mark. Baroque is back, and this time it’s here to stay. One of the biggest success stories of recent

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Bored by Brahms

Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet begins, writes his biographer Jan Swafford, with ‘a gentle, dying-away roulade that raises a veil of autumnal melancholy over the whole piece: the evanescent sweet-sadness of autumn, beautiful in its dying’. This being late autumn, I listened to the quintet on Sunday to see if its ‘distillation of Brahmsian yearning’ still made an overwhelming impression on me. It did. I swear these are the most miserable 35 minutes in classical music. One critic refers admiringly to the display of ‘every super-refined shade of silver-grey regret’. But that’s the problem. The ageing Brahms — obese, cantankerous, his spirits lowered by the deaths of friends and undiagnosed cancer —

Jasper Rees

The man who wouldn’t be king

Not that long ago the BBC trumpeted a new Stakhanovite project to big up the arts in its many and various hues. And praise be, this it is jolly well doing with all sorts of dad rock docs, homages to painters and poets, while Sralan Yentob (as he surely ought at the very least to be, and soon) continues to knock frock-coated on doors like a highly remunerated person from Porlock. Before multichannels and multi-platforms, great arts coverage was (if memory serves) done without much song and dance. Lest we forget, Yentob was once a progenitor of Arena. Long the haven of burgeoning filmmakers such as Mary Harron, James Marsh

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Bach breaking

It’s just not what you expect to hear on Radio 3 but I happened upon Music Matters on Saturday morning and after playing us a clip from the opening chorus of St Matthew Passion Tom Service pronounced, ‘Bach is a tasteless and chaotic composer.’ I felt as if my ears had been syringed. Service was actually repeating what one of his guests, the Bach scholar John Butt, had just asserted, as if to verify his intention. Was he really saying that the composer formerly thought of as the epitome of balanced reflection and ‘motivic organisation’ would have sounded ‘incompetent’ to his audiences in 1727? Butt insisted, on the Passion, ‘It’s

Thursday

Peter Phillips

Fantasy on ice

In this exciting new era of Spectator cruises I have been put in mind of a dream event long in the planning: to hear Allegri’s Miserere on ice, specifically on the ice of Antarctica. A number of things came together to put this on my bucket list, from the thought of dressing up like penguins (as usual) while we sing to penguins, to reading in the press that the Tallis Scholars ‘have performed on every continent on the planet except Antarctica’. I want to fill a boat with like-minded enthusiasts and adventurers, and set off from South America via the Falklands to the Antarctic Peninsula, hoping to make a landing

Christopher Bray

Frank’s world

‘He never went away. All those other things that we thought were here to stay, they did go away. But he never did.’ Who was Bob Dylan talking about earlier this year? Woody Guthrie? Elvis Presley? Or maybe, halfway through the sixth decade of his own career, himself? But no. The man in question was Frank Sinatra — the inspiration behind Dylan’s latest album, Shadows in the Night. That record is a collection of covers —from the great American songbook — ‘Autumn Leaves’, ‘The Night We Called it a Day’, ‘What’ll I Do’. We call such songs standards, as if they have been set, if not in stone, then at

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 29 October 2015

Killer facts The World Health Organisation added processed meats to its list of ‘known’ carcinogens. A few of the other things which have been claimed to be linked to cancer in the past fortnight: — Make-up in Halloween outfits (blamed by a laser surgery centre in New York) — Chocolate (blamed by a colorectal surgeon at St George’s Hospital, Tooting) — Deodorants (tabloid article — no source given) — Hormone-replacement therapy (tabloid article — no source given) — ‘Roundup’ herbicide (named in US lawsuit) — Sand used in fracking, which is to say, sand (Friends of the Earth) — Nail polish (tabloid article — no source given) — Shampoo (US

Mark Palmer

Maximum Bob

We were like four hapless contestants on University Challenge. None of us knew the answer. But just like they do on the telly, I leaned learnedly across towards my 28-year-old son, who in turn looked despairingly towards one of my stepsons, before my other stepson made his contribution with a shrug of the shoulders. So, it was up to me as captain of the team to take a guess as the first few bars wafted through the Royal Albert Hall. ‘“Tangled Up in Blue”?’ I proffered with as much enthusiasm as Jeremy Corbyn at a white-tie dinner. But, fingers on the buzzer, there were far bigger questions to be answered.

James Delingpole James Delingpole

DVF worship

Girl is back for half-term so I’ve been able to watch nothing but crap on TV this week. Some of you will say, ‘Oh come on! You pay the bills, so you get to control the remote.’ But that’s not how things work when you’ve got a teenage girl at home. Especially not one whose ankle you have been responsible for breaking. So crap, I’m afraid, is what I’m going to have to review. Not, it must be said, that the crap has all been crap. House of DVF (E! Online), for example. I’ve mentioned it before and the reason I’m mentioning it again is the matchless insights it offers

Saturday

Philip Clark

Richard Strauss was no conservative

With the ardent zeal characteristic of the freshly converted, I found myself channelling waves of anger towards Stanley Kubrick. The closing bars of Also sprach Zarathustra had utterly turned my head, transforming what had been my passing interest in the music of Richard Strauss into an infectious bout of Strauss monomania. Kubrick’s exquisitely consummated marriage of music and image, however, dared to hoodwink our collective consciousness into believing that Strauss’s 1896 Nietzsche-inspired tone-poem is actually sci-fi space music – more Star Wars than Übermensch – a reality that felt unmerited and unjust. The opening sequence of Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey used the trumpet and timpani fanfares that launch