The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Comedy’s a funny thing. No, seriously, the business of making people laugh is as fragile, as mercurial as cryptocurrency — a constellation of shifting risk factors, many beyond control, any of which can kill a joke deader than Dogecoin. Opera is already at a disadvantage. Timing — comedy’s accelerant of choice — is predetermined, dictated
Grade: B– Is there anyone in rock music more irritating and stupid than Bobby Gillespie? The rawk’n’roll leather-jacketed self-mythologiser. The affected drawl. The shameless pillaging of every hard rock album made between 1969 and 1972, but especially the Faces and the Rolling Stones. The moronic lyrics. The hard-left radical chic posturing and condemnations of Israel
When you think of Handel’s Amadigi (in so far as anyone thinks about the composer’s rarely staged, also-ran London score at all) it’s as a magic-opera. Sorcerers and sorceresses do battle in a fantasy land not found on any map. The stage directions alone are enough to stir the commercial loins of any 18th-century impresario.
Grade: A– The problem with Norwegians is that they are so relentlessly, mind-numbingly pleasant. Well, OK, not Knut Hamsun or Vidkun Quisling. And probably not the deranged fascist murderer Anders Breivik either. But then maybe that’s what unrestrained, suffocating niceness does to a certain kind of person: they end up strapping on a machine gun,
There are worse inconveniences than having to wear a face mask to the opera. But there’s one consequence that hadn’t really struck home until an hour into Rimsky-Korsakov’s Ivan the Terrible. The citizens of Pskov are massing in the streets. The Tsar’s army is approaching, and Rimsky is building one of those surging Russian crowd
I’ve given up comfort food. I’m trying to shift lockdown pounds that have left me with the physique of the kind of ageing second-string wrestler you used to see on World of Sport early on a Saturday afternoon in the 1980s. It’s all eschewing oils and measuring portions round these parts, and so I have
There was no printed programme for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s first concert under its music director designate Domingo Hindoyan. Nothing to download either; just a piece of paper the size of a train ticket, handed out by a steward with a conspiratorial air, containing a bare listing of the pieces we were about to
When Trojan Records attempted to break into the United States music market in the early 1970s, it hit an insurmountable barrier: the company shared its name with America’s most popular brand of condom. ‘It was a case of commercial coitus interruptus,’ says Rob Bell, at the time the label’s production manager. In America, Trojan signified
When Raymond Gubbay left school, he was articled to an accountant’s firm. Fascinated by opera and depressed at the prospect of life as a Golders Green beancounter, he wriggled out of it in a matter of months, and into an assistant’s job at Pathé Newsreels. Sensing that newsreels had a looming expiry date, he asked
There are many Symphonies No. 10 by Gustav Mahler, or none. The situation is rare, if not unique, in the history of music. Basic facts: Mahler finished the Ninth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde in the summer of 1910. At the same time he discovered that his wife Alma was having an affair
At the turning point of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Der Rosenkavalier, all the clocks stop. Octavian has arrived at the house of the teenage bride-to-be Sophie von Faninal as bearer of the silver rose — the symbol of a love that is simultaneously as artificial and as eternal as any human creation can
Grade: A– Imagine a really disgusting and immoral scientific experiment in which the members of Weather Report, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, King Crimson and Wire were somehow fused together into a giant caterpillar or something. This album is the kind of racket the forlorn creature might make. It sits in that usually arid zone where prog
On the way home from This Is The Kit’s show at a socially distanced Barbican, I listened to Avalon by Roxy Music, which had been brought to mind by the previous 90 minutes or so of music. It’s perhaps worth saying that This Is The Kit — the nom de chanson of Kate Stables, backed
‘The records are only half of the picture,’ says Irmin Schmidt, founder member of the great German experimental collective Can. ‘Live [performance] is the side of ours which actually has still to be discovered. For many of the people who came to our concerts, it was much more important in building up the legend than
At the first night of Glyndebourne Festival 2021 there was relief and joyful expectation as Gus Christie made his speech of welcome. Never mind the hit to takings from the closed bar and the necessarily half-empty auditorium; never mind the scaled-back orchestra and abridged score. The new production of Katya Kabanova provided the thirsty opera-goer
There is a reason music writers tend to stick with music writing rather than transferring their manifold talents to the business side of things. Our dirty secret is that, for all our exquisite taste, most of us — with a few exceptions — have no conception of what the rest of the world actually wants
Rejoice: live music is back. Or at least, live music with a live audience, which, as Sir Simon Rattle admitted, addressing the masked and socially distanced crowd immediately before the LSO’s first full-scale public performance for 14 months, is kind of the whole point. Yes, he said, they’d streamed online concerts from the Barbican, but
Reading the opening chapter of Gary Numan’s recent autobiography, (R)evolution, I start to get the odd feeling that I could just as well be reading about my own early life. Like Numan, I grew up near Heathrow and found the aircraft that flew over our house beautiful and magical. My parents were working class and
Grade: B– Advancing age has smoothed the edges of Bellshill’s finest lads, once — back in the early 1990s — arguably Britain’s best band. This is like being embalmed for ever in suffocating pleasantness. You doze off during ‘Warm Embrace’ and wake, perhaps hours later, to the same gentle, winsome, minor-key harmonies chugging by at
Over the decades, Van Morrison’s role within the tower of song has shifted from chief visionary officer to head of complaints. It’s not a promotion. The title track of his new album, Latest Record Project, Volume 1, is a rebuke to those who insist on living in an artist’s past rather than his present. A
When this whole mess is over, there’ll be a shortish MA thesis — or at least a blog post — to be had from analysing classical music’s evolving response to the crisis. Already, looking back, distinct phases are emerging from the viral fog. Phase One: the Banana Bread Apocalypse — that first lockdown, when Jamie
St Vincent — Annie Clark, a 38-year-old singer-guitarist of prodigious gifts — spends a lot of time confounding people. She confounds them with stage shows that are less gig than theatre, ostentatiously choreographed and fabulously provocative (though not in any crude sense). She confounds them with an image that morphs from album to album (for
Grade: C Revisionism has been extraordinarily kind to Tom Jones, ever since he barked his way through Prince’s ‘Kiss’ with the kind of subtlety you might expect from someone who is about to nut you in the mouth. That enormous fruity bellow is one part threat, one part music hall. He was repackaged as someone
Stepping into the Sistine Chapel, the choir loft is probably the last thing you’d notice. ‘Loft’ is, frankly, a stretch for what amounts to a small alcove with a wooden bench, carved out of the chapel’s wall. But if you made your way up there and ran your hand over the stone you’d feel something
The other week someone posted on Twitter a link to a YouTube clip titled ‘Family Lotus and D.J. Cookin’ at the Golden Inn, July 4 1981’. It showed a bunch of long-haired people on a makeshift stage in the New Mexico desert and a handful of people dancing around in the dust to the music,
It has never been easy for women in the music industry. Once upon a time the evidence was largely anecdotal. Now it’s being recorded for posterity, frame by frame. Recent documentaries about Britney Spears and Demi Lovato exposed the trauma inflicted on post-millennial pop stars. Two new portraits of Anna Mae Bullock and Marianne Elliott-Said,
There are worse fates than posthumous obscurity. When Mozart visited Munich in October 1777, he was initially reluctant to visit his friend, the Bohemian composer Josef Myslivecek. Myslivecek was in hospital, undergoing treatment (as he told it) for a facial cancer brought on by a recent coach accident. But this being the 18th century, and
Has any musical moment extended its tendrils in so many unexpected directions as the English folk revival of the mid-1960s? In its beginnings, it was a source of pilgrimage for Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, who pinched his arrangement of ‘Scarborough Fair’ from Martin Carthy way back in the dim and distant past when the
Grade: Z If you wish to experience the full hideousness of Now, of our current age, condensed into one awful hour, then you should invest in this bucket of infected expectorant streaked with blood. It’s all there. The depthless self-absorption and introspection, the me me me. The self-aggrandising, the wallowing in victimhood, the complete lack
