The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
‘All fish in flood and fowl of flight/ Be mirthful now and make melody’ writes the poet William Dunbar in the verses that Sir Charles Hubert Parry set to music as Ode on the Nativity. In David Matthews’s new Ninth Symphony, one particular fowl does exactly that. The symphony’s central movement begins on strings: an
The worst entry for this year’s Euro-vision song contest was that vast cater-wauling aboriginal. I can’t remember her name, only that her performance convinced me still further that Australia might not, technically, be a part of Europe. But then I was a little worried by the winner too. The song ‘Toy’, sung by Israel’s Netta
Apparently it’s called ‘expectation management’. Pollux, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s new work for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, takes its name from Greek myth. But as Salonen explains in his programme note, there’s more: lots more. It’s intended to form a diptych with a second piece called (naturally enough) Castor. It’s also part-inspired by Rilke’s Sonnets to
Grade: B+ One of my favourite songs from the 1990s was about a Chinese adulteress forced to walk around town with a decomposing dead dog on her back. ‘Slow Dog’, from Belly’s debut album Star, was mental and frenetic and possessed the kind of berserk and glorious chorus most bands would kill for. The rest
Salome is my favourite opera by Richard Strauss, the only one where there is no danger, at any point, of his lapsing into good taste, which there is to some degree in all his other operas, even if only momentarily. With Salome, from the opening quiet clarinet slithering upwards, and the luckless young Syrian Narraboth,
The opening of Mark Simpson’s new Cello Concerto is pure Hollywood. A fanfare in the low brass, an upwards rush and suddenly the screen floods with lush orchestral sound — as confident in its onward sweep as Star Wars or ‘Tara’s Theme’. Waiting, poised, in the middle of it all was the soloist Leonard Elschenbroich,
Grade: D– Kylie has a place in my heart for having made the second-best single to feature the chorus ‘na na na na na na na na’. The best was Cozy Powell’s ‘Na Na Na’ (all the better for being capitalised), but Kylie’s magnificently vacant synth pop disco lament ‘Can’t Get You Out of My
Imagine the National inviting RuPaul to play Hamlet. Or Tate giving Beryl Cook a retrospective. The London Sinfonietta offered a similar cocktail of mischief and insanity in devoting the opening concert of its return to the Queen Elizabeth Hall, after a three-year refurbishment, to the nihilistic drag act David Hoyle. It had me grinning from
Glenn Gould used to say that Mozart died too late rather than too early. The remark was intended to get up the nose of Mozart-lovers and it succeeded. What a nerve, coming from a pianist whose own reputation peaked in his early 20s, with his first Goldbergs, and was especially tarnished by his Mozart piano
The slow but certain conquest of all public life by those promulgating the politics of identity has achieved a new victory in the realm of classical music. Cloaked in claims of benevolence and good intent, it arrives as a divisive force, screaming equality but in reality delivering nothing of the sort. Much of our public
The lur is a horn, modelled in bronze after a number of 3,000-year-old instruments discovered at various archaeological sites across Scandinavia. Its unrefined yet distinctive sound — penetrating, direct and rough-edged — seems to rise up through the body rather than enter through the ears, like the stirring of a long-forgotten memory. The instrument, whose
They’re still alive, then. Chuggedy-chug, grawk, screech screech, chuggedy-chug. First mention of demons — line one, song two. Song one is about blowing people to bits with firepower, cos they’re really EVIL. There are spurts of lead guitar that sound like knives slashing at an empty plate and those strange, pompous, strangulated vocals — operatic
A spectre haunted the first weekend of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s Debussy Festival: the spectre of Richard Wagner. Debussy’s relationship with Wagner began with infatuation, and ended (as so often) in open rebellion. The young decadent who declared Parsifal ‘one of the loveliest monuments of sound ever raised to the serene glory of
When Palestrina wrote his Mass settings and motets, or J.S. Bach his cantatas and passions, they could not have imagined the ways in which their music would be heard today. We can now access sacred music in our living rooms, at work and on the commute: an hour-long compilation of the choir of New College,
Grade: B+ Another ex-Long Beach crip replanted in pleasant Orange County via the conduit of very large amounts of record company money and thus now able to draw on his time as a gangsta, while telling us all it was a very naughty thing to have done. The difference between Staples and much of the
Rarely has one irate punter so affected a band’s trajectory. Without the anger of the man who went to see the Moody Blues at the Fiesta Club in Stockton in 1966, the band would never have reinvented themselves, never have transformed into psychedelic pioneers, and next month they would not be travelling to America to
Blue Gadoo is one of those cats whose face looks like it’s been bashed flat with a wok. He lives in New York, apparently, and his bulging eyes goggle out from Gerald Barry’s programme note for his new Organ Concerto. Check him out: the Guardian published the full note a day before the performance, which
My two attempts to see Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites at the Guildhall School were frustrated by the weather. Forced back on to my DVDs and CDs — vinyl, even — I took the opportunity to survey some of the manifestations and investigations of religious feeling in 20th-century French music. I began with Vincent d’Indy’s Fervaal,
Grade: A Here we are in that twilit zone where post-techno and post-ambient meets modern classical, a terrain that has its fair share of tuneless charlatans and chancers. Frahm is not one of those. There are of course the repetitive synthesiser arpeggios familiar to anyone who has had the misfortune to sit in some achingly
The invitation to take a song by Abba or the Beatles and rewrite the lyrics as a sonnet went down a storm and drew a large, clever and funny entry. John Lennon once said, in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine: ‘…that’s been my hang-up, you know— continually trying to be Shakespeare…’. So perhaps it’s
Ageing rockers The Rolling Stones announced their first live shows for five years. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards (both 74), Charlie Watts (76) and Ronnie Wood (70) are not alone rocking on into their eighth decades. Other septuagenarians you can hear live in 2018: — Elton John (70) unveiled a farewell tour. Paul Simon (76) says
I’m unlucky with Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata. Twice in the past year I’ve bolted for the exit as soon the pianist crossed the finishing line. The first performance was phoned in to the Royal Festival Hall by a washed-out Maurizio Pollini. The second was musical chloroform, so dreary that it would be cruel to name the
Grade: A Yay, people with a modicum of wit. They come along so very rarely these days. A decade on and that punky, guitar-driven power-pop funk has long since been expunged. Singer Alex Kapranos expressed a wish for Franz Ferdinand to reinvent themselves — and has turned to the same source inspiration as did their
Grade: B Horrific memory, flooding back, halfway through the track ‘TSLAMP’ (Time Spent Looking at My Phone). It was the nastily burbling bass guitar that did it. I had been wondering what I was listening to and then it dawned — a Level 42 tribute band. Naffer than T’Pau. Whitey does bland, tuneless funk. And
The new production of Bizet’s Carmen at the Royal Opera has received mixed reviews. It shouldn’t have done. They should have been unmitigatedly hostile, indignant, outraged — except that all those reactions would almost certainly have delighted the director, Barrie Kosky. What might please him less is the accusation of tedium, of making what often
Grade: B– Hey, here comes Justin, the ‘President of Pop’ and ‘one of the greatest all-around entertainers in the history of show business’, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Sheesh, shows how far a white man can go by pretending — pretending very, very hard — to be black. Maybe there’s a market in the States
Das Rheingold at the Royal Festival Hall was, all told, a disappointment, but it might not have been had there been one or two more rehearsals, and a replacement of one of the singers. Vladimir Jurowski plans to perform the whole Ring cycle in due course with the LPO, but he needs to remember that
Grade: D– You’re in a minicab, on the way home from some bash that was considerably less pleasing than you had anticipated. The driver has the radio on and this limp, witless, landfill R&B crap is hammering into your sinuses. You want to tell him to turn it off right now but don’t because you
Grade: A- Berlioz’s Les Troyens, one of the greatest operatic masterpieces, manages to be neglected even if it is quite often performed. The vast reputations of the most popular operatic composers seem to grow ever larger with the years, but Berlioz somehow always needs defending. Listening to this latest CD set, ‘live’ from Strasbourg,
