The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Yes, I’m sorry, the Stones at Glastonbury really were that good and if you weren’t there I’m afraid you seriously need to consider killing yourself. You missed a piece of rock’n’roll history, one of the gigs that will likely be ranked henceforward among the greatest EVER. So again, sorry if you weren’t there to enjoy
One of the many cultural initiatives to have come out of France in the past 50 years — and therefore by definition to have been viewed with suspicion by the British establishment — is the Fête de la Musique. One need look no further than Margaret Thatcher and Unesco to get the flavour of what
I suppose this will seem churlish, but I’d just like to add my support to the grime rapper Wiley who, upon arriving at the Glastonbury festival, tweeted to Michael Eavis: ‘Fuck you and your farm.’ I’m not sure what motivated this annoyance but credit where it’s due, it’s roughly what I’ve felt about this bloated
Field reports The Glastonbury Festival is once again being held at Michael Eavis’s dairy farm at Pilton, just outside the Somerset town. The venues of some other famous festivals: — Monterey: the festival most associated with the 1967 ‘Summer of Love’ was held at the Monterey County Fairgrounds, previously used for jazz festivals. — Woodstock:
Robert Schumann met a wretched end. He died in a lunatic asylum where he thought the nurses were feeding him human faeces. Meanwhile he drove his fellow residents mad by sitting at the piano and bashing out nonsense-music until he had to be dragged away — a grotesque indignity for the creator of the most
I am suffering, as we all do from time to time, from a shortage of decent new tunes. Of course, ‘suffering’ may be a slight exaggeration here. Very little physical pain has been involved. But research has shown that music obsessives need a constant upgrade of their personal tunebanks in order to perform at full
Christopher Purves began his musical career playing doo-wop and rock and roll with the band Harvey and the Wallbangers . These days however, the stages of Glyndebourne and La Scala are his new stomping ground. In this week’s magazine, Julian Flanagan chats to the baritone about his transition from pop to opera, the pivotal events of
The current love affair that the Germans seem to be having with all things British has deep roots. It was Schlegel who first claimed Shakespeare for the German-speaking world when he said that the bard was ‘ganz unser’ (entirely ours). Goethe was equally obsessed. There are now more productions of Shakespeare’s plays in Germany every
Last weekend my iPad sucked me deeper into Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony than I thought possible. Deutsche Grammophon and Touch Press have released an app devoted to the work that rendered me slack-jawed with wonder, like a Victorian on his first visit to a cinema. The app gives you four complete performances of the Ninth: by
Last night’s Eurovision was, as always, a collision of music, culture and politics. As always, the official British entry was dire – but, as always, the invisible hand of Britain’s world-class musicians lay behind many acts that did well. So it was with Denmark’s winner, Emmelie de Forest, whose song Only Teardrops won by quite
Every new product, whatever it is, needs a bit of ‘buzz’, and indeed vast numbers of people around the world make a decent living trying to generate that ‘buzz’, while the rest of us spend much of our time trying to ignore it. Last week, though, much chatter was to be had in music-loving circles
Being an English pianist must be a lonely calling at times. There is no native tradition like the ones that, say, German or Russian musicians are heir to, so many superb pianists have been unjustly overlooked. It used to be said of John Ogdon that, had he been born Ogdonski, in Minsk rather than Mansfield,
With the publication of this year’s Proms brochure it is clear that what was already large has just become larger; and what was already a smooth production has just got smoother. Whether this is sustainable growth, or even desirable growth, are questions for the future; but I think I’ve discerned one of the main reasons
When we describe music as ‘sublime’, what do we mean? For the Romans, sublimis signified greatness beyond measure. In the 18th century, Englishmen looked to The Spectator for clarification. Joseph Addison, in his Essay No. 339 of 1712, suggests that the sublime often achieves greatness without stirring up ‘pathetick’ human passions. The example he gives
When you can do anything you like, what do you do? In Bryan Ferry’s case, the answer seems to be ‘make a 1920s instrumental jazz record out of some of my old songs’. I have to admit that the mere idea of The Jazz Age (BMG), which is credited to The Bryan Ferry Orchestra, appealed
‘The overpowering accents of the music that accompanies Siegfried’s funeral cortège no longer tell of the woodland boy who set out to learn the meaning of fear; they speak to our emotions of what is really passing behind the lowering veils of mist: it is the sun-hero himself who lies upon the bier, slain by
To hear Christian Thielemann conduct the Dresden Staatskapelle in Wagner’s ‘stage consecration play’, in Salzburg at Easter, proved a musical experience that could only deepen anybody’s love of this extraordinary opera. To see it was another matter, as it often is. But let us first praise the musicians who, guided by their conductor, gave it
What sort of room do you prefer to hear classical concerts in? We have all got used to industrial-strength symphony halls and opera houses, capable of holding 3,000 people, with dry acoustics and omni-look interiors. As with art galleries around the world, once inside you could be anywhere: there is little to tell you which
I’ve just been reunited with a man whose pungent and patronising views on great composers have haunted me for more than 30 years. His name is Gervase Hughes, and I’ve discovered from Wikipedia that he was an upmarket travel agent who died in 1984. I had no idea, because I knew him only through his
I haven’t heard the David Bowie album yet, but the Amazon order is in and Postie has been alerted as to the importance of the delivery. How often these days do any of us feel so excited about an imminent release? The ten-year gap between Bowie albums might have something to do with it, but
Musicians have always had an uncertain social status in England, the traditional reactions varying from amused condescension to mild repulsion. The former was the old class-based judgment on men who had chosen to take up a profession which at best was associated with society women and at worst seemed menial; the latter directed towards brass
Johnny Marr’s at it again. ‘David Cameron is not allowed to like my music,’ he fumes. He revives his disgust for Cameron’s love of The Smiths at least once every three months. God knows why he bothers. A bid to get his once famous name back in the papers? Or perhaps he likes to madden Tories? Ever since Cameron
Since the birth of the peer-to-peer file-sharing service Napster in the late 1990s, the record industry has been the unwilling poster child for entire businesses being overthrown by the march of technology. The major labels, once all-powerful, now stand Ozymandias-like, looking out over their barren empires; an ailing HMV, long ago diagnosed as terminal, is
It’s all been happening in the pop world since I was last here. David Bowie released a new song, arguably his best in several decades. Wilko Johnson announced that he had terminal cancer, and a lot of men in their fifties wept for their own lost youth. HMV went belly up, and I ripped my
The question of who is going to buy EMI Classics has arisen once again in the past few days with the collapse of HMV. This followed on from the collapse of Comet, Jessops and Blockbuster, the film rental chain — all indicative of a fundamental shift in our purchasing habits. A spokesman for HMV, while
You would think that asking for and receiving the names of the judges of a set of BBC awards would be a straightforward matter. The corporation’s own awards guidelines, available on its website, demand transparency. So it was surprising that when I asked who chose the winners of the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, thinking
All my life I’ve wanted to be able to write confidently about orchestral performances and I think I may have cracked it. So forgive me while I show off for a paragraph. In the last movement of Bruckner’s Seventh, Mariss Jansons and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra capture the jauntiness of the opening theme; there’s
André Léon Marie Nicolas Rieu is a Dutch violinist, conductor and composer best known for creating the Johann Strauss Orchestra. So says Wikipedia. But I know better. André Rieu is a cunning hypnotist who has lulled my mother into a zombified trance from which I cannot waken her. His televised open-air concerts, which now take
I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling a bit sorry for Mike Harding. The long-serving host of BBC Radio 2’s ‘folk, roots and acoustic’ show was given the heave-ho last month, and the far-from-underemployed Mark Radcliffe took his place last week. One might ask what Harding had done wrong, and indeed Harding has been asking