Richard Bratby | The Spectator Columnists & Writers

The musical event of the year: Wigmore Hall BBC Radio 3 Special Broadcasts reviewed

Remember when 2020 was going to be Beethoven year? There were going to be cycles and festivals, recordings and reappraisals; and if you weren’t actively promoting old Ludwig Van there was money to be made whinging about overkill. So was Stephen Hough’s decision to end his Wigmore Hall recital last Monday with Schumann’s Fantasie in C — a work conceived at least partly in homage to Beethoven, which opens with a fragmented musical landscape that Schumann at one point called ‘Ruins’ — a conscious reflection of the musical world’s changed circumstances? Or would that be reading too much into a situation in which a once-routine lunchtime concert suddenly feels like the musical event of the year? I don’t think that’s overstating it — at least not if Twitter is any indication.

Richard Bratby

I’m still not wholly convinced by Kirill Petrenko: Berlin Phil’s Digital Concert Hall reviewed

Richard Bratby

I’m still not wholly convinced by Kirill Petrenko: Berlin Phil’s Digital Concert Hall reviewed

At the start of Elgar’s Second Symphony the full orchestra hovers, poised. It pulls back; and then, like a dam breaking, the music surges forward in wave upon wave of golden sound. ‘Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight!’ writes Elgar, quoting Shelley, at the top of the score, and you won’t hear that spirit captured more exuberantly than in a performance from May 2009 by the Berlin Philharmonic under its future music director Kirill Petrenko. The violins gleam, the horns swell and every player is audibly leaning into the music. Under Petrenko, Elgar’s leaping compound rhythms almost seem to dance. The catch, of course — the truth that gives this symphony its universality, and its wrenching emotional power — is that this is pretty much as joyous as it gets.

Richard Bratby

Drunk singers, Ravel on film and prime Viennese operetta: the addictive joys of classical YouTube

Richard Bratby

Drunk singers, Ravel on film and prime Viennese operetta: the addictive joys of classical YouTube

The full addictive potential of classical YouTube needs to be experienced to be understood. And let’s be honest, there are only so many lockdown videos the human spirit can take. Which is why, on a sunny spring afternoon, in the prime of life and health, I find myself watching the late John Cage stroking bits of wire with a feather. The haircuts suggest that we’re in the early 1980s, and a Ron Burgundy type is floating across the screen in a little box. ‘It’s been said that listening to John Cage’s music is like chewing sand,’ he explains, unhelpfully. It seems that we’ve also been watching a live performance by the German artist Joseph Beuys. And that we’re now going over to a firework display at the Pompidou Centre.

Richard Bratby

It costs a lot of money to look this cheap: Metropolitan Opera’s At-Home Gala reviewed

Richard Bratby

It costs a lot of money to look this cheap: Metropolitan Opera’s At-Home Gala reviewed

Desperate times call for desperate measures. With the world’s opera houses currently dark, the New York Metropolitan Opera tackled the crisis the way it knows best — by assembling the most glamorous possible list of vocal megastars and presenting them at astronomical expense. But dollars can’t get around social distancing, and in lockdown even the greatest voice is only as good as the mic on a smartphone. Cue four hours of free-to-view party pieces from 43 of the world’s greatest singers, broadcast live from their homes without orchestra, without editing and without excuses. So the credits rolled with all the bombast familiar from the Met’s cinema relays, and it was over to Peter Mattei, live from his summer house in the Stockholm archipelago, singing Don Giovanni’s serenade with the camera jammed at a wonky angle and what looked like a dog (but might have been a cushion) snoozing on the floor behind him.

Richard Bratby

From Middlemarch to Mickey Mouse: a short history of The Spectator’s books and arts pages

Richard Bratby

From Middlemarch to Mickey Mouse: a short history of The Spectator’s books and arts pages

The old masters: how well they understood. John Betjeman’s architecture column ran for just over three years in the mid-1950s. Yet during that short run he experienced the moment that comes, sooner or later, to every regular writer in The Spectator’s arts pages. ‘It is maddening the way people corner one and make one discuss politics at the moment,’ he wrote on 23 November 1956, clearly as bored of the Suez crisis as the rest of us were, until recently, by Brexit: Because I write in this paper, people assume that I share its Editor’s views about Suez… But I don’t know what the views of this paper about Suez are, because I never read the political stuff in front. I take the Spectator to see whether there are any misprints in this column and for the book reviews and for dear old Strix and the angry letters.

Richard Bratby

The marvel of Mozart’s letters

Richard Bratby

The marvel of Mozart’s letters

It’s 1771, you’re in Milan, and your 14-year-old genius son has just premièred his new opera. How do you reward him? What would be a fun family excursion in an era before multiplexes or theme parks? Leopold Mozart knew just the ticket. ‘I saw four rascals hanged here on the Piazza del Duomo,’ wrote young Wolfgang back to his sister Maria Anna (‘Nannerl’), excitedly. ‘They hang them just as they do in Lyons.’ He was already something of a connoisseur of public executions. The Mozarts had spent four weeks in Lyons in 1766 and as the music historian Stanley Sadie points out, Leopold had clearly taken his son (ten) and daughter (15) along to a hanging ‘for a jolly treat one free afternoon’. Mozart’s letters deliver many such jolts — reminders that, however directly we might feel that Mozart’s music speaks to us, he’s not a man of our time.

Richard Bratby

The joy of Haydn’s string quartets – here are the best recordings

Richard Bratby

The joy of Haydn’s string quartets – here are the best recordings

As Joseph Haydn was getting out of bed on the morning of 10 May 1809, a cannonball landed in his back garden. Napoleon’s armies were closing on Vienna, and Haydn’s suburban home was in the line of fire. His valet recorded that the bedroom door blew open and every window in the house rattled. Shaking violently, the 77-year-old composer’s first thought was for his household, which at that point comprised six servants and a talking parrot who addressed him as ‘Papa’. ‘Children, don’t be afraid, for where Haydn is, nothing can happen to you,’ he shouted. This was nothing particularly new. Over a long life Haydn survived smallpox, saw his house burn down (twice) and narrowly escaped castration at the hands of an overenthusiastic choirmaster.

Richard Bratby

Bleak humour, resourcefulness and wit: Budapest Festival Orchestra’s Quarantine Soirées reviewed

Richard Bratby

Bleak humour, resourcefulness and wit: Budapest Festival Orchestra’s Quarantine Soirées reviewed

There’s a certain merit in bluntness. ‘Quarantine Soirées’ was what the Budapest Festival Orchestra called its response to the crisis, and if the name conveyed a certain bleak Magyar humour, the resourcefulness couldn’t be faulted. Elsewhere, orchestras were still talking optimistically about broadcasting concerts from empty halls, and (even more optimistically) about persuading online viewers to pay for them. Realising that any activity that brings 90 musicians into close proximity was probably running out of road, the BFO’s music director Ivan Fischer announced that ‘this is not the time for orchestral music’ and launched a programme of chamber recitals by the orchestra’s players, livestreamed from their rehearsal hall.

Richard Bratby

Bigamists, lunatics and adventurers: the raucous world of 19th century British music

Richard Bratby

Bigamists, lunatics and adventurers: the raucous world of 19th century British music

For a patriotic German in the decades before Bismarck, Britain’s power was an object of envy. But there was one thing, at least, that you could always hold over the Anglo-Saxons on their foggy little island. On 1 January 1837, Robert Schumann sat down in Leipzig to hear a new piano concerto by the 20-year-old William Sterndale Bennett. ‘An English composer; no composer,’ commented his neighbour, smugly, before the music started. Few 19th-century German music-lovers failed to point out that the land of Shakespeare had somehow failed to produce a single really significant composer since the late 17th century. We know how that story ended; and if you want to explore the flowering of the British musical renaissance, it’s never been easier.

Richard Bratby

If your instinct is to undermine Beethoven, you’re directing the wrong opera: Fidelio reviewed

Richard Bratby

If your instinct is to undermine Beethoven, you’re directing the wrong opera: Fidelio reviewed

‘People may say I can’t sing,’ said the soprano Florence Foster Jenkins, ‘but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.’ There were groans of dismay as an official walked out before the start of the Royal Opera’s new Fidelio: Jonas Kaufmann was not feeling on top form, but he was going to perform the role of Florestan regardless, and begged our indulgence. The mind plays tricks and after an announcement like that it’s hard to be entirely sure whether you’re hearing a skilfully proportioned interpretation or a singer dialling it down. But let the record show that Kaufmann did sing, and if you’ve booked for this production on the strength of that magic name alone, you can breathe easy. And indisposed or not, there’s no mistaking that endless, unfurling stream of black-and-gold tenor tone.

Richard Bratby

Eurotrash Verdi: ENO’s Luisa Miller reviewed

Richard Bratby

Eurotrash Verdi: ENO’s Luisa Miller reviewed

Verdi’s Luisa Miller is set in the Tyrol in the early 17th century, and for some opera directors that’s a problem. After all, they’re busy people. They probably never had time to read Wolf Hall, or to speak to any of the 100 million people worldwide who watched Game of Thrones. It’s self-evident to them that modern audiences will be unable to empathise with anything involving swords, castles or feudal hierarchies. Which is why they work hard to imagine new contexts that can make these hopelessly dated dramas address contemporary life as we live it, right here, right now. Counts, village maidens and men in ruffs? Baffling. But a clown strapped to a gyrating crucifix being stabbed with arrows by a group of dancers in flesh-coloured swimming caps and black fetish wear? Now that’s relatable.

Richard Bratby

Weill’s Broadway opera is made for telly: Opera North’s Street Scene reviewed

Richard Bratby

Weill’s Broadway opera is made for telly: Opera North’s Street Scene reviewed

It’s a sweltering night in Manhattan, circa 1947, and on the doorstep of a brownstone tenement three women are waiting for their menfolk to return. There’s plenty to gossip about. The Hildebrands upstairs are being evicted tomorrow, and the Buchanans are expecting a baby. And what’s the deal with Mrs Maurrant and Steve the milkman? Old Mr Kaplan reads the newspaper and denounces the bourgeoisie. A kid cadges a dime and big, kind Lippo Fiorentino arrives home from work with ice creams for everyone. At which point it becomes fairly safe to conclude that the America of Kurt Weill’s Street Scene is not the America of his Mahagonny. Forget the acid harmonies and hard-left caricatures of his Berlin collaborations with Bertolt Brecht.

Richard Bratby

Are we going to have to start taking Calixto Bieito seriously? ENO’s Carmen reviewed

Richard Bratby

Are we going to have to start taking Calixto Bieito seriously? ENO’s Carmen reviewed

Calixto Bieito’s Carmen: three words to make an opera critic’s heart leap. Until quite recently, Bieito was the operatic provocateur of the century — the director who opened Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera with a row of men defecating on stage, and who presented Mozart with a side order of torture porn. Veterans of his Carmen told of fellatio and gratuitous nudity; it all sounded very promising. Add the malicious pleasure of seeing what unrevivable horrorshow ENO had lumbered itself with now — what steaming paella of body fluids it was about to dish up to an audience who’d paid for an evening of good tunes and sultry senoritas — and the review practically writes itself. In retrospect, the fact that this show has been in ENO’s repertoire since 2012 should have been a red flag.

Richard Bratby

Inspired programming and a proper celebration: Barbican’s Beethoven Weekender reviewed

Richard Bratby

Inspired programming and a proper celebration: Barbican’s Beethoven Weekender reviewed

Beethoven wears a feather boa and pink shades. He wrangles an electric guitar. A red lightning flash streaks across that familiar, scowling face. ‘Genius before Elton. Radical before Prince. Iconic before Bowie’ proclaimed the posters for the Barbican’s Beethoven Weekender, and apparently there’ve been complaints about them, which probably means that they’ve got the tone about right. Two hundred and fifty years after his birth, Beethoven still has a way of driving all the right people round the bend. US campus musicologists have called for his music to be suppressed (you’d think that champions of inclusion would support a year-long celebration of a disabled composer, but it seems not. Wrong chromosomes). Last month, EU groupies tried to co-opt him to the Remain cause and ended up putting the permatanned Dutch cheesemonger André Rieu at number one, in a slightly unfortunate self-own.

Richard Bratby

The joy of Radio 3’s Building a Library

Richard Bratby

The joy of Radio 3’s Building a Library

So, you’ve fallen in love with a piece of classical music and you want to buy a recording. The problems begin when you hit Amazon. Any reasonably established classic will have been recorded numerous times: do you go for the performer you’ve already heard of? The crackly vintage recording with the gushing five-star reviews? Or the budget-priced unknown with the vaguely Slavic name; after all, it’s the same music. Isn’t it? Radio 3’s Building a Library sorts it out so you don’t have to. Tucked away within Record Review each Saturday morning, the format is simple: every week, the BBC details a critic to listen to as many recordings of a given work as is humanly possible. Then they present their findings, playing one recording off against another before settling on a single recommendation.

Richard Bratby

The audience were in tears: Christian Gerhaher/Gerold Huber at the Wigmore Hall reviewed

Richard Bratby

The audience were in tears: Christian Gerhaher/Gerold Huber at the Wigmore Hall reviewed

‘Popular’ classical music is a relative term. Show me someone who thinks Beethoven is surefire box office, and I’ll show you someone who’s never tried to sell tickets for the Op. 9 string trios. Even Mahler, the blockbuster concert phenomenon of the past four decades, has his limits. Audiences love him, sure. But in 2011, when several orchestras performed complete Mahler cycles, the limits of that love became embarrassingly clear. The Second and Eighth symphonies — roof-raising choral spectaculars — promptly sold out. The gentle Fourth and the knotty, reconstructed Tenth: not so much. As for his songs, forget it. Well, that’s lieder for you. For most Anglophone music lovers, the entry barriers to the world of German song — a near-native understanding of Schiller, Goethe and Heine, just for starters — can feel impossibly high.

Richard Bratby

Warmth, energy and gripping momentum: Stephen Hough’s Wigmore Hall residency reviewed

Richard Bratby

Warmth, energy and gripping momentum: Stephen Hough’s Wigmore Hall residency reviewed

In the summer of 1878 Johannes Brahms finally succeeded in growing a beard. It was his third attempt. ‘Prepare your wife for the grisly spectacle, for something so long suppressed cannot be beautiful,’ he wrote to a friend, and by all accounts he wasn’t wrong. Clara Schumann pleaded with him to shave it off. She’d have remembered Brahms as the golden-haired 20-year-old who had arrived on her doorstep in September 1853, glowing with genius; in the words of her husband Robert, ‘a young blood at whose cradle graces and heroes stood guard’. For modern listeners, though, the beard has long since conquered — as if, like one of Philip Pullman’s daemons, it somehow embodies Brahms in his gruff and hairy definitive form.

Richard Bratby

Beer, sweat and jockstraps: the real history of the CBSO

Richard Bratby

Beer, sweat and jockstraps: the real history of the CBSO

In childhood, the theme tune to The Box of Delights was the sound of Christmas. The melody was ‘The First Nowell’ but that wasn’t what cast the spell. It was the way the harp glinted and pealed, and the eerie wisp of the ‘Coventry Carol’ that drifted through on muted violins: a masterclass in orchestration for a BBC teatime audience. After inquiries at Circle Records in Liverpool (this was pre-Amazon), my father established its identity: the Carol Symphony, by a composer with the pleasingly Edwardian name of Victor Hely-Hutchinson. And that was that, for me anyway, until three decades later, rifling through the archive of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, I noticed the initials ‘VHH’ on files from the 1940s.

Richard Bratby

Don’t tell me model railways aren’t art. My little engine is a thing of spirit and beauty

Richard Bratby

Don’t tell me model railways aren’t art. My little engine is a thing of spirit and beauty

It’s a summer day at Llangenydd station, and the afternoon train is already late, not that anyone seems to mind. A smartly dressed man has leaned his bicycle against the station’s water tower, and his terrier jumps up as he unwraps his sandwich. A commercial traveller, perhaps, or a professor from Liverpool University on a cycling tour of Snowdonia. Even though we’ve never been here before, we can guess where we are. The colour of the stone, the yellow gorse on the embankments, and the distant glimpse of the sea all tell us that we’re in the top left-hand corner of Wales. The weatherbeaten condition of the steam locomotive that wheezes into view suggests that we’re in the early 1960s: just a few years before Dr Beeching will sweep this whole scene into history.

Richard Bratby

Sadistic and repellent and thrilling: Mascagni’s Iris reviewed

Richard Bratby

Sadistic and repellent and thrilling: Mascagni’s Iris reviewed

If you’ve ever felt that poor Madama Butterfly had a bit of a raw deal, then you really, really don’t want to know what happens in Mascagni’s Iris. Take that as a spoiler alert: our Japanese heroine is so young that as the opera opens, she’s playing with a doll. She’s abducted, installed in a brothel and offered up for the delectation of a noble client, whose advances she is too innocent to comprehend. Disowned by her blind father, by the beginning of Act Three she’s literally lying in a sewer listening to disembodied voices telling her that nothing could have prevented this outcome. Obviously, it sounds exquisite. You don’t have to be a social justice warrior to find Iris a bit much. Mascagni and his librettist Illica (who wrote Butterfly six years later) call their male leads Osaka and Kyoto — that’s about the level of their engagement with Japanese culture.

Richard Bratby

Ravishing and poignant: ENO’s Orphée reviewed

Richard Bratby

Ravishing and poignant: ENO’s Orphée reviewed

Billy Wilder, asked for his opinion of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version of his movie Sunset Boulevard, famously replied: ‘Those boys hit on a great idea. They didn’t change a thing.’ I don’t think you could say exactly that about Netia Jones’s new staging of Philip Glass’s Orphée, a piece that takes the script of Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film and turns it into — well, into an opera by Philip Glass. Cocteau’s shimmering cinematic imagery (think Man Ray come to life) defies physical realisation, so Jones and her designers Lizzie Clachan (sets) and Lucy Carter (lighting) have found poetic, often blindingly beautiful theatrical equivalents. But that apart, Jones takes Wilder’s advice and goes, by and large, with Cocteau and Glass’s haunting, strangely compulsive flow.

Richard Bratby

Meet the unrivalled Sun King of early music, William Christie

Richard Bratby

Meet the unrivalled Sun King of early music, William Christie

Richard Bratby

Why are Haydn’s operas so lousy? La fedelta premiata reviewed

Richard Bratby

Why are Haydn’s operas so lousy? La fedelta premiata reviewed

There’s a book about musicals that every opera lover should read. Not Since Carrie by Ken Mandelbaum is a history of musical theatre’s greatest flops: a comprehensive study of the thousand ways in which a collaborative artform can crash and burn. It’s unbelievable stuff. The Broadway cast of 1961’s Kwamina participated in a voodoo ritual to neutralise the show’s critics (English National Opera is rumoured to be planning something similar). Adverts for Jule Styne’s Subways Are for Sleeping were banned from New York public transport after vagrants took them as an invitation to spend the night on board. And the prize exhibit: the RSC’s Carrie, whose star Barbara Cook was nearly decapitated on opening night, but whose director, Terry Hands, could not be fired because… well, one simply does not fire the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Richard Bratby

The joy of Malcolm Arnold’s optimistic, hummable tunes

Richard Bratby

The joy of Malcolm Arnold’s optimistic, hummable tunes

Never meet your heroes, they say. But if you grew up with classical music in the 1980s, there was fat chance of that. Stravinsky, Britten, Shostakovich, Walton: you’d just missed them. Which is why, in 2001, and finding myself duty-managing an 80th birthday concert for Sir Malcolm Arnold, I inched past his minders and delivered a few trite, polite but entirely sincere words of gratitude and admiration. No response: Sir Malcolm stared blankly ahead. Then he gripped my hand, and started shaking. And kept shaking, faster and faster, his grip tightening like a vice. Raising his head slightly, and pumping my hand with increasing force, he growled: ‘I’m not letting go until you call me Sir.’ In truth, it was reasonably widely known by then that Arnold was no longer ‘all there’.

Richard Bratby

More misogynistic than the original: ENO’s Orpheus in the Underworld reviewed

Richard Bratby

More misogynistic than the original: ENO’s Orpheus in the Underworld reviewed

It’s Act Three of Emma Rice’s new production of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, and Eurydice (Mary Bevan) is trapped in the backroom of a Soho peep show. But that doesn’t really matter because Jupiter (Willard White), a cigar-toking love walrus in a silk bathrobe, has transformed himself into a fly and is about to ravish her, once he’s worked out the practicalities of doing so while three millimetres long. Eurydice’s more than game. ‘Zzzz, zzz,’ she sings, draping herself lasciviously over the mattress. ‘Zzzz, zzz,’ buzzes Jupiter, wings popping erect. Rice’s puppeteer darts about with a toy fly on a string, dressed in a black catsuit and (the killer detail) a beatnik beret. The audience cracked up; not a nervous titter, but the real, uncontrolled thing, with whoops and cheers.

Richard Bratby

Simon Rattle’s Messiaen is improving with age

Richard Bratby

Simon Rattle’s Messiaen is improving with age

Two flutes, a clarinet and a bassoon breathe a chord on the edge of silence. As they fade, the sound quietly intensifies, morphing into the metallic buzz of cor anglais and muted horn. The third of Arnold Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces of 1909 doesn’t have a conventional melody, and there’s even less in the way of rhythmic or harmonic activity. It’s entirely about those minutely graded shifts in timbre. And having rendered this idea with such poetry, Schoenberg, being Schoenberg, duly slapped it with a label as clunky as his music was subtle: klangfarbenmelodie, literally, ‘sound-colour melody’. Apologies: it’s too easy to poke fun at Schoenberg. God knows, writing persuasively about music is impossible without metaphor, and the idea that sounds can equate to colours was particularly apposite in Schoenberg’s fin-de-siècle prime — an era when composers used sonorities like artists covering a canvas, with the symphony orchestra as the grandest of paintboxes.

Richard Bratby

Needed a shot of Stolichnaya: The Tchaikovsky Project reviewed

Richard Bratby

Needed a shot of Stolichnaya: The Tchaikovsky Project reviewed

Grade: B+ I’m not sure about ‘Projects’. Aren’t those what ageing rockers produce, in a haze of sedatives, when their ego finally outgrows their talent? In classical music, there’s something unseemly about the idea of Maestro X condescending to bestow their attention upon music that is — or should be — bigger than they’ll ever be. Still, the conductor here is the Russian-born Semyon Bychkov, unambiguously one of the good guys, who, after decades spent paying his dues, has recently hit the sweet spot where every note speaks, every gesture ignites, and — crucially — critics actually notice. This Tchaikovsky box celebrates his relationship with the Czech Philharmonic, an orchestra which, so the thinking goes, combines Slav instincts with western polish, just like Tchaikovsky himself.

Richard Bratby

Why this première felt important: James MacMillan’s Fifth Symphony reviewed

Richard Bratby

Why this première felt important: James MacMillan’s Fifth Symphony reviewed

All symphonies were sacred symphonies, once. Haydn began each day’s composition with a prayer, and ended every score with the words ‘Laus Deo’. ‘These thoughts cheered me up,’ he told his biographer Albert Dies. Haydn, like Mozart, was a lifelong Catholic, and the Swiss theologian Hans Küng has suggested that the daring, exuberance and glorious wholeness that characterises even Mozart’s secular music comes from a specifically Catholic understanding of the universe: of salvation perceived not as an object of struggle, but as an unshakable, all-embracing certainty. Sir James MacMillan’s Fifth Symphony concerns itself with the Holy Spirit, but he struggled to find an English phrase that did the job, so its title is Le grand inconnu.

Richard Bratby

Golden threads

Richard Bratby

Golden threads

When it comes to the opening of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, Mark Twain probably put it as well as anyone: ‘Out of darkness and distance and mystery soft rich notes rose upon the stillness, and from his grave the dead magician began to weave his spells about his disciples and steep their souls in his enchantments.’ As at Bayreuth, so in Dalston. At the start of Julia Burbach’s production for Grimeborn, a man stumbles into a back alley and, rummaging through discarded boxes, finds a pair of headphones. And there it is: that deep, eternal E flat. Don’t some people say they can hear an all-pervading global hum? Wagner’s world is turning, and for good or for evil the old sorcerer is weaving his spell again. Staging any part of the Ring cycle in the handkerchief-sized Arcola Theatre might sound like a stretch, but Wagner handles the hard bit, and even in Jonathan Dove’s reduced 18-piece orchestration (conducted with quiet command by Peter Selwyn), he can move universes with the shift of a harmony.