Music and Opera

Grade: B In which the foppish Davy Jones figure from the manufactured band One Direction (Zayn Malik being Peter Tork; One Direction didn’t have a Mike Nesmith) sheds the soft-rock pop-lite that has served him so well and goes with what he fondly believes is challengingly funky EDM, a genre which I do not believe plays to his strengths. So what you get is lyrics as fabulously inane as on ‘Watermelon Sugar’ but very little of the pleasant tunes which accompanied that and his many other hits. There are some interesting rhythmic textures for sure, and a surfeit of old-skool playground synths. There is also a surfeit of repetition, a

Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling, which won the Jury prize at Cannes, explores the lives of four generations of women growing up in the same rural farmhouse in Germany over the course of a century. It’s non-chronological, impressionistic, profoundly art-house and even though I am a fervent fan of linear storytelling – what can I tell you? I just love a beginning, middle and end – this is compelling and mesmerises even when it confounds. I think it’s saying that the past inhabits us all, which isn’t stunningly original, but the film itself is. It’s candles and kerosene lamps one moment, electricity and iPhones the next I did wish it

Whither the protest song in 2026? In January 1970, John Lennon wrote and recorded ‘Instant Karma!’ in a single day and had it in the shops a little over a week later – no mean feat given the mechanics of physical record production at the time. Nowadays, when the practicalities of releasing music are infinitely more streamlined, it has never been easier for artists to react to current events within moments of them occurring. And with the febrile news churn packing a year’s worth of drama into each week, there is certainly no shortage of material. A small man with big ideas and a loud voice, Bono is a veritable

Even if Schoenberg’s song cycle Pierrot Lunaire is never going to feature on anyone’s Desert Island Discs, it stands as a work of rich and complex resonance shot through with all the neurotically introverted obsessions behind expressionism. Through Albert Giraud’s 21 opaque lyrics, scored atonally for a soprano who declaims rather than sings them, accompanied by seven instruments, it presents some sort of parable of the tormented artist adrift in a hostile world. Perhaps one can’t be charmed by the result, yet its power is undeniable: it grips even when it baffles and repels. Perhaps one can’t be charmed, yet its power is undeniable: it grips even when it baffles

I don’t much like Lord of the Flies. It’s nasty, weird in an oblique, psychotic way and wrong. William Golding – a war-damaged, depressive alcoholic – wrote it as an antidote to the uplifting escapism of The Coral Island, a Victorian yarn by R.M. Ballantyne about plucky young British castaways surviving and thriving in the tropics. Golding turned it on its head and revealed, supposedly, the heart of darkness that lurks within us all. Au contraire, Golding’s misanthropic message was bollocks Says who? The lesson of the Christmas truce in the trenches is that ordinary men have to be coerced into killing one another. The lesson of Jena is that