Music and Opera

I’m not a natural lender. I’m a reasonably soft touch when it comes to money, but regarding the important things in life – books, music, pens – I loan with a gently thrumming underscore of anxiety. While I’ve weaned myself off my mother’s habit of writing her name in every book she buys, I still tend to keep an internal inventory of where each one has gone, and when I’d like it back. Add in the fact that I’ve never possessed the zealot’s desire to convert others to my enthusiasms, and I’m forced to concede that I make a poor practitioner of the art of lending. Leonard Cohen was the

Grade: A– No, Lana, I didn’t, thank you – all cleared up. The most extravagantly talented of that lachrymose, self-harming genre, miserycore, returns with an album described by critics as ‘heavy’, as if we might have expected Mungo Jerry or the Venga Boys. The difference between Del Rey and the rest of those dispossessed chicks warbling bleakly in their bedrooms about all manner of woe is that Lana has a degree of self-awareness and, Christ be praised, even humour. Otherwise, why would she start a song with the words: ‘I haven’t done a cartwheel since I was nine.’ Really – you haven’t? Also, she has learned, over the years, how

Recently in these pages, ruminating on the ghastly Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I wrote that music does not conform to any equation. I should have added: except, of course, for the occasions when it does. One tried-and-true formulation is that ‘super-groups’, those bespoke vehicles bringing together artists best known either for working alone or within other bands, tend to add up to considerably less than the sum of their parts. Supergroups are in thrall to the idea of their own existence; the music trails sluggishly behind We could blame Eric Clapton. Indeed, it seems remiss not to. Blind Faith – a fatally untidy union of Clapton (ex-Cream), Steve

Think of pop music as being like the parable of the sower. These days the seed falling on stony ground comes from the young rock bands, while the stuff that’s finding fertile earth is on the edges of R&B where it shades into other styles, especially psychedelia. It works from both ends: the Australian group Tame Impala went from being a workaday psychedelic rock band to being festival headliners by bringing dance music into their sound. Meanwhile within black music, Janelle Monae – perhaps better known as an actor – and Solange Knowles are regarded by critics as something not far short of deities for their Afrofuturist, trippy takes on

The German composer Max Reger, born 150 years ago next week, is mostly remembered today for countless elephantine fugues and one piece of lavatory humour. When he was savaged by the Munich critic Rudolf Louis, he wrote back to him: ‘Sir, I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me.’ The quip was probably borrowed from Voltaire, but since no one can find it in his writings the credit has gone to Reger. Max Reger was probably the most technically accomplished writer of large-scale fugues since Bach But let’s not dwell on the image of

Hector Berlioz dismissed Handel as ‘that tub of pork and beer’ but it wasn’t always like that. Picture a younger, sexier Handel, rocking into Rome aged 22 and challenging Scarlatti to a keyboard duel. The Italian elite couldn’t get enough of Il caro Sassone, ‘the darling Saxon’, and he repaid them with 80-odd short Italian cantatas: little controlled explosions of character, colour and flamboyant melody in which his whole future career as a musical dramatist can be heard in concentrated form. This was an encounter with a genuinely evil work of art For the London Handel Festival, the director Adele Thomas staged four of these pocket-operas. The setting was Stone

Careful what you wish for. There can be no definitive way to stage an opera, and it’s the critic’s duty to keep an open mind. Still, we’ve all occasionally gazed at a white cube that represents an Alpine meadow, or watched a chivalric hero slouch across the stage in tracksuit bottoms, and felt our hearts slump. Then you pitch up at the Royal Opera House’s new production of Dvorak’s Rusalka and it’s as if some mischievous sprite has magicked you straight back to 1960. The directors are also credited as ‘creators’ (back in your box, composer and librettist!) At first, you don’t suspect much. It’s actually rather enchanting: deep forest

Standing at the Sky’s Edge is an ode to a monstrous carbuncle. The atrocity in question is a concrete gulag, Park Hill, built by Sheffield council in the 1960s as a punishment for hard-up locals who couldn’t afford to buy a house. The show is a propaganda effort on behalf of bossy, big-state, high-tax Labour authorities so the smiling residents of the brutalist eyesore keep telling us how much they love their multistorey dungeon. ‘You can see the whole city from up here,’ say the characters, as if no Sheffield resident had ever mounted any of the bluffs or heights that surround the area. The script is honest enough to