Classical music

I was going to start with a little moan. About the shouty marketing, the digital diarrhoea, the sycophantic drivel, which, like a bad smell, hovered over Simon Rattle’s ten-day coronation. But then came the most amazing Rite of Spring I’ve ever heard and to moan suddenly seemed criminal. No masterpiece is harder to pull off than the Rite. So often it deflates midway and never regains its shape. Rattle made his name with the piece when he was at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, taming the brute, slowing it down, prising open its interior, allowing us to inspect its fangs, look straight down its snappy gob. Here, the beast

Much fuss has been made of the title given to Sir Simon Rattle on arrival at the London Symphony Orchestra. Unlike his LSO predecessors — Valery Gergiev, Colin Davis, Michael Tilson Thomas, Claudio Abbado, André Previn — all of whom were engaged as principal conductor, Rattle has been named music director, a position that bears serious administrative responsibilities. As Rattle put it recently in one of a dozen media interviews: ‘Valery wasn’t interested, nor Claudio. Colin loved them to bits, but he made it very clear that he did not want anything to do with the running or the auditions or the personnel… I will be much more involved with

‘We’re going to live for ever!’ declares Robert Powell as Gustav Mahler at the end of Ken Russell’s 1974 biopic. We’ve just had the big reveal (Russell said it ‘out-Hollywoods Hollywood’) in which Mahler admits to his young wife Alma that she inspired the lyrical theme in the first movement of his Sixth Symphony. It’s a tale for which the only source is Alma herself, but hey, over the course of the movie we’ve already had exploding garden sheds, interpretative dance and Cosima Wagner in fetish gear. Russell cues the music, and few film-makers have understood better how to cut to a composer’s emotional core. As the credits roll, the

The two Proms concerts given on consecutive evenings by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra were well planned: a short opening work, and after the interval a long and demanding symphony. Moreover, the big symphonies were by Bruckner and Mahler, to the latter of whom this orchestra has been devoted almost since its foundation. Willem Mengelberg, the orchestra’s chief for 50 years, was the only conductor, Mahler said, that he could trust with his works, and the orchestra has been headed by a succession of distinguished Mahlerians ever since.Bruckner, meanwhile, entered the orchestra’s repertoire in a major way in the 1950s, and has been there ever since. Daniele Gatti, who became the

This year’s Lucerne Festival is given its identity by having as its theme ‘Identity’. Since the word doesn’t mean anything, that isn’t a lot of help. But does a festival have to have a theme? Surely a glut of fine performances of great, or at least interesting, music is enough? Michael Haefliger, the icy artistic director, clearly doesn’t agree, and offers two accounts of identity, one in the general festival booklet, where the emphasis is on refugees and national identity, the other in the programmes for the individual concerts, where he is more metaphysical, and concludes with the hope that by listening to the chosen music we will ‘rediscover ourselves

They say the first step towards recovery is admitting that you have a problem. So I’m staging an intervention and asking the BBC Proms to admit what they’ve known for some time: they have a big problem when it comes to early music. How to perform it, where to perform it, even who should perform it — these are all questions that, year after year, remain unsatisfactorily, inconsistently or superficially answered, and there’s little in this year’s programming to suggest that 2017 will be any different. Up until now the festival’s conversation about early music has been dominated by the red-herring question of venue. When the readers of Time Out

Sir James MacMillan’s European Requiem, performed at the Proms on Sunday, isn’t about Brexit. The composer had to make this clear in a Radio 3 interview just before the broadcast, because the BBC was just itching to cast the work — a melancholy score, despite its thunderous drumbeats — as a lament for us leaving the EU. That would have been neat, given that the second half of the concert consisted of Beethoven’s Ninth, whose ‘Ode to Joy’ has been clumsily appropriated by Brussels. Incidentally, some Remainers in the audience chattered through the symphony’s first three movements, impatient for their Big Tune. I don’t know if there were any ancient

When you first encounter it, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis can sound like the Ninth Symphony with more singing but no tunes. But the more I listen to it, the more I agree with the composer that it’s his greatest work — or, at least, up there with the last two piano sonatas and his String Quartet Op. 131, my other nominees. Despite its titanic scale, the Missa solemnis inhabits their intimate sound world: it is built from the harmonically ambiguous motifs of Beethoven’s ‘third style’. Nothing in it is as catchy as the ‘Ode to Joy’. On the other hand, nothing in the Ninth reaches the spiritual stratosphere of the Benedictus,

Gerald Barry once licked Beethoven’s carpet. At least, that’s what he told me, and I’m as sure as any interviewer of Gerald Barry can be that he wasn’t pulling my leg. While showing him round a museum, a guide pointed out said floor-covering. Whereupon — Barry being Barry — he was overcome by an urge for tangible, physical contact with a relic that had, after all, once been trodden by the Master. ‘So, once everyone was out the room, I got down and had a quick lick.’ And, if you can compare music to a physical sensation, the closing passages of Barry’s 1988 orchestral work Chevaux-de-Frise feel a bit like

Playing in an orchestra that disintegrates mid-concert is not an experience you forget. One moment everything’s motoring along nicely. Suddenly a harmony doesn’t quite fit, the soloist enters on the wrong beat: it doesn’t matter, because before you can work out what to do next the confusion spreads, the conductor signals frantically and with a pit-of-the-stomach lurch the floor drops out of the music and you’re all sat there facing the audience amid the one sound that no one present has paid to hear: mortified silence. The Aurora Orchestra has worked out a way to monetise that sensation. Well, maybe that’s putting it a bit cynically. But if every orchestral

The concert began with a flourish and a honk. Well, of course it did. Telemann wrote his last Ouverture-Suite in F major for the Landgrave of Darmstadt. The Landgrave loved hunting, and in the 18th century hunting meant horns. And horns mean honks. If you’ve ever played the horn — applied 12 feet of coiled metal tube to your face and tried, through a combination of lip muscles and willpower, to make the damn thing sing — you’ll know that no amount of hoping, praying or practice can prevent the occasional squawk. The two excellent players in Florilegium’s concert at St John’s Smith Square, moreover, were using 18th century-style horns

Coined in 1944, ‘completism’ is a modern term for a modern-day obsession. What began as a phenomenon of possession — whether of comic books, records or stamps — has evolved in the age of Spotify, Netflix and cloud computing. No activity defines current cultural trends better than binge-watching, completism taken to its logical extreme: art turned extreme sport. It’s an attitude that has found a natural home in the concert hall and opera house (what is Wagner’s Ring Cycle, after all, if not the original box set?) where length has long been fetishised and endurance accepted. But just as new media has changed the way we make art, so new