Culture

In middle age Alfred Brendel looked disconcertingly like Eric Morecambe – but, unlike the comedian in his legendary encounter with André Previn, he played all the right notes in the right order. OK, so perhaps I’m selling the maestro a bit short: I do think Brendel, who died on 17 June at the age of 94, was a peerless interpreter of the Austro-German repertoire, and for a time in the 1970s had a better claim than any other pianist to ‘own’ the Beethoven and late Schubert piano sonatas. But some of the media tributes have been embarrassingly uncritical, implying that Brendel was universally loved. He wasn’t, and he didn’t want to be.

These days the heart sinks when Deutsche Grammophon announces its new releases. I still shudder at the memory of Lang Lang’s 2024 French album, in which he drooled over Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte; when I reviewed it I suggested that if the poor girl wasn’t dead when he started, then she certainly was by the time he’d finished. Now she’s been killed again, this time by the guitarist Robin Scherpen, whose Ravel Reimagined offers us ‘a peaceful and serene soundscape’. Then there’s Rêverie from Nemo Filou, a trio whose cocktail-lounge noodling allows ‘the listener to drift off into bliss’, and Sleep Circle, a ‘re-recorded version of the 2012 project Sleep’ by DG’s in-house snoozemeister Max Richter.

It’s funny what you see at orchestral concerts. See, that is, not just hear. If you weren’t in the hall during Poulenc’s Stabat Mater would you even realise that the tuba uses a mute in the final chord? Visually, it’s hard to miss – the thing’s huge, whether standing on the floor or being heaved into the instrument’s bell. The sound? A muffled, matte effect, quite unlike the usual nasal buzz of muted brass. But how droll of Poulenc, and how utterly in keeping with the raffish, trash-fabulous aesthetic of Gallic brass writing: a world where no symphony is complete without a pair of honking cornets à pistons. And how perfect, too, for this Stabat Mater, a fervent choral work that sounds nonetheless as if it’s about to break into giggles.

‘When you’re not offensive in life, you obtain absolutely nothing,’ declares a twinkly-eyed Pierre Boulez in one of the archive films that the Barbican were screening to celebrate the composer’s centenary. What a joy to be reminded of the young Boulez – the unashamed elitist, the unbeatable snob. Not even allies such as Schoenberg (too trad) and Messiaen (‘vulgar’) were safe from his tongue. To Boulez, pop music wasn’t good or bad; it didn’t exist. Ditto his own life. ‘I will be the first composer without a biography’, he proclaimed. Forget that Boulez was entangled in a love triangle with Camus’s mistress and for most of his time on earth screwing his valet, Hans… The music was everything.

It’s Arvo Part’s 90th birthday year, which is good news if you like your minimalism glum, low and very, very slow. Lots of people seem to. The London Philharmonic’s concert on Saturday night was a reminder of an earlier, less ingratiating Part: the dissident composer in Soviet-controlled Estonia. Hannu Lintu revived Part’s First Symphony of 1963, and there’s nothing remotely minimal about its opening. There’s a swagger of brass, machine rhythms and an onslaught of string chords in which the dissonances don’t feel aggressive so much as mischievous. This is a young composer taking a manic glee in piling on the wrong notes just because he can.

Puccini’s Turandot is back at the Royal Opera in the 40-year old production by Andrei Serban and… well, guilty pleasure is an unfashionable notion these days, but I still feel a batsqueak of shame at enjoying it so much. It’s not the chinoiserie – anyone who believes that an opera based on an 18th-century Italian pantomime should be taken literally is probably beyond help. No, it’s a Spectator headline from years back that still nags. ‘Turandot is a disgusting opera that is beyond redemption’ was the gist of a review of this same staging by the late Michael Tanner, and if it was anyone else you’d put it down to snobbery and move on. But you can’t do that with Tanner, a thinker of piercing intelligence who spent decades interrogating how opera works and why it matters.

Last week, Barbara Hannigan conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in Haydn, Roussel, Ravel and Britten, though to be honest she had me at Haydn. It’s still relatively unusual to encounter him in a symphonic concert, and more than one promoter has told me that Haydn is ‘box office poison’, which is a shocking description of such life-enhancing music. Perhaps it’s down to sonic overkill. Bingeing on Shostakovich and Mahler has left our emotional reflexes distended and coarsened, and now we feel short-changed if every inch of the concert platform isn’t crammed with extra brass and percussion.

The photograph on the cover of Jessica Duchen’s magnificent new biography of Dame Myra Hess shows a statuesque lady sitting at the keyboard, hair swept back into the neatest of buns. Add a pair of half-moon spectacles and she could be Dr Evadne Hinge, accompanist to Dame Hilda Bracket. This isn’t to imply that Dame Myra looked like a man in drag, but then neither did the ‘Dear Ladies’ played by George Logan and Patrick Fyffe, some of whose fans thought the singing spinsters actually were women. In their 1980s heyday Hinge and Bracket were national treasures – and so, on a far grander scale, was Dame Myra, who lifted Londoners’ spirits with her National Gallery concerts during the second world war.

Stephen Hough’s new piano concerto is called The World of Yesterday but its second ever performance offered a dispiriting glimpse into the world of tomorrow. A couple of minutes into the finale Hough stopped playing and the orchestra fell silent. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he explained. ‘My iPad is going crazy.’ A murmur of sympathy, mingled with laughter; then Hough signalled to the conductor Mark Wigglesworth and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and they carried on, this time without mishap. But we’d seen it happen, and until last week I’d have told you it was inconceivable. This wasn’t some rash experiment: professional musicians have been using electronic scores for well over a decade, generally without problems.

My Piano Concerto, The World of Yesterday, began with an email during one of the darker days of the pandemic: would I like to write a score for a movie about a concert pianist writing a piano concerto. As I looked at my concert diary, blank but for Zoom calls, it seemed like a wonderful way to keep me busy. I’d never wanted to write a piano concerto (how to begin?

Three projects shedding light on the sacred music of J.S. Bach are nearing completion. The first consists of an epic 25-year project to record all the composer’s vocal works – passions, masses, motets and more than 200-odd cantatas – in electrifying performances supplemented by lectures and workshops. At the helm is a Swiss choral conductor renowned for his improvisatory skills – and surely the only baroque specialist to have played Sidney Bechet on a chamber organ. The second project is a guide to Bach’s church cantatas tailored at ‘cultural Christians’; that is, music lovers intrigued but intimidated by their Lutheran theology, unsure how to approach this treasure trove of, at a conservative estimate, more than 100 masterpieces of western civilisation.

The overture to The Flying Dutchman opens at gale force. There’s nothing like it; Mendelssohn and Berlioz both painted orchestral seascapes but no one before Wagner had flung open the sluices and let the ocean roar into the opera house with quite such elemental power. Garry Walker and the orchestra of Opera North dived into it headfirst, while images of waves were projected on the curtain. If you believe that opera audiences can’t handle an overture without visual distraction (and most opera directors do appear to think this) it’s as good a solution as any. A strong start for a new production. Then the curtain rose and we were in the Home Office.

They do things their own way in Liverpool; they always have. In 1997 the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra launched a contemporary music group called Ensemble 10:10 (the name came from the post-concert time-slot of their early performances). For a decade now, they’ve also administered the Rushworth Prize, an annual competition for young composers based in the north-west. And while classical fads and crises have come and gone, the RLPO has held its friends close and tended its garden. The result? The kind of artistic self-assurance that lets you put your chief conductor in charge of a première by a novice composer, and then call in a Barenboim to guarantee a full house.

It’s a right mess, the classical piano trio; the unintended consequence of one of musical history’s more frustrating twists. When the trio first evolved, in the age of Haydn, the piano (or at any rate, its frail domestic forebear) was the junior partner, and the two string instruments, violin and cello, were added to make the silly thing audible. Then the piano started to evolve, while its partners – give or take the odd tweak – really didn’t, much. The end result, by the second half of the 19th century, completely reversed the original balance of power, leaving the two string instruments thrashing for dear life against the onslaught of that glossy, black, all-devouring monster, the modern concert grand.

Sir Antonio Pappano began 2024 as music director of the Royal Opera and ended as chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. Around the middle of the year, there was a sort of retrospective; a stock-taking, if you like, as he made the transition to this third act of his career. Warner Classics released a box set of Pappano’s recordings with the Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome, where he held the top job from 2005 to 2023. And Pappano published a memoir, My Life in Music – a masterclass in diplomacy. No beans were spilled, and they were never likely to be. You don’t survive 22 years in an international opera house without learning discretion; not, that is, if you intend to remain sane.

Why, my sharp-minded colleague Tom Utley once asked after a Telegraph Christmas Carol service, should anyone think God would abhor the Virgin’s womb? He was talking about the line in ‘O come, all ye faithful’ that goes: ‘Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb.’ Wasn’t it a bit weird? At last I found the answer in a book, Redeemer in the Womb, by the theologian John Saward, which brilliantly explores the unusual subject of what writers in the early Church thought about the months spent by Jesus in the Virgin Mary’s womb. A pagan presumption in the ancient world was that women’s insides were nasty and shameful.

Ivor Cutler called silence the music of the cognoscenti. But there’s silence and there’s silence, and a regular concertgoer hears a fair bit of both. The ability to fold silence into a musical line – to create the impression that a conductor is somehow sculpting a sound which doesn’t exist – is an indicator of high artistry on the podium. This was real: the concentrated hush of 2,700 people listening as if the silence was part of the symphony Conversely, there’s the embarrassing strained silence when, at the end of a work, a conductor decides to keep the baton raised and see how long he can hold back the tide of applause. It’s spray-on sublimity; an attempt to force the illusion of shared transcendence. It’s the musical version of faking an orgasm.

Scottish Opera’s new production of Albert Herring updates the action to 1990, and hey – remember 1990? No, not particularly, and I suspect that’ll be a common reaction if you were actually around back then. The director Daisy Evans was a toddler at the time and she imagines a gaudy, tawdry small-town world of bum-bags, WeightWatchers and decrepit gas heaters. Loxford Village Hall looks like it hasn’t been redecorated since the year the opera was composed, 1947, and that certainly rings true. Blancmange for the May Day feast, though? I’m pretty sure that even under John Major, blancmange was a throwback. But Evans has a show to put on after all, and a pink wobbling gelatine-based dessert is more theatrical than a bowl of Monster Munch.

George Gershwin once made a home movie of Arnold Schoenberg grinning in a suit on his tennis court in Beverly Hills but, sadly, never filmed one of their weekly matches. According to one observer, the composer of ‘I Got Rhythm’ played with languid strokes in a ‘nonchalant and chivalrous’ manner against the ‘choppy, over eager’ strokes of the creator of Erwartung. That figures. But how odd that the two men should be friends and passionate admirers of each other’s work. Gershwin paid for the first recording of Schoenberg’s gnarliest string quartet, the Fourth; when the younger man died, Schoenberg described him as ‘a great composer’ and expressed ‘the deepest grief for the deplorable loss to music’.

When does a new opera enter the repertoire? Judith Weir’s Blond Eckbert has only had a couple of UK productions since its première at English National Opera in 1994, but it’s been doing reasonably good business on the continent, where its source material – a story by German writer Ludwig Tieck – presumably has more cultural currency. In any case, it’s back now, as part of English Touring Opera’s autumn roster, and both the staging (by ETO’s general director Robin Norton-Hale) and the performances deserve to make Weir’s haunted, oddly unsettling opera a lot better known. If my toes had curled any harder I think I’d have dropped a shoe size As it should be: this is a small opera that makes a bigger and darker impression each time you see it.

The curtain is already up at the start of Ted Huffman’s new production of Eugene Onegin. The auditorium is lit but the stage is in darkness and almost bare. Gradually, as Tchaikovsky’s prelude sighs and unfurls, the stage brightens and the theatre grows dim. But not before Onegin (Gordon Bintner) – tousle-headed and in a designer suit – has walked out, bowed to the house and retired to a chair at the back of the stage, to wait for the story to call him to life. Any competent maestro can whip up a big noise, but it’s a lot harder to make meaning out of silence Russophiles have grumbled for years about the way Tchaikovsky trimmed and tidied Pushkin’s raffish first-person narrative into seven self-contained ‘lyrical scenes’.

At a Hollywood party in the 1940s, the garrulous socialite Elsa Maxwell spotted Arnold Schoenberg, then teaching music at UCLA, looking miserable. So she pushed him towards the piano with the words: ‘Come on, Professor, give us a tune!’ I couldn’t help thinking of those words on Friday night, when we heard the first Proms performance of a symphony written in 1847 by a professor at the Paris Conservatoire. The Third Symphony of Louise Farrenc is full of well-crafted melodic lines, neatly configured to fit maddeningly predictable textbook chord progressions. It’s delicately orchestrated, but even the feathery flutes of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment couldn’t disguise the professor’s failure to give us a single memorable tune. This is not a popular opinion.

Klaus Makela is kind of a big deal. He’s a pupil of the Finnish conducting guru Jorma Panula – the so-called ‘Yoda of conducting’ – and he’s chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic as well as the Orchestre de Paris. Within the next three years he’s scheduled to take the baton at both the Chicago Symphony and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam: blue-chip international positions, with fees to match. So we’re going to be hearing a lot more from maestro Makela, though possibly not in the UK where he has almost certainly (barring the LSO and Covent Garden) been priced out of the market. He is only 28, though apparently his agents would prefer it if you didn’t talk about that.

As the Proms season enters the home straight, it’s moved up a gear, with a string of high profile European guest orchestras. First up was the Czech Philharmonic playing Suk’s Asrael Symphony under Jakub Hrusa before moving on to Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass the following night. These grand, glittering monuments of Czech music were garnished with a couple of relative rarities – Dvorak’s Piano Concerto, played by Mao Fujita, and the Military Sinfonietta, composed in 1937 by (the then 22-year-old) Vitezslava Kapralova, who died at the age of 25. It’s unmistakably the work of a young composer. Xylophone?

The Proms have started but there is a world elsewhere, and in Worcester Cathedral the 296th Three Choirs Festival set sail with a concert that couldn’t have happened anywhere else. A few years back I caused grave offence when I described the Three Choirs as a ‘home of lost causes’; as if, coming from The Spectator, that could ever be anything but a compliment. In truth, there’s still no classical music festival that provides such a sense of being plugged into a vital and ancient tradition – of being so close, as Elgar put it to ‘the living centre of music in Great Britain’.

On 5 August, Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto will be performed at the Proms for only the second time. It should have been the third time, but a Musician’s Union strike in 1980 forced the cancellation of the concert at which Martin Jones had been booked to give the première. Jones is a fearless virtuoso, still recording in his eighties, but one can’t help wondering whether his disappointment back then was tinged with relief. In one place, the soloist’s fingers must wrap themselves around 128 notes in a single bar Garrick Ohlsson, a long-time champion of the work, describes its difficulties as ‘absolutely immense, and 25 per cent of this piece is the most cruelly difficult writing in any piano concerto’.

Gabriel Fauré composed his song cycle La bonne chanson in 1894 for piano and voice. But he added string parts later and he premièred that version in April 1898 at the London home of his friend Frank Schuster: 22 Old Queen Street, the building currently occupied by this very magazine. I’m not sure how much Fauré gets played at Spectator HQ these days; his music certainly hasn’t been a feature of recent summer parties. Perhaps Fauré himself caressed the ivories where James Delingpole and Toby Young now prop up the bar. Imagine Verlaine’s poetry drifting out into the garden to mingle with Rod Liddle’s cigarette smoke on the moonlit air. L’heure exquise, indeed.

Bristol has a new concert hall, and it’s rather good. The transformation of the old Colston Hall into the Bristol Beacon has been reported as if it was simply a matter of upgrading and renaming. There were probably sound reasons for doing so, but in fact (and despite protests from the Twentieth Century Society) the postwar auditorium has been demolished outright and replaced with a wholly new orchestral hall designed on the best current principles: shoebox-shaped, with much use of wood and textured brick. Butterworth sears his melodies on to the eardrums. Isn’t it weird we still think of the Edwardians as inhibited? Acoustically, it’s extremely fine – not a glamorous sound, but a remarkably transparent one.