Culture

It’s curious to consider what a venerable old thing noise music is. That this most singularly untameable of musics – the place where melody, harmony and pulse all go to die – is an Edwardian invention. It first arrived in this country 110 years ago when futurists Filippo Marinetti and Luigi Russolo set up camp at the London Coliseum a month before the start of the first world war and, over ten consecutive nights, blasted the West End audience with their ‘noise-tuners’ or intonarumori, alongside diverse variety acts. I say blasted but making a decent racket was the one thing these homemade instruments were incapable of doing. ‘It could have been drowned easily by a good tympanist,’ noted the Musical Times. The artist C.R.W.

Michael Tanner, who died yesterday at the age of 88, lived two parallel lives. To many Spectator readers, he was the magazine's peerless opera critic: wise, passionate, thrillingly disputatious, intensely funny, extremely generous with the Semtex. Essential reading. He wrote The Spectator's weekly opera column from 1996 to 2014 and continued to review – and raze to the ground where necessary – concerts, books, albums and opera, whatever we flung at him, right up until 2022.  To countless others, however, he was one of the great philosophical scholars.

Always make your redundancy announcement when the people at the receiving end of it are on a high. This seems to be the favoured method of today’s managing executives, who perhaps imagine that adrenalin will somehow anaesthetise the blow of getting the sack. For the Cambridge student choir St John’s Voices, the news of its imminent disbanding and the redundancy of its director Graham Walker came just two minutes after the light was switched off at the end of a three-day recording session of Russian choral masterpieces last week. Does egalitarianism have to be promoted at the expense of up-and-running excellence?

Grade: A- One thing videogames are surprisingly good at is scaring the willies out of you. Claustrophobia, unease, jump-scares, anxious-making camera-angles... Gamers of my generation will not have forgotten the spooky crackle of the Geiger counter in Silent Hill; nor needing fresh trousers after that dog jumps through the window in the first Resident Evil. The granddaddy of them all was Alone in the Dark – which, when it came out in 1992, essentially invented the survival horror genre. It sent you crawling through a spooky old mansion solving puzzles, fretting about your inventory and being jumped by sluggish monsters. Now a lavish and loving reboot stars B+-listers David Harbour and Jodie Comer. The former is grizzled PI Edward Carnby; the latter his employer Emily Hartwood.

Grade: F At the end of his life Sviatoslav Richter decided to try his hand at the Gershwin Piano Concerto. It was a ghastly experiment, but his admirers were used to his quirkiness, knew his powers were fading and so sensibly forgot about it. Now we have Lang Lang playing Saint-Saëns. It’s an even more wretched mismatch than Richter and Gershwin – but I learn from a Deutsche Grammophon press release that fans of the ‘Chinese superstar’ have pushed this horrible album to the top of the UK classical charts. The liner notes are beyond parody. I counted ten photos of the superstar, in which he’s clutching a flower, playing air piano or resting his head on the keyboard. ‘In the Orient, music is sometimes just an idea, a mood, or a smell,’ he explains.

Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte hasn’t always been taken seriously. In fact for much of the 19th century it wasn’t even reckoned to be very good (Donald Tovey described its characters as ‘humanly speaking, rubbish’). For the modern director, there are several potential approaches. One – the hardest – is to try and evoke in the audience an approximation of a late-18th-century mindset. Another, scarcely easier, is to go all-in on psychological subtlety – the path taken by Tim Albery in the current Opera North production. A third is simply to play the whole thing as a saucy romp with a beautiful score, and that’s the choice that Max Hoehn has taken in his new staging for the Welsh National Opera.

To Dalston to witness the worst gig of my life. The premise of the Random Gear Festival was simple and rather inspired: gather some arbitrary objects; get people to play them. In previous iterations, the offerings had included an ice skate, a wet baguette and an exercise bike. This time we had a trampoline, a microwave, a dead fish. I kept an open mind. I was reminded that years ago at Cafe Oto I had seen the then chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra Ilan Volkov rub two blocks of polystyrene together with the subtle virtuosity of Martha Argerich at a Steinway. I was reminded too of what the composer Hector Berlioz had declared in his 1844 Treatise on Orchestration: ‘Every sounding object employed by the composer is a musical instrument.

Next month in London, they’re celebrating a composer you’ve probably never heard of, but whose work you’re sure to have heard. If you’ve watched much British TV or cinema in the past half century, you’ll already know his music, and better than you think. A quick test of age: do you remember ‘The Right One’ – the song that used to advertise Martini (‘any time, any place, anywhere’) in a haze of wah-wah pedal and 1970s hair? How about Dennis Potter’s sci-fi swansong Cold Lazarus, or more recently, the Bafta-winning Édith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose? Still no? Then picture David Suchet as ITV’s Poirot: and come on, surely you can already hear that smoky sax curling across the titles?

Fifteen years after her death and the shrine to Pina Bausch is still thick with incense and adulation. Whether one acknowledges her as a genius or not, there’s no doubt that her influence has been baneful – a cult that has spawned a thousand imitators, all following her absurdist idiom, all mesmerised by subversions of everyday logic, all ultimately trapped in a vacuous dead-end aesthetic in which anything goes, the weirder the better. ‘Nonsense, yes,’ cries the aesthetic Lady Saphir in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience. ‘But oh! What precious nonsense!