The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The other week I saw a T-shirt bearing the caption ‘For the girls, the gays and the theys’. And if you want a very quick and easy demonstration of why someone might wish to wear a T-shirt specifically excluding straight men, I suggest you go to pretty much any big standing show, certainly any featuring a youngish guitar band.
Tubas and timpani thunder in The Rhinegold as the giants Fasolt and Fafner, having built Valhalla, arrive to claim their fee: Freia, goddess of beauty and youth. It doesn’t go well. Suddenly Fasolt drops his defences and declares his yearning (the translation is John Deathridge’s) for ‘a woman who’d lovingly and softly live with us lowly mortals’. At those words the music melts, and a solo oboe sings a melody so poignant that Ernest Newman thought it worthy of Mozart. This is the first instance in the whole cosmic drama where Wagner gives us a glimpse, however unformed, of something that an adult human might recognise as love.
I was sceptical when the lady on the bus to Reading town centre told me that her father knew Liszt. Who wouldn’t be? This was a long time ago, mind: probably 1980, and I was on my way into school. I think our conversation started because I was reading a book about music. She was old and tiny, wearing a luxuriant wig. She introduced herself as Mrs Ball but her accent was unmistakably German. Even so, Liszt had been dead for nearly a century. Could it be true? ‘Oh, my father knew everyone,’ she said. ‘Richard Strauss was a great friend. And dear Bruno Walter. He lived in our house, you know. They were wonderful days – we were surrounded by the finest music.
There is footage on the internet of Robert Smith, lead singer in the Cure, being interviewed on the occasion of his band being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. At high pitch and tremendous volume, the host yells up a storm about the incredible honour being bestowed upon the group, while Smith claws at his face, grimaces, and rolls his eyes. ‘Are you as excited as I am?’ she shouts. ‘By the sounds of it, no,’ Smith mutters – speaking, surely, for all of us. Of all the many reasons to dislike the RRHOF – some of which we’ll get to shortly; and yes, the acronym is one of them – it is the jarring mix of shrieking self-love and august earnestness which rankles most.
Opera North has begun 2023 with a couple of big revivals, and it’s always rewarding to call in on these things and see how they’re holding up. The long-lived, endlessly revived classic production is one of the quirks of operatic culture. It actually feels disconcerting, as a regular operagoer, to go to the conventional theatre (you know, the vanilla kind where they don’t sing) and discover that they’ve started again from scratch. A completely new Tempest? What was wrong with the 2016 staging? Possibly it’s to do with the financial realities of an art form that needs to keep a full orchestra and chorus on the payroll. A Year Zero policy every other season simply isn’t economically viable.
Civilisation has never nurtured more than a handful of front-rank choreographers within any one generation, with the undesirable result that the chosen few end up excessively in demand, careering around the globe and overworking, delegating or repeating themselves. Please can someone up there ensure that Pam Tanowitz doesn’t suffer such a fate. This fifty-something American has recently matured as one of the best in field, producing dance of rigorous clarity, austere yet richly nuanced, that makes the work of certain other big names look fuzzily derivative or gimmicky. Just don’t ask too much of her, because she works through fine detail, not a broad brush.
Why aren’t Metric stars? In their native Canada, several of their albums have gone platinum, but the rest of the world? Not so much. Twenty-five years after Emily Haines and James Shaw formed the band, here they still are, playing to a not-quite-full Roundhouse to promote their eighth album, Formentera. It was a pretty good turnout – about 3,000 people on a Wednesday night in January – but I doubt anyone ever formed a band thinking: ‘In a quarter of a century, we might be able to not quite fill one of London’s mid-sized venues!’ Writing very good songs isn’t enough to take a band to the top, but Metric do write very good songs All of which is a shame because they were flatly brilliant.
Sound of the Underground is a drag show involving a handful of cross-dressers who spend the opening 15 minutes telling us who they are. Then, rather ominously, they announce: ‘We’ve written a play.’ But they haven’t really. The scene shifts to a kitchen where the drag queens meet to discuss their pay and conditions, and the show turns into an advertisement for their woes. Drag is facing a crisis, we hear, caused by its sudden popularity. Drag queens are in demand from TV bosses and corporate executives but the artistes feel dismayed and traduced by this surfeit of opportunity. They loathe RuPaul, a cross-dresser favoured by the BBC, and they blame him for betraying the true spirit of drag, whatever that may be. One of them calls RuPaul ‘exclusionary’.
Grade: D Yes, it’s porky Sam from Essex, with his body issues and his complex gender pronouns and his endless narcissistic banalities, his depthless self-importance. This is Smith’s fourth studio album in a career that seems to be nosing a little downhill, mercifully – although it will still sell by the million worldwide. He has recently decided he is genderqueer, rather than just gay. He says he feels like a woman. Me too, mate – but what’s a boy to do? The good things? Just one. He has a pleasant and flexible tenor voice which, when unadulterated, is capable of carrying a tune – if there were, y’know, tunes. And that’s it.
A classical concert programme is like a set menu, and for this palate the most tempting orchestral offering in the UK this January came from the Slaithwaite Philharmonic under its conductor Benjamin Ellin. They opened with a suite from Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo, and the inclusion of Hollywood film music in a ‘straight’ classical programme was interesting in itself. Film music has been around for more than a century now. Many scores are fully as effective in concert as (say) Schubert’s Rosamunde or Beethoven’s Egmont, and yet this almost never happens. Film scores (unless by a big beast of the classical world) are generally hived off into ‘pops’ nights. Snobbery is the most adaptable of vices.
Folk is the Schiphol of Scottish music. Eventually, every curious traveller passes through. From arena rockers to rappers, traditional music remains an undeniable source. Which is why the second word in ‘Celtic Connections’ is at least as significant as the first. Now in its 30th year, lighting up the otherwise unpromising prospect of a Glasgow January, this year’s instalment of the roots festival features artists from all corners of the globe. Many of them would regard folk only as their second or third musical language, rather than the mother tongue. One of the early highlights makes the point rather beautifully. It’s a homegrown affair, showcasing pianist Fergus McCreadie and harpist Maeve Gilchrist, two of Scotland’s most inventive solo musicians.
The great country singer George Jones was famed not just for his voice, but also for his drinking. Once, deprived of the car keys, he drove his lawnmower to the nearest bar. In the very good Paramount+ drama about Jones and Tammy Wynette – entitled George and Tammy, so there’s no excuse for forgetting – Michael Shannon, playing Jones, is asked time and time again why he keeps on making such a mess of his life and his career. ‘That’s what the people want from me,’ he shrugs in reply. That came to mind watching the 1975’s return to British arenas, in a tour grandiosely and amusingly billed as ‘In Show and In Concert – The 1975 At Their Very Best’.
‘We hope you enjoy the performance,’ announced the Tannoy before the lights went down for How did we get here? – the accent being put on ‘hope’, as though enjoyment was unlikely. I took a deep breath in anticipation of modern dance at its most portentous and pretentious, my expectations already depressed after imbibing some hot air from a note in the programme – ‘we feel our power, all the way to the edges of ourselves’ and so forth. How did we get here? Or should that be What am I doing here? But what transpired was a thing of simple beauty: spare, precise, lucid, free of wanton gimmicks or histrionics.
Daniel Barenboim was supposed to perform with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra earlier this month. His recent health concerns made that impossible, but it was a reminder that for the first time since the appointment of the late Libor Pesek in 1987, the RLPO is under the direction of a conductor soaked in the German tradition. Domingo Hindoyan, the orchestra’s chief conductor since autumn 2021, was born in Venezuela and has a soft spot for French music, but Barenboim is his mentor and there’s a gravity – an intellectual centre – to his conducting that made me eager to hear him get to grips with the sacred monsters of German romanticism. It’s something of an RLPO tradition, after all.
‘The rays of the sun conquer the night’ sings Sarastro, at the end of Mozart and Schikaneder’s Die Zauberflöte. It was the Royal Opera’s first performance of January 2023 and there’s something profoundly consoling about seeing this of all operas at the midnight of the year. The lights dim; five chords ring out and that first triplet from the violins falls quietly into place as Mozart engages the gears and together we move off on our long, sweet journey towards light. In David McVicar’s staging, robed figures process down the auditorium bearing glowing orbs, while Tamino, in late 18th-century frock-coat and knee-boots, clambers out from the boxes and vanishes through a portal in the front-cloth. There is a world elsewhere. And then we’re off.
There’s a case to be made for John Cale being the most daring ex-member of the Velvet Underground. Lou Reed redefined the transgressive possibilities of literate three-chord rock’n’roll. Cale, arguably, has travelled even further. A Welsh miner’s son who won a scholarship to Goldsmiths, Cale engaged with the early flowerings of Fluxus before mixing with John Cage and La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music in New York’s downtown avant-garde scene. His droning viola, hammering piano and relentless bass brought the serrated edge to the Velvet Underground’s art music. More than anyone in the band, he rendered Reed’s whiplash words in sound.
On 3 February 2003, the emergency services in Los Angeles received a call. ‘I’m Phil Spector’s driver,’ a voice told them. ‘I think my boss killed somebody.’ This was the inevitable yet still extraordinary starting point for Spector – a new four-part documentary on a man who, in the face of fierce competition, might well be the strangest figure in pop history. By that stage, he perhaps deserved the description of him in one news report as ‘a ghost, a phantom, a half-forgotten rock genius’. Except that – whether by coincidence or something more sinister – he’d recently granted his first interview for decades to the British journalist Mick Brown. ‘I have devils inside me,’ said Spector during their conversation.
Grade: A– James Newell Osterberg Jnr’s unexpected and unwarranted longevity on this planet has conferred upon him the status of irascible, but very loveable, grandfather of punk: it suits him just fine. A delightful contrarian in a profession otherwise staffed by vapid, guileless, liberals – Iggy actually meant it when he sang ‘I’m a Conservative’ – Iggy now sprays the profanities around with abandon while delivering gobbets of bile and occasionally hard-bitten wisdom in the direction of yoof. Which, given Iggy is now 75, means pretty much everyone. This album veers between the addled late-1970s pop rock of The Idiot and Lust for Life and the scabrous metal raunch of his earlier incarnation with the Stooges.
Orlando opens with a pack of Virginia Woolfs on stage. All wear the same costume of horn-rimmed spectacles, long tweed skirts and woolly cardigans, and they comply with current diversity targets. There’s a white Woolf, a black Woolf, a mixed-race Woolf, an East Asian Woolf, and a male Woolf with a deep voice who seems to have wandered in from Little Red Riding Hood. The pack of Woolfs chat away about how to tell the story of an English aristocrat, Orlando, who was a teenager in the 1590s. He enters the stage dressed like a girl. (Confusion over sexual identity is the show’s big idea.) After an opaque interview with Elizabeth I, Orlando moves to the Jacobean era, then to Charles II’s court, then to an embassy in Constantinople and so on.
I’m generally not a fan of New Year’s resolutions, but one occurred to me recently as the younger members of my family were blasting out a patchy David Bowie playlist: Stand Up Against Revisionism. It’s harder than ever these days not to succumb to printing the myth – reality can be so so-so – but critics have a duty to keep a clear head while others are losing theirs. Even around the dinner table on New Year’s Day. Bowie would have been 76 this week; he was born on 8 January 1947, and died two days after his 69th birthday in 2016. He’s not getting any less popular in posthumous old age. In fact, business is booming. At the end of last year, the latest hefty Bowie box set arrived, titled Divine Symmetry and covering the Hunky Dory era.
Playing under the baton of Arturo Toscanini must have felt a bit like fighting in the trenches. There are recordings of him rehearsing in the 1930s or ’40s. The orchestra is bowling along; there’s a low muttering, and then suddenly, out of nothing, the explosion. A scream of rage: a huge, operatic, animalistic roar. There’s a barrage of Italian profanities and what sounds like a fist smashing repeatedly on wood. Bernard Shore, who played under Toscanini in the BBC Symphony Orchestra, witnessed him hurling his baton at a cowering viola section. With the NBC Symphony, Toscanini threw his gold pocket watch to the floor and stamped on it.
What’s wrong with sentimentality? The answer, I’d suggest, could either be: a) its almost bullying insistence on us having emotions disproportionate to anything a particular story has earned; or b) nothing at all. And if you want to see how both of these are possible, two of this year’s big Christmas TV offerings provide handy illustrations. Firmly in category a) is The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, an animated film by Charlie Mackesy, based on his own mega-selling book and with some impressively big-name actors doing the voices. Its methods are established immediately when a boy lost in a snowy wood happens across a cute talking mole (Tom Hollander). ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ the mole enquires. ‘Kind,’ says the boy.
Grade: B+ By the time the 1970s had come along – post Altamont and post hope – the Beach Boys were tired of being beach boys and thus became, for a while, just another rather mediocre rawk band. The two albums they released in the first three years of the decade, Carl and the Passions – ‘So Tough’ and Holland, dispensed (largely) with those sumptuous harmonies and the simplicity of teenage anthems to God and gave us unconvincing blue-eyed soul and tinny R&B. Of those two albums, only the lovely ‘Marcella’ (where those harmonies come back) and the commendably ludicrous ‘All This is That’are worth shelling out your hard-earned pennies.
A Christmas revival of New Adventures’ ten-year-old production of Sleeping Beauty stirs up all my nagging ambivalence about Matthew Bourne’s work. I’ve mulled over this in print elsewhere several times, and I feel conscious that if Bourne reads reviews – perhaps he doesn’t – he might be groaning into his Corn Flakes. But his reputation is so securely high (a knighthood, Tonys and Oliviers galore), his popularity so ubiquitous, that an honest doubter can’t do him any harm. Here are the pros. He has invented a recipe of his own, hard to imitate, though many have tried – a mix of Kenneth MacMillan’s sexed-up ballet idiom, Cameron Mackintosh-Andrew Lloyd Webber theatrical spectacle, and the cinematic fantasies of Disney and Tim Burton.
It’s unlikely that Irving Berlin was pondering the energy price cap when he composed the seasonal standard ‘I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm’ in 1937. ‘I can’t remember a worse December, just watch those icicles form,’ he wrote, a sentiment many of us can surely relate to right now – but wait! ‘What do I care if icicles form,’ he continues. ‘I’ve got my love to keep me warm.’ Good for you, sir. Meanwhile, the rest of us are watching the digits ticking incessantly upward on our smart meter with the murderous fascination of a gun dog fixated on a fox hole. For the first time in my life, I’m actually hoping to get socks from Santa – and perhaps one of those natty woollen jumpers Shakin’ Stevens wore in the video for ‘Merry Christmas Everyone’.
Temperature records for Los Angeles in the summer of 1945 are patchy, but 90 in the shade seems to have been the norm. It was during one such scorcher, presumably, that the songwriters Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn pulled up at a red light on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Cahn suggested going to the beach. Styne had a better idea: ‘Let’s go write a winter song.’ Driving over to the offices of their publisher Edwin H. Morris, Cahn commandeered a typewriter, glanced out the window and typed the exact opposite of what he saw: ‘The weather outside is frightful.’ The Great American Songbook had acquired another Christmas classic. And ‘Let it Snow!’ is no less classic – and all the more American – for omitting any mention of Christmas.
Only boring people are bored by Ravel’s Boléro. True, the composer – the slyest of wits – left his share of booby traps for the uncomprehending; take his comment, in a letter to Paul Dukas, that ‘I have written only one masterpiece, Boléro. Unfortunately there is no music in it.’ Yet Ravel was a sublime colourist; a master of the instrumental palette who makes Stravinsky’s orchestration sound coarse by comparison, and Boléro is one long twist of a fabulous kaleidoscope. Even its notorious repetitions are a red herring. Take the full score as a whole and you’ll struggle to find two bars that are identical (there are a couple at the start and a couple near the very end, but that’s basically it).
Grade: B+ We are all very touched, up here, that the esoteric French artist formerly known as Christine and the Queens has changed her name to Redcar, in honour of our once vibrant beachside steel town. Perhaps she was impressed by the newish ‘vertical pier’, or enjoyed a nutritious meal in the Light of Asia. Or, better still, maybe she is planning to adopt a whole bunch of East Cleveland nom de plumes and will next call herself Liverton Mines, or Boosebeck. She may, of course, just mean a red car. Héloîse Letissier (her born name) is very good at simple, naggingly catchy, woebegone synth pop. The simpler the better – as with 2018’s wonderful ‘Five Dollars’ which once heard will never leave your head. She is much less good at ethereal electronic art-pop.
As she recalls a decade of infamy, Maria Alyokhina wanders one of the many anonymous apartments she has lived in since escaping Russia six months ago. ‘We didn’t expect a criminal case, we didn’t expect imprisonment, we didn’t expect international attention. We didn’t expect how many people would support Pussy Riot, would go to the street in balaclavas. We could never have predicted that.’ Alyokhina and Pussy Riot, a loose feminist collective who perform in brightly coloured balaclavas, came to international attention in February 2012 with their ‘punk prayer’, a guerilla music performance in Moscow’s orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.