Culture

April is the cruellest month, but May is shaping up quite pleasantly and the daylight streamed in through the east window of St Martin-in-the-Fields at the start of I Fagiolini’s latest concept-concert, Re-Wilding The Waste Land. The centenary of Eliot’s poem is the obvious hook. But whether you’re counting from the Rite of Spring riot in 1913, Schoenberg’s Skandalkonzert the same year, or further back to Strauss’s Salome or Debussy’s Faune, music’s modernist moment occurred some time earlier. Which is helpful, in a way, because it freed the group’s director Robert Hollingworth from the limitations of chronological programming and gave him scope to do something a bit more interesting, and possibly a bit more Eliot-esque.

Imagine growing up with a whole orchestra as your plaything. Richard Strauss’s father was the principal horn of the Munich Opera, and doting relatives funded publication of the teenage Richard’s earliest compositions. At the age of 19 he was assistant conductor of the Court Orchestra in Meiningen, and had rather got used to having world-class musicians at his command.

There are many things to enjoy in the Royal Opera’s revival of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, but perhaps the most surprising is that the director plays it straight. This was my first encounter with Damiano Michieletto’s newish (2019) staging, and the plan was to approach it without preconceptions. (If we’re about to experience, say, a Bold Feminist Re-Imagining, I’d prefer to deduce it from the evidence on stage.) But for an opera premièred in 1843, Don Pasquale is distinctly old-school, with all its commedia dell’arte assumptions intact and whirring away like clockwork. The elderly miser Don Pasquale disinherits his lovelorn nephew and marries a compliant young bride who instantly becomes an abusive shopaholic scold.

Dua Lipa’s second album, Future Nostalgia, was released at the least promising moment possible: 27 March 2020, the day after the first lockdown came into force in the UK. Just as a pandemic swept the world, she was releasing a maximalist pop album that, surely, was designed for the communal experiences no one was having. But something about it connected: Future Nostalgia was a worldwide hit, the first British album released in 2020 to go platinum, the tenth bestselling record in the world that year. It turned out to be the right album for a wretched year. No wonder her show at the O2 was centred on it – every track was heard, which would normally be overegging the promotional pudding, but, given its consistent excellence, was entirely justifiable.

You don’t need to be a historian of pop to realise that having been part of a huge manufactured group is no guarantee of subsequent success. Most boy and girl band stars, after a brief flurry of passion, are forced to descend into the netherworld of panto, reality TV, and ever-diminishing returns from the actual music. The problem seems to be that the wider world doesn’t have the mental space to accept three, four or five people competing for attention. In almost every case, the wider world can only be bothered to embrace one person after the split, and it’s not always the one you expect. Gary Barlow – the talent! – was meant to be the solo star from Take That; it turned out to be Robbie Williams.

Ordinarily, if a podcast purports to be revelatory, you can assume it is anything but. There’s a glut of programmes at the moment featuring interviewer and interviewee locked in passionate heart-to-hearts in which a few, carefully selected beans are spilled to no real consequence or effect. The Last Bohemians makes no claim to shatter the earth with secrets, but the guests are so unguarded that the episodes possess that longed-for bite. Maggi Hambling reels off a to-do list she made at art school while she was seeking to lose her virginity: ‘Older man, younger man, black man, woman’. Dana Gillespie, singer and former flame of David Bowie, describes undoing her top button to be photographed in the cleavage-obsessed press of her youth.

Squaring up to the prospect of a new Red Hot Chili Peppers album, I’m reminded of a vintage quote by Nick Cave: ‘I’m forever near a stereo saying, “What… is this garbage?” And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.’ I can empathise. I don’t habitually harbour animus against artists I dislike, but something about the sheer scale of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ awfulness has always felt weirdly personal. Despite the kind of success that looks mightily impressive in a Wikipedia stat dump – 100 million record sales, multiple Grammy wins, numerous number ones – the Californian rock band have always been tricky to tolerate, let alone love. The reasons for this are manifold.

Stormzy occupies a curious place in British pop culture right now. He’s the darling of liberals for all his good deeds – setting up an imprint for black writers within Penguin, and a charity to put black kids through Cambridge. He’s also the figurehead of UK hip hop, which at times has made him a lightning rod for the particular worldview of certain people. ‘Is it asking too much that he show a scintilla of gratitude to the country that offered his mother and him so much? Instead of trashing it,’ wrote, inevitably, Amanda Platell in, inevitably, the Daily Mail, after Stormzy had attacked Theresa May’s government over the Grenfell fire. You don’t see so much of that sort of coverage these days, and a glance around the O2 showed why.

For an art form that once boldly set out to question conventional divisions of gender, ballet now seems to be retreating towards the butch – ironically, just as the rest of the world is moving obsessively to the femme. Scroll back a century or so and Nijinsky cross-dressed at masked balls, danced on pointe and covered himself in petals as le spectre de la rose; in Les Biches, his sister Nijinska shamelessly choreographed all manner of sexual indeterminacy and suggested that girls could also be boys. Then came the Carry On stereotype of limp-wristed ephebes in pink tights with an ominous bulge – every mother’s nightmare in the homophobic post-war era, and perhaps still a source of psychotic contempt among certain sections of society.

Grade: A+ I was going to review hyperpop chanteuse Charli XCX’s album this week, but it was such boring, meretricious, grandstanding 1980s retread electropop vacuity that I thought, nah, even if it is headed to the top of our ravaged charts. So have this instead. Oxxxymiron is Russia’s No. 1 hip-hop artist. Yes, Russian hip hop is indeed an oxxxymiron, much as would be Serbian reggae or Iranian gospel, but never mind. He’s a youngish Jewish bloke born in Leningrad, with a degree in Middle English from Oxford University, and is hugely popular in his home country. Is it any good, this album released late last year? It’s darker and nastier than US hip hop, full of menace and those icy synths the Russians seem to adore even more than their Iskander missiles.