Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Michael Hann

A terrible joke gone wonderfully right: Rick Astley and Blossoms Perform the Smiths reviewed

Pop

Many of us who grew up loving the Smiths have rather shelved that affection in recent years. Many of us, being lily-livered liberals, have rather taken against Morrissey’s politics and his public support for the far-right For Britain party. Even those inclined to agree with him might have tired of his unrelenting self-pity and his inability to say anything nice about anyone, ever. Yes, we’ve still got lovely Johnny Marr playing the songs in his solo shows, but with the greatest goodwill in the world — and Marr gets granted the greatest goodwill in the world by being such an obviously decent fella — he’s no one’s idea of a great singer.

7 October 2021

Ian Pace

How the culture wars are killing Western classical music

Arts feature

Musicology may appear an esoteric profession. But several events in the past few years have pushed musicological debates into the columns of national newspapers, from the American academic who claimed that music theory was a ‘racial ideology’ and should be dismantled, to the Oxford professor who allegedly suggested that studying ‘white European music’ caused ‘students of colour great distress’, to the high-profile resignation of a professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, reportedly in response to academic ‘cancel culture’. These disputes have not emerged from nowhere.

Richard Bratby

Hits you where it hurts: Welsh National Opera’s Madam Butterfly reviewed

Opera

‘It’s generally agreed that in contemporary practice, this opera proposes significant ethical and cultural problems,’ says the director Lindy Hume in the programme book for her new production of Madam Butterfly, and if you’ve just shelled out 75 quid in the expectation of attractive scenery and luscious tunes, that’s you told. In truth, it’s rarely advisable to read what a director thinks about their own work, at least until after the show, when it can serve as a bemusing footnote to the evening’s entertainment. Ah, so that’s why they were wearing pink beehive wigs! If a director is any good at their job, it’ll come across on stage without any need for commentary.

30 September 2021

Graeme Thomson

Banal and profound, bent and beautiful: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis at Edinburgh Playhouse reviewed

Pop

Nick Cave has always been drawn to parable and fable, but more than ever these days he is engaged in the necessary work of mining magic from the base metal of day-to-day existence. The key lines in this show came early, during ‘Bright Horses’: ‘We’re all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are,’ Cave sang in that hollow, sorrowful baritone. ‘This world is plain to see/ It don’t mean we can’t believe in something.’ Cave’s recent songs have a terrible and powerful context: the death of his teenage son, Arthur, in 2015. As an artist he has confronted this personal tragedy side on, acknowledging its profound impact without letting it overwhelm his writing.

Damian Thompson

The best recordings of the Goldberg Variations

Classical

I sometimes think the classical record industry would collapse if it weren’t for the Goldberg Variations. Every month brings more recordings of Bach’s monumental, compact and rhapsodic keyboard masterpiece. And that’s impressive, given that nowhere else does the composer demand such sustained technical brilliance from the performer, who must execute dizzying scales and trills that wouldn’t sound out of place in one of Liszt’s fantasies. If the Goldberg Variations are an ordeal for harpsichordists, they’re a bloody nightmare for pianists, because they have to tackle music written for two manuals on just one. Their fingers tumble perilously over each other; it looks a bit like high-speed knitting.

Richard Bratby

See it while it’s still hot: Royal Opera’s Rigoletto reviewed

Classical

In Oliver Mears’s new production of Verdi’s Rigoletto, the curtain rises on a work of art. The stage is in deep shadow, the backdrop glowing with the rich impasto of an old master painting. Out front, and lit like a Caravaggio, the Duke of Mantua poses amid a mass of human figures in sculptural attitudes. It’s a living representation of some allegorical Renaissance swagger portrait and, as we’re about to see, this Duke is something of a connoisseur. A colossal Venus of Urbino reclines lasciviously above the Act One orgy, replaced in Act Two by an equally gigantic Rubens: Europa riding a wild-eyed bull. Anyway, it looks classy and suitably historic. The offstage band chunters away, and the audience can breathe a sigh of relief.

Michael Hann

Two gigs that prove that rock and pop is never just about the music

Pop

The single most boring and pointless thing that is ever said about rock and pop — and it always comes from the Campaign For Real Rock brigade, with their alphabetised vinyl and back copies of Mojo — is that it should be ‘all about the music’. It is never, of course, all about the music, even among the Real Rockers’ heroes. An ugly Elvis would never have become Elvis; if the Stones had been clean-cut, helpful young men, they might as well have been Herman’s Hermits. Had the Clash made exactly the same records but looked and dressed like the Wurzels, elderly men would not still be banging on interminably about how Joe Strummer changed their lives. It is, in fact, never all about the music. You can see that most clearly at shows.

23 September 2021

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

A lockdown masterpiece and the Jessica Rabbit of concertos: contemporary classical roundup

Classical

So it finally happened: I experienced my first vocal setting of the word ‘Covid’. An encounter that was, inevitably, more harrowing than when I caught the virus itself. ‘Coviiiiiiid!’ yowled the singer, while the orchestra emitted a boom, crack, snap, rumble rumble, shriek, bang, dissonance dissonance. Rice Crispies fans, eat your heart out. It was part of Exiles, a 30-minute new commission by Julian Anderson for the opening concert of the LSO season.

Nicola Christie

How the British musical conquered the world

Arts feature

What do Henry VIII’s wives, a Rastafarian musical icon and a drag queen have in common? They are all the subjects of new stage shows that are heralding a golden age of the British musical. Let’s start with the court of Henry VIII. A pair of friends at Cambridge University, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, decided to write their own musical four years ago because the student theatre society couldn’t afford to pay the royalties for an existing one. They based it on the life stories of the six women who were unfortunate enough to marry Henry VIII. Six, as this debut effort came to be known, opens on Broadway this week, with huge advance ticket sales already achieved. ‘Historically, Britain was a place of Shakespeare, and new plays.

Rod Liddle

God, it’s slight: Lindsey Buckingham’s new album reviewed

The Listener

Grade: B– The first time Lindsey Buckingham had a big falling out with Stevie Nicks we at least got some half-decent, if occasionally soporific, music out of it. That was Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, a soft-limbed, coked-up AOR colossus that for many defines mid-1970s music. It contained Buckingham’s finest moment, ‘Go Your Own Way’ — the weird, awkward, staggered rhythm of the verse somehow enhancing the howl of rage in the chorus. A howl of rage directed at the ethereal and slightly irritating Nicks, of course. Nearly 50 years later, they’re still at it. Nicks reportedly had him fired from the band’s latest tour because she couldn’t bear to be anywhere near him.

16 September 2021

Richard Bratby

A terrific night of opera: Zanetto/Orfeo ed Euridice, Arcola Theatre, reviewed

Classical

For a one-hit composer, we hear rather a lot of Pietro Mascagni. His reputation rests on his 1890 debut Cavalleria Rusticana, the one-act Sicilian shocker that’s usually yoked (not always to its advantage) to Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. But in recent years we’ve also seen the cod-medieval car crash of Isabeau, and a couple of outings for Iris, an opera that fuses orientalist opulence with tentacle porn, but not in a good way. In fairness, there have been winners too: Opera Holland Park revived L’amico Fritz in July, and this sun-kissed romcom about an Alsatian cherry farmer slipped down like a Negroni with audiences thirsty for a strong, sweet triple-shot of escapism, verismo-style.

Michael Hann

Teenage Fanclub are not a dramatic group, but they are lovely

Pop

They may no longer get many teenagers at their shows spending all their money on merchandise, then throwing up on the way home, though that certainly happened at the end of the 1980s, when they began, but people do love Teenage Fanclub. Their teenage fans are now middle-aged, and have spent the intervening years growing up with the band. They’ve listened as the group started singing about parenthood, long-term relationships, ageing, and they’ve stayed with a group who reflected their own lives back at them. The music, too, has changed. Where the early Fanclub records were sparky, messy alt-rock, they have spent the decades refining themselves so their songs are now polished miniatures, undramatic at first sight, but filigreed and burnished like tiny masterpieces.

9 September 2021

Richard Bratby

Opera della Luna is a little miracle: Curtain Raisers at Wilton’s Music Hall reviewed

Classical

Arthur Sullivan knew better than to mess with a winning formula. ‘Cox and Box, based on J. Maddison Morton’s farce Box and Cox’ reads the title page of his first comic opera, composed to a libretto by F.C. Burnand a good five years before he latched up with W.S. Gilbert. ‘Those boys hit on a brilliant idea,’ Billy Wilder is supposed to have said when he saw the musical that Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black had created from his movie Sunset Boulevard. ‘They didn’t change a thing.’ Gilbert’s comic beats are sharper and faster; and he’d doubtless have shortened it by about 15 minutes.

2 September 2021

Richard Bratby

Exuberance and class: Ariadne auf Naxos at Edinburgh Festival reviewed

Classical

For some reason, I’d got it into my head that the main work in the Gringolts Quartet’s midday recital at the Edinburgh Festival was going to be Beethoven’s Quartet in C sharp minor, Op.131. No problem with that, of course; it’s exactly the sort of big serious work you’d expect a big serious international violin soloist like Ilya Gringolts to play when he forms a string quartet, and then to bring on tour to a big serious international festival like Edinburgh. Still, it’s not a piece that you can really listen to before lunch without a certain amount of mental preparation; and it was while revisiting the Festival website that I saw that I’d got it all wrong. They were actually due to play the Quartet Op.106 in G major by Antonin Dvorak.

Graeme Thomson

Cast a spell, clear and sharp as frost: The Unthanks reviewed

Pop

As August unwound, the EIF settled into the cavernous gazebo that is Edinburgh Park, and things began to loosen up. First there was an outbreak of vigorous clog dancing — more on which later. This escalated within 48 hours to a polite mini stampede from our designated seats towards the front of the stage at the start of Damon Albarn’s show, instigated at the artist’s request. ‘I’ve checked and we’re allowed,’ said Albarn sensibly. In 2021 we must take rebellion as we find it. When he lit a cigarette near the end it felt like civilisation was teetering on the very brink. As it transpired, this wasn’t really music designed for rushing the stage.

Rod Liddle

Repetitive, spiritless, god-bothering music: Kanye West’s Donda reviewed

The Listener

Grade: C– The nicest thing one can say is that this is a marginally better album than we would have got from either of the other two presidential candidates. Just about. But sheesh, it’s still nearly two hours of the most repetitive, spiritless, god-bothering music you will ever hear, full of portentousness and self-pity and utterly devoid of any insight or humour. Rap, trap, snap, all the tiresome bases covered. Decent tunes and memorable rhythms are few and far between. I like West, the man, for his stoic refusal to kowtow to the stupid liberal orthodoxies demanded by the music business. But his self-importance is now so bloated he resembles Mr Creosote from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, in those terrible few seconds before he eats a final wafer-thin mint.

26 August 2021

Graeme Thomson

Good noisy fun: black midi, at the Edinburgh International Festival, reviewed

Pop

This year we must love Edinburgh for her soul rather than her looks. The EIF should be commended for making the best of a tricky hand, but the lodgings for its music programme bring to mind a fallen society beauty forced from her New Town villa into a rented bedsit. Edinburgh Park is a cathedral-sized tent in a business park, wedged between the city bypass and a shopping mall. The wooden floor planks buck and roll like a galleon deck. There is a roof but no sides and the Covid-quelling ventilation is, shall we say, robust. So yes, forget the optics. In 2021, content is everything. As it transpires, it proved a fitting spot in which to experience three artists engaged in similar quests to remould the traditional and familiar.

Richard Bratby

The central performances are tremendous: Glyndebourne’s Luisa Miller, reviewed

Classical

Opera buffs enjoy their jargon. We all do it, scattering words like ‘spinto’ and ‘Fach’ like an enthusiastic pizza waiter with an outsize peppermill. It’s principally a means of signalling that you’re part of the club. But occasionally it’s genuinely useful, and Glyndebourne’s new production of Verdi’s Luisa Miller had me thinking about the concept of ‘tinta musicale’, a term used to describe Verdi’s sense that each of his operas should have its own distinctive sonic colour. The late-summer warmth that suffuses Falstaff, for example, or the maritime translucence of Simon Boccanegra. Or take La traviata: the enervated violins of the prelude, the hectic brilliance once the curtain rises.

19 August 2021

Michael Hann

What a genuine delight to be among people: Gorillaz, at the O2, reviewed

Pop

The new music economy relies on cross-promotion and artists reaching out to different scenes. And the rise of streaming means everyone can hop between audiences with ease, hence those singles apparently by one person but with a cricket team’s worth of other names credited. As the Beach Boys once sang, ‘you need a mess of help to stand alone’. Alongside the featured artist sausage factory there are musical patrons. Take Damon Albarn, who has spent much of the past 20 years elevating the work of other artists, using the strength of his own name — made, of course, as the frontman of Blur — to promote music that might otherwise slip past his core audience.

12 August 2021

Rod Liddle

Hugely unmemorable: Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever reviewed

The Listener

Grade: C+ Time to get the razor out again — Billie’s back. The slurred and affected can’t-be-arsed-to-get-out-of-bed vocals. The relentless, catatonic introspection, self-pity and boilerplate psychological insights. The queen of sadgurls has a new album — and yes, of course, the title is the closest Billie has ever come to making a joke. Of course she’s not happy — that would be her schtick sold down the river. If Billie ever professed herself really happy her fans would quickly go elsewhere to slake their misery jones. Eilish has talent, along with the over-weening narcissism that comes with affording your every feeling a sense of great, dramatic import. But it is spread very thin here.

5 August 2021

Richard Bratby

Ecstasy from Birmingham Opera Company: Wagner’s RhineGold reviewed

Classical

At the end of Birmingham Opera Company’s RhineGold, as the gods stood ready to enter Valhalla, Donner swung a baseball bat and summoned a rainbow bridge of human bodies — crawling, abject, before the new lords of creation. It was pretty much what we’ve come to expect from BOC’s founder Graham Vick, a director who never hints at a contemporary social message when he can ramraid our consciousness with one. Here, though, there was another twist of the knife. The human bridge was made up of delivery couriers, complete with branded cagoules and cycle helmets. Didn’t someone describe lockdown as ‘middle-class people hiding while working-class people bring them things?’. A smart touch, and vintage Graham Vick. Except Vick wasn’t there.

Graeme Thomson

When musical collaborations go right – and when they go horribly wrong

Pop

Big Red Machine release their second album later this month. It’s a fine name for ten tonnes of agricultural apparatus but perhaps not quite so persuasive for a pop group, particularly one with a considerably lower profile than most of its members. A collective formed by the National’s Aaron Dessner and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, Big Red Machine has corralled the likes of Robin Pecknold (Fleet Foxes), Sharon Van Etten and Taylor Swift into making a collaborative record called How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?. It sounds intriguing on paper, but the quality of musical collaborations is notoriously hard to gauge from the cast list.

29 July 2021

Richard Bratby

Springtime for Putin: Grange Park’s The Life and Death of Alexander Litvinenko reviewed

Opera

Alexander Litvinenko lies in a London hospital, dying of polonium poisoning. That photograph from 2006 haunts the memory: the medical robe, the electronic monitors, Litvinenko’s accusing gaze and bald, ravaged head. But in case we needed reminding, Grange Park Opera handed out copies of Death of a Dissident, the account of the crime by Litvinenko’s widow Marina, and the principal source for Anthony Bolton and Kit Hesketh-Harvey’s new opera The Life and Death of Alexander Litvinenko. Minutes later, a hospital bed rolled on stage replicating that exact image. And then Litvinenko — the tenor Adrian Dwyer — opened his mouth and started to sing. Opera plays a high-stakes game with dramatic realism at the best of times, but this was startlingly upfront.

22 July 2021

Richard Bratby

Zips along with enormous vim: Malcolm Arnold’s The Dancing Master reviewed

Opera

Malcolm Arnold composed his opera The Dancing Master in 1952 for BBC television. It never appeared, the problem being the source material — William Wycherley’s 1671 farce The Gentleman Dancing Master. Jokes about wedding nights and ‘scarlet foppery’ might have flown in the reign of Charles II but the New Elizabethans at Broadcasting House were altogether more shockable. ‘Too bawdy for family audiences,’ was Auntie’s official verdict, leaving The Dancing Master largely forgotten until a premiere recording late last year, and now — conducted by John Andrews and using almost the same cast — its first ever professional production, at the Buxton International Festival.

15 July 2021

Michael Hann

The real death of rock

Pop

What would a rock band have to do now to be seen as heralding the future? Twenty years ago, it was enough to be in possession of sharp cheekbones, tight jeans and 11 fantastic songs. The first album by the Strokes, Is This It, was released 20 years ago this month. It spread around the world in a way that would be impossible now. Only Australia got the album in July 2001. The UK release was not for another month, to tie in with the Reading and Leeds festivals. The US vinyl version was released on 11 September, but the CD edition was held back, so they could remove the song ‘New York City Cops’, whose refrain of ‘they ain’t too smart’ didn’t itself seem too smart in the wake of 9/11.

Richard Bratby

Comedy genius: Garsington Opera’s Le Comte Ory reviewed

Classical

Melons. An absolutely cracking pair of melons, right there on a platter: the centrepiece of the banquet that the chaste, all-female inhabitants of the castle of Formoutiers have provided for their surprise guests, a band of nuns. Except these sisters all seem to be singing well below the stave, and judging from the way she adjusts her crotch, Mother Superior has something more than a chastity belt beneath her habit. We all know where this is going. You can’t get your melons out on stage unless, sooner or later, some great hairy bloke in a wimple is going to shove them down his front. It’s the law.

8 July 2021

Alexandra Coghlan

The finest Falstaff you’ll see this summer

Opera

Comedy’s a funny thing. No, seriously, the business of making people laugh is as fragile, as mercurial as cryptocurrency — a constellation of shifting risk factors, many beyond control, any of which can kill a joke deader than Dogecoin. Opera is already at a disadvantage. Timing — comedy’s accelerant of choice — is predetermined, dictated by the demands of unwieldy choruses and slow-moving sets, pinned down to the second by a score whose creator may be anything but a natural comedian. Just ask Verdi, whose early farce Un Giorno di Regno was such a comprehensive flop that he gave up the genre altogether for almost an entire career. But at 75, all but retired after a sequence of bloody tragedies, the composer returned for one last shot at comic victory.

Rod Liddle

Is there anyone more irritating and stupid than Bobby Gillespie?

The Listener

Grade: B– Is there anyone in rock music more irritating and stupid than Bobby Gillespie? The rawk’n’roll leather-jacketed self-mythologiser. The affected drawl. The shameless pillaging of every hard rock album made between 1969 and 1972, but especially the Faces and the Rolling Stones. The moronic lyrics. The hard-left radical chic posturing and condemnations of Israel from a man with all the geopolitical understanding of a nipple-clamp. The desperate, pathetic, yearning to be cool. Trawl back through those Primal Scream albums and show me a moment of true originality. There isn’t one, is there? Which isn’t to say that — annoyingly — they’re devoid of fun and the occasional good tune.