Music Archives

Dazzling and nonsensical in equal measure: Madonna at the London Palladium reviewed

Pop

You might have thought Madonna was not a singer but a professional footballer judging by the talk before she took to the stage at the Palladium last Wednesday night. She’d missed ten out of 93 appearances, and she’d been picking up the kind of niggling injuries — would her knees stand up to the strains of a long, hard season? How’s her hip? — associated with hard-running midfielders. Just as in the Premier League, there were gripes about ticket prices — go on Ticketmaster and they range from £69 to £511.50 (yes, there are tickets available throughout the run; you’ve got until 16 February to see her).

1 February 2020

Michael Hann

You have to be a terrific snob not to see the appeal of Slipknot

Pop

Every development in heavy music is derided by mainstream critics. When Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin emerged in the late 1960s, they were sneered at for their lumpen, troglodyte stupidity. A decade on, AC/DC were reviled for precisely the same reasons. When Metallica and Slayer helped lead the thrash metal movement in the mid-1980s, it was at first only enthusiasts for extreme noise who cheered them on. The disdain never lasts. People who grew up listening to those bands became critics or editors or broadcasters or musicians, and each of them was absorbed seamlessly into the rock canon. That’s precisely what’s happened to the Iowa band Slipknot, too.

25 January 2020

Richard Bratby

The audience were in tears: Christian Gerhaher/Gerold Huber at the Wigmore Hall reviewed

Classical

‘Popular’ classical music is a relative term. Show me someone who thinks Beethoven is surefire box office, and I’ll show you someone who’s never tried to sell tickets for the Op. 9 string trios. Even Mahler, the blockbuster concert phenomenon of the past four decades, has his limits. Audiences love him, sure. But in 2011, when several orchestras performed complete Mahler cycles, the limits of that love became embarrassingly clear. The Second and Eighth symphonies — roof-raising choral spectaculars — promptly sold out. The gentle Fourth and the knotty, reconstructed Tenth: not so much. As for his songs, forget it. Well, that’s lieder for you.

Michael Hann

Best gig of the week: the fuzzy, slacker melodies of teenage quintet Disq

Music

Come January, when the proper pop stars are all in the gym working off the pounds before they emerge, blinking and svelte, into the watery winter sun, the small venues of London attempt to pack in the curious by filling their schedules with seasons of up-and-coming artists. In east London this past week, the excellent promoter Eat Your Own Ears ran three free nights of new acts. In Islington, the Lexington offered first the Winter Sprinter — five nights of sweet-toothed indie pop, where you might have caught the Portland Brothers, the occasional duo featuring Steven Adams, once of the Broken Family Band, and the best songwriter almost no one in the country has heard of — and then the Five Day Forecast, in conjunction with the new music website the Line of Best Fit.

18 January 2020

Richard Bratby

Warmth, energy and gripping momentum: Stephen Hough’s Wigmore Hall residency reviewed

Classical

In the summer of 1878 Johannes Brahms finally succeeded in growing a beard. It was his third attempt. ‘Prepare your wife for the grisly spectacle, for something so long suppressed cannot be beautiful,’ he wrote to a friend, and by all accounts he wasn’t wrong. Clara Schumann pleaded with him to shave it off. She’d have remembered Brahms as the golden-haired 20-year-old who had arrived on her doorstep in September 1853, glowing with genius; in the words of her husband Robert, ‘a young blood at whose cradle graces and heroes stood guard’. For modern listeners, though, the beard has long since conquered — as if, like one of Philip Pullman’s daemons, it somehow embodies Brahms in his gruff and hairy definitive form.

18 December 2019

Richard Bratby

Beer, sweat and jockstraps: the real history of the CBSO

Music

In childhood, the theme tune to The Box of Delights was the sound of Christmas. The melody was ‘The First Nowell’ but that wasn’t what cast the spell. It was the way the harp glinted and pealed, and the eerie wisp of the ‘Coventry Carol’ that drifted through on muted violins: a masterclass in orchestration for a BBC teatime audience. After inquiries at Circle Records in Liverpool (this was pre-Amazon), my father established its identity: the Carol Symphony, by a composer with the pleasingly Edwardian name of Victor Hely-Hutchinson. And that was that, for me anyway, until three decades later, rifling through the archive of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, I noticed the initials ‘VHH’ on files from the 1940s.

12 December 2019

Michael Hann

A son-et-lumière spectacular: The Chemical Brothers at the O2 Arena reviewed

Music

How does one account for the phenomenon that is the Chemical Brothers, a quarter of a century on from their first records, just getting bigger and bigger? Only now are they touring the arenas of the UK for the first time. They’re nominated for a Grammy. Their current album, No Geography, is a top-five hit. Wasn’t the 1990s dance-music explosion meant to have ended with, well, the 1990s? They’re not alone either: Underworld, too, are now playing arenas, and not just to people who want to shout the refrain to ‘Born Slippy’: ‘Lager! Lager! Lager! Lager!’ Perhaps there’s something in the fact that neither group was completely contained by dance music.

Alexandra Coghlan

One hell of a concert: Opera North’s Bluebeard’s Castle reviewed

Music

Freud knew something about fear. Not the sudden shock of terror, but the creeping, sickening, slow-burn horror of the uncanny. A haunted house might make us jump, but how much more pervasive is that fear when the house is our own home, the monsters our own family, our own self even? It’s when the familiar becomes the unfamiliar, when the telephone call is coming from inside our own psyche, that the chills really build. Bartok knew this too. ‘Where is the stage — outside or within?’ asks the spoken Prologue to his one-act opera Bluebeard’s Castle — the young composer’s take on the classic fairytale of a curious wife, her mysterious new husband and his many locked doors.

5 December 2019

Richard Bratby

Sadistic and repellent and thrilling: Mascagni’s Iris reviewed

Music

If you’ve ever felt that poor Madama Butterfly had a bit of a raw deal, then you really, really don’t want to know what happens in Mascagni’s Iris. Take that as a spoiler alert: our Japanese heroine is so young that as the opera opens, she’s playing with a doll. She’s abducted, installed in a brothel and offered up for the delectation of a noble client, whose advances she is too innocent to comprehend. Disowned by her blind father, by the beginning of Act Three she’s literally lying in a sewer listening to disembodied voices telling her that nothing could have prevented this outcome. Obviously, it sounds exquisite. You don’t have to be a social justice warrior to find Iris a bit much.

28 November 2019

Sam Leith

‘My wife sends me sleep bubbles’: The extraordinary world of Pete Townshend

Features

When most rock stars have trouble sleeping, they fall back on Valium, temazepam, heroin or Jack Daniel’s. But Pete Townshend, guitarist and songwriter for The Who and — we’re pleased to discover — Spectator subscriber, isn’t much like most rock stars. Sober now for three decades, he calls instead on his wife Rachel’s psychic powers. ‘Sometimes,’ he says, ‘when I’m having difficulty sleeping, Rachel — who has some… certainly, some kind of healing powers — will say to me, “Do you want me to send you a sleep bubble?” Now, I often go’ — he mimes squirming like a reluctant child — ‘“No, of course I don’t need you to send me a bloody sleep bubble!

Michael Hann

Rap that feels like a sociology lecture: Loyle Carner at Alexandra Palace reviewed

Music

A few years ago, I asked the young American soul singer Leon Bridges — a latter-day Sam Cooke, with the old-fashioned song arrangements to match — if he ever pondered the incongruity of being a black man, backed by a white band, playing music in the African-American tradition to audiences that (in the UK at least) were almost entirely white. ‘I have a song called “Brown Skin Girl”,’ he replied, ‘and I ask “Where my brown-skinned girls at?” And there’s maybe one or two in the crowd. It’s a little awkward sometimes.’ His words came to mind watching Adia Victoria.

Alexandra Coghlan

Handsome and revivable but I wasn’t moved: Royal Opera’s Death in Venice reviewed

Music

Premièred within two years of each other, Luchino Visconti’s film and Benjamin Britten’s opera Death in Venice both take Thomas Mann’s novella as their starting point. But from shared beginnings the two works diverge dramatically. The cloying visual beauty of the film, its pink-and-grey vision of Venice swaddled in Mahler strings, couldn’t be further from the stern, self-loathing austerity of Britten’s last opera, whose beauty is much harder won. The sea that pounds and dashes the Suffolk coast in Peter Grimes is lulled in Death in Venice into the queasy, syncopated swell of the lagoon, a miasma of heat and sickness rising from its waters.

21 November 2019

Michael Hann

Range and power – and amazingly she sang all her songs: Christina Aguilera at Wembley reviewed

Music

In every respect bar its austere pews, the Union Chapel is one of the best venues in London: beautiful and atmospheric, it encourages concert-goers to listen rather than chat. There’s no bringing in booze from the bar, so you’re not disturbed by people going hither and thither (though the couple next to me had smuggled in a thermos of tea and a pack of Choco Leibniz). It suited the Delines, from Oregon, down to the ground. Though they released their first album only five years ago, the Delines are hardly a young band. They’re middle-aged and their songs are middle-aged: sad and weary laments for lives that have slipped out of focus.

Richard Bratby

Ravishing and poignant: ENO’s Orphée reviewed

Music

Billy Wilder, asked for his opinion of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version of his movie Sunset Boulevard, famously replied: ‘Those boys hit on a great idea. They didn’t change a thing.’ I don’t think you could say exactly that about Netia Jones’s new staging of Philip Glass’s Orphée, a piece that takes the script of Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film and turns it into — well, into an opera by Philip Glass. Cocteau’s shimmering cinematic imagery (think Man Ray come to life) defies physical realisation, so Jones and her designers Lizzie Clachan (sets) and Lucy Carter (lighting) have found poetic, often blindingly beautiful theatrical equivalents.

14 November 2019

Damian Thompson

The cult of Trifonov is doing the pianist no favours

More from Arts

Grade: B– Deutsche Grammophon have decided that Daniil Trifonov’s new Rachmaninov piano concertos with the Philadephia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin are a railway journey. The video trailer offers no explanation — but, boy, they certainly threw some cash at their conceit. The pianist is dressed like a Russian anarchist, wandering wild-eyed through a railway carriage. Is he fleeing a ticket inspector? Apparently not, because later he’s playing on the train, presumably in the compartment reserved for grand pianos. Those were the days! Last year we had the second and fourth concertos, entitled Destination Rachmaninov: Departure. Now it’s Arrival — the first and third.

Richard Bratby

Why are Haydn’s operas so lousy? La fedelta premiata reviewed

Music

There’s a book about musicals that every opera lover should read. Not Since Carrie by Ken Mandelbaum is a history of musical theatre’s greatest flops: a comprehensive study of the thousand ways in which a collaborative artform can crash and burn. It’s unbelievable stuff. The Broadway cast of 1961’s Kwamina participated in a voodoo ritual to neutralise the show’s critics (English National Opera is rumoured to be planning something similar). Adverts for Jule Styne’s Subways Are for Sleeping were banned from New York public transport after vagrants took them as an invitation to spend the night on board.

Michael Hann

Fascinating and compelling: Bruce Hornsby at Shepherd’s Bush Empire reviewed

Music

In the unlikely event that Bruce Hornsby and Morten Harket, A-ha’s singer, ended up featuring in the Daily Mail for, I don’t know, getting into a fight in a supermarket over the last luxury Scotch egg, they would be described as ‘“The Way It Is” hitmaker’ and ‘the “Take on Me” star’. In neither case, I suspect, would that be how they would choose to be remembered. In Hornsby’s case, I know it’s not, because he told me so earlier this year. And when he played that song — a piece of high-class MOR so persuasive that it’s been sampled by hip-hop stars and used incessantly in TV montages since 1986 — at his London show, he introduced it by saying it was ‘why some of you are here.

7 November 2019

Rod Liddle

Woke slogans welded to incompetent grunge: Neil Young’s Colorado reviewed

More from Arts

Grade: B- Horribly woke boilerplate slogans welded inexpertly to the usual incompetent Crazy Horse grunge. Young and his pick-up band of now 50-years standing usually work well together — as on Zuma, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and even Ragged Glory. But that’s when there were a few decent songs in the mix, stuffed with compelling ideas and interesting imagery. That sort of thing is in terribly short supply here. ‘She Showed Me Love’ staggers along for an unendurable 13 minutes: ‘I saw old white guys trying to kill mother nature.’ Just old white guys? How about you check out the Indonesian and Brazilian loggers for a second? Then the tuneless thud of ‘Shut it Down’ — ‘shut the whole system down!

Michael Hann

The open-hearted loveliness of Hot Chip

Music

Squeeze and Hot Chip are both great British pop groups. But they never defined a scene. Their ambitions extended further than being hailed by a few hundred people in bleeding-edge clubs. Squeeze piggybacked on punk, but they were quite evidently never a punk group, even if they dressed up as one. They were of the street rather than the art school, but they had no interest in gobbing, and Chris Difford was able to turn vignettes of everyday London life into three-minute comic dramas. (Perhaps he had more in common with John Sullivan — another south Londoner whose characters combined humour and pathos in his scripts for Only Fools and Horses — than he did with Joe Strummer.

Norman Lebrecht

How a City lawyer conquered the hardest piano work ever written

Music

Charles-Valentin Alkan played the piano faster than Liszt and louder than Chopin. The dying Pole left instructions that only Alkan was to be trusted with completing his unfinished Études. Alkan cited Liszt and George Sand as his referees in a bid to be made head of piano at the Paris Conservatoire, but was rejected in what he perceived as an anti-Semitic snub. After one last concert in 1849, Alkan locked himself in his apartment for 20-odd years, emerging finally at the dead of night in the Salle Érard to play for a word-of-mouth audience of professional pianists. He was found dead 15 years later on 29 March 1888, supposedly crushed by a falling bookcase from which he was extracting a top-shelf tome from the Talmud.

31 October 2019

Damian Thompson

In his new piano concerto Thomas Ades’s inspiration has completely dried up

Music

There’s nothing like a good piano concerto and, sad to relate, Thomas Adès’s long-awaited first proper attempt at the genre is nothing like a good piano concerto. Not in the version we heard at its UK première in the Royal Festival Hall, anyway. What a disappointment! Perhaps Adès can rescue it, but he’d have to hack away at the score as ruthlessly as Bruckner dismantling his Third Symphony. That work wasn’t necessarily improved by its revisions but, honestly, almost anything would be an improvement on the first two movements of the 21-minute concerto performed by Kirill Gerstein and the LPO conducted by the composer. You knew there was something wrong after ten seconds.

Rod Liddle

Patently insincere: Kanye’s Jesus is King reviewed

More from Arts

Grade: B– Kanye West has found Jesus Christ. Lucky old Christ. If I were Christ I’d have hidden out a while longer, frankly, but there we are. The most lauded (mysteriously) performer in the world right now wishes us to believe that he has been reborn, as a kind of cross between Billy Graham and the Revd Ian Paisley. The man who previously requested his girlfriend to perform oral sex upon him so that he didn’t get ‘spunk on his mink’ is now instructing people not to have premarital sex. The man who recently described himself as ‘beyond all doubt’ the greatest artist in the entire history of the world is now suffused with humility, as befitting a Christian proselytiser. You can believe this latest schtick if you want; I don’t.

24 October 2019

Michael Hann

Witty, clear-eyed and free of self-pity: Slowthai at Brixton Academy reviewed

Music

Those who cherish the notion that the current prime minister really is ‘electoral Viagra’ should have paid a visit to Brixton last Friday evening to see what actual young people think about him. Before Slowthai — the young rapper from Northampton who ignored complaints about the toxification of political discourse by brandishing a dummy of Johnson’s severed head at this year’s Mercury Prize ceremony — even took to the stage, the 5,000 or so kids took up a chant of their own volition: ‘Fuck Boris! Fuck Boris!’ The Britain of Slowthai and his fans is not one in which anything can be overcome with a bit of Dunkirk spirit.

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

A triumph: ENO’s Mask of Orpheus reviewed

ENO’s Mask of Orpheus is a triumph. It’s also unintelligible. Even David Pountney, who produced the original ENO staging in 1986, admitted to me in the interval that he didn’t have a clue what Harrison Birtwistle’s opera was about. But who cares when, visually and musically, you’re being socked between the eyes? Mask makes sense in the same way an earthquake makes sense. Fittingly we begin with total nonsense: Orpheus, in the bath, attempting to reform language. This is Orpheus the Man, in red velour and gelled-up hair, looking like Rod Stewart. An unlikely charmer of fishes and trees, it has to be said. But soon enough another Orpheus pops up: Orpheus the Myth, looking even worse, like Rod Stewart’s drunk dad.

17 October 2019

Richard Bratby

The joy of Malcolm Arnold’s optimistic, hummable tunes

Classical

Never meet your heroes, they say. But if you grew up with classical music in the 1980s, there was fat chance of that. Stravinsky, Britten, Shostakovich, Walton: you’d just missed them. Which is why, in 2001, and finding myself duty-managing an 80th birthday concert for Sir Malcolm Arnold, I inched past his minders and delivered a few trite, polite but entirely sincere words of gratitude and admiration. No response: Sir Malcolm stared blankly ahead. Then he gripped my hand, and started shaking. And kept shaking, faster and faster, his grip tightening like a vice. Raising his head slightly, and pumping my hand with increasing force, he growled: ‘I’m not letting go until you call me Sir.

Michael Hann

At their best the Psychedelic Furs are fantastic

Music

It’s amazing what the movies can do. In 1986, the John Hughes teen flick Pretty in Pink — the one where poor girl Molly Ringwald and rich kid Andrew McCarthy get it together despite their friends’ disapproval — took its title from a Psychedelic Furs song, which featured heavily in the film. Whoosh! Suddenly they were proper stars. Or rather they were for a year or so. They reformed in 2000, but were just another band on the nostalgia circuit. Then along came another movie, the 2017 arthouse hit Call Me By Your Name, which featured their 1982 single ‘Love My Way’. Since then, the venues have grown again, the reviewers returned and the notices have been glowing. There are even whispers of another album.

10 October 2019

Rod Liddle

Imagine ZZ Top stuck in a lift with Gary Numan: Sturgill Simpson’s Sound & Fury reviewed

More from Arts

Grade: A– The outlaw country genre has shifted a little over the decades since Waylon and Willie, with each proponent trying to out-badass each other, the guitars getting louder, the lyrics either more obtuse or (in the case of David Allan Coe) more obscene. This takes it all one stage further. I don’t think Sound & Fury would go down too well at the Grand Ole Opry: it is more Seattle than Nashville, 40 minutes of howling rawk guitar, ferocious boogies and cheap synths. It sounds, at times, like ZZ Top stuck in a lift with Gary Numan. Grunge, blues, heavy metal, all rendered darkly as if Mark Lanegan were somewhere in the mix.

3 October 2019

Alexandra Coghlan

Joyce DiDonato seduces you within the first 10 minutes: Royal Opera’s Agrippina reviewed

Music

‘Laws bow down before the desire to rule…’ Centuries before ‘proroguing’ had entered British breakfast-table vocabulary there was Handel’s Agrippina, and centuries before that there was the woman herself. Sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius (who she may or may not have poisoned) and mother of Nero (by whom she was eventually executed), Agrippina was a true political animal: instigator, manipulator, machinatrix and far more. It’s a heady story in prose, so add a bit of poetic licence and a score by the 24-year-old Handel and you have a spicy blend of politics, satire and sex — Succession with a Roman accent.

26 September 2019

Rod Liddle

Proggery beyond parody: Iggy Pop’s Free reviewed

More from Arts

Grade: D+ Pleasant memories — of hearing ‘Raw Power’ for the first time and later the amiably shambolic chug of ‘The Passenger’. And of watching my daughter, aged ten, dragged along to some open-air concert where she danced, an ingenue, to ‘Cock In My Pocket’. At least I hope she was an ingenue. All gone. Iggy has been reconditioned. No longer a mentalist drug fiend from Detroit, which was how we liked him, he is now a godforsaken rock institution for the hip middle-class twats who hated him first time around. James Newell Osterberg Jr is an agreeable interviewee and hosts a decent radio show. But sadly someone has told him he is a sage and a great singer. Both verdicts are miles wide of the mark. So there are TRUMPETS on this album.