Culture

Gerald Barry loved playing organ for Protestants as they allowed him a lie in. Then they found out he wasn’t Protestant and sacked him. When he moved to a Catholic church, he was forced up at the crack of dawn, so he punished the congregation by not giving them the chance to breathe between verses. He has a similarly cruel approach to the singers in his latest opera Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, whose voices he puts through the wringer, compelling them to squawk or chunter — or recite the ‘Jabberwocky’ in German. Barry has to be one of the most enjoyably contrary composers alive, but he is also, I fear, a sociopath, and I’m not sure the two things are entirely unrelated.

A couple of weeks ago, George Michael announced he was collaborating with another songwriter, Shahid Khan, and for his fans (myself included) it was set to be a highlight for 2017. The strange thing about his music was that it just got better, even if his newer releases had only a fraction of their earlier profile. Some of his greatest songs (like Waltz Away Dreaming with Toby Bourke, above) are hardly known at all. He'd go through quiet phases, followed by an creative bursts and he might well have managed one again. But about an hour ago, it was announced that he has died, aged just 53. George Michael's voice could be recognised, instantly, anywhere.

We’re closing 2016 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 9: James Woodall on celebrating the musical contribution made by the forgotten Beatle: Ringo Starr ‘He was the most influential Beatle,’ Yoko Ono recently claimed. When Paul and John first spotted him out in Hamburg, in his suit and beard, sitting ‘drinking bourbon and seven’, they were amazed. ‘This was, like, a grown-up musician,’ thought Paul. One night Ringo sat in for their drummer Pete Best. ‘I remember the moment,’ said Paul, ‘standing there and looking at John and then looking at George, and the look on our faces was like ...what is this? And that was the moment, that was the beginning, really, of the Beatles.

Elvis Aron Presley departed this world on 16 August, 1977. Even if you delight in conspiracy theories and believe the film Elvis Found Alive was a documentary, he is currently unavailable for personal appearances. So his presence at the O2 Arena and five other UK cities in November was confined to giant screens. Actually present on the stage beneath was the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra under conductor Robin Smith plus a rhythm section and three backing singers. It’s not the first time something like this has been done — former members of Presley’s band took a similar show around the world and it worked surprisingly well.

For millions of people around the world the shock of the US election results will be enormously magnified by news of the death of Leonard Cohen, 82, a singer poet icon who had long sung about his own impending death. Thin and frail he died in Los Angeles in the early morning hours of November 8 -- the day of the US elections -- according to sources close to the family. A Canadian by birth he had long said that he wanted to be buried in his hometown of Montreal in the family graveyard lying alongside his Jewish forefathers, before any public announcement of his death was made. The formal announcement of his death has only spoken about a public memorial service to be held in the future in Los Angeles and there is no mention of where or when he was buried.

Everyone has a special place in their heart for the late Leonard Cohen – from his 80-something contemporaries to middle-aged musos to teenage girls. The last – quite unusual for an artiste of Cohen's generation, especially one so apparently glum, uncommercial and downbeat – is largely thanks to his composition 'Hallelujah', which was what Alexandra Burke sang to win the X-Factor final in 2008.  It was memorably covered for Generation X by the doomed Jeff Buckley in an angelic rendition on his 1994 album Grace. Oh and also it appears in a very sad moving scene in Shrek. And it's not even Cohen's best song. Cohen himself thought little of it when it trickled out on his 1984 album, Various Positions.

Years ago, when I met a famous concert pianist, I was surprised when he greeted me in a northern accent. A soft one, mind you, but completely intact. I’d assumed that, by the time a conductor or soloist reached a certain level of fame, the northern vowels would have been erased by Received Pronunciation or some painful mid-Atlantic hybrid. I was such a little snob in those days, affecting a languid drawl that had my old schoolfriends in Reading rolling their eyes. But my social climbing had at least given me a good ear for other people’s doctored accents. London was crawling with northern choirmasters and music critics whose self-taught ‘posh’ accents were about as convincing as home-tinted hair (which, incidentally, some of them also sported).

There’s a folder in my computer’s external hard drive in which you’ll find 24 complete recordings of the Bach Cello Suites, 100 recordings of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, 97 of his Sixth, 107 of his Seventh, 65 of Bruckner’s Seventh, 26 of Debussy’s La Mer, 44 Fauré Requiems, 25 Mozart Requiems, 79 Mahler Sixths and 45 Rachmaninov Second Piano Concertos. That sounds as if I’ve moved beyond anorak collecting to compulsive hoarding; or maybe I have delusions of presenting Building a Library on Radio 3 (‘… but only Tennstedt, with his impulsive diminuendo, grasps that the second subject is tragically compromised by the shift to C sharp minor’). Actually, I didn’t really collect them. Someone else did.

Tristan und Isolde Met Opera Live I am sick to death of productions of Tristan und Isolde which leave me bewildered, alienated, distracted from the work and its significance, unable to concentrate on the music. I haven't seen a Tristan which didn't do all these things for many years, and had vowed never to go to another, until the Met advertised its new production, with a starry cast and with Simon Rattle, a conductor who at his best, as he has been recently, is quite wonderful, even revelatory. My hopes were soon dashed.

Music likes to tell the same story over and over again. This is part of its tradition but even individual composers can be drawn back to the same models in attempts to reclothe and reinterpret musical forms and structures and settings of classic texts. This is especially the case with the Crucifixion narrative. Bach is revered for his two Passions — St Matthew and St John — but there have been other ways for composers to relate this story in sound. The Seven Last Words from the Cross is a now defunct liturgical form which attracted the attention of Lassus, Schütz, Haydn, Gounod and César Franck.

I was looking forward to going to Malcolm Williamson’s opera English Eccentrics set to a text by Edith Sitwell at the Peacock Theatre this week partly because my only experience of meeting the composer was so bizarre, not to say traumatic, that I haven’t been able to face listening to any of his copious output since. Not that there have been many opportunities, since he seems to be neglected in concert, on the radio and to a large degree on CD.

The bad news for old rock’n’rollers is that there’s not much time left to stay at Heartbreak Hotel — these days located not at the end of Lonely Street, but on Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis. In October it will close, to be replaced by the demurely named Guest House at Graceland: in reality a swanky new hotel with nearly twice as many rooms as the Dorchester. But this is only the latest addition to Elvis’s former pad since the operating rights were bought by the Authentic Brands Group in 2013.

Forty years ago, I spent 14 hours in a large field near the A1 in Hertfordshire. I had just taken my O-levels, liked Be-Bop Deluxe, Genesis and Rachmaninov, and often danced my head off to The Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. I was confused about girls and worried that I’d chosen one wrong A-level (Ancient History). In the nation at large, Harold Wilson had resigned as prime minister in March. Under James Callaghan, Britain would wobble further into a strife that marked the late 1970s like a purulent eczema. Pop music would start, rather violently, to reflect it. In the polity these were not confident times. Friends had persuaded me to go and see The Rolling Stones, headlining at that year’s Knebworth Festival, a rock jamboree that had begun in 1974.

Walking along the Brighton seafront, I was struck by posters advertising endless tribute acts; among them Suspiciously Elvis, the Small Fakers and The Kinx. The Edinburgh Fringe is much the same. Shows this summer include Dirty Harry: The Ultimate Tribute to Blondie and Billie Holliday: Tribute to the Iconic Lady Day. Or how about Gary Bland’s Mr Romantic: A Tribute to Johnny Mathis — ‘an insight into Mathis’s career, and how Mathis’s music has been a big part of Gary’s life through love, heartache and laughter’. The theatre at Edinburgh, too, is full of remakes. Fancy Dan Choo-Park’s The Song of Beast (after Hamlet), where the Prince of Denmark is teleported to a South Korean slaughterhouse?

Michael Heath, The Spectator’s brilliant cartoon editor, has been on Desert Island Discs - which is like a knighthood, but without the cronyism. He's been talking through his illustrious career and his decades-long association with The Spectator. Subscribers know how well he draws; but his wit is a secret hitherto shared with those of us lucky enough to work with him. The interview (above) shares a bit of that with the rest of the world. Avant-garde jazz, he says, "sounds like fire in a pet shop". "I am the most romantic man you’ve ever met in your life – absolutely, completely certifiably-mentally soppy. If you showed me Bambi, I’d mop the floor sobbing..." "I don’t think there’s any fun without you being depressed at the same time.

Electronic Dance Music is dying. You may not have noticed. It may not affect you directly. But it’s a really big thing and, unless your teenage children have already told you, then you heard it here first. In fact, your teenage children are probably still in denial about it, so go and tell them. Get them back for scratching the car or vaping in the kitchen or whatever pitiful infractions pass for rebellion these days. Tell them: sorry, but electronic dance music is dying. Your rave is going to its grave. Ibiza now exerts the same cultural pull as any other barren 220 square-mile island, including the Isle of Man. The DJ has been hung, not by Morrissey as some of us hoped, but by his own corporate greed.

This must rank as the most heartbreaking example of premature chicken-counting in musical history. ‘Gotter has made a marvellous free adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest,’ wrote poet Gottfried Bürger to the translator A.W. Schlegel on 31 October 1791. ‘Mozart is composing the piece.’ Three days later, brimming with misplaced confidence, the dramatist Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter confirmed that ‘the edifice is all ready to receive Mozart’s heavenly choruses’. By 5 December 1791, Mozart was dead. Most probably, he never saw Gotter’s Tempest adaptation, although the musicologist Alfred Einstein stirred the pot of Mozartian myth by presuming that the master had set to work on it during his dying days.

After peaking at around the tenth instalment, birthday celebrations get progressively less interesting, for their subjects at least. I remember the lunch we held for my great-aunt Winnie’s 100th birthday. It was a jolly affair and she received the toast with a fine speech of thanks. When the cheering subsided, she delivered the speech again, verbatim. Classical music nowadays seems largely to be propped up by birthday celebrations for people who couldn’t care less, mostly because they’re dead. For some decades, the planning of concert seasons has come down to whether the number of years since a composer died or was born has a zero on the end of it.

In a week that saw the UK vote itself out of the EU, the resignation of David Cameron followed by most of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, the audience who dutifully trooped to the Royal Albert Hall this Sunday for a concert celebrating the 2,000th performance of Karl Jenkins’ The Armed Man – A Mass for Peace were clearly looking for reassurance. And reassurance is what they got – because whatever happens in the big wide world outside, Jenkins’ music has always been, and probably always will be, utter crap. If you believe ‘crap’ to be unworthy of the critical lexicon, no word could be more apt. Believe me, nothing would have given me greater pleasure than going on record in calling his music shit.

Radiohead have been at the top of the musical tree for so long now that it’s easy to forget what an irreducibly strange band they are. Last Thursday, during the first of their three hugely anticipated gigs at the Roundhouse, they uncharacteristically played three popular favourites on the run — in their defence, it was the encore — causing someone in the audience to call out for another one. ‘No,’ replied Thom Yorke with a smile, ‘this is all getting too much fun.