Culture

Freighted by a 350-year history, the Paris Opéra Ballet is a behemoth of an institution – lavishly subsidised by the state, hampered by barnacled traditions (including compulsory retirement on a full pension at the age of 42) and about twice the size of our own dear Royal Ballet. They do things differently there. Programming favours choreographers such as Pierre Lacotte, Maurice Béjart and Jiri Kylian – relatively unfamiliar in London – and the classics are dressed up in fancily revisionist productions by the company’s overly venerated former director Rudolf Nureyev (transliterated as Nouréev in French).

‘What we want is proper comedy!’ bellows the male chorus in the opening seconds of Prokofiev’s L’amour des trois oranges – in this case, a bevy of Monty Python bruisers in nylon frocks. The audience stirs. We’re being invaded by outsize schoolkids and what looks like a Scandinavian Eurovision entry, pushing through the stalls to the roars and whoops of a more-than-up-for-it student crowd. The previous night, I’d had four hours of manicured Handel and now a solo trombone was blowing raspberries in my face. ‘Stuff your tragedy! Take us out of ourselves!’ Yes, please! Do that. After prolonged exposure to da capo arias, a blast of raucous, multicoloured nonsense felt like shock therapy.

The path that links the Spice Girls to Jeffrey Dahmer – necrophile mass murderer of at least 17 men – is a circuitous and unusual one. It involves the establishment of Mothercare and Harold Wilson’s Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the New York underground of the early 1980s. The thread that joins the ends is a 76-year-old Ohioan called Chris Butler. Butler was part of that art underground in 1981. He was – and is – a musician. Back home in Akron he’d started several bands – the wonderful art rock group 15-60-75 (aka the Numbers Band), and Tin Huey – and he’d brought the newest of them, the Waitresses, to New York. They were signed to ZE Records, an extraordinarily hip label run by a Frenchman, Michel Esteban, and an Englishman, Michael Zilkha.

The Beast in Me is one of those ‘taut psychological thrillers’ that everyone talks about in the office. This might sound disparaging – as it is, obviously – but I have to admit that, having succumbed in desperation (because, as usual, there is so little else on), I did find the show pretty addictive and unusually satisfying. What makes it stand out is that it doesn’t go for the obvious. Yes, its heroine – played by Claire Danes – is feisty, talented and capable. But she’s also whiny, uptight and really quite unsympathetic, as perhaps screenwriter Gabe Rotter intended when he gave her the weirdly repellant name Aggie Wiggs.

It was such an enticing programme, too. The Philharmonia had booked Evgeny Kissin, the last great piano prodigy of the Soviet era and one of the superstars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. And then there was the music: three Russian showpieces, including Rimsky-Korsakov’s enchanting and almost unplayed (in the UK, anyway) single-movement Piano Concerto. Better still, Kissin was down to perform Scriabin’s youthful Concerto in F sharp minor, a private passion that I’ve heard live only twice in four decades. Imagine a Russian Chopin, if Chopin knew how to orchestrate. Gilltburg has the agility and power of an old-school keyboard lion, though he uses it with Bach-like objectivity Too bad.

When Gurdain Ryatt, Ojas Adhiya, Milind Kulkarni and Murad Ali Khan take to the stage at Milton Court this Sunday they will be united by a common language: the tradition of Hindustani Indian classical music, rooted in the north of India. Ryatt and Adhiya’s job will be to keep beats circulating on their pitched, drum-like tablas, while Kulkarni’s harmonium will sustain drones, apparently towards infinity. Khan plays the sarangi, a string instrument famed for its uncanny invocation of the wavering of the human voice. Shankar’s tireless advocacy spawned a crossover culture that he felt too often sullied the very music he loved British audiences have a head start when it comes to appreciating this tradition.

Stravinsky’s The Firebird begins in darkness, and it might be the softest, deepest darkness in all music. Basses and cellos rock slowly, pianissimo, in their lowest register; using mutes to give the sound that added touch of velvet. Far beneath them rumbles the bass drum: a halo of blackness, perceptible only at the very edge of the senses. In Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, with Sir Simon Rattle conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, you felt your hairs tingle before you discerned a note. Seconds later, the very air within the hall seemed to be quivering with sensuous, engulfing bass warmth. You can be sure that Rattle anticipated that sensation; planned for it, in fact, from the moment that he confirmed this short British tour with his new orchestra.