Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson is an associate editor of The Spectator and presenter of The Spectator’s Holy Smoke podcast

Saturday

Damian Thompson

Getting to know him

Here’s a strange thing about Johann Sebastian Bach. Here’s a strange thing about Johann Sebastian Bach. You can be devoted to his work, love it more intensely than any other music, yet never get round to hearing some of his most awe-inspiring compositions, or even know what you’re missing. There are dozens — literally dozens — of pieces of 24-carat Bach whose names are known only to professional musicians and scholars and are barely represented in the recording catalogue: you might find two good digital performances of them, maybe three. Bach wrote at least 400 Church cantatas, of which half are missing.

Saturday

Damian Thompson

Shop talk

Last Friday I popped into Gramex, the world’s best second-hand classical CD and record shop, just behind Waterloo Station. Last Friday I popped into Gramex, the world’s best second-hand classical CD and record shop, just behind Waterloo Station. The owner took one look at me and declared, ‘This gentleman is tired. He needs a cup of tea and a Belgian bun.’ Before I had time to reply he dashed into the bakery opposite. Two minutes later I sat there, sticky bun in hand, while he put the kettle on. They wouldn’t do that in HMV. Actually, I suspect they won’t be doing anything in HMV by this time next year.

Saturday

Damian Thompson

Pill-popping pianist

What would Glenn Gould’s playing have sounded like if he hadn’t chomped his way through bucketloads of Valium? It’s not a question that is asked in Genius Within, a much-praised documentary about the tortured Canadian pianist that has just been released in Britain. What would Glenn Gould’s playing have sounded like if he hadn’t chomped his way through bucketloads of Valium? It’s not a question that is asked in Genius Within, a much-praised documentary about the tortured Canadian pianist that has just been released in Britain. But perhaps it should have been. In the nine months before his death at the age of 50 in 1982, Gould consumed more than 2,000 pills of every variety.

Saturday

Damian Thompson

Hit Liszt

Damian Thompson highlights the gems among the prolific and pilloried composer’s nine million notes The extraordinary thing about Franz Liszt is that he remains one of the most famous composers of the 19th century despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of his music is forgotten — and likely to stay forgotten. He wrote enough of it, that’s for sure. If you were to listen to his works one after another without interruption, it would take about a week. I’m basing that estimate on the fact that Leslie Howard’s 98 CDs of Liszt’s complete piano music, which are just about to be reissued by Hyperion, last for just over five days. That’s nine million notes spread over 12 miles of printed pages, in case you were wondering.

Saturday

Damian Thompson

MacMillan’s loyalty

In the first week of September, the Scottish composer James MacMillan sat in the ‘composition hut’ in the backyard of his Glasgow house, finishing the music he’d been commissioned to write for the Pope’s Mass at Westminster Cathedral. In the first week of September, the Scottish composer James MacMillan sat in the ‘composition hut’ in the backyard of his Glasgow house, finishing the music he’d been commissioned to write for the Pope’s Mass at Westminster Cathedral. ‘I’m enjoying it — oh, the triumphalism!’ he wrote on his blog. He wasn’t kidding. Two weeks later, as the small, frail figure of Benedict XVI processed into the cathedral, a fanfare sounded over his head.

Saturday

Damian Thompson

Hitting the wrong note

When I told a young pianist that I was planning to write a piece about wrong notes he nearly tore my throat out. ‘I’d like to see you on stage in front of thousands of people trying to play Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto,’ he snapped. My friend hasn’t played the concerto yet and presumably he’s dreading it: even the most seasoned soloists describe its left-hand leaps as the equivalent of a motorcycle jump across the Grand Canyon. At any rate, he left me in no doubt that wrong notes are a seriously touchy subject for pianists. No other instrument commands such a thrilling emotional range — but its demands in terms of memory and motor skills are incredibly cruel. And we pianophiles are cruel, too.

Saturday

Damian Thompson

Eastern promise | 23 October 2010

The Singapore Symphony Orchestra is like a teenage athlete just about to hit peak form. This could be one of the great orchestras of the 21st century. So could its rival, the Malaysian Philharmonic. We all know that Asia produces dazzling soloists. But orchestras? I was sceptical until I heard the Singaporeans at the Southbank Centre this month. Accompanying Stephen Hough in Mendelssohn’s First Piano Concerto, they matched his virtuosity with their bouncy brio. The conductor, Lan Shui (above), had the sections swaying like stalks in a gale in Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead and Debussy’s La Mer. The encores: Bernstein’s Candide overture, taken at a lick that would have raised even Lenny’s eyebrows, and Stokowski’s arrangement of Air on a G String.

Wednesday

Damian Thompson

Between Cameron and the Pope

With preparations for the Pope’s visit to Britain in disarray, the government called in Lord Patten to smooth things out. He tells Damian Thompson why he is up to the task Prime Ministers do not always enjoy reading The Spectator and a month ago we ran a cover story that was — I am told — a ‘real eye-opener’ to David Cameron. We revealed that the Catholic hierarchy in England was hopelessly out of its depth organising the Pope’s visit to Britain and that the event was out of control. Its centrepiece, a Mass at Coventry airport to beatify Cardinal Newman, was about to be cancelled as a result of soaring costs. The first state visit of Mr Cameron’s premiership was in danger. Someone needed to take charge.

Saturday

Damian Thompson

The papal visit is in jeopardy

Damian Thompson reveals the turmoil behind the scenes in the preparations for Pope Benedict XVI’s keenly awaited visit to Britain — and how the trip has been hijacked by a Blairite cadre Last week, the Catholic Arch-bishops of England and Wales were summoned to a private meeting in London where they were given astonishing news about Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain. The pontiff is due in four months’ time (16-19 September), yet preparations were going badly wrong. Some of the major venues, while announced, had still not been booked. And worse, the Church’s share of the cost of the four-day trip had veered wildly out of control, from £7 million to a figure nearer £14 million.

Saturday

Damian Thompson

The public sector at prayer

The government’s fiercely secularist agenda has turned very few Christians into Tory voters. Damian Thompson asks why the Churches have kept faith in New Labour Gordon Brown’s Cabinet is the least Christian in British history. Its members sneer at the Churches’ teachings about sexuality. They bully faith schools with relish, making them talk to primary schoolchildren about sexual intercourse. They are just about to force Catholic schools to advise teenage girls on where to procure an abortion. They want to compel religious institutions to employ people whose beliefs run entirely counter to the values of those institutions. They favour ‘assisted dying’ and are surreptitiously working to enshrine it as a legal right.

Saturday

Damian Thompson

Music and emotion

Damian Thompson says we can learn a lot about Beethoven if we look beyond the symphonies Beethoven Unwrapped is the title of the year-long musical celebration marking the opening of Kings Place, the new ‘creative centre’ at King’s Cross. But does Beethoven, of all composers, need unwrapping? The answer is yes, more than ever, if the process allows us to examine his music without constantly genuflecting in front of the symphonies. The Kings Place festival includes only one live Beethoven symphony: the First, played by the Avison Ensemble next March. That’s fine by me.

Wednesday

Damian Thompson

Is the Catholic Church sliding towards civil war?

Damian Thompson on the bitter feud between the new young defenders of the recently reinstated Latin Mass, and Britain’s ‘magic circle’ of liberal bishops While Church of England bishops recoil from the prospect of gay ‘weddings’ with no precedent in Christian history, their Catholic counterparts are wringing their hands at the growing popularity of services that are too traditional for their tastes. On Saturday 14 June Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, one of the most senior figures in the Roman Curia and an ally of the Holy Father, celebrated a Pontifical High Mass at Westminster Cathedral. The bishop of the diocese, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, did not attend; nor did any of his four auxiliary bishops.

Saturday

Damian Thompson

This is a true Catholic revolution

Next Friday, 14 September, the worldwide restrictions on the celebration of the ancient Latin liturgy of the Catholic Church will be swept away. With a stroke of his pen, Pope Benedict XVI has ended a 40-year campaign to eradicate the Tridentine Mass, whose solemn rubrics are regarded with contempt by liberal bishops. In doing so, he has indicated that the entire worship of the Church — which has become tired and dreary since the Second Vatican Council — is on the brink of reformation. This is an exciting time to be a Catholic. Unless, that is, you are a diehard ‘go-ahead’ 1970s trendy, in which case you are probably hoping that the Good Lord will call Joseph Ratzinger to his reward as soon as possible. First, let us get some terminology out of the way.

Saturday

Damian Thompson

Anglican miracle

Ten years ago, a priest at the Brompton Oratory began a sermon with the words, 'At last, we are witnessing the final disintegration of old mother damnable, the Church of England.' At about the same time, Paul Johnson suggested that the cause for which Thomas More was martyred and Cardinal Newman preached was 'now in sight of victory'. Cardinal Hume, throwing his usual caution to the winds, speculated that the Elizabethan Settlement was at an end. The Protestant nostrils of Ferdinand Mount detected 'an intrusive whiff of incense' in public life: writing in The Spectator on 29 January 1994, he said it would be 'much nicer if some of our best friends could continue to be the affable and self-effacing papists we used to know'.