Richard Bratby

Grade: A Maurice Ravel was tougher than he looked. True, he dressed like a dandy and wrote an opera about a dancing teapot. But when he was rejected for military service in the first world war (he was 39 and 5ft) he practically forced his way to the front line as a lorry driver – sheltering for days in a forest near Verdun after his truck was disabled by shrapnel. Apparently, when he visited Vaughan Williams in London he went straight to the Victoria Station grill and ordered steak and kidney pudding. Just when you thought you couldn’t admire the man any more.  It’s the toughness that impresses in this new recording of his Piano Trio. OK, not toughness – more like tautness, perhaps; a clear-eyed, athletic sort of grace.

It’s Arvo Part’s 90th birthday year, which is good news if you like your minimalism glum, low and very, very slow. Lots of people seem to. The London Philharmonic’s concert on Saturday night was a reminder of an earlier, less ingratiating Part: the dissident composer in Soviet-controlled Estonia. Hannu Lintu revived Part’s First Symphony of 1963, and there’s nothing remotely minimal about its opening. There’s a swagger of brass, machine rhythms and an onslaught of string chords in which the dissonances don’t feel aggressive so much as mischievous. This is a young composer taking a manic glee in piling on the wrong notes just because he can.

Puccini’s Turandot is back at the Royal Opera in the 40-year old production by Andrei Serban and… well, guilty pleasure is an unfashionable notion these days, but I still feel a batsqueak of shame at enjoying it so much. It’s not the chinoiserie – anyone who believes that an opera based on an 18th-century Italian pantomime should be taken literally is probably beyond help. No, it’s a Spectator headline from years back that still nags. ‘Turandot is a disgusting opera that is beyond redemption’ was the gist of a review of this same staging by the late Michael Tanner, and if it was anyone else you’d put it down to snobbery and move on. But you can’t do that with Tanner, a thinker of piercing intelligence who spent decades interrogating how opera works and why it matters.

Last week, Barbara Hannigan conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in Haydn, Roussel, Ravel and Britten, though to be honest she had me at Haydn. It’s still relatively unusual to encounter him in a symphonic concert, and more than one promoter has told me that Haydn is ‘box office poison’, which is a shocking description of such life-enhancing music. Perhaps it’s down to sonic overkill. Bingeing on Shostakovich and Mahler has left our emotional reflexes distended and coarsened, and now we feel short-changed if every inch of the concert platform isn’t crammed with extra brass and percussion.

Grade: A– There’s a species of music-lover who enjoys pointing out that Elgar isn’t played much on the Continent – the musical equivalent of those social media bores who pop up each April to reveal that Saint George was Turkish, ackshully. It’s all rot, of course. Some of the best Elgar performances of recent years have come from Barenboim and Petrenko in Berlin; and, after all, it was Richard Strauss in Düsseldorf who put The Dream of Gerontius on the map.  And now here’s Gerontius from Helsinki. True, the conductor, Nicholas Collon, is British and I hadn’t previously had him down as an Elgarian. The choirs are a mixture of Finns and Brits (they blend well) and the soloists are about as fresh a crop as you could hope for right now.

Stephen Hough’s new piano concerto is called The World of Yesterday but its second ever performance offered a dispiriting glimpse into the world of tomorrow. A couple of minutes into the finale Hough stopped playing and the orchestra fell silent. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he explained. ‘My iPad is going crazy.’ A murmur of sympathy, mingled with laughter; then Hough signalled to the conductor Mark Wigglesworth and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and they carried on, this time without mishap. But we’d seen it happen, and until last week I’d have told you it was inconceivable. This wasn’t some rash experiment: professional musicians have been using electronic scores for well over a decade, generally without problems.

Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera Festen opened at Covent Garden earlier this month, and reader, I messed up. I broke my own golden rule with new operas: don’t do any homework, don’t try to memorise the plot, and whatever you do, don’t revisit the source material. The aim is to experience the new work on its own terms. That’s hard enough, given the PR onslaught that precedes any Royal Opera première – the way the classical establishment circles the wagons, and the unspoken consensus that certain living composers (including Adès, Benjamin and Turnage, though not Judith Weir, curiously) are simply too big to fail. But no: I rewatched Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 Dogme movie, twice, and it was the wrong decision. Inevitably, and unfairly, you cross-reference.

I saw the world end in a Bethnal Green leisure centre. Regents Opera’s Ring cycle, which began in 2022 in Freemasons’ Hall in Covent Garden, has found its culmination and completion at York Hall, a rundown public bath better known for championship boxing. Tower Hamlets security staff scan you for concealed weapons on the way in, which is not exactly typical at the opera. Still, the Ring is not a typical opera – and isn’t art supposed to feel dangerous? But once you’re inside – and as long as you’re not seated within earshot of the bar staff, who clatter and chatter throughout – Caroline Staunton’s scaled down production transfers seamlessly; in fact, the sightlines are better.

Grade: B When a music-lover is tired of Haydn’s London symphonies, they’re tired of life. It’s not just the sheer creative verve of these 12 symphonies by a composer in his sixties. It’s the generosity of spirit. Beethoven demands a battle of wills; Mozart a near-impossible grace. But a conductor can run straight at a London symphony and Haydn will show us, with a smile, exactly who they are. Beecham is urbane, Bernstein camps it up; Abbado is trim and impeccably turned out. Eugen Jochum (a belated discovery) is just very, very German. Haydn’s still bigger than all of them. Paavo Jarvi has reached the second volume of his London symphonies with the Bremen-based Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie, and he’s surely never been anyone’s idea of a ray of sunshine.

Next week, after the première of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera Festen, the cast and conductor will take their bow. All being well, there’ll be applause; and then a brief lull as the creative team takes the stage. There’s often a ripple of curiosity in the audience at this point, because it’s rare that we get to see just how many people it really takes to make an opera. Standing near the composer will be Lee Hall, the writer of Billy Elliot and The Pitmen Painters, and now part of the most maligned – and indispensable – profession in all of music. He’s the librettist. In short, Hall wrote the words, and in the world of opera there’s no more thankless task. ‘There’s this snobbery about it, an English snobbery, I suppose,’ he says.

They do things their own way in Liverpool; they always have. In 1997 the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra launched a contemporary music group called Ensemble 10:10 (the name came from the post-concert time-slot of their early performances). For a decade now, they’ve also administered the Rushworth Prize, an annual competition for young composers based in the north-west. And while classical fads and crises have come and gone, the RLPO has held its friends close and tended its garden. The result? The kind of artistic self-assurance that lets you put your chief conductor in charge of a première by a novice composer, and then call in a Barenboim to guarantee a full house.

Once upon a time on Broadway, Igor Stravinsky composed a ballet for Billy Rose’s revue Seven Lively Arts. After the first night, Rose felt that Stravinsky’s efforts might benefit from the attention of Robert Russell Bennett – the king of Broadway orchestrators, who’d collaborated with Cole Porter and the Gershwins. ‘YOUR MUSIC GREAT SUCCESS,’ he telegrammed to Stravinsky. ‘COULD BE SENSATIONAL SUCCESS IF YOU WOULD AUTHORISE ROBERT RUSSELL BENNETT RETOUCH ORCHESTRATION.’ Stravinsky wired straight back: ‘SATISFIED WITH GREAT SUCCESS.’ If you’re mad enough to revive Love Life, you have to commit. Opera North did There were moments in this revival of the Lerner and Weill flop Love Life when I wondered whether Weill, too, might have profited from a Bennett makeover.

It’s a right mess, the classical piano trio; the unintended consequence of one of musical history’s more frustrating twists. When the trio first evolved, in the age of Haydn, the piano (or at any rate, its frail domestic forebear) was the junior partner, and the two string instruments, violin and cello, were added to make the silly thing audible. Then the piano started to evolve, while its partners – give or take the odd tweak – really didn’t, much. The end result, by the second half of the 19th century, completely reversed the original balance of power, leaving the two string instruments thrashing for dear life against the onslaught of that glossy, black, all-devouring monster, the modern concert grand.

Sir Antonio Pappano began 2024 as music director of the Royal Opera and ended as chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. Around the middle of the year, there was a sort of retrospective; a stock-taking, if you like, as he made the transition to this third act of his career. Warner Classics released a box set of Pappano’s recordings with the Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome, where he held the top job from 2005 to 2023. And Pappano published a memoir, My Life in Music – a masterclass in diplomacy. No beans were spilled, and they were never likely to be. You don’t survive 22 years in an international opera house without learning discretion; not, that is, if you intend to remain sane.

John Savournin has been busy. That comes with the territory for a classical singer – things often get a little hectic as the music world barrels towards Christmas. But with Savournin, it’s sometimes hard to keep track of which theatre – which city – he’s in on any given night. ‘This week has been Pirates of Penzance rehearsals at English National Opera,’ he says: we’re a fortnight away from opening night, and he’s playing the Pirate King. ‘On Thursday I was bobbing up to the Lowry in Salford for Ruddigore with Opera North.’ He’s been swirling his cape as Sir Despard Murgatroyd since late October. ‘And yeah – whenever I can, I’ve been checking in on panto rehearsals.

Ivor Cutler called silence the music of the cognoscenti. But there’s silence and there’s silence, and a regular concertgoer hears a fair bit of both. The ability to fold silence into a musical line – to create the impression that a conductor is somehow sculpting a sound which doesn’t exist – is an indicator of high artistry on the podium. This was real: the concentrated hush of 2,700 people listening as if the silence was part of the symphony Conversely, there’s the embarrassing strained silence when, at the end of a work, a conductor decides to keep the baton raised and see how long he can hold back the tide of applause. It’s spray-on sublimity; an attempt to force the illusion of shared transcendence. It’s the musical version of faking an orgasm.

There was some light booing on the first night of English National Opera’s The Elixir of Love, but it was the good kind – the friendly kind, aimed not at the baritone Dan D’Souza but his character, the caddish charmer Belcore. In other words, it was what opera snobs call ‘pantomime booing’, and which, as a peculiarly British phenomenon, they affect to deplore. If it happened in Munich or Milan they’d brandish it as evidence of an advanced opera-going culture – proof that an audience has been so completely transported by a performance that they’re reluctant to step out of its world. But any singer who’s remotely familiar with British theatrical traditions knows that it’s a compliment, and D’Souza beamed. It had been a thoroughly good-natured evening all round.