Martin Kettle's Blog, page 2

Royal Concertgebouw/Mäkelä review – Proms showcase legendary orchestra and its star signing

Royal Albert Hall, London
The masterly Amsterdam ensemble were at the Proms for two concerts with their Chief Conductor Designate Klaus Mäkelä. In works by Berio, Mahler, Mozart, Prokofiev and Bartók there was dazzling playing and immaculate attention to detail

The 2025 Proms are turning towards the final stretch. That means it’s time for more visiting orchestras. The Leipzig Gewandhaus and the Melbourne Symphony are among this week’s arrivals. But the past weekend belonged to the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. No visit by Amsterdam’s finest is to be missed, but these two Proms in less than 24 hours brought something more – the starry presence of Klaus Mäkelä, who becomes the RCO’s chief conductor in 2027 and who currently has the musical world at his feet.

The obvious challenge in judging whether the two will become a perfect fit is that the RCO are simply so good. The warmth and precision of the Amsterdam string sound is legendary, while the RCO offers listeners wind playing to die for. So strong is the squad that, like a top football club, many principals who played in the visit’s first concert of Berio and Mahler were rotated in the second, consisting of Mozart, Prokofiev and Bartók.

Continue reading...

A Mass of Life review – magical and ecstatic Proms performance of Delius’s magnum opus

Royal Albert Hall, London
Mark Elder and the BBC Symphony Orchestra make such an outstanding case for Delius’s setting of Nietzsche that its 37-year absence from the Proms is baffling

It is 37 years since A Mass of Life was last done at the Proms, and that 1988 outing was only the second complete Proms performance. The neglect is barely credible, and this outstanding occasion showed what audiences have been denied. If ever there was a piece ideally suited to the Royal Albert Hall it is Delius’s voluptuous 1905 magnum opus, with its double chorus, vast and sensuous orchestration, and the ecstatic affirmations of its Nietzsche text. And no conductor is more ideally suited to bringing all this together than the lifelong Delius advocate Mark Elder.

Why the disregard? Partly, perhaps, the enduring boldness of Nietzsche’s atheist polemic Also Sprach Zarathustra, from which the text is culled. The main reason, though, is surely that Delius’s defiantly individual aesthetic – “a little intangible sometimes but always very beautiful”, as Elgar, no less, put it so well – remains a hard sell to audiences who want their music to have more obvious structure and progression.

Continue reading...

Nicola Sturgeon’s immense political talent is undeniable. The nationalism was the problem | Martin Kettle

Many of her admirers gloss over her desire to break up the UK as Scotland’s first minister. But in her open and touching memoir, it plays a starring role

Nicola Sturgeon was – and still is – important, talented, personable and, to many, inspirational. She was also extremely lucky and often wrong, sometimes seriously so. There are examples of all these qualities in her newly published memoir, Frankly. Sturgeosceptics should concede at once that it contains much that is fascinating, especially about her relations with her charismatic mentor turned vengeful enemy Alex Salmond. Starry-eyed Sturgies should equally admit she made several deep and lasting errors that have left behind a divided nationalist party and movement.

The book is more open and touching about private issues than most political memoirs, although Sturgeon deploys these qualities selectively. Many of the intimate reflections are about being a woman in politics. Other memoirs by female politicians – including those of Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel – leave such subjects alone.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please .

Continue reading...

The biggest problem for Starmer and co: the machinery of government is broken and they can’t fix it | Martin Kettle

The prisons crisis is symptomatic of a dysfunctional system that is defeating these ministers as badly as those before them

In one of my favourite Seinfeld episodes, George Costanza is sitting in a New York diner and – this shows how long ago it was – reading his morning paper. Suddenly he folds the paper up, sets it down on the table and looks across to his companion with weary exasperation. Why, he asks, does the high-minded New York Times refuse to accept that China is a turn-off?

Just like George, many readers will at some stage probably have experienced a similar feeling. Perhaps it was about China, but perhaps about something completely different. Call it the “not right now” syndrome. It is the syndrome that recognises that a subject might be important, but reading a lengthy report about it can be another thing altogether.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

Continue reading...

Lim/CBSO/Yamada review – wonderful Rachmaninov and a swirling Sinfonia

Royal Albert Hall, London
Young Korean Yunchan Lim naturally conjured a willing audience into silence with his commanding range after an alarm disrupted the popular pianist’s Prom

London’s Koreans helped ensure a sold-out Royal Albert Hall for the Proms return of Yunchan Lim on Friday night, paired this time with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Kazuki Yamada. But Lim doesn’t just shift tickets. His huge social media following ensures waves of global attention for everything he does or that is written about him.

This Prom will achieve this for an unusual reason. Soon after Lim began Rachmaninov’s fourth piano concerto, a distant alarm started ringing in the Albert Hall. Red lights flashed high up. Yamada and Lim pressed on. At the end of the movement, Yamada left the podium and disappeared off-stage, leaving the musicians and audience uncertain. After about five minutes, though it felt longer, the red lights stopped, the alarm was silenced and Yamada returned, to applause and relief all round.

Continue reading...

Critics say Starmer is no Attlee – and they’re right. Labour must look to the future, not the past | Martin Kettle

All Labour leaders live in the shadow of his postwar triumphs. But he wasn’t perfect – and didn’t face the challenges of today

We raised a glass last Saturday evening, the four of us, to toast the 80th anniversary of the 1945 Labour government. None was old enough to remember the event itself, but three of us were born while Clem Attlee was prime minister. In a funny way, I still take a kind of childish pride from that inheritance, as if a piece of that distant era somehow transferred itself by osmosis into my DNA. A photograph of Attlee in old age, taken and given to me by the late Sally Soames, is a treasured possession too.

Our little group was certainly not alone this summer in marking Attlee’s anniversary. There have been TV documentaries and, most substantially, David Runciman’s fascinating Postwar series on BBC Radio 4. All of these start – and Runciman’s series also ends – with the same enduringly astounding fact about Britain in 1945. Weeks after Winston Churchill had led the country to victory in the war in Europe, the voters rejected him by a landslide in favour of Attlee’s Labour.

Continue reading...

Letter: Lord Lipsey obituary

Among his multiple accomplishments and achievements, the commitment of David Lipsey to classical music education stood out. Unlike too many politicians, who merely talk the talk about the arts, David walked the walk.

He was chair of governors at Trinity Laban Conservatoire, 2012-17, leading its transformation into Britain’s first university level college of both music and dance, and establishing Trinity Laban as the inclusive and innovative creative institution it is today.

Continue reading...

With Cleverly centre stage, the Tories have a new look – but that isn’t the same as a plan | Martin Kettle

Does Kemi Badenoch’s elevation of a former rival mean the Reform-lite strategy is over? I don’t know and I’m not sure she does either

It hardly compares for importance with all the cruelties in Gaza or Sudan. But then little else does that at present. It caused barely a ripple on the parochial surface of British politics either. That’s hardly surprising at a time when Downing Street is warning about summer riots. Tellingly, the Daily Telegraph itself could only muster a single front-page paragraph on it on Wednesday, underneath Ozzy Osbourne’s death and the England women’s football extra-time squeaker.

Yet Kemi Badenoch’s shadow cabinet reshuffle this week should not be totally dismissed. See it instead as an inadequate recognition of an indisputable problem for any contemporary centre-right party, as well as an incoherent attempt to address it. If the Conservative party is very lucky, the reshuffle could be the start of better times. But it is nowhere near that point today. Right now, the reshuffle counts as the merest glimmer amid the Tory gloom. But a glimmer all the same.

Continue reading...

For all the errors and crises, the blight on Starmer’s first year is still the lack of vision | Martin Kettle

Prime ministers have recovered from bad starts. But unless Starmer can articulate an idea of the Britain he wants, the public – and his party – may desert him

There will be no birthday candles in Downing Street this week. Nor should there be. Twelve months after Labour’s landslide election win on 4 July 2024, Keir Starmer’s government has capped a year in office with a week of political dishevelment and ineptitude. The welfare reform bill itself is now a meaningless shell. The Labour party is united only in its frustrations.

The welfare rebellion was not a bolt from the blue. Instead, it provides the keystone to an arc of earlier blunders. It poses urgent issues about professional incompetence in Labour’s Westminster machine. It embodies what is not working in the way Starmer’s top-down party does politics more generally. This will not be the end of it, as the furore over Rachel Reeves’s tears at a raucous prime minister’s questions seems to confirm. Things can’t go on like this.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

Continue reading...

Pelléas et Mélisande review – Longborough’s staging is accomplished and atmospheric

Longborough festival opera, Moreton-in-Marsh
Anthony Negus is attentive to the subtleties of Debussy’s translucent score, and, matched by Jenny Ogilvie’s darkly mysterious production, this makes for one of the most successful shows Longborough festival has ever mounted

Anthony Negus’s conducting of Wagner has long been the chief musical glory of the Longborough festival. Now he has turned his attention to Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, an opera on which he assisted Pierre Boulez at the Welsh National Opera more than 30 years ago. The results are no less unmissable and authoritative as his Wagner.

From the dark chords of the opening bars, Negus conjures a fluently idiomatic reading of the translucent score. The pacing is beautifully controlled and Negus is always attentive to Debussy’s many tone colour changes and subtle dynamic contrasts. He draws some ravishing woodwind playing from the Longborough orchestra.

Continue reading...