Martin Kettle's Blog, page 25

Roger Norrington: a musical revolutionary bids farewell with Haydn, cheer and chat

The conductor’s final ever concert was at Sage Gateshead with the Royal Northern Sinfonia playing an all-Haydn programme. He leaves classical music changed emphatically for the better – and with less of that ‘wobbly stuff’

Not for Roger Norrington a grand and glitzy farewell in the capital surrounded by the metropolitan elite. Instead – good for him – arguably the most important British conductor of the last half century travelled north to bow out. The 87-year-old’s farewell concert took place in Sage Gateshead, directing the Royal Northern Sinfonia in an all-Haydn concert that effortlessly rolled back the years. It reminded us that this is a man who has changed classical music emphatically for the better.

Everything about the event was quintessential Norrington: the choice of Haydn, whom the conductor has described as the composer he would most like to invite – “Joe’s the guy” – to his farewell party. Then the programme: not just two of Haydn’s London symphonies, Nos 101 and 103, but Haydn English language canzonettas sung by Susan Gritton with Steven Devine at the fortepiano, a wind band march, and one of the greatest of Haydn’s string quartets, Op 76 No 5.

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Boris Johnson’s anti-sleaze plan is purely for show. He knows it will not pass | Martin Kettle

The prime minister leads a fractured, ungovernable party that will never agree to a clampdown on second jobs

Under Theresa May and Boris Johnson, the Conservative party has become increasingly ungovernable. The process shows no sign of stopping. It will continue in the next parliament, especially if Johnson wins with a smaller majority.

Let me be clear. This isn’t me speaking: it is the view of a number of current and former Conservative MPs, with different standpoints, whom I have been talking to in recent days and weeks.

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A scoundrel he may be, but Boris Johnson is well placed to ride out this crisis | Martin Kettle

Politics is coarser than it was, the Tory leader is surrounded by loyalists, and no one is wielding the stiletto

In the midst of the Conservative car crash over the Owen Paterson lobbying affair, I asked a very senior Tory if he thought Boris Johnson’s ignominious U-turn would now reshape the party political landscape. He replied with the words of the instinctive pragmatist: “We will see. In politics, nothing matters – until it does.”

Plenty would say this is a moment when it matters. Labour seems re-energised by the anti-sleaze campaign. Charges against Tory MPs Geoffrey Cox, Iain Duncan Smith and Daniel Kawczynski have given the Paterson outrage fresh legs. Reporters across Fleet Street are digging for more scandals. Columnists – not just on this newspaper – are plundering the thesaurus for condemnatory language with which to damn the scoundrel in Downing Street.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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RPO/Petrenko review – British focus for ambitious orchestra’s new era

Royal Festival Hall, London
New Royal Philharmonic music director Vasily Petrenko excelled in pacey but nuanced performances of Walton and Elgar, with violinist Ning Feng the dazzling soloist

After 15 successful years in Liverpool and six in Oslo, Vasily Petrenko’s appointment as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra’s music director was something of a coup. There was immediate proof of this in the Russian conductor’s ambitious and generally excellent Festival Hall debut concert in his new role. There were also plenty of signs that, under this conductor, the RPO’s profile is likely to rise just at a time when the orchestra, and musicians generally, most sorely need it.

Petrenko’s theme in this first season will be British music, and the series is being marketed by the RPO under the impeccably post-Brexit catchline of “Freedom, Hope, Adventure”, that is sure to get the new culture secretary’s approval. Future concerts will include major works by Holst, Vaughan Williams, Britten, Walton and Elgar, and it was the last two who provided the bookends of this programme.

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Owen Paterson’s escape shows that the sleaze era is back | Martin Kettle

Despite the former minister being found in clear breach of lobbying rules, Tory MPs have stepped back to the corrupt past

Remember the collective shock that greeted the murder of David Amess less than a month ago? Back then, devastated parliamentarians of all stripes queued up to mourn their slain colleague as a victim of violent and unjustified public contempt towards working MPs.

Yet now, many of the same parliamentarians have taken a giant’s stride away from that reflective mood. Instead they have invited the public to stoke its contempt afresh. Not content with dismissing the motion to suspend the Conservative MP Owen Paterson over breaches of lobbying rules, today MPs overturned the entire system of parliamentary standards in place since the sleaze crisis of the 1990s. They did it, what’s more, with the government’s explicit encouragement.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian associate editor and columnist

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Germany's election result could soon be inspiring Europe's centre left | Martin Kettle

If Olaf Scholz becomes chancellor after his narrow victory, progressives across the continent will be trying to imitate him

Germany’s general election signals far more than just the end of the Angela Merkel era. Although it will eventually produce yet another centrist coalition government, this should not be dismissed as simply the same old same-old. For the new government will represent several steps into the unknown. There will be significant lessons and lasting political consequences – for Germany above all, but also for the continent of which, in spite of everything, Britain remains part.

Even without Merkel at the helm, Germany remains Europe’s economic powerhouse and principal regional player. That will not change. Yet, with no party exceeding 26% of the votes after last Sunday’s contest, German voters have ushered in a new and more fragmented political order. For the first time they face government by a three-party coalition, not the more familiar two.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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LSO/Rattle review – a Brucknerian labour of love

Barbican, London
Simon Rattle has become a very fine and authentic Brucknerian, as this fascinating concert – offering insights into the composer’s fourth symphony – revealed

Bruckner is not the only composer whose music exists in several revisions. But he has few rivals as music’s most compulsive tinkerman. Bruckner’s fourth symphony, in particular, underwent multiple and substantial alterations between its first incarnation in 1874 and its more or less final version in 1881 that is among his most popular works. Some of the most important examples provided the inspiration for this highly imaginative LSO concert under Sir Simon Rattle.

In the first half, Rattle directed the LSO in discarded movements from earlier versions of the symphony: a scherzo that was later dumped in favour of the more familiar “hunting” alternative, and the composer’s second shot at writing the finale, a movement that continued to trouble Bruckner for years. In part two, Rattle then gave the world premiere of a new reworking of the symphony’s final version by Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs for the Vienna-based Bruckner complete edition and published this year.

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Glyndebourne Tristan und Isolde review – Ticciati impresses in pared back Wagner

Glyndebourne, Lewes
Fine conducting by Robin Ticciati and superb playing by the London Philharmonic Orchestra lift this semi-staged Wagner

Glyndebourne’s original plans for 2021 envisaged a fully staged summer revival of the late Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s distinguished production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Things have not worked out that way because of Covid, but the Tristans have gone ahead nevertheless, in semi-staged performances directed by Daniel Dooner, described as being based on Lehnhoff’s restrained and reflective account.

Semi-staged Wagner is familiar from the concert hall, and these performances are in that mould. The main stage is given over to the full-strength London Philharmonic Orchestra under Robin Ticciati, while the singers perform on an apron and the chorus is pre-recorded. In truth, vanishingly little of Lehnhoff’s staging, and almost nothing of the sets and props, survive.

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Overconfident and rebellious – Johnson will rue the day he made a Tory party in his own image | Martin Kettle

Clashes over the climate crisis and Covid are revealing deep divisions in government. A time of reckoning is approaching

Compared with the fate of the globe, that of Boris Johnson is infinitesimally trivial. Yet the two things are interconnected. In November, Johnson hosts what is likely to be a knife-edge Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow. At the same time he faces an autumn of acute political dilemmas at home, in which his own future as Conservative leader will be on the line. Truly the coming months are a season of reckoning – for the planet and the prime minister alike.

This week’s report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) posed existential questions for the nations when they come to Glasgow. But it also highlighted issues that are becoming increasingly important to Johnson’s own survival. He is the leader of a Tory party that bridles both ideologically and financially at the hard and expensive choices – on everything from aircraft and cars to home insulation and power generation – that are umbilically linked to his net-zero-by-2050 pledges and to the implications of the IPCC report.

Related: There is no ‘getting back to normal’ with climate breakdown | Mark Blyth

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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As our Olympians bring us together, so our politicians tear us apart | Martin Kettle

Team GB’s athletes embody a pluralist national vision, while political GB show us the worst of ourselves

I accept that the Olympic Games leave some people cold. There are those who don’t like sports at all. There are those who are scornful about some activities that now qualify as Olympic sports. Then there are those who insist it is all a waste of money, those who think it’s been poisoned by drugs and politics, those who bridle at the parochial media coverage and those who seem reflexively determined to dislike anything popular.

I’ll admit there have been times, especially during the cold war and the drug scandals, when I dallied with some of those thoughts about the Olympics myself. But London 2012 blew them out of the water. That experience was almost universally positive. It was also unambiguously good for Britain. It would have been churlish and out-of-touch to ignore the shared pleasure that surrounded those games. This year, in very different and more difficult circumstances, Tokyo 2020 has confirmed that conversion. These games have also been a global affirmation. Most of the public is captivated. And the experience has been good for a battered Britain, too.

Related: Team GB make best start to an Olympic Games in modern times

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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