Martin Kettle's Blog, page 3

Aurora Orchestra/Collon/Power review – Italian immersion with introspective Berlioz and extrovert Mendelssohn

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
Pairing Mendelssohn’s sun-filled Italian symphony with Berlioz’s broodingly romantic Harold en Italie – with actor Charlotte Ritchie on hand to bring Berlioz’s own voice to life - the Aurora Orchestra were on irresistible form

So much shared, yet so utterly different. Mendelssohn wrote his Italian symphony in 1833, revising it the following year. Berlioz wrote his Harold en Italie symphony in 1834, following a stay in Rome during which the two composers had spent quality time together. Thus the Aurora Orchestra came up with the smart idea of putting the two Italian symphonies side by side.

Beyond their loosely shared inspiration and form, however, the two works have little in common. Mendelssohn’s is an expert and extrovert piece of symphonic writing, tight and technically impeccable. That of Berlioz, meanwhile, follows a wandering star all its own, broodingly romantic and constantly innovative, exemplified by the solo viola that depicts the melancholy of Byron’s introspective hero Childe Harold.

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Without dignity, leaders fell at Trump’s feet in The Hague – and for what? All Nato’s key problems remain | Martin Kettle

The relationship with him is still volatile, the Ukraine strategy still unclear and Europe needs to ensure its collective defence

Nato’s Hague summit was an orchestrated grovel at the feet of Donald Trump. The originally planned two-day meeting was truncated into a single morning’s official business to flatter the president’s ego and accommodate his short attention span. The agenda was cynically narrowed to focus on the defence spending hikes he demands from US allies. Issues that may provoke or embarrass Trump – the Ukraine conflict, or whether the Iranian nuclear threat has actually been eliminated by US bombing – were relegated to the sidelines.

Instead, the flattery throttle was opened up to maximum, with Nato’s secretary general Mark Rutte leading the assembled fawning. On Tuesday, Rutte hymned Trump’s brilliance over Iran; yesterday, he garlanded him as the vindicated visionary of Nato’s drive towards the 5% of GDP spending goal. No one spoiled the party. As the president’s own former adviser Fiona Hill put it yesterday, Nato seemed briefly to have turned into the North Atlantic Trump Organization.

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A man of sense and wide sensibilities, Alfred Brendel was simply the pianist of pianists

His technique was of the highest order, his performances unmatched – but it was always at the service of the music, not of his own reputation

Alfred Brendel would have scorned the suggestion he was the world’s leading pianist. He would have dismissed such an accolade as banal, journalistic and ignorant. He would, of course, have been right. Piano playing, he once said, was never sufficient, even when it was faultless.

Yet, for a generation of musicians, especially in Britain, where he lived the second half of his long life, this dismissal of his own greatness could itself be dismissed as false modesty. When London’s Royal Festival Hall, still at that time the capital’s most cherished classical music large venue, reopened after a long renovation in 2007, the choice of its first recitalist was a no-brainer. For his legions of admirers, Brendel was always the one.

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Easy regime change in Tehran is a nice idea. But look to history: it’s a near-impossible one | Martin Kettle

No one doubts the malignity of the Iranian government, but if we forget the tragedies of interventions past, we’ll make the same mistakes

On the eve of the 1991 Gulf war, a TV reporter asked the US commander Norman Schwarzkopf if he would topple Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Stormin’ Norman replied with a memorable succinctness: “Easy say. Hard do.”

Schwarzkopf knew what he was talking about. The general was a lifelong student of the Middle East region – he spent some of his childhood years in Tehran – and of military history. Indeed his successful ground-war strategy for Saddam’s defeat in Kuwait was consciously modelled on the flanking tactics used to such devastating effect by the Carthaginian commander Hannibal to defeat the Romans at Cannae in 216BC.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Rachel Reeves seized her moment – whatever the future brings, Labour’s economic course is now set | Martin Kettle

The chancellor is no mere technocrat: her spending review revealed a visceral commitment to social and economic mobility

The consensus has long been that the 2025 spending review would be a defining moment for Keir Starmer’s government. For once, the consensus proved spot-on. The government’s main priorities were set out on Wednesday in a blizzard of Commons announcements from Rachel Reeves, some economically substantive, others more for show. The upshot is that the shape of the British state, as Labour intends it, is now decided until the eve of the next election.

There are further crossroads still to come, some of them major, as the years covered by the review unroll. Taxes are likely to rise, probably as soon as the autumn budget, to pay for Reeves’s big ticket boosts on Wednesday for defence, health and housing. Council tax could rise too, with possibly dramatic results. The review’s emphasis on capital spending means current spending could be squeezed again, perhaps heralding pay battles. Nevertheless, Labour has set its course.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Così Fan Tutte review – country house remix offers fresh farce and energy

Nevill Holt festival, Market Harborough
Misogynist Don Alfonso is at the centre of things in this opera-within-an-opera benefiting from a witty translation into English, formidable arias and scene-stealing acting

Atop its elegant Leicestershire hill, the operatic foundations of the Nevill Holt festival feel more secure right now than those of the beleaguered state funded companies down in the cities. The stable courtyard at Nevill Holt was converted into a comfortable 400-seat opera house seven years ago, and now this year’s festival also offers the first fruits of a tie-up with Leeds-based Opera North, who will take a new production south for the coming five years.

This summer’s Così Fan Tutte offers alternating casts under the assured and energised conducting of Chris Hopkins. But it is not in every respect a wholly new production. Cecilia Stinton’s direction and George Leigh’s designs provide a specially created version of Mozart’s opera for the Nevill Holt residency. Yet there remain traces, notably in the costumes, of the Tim Albery production that did sterling work for Opera North from 2009. Perhaps it is best to think of this as a country house remix of Albery’s Così.

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Why is defence such a hard sell? The same reason Starmer is struggling in the polls | Martin Kettle

Decades of failures have left liberal democratic governments unable to command public confidence when it really matters

Defence reviews and foreign policy resets seem to turn up almost as often as the Sussexes’ lifestyle brand relaunches these days. Labour’s strategic defence review this week comes less than two years after the Conservatives’ hardly less detailed defence white paper in July 2023, which in turn was a “refresh” of Boris Johnson’s ambitious integrated review of defence and foreign policy of March 2021. By this measure, it must be doubtful if, come the 2030s, analysts will look back on Keir Starmer and John Healey’s review and say it broke the mould.

The Labour government was entitled to try to put its own stamp on defence policy, of course, and its review team of George Robertson, Richard Barrons and Fiona Hill did a good, reasonably independent job. Yet this 2020s pattern of repeated strategic adaptation and refocus feels like the new normal now. It is also true that grand strategy does not often survive prolonged contact with the real world. In wartime, as the US general, later president, Dwight Eisenhower once put it, plans are useless but planning is essential.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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The Queen of Spades review – dark and convincing staging of Tchaikovsky’s compulsive drama

Garsington Opera, Wormsley
Aaron Cawley brings a prodigious intensity to Pushkin’s antihero Hermann, while a fine ensemble and Douglas Boyd on the podium help drive the innovative score forward

Garsington’s production of The Queen of Spades leaves little room for doubt that this is Tchaikovsky’s most substantial and forward-looking operatic achievement. There are a few debatable aspects to Jack Furness’s ingeniously busy production and Tom Piper’s mirror-dominated stage designs, and on the opening night it took time for the show to fully hit its musical stride. Overall, though, this is an overwhelmingly convincing staging of a genuine music drama, and it will surely come to be seen as one of Garsington’s most notable milestones.

The opera’s 18th-century setting, following Pushkin’s short story, is retained. But in every other respect this is an unmistakably dark 21st-century reading. Furness is good at inserting troubling new details into the opera’s apparently sunnier moments, literally so when black curtains zip across the late afternoon Garsington windows. The children playing soldiers on the banks of the Neva are here more sinister than cute, while the costume ball scene is riddled with transgressive suggestion. Suffice to say that the grand entrance of Catherine the Great after the ball scene’s pastorale will not end as traditionalists will expect either.

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In Canada, Charles pushed the boundaries of politics as king. So far, he has gotten away with it | Martin Kettle

Right now, the monarch’s political leanings appear in sympathy with the mood of Britain. But what if the public moves further to the right?

It requires an effort to keep reminding yourself of the sheer historical oddity of monarchy’s healthy survival into the modern democratic age. Yet so rooted is the monarchy in the mental furniture of Britain that most people in our politics barely think about it. This week, however, the modern British monarchy has stood up and demanded to be counted, doing something new and perhaps genuinely consequential.

Judged by any yardstick, Charles III’s visit to Canada was an audaciously disjunctive event. The idea that a vibrant democracy such as Canada, with a highly sophisticated sense of its own complex identity, might summon an elderly hereditary monarch from across the ocean to provide a focal point for its resistance to Donald Trump’s existential threat takes some believing. Yet that was exactly what played out this week, when the king travelled to Ottawa to open the new Canadian parliament.

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Charles has pushed the boundaries of politics as king – and got away with it | Martin Kettle

Right now, the monarch’s political leanings appear in sympathy with the mood of Britain. But what if the public moves further to the right?

It requires an effort to keep reminding yourself of the sheer historical oddity of monarchy’s healthy survival into the modern democratic age. Yet so rooted is the monarchy in the mental furniture of Britain that most people in our politics barely think about it. This week, however, the modern British monarchy has stood up and demanded to be counted, doing something new and perhaps genuinely consequential.

Judged by any yardstick, Charles III’s visit to Canada was an audaciously disjunctive event. The idea that a vibrant democracy such as Canada, with a highly sophisticated sense of its own complex identity, might summon an elderly hereditary monarch from across the ocean to provide a focal point for its resistance to Donald Trump’s existential threat takes some believing. Yet that was exactly what played out this week, when the king travelled to Ottawa to open the new Canadian parliament.

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