Martin Kettle's Blog, page 33
June 26, 2020
Mark Padmore/Mitsuko Uchida review – Wigmore recital series ends on compelling and sombre note
Wigmore Hall/BBC Radio 3
Padmore and Uchida’s punctilious and austere reading of Schubert’s Winterreise gave this final recital depth and clarity
When June’s Wigmore Hall concerts were announced one wondered if it were a misjudgment to end them with Schubert’s Winterreise. To be fair, the schedulers weren’t to know that this final concert would be a winter’s journey undertaken in a summer heatwave, but the most introspective of song-cycles nevertheless seemed a bleak message with which to close a season that was conceived affirmatively and has been widely greeted as an important act of cultural rebirth.
Not for the first time, the Wigmore’s John Gilhooly proved to be ahead of the game. Not only did Mark Padmore and Mitsuko Uchida produce the compelling account of Schubert’s 24 songs that might have been expected from them, their performance also seemed to make the larger artistic connection between the isolation at Winterreise’s core and the possibility that isolation is now to be the fate of the performing arts after the pandemic. Gilhooly’s valediction to this remarkable series of concerts that prefaced the concert seemed to suggest that isolation – if not extinction – could well be the fate of live arts without government aid.
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June 24, 2020
On different planets: how Germany tackled the pandemic, and Britain flailed | Martin Kettle
From health spending to test and trace, the German response to coronavirus has many lessons for the UK. Can we learn them?
Rest assured that this is a column about politics, not football. Nevertheless the most resonant political insight of the week has come from Liverpool’s manager Jürgen Klopp, who has guided his team to the threshold of winning the Premier League. On the eve of the resumed 2019-20 football season, Liverpool’s German coach was asked last weekend whether he had ever worried about the dangers of the Covid-19 pandemic to the completion of the season. His answer was one to savour.
“The problem I had,” replied Klopp, “was that I was getting the news from Germany as well as from England. I had no idea of the pandemic situation in Italy or France, but I do know exactly how it is in England and Germany, and an alien looking at it from outside would think we came from two different planets.”
Related: Meat plant must be held to account for Covid-19 outbreak, says German minister
Related: Germany and France reopen borders as Europe emerges from lockdown
Continue reading...June 17, 2020
Boris Johnson's U-turn shows the assault on liberal values is faltering | Martin Kettle
The free school meals debacle is a sign the party is turning against Dominic Cummings’ influence
Harold Wilson – who lost his only election as Labour leader half a century ago today – once said a week is a long time in politics. If that was right, then how long is an entire year?
Eleven months ago, the Conservative party looked into the abyss and decided Boris Johnson was the right answer to its (and Britain’s) problems. It did this because most Tory members, though not most Tory MPs, thought he would deliver the hard Brexit they favoured, and be electorally popular.
Related: Incompetence is a built-in feature, not a bug in Boris Johnson's government | Rafael Behr
Johnson appears to have evacuated the middle ground and, at Cummings’s direction, pitched his tent on the right
Continue reading...June 15, 2020
Imogen Cooper review – beautifully executed keyboard colour
Wigmore Hall/BBC Radio 3
Cooper’s hauntingly atmospheric encore alleviated the mood of seriousness that she brought to this programme of Schubert and Beethoven
The Wigmore Hall’s lockdown concerts are so life-enhancing that one straps on one’s tin helmet before offering even a mite of criticism in connection with musical events that richly deserve to live long in the memory. Nevertheless, helmet on and here goes.
It was not until Imogen Cooper’s tantalisingly brief encore in this third piano recital in the series that a single note of 20th-century solo piano music has been heard at all this June. To rub salt in the wound of what might have been, Cooper’s playing of Dobrou Noc! (Good Night!) from Janáček’s cycle On an Overgrown Path, at the end of a recital of Schubert and Beethoven, was so hauntingly atmospheric in its sense of loss that it was a cruel reminder that this was the path not taken.
Available to listen on BBC Sounds and watch via Wigmore Hall Live Stream. The Wigmore Hall lunchtime series continues until 26 June.
Continue reading...June 11, 2020
Fighting over statues obscures the real problem: Britain's delusion about its past | Martin Kettle
A collective failure to look the history of empire in the eye stops us from being the kind of country we could be
There were two historically striking things about Bristol’s statue of Edward Colston. The first, most obviously, was that the statue of a slave trader could still have had pride of place in a British city in 2020. The second, much less remarked, is that the statue was only erected there in 1895, fully 200 years after Colston’s life and almost 90 years after the abolition of the slave trade.
Why did the statue go up when it did? It wasn’t to celebrate slavery. It was because, at a time when Britain’s empire stretched around the globe, what seemed to matter most about Colston to the city’s rulers was not how he had got his riches but his enduring and formidable legacy of philanthropy. Like most late Victorian British cities, Bristol was governed by Gladstonian Liberals not by Tories. The Liberals abhorred slavery and extolled their abolitionist forebears. But they celebrated their own enlightenment, in the form of the charitable schools, hospitals and research centres that they endowed, even more.
The dark star behind Brexit remains the British people’s unreconciled relationship with the experience of empire
Related: BLM protesters topple statue of Bristol slave trader Edward Colston
Continue reading...June 8, 2020
Steven Isserlis/Mishka Rushdie Momen, Wigmore Hall review - joyful music making
Wigmore Hall/BBC Radio 3
The interplay between Mishka Rushdie Momen’s piano and Steven Isserlis’s lustrous cello was delicately matched, nothing overstated.
Steven Isserlis has been busy teaching, writing and studying Bach during the lockdown, explained the Radio 3 announcer. He hasn’t risked a Covid cut, that’s for certain. Yet, judging from his playing at this Wigmore concert, the celebrated cellist was feeling like a musical prisoner savouring his first day of freedom. Everything about his recital with the pianist Mishka Rushdie Momen spoke of a performer carried away by a reunion with his instrument and his art.
Everything about Isserlis's recital spoke of a performer carried away by a reunion with his instrument and his art.
Continue reading...Paul Ress obituary
Paul Ress, who has died aged 98, was an American journalist and press officer who spent most of his adult life in Europe, where he amassed devoted friends, bearded collie dogs, fabled contacts and a talent for puns, which all sustained him through a long and richly industrious career.
Born in New York, Paul was the son of Samuel Ress, a lawyer, and his wife Lilian. His education at Yale was interrupted by second world war service in the Philippines. In 1947, he travelled to Europe where he talked his way into a $26-a-month writing job in the Paris offices of the New York Herald Tribune, where Art Buchwald was among his colleagues. In 1948 he married Fanchette Laroque and they settled in Maisons-Laffitte, just outside Paris, and had three children, Colin, Coralie and Manon.
Continue reading...June 3, 2020
Johnson's 'mission accomplished' mode on Covid-19 shows how rattled he is | Martin Kettle
Keen to show he has a grip, the prime minister is gambling with people’s health as he tries to get back to Brexit
News that Boris Johnson is to take “direct control” of the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis raises more questions than it answers. What exactly has the prime minister been doing until now? Were we not also told, when he returned to work in April after his brush with death in St Thomas’ hospital, that he was resuming control then as well? Taking back control seems to be rather harder than it sounds. Maybe he should have grasped that a bit sooner.
Trying to get a grip goes with the job. Prime ministers dream of being able to make an announcement, issue an order and then pull a lever or press a button so that things will happen. It almost never works, which is why prime ministers react by doing what Johnson has just done. They shake up Downing Street. They bring in new people. They form new committees. Then they try again. Sometimes the problem is the prime minister. More often the problem is the state machine. In Johnson’s case it is both, which is a bad combination.
Continue reading...May 27, 2020
Faced with questions from MPs, Boris Johnson was like a blundering schoolboy | Martin Kettle
His appearance at the Commons liaison committee saw him way out of his depth – on Dominic Cummings and everything else
Boris Johnson signed off this afternoon by telling the Commons liaison committee how much he had enjoyed his first meeting with them. If that’s true, then either I’m a Dutchman or Johnson has a weird way of having fun. No wonder he has managed to go almost a year before attending Westminster’s most prestigious committee. He came determined to say nothing new about Dominic Cummings and more or less managed it, though it came at a cost. On the wider issues of his government’s response to the pandemic, he mostly flannelled. Some of the questioners, notably Greg Clark, Stephen Timms, Robert Halfon and Darren Jones, beat him all ends up. Yvette Cooper delivered some icy remarks that should send shivers down his spine. Leadership Winston Churchill style it most definitely was not. Billy Bunter in the headmaster’s study kept coming to mind.
Johnson said he had spent a lot of time preparing for the meeting. It felt like a wasted effort. To expect the grasp of detail normally expected of a modern leader was and is hopeless. Issue after issue had to be parked, with promises of written replies later. Because he knew he had to be on his best behaviour in front of the assembled select committee chairs, there was less recourse to the irrelevant analogies and verbal folderols that Johnson often hides behind. The contrast with Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Theresa May – all of whom were consistently across the detail and submitted more often to attending the committee – was a painful one.
Continue reading...May 24, 2020
By backing Cummings, Johnson has laid bare his disdain for the British public | Martin Kettle
The prime minister’s self-centred endorsement of his overmighty adviser is an outrageous snub to the rest of us
The shadow of death still hangs over the country. The losses from the Covid-19 virus continue to mount. The end is not yet in sight. The way we live will be altered by the pandemic and its consequences for years to come. Amid the weight and seriousness of life-changing and life-ending events, how can the national conversation be dominated for three days by the bad behaviour of Dominic Cummings during the lockdown?
The answer is brutal but clear. It is because Cummings has so much power and has done so much to make this country what it is today, first because of Brexit, and now because of the mishandling of the pandemic. The furore over his rule-breaking cannot be dismissed as a bubble issue, especially after Boris Johnson backed him so comprehensively and divisively from the No 10 lectern today. Now, whether Cummings ultimately goes or stays, this is a choice that affects everyone and everything.
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