Martin Kettle's Blog, page 4

Faust review – darkly gothic production turns Gounod’s opera into boisterous Les Mis

Royal Opera House, London
The 1860s French setting mixes panache and musical charm as Faust sells his soul to Méphistophélès and seduces Marguerite

Gounod’s Faust is one of those operas – readers may wish to nominate their own candidates – that one does not wish to see too often. Yes, Faust has celebrated musical moments which are a pleasure to hear sung well. Yes, Gounod’s score eventually becomes more interestingly chromatic as the denouement nears. And yes, David McVicar’s darkly gothic production, now with 21 years’ service on the clock, successfully removes it from Goethe’s intellectual shadow, turning Faust into a theatrically boisterous Parisian show reminiscent at times of Les Mis or Moulin Rouge.

McVicar’s production is revived, amid Charles Edwards’s towering Second Empire sets, by Peter Relton. You immediately grasp why this 1860s French setting is still one of Covent Garden’s most bankable productions. Yet, for all its mix of panache and musical charms, well marshaled under Maurizio Benini’s experienced direction in the pit, Faust struggles to hold the attention, not least because of the final act ballet that Gounod added a decade after the 1859 premiere.

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The UK risks falling apart. Keir Starmer can mend it now – but he doesn’t have much time | Martin Kettle

The PM has little choice. Unless he brings the fractured nations together, none can move forward, and neither can he

A house divided against itself cannot stand, warned Abraham Lincoln. The United States’ later descent into civil war over slavery would prove Lincoln right. But is 21st-century Britain now also becoming, in its different way, an unsustainably divided house too? And have Britain’s economic divisions become so intractable that the UK state can no longer manage them? More than at any time in the postwar era, the answer to both questions looks increasingly like yes.

History shows that Britain’s capacity for pragmatic resilience in the face of internal and external threat is not to be underestimated. Wednesday’s partial climbdown on winter fuel payments was an example of that instinct for self-preservation at work. Yet the U-turn will not have restored the public’s lost trust in the ability of government to solve their problems.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Can we stop pretending a trade deal with Trump will be a gamechanger for the UK. It won’t | Martin Kettle

I’m not saying Britain should refuse every sort of free trade agreement with the US, but there may be options that better suit Labour’s purpose

It’s a deal. The words sound good. Most human beings are primed to think of a deal as desirable in itself. It isn’t hard to see why. Agreement is generally better than disagreement. In most aspects of life, shaking hands under shared rules makes sense. So it takes a bit of effort to think more objectively. But it is important to do that now, especially in the case of the proposed UK trade deal with the United States.

Even before Donald Trump became president again, and long before the US started its current tariff wars, there were already plenty of reasons for caution about what a free trade deal with the US might look like. In the wake of Brexit, these concerns centred on whether a deal could be struck – and sold at home – on bilateral trade issues such as pharmaceuticals, food products and digital regulation, on all of which very different standards and assumptions have long applied on the two sides of the Atlantic.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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BBC Symphony Orchestra/Oramo review – Carwithen comes in from the cold

Barbican Hall, London
The neglected British composer’s concerto, ignored for more than half a century, only hints at greatness – but triumphant recitals of Arnold and Williams make up for it

Doreen Carwithen’s concerto for piano and strings is emerging blinking into the light from half a century of oblivion, and one suspects that the return to life has further to go. Premiered at the 1952 Proms, when it was the only music by any female composer that season, the concerto languished until after Carwithen’s death in 2003. Now the 30-minute piece has been recorded twice, received its German premiere last month, and, in the latest step in its reawakening, was the centrepiece of the latest Barbican Hall concert by Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Carwithen’s champions, who include the soloist in both this and the German performances, Alexandra Dariescu, make large claims for concerto and composer alike. Despite Dariescu’s unstinting performance, however, Carwithen’s piece does not entirely justify them. The concerto is accomplished for sure, with neatly crafted moods veering between late romantic and neo-classical, but more is hinted at than is achieved, even in the intimacy between the piano and a solo violin in the slow movement. The closest the concerto comes to a crux or a moment of revelation is in the thundering solo cadenza in the final movement.

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Carmen review – Akhmetshina and Elder make this an outstanding evening

Royal Opera House, London
Damiano Michieletto’s staging gets its first revival with Aigul Akhmetshina returning to the title role with panache and conviction

The latest of several strong Covent Garden revivals of core repertoire this season, this Carmen may be the best of the lot. The new run has two outstanding things going for it, in the shape of Mark Elder’s conducting and Aigul Akhmetshina’s return to the title role. But there is plenty of vigorous underpinning elsewhere, particularly in the energy of its largely youthful cast.

Damiano Michieletto’s 2024 production, revived here under Dan Dooner, is an improvement on Barrie Kosky’s bold but ill-judged 2018 effort to purge Carmen of almost all of its Spanishness. Michieletto’s modern-day Spain, however, is a flyblown place, with not a cathedral or a bullring in sight, and none of the horses of even earlier productions here either – this is a place where life is fierce, lawless and precarious.

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There are opportunities for Keir Starmer in Trump's trade chaos. Here's how he can seize them | Martin Kettle

From fiscal rules to universities, doors have opened that were shut three months ago. Our future depends on which he chooses

It was Bismarck who expressed the art of political leadership most poetically. “A statesman cannot create anything himself,” Germany’s 19th-century iron chancellor once said. “He must wait and listen until he hears the steps of God sounding through events; then leap up and grasp the hem of his garment.”

In other words, when it comes, seize the day. Leadership as Bismarck perfected it combined opportunity, readiness and drive. If circumstances allowed – something Bismarck was brilliant at ensuring – an opening might present itself, through which he could propel the state in the direction he wanted. At such moments, the gales of history seem to intensify, making it possible to achieve things that would otherwise be impossible, or more hazardous, in normal times.

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Aurora Orchestra/Collon review – reduced Mahler still packs a punch

Kings Place, London
A chamber reduction of Das Lied von der Erde formed the centrepiece of this spring-themed concert

Back when Mahler’s symphonies were still rarely played in Britain – and, yes, there really was such a time – Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) was the most familiar of his major orchestral works. Much of that was the legacy of Kathleen Ferrier’s inimitable recording of Das Leid’s final song, Der Abschied (The Farewell) under Bruno Walter before her early death in 1953. But then came the Mahler renaissance of the 1960s and performances of The Song of the Earth – in effect a six-movement song symphony for tenor and alto – became part of the new and much more varied Mahlerian picture.

Renewed interest in chamber reductions of Mahler has been part of this change. Iain Farrington’s version of Das Lied for the Aurora Orchestra is the latest example, and formed the centrepiece of this spring-themed concert under Nicholas Collon. As with Arnold Schoenberg’s 20th-century version, completed by Rainer Riehn, the reduction is abrupt, with just a handful of solo strings and winds in place of a full orchestra. But most of the detail is still there, allowing the winds to be heard with particular clarity, and, under Collon’s fluent and vigorous direction, it still packs a true Mahlerian punch.

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Perilous and chaotic, Trump’s ‘liberation day’ endangers the world’s broken economy – and him | Martin Kettle

While the president has identified the need to do things differently, his strategy risks a slump, hitting the very Americans he claims to champion

It would be “liberation day” in the US, the White House announced. Well, we shall see. Yet even if one puts the noise and nastiness that accompany a Donald Trump announcement to one side – in this case tonight’s pronouncement that there will be an executive order announcing “reciprocal tariffs on countries throughout the world”, a 10% tariff on the UK and 20% on the EU – the significance of the theatre is hard to miss. Whether they presage the US’s liberation, or instead the disintegration of the global trading order, Trump’s tariffs add up to an attempt to transform a badly broken economic model. And that is something that affects us all.

Trump’s announcement was awash with insult and rambling nonsense. The rest of the world had looted, raped and pillaged, had scavenged and ransacked America – shocking claims if they had come from any other US president, yet water off a duck’s back today. But the hard core was there all the same: tariffs on the whole of the rest of the world. The shutters were up.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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DiDonato/Emelyanychev review – ingenious artistry brings Schubert’s bleak Winterreise to life

Wigmore Hall, London
Joyce DiDonato’s theatrical skills enabled her to feminise the cycle in a particularly original way, before Strauss’s Morgen! gave us all hope

Joyce DiDonato doesn’t just sing Winterreise. She acts it too. This is not as rare as you may imagine. The desolated lover’s winter journey is an accommodating masterwork. Actor-singers including Håkan Hagegård, Mark Padmore and Simon Keenlyside have performed staged versions too, establishing for all except diehard purists that a traditional male voice and piano recital need not necessarily be the only way with Schubert’s bleak setting of Wilhelm Müller poems.

DiDonato takes this a step further by inhabiting the songs from the standpoint of the woman whom the poet has deserted. Many women, including Alice Coote, have performed these songs with searing authenticity, but DiDonato’s theatrical skills bring something more. Costumed in black mourning, she sings each song from the poet’s journal, giving her voice to the verses within. Only at the end, in Schubert’s totemic final song, Der Leiermann (The Organ Grinder), does she put the journal aside and own the song outright, and with it the whole cycle’s pain, as her own.

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Britten Sinfonia/Berman review – haunting premiere about memories of the Holocaust

Milton Court, London
Michael Zev Gordon’s new piece about his Polish Jewish ancestors, for two narrators, a baritone and string orchestra, was performed with nuance, solemnity and intensity

There is memory, but there is also “post-memory”. Mingled with the recollection of our own life stories, we humans also carry those of others, told or sometimes concealed by those we once knew, or even never met. But what is passed down becomes ours too. This interwoven fabric of past, present and future is the rewarding inspiration behind Michael Zev Gordon’s compelling and intelligent new concert piece, A Kind of Haunting.

Gordon’s substantial setting is for two narrators, baritone and string orchestra. Premiered by the Britten Sinfonia under Jonathan Berman, it proves true to its title. The score explores Gordon’s search for his Polish Jewish ancestors, murdered in the Holocaust in 1941: an event of which Gordon’s own father barely spoke, and which the composer and his own children now own too. The focus is on the haunting not just the horror. As Gordon says, the work explores the potency of the Holocaust’s aftereffects – a gift and a curse, as Marianne Hirsch’s narration has it.

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