Martin Kettle's Blog, page 5

Turandot review – with high energy, mighty voices and delicacy, epic staging feels newly minted

Royal Opera House, London
Andrei Serban’s 1984 production of Puccini’s final opera is meticulously revived with Sondra Radvanovsky and SeokJong Baek both stellar in the central roles. In the pit, Rafael Payare brings care and lightness to the intricate score

Andrei Serban’s 1984 production of Puccini’s final opera was a well-flogged warhorse by the turn of the millennium, hugely assisted by the global 1990s popularity of the aria Nessun Dorma. Revived only two years ago it returns again, part of a Puccini-rich season marking the centenary of the composer’s death (the event which left Turandot unfinished). But thankfully this staging is still far from showing its age.

Instead Jack Furness’s meticulous staging, tightly choreographed by Kate Flatt, feels newly minted. When the blood red drapes at the front of the stage are ripped down in the opening bars, the oppressive ceiling-to-floor set looms over everything, severed head masks looking down. The action takes place amid shadowy watchers, seemingly indifferent to the heartlessness that pervades Turandot almost up to its sudden happily-ever-after end, which used the cut version of Franco Alfano’s 1926 completion.

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Europe doesn’t need Trump to form a western alliance – and one is already taking shape | Martin Kettle

Britain, France and Germany are closing ranks to bolster Nato as the unreliable US president marches to his own drum

An Atlantic alliance without the United States? It sounds like a contradiction in terms – Hamlet without the prince. Yet this is the improbable, disjunctive world we now inhabit. It is the one in which our children and grandchildren will live their lives. Like it or not, the systemic shock launched by Donald Trump is our new reality. Absolutely nothing about Trump’s latest phone call with Vladimir Putin on Tuesday has changed that.

Europe’s scramble to respond to Trump’s return to power was driven initially by the urgency of maintaining support for Ukraine. Most of the focus was diplomatic: keeping US military aid and intelligence flowing, shoring up damaged channels between Washington and Kyiv, engaging quietly with both Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy to both encourage and deter, while moving very publicly to take up more of the security burden.

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Though Starmer’s project is fragile, he’s taking one giant leap: to reconfigure the British state | Martin Kettle

Headlines about Whitehall cuts obscure the real intent. The PM wants effective, dynamic administration that voters will believe in

When Keir Starmer’s government finally arrives on the threshold of the next general election, due in 2028-29, Labour’s hopes will not rest on the battlefields of Ukraine, however well-judged Starmer’s diplomacy is proving to be in that conflict right now. Labour’s long-term fate will instead be determined here at home, in the way all elections almost always are.

As so often, the outcome in four years’ time will be decided by whether voters feel more secure then than they did in the past. If they do, they may vote Labour. If they do not, they may turn to the Conservatives and to Reform UK. The government’s preoccupation with this crossroads explains why Downing Street wants the prime minister’s speech on the civil service on Thursday to be seen as a defining choice of direction.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Starmer is at his best right now – but he must accept there is no going back with Trump’s US | Martin Kettle

The president has just four years until a successor takes the reins, but the new approach he has forged – exceptionalist, isolationist – is likely to endure

Keir Starmer, it turns out, is at his best in a crisis. He has faced two since he became prime minister last year, one domestic, the other international. The first came with the riots that followed the Southport killings, when Starmer’s response was impressive and effective. The second is Donald Trump’s attempt to stitch up Ukraine, where Starmer has been surefooted in trying to hold the line against a sellout to Russia. In both cases, he has looked like the right person in the right place at the right time.

There was another example of this deftness on Wednesday in the Commons, when Starmer went out of his way to mark the anniversaries of the deaths of UK service personnel in 2007 and 2012. A total of 642 died in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars alongside their US allies. They would not be forgotten, he said. The name of JD Vance was not mentioned. Nor was the US vice-president’s contemptuous “some random country” insult this week. But Starmer’s reprimand was unerring.

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Il Trovatore review – let’s face it: these Verdi characters are very dull

Royal Opera House, London
With demons ripped from Where the Wild Things Are and costumes culled from Paddington, this is a rum reworking – just a shame some of the singing and conducting lack zip

The Il Trovatore problem is easily summarised. Brilliant musical craftsmanship, some great singing roles, and an absurd, wild and cruel story – populated with (mostly) dull characters who make the whole drama hard to watch without a certain growing indifference.

Still, one takes one’s seat at Il Trovatore with an open mind and aware that Verdi, then at the height of his creative energy after the triumph of Rigoletto, was keen to write it. There is not a dull page of music to come. But it is pointless to deny that the opera George Bernard Shaw unfairly dismissed as “absolutely void of intellectual interest” is a distinctly odd experience.

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Trump might not know it, but he’s forging a new relationship between Britain and the EU | Martin Kettle

Support for Ukraine means that closer ties to Europe are now a patriotic priority, opening up avenues that Brexit had once blocked

It would be absurd to claim to see a silver lining behind every Donald Trump cloud. Those clouds are too many, too dark and too dangerous. All the same, viewed from a domestic political perspective, there is a clear emerging British upside to Trump’s efforts at crashing the post-cold war order. It might even get a boost from Thursday’s Washington visit by Keir Starmer.

In July 2024, when Starmer became prime minister, Labour was rigidly on the defensive about Europe. Brexit was seen as an electorally unstable issue for a party whose priority was to reconnect with leave voters. Everything about Europe was thus sidelined during the election. Only vague generalities were permitted. The only foreign leaders pictured in the party manifesto were Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Canada’s Justin Trudeau.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Hold your breath and look to Germany: its election could decide the fate of Europe – and the UK | Martin Kettle

If the country holds out against the Trump-assisted AfD, it shows rightwing populism can be resisted in Europe’s heartland

Even in less stressed times, Britain always pays too much attention to the US and too little to Germany. In today’s torrid circumstances, that imbalance is perhaps excusable. After all, Donald Trump, it now turns out, really means it. He is more interested in US plunder and profit from places like Gaza, Ukraine and Greenland than in upholding a just peace or good order.

Even so, the inattention towards Germany needs to end. Britain’s politicians, like German politicians, are rewiring their worldviews amid a political gale. But Germany, though no longer a great power, is nevertheless a great nation. Indeed, it may be more than ever the essential European nation now, after the Trump administration’s very public trashing of the entire Atlantic alliance seemed to leave Europe to its own devices.

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Der Ring des Nibelungen review – less is more in Regents Opera’s whittled-down Wagner

York Hall, London
With a handful of musicians playing a skilfully reduced score and a minimal staging by Caroline Staunton, this Ring cycle is an intense and involving experience

Regents Opera are staging their first Ring cycle not in an opera house but in the spiritual home of British boxing in the East End of London. The counterintuitives don’t end there. There’s no Wagnerian-scale orchestra of 90-plus players in this Ring either; instead, just 22 heroically committed musicians give their all in a skilfully reduced version rescored by conductor Ben Woodward.

Nor is the nearly 15 hours of action mounted on a conventional stage. Instead, this Ring is performed in the round, in an in-your-face way that grips the attention. Everything is acted out on a raised white oblong not much bigger than the York Hall canvas on which Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua began their careers. Call it the Ring in the ring if you choose.

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Trump’s Gaza plan has staggered the world. Did he mean it? For now, that doesn’t matter | Martin Kettle

The president’s appalling threat to seize Gaza and drive out its people imperils global stability, even if he never deploys a single US soldier

The comments were brazen, swaggering, jaw-dropping, audacious, and, to many, simply outrageous. “Stupéfaction mondiale” was how the French paper Libération responded on Wednesday morning. The sober-sided New York Times contented itself with “improbable”. A US senator gave voice to what will surely become a drumbeat charge across the Middle East and beyond in the hours and days to come, that what Donald Trump had said about Gaza amounted to “ethnic cleansing by another name”.

On Tuesday, at the end of his White House meeting with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, President Trump declared that the US should seize control of the Gaza Strip and permanently remove its 2.2 million Palestinian inhabitants to resettlement in places such as Egypt and Jordan. The US would “own it and be responsible”, said Trump. “We’ll take it over and develop it,” he added. There would be “unlimited numbers of jobs and housing” for “the people of the area” – though which people they would be was not specified. Gaza would be turned into “the Riviera of the Middle East”.

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LSO/Harding/Trifonov review – nuanced and individual Schumann, then propulsive Mahler

Barbican Hall, London
Making a much-anticipated London appearance, Daniil Trifonov balanced lyricism and vigour in Schumann. Daniel Harding’s well-judged account of Mahler 7 caught the symphony’s sense of impending disintegration

Ordinarily, the main attraction of this London Symphony Orchestra concert under Daniel Harding would have been Mahler’s Seventh symphony, a special-occasion piece which is still relatively rarely performed compared with its peers. But this was also Daniil Trifonov’s much anticipated first appearance in London since before the pandemic. The buzz among a capacity Barbican audience about the celebrated Russian pianist’s return was palpable.

Trifonov did not disappoint. Under his hands, the reading of Robert Schumann’s A minor piano concerto was searchingly individual in the very best sense, with Trifonov illuminating the muscularity of Schumann’s piano writing as well as its delicate poetry. Trifonov unquestionably commands the restraint of dynamics that Schumann’s scoring requires from the soloist – his passagework was exemplary. But he was unafraid of making weightier keyboard statements too, even in the opening bars and especially in the first movement cadenza.

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