Martin Kettle's Blog, page 7

Philharmonia/Blomstedt review – the collective performance of a lifetime

Royal Festival Hall, London
The 97-year-old conductor led the Philharmonia – on exceptional form – in one of the finest performances of Mahler’s epic Ninth Symphony one is likely to hear.

To conduct any orchestra aged 97 is exceptional. To conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony aged 97 is nonpareil. Mahler’s Ninth can take 90 minutes to play. It reaches levels of intensity that seem on the edge of the bearable. It probes audaciously into every aspect of the orchestral palette. Yet this is the work that Herbert Blomstedt, visibly frailer than before, conducted in his latest London concert with the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Blomstedt may not seem a natural Mahlerian. His performances of the repertoire he normally favours – Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner among them – are invariably wise, enabling and balanced. These are not words that come naturally about Mahler’s Ninth. The Ninth is on the edge. It looks into the abyss. It grapples with mortality. But there is room in the world for many Mahler Ninths. Nor was Blomstedt presiding benignly as the Philharmonia played Mahler. He gripped it. He really did.

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Sue Gray’s final departure marks the moment that the Starmer project gets serious | Martin Kettle

The prime minister has finally grasped that Downing Street must control the narrative. But is it too late to undo this summer’s self-inflicted damage?

Sue Gray’s departure matters. But not in the way some may assume. Gray became famous because of three things: her Partygate investigation under Boris Johnson, her recruitment to Keir Starmer’s team in opposition and for having once run a pub in Northern Ireland. It all turned her into just about the only British civil servant whom people beyond Whitehall might recognise on the news.

It was therefore predictable that her fall from power would also be depicted in personality terms. Sure enough, Gray’s original ousting in October was attributed to a turf war with Morgan McSweeney, now her successor as Downing Street chief of staff. Or to the fact that Labour special advisers were disgruntled over their pay differentials. Gray’s final exit this week was also reportedly triggered by Starmer’s frustration that she had not started work on the job to which he demoted her five weeks ago.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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The shocking US election result will create a new world order – and launch a fresh wave of Trump wannabes | Martin Kettle

A whole raft of tired assumptions collapsed today. Britain must be realistic about America now – and our so-called ‘special’ relationship

US election 2024 – latest updatesUS election results 2024: live map and tracker

Even more than his first victory in 2016, Donald Trump’s re-election marks a historic disruption. It is a profound moment of change, not just for the United States but for the rest of the world, too. For decades, the US has been the free world’s essential and reliable nation. Not any more. It could even one day become them against us.

Trump 2.0 seems certain to put one of the final nails in the coffin of the post-1945 Pax Americana. In reality, that old normality has been disintegrating since at least the Vietnam conflict. George W Bush’s “war on terror” caused more problems than it solved. Barack Obama and Joe Biden were each reluctant to wield America’s big stick, most recently and tragically in the Middle East. Now, though, there is no hiding from the realities.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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BBCSO/Oramo review – Kirill Gerstein plays the near unplayable

Barbican Hall, London
The pianist delivered the thundering arpeggios and glittering octave runs of Ferrucio Busoni’s prodigiously difficult 1904 piano concerto with total authority

Decades can pass without an opportunity to hear a live performance of Ferrucio Busoni’s pantheistic 1904 piano concerto. At 75 minutes in length, the ferocious five-movement monster is a taxing play and an equally taxing listen. It requires heroic stamina from the musicians, and no small financial outlay by an orchestra on both a soloist and a chorus. The extravagance does not end there, since the concerto itself is prodigal in its utopian ambition and difficulty.

But here, in the centenary of the composer’s death, was the concerto’s second London outing in less than four months. Compared with the Albert Hall, where Benjamin Grosvenor and Edward Gardner powered through Busoni’s score in this summer’s Proms, the drier acoustic of the Barbican Hall provided a more clinical sound. There was no opportunity either, unlike in the Albert Hall, for the male chorus to remain invisible as they sang the work’s serenely effective setting of the Danish poet Adam Oehlenschläger’s mystical verses.

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After Reeves’s historic budget, Labour has time to pursue its revolution. What it needs now is public trust | Martin Kettle

The government is operating in an unforgiving time and lacks capital with voters. It will be crucial to address that

Rachel Reeves is the third Labour chancellor of the exchequer to be an MP in my home city. In earlier times, Hugh Gaitskell and Denis Healey both sat for Leeds seats too, as Reeves does today. Their budgets, like hers this week, were delivered in challenging, though extremely different, economic times.

Both these Labour predecessors, however, would unhesitatingly have recognised Reeves’s 2024 budget as what it is. It is a budget in the identifiably social democratic Labour tradition to which Gaitskell and Healey also belonged. It is a tradition qualitatively different from that of even the most progressive Conservative chancellor.

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Rigoletto review – Miller’s mafioso take still brings style and insights to Verdi’s masterpiece

Coliseum, London
Jonathan Miller’s iconic staging for ENO is 40 years old but with Richard Farnes conducting and a striking debut from Robyn Allegra Parton as Gilda, this remains a vibrant and engaging production

Jonathan Miller’s mafioso Rigoletto has been running at the Coliseum for almost as long as Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap up at the top of the street. First unveiled in 1982, this is its 14th English National Opera revival, surely some kind of record. With ENO still so threatened, there must be qualms about the wisdom of yet another run-out, but this iconic show proved worth it: it remains a very clear, insightful and stylish setting for Verdi’s ever-popular breakthrough masterpiece.

True, the updating to 1950s New York no longer tingles with spooky recognition as it did back in the era of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather movies. Some of the sharp details at which Miller’s best productions excelled have been lost along the way in Elaine Tyler-Hall’s revival, too – though the famous jukebox gag remains. By modern standards, this Rigoletto also skirts some of the brutal sexual cruelty and othering that today’s productions emphasise more.

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The US election interference row tells us this: Starmer’s political compass urgently needs resetting | Martin Kettle

While it’s likely Labour did nothing illegal in assisting its politicos to volunteer for Harris, it’s yet another issue that was easily avoidable

Gordon Brown famously brought his moral compass to the prime ministership. Boris Johnson, notoriously, did not. Under Keir Starmer, there is a moral compass in Downing Street once more. But something else has gone missing. Too often, Labour now seems to lack not a moral compass, but a fully functioning political one. It has never needed one more than it does today.

Recent history suggests that any government’s political compass is a powerful embodiment of its survival instinct. The compass addresses the dangers, as well as the attractions, of a course of action. It recognises that the way an action will be portrayed is a reality as powerful as the intention behind it. It prioritises grip, speed and proactive flair, as well as discipline about priorities.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Does Starmer believe in anything, people ask, and now we know: his credo is the rule of law | Martin Kettle

Rwanda, the Chagos Islands, arms to Israel – all fit a pattern. Look to the speech his attorney general made this week; all the clues are there

Political speeches seem to fall like autumn leaves at this time of year. Speeches at party conferences. Speeches at leadership hustings and to the UN general assembly. And the budget speech itself is still to come. Yet even the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, may struggle to say anything more illuminating than a speech this week by a far less high-profile government member than she.

In July, Richard Hermer KC was plucked from a successful bar career by his fellow barrister Keir Starmer, given a peerage and made attorney general. It was a hand-picked appointment by Starmer, who snubbed the shadow attorney general, Emily Thornberry, to make it. As Lord Hermer, the former head of Matrix Chambers is now the Starmer government’s lawyer. He is also, we may reasonably assume, Starmer’s eminent legal proxy in the attorney’s role.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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The Turn of the Screw review – creepy and challenging, ENO’s new Britten staging is an ambiguous triumph

Coliseum, London
Isabella Bywater’s intelligent and demanding production injects fresh menace into Henry James’s tale of a ghosts and dark histories

These days, the Turn of the Screw has become an operatic standby. So you might think it would be hard to inject freshly original layers of menace into Benjamin Britten’s claustrophobically taut adaptation of Henry James. Isabella Bywater has nevertheless found a way in her production for English National Opera. Not every idea lands, but in this intelligent and demanding production, the big one does, and its implications ripple across the whole evening.

Does anyone other than the governess see the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel who appear to drive the tragedy at Bly? In his novella, James never provides an answer to this key question. To put the story on the stage, however, Britten and his librettist Myfanwy Piper required Quint and Miss Jessel to be visible, to interact, and to sing. This can turn the governess’s role into a one-woman rescue mission, as she tries to break the ghosts’ hold on her charges, Miles and Flora.

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Fidelio review – Kratzer’s iconoclastic take turns Beethoven into something it’s not

Royal Opera House, London
Directorial tweaks weaken the opera’s fervour and idealism, but Jennifer Davis’s Leonore and Chrstina Gansch’s Marzelline both impressed and in the pit, Alexander Soddy keeps things brisk

More than 200 years on, the most remarkable thing about Beethoven’s Fidelio remains its prison setting. Even in our supposedly more enlightened world, prisons are out of sight and mind. This enduring complacency forms the main target of Tobias Kratzer’s production for the Royal Ballet and Opera, but it is achieved by turning Beethoven’s hymn to the triumph of hope and love into something it is not.

The first half is set more or less in period. Kratzer moves the setting from autocratic Spain to revolutionary France, with additions to the spoken dialogue so as to insert his political points. The heroine’s cross-dressing disguise as Fidelio is rumbled early too, pushing Marzelline, the jailer’s daughter, into a more forward role in the drama. There is also a horse on stage – always a bad idea.

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