Martin Kettle's Blog, page 70
February 14, 2016
Antonin Scalia: the judge whose conservatism shaped America | Martin Kettle
Few British judges ever become great public figures in a wider sense. Most of them prefer it that way. American judges, by contrast, have always been different, not just because the constitutional separation of powers necessarily makes them more prominent, but also because the process of their appointment is overtly politicised. The president nominates new supreme court justices, and the Senate must confirm them. This goes some of the way to explaining why the death at the weekend of Justice Antonin Scalia is such a significant public event.
Related: Antonin Scalia: man of his word who shaped America in life and in death
Related: Supreme court justice Antonin Scalia dies: legal and political worlds react
Continue reading...
February 11, 2016
Liverpool football fans have shown why we need a moral economy | Martin Kettle
Even in modern Britain, moral force can still occasionally win out over greed. And when it does, we all cheer. It happened this week when Liverpool football club, already awash with television money like all the other Premier League clubs, had to junk plans to increase the price of top tickets to £77. Liverpool even apologised for the distress the plan had caused. But it took a well-publicised protest to change the owners’ minds.
Related: Liverpool owner backs down on ticket prices and apologises to fans
Clinton is streets ahead of Corbyn’s rivals for the Labour leadership last summer. And yet she faces the same fate
Related: Bernie Sanders secures decisive win over Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire
Continue reading...February 9, 2016
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House/Pappano – Russian rarities, irresistibly delivered
Royal Opera House, London
Antonio Pappano introduced a dramatic programme by Russia’s ‘mighty handful’ of composers for this annual showcase of his orchestral players’ talents
London is not exactly short of symphony orchestra concerts. So Antonio Pappano’s ongoing project to get his Royal Opera House orchestra up from the pit and on to the Covent Garden stage relies heavily on rarity value – they give just one concert a year – and on some thoughtfully niche programming. This year’s focused on Russia’s mid-19th-century “mighty handful”, serving also as a musical taster for the opera house’s new production of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, which Pappano will conduct in March.
Pappano’s charisma is a huge part of the draw at these events. He turned on the charm in short and informative speeches at the start of both halves of the evening, but it was his musical grasp and attack that made the concert special. Working with an orchestra whose day job gives it an inbuilt sense of the dramatic, the combination soon overcame any doubts about the suitability of the opera house acoustics for such a venture.
Continue reading...February 7, 2016
The Magic Flute review – happy return of an exhilaratingly inventive production
Coliseum, London
Featuring the best sung Pamina in years from Lucy Crowe, this revival of Simon McBurney’s ENO staging is highly engaging
The exhilarating achievement of Simon McBurney’s highly engaging production of Mozart’s Magic Flute for ENO, first seen at the Coliseum in 2013, is to draw its audience in by returning the piece to its roots as an eclectic entertainment. The unique theatrical personality of the piece is captured right from the start, with the orchestra raised from the pit to become very much part of a stage show that evolves around them and in which, in the case of the flautist and the celeste player, they actively participate.
Related: ENO's woes: opera company begins new year in offstage turmoil
Continue reading...February 5, 2016
David Cameron got a good deal on the EU. Just look at the fine print | Martin Kettle
David Cameron has been on the wrong end of a media kicking all week over Europe. The polls have turned anti-European in the aftermath. But does all this say more about the prime minister or more about the British press? The answer, overwhelmingly, is the latter.
Related: The rightwing press can’t be allowed to bully us out of the EU | Polly Toynbee
Related: The EU no longer serves the people – democracy demands a new beginning | Yanis Varoufakis
Continue reading...February 1, 2016
Why it matters that Terry Wogan was Irish | Martin Kettle
In the flood of tributes to Terry Wogan, many of the late broadcaster’s enduring qualities have been remembered: his seemingly indestructible niceness, his mischievous wit, his relaxed professionalism at the microphone, his gift of connection with his listeners. The front pages of the Sun and the Daily Mirror today summed them up: “Thank you for being our friend.”
Yet, with the occasional exception, few of the British tributes lingered long, or at all, on what was surely one of Wogan’s most interesting other qualities – his Irishness. Perhaps this was so obvious as not to require comment or deconstruction by his legions of British admirers. Yet it was an odd omission, given the scale of the tributes, and it was not one that was missed in Ireland itself, where the president, Michael D Higgins, and the prime minister, Enda Kenny, were quick to celebrate the Limerick-born broadcaster’s role as “a bridge between Britain and Ireland”, as Kenny put it.
Related: Sir Terry Wogan: tributes to BBC broadcaster dead aged 77 - as they happened
Related: The terrible beauty of the Easter Rising remains alive today | Fintan O’Toole
Continue reading...LPO/Jurowski review – green Raskatov eclipsed by pastoral Beethoven
Royal Festival Hall
Beethoven’s Sixth was beautifully played, outshining the debut of Alexander Raskatov’s Green Mass – which has less to say and takes longer to say it.
On the face of it, and depending on how much you consider music to be a bearer of ideas, this might have been a fascinating compare-and-contrast concert. In the first half, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, a hymn to nature and life. In the second, the world premiere of Alexander Raskatov’s Green Mass, an extended reflection on our generation’s continuing sins against the natural world.
The trouble was that the comparison worked so lopsidedly in Beethoven’s favour. Before the interval, Vladimir Jurowski conducted a historically informed performance of the Pastoral in the modern manner, fewer than 60 players, avoidance of vibrato, with valveless trumpets and double basses at the back. The London Philharmonic played it beautifully, the string sound in Beethoven’s figurations clean and compelling throughout.
Continue reading...January 29, 2016
Philharmonia/Rouvali review – nervous energy gives tremendous results
Royal Festival Hall, London
A swaying, dancing Santtu-Matias Rouvali conjured precision and excitement while trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger played at the edge of possibility
Publicity photos make the Finnish conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali look like the enigmatic teenager in Visconti’s film of Mann’s Death in Venice. In the flesh, though, Rouvali is all nervous energy, nonstop action and is anything but enigmatic. He threw himself at the music in this Philharmonia concert, at times swaying and dancing around the podium in ways that would make Leonard Bernstein seem school-of-Adrian-Boult. If you closed your eyes and just listened, however, the results were often tremendous.
Related: Facing the music: Håkan Hardenberger
Continue reading...January 28, 2016
Here’s a US import Britain should ban – and it’s not Donald Trump | Martin Kettle
We can embrace presidential elections and the Oscars, but the NFL is too dangerous to adopt
Anyone tempted to imagine that the influence of the US is in terminal decline should pull the duvet over their heads for the next few weeks. For we are entering one of those times of the year in which America’s soft power dominance of our world is about to be comprehensively confirmed in a way that no other culture can come even distantly close to matching. Three imminent events converge in February to make the point.
In the first, America’s presidential election gets serious next week in the Iowa caucuses. The Republican race in particular will rivet the attention of the global political class. Which is a tiny bit odd, since the campaigns of the last two Republican winners there, Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Rick Santorum in 2012, crashed and burned shortly after their apparently significant victories in Iowa.
Related: American football is too dangerous, and it should be abolished | Dave Bry
Dozens of former NFL players have now been diagnosed postmortem with a particular form of brain trauma
Related: 'It's been devastating': former NFL players count the cost of concussion
Continue reading...January 27, 2016
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet review – spaciousness and clarity in all-Beethoven programme
St John’s Smith Square, London
The pianist took time to settle, but rose to the challenge of three Beethoven sonatas with insightful and focused playing
When he first began to attract widespread notice for his bright and characterful playing, the French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s signature repertoire was the keyboard literature of the early 20th century, particularly the composers of his own country. More recently, however, Bavouzet has looked further back in time, first to Haydn and now to Beethoven, whose final three sonatas formed this recital.
St John’s Smith Square has a bright and warm acoustic, which suited Bavouzet’s crisp and well-weighted clarity. Nevertheless, as often seems to happen when pianists give this formidable programme of late Beethoven, he took time to settle. The opening of the E flat Sonata, Op 109 sounded less ripplingly crystalline than it should, and there was some rhythmic untidiness at first, but Bavouzet’s playing always had momentum, and the control gradually asserted itself. The prestissimo second movement was fiery and urgent, and the long final movement, where the emotional and intellectual weight of the music lies, was impressively maintained.
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