Martin Kettle's Blog, page 72
December 10, 2015
Floods bring people together, but they also wash away trust | Martin Kettle
If I were David Cameron, I would fast-track flood defences ahead of HS2, and say: ‘These are the people’s priorities – I get it’
Ever since at least the time of King Canute, and probably long before that, those in authority have had an uneasy relationship with the forces of nature. And with good reason, as this week has once again reminded many parts of Britain.
Floods, like the ones that have coursed through so many communities in northern England and southern Scotland this week, have a way of uprooting more things than the cars, trees and bridges that have been the stuff of the week’s television news bulletins. Water can sweep away the metaphysical as well as the physical. It can carry away authority, trust, and some of the certainties of ordered life with them too. And floods are no respecter of reputations either. King Canute understood this. It is not so clear that David Cameron does.
Related: ‘Hammering, grim, brainless’ – how Storm Desmond hit Lancaster
Related: Drip, drip, drip, by day and night
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December 9, 2015
La Damnation de Faust review – Hawking walks and snails mate in mawkish opera
Opéra Bastille, Paris
Alvis Hermanis’s self-absorbed production gets it all wrong, but you can’t fault the singing in this star-studded version of Berlioz’s tricky work
Even Berlioz didn’t know how to categorise La Damnation de Faust. On the title page he erased his original designation, Opéra de Concert, in favour of the more romantically inscrutable Légende, later Légende Dramatique. To put this episodic and far from inherently theatrical work on the stage is therefore not easy, although both Harry Kupfer and Terry Gilliam have pulled it off in recent decades in London.
Continue reading...December 8, 2015
Philharmonia/Nelsons review – breathtaking Bruckner's Eighth
Royal Festival Hall, London
Aided by eloquent playing, Andris Nelsons was alive to the composer’s uncertainty in a lithe and at times mesmerising performance
Bruckner was notoriously uncertain about some of his own symphonies. Perhaps that partly explains why these works can withstand such very different approaches. A month ago, the 92-year-old Stanislaw Skrowaczewski conducted a monumentally spacious Bruckner Fifth in this hall, full of vast paragraphs. Now here was Andris Nelsons, more than 50 years younger, pushing, shaping and at times driving the Eighth Symphony organically onwards. The two approaches inhabit different worlds.
Nelsons is a classic podium fidget, visibly and audibly attentive to phrasing and dynamics. In the abstract, this detailed way of doing things might seem too exhausting for Bruckner’s 70-minute span. Yet Nelsons has a sense of architecture, too. His changes of pace felt idiomatic, always part of the larger picture, and he gets the obsessive, uncertain and unresolved nature of Bruckner’s writing.
Continue reading...December 7, 2015
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf: Does the art excuse the politics?
As the classical world marks Elizabeth Schwarzkopf’s centenary this week, it’s worth remembering the soprano’s glorious music, as well as the Nazi affiliations
It is 44 years now since the German soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf last stepped off the operatic stage after a performance of Der Rosenkavalier in Brussels. And it is 36 years since she gave her final concert recital in Zurich.
Related: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf - a life in pictures
Continue reading...December 4, 2015
MPs back Syria airstrikes and Labour holds Oldham West – Politics Weekly podcast
Helen Pidd, Simon Jenkins, Gary Younge and Martin Kettle join Tom Clark to discuss an emotional Commons debate on bombing Isis in Syria and a Labour victory in Oldham West that has defied media expectations
Jeremy Corbyn’s first engagement with the ballot box as Labour leader came in the Oldham West and Royston byelection on Thursday. Corbyn was quick to claim credit for a swing towards Labour as the party held it with a thumping majority.
Joining Tom Clark this week to discuss it all are the Guardian’s north of England editor, Helen Pidd, and columnists Simon Jenkins, Gary Younge and Martin Kettle.
Continue reading...Philharmonia/Salonen review – a highly persuasive performance
Royal Festival Hall, London
Lang Lang’s prodigious fingerwork gave Prokofiev’s third piano concerto tremendous impact, while Salonen oversaw a superb rendition of Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy
Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No 3 – completed in 1921, near the start of the composer’s exile from Russia – was an appropriate vehicle for the last of Lang Lang’s three concerto dates with a Philharmonia Orchestra that was always on top form. The piece was written as a pianistic showcase and so, since classical music has no flashier keyboard showman than Lang Lang, the combination was often irresistible.
Lang Lang’s tendency to wallow in contrasts suits Prokofiev’s wild ride from frenetic to languid and back again, and the mannerisms that appal when the pianist plays many other composers felt less inappropriate here. The sheer steeliness of the fingerwork was absolutely prodigious, and Lang Lang articulated the enigmatic gavotte and variations of the concerto’s second movement with just the right emotionally empty irony. There wasn’t much of an attempt to make a unified piece out of the concerto, but the instant impact of the performance was tremendous.
Continue reading...December 3, 2015
Hilary Benn’s speech on Syria could transform Labour | Martin Kettle
The shadow foreign secretary’s electrifying speech not only gave Labour MPs permission to vote for extending military action, it also positioned him as a serious leadership challenger
Beware the instant theatrical excitement of the great parliamentary moment. Always read the health warnings before swallowing the claims about the House of Commons at its best. Real politics isn’t a Spielberg movie about slavery, or a West Wing episode, in which a great speech changes history and the credits roll. Real politics is mostly one damn thing after another – a big Commons vote, a shabby reselection campaign in Walthamstow, a lousy byelection result in Oldham.
Yet Hilary Benn’s speech at the end of the Syria debate on Wednesday night was politically elevating all the same. It was riveting as he delivered it in real time on the night. It was still compelling when replayed in the cold light of morning. It was calm and without pomposity. And over the allotted 15 minutes it led unerringly to a climactic argument – that the right thing to do in Syria is to stand up to Islamic State’s fascism.
Related: Hilary Benn speech on Syria exposes political genes
Related: It’s Cameron, not Corbyn, who is the terrorist appeaser | Simon Jenkins
Continue reading...November 26, 2015
The Syria debate shows MPs have learned the lessons of war | Martin Kettle
In the ancient legend, Prometheus is chained to a rock, where his liver is pecked out by an eagle every day – only to regenerate each night, ready to be eaten once again. As British politics wrestles again with whether to commit the military to another post-9/11 conflict, it is easy to get the feeling that a collective Promethean agony is being repeatedly re-enacted here too. Look more carefully, however, and something may be changing for the better.
True, the questions that David Cameron posed yesterday over Syria in the Commons have an extremely familiar feel: Why? Why us? Why now? Is it legal? Will it work? What happens next? Those were exactly the same questions, almost word for word, that Tony Blair faced over Iraq in 2003.
Most of them are not forever stuck in 2003. They are being pragmatic, by recognising the limits of UK military power
Related: Defence review: Cameron to announce new UK reconnaissance planes
Continue reading...November 25, 2015
Spending reviews are just meaningless guesswork. They should be abolished | Martin Kettle
Government spending. It’s hard to think of a more important domestic political subject. Nothing MPs do through the year matters more than when they decide how much the state spends, where the money comes from and how it is distributed.
By rights, that makes today a hugely important date in the political calendar. Today we don’t just get the annual autumn statement, which is always one of the two big days in the Treasury’s year. This time we also get the comprehensive spending review, setting targets and budgets for the three years from 2016 to 2019, by which time the next general election will be looming.
Related: George Osborne's spending review cuts to hit social care and police
Related: Autumn statement 2015: five key charts
Continue reading...November 23, 2015
The Mikado review - feels as fresh as paint
Coliseum, London
Jonathan Miller’s classic production of the Gilbert & Sullivan opera might be on its 14th revival but this fine cast make the evening hum
Jonathan Miller’s ageless ENO production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado is beginning its 14th revival. The Coliseum performance on 6 December will be the 200th. Revivals always differ, but it is as fresh as paint this time. If you have never seen it, go. If, like me, it’s a decade or two since you last went, then go again.
Individual good things abound in this latest outing. But it is Miller’s production, part Noel Coward, part Marx Brothers, part Busby Berkeley tap-dance routine, with its grand hotel setting and its essential insight that The Mikado says infinitely more about England than it says about Japan, that still makes the evening hum. The Mikado is a wonderful score, with both Gilbert and, in particular, Sullivan stretching themselves to great effect, but Miller’s show liberates the piece to give of its best, as a good production should.
Related: Most unwanted
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