Martin Kettle's Blog, page 76
July 30, 2015
Why you won’t catch a British politician at the opera | Martin Kettle
Last Saturday I sat in something very close to rapture just a few feet away from Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel. But Merkel wasn’t making a speech. She wasn’t giving a press conference. And, although I live in hope, she wasn’t giving me an exclusive interview for the Guardian about Britain and the EU either.
Merkel was doing the same thing I was doing. She was at the opera house, listening to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. And not just in any old opera house. We were at the Bayreuth festival theatre, the legendary Wagner shrine in Bavaria. It was the opening night of the 2015 festival. Merkel was the guest of honour there, as she often is.
Related: Tristan und Isolde review – radical reimagining marks new chapter for Bayreuth
Whenever British politicians see the word ‘culture’, they make their excuses and leave
Related: Could opera improve the tenor of political debate? | Letters
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July 26, 2015
Tristan und Isolde review – radical reimagining marks new chapter for Bayreuth
Bayreuth festival, Germany
Christian Thielemann and co were on top form for a raw, impressive new production by Bayreuth boss Katharina Wagner
There is personal and institutional credibility riding on Katharina Wagner’s new production of Tristan und Isolde, which opened the 2015 Bayreuth festival. In many respects, the new Bayreuth boss delivers. Her Tristan is not beyond criticism, but it is a serious and interesting staging. With fine singers in all roles and Christian Thielemann delivering high musical standards from the pit, it marks a turn away from the directorial indulgence that has seemed to be Bayreuth’s hallmark in recent years.
Related: The Bayreuth Wagner festival: more soap opera than classical opera
Continue reading...July 23, 2015
Labour can come back from the brink. But it seems to lack the will to do so | Martin Kettle
Related: The battle for the Labour party’s heart and soul | Letters
History suggests that the temptation to write off the Labour party’s prospects is both recurrent and unwise. In 1910, even Keir Hardie concluded that “the Labour party had ceased to count”. Yet less than a generation later, in 1924, Labour formed its first government. Decades later, some of Britain’s most distinguished political scientists wrote a book about the 1992 election whose doom-laden title asked: Labour’s Last Chance? Yet a mere five years later, in 1997, Labour won one of its largest electoral victories of all time.
Related: Jeremy Corbyn gathers support from Communist party, Ukip and Tories
The left is unusually bad at asking itself really difficult questions about its approach to politics at all, ever
Related: For Labour the choice is stark: purity, or power | Martin Kettle
Continue reading...July 15, 2015
A message of hope to the next Lib Dem leader: your electorate awaits you | Martin Kettle
There is always something more important to write about in any given week than the Liberal Democrats. Even when the party was thriving under the late Charles Kennedy, a cartoon by Matt in the Daily Telegraph nailed the Lib Dem problem perfectly. He drew his cartoon in the intense autumn days after the 9/11 attack, which happened to coincide with the start of the party conference season. Two men with beards, turbans and rifles are standing in the mouth of an Afghan cave. One asks the other: “Any news from the Lib Dem conference in Bournemouth?” Squish.
So even in a week in which a new Lib Dem leader is elected to replace Nick Clegg, it still requires some chutzpah to focus on what is now at best only the fourth party in the land. For Clegg’s successor confronts a desolate political landscape with years of hard-won, steady incremental growth now laid waste. The BBC’s head of political research, David Cowling, recently turned to Milton to express the party’s situation: “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.” So why bother?
Postindustrial Britain is a more generally liberal and democratic country than industrial Britain ever was
As Nick Clegg has pointed out, these are lean times for liberal parties in many countries, not just Britain
Membership Event: Guardian Live| The next London Mayor?
Continue reading...July 10, 2015
Lakmé review – finely sung but unambitious
Opera Holland Park, London
This faithful production of Delibes’s rarely staged 19th-century opera exposes weaknesses in his writing but is lifted by solid performances all round
Delibes’s Lakmé has notched more than 1,600 performances in Paris since its 1883 premiere, but it rarely crosses the Channel these days. That’s particularly odd, given the pop-classic status of the first act’s Flower Duet — best known as the music for the British Airways ad — and the enduring fame of the soprano’s Bell Song in the second act. Opera Holland Park deserves bags of credit for giving this elegantly crafted piece another UK airing, the company’s second in less than a decade.
Lakmé’s British Raj setting could easily lend itself to the kind of updated staging that is being visited in Rossini’s William Tell at Covent Garden. Instead, Holland Park’s new production is unambitiously content to take Lakmé on its own 19th-century orientalist terms. Many will find it a relief that the opera is not reimagined in post 9/11 Afghanistan, for instance. But the culture-clash love between the British officer Gérald and the Brahmin priest’s daughter, Lakmé, is so quaintly staged and kept in such relentlessly soft focus that the production is not just boring but in some respects offensive.
Continue reading...July 9, 2015
George Osborne’s budget was more New Labour than Thatcherite | Martin Kettle
No event in the political calendar is more thoroughly scrutinised yet more routinely overhyped than the budget. Only a tiny handful of budgets actually change the country or remain lodged in the memory as agenda-shaping moments. So let the dust settle before being too categorical about the long-term importance of George Osborne’s latest budget – especially as it is his second in four months.
Related: Summer budget 2015 represents new centre of UK politics, says Osborne
Osborne’s desire to appeal to centre-ground support and to force Labour towards the margins could not be plainer
Related: Budget 2015: tax credit claimants will be up to £1,000 a year worse off, says IFS
Continue reading...June 25, 2015
For Labour the choice is stark: purity, or power | Martin Kettle
In human lives, a traumatic experience lasts for years. In politics, it seems a trauma can be overcome in only a few short weeks. The Liberal Democrats will have a new leader in less than a month, while Labour is well into selecting a new chief by September. These processes are trauma denial. By putting the leadership carts before the inquest horses, both parties will fail to draw the strategic conclusions that a longer period of reflection on their general election defeats might make more possible.
This week’s Guardian reconstruction by Patrick Wintour and Nick Watt of the anguish inside the Lib Dems in the months leading up to the May catastrophe is genuinely revelatory. In many ways it is even more revelatory than Wintour’s earlier attempt to get inside the backroom stresses of the Labour campaign. In Labour’s case, the party’s internal anguish about Ed Miliband and his ineffectual leadership was hardly a secret before the election. But the Lib Dem psychodrama has been much more effectively concealed from the public gaze – until now.
Related: The Clegg catastrophe | Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt
Both the Lib Dems and Labour are flirting with classic denial mechanisms of the politically traumatised
Related: Pollster John Curtice warns Labour a majority in 2020 is 'improbable'
Continue reading...June 22, 2015
In choosing Petrenko, the Berlin players are putting the music first
His symphonic repertoire is small, and his media experience even smaller, but Kirill Petrenko is a bold and an inspired choice for music director of the Berlin Philharmonic
From a narrowly British perspective, the first response to might be: “Who on Earth is he?” Or maybe: “Haven’t you got his first name wrong? Surely it’s Vasily Petrenko?”
Well, it’s definitely not. And although Petrenko, K, (no relation, incidentally, to the music director of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra) may be relatively unfamiliar in the UK – despite appearances with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and a production of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier at Covent Garden – he has been one of the outstanding conductors of his generation in the rest of Europe.
From the brazen whooping of the first bar’s horns, it’s clear that Petrenko eschews the cosy approach. The effect is sometimes indiscriminate, and a few of the score’s great moments suffer, but one is constantly reminded that this composer was also the composer of Elektra.
In the pit, Petrenko saved the best for the last two parts of the cycle, which had all the musical weight they require. The conductor emerged covered in glory. But Castorf’s production should be binned.
Continue reading...June 17, 2015
Napoleon’s dream died at Waterloo – and so did that of British democrats | Martin Kettle
What does the battle of Waterloo mean, 200 years on? Two things, but they are impossible to reconcile. First, part historic reality and part enduring symbol, the victory over Napoleon was a moment when a long war was ended, our island nation survived, and the invasion threat to Britain was lifted. Hence this week’s celebrations for our boys and their German allies.
And the second? That’s much tougher to celebrate. The second thing that Waterloo means is the victory of the feudal crowned heads of Europe over the forces of the French revolution. This Waterloo ushered in the repressive united Europe of the Vienna settlement: Castlereagh and Metternich, Louis XVIII and Charles X of France and Ferdinand VII of Spain, anti-liberal anti-democratic reactionaries set on consigning the Europe of republics and peoples to the history books.
Related: Waterloo: A German victory?
At Torbay there was fear of onshore popular sympathy if Napoleon were to set foot on English soil as he wished
Continue reading...June 16, 2015
LSO/Haitink/Ibragimova review – he cast an instant spell
Barbican, London
When Bernard Haitink and the London Symphony Orchestra get together, the high-level musical organisation is profound in a way few can rival
When Bernard Haitink gave his downbeat to the London Symphony Orchestra, it was as though he had cast an instant spell. There was no visible demand for the subtle dynamics and impeccably modulated tempi that flowed from the LSO players for the next two hours in music by Mozart and Mahler. But when this conductor and this orchestra get together, the high-level musical organisation seems instant and profound in a way that few can rival.
Haitink chose Mozart’s G major violin concerto, K216 for this concert, and Alina Ibragimova paid him the compliment of learning the piece for the occasion. The performance had Haitink’s restrained imprint on it from the very start, but Ibragimova brought characterful attentiveness to every bar of the opening allegro. The adagio was spun out in a long lovely line by conductor and soloist, and Ibragimova gave a very personal quietness and depth to the brief, introspective cadenza.
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