Martin Kettle's Blog, page 77
June 15, 2015
Labour leadership: the timing is bad, the process stinks, but this is going to be a good contest | Martin Kettle
They shouldn’t be having this election now. They are doing everything in the wrong order. The nomination system stinks. The election system is neither democratic fish nor electoral college fowl. The candidates are all a bit lacking in different ways. The race for the deputy’s job is a total waste of time. And Labour is a party in denial about going through a near-death experience. Yet apart from all that, the Labour leadership election is actually looking like a good contest as nominations close today.
The good news is that there is a decent range of candidates to choose from. Two men and two women; age and youth; a spectrum of views from old left to Blairite; a mix of ministerial experience and views from the backbenches; candidates from London, the Midlands and the north. Believe me, it could be a lot, lot worse.
Female leaders can change the nature of politics in the way that men struggle to do
Related: The wrong ways and the right ones to pick Labour’s next leader | Andrew Rawnsley
Continue reading...
Tristan und Isolde review – Negus's conducting is worth the entire evening
Longborough Festival Opera, Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire
The production feels cluttered, but in most other respects, this Tristan is a triumph
Related: Longborough festival: how the Cotswolds became a mecca for Wagnerians
The Wagnerian odyssey in the Cotswolds has elevated Martin Graham’s enterprise to cult status among devotees, but its limitations must not be glossed over. There is much to celebrate about the Longborough festival’s new production of Tristan und Isolde, but it is important to look its shortcomings in the eye.
June 12, 2015
Paul Lewis review – a display of pianistic depth
Wigmore Hall, London
Few keyboard works repay repeated listening more than Beethoven’s last piano sonatas
Actors are used to giving two performances of the same play on the same day. Not so musicians with their concerts. Yet there is so much to be learned and matured from playing and listening to the same music a second time within 24 hours that it is surprising that concerts like Paul Lewis’s pairing are so rare. Since Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas make up a concentrated 70-minute summation of his writing in the form, it was an inspired idea for Lewis to play a 6pm recital of them, followed by a 9pm return with the same programme.
There were, inevitably, nuances of difference between the two concerts – though these can of course reflect differences within the listener as well as the performer. The compressed opening of the E-flat sonata Op 109 was more subtly articulated the second time around, although the cumulative musical tensions of the finale were built up even more irresistibly in the first concert. The overall rendering of the A flat sonata Op 110 was more sustained in the first performance while that of the C minor final sonata Op 111 was more profoundly exploratory in the second. Overall, it felt as though the playing in the first recital was a little more by the book than in the second, in which Lewis allowed himself a greater degree of impulse. But the evening was a display of pianistic depth, and there are few keyboard works that repay repeated listening more than these.
Continue reading...June 11, 2015
Security v privacy: Anderson offers the balance we’ve been seeking since 9/11 | Martin Kettle
Occasionally in the long history of British policymaking someone manages to break through the confusion and reset the terms of an apparently unresolvable public argument. Edwin Chadwick on the poor law and public health, William Beveridge on the welfare system and Leslie Scarman on the police all changed things for generations – and for the public good – in their respective fields. The question today is whether the name of David Anderson – Britain’s watchdog on terrorism laws – should be added to the list of these national reformer-reconcilers.
With a fair wind behind it, his report on the future of surveillance laws, published yesterday, may eventually prove to have poured calming oils on a stormy argument that British governments have often seemed incapable of resolving. If Anderson’s plea is taken seriously, and we wipe the slate clean and start again on Britain’s efforts to balance security and privacy in the pursuit of crime in the borderless online world, his report really could be the turning point that policymakers have looked for and missed ever since 9/11.
Related: UK intelligence agencies should keep mass surveillance powers, report says
The post-Snowden debate in this country has seemed like a full-pelt dialogue of the stone deaf
Continue reading...June 4, 2015
Let’s have a reality check. The Tories aren’t all wicked and wrong | Martin Kettle
What kind of Conservative government is David Cameron actually leading now? It says something about the blurriness of our second-term prime minister that, even after nearly a decade leading his party, answers to this question still vary so radically. Yet there is no more interesting or more important question in the new era of British politics.
Related: David Cameron packs plenty into his one-party Queen's speech
Part of the problem of trying to understand him is that he does not impose as leader. He is a halfhearted party manager
Continue reading...June 3, 2015
Daniel Barenboim review – reveals the essence of Schubert's piano writing
Royal Festival Hall, London
In his final two Schubert recitals, there was a sense of spontaneous encounter in everything Barenboim played, with the details never subsumed into a predetermined whole
Related: Daniel Barenboim review – interesting rather than revelatory Schubert playing
The final two legs of Daniel Barenboim’s four concert, 11-sonata Schubert series culminated, as it must, in the last sonata of them all: the B flat, D960. But the journey towards this inevitable summation began far away with the E flat sonata, D568, grand and exploratory in Barenboim’s occasionally undisciplined hands, and the darker dramas of the A minor, D784, in whose clashes and contrasts Barenboim’s Beethovenian instincts clearly revelled. It was, though, the D major sonata, D850, that revealed the characteristic essence of Schubert’s piano writing, with Barenboim’s mastery of tone, weight and touch turning the spotlight on details of this expansive work, which is playful, wistful and soaring by turns, almost as if Schubert was extemporising as he wrote his score.
Continue reading...June 2, 2015
Chausson's operatic rarity Le Roi Arthus deserves clarity not banality
Chausson’s opera has languished in the shadows for over a century. Graham Vick’s new production in Paris does little to makes its case
All art forms have their overlooked great figures and their neglected great works. Opera is certainly one of these. The neglect is perhaps surprising. Opera houses, after all, depend financially upon a finite corpus of enduringly popular works from the 19th and early 20th centuries. So it is strange that they mostly make so little effort to unearth less well known treasures from this same productive period.
Such pieces undoubtedly exist, although there is of course much that is clearly beyond rescue. Festivals such as Wexford and Buxton have built their reputations on a continuing ability to come up with rarities and largely forgotten works by established composers. And almost every year the remarkable University College Opera still manages to disinter an obscure piece by a notable composer and put it on in the heart of London.
Few significant operas have suffered neglect on the scale that has been endured by Ernest Chausson’s Le Roi Arthus
Such operas that have languished in the shadows deserve productions that help the audience grasp an unfamiliar work
Continue reading...June 1, 2015
Charles Kennedy, a truly authentic politician who rose above the crowd | Martin Kettle
Whatever his inner demons, the former Lib Dem leader was one of the few politicians of the modern era to whom ordinary Britons could relate
Authenticity is the most elusive but the most precious of all qualities in modern democratic politics. Very few politicians are blessed with it. Lots of politicians pretend to possess it. The lack of it causes many careers to stumble and not even get off the ground. But Charles Kennedy had it naturally and he had it in spades. He was one of the very few politicians of the modern era to whom ordinary non-political people instinctively related. People liked him and were right to do so. It gave him a special status in public life right to the enormously sad end.
At his best, Kennedy had the ability to rise above the crowd and speak for his times in easily expressed and easily understood language. His ability to cut through the evasions and cliches of modern politics was a quality so many others struggle to emulate, often without success. He also had a great and natural sense of humour, unusual in a very private man such as he. It made him one of the few politicians who could master every form of television interview or appearance without looking awkward.
Continue reading...May 28, 2015
From provocation to power: the SNP’s tricky road ahead | Martin Kettle
They have had their amazing night of electoral triumph. They have had their photocalls with Nicola Sturgeon by the Forth bridge and outside the House of Commons. Inside the Commons they have taken their dispatch box selfies, have made their prickly point by affirming rather than taking the oath, and have played silly buggers with Dennis Skinner over who sits where.
Related: SNP MPs flout Commons etiquette with first-day tweets
It remains to be seen whether the SNP have tougher tactics in their locker, or the will to deploy them
Continue reading...May 27, 2015
Queen’s speech 2015: ‘Like a teenager’s bedroom it will become a mess’ | Hugh Muir, Deborah Orr, Michael White, Martin Kettle
Was it aspirational, isolationist or just a bit all over the place? Our columnists give their view. But what did you make of the Queen’s speech?
Related: Queen's speech 2015: Cameron's plan to axe Human Rights Act delayed - Politics live
There is videogame quality, a sense of the PR man’s gloss on the unpalatable limits of a fragile economic recovery
Continue reading...Martin Kettle's Blog
- Martin Kettle's profile
- 2 followers
