Martin Kettle's Blog, page 79
April 23, 2015
Why the real election result could be voting reform | Martin Kettle
On 7 May, Britain is widely expected to elect a hung parliament. This article offers a plausible scenario for the result, and a more speculative but optimistic scenario for what could follow. It is based on the polls and on recent political pledges, as well as on precedent from the 1920s. It illustrates the dilemmas that may be awaiting Britain in just two weeks.
When the results are in, the Conservatives have lost seats but remain the largest single party in votes and seats. Labour makes gains in England and Wales, but sustains huge losses to the Scottish National party north of the border. The SNP commands almost all Scottish seats. The Liberal Democrats lose half their MPs but the other half hold on. Ukip gets lots of votes, but only a tiny handful of seats. Nothing much changes in Northern Ireland, or for the Greens or Plaid Cymru.
The SNP cannot risk going into the 2016 Holyrood elections as the party that brought Labour down
Related: General election 2015: If this deadlock holds, a battle is coming over Ed Miliband’s legitimacy
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Capuçon/Angelich review – lyrical Schumann and rich Brahms
Cellist and pianist overcame difficult acoustics with elegant and at times impassioned playing
The size of the Barbican Hall was no friend to the cellist Gautier Capuçon and pianist Nicholas Angelich, in this recital centred on Brahms’s two cello sonatas. Even when it is full, the hall’s dry sound can be difficult for solo string players. When that player is such a refined artist as Capuçon, the cello sound can seem trapped on the platform, and it was hard not to spend the evening wishing the recital was taking place in a venue which allowed him more chances to bloom.
With that proviso, both Capuçon and Angelich are experienced collaborators and distinguished Brahms players, and the two sonatas were each given well-judged and elegant performances. Angelich’s light-touch playing of Brahms’s sometimes heavily textured piano parts was a model throughout, the richness and weight of the writing admirably kept under control. This enabled Capuçon to articulate the grave opening movement of the E minor first sonata with his 1701 instrument’s characteristically velvety tone without ever straining or becoming histrionic. The give and take between the two players in the contrapuntal final Allegro was compelling.
Continue reading...BBC Proms 2015: It's a season with practically everything
With innovation, anniversaries, late-night solo Bach and Sherlock Holmes, the 2015 Proms tick every box
News: The BBC Proms go clubbing: 2015 lineup includes Ibiza dance night
I’m afraid I give up. Every year at about this time, I look at the new Proms season programme and, being a cynical journalist, every year I look for an angle to criticise what’s on offer. And every year I fail.
Take this year’s programme, revealed today. It’s got practically everything. Lots of dependables who bring in the punters, not least Beethoven, Mahler and Shostakovich. But lots of new music too, including world premieres by Tansy Davies, HK Gruber, James MacMillan and Hugh Wood. Plenty of star conductors – Simon Rattle, Daniel Barenboim, Andreis Nelsons and Semyon Bychkov. Glitzy soloists including Daniil Trifonov, Nicola Benedetti, Bryn Terfel and Jonas Kaufman. And Marin Alsop back for the Last Night after her brilliant success as the first woman to conduct the shindig in 2013.
Related: The BBC Proms go clubbing: 2015 lineup includes Ibiza dance night
Continue reading...April 22, 2015
Staatskapelle Berlin/ Barenboim/ Batiashvili review – luxuriant and committed
Royal Festival Hall, London
Barenboim brought a very special sense of occasion and affirmation to Elgar’s second symphony, while Tchaikovsky’s violin concert with Lisa Batiashvili had gutsy grandeur and soaring lines
Daniel Barenboim’s talents and confidence are so prodigious that sometimes he can seem happier just to wing it. In this performance with his Berlin orchestra of Elgar’s second symphony, however, that was never the case for a single moment. Barenboim has said recently that Elgar’s credentials are universal. And, right from the first bar, with the crescendo thrillingly elongated, Barenboim seemed on a mission to prove the point.
It was a mission in which the Staatskapelle were equal partners. Their playing was luxuriant, whether in the surging tuttis of the opening statement, or the hushed intimacies that are such an essential recurring part of this symphony’s texture. Brass and woodwind were outstanding, while the string playing, audibly urged on by Barenboim at times, was richly committed in quiet and loud passages alike.
Continue reading...April 20, 2015
Borodin Quartet review – fierce and formidable
The Russian masters of chamber music marked their 70th anniversary with a formidable start to their Shostakovich and Beethoven cycles
This formidable concert marked the start of a complete cycle of Shostakovich and Beethoven quartets in a Wigmore Hall series over the next two years. The Borodin Quartet, who are celebrating their 70th anniversary, remain the gold standard for Russian chamber music and the Russian approach. And, sure enough, as soon as they put bow to string in Shostakovich’s 10th Quartet in A flat, from 1964, one felt as though this was very much the way the composer heard the piece.
Like the other two quartets in this programme, the 10th begins sparely and sombrely, and at a meditative pulse. The Borodins gripped the piece from the start, with the sinister little viola triplets emphasising the troubled nature of the dark reflections in the other strings. The playing was rich-toned and dramatic, in ways that seemed authentically Russian, and the technique was formidable.
Continue reading...Barenboim celebrates Elgar: 'It is music fit for universal consumption'
Mahler, Strauss and Toscanini were among those who championed his music, but Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Staatskapelle’s forthcoming London performance of Elgar’s second symphony is an important landmark for the composer’s international reputation
To Daniel Barenboim, as he put it in a discussion with journalists in Berlin last month, Edward Elgar is simply “a universal composer.” The great conductor is determined to stop his audiences from thinking of Elgar as English or British first and a composer second. And tomorrow evening, Barenboim will once again put his music-making where his mouth is, when he conducts at the Royal Festival Hall his Berlin Staatskapelle in Elgar’s E flat major second symphony, written in 1911.
This may not seem like a big deal to some. After all, Barenboim is one of the world’s great conductors. The Elgar second is without much argument a great symphony. What’s to remark upon when the two come together, as they will tomorrow in London and as they did in a 2013 recording with the Staatskapelle, which was recently voted - against competition from generations of home-grown Elgarians - the Building a Library choice on the Radio 3 programme?
Continue reading...April 19, 2015
NY Philharmonic/Gilbert review – vigour and clarity with contemporary work
Alan Gilbert’s skill with new music was in evidence at the UK premiere of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Nyx – along with an artful Joyce DiDonato
When a great orchestra comes to town, audiences traditionally expect a big statement – a mighty symphony, or a great-composer focus. The New York Philharmonic’s residency at the Barbican this month is simultaneously less grandiose and more ambitious. Its organising idea is the connective programming that its music director, Alan Gilbert, explored in his Royal Philharmonic Society lecture last week. And there’s not a symphony in sight.
There was New York glamour in the series’ opening concert, nevertheless. It could not be otherwise with Joyce DiDonato. The mezzo-soprano artfully combined both musical intelligence and vocal control to capture the decadence – it’s the only word for songs that at one point get off on the decapitation of innocent victims – of Ravel’s 1903 Shéhérazade song cycle. But she did it more by exquisite restraint than by show, emphasising the self-regard of the Tristan Klingsor texts, rather than milking Ravel’s orientalism. Ever the trooper, DiDonato gave Richard Strauss’s Morgen as a lusciously indulgent encore.
This is an eclectic, almost postmodern piece for a very large orchestra, full of stylistic allusion and dynamic twists
Continue reading...April 17, 2015
Coalition and minority governments are not so unusual in UK elections
The first-past-the-post system has led to fewer one-party majority governments in Britain than might be expected – only half of all those in the 20th century
It is late in the afternoon of Friday 8 May. From the early hours, it has been clear that Britain has voted for another hung parliament. The exhausted party leaders have been conferring with advisers and, discreetly, with one another. Now they are back in their offices after being on parade at the awkwardly timed Cenotaph ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of VE Day. On the television, the final constituency, Westmorland and Lonsdale as in 2010, declares its result – a rare Liberal Democrat hold. The 650 results are all now in. The hung parliament is confirmed. At Buckingham Palace, the phone of the Queen’s private secretary phone rings…
What happens next mainly depends on the number of seats held by each party. Yet until the situation is resolved, one thing is certain: Britain will still have a government. David Cameron will remain prime minister until his resignation is offered and accepted. Even ministers who have lost their seats may remain in government for a short while. And even if the Conservatives have fewer seats than Labour, Cameron would be within his rights – and some would argue it would be his constitutional duty – to stay in Downing Street until a new government is formed. And that could take longer than it did in 2010, when the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition was formed after five days of talks.
April 16, 2015
Here’s a bold plan, Ed Miliband – it worked for Roosevelt | Martin Kettle
What does Hillary stand for? The Economist’s front cover posed that question last week: the frontrunner for the US Democratic nomination in 2016 will have to craft a plausible answer.
Does she still understand the anxieties of ordinary Americans whose real wages have stagnated while the economy surged? And is she more than a moderate and experienced liberal person who, in the end, has no clear answers to what elected government can actually do for those families in the face of corporate American power, Wall Street’s flash boys and the sleepless hatred of the Republican right?
Related: The making of Ed Miliband
If making social democracy work in a globalised capitalist economy was easy, it would have been done long ago
Continue reading...April 14, 2015
Philharmonia/Järvi review – Järvi tames Nielsen’s wild masterpiece
An awesomely executed performance of Nielsen’s fourth symphony sat alongside perfectly pitched Haydn and sparkling Beethoven
Even within my lifetime a Guardian critic could write a review complaining that Nielsen’s fourth symphony should not have been titled the “Inextinguishable” but the “Indistinguishable”. We are certainly more interested in and hopefully much wiser about Nielsen’s achievement now. And with two cycles of his symphonies – the other under Sakari Oramo – interweaved in London’s current concert season, Paavo Järvi’s impassioned performance of this craggy yet sweeping masterpiece was the best possible retort to an earlier era that struggled to get it about Nielsen’s individuality and metaphysical drive.
Few symphonies explode with such pent-up energy as Nielsen’s first world war-era assertion of what he saw as the embattled life force. A conductor must work hard to prevent the piece becoming so wild and relentless that its textures and motivic structure are lost. Järvi was equal to that challenge, hugely helped by some committed wind playing, which brought out the more angular dimensions of the score. But he never lost his grip either, and the awesomely executed duel of timpani thunderbolts across the orchestra in the final movement was not allowed to eclipse the compelling trajectory of Nielsen’s argument.
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