Category: Music

Cécile Chaminade is no longer a household name, or even a recognisable name, even in a time when female composers are being rediscovered and celebrated. I’ve loved her since I was a little boy visiting Hoylake for piano lessons with Heather Slade-Lipkin – her mother used to play Chaminade for me. It seems extraordinary now, but every time Joan would sit down at the piano for this opened-eyed little boy, devouring music like I was in a sweet shop, it was Chaminade’s Automne, or her Scarf Dance, or the tricky Toccata. One treat after another.

I’m playing a lot of Chaminade this season; or, more accurately, I’m playing a few pieces of hers many times – alongside three of the great, 30-minute masterpieces of 19th-century piano music: the Schumann Fantasie, and the B minor Sonatas of Liszt and Chopin. To those surprised by the juxtaposition, I think Chaminade sits very comfortably and proudly there, not because her elegant miniatures are comparable in scope and ambition to those three greatest keyboard works of the 19th century by three geniuses, but because she shared an important place with them in the most popular performance venue of the Romantic era: the salon.

Salons have pretty much disappeared today (apart from those who try to resurrect the idea – a musical equivalent of jousting on the village green or taking a ride on a steam train) so we tend to forget that for most of the 19th century solo piano recitals in large public spaces were rare. It was the salon – a large room in a large private home to which music lovers would be invited – which was ubiquitous. Chopin’s whole creative life was fuelled by these opportunities for his music to be heard. His pieces were almost all dedicated to various countesses and rich patrons who would invite him to play for them; the intimate setting of a dozen people listening quietly in an elegant private room was his chosen space.

All the great 19th-century composers wrote some music specifically for amateurs to play at home. Apart from anything else, it was their main source of income. If you had the money and space for a china cabinet it’s likely you’d have a piano in the same room too. Pretty much everyone who had the time and leisure to read a book would have learned the piano as well. Especially women.

Enter Cécile Chaminade. She was born in 1857 into a musical family, receiving her first piano lessons from her mother. When she was 10 she was accepted for study at the Paris Conservatoire but her father forbade it, so she studied with various of its professors privately. Although all women of a certain class at the time were encouraged to play the piano at home, it was unusual for them to be allowed to pursue a career doing so. In fact, women were generally discouraged from travelling or dining alone, two activities which fill the lives of touring concert performers.

One of the keys to understanding the paucity of female composers until the 20th century is that composers generally wrote music for themselves to play, whether in public venues or the more private world of the salon. So if a performing career was not a possibility for a woman then neither was writing music. Chaminade is one of the few who were able to ride over this restriction, a witness to her determination and her popularity.

And Chaminade was exceptionally successful for a while. She played her music all over Europe, including for Queen Victoria who gave her the Jubilee medal in 1897; her Prélude for organ Op 78 was played at the monarch’s funeral. Most of her large output was written between the 1880s and 90s and she had an enormous international renown. Her Scarf Dance alone is said to have sold more than five million copies. In the US hundreds of women across the continent around the turn of the 20th century founded and joined Chaminade Clubs, from Yonkers, New York to Jackson, Mississippi – two of the many which exist to this day, and still present concerts.

Chaminade married a music publisher but they lived in a platonic relationship and separately, he in Marseille and she in Paris. He died in 1907 and she never remarried. It’s hard not to draw certain conclusions from this – a further indication of the restrictions of the age.

Then, soon after his death, and to the end of her life, more than 35 years later … silence. The composing dried up. The performances ceased. The accolades became a distant memory. Ironically, the postwar era of greater emancipation for women passed Chaminade by. It’s astonishing to realise that she died as late as 1944. Alone in Monte Carlo.

Where to place her in the rich period of French musical history that coincided with her life? She has something of the sweetness of Massenet, Delibes, Gounod and other Romantics; we hear the pianistic confidence of Saint-Saëns in the elegant glitter of her figuration; early Fauré’s shifting melancholy is present at times. Her music is at least as charming and lyrical as Debussy’s in his early Arabesques and Clair de Lune. Like Chopin she was a composer of meticulous craft; like Liszt she knew how to make the piano sparkle; and like Schumann there are many moments of tender poetry. She would have loved and played all three composers, and I have the sense she would have been delighted to take her place once more alongside them.

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center presents An Evening with Sir Stephen Hough at David Geffen Hall, New York City, on 24 November; Stephen Hough plays Chaminade, Chopin and Schumann at the Barbican, London, on 4 December.

As one quarter of the Swedish underground-ish rap collective Drain Gang, Bladee (pronounced Blade) spent his 20s on the frontlines of a hyper-online youth culture. But as his 30th birthday loomed, the musician born Benjamin Reichwald started to sweat. His anxiety about ageing, a serious depressive spell, and the mixed reception to his latest album, spiralled into a crisis: were he and his Drain Gang peers “permanently frozen as 20-year-olds because we came up at a certain time of our lives”, he wondered. Was he already past it at 29?

“I got so old, I got embarrassed to be even here,” Reichwald sings on his newest album, Cold Visions. Older readers may roll their eyes, but given Reichwald has built up one of the most ardent young fanbases in music, this was a valid worry. “I had a lot to get off my chest,” he says now. “I was thinking a lot about my position and I felt stuck – do I have to be perceived as an artist to feel fulfilled? I’m chasing that and it doesn’t give me anything. So why am I doing this?”

Reichwald has a reputation for being elusive (this is one of the very few solo interviews he has ever done) and frequently obscures his face. Lately he has favoured corpse paint, blood-red grills for his teeth and a chaotic assemblage of bandanas, sunglasses and Oakley hats. But during a two-hour conversation in a Brooklyn hotel room, in Gucci sneakers and a T-shirt with the logo of Norwegian black metal band Satyricon, he is thoughtful and forthcoming.

Despite his worries, being 30 has treated Reichwald well. In March he released Psykos, a rock-leaning collaboration with his fellow Swedish rapper and long-term friend and collaborator Yung Lean, who also featured on Cold Visions, which was released the following month. In October, they both appeared on Charli xcx’s Brat remix album, with Bladee reworking the song Rewind. “It’s a Bladee verse, I did my thing,” is how he modestly describes his contribution, but he speaks more effusively of Charli: “I have eternal respect for her. She put me in this context with all these other people” – Ariana Grande, Lorde and Billie Eilish all appear on the remix record – “and I’m very grateful to be involved.”

It caps a big year for Reichwald. Released a decade after his debut mixtape, Cold Visions is his most fully realised project yet. Made in two weeks in his house in Stockholm, the album is, he says, “really honest, more like a diary”. In the course of 30 songs, he purges his demons over raging, blown-out trap beats. Brain cells fried into oblivion, he navigates panic attacks and self-loathing, calls himself “the king of nothing matters” and raps about “violently drug abusing weed”. In one line he’s working out and getting tanned in LA, the next “I’m crashing down some like a wave over castles made of sand.”

Cold Visions was self-released after Reichwald split from Year0001, Drain Gang’s longtime label and management company. “I don’t really care any more about being a bigger artist,” he says. “The only thing that’s important is that I’m doing something that’s true to me.”

The Drain Gang collective – Bladee, Ecco2K, Thaiboy Digital, and Whitearmor – have been best friends since their teens, playing around with Auto-Tune, and freestyling in the vein of idiosyncratic US rappers such as Lil B and Chief Keef. Early Bladee tracks – overcast cloud rap about crushed hearts, pills and dreams – were so digitally processed that they passed through the uncanny valley and ended up somewhere strangely melodic and emotive. “I hated to hear my voice without the Auto-Tune,” Reichwald says. “It’s how we found our sound. Without it we wouldn’t have committed to doing it – it sounded too bad.”

The group cycled through a number of names before landing on Drain Gang, inspired by a nihilistically gothic sentiment later articulated in Bladee’s song Be Nice 2 Me: “Take a knife and drain your life.” They quickly found kindred spirits in Sad Boys, a local crew featuring Yung Lean. In 2014, Lean’s melancholic and memeable hip-hop was taking the internet by storm, and Reichwald quit his job at a kindergarten to join him on tour.

By April 2015, barely out of his teens, Reichwald was living with Lean in Miami, where working on music came second to partying and drug use. One evening, Lean suffered drug-induced psychosis; Reichwald called the ambulance which probably saved his life. Hours later, Barron Machat, Lean’s 27-year-old manager, died in a car accident on his way to the hospital; Xanax was found in his system. “Things were building to a point where something was going to happen because of how we were living,” Reichwald says. “We didn’t think that anything could go wrong, we were so in this drugs and rock star lifestyle. Someone was probably always gonna die with how we were moving. It was very reckless, but we were so young, we just didn’t know.”

Reichwald returned to Sweden and worked at a shampoo factory while suffering from PTSD and struggling to process Machat’s death and Lean’s deteriorating mental health. “I was not really OK,” he says. Reichwald says it took him a long time to understand that he and his friends had autonomy over their surreal new lives as successful rappers. “I sometimes felt like, ‘I shouldn’t be here, so I have to do what everyone says.’ I didn’t understand that I had any value in the situation. I didn’t understand why people would like my music. I thought there must be some kind of misunderstanding. But now, I’ve done it for so long and I actually know what I’m doing. I believe more in my ability.”

His music remained dark and dissociative for a good while, but the clouds began to part around 2020. While Reichwald’s persona had long swung between mall rat and mystic, his spiritual side became more pronounced as his music grew brighter. Fans started to wonder if he had experienced some sort of transformative near-death experience because, in 2019, he had mentioned that he’d been struck by lightning in Thailand. Or at least he thinks that’s what happened. “Either I had a random seizure from seeing the lightning or I got struck by it.” Whatever it was, “something definitely changed around that time”.

Drain Gang’s angst once enticed a considerable number of nihilistic, male online edgelords, but their fanbase has evolved as their music has become more euphoric, frequently going viral on TikTok during the pandemic. Most of the crowd at a recent show were dressed in distressed black clothes like Reichwald; they were mainly so young that fans older than 26 were given their own fast-track queue as if they needed elderly care.

Reichwald says that he is uncomfortable with being idolised, but understands the way that belonging to a subculture can be life-affirming. Even before his teens, he formed a punk band with Ecco2K after seeing someone with a studded leather jacket and thinking: “I want to be like that. But,” he adds, “you need to find yourself within all that.”

He allows himself a little pride in the way Drain Gang have built and maintained their singular corner of music. “We still don’t feel like someone is doing what we’re doing, better,” he says. “I would love to hear someone take it to the next level with a new perspective, someone young. I feel like that’s the point of it – you can keep the idea going.”

He’s now looking beyond Cold Visions to his own future. “I want to become a better person,” he says with a sweetly earnest laugh. “I want to have a brighter outlook and work on liking myself more. I’m sick of thinking about myself; I would like to be more outside my head.” After several years spent getting “sick all the time”, he is “trying to be sober and healthy”. Lately he’s been experimenting with songwriting in Swedish, and working on abstract paintings in his art studio. Ultimately, he finds solace in the act of creating. “Even in my sadder music,” he says, “I’m striving for joy.”

One of his short stories inspired Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker, but ETA Hoffmann – German romantic writer, polymath, rake – was also a sci-fi pioneer. He tried to build his own automata and invented tales about artificially created beings even before Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. The wind-up mechanical doll, Olympia, from his story The Sandman (1816), has a central role in composer Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, which has opened at the Royal Opera in a richly inventive new production conducted by Antonello Manacorda and directed by Damiano Michieletto. No gag opportunity is missed, no surprise suppressed. The whole event is a riot, done with extreme seriousness.

Offenbach died in 1880 before the work could be staged. Had he not done so, he might have left a definitive edition of his odd, lopsided but touching creation. The Royal Opera, in a co-production with Opera Australia, Opéra National de Lyon and the Teatro La Fenice, Venice, presents a new edition. For an opera staged regularly but not frequently, any changes should distract few: it manages a degree of chronological security that leaves the Italian production team – also responsible for, among others, the Royal Opera’s winning Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci last year – free to pursue their wildest fantasies.

And they do. Industrial quantities of glitter, a pea-green corps de ballet who dance with chairs, extreme wigs, carnival masks, a smashed cello, enchanting child ballerinas, parrot and doppelganger, stilts, tumblers, hula hoops: all – relatively – normal operatic fare. Add in the shrivelled brain, the enlarged eyeball, the mathematic equations in which integers end up as a choreographed chorus (you had to be there), and a bizarre new Hoffmannesque world emerges. In Paolo Fantin’s joyful set designs, an extravaganza of greens, pinks and crimsons, with costumes by Carla Teti, lighting by Alessandro Carletti and choreography by Chiara Vecchi, skill and imagination are boundless.

All this would be worthless without excellent soloists, chorus and orchestra to deliver Offenbach’s melodic, sprawling score. In short, the old man Hoffmann recalls his failed, youthful loves: Olympia (Olga Pudova), who is merely a doll; Antonia (Ermonela Jaho), who will die if she sings – her talent shown here through the metaphor of dance; and Giulietta (Marina Costa-Jackson), a courtesan. Pudova’s coloratura, chiselled and icy, and her stiff, clockwork gestures stole the show for dazzle, but Jaho, as ever, caught the work’s heartbreak. Costa-Jackson made the most of the less rounded character of the glamorous Giulietta.

Hoffmann himself is a curiosity, hard to comprehend but elegantly sung by Juan Diego Flórez, intonation always secure though at times his top notes lasted just a bit too lo-o-ng. His nemeses – various devil-like figures played with sinister brilliance and terrific vocal finesse by Alex Esposito – held us mesmerised. With outstanding support from Julie Boulianne, Christine Rice, Jeremy White, Alastair Miles and more, and a committed chorus required to perform unlikely complex sequences including lying on their backs and waggling their feet, this was the Royal Ballet and Opera on best form.

The orchestra delivered this long score with endless panache and attention to detail. Manacorda paced the performance well, and idiomatically, though the stop-start gaps for applause were excessive. Offenbach, after so many effervescent operettas, wanted to be taken seriously. This production honours his strange and idiosyncratic genius.

Composers of one generation can cast shadows, as well as light, on the next. Nineteenth-century romantics struggled beneath the tonnage of Beethoven. For a generation in Finland, Sibelius dominated. As the composer-conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen (b.1958), said in a recent interview: “When I was growing up. I chose to go to Italy to study, because I wanted to get somewhere far away from Sibelius – he was everywhere.” Now based in Los Angeles but back in London as conductor laureate of the Philharmonia Orchestra, Salonen acknowledges Sibelius as the greatest artist in Finnish history. Accordingly, a deep understanding shaped his reading of Sibelius’s Symphony No 1, drawing fearless, well-drilled playing from the orchestra.

The centrepiece of this all-Finnish concert, after the short, jubilant Flounce by Lotta Wennäkoski (b.1970), first heard at the Proms in 2017, was the UK premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s Viola Concerto. A friend and exact contemporary of Salonen, Lindberg more willingly embraced the influence of Sibelius, creating pieces which capture similar expanses of Nordic landscape, musical or actual. He wrote the viola concerto for Lawrence Power, one of the most imaginative exponents of the instrument, and currently a resident artist at the Southbank Centre.

The three movements flow into one another, punctuated by heady brass fanfares. Every string technique is employed by the soloist: pizzicato (plucking), quadruple stopping (bowing four strings at once), harmonics (touching the string lightly to create ghostly, ethereal high notes) and, in an extended cadenza, playing the viola as a banjo and singing along, as if searching for notes in the ether. All that, plus the long, lyrical lines so distinctive in this middle-voiced instrument, made this a compelling work, immediately worthy of a place in the repertoire as long as someone apart from Power is capable of playing it (Timothy Ridout or Tabea Zimmermann should cope).

Another world-class string player, the Norwegian Vilde Frang, made a powerful case, were one any longer needed, for Erich Korngold’s Violin Concerto, which draws on melodies from his own Hollywood film scores, causing inevitable disdain in some quarters at the time of its 1947 premiere. In a concert with the Berlin Philharmonic under the baton of the orchestra’s chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko, Frang caught the mood of bittersweet melancholy and yearning, galloping to an elfin, catch-me-if-you-can finale, exuberant horns stating the luscious main theme in the closing section. The orchestra also played Dvořák’s Symphony No 7, as if this familiar score had been taken to pieces – Petrenko is exhaustive in his analysis of every note, every bar – and reconstructed with fresh, rebellious, carefree energy.

The other work was Rachmaninov’s tone poem The Isle of the Dead, inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s spooky painting. A mysterious rocking melody builds to a ferocious climax, often likened to Charon ferrying the dead to Hades. The Berliners united in a mighty roar. The River Styx was in full spate. The return to a perfectly hushed pianissimo came as balm to the soul.

Star ratings (out of five)
The Tales of Hoffmann ★★★★
Philharmonia/Salonen ★★★★
Berlin Philharmonic/Petrenko ★★★★★

As they lock in to Yatton’s remorseless groove, you get the sense that the audience could leave and Beak> wouldn’t break stride. Night one of the experimental rock band’s final tour with Geoff Barrow – their drummer and, thanks to the lingering power of his work with Portishead, their foot in the door when they began in 2007 – is a celebration of noise, focus and, most importantly, the things that can be achieved when musicians really get each other.

With Barrow stage left, bassist-vocalist Billy Fuller seated in the middle and multi-instrumentalist Will Young standing off to one side before a table of gadgets that look like they might once have sent a cosmonaut into orbit, the trio play spiky, difficult songs with the low-stakes freedom of three mates with a block booking at a rehearsal space.

The set is split in two, with almost all of Beak>’s recently released fourth album >>>> played front to back before a “greatest hits” segment devoid of any actual hits. “All you have to do is be polite for the first bit,” Barrow says, but the decision is a have-your-cake-and-eat-it success, allowing new songs such as the nuanced Hungry Are We to seep in without anything too cacophonous either side of them.

Backed by flashing neon strip lights, which hang from wire trellises in mid-80s Top of the Pops fashion, Secrets is a weightless synth-pop song, its hook all the more effective for its half-mumbled delivery. “That was the ghost of Phil Oakey,” Fuller quips, and he’s not wide of the mark.

The latter stages are a thunderous charge for the finish. Allé Sauvage is dialled up into a rumbling kosmische jam, while Wulfstan II is all fuzz and low-level threat, like the Stooges if they were into craft beer instead of heroin. Once the final note lands, the band get up and wander off. There isn’t anything like sentiment, certainly not a sweat-soaked bow, to send Barrow on his way. That would be a bit much given this was just some friends mucking about.

‘America is ready for a new chapter,” Barack Obama declared to the Democratic National Convention in August, “America is ready for a better story.” Many would agree, but as commentators try to explain the bewildering reversals and bizarre dynamics of this long and unprecedented election campaign they have often instead reached for stories that are old and familiar.

Shakespeare has been a popular reference point: Joe Biden has frequently been compared to King Lear in his reluctance to relinquish power, Donald Trump to everyone from Richard III to Macbeth. Yet a rather different form of drama, ostensibly less realistic and less obviously relevant to contemporary politics, may in fact offer analogies that are more illuminating still.

Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung was first performed in its entirety in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth almost 150 years ago. As the cycle of dramas begins, the dwarf Alberich, the Nibelung from whom it takes its name, gropes the beautiful Rhinemaidens and lasciviously compares their charms. They carelessly reveal that their river contains gold that could make its owner master of the world, but only if he renounces love. Alberich accepts this condition and steals the gold, an act of despoliation whose consequences ripple out through the work’s four evenings. With his brother Mime as his apprentice, he makes a ring and a magic helmet that bring him supreme authority. Similarities with Donald Trump, his beauty contests and gameshows, his misogyny, his exhortations to “drill, baby, drill” and his amoral lust for power, are not hard to find.

Like Trump, Alberich holds on to power for much less time than he hopes. His enemies exploit his vanity to trick him out of the ring, effecting a transition whose legitimacy he will never accept. Alberich exhorts his followers to revolt, but without success, and regaining the ring is an obsession that endures for the rest of the story. In the final drama, Twilight of the Gods (Götterdämmerung), Alberich enlists the help of Hagen, the son he has fathered in a loveless union with a mortal woman. Trump, too, relies on younger family members to prosecute his interests: Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner were crucial figures in his presidency, Eric and his wife Lara have recently risen to prominence, Donald Jr is a constant presence.

Trump’s latest surrogate is his vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, reputedly selected at Donald Jr’s behest. Like Hagen, Vance is a vociferous advocate of marriage: in Twilight of the Gods, Hagen seeks matches for his half-siblings Gunther and Gutrune, supposedly for their benefit but in fact as part of an elaborate strategy to trick Siegfried into giving up the ring. Both Vance and Hagen offer plausibility, engaging in social interactions and vice-presidential debates with a superficial courtesy of which Trump and Alberich are incapable.

But both are less interested in serving their promoters than in securing for themselves the ultimate prize, whether that is the ring or the 2028 Republican nomination.

The parallels between Biden and Wotan – the character who seizes the ring from Alberich – are equally striking. Like the 46th president, the king of the gods has accomplished much during his long career as a legislator, notably building the magnificent fortress of Valhalla.

But he is tormented by his waning abilities, and the reluctant realisation that the task he wants to accomplish himself – the recovery of the ring from the dragon, Fafner – can only be achieved by a younger proxy: stronger, fearless and less tarnished by a lifetime of compromise. Ultimately, it is a female authority figure, older even than himself, who persuades him to abandon his ambitions. Few people know what Nancy Pelosi said to Biden in July, but the agonised confrontation between Wotan and Erda in Act III of Siegfried gives some idea of the likely emotions involved.

Wotan’s daughter, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, ends The Ring with an impassioned soliloquy. It is now impossible to predict whether Kamala Harris can emulate Brünnhilde by having the last word in this year’s election drama – but millions across the world cling to the hope that she will. Through most of Twilight of the Gods, Brünnhilde is exploited and humiliated by Siegfried, the hero she thought was her husband, and Hagen, the villain who uses her for his own ends. But in the drama’s final minutes, she emerges from her torment to convey a commanding message of love, laughter and joy. Harris’s willingness to embody these same values, conspicuously absent from recent political discourse, fuelled her swift transformation from patronised vice-president to plausible candidate. Journalists covering her campaign frequently comment on her personal warmth; her equally exuberant running-mate, Tim Walz, observes that “she brings the joy”.

Of course, as many have noted, joy is not a political programme, and despite Harris’s success in changing the campaign’s character, she has struggled to define what she would do differently from the unpopular administration she has served. Late in the day though it came, Harris’s incursion into the hostile territory of Fox News, where she insisted that her presidency would not be a continuation of Biden’s, was a notable effort to do just that. The interview’s equivalent in The Ring is Brünnhilde’s searing encounter with Waltraute in act I of Twilight of the Gods, when she resists her sister’s pleas to halt their father’s decline by returning the ring to the Rhine. By doing so, she condemns Wotan to irrelevance, but also articulates what is most important to her, establishing the moral authority that allows her to command the cycle’s ending as she does.

Needless to say, the parallels between Wagner’s story and that of the election only stretch so far. Incest and immolation, key motifs in The Ring, have not surfaced as themes even in the most surreal of Trump’s ramblings – though with a week to go, anything remains possible. Nor are there many swords and spears, dragons or talking birds in today’s American politics. Intrepid heroes, too, are notably absent, though perhaps there have been enough would-be Siegfrieds among Biden’s 45 predecessors. But if we take The Ring less literally, it offers extraordinary insights into how power passes from one generation to another, into the consequences of denuding the Earth of its resources, and into the transformative potential of love.

Wagner has often been appropriated by the political right, notoriously during the Third Reich, and there is plenty in his writing to encourage fascists and authoritarians, not least the disgustingly antisemitic tracts that disfigure his posthumous reputation. But at the time he conceived The Ring, Wagner was a leftwing revolutionary, working to overthrow the regime in Saxony that employed him as Kapellmeister. As his idealism curdled into resignation, he experimented with different endings, giving Brünnhilde words that echoed the philosophy of renunciation of his new intellectual hero, Arthur Schopenhauer. He ultimately decided not to set these words, giving the final say instead to music, and to an ecstatic melody that he told his wife Cosima represented the “glorification of Brünnhilde”.

The Ring is many things: a practical realisation of a revolutionary theory of musical theatre; a compendium of brilliant orchestral sounds; a monumental physical and psychological challenge for singers; for some, a philosophical meditation or political tract. But it is also, perhaps above all, a supreme piece of storytelling, one that only truly exists when played out in a theatre. This need for perpetual recreation makes The Ring inescapably not just a story of its own time but of ours too, one that absorbs and reflects its audience’s preoccupations. And by allowing music to take flight in his drama’s final moments, Wagner invites his listeners to fill the imaginative space he has opened up, connecting his concerns with our own.

Like The Ring, this election campaign still permits many possible endings, and like Wagner, the American electorate is leaving it uncomfortably late in the process to clarify which will prevail. The ultimate fate of Alberich is left ambiguous: almost uniquely among The Ring’s major characters, he is neither shown nor described as dying, though his world-view is discredited and his scheming thwarted, and he plays no part in the cycle’s final act. Perhaps the one certainty about this election is that whether defeated or victorious, Trump will not remain similarly silent. But whatever the outcome, old stories like Wagner’s can help us understand the newest chapters in our own.

Bryan Ferry, singer, songwriter

I’m not a musical detective, but I’d put my money on the inspiration for Slave to Love coming from Prisoner of Love by the Ink Spots, which I heard when I was five. My Auntie Enid’s husband was stationed in Europe with the armed forces and I think he picked up American records and brought the Ink Spots home. I still have the 78 RPM single.

I wrote the lyrics in a hotel room in New York, while pacing the floor at night. I’d done more esoteric things in the past, but I wanted something simple and memorable, a song for everyone. A hit! The first line – “Tell her I’ll be waiting / In the usual place / With the tired and weary / And there’s no escape” – set the scene.

I’d loved being in Roxy Music but, going solo, the world was my oyster. We had assembled a team of big guns, people like David Gilmour (guitar), David Sanborn (saxophone) and Nile Rodgers (guitar). Neil Jason had a swing to his bass-playing that suited the track down to the ground. Neil Hubbard had the most wonderfully soulful tone and we recorded him early on to build the song around him. The guitar solo in the middle is actually three interweaving guitarists: Gilmour, Keith Scott and Hubbard.

I did the video in Paris with Jean-Baptiste Mondino. It was beautifully filmed, with a certain chicness – all these beautiful girls and me in the background, which was how I liked to be. At the end of the video, I’m hugging a child, like a long-lost daughter or something. Good twist. It turned out this child actor was the daughter of someone I’d had dinner with, along with Salvador Dalí, in 1973.

When I performed the song for the first time, at Live Aid, the drummer broke his snare-drum skin, the bass was in a different tuning, Gilmour’s guitar wasn’t working properly, and someone had to tape another mic to mine because it wasn’t audible. But despite all that, the song took off pretty quickly and has been in lots of films. It’s fabulous when people identify with your feelings about something.

Rhett Davies, producer

I first met Bryan when I engineered a track on his 1974 solo album Another Time, Another Place. Then in 1979, when Roxy had got back together, I was pulled in to do a week’s work on the Manifesto album and stayed for 40 years. We had found a way to cut Dance Away, which they’d tried before but hadn’t pulled off. I suggested laying down a keyboard and rhythm box and building it up from there. As Roxy’s sound evolved from Manifesto to Flesh and Blood to Avalon, we kept that way of working.

Bryan’s Boys and Girls album felt like a continuation, just without Roxy. We started working on it at his house in Sussex with simply his voice and his CP-80 electric piano. We went to a studio in London called the White House, then went to Bette Midler’s house in New York. She’d had trouble sleeping and had built a soundproof room, so we set a studio up in there.

It was one of the most difficult tracks to finish and it went through a lot of lives. In the chorus, there’s a little keyboard phrase that came from another track we never got to finish, so we moved it into Slave to Love. Bryan loves having something straightforwardly passionate throughout a song, and on this one it was a cowbell. The drummer, Omar Hakim, recorded the big snare drum sounds in New York’s Power Station studios’ stairwell, which had a famous reverb.

Bryan was still working on the lyrics so the vocals came last, and it was the last track we finished for the album. Bob Clearmountain [mixing engineer] mixed it so many times in so many studios. He remembers falling asleep in Air Studios mixing it even more. It was finally finished at three in the afternoon. When we heard the completed song, there was just elation. When I listen to it now, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Two hundred years before that hilarious farce The Play That Goes Wrong became a West End hit, Italian playwrights had come up with a similar comic formula, targeting the often disastrous nature of rehearsals before a show. Later, Gaetano Donizetti grabbed the idea and took it into the realm of opera, walking us backstage to witness the tantrums, jealousies, fist-fights and sheer panic that sets in when the clock is ticking inexorably towards curtain-up.

His two-act comedy Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali this year joins a laudably long list of rarely heard works revived by Ireland’s Wexford Festival Opera since 1951. It’s a piece that fits perfectly into this season’s theme of “theatre within theatre”. Orpha Phelan’s brilliantly inventive new production, graced with a golden cast, has the whole house rocking with laughter from start to finish.

Canadian coloratura soprano Sharleen Joynt combines superb technique with great comic timing as the impossible prima donna Daria, who refuses to rehearse with a mere secondo soprano Luigia (Paola Leoci) – a decision that hastens the arrival of every director’s nightmare: Luigia’s domineering mother, Agata, played by the outrageous bass-baritone Paolo Bordogna. Agata steamrollers her way into the opera, shamelessly promoting her daughter, demanding cuts and rewrites and ignoring all objections. She can’t read music, sings badly, dances hilariously (even on pointe) and scatters cheerful catastrophe wherever she goes. It’s a wonderful performance.

Wexford’s new edition of this firecracker updates the 19th-century tradition of including in it music not written by the composer; the tenor Guglielmo (Alberto Robert) turns up thinking he’s rehearsing The Sound of Music. Later we get a very classy burst of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. Amy Share-Kissiov devises some terrific dancing, and Danila Grassi conducts the festival orchestra with passion and precision. At the curtain call she wept as the opening night’s rapturous applause rang out; surely not the only tears of joy shed that night.

Compare Italian Giacomo Puccini and Anglo-Irishman Charles Villiers Stanford and they would seem to have nothing more in common than the year in which they died – 1924 – and yet both composers burned with a passion for opera. Puccini enjoyed wild success, amassing a fortune equivalent to $200m in today’s money, while Stanford found rejection, his works for the stage sinking almost without trace. You can hardly move for Puccini centenary revivals this year, but Stanford’s nine operas have had precious little attention. Justifiably so, some might say.

Wexford disagrees, and is honouring the Dublin-born composer by reviving The Critic, Stanford’s 1916 reworking of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1779 satirical play of the same name. Stanford’s biographer Jeremy Dibble has produced a new performing edition of this surprising curiosity, which fits neatly into the festival’s theatrical theme. What immediately becomes apparent is Stanford’s evident impish sense of fun. He believed wholeheartedly in opera but plainly was not above mercilessly lampooning its pretensions, plots and stars.

Sneer, the critic, has been invited to witness a rehearsal of Mr Puff’s absurd new play The Spanish Armada, which composer Mr Dangle has transformed into an opera. These speaking characters comment on the action while singers portraying figures from the reign of Elizabeth I strut around the stage making ludicrously pointless gestures and getting in each other’s way. Sneer (Arthur Riordan) is quick to spot a flaw in the creaking plot: Walter Raleigh (Ben McAteer) and his comrades have already captured Don Ferolo Wiskerandos (Dane Suarez), son of the Spanish admiral, even though the fleet is nowhere in sight. Puff (Mark Lambert) brushes this aside: he needs to create a love story between the hapless Spaniard and Tilburina, the improbably named daughter of the governor of Tilbury fort.

Stanford reserves his best vocal writing for Tilburina, which soprano Ava Dodd exploits to the full, while the choruses swell with typical Stanford grandeur. Musical gags come thick and fast. Quotations from Wagner, Elgar, Beethoven and Parry pepper the score, and the increasingly desperate plot includes a lost-orphan-found moment parodying both Mozart and Sullivan. There’s even a portentous, doom-laden orchestral introduction to a character who neither sings nor speaks.

Conductor Ciarán McAuley has a lot of fun with those name-that-tune moments, while also caressing Stanford’s often luminously lyrical orchestral writing. John Comiskey has designed a handsome theatrical set, and director Conor Hanratty follows to the letter Stanford’s imprecation that the piece be played in all seriousness. “Any attempt to treat it farcically only spoils the humour.”

The season opened with Pietro Mascagni’s Le maschere, his 1901 bid to escape the shadow of his hugely popular Cavalleria Rusticana by honouring two Italian institutions: commedia dell’arte and the operas of Gioachino Rossini. It doesn’t really succeed in either aim, but director Stefano Ricci and choreographer Stellario Di Blasi give it their best shot, moving the action to a very 21st-century wellness centre. The plot is stock Rossini: father wants to marry daughter to unsuitable man; she has other ideas. It takes far too long to tell a simple tale, but some of the singing is excellent, particularly from sopranos Lavinia Bini as daughter Rosaura, and Ioana Constantin Pipelea as Colombina. Francesco Cilluffo conducts with Rossinian brio.

The three main operas are accompanied by some 70 small-scale recitals, lectures and new pieces over the 16 days of this most friendly of festivals. Chief among them is a contribution from celebrated Irish writer Colm Tóibín, who, with composer Alberto Caruso, has devised a witty, biting, one-act opera about Dublin’s Abbey theatre’s 1911 tour to the US with JM Synge’s controversial work The Playboy of the Western World. Lady Gregory in America is a beautifully fluent, lyrical hour, cleverly staged by Aoife Spillane-Hinks. A young cast is led by mezzo Erin Fflur as the redoubtable Augusta Gregory, making her defiant stand for art against US puritanism, alongside a standout performance from soprano Jane Burnell as the spirited actor Molly Allgood. Today’s America needs to see it.

Star ratings (out of five)
Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali ★★★★★
The Critic ★★★★
Le maschere ★★★
Lady Gregory in America ★★★★

“Let the healing begin,” says Sam Herlihy the moment I turn on my tape recorder. He’s joking, but not entirely. In December, Herlihy’s band Hope of the States will reform for a series of shows – the first time they have played together live for more than 18 years. The gigs, along with a new EP, mark 20 years since the group’s debut album The Lost Riots bucked the early-00s trend for short, spiky indie songs in favour of epic soundscapes that incorporated military drums, Morricone-esque strings and portentous lyrics about the perils of nationalism. When Hope of the States split in 2006, shortly after playing the Reading and Leeds festival, Herlihy declared that the band were cursed. Certainly, their short tenure had more than its share of misfortune and tragedy.

Herlihy was the person who walked into the studio late one night, during the recording of The Lost Riots, to find his friend and bandmate Jimmi Lawrence had killed himself. These days, such a terrible event would involve interventions – therapy, a lengthy career pause. But three weeks after Lawrence died, Hope of the States were back in the studio, finishing their album before touring the world.

“I don’t blame the label,” says Herlihy today over a pint of Guinness. We are in a beer garden in Margate, Kent, where the band are recording four new songs. “It was a different time. People didn’t talk about mental health. And going back into the studio was what we said we wanted.”

In one sense, at least on the surface, Hope of the States managed to keep going after Lawrence’s death. They finished The Lost Riots and recorded a follow-up called Left, as well as playing gigs in the US and Japan. But in another sense, they never really recovered. When Herlihy recounts his time in the band it reads like a series of stressful incidents. He remembers being about to go on stage at Glastonbury festival and realising the military jackets that the band always wore during performances had been locked in their tour van. Their tour manager had done a runner with their money and they had to smash the windows to get inside. He recalls guitar strings constantly breaking while recording Later … With Jools Holland, and Top of the Pops making them play live on unfamiliar instruments (“We were drunk … It was a disaster”). There were temper tantrums and meltdowns whenever things went wrong. “God, I did not deal with that stuff well,” he says. “But I was grieving, I was a kid … I shouldn’t have behaved like that, but it felt like it all mattered so much.”

It’s no wonder, then, that Herlihy had doubts about bringing Hope of the States back. But when his wife pointed out the 20th anniversary date, and music industry friends expressed enthusiasm for a reunion, he reached out and found the band were keen to make it happen. Herlihy says he “felt like I was going to have a panic attack” when he walked back into a rehearsal room. Then they staggered through some old songs and he realised the magic was still there. “It’s not quite muscle memory but emotional memory,” he says. “You suddenly feel the same things you felt then, even though you’re 20 years older.” Adding to this emotional wallop is the fact the producer of their new EP is Jolyon Thomas, son of the late Ken Thomas who produced The Lost Riots.

Sonically similar to the grandeur of their debut album (one song even reaches the 12-minute mark), the new songs try to capture that original youthful passion when everything – especially music and film – felt vitally important. Old friends from high school are name-checked; old times drinking stolen booze in a park are glorified.

I first met Herlihy and his bandmates back when they were releasing early singles such as Black Dollar Bills and Enemies/Friends. They were great company and talked a good game. “I think I was a cocky gobshite, really,” laughs Herlihy. But they also seemed hyper aware of being outsiders in a scene that was spawning the more commercial likes of Franz Ferdinand and the Killers. How could they compete? Their live shows involved doomy video projections and their songs were inspired by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mogwai and Naomi Klein’s No Logo. Somewhat implausibly by today’s standards, Sony offered them a £1m record deal anyway – which they enjoyed spending.

“Our budget for promo CDs would be a grand,” says Herlihy. “But we’d be like: ‘No, we want to do them in hand-sewn sleeves made out of flags that are half burnt!’ So a bunch of Sony interns would be sewing these flags and burning them with little kitchen flamers and it would cost 10 times the budget. But we’d be like: ‘Wicked! Look at these things, they’re cool!’”

Over time, the band drifted away from wild creative whims. Things became a slog, and they started to question why they were still doing it. When the band were offered the opportunity to record a third album, they declined. It was no longer fun. Partly, says Herlihy, because of the way they were treated by other bands following Lawrence’s death. “We wanted to have drinks with them at festivals and hang out,” he says. “But it was like we were damaged goods. Everyone’s looking for you to be some kind of grief-stricken doomlord, but I didn’t feel like I was.”

The complexity of grief was starting to entangle the band. They were devastated, of course, but they also realised they were living out their dreams. “It was difficult to put across your best side because then I would feel a bit guilty. I felt like people expected me to just want to sit there and cry. The whole situation was messy and horrible.”

It was after the band had split that things caught up with Herlihy. For more than a decade he was haunted by comments from friends of Lawrence who had said that he was to blame – there seemed to be an implication that, as the leader of the band, he was the one responsible for Lawrence’s welfare. “I was the last person to see him and I was the one who found him,” he says. “So you just think, oh, this is my fault.” It was only when he eventually saw a therapist that he realised he was suffering from PTSD. He began work resolving the conflicting anger and guilt he still had around Lawrence’s death. These days he remembers his friend from a much healthier perspective.

“I think about him now as a mate more than anything else. The way it happens is, ‘Oh, he’d have loved that television show’, or ‘I wish he could hear that album.’ Because we weren’t just in a band together – we got drunk together, we hung out and we talked about the Pogues. So yeah, it would be cool to have him on stage playing guitar with us, but that’s not the main way I think about Jimmi.”

Before reaching out to a therapist, Herlihy’s life had taken a rather bleak turn. He had assumed he would just start a new band after Hope of the States and get another record deal. “Then, when that didn’t happen, I thought: ‘Oh shit.’” He found a job in Starbucks, and still winces when remembering the encounters he had there.

“Maybe once every couple of weeks, you’d hand somebody their coffee and they’d do a double take. And I’d be like: oh God, I know what’s coming. They’d have this sort of disappointment on their face and they’d say: ‘Aren’t you Sam from …’ and I’d say: ‘Yeah, you know, bills to pay!’ It was quite brutal. Looking back it’s like: why the fuck didn’t I just take an office job? My wife says I probably did it as some sort of self-flagellatory thing.”

Herlihy bounced back, though, opening the fine dining restaurant Pidgin in Hackney, east London, along with a bunch of other eateries. Other members of the band also seem to have gone into various foodie jobs – from restaurants and microbreweries to natural wine bars in Copenhagen. Herlihy has three kids; his eldest is now around the age he was when his band first took off. He’s thrilled that they will get a chance to see the band perform.

And this time if any strings break or amps blow up there will be no tantrums. “Hopefully not. I’m a grown man now,” he laughs. “There’s no reason to do it unless it’s joyful. The minute it isn’t, then I’ll leg it.”

These are the words of a happier, more stable Herlihy. So is he really ready to risk unleashing the band’s curse again? After our interview ends, I stand to leave and realise that a bottle of water has leaked into my bag, soaking the contents, which includes a battery pack.

Sam clocks it and, with a grin, imagines a future conversation he might be having. “Yeah, well we were all set to get this piece published in the Guardian … but the journalist electrocuted himself on the way home so it never happened.”

Well, if you’re reading this then maybe the curse has been lifted.

Hope of the States release Long Waits in A&E digitally on 1 November. The vinyl edition will be available as the band tour 4 to 7 December; tour starts Manchester.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

‘Fauré? Ah, yes, I love the Requiem. And there’s that lovely Pavane too …” This is the typical reply to the question: “Do you like the music of Gabriel Fauré?” But it’s about as satisfactory a response as would be, to a similar question about Beethoven: “Oh yes! There’s that great symphony – the one that goes da-da-da DAA.”

Glorious though Fauré’s Requiem and Pavane are (along with his other best-known works, such as the first violin sonata and first piano quartet), there are whole other worlds to his music that deserve to be far better known. Luckily, 2024 marks the centenary of Fauré’s death, which gives us Fauréans a wonderful opportunity to share with audiences his lesser-known masterpieces.

Gabriel Urbain Fauré was born on 12 May 1845 in the village of Pamiers, in south-western France. A lonely childhood was largely spent playing alone in a beautiful meadow outside his house; in the middle of this meadow was a chapel. Elements of both these features – the beauties of nature, and the peace and tranquillity of worship – were to become crucial aspects of Fauré’s music.

Sent to the Niedermeyer school – an institution specialising in early church music – at the age of nine, the boy’s musical education was entrusted to a brilliant if irascible young man with a huge nose, Camille Saint-Saëns. The two became friends for life, Saint-Saëns – whose own two little sons were to die within six weeks of each other – taking a fatherly role in the life of his younger protege.

Growing up, the quietly charming Fauré fitted perfectly into the elegant, highly artistic world of the Parisian salons, where many of his works received their first hearings; an observer remembered him “moving at his ease among the milling crowds, a blissful smile on his face like an Olympian deity”. (Marcel Proust, among countless others, became a devoted fan.) Life was not all roses, though. Fauré suffered from acute migraines and bouts of depression. Furthermore, his career as a composer failed to take off to the level it so richly deserved, forcing him for many years to earn his living as a church organist.

It wasn’t until his early 60s that he finally landed a major position, as head of the Paris conservatoire. There the gentle composer astounded everyone by introducing drastic reforms, sweeping away the crusty traditions that had reigned for generations. (As a young boy, I knew an old gentleman who had studied there during Fauré’s tenure; “his influence was everywhere,” he affirmed.) Alas, by that time another problem was threatening Fauré’s equilibrium: he was losing his hearing. His deafness was to become profound, with all that that change entails – particularly for a musician.

At least there were compensations in his private life – albeit with a rather French twist. His marriage, in his late 30s, to Marie Frémiet produced two sons, one of whom became a famous biologist, the other a writer. His relationship to Marie, however, seems to have lacked passion – though the couple remained close until the end of Fauré’s life, Marie becoming a musical confidante in whom he seems to have had absolute trust – she would kiss his manuscript paper to bring him luck.

But Fauré looked for other outlets for his romantic energies. Among his lovers, for some years, was Emma Bardac, who was later married to Debussy. And for the last 25 years of his life, Fauré was in a close relationship with a pianist, Marguerite Hasselmans. She was apparently the finest interpreter of his music; frustratingly, there seem to be no recordings of her playing. On his deathbed in 1924 the composer begged his sons to look after Marguerite, who despite the very public nature of their relationship, was officially invisible. Thankfully, the two men did just that.

So to the music: what is so special about Fauré? How can one explain the unique magic of his art? And why is much of his music, if not his name, so little known, compared with that of his younger compatriots Debussy and Ravel (the latter a student of Fauré’s)?

It’s a tricky question. Despite his innate modesty, Fauré knew his own worth. In a cross letter to the pianist Alfred Cortot (a great musician, but an opportunistic careerist), chiding him for performing so much of Debussy and Ravel’s music while neglecting his, Fauré inquired of Cortot why he was “more modest on my behalf than I am myself?”

Perhaps the reason lies at least partly in Fauré’s dislike of self-aggrandising display, and the immense subtlety of his nature, both personal and musical. (“I’m not in the habit of attracting crowds”, as he told a friend.) Whereas Debussy and Ravel – like so many of their Parisian contemporaries across all the arts – proclaimed their originality in no uncertain terms, producing works with extra-musical, visually or nationally oriented titles that were arresting in themselves (La Cathédrale Engloutie, Le Gibet), Fauré’s extraordinary originality was almost entirely contained within outwardly traditional forms. As the perceptive critic Émile Vuillermoz (1878-1960) put it: “To love and understand Fauré, one must at all costs have a musical nature. Fauré is pure music … It is no good bringing anything in the way of painter’s or sculptor’s gifts to listen to him … Under its apparent classicism, [Fauré’s music] contains the most magnificently revolutionary audacities.”

He’s so right. Particularly in his later works – in which Fauré, like Beethoven before him, having been deprived of the outer world of sound, created his own, ecstatically radiant aural universe – the quiet shock of his extreme harmonies still has the power to make us gasp. As with Beethoven, the creations of his last period contain even deeper subtleties than the (perhaps) more outwardly attractive earlier works. And also corresponding to the older German master (whom Fauré, unlike many of the French composers of his time, revered), Fauré’s music, despite his increasingly poor health never strays anywhere near self-pity or depression. His avowed intention was to show through his music a reality better than our own – and how he succeeds. There is a joy, an energy, a luminous quality to his output that is unique.

Fauré’s music uplifts – and moves us deeply. The French musicologist and Fauré’s contemporary Joseph de Marliave expresses it well when he wrote that the simplicity of Fauré’s music “is so great that it can surprise us before it touches and moves us”. Absolutely true: often in rehearsals I have found that it is the seemingly artless touches – some unassuming passing notes in the slow movement of the second piano quintet, for instance, or the unadorned rising scale that forms the second main theme of the string quartet (his last work) – that suddenly bring tears to the eyes.

Since being introduced as a child to his music Fauré has been an important presence in my life. In fact, he has been something of a benevolent if absent godfather, playing a surprisingly big role in many of the important relationships in my life – it’s no coincidence that my son is named Gabriel. The current festival at London’s Wigmore Hall gives me a rare and precious opportunity to play his entire chamber music output with musician-friends for whom Fauré is a similarly central figure. It is our way of offering thanks for all the blessings he has bestowed on us.

Beyond the Requiem: Steven Isserlis’s five favourite Fauré works

Cantique de Racine Fauré was still a teenager – still at school, in fact – when he wrote this meltingly beautiful choral song.
Theme and variations for piano, op 73 Fauré’s only “official” set of variations, this is a winner.
Clair de Lune, Mandoline There are so many glorious Fauré songs that it’s impossible to pick just one; I find these two especially touching.
Piano trio op 120 If I had to choose one piece by Fauré – thank God I don’t – this would have to be it. Ecstatic hardly begins to describe it …
String quartet, op 121 Fauré’s farewell to life, his last work – profound, gentle, deeply moving; and ultimately joyous.