Category: Music

You have one of the greatest flows in the history of hip-hop. How have you developed the rhythmic aspect of it? Any similarities with free jazz? Baroqsaverio
People have always made a point of highlighting the uniqueness of my flow patterns, which is beautiful to hear. Big Daddy Kane talks about how he heard me use between seven and 10 different flows on one song. Listen: I don’t do it intentionally! I don’t write my songs until I hear the music, as I want my flow to truly marry the music. Therefore, one flow I do for one beat is never going to be the same for the next beat.

Free jazz is a great example. I like that, bro. I’ve learned not to overthink the creative process and improvise. I actually stopped writing songs with my pen probably 15 years ago, because I realised you can document thoughts so much quicker if it all comes off the top of your head.

I saw you on the Area 2 festival tour alongside Moby and David Bowie. I remember watching you jump up and down offstage during Bowie’s performance of Fame. Was that experience as good as it appeared? jlivechii
I was raised on Bowie’s music. Remember, I spent time in England when I was a little boy, staying in places like Morecambe, Preston and Blackpool. Wham!, Culture Club, David Bowie – all that shit was popping. In the summer holidays, my mother would always send me off [from New York] for a month to stay with our family overseas, and we had a lot of family who emigrated from Jamaica to England. It was also so I would stay out of mischief in Brooklyn.

In England, that was the first time I saw an interracial relationship in public. So, when I was with Bowie on the tour, I told him it was great to see a beautiful Black interracial relationship with the incredible Iman. Hunky Dory is the illest shit ever to me. I wanted to know about his recording processes when making things like Space Oddity, what studios he used and how he made money back then, as opposed to now. Bowie had no problems allowing you to learn and ask questions. I remember I used to ask David why he dressed in makeup and eyeliner and wore all the clothes he wore. He just said: “I am a free spirit and I wanted to do the shit I knew others wouldn’t do.” Ziggy Stardust was like putting on a superhero costume.

Was bouncing around in straitjackets with Ol’ Dirty Bastard in a padded cell as fun as it looks in the music video for Woo-Hah!! Got You All in Check? Haemodroid
A lot of people just think Ol’ Dirty Bastard was super crazy, right? But he was super smart, too. Obviously, a crazy motherfucker can’t act smart; only a smart motherfucker can act crazy – and that is ODB. He was a genius, especially when it came to the high sciences. We’re all far from perfect, and he succumbed to his shortcomings, unfortunately, but every time I was around ODB there was this glorious energy. Maybe sometimes that energy could be overwhelming, too. Once that switch was on, it was hard to turn off. When he was ready to light the room up, though, it was infectious. No one else sounds like him, still.

I remember once reading that you loved Benny Hill. What was it about him that was so funny? Stockportman
Benny Hill is the funniest motherfucker ever to me! We grew up watching Benny Hill’s shit. It wasn’t just an England thing. Benny was huge here in Brooklyn, too. He wasn’t just funny – he pushed that envelope, unlike anyone else at that time. So, it was shock value, but it was also funny.

What was your experience like working with J Dilla? How did he approach the studio compared with other producers? Did you make much music together that didn’t get released? Platesrecords
There really isn’t no comparison to J Dilla. In the studio, he wasn’t really that talkative. But he was a massive jokester! I’ve never been around Dilla and experienced any down energy. There was a point in time when Dilla stopped coming to New York, so he would send me CDs with 20 to 25 new beats, but all them shits would fade out after 30 seconds. I would want them to go on for ever! I got lots and lots of those CDs. Some of the songs we did together were made from me looping those 30-second clips.

I remember [A Tribe Called Quest’s] Q-Tip first introduced me to Dilla, and Tip had this cassette tape with six of the illest Dilla beats I’ve ever heard. I still hear those beats in my head sometimes. I lost that cassette. But, look, Dilla gave me so much incredible new shit, I forgot to tell him about losing the old stuff. We never even had that conversation. Our approach? [Quoting their Stereolab-sampling collaboration Show Me What You Got] Immaculate, raw.

Missy Elliott seems a while ago. How do you see women in rap today? TheRemedy
Right now, there is a huge female presence that has been really good for the culture. There has been an incredible and significant amount of dope women MCs that haven’t got the proper shine they deserved over the years. That imbalance, I was never a fan of it – I love women’s presence being as strong as it is right now. My immediate favourites are Scar Lip, Coi Leray, Bia and Little Simz. I am actually in the process of doing some shit with Simz; I’m definitely looking forward to that.

Your classic single, Gimme Some More, samples Bernard Herrmann’s soundtrack to Psycho. Are you a fan of the film? MESM
During the holidays, especially when I was younger, they used to do Psycho marathons on TV, right? They would play a bunch of that shit back-to-back. It would always happen around Christmas time. We all sat in the crib when I was young, and I couldn’t go out late, and we would just watch Norman Bates do his thing. It was exciting for me and my younger brother to watch, with all the weird music.

I didn’t actually come up with that idea for Gimme Some More. DJ Scratch, the producer of the track, came to the studio with that shit and it blew all of our minds. When I first heard the drums, I knew I could do something to that beat that could make people react in live venues.

Horror and rap have always been connected. I’m glad I was given the opportunity to really cuff Michael Myers’ ass up in the movie Halloween: Resurrection. I was hoping they wouldn’t write it for the Black dude to die, and they didn’t, so for me to survive and get the opportunity to do some Bruce Lee kicks on Michael was so cool.

Do you miss 2Pac? noamericano1
I miss Pac as my friend, a brother, a creative person, an MC. I know things about 2Pac that the world doesn’t know, because he was my dear friend and we shared dope times together through this music shit. He was a really good dude.

I very much miss my brother, the glorious Notorious BIG, too. Me, Biggie and Jay-Z went to high school together, you know? I just wish things had played out differently between Biggie and 2Pac. They should still be here.

Should there be limits on AI technology? RDMiller
Anything that the government and powers that be can create to try to play God is a significant concern to me. I just think that when you play with anything that replaces the mind, the body and the soul, and to the point where it actually devalues it, well, that is serious.

They gave us these devices and if you speak a certain way, the phone stores all the data and then it is thinking for you. Then when you are texting somebody, well, words pop up the way you spell it, so you ain’t gotta type it any more! The phone is taking your soul from you. The way you think. It is becoming you. That is some real weird shit when you think about it, right? When the AI gets to a place of evolution and they feel like: “Fuck the humans!” That is some shit where I don’t know what the solution is. With AI, we’re fucking around with something real dangerous.

What inspires you to continue evolving, decade after decade? Have you ever been tempted to “retire” from writing new material? mr_bert
Every good thing comes to an end, but I don’t think I’d ever call it retirement. I love hip-hop culture too much. It has let me see the whole planet. Even if I am not releasing records publicly, I will always record just for me, even as an old-ass man. I love being inside those four walls of the studio. The studio doesn’t disrespect you or betray you; it is the place I go to escape all of that shit. I can be whoever I want to be in there. I can be Thanos, a dragon, a gentle giant. The passion for rapping continues to burn in my spirit and my soul, so, for now, I am going to continue on this path.

Whether by serendipity or design, Sakari Oramo’s concert with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on the 158th anniversary of Sibelius’s birth ended with superb performances of the great composer’s two final symphonies, the Sixth and Seventh. Oramo’s credentials as a Sibelius interpreter are already impeccable – his accounts of the tone poems in the Total Immersion day that the BBCSO devoted to the composer last season were one of the highlights of 2022 – but the clarity and freshness that he brought to these symphonies still came as a joyous revelation.

Oramo presented the two works as a single span, with no break between them, so that the modal radiance with which the Sixth comes to rest was followed immediately by the ominous timpani rolls that set the massive mechanism of the single-movement Seventh under way. His approach was free of mannerism or affectation, totally avoiding the moulding and micro-management that some conductors impose on the great musical paragraphs. Sibelius’s architecture was allowed to speak for itself, sometimes enigmatically in the Sixth, majestically and unswervingly in the Seventh, with the BBCSO ensuring that every unvarnished detail registered in both symphonies.

The concert began with Nielsen’s overture An Imaginary Trip to the Faroe Islands, before the Swedish-Norwegian violinist Johan Dalene, a former BBC Young Artist, was the soloist in the UK premiere of Tebogo Monnakgotla’s Globe Skimmer Surfing the Somali Jet. Co-commissioned by the BBC, it’s a violin concerto in five continuous sections inspired by the annual migration of a dragonfly, the globe skimmer, which flies across the Indian Ocean to winter in east Africa, and is then carried back on the Somali jet stream to breed in northern India.

The details of that programme don’t mean a great deal in performance, other than to identify the solo violin with the dragonfly’s darting, shimmering flights – brilliantly projected by Dalene – while the orchestra evokes the shifting clouds through which it travels. There’s perhaps more style than substance, but it’s a vivid exploration of fleeting orchestral textures.

Radie Peat is a singer and multi-instrumentalist best known for her work with the Irish folk band Lankum. She grew up in Dublin and performed in pubs at a young age, singing and playing concertina (she also plays tin whistle, accordion, harmonium, banjo and harp, among other instruments). With Lankum, Peat has recorded four albums including this year’s False Lankum, which was nominated for the Mercury prize. She’s also part of a new four-piece, ØXN, whose album CYRM – “a debut full of unsettling dark magic”, according to the Guardian – is out now on Claddagh Records. Lankum are on tour and will play London’s Roundhouse on 13 December.

1. Film

Mandy (dir Panos Cosmatos)

This is the last film I saw in the cinema where I was like: “Jesus Christ this is amazing.” It’s like a metal band on acid wrote a movie script with Nicolas Cage in it: disturbing and mad but also very funny. It was a repeat viewing at the Lighthouse cinema in Dublin and the rest of the audience had seen it before – everyone was roaring laughing and cheering at the screen. It was just really fun, which is odd because it’s also a really tense film. The first half sets up a couple’s life together and it’s weirdly enchanting. Then something really violent happens and it turns into an acid-fuelled gore rampage. I couldn’t get it out of my head.

2. Performance

Andy the Doorbum

Andy the Doorbum is an uncategorisable artist who flies under the radar but should be huge. He makes music, playing every instrument himself, but his live performances are more like theatre. He uses paint and lights and prosthetics and antlers – it’s like a pagan one-man show. He designs the artwork for his albums himself and even does artwork on his own clothing. We came across him in a squat in LA called Church of Fun, where he did an acoustic set, but it was only afterwards, looking him up online, that we got the full picture. He’s based in North Carolina but I would love to convince all the promoters in Ireland to book a tour for him.

3. TV

Puffin Rock

My daughter is completely obsessed with this show, and I’m actually fine with her watching it because it’s so lovely. It’s made in Ireland by Cartoon Saloon and all the characters have lovely, thick Derry accents. It’s about brother and sister puffins called Oona and Baba who live on Puffin Rock off the Irish coast. It celebrates nature and biodiversity and I’ve learned loads from it about birds and sea creatures. TV shows for kids can be so frantic, but this is very soothing and the storylines are really nice. There are little jokes in there for the parents as well.

4. Restaurant

Library Street, Dublin

Somebody booked this restaurant for me as a present. I’d never heard of it before but it was just fantastic. The food is absolutely amazing – all kinds of small plates using seasonal Irish ingredients. There was a cabbage dish that was really addictive, which is saying something because I don’t even like cabbage. There was delicious raw mackerel with a vinaigrette. And the cocktails are really good too. It’s more for special occasions – you’re not going to be eating there all the time – but if you want a really interesting food experience, I’d highly recommend it.

5. Tattoo artist

Skullduggery (Helen McDonnell)

Helen McDonnell was the first female tattoo artist in Ireland. She’s studied all over the world, including in Samoa, and she’s had a parlour in Belfast called Skullduggery for nearly 25 years. She’s tattooed me and both the Lynch brothers in Lankum and, honestly, pretty much everyone I know in Belfast and around Ireland. I’d prefer to keep my own tattoos private but Ian [Lynch] has a series of amazing Wicker Man tattoos, because he’s obsessed with that film. They’re really cool. Helen is so talented: she’s an amazing all-rounder.

6. Song

John Francis Flynn: Kitty

As soon as I listened to this song from the new album by [Dublin folk singer] John Francis Flynn, Look Over the Wall, See the Sky, it made me cry. (The previous piece of music that did that for me was Max Richter’s Sleep.) I think it’s his voice that got me. When he goes down low, singing in a very low register, it just sounds really emotional. It’s like he’s singing to himself and not for an audience at all. It got a very immediate response from me. The other song he released as a single, Mole in the Ground, is great in a totally different way. It’s really invigorating, whereas Kitty is like a big emotional slap.

In the final moments of Stephen Spielberg’s 2001 film AI: Artificial Intelligence, android boy David brings his “mother” Monica back to life for a single, bewildering day. People think this scene is sentimental, but it actually underlines the film’s dark central point: David can never be a real boy, and the bizarre and cruel resurrection of Monica only reinforces his intrinsic inhumanity.

This came to mind on Thursday night, as I snuck in late to Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s “concert in hologram” with legendary soprano Maria Callas.

I wasn’t the only one late. Callas died in 1977, and she appears here via “cutting-edge holographic technology”, according to the program. The hologram – which uses projectors and motion capture technology to create a 3D image of Callas – interacts with the audience without speaking directly to us; she motions to conductor Daniel Schlosberg, who motions back. She pauses for applause even after any real applause has died off. It’s a gimmick, of course – highly complicated technically, cobbled and reconstituted and projected into almost seamless life.

We are meant to be charmed, and yet I found it not just unsettling but profoundly depressing. Callas was most famous for her fulsome emotional connection to her material, an ability to marry musical phraseology and fine vocal technique to psychological verisimilitude. Her performances were, above all, soulful, deeply humanist; she was loved because we saw ourselves in her. Callas the Copy is the inverse of this, an ersatz simulacrum of a long dead diva – a most callous Callas.

The voice is there, mercifully. Callas’s richness of tone, her dazzling range, that ability to make virtuosity seem a perfectly natural emanation of the self, fills Hamer Hall with conviction. So much so that you can almost trick yourself into believing she’s present. But the lip-synching technology, and the faintly blurry figure itself, create an uncanny valley that resists full immersion. The energy in the room is not just muted, it’s moribund.

The MSO musicians were shrouded in shadow, and Callas shone in the centre of the stage like a precious stone. Arriving after the show had started, I had the uncomfortable sensation that the rest of the audience were also a simulation; that I’d somehow stepped into a computer program or virtual reality display. Watching Callas through other people’s phones seemed more satisfying to me than looking at the stage, in a strange loop of unreality.

Maybe this grappling with the insubstantial is just a teething problem with the tech. These kinds of virtual performance are only on the rise, from ABBA’s Voyage in the UK to Kiss’s just announced “immortal avatars”, coming soon. Perhaps this kind of performance will improve enough for us to forget how weird and monstrous it all is. But a part of me hopes not. It’s one thing for us to luxuriate in nostalgia for the things we’ve lost – to spend whole weekends listening to recordings of Callas’s finest arias, for example – but to trick ourselves into thinking we’re progressing boldly into the future by indulging in gimmickry seems dangerous to me.

My response may seem like the quaint ravings of a luddite in no time at all. But one of the key elements of opera that gives it such power is the physical presence of the singer in the room, the way an extraordinary artist can move you with the vibrations of their voice. Deluding ourselves that a hologram – even when they become so lifelike they’re indistinguishable from the real thing – can ever replace actual artists can only lead to further decline of an artform that’s already dying off.

We might, like David recreating Monica for his own emotional entertainment, use the greats of the past as our future playthings. The one thing we won’t be able to resurrect is our own humanity.

• Maria Callas: A Concert in Hologram will travel to the Dunstan Playhouse in Adelaide on 9 December and Perth Concert Hall on 13 December

To say that it has been a bumpy ride is an understatement – but oddly enough, English National Opera is back where it was in November 2022, when it was told that it would lose its entire government grant unless it moved outside London, probably to Manchester. That was the indirect result of then culture secretary Nadine Dorries’ insistence that millions of pounds of arts funding be transferred out of the capital as part of the Conservative government’s levelling-up agenda.

But it will be a very different company. While it will continue to stage some full-scale work in its London home, in Greater Manchester it will collaborate with venues and organisations across the city to make new kinds of operatic work at different scales. It has lost its stalwart music director, the conductor Martyn Brabbins, who resigned this autumn in the wake of proposals to abolish 19 posts at ENO’s orchestra and re-employ the other musicians part-time, and make cuts to the chorus, as part of what he called a “plan of managed decline”.

Is the new model for ENO “managed decline”? The proposed post-cutting and re-employment would be part of a move to a short, five-month season in London. It is undeniably the end for the company’s former year-round model of ensemble-led, large-scale work, a model that presented a cheaper, edgier, more accessible alternative for opera audiences in the capital to the purring Rolls-Royce that is the Royal Opera House. Livelihoods will be lost and an outstanding tradition broken. A five-month season simply isn’t the same as blood pumping through the veins of a brilliant full-time company.

The fact that ENO has circled back to Manchester is, in a way, surprising. A year ago, the great and the good of the city’s cultural scene were, to put it mildly, sceptical of having a reluctantly transplanted ENO visited upon them – “like cultural missionaries arriving to bring us great art from London” as one arts leader in the city put it to me. “If they want to come, come willingly. If you can’t come willingly, don’t come at all,” Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester said, somewhat testily.

What has abruptly changed, say insiders in Manchester, is the nature of conversations with ENO which, since Jenny Mollica took over as interim chief executive, have become more open and collaborative. One Manchester arts leader said, “My thinking pivoted from, ‘Go where you like, I’m not bothered,’ to ‘This could be really interesting.’”

On the ENO side, the decision of where to move to was based on conversations with a number of cities that boiled down to three possibilities: Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham. Manchester was chosen because ENO felt it could fit into and work with the existing cultural ecology of the city. That is surely true. The infrastructure is incredibly confident: BBC Radio 3 will soon be established at the BBC base at Salford, and Manchester is the base for excellent organisations, from the arts centre Home and the new Aviva Studios to the Hallé and the BBC Philharmonic orchestras, as well as the Manchester Camerata and the Manchester Collective. Some might even question whether a better destination for ENO might have been a city with less of a formal cultural offer already, but the idea is of collaboration and co-production, Manchester’s existing heft will be necessary.

Those with long memories will recall that, in 2008 - when Burnham was culture secretary - the Royal Opera House was on the point of establishing a “branch” in the city, in the Palace Theatre, notionally to be refurbished at the cost of some £80m. That was scuppered by the global financial crisis and fears that it would cannibalise the Opera North audience, which tours to Salford’s Lowry. Presumably such fears have been partly assuaged by the fact that in Greater Manchester, ENO will be making a different kind of work from main-stage operas behind a proscenium arch. Opera North is said to be open to finding ways to grow opera audiences together with ENO.

Is this a good outcome? It depends on the quality of work that the newly reshaped company eventually produces with its new Mancunian partners. One thing is clear – in the zero-sum game that the Conservatives have been playing with the arts in England, London is the loser and Manchester the winner. Whether you approve of that outcome depends on where you – literally – stand.

Denny Laine, the frontman of the Moody Blues who went on to huge success with Paul McCartney in Wings, has died aged 79.

He had lung damage caused by interstitial lung disease. His wife, Elizabeth Hines, wrote on Instagram: “My darling husband passed away peacefully early this morning. I was at his bedside, holding his hand as I played his favourite Christmas songs for him … My world will never be the same.”

Laine was the voice of Go Now, one of the defining ballads of the 1960s, and co-wrote one of the biggest-selling songs in UK chart history, Wings’ Mull of Kintyre.

Born Brian Frederick Hines in Birmingham, 1944, he took on a snappier stage name and began his first band in his teens: Denny Laine and the Diplomats, whose singer was the future glam star Roy Wood and whose drummer was the future ELO member Bev Bevan.

Along with other rising stars of the “Brumbeat” scene of blues and R&B, he formed the Moody Blues in 1964. The group had a big hit from the off with their second single, Go Now, a cover version of Bessie Banks’ R&B ballad. Powered by one of the most distinctive, melancholic openings to a pop song ever – a downbeat Laine soulfully singing “we’ve already said goodbye” to a newly ex-lover – and a stunningly harmonised chorus, Laine’s hurt, jazzy delivery of the song’s top line helped make it a huge success, reaching No 1 in the UK and No 10 in the US.

The band initially struggled to match that success, although a Laine co-write, From the Bottom of My Heart (I Love You), reached the UK top 30 in 1965. The Moody Blues toured with the Beatles on the latter’s final UK tour later that year, but with the band at a low ebb in 1966, Laine left. (Justin Hayward replaced him, and the Moody Blues would find success with a more psychedelic direction thereafter with songs such as Nights in White Satin and the album Days of Future Passed.)

Laine’s next band, the Electric String Band, was a more psychedelic proposition and they played on bills with the likes of Jimi Hendrix. Laine released solo tracks, joined the Brummie supergroup Balls and took up a post in another supergroup, Ginger Baker’s Air Force. But his biggest and most sustained success came with Wings, the group formed by Paul McCartney and his wife, Linda, in the wake of the Beatles’ breakup.

Laine was tooling around with a solo album but dropped it after a call from McCartney. “I’d known [Laine] in the past and I just rang him and asked him: ‘What are you doing?’” McCartney has explained. “He said ‘nothing’ so I said: ‘Right. Come on then!” Beginning with the debut album Wild Life, Laine spent the next 10 years with the band, earning co-writing credits including on the strident Celtic ballad Mull of Kintyre, a Christmas No 1 in 1977 and the first British single to sell 2m copies.

Wild Life failed to make the UK top 10 but the band – perhaps aided by McCartney adding his name to the group for a spell – were soon hugely popular, with their next five albums (including the live LP Wings Over America) all topping the US charts. They included an enduring high point in McCartney and Laine’s back catalogue, Band on the Run, which features the Laine co-write No Words.

Mull of Kintyre, meanwhile, was written by Laine and McCartney overlooking the mull of the title where McCartney was living. Laine said: “Paul and I sat with a bottle of whisky one afternoon outside a cottage in the hills of Kintyre and wrote the song – Paul had written the chorus and we wrote the rest of it together.” Given an extra Scottish flavour with the addition of a local band of pipers, it then eclipsed the Beatles’ She Loves You to become the biggest-selling single ever in the UK, a record that lasted until Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? in 1984.

As well as mainly playing guitar, Laine paired with Linda on harmonised backing vocals and also chipped in with keyboard, bass and woodwind parts. His pedigree was acknowledged in the Wings Over America tour, with a solo section where he performed Go Now and other songs, and in 1977 the McCartneys backed Laine on his solo album Holly Days, a collection of Buddy Holly covers.

Laine contributed to a pair of early 1980s McCartney solo albums while Wings were still a going concern, and while drummers and other guitarists came and went, Laine was the sole member to stay alongside the McCartneys for the duration of Wings’ career.

But he fell out with McCartney over the band’s business affairs and interpersonal frictions and left in 1981, precipitating the end of the band. He recorded a number of his own solo LPs that decade, and later revisited the Wings material, including in a number of McCartney-less band reunions.

Laine also continued to tour solo, including his Songs & Stories tour earlier this year, a hybrid of acoustic performances and career anecdotes.

Speaking this year, he reflected on his career. “I’m just a normal musician who doesn’t really think about the fame side of it. That always surprises me, the fame side of it … I never really had a big hit, but then people will come up to me and say: ‘I’ve got all of your solo stuff. I know every song you’ve ever written.’ It’s a compliment and it does give you a good feeling. You’ve gotten across to a lot more people than you thought you did.”

Continuing her tribute, Hines wrote of Laine’s illness: “He fought every day. He was so strong and brave, never complained. All he wanted was to be home with me and his pet kitty, Charley, playing his gypsy guitar … Denny was an amazingly wonderful person, so loving and sweet to me. He made my days colorful, fun and full of life, just like him.” She thanked fans and medical staff for supporting him.

Italian neorealism of the 1950s and 60s lurks behind Damiano Michieletto’s 2015 Covent Garden staging of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, now on its third revival, overseen by Noa Naamat and conducted by Daniel Oren. It remains a compelling piece of theatre, subtle in its attention to psychological detail, compassionate, and admirably avoids melodrama in its exploration of emotional extremes.

Michieletto sets both operas in the same poor Italian town and interweaves their characters and narratives. Cavalleria Rusticana centres on the bakery run by Mamma Lucia (Elena Zilio), where Pagliacci’s Silvio (Andrzej Filończyk) also works, and where he first meets Nedda (Anna Princeva) while she’s handing out publicity leaflets for the touring company’s show. Pagliacci, meanwhile, takes place in the local municipal hall-cum-theatre, where we also now find the pregnant Santuzza (Aleksandra Kurzak) moving towards reconciliation with the initially unforgiving Mamma Lucia after the death of Roberto Alagna’s Turiddu.

Michieletto’s approach is largely naturalistic, though each opera tips towards surrealism in a hallucinatory moment of crisis. Santuzza cowers in terror before a vision of the Madonna extending her arm in condemnation during the Easter procession. And as the actor Canio (Jorge de León) loses his grip on reality in Pagliacci, we witness events on stage and offstage begin to meld, buckle and blur in his mind.

Musically, there is much to admire, though Oren, sometimes solid rather than inspired, takes time to get into his stride in Cavalleria, the opening of which is both too slow and too refined, and it’s only when we reach the confrontation between Alagna and Kurzak that the opera begins to exert its grip.

Alagna’s voice has lost some of its lustre of late, but this is nevertheless a powerful portrait of a man unwillingly facing the consequences of his own unthinking sensuality. Kurzak, who has admirably made the transition from coloratura to dramatic soprano, is unsparingly intense in her rage, wounded pride and sheer desperation. She and Zilio are both terrific stage animals – the relationship between the two women really convinces. Rachael Wilson, meanwhile, is the knowing Lola, Dimitri Platanias the brutish Alfio, whom Michieletto imagines as a self-made man, whose money, however, can’t buy love.

Platanias also plays Tonio in Pagliacci, singing the famous Prologue with handsome tone and considerable dignity, though later the mix of insidious pianissimos and declamatory ferocity make him very malign indeed. De León, dark voiced and brooding, admirably captures the violence and incipient instability that lurk, barely concealed, beneath Canio’s charismatic exterior, and Princeva and Filończyk, are just gorgeous together in their love duet, where you don’t mind Oren’s lingering tempi for once. Pagliacci, carefully paced, suits him better than Cavalleria Rusticana, in fact. Playing and choral singing, meanwhile, are exemplary throughout.