Category: Music

Anna Lapwood, Cambridge choral don and TikTok phenomenon, is on a mission to show the riches of organ music beyond the realms of weddings and funerals. Luna, her debut solo album for Sony Classics, combines classical repertoire with works by living composers – Philip Glass, Ludovico Einaudi, Max Richter – and film music transcriptions. The only Bach, usually an organist’s mainstay, is the Ave Maria in the sweetened arrangement by Charles Gounod. Her choices are popular: some, such as Chopin’s E flat Nocturne, Op 9 No 2, were written originally for piano. The opening work, Flying, is from the soundtrack, by James Newton Howard, to the live-action 2003 film of Peter Pan. The album is direct, honest, accessible. If you object to these attributes, stick to the plentiful supply of mainstream organ music on offer elsewhere. If you are open to Lapwood’s distinctive approach, there’s plenty to enjoy from this talented musician and advocate.

Mozart’s five violin concertos, accessible and melodic as well as relatively manageable technically, are often tackled by young players early in their musical ascent. As soloist and director of the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne (Deutsche Grammophon), the French violinist Renaud Capuçon, whose career began in earnest about three decades ago, is decidedly beyond that novice stage. His view is that these works, written quickly, the first when Mozart was still in his teens, require a communicative flow and lightness almost beyond the scope of a novice player: they should be approached with caution, and an open mind. The result is a spirited and elegant set of recordings – especially effective in the more elaborate No 5, “Turkish” – reflecting this ensemble’s close association with Mozart since it was set up in 1942.

Vinyl sales surged by 13.2% in the first nine months of 2023 compared with the same period last year, according to new statistics from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), fuelled by releases from Lana Del Rey, Taylor Swift, Blur and Kylie Minogue. This 16th year of growth is made possible by the physical music distribution businesses responsible for getting records to shops and consumers in the UK. But disarray in one of the UK’s biggest players means that smaller acts are missing out on chart positions. This is affecting consumers and independent retailers already struggling with small profit margins during the industry’s pivotal fourth retail quarter.

One British independent label saw one of its biggest acts miss out on a Top 20 album placement when the UK’s leading physical music distribution company became mired in chaos during a warehouse move. Additionally, nine months of work and thousands of pounds of investment were undermined when part of its stock for a September release was temporarily unable to be located, said a senior executive from the label. “It put a crack through the middle of the campaign. It could mean a knock of 50% off sales.”

The company at the heart of the controversy is Utopia Music, which in September 2022 took over the biggest physical music distribution company in the UK from Cinram Novum to save it from insolvency. Having also acquired the distributor Proper Music Group that January, Utopia now has an estimated 70% share of the business of getting records to shops and consumers in the UK.

Drew Hill, VP of distribution services at Utopia admits there were issues during the site move, explaining it was a process that should have taken 12 to 18 months but had to be squeezed into six. He says these transition problems affected everyone equally and is emphatic that the majors were not given preferential treatment and didn’t have their stock prioritised. He says that 27 trailers of stock “were loaded without being properly manifested”, resulting in an unloading backlog. “Nothing went missing or got lost,” he says. “This has been a very unfortunate situation brought about by the speed at which the move was forced to happen by the lease end date [for Aylesbury].”

The Switzerland-based company called in the liquidators for its Utopia UK (R&D) operation this summer. For the separate distribution arm of its business, UDS, it sought financial assistance from the major labels Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment (to fund the move of its warehousing from Aylesbury to Bicester, as reported by music business title CMU), leading to fears of an unhealthy level of influence over the independent sector. Hill already admits: “Part of me wishes now I hadn’t gone to [the majors] to say: ‘Do you want to come along for the ride?’”

A music fintech company, Utopia Music has run into multiple problems recently. Aside from calling in UK liquidators, it also had to divest several companies – including publishing tech company Sentric, Absolute Label Services and music analytics platform ROSTR – after an acquisition frenzy in 2021 and 2022.

There is concern among some independent labels that the bailout by Universal and Sony could be the first step of a takeover by stealth. “Of course, Universal and Sony releases will be prioritised,” says the indie label executive.

UDS rebuts this. “Sony and UMG have no control over operational workflow on site,” says Hill. “I don’t think they’ve got any desire to get back into something” – physical distribution – “they spent years trying to get out of.”

The Association of Independent Music, the trade body for UK independents, also dampened down panic. CEO Silvia Montello says she understands why “there’s a nervousness within parts of the independent sector” around the Sony/UMG loan.

“Everything that we are seeing and hearing does not point to the fact that the major labels would want to take over the distribution again,” she says. “This is about maintaining physical distribution for labels within the UK and making sure that there is a good, robust future.”

Hill argues that Utopia threw Cinram a lifeline and thereby saved UK distribution. “It would have gone to the wall,” he says. “There was no one else waiting in the wings to step in and fill the void. If it wasn’t for Utopia, then physical distribution would be in an absolutely dire place.” He adds: “The project to buy Cinram, to upgrade the business and move it to the new warehouse is a multimillion pound project. I’m not at liberty to discuss the size of these loans [from major labels], but they’re pretty small in comparison to the amount of money that Utopia has pumped into the project.”

Kim Bayley, CEO of the Digital Entertainment and Retail Association, says that consolidation in any sector is a worry. “There will always be concerns, but the big picture is that music is an ecosystem which needs big players and independents,” she says. “Retailers, more than most, know the implications of a shrinking pool of distributors, but with streaming now accounting for more than three-quarters of the music market, that was inevitable.”

The two biggest majors might be helping financially support UDS through its relocation, yet if Utopia decides to divest its distribution arm, it is the majors who are the most likely, and most able, to buy it out. For the indies, it could spell dystopia.

When Deborah Warner took over as artistic director of the Ustinov Studio at Bath’s Theatre Royal, she announced her intention of programming opera, dance and song alongside theatre. Launching her second season there, tenor Ian Bostridge gave a memorable recital, proving just how appropriate a space it is for such performances. The Ustinov is small and darkly intimate, and Bostridge and his pianist, Julius Drake, used the acoustic to great effect, with a pianissimo that would be impossible in most venues carrying wonderfully here.

Recently recovered from a chest infection, Bostridge exercised caution and abandoned the demands of Britten’s Michelangelo Sonnets in favour of a Schubert sequence, while retaining the cycle Winter Words, Op 52, setting eight poems by Thomas Hardy and first performed by Britten and Peter Pears exactly 70 years ago. Britten’s instinct for word-setting and Bostridge’s own instinct for conveying meaning and emotion with disarming clarity made each song a little gem: the opening and closing pieces, with their references to the passage of time, carried a suitably philosophical weight. Bostridge’s gift for narrative elevated Hardy’s descriptions into tiny monodramas, as in At the Station, Upway – the tale of a boy with his violin and a handcuffed convict. In all these, the peerless Drake brought out the wit and elegance of the piano writing, with such characterisation and dramatic detail as to complete a vivid aural picture.

Their choice of eight Schubert lieder formed an ideal complement, balancing favourites such as An die Musik with songs invoking the moon, such as An den Mond. Bostridge’s mellifluous line and careful inflection of key words always a delight. In this context, An Mein Klavier, Christian Schubart’s poem in praise of the piano, seemed by extension to be a paean from the singer to Drake’s pianism, every line immaculately voiced.

Three Britten folk songs were the ideal end, with Drake’s underlining of the dissonance at the opening of Oliver Cromwell matched by Bostridge’s final, gIeeful challenge: “If you want any more you can sing it yourself!” But the audience did want more and they were obliged with another sprinkling of moonshine.

For a while now, Bakar has seemed on the cusp, ready to stellify. His 2018 mixtape, Badkid, radiated scrappy, politicised energy fused to anything-goes ambition, an electrifying combination. The north London singer attracts a rabidly devoted young following who adore his vivid tales of rocky relationships, powdery stimulants and outsider life. He certainly has the songwriting chops and charm to be a star, as last year’s debut album, Nobody’s Home, hinted. Yet he only scored a first chart hit in March with 2019 single Hell N Back, an atypically softboi love song remixed here as a sweet duet with Summer Walker.

His acoustic punk-pop and street-corner soul are smoothed out sensibly on Halo, with grownup harmonising and choral interpolations on Selling Biscuits and Hate the Sun. As always, Bakar deals melodies that spill sunshine – Alive! is a perky follow-up to last year’s superb The Mission. And his singing is better than ever, whether reminiscent of Billie Eilish’s lean-in intimacies (Facts_Situations) or Kele Okereke’s husky confessionals (I’m Done). Yet mostly Halo feels like an inch rather than a leap forward. He may need more of the ravening attack of his full-band live show. Next time, perhaps.

Like a panel of elementary-school teachers, music critics weren’t mad—just disappointed yesterday. That was when the Staatsoper Unter den Linden announced that conductor Christian Thielemann would replace Daniel Barenboim as music director starting with the 2024-25 season. Stern and badly-spelled I expected better of yous rang out across the land, directed at the city’s center-right government, incoming Staatsoper artistic director Elisabeth Sobotka, and the house’s orchestra, the Staatskapelle. 

At first glance, he seems like a good fit for the post. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that Thielemann, 64, is one of the great interpreters of Wagner, Bruckner, and Richard Strauss. Music that can otherwise plod sounds liquid and luminous in his hands. The Staatskapelle, which Barenboim transformed from an East German relic to one of the country’s great orchestras, was strongly in favor of Thielemann, a born-and-bred Berliner and one of the few artists with a standing to match Barenboim’s. Reviewers perceived real chemistry between the conductor and the ensemble when Thielemann took over two cycles of last year’s “Ring.” In possession of this good fortune, what is Thielemann in want of? 

You already know exactly what repertoire Thielemann will lead at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden if you read the second sentence of the previous paragraph. Great maestros often show a barely-cursory interest in music beyond the obvious masterpieces. But Thielemann’s personal canon consists of a handful of German-speaking composers, mostly from the mid-19th to the early-20th centuries, all of whose music benefited massively from the invention of the volume knob. It’s not just that we can’t expect Saariaho from Thielemann; even non-German composers like Janáček and Debussy, whose operas have real musical similarities with Thielemann’s Big Three, seem a stretch. (Scroll through his albums on Spotify if you don’t believe me.) That parochialism is an odd fit for Berlin, a city with its own provincialism, but whose residents speak over 120 mother tongues. 

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As András Schiff said in VAN, no musician has to do everything, and it’s not inherently disqualifying that Thielemann does a narrow, important repertoire extremely well. But the music director of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden is not just responsible for his own concerts, and leadership means delegating productively and with the right priorities. On the podium, Barenboim has rarely been an incisive interpreter of contemporary music. Nonetheless, with the Pierre Boulez Concert Hall, he created one of Germany’s best venues for its performance. Thielemann has left no such legacy in his previous positions. “Whether in Nuremberg, at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, in Munich or Salzburg, Thielemann cultivated his German mini-repertoire,” Hartmut Welscher wrote in VAN earlier this year. “He was too conservative even for Dresden.” For context, Dresden is a city where I once received the following comment after jaywalking with my boyfriend: “Bad enough they’re two men holding hands. Now they’re crossing the street when the light is red!” 

Barenboim was a consummate politician, but the boss from hell. Thielemann’s political instincts are shakier, and he isn’t exactly a natural leader of men either. As the critic Robert Braunmüller wrote on X aka Twitter, “By now EVERYBODY outside of Berlin knows that he’ll stick his nose everywhere, but never take care of anything.” The mere fact that Thielemann allegedly bullied musicians and burned bridges at Bayreuth—the only place between Spandau and Valhalla where his limited repertoire is no limit—tells me he’s not ready to work in the querulous, confident capital. 

One of Thielemann’s favorite sayings goes: “D Major isn’t political, thank God.” The conductor has been accused of right-wing sympathies. His politics are maybe better understood as those of a cringe conservative uncle, but one with whom you start to find common ground after a couple drinks. He represents an upper-middle-class, conservative, educated—yet still artistic—old West Berlin milieu worlds away from the city’s current hipsterdom. He’s fascinated by the history and ephemera of the Prussian Empire, in which the Staatsoper Unter den Linden played a significant role. (“I love Otto von Bismarck.” “You mean you’re interested in him.” “Oh, yes, he is a monster.”) In 2015, a Die Zeit reporter went out for Turkish food with Thielemann in Dresden. Apparently, the conductor found it so spicy he got a nosebleed. 

Aloofness can be an asset for a conductor’s musical work. But as a leader, Thielemann will also have to connect with audiences in a very different Berlin than the one that produced him. His preference for heavy meat and potatoes—in his food, in his repertoire—is just that: a personal preference. As the figurehead of the Staatsoper Berlin, these preferences function as a bat signal for some uncomfortable allies. The conservative newspaper Die Welt crowed of the appointment:

In times where filling a creative leadership role seems like an exercise in box-ticking, for the right gender, the right political positions, possibly the right skin color and the right sexual orientation, Thielemann didn’t tick the boxes. But: The kind of person who they were probably dreaming of doesn’t exist. The sensational trans conductor who fled the West Bank to Germany and who uses her free time to volunteer with the homeless and holds a voluntary position with the musicians’ union is just a construct of the zeitgeist. 

Soon, I’ll go hear some Wagner, or Bruckner, or Richard Strauss with Thielemann at the Staatsoper. Undoubtedly, it will be excellent, but I might think a little harder about who I’m sitting next to.  ¶

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Performances of Charles Ives’s monumental Concord Sonata may no longer be the extreme rarities they used to be, but they are still infrequent enough to make each a special event. Pianists with the technique and perspicacity to take on the challenge of finding their way through the thickets and tangles of notes are rare creatures too, but that is exactly the kind of challenge that Marc-André Hamelin relishes. He devoted the first part of his Wigmore Hall recital to Ives’s three-quarter-hour work, and a capacity audience was enthralled from first note to last.

It’s sometimes forgotten that the four movements are character pieces, and that the reference to the Massachusetts town of Concord in the title, and Ives’s labelling of the movements after leading writers of the New England school of transcendentalism, aren’t merely cosmetic. This is music with a tough philosophical core, whether in the search for a clear path in Emerson, the opening movement, the more picaresque diversions of Hawthorne, the domestic calm of The Alcotts or the swirling ruminations of Thoreau. Hamelin’s performance conveyed those different characters with wonderful vividness, taking the music’s extreme technical difficulty, with its fistfuls of notes and disorienting changes of direction, entirely in his stride, and finding beauty in the most tangled moments. It was a remarkable achievement.

After such a strenuous workout Hamelin would have been forgiven for allowing himself some less demanding pieces in the second half of his programme. But he ended with Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, as challenging as the Ives but in an entirely different way. His performance certainly had the requisite sweep and brilliance, through the surging climaxes of the opening Ondine, the insistent tolling of Le Gibet, and the snap and crackle of the final Scarbo. But there seemed to be a dimension missing; the range of keyboard colour that the piano writing exploits seemed rather muted, just as the element of fantasy and sheer playfulness had been played down in the miniatures of Schumann’s Waldszenen before it. Where the Ives had been very special indeed, the performances of these works seemed just a little bit ordinary.

Spanish prosecutors have charged Shakira with failing to pay €6.7m (£5.8m) in tax on her 2018 income, authorities have said, in the country’s latest fiscal allegations against the Colombian singer.

Shakira is alleged to have used an offshore company based in a tax haven to avoid paying the tax, Barcelona prosecutors said in a statement.

She has been notified of the charges in Miami, where she lives, according to the statement.

Shakira is already due to be tried in Barcelona on 20 November in a separate case that hinges on where she lived between 2012-14. In that case, prosecutors allege she failed to pay €14.5m in tax.

Prosecutors in Barcelona have alleged the Grammy winner spent more than half of the 2012-14 period in Spain and therefore should have paid taxes in the country, even though her official residence was in the Bahamas.

Spanish tax officials opened the latest case against her in July. After reviewing the evidence gathered over the last two months, prosecutors have decided to bring charges. No date for a trial was set.

The public relations firm that previously has handled Shakira’s affairs, Llorente y Cuenca, made no immediate comment. Last July, it said the artist had “always acted in concordance with the law and on the advice of her financial advisers”.

Shakira, whose full name is Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll, has been linked to Spain since she started dating the now-retired soccer player Gerard Piqué. The couple, who have two children, lived together in Barcelona until last year, when they ended their 11-year relationship.

Spain tax authorities have over the past decade cracked down on footballers including Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo for not paying their full due in taxes. Those players were found guilty of tax evasion but avoided prison time thanks to a provision that allows a judge to waive sentences under two years in length for first-time offenders.