Category: Music

Francisco Coll’s Cello Concerto, which received its UK premiere in the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Sunday morning Prom with conductor Tianyi Lu, is one of a series of works that Coll has composed for the Argentinian cellist Sol Gabetta. Typically for Coll, the concerto packs a huge amount of instrumental energy into its compact four movements, with textures jostling and colliding with each other in the outer movements (so that perspectives within the music are constantly shifting) and a pair of predominantly slow reflections between them, culminating in a cello cadenza.

While always remaining unmistakably itself, the stylistic frame of Coll’s music is deliriously wide. The ghosts of tangos from Gabetta’s native Argentina haunt the first movement of the concerto, and their dislocated rhythms also seem to hark back to the cubist world of Stravinsky’s wartime pieces for string quartet, while there are turns of phrase in the cello writing elsewhere that could refer to Elgar’s concerto for the instrument. As if to underline the music’s South American connections, Gabetta’s encore was a solo piece that Coll had composed for her, The Secret Life of Tango, which circles around the dance before finally and briefly allowing itself to become one.

Gabetta’s brilliance was matched by the BBCSO, too, for the frantic orchestral writing in the concerto sometimes seems as technically demanding as the solo cello part, yet under Lu’s cool control even the most tangled passages were perfectly precise. So was the rest of her programme, which was framed by showpieces – Dukas’s symphonic scherzo The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, one of the underrated miracles of French music, and a suite from Stravinsky’s Firebird ballet, not the usual 1919 selection, but the longer one from 1945 – both full of carefully tended, if slightly cool detail. And there was also a nod towards one of this year’s anniversarians with a Puccini rarity – the Preludio Sinfonico, written as a graduation exercise in 1882, but later partially recycled in his first two operas, Le Villi and Edgar, and seeming to come from an utterly different world to the rest of Lu’s programme.

A song about immigrants whose music, vocals and artwork were entirely generated using artificial intelligence has made the Top 50 most listened to songs in Germany, in what may be a first for a leading music market.

Verknallt in einen Talahon is a parody song that weaves modern lyrics – many of them based around racial stereotypes about immigrants – with 60s schlager pop.

The song is No 48 in Germany, the world’s fourth largest music market. Less than a month after its release, the song has 3.5m streams on Spotify and is No 3 on the streaming platform’s global viral chart.

Its creator, Josua Waghubinger, who goes by the artist name Butterbro, said he made the song’s chorus by feeding his own lyrics into Udio, a generative artificial intelligence tool that can generate vocals and instrumentation from simple text prompts.

He used the music tool to add a verse after the chorus had gained a favourable response on TikTok. “I think there’s still enough creative freedom in the song to make it a creative project,” the IT professional and hobby musician told Die Klangküche (The Sound Kitchen), a German music production podcast.

The song has drawn attention in German media not only for the production technology used but also its lyrical content. Translating as In Love with a Talahon, the song references a Germanised version of the Arabic expression “taeal huna”, meaning “come here” but now commonly used in Germany to describe groups of young men with immigrant backgrounds, often with derogatory overtones.

The lyrics parody the classic “good girl falls for bad boy” storylines of songs of the 1960s, such as the Shangri-Las’ Leader of the Pack. The object of the AI-generated singer’s desire wears “a Louis belt, a Gucci bag and Air Max trainers” and “smells like an entire perfume shop”.

When her lover gets angry, she ponders, “he’s as sweet as baklava” – presumably an attempt to identify him with Turkish culture.

Waghubinger said he wanted to make a song that made fun of overtly macho behaviour “with a twinkle in the eye and without discriminating”, but added that his overriding motivation had been to produce a track that would go viral on social media. “That was the challenge I set myself,” he told Die Klangküche.

But Marie-Luise Goldmann, culture editor of conservative broadsheet Die Welt, said the song walked a fine line between parody and discrimination.

“The mixing of migrant youth culture with German schlager conservatism alone will thrill as many listeners as it offends,” she said. “The talahon [in the song] doesn’t hide his backward gender image but it’s debatable whether he [Butterbro] is trivialising, glorifying or attacking it.”

Felicia Aghaye, a writer for the music magazine Diffus, called the song’s popularity “doubly problematic” because “talahon” was firmly established as an insult among young Germans and Austrians against migrants.

“Rightwing groups, for example, use the term to create a bogeyman and stoke Islamophobia and xenophobia,” she said. “What’s problematic is that Butterbro doesn’t seem to understand the negative issues around the term.

“His track is to a certain extent aiding and abetting making the term mainstream.”

Numerous AI-generated songs in a similar style, mixing the sweet sound of MOR schlager pop from the 1960s with crudely sexualised lyrics, are circulating on German social media.

Artificial intelligence is being increasingly used by music producers to generate vocals in the style of well-known singers. In 2023 the Beatles released Now and Then, a track that used the assistance of AI to extrapolate John Lennon’s vocals.

A track featuring an AI-generated version of Tupac Shakur’s voice was uploaded on Canadian rapper Drake’s Instagram account in April, but disappeared after lawyers for the late rapper reportedly threatened to sue.

Giacinto Scelsi died in 1988, aged 83. Virtually unknown for most of his life, his music had been discovered and much of it performed for the first time only in his last 10 years, when his works suddenly became influential on both sides of the Atlantic – American experimentalists such as Alvin Curran, Morton Feldman and Earle Brown were among his admirers, as were the French spectralists, especially Tristan Murail and Claude Vivier. The mystique that surrounded Scelsi added to the allure of his music – a self-taught composer who was born into the Italian nobility, he refused to have his photograph associated with his music and regarded himself as a messenger from another world. His intense later works were often confined to a single chord or pitch that was subjected to microtonal inflections and all manner of textural variation.

As these fine, fiercely committed performances by the Quatuor Molinari demonstrate, Scelsi’s five string quartets and his string trio provide a good sense of the way in which his music developed. While the First Quartet, composed in 1944, is clearly indebted to Schoenberg and Berg, by the time of the trio 14 years later, his music is already pared down, so that each movement centres on a single pitch and the ways in which it may be articulated. After that, each of the subsequent quartets, composed between 1961 and 1984, takes a different approach to creating a unique sound world – specially made metallic mutes in the Second, retuning of the strings in the Fourth, exaggerated vibrato and glissandos in the Fifth. But for all its originality, it’s music that always remains at arm’s length, content to remain very much within its own expressive world: easy to admire, much harder to love.

Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify

20. Something to Believe In (1986)

Perhaps the last Ramones song to sound heartfelt came on 1986’s Animal Boy. Joey Ramone’s voice was an acquired taste, but for those who loved it, he had a unique ability to communicate vulnerability. No hiding behind cartoon lyrics here – this was raw.

19. Oh, Oh, I Love Her So (1977)

In some ways, a minor Ramones track, but it captures the band at their absolute brightest on second album Leave Home. It’s no more than a high-power pastiche of early 60s teen pop, but made with such love, down to that final sprannng! of guitar.

18. Psycho Therapy (1983)

The 1983 album Subterranean Jungle sounded awful – terrible mix and production – and Psycho Therapy would have been higher on this list had it appeared on any other record. It’s Ramones by numbers, but brutal, edgy and thrilling.

17. Daytime Dilemma (Dangers of Love) (1984)

Through the 80s, Ramones’ greatest strength was Joey’s ability to summon up a couple of perfect pop songs for each album, many of which would have been woeful otherwise. At four and a half minutes, this was Ramones’ Lord of the Rings track in length, but a pop-rock masterclass.

16. Mama’s Boy (1984)

Too Tough to Die was seen as Ramones’ response to the hardcore bands they had inspired. The album opened not with speed, but with the menacing slow churn of Mama’s Boy, on which, for the first time, the band sounded threatening rather than madcap.

15. The KKK Took My Baby Away (1981)

Joey’s girlfriend started going out with Johnny Ramone. Joey wrote a song about it and the pair didn’t speak for the remaining 15 years the band were together. Admittedly, comparing your Republican bandmate to the Ku Klux Klan was harsh, and it’s hard not to feel that therapy might have been more productive.

14. You Should Never Have Opened That Door (1977)

Stuck for a song subject? Offer advice to horror movie characters! It worked on their debut album’s I Don’t Wanna Go Down to the Basement, and it worked even better here, with Johnny’s great riff and Dee Dee Ramone’s sunny harmonies.

13. I Wanna Be Sedated (1978)

By album four, Road to Ruin, Ramones – with new drummer Marky Ramone – were changing their sound a little. Not hugely – in subject and approach this is very much a Ramones song. But the arrangements were getting fancier, the hooks a little more polished.

12. We’re a Happy Family (1977)

Ramones were mocked for their apparent stupidity, but managing to rhyme Queens, refried beans, magazines and Thorazines didn’t seem too dim, not least because those four words appeared to encompass the band’s entire horizon.

11. Bonzo Goes to Bitburg (1985)

The angriest, most politically committed song Ramones ever wrote was a response to President Ronald Reagan visiting a cemetery in which SS soldiers were interred. Joey and Dee Dee wrote it, but Republican Johnny insisted it be renamed My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down for the Animal Boy album.

10. Judy Is a Punk (1976)

Ninety seconds, a headlong rush to the end with Johnny’s guitar buzzing like hornets in your ear, and still time for Joey to commentate on the structure of the song as he sang it: “Second verse, same as the first … Third verse, different from the first.”

9. Questioningly (1978)

Between them, Dee Dee, Joey and Johnny came up with this heartbreak ballad, played on acoustic guitars like an old Jackie DeShannon number. And how’s this for twisting words to force a rhyme? “Looked at her close, forced her into view / Yes, I said, you’re a girl that I once may have knew.”

8. Sheena Is a Punk Rocker (1977)

In which Ramones, indulging Joey’s dreams of trying to sound like Phil Spector, go all out for a hit in punk’s high summer of 1977, guitar overdubs and all. In the UK, it reached No 22, but it got no higher than No 81 in the US. You simply can’t trust the public.

7. Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment (1977)

Mental health was a recurring theme in Ramones’ songs. Joey and Dee Dee both suffered with mental illness, so the latter writing this for the former to sing was apt. But Ramones never felt sorry for themselves, even when dripping with sarcasm.

6. Do You Remember Rock’n’Roll Radio? (1980)

In 1980, Joey got his wish of working with Spector. End of the Century was largely forgettable, but Spector did absolute justice to this hymn for the golden days of pop radio – Murray the K, Alan Freed and all – which sounds like a fairground at night.

5. Danny Says (1980)

Maybe the band’s most heartfelt song, addressed to their manager Danny Fields as a series of pleas from the road. It’s given pathos by the fact that Ramones, unlike most artists moaning about the road, weren’t living the life of five-star hotels.

4. Beat on the Brat (1976)

Random, cartoon violence was a theme of early Ramones songs – they sounded like late-night TV being reprocessed. With what should you beat on the brat? A baseball bat, naturally. And why? Well, what can you do with a brat like that always on your back? Faulty logic, thrilling song.

3. Swallow My Pride (1977)

The most grownup Ramones song yet when it emerged on their second album. A mid-pace chug that was a very conscious piece of classicism, with actual harmonies in the mix, and a change of dynamics from verse to chorus – and yet another great single.

2. Blitzkrieg Bop (1976)

The first real punk-rock single, as 1976 dawned, was the Bay City Rollers’ Saturday Night rewritten as a call to arms. Beginning with the “Hey ho! Let’s go!” chant was genius, and sealed the song’s future for use in sports arenas and advertising white goods.

1. Rockaway Beach (1977)

Perhaps the greatest single from punk’s first wave, and one that showed how deeply Ramones were rooted in old rock’n’roll. Imagine it played in the style of Little Richard’s Keep a-Knockin’, with horns and piano: it sounds just as thrilling. It had a perfect lyric from Dee Dee as well, capturing the soporific ennui of teenage summers: “Chewing out a rhythm on my bubble gum / The sun is out and I want some / It’s not hard, not far to reach / We can hitch a ride to Rockaway Beach.” Nearly half a century later, it still sounds like cold fizzy drinks, fried onions and the smell of salt water.

It was the concert many suspected we would never hear. Yet, on Sunday, nearly two years after he stepped back from performance following the diagnosis of his “serious neurological condition”, Daniel Barenboim was back. Back in the London to which he has given so much, back at the Proms which loves him, and – every bit as powerful in its defiance of calamity – back with his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra of musicians from Israel, Palestine and other Arab and Muslim countries.

In such circumstances, Barenboim’s determination to return felt heroic. The Royal Albert Hall was packed to acclaim him. But the strength of will, always a feature, comes at a visible cost now. Barenboim is far frailer, moves slowly on and off the platform, ascends the podium carefully, sits to conduct, and directs with only minimal gestures.

The music-making is different, too. The physicality of the past is not there. The impetuousness has gone. Well, almost gone. Barenboim can still conjure an instant response from his players with a tiny flick of the baton when he chooses. But the grip remains. There was an austere depth, even a solemnity, to his performances of Brahms and Schubert. It echoed the Olympian late concerts of Otto Klemperer, with whom Barenboim the tyro pianist performed in the 1960s.

In Brahms’s violin concerto, Barenboim and Anne-Sophie Mutter simply ignored the press-on modern performance fashion altogether. Instead, theirs was an unapologetically sombre and reflective reading, with collaborative seriousness front and centre. Mutter’s tone ranged from full-blooded to gossamer fragile. The orchestra’s oboe principal – the West-Eastern players are not named in the programme for grimly obvious reasons – played his andante solo exquisitely. As an encore, Mutter played the sarabande from Bach’s second partita “as a musical prayer for lasting peace in the Middle East”.

Barenboim’s handling of Schubert’s “Great” C major symphony after the interval was equally uncompromising. Instead of rushing it, as too many do, he allowed the symphony’s “heavenly length” – in Robert Schumann’s phrase – to unfold at its own pace. The conducting grew more animated and the playing had the requisite grandeur. The result was Schubert’s extraordinary symphony as it ought to be heard but rarely is. It was already an unforgettable evening. This performance alone made it a great one.

Nick Cave has described how the deaths of two of his four sons have made him prioritise being “a father and a husband and a kind of person of the world” over “the concept of being an artist” in an interview conducted in May on the anniversary of his son Jethro’s death, and aired in a 30-minute Australian broadcast on Monday night.

“For most of my life I was just sort of in awe of my own genius, you know, and I had an office and would sit there and write every day and whatever else happened in my life was peripheral,” Cave told ABC’s Australian Story presenter Leigh Sales.

“This just collapsed completely and I just saw the folly of that, the kind of disgraceful self-indulgence of the whole thing.”

Grief has been a defining influence in Cave’s work and public persona since his 15-year-old son Arthur, one of his twin sons with wife Susie Cave, died after falling from a cliff near Brighton in July 2015. In 2022, Cave announced that his eldest son, Jethro Lazenby had also died, at the age of 31, not long after he was found guilty of unlawful assault for physically attacking his mother.

During the career-spanning interview, which ranged from Cave’s childhood in Wangaratta, Victoria, to his 1995 collaboration with Kylie Minogue, Cave revealed to Sales that the session was taking place on the second anniversary of Lazenby’s death.

“I had an understanding of the process, because I’d been through it already,” he said of grieving. “There is the initial cataclysmic event that we eventually absorb or rearrange ourselves so that we become creatures of loss as we get older.

“But this is part of our fundamental fabric of what we are as human beings. We are things of loss. And this is not a tragic element to our lives but rather a deepening element that brings incredible meaning into our life.”

A visibly surprised Sales apologised for the timing of the interview on the anniversary.

‘It’s not your fault,” Cave replied. “For me when I do interviews, it just very quickly lands back at this place.”

Cave also explained how his relationship with the public evolved after Arthur’s death. His website, the Red Hand Files, still receives “hundreds and hundreds of letters” each week, all of which Cave reads before posting answers to a select handful each month.

“It was also a kind of lifeline for me that reached out and collected up these people. It’s something that’s just allowed me to remain open to the world rather than shut down,” he said.

“There’s a great beauty in the Red Hand Files that, you know, it’s an extreme privilege to be receiving these letters from people. It’s this bizarre opportunity for people to indulge to some degree in their grief.”

Cave, who will release a new Bad Seeds album named Wild God later this month, revealed via the website in May that he had become a grandfather when his second son Luke, born to Cave’s first wife Viviane Carneiro, welcomed a son.

Cave told Sales he hopes to be the “grandfather that sits in the armchair and says inappropriate things and has a terrible influence over everybody but the child secretly loves.”

• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. Other international suicide helplines can be found at befrienders.org

Pitch darkness. Then a single spotlight on a piano in the middle of the stage. A figure walks on – head down, almost apologetic – and sits. The auditorium is silent. There is a gentle cascade of notes, fingers rippling the length of the keyboard again and again in the harmonic equivalent of rotating a kaleidoscope. The audience seem barely to breathe: hundreds of people all joined in intense, ecstatic concentration, cameraphones held reverentially aloft.

What music inspires such rapturous attention? On this occasion, it is the bearded Ukrainian pianist-composer Lubomyr Melnyk playing what he calls “continuous music”. Lots of arpeggios (yes, the ones you practised for hours if you ever had piano lessons, going up and down the notes that form a chord) and lots of sustaining pedal. There is not a huge amount else on the list of musical ingredients – but the euphoric absorption displayed by all those listeners outstrips just about anything I’ve ever witnessed at more mainstream classical performances.

Yet Melnyk is far from alone in generating such responses. Take Dutch pianist-composer Joep Beving. His music is subdued, softly intimate and pedal-heavy. Understatement comes as standard. He has described what he creates as “simple music for complex emotions”. He also clocks up more monthly listeners on Spotify than classical piano legends András Schiff, Mitsuko Uchida and Alfred Brendel. Combined.

Beving and Melnyk are two figures in a huge musical phenomenon unfolding on the fringes of classical music. It can be heard on film and TV soundtracks, adverts and call-centre hold music, and behind that trickledown lies an enormous number of albums, singles and playlists by pianist-composers now attracting more listeners than most big names of classical piano performance. Did you think Yuja Wang, the 37-year-old Chinese phenomenon, was one of the most famous pianists in the world? Think again.

Beving, Melnyk and similar artists work in a solo piano soundworld sometimes known as “ambient” or “neoclassical” or “postminimalist” – although categories aren’t really its thing. As one fan put it to me with a hint of impatience: “It’s all just stuff, you know?” And this particular stuff is about soulful simplicity. A stripped-back aesthetic. Quiet melancholy. It is a world of arpeggios and gentle undulations, of atmosphere rather than athleticism.

There’s nothing new in that, you might think if you’re classically inclined. And true, there are slow movements by Mozart that might fit the bill, not to mention meditative keyboard pieces by Bach or Couperin. Or Erik Satie, whose groundbreaking experiments in ambient composition saw him labelled an eccentric in the late 19th century. Yet none of these continuities can explain one of the most striking aspects of the 21st-century “sad-piano” phenomenon: the fact that the classical music establishment has largely ignored it.

Take Riopy, a French pianist-composer who spent his childhood in a cult, ultimately escaping it, and now records his signature brand of meditative keyboard-rippling for Warner Classics. He may not be a household name yet he has more than 725,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, easily exceeding Wang’s 645,000.

More obviously avant garde is Berlin-based composer and musician Nils Frahm, who was taught piano as a child by Nahum Brodsky, himself a pupil of composer-pianist Sergei Rachmaninov. “He made me practise Russian style,” Frahm tells me, “although without the weight on my fingers.” With a grin, he adds: “And no bleeding was involved.” Frahm’s music does attract critical attention – not to mention 1.4 million listeners a month on Spotify – but he is still treated as “pop”, not “classical”.

This may be strange considering that, in the course of our conversation, Frahm talks energetically about a vast array of musicians, from Thelonious Monk and Valentin Silvestrov to JS Bach and Heinrich Biber. His compositions often use electronics as well as the piano (his 2022 track Brainwash sounds like the cheerful progeny of US minimalist Steve Reich and an arcade game). But the mechanism-heavy aesthetic of Frahm’s solo piano pieces is instantly recognisable to those in the know – and it is widely imitated.

Beving, despite huge listener figures on Spotify (1.8m per month), also flies beneath the radar of classical music writers – this despite being signed to Deutsche Grammophon (DG), another explicitly “classical” record label. Like Frahm, Beving had some formal piano training as a child. He was accepted on a conservatoire course while studying at university, before repetitive strain injury forced him to drop out. “I had very, very little time to do my Czernys,” he confesses from his studio, referring to the studies that have been a foundation of piano training for almost two centuries. “And so yeah, my technique was really bad. Still is.”

That didn’t trouble Christian Badzura, vice president of DG’s A&R New Repertoire department, who signed Beving after hearing his self-released first album in a Berlin bar. When I ask via email whether Badzura defines Beving’s music as “classical”, he fires back: “Just because it is not a late Beethoven sonata or a complex atonal piece, why should it not be part of the classical music repertoire?” That surely depends on who you think polices the endlessly movable boundaries of classical music.

Which brings us to the Italian pianist-composer Ludovico Einaudi. His music does dominate the UK classical charts, and he boasts an astonishing 8.1m monthly listeners on Spotify – more than Bach, Beethoven or any classical performer, dead or alive. And you can’t say Einaudi is ignored by the critical establishment – in fact, critics of all stripes love to hate him. “Einaudi’s music speaks fluent cliche,” diagnosed a classical reviewer in the Guardian back in 2019. A few years earlier, a pop critic in the same paper detected “the balladry of Westlife but without their clarity of purpose”. More recently, the Times simply branded him “the middlebrow maestro”.

This isn’t purely a case of snobbery. For hundreds of years, classical music has valued musical “development”, meaning today’s composers are supposed to function as the next step in an onwards march of evolution. In that context, the perma-tonality and looping structures of music by Einaudi and others like him seem inexplicably static – much like the once mind-boggling repetitions of 1960s minimalism, but decades after the fact and with the philosophical daring excised.

Einaudi’s fans beg to differ, though. One tells me he has seen Einaudi live three times: “His music is so universal. You have to react. I get in touch with my joy and with my sadness.” Another says she used to play Einaudi’s music herself in school assemblies. “Some people would be really snobby. They’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s pretty basic.’ But I love it. I played it at my grandma’s funeral. It’s very moving music.”

And that’s the thing about this type of piano music: its creators are mostly uninterested in labels but they are very interested in “authenticity”. Biographical backstories are crucial. Beving started composing after a burnout. “I couldn’t really talk,” he tells me. “But the piano was giving me clarity and something to hold on to.” His compositional process is all about “allowing things to happen”. Improvisation is essential. And the characteristically barely-there softness of his music? “I couldn’t deal with the normal sound, so I had the study pedal [which dampens sound] on. There was a profoundness, a warmness and intimacy which allowed me to give more space between the notes.” It’s that sound, he reckons, that draws listeners in: “It’s almost like you’re on the piano stool, next to the guy playing.”

Ah, yes: it almost always is a guy playing this type of music – usually a white guy at that. There are female artists out there – Hania Rani, Sophie Hutchings, Poppy Ackroyd – but none match the listening figures of Frahm, Beving and their male colleagues. Frahm winces when I point this out. It may, he suggests, be connected to “the desirable image of the modern man, who should be very sensitive”. Speaking to me from her home in Australia, Sophie Hutchings is unsure why the skew remains so extreme, beyond still-entrenched expectations about the gender of “a composer”. But she admits: “Most female composers I’ve met in my world, which isn’t that many – they’re very determined. Because, yes, I would say it can be harder as a female.”

Like Beving and co, Hutchings writes through improvisation: “It’s a very subliminal process.” As we chat, she refers to the “therapy” that composing and listening entail. Also like Beving, Hutchings – a long-term insomniac – emphasises music’s capacity to heal and soothe. “We live in an overly saturated world of complexities,” she says. “And I think we are craving to strip back the layers, to feel things.” Which is where her own delicately circling solo pieces come in. Does she hope her music helps others to sleep, I wonder, or is that a rather backhanded compliment? “I take that absolutely as a compliment!” she says. “It’s not that it doesn’t tap into an emotion. It’s just not demanding your attention.”

And therein lies a clue as to why this music is so widely embraced by listeners and so little discussed by the establishment. What can you say about music that is intentionally so stripped back and evanescent? As Hutchings puts it serenely: “The music replaces the conversation. It’s this silent world of communication. It just hovers.”

Georges Bizet died, aged 36, thinking Carmen was a flop. He was barely in his grave when those who had curled their lips at its premiere three months earlier – too immoral, too long, too shapeless – changed their minds, knocked into sense by grief. History has done the rest. A highlight of the opening weekend at the Edinburgh international festival was a production by the Opéra-Comique, Paris, where the work was first staged in March 1875. French authenticity, linguistic fluency and wit were only part of its success. This was the third Carmen I have seen this year: each anticipated with muted excitement (not another Habanera), each, in their different ways, replacing hesitancy with surging adrenaline and musical brilliance. If only Bizet had known. His story is not as terrible as Van Gogh’s but there are parallels.

Travelling light, with a simple set and few props, this version – conducted by Louis Langrée, directed by Andreas Homoki and designed by Paul Zoller – leaps across the centuries, incorporating tropes from the original Paris staging through to a generic present. Crimson and gold drapes in a false proscenium arch are constant, with a few meta-theatre tricks employed (follow spots, house lights, surprised acknowledgment of an audience) but not overplayed. Costumes evolve, from top hats and bustles to wartime drab to jeans and T-shirts. In the final act, the crowd gathers to watch the arrival of the toreador’s mighty entourage – banderilleros! cuadrilla! – on a TV set. Its antenna aerial suggests the wheel of time stopped a couple of pre-woke decades ago. Carmen raises enough issues around male violence. No need to spell it out. (Other operas in the popular canon present far greater problems for directors to negotiate on that front.)

The French mezzo-soprano Gaëlle Arquez, without resorting to hip flicks or pouts, had sexy grace and vocal flexibility. She also played it cool. Dance? No way. When she tells Don José (the Albanian tenor Saimir Pirgu) that she will indeed dance for him, she merely sets about taking his clothes off: a reverse striptease. Pirgu was ideal casting, bright-toned, powerful, convincing in his sexual humiliation. The French bass-baritone Jean-Fernand Setti, as his rival Escamillo, had an almost comic level of swagger, but if you have to wear a skin-tight suit of lights and pink silk socks you should be allowed as much excess as you fancy.

The well-chosen ensemble cast, French chamber choir Accentus, and children’s choir la Maîtrise Populaire de l’Opéra-Comique were admirable, together and apart. In an updating of the auld alliance, this French company was joined by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, who played with superb pliancy, catching all the sensuous accents of the score, conducted by Langrée with an energy that was at once relaxed, louche and explosive.

At the Usher Hall, every seat was sold for Yuja Wang’s solo recital: eight encores, each more extraordinary than the last, with a short concert attached. That’s only a slight exaggeration. This one-off pianistic meteorite, who holds the stage with magnetic authority and inscrutable charm, played a recital of Chopin’s Four Ballades, as well as eight preludes (and two fugues) by Shostakovich and Samuel Barber’s thorny, ferocious Piano Sonata Op 26 (1949): enough for anyone, you might say. There were internal connections in her choices, not least several percussive fugues. Wang plays her cards smartly, but isn’t one to reveal them. Ranging from Philip Glass to Tchaikovsky to a Chinese piece, she had the audience shouting “I love you” (well, someone did).

At the Queen’s Hall, the Leonore Piano Trio settled for one encore, by Haydn and just as thrilling in its own way. They had played Clara Schumann’s youthful Piano Trio, Op 17 and Helen Grime’s wonderfully inventive and varied The Brook Sings Loud, but the main work, Dvořák’s Piano Trio No 3 in F minor Op 65, showed the aural capacities of this combination of instruments, here excellently played by musicians happy to talk about the work in advance. In the case of the Grime, cellist Gemma Rosefield’s explanation was all that was needed to help the ear follow this atmospheric work, with its fitting nod to Highland bagpipes tradition.

Abstraction meets expressionism head on in Glyndebourne’s classic staging of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, new in 2003 and now in its fourth revival. Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s production (revival director Daniel Dooner) revels in potent stillness. Concentric circles, fixed and stepped, shift from slate grey to intense blue to black, now boat, now omphalos, now camera lens. The fated lovers stand apart, ineluctably joined by the might of Wagner’s score. As she sings her climactic Liebestod, Miina-Liisa Värelä, ardent and always secure as Isolde, dissolves into the great beyond as if swallowed by an omnipotent focal point. Twenty-one years on, the production still compels – not the only way to do this opera but one of the best.

The London Philharmonic Orchestra played with intensity, control and detail. Of the many high points across six hours (including interval), the elegiac cor anglais solo in Act 3, as the dying Tristan waits for Isolde, stood out. Stuart Skelton, in his house debut, is a seasoned Tristan but still a world leader, capable of every shade of feeling in this marathon role. He was not comfortable negotiating the set, which had also, alas, led Karen Cargill to sustain injury. Brangäne was sung instead by Marlene Lichtenberg (and later in the run, Tanja Ariane Baumgartner). Shenyang (Kurwenal) and Franz-Josef Selig (King Marke) seized their affecting moments with skill.

The night belonged to Robin Ticciati, in his 10th year as music director of Glyndebourne. From the prelude to the last bar, each note was beautifully paced, wisely judged. Quietly, and without show, he has evolved from prodigious youth to mature, serious conductor up there with the finest. Next year: Parsifal. How Wagner’s holy grail fest will suit the picnickers is one to ponder.

Star ratings (out of five)
Carmen ★★★★
Yuja Wang ★★★★
Leonore Piano Trio ★★★★
Tristan und Isolde ★★★★

The album expected to make its debut at the UK No 1 spot on Friday is titled The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess – though for its creator, breakthrough pop star Chappell Roan, the past year has been all rise and no fall.

When the Missouri-born 26-year-old released her debut album last September, it marked the beginning of a slow-burning second act in pop. In her late teens, she had been signed as a downbeat songwriter by Atlantic and subsequently dropped. The experience prompted her to cultivate an outre persona that allowed the queer musician born Kayleigh Amstutz to express everything she had once repressed, growing up in a Christian community. “I grew up thinking being gay was bad and a sin,” she told the Guardian last year. “I went to the gay club once and it was so impactful, like magic. It was the opposite of everything I was taught.” She then hustled her way – via stints back home working in a drive-thru doughnut shop – to a deal with Island.

Roan draws from the mega-pop of the 2010s, from Lady Gaga to Taylor Swift – then laces it with sexually frank asides and lavish doses of camp, and performs it with a maximalist, absurd aesthetic indebted to drag, John Waters and Freddie Mercury.

What first resonated with queer gen Z fans on TikTok in particular has since become a more widespread phenomenon – or a Femininomenon, as the album’s riotous opening track would have it. At the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago last weekend – where she performed in a lucha libre outfit, surrounded by female bodybuilders – Roan was upgraded to a prime slot and drew what organisers estimated to be the event’s biggest crowd ever.

Just a year ago, US music industry magazine Billboard reported: “Pop stars aren’t popping like they used to – do labels have a plan?” No one had seriously broken through since Olivia Rodrigo in January 2021. But this summer has been ruled by a fresh pop cohort: Brat mastermind Charli xcx, Espresso singer Sabrina Carpenter and Roan. Where the former two have been building for a decade, Roan is essentially brand new.

Her rise, said NPR music editor Hazel Cills, came in part as a result of Roan’s ability to operate in so many different spaces, from serving her core audience on TikTok, to finding new fans when she supported Rodrigo on tour – they share a producer in Daniel Nigro – to spectacular performances on NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, then festival stages. “She’s been building up her presence in all of these different spheres,” said Cills. In April, Roan released a new, non-album single, Good Luck, Babe!, about her romantic travails with a closeted girl. “It’s her biggest and best song so far, it can do really well on television, at festivals – that catapulted her in a much bigger way,” said Cills.

And where many pop stars who made their name on TikTok struggle to translate their music to the stage, Roan’s panache for performance has set her apart: she has played dressed as the Statue of Liberty – at a festival where she said she had turned down an invitation to perform at a White House Pride event until they truly offered “liberty, justice and freedom for all” – as well as drag queen Divine and Marie Antoinette, and themes her shows to inspire audience costumes.

“For the past 10 years, alternative pop has been very bedroom oriented,” said Cills. “Post-Lorde, Halsey, Clairo, even Rodrigo – they’re all indebted to singer-songwriter traditions and making quiet, minimalist music.” From Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 film Poor Things to British band the Last Dinner Party and Roan, baroque aesthetics are now everywhere. “There’s been a huge shift towards music that should exist outside the bedroom,” said Cills. Young audiences are yearning for the theatricality of early 2010s pop stars that they were too young to experience, something the pandemic made impossible. “Chappell is catering to all these desires and can take that mantle.”

Roan has been explicit about her debt to drag. She introduces herself as “your favourite artist’s favourite artist” – a riff on RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Sasha Colby calling herself “your favourite drag queen’s favourite drag queen” – and has said that becoming a drag version of herself, otherwise an introverted video gamer, has allowed her to be “whatever I want”. Her song Pink Pony Club draws from the aforementioned night she experienced at West Hollywood club the Abbey. “Fans have been visiting just to experience the place that inspired the song,” said club owner Tristan Schukraft, “and the dancefloor goes wild whenever we play her music.” (They also added a Pink Pony cocktail to the menu.)

At Roan’s headline shows, she invites drag artists to support, and has raised money for LGBTQ+ supporting charities such as the New York City-based For the Gworls, Kaleidoscope Trust in the UK, and GLO Center in the Ozarks, Missouri (she also provides a scholarship scheme offering tickets to fans on low incomes). At Heaven nightclub in London in December, drag queen Bones, the self-styled Queen of Soho, was selected after Roan’s team put out a call for performers. “It was one of the best crowds I’ve ever had,” said Bones.

The history of pop is littered with artists exploiting drag without necessarily respecting the culture or benefiting the performers. Roan feels different, said Bones. “I know American queens who know her as the girl who used to come to the club and support the queens. Like Lady Gaga, you know exactly who she is – there’s a certain authenticity from the get-go.”

You can’t move at drag shows now, Bones said, for queens doing Roan’s songs. “Every song on the album is so great and sounds so different, or people are doing the same song in a completely different look – it’s so cool.” At a time when drag artists are being persecuted in the US and the UK, Roan’s success felt particularly striking, said Bones. “Ironically, the protesters are probably driving to whatever stupid protest they’re doing with Good Luck, Babe! on the radio.”

Roan’s success had broken beyond the queer community, she said, because “it’s just that little bit of camp that everybody kind of loves – she has that casual star quality.”

Many pop stars who have experienced viral fame experience burnout – UK singer-producer PinkPantheress, who rose through TikTok, announced last week that she was cancelling all forthcoming dates to focus on her wellbeing – or are unable to translate one hit song into a career. For Cills, Roan’s “serious stage presence and technical talents, her ability to establish herself on social media and in more traditional spaces, signal sustainability”. With six songs on the US Hot 100 this week, in addition to that probable UK No 1, Roan’s rise looks unstoppable.