Category: Music

Musical responses to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream are among the themes of this year’s Proms. Mendelssohn’s incidental music and Britten’s opera can be heard later in the season, but before that came a staging, first seen in France last year, by choreographer-director Mourad Merzouki of The Fairy Queen, Purcell’s glorious sequence of songs, dances and masques for an anonymous 1692 adaptation of the play. Paul Agnew conducted Les Arts Florissants and singers from its young artists academy, Le Jardin des Voix. Merzouki’s own Compagnie Käfig supplied the dancers.

The end result was in some ways idiosyncratic yet extraordinarily captivating. Jettisoning the dialogue is nowadays standard practice in performance, though Merzouki also dispensed with Shakespearean narrative, using movement to illustrate strands of imagery in the sung text. So the dancers preened like birds during Come All Ye Songsters of the Sky, and a soloist conveyed the vagaries of desire with angular, yearning gestures in If Love’s a Sweet Passion. Merzouki’s street-dance, hip-hop style suits Purcell’s exuberant worldliness uncommonly well, but his real genius here lies in his ability to integrate movement between singers and dancers so they function as an indivisible theatrical unit. The singers danced, albeit without the spectacular acrobatics of Compagnie Käfig, and the dancers joined in the final chorus They Shall Be As Happy As They’re Fair. It was never less than mesmerising to watch.

Agnew took a few liberties with the score. There were some cuts and re-orderings, with the excision of Let the Fifes and the Clarions the principal casualty. Some of the detail got lost in the vast space of the Albert Hall, but Agnew conducted with wonderful grace, and it was played with great rhythmic dexterity and an admirable sensuousness of tone and texture. Nine singers, all of them excellent, shared the arias and choruses between them. Tenor Ilja Aksionov sounded elegant yet suggestive in One Charming Night, while bass-baritone Benjamin Schilperoort sung Hush, No More with a dark fervour and great beauty. It was baritone Hugo Herman-Wilson, a real stage animal, who dominated the ensemble, though, with acting and singing of great subtlety and wit.

Amelia, the latest album by avant garde pioneer Laurie Anderson, tells the story of the final days of the pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart, “inspired by her pilot diaries, the telegrams she wrote to her husband, and my idea of what a woman flying around the world might think about”, Anderson has said. It started life as a live performance in 2000; now, this recording of an updated piece recently premiered in Europe features the likes of Anohni, Marc Ribot and the Filharmonie Brno. In a review of the album, Uncut magazine wrote: “Anderson’s admiration and affection for this feminist icon is such that you come away from Amelia with a greater respect for those who keep on taking risks” – and it’s not hard to see the garlanded personnel on Amelia as a similar sign of admiration and affection for Anderson, a true one of a kind.

Amelia is Anderson’s latest album for Nonesuch, the label she joined in 2001. She’s collaborated with the Kronos Quartet, won the 2017 Venice film festival award for best VR experience, published a collection of her artwork with Rizzoli. Earlier this year, she won the 2024 Stephen Hawking medal for science communication alongside Christopher Nolan and David Attenborough, and the International Astronomical Union named a minor planet in her honour, the Asteroid 270588 AKA Laurieanderson. In recent years, she’s also overseen an AI chatbot of her late husband Lou Reed – and become “hopelessly addicted” to it – as well as unearthing a 1965 Reed demo tape that illuminated the surprising seeds of his musical flourishing. Margaret Atwood is a fan; so, apparently, are teens on TikTok, who made a viral hit out of Anderson’s 1982 surprise smash hit O Superman earlier this year.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg of an incredible career that – with Anderson now 77 – shows no sign of slowing down. You can ask Anderson about any of this, or anything else besides, when she sits for the Guardian’s reader interview. Post your questions in the comments by 10am BST on 14 August.

Anyone with an ear for Thomas Hardy’s poetry will respond to the sinewy variety of The Past & I – settings, composed or arranged by Arthur Keegan (b 1986), and outstandingly performed by Lotte Betts-Dean (mezzo-soprano), James Girling (guitar) and the Ligeti Quartet. The album opens with Keegan’s Elegies for Emma, six songs that explore the sad complexity of Hardy’s feelings for his dead first wife. Derek Holman’s Midnight on the Great Western, for voice and string quartet, with a gently lurching rhythm and splashes of dissonance, is the first of three “train” poems included here. Faintheart in a Railway Train is a brief, poised song by Muriel Herbert (1897-1984).

In Benjamin Britten’s At the Railway Station, Upway – from the composer’s song cycle Winter Words – a boy plays his violin on a crowded platform. Here, the transfer to guitar (from the piano original) is especially sensuous. Betts-Dean, who has an acute response to the texts, is equally at home in the pastoral wistfulness of Gerald Finzi and Imogen Holst as in the quirky originality of Kerry Andrew (b 1978). Her The Echo Elf Answers was commissioned for this project. The recital ends with Keegan’s String Quartet No 1, Elegies for Tom, an atmospheric response to the opening songs for Emma and a fitting end.

For 55 years, the record label Sain, which is based in the north-west Wales village of Llandwrog, has been behind some of the most important Welsh-language music, promoting genres as diverse as pop, hip-hop, folk and classical.

Now the painstaking process of digitising its sprawling back catalogue is under way to ensure that no gems are lost and, hopefully, to inspire future musicians.

“It’s quite a job,” said Kev Tame, who is running the project. “They are in all kinds of different formats – CD, vinyl, original tape. There is an engineer at the studios digitising them all. There are more than 3,000 albums, singles and EPs – more than 26,000 tracks. It’s really important to protect them for future generations.”

Some have already been added to commercial streaming platforms and all will be put on a digital repository at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.

Sain, Welsh for audio or sound, was co-founded in 1969 by the Welsh protest singer Dafydd Iwan, whose song Yma o Hyd (We’re Still Here) has become an anthem for Wales football fans.

Some early releases were recorded at Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire, south-east Wales. The first single from the label was Dŵr (Water), a protest song from Huw Jones about the flooding of the Welsh-speaking village of Capel Celyn to create a reservoir to provide water for Liverpool in 1965.

Sain moved north in 1974 and artists who have recorded with the label include the indie favourite Catatonia, psych-folk musician Meic Stevens, poet and musician Geraint Jarman, the classical and opera star Bryn Terfel, and harpist and composer Catrin Finch.

Collaborations and new recordings have been inspired by the project, including a deep dive into the Sain archive on a forthcoming new album by the Cardiff-based artist Don Leisure.

The National Library of Wales will provide advice and support to Sain to ensure the archive is preserved digitally in the most accessible formats.

Preservation began in January and will last a year. Tame said they had asked a few contacts for pieces they could not find. “Most artists and contacts are very helpful. There is nothing missing yet.”

It comes at a good time for Welsh language music. Streaming has made music performed in Cymraeg much more accessible. “All over the world, people are open to the language being part of the sound they hear,” Tames said. “It doesn’t have to be in English for them to enjoy it.”

Financial support was provided from the Arfor challenge fund, a joint venture by Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion, Gwynedd and Anglesey councils funded by the Welsh government, which seeks to use entrepreneurship and economic development to support the heartlands of the Welsh language and, thus, maintain the language.

Iwan said: “This project will allow us to ensure that the musical output of the last half century will be available and accessible for future generations.”

Rhodri Llwyd Morgan, the chief executive of the National Library of Wales, said: “The Sain catalogue is one of our nation’s most important music archives, chronicling Welsh cultural expression for over half a century.”

Three tracks from the Sain back catalogue available on Spotify

Tacsi I’r Tywyllwch (Taxi Into Darkness)
A 1977 early release from Geraint Jarman, who was described by the Super Furry Animals singer Gruff Rhys as “serving as a bridge to a new wave of post-punk Welsh-language artists in the 1980s and beyond who had a less self-conscious relationship with their Welsh identity”.

Gormod i’w Golli (Too Much to Lose)
A single by the Welsh rock/metal singer Rhiannon Tomos, who went on to front on to front the Welsh heavy metal band Y Diawled (The Devil).

Dŵr (Water)
Huw Jones describes the feelings of a Welsh man returning to the valley of his childhood, only to find his people had been expelled and the land flooded to make a reser­voir to supply water to England.

What is the role of the arts in times of suffering? If we know that a symphony can’t halt a slaughter, and that life-and-death decisions in war are made on battlefields and in government offices not in concert halls, why do artists continue to respond to the most tumultuous of events around them, and why do we all yearn to experience what they see and say and sing?

On the day Vladimir Putin launched his attempted full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, we knew this was an assault not just on a nation but on its culture. So my husband – Peter Gelb of the Metropolitan Opera in New York – and I worked with the Polish National Opera in Warsaw to bring together Ukrainian musicians still at home and refugees abroad for a new kind of orchestra, one that would fight for the country’s cause all over the world. While I could not take up arms, I could take up my baton as my weapon instead.

I am of Ukrainian-Canadian heritage with close cousins in the country, one of whom is a lieutenant colonel, who has been fighting in Donetsk since 2014. All of the orchestra, and many members of our audiences, have similar stories to tell.

That first summer, the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra played in London, Amsterdam, New York, Washington DC and more, to make a statement of cultural resistance to barbarity. We had hoped that our first tour would also be our last, and the war would be over. But here we are, two years later. The war goes on and continues to exact its devastating toll. In the wider world, the assurances made in 2022 that a staunchly united west would support Ukraine, come what may, appear less certain. On the ground, this month’s atrocity of Putin bombing a children’s cancer hospital in Kyiv devastated us all.

In the face of these vast geopolitical movements, and accompanying humanitarian catastrophe, you can’t help but consider the purpose and the impact of cultural interventions such as ours. But everywhere we visit provides some different form of inspiration. I write these words from Gdańsk in Poland, having just conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with Schiller’s great cry of freedom, the Ode to Joy, sung in Ukrainian. Our venue was the vast hall of a working shipyard, in the presence of the former Polish president Lech Wałęsa. The resonances with the Polish people’s struggle against Soviet oppression were poignantly apparent and he spoke movingly about his ambitions to integrate Ukraine into the EU and Nato, and his regret that failure to do so has partly led to what we see today.

In Paris, the Choir of the French Army sang Schiller’s exhilarating words in Ukrainian, having been taught them by a Ukrainian refugee chorus master. This came just days after France had narrowly avoided electing a Putin-apologist party to lead its parliament. When President Macron refused to rule out sending troops to Ukraine, he caused a diplomatic stir, but here were Nato boots on the cultural ground.

At St Paul’s Cathedral in London today, we will be joined by the Royal Opera House’s Songs for Ukraine chorus, which is made up of Ukrainian refugees and members of London’s Ukrainian diaspora affected by the war.

The fight for democracy is fought not only in the trenches, but through the revolutionary music created in response to political oppression. That is as true of Beethoven’s Ninth – this year celebrating its 200th anniversary – as it is of the opening work of our programme on tour by the acclaimed contemporary Ukrainian composer Victoria Vita Polevá. Her Bucha Lacrimosa was written in memory of the innocent victims massacred at the hands of Russian invaders in the Ukrainian town of Bucha in 2022, after she had travelled through the town while making her escape from the country.

Conductors have also taken a stand. In the 1930s, Toscanini’s heroic anti-fascism saw him refuse to perform in Germany, while continuing to speak up for a more noble vision of culture by conducting the great German repertoire in neighbouring nations. Daniel Barenboim’s East-West Divan Orchestra attempted to bring together young Israeli and Palestinian musicians. Leonard Bernstein was vociferous on a number of causes, notably civil rights. The Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra follows his example set on Christmas Day 1989, just weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when he conducted Beethoven’s Ninth in the city and made one important change to the text. He altered Schiller’s opening word Freude (Joy) to Freiheit (Freedom). In our version, we have changed Freude to Slava, from the phrase that has become familiar around the world as the rallying call of Ukrainian resistance in the face of ruthless Russian aggression, Slava Ukraini (Glory to Ukraine).

When the war ends there will be a rebuilding: of physical infrastructure and military capacity to ward off future threat; but also a need for the less tangible rebuilding of health and education and robust institutions, businesses and public administration. A vibrant and confident culture will be vital to this national renewal. As President Zelenskiy recently said: “In times of war – even more so than in times of peace – we must all remember the significance of culture. And people of culture matter. Everyone who speaks out for Ukraine, who voices what’s on their hearts, who revives what could have been forgotten, gives people strength.”

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My family are avid walkers. Every holiday I can remember there has been an ambitious hike of some kind. Last summer my parents conquered Ben Nevis with my elder brother, who has Down’s syndrome, and we were all particularly proud of his achievement.

No muddy walking boots for me yet this year though. My own challenge has been a mountain of a more horizontal nature: that of the piano keyboard and Busoni’s monumental Piano Concerto. Often referred to as the “Everest” or the “skyscraper” concerto, it is a piece of such hyper-virtuosic pianistic demands that few play it, or are mad enough it take it on.

A five-movement work 70 minutes in length, this monster by the Italian composer – who died 100 years ago this month – is an extraordinary musical journey for solo piano with massive orchestration and a male-voice choir, silent until the final movement. The involvement of the chorus – which Busoni stipulates should be invisible – elevates the work’s legendary status in the repertoire even further.

More than 120 musicians must come together to perform the work, making it a piece which demands venues that fit its proportions. Earlier this year, I travelled to Iceland to perform it in Reykjavik’s stunning Harpa concert hall, where a volcano was erupting nearby in the dramatic arctic winds of dark winter, and a few weeks later to Berlin, where Busoni himself debuted the work, for my own debut at the Berlin Philharmonie with Robin Ticciati on the podium – who himself has family links to Busoni. And next week I’m bringing it to the BBC Proms – with the London Philharmonic and Edward Gardner. It will be 36 years to the day since it was last performed at this festival in the Royal Albert Hall, and I can’t think of a better space to play it in – especially since Sir Henry Wood himself was such a personal champion of the composer.

Busoni thought of the work as his “Italian symphony” with quotations from Neapolitan songs, Italian dance forms and vivid directions in his native tongue. But the influences are much more complex than this: you can detect the shadows of Brahms, Liszt, Bach and Chopin among others, perhaps even Wagner, intentionally or inadvertently. Busoni’s inspirations for the concerto also include classical architecture, nature and quasi-Egyptian iconography, and he uses for the choir’s text a German translation of a Danish play about Aladdin in praise of Allah. Such are the enormous contradictions and fascinatingly diverse strands of this unique piece of music. And all this is very much a reflection of the man himself.

Busoni was a trailblazer pianist and is one of my heroes. Emerging from the long shadow of Liszt, he was the ultimate cosmopolitan – an Italian who lived in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Russia, Finland and the US. A visionary, this straddler of the 19th and 20th centuries (born in 1866, he died in 1924) recomposed Bach for the modern piano, wrote an incredibly diverse body of music and speculated broadly about music and its future, predicting electronic music and microtonality. He said of the Piano Concerto: “I endeavoured … to gather together the results of my first period of manhood, and it represents the actual conclusion of it.”

I’ve played dozens of concerti, but there’s something different about this one. It’s perhaps best to think of it as a kind of operatic-symphony, where the piano is the central character in the drama. It is structured on a truly large scale. Themes and rhythmic motifs connect the five movements, the final one brings the most important strands together. The role of the pianist is frequently heroic, as we might expect, but it is multi-faceted: sometimes the orchestra has the principal themes; the piano takes the spotlight and then moves out of it; it blazes, comments, transitions, dreams; sometimes supporting the orchestra by laying down delicate blankets of notes or thick carpets of sound. At the piano you have to be acutely aware of coordination with the conductor and the orchestra, despite the difficulties of the piano part. It is like chamber music on a gargantuan, truly maximalist scale. Sometimes you are going full throttle at the keyboard but are fully absorbed in the orchestral sound. It can be frustrating (or a relief!) but it’s all part of the show.

Some passages border on physical impossibility. Take this example. A set of thick chords requiring various different hand positions, travelling irregularly in different directions in each hand, presto e forte possible (as fast and as loud as possible, in an impetuous tempo thrown at you by the orchestra). To be executed in the 60th minute!

Busoni drew his own image of the piece that visualises its journey. The first, third and fifth movements are represented by architecture: Greco-Roman, Egyptian and Babylonian. The more overtly Italianate second and fourth movements, by nature. For the first movement we see a magnificent temple with the sun rising behind it, an image encapsulated in the bold C-major entry of the piano. A large statue looms mysteriously in the darkness within. The second movement is represented by a fantastical bird rising out of flowers – this image is instantly recognisable in the wash of colour and the fluttering, rising figures that open the movement.

The substantial third movement is processional, ceremonial and quasi-religious. A flaming torch invites us into a tomb or temple, a sphinx keeps guard outside. The climax of the central section is imposing and terrifying, as if – as in a scene from Indiana Jones – an earthquake threatens to crumble and collapse the temple around you.

The fourth movement is my favourite. Cypress trees are shadowed by an erupting volcano. It is a tarantella – an Italian folk dance where the protagonist is bitten by a spider and dances to the death. If normally it is a dance to the death, here it is a dance to the end of the world, or rather to a Bacchanalian end of civilisation. The music becomes increasingly feverish, more and more bombastic. The orgiastic excesses border on the ridiculous, like an immense parody, and there are moments that are simply funny. It culminates with the cadenza to end all cadenzas – an erupting volcano – with orchestral interjections daring the pianist into even higher-stake feats of virtuosity (the passage shown above) and a final unexpected, heroic blast of C major, harking back to the very first piano entry.

Dissolving into darkness, the fifth movement begins with a transitional passage that slowly invites us into a cave or tomb, where flickering semiquavers conjure images of torchlight on the walls. Then, the sublime. The stark contrast that the entrance of the choir presents after the hedonism of the tarantella is what makes it so affecting and memorable. The final movement is a tomb with a wreath on the door. A winged figure outside represents mysticism in nature. The images now overlap – the volcano still looms overhead. The tomb is sealed.

Busoni writes in the score at the beginning of the fifth movement a quote from Oehlenschläger’s Aladdin play: “Low and soft the pillars of rock begin to sound.” At this moment in the play, Aladdin returns the lamp to the cave, and the cave around him begins to sing. The choir praise Allah and his works; the enduring achievements of ancient civilisations. As the pianist in this moment you feel an enormous sense of relief. The male voices become the protagonist and the piano recedes into the orchestra; most of your work is done. The very walls of the room you are in begin to reverberate with music.

Given the chaos of our times, this mammoth work speaks to us in myriad ways and offers something for everyone within its great dramatic landscape: heroism, despair, confusion, extreme joy and ultimately – renewal. And for the best possible view of this musical Everest – well, you just have to experience it for yourself.

For months, one question has been plaguing pop fans: why is Spotify playing me the same songs over and over again?

Every other week, a post goes viral on X asking why Chappell Roan’s Good Luck, Babe!, or Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso, or Billie Eilish’s Birds of a Feather, are constantly being put into a user’s autoplay queue by the streaming service’s algorithm, regardless of what they were listening to previously. One user got Carpenter’s recent hit Please Please Please after the extremely different vibe of Get It Sexy by St Louis rapper Sexyy Red; another complained to NME that Espresso was constantly playing after the “sad music and songwriter types” she often listens to.

This saga has caused online pop music fans, already a relatively paranoid bunch, to go full conspiracy theorist. Taylor Swift’s fans allege that Eilish has turned on the “mass autoplay feature”. (Such a feature doesn’t exist.) Last month, a post went viral alleging that Roan is an “industry plant”, a meaningless term used to discredit artists who achieve a rapid rise to fame. (If the industry could just “plant” stars, there would be a lot more of them.) Others describe the prevalence of artists in autoplay as “payola”, reviving the term for when a record label pays a radio station to play its music – and this mindset is easier to understand.

Pop has always presented listeners with the illusion of choice – no matter whether you listen to Roan, Eilish or Carpenter, your $0.003 lines the coffers of Universal Music Group – but it’s certainly got worse in recent years, as artists and their teams have worked out new ways of gaming charts and algorithms. Taylor Swift has maintained a chokehold on the charts not just because of widespread listenership of her album The Tortured Poets Department, but because she has savvily released geolocked alternate versions of the record when a competitor, such as Charli xcx, comes within spitting distance of the No 1 spot.

There is also a fundamental disconnect between what feels popular and what is statistically popular, which has contributed to this weird tension among pop fans. Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter attracted outsized media attention on its release earlier this year, but it only ranks at No 16 on the UK’s Official Charts Company’s list of highest-selling albums of 2024 thus far, bested by Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine, Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft, and five Swift albums.

And then, of course, there’s “discovery mode”, a controversial new Spotify feature that allows artists to forgo a portion of their royalties in order to receive a boost in algorithm-led zones of the app such as the autoplay queue, radio, and “smart shuffle,” a feature that adds suggested songs into users’ playlists. It’s not strictly payola, but certainly feels to users like its 21st-century equivalent.

Discovery mode became widely available in 2023, but it’s not yet known how widely it’s used, or what kind of success artists are seeing from it. Spotify says “on average, artists see +50% in saves, +44% in user playlist adds, and +37% in follows during the first month,” but these metrics are specifically tied to the Spotify ecosystem – making it hard to say whether musicians are actually making much money from these new “discoveries” of their music.

So there is good reason for fans to be concerned about whether their mechanisms for listening to music are being tampered with. The industry, too, hasn’t educated listeners about the possibility they may be subject to new-school payola. Speaking to label reps, publicists and artists – all of whom were wary of going on the record – I know that many in the industry feel discovery mode sets a dangerous precedent when it comes to tech’s incursions on music. I’ve also heard people questioning whether the tool is really worth it, given that there is a natural limit on how many songs can be boosted into a listener’s feed.

But many artists and most labels are fearful of reprisal from Spotify in the form of reduced editorial or algorithmic support, making public critique risky. There’s an element of slightly paranoid thinking here, too; nobody really knows how active Spotify is in coercing its own algorithm, meaning the spectre of being “blacklisted” looms large even though there’s no evidence that angering Spotify can actually end in such a result.

Spotify also wouldn’t speak to me on the record; this lack of information from all sides makes it hard for anyone to consume music on the service in any kind of informed way. A representative for a major label told me they don’t think their label actually uses discovery, despite speculation that they do, a fittingly oblique response for such a mystifying topic. The promise of the internet was that it would allow us to cut out middlemen and buy music direct from the artist, but the reality is that quite the opposite has happened – we’re faced with an even more infernally complex system. Spotify users remain in limbo, left to guess how much of their feed is what essentially amounts to undisclosed advertising – and how much, at the other extreme, is totally randomised.

Outside the Proms, British orchestras from beyond the M25 get far too few opportunities to showcase their achievements in the capital’s concert halls. It’s not surprising, then, that those bands often have points to prove when they do make their annual visits to the Albert Hall, and the three that have appeared there during the first week of this summer’s Proms have all shown what London is missing the other 10 months of the year.

After the fine concerts from the Hallé and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the third to acquit itself so well was the BBC Scottish Symphony, under its chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. The range and originality of the concerts that Wigglesworth has come up with during his first two seasons in Glasgow have quite often put the BBCSSO’s London sibling to shame, and while this programme of Brahms, Schoenberg and Mahler was very much a mainstream affair, the way in which it was put together and the musical connections it suggested were never commonplace.

Wigglesworth began with Brahms, a slow-burn performance of the Third Symphony that almost seemed too relaxed in its opening movement, and reserved its dramatic intensity for the finale. The movement’s quiet, perfectly tuned coda was marked out by the beauty of the wind playing, with the horns particularly outstanding as they had been throughout the symphony.

Whether or not Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht is really suited to a space like the RAH, even in its string-orchestra version (when it seems a very different work from the string-sextet original), is debatable. Those listening to the concert on Radio 3 may have got a better sense of the careful way in which Wigglesworth was managing and terracing the string textures than we sometimes did in the hall, but the quality of that string playing was never in doubt. There were moments in Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder too when the size of the space robbed the searing music of some of its impact, and perhaps blurred some of the finer-grained detail of mezzo Alice Coote’s singing. But her projection of the meaning of each word, combined with Wigglesworth’s meticulous shaping of every orchestral phrase, always provided plenty of compensation.

Ahead of this Sunday’s first round of France’s high-stakes parliamentary election, the slogan La jeunesse emmerde le Front national has been making the rounds on social networks. Young people are uploading clips of themselves singing it on TikTok, leftist MEP Manon Aubry has led chants of it at rallies, and actor Marion Cotillard has worn a badge with the slogan. Where does it come from?

François Guillemot: The line is from the song Porcherie that I recorded with my punk band, Bérurier Noir, in 1985. The year before the far-right Front National party, then fronted by the father of National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie, had obtained its first strong result at the European parliamentary elections, gaining almost 11% of the vote. Porcherie starts with a sample of Le Pen addressing a rally in Belgium, predicting there would be a huge nationalist movement in that country too. We cut out the word “Belgium” and replaced it with “oink oink oink”.

What does La jeunesse emmerde le Front national mean?

I’ve been struggling to think of the right translation. Emmerder can mean “to piss off” or “to annoy”, so one translation would be “the kids annoy the Front National”. But perhaps a more accurate rendering of emmerder in the context of the song would be “to tell someone to fuck off”, so “As far as the kids are concerned, the Front National can fuck right off”.

How did that line from the song become a political slogan?

When we wrote it, the song was only partially meant to be about the rise of the far right. It was more of a lament directed at the situation in the world as a whole, which to us then looked like porcherie (“pigsty”) full of violence, wars and oppressions.

It really developed into a political statement at our concerts. At the time, there was a strong far-right skinhead movement, some of whom would turn up at our gigs. In its early phase, punk was politically ambivalent. When I became a punk as a 14-year-old, I wore shirts imprinted with pictures of Karl Marx, but also with swastikas and the Prussian iron cross: we were experimenting with anything that could shock the establishment and rejected all politics.

But in the early 80s there came a turning point, where we realised we must change our attitude and be more clear and careful. In Bérurier noir we admired the British punk band Crisis and their song “White Youth”, which contained the line “We are black, we are white, together we are dynamite”.

So we translated that line into French and added it to Porcherie when we played it live: Nous sommes blancs, nous sommes noirs, nous sommes jaunes, et ensemble, nous sommes de la dynamite. Followed by La jeunesse emmerde le Front national! It was a positive slogan: we want to say that youth, unity and solidarity were important.

I think the first time we played the song with those words was at a really big concert in Toulouse in 1985, and it instantly got really good feedback from the crowd. From then on, the entire audience at our concerts would shout that line at the end of the song. People started chanting it at protest rallies, holding up their middle finger to show their rejection of the Front National.

Why has the slogan resurfaced now?

In 2002, between the first and the second round of the presidential elections, there were huge protests against the Front National, and when I joined them I heard some young people chant La jeunesse emmerde le Front national. But that was before social media, and few people noticed.

This time it’s different, because I see a lot of young people – especially young women – use the song or the slogan on social media to say they don’t want a far-right party in government managing France. Its virality has become the point: it is a kind of virus to counter the virus of National Rally president Jordan Bardella, who is very present on social networks and effective at using them. But to be honest, the song’s revival doesn’t make me happy.

Why?

Because it comes at a really dangerous point in French history. It feels like we are at the turning point, and I don’t want people like Bardella and Le Pen take power because they will be dangerous.

It was easy to chant against Jean-Marie Le Pen because he was almost a caricature of a far-right politician: he was very bourgeois, very racist and that made it easy to stand up to him. His daughter, by contrast, changed her looks and has been very strategic in detoxifying the party’s image, for example by condemning antisemitism.

She and Bardella have managed to attract voters who are not ideologically formatted like the skinheads of the 1980s. These voters are ras-le-bol, fed up with the old way of doing things. They want to topple the system. I see it in a place like Lyon, where I now teach history at the university: inside the city, most people vote left or centre, but on the outskirts it’s mostly the National Rally.

I think Macron has to shoulder most of the blame. He had everything in his hands to create real change, but his arrogant management of the state managed to turn a lot of people against him. And with his unpopular pension reforms and the new immigration law he opened the door for the National Rally, because he normalised their ideas. The media, who have helped de-demonise the National Rally and played up Bardella as a pop star, have not helped.

At the presidential run-off in 2022, 49% of 25-34 year olds voted opted for Le Pen, compared to just over 41% of the general population and 29% of voters over 70. Can the far right still fuck off, as far as the kids are concerned?

There is a media narrative which says “Oh, the youth now vote for Le Pen”. I don’t think that is really true. The percentage of young people who vote for the National Rally has gone up, for sure. But if you add up all the votes from parties on the left of the political spectrum, then that is what most of young voters support: at the European elections, 51% of 18-24-year-olds voted for left parties. What I see among my daughter’s generation is a real rejection of racism and great respect between all cultures.

I love France. I’m a punk, but I am also a French boy. When we won the World Cup in ’98, I was happy and I waved the French flag, because it was the team of diversity. The French are multicultural right now.

Since their closure in 2020 due to the coronavirus, American opera houses have been struggling to regain their financial footing—and their audiences. Most have reduced the number of performances they give and retreated to a repertoire of safe favorites. However, the Metropolitan Opera has taken a different tact by embracing untried contemporary works it hopes will appeal to younger, more diverse audiences. Recently released attendance data suggests that this Met initiative might not be working.

Bolstered by significant governmental support, European companies mostly appear to have returned to a pre-pandemic status quo. A recent visit to Germany found both the Hamburg and Berlin Staatsopers fearlessly mounting challenging operas of questionable popular appeal, but both Olivier Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise and Modest Mussorgsky’s Chowanschtschina (better known in the U.S. as Khovanshchina) proved to be singular artistic and reasonably popular successes.

Written nearly one hundred years apart, both operas deal with rigorous religious beliefs and both require enormous resources from the theaters presenting them. Messiaen, one of France’s leading 20th-century composers, had never written an opera when in the early 1970s, Rolf Liebermann, then head of the Paris Opéra, commissioned him to create Saint François, his first and only opera and one he struggled for more than a decade to complete. A devout Catholic, he toyed with setting Christ’s Passion which he eventually found too daunting and settled instead on the life and death of Francis of Assisi, the early 13th-century saint.

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Messiaen intently studied Francis’s life, including visits to Assisi, and though the vows of ascetic Franciscans, the religious order founded by the saint, focused on poverty, chastity and obedience, the composer-librettist created a four-hour opera that demanded huge resources. The program for Hamburg’s production listed an orchestra of 110 and a chorus of 125, plus nine vocal soloists. Saint François, long a favorite of Hamburg’s music director Kent Nagano, proved too large for the relatively modest Staatsoper, so it was presented in a semi-staged production at the large concert hall of Elbphilharmonie, an awe-inspiring structure constructed on top of an old warehouse on Hamburg’s waterfront that opened after many delays and cost overruns in 2017.

For Saint François, director Georges Delnon and his designer Thomas Jürgens thoroughly utilized the Elbphilharmonie’s notable surround-seating design with the chorus filling the audience seats behind the orchestra platform with Jacques Imbrailo, the South African baritone portraying the title character, inhabiting a high round platform soaring over the orchestra. Other performers, including Anna Prohaska as The Angel who appears to Francis, often darted about the auditorium while on a cylinder suspended over the proceedings a video which also contained a German translation of the French text played throughout the entire work.

While Delnon’s economical direction drew intensely focused performances from the soloists, his video which depicted actors aimlessly wandering around contemporary Hamburg sites grew so monotonous and unilluminating that I began to ignore it. While one appreciated Delnon’s urge to provide some visual stimulation during the opera’s eight lengthy tableaux, his inexpensive, unimaginative solution ultimately proved a distraction.

Most of Messians’s libretto is aggressively anti-dramatic. The meditative opera begins after Francis’s conversion and contains little action beyond the riveting scene that concludes the first act in which Francis cures a leper. Anthony Gregory’s searing portrayal of the tortured man contrasted markedly with Imbrailo’s unflappable serenity.

Replacing the originally announced Johannes Martin Krãnzle late in the day, the singer always sang from his iPad on a music stand in front of him. His tireless, soft-grained lyrical baritone and sensitively clear French diction fell pleasingly on the ears throughout the long evening. Among the six brothers who interact with Francis, baritone Kartal Karagedik as Frère Lêon stood out for his hearty earnestness and attractively mellow baritone. Prohaska started weakly with sometimes unsteady long-breathed pronouncements delivered from all over the auditorium. She was at her best in the later scenes especially in the second act when the disguised Angel arrived to quiz the monastery’s brothers.

Messiaen’s vocal writing consists of lyrical recitative that mostly avoids extremes of range and dynamics. The score’s most effective pages feature intensely dramatic and fantastically inventive writing for the huge orchestra and chorus. The composer consistently surprises with the most unusual colors ranging from softly soothing evocations of bird songs to thunderous soul-shaking choral outbursts.

The static plot as well as the score’s length and demands have limited the opera’s opportunities since its 1983 Paris premiere. Pamela Rosenberg bravely scheduled the work’s only U.S. performances in 2002 during the first year of her ambitiously brief tenure at the San Francisco Opera. In his early years at the Met, Peter Gelb talked about mounting the work with Eric Owens in the title role, but financial concerns clearly doomed that project which hasn’t been again mentioned in years.

But the Hamburg Staatsoper and its resident Philharmonisches Staatsorchester pulled off an awesomely impressive local premiere of just three performances, clearly as a nod to Nagano who will be stepping down from his Hamburg duties at the end of next season. His cooly unflappable presence on the podium drew virtuosic playing from his fiercely committed orchestra even when Messiaen’s imagination waned during the endless “Sermon to the Birds” which closes the second act. Not everyone who initially filled the house remained at the end more than five hours later, but those who did gave Nagano a hero’s loud and long ovation.

An equally intent and enthusiastic audience several days later in Berlin cheered Claus Guth’s new puzzling yet gripping post-modern staging of Mussorgsky’s unfinished work about the complex religious and political emergency that embroiled late 17th-century Russia. While most of Guth’s staging cleanly and clearly presented the internecine conflicts between factions, he introduced intrusive contemporary figures clad in Pepto-Bismol pink—perhaps made of fabric left over from Carrie Cracknell’s recent Met Carmen?

Throughout the performance, one of those typed helpful historical notes projected onto a screen until her “project” was aborted for unexplained reasons. At times the pink interlopers seamlessly rearranged details of the historical recreation while shooting live video of the action, images that were projected to the audience on the vast nearly empty black set. The separation between the two time-frames collided when Ivan Khovansky during his slaughter of dancing dervishes also slayed one of the pink crew.

The opera’s action was framed by a hyper-real setting of a contemporary president or premier’s official office containing a large statue of Peter the Great being fussed about by a busy lackey. This tableau returns briefly at the very end presumably to suggest that things have not changed all that much: a simplistic comment that robbed the pathos from the haunting scene of the Old Believers’s self-immolation. Guth did everyone a disservice by undercutting the moving intensity he’d so skillfully conjured all evening.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r5BwdT0cY8[/embed]

Using Dmitri Shostakovich’s orchestration but including Igor Stravinsky’s version of the final scene, Guth and conductor Simone Young thrust their audience headlong into the violent clashes that obsess the characters and if every twist wasn’t immediately clear, helpful explanations filled the Staatsoper’s typically thorough and illuminating program.

Young, who rarely gets much love at the Met, drew colorful and soulful playing from her accomplished orchestra and the chorus, which dominates this opera much as it does Mussorgsky’s other masterpiece Boris Godunov, covered itself in glory singing with fearsome dynamic variety and acting with wrenching pathos (often projected in stage-filling close-ups reminiscent of films by Sergei Eisenstein).

Basses Mika Kares and Taras Shtonda dominated the performance as ferocious opponents Iwan Chowanski and Dossifei. A dynamic Kares embraced Iwan’s flamboyant excesses with a booming voice and a larger-than-life ebullience. Replacing the originally announced Ferrucio Furlanetto, Shtonda took a more restrained approach that suited the powerful religious leader, and he too thundered over the orchestra and chorus with potent steadiness. George Gadnidze, who regularly appears at the Met in Italian roles like Rigoletto and Scarpia, brusquely seized his opportunity to shine in Schklowity’s brutal monologue.

As spoiled Andrei Chowanski, Najmiddin Mavlyanov made his petulant whining so vivid that it was a shock when he briefly sang very beautifully as his privileged life began to crumble. Staatsoper veteran Stephen Rügamer made Golizyn’s dramatic fall from grace palpable, though his still-strong tenor has clearly seen better days. Anna Samuil, another Staatsoper stalwart, raged effectively as the fanatical Susanna though a more dramatic soprano might have been more effective. Evelin Novak’s brightly soaring high notes made much of Emma’s brief physical struggle with Andrei.

But the revelation of Chowanschtschina was the riveting Marfa of smoldering Russian mezzo Marina Prudenskaya, a versatile star throughout Europe but one who remains virtually unknown in the U.S. Her darkly smoky voice rises easily from deep contralto richness to securely shining high notes. She embodied the fascinatingly complicated extremes of Marfa who can predict the future for Golizyn but cannot see that Andrei, with whom she is helplessly in love, is a selfish scoundrel. Tall and striking, she was compulsively watchable, and her near-ideal Marfa made one eager to hear her in her acclaimed Verdi and Wagner roles.

Saint François d’Assise and Chowanschtschina displayed the kind of expensive epic opera that we rarely experience these days in the U.S. Will that ever change? Unfortunately, current indicators aren’t very encouraging.