Michael White, Author at Catholic Herald

Michael White

The Mass Henry heard after dispatching More

April 13, 2017

In the small, dark chapel of a 16th-century country house a priest is saying Mass, using the Latin Rite that in a few years’ time will be a capital offence. His footsteps echo as he purifies the altar. Thurible chains clank. And choirboys sing elaborate polyphony appropriate to a royal occasion – because high above

Music: The playful genius of Britain’s hot property

April 06, 2017

New concert music gets such scant attention nowadays that travellers on the Clapham Omnibus would struggle, I suspect, to name a living British composer. But if they got beyond Birtwistle, they’d probably make it to Thomas Adès, who has been the hot property of his generation since he was a student in the 1990s. Two

The secret place where opera flourishes

April 06, 2017

If there’s a catalogue of all the theatres that exist in London, I don’t know of it. But there are more than you’d expect, in sometimes hidden places. And one I’ve only just discovered is the McIntosh Theatre, Fulham, which you wouldn’t know about unless you’d visited the London Oratory School – because the McIntosh

Music: Playing the trans debate for laughs

March 30, 2017

Music historians spend much time and effort trying to recapture the original experience of artworks that survive for us only as notes on paper. And among their hardest tasks is to explore what state of mind our ancestors would be in, in order to create an opera such as Handel’s Partenope, which has just returned

Music: A revisionist Wagner is greeted with booing

March 23, 2017

If you’re leaving an important job it’s natural to make some kind of statement as you go; and Kasper Holten’s statement on stepping down as director of the Royal Opera is an opulent, in parts magnificent, in parts a complete mess, staging of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg with an interesting if questionable sting in

A school choir that boys are desperate to join

March 16, 2017

‘You can’t get boys to sing these days,” is the complaint of choirmasters the length and breadth of Britain, and they don’t exaggerate. Gareth Malone may dedicate his life to selling the idea that choral singing can be cool and an appropriate activity for alpha males, but getting younger ones to take an interest in

Music: The trouble with reducing Shakespeare

March 16, 2017

According to the statistics, there are more operas based on Shakespeare than on the work of any other single writer – a clear case of composers following the money. And the catalogue has just been increased by one more: an adaptation of The Winter’s Tale, which seemed from its world premiere at ENO to have

Music: Climate change turns Rossini into a racket

March 09, 2017

If John Cage taught us one thing, it’s that music can exist beyond the boundaries of how we think of it. And that idea lives on in an intriguing little festival at Plymouth University – Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival – devoted to the common space where science and music overlap. Effectively a public platform

Music: A new Russian master arrives in London

March 02, 2017

Kings Place still feels like a relative newcomer among London’s many (perhaps more than enough) concert halls, and sometimes struggles to be noticed. But its fine acoustic draws significant events. And last week brought two world-class concerts on successive nights. One was the Dante Quartet playing Janáček and Mendelssohn as though their lives depended on

Music: Strings fight back on the Southbank

February 23, 2017

Textbooks tell you that concertos are a battle between soloist and orchestra; and it’s a mostly unfair match, won by the orchestra through force of numbers. But not in the case of Poulenc’s Organ Concerto, which pitches the mightiest of instruments against a modest string ensemble. In a big space like the Albert Hall, the

Music: A sharp-suited pianist strips Beethoven bare

February 16, 2017

One of my private theories of performance is that as dog owners look like their dogs, so pianists look like their approach to playing. And a case in point is the Russo-German pianist Igor Levit, whose cycle of the complete Beethoven sonatas is the hot ticket of the current Wigmore Hall season. Levit is young,

Music: Battleship-grey hair and all guns blazing

February 09, 2017

When you talk to other pianists about Martha Argerich, a standard response is: we don’t know how she does it. And I was thinking much the same myself last week when she was at the Southbank, playing Prokofiev’s Concerto No 3 with the St Petersburg Philharmonic under Yuri Temirkanov. Argerich is a capricious personality who

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