Michael White, Author at Catholic Herald

Michael White

Music: Ravishing Rice leaves the audience crushed

February 02, 2017

The French composer Francis Poulenc offered two contrasting faces to his audience: on the one hand a committed Catholic, on the other a robustly hedonistic socialite. His music comes with a similar ambivalence. The last scene of his opera Dialogues des Carmélites – in which a whole convent of nuns march, singing, to the guillotine

Music: Operatic love story is almost like an exorcism

January 26, 2017

It often feels as though the age of deathless opera destined to be standard repertoire ended with the death of Britten 40 years ago. But then, very occasionally, you find something like George Benjamin’s Written on Skin and know that all is not lost. Covent Garden’s new revival was my third encounter with this piece,

Music: The Daniel Craig of cellists holds the stage

January 19, 2017

The Kings Place concert venue is acoustically the best new small-scale hall in London; and the first sounds ever heard there, when it opened back in 2008, came from a solo cello playing Bach as part of an acoustic test. According to the venue’s founder, Peter Millican, that cello test was proof he’d got things

Music: A Messiah that nearly had me dancing

January 12, 2017

Like dogs, Messiahs are for life, not just for Christmas. But they come into their own around December 25. And easily the best I heard over the holidays was given by Polyphony as part of the St John’s, Smith Square season of all things choral. On the circuit now for 30 years, Polyphony ranks in

Music: A legendary diva’s disappointing farewell

January 05, 2017

When a much-loved singer knows her time is up and says farewell to a stage where she’s triumphed over the years, you want it to be an occasion. And so it should have been with the expensive new production of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier that marked Renée Fleming’s farewell to Covent Garden. If nothing else, the

Music: The baby who turns a continent upside down

December 22, 2016

Whether artists and musicians regard the birth of Christ in Bethlehem as history or poetry, it’s always been a potent narrative for them to adapt to the agenda of their times. And an example of our own time is John Adams’s dramatic oratorio El Niño, which was done in concert at the Barbican the other

Music: The Boris Johnson of the harpsichord

December 15, 2016

Harpsichordists rarely make it into headlines: it’s a quiet profession. But a notable exception is Mahan Esfahani, the provocative, outspoken master-maverick of his world (think Boris Johnson crossed with Stephen Fry) whose recent claims to fame include a fracas at a concert in Cologne, where he played modern music to a hostile audience and then

Music: Why great singers can’t keep a secret

December 08, 2016

In the world of song recitals there’s a national hierarchy: this favours Franco-German repertoire and leaves the English some way down the pecking order, jostling for position with the Russians and the Spanish. But it isn’t fair. Between them, Britten, Butterworth, Vaughan Williams and their like produced a treasury of song that stands comparison with

Music: The anti-Nazi opera for our times

December 02, 2016

If you were looking for an opera with a message for the times we live in, a good place to start would be Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Simplicius Simplicissimus, which has had a belated UK premiere at Sadler’s Wells. Because Simplicius (yes, it’s a mouthful of a title) is a piece about what happens when great

Music: Mozart makes the sun shine on a wet Bath

November 24, 2016

Georgian architecture and Jane Austen have, between them, fostered an idea of Bath as a historic centre of civility, which isn’t altogether true. During its heyday, circa 1800, it was England’s own Las Vegas: raunchy, racy, fast. That said, it seems pretty civilised nowadays – especially in November when the annual Bath Mozartfest fills its

Music: A great modernist hymn to the Trinity

November 17, 2016

Running a music festival in London is a hard task, because London is effectively a year-round festival with so much going on that no one notices your efforts. And when the Hampstead Arts Festival was set up – from the ashes of assorted previous, precariously lived existences – its long-term future wasn’t hopeful. But its

Music: Even the best trumpet recital can be an ordeal

November 10, 2016

The Two Moors Festival is a phenomenon that doesn’t answer to the laws of reason. Its events take place in hard-to-get-to towns and villages across a sweeping stretch of south-west England with more sheep than people and long drives, however scenic, from one venue to the next. It shouldn’t work. But happily it does, and

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