Michael White, Author at Catholic Herald

Michael White

Music: Assault and battery by grand pianos

August 18, 2016

Pianos, like dogs, are best kept apart: the sound of more than one together in a small space can be torture. And it was in a relatively small space at Clare Hall, Cambridge that I heard a two-piano recital to mark the college’s 50th year of existence. Marie-Noëlle Kendall and Patrick Hemmerlé were both strong,

Music: Powerful pianists and macho mosquitos

August 11, 2016

If you’re a grand Anglo-Italian family who own a castle on a hill in Tuscany, the thing to do is run a summer music festival. Ideally like the one on an estate, La Foce, where the writer Iris Origo chronicled her wartime experiences in the 1940s, and where the Incontri in Terra di Siena now

Music: A life-changing triumph in Yorkshire

August 04, 2016

When TS Eliot drew together his sequence of reflections on humanity and time under the title Four Quartets, it was with reason. Structurally and sonically the poems are indebted to the way that chamber music works. And in their questing if impenetrable spirit they specifically owe something to the late quartets of Beethoven – which is

Music: Mozart opera comes dripping with slime

July 28, 2016

One of the less canonic Mozart operas, Idomeneo is a piece that stage directors tend to feel they have a licence to maul. And it was mauled with a vengeance last time around at Covent Garden by Martin Kusej, who pulled that tired old German Regietheater trick of turning everything into a story of totalitarian

Music: What it’s like to listen to a Turner painting

July 21, 2016

Dr Johnson’s dictionary has no entry for synaesthesia: I don’t suppose it figured much in 18th-century consciousness, and if it had, he wouldn’t have believed in it. But the enchanting Georgian town of Lichfield, the doctor’s birthplace and home to his gouty-looking statue in the main square, took the idea seriously during its annual festival

Music: Venezuelan fire in a sleepy spa town

July 14, 2016

For Anglophones, ‘‘Kissinger” means US foreign policy during the Nixon era. But for German-speakers it betokens an old-fashioned spa town in Bavaria, Bad Kissingen, where for a month through June/July you find Kissinger Sommer: one of Europe’s grander music festivals. Its audience is conservative and elderly, in town for rest cures and to take the

Music: Genius Britten left me in Fluddes of tears

July 07, 2016

Benjamin Britten made a habit of writing music-theatre pieces to be done in church, with varying degrees of theatricity, ranging from the oratorio-like St Nicolas to the operatic Burning Fiery Furnace. And they’re all great pieces. Very great, I’d argue, in the case in Noye’s Fludde which, although written for amateurs and children, is a work

Music: Making Messiaen sing in the dead of night

June 30, 2016

Musicians aren’t expected to be early risers. So it was bizarre that last week at the Aldeburgh Festival, the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard was at his keyboard by 4.30 am – with an audience and the BBC in wrapt attendance. And what’s more, he was still there, performing, after midnight. It was the beginning of a day

Music: Soprano’s high-wire act hits all the top notes

June 23, 2016

The best arts festivals deliver more than fun. They challenge, stimulate and provoke, with tailor-made events you wouldn’t/couldn’t find elsewhere. The Aldeburgh Festival has an outstanding record for that sort of thing, and opened last week with a fine example: Britten’s Les Illuminations packaged as a theatre-piece with acrobats, trapeze artists and aerial gymnasts sweeping

Music: An evening in a bin liner with Tchaikovsky

June 16, 2016

You know it’s summer when the country house opera season starts – though when Garsington opened last week with a new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, the weather was so bleakly Russian you could see your own breath. How the glamour of a black-tie picnic fades when everybody’s wrapped in blankets, tablecloths and bin liners

Music: A little ukulele goes a long way in Dresden

June 09, 2016

I love Dresden. It’s a city with a special history (a treasure-house of European culture, brutally destroyed in 1945 but now spectacularly resurrected), a hotel that ranks among my favourites (Palais Taschenberg, built as a royal love nest, bombed to rubble, but restored now to its former Baroque glory), and a music festival that few

Music: The road to Damascus passes through Kent

June 02, 2016

The charms of Folkestone are equivocal. But one small corner of the town is worth the 50-minute train from St Pancras: tranquil, picturesque, with sea views and an ancient church part-dedicated to St Eanswythe (new to me, but she apparently created the first English convent). The Sacconi Quartet run a festival here. It’s engagingly well programmed

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