Michael White, Author at Catholic Herald

Michael White

Music: Dark truths emerging from the men’s room

May 26, 2016

A synopsis of Mark Simpson’s opera Pleasure – premiered in Leeds before the Royal Opera brought it to London last week for a short run – might not recommend it to an average reader of the Catholic Herald. Set inside the toilets of a gay bar, its four characters include a sharp-tongued drag queen, a

Music: Here’s one Boris you won’t have heard of

May 19, 2016

Fame is a lottery. It’s nice to think that genius will out and be acknowledged but that doesn’t always happen, and it hasn’t with the violinist Boris Brovtsyn – someone you’re unlikely to have heard of, though he lives in London and gets honoured in musicians’ circles. I had barely heard of him myself until

‘This music is in our blood’

May 19, 2016

I’ve been learning about Lobo – who, before you ask, isn’t a child’s construction toy but a composer of the Spanish High Renaissance, also high on the agenda this month of the choir of Westminster Cathedral. The choir is about to issue a new CD of Lobo’s choral works on the Hyperion label, with a

Music: A pilgrim path that leads not to God

May 12, 2016

It’s not for nothing that the best-known music in Wagner’s Tannhäuser is the “Pilgrim’s Chorus”, sung by penitents en route to Rome to seek forgiveness from the pope. Ostensibly this is a Christian opera that elaborates a Christian myth – about a wandering knight who vacillates between the steamy sexual pleasures of the Venusberg (a sort of

Music: A haunting choral tribute to the Bard

May 05, 2016

Shakespeare: there was no escaping him the other weekend when the world went into overdrive to celebrate 400 years since his death in 1616. And nowhere were the celebrations more intense than in Stratford-upon-Avon where, among the readings, flags, flowers and processions, there was music. Every Shakespeare play but one, King John, asks somewhere in

Music: Teenage Menuhins do his memory proud

April 28, 2016

Whether Yehudi Menuhin was the greatest violinist of the 20th century is debatable – there are others, not least Jascha Heifetz and David Oistrakh, in the running for that title. But he was certainly the best known, with a name that signalled serious musicianship even among those who weren’t too sure how to pronounce it.

Music: New life in Venice for French Romanticism

April 21, 2016

Ask an Englishman or woman what they understand by French Romanticism and they’ll probably say Brigitte Bardot (younger readers, make that Audrey Tautou). But in music it means Gounod, Berlioz, Lalo, Massenet – along with a host of lesser 19th-century composers who have virtually disappeared from concert schedules, but are being thrown a lifeline in

Music: Painted lady dazzles at Leeds song festival

April 14, 2016

Leeds Lieder is a cute but not entirely accurate name for a festival that takes in every kind of art song, not just German. And it’s flourishing. There was a time when serious song was an endangered species; it was certainly a hard sell. But the packed audiences for this annual Yorkshire fixture tell a

Music: Homeless join the pros for a thrilling Passion

April 07, 2016

Bach’s great Passion settings weren’t intended to be staged: they were liturgical reflections, to be heard in church with a substantial sermon in the middle. But they work like opera. They engage their audience in powerful and moving drama. And the terms of that engagement couldn’t be more physical, immediate and overwhelming than they were

Music: Subverting grand opera with nasty wigs

March 31, 2016

Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov is one of those grand historical operas that usually come encrusted in slow-moving spectacle, trundling along like floats at the Lord Mayor’s Show. But strip away the ceremonial and you’re left with the human story of a fragile ruler haunted by a dark past. And that’s the approach taken by Richard Jones,

Music: My running bet with an atheist firebrand

March 24, 2016

When Peter Maxwell Davies died last week it wasn’t unexpected: he was 81 and had been ill. But Max’s passing (he was universally known as Max) ended a chapter in the history of British avant-gardist music. As he aged, his outlook on the world grew softer, more “Establishment”, not least with his appointment as Master

Music: Fabulous visuals, but Glass is still half-empty

March 17, 2016

It’s hard to think of a composer in all music history who has built so big a career from so small a talent as Philip Glass. And that being the case, it was with guilty pleasure that I watched Glass’s new Akhnaten. It was not because of the score, which exemplifies the worst of his

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