Michael White, Author at Catholic Herald

Michael White

Music: Electronic sounds inspired by slime

March 10, 2016

In the old days it was cities such as Berlin, Vienna and Salzburg that commanded progress in the music business. These days they have curious rivals. If it’s off-the wall experiments you’re after, then you go down to Plymouth in the early spring – where there’s a festival devoted to how music and technology combine,

Music: Figaro gets a divorce, Cherubino grows fat

March 03, 2016

As the central character in not just one but two great operas, Figaro romps through Rossini’s Barber of Seville (where he gets a bride for Count Almaviva) and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro (where he gets a bride for himself) with adventures that are carved in the hearts of theatregoers. But what happens next in the

Music: Romanticism written with a clenched fist

February 25, 2016

Whatever their achievements, the most prominent composers of our time don’t feature prominently in the public mind; so it may well be that you’ve never heard of Louis Andriessen, the veteran of the Dutch musical avant-garde who was the subject of the BBC’s Barbican showing of Total Immersion: The Work of Louis Andriessen. But that’s

Music: A Tudor revival at Hampton Court

February 18, 2016

Hampton Court was built by a cardinal, surrendered to a king, and played host to some of the determining dramas of the English Reformation – from which point cardinals no longer graced its Chapel Royal. The last known Catholic liturgy there took place during the reign of Bloody Mary in the 1550s. So it was

Music: Don’t give up the day job, Sir Simon

February 11, 2016

It’s always good to see a promising young hopeful get his first break; and though not so young (but definitely hopeful), last week’s spotlit debutant was Simon Rattle at the Wigmore Hall, waving his arms but not conducting. He was playing the piano – to accompany his mezzo-soprano wife, in a show called Celebrating Magdalena

Music: ‘If it wasn’t vulgar it wouldn’t be Percy’

February 04, 2016

Once a year, somewhere in the UK, the Association of British Orchestras holds a great meeting for movers and shakers in our national musical life. Half the delegates come wreathed in gloom, expecting there soon to be no music left if the same swingeing arts cuts continue. The alternative view is proffered by the other

Music: White tie doesn’t suit the once-wild Bolívar

January 28, 2016

Daniel Barenboim was 13 when he first appeared at the Festival Hall, and he was back there last week to mark the 60th anniversary of that adolescent debut – playing both of Brahms’s heavyweight piano concertos with Gustavo Dudamel and his Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela in a hot-ticket event that didn’t deliver all

Music: Debussy’s wish comes true at the Barbican

January 21, 2016

Now Valery Gergiev has left the London Symphony Orchestra (not without sighs of relief from the players: his genius was unreliable), Simon Rattle is doing more than wait in the wings as his heir apparent. He doesn’t officially take charge until 2017, but between acts he’s much in evidence at the Barbican. And he was

Music: Mentor helps Appl shine in the New Year

January 14, 2016

New Year is downtime in the music world, recovering from the seasonal surfeit of Messiahs and Christmas Oratorios. But in the void, small things stand out. And one that did for me was a Wigmore Hall recital by the young German baritone Benjamin Appl, who has been on the London circuit for a while as

Music: Meet Clare, my constant Christmas companion

January 07, 2016

It felt as if I had a constant companion in the run-up to Christmas – or to be accurate, 30 companions, in that they were the choir of Clare College, Cambridge, whose profile has always been significant but never quite on the scale that it has achieved in the past year or so. I heard

Music: La bohème is sweet enough as it is, thanks

December 22, 2015

Consider this. It’s late on a December night in one of the world’s greatest early-Christian churches, the mosaic-encrusted Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna. Thick fog clings atmospherically to its 5th-century architecture. And the few of us inside are waiting for the choir to sing, expecting something Byzantine, austere and ancient to come wafting from

Music: Crack young choristers take on St Nicolas

December 17, 2015

Written in 1948, Benjamin Britten’s cantata St Nicolas seems to belong to another, more innocent age when profound truths could be spoken with childlike simplicity. The music is straightforward, guileless and accessible – utilitarian in its desire to serve the ordinary listener, but alive with genius. The words (by Eric Crozier) tell St Nicolas’s legends

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