Michael White, Author at Catholic Herald

Michael White

A rarely-seen Requiem performed with a vengeance

November 15, 2018

When Stravinsky wrote his own sober if seductive Mass setting, he stressed the importance of using emotionally cold music to ensure nothing obscured its spiritual purpose; so what he would have made of the Requiem Mass by Alfred Bruneau, a French composer (1857-1934) of crazily overheated Romantic ambition, one dreads to think. But then he probably

A fab Porgy and Bess – but it’s hardly opera

November 08, 2018

When George Gershwin wrote Porgy and Bess, he believed himself to be writing an opera – and so by general acceptance he was, although its requirement for coachloads of black singers with the vocal strength to shine in small but spotlit roles makes it a hard one for European opera companies to stage. As a

The spiritual intensity of a Suffolk weekend

November 01, 2018

Composers by tradition channel their most serious, abstract thinking into symphonies and string quartets. And though Benjamin Britten was neither a symphonist nor someone who worked in the abstract – writing mostly vocal music with a narrative – he did produce three significant quartets, as well as youthful stabs at the medium that were consigned

Recovering the delicate radicalism of Debussy

October 25, 2018

One of this year’s major cultural anniversaries has been the centenary of the death of Debussy, a composer who ranks alongside Schoenberg and Stravinsky as a herald of our modern sound-world. You could say that 20th-century music began in 1913 with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. But you could also pre-date its arrival to Debussy’s Prélude

Music: Spending too long in the trenches

October 18, 2018

In the coming weeks there will be no escape from World War I commemorations. In the concert hall, onstage and in exhibition spaces we’ll be overwhelmed by sombre torrents of remembrance – which of course is as it should be. War has shaped even the lives of those of us without direct experience of it;

Music: A smug and desperate attempt to shock

October 11, 2018

Salome has no more than a bit part in the Bible, and doesn’t even merit a name-check in the two accounts of her demanding the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Neither Matthew nor Mark identifies her as more than the “daughter of Herodias”; it took a later historian, Josephus, to pin her

Music: The fine-tuned purr of flawless a cappella

October 04, 2018

Time flies. It seems like last week, but it’s actually been a year since Simon Rattle’s triumphant homecoming to take charge of the London Symphony Orchestra. And while relationships between conductors and their bands usually involve honeymoons that fade into mutual loathing, this one hasn’t put a foot wrong yet. It’s still a lovefest with

Music: When WH Auden broke opera’s rules

September 27, 2018

People who write words for opera end to tell you it’s a thankless task. The text is always secondary to the music, which invariably drowns it. And as WH Auden said, words to a composer are like infantrymen to a Chinese general. Expendable. All of which explains why libretto writing has rarely attracted authors of

Music: Songs of Darkness light up Last Night

September 20, 2018

The Last Night of the Proms is always a bizarre event. The best-known concert in the world, it mixes melancholia with craziness as a finale to the summer season at the Albert Hall; and for determined Promenaders who have been there every night for eight weeks, there’s an understandable emotion when they link arms and

Music: Elegant, meticulous…but still Karajan-lite

September 13, 2018

When Simon Rattle left the Berlin Philharmonic – by tradition, expectation and occasional reality the finest orchestra on earth – the job of chief conductor passed to Kirill Petrenko. Leaving many earthlings asking: “Kirill who?” Outside Germany, where he held opera house positions in Berlin and Munich, Petrenko wasn’t high profile. And here in Britain

Classical: We’re no longer the Land Without Music

September 06, 2018

For a Land Without Music, as the Germans used to call us, we British don’t do badly when it comes to sending conductors overseas to run the orchestras of other countries. I suppose it resurrects, in cultural terms, our old colonial habits. And there’s always interest when the conductor brings his orchestra back to the

Music: Simon Rattle delivers a Ravel suite to die for

August 30, 2018

I’ve long thought that, should there be a full-sized symphony orchestra to hand, I’d happily die to the closing section of Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite – so long as it was done with the enfolding tenderness the score requires, and very, very slowly. Simon Rattle’s reading of this music at the Proms was on the

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