Michael White, Author at Catholic Herald

Michael White

August 23, 2018

Turning the lives of great composers into theatre is a dodgy task – remembering those 1950s films where Grieg or Schubert strike artistic poses at the piano as they pen their latest masterpiece. And according to the author James Runcie, a more recent plan for a biopic about Bach was ditched on the grounds that

Music: The quartet with a boy band’s swagger

August 16, 2018

No one has ever come up with a convincing explanation of what makes a conductor and an orchestra a good fit; but when the chemistry works, you know it. And it worked with a vengeance last week when the conductor Paavo Järvi led the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen (one of Germany’s best) through two concerts given

Music: Youth and experience in the Swiss mountains

August 09, 2018

Gala concerts can be self-indulgent, over-long, and a complete dog’s dinner when it comes to repertoire. But they can also be extraordinary – like the one last week that celebrated 25 years of the Verbier Festival in Switzerland. A sort of music factory in the mountains, Verbier is famous as a glitzy meet for megastars.

A flawed masterpiece of 18th-century satire

August 02, 2018

It isn’t only priests who struggle with hard questions about human suffering: 18th-century philosophers were exercised about the subject too. And one of them, Voltaire, made it the basis for his novella Candide which, perhaps surprisingly, turned out to be a comic romp: a satire on the argument that everything in life is for the

Music: Knussen’s Fireworks light up the Proms

July 26, 2018

Given how far in advance concert schedules get fixed, it’s good to know that things can sometimes happen on the spur of the moment – as they did when the new Proms season at the Albert Hall began with an unscheduled item: Fireworks with Flourish by the composer Oliver Knussen, who had died just a

Music: A murder-mystery opera on ice skates

July 19, 2018

There are, I suppose, more spiritual ways to spend a Sunday morning than strolling through the urban civility of Cheltenham’s Pittville Park en route to a Cheltenham Festival recital in the Pump Room. But for sheer pleasure it takes some beating. And when the performer is Benjamin Grosvenor in his comfort zone, playing Ravel and

Music: From absurd murder to feelgood escapism

July 12, 2018

In a 1980s lecture Iris Murdoch made the telling observation that “in good art we do not ask for realism; we ask for truth”. And it’s a comment worth bearing in mind with Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball), playing at the new Grange Park Opera, Surrey. The plot of Ballo culminates in

Music: Noah’s Ark concerts come in two by two

July 05, 2018

When Noah took the animals into the Ark it was, with a long-term approach to wildlife preservation, two by two. And while you can’t expect music to go forth and multiply, that may just have influenced the decision of the BBC to stage, with its own BBC Singers, not one but two musical versions of

Music: What Bernstein taught Britten

June 28, 2018

Artists sometimes need to leave home and experience “otherness” to find out who and what they are. And so it was with Benjamin Britten, who left for America in the 1930s, experienced “otherness” with a vengeance (after a sheltered youth in small-town Suffolk), then got homesick and came back: a changed but fully formed composer.

Music: A Magic Flute that rallies the sisterhood

June 21, 2018

Few stage directors these days can resist the temptation to teach us all a lesson about the subjugation of women; and Netia Jones’s new Magic Flute at Garsington goes for it with a vengeance, seizing on the idea of the opera’s masonic community as a male preserve from which women are excluded. Where Mozart regards

Music: The Vatican anthem’s forgotten composer

June 14, 2018

I doubt if many music lovers, Catholic or otherwise, would know who composed the official anthem of Vatican City State; and if they did, they probably wouldn’t be over-excited to learn that this month marks the bicentenary of his birth. But Charles Gounod – for it is he – hasn’t fallen so profoundly off the

Music: Berlioz at Bergen was a blast – ear plugs and all

June 07, 2018

Whatever happens to me in the afterlife I hope it won’t be like the Berlioz Requiem, whose heavily French 19th-century sense of death is probably the most oppressive, overbearing, dark and loud liturgical setting of its kind. Not that it’s ever done liturgically, given the difficulty of finding the four separate brass bands Berlioz requires

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