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Michael White

Music: An off-the-wall work out of a lighthouse
May 31, 2018
The appearance of the young, black British cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason at the Royal Wedding was a joy – not just for his engaging musicality but also for the broader social statement his appearance made. Black faces on the concert platform are still rare, and Kanneh-Mason is a timely role model. But not the first: there
Music: This new opera is undone by good taste
May 24, 2018
When you’ve written two outstand-ingly successful operas, the pressure to deliver a third can be tough. And George Benjamin, whose Into the Little Hill and Written on Skin have been the hot properties of modern British opera in recent years, has clearly tried to limit the chance of failure by delivering his new Lessons in
Music: The return of a Russian enigma
May 09, 2018
By common consent there are good pianists, great pianists, and one or two who rank as gods. Among the godlike is the Russian star Grigory Sokolov, whose concerts are the sort of dates that people fly around the world to catch. And last week many did, including me, when he performed a slightly offhand, self-absorbed
Music: A breathtakingly epic evening in Leeds
May 02, 2018
Without a world-class concert hall or concert orchestra to play in one, Leeds isn’t what you’d call a music destination. But it does have Opera North. It has the Leeds Piano Competition. And it has the wonderful Leeds Lieder Festival: four days of well-attended vocal artistry around the clock, and proof that song recitals are
Music: When politics drowns out music
April 26, 2018
After being closed for nearly three years for refurbishment, the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s Southbank has re-opened – looking not so different to the way it did before, apart from re-upholstered seats and cleaner concrete, but it’s good to have the place back. And the Southbank has been celebrating its return with some unusual
Music: When Bernstein took on the Church
April 19, 2018
Leonard Bernstein’s Mass is not the sort of thing its name suggests or something you could do in church. It isn’t liturgy, it’s music-theatre, written in exuberantly big, brash, heart-on-sleeve terms for a cast of hundreds who are usually young people – as they were last week at the Festival Hall, in a performance conducted by
Music: A French band takes our music to heart
April 12, 2018
What does it take to write a children’s opera? Clarity, accessibility, an open-hearted story with a touch of danger (happily resolved) are all a good start; and you find them, mostly, in Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new Coraline, which the Royal Opera has just premiered offsite at the Barbican. Advertised as “accessible to all ages”, the libretto
Music: Igor Stravinsky’s glamorous austerity
April 05, 2018
The so-called Psalms of David (the authorship is, in truth, uncertain) are perhaps the oldest singing texts still to survive in common use. And though their natural home is liturgy, they turn up in concert too – as they did last week in fiercely contrasted settings by Bernstein and Stravinsky at the Festival Hall, performed
Music: A wonderful night at the museum
March 29, 2018
Stephen Hough is one of those annoying polymaths who, to the despair of the rest of us, seem able to do anything. He’s best known as a pianist, but he also paints and writes. He’s just published a novel. And it was as a composer that he featured in a concert at the British Museum
Music: A sonic cavalry charge that blew me away
March 22, 2018
Janáček’s From the House of the Dead is a contender for the most depressing opera in the repertoire, and Covent Garden’s new production doesn’t do a lot to cheer it up. Transferring the action from a Siberian prison camp to a modern, possibly American penitentiary, the director Krzysztof Warlikowski delivers something that not only looks
Arts essay: A Catholic composer who survived Henry VIII
March 15, 2018
To be an English composer in the 16th century was a risky business. Monarchs came and went, changing the state religion every time the Crown passed on. And if you valued your head, you kept it down: as seems to have been the case with Nicholas Ludford, one of the less famous Tudor composers whose
Music: An oddly unmoving mass martyrdom
March 15, 2018
Anyone who complains that there aren’t enough opportunities for women in the arts has never seen an opera about nuns – like Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites which has just been playing at the Guildhall School. Written for an overwhelmingly female ensemble, Carmélites is something no conservatoire should attempt unless it’s having a bonanza year for
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