A year on from watching the Royal Northern Sinfonia accompany Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, Wendy and I returned to see them repeat the trick with Chaplin’s 1936 follow-up, Modern Times.

I don’t think I’ve seen Modern Times before. The programme for this performance leaned into a narrative around automation and drew a comparison with the current debate about the future of work in the context of artificial intelligence. I found this a bit reaching: I saw the film more as a commentary on capitalism and the Great Depression.

You may already know the plot: Chaplin’s Tramp is sacked from his job at a steel mill after the pace and repetitive nature of the work produces a nervous breakdown. He meets a girl, they plan a life together, but he bounces in and out of employment and prison. It’s a mostly-silent comedy romance, scored by Chaplin.

Not knowing the film, I was disappointed by the score, which seemed to draw heavily on the jazz standard Smile. You may chuckle knowingly: as I’ve since discovered, the score came first, and combined with lyrics inspired by the film, it became Smile only two decades or so later.

Modern Times was brilliant, particularly in its physical comedy, but I thought it lacked a bit of the warm innocence of City Lights. It also had less emotional range: Modern Times didn’t have the profound melancholy and longing of City Lights: it was an altogether lighter affair, despite its political message.

But the film was only half the experience. The Royal Northern Sinfonia performed as brilliantly as always, and as with last year’s example, really brought the film to life.

We had a great time.

Judging by the sheer quantity of ‘think pieces’ that have been written on the subject, it seems that it is now mandatory for every living being to share their opinion on Beyoncé’s cover of Dolly Parton’s Joelene.

Mine is best summarised as: ‘meh’.

Beyoncé’s revised lyrics change the tone of the song from plaintive to combative, and it’s therefore a bit discordant to keep the same plaintive melody. It’s the Wonka / Pure Imagination problem all over again.

But, then again, perhaps the discordance is an intentional commentary on how plaintive feelings often find expression in combative language, particularly among those who are reluctant to admit vulnerability.

I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt… but neither version is really up my musical street and I have no immediate plans to listen to either version again.

I can’t remember when I first read a Kazuo Ishiguro novel, but I can remember when he became one of my favourite novelists: I was blown away by The Remains of the Day in 2016.

I can’t remember when I first heard Stacey Kent’s singing. I suspect I’d have first heard her on Monocle Radio, and I know for sure that she’s been on my playlists for about a decade.

I can remember when I first learned of a connection between the two: it was six months ago, when Faber announced the publication of this book. It is a collection of sixteen songs Ishiguro has written for Kent since 2007, several of which are still to be recorded. Some of my favourite Stacey Kent songs are in here: how did I miss that they were written by one of my favourite novelists?

Reading the lyrics of familiar songs on the page is a strange experience, and it is most definitely not the best way to experience these pieces of writing. They are made to be sung.

And yet, seeing them written down in the book, alongside beautiful cartoons by Bianca Bagnarelli, gave me a different appreciation for the work.

As astoundingly obvious as it may be, I’ve never before noticed that many of Kent’s songs are rooted in the present day, unlike jazz standards. No matter how many times I’ve heard The Ice Hotel or Bullet Train, it’s never previously occurred to me to think, ‘Gosh, that’s an unusually modern setting for a jazz song.’

I was also surprised by how short many of the lyrics are: the songs tell complete stories in my mind, and I’ve never before realised the linguistic brevity with which they’re told—or, perhaps, how much of the story-telling relies on Kent’s performance.

This book therefore gave me a renewed appreciation for the talents of both Ishiguro and Kent—but if you haven’t already heard the music, then it might not do much for you.

According to BBC News:

To the jazzy sounds of Nancy Wilson’s 1960s tune I Wish You Love, the Duchess of Sussex emerges from the kitchen of her Californian mansion in a teaser unveiling her new lifestyle brand.

Although little was revealed in the 16-second long video, an Instagram account for Meghan’s new brand has already amassed hundreds of thousands of online followers.

For the past week or so, I’ve had Blossom Dearie’s 1964 cover of the same song stuck in my head after Spotify kept serving it to me. It seems that I’ve more in common with the Duchess of Sussex than I could ever have guessed, though I’m not certain I’d have chosen a break-up song to launch an aspirational lifestyle brand. I defer to the Duchess’s much greater knowledge and experience in this area!

On Friday night, Wendy and I returned to the Glasshouse International Centre for Music to hear the Royal Northern Sinfonia play works by Beethoven and Schumann, plus a Clara Schumann piano concerto featuring Isata Kanneh-Mason. We saw Isata’s cellist brother several times last year, including in this very hall. The talent in the Kanneh-Mason family is astonishing.

The RNS now stream most of their home performances on YouTube, as they did with this one. It’s both fascinating and discombobulating to see the same concert I’ve witnessed in person streamed online, with all of the televisual close-ups and changes of angles that medium provides. I guess it’s a uniquely twenty-first-century experience.

I almost booked the seats behind the stage, and given how prominent they are in the streamed production, I’m glad I didn’t!

On Friday, Wendy and I were fortunate enough to visit the recently re-christened Glasshouse to hear Erland Cooper and a string quartet from the Scottish Ensemble, supported by Midori Jaeger. We had a brilliant time.

Neither of us had previously heard Jaeger, but her set of original songs performed solo with her pizzicato cello demonstrated remarkable talent. It was Wendy’s favourite part of the night. Jaeger also joined the Cooper and the quartet in the main set.

And what a main set it was, with remarkable performances. I’ve listened to all of Cooper’s albums repeatedly, but my favourite is still the original Solan Goose, and a fair proportion of the set was drawn from that album. There were a couple of moments of real imagination: the title song of that album accompanied by a ‘gannet choir’ made up of the audience streaming gannet calls from Cooper’s website; one song played entirely in the dark.

Cooper’s music isn’t entirely up Wendy’s street: the melodies are quite simple and repetitive (I would say ‘meditative’) but we were both nevertheless entranced by the skill of the musicians. Cooper himself also proved to be an endearing character, bringing real warmth and humour to the evening.

Basically: we had a great night out.

I’ve mentioned a number of times on this blog, though always in passing, that I enjoy Daft Punk’s music. I was saddened to learn of their split in February 2021.

Last week, Le Monde published a fanatic five-part series of long reads by Bruno Lesprit. Under the title ‘how Daft Punk got lucky’, the series went into far more detail on the duo than I’ve ever read before. I enjoyed it enormously.

The articles aren’t very well linked on the English version of the Le Monde site, so here the five articles in orderfor convenience:

• Daft Punk’s New World odyssey
• Daft Punk’s early masterpieces, crafted in a childhood bedroom
• Daft Punk and the album that was a Hollywood blockbuster
• Daft Punk, pardon my French touch
• Daft Punk, two robots put to sleep after 28 years
  

There were two particularly stand-out takeaways from this series.

Firstly, Daft Punk have released a new, extended, tenth anniversary edition of Random Access Memories—my favourite of their albums—and the news had completely passed me by. Guess what I’ve been streaming while I’ve been writing this?

Secondly, this was a thing that happened in this crazy world of ours, and I’d forgotten all about it:

When it comes to music that just makes me smile, nothing beats cover versions of songs where the cover is in a different musical style to the original. They can be as out of the box as you like—the madder the better, really—and Wendy generally can’t help but smile either.

Postmodern Jukebox do exactly that, covering modern tracks mostly in 1950s style. Until very recently, I was only aware of a couple of their tracks from albums, and didn’t realise they are very popular on YouTube.

Wendy and I were fortunate to get tickets to their tour, which called in at the Sage on Friday night. It was completely nuts—where else would you see someone tap dance to the Super Mario theme or watch a Motown cover of Beyoncé? But it was also brilliant, both for the joy in the insanity and for the outstanding musical performances of the band, the singers and the dancer.

We had two particular highlights. Our long-standing favourite, a 50s cover of Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On, is in a style that’s totally at odds with the lyrics yet is somehow spot-on, and it closed the show perfectly. And Effie Passero’s cover of Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah, which we’d never heard before, found something genuinely new in a song that has been covered to death, and received a mid-show standing ovation like nothing else I’ve seen before.

Their support act, The Last Morrell, was a complete unknown to us, but he struck us as a brilliant songwriter and he’s gone on our playlists.

We had a great night.

Yesterday afternoon, Wendy and I went along to the Sage to see Hyeyoon Park (violin), Benjamin Grosvenor (piano) and Sheku Kaneh-Mason (cello) performing Beethoven’s Triple Concerto in C with the Royal Northern Sinfonia.

I’ve never previously seen a performance of this, or indeed any other, triple concerto. There aren’t that many of them, and they are relatively seldom performed, given the challenge of finding three suitably talented soloists to appear together.

In this case, the challenge was all the greater: the violin part was due to be performed by Nicola Benedetti, but she had to pull out at the last-minute due to illness.

Quite how the RNS managed to pull off getting Hyeyoon Park to fill in, and quite how she managed to give such an incredible performance at the drop of a hat, I’ll never know.

If I’m honest, it was Kaneh-Mason’s name that attracted us to book tickets. He’s probably most famous for his royal wedding turn or that performance to an empty Royal Albert Hall during COVID, though his list of achievements is endless. Yet, in the moment, Park definitely stole the show. The warmth and richness of her playing was astounding, even alongside the other two exceptional soloists.

The RNS were on their usual top form too, giving a passionate and fun rendition of Mendelssohn’s Italian symphony after the interval.

Apart from anything else, it was great to see The Sage packed to the rafters once again: this was a sell-out encore performance, laid on after Friday night’s performance sold out.

The Cellist is a one-act ballet choreographed by Cathy Marston with music by Philip Feeney. It tells the story of the life of the noted British cellist, Jacqueline du Pré, who career–and ultimately life–was cut short due to multiple sclerosis. I streamed the 25 February 2020 performance at the Royal Opera House, starring Lauren Cutherbertson, Marcelino Sambé and Matthew Ball via Royal Opera House Stream.

If it weren’t for Wendy, I would probably have no idea who Jacqueline du Pré was, and so this whole ballet would probably have passed me by. I’m also not a regular fan of ballet—I often find the plots quite hard to follow, and find myself distracted by that. So, if this hadn’t been available for streaming, I would almost certainly never have seen it. I logged on more out of curiosity about how Feeney would reference various cello concerti in his score than because of any particular interest in the dancing: the score turned out to be brilliant.

I put this on almost in the background, thinking I’d do other things while I listened, but quickly found myself drawn in. Marston’s masterstroke was to cast a dancer in the role of ‘The Instrument’ rather than using a prop. This turned the entire setup into a love story, contrasting the platonic but inseparable relationship between du Pré and her cello with the profound human love story between du Pré and her husband. This was fascinating to watch.

Cutherbertson’s ability to communicate the complex emotions du Pré must have felt when her symptoms started was remarkable: confusion, anxiety, and fear seemed almost to age her before our eyes. I was less convinced by the personification of some of her symptoms, danced by the chorus surrounding her, which I sometimes found really quite difficult to interpret. But the orchestral scene was excellent, and the three central performances were all so strong throughout the whole piece. Who knew someone could have such impact while pretending to be cello?

The set too, redolent of the inside of a cello, was inspired.

This was a remarkable hour of performance.