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.

Wendy and I have always shared eclectic musical tastes, and when we recently took a road trip, our two most-played songs perhaps summed up that eclecticism.

2wei’s cover of Faithless’s Insomnia:

The Postmodern Jukebox cover of Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On:

I maintain that it’s impossible not to smile during either of those tracks.

On Friday evening, Wendy and I crossed the glassy Tyne to see Stefan Geiger conducting the Royal Northern Sinfonia. The occasion was a performance of Charlie Chaplin’s score to his 1931 silent film, City Lights. The film played out on a screen above the orchestra. This was our first time back to the Sage since the pandemic, and it was delightful to be back in a venue that holds so many happy memories for us.

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen City Lights before. But, it is one of those films with such cultural relevance that perhaps I’ve just seen so many clips and references to it that I think I’ve seen it before. I’ve certainly never paid much attention to the score, and I wasn’t aware that Chaplin had ever written music. As Geiger pointed out in his opening remarks, Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, edited, starred in and scored the film, surely marking him out as a genius.

The experience of seeing the film with the score performed live obviously drew our attention to the music to a much greater degree than usual. The score is notable for its melancholy, which might not be expected in a comedy film. The Royal Northern Sinfonia performed it beautifully.

This was also, I think, my first experience of seeing a Charlie Chaplin film with an audience—and perhaps even my first time seeing a silent film with an audience. I was struck by how the laughter of the crowd—and especially the final “ahh”—became part of the soundtrack in itself, and made for a genuinely shared experience.

This was a lovely night out.