This, reader, is why we can’t have nice things

The Spectator comments on 'Two terrific new operas – without an afterlife', one of which is John Joubert's Jane Eyre.

John Joubert’s opera Jane Eyre has had an altogether unhappier time of it — so far, anyway. Completed in 1997, it has only now been heard in full, in a concert performance by the English Symphony Orchestra under Kenneth Woods that doubled as a recording session. Joubert and his librettist Kenneth Birkin have taken the Eugene Onegin approach, extracting six key scenes from a well-loved novel and going straight for their emotional heart. Some critics have grumbled about a lack of narrative continuity; I couldn’t feel it myself, and Joubert’s luminous, ardently lyrical score (think Britten without his splinter of ice) is disarmingly direct. David Stout made a suitably brusque and Byronic Rochester, but it was April Fredrick as Jane who really carried the whole thing. Whether flashing with defiance or soaring rapturously and with radiant tone over a surging orchestra, she looked — and sounded — as if she needed to be on stage. Jane Eyre itself certainly does.
At the end of the performance the audience rose and, applauding, turned to the 89-year old Joubert. I was left with the unhappy thought that this one-off outing in a suburban school hall was in all probability the only time that the composer will get to hear his vital, warm-blooded creation performed live. We tut disapprovingly at the way Victorian Britain forced its composers on to a treadmill of oratorios. But in Joubert we’ve taken a born musical dramatist and pigeonholed him as a composer of Christmas carols. Barring a David Pountney or a James Conway throwing the resources of a national opera company behind it, the odds of Jane Eyre receiving the full professional staging it begs for are vanishingly small. And there’d still be the problem of attracting an audience that’s long since learned to run a mile from an unfamiliar name. This, reader, is why we can’t have nice things. (Richard Bratby)

Daily Mail reports that film editor Anne V. Coates will be receiving an honorary Oscar. Apparently,

Coates first became dazzled by the world of film while a student at boarding school. Her class was reading "Wuthering Heights" (which she found "extremely boring") when they went on a field trip to see the movie version.
"Well, apart for falling madly for Laurence Olivier, it just so excited me to see what you could do with pictures, with telling a story in pictures," she said.

Fact Magazine is rather confused about the new release by Dean Blunt and Yung Lean.

Dean Blunt and Yung Lean have released a video for a new project titled ‘Fronto Kings’. The eight-and-a-half minute clip features both artists walking through late night Stockholm, entering apartment buildings and an arcade filled with pinball machines.
In typically oblique Blunt fashion, it’s unclear whether ‘Fronto Kings’ is the name of a project, an album or a song. The video itself actually appears to contain multiple tracks and the description alludes to something called ‘Wuthering Heights’ a possible reference to the Kate Bush track Blunt has sampled in the past along with many others.