Eye-eye

One of my sad life's little pleasures is pondering the possible identities of the Eye's specialist writers who lurk behind the amusing bylines. The identities of some of them are widely known. The magazine's medical correspondent, Phil Hammond, makes no secret of being 'M.D.' and since he's one of the Eye's sharpest it's a feather in his ex-curricular cap to be able to boast that the sainted Hislop thinks he's both funny and right. Others ('Piloti', 'Old Muckspreader' et al) are known to the cognoscenti but we peasants out here in readership-land can only surmise.

It's more than probable that, at any one time, the unchanging noms de plume mask teams of people each of whom scribbles about the goings-on in his own arcane corner of a larger field, although the consistency of style would seem to indicate that, in each column, it's one well-informed specialist who writes regularly. Mostly.

Being a music lover and avid reader of reviews, I have long worrited over the ID of Lunchtime O'Boulez. I have a growing suspicion that it's the Spectator's opera critic, the delightfully acid and never-normally wrong (i.e., he agrees with me most of the time) Michael Tanner, who doesn't only 'do' opera.

Here's O'Boulez on ENO in the current Eye:

(The Met's) Faust (which Gheorghiu has ditched) is the one recently seen at ENO, done by Broadway director Des McAnuff as part of the English National Opera's lamentable series of stagings by people with little or no experience of opera. ENO has talked up this experiment as bringing fresh minds to old repertory. But all it has shown is that opera is a specialist undertaking that demands specialist knowledge.

And... he's right again, see?

So, either Tanner or possibly Michael White (no relation). No, not White. He's too amiable.

I am just praying to all the gods of music that O'Boulez is not the appalling Dame Norma Lebrecht. If you are in the know and you know that it is indeed Lebrecht, please do not enlighten me. My amour propre simply will not permit me to agree with that ghastly man about anything whatsoever. Were I to discover that I did, it would be proof that the sky was falling and I should have to kill myself. Would you like that on your conscience?