‘A spectacle to horrify the world’: what the papers say about Trump and Vance’s meeting with Zelenskyy

The shocking and unprecedented scenes in the Oval Office dominate UK front pages today, with the papers united in horror

The unprecedented scenes in the Oval Office dominated the front pages on Saturday, with the papers united in their horror. Adjectives including disastrous and vile were used to describe the meeting in which Donald Trump and his vice-president JD Vance openly berated the Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The Guardian leads with a quote from Donald Trump: “You are gambling with world war three”, characterising the meeting between the US and Ukrainian presidents as “disastrous”. In a separate sketch of the furious row, David Smith wrote that “Trump on Friday presided over one of the greatest diplomatic disasters in modern history.”

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Innocence review – monumental achievement shows how essential opera can be

Adelaide festival
Finnish opera of staggering depth by Kaija Saariaho and directed by Simon Stone, set in the aftermath of a school shooting

It’s a cliche as regular as clockwork in the aftermath of an inexplicable tragedy: “That was the day we lost our innocence”. But do we really start from a place of innocence or are we always somehow complicit in acts of violence? Do perpetrators attack from without, or are they an expression of something abominable within the community, its monstrous id? These questions haunt the halls of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s extraordinary contemporary opera as surely as they’ll disturb the dreams of its audience.

Innocence opens with a deeply ominous series of chords from the lowest keys on the piano, as swirling strings and smirking bassoons mix with the trills and runs from the higher woodwinds, punctuated by the occasional crash of percussion. Atmospheric doesn’t begin to cover it. The music has shades of Bartók and Górecki, with more than a little of that master of dread, György Ligeti. The singers slink on as the curtain rises, explaining that they “can’t go to work any more”, that they “can’t have my back to the door”. Trauma animates every flinch; these people have clearly been exposed to unspeakable horror.

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Continue ReadingInnocence review – monumental achievement shows how essential opera can be