tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-65577912024-03-07T09:02:55.357+00:00JDCMBJessica Duchen's Classical Music Blog. Music and writing in London, UK. Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comBlogger2681125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-28352875570069004732021-09-08T12:22:00.006+01:002021-09-08T12:48:59.440+01:00Authentic Korngold to raise the Proms roof<p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Last Saturday night, I left the Royal Albert Hall after the debut Prom of the Sinfonia of London and started down the slippery slope to South Kensington tube station. Moments later I stopped, because I'd realised I was, rather uncharacteristically, shaking all over.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What induced this state was an extraordinary concert by an orchestra that hasn’t performed for more than 60 years, reconvened and conducted by John Wilson. Their programme was of works that can thrill and terrify in equal measure: Johann Strauss, Berg, Ravel’s <i>La Valse</i>, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Symphony in F sharp.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYyQAPezJa8Rw3TIQRO1oK1leC6S8iF5d9F8Q6t3TvA5L59bL1F_FaZ14KYPrE-asO_WgtDAtUa_0tSIhAUe16TQEcx8kIVLFQs6YEmet1fpOEtjOCDHLh8kqCBnSsFR7oIU7VBg/s800/Prom+38+Sinfonia+of+London+and+John+Wilson+CR+Chris+Christodoulou+%25286%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="532" data-original-width="800" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYyQAPezJa8Rw3TIQRO1oK1leC6S8iF5d9F8Q6t3TvA5L59bL1F_FaZ14KYPrE-asO_WgtDAtUa_0tSIhAUe16TQEcx8kIVLFQs6YEmet1fpOEtjOCDHLh8kqCBnSsFR7oIU7VBg/w400-h266/Prom+38+Sinfonia+of+London+and+John+Wilson+CR+Chris+Christodoulou+%25286%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Wilson conducting the Sinfonia of London<br />photo: BBC/Chris Christodoulou</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /><o:p></o:p></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Thirty-five years after I first fell in love with Korngold’s music, 30 after seeing with horror how loathed it was in certain quarters of the music world, and a quarter-century since my compact biography of him was published, I’d finally witnessed his Symphony – a tragedy-laden, post-war howl of pain – receive the performance it deserves. <i>The Times</i> review has now gone the whole way, hailing it as a masterpiece.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Symphony was completed in 1952 (it took him a while) and premiered on Austrian radio in 1954. The short version of the story is that it wasn’t successful. Then Mitropoulos wanted to perform it - he called it ‘the perfect modern work’ – but died before he could do so. It wasn’t played in concert until 1972, in Munich, under Rudolf Kempe. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Saturday wasn’t the first time it’s been performed in the UK, far from it, but it’s the first time that I have heard it sound as it can and should. Such was Wilson’s hold on its architecture that there was no mistaking its staircases and supporting walls, nor any chance of them succumbing to the rising damp of technical imprecision. His scherzo was fast, light-footed and ferocious as an orchestral cheetah, the adagio as carvernous and profound as the catacombs; and his hand-picked performers were virtuosi enough to carry off a sort of orchestral Olympic gold (a sample: Adam Walker on first flute, Juliana Koch on first oboe, Thomas Gould playing no. 3 first violin, Peter Moore as first trombone; the list carries on).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">So easy to love?<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Symphony is not an easy work to love. No warm, cuddly, Czech-Viennese Korngold here, guzzling fine goose-liver or chocolate cake. It’s totally of its time and place: the structures of the classic symphonists, the expected playing standards of the Vienna Philharmonic, but also the emotional condition of someone torn from his whole world and flung seven thousand miles around the globe into a new life where material success never once meant real happiness. Someone struggling to save his family and friends, witnessing destruction on an unimaginable scale. Someone bewildered to find himself facing, in turn, racial prejudice, survival necessity and artistic snobbery; someone who’d watched everything he had been born into swept away forever by World War II. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The music is bitter, sometimes furious, sometimes ironic, sardonic or surreal, its malleable tonal centre (F sharp doesn’t mean F sharp <i>major </i>– anything but) with more than one toe in German expressionism. Occasionally a big punchy motif – try the horn call in the scherzo’s trio – prefigures the sounds of John Williams, like the New York skyline glinting into view over a choppy ocean. It’s three parts Fritz Lang to one part Steven Spielberg. It is not nostalgic or schmalzy in any way, shape or form, even when the emotion knocks you for six. You may not like it; it’s not necessarily meant to be likeable. But at least if you still don’t like it after you heard this performance – or the award-winning CD that the SoL and Wilson have made – you can rest assured that you’ve given it a fair try and are responding to the work, and not just to the way it was played.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So what went right at the Prom that doesn’t usually? And what’s gone wrong before?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">The trouble with Korngold<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The first trouble with Korngold is that his music is so damnably difficult to play. Growing up as a child prodigy in Vienna, he was accustomed to astronomically high standards. He had the ear of Mahler at nine and Strauss by 15 (until his critic father ruined that for him). He was surrounded by the crème-de-la-crème of Europe’s great musicians and knew he didn’t need to make their lives easier. He wrote a violin sonata for Carl Flesch and Artur Schnabel when he was 14, a one-act opera (<i>Violanta</i>) for Maria Jeritza at 16-17, <i>Die tote Stadt</i> for Jeritza and Richard Tauber, premiered when he was 23. Conductors? He expected someone on the level of his neighbour, Bruno Walter. Frankly, if we give him instead – er, one of a few I can think of, we’re asking for trouble. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8D8Jrqgjn9H12lz0_livSvQ9-q9GzXRs20qMQLZnqSC5wexpI3ln7mEUQXXJPz8ZBQzxDmfGkFl1Wp9XXwQYq2yiPkqX_bDWdl_FouApPjGtBsWf-rk7JODDD0PWXCZYimDf7gg/s2048/Marietta%2527s+Lute+Song+music.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8D8Jrqgjn9H12lz0_livSvQ9-q9GzXRs20qMQLZnqSC5wexpI3ln7mEUQXXJPz8ZBQzxDmfGkFl1Wp9XXwQYq2yiPkqX_bDWdl_FouApPjGtBsWf-rk7JODDD0PWXCZYimDf7gg/s320/Marietta%2527s+Lute+Song+music.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Marietta's Lute Song from<i> Die tote Stadt</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Korngold is, moreover, a control freak: often he writes out the rubato exactly as he wants it to sound. I once counted the changes of time signature in the slow movement of his Piano Quintet – I think there were 57. Or possibly just 54. If you play what he writes, you provide the sound he wants. The audience hears a flexible, satiny, well-oiled ebb and flow that breathes and rests and intensifies. The musicians, though, are probably breaking quite a sweat over the mathematical exactitude that such freedom entails. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">They may also be doing their nut over poorly-prepared parts. A new complete Korngold edition is mercifully underway now, but previously some of the trouble with e.g. <i>Heliane</i> has been that the originals were so badly presented. There was even a theory that in the 1920s there may have been deliberate sabotage by an (or some) anti-semite(s) who made the music as illegible as possible and even mis-wrote the then very famous composer’s name as Korn<i>feld</i>. (They did. I’ve seen it.)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Once you can read what’s on the page, there’s another issue. This music is full of expression and feeling. Recognising this, some musicians, with the best of intentions, ladle on still more of it in great hot-caramel dollops. If you do that, it overbalances, goes soggy in the centre, loses momentum, loses direction, and sometimes falls to bits. It turns into the schmalz that people came to expect it to be because they know Korngold ended up in Hollywood - but it is not, it was never meant to be, and if it sounds that way, something is very wrong. As the composer’s father, the critic Julius Korngold, wrote at the start of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, <a href="https://forbiddenmusic.org/2021/09/03/julius-korngolds-article-on-the-modern-in-music-1901-richard-strauss-gustav-mahler/" style="color: #954f72;">the ‘modern’ was all about expression</a>. In 1910 his son was therefore as modern as modern could be. Hollywood Schmollywood. I can’t put it better than John Wilson himself, who said to me in an interview: ‘The last thing you want to do with Korngold is pour chocolate sauce all over it.’ <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A few years ago I wrote a ‘Building a Library’ article for BBC Music Magazine about the Beethoven ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata. I listened to around 50 recordings, but found that a surprising number of pianists played it reverentially, every note a precious gem wrapped carefully in cotton wool. The one I loved the most played it, instead, like a huge, wise, quirky, brilliant, firebreathing dragon awakening (it was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK3idiZtl_E" style="color: #954f72;">Peter Serkin on a fortepiano</a>). How many others, I wondered, were playing not the music, but their expectations of it? <i>Their attitude towards</i> the music, one of reverence and fear? <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Korngold’s music has been open season for this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Exploring recordings of the Korngold Violin Concerto for Radio 3’s equivalent feature (some years ago) it sounded much as if some of the artists, thinking the music is chocolate sauce, thought they should pour on even more. Swooning is expected, schmalz encouraged: that old Hollywood prejudice hangs over performers who have probably never even seen the films with Korngold scores – let alone heard him conducting on the soundtracks, a great clue to his genuine style, which is dynamic and sweeping enough to whoosh you clear off your chair. So, too is the recording of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EW8Ywtd6eFo" style="color: #954f72;">Heifetz in the Violin Concerto, live in Carnegie Hall, 1947</a>: no swooping or splurging, but virtuosic, eloquent, heroic, idealistic. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Interpretations can end up skewed, sometimes for the sake of received opinion, and if the music isn’t well known, then if it is poorly delivered nobody knows any better. Without top-notch performances, the impression is given that the music isn’t good, not that the playing might perhaps be responsible. This is quite often the fate of composers who are being rediscovered. In many instances, it’s only when they have come on to the radar strongly enough that the top musicians – or their record companies – will jump in and do them justice. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The quantity of vicious abuse I’ve seen directed at Korngold over the last three or four decades is mind-boggling. But now, here’s a really great performance of the Symphony and suddenly... <i>The Times</i> critic, Rebecca Franks, writes:<br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></span></i></span></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">It emerged here as a staggering masterpiece: brooding, biting, anguished, mourning, soul-stirring. Played with the high-octane approach so familiar from the John Wilson Orchestra’s Hollywood film and musicals Proms, the symphony seared itself in the mind. No surprise, perhaps, given that the Sinfonia of London made its recording debut with this work. Yet hearing it live, in all its emotional intensity and ferocity, was another experience entirely.</span></i><i><o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></i></p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Striking a chord<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I’ve sometimes wondered if perhaps the composers whose music can appear most closely related to their life stories stand the best chance of cutting through to the public upon discovery or rediscovery. Weinberg, for example, and indeed Korngold, are possibly easier ‘to get a handle on’ than certain figures among their more-or-less contemporaries who wrote marvellous music yet kept it wholly detached from their personal circumstances, such as Hans Gál and Szymon Laks. I’ve loved everything I’ve heard by both the latter; if they are winning through now, it’s because of the assiduous championship of some very devoted performers. Hopefully it will continue, but I wonder if this may partly explain why it’s sometimes seemed more of an uphill struggle.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Still, there’s a danger mark over which parts of Korngold’s story are remembered. For decades he was vilified for having gone into film music, but does one really have to spell out why he did so? Korngold was Jewish in Vienna. After the Anschluss in 1938, had they not escaped, he and his family would have been deported to a concentration camp and murdered. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">His astute colleague Max Reinhardt, the theatre director, invited him to Hollywood in 1934 to arrange Mendelssohn’s music for his film of <i>A Midsummer Night’s Dream</i> and introduced him to Warner Bros. He had the perspicacity to accept their commissions and to apply for American citizenship in 1936. Warner Bros saved the Korngold family’s lives. The Korngolds were, in the grand scheme of things, ‘lucky’.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The fact that he escaped with his life did not prevent exile from being painful, or the job of film music ultimately unsatisfying. When the films disappeared from the cinemas, so did his music. This is why he recycled so much of it into concert works – though that’s complicated by the fact that many of the ideas in his film scores originated from notebooks he had kept years earlier in Vienna, before Hollywood was ever a glint in anybody’s eye (try this: the main theme from <i>The Adventures of Robin Hood</i> can be found in waltz form in his completion of Leo Fall’s operetta <i>Rosen aus Florida</i>, 1925). <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The problem changed a little when television became ubiquitous. For years, those films remained in wide circulation on TV: <i>The Sea Hawk</i> and <i>The Adventures of Robin Hood</i> brought Korngold’s name and soundworld to generations of viewers. No wonder people associated him with film music – especially when his concert works and operas were being performed very little in the mid-century. A few recordings won through in the ‘70s: Kempe conducting the Symphony, Leinsdorf’s <i>Die tote Stadt</i>, for instance, but it’s fair to say that these were a tad niche. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Korngold was therefore being remembered as ‘a Hollywood composer’, rather than as a Jewish composer in exile who, after the war ended, must have seen the film footage from the liberation of Auschwitz. The degree of that shock and agony is unimaginable to most people sitting in concert halls today. (Michael Haas, author of <i>Forbidden Music</i>, has explored the issue of cultural loss <a href="https://forbiddenmusic.org/2015/03/28/reconciliation-of-music-developments-pre-and-post-hitler/" style="color: #954f72;">in depth here</a>.) <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></o:p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBbW1zqBgaVOfTsDlbDVO1kPkdeIfAa_7h3NMdtptp6IwP2FY9pH2-LI4DdlsEmoi9puSLZ4G7OgWdpwqM6axPQ6hMfME9s7LKd1ldA3httdYcxXWEIMjBUv4lomyDXD4QPSSUzw/s2048/Die+tote+Stadt+cover.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBbW1zqBgaVOfTsDlbDVO1kPkdeIfAa_7h3NMdtptp6IwP2FY9pH2-LI4DdlsEmoi9puSLZ4G7OgWdpwqM6axPQ6hMfME9s7LKd1ldA3httdYcxXWEIMjBUv4lomyDXD4QPSSUzw/s320/Die+tote+Stadt+cover.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My copy of <i>Die tote Stadt</i>, piano score<br />sourced from Travis & Emery in 1987</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /> </span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">A little knowledge is a dangerous thing… <o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When I was a student 35 years ago, the faculty spent plenty of time drumming into us that a composer’s music has nothing whatever to do with his/her/their life experience: works were to be considered solely on their own terms, regardless of their creator’s history. This is the diametric opposite, of course, of my speculations about which music chimes with the public when neglected composers come out of the woodwork. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Again, it’s a massive generalisation, a trawler-net in which some pretty big tuna are left flailing. Nobody who knows any composers personally could think that (as some clunky biopics would have it) they just sit down and write a piece that expresses his/her/their immediate, overt experience or state of mind. Some might have, sometimes: for example, a Robert Schumann who wrote so intensely that he could draft a whole piano work in just a few days - but that’s the exception. There are many, the Gáls and Lakses for instance, who deliberately keep their work and their lives separate. Or to quote (or misquote) a line of Nina Raine’s play <i>Bach and Sons</i>, Sebastian says rather tetchily: ‘Of course there are emotions in my music – just not <i>my</i> emotions.’<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In between, there’s infinite middle ground. Try Beethoven. Sometimes what he <i>didn’t</i> write can tell us a little bit about how he did, when he did. He had notably scant output in 1817, something often attributed to his personal state of mind, body and preoccupations at the time: illness, depression, trying to adopt his nephew, and so forth. Look a little closer, though, and you see what was actually going on in 1817: the noxious mix of Napoleon’s rampaging return, the 1816 Indonesian volcanic eruption which produced a ‘year without a summer’ in Europe with crop failure leading to massive food shortages, runaway inflation… It’s a wonder that anybody managed to write any music at all. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">You can take composers out of their times, but… We’re all subject to the buffeting of history, like it or lump it, and composers perhaps more so than most, since their work is widely expected, despite all that detachment, somehow to distil their zeitgeist into sound.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Each note on a page is a choice by the person who put it there; each person will present a different, individual set of responses. One size doesn’t fit all. And essentially, music is a human creation. It doesn’t write itself. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">…wildest dreams…<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When I set about my university dissertation on <i>Die tote Stadt </i>in 1986, I can’t say I ever expected to see it on stage, let alone at the Bavarian State Opera by Marlis Petersen, Jonas Kaufmann and Kirill Petrenko. I’d heard just one, rather muddy recording of the Symphony. I knew nothing of <i>Das Wunder der Heliane</i> except the one famous aria, ‘Ich ging zu ihm’; I never imagined I’d give the pre-concert talk for its UK premiere and, since that performance wasn’t a massive success (it didn’t fit inside the hall and the chosen solutions did not work) the recent production at the Deutsche Oper Berlin was beyond my wildest dreams. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But here we are, it’s 2021 and the Symphony has raised the roof. Korngold fanatics from all over the country came to London to hear it. The recording (on Chandos) has been winning prizes. There will still be people who don’t like the piece, but that’s natural: nobody can like everything and no one should be expected to. The crucial thing is that with such a performance, the composer has the best possible chance of getting his music to us across time, space and dimensions. And we can hear it, at last, as it really is, because Wilson knows the style inside out, understands what to do with it and has an orchestra that can play it properly. (Catch it on TV on BBC4 on Thursday evening, or afterwards on the iPlayer.)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Next…can we perhaps plead with ENO to stage <i>Die tote Stadt</i> with Wilson conducting? I’m sure somebody could make a good, singable translation [raises hand]. It is to be featured at the Longborough Opera Festival next year – its first hearing in the UK since a slightly uninspiring outing at Covent Garden about 13 years ago, even though it is all over Europe these days. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Finally, I’m daring to dream. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comLondon, UK51.5073509 -0.127758323.197117063821153 -35.284008299999996 79.817584736178844 35.028491700000004tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-48214956319850151872021-07-04T13:10:00.004+01:002021-07-04T13:12:21.182+01:00Cheers<p>If you've been following JDCMB in the past, you'll know I've been blogging for a long time. 17 years. The climate back in 2004 was very different. All this online stuff was new, thrilling and full of hope. I was still in my thirties and didn't seem to have anything to lose, so I just bounced into the Wild West that was the Internet and found it was fun.</p><p>This past pandemic time hasn't been easy for anybody, of course, but it does focus the mind a little. I am doing many more different things now than was the case in 2004. I am also a bit older, and if not wiser, then less energetic. I have to prioritise paid work and when I found I was so busy writing back to people saying 'sorry, I haven't got time to cover your project in my spare time for free', and the reason I didn't have time was because I was writing so many 'sorry I haven't got time' messages, something had to give.</p><p>In the end the only reason to do unorganised, unmonetised blogging is if it's fun. And I'm sorry, but it isn't fun any more. Frankly, it's a millstone. It's a monster and it rejects low-calorie food. So I'm stopping. I might pop back from time to time, to fulfil a commitment or whatever, but it's not going to be remotely regular and might indeed migrate elsewhere.</p><p>What am I doing? Writing about music. If you've enjoyed reading JDCMB, you might enjoy some of my books, articles and reviews. I currently contribute to the i, the Sunday Times, BBC Music Magazine, the JC and various online outlets like Udiscovermusic and The Arts Desk. Links to the books are in the sidebar. I have two very nice music book projects in the works at the moment: a centenary book for the London Chamber Orchestra, and a biography I've always wanted to write, that of Dame Myra Hess. Opera librettos: watch out for the next operas at Garsington with John Barber this month and with Roxanna Panufnik next summer. And the narrated concerts, or concert dramas, or words&music, whatever you want to call them, are very much up and running: Bach at Deal Festival next weekend, Beethoven at the British Library's theatre in the winter, and more. </p><p>So it's not goodbye, but it is definitely 'over and out'.</p><p>Thank you for reading JDCMB.</p><p>JDx</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-81400017083201064352021-04-15T11:37:00.001+01:002021-04-15T11:40:51.143+01:00Down under, but not out: the Australian Festival of Chamber Music is coming soon to a computer near you<span style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8owh_5dQSrFQJnlZlWVGlPwsBOjOJb-uAGBPBjZY3x07G9l0vPBaHBLsTVVyDJ4DU2-v9DyqAC2BT5-c1U7skwB-cF94xGP61awgJZWKqMAkF89yDWEueoPYOY5WyR5XNT01R-A/s2048/AFCM2+by+Andrew+Rankin.jpg" style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8owh_5dQSrFQJnlZlWVGlPwsBOjOJb-uAGBPBjZY3x07G9l0vPBaHBLsTVVyDJ4DU2-v9DyqAC2BT5-c1U7skwB-cF94xGP61awgJZWKqMAkF89yDWEueoPYOY5WyR5XNT01R-A/w400-h266/AFCM2+by+Andrew+Rankin.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The Australian Festival of Chamber Music gets into gear...</span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Photo: Andrew Rankin</span></span></div><br /><br />The pandemic is reaching the point at which we almost don’t dare to plan ahead at all, for fear of hopes being dashed yet again. If you are the director of an international festival, though, you can’t really afford to think like that. You have to hope and plan for the best, while also being prepared for the worst, doing all you can to anticipate likely troubles and short-circuit them before they happen. The Australian Festival of Chamber Music is a case in point. <br /><br />I’d hoped to go last year, but of course that proved impossible, and the initial rescheduling for this year bit the dust when the organisation reluctantly but necessarily took the step of revising the schedule to use only those artists already in Australia, rather than importing the large contingent of “internationals” as originally planned. This weekend – starting tomorrow, Friday - they’re holding a three-day online festival to showcase a few of those internationals and bring their devoted audience some delicious musical offerings, even if not quite on Orpheus Island yet.</span><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh9jSTLrZS1ktPg14lu0JCQIuQt7_bG44yoxQqXd-o8f7QcDp6mmJru2oaNuwp_VhuPl4lKKfKtVM_pu_dmCtCn-wiXWJjvrRwNXKs-QB9HWdQMrgUr9sBcDkm_CY9jQjLejKh5g/s2048/8A747972-A2E9-46F3-96EC-BA962ECA9181.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh9jSTLrZS1ktPg14lu0JCQIuQt7_bG44yoxQqXd-o8f7QcDp6mmJru2oaNuwp_VhuPl4lKKfKtVM_pu_dmCtCn-wiXWJjvrRwNXKs-QB9HWdQMrgUr9sBcDkm_CY9jQjLejKh5g/w400-h300/8A747972-A2E9-46F3-96EC-BA962ECA9181.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Kathy Stott at Orpheus Island in 2018<br />Photo: JD</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">The festival’s artistic director for the past few years has been the British pianist Kathryn Stott, and the Covid-19 reshuffles have chiefly landed in her inbox. She was to be handing over to the incoming new director, violinist Jack Liebeck this year, but when her last festival had to be postponed, Jack gallantly offered to defer taking up his appointment too, allowing her to go out in style. <br /><br />“It was really generous-spirited of him,” Kathy says, “and I’m very grateful.” Whether she can be there herself, though, is still in question: the borders of Australian states have been closed very quickly at various times during the pandemic and with international travel all but impossible, Kathy has had essentially to write herself out of the programming to be on the safe side.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLWAMrH20cv8hSkfYlyrvAa4XHT59g3GYwmosUm0z7ZuBtwH1_rlX83vR5r773PQwnvIfyUIYj0mdvV0FoI6P40Sw6MfgktRrw-Wi33-yKVHtP0-9LbAuvf-uxZzVxmVAeaf-bJA/s2048/Cheryl+Barker+by+Keith+Saunders.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1365" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLWAMrH20cv8hSkfYlyrvAa4XHT59g3GYwmosUm0z7ZuBtwH1_rlX83vR5r773PQwnvIfyUIYj0mdvV0FoI6P40Sw6MfgktRrw-Wi33-yKVHtP0-9LbAuvf-uxZzVxmVAeaf-bJA/w266-h400/Cheryl+Barker+by+Keith+Saunders.jpg" width="266" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Cheryl Barker<br />Photo: Keith Saunders</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Keeping the musical schedule as planned as far as humanly possible, she has reassigned the pieces she would have played to other pianists, drafted in the presenter Russell Torrance from ABC to conduct the morning musical chats with festival artists that are a regular and extremely popular part of the proceedings, and as hosts for the evening concerts, Australia’s operatic “golden couple”, Cheryl Barker and Peter Coleman-Wright, will be on location (I’m delighted that Cheryl will also take over my script for the <i>Immortal Beloved</i> concert, though am of course sick as the proverbial parrot about not being there in person). An unexpected bonus that’s arisen from the state of international travel is that Piers Lane, who was artistic director for 16 years before Kathy, is spending most of this year in Australia and will be returning to AFCM for the first time since standing down from the post.<br /><br />“As far as I’m concerned,” Kathy declares, “it is still Beethoven’s anniversary year, it is still the Goldner String Quartet’s 25th anniversary and although I’ve had to pull out the odd piece here and there, the festival is still its whopping, ginormous self!”<br /><br />It was certainly whopping and ginormous when I went in 2018. Glittering seas, palm trees, Australian wine under the stars, the best seafood ever and a wonderfully convivial atmosphere among the large team of performers, to say nothing of the audience and the devoted festival Friends who come to absolutely everything – it was the festival of a lifetime. “That was a wonderful year for building new friendships and musical relationships,” Kathy says, pointing to several new associations among her colleagues with invitations to Norway, new commissions for some of the composers from various performers and plenty more to look forward to when “all this” is finally over.<br /><br />The online Festival Overture from 16 to 18 April brings music from morning til night, as is always the case at the main AFCM, and features three special recitals from musicians based in London, where they are being streamed from the Voces8 Centre: Jack Liebeck and Katya Apekisheva, Carolyn Sampson & Joseph Middleton, and husband and wife duo Alexander Sitkovetsky and Wu Qian. These events can be accessed via the Melbourne Digital Concert Hall’s site, which is partnering with AFCM for the occasion (you’ll need to buy tickets). Morning and lunchtime concerts feature artists who will be appearing at the festival in August, plus a special performance by Kathy herself. Meanwhile you can feast on South Pacific travels from the comfort of your own home through the Destination Dreams videos of the landscapes around Townsville, Far North Queensland and the surrounding islands. <a href="https://www.afcm.com.au/whats-on/online-festival/">Find the full schedule here.</a><br /><br />I’ll be writing more about AFCM in the run-up to the 2021 festival, so do stay tuned, and keep your fingers firmly crossed that everything can go ahead as intended when we finally reach August. <br /><br />Booking for AFCM2021 is now OPEN and you can find this, along with full details of the programme, here: <a href="https://www.afcm.com.au/">https://www.afcm.com.au</a></span><br /></div></div>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-74171739772491952592021-04-01T11:51:00.002+01:002021-04-01T11:52:26.266+01:00Playlist for IMMORTAL<p><span style="font-family: inherit;">When <i>Immortal </i>was published last October, I made a playlist to go with it on Apple Music. This was originally intended for the subscribers to the novel. As they've now had exclusive access to it for quite a few months, I'm happy to open it up to interested readers. It's a substantial quantity of music, lined up in the order you'll need it. Below is a list of which pieces go with which chapter. Hope you enjoy it.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">The pieces are by Beethoven, unless otherwise indicated: I have included pertinent works by Mozart, Marianna Martines, Schubert and Schumann. Wherever possible they illustrate events in the book. In the instances where they are not directly connected to the narrative’s timescale, they should illuminate particular points, such as the “Josephine” motif, a similarity between two different works, or a dedication e.g. to Count Razumovsky. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Mostly I’ve chosen one movement of a work - in the hope that you’ll want to source and listen to the rest as well. For some of the crucial piano sonatas, however, I’ve included the whole piece. It was, after all, by playing the piano sonatas that our narrator, Therese, would have best known Beethoven’s music. I’m sending herewith a list of which works go with which chapters.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">There’s a lot of piano music here, so I’ve selected several different recordings. For the early sonatas, we have András Schiff’s live recording - not least because he is one of few to play the entire first movement of the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata as indicated, in one long pedal. For the ‘heroic’ period and the final trilogy, we have Daniel Barenboim and for the ‘Hammerklavier’ the magnificent recording by Murray Perahia. In the Andante Favori I picked Mari Kodama for her clear, Josephine-like phrasing.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">The utterly splendid Takács String Quartet perform all the quartet extracts - and as I’ve named the Brunsvik family coachman after them, it seems only fair. The Cello Sonata in A major is played by Miklós Perényi (cello) and András Schiff (piano). The symphonies are variously represented in a classic recordings by conductors including Carlos Kleiber, Iván Fischer and Claudio Abbado; the latter also conducts the Piano Concerto No. 3 with the one and only Martha Argerich. The Beethoven songs are from a recording by baritone Matthias Goerne and pianist Jan Lisiecki in a recording released for the Beethoven 250<sup>th</sup> anniversary in 2020. As for <i>Fidelio</i>, from which extracts appear at various points, this is conducted by Abbado with Nina Stemme as Leonore and Jonas Kaufmann as Florestan, a performance filled with ‘namenlose Freude’. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">I hope you enjoy the mix of reading and music. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><a href="https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/immortal/pl.u-yZyVE31CYVPPga"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/immortal/pl.u-yZyVE31CYVPPga
</span></a><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">IMMORTAL: Playlist<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 1<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">24 Variations on ‘Venni amore’ by Righini<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 2<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Marianna Martines: Cantata ‘Il nido degli amore’ - aria ‘Sarà più dolce assai’<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 3<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Piano Trio Op. 1 No. 1<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Eleven Dances WoO 17 No.1 - Walzer<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 4<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Piano Sonata in D, Op. 10 No. 3, 2<sup>nd</sup> movt<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Mozart Fantasia in F minor for mechanical organ, 3<sup>rd</sup> movt<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 5<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Piano Sonata in E flat, Op. 7, 1<sup>st</sup> movt<br />Piano Sonata in C minor, Op. 13, ‘Pathétique’, 2<sup>nd</sup> movement<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Variations for piano duet on ‘Ich denke dein’<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 6<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Septet in E flat, Op. 20, 1st movt<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">String Quartet in F, Op. 18 No. 1, 2nd movt<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Piano Sonata in C sharp minor, Op. 27 No. 2, Moonlight, 1<sup>st</sup> movt<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 7<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, 1<sup>st</sup> movt<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Piano Sonata in E flat, Op. 31 No. 3, minuet<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 8<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Symphony No. 3 in E flat, ‘Eroica’, 1<sup>st</sup> movt<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Andante Favori<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Sonata in C, Op. 53, Waldstein, complete<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 9<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">‘An die Hoffnung’, Op. 32<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 11<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Fidelio - ‘Abscheulicher’ <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">String Quartet in F, Op. 59 No. 1, 1st movt<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 12<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 57, ‘Appassionata’, complete<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 13<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Cello Sonata in A, Op. 69, 1<sup>st</sup> movt<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 15<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Piano Sonata in F sharp, Op. 78 ‘A Therese’, complete<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 16<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Für Elise<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Fidelio - ‘O namenlose Freude’<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Piano Sonata Op. 81A ‘Das Lebewohl’, 3<sup>rd</sup> movt<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 17<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">String Quartet Op. 95, 3<sup>rd</sup> movt<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 20<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Symphony No. 7, 2<sup>nd</sup> movt<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 21<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Symphony No. 6 ‘Pastoral’, 2<sup>nd</sup> movt<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Fidelio - ‘O welche Lust…’<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Fidelio - ‘Gott, welch’ Dunkel hier’<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 23<br />Piano Sonata Op. 90<br />String Quartet Op. 59 No. 2 <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 24<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Schubert: ‘Erlkönig’<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Piano Trio in B flat, Op. 97, ‘Archduke’, 1<sup>st</sup> movt<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 25<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">‘An die ferne Geliebte’ - No. 6, ‘Nimm sie hinn denn, diese Lieder’<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 26<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Piano Sonata in B flat, Op. 106, ‘Hammerklavier’, 1<sup>st</sup> movt<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 27<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Schubert: ‘Death and the Maiden’<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Piano Sonata Op. 109 3<sup>rd</sup> movt<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Piano Sonata Op. 110 (complete)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Piano Sonata Op. 111 (complete)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 28<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Symphony No. 9 4<sup>th</sup> movt<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Grosse Fuge<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">CHAPTER 29<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">Schumann: Fantasie in C, Op. 17, 1<sup>st</sup> movt<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><br /></p></div>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-73351355546656108012021-03-31T09:56:00.007+01:002021-03-31T09:58:37.409+01:00Putney Music Interview...<p>We are extremely grateful to the brilliant team of Putney Music, the long-running and much-loved local organisation that presents interviews with the great and good of the music world and who this week decided Tom and I might be a fun double-act addition to the roster. </p><p>As the events can't be held in the usual way with stage and live audience, it's all gone online. Andrew Neill (not to be confused with Andrew Neil) asked the questions over Zoom and we responded, aided and abetted by Ricki the cat, from the study. Tom talks 35 years with the LPO, plus Bavarian State Opera, Denmark and Buxton, and I was permitted to indulge my nerdiest passions, including Korngold and golden-age piano playing. There are musical extracts from Korngold himself, Dame Myra Hess, Solti, Tennstedt, Glyndebourne and Carlos Kleiber, and more. </p><p>You can watch it here:</p><p><br /></p><iframe allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/529397753" width="640"></iframe>
<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/529397753">Putney Music: Thomas Eisner & Jessica Duchen talk to Andrew Neill</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user124620158">Win Carnall</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-79372128006715027602021-03-23T09:39:00.004+00:002021-05-21T09:37:41.325+01:00Muesli for breakfast<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;">Yesterday I had my first Covid-19 vaccination. Everyone said I’d feel odd afterwards, perhaps with a headache and exhaustion, but I was absolutely fine. </span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Early this morning, my husband and I were at the breakfast table having coffee and I went to pour myself a bowl of fruity muesli. Our preferred fruity muesli is sold in plastic bags, so to stop spillages we decant it into a Tupperware box, which was on the other side of the kitchen. As this box was nearly empty, from a cupboard containing several bags of cereal I retrieved a fresh pack, opened it and poured one helping into my bowl and the rest into the Tupperware box. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Then, however, I realised there were no raisins in it, and no almonds either. I had inadvertently poured porridge oats into the fruity muesli’s Tupperware box. I’d wanted to eat fruity muesli, but since I’d opened porridge instead, I thought ‘oh well,’ tipped my bowl of oats into a saucepan to make porridge, then took a large blue freezer bag from a drawer and prepared to pour the rest of porridge oats into it, so that I could instead fill the Tupperware box with fruity muesli.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">‘Hang on,’ said my husband, ‘we can use the Tupperware box for porridge oats instead of muesli.’ That seemed sensible. I put the large blue freezer bag back in the drawer and fetched milk to pour into the porridge saucepan. ‘But if you want muesli, you can just put those in with the other porridge oats,’ my husband said. I put the milk away and poured the porridge oats from the saucepan back into the Tupperware box. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now we remembered that there had been a little bit of muesli that was not so fruity any more at the bottom of the Tupperware box before I filled it up with what I thought was fruity muesli but was actually porridge oats. ‘It’s OK to use muesli as porridge, or to eat porridge oats as muesli – isn’t it?’ said my husband. We thought about it for a minute, because there may be some kinds of oats that you are supposed to cook first and we were not certain. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">‘Here, I’ll do it,’ said my husband. I went back to the table and my coffee. My husband took the large blue freezer bag from the drawer and began to pour the porridge oats from the Tupperware box into it, which was what I’d been going to do in the first place. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Suddenly, a noise and an exclamation. The porridge oats were now on the kitchen floor. I heard the cupboard opening and the vacuum cleaner clonking, then roaring as my husband took it out, assembled it and switched it on. ‘Stay at the table!’ he said, ‘I’m hoovering.’ I had a few sips of coffee. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The porridge oats were now inside the vacuum cleaner. The large blue freezer bag was back in the drawer. The saucepan was in the sink. The Tupperware box was empty. Finally I could have breakfast. I retrieved a bag of fruity muesli from the cereal cupboard and filled my bowl and the Tupperware box.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I now have a headache and exhaustion.</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-31517402983461069122021-02-05T09:59:00.010+00:002021-11-13T14:30:21.967+00:00"DALIA" - our new People's Opera for Garsington<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Kmq8Bozg_kU" width="560"></iframe>
<p><br /></p><p>We weren't planning to spill the beans about this project so soon, but it has just been shortlisted for an exciting development prize, the <a href="https://www.fedora-platform.com/discover/shortlist/dalia-a-community-opera/356">Fedora Award in Education</a>, so it's time to say something.</p><p>You might remember <i>Silver Birch</i>, the so-called People's Opera that Roxanna Panufnik and I wrote for Garsington Opera a few years back. A People's Opera is a community project plus much more, designed to appeal to all ages, include professionals and amateurs alike and offer an artistically memorable experience to the audience as well as to the performers. <i>Silver Birch</i> was the one with the Iraq War, Siegfried Sassoon, the trees, the Foley Artists, 180 performers aged one to 82, the kitchen sink and the dog, and the International Opera Award education shortlist in 2018. It did well. They wanted another. This is it.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzYzAXm75kURK03Z4A5F8JlyWifq0CjYcI67iJgegTu3gthfT3zO9YLMAT8BW4YDrOBLpBHu-SucP9ZfpDp_CDtrp1vPM_PUNbSs9GXwbRFmMsteAMl5bSfSl3_ozzKDaTjXWK6Q/s1414/Dalia+pic.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="795" data-original-width="1414" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzYzAXm75kURK03Z4A5F8JlyWifq0CjYcI67iJgegTu3gthfT3zO9YLMAT8BW4YDrOBLpBHu-SucP9ZfpDp_CDtrp1vPM_PUNbSs9GXwbRFmMsteAMl5bSfSl3_ozzKDaTjXWK6Q/w400-h225/Dalia+pic.png" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p><i>Dalia</i> is on a similar model. It involves children, teens, adults, professionals, amateurs, the Philharmonia and quite possibly a cricket team. It is the story of a young girl from Syria who is fostered into a UK family having lost her father and brother during a terrible journey into exile. She doesn't know if her mother is alive or dead. She is determined to survive, to seize her day and to follow her dreams - of playing cricket. But there are inner and outer demons to face: trauma, flashbacks, racists, jealousies, misunderstandings and, ultimately, an impossible decision she must make. Along the way, as her life changes, so she transforms the inner worlds of those around her.</p><p>My libretto is done and Roxanna is hard at work on the score now, fired up and (to judge from my sneak peeks) writing music that, as always, goes light years beyond anything I could have imagined. The Fedora shortlist is not the first time this project has jumped ahead of our plans for it: the Amwaj Choir of Bethlehem, which has collaborated with Roxanna on elements of the music, has already recorded 'Dalia's Song' for the Bethlehem Cultural Festival. </p><p>If you've been to Garsington Opera's home at Wormsley, you may have seen the fabulous cricket pitch on location. This is not a coincidence. How can one better unite a community of diverse peoples than through sport and music together? To say I've been on a steep learning curve is probably not saying enough; I still don't entirely understand the rules, and the fond hopes that Roxanna and I had of spending last summer at a test match evidently had to bite the pandemic-induced dust. Still, I've learned enough to know that cricket doesn't have much to do with ball games. </p><p>We owe a vast debt of gratitude to all our many advisers, who include the aforementioned Amwaj Choir, our community liaison head Manas Ghanem (who is originally from Syria), the charity Refugees at Home, the BBC commentator Eleanor Oldroyd, the South African former professional cricketer Mo Sattar, and the former refugee, now bestselling author and motivational speaker, Gulwali Passerlay, whose book <i>The Lightless Sky</i> has been a major inspiration. The production reunites us with our fabulous director Karen Gillingham, conductor Dougie Boyd, our dear friends at Garsington and hopefully even some of the same young people as <i>Silver Birch</i>, plus several years' worth of new Youth Company recruits. </p><p>One more credit: my late mother-in-law, Gisela Eisner. Her history inspired Dalia's. She was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany at the same age as our Dalia. She was put onto the Kindertransport to London aged 12, said goodbye to her parents and brother at the station in Berlin and never saw them again: all three were murdered in concentration camps. She was fostered by a Quaker family in Wolverhampton, where she found her feet and her means of integration by learning to play netball. Originally I longed to tell her story, but in collaboration with the whole team we decided we needed a present-day setting. The equivalent was all too easy to find. The difference is that shamefully the UK does not have anything remotely resembling the Kindertransport to rescue children from Syria. </p><p>On the Fedora shortlist, <i>Dalia</i> is the UK project among ten from countries all over Europe. One of the prizes is given through public vote, so if anyone felt like logging in and lending us your click, we would be very happy indeed. Thank you for your support! <a href="https://www.fedora-platform.com/discover/shortlist/dalia-a-community-opera/356">https://www.fedora-platform.com/discover/shortlist/dalia-a-community-opera/356</a></p><p><i>Dalia</i> is planned for premiere in summer 2022. We profoundly hope that the pandemic will be firmly in the past by then. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-66431290093428699772021-01-21T10:54:00.011+00:002021-01-21T11:09:16.607+00:00Commonplace books<p>Moved beyond measure by President Biden's inaugural ceremony yesterday, I've entered the last lines of Amanda Gorman's poem <i>The Hill That We Climb</i> into my "commonplace book".</p><p><i>"When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid. The new dawn blooms as we free it. For there is always light. If only we're brave enough to see it. If only we're brave enough to be it."</i></p><p>I've kept a so-called commonplace book since 1986, when my sister gave me a sleek blank notebook with thin ivory-light pages and a black leather cover that looked ever so sophisticated. A "commonplace book" is somewhere to copy out pieces of text that you don't want to lose: perhaps they appeal to you by ringing emotional bells, putting words together like music, or reflecting what you feel, think or hope. Amanda Gorman's poem uses the 110th page and after 35 years the notebook is still is excellent shape and has enough room in it to last me another 70 if used at the same rate, which will hardly be necessary.</p><p>If you've never kept a book like this, I recommend it, because you can measure out the progress of your inner self by what you read back, what you've chosen, why you chose it and where the holes are. I didn't enter anything into it between the month of my father's death in August 1996 and that of my sister's death in March 2000. The latter was poetry by Irina Ratushinskaya and Arthur Rimbaud. The former was an advert for running shoes on TV that stated simply: "Some people quit when they reach their threshold of pain. Some don't."</p><p>Back in the 80s, when I was a student, I used to write with an italic pen, trying to preserve these slivers of guiding wisdom in beautiful calligraphy, but it never quite looked as good as I wanted it to (and crossings-out suggest I'd never heard of Tippex then), so in due course I gave up and used a biro, while still attempting neatness. That went out of the window too, so there are a few entries that I can hardly read at all. Now I'm trying again to make things legible so that some day, if we survive this year and manage to grow older and need stronger reading glasses, I'll be able to look back on the latest passages and say "Hm, OK, so that's how we got through that little nightmare..."</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG-RkRR6X2K0W4XujCD3SbgHAjcSw2bHizWPNQMsXubuT1syGdPuoG7VDE668q9E19SaxustNVVr3OL3IvL9Xl4NpNd7sZMQEAmV0lNKrBtqj7FMbENE7_U5zku1t_pQzr5nEmPQ/s2048/Wallfisch+extract.HEIC" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG-RkRR6X2K0W4XujCD3SbgHAjcSw2bHizWPNQMsXubuT1syGdPuoG7VDE668q9E19SaxustNVVr3OL3IvL9Xl4NpNd7sZMQEAmV0lNKrBtqj7FMbENE7_U5zku1t_pQzr5nEmPQ/s320/Wallfisch+extract.HEIC" /></a></div><br /><p>In May 1986, I see, I copied out a passage of an interview in The Strad with Raphael Wallfisch, having no clue that I would someday meet and interview him myself. It is about the pace of artistic growth. <i>"It's interesting that everyone develops at different speeds through different circumstances. In the end it does not matter how you are formed. If you've been lucky, as I have, to be surrounded with music and to have had fantastic teaching, then you can go at your own rate without fear of going off on a wrong track." </i></p><p>This was from a time when I was profoundly unhappy at university, furious about the institutional arrogance, small-mindedness and snobbery I was encountering there, especially when I'd just spent the Easter holidays in New York sitting metaphorically at the feet of some really incredible musicians. That was the year I had a consultation lesson with Richard Goode, went to a lecture by Carl Schachter about Schenkerian analysis at the Mannes College, and met Oscar Shumsky, who put on an LP of Rachmaninov playing his own music, which blew my mind as I had never heard him before. Historical recordings were in their infancy of CD transfer back then, these gems were rare and precious and the idea that one day the whole lot would be available on computer at the touch of a button would never have been even a glimmer in the eye, let alone the ear. With a quick splash of memory, I can see how comforting Raphael's words would have seemed at that moment.</p><p>All this can be brought back at the sight of those words, inscribed in slightly smudged black ink.</p><p>Over the years the focus of the entries change - from musings on love and friendship from Emily Brontë and Joni Mitchell, to seeking ways forward in writing (Angela Carter, Hermann Hesse, DH Lawrence) and some awfully naive and now slightly embarrassing spiritual texts that were nevertheless helpful around the time my mother died in 1994. There's material from poets and authors from France, Germany, Austria, Bosnia, Russia, America, Ireland, Hungary. Bits of wisdom from Lutosławski and Cage. There's some Ovid, some Keats, some Byron, Betjemen, Dylan Thomas. There's a wonderfully useful poem about how to stop worrying - Mary Oliver's "I worried" - copied out in January 2019, and thank God almighty I didn't know that what I was worrying about just then (Brexit and the likely collapse of our musical world) was in fact entirely justified. </p><p>In the past year I've only made three entries, but that's quite a lot, since there was nothing at all in 2014 and only one apiece in 15 and 16. Since the pandemic struck, I've lighted upon a little phrase of Yeats, a fierce piece by Robert Frost called "Fire and Ice", and an extract from an interview with Hilary Mantel about what historical fiction can do that academic writing on history does not. </p><p>And now from the past to the future: Amanda Gorman, the US's youth poet laureate, 22 and blazing a trail into the future. I hope her words at the inauguration will stand as inspiration and sustenance to us for many years, should we be fortunate enough to be granted them. Now I will have them in my notebook, accessible at the slide of a drawer, for as long as I live. </p><p><br /></p>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-74338604431911632982020-12-31T17:43:00.000+00:002020-12-31T17:43:02.560+00:002020 in the JDCMB-Haus<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEd4NOdNTnZqCqw_1plhZyh2afkl-8ES9BVRvDIkYiuxbHUV1Eu1CKp9QhwzkNZGG5kzBMf7JXa9BEZJ8YKmZWGB6e-Uy47iqCWeZc9ToElclalruBvZMb8_lq9PXpEk98DERHKQ/s347/Beethoven+messy+study.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="347" data-original-width="236" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEd4NOdNTnZqCqw_1plhZyh2afkl-8ES9BVRvDIkYiuxbHUV1Eu1CKp9QhwzkNZGG5kzBMf7JXa9BEZJ8YKmZWGB6e-Uy47iqCWeZc9ToElclalruBvZMb8_lq9PXpEk98DERHKQ/w273-h400/Beethoven+messy+study.jpg" width="273" /></a></div><p>What did we do in 2020? The world did a pandemic. The UK did Brexit. I did Beethoven. </p><p>I finished writing a book about Beethoven. I wrote a bunch of articles about Beethoven and I wrote a bunch of articles about writing a book about Beethoven. I made a video with a musician, the fabulous Mishka Rushdie Momen, at the Wigmore Hall where I read from my book about Beethoven and she played some Beethoven on the piano. I played some Beethoven on the piano - I learned Op. 31 No. 3 and the 'Waldstein' and I wrote an article about learning the 'Waldstein'. My big new piece with Roxanna Panufnik about Beethoven for the Berlin Philharmonie had to be cancelled (hopefully back in 2022). My Beethoven concerts with Viv McLean and others had to be cancelled. My trip to do Beethoven in Australia had to be cancelled. I reviewed some CDs and even a recital or two at the Wigmore Hall where Beethoven was played. Others had to be cancelled. I talked to musicians about Beethoven in person, on the phone, on Zoom. I was in videos talking about Beethoven and talking to musicians about Beethoven. I presented some Beethoven events on Zoom including a video launch for my book. I spent part of December chasing Krystian Zimerman and Simon Rattle around parts of east London trying to make some videos talking to them about Beethoven. I heard them playing some Beethoven concertos at LSO St Luke's and it was heaven. I saw Fidelio twice at Covent Garden and many times online. I talked to musicians about Fidelio. I listened to my husband learning the Beethoven Violin Concerto while I was writing my articles about Beethoven. I heard one of Tasmin Little's farewell recitals, in which she played a Beethoven sonata gorgeously. I read articles about Beethoven and books about Beethoven and listened to radio programmes about Beethoven and watched TV programmes about Beethoven, and then I reviewed a book about Mozart for the Sunday Times. I think I had Covid back in February, but that was before it made the big time, and I had to cancel going to a Beethoven concert because of it. Yes, there was a global pandemic, Brexit "got done", it felt as if everything had to be cancelled and our musicians are in appalling, desperate financial trouble, with no end yet in sight, but Beethoven just went on getting everywhere.</p><p>And in the summer we got away to Germany, where we walked up some mountains, rowed across a lake, saw wonderful friends and ate more oysters, and more wonderful oysters, than I have ever seen or eaten in all my life.</p><p>Hooray for Beethoven. Hooray for oysters. Boo to Brexit. Our country used to be flawed, but workable; we had the best musical life in the world. That's finished. We'll muddle through, but the golden age is over. Beethoven will survive. </p><p>Next, I think I might learn some Mendelssohn.</p>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-16189318690364505742020-12-29T09:36:00.003+00:002020-12-29T09:37:59.013+00:00Farewell to Fou Ts'ong (1934-2020)<p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Late last night the tragic news reached me that the great Chinese pianist Fou Ts'ong has died, aged 86, of Covid-19. This phenomenal artist was part of my childhood, as from the age of 10 to 17 I studied piano with his wife, Patsy Toh. He would flit by occasionally, a somewhat shy and shadowy figure in a doorway or in the hall, and my small self was rather terrified of him. I knew little of his story then, nothing about the horrific fate of his family in the Chinese Cultural Revolution or his dramatic escape via Poland after the Chopin Competition - though I did know he was friendly with Richter, because I once turned up for a lesson to find that Richter was there in the house, practising Schubert. Finally, as editor of what was then <i>Classical Piano</i> Magazine in the 1990s, I had the chance to interview him on the occasion of his 60th birthday. I asked him one question and he talked for two hours. Fortunately I still have the text, so I am rerunning it below in tribute to him. </span></p><p><br /></p><h2 style="text-align: left;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk9bpn-vzInqi5L4crRhoahyPuEBmsPEXN348BPNYNhi9B-scLti-IjG6gNIDg4rlYXIIX9c0G8JclHvy7JSKxt0brfaVCrJ7W-oYQ4BHosB7VKVYbLvYIcZyi9jphHDFuW-VjFQ/s939/Fou+Ts%2527ong.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="939" data-original-width="750" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk9bpn-vzInqi5L4crRhoahyPuEBmsPEXN348BPNYNhi9B-scLti-IjG6gNIDg4rlYXIIX9c0G8JclHvy7JSKxt0brfaVCrJ7W-oYQ4BHosB7VKVYbLvYIcZyi9jphHDFuW-VjFQ/s320/Fou+Ts%2527ong.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fou Ts'ong<br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;">(Picture source: <span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-left;">Svensk Konsertdirektion AB Website)</span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></h2><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"I am always a beginner. I am always learning..." </span></h3><h4 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Fou Ts'ong tells Jessica Duchen the extraordinary story of his childhood in China and his escape to the West</span></h4><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Fou Ts'ong's life and career have been unconventional in almost every way, sometimes spectacular, sometimes unobtrusive, yet always sincere, taking him from the cosmopolitan Shanghai of the 1930s through Poland in the 1950s to the shores of Lake Como in the 1990s. There, under the auspices of the International Piano Foundation, he works with other eminent teachers and a select group of the best young pianists, creating, as he puts it, "the Davidsbündler of our time".</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Fou talks with great enthusiasm (and an astonishing gift for mimicry) about his childhood and the early part of his career. This world could not have been more different. "My childhood would have been peculiar anywhere," he begins, "but was especially so in China, then a country of 450 million people over 90% of whom were peasants and the small core of intellectuals a tiny percentage." Fou belonged to that minimal number, being the son of a leading Chinese scholar, Fu Lei, who, having travelled freely to Europe and studied in Paris for five years, was exceptionally equally well versed in both Classical Chinese and modern philosophy. Among his works he counted the translation into Chinese of Romain Rolland's immense and influential novel <i>Jean Christophe</i> and the complete works of Balzac. [<i>Fu Lei's Family Letters</i>, a best-seller in China, published the correspondence of father and son and the progress of the youthful musician's piano studies.]</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"<i>Jean Christophe</i> was an enormous influence in China, much more so than in Europe," explains Fou. "I think that was because it represented the liberation of the individual. To the Chinese this is the crucial issue - to this day it is not solved. My father was an extraordinary person, a renaissance man of great humanism; that is the way I was brought up. I was taught classical Chinese from a very early age by my father himself and this kind of classical education even in my generation is very rare. And my father, when he was teaching me Lao-tse or Confucius, would also quote Aristotle or Plato or Bertrand Russell or Voltaire."</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Those were very frenetic years in China, we were under Japanese occupation from 1941-45 - and for four years my father never went out of the house. There was hardly any food, just very coarse rice. Very hard times, but also it was a very hopeful time because the whole of China was in a ferment; everybody felt that fascism was evil, and evil and good were very clear cut. We were good, so we fought for the cause."</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Fou's family also possessed a large number of records of classical music. Fou grew up to the sounds of artists such as Alfred Cortot, Edwin Fischer, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Pablo Casals. From a very early age he was mesmerised by music, yet it was not until he was 17 years old that he began to take the piano seriously as the focus of his life. Early lessons when he was ten were given by a pupil of his father, a young woman who had studied with a Russian pianist in Shanghai. Her loving and encouraging approach provided "the greatest joy in my life" for the otherwise strictly reared child. He progressed by leaps and bounds, but when he was sent instead to the Italian pianist and conductor Paci, one-time assistant to Toscanini at La Scala Milan and the founder of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra - who had "got stuck" in Shanghai thanks to a passion for gambling - he found himself facing a very different approach which took all the joy away. He was given nothing but exercises to play for a year, plus the indignity of balancing a coin on the back of the hand.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">After the family moved to Kuming in Yunan province, Fou became a rebellious teenager, passionately committed to the idea of communist revolution. His father, among the first Chinese to realise the truth about Stalin and the lies of Bolshevik communisim in Russia, acted as "a Cassandra of his time" and foretold disaster. His son disagreed and eventually a family split ensued. His father went back to Shanghai while Fou, alone in Yunan, was thrown out of school after school and finally, running out of schools and excuses, applied to and was accepted at the University of Yunan at the age of 15. He enrolled for English literature but spent his time "making revolution all over the place, falling in and out of love all the time, drinking and playing bridge!" </span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But word got out that he could play the piano. When two rival churches in the town both put on Handel's <i>Messiah</i> at Christmas they competed for Fou's services as accompanist. Fortunately the performances were on different days, so he played for both. By exam time he was terrified, having done no work. Instead, he put on, with the help of fellow students, a concert in one church where he played an album called <i>101 Favourite Piano Pieces</i> from cover to cover on a wartime upright. At the end a collection was made for him and immediately he had enough funds to make his way back to Shanghai by himself to continue his musical development.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The 17-year old thoroughly impressed his father with his difficult two-month solitary journey; his father agreed to help him pursue studies with the aim of becoming a concert pianist. These took on a distinctly surprising slant as Fou had very few lessons; one piano teacher emigrated to Canada after three months; next, what lessons he did have were from not a pianist but a violinist, the aging Alfred Wittenburg, a refugee from Nazi Germany, ex-concert master of the Berlin Opera and chamber music partner of Artur Schnabel. After Wittenburg's death, "I studied by intuition, thinking and reading books. I studied on my own and made my debut one year later. In Shanghai that made such a stir that central government, who wanted to send someone abroad for a competition, came to Shanghai to search out for me as one of the candidates."</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That was how Fou went to a competition in Bucharest, where he won third prize, and then, fatefully, to Poland, where the government sent Andrzej Panufnik himself to listen to him to find out if he was worthy to participate in the Chopin Competition Panufnik raved, "and soon everyone in Poland was raving. 'Have you heard him play mazurkas? Listen to those mazurkas!' I became a sort of performing monkey, everyone was asking me to play mazurkas all the time!" Fou laughs. He duly entered the competition and won the mazurka prize.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><a href="https://youtu.be/SqFOylOw2Ls">https://youtu.be/SqFOylOw2Ls</a></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">After the competition Fou studied in Warsaw and Cracow, thriving on the enthusiasm and encouragement he received there and falling in love again, this time with Mozart, an affair which lasts to this day. Professor Drzewicki, who also taught Halina Czerny-Stefanska and Adam Haraciewicz, sat and smiled through Fou's lessons. "After the competition he told me, 'Ts'ong you are different, you are so original and personal, you should only come to my lesson maybe once a month, no more'. Altogether I can count on my fingers the number of times I went. He said, 'I am here only to guide you if you go out of way'. </span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"I was a great counterfeiter because I managed to hide all my troubles by my unique way of fingering, by my imagination, somehow by hoping to produce the goods. I always wanted to realise whatever vision I had in my head - in what way I don't know, I found it in my own way. Unless the vision was presented in a way that didn't show its deficiencies I would not allow it to go out. In a way I am my own downfall because I camouflage so well. In some ways it's also good because my way is original. But the struggle I have had with pianistic problems over the years is unbelievable, even to this day. I have to practise awfully hard; I envy pianists who have a great facility because I wish I had more time to play more music. Musically I am very greedy!'</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Fou extended his stay in Poland as long as he could, for by then it had become dangerous for him to return to China where the anti-rightist movement - "the dress rehearsal of the Cultural Revolution" - had begun, and condemned him and his father. "It was a matter of life and death." He was desperate to go to Russia where a new friend and supporter was doing his best to offer help: Sviatoslav Richter, who wrote an enthusiastic article about Fou for a communist magazine entitled <i>Friendship</i>, published jointly in Russia and China. Richter had hoped thus to help Fou come officially to Russia, but while the article appeared in the Russian edition, the Chinese never carried it; nothing came of the scheme. Fou did not learn of this episode until many years afterwards.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">His dramatic escape to Britain was made possible by the help of some more eminent beings: Wanda Wilkomirska, who helped to persuade the Polish authorities to "look the other way"; a music-loving wealthy Englishman named Auberon Herbert, who helped arrange an invitation for Fou to play in London, for which he could obtain a visa; and the pianist Julius Katchen, who lent him the air fare. To help throw the Chinese authorities off the scent, a "farewell"concert was announced at the last minute; Fou Ts'ong would perform two concertos, Mozart 's C major K503 and Chopin's F minor (both of which he learned in a week - on Saturday evening, 23 December. Another red herring, a farewell recital, was also announced for a later date, though pianist and organisers knew it would never happen. Early the next morning - a Sunday and Christmas Eve in a strongly Catholic country, a day on which "even the most diehard military police will become a little bit lax!" - Fou Ts'ong took a British Airways plane to London. He was free and an immediate celebrity in the West. Caught in the Cultural Revolution in China, Fou's father and mother both committed suicide.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Today, looking back over this extraordinary story and his varied fortunes since that time, Fou has some sensible advice to offer young would-be pianists. "First, you must have good self awareness, to know what you're made of. If you really have got it in you, not only talent but real aspiration, that means you are ready to sacrifice your life for it, totally dedicated to it, that's almost more important than talent. And even with these two, you have to be prepared to get nowhere in terms of worldly 'success'. You must know what you're in for! I wouldn't advise anyone to go on for the wrong reasons. </span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"I consider myself terribly lucky, although I wouldn't consider my career that easy, partly because I have my deficiencies, also partly and largely because of my character. My wife Patsy [pianist and teacher Patsy Toh] says to me, 'You shouldn't complain, because you made your own destiny'. And that's true. Today I think to myself, thank God, now I'm really beginning to understand music. But I consider myself a beginner. I am always a beginner. I am always learning. I think I am very lucky that I never had so much success that I could be blinded by vanity. And to be in music, you are very lucky. When I was very young, I wrote to my father from Poland that I was sad and lonely. He wrote back: 'You could never be lonely. Don't you think you are living with the greatest souls of the history of mankind all the time?' Now that's how I feel, always."</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p>
</p><p style="font-family: Times; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-85563389243569139322020-12-23T12:15:00.001+00:002020-12-23T12:15:15.744+00:00Happy...<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1FuJZ_C4E6eWsGDnz0QRxviJ65A-DgeW3rQ6UhEN2z6tDmj4ffpxnZMgGyxN-LLhkNRSrQ4VNuE_YBccTdBkgn2OZMRF4k5CjrFnMYH7AZw55kvWErotzRy8jbFUn8h04hcjVaQ/s1747/HAPPY+CATMAS%2521.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1240" data-original-width="1747" height="284" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1FuJZ_C4E6eWsGDnz0QRxviJ65A-DgeW3rQ6UhEN2z6tDmj4ffpxnZMgGyxN-LLhkNRSrQ4VNuE_YBccTdBkgn2OZMRF4k5CjrFnMYH7AZw55kvWErotzRy8jbFUn8h04hcjVaQ/w400-h284/HAPPY+CATMAS%2521.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: red; font-size: large;">A very merry Christmas and happy new year </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: red; font-size: large;">to all our friends and readers,</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: red; font-size: large;">with love from JDCMB</span></p>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-59866269206862108212020-12-21T00:00:00.025+00:002020-12-21T10:27:05.362+00:00Welcome to (what remains of) the JDCMB Chocolate Silver Awards 2020<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi13Mp5FjIpRRqP6edDeXdTDyx14oU9CyRBhoKJ4KpyUZoUcajEXvvFToXTFUzhYjJMO3S7hauJAeeSxxWjipaA1cjFJ3l9CvllfeW1KxLP85lFFjs7OZd0_1XCbFcHch9Zubzww/s620/Bubbly.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="255" data-original-width="620" height="165" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi13Mp5FjIpRRqP6edDeXdTDyx14oU9CyRBhoKJ4KpyUZoUcajEXvvFToXTFUzhYjJMO3S7hauJAeeSxxWjipaA1cjFJ3l9CvllfeW1KxLP85lFFjs7OZd0_1XCbFcHch9Zubzww/w400-h165/Bubbly.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>It's 21 December! Welcome back to our cyberposhplace, with a difference. Nowadays we are all living permanently in cyberplaces. Paradoxically, I considered holding this year's JDCMB Chocolate Silver Awards ceremony in the flesh for the first time, because now a real cybermeetingplace exists called Zoom and we'd be able to invite readers to join in from all over the world. This time last year nobody would even have thought of such a thing. That's just one way that Covid-19 has changed our world. The others are worse.</p><p>One thing I've learned in 2020, though, is that presenting an event online is still real. It takes, in fact, a lot of organisation, forward planning and slick technical support. And you know something? I'm tired. </p><p>Many of us are. Unable to see our friends and family, deprived of the concerts and theatres on which our imaginative and social life centres and watching our towns crumbling as unit after unit gives up and shuts down, is depressing enough. Seeing even household-name musicians and actors struggling to make ends meet while excluded from the government's self-employment support schemes - that's horrifying. And guess what, we've got Brexit in 10 days' time and <i>still </i>nobody knows what's going to happen. Since I first drafted this post yesterday, a new crisis has emerged, which you can read about in all the papers rather than here.</p><p>While I could be all positive and "hello sun, hello trees," and "isn't music wonderful," I don't want to pretend. I'm doing my best to keep my nose above water. As regular readers will have noticed, blogging is not uppermost. I hit a largish birthday this month and it seemed time to take stock. It's not only a question of not being as young as one used to be, but also of longing to create something worthwhile, something that has a chance of lasting. Blogging is ephemeral. I wrote <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Immortal-Jessica-Duchen/dp/1789651158" target="_blank">a novel about Beethoven called </a><i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Immortal-Jessica-Duchen/dp/1789651158" target="_blank">Immortal</a>,</i> it's more than 400 pages long and you can always read that instead. (For a taster, h<a href="https://wigmore-hall.org.uk/live-streams/jessica-duchen-immortal-who-was-beethoven-s-immortal-beloved">ere's the video presentation that the Wigmore Hall</a> filmed in September, in which I introduce the book and read extracts, and the wonderful <a href="https://www.mishkarushdiemomen.com">Mishka Rushdie Momen</a> plays the Piano Sonata in F, Op. 10 No. 2.)</p><p>Now, on with our awards ceremony, or what remains of it.</p><p>Come on in! Grab a glass of cyberbubbly. Here in our imaginary virtual venue, we can hug our friends without fear. This time we're outdoors, but it's a beautiful warm Mediterranean-style night. Strings of fairy lights glitter in the trees. The moon shines bright over the water, a string quartet is playing Irving Berlin and Cole Porter in the background, there's a buzz of conversation punctuated by the piccolo of joyous laughter (remember that sound?), and Ricki and Cosi are ensconced on their silken cushions in front of a large photo of Solti the Ginger Cat, ready to present the winners with their prize purrs and a cuddle of their lovely chocolate-silver and usual-silver Somali cat fur. </p><p>Our guests of honour have scrambled up through the back of the centuries' wardrobe to join us from far-flung times. Ludwig van Beethoven has made an exception to his hatred of parties and is present to celebrate his 250th birthday. We can't change his otosclerosis, but we can give him a state-of-the-art hearing aid, so he's with us, smiling, laughing and joking, with Josephine by his side and little Minona in her party dress. Times have changed, they remark; if only they could be alive now instead, this is how it could have been. And we'd have had nine more symphonies. Only Therese, in her habitual black, is little changed. Don't say I didn't tell you, she twinkles. </p><p>Alongside them, here are our friends of the present day, gathering from everywhere in the world: New York and Sydney, Paris and Berlin, Tuscany and Switzerland, Leipzig and Warsaw. Barnes, Manchester, Glasgow and Camden. We haven't seen each other the whole damned year. Love you. Miss you. Here's to next time...</p><p>Quiet please. Grab a refill and come over to the cushions. Now, would the following winners please approach the podium. And let's have a huge round of applause for every musician who has soldiered on bravely during 2020 and still manages to touch our hearts and souls, despite everything.</p><p><br /></p><p>ICON OF THE YEAR</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBl-u35cQbWrtwFmYPboLQd0Sei873WtQKaNzXDkSBM5ArJ3IlzvQqe4ALUQjkQx-XWg7LDTZ_s9eGlWZwMEXICa9T4qt0fKh7Vh_6QOemiORIzSG59_KoAFMHNxhw1Yk5OV340w/s640/Beethoven+by+Stieler%252C+1819.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="512" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBl-u35cQbWrtwFmYPboLQd0Sei873WtQKaNzXDkSBM5ArJ3IlzvQqe4ALUQjkQx-XWg7LDTZ_s9eGlWZwMEXICa9T4qt0fKh7Vh_6QOemiORIzSG59_KoAFMHNxhw1Yk5OV340w/w160-h200/Beethoven+by+Stieler%252C+1819.jpg" width="160" /></a></div>Thank you, Luigi. You help us to be resilient. There could have been no better anniversary to mark in this of all years. And I'm glad to see that in Germany they've decided your celebrations are going on next year too. Hopefully we'll do the same here. Thank you for letting me put you in a book. Thank you, too, to those marvellous people who have paid sterling tribute to you in their top-notch series: <a href="https://www.classicfm.com/radio/shows-presenters/beethoven-the-man-revealed/podcast/">John Suchet on Classic FM</a> and <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1119363/beethoven-unleashed/9781529128246.html">Donald MacLeod on BBC Radio 3</a>, respectively available now as podcast and audiobook. And a huge thank you to my publishers, Unbound, for your faith in <i>Immortal</i> and for making sure that it could still come out in time for the anniversary even when so much else was being put back to 2021. <a href="https://roxannapanufnik.com">Roxanna Panufnik</a>'s choral piece <i>Ever Us, </i>with my libretto, fell victim to the pandemic back in May - it should have been in the Berlin Philharmonie - but all being well it might instead be heard in 2022.<div><br /><p></p><p><b>ARTISTS OF THE YEAR</b></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEJinBias9ykoLlTIyDF5_vOBV4-qoGoZA26LctRUopTS6xawkhZw2XA_IZGSXJfUVchPi-kvorVb46cw-IzAYx0K_3WyLgoN_IQFOPEJjqVLMsT3GNnypJNRQr4yJBrSyd1bM4w/s410/Krystian+by+Kasslara.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><b style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="410" data-original-width="320" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEJinBias9ykoLlTIyDF5_vOBV4-qoGoZA26LctRUopTS6xawkhZw2XA_IZGSXJfUVchPi-kvorVb46cw-IzAYx0K_3WyLgoN_IQFOPEJjqVLMsT3GNnypJNRQr4yJBrSyd1bM4w/w156-h200/Krystian+by+Kasslara.jpg" width="156" /></b></a></div><div><b>-- Krystian Zimerman</b></div><div><br /></div>I've met many musicians, and plenty of the finest, but only two who I believe deserve the title "genius". One was Pierre Boulez. The other is <a href="https://www.harrisonparrott.com/artists/krystian-zimerman">Krystian Zimerman</a>. Thanks to a booklet notes commission, I've spent part of December pursuing Zimerman and Simon Rattle around corners of east London and attending some of the rehearsals for their incredible series of the Beethoven piano concertos at LSO St Luke's. It has provided an insight into what it actually takes to be such an artist: as TS Eliot said, "A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything)." Yes: everything, every hour, every cell, every emotion and every last scrap of spirit. Most of us have simply no idea... The concerts are being <a href="https://www.dg-premium.com/dg_stage_video/beethoven-250-krystian-zimerman-performs-the-complete-beethoven-piano-concertos-3/">streamed on DG's new online concert platform</a>, DG Stage (the last is the 'Emperor' Concerto, being shown tonight - you can still catch part 2, nos. 2 and 4, as well). The audio recording will be out in the spring. Perhaps one of 2020's biggest surprises was finding that he's on Instagram. (Photo above by Kasslara.) <p></p><p>-<b>- Tasmin Little</b></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9Li7STIkmrULLai2GFNLyywvCoFNZwurm-Q8FNYVmYwPf8TlcUhCc7uUF_yEgHjR19nLrlJdwldrZNk4k90L3yYX_qEUAcYPFU5P0qBuM9aE-NrQmwPUxJmElQMmUNPMoyTL-CA/s2048/Tasmin+Little+by+Paul+Mitchell.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1365" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9Li7STIkmrULLai2GFNLyywvCoFNZwurm-Q8FNYVmYwPf8TlcUhCc7uUF_yEgHjR19nLrlJdwldrZNk4k90L3yYX_qEUAcYPFU5P0qBuM9aE-NrQmwPUxJmElQMmUNPMoyTL-CA/w133-h200/Tasmin+Little+by+Paul+Mitchell.jpg" width="133" /></a></div>It's hard to believe that <a href="http://www.tasminlittle.com">Tasmin Little</a> is retiring from the stage, but she insists that she is. I attended her last Southbank Centre performance, watching from among a smattering of guests distanced in the back stalls; it included among other things, her astounding performance of Brahms's D minor sonata with the stunningly fine Russian pianist <a href="https://gugnin.com">Andrey Gugnin</a>. Tasmin, I said later, did you know that Margot Fonteyn decided against retiring when she met Rudolf Nureyev? Hint hint. Tasmin laughed, but her bright smile hardened a little. She says she regrets having to discontinue such a partnership, but she<i> is </i>stopping, and that is that. So you can't say I didn't try. She'd already had to postpone her farewell concerts from summer to autumn and is busy giving the last ones right now, in those places where concerts haven't been knocked out of the water yet again by Tier 3 or 4. Here's to your pastures new, Tasmin, whatever they may be. Come and have a purr from Ricki and Cosi. (Photo by Paul Mitchell.)</div><div><br /><p></p><p><b>LOCKDOWN HEROES</b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBXluiL3CkHwxs4TX6ezjRXSxg8G-nq32MJE3ICXRGeBPGNn75c2iJ73ZGGLSTZG9UnpybIJrn2t6TK5mKFCzS5WUun-VpA8y_Q9vAvtt4tNkD4MGUjqC0pEKn-V-w3VTPF5I4fw/s2048/Elena+%2526+Tom+at+Kings+Place.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBXluiL3CkHwxs4TX6ezjRXSxg8G-nq32MJE3ICXRGeBPGNn75c2iJ73ZGGLSTZG9UnpybIJrn2t6TK5mKFCzS5WUun-VpA8y_Q9vAvtt4tNkD4MGUjqC0pEKn-V-w3VTPF5I4fw/w240-h320/Elena+%2526+Tom+at+Kings+Place.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><p>There are quite a few of you who meet this description. Step forward, <b><a href="https://www.elenaurioste.com">Elena Urioste</a> and <a href="https://www.tomposter.co.uk">Tom Poster</a> </b><i>(pictured right)</i>! Your UriPoste Jukebox, violin and piano music for all seasons daily from your home, has brightened the year. Hello <b><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/may/01/its-diy-tv-daniel-hope-on-performing-to-millions-from-his-living-room">Daniel Hope</a></b>, whose living room concerts were pounced upon for televising by Arte and spread the music-making of fabulous colleagues in Berlin far and wide. Welcome, dear <b><a href="http://www.kannehmasons.com">Kanneh-Mason Family</a></b>, who have brought us hope and inspiration at every turn - from your home concerts on Facebook to Sheku and Isata's gorgeous Proms recital to Jeneba playing Florence Price's Piano Concerto in One Movement with the ever-more-marvellous <a href="https://www.chineke.org">Chineke! Orchestra</a> at the Southbank, plus the enchanting Carnival of the Animals album with Michael Morpurgo. I also loved Kadiatu's book <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B084G9316B/">House of Music</a></i>, charting in graphic detail what it takes - oh yes - to raise such a family. <b><a href="https://www.gabrielamontero.com">Gabriela Montero</a>, <a href="https://angelahewitt.com">Angela Hewitt</a>, <a href="https://www.igor-levit.com">Igor Levit</a> and <a href="https://borisgiltburg.com">Boris Giltburg</a> </b>are among the many fabulous pianists who have been playing for us online. The <b><a href="https://wigmore-hall.org.uk">Wigmore Hall</a></b> blazed a trail in getting live concerts going again, while they could, and streaming them into our homes for free. It is up to us to do better at paying for this, and really you should if you can. <b><a href="https://www.kingsplace.co.uk">Kings Place</a> </b>hit on an inventive and empathetic way to tempt nervous audience members out of their houses<b> </b>and into to the concert hall for the first time in the summer, offering one-to-one 10-minute sessions with Elena and Tom among others. That was my own first trip on the tube in four months, and they performed a piece selected especially for me ("We heard you were coming in, so we dug out some Fauré..."). And jolly wonderful it was. (Pictured above, photo by JD.)</p><p>This list could continue. What's astonished me is the amount of imagination, resourcefulness, determination, understanding, urgency and passion that so many in the music world have shown in the face of catastrophe. They don't call us "creative industries" for nothing. Perhaps the only good thing to come out of 2020 is the fact that we will never, ever take music for granted again. And if some do, we can say to them "Remember the pandemic, when the music stopped..." Could we live without it? No, we couldn't. Never forget.</p><p>Oh, and one Turkey of the Year: the British government marching us smack onto the rocks of Brexit despite the existing devastation. What a phenomenally stupid waste of time and energy it all is. We'll have to spend the years ahead putting ourselves back together. </p><p>We are all connected. We all affect one another. There are positive forces that unite and inspire us: music, art, logic, poetry, science, learning, wisdom, generosity, honesty, kindness, love. There are negative ones, which divide us: greed, wanton destruction, lies, superstition, ignorance, heartlessness, hatred and indifference. </p><div>Perhaps the best we can hope for is that destruction really will bring creative opportunities (as the disaster capitalists would say - admittedly that's not a great advert...) and that we can turn the collapse of old structures to good by creating new ones, re-establishing as our driving values the qualities that represent the best of humankind, rather than the worst. </div><div><br /></div><div>Speech over. Grab some more cyberbubbly and let's dance while we still can. Merry Christmas.</div><div><br /></div></div>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-59527523347274770212020-11-23T10:24:00.005+00:002020-11-23T11:17:06.363+00:00Here in our haven...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwwKx4JPpxKjszeUMHecy-5-CCkwlxU0buor6pavSV0t26HX1PEJoiyATjak-oC6Iyb4l_3D19lWCz30PCmtYQcHaogc2qnzqXVsQTlUT2UO6mC2sMIEDeap7_Q7pBeTzZLLUhUA/s2048/IMG_7837.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwwKx4JPpxKjszeUMHecy-5-CCkwlxU0buor6pavSV0t26HX1PEJoiyATjak-oC6Iyb4l_3D19lWCz30PCmtYQcHaogc2qnzqXVsQTlUT2UO6mC2sMIEDeap7_Q7pBeTzZLLUhUA/w400-h300/IMG_7837.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>It's been a hectic few weeks and a bout of tonsillitis didn't help. So from the tranquility of a plane-less Monday morning, in company with a snoring cat and a violinist practising Paganini downstairs, here's a quick update and some links for a catch-up.</p><p>First of all, because of a sudden, belated and unexpected lockdown (thanks, Boris...) everyone's carefully laid plans for distancing audiences at concerts went up in smoke and everything for November got cancelled. There's been a scramble to rethink, reimagine and reschedule. The Up Close and Musical festival at the Fidelio Orchestra Cafe has been moved to May, my 'Immortal' concert with Piers Lane for the Barnes Music Society has been rescheduled for 16 January, and the Nordern Farm performance has unfortunately had to bite the dust. There are a few other dates in the diary for June, but let's cross that bridge when we come to it.</p><p>One of the events that I was most sorry to lose this year was the staging of the youth opera <i>The Selfish Giant</i> by the composer John Barber, for which I did the libretto. It was meant to happen in July. Now we are hoping that it will be able to enjoy a performance in some way, shape or form next summer instead. Like <i>The Happy Princess </i>with composer Paul Fincham in 2019, it's a commission from Garsington for their youth companies, and this time it is also a co-commission from Opera North. The story is a transformation of an Oscar Wilde fairytale. It is all about the beauty of nature, how much we need it, how much we need to be at one with it, and how completely stupid it is to build walls between different peoples and different generations. We need to work with nature and with each other to build a better world - because one day we will leave it, and then what is our legacy?</p><p>"Here in the garden, our haven, here in the garden, our heaven; here we can be who we're meant to be, where we find ourselves and are free..." When we wrote the piece we had no idea that this year the beauty of nature would become what would sustain our young performers who were indeed cut off from their friends, their schools, their rehearsals and their joy in singing together. They made a film about it, using some songs from the opera. It's called <i>Our Haven</i> and Garsington released it on Friday for National Children's Day. Here it is: <a href="https://youtu.be/jJK1Rc1DdFU">https://youtu.be/jJK1Rc1DdFU</a></p><p>Meanwhile, the Zoom launch for 'Immortal' went off with much more zing than I'd thought possible. We had more than 50 attendees from all over the world, which was astounding, and the support of Joanna Pieters, who presented and interviewed, Simon Hewitt Jones, who produced, and Mishka Rushdie Momen, who played, was absolutely incredible. Although I was alone in the study, and Ricki slept in a chair behind me all the way through, I felt as if we'd had a real party. If you didn't see if and you'd like to, t<a href="https://youtu.be/acmvkCaAvXI">he whole thing is now on Youtube, here.</a></p><p>Soon afterwards, I found myself roped into a reimagining of an event for the wonderful <a href="https://www.wimbledonmusicfestival.co.uk">Wimbledon International Music Festival,</a> a favourite calendar highlight of mine here in south-west London. Normally the inimitable Anthony Wilkinson brings world-class music to live stages on his own doorstep, but of course this time everything had to be moved online and replanned for the format. You can see the lot for a small fee at their website - and yes, one should have to pay to watch music online, because making these things costs and otherwise there soon won't be any. The festival includes some amazing concerts such as a cello and piano recital of Beethoven by Raphael Wallfisch and John York, a typically thoughtful and eclectic programme from pianist Clare Hammond and a star highlight filmed at Wigmore Hall with Paul Lewis performing the Beethoven Diabelli Variations. If you think there's a Beethoven theme, you're right; the event into which I was parachuted was a discussion with pianist Piers Lane, actor/director/writer Tama Matheson and festival director Anthony Wilkinson exploring the magic of Beethoven and, beyond that, what the arts really mean to us, why we need them and where we go from here. <a href="https://www.wimbledonmusicfestival.co.uk">All details here.</a></p><p>Next, a call from The Sunday Times. There's a new biography of Mozart just out, by the splendid Jan Swafford, the musicologist and composer who seemed to capture the nation's hearts when he appeared in the BBC series <i>Being Beethoven</i>. This latest book is 800 pages long, which I didn't completely realise until after I'd agreed to review it, but it is such a lovely read that I felt a bit bereft when I'd finished. The review was in yesterday's paper and <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mozart-the-reign-of-love-by-jan-swafford-review-gd2mm53pm">is online (£) here.</a></p><p>Yesterday, too, I was on Talk Radio rabbiting about Beethoven and 'Immortal'. There's been an enthusiastic blog tour of book site reviews, and we're waiting with slightly nibbled nails for further reviews to appear in print. In general, though, I would advise any budding novelists to check in advance that their release date does not coincide with a very important American presidential election, because firstly nobody will have eyes for much else, and secondly nothing that you write will ever be able to match up to the bizarre reality unfolding in front of our eyes there.</p><p>As the divine Joni Mitchell sings, "something's lost and something's won, in living every day... I really don't know life at all."</p><p>Let's keep on keeping on, and remember the beauty in the garden. </p><p>To which end, I've just ordered 80 daffodil bulbs. </p>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-14736630434705980972020-11-08T12:01:00.002+00:002020-11-08T12:01:24.113+00:00Zoom launch event for 'Immortal' on Tuesday <p>"<i>O friends, not those tones!" </i>That particular dog has had its day: soon a new day will dawn. Congratulations to our friends over the Pond for electing President Biden and Vice-President Harris! I've been out in the park this morning and everyone is smiling, despite lockdown. America's big moment can bring hope to us all: change is possible. </p><p>Meanwhile...</p><p><br /></p><img alt="Immortal - Jessica Duchen Book Launch" class="img-responsive" src="https://us02web.zoom.us/w_p/89450432948/862461d6-0671-437e-879b-c6ca6ebb788b.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(35, 35, 51); color: #232333; display: block; font-family: Lato, Helvetica, Arial; font-size: 14px; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-height: 200px; max-width: 640px; vertical-align: middle; width: auto;" /><p>All the book events I had lined up for November have had to be cancelled/postponed due to the new lockdown (details in the sidebar, which I'll update as necessary). So we're having an online celebration instead. It's on Tuesday 10 November at 6pm UK time for round about an hour, and there'll be an interview, a reading, Q&A and hopefully even some music. If you'd like to join in, <a href="https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0pcumsrTkjHtwIRPQaTf0oMPbVmmvc4Wn5">please register here </a>to receive an email containing the Zoom link, and then just show up in cyberspace with a glass of something or a cuppa or whatever. We will do our best to make it as festive as possible! Hope to see you there.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-12820722605262285842020-10-29T15:02:00.009+00:002021-05-21T09:39:00.617+01:00'Immortal' is out, and so is its Wigmore digital launch<p>It's publication day for <i>Immortal.</i> I am overjoyed to say that we are sending it out into the world with a digital launch presentation from the stage of the Wigmore Hall, thanks to the unbelievably kind invitation of John Gilhooly. </p><p><span style="text-align: left;">I'm joined in a unique words&music presentation by the rising star pianist Mishka Rushdie Momen, who plays the Beethoven Piano Sonata in F, Op. 10 No. 2. It was a memorable day: both of us were back in the hall for the first time since lockdown and I certainly felt a little strange performing to the empty auditorium, where I've enjoyed so many unforgettable concerts in better times. I hope you enjoy hearing the readings from the early part of the book when Josephine and Therese meet Beethoven for the first time, become his pupils and hear him improvise; and Mishka's playing is out of this world.</span></p><p>My profound thanks to Mishka, John, my lovely publishers Unbound, and the entire Wigmore Hall team for making this possible.</p><p>Meanwhile, <i>Immortal </i>is now available from all good bookshops. Enjoy!</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xM3lfdXOtWs" width="320" youtube-src-id="xM3lfdXOtWs"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-63202270403550191302020-10-24T09:37:00.005+01:002020-10-24T09:37:59.158+01:00Hologram future?<p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Eugene Birman has sent me a fascinating piece about how a university research project that he initiated pre-pandemic has been reimagined for the Covid-19 era - using holograms. Is this the future? Who knows - I can hardly see more than a few days ahead at the moment and I am sure I'm not the only one - but what's certain is that it is emblematic of the creativity, originality and sheer determination with which so many people in the arts world are responding to the situation in which we find ourselves. I hope that we can take heart, build on the positives and find a way forward, possibly one that will break down boundaries in all kinds of new ways. I am not the planet's most optimistic person at the best of times, but I do have <i>hope</i>. Which is different. Over now to Eugene's guest post. JD</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnib9ZjLsJawf0Hs_6563jGaoBzZdy706DW1kVs5lzdYT2OkmIVfrIZr8tg37M0uS0iQBDRUvlxh6c5esDd1zXYG-6JUttZQAjiWxbLLzWIgLAjMRlLvxbqrkGY_tiWVNIi3xABA/s2048/holo1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="2048" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnib9ZjLsJawf0Hs_6563jGaoBzZdy706DW1kVs5lzdYT2OkmIVfrIZr8tg37M0uS0iQBDRUvlxh6c5esDd1zXYG-6JUttZQAjiWxbLLzWIgLAjMRlLvxbqrkGY_tiWVNIi3xABA/w400-h250/holo1.png" width="400" /></span></a></div><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><b>HOLOGRAM FUTURE? </b></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">A guest post by Eugene Birman</span></b></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 9pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There can never be enough ink spilled on the global catastrophe in which the performing arts finds itself at the moment.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>From my own vantage point in Hong Kong, where pandemic and protests have, in concert, over the past 12 months effectively cleared the entire live performance calendar, the term ‘catastrophe’ is particularly apropos because the public life in the city is essential to its functioning - with the smallest average home size in the world, the street is our living room, and the concert hall our home theatre system. Yet to focus on what we don’t have distracts from a conversation on what we <i>could </i>have. Today, the ink spills in the direction of some positive, practical thinking.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 9pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 9pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Eighteen months ago, back when a trip to London was about as easy as one across Hong Kong harbor, I initiated a university research project with installation artist Kingsley Ng in how arts and computer science could reflect on global climate change, a guilt-free musical discourse on the indisputable facts. We had a plan - a big data-fueled art and music installation on how we relate to air in Hong Kong, which, with no heavy industry of its own, has lost its clear skies increasingly to smog from an industrializing world.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 9pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 9pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;">Theatre of Voices would sing it, we would work with groups of young people from the Hong Kong Children’s Choir - the real stakeholders of our current-day decisions - to design a text to sing that they actually wrote, and bring audiences in small groups on a narrative adventure through a lush and lavish greenhouse in the center of the city, the Forsgate Conservatory. ARIA </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;">空氣頌</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;">would combine symbolism, star performers, and a scheduled premiere in September 2020 during the Autumn Festival, which, away from its colored lanterns, is traditionally a time to reflect on our connection to the Earth.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 9pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 9pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyoR677OVQk4J1_YRhJzULvDd9tdAcrPMKOIuxdnKjjB58DyzDIVfwd0Vu8B9FHBix84Ma7eFKKsXuj5FFzoFkjx098tCNQTnX1CRUqqGxBgtJdynzo-L5g5BGWmlvyMQhn_X5QQ/s2048/holo2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="2048" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyoR677OVQk4J1_YRhJzULvDd9tdAcrPMKOIuxdnKjjB58DyzDIVfwd0Vu8B9FHBix84Ma7eFKKsXuj5FFzoFkjx098tCNQTnX1CRUqqGxBgtJdynzo-L5g5BGWmlvyMQhn_X5QQ/w400-h250/holo2.png" width="400" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span></span><p></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 9pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 9pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">History, evidently, took a different course. The complete closure of the city’s external borders meant bringing Theatre of Voices to perform live would be impossible. Strict guidelines on social distancing inside enclosed spaces, the impossibility of rehearsing the children’s choir due to restrictions on assembly and closed schools, and then a third wave of infections in the latter half of July: I suppose the right idea would have been simply to postpone to some far-off date in a less dystopian future.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 9pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 9pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But somehow we insisted on adapting to this whole thing, and with the frankly unprecedented support and encouragement of the city’s Leisure and Cultural Services Department as well as Hong Kong Baptist University, not to mention a tireless team led by curator Stephanie Cheung, the project in its pandemic-proof, but conceptually unaltered, state will go live in mid-November.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 9pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 9pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The key, I think, was to preserve the live element. Certainly, streaming performances have allowed musicians to at least continue to exist in the public consciousness, but we do not experience them as an audience as much as we simply consume their content. Back in May, we started investigating the possibility of rendering Theatre of Voices as holograms, keeping their presence as performers in the physical space intact.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 9pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 9pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">By the end of August, we had 335GB of video and audio footage, meticulously shot in Copenhagen to Kingsley’s specifications. The Hong Kong Children’s Choir somehow learned a microtonal score over Zoom, with rehearsals beginning live only the second week of October due to relaxed gathering restrictions. And while we’re not quite sure whether a public audience will be permitted for the live event or not, should they be, they will experience the show at most 20 to a group, allowing for ideal sightlines and plenty of separation. Having the holograms allowed us to increase the live shows from three as initially planned to eight nights with perhaps two shows per night; those 335GB are working very hard for us.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 9pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 9pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMhqSdV-5Ppp6CRYWncUf3QP1Z9CQ77N9K2zvPMeO9HA6w7Hv7vHtntSNqqKZtaYojtlsmJAZaBNeb5g9ifjTitmzxoszzKQzQmOWoXMeXArK9fuuGiRr5dgsZi3_Z3JsQtDzTnQ/s2048/holo3.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="2048" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMhqSdV-5Ppp6CRYWncUf3QP1Z9CQ77N9K2zvPMeO9HA6w7Hv7vHtntSNqqKZtaYojtlsmJAZaBNeb5g9ifjTitmzxoszzKQzQmOWoXMeXArK9fuuGiRr5dgsZi3_Z3JsQtDzTnQ/w400-h250/holo3.png" width="400" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span></span><p></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 9pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">It’s been sufficiently mentioned already that the new reality of travel, even if temporary, asks valid questions of whether star performers genuinely need to carve such a global (carbon) footprint. They certainly look convincing in their hologram form in the greenhouse tonight - artistically expressive, with the added adrenaline of having to learn and record an eighty-minute work in the space of a week. And in a work about the environment, it’s what we should have done all along anyway.</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 9pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 9pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Fundamentally, the decision to postpone events and cancel seasons is generally understandable, but relies on the naive idea that the world next September will be precisely like the world in 2019. What if it won’t? As social distancing grows untenable, so will streaming become insufficient and further delay, impossible. What then? The post-pandemic concert is, in fact, a puzzle for our lonely present.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 9pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Eugene Birman</span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-26283638749623946382020-10-21T09:07:00.005+01:002020-10-21T09:12:22.336+01:00Not quite normal<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguOBxLZ7urMHOT36RflhXe33l-IjNbQwadpFeRW9wgauP35rEN_t7SS89la-3AVyJ6cGALHirO8Rk_glFahuN4MhHyaptIPYlwK63cwDQW98haShTqSahWcifcLV-uHS1jtFk7Kw/s2048/Chineke%252C+RFH.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguOBxLZ7urMHOT36RflhXe33l-IjNbQwadpFeRW9wgauP35rEN_t7SS89la-3AVyJ6cGALHirO8Rk_glFahuN4MhHyaptIPYlwK63cwDQW98haShTqSahWcifcLV-uHS1jtFk7Kw/w400-h300/Chineke%252C+RFH.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Back in the Royal Festival Hall: Chineke! takes the stage</td></tr></tbody></table><p>I'm astonished to realise that my schedule this past week has been a closish mirror to business as usual - without feeling remotely as if it is. It has included, among other things, a couple of interviews, but on Zoom rather than face to physical face; and two concerts to review, both with world-class performances, but in front of scant, distanced, masked-up audiences, and one evening featuring the new-look pandemic-era 21st-century orchestral layout in which every player has their own music stand. There was even a press launch to "attend" - for the <a href="https://exilarte.org/ausstellung/kiepura-and-eggerth?lang=en">exil.arte centre in Vienna's new exhibition about Jan Kiepura and Martha Eggerth</a>, with their son Marjan and his wife Jane Kiepura taking questions, but beamed in from all corners of Europe and America direct to my study in sunny Sheen. </p><p>I was a guest on Radio 3's Music Matters the other night after the Chineke! concert, but broadcast live from a corner of the Royal Festival Hall that used to be where the receptions were held (Radio 3 is in residence at the hall for a fortnight). Instead of standing with glass in hand gazing out at the London Eye and anticipating a packed-out concert with standing ovation, we were tucked into a corner with tables, microphones and wires, trying to figure out how to get the microphone black foam 'socks' out of their packaging. I caught my 11.03pm train home, but instead of the usual scrummage of passengers sporting theatre programmes, John Lewis bags and excess alcohol-breath, there was...nobody. Nobody else at all. </p><p>It's good that we can find ways, now and then, to keep on keeping on, but my goodness, it's weird. "Are you optimistic for the future?" asked Tom Service on Music Matters. I had to struggle for a few seconds, and then explained that I'm not a particularly optimistic person in any case, but that even if I'm not optimistic per se, I look at the quantity of creativity and invention and adaptability around us and that gives me hope. Hope is different from optimism. </p><p>Here are a few links if you want to read some more or listen back to the broadcast:</p><p><a href="https://theartsdesk.com/classical-music/stephen-kovacevich-wigmore-hall-review-sublime-birthday-treat">Review of Stephen Kovacevich's 80th birthday concert at the Wigmore Hall</a>...</p><p><a href="https://theartsdesk.com/classical-music/jeneba-kanneh-mason-sode-chineke-orchestra-edusei-rfh-review-protest-passion-and-joy">Review of Chineke! at the RFH with Jeneba Kanneh-Mason and more</a>...</p><p><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000nmpv">BBC Radio 3 Music Matters, live from the Royal Festival Hall</a>...</p>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-52691401367724702932020-10-14T14:36:00.002+01:002020-10-14T14:36:31.011+01:00'Immortal': the difficult stuff<p>I was saddened to hear the other day that the celebrated musicologist Maynard Solomon has died, aged 90. I have admired his writings for many, many years, I love his book on Mozart and have found his articles about Beethoven absolutely invaluable when working on <i>Immortal</i>, especially his explorations of the composer's conversation books. He sounds a fascinating person and I am only sorry that I never had the chance to meet him. Here is an excellent obituary from the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/arts/music/maynard-solomon-dead.html">New York Times</a>.</p><p>This is a good moment to put some "difficult stuff" about <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Immortal-Jessica-Duchen/dp/1789651158/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=">Immortal</a></i> briefly under the spotlight and get it, hopefully, out of the way.</p><p>Maynard Solomon's theory of the Immortal Beloved was that the woman in question was Antonie Brentano, the wife of one of Beethoven's closest friends and supporters. There were two principal reasons: first, that she was definitely in Prague on the right day in 1812; secondly, that Solomon undertook a sort of posthumous psychoanalysis of Beethoven which seemed to support this theory. His suggestion has been much approved and amplified, notably by the writer and scholar Susan Lund, who has worked on Beethoven since the 1970s and has written a novel, a play and a factual book about it. </p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiugNB35XsKSoOwJclpeNi3yihaLJXQJ3e1liLfcabWSwuFHL3N7i_suWT5hs16mtsHdFFaKVLcsUXa1-Kt-uAHmqsIzZatnNX1iyRiB5kwVks9aC0-X4ScNRjlMW3J2jIASTQA_Q/s287/josephine-brunsvik-721596e6-dd73-4848-a219-2511879d68f-resize-750.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="287" data-original-width="250" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiugNB35XsKSoOwJclpeNi3yihaLJXQJ3e1liLfcabWSwuFHL3N7i_suWT5hs16mtsHdFFaKVLcsUXa1-Kt-uAHmqsIzZatnNX1iyRiB5kwVks9aC0-X4ScNRjlMW3J2jIASTQA_Q/w174-h200/josephine-brunsvik-721596e6-dd73-4848-a219-2511879d68f-resize-750.jpg" width="174" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Josephine - 'Pepi'<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>The theory has also been widely contested, even objected to, the alternative being that the Immortal Beloved was Josephine Brunsvik. Chief among the scholars exploring in this direction was the late Rita Steblin, whose articles and books have been a mainstay of my own information (I was devastated to hear that she died a year ago, leaving some important research unfinished). Before that, Marie-Elisabeth Tellenbach had written a fascinating, extremely detailed book on the Josephine theory and the zealous John Klapproth translated into English some crucial early texts on the subject, including La Mara (1920s) who had published some of Therese's memoirs. Some of these writers entered into spirited and occasionally angry exchanges with Solomon on the Josephine v Antonie topic. </p><p>But if you saw the BBC's <i>Being Beethoven </i>series recently, you will have noticed (or you might not - it went by very fast and in almost sheepish tone) that one of the Viennese academics acknowledges, after much "we don't know who she really was", that they do now think there is a 90 per cent likelihood that the Immortal Beloved was Josephine. Ninety per cent is not a small figure. The doubt remains because the traces of this affair were extremely well concealed at the time. It's impossible to prove the final ten per cent without digging up Beethoven and the person - or indeed more than one person - who may have been his illegitimate child and doing a DNA test. I doubt that is going to happen any time soon. </p><p>The fascinating thing about either theory, Antonie or Josephine, is that <i>both</i> present Beethoven with a possible "love child" at the crucial moment. Antonie's youngest son was born about three weeks before Josephine's daughter in spring 1813. So whichever of these infants was the one to whom he could never be a father, the likely outcome - his obsession with adopting his nephew - still applies and makes sense.</p><p>It's true, too, that we don't know for certain, and that last 10 per cent of doubt is why I have tackled <i>Immortal</i> in the way I have: a fictional first-person narrative from a not necessarily reliable observer, leaving a little room for a question mark around the potential of Antonie. I'm not a zealot about this (I've died on a few hills before and this isn't going to be another, especially not when we are facing the biggest crisis to hit the world in my whole lifetime...). I do know that the Josephine theory looks, walks and quacks like a duck; the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn favours her as the likely solution; and I can't deny that I am not wholly in favour of psychoanalysing someone who is not present to speak for himself, though I find the nephew explanation perfectly plausible. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWC-XqgtZ0T9Mz1zw2nNJZUR47pwYZ8OmVum5i2zUdOrvev7fbJ5qER4vRmfjHG9MQaXvE5OPKr84WgU1C8HXxY4fsLZEcQeobwJcs_jO51zZCdpk4C61sg7xiYdm0Ol_11UNWkQ/s1860/1200px-Antonie_Brentano3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1860" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWC-XqgtZ0T9Mz1zw2nNJZUR47pwYZ8OmVum5i2zUdOrvev7fbJ5qER4vRmfjHG9MQaXvE5OPKr84WgU1C8HXxY4fsLZEcQeobwJcs_jO51zZCdpk4C61sg7xiYdm0Ol_11UNWkQ/s320/1200px-Antonie_Brentano3.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Antonie Brentano<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>Let's cut to the chase: the problem with the Josephine v Antonie dilemma is that it is not really about Josephine and Antonie, or not any more. It is about today's factions. The fact is that <i>if</i> the Immortal Beloved was Josephine, it means Solomon's solution is not correct, which would be a painful admission for his disciples and admirers. Moreover, on Josephine's side it's unfortunate that Klapproth - who died several years ago - entered into some startlingly belligerent and rather wild-toned arguments about it, even with scholars of the calibre of Jan Swafford (whose book stays sensibly neutral on the issue, though seems unusually in favour of Bettina Brentano). It's not impossible that Klapproth harmed his own cause through sheer obsessiveness; moreover, his translations are not of the quality one could wish for, but their existence may perhaps have prevented others from producing more lucid ones. </p><p>Rita Steblin's clear, rational, scholarly writings have clarified much, however; she confirmed that Josephine expressed a wish to consult someone in Prague at the right time, and furthermore revealed that as late as 1818 Therese was mooting to her sister a possibility that they could consider going to London with Beethoven (see her article in <i>The Musical Times</i>, summer 2019). Steblin's involvement was key to the turnaround. There are probably power struggles rumbling away beneath the entire situation, and it's quite likely that they could involve the reverence sometimes accorded to senior male scholars, the propensity back in the 20th century for squishing away the women who see things differently...and much more besides.</p><p>This is a topic that can get under your skin. I'm not surprised it provokes obsession - and some of the texts in existence are almost terrifying in this respect. That was one reason that I hesitated for several years before plunging into writing <i>Immortal. </i>It is dangerous, disturbing and disruptive. </p><p>But it's also a fantastic story, strong and important enough to become known beyond academia, especially as it potentially casts fresh light on some of Beethoven's music. I've found that it's better recognised in Germany and, indeed, Hungary (the Brunsviks were Hungarian) than it is in English-speaking countries. Few writers of my outlook would be able to resist it, so...here we are. </p><p><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Immortal-Jessica-Duchen/dp/1789651158/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr="><i>Immortal</i> </a>is a novel because it couldn't be anything else. It travels from the spheres of Jane Austen at the beginning towards the emotions of Tristan and Isolde at the end. If you like it, great; if not, a pity; either way, it is not intended as <i>a definitive statement on the ultimate truth</i>. I'll leave that to academia and, possibly, the DNA lab. Meanwhile I heartily recommend that readers should also explore the writings of Solomon and Lund, weigh up the theories and decide for themselves. In the end, that's all we can actually do. </p><p><br /></p>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-79001173779512443722020-10-04T09:33:00.001+01:002020-10-04T11:55:28.419+01:00Letting Music Live<p><b>Where? </b>Parliament Square, London; Centenary Square, Birmingham. <b>When? </b>Tuesday 6 October, 12 noon. </p><p>Time to show parliament what's what in the music world, which is in graver peril than ever before. Under the auspices of a new banner, Let Music Live, convened by violinist Jessie Murphy, 400 professionals - chiefly freelancers, as most are - will be setting out to show that music is still alive and ready to work...</p><p>The arts culture sector contributes enormous amounts to the UK economy every year, but has yet to receive anything more than a kick in the teeth from the government. Despite that promise of £1.57bn of help, months later not much <i>actual money</i> has yet been distributed to the people who need it - <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/oct/04/arts-bailout-delay-leaves-jobs-at-risk-in-uk-and-theatres-on-brink-of-ruin">if any</a>. And that's the ones who do "qualify". Even performers who are household names in the musical and theatrical worlds have had no work or income since March and still fall through the "safety net", such as it is, "qualifying" for no support whatever. </p><p>Please note that due to social distancing restrictions numbers are strictly controlled. Anyone who wants to attend Parliament Square <i>must</i> please contact the organisers first at letmusicliveuk@gmail.com.</p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #000001; font-size: 11px; text-align: justify;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #000001; text-align: justify;">400 freelance professional musicians from all parts of the industry will be joined in support by leading musical figures including </span><b style="color: #000001; text-align: justify;">David Hill</b><span style="background-color: white; color: #000001; text-align: justify;">, </span><b style="color: #000001; text-align: justify;">Raphael Wallfisch</b><span style="background-color: white; color: #000001; text-align: justify;">, </span><b style="color: #000001; text-align: justify;">Emma Johnson</b><span style="background-color: white; color: #000001; text-align: justify;"> and </span><b style="color: #000001; text-align: justify;">Tasmin Little</b><span style="background-color: white; color: #000001; text-align: justify;">, to perform in Parliament Square and Centenary Square, Birmingham, shining a light on the need for targeted support for freelance musicians and all those who work in the arts and entertainment sector. They are also joined in solidarity by the</span><b style="color: #000001; text-align: justify;"> Musicians' Union</b><span style="background-color: white; color: #000001; text-align: justify;">, </span><b style="color: #000001; text-align: justify;">The Musicians' Answering Service</b><span style="background-color: white; color: #000001; text-align: justify;">, </span><b style="color: #000001; text-align: justify;">Emily Eavis</b><span style="background-color: white; color: #000001; text-align: justify;"> and more.</span><br style="color: #000001; text-align: justify;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #000001; text-align: justify;"> </span><br style="color: #000001; text-align: justify;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #000001; text-align: justify;">Conducted by renowned director </span><b style="color: #000001; text-align: justify;">David Hill</b><span style="background-color: white; color: #000001; text-align: justify;"> in Parliament Square, the freelance musicians will perform a short section of </span><b style="color: #000001; text-align: justify;">'Mars' from Holst's <i>The</i> <i>Planets</i></b><span style="background-color: white; color: #000001; text-align: justify;"> before </span><b style="color: #000001; text-align: justify;">standing in silence for two minutes</b><span style="background-color: white; color: #000001; text-align: justify;">. The 20% of the piece that they will perform represents the maximum 20% support that freelancers receive from the government through the SEISS grant. The two-minute silence represents the 45% of musicians currently not covered by the SEISS grant (MU). The event will be Covid-safe, adhering strictly to social distancing regulations, facilitated by support from #WeMakeEvents.</span><br style="color: #000001; text-align: justify;" /><br style="color: #000001; text-align: justify;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #000001; text-align: justify;">The </span><b style="color: #000001; text-align: justify;">arts and culture industry contributes £10.8 billion a year</b><span style="background-color: white; color: #000001; text-align: justify;"> directly to the UK economy (ONS), with growth in creative industries previously running at five times that of the rest of the economy. With effective short-term support, freelance musicians will continue to make a positive impact.</span><br style="color: #000001; text-align: justify;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #000001; text-align: justify;"> </span><br style="color: #000001; text-align: justify;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #000001; text-align: justify;">For every £1 directly spent on music and events, an extra £2 is generated in the wider economy (ACE), powering a network of businesses across the country. Supporting freelance musicians means supporting the wider economy.</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #000001; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Let Music Live</b> calls on the Government:</span></span></p><ul style="color: #000001; text-align: justify;"><li style="text-align: left;"><span><span style="font-family: inherit;">to recognise that freelance musicians are an economic asset. It is essential they invest in freelancers so that they can continue to support the intricate network of businesses that rely on arts and events for their footfall.</span></span></li><li style="text-align: left;"><span><span style="font-family: inherit;">for sector-specific support to reopen, including a subsidised concert ticket scheme while social distancing restrictions remain, and Government-backed insurance for live events and theatre performances.</span></span></li><li style="text-align: left;"><span><span style="font-family: inherit;">for targeted support for those skilled workforces forced to remain closed by Covid restrictions, so that freelance musicians are still there to bring music to everyone when this is over. </span></span></li></ul><p></p></blockquote><p><br /></p>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-31815772170542973022020-09-25T08:57:00.006+01:002020-09-25T08:59:48.203+01:0032 not out: a Beethoven piano festival with a few major differences<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>Moving music online may have reduced audiences in one way, but it's expanded them in others. Next weekend, on 3 and 4 October, you can log on from anywhere on earth to see all the Beethoven piano sonatas being played in a festival in a tiny 12th-century church in west London. Hugh Mather, who runs the series at St Mary's Perivale, has put together what looks like an extraordinary logistical feat: 32 pianists for 32 sonatas. Here he tells me why and how - and what Beethoven has meant to us in these troubled times. You can see the whole festival line-up here: </span><span style="font-size: 16px;"> </span><a href=" http://www.st-marys-perivale.org.uk/events-beethovenfestival3.shtml"><span style="color: #954f72;">http://www.st-marys-perivale.org.uk/events-beethovenfestival3.shtml</span><span style="font-size: 16px;"> </span></a></span></p><p><br /></p><p><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"></i></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMv-gVKdwO_xgqgHN8Ow-v5IoQgET_sTgDu3XB2wJacERk2FAzxXoZqiImHH559slEmsgzqgO5V_TYJ-S86jAabyuGAI6uq2nCKeqpHL6e9t2LCnq1g61Y1ldu5ee3hh7cDIbXDA/s2048/St+Mary%2527s+Perivale+Piano+Recital+Amit+Yahav.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1400" data-original-width="2048" height="274" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMv-gVKdwO_xgqgHN8Ow-v5IoQgET_sTgDu3XB2wJacERk2FAzxXoZqiImHH559slEmsgzqgO5V_TYJ-S86jAabyuGAI6uq2nCKeqpHL6e9t2LCnq1g61Y1ldu5ee3hh7cDIbXDA/w400-h274/St+Mary%2527s+Perivale+Piano+Recital+Amit+Yahav.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Amit Yahav performs at St Mary's Perivale<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></i><p></p><p><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span lang="EN-US">JD: Why did you decide to have a festival of the Beethoven piano sonatas at St Mary’s Perivale, given that Beethoven was already to be so extensively celebrated this year in the “upper echelons” of the music world?</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">HM: We obviously had to mark the great 250<sup>th</sup> anniversary in some way. I had organised three similar cycles of the sonatas with 32 pianists at St Barnabas Ealing in 2009, 2012 and 2014, so I knew the format works. Our strong suit is the large number of superb pianists who live in or around London. A sonata cycle was the obvious way of giving 32 of them a chance to perform, and the opportunity for listeners to re-discover many of the lesser-played works. Unfortunately the virus has led to many other festivals being cancelled, and we are now one of the few big Beethoven events still happening. Our friends in the Beethoven Piano Society of Europe are also putting on a similar cycle, but spread over the whole year, rather than a weekend, and in different venues. I had also planned to present all 10 violin sonatas played by 20 musicians in a single day, but that will have to wait till next year. <i><o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i><span lang="EN-US">JD: You have a different pianist for each sonata - a major contrast from most Beethoven cycles which are attempted like a solo Everest-climb by individual pianists. Why did you decide on this? </span></i><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">HM: Simply because the format is infinitely more interesting and enjoyable with 32 different pianists! I have at least 15 CD or LP sets of the complete sonatas, but I always skip around to hear different pianists and their various sonorities and approaches. Even if Schnabel were reincarnated, I would get slightly bored in hearing the same sort of sound and aesthetics for 14 hours, whereas with different pianists it is endlessly fascinating. And we have a superb team of pianists who will each have something special to offer and will all sound very different from each other. I guarantee a very high standard of performance throughout the cycle, and it will be compelling viewing and listening for anyone interested in Beethoven or fine piano-playing. </span><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i><span lang="EN-US">JD: What were the issues involved in putting it together? Organising 32 pianists sounds like a logistical nightmare…</span> </i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i><br /></i>HM: Actually it was surprisingly easy. I wrote to a carefully selected group of pianists in early January, asking them if they would like to participate, and if so, which sonatas they would like to perform. A handful of pianists were unable to participate because it was expected to clash with the Warsaw Chopin competition (since postponed), but otherwise virtually all instantly agreed to play, and I am very happy with our current team ! </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">To put this in perspective, I have a database of 160 very good pianists who have asked for a solo recital slot. Our venue is always popular because we pay our musicians, we have a nice piano and we provide a high quality recording. So I could easily construct teams to play 2 or 3 cycles! As regards choice of sonatas, nearly all offered the 'Appassionata' and 'Moonlight', etc, but I asked them to specify less familiar sonatas which they would be prepared to play in 9 months' time. From previous festivals, I know that the difficult sonatas to fix are Op 2 no 2, Op 22, Op 31 no 1, Op 54 and the two Op 49s. The jigsaw fell into place over the spring, before the lockdown in March. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNsQVA2mrrULXxTE6Vgw8aeKq9Bv63kj0oto-2d1me6HERU08PQhiY2j_FVqgEVhJQOdleqf1ODWdRLhAfNz8YPzJCXpfo3ivMLC7K3CNux1vEzLUYZ_tZOy5SAdxCp2R1ZGIGPQ/s2048/St+Mary%2527s+Perivale+exterior.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNsQVA2mrrULXxTE6Vgw8aeKq9Bv63kj0oto-2d1me6HERU08PQhiY2j_FVqgEVhJQOdleqf1ODWdRLhAfNz8YPzJCXpfo3ivMLC7K3CNux1vEzLUYZ_tZOy5SAdxCp2R1ZGIGPQ/w400-h300/St+Mary%2527s+Perivale+exterior.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">St Mary's Perivale</td></tr></tbody></table><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i><span lang="EN-US">JD: It’s wonderful that you can livestream concerts from St Mary’s, even without a physical audience. How has COVID-19 affected your plans in terms of the pianists themselves? Have many had to drop out, and how do you replace them?</span> <o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i><br /></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">HM: The original team of 32 pianists in January included a very good Polish pianist – Michal Szymanowski – who obviously had to cancel because of travel restrictions, and two other pianists cancelled because of other considerations, but otherwise the team is virtually unchanged. I recently advertised on Facebook for replacements to play Op 13 and Op 79 and within 24 hours received offers from 20 and eight pianists respectively. With such a large team of musicians, I suspect there may be at least one to three cancellations next week, and I will need to find a replacement at short notice! That is the worst aspect of the whole project.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i><span lang="EN-US">JD: What are the technical challenges of relaying concerts on the internet? How does St Mary’s manage this? <o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">HM: Our video and streaming facilities were developed over several years by a group of retired BBC personnel, led by Simon Shute and George Auckland, who live in Ealing and are longstanding friends. The system now comprises 7 high definition cameras and 2 high quality microphones permanently installed in the church. It was developed as an adjunct to our concerts, initially to provide recordings for our musicians, and it only realized its full potential in the lockdown, since when we have become, in effect, a broadcasting studio! Since then we have streamed 28 live concerts and 53 concert recordings. Our superb technical team provide their services free of charge, in keeping with everyone else at Perivale, so we have been able to install broadcast quality video systems remarkably cheaply.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i><span lang="EN-US">JD: Do you think concerts change substantially without an audience? How do performers cope without that live feedback?</span> <o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i><br /></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">HM: Broadcast concerts, viewed at home, are inevitably a poor substitute for the ‘real thing’, and I can’t wait to return to having a ‘live’ audience enjoying a communal experience again. Nevertheless, the concerts have filled a void in many peoples’ lives, providing much entertainment and solace, and they have enabled us to support so many musicians over the past few months of financial hardship, from viewers’ donations. Performing in an empty venue is indeed slightly nerve-racking, rather like a professional broadcast, but most of our musicians are experienced performers and soon get used to it.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i><span lang="EN-US">JD: As a pianist yourself, can you tell us something about what makes the Beethoven sonatas such an extraordinarily special body of works? Do you have any personal favourites among them? If so, which and why?<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">HM: The Beethoven sonatas have been called the ‘New Testament’ of the piano literature. They cover such a remarkable range, from the early classically-based works to the late transcendental sonatas, and there are few if any weak pieces among them. I love them all, and have listened to them all my life, but I didn’t have time to study many of them, on top of my medical career. My favourite will always be the 'Hammerklavier', for personal reasons. After graduating in medicine in 1971, I took a few months off to study the piano with Jimmy Gibb at the Guildhall, and decided to learn the great work, which I played at an open recital at the Guildhall in 1972. Then I got married to Felicity Light, who was a medical student, so I had to earn a living, and returned to a frantically busy career, which precluded serious practice for years. So I have only learned and played about 5 of the sonatas in public. The 'Hammerklavier' has stayed with me ever since, and I played it in our complete Beethoven cycles at St Barnabas in 2009 and 2014. The slow movement still moves me to tears every time I hear or play it – one of the most profound and transcendental pieces ever written. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">JD: Medicine and music are often deemed to “go together”. While writing ‘Immortal’ I’ve been fascinated to learn that Beethoven occasionally practised </i><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">almost</i><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"> an early form of music therapy: he would improvise for friends who were suffering grief, bereavement, depression etc, and his musical response to their frame of mind would bring them the relief of tears. During this weird year, I’ve gone back to my piano and playing Beethoven has brought me energy, positivity and renewed enthusiasm for life. Do you find he has a similar effect?</i></span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">HM: The link between medicine and music is indeed widespread. As for Beethoven, one can spend a lifetime exploring these wonderful masterpieces, and I never tire of them. I particularly enjoy all the early sonatas which people rarely play in recitals, as well as the immortal late sonatas. Part of the joy of our festival will be a re-acquaintance with some of the less-commonly played works. In the lockdown I have been re-listening to the late string quartets and have found them to be life-enhancing and deeply enriching, and appropriate listening material for this strange and depressing time. At the risk of sounding pompous, Beethoven’s compositions really do encapsulate every facet of the human experience, rather like Shakespeare. We hope to show that in our great festival at St Mary’s Perivale on 3 and 4 October.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Beethoven Festival, St Mary's Perivale, 3 </i><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i>and</i></span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"> 4 October, is online here: </i><a href="http://www.st-marys-perivale.org.uk/events-beethovenfestival3.shtml" style="color: #954f72; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">http://www.st-marys-perivale.org.uk/events-beethovenfestival3.shtml</a><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </i></span></p>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-21129447406187923722020-09-22T10:18:00.006+01:002021-08-19T08:48:35.027+01:00Can conductors change the world? A guest post by Rebecca Miller<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1QIal9CVjt4uCctrJrVy71mDfDoa85XzqYCOBjuj7Okq3F78WUcvfpkcyL-vzmPRlBxpVKPlp6FGlNOhXYXhtGiPIV7K12_N0vfTMpSGwoOgCuu26W0MyozqXmSjsygH16ZYd4A/s600/Rebecca+Miller+by+Richard+Haughton.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div></a></div><p><i><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw0OsGCx0kCereIpDJP8R_TC5EObsVRPRhIjRJvktFc3oxOix_nVJ0NxYJzAAlIMoR-N23IobnYy_DbwyNUSCt218DmSkc5P6hJKKrKGl-UVd08rDnYb9QyAkSYt0BaX7mGm14aQ/s500/Beyond+Borders+logo.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw0OsGCx0kCereIpDJP8R_TC5EObsVRPRhIjRJvktFc3oxOix_nVJ0NxYJzAAlIMoR-N23IobnYy_DbwyNUSCt218DmSkc5P6hJKKrKGl-UVd08rDnYb9QyAkSYt0BaX7mGm14aQ/w320-h320/Beyond+Borders+logo.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></i></div><i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />I've been astounded, these past tricky months, at the explosion of creative thinking and doing by musicians around what can feel like a very shattered world. The news in the papers is universally awful: a third of MU members are thinking of leaving the profession, while the ISM has found that 64 per cent of musicians are considering the same, and there are eye-watering redundancies at many of our leading concert halls. And yet things have come about in six short months that we'd never have dreamed of a year ago, from ENO staging a drive-in La Bohème in the car park at Alexandra Palace, to the ability to tune in online to performances from far and wide, many of which are fortunately starting to charge for viewing, which they should. </span></i><p></p><p><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">With education and social life suffering abominably, creative initiatives that bring people together online for stimulating discussions and masterclasses are coming into their own. Among the best I've come across is Beyond Borders, devised by the conductor Rebecca Miller, which is launching on 2 October, aiming to gather musicians, educators and music industry leaders from all over the world. I'm delighted that she has written us a guest post. Please follow the links at the end to sign up and take part. JD</span></i></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT3Mu7WEqCfY4gl0tJQKUcwp-wn6st9lRPmQIjr1g_9YshFaXWFu_xnv_rPpX85yUIC0Wiv-sfxhGU4izSADdjLl7e-BlJDS8Qe8dkC2w4k0Gq5IGOKL4k2-ROHjCCfH5ZpECMJg/s600/Rebecca+Miller+by+Richard+Haughton.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="400" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT3Mu7WEqCfY4gl0tJQKUcwp-wn6st9lRPmQIjr1g_9YshFaXWFu_xnv_rPpX85yUIC0Wiv-sfxhGU4izSADdjLl7e-BlJDS8Qe8dkC2w4k0Gq5IGOKL4k2-ROHjCCfH5ZpECMJg/w266-h400/Rebecca+Miller+by+Richard+Haughton.jpg" width="266" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><p></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">Can conductors change the world? </span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">A guest post by conductor Rebecca Miller</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i><span lang="EN-US"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Who is this crazy woman spouting about conducting masterclasses when the world is falling apart? What relevance do orchestras have to us today? Why should we try to save them? Can orchestras make the world a better place? How? What makes a community? How can we fix the world? <o:p></o:p></span></b></span></i></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></b></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i><span lang="EN-US"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">(…just a small insight into the current state of my mind)<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></i></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i><span lang="EN-US"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></b></span></i></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><span lang="EN-US">From darkness to light</span></b></span></h3><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 11pt;">People often ask me if I have a favourite composer. I usually laugh and say, ‘that’s impossible to say - it’s like asking me which of my children I like best’. But if I had to choose one at gunpoint, I would choose Beethoven. Of all the composers who mastered the art of finding light through the darkness… for me, it is Beethoven. Of all the composers who excelled in imagination through extreme limitations… for me, it is Beethoven. </span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Throughout lockdown, throughout the darkness, the despair, the fear, the longing, I have found a token of strange and sombre comfort somewhere - it wasn’t in Beethoven, but it was in the knowledge that everyone in the world is in the same plight - that everyone is in this isolation - together; that everyone in the world is affected in some way by COVID and that we are all fighting the same fight. When else has it been that the whole world fights the same problem at the same time? That we are completely united as a world, against a single cause? As humans, as societies, we are usually wrapped up in our own problems - we often don’t pay enough attention to the problems of others. But here we are, every single person in the world has heard of COVID, is affected by COVID, wants to rid the world of COVID. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That unified purpose - that’s what an orchestra does on stage. We are all committed to one objective - to play this piece, at this time, on this day, for this audience, to the best of our abilities. Nothing else matters at this moment. It doesn’t matter who the person is next to us - what is the shape their violin, or what is the colour of their skin. All we care about is getting it right - getting it better, and better, as we strive further and further towards an unattainable perfection. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">I started <span class="Hyperlink0" style="color: blue;"><a href="https://www.beyondborders.org.uk/" style="color: magenta;">Beyond Borders</a> </span>out of isolation, out of a desire to overcome the restrictions on human contact - to bring people together, from across the world, in ways and for discussions and sessions that previously didn</span><span lang="AR-SA">’</span><span lang="EN-US">t seem possible. I think we have all accepted - like it or not - that digital meetings and conferences are a way of the present and likely a way of the future - and I have decided to embrace it, rather than reject it. So I turn back to Beethoven. To find the light out of the darkness. To create something imaginative out of extreme limitations. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span lang="EN-US">Beyond Borders aims to bring people throughout the world together through online sessions and masterclasses - to discuss and contemplate community, leadership, and orchestras, but through the eyes of a conductor. Individual sessions and masterclass series - details </span></i><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Hyperlink0" style="color: blue;"><i><a href="https://www.beyondborders.org.uk/" style="color: magenta;">here</a> </i></span><i>and more below.<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><b><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So… can conductors change the world? </span></span></b></h3><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I’m passionate about changing the world. I have been ever since I was little. I did realise at some point, however, that I cannot change it all myself. And I probably can’t change very much about it. But in my own little way, each day, I try to at least make small changes. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I want a world that is kinder, more respectful, more empathetic, and that listens more to each other. Through Beyond Borders I’m trying to take my small corner of the world - conducting an orchestra - and shed a light on the relevance to society of this rather strange and seemingly mysterious job. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I’m passionate about teaching my conducting students that the ‘stick technique’ (arm waving) is only a very small portion of ‘the job’. The majority of the job is actually the people skills, the collaboration, the leadership, the big ideas, and of course all the intense study of the music and its context that is the basis for all of the former. In order to lead you must be able to offer - at the very least - knowledge, ideas, and context, and then hopefully you’re also able to add a dollop of inspiration, trust, and enabling. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I bang on and on in my conducting lessons about stepping outside of yourself - what’s the view like from the other side? What do your co-collaborators need from you? Do you understand their position? Do you understand what they need in order to do what you are asking of them? That you serve the musicians - your team - not the other way around. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For me these skills - putting yourself in context, viewing yourself from the outside, and having a wide perspective - are life skills. And I hope that my students - conducting and orchestral - take these pieces of advice and apply them to their wider lives as human beings. I am convinced that by widening the perspective of a few young conductors, that I am in my own tiny little way, changing the world - just one conductor at a time. And that’s OK with me. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span lang="EN-US">I hope you’ll join me at Beyond Borders - whether as a participant, as a guest at one of our sessions, or as a member of our </span></i><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Hyperlink0" style="color: blue;"><i><a href="https://www.beyondborders.org.uk/contact" style="color: magenta;">mailing list</a> </i></span><i>to start. We will be rolling out sessions on orchestras, community, conducting, and leadership. </i></span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></i></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Our first offering is a master class series that touches on all of these topics - Making Waves - </i><a href="https://www.beyondborders.org.uk/making-waves" style="color: magenta;"><span class="Hyperlink0" style="color: blue;"><i>October 2-4th</i></span></a><i>, with some fantastic </i><span class="Hyperlink0" style="color: blue;"><i><a href="https://www.beyondborders.org.uk/our-guests" style="color: magenta;">guests</a> </i></span><i>from the industry. Please join with us - to help bring the world together and to work towards a kinder and more collaborative society. <o:p></o:p></i></span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Rebecca Miller </span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">———————<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p><p class="Body" style="border: none; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-62340745643589150242020-09-11T11:25:00.004+01:002020-09-11T11:28:19.239+01:00Nights in the garden of panic(A shared post with 'Immortal' at Unbound.)
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZaqirHYu7nOU3hHXrVyWwEI9s6LIP0DEKSPebKEuh1QPb3CENjP7D-J6IpyRvvaQQlT5Rv96vhPVxT_wW0pjfmoxLSUonqXyXQ6oPZNwZj96UY0wKYUdcoeda28BtJTM35Kh0nA/s1597/IMMORTAL+front+cover.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1597" data-original-width="1026" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZaqirHYu7nOU3hHXrVyWwEI9s6LIP0DEKSPebKEuh1QPb3CENjP7D-J6IpyRvvaQQlT5Rv96vhPVxT_wW0pjfmoxLSUonqXyXQ6oPZNwZj96UY0wKYUdcoeda28BtJTM35Kh0nA/s320/IMMORTAL+front+cover.jpg" /></a></div>
If you're a subscriber to 'Immortal', which is due out on 29 October, you should by now have received a message from Unbound announcing that the book has gone to press. So there we are: done, dusted and ready to rock. People have been asking how I feel, expecting "great", "thrilled", "proud" and "let's PARTAAY...except we can't..." . <div><br /></div><div> The reality is that I'm scared witless. </div><div><br /></div><div> I'm sure I'm not the only person who, throughout this hideous year, hasn't been enjoying the dark. I've woken in the small hours almost every night in a state of anxiety that does violence to my mind, heart and physical state. </div><div><br /></div><div>Sometimes it's about the cat throwing up: is it really just hairballs? Next up, so to speak, the collapse of the arts: 64 per cent of the UK's musicians are thinking of leaving the profession, according to the ISM. If you've lived half a century fuelled, inspired and/or paid by music and theatre, the prospects are bleak. Then the knock-on effects: where will we all be in a year's time? Will we even be alive to witness the wreck our country will become if there's a no-deal Brexit? Oftener than not, I'm feeling as if I'm on the Titanic yelling about the iceberg ahead, and everyone's shrugging and saying "but it's not in anyone's interests to hit an iceberg...". </div><div><br /></div><div> But that's not what's waking me in the nocturnal garden of panic. It's something worse: THE BOOK. Have I overwritten? Have I left out something crucial? Have I interpreted x, y or z right? Are people in the right place at the right time doing the right thing? Have I thanked all the right people, and what will they say if I haven't? If not, tough: it's too late. I find comforting words to talk myself down: the book is long because it starts in the 1790s, ends in 1828, and is written from Therese's perspective in 1759, so there is a lot to fit in - and I have actually cut 21,000 words. </div><div><br /></div><div>It could easily have been double the length. Gigantic 19th-century novels were fine in the 19th century, but no longer. I excised a whole chapter exploring notions of romanticism and it pretty much broke my heart; but then, I never finished reading <i>Les Misérables</i> because Hugo takes us into a labyrinth of a section set in a nunnery, which goes on and on, and I failed to find my way out. If only someone had said, "Look, Victor, about that nunnery..." </div><div><br /></div><div>As for people being in the right place at the right time: sometimes they're not, because if Therese is observing her sister, she has to be there with her. Therefore at some moments I've put her in Vienna although she was, in reality, in Budapest. I am upfront about this in the "author's note". Is there still such a thing as "artistic licence"? </div><div><br /></div><div> I can justify all these questions and alarms all I like, but I still wake up panicking. A Facebook post asking how people deal with anxiety attacks produced such a welter of responses that it's clear innumerable others feel exactly the same way. If you do: my sympathies and solidarity. </div><div><br /></div><div>I still don't know which, if any, of our autumn narrated concerts will go ahead - sadly, Oxford at the Holywell Music Room has been cancelled, or at least postponed. I don't know when we can have our launch party or give one special benefactor his private concert. I don't know if the book will be welcomed and praised, or if it and I will be torn limb from spine. You may like it. You may loathe it. It's up to you; either way, there's nothing more I can do about it now. </div><div><br /></div><div>Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your support, your kindness and your enthusiasm for the idea of IMMORTAL. I hope the reality will live up to it. </div><div><br /></div><div> Please excuse me while I go and pop another Kalms.</div>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-64801520476347665002020-08-14T17:57:00.007+01:002020-08-14T18:14:08.938+01:00Catch up with Ludwig and Levit hereWhile we in the UK continue to run about like headless chickens (which in many ways we actually are), the Salzburg Festival has managed to be up, running and shouting about it with well-deserved pride. In the fast-growing blackberry bushes of classical music on the internet, there is plenty of ripe fruit waiting to be foraged, stewed and savoured, and the concerts of Salzburg being streamed by Arte.tv are not only some of the best, but also available to watch in the UK (which not all Arte films are).<br />
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Having been working flat out to finish the editing and proofreading of IMMORTAL - which is now going into production - I haven't had time, energy or inclination to watch or listen to anything very much for weeks, so it's time to catch up, and I'm very happy to say that they have sent me the first three of Igor Levit's complete Beethoven sonatas cycle for us all to enjoy here on JDCMB. Plenty more available at Arte's own site, of course. Levit has been one of music's outstanding lockdown heroes and I am looking forward to hearing the lot in due course.<br />
Enjoy!<br />
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Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comLondon, UK51.5073509 -0.127758323.197117063821153 -35.284008299999996 79.817584736178844 35.028491700000004tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-1388520335877546302020-08-03T09:08:00.008+01:002020-08-03T09:10:05.779+01:00Leon Fleisher (23 July 1928 - 2 August 2020): in memoriamSad news today of the death of the great pianist and teacher Leon Fleisher, aged 92. I much regret not having met him in person, especially as my father was among the scientists whose research led to the therapy that ultimately helped Fleisher's focal dystonia. I did, however, talk to him on the phone for the Independent back in 2010 when he came to the UK to participate in the Aldeburgh Festival. Here is some of that interview.<div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgCeNxdE9TcNaN7IgZ_5HYrC7cTjP4ojFUS1WkkiSBGTz0H7WChf_dXhwHrL1Jix5apwlGicQjA07TYwabBel_wdwyqky7Fkw48Qg1bfxy_7Z9g4H9M0dABM2ICXARbmwIvssjbA/s300/Leon+Fleisher+by+Ned+Burgess.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="239" data-original-width="300" height="319" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgCeNxdE9TcNaN7IgZ_5HYrC7cTjP4ojFUS1WkkiSBGTz0H7WChf_dXhwHrL1Jix5apwlGicQjA07TYwabBel_wdwyqky7Fkw48Qg1bfxy_7Z9g4H9M0dABM2ICXARbmwIvssjbA/w400-h319/Leon+Fleisher+by+Ned+Burgess.jpg" title="Leon Fleisher. Photo by Ned Burgess" width="400" /></a></div><div><span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> </span></span></span></span></span></span>Leon Fleisher </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>Photo: Ned Burgess</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></div><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><font face="inherit"><i>JD: Please talk us through your experience of focal dystonia, what it did to you and how it came about?</i><o:p></o:p></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><o:p><font face="inherit"> </font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><font face="inherit">LF: I noticed that the fingers of my right hand started to have the tendency to curl under and my initial reaction was that it seemed to me I’d have to increase my practising and it was a sign that I wasn’t working enough – which was the wrong thing to do. Over a period of about 10 months that tendency became so pronounced that two fingers virtually dug into the palm of my hand and it took enormous effort to straighten them out, followed by endless visits to countless doctors and a search that lasted 35 years with no answers. </font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><font face="inherit"><br /></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><font face="inherit">To make a long story short, I found two modalities eventually that helped me. One was called Rolfing, named after the German therapist Ida Rolf. Because Rolfing is a modality of tissue manipulation that can restore the normal plasticity of even the fibres of whatever tissue is being manipulated; and eventually I was informed of a programme at the National Institute of Health in Maryland for people with similar dysfunction and they were treating them with something called Botox, of all things. They inject the botox where the nerve informs the muscle to contract, which is not at the site of the muiscle itself but usually somewhere between the site where the muscle is affected and the brain. In my case, it’s in the forearm and they inject a minute amount of botox - which is a virulent poison - into the muscle, just paralysing it a little bit so that the tendency to curl under is weakened just a wee bit and therefore allows the opposing muscles, the flexor muscles, to be more effective. That’s the mechanism for the treatment of focal dystonia. They don’t know what causes it and therefore they don’t have a cure, but they’ve found this way to help deal with the symptoms. <o:p></o:p></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><o:p><font face="inherit"> </font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><font face="inherit"><i>JD: My father was a neuropathologist, involved in the early research into the therapeutic use of botulinum toxin….) </i><o:p></o:p></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><o:p><font face="inherit"> </font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><font face="inherit">LF: Possibly he knew the neurologist friend of mine here in Baltimore who developed the idea of the botulinum – Dan Drachman. <i>(JD: Yes, they were good colleagues)</i>. His father-in-law was Gregor Piatigorsky! Dan was the one that told me about this programme. <o:p></o:p></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><o:p><font face="inherit"> </font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><font face="inherit"><i>JD: You returned to playing with both hands around 1995-96. How do you feel the whole experience changed you as a musician? </i><o:p></o:p></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><o:p><font face="inherit"> </font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><font face="inherit">LF: All I can say is that after a couple of years in a pretty deep depression I finally woke up one morning realising that my connection to music was not exclusively as a two-hands piano player, it was a little more profound than that. This enabled me to do a number of things. It enabled me to expand my teaching in a way that became more productive: that is to say I was no longer able to push students off the piano bench and demonstrate the way I thought it should go, I had to find words to express that very intangible and ephemeral aspect of music, and I think I became a better teacher. </font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><font face="inherit"><br /></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><font face="inherit">The formal admission to myself that I had this thing of being dystonic somehow freed me up to examine the not-inconsiderable literature for the left hand alone in which can be found several great works – the Ravel Left Hand Concerto is one of the great pieces of literature for the piano and it gave me the idea also to start conducting, which was a totally new endeavour for me and from which I learned so enormously and which brought me tremendous satisfaction and gratification – it makes me wonder, were I to live my life over again I’m not sure I would change anything.<o:p></o:p></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><o:p><font face="inherit"> </font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><font face="inherit"><i>JD: Do you remember now how it felt the first time you were able to sit down & play with both hands again?</i><o:p></o:p></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><o:p><font face="inherit"> </font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><font face="inherit">LF: Yes, and curiously enough it wasn’t what many people might think – I’d tested it every day of those 35 years so that I was expecting somewhere, somehow, I was always one step away from being able to do it. So when I finally did it, it was enormously satisfying, but not as enormously revelatory as you might think. <o:p></o:p></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><o:p><font face="inherit"> </font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><font face="inherit"><i>JD: Was there any special piece or composer that you were most happy to be able to play again?</i><o:p></o:p></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><o:p><font face="inherit"> </font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><font face="inherit">LF: Well, yes, I played some of my old favourites for myself – the D minor Brahms Concerto, Beethoven 5. Enormously satisfying.<o:p></o:p></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><o:p><font face="inherit"> </font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><font face="inherit"><i>JD: What happens now? Do you have to keep having treatment? </i><o:p></o:p></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><o:p><font face="inherit"> </font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><font face="inherit">LF: Once a dystonic, always a dystonic, so I get my injections now once every four months.<o:p></o:p></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><o:p><font face="inherit"> </font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><font face="inherit"><i>JD: There have been a lot of studies recently, looking at music and science and the way the brain and musical instinct hook up – I wonder, why now? Do you have any views on that? </i><o:p></o:p></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><o:p><font face="inherit"> </font></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><font face="inherit">LF: Perhaps it’s just that it’s probably about time and it’s ripe for investigation. I don’t think the question is so much from the artistic side, but science is now ready. The mind is always trying to break things down and look for that moment in time when creativity starts<o:p></o:p></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span lang=""><font face="inherit"> </font></span></p></div></div>Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557791.post-65240482150863625002020-07-06T08:45:00.002+01:002020-07-06T09:07:14.597+01:00Thank you!<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/05/boris-johnson-uk-lifeline-arts-heritage-sector-afloat">The government has just announced a rescue package for the UK's arts and heritage that is worth £1.57bn. </a><br />
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A massive "thank you" is in order - to them, to the organisations whose directors lobbied for us all, to the individuals who talked and discussed and presented and persuaded, to the members of the public who shouted and signed petitions, and to everyone who has realised - at long, long last - just how much the arts are worth to us as human beings and as a country. As the first, they support our souls. As the second, they support our entire lives by bringing in billions to the treasury - and they're inextricably enmeshed with innumerable other industries that depend on the people they attract. </div>
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The small print will need reading, of course. For several theatres it may be too late. The status of the arts freelancers whose income is now £0 and who don't qualify for the self-employment support scheme remains to be seen - there's scant indication of help for them. Whether there are strings attached, and what they are, likewise. Still the package is a lot more than most of us had expected and we should give credit where it's due. It makes the difference between hope and no hope - and that is very big indeed.</div>
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Jessicahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01466731742820325857noreply@blogger.com