My first opera...

I've enjoyed taking a trip down an operatic memory lane for Sinfini, plus talking to a range of celebs about their first experiences of opera and what got them hooked - among them ballerina Zenaida Yanowsky, actor Henry Goodman and comedian Rainer Hersch. Read the whole thing here: http://sinfinimusic.com/uk/features/2013/02/my-first-opera-curtain-up/



What follows is a further ramble on the topic...

Thinking back, I owe my whole opera thing to my parents, who never talked down to me about music when I was a kid. They seemed to know how to encourage an enthusiasm without piling on undue pressure and when I picked up that Magic Flute box (tempted by the picture: left) and wanted to know what was in it, my mum showed me how to follow the translated text as if it was the most natural thing in the world (it was the classic Klemperer recording, in German, without dialogue). It was good of them to put up with my unfortunate singalongaluciapopp tendencies, too.

I’m not surprised they bought me an alternative. This was easier: just one LP, in English, much of it positively designed for singing along. It was The Little Sweep by Benjamin Britten: the story of a group of children and their nanny who rescue a small boy chimney sweep from his abusive employer. It was easy to follow and impossible to forget. Nobody ever seemed to perform it, though. At the time, I had no idea there could be anything sinister in a song about a boy in a bath and I still find myself humming that syncopated, swingy waltz melody now and then. I’ve never once seen this opera live. A footnote: one of the child singers on that recording turned up in my year at university and we used to have a whale of a time playing violin and piano music together (he’d swapped the voice for the fiddle long before). I enjoyed the notion that I’d cut my musical teeth by inadvertently listening to my duo partner singing.

I fell for Eugene Onegin on the car radio, but seeing it in the theatre aged about ten (starring a young soprano named Kiri Somethingorother) left me colder than I'd hoped it would. It was all a bit static, it was hard to hear the words and I couldn't work out why on earth Tatyana fell for Onegin in any case, as he wasn't exactly an appealing kind of chap. (Right: Kiri as she probably looked in those days...)

Eventually live performance did enchant me – but not as you might expect. It was comedy, courtesy of English National Opera. The gods in Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld perching on their clouds; Lesley Garrett stripping off as Adele in Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus; and above all, the sight of my father reduced to complete screeching, weeping helplessness over the nuns in drag in Rossini’s Count Ory. This could only happen in the theatre. And when it happened, there was no point resisting. 

Interesting to see that while a lot of my interviewees cite Mozart and Puccini as their ways in to opera, Ed Gardner thinks those aren't such a good place to start. He plumps straight for Shostakovich and Janacek. 

 

OK, let's get Britten year off to a flying start

[UPDATE, MONDAY MORNING: COME AND HEAR BENJAMIN GROSVENOR PLAY THIS VERY CONCERTO AT THE BARBICAN WITH THE BBCSO THIS VERY FRIDAY, 11 JANUARY. BROADCAST LIVE ON BBC RADIO 3. INFO & BOOKING HERE.]

Here's a big Britten favourite of mine. It's the Piano Concerto, written when the composer was all of 25 years old. He had just met Peter Pears and not yet sloped off to the States. Britten, who was a very brilliant pianist when he wanted to be, was the soloist in the world premiere at the Proms and apparently finished the piece just in time for the first rehearsal. It's a wonderfully 1930s sound, full of an Art Deco glitz akin to Poulenc, Ravel or Prokofiev, and I've never understood why it isn't played more often. The most recognisably Britteny movement, of course, is the Intermezzo, which was a late replacement by way of slow movement and dates from 1945, hence contemporaneous with Peter Grimes.

Here's a performance of it to brighten a gloomy January Sunday: another Benjamin - Grosvenor, this time - at the Proms 2011, with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. Benjamin G was 19. Incidentally, if you're wondering where he is at the moment, he's just been wowing Seattle with a spot of Rachmaninov.

New Year Fireworks!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

As a disembodied voice said over the firework display by the Thames, "London 2012: we did it right". Wonder if we can keep that up in 2013? 

Here are a few handy points for starting the year with best foot forward.

1. Feel free to enjoy the New Year's Day Concert from Vienna. Whatever those self-righteous moaners say about the Vienna Philharmonic, I love it and New Year's Day would feel all wrong without it...
UPDATE, 11.55am: woops. This year's, conducted by Franz Welser-Most, really is "frankly worse than most" and I have SWITCHED IT OFF for the first time in living memory. There's no point grumbling about the number of women in the orchestra if there is an elephant on the podium.

Solution? Make Your Own New Year's Day Concert. Here's Willi Boskowsky, leading a Csardas with violin, smile and real pizzazz in 1967. This, dear friends, is more like it...



2. Make some fun resolutions. Yesterday the Royal Opera House asked us on Twitter for our best operatic ones. Mine include recognising that gold rings are overrated, especially when sourced in the Rhine - stick to platinum in future. And do not write unsolicited love-letters to handsome visitors, even if they can sing in Russian.

3. Then there are non-operatic resolutions, such as practising the piano, going back to ballet class, finishing the new novel, and other things that are probably doomed if you have to make a resolution about doing them.

4. Invest in some good carpet shampoo. Handy for cleaning up others' mess. (I think Solti must have overindulged at the cat party last night.)

5. Ring out the old, ring in the new. What's past is past.

6. Speaking of the Ring, this year there will be so much Verdi, Wagner and Britten around that it's tempting to board up the windows and say GONE SOMEWHERE SUNNY, SEE YOU IN 2014. Which of the three birthday boys will you still want to hear in 366 days' time?

7. While V, W and B are carpet-bombing us (or should that be BWV? is it all a plot by Bach?), please don't forget Lutoslawski. Luckily the Philharmonia is celebrating his centenary. Krystian Zimerman is performing the Piano Concerto that Lutoslawski wrote for him - RFH, 30 January.

8. I have a new concert-of-the-novel in the works, this time based on Alicia's Gift, with the lovely pianist Viv McLean. The story of a child prodigy trying to grow up, it includes piano music by Chopin, Ravel, Granados and others. I read, Viv plays and we'll launch it in the autumn. Ideal as a coffee-concert with a difference. Book us!

9. The Hungarian Dances concert and A Walk through the End of Time are expecting more airings - watch this space. I'm also looking forward to some seriously exciting interviews and various things that are currently queuing up in the ether, waiting to be written and performed.

10. It's tough out there. We'll all have to be positive and ingenious to navigate through '13. But if we have music, love and laughter in our hearts, we can do that. We need to invent, communicate, inspire and do good things. And you know something? We intend to. Please join us.

Britten's got talent

In today's Independent you can find my two pence ha'penny on the Britten centenary. It's about why Britten has gone global, perhaps becoming the only British composer to have done so - and how his humanity gives his music a universal appeal, however unlikely a hero he may seem.

Who do they think Benjamin Britten is? Mozart? That's the first thought that comes to my mind, gazing at the phenomenal programme of events for the composer's centenary, which falls in November 2013. It's the most widely celebrated anniversary of any British composer, ever. Few worldwide could compete. Wagner and Verdi, whose bicentenaries are both due next year, won't stand a chance.

The UK's musical life will be dominated by Britten while this goes on – his image will even appear on a new 50p coin – and the Britten 100 online diary currently lists more than 1,150 events worldwide, and rising. Britten is the only British composer who has gone truly global, and the international roster of performances, books, films, exhibitions, festivals, broadcasts and commissions proves the point. Russia, where Britten is well-known, will enjoy high-profile commemorations, but anniversary events also pop up in corners of the globe where he is less recognised, among them Chile, Brazil, China, the Palestinian Territories and possibly the Amazonian rainforest...

Read the rest here.

Meanwhile, over in Independent Voices, Dominic Lawson has written an essay about getting older. Click on it and you find yourself facing an enormous picture of my favourite composer, not. Dominic quotes at length from my rather unfortunate little piece about said composer (I appreciate his kind words), and explains that it's the vastness of Bruckner's symphonies that makes them so valuable to him: they seem to hold off the passage of time.

It's a good point. None of us are as young as we used to be. I share much of his feeling about the inexorable tramp of year upon year; and, like him, I lost my mother and a sister (and my father too) while they were all still young. Read the whole thing here.

But his final sentence brings out the difference between us: "Time to listen to some Bruckner: either that, or to grow up, however late in the day." Personally, I have no intention of doing either!

Watch Marion Cotillard as Joan of Arc, complete, here

Whee! It's Benjamin Britten's 99th birthday and everyone is behaving as if it is already his 100th. Wonderful stuff, of course, on the one hand...but on the other hand there will be such a lot of Britten around in the next two years - first the run-up to the centenary, then the run-away, so to speak - that I wonder if we'll ever want to hear a note of him again afterwards. So here's a reminder that other composers in the same generation also wrote some rather good music. (Honegger was, of course, 21 years older than Britten, but shares with him a gritty and distinctive approach to personal language and an origin in, comparatively speaking, a musically parochial country - in his case, Switzerland - that led him to gravitate to France early on.)

The gorgeous French actress Marion Cotillard starred in the title role of Honegger's 1938 masterpiece Jeanne d'Arc au bucher in a live broadcast on Medici TV the other day. They've kindly made the video available for us to watch complete, free, right here on JDCMB, for 90 days. Honegger wrote the oratorio originally for the actress Ida Rubinstein and the combination of his vivid and filmic imagination with Paul Claudel's poetic text make for a compelling listen.

Don't forget, in the months ahead while we soak up every note that Britten ever wrote, that the early to mid 20th century was one of the richest eras in terms of diverse creativity that the world has ever known; now that the stranglehold of the Second Viennese School has shifted to give us a more accurate perspective, we can see and sample the full spectrum of artworks in all their glory.

Joan at the Stake – With Marion Cotillard on medici.tv.