A plea

Pliable at the Overgrown Path has a powerful and moving post about the current horrific plight of the Roma in Italy, in which he also describes the origins of Bartok's Romanian Dances and links to this article from yesterday's Independent. Here in the midst of happily multicultural London, it's horrifying to think that such inhumanity is taking place so nearby.

Not that we have a leg to stand on. Less than a decade ago there was an influx in London of Roma from eastern Europe - Slovakia or Romania, I think - who were seeking to escape the persecution and discrimination they'd been experiencing there. They used to beg on the Underground and elsewhere and the tabloid press laid into them with full complement of teeth and claws. After a year or so, they vanished. Presumably they were deported - back to the persecution that will always do its utmost to prevent them from escaping their deprived situation.

Here is a history of the Roma from the Patrin Web Journal.

Whatever happened to that old-fashioned notion that human beings have human rights? Hungarian Dances, which features a Hungarian Roma-descended heroine, has been contracted by publishers in Hungary and Romania as an anti-racist novel, but I wish it could have proved less timely.

As a tribute to the musical achievements of the Roma, here is the astonishing Roby Lakatos playing Hejre Kati, one of the most famous Gypsy melodies that dates back to the legendary violinist Janos Bihari, of whom Lakatos is a descendant.

Die Meistersinger von London, aka...

...the Worshipful Company of Musicians, which rather remarkably invited me to their gala Midsummer Banquet last night and asked me to make a speech on behalf of the guests.

For the benefit of our friends overseas, I should explain that the City of London's Livery Companies date back to the 15th century if not earlier, and were a form of early trade union. The musicians' organisation started off as a Fellowship of Minstrels (read about its history here). These Companies still exist and range through everything from Stonemasons to Water Conservators; each has its own tradition of medieval pageantry and ritual, and you kind of have to be there to believe it's true.

The evening was held in Stationers' Hall - an exquisite building tucked away behind St Paul's Cathedral, rebuilt in the 1680s after the Great Fire. It was an astonishing affair - like something straight out of Die Meistersinger, complete with ceremonial robes, a fanfare to play us all in, a sung Grace, extremely good food and a Ceremony of the Loving Cup. During the course of the evening we enjoyed a fine performance by two extremely gifted young musicians - soprano Laura Mitchell and guitarist Milos Karadaglic - and the Master, Leslie East, presented the Company's Gold Medal to Sir Richard Rodney Bennett. Among the other guests we were delighted to encounter such distinguished beings as conductor Stephen Barlow and his absolutely fabulous wife Joanna Lumley, violinist Madeleine Mitchell, conductor Ronald Corp and a number of the musical philanthropists who help to make the musical world go round - part of the Company's raison d'etre is to help fund scholarships for young musicians.

In his own excellent speech, Leslie speculated on the way that, in 300 years' time, researchers looking into the history of the Company might discover a report on a blog by a novelist and music journalist describing the evening in terms not so far removed from that which graced reports of its dinners three centuries ago. And perhaps not much has changed.

So - if you're reading this in 2308, a very warm greeting from us all here in the 21st Century! And a huge thank-you to the Company for a truly splendid evening.

Here's my speech.

Master, wardens, aldermen, liverymen and fellow guests!

It’s a great honour to be here tonight and to speak at such a sumptuous dinner.

It’s a special delight, too, to see Sir Richard Rodney Bennett here as the Company’s special guest. Like all of us, I’ve been enjoying his music for many years in all its shapes and forms – he must be one of the most polymorphous composers working today. And his presence is a wonderful excuse to take a very brief look at what it means to be a composer at all, but especially now, in the first years of the 21st century, an era of extraordinary change.

It goes without saying that if it wasn’t for composers, none of us would be here tonight, because western classical music wouldn’t exist. Music may be a God-given gift, but it’s also a man-made art: every tune you whistle, every mobile phone jingle you hear, every song you sing with your kids in the car, has at some point been thought up and written down by a composer. It’s so easy to take music for granted these days that it’s equally easy to forget what an extraordinary phenomenon the ability to compose good music really is.

It’s peculiar enough to create a substantial piece of work in any medium. Writing novels can feel like an insane undertaking at times, especially when you find you have to research 80 years of Hungarian history, but at least words and language are everyone’s staple diet of communication. Writing music is a more extreme sport, because music begins where words end. To create music means working with a raw material that is much more elusive yet also much more direct in the way it reaches the audiences’ emotions. That’s why composers often leave me feeling quite simply awestruck.

For about two minutes, when I was about 17, I thought I wanted to compose. Actually I was put in a corner at metaphorical gunpoint and ordered to write a setting of a psalm for a big school event. But when I got to university, it started to look like a less appealing option. This was the mid Eighties. First, I was a girl, and the rather monastic atmosphere around the composer cliques left one in no doubt that one was not precisely welcome. But even if you got past that, the resistance to the idea of melody or harmony was another matter. A composer friend knocked on my door one day badly in need of tea – his teacher had just told him he ‘thought too much about the way his music sounded’. I know there’ll be resistance and dispute over this, but I am speaking according to my own experience and observations: a quarter of a century ago there was a distinct feeling that there were party lines to toe. We were all in thrall to a perceived sort of historico-political imperative to write serialism, modernism et al, and if you didn’t, you were A Bad Person. The fact that not many people wanted to listen to the results didn’t seem to be a problem, because Beethoven was misunderstood in his day and alienated his audiences, therefore if nobody likes your stuff, you are obviously the next Beethoven... Fuzzy logic, perhaps, but certainly the secret was to épater les bourgeois. Shock those dreadful middle classes out of their appalling complacency!

Anyway, the bottom line was that I had no talent. So I gave up and sat back to see whether this new batch of would-be Beethovens would be Beethoven. Most of them weren’t. My friend who needed tea ended up appropriately enough in China... learning to play folk instruments. I’d loved his music and it still breaks my heart that he – and innumerable others – were so alienated by their supposedly educational experiences that they fled the country, or composition, and sometimes music itself. It wasn't serialism or modernism that was to blame, of course - some of the greatest composers of the 20th century used these - but rather the stranglehold they were permitted to exert over all possible alternatives. Living composers desperately need support, and prime among that support must be open ears and open minds on the part of the people who make the decisions.

Meanwhile, everyone seemed to have forgotten that while 'epateeing' les bourgeois may be fun, les bourgeois are on the whole the ones who buy the tickets. And sooner or later, they vote with their feet – and their wallets. Musicians, contrary to popular opinion, are human beings and have to eat.

In the last fifteen or twenty years, there’s been a radical shift in the new music world. First, if you’re a girl, it’s not such a problem any more. The roster of women composers is growing fast – while the Judiths Weir and Bingham have blazed an inspiring trail in this country, younger composers like Roxanna Panufnik, Errollyn Wallen and Tansy Davis aren’t far behind. Meanwhile the range of styles available to composers has never been greater. Back in the seventies and eighties, composers with the versatility to range from jazz to classical to film to pop used to keep their activities strictly separated. That’s no longer the case.

One of my special passions is the music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who started off as a child prodigy in Vienna a hundred years ago and ended up becoming the founding father of the Hollywood film score. He once said: “Music is music, whether it is for the stage, screen or rostrum. Form may change, the manner of writing may vary, but the composer needs to make no concessions whatever to what he conceives to be his own musical ideology.” He was speaking in 1946, but even if he was right, the attitudes of the time didn’t perceive it that way. He was dismissed as ‘a Hollywood composer’ – back then a deeply damning term – because his serious music sounded like film music; although the truth was actually that film music sounded like Korngold, who invented it in his own personal style.

It took decades to break down that barrier, but Korngold’s best opera, Die tote Stadt is now firmly back in the international repertoire and will have its UK stage premiere at Covent Garden in January – an indication that those proscriptive attitudes have relaxed. So, how did this change happen? First, the Minimalists in America essentially went back to the drawing board and created a new, basic and accessible language which caught something of the eighties and nineties zeitgeist and achieved a huge impact with audiences; secondly, the fall of the Iron Curtain meant that composers from the eastern bloc could come to the west and we could explore the richness and spirituality of their works; thirdly, cheap air travel has – while it lasts – meant extraordinary ease in exchanging ideas with a wealth of musical traditions around the world. And information is so easily available on the internet, in print and in person that the range of potential influences open to a composer is infinite.

We’re poised, I reckon, on a kind of communicative cusp – our means of disseminating information and art is changing faster than we are, and part of the challenge for any creative artist is simply keeping up and making the new mediums work with you rather than against you. Youtube is just the beginning and ten years from now it will look antiquated. Probably two years from now it will look antiquated. Finding a personal voice in the face of an world that’s so fragmented and varied may never have been harder – but as ever there’s nothing that stimulates creativity so much as a challenge. Maintaining artistic individuality in the face of globalisation isn’t easy. But as ever, the ones who will succeed are the ones who can meet the challenges of their times head on in the strongest way and with the greatest integrity.

All this is really just a long way of saying that music remains the greatest gift and the greatest miracle of human creativity. Therefore musicians are a worshipful company indeed. It’s a joy to celebrate with you tonight the art that we all love so much.

So, on behalf of your guests I am very grateful for your hospitality this evening and I would ask my fellow guests to join me in a toast to the Company!

Stop press: Ida Haendel is in town

Don't miss Ida Haendel at the Wigmore Hall tonight! She is performing with pianist Olga Sitkovetsky and members of the Razumovsky Ensemble and Academy in a very rare London recital. Box office: 020 7935 2141. Also, do try to get to Anna-Liisa Bezrodny's 6pm Razumovsky Young Artist Recital - she is an absolute delight.

I will write up the Kernis and Rorem performance asap, but as I'm supposed to deliver my next manuscript to Hodder rather soon - like, er, next week - it mightn't be immediate...

Songs from West and East

It may not be the easiest time to sell American music in London, given the all-time low popularity of that president. But hey, he's going soon and it's no reason not to enjoy the fascinating music of Samuel Barber or the European premiere of a new song cycle by Ned Rorem, one of today's finest composers of art song. An team of excellent young musicians are presenting a programme that is exciting, fresh and (especially for the Wigmore Hall, which is largely back to its old conservative ways) new, on Sunday evening, spearheaded by prizewinning pianist Marisa Gupta.

The Rorem cycle is called Aftermath - Ten Songs on Love and War and sounds, to put it mildly, topical. Super baritone Thomas Meglioranza sings it, and Brilliant Sky, Infinite Sky by Aaron Jay Kernis. Those of you in Australia, by the way, can hear him soon in the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville on 9 July when he sings the baritone songs in our Turgenev-Viardot programme The Song of Triumphant Love. Programme also includes music by Gershwin arranged by Heifetz, with violinist Hayley Wolfe, and Barber's excellent Excursions.

Meanwhile Patricia Rozario is gearing up to a wonderful recital programme in the City of London Festival on 3 July, bringing together songs of longing for the East by Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn with some powerful Tavener (the Akhmatova Songs, written for her), a new cycle by Param Vir on poetry by Rabindranath Tagore (also written for her) and some folk songs from Goa. Read my piece about her in yesterday's Indy here.

Merci pour la musique!

And not only for the music. A thousand thanks to everyone who helped to make the Hungarian Dances concert yesterday a rip-roaring runaway success. Thanks to Vernon Ellis, Veronica Davies and the Queen's Gate Terrace Concerts for accepting us into the series and hosting the event in their beautiful salon, and for all their hard work. Thanks to Janine for some very "different" canapes: transforming Hungarian cuisine into finger food is no small order. Overwhelming thanks to Ilona for her sensational Austro-Hungarian biscuits, expert page-turning, and astonishing tranquility backstage throughout; ditto for Linn, who was able to keep her head when all about her might have been losing theirs; and ditto to Kate and Marissa from Hodder. Thanks to the team from omusic TV - more of which, I hope, in due course. Thanks to everyone in the audience for being so tolerant when I succumbed to brain-loss and forgot their names. And most of all to Philippe Graffin, Claire Desert and Tom, who pulled out all the stops on violins and piano and put up with me reading stuff in between the pieces.

I think Sir Alan would have been pleased.

Pictured, Philippe and Tom in full flood of Bartok Violin Duos.

Tomorrow...

...is the Hungarian Dances concert. Please excuse me while I go and have a quick shake. I'll be back later in the week. Anyone still wanting to book can do so by following the link in the sidebar.

An artist's choice: endorse designer gear, or play in a prison?

Here's a pseudo-profound thought for Sunday brunch. When someone makes the celebrity big-time as a classical musicians, should they popularise the face of classical music and making it look 'cool' by modelling designer gear? Or would they do better to take music where it doesn't usually go and show how much good it can do?

Opera Chic reports that Lang Lang has endorsed some Adidas trainers. You can wear his name in Chinese on your heels.

I remember the day - some years ago - when I went to heaven and back at Lang Lang's concerts. A Mendelssohn piano concerto, light as a hummingbird. A Wigmore recital full of variety and marvel and love. Hats off, folks, a genius, I said. Then it all went pear-shaped. No idea what happened, but he zoomed way off the deep end in a Rachmaninov concerto in Verbier, and it just hasn't been the same since. So if he fancies going down a different route to make money, that's fine with me. We should let all the megastar names who've made the big time and become warped in the process do their modelling and endorsing et al, and make way for the real musicians who are quietly working themselves into the ground for the sake of their art.

Tonight, one of the less-blingy artists who's in it for the music is indeed getting some prime media attention: our own violin heroine Tasmin Little is the subject of The South Bank Show! Tune in and see her playing everywhere from Stratford-on-Avon to a Brighton hostel for the homeless and Belmarsh Prison on her Naked Violin project.

Finally, just have a look at this article from today's Independent on singing for peace in Darfur. Music has that much power. So what are its most famous practitioners doing endorsing trainers?

Rant over. off to practise my readings for Tuesday now.

Return of the little black dress...

Mad props to whichever clever being at the Independent thought up the headline A SVELTER BELTER for my piece today about the glorious Deborah Voigt, who is back at Covent Garden next week after an eight-year absence to sing Ariadne auf Naxos, complete with THAT little black dress.

Here's one of the cuter promotional videos I've encountered:

Mary Whitehouse moment...

Having missed The Minotaur at Covent Garden, I watched it on TV yesterday - yes, BBC2 actually decided to show an entire brand-new opera by Birtwistle from the Royal Opera House on Saturday night at prime time (so full marks for that).

I ended up hiding behind the sofa. Honest to goodness, guv, I haven't seen anything so scary since the Daleks, or anything so horrific since Downfall.

Of course, it was fantastic - amazing singing and great performances from everyone and especially John Tomlinson and Christine Rice, huge power in the music even if it's tough on the ears and brain (I liked the use of the cimbalom), and the libretto is very striking indeed. I was just relieved not to have been locked into a Bayreuth-style pew for the duration and I really don't think they should have shown it before the watershed.

Could someone over the Pond please tell us something: are Birtwistle's operas performed much in the States, and how do they go over? Ditto for Germany, France and Italy?

Tragic deaths of Halle Orchestra couple

I'm sorry to have to report that Halle Orchestra musicians Mike and Dorothy Hall have been killed in an avalanche while on a walking holiday in the Pyrenees. Full story here.

Mike, a violinist, was a student alongside my husband a few decades ago and Tom describes him as one of the most positive and supportive people he knew. Dorothy was a cellist. I never met them, but after a wonderful phone chat with Mike I made him one of the 'case studies' in a piece I wrote about orchestral life a few years ago.

Why didn't he just turn the guy into a flautist?

My eye was caught today by this story from The Times about 'the cellist of Sarajevo', who is extremely upset by a novel called, er, The Cellist of Sarajevo. The author, Steven Galloway, raises some interesting points in the article about how to draw the line between fiction and reality, eg whether you have to pay off the latter if creating the former. (His book raises even more interesting questions about this. I am in the middle of it at the moment and feel, so far, that it straddles both fiction and reality, therefore satisfies entirely as neither.)

But what excellent publicity...

Tosca, or Why the Best is the Enemy of the Vaguely OK

It was one of those Cloud 9 moments: a man on a ladder starts to sing, the sound hits you in the gut and you undergo some kind of out-of-body experience...The ladder was on stage at Covent Garden, the man was Cavaradossi, aka Jonas Kaufmann and I am still afloat 14 hours later.

The trouble with placing a voice like Kaufmann's centre stage in Tosca, though, is that you need a soprano and a baritone who function at the same artistic level. Not to mention a conductor who knows what his singers are doing. Micaela Carosi as Tosca looked gorgeous and has a big voice, but she proved irritatingly mannered - too much swooping and mucking about with vibrato and lack of - and though she milked 'Vissi d'arte' and got a huge round of applause, it left me faintly chilly. Paolo Gavanelli as Scarpia looked great, but had neither sound nor charisma to match - you kept thinking he was probably quite a nice guy underneath. Paul Wynne Griffiths, in the pit, didn't seem to have liaised much with the chorus master and he and Kaufmann parted company rather drastically several times.

Kaufmann bowls out his black-coffee tenor tone as if it's the easiest thing on earth: it's dark, delicious and leaves you unable to sleep. And he can act, too. He simply showed the others up.

The production, by Jonathan Kent, does what it says on the tin. This is the most classic Tosca you could hope for. Beautiful designs, correct period setting, no monkey business other than that explicitly stipulated. A Tosca for tourists, I thought, trying hard to wish for something more imaginative. But it looks so good that it was impossible to keep thinking that...and I liked the attention to detail: Cavaradossi descending the ladder on a descent in the orchestra, and running up the stairs on an ascent, or a soldier putting out a cigarette at the beginning of Act III with a flourish of light matching a squiggle on the flute.

As for Kaufmann - please, G-d, if you're there, take good care of this guy. Let that voice stick around for a long, long time. It's proof that miracles exist.

There is a video on Youtube of him singing 'E lucevan le stelle' in a TV show, but I think he is best in operatic context, which shows the full range of what he can do. So here he is in the Flower Song from Carmen at Covent Garden last year. Enjoy.

The Apprentice Concert Manager

With two weeks to go until our Hungarian Dances concert-of-the-book, I've somehow acquired a whole new respect for concert managers. Meanwhile I've got hooked on The Apprentice. So here, with apologies to Sir Alan Sugar, the BBC and the French language, is a little JDCMB take on the proceedings...


(Prologue: darkness: Jess asleep, feverishly tossing and turning...)

Voice-over: One book. One concert. One CD. One chance only. Four people are coming to South Kensington to make their dream come true: the awesome uniting of fiction and music. But to bring this dream to fruition, these artistic celebrities must learn to work together, even if they are married...

(Morning. Phone rings. Dishevelled Jess answers.) Disembodied secretary voice: Sir Alan would like you to meet him at Queen's Gate Terrace. The car will be there in half an hour.

(Queen's Gate Terrace: masterclass in full swing under the chandeliers).
Sir Alan: This beautiful salon is in the heart of musical London, two minutes from the Royal Albert Hall. You want to make a recording, but you need to raise some capital to back it. This place seats 110 people and offers a top-notch series of recitals and masterclasses. Here is your task: you're going to put on a concert. The one who makes the most money wins. Of the rest, one of you will get fired.

Jess, Tom, Philippe and Claire: Yes/oui, Sir Alan.

(Cut to: JDCMB home base: much activity, with Solti getting underfoot. Jess designing flyer on computer, Tom taking memory stick to Prontaprint.)

Claire: J'ai des concerts a Paris. A bientot!
Philippe: J'ai des concerts a New York. A bientot!
Tom: It'll soon be Glyndebourne.
Administrator: What a lovely idea your concert is. Have you decided what you'd like to do about catering?
(Fatalistic fanfare) Jess (shocked): Catering?!

(Music: signature tune to the latest Nigella Lawson series)
(Cut to: Jess in supermarket, selecting ready-made canapes. Cut to: Jess & Tom at home, eating them.)
Tom: Yuck.
(Cut to: Jess in Budapest, musing over menus and buying the Gundel Cookbook. Then discovering she got the wrong one and it's all in Hungarian.)

(Cut to: Jess at the gym. Enter Friendly Caterer on the next machine)
Friendly Caterer: We could do cold cherry soup in espresso cups!
(Dreamscene: guests tippling from espresso cups, spilling pink gloop on beautiful wooden floor...)
Friendly Caterer: Have you thought about Hungarian wine?
(Cut to: Jess bringing home Hungarian white wine from supermarket, sampling it, then doubling up with heartburn.)
Philippe: I 'ave to practise. A bientot!
Tom: I'd better learn those Bartok Duos.
Jess: At least I don't have to play the bloody piano.

(Cut to: Tom practising. Cut to: Philippe practising. Cut to: Claire practising. Cut to: Jess on phone to publisher.)
Publisher: Very nice, dear, sorry we can't help to pay for it. By the way, why is your next manuscript so late?

(Cut to: Jess putting a post advertising the concert on JDCMB. Cut to: email from famous singer requesting ticket. Cut to: date - 1 April.)

(Music: The Beatles, With a little Help from my Friends)
(Cut to: Tom wheeling and dealing around the Festival Hall, the supermarket, the train, Glyndebourne and the dentist. Cut to: concert bookings spreadsheet, numbers rising)
(Cut to: Jess doing mass emailing. Replies arrive: "great, two comps please.")
(Cut to: Jess on phone to Philippe, conversation inaudible but cartoon images flying around of weeping Pound signs being eaten alive by grinning Euros with blood-stained teeth.)
(Cut to: concert promotion in Hungarian Cultural Centre brochure. Cut to inbox: email arrives - in Hungarian.)
(Cut to: Jess rips up cover and experiments with different titles. English Dances. Italian Operas. French Letters.)

(Cut to: Philippe and Tom rehearsing Bartok Duos.)
Tom: Blimey, he's amazing!
Jess: So are you, darling.
Tom: I've sold loads of tickets. What about you?
Jess: Erm, I've sold some.
(Cut to email from famous singer, who is not an April Fool joke after all, requesting another ticket.)
Tom: I'm going to get that job with Sir Alan, and sod the rest of you! Just wait until we get into the boardroom...
Solti: Meow.
Philippe: J'ai des concerts en Afrique-du-Sud. A bientot!
Friendly Caterer: Is there anywhere to park in South Kensington?
Tom: Maybe we can sell copies of your book and make a donation to the project from the sales.

(Cut to: Jess on phone to warehouse)
Warehouse manager: Congratulations! The Hungarian Dances hardback has sold out.
Jess: But I've only got one copy left! And I'm going to have an audience of 100 people - and no books?!
Publisher: Very nice, dear. Rather than reprinting the hardback, we'll print the paperback early.
Jess: Oh, that's so wonderful of you, I'm terribly grateful, you are wonderful lovely people.
Publisher: No problem, dear. We should receive copies on 19 June...
(Cut to: Jess staring at concert date, which is 17 June. Cut to: Jess trawling Internet for cheap copies of own book.)
Publisher: We'll find some somewhere, don't panic... By the way, why is your next manuscript so late?
Jess (running in circles, flapping arms): Don't panic, don't panic! Help!
Solti: Meow?!

(Cut to: The candidates assemble at Sir Alan's office. Ominous woogly Apprentice music.)
Sir Alan's secretary: You can go through to the boardroom now. (Cut to: the boardroom.)
Sir Alan: Philippe and Claire, you're great musicians. You can go back to the house.
Philippe and Claire: Merci, Sir Alain. A bientot!
Sir Alan: So...Tom and Jessica...Today one of you will get fired. Who's sold the most tickets, Margaret?
Margaret: Tom has, Sir Alan.
Sir Alan: Tom, well done. How did Jessica bear up through the task?
Tom: Sir Alan, my wife means well, but to be honest, Sir Alan, selling is just not her cup of tea. She's only a writer. I've been left with doing all the hard work while she sits in her study making up stories. Everything that's been good in this task is down to me, and (sob) I have to play second violin on the night, too!
Sir Alan: Jessica, give me a good reason why I shouldn't fire you.
Jess (defensive): Sir Alan, I devised the concept, which is totally unique, I've made a four-page script out of a 400-page book, I worked out the programme as a team with Philippe, I've found a caterer who for an excellent price can transform soupy, stewy Hungarian cuisine into finger-food, I've found a good wine deal, and none of this would even be happening if I hadn't written the book. I believe at the end we will have a package that will be immensely attractive to the public. It has total artistic integrity. And only we could have done this - as the special team that we are.
Sir Alan (shaking head): And do you think you'd last even two minutes in my organisation? You haven't got a bloody clue. (points finger) Jessica, you're -

(Cut to: Jess sits bolt upright in bed, gasping and sweating: it was all a dream...)
Solti: Prr.

HUNGARIAN DANCES: THE CONCERT OF THE NOVEL is at 49 Queen's Gate Terrace on 17 June, 7 for 7.30. Booking details here.