Pianophiles, do not miss this one...

The legendary Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov has been filmed in recital for the first time in ten years, at the Berlin Philharmonie. The concert, including impromptus and Klavierstücke by Schubert and the Beethoven 'Hammerklavier' Sonata, is available to watch exclusively on Medici.tv starting from today.

Above, a taster: sounds like it is not exactly your average piano recital. But it wouldn't be and couldn't be. Sokolov is occasionally compared to his mentor, Gilels - but in fact he is a one-off. I've never heard an artist like him, before or since, and as he won't come to Britain because of our crazy requirements for a working visa (after all, why should he bother coming here when he can go elsewhere more easily?) this chance to see him in action is valuable indeed.

Wedges - of several kinds

The thin end of one wedge is webcasting. I was supposed to be in Verbier now. Long boring story about storms, leaks and missed planes. I was planning to hear a tetralogy of my piano gods, and more, but am running after builders instead. Gutted to be missing Ferenc Rados and Grigory Sokolov - the latter still the man I regard as the greatest living pianist, and tragically one we will not hear in the UK any time soon (I understand he refuses to go through the visa rigmaroles that we require). But the good news - if wedgy - is that the concerts these past two nights featuring respectively Martha Argerich and Stephen Kovacevich are available to watch online at Medici TV and tonight's recital by Daniil Trifonov will be webcast live as well. Starts at 6pm. So that's a bit of a comfort. Sokolov, as far as I know, is not due for the webcast line-up.

To cheer myself up for lack of mountains, I took myself off to the Wigmore Hall instead last night to hear the adorable Simon Trpceski in recital. One shouldn't complain about missing a festival elsewhere when there is so much great music to hear right here on the doorstep, and Simon didn't disappoint. His recital of Brahms, Ravel and Poulenc was a marvellous treat and I ended up reviewing it for The Arts Desk, so here is the link.

Last but by no means least, it has come to my attention that some very fine new music at the Proms is being sequestered away on its own website - "an exclusive iPlayer New Music Collection" - rather than enjoying a TV broadcast with proud trumpeting to the nation as a whole, even if the rest of those programmes will indeed be televised. I made an enquiry and received this back:

As you know we're constantly evolving the way we cover the Proms - from the introduction of the newly themed strands on TV through to increased online and Iplayer collections in an ever multi-platform world.  This year we are exploring new ways of curating and presenting the filmed performances across the season with  more Proms than ever before available online, both audio and visual.
 As part of this, and new for 2014,  we are creating an exclusive iPlayer New Music Collection, celebrating all the new music filmed across Proms 2014, bringing it together in one place for our audience with context provided by special filmed introductions by Tom Service. We will be showing the performance of Roxanna Panufnik's Three Paths To Peace in this collection and Jonathan Dove's Gaia piece in this collection. Both pieces will be available on iPlayer as soon as possible after the performance (we hope within a few days) - and will be available to view for longer for the first time, for a special 30 days, giving them access to a wider audience. We will be pointing our audience towards the New Music Collection from all our other platforms, including Proms Extra as soon as they are live...the Proms Extra iPlayer Collection,  and our TV broadcasts.

So apparently it is A GOOD THING that we CAN see good, accessible, listenable, beautiful new music AT ALL, isn't it. Wedge, end, thin.

Shouldn't the BBC be championing British composers to the rooftops? Did someone, somewhere, perhaps consider that the poor old wider public is too stupid to appreciate contemporary music on TV, however enjoyable and downright pertinent it is? Hiding it from wider view sends out an oddly mixed message from an institution that prides itself on supporting today's composers with plentiful commissions. I would put up a link to that "exclusive iPlayer New Music Collection" - only I can't find it.

Roxanna Panufnik's piece about peace opens tonight's Prom. It is the first time her music has been played at the Proms and it's long overdue. Listen live on Radio 3.

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.

JD meets... PIERRE BOULEZ

My interview with the man many consider today's greatest living composer was out in The Independent on Saturday. Read it here: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/pierre-boulez-a-very-modern-maestro-8095947.html

I found the Maestro on excellent form, despite the eye operation. He may be 87, but the fire of his spirit burns as strong as ever. And I'm not sure I have ever met anyone else who is so searingly intelligent, creative and wise, all at the same time. I'll be doing a longer feature in a few months' time, for International Piano Magazine, which will also involve Pierre-Laurent Aimard, but for now, I'm putting below the "director's cut" of the Indy piece, which includes a few choice out-takes: the bit about Waiting for Godot might intrigue, and, of course, I love Boulez's attitude that you can't just see something is wrong and do nothing about it.

You can see the New York Philharmonic concert in the Armory on Medici TV until 2 October, here. (Remember, JDCMB readers get discounts on Medici subscription.)


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If Pierre Boulez is this energetic aged 87, imagine him at 30. Arriving at the Lucerne Festival, the composer, maestro and man of musical action is recovering from an eye operation; it obliged him to cancel his visit to the Proms, where the conductor Daniel Barenboim juxtaposed his works with the complete Beethoven symphonies. But he will not be kept back. “It forces me to stay quiet for an hour to let the eye rest,” he remarks. “But it is very difficult to stay quiet.”

Boulez remains the heart, spine and soul of musical modernism. Many consider him today’s greatest living composer. His music is demanding listening, but once you open your ears to it, it can reveal entire vistas of sonic imagination and spectral beauty. And he affirms that he would like listeners to find it beautiful. “Sometimes it’s difficult to go to this kind of beauty, which is different from other beauties,” he says, “but I want the music to bring you into a sphere where you don’t go generally.”

He is a figure wreathed in myth. Some suggest he is a “musical Stalinist” (a term used by the composer Pierre Schaeffer); others, notably his performers, praise him as the nicest person they know. 

What’s certain is that he challenges everything, in music and in life, analysing issues with visionary exactitude. Besides, he is not a talker, but a do-er. “We don’t come to the world just to look at it and accept it,” he declares. In the 1950s he became notorious for the ferocity with which he called for the past to be swept away, seeking a blank slate for musical language to break with the preceding disasters of history. 

“The ‘tabula rasa’ was something of my generation,” Boulez says. “Works like Stockhausen’s could not exist in the years 1933-45: this part of musical life was banned completely in Germany. It was the same in the USSR under Stalin. Therefore I could not adopt the Communist point of view, because we have seen that already and we know what it produces. 

“It was not tabula rasa for pleasure. It was necessity, because this generation had, for us, failed to find something important. We did not want to prolong this kind of failure. We were radical in the sense that we at least tried to establish a new way of thinking. We did not succeed all the time, either – but it was important for us to begin from scratch.”

He was, moreover, a very angry young man kicking against the ultra-conservative musical establishment in his native France, where the music that galvanised him – Berg, Schoenberg, Bartók – remained unknown. Proving the point, it was down to Boulez himself to conduct the French stage premiere of Berg’s operatic masterpiece, Wozzeck, as late as 1963. He rejected France entirely until the prime minister Georges Pompidou used the promise of state funding for a new research institute for electronic music, IRCAM, to tempt him back from Germany, where a new internationalism in music was flourishing at Darmstadt. 

Boulez’s early pronouncements – burn down opera houses, kill the Mona Lisa, and so on – have clung to his image, perhaps excessively. Not that he has truly mellowed. “I was not more radical than I am now,” he says, “but I was, I suppose, more frank. Now I see that sometimes you have to be less direct – and more effective. But when things are wrong, insufficient, or not exactly the way it should be, then you have to tell it. I did tell it, sometimes with paradox or provocation. I did not stay at this point, but people think generally of me as a man of 1950, not of today – and I have to accept that.” His attitude is much as ever: “Something unpleasant exists: simply that. And you cannot just stay in front of it without doing anything.”

Among Boulez’s more prophetic demands was an upheaval in traditional concert environments and formats. Four or five decades ago, the world was not ready to listen. Today, though, the increasing popularity of ‘classical club nights’ – spearheaded by, for example, Gabriel Prokofiev (grandson of Sergei) in London, Le Poisson Rouge in New York, and a series at the Lucerne Festival – echoes Boulez’s call for informal, communicative atmospheres between audience and performers. Still, he smiles when I mention a recent performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in a south London car park. 

“It has a double meaning,” he suggests. “It can be important, or it can be just a fashion moment. But I prefer a ‘fashion moment’ to doing nothing. Recently the New York Philharmonic has done, with concerts in the Armory, what I tried to do as its music director in the Seventies. I was not successful because the time was not right.” 

In June the orchestra gave a performance in this unconventional venue on Park Avenue, including music by Boulez himself. It sold out and is streamed on the Internet until 2 October. He keeps dreaming: “Today people like to change the relationship between the sound and themselves. You could bring in improvised elements involving people’s reactions to the sound, like a fountain of music: sometimes good, sometimes not, but always with the freedom of creating.”

He is still composing, too. Currently he is trying to finish his Notations – 12 pieces for piano, some dating back to 1945, which he has been reworking for orchestra. Rumour has it that he would like to write an opera. It’s true, he says, but his plans were always beset by bad luck: intended collaborations with Jean Genet and Heiner Müller were each cut short by the author’s death. He would love to adapt Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: “The great novelty of Wagner,” says Boulez, “is that of creating a myth – the myth of Wotan, the myth of Siegmund – and finally the story becomes less important than the myth itself.” Wotan in The Ring is very real in dramatic terms, but in the Beckett, the myth is Godot, who never appears: “You find yourself questioning the myth, but you cannot discuss its qualities because there is nothing there! Therefore I was interested.” 

Can we keep hoping he will tackle it – or would we be Waiting for Boulez? “If you can give me an elixir of long life,” Boulez twinkles. Still, I wouldn’t put it past him. This is a man who changed the world. Given a chance, he will not stop now. 

Pierre Boulez gives a week of masterclasses at the Lucerne Festival from 1 September and conducts the Academy Orchestra on 7 September. www.lucernefestival.ch

 

Operalia finale - coming to a computer near you

The grand finale of Placido Domingo's Operalia competition is on Sunday 10 June. Reflect that this contest has launched the careers of Rolando Villazon, Joyce DiDonato, Nina Stemme, Jose Cura and many more in its past 19 years - this year marks its 20th anniversary - and you might well want to see what's going on. The competition is held in a different place every time and this year it will be at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, China, and will be streamed live on Medici TV. Ten young candidates will perform for an audience and jury led by Domingo himself. Remember, as a JDCMB reader you can benefit from a cut-price subscription to Medici TV: full details here. Fans can also see there a selection of films displaying some of those former winners since they've made the big-time.