32 not out: a Beethoven piano festival with a few major differences

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:  http://www.st-marys-perivale.org.uk/events-beethovenfestival3.shtml 

Amit Yahav performs at St Mary's Perivale

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?

HM: We obviously had to mark the great 250^th 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.  

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?   

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.       

JD: What were the issues involved in putting it together? Organising 32 pianists sounds like a logistical nightmare… 

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 !    

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.  

St Mary's Perivale

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?  

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.

JD: What are the technical challenges of relaying concerts on the internet? How does St Mary’s manage this?  

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.

     

JD: Do you think concerts change substantially without an audience? How do performers cope without that live feedback? 

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.

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?

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. 

JD: Medicine and music are often deemed to “go together”. While writing ‘Immortal’ I’ve been fascinated to learn that Beethoven occasionally practised almost 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?

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.

Beethoven Festival, St Mary's Perivale, 3 and 4 October, is online here: http://www.st-marys-perivale.org.uk/events-beethovenfestival3.shtml 

More shows on 17 and 27 April!

We had a whale of a time at Kings Place, performing the UK premiere of Being Mrs Bach on Saturday afternoon. Left to right: Ben Bevan (baritone), Steven Devine (harpsichord), me, Jonathan Manson (cello and gamba) - what an absolute privilege to work with them! Totally knocked out by the brilliance of Steven's harpsichord playing, which provided the effect of an entire orchestra or two, the apparently effortless beauty of Jonathan's solos and the way he switched between instruments as if simply taking another breath, and the warm, gorgeously tender tone of Ben's baritone, which we understand will be gracing Opera Holland Park this summer.

Onwards... next up is Odette: A Celebration of Swan Lake, which takes wing on Wednesday. The award-winning Fenella Humphreys (violin), also-award-winning Viv McLean (piano) and I will be at Bob Boas's series, Music at Mansfield Street, London W1, on 17 April, and St Mary's Perivale on 27 April. St Mary's will be LIVE STREAMED! If you would like to come along on Wednesday, there are still places available (it clashes with a) the Easter hols and b) most annoyingly, the Proms launch) and you can email boas22m@btinternet.com for further details. If you want to come to St Mary's, just turn up on the night - more details here. And if you want to watch the live stream, it will be here (but is only available at the actual time, not online thereafter.) The concert is an hour and a half without an interval.

More stuff below!

Fenella Humphreys (violin)
Viv McLean (piano)
Jessica Duchen (narrator)

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet score for Swan Lake casts a powerful spell over generation after generation. It has had innumerable reimaginings and retellings, balletic and otherwise. The latest is author and music critic Jessica Duchen's magical-realist novel ODETTE, in which the enchanted swan princess meets 21st-century Britain.

This remarkable narrated concert mingles selected readings from the book with the story behind Tchaikovsky's creation of Swan Lake and its passionate, tragic inspirations. Award-winning, ballet-loving British violinist Fenella Humphreys embraces the great violin solos with which Tchaikovsky embroidered his score, as well as the closely related Violin Concerto; pianist Viv McLean evokes the influence of Chopin and Liszt on Tchaikovsky; and there's plenty of humour, with works by Saint-Saëns and Gershwin. Share the enchantment with this joyous celebration of a beloved ballet, its composer, its fairy tale and what they can mean to us today.

Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake – Introduction 

Saint-Saëns: Danse macabre 

Liszt (arr. Achron): Liebestraum No.3 

Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake – Odette's Solo 

Gershwin: The Man I Love 

Chopin: Polonaise-Fantaisie 

Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake – White Swan Pas de Deux 

Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake – Adagio from the Black Swan Pas de Deux 

Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto in D major - finale 

Fenella Humphreys (violin) enjoys a busy career combining chamber music and solo work, performing in prestigious venues around the world. Her first concerto recording, of Christopher Wright's Violin Concerto with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra was released in 2012 to great critical acclaim. Her recent Bach to the Future project, a set of six new unaccompanied violin works by eminent composers was a huge success, garnering performances at acclaimed UK venues, and has now been recorded over two CDs for Champs Hill Records. Both have received huge critical acclaim, and the second received the BBC Music Magazine's 2018 Instrumental Award. Her new disc with Nicola Eimer was released in February 2019. Fenella is a passionate chamber musician and is regularly invited by Steven Isserlis to take part in the prestigious Open Chamber Music at the International Musicians' Seminar, Prussia Cove. Concertmaster of the Deutsche Kammerakademie, Fenella also enjoys guest leading and directing various ensembles in Europe. Her teachers have included Sidney Griller CBE, Itzhak Rashkovsky, Ida Bieler and David Takeno at the Purcell School, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the Robert-Schumann-Hochschule in Düsseldorf. She plays a beautiful violin from the circle of Peter Guarneri of Venice, kindly on loan from Jonathan Sparey.

Viv McLean (piano), the winner of the First Prize at the 2002 Maria Canals International Piano Competition in Barcelona , has performed at all the major venues in the UK as well as throughout Europe, Japan , Australia and the USA . He has played concerti with most major UK orchestras, performed chamber music with leading groups such as the Ysaye String Quartet and the Leopold String Trio. Viv studied at the Royal Academy of Music and was the piano winner at the Royal Overseas-League Music Competition and one of three winners of the National Federation of Music Societies' Young Artists Competition, leading to various recitals and concerto appearances throughout Great Britain . Viv has recorded regularly for BBC Radio 3 and recorded for Sony Classical Japan and Naxos , as well as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's own label. Viv lives in Harrow and has been a huge supporter of concerts at both St Mary's Perivale and St Barnabas in recent years.

Jessica Duchen's books have gathered a loyal fan-base and wide acclaim. Odette, published by Unbound in November 2018, is her sixth novel, but has occupied her for over 26 years. Ghost Variations (Unbound, 2016) was Book of the Month in BBC Music Magazine and was John Suchet's Christmas Choice among the Daily Mail's Best Reads of 2016 ("A thrilling read" - John Suchet).   Jessica grew up in London, read music at Cambridge and has devoted much of her career to music journalism, with 12 years as music critic for The Independent. Her work has also appeared in BBC Music Magazine, The Sunday Times and The Guardian, among others. She was the librettist of Silver Birch by composer Roxanna Panufnik, which was commissioned by Garsington Opera and shortlisted for an International Opera Award in 2018, and she has worked frequently with Panufnik on texts for choral works. Her further output includes biographies of the composers Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Gabriel Fauré, her popular classical music blog JDCMB, and the play A Walk through the End of Time , which won the town medal of St Nazaire in France, where its commissioning festival was based. Jessica lives in London with her violinist husband and two cats.

Please come to St Mary's Perivale on 7 September!

Ghost Variations is nearly here. Just three more days, I believe....and next week my performance partners David Le Page and Viv McLean - an absolute knockout of a violin and piano duo - join me for the first of four concerts we are giving through the autumn based upon 'Ghost Variations'. I narrate, they play the appropriate music and thus we tell the story together. 

The first concert is on Wednesday 7 September at the exquisite 12th-century church of St Mary's, Perivale, tucked away behind the A40. It's an intimate venue with a magical atmosphere and a marvellous concert series. Admission is free and seats unreserved (though you may make a donation at the end). 

The "pilot" for the project took place, to a very warm reception, at the Hungarian Cultural Centre back in March and  we have now extended it a little and added an interval, creating a full-evening recital. Incidentally, there will also be a shorter version, available for coffee concerts in the new year. Every piece has been chosen with forensic care to match the story, its protagonists and the necessary atmosphere.

(Above, Dave plays at the premiere...)

You'll have the chance to hear music written for Jelly d'Arányi - Ravel's Tzigane; Brahms Hungarian Dances arranged by her great-uncle, Joseph Joachim; music she played a great deal, such as the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto; a piece by Frederick Septimus Kelly, whom she had hoped to marry before he was killed at the Somme; 'Hejre Kati' arranged by her teacher, Jeno Hubay; and, of course, plenty of Schumann, including a juxtaposition that makes clear how close the slow movement of the Violin Concerto is to the theme of the Geistervariationen. Songs from the Thirties will welcome the assembling audience, creating the ambience in which the story unfolded (and I'm on the lookout for some vintage clothing...).

More details of the concert and how to get to St Mary's are available at the website: http://www.st-marys-perivale.org.uk/events-2016-09-07.shtml

PLEASE COME ALONG AND JOIN US!

Further performances very soon...watch this space...

JDCMB IS 10 TODAY!

It was 10 years ago today that I thought I'd investigate these strange new things called blogs. All of a sudden, you could write something and press a button and a minute later a total stranger could be reading it on the other side of the world. For a writer this was a) mind-blowing, b) irresistible. I started mucking about with a site or two and next thing I knew, I had my own blog. I didn't know you could give blogs fancy titles so I just called it Jessica Duchen's Classical Music Blog. And here we are.

Celebration? Well, there's a Hungarian Dances novel-concert this afternoon at 3pm at the gorgeous St Mary's Perivale, with me, David Le Page (violin) and Viv McLean (piano). Admission is free, though you can make a donation afterwards. There will be cake, and there's a pub over the road.

So, how have things changed in these first 10 years?

First of all, and most obviously, we are still here. Many are not. I've recently overhauled the blogroll and am surprised by the number of writers who've stopped blogging in the past couple of years. Perhaps novelty wears off; perhaps pressures of time encroach too much. I've often considered closing down this one, but have never quite been able to bring myself to do it. It's often a sort of mental limbering up at the start of the day, a way of getting brain into gear - even though you should never blog before your second cup of coffee - and it's cheaper than therapy. More importantly, there are few ways to keep certain values going in this scary world, but JDCMB is one. If you are a regular visitor, chances are that you know them. That's why I keep on keeping on.

When the Internet was becoming ubiquitous, its gatekeepers - and its users - made two enormous mistakes. One was to allow anonymity. The other was to make everything free.

Ten years on, many gifted individuals are struggling to make ends meet because of the second; as for the first, this is why many of us have closed our comments facilities and never read "below the line". I closed the JDCMB comments facility not because there were regular trolls, but because it was always a worry that there might be. One needs to eliminate sources of avoidable stress whenever possible.

When Amazon started to allow anonymous book reviews, one of the first things that happened to my stuff was that someone wrote a vicious anonymous review of my Korngold (pictured right) biography. I was convinced I knew who'd written that review and sent a letter to the Society of Authors journal saying, essentially, that anonymity makes nonsense of the whole idea of reviewing. Apparently this was news and I got interviewed by The Guardian. That was 15 years ago, never mind ten; it's still true; and it's still not sorted. (I still think I know who wrote that review, btw, only now I think it wasn't the person I thought it was then. It's worse. Never mind.)

As for free...well, this blog is, obviously, free. Mainly because I haven't worked out a way to put up a paywall. If it becomes possible, I may do so. I've tried other ways to allow it to bring in an income, including, briefly around 2009, virtually selling my soul (it's back - thanks). Occasionally some of you kindly decide to sponsor Solti's cat food and receive a sidebar advert in return. You can still do this if you so wish. Thank you to everyone who's taken up the possibility, especially Amati.com, our latest long-term sponsor, for whom I now write a reasonably regular Soapbox column. Here's the latest, featuring one of Mr Buchanan's priceless cartoons: when should we applaud prodigies?

A lot has happened to me in ten years. I've written four novels, two plays and several words&music projects, joined the Independent as a freelance music and ballet correspondent, met and interviewed many of my heroes and heroines, become a bit of a campaigner for women's equality in the musical field and survived a Dalek invasion (my digestion remains a long-term casualty). I've travelled a lot and fallen in love with Budapest (right); I've trailed Martha Argerich to Rome; I've even found my way back from Munchkinland. And if you've enjoyed the novels to date, there IS another one, it is finished and it is musical (we just have to find it a publisher who doesn't think classical music is elitist...). But do read this article from The Observer today.

During the past decade we've watched the emergence of many glorious new artists: Benjamin Grosvenor, Daniil Trifonov, Juan Diego Florez, Jonas Kaufmann, Julia Fischer, Alisa Weilerstein, Joseph Calleja, Yuja Wang and more have risen to prominence. It's been a privilege to chart this. Here is my latest big interview for Opera News, with the glorious mezzo-soprano Sophie Koch (March issue cover feature).

But the most worrying thing at present is the reduction in freedom of expression that results from this bizarre climate of mass hysteria and free-for-all, line-toeing mudslinging, encouraged by the tabloids and a few bloggers who like high ratings. Such a climate has never happened before in my lifetime. "What do they want? Blood?" asked someone recently. I fear so. It resembles a primitive call for blood-letting - like The Rite of Spring, a ritual in hard times to bring back the sun. It is always the innocent who are sacrificed - whether it's an abstract force for good, like art music itself, or learning, or intellectual capability; or the Chosen Maiden of Stravinsky's ballet, who if you remember is a young, innocent and terrified teenage girl. Guess what? It doesn't help.

I believe we need nothing less than the Enlightenment. An embracing of reason, clarity, proportion, sense and sensibility; love to combat hatred; the power of laughter, which is also an endangered art; a note of sanity to restore rational thought against ideologies that have tipped askew under their own over-inflated obesity. This doesn't mean "a return to..." anything - because you can never go backwards. Nothing does. Time doesn't work like that. You can only go forward. Let's go forward to a fresh Enlightenment. Let there be light.

So, to celebrate JDCMB's tenth birthday, above is the ultimate Enlightenment masterpiece: Haydn's The Creation, a work that features all the qualities and values I love the most, in a performance from 1951 conducted by Eugen Jochum. Enjoy.

"Sacred space" syndrome

Or...an afternoon at St Mary's, Perivale. 

We used to hear a fair bit about the concept of a "sacred space": a place that builds up an atmosphere over years, decades, centuries - and that transmits this special energy to people who enter it and breathe it in.

I well remember reading a particularly beautiful book by lutenist Anthony Rooley which went into this idea in some depth and discussed the question of what it adds to musical performance. The short answer was "a lot". The epitome of this sacred space, if I remember right, was Dartington Hall.

In recent years - at least since the financial crash - the notion of something sacred has become inordinately tied to associations with fundamentalism (in many forms) and the question of experiencing something perhaps "psychic" or "esoteric" has become somehow old-hat new-age.

Fortunately for us, though, these matters don't cease to exist just because we stop taking notice of them.

In the past week, I've encountered two manifestations of sacred-space energy in musical performance. One was at St Bartholemew the Great - probably the most beautiful church in London, part of which dates back to 1123. Last week Peters Edition held its Christmas concert in there, candle-lit and featuring a cappella contemporary choral pieces from Britain and the Baltics, performed by the choirs VOCES8 and Lumina. Such composers featured as Morten Lauridsen, Vytautas Miskinis (from Lithuania), Eriks Ešenvalds (from Latvia), Alexander Levine (Russian-born British resident), our own Roxanna Panufnik and a fine organ piece by Judith Bingham. Anyone who thinks that beauty in music is dead should have been there. Some of the pieces were breathtaking in their use of original harmonic language and sonic imagination that - especially in the case of Ešenvalds's The Long Road - could stretch our consciousness out towards the most unexpected of developments, blending tradition with absolute originality. In the audience, it was magic.

Then yesterday Viv McLean and I went to perform Alicia's Gift at St Mary's, Perivale, and got more than we bargained for. Pictured above, Viv warming up...

St Mary's is a tiny 12th-century wooden church tucked away behind a west London golf course and the A40 just north of Ealing. For the past few years Hugh Mather - a retired medic and devoted pianist himself - has been running a concert series here. The place seats about 80 and admission is free; the audience can give a donation at the end if they wish. It's small, white, wooden-beamed, with 15th-century brasses in the floor stones protected by a carpet; and the platform area is currently dominated by a small but excellent Yamaha and a large and lovely Christmas tree. It is a comfortable, intimate space for a performance; speaking without a microphone is no worry, and the exchange between us in the cosiness of the space made unifying the two mediums of words and music remarkably easy.

But then, sitting close to the piano while Viv played Rhapsody in Blue, I noticed something extraordinary taking place. It is hard to describe, but I think some might call it "grace". It's a feeling of being suspended within the flow of time and space and breathing something lighter and purer than oxygen. A form of happiness, perhaps. Joy in its purest form: motionless and light and lacking in any worldly element. It resembles the state of a very good meditation session, yet it's spontaneous, not striven for;  something that lands on you, and you accept it because it feels so astonishing. And it is definitely to do with the space, because I've only experienced anything like it a few times before, and always in places that contain deep resonances and/or long-rooted dedications. Jerusalem, Lincoln Cathedral, that kind of place. And, yes, St Bartholemew the Great.

I told Hugh about this impression and he remarks that prayers have been said in that church for 800 years, "around 30 generations in which people have assembled there in good times and bad, and the accumulated spirituality soaked into the walls".

Incidentally, I'm supposedly an atheist. You can be as cynical as you like, but that doesn't change the fact that these things happen sometimes.

Anyway, the audience seemed to love the concert, we had a completely adorable day and it was lovely to finish the show and be greeted, heading off stage, with a nice cup of steaming hot tea.

A trailer for the ALICIA'S GIFT concert

Here is my Alicia's Gift Concert partner, Viv McLean, playing Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which will feature in our programme in a big way. This was at the gorgeous 12th-century church of St Mary's, Perivale, where the tireless Hugh Mather runs an exceptional concert series - Viv is a regular there. Enjoy.

Alicia's Gift will be at St Mary's on 8 December, but don't forget we kick off on 9 November at the Musical Museum, Brentford, with Kensington & Chelsea Music Society to follow on 13 November, Vernon Ellis's Queen's Gate Terrace salon on 27th, and finally before Xmas a performance for our North London fans at Burgh House, Hampstead, on 15 December.

Piano Passion in...Perivale and Ealing?

There've been some rather amazing noises coming out of what used to be a quiet corner of west London. Two churches - St Mary's, Perivale, and St Barnabas, Ealing - have in recent years sprouted extraordinary programmes of intense music-making, under the artistic direction of retired doctor and passionate pianist Hugh Mather.

With innovative schemes involving big screens for a better view, tickets issued on the door only and a Chopin Festival, which is coming up fast (11-12 May), comprising ten hours of piano music from a plethora of rising stars each playing for 20-30 minutes, it seems that Perivale and Ealing are reaching - with remarkable ease - ideas upon which bigger promoters fear to tread; and, best, making a success of them.

How does Hugh do it? I asked him for a JDCMB Q&A session...

JD: Hugh, you were a medic and now you're a concert promoter! Please tell us your own story? How did you get started in the music scene?

HM: I was a chorister at Westminster Abbey, and played the piano and organ from an early age, gaining the FRCO diploma while still at school, and subsequently the ARCM piano performer’s diploma. I then studied medicine at Cambridge and in London, and was appointed Consultant Physician at Ealing Hospital in 1982, specialising in diabetes. However, I always combined medicine with music, and continued to have piano lessons with the eminent teacher James Gibb, initially at the Guildhall and then privately, for over 30 years. I gave many concerts as a solo pianist, including concerti by Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Chopin, Grieg, and Schumann, and played Beethoven’s 'Hammerklavier' sonata at the Guildhall and elsewhere. In 1986 I commenced weekly classical concerts at Ealing Hospital, providing performing opportunities to musicians living around Ealing, and these continued for 20 years, with approximately 800 concerts. I retired from medicine in 2006 and since then I have developed a second career, promoting about 100 concerts per year - about 600 concerts since 2006 - at two contrasting Ealing venues, namely St Mary’s, Perivale, and St Barnabas Church.  

JD: Tell us about your two west London venues, St Mary's Perivale and St Barnabas Ealing - what makes them great places to play and listen to music?

HM: St Mary’s, Perivale, is a small, 12^th-century Grade 1-listed church hidden away within Ealing Golf Course, just off Western Avenue in Perivale, near the Hoover Building. It became redundant in 1973 but is now a flourishing concert venue, run by a charitable trust, the Friends of St Mary’s Perivale, of which I am Chairman. It is a stunningly beautiful building with a magical ambience, and provides the perfect setting for small-scale concerts, particularly instrumental and chamber music, with a capacity of 70. It has excellent acoustics, a good piano, and the audience appreciate being closer to the musicians than in most other venues. 

We cultivate a ‘club-like’ informal atmosphere, with free admission, free drinks and nibbles at the end of the concert. We hold about 50 concerts per year, most of which are ‘double concerts’ with different musicians performing in each half, as can be seen from the Archive section of our website (www.st-marys-perivale.org.uk/events.htm ). This has details of around 320 concerts since 2006, with performances from over 180 pianists and 100 violinists. The standard of performance is very high indeed, and is rising year by year. Musicians love the both the venue and our enthusiastic audience, and are invariably keen to return.  

We have informal links with the Royal Overseas League, who send their top prizewinners to play, as well as with the Royal Academy, the Royal College and the Guildhall, so we have a constant influx of the best new talent. We have excellent in-built video recording facilities, and produce a high-quality DVD recording of every performance, which is sent free of charge to all the musicians.  We have recently commenced putting some highlights onto our Youtube channel (www.youtube.com/user/StMarysPerivale) and so far have uploaded about 60 performances. These amply demonstrate the high calibre of our concerts.

St Barnabas Church, Pitshanger Lane, Ealing, is a large active Anglo-Catholic church built in 1916 with a fine choral tradition and a magnificent, newly-installed pipe organ. I have attended the church as a parishioner for many years, and in 2007 I bought a very good Bosendorfer concert grand, previously used by the BBC at the Maida Vale Studios for broadcasts, from Harrow School. This fine instrument has been the basis of all our subsequent concerts. The church has a much larger capacity than St Mary’s Perivale, and is used for Friday lunchtime recitals and occasional large festivals, such as the forthcoming Chopin festival. Since 2007 we have had 260 Friday lunchtime concerts. We have also held eight major festivals devoted to single composers, listed in www.barnabites.org/concerts/concertarchive/, and three series of Summer Proms, each with 12 concerts. About 170 pianists, listed in our archive, have played in concerts at St Barnabas. Concerts are held in the ‘round’, with the piano in the nave and the audience seated as close as possible.

We have developed a novel ‘big screen’ system. This was originally acquired for organ recitals, but is now proving immensely beneficial in piano festivals, enabling everyone to see each pianist in ‘close-up’. The concerts have been used to raise funds to pay for the new organ, and to date have raised over £130,000.       

JD: We hear that you don't sell tickets in advance - people just come along on the night and pay what they like in a retiring collection at the end. How does that turn out in practice? How do your musicians respond to this?

HM: We don’t sell tickets in advance, and all concerts at St Mary’s Perivale are indeed free admission with a retiring collection. This simplifies the administration of concerts, and encourages more people to attend.  In practice, the amount donated varies from £1 or less to £20 or more, and averages at about £6-7 per person. This attracts Gift Aid, raising the total to approximately £8 per person. Our Wednesday concerts at St Mary’s Perivale are ‘double concerts’ with different musicians in each half, so that we can provide more performing opportunities and the audience have a more varied and interesting evening. Soloists usually get paid around £100 for half a concert, or £200 for a whole recital, depending on the size of the audience, and we usually give ensembles £50-60 per person. We aim to give the musicians about 70% of our receipts and to keep 30% to pay our overheads. All musicians also receive a high-quality DVD of their performance free of charge.
       

At St Barnabas, our Friday lunchtime concerts are also free with a retiring collection, and we pay our musicians a fixed fee, namely £100 for a soloist, £120 for a duo, £150 for a trio and £200 for a quartet. We do charge a fixed fee for our festivals of £12 per session (afternoon or evening) (£6 for young people).

JD: Why a Chopin Festival, and why this very unusual format? Please tell us how it's going to work, why you're doing it and what you hope to achieve with it?

HM: The Chopin festival repeats the well-tried and successful formula used in previous festivals, as detailed in our archive www.barnabites.org/concerts/concertarchive/. These have covered all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas (twice), Liszt piano music, Chopin piano music, Haydn sonatas, the music of Schumann and Schubert (including chamber music as well), and an organ festival.

The formula really does work brilliantly well in practice. It is infinitely more interesting and rewarding to hear many different pianists playing similar repertoire on the same piano, rather than have a single artist, however good or eminent. We have an inevitable bias towards piano events because there are so many excellent pianists based around London who need  and deserve performing opportunities.

The St Barnabas Chopin Festival will take place on May 11^th and 12^th 2013 from 2.30-6.00pm and from 7.00-10.00pm on each day. A flyer with the detail, and full information on the pianists, their programmes and brief biographical notes, is on www.barnabites.org/chopinfestival/.

We have 21 pianists, including many prizewinners from international piano competitions, giving short recitals of 20-30 minutes, including virtually all the most famous Chopin works, comprising almost 10 hours of piano music. Admission is £12 per session, or £40 for the whole festival (four sessions), half price for young people under 16. No tickets will be issued beforehand – just turn up on the day. The church is large and admission is guaranteed. Free parking is available in nearby residential streets. There are regular breaks for refreshments, and tea and supper will be available.

All piano fans, and all lovers of Chopin, are encouraged to come along to this festival of fine piano playing. I am grateful to the support of both the Chopin Society and Liszt Society in helping to advertise this event. I have no doubt that it will be as successful as our several previous festivals have been.

JD: What are your aims for the future of your series ?

HM: My overall aims with my concert-promotion activites are threefold, namely 1) to provide vital performing experience for the best musicians based in London, particularly at the start of their careers, 2) to provide concert-goers in Ealing with much pleasure in their locality, without having to travel into central London, and 3) to raise funds to preserve St Mary’s, Perivale, in pristine condition for future generations, and funds to support St Barnabas Church. It is gratifying to see several of our regular musicians starting to make waves in the musical world.

As regards pianists, two of the finalists in the Leeds competition last year – Jayson Gillham and Andrejs Osokins – are regular performers, as are many other rising or established piano stars, such as Viv McLean, Ashley Fripp, Mishka Rushdie Momen, Mei Yi Foo, Ivana Gavric, Rustem Hayroudinoff, Jianing Kong, Meng Yang Pan, Konstantin Lapshin, Ji Liu, Evelina Puzaite, etc, and many of the best string players and chamber ensembles based in London have played at both our venues. 

JD: Anything you'd like to add?

HM: Only that organising 100 concerts a year, with all the fixing, advertising, publicity and sorting out arrangements, has now become a busy full-time job, but is an excellent and rewarding way of spending my retirement!