Meet lifelong composer Erika Fox. Her first CD is out today. She is 82.

This is one of my favourite interview assignments ever, just out in The JC. Erika Fox, who escaped Anschluss Vienna as a toddler with her mother, and has struggled all her life to follow her musical vocation, tells me her story. The first-ever commercial recording of her music is released today on the NMC label.

Erika Fox
Photo: Tim Fox

Erika Fox’s coffee mug is emblazoned with the title of HG Wells’s The Invisible Man. One can’t help noticing, because this extraordinary composer has for too long been an almost invisible woman. Today, her first-ever commercial CD is released, featuring a selection of her chamber works. She is 82.

Musical cognoscenti reacted with horrified astonishment to the realisation that Fox’s music has not previously been recorded. Its style is tough yet mesmerising, highly individual, with a strong undertow of unsettling emotion. “Some people have said it’s challenging, but because it’s mine, I don’t think of it that way,” Fox remarks. “To me it’s ordinary. It’s what I do.”

She lives in west London in a house overflowing with books and music, her home on and off for decades. Her music is much like her upfront personality — warm, perceptive and forthright, with a refreshing dislike of “pussyfooting around”. But it has also been nurtured with many difficult and painful memories...

Read the rest here...

Zukerman: "We need peace. Stop this occupation."

Pinchas Zukerman
Photo from rpo.co.uk

Pinchas Zukerman, who's at the RPO this week for his own summer festival (lots of Mozart, Haydn and Mendelssohn), is, as ever, an inspiration. I had his recording of the Mendelssohn concerto when I was a kid and loved it so much I nearly wore out the LP. I talked to him the other week for a 70th Birthday interview for the JC, and frankly, it's not every day that a top Israeli musician will speak out in this way. Sometimes it takes a figure like Pinchas Zukerman to say this, and to say it somewhere it will be heard. Born in Israel in 1948, he's only a couple of months younger than the state itself and his voice demands to be heard.

Here's a taster and you can read the whole thing here.

“After 70 years,” declares Zukerman, “we need peace.

“I come from there, I was born there, I have a passport, I have an identity, I’m an Israeli of Jewish faith. We have Israelis of non-Jewish faith, many, many denominations. We need to experiment with all denominations a little bit better on the human side and give them a little more respect.   

“The government of Israel should really look itself in the mirror every day and say: ‘Show respect, for God’s sake!’ Stop doing what you’re doing and just talk to them. 

“After 70 years now, we need a piece of paper that calls for peace. I don’t care if you call it two states, three states, four states — we need peace. We need something that says: ‘I respect you as my neighbour. Let’s sit down, then, and start talking about it on equal grounds.’ 

“You’ve got to stop this occupation: it is wrong. It is wrong for the people who live there. That doesn’t mean that one will have this and the other will have that. Just let’s have one document that calls for peace signing or a peace treaty of some sort: the place could just blossom no end. These are extraordinary peoples that live there. 

“I hope I could still see and experience this in my lifetime: that I could be in Arab countries, not just Jordan and Egypt, but many others, where I could play. There are some fantastic talents from the Arab world whom I have met over the years in Canada, in America, in London and so on — I would like to see that in Tel Aviv. And we in turn could go to places in the Arab world and play and enjoy our art form that we are so blessed to have. It’s time. Seventy years is enough!”