British technotwit

Thanks to Scott and Nancy, both of whom mentioned in Comments that I got written up (or my Blog did) in the Atlanta Constitution Journal. Scott was surprised that I hadn't remarked on it. Well, guess why...can I log on to the Atlanta Constitution Journal? No, I cannot! OK, I'm the British technotwit of the year, if not the millennium. But for once, it may not be my fault.

The website demands that you register, and when you're doing so it wants to know your phone number and your home state & zip code. British phone numbers have the wrong number of numbers, it seems, and the 'home state' is required but only gives you a list of American ones to choose from! Therefore nobody outside the happy USA can ever read this newspaper! Since many of you guys are American, and I've adored the place every time I've been there (with the possible exception of Fort Worth), I'll keep my blogmouth shut about Bush, protectionism, isolationism et al. Suffice it to say that if anyone could possibly E-mail me the article, copied & pasted in to a message, I'd be most grateful!

Smugness still reigns supreme over here...today we are having our celebration dinner and I am also going to do something that I have been promising myself for a couple of decades. I decided, when I was about 18, that when my first novel got accepted, I would buy myself a cashmere sweater - and would not have one until then. And I never have. So we are going to a cashmere sweater shop before dinner. The big decision: black or violet?

Valentine news!

Happy Valentine's Day, everybody! Here's my news. My first novel is going to be published next year and I now have one year in which to write the second. RIGHT NOW I LOVE THE WHOLE WORLD!!! :)

Details will follow in due course. Tom and I are treating ourselves to a very posh dinner to celebrate, but not until Thursday.

Ist possible?

Just saw something in the Radio Times that produced a sensation of sinking horror, the emotion hitting home before I could work out why. Artsworld is showing Kenneth MacMillan's ballet Romeo and Juliet this week and it's nice to see it picked out as a top choice. But the blurb begins: 'It helps to know the Shakespeare play on which Kenneth MacMillan's ballet is closely based...'

My heart missed a beat and a few seconds later I understood: the implication of this sentence is that there are people out there, people who might enjoy ballet on TV, who DON'T know Romeo and Juliet, not even the story.

What is the world coming to? I had thought that Romeo & Juliet, like The Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, was an Essential: one of those stories that you can assume most people (most people who'd want to see ballet, that is) know - as part of themselves, almost as part of modern western folklore. Has all this changed? HOW? WHAT HAPPENED?


COMFORTING, PERHAPS, in the light of this, to have found the RFH packed for Bernstein's Candide last night. Fab show, funny, moving, sharp-edged, amazing music. I couldn't stop foot-tapping and must have annoyed my neighbours. Wonderfully sung, too, with a sensational Canadian soprano, Carla Huhtanen, as Cunegonde, the indefatigable Kim Criswell as The Old Lady and the latest hot property - fresh-faced, bright-voiced young US tenor Michael Slattery - in the title role.

New York Phil

My friend Philippe Graffin is playing at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, tonight at 8pm and on Sunday at 5pm. If you're in New York, do go and hear him. This man can play the fiddle! He is with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center playing the Ravel Violin Sonata and the Faure C minor Piano Quartet. His colleagues are cellist Gary Hoffman (Saint-Saens Cello Sonata No.1), violist Paul Neubauer and pianist Andre-Michel Schub.

The programme is called 'Favourites from France' and, bless them, they've got a wine-tasting at 7pm too. I hope this entire occasion indicates a gentle thawing of the icy waters between France and the US?

Reading?!?

Nice feedback today from my friend Beate in Vilnius. She's been showing off the piece I wrote for The Strad (February issue) about musical life in Lithuania, one of the articles I was able to do as a result of my visit to the Vilnius Festival last June, and it seems to be going over well with many of the individuals and institutions involved.

This is a great relief, because trying to encapsulate an entire culture, a whole history and its associated personalities and triumphs and tragedies after only 5 days in the place is no easy task - and squeezing even 5 days' worth of experiences into three pages is just as problematic (especially experiences like that!). I can't help remembering that the whole of James Joyce's Ulysses takes place in one day.

It's weird, but after 15 years in music journalism, I still find it terrifying to think that anyone actually READS what I've written. Writing these days is a remarkably odd process (perhaps it always was...). You sit in your study, type away at the computer, brush and hone and chop and change and try reading things aloud and eventually you get the word length about right; then you press a button and off it goes...and you forget about it until, a few weeks or months later, there it is in the programme/newspaper/magazine and you can't even remember what you wrote or how you wrote it. I did some programme notes for an LPO concert last week and it was pretty alarming to see people in the audience sitting expectantly with the relevant page open on their knees. The most frightened I've ever been on such an occasion was once when I'd written the notes for a song recital at the Wigmore Hall and on the night I spotted Vikram Seth, one of my favourite writers, sitting across the aisle, leafing through...

Blogging, by contrast, is in real time. Plus, you can go back and change things if you need to. And you don't have to watch while people go 'tut tut tut' and shake their heads sadly over your remarks. Much more friendly.