Saturated fads

Ready meals in British supermarkets carry 'traffic light' markers to show you the level of sugars, fats etc in what you are about to receive. If you see a red blob next to 'saturated fat', at least you know in advance that you're going to clog up your arteries. I think it's time CDs started carrying traffic-light warnings about the level of saturated fads they contain.

A violin can sound like many things, but I for one would rather it didn't sound like the dog next door. I have just listened to one new disc too many: a clearly gifted and imaginative violinist who nevertheless seems compelled to hack through romantic-era sonatas either Very Fast, Loudly and Aggressively or very slow, playing with around two hairs of the bow to make a wispy vibratoless pianissimo that you can barely hear against the piano (NB it is not the pianist's fault). And full, of course, of those ugly bulges and barks and stops and starts (an effect much like drivers who accelerate after a speed camera, then slam on the breaks just before the next one) that masquerade as expressiveness; the ideal violin territories of beautiful tone, colour through varied rather than absent vibrato, and songful and speaking phrasing are apparently forbidden to any hapless young artist who wants to be noticed.

It reminds me of hearing one of the most depressing piano concerto performances in living memory - either Very Fast and Loud and Aggressive or so excruciatingly slow that I suspected the pianist in question was about to stop altogether. The audience went nuts, of course, but I think the composer, a man of exceedingly discerning taste, would probably have sent in the polonium sushi. This event would have been less depressing if it hadn't been action-replayed numerous times by other pianists in other concertos.

This style of playing has nothing to do with the composers and their music, but everything to do with fashion. Some musicians are inspired enough to pull these stunts off convincingly, but most just seem desperate to do something 'different', exaggerating to project ideas that actually don't exist. Besides, it's not different any more. It is the same as everyone else who's trying to be different...

Such trends have risen to the fore through certain exponents heavily promoted by their record companies, though many are good enough musicians to know better. Younger artists are trying to emulate them, to very little effect.

Why should music leave the listener feeling irritated, infuriated and occasionally nauseous if that isn't what the composer intended? Couldn't a red cardboard blob warn us off?

Now may I please direct you to one of the most wonderful piano CDs I've heard in ages: Maurizio Pollini's brand-new Chopin recital, on DG. This is truly great, fad-free musicianship, delivered with authority, humility and absolute integrity. In case you'd forgotten - many have - that's what it is all about.

Lipatti plays La Leggierezza

Since I'm having a phase of preferring dead pianists to living musical politics, let's make the most of it and mine Aladdin's Cave, aka Youtube, for its latest and rarest gems. This performance by Dinu Lipatti of Liszt's La Leggierezza is apparently a 'copy of a lost BBC recording from 1947' (where do people find these things?!) and the poster is not kidding when he says the performance is 'a miracle'.

There is more where this comes from. I thought I'd heard all Lipatti's surviving recordings, but evidently not...

Speaking of politics, here's John Adams

The Observer today carries strong words from composer John Adams about his life post-Death-of-Klinghoffer. It's an apposite moment: his opera Dr Atomic opens at the Met tomorrow and his musical autobiography Hallelujah Junction is published this month. The report draws on an interview with Adams on Radio 3's Music Matters yesterday and those in the UK can access this on the Listen Again facility.

Interviewed on BBC Radio 3's Music Matters yesterday, Adams said he was now 'blacklisted'. 'I can't check in at the airport now without my ID being taken and being grilled. You know, I'm on a homeland security list, probably because of having written The Death of Klinghoffer, so I'm perfectly aware that I, like many artists and many thoughtful people in the country, am being followed.'

A voyage around my father

Today should have been my father's 80th birthday. He died in 1996.

He was a neuropathologist, but his greatest passion in life was for music. I owe my knowledge of the classical repertoire to the fact that he used to listen to Radio 3 every morning and every evening, and would spend Sunday afternoons happily ensconced in his favourite armchair comparing a pile of LPs of Brahms's Second Symphony just for fun. Our family holidays often consisted of driving through France to the Swiss mountains; I think those long twisty days on the road were his excuse to spend eight hours at a stretch listening to tapes of the great pianist Julius Katchen. That is where I first heard the Brahms piano music, including the Hungarian Dances (below).

Katchen - the nearest thing the piano had to a literary philosopher - would have been just two years older than my father, but died tragically at the age of only 42. Fortunately for us, he left a wonderful legacy of recordings. I'm thrilled to have found copious film of him on Youtube.

Happy Birthday, Dad. I miss you.

Off the Richter scale

Another one for the Dead Pianists Society. I was looking for something to prove a recent comment that 'Richter wasn't always right'. But then I found this: his performance, live in Leipzig in 1963, of Beethoven Op.111, first movement. Audio only, but you may nevertheless need to don goggles to listen to it.

OK, Maestro Sviatoslav. You win. Every time.

Arrival of the mini-maestro

If you were my height, you'd know that finding someone who's shorter than you is always a delight, and watching them achieve artistic marvels is even better. So, meet my new favourite find, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the pint-sized principal conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic and now also the principal guest conductor of the LPO. He's lovely. He's terrific. He's tiny.

Yannick took up his London podium the other night and did a fine job of steering the orchestra through its backing to the not-inconsiderable antics of Christian Lindberg, Swedish trombonist par excellence. Lindberg's performance in a concerto by Sandstrom based on Don Quixote required him not only to play the instrument but also to execute some superb balletic sautés, shout in Spanish, sing very loudly and strip down to his, er, leopard-spotted leggings. Blimey, guv. Lindberg also transformed a Leopold Mozart rarity from what could have been computer-generated multipurposeclassicaltwaddle to a jewelled butterfly of sweetness.

Topping and tailing the Swedish showstopper were two wonderful Ravellian warhorses, La Valse to start and his orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition to close.

Yannick is a joy to watch: he moves with grace, enthusiasm and eloquence, the band appears able to follow his beat and he'd memorised Pictures to perfection. There'll be lots to look forward to from him in future. Yet...

...I couldn't help missing Vladimir in the Mussorgsky. I don't need to tell you, dear readers, that Mussorgsky is one of the darkest of all self-destructive Russian romantics and that there is a demoniac quality to those pictures - the horrible ox-cart with its drunken driver, the disgusting antisemitism of the wheedling trumpet solo, the witch herself flying from the chicken-legged hut...and the towering Great Gate of Kiev is an idealised vision of something that never matched up to its plan (I've seen the real thing, and it is quite sad by comparison). But the other night we enjoyed a sort of musical stroll through the National Gallery's impressionism section, relaxed and very colourful, but not remotely disturbing. I could nearly taste the choc-ice. It was nice. Very nice. Too nice.

One final moment to remember: our own Tomcat, not being required for the Leopold Mozart, was backstage munching a sandwich, lost track of the time and wasn't quite expecting to see the orchestral manager hunting for him with a cattle prod. He ended up receiving a round of applause to himself before the Sandstrom began.

Hamari sings 'Erbarme dich'

Sometimes only Bach will do, and an illicit Youtube hunt when I should have been working led me to this spellbinding performance by the Hungarian mezzo-soprano Julia Hamari: 'Erbarme dich' from the St Matthew Passion, conducted by Karl Richter. I can't ascertain whether this was the debut performance that launched her career.

Her biography begins with the words: "Born 21 November 1942, Budapest, Hungary". That was not exactly an ideal time or place to enter this world. She would have been barely 16 months old when the Nazis invaded, and nearly 14 at the time of the 1956 Revolution. I'm not saying that to sing Bach like this you have to have spent your early childhood in a place as horrific as Budapest became while the Germans and Russians killed each other there in 1944, and naturally I know nothing of her life beyond her biography as linked; but one senses a depth to this performance - something trancelike, as the Youtube user comments - that is far indeed from the ordinary. I hope you love it as much as I do.

Adieu, Yonty Solomon

We were desperately saddened to hear the other day of the death of Yonty Solomon, a pianist who was one in a million. Born in South Africa, he became a student of Dame Myra Hess and for many years enriched his students at the Royal College of Music with his wisdom, humanity and humility. He had suffered from a brain tumour.

I will never forget the beauty of his tone, the freshness and deep love of music that infused his interpretations and the terrific regret that I felt, when I finally met him a few years ago at the Chetham's Piano Summer School, that I hadn't met him and studied with him a very long time ago.

His former student Vanessa Latarche wrote this beautiful tribute which was read out at his funeral on 29 September:

"Yonty was for all of his students the best role model that a teacher could possibly be, a colossus of the piano world, warm-hearted, generous, enthusiastic, energetic, and intellectually curious. To say that he will be sorely missed by us is an enormous understatement; his passing has left a huge hole on the second floor of the RCM, but his exceptional legacy is legendary. I know I can speak for all my colleagues when I say we feel very privileged to have known him."

OMG

This is Cziffra, playing Liszt's Transcendental Etude no.10.

There seemed to be a lot to say about this, but actually - please, just listen.

Er, right...

Anna, as in Anna&Robin 'Life of a Musician', has 'tagged' me, so I'd better be good and play the game.

The brief is 'to write six things about me, personally, that my readers might not know', and then, 'tag' six other twitter/blogger friends and make them 'it'.

All right, here goes.

1. I got into Cambridge for composing. I had to write something for a school celebration (it was a setting of Psalm Somethingorother) and the headmistress liked it and she wrote me a glowing reference...oh well...

2. My first cat was called Whiskers.

3. But I really wanted a dog.

4. If I could, I would move to France tomorrow. No, today.

5. I wrote 7 novels before Rites of Spring.

6. I was at university in the mid-80s with a hell of a lot of people who went into the financial world with the starry glow of Thatcherian idealism writ large across their wine-sluiced visages, and having seen which people they were I am not remotely surprised that the entire world financial system is in the throes of collapse since this is the generation that is now in charge of the bloody thing. Could have told you that years ago. I believe that Margaret Thatcher wrecked the moral fibre of the western world, and this is the price. (There. Bet you didn't know that about me. ;-) )

Now for the tagging.

1. Opera Chic! Opera Chic!

2. Erin! Put down that cello a minute and get into your Fugue State.

3. Wonderful, wonderful Jeremy, we can't wait to see what you have to say about this over at Think Denk.

4. Come on, Norman, give it a go!

5. Patty in California, a great oboist who's a secret string quartet fetishist just like me...

6. Ruth, of Meanwhile, here in France...because she lives where I'd like to live. Just look at her photos of late-season veg and the reasons for point no.4 will be apparent.

Have fun, folks. I am off to Newcastle in the morning.

The Sage ExploreMusic Library talk tomorrow

I'm off to Newcastle/Gateshead tomorrow to give a talk at The Sage's ExploreMusic library series, which very wonderfully seeks to bring music and fiction together. I'll be talking a little about the different ways music features in my novels and a lot about Hungarian Dances. Plus readings from book. If you're in the area, do come along, it's free.

By the way, if you're wondering what became of our recent poll about the future of JDCMB, the result was a slight but clear lead for keeping this blog as it is and initiating a separate books blog. Naturally it would be handier for me to lump everything in together - after all, they're equal concerns in my mind, and to run two separate ones will mean less frequent posting on both - but I appreciate that not everyone sees it that way. October will therefore see the launch of my new Books, Writing & Culture in London blog. Watch this space!

Meanwhile in Cleveland...

...there's a case of Critic v Conductor.

The New York Times has carried a story explaining that a music critic in Cleveland has lost his job for being, allegedly, excessively critical of the Cleveland Orchestra's conductor, Frankly Worse Than Most, oops, I mean Franz Welser-Most (FYI, the former is what certain musicians in London used to nickname him).

A lot of grey areas surrounded the appointing of FWM as principal conductor of the LPO, where he started back in 1990. Tennstedt departed in 1987 due to ill health, a replacement had not yet been named and it was then that the Tory government got a Lord to investigate things and recommend which of the London orchestras should be murdered. To qualify for a chance of survival, an appointment was needed and FWM was named PDQ. Not very many conductors would have been available at that kind of notice. Happily, the Hoffmann Report eventually told the government to get off and leave all our orchestras right where they were. Meanwhile FWM was in place, and if I remember rightly some of his performances were good and others weren't. Fairly normal, then.

BUT: the London press loathed him.

It was the critics, not the orchestra, that wrecked his career at the time in the British capital; he kept talking about this nightmare era in interviews for years. It is not entirely clear how it happened, but seems to go back to his first-ever press conference for the LPO, which most of the critics left with the impression that FWM was arrogant, abrupt, inexperienced and so forth. All of which may have mean that he was just bloody nervous. But what's certain is that the resident vipers developed a serious grudge which only got worse. The difference was, they didn't lose their jobs - whereas eventually the unfortunate youth, after enduring five and a half years of printed hell, packed his bags earlier than intended.

Perhaps what's happened to the critic Donald Rosenberg is a hazard of smaller-city-America cultural life; here in London, just one critic could never have been held responsible for the savaging of FWM. They were all at it like a pack of hyenas. It is easier to target one person operating in a cultural desert, like a gazelle that's been separated from its herd...

All of which does not necessarily mean that FWM is the world's greatest conductor.