Charles Darwin on why we need the arts

This marvellous quote appeared in the programme for the Wigmore Hall concert last night:

"...if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature." - CHARLES DARWIN

Take note, politicians...

The other day, travelling home on the train, I found myself next to a gentleman who had just bought, and was reading, a large, highly illustrated, full-colour edition of The Origin of Species. I peered over his shoulder at it for the whole 20-minute journey, entranced. Luckily he didn't mind and was only too happy to share this treasure. The sense of wonder that emanates from Darwin's prose manages to be both balanced and ecstatic - an ideal way of being, perhaps. Marvellous. My neighbour told me he had bought the book at the Darwin Exhibition at the Natural History Museum, which he recommended most highly. I'll be along there as soon as I have a free moment. Lots to explore meanwhile.

Back to speech-writing for library gig tonight now...

Philippe & London Sinfonietta tonight

Do please come and hear Philippe Graffin & the London Sinfonietta at the Wigmore Hall tonight if you're within concerting distance of central London. Philippe found the chamber-music version of the Chausson Poeme hiding somewhere in Paris sometime in the 1990s and it doesn't have many London airings, so this is a rare chance to hear it. It is incredibly beautiful - the effect, compared to the full orchestra version, has the same intriguing charm as listening to a 78 instead of an LP, or watching a black & white reel-to-reel movie rather than Blu-Ray.

And, of course, we've got the library gig tomorrow.

Saturday night...

This was what I sat through & wrote about. Given that I loathe and detest Carmina Burana with a passion I've never bothered to hide, and the music was the star of the evening, you can imagine what the rest was really like. The sub-head isn't mine, as you'll gather from the fact that the review makes it clear that CB is neither an opera nor a romp. This staging was, generally, more CBeebies than CB. The lighting was pretty, though, and I thought it deserved a good mensh, as did the poor old RPO. To judge from the comments on the Indy blogs, everyone else hated the whole thing.

kurze pause...

This week gives a whole new meaning to the words 'nose' and 'grindstone'. The phone hasn't stopped ringing since I got back from India, which is A Very Good Thing, but lots of work. I can't remember when I was last as busy as this. Am wondering whether it's anything to do with the wooden carving of Ganesh, the elephant-god Remover of Obstacles, that we brought back from Cochin...

I can't guarantee much blogging until next week (though will post any of my articles appearing meanwhile). Please have fun with the blogroll - newbies include the blogs of ace pianists Stephen Hough and Jonathan Biss, plus Sebastian's LondonJazz blog for all aficionados.

Taking the 'Dow' out of Endowment

Sobering news in the New York Times today that the Met is in financial straits, its endowment hit by the massive drop in the Dow Jones.

Just as it was riding high in the opera world, the Metropolitan Opera has been bludgeoned by the recession and now faces a “disaster scenario” unless the company finds major cost cuts, including concessions from its powerful unions, the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, said on Thursday.

Here in sunny London, nobody seems to want to talk about what will become of the arts over the next few years. Either they're too scared (or they prefer to spew out bile about Korngold in case the poor unsuspecting public might commit the heinous sin of wanting to see Die tote Stadt...) Seriously, though, the UK scenario is likely to be no less terrifying. But it will hit us later. Seasons are planned two, sometimes three years in advance; government funding is allocated by the Arts Council over three-year periods, and though it doesn't account for everything, it does provide a strong proportion of the money that makes things happen. Sponsorship is drying up left, right and centre, but people are trying nonetheless to be positive and keep on hoping...

Perhaps those who have advocated American-style privatisaion of the arts world ever since the days of Margaret Thatcher will now have to think again. You can't run a nation's cultural life (I mean 'culture' in the old-fashioned sense when it meant culture) on fairy gold that melts away at dawn.

On the other hand, the government is now facing the very likely nationalisation of various banks, a huge bill for unemployment benefit and, heaven help us, the 2012 Olympics. If they decide to divest themselves of some financial minnows along the way, we shouldn't be too surprised. And who, in the Labour goverment, cares anything for the arts? David Miliband's wife is a violinist, but beyond that, um... But replace that with 'who, in the Tory government, cares anything for the arts?' and it'll be time for us all to put on our boxing gloves. Start limbering up at the sandbags now, chaps, so that you are in good fighting shape when the match begins.

Mendelssohn responses...

Mad props to Tom Service at The Guardian and the redoubtable Opera Chic for picking up on the Mendelssohn mystery.

A coupla points in response. First of all, Tom S says Mendelssohn was nursing an 'unrequited' passion for Lind. The point is, it was requited, and evidence is said to point to an affair between the two, who went down the Rhine together on a boat, which...but that's a long story. Nevertheless, the affair required squashing, given both their reputations and Mendelssohn's family situation. It wasn't just an unrequited crush, but a genuine lost love.

And even it's true that a composer's music is not directly connected to his/her biography as such, it is necessarily connected to his mind, personality and general state of being, because every note on the page is the product of a personal choice on the composer's part. We've been over this many times here in the blogosphere. The modernist camp especially will deny every jot of it. Everyone would love it not to be the case, musicologically speaking, since that gives us carte blanche to consider only the notes and not the person who wrote them.

I have never been comfortable with that. Would a non-obsessive, stable individual have written Schumann's unbalanced, stream-of-consciousness works with their impossibly repetitive rhythms? Could someone who was not torn apart by the prospect of early and loveless death have written 'Die schone Mullerin' and 'Winterreise' with the devastating power of Schubert? Could someone not prepared to fight for art, humanity and idealism ever have dreamed up Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? Could a non-megalomaniac have written the 'Ring Cycle'? What about Messiaen, religion and birdsong? This could go on and on.

Mendelssohn was more controlled than most, more self-contained and self-effacing, having fewer such battles in his life until the very end; but would someone not thrilled by the atmospheres of Italy and Scotland have written those symphonies? Would someone normally so cheerful and energetic have produced that last, devastating string quartet?

Now, I'm a 'creator' of sorts too and I know from the inside that what and how I choose to write can tell you much more about me than I'd like. For example: I am obsessive. I try to do too much. I consider myself lazy and should wear my glasses more often. I am easily spellbound. I am a dreamer and sometimes ought to get my feet more firmly back to earth. I have a 'thing' about the violin. I am rather an outsider, like to stand back and observe, and slightly enjoy being quietly subversive. I am drawn to difficult and recovering places, histories and people, and yes, this is indeed because I have experienced difficult times that still require recovery, which has been much aided by music, art, writing etc. There is not one directly autobiographical sentence in any of my novels, nor a single character who is based entirely on a real person; yet everything from the story structure to the specific word is there because I chose it, for better or worse, and each is, I imagine, the sum total of a lifetime-so-far's experience and what I've learned to date about human nature.

I have no reason to imagine that a composer would function especially differently. With the one proviso that, as Tom S quotes, in Mendelssohn's words, "It's not that music is too imprecise for words, but too precise."

Perhaps this helps or perhaps it doesn't, but that's my 2 1/2p for what it's worth.

Mendelssohn and Lind: A Conspiracy of Silence

I promised some news from the Mendelssohn camp, and here it is. Come over to the Indy now and have a look at my feature.

A few January highlights

I don't know how any musician gets any listener out of their warm home through freezing temperatures and shaky bank accounts to a concert hall just at the moment. But here, for those inclined to brave the elements, are a few things that my muso-friends and I are doing this month.

Tonight, 11 January, Kings Place, 6.30pm, part of London Chamber Music Series: the Allegri String Quartet gives its first concert in the shiny new venue, starring the Schubert String Quintet with guest cellist Colin Carr and the London premiere of the redoubtable Matthew Taylor's String Quartet No.6.

Friday 16 January, Royal Festival Hall: The LPO is back, welcoming one of my favourite younger pianists as soloist for Mozart's E flat concerto K482: Jonathan Biss, who not only has an astonishing musical pedigree (mother Miriam Fried, grandmother Raya Garbusova, etc) but possesses the heart, mind and hands to match. His playing has regularly set me hunting through thesauri for rare words of praise. His Schumann CD on EMI is absolutely to die for. And guess what? He's got a blog. ...oh yes, the concert... Marin Alsop conducts and is throwing in not only Till Eulenspiegel and the Daphnis and Chloe Suite but the Firebird Suite as well, so if that doesn't brighten our winter, nothing will.

Next Sunday, 18 January, Royal Festival Hall, 3pm: Stephen Hough, multiple award-winner, startlingly original and insightful musician and, now, fellow blogger (yay! another great pianist joins the blogosphere! even if it is for the Telegraph...) gives a wonderful recital programme to banish the Sunday afternoon blues - lots of Chopin, Franck and Faure, among other things, focusing on the theme of Paris and paying tribute to one of Hough's piano gods, Alfred Cortot. I've been drafted in to be his interviewer for a post-concert talk...you may have some difficulty shutting us up when we get into our stride.

Tuesday 20 January, Symphony Hall, Birmingham: The CBSO is taking to Korngold! This adorable programme conducted by Michael Seal features not only the happily-ubiquitous Violin Concerto with soloist Anthony Marwood, but also the enchanting Incidental Music to 'Much Ado About Nothing'. Yummy stuff, rounded off with Brahms's First Symphony. And I will have to get my voice back fast after Sunday to do the introductory talk at 6.15pm. (This is, so to speak, my Symphony Hall debut.)

Wednesday 21 January, Wigmore Hall: Philippe Graffin and the London Sinfonietta mark the Darwin Anniversary with a brand-new work, 'Age of Wonders' by Michael Stimpson, plus Mendelssohn and Chausson. They are brave: it is sad but true that getting a Wigmore Hall audience to attend new music is almost as difficult as getting a new music audience to attend the Wigmore Hall, though the super-classy venue is currently making a valiant effort to change that by instigating an ongoing series of new commissions. Come on, chaps, give it a go! Besides, the Chausson in question is the Poeme in the rare chamber-music version that Philippe discovered lurking in the Parisian shadows some years ago; and the Mendelssohn is the Violin Sonata that our Felix wrote when he was all of 11 years old: two pieces that we don't hear every day.

Thursday 22 January, East Sheen Library, Sheen Lane, London SW14, 7.30pm: fresh from the Wigmore, Philippe Graffin heads south-west to East Sheen Library for an evening devoted to our 'Hungarian Dances' projects. Full details are already at the top of the JDCMB sidebar, but just to remind you...admission is a modest £2 including wine, and places can be reserved on 020 8876 8801. Tom joins Philippe to play Bartok Duos live in library, I'll read some extracts of the book and, as novelists and starry fiddlers don't work together every day, we'll be discussing what happens when we do. (Our virtual Sir Alan has already given the prize for this task to the dynamic East Sheen Library adminitrative team...)

Thursday 22 January, Wigmore Hall: the above prior engagement means that I have to miss the latest flying visit from the legendary Ida Haendel to the Razumovsky Ensemble and Academy! At this all-day event, the great lady will be giving masterclasses to the students and young artists of the RA, of which she's now the Patron, and at the 6pm concert she'll present the Ida Haendel Scholarship to one of them. She will also be performing with them, notably the Devil's Trill Sonata by Tartini. The 7.30pm concert finds the Razumovskys performing an all-Schubert programme, with the B flat Piano Trio and the 'Trout' Quintet.

Tuesday 27 January, Royal Opera House: The British stage premiere of Korngold's Die tote Stadt! It's true! The acclaimed Willy Decker production, already seen in Vienna and Salzburg, opens at Covent Garden starring Nadja Michael as Marietta/Marie, Stephen Gould as Paul and Gerald Finlay as Frank/Pierrot, with Ingo Metzmacher on the podium. I'll be at the 2 February performance and will make a full report after that. Performances up to 13 Feb. Meanwhile, catch our ROH podcast on the website...if I can get them to fix the faulty link.

That should keep us all busy, and January will be over for another year before you can say 'Erich Wolfgang Korngold'.

Meanwhile, over in the Mendelssohn camp, prepare to light the red touchpaper...

Felixcitations #2

Latest post on my BBC R3 Mendelssohn blog is on the site now.

Win a trip to NY

I enjoy being, in trend-speak, an ambassador not just for 'kultcha' but for London, having been born within the sound of Bow Bells and lived in the UK capital all my life. Recently I joined a reviewing team at Metrotwin, a new venture powered by British Airways, reviewing and 'twinning' favourite places in those two mega-meccas London and New York. You'll find it under the site partners section in the sidebar, but meanwhile:

If you register at Metrotwin.com before 15 January you could win a pair of return economy flights to New York and three nights in The Plaza New York. Conditions apply.

http://tinyurl.com/7t9hnr

Enjoy!

Namaste!

HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE. We are just back from south India. I hope you've all had an excellent Xmas and wish you health, happiness and peace in 2009.

I've put an album of 60 photos from our trip on Facebook. It has been an extraordinary fortnight, packed with fascinating, wondrous, perspective-grinding impressions. Here are just a few:

We saw:
Tiger paw-prints - fresh - in the Periyar national park
Sunsets the colour of a swami's robes over the Chinese fishing nets at Fort Cochin
Sunrise over the tea plantations at Thekkady
A dazzling display of Kathkali dance
Plantation of cardamon, pineapples, tea, rice and coffee
Amid myriad carvings in the 'city of a thousand temples', Kanchipuram, one showing Parvati embracing Shiva, standing delicately on tiptoe
A kingfisher flashing fluorescent turquoise above carmine lotus flowers on a pond
The Kerala backwaters, from a houseboat
Children as young as 4 begging on the beach
Entire families - mum, dad and three kids - zooming along on a single motorbike
A guest house called Pallava
A bus called Melvin

We heard:
Monkeys 'policing' the jungle by whooping from the treetops (="look out, tigers, here come another bunch of those idiot tourists!")
The sitar, Indian flute, the tabla
The rolling of waves on the Bay of Bengal
The call to prayer in Cochin, where 4 world religions have long flourished peacefully side by side
That there are more than 22 languages spoken in south India
That units of measurement include a 'lac' (100,000) and a 'karu' (10 million) - London is a small city in Indian terms.

We smelled:
Jasmine everywhere in Kerala
Crushed leaves from spice bushes - curry, cloves, allspice...
The bark of cinnamon and sandalwood, the sap of incense and rubber
Ayurvedic hair oil (well, I did - Tom doesn't have hair). It works.
Fish, fish, fish
A great deal else, often in places it shouldn't have been

We tasted:
Fresh coconut water drunk with a straw from the shell
Keralan fish curry galore
White snapper and fresh lobster drenched in garlic butter sauce
Too much channa masala (hot spicy chick-peas)
Fresh green peppercorns plucked from the plant
Home-made chocolate
An intriguing concoction that arrived when I requested peppermint tea: a stew of Tetley's, a handful of mint leaves and about 2 tablespoons of black peppercorns.

We felt:
Thoroughly pummelled by Ayurvedic massage, which seems to have sorted out my bad back
An extraordinary bop on the head from the elephant that blessed us with its trunk in Kanchipuram
The aurora of heat that greets you when you leave the airconditioning behind
Intense sun on our skin
Covered in grime after a day's sightseeing
Terrified on the roads: overtaking is a way of life, whether you're a bus, a truck, an ox-cart, a car, a motorcycle, a rickshaw, a bicycle or an elephant, and traffic lights are in short supply.
That we would have liked to stay for much longer than 2 weeks
Humbled by the wealth of ancient artistry, skills and wisdom
Touched by friendliness, non-aggression, kindness, community and family strength: people supporting extended families on 300 rupees a day (= approx 45p) often appear happier in themselves than most Londoners do
Saddened by the plethora of ingrained attitudes that nevertheless seem to hold everything back. India is a succession of priceless gems strung together on a decaying thread. Marvel after marvel, linked by disastrous infrastructure.
Challenged, moved, churned up
Changed.

MERRY CHRISTMAS & HAPPY NEW YEAR!

This is my last post of 2008 - I'm taking a break for a couple of weeks. So here's a little Christmas present for everyone: how better to finish this year than by hearing the 95%-cocoa-solids violinist Toscha Seidel play 'Hejre Kati'?

Enjoy.

A bientot!