The Green Mountain Strikes Back

In the earliest days of the year I went to something truly glorious in Spitalfields and never got round to running my review (OK, it was intended for somewhere else, and they never got round to it, but it comes to the same thing). So here it is...followed by a video that I hope proves my points better than I can. Please welcome La Venexiana with Roberta Mameli in Lamento della Ninfa, and the freshest, ripest view I've yet heard of that glorious Mr Green Mountain...

LA VENEXIANA

Christ Church, Spitalfields, 5 January 2011

A jewel of a Hawksmoor church, an accolade-showered ensemble and a feast of music from the 16^th century titan, Claudio Monteverdi: fine fodder for a winter festival par excellence, as Spitalfields Music’s current series undoubtedly is.

Monteverdi is best known today for his operas and his Vespers of 1610, but until he was 40 he wrote madrigals almost exclusively; over his long life he produced nine volumes of them. These short pieces for small vocal ensemble with accompaniment on harpsichord, theorbo or both can blaze out unexpectedly as the more subtle forerunners of the modern pop song.

La Venexiana, proud winners of numerous recording prizes, are currently without peers in this music, offering a sense of freedom, theatricality and no-holds-barred emotional engagement that make it leap into being as freshly as it must have done 400 years ago. It still sounds incredibly daring: there is nothing Monteverdi will not risk in the service of the poetry (which includes Petrach and Tasso) and his harmonies are full of scrunches, clashes and innard-churning concatenations of unlikely sounds.

La Venexiana is a flexible-sized group; tonight they were five singers plus theorbo player Gabriele Palomba, with their versatile director Claudio Cavina nipping effortlessly from singing contralto to playing the harpsichord. Each singer is a master of character; and so charismatic a vocal actress is the lead soprano, Roberta Mameli, that I nearly mistook her for Anna Caterina Antonacci doing a spot of moonlighting. Her solo in Lamento della Ninfa was utterly astonishing: as sophisticated, sensual and raw as the finest jazz singer (she’s performed this elsewhere with an accompanying saxophone), while the Lamento itself is powerful enough to make Purcell’s Dido seem downright insipid.

Elsewhere, star spots found the three men -- Cavino with the romantic Raffaele Giordani (tenor) and the deep yet sparkly bass Salvo Vitale -- turning the parallel of love and war in Gera il nemico insidioso into hammy fun with a venomous sting in its tail; and Mameli and soprano Giulia Peri duetted celestially in the birdsong of O come sei gentile.

The only complaints around the church were that the encore was a madrigal we’d already heard; and that the concert -- 75 minutes with no interval -- was too short. We’d have loved hours more of it.

(NB: The following video is from a different occasion & in Spitalfields we didn't have certain elements of this performance. "No sax, please, we're British"?)

Schubert in memoriam

February 12th - the anniversary of my mother's death in 1994. It doesn't feel like 17 years ago; it doesn't fade. Here is her favourite piano piece, Schubert's Impromptu in G flat, Op.90 No.3, played by her favourite pianist, Krystian Zimerman. This doesn't fade either.

This is by Bartok - yes, really

Almost a Friday historical - the Andante, or Albumblatt, by Bartok, written for the then 15-year-old Adila d'Aranyi (elder sister of Jelly) in 1902. Bartok fell for the d'Aranyis in turn (oh, and Stefi Geyer), but it seems that neither of those feisty sisters returned his feelings. Which, to judge from this performance (1978) by Gyorgy Pauk and Peter Frankl, must have been pretty powerful. Enjoy.

How friendly are Friends?

No, not Facebook... This is about our leading cultural institutions and their membership systems. Friends schemes are a wonderful thing if you're in them; and as public subsidy shrinks we'll be seeing more and more developing. But with demand for membership starting to outstrip the supply of seats, the most sought-after events can sell out before booking has opened to the general public.

Now, in an ideal world, I personally would like the government to support the performing arts wholeheartedly, delivering high-quality performances and making low-cost seating available to all at the same modest price. Museums are free; why not music? But this is looking increasingly like a pipe-dream, at least in Britain. Instead, here is what's happening, as written by muggins in today's Indy:

The other day, public booking opened for this year's Aldeburgh Festival. Helen Hayes, who runs a recording studio at the nearby Potton Hall with her husband, dashed to her phone, hoping to book seats to take their small son to hear the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. It wasn't to be. "I've just tried to book for the CBSO Rattle concert and it is sold out – before public booking opens!" she declared on Facebook, adding: "Talk about access to music... and they get most of the public funding for music in this area. Elitist? Classical Music?"

So what happened? Well, Aldeburgh's Snape Maltings concert hall seats a modest 800. The 16,000-odd Friends of Aldeburgh Music receive priority booking. And everyone wants to hear Sir Simon Rattle in action.

Non-members can keep phoning the box office and hope for returns. The alternative is to become a Friend...

Read the whole thing here.

Catch-up

I know I've been neglecting you all this week. I've been away - more of that in a moment - but while I was gone the Henley Report on music education in England was published, as was the government's response. It seems very positive. Darren Henley's recommendations are spot-on, and the government, Michael Gove in particular, appears to be taking on board the majority of the points made. The term 'ring-fenced' even appears in relation to funding for music education, which is fabulous. But - and there are some big buts - the excellent In Harmony, in effect the British version of El Sistema, is only awarded funding for one more year... It's easy to talk... As Tom Service says, it's what happens next that will really count. And the National Union of Teachers is extremely sceptical about the likely results, not least because many local councils haven't waited for the report and the response and have already started handing out redundancy notices to music staff. Here are:

The Henley Report;
The government's response;
The ISM's response;
Tom Service's response in The Guardian;
The NUT comment. 
UPDATE: Follow the link from here to the 9 February 2011 release to see the response from the CBSO - again, welcoming the report, but nudging the government for firm commitment to ongoing support.

Meanwhile I was having the week that was...

Last Wednesday I gave a talk on Mahler and Musical Endgames at Symphony Hall, Birmingham. The next morning Tomcat and I travelled to Mainz to see Schott's fascinating historical headquarters. There you're greeted by a bust of Big Richard himself; there's a beautiful room, now replete with treasures of memorabilia, in which he presented the text of Meistersinger to the company for the first time; and the corridors are adorned with costume designs for Strauss's operas. Thence we went to Freiburg, just to see Freiburg; and Stuttgart, where we sat down to bask in pre-spring sun on the opera house steps, got talking to someone who turned out to be the former prima ballerina Julia Kramer - and ended up spotting numerous ballet stars wandering by, including the legendary Marcia Haydee herself. They were all there for the company's 50th anniversary festival. As an underage balletomane a few decades back, I always longed to go to Stuttgart to see the renowned Stuttgart Ballet...so this afternoon was an extraordinarily fine surprise. Here is Julia:



Back home I took part in the launch on Tuesday of The Road to Jericho with the devoted and idealistic team of Simon Hewitt Jones, Drew Balch, Candace Allen, Antony Pitts and friends, which involved test-driving something I'm trying to write about my visit to the West Bank last year. On 10 June at the Spitalfields Festival the London performance will take place and I'll be doing an open pre-concert interview with Simon, Drew and the inspirational Ramzi Aburedwan, head of Al Kamandjati in Ramallah, who will be here with his ensemble Dal'Ouna. Here is the video for The Road to Jericho:

Yesterday I went to Amsterdam and back to interview a Very Important Maestro. (And also passed a beautiful Amsterdam afternoon walking in the park with Norman Perryman, creator of magnificent kinetic paintings to music (you may have caught our double-act interview on Dilettante Music a few months back).

Here is the maestro.



Blimey, guv, it was quite a week. Back now, with a cold.

Down with "moronic melodies"!

Sometimes I'm afraid I may be the only one who loathes music as noise. And it is transformed into noise by its extreme prevalence in all forms, all over the place, all the time. But according to Terence Blacker in today's Independent, now the composer Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen's Music, has described taped music in public places as "some kind of commercial and cultural terrorism".

Too right. It stops us thinking. It stops us feeling. It stops us questioning. It stops us speaking (you can't talk to someone who's hooked up to his headphones having the head within banged to breaking point by some synthetic beat). Why do we put up with it? And when will shops learn that it's sometimes not productive at the counters? Now and then it persuades us to buy things we absolutely shouldn't - try resisting a boutique full of women all humming along to 'Dancing Queen' - but often it has quite the opposite effect. I beat a hasty retreat from shops, even nice ones having good value sales, if I don't like the aural assault they subject me to. They lose my custom. Simples.

From Terence Blacker's article:

The composer revealed that he had recently been driven out of a branch of Waterstone's by the rubbish being played on the book shop's sound system. The "moronic melodies" of mobile phone ringtones were every bit as bad. The Performing Rights Society (PRS), collecting cash on behalf of musicians, was, said Sir Peter, contributing to a general process of dumbing down...

The reason piped music is used by business is to reduce customers to a state of blissed-out receptiveness. "Audio architecture is emotion by design," the Muzak website creepily explains, "Its power lies in its subtlety." But there is something alarming about a society so afraid of silence or the sound of human communication that it is prepared to have its privacy invaded in this way.

What went wrong? When did music turn into mass-produced mind control? I would dearly love to persuade Adam Curtis (The Power of Nightmares, The Trap, etc) to make some documentaries on the subject. Meanwhile, here's a simple message to the shops, lifts, hotel lobbies and self-deafening, noise-polluting headbangers out there: turn it off!

UPDATE: Demetrius, in the comments box, has suggested we ask you to post your worst experiences of piped music. Good idea, so please -- go for it! And, if you have any good ones that make you love it, please post those too...

"Albert, your timing is very relative today..."

To Albert Einstein, music was more than merely the greatest source of happiness in life... Find out why in my feature for today's Independent about Jack Liebeck and Professor Brian Foster's music-and-physics night, The Music of the Spheres, which I think contains a few good reasons why schools should teach kids to play musical instruments.  http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/the-relative-beauty-of-the-violin-2196313.html

They're presenting it at St John's Smith Square on 4 February and tonight at the Leeds College of Music. And drawing together music, science and the arts is the very heart of Jack's excellent Oxford May Music festival, of which more, I hope, in due course: http://www.oxfordmaymusic.co.uk/Oxford_May_Music_Festival/Home.html

Here are some more great amateur violinists from history (and elsewhere)...

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

Jefferson, the ‘Philosopher of Democracy’, third president of the USA (1801-09) and principal author of the Declaration of Independence, said that music was “the passion of my soul” and “an enjoyment, the deprivation of which . . . cannot be calculated”. His accomplishment on the violin helped to see off lesser rivals for his future wife’s affection.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867)

The French painter, while studying at the Académie Royale de Peinture, Sculpture et Architecture in Toulouse, spent three years playing second violin in the Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse. He continued playing as an amateur for the rest of his long life, sparking the expression “Le violon d’Ingres” (meaning “hobby”).

Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977)

From age 16, Chaplin practised the violin several hours a day. He was left-handed and his violin was set up back-to-front to accommodate this. “I had great ambitions to be a concert artist,” he recalled, “but…I could never achieve excellence, so I gave it up.” He often composed theme songs for his films. Friends included the violinist Isaac Stern and Albert Einstein.

Paul Klee (1879-1940)

The Swiss artist followed an early career as a violinist, playing in the Bernische Musikgesellschaft while at school. His paintings are deeply influenced by music and he introduced to art expressions such as ‘polyphony’ and ‘rhythm’. He knew Schoenberg and Bartók personally, but, like Einstein, believed Bach and Mozart the epitome of musical abstraction.

Sherlock Holmes

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective uses his violin much as Einstein used his: to retreat into a mental space from which he can emerge refreshed and with crystallised perspective on the mystery he is trying to solve. It is a more salubrious pastime than his other retreat: injecting cocaine.

Elvis lives?

The healthy-sized audience that gathered at Kings Place yesterday for the opening night of the Hungarian Liszt festival (and Hungarian it was - I only heard two or three other people speaking English) arrived with high expectations of the brilliant young violinist Barnabas Kelemen and his duo partner Gergely Boganyi. But I'm not sure any of us anticipated the discovery that Elvis is alive, well and playing the violin. Kelemen strode on stage sporting the hair, the sideburns, the charisma and a slightly incongruous Chinese silk jacket; alongside him, Boganyi was long-legged, long-fingered and long-haired, clad in a shiny silver suit. They were quite a duo before they'd even begun.

This recital began literally where others end, plunging into the Bartok Romanian Dances with all the energy and earthy passion of musicians who have already warmed to their task and need no moment to test the water or coax in their audience. Instead, they just grabbed us. And there's no arguing with musicianship like this. Kelemen is a full-on virtuoso and makes no bones about it: his sound is huge, almost too big for KP, not invariably beautiful, but bursting with personality. Yet what struck me at every turn was the musical intelligence behind the charismatic showman: in the four Liszt pieces, he and Boganyi slid elegantly into that metaphysical soundscape between water and sky so characteristic of Liszt at his most spiritually removed, especially alive to the chilling and lonely visions of La Lugubre Gondola; the Romance Oubliee, too, was as delicate and elusive as anyone could hope.

Perhaps the biggest test of all was the Faure A major Sonata, which might seem an odd companion piece for the Hungaryfest, but bears traces of Liszt's influence via that of Saint-Saens, certainly in its fiendish piano part (I've played it rather a lot, struggling with the sensation I was doing the dog-paddle up an Olympic swimming pool). Boganyi made it sound all but effortless. I'm told that this admirable, clear-toned and sensitive pianist gave the complete solo works of Chopin last year at the Budapest Palace of Culture, in two days flat.

Mercifully lacking any English preconceptions that Faure should be pretty, floaty and over-refined, they really went for it. The work is pure passion, a wonderful, optimistic, sensual love-song for Marianne Viardot (Faure kept writing to her of "our sonata" during their brief engagement, and this was it). But being truly passionate doesn't mean bashing the hell out of something - quite the reverse - and it was the way Kelemen spun the melodies that impressed so much, shaping the drawn-out phrases with lines as long as Proustian sentences; and the variety of colours and shades of expression he is able to conjure, with varied vibrato and all-giving bow (plenty of flying horsehair). In the glitter of that nearly-an-optical-illusion scherzo, each pizzicato had a different shade of meaning. No repeated phrase was the same twice; no automatic pilot, thanks very much. Each moment lived, breathed and spoke. Faure's glorious elan shone in the sunshine, taking the sky and revelling in its breathtaking beauty.

As if that wasn't enough, Kelemen and Boganyi picked the Sarasate Zigeunerweisen by way of encore. First, Kelemen told us first about his famous Gypsy violinist grandfather, who died before Barnabas was born but has been captured on film (we've featured him before on JDCMB, but here he is again in case you missed it!). "There's one style we haven't played yet," said Kelemen, "the Gypsy style. I hope you all like Gypsy style..." Kelemen's grandpa would have been proud of the dash and devil-may-care daring with which Zigeunerweisen zoomed through Kings Place, some of it right on the edge of possibility in terms of speed. No safety net; no need for one.

Kelemen is one of very few violinists who can embody the ideal meeting of the Gypsy and Classical styles, understanding both from the inside and bringing out the best of both worlds. And not because of his "blood", but because of his musicianship. Though I do remember reading somewhere that Elvis had some Roma extraction too...

Catch him again on Saturday, playing Bartok's Violin Concerto No.1 at the RFH with...the LPO and Jurowski.

Action, please

A few fabulous musical events this week and next, all of which deserve that elusive thing called an audience but, being at Kings Place, are not as yet assured of having one. I reckon music-lovers just haven't clocked yet that this terrific venue exists -- it's not in a place where you can exactly bump into it. Get on your hiking boots and balaclavas and head for Kings Cross:

Today til Saturday: BIG HUNGARIAN LISZT BICENTENARY FESTIVAL with ace fiddler Barnabas Kelemen, Dezso Ranki & Edit Klukon who will play the Faust Symphony on 2 pianos, brilliant clear-toned pianist Denes Varjon, the Joyful Company of Singers and many more. Barnanas is first up this evening, and there's a pre-concert talk by Karl Lutchmeyer. But please ignore the note online saying that Barnabas is playing Liszt's 'finest violin sonatas' - you're right, there aren't any - he is actually playing Liszt's own violin version of some great piano pieces. And Bartok Romanian Dances and First Rhapsody & Faure's Sonata No.1. Full programme here.

Next week: TASMIN LITTLE AND FRIENDS in 'VIOLIN JOURNEYS'. Tazza, John Lenehan, Piers Lane, Paul Watkins, David Le Page and more in a fiddletastic whirl, plus mesmerism, masterclasses and Messiaen. (Infuriatingly, I am going to be elsewhere next week, but if I wasn't, I'd be there.) Here is Tasmin's sneak preview podcast.

BUT even if you do nothing else today, please read this inspirational and impassioned speech by the fabulous author Philip Pullman about the perniciously stupid, absolutely misguided current plans to close down our libraries.

A Leap of Faith, aka Mozart from Daniel Ben Pienaar

OK, I know this animation isn't exactly JDCMB usual style. But I want you to hear the piano playing on the soundtrack. Currently it is all I can find on Youtube of Daniel Ben Pienaar playing the Mozart piano sonatas.  

Pas mal, hein? I've recently been sent the complete set to review -- it is just out on Avie Records, though the above video suggests that bits have maybe been floating around Magnatune for a while -- and as a whole it's the most fresh, vital, intelligent, inspiring Mozart playing I have heard in literally years.

If you enjoyed my post 'Let's hear it for.. the Mozart Piano Sonatas', then you'll love this recording. Daniel Ben plays the C minor Fantasy and Sonata as if it has stepped straight out of Don Giovanni. The sicilienne slow movement of the early F major sonata is as raw, painful and amazing as that of the big A major piano concerto or Pamina's 'Ach, ich fuhls..'. There's brilliance aplenty, too, as you can hear above. But essentially DBP (as a growing circle of pianophile admirers call him) meets the sonatas head on, throws out all the silly received opinion crap about them being tinkly salon pieces or rarified only-for-fortepianos early stuff, and embraces them as the full-on, every inch WAM, works of genius that they really are. I'm far from being the only critic who loved them: he's been highly praised in The Sunday Times and Gramophone as well, for starters. Get the album here.

So where has DBP been all our lives? I first came across him some while ago when he was recording Bach -- his Goldberg Variations is again among the richest, most thoughtful and provocative accounts of the work I've come across -- and I know he lives somewhere in London and teaches at the Royal Academy of Music, whose principal, Jonathan Freeman-Atwood, is the producer of the Mozart set and has recorded trumpet and piano works with him. He is South African and won the big competition in Pretoria a while back. He has also recorded more Bach, Orlando Gibbons (yes, on the modern grand, and jolly good it sounds) and lots of Schubert.

But that animation isn't so silly. In recording all the Mozart sonatas, and not being afraid to make his own very personal and profound statement with them, DBP has indeed taken a leap of faith. He has the air of an artist who will take a plunge from a high tower and sprout wings at the crucial moment. In the week of Mozart's birthday, I'd like to suggest that perhaps this set will be those wings.

Speaking of wings, those who tweet might like to know that there'll be a Mozart party on Twitter on the birthday itself, Thursday 27 Jan. Use the hashtag #mozartchat ... see you there.
@jessicaduchen

Friday Historical: Menuhin and Kentner play Schubert

There is nobody like Schubert. There was nobody like Menuhin. There was no pianist like Kentner. So, just because we can, just for the sake of incredible music and musicianship, here they are. For the rest of the recording, click through the video to Youtube and you should find the other three parts pop up in sequence.

A Magical Musical Tour at Southbank Centre

Here's my piece from today's Independent: meet Olly Coates, artist-in-residence at Southbank Centre and "curator" of the Harmonic Series. All you have to do, for a fiver, is pitch up by the box office at 7.45pm on the appointed day and Olly will lead you to a surprise space for a weird and wonderful mix of magical new sounds. No.1 is on 30 January with pieces by, amongst others, Michel Van Der Aa, Zemlinsky, Mara Carlyle and, with Streetwise Opera, Emily Hall's The Nightingale and the Rose. But where? Dunno. See you there.