It's Fauré's birthday

It is. Amazingly enough, it is also Massenet's birthday. But I heard an awful lot of Massenet yesterday, so here is my main man, the glorious Gabriel: Christian Ferras plays the Berceuse.

Love you, Gabriel Fauré. Love you too, Christian Ferras - dear, doomed, tragic violin genius. How I wonder what you were thinking when you played this.

Once upon a time...

Once upon a time...there was a music journalist who loved beautiful voices. She thought there was something miraculous to the way a great singing voice can exist quite by accident in any part of the world, given the appropriate training and development. So when she found that one especially great tenor voice was shortlisted for a major prize, she thought she must really go to the awards dinner, just in case he won, turned up and sang. But she held out little hope, because he was, after all, a very busy person and was currently on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.


But - imagine her amazement! Another fine tenor suddenly developed a frog in his throat at an opera house nearby, and his understudy was off on a golfing holiday. Someone had to be found who knew that major role, and quickly. It so happened that the great tenor had booked some rest time before a Very Big Show, but he was technically free and beside his Very Big Show the role in London was a stuck der kuche. So he hopped on a plane, and when the awards dinner team realised he was on his way they rushed a fast car over to the airport to kidnap him and bring him to the RealLifePoshPlace for the awards dinner. 


At the dinner the journalist found herself seated [note: SEATED. not: SAT] next to him. He accepted his award with gratitude. They talked all evening, he taught her some vital words in his language and then he invited her for a glass of champagne in his dressing room after the show the next night. And said 'Do bring your husband'...

NO - NO - NO - that's just a fairy-story. Except for the grammar lesson. But last night we all had a cracking good time at the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards at the VeryPoshRealPlace aka The Dorchester. The industry donned its glad rags and gave prizes to some truly wonderful musicians who deserved every inch of them and more. And I'd like to thank whoever the kind person was who decided to put me on Ivan Fischer's table entirely surrounded by Hungarians and next to my good friend from the Hungarian Cultural Centre.

Imogen Cooper presented the prizes, with Katie Dereham and Andrew MacGregor doing the announcements. And playwright Mark Ravenhill, whose translation of L'incoronazione di Poppea is currently on at the King's Head, made a superb speech. In days gone by, the RPS dinner speech was often Whingeville Incorporated, a chance for a leading figure to lambast the government/the BBC/the radio stations/the world for not being all it/they should be. No longer. Mark compared the current approach of arts organisations to 'a luxury airline lounge with an access policy' and pointed out the anomalies of this. 'Let's get out of the airline lounge - and fly!' Now we just have to work out how.

It was also a particularly good night for composers, with honorary membership of the RPS presented to George Benjamin and more honours for Lachenmann, Dillon and Ferneyhough.

You can read the full shortlists and more about the winners on the RPS site, here. Meanwhile...


Here are the prizes.

Conductor: As you'll have guessed, Ivan Fischer. Who is marvellous, magical and glorious. I can't wait to hear the Budapest Festival Orchestra Prom (2 Sept) where he'll be conducting Liszt, Mahler and a bunch of surprises to be chosen at the last moment by the audience itself.

Chamber music and song (this was the jury I was privileged to be on): the Takacs Quartet for their Beethoven cycle in 2009-10. Unfortunately they couldn't join us as they are currently touring down under, but they sent a lovely video message.

Audience Development: ENO for Access all Arias - free membership for students and under-30s, plus Punchdrunk in the warehouse.

Chamber-scale Composition: Brian Ferneyhough for his String Quartet no.6.

Concert Series and Festivals: Southbank Centre for the Helmut Lachenmann weekend.


Education: Sing Up. We were treated to a performance by the children of St Mary's Primary School who sang very, very well and did all the choreography too. Sing Up may not be star-ridden, but it's probably the most important award of the evening because this fabulous initiative has introduced quality singing to millions of children in English primary schools for the first time and has become the envy of Europe and beyond. If the government does not continue to fund it after 2012 then they'd be even stupider than they currently look and would deserve to be [insert execution method of choice].

Ensemble: Aurora Orchestra, who have achieved wonders, joyous music making and a real niche in just five years. Very nice to meet their conductor Nicholas Collon and to see Olly Coates, the excellent young cellist whom I interviewed a few months ago. These bright, articulate, fired-up young men and their generation are the people who are going to bring new ideas and new thinking to the music world in the next couple of decades - watch them!

Creative Communication: BBC4's Opera Italia series, presented to Tony Pappano in person. Is Tony the most human and approachable and communicative conductor Covent Garden has ever had, perhaps?

Singer: Susan Bickley. What an ovation she got, too. 'A consummate artist' said the citation, and we couldn't agree more!

Young Artist: Alina Ibragimova. At 25, she's a shooting star, busily fulfilling the promise that her Sibelius concerto showed when she was 16 - my jaw hit the floor listening to her then. More power to her elbows.

Large-Scale Composition: James Dillon for Nine Rivers, 'for its sheer ambition and the consistency of creative thought sustaining it'. The extract that was played was completely mesmerising and I am itching to hear the rest of it. This man has a phenomenal sonic imagination and my resolution for the evening was to explore much more of his music.

Opera and Music Theatre: The ROH for Tannhauser. Which I flipping well missed. Hopefully they'll do a revival.

Instrumentalist. Leon Fleisher. Hooray! Not just a great pianist with an extraordinary journey through incapacity and back again, but a humane, deep-thinking, fabulous musician from the heart of what it's all about. Wish he could have been there in person.

Egézségedre! And there will be an awards broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0112czv

AND FROM THE OFFICIAL STUFF:
John Gilhooly, Chairman of the Royal Philharmonic Society commented:
“The Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards are able to respond to the zeitgeist, but prefer to set the agenda.  They reward serious, imaginative projects which broaden the understanding and enjoyment of music and trumpet the outstanding brilliance of distinguished musicians, composers and young artists at the very top of their game.  There is much to be said for intellectual rigour in a time when serious ideas can often struggle to get a hearing.  The RPS is committed to creating a vibrant future for classical music through a careful, rigorous and artistically bold approach – something which is mirrored in the work of all tonight’s winners.”

Roger Wright, Controller, BBC Radio 3 and Director, BBC Proms commented:“This set of awards is a celebration of the classical music world, not least the value of live music and new work. I am delighted by the recognition given to James Dillon, a composer who has long been supported by both Radio 3 and the Proms. Live music is at the heart of Radio 3 and our recent announcement of the groundbreaking schedule of live music every week night on Radio 3 is just one example of our shared values with the Royal Philharmonic Society and our desire to share live performances with millions of our listener.”


Please join the Royal Philharmonic Society - you can do so HERE.


Last but not least, here's Ivan again, with the BFO, doing a Hungarian Dance in, er, Chinese.

THE DAMNATION OF TERRY GILLIAM

Here you go. My Faust review for the Independent.

THE DAMNATION OF FAUST
English National Opera, 6 May 2011

Review by Jessica Duchen (for The Independent)

Poor old Berlioz. The moment Terry Gilliam was announced as director
of this new ENO staging, it was obvious that the composer would
scarcely get a look in, at least in advance. It’s the first venture
into opera (in a co-production with De Vlaamse Opera, Antwerp) for the
former Monty Python animator and director of such legendary movies as
Brazil, Twelve Monkeys and The Fisher King. The question, of course,
was: could this operatic novice deliver in a field where so many other
film supremos have fallen flat on their faces?

Well, in certain ways Berlioz doesn’t get a look in in the finished
version either, since Gilliam has elected to take us through a journey
through German history, all the way from Romanticism – the red-haired
Faust himself is straight out of that famed Caspar David Friedrich
painting – to…you guessed it, Marguerite rises to heaven from
Auschwitz. It’s not so much Monty Python as The Producers, so full is
the show of camp, dancing, exercising Nazis. Springtime for Terry and
Berlioz, anyone? But Python fans will be glad to know that close to
the start we do get a glimpse of something much resembling the Knights
that say Ni.

Berlioz’s Faust is a challenge at the best of times – it’s not even
opera, strictly speaking, but in the composer’s terminology a ‘légende
dramatique’, part cantata, part opera and possibly as ill-suited to
the stage as Goethe’s ‘closet drama’ (a deliberately unstageable play)
that inspired it. But Berlioz, Gilliam and the character of
Mephistopheles, the devil, have two great things in common: a vast
imagination and a sense of unbounded mischief that means breaking all
the rules, including ‘avoid cliché’; Gilliam seems to have elected to
do the latter so spectacularly that it floors everyone anyway. At
least sometimes.

When it doesn’t work, it really doesn’t work. After all, the Nazis had
nothing whatsoever to do with Berlioz, who wrote this magnificent work
back in 1846, let alone Goethe. Yet the best moments are stunning.
Having spent most of the first half thinking “When are we ever going
to grow up and get past putting the Nazis into  opera?” by the end of
the evening this critic was shaken and profoundly moved.

All credit to ENO for pulling it off. It’s a phenomenally slick,
complex show of many components and brilliant theatrical effects:
Faust and Mephisto’s motorbike ride to the gates of hell, dodging
“birds” that are aircraft dropping bombs, Faust’s entry to – and exit
from – hell itself, and the chilling transformation in Act I of the
songs of the Rat and the Flea into anti-Semitic cabaret horrors. And
there’s a brilliant moment at which Gilliam literally turns back time:
the precision of its execution alone would have been astounding even
if it hadn’t happened to work conceptually.

Gilliam’s not-so-secret weapons are his Mephistopheles, Christopher
Purves at his  most charismatic, infallible and infinitely nuanced;
and, as Marguerite Oppenheim (yes, really), the glorious Christine
Rice, whose rich yet pure mezzo - and aching calls of ‘Alas’ as she is
herded into the cattle truck - suits this music to perfection. Peter
Hoare as Faust performed strongly in the first act, though the start
of Act II found him suffering in the high notes and somewhat losing
his stride for a short while thereafter. The orchestra and chorus were
on fabulous form under Ed Gardner’s baton.

Goethe and Werther

It's been a week here of French Opera Based On Goethe, with Covent Garden's Werther and ENO's The Damnation of Faust opening within 24 hours of each other. I'll post a link as soon as my review of the latter is available on the website. Meanwhile here's the feature-length version of my 'Observations' piece about Werther. Plus a little sample of Massenet at his dusky, sexy best.

I'll be at the performance on Wednesday night. The question everyone's too scared to ask is 'Can Villazon still sing?' Ed Seckerson says he can and does. But the only samples of him in Werther on Youtube date back a few years and are kind of distressing at times, so for now here is, uh, someone else.




Jules Massenet’s opera Werther is opening at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. And, looking at its origins, it seems amazing that this morbid, sugary and really rather French creation should be the chief stage version of Goethe’s searing novella The Sorrows of Young Werther. The book was written when the great German poet was only 24 and it was first published as early as 1774. Mozart was 18 at the time, Beethoven a toddler and Schubert not yet born. Goethe revised the book in 1787. But Massenet’s opera did not appear until over a century later, in 1892.

I’ve been hunting for earlier operatic adaptations of Goethe’s story and so far have drawn a blank. It’s possible that the novella, which was based on Goethe’s own experience of unrequited love and bore an uncanny parallel with the suicide of a friend, may have scared composers away. It was a scandal-ridden bestseller that sparked a fashion craze, revolutionary concerns and a spate of copycat suicides; several authorities banned it. Perhaps it was just too famous, too dangerous, too enticing. It could no more have been turned into an opera in its own time than could Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Goethe’s tale describes the passion of a young poet for the pragmatic Charlotte. His love seems unrequited; she marries another man; finally Werther shoots himself. The book is terse and spare; its most emotional passages are swathes of translated poetry supposedly by Ossian, mirroring Werther’s turbulent feelings as he reads it aloud to Charlotte. He resolves to die not because Charlotte does not love him, but because it turns out, too late, that she does.

The story looks perfect for adaptation by a German romantic – Schubert, Schumann, Weber or Mendelssohn; and Brahms requested that his Piano Quartet in C minor should be published with an illustration of Werther on its cover. Yet all these composers missed the chance to create an opera that did justice to the author.

Massenet (1842-1912) finally muscled in where his peers feared to tread. Beside Goethe’s original, his version can look desperately sentimental: Werther dies by inches in Charlotte’s arms while the tragedy is offset by anodyne Christmas scenes for kiddiwinks. Nevertheless, parts of Werther remain peculiarly magical. Massenet was famed for his expert orchestration, and the opera owes much to this:  the hero has his own soundworld, darkly translucent, replete with harp and low strings, and his aria ‘Pourquoi me reveiller?’ is a serious showstopper.

Highly successful in his day, Massenet wrote as many as 25 operas; aged 36, he became the youngest member ever elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He knew exactly how to pander to the public. Debussy described his situation pithily: “His brethren could not easily forgive Massenet this power of pleasing which, strictly speaking, is a gift. His is a delightful kind of fame, the secret envy of many of those great artists who can only warm their hands at the somewhat pallid flame provided by the approbation of the elect.”

As a professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire, Massenet coached fine youngsters including Ernest Chausson and Charles Koechlin. But eventually, with the rise of more forward-thinking musicians including Debussy himself, Ravel and ultimately Messiaen, the sepia glow of such romanticism faded substantially from view.

Werther, though, has a secret weapon: it is a glorious vehicle for a star tenor. Recently, new high-profile performers have aided its resuscitation, notably Jonas Kaufmann. Now, at the ROH, Rolando Villazón is to take the title role, after a chequered period of vocal problems that has seen him testing an alternative career as TV presenter and talent show judge. The Mexican singer is a passionate performer who pours heart and soul into music and acting alike. All eyes will be on him in the hope he can rise to the challenge of this mysteriously mesmerising work.

Werther opens at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on 5 May. Box office: 020 7304 4000


[AFTERTHOUGHT, Sunday 11.35: HAS anyone ever made an opera out of Lady Chatterley's Lover? If not, could it work? *sounds of brain-cogs whirring...*]

The thin end of the epiglottis?

Do opera cinecasts bring us the best of both worlds - live opera plus film - or just the thin ends of two wedges? Can they be more than just radio plus epiglottis? A few questions I'm addressing in today's Independent.... http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/nice-aria-shame-about-the-film-2279518.html

Meanwhile, stand by for a French opera fete as Werther opened last night at the ROH and Ed Seckerson has given it five stars; and La damnation de Faust launches at ENO, directed by Terry Gilliam, this evening...the rapid response unit is out for the latter... 

And finally, hugest thanks to everyone who trekked down to sunny Sheen yesterday for the play reading, and to Bernard and Jeremy for putting so much hard work into making it a very lovely occasion. The full house and warm welcome was greatly appreciated! 

Russians, power, electric guitars, Messiaen and polling stations

Fascinating report in today's Guardian: in Russia a music critic is going on trial for allegedly insulting a rock guitarist re alleged political affiliations. In the report we also learn that Medvedev is a Deep Purple fan and that a Bolshoi ballerina resigned earlier this year claiming she had been "used" politically... Read the whole thing here.

In other news, it's Big Thursday. Today's the day we vote on for AV in Britain - the Daily Mail is telling people to vote NO, which is a very good reason to vote YES. Werther is opening at the Royal Opera House so we can see if Villazon can still sing (I'm going on 11th). And my Messiaen play reading is at East Sheen Library this evening, conveniently in the same building as the local polling station. A Walk Through the End of Time is in one act, about 45 mins, and afterwards we'll have interval drinks and then reconvene for a discussion, assuming anyone wants to discuss anything. Do come and join us. Here's a map: http://www.richmond.gov.uk/home/community_and_living/local_maps/libraries_map.htm

After 'auditioning' a range of Youtube clips of the Messiaen itself, I've opted out of adding one here. Incredible number of different interpretations involving dance, film projected behind musicians (flying ducks?) sand pictures, short 'art' film (a dog salon? to the last movement??)... If I look at any more...well, you get the idea.

Meanwhile, back in Croydon

The other day I received two messages. The first was headed simply LONDON MOZART PLAYERS and said "I'd be grateful for your help in publicising the information attached". People Give Concert...? Oh. No. Hang on... The "information" was actually that this doughty chamber orchestra is fighting for its very existence.

While several early music ensembles lick their chops at the prospect of getting their paws on some ACE lolly at long last, the London Mozart Players is threatened with closure. Having lost all its ACE support, it faces the prospect of annihilation unless alternative sources of income can be found. It has launched an urgent campaign to this end.

Its MD Simon Funnell says this:

“This campaign is urgent and vital – if we don’t succeed it is highly likely that the board will have to take the decision to close the orchestra later this year so the stakes are very high indeed. The LMP is one of the finest chamber orchestras in the country and it is crucial that we protect this part of our heritage....

"Many arts organisations face challenging times in the coming years; thanks to the deep impact of the recession, Government cuts to the Arts Council, low interest rates and a gloomy outlook on the economy, the orchestra is facing a squeeze on every side: there are more organisations chasing smaller and smaller pots of money.

“Every time we lose a cultural institution like the LMP, we lose something of our humanity and we cannot allow this to happen. The sums of money the LMP need to survive are relatively small but vital if the orchestra is to survive. The government is calling on philanthropists and companies to do more to support the arts, and now the LMP is asking directly for that support.”

So why do I think the LMP deserves the funding that went instead into early music? Early music ensembles are not generally about keeping music on the pulse of today: they cater for an elite-within-an-elite in musical taste, one that prefers to create fantasies of sounds that may have existed centuries ago (some call it 'Taliban' syndrome...) rather than engaging in the sounds and issues of today. Not many of them make a habit of commissioning living composers to refresh audiences and musicians alike with new, living, breathing music. The LMP does. Supporting the creation of new music should be an absolute pre-requisite.

Or...could the LMP be suffering from a simple image problem: their home base? What are the chances that the yay or nay-sayers in public funding just don't bother going to the concrete compounds of Croydon to hear their completely excellent work? Hmm.

My second message was from a friend who is involved in running a small arts organisation that does rely on private donations. Here's what's happening to them:

"Twice we have been seriously let down by two philanthropists....We spent money on giving two invited superb presentations with artists in private homes, in total to about 60 people, all who loved it and were emotionally moved and promised the earth. Two in particular, both wealthy and one quite well known, offered £30,000 and £150,000 respectively.  In front of witnesses.  Neither of them have come up with a penny.  All sorts of excuses.... But I am flabbergasted and shocked and the more I tell people the more I hear it goes on. Jeremy Hunt et all better be warned.  I also heard via an email this morning that in the States one concert series that annually receives a fund of $100,000 this year got $5000 from the same person."

Philanthropy shmilanthropy.

Im wunderschönen Monat Mai...

Happy May. A special treat for this special long weekend, and something you won't have heard at the royal wedding...

JONAS KAUFMANN SINGS SCHUMANN'S DICHTERLIEBE 
With the fabulous Helmut Deutsch (piano). Enjoy... and many thanks to "operazaile".

n°1 "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai"
n°2 "Aus meinen Tränen sprieben"
n°3 "Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne"



n°4 "Wenn ich deine Augen seh"
n°5 "Ich will meine Seele tauchen"
n°6 "Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome"
n°7 "Ich grolle nicht, und wenn das Herz auch bricht"



n°8 "Und wüßten's die Blumen, die kleinen"
n°9 "Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen"
n°10 "Hör' ich das Liedchen klingen"



n°11 "Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen"
n°12 "Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen"


n°13 "Ich hab' im Traum geweinet"
n°14 "Allnächtlich im Traume seh' ich dich"
n°15 "Aus alten Märchen winkt es"



n°16 "Die alten, bösen Lieder"

Watch with Mother for composer of Royal Wedding work....

It's been a closely-guarded secret, that Royal Wedding music, and on the whole it's very best-of-British. Well, British, anyway. According to BBC Breakfast today, we're promised Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Britten (!), and Kate is walking up the aisle to the strains of Parry's utterly execrable I was Glad. The London Chamber Orchestra will be doing the honours - more of them soon, I hope... but meanwhile the breaking news is that a work by a little-known Welsh composer, Paul Mealor, 35, has been chosen for performance on the big day alongside all the pomp and circumstance.


The piece, Ubi caritas, was premiered last year at St Andrew's University, meeting place of the happy twain, and will be performed by the choirs of Westminster Abbey and Her Majesty's Chapel Royal, conducted by James O'Donnell. Paul says: “I was thrilled to hear that HRH Prince William of Wales had chosen my music for his wedding. How humbling it is for me to know that Prince William and Catherine will celebrate the beginning of their lives together with my music. The ceremony is going to be, without a doubt, the most emotionally intense and exhilarating hour of my life.’’    


After making the poor guy keep all the excitement under wraps until now, you'd think that the least they could do was make sure he's in the abbey to hear his piece. But no. He's apparently planning to be at home in Wales, watching on telly with his mum. I can't help wondering if he was even invited. Shall we hazard a guess?


About Paul: he studied composition privately from an early age with John Pickard, at the University of York with Nicola LeFanu (1994-2002) and in Copenhagen with Hans Abrahamsen (1998-99). Since 2003 he has taught at the University of Aberdeen, where he is currently Reader in Composition, and has held visiting professorships in composition at institutions in Scandinavia and the United States.


Update: the full list of music for the Royal Wedding is now online at the official site, here. John Rutter has been commissioned to write a brand-new anthem, there'll be a piece by Peter Maxwell Davies who's Master of the Queen's Music, and the happy couple will exit to Walton's 'Crown Imperial', followed by the Widor Toccata and a spot of Elgar. And much more.

Seeing Pina

I hadn't seen a 3-D movie since the deep sea extravaganza at the Imax where we all tried to catch the fish in front of our eyes. It was fun, but what exactly was the point? 3-D is not 3-D: it's the illusion of it, an evocation of being there when we are not. So, attending Wim Wenders's Pina, it's hard to avoid cynicism when the screen instructs us to don our special glasses. Yet Pina's own words tell us within the first few minutes that dance is an evocation of experience. So, too, are words. All we can do is...evoke. Now it begins to make sense, and the magic is ready to start.

But wouldn't Pina be just as magical without the 3-D? I suspect it would, because the beauty of Wenders's filming has never let us down before and certainly doesn't do so now. Pina is indeed an evocation: Pina Bausch herself died almost two years ago and this is no documentary, since Wenders tells us nothing of her life or career. Instead he lets her choreography, her dancers and her company's home surroundings of Wuppertal pay tribute through image and only the sparest of words.

The dance rarely stops. Thanks to the 3-D we seem to be on stage amongst the dancers during Bausch's devastating choreography of The Rite of Spring, or riding on the odd dangling Wuppertal monorail to witness a little street theatre: one dancer wears donkey ears while another gets up to all manner of peculiar things with a pillow. Sometimes muslin curtains waft in front of our noses; at other moments we nearly feel the autumn leaves blowing out of the screen, or seem to smell the water that flies around the stage in the dazzling, magnificent and fabulously funny Full Moon.

Pina Bausch is glimpsed in existing film, for little more than seconds. Her dancers each pay a brief and beautiful tribute to her - they are an international crowd of many different shapes, sizes and ages, unified by their devotion to Bausch and her dance style. The latter may look wild, free and zany, but is phenomenally demanding: it requires incredible control, an all-giving and all-taking matter in which if you lose your sense of humour you will quickly be lost too. This is dance as the ultimate human expression, able to travel from high comedy to tragedy and insanity within two blinks: every millimetre of finger or toe contains the very essence of emotion. Marius Petipa, eat your heart out.

Bausch was an artist ahead of her time - it is only now, and largely thanks to this movie, that a wider public appears to be waking up to her astounding work. It has taken a cinematic legend to send her mainstream - and if the 3-D is a gimmick, it's a good one, well-handled and more appropriate than some of us expected. Wenders's poetic touch is assured, luminous; you can go in knowing nothing of Bausch and still come out moved. The dancers' devotion to her and her work says it all. Amazing how two-dimensional Finchley Road appeared on exit.

The film's website has all the background information one might wish for, here. Meanwhile, perhaps we need filmmakers of genius to transform performance art of all types for this still-new century.

"Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost..."

Padding more around Vaughan Williams and Ravel

In case you missed this little treat about the friendship of Vaughan Williams and Ravel in The Independent on Friday, here it is again, very mildly tweaked, to trail Mark Padmore's concert with Roger Vignoles and the excellent young Navarra Quartet tomorrow night at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. The Navarras' CDs, btw, are well worth a listen - I've thoroughly enjoyed them when reviewing for Classic FM Magazine. And I don't need to introduce you to Mark, I'm sure - but here he is anyway, singing the beginning of RVW's On Wenlock Edge (with pianist Simon Lepper and the Royal String Quartet). And just see if it doesn't sound a tad more Ravellish when you've read the article...

WHEN RALPH MET MAURICE...

Jessica Duchen

At the outset of the 20^th century, a transformation was about to take place in British music. Long dominated by German influences and newly interested in folk songs, British composers began to discover France. And in 1907 Ralph Vaughan Williams went to Paris to take lessons with Maurice Ravel: a composer several years his junior, yet one whose music – sinuous, detailed and highly individual – proved an irresistible attraction to a young man who declared himself afflicted by “French fever”.

The influence of Ravel on Vaughan Williams, and the long friendship between the two, is the basis of a fascinating concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall by the celebrated tenor Mark Padmore next week, with the Navarra String Quartet and the pianist Roger Vignoles. The concert, says Padmore, offers a musical “conversation” between the two composers: “It’s like visiting an exhibition of Picasso and Matisse together, so you can see the points where their ideas coincide,” he says.

Ravel and Vaughan Williams were first introduced to each other by the music critic Michel Dimitri Calvocoressi; soon afterwards, the Englishman – a great-nephew of Darwin and a descendant of the Wedgewood family – decamped to Paris for three months of study. As Padmore says, “Vaughan Williams decided he needed a bit of French polish.”

The beginning, though, was anything but auspicious. Vaughan Williams later recalled: “When I had shown [Ravel] some of my work he said that for my first lessons I had better ‘write a little Minuet in the style of Mozart’. I saw at once that it was time to act promptly, so I said in my best French, ‘Look here, I have given up my time, my work, my friends and my career to come here and learn from you and I am not going to write ‘a little Minuet in the style of Mozart.’ ”

Ravel seems to have responded positively to being stood up to; besides, Vaughan Williams, at 35, was hardly a beginner. Soon the English composer was writing to Calvocoressi thanking him for the introduction to “the man who is exactly what I’m looking for. As far as I know my own faults, he hit on them exactly and is telling me to do exactly what I half feel in my mind I ought to do – but it just wanted saying.”

Ravel’s motto, Vaughan Williams noted, was “complex but never complicated”. The lightness of touch he advocated was a far cry from the blandishments of Sir Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford, Vaughan Williams’s main teachers at Cambridge University and the Royal College of Music, who had steeped him in Beethoven string quartets and the English choral tradition. “The heavy contrapuntal Teutonic manner,” he discovered, to his delight, “was not necessary”.

On Wenlock Edge, Vaughan Williams’s song cycle at the centre of Padmore’s programme, may seem quintessentially English, setting evocative poetry by AE Houseman. But on closer examination, Ravel’s stamp is everywhere in it. “There’s an impressionistic style to the writing, like the sweeping winds of the first movement, or the way that bells are depicted in ‘Bredon Hill’, and it sounds less folksong-like than much of Vaughan Williams’s earlier music,” says Padmore. The transparency of the textures and the pared-away clarity of line about the melodies were also new to Vaughan Williams and highly Ravellian. Ravel championed the work, organising its French premiere in 1912 and playing the piano part himself.

The year after Vaughan Williams’s time in Paris, Ravel came to London to stay with him in his home in Cheyne Walk. Ursula Vaughan Williams later remembered her husband describing Ravel as a charming and sometimes very surprising house-guest: “Ralph enjoyed taking him sight-seeing and was fascinated to find that he liked English food...It appeared that steak and kidney pudding with stout at Waterloo Station was Ravel’s idea of pleasurably lunching out,” she wrote.

But several years later, world events conspired to create a stronger tie between the works of Ravel and Vaughan Williams than either could have envisaged. With the outbreak of World War I, both composers enlisted for active service. The traumas of that time were often reflected by a deep, unsettling chill in their music in later years.

Vaughan Williams served in the Field Ambulance Service of the Royal Army Medical Corps and later in the Royal Garrison Artillery. His experiences of trench warfare in France in 1916 – he was a stretcher-bearer evacuating the wounded from Neuville St Vaast in hellish conditions – left him profoundly shaken. Here he conceived a work whose misleading title, A Pastoral Symphony, belied its true nature.

“It’s really wartime music – a great deal of it incubated when I used to go up night after night with the ambulance wagon at Ecoivres and we went up a steep hill and there was a wonderful Corot-like landscape in the sunset – it’s not really lambkins frisking at all as most people take for granted,” he explained.

Ravel had hoped to join the Air Force, but ended up driving an ambulance. “For several months I have been at the front, at the part which has seen the most action,” he wrote to Vaughan Williams. “I went through some moving experiences...enough to amaze me that I am still alive.” During the war he experienced an additional tragedy, the death of his mother. His own health suffered: he contracted dysentery and was operated on. Afterwards, he composed virtually nothing for three years, but worked frenetically when he finally resumed. Each movement of his piano suite Le tombeau de Couperin is dedicated to the memory of a fallen comrade – as necessary and cathartic an exercise for him as A Pastoral Symphony was for his English friend.

Recovering his physical health, he wrote to Vaughan Williams: “It is now my morale that must be cared for and I don’t know how to do it... Won’t you be coming to Paris soon? I would be very happy to see you after so many terrible years.” The memory of war stayed with Ravel: the tramp of marching boots seems to haunt his Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (1929-30) while the supposed tribute to the world of old Vienna, La Valse, which he started well before 1914, was transformed after 1918 into a veritable dance of death. 

But oddly, it was Ravel’s mother who may have held the true key to the affinity between the two composers. “She was from the Basque region,” Padmore says, “and Ravel recalled her singing folksongs to him.” We don’t usually think of Ravel as a folksong-influenced composer – unlike Vaughan Williams, who spent much time researching traditional English music with his friend Gustav Holst, and loved to employ its musical language in his works. “But it’s clear that Ravel did have an interestin folksong,” Padmore insists, “and I think it influenced the way he approached word-setting, as it did with Vaughan Williams.” 

Ravel died in 1937; Vaughan Williams outlived him by 21 years, becoming the grand old man of British music and being awarded the Order of Merit. The two might have been linked by a natural andprogressing affinity, but Vaughan Williams always remained, as Ravel said, the only one of his pupils who did not write music that sounded too much like Ravel. Perhaps Ravel’s greatest gift to Vaughan Williams was the courage to be himself.

Mark Padmore and friends perform Ravel and Vaughan Williams in Southbank Centre’s International Chamber Music Series, Queen Elizabeth Hall on 27 April. Box office: 0844 875 0073

How NOT to get coverage for your concert, part 2

Part The Second... More top tips straight from the horse's mouth, a.k.a. desk of JDCMB. Best tip of all is provided by Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers at the end... Tomorrow we'll have the best of your tips - there've been a few. HAPPY EASTER & ENJOY THE SUNSHINE!

13. Do not... choose anodyne titles. Some extremely good organisations perhaps fail to attract media interest because their names/titles are so bland, general and lacking in statement-creation that they sound unbelievably boring, even if the content ought to prove otherwise.

14. Do not...try to cultivate a 'friendship' with a critic imagining that they'll give you good reviews. A true friend will tell you exactly what he/she thinks. And you mightn't like it and you might be upset. So might they. Chances are they'll have seen straight through you long before then in any case.

15. Do not... have a conversation that goes like this: "Darling, how are you? I was so worried! I saw your note saying you were off sick and didn't want calls, I hope you're feeling better?...Oh, I'm sorry - you need more time? Well, at least it's sunny, and oh, by the way, we've got a concert on Thursday, if you fancied coming along - not to review it, of course, purely for a nice evening out...our soprano is really amazing, she has a fantastic story to tell about how she sang Isolde the night her dog died...but I only called to see how you were...." (Yeah, right...). If a journalist ever claims to be off sick, they mean it. Most of us are freelance and can't afford to take 'sickies'. And if we say "please don't call for three weeks," we won't like it if you do.

16. Do not...fail to address someone by name, or fail to say 'please'. Old-fashioned? Yes, but there's a reason people used to do these things. "People give concert: consider feature or review" goes straight to SPAM because it's no way to accost a hack in her own home.

17. Do not...take anyone or anything for granted, and do not regard yourself as entitled to anything at any time. (Actually, this applies to all of us, no matter our profession. A principle for living.)

18. Do not...be indiscreet. If you slept with anyone in order to get that concert, make sure nobody ever finds out (eg, check that he doesn't buy all his girlfriends the same hat; and make sure you hide his Christmas cards). If you are indiscreet you might indeed end up with coverage. The wrong kind of coverage. Possibly in the wrong kind of newspaper.

19. Do not... offer press tickets to someone who lives in another country unless you're also willing to pay their travel and accommodation. Otherwise, see point #10. in yesterday's post.

20. Do not... send impersonal notes saying "I'd be grateful for any publicity for the attached...". Of course you would be. So would everyone else who's trying to publicise their stuff. You're asking for free help, remember. If you're that grateful, buy an advert. And don't be surprised if someone rings you up wanting to sell you one.

21. Do not...misuse social networking. Facebook, Twitter, etc are great for spreading the word about what you're doing, making new friends, staying in touch etc - but they're not appropriate for direct personal approaches re coverage. Don't be surprised if jaunty tweets saying "hey! revu mi konzert 2nite" get short shrift.

22. Do not...betray the fact that you know sod-all about the music you're trying to sell. Did I ever tell you about the 1980s record company exec - newly employed, from a background in an unrelated industry - who'd suddenly learned Tchaikovsky was gay and started talking to a roomful of hard-bitten, traditionally-minded music critics about how he was 'developing some Tchaikovsky concepts'?

23. Do not...write furious letters if you get coverage and it's bad. Shit happens. And it happens to everyone at some point. Once a review is out, it's out and unless it contains actual libel (contentious point, that) there's not a lot you can do about it. Thing is, probably nobody will remember it in any case, assuming they even saw it. Get your revenge by doing something utterly marvellous next time. Remember, once your brilliant career is well established worldwide, that reviewer will look really stupid.

24. Do not...underestimate the role played in all this by plain - old - good - luck.

Now, here's what Fred, Ginger & Jerome Kern say...



...and look how they end up: