Brava, Anna Caterina!

That was the astonishing and absolutely unique Anna Caterina Antonacci, in Carmen (at the Opera Comique - that opera's birthplace - with John Eliot Gardiner conducting and Andrew Richards as Don Jose). My interview with her, conducted in the unlikely setting of a pub just off Borough High Street when she was in London for Berlioz's La mort de Cleopatre, is the cover feature in the new issue of Opera News in the US, just out now. I believe she is the nearest thing we have today to Pauline Viardot, of whose voice Alfred de Musset wrote: "It is the same timbre, clear, resonant, audacious … at the same time so harsh and so sweet, which produces an impression similar to the taste of a wild fruit."

Here's the feature. Enjoy.

Balsom soothes and sizzles!

My interview with the lovely and brilliant Alison Balsom is in today's Independent.

She has some strong words, too, that can go under our JDCMB Music for All banner - hopefully a cause of the type she will espouse as a patron of the new Mayor's Fund for music scholarships, which was launched by Boris Johnson a few weeks ago. Alas, the first paragraph below hit the cutting room floor at the paper, but here it is, plus some:

“What worries me greatly is the lack of value put onto arts education,” she says. “Because it doesn’t lead directly to a well-paying job, people think it should be cut from schools. I think this is a travesty! I do earn my living through music, but learning music as a child taught me so much more. It taught me to be a rounded person. It helped with self-discipline, it taught me about working with other people, it’s a way of expressing myself and of organising my thoughts. If I hadn’t had that, I don’t know how I’d have developed those parts of my brain. And I’d never have started to play if I hadn’t had access to heavily subsidised lessons. Music should be available to everybody, not just to people who can afford it.”

“Since I’ve had Charlie [her 14-month-old son] it’s become even clearer to me that even very young children have an instinctive response to music,” she adds. “It’s like a fast track into their brains. It’s so obvious. How can we ignore that? To lose that connection would be a dangerous thing for our culture.” Helpfully, Charlie toddles by, singing to himself.

It will take figureheads like Balsom to bring the cause to the fore – and at least she is there to try. “I want to get that message across,” she says. “But often people are more interested in the Armani dresses and the diamonds. And the fact that I’m a female trumpet player.”  

Here she is at the Last Night of the Proms two years ago, with a spot of Piazzolla...

Happy Birthday, EWK

It's Korngold's birthday (114). I'm afraid I'm currently laid up with something bronchial and can neither stop coughing nor think straight, so without further ado, here's 'Ich ging zu ihm' from Das Wunder der Heliane, recorded in 1928 by its original interpreter, Lotte Lehmann. Enjoy.

Should Strads be played?

One of the best-preserved Stradivarius violins in existence, the 'Lady Blunt' of 1721, is about to come up for auction. The auction house Tarisio has announced that the violin will be included in their online sale on 20 June. It's currently owned by the Nippon Music Foundation of Japan. All proceeds will go to the Nippon Foundation's Northeastern Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Fund. This violin, named after one of its former owners, Lady Anne Blunt, who was Lord Byron's granddaughter, was bought by the NMF in 2008 for over $10m.

The press release quotes Christopher Reuning of Reuning & Son Violins in Boston, praising the instrument's exceptional nature: “Rarely does a Stradivarius of this quality in such pristine condition and with such significant historical provenance come up for sale. It still shows the tool-marks and brushstrokes of Stradivari.” Jason Price, director of Tarisio, says that the instrument is the violin "equivalent of da Vinci's Mona Lisa or Michelangelo's David."

If you have some spare millions sitting about and you won't already have spent them at Sotheby's on the Mahler 3rd first edition, the Mendelssohn watercolour or the nude pics of Britten and Pears, there could be worse purchases than this to consider.

As a pleasant side-effect, you could enable a great violinist to play a great instrument: in the list of illustrious owners of this violin, the names of any actual musicians are conspicuous by their absence. On the other hand - is that why the instrument is as well preserved as it is? Very probably, yes. The less wear and tear there is from playing an instrument, the more you can tell about the original craftsmanship that went into its making. After some 300 years, we're still trying to understand the secret magic of Antonio Stradivari  The new owner of the 'Lady Blunt' will need to weigh up the pros and cons of sound versus legacy.

Personally, I believe passionately that great violins should be played by great violinists; it is painful to see a Strad hanging in a glass case, the voice for which it was created silenced apparently forever. But clearly it's a debate that has two sides. Currently there's an amazing exhibition of musical instruments at the Horniman Museum in south-east London and I had a very interesting chat with one of its curators, Bradley Strauchan, just before it opened in March. It’s amazing how much you can learn from a 19^th-century French horn, she told me. 

Side by side in the exhibition, 'The Art of Harmony', sit two instruments once owned by Giovanni Puzzi. A lynchpin musical impresario in London in the Victorian era, he was also the Paganini of the horn, easily able to transcend the unfortunate Italian slang meaning of his name: “stinky”. His horns are reunited here probably for the first time since his death in 1876. One belongs to the Horniman, the other to the Victoria and Albert Museum. 

In the bell of the latter instrument, lavish decoration in green lacquer has worn away exactly at the spots on which Puzzi placed his hand to shape the pitch of his notes. This horn has a tale to tell of its owner’s technique (we can even learn that he was right-handed), his distinguished and wealthy status (such decoration didn't come cheap) and the precious place the instrument held in his family history. The musician’s grandson gave it to the V&A in 1926; nobody had played it but Puzzi himself. 

The horns in the Horniman are typical of the fascinating and exquisitely made instruments on show here. We have three years to beat a path to Forest Hill to see them, for this relatively small museum is thinking big. When the V&A’s musical instrument galleries were closed last year, an outcry followed among musicians, music-lovers and all admirers of instruments as historic objets d’art. This was, after all, the first publicly displayed collection of its kind in the country and remained one of the most prized. So the arrival in south-east London of 35 items from the V&A, on extended loan, represents a welcome venture to keep them in the public eye.

The V&A’s instruments provide an intriguing counterpoint to the Horniman's own, which were chosen by Frederick Horniman himself with utterly different aims. The juxtaposition highlights the contrast in mission between the two very Victorian gentlemen responsible for building up the collections. And, situated in the south London hills not far from the Crystal Palace, the museum – Horniman’s former home ­– was within a stone’s throw of one of the most important shopping grounds for instrument collectors, who flocked to its Great Exhibition of 1851 and bought up whatever they could. Horniman, though, accumulated the bulk of his collections – musical instruments and well beyond – during his international peregrinations as a wealthy tea merchant.

“In his whole collection, the emphasis was on eclecticism,” says Strauchen. Horniman was an obsessive collector of artefacts from around the world and especially of natural history; the museum is also home to a quantity of collected butterflies and a magnificent stuffed walrus. “When it first opened, the museum was about entertainment, spectacle and fun -- the grounds would be open, there’d be brass bands, firework displays and balloons ascending.

“Horniman was a Quaker,” she adds, “and very much in keeping with his Quaker ethos he felt a great responsibility to share his material fortune with others and provide the community with access to these things that they might not otherwise be able to see. For him, the Victorian didactic element, the desire to teach, the desire to share, was almost a moral imperative. The musical instruments in his collection, from all over the world, show his interest in music’s anthropological element, focusing on how they were used by musicians and what the social role of music was.”

Carl Engel, on the other hand, was employed by the V&A to build their own collection of instruments with an emphasis on design and craftsmanship. Engel, a German-born pioneer of organology (the study of musical instruments), was the perfect choice for the job. “He had a wonderful eye,” says Strauchen. “The V&A was set up expressly to help British designers and manufacturers to compete on an international basis, and the instrument collection was no exception. Here, it’s as if the two collections and their different purposes have been brought into dialogue with each other.”

The highlights are plentiful. Besides Puzzi’s horns, there is a chance to see Rossini’s oboe; Renaissance viols with exquisitely carved scrolls; an octagonal recorder carved out of ivory; long-abandoned models of instrument such as the viola d’amore and the baryton. Intricately decorated harpsichords and an exquisite oboe bell from 17^th-century Holland bear witness to the aesthetic value that was placed on creations of that time. And there is a Stradivarius violin, made in 1699 and part of the V&A’s collection since 1937. It's the first time, says Strauchen, that the Horniman has had a Strad under its roof.

Plenty of violinists would be itching to get hold of that Strad. But it and its fellow exhibits are there for a good reason: leaving them untouched, says Strauchen, is the only way we can continue to gather detailed information from them about how they were made and the techniques that were used to play them. Still, she can’t help seeing both viewpoints. “As a horn player myself, there would be nothing more tempting than to take Puzzi’s horn into a quiet room for a few hours and play it!” she admits. So far she has managed to resist. 

What do you think? Let them be played, or leave them alone?

Another little coup for the in-laws

It's always funny when I hear what's going on at the LPO before the Tomcat does, but this news is very nice: the London Philharmonic has just snaffled Nicholas Collon to be its new assistant conductor. From the autumn season, Nicholas will be the lucky lad who gets to shadow Vlad 'the Impaler' Jurowski, and he will conduct a number of LPO concerts and pre-concert events himself. Twitter addicts have probably found him already, but in case not, follow him at @nicholascollon. Maybe he can persuade Vladimir to tweet too.

Currently in charge of the brilliant Aurora Orchestra, which won the RPS Award for Best Ensemble the other week, Nicholas has already made an impressive mark on the musical scene here. He's dynamic, creative, articulate and has one absolute prerequisite for a gifted young 21st-century conductor: seriously curly hair.

See also the similarly hirsute Ilyich Rivas, and Robin Ticciati...

For sale: Britten in the buff

A tip-off from Alex Ross about some of the treasures on sale in Sotheby's next Music and Continental Books and Manuscripts sale has revealed that Lot no.223 includes "Six Unpublished Photographs of the Naked Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears". They were taken in 1939 on Long Island and apparently show the composer swimming with Aaron Copland and others. I wish this was a more exciting prospect, but...well, just look at him. No wonder he didn't want to stick around in the UK to fight the Nazis. (Has anybody got one of the deshabillé Franz Liszt, by any chance...?)

But the auction is well worth exploring if you've got a five-figure sum or two to spare. It's offering, amongst much else, some valuable letters from Chopin to the cellist Auguste Franchomme, some pages of manuscript of Strauss's Capriccio and a first edition score of Mahler's Third Symphony with corrections in the composer's own hand (someone must have thought the double anniversary a jolly good moment for this to go under the auctioneer's hammer - and its estimated sales figure is between 100,000 and 150,000. Norman is curious too...). Still, after browsing the splendid online catalogue, I would spend my fantasy ££££s on Mendelssohn's characterful watercolour painting of the Amalfi coast. The Italian Symphony made visible? Have a dekko - it's Lot 303.

The auction is taking place in London on 8 June.

Musik und Fussball...

A quick update from our friends in Munich: the doughty Damenfußballmannschaft des Bayerischen Staatsorchesters has scooped first prize in that competition for Brigitte Magazine - partly thanks, I don't doubt, to the helpful viewing and voting of JDCMB readers! :-)

The Bavarian State Opera Orchestra Women's Football Team cites as its colours 'Bordeaux - Champagne' and as its mascot 'Maestro Kent Nagano'. It is now the proud winner of a van worth some E29,000. Stats tell me that the triumphant video by fab fiddler Corinna Desch, recently featured on JDCMB here, has been one of our most popular posts this year. In case you missed it, here it is again:



Below, the team manifesto. If you need to translate it, go and listen to Jonas Kaufmann singing Die schoene Muellerin and you may come out, as I once did, mysteriously fluent in German for approximately 56 minutes. But in case Jonas is stuck in the volcanic ash in Iceland, I can tell you that among the team's answers are: Worst place to be: In the orchestra pit next to the piccolo; and Our dream: a tournament with many teams from orchestras, women and men!

Wir kicken, weil...

wir lieber Tore als Takte zählen.

Frauenfußball ist...

große Oper!

Darin sind wir unschlagbar

große Töne spucken!

Das sagen unsere Gegner

welche Gegner?

Nach einem Sieg...

ab in den Biergarten!

Niederlagen bedeuten...

welche Niederlagen?

Der schlimmste Platz

im Orchestergraben vor der Piccoloflöte

Die beste Stimmung

beim Schlussapplaus

Darüber sprechen wir in der Umkleidekabine

wir können nicht mehr sprechen- wir haben einfach alles gegeben!

Unser Traum

ein Fußballturnier mit ganz vielen Orchester- Damen- Mannschaften

Warum wir das leidenschaftlichste Team sind...

Leidenschaft ist unsere Berufung!

Music for All: latest from the ISM

This is the latest news from the Incorporated Society of Musicians re their lobbying of the government to include music in the English Baccalaureate.

Musicians tell minister: Baccalaureate harming music in schools

ISM continues lobbying government to change policy

Young people in England may soon find it difficult or even impossible to study music at GCSE level if the Government continues to belittle music in its performance tables, according to the Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM), the representative body for music professionals.

The Government’s English Baccalaureate proposals rank schools by attainment in a small selection of subjects, including geography, history and Latin but currently exclude other challenging and enriching academic subjects such as music and religious education.

In a letter to Nick Gibb MP, Schools Minister, and the Education Select Committee, the ISM’s Chief Executive Deborah Annetts said:

‘Fifty-six per cent of our members in a position to comment have already noticed music being squeezed out of their schools.’

The ISM also drew attention to Cambridge University entry guidelines which put music among the highest subject rankings. 

One teacher – wishing to remain anonymous – has also reported that as a result of music being left out of English Baccalaureate league tables, the head teacher has stopped music being offered at GCSE level and is even cutting it back for younger pupils.

Another teacher has reported that the uptake in music is ‘down by around 20-30% on last year.’

Deborah Annetts added:

‘These proposals are having a direct impact on music in schools. The Government must listen to the Henley Review of Music Education, which they themselves commissioned, and include music in the English Baccalaureate.

‘Without music GCSE being given the weighting it deserves, our cultural and creative economy will be put at risk, and young people who want to be involved in the music sector will have their efforts hampered.

‘The Government is setting England up for an almighty shock in the future if they continue this policy – let alone the impact it is already having on young people who want to study music.’

Notes to editors

1. The Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM) is the UK’s professional body for musicians and music teachers. We champion the importance of music and protect the rights of those working within music through a range of services, campaigns, support and practical advice.
2. The ISM recently commissioned a YouGov poll which found that 97% of adults who expressed an opinion think that music should be taught in schools (don’t know/ neither agree nor disagree responses removed).
3. Trinity College, University of Cambridge entry guidelines: http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/index.php?pageid=604

Rapture Day: Die Meistersinger von Glyndebourne

While American evangelicals were preparing for those with the right kind of beliefs to be swept up in a 'rapture' to heaven, Glyndebourne offered something rather similar - yet fortuitously real - to its own beticketed denizens: the opening night of its biggest-ever endeavour, the house's very first go at Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg. It's Wagner's heftiest and sunniest, a sort of benign brontosaurus of an opera that starts at 3pm and doesn't clock out until shortly before 10pm. After the great success of the first Glynditz Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, expectations ran high. I attended the dress rehearsal, but had to be good and keep shtum until today was over... (Picture right: half an hour before the show, by Tomcat.)

David McVicar excels at productions that are deeply rooted in the characters (as all fine productions should be) and appear naturalistic thanks to their wealth of detail. No exception, this. What is exceptional, though, is its sheer, fabulous, irresistible visual gorgeousness, for which very many more than three cheers go to designer Vicki Mortimer. The production and design centre the action firmly in the time and the town: we're in the era of Wagner's childhood, the early 19th century, but Nuremberg is still medieval and you feel you're walking into it and meeting the inhabitants. (Among the inhabitants you meet, btw, is the lovely Martha Jurowski, Vladimir's teenage daughter. Look out for her in the crowd...)

The basic shell is the arches and pillars of the church in which Eva and Walther eyeball one another at the beginning. The church is filled with vast murals; the full congregation with restive apprentices and well-behaved burghers' children, is in the background. We have Walther's viewpoint, the outsider looking in, hesitantly approaching in the hope of joining this prosperous yet rather volatile community. Walther is the first of several isolated, outsider-ish characters - the others turning out to be Beckmesser and Sachs himself. The second act takes place around a statue and fountain, with the carved wooden balconies of Pogner's house and Sachs's on opposite sides. But it's the third that is most revealing of all.

The final scene in the meadow, with fire-eaters on stilts and huge numbers of jugglers, singers, dancers and actors bustling around a wooden pavilion, drew amazed applause from a thrilled dress-rehearsal crowd of friends and family, something that doesn't happen too often (we're a hardened old lot, us). But in the scene before that, we're in Sachs's house. His excellently messy desk is that of a poet, a creative - piled haphazardly with books and papers. In the centre of the room is a portrait of his deceased wife and children, covered with a curtain that he removes briefly, then replaces. Furniture is stored in heaps, as if it has sat there ever since the deaths of those in the painting, however long ago that may be. We're not only in his house, but in his head.

Meistersinger is an overwhelming work, of course, but it can have thankless elements: Hans Sachs and his apprentice, David, are the only truly rounded characters, though the deliciously odious Beckmesser is close behind. It's too easy for Eva to slip into cardboardy cuteness and for Walther to be one of those doltish Wagnerian tenors with more brawn than brain - though admittedly he needs brawn to get through the role at all. One operatic friend of mine remarks that Walther reduces most tenors, by the time they reach the Prize Song, to sounding as if they've been "gargling with hydrochloric acid".

But McVicar has solved most of the potential awkwardnesses of staging with one phenomenal explosive device. It is: Gerald Finley as Hans Sachs.

Some surprise went around when the casting was initially announced: surely Finley would be too youthful, too lightweight, not quite Terfel-ish enough? Ahaa - but stupendous as Terfel was last year at WNO and the Proms, this concept is something quite different. First of all, not only does Finley, in his debut in the role, convince us that it's a piece of cake, but his voice is  utterly, phenomenally beautiful. With the quality of the tone, the phrasing, the enunciation and the sense of character, Finley's Sachs is possessed by poetry from start to finish. I can't imagine a greater one. (Read a very good interview with him about the role from Musical Criticism, here.)

It's the inner conflicts of Sachs and Eva (the lyrical Anna Gabler) that drive the drama. This exceedingly handsome Sachs - Finley is one of the world's finest Don Giovannis, remember - is still in devastated widowerhood and part of him loathes his own attraction to Eva; this makes it perfectly plausible that Eva too has a divided heart, with a crush on Sachs that's still relatively fresh. Instead of teasing him about possibly winning her hand in the contest, you feel that a good two-thirds of her would genuinely like him to do so. So if Walther is a bit of a dolt - or in this case, a drip - it helps, rather than hinders the drama, leaving enough room in Eva's emotions for Sachs too. The gangly Marco Jentzsch does a reasonable job as Walther, but if this Sachs were to participate in the contest, the baritone would sing the tenor off the stage, fin.

What about Beckmesser - the critic Eduard Hanslick in disguise, say some? He's an interesting creation: clearly an outsider, more somberly dressed and darker haired than the rest - but with hirsute style strongly suggestive of pictures of Wagner himself. Still, he does a shrug at the end of Act 1 that makes one wonder if McVicar is succumbing to the "Beckmesser is an anti-Semitic caricature" line of thought. If so, though, the point isn't overstated. Thereafter he's more Buster Keaton than Shylock - and the episode in which he invades Sachs' house and steals the Prize Song is hilariously akin to Simon's Cat (the "Sticky Tape" film...). Bravo to Johannes Martin Kränzle, another brilliant voice and fine actor, and to the doughty Rachel Masters, accompanying him from the pit on the Celtic harp.

More singers to single out are Alastair Miles as Pogner, Michaela Selinger as Magdalene and Mats Almgren as the Night Watchman. And the chorus is a knockout. McVicar has chosen the period in which Wagner's psyche would have been first formed, and there are plenty of children on stage: maybe one of those small 19th-century boys could grow up to be Big Richard himself? And with Sachs musing upon the origins of all the repressed anger, once again in the context of 19th-century Bavaria there's a sense that Wagner may have been a little more perceptive than we usually give him credit for.

There's one big clanger: the choreography. In such a true-to-life, detailed, historically convincing production, if the dances don't match, it really jars. This choreography works against rather than with the music and looks like a rough mashup of line dancing, disco moves and pelvic thrusts that seem to say 'oooh-aarrgh-look-at-us-earthy-townsfolk'. Please ditch and rethink before the revival.

Down t'pit, Vladimir Jurowski, tackling his very first Meistersinger too, has picked an unusual way to deal with Big Orchestra in Smallish House syndrome. For many quieter, dialogue-based episodes, he cuts the orchestral sections down considerably - in the case of the first violins, to just six players. It so happens that Tom is no.5 and the increased stress levels have induced the consumption of far too much chocolate, so I'll leave it to everyone else to remark upon whether or not the tactic works.

There's no excuse not to see the show, sold out though it is: it's being cinecast on 26 June to cinemas all over the country (and, intriguingly, to the Science Museum). Plus The Guardian will be live-streaming it online.

Here's the one and only Stephen Fry talking about the opera in the Glyndebourne organ room at the show.


And one final image: this was the opera John Christie always longed to stage. After 83 years, his dream has been realised at last. We can't quite believe it. But it's true.

Meet Ruth Waterman

Here's my interview from this weeks' JC with a wonderful violinist whose work I've been enjoying for a long time: http://thejc.com/arts/music/49238/the-woman-putting-feeling-back-bach. Don't miss her CD of Bach's complete sonatas and partitas, out now on Meridian.

Meanwhile, it's a beautiful morning, not a cloud in the sky, and Glyndebourne opens tonight - well, this afternoon - with its first-ever production of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, the opera that John Christie used to dream of putting on when he founded Glyndebourne back in the 1930s. The organ room was a bit small for such a vast opera, so they just sang extracts then. Today it's the full monty, with Glyndebourne's biggest-ever chorus, David McVicar directing, Vladimir Jurowski conducting and Gerald Finlay as Hans Sachs. Try for returns. From down t'pit, Tomcat nodded wisely when I pointed out that someone in America says today is Judgement Day.

Hooray for Sir Hubert!

I've been having some fun with Sir Hubert Parry this week. Rarely has a composer needed more urgently to be rescued from his fans. Come over to the Indy and see what he was really like. Mightn't be what you think.

Here's a little bonus: an extract from a letter home penned by a certain of Parry's students, one Donald Francis Tovey: “Dr Parry came into the examination room, talked to Sir John Stainer and tipped me a wink. Most people look austere in a cap and gown. Dr Parry looks positively rakish!” 

I'd post some of his music here, but I'd have to listen to a lot of it to choose something good, so I shall let you do the hunting yourselves instead. At least I can promise you that he was a really good bloke, and we Brits love really good blokes, even if they're awfully amateurish about writing music. Blame his mother-in-law. 

Must dash now - am off to the wilds of south-east London to see a lady about a trumpet.

Speaking of national anthems...

My orchestra-in-law, minus Tomcat, has been busy ploughing through recording sessions involving 30 national anthems a day, specially arranged for next year's Olympic Games by Philip Sheppard. The Telegraph has a fun interview with him on the topic (they say he looks like Nick Clegg...but that probably has more to do with the Telegraph than with Philip, to judge from the photo). The whole thing puts me in mind of one of Tomcat's favourite Misspent Youth In Denmark stories...

As a younger Tomkitten, JDCMB's right-hand violinist lived in the land of Forbrydelsen for five years: his first orchestral job was with the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra. In 1982, with a little splinter band that specialised in Viennese waltzes and the like, he went on tour to Greenland to celebrate the 1000th anniversary of Eric the Red. This was a very big deal in Greenland: the Queen of Denmark was going and the national anthem had to be played. The library apparently contained some wonderful old books of the things from times gone by, so one day the orchestra in rehearsal amused itself by playing through some theme tunes of nations that no longer exist, but might still have cats named after them.

Unfortunately, come the concert, some kind of mix-up took place. The Queen arrived, everyone stood up and the band began to play...the Swedish national anthem. Her Majesty, who'd turned up in Greenland national costume complete with those enormous knitted socks, was decidedly not amused. The Pythonesque perplexment made the front of their local newspaper back home. Nobody ever really worked out what went wrong. Was it a conspiracy or a plain old c***-up? Nearly 30 years on, we are none the wiser.

Given this history, I can hardly blame him for not taking part in the sessions.