Happy Pâques!

Something very cute to warm you in the chill winds of an endless Winterreise, with love from the JDCMB household, Solti and some French associates (thanks to an alert from Gretel)...

Alice's Adventures at the ROH

So did you all go to the cinecast of the Royal Ballet's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland yesterday?

It was such a full-on, energetic and brilliant performance that I felt as tired this morning as if I'd danced it myself. Er, OK, not quite. I was in the theatre this time, not the cinema - and enjoying the fact that there were so many young children around who were visiting the gorgeous ROH for the first time and falling under the spell of live performance at the age of only six or seven.

Alice is, first of all, the perfect (purrfect) ballet for anyone who has a large, striped cat.

The outsize Cheshire Cat - a giant puppet whose limbs, tail and head are manipulated by black-clad dancers and that hence is able to come to pieces and disappear bit by bit as Lewis Carroll stipulates - is so cleverly conceived and slickly executed that you'd think it would steal the show.



But of course the rest is on that level as well. It's a virtuoso tour-de-force for every part of the company: Bob Crowley's designs, Joby Talbot's glittering music and the total choreographic effect mesh together into one madcap yet consistent world, while the level of execution (pace Queen of Hearts) is tip-top from orchestra to lighting to corps to soloists. There's no weak link anywhere in the piece.

There seems no limit to the daredevil imagination of choreographer Christopher Wheeldon or the abilities of his dancers. Steven McRae's tap-dancing Mad Hatter is a special joy...



(That's from the previous TV broadcast/DVD, with Lauren Cuthbertson as Alice.)

More great moments with Zenaida Yanowsky's spoof Rose Adage as the Queen of Hearts (hilarious, yes - but have you ever noticed that mothers in ballet stories get a really raw deal?). And the flamingos, and the scampering little hedgehogs, and the fresh, tender, striking choreography for the pas de deux of Alice and Jack - Sarah Lamb and Federico Bonelli...

Incidentally, Eric Underwood's supple-backed, strong-torsoed Caterpillar needs special mention. His smouldering power and super stage presence has stood out in quite a number of performances this season and I for one can't understand why this fabulous American, who started his career in the Dance Theatre of Harlem, is not ranked higher than Soloist. He got a huge and much-deserved cheer last night.

Particularly fascinating to see Alice at the RB two days after Giselle by the Mikhailovsky. The former is everything that the latter is not: sterling quality at every level, slick, contemporary, seamless, crazy, riotous, ironic, funny. The latter, though occasionally clunky in scenery and workaday in general level of the corps, had one thing (or two, depending how you see them) that the Royal doesn't: namely, Osipova and Vasiliev.

Lamb and Bonelli are both beautiful, technically tremendous dancers. The role of Alice is a particular workout for the lead ballerina, who's on stage and holding the show almost the whole time - a massive challenge carried off by Lamb with immense strength, charm and delicacy. But neither of these two excellent principals manipulates the confluence of time and space on stage the way the Russian duo do. They were part of the performance, key members of the Olympian teamwork; they didn't transcend it.

In the second interval, we spotted two audience members, pale and frown-faced, putting on their coats. They looked like ex-dancers. You'll miss the best bit if you leave now, we said. "We are not so impressed," said the man, Russian accent to the fore. "We find rather simplistic." That's your problem, mate, we didn't say. It's not a word I'd ever choose to describe a production as complex, bravura and vivid as this one. Was that, perhaps, a little indication of the different priorities of British versus Russian ballet? But next year, come to think of it, Wheeldon and Joby Talbot are teaming up again to bring us another full-length creation at the RB: The Winter's Tale. By Shakespeare. That will be very different - and interesting indeed.

"Vasipova" hits London

Sometimes you feel lucky to be around to see certain people do certain things. Since starting this blog nine years ago, I've been aware of this frequently: it's a privilege to chart the coming-of-age of musicians like Benjamin Grosvenor and Daniil Trifonov, the birth of operas like Written on Skin and The Minotaur, the zooming to stardom of Jonas Kaufmann, Joseph Calleja and Joyce DiDonato. And I've been fortunate, over the decades since being a balletomane kid, to see many, many great dancers.

Still, the other night I had the distinct impression that if there's a ballet biscuit to take, Natalia Ospiova and Ivan Vasiliev have walked away with it - assuming their feet touch the ground long enough to actually walk anywhere.

The Russian ballet couple sometimes known to fans collectively as "Vasipova" are in London at the moment with their home company, the Mikhailovsky Ballet from St Petersburg, which they joined after a dramatic exit from the Bolshoi a couple of years ago. The Mikhailovsky may be less well-known here, yet has a distinguished history, its theatre going back over 100 years and the ballet company for around 80; it is currently under the direction of Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato. To judge from their Giselle at the London Coliseum the other night, perhaps the issue now is that their two top stars simply eclipse the rest, in the syndrome of "the best is the enemy of the vaguely OK".

The production is bright, pretty, traditional, often finely wrought in terms of drama: clear mime and some impressive detail: eg, Giselle's mother doesn't know whose wine to pour first, the princess's or her press secretary's - as a peasant she is used to pouring first for the man. A few clunky things like noisy spook-flames and a manically active tree in the second half were probably opening-night glitches, and the orchestra was reasonably impressive, but for some dodgy intonation in the big viola solo. But above all it's a vehicle for Natalia and Ivan...whom, incidentally, I went to meet on Saturday afternoon. (Oh yes, I did. And they are adorable. More soon.)

Osipova is nothing less than mesmerising. It's not just her extreme lightness, focus and flexibility that astounds - every jump seems to take place in slow motion, for instance, and a series of backward-shifting sautes in one Act II solo had the audience holding its collective breath in near disbelief. What really makes the difference is her absorption in the drama. Every move serves the story and the character, in the same way that Verdi only employs virtuoso coloratura to serve his text. There's a shudder of premonition in "he loves me not"; the mad scene is both a devastating disintegration and a desperately convincing heart attack; and Vasiliev as Albrecht delivers a final coup-de-grace to the audience with the violence of his fury when accused by Hilarion.

Act II found Ospiova's supremely ghostly Giselle, whirling around on the spot when initiated, perhaps free at last to dance as she wants, as her human heart had prevented in life; and Albrecht, forced to dance himself almost into a grave of his own, is being put through what she had to experience - a lesson in ultimate empathy. The silence of ballet, the symbolism of the lilies, becomes part and parcel of the ghostliness - can the ghost-Giselle speak to the living Albrecht her Wili sisters have entrapped? The whole means of communication has transformed since Act I.

Strange how different Osipova and Vasiliev are, yet their partnership works like a jet engine. Vasiliev's presence is a bolt of pure kinetic energy that can flatten you, while Osipova's feet work like a hypnotist's wheel. Act II resembled watching the sun dance with the moon. Both simply defy gravity - cliche, yeah, I know, but there's no trampoline in the Coli stage. And the chemistry between them is unbroken and unmistakeable. If they're in different parts of the space, though, you can go cross-eyed trying to work out which of them to watch first.

Some critics seem perturbed by the size of Vasiliev's leg muscles. Since he can do THAT (right), I personally wouldn't grumble.

They're here until 7 April. Don't miss the chance to see them.

Brewer sentenced to 6 years

Michael Brewer, formerly conductor of the National Youth Choir and before that director music at Chetham's, has been sentenced to six years imprisonment for a catalogue of abuse against a pupil at the school in the 1980s, the late Frances Andrade. His wife, Kay Brewer, was sentenced to 21 months.

There is more information in the Independent here and the story has been extensively covered on the TV news. Pianist Ian Pace has much more to say on the matter, plus further links, here, and he has organised a petition calling for an inquiry.

The judge's sentencing remarks are available to read in full here. Among many other things, he says this:

"Indeed, perhaps one of the few positive features to have emerged from this case is the resulting close scrutiny of the seemingly wider acceptance of this type of behaviour amongst those who should know better."

It is essential now that the institutions involved in these appalling events should be able to "bounce back" and clear their reputations in order to keep on educating the finest young musicians in the country. We need specialist music schools for gifted children; the entire edifice should not be demolished because of these events. Regulations have been changed, the modus operandi is different now and the whole climate is notably (and thankfully) more censorious today.

But psychological abuse by teachers as well as sexual abuse needs to be under scrutiny - something that the more outspoken of my interviewees have talked about over the years, incidentally, regarding advanced music colleges in mainland Europe and the US as well as here. Some very prominent figures have reminisced about their studies in a pretty dim light. I can think of one musician who left his home country because of such abuse, another whose experience in New York seems indefensible, and several who have said that after studying with x or y they had to find ways to put themselves back together in a musical or artistic sense...and heaven knows what else. Many of the teachers involved are now deceased, but the syndrome is, arguably, more difficult to guard against. Perhaps that is the next step.

Korngold for beginners

Yesterday at The Rest is Noise we had fun introducing newcomers to the wonderful world of Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Ben Winters of the Open University gave a fascinating talk about the composer's years in America; the two of us then had quite a wide-ranging discussion, and some interesting questions came from the audience. Later on, I took part in a "bites" session with a political economist, a film historian and an art historian; each of us picked a topic that involved America finding its voice in the first half of the 20th century. Mine was Korngold and opera; I played, among other things, an extract of Marietta's Lute Song from Die tote Stadt.

It's easy to think Korngold has been rehabilitated, especially now that I've been on his case for more than two decades, but after the talk several people wanted to know, wide-eyed and open-eared, what this opera was and where they could hear more of it. It's so beautiful, they said. Why do we never hear it? The extract was too short, they said. They wanted to hear the rest.

This is an aria, indeed an opera, for anyone who has ever loved and lost.

Here is an interpretation of Marietta's Lied from the opera film Aria (1987), with some exquisite shots of Bruges, where the opera is set. (Warning: involves a bit of arty nudity.)

Korngold and The Rest is Noise

Anyone coming to the Southbank today for The Rest is Noise? This weekend the festival has reached America and I've been roped in to help show how Korngold did too.

At 12.30pm in the Purcell Room, I'm introducing Ben Winters from the Open University, who'll talk about Korngold in the US, which we'll then discuss further, and there'll be time for audience questions. At 5pm I'm also joining in an hour of short talks around American topics to bring in the matter of Korngold and opera - that will be in the Blue Bar, Level 4, Royal Festival Hall. (Yes, I know - it wasn't an American issue, but a Viennese one. But that is sort of the point...)

Please join us!

If you haven't been able to get to this extraordinary festival, you can listen to some of the talks on the website: here is the link to the Berlin in the 20s-30s section, beginning with Alex Ross on 'How music became so politicised': http://therestisnoise.southbankcentre.co.uk/explore/berlin-in-the-20s-and-30s/#1

In which Kaufmann says he "can't wait" to sing Tannhauser

Go for it, Jonas!

Three easy ways to get into opera

La Voix Humaine from washmedia on Vimeo.

1. Combine exploring opera with your passion for the piano. If you're heading to the Institut Francais's big three-day keyboardfest, It's All About Piano - starting today and running through Sunday - catch the screening of Poulenc's one-woman opera La Voix Humaine, filmed with the one and only Felicity Lott - with piano accompaniment, in which version it's been recorded for the first time, delivered by the brilliant Graham Johnson. Sneak preview above. The screening is tonight at 8pm - and if you turn up at 6pm you can hear Nick van Bloss play the Goldberg Variations and a four-hands programme from Lidija and Sanja Bizjak at 7pm.

2. Pop over to CultureKicks for my latest post, which is called "How to get into opera in under six minutes". You'll find a quick guide to Rigoletto, a film of its astonishing quartet 'Bella figlia d'amore' and a short explanation of why it shows to perfection what opera can do that just cannot be done nearly so well in any other art form... (Lovely editor there then said "What about Wagner?" to which the response can only be: "Well, what about Wagner...?" Watch that space.)

3. Listen to Andris Nelsons conducting. I've just been in Birmingham doing some pre-concert talks for the CBSO's Beethoven Cycle, which he, their music director, is doing for the first time. Honest to goodness, guv, this guy is amazing. Not sure I've seen anything so purely energetic and with so much warmth since...well, who? Jansons? Solti? The atmosphere in Symphony Hall - which was sold out - really had to be experienced. Nelsons, who hails from Latvia, cut his musical teeth as an orchestral trumpeter and started off, as so many great maestri do, in the opera house, and he's married to the soprano Kristine Opolais, who's currently wowing ROH crowds in Tosca.

He conducted his first Ring Cycle at the age of 26 and is now a favourite at Bayreuth. Hear his Beethoven and you can tell why. The structures are clear, but the emotion is allowed to blaze: there's enough rhythmic strength to build a castle, but enough flexibility to let in the sunshine. The characters and personalities that shine out of each of Beethoven's symphonies are as distinct as those of any opera. Perhaps, in this conductor's hands, music is inherently operatic?

It was an absolute privilege to have introduced this extraordinary concert. Great turnout for the talks, too, especially for yesterday's matinee, where a door-count estimate suggested we had nearly 500. Thanks for your warm reception, dear friends, and I hope you all enjoyed hearing about the slow movement of Beethoven 7 through the narrative of Rosa Parks and the American civil rights movement. 

Last but not least, it was a special treat to run into our old friend Norman Perryman, the musical "kinetic artist", whose beautiful paintings and portraits are part of the Symphony Hall visual brand. Here he is beside his magnificent picture suggested by Elgar, Gerontius, which hangs in the foyer at level 4. Glad to say he was in town to start work on a portrait of Nelsons.

A bit of Bach for Easter?

Like, er, nine hours of it with John Eliot Gardiner and friends? Sounds OK to me. He's putting on a Bach Marathon at no less a venue than the Royal Albert Hall, with a stellar line-up of soloists and speakers. It's on 1 April and it is no joke.
 

It's a kaleidoscopic celebration of the single most seminal figure in the history of music, whether in works for one violin or for full chorus, soloists and orchestra. Alongside the concerts, lectures and discussions draw in a plethora of experts both musical and scientific, and the day culminates in a complete performance of the B Minor Mass. Gardiner's the man of the moment for Bach. He's fronting a new BBC documentary about the composer, which is being shown the day before the RAH bonanza, and his biography of Bach will be published in the autumn. Somewhere along the way he might have time to stop and celebrate his own 70th birthday, but don't count on it - he's a very busy person.

"It’s a celebration," says JEG. "Really, a celebration of the decade since we did the Bach cantata pilgrimage. Working through the cantatas in such a concentrated span led to me and the group reacquainting ourselves with the really big pieces – the B minor Mass, the two Passions, the Christmas oratorio, etc – and one’s whole perspective on those pieces has changed as a result of the cantatas. One sees them not as isolated peaks but as being part of the whole connective tissue of Bach’s church music. The cantatas are really the foundation of it all and the passions, the Mass and the oratorios are outcrops: they grew out of the cantatas. 

"Our original plan was to do the St John Passion in the first half and the B minor Mass at the end. Unfortunately we couldn’t raise enough money to make that work, but what we have now is still an incredibly rich cross section from both ends of Bach’s life, in many different genres. The violin D minor partita, the cellos suites, the Goldberg Vairations, lots of organ pieces and the best of the motets. We have one of the earliest but also most magnificent of the cantatas that he wrote for Easter Day, and then the culmination is the B minor Mass."

Intriguingly, though, the Bach Marathon seems to be part of a growing trend in the classical music sphere towards grand-scale occasions packed with tempting talks and bonus treats. 

They're all at it these days. The BBC Symphony Orchestra has scored major hits with its Total Immersion days devoted to contemporary composers such as Jonathan Harvey, Oliver Knussen and Toru Takemitsu. The Barbican is shortly to have a May Marathon weekend, curated by the hotshot young American composer Nico Muhly. Meanwhile BBC Radio 3 has taken to devoting a week or so of its schedules from time to time to the work of just one composer and, this year, a whole month to the Baroque era. And over at the Southbank Centre, the year-long festival The Rest is Noise is going further still, with weekend after weekend devoted to concerts, talks and films exploring 20^th-century culture, setting the developing story of classical music in crucial context. 

Gardiner has strong views on the necessity of this development. “I think it puts the spotlight on how limiting one-off concerts can be,” he says. “They can, of course, be fantastic. But when things are loosened up from that unit of a single event and related to a much wider experience, it allows people to get their shoulders underneath the surface of the water and relish what they find there – whether it’s in terms of variety of genres, a much broader approach towards a single composer or a phenomenon like The Rest is Noise. I think it shouldn’t be regarded as something freakish or exceptional. It should be welcomed as a corrective to the fixation on individual concerts.” He is convinced we’ll be seeing much more of this in future.

I reckon he's right. There’s a growing appetite for events at which we can learn a lot about one topic very, very quickly. It’s possible that pressures on people’s time and energy mean a one-day feast is more likely to draw a crowd than an ongoing course. But perhaps the crucial factor, certainly in the case of Gardiner’s Bach, is that it is more about celebration than didacticism. Everyone can take from it what they want: you can go to a single concert, or to the full gamut, plus lectures on the universality of this composer’s art by the likes of the science writer Anna Starkey and the jazz musician Julian Joseph. 

“It’s a chance in a lifetime,” says Gardiner. He hopes his audience will take away “a sense of how unbelievably varied Bach’s oeuvre is and what a towering genius he is. One can perceive just from listening to his music what an enormous impact he had on subsequent musicians, both in classical music right up until our own times, but also in the worlds of jazz and of pop music. It can all be traced back to him.” 

Bach Marathon, Royal Albert Hall, 1 April, 1pm onwards. Box office: 0845 401 5045

Alicia's Gift concert is up and running

The ALICIA'S GIFT concert-of-the-novel is up and running. Viv McLean and I have five dates in the diary for November-December, and more on the way.

I've started a Facebook page to help keep everyone in touch. Please feel free to like us if you like liking things, like; and, dear promoters, check in for details of how to book us for your concert series. You want this one, y'know. It's topical. It's all about what a talented child does to the family, and what the family - and her teachers - do to her. And it's stuffed full of some of the loveliest piano music on earth.

Here's the page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alicias-Gift-the-Concert-of-the-Novel/552320611466414

Reading and talking

I've been talking to some interesting people recently...

The unbelievable Edward Watson, who is dancing the lead role in Mayerling at Covent Garden next month. The crazed Crown Prince Rudolf is, weirdly enough, the only ballet prince he's played, other than Albrecht in Giselle, who's not really that princely. A dancer with his levels of drama, flexibility and power would probably be wasted chasing after a swan. Catch him first in the equally incredible The Metamorphosis.



A composer called Nimrod - who, as it turned out, lived next door to me in West Hampstead 20 years ago, except that we never met. The Philharmonia played a work of Nimrod Borenstein's the other week with Ashkenazy conducting, and has commissioned a new piece from him for June at the RFH. He's also writing a violin concerto for Dimitry Sitkovetsky. He's a live wire who thinks big, and talked to me (for the JC) about finding his voice and what he's doing with it now that he has.

It's All About Piano! Francoise Clerc, the one-woman dynamo at the heart of the Institut Francais's classical music programming, has put together an absolute bonanza of a piano festival, which will take place over three days next weekend, 22-24 March. Star performers include Imogen Cooper, Nick van Bloss, Charles Owen, Katya Apekisheva, Cyprien Katsaris and Anne Queffelec; there's a chance to hear some rising stars including a raft of the most gifted budding virtuosi from the Paris Conservatoire, a modern American programme from Ivan Ilic, jazz from Laurent de Wilde, talks by Steinway technicians, children's events and plenty more. When did London last have a piano festival like this? Um. Pass. This is for Classical Music Magazine and you'll need to be logged in to read the whole article.

Meanwhile, if you're in Birmingham on Wednesday evening or Thursday lunchtime, I'm doing pre-concert talks for the CBSO to introduce Beethoven's Symphonies Nos.6 and 7. Andris Nelsons conducts them both. Very privileged to be allowed to hold forth about my two favourite Beethovens, let alone to complement such an event: there's a major buzz about Nelsons' Beethoven cycle and Symphony Hall is apparently packed solid.

And next Sunday at 12.30pm I'm at The Rest is Noise to introduce a talk about Korngold in America and discuss the issues around him with the Open University's Ben Winters. In the Purcell Room, and part of the ongoing festival's American Weekend. (We're not in the current listings PDF as far as I can tell, so this may be a late addition!)

Friday Historical: Cortot plays Chopin Op.10 No.3

Today - the Ides of March - is the anniversary of my sister's death. Claire died on 15 March 2000 of ovarian cancer, aged 45. 

I remember that I had been reading a book about Alma Rosé, daughter of Arnold Rosé and niece of Gustav Mahler, who ended up conducting the women's orchestra in Auschwitz, where she later died. The book quoted the lyrics of a song set to this melody, which used to be played there. All that terrible day I had this piece on the brain. Here it is, in memoriam.