Music, museums and a wake-up call

The habit of many musicians, administrators and other pundits to say that classical music mustn't be a "museum culture" (or words to that effect) has been bugging me. This week alone I've seen such phrases trotted out in interviews with two people whose work I greatly admire - novelist and Sunken Garden librettist David Mitchell, and even Jonas Kaufmann in the German article I linked to the other day. 

I have a think-piece in The Independent today (written before I saw either the Mitchell piece or the Kaufmann one) about why we should rethink this old cliche. Museums are doing rather well. Doesn't anyone ever go to one? 

I have a Tate Buddy. We go to Bankside, have a cuppa gazing out at the best view in London, then dip into all manner of fascinating exhibitions or the permanent collection. We never leave without learning something new. That's part of the point: to discover something, to learn about it, to find your brain and spirit stirred by fresh ideas. It doesn't matter if you go in thinking you know nothing about whatever-it-is, because you will by the time you go home. It's sad to think of the number of people who shy away from trying a concert because they think they don't know enough about it... And at the Tate, the gallery itself is part of the treat; walking through it, you sense the pride that is taken in its sleek contemporary expertise. Contrast that with the recent Royal Albert Hall experience described in the article.

Speaking of the Tate, I went to the premiere last night of Michel van der Aa's Sunken Garden, which wouldn't look out of place there. More of that later.

RPS Awards promise a fine vintage for 2012

I was on BBC Radio 3's In Tune yesterday, talking to Sean Rafferty about the just-announced shortlist for the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards. It's chock-full of great people and projects, with what seems an unusually high quotient of British nominees - the legacy of the London 2012 Olympics, I suspect. And proof, as if it were needed, that if you invest £s in culture, as in sport, you can get some extremely good results. British artists really had a chance to shine last year. Vital not to forget this now that that particular heady bonanza is gone. A fitting treat, too, for the RPS, which celebrates its 200th anniversary in 2013. UK listeners can hear the programme here for 6 more days.

Full RPS Awards shortlist is here. Highlights include a Singers shortlist of Sarah Connolly, Alice Coote, Bryan Hymel and Bryn Terfel, Conductors Kirill Karabits, Andris Nelsons and Richard Farnes, Composers established and new, Operas highly contemporary, and many more projects with a plethora of Olympic and educational associations. Daniil Trifonov puts in a particularly welcome appearance on the Young Artists shortlist.

"If they start shooting, whatever you do, don't leave the synthesizer behind"

Fasten your seatbelts: in Gramophone, the Russian pianist Rustem Hayroudinoff has spilled the beans about his studies at the Moscow Conservatoire in the last days of the USSR.

It's a hair-raising read: from what eight-year-olds had to do in rhythm classes - it could make the UK's Grade VIII examiners blanch - to queuing for practice rooms at 5am in -30 degrees, plus the restaurant band job that Rustem turned down after learning the vocation of the clientele (the quote in our heading gives you a clue). Immense demands, yet equally gargantuan rewards: for all its challenges, this was the best musical training on earth.

If you've been through typical British school and college musical studies, you might be pretty sobered to consider the level of expertise that Moscow expected of its students. No wonder they tended to wipe the floor with everyone else at competitions...

Not to put too fine a point on it, it makes most of us look like complete amateurs (nothing wrong with being an amateur, of course - unless you want to be a professional.)

Rustem's CDs have often grabbed five star reviews and some of his Rachmaninov recordings have become "benchmarks" for BBC Music Magazine, which shortlisted him for its Instrumental award a couple of years back. But he doesn't give that many recitals, so a chance to hear him isn't to be sniffed at. This Saturday Rustem plays at St John's Smith Square.

He introduces the programme himself from the microphone. It's focused on contrasts between JS and CPE Bach, Liszt's devilish and saintly modes, and Rachmaninov's extraordinary Sonata No.1, which is based on the 'Faust' legend but is rarely performed, compared to the Sonata No.2 (possibly because it's too difficult!). Do come and hear him.

More about Rustem from the Cross-Eyed Pianist blog here: a frank, ferocious chat in which he doesn't mince his words about the music business in general...

Here's an interview, an extract of the Rachmaninov Sonata No.1 and an Etude-Tableau, from Canadian radio:

Kaufmann on Wagner and anti-Semitism

[First of all, wanted to let you know that I'm on BBC Radio 3's IN TUNE today between 5 and 5.30pm, talking about the Royal Philharmonic Awards shortlist, which is being announced this afternoon.]

In an interview with Mannheim Morgenweb the one and only Jonas Kaufmann talks about - among other things - Wagner, anti-Semitism and how to separate them. Below are a few  highlights (any mistakes are either mine or Google Translate's) and the whole thing in German is here. In case you didn't know, he is giving a recital with orchestra in London at the Royal Festival Hall on 21 April including arias by the anniversary boys Verdi and Wagner.


... it appears that you currently working a lot on your piano. Optical illusion?

Kaufmann: No, do not be fooled. I lay on the soft and subtle sounds at least as much value as the large and dramatic. An old rule for singers is: only those who have a sonorous piano can develop a healthy forte. But this concerns not only technical matters, but above all the artistic.

What position do you refer in the matter of Wagner? Can you separate the wonderful work of vile anti-Semites?

Kaufmann: Wagner's anti-Semitic writings and his self-esteem will always be a stumbling block. Even militant Wagnerians wish sometimes that he had only composed, and not written so much. But as for your question, I think you should separate work and man, just as one should distinguish the anti-Semitism of nationalists like Wagner from the antisemitism of the Nazis.

Does that work?

Kaufmann: The fact that Wagner's works have been abused by the Nazis does not alter their artistic importance. They belong to the greatest. Many Jewish artists who were expelled by the Nazis from Germany and Austria have also recognised this: singers like Friedrich Schorr had no problem with Wagner being performed at the Met. And someone like Daniel Barenboim has long worked for the performance of Wagner in Israel to be allowed. 

How to get into Wagner: your five-point plan

Here's a piece I wrote for Culturekicks about how to get into Wagner, complete with a twist in the ginger tail. Enjoy! http://www.culturekicks.co.uk/2013/04/09/your-five-point-wagner-plan/

Where were you yesterday?

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie. Gone, gone, gone. Where were you when you heard the news? Ironically enough, I was in the reception area of Voice of Russia UK Radio, ready to take part in their culture show 'Curtain Up' with one of the first - possibly the very first - Russian pianist who sloped away from the USSR to study in London. The lovely Rustem Hayroudinoff is playing at St John's Smith Square on Saturday 13 April and is now a professor at the Royal Academy of Music.

To play devil's advocate for a moment, this couldn't have happened without Thatcher. The persuasive diplomatic relationship she built with Gorbachev helped to lead to perestroika, the fall of the Iron Curtain and a new freedom of movement. Rustem came to London in 1992; a decade or two earlier, he'd have had to 'defect' instead. Some other Russian musician friends who moved to London around the same time got married in the late 1990s and celebrated by lunching with their parents at the Ritz. And there at the next table was Thatcher. That made their day: they adored her for what she'd done for their country. (Yesterday, Thatcher died at the Ritz, after suffering a stroke. Or, as one major news website succinctly misprinted, a 'strike'.)

Many of us Brits felt she did more for Russia than the UK. Newspaper reports this morning expose the lingering and indeed widening divisions she left behind. I was 13 when she came to power and the impact of watching the changes that took place under her rule ran deep. Everything my parents believed in and that had brought them to London rather than the US (escaping apartheid South Africa in the 1950s) was brought into question in her era. The value of collective rights and the dignity of human beings per se was under fire: from then on, all that mattered was the price of something, not its worth. The central bricks that held together the moral fibre of Britain were kicked out of its wall. The mess the UK is in now can be traced back to a fundamental change of philosophical attitude that took place here in the 1980s: it became morally legitimate to put the grubbing of money ahead of any vision of what to do with it to make a better, more beautiful world.I don't doubt that Thatcher sincerely believed in "the trickle-down" effect - but after 30 years, the limitations of the notion are all too clear.

The NHS, the Arts Council, school buildings, public transport, which crumbled to shreds through lack of investment during the Thatcher years and reached rockbottom under John Major - everything that required an input of public money was slashed to pieces. In the arts, many of our finest institutions, including all the London orchestras, were sliced to the breadline. Doesn't anyone remember the later sticking-plaster of "stabilisation funding"? Has everyone forgotten the Hoffmann Report? As for London itself, the GLC was abolished wholesale; the capital city became just a conglomeration of boroughs with a broken heart instead of a full-scale identity, greyness instead of pride, infrastructure crumbling and homelessness rife. Doesn't anyone remember the South Bank's Cardboard City in the middle of the roundabout where the IMAX is now? Has everyone forgotten the Poll Tax Riots? And the Miners' Strike?

What miserable, shattering, hideous, divisive years those were. How tenderly the British right-wing still clings to them today.

It's been left to the country's fine playwrights to preserve the subtleties of Thatcher: the essence of the character, the paradoxes, the personality and the shadings of good intention that illuminate the person behind the nation's favourite punchbag ("I blame Thatcher"), though she is probably so with good reason.

As Michael Billington writes in today's Guardian, part of her legacy is that "we are still having to argue that subsidy of the arts is a fruitful investment rather than a frivolous expenditure".

We're all human. That's the only lesson, in the end.  But we should be making the best of that, and helping others to make the best of it, too. That should mean expanding minds, not shrinking them; broadening lives, not narrowing them; bringing people together, not dividing them; opening us up, not closing us down; singing, not silencing.

Now I'm off to the BBC Music Magazine Awards and am happy to leave anyone who doesn't already know with the happy news that Natalia Osipova is joining the Royal Ballet right here in good old London. We must be doing something right.

(UPDATE, Thursday 11 April: listen to this speech about Thatcher by Glenda Jackson, MP and former great actress, in Parliament. She tells it exactly as I remember it.)

Friday Historical: Beethoven's Triple in Moscow, 1970

Heads up, first, to a feisty performance of this extraordinary piece at St George's Hanover Square yesterday. The Orpheus Foundation's mission is to help young musicians bridge the gap between finishing college and finding their way into the profession by providing orchestral performing experience with the Orpheus Sinfonia. Yesterday their cello soloist was one of their increasing number of success stories: born in Belorus, Aleksei Kiseliov played with the ensemble for several years and, besides winning a number of prizes, he has now been appointed principal cello of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Beethoven's Triple Concerto features a virtually irrational workout for the cello, which has to undertake all manner of stratospherical pyrotechnics, but Aleksei stayed cool as can be, maintaining exquisitely beautiful tone throughout. Expert contributions, too, from his fellow soloists - the fine young violinist Benjamin Baker and our neighbour-in-SW-London Anthony Hewitt, who was in volcanically eloquent mode at the piano.

Since giving that talk a couple of weeks ago, I've been preoccupied with Beethoven. It's too easy to take him for granted. Rather than musing at length, though, let's hear some...

So here are the Triple's second and third movements, played live in Moscow in 1970 by David Oistrakh (violin), Sviatoslav Richter (piano) and Mstislav Rostropovich in "that" cello part. Kirill Kondrashin conducts the Moscow Philharmonic in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory.

Polunin update

Following yesterday's announcement that Polunin will not dance next week and hasn't been seen since Tuesday, a report in the Independent suggests that his disappearance is a matter of "artistic differences" rather than anything more serious. Nick Clark tells all: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/sergei-polunin-the-runaway-ballerino-strikes-again--coliseum-hit-by-new-disappearing-act-8560542.html

Polunin vanishes

The Ukrainian ballet star Sergei Polunin appears to have gone missing in London. He is here to dance in Peter Schaufuss's controversial contemporary ballet Midnight Express from next Tuesday, but did not show up to rehearsals yesterday. The company has said that he has not checked out of his hotel, but is not responding to their calls, and Schaufuss has said that he is concerned for Polunin's welfare. More from the Evening Standard, here.

He has just performed, with the Stanislavsky Ballet, the Russian premiere of Kenneth MacMillan's dramatic masterpiece, Mayerling, with reports of his interpretation of the anti-hero Crown Prince Rudolf suggesting history in the making. Fortunately someone filmed it.

Gove "could close Chetham's"

This report from Channel 4 News last night is about the latest developments at Chetham's in Manchester. It suggests that after ISI findings and a Manchester City Council report, the institution has until May to address alleged failings in its management structures and child protection systems and that if this is not done satisfactorily, the education secretary Michael Gove might have the powers to close it down.

This school is too vital and precious a presence in British musical life to allow such a thing to occur. We always hear bad news first, but the number of fine musicians and happy people who have also emerged from its portals over the years is high, and now many devoted, honest, hard-working and non-abusive teachers are there to guide musical youngsters through top-level training and see them into the profession. We hope profoundly that the necessary issues can be addressed rapidly and thoroughly and put right once and for all. We need specialist music schools, we need more of them, and we need them to function reliably.

Of course, the National Union of Teachers has just passed an unprecedented motion of no confidence in Gove.

Hot Bach in freezing hall

 "HEY, YOU! TURN ON THE BLOODY HEATING!"

My gosh, but it was cold in the Royal Albert Hall on Monday. The Bach-loving faithful assembled for John Eliot Gardiner's nine-hour marathon (as trailed on JDCMB here) - some of us, heeding anxious tweets from the orchestra saying we should please dress warmly, realised what was going to happen and restricted our attendance to the evening.

Blasts of chill wind bowled down upon us in the stalls. A friend among the performers told us afterwards that she was wearing six layers on stage. And, most regrettable of all, the performance suffered: the English Baroque Soloists use original instruments, natch, and the delicate, valveless horn and trumpets made their opinions of the situation felt even if their players did not - tragic, because eminently avoidable. I'm informed that the day itself was better than the day before: apparently when they arrived to rehearse, the heating wasn't working at all.

What on earth is the matter with the endemic attitude in UK institutions towards people and  temperatures? I've never, ever, in any other country, seen an audience sitting through a two-hour unbroken performance (or any other performance, for that matter) in their overcoats and scarves. And we wonder why people cough? It was an absolute disgrace. I suspect the management is now being told so repeatedly by disgruntled punters who had forked out a lot of money for the privilege of freezing their butts off for nine hours. OK. RANT OVER.

All the more credit to the Monteverdi Chorus and Orchestra and JEG for pulling off a tremendous occasion with such aplomb. The atmosphere was ecstatic, despite the cold. Promenaders in the arena (much less crowded than for the Proms proper) clustered at the front, hanging on every word and note. And when one speaker declared that though Bach has been accused of all manner of personal failings, handicaps or faults, he was actually a really good bloke, there was applause. The hall was really too large for the occasion - it was about half full, which would translate in the RFH or Barbican into queues around the block - yet it's hard to think of any other London venue in which such an atmosphere can be created. This was a Prom in all but the calendar.

The talks, led by Catherine Bott, were fascinating: the final one, featuring Howard Moody, John Butt, Raymond Tallis and JEG, focused on Bach the human being and raised questions such as whether he was as supportive to his daughters as to his sons (answer: "he was no better and no worse than anyone else"), whether he eschewed opera or was influenced by it, and whether he had any idea of just how good he really was.

Everyone had been mesmerised by Joanna MacGregor's Goldberg Variations; there was much enthusiasm for the singalongaBachChorale for Christ Lag in Todesbanden and the way JEG led the audience rehearsal; and violinist Viktoria Mullova, cellist Alban Gerhardt and organist John Butt had all drawn many plaudits. But the B minor Mass can only have been the crowning glory.

It was a celebration of a performance, one that stirred rather than shook, but stirred greatly: if there is ever to be a procession into heaven led by angels, saints and composers, the Sanctus - stately, airy, magnificent, blazing - would surely accompany it. The strangeness and mystery of the work shone out, too: the chromatic harmonies of "Et expecto resurrectionem", hushed, legato and translucent, evoke sometimes Mozart and sometimes Wagner, and the final alto aria seemed a humanising plea of doubt and guilt before the "Dona nobis pacem". The bizarre nature of the Lutheran Bach's Catholic Mass stood out as well: soon after the belief in one Catholic thingywhatsit been proclaimed there's a chorus in which a Lutheran (or quasi-Lutheran) chorale is unmistakeably embedded, in true Bach Cantata/Chorale Prelude fashion. All the more reason to appreciate it as pure music that can speak to us all, if we allow it to.

A very different performance from Andras Schiff's at the Lucerne Easter Festival a year ago, of which I adored every minute. At Gardiner's, I missed the intimacy and collegiality of Schiff's Cappella Andrea Barca - though smaller forces would have been insane in a space as large as the RAH; also, sometimes the consistency and audibility of their more modern instruments. An oboe d'amore is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, but they were often hard to hear, being so quiet. Still, Gardiner's sheer magnificence, the sense of 'rightness' in the tempi, and the fierceness of passion that underpinned the whole interpretation, all of this was in a class of its own.

What an achievement. What a way to celebrate your 70th birthday. Someone, please give that man some champagne, the world's finest Easter egg and a good hot bath. Me, I think I'm coming down with a cold - but at least if I do, I can listen to the rest of the day on the iPlayer.

(Photos: Chris Christodolou)

Stop press! Motorcycles to take over Royal Opera House

The Royal Opera House's new production of I vespri siciliani, a grand celebration of Verdi's bicentenary involving both the opera and ballet companies, has been widely tipped to be the event of the season. And so it will be - but not quite as expected.

Everyone has been so busy speculating about the choice of the French language version and the strength of the mooted dance element - to say nothing of the cost - that until now we completely failed to notice one vital fact about the production.

This is in fact not Giuseppe Verdi's opera The Sicilian Vespers, but a work by Guillaume Verdi, an all-but-unknown French composer deemed to be the descendent of, allegedly, an illegitimate relative of the great Italian father of grand opera. Its title is The Sicilian Vespas.

It's to be a treat for opera and ballet lovers alike: a newly discovered European equivalent, perhaps, to West Side Story. Two rival motorcycle gangs in Palermo clash over their Mafia heritage; the star-crossed lovers, Paulo and Giulia, mirror the tragic progress of their Shakespearean models. The stage of the Royal Opera House is to host a specially constructed "volcano" on which the bikes will race in a spectacle unlike anything these august spaces have seen before.

I tracked down Guillaume Verdi's daughter to her remote hillside home in Provence. Valerie Verdi, a woman of few words, with dark eyes that speak more than her voice, expressed simple gratitude that her father's work is at last to receive the attention it deserves.

"It's a beautiful, dynamic creation," she suggested, "but was long suppressed in an atmosphere of contemporary music that was hostile to any style but the atonal avant-garde. And in terms of stage drama, Leonard Bernstein dominated the same territory my father chose, with West Side Story, and who knows if he had a vested interest in suppressing any potential rival? Who knows the truth?" She gave a shrug and a smile that betrayed a long-held and infinite sorrow.

I asked her to tell JDCMB readers more about her father's relationship to Giuseppe Verdi. "It's difficult to prove," she said. "Given the circumstances of my father's birth, documentation is limited. But there really was an extraordinary resemblance between them. When I look at photographs of Verdi and his beard, I see my father's face."

Will she come to London for the show? "Yes, perhaps," she said, "if I can find someone to feed my goats in my absence."

Speculation is rife that Sergei Polunin will return from Moscow's Stanislavsky Ballet to dance the ballet-double of Paulo, with tiger-scratch tattoo fully exposed. Leading ballerinas are said to be vying for the chance to play Giulia. As for the singers, the house has apparently put in a call to a German tenor who happens to look rather good in leather.