Isolde rising

I just interviewed Rachel Nicholls, who's about to sing her first Isolde at the wonderful Longborough Festival Opera. Piece is in the Independent today. Director's cut below. She tells me how her local comprehensive school helped her rise to the top; why sheer persistence was the key to embracing the Wagner that's now her home territory after she started out in Baroque; and that she's actually married to Kurwenal.

The shining sonic arc of a soprano voice in full flight cuts through the air in a Tower Hamlets backstreet. The Cotswold-based Longborough Festival Opera team has come here to rehearse its new production of Tristan und Isolde, which opens on 12 June. Anthony Negus, Longborough’s expert Wagnerian music director, is conducting, ratcheting up the intensity; and in a sunny studio with seated cast and piano accompaniment, the sound is overwhelming as Isolde – Rachel Nicholls – lets rip. 

The British dramatic soprano is performing this marathon role for the first time, and it’s fitting that it should be at Longborough, where her rise to fame in Wagnerian spheres began. The country house opera, its theatre a converted former chicken shed, offered a complete, staged Ring cycle during the composer’s bicentenary year, 2013; Nicholls starred as Brünnhilde. Turning 40 this year, she is blessed with a bright-edged, flexible and voluminous voice that has an uplifting sense of release and freedom, combined with precision and control – a near-ideal mix. 

But Isolde, as Nicholls points out, is a huge challenge, with more music to sing than Brünnhilde has in all of her Ring operas put together. Isolde – the Irish princess who comes to Cornwall to marry King Marke, only to fall in love en route with his emissary, Tristan – experiences deep inner conflicts, which are often expressed intimately. “While bits of the role are as muscular as Brünnhilde, there’s more quiet singing, more passages of light and shade, which makes it more interesting to sing,” Nicholls says. “Probably there’s nothing in it that’s quite so much fun as the Ring, charging about with a spear – as Brünnhilde I got very good at swords, spears and battles. But Isolde’s language is subtler; it is all about feelings, rather than action.” 

Nicholls, a down-to-earth personality with ready sense of humour, cropped hair and sensible shoes, hails originally from Bedford. She attended a local comprehensive school whose excellent music department, together with the county’s free music provision, offered her ample opportunities to test her wings. “My school happened to be fabulous for music,” she says. “Quite a few of us have made fantastic careers in the music world thanks to our teacher there.” On Saturdays she attended Trinity College of Music’s junior department, learning the piano and the violin: “The county paid for me to go there and paid for my travel too.” Bedfordshire offered not only a county youth choir, in which she sang, but also a youth opera group for the 15-25s: “Every year it would put on a fully staged opera with orchestra. I joined it when I was 15 – and I knew straight away that that’s what I wanted to do.” 

But after taking a degree in languages, plus postgraduate study at the Royal College of Music, it was in baroque music that she began her singing career. Changing from its light, somewhat constrained purity of tone to the full-blooded dramatic soprano repertoire did follow the needs of her voice, she says, but it also required immense determination.

It all began at Longborough. She first arrived there to sing Fiordiligi in Mozart’s Così fan tutte. “I loved it,” she says, “but at that point Wagner wasn’t really on my radar.” Longborough was planning its Ring cycle at the time, and Nicholls’s agent persuaded her to audition for a small role in Die Walküre. 

“I was totally seduced by the music,” says Nicholls. “My friend Lee Bisset was singing Sieglinde. I listened to her and thought: I want to be able to sing like that. And I listened to the role of Brünnhilde and realised that that was what I wanted to sing. I knew I had the necessary weight in the middle range of my voice, and that the soprano Alwyn Mellor wasn’t available for the role at that time, so I volunteered to do Götterdämmerung.” It was a huge leap – both of repertoire and of faith – but she would not be dissuaded. “People told me not to do it, but I persisted and nagged until eventually they gave in and let me.”

“I did wonder if I’d bitten off more than I could chew,” she admits, “but I prepared it thoroughly – and I had the chance to study with Anne Evans. That’s the thing that’s made the biggest difference to my life.” Evans was one of the preeminent sopranos of her day, especially celebrated for Wagner: “She can take me through every note and word and suggest different ways to think about it and the emotion behind it.” 

Taking the time to retrain her voice, Nicholls says, was a big risk – “My income went down by about 50 per cent” – and she needed both inner strength and moral support. Fortunately she had them. She and her husband, the baritone Andrew Slater – who sings Tristan’s friend Kurwenal at Longborough – live in the Peak District and, she says, help one another maintain a healthy perspective. “As a baritone, Andrew usually has to play a king, a murderer, or somebody’s dad – often mine!” she remarks. 

“Singing’s very important to us both, but it’s not the whole story. If you put all of yourself into whether or not people like you and your singing on stage – which is entirely subjective – it’s a recipe for disaster. Sometimes you’ll get horrible reviews, or maybe someone’s going to decide you look fat in your costume and they’ll say something mean. And if everything about you is poured into that little public space, you could end up a very unhappy person. 

“I’m lucky to live in Derbyshire,” she adds. “The job is stressful, the travelling is too, and the pressure is immense. My release is getting out for a run or a hike in the hills. Being outside keeps me sane.”

Tristan und Isolde, Longborough Festival Opera, from 12 June. Box office: 01451 830 292

Tchaikovsky, spades and stalkers...

I had a chat with director David Alden about The Queen of Spades at ENO for The Independent (opening night was yesterday). He revealed that Tchaikovsky was no stranger himself to the sort of stalking that Lisa experiences from Hermann...

Few operas can boast a libretto based on a literary masterpiece that is also a psychological thriller. Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, after Alexander Pushkin’s short story, is the exception – and its gripping tale, focusing on a crazed anti-hero, presents a peach of a challenge for any opera company. English National Opera is about to stage its first production of the work in some 20 years with the American director David Alden at its helm. After his enduring success for ENO with Britten’s Peter Grimes, expectations run high.

The opera’s protagonist, Hermann, believes that if he can discover the secret of the “three cards” it will transform his life. He courts the unfortunate Lisa to gain access to her grandmother, an elderly Countess who guards the crucial gambling formula; tragedy ensues as his obsession spirals out of control.

“It’s not easy to stage,” Alden confirms. “It’s a very big piece, it’s quite a monstrous, gigantic panorama, and to keep refocusing it requires a difficult balance between its elements.”

Despite its scale and depth, The Queen of Spades is often overshadowed by Tchaikovsky’s operatic masterpiece, Eugene Onegin, also based on Pushkin, which preceded it by a decade. No less compelling, though, are the driven, haunted qualities of his music for Hermann and Lisa and the care and delight with which he created Mozartian pastiche to evoke the Countess’s memories of the court of Catherine the Great.

The score’s special intensity, Alden points out, may have been turbo-charged by a frightening situation that would have led Tchaikovsky to identify with the confused and increasingly desperate Lisa. Some years earlier, the composer had married, most ill-advisedly, a young woman named Antonina Milyukova who had pursued him by letter. He was gay; she was mentally unstable; disaster ensued. “He had got her out of his life, but she returned and started to make trouble for him,” Alden says. “She flipped over something petty and started threatening to expose him. He fled to Italy in order to write this piece.”

Hermann is in love, at a distance, with Lisa; he pursues her like a stalker, uses her blatantly to access the Countess, and finally drives her to suicide. His obsession transfers to the old Countess and her secret of the three cards. “It’s very Freudian,” Alden suggests. “There’s a triangle of him and the two women, and it turns out the real erotic zinger of the opera is between him and the Countess: his horror of her, his desire for her and the cards.” The setting of St Petersburg becomes virtually a character in its own right, “an aristocratic milieu with decadence and corruption only just under the surface”.

It sounds all too contemporary – but the psychological element remains timeless and universal. “It is very non-literal,” Alden says, of his new production. “It’s a weird, beautiful, dreamy thing.”

The Queen of Spades, English National Opera, from 6 June. Box office: 020 7845 9300

Glyndebourne baby arrives!

Many congratulations to soprano Danielle de Niese and her husband Gus Christie, chairman of Glyndebourne, on the birth of their baby son, who arrived today. Glyndebourne tells us that mother and child are doing well.

Here's some musical champagne to celebrate...

Looking ahead...

Taking a Barenbreather after the excitement of the Schubert series to reflect on the different things coming up this month. Do join me for some of them if they're in your neck of the woods...

TOMORROW: 5 June 2015, 8pm Riverhouse Barn, Walton-on-Thames A rehearsed reading of my play A Walk through the End of Time with actors Caroline Dooley and David Webb. The Cremona Trio will feature in a performance of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time the next day. We'll be there for Q&A afterwards. Book here.

10 June 2015, Opera Holland Park. Pre-performance talk for Flight, in which I interview its composer, the fabulous Jonathan Dove. Talk begins at 6.30pm. Details here.

12 June 2015, 6.15pm Ulverston International Music Festival. Pre-concert talk with violinist Tasmin Little and pianist Martin Roscoe before their recital on the opening night of one of the Lake District’s most beautiful festivals. More here.

22-26 June 2015 Istanbul Music Festival A series of four pre-concert talks for the Istanbul International Festival, to be held in the garden of the Hagia Eirene Museum in the historic centre of this great and vibrant city… 22 June The Young Chopin. This evening Daniil Trifonov performs the composer's Piano Concerto No.1. 23 June The Fantastical World of the French Baroque. Preceding a concert featuring Magdalena Kožena (mezzo) and Emmanuelle Haïm (conductor). 24 June Brahms, Schumann, Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim: The Indivisibles. Christian Tetzlaff performs the Brahms Violin Concerto. 26 June Mozart and the Violin. Arabella Steinbacher and Maxim Rysanov feature with the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra in two of Mozart’s violin concertos and the Sinfonia Concertante. Festival website here.

Barenboim talks to Channel 4 News

Let's continue the Barenboimfest. In case you missed this the other night - well, it's strong stuff and he says it better than anybody else could.

Heart of darkness

Barenboim in concert at the RFH. Photo: Chris Christodoulou

Yes, it's him again. Them. Barenboim and that piano. I reviewed the final recital of the Schubert series last night for The Arts Desk - and a very extraordinary evening it was.

I'm normally loathe to use imagery quite as colourful as suggesting that a pianist becomes Orpheus and leads us across the Styx, but how else to convey in words with reasonable accuracy the effect of what he did with the slow movement of the B flat Sonata? He went right into the work's darkest recesses and drew from it something resembling catharsis in the ultimate sense. I don't think I'll be able to listen to the piece again for quite a while, so strong was this. Read the whole thing here.

Incidentally, I had a fascinating little chat with the piano technician Peter Salisbury, who has been helping with maintaining the newbie instrument through the series. I've rarely seen any piano expert quite so fired up about anything. Apparently the action on the Barenboim-Maene piano is not lighter than a "normal" concert grand - it is as heavy, or heavier, he says - and it is not easier to play, but more difficult, and takes a lot of getting used to; yet the rewards are still emerging in terms of colour and seem to hold endless potential.

Last week Barenboim gave the Edward W. Said London Lecture at the Mosaic Rooms. You can find a video of it and the Q&A that followed online at the London Review of Books, here. The lecture focused on...

Music education. Its crucial, essential nature. The necessity for music to be taught in schools 'on a par with mathematics or biology'. So there. Listen up, politicos.

Glazunov for 1 June

One of my favourite moments in all of Russian music: Glazunov's Spring turns into Summer. Bugbear: why doesn't anyone play The Seasons these days? (Classic FM does. Concerts don't. Would rather listen to this any day than...oh, never mind.)

Happy 1 June, dear readers.

10 things not to say to a music critic

Here are 10 things not to say if you spot a music critic, scribbling notes, near you in a concert.

1. "Do you have to keep on writing during the music? It's very annoying - please stop."

2. "Oh, I see - you're a critic? Wow! What a privilege to meet you. What do you think of the concert?"

3. "Oh, really? I'm amazed. I thought it was sublime. But what do I know?"

4. "Who's the best pianist around, then?"

5. "But you must know - you're a master, you hear them all!"

6. "Where can I read you?...Oh dear. I never read them. Ha ha."

7. "So, do you play the piano yourself? ....Really? Why not? ...Oh. So how come you get to review a piano recital?"

8. "How do you become a critic? You have to study music for years and years, right?"

9. "Goodness. That is very surprising."

10. "Here's my email address. Please write to me. Please. Please. When you have a moment. Just put down the best pianists to hear, the best orchestras in town...please..."

AND A BONUS:
11. Well, come and hear a symphony by XYZ with me - I'll convince you to like him!

MESSIAEN PLAY ALERT

Chgall: The Falling Angel (1923-47)

My play A Walk through the End of Time is being given at the Riverhouse Barn Arts Centre, Walton-on-Thames, next Friday, 5 June, 8pm. Tickets are just £5 each and the evening will involve a rehearsed reading by actors Caroline Dooley and David Webb. The next evening the Cremona Trio (and friend) will be giving a performance of the complete Messiaen Quartet for the End of Time and they and I will all be there on Friday to take part in a Q&A session after the reading. Come along and find out about Messiaen, Stalag VIIIA, the significance of these pictures by Chagall and Yves Klein and why this piece can and does matter so much to us all.

Yves Klein: Leap into the Void (1960)
SHUNK-KENDER/©ROY LICHTENSTEIN FOUNDATION/MENIL COLLECTION, HOUSTON

Anniversary joy: Korngold plays Korngold

It's Korngold's birthday (118) and how better to celebrate than listening to him play his own music? This is the 'Pierrot Tanzlied' from his most popular opera, Die tote Stadt, recorded in 1951 during the composer's optimistic yet short-lived attempt to return to Vienna after more than a decade of exile in Hollywood. He makes the piano sound like a couple of full orchestras. Enjoy.

Lovely piano, shame about the Schubert

I was kind of underwhelmed by Barenboim's approach to Schubert yesterday, sorry to say. But his bespoke piano sounds terrific.

Here's my review in The Arts Desk

David Pickard to head the Proms

Some very welcome news yesterday from the Proms, which has appointed a new director at long last. And it's not a BBC insider with an axe. It's David Pickard of Glyndebourne - a charismatic, well-liked, forward-thinking, online-aware guy who seems, to many of us, an inspired choice. I've expounded a few thoughts on the task ahead of him in today's Independent.

Here is the Director's Cut, a slightly longer version.

The BBC Proms has named its new director at last: David Pickard, who is currently general director of Glyndebourne. The appointment process has been lengthy – it is 14 months since Roger Wright resigned from the job – but one hopes that the organisation has taken its time in order to find just the right person.

Pickard’s appointment has surprised many in the music world; it was widely expected that a BBC insider would be chosen, possibly one ready to wield an axe. Instead, this decision appears to signal a willingness to be open to the new, the forward-looking and the creative. Pickard has brought all these qualities to Glyndebourne; and that opera house’s continuing success despite the crash years suggests that he is no stranger to helping an institution weather a blast.

Wright’s shoes at the Proms won’t be easy to fill. His determination to think big reaped dividends, bringing to fruition ambitious projects such as a tie-in with the 2012 Olympics and, the following year, a complete Wagner Ring cycle for the composer’s bicentenary year, conducted by Daniel Barenboim and featuring some of the world’s finest Wagnerians singers – each opera accessible to promenaders for a mere £5.

Pickard is bound to face thorny challenges. The BBC licence fee is due for a rethink next year; any changes to the funding model can scarcely help but affect the Proms. At Glyndebourne Pickard has presided over an institution that receives public funding only for education work and touring – the opera festival relies entirely on private money. He will now need to apply the diplomatic skills he has honed during 14 years dealing with sponsors, donors and patrons to fighting the Proms’ corner in the boardrooms of the BBC.

The Proms’ position as “the world’s greatest classical music festival” – as it trumpets itself – will demand maintenance in the programming department and requires a fine balance between the new and risky and the tried and tested. Expectations land on the festival’s shoulders from every direction – some call for more premieres, others for more Mozart; some may demand more BBC tie-ins, while others regard the occasional foray into pop or musicals (each happening about once a season) as the End of the World As We Know It. Pickard must steer a slalom course through all of this.

Then there’s the brave new world online. Almost every year the Proms announces further digital initiatives – this year’s innovation is a Proms App – and Pickard must make sure that they keep pace with the ever-more digitally aware younger audience. Under his direction Glyndebourne was the first UK opera house to stream performances live online for free and to send its productions to cinemas for HD relay. All of this is surely a must for the Proms to consider in the years ahead.

But above all Pickard needs to embrace the scale of vision for the Proms that Wright established. This means not only continuing the mission of bringing world-class classical music to the widest possible audiences. It also means doing so with a flair that can make the finest events an experience to remember for a lifetime.

Meanwhile, there's a very nice job up for grabs in East Sussex. Arts administrators fond of opera, picnics and sheep should form an orderly queue.

Barenboim designs new piano - and plays it here, tomorrow

Astonishing news this morning that Daniel Barenboim will be playing his Royal Festival Hall Schubert series on a brand-new piano that he conceived and commissioned himself. It was unveiled today at the hall and is called the Barenboim-Maene Concert Grand, developed and built by piano maker Chris Maene of Belgium, with support from Steinway & Sons. I'm going to three of the four concerts and can't wait to hear how it sounds.

The other day at Classical:NEXT I had a go on a fortepiano - one recently built - and was amazed at the lightness of the touch and the ease with which it produces a beautiful, singing tone. How come pianos have kept on being made larger, heavier and more unwieldy, playing ever-louder with sensitivity suffering the while? Gergely Boganyi in Budapest unveiled a new piano a few months ago - one with a reasonably space-age design; the fashion for Fazioli (which sometimes convinces me and sometimes doesn't) has been gathering pace; and now it could be that Barenboim's initiative is going to point the way forward to something of a revolution in how we play and listen to the instrument.

I will report back after the concert. Meanwhile, here's the info...

Photo (c) Chris Maene

"The new Barenboim-Maene piano combines the touch, stability, and power of a modern piano with the transparent sound quality and distinguishable colour registers of more historic instruments. While on the outside it does not differ significantly in looks from a modern concert grand, most of its components – including the braces, soundboard, cast-iron frame, bass strings, keyboard and action – have been specially-designed and tailor made, and the positioning of others, such as the hammers and strings, is radically different.

"Barenboim was inspired to create a new piano after playing Franz Liszt’s restored grand piano during a trip to Siena in September 2011. Struck by the vital differences in sound of an instrument constructed with straight, parallel strings rather than the diagonal crossed ones of a contemporary instrument, he set out to create a brand new instrument that combines the best of the old and the new and offers a real alternative for pianists and music-lovers in the 21^stcentury."

photo (c) Paul Schirnhofer/DG

Daniel Barenboim says:

“The transparency and tonal characteristics of the traditional straight-strung instruments is so different from the homogenous tone produced by the modern piano across its entire range. The clearly distinguishable voices and colour across its registers of Liszt’s piano inspired me to explore the possibility of combining these qualities with the power, looks, evenness of touch, stability of tuning and other technical advantages of the modern Steinway. I am so delighted to have worked with Chris Maene, who had the same dream and I must pay tribute to his incredible technical expertise and his deep respect for both tradition and innovation. I must also thank Steinway & Sons, for bringing us together and for delivering key components for our new instrument, thus enabling a perfect match of the traditional qualities and modern advantages.”

Nepal: Marriner to conduct for appeal

Past and present members of the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields, and friends, are to give a fundraising concert for the people of earthquake-blighted Nepal on Wednesday evening, 28 May, under the baton of the ASMF's legendary conductor, Sir Neville Marriner - who is 91.

Soloists are Nicholas Daniel (oboe) and Kenneth Sillito (violin), and John Suchet will speak. Tickets are priced £9-£35. The performers and organisers are giving their services free and all proceeds go to the Disasters Emergency Committee Nepal Appeal.

Concert organiser and former ASMF violinist Enrico Alvares tells us that just a few tickets are now left now, so book soon!: "I may have organised this thing," he says, "but in truth it genuinely belongs to all those playing and listening on the night. It's our concert. Our effort to help thousands of people we don't know and will never meet. Join us."

Incidentally, for those of us who grew up listening to those irreplaceable recordings by the ASMF and Marriner this is a unique chance to go down memory lane.

Please note that the venue is St James Piccadilly, not St Martin-in-the-Fields!

Programme:

Elgar – Introduction and Allegro, Op 47
Bach – Concerto for Oboe and Violin in D minor
Marcello – Oboe Concerto in D minor
Tchaikovsky – Serenade for Strings, Op 48

7:30pm, Thursday 28 May. St James's Church, Piccadilly, W1J 9LL.

BOOK TICKETS HERE

Groundbreaking projects from UK and Switzerland win Classical:NEXT Innovation Award

Great, great news from Classical:NEXT! Southbank Centre's year-long festival of 20th-century music and culture, The Rest is Noise, has won the Innovation Award, together with the Lucerne Festival's Ark Nova, a mobile, inflatable concert hall that toured Japan's earthquake-blighted regions in 2013. More good news is that the first runner-up is the Morley College course for young women conductors. Cheers, all! Wish I was still there to help celebrate!

Around 2000 participants from the three previous Classical:NEXT trade fairs voted for two winners from a list of 21 projects all around the world. It's a list of remarkable scope and continual inspiration, from a street orchestra in Brazil to Alistair Campell - no, not that Alistair Campbell, but the co-director of the Tectonics Festival in Glasgow.

Classical:NEXT’s director Jennifer Dautermann says: “This award aims to give international recognition to the people who are doing the most to push things forward with daring yet intelligent, effective and successful ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking, planning and action.”

You can see a collection of video interviews by Klassik.tv at Classical:NEXT here - including one with me, doing my bit for gender politics.

Chances are that if you're a regular here at JDCMB you already know all about The Rest is Noise festival, so here is a video introduction to Ark Nova.

A pianist's victory for the right to speak out

The pianist James Rhodes has won the right to publish his traumatic memoirs after a lengthy legal battle in which an injunction to prevent its release was raised by his ex-wife in the court of appeal. He was at Classical:NEXT in Rotterdam the other day and gave this interview to The Guardian while there.

There's another significance for this besides freedom of speech. In a music world that has been riven by revelations of historic sexual abuse of schoolchildren and college pupils, for which several people have gone to jail in recent years, this memoir has not come a moment too soon.

All too often victims of abuse in childhood are not believed when they speak up as adults, or are put through torments in court of the type that allegedly led to the death by overdose of the violinist Frances Andrade in 2013. Rhodes is a powerful communicator and eloquent with both words and music. He is the person who has now been brave enough to tell us all the truth, to show us what the realities of this living hell are - for nobody can imagine it for themselves if they have not experienced such a thing - and thus offers us a chance to understand what happens, what the long-term effects are and therefore why it is so important that we don't keep on turning a blind eye or blaming the victims for somehow, supposedly, bringing these horrors on themselves.

We owe it to him and to other people who have been through such experiences to treat them at the very least with compassion. The German word for compassion, 'Mitleid' (see Parsifal), explains this better than anything else: literally meaning "with sorrow" - i.e., sorrowing together. And as Parsifal shows us, the presence of this quality in other human beings is an essential ingredient in the start of a healing process of sorts that cannot take place without it.

As for freedom of speech, this is a major victory - and hopefully will set a precedent for other situations in which people speak up, tell the truth yet are silenced by a society that just doesn't want to know and tries to find official ways to make sure it needn't. As the court ruled: "The right to report the truth is justification in itself."

English PEN, Index on Censorship and Article 19 all intervened at the Supreme Court, pointing out that the implications were the book to be suppressed would have "a chilling effect on the production and publication of serious works of public interest and concern".

English PEN reports:

In a robust defence of freedom of expression, the court ruled: ‘The only proper conclusion is that there is every justification for the publication. A person who has suffered in the way that the appellant has suffered, and has struggled to cope with the consequences of his suffering in the way that he has struggled, has the right to tell the world about it.’

The Supreme Court criticised the Court of Appeal’s ruling in its judgment, stating that the terms of the injunction were flawed and voicing its concern about the curtailment of freedom of speech:

‘Freedom to report the truth is a basic right to which the law gives a very high level of protection. It is difficult to envisage any circumstances in which speech which is not deceptive, threatening or possibly abusive, could give rise to liability in tort for wilful infringement of another’s right to personal safety. The right to report the truth is justification in itself. That is not to say that the right of disclosure is absolute, for a person may owe a duty to treat information as private or confidential. But there is no general law prohibiting the publication of facts which will cause distress to another, even if that is the person’s intention.’

Just in: Chetham's pupil wins in Cleveland

Chetham's upper sixth-form pianist Yuanfan Yang yesterday won first prize in the senior division at the Cleveland International Piano Competition for young performers (12-18). Yuanfan is a former winner of the BBC Young Musician of the Year piano section and is a fine composer as well as a brilliant performer. Congratulations!

As part of his prize, Yuanfan wins a debut recital at the Frick Collection in New York. The concert will take place on 13 August.

Greetings meanwhile from the seriously buzzy trade fair Classical:NEXT in Rotterdam. I'm here for a few days and presented a session on gender equality in the music world, with a fine panel of speakers including Gillian Moore of the Southbank Centre, Susanna Eastburn of Sound and Music and James Hannam of the PRS for Music Foundation. Lively discussion with valuable contributions from the floor. Blogging on iPhone is not ideal, so more when I'm home...