Open air spectaculars - or muddy field gigs?

Hope you enjoyed that all-star Munich outdoor opera concert t'other day. I've been having a chuckle over Amanda Holloway's piece over at Sinfinimusic.com about the highs and lows of summer spectaculars, from "extreme page-turning" to dive-bombing herons, so delved into my archive to find something I wrote for the Independent a few years ago on a similar topic. As the clouds are gathering today, it seems worth rerunning.

At the Waldbuhne, of course, they seem to have a way of getting it right, sparklers and all...but closer to home, it's low-flying Smarties and birdshit in the harp...

......What could be nicer than a classical summer spectacular? To the audience, it’s the perfect night out: take some friends, a picnic and a bottle of wine and enjoy some beautiful music in the leafy open air. Maybe the evening will finish with a thrilling firework display. But be warned: the duck noises you hear during the slow movement of the symphony may not actually emerge from a duck. It could just as easily be a disgruntled musician lurking behind the scenes with a quack machine, bent on sabotage.

At their best, outdoor summer concerts are fun for everybody, including the musicians in the orchestra. At their worst, though, the conditions in which the players have to operate, combined with awkward journeys, long, difficult programmes often catastrophically under-rehearsed, all for payment that’s little better than an insult, can mean that disgruntlement is the best they can hope for. A “rank-and-file” musician is usually paid a flat fee of £80 for such a day, including the performance, one three-hour rehearsal and the time it takes to travel to often out-of-the-way venues. These concerts are known in the profession as “muddy field gigs”. But the freelance musicians I spoke to were so anxious about complaining of the way they’re treated that they asked me to change their names, citing the risk that “we might never work again”.

The biggest hazard – which will come as no surprise – is the British “summer” weather. We’ve all shivered our way through such concerts under umbrellas. Jane, a harpist, recounts, “You spend a lot of time leaping around after the sheets of your music as it blows away! One time it rained so hard that a lake formed in front of the stage and outside buses were turning over in the mud.” Michael, a violinist, recounts stories of driving rain across the platform during Rossini’s William Tell Overture (“Never had the storm music seemed so appropriate!”) and doing gigs “wearing long-johns and jeans under my concert suit”.

Jane faces all kinds of extra problems in transporting her instrument: harps are large, expensive and heavy. “I always try to drive the harp up to the stage’s back entrance and once I drove over the central power cable and all the electricity went off! I often have to be towed back to the road afterwards because otherwise I get stuck in the mud with the car wheels going round and round. And if you’re on a beach you have to watch out for the tides.” Worse, “a few weeks ago a bird shat on my harp. Right into the mechanism. It’s almost impossible to clean it out.”

Indignities don’t only come from birds. One violinist recalled a “Last Night of the Proms” programme during which his valuable Italian instrument was damaged by some flying Smarties from the audience. Another musician had just experienced an outdoor concert in the north of England at which an excessively jingoistic presenter, clad in Union Jack outfit and hat, had found it amusing “not only to make quips slagging off ‘frogs’ but also to pick out members of the orchestra to humiliate. He was saying to the audience things like, ‘This is Mary, she got her roots done just in time for this evening’ or ‘This is Lizzie, she’s pregnant – ooh, we know what you’ve been doing!’ Nobody ever asks if a presenter peddling racist attitudes and personal insults is OK with us and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.”

So much for the compères – what about the star turns? A big-name singer earns thousands or upwards for a big outdoor gig, while the orchestra plays for peanuts. That’s fine, says Jane – as long as those soloists really can sing. “I did a concert with one famous singer who actually couldn’t. He’d had to have some of the music transposed down because he couldn’t reach the high notes. We started off laughing, but by the end he was so bad, and being paid so much, that it stopped being funny. He was kind to us in the band, but at one point in the rehearsal he declared, ‘Sorry, I’ve got some technical problems,’ and the first horn called out, ‘We all know that, mate!’”

All the players were keen to stress that “muddy field gigs” can be useful and, on a good day, enjoyable. They’re an excellent way for young musicians to jump in the deep end, learn the repertoire and perform it on minimal rehearsal (“after which anything seems easy,” comments one musician). “You never know which the good gigs are going to be,” Michael remarks. “The ones that sound the most glamorous are frequently the worst, while ones that you might think will be dubious can be wonderful experiences. One of my best was a free local authority gig near Huntingdon with a little chamber orchestra. It was cold, but we had the most fabulous show. That was because the conductor, John Wilson, was terrific. He insisted on us using loads of vibrato to get a big, fat, Hollywood tone – it sounded fantastic, it was great music-making and the audience loved it.”

Sometimes, though, it’s just too much to take. “Once we were in a big park at the end of the season when the weather was chilly,” Michael recounts, “and it was a bad date all the way through. There was a generator the size of a lorry churning out diesel fumes right next to the stage. We had a huge programme, almost three hours of music, including ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ which sounded ludicrous on a tiny orchestra with virtually no rehearsal. I was sitting on the inside third desk [row] of the first violins and the lighting strip stopped just in front of us so my desk partner and I couldn’t read our music and we got colder and colder – lighting helps to keep you warm.  As the evening went on, my desk partner became more and more furious. And at the end, in the 1812 Overture, the fireworks were right next to us and when one huge one went off beside us, he just lost it. In front of 6,000 people. He stood up in the middle of the piece, got his fiddle case out from under his chair, wiped down his violin and bow meticulously with a cloth, put them away, jumped off the stage and went home! Afterwards he thought he’d be sacked. But he’d had such a terrible evening and been so angry about it that the management didn’t dare go near him.”

But these highly trained, accomplished and dedicated musicians agree that the worst indignity of all is that audiences will come to a concert like this and assume that “that’s what classical music is”. “Some outdoor concerts are good,” says Jane. “But usually you turn up, you freeze, you have only a top-and-tail rehearsal, there’ll be a bad soloist who’s married to the director, and it’s amplified so you don’t know what it really sounds like. These concerts are part of our job, they’re good experience, people enjoy them and we shouldn’t be too precious about them. It’s a fun evening. But surely not at the price of people thinking that that’s all there is to classical music?”

Dante's piano inferno: three days to go

The pianist Angelo Villani, an astonishing Australian-Italian artist based in London who's featured strongly in these posts before, is raising funds for his debut album. It's a superb programme based around Dante's Inferno, featuring Liszt's Dante Sonata, Angelo's own transcription of Dido's Lament from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, some rare music by Hans von Bülow, and a fantasia on Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, uniting keyboard versions by Bülow, Liszt and Angelo himself. I've written his sleeve notes.

Angelo's burgeoning career was cut short in his teens by an injury to his right hand (karate is to blame). After 25 years and consultations with hundreds of specialists, he has been able to resume playing and his comeback began in 2012 with a debut recital at St James Piccadilly. This will be his first CD.

He's now found 77 per cent of the cash he needs, but with three days left, there's still a good bit to go...please help him!

Here's his Kickstarter page.

Proms are upon us

I've written a vaguely grumpy piece for the Independent about why this year's Proms programme feels just that bit meh. I've only done this because I love the Proms and I want them to be purrfect.

Let's just explore the business about the Proms' new music on TV a little more, as a lady from the press office has sent me a lot of information.

The Proms contains no fewer than 30 pieces of music that are receiving world, European, UK or London premieres. This is an admirable count and one would expect them to be proud of it and wish to relay those works to the widest possible audience on TV.

Last year several composers of my acquaintance were utterly shell-shocked to discover that while the Proms in which their music was being done were to be televised, their pieces had been cut from the TV broadcast and moved to a designated area for new music online. At this year's Proms press launch, Edward Blakeman was challenged about this and he offered a robust defence of "curating" Proms for the TV audience (the concept of "curating" is maybe a topic for another time).

Apparently this year 16 pieces of music will be filmed for online only, but just three of those are new works. Apparently I am therefore off the mark to say that "certain pieces of music that are filmed will be viewable online only".

The three new works that will be filmed but not televised are by John Woolrich, Tansy Davies and Luca Francesconi. (So: certain pieces of music that are filmed will be viewable online only.)

The full TV schedule for the Proms is online here.

Here is how new music from the Proms on TV will look:

New music really is an important part of the Proms television offer across BBC Two, BBC Four, CBBC and online this year. New commissions by Gary Carpenter (world premiere of BBC commission Dadaville) and Eleanor Alberga (world premiere of Arise, Athena!) feature in the live First and Last Night TV broadcasts on BBC Two. New music is also broadcast within BBC Four’s weekly curated programmes on Thursday, Friday and Sunday evenings throughout the festival including: a concerto and recital series on Thursday evenings which will devote an episode to the world premiere of HK Gruber’sInto the open… and also feature the world premiere of Hugh Wood’s BBC commission Epithalamium; a series on Friday evenings featuring European premieres of works by Jonathan Newman and Eric Whitacre; and an 8-part symphony series presented by Sir Mark Elder and Katie Derham on Sunday evenings which will devote 5 episodes to 20^th century music, 2 episodes to new symphonic works (the first Proms performance of Brett Dean’s Pastoral Symphony and the world premiere of James Macmillan’s BBC commission, Symphony No. 4) and the world premiere of Anna Meredith’s BBC commission Smatter Hauler. The London premiere of Anna Meredith’s Connect It will also be included in the broadcast of the Ten Pieces Prom on CBBC.

So, it looks as if around a third of the new/newish pieces will find their way onto our TV screens in one form or another, which is good news. Thanks, chaps.

ENO loses its head

ENO's Benvenuto Cellini, directed by Terry Gilliam

ENO is to lose its head. The company announced this morning that John Berry is stepping down after 20 years with the company, ten of them as artistic director. It seems that his departure will take effect with the close of this season, since Berry says he intends to spend the summer "deciding on my next role".

ENO has been in financial trouble for a very long time. It's both a tragic and ridiculous situation, and one with roots that go back way further than Berry's directorship. And it's a crying shame. London is a huge European capital, with a population forecast to rise to 10 million sooner rather than later, and it deserves at least two opera houses of world quality - which is what ENO has been of late, troubles aside. The audience exists, but it must be maintained. The will has to exist too. The will has, indeed, existed until now. Will it continue?

Those who for some mysterious reason would like to see it turn into a middle-of-the-road theatre offering middle-of-the-road productions of ever-popular hits might be rubbing their hands with gleeful hope. Those of us who love cutting-edge productions, the taking of risks, the soaring of artistic standards and the pushing out of repertoire boundaries are not so happy. Yes, some productions have been more successful than others and there've been a few turkeys - but the same is true round the corner at Covent Garden, which is funded to another tune altogether.

Without Berry we might never have had such stupendous efforts as Martinu's Giulietta - a gorgeous opera and Richard Jones production to match - which didn't sell, but shouldn't have been missed for the world. We wouldn't have had Weinberg's The Passenger. We wouldn't have had that now-classic Peter Grimes. We wouldn't have had the glorious Jones production of Meistersingers coming to London from its Welsh origins, or the David McVicar all-UK-star Rosenkavalier - two of the best evenings I've ever had at any opera house anywhere in the world. And we wouldn't have had Terry Gilliam's Berliozes. I rest my case.

If change is needed at ENO - and, sadly, it seems that it is - that change has to be in its pricing policies, the way it sells itself, and maybe the pressing ahead of creative outreach and education work, a field in which it is sometimes perceived to be lagging behind. Artistically, dear ENO, keep your vision and ambition. Please keep believing that where there's a will, there's a way.

Anthony Whitworth-Jones, who is heading the board's artistic committee, is one of the most experienced people in the business, with both Glyndebourne and Garsington long under his belt; one senses a safe pair of hands in which confidence can be placed, and this can only be a good thing. Good luck to you all.

A treat from Munich

Grab a coffee, let in the sunshine and enjoy this Jonas Plus fix from Munich's Königsplatz, which took place a couple of weeks ago on 27 June. With Kaufmann, Anna Netrebko, Ildar Abdrazakov, Thomas Hampson and the Janacek Philharmonic of Ostrava conducted by Claudio Vandelli.

Not so long now until I'm off to Munich myself for the annual end of the opera festival rapidly followed by a little excursion to another part of Bavaria where there's a Wagner festival...so it's good to get in the mood for the summer from underneath a heap of work, nice though the work is.

"Self-taught" is not the panacea you think

The other day I went to Cambridge and had a fascinating chat with Stephen Layton, the inspirational director of Trinity College Choir. Layton is one of those rare people who not only lives for music, but whom you can't help seeing does so. You see it in the way his face illuminates as he talks about the composers he loves to perform - whether it's Byrd, Purcell or Eriks Esenvalds - and the disarming sincerity with which he recalls his own start in musical life: he came from a council estate background and found that music "gives me something to live for". He won a scholarship to Eton, came to King's Cambridge as organ scholar, and the rest is history.



We got talking about how many of the best-known British conductors come out of Cambridge. Some musicians of my acquaintance are cynical about this. They think it's the old boys' network that ensures the career advancement. Now, I can't be sure how much of a role that does play. But one thing is clear. Cambridge University is (or used to be - I hope it still is) a melting pot of multi-talented people. If you have the gumption to get an orchestra together and conduct it, you can do so. Nobody will help you, but the raw material will be there: students to recruit to your band, chapels to perform in, halls to hire if you raise the money, college bars in which to put up posters. If you step up, take the initiative and make it happen, you can ensure that you have more opportunities to stand in front of an actual orchestra and perform than many conservatory conducting students will ever get. You won't find any conducting lessons in the music faculty - you might as well be studying languages, medicine or anthropology - but you might have the chance to teach yourself by learning on the job the hard way.

And for some, indeed for most of us, that experience will teach you the things you never forget. You learn to teach yourself by being forced to work out, from within, how it's done.

Some of the best instrumental teachers will leave their students with this attitude and the analytical ability to keep working it out for themselves long after they have finished their formal studies. (That was how I tackled, in my thirties, pieces of piano music I wouldn't have been able to get near as a student. You work out what the problem is, what you need to be able to do, and how to practise in such a way that it becomes physically possible.)

So, to some degree, all musicians need to be "self-taught", because a musical career is an ongoing process in which if you don't keep moving forwards, you move backwards. If you work hard in a systematic way, you'll improve. If you don't, your abilities will ossify. And this is true at any and every age.

But let's face it: you will probably also have some advantage in terms of technique if you have actually had some formal tuition (and this goes for conductors too).

Therefore the fuss attending one young competitor of the Tchaikovsky Competition has reached a point where it risks being seriously misunderstood.

Articles have been appearing saying that Lucas Debargue, fourth prize winner, is "self-taught". Even though his biography makes it perfectly clear that he went to the Paris Conservatoire. It seems he was a late starter: taking up piano from 11 (as opposed to 3), and serious music studies from 20 (not 12). That's not quite the same thing.

It's dangerous to overplay the "self-taught" card because, sad to say, a large part of the British public thinks music happens by magic. That it's something for "fun". That it doesn't take hard work to be good at it. That if you want your kids to have music in their lives as something to enjoy, they don't have to practise every day (despite the fact that it'll be a lot more fun in the end if they can play decently). They seem to believe, too, that if you by-pass all the traditional channels but follow your dream in any case, you'll be bound to come out as some kind of genius. That traditional studies are somehow bad and the inspiration of the moment is good, indeed is everything.

Britain's got canine talent

Pardon my French, but this is bollocks. Britain's Got Talent probably has a lot to answer for, but please note: it was won by a dog.

It bothers me, too, that this attitude is something that might somehow give governments carte blanche to cut funding for music education.

There are people, for sure, who can indeed make some headway on raw talent. But music does not happen by magic. Music happens, for the vast majority of people wishing to make it, by hard graft, long hours of solitary slog, gritty determination and personal sacrifice. Yes, you can teach yourself and many important lessons will be learned that way. But "self-taught" does not mean miracles. "Self-taught" means you did that work, but maybe you did more of it on your own than others might - and maybe you'd have done even better if you'd had good tuition from the get-go. By all means, praise a wonderful young pianist with a slightly unconventional approach. But please don't mistake it for a miracle.

7/7 - the 10th anniversary

It is ten years since the London tube and bus bombings of 7/7. 52 people were murdered in the attacks, and hundreds were injured.

That day I was supposed to go to the Hampton Court Flower Show with a friend. We didn't make it. Instead, I was at home trying to get hold of Tom, who had gone to a rehearsal at the south bank, and various musician friends who were on their way to the Guildhall, the Royal College and probably the airport.

I remember the sense of unreality that accompanied the fright until their texts pinged back to me. And, much, much worse, the grim, appalling news by email later that told me that a young executive from Rhinegold Publishing (where I worked for eight years and which produces Classical Music Magazine, Opera Now, Music Teacher, and the piano magazine I used to edit) had been killed at Edgware Road on her way to work. Her name was Jenny Nicholson.

A group of friends led by the violinist Philippe Graffin had a concert the following night at the Wigmore Hall and I had to get on the tube to go home from it. And forced myself down that escalator knowing that if I didn't do it then, I would probably never do it again, and it's very difficult to live in London if you can't face getting on the tube, and that a bunch of criminal thugs were not going to scare me into missing that performance, no siree. At the start of the second half, Philippe thanked the audience for coming out to the concert. An audience member called right back: "Thank you for playing for us!" Here's the account from the time...

Some of the musicians came over for dinner the following week and we listened to Schubert. This seemed the ultimate consoling music. I think it remains so.

Edward Gardner bows out

Photos both by Richard Hubert Smith

Yesterday Edward Gardner took his final bow as music director of English National Opera after the last night of The Queen of Spades.

The new incumbent, Mark Wigglesworth, steps up in the new season. We love Mark too, but we are going to miss Ed like the blazes. I have no doubt that the brightest of brilliant futures awaits this thrilling, charismatic and galvanisingly energetic musician. The good news is he's coming back to do Tristan & Isolde next year.

ENO sent out a range of pictures from the event. Below, John Berry, flanked by the orchestra, bids farewell to Ed. I hope the figures high above them are not representatives of Arts Council England.

The other Prokofiev

I had a lovely interview a few weeks ago with Gabriel Prokofiev: composer, grandson of Sergei, founder of Nonclassical and composer of a Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra which is now on the new secondary school Ten Pieces list compiled as a music resource for schools by the BBC. It was in the Independent while I was away in Turkey. Here is a longer version with a good few chunks of bonus material.

Gabriel Prokofiev is pondering, over a Turkish lunch in Bethnal Green, a surprise development in his career as composer. The BBC has picked a movement from one of his most famous compositions to date, the Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra, to feature in its new Ten Pieces list for schoolchildren aged 11 to 14. The list is second stage in an initiative that began with a nationwide project to help schools introduce younger pupils to ten pieces of classical music.

This concerto’s mix of a contemporary invention – the scratching and sampling of a DJ on turntables – with a traditional classical format exemplifies Gabriel  Prokofiev’s musical inventiveness and looks like a perfect choice to introduce secondary school pupils to the sometimes mysterious spheres of contemporary classical music.

“I’m thrilled about this – I couldn’t believe it,” Prokofiev says. “I’d heard about Ten Pieces and I’m a big fan of the project. It’s worrying that music education doesn’t seem to be thorough enough – there could be a lot more – and this is a very efficient way of introducing children to some key repertoire. It’s exciting to see a contemporary piece in there and hopefully it’s a chance to encourage young people at the age when you’re developing your taste in music and deciding which genres you’re into. I’m hoping that this will help to bring contemporary classical into their list of choices.”

If you see the name ‘Prokofiev’ on a musical list, you might well assume that it indicates Sergei Prokofiev, one of the best-loved composers of the last century. Gabriel, who turns 40 this year, is his grandson – and in many ways he is a chip off the old block, sharing with Sergei an intent gaze, high cheekbones and a quiet, concentrated demeanour.

In other ways, of course, they are very different. Although he says he feels a strong affinity with his Russian heritage, Gabriel Prokofiev seems a Londoner through and through, living in Hackney Downs with his partner, a French-Congolese academic and author, and their three children whom he ferries to primary school in a cargo box attached to his bicycle. His studio in Bethnal Green is in a crumbling 1960s block that, he says, is facing potential demolition. The urban flavour of his music remains powerful: a mix of driving rhythms, gritty timbres and outlines, and a lyrical thread lurking under the surface that sometimes recalls the sardonic irony and fantastical textures of his grandfather’s works. His Violin Concerto, premiered last year at the Proms by Daniel Hope, evokes a narrative about the outbreak of the First World War and included marches with an unmistakably Prokofiev-like bite.

It’s entirely deliberate, he says: “I grew up listening to my grandfather’s music. My siblings and I were aware as children that we were getting some extra attention because of him – and I think it made me a bit self-conscious. I love his music, he is my grandfather and there are so many fans that it’s natural people get excited about it. But I’m quite relieved that there hasn’t been too much comparison.”

Grandpa Prokofiev

The fear of comparison, he says, made him at first over-hesitant to become a composer. “As a teenager and in my twenties I was definitely intimidated,” he admits. “Any creative process is hard graft and though you can have wonderful moments of inspiration, finishing a piece requires a lot of work. I think I was intimidated to do that. So I focused a lot more on popular music, making electronic and dance music and playing in bands. I found another way of making music. But as I got more confident and ultimately had a strong enough drive to want to do classical music, I realised I’ve just got to get on with it. As I was writing my first string quartet I planned that I was going to use a different surname - and the thought that I’d be presenting the piece not as ‘Gabriel Prokofiev’ actually freed me up a bit.”

Was he not tempted to stick with popular music – bigger sales, more income? “Sometimes I wonder if I should have stuck longer at it,” he admits. “But I was trying to juggle everything and sometimes when I was involved in a project and should have been going to record industry parties and networking, instead I was in my studio writing a string quartet. Ultimately I couldn’t help myself: I really wanted to write classical pieces and eventually I got some orchestral commissions and decided it was an unmissable opportunity.

“In pop, although you can earn more money, it’s a much more thankless world. I had run-ins with record labels because suddenly you had this weird feeling that your creative control is slipping away – they’d wanted you to make it sound more like the track that had just been no.1 last week, you had to make sure your music fitted in with certain DJs’ playlists – this whole side holds you back. For a classical commission, they never give you strict creative criteria; maybe they’ll specify the duration and the instruments, but there’s more emphasis on being original and doing your own thing. With pop music, when I started to get into the more commercial area, that started to bring with it more restrictions and requirements to conform, and that was creatively frustrating. I’d find that sometimes I’d made stuff I was really pleased with, but it turned out it was a bit too original or too quirky, and people would say ‘it’s a bit far-out, what about something like this?’, and play me something I found mundane and unimaginative. Often I felt people were making judgments just because something had been successful – it wasn’t always about the quality of the music.”

Prokofiev’s father, Oleg Prokofiev (Sergei’s younger son) was a painter and sculptor, a prominent figure in the movement known as the Nonconformists – Russian artists whose abstract work did not meet the criteria of state-approved socialist realism. His second wife was a British art historian who was allowed to travel to the USSR to research; after she died tragically young; Oleg was permitted to come to her funeral in the UK, and defected to the West while here. Gabriel’s mother was Oleg’s third wife, Frances, and he grew up in Greenwich where the family settled,

Echoes of nonconformity pepper the composer’s musical life too. Not least, a decade ago he started a record label called Nonclassical, which has evolved into a veritable movement in its own right. He says the name was largely coincidence as it derived from a pop label he had been running, entitled Nonstop – “Originally it was going to be Nonstop Classical, but that was too much of a mouthful,” he remarks. “Then the penny dropped...” Launching Nonclassical, he was among the first to devise classical club nights – presenting classical music in a nightclub setting that would feel normal and everyday to younger people and help to create a new audience. The organisation now runs a monthly event in east London.

“I’m always surprised how many young musicians and composers don’t question a status quo that gives them so few performances and reaches such limited audiences,” Prokofiev remarks. “It’s natural that we need to find ways of getting our music out there more and reaching our own peer group. A lot of different things motivate me; one is that there’s a lot of great contemporary music and it feels unfair that it’s not made accessible to many people. You can sit back and blame radio and TV, but the other option is to get out and do something about it.

“Having played in bands, I was used to this idea that you write a piece, then you gig it and your friends come and hear it. I felt strongly with my classical stuff that it would appeal to my peer group, but when it was performed in the traditional classical setting most of the audience would be twice my age – there’s nothing wrong with that, but it seemed a real shame that my friends weren’t there. That was a big motivator in getting Nonclassical going – just thinking you’ve got to present classical music like other music, in a more day to day approach, and for me that seemed pretty obvious. If you’ve put a lot of work into composing a piece and rehearsing it, then to have only one performance is criminal.”

His Concerto for Turntables is likely to have a great many more performances now that it is on the Ten Pieces list; and Prokofiev has his work cut out with a string of commissions, including more concertos – a favourite medium, he says – and more works involving dance and drama. He has also been asked to add some new musical creatures to the Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saëns and is trying to decide which to pick. I’m about to suggest a cat – when I remember that possibly the most famous cat in musical history is grandpa Prokofiev’s, in his perennial childhood favourite, Peter and the Wolf. “Probably a no-go area,” Gabriel smiles.

Congratulations, Tchaikovsky Competition. You have an all-male piano final.

We are not amused. Can it REALLY be the case that no women, not even Maria Mazo, were considered good enough to have a try for the final? Or is it same-old same-old yet again?

The piano jury is all male too.

The cello jury includes one woman. The cello final also includes one woman.

The violin jury includes three women. The violin final also includes three women.

Make of this what you will, because it all seems so wonderfully coincidental that I am stumped.

You can watch the final live, and catch up on earlier rounds, on Medici.tv, here.

Good luck to them all and may the best, er, man win.

Blown away by Chopin in Istanbul

Here's one of my talks from Istanbul. They're now all on Youtube. This one was dedicated to the topic of the young Chopin and preceded a mesmerising account of the E minor Piano Concerto by Daniil Trifonov, no less. If any of us hadn't been blown away by the weather, he blew away anything that remained. Enjoy.

My visit to Istanbul this week...

Here's where I'm going tomorrow...

...and here's what I'm doing, for the Istanbul Music Festival, in a series of pre-concert talks in the gardens of the Hagia Eirene Museum, Topkapi Palace.

22 June The Young Chopin. This evening Daniil Trifonov performs Chopin's Piano Concerto No.1 as part of a programme of varied concertos with different soloists, with the Moscow Soloists. In the talk, I'll be looking at the influences that fed into the formation of the young Chopin's distinctive style.

23 June The Fantastical World of the French Baroque. Preceding a concert featuring Magdalena Kožena (mezzo) and Emmanuelle Haïm (conductor). An introduction to the extraordinary relationship between Louis XIV and his composer in chief, Lully; the enduring influence of French Baroque music; and the splendour of the world into which it emerged.

24 June Brahms, Schumann, Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim: The Indivisibles. Brahms galore: Christian Tetzlaff performs the Violin Concerto and the concert also includes the Symphony No.1. What a wonderful chance to explore the way these vital relationships are preserved in Brahms's music. 

26 June Mozart and the Violin. Arabella Steinbacher (violin) and Maxim Rysanov (viola) feature with the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra in two of Mozart’s violin concertos and the Sinfonia Concertante. A perfect opportunity to explore Mozart's somewhat chequered relationship with the violin, and with his violinist father. 

It's a great festival. Explore the website for the complete programme, here.

Please join us if you're there, and come and say hello.

Pianist soldiers on with broken shoulder...

Last Friday I was up in Ulverston for the music festival. I did a pre-concert talk with Tasmin Little and Martin Roscoe. The atmosphere is warm and friendly, the town and its countryside almost too pretty to be true and there's gluten-free food galore. And on the train on the way up you go through Carnforth, where Brief Encounter was filmed. This is a good trip for old-film buffs, especially with Stan Laurel being Ulverston's biggest local celeb.

Anthony Hewitt (left) and me with local celeb Stan Laurel
& his pal outside Ulverston's Coronation Hall

Other than Anthony Hewitt, that is. He's the director of the Ulverston Festival and a very fine pianist indeed. But about six weeks ago disaster struck. He had a cycling accident in which he suffered a broken collar-bone and dislocated right shoulder.

You may remember that back in 2012 he was The Olympianist, cycling from Land's End to John O'Groats and giving a recital wherever he stopped each night, to raise money for musical and sports charities.

Still, it took a shoulder injury for the TV news to go and film him...playing music for left hand alone, written for Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in the First World War.

Better late than never: here he is on ITV.
http://www.itv.com/news/border/story/2015-06-16/the-show-must-go-on/

Excuse me, but why isn't this man conducting Wagner at Covent Garden and Bayreuth?

Here's my review for The Independent of Tristan und Isolde at Longborough Festival Opera the other day. GO. NOW. Only two more performances, one of which is today.

I'm seeing Tristan again at Bayreuth in August, incidentally, and I challenge their very, very, very celebrated Wagner conductor to do anything with it that is even slightly more powerful, devastating, thrilling, detailed, loving, intelligent, wise and glorious - more downright Wagnery in the very best sense - than Anthony Negus (left)  did the other night. So there. Why isn't this man conducting there, and at the ROH and at ENO and all the rest? Their loss is Longborough's gain - but they are missing out.

Here is his article about his life with Wagner, from Longborough.

****

Tristan und Isolde, Longborough Festival Opera, Gloucestershire

16 June 2015

Tristan und Isolde, Wagner’s vast paen to love and loss, has reached the intimate setting of Longborough Festival Opera in a thoughtful new staging. But its ultimate marvel is on the podium.

One weird conundrum in the world of classical music is that some conductors who wield enormous power are not especially inspiring musicians, while a few masters of their art, equipped with peerless understanding, remain tucked away working in unlikely corners such as the Cotswolds. Longborough’s music director, Anthony Negus – a disciple of the now legendary Wagner conductor Reginald Goodall – is a Wagnerian maestro of a calibre that should rightfully be heard and lauded at the likes of Covent Garden and Bayreuth. Meanwhile, it is Longborough’s wisdom and good fortune to have him.

Presiding over a reduced-scale orchestra, Negus offers exceptional, profound knowledge of and empathy for this music, letting it fly by building the aerodynamics of its structure – whether streamlining to perfection the lengthy build-ups of tension in Act I, sustaining the hushed ecstasy of the love scene or bringing to life the raw agony of the wounded Tristan in Act III. His placement of details – for instance, homing in on a light-shaft of harp here or a deep-set heartbeat rhythm there – bring continual insights. And he inspires everybody, from Isolde to the bass clarinet, to excel themselves. The musical results are deeply human and emotionally shattering.

Carmen Jakobi directs a staging based in suitable strength and simplicity, set within clean-edged designs by Kimie Nakano and pleasing, rich-coloured lighting by Ben Ormerod. Two dancers – Katie Lusby and Mbulelo Ndabeni – portray Tristan and Isolde’s inner emotions at key moments. This device is overused in opera productions today, yet here they contribute just enough, without interfering – and they are superb dancers. Isolde’s hapless husband, King Marke, is shadowed on stage by the bass clarinet in his monologue. The opera would not suffer without such tricks, but they are judiciously managed.

Rachel Nicholls, singing her first run as Isolde following her triumph as Brünnhilde in the Ring, offers a calm, centred, imperious interpretation; vocally she embraces all of the role’s challenges, from volume and precision through tonal colour to unflagging stamina. With time her performance is bound to deepen, but she sets her own bar high from the start.

As her Tristan, the dark, steely-centred and extrovert tenor tone of Peter Wedd proves an ideal match – indeed, he offers far more convincing acting and more beautiful singing than some one encounters in higher-profile venues. Presenting the anguish of Act III with such devastating intensity is no small feat.

The Norwegian bass Frode Olsen as King Marke is a further highlight; his artistry (including perhaps the evening’s finest diction) as Tristan’s betrayal cuts him deep makes this scene just as heart-breaking as Tristan and Isolde’s own.

Catherine Carby as Brangäne is a warm-toned foil to Nicholls’ bright Isolde; Stuart Pendred is a sympathetic Kurwenal; and the chorus of sailors pulls its weight. Some ragged edges around the actual playing of the orchestra and its off-stage horns are audible, but forgivable.

Two performances remain. Go.

The Who?

The other day, into my in-box popped one of those press releases emblazoned with the portentous word EMBARGOED. This indicates something Very Important Is Happening, only we're not allowed to say - or such is the implication.

Turns out that the reason is that the recently released orchestral recording of The Who's Quadrophenia has been denied its rightful spot in the classical chart (at the very top) because it isn't actually classical music. The press release quotes composer Pete Townshend's fury at the snobbism of the classical world, as expressed on Twitter: “So musical snobbery in the “classical” elite is still alive & kicking then? F**k ’em. There’s a huge team behind this album, entirely rooted in the practical world of recorded classical music, who deserve better than this petty slap-down. I know I'm a rock dinosaur and I'm happy to be one, but the team on Classic Quadrophenia are all young, creative and brilliant.” – Pete Townshend  

So is a 'rock opera' a 'classical' opera or not? I once had a look at this issue for The Independent. It was ten years ago and the website has been revamped since then, unfortunately making it impossible to open the article. Therefore I'm re-running it below. My feelings about the negative impact of insisting on putting things in boxes haven't changed.

Incidentally, in the Olden Days, "music" in a newspaper review section meant what we now call "classical music", while other stuff was called "pop music". At some point - in the eighties? the nineties? not sure - the situation was reversed. This was the doing of the media, not of the art form. Recently Julian Lloyd Webber suggested that we should get rid of these labels once and for all, and I think he's right. As Korngold once said, music is music.

Meanwhile, the implications of not classifying orchestral Quadrophenia as classical music are potentially quite positive - depending on who has suggested this and why.

Let me explain. The Musicians Union pays different rates to orchestral players for classical recordings and for non-classical recordings.

If you are a rank-and-file member of an orchestra, the MU rate for a classical session of three hours' duration is £71.76.

For a non-classical recording of the same length, the same player would be paid £120.

It would therefore be a lot more expensive to record a big orchestra playing something that is not classified as classical music. And no doubt this contributes to certain classifications of certain stuff as classical when it is actually...something else.

The reverse might potentially apply in this case - which would be an admirable contrast.

Among my biggest regrets is having missed the 1960s. Not the fashions or the drugs, I hasten to add, but the music. Creative things were happening then that just didn’t apply during my teens in the unfortunate Eighties. When The Who released its double album Tommy in 1969, it coined a new concept of ‘rock opera’, following it up with Quadrophenia in 1973. Both were later made into feature films, but by then I was busy practising piano, violin, oboe and ballet, so I missed the lot. Therefore a new DVD set of The Who performing live – Tommy from 1989 and Quadrophenia from a 1996 tour of a specially adapted revival – is my first taste of Peter Townshend’s ‘rock operas’. They’re original, stirring, peculiarly irresistible. They’re certainly ‘rock’. But are they remotely ‘operatic’?

The New Grove Dictionary, musical academia’s Bible, gives the following definition of opera: “The generic term for musical dramatic works in which the actors sing some or all of their parts. Opera is a union of music, drama and spectacle …” Its most extreme manifestation is Wagner’s ideal, the gesamtkunstwerk – ‘complete art work’, combining music, drama and spectacle to the highest degree. More generally, when you go to an opera, you expect to see a good story and believable characters in, hopefully, a halfway decent production, with music that is appropriate, inspired, sophisticated and well performed. You hope to come out moved and uplifted.

A ‘purist’, of course, would have plenty of objections to calling Tommy and Quadrophenia ‘operas’. For a start, in most operas worth their salt, you find a variety of musical structures: dramatic scenas, choruses, love duets, reflective solo arias and ensembles where characters simultaneously express different viewpoints. The singers have to act, staying in their roles for the duration. But the majority of the songs in Tommy and Quadrophenia are simply songs. They progress, in Tommy, one after the other without speech; telling a story, but without the wide variety you’d expect in a ‘real’ opera.  In these staged versions, unlike the feature films, the members of the band aren’t in costume (given Roger Daltrey’s muscular good looks in 1996, that’s fine with me) and they convey a variety of different viewpoints as the stories unfold. The guest artists do adopt characters and costumes: in Tommy, Patti Labelle sings The Acid Queen, Billy Idol the bullying Cousin Kevin, and there are guest spots for Phil Collins and Elton John; Quadrophenia features Billy Idol as the Ace Face.

On the other hand, Townshend – who’d penned operas and studied orchestration, but didn’t expect The Who to perform such things – lets rip when opportunity allows. Tommy’s recurring plaint, “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me”, is as raw and vulnerable as anything you’ll hear in Covent Garden, though probably not every singer could bring it off as convincingly as Daltrey. And Tommy’s overture is as fizzy and galvanising as any Rossini.

Opera traditionally deals with emotion on a grand scale – from Monteverdi’s chilling 16^th-century vision of a Roman emperor and his mistress murdering their enemies in L’Incoronazione di Poppea, through Wagner’s depiction of the end of the world in Götterdammerung, and Verdi’s musical transformations of stories by Shakespeare and Victor Hugo. More operas flounder because of lousy libretti than for any other reason – huge chunks of Italian bel canto, French Romanticism and German Expressionism, not to mention works from the later 20^th century, are rendered third-rate because of their hopeless stories. Timelessness, humanity and a well-constructed plot can count for much in an opera’s longevity.

Tommy and Quadrophenia both involve powerful emotions, springing from a shared underlying theme: the legacy of a generation’s wartime traumas upon its children. Unlike many operas other than Wagner’s, words and music originate (mainly) with the same creator. Tommy’s plot lets it down a bit, requiring major suspension of disbelief: a child witnesses the murder of his father by his mother’s lover, turns blind, deaf and dumb in consequence, becomes a pinball champion, then is cured by a smashed mirror and turns into a pseudo-Messiah who nonetheless remains alienated by the severity of his experience. Hmm.

Quadrophenia is more internalised: most of it takes place inside Jimmy’s muddled head. Yet this adolescent anti-hero’s spiritual journey involves emotions that run so high, with imagery so strong and archetypal, that Townshend borrows directly from Wagner’s Das Rheingold to depict a boat journey. Wagner writes about gods building Valhalla, Townshend about an alienated teenager running away to Brighton; yet their protagonists are tormented to the limits of their experience, whether through godhood or through drink and drugs. Wagner’s monumental power matches the myths behind his stories; Townshend’s rock soundworld fits Jimmy’s angry internal agony to perfection.

It’s in Quadrophenia that Townshend really crosses the great divide. The four different aspects of Jimmy’s mind are each represented by a leitmotif, a Wagnerian association of idea with musical theme, which join together at the climax when Jimmy is stranded alone on a rock in the sea and experiences his spiritual epiphany (“It’s difficult to make four leitmotifs work together,” comments Townshend on the DVD. “It’s easy if you’re Bach, or that bloke from Coldplay…”). In the original album, each member of the band represented a different part of the four-fold personality. Meanwhile, there’s a gesamtkunstwerk idea too: in this version, Jimmy’s narration is portrayed on film, images of the sea return constantly, and near the start a lengthy instrumental interlude accompanies a montage of newsreel footage, tracing the evolution of teenagers against a background of the Blitz, Churchill, Hiroshima, rationing and the Beatles. What’s more, Quadrophenia’s subject matter – growing up – is timeless.

In some ways, Quadrophenia is more successfully operatic than many ‘official’ operas of the same time, not least because it’s a sophisticated fusion of artforms, primarily well-wrought music, with something powerful to communicate. Townshend reached his audience by writing about alienation; but in the Seventies his classical contemporaries, experiencing alienation themselves, frequently forgot their audience altogether. Stockhausen’s operas (like Donnerstag aus Licht, 1978) are too naval-gazingly bizarre to expect much uptake. Michael Tippett, who wrote his own libretti, sometimes created psychological stories so convoluted that they can remain baffling even if you like the music. As for Harrison Birtwistle, there can be few figures in contemporary culture so showered with critical awards yet so unwelcomed by the general public. One could argue that opera is opera whether or not anyone goes to see it, and that the mere presence of an audience is certainly no assurance of artistic quality. But if the audience is alienated by both story and sounds, no opera, rock or otherwise, is likely to live for long.

The Who’s rock operas connect with a public wide enough to include classical music journalists. We were all teenagers once. We’ve been there too, even if we were practising three instruments at the time. And we love good music, well performed, whatever its genre. Tommy and Quadrophenia are as characteristic of their era as any opera by Mozart or Wagner; now, with our feet planted firmly in a new century, it seems they can also stand the test of time.

Labels can be deceptive; at worst, they stifle creative thought. Quadrophenia may not be a traditional opera, but it’s a bloody marvellous band performing terrific music that tells a strong story, blending song, drama and spectacle in a manner of its own. Moved? Exhilarated? Uplifted? You bet. Rock opera? Yeah. Why not?