Visas for Life - a return to Lithuania

It is Lithuania's National Day today, and for the first time Symphony Hall, Birmingham, is to resound to The Sea by Mikolajus Čiurlionis, the CBSO conducted by Mirga Gražynitė-Tyla, with live-painted visual interpretations by Norman Perryman (see his recent guest post here). I'm going up to hear it. 

As Norman mentioned the other day, I have Lithuanian roots, or sort of. My ancestors were from a small town now called Skudas, where they lived for several centuries until pogroms in the late 19th century persuaded them to seek a new life on the other side of the world, when they fetched up in South Africa. I visited Lithuania for the first time 15 years ago, in 2004, when the violinist Philippe Graffin suggested I could come out to Vilnius to cover a world premiere that he and the violist Nobuko Imai were giving, of Vytautas Barkauskas's Duo Concertante, and do a spot of roots-finding while I was about it. This seemed like a good idea, especially as there was a heap of interest in Lithuania at that point, since the Baltic states had just joined the EU. I went - and wrote, and wrote. And found myself transformed, for press ticket purposes, into Dzesika Duciene.

Since today is today, I've been looking up some of the old articles I produced then and would like to offer you part of an extended piece I wrote for the Jewish Quarterly. 

It seems a long time ago and I am sure things have changed a lot in the intervening decade and a half.  So, please bear in mind that this article first appeared in 2004. And if you're at Symphony Hall tonight, do say hello.

VISAS FOR LIFE – A MUSICAL TRIBUTE IN VILNIUS

Jessica Duchen

This is part of an article that first appeared in the Jewish Quarterly in 2004

The wide, lonely landscape sprawls beneath the plane, pine forests basking in Nordic evening sun that transforms the sky into an expanse of blazing gold. My heartstrings twang; my knees turn to water. I am going to Lithuania. I am the first member of my family to go to Lithuania in a hundred years. If everything had been different around 1904, then when we touch down in Vilnius, I might have been coming home.

I am visiting Lithuania not solely as a modern Jewish woman trying to find her roots, however, but specifically to attend the Vilnius Festival, which has commissioned a new work from one of the country’s leading composers, Vytautas Barkauskas. His Duo Concertante for violin, viola and orchestra is the substantial result. In it he has chosen to pay tribute to one of the most extraordinary figures of Lithuania’s Jewish history: Chiune Sugihara, Japanese consul in Kaunas in 1940, who took it upon himself to issue transit visas to save more than 6000 Jewish refugees from the Nazis, despite the censure of his government. 

Chiune Sugihara is recognised in the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and his story is chronicled in several books, including one by his wife Yukiko, who encouraged his actions at every turn. But, compared to Oscar Schindler’s Spielberg-enhanced fame, Sugihara’s heroism has been significantly under-recognised, not least because during the long years of Soviet occupation in Lithuania, such matters were swept under the all-embracing USSR concrete carpet. Fourteen years after the country declared its independence, Vilnius’s legacy as the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’ has yet to be fully acknowledged by a populace that has grown up with little awareness of its city’s tragic past.

Vilnius: The Gates of Dawn

The Vilnius Festival, which has run for eight years, is a proud, ambitious event, featuring some of the biggest names in classical music – conductor Mstislav Rostropovich and violinist Gidon Kremer are regular visitors – as well as an annual commission which to date has included symphonies, ballets and an opera. Vilnius enjoys an extraordinarily vibrant cultural life: in this city of only half a million people, there are two symphony orchestras, a National Opera and Ballet Theatre that has staged ten new productions in just two years, two chamber orchestras, a thriving theatre and literary scene, a jazz festival and much more besides. As for historical figures, the artist Chaim Soutine was born in Vilna (as it was then known), while Marc Chagall first saw daylight in nearby Vitebsk. And the great violinist Jascha Heifetz too was born in Vilna and made his debut aged seven on the stage of the Filharmonja, a beautiful concert hall combining grandeur with intimacy, which today is the setting for most of the Vilnius Festival’s performances. 

Why should the Sugihara story find its musical tribute through Barkauskas, and why now? As with many of the best things in life, much can be attributed to sheer serendipity. Vytautas Barkauskas, at 72, is probably Lithuania’s most prolific composer, but until recently he has been known abroad mainly for his dazzling Partita for solo violin, a favourite recital piece of Gidon Kremer’s. The recipient last year of Lithuania’s prestigious National Prize for his Violin Concerto ‘Jeux’, Barkauskas has now found another champion in the musician to whom he dedicated ‘Jeux’, the French violinist Philippe Graffin, whose international career spans a large number of contemporary works as well as celebrated recordings of French music and unusual repertoire for Hyperion and Avie Records. Graffin has visited Vilnius a number of times and has grown ever more fascinated by its character, its heritage and its loss of that heritage. 

Nobuko Imai, Philippe Graffin and Vytautas Barkauskas

‘I’m intrigued by the fact that it was such a centre of Jewish culture and yet so much has been erased from its map,’ Graffin says. ‘The Communist era put a lid over that, but today it is opening up. As you walk through the old town, you can sense the presence of generations of children playing in every yard and the spirits of the vast numbers of people who were massacred. Those generations have left their feeling in the stones themselves – you sense that Vilna in its day was a melting pot like London or New York. I feel the absence of this very strongly.’

Barkauskas, having received the much-coveted National Prize, had the opportunity to provide the 2004 Vilnius Festival with its annual commission; he had already written a violin concerto and a work for viola and orchestra, so, as he explains, ‘I was happy to put the two instruments together. But the total is more than the sum of its parts. It offers many more interesting opportunities psychologically with many more possibilities – it is like a man and a woman together, exploring a loving relationship in many different ways.’ Graffin suggested as his fellow soloist the Japanese violist Nobuko Imai – and at once the Japanese connection with Chiune and Yukiko Sugihara presented itself as a driving force in the work’s development.

JD and Vytautas Barkauskas

Barkauskas welcomed the opportunity with open arms. ‘It was wonderful to write a piece dedicated to this man. Thousands of people were murdered during the Holocaust in Lithuania and he undertook an exceptionally humanitarian act. I had heard about Sugihara and his wife Yukiko who together had helped people to leave the country within just 29 days of applying for a visa – a visa for life. It was a great humanitarian act, showing great feeling, courage and understanding; his government had forbidden it and later destroyed his career because of it. At the time this happened, I was nine years old, living in Kaunas, and my father had been thrown into jail in the first week of the Russian occupation. My Duo Concertante is not programme music; it doesn’t tell the story of what happened. But in it I aim to recapture the feelings of those times, the emotions, the psychology. I too was a victim of the war, through the subsequent Soviet occupation, so to feel this humanitarian aspect is very natural to me. Writing the Duo Concertante has certainly helped me to work through the connection.’

Nobuko Imai, who travelled to eastern Europe for the first time to take part in the premiere, was overwhelmed by the experience. ‘I found people so welcoming and warm, especially Mr Barkauskas and his wife,’ she says. ‘In a way, there is still much of the “real Europe” alive in Lithuania; people are so genuine. The Duo Concertante is a very effective piece, but also I find it human, warm and profound. In the second movement, the song about the cherry trees – a song we all grow up knowing in Japan – is beautifully used. It could have been cheap and predictable, but instead it is treated with true depth. It is melancholy, nostalgic and always beautiful; and the motif returns again and again. It seems to speak of something eternal that keeps going across generation after generation. And the last movement finishes with a tremendous sense of positive energy.’

The final movement of the Duo Concertante, recorded live in the concert

Imai adds, ‘I’m sad to say that I knew very little about Sugihara before becoming involved in this project. I read the memoir by Yukiko Sugihara and I think that if I had read it earlier, it might have changed my life. I think it is vital to keep this story alive to inspire new generations – and there is no stronger way to do this than through music.’ 

Around 90 per cent of Vilna’s Jewish population perished during the Holocaust. On my third morning in Vilnius, I wended my way through the back streets to find the Vilna Gaon Jewish Museum. What I didn’t realise was that the museum is in two parts, one dedicated to the history of Vilna as the Jerusalem of Lithuania, the other to the Holocaust itself. I found myself, unintentionally, in the Holocaust division: an old wooden house, typically Baltic and painted deep green, tucked away behind a busy street. In front of it stands a sculpture that serves as a memorial to Sugihara; inside is preserved the full horror, in memorabilia, in yellow stars and armbands and in horrific pictures, of what became of the Jewish population of this extraordinary centre of culture and learning. The museum appears to run on a shoe-string and many of the captions have yet to be translated into any language beyond Russian. That morning I was the sole visitor, alone with the full recognition of what would have become of my ancestors had they not emigrated to South Africa at the beginning of the 20^thcentury. 

Statue of the Vilna Gaon

A statue paying tribute to the Vilna Gaon, the legendary figurehead for the Jewish community in the 18^thcentury, stands in an out-of-the-way corner of the old town beside some characterless Soviet office blocks and an empty patch of grass. Only an exploration of a map in the Jewish Museum reveals the reason for this memorial’s position: this was the site of the Great Synagogue, a magnificent building seating more than 3,000 people, razed by the Nazis and its remains subsequently flattened by the Soviets. Nothing is left to show that it ever existed.

So does a healing process still need to take place between modern-day Lithuania – with its brand new EU membership, Vilnius’s renovated Old Town gleaming with new paint thanks to the World Heritage Fund, its growing number of tourist coaches and souvenir shops selling amber and linen – and the history so long buried under the rubble of its 20^th-century nightmare? 

The process is just beginning and in many ways one cannot be surprised that it is not the country’s first priority. Lithuania, and particularly Vilnius, is currently poised on a historical cusp, undergoing a tug of war between centuries and ideologies. Ironically, this was directly represented on the very night of the Duo Concertante’s premiere, 27 June, which coincided with the presidential election (the former president, Rolandas Paksas, having been dismissed from office after allegations of financial scandal). The victor, Valdas Adamkus, president from 1998 to 2003, represents the reforming force, though his pro-Moscow opponent Kazimira Prunskiene won much support. As the managing director of the Vilnius Festival, Ruta Pruseviciene, puts it, Vilnius itself is ‘a battleground between old and new, Russian and American, values and systems. Half the members of parliament play with Russian rules and the other half with western rules and they often find no common language at all!’

Local legend has it that Heifetz was born in this house

In the midst of such intense and turbulent years, some tribute is nevertheless being paid to Jascha Heifetz, whom Graffin describes as ‘the most famous and the most mysterious of violinists’. The house where Heifetz was born still stands amid an area ripe for redevelopment on a hillside outside the former ghetto area. No plaque has been raised to him on the house (I’m told there is one elsewhere), but local word-of-mouth seems to have established that this was indeed Heifetz’s first home. A more public tribute exists in the form of an international violin competition named after Heifetz, held for the first time in 2002, with Gidon Kremer as chairman of the jury. The competition will be held again next year. 

Sporadically, there have been wider-ranging events too. Gintautas Kevisas, artistic director of the Vilnius Festival and intendant of the National Opera and Ballet Theatre, in 2002 staged the first Festival of Jewish Art Music in Vilnius, in collaboration with Tel Aviv University and the Rubin Academy of Music. ‘I had no knowledge about this music, but I knew the festival needed to explore it more deeply than just whether Mahler or Mendelssohn had some Jewish roots,’ Kevisas says. 

But even Kevisas, who has long been a prime mover and shaker in Vilnius’s cultural life and was minister of culture for a year in 2001, had had little insight into Vilnius’s Jewish culture until then. ‘I was very much surprised when I looked deeper into Jewish culture and realised that Vilna had been the “Jerusalem of Lithuania” – then historical things happened and this changed. That’s life. Every nation suffered; we are a small nation and we suffered a lot.’ Kevisas trained as a pianist at the Moscow Conservatoire, ‘where I realised that Russians and Soviets were not the same thing at all. The nation that suffered the most in the 20^thcentury was Russia – the biggest number of victims were Russian.’ This perspective is typical in Vilnius. As Ruta Pruseviciene says, ‘In the end, only time can heal.’ But the 2002 festival took an interesting standpoint, inviting contemporary Lithuanian composers to write with Jewish texts – to explore, says Pruseviciene, ‘their individual view of what Jewish cultural and religious thinking means to them’.

Anatolijus Šenderovas

For next year [2005], the Vilnius Festival is commissioning a new ballet score from the city’s only Jewish composer, Anatolijus Šenderovas; the story is based partly on the legend of the Dybbuk. Senderovas, who enjoys one of the strongest international profiles among Lithuanian composers, has written numerous works for the Lithuanian-born cellist David Geringas and composed the set piece for the first Jascha Heifetz International Violin Competition. Born in 1945, he grew up in Vilnius, where his parents settled shortly after the war. They settled in ‘a normal street’ with no idea that just two years earlier it had been part of the ghetto, nor any notion of the tragedy that had taken place there. 

Vilnius, however, was a relatively positive place to be a composer, Šenderovas points out. As the Soviet system had regarded music and culture as ideologically advantageous, plenty of money had gone into cultural life and also into education, notably a network of music schools and the Čiurlionis School for the Arts, at which many of the country’s gifted young musicians, artists and ballet dancers trained. Senderovas adds, ‘At the Conservatory, we had good professors and I also had the chance to study in St Petersburg with Orest Evlachov, who had been a pupil of Shostakovich – that was very important to me because everything Shostakovich had told him, he then told me.’ 

Šenderovas has written a number of works drawing intensely on Jewish themes and the Sephardic music that he was able to study in Tel Aviv following Lithuanian independence in 1990. But now, he says, the issue is not to be solely Jewish or solely Lithuanian, but to achieve something more universal. ‘If we say somebody is a Lithuanian composer or a Jewish composer, then maybe he’s quite good,’ he remarks. ‘But if someone is a real composer, we have to say he is a good composer, not a good Jewish composer! Somebody in the future will decide what I am – maybe Jewish, maybe Lithuanian, maybe both, maybe neither, but hopefully a composer.’ 

Geringas plays Šenderovas

Barkauskas, Šenderovas and Kevisas all see Lithuania’s new EU membership as a cultural step forward. ‘It is certainly easier for my works to be played abroad now,’ says Barkauskas. ‘In Soviet times, Vilnius was seen very much as a province; most of the privileged composers were in Moscow and St Petersburg and, from Lithuania, it was difficult to get works through the Composers’ Union, which was a very powerful organisation. My works became known through individual musicians who took them up and performed them, such as Gidon Kremer, rather than through the Union.’

‘Our cultural life in general will not change so much, because it was already at a very high level,’ says Senderovas. ‘What has become easier is to travel and to invite people from overseas. The choreographer for my new ballet is Italian – under the Soviet system, this would have been completely impossible. But now we can be constantly in touch.’ Kevisas feels that greater internationalism will enhance the quality of Lithuanian culture: ‘Now maybe we will not think only locally. The Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra or the National Opera and Ballet Theatre are already very good, but now they need not be thought of as primarily Lithuanian; instead they need to be thought of primarily as good! Quality is my priority. Now we can compete for the best quality of musicians and directors, and if we succeed then we can improve, with fresh ideas and new approaches.’ 

Barkauskas sums up the atmosphere today: ‘Fantastic! There is a whole new feeling – people are hopeful and happy. It’s like springtime.’ 

My thanks to the Jewish Quarterly for commissioning and publishing a longer version of this article in 2004

Miracle at Milton Court?

Benjamin Grosvenor
Photo: Patrick Allen

Imagine for a moment that you are at, say, the Derby. It’s pretty good. But then in flies Pegasus, the mythical winged horse. What happens?

We need to talk about these rare moments of almost inexplicable magic in concerts, because unless I’m massively mistaken, that is one crucial factor that keeps us going to them. Perhaps you’ve witnessed one. Something happens. Some might say that a spirit descends. An atmosphere comes to surround us and we all sense it, musicians and audience alike, and we lose ourselves in it together. Welcome to Milton Court’s evening with the Doric String Quartet and pianist Benjamin Grosvenor, with a spot of Chopin...

An astonishing evening at Milton Court yesterday with Benjamin Grosvenor and the Doric String Quartet in the Chopin Piano Concerto No.1 and Fauré's Piano Quintet No.1. Here's the whole of my review for The Arts Desk (£). https://theartsdesk.com/classical-music/grosvenor-doric-string-quartet-milton-court-review-–-night-remember

Heads-up: Grosvenor and the Dorics are back in late May for the other Chopin concerto plus the Dvorák Piano Quintet in A major. Grosvenor gives a recital on 16 May at the Barbican.

Seeing is Believing: Norman Perryman paints the music

Last night I was describing the musical work of the painter Norman Perryman to some artistic friends who were young in the 1960s. "That's rock'n'roll!" they declared. It is. And it's also going to rock Symphony Hall Birmingham next Saturday, when Perryman and his projectors join the CBSO and Mirga Gražynitė-Tyla to perform The Sea by the composer and artist Mikolajus Čiurlionis, Lithuania's most celebrated artistic figure, one whose music is hardly ever heard in the UK – though Mirga, herself Lithuanian, is about to change all that. Čiurlionis's combination of musical and visual artistry makes him the perfect outlet for Perryman, who creates "kinetic painting" live in concert. 

Video trailer for Saturday from the CBSO:

As I have adored Norman's work for years, yet never before had the chance to see him in action in a top UK concert hall, I thought we should ask him for a guest blog. He has kindly provided one, so here it is. JD

SEEING IS BELIEVING

A guest post by Norman Perryman

“What? Are you crazy? Have you ever done this before?” 

“Yes, for 45 years or so.”

For years, I’ve been trying to verbalize what I do – create a hybrid art-form of flowing colours and light in synch with the music. Unlike a framed static painting, this painting only exists in real time – for as long as the music lasts. Instead of using computer-generated images, I use my hands, as musicians do. My instrument is my paintbrush. I don’t just improvise. I memorize the score, mark it up with my choreography for brushstrokes and colours, then practise for months before the performance.

Rather than synthetic pixelated images, I prefer pure analogue fields of flowing colour that touch our emotions with their organic properties. When these watercolours are magnified with my overhead projectors onto a ten-metre wide screen as I paint, they acquire an other-worldly quality. But words fail me - seeing is believing.

Every day now in my studio, as I practise my lyrical expressionist painting for a performance of the symphonic poem The Sea, by Lithuania's national hero the painter/composer M.K.Čiurlionis (1875-1911), I feel deeply moved. By the end of this 35-minute piece I’m almost in tears, with a sense of having plumbed the depths of his “boundless longing” for a sublime mystical experience with Nature. After months of work, his music is in my blood, in my ears, day and night. I feel we know each other. It’s time now to show this to the world.

Widely regarded as one of the precursors of European modern art, Čiurlionis was steeped in the cultural philosophies of his day, in his case visualized in hundreds of paintings of mystic symbolic landscapes, seascapes and fantastic architecture. It would be totally inappropriate to try to imitate his paintings. Instead, I take my inspiration from his music to show in my own style of painting, how visual and emotional his music is. Had he lived longer, he might have become one of the early film composers, who knew how to underscore the drama of the movies. I myself underline the emotions of the music with my own movies of abstract lyrical images.  

I shall never forget the moment when two years ago the new Lithuanian CBSO Music Director Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla flipped through one of my heavily marked-up scores and exclaimed: ”Aha… you paint the music!” Then, after 20 seconds fast-forwarding through a video-trailer of my Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, she looked at me very thoughtfully and said: “We must work together, with Čiurlionis”. The obvious choice for my fluid watercolours was The Sea.  I spent the following summer travelling in Lithuania, to soak myself in its rich culture and nature. I felt I was in the very heart of Europe. That visit and following studies played an essential part in my understanding of The Sea and of the amazing man who wrote it. 

How did it all start? As a Birmingham art-college student in the early 1950s, I couldn’t afford lunch, so my lunch-times were spent at free concerts given by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra just across the road in the Town Hall. I was wrestling with the choice of studying music or art. My compromise was to dedicate my life to finding a way of satisfying two passions, by bringing these art-forms together. Forty years later, it was the visionary Simon Rattle who recognized my ambition. He suggested working together with his CBSO and in 1993 BBC Television filmed the results in the documentary entitled Concerto for Paintbrush and Orchestra. Since then, after 25 years of performances worldwide, it feels like coming home to be back in Symphony Hall, this time via a pathway that led to Lithuania, of all places.

But I was also appalled with the realization of how tragic and complex the history of Lithuania is, despite having been the largest and one of the most prosperous countries in Europe. Many of us are ignorant of the significance of this tiny country and of the many cultural heroes it has produced. Did you know that Jascha Heifetz, Philip Glass, Bob Dylan, Sean Penn, Leonard Cohen and our celebrated author Jessica Duchen, to name just a few, all have Lithuanian roots? [another story, that - JD]

It’s been a long road, so this performance with Mirga and her CBSO in Birmingham Symphony Hall on 16  February, Lithuania’s Independence Day, is a huge milestone for me. I’m proud to play a modest part in the ongoing cultural renaissance of the city where I was born.

Norman Perryman

www.normanperryman.com

www.normanperryman.blogspot.com

Norman Perryman is with the CBSO and Mirga Gražynitė-Tyla at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, on Saturday 16 February, 7pm. More info and booking here.

Everything you wanted to know about the Russians, but were afraid to ask

Many years ago, in another century, in what feels like another lifetime (though was merely the 1990s) I used to edit a piano magazine. It was the UK's first independent piano magazine, named Classical Piano, and its creation, lifeblood and later eventual absorption into one of its fast-springing rivals is now ancient history. While there I published an article by a then-youthful Russian pianist, Rustem Hayroudinoff, about what the Russian School really means.

It was one of the most informative and interesting articles we ever ran, I think. So I was more than delighted to log on to Rustem's website and see that he has now revised the article and much expanded it, complete with all mod cons such as recordings from the likes of Rachmaninov, Chaliapin and Neuhaus, to name but three. Rustem is now a professor at the Royal Academy of Music and has made some stunning recordings himself, notably of Rachmaninov.



Here's a taster of the article: 

A great deal of confusion surrounds the term “The Russian Pianistic Tradition”. This phrase has been applied to any successful pianist coming out of Russia - often conjuring up images of fire-eating virtuosi scooping up competition prizes. And very often musicians with aesthetic principles as different as those of, for example, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Sviatoslav Richter are mentioned in the same breath as being representatives of the same “great Russian School”. To discover the true meaning of this term, I am going to look at some common features in the pianistic principles of several performers who belonged to this tradition.

Even the most superficial acquaintance with the recording legacy of pianists such as Sergei Rachmaninoff, Josef Lhevinne, Josef Hofmann, Vladimir Horowitz and Heinrich Neuhaus reveals that all of these pianists possessed an exquisitely beautiful tone. Their incredible achievements in this area were due to a very conscious cultivation of singing tone and colour on the piano, as the following quotations illustrate.

Josef Lhevinne dedicated a long chapter of his Basic Principles in Pianoforte Playing to “the secret of a beautiful tone”, in which he explains how a “ringing, singing” tone is to be achieved: “The main principle at first is to see that the key is touched with as resilient a portion of the finger as possible, if a lovely, ringing, singing tone is desired ... Just a little further back in the first joint of the finger, you will notice that the cushion of flesh is apparently more elastic, less resistant, more springy. Strike the key with this portion of the finger, not on the fingertips as some of the older European methods suggested ...” 

He also emphasises the role that the free wrist and arm play in the production of a good tone: “... the wrist [is] still held very flexible so that the weight of the descending hand and arm carries the key down to key bottom, quite without any sensation of a blow.” And “... when the hand descends, as large a surface of the fingertip as feasible engages the key; and the wrist is so loose that it normally sinks below the level of the keyboard.” 

This last passage holds particular interest because it testifies to the fact that Horowitz’s famous flat finger-low wrist technique was not a mere oddity but an integral part of this same tradition which he took to its extreme in the pursuit of his ideal of a singing tone...

Read the rest here.

Lupu's London farewell?

Radu Lupu in rehearsal.
Photo from New York Review of Books, nybooks.com

The chairs were out for the returns queue at the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday night. Word was spreading that this might be the last chance for London to hear Radu Lupu play. He has long preferred to avoid the capital's concert halls - whether because of iffy acoustics, acidic critics or other reasons I could not say - and an appearance with the Philharmonia Orchestra and conductor Paavo Järvi for Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto looked almost too good to be true. 

Lupu, 73, is tall and imposing on the platform, yet somewhat frail in gait and balance. His Beethoven came through in parts almost as a memory of the concerto. Yet the unique quality of his playing lies in the touch itself. It's the transparency of tone, the cushioned finesse of it, and the way he turns a phrase that, in a matter of a few notes, suggests a deep, empathetic humanity and a profound love for the music.

He uses a chair rather than a piano stool and sits at the keyboard almost as others might at a desk, as if making notes (in every sense, of course). He's thinking aloud with his hands. His playing is a form of writing, a direct channel from mind and spirit. And it is quiet, fabulously so. Rather than slamming out sounds to reach the back of the auditorium, he pulls the audience in towards him, forcing you to listen.



A few memory lapses were accompanied by a half-humorous dismissive gesture with one hand; and in the final movement's cadenza he wasn't above turning a pause into a joke, catching Järvi's eye as if to say 'OK, wait for it....' Järvi proved the perfect accompanist, deferring to Lupu but keeping everything gently on the rails, perhaps stoking up the orchestral energy if the solo line had wandered into the realms of introspection just before.

One hopes that the suggestion Lupu might be winding up his concert schedule this year is not true, but it wouldn't surprise me if it is. I'm sure I wasn't the only person present who listened to his exquisite encore of Brahms Op.117 No. 1 - the darkest of whispered lullabies - with a fearful lump in the throat.

(Please read this beautiful tribute to him by fellow pianist Kirill Gerstein, which appeared in the New York Review of Books for Lupu's 70th birthday.)

Järvi, having proved himself a master of managing energies, did so again in the second half, with a taut, glistening, impassioned account of the Rachmaninov Symphony No.2. It was the perfect cathartic finale for a rather emotional concert hall, and as an interpretation it had the glorious variety of a great epic narrative: the elemental fire of Tolstoy, the fantastical colours of Bulgakov and the aching passion of Chekhov. The Philharmonia played as if their lives depended on it.

Lupu is playing in London tonight

The legendary Romanian pianist Radu Lupu is performing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No.4 at the RFH with the Philharmonia, conducted by Paavo Järvi. It's pretty much sold out. But Lupu does not play in London every night. In fact, he hardly ever plays in London. To say this is a rare sighting is not saying enough.

And before you ask, the answer is no, I haven't: he doesn't do interviews. The RFH website says he has not given a press interview for 30 years. The best I can offer you is that he used to play bridge with my former piano teacher back in the 1970s-80s; and I met him once backstage in Lucerne, where he was utterly charming, funny and kind.

All being well, I'll report back.

Enjoy this rare gem meanwhile:

It was 20 years ago...

This morning I enjoyed a moment of quiet satisfaction, the kind known only to writers of rather obscure biographies. I glanced at my author page on Amazon, as I do about twice a year to see how the books are doing, and noticed something peculiar. My first book, about a then very unusual composer, was published in 1996. It used to have a princely 6 reviews. It now has 5.

It's gone. Yes! GONE! The abusive, mendacious, vicious one-star anonymous review that was the first I ever got on Amazon when it opened its "reader review" facility in 1999, is no longer there - after 20 years.

When that thing initially appeared, it was a heck of a shock - especially as it was pretty obvious to me who'd written it. After all, there was only a handful of people whom I'd told what I wanted the book to do, and who then might have had cause to go online and write an anonymous review saying that it didn't do exactly that. What is this, I thought. Anonymous reviewing? Isn't that just asking for trouble? Isn't it opening the door to all manner of revolting abuse? It makes a mockery of the whole concept of criticism...

In 1999, an abusive review was not a daily occurrence in thousands of writers' lives, but actual news. It was, indeed, such news that the Guardian interviewed me. They put in a photo of the 32-year-old me looking very grumpy (Me: "Do you want me to smile?" Photographer: "NO!") and I think it was Emma Brockes who wrote the feature, which was headed 'Trash your rivals and get away with it'. Then the Times called and asked, in a gentle, confiding tone, "As a matter of interest, who do you think it was?" I told them I wasn't going to say, in case I was wrong.

But that review sat there, and sat there, and sat there. Others appeared, seeming satisfied with the book, which was nice. But Mr One Star still crouched on the site like a sodding great spider, glaring at me with its compound eyes and eight spiky, hairy legs, and there was nothing on earth I could do about it.

Except now, it's gone. It has only taken 20 years.

I like to think about how different the world in general might be today if people had not had anonymity on the internet. Think about it. Just think about it.

Citizen of Nowhere, here

The revival of interest in Mieczyslaw Weinberg's music began with his opera The Passenger a few years back. But now, with the centenary of his birth falling in 2019, the floodgates have opened at last. Next season the Wigmore Hall is hosting a complete cycle of his string quartets. Mirga Grazynite-Tyla has brought his Symphony No.21 (the man was very prolific) to the CBSO this season and, along with Gidon Kremer, has been focusing much attention on him at Symphony Hall. And on Sunday the bass-baritone Mark Glanville and pianist Mark Verter are giving a concert devoted entirely to his songs at the Purcell Room here in London. It is entitled - poignantly and appositely - Citizen of Nowhere.

I went to interview Mark about it and you can read the full story in The JC. Below are some pertinent extracts. Meanwhile: please come and hear them!

The name of Mieczyslaw Weinberg was virtually unknown in western Europe until his opera The Passenger, set partly in Auschwitz, was staged for the first time at the 2010 Bregenz Festival. Since then, championed by prominent musicians across the world, Weinberg has finally made it onto the musical map. 

This prolific and powerful Polish Jewish composer left a vast legacy of music, including 22 symphonies, 17 string quartets, 40 film and animation scores, seven operas, copious miscellaneous instrumental and orchestral pieces, and more than 200 solo songs...

Glanville’s concert, pointedly entitled “Citizen of Nowhere”, is a journey through Weinberg’s long, turbulent life. “Obviously the title is a direct reference to Theresa May’s appalling declaration,” says Glanville (the Prime Minister said, “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere,” during a speech at the Conservative Party conference in 2016). “I felt strongly about that,” Glanville says. “It seems to evoke the ‘Rootless Cosmopolitan’ term of Stalin, which was obviously shorthand for ‘Jews’. But if you look at Weinberg’s life, he really was a Citizen of Nowhere...”

Rostropovich plays the amazing Weinberg Cello Concerto (part 1) - please, please listen to this

Weinberg was born in 1919 in Warsaw to Jewish parents from Kishinev (now in Moldova), who had fled after their own parents were slaughtered in the 1905 pogrom in that town. When the Nazis invaded Poland, Weinberg escaped to the Soviet Union: first to Minsk, then to faraway Tashkent. Both his parents and his sister were killed in the Trawniki camp. 

In Tashkent, to which many of Russia’s intellectuals and artistic community had been evacuated, Weinberg married the daughter of the celebrated actor Solomon Mikhoels, and met Dmitri Shostakovich, who became a close friend and urged him to move to Moscow. Weinberg did so in 1943. But in the so-called ‘Doctors’ Plot’ in February 1953, Mikhoels was murdered and Weinberg, as a close family member, found himself thrown into jail. “He was probably on death row,” says Glanville. “It was only because Stalin died that he was released.” 

Weinberg went on to live a long and fruitful life - he died as recently as 1996. Yet his fate was to remain a perpetual outsider. “The Poles never accepted him as Polish,” says Glanville. “In Russia, he was never Russian. And there is even a weird, bizarre, horrible reverse snobbery to do with the Holocaust and Jewish composers: if you survived, you’re not taken as seriously as the composers who died. It has possibly stood against him, a composer of such genius, that he survived.” 

Glanville has assembled a personal selection of what he sees as some of Weinberg’s very best songs. “To me, they knock Shostakovich’s songs out of the park,” he asserts. Among them are settings of the Polish-Jewish poet Julian Tuwim, the Hungarian poet Sándor Petőfi in Russian translation, and some harrowing pieces about the Holocaust. 

They are enormously challenging to perform, Glanville adds. “It’s very demanding music: I have to have a range of about two and a half octaves, because he writes huge stretches for the voice. The piano parts too are very difficult: he’s pushing you, as a musician, to the absolute limits of your ability. He will never compromise. He will write whatever needs to be written to say what he wants to say. He won’t spare you: you do what he needs to do. He has a very authentic voice and I think it’s insulting to see him, as some do, as a B-list Shostakovich. He’s not trying to be anyone but himself.” .....

Read the full article here.

Mark Glanville and Mark Verter perform Citizen of Nowhere: A Sung Life at the Purcell Room on 3 February. Booking: 020 3879 9555

Here is a conversation with Irina Shostakovich about Weinberg, from the International Weinberg Society, filmed in 2015:

Tribute to Tasmin Little

Tasmin Little
Photo: Paul Mitchell

Last week Tasmin Little, one of the UK's top violin soloists, announced that she has decided to 'hang up her concert gown' in 2020. Plenty to do, she says, but no more concerts. Here's the story from The Strad.

A flood of tributes has been pouring in and I'm adding to that. But I can't deny that here the news initially came as a shock. It so happens that Tasmin is one of my oldest and dearest friends. We're the same age and got to know each other when we were 17 - long before I had any notion I'd become a journalist. She is the first of our circle - possibly the first of any of my immediate 'peer group' - to hint at the word 'retire'. Not that she's said 'retire' as such - her website says that she will be 'ending her concert career' - but effectively this means retiring from the stage. It pulls one up short: whaddaya mean, 'retire'? We're only 17...aren't we? Heavens. Does time really go this fast?

Oh, yes. It does. And for any international classical soloist it goes faster still. A glance at a random selection of appropriate Twitter feeds will be enough to prove that musicians probably spend more time in airports than they do on the concert platform, that the matter of playing an instrument is highly physical, that the continual round of jet-lag, adrenaline and performance pressure demands great resilience in addition to evident talent.

I decided at the age of 23 to face the fact that I wasn't cut out for a piano career, and though I missed it at first, I've never doubted that stopping then was the right thing to do. Years on, I don't know how anyone does it at all.

I don't blame Tasmin one bit for wanting a change and I have the utmost respect for her decision, which can't have been easy. She is making the choice in a manner that is objective, in control and powered by self-knowledge. And I know she will excel at whatever she turns her hand to next - she has so much to give.

She is also in good company. My second-ever interviewee, when I was 21, was the great Italian violinist Gioconda de Vito. She was turning 80 and I went to talk to her for The Strad. She lived in Rickmansworth in a house surrounded by a beautiful garden full of birds and animals, and her husband translated for her since she had never learned to speak fluent English. She had retired in her fifties at the peak of her career. She played to the Pope. Then decided things couldn't get any better than that. She'd heard a late recital by the elderly Alfred Cortot, a car-crash full of wrong notes, and did not want to follow his example. So she stopped. I was intrigued: didn't she miss it? She didn't. At 21 I was incredulous. Several decades later, I understand it a lot better.

Tasmin has weathered everything magnificently, her zest for life and fun and music sparkling out of that Guadagnini, lighting up with joy and positivity every hall and every room she enters. She is one of the most extraordinarily consistent individuals I've been lucky enough to know: pure gold all the way through.

A lively interview from The Violin Channel


Tasmin and I met for the first time at a private recital by a mutual pianist friend at my (and the friend's) piano teacher's house. It was December 1983. I'd just done A levels, was having what was then called a 'year out' (the term 'gap yaar' was yet to be devised) and was learning to drive. Tasmin had reached the final of the BBC Young Musician of the Year the previous year; now she was fresh out of the Menuhin School, going to the Guildhall, and wanted driving lessons too. It turned out we lived near each other, so she called me the next day to ask for my driving teacher's number and to invite me round for supper.

I was enchanted by the Littles. Tasmin is from a gloriously theatrical family. Her father is the actor George Little, whose splendid performances I enjoyed very much - in particular the one-man show he wrote, Paradise Garden, about growing up during the war in Bradford, culminating with the revelation of local boy Frederick Delius's music on the radio... Charismatic, funny and warm, he was an irresistible presence and Tasmin learned much about public presentation from him, as well as how to turn pre-performance adrenaline to advantage. Jilly, her mother, is just as sunny, extrovert and full of good humour. They could scarcely have been more different from my own parents, who were quiet, academic and somewhat shy, tending to keep themselves to themselves, whether by accident or design.

Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending at the Proms in 1995, conducted by Andrew Davis



Living a longish tube ride from my school, I'd been friendly with a circle of girls from another part of the suburbs altogether and did too little socialising out of hours. But to find a friend down the road - well, that was a first. Even today, one of my favourite memories of Tasmin is the time, one afternoon not long after that, she invited me along to a masterclass at the Purcell Room in which she was playing to Michel Schwalbé, the leader of the Berlin Philharmonic under Karajan. I was on the edge of my seat, soaking up all that was going on (he was quite a personality - that's another story). Afterwards we sloped off to unwind. We hopped on the Bakerloo Line to Piccadilly Circus, wandered through Chinatown and feasted royally on red bean buns. Afterwards we went back to my house, where my mum tried to give us a nice healthy supper, but could we eat? Er...

Over the years, friends sometimes vanish. New study environments, moves of house, demanding jobs, marriages, children and so forth, or simply growing apart - everything conspires against keeping in touch. But Tasmin never vanished. She went to study in Canada with Lorand Fenyves, but she always took the trouble to write letters. While I was away at university, she wrote letters (and anyway I wasn't too happy there and used to zip home whenever I could). If one has no kids (I haven't) it can be tricky keeping up with friends who do have them because often their other friends with children are prioritised, quite understandably so. That was never the case here. We followed each others' ups and downs over the years - and we both had plenty - even though life took us in very different directions. I basically sit at home with my husband and cats, writing. She travels the world with her violin, while also bringing up her two wonderful kids. I named the baby who arrives at the end of my first novel Rites of Spring after Tasmin's daughter.

Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata with Andrey Gugnin at the Sydney International Piano Competition. Andrey went on to win first prize.



I could fill this blog with memories of Tasmin. One that particularly stands out is the time I invited her to go busking at Waterloo as an experiment for The Independent, following Joshua Bell's example in Washington DC. That was an eye-opener for us both and sparked her idea to create the Naked Violin project - free access to a solo recording and plenty of information about it on the internet, which back then was groundbreaking, accompanied by a high quotient of outreach work in schools, shopping malls, oil rigs, homeless shelters and more.

Well before that, there was the time she played the Korngold Concerto in Manchester, about eight months pregnant. Later, Carnegie Hall with Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic - Tom and I flew there to hear and cheer her and we all went for cocktails at the Rainbow Room. The Proms - lots of them, but especially the Ligeti Concerto with Rattle. I think that was the evening a mobile phone went off a few bars into The Rite of Spring and Rattle stopped and gave the audience a bit of a tirade about it. It's thanks to Tasmin that I got to know Roxanna Panufnik, Piers Lane and a whole galaxy of other marvellous people. And I'll always cherish the countless times we and our little group of friends who meet for lunch every few months have found ourselves falling off our chairs with laughter together, sometimes in rather nice restaurants, to everyone else's amusement.

Those memories will continue to build, but the sound of her playing, at least publicly, will soon have to rely on her recordings for preservation. Fortunately there are plenty of them, and the newest is coming out in February - recorded with the pianist John Lenehan, it's of music by fantastic composers who happen to have been women: Clara Schumann, Dame Ethel Smyth and Amy Beach (more info here from the Chandos website).

Here's a promotional video for it from Chandos: https://www.facebook.com/chandosrecords/videos/2495919247146924/?t=39

In the meantime, we still have a year and a half to enjoy the remaining concerts.

Brava bravissima, Tasmin - and more power to your elbow!

Learn the violin with Nicola Benedetti

Bravo to Nicola Benedetti, who on Tuesday launches a series of Youtube presentations for would-be young (and less young) violinists and their teachers. She is also launching a charitable foundation focused on music education. Above, the first, introductory video. In The Times, applause from Richard Morrison. Below, Nicky's own intro to the intro. Splendid when fine musicians decide to share their expertise, and especially when the musician in question is as natural and charismatic a communicator as Nicky. More power to her elbow!

Nicky writes:

I have some news which I am super excited to share with you all. Over the coming year, I intend to expand my commitment to the education of young people and the supporting of music teachers by establishing a charitable organisation. The Benedetti Foundation plans to focus on providing enrichment, inspiration and variation to the UK’s education system and communities. The ambition is to carry out a series of orchestra-based weekend workshops, designed to address, in equal part, the needs of young musicians and teachers. Today, however, I have launched a new online series of educational videos called “With Nicky” that intends to provide information, guidance, and support for young musicians throughout their musical and personal development. The content of these videos will become an integral part of the work of the Benedetti Foundation, and will also provide useful information for teachers looking to support their work with new ideas. “With Nicky” will eventually cover a broad range of questions and themes, but naturally these first videos focus on the violin. Phase one of the series will be released every Tuesday at midday GMT on my YouTube channel starting on Tuesday 29 January and will enable young people and teachers to connect with me on a more regular basis. The videos will cover topics including: ï Back to Basics ï Develop your Sound ï Vibrato ï Talking about Thumbs ï Practice ï Motivations and Inspirations ï Investigating Intonation The first video released today is an introduction to the series. Subscribe to the channel and activate notifications. I meet so many fantastic young musicians and teachers across the world and yearn for more regular interaction with all of them. It is tough to practice, it’s difficult to stay motivated and to know the best way forward. I have had the huge fortune in my life of being exposed to some of the world’s greatest violin and music teachers, and I want to make as much of the information available to as many people as possible. More on Tuesday 29 January at midday. If you have any questions, then we’d love to hear from you! The videos have been generously supported by ESTA UK, MiSST – The Andrew Lloyd Webber Programme, and Oasby Music Group and I am very grateful for their support. Huge thanks to our media partners Classic FM, The Strad, The Violin Channel and WQXR who will be sharing the videos with their audiences each week when released.

Pianists to battle it out in Hastings

The Hastings International Piano Competition held a launch reception in the House of Commons last night, thanks to the town's MP, one Amber Rudd, aka the Work and Pensions Secretary, who agreed to host the event. Pleased to hear her voicing support for a contest and festival that, she said, helps to bring classical music to local people who may never have encountered it before in their home environment, giving them the chance to experience the best music in the world on their own doorstep.

Amber Rudd introduces the competition.
photo: JD

I can't help remembering that Ghost Variations begins with Jelly d'Arányi playing the Brahms Violin Concerto in Hastings in 1933. Adrian Boult, no less, stepped in to conduct when the intended conductor went down with appendicitis. And the concert was reviewed [luckily for novelists doing research] in The Times. Those, as one might say, were the days. World-class music-making used to be absolutely standard fare in Hastings and similar towns, less than 100 years ago.

The piano competition certainly has the wind in its sails, with a new biennial plan intended to beef up the offer each time, the Royal Philharmonic aboard with a five-year deal, and a valuable line of alumni who have gone on to win top prizes at other contests, notably the Van Cliburn. More power to its elbow, and to the many elbows of its gifted competitors.

Nevertheless, one would dearly have liked to ask a few public questions. For instance: what assurance could our host give that over Brexit the concerns of the cultural industries - worth billions to the exchequer - have been heard, let alone listened to? What future is there for young British pianists robbed of their international competitiveness? After all, if e.g. Pollini goes sick and someone is needed to play Beethoven at the last minute, they won't choose someone from a country that demands paperwork for the privilege if a different soloist in another European country can jump on a train and be there in two ticks. How will young musicians ever afford to live in Britain if they have to be earning £30k before being admitted? Those kinds of things. But of course, this was a celebration rather than a press launch and question time was there none. Not that there's anything much happening in the House of Commons at the moment, joked our host.

Entering the House of Commons is an illuminating experience. The atmosphere resembles a cross between Westminster Abbey, a gentlemen's club (posh sort, not lap dancing), Hampton Court and a public school, plus a strong dose of Hogwarts. Corridor walls are lined with images of battle showing troops carrying St George's flags. There are plentiful statues, all of men (at least the ones I went past were), mostly in 17th-18th century wigs. It's an ageing rabbit warren, a draughty, sprawling complex full, I'm sure, of ghosts and it's quite disorienting; on emerging afterwards, I knew where I'd been but had to take a minute to work out where I was, at least in relation to the nearest tube. You can see how it's possible for the occupants of this building to become detached from the reality of London around them, let alone the rest of the UK.

Across the room, one person braver than I am had come along wearing an EU flag. My contribution was restricted to a yellow BOLLOCKS TO BREXIT sticker that's still on the back of my phone from the march in October and shows itself whenever I raise the object to take a photo. 

The competition takes place in about a month's time and focuses on concertos. If you're a local, you're in for a major treat. Do go. Details here: https://hastingsconcertocompetition.co.uk

Musical inspiration and where to find it

What spurs a new piece of music into existence? Where do composers find their inspiration? Here is a wonderful insight from someone who knows all about it. 

Stephen Johnson's extremely moving How Shostakovich Changed My Mind was one of my Books of the Year for the Sunday Times, so it was a particular joy that he wrote a couple of weeks ago to tell me about his new Clarinet Quintet, 'Angel's Arc', which receives its world premiere next Thursday. At the time I was in South Africa, cuddling lion cubs and so forth, which made writing something myself a bit tricky. Fortunately Stephen - author, journalist and composer - was only too happy to pen us a guest post. Here he reveals how the piece took shape in his imagination, with a range of vivid and varied references that mirrors his splendid book - from the literary and the biblical to the natural, the emotional and even the feline. 

Enjoy. And do go and hear his new quintet if you can - full performance listings are at the end of the article. JD

A rainbow snapped during the first rehearsal of Angel's Arc. Photo: Kate Johnson

Angel's Arc

A guest post by Stephen Johnson

It was a cat who inspired my orchestral piece Behemoth Dances: the pistol-packing, chandelier-swinging cat-demon Behemoth from Mikhail Bulgakov's wild, terrifying, utterly magical novel The Master and Margarita.And in a different, slightly more oblique way it was a cat who set my Clarinet Quintet, Angel's Arc, in motion. 

Two years ago, my wife Kate and I lost our much-loved Agatha, a tiny ginger female cat of immense character, who had a way of charming round even resolute cat-haters. Our wise vet, Amanda - who put Agatha very tenderly to sleep in her favourite spot in our garden, on a heartbreakingly beautiful summer morning - told us afterwards that in her experience the loss of a beloved pet often released feelings of grief connected with other important losses. So it was with Agatha's parting. I felt keenly the loss of my father-in-law, Harold Jones, a remarkable old-fashioned rural rector with some very un-old-fashioned views and a generous, loving heart. I'd lost my aunt, Elizabeth (Betty) Johnson, nearly twenty years earlier, but now I felt her absence more than ever, and wished terribly that she could have witnessed the emergence of Behemoth Dancesinto the light. I also realised with new intensity just how much both these two people had stood in loco parentis, and how privileged I had been to have them in my life.

Then along came Andrew Jamieson, the IMG impresario who, in a magnificent leap of faith, had arranged the Moscow and UK performances of Behemoth Dancesafter hearing just three minutes of it in a horrible computer playback version. He suggested that I might follow it up with a clarinet quintet - he already had Emma Johnson and the Carducci Quartet in mind. I leapt at the chance: I loved the clarinet, and the two glorious quintets Mozart had Brahms had written for it. But where was the seminal musical idea? 

Playing around on the piano it struck me that I could make a kind of Schumann/Shostakovich-style cipher out of the letters of Agatha's name: with Te (sol fa) representing B, plus H from German notation, it gave A-G-A-B-B-A - a chant-like motif very like the haunting plainsong phrase 'Lux aeterna' I'd used in Behemoth Dances. Suddenly a host of ideas began to flow from that tiny motif. Fascinatingly, as with Behemoth, the shape of the whole thing seemed fairly clear from the start: beginning, middle and end were quite distinct. But the title, and with it the emotional character, took a little while to emerge from the mist - almost literally, as there is something very mist-like about the hushed opening pages: lots of natural string harmonics and clarinet echo tones. 

As I worked on what was at first simply my 'Clarinet Quintet', I found that memories of the West Pennine moors, and their surrounding woodlands and lakes, were flooding into mind. As a teenager I'd loved those moors with a fierce passion, and I walked and cycled them energetically. The wildest expanse of moorland bore the striking name Anglezarke, and I remember someone (it might have been a teacher) telling me that it derived from the Flemish words 'Angel's Arc', or 'Ark' - the story was that it was given this name centuries earlier by Protestant refugees fleeing persecution in the Spanish Netherlands. Almost certainly this was nonsense: my place-name dictionary gives the derivation as from the Norse 'Anlaf's hill-pasture'. But at the time I could hardly have cared less, nor would I have been terribly interested if I'd been told that my favourite line from the Book of Psalms, 'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills', was a mistranslation. What has dull fact to do with poetry - especially when poetic fantasy is one of the few precious things that helps you to find your way emotionally? And as this poetic idea was now helping me find my way musically, here surely was my title: Angel's Arc.  

Once I'd embraced that title, and the images that came inevitably with it, vivid memories of Harold and Betty followed. Harold's favourite line from the Anglican Communion Service, 'Lift up your hearts', along with the response, 'We lift them up to the Lord', morphed in my mind with the idea of looking up to the hills for help: both found their way into the score. 

As for Betty, I'd noted quotations from, or allusions to, symphonies I'd adored as a teenager emerging quite spontaneously as I wrote: Walton One, Bruckner Nine, Mahler Six. And then it hit me: it was Betty who'd given me the scores of all three symphonies as birthday presents. I still have them, battered, dog-eared and irreplaceable. Here then were keys to the emotional significance of this music - for me at least. There is grief in this music, but also gratitude. It's a close-run thing, but in the end I think gratitude wins: gratitude to Betty, to Harold (whom I also have to thank for Kate), to Andrew Jamieson, who made these three performances happen, to the friend-sponsors who gave their financial support, Fiona Costa, Peggy Czyzak-Dannenbaum and Irina Knaster, and to those wonderful hills - and to whoever or whatever made them. Angel's Arcis my hymn of thanks. 

Stephen Johnson

Performers:

Emma Johnson, clarinet

Carducci String Quartet (based in Cheltenham)

Dates:

London Cadogan Hall - Thurs 24 January 2019, 7.30pm

Guildford G Live - Sat 9 February 2019, 7.30pm

Warwick Arts Centre - Thurs 28 February 2019, 7.30pm 

Programme:

Brahms – Clarinet Quintet (35 mins, 1891)

Interval

Johnson – Clarinet Quintet, Angel's Arc(14 – 15 mins, 2018)

Mozart – Clarinet Quintet (30 mins, 1789)

Not new year resolutions

The Apothecary's Rose, from my garden. It should work magic, if I only knew how.

I decided not to make any new year resolutions because they're expected to be gloriously positive and, as you'll know from yesterday's Mood Ludwig, that's not where I am right now.

So I'm not going to do it. Not going to think about practising the piano and then not do it. Not going to decide not to eat chocolate. Not going to promise myself to go running three times a week. Not going to stop procrastinating - you can't teach a middle-aged catwoman new tricks. And I'm not going to not post as many cat pictures. So I'm not going to pledge to do anything except be myself to the best of my ability. 

Current mood: KAPUSTIN



Here is the annual reminder of what JDCMB is and isn't.

Darlings, a very warm welcome to all readers, whoever and wherever you may be. JDCMB is Jessica Duchen's Classical Music Blog. It's a relatively random and succinctly spontaneous collection of content involving words and music. 

I'm a writer with a musical training (academic/piano). In my twenties and early thirties I held jobs on music magazines, including spearheading the creation of the UK's first independent piano magazine. Later I was with The Independent as a music journalist and critic for 12 years. Now I juggle different kinds of writing: novels, librettos, articles, reviews, programme notes and more. I often give pre-concert talks and also present narrated concerts, often based on my novels (you'll find upcoming the dates in the sidebar). I enjoy the adventure of these different activities, and others besides: it keeps me on my toes, or at least my fingertips. And JDCMB is simply...my blog.

Things you might think you know about JD: I'm pro-feminism and anti-Brexit; I have cats; I'm married to a violinist; I've written biographies of Korngold and Fauré; my latest novels are Ghost Variations (about Jelly d'Arányi and the Schumann Violin Concerto) and Odette (swan-girl).

Things you might not know: I'm an absolute, total, utter piano nerd. I adore historical recordings, especially slidey violins. I love a massive range of music including Boulez, Bartók, Beethoven, Bach, Barbara Strozzi. I have a 'thing' about Hungarian musical traditions. I go to a lot of opera, ballet and orchestras, but my favourite pieces are mostly chamber music. I have some great roses in the garden.


JDCMB has:
• News, reviews, interviews, occasional select guest posts, think-pieces, personal experiences/memories/chronicles.
• Values about music, art, quality, equality, passion. I believe everybody deserves to have great music, art and creativity in their lives.
• A feminist slant, because people are people are people, but the music business and related fields (actually, most fields) still often treat women as second-class citizens. There's been good progress recently, but not enough.
• English English. I'm in London, UK, so please don't expect American spellings.
• An internationalist outlook. Music is an international art and depends on its internationalism for its very existence. 
• Bollocks to Brexit.
• A personal slant.
• Irony and sarcasm, so please be prepared.

JDCMB doesn't have:
• Sexism, racism or other prejudices.
• Porn.
• Comments boxes. For discussions, please come over to Facebook - I put all the links on my author page and we have some lively chats, but you do have to say who you are.
• Pro-Brexit writing.
• Conspiracy theories.
• Personal attacks.
• Pop music. I've nothing against it, but I don't cover it, because I do other stuff.

If you want coverage on JDCMB:
• I receive a lot of requests, but even with the best will in the world, I can't do it all.
• Stats tell me that what you respond to the most, darling readers, is strong, personal think-pieces. So the slant for 2019 will be towards this.
• Advice for PRs:  a) Please don't approach me about "classically trained crossover" artists. Yes, I once interviewed Bocelli. That doesn't mean I like crossover. It just means my editor wanted a piece and I was curious. b) Please try not to start your emails by saying "My name is...". Nine times out of ten I'll already know that's your name because it's in your email address.

And the winner is...

Many thanks to everyone who entered the Swan Lake Competition! I hope you've all had excellent Christmasses. 

It's time to reveal the winner.

The question was:

Which ballerina danced the role of Odette/Odile in the world premiere of Swan Lake, at the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, on 4 March 1877?

The correct answer is:

Pelagaya Karpakova

The first correct entry out of the hat is from Lucy Braga, who will receive a paperback of Odette from JDCMB and a CD of Swan Lake conducted by Vladimir Jurowski from Pentatone. Congratulations!

A seasonal message from home...

Dear readers, have a wonderful Christmas and new year!

Lots of love from your slightly knackered blogger and her household.

xxxxx