Publishers be damned...

I've just been reading Alex Ross's article 'Listen to this' from The New Yorker, which you can find on his Blog. It's a superbly written, perceptive, spot-on critique of the concepts and preconceptions that are too often associated with the word 'classical'; and it serves to underline several gripes I have with the outside world's attitude to 'us', especially the attitude of publishers and bookshops.

As Alex points out, when people hear the word 'classical', they think 'dead'. Music is alive. Try telling this to the publishers of books on music. Browsing through the few remaining shelves in shops like Waterstones and Books Etc devoted to music - almost all have cut back to the bare minimum - I look at the offerings and wonder what planet these people are on. One noteworthy thing about Alex's aforementioned article is that it is so well written. There are not many writers on music with such a fine grasp of style. That's possibly why, when they exist, they get snapped up by a public that does have a hunger for intelligent writing about culture in general. Norman Lebrecht also springs to mind - even if what he says raises your blood pressure, the way he says it is so well-turned that some of us forgive him virtually anything.

Music begins where words end. Therefore expressing the essence of a musical experience in words is unlikely to be adequate. Usually it is rather worse. The bookshelves, such as they are, feature volumes intended for university libraries and perhaps the private collections of what we in Britain commonly call 'anoraks'. Publishers perceive a specialist market for books on music in which anything basically 'accessible' (awful word) or 'readable' is wide of the mark. At the opposite extreme, the number of books on classical music addressed in their titles to 'dummies' or suchlike is staggeringly large. Publishers seem to think that to want to read about music, you have either to be so intellectual that you can't bear to step outside your ivory tower, or alternatively that you regard yourself as thick. Most of us are neither.

Music books are segregated in the music shops like women in an orthodox shul. I dream of the day when my biography of Korngold will live on a shelf of mainstream biographies rubbing shoulders with Kafka and Kokoschka, and my Faure book will happily cohabit with tracts on Foucault and Flaubert. Composers have made as great a contribution to the history of culture as writers and artists, but are seen as something to be handled with kid gloves, graphs and Schenkerian analyses, kept well away from the superbug infections of the mainstream. Music is boxed out, away from literature, away from art, away from real life. (It is also boxed out of absolutely everything by lazy marketing and promotion departments...) This is not only ridiculous but also damaging.

About a year ago I made a little academic discovery... The full story will be coming out in The Strad later this year. All I can say for now is that this discovery has been lurking in the depths of fin-de-siecle Paris for more than a century, but has so far gone unremarked. Perhaps that is because music, art and literature tend to be studied in isolation from each other. If experts on certain writers also bothered to look at the lives of certain composers who were close to them, this would have been spotted decades ago. And if experts on composers looked in any detail at their contact with the writers in question, who knows what could turn up? About 110 years ago in Paris, these segregations were unheard-of. Chausson was friendly with the artist Odilon Redon. Faure married the daughter of a well-known sculptor. Pauline Viardot virtually lived with Ivan Turgenev, an opera libretto by whom her friend Brahms once rejected (!). Most of them met at each others' salons. I rather enjoy Schenkerian analysis on occasion, but what can it tell us about the way these circles of artists fed off each other's creativity and what cross-fertilisations this could have produced that we enjoy, unknowingly, today?

Here are a few recommendations of books on music that are well written, well researched, serious and still enjoyable to read:

Edward Elgar: a creative life, by Jerrold Northrop Moore

Beyond the Notes, by Susan Tomes (as mentioned the other day)

Parallels and Paradoxes, by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said

Wagner and Philosophy, by Bryan Magee

Tchaikovsky, by David Brown

The Maestro Myth, by Norman Lebrecht

Back to the future

With apologies to any of you who might believe that the Almighty created the human being Perfect, I have to report that THERE IS A SERIOUS DESIGN FAULT IN THE HUMAN BACK.

Last weekend, in a flurry of 'Beloved Clara' anxiety, I spent three happy hours gardening. Monday morning I woke up and could hardly move. I've done nothing useful this week except lie on my back in 'Alexander Technique' pose trying to straighten out my spine, which isn't broken but feels as if it is. Back pain is vile. It not only scuppers you physically, but also mentally. I've written nothing (except Dulwich blog entry, pretending all was well!), read nothing, listened to nothing, been no further from the house than Waitrose (3 mins gentle stroll) and only watched one French film (Jean de Florette, which I've seen 5 times already).

When things get you down this way, you can become 'half in love with easeful death' - at least with the notion of an anaesthetic to knock you out for a few weeks. But there is one thing to live for. Music, of course.

I've spent two hours this afternoon gritting my teeth and playing the piano. I've played through the Franck violin sonata to make sure I can still play it (yes!), brushing up the Debussy 'Clair de lune' (my party piece since 1981) and reading through some of my beloved Faure's abominably tricky nocturnes. Even if my back isn't better, my soul is on the mend. As long as there is music of such overwhelming beauty in the world, it's worth being here.

Having nothing better to do, besides practising, than surf the internet, I've just come across a blog by Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, which is excellent - link under Music Friends. Alex, sorry you knew about my blog before I knew about yours, but better late than never!

Of course, one of the other things worth living for is good food. I've had some major successes with Nigella Lawson's recipes, especially the ones from 'Forever Summer'.

Actually, there's plenty to live for, isn't there!

Matzo pudding competition winner

Looks like nobody else knows how to make a matzo pudding any more than I do. But the prize goes to Marion Gedney of New York City, who e-mailed me to say that although she doesn't have a recipe, she thinks she knows what my father meant and hopes that it was supposed to be funny.

Marion is a clinical psychologist...

Marion, e-mail me your postal address and a CD will be on its way to you shortly!

Glyndebourne, plus newsy bits

Dress rehearsal of Pelleas et Melisande at Glyndebourne yesterday. One of those rare occasions when the first trip down of the summer is on the sort of cloudless, hot day on which the place is basically paradise. The leaves are bright May green, the hawthorn flowers are out, there are sheep in the field on the hillside. In the interval the lawns are so covered with the company friends and relations picnicking that it's like a scene from Renoir. This is my seventh year of hanging out there with Tom and I still have to pinch myself to make sure it's real. I love the dress rehearsals because the family atmosphere is so excellent. Yesterday I was in the front row of the stalls right next to the violins - had to resist the temptation to pull silly faces at Tom and to throw his colleagues sweets over the railing. Not a good idea.

Pelleas is a revival of a stunning Graham Vick production, with gold panelled walls, a floor of flowers and an incredibly claustrophic atmosphere. John Tomlinson as Golaud is the central figure and his charisma makes the story work much better than usual. Marie Arnet is a gorgeous, delicate Melisande and the lovely Louis Langree takes a robust approach to the score which I like very much. I don't believe Debussy (or Faure, for that matter) should be all elusive and floaty. This stuff comes right from the gut. Highly recommended.


BOOKS AND CDS UPDATE

Tasmin Little has recorded the Karlowicz Violin Concerto on Hyperion and if you don't know the piece, you should get a copy right away. Karlowicz was a Polish composer of the early 20th century who died terribly young and has only recently attracted much attention. About 13 years ago, I visited Krystian Zimerman in Switzerland and he played me an old Polish recording of this concerto; I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever heard. Marvellous that it's now new-minted on a mainstream label. Bravo, Taz.

Marc-Andre Hamelin's new Kapustin disc is a complete delight from start to finish. Kapustin is a rather retiring Russian who prolifically composes piano music in traditional classical forms but fills them with an astonishing, idiosyncratic, energetic jazz idiom. Charming, dizzying and virtuosic, it shows off super-cool Marc to the manner born. Also on Hyperion.

Susan Tomes has written a book called 'Beyond The Notes' about life as a travelling chamber music player. Insights into what Domus was all about and why it had to give up its dome - that was the early 80s - can you imagine anyone daring to leave a concert dome unattended overnight in the Pavilion Gardens in 2004?! Susan's a deep thinker and her philosophical reflections about the nature of musical communication and relationships in a chamber group are fascinating. From Boydell Press.

You can get all of these from Amazon via the link box on the left.


MYSTERY VIEWER IN FRANCE - WHO ARE YOU???
Dear readers, my web-counter doesn't tell me who you are but does give me a rough idea of where you might be. One reader particularly intrigues me. You've been checking in roughly twice a day. You are in France. You are logging on from UNAPEC, which Google tells me is a university. Please, whoever you are: if you can bear to, write a comment box and identify yourself! S'IL VOUS PLAIT, ECRIVEZ-MOI! The suspense is killing me!

If you were...

In cover features for PIANIST magazine, I have to ask my interviewees a particular set of questions. 'If you were....... - what would you be?' I get some interesting responses - it can be surprisingly illuminating. So I thought I'd have a go at it myself. Here's the result

IF YOU WERE...

A HISTORICAL OR FICTIONAL CHARACTER - WHO WOULD YOU BE?
Franz Liszt. I think he had fun. I do NOT want to have been any of those patient, long-suffering women who struggled all their lives to be creative, like Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn or Charlotte Bronte! (Emma Bardac is a better option, as she sang well, hosted a progressive Parisian artistic salon and slept with both Faure and Debussy...but even that had its drawbacks...)

A BOOK?
'I Capture the Castle' by Dodie Smith. My favourite book. I've read it about 350 times and never get tired of it. (Available via Amazon, link on left.)

A FILM?
'Les enfants du paradis' - French masterpiece from the 1940s starring Jean-Louis Barrault and Arletty. Now available in snazzy DVD (see Amazon).

A PIECE OF MUSIC?
Unfair!! But - on balance - Faure's Piano Quartet No.1 in C minor

A TYPE OF FOOD?
Chocolate - preferably Green & Black's Organic, absolute minimum 70% cocoa solids

A WINE?
An excessively fine 1976 red Bordeaux

A QUALITY?
Enthusiasm

A FAULT?
Over-enthusiasm

What about you? Try it and put the results in a comment box!