Asking for trouble

If you name your cat after a fierce Hungarian conductor, you can bet he'll get into trouble. Solti appeared this morning with a cat war wound on his face and had to be taken to the vet to have the abcess lanced. Now he looks like an extra-mean feline Long John Silver, minus parrot (wouldn't put it past him to catch one, though).

Tom is currently in Brazil with the BBC Symphony Orchestra (he normally plays for the London Philharmonic, but these things happen sometimes). He reports that Sao Paolo in the rain looks like Manchester, Rio has great food, and Leonidas Kavakos, who's the soloist for Berg and Sibelius violin concertos, is one of the three top fiddlers on earth.

I've adored everything I've heard Kavakos play, and I find it most encouraging to reflect that here is someone who matches none of the International Star stereotypes yet knocks the spots off the majority of those that do. He's Greek. He has a moustache. He wears glasses. He is (I think) about 40. He doesn't have to be photographed in jeans or hugging wolves. It's not just technique, it's what you choose to do with that technique. This man doesn't only have a fiddle - he has a brain. And also, I think, a sense of humour. Read my review of his Ravel and Enescu CD on ECM here (scroll down to January 2004).

Incidentally, in case anyone is wondering why I have a violin fetish despite being a pianist, it all goes back to when I fell in love with my violin teacher in 1984...Talk about asking for trouble.

Latest violin epiphany

A friend recently lent us a DVD of a violinist whom we knew by name but nothing more. We sat transfixed, watching the film of him playing Sibelius in the mid 1950s. This man has a sound that can slice through your abdomen like the world's finest butterknife; the intensity is heartbreaking, the consistency silky and substantial from foreground to background, the integrity total. We read the booklet and first discovered he was born in 1933 - a moment of excitement realising that he could, should, still be alive - until a paragraph later came the shock that he committed suicide at the age of 49.

Little clue is given to his character, his motivation, his problems. All that remains is the testimony of his musicianship. I sent off at once for a set in the EMI 'Les introuvables' series (EMI being EMI, you have to get it from France, but that's easy with amazon.fr). It arrived yesterday, including two different recordings of the Faure A major sonata made a few years apart - the first as tender and delicate as a mountain stream, the other smouldering and sparking like a volcano, yet each perfect in its own way - but they are almost upstaged by his account of Faure's Second Sonata in E minor, which is often thought 'difficult' yet which he lights up with visionary luminescence, generous tone and intuitively perfect phrasing. One senses from such white-hot playing that for this person life and music were serious matters - that perhaps his sensitivity and personal standards were too high to allow him to deal with reality.

His name is Christian Ferras.

This is the DVD. This is the CD set.

Meanwhile, Alex Ross has the most eloquent words about Korngold I've seen in a long time here.

Damsel in major computer distress

HELP!!!! Any computer wizards out there? I came back late last night in the middle of what's been the Week From The Depths of Hell to find that my internet connection won't work. I am a technoignorama [good word...] and Tom (who, to be fair, isn't much better) is away on tour in Brazil.

It isn't as simple as it sounds. My computer and Tom's are networked together on a single broadband connection in which Tom's is the closest to the telephone source. His works fine, hence I am on it now. All I can get out of my Internet Explorer and Entourage, though, is 'The Specified Server Could Not Be Found'.

What's going on? Is it my computer hardware? Software? The network? (yes I HAVE checked that the wires are plugged in.) Do I need to reinstall all my software, will it help, will I lose all my info if I do so? Who do I call? The Mac man? The friend who set up our network, which worked absolutely perfectly until Tom and his suitcase and violin vanished Heathrowards yesterday? I think actually I need Superman.

Anyone out there got any SENSIBLE AND HELPFUL SUGGESTIONS? ***PLEASE?!?!?***

Strange stats

So far I've had hits on this blog in 36 countries, including via a few very odd google searches. My favourites are:

General anaesthetic symbolism
Danish blondes
Hungarian communist apartment disgusting
Where can I find magic mushrooms in Scunthorpe
Latkes en francais

I think that a latke is a latke is a latke - except perhaps in Lithuania, their homeland, where they're called something else since 94% of the Jewish population was killed 60 years ago.

My first English-language article about my Lithuanian trip is out now in the Jewish Quarterly.

Getting into Korngold

A Comments note from Ken Nielsen in Oz asks where to start with Korngold. Here we go:

START with the films - Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Deception. You'll probably find you've heard them before, somewhere in your distant past. Next, the Violin Concerto is the best-known orchestral piece: try Gil Shaham with the LSO and Andre Previn. Happy? Now for his best opera, Die tote Stadt, in the recording by Erich Leinsdorf (don't bother with el cheapo Naxos, recorded live in Sweden complete with stage clonkings and swingeing cuts). If you get along with that, move on to Das Wunder der Heliane, the most ambitious of the operas and the work he regarded as his masterpiece - and turn the volume up high! If you can swallow Heliane, you are truly a Korngold person...

In which case, you can gorge happily on all those beautiful but underplayed orchestral works like the Sinfonietta, the Abschiedlieder, the Symphony in F sharp, the Cello Concerto (here with hot young cellist Zuill Bailey), and the Piano Concerto for the left hand (with the glorious Marc-Andre Hamelin); and the songs, gloriously sung by Anne Sofie von Otter (this recording also features some of the chamber music, which is interesting, but not really the best place to begin).

Er, Ken, do I take it you've read my book already? If not, here's the Amazon link...