Friday, April 22, 2005
showing off dreadfully...
...but nevertheless I've got something to shout about today. Opened The Independent this morning to find that my piece on 1984 the opera is the Review section cover feature; and also that my piece about Faure and Turgenev has been turned into a sort of column on Review p18. Was going to put up the links here, but my computer has problems with the Indy website and for now all I can suggest is going to the music section here and scrolling down FEATURES to a) The Original Big Brother and b) Talking Classical. Or, of course, you could buy the paper. :-)
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Fiddlesticks...
Ilka Talvi has some marvellous reminiscences about his studies with violin professors who seem to have had a penchant for breaking their pupils' bows, intentionally or not. At least Heifetz gave the poor Japanese girl he victimised in this way a new one. There's been a fair bit of controversy about Mr Talvi's blog - various forums ask what he hopes to achieve - but as someone who is a little too close for comfort to orchestral life, not to mention the violin in the front room, I find what he has to say fascinating. And I love stories about those Golden Age fiddlers.
I met another fiddler the other day - one with a difference. This one grew up to be a conductor. And the conductor turned into a composer. Now 75, he is about to have his first opera performed at Covent Garden and very scarey it sounds too. I got an emergency call last week asking me to interview him the same afternoon...well, I dropped everything and legged it to the Royal Opera House. The maestro was singularly charming (rather more so than a certain other gentleman I interviewed not long ago who answered questions monosyllabically - usually with "no" - before I'd finished asking them) and I read the libretto with hair standing on end. "1984" doesn't sound like an obvious subject for an opera, but the dramatists have certainly done Orwell proud; now we'll have to wait and see what the music is like... My article should be in the Independent on Friday or Saturday. Meanwhile, the Royal Opera House website has more details. Lorin Maazel's 1984 opens on 3 May.
Afterwards, I told Tom that this is what a violinist can achieve if he puts his mind to it. I don't think he was too pleased.
ADDENDUM, 21 APRIL 9.30am: here's another view on Maazel's 1984 from the inimitable Norman Lebrecht. He's concerned with rather different matters, but I agree with him that there should be far more of a buzz surrounding this event than there has been so far. Not sure exactly when my Indy piece will appear - it may not be tomorrow after all, since they are running something else of mine.....
I met another fiddler the other day - one with a difference. This one grew up to be a conductor. And the conductor turned into a composer. Now 75, he is about to have his first opera performed at Covent Garden and very scarey it sounds too. I got an emergency call last week asking me to interview him the same afternoon...well, I dropped everything and legged it to the Royal Opera House. The maestro was singularly charming (rather more so than a certain other gentleman I interviewed not long ago who answered questions monosyllabically - usually with "no" - before I'd finished asking them) and I read the libretto with hair standing on end. "1984" doesn't sound like an obvious subject for an opera, but the dramatists have certainly done Orwell proud; now we'll have to wait and see what the music is like... My article should be in the Independent on Friday or Saturday. Meanwhile, the Royal Opera House website has more details. Lorin Maazel's 1984 opens on 3 May.
Afterwards, I told Tom that this is what a violinist can achieve if he puts his mind to it. I don't think he was too pleased.
ADDENDUM, 21 APRIL 9.30am: here's another view on Maazel's 1984 from the inimitable Norman Lebrecht. He's concerned with rather different matters, but I agree with him that there should be far more of a buzz surrounding this event than there has been so far. Not sure exactly when my Indy piece will appear - it may not be tomorrow after all, since they are running something else of mine.....
Saturday, April 16, 2005
Sokolov: this is what it's all about
The long-sold-out QEH recital by Grigory Sokolov yesterday has left me sleepless most of the night.
Do you remember what tomatoes are supposed to taste like? Sometimes you go to the Mediterranean - Israel, Italy, the south of France - and you eat a tomato that has just come off its plant, as red as a garnet and with a flavour as rich as if it's been ripened inside a volcano. And you think 'ah...I remember now...that's what it should taste like.' Not the pallid greenhouse (conservatory?) ones we buy in the supermarkets here. Somehow you know - as if you're remembering, even if you've never actually eaten one like this before - that this is the real thing and that nothing else passing for a tomato can ever taste as good, because this tomato has grown to be everything a tomato can and should be.
Sokolov's playing is like that.
It's difficult even to decide where to begin. Tone quality, I suppose, is as good as anywhere. Sokolov is a hefty fellow and he uses big gestures. His tone is massive and mountainous when he lets rip, but at every dynamic level it keeps its richness and beauty. In the first arpeggio of the Schubert A major Sonata D 959, the first piece on his programme, the quality of tone was so pure and smooth and magical that I found tears in my eyes from that alone. And although he's a big bear of a man, he can be as graceful as a ballet dancer (take the hand crossings in the Schubert) and create sounds as delicate as a hummingbird. He often chooses to play slowly and deliberately, to the point of idiosyncrasy; but the most rapid, filigree, spidersweb playing of the Chopin Fantasie-Impromptu proved that he does only what he chooses to do.
Then there's the way he orchestrates at the piano. If every piainist played this way, we'd have no need for orchestras, because this instrument turned into a one-man Berlin Philharmonic (or perhaps Moscow). Who knows how he does it - but the subtlest shift in weight or nuancing brings in a new character, a newly invented instrument, a new notion or emotion that can suddenly cast everything you've just heard in a revelatory new light. The second half was all Chopin: the impromptus, the two Op.62 Nocturnes and the Polonaise-Fantasie; the G flat impromptu, taken about half the speed most people take it, had a tenderness and profundity that could stop hearts and the B major nocturne glowed from within, filled with deep, unimaginable colours.
But then, just when you thought you'd heard it all, he unleashed the Polonaise-Fantasie. It was like listening to an entire Tolstoy novel compressed into a few pages of music - so expertly structured that when the climax arrived it emerged as a shattering apotheosis that blew the emotional horizon away into something resembling heaven. I wasn't the only one moved past reason by this - one of my dearest friends, a piano-world professional, tells me she simply burst into tears at the end because she had never realised that the Polonaise-Fantasie could be played like that. Nor, I reckon, had the rest of us.
This was an evening that showed what art is for and what art truly is. It's all real; it does exist; it is possible. Every shade of nuance, every grand-scale emotion that you never quite believed in, is absolutely true; to experience them is the ultimate reality of being human; this is love in its most pure and ecstatic form and to transmute it into artistry is something worth living for and worth dying for. This is why we have great art and why we need great art. Nothing else should do.
ADDENDUM, 17 APRIL: Here's a review of the concert. from Ying Chang at Classicalsource.com.
Do you remember what tomatoes are supposed to taste like? Sometimes you go to the Mediterranean - Israel, Italy, the south of France - and you eat a tomato that has just come off its plant, as red as a garnet and with a flavour as rich as if it's been ripened inside a volcano. And you think 'ah...I remember now...that's what it should taste like.' Not the pallid greenhouse (conservatory?) ones we buy in the supermarkets here. Somehow you know - as if you're remembering, even if you've never actually eaten one like this before - that this is the real thing and that nothing else passing for a tomato can ever taste as good, because this tomato has grown to be everything a tomato can and should be.
Sokolov's playing is like that.
It's difficult even to decide where to begin. Tone quality, I suppose, is as good as anywhere. Sokolov is a hefty fellow and he uses big gestures. His tone is massive and mountainous when he lets rip, but at every dynamic level it keeps its richness and beauty. In the first arpeggio of the Schubert A major Sonata D 959, the first piece on his programme, the quality of tone was so pure and smooth and magical that I found tears in my eyes from that alone. And although he's a big bear of a man, he can be as graceful as a ballet dancer (take the hand crossings in the Schubert) and create sounds as delicate as a hummingbird. He often chooses to play slowly and deliberately, to the point of idiosyncrasy; but the most rapid, filigree, spidersweb playing of the Chopin Fantasie-Impromptu proved that he does only what he chooses to do.
Then there's the way he orchestrates at the piano. If every piainist played this way, we'd have no need for orchestras, because this instrument turned into a one-man Berlin Philharmonic (or perhaps Moscow). Who knows how he does it - but the subtlest shift in weight or nuancing brings in a new character, a newly invented instrument, a new notion or emotion that can suddenly cast everything you've just heard in a revelatory new light. The second half was all Chopin: the impromptus, the two Op.62 Nocturnes and the Polonaise-Fantasie; the G flat impromptu, taken about half the speed most people take it, had a tenderness and profundity that could stop hearts and the B major nocturne glowed from within, filled with deep, unimaginable colours.
But then, just when you thought you'd heard it all, he unleashed the Polonaise-Fantasie. It was like listening to an entire Tolstoy novel compressed into a few pages of music - so expertly structured that when the climax arrived it emerged as a shattering apotheosis that blew the emotional horizon away into something resembling heaven. I wasn't the only one moved past reason by this - one of my dearest friends, a piano-world professional, tells me she simply burst into tears at the end because she had never realised that the Polonaise-Fantasie could be played like that. Nor, I reckon, had the rest of us.
This was an evening that showed what art is for and what art truly is. It's all real; it does exist; it is possible. Every shade of nuance, every grand-scale emotion that you never quite believed in, is absolutely true; to experience them is the ultimate reality of being human; this is love in its most pure and ecstatic form and to transmute it into artistry is something worth living for and worth dying for. This is why we have great art and why we need great art. Nothing else should do.
ADDENDUM, 17 APRIL: Here's a review of the concert. from Ying Chang at Classicalsource.com.
Thursday, April 14, 2005
Hotting up in the blogosphere
They're coming thick and fast, these music blogs. Today I've come across the first one devoted to ongoing life with an orchestra, namely the St Louis Symphony Orchestra - they can be found here - and also a blog named Of Music and Men by an individual who signs himself simply 'Talvi', but whom I understand from a bit of quick internet research is Ilka Talvi, the former concertmaster of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. I felt that the tone of his blog seemed inordinately familiar to me...oh, sing hey for orchestra life...or not! Fiddlers of the world (and their spouses) unite! I've added both of these to the blogroll, as well as On an Overgrown Path, whose author's thoughtful comment here the other day had unfortunately to be deleted along with the post to which it was attached.
I wonder whether our own LPO has thought of having its own blog.....A few years ago, long before blogging had really begun to take off, I began to write a little book called 'Married to the LPO'. I wrote about 100 pages and my agent kindly sent it off to a few publishers, all of whom said thanks but no thanks, it's too much like a diary. I didn't realise that what I was writing was, effectively, a blog! Sadly, it ended up joining the stack of manuscripts confined to the attic.
I wonder whether our own LPO has thought of having its own blog.....A few years ago, long before blogging had really begun to take off, I began to write a little book called 'Married to the LPO'. I wrote about 100 pages and my agent kindly sent it off to a few publishers, all of whom said thanks but no thanks, it's too much like a diary. I didn't realise that what I was writing was, effectively, a blog! Sadly, it ended up joining the stack of manuscripts confined to the attic.
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Fab CDs
My last post has been removed due to circumstances beyond my control. Sorry. I thought it was nice. Anyway, here are two wonderful new CDs for you instead.
As promised, details of Philippe Graffin's new recital disc: release date is now 18 April. Entitled in the shade of forests: the Bohemian world of Debussy, Ravel, Enescu, this is a disc that could only have been devised by a violinist with more than his fair share of intelligence and creativity, and the musical result is just as exciting, with Philippe's improvisatory sense of fantasy and glorious tone expertly partnered by the French pianist Claire Desert. The programme's inspiration is the image of the gypsy wanderer so long associated with the violin in its purest, most instinctive form, and the way that that image has inspired the three composers involved.
Enescu's Impressions d'enfance begins the disc, imbued with the notion of the wandering minstrel fiddler that Enescu carried with him to maturity; then there is, of course, Ravel's Tzigane, but played as you've never heard it before. Philippe and Claire employed not only the 'lutheal' - the mechanism, akin to a prepared piano, that provides the piano with a range of stops to evoke the sound of the cimbalom, the guitar and many stranger beings - but the original lutheal, fitted into a small 1919 Pleyel grand in the Musical Instrument Museum in Brussels, on which the piece enjoyed its very first recording. Sounds completely different from Dan Hope's also excellent recording ('East Meets West'), which involved fitting the machine into a modern Steinway. The 1919 instrument sounds more like a guitar than a harpsichord and meshes into some extraordinary, mesmerising soundworlds with the violin. Then comes the Ravel 'posthumous' sonata (a beautiful early work written for the composer to play with Enescu while both were students of Faure) and, last but not least, Debussy's complete works for violin and piano: not only the wonderful sonata, but also an early Nocturne & Scherzo that Philippe has reconstructed himself, and a batch of lovely pieces - two preludes and two songs - in arrangements, approved by Debussy, by the American-Hungarian violinist Arthur Hartmann. With superlative presentation, a thorough and fascinating booklet written mostly by Philippe himself and, above all, matchless, poetic, 500%-committed playing from both artists, this is Avie Records' latest must-have.
Marc-Andre Hamelin has an amazing new CD out: Albeniz's Iberia, complete, filled out with more treats from this ever-underrated but truly astonishing Spanish composer-pianist. Albeniz himself realised just how difficult Iberia was - apparently he considered it virtually unplayable and almost destroyed the manuscript for that reason. Thank heavens he didn't. And thank heavens for Marc, someone who can not only play it but can imbue it with the poetry, evocativeness, warmth, passion, earthy rhythm and sheer, lush gorgeousness that it deserves. I couldn't get enough of this, especially since I once entertained fond ideas of learning 'Triana', only to find my eyes crossing in front of my nose at the sight of the termite-heaps of notes that comprise the score. You'd never guess its fiendish complexity from this apparently effortless rendition, filled with wit and colour and dreamlike beauty bringing out every inch of the extensive French influence on the composer. If Debussy liked to sound Spanish, then Albeniz liked to sound like a French symbolist (except that he, of course, had just a little too much of a sense of humour!). Iberia is a one-off - there is nothing else quite like it in the piano repertoire - and I think this new recording is likely to be regarded as definitive for some time ahead. It's Hyperion's Record of the Month, and they're not wrong.
More soon.
As promised, details of Philippe Graffin's new recital disc: release date is now 18 April. Entitled in the shade of forests: the Bohemian world of Debussy, Ravel, Enescu, this is a disc that could only have been devised by a violinist with more than his fair share of intelligence and creativity, and the musical result is just as exciting, with Philippe's improvisatory sense of fantasy and glorious tone expertly partnered by the French pianist Claire Desert. The programme's inspiration is the image of the gypsy wanderer so long associated with the violin in its purest, most instinctive form, and the way that that image has inspired the three composers involved.
Enescu's Impressions d'enfance begins the disc, imbued with the notion of the wandering minstrel fiddler that Enescu carried with him to maturity; then there is, of course, Ravel's Tzigane, but played as you've never heard it before. Philippe and Claire employed not only the 'lutheal' - the mechanism, akin to a prepared piano, that provides the piano with a range of stops to evoke the sound of the cimbalom, the guitar and many stranger beings - but the original lutheal, fitted into a small 1919 Pleyel grand in the Musical Instrument Museum in Brussels, on which the piece enjoyed its very first recording. Sounds completely different from Dan Hope's also excellent recording ('East Meets West'), which involved fitting the machine into a modern Steinway. The 1919 instrument sounds more like a guitar than a harpsichord and meshes into some extraordinary, mesmerising soundworlds with the violin. Then comes the Ravel 'posthumous' sonata (a beautiful early work written for the composer to play with Enescu while both were students of Faure) and, last but not least, Debussy's complete works for violin and piano: not only the wonderful sonata, but also an early Nocturne & Scherzo that Philippe has reconstructed himself, and a batch of lovely pieces - two preludes and two songs - in arrangements, approved by Debussy, by the American-Hungarian violinist Arthur Hartmann. With superlative presentation, a thorough and fascinating booklet written mostly by Philippe himself and, above all, matchless, poetic, 500%-committed playing from both artists, this is Avie Records' latest must-have.
Marc-Andre Hamelin has an amazing new CD out: Albeniz's Iberia, complete, filled out with more treats from this ever-underrated but truly astonishing Spanish composer-pianist. Albeniz himself realised just how difficult Iberia was - apparently he considered it virtually unplayable and almost destroyed the manuscript for that reason. Thank heavens he didn't. And thank heavens for Marc, someone who can not only play it but can imbue it with the poetry, evocativeness, warmth, passion, earthy rhythm and sheer, lush gorgeousness that it deserves. I couldn't get enough of this, especially since I once entertained fond ideas of learning 'Triana', only to find my eyes crossing in front of my nose at the sight of the termite-heaps of notes that comprise the score. You'd never guess its fiendish complexity from this apparently effortless rendition, filled with wit and colour and dreamlike beauty bringing out every inch of the extensive French influence on the composer. If Debussy liked to sound Spanish, then Albeniz liked to sound like a French symbolist (except that he, of course, had just a little too much of a sense of humour!). Iberia is a one-off - there is nothing else quite like it in the piano repertoire - and I think this new recording is likely to be regarded as definitive for some time ahead. It's Hyperion's Record of the Month, and they're not wrong.
More soon.
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