Bleak house?

Plenty of food for thought in the December edition of BBC Music Magazine, which landed on the mat this morning (you can order the mag here, though the articles aren't online).

One of its most valuable fixtures is Richard Morrison's Comment page, which this time presents the most sensible writing I've yet seen about the crazy crisis now facing our poor UK orchestras, who are usually tackling one crisis or another but had recently been lulled into a false sense of security by the government's 'Stabilisation Programme'. This time, absurd Inland Revenue bureaucracy appears to be to blame - though not solely.

There's plenty of stuff about it in the press, so I won't restate the detail. Briefly, if the Revenue gets its way and stings them all for National Insurance arrears, the results will bankrupt 4 out of 5 British orchestras.

If that included the LPO - and I'm afraid it would - Tom and I would have to sell our house; a budding novelist would find herself back at the subs desk; and Tom says he'd like to be a train driver if he grows up. Worse, where would our souls be without our music?

Richard says:

"What all this adds up to, I believe, is a national crisis. Do we want a viable orchestral profession in Britain or not? The question is as stark as that. Of course musicians cannot be exempt from the tax laws. But it does seem mad for the Culture Department to invest £35m in 'stabilising' our orchestras, only for almost exactly that sum to be snatched away by the Inland Revenue."

Furthermore, he points out that if all those orchestras went to the wall and their musicians were denied a livelihood, the Revenue certainly wouldn't get its desired £33m.

Also in the magazine there's a fascinating article about the music boom in China, which points out that an entire generation of potential music-lovers was lost because of the policies of Mao. Obviously things are less extreme in the UK, but Richard remarks that he's observed hundreds of empty seats at fantastic concerts in Birmingham, Manchester and Scotland: What we are reaping now, I fear, is the withered harvest of a national music curriculum that has left two generations of school-leavers unequipped to understand symphonic music. Expecting the orchestras to remedy that with 'outreach' projects is a bit like asking cancer patients to heal themselves with aspirin." (Crikey, why has it taken 10 years for someone to admit the truth about 'outreach'?!)

Were Thatcher and Major the British cultural equivalent of Mao? The following will seem harsh, but in China, Chinese traditional culture was supposed to replace Western. Here, Western culture was being elbowed out in favour of...nothing but mindless, soulless consumerism.

That's quite enough ranting... I shall stop panicking, take another Kalms tablet and get back to work on the next novel.

New voices

The Blogosphere never stands still for very long and while I've been spacing out on Mendelssohn and Barkauskas, new voices have been making themselves heard! Readers with good German should have a look at this: Trip to Asia, a preview blog about a new film featuring Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, discovered via not only our old friend at On an Overgrown Path but also Sequenza 21, the contemporary classical portal that everyone seems to have known about except me. Several music journalists in the States have started their own blogs: check out Danny Felsenfeld's Felsenmusick, Marc Geelhoed's Deceptively Simple and Anastasia Tsioulcas's Cafe Aman. All well worth reading and duly added to blogroll here, along with Mackenzie Chan's Top Ten Sources, Mac kindly having written to ask if I mind being included in the classical list. Mind? moi?!? Thank you, Mac!!

Meanwhile, a more familiar voice in the shape of Cecilia Bartoli: my article following my trip to interview her in Rome, Sweet Rome (see September 05 archives) is in The Independent today. Read it here.

UPDATE, 4pm: I've also been overhauling the index to include a range of stuff I've been meaning to add for a while, but never got round to before. There's not much rhyme or reason to the order of the links, but please have fun exploring them!

Smile, you're in the paper

Tomcat was rung up by The Guardian the other day and this is the result. He's talking here to Stephen Moss about the recent kerfuffle over the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra's gloomy facial expressions. I love the comment about only needing to be truly awake between 7.30 and 9.30pm.

Apologies over the delay in your comments appearing recently, by the way. I've introduced Comments Moderation but have just discovered that it wasn't working because my browser is deeply incompatible with Blogger and I have to work that elaborate system via Tom's computer when he's not looking. A few guidelines: I will be REJECTING any comments that are anonymous, abusive, advertising-oriented or otherwise iffy. Now that we've been Blog of the Week, we've got standards to maintain!

Sunday discs

A few CDs that have come my way recently that you may enjoy too:

Marc-Andre Hamelin's new disc of Schumann (Hyperion), featuring Papillons, the Fantasiestucke Op.12 and Carnaval. There's so much fantasy, warmth, tenderness and sheer 'oomph' about Marc's playing here that for the first time I'm willing to relegate my previous Carnaval favourite, Youri Egourov, to the back-burner shelf.

Double Dream (EMI), a bizarre but oddly successful programme of improvisations on some well-known piano pieces on two pianos, played by Mikhail Rudy and Misha Alperin. I approached this with some caution, but found it amazingly compelling: the two Mishas choose works including Schumann's 'Prophet Bird', Janacek's 'On an Overgrown Path', and works by Chopin, Prokofiev and Bach besides Alperin's original compositions, and take them meditatively to places you'd never have dreamed they could go.

The Florestan Trio plays Mendelssohn (Hyperion). This is WONDERFUL. Mendelssohn needs a very special soundworld, driven with elan and fire yet full of air and lightness and subtlety. The Florestans give him the lot. Not many CDs make it straight onto my iTunes (that's on the computer, not an iPod, which I don't have...), but this one did and I play it every time I need cheering up.

The Wanderer: Luiza Borac plays Schubert and Liszt (Avie). Dynamic, glittering, galvanising and sensitive playing from this wonderful young Romanian, following the Wanderer Fantasy with a smashing selection of Italian-themed Liszt from the Annees de Pelerinage.

Vytautas Barkauskas's Duo Concertante and more (Avie), recorded live in Vilnius last year by Philippe Graffin, Nobuko Imai and the Vilnius Festival Orchestra under Robertas Servenikas. I was THERE when they recorded it (see Archives, June 2004) and it sounds every bit as good on CD as it did on the day. The piece is fabulous, full of colour and imagination, with the two characterful soloists on top form. On the disc Philippe also plays Barkauskas's Violin Concerto, Jeux, which he commissioned and recorded the previous year - again, playful, quirky, intriguing music that lives in a special imaginative world of its own.

Anyone else cry over old movies?

I disgraced myself yesterday by dissolving into FLOODS at my oldest friend's dad's birthday party. The evening included (convoluted explanation omitted) a viewing of an astonishing film from the 1940s entitled HUMORESQUE, starring Joan Crawford and John Garfield, with Oscar Levant as light relief/fantastic pianist. John Garfield plays a gifted young violinist from a disadvantaged background in New York. Joan Crawford is an older(ish), wealthy, married, society party-giver who helps his career and falls for him in the process. He falls for her too. She drinks too much, is deeply insecure and a little short-sighted (in many ways). He plays music, music and more music - played on the soundtrack by Isaac Stern. Music arranged and conducted by Franz Waxman, including his wild version of the Liebestod from Tristan for violin, piano and orchestra - to which Joan Crawford ultimately goes to pieces and drowns herself. The screenplay is multilayered, insightful, accurate and original and turns out to be by Clifford Odets. I was a snuffling wreck at the end.

Sample line: "A French philosopher once wrote down 300 ways of committing suicide. He left one out: fall in love with an Artist..."