I don't usually buy Gramophone. But this month Philippe Graffin's CD 'In the Shade of Forests' has made Editor's Choice and an extract on the cover CD - he's plastered all over the thing! - so I thought I'd better get a copy. Gramophone is celebrating its 1000th issue and it proves full of interesting things to read, not only the review of Philippe's disc by Rob Cowan, which is marvellous. I'll post a link to it as soon as Gramophone.co.uk has sorted out the glitch on its Editor's Choice page.
[UPDATE, 3 DECEMBER: Finally, they've done it! Voila!]
The magazine's celebratory articles include a section in which they've asked musical bigwigs to contribute short pieces about why classical music matters (unfortunately heralded with a picture of an audience giving a standing ovation in a plush hall dressed in penguin suits - not the most encouragingly egalitarian approach and not a regular sight anywhere in the UK except Glyndebourne!) Some are succinct and moving on the reasons why we can't live without music, others fully representative of the dense academicism that puts so many people off the stuff altogether. Here are two. Anyone want to guess who wrote each of them?
1. Classical music is unique, in that its grammar, syntax and formal construction present an abstract discourse in time roughly equivalent to that of the most ambitious architecture in space, in which thematic material of contrasting functions is subjected to variation, development and transformation in organically consistent ways, with the tonic of the home key providing a sense of direction over large spans of time - not least harmonically - making multi-dimensionality possible in time, with an ever-changing focus between foreground, middle-ground and background, which as a vanishing point enables this to happen in space. This has no equivalent throughout civilisation.
2. Think of a world without the joys of Rossini, the consolations of Schubert, the ambiguities of Mozart, the austerities of Stravinsky, the complexities of Birtwistle, the diversions of Ligeti. No, don't; it would be too awful to endure. For at least 1000 years, from medieval plainchant to Renaissance polyphony, though two Viennese schools and on to contemporary minimalism, 'classical music' has demonstrated a continuing ability to adapt, form and reform itself, and divert into new codes, discipline and shapes. Throughout this time, 'classical music' has remained universal in its language, extending its reach globally in a remarkable way. If it wasn't also about exhilaration, exultation, anguish, despair and pathos, it would not have survived or deserved to.
Identification tomorrow!
Elsewhere in the magazine, critics are asked to a) select any musician of their choice to give them a Command Performance; b) choose their greatest disc ever. It's refreshing to find Jed Distler choosing Barbra Streisand for his Command artist - and volunteering to accompany her! But the fact remains that the vast majority of musicians chosen by critics in both categories are DEAD. Is there any other field in which young creative artists have to struggle quite so hard to hold their own in the present day against the reputations of their forerunners? At least in literature, the reputations of Tolstoy or Jane Austen don't actually prevent new books from doing well. But any young pianist on CD has to battle the recorded legacy of Rachmaninov and Horowitz, while violinists are up against that of Heifetz and cellists Casals or du Pre.
I'd agree with many of these critics, of course - I'd love to have heard Heifetz, Rachmaninov or Cortot live, and I'm certainly with Rob Cowan on longing to hear Fritz Kreisler play the Elgar Violin Concerto. Still, I've also heard a lot of great stuff right here and now. As I don't write for Gramophone, here is my request for a Command Performance:
DEAREST KRYSTIAN, PLEASE PLAY ME SOME CHOPIN?
Friday, November 25, 2005
Thursday, November 24, 2005
From Russia, with teddy bear
The St Petersburg Philharmonic concert last night was quite an event. A huge orchestra crammed on to the Barbican platform - not for these guys those trendy slimmed-down bands - and, presiding over them, the modest yet magnetic figure of Yuri Temirkanov, whose combination of authority, focus, musical fidelity and genuine feeling makes him one of the few maestri whom most musicians not only respect but also love.
The tone blew me off my chair in seconds. Oh, those strings. To die for... Brahms 2, in the second half, was a chance for a serious wallow: those violas! Those cellos! Oh yes, yes, YES! But the first piece in the programme was a highlight in itself. The Suite from Prokofiev's Cinderella doesn't hit the concert hall often enough - I've only heard it live before at the ballet (admittedly, the Ugly Sisters bits aren't the same without Frederick Ashton) - and it has some glorious moments. The best, for me, is the striking of midnight: it's as if you are inside the mechanism of a great grotesque clock with the cogs and wheels grinding and clonking around your ears. And the greatest magic is the moment of silence when it's over and you have to surrender to the big tune that signals all is lost and pumpkindom regained.
So to our young pianist, Denis Matsuev, who was the soloist for the Rachmaninov Paganini Rhapsody. Apparently he's 30, but he looks like a 14-year-old teddy bear in a penguin suit who wants, when he grows up, to be Sokolov. I swung both ways, listening. Some of it I loved; some I admired; some had my eyes and ears on stalks; some I hated. His tone in the quieter parts is truly beautiful: loving phrasing for the famous tune, the clearest, most gleaming sound and beautifully limpid phrasing for the fast solo variation that I've come across; but he's not above thumping the hell out of the piano at the top end of the spectrum (Sokolov's tone, please note, remains rich and glorious even at FFFFF). Sometimes he let things run away with him: the excitement becomes too extreme, he overheats and the sound, and concept, become less controlled and more questionable than they should. But my attention was absolutely with him the whole way, which is more than I can say about Lugansky's performance of the same piece last year (=bored silly). I'm convinced, too, that there was a sense of striving for something beyond the ordinary, a visceral excitement, hints of a far-seeing beauty that one hopes he'll develop over the years. His encore was breathtaking: a virtuoso fantasy on The Barber of Seville, dizzyingly fast, light as a feather, spot-on timing, the whole thing assured as a mountaineer at the summit of Everest. The hall went bananas. The friend I was with, incidentally, absolutely hated his playing - "He's slick, he plays fast, so what?!"
But I feel this was more than just another teddy bear's picnic - though Matsuev will probably be dining out on his success with the audience for years to come. The place was full of music-biz bigwigs cheering him to the rafters. Like him, loathe him or both, I think he'll be back.
UPDATE, FRIDAY 25TH NOV: Here's Richard Morrison's review from The Times. Seems like he doesn't share my taste for yummy string tone. He's right about the fluffed horns and missing flute phrase in the Brahms, but frankly I didn't think it was worth mentioning those because a) find me a horn section these days that DOESN'T fluff anything, b) the band was probably in the midst of tour-funk knackeredness. His comments about Matsuev are pretty interesting.
MORE, TUESDAY 29TH NOV: Here's Erica Jeal's review from The Guardian.
The tone blew me off my chair in seconds. Oh, those strings. To die for... Brahms 2, in the second half, was a chance for a serious wallow: those violas! Those cellos! Oh yes, yes, YES! But the first piece in the programme was a highlight in itself. The Suite from Prokofiev's Cinderella doesn't hit the concert hall often enough - I've only heard it live before at the ballet (admittedly, the Ugly Sisters bits aren't the same without Frederick Ashton) - and it has some glorious moments. The best, for me, is the striking of midnight: it's as if you are inside the mechanism of a great grotesque clock with the cogs and wheels grinding and clonking around your ears. And the greatest magic is the moment of silence when it's over and you have to surrender to the big tune that signals all is lost and pumpkindom regained.
So to our young pianist, Denis Matsuev, who was the soloist for the Rachmaninov Paganini Rhapsody. Apparently he's 30, but he looks like a 14-year-old teddy bear in a penguin suit who wants, when he grows up, to be Sokolov. I swung both ways, listening. Some of it I loved; some I admired; some had my eyes and ears on stalks; some I hated. His tone in the quieter parts is truly beautiful: loving phrasing for the famous tune, the clearest, most gleaming sound and beautifully limpid phrasing for the fast solo variation that I've come across; but he's not above thumping the hell out of the piano at the top end of the spectrum (Sokolov's tone, please note, remains rich and glorious even at FFFFF). Sometimes he let things run away with him: the excitement becomes too extreme, he overheats and the sound, and concept, become less controlled and more questionable than they should. But my attention was absolutely with him the whole way, which is more than I can say about Lugansky's performance of the same piece last year (=bored silly). I'm convinced, too, that there was a sense of striving for something beyond the ordinary, a visceral excitement, hints of a far-seeing beauty that one hopes he'll develop over the years. His encore was breathtaking: a virtuoso fantasy on The Barber of Seville, dizzyingly fast, light as a feather, spot-on timing, the whole thing assured as a mountaineer at the summit of Everest. The hall went bananas. The friend I was with, incidentally, absolutely hated his playing - "He's slick, he plays fast, so what?!"
But I feel this was more than just another teddy bear's picnic - though Matsuev will probably be dining out on his success with the audience for years to come. The place was full of music-biz bigwigs cheering him to the rafters. Like him, loathe him or both, I think he'll be back.
UPDATE, FRIDAY 25TH NOV: Here's Richard Morrison's review from The Times. Seems like he doesn't share my taste for yummy string tone. He's right about the fluffed horns and missing flute phrase in the Brahms, but frankly I didn't think it was worth mentioning those because a) find me a horn section these days that DOESN'T fluff anything, b) the band was probably in the midst of tour-funk knackeredness. His comments about Matsuev are pretty interesting.
MORE, TUESDAY 29TH NOV: Here's Erica Jeal's review from The Guardian.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Why is Faure like the No.28 bus?
Some good gigs in London this week.
The Wigmore Hall is enjoying a plethora of Faure. Tomorrow (Wendes) and Thursday, the fabulous Leopold String Trio and the delectable pianist Pascal Roge (his website is sensational!) are giving programmes that include the two Piano Quartets, one per night. On Sunday morning at 11.30 the ever-popular Coffee Concerts feature the Panocha Quartet from the Czech Republic with pianist and Faure editor Roy Howat, offering the first London performance of Roy's new edition of the Piano Quintet No.1. We could be in for some surprises there, as Roy has reached the end of a long battle with a French musicologist who was so outraged by his discoveries about the work's tempo indications (and, we expect, much more too) that he attempted to censor the entire effort out of existence...More details of Wigmore gigs here.
Wednesday is clearly the big day. While Pascal and the Leopolds are in full flight at the Wigmore, Tom's band, the LPO, is performing Mozart Symphony No.40 and the Rossini Stabat Mater at the Queen Elizabeth Hall - details and last few available seats here - and on Thursday they're off to Rome to do the same programme in the San Giovanni Cathedral.
Meanwhile, I shall be sloping off to the Barbican to hear the St Petersburg Philharmonic and Yuri Temirkanov who are currently touring the UK - Prokofiev Cinderella Suite, Rachmaninov Paganini Rhapsody and Brahms Second Symphony. The soloist in the Rachmaninov is a rather interesting youngster, Denis Matsuev, who is 30 and a Tchaikovsky Competition Winner (incidentally, a former pupil of the same legendary professor who taught Nikolai Lugansky pre-Tchaik Comp win). Will be intrigued to see if I enjoy his performance more than Lugansky's a year ago.
On Saturday at Cadogan Hall there's the final of the Pianist Magazine/Yamaha Piano Competition for Amateurs. Inspired by the success of the Van Cliburn similar set-up, an acolyte contest to the main competition, this one seems to have caught everyone's imagination and seven competitiors, including a piano tuner in his seventies and a financial manager from the City are going to battle it out on the Chelsea stage in front of 600 people plus Pianist editor Erica Worth and a jury including Martin Roscoe, Kathryn Stott and Jamie Cullum! Blimey. I don't know why they put themselves through it. I had quite enough trouble in front of Stephen Kovacevich and ten friends in his front room. Go, guys, go!!! Chase that dream! Read more about it here.
Out of town, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and our very dear friend Marc-Andre Hamelin are touring Poole, Exeter and Southampton tomorrow, Thursday and Friday, playing - you guessed it - Faure! The Ballade, namely, which Marc is augmenting with the Falla 'Nights in the Gardens of Spain'. Full details here.What is it about Faure? Nothing for months and then everyone is at it at once.
That, in case you were wondering, is why Faure is like the No.28 bus, on which I used to rely too much when I lived in West Hampstead.
The Wigmore Hall is enjoying a plethora of Faure. Tomorrow (Wendes) and Thursday, the fabulous Leopold String Trio and the delectable pianist Pascal Roge (his website is sensational!) are giving programmes that include the two Piano Quartets, one per night. On Sunday morning at 11.30 the ever-popular Coffee Concerts feature the Panocha Quartet from the Czech Republic with pianist and Faure editor Roy Howat, offering the first London performance of Roy's new edition of the Piano Quintet No.1. We could be in for some surprises there, as Roy has reached the end of a long battle with a French musicologist who was so outraged by his discoveries about the work's tempo indications (and, we expect, much more too) that he attempted to censor the entire effort out of existence...More details of Wigmore gigs here.
Wednesday is clearly the big day. While Pascal and the Leopolds are in full flight at the Wigmore, Tom's band, the LPO, is performing Mozart Symphony No.40 and the Rossini Stabat Mater at the Queen Elizabeth Hall - details and last few available seats here - and on Thursday they're off to Rome to do the same programme in the San Giovanni Cathedral.
Meanwhile, I shall be sloping off to the Barbican to hear the St Petersburg Philharmonic and Yuri Temirkanov who are currently touring the UK - Prokofiev Cinderella Suite, Rachmaninov Paganini Rhapsody and Brahms Second Symphony. The soloist in the Rachmaninov is a rather interesting youngster, Denis Matsuev, who is 30 and a Tchaikovsky Competition Winner (incidentally, a former pupil of the same legendary professor who taught Nikolai Lugansky pre-Tchaik Comp win). Will be intrigued to see if I enjoy his performance more than Lugansky's a year ago.
On Saturday at Cadogan Hall there's the final of the Pianist Magazine/Yamaha Piano Competition for Amateurs. Inspired by the success of the Van Cliburn similar set-up, an acolyte contest to the main competition, this one seems to have caught everyone's imagination and seven competitiors, including a piano tuner in his seventies and a financial manager from the City are going to battle it out on the Chelsea stage in front of 600 people plus Pianist editor Erica Worth and a jury including Martin Roscoe, Kathryn Stott and Jamie Cullum! Blimey. I don't know why they put themselves through it. I had quite enough trouble in front of Stephen Kovacevich and ten friends in his front room. Go, guys, go!!! Chase that dream! Read more about it here.
Out of town, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and our very dear friend Marc-Andre Hamelin are touring Poole, Exeter and Southampton tomorrow, Thursday and Friday, playing - you guessed it - Faure! The Ballade, namely, which Marc is augmenting with the Falla 'Nights in the Gardens of Spain'. Full details here.What is it about Faure? Nothing for months and then everyone is at it at once.
That, in case you were wondering, is why Faure is like the No.28 bus, on which I used to rely too much when I lived in West Hampstead.
Friday, November 18, 2005
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.
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.
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
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!
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!
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