Molto andante

In view of the comments arriving re the closure of Andante.com, I should mention that the message I referred to in my last post was a personal communication from the editor, not something on the site itself, and that apparently I'm wrong in referring to Naive as "new" owners - seems they've been on board longer than I'd realised. Time flies as you get older.

As time goes faster, articles get shorter, classical music has to fight harder for its minute corner, and the more TV channels there are on which to find nothing you want to see. I have just been out to see a marvellous French film starring Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, entitled HIDDEN (CACHE in French) and very refreshing it was. Sometimes it's good to escape. Or is it just the weather that's getting to me?

Top tips for surviving February in London:
Hot baths;
Camomile tea;
Rioja, the more expensive the better;
Home-made chocolate cake;
Concerts coming up including a recital by Piers Lane, Lucy Parham's Schumann Festival at Cadogan Hall and Frederica von Stade and friends singing Pauline Viardot at Wigmore Hall;
Piano practice: Beethoven Waldstein Sonata for energy, Mendelssohn Songs Without Words to get the fingers moving and Faure Nocturnes for transferral to magical, poetic universe far removed from the flight path.

Figaroooooohhhhh

Looks like David McVicar's Figaro is going over rather well. I'm going to see it on Tuesday and will report back then, but for the time being here's Ed Seckerson in The Independent, Tim Ashley in The Guardian and the marvellous Richard Morrison in The Times, comparing Gerald Finley's Count to 'a cornered dinosaur who senses the impending Ice Age...' and pointing out pithily that Rinat Shaham (Cherubino)'s future 'probably doesn't lie in impersonating boys' (we well remember the shapely Rini as a simply sensational Carmen at Glyndebourne). David McV meanwhile has proved himself the sort of person who does win things - namely, the South Bank Show Award for Opera - and I bet there'll be more to come.

Meanwhile, less happy news from New York: a farewell note from the erstwhile editor of the online magazine at Andante.com, which has been killed by its new owners, the French record label Naive. How naive. How daft. How pointless. It will be sorely, sorely missed by its many readers.

No holds barred

Here's my piece about David McVicar in today's Independent. He has plenty to say, on the day of the State of the Union address, about the State of the Art of opera here in the UK and he doesn't mince his words. How some of his comments got past my editor, I'll never know. So far there hasn't been nuclear fallout...not yet...

You can also read/download a PDF the article at my online archive on main website.

I'm going to see the resulting production next week & will report back then.

Meanwhile computer nightmares continue, but there are some exciting things happening later this week...more soon...

Mozart day

It's the Big Birthday: Mozart is 250 today. Happy birthday, Wolfie.

BBC news is marking the occasion by showing all the kitsch for sale in Salzburg and interviewing Lesley Garrett. Kenneth Branagh is making a film of the Magic Flute with a text by Stephen Fry setting the whole thing around the era of the First World War. Channel 5 is the only terrestrial TV station that's shown anything like a celebratory documentary. Norman Lebrecht is busy slagging WAM off again (it's clear, from what he writes, that he's never heard the Serenade for 13 Wind Instruments) and Ian Bostridge in The Guardian penned something about how Idomeneo contains the only interesting tenor role Mozart ever wrote. David McVicar, who is directing Figaro at Covent Garden, decided, when I interviewed him the other day, to be incredibly outspoken about all of this. All being well, the piece should be appearing next week (fingers crossed). My feature on why this anniversary is not likely to be the greatest thing since sliced bread seems to have missed its sell-by date, gazumped by something in the news section that covered some of the same ground.

While despairing over the state of music and attitudes towards it, I'm simultaneously gob-smacked by the levels of artistry that still exist among today's greatest musicians, and especially by a new DVD that I watched yesterday: Thomas Quasthoff and Daniel Barenboim performing Winterreise from the Philharmonie in Berlin. Words fail in the face of such musicianship, and musicianship doesn't even begin to describe what they do. It's staggering. Try and see it. Yes, we live in an age of appalling Philistinism, but if Quasthoff and Barenboim are in the world, it can't be all bad.

3.40pm UPDATE: Nice to see that Google has joined the celebrations.

Housekeeping

I'm feeling too ill to think creatively and my Internet Explorer keeps crashing now. This is the third time I've started writing this post to explain that I have removed all my articles from further back than October from the sidebar. This is because I now have a snazzy web archive of articles on my permasite (good word, that?), which you can find here. It's not complete, but has a good selection and will be updated periodically, once I have the capability to scan articles and send them to my webmaster.

Gig of the week: Tasmin Little joins the Britten Sinfonia for her 1000th concert. She'll be playing Mozart and Bach and the programme also includes plenty of Shostakovich. Queen Elizabeth Hall, London.