Reflets dans le blog

A little idle surfing yesterday produced some information that gave me a pleasant surprise: a Google search on 'classical music blog' produces (!drumroll!) JDCMB at the top of the pile. I have no fond illusions of grandeur, though: I reckon it's simply because my title includes the words 'classical music blog'. I can assure everyone that there was nothing 'clever' about the way I chose the name in March 04.

JDCMB came into being almost by accident. Blogs weren't as much of a global phenomenon then as they are now and I'd never thought of looking for any devoted to classical music. In a quiet patch following some intensive work on Ravel, after which I felt a little flat, I thought I'd investigate Something New and logged on to Blogger to see how these funny things called blogs worked. Next thing I knew, a prompt was asking me to choose a name for my blog. I didn't know that other similar sites might have poetic, meaningful titles, so I typed in the first thing that came into my head: Jessica Duchen's Classical Music Blog, which seemed to say everything anybody needed to know. Bingo: one blog. Nobody could have been more surprised than I was. And here we are.

Release day!

27 July: RITES OF SPRING paperback release day! As of now, I'm a real Paperback Writer! Amazon has been selling the thing for a while already, but this is the date when it's supposed to hit the physical bookshop shelves.

Time to press on with the editing of no.2 and the drafting of no.3...

Fun at the opera? Heaven forfend!

I'm going to start eating those Sussex hats: The Guardian has only given 3 stars (out of 5) to 'Betrothal in a Monastery'. The objection is that the work itself isn't political enough. This opera commits the cardinal sin of being FUN. Come to think of it, with the Guardian one could perhaps predict this attitude.

The Times offers pretty much the same view, only without the politics. 'To what end? Entertainment, obviously...'

Entertainment in the opera house? How utterly, utterly dreadful! What a horrendous thought! You take an afternoon off work, spend all that money on a ticket and hiring your tux, pay for champagne & dinner & the ruinous programme, and then the company has the affrontery to ENTERTAIN you?! In Russian? Oy vay!!!

I predict deep suffering amongst the critics at tonight's Prom, where Juan Diego Florez is singing bel canto arias and Latin American songs that might just be enjoyable.

UPDATE 26 July 9am: The Daily Telegraph joins the killjoys. I suppose most of my colleagues would rather force us all to listen to 4 hours of Birtwistle. No wonder classical music is said to be dying...

UPDATE 26 July, 1.30pm Hooray for The Independent: Edward Seckerson got the point and catches the spirit.

UPDATE 31 July, 2.15pm: Hugh Canning of The Sunday Times must have been in a very, very bad mood. Perhaps a combination of the ridiculously high summer temperatures we've been having and an overdose of Russian?

5 August

On Saturday 5 August at 2pm I'll be at Waterstones in Richmond, signing copies of RITES OF SPRING, the paperback of which is now springing into life...

The shop address is 2-6 Hill Street, Richmond, Surrey, and it's less than ten minutes' walk from Richmond station (District Line, Silverlink Metro & South West Trains).

Musical reads

This was in The Independent last Monday: I picked out just a few of the novelists whose fiction best captures the intangible power of music, and added Jilly Cooper for the sake of a good contrast.