Orlando: what was that about marmalade?

Opening at Covent Garden on 26 February, "a tale of conflicting passions, threats, magic, deceit and revelations which inspired Handel to some of his most original operatic work..." Francisco Negrin directs, stars include Bejun Mehta and Rosemary Joshua. Info here.

Solti is in favour...

Korngold 07 #2

Here's one of our regular Korngold updates for this year, the 50th anniversary of the composer's death. My prolific thanks to Korngold devotee and biographer Brendan G Carroll for keeping up the flow of info!

In March, the complete film score of THE SEA HAWK will be released on Marco Polo/Naxos.

In April, the complete sound-track of KING'S ROW is due out on CD, conducted by Korngold himself, from archive studio recordings from Turner/Rhino. In case you haven't seen KING'S ROW, it's the one where Ronald Reagan's legs are amputated. He wakes up and calls out to his wife, "Where's the rest of me?!?" Which is what a lot of other people wondered too, some years later... seriously, though, it's a terrific score and the film is not bad either.

On 1 May at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Barry Wordsworth will play the gorgeous Sinfonietta - a symphony in all but name, written when EWK was only about 15. It's full of sweeping melody, beautiful orchestration, Klimtish-Jugendstil atmosphere and EWK's typical generosity of spirit. Here's a recording by the BBC Philharmonic under Matthias Bamert. In the concert's first half, those two stalwarts Philippe Graffin and Raphael Wallfisch will play Miklos Rozsa's Double Concerto, which is one heck of a fantastic piece too (hear their recording).

As it happens, it's also the centenary of Miklos Rozsa's birth [huge apologies for my previous error over this anniversary, which a kind anonymous commentator has drawn to my attention - many thanks]. Rozsa, a dynamic Hungarian, also ended up in Hollywood writing film scores and deserves way more attention than he usually gets. Being pro-Hungarian at the moment, for bookish reasons, I really should do something about this...

More Korngold soon - introducing a Korngold 2007 label to make it easier for fans to follow the updates en masse.

To Lenny from Solti

A note from David K Israel alerts me to Mentalfloss.com, where he's joined the blogging team. David was Leonard Bernstein's editor and is a fellow novelist, but most significantly he nearly named his cat Solti, then chose Lenny instead. In case you missed my intentionally-very-silly two-part story for Classical Music Magazine around Xmas & New Year, it's called LENNY: THE CAT THAT SHOOK AN ORCHESTRA and you can read part 1 here and part 2 here. As for transatlantic Lenny and my resident Sir Georg 'Ginger Stripes' Solti, they send each other colleagial greetings and compare the mice they've recently killed with their built-in batons.

We named Solti Solti because in a former life he was Tom's favourite conductor. Most orchestral musicians jump out of their skins when we tell them this - one cellist who used to live nearby famously threatened to run our cat over every time he came round - but Tom, being from one of those indomitable central-European pre-War families, is used to larger-than-life personalities and knows how to stand up to them. In one legendary LPO rehearsal, Solti turned to the first fiddles and said "You must play this better, I pay you money if you play this better!" Tom put up his hand and demanded "How much?" Solti exclaimed: "Ah, we discuss it later..."

ALICIA'S GIFT has arrived!

It's here: the first copy of my new book! As you can see, it's about a little girl with a precocious talent for the piano... Aged three, Alicia sits down at her dad's battered old upright and begins to play by ear, and in the right key, a piece she'd heard at nursery. Her Derbyshire-dwelling parents, Kate and Guy, have to decide what on earth to do with her. Kate wants her to develop her talent to the maximum, but she also wants her to be at home. Guy wants her to be a normal kid. Alicia just wants to play her piano and walk her dog on the moors. Alicia's motorbike-fixated brother, Adrian, sees through them all. As Alicia grows up and her fame spreads, everyone wants a piece of the Peak District prodigy. But life, naturally, has ideas of its own...

ALICIA'S GIFT is available for preordering at Amazon.co.uk here: beautiful quality, limited edition hardback! Release date is 8 March. The paperback will be out later in the year.

PAULINE VIARDOT: ESSENTIAL LISTENING

If you haven't yet sampled the enchanting songs of Pauline Viardot - or even if you have - just try these gems from Cecilia Bartoli, accompanied by Jean-Yves Thibaudet. Nuff said.

'HAI LULI'



'HAVANAISE'