Valentines: the dark side

Opera Chic on dating 'Big Willy' Furtwangler...! What a shame that the blacklist she mentions seems restricted to the US.

Korngold update

Latest on the King's Row soundtrack release: Brendan Carroll tells me that it is a co-production of Turner with Film Score Monthly on the Screen Archives label. He thinks it will now be a May release as more work is required on the restoration. Booklet will include an 8000-word essay by Brendan on Korngold, the score and the film.

Return of the pied pianist

Marc-Andre Hamelin will be at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Sunday afternoon, 18 February, 3.30pm, to play Beethoven's two last sonatas and Schubert's B flat sonata D960. Marc has possibly the greatest piano technique on earth, but he's the human face of virtuosity. Those twinkling fingers are there to serve a great heart. Not just speed, but tenderness. While he's always been recognised more widely for performances like the second of the two extracts that follow, I can't wait to hear him in Op.111. Box office: 0871 663 2500.

I have to get rid of a nasty bronchial lurgy before then. Feeling too crap to write much today, so will let Marc speak for himself through his piano in these must-see video clips. [Anyone looking for a response to Pliable will find it in his Comments box on On An Overgrown Path.]

Marc plays Beethoven Op.109, movements 1 & 2




Marc plays Chopinata by Doucet....

Love is in the...cello section??

[cue tchaikovsky] Happy Valentine's Day, everyone! Muso Magazine's survey of which musicians make the best lovers has named [drumroll] the cello as the sexiest instrument and cellists at the top of the nookie class (have a look at the mag's G Spot section...). I can't elaborate, having never, alas, touched either the instrument or one of its practitioners...

...so instead here's a picture of the best pin-up of the lot, who happens to be a tenor. [not that I've tried one of those either, but one can dream...]

And I still say three cheers for the good old violin. There's a reason why violinists are called fiddlers... On Friday Tom and I celebrate the 10th anniversary of the day we met, so someone must be doing something right.

Richard Morrison has a hilarious take on the Muso survey in The Times:

'...After all, it was a cellist who featured in the best-ever story about musicians and sex. Just turned 80, the great Pablo Casals proposed marriage to a twentysomething pupil, and was accepted. On his wedding day his doctor and friends approached him. “You should be very careful tonight, Pablo,” they said. “Think of the health risk.”

Casals brushed them impatiently aside. “I’m going to enjoy myself,” he said. “And if the girl dies, she dies.”'

RTWTH.

meanwhile, in the Lubyanka of Farringdon Road...

...the Grauniad has decided that Madama Butterfly is racist, courtesy of Roger Parker of King's College London. Hasn't anyone there seen it? Presumably not, or they'd know that it's one of the strongest anti-racist arguments in the whole bloody opera world.

This is the same newspaper that would like to ban Gershwin's masterpiece Porgy and Bess. Can't wait to see what they'll have to say about Carmen Jones at the RFH this summer.