Schiff shape!

One of the delectable things about writing booklet notes for CDs is that now and then you're assigned a task you like; and you get the disc at the end of it. This morning a box of dizzying delights hit my desk as a result of one such job: a set of reissues from Warners of Andras Schiff playing concertos and chamber music - no fewer than nine discs.

OmG, which to play first?! The Bartok piano concertos with Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra? Schubert trios with Yuuko Shiokawa and Miklos Perenyi? The Dvorak Piano Quintet with the Panochas? Beethoven, Mozart and the fascinating Sandor Veress... Solution: close eyes, shuffle discs and pick the one at the top. It's the Dvorak. Heaven.

"...Schiff always puts the music first and last. In a world obsessed with superficiality, image, anti-intellectualism and short-term thinking, Schiff continues to stand proudly for the opposite, offering a voice of reason and artistic integrity."

A couple of weeks ago Andras was awarded the Royal Academy of Music Bach Prize. He'll be starting his Beethoven sonatas cycle in the States this October - Ann Arbor, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York - I've recently done an interview with him about this for Carnegie Hall's Playbill, which I'll post as soon as it's available online. And you can still hear his lectures about the sonatas from the Wigmore Hall on The Guardian's webcast.

Please excuse me while I gloat, worship and purr, all at the same time.

Bartok goes back to Romania

Do have a look at this fascinating article in today's Independent about Taraf de Haidouks, the Romanian Gypsy group I went to hear at the Barbican a few weeks ago. Here's an extract:

"It's all in the body language. They'll pull close together as if drawing around a fire, goading each other towards dizzier tempos and ornamentations. It's a game-playing delivered with fatalistic abandon, shifting its weight and shape from one passage to the next, delivering moments of outrageous serendipity."

Their new album, Maskarada, is just out and features their version of Bartok's Romanian Dances and the waltz from Maskarade by Khatchaturian, among other pieces of magic. Most of the album involves their reinterpretations of classical works that were inspired by, or borrowed from, folk and Gypsy music.

Pillow fight at the Proms

Yesterday's Prom with the English Baroque Soloists & Monteverdi Choir mixing and matching with Buskaid's Soweto Strings Ensemble, and the Compagnie Roussat-Lubek from France with Dance for All from a township near Cape Town, was unlike anything I've seen at a Prom in the (various) decades I've been attending them - or, indeed, anywhere else.

From the most authentic of the schmauthentic in the baroque Franco-Latin pronunciation of Andre Campra's long-forgotten and very beautiful Requiem in the first half, to the reinventing of Rameau as a traditional African miners' gumboot dance at the end of the evening, this concert was a revelation, a marvel and an inspiration - and a statement about how the most apparently disparate of cultures can come together and be united through the shared joy of creating sound and movement...

That's where the pillow fights came into it. It would be so easy for an event like this to become portentous and preachy, but that was never going to happen: the Compagnie Roussat-Lubek, founded by two dancers who trained in mime, circus and acrobatics as well as ballet, offered such quirky imagination, from orange frock coats to pillow fights to a ballerina in a false nose tossing glitter over the tenor, that joyousness remained uppermost for its own sake. Then in came their secret weapon: a cherubic, curly-haired little boy, who we reckoned couldn't be more than 4 years old yet performed with the assurance of all the adult dancers on the stage with him. Imagine the noise in the RAH!

As for the Soweto Strings Ensemble, they sounded every bit as good as the English Baroque Soloists. Their director, Rosemary Nalden, is an EBS alumna and has trained her ensemble with perhaps an even greater unanimity of style; their physical engagement with the music and seriousness of purpose was second to none. Samson Diamond, the leader, currently studying at the Royal Northern College of Music (pictured above right), could just be a young artist to watch out for. And from time to time, a fiddler or two put down his or her instrument and stepped out to join Dance for All.

The energy left me awake most of the night, cherishing the image of some of the finest baroque players and singers in Britain sharing the stage with inspirational youngsters and marvellous dancers, in a musical world where everything, at last, is possible. John Eliot Gardiner picked up the little lad and hugged him as if he were standing to be president. An evening to remember, forever.

A symbol of the future? If so: oh, yes, please.

(Oh - no, JEG, we don't want you to be president, we want you to keep conducting things like this, hope that clarifies it, hugz, jdxxx).

Rameau is/was a complete genius. Never got him before. Get him now.

Read JEG's own account of the story behind the story here.

Hear the concert here.

This thing called The Proms, once again

It's Friday 13th and the Proms open tonight. I've managed to write a substantial piece about the forthcoming programme without grumbling about the Royal Albert Hall's acoustics, sightlines or temperature, and trying very hard to be enthusiastic since there is some great stuff to be heard. The Independent is running daily 'Promcasts', previewing every concert.

A few little updates since blogging has been taking a back seat for the past few weeks. Differences in Demolition sold out and went beautifully; the critics enjoyed it, but mostly missed the point, with the exception of Neil Fisher in The Times. Tristan is in rehearsal for Glyndebourne and Tom is coming home high as a kite after playing Wagner for 6 hours a day, not to mention practising. An interesting experience to undertake remedial, editorial-hawkeye work on book while the Liebestod is going hell for leather in the living room. Alicia's Gift is out and about in paperback and had some nice reviews in various magazines. The Messiaen play is complete and is being translated.

More here as soon as possible.

Book signing this week

ALICIA'S GIFT is out in paperback on Thursday 12 July and that day I'll be at Waterstone's in Richmond, Surrey, to sign copies at 12 noon. All welcome!