Raising a glass at the Gramophones

Spent Wednesday at the Gramophone Awards. Suffice it to say that the Dorchester is a splendid venue, the food was superb and the champagne flowed. More importantly, so did some very astute prizes.

I was particularly pleased to see the veteran record producer Christopher Raeburn being presented with a Special Achievement accolade. We miss people in the industry with his level of artistic judgment, musical idealism and integrity. Bravo.

Also thrilled that Jonas Kaufmann's CD of Strauss Lieder won its category, with some strong words from the relevant commentator about how fabulous this glorious tenor is.

Speaking of tenors, who should turn up but Juan Diego Phwoarez! Montserrat Caballe was to be presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award, but apparently her taxi was involved in an accident on the way to the airport. She's unhurt, but missed the plane. JDF, as her colleague and friend, accepted it very graciously on her behalf. He also accepted a prize for one of his own recordings, too: the rarely heard Rossini opera Matilde di Shabran. (Last night he gave a concert in the Rosenblatt Recital series. I couldn't get in. Nobody could.)

Brahms did well. There was a prize for the German Requiem from the Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by Simon Rattle, with soloists Dorothea Roschmann and Thomas Quasthoff, and for Nelson Freire's recording of the two piano concertos, which happily scooped Record of the Year. A true artist, Freire: a musician of honesty, finesse and intelligence through and through.

Julia Fischer, the wonderful young German violinist, was Artist of the Year, voted for by millions of listeners to some 15 radio stations around the world. Young Artist of the Year was Vassily Petrenko, the youthful Russian who's currently making the kind of waves at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic that would please a surfing champion.

But the show was rather stolen by the Instrumental Award: Steven Isserlis's Bach Cello Suites. Steven was on tour, so he sent a friend to pick up the prize. The friend was none other than ace comedian Barry Humphries. And it didn't take him long to have the entire ballroom in stitches with jokes such as one about how a friend mixed up the words 'falsetto' and 'fellatio'. That word must have been a first for the Gramophone Awards...

There are many more prizes and you can read the full list here.

UPDATE, 6.07pm: The Overgrown Path appears to think we should all have stayed home to improve our souls by reading Adorno instead. He is right to imply that contemporary music did not have a major presence in the selection. One award was presented for a CD of music written in the past decade - it went to Julian Anderson - but only one. I would love to see the huge variety of contemporary music being encouraged and celebrated with more prominence at such events. We should perhaps note that the full title of these awards is The Classic FM Gramophone Awards.

Been here...

Baden-Baden, where I plucked up the courage to join Tom & the orchestra for a Tristan-dash (check in Heathrow 7.30am, plane delayed 1.5 hours - though not, this time, due to a cat in the hold, just the usual London airspace nonsense; arrive Frankfurt 12.45pm, leave Frankfurt by coach 1.20pm, hold-up on the autobahn, arrive B-B 3.30pm, scheduled start of opera 4pm, actual start of opera necessarily 4.15pm, finish playing 10.15pm, much beer 10.30pm).

Mad, perhaps, but wonderful as well: it was worth every minute of the extra stress. Glorious performances of Lehnhoff's breathtaking blue-light-of-nirvana production from Glyndebourne; Nina Stemme and Katerina Karneus resplendent as Isolde and Brangaene, Robert Gambrill as Tristan, Bo Skovhus as Kurwenal. The excuse for exporting Glyndebourne wholesale (I think this was the first time they've done so) was the Herbstfestival in B-B's marvellous Festspielhaus - once the station at which Brahms, Turgenev et al would have arrived in the town. The all-star line-up meant that on the first morning we met the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra at breakfast in the hotel, and on the second the Vienna Philharmonic, which caused much interest in the LPO because they turned up to the dining room mostly in jackets.

We stayed on between nos.3 and 4 (Thursday to Sunday) and went sightseeing. There's something magic about Baden-Baden, which is utterly unspoiled, surrounded by hills that are lathered in rich, varied woodland; the air is pure, the Friedrichsbad allures with promises of steam rooms and massages, and you can walk half an hour to Lichtental to see Brahms's flat, along the Lichtentalerallee which is dotted with 200-year-old weeping elm trees that would have been sizeable 50-year-olds when Brahms, Clara Schumann, Turgenev and Viardot walked here in the 1860s. Just a pity about the food...too many sausages...

Above, top to bottom: the Turgenev bust in the park; Brahms himself (frei aber froh? Really, Johannes? Look at those eyes...); Brahms's house; and the house that Turgenev built (which bears a cruel plaque saying 'Villa Turgenev, kein zutritt') next to Pauline Viardot's, which has been knocked down and replaced with apartments.

Why no statue of Pauline?

But the day after coming back, I went to Paris to investigate what Cecilia Bartoli is doing with Pauline's legendary big sister, Maria Malibran.

Not everyone likes cats

The LPO, fresh from last week's Southbank triumph, headed for Baden-Baden for the opening leg of a short run of Glyndebourne's Tristan und Isolde. Dress rehearsal & three performances, several days apart: the band is supposed to fly there and back for each occasion (on performance day, via Frankfurt and a 2 1/2 hr coach journey). The other day the first show started late because the plane was held up. We hear that this was because of problems with a cat in the hold.

Sir Georg 'Ginger Stripes' Solti asks me to point out here that he was safely at home tearing up manuscripts in the study.

Blogging may be thin on the ground due to performances 3 & 4 to which I'm heading tomorrow. Taking camera along to find B-B 19th-century haunts of Clara Schumann, Brahms, Viardot, Turgenev et al.

Adieu, Marcel Marceau

Marcel Marceau, master of mime. 1923-2007.

The rest is news

Alex Ross's book The Rest is Noise has reached print at last. Congratulations, Alex - and I'm looking forward to the UK edition from Fourth Estate which is due out here in spring. Stylists as fine as Alex are a rarity in classical music writing and this volume looks certain to become a classic. If anyone out there still hasn't sampled Alex, here's a link to his Sibelius chapter - some of the most beautiful writing about music I've ever seen.

Chris Foley of Collaborative Piano alerts today to an interesting innovation: he's created a Classical Music Pagecast on Pageflakes. Technotwit here hadn't come across this idea until now, but it's good: the ultimate blogroll.

Opera Chic has found a real Italian tenor and links to a Youtube video of him singing Nessun Dorma. Voice to die for. Name: Fabio Armiliato. Thanks, OC!

And over at Think Denk, Jeremy has created a side-splitting scenic spoof: Shakespeare's little-known tragicomedy about life, love and death al dente among passionate youngsters in New York, Romeo and Juilliard. Get along there quick and meet Romeo, Mercutio, Candy and the Ghost of Dorothy DeLay.