BBC Music Magazine Award shortlists!

The new issue of BBC Music Magazine includes the shortlists for next year's Awards. Visit www.bbcmusicmagazine.com/awards to see the lot, hear extracts and vote for your favourites.

There are some real gems among them and I suspect the decisions aren't going to be easy. (I remember last year's fun and games on the jury with some pleasure, though it was quite hair-raising at the time! But in case you were wondering, they choose a different panel of reviewers each year.) Many of the people-of-the-moment feature prominently - Natalie Dessay leads in two out of three Opera nominations, La Sonnambula and Il trionfo di Tempo e del Disinganno; Mark Padmore soars forth in a Handel disc with The English Concert under Vocal, which category also includes what would be my personal choice for disc of the year, Anne Sofie von Otter's Terezin. And under Chamber it is nice to see a disc by the Nash Ensemble of quintets by Coleridge-Taylor. Meanwhile all the Orchestrals begin with S - Shostakovich, Saint-Saens and Schumann.

And what's this? The biggest photo in the whole section shows none other than Rustem Hayroudinoff, whose Rachmaninov discs on Chandos do keep being compared favourably to Richter's - once more for this one, "equal even to the greatness of Richter," says David Nice - and whose latest, the Etudes-Tableaux Op.33 & 39, has been shortlisted alongside Mitsuko Uchida's Beethoven 'Hammerklavier' and Steven Isserlis's Bach Cello Suites.

I won't have many fingernails left by the time they make the announcements.

A birthday present from OC

No, you're not on the wrong blog - this is JDCMB. But our dear friend Opera Chic is a dab hand with Photoshop, which JD ain't, and sent me this stunning birthday present last week, inspired by a press release I forwarded to her that was entitled, pricelessly enough, JOHN ELIOT GARDINER RE-OPENS OPERA-COMIQUE IN FRONT OF FRENCH CABINET. (Here in London I have a very nice French cabinet that we bought on E-bay. I think it's walnut wood.) Salut, Maestro Jean Eliot Jardinier! Et merci bien, chere OC!

The serious point, though, is that Paris's historic theatre was indeed reopened by said maestro on 13 December, in front of not a cupboard but probably more politicians than ever set foot inside London's opera houses separately, let alone together. The show was Chabrier's rarely-heard opera bouffe L'Etoile. According to the press release - tragically, I missed the event, being on the wrong side of La Manche - the opera includes "a trio about the use of tickling in foreplay" as well as dealing with the delights of green Chartreuse.

Gardiner and his attendant orchestra and choir are starting a yearly residency at the Opera-Comique and on other occasions will be performing Carmen and Pelleas et Melisande there - both operas which were first seen on that very stage.

Nausea

Christmas cheer, anyone? The so-called Arts Council is about to undertake the "bloodiest cull in half a century" on England's cultural life. According to The Guardian:

In music, two respected chamber orchestras, the City of London Sinfonia and the London Mozart Players, have been told to brace themselves for the worst.

The word 'Olympics' does not feature in this article, but I don't think it can be far off. Odd to think now that when we first heard the news that London had won the 2012 'Orrific Games, we were actually pleased. Ho ho ho.

Viva Ida!

JD meets Ida Haendel in the green room of the Wigmore Hall. This was one of countless memorable moments during the visit of this doyenne of the violin to the Razumovsky Academy, organised by the inimitable Oleg Kogan, during which she gave masterclasses to the gifted youngsters and performed in their Wigmore Hall concert. She played the Bach Chaconne. Nobody who was there will ever forget it.

Go to the Razumovsky website for my full account of the day and lots more pics.

All the Razumovsky students and young artists are immensely impressive and maybe it's not fair for me to single one out - nevertheless, keep a look-out for the simply staggering talent of Anna-Liisa Bezrodny (left), the Razumovsky Academy's glorious 26-year-old violinist from Estonia. She has one of those all-giving and all-encompassing tones whose white heat can lift you right out of your chair. Hers was the last of the lessons - on the Sibelius concerto - and I've never before seen a masterclass which ended in a great big hug centre stage. Anna-Liisa recently won the Gold Medal at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where she's been studying with Oleg among others. I am pleased, but not surprised, to see that on her Myspace profile she lists, under 'influences', the name 'Hirschhorn'.

Music censorship at the BBC

Yesterday The Independent ran a fascinating article by Spencer Leigh about the censorship of popular music at the BBC between the mid 1930s and 1960s. Here are a few nuggets:

In 1942, the BBC's director of music, Sir Arthur Bliss, along with other luminaries, had written wartime instructions for the committee and had allowed the banning of songs "which are slushy in sentiment"....

...Bliss, as might be expected, was staunchly against tunes borrowed from classical works. The application of Chopin's Fantasie-Impromptu for the melody of "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" prevented it from being played. The instruction led to surprising bans: sometimes whole albums by Liberace, Lawrence Welk and Mantovani were prohibited. The score of Kismet was seen as suspect as it borrowed from Borodin, and so "Baubles, Bangles And Beads" was not played....

...The most unlikely record to slip through the net has to be B Bumble and the Stingers with their 1962 chart-topper, "Nut Rocker". The committee deliberated hard about it and concluded: "This instrumental piece is quite openly a parody of a Tchaikovsky dance tune, is clearly of an ephemeral nature, and in our opinion will not offend reasonable people."

Auntie's little committee appears to have been functioning in a faintly similar vein to Hollywood's Hayes Commission, which wrecked countless film scripts (though not for the sake of eliminating the 'slushy in sentiment').

I wonder whether these files may help to clarify a matter that has split the British musical community for years. A number of composers, some of whom are no longer with us having died in possibly unwarrented obscurity, insisted that their music had been rejected for broadcast by the BBC in the days when William Glock was controller of Radio 3 because it did not toe the establishment line on what was acceptable in new music. Others insist this was not true: no censorship, no party line, just a clever man refusing to broadcast bad music. As far as I'm aware we don't know, yet, what really happened. What's evident is that many composers had fallen foul of something or someone, and had their lives and careers wrecked by it.

Welcome to Little England, as was. Some day the truth will out, one way or another.

For the moment, prurience lives on in the very air breathed in the ivory towers of this green and pleasant land.

I can't help remembering all those critics blustering that Heliane was 'blasphemous' and 'degenerate' - dearie me, it has tunes, it has harmonies, it is intensely emotional and it advocates the divine approval of a loving sexual relationship between a man and a woman. Apparently this makes it horrific, and worth restoring Nazi terminology for. Yet today we're contending with Gangsta Rap glorifying across the airwaves extreme violence both racial and sexual. Maybe awareness of such cultural trends has never got past the college gates, the formal halls, the cellars of vintage Bordeaux. A sense of perspective has gone missing, no?

My high horse is going to pasture for the day now, while I head for the library to look up someone who became virtually the voice of the BBC in a totally different way...