“Many qualities can make you love this music. You can be touched by its spirituality, transported by its energy, and moved by its overproportioned dimensions; you can be fascinated by its rhythmical life; you can be seduced by the colours and harmonies which lead you to the borders of timbre; you can be absorbed by the multiplicity of inspiration, whether local to different parts of the planet or historical, ranging from ancient music to recent. In the end, every listener can decide which dimension in this accumulation of experience is for him or her the most important. But certainly this music reflects someone who can invite us to open other dimensions in ourselves, from meditation to ecstasy, and to open our ears and minds to a world made of multiplicity.”
Thursday, January 31, 2008
What Pierre-Laurent said last
When I interviewed Pierre-Laurent Aimard about Messiaen for yesterday's feature, I also asked him what he would say to encourage someone who'd never heard any before to try it. His response wasn't in the piece as printed, but I think it is beautiful:
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Look what we can do now!
My article previewing the Messiaen Festival at the South Bank is out in The Independent today. The website has just been revamped and I switched on this morning to discover that not only are sound-clips now included amid the text but Youtube video as well. Have a look at it here. Unfortunately there's no clip from the Quartet for the End of Time, which is central to my article, but we can fix that here - see below...
The festival 'From the Canyons to the Stars' opens at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Saturday 2 February with the Ensemble InterContemporain playing the eponymous piece. On Sunday there's a study day about the Quartet featuring a screening of a new French documentary which I'm told includes interviews with those who were there in Stalag VIIIA; there's a round-table discussion in which I will be participating along with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Jonathan Harvey, Robert Scholl, Christian Poltera and the South Bank's Gillian Moore, and the day will finish with the Nash Ensemble playing the work twice (6pm and 9pm). The festival continues until the end of this year - no kidding - and promises to be London's Messiaen Fest of, so to speak, all time.
The festival 'From the Canyons to the Stars' opens at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Saturday 2 February with the Ensemble InterContemporain playing the eponymous piece. On Sunday there's a study day about the Quartet featuring a screening of a new French documentary which I'm told includes interviews with those who were there in Stalag VIIIA; there's a round-table discussion in which I will be participating along with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Jonathan Harvey, Robert Scholl, Christian Poltera and the South Bank's Gillian Moore, and the day will finish with the Nash Ensemble playing the work twice (6pm and 9pm). The festival continues until the end of this year - no kidding - and promises to be London's Messiaen Fest of, so to speak, all time.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Kreisler & Rachmaninov play Grieg
And they win...
This is to mark the anniversary today of Fritz Kreisler's death in 1962. Enjoy.
This is to mark the anniversary today of Fritz Kreisler's death in 1962. Enjoy.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Après moi le déluge?
News from MIDEM in Cannes as reported in The Times today. This covers pop, but what happens to our side of things?
Just think, some of those opera singers and conductors might be forced to reduce their fees, shock horror.
Thoughts, folks?
MEANWHILE, the Arts Council has been forced to say 'er, right, maybe that wasn't our best idea' and is promising a reprieve to some of the groups whose funding it wanted to slash for no immediately obvious reason - this may include the London Mozart Players. We haven't yet seen the name City of London Sinfonia on the list, but are hoping that that is simply an oversight on the part of newspapers that don't know what a chamber orchestra is.
ALSO, from comments received on JDCMB recently, it's obvious that certain people in Philadelphia are still ogling beloved Vladi. He's back here this week, conducting at the RFH on Wednesday. Paws off our maestro!
Just think, some of those opera singers and conductors might be forced to reduce their fees, shock horror.
With CD sales in free fall and legal downloads yet to fill the gap, the music industry has reluctantly embraced the file-sharing technology that threatened to destroy it. Qtrax, a digital service announced today, promises a catalogue of more than 25 million songs that users can download to keep, free and with no limit on the number of tracks.
The service has been endorsed by the very same record companies - including EMI, Universal Music and Warner Music – that have chased file-sharers through the courts in a doomed attempt to prevent piracy. The gamble is that fans will put up with a limited amount of advertising around the Qtrax website’s jukebox in return for authorised use of almost every song available.
Thoughts, folks?
MEANWHILE, the Arts Council has been forced to say 'er, right, maybe that wasn't our best idea' and is promising a reprieve to some of the groups whose funding it wanted to slash for no immediately obvious reason - this may include the London Mozart Players. We haven't yet seen the name City of London Sinfonia on the list, but are hoping that that is simply an oversight on the part of newspapers that don't know what a chamber orchestra is.
ALSO, from comments received on JDCMB recently, it's obvious that certain people in Philadelphia are still ogling beloved Vladi. He's back here this week, conducting at the RFH on Wednesday. Paws off our maestro!
Saturday, January 26, 2008
"People who couldn't even spell classical are into it now"
Yesterday, having been warned off the fiddle concerto at the RFH, I spent a happy evening doing something I don't do often: watching TV. Solti fans may know that BBC2 had a documentary about tigers in India...but what caught me off-guard was a follow-up programme to The Choir, a reality TV series following what happened when a choral conductor named Gareth formed a choir at a school in Northolt, north-west London, trained them up and took them to China to enter an international competition. The cameras returned to see where they all are now, as well as recapping on the series for those who'd missed it, like me.
I ended up in tears.
The kids had prepared two numbers for the competition: 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' and Faure's 'Cantique de Jean Racine'. Faure?! They were stumped. First, the competition stipulated that one song had to be in a foreign language. Secondly, they just didn't see, when they tried it for the first time, how they could sing this.
Leaving aside the issue of why decent, normal schoolkids from multicultural backgrounds in a city that considers itself the capital of Europe should recoil in horror at the notion of using another language - they did it. They fought and grumbled and one stormed out. But they did it. They learned the Cantique, took it to China and sang it from memory. First, they sang it to their mums, who couldn't believe their ears. At the contest, the choir didn't get through to the second round, but they'd had an experience that moved them to bits and will stay with them forever. None of them had had the first notion of classical music before this. They assumed it was 'a bit boring' and not for them.
And the long-term effects? One, the shy Chloe, had found the confidence to sail out of school into a job that involved giving presentations. She'd found she prefers singing classical music to pop - she couldn't put her finger on why, but said "it feels good" (or something like that). One boy who'd never sung before was at college and wanting to form his own band. A lively blonde missed the choir so much that she went out and joined another. A 13-year-old was now singing in his church choir and loving it. And one boy - the one who'd thrown the tantrum - said: "Even people who couldn't spell classical before are into it now."
Tasmin started her Naked Violin project by wondering what it would take to get music through to people. This programme made clear that one thing it takes is opportunity; another is a little effort, on everyone's parts. The rewards for that effort? Immeasureable.
BBC TV now has an 'iplayer' facility, which I hadn't anticipated using...but you can see programmes online for 7 days after they've been screened. So here is this one.
I ended up in tears.
The kids had prepared two numbers for the competition: 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' and Faure's 'Cantique de Jean Racine'. Faure?! They were stumped. First, the competition stipulated that one song had to be in a foreign language. Secondly, they just didn't see, when they tried it for the first time, how they could sing this.
Leaving aside the issue of why decent, normal schoolkids from multicultural backgrounds in a city that considers itself the capital of Europe should recoil in horror at the notion of using another language - they did it. They fought and grumbled and one stormed out. But they did it. They learned the Cantique, took it to China and sang it from memory. First, they sang it to their mums, who couldn't believe their ears. At the contest, the choir didn't get through to the second round, but they'd had an experience that moved them to bits and will stay with them forever. None of them had had the first notion of classical music before this. They assumed it was 'a bit boring' and not for them.
And the long-term effects? One, the shy Chloe, had found the confidence to sail out of school into a job that involved giving presentations. She'd found she prefers singing classical music to pop - she couldn't put her finger on why, but said "it feels good" (or something like that). One boy who'd never sung before was at college and wanting to form his own band. A lively blonde missed the choir so much that she went out and joined another. A 13-year-old was now singing in his church choir and loving it. And one boy - the one who'd thrown the tantrum - said: "Even people who couldn't spell classical before are into it now."
Tasmin started her Naked Violin project by wondering what it would take to get music through to people. This programme made clear that one thing it takes is opportunity; another is a little effort, on everyone's parts. The rewards for that effort? Immeasureable.
BBC TV now has an 'iplayer' facility, which I hadn't anticipated using...but you can see programmes online for 7 days after they've been screened. So here is this one.
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