Events of the last 41 hours

* ... Christian Tetzlaff's E string broke in the first bar of the Brahms Violin Concerto finale chez LPO/Jurowski on Saturday night. He zipped off the stage to change the string rather than grabbing Boris the leader's fiddle. Apart from that, the best Brahms concerto I've heard in 20 years.

* A mobile phone going off in the last bar of the Tchaikovsky Pathetique in same concert. Vladimir held up his baton after the basses reached the end and maintained silence until the ringing expired. It became the spookiest moment of a staggering performance - almost like the death of Tchaikovsky's own phone.

* A study-day on Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time at the QEH yesterday. Included the very first screening of a new film about its origin, entitled 'The Charm of Impossibility'. Fabulous. I urge all Messiaen fans to see it if and when they get the chance.

* A quiz at the Royal Opera House in aid of the National Youth Orchestra, at which the great and good of the musical world, including the national broadsheet newspapers, the National Theatre, the ROH, a bunch of 'Maestri', BBC Radio 3, the Barbican, etc, buy tables, build teams and compete against one another. Now a well-established annual highlight, though this was the first time I'd taken part. The Guardian won again (it usually does), even though its editor is chairman of the NYO and organises the shebang. It was b****y difficult, too, heavily biased in favour of those who know how to handle early music, Britten and crosswords.

* Heard extract of Jonas Kaufmann's long-awaited new operatic aria disc on the radio. Meistersinger Prize Song - taken so slowly and rendered so sentimental that all the stuffing fell out. It was positively painful - and a terrible disappointment to those of us who were trying so effortlessly to love him.

* Hubby's departure on tour to Toulouse and Spain at 5am today.

* The news, fresh from Opera Chic, that Anna Netrebko and Erwin Schrott are pregnant!!

Blimey. Time for a trip to the gym and a stiff g&t.

Classical music goes underground

More and more stations on the London Underground are piping out canned Mahler to calm us all down. Neil Fisher has an article about this in today's Times. Is it about crowd control, banishing yobs or persuading us that our commuting lifestyle is pleasant?

Quietly, steadily and, if not secretly, then certainly stealthily, London Underground is rolling out a compulsory classical diet. And it's joining a growing group of local authorities, transport companies and even supermarkets across the country. The idea? If we are all stressed out, we need calming down. And if we are antisocial yobs looking to cause some bother and steal Travelcards, we need moving on. Somehow classical music seems to fit the bill in both cases.

Perhaps this is why Brixton is already well used to it, as I discover while the blast of Schubert's Unfinished is throbbing through the ticket office on a Tuesday lunchtime. The station first got plugged in more than four and a half years ago, a test site to see whether the embryonic scheme deserved expansion. Clearly it seemed to do the job; as of the beginning of this year 40 stations have now been equipped with the necessary kit, and they range from the positively genteel (West Brompton) to the Wild East of the District Line - Dagenham, Upton Park - alongside more mixed South London spots such as Balham and Morden.

I'm interested in the question of who chooses the music - see later in the piece for info on the 40-hour playlist - not least because I'm convinced he/she has a macabre sense of humour. I was at Vauxhall Station the other week, trekking from South-West Trains to the Victoria line to get into central London, and unfortunately for me it was rush hour. The glum-faced populace plodded en masse at the necessary snail's pace towards the ticket barriers. And what were they playing over the Tanoy? Mahler's Symphony No.1, slow movement.

Yes. Quite.

As if winining all those Gramophone awards wasn't enough...

...ace British pianist Stephen Hough has won first prize in a poetry competition!

Read his beautiful prize poem 'Early Rose' here.

UPDATE: 10 Feb 9am...and read Jeremy Denk's priceless response over at Think Denk here!

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:

“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.”

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.