Turn up the volume!

We all burst into tears at 4am London time when the figure rocketed past 270 - the world's most vital and emotive moment since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Bravo, guys, you did it, you elected the first black President of the USA and it looks like you also elected someone who is intelligent, idealistic and convincing. So turn up the volume, sit back and have a good celebrate...

Well, now I've seen it all...

...in today's Grauniad: Germaine Greer, yes GERMAINE GREER, she of The Female Eunuch, defends - wait for it - VIOLA PLAYERS.

I am not joking. She has been exploring paintings of Orpheus. She has picked some viola jokes, albeit not the best ones. She clearly evinces no understanding whatsoever of the balance of sound in an orchestra ("British orchestras generally follow the dictum of Sir Malcolm Sargent, who thought that violas should be seen and not heard, and may have as many as four times as many violins as violas." Like, wow.) And she has had an encounter with the delectable Maxim Rysanov - who admittedly can twist most of us round his little finger within a well-turned single bar of Brahms. Even so, from the author of the afore-mentioned book comes the following description:

"Tall, handsome, dark-eyed, Maxim Rysanov looks Byronic; on stage, he accentuates the look by wearing stove-pipe trousers along with sweeping tails. But it is the thrilling sound he draws from his viola that is the authentic voice of Byron's and Strauss's young hero."

Well, what I can say? You go through years, nay decades, of controversy and celebrity. You write books and inspire new generations of feminists. Yes, you change the world. And then perhaps it just takes one gorgeous guy playing a bowed instrument to change yours all over again. Blimey, guv.

Sunday...

...and the course is over, apparently successfully so. The only downside, as far as I can see, is that I ate far too many of the chocolate shortbread biscuits that were intended for my students. We'll do it again, but maybe with only one box of those next time. Suggested dates are 24 January and 1 February, but please watch my news page for further details.

Mad props meanwhile to Aarp.org's Richard Gehr (yes, I nearly misread that one too - wishful thinking...) for picking JDCMB as his favourite music site, and to the one and only Opera Chic for the shoutout in her interview with Artsjournal's Life's A Pitch. OC is on a Katherine Jenkins roll at present...

What with one thing and another, I haven't plugged Vladimir Jurowski's Revealing Tchaikovsky festival as much as I should. It's a knockout. Iolanta, with the LPO, Tatiana Monogarova and a similarly luscious cast, moved a number of us to tears - gorgeous, life-affirming and deeply touching. This week, catch the Manfred Symphony with Vlad at the RFH on Wednesday and the Second Piano Concerto and Suite No.3 with Rozhdestvensky & Postnikova on Friday.

Course on Saturday

There is still ONE place left for my Kick-Start Your Writing one-day intensive this Saturday, 1 November. Please see my news page for full details, and email me PDQ if you want to attend.

HUNGARIAN DANCES: THE CD - OUT NOW

Here it is: Philippe Graffin, Claire Desert and several friends including Tom, in a new CD that is the disc-of-the-book, yet a great deal more besides. Get it now from Onyx Classics as a disc or a download.

Philippe has taken the novel's violin music - much of it concerning cross-currents between Gypsy violin playing and classical - as a starting point for a concept album that encompasses some truly extraordinary stuff. The programme begins with Dohnanyi's Andante rubato alla zingaresca - the closest thing I have come across to my fictional Marc Duplessis's lost concerto movement. We move on to Kreisler, initiating the journey with the Marche miniature viennoise (in New York, the violinist/composer meets our Mimi), and Monti's Csardas with the additional cimbalom effect of Ravel's piano-lutheal, expertly delivered by Claire.

Brahms and his great violinist friend Jozsef Joachim punctuate the programme with four virtuoso Hungarian Dances. And there's Liszt - in the form of something that Philippe suggested by saying, "it is Hungarian, and it is a dance..." - nothing less than the Mephisto Waltz No.1 in a dazzling arrangement for violin solo by Nathan Milstein, who apparently declared it the hardest piece he'd ever played. The gorgeous Romance Oubliee follows.

The disc is effectively a tribute to the great Hungarian violin tradition of the 19th/early 20th centuries - notably Joachim, Hubay, Vecsey, but implicitly also Auer, Flesch and d'Aranyi. Vecsey, who gave the premiere of the Sibelius Violin Concerto, is represented by his own Valse triste, and Hubay by the stunning Hejre Kati, again with piano-lutheal cimbalom effects - the melody is said to date back to the great Gypsy violinist Janos Bihari. And Scarlatescu's Bagatelle, a glorious Romanian Gypsy-style work, is mesmeric, a piece that builds up from a gentle lilt into a trance-like frenzy - it was a favourite of Ginette Neveu, but has been rarely recorded by solo violinists since.

Bartok is absolutely central: the Romanian Dances (which in the book Mimi plays with the composer in 1940) and five of the Violin Duos with Tom (they are played in the novel by our heroine Karina and her would-be lover, Rohan, but for their sake Tom experienced a railway journey almost worthy of Karina's friend Lindy's worst nightmares...that's another story...).

Finally, Hungary goes to France: Debussy's La plus que lente - a long-standing favourite of Philippe's, which was inspired by a Gypsy band performing in a Paris hotel; and a world premiere recording, L'amour - valse bluette, by Arthur Hartmann, an American violinist of Hungarian origins who was a close friend of Debussy's, went with him to hear that Gypsy band and arranged some of his songs for violin and piano. It's muted, decadent and deeply nostalgic. Programme notes by yrs truly can be read on the Onyx site.

Now, as far as I know, it's the first time that anyone has done anything like this: an international soloist making an original recital recording to exist alongside a new contemporary novel. Let alone a programme that is so chock-full of ideas, character, daring, imagination and poetry. It's quite an overwhelming thing... I'm deeply grateful to Philippe and Onyx for the tie-in - but the CD is an amazing production in its own right.

We hope that you will enjoy it.

UPDATE, 2 November: Review from The Independent on Sunday by Anna Picard