RSS for the new site: please stay logged to JDCMB for now...

Hi all, I'm back. Well, not quite. The site at Standpoint magazine is still being fine-tuned and as yet there's no direct RSS feed for my blog. I have no idea how such things work, but a brief bit of market research via Facebook suggests that you really, really need this, so until they get one up and running there, I will continue to post links here so that at least you'll know the thing exists and you can click straight through to it.

I now have a column in the magazine itself, starting from the July issue, which is out now. I am standing in for their usual columnist, Ian Bostridge. First article is about HAYDN! Read it here.

Here are my blog posts so far:

Introductory post

Mastersingers - from Cardiff to Cohen (on what some of the candidates at the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition could learn from Leonard Cohen).

There's nothing like a piano-playing Dame (Arise, Dame Mitsuko!).

Chopin as Prophet - Mikhail Rudy's stage version of The Pianist, in Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre, blows off my socks.

Tribute to a Contemporary Genius - a somewhat ironic heading for a post about what the heck was so great about Michael Jackson?!

Please leave comments on the Standpoint site rather than this one! They are moderated in house, but do appear sooner or later as long as they're not libellous, racist or gratuitously personally insulting.

Please note, too, that the views expressed in my pieces for the Standpoint magazine and website are entirely my own and do not represent those of the magazine or its staff. Please note, likewise, that the views of the other writers therein are entirely their own and have nothing to do with mine.

JDCMB is moving to STANDPOINT

Dear all,

WE ARE MOVING HOME!

After 5 happy years at Blogger, where I've been enjoying adjusting seasonal colours and encountering self-reliant-technotwit-dom on a regular basis, I am taking my blog to the new website of STANDPOINT Magazine.

STANDPOINT, which launched in May last year, is an upmarket, intellectual current affairs monthly with a global approach. I will have a monthly music column in the magazine itself, starting from the July issue, where I'm stepping into Ian Bostridge's shoes (!). And I'll be blogging alongside people like legal eagle Joshua Rozenberg and STANDPOINT's editor Daniel Johnson (who covered the fall of the Berlin Wall for the Daily Telegraph), so I suppose I'll have to be on best behaviour for a while. My first two blog posts are up already; the design is being fine-tuned even as I write now; and very soon it should be business as usual.

They have promised me that I can continue JDCMB exactly as before. I only hope they know what they're letting themselves in for.

JDCMB will continue to be visible here on Blogspot so that the archives are readable and the links followable - I won't have the same sidebar space at STANDPOINT. Please feel free to come back and explore whenever you like.

See you there soon!

L'embarquement pour...

I'm off to France with Tom. Here's something suitable to mark the occasion.

A bientot!

One who got away, and TWO who didn't

Mariangela Vacatello, who won the audience prize at the Cliburn, playing Stravinsky in an early round. The 27-year-old Italian studied at Imola and is a great favourite back home. Here in Britain we can hear her at the Chichester Festival Theatre on 10 July and the Buxton Festival on 13 July. Her semifinal video is a gorgeous performance of the Scriabin Etude for the Left Hand.

Now here's winner Haocheng Zhang in what sounds to me like a jolly impressive Scarbo.



And - after a bit of to-ing and fro-ing involving a mysteriously missing video on Youtube - thanks to Michael Monroe for sending me a link that actually works so we can show Nobuyuji Tsujii playing some of the Hammerklavier:



UPDATE: 5.30pm, Thursday - whatever you thought of the Facts & Arts piece, try this one for nastiness: Benjamin Ivry in The Wall Street Journal, under the title WHAT WAS THE VAN CLIBURN JURY THINKING? I find some of his arguments exceedingly odd - and the Takacs Quartet has not come 'from Hungary' for donkey's years and is in fact half English.

I should warn you quickly, if you are wanting to comment further on any of this, that as of tomorrow afternoon I am OFF until the end of next Thursday and have no intention of straying further from the swimming pool behind our favourite Luberon bed & breakfast than I absolutely have to - and it's in a spot deliciously remote from WiFi. So speak now or temporarily hold your peace!

Van Cliburn competition delivers 'odd couple'

For the first time the Van Cliburn Competition has been won by three Asian candidates: two very young winners sharing the top prize and no 'crystal' (third) prize being awarded. One of the top two was a blind Japanese boy whom some have been calling the 'Susan Boyle' of the piano: Nobuyuki Tsujii, 20, who has been blind since birth. The other, Haocheng Zhang from China, turned 19 during the contest.

Here's a report from Michael Johnson from Facts & Arts, putting most of the situation into a nutshell and including the delicately-expressed information that some of the jurors appear to have voted for their own students, that the contest finished on a 'sour' note, that some felt there was a bias against Russian candidates and that the audience mobbed the Italian finalist Mariangela Vacatello and thought she'd been short-changed. [The Facts & Arts article also alleges that Tsujii is 'mentally handicapped' as well as blind, but as you'll see from the comments this detail is disputed and I am unable to confirm either way, though have found no other references to this condition as yet.]

I dread to think what the music business machine will decide to do with 'Nobu'.

See further updates above!