My Big Fat Gypsy Violin!

Forget "Gypsy" weddings, just hear the music... Meet the magical Magyar melodies and their impact in my feature in today's Independent, which was kind enough to let me add details of our Hungarian Dances concerts next week. 18 March, Potton Hall, Suffolk; and 22 March, Old Swinford Hospital School, Stourbridge. Do come and join us!

It's Friday, so here's Jascha Heifetz in Dohnanyi's Andante rubato alla Zingaresca, with pictures to match. This unbelievably beautiful piece is the first number in our concert: to me it's the perfect incarnation of the 'lost Gypsy concerto' straight out of the novel. This recording was made in 1943.

At that point, the Roma of Nazi-controlled European countries were undergoing the same fate as the Jews, being rounded up and herded into concentration camps, and indeed one section of Auschwitz was designated for them. But in August 1944, after the invasion of Hungary, a new contingent of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews was brought to the camp. There was not enough room for them, so the Nazis decided to make room. They slaughtered the Roma inmates in one night.

I've run this tribute video before, but several years ago. We should see it again. We shouldn't forget what happened to them.

Meet Sonia Wieder-Atherton

Here's my piece from the JC about the amazing cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton, who is bringing a series of three varied and fascinating concerts to Kings Place next week. The article is about the first concert, Chants Juifs, but the programmes pairing Monteverdi and Scelsi with a dose of magical realism (Vita, just out on disc too) and Chants d'Est - cello music and transcriptions from around central and eastern Europe - promise to be every bit as intriguing. I will be doing an open interview with Sonia at the Institut Francais in South Kensington on Tuesday 15 March. Do come along and join in.

Here she is talking about Chants d'Est and playing extracts from the album. Enjoy.

Hello, Moscow, this is RICHMOND-ON-THAMES!

Don't ask me how Ivan Vasiliev did that. Don't ask me, either, what it was he did, because I don't know. I'm not sure it has a name. It takes place at a height of about eight foot and goes about the speed of a Roger Federer ace. He leaps, spins and does something else at the same time involving feet, legs, arms, and it's over before you believe he really did it or that you really saw it. With the Bolshoi Ballet around, who needs the Olympics? I fear I squawked aloud.

This happened yesterday in that most genteel of surroundings, the Curzon Cinema in Richmond, Surrey. It wasn't well populated - not much more than half full - and my theatrical pals and I were among the younger members of the audience. I wouldn't have known about it, indeed, if Brian the Ballet Teacher hadn't addressed class on Friday with the words: "Now, there's a live cinecast of Don Quixote from the Bolshoi starring Osipova and Vasiliev on Sunday at 4pm and I expect you all to attend!" Ballet cinecasts have passed me by thus far, mostly because I didn't know they were happening until they were over. Hey, Richmond - did you know you can see the Bolshoi almost as good as live, on a big screen, in a comfy cinema chair, sipping your coffee when you like, watching the greatest dancers in the whole damn world for £15, on your own doorstep?!? No, I didn't think you did.

This performance was being watched by friends in central London, Australia, Denmark, France, Germany and, I think, Canada. All we need now is one of those live link-ups, routinely employed for the Eurovision Song Contest and Proms in the Park, where you can shout "Hello, Moscow! This is Richmond-on-Thames!"

It's not quite the same as being there, of course; the Bolshoi applauds, but we don't, because they can't hear us and that takes the edge off slightly. But you can see everything, hear everything - the orchestra is phenomenal, even if they have to play dear old Minkus - and you're treated to glimpses backstage before and after each act, while the happy Russian hostess interviews interesting Bolshoi-ish people - the discussion of the character dancing in the Tavern scene and Gypsy scene was fascinating if only because here in sunny London such discussions are reserved for exceedingly esoteric dance journals and would probably by-pass any outreach project by going clean over everyone's head. I do love the Russian attitude. Taking it for granted that these issues are of mass interest worldwide goes part of the way to explaining how they get to be so good at the performing arts.

As for the performance itself - it really was amazing. Don Quixote is a great party piece for a fantastic company, a Spanishy kitschy bonanza of virtuoso bedazzlement in bright colours complete with fancy flamenco robes, Gypsies doing mystic fire with Hungarian-style music (we did get the giggles when she threw the guitar over her shoulder, though - my friend being married to a guitarist...). Osipova matches Vasiliev almost move for move, leaping higher, twirling faster and sizzling more hotly than any rival could hope to touch. As a pair, they're absolutely on fire, bowling out personality, a hungry, adrenaline-high glow in their eyes. Someone complained to me recently that classical ballet is anti-feminist because it seeks to keep women as virgins forever. Er, nnooo...

The music goes on a bit, but has its moments. There's one really beautiful piece in the sultry Spanish tavern scene, the dance featuring unbelievable backbends (so that's what Brian the Ballet Teacher means when he says "...and now a beautiful Bolshoi backbend" and we all try to shift our shoulders an inch or two). But it turned out to be by Gliere, not Minkus. And the end of the show is rather abrupt - but after the grand pas de deux, what more is there to say?

The staging also features, for the Don and Sancho Panza, a white stallion and a donkey. Donkey Hotey?

Here's a taster. This isn't from yesterday - but you get the general idea.

Daniel Hope & the Missing Link

The Missing Link is Joseph Joachim, lynchpin of the split in Romantic music that made everyone go a bit Brahms and Liszt. Daniel Hope has been delving into the influence of this legendary violinist and I recently had a lovely interview with him about it. A somewhat truncated version is in today's Indy, which does make it clear that if Brahms hadn't nodded off at a crucial moment, the whole history of music might have been different... Below please find the Director's Cut - complete with some Youtube of the great Joachim himself, who lived just long enough to make a few short recordings...

He’s the missing link of musical Romanticism: a man of uncompromising ideals, the greatest violinist of his day and an accomplished composer. Yet today Joseph Joachim is barely remembered. Because he was more famous as a performer than as a creator, he has slipped behind his closest friends in terms of repute. And since those friends included Robert and Clara Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Felix Mendelssohn and -- for a while -- Franz Liszt, perhaps it’s no wonder.

Now, though, the British violinist Daniel Hope (right) is setting out to restore Joachim to his rightful place as the lynchpin of music-making in the Romantic era, with a new CD entitled The Romantic Violin. And it’s not a moment too soon, for some of the 19^th century’s crucial musical developments revolved around this extraordinary, and extraordinarily cantankerous, artist.

The idea, Hope says, has been bubbling away for years. Joachim (1831-1907) lived long enough to make a few gramophone records towards the end of his life; Hope’s fascination began when he heard those recordings as a child. “By then he wasn’t in his heyday, but there was something very distinct about his sound,” says Hope. “His exceptionally pure tone always intrigued me.”

He found that Joachim’s name “just kept popping up” as dedicatee of countless works, including the Brahms Violin Concerto and pieces by both the Schumanns. As he learned more, Hope was “amazed by the breadth of talent Joachim had, not just in playing the violin but in forging new approaches in musical expression, making new programmes, rediscovering the Beethoven Violin Concerto. He was tremendously interested in poetry, the arts, humanity in general, and he embodied the Romantic spirit more than any other violinist.”

As a child prodigy, the young Joachim was dandled, metaphorically, on the musical lap of Mendelssohn, who was not only his mentor but conducted a performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto in which Joachim, aged 13, was the soloist. “Without that performance, the concerto might have disappeared,” says Hope. “Until then, violinists had treated it as little more than an exercise. But Joachim played the music as he felt it. It must have been a complete revelation.”

Liszt, then honorary kapellmeister to the court in Weimar, persuaded the still teenaged violinist to become leader of his orchestra in 1848. There Joachim joined Liszt’s group of young disciples for several years. But another friendship soon came about which altered matters considerably: that with Johannes Brahms, two years Joachim’s junior.

It was Joachim who famously provided the 20-year-old Brahms with a letter of introduction to Robert and Clara Schumann, a meeting that profoundly affected the course of Brahms’s life and music. But just before that, Brahms went to see Joachim and Liszt in Weimar. This had a different result, equally lasting. When Liszt played his B minor Sonata to his assembled students, Brahms made a crucial faux pas: he fell asleep. His lack of sympathy with Liszt’s style was a sign of things to come.

What ensued later was the so-called ‘War of the Romantics’, which split the aesthetic of new music in Europe into two separate directions. In one camp were Liszt, Wagner and their followers, determined to create “the music of the future”, shaking up old preconceptions about style, harmony and structure; in the other camp, Brahms, Joachim and Clara Schumann, among others, deplored such iconoclasm and showiness.

But it was largely due to Joachim that the split became unreasonably vitriolic. A letter he wrote to the generous Liszt in 1857, refusing his invitation to perform in a festival in Weimar, simply beggars belief:

“Your music is entirely antagonistic to me,” he wrote. “It contradicts everything with which the spirits of our great ones have nourished my mind from my earliest youth. If it were thinkable that…I should ever have to renounce all that I learnt to love and honour in their creations, all that I feel music to be, your strains would not fill one corner of the vast waste of nothingness…”

Joachim thus ratched up the heat of the ongoing arguments and set the tone for much of what followed from the likes of Wagner himself and (on the side of Joachim and Brahms) the notorious critic Eduard Hanslick. But why was he so bitter?

It could be that the crux was Joachim’s own longing to be a finer composer than he was. Two of his most beautiful works feature on Hope’s CD, but alongside his friends, his music pales by comparison and he would have been the first to admit it. Perhaps because of that inward disappointment, he was a tortured soul.

His letters often reflect the dark side of his nature: he possessed the capacity for hyper-criticism of his nearest and dearest that often goes with great sensitivity and perceptiveness. For instance, despite his closeness to Brahms he would not demur from describing him as ‘egotism itself’ to a friend. His marriage to the singer Amalie Schneeweiss ended in acrimonious divorce (a rare decision in those times); that in turn sparked a serious fallout with Brahms.

But it was the Liszt incident that changed the future of music. “If Joachim had not split with Liszt,” says Hope, “the Liszt Violin Concerto would not have been forgotten; and there might have been one by Wagner. Instead, we have Brahms, Schumann, Dvorák, Bruch…”

Nothing wrong with those, of course; and Joachim’s input requires attention, especially for Bruch’s Concerto No.1, which opens Hope’s CD. “In its first version the concerto wasn’t a success,” Hope says. “Bruch then enlisted Joachim’s help, because with his fame and his ability he could save pieces. Sure enough, he revised it radically.” The concerto partly owes its popularity to Joachim’s rewrites. “And in terms of German Romantic sensibility, it reaches a zone beyond any of the others.”

Joachim’s attitude to Romanticism was quite unlike our general notion of it today, which is closer to that of Liszt and Wagner. “It’s interesting that Joachim was the violinist whose tone was the purest,” says Hope. “It’s like listening pure emotion. Other violinists who recorded around the same time couldn’t sound more different -- perfumed, beautiful, fantastic playing, but showy. That is how Romanticism, as we define it, happened; but it has little to do with what the Romantic movement was really about.”

The CD, Hope says, is the starting point for many of his concert programmes and projects this year. He is never less than snowed under: shortly his third book, Toi Toi Toi, is being released -- “a chronicle of musical superstitions and disasters, including my own,” he says -- and he’s about to assume a new festival directorship in Mecklenburg, Germany. That makes it all the more impressive that he’s spending so much time and effort focusing attention on Joachim. Stand by for some seriously amazing music-making. The CD is out tomorrow.

Here is Joachim himself in the Bach G minor Adagio, recorded in 1904. An ultimate Friday Historical.

On the way to 'Let Me In'

No, not the vampire movie. We came up with the title well before posters for the horror film hit the London Tube. Our Let Me In is a wee bit different from that. It will be premiered by the magnificent choir Chanticleer in California on 26 March and given a number of performances in the environs during the ensuing week. It's an a cappella choral piece by Roxanna Panufnik, one of three new works commissioned from different composers by the American choir for a project based on episodes in the life of Jesus. They'll perform them alongside existing music by Part, Gorecki and Mason Bates. And if you're wondering how a nice Jewish girl who likes Richard Dawkins and scribbles for the JC ends up doing the words, read on...

When Rox (who's Roman Catholic) asked me for a poem to set, I think my first words were "You do know I'm a Jewish atheist, don't you?" Of course she did - we've been great friends for more years than I'd care to state - but the human element of the story was, she felt, more important than the faith. Having selected the childhood of Jesus as her patch, she'd read the Gnostic Gospels (I wanted to know if there were some Agnostic ones too) and settled on a story in which the boy Jesus meets a grieving mother whose child has died. He resurrects the baby. As a mum of three, Rox was deeply drawn to the emotions of this tale. And she was well aware that I know more than I'd have liked to know about bereavement.

The project soon turned into one of those creative onions in which you peel off one layer only to find ten more with ever-stronger flavours underneath. I suggested that we set the narrative in the early Jewish community in which the Gnostic Gospels suggest it could have taken place (eg, in one of the other stories, to which we make passing reference, our lad is told off for making clay birds on the Sabbath).

I filled the first part of the poem with imagery from the traditional rituals of Jewish mourning: the covered mirrors, the torn robes, etc. But the twist is that the mother is nearly losing her mind in her grief and won't allow anyone into the house to sit with her. A boy appears outside, calling: "Let me in!" The crowd are suspicious: they have heard frightening stories of this child's uncanny powers. But so has the mother: she opens the door, recognising he is the one person who could help her. He does. The baby is returned to life. Amid general jubilation, the boy slips away unnoticed.

But how to depict the background in the music? Rox wrote to the marvellous Professor Alex Knapp, expert on Jewish traditional music, who talked us through early settings of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. We visited Jackie, a cantor in North London, who offered even more detail on the topic and sang some to us, her voice carrying exactly the focus of spiritual energy that I think Rox was hoping to find in these powerful chants. The earliest version that could be traced was a Yemenite melody infused with a rawness and intensity that grabbed us both by the innards. This Kaddish runs through the first part of the piece.

So far I've heard Let Me In only on Rox's Sibelius computer, but on first listening I was bowled over by the emotional oomph in her harmonies and the way the vocal lines rise up through the keening pulsation of the texture, rather like trying to find one's way through a forest of exotic plants. It's a story to be told - but also to be felt in the gut. Rox has just been appointed as the London Mozart Players' first associate composer. They're in for a treat.

As for the movie...well, I didn't go because I don't get on with that kindathang. But it was nice to see the title of our piece plastered all over the walls at Bond Street Station.

Meanwhile it's turned out there's still another Let Me In! Here it is...