Im wunderschönen Monat Mai...

Happy May. A special treat for this special long weekend, and something you won't have heard at the royal wedding...

JONAS KAUFMANN SINGS SCHUMANN'S DICHTERLIEBE 
With the fabulous Helmut Deutsch (piano). Enjoy... and many thanks to "operazaile".

n°1 "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai"
n°2 "Aus meinen Tränen sprieben"
n°3 "Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne"



n°4 "Wenn ich deine Augen seh"
n°5 "Ich will meine Seele tauchen"
n°6 "Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome"
n°7 "Ich grolle nicht, und wenn das Herz auch bricht"



n°8 "Und wüßten's die Blumen, die kleinen"
n°9 "Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen"
n°10 "Hör' ich das Liedchen klingen"



n°11 "Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen"
n°12 "Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen"


n°13 "Ich hab' im Traum geweinet"
n°14 "Allnächtlich im Traume seh' ich dich"
n°15 "Aus alten Märchen winkt es"



n°16 "Die alten, bösen Lieder"

Watch with Mother for composer of Royal Wedding work....

It's been a closely-guarded secret, that Royal Wedding music, and on the whole it's very best-of-British. Well, British, anyway. According to BBC Breakfast today, we're promised Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Britten (!), and Kate is walking up the aisle to the strains of Parry's utterly execrable I was Glad. The London Chamber Orchestra will be doing the honours - more of them soon, I hope... but meanwhile the breaking news is that a work by a little-known Welsh composer, Paul Mealor, 35, has been chosen for performance on the big day alongside all the pomp and circumstance.


The piece, Ubi caritas, was premiered last year at St Andrew's University, meeting place of the happy twain, and will be performed by the choirs of Westminster Abbey and Her Majesty's Chapel Royal, conducted by James O'Donnell. Paul says: “I was thrilled to hear that HRH Prince William of Wales had chosen my music for his wedding. How humbling it is for me to know that Prince William and Catherine will celebrate the beginning of their lives together with my music. The ceremony is going to be, without a doubt, the most emotionally intense and exhilarating hour of my life.’’    


After making the poor guy keep all the excitement under wraps until now, you'd think that the least they could do was make sure he's in the abbey to hear his piece. But no. He's apparently planning to be at home in Wales, watching on telly with his mum. I can't help wondering if he was even invited. Shall we hazard a guess?


About Paul: he studied composition privately from an early age with John Pickard, at the University of York with Nicola LeFanu (1994-2002) and in Copenhagen with Hans Abrahamsen (1998-99). Since 2003 he has taught at the University of Aberdeen, where he is currently Reader in Composition, and has held visiting professorships in composition at institutions in Scandinavia and the United States.


Update: the full list of music for the Royal Wedding is now online at the official site, here. John Rutter has been commissioned to write a brand-new anthem, there'll be a piece by Peter Maxwell Davies who's Master of the Queen's Music, and the happy couple will exit to Walton's 'Crown Imperial', followed by the Widor Toccata and a spot of Elgar. And much more.

Seeing Pina

I hadn't seen a 3-D movie since the deep sea extravaganza at the Imax where we all tried to catch the fish in front of our eyes. It was fun, but what exactly was the point? 3-D is not 3-D: it's the illusion of it, an evocation of being there when we are not. So, attending Wim Wenders's Pina, it's hard to avoid cynicism when the screen instructs us to don our special glasses. Yet Pina's own words tell us within the first few minutes that dance is an evocation of experience. So, too, are words. All we can do is...evoke. Now it begins to make sense, and the magic is ready to start.

But wouldn't Pina be just as magical without the 3-D? I suspect it would, because the beauty of Wenders's filming has never let us down before and certainly doesn't do so now. Pina is indeed an evocation: Pina Bausch herself died almost two years ago and this is no documentary, since Wenders tells us nothing of her life or career. Instead he lets her choreography, her dancers and her company's home surroundings of Wuppertal pay tribute through image and only the sparest of words.

The dance rarely stops. Thanks to the 3-D we seem to be on stage amongst the dancers during Bausch's devastating choreography of The Rite of Spring, or riding on the odd dangling Wuppertal monorail to witness a little street theatre: one dancer wears donkey ears while another gets up to all manner of peculiar things with a pillow. Sometimes muslin curtains waft in front of our noses; at other moments we nearly feel the autumn leaves blowing out of the screen, or seem to smell the water that flies around the stage in the dazzling, magnificent and fabulously funny Full Moon.

Pina Bausch is glimpsed in existing film, for little more than seconds. Her dancers each pay a brief and beautiful tribute to her - they are an international crowd of many different shapes, sizes and ages, unified by their devotion to Bausch and her dance style. The latter may look wild, free and zany, but is phenomenally demanding: it requires incredible control, an all-giving and all-taking matter in which if you lose your sense of humour you will quickly be lost too. This is dance as the ultimate human expression, able to travel from high comedy to tragedy and insanity within two blinks: every millimetre of finger or toe contains the very essence of emotion. Marius Petipa, eat your heart out.

Bausch was an artist ahead of her time - it is only now, and largely thanks to this movie, that a wider public appears to be waking up to her astounding work. It has taken a cinematic legend to send her mainstream - and if the 3-D is a gimmick, it's a good one, well-handled and more appropriate than some of us expected. Wenders's poetic touch is assured, luminous; you can go in knowing nothing of Bausch and still come out moved. The dancers' devotion to her and her work says it all. Amazing how two-dimensional Finchley Road appeared on exit.

The film's website has all the background information one might wish for, here. Meanwhile, perhaps we need filmmakers of genius to transform performance art of all types for this still-new century.

"Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost..."

Padding more around Vaughan Williams and Ravel

In case you missed this little treat about the friendship of Vaughan Williams and Ravel in The Independent on Friday, here it is again, very mildly tweaked, to trail Mark Padmore's concert with Roger Vignoles and the excellent young Navarra Quartet tomorrow night at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. The Navarras' CDs, btw, are well worth a listen - I've thoroughly enjoyed them when reviewing for Classic FM Magazine. And I don't need to introduce you to Mark, I'm sure - but here he is anyway, singing the beginning of RVW's On Wenlock Edge (with pianist Simon Lepper and the Royal String Quartet). And just see if it doesn't sound a tad more Ravellish when you've read the article...

WHEN RALPH MET MAURICE...

Jessica Duchen

At the outset of the 20^th century, a transformation was about to take place in British music. Long dominated by German influences and newly interested in folk songs, British composers began to discover France. And in 1907 Ralph Vaughan Williams went to Paris to take lessons with Maurice Ravel: a composer several years his junior, yet one whose music – sinuous, detailed and highly individual – proved an irresistible attraction to a young man who declared himself afflicted by “French fever”.

The influence of Ravel on Vaughan Williams, and the long friendship between the two, is the basis of a fascinating concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall by the celebrated tenor Mark Padmore next week, with the Navarra String Quartet and the pianist Roger Vignoles. The concert, says Padmore, offers a musical “conversation” between the two composers: “It’s like visiting an exhibition of Picasso and Matisse together, so you can see the points where their ideas coincide,” he says.

Ravel and Vaughan Williams were first introduced to each other by the music critic Michel Dimitri Calvocoressi; soon afterwards, the Englishman – a great-nephew of Darwin and a descendant of the Wedgewood family – decamped to Paris for three months of study. As Padmore says, “Vaughan Williams decided he needed a bit of French polish.”

The beginning, though, was anything but auspicious. Vaughan Williams later recalled: “When I had shown [Ravel] some of my work he said that for my first lessons I had better ‘write a little Minuet in the style of Mozart’. I saw at once that it was time to act promptly, so I said in my best French, ‘Look here, I have given up my time, my work, my friends and my career to come here and learn from you and I am not going to write ‘a little Minuet in the style of Mozart.’ ”

Ravel seems to have responded positively to being stood up to; besides, Vaughan Williams, at 35, was hardly a beginner. Soon the English composer was writing to Calvocoressi thanking him for the introduction to “the man who is exactly what I’m looking for. As far as I know my own faults, he hit on them exactly and is telling me to do exactly what I half feel in my mind I ought to do – but it just wanted saying.”

Ravel’s motto, Vaughan Williams noted, was “complex but never complicated”. The lightness of touch he advocated was a far cry from the blandishments of Sir Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford, Vaughan Williams’s main teachers at Cambridge University and the Royal College of Music, who had steeped him in Beethoven string quartets and the English choral tradition. “The heavy contrapuntal Teutonic manner,” he discovered, to his delight, “was not necessary”.

On Wenlock Edge, Vaughan Williams’s song cycle at the centre of Padmore’s programme, may seem quintessentially English, setting evocative poetry by AE Houseman. But on closer examination, Ravel’s stamp is everywhere in it. “There’s an impressionistic style to the writing, like the sweeping winds of the first movement, or the way that bells are depicted in ‘Bredon Hill’, and it sounds less folksong-like than much of Vaughan Williams’s earlier music,” says Padmore. The transparency of the textures and the pared-away clarity of line about the melodies were also new to Vaughan Williams and highly Ravellian. Ravel championed the work, organising its French premiere in 1912 and playing the piano part himself.

The year after Vaughan Williams’s time in Paris, Ravel came to London to stay with him in his home in Cheyne Walk. Ursula Vaughan Williams later remembered her husband describing Ravel as a charming and sometimes very surprising house-guest: “Ralph enjoyed taking him sight-seeing and was fascinated to find that he liked English food...It appeared that steak and kidney pudding with stout at Waterloo Station was Ravel’s idea of pleasurably lunching out,” she wrote.

But several years later, world events conspired to create a stronger tie between the works of Ravel and Vaughan Williams than either could have envisaged. With the outbreak of World War I, both composers enlisted for active service. The traumas of that time were often reflected by a deep, unsettling chill in their music in later years.

Vaughan Williams served in the Field Ambulance Service of the Royal Army Medical Corps and later in the Royal Garrison Artillery. His experiences of trench warfare in France in 1916 – he was a stretcher-bearer evacuating the wounded from Neuville St Vaast in hellish conditions – left him profoundly shaken. Here he conceived a work whose misleading title, A Pastoral Symphony, belied its true nature.

“It’s really wartime music – a great deal of it incubated when I used to go up night after night with the ambulance wagon at Ecoivres and we went up a steep hill and there was a wonderful Corot-like landscape in the sunset – it’s not really lambkins frisking at all as most people take for granted,” he explained.

Ravel had hoped to join the Air Force, but ended up driving an ambulance. “For several months I have been at the front, at the part which has seen the most action,” he wrote to Vaughan Williams. “I went through some moving experiences...enough to amaze me that I am still alive.” During the war he experienced an additional tragedy, the death of his mother. His own health suffered: he contracted dysentery and was operated on. Afterwards, he composed virtually nothing for three years, but worked frenetically when he finally resumed. Each movement of his piano suite Le tombeau de Couperin is dedicated to the memory of a fallen comrade – as necessary and cathartic an exercise for him as A Pastoral Symphony was for his English friend.

Recovering his physical health, he wrote to Vaughan Williams: “It is now my morale that must be cared for and I don’t know how to do it... Won’t you be coming to Paris soon? I would be very happy to see you after so many terrible years.” The memory of war stayed with Ravel: the tramp of marching boots seems to haunt his Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (1929-30) while the supposed tribute to the world of old Vienna, La Valse, which he started well before 1914, was transformed after 1918 into a veritable dance of death. 

But oddly, it was Ravel’s mother who may have held the true key to the affinity between the two composers. “She was from the Basque region,” Padmore says, “and Ravel recalled her singing folksongs to him.” We don’t usually think of Ravel as a folksong-influenced composer – unlike Vaughan Williams, who spent much time researching traditional English music with his friend Gustav Holst, and loved to employ its musical language in his works. “But it’s clear that Ravel did have an interestin folksong,” Padmore insists, “and I think it influenced the way he approached word-setting, as it did with Vaughan Williams.” 

Ravel died in 1937; Vaughan Williams outlived him by 21 years, becoming the grand old man of British music and being awarded the Order of Merit. The two might have been linked by a natural andprogressing affinity, but Vaughan Williams always remained, as Ravel said, the only one of his pupils who did not write music that sounded too much like Ravel. Perhaps Ravel’s greatest gift to Vaughan Williams was the courage to be himself.

Mark Padmore and friends perform Ravel and Vaughan Williams in Southbank Centre’s International Chamber Music Series, Queen Elizabeth Hall on 27 April. Box office: 0844 875 0073

How NOT to get coverage for your concert, part 2

Part The Second... More top tips straight from the horse's mouth, a.k.a. desk of JDCMB. Best tip of all is provided by Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers at the end... Tomorrow we'll have the best of your tips - there've been a few. HAPPY EASTER & ENJOY THE SUNSHINE!

13. Do not... choose anodyne titles. Some extremely good organisations perhaps fail to attract media interest because their names/titles are so bland, general and lacking in statement-creation that they sound unbelievably boring, even if the content ought to prove otherwise.

14. Do not...try to cultivate a 'friendship' with a critic imagining that they'll give you good reviews. A true friend will tell you exactly what he/she thinks. And you mightn't like it and you might be upset. So might they. Chances are they'll have seen straight through you long before then in any case.

15. Do not... have a conversation that goes like this: "Darling, how are you? I was so worried! I saw your note saying you were off sick and didn't want calls, I hope you're feeling better?...Oh, I'm sorry - you need more time? Well, at least it's sunny, and oh, by the way, we've got a concert on Thursday, if you fancied coming along - not to review it, of course, purely for a nice evening out...our soprano is really amazing, she has a fantastic story to tell about how she sang Isolde the night her dog died...but I only called to see how you were...." (Yeah, right...). If a journalist ever claims to be off sick, they mean it. Most of us are freelance and can't afford to take 'sickies'. And if we say "please don't call for three weeks," we won't like it if you do.

16. Do not...fail to address someone by name, or fail to say 'please'. Old-fashioned? Yes, but there's a reason people used to do these things. "People give concert: consider feature or review" goes straight to SPAM because it's no way to accost a hack in her own home.

17. Do not...take anyone or anything for granted, and do not regard yourself as entitled to anything at any time. (Actually, this applies to all of us, no matter our profession. A principle for living.)

18. Do not...be indiscreet. If you slept with anyone in order to get that concert, make sure nobody ever finds out (eg, check that he doesn't buy all his girlfriends the same hat; and make sure you hide his Christmas cards). If you are indiscreet you might indeed end up with coverage. The wrong kind of coverage. Possibly in the wrong kind of newspaper.

19. Do not... offer press tickets to someone who lives in another country unless you're also willing to pay their travel and accommodation. Otherwise, see point #10. in yesterday's post.

20. Do not... send impersonal notes saying "I'd be grateful for any publicity for the attached...". Of course you would be. So would everyone else who's trying to publicise their stuff. You're asking for free help, remember. If you're that grateful, buy an advert. And don't be surprised if someone rings you up wanting to sell you one.

21. Do not...misuse social networking. Facebook, Twitter, etc are great for spreading the word about what you're doing, making new friends, staying in touch etc - but they're not appropriate for direct personal approaches re coverage. Don't be surprised if jaunty tweets saying "hey! revu mi konzert 2nite" get short shrift.

22. Do not...betray the fact that you know sod-all about the music you're trying to sell. Did I ever tell you about the 1980s record company exec - newly employed, from a background in an unrelated industry - who'd suddenly learned Tchaikovsky was gay and started talking to a roomful of hard-bitten, traditionally-minded music critics about how he was 'developing some Tchaikovsky concepts'?

23. Do not...write furious letters if you get coverage and it's bad. Shit happens. And it happens to everyone at some point. Once a review is out, it's out and unless it contains actual libel (contentious point, that) there's not a lot you can do about it. Thing is, probably nobody will remember it in any case, assuming they even saw it. Get your revenge by doing something utterly marvellous next time. Remember, once your brilliant career is well established worldwide, that reviewer will look really stupid.

24. Do not...underestimate the role played in all this by plain - old - good - luck.

Now, here's what Fred, Ginger & Jerome Kern say...



...and look how they end up: