Saturday, June 04, 2011

Debate and webcast today...

Don't forget The Road to Jericho London debate & webcast at 3pm today. If you can join us, we're here: http://www.mosaicrooms.org/how-to-find-us but if you can't, you can access the webcast by going here and following the video link: http://www.roadtojericho.com and you can submit questions via Twitter using the hashtag #R2J - see you there!

If I can work the technology, I might even be able to run the webcast right here on JDCMB. Simon says it's easy..........

Friday, June 03, 2011

Aldeburgh dreams

My interview with one of my very favourite singers is in today's Independent: meet Angelika Kirchschlager ahead of her first-ever trip to Aldeburgh. http://ind.pn/lHqNtj.

It so happens that I was there yesterday...

That was the beach about 24 hours before I wrote this blogpost... Two minutes in this extraordinary little place and you can start to wonder why you bother staying in London. The air! The sea! The sky! The croissants! (yes, all mod cons, thanks.) Of course, on a day as beautiful as that it's easy to forget what the winter is like - but I can safely say I didn't really want to go home.


I went up to visit the Aldeburgh Young Musicians at Snape. The Britten-Pears buildings around the Maltings have been transformed into the type of space that just hungers for bright, creative youngsters to bound in and start making music. The Aldeburgh Young Musicians programme started about three years ago and chooses a number of gifted kids aged from 10 to 18 from all over East Anglia: they arrive at every possible opportunity to take workshops, write music and play it together. Aldeburgh takes them on board not as kids, but as young artists - and in this buzzing and beautiful atmosphere, they're flourishing.

This week the Road to Jericho boys are on board - Fifth Quadrant from London and Dal'Ouna from Ramallah, working together on instruments eastern and western. I watched a brilliant drumming workshop, led by Ramzi Aburedwan (pictured above, pointing). Ramzi gets the energy flowing and everyone is drawn in... until the drums almost play them, instead of the other way around. Earlier I gatecrashed a rehearsal of a piece that one boy had just written that day and which he conducted so clearly that several professional maestri of my acquaintance could usefully have watched him too. Might the ghosts of Britten and Pears have been lurking in a corner and smiling to see the spirit of music living on in this dedicated and passionate new generation? It's quite possible that Britten's most important legacy will turn out to be not his music (or at least, not just that), but the ongoing, lasting influence on Britain's musical life of Aldeburgh and Snape.

The kitchen produced a delicious Middle Eastern meal with couscous specially for the occasion; we watched a French documentary about the founding of Al Kamandjati; and yesterday morning I found myself sitting beside Ramzi in the studio, reading out the words of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The fact that Ramzi and I, with our contrasted backgrounds, can sit and share and discuss the transformative effects of music has to say something about the nature of those transformative effects. If we can do that - a Palestinian who grew up in a refugee camp and a 'nice Jewish girl' from north London, who happen to share one big faith, that of music - then so, one hopes, can others.

Join us tomorrow at the Mosaic Rooms tomorrow at 3pm, where we'll be talking about all that and more together with Fifth Quadrant violinist Simon Hewitt Jones and film-maker and author Dennis Marks. There'll be chocolate hobnobs. http://www.mosaicrooms.org/how-to-find-us/

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

The Road to Jericho #1

If you haven't already met them, then meet my friends Fifth Quadrant and Dal'Ouna. Fifth Quadrant is a go-ahead young British chamber ensemble featuring, amongst others, Simon Hewitt Jones and Drew Balch (left, photo by Ian Dingle). Dal'Ouna, from Ramallah, is an ensemble of Palestinian musicians led by Ramzi Aburedwan, director of the inspirational music school Al Kamandjati (=The Violinist). The Road to Jericho brings both ensembles together for joint concerts and projects with young musicians in Britain and the Palestinian Territories. This week they're working in Snape with Aldeburgh Young Musicians and tomorrow I'm off there to see how it's all going. More shortly about the forthcoming evening with all of them that opens the Spitalfields Festival.

This Saturday afternoon, 4 June, at 3pm, please come and join us at the Mosaic Rooms, Earl's Court, for a discussion about music-making and musical education in the Palestinian Territories. Simon is planning to webcast the debate live at the Road to Jericho website - and possibly right here on JDCMB as well (assuming he can conquer my technotwitdom). I'll be chairing a panel discussion featuring Simon, Ramzi and the filmmaker, broadcaster and author Dennis Marks, and we'll be inviting questions from our live audience and also our virtual audience via Twitter. Admission is free (though donations are welcome) and there'll be refreshments and a short performance by Dal'Ouna. Watch this space for more details!

Here is a little something to whet the appetite: this is one of the pieces I wrote following my trip to the West Bank in the week of the ash cloud a year ago - when I met one of the most musical kids I've ever seen in my life.



 ISSA’S DABKE

Foot-stamping, boot-tramping,
Mood to dance! A time to dance!
Mood to dance! A time to dance!
Stamp and jump, and keep the beat,
Dabke dance, we need to dance!

Bare the floor and bare the window
Cracked the floor and blank the window
Linked the arms and dark the hair,
Themed by scarves, and teamed by dance
Mood to dance! A time to dance!

Teenaged boys don’t dance in England,
But here they’re men in dance and drive,
Dance their life and dance their soul,
Dance their team and dance their dream -

But where’s the music? We have none,
Blank the floor and bare the window
Jump and stamp, the music’s blank.
And there in a corner sits the guest:
A western violinist.

…“Play us something so we can dance!
…Play us something that sounds Arabic!”
…But the violinist stands helpless,
…He can’t play anything but Mozart and Tchaikovsky…

Issa calls the need to dance,
Issa leads the time to dance,
Issa’s burning up with dance,
Issa’s music lives within
And Issa’s mind will find a way.

Bare the floor and blank the windows
But music’s in the mobile phone!
Rig it up and blast the windows!
Tape it up and stamp the floor!
Damn the fiddle and stream the music,
Mood to dance! A time to dance!
Energy will find its way.
The violinist taps a toe,
The violin will learn to play.

© Jessica Duchen, 2010

Brava, Anna Caterina!



That was the astonishing and absolutely unique Anna Caterina Antonacci, in Carmen (at the Opera Comique - that opera's birthplace - with John Eliot Gardiner conducting and Andrew Richards as Don Jose). My interview with her, conducted in the unlikely setting of a pub just off Borough High Street when she was in London for Berlioz's La mort de Cleopatre, is the cover feature in the new issue of Opera News in the US, just out now. I believe she is the nearest thing we have today to Pauline Viardot, of whose voice Alfred de Musset wrote: "It is the same timbre, clear, resonant, audacious … at the same time so harsh and so sweet, which produces an impression similar to the taste of a wild fruit."

Here's the feature. Enjoy.

Monday, May 30, 2011

Balsom soothes and sizzles!

My interview with the lovely and brilliant Alison Balsom is in today's Independent.

She has some strong words, too, that can go under our JDCMB Music for All banner - hopefully a cause of the type she will espouse as a patron of the new Mayor's Fund for music scholarships, which was launched by Boris Johnson a few weeks ago. Alas, the first paragraph below hit the cutting room floor at the paper, but here it is, plus some:

“What worries me greatly is the lack of value put onto arts education,” she says. “Because it doesn’t lead directly to a well-paying job, people think it should be cut from schools. I think this is a travesty! I do earn my living through music, but learning music as a child taught me so much more. It taught me to be a rounded person. It helped with self-discipline, it taught me about working with other people, it’s a way of expressing myself and of organising my thoughts. If I hadn’t had that, I don’t know how I’d have developed those parts of my brain. And I’d never have started to play if I hadn’t had access to heavily subsidised lessons. Music should be available to everybody, not just to people who can afford it.”


“Since I’ve had Charlie [her 14-month-old son] it’s become even clearer to me that even very young children have an instinctive response to music,” she adds. “It’s like a fast track into their brains. It’s so obvious. How can we ignore that? To lose that connection would be a dangerous thing for our culture.” Helpfully, Charlie toddles by, singing to himself.


It will take figureheads like Balsom to bring the cause to the fore – and at least she is there to try. “I want to get that message across,” she says. “But often people are more interested in the Armani dresses and the diamonds. And the fact that I’m a female trumpet player.”  
Here she is at the Last Night of the Proms two years ago, with a spot of Piazzolla...