A revelation from Murray Perahia

A few months ago I interviewed Murray Perahia for PIANIST magazine.

Murray is much occupied long-term with preparing a new edition of the Beethoven piano sonatas. Here's an extract from my article, regarding the true nature of Op.27 No.2, the so-called 'Moonlight' Sonata, about which title we are usually very sniffy. Um...it seems we may have to think again.

...Beethoven scribbled some notes on an article from an important music journal concerning the Aeolian harp... “It says that the Aeolian harp is dedicated to the children of moonlight, who are not loved on this earth; those who have had blighted lives. In other words, not the people of the sun. 

“The sun was the symbol of the Enlightenment, but the Romantics came up with the idea of the moon to represent the disadvantaged, the hurt, the vulnerable. The idea was that they would sing their songs from the spirit world, it would transfer to the Aeolian harp and we’d hear their pain and learn from it. This is modern scholarship, it’s a point of view – but it is possible that the sonata suggests the Aeolian harp bringing out these people’s song of a tragic life." 

Get the current issue of PIANIST to read the whole thing.  

Meanwhile, just listen to that first movement afresh, with those images in mind. There had to be more to this piece and its inspiration that the old quip about moonlight on the surface of Lake Lucerne... Here is Murray himself playing it: the film is not great quality, but it's all I could find on Youtube (the comments at the beginning are those of the person posting the film, not me).

The rest is a lot of noise

"Join us to explore how war, race, sex and politics shaped 

the most important music of the 20th century"!

I've just been to the Southbank Centre to see the unveiling of The Rest is Noise festival: a jamboree to last right the way through 2013, inspired, of course, by Alex Ross's book of the same title. It is a complete embracing of the world of 20th-century music and the way it interacted with the politics, wars, science, arts, literature - indeed the total history of its time. And it's a magnificent effort pulling together the Southbank, BBC4, Radio 3, the Open University, various digital platforms and a lot of very incredible music and musicians.

You have to come to London for this. Perhaps such a festival could happen in New York, but in few other cities of the world; what a celebration of creativity, collaboration, artistic quality, storytelling and, hopefully, transformation we can expect. It strikes me - having spent much time this year in Switzerland and Austria - that perhaps one needs an element of financial unease to become truly creative (not too much, mind - just enough...). If the universe has provided excess security, there's no need to do anything half so exciting and you can end up as half asleep as the inhabitants of the hotel in which my jacket caught fire the other day.

If The Rest is Noise can turn around the fortunes of 20th-century music and let people listen to it with fresh ears, with new understanding thanks to the provision of vital context, and cleansed of prejudice, preconception and pernicious agendas, it will have made a major contribution to the transformation of modern-day culture and how it is perceived. As Jude Kelly explained, we need to put classical music at the heart of contemporary thinking about how we reflect our world and our place in it.

At the launch, Vladimir Jurowski spoke of breaking down the "cults" of the past and putting living, breathing music of our time onto the stage. That will be a tall order in Verdi and Wagner year (they can probably get away with it where Britten is concerned), but it's an admirable aim. You have to think big in this business, or you never get off the ground. You'd remain stultified by ancient anniversaries instead. Oh, wait...

Perhaps the most exciting thing of all, though, is that the London Philharmonic Orchestra is devoting its entire RFH concert schedule throughout 2013 to this festival. A little over a year ago, they saw fit to declare, er, that "AT THE LPO, MUSIC AND POLITICS DON'T MIX". I look forward to watching them spend a whole year proving themselves wrong.

On fire at the Lucerne Piano Festival

How I wish that that title were metaphoric, but for once, dear readers, it isn't.

There I am in the foyer of one of those beautiful hotels with the piano bars, leafing through a newspaper and leaning against a convenient ledge while waiting for a jam session to start in which the likes of Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Simon Mulligan and friends are to play the night away. And I smell burning. And my back begins to feel hot. For there, behind me, is a candle, and it may be Christmas and it may be pretty, but it's nevertheless a naked flame and it has set light to my inexpensive yet smart and brand-new black lace jacket, and another 30 seconds and JD will be toast. With rapid brain-to-hand connections honed by typing and piano-playing (or in this case schnozz-to-hand connections, perhaps) I manage to whip off the jacket and save myself and the smartest hotel in Lucerne from spontaneous combustion.

All's well that ends well. The jacket is a write-off, but I escaped with only a whisker of a singe, if a bit shaken. Missed the jam session and slunk back to my own hotel for camomile tea and a stiff whisky. It's not a bad place to slink back to.

The jazz element is one of the nicest things about the piano festival. You find scenes like this - Jan Eschke in the KKL foyer entertaining the concert-goers at a scarlet Steinway created specially for the festival...








 Or this - Simon Mulligan in residence for Saturday afternoon at the Schweizerhof:

The big concerts, meanwhile, went on on Saturday night with Jean-Yves Thibaudet in the Ravel Left Hand Piano Concerto, partnered by the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under Bernard Haitink. The maestro gave us some gorgeous Mozart in the second half: the G minor Symphony No.40 with judicious tempi, beautiful long phrases and plenty of heart. Ravel, though, didn't seem quite their thang, emerging a bit ploddy and metronomic, while the inimitable Jean-Yves did his very best to insert some sparkled into the proceedings beyond his trademark diamante belt. I am still cross about missing his jazzathon - he can do a mean Bill Evans turn when he wants to.

Last but by no means least, possibly the most gorgeous piano recital I have heard all year. Andras Schiff is very busy with Beethoven at the moment, and having missed his Wigmore Hall recital last week, it was a treat to hear him in the much larger KKL with its warm and exquisite acoustic. His programme included the sonatas from Opp.14 to 28 - all of them - and involved the special atmosphere that Andras's mega-traversals of repertoire tend to have, plus some.

This total-immersion experience is a little like a meditation. Instead of grabbing us, shocking us and bashing the hell out of the instrument, as some pianists do, Andras leads us into another world through silken beauty of sound, absolute love for every note and a temperate attention to the purity of the music. The hall lights are darkened and he plays under a spotlight - a very good idea, since it stops the audience rustling pages as they try to read the programme mid-flow.

He is currently touring with a Bechstein of 1921 that was used often by Wilhelm Backhaus - implicitly aligning himself not so much with the "HIP" movement as the "Golden Age" of pianism. In my case, of course, he's preaching to the converted by choosing a Bechstein. I grew up with one, then bought a new one about eight years ago. I love the character of the Bechstein sound, the woody plangency of the tone, the distinctive nature of the different registers. Andras himself has perhaps the most recognisable personal sound of any pianist working today - it isn't comparable to any other pianist I've heard, other than recordings of Bartok himself. Over the years it has grown and evolved to suit Beethoven every bit as well as Bach - and it is difficult to imagine a more ideal vehicle for it than this instrument. This playing was not like Beethoven that you'll hear from anyone else - and it is revelatory, allowing those underrated  Op.14s, Op.22 and Op.26 to glow as the masterpieces they are by stripping them to their essence and, with total empathy, focusing on nothing but that. I could have listened to him forever.

I urge you to seek out this unique artist and hear him at every possible opportunity. He plays a lot - and here in London, I fear that it has perhaps been too easy to take his presence for granted. Tonight he is playing the same programme as in Lucerne, this time at the Wigmore Hall.

Here's his American website and schedule; and the UK one.

And here he is talking about Op.111. You can hear all his lectures on the Beethoven sonatas via The Guardian, by following these links.

Provocation on the podium

John Axelrod doesn't mince his words. In my interview with him for the JC today, he shows us part of why he's becoming so controversial in the orchestral world...

Here's the beginning of the Bernstein Symphony No.3 'Kaddish', with Samuel Pisar, which John discusses in the interview. It's all too relevant at the moment - though let's hope the ceasefire holds. The rest of the performance is on Youtube and you can find it by clicking straight through. You'll need to feel strong for this, by the way.

Watch Marion Cotillard as Joan of Arc, complete, here

Whee! It's Benjamin Britten's 99th birthday and everyone is behaving as if it is already his 100th. Wonderful stuff, of course, on the one hand...but on the other hand there will be such a lot of Britten around in the next two years - first the run-up to the centenary, then the run-away, so to speak - that I wonder if we'll ever want to hear a note of him again afterwards. So here's a reminder that other composers in the same generation also wrote some rather good music. (Honegger was, of course, 21 years older than Britten, but shares with him a gritty and distinctive approach to personal language and an origin in, comparatively speaking, a musically parochial country - in his case, Switzerland - that led him to gravitate to France early on.)

The gorgeous French actress Marion Cotillard starred in the title role of Honegger's 1938 masterpiece Jeanne d'Arc au bucher in a live broadcast on Medici TV the other day. They've kindly made the video available for us to watch complete, free, right here on JDCMB, for 90 days. Honegger wrote the oratorio originally for the actress Ida Rubinstein and the combination of his vivid and filmic imagination with Paul Claudel's poetic text make for a compelling listen.

Don't forget, in the months ahead while we soak up every note that Britten ever wrote, that the early to mid 20th century was one of the richest eras in terms of diverse creativity that the world has ever known; now that the stranglehold of the Second Viennese School has shifted to give us a more accurate perspective, we can see and sample the full spectrum of artworks in all their glory.

Joan at the Stake – With Marion Cotillard on medici.tv.