The secret world of Federico Colli

You know exactly why budding great pianists in their early to mid twenties are like London buses, don't you? That's right - you wait for a decade or so and then along comes a whole bunch at the same time. So please welcome yet another: to add to the roster of Trifonov, Grosvenor, Levit and Avdeeva, please welcome, from Brescia...

...Federico Colli, winner of the latest Leeds International Piano Competition, who made his London debut last night at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in a stunning recital of Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann. Pictured, right, with a very happy Dame Fanny Waterman, founder of the Leeds, who can be rightly proud of her laureate.

Colli - playing a Fazioli, also the choice of Trifonov last week - began his concert with the Mozart Sonata in F major K283: a vivid, spirited account that established several strengths at once, notably the sense of "flow" that characterised the whole programme, an ongoing thread of musical connection that feels as if he is entirely one with the music, creating it from the inside out. He used a light, strong touch with singing tone, beautifully balanced voicing, extremely well-judged pedalling - an ideal blend of colour and clarity. I wondered briefly about a few exaggerated gestures - hand movements for each repeated note of the slow movement's melody, for instance - but by half way through the Beethoven 'Appassionata', any such concerns went out of the window as a tingle of recognition spread that we were listening to a potential true great.

Something magical began to happen with the first variation of the Beethoven's second movement: a pattern of figuration that in other hands can be nothing more than that, but that for Colli became a shifting lattice of subtle voices, light and shade - as if he could hear and imagine things that the rest of us can't. And while everything seemed thought out and judicious, there was no sense of playing it safe: let off the leash in the finale's coda, Colli tackled Beethoven's fall of Lucifer like a lightning bolt.

Schumann's Sonata No.1 is one of the composer's weirdest works, more fantastical than the Fantasy, less "sane" by far than all those supposedly difficult "late"compositions. Pulling it off is a very tall order, yet throughout its magnificent long span Colli made it entirely his own. He gave the fantasy its head, working in the dimension of silence together with that of sound in masterful fashion: the transitions, of which there are a great many, were not only handled with ideal pacing but became virtually the raison d'être of the piece.

By now one could forget technical concerns and take for granted the full yet never heavy-handed sound quality, the singing nature of the phrasing, the richness of colour, and move instead into another world. He made sense of the work by recognising that making sense is not the point; that this is visionary, groundbreaking music far ahead of its time. He had the hall breathing and concentrating as one with him and the piano and the sonata. This was his secret world, unfolding in front of us. He gave us all of Schumann and all of himself.

For an encore he offered the Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy, in what I think must have been Pletnev's arrangement.

It was a short programme, but one of uncompromising and unforgettable intensity.

Meanwhile, my interview with him is the cover feature for the current issue of Pianist magazine. Enjoy.

Government backs more cuts to music education funding

While we ate chocolate, they were busy with the axe.

It has not been a happy Easter for anyone who cares about music education in the UK. And, you know, many of us do - not that you'd ever guess that from the actions of a government that first commissioned a report broadly welcomed for its positive recommendations on the topic - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/music-education-in-england-a-review-by-darren-henley-for-the-department-for-education-and-the-department-for-culture-media-and-sport - yet now is apparently telling local authorities that they should have no money to fund music education.

This article from Arts Professional sets out the situation neatly: http://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/news/pressure-mounts-councils-cut-music-education-funding

Deborah Annetts, head of the Incorporated Society of Musicians, has pointed out the chaos instigated by mixed messages from government and lack of joined-up thinking from those wielding the purse-strings. She says:

‘Following the confusion caused by the EBacc and other mixed messages around the value the Government places on music education, we now need an unequivocal commitment from the Department for Education that it supports music education and is fully behind the National Plan for Music Education.

‘Last week we celebrated as music was included in the Government’s GCSE reforms, but this week, we find that the Government is backing additional cuts to the music education budget worth millions.

‘The National Plan for Music Education supported by the Department for Education, was a visionary strategy for music education in England. The demand that local authorities should stop funding music services risks derailing this flagship Government initiative.’

The ISM is stepping up its Protect Music Education campaign. Please sign up to it. 

UPDATE, 22 April: this piece by Jonathan Savage contains more detail - please read.

Meanwhile, this article from the Guardian raises the idea that dismantling our youngsters' creative abilities may be more sinister a move still: "Indeed, it may not be too cynical to suggest that it actually suits some if the creative noise is kept down in poor areas. Talented working-class youngsters who learn how to use the tools of their artistic trade are notoriously prone to asking awkward questions with them." 

Bechstein bunnies, dressing for Easterjet and a recipe for Scriabanoffiev Pie

In an increasingly off-the-wall Easter, we have here a fantastic greeting from Bechstein Pianos:

Meanwhile stunning soprano Sarah Gabriel - who was our premiere production Vicky in my Wagner play Sins of the Fathers - found her concert dress falling foul of Easyjet's carry-on baggage regulations the other day and in the resulting carry on, worthy of the eponymous films, she came up with a fine sartorial solution, which made it into the national papers.

Don't miss Sarah at the Purcell Room on 29 April, when she will be singing KORNGOLD - a special new arrangement of the Shakespeare Songs, by conductor Ben Palmer, who wields the baton of the Orchestra of St Paul's for the occasion. Booking here.

And finally, here is a recipe for something very Easteryjet dreamed up for our piano soloist the other night, who as his recording approaches says he is going a bit Scriabinanas: 

SCRIABANOFFIEV PIE:

Biscuit base: 

100g butter (unsalted)

300g digestive biscuits (gluten-free if necessary)

Caramel:

175g butter

85g white sugar and 85g brown sugar (but if you really love Scriabin, use only darkest brown sugar for a truly demonic twist) 

A tin of condensed milk

4 bananas

Carton of double cream, whipped

High cocoa-solids plain chocolate to shave over the top (pref 80+%)

A shot of plain Russian vodka

Mix together melted 100g butter and the crushed biscuits in a saucepan and press into 19cm loose-bottomed cake base. Chill in the fridge. Make caramel by stirring butter & sugar together in saucepan over low heat until dissolved, then add the condensed milk and mix until boiling and golden (or very dark golden if using the all-brown sugar version). Pour over the biscuit base, spread evenly & chill. When set, chop the bananas and arrange on the top. Mix the vodka into the whipped cream and spread across the bananas. Sprinkle liberally with shavings of black chocolate. Serve with a show of coloured light and prepare for either a poem of ecstasy or a vision fugitive from your guests. 

Disclaimer: JDCMB cannot be held responsible if this pie turns out to be a complete disaster. Just make sure you don't burn the sugar and keep your paws well clear of the mixture while it's hot.

A great playwright's daughter speaks

The Silver Tassie, Sean O'Casey's great anti-war drama of 1928, is about to open at the National Theatre and I was delighted to have the chance to talk to the playwright's daughter, Shivaun O'Casey, about life with her father. The piece is in the Observations section of today's Independent, and here is the director's cut, so to speak. (I don't often do theatre features, but adore it.)

Dear mother, this helpless thing is still your son. Harry Heegan, me, who, on the football field, could crash a twelve-stone flyer off his feet.

Sean O’Casey’s anti-war drama The Silver Tassie, which is about to open in a new production by Howard Davies at the National Theatre, represents the great Irish playwright at the height of his iconoclastic powers. Showing the devastating impact of World War I on an Irish footballer and his friends, it features a surreal battleground scene, as shocking today as it must have been when in 1928 O’Casey first unleashed the text upon the unsuspecting WB Yeats, a director of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.

Although he had defended O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, which shot to riot-sparking notoriety there, Yeats rejected the new play out of hand. O’Casey, he declared, should not write about the trenches because he had not experienced them; and he objected to his sundering of conventional dramatic unities. O’Casey’s riposte? “Aristotle is all balls.”

O’Casey can easily sound like a fighter and a firebrand; and his socialist standpoint was distinctly at odds with establishmentarian mainstream theatre. His daughter, Shivaun, herself a theatre director before her retirement, nevertheless casts a different perspective on his nature.

“He hated fighting,” she declares, “but he couldn’t let things lie when he saw injustices. He had to say what he really thought. In fact he was the kindest person I have ever known.” His socialism sprang more from compassion than from communist convictions, she adds: “He was never a member of the party – he couldn’t ever be a member of anything, because he couldn’t toe any line. He was a free thinker. I think a lot of people don’t quite understand that.”

Born in Dublin in 1880, O’Casey started to write plays in his forties while working as a manual labourer. Shivaun relates that he occupied a small room in an overcrowded house on Dublin’s North Circular Road where, on returning from work, he would write by candlelight far into the night.

Coming to London to accept the Hawthornden Prize for Literature for Juno and the Paycock, O’Casey discovered a more congenial atmosphere than Dublin provided – he later remarked that “in Ireland they wore the fig-leaves on their mouths”. Here he met and married the actress Eileen Carey Reynolds in 1928. Shivaun, the youngest of their three children, feels that her father’s lessons in warmth, caring and honesty have never left her: “He would quote Polonius’s speech from Hamlet, ‘To thine own self be true,’” she remembers.

The family settled in Devon, yet Ireland stayed strongly in O’Casey’s consciousness. “It was inside him and he brought it with him,” Shivaun suggests. “He continued to create Irish characters all his life.” One such character in the play Red Roses for Me, she says, was based on a local from Totnes market who asked him repeatedly whether the banks were safe. (Totnes was their chosen home after George Bernard Shaw advised that Shivaun's two elder brothers should attend the progressive school at nearby Dartington: "That's the only school for the O'Casey children," he declared, according to Shivaun.)

Despite his prolific output, O’Casey made little money from his writing. “He wasn’t what you might term a popular playwright,” says Shivaun. “Yeats’s dismissal of The Silver Tassie didn’t help him, and neither did his politics. He was always fighting for equality, so he wasn’t an easy writer to put on if you wanted to be safe.”

There is certainly nothing safe about The Silver Tassie. Today, Shivaun adds, its message is as relevant as ever: “It’s a stark reminder of what war really is, and of its terrible waste of young life.”

The Silver Tassie, Lyttleton Theatre, currently previewing, opens 23 April. Box office: 020 742 3000

"Mache dich..."

Pick an occasion - any occasion - in the history of music at which you'd have liked to be present... Today I'll choose the Bach St Matthew Passion as conducted in 1829 by the 20-year-old Felix Mendelssohn. The performance was organised by the young composer and his actor friend Eduard Devrient and the work enjoyed probably its first outing since the death of Bach himself, some 80 years earlier.

Apparently they only used about half of it, and Mendelssohn made plenty of changes to the harmonies, orchestration and vocal lines - but it still had the required effect. Goethe, hearing of the occasion, sensed its significance, saying: "It's as if I heard the roaring of the sea from afar."

Mendelssohn's aunt, a friend of CPE Bach's wife, a pupil of WF Bach and hostess of one of Berlin's finest artistic salons, had a number of Bach's manuscripts in her possession, including the St Matthew Passion. She presented it to her gifted nephew when he was 16 and consequently changed the course of history. Imagine a new world hearing it - even half of it - for the first time. "To think that it took an actor and a Jew's son to revive the greatest Christian music for the world!" Mendelssohn remarked.

Mendelssohn, born into a Jewish family, raised as a Lutheran after his parents' conversion, and a practising Christian for the rest of his life, saw no need for a conflict between his background and his faith. He achieved a unique point of balance that allowed him to embrace both - despite the widespread atmosphere of low-level anti-Semitism around him (I'm sorry to see that even Clara Schumann made snide remarks behind his back). In the bicentenary year, 2009, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies once remarked that he regarded Mendelssohn as "the prophet of light". I'm with him on that.

As for Bach, he takes us into another world. The St Matthew Passion makes us live the story and its processes as if from the inside. It offers music that cleanses the soul; even if you approach it as drama rather than religion, it doesn't seem to mind and will still work its wonders. It offers, too, an oasis of calm, reflection and redemption, along with a massive dramatic catharsis that might be felt especially keenly by anyone who has lived through the loss of a loved one. When my mother died, 20 years ago, I could listen to nothing else for months.

Here is the last aria of the St Matthew Passion, "Mache dich mien Herze rein". It's a marvel in its own right, heard alone; but at the end of the whole it arrives as a purifying sunrise after three hours (or so) of anguish, soul-searching and tragedy. It's sung here by the great baritone Thomas Quasthoff. Have a good Easter, all.