'Ghost Variations' Schumann tickets up for grabs

Jessica Duchen on crowdfunding Ghost Variations from Jessica Duchen on Vimeo.

If you haven't yet signed up to support Ghost Variations, now's your chance: delighted to say that we're 85% of the way there after only ten days! Just need to swing that last 15% before it can be full steam ahead. There's a nice range of pledge rewards, and a few places remain on the Early Bird Special which involves a trip to hear its central work, the Schumann Violin Concerto, at the OAE's 6 February concert at the Royal Festival Hall with me and fellow supporters. Marin Alsop conducts and the soloist is Patricia Kopatchinskaja. This has to be booked BY THE END OF SUNDAY 31st please.

All links and buttons and info on other goodies are here, on the book's page at Unbound.

Southbank's new season goes beyond reality and belief...

...with the first-ever virtual reality orchestra (an initiative with the Philharmonia) and a year-long festival with the LPO called Belief and Beyond Belief, echoing the concept of the groundbreaking The Rest is Noise cross-genre festival.

A few other points of seriously good news:

• Chineke! is to be an associate orchestra, HOORAY!

• There's a new ticket scheme for the under-30s, plus 1000 free tickets available to young concert-goers across the season

• The start of a three-year collaboration with Mitsuko Uchida

• International Orchestras visiting include the Budapest Festival Orchestra, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and Cape Town Opera

• A 2017 New Music Biennal, a new contemporary music festival celebrating young composers

• Pianists giving recitals include Benjamin Grosvenor, Yuja Wang, Richard Goode and Maurizio Pollini among others. And Lucas Debargue, who made waves last year at the Tchaikovsky Competition, will be performing with the LPO.

• The OAE's highlights include Bach with the legendary Masaaki Suzuki.

• A major series of live film scores - an increasingly popular phenomenon - including an improvised organ accompaniment to Hitchcock's The Lodger.

A lot more besides. See everything here.

It's heartening - with the roll-out of fabulous programmes for 16-17 at the Barbican the other day, and now all of this - that despite everything, our cultural institutions can still produce exciting, attractive, fresh and inspiring programming at the highest international level.

Did you know that the UK's creative industries are worth, to the economy, £10m PER HOUR? Apparently our creative sphere is growing at twice the rate of anything else. So keeping it on the rails, dear government, is really quite a good idea, please note.

Rachmaninoff and the agony of perfectionism

If you went to the HD cinecast of the Royal Ballet in The Two Pigeons and Rhapsody last night, you might still be under the spell of Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The Royal Opera House web department asked me to write something about the composer and here it is.

Taster: 

When music magazines compile lists of the Greatest Pianists of All Time (or similar impossibilities), Sergei Rachmaninoff is often named as number one. As both composer and performer, he was unrivalled, matching inspiration with craftsmanship, brilliant technique with rigorous personal standards.

His contemporaries, on hearing him play, often remarked on the beauty of his tone quality, its singing nature and its variety of colour. ‘That is the most important thing for me in my interpretations, colour’, he once explained. ‘So you make music live. Without colour, it is dead.’

The Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, the work to which Frederick Ashton’s ballet Rhapsody is set, exemplifies the joint marvel of Rachmaninoff’s crafts as composer and pianist. The piano writing – terrifically difficult – requires grace, flexibility, precision, tenderness and, of course, colour, within a casing of dazzling virtuosity. Ashton matches it throughout the ballet with the extravagant demands he places upon his dancers.

Rachmaninoff’s mastery, though, had a psychological dark side...

The rest is here.

Jonas is coming to stay

Jonas Kaufmann in Gstaad. Photo: Raphael Faux

As the remnants of Storm Jonas blow into Britain (this means: it's gonna rain), some news from the Barbican should soon have Kaufmaniacs queuing up through the City of London. The actual Kaufmann is to have a ten-day residency at the arts centre in February 2017, featuring among other things two big Richards. He will be doing:

• a Lieder recital with Helmut Deutsch;

• Wagner! A concert including Act I of Die Walküre, with Winterstürme und alles, with Karita Mattila as Sieglinde and Eric Halfvarson as Hunding, LSO conducted by Tony Pappano. Plus the Wesendonck Lieder in the first half;

• Strauss! A programme with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jochen Rieder in which repertoire includes Strauss Lieder and...the Four Last Songs. I am especially pleased to report that this programme will open with Korngold's Schauspiel Overture...

• A public interview;

• Workshops with students from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama

The Four Last Songs - for tenor? well, why not? As long as the transposition works with the orchestra, there really shouldn't be a problem. Alice Coote has sung Winterreise to powerful effect. Kaufmann has already done glorious things with the Wesendonck Lieder. In the end, it's artistry that counts. Bring him on.

Of course, our hurricane-naming system in the UK differs from that of the US, so when Storm Jonas arrives on these shores its name changes to Gertrude.

Third go for prizewinning pianist in BBC Young Musician final

The BBC has announced the line-up of category finalists for its Young Musician of the Year 2016. There are some exciting names on the list, including some we've come across before and loved hearing, in a variety of contexts, and a couple who are apparently gluttons for punishment since they are taking their second try - or, in one case, even a third shot at the contest despite having won his category before.

Watch out for cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason - from a whole family of gifted musical siblings...here he is with his violinist brother Braimah playing the Handel-Halvorsen Passacaglia:



Terrific saxophonist Jess Gillam was in the contest in 2014 and proved herself local heroine at last year's festival in her Lake District home town of Ulverston...



Then there's pianist Julian Trevelyan, who was also in the 2014 and won the top prize (2nd - no first awarded) in the 2015 Long-Thibaud-Crespin Competition in Paris. Here he is in some mightily impressive Shostakovich in another competition in France recently:

And the third go? Quite remarkably, the pianist Yuanfan Yang is back for yet another try for the top. Then a pupil at Chetham's, he won the BBCYM piano prize in 2012 and two years earlier was the youngest contestant in the category's final. He is now 19 and has established a very promising international career. But evidently he still wants to win this particular thing outright and over all. Will it be third time lucky for Yuanfan? Here he is in the final four years ago:



That's just small a taster of some of the amazing talent that this competition continues to attract and showcase - and I can't wait to hear all the others as well. What a shame that, in true TV talent contest style, "There can only be one winner"...

Here's the full line-up:

Keyboard

Jackie Campbell (15) – piano

Tomoka Kan (17) – piano

Harvey Lin (13) – piano

Julian Trevelyan (17) – piano

Yuanfan Yang (19) – piano

Woodwind

Polly Bartlett (17) – recorder

Lucy Driver (17) – flute

Jess Gillam (17) – saxophone

Joanne Lee (15) – flute

Marie Sato (15) – flute

Percussion

Matthew Brett (14)

Hristiyan Hristov (17)

Joe Parks (16)

Tom Pritchard (18)

Andrew Woolcock (16)

Brass

Sam Dye (16) – trombone

Zak Eastop (18) – trumpet

Ben Goldscheider (18) – french horn

Zoe Perkins (17) – trumpet

Gemma Riley (17) – trombone

Strings

Stephanie Childress (16) – violin

Sheku Kanneh-Mason (16) – cello

Charlie Lovell-Jones (16) – violin

Joe Pritchard (16) – cello

Louisa Staples (15) – violin