Rubinstein plays the Chopin A flat Polonaise

Why? Because you never need an excuse to listen to something as inspirational as Rubinstein playing Chopin. This performance was filmed for NBC in 1956. Enjoy.

Wagner summer twilights

Meistersinger in Munich: Jonas Kaufmann as Walther. Photo: Wilfried Hösl

I've been away for a couple of weeks in Germany and Switzerland, starting the trip with two Wagner performances which might resurface somewhere in this year's Chocolate Silver Awards for Best Opera and Weirdest Moment respectively (admittedly there's plenty of the year left for others to exceed, but they'll have to try hard...).

I reviewed both events for the Critics' Circle website: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg on the final night of the Munich Opera Festival, starring Wolfgang Koch as Sachs and Jonas Kaufmann as Walther, conducted by Kirill Petrenko - a dark-hued, clever, detailed, fascinating, roller-coaster production by David Bösch, set in 1968; and Parsifal at Bayreuth, the new and fervently anti-religion production by Uwe Eric Laufenberg, with Klaus Florian Vogt in the title role. The editors have entitled this one, with perspicacity, 'Twilight of the gods'.

'Weirdest moment' goes to the latter evening. Eating out with friends afterwards, we found ourselves in the same restaurant as Angela Merkel, who had been at the opera too, and she was perfectly friendly when some members of our group bounced up to her to explain how desperately sorry and embarrassed we are about Brexit.

How to succeed as a writer in tough times

Huge thanks to the wonderful Joanna Pieters and her inspirational podcast initiative The Creative Life Show: she probes the workings of creativity with her guests, from all walks of creative living, so that we can all learn from them and find new ideas to take our own lives forward.

She asked me for this interview about life as a writer in, er, challenging times. In it you'll learn why creativity is about pragmatism, versatility, practicality, relationship building, pushing yourself, anxiety management, plumbing and an awful lot of tea. I hope you enjoy it!

Here it is on The Creative Life Show site: http://creativelifeshow.com/009-succeed-as-a-writer-tough-times-unbound-jessica-duchen/

And here, on iTunes podcasts (free): https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-creative-life-show/id1131161041?mt=2

Schumann's anniversary, and a spot of Brahms

Darguerrotype of Schumann c1850. (source: Wikipedia)

Today is the 160th anniversary of Robert Schumann's death.

This is the house - the former mental hospital - in which he died, in Endenich, on the outskirts of Bonn, as it looked a few years ago. Its ground floor now houses a music library; Schumann's rooms, upstairs and at the end of the landing, are a museum, which includes the tiny bedroom in which he died, overlooking a peaceful garden; there's a small piano, a covering for it which belonged to Liszt, and pictures and memorabilia of Clara, Joachim and Brahms. Clara was permitted to see him again only the day before his death.

Looking back through the Schumann, Brahms and Clara books on my shelf always turns up some new gem - and today, dipping into Johannes Brahms: Life and Letters, selected and annotated by Styra Avins (this is my 'Brahms Bible'), I stumbled over the information that at a memorial concert for Schumann soon after his death, Brahms himself was the soloist in Schumann's Piano Concerto. There are a few moments in musical history that make me long to time-travel, and that's one of them.

One thing you will find in Ghost Variations (named after Schumann's Geistervariationen, which shares a germ of a musical theme with the Violin Concerto's slow movement) is a brief exploration of how Brahms reflected the cyclic theme of Schumann's Violin Concerto in his own - despite the latter having been written more than 20 years later. It's quite useful to have a musicologist as a character in this sort of novel: in this case, Donald Francis Tovey. If he were around today, his insights would of course be much more profound than that. But this reference is an under-recognised element of the Brahms work, although Yehudi Menuhin spotted the connection as soon as he first set eyes on the Schumann, and it seems worth pointing up a little.

Here's the first movement of the Schumann, played (quite fast) by Henryk Szeryng. Listen for the second subject: this is the theme that transforms, twisting itself through the textures of the second movement and then shape-shifting into the final Polonaise.



And here's the beginning of the Brahms - Szerying again (filmed in Paris in 1962). Listen for the little linking pattern - and what Brahms does with it - from 2:27 to 2:50. Can that be a coincidence? I doubt it...

Sir András Schiff on 'Ghost Variations'

I've received a rather splendid endorsement for Ghost Variations. It's going on the cover.

"Schumann's wonderful violin concerto has a tragic history unlike any other piece of music. In this splendid new novel Jessica Duchen manages to find the fine balance between facts and fiction. Her book reads like a thriller, yet it's also a tribute to great music and musicians." -- Sir András Schiff

(There is still time to pre-order the e-book and get your name listed as a patron, incidentally. Publication due on 1 September.)