Very grateful to the excellent Andrew Morris at The Devil's Trill blog for doing this e-interview with me about the umms and ahhs of turning history into fiction. It was interesting to try and articulate my thoughts on the process, as I hadn't particularly tried before. The questions we explored include: where do you start? And where do you stop? What's comfortable and what isn't? And how did a Swedish-French supermodel prove that it was time to stop the research?
http://devilstrillblog.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/the-novel-approach-to-history-ghost.html
If you're a subscriber waiting for your copy of Ghost Variations, we're nearly there. Just a teensy bit of last-minute snagging today. It will be with you soon! Everyone else will be able to pre-order the paperback or e-book from online bookstores sometime next week and general release is slated for 20 September.
Friday, September 02, 2016
Tuesday, August 30, 2016
Please come to St Mary's Perivale on 7 September!
Ghost Variations is nearly here. Just three more days, I believe....and next week my performance partners David Le Page and Viv McLean - an absolute knockout of a violin and piano duo - join me for the first of four concerts we are giving through the autumn based upon 'Ghost Variations'. I narrate, they play the appropriate music and thus we tell the story together.
The first concert is on Wednesday 7 September at the exquisite 12th-century church of St Mary's, Perivale, tucked away behind the A40. It's an intimate venue with a magical atmosphere and a marvellous concert series. Admission is free and seats unreserved (though you may make a donation at the end).
The "pilot" for the project took place, to a very warm reception, at the Hungarian Cultural Centre back in March and we have now extended it a little and added an interval, creating a full-evening recital. Incidentally, there will also be a shorter version, available for coffee concerts in the new year. Every piece has been chosen with forensic care to match the story, its protagonists and the necessary atmosphere.
(Above, Dave plays at the premiere...)
You'll have the chance to hear music written for Jelly d'Arányi - Ravel's Tzigane; Brahms Hungarian Dances arranged by her great-uncle, Joseph Joachim; music she played a great deal, such as the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto; a piece by Frederick Septimus Kelly, whom she had hoped to marry before he was killed at the Somme; 'Hejre Kati' arranged by her teacher, Jeno Hubay; and, of course, plenty of Schumann, including a juxtaposition that makes clear how close the slow movement of the Violin Concerto is to the theme of the Geistervariationen. Songs from the Thirties will welcome the assembling audience, creating the ambience in which the story unfolded (and I'm on the lookout for some vintage clothing...).
More details of the concert and how to get to St Mary's are available at the website: http://www.st-marys-perivale.org.uk/events-2016-09-07.shtml
PLEASE COME ALONG AND JOIN US!
Further performances very soon...watch this space...
Monday, August 29, 2016
Whence Mirga?
Listening on the radio to the splendid Proms debut of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla with her CBSO the other night, I couldn't help a smile or ten. Cometh the hour, cometh the woman: with a performance like that, wonderfully sculpted, full of conviction, detail and blazing emotion, it couldn't be clearer that the orchestra has snapped her up because she is a fantastic conductor, not because she is female in an era when (at last) equality is being demanded. UK listeners can hear the concert on the iPlayer here. It's also clear that quite a few people haven't much idea of where Lithuania is, or why it should produce such an excellent musician.
When Lithuania and the other Baltic states joined the EU in 2004, I was lucky enough to be invited over to the Vilnius Festival to write some articles about the place, its musical scene and its artistic history - and to do some roots-finding at the same time, as my ancestors were from there in the 18th century. Concerts were held in the beautiful Filharmonja, where Heifetz - who was born in Vilnius - made his debut as a child; and in there I heard an astonishing performance of the Tchaikovsky 'Pathétique' Symphony, conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich. It was an absolute glory: gut-wrenching stuff, with old-school Russian-style strings and distinctive vinegary trumpets, sizzling narrative, epic-scale tragedy: music as a matter of life and death.
Vilnius has a proud and distinguished musical life; it's had its problems over the decades, of course, but the influences run deep and come from powerful origins. That's Mirga's background. (She must have been about 18 when I went there, of course...)
It seems worth revisiting those thoughts, so here's the briefish blogpost about it; and below I am pasting the article I wrote then for The Strad, 2004. (It may be missing some accents and suchlike, I'm afraid.) Pics are mine, from then.
When Lithuania and the other Baltic states joined the EU in 2004, I was lucky enough to be invited over to the Vilnius Festival to write some articles about the place, its musical scene and its artistic history - and to do some roots-finding at the same time, as my ancestors were from there in the 18th century. Concerts were held in the beautiful Filharmonja, where Heifetz - who was born in Vilnius - made his debut as a child; and in there I heard an astonishing performance of the Tchaikovsky 'Pathétique' Symphony, conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich. It was an absolute glory: gut-wrenching stuff, with old-school Russian-style strings and distinctive vinegary trumpets, sizzling narrative, epic-scale tragedy: music as a matter of life and death.
Vilnius has a proud and distinguished musical life; it's had its problems over the decades, of course, but the influences run deep and come from powerful origins. That's Mirga's background. (She must have been about 18 when I went there, of course...)
It seems worth revisiting those thoughts, so here's the briefish blogpost about it; and below I am pasting the article I wrote then for The Strad, 2004. (It may be missing some accents and suchlike, I'm afraid.) Pics are mine, from then.
 |
| The Vilnius Filharmonja |
LITHUANIA by Jessica Duchen - from THE STRAD, 2004
Local legend has identified, on a hillside in the Old Town
of Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, an unmarked site of pilgrimage for violinists.
Surrounded by the tumbledown remains of what was long ago the Vilna Ghetto,
ripe for redevelopment amid the turmoil of change underway all around, stands
the birthplace of Jascha Heifetz – its yellowish brick and the wooden stables
in its back yard probably unchanged since the day Vilna’s greatest prodigy made
his debut at the Filharmonja concert hall, aged seven.
 |
| Apparently this is Jascha Heifetz's birthplace |
Part of the Baltic territory that over the centuries has
been carved up between surrounding powers in a variety of ways, Lithuania is
home to a proud and impressive musical tradition, bearing important influences
from both its heftier neighbours, Russia and Poland. Cesar Cui (1835-1918), one
of Russia’s Mighty Handful, was born in Vilnius; among his teachers was the
Polish-born Stanislaw Moniuszko (1819-1872), who was organist at St John’s
Church in Vilnius and set to music poems by Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish poet
said to have inspired Chopin’s Ballades, whose Vilnius home is now marked by a
stone plaque.
Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis (1875-1911), after whom
the country’s elite arts high school is named, was both a composer and a
painter who pioneered abstract art in Lithuania; speaking of paintings, Marc
Chagall was born in nearby Vitebsk and his canvases evoke, in fantastical
images of floating violins and traditional Jewish fiddlers ‘on the roof’, the
musical aspect of the once vast, artistically fertile Jewish community of this
region. Vilnius was known in the 18th and 19th centuries
as ‘the Jerusalem of the North’. All that was destroyed (with local help)
during the Nazi invasion, and the traces of it flattened and suppressed under
the subsequent Soviet regime.
 |
| Interior of the Filharmonja |
But today Lithuania’s musical life is flourishing. Its
ensembles include two symphony orchestras, the Lithuanian Opera and Ballet
Theatre with its own orchestra in Vilnius and the State Music Theatre in
Kaunas, two chamber orchestras in Vilnius and another in Kaunas, and a lively
choral and chamber music scene. Add to that the ambitious Vilnius Festival,
which has run every June for ten years, several annual festivals of
contemporary music and three high-level musical competitions, including a
violin competition named after Heifetz, and the importance of music becomes
clear as daylight. Folk music, particularly song and dance, is ever popular
(the local stringed instrument is the ‘kanklés’), and international jazz festivals
bring visitors flocking to Vilnius and Kaunas each year; also taking place is a
gradual resurgence of interest in Klezmer and the Jewish folk music of the
Vilna Ghetto.
Among today’s most celebrated Lithuanian-born soloists are
violinist Julian Rachlin and cellist David Geringas – the latter has
particularly championed the music of Anatolijus Senderovas, once a childhood
friend, now a leading Lithuanian composer, who has written a concerto and a
number of solo and chamber works for him. Lithuania has a strong
quartet-playing tradition; and although the Lithuanian String Quartet, for many
years the country’s leading chamber ensemble, has now disbanded, others are
doing well, notably the MK Ciurlionis Quartet and the Chordos Quartet which
places considerable emphasis on contemporary music.
 |
| The Gates of Dawn |
This is currently in abundant supply. The director of the
Vilnius Festival, Gintautas Kevisas, also director of the Vilnius Opera and
Ballet Theatre, says that he wants composers ‘to feel that they are a very
significant part of the community’; he is eager to encourage this with an
annual Festival commission. The 2004 festival’s world premiere was the Duo
Concertante for violin, viola and orchestra by Vytautas Barkauskas, who won the
prestigious National Prize in 2003 for his Violin Concerto, Jeux. His Duo Concertante is dedicated
to the memory of an extraordinary figure in Lithuanian history: Chiune
Sugihara, Japanese vice-consul in Kaunas (then the capital) in 1940, who saved
6,000 Jewish refugees from the Nazis by issuing them with transit visas
although his government had forbidden him to do so. In tribute, much of the Duo
Concertante is modelled on Japanese music. Its premiere, with violinist
Philippe Graffin and violist Nobuko Imai as soloists, drew an enthusiastic
response; Imai has now arranged its Japanese premiere for the Tokyo Viola Space
Festival in May 2005.
This year, the Vilnius Festival commission is a new ballet
score from Senderovas. Senderovas, Barkauskas and numerous other Lithuanian
composers have been enjoying increasingly international profiles since
Lithuania declared independence from Russia in 1991. As Barkauskas says,
preparing for a previously unthinkable visit to Japan, ‘It’s like springtime!’
Lithuania is at an ‘interesting’ point in its history,
caught in a tug-of-war between Communist legacy and capitalist aspiration.
Experiences in some musical organisations are symptomatic of this ideological
transition: most notably, last year the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra ejected
its 77-year-old conductor, Saulis Sondeckis, who had been at its helm for 44
years, after a heated, vociferous and very public power struggle. During the
Communist years, such appointments were jobs for life. This – as every musician
I met in Vilnius agreed – has to change.
Nevertheless, most music in Lithuania is still state-run.
The National Philharmonic Society, the umbrella organisation under which
musical organisations were centralised under the Soviet regime, is still in
place and is generally regarded as a positive way to protect musical life,
preferable to exposing every organisation individually to the uncertainty of
market forces. Young talent is still nurtured by a network of state music
schools across the country, and also by the sizeable Ciurlionis School, which admits
the most talented pupils in music, ballet and fine art. When I visited Vilnius,
I found that most of the musicians and arts administrators I met had been
educated there.
Unsurprisingly, the dominant force in Lithuania’s string
teaching is the Russian school. At the 2004 Vilnius Festival, hearing the
Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra performing Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique
Symphony conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich, and the young Lithuanian conductor
Robertas Servenikas leading the specially-formed Vilnius Festival Orchestra
through Mozart, Stamitz and Barkauskas, it was easy to imagine oneself sliding
back in time by 30 years. The LNSO’s style is intense and creamy, reminiscent
of recordings by the finest USSR orchestras, while the Festival Orchestra’s
approach was lively, spirited and clear, but without a trace of influence from
the sinewy sounds, inspired by period instrument performance, that now dominate
many European chamber orchestras.
 |
| The Heifetz Hall is in the Jewish Community Museum |
The LNSO’s concertmaster, Almina Statkuviene, explains the
benefits of her colleagues’ unity of style: ‘Because we have all trained in the
same system – we are almost all graduates of the Lithuanian Music Academy – we
play together very naturally, with the same technique. Our principal conductor,
Juozas Domarkas, has been with the orchestra since 1964, but we have none of
the tensions that some other orchestras are currently experiencing! He studied
in St Petersburg with Ilya Musin and Mravinsky and has brought some excellent
traditions with him.’
Head of strings at the Lithuanian Academy of Music is
violist Petras Radzevicius: he is also principal viola of the LCO and has been
a crucial lynchpin in establishing the Jascha Heifetz Violin Competition. He
has taught at the LMA since 1963 and served as head of department since 1987.
Currently, he says, the string department holds 12 professors and around 80
students.
 |
| On Gediminas, looking towards the cathedral |
‘After the war, in the early days of the Soviet occupation,
some young musicians from Moscow arrived in Vilnius,’ he explains, ‘and from
that time onwards the Russian school of playing, in those days considered
rather progressive, established itself here. All the professors in the string
department today are students of those original Russian teachers, and many of
them also went to Moscow for postgraduate studies with pupils of David
Oistrakh.’ A good handful of foreign students come to the Academy each year, he
adds: ‘Lithuania is known as a good place to study the Russian style.’
Nevertheless, some of Lithuania’s younger musicians,
especially those who have studied abroad, are impatient with the pace of
change. Mindaugas Backus, principal cello of the Lithuanian State Symphony
Orchestra and cellist of the Chordos Quartet, came to Britain to spend two
years at the Royal Northern College of Music; the contrast, he says, proved
revealing. He feels that musical attitudes in Lithuania need to be updated to
take in stylistic developments in the wider musical world as well as more
positive responses to personal enterprise. ‘The mentality in Lithuania remains
to a large extent very Eastern European and there is a lack of choice,’ he
explains. ‘Part of the problem is that so many young people leave the country;
I think they should come back and help to carry things forward to new
generations here!
‘Things are improving gradually,’ he adds. ‘People are
working hard and the atmosphere is hopeful. EU membership makes it easier for
us to travel and to invite people from abroad to give masterclasses and
perform, although resources are still scarce. And when you go overseas, it’s
very nice to stand in the EU Passports queue at immigration!’
Lithuania, poised on its cusp between old and new, looks set
to become a fertile ground for musical development in the 21st
century. It has long enjoyed that potential. And it may at last be on the road
to fulfilment and international recognition. JD
Friday, August 26, 2016
Not much in praise of exams
There's been a little flurry of attention towards music exams following an article by the excellent Rosie Millard about the pride and joy that success in them has brought to her kids - and countless others all around the world (the article is entitled somewhat misleadingly, 'Why I'm proud to be a pushy music parent').
There's a huge sense of satisfaction, she explains. She took Grade V piano herself, learned the necessary pieces for two years, had a "horrendous experience" on the day and passed. The system is "a gold standard which everyone understands" and a "useful byword to sling around CVs..." It shows you have guts, courage, patience, application. And you feel proud of yourself. Great. What's not to like?
The day that article came out, we went to a pianist friend's place to hear her perform Bach for a small audience including two elderly Holocaust survivors. Our friend is one of London's more magical musicians and she played us a selection of JSB's less often-programmed music - Two-Part Inventions, Three-Part Sinfonias, some Capriccios (the one graphically depicting the departure of a beloved brother is a delight!) and more. But in two instances - the D minor Invention and the B minor Sinfonia - within two notes I felt a chill descend on my shoulders. Images assaulted me: Oh My God, That One.
I did the D minor Invention for goodness knows which exam, when I was I forget how young. The B minor Sinfonia was a set piece for Grade VII when I was 14. And the struggles came straight back. I worked on that bit for weeks and months. It was terrifying. I didn't know what the flippin'heck to do with the music and I didn't like it very much. You need fast fingers that aren't sweating and shaking, a light touch, preferably not too much pedal. You need to understand Bach's dance rhythms, his own instrument, his glittery, humorous flair. I don't think I'd ever heard of any of them at that age.
Glenn Gould plays the B minor Sinfonia. What a mean thing to set for Grade VII!
Exams? I was terrified. I didn't know what the piano was going to do to me (the keys are usually sticky and sweaty from all the other terrified students' fingers before you). You're shoved through the process as fast as humanly possible, because there's a time limit and a lot of kids waiting their turn outside in the waiting room, pasty-faced and nauseous.
None of that has the first thing to do with making music, enjoying music, understanding it, taking in the spirit-food with which it provides us. It's all about building up the CV, same as any exam. And 35 years later, the music is still laden with the ghastly associations of that miserable day: warming up from the chilly corridors by soaking your hands in a basin of hot water in the ladies' loos, simply counting the minutes until the whole thing will be over and you get given a nice treat of tea and cake as your reward (or I did - I was lucky).
Our friend plays Bach as if it's music to which angels dance. Among the guests were a sparky and elegant woman in her eighties, born in Hungary, who survived Bergen-Belsen, and a retired doctor of similar vintage who was deported from Amsterdam, where he'd lived a few blocks away from Anne Frank, at the age of five. He plays a little and has a clavichord at home. He and I followed the score of the Inventions together until he decided to stop and listen only, since there were tears in his eyes.
Of course, there's room for music to do both these things: to bring CV enhancement and "life skills" and to offer spiritual sustenance and oneness with the universe. That's an amazing thing about music: it's like a tree, which can pump out oxygen that we breathe, grow fruit that we eat, burn to help us keep warm, make furniture that we can sit on, make a violin that we can play, build a house or a ship, be carved to make a beautiful work of art.
Not enough of us, though, have the chance to realise that there is more to music than horrible experiences in exams. They should never be the be-all and end-all, but it worries me that perhaps, to many modern families, they become so, and they could actually put the kids off music. After all, if your first experiences of performing are in an exam situation, those associations might stay with you and they can be awfully difficult to shake off. You're ingrained to feel you are being judged from the start, not sharing music with other human beings.
Another downside is that they hold people back. You become psychologically tied to your level. "Oh, I can't play that - it's Grade VIII and I'm only Grade V." I remember being stuck with Grade VI for two years because for some reason my entry forms didn't arrive when they were meant to, so it had to be put back, but the syllabus changed, I had to learn the new set pieces and so forth. And you needed Grade VI for A level, I think, so I had to do it. When I could have just said "what the heck", and moved on to something more challenging, and maybe progressed faster.
Like various other great Victorian inventions (the first syllabus was developed in 1890) this system was possibly designed via a mindset that liked to keep people neatly in their place, like kitchen utensils. I once interviewed a quartet leader who'd been teaching the Sistema kids in Venezuela; we'd all been marvelling at the joy and enthusiasm of the Simón Bolivár Symphony Orchestra. What do those kids have that we don't, I asked. "They don't do graded music exams," my violinist growled. "Nobody tells them they can't do this or that piece because they're only Grade IV."
The Simón Bolivár Youth Orchestra in 2007. I know it's fashionable to denigrate El Sistema these days, because of the appalling conditions of life in Venezuela, but I don't think they'd have been playing like this at the Proms if they'd been stuck shivering in a corridor waiting to do their Grade V.
I don't know many professional musicians who went through the grade exams. If they're going to make a career, they'll probably have exceeded Grade VIII by the age of 12 in any case.
So do the grades, by all means, but don't forget about making music. If your children are tackling these exams, invent ways for them to practise performing for fun, with other kids, with ice cream and balloons, with a celebratory atmosphere. Take them to fun and social musical events - kids' operas, youth orchestra concerts, holiday courses. Let music-making be a natural and integral part of life, about giving, about sharing an enthusiasm, something to look forward to, something to love. If the exam associations - being judged, being frightened, longing for it to be over - can stay with you for decades, so can the joy of that other way forward.
 |
| A badge makes a nice post-exam present. (pic: zazzle.co.uk) |
The day that article came out, we went to a pianist friend's place to hear her perform Bach for a small audience including two elderly Holocaust survivors. Our friend is one of London's more magical musicians and she played us a selection of JSB's less often-programmed music - Two-Part Inventions, Three-Part Sinfonias, some Capriccios (the one graphically depicting the departure of a beloved brother is a delight!) and more. But in two instances - the D minor Invention and the B minor Sinfonia - within two notes I felt a chill descend on my shoulders. Images assaulted me: Oh My God, That One.
I did the D minor Invention for goodness knows which exam, when I was I forget how young. The B minor Sinfonia was a set piece for Grade VII when I was 14. And the struggles came straight back. I worked on that bit for weeks and months. It was terrifying. I didn't know what the flippin'heck to do with the music and I didn't like it very much. You need fast fingers that aren't sweating and shaking, a light touch, preferably not too much pedal. You need to understand Bach's dance rhythms, his own instrument, his glittery, humorous flair. I don't think I'd ever heard of any of them at that age.
Glenn Gould plays the B minor Sinfonia. What a mean thing to set for Grade VII!
Exams? I was terrified. I didn't know what the piano was going to do to me (the keys are usually sticky and sweaty from all the other terrified students' fingers before you). You're shoved through the process as fast as humanly possible, because there's a time limit and a lot of kids waiting their turn outside in the waiting room, pasty-faced and nauseous.
None of that has the first thing to do with making music, enjoying music, understanding it, taking in the spirit-food with which it provides us. It's all about building up the CV, same as any exam. And 35 years later, the music is still laden with the ghastly associations of that miserable day: warming up from the chilly corridors by soaking your hands in a basin of hot water in the ladies' loos, simply counting the minutes until the whole thing will be over and you get given a nice treat of tea and cake as your reward (or I did - I was lucky).
Our friend plays Bach as if it's music to which angels dance. Among the guests were a sparky and elegant woman in her eighties, born in Hungary, who survived Bergen-Belsen, and a retired doctor of similar vintage who was deported from Amsterdam, where he'd lived a few blocks away from Anne Frank, at the age of five. He plays a little and has a clavichord at home. He and I followed the score of the Inventions together until he decided to stop and listen only, since there were tears in his eyes.
Of course, there's room for music to do both these things: to bring CV enhancement and "life skills" and to offer spiritual sustenance and oneness with the universe. That's an amazing thing about music: it's like a tree, which can pump out oxygen that we breathe, grow fruit that we eat, burn to help us keep warm, make furniture that we can sit on, make a violin that we can play, build a house or a ship, be carved to make a beautiful work of art.
Not enough of us, though, have the chance to realise that there is more to music than horrible experiences in exams. They should never be the be-all and end-all, but it worries me that perhaps, to many modern families, they become so, and they could actually put the kids off music. After all, if your first experiences of performing are in an exam situation, those associations might stay with you and they can be awfully difficult to shake off. You're ingrained to feel you are being judged from the start, not sharing music with other human beings.
Another downside is that they hold people back. You become psychologically tied to your level. "Oh, I can't play that - it's Grade VIII and I'm only Grade V." I remember being stuck with Grade VI for two years because for some reason my entry forms didn't arrive when they were meant to, so it had to be put back, but the syllabus changed, I had to learn the new set pieces and so forth. And you needed Grade VI for A level, I think, so I had to do it. When I could have just said "what the heck", and moved on to something more challenging, and maybe progressed faster.
Like various other great Victorian inventions (the first syllabus was developed in 1890) this system was possibly designed via a mindset that liked to keep people neatly in their place, like kitchen utensils. I once interviewed a quartet leader who'd been teaching the Sistema kids in Venezuela; we'd all been marvelling at the joy and enthusiasm of the Simón Bolivár Symphony Orchestra. What do those kids have that we don't, I asked. "They don't do graded music exams," my violinist growled. "Nobody tells them they can't do this or that piece because they're only Grade IV."
The Simón Bolivár Youth Orchestra in 2007. I know it's fashionable to denigrate El Sistema these days, because of the appalling conditions of life in Venezuela, but I don't think they'd have been playing like this at the Proms if they'd been stuck shivering in a corridor waiting to do their Grade V.
I don't know many professional musicians who went through the grade exams. If they're going to make a career, they'll probably have exceeded Grade VIII by the age of 12 in any case.
So do the grades, by all means, but don't forget about making music. If your children are tackling these exams, invent ways for them to practise performing for fun, with other kids, with ice cream and balloons, with a celebratory atmosphere. Take them to fun and social musical events - kids' operas, youth orchestra concerts, holiday courses. Let music-making be a natural and integral part of life, about giving, about sharing an enthusiasm, something to look forward to, something to love. If the exam associations - being judged, being frightened, longing for it to be over - can stay with you for decades, so can the joy of that other way forward.
Thursday, August 25, 2016
A dark horse of music steps into the light
Want to hear something completely different? Pop along to The Warehouse, Waterloo, tonight, where Fifth Quadrant and violinist Simon Hewitt Jones are presenting the work of Michael Rosenzweig, a multi-talented South African-born composer who moved to Britain several decades ago full of promise, yet whose work has gone all but unheard until now. Fifth Quadrant tonight performs his String Octet, Elegy for 13 Solo Strings and Fugue '97 alongside music by Dvorák and Barber.
Here's a sneak preview: an extract from Fifth Quadrant's first read-through of the Elegy. The composer conducts.
Simon Hewitt Jones writes:
At the age of 65, Michael Rosenzweig remains the dark horse of British classical music, a position he has held since his arrival on these shores in l979 touting a Symphonic Tone Poem, a string quartet, a piano trio and several other works that paid homage to Mahler, Schoenberg, Bartok and Stravinsky.
At the time, Rosenzweig had no formal music education at all; he’d simply listened to the masters, taught himself to write music and somehow produced work of such promise that two major universities offered to admit him straight into their Masters and Doctoral programs – on full scholarships. Further honours soon materialised, including the DAAD Artists Fellowship in Berlin and ringing endorsements from such luminaries as Chou Wen-chung, Lukas Foss, Jack Beeson and Emanuel Hurwitz.
Rosenzweig appeared to be on the brink of greatness, but he ‘dropped out of sight’ circa 1995 and has spent the last three decades starving in London garrets while making the odd appearance as guest conductor of Bulgaria’s Vidin State Philharmonic. His appearance at The Warehouse with Simon Hewitt Jones' Fifth Quadrant offers Londoners a rare chance to see this enigmatic figure and hear some of his unheard music.
Here's a sneak preview: an extract from Fifth Quadrant's first read-through of the Elegy. The composer conducts.
Simon Hewitt Jones writes:
At the age of 65, Michael Rosenzweig remains the dark horse of British classical music, a position he has held since his arrival on these shores in l979 touting a Symphonic Tone Poem, a string quartet, a piano trio and several other works that paid homage to Mahler, Schoenberg, Bartok and Stravinsky.
At the time, Rosenzweig had no formal music education at all; he’d simply listened to the masters, taught himself to write music and somehow produced work of such promise that two major universities offered to admit him straight into their Masters and Doctoral programs – on full scholarships. Further honours soon materialised, including the DAAD Artists Fellowship in Berlin and ringing endorsements from such luminaries as Chou Wen-chung, Lukas Foss, Jack Beeson and Emanuel Hurwitz.
Rosenzweig appeared to be on the brink of greatness, but he ‘dropped out of sight’ circa 1995 and has spent the last three decades starving in London garrets while making the odd appearance as guest conductor of Bulgaria’s Vidin State Philharmonic. His appearance at The Warehouse with Simon Hewitt Jones' Fifth Quadrant offers Londoners a rare chance to see this enigmatic figure and hear some of his unheard music.
Endorsements are impressive, too. These are just two of them:
CHARLES MACKERRAS, international conductor: “I must say I find your compositions wholly admirable. You are obviously a man of huge talent.”
OLIVER KNUSSEN, composer, conductor, Conductor Laureate London Sinfonietta: “A talent of a major order…one of the most substantial composers of his generation at work anywhere today.”
OLIVER KNUSSEN, composer, conductor, Conductor Laureate London Sinfonietta: “A talent of a major order…one of the most substantial composers of his generation at work anywhere today.”
7.30pm 25 August, The Warehouse, 13 Theed Street, Waterloo, London SE1 8ST. Further info and online booking: http://www.michaelrosenzweig.com
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