They are going to measure artistic quality. Seriously.

Most perturbed by the revelation that Arts Council England is planning "to impose quantitative measures of artistic quality" upon its National Portfolio Organisations. Here is more information about it on the ACE website.

Here is a clear and detailed report in Arts Professional: http://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/news/arts-council-impose-quantitative-measures-arts-quality

The scheme so far has apparently cost more than £700k, and the ACE is said to be pressing ahead with it despite concerns, following the pilot scheme, that it's not guaranteed to deliver in an entirely satisfactory way...

So how is this going to work? ACE site provides us with this.

The core quality metrics

Self, peer and public:

• Concept: it was an interesting idea
• Presentation: it was well produced and presented
• Distinctiveness: it was different from things I’ve experienced before
• Challenge: it was thought-provoking
• Captivation: it was absorbing and held my attention
• Enthusiasm: I would come to something like this again
• Local impact: it is important that it's happening here
• Relevance: it has something to say about the world in which we live
• Rigour: it was well thought through and put together

Self and peer only:

• Originality: it was ground-breaking
• Risk: the artists/curators really challenged themselves
• Excellence: it is one of the best examples of its type that I have seen

Some of these points make more sense in some areas of the performing arts than in others; it would, one surmises, be iffy to apply them en masse not only to theatre and cinema but also to opera and ballet both traditional and contemporary, and to concerts of classical music. One size doesn't fit all. It never did and it never will. 

It's tempting to wonder if this is an unintended consequence of the continuing reduction of space for professional critical assessments of artistic work in the national press - now so marginalised that the majority of cultural work never receives any newspaper assessment at all. The notion of public reviews - the 'everyone is a critic' stance - seems to be progressively devaluing the concept of the alternative: this is because consensus is so rare that once you pass a certain number of reviews everything ends up, on a scale of one to five, averaging around three because some like it, some don't, everyone takes a different view for a different reason and nobody really trusts what other people say in any case. 

This in itself should demonstrate how problematic it is to assess artistic quality in a generalised way.

Let's try out the Core Quality Metrics on an actual classical concert...

Yulianna Avdeeva. Photo: C. Schneider

It so happens that the most recent event I've been to was the debut recital at the Wigmore Hall the other night of Yulianna Avdeeva, the young Russian pianist who won first prize at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 2010 - the year Daniil Trifonov pulled in in third place. Instead of a review, here is an assessment of the evening according to Core Quality Metrics.

CONCEPT: it was an interesting idea

Of course it's interesting to have the winner of the Chopin Competition make her Wigmore debut six years after the event. She is an extremely fine artist and should be far better known than she is.

PRESENTATION: it was well produced and presented

Find me anything at the Wigmore Hall that isn't well produced and presented? It's the Ritz of concert halls. Such things are never in doubt. As for Yulianna, she is a consummate professional, at ease on the stage and in complete control at every turn. (Presentation? I don't know where she got her pewter-coloured shot-silk jacket, but I'd like one too.) 

DISTINCTIVENESS: it was different from things I've experienced before

Yes, because I haven't previously heard Yulianna Avdeeva give a recital at the Wigmore Hall. I'm not sure I've heard those exact pieces played in that exact succession before either. But others might say: well, it's a piano recital, so it's not all that different. To those who love going to piano recitals, it was different for the above reasons. To the non-pianophile bureaucrat, though, would this risk raising puzzlement?

CHALLENGE: it was thought-provoking

That depends purely on the individual listener. Some might experience provoked thoughts such as: here is Bach's English Suite No.2 being played on the modern piano with absolute clarity, great conviction, beautiful rhythmic sense, exquisite sound quality and enthralling virtuosity, so what price those who think it's the wrong instrument, and do those people still even exist? And: here is Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No.8, written towards the end of World War II: it is a massive, nearly symphonic work, full of colour, deeply original and fantastically difficult to perform, and Yulianna is so at one with it and its idiom that she's making me imagine that I am in Moscow looking at Russian modernist art by the likes of Malevich and Goncharova. 

I hope this is what they mean by 'thought-provoking', but it's quite hard to tell. 

CAPTIVATION: it was absorbing and held my attention

Yup. See above.

ENTHUSIASM: I would come to something like this again

Yup. You bet.

LOCAL IMPACT: it's important that it's happening here

We're going round in circles now. Yes, it is important that Yulianna, a top-class musician with a growing international profile, should have a Wigmore Hall debut, here in central London, and that our discerning audience should have a chance to hear her. See above.

RELEVANCE: it has something to say about the world in which we live

This can only mean what you want it to mean. The concert says that people still adore listening to Bach, Chopin and Prokofiev, that some young pianists are as good as ever at playing them, and that the Wigmore Hall is one of the best places to go to listen to them. But what of the mindsets with which people approach this topic? What do we want an artistic event to say about the world in which we live? 

Again, to standardise that expectation would be an unpleasant development. If I come out of the concert without any particular thoughts about the world in which we live, but having had a really great evening nonetheless, isn't that my prerogative as a member of the public? Some people go to arts events precisely to escape having to think about the world in which we live for a couple of blessed hours.

This recital brings us great music, wonderfully played, and people love that. This really ought to be enough. It doesn't tell us whether or not Southern Trains are still on strike, or whether it's a good thing if the third runway at Heathrow gets built, or what's going on now in Syria, and it shouldn't have to do so to be 'relevant'. Music connects people to one another across time and space - listening to Chopin we're in a way communing with the soul of a human being who died in 1849, and the souls of everyone who has played or listened to his music since then. That tells us something about ourselves as human beings at our best, and perhaps that is one of the many things that music is for. Can we hope that this registers as valuable in this 'core quality metric'?

RIGOUR: it was well thought through and put together.

Yup. 

Self and peer only (including this because it's there):

ORIGINALITY: it was ground-breaking

In the sense that it was Yulianna playing in a venue that is new to her, and that venue hosting her for the first time, I guess that's a yes. In terms of musical content, not necessarily; but I don't really care because I enjoyed it so much.

RISK: the artist really challenged herself

And how. People forget what an enormous feat of accomplishment it is to play extremely complex music to a world-class level for a discerning public for about two hours. (Besides, she's hardly going to sit up there and play Chopsticks, is she.)

EXCELLENCE: it was one of the best examples of its type that I have seen

It was bloody excellent. But if every piano recital I attend has to be "one of the best examples of its type that I have seen", I think that would be a problematic way to assess them. This one was indeed top-quality artistry. But I've previously attended plenty of piano recitals that have been most enjoyable, not necessarily "one of the best" of all, yet still worth giving, worth listening to and worth loving. 

Core Quality Metrics as a measurement technique, then, seems a mixed bag. The bits that work would work anyway. The bits that don't work probably never will. And everything, but everything, depends on how the criteria are applied, and by whom, to what - and to which ends, with what effect.

For the moment, one has to try to set aside the unpleasant visions that a quango's "one size fits all" policy conjures up, with all our instinctive shudders about Stalin, Kafka and Orwell, and hope that this latest bizarre algorithmic development may somehow be able to do more good than harm. I can't say I'm holding my breath.

When Steven met Schumann...

Steven Isserlis is one of those infuriating musicians who writes as well as he plays. His latest book is just out and it is a revisiting of Schumann's Advice to Young Musicians, as tweaked for the 21st century (published by Faber & Faber). I went to talk to him about it - and also about his new recording of the Brahms Double and original version of the Op.8 Trio plus the slow movement of the Schumann Violin Concerto arranged by Benjamin Britten (yes, really), with Joshua Bell. Feature is out now in this week's JC and here's a taster.

....The question remains whether today's younger generation can share the attitude that music is something sacred, as he and Schumann both advocate. "It's not a sport," Isserlis declares. "I say it in the book and I've said it many times: music is not a sport and it should be taught as a mixture of religion and science. You find out as much as you possibly can about it and approach it with respect. You don't make it a vehicle for impressing people and showing off. 

"Actually I think the new generation has this outlook still more, at least among violinists and cellists," he adds. "They really respect the music. I think we went through a bad phase about 20-30 years ago. But those in their late teens and early twenties today seem to have a much better attitude and are emerging much more rounded as musicians."

Read the whole thing here.

Pianophiles: Martha alert!

Psst, pianophile friends: did you know that Martha Argerich is playing the Schumann Piano Concerto at the Royal Albert Hall on Monday? Well, she is. Get there.

It's part of a very special concert: the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's 70th anniversary gala. Their principal conductor, Charles Dutoit, will be on the podium for most of it and Pinchas Zukerman, the principal guest conductor, will also star in the Bruch Violin Concerto which I think he is directing from the violin. The programme is topped and tailed by the Rossini Overture to William Tell and the Stravinsky Firebird suite. Details and booking here.

I was lucky enough to interview Charles Dutoit for an RPO preview film about the concert and his long history of working with this orchestra, so here it is.

Proms to World: We're still us

Here are some pics from the Last Night of the Proms: Juan Diego Flórez serenading Paddington Bear - Britain's beloved fictional character is from Darkest Peru, remember - and (above) singing 'Rule, Britannia' dressed as arguably the Last King of the Incas, with Sakari Oramo holding the fort from the podium and a plethora of different international flags happily rubbing colours together throughout the arena. Photo credits: all BBC/Chris Christodoulou.

You know something? If we hadn't known about Brexit, we wouldn't have guessed it was (supposedly) happening. If we hadn't read in the right-wing press that nasty Remainers were printing EU flags to stir up trouble, we would have thought there were just as many other-nation flags around, including EU ones, as there usually are at the LNOP (and I've not seen or heard about any trouble at all - the notion that some pro-EU riot would happen seems to have been fictional, not that the Leave camp is known for making things up...). 

And if we thought that the UK has turned overnight into a vicious, small-minded, xenophobic nation bent on economic suicide for the sake of keeping out foreigners, we should think again. There are those elements here, as everywhere; and there have been some vile incidents of hate crime around the country, which could possibly have been stirred up by the Brexiters' rhetoric during the campaign. But it's not the whole picture - far, far from it. 

Because what the LNOP tells us is that at heart we're the same as we always were: a bit bonkers, zany humoured, welcoming, and loving a big party with a noisy communal singsong. Sakari (who as you know is Finnish) made a beautiful speech about the deeply magical power of music to transcend petty differences and unite us in our shared humanity. Ultimately the entire spectacle rather revived hope and faith in London's ability to remain the splendid multicultural melting pot as which it has flourished these past decades. 

As for 'Rule, Britannia', you don't have to sing it if you're watching at home, but if nobody can hear you, you can always consider some alternative words such as: 'Rule, Britannia! Britannia waives the rules...Britons have been led astray by self-serving fools'.

Guest Post: An opera that really is for the young...

In a lively guest post for JDCMB, young conductor Gaetano Lo Coco explains why his Rossini Festival is putting on The Barber of Seville on Monday, at Cadogan Hall, in possibly the youngest performance ever. And why Rossini would have loved it, having been only 23 when he created this tip-top favourite.

THE YOUNGEST BARBER

A Guest Post by Gaetano Lo Coco

Gioachino Rossini was 23 years old when he wrote The Barber of Seville. This is perhaps the most precocious feat of operatic composition in the history of music. It is one of the masterpieces of opera buffa, a complex, ironic and theatrically explosive work written, rehearsed and premièred in under three weeks. At the heart of its brilliance is the fact that it is a perpetually young opera that can allow itself to take a benign – even joyful – look on the grimy society that it represents. 

This is what the Rossini 2016 Young Artists‘ Festival production of The Barber at Cadogan Hall (Monday 12 September) tries to bring to life: our original 1950s staging of the opera with sets and costumes inspired by the Italy of Fellini and De Sica contrasts the self-interested, corrupt society of the opera against the pure optimism that runs through the work. We feel a real affinity to the opera and a commitment to this vision because everyone on our team (from orchestral players to singers and designers) is extremely young – between 20 and 25 more or less – and so just about the same age as the composer when he wrote the piece exactly 200 years ago!

There is a lot to be said about a composer’s age and the spirit of his opera – and it is almost always true for the greats that they are unmistakably themselves almost from the very beginning: Rossini’s first masterpiece, Tancredi, written when he was just 19 years old, has all the marks of his mature style (the crescendi, the powerful use of rhythms, especially overlapping rhythms as the excitement builds in the score). Bellini is unendingly melodic even from Adelson e Salvini (his very first opera, written at 24) and the glorious, mature Capuleti e Montecchi came only 5 years later. The orchestration and the elegance of Bastien und Bastienne, composed by Mozart at 12, is a miracle. But there is something more profound than the seeds of a mature style present in the works of young composers: it is an unsullied sense of beauty and comedy, and a belief in music as a benign force over the machinations of society. 

Verdi’s Falstaff, the direct descendant of Barbiere in the Italian tradition, was the composer’s last opera and written when he was near 80. It makes for a fascinating comparison with Rossini’s opera: at the end of The Barber, Dr Bartolo, who has seen his life ruined in the course of a disastrous day, forgives Figaro, the Count and Rosina when they allow him to keep Rosina’s dowry, and the final chorus toasts “amore e fede eterna” (love and eternal faith). At the end of Falstaff, in which the protagonist, like Bartolo, has been mocked, humiliated and crushed in the course of the day, the final chorus is quite different and ends with the memorable phrase: “ma ride ben chi ride la risata final” (he who laughs last laughs longest). Falstaff is a comedy full of the bitterness of age, both in its plot but also in its actual music: Verdi recycles and mocks his own style repeatedly in the course of the opera (there are subversive references to Aida, Ballo in Maschera and Otello in the piece) as we imagine the composer looking back at his own career and at the opera-going public that abandoned him in favour of new music, like Wagner’s. Hence Falstaff’s line, almost straight from Verdi’s own mouth: “Ogni sorta di gente dozzinale mi beffa e se ne gloria; pur, senza me, costor con tanta boria non avrebbero un briciol di sale” (all kinds of cheap people mock me and feel glorious about it, and yet without me, these haughty people wouldn’t even have a single grain of salt in their lives). 

In stark contrast, Rossini, at the beginning of his career and with the world ahead of him at the première of The Barber in 1816, mocks the operatic institution in the most benign of ways: when Bartolo is told of a new opera called “L’Inutil Precauzione” (the Barber’s subtitle), he replies: “Un dramma? Bella cosa! Sarà al solito un dramma semiserio; un lungo, malinconico, noioso, poetico strambotto. Barbaro gusto! Secolo corrotto!” (A drama? So you call it! It will as usual be a semi-serious piece, a long, melancholic, boring, poetic piece of nonsense. What barbaric taste! What a corrupt century!). Verdi’s and Rossini’s are two completely different kinds of cynicism: one of old age, another of youth; one wise, the other naive; one at heart pessimistic, the other optimistic. This, perhaps, is the beginning of an approach to a young composer’s opera.

Join us on Monday 12 September at Cadogan Hall for a Barber of Seville bursting with the optimism of its 23-year-old composer, performed by a cast of rising opera stars just as young!   

Book tickets online here.