Conducting: a dialogue with the unknown

As a farewell tribute to the great Polish conductor Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, who has died at the age of 93, I'd like to post this fascinating interview filmed in 2012, in which he talks at length about the arts of conducting and composing. Also, here is his obituary from Classical Music Magazine.

A bit like Valentine's Day...

An addendum to yesterday's info about the Moscow Virtuosi concert on 8 March.

A spokesperson for the Barbican assures me that it's a hall hire and nothing to do with their own in-house artistic planning.

She says: "This concert is a rental of the Barbican Hall with the marketing of the event undertaken by an outside promoter, and while the concert does fall on International Women’s Day it was not programmed to mark this event. The Barbican had not been sent or approved this version of the advert and had not been made aware that the promoter intended to market it in this way. We recognise that it is entirely inappropriate to claim any link between the concert and International Women’s Day and have instructed the concert promoter to remove all mention of this from any future advertising copy.

"Having spoken to the promoter since this advert was brought to our attention, it appears that the promoter and orchestra had misunderstood the focus of International Women’s Day on celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievement of women. They informed us that they included the mention in the advert as the focus and ways of celebrating International Women’s Day are different in former Soviet Union countries. This in no way excuses the advert making this link, I just wanted to give you some context to try to explain how this error has occurred!

"...We absolutely agree that it was entirely inappropriate for the promoter to make this link between the concert and International Women’s Day the way it is understood in the UK/more internationally."

Apparently in Russia International Women's Day is a bit like Valentine's Day, with flowers and pretty stuff, etc. - so a celebration of traditional femininity rather than of women's achievements. Very different from London.

Laurence Equilbey.
Photo from Alechetron.com

Next year the Barbican has scheduled an actual IWD concert on 8 March, featuring the Insula Orchestra with Laurence Equilbey (conductor - pictured above), Alexandra Corunova (violin), Natalie Clein (cello) and Alice Sara Ott (piano) and they will be playing some works by Louise Farrenc - whose music is so fine that really it ought to be standard repertoire by now. 

How to mark International Women's Day. Not.

What do you notice about this programme?

• It's taking place on 8 March and the poster says it's a special concert "From Haydn to Piazzolla, to mark International Women's Day..."

• It consists of music entirely by men.

• It is led by a male violinist/conductor.
• The orchestra is all-male, unless there are some players whose names aren't listed here, since on the website picture I can see maybe two or three amid the massed players.
• The music includes "Hymn to Beauty" and some sexy tangos. [Just what we always wanted, yes?]

Beggars belief, really. Anyway, I'll be at the Southbank for the Women of the World Festival, in which events include Strength in Song - Women in Opera, a lively exploration of the power of the female singing voice, with some of ENO's brightest young singers...

UPDATE: The Barbican explains that it's a hall hire with external marketing. More here.

"The tragedies of thousands of years ago are the tragedies of today"

The splendid composer Nicola LeFanu introduces her major new piece The Crimson Bird, which will have its world premiere tonight at the Barbican, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Ilan Volkov and soprano Rachel Nicholls as soloist. The work was commissioned under the Royal Philharmonic Society's Elgar Bursary. It's on BBC Radio 3 and the iPlayer thereafter - don't miss it! You can listen to Nicola's introduction here. The concert kickstarts the celebrations of her 70th birthday, which will continue through 2017.

The Crimson Bird sees LeFanu collaborate with poet John Fuller, who also wrote the libretto for the composer's 2011 chamber opera Dream Hunter. Fuller's work also forms the basis of The Crimson Bird's libretto, whose text has been adapted from his poem 'Siege'. 'Siege' examines the bond between mother and son as it is tested within an environment of war and terror - 'When death is the work of hands, Anyone may be a murderer or a hero. Which is it that you claim?' In The Crimson Bird, LeFanu brings Fuller's text to life by making use of her extensive experience of writing for the voice in the eight operas she has composed.

Speaking on The Crimson Bird, LeFanu said, "In its exploration of love, fear and death, 'Siege' has a universal scope that speaks to human experience throughout time. Coverage from conflict zones under siege fill our TV screens every day. A mother sees her son caught up in the conflicts raging around her country. Is he a hero or a murderer? Composing for the BBCSO and the dramatic soprano Rachel Nicholls, I had a marvellous opportunity to explore these perennial issues."

Valentine for a favourite film

Having not previously experienced one of the talkies-with-live-music events that have become so popular since digital technology enabled them to exist, I went to see Brief Encounter with real-time Rachmaninoff at the Royal Festival Hall the other night. Digital transformation involves the careful stripping out of the music while leaving the voices in place; it's so detailed that 60 seconds takes a day to do. Striking the balance in the hall between the volume of the soundtrack and the live music isn't easy either, but the effect is so absorbing and compelling that we can forgive the occasional "what did she say?" for the gorgeous horn-playing or clarinet solo that might mask a couple of seconds.

Alexandra Dariescu with a creation of her own.
Photo: BBC Music Magazine

And jolly lovely it was, y'know... First we had the complete Piano Concerto No.2 with soloist Alexandra Dariescu making her debut at the hall and with the LPO. She offered a near-ideal balance of heart and head, with plenty of excitement and lyricism matched by beautiful tone, intelligent voicing and excellent musical narrative even without that of Noel Coward. And as Eileen Joyce, the legendary Australian pianist for the original film, used to do, she even changed her dress in the interval. Dirk Brossé conducted with reasonable attentiveness. It's no small feat to play the whole concerto in a "real" interpretation and follow it immediately with bleeding chunks, timing determined by (I guess) a click-track, and everyone rose to the task magnificently.

Celia Johnson's daughter, the actress Lucy Fleming, introduced the evening, telling us about her mother's memories of the filming: the cold early mornings at the station pervaded by the smell of the fish train from Aberdeen; the enormous challenge of playing a role that involves large tracts of silence with a narration over the top; and Noel Coward's absolute insistence, when others tried to demur from using that concerto, that nothing could happen without the Rachmaninoff - that Laura's character is circumscribed by the facts that "she changes her library book at Boots, she eats at the Kardomah and she listens to Rachmaninoff"...

Of course! Where would we be without Rachmaninoff? The music creates perhaps 85 per cent of the film's emotional world. The little town it shows us, otherwise, is cold, small, mean. Everything is based in deadened routine: putting on the wireless, picking up the embroidery or the Times Crossword, the Thursday ritual of going into Milford, chatting to acquaintances you can't stand and who haven't an interesting thought in their heads, going to the cinema no matter what's on, laughing at the Mighty Wurlitzer, and then the cup of tea at the station where the staff never say hello even though they see you every single Thursday and try to make life a little bit harder for you because it's their job (Beryl swings her keys at Laura with such relish). The one sign of passion is Alec's devotion to his work in preventive medicine; as he describes it Laura falls for him, perhaps because she has never seen anyone express such aliveness before.

We never really know Alec, though, or Laura either: only the tip of the iceberg, plus their eyes. Laura is Celia Johnson's eyes and Rachmaninoff. Everything in the movie happens at a tangent - the shadows of Alec and Laura in the station underpass, the chilly stone bridges, the snide and hypocritical "friends", and even Laura's impossibly cute kids are filmed from off-beat angles. ("My birthday's in June and there aren't any pantomimes in June," says little Margaret in expert plummy tones. Apparently the little girl was actually Celia Johnson's niece.)

Only the Rachmaninoff is direct. And we love it and we weep because there is so much love in there, being squashed to extinction by that ghastly, two-faced provincialism and hypocrisy that Coward captures to perfection. Remember, Coward was gay and homosexuality was illegal. The whole thing is an analogy of illicit love, with its truth spark buried deep.

Odd to think that that world-in-black-and-white represents to some the sort of nostalgia that's sparked the ludicrous prospect of Brexit. Love will go away from us forever on the 5.43pm train and we will never get it back because we're worried about what other people will think if we try. What could be more British than that?

Dated? Not necessarily. Quite a few people, not least in the orchestra, were seeing that film for the first time and it won a lot of new friends.