A HAPPY NEW YEAR 2018, WITH A DIFFERENCE

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

The difference - at least to begin with - is this astonishing performance of Schulz-Evler's 'Arabesques on the Beautiful Blue Danube' from Marc-André Hamelin. The year ahead no doubt will contain fireworks of one sort or another. Here's hoping that musical ones in the best sense will be prime among them.



I usually start the JDCMB new year with a sort of factory-reset post about this blog and what it's for (assuming it's for anything at all, which it may not be).

A very warm welcome, then, to all readers, new and older. JDCMB is Jessica Duchen's Classical Music Blog - because I didn't know, when I set it up in 2004, that people were going to give blogs catchy and poetic names. JDCMB nevertheless continues to do what it says on the tin. It's a relatively random and chiefly spontaneous collection of content involving words with, for or about music. A lot of bloggers are admirably organised and systematic. I'm afraid I'm not.

I'm a Londoner and I'm a writer with a musical training. I did music at Cambridge and piano with the wonderful Joan Havill, then had to decide aged 23 which route to take. I ended up getting "proper jobs", first in music publishing, then on a succession of music magazines (including spearheading the creation of the UK's first independent piano magazine), which carried me through to my thirties. Later I was with The Independent for 12 years. I write novels, librettos, journalism, programme notes and pre-concert talks. I also often present narrated concerts based on my novels. JDCMB has come to serve as a kind of glue that holds these different boxes together.

The industries of music and writing alike have changed beyond recognition since I started out. Back then, there were paid posts for several critics on each national paper, and people could make a perfectly decent living out of writing novels. All of these possibilities have reduced or vanished since 2008, if not earlier. Therefore variety has to be the spice of life. Still, I enjoy the range and diversity of these different activities as it keeps me on my toes, or at least my fingertips.

Last summer I started a GoFundMe page called A Year for JDCMB in which those who enjoy the site can, if they wish, support it with a small subscription (or a large one if you prefer).

JDCMB has:
• News, reviews, interviews, guest posts, think-pieces, personal experiences/memories/chronicles.
• Values about music, art, quality, equality, passion. I believe everybody deserves to have great music, art and creativity in their lives.
• A feminist slant. I think people are people and should be equal and there's too much skewed against women in the industry. Therefore I do what I can to combat this.
• English English. I'm in London, UK, so please don't tell me to use American spellings, because it's not going to happen.
• An internationalist outlook. Music is an international art and depends on its internationalism for its very existence.
• A personal slant.
• Irony and occasional sarcasm, so please be prepared.

JDCMB doesn't have:
• Sexism, racism or other prejudices.
• Porn.
• Comments boxes. If you want to discuss the posts, please come over to Facebook - I put all the links on my author page and we have some lively chats, but you do have to say who you are.
• Pro-Brexit writing.
• Conspiracy theories.
• Personal attacks.

If you want coverage on JDCMB:
• I receive a lot of requests and even with the best will in the world, I can't do it all.
• Please remember you're asking me to spend my free time giving you free publicity.
• You might like to buy an advert and/or contribute to the GoFundMe page.
• Try not to start your emails by saying "My name is..." because nine times out of ten I'll already know that's your name because it's in your email address.

So there we go. Thank you for reading the site and we look forward to seeing you in 2018!


Enjoy JDCMB? Support it here!

Top Ten Posts of 2017 on JDCMB, and thank you to JDCMB's Patrons

It's been a roller-coaster year, to say the least, and my most-read posts reflect many of the ups and downs we've been riding together. Here goes.

1. April Fool's Day - "SHOCK: Top London Orchestra will Relocate to Germany"
Honest to goodness, this little quip on Brexit and Hamburg's fab new hall is JDCMB's highest-scoring post ever. I'm still finding people who believed it, London Hamburger Orchestra and all... perhaps this is some statement about our gullibility and the power of fake news. But I did think that 1 April was the one day of the year on which people would actually trouble to evaluate the truth or otherwise of what they were reading. Hmm.

2. The Cello Hurricane
Of all musical icons, Jacqueline du Pré is the one who never loses her power. My memories of the October she died plus the Q&A with the film-maker Christopher Nupen about his latest documentary about her won a great many readers.

3. Soulmates?
The soulmates in question are Leif Ove Andsnes and Marc-André Hamelin, whose two-piano concert at the Wigmore Hall was a big highlight of the year. Delighted that my review of a thoroughly pianophiliac evening proved so popular.

4. Hotello 
I'm afraid I pinched that title from another critic via Twitter - and I was using it simply because poor old Jonas Kaufmann had to give his role debut as Otello on the climatically hottest night of the year. Extreme heat in central London is not much fun - humid, polluted, draining - and I don't know how anybody managed to sing anything at all. Still, it was a memorable performance.

5. 'Quick Reminder'
This was where I explained that No.1 was an April Fool's joke, in case people didn't get it, as it seemed they didn't. Though it was my fifth most popular post, only a small proportion of those who read No.1 also read this, so maybe there are still people wandering around believing in the imminent creation of the London Hamburger Orchestra.

6. Farewell Hvorostovsky
One of the tragic losses to the musical world this year: the great baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky passed away aged only 55.

7. Meaty Hamlet
Brett Dean's new opera based on Hamlet was a massive hit and justifiably so. I reviewed it here.

8. The Mind Behind the Cough
My hideous experience in the middle of a celestial concert made, at least, for a good read.

9. Westminster (Meditation)
The attack on Westminster Bridge was a terrible and deeply troubling event. This was a small tribute to its victims and to my home city and all its paradoxes, aided and abetted by Eric Coates.

10. Rattle's Big Night
Last but by no means least, another landmark concert: Sir Simon Rattle's first night as music director of the LSO, featuring four major pieces of British contemporary music plus the Enigma Variations.

Thank you, dear readers, for your attention and enthusiasm. Let's seize fate by the throat in 2018!

A massive thank you to all the patrons who have so kindly supported JDCMB's GoFundMe campaign, in which I am attempting to build up JDCMB and increase the "content", which means spending more time on it. Blogging is, of course, unpaid and it is only through your generosity that I can continue writing JDCMB to the level that I would like. I promised in the GoFundMe manifesto to present a list of patrons at the end of this year. Here it is.

THANK YOU ALL VERY MUCH FOR YOUR GENEROSITY AND FOR THE MORAL SUPPORT YOU PROVIDE!

JDCMB PATRONS 2017

Liz Brereton

Kate Buchanan

Lalita Carlton-Jones

Ellen Dahrendorf

Fiona Fraser

Chris Glynn

Barbara Japp

Hanjem Kemu

Beth Levin

Hugh Mather

Gillian Newman

Tomo Sawado

Sue Shorter

Kathy Stott

Beverly Usher

and Anonymous x 7

There is still time to join the list of patrons at the GoFundMe page here!

Baroque and roll: a guest post by Lindsay Kemp

It's sometimes crossed my mind that if we took even half the energy and resources that went on researching offbeat baroque repertoire and "authentic" presentation and put it into new music instead, some rather exciting, up-to-the-minute music-making might result. And at last, here comes something that mingles the two: Baroque on the Edge, which takes place at LSO St Luke's in early January, under the direction of Lindsay Kemp and Lucy Bending. Lindsay, formerly artistic director of the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music and the London Festival of Baroque Music, has written a thought-provoking guest post for us about what they're attempting, and how, and why. Enjoy! JD

THE NEW SHOCK OF THE OLD

Lindsay Kemp wonders if there has to be 

only one way to programme baroque music 

Is baroque music about composers or performers? Is what counts the notes as written down or what an inspired musician can make of them? And is it about context – by which I mean  historical context – or about 200-300-year-old music serving as raw material for anyone to play with and make contemporary, as if it were a folk song or a jazz standard?

Well of course there are no rules in this matter, though you could be forgiven for thinking so from the way some people talk. But while all of the above are certainly valid, I think it’s fair to say that most festivals that set out to devote themselves to baroque music tend to start out from the composers/written notes/historical point of view. I know that’s true of the ones I’ve been involved in over the years, principally the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music and its successor the London Festival of Baroque Music, in which for ten years I had enormous fun building around themes which, however widely they might have ranged and however virtuosic and/or imaginative the musicians I found to realise them, emerged in the first instance from a historical understanding of the music they contained.

Joanna MacGregor
Photo: baroqueattheedge.co.uk

Nothing wrong with that. Few would deny that it is the ‘historically informed’ approach to baroque music that has brought so much of it back into the light with such vitality and understanding over the last fifty years. But as I was preparing to step down from LFBM last May, I got to wondering how it would be if one were to plan a baroque music festival from the other direction, as it were. What if instead of concentrating on being historically aware and obsessing on when a piece of music was written, or who or what it was written for, I could find a way of celebrating what it actually is, what its inner lights are, shining unfiltered through the centuries to illuminate any musician of talent and imagination? What if we were to have a ‘no-rules’ baroque music festival? Thus was Baroque at the Edge born.

If it sounds like a dismissal of everything the early music movement stands for, it certainly isn’t intended to be. I’ve been a ‘believer’ in it ever since my teens, and my own experience of the kind of performer who tends to be drawn to it has taught me that there are plenty of them with the open minds, requisite skills in improvisation and flair for intimate communication with an audience that make them natural and free interpreters of baroque music. I’ve invited some of them to the inaugural Baroque at the Edge: Paolo Pandolfo, the gamba genius who can compel you to silence with a piece of Marais but also deliver an entire programme of gripping improvisations that effortlessly blend the baroque with the whatever else comes into his head, be it jazz or The Beatles; Thomas Dunford, who plays Dowland with heart-melting beauty while also merging minds and styles with Persian percussion-master Keyvan Chemirani; and violinist Bjarte Eike, who can play a Biber Sonata with the best of them and yet channel his upbringing in rural Norway into folk-fiddling mixes and atmospheric contemporary creations in the company of jazz pianist and composer Jon Balke.  

'Breaking the Rules', Gerald Kyd (centre) as Gersualdo with the Marian Consort
Photo: Robin Mitchell for the Lammermuir Festival

In addition, however, I wanted to find a context for baroque masterpieces among the music of our own time, which is why the festival opens with a recital by one of the most adventurous of all today’s pianists, Joanna MacGregor, who will set pieces by Rameau, Daquin, Couperin, Pachelbel, Byrd and Purcell among works by Messiaen, Birtwistle, Gubaidulina and Glass. Another concert will see young recorder virtuoso Tabea Debus and lute-player Alex MacCartney putting music by Telemann alongside companion pieces specially commissioned from Colin Matthews, Laura Bowler and Fumiko Miyachi. And finally, the festival seemed a perfect setting for the London premiere of Clare Norburn’s highly acclaimed concert-drama Breaking the Rules, which visits Carlo Gesualdo (played by actor Gerald Kyd) on the last dark night of his life, with music from The Marian Consort ramping up the tension.

I think Baroque at the Edge may well be the first festival to set out specifically to explore this approach, and my hope is that it will appeal to people who know their baroque music and admire many of these artists already, as well as attract a new audience of curious-minded listeners for whom genres and conventions are less important than the way the music actually sounds, and how it can feed the act of musical creation in front of their eyes. That’s got to be worth a go hasn’t it?  

‘Baroque at the Edge’ runs from 5-7 January 2018 at LSO St Luke’s in London.

baroqueattheedge.co.uk

*clears throat*

Two less than Christmassy pieces of news in music journalism have arrived within a matter of weeks. One is that the Ham & High - more than just a local paper for Hampstead & Highgate - is dropping classical music coverage. The other is that the Birmingham Post would be too, except that its critic of 48 years, the highly respected Christopher Morley, has agreed to keep writing for it without payment.

I don't need to tell you that this is sad. You know that. You also know, because it's plain logic, that if a newspaper pays some of its writers, then it should pay them all. A national newspaper well known to me stopped paying its critics too for a bit (someday I'll fill you in on that over a drink) and although we hear it has since rethought, it probably won't be the last.

If publicity is oxygen, classical music is allowed less and less of it - for reasons best known to higher-up editors whose eyes are most likely trained on clickbait and advertising revenue. This is boring for readers, bad for musicians and hopeless for an art that has been largely wiped from mainstream exposure and discussion - except when a conductor is misconducting himself or everyone is counting the women in the Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Concert.

Evidently diversification is needed. In the absence of paying sites, a good few unpaid ones have sprung up - most of them founded for idealistic reasons, namely to keep providing that oxygen for the arts and the high-quality reading ("content" schmontent) that music-lovers want and need. Does that mean that a newspaper with wealthy owners, read by many thousands, is justified in not paying its writers? Of course it doesn't. The two things are not even comparable.

But I fear it might be used as an excuse. I hate to say it, since obviously I write this blog, but possibly those of us who provide free reading matter are part of the problem. This isn't a comfortable thought.

Most of us started blogging because we're writers, and writers like to write and find audiences, and blogging is the easiest way there has ever been to do that. Some of us started the moment this medium was invented and quickly got "high" on its possibilities. Now I suspect that with the reducing of professional outlets, audiences are following us to our own sites (when I last checked the stats for JDCMB, they'd more than trebled since summer 2016). 

In some ways this makes the field "democratic". The audience becomes the editor. If you don't like a blog, for whatever reason, then you don't read it. If you don't like below-the-line comments, you don't read those either, and music blogs are equally prone to that brand of hideousness (which is why I got rid of the comment facility from JDCMB - we still have non-anonymous discussions, on Facebook). But people still have to make a living, so eventually the most active blogs will end up being written by those who have independent means or pensions, or who are lucky enough not to need more than four hours sleep a night. 

Many of us, JDCMB included, have therefore started a "support this blog" facility on crowdfunding sites such as GoFundMe, Patreon and elsewhere. If you like a blog, then please don't just read it: support it. Perhaps the central blogging host sites will eventually provide a way to put up a paywall. Until then, crowdfunding will have to do. 

And meanwhile, newspapers that pay some of their writers should pay all their writers, and pay them properly.


Enjoy JDCMB? Please support it at GoFundMe

MERRY CATMAS

Dear readers,

Wishing you all joy and peace for Christmas 2017

Lots of love from JD & the crew