Young Musicians All

Lauren Zhang plays Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto with the CBSO in the BBC Young Musician final
Photo: Greg Milner

Coinciding with yesterday's apparently stunning final of this year's BBC Young Musicians Competition, oboist Nicholas Daniel and a magnificent roster of fellow past winners - Nicky Benedetti, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Natalie Clein, Guy Johnston and many more - have launched a plea for music lessons to be available free of charge to every primary school pupil in the country.

The BBC YMoY is 40 this year and has helped to inspire several generations of young people to love music and want to play it. This (along with so much else in the UK at present) is desperately under threat. 

Here's some of the letter:

"....despite some brilliant schemes, we are all deeply concerned that instrumental music learning is being left to decay in many British schools to the point that it could seriously damage the future of music here and jeopardise British music’s hard won worldwide reputation.

"Today, we are launching a campaign for every primary school child to be taught to play an instrument, at no cost to them or their families. It is crucial to restore music’s rightful place in children’s lives, not only with all the clear social and educational benefits, but showing them the joy of making and sharing music. We are especially concerned that this should be a universal right. This is an opportunity to show the world that we care about music’s future and its beneficial impact on our children.

"Musical life in the London Borough of Newham could be one example, with their excellent Every Child A Musician scheme. The programme gifts all of their primary school children a free instrument to keep and teaches them how to read and play music in weekly lessons. This at no cost to the children or their families.

"We believe that every child deserves to enjoy the benefits of Ecam and other excellent schemes, and their widespread adoption would alleviate many of our current concerns about the future of music in this country..."

Read the whole thing here.

Meanwhile 16-year-old pianist Lauren Zhang from Birmingham swept to victory at yesterday's final, playing Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No.2. It's not a piece you expect to pitch up in a competition final - dark, intense, tragic, as well as phenomenally challenging in technical terms - and everyone I know who heard this performance was blown away. I managed to miss it and will catch it on the much-blessed iPlayer - you can too, here.

Observing Pauline Viardot

Last week I had a call from The Observer to ask me to stand in for their absent critics Fiona Maddocks and Stephen Pritchard, which was both a surprise and an honour.

It looked like a quiet patch at first - just too early for the premiere of Lessons in Love and Violence - but closer examination revealed two concerts that couldn't have been more 'up my street' if they'd tried. One was the shooting-star French soprano Sabine Devieilhe at the Wigmore lunchtime concert in a programme based around the salons of Pauline Viardot, who happens to be a long-standing obsession of mine. The other was billed as a TED Talk with music: Cambridge history professor Sir Christopher Clark joined Brett Dean and the City of London Sinfonia for an evening of Beethovenian exploration at the shiny new QEH. Due to circumstances beyond my control, it was my first trip there since the hall reopened - and gosh, it's good! (And it really does smell like a shoe shop.)

Here's the review.  You can hear Devieilhe's Wigmore recital on the iPlayer, here.

And here's one of my favourite Pauline Viardot songs, Die Sterne, sung in French by Isabel Pfefferkorn with cellist Romana Kaiser and pianist Anna Reichert. I think Viardot's songs are the equal of any in her salon, and a good bit better than some. Devieilhe sang the best-known number, Hai Luli, and one of the Chopin mazurka adaptations, Aime-moi - the latter is a bit of a masterclass in why it's best to write words first and music afterwards - but there's a wealth of fantastic music sitting there, waiting to be explored.

When Life Does Things

Taking a short break. I'll be back as soon as possible.

Nutcracking open

Alexandra Dariescu's virtual-reality piano recital ballet marvel The Nutcracker and I is off on a world tour soon, taking in China, Romania, Belgium, Germany, Austria (four performances in Vienna's Konzerthaus), Sweden, Australia and the UK (including, among others, the London Piano Festival and the Ryedale Festival). Above, the Trepak, with Alex at the piano and ballerina Amy Drew meeting some rather special friends. Full tour dates here.

Last year Alex decided to record a CD of the complete music - some of the arrangements have been specially commissioned for the project - with a souvenir booklet, targeted at the young audience she hopes will be attracted to experience a piano recital for the first time. But you can't put virtual reality into audio or print...so she needed a text version of the story. I was more than thrilled when she asked me to oblige. The script, recorded by Blue Peter presenter Lindsey Russell, has been very cleverly woven into the music (it works even better than I'd imagined) and the CD was released yesterday on the Signum label. You can get hold of it here.

(If you enjoy this, you might also enjoy my other, somewhat longer piece of Tchaikovskian magical realism, Meeting Odette...https://unbound.com/books/meeting-odette/).

Tomorrow...

...I'm off to Glasgow to give a pre-concert talk about Chopin for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Concert Hall. Curtain-raiser for a gorgeous programme bookended by Smetana and Dvorák, and in the middle David Kadouch is the soloist for Chopin's Piano Concerto No.2. Matthias Pintscher conducts. I'll be telling the story of the young Chopin, the significance in his life and output of his 'Second' Piano Concerto (inverted commas used for a good reason there) and the various elements that went into forming his style then, and which would stay with him for the rest of his life. The talk starts at 6.45pm and the concert is at 7.30pm, broadcast live on Radio 3. More details here. It is actually, embarrassingly, more years than I'd care to admit since I last went to Scotland at all, and I'm looking forward to revisiting this vibrant metropolis, if all too briefly.