No looking back...

Did you know that if you are a member of certain libraries you can read their stables of digital magazines online? I have a Westminster Libraries card, as it's my go-to resource for reference books, the music collection at Victoria and more, so nowadays when I have read every last word of The Guardian I can log in online and read The New Yorker instead. And I look at its font and imagine what life might have been like had I taken the other road of my Great 1997 Fork and moved over there for a job with a firm of music publicists. (I didn't. I stayed in London, got married and stuck with the writing. But I acknowledge that NY was a big dream and I didn't follow it.) COVID-19 lockdown is a strange place from which to contemplate the What-Ifs, which as ever are pointless. I had several chunks of What-If reflections in Immortal; the editor has gently suggested removing them and she is absolutely right.

Spring oak trees demonstrate social distancing

I am relieved not to be in NY, where lockdown must no doubt be claustrophobic and alarming. I admire my friends and family there who are positive and capable and full of good humour, as they always are. Every day I count the blessings of our life here: we have a garden, there's a large and beautiful park nearby for walking at safe distances from other people - and as it is now gloriously free of planes, cars and bicycles, you can hear the skylarks. There's a supermarket three minutes' walk away and if the queue to enter looks over an hour long you can go home again and try again at a different time. The other day Tom did a dash to try to locate eggs and matzah for an elderly neighbour who can't go out of his house and has never in his life had Pesach without a seder.

This week The JC announced it was going into liquidation. I've contributed on and off to that paper for about 20 years and have always appreciated the chance to cover in depth musical stories that fit its niche but might be, well, passed over elsewhere. Some of my favourite assignments over the years have been for its pages: my visit to Vienna's exil.arte centre, the interview last year with the remarkable Erika Fox and in 2016 with Zuzana Ružičková in Prague are all up there with the dearest. I hope there is still a chance it will find some way, shape or form in which to reconstitute itself, but we'll have to see. At times of strain, sometimes you can hear the ropes snapping.

On Thursday nights everyone comes out and makes a heap of noise to thank the NHS and essential workers. A couple of empty doorways, however, betray an ache of sorrow: two elderly people on our cul-de-sac have died in the past six weeks, though neither from COVID-19. Each had lived here for more than 50 years. (One house is now for sale - if you want to be our opposite neighbours, this is your chance).

Looking back is too painful, because you think about everything you should have been doing and everything that has been postponed or bitten the dust and it can slice you up to remember you were supposed to have a premiere at the Berlin Philharmonie on 1 May and you were meant to go to Australia and the Beethoven celebrations should have been in full swing. You can try planning ahead - some events, such as the youth opera I've been working on for Garsington with the wonderful composer John Barber, will probably happen next year instead, as will Australia, but we cannot see into next year right now because we don't know how this one is going to progress, let alone end. So no looking back. No looking forward. We must live in the present and deal with each day as it comes. There is a lesson in this, somewhere.

Living in the present has its challenges as well, notably the amount of time I'm spending trying to dissuade people from believing conspiracy theories. Today there were two before 8am. Everything from "Boris Johnson didn't really need to be in intensive care" to the suspicion that someone had faked a music video, to which you can only point out "of course they're going to take extra care of him, he's the flippin' PM," and "but why would they pre-record and sound like that?...".

My years freelancing with newspapers have shown me a few little truths. First of all, what you see is probably not what's really going on, which is almost certain to be worse. Secondly, never underestimate the number of slips that are made twixt cup and lip. Thirdly, your imagination is just your imagination. The world is not going to change its reality merely because you're believing only what you want to believe. There is such a thing as empirical fact, so get used to it.

Get it? Got it? Good.

So don't look back. Don't look forward. The present is where we will find the pleasures that still make life worth living.

Notes from Musicians' Kitchens

British mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnston has launched a super initiative to help raise money for our crisis-stricken musicians and to inspire us in our cooking efforts too. Its name is Notes from Musicians' Kitchens. Jennifer writes:

Jennifer Johnston
photo: Helena Cooke

The musical world across all genres has been very seriously affected by the shutdown, and there are millions of musicians and music professionals worldwide who are out of work and fearing for both their futures and the future of the industry as a whole. It has now fallen to charities like Help Musicians U.K. to take up the slack, offering one-off hardship grants to those musicians affected by the crisis, but their £5million money pot will not last forever. 

It’s now time for creatives to be creative and so I have established Notes From Musicians Kitchens (www.notesfrommusicianskitchens.com), a subscription-only digital recipe resource, with a £10 one-off access fee, of which 100% goes to Help Musicians U.K. The aim is also to publish a cookbook which will hopefully be sold worldwide. 

Food is not just a universal need but also a universal link to our homes and communities, and a universal pleasure, just like music, and so, in the midst of this worldwide shutdown, I want food to bring us all together as a global community, and help to ensure that there is a music industry to return to after the shutdown, not leaving any of our colleagues and friends behind. 

Notes For Musicians’ Kitchens is a means of digitally breaking bread with each other, of sharing and appreciating our diverse food cultures, of creating new memories. Once lockdown is over, food will be used to celebrate our freedom and our ability to give each other hugs again, not to mention throw parties. 

The recipes are from all over the world, and all have a personal story attached, we all have our own stories to tell which are as important as the food. There’s also a section for those who don’t like to cook, or who are too busy and want an easy life, and there will be plenty of vegan / gluten-free / vegetarian / dairy-free / Keto recipes, so there should be something for everyone. 

We’re always accepting submissions, so if you’re a music professional, please think about it, The Rules are below. My thanks go to those who have submitted their recipes and told their stories so far, and to those who are helping me run this project behind the scenes, especially Madeleine Pierard, my right-hand woman who has designed the website. You can also follow this project on Instagram: @notesfrommusicianskitchens. 

The aim is to raise as much money as possible for musicians in need, and whilst the subscription to our site is a donation in itself, we also have a fundraising page, linked directly to Help Musicians, in the event you wish to donate more than £10: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/notesfrommusicianskitchens. Please give generously, and please help us to spread the work by telling everyone you know about the project.

I have asked musicians to tell me what food means to them: 

Food is culture
Food is habit
Food is nourishment
Food is health
Food is identity
Food is memories
Food is comfort
Food is family
Food is community
Food is universal
Food is life
Food is home
Food is LOVE

*recipe submissions will be accepted from music professionals only
*only one recipe per person will be accepted
*it must be your own recipe and free from copyright
*by submitting you agree to your recipe being donated and published without any payment
*not all recipes will be selected for the physical cookbook but all will be published on the website
*it would be enormously helpful if you could send us a photo of your finished dish with your recipe
*when you submit a recipe, please could you also identify yourself and any website you would liked listed with your submission

Please consider subscribing or, if you're a musician yourself, contributing a favourite recipe!

Karina takes the cake

There is some seriously good news this morning: actual progress in the upper echelons of a London orchestra. Karina Canellakis is announced today as the principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic, the first woman (as far as I know) to hold this level of post among the capital's sort-of-self-governing symphony orchestras. I'm reliably informed that her concerts with them last season were rapturously received by players and audience alike and I look forward to many more when we are all up and running again. At present she is scheduled to conduct them in October in a programme of Adams, Bartók and Beethoven and a series of three concerts in April 21 in repertoire that includes both Brahms piano concerts with soloist Stephen Hough.

Brava Karina!

KARINA CANELLAKIS
Karina Canellakis is the newly appointed Chief Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor of Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin. Internationally acclaimed for her emotionally charged performances, technical command and interpretive depth, Canellakis has conducted many of the top orchestras in North America, Europe, and Australasia since winning the Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award in 2016. 

She makes several notable debuts in the 2019/20 season, including Philadelphia Orchestra, the symphony orchestras of San Francisco, Atlanta and Minnesota, London Symphony, Munich Philharmonic and NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra. With a strong presence at European summer festivals, Karina also makes debut appearances at St Denis Festival with Orchestre Philharmonique du Radio France and Edinburgh International Festival with BBC Scottish Symphony, and returns to Bregenz Festspiele with Wiener Symphoniker with a programme featuring the third act of Wagner’s Siegfried. Other notable re-invitations include the Orchestre de Paris, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, the Houston and Toronto symphonies and the LA Philharmonic for performances at Walt Disney Concert Hall. 

A sterling 2018/19 season saw Karina conduct the First Night of the Proms in London and the Nobel Prize Concert in Stockholm. Debuts included Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, St. Louis Symphony, Melbourne Symphony, London Philharmonic, Deutsches Symphonie-orchester Berlin, Dresdner Philharmoniker and Oslo Philharmonic. She returned to Swedish Radio Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the symphony orchestras of Cincinnati, Dallas, Detroit and Milwaukee. 

On the operatic stage, Karina returns this season to Opernhaus Zurich, where she will lead a fully staged production of Verdi’s Requiem. Last season she conducted critically acclaimed performances of Don Giovanni with the Curtis Opera Theater at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia. She has also conducted Die Zauberflötewith Opernhaus Zurich, Le nozze di Figaro with Curtis Opera Theatre, and gave the world premiere of David Lang’s opera The Loserat the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In 2017 Karina led Peter Maxwell Davies’s final opera The Hogboonwith Luxembourg Philharmonic. 

Already known to many in the classical music world for her virtuoso violin playing, Karina was initially encouraged to pursue conducting by Sir Simon Rattle while she was playing regularly in the Berlin Philharmonic for two years as a member of their Orchester-Akademie. In addition to appearing frequently as a soloist with various North American orchestras, she subsequently played regularly in the Chicago Symphony for over three years and appeared on several occasions as guest concertmaster of the Bergen Philharmonic in Norway. She also spent many summers performing at the Marlboro Music Festival. She plays a 1782 Mantegazza violin on generous loan from a private patron. Karina Canellakis previously served as Assistant Conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. She is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music and The Juilliard School.

A message from pianist Helena Glover, 8

Please listen to this wonderful message from 8-year-old Helena, a prodigiously gifted young pianist from London, appealing for assistance for those many, many musicians who have lost all their work and income in one week. And listen to her playing in her home recital, which will show you why her words matter so much. We need music. Children need music. We cannot cut off this life source in the springtime. (Or any other time.)

Great to see Stephen Fry tweeting about this. Do please join him (and us) in spreading the word.

And please do whatever you can to lobby the government for the inclusion of freelancers in their employment support plans, which are good but only if you are actually an employee, which 5m people in the UK are not.

Dear London,

...Good morning. You are my home. You always were. Sometimes I hate you and dream of escaping your grey skies and fume-filled air for...somewhere warm, somewhere pretty, somewhere with sun and orange trees...and never returning. At the moment, though, I love you more than ever.

A couple of years ago we joined a club, one of those spacious, historic buildings where you can sit in absolute peace in the centre of the city, sipping a nice glass of wine and reading the TLS. Like most of these clubs, its doors are now closing for the C-19 crisis, so we went for dinner last night, the last opportunity. We are fine and have not been in contact with anybody suffering symptoms, so this was a reasoned decision and will probably be our last outing for months. I took the train into Waterloo - not empty, but relatively quiet - and walked across the bridge, past Charing Cross and through Trafalgar Square.

There is no upstream overcrowding on exiting the station, no traffic, and only scant bicycles or scooters to knock one over between there and the South Bank; usually the Waterloo main entrance is so appallingly designed, and the streets nearby so mismanaged, that there are 10 different ways you can be killed in five minutes.

The Royal Festival Hall is eerie: most of the restaurants are still open, and sparsely populated by small groups of young people, but the venues are shut. On the way home later, Tom admits quietly to having a "soft spot" for the place (where he has after all worked for 34 years), which is a way of saying it means the absolute world to him, and now it's closed. The bridge is empty of tourists, buskers or sellers of caramelised nuts. River boats pass underneath looking like the Marie Celeste. In Trafalgar Square, the lions preside and Nelson seems to wonder, up there, what's going on. The mood is sober. Outside the National Gallery a young man plays a Celtic harp - a silvery, ancient sort of sound, a fine alternative for St Patrick's Day - and pavement artists are chalking Paddington Bear with his red duffle coat onto the flagstones. I imagine Dame Myra Hess marching up those stairs during the Blitz, then wonder if she had to use a side entrance.

As usual, in London, there are as many different attitudes and opinions as there are people (estimated: 10m). One newspaper has noted that we're all talking to each other on the phone more than usual. The instinct is to huddle together, just when we can't. As the Italians say, we must keep our distance now in order to hug each other later. I've had various phone conversations with friends, three-metres-away chats with neighbours, and some long emails. The emotional range is from basic panic (induced mostly by empty shelves in Waitrose) to basic, relaxed, sit-it-out acceptance and, also, a downright relishing of the opportunity this unprecedented-in-our-lifetimes event gives society to rethink, completely, its priorities, structures and means of functioning.

I quote one dear friend who sees things in a more positive light than I do, and may have a point:

"The world is entirely reinventing itself! Our utterly corrupted and broken society and planet is forcing us to rethink our ENTIRE way of life... I know it is SO sad for us individually when so much is being lost (especially income ... very worrying), but I just wonder whether this is the moment where the world as we knew it cracks open, and then a new, more human way of existing is forced into existence...I'm not unhappy about the world taking a break ... the human tragedy aside, I can't think of anything better than the planet having space to breathe, and people having a chance to reconnect and reflect and think..."

Income being lost...well, quite. Yesterday, my commissions and engagements dropped like flies, and not like albums (how I loathe that term "x is dropping a new album" - it sounds like trousers, or guano). Programme notes for concerts are not needed if there are no concerts. Two of our planned IMMORTAL pilot performances in late spring are victim to cancelled series and festivals; much uncertainty surrounds major events in other parts of the world as well as closer to home. I am trying to find a silver lining in the truism that this will give me more time to work on IMMORTAL when it comes back from the editor, who hopefully is as able to work alone at home as I am.

The flood of dis/misinformation continues. When fact-checking the news, please read only official and trusted sources, and apply common sense at all times. Remember, for example, that if a virus could simply be flushed into the stomach and killed by warm water, we wouldn't have a pandemic at all. Meanwhile even left-wing commentators are noticing that the charismatic Rishi Sunak, the recently appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer, can wipe the floor with the bumbling, bungling, burbling Boris PM. And reading Keir Starmer's articles, I keep wishing there was some way to magic him into Downing Street right away.

We go day by day. We can't do much else.

Hang in there, and see you tomorrow.
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