Been here...

Baden-Baden, where I plucked up the courage to join Tom & the orchestra for a Tristan-dash (check in Heathrow 7.30am, plane delayed 1.5 hours - though not, this time, due to a cat in the hold, just the usual London airspace nonsense; arrive Frankfurt 12.45pm, leave Frankfurt by coach 1.20pm, hold-up on the autobahn, arrive B-B 3.30pm, scheduled start of opera 4pm, actual start of opera necessarily 4.15pm, finish playing 10.15pm, much beer 10.30pm).

Mad, perhaps, but wonderful as well: it was worth every minute of the extra stress. Glorious performances of Lehnhoff's breathtaking blue-light-of-nirvana production from Glyndebourne; Nina Stemme and Katerina Karneus resplendent as Isolde and Brangaene, Robert Gambrill as Tristan, Bo Skovhus as Kurwenal. The excuse for exporting Glyndebourne wholesale (I think this was the first time they've done so) was the Herbstfestival in B-B's marvellous Festspielhaus - once the station at which Brahms, Turgenev et al would have arrived in the town. The all-star line-up meant that on the first morning we met the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra at breakfast in the hotel, and on the second the Vienna Philharmonic, which caused much interest in the LPO because they turned up to the dining room mostly in jackets.

We stayed on between nos.3 and 4 (Thursday to Sunday) and went sightseeing. There's something magic about Baden-Baden, which is utterly unspoiled, surrounded by hills that are lathered in rich, varied woodland; the air is pure, the Friedrichsbad allures with promises of steam rooms and massages, and you can walk half an hour to Lichtental to see Brahms's flat, along the Lichtentalerallee which is dotted with 200-year-old weeping elm trees that would have been sizeable 50-year-olds when Brahms, Clara Schumann, Turgenev and Viardot walked here in the 1860s. Just a pity about the food...too many sausages...

Above, top to bottom: the Turgenev bust in the park; Brahms himself (frei aber froh? Really, Johannes? Look at those eyes...); Brahms's house; and the house that Turgenev built (which bears a cruel plaque saying 'Villa Turgenev, kein zutritt') next to Pauline Viardot's, which has been knocked down and replaced with apartments.

Why no statue of Pauline?

But the day after coming back, I went to Paris to investigate what Cecilia Bartoli is doing with Pauline's legendary big sister, Maria Malibran.

Not everyone likes cats

The LPO, fresh from last week's Southbank triumph, headed for Baden-Baden for the opening leg of a short run of Glyndebourne's Tristan und Isolde. Dress rehearsal & three performances, several days apart: the band is supposed to fly there and back for each occasion (on performance day, via Frankfurt and a 2 1/2 hr coach journey). The other day the first show started late because the plane was held up. We hear that this was because of problems with a cat in the hold.

Sir Georg 'Ginger Stripes' Solti asks me to point out here that he was safely at home tearing up manuscripts in the study.

Blogging may be thin on the ground due to performances 3 & 4 to which I'm heading tomorrow. Taking camera along to find B-B 19th-century haunts of Clara Schumann, Brahms, Viardot, Turgenev et al.

Adieu, Marcel Marceau

Marcel Marceau, master of mime. 1923-2007.

The rest is news

Alex Ross's book The Rest is Noise has reached print at last. Congratulations, Alex - and I'm looking forward to the UK edition from Fourth Estate which is due out here in spring. Stylists as fine as Alex are a rarity in classical music writing and this volume looks certain to become a classic. If anyone out there still hasn't sampled Alex, here's a link to his Sibelius chapter - some of the most beautiful writing about music I've ever seen.

Chris Foley of Collaborative Piano alerts today to an interesting innovation: he's created a Classical Music Pagecast on Pageflakes. Technotwit here hadn't come across this idea until now, but it's good: the ultimate blogroll.

Opera Chic has found a real Italian tenor and links to a Youtube video of him singing Nessun Dorma. Voice to die for. Name: Fabio Armiliato. Thanks, OC!

And over at Think Denk, Jeremy has created a side-splitting scenic spoof: Shakespeare's little-known tragicomedy about life, love and death al dente among passionate youngsters in New York, Romeo and Juilliard. Get along there quick and meet Romeo, Mercutio, Candy and the Ghost of Dorothy DeLay.

Some of my favourite men wear tights

The Guardian today runs an extract from the autobiography of Carlos Acosta (picture above shows him without said tights...photo credit by Tristam Kenton, from The Guardian).

When the news reached my father's ears that I was running around the streets with gangs, he said to my mother, "We have to do something, Maria, otherwise we're going to lose the boy." Our neighbour Candida, whose nephew was one of the principal dancers with the Cuban National Ballet, had a suggestion: "You say he likes dancing? Why don't you send him to ballet school?"

My father's eyes lit up. Ballet! Suddenly there was hope. I was only nine, but I still remember that day when my parents told me their plans.

"What's everyone in the neighbourhood going to think? They'll say I'm gay!"

"Listen, you're my son and the son of the tiger shares his father's stripes. If anyone calls you gay, just smash his face in, then pull down your trousers and show him what you've got between your legs."

"But Papito, I want to be a footballer."

"Your mother and I have made up our minds, and that's that. It's your future, my boy!"

Meanwhile I have a hot date with my tv tonight: special documentary Nureyev: From Russia with love on BBC2 at 9.30. Watch clips here. And BBC4, the digital channel, is showing the Fonteyn & Nureyev film of Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet immediately afterwards. Is Acosta the closest thing we have now to Nureyev? I reckon so...

Nureyev, for a while, had a house about ten minutes walk from where we live. Sometimes I stare over the wooden gate towards the door that was once his, trying to imagine a creature as self-willed and wild as that living somewhere as ridiculously bourgeois and uneventful as this suburb. Not that he stayed long. One biography tells the story that he decided to move after an occasion when he left late for a performance at Covent Garden and jumped on the District Line at East Putney in the wrong direction.

Krystian speaks...

My German isn't brilliant, but I think that this open letter from Krystian Zimerman explains why he and Gidon Kremer did not appear together as originally planned at this year's Salzburg Festival.

For those of us who rely on the universal language that is music, here is KZ playing two of Gershwin's Preludes in Japan. I'm told that he also made a substantial speech to the audience - in Japanese - about American politics and the war in Iraq, but that has not as yet made it on to Youtube.

Enjoy.

Et a propos de St Nazaire...

...here are some famous goings-on from up the road in St Marc, courtesy of Jaques Tati a.k.a. Monsieur Hulot, on his holidays. This episode includes the conversational reference to St Nazaire plus...well, you have to see it.

A walk through the end of time...

Back from France...as I'd suspected, my technotwit tendencies (or inadequate laptop) prevented any blogging en route.

My play 'A Walk through the End of Time' was premiered on Saturday as part of the opening night of the Consonances Festival - a privilege indeed, and an astonishing experience.

The Alveole 14 of St Nazaire's former Nazi submarine base eyesore has been renamed LIFE and transformed into a venue for experimental performing arts which turned out to have a startlingly good acoustic; ours was the first show to take place inside it. Actors Marie-Christine Barrault and Charles Gonzales gave their all, director Ilonka van den Bercken from Amsterdam devised some beautiful coups-de-theatre, a young Dutch artist created projected drawings to illustrate the action in real time and the closing performance of the Messiaen Quartet for the End of Time by Charles Neidich, Philippe Graffin, Raphael Wallfisch and Claire Desert was unforgettable. And afterwards the mayor of St Nazaire awarded me a medal. :-)

More pics on my permasite. For the moment, above: the American War Memorial on the beach at St Nazaire; the set inside LIFE; and a would-be playwright with Raphael Wallfisch (left) and Philippe Graffin (right).

September

It's September - so here is the late Lucia Popp singing 'September' from Strauss's Four Last Songs in 1977, conducted with tremendous panache by Solti. The sound is slightly crackly, but the voice's purity and directness goes straight to the heart. She died much too young in 1993 and is still sorely missed.



Not much blogging last week, due to final work on the manuscript of Hungarian Dances, which went back to Hodder & Stoughton yesterday for typesetting.

Blogging will be scant for the next couple of weeks too, as I'm off to France. Remembering foiled intentions of blogging the Viardot concert at St Nazaire a year ago, let's just say that I'll blog the progress of the Messiaen play if I can, but as it'll involve the same laptop, same hotel and same brain, it mightn't happen.

A bientot...

Gioconda de Vito: centenary of an angel

Gioconda de Vito was my second-ever interviewee, twenty years ago. It was a piece for The Strad to mark her 80th birthday (published in the June 1987 edition); she died seven years later. This summer marks her centenary. I've seen her birthday cited variously as 22 June and 26 July.

I was young and impressionable at the time, but meeting this remarkable violinist remains one of my most treasured memories.

Madame de Vito spoke very little English, but had lived in Britain for decades. Her husband, David Bicknell, had been a producer and executive for EMI; the pair settled in a beautiful stone house on the outskirts of Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, surrounded by countryside and an extensive garden through which a slender river flowed. My interview with her was conducted mainly via David's translation, but after tea she and I took a turn around the garden, during which I met her friends: the local animal population, from flocks of starlings to a family of swans, which she fed from huge cereal bowls on the bank of the stream, as well as squirrels that would eat nuts out of her hand, and some shy roe deer lurking in the wheatfield nearby.

Among the anecdotes that arose were tales of her impossibly early retirement from the violin. She had attended a recital by Cortot when the great pianist was way past his best; the result was a personal resolution not to fall into the trap of continuing too long. She was a deeply religious Catholic, moreover. Having played twice to the Pope, she decided she had reached the peak of her career and that that would be the end of it - even though the Pope himself spent an hour trying to talk her out of abandoning her God-given talent! She spent so long with him that members of her family, waiting to meet her outside, were afraid that she was lost somewhere inside the Vatican. She didn't miss her violin and never doubted that she'd done the right thing.

I'll never forget her eyes, which saw everything and understood life from the heart, language or none. If I ever met an angel in the music world, it was her.

Here is the 1987 article from my archive. And please enjoy her magical Beethoven and the informative film that appeared with it on Youtube only last week.

Buxton break

The Buxton Advertiser ran a lovely news story about Alicia's Gift this week.

Wild Oates!

Fantastic piece in today's Independent about one of my favourite authors, Joyce Carol Oates.

"Many writers are sad, bookish people who are comfortable writing. But as a writer you have access to people. It's your job as a mediator to respect those people – not to ridicule them." Forget prizes and adoration from the critics, Joyce Carol Oates knows why she writes. "A novel should extend sympathy," she says. "That is what a writer should try to do."

If you haven't read her yet, try Blonde, her imagining of the life of Marilyn Monroe, or We were the Mulvaneys. Or more or less any one of her other novels (more than 30, and that's just the ones under her own name...).

Philippe Hirshhorn plays Chausson...

Thanks to good old Youtube, here is a clip of this phenomenal yet not widely recognised Russian violinist playing the Chausson Poeme. Hirshhorn, who died of a brain tumour in 1996 aged 50, is something of a legend in violinistic circles and this playing, along with some perceptive comments from Mischa Maisky, helps to prove why.

A marvel in Manchester

The final evening of the Manchester International Concerto Competition for Young Pianists last Friday was quite an event. With two categories - the 16 and Under and the 22 and Under - the competition had already reached a climax the night before, with four superb youngsters strutting their stuff in Bach and Mozart; but, perhaps ironically, the 22 and Under's strongest impression was left by someone who was also under 16: Jan Lisiecki from Calgary in Canada, who played Chopin's Second Concerto. He's only 12.

Jan took joint second prize with the excellent 18-year-old Jamie Bergin, a student at Chetham's, but much of the buzz focused on him, with grown professional musicians drifting about the cathedral afterwards making remarks like 'touched by God...'. Jan already has a considerable track record, having played 12 times with orchestras including the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, and having performed in a gala concert with Yo-Yo Ma, Manny Ax and Pinchas Zukerman.

Still, first prize went to the right winner: Anja German from Slovenia, who played Beethoven 3 just beautifully. She is 22 and ready for anything. She's studying at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and has also won prizes in the National Competition in Slovenia and the EPTA International Competition for Young Pianists. She wins a series of excellent high-profile engagements around the UK, including London, and the chance to make a CD on the Dunelm label. Child prodigies may be prodigies but they are also children; young Jan deserves time to study and grow up before being plunged into the concert circuit, as he probably will be.

Plaudits too to third prizewinner, 17-year-old Walid El-Yafi, also studying at Chet's, who gave a strong and musical account of Saint-Saens' Third. Bravo to the Manchester Camerata, conducted by Chetham's head of music Stephen Threlfall, navigating four very difficult and exposed works with what must have been limited rehearsal time.

Competition founder Murray McLachlan, head of piano at Chethams', ensured another twist that seems valuable: the jury consisted entirely of concert pianists, an inspiration, he said, from the old days in the 'golden age' of pianism when musicians, rather than pedagogues, critics and others hunting power, were the norm on such panels. Murray wrote an interesting article for Classical Music's 'Soapbox' column a few months back, taking a fresh look at piano competitions, which is reproduced on the competition's website.

The competition has a good roster of backers and media partners and looks set to continue in fine style - and it has steered a clever course that doesn't bring it into headlong collision with the mighty Leeds, serving a different and complementary role in its young contestants' rites of passage. It attracted an extremely international crowd: around us in the packed cathedral we heard Chinese, Russian, Polish, Korean, French, Japanese and more. Hand in hand with the stunning new-look Manchester International Festival, which wants to rival Edinburgh (and may succeed), and the general transformation of Manchester from grimy, industrial, depressing lump to buzzing, happening, modern metropolis, the competition is part of an inspiring north-western renaissance.

Read more about the competition in the Manchester Evening News, here.

When is opera not opera?

When it's comparable to cycling and prostitution, as this article in today's Observer claims, through an interview with the tenor Endrik Wottrich.

Endrik Wottrich, a popular fixture at the annual Bayreuth festival in Germany, has revealed opera singers are turning to drugs and other stimulants to cope with the pressure from the increasing commercial demands on them. 'No one talks about it, but doping has long been the norm in the music world,' he said in an interview with music critic Axel Bruggemann in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 'Soloists are taking betablockers in an attempt to control their angst, some tenors take cortisone to ensure their voices reach a high pitch, and alcohol is standard practice.'

There is more, lots more, in the article, which says that Villazon is suffering from depression, that claques are often extortionists and that greedy promoters may be responsible for wrecking their stars' voices with undue pressure...

Saddest of all is that this is news - most people close to the action have taken this beastly stuff for granted for years. And most dare not talk about it.

Igor blimey

Biopic fans are going to have some fun with this: an interview with actress Marina Hands in today's Times (re her new film of Lady Chatterley in French) reveals that she'll be starring in a film about Stravinsky and Coco Chanel:

Having taken a small part in Julian Schnabel’s forthcoming The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Hands is now readying herself to play Coco Chanel in a film that concerns the French fashion icon’s relationship with the composer Igor Stravinsky. “She supported him financially and they had a fascination for each other,” says Hands. Called Coco & Igor, bizarrely it is to be directed by The Exorcist’s William Friedkin, though this is just one of the talking points that has set the French media buzzing. “They all have a point of view [on her] and no one agrees,” she sighs. “I might go to Rome to rehearse, so I don’t feel the pressure!”

Presumably this is the film of the book by Chris Greenhalgh? Come on, Timesy, credit the author when credit is due. Stories don't get there all by themselves.

Last night...

...there was a screw-up which would take too long to explain, but means that anyone trying to listen to the interview wouldn't have been able to...

More about the piano competition very soon, though.

'Thorn in the flesh' dies at 94

The Russian composer Tikkhon Khrennikov has died at the age of 94, decades after the geniuses he helped to persecute. The Independent's obituary is rather kind to him.

UPDATE: Allan Kozinn in the New York Times is a little less kind.

The truth about Scotland

James MacMillan, one of the finest composers in Britain, never mind just Scotland, has written a fascinating article in today's Guardian about why music has tended to remain a 'black hole' in the soul of his home country.

Scotland's place in the history of European music suffered two near-fatal body blows in 1560 and 1603. The ancient universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen were founded in the 15th century, and music played a vital role. Collegiate chapels cultivated, besides Scottish music, English decorative composition, music by the Burgundian Dufay and Flemish-inspired polyphony. Scottish liturgists travelled to Rome, Paris and the Netherlands, absorbing the fashionable musical traits of the day.

In 1560, the Scottish Reformation stopped this all abruptly. The liturgy became a principal battleground, involving a violent repudiation of the past and of foreign influences. The second blow came with the departure of the Scottish court in 1603. At the very time when aristocratic courts all over Europe were becoming central in sponsoring great composers, Scotland lost the main arena where great music could be created and thrive. The result was an absence from our culture which has damaged the national soul and psyche, and the reverberations of this are still apparent today.

Manchester International Piano Competition kicks off

The semi-finals of the First Manchester International Concerto Competition for Young Pianists, to give it its full name, kicked off yesterday; the finals are on Thursday and Friday.

Organised by Murray McLachlan, head of piano at Chetham's School of Music, the contest's top-notch jury is made up entirely of concert pianists, many of them figures I admire for their sensitivity and musical integrity - Philippe Cassard, Noriko Ogawa, Anton Kuerti, Peter Donohoe, Kathryn Stott and more - and the finals are to take place in Manchester Cathedral, with the Manchester Camerata accompanying the candidates. What's relatively unusual is that the age limit is from 16 to 22 - I'd anticipate that a competition like this will perhaps help to provide invaluable experience for youngsters with their sights set on Tchaikovsky, Chopin or Leeds, occasions on which you definitely don't want to be playing a concerto for the first time. The semifinalists include pianists from the UK, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Korea, Singapore, Switzerland, France, Norway, Canada and India.

I'm going to the final night: Murray thought a reading from Alicia's Gift might help to entertain and distract everyone while the jury makes up its mind. Since the book is about a young pianist from the Manchester region and features competitions in quite a big way, it's maybe appropriate to some degree...

Second Life, now

The hot news today is that the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic is going to play in 'Second Life' on the internet on 14 September.

Hang on. If soprano Kate Royal is to be represented by an 'avatar', how does that approximate a live concert? If only 100 people can watch, does that really constitute 'reaching a new audience'? And why should anybody want to nip to a virtual online loo? We waste enough time queuing for the damn things in real life. Forgive me, but there's too much I don't understand about the point of this little exercise, so will refer you straight to The Times, which admittedly isn't all that informative for the uninitiated.

The rest of us can stick with the orchestra's beautiful Elgar Violin Concerto recording with Philippe Graffin and Vernon Handley - and look out for another next month, the Cello Concerto with Natalie Clein on EMI.

This is the LIFE

Welcome to LIFE, St Nazaire. The exterior looks as it always has - this is, after all, the old Nazi submarine base that the Allies never managed to destroy, though they left little standing in the rest of the town. But now St Nazaire has added to the place's usefulness as museum by carving into it a new centre for the experimental arts, featuring Alveole 14, a huge performance space with a back wall that can peel back to open on to the entire harbour...and it is here that my first one-act play, The End of Time, is due to be premiered one month from tomorrow, starring Marie-Christine Barrault. Philippe Graffin, Claire Desert, Raphael Wallfisch and Charles Neidich will play Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time in the second part of the evening. In a special pre-event event, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch will talk about her experiences in the Auschwitz women's orchestra, among other matters, and Philippe and Raphael will play the Duo for violin and cello by Erwin Schulhoff, who was later a prisoner in Terezin. It's the opening concert of the Consonances Festival and the full programme can be viewed here. It continues for a week and features a special focus on Ravel; performers include pianists Pascal Devoyon and Piers Lane, the fabulous Beynon girls (Emily, flute, and Catherine, harp), the Michelangelo Quartet and many more. Info on tickets is here.

Meet the Clarke brothers

Rodney (left) and Andrew Clarke are centre stage in Carmen Jones at the RFH, which I finally got to see on Saturday. As it happens, these sensational siblings are familiar faces from Glyndebourne - and finally they have their chance to shine in central London.

Rodney, a massively tall and very striking baritone, is perfection as Husky Miller (the character formerly known as Escamillo) and Andrew, a high, romantic tenor brimful with charm, plays Joe (Don J) as a repressed mama's boy whose emotions are wrenched out of him in fits of startling violence. He sings the flower song like a dream (and that goes for the original too, which I know because I accompanied him in it in a charity concert a few years ago!). With the gorgeous Tsakane Valentine Maswanganyi, born in Soweto and now a south Londoner, as slinky as a cat as superbitch Carmen and a charismatic supporting cast, it's a terrific night out.

I admit, though, to being an old stick-in-the-mud and preferring the original Bizet. Maybe it was something to do with the production - set in Cuba, yet forgetting that Cubans don't have deep south American accents (or, in some cases, perfect English choir school enunciation!), and that you can't actually take a train ("clickety clack, clickety clack," says the quintet) from Havana to Chicago because there's sea in the way. Suspension of disbelief was difficult. Besides, I don't see why Andrew and Rodney and the rest of these superb singers should have had to depend on an all-black show to have the opportunity to make their mark in such a big way. Sherry Boone as Cindy Lou is the best Micaela I've heard in years.

If I ran a record company I'd give the Clarke brothers a contract prontissimo.

PS - the Southbank website for Carmen Jones features an article of mine to introduce the musical in the context of other adaptations of Carmen. Gorgeous pic of Rodney, too.

Wanna learn the piano?

Enjoy...

Strolling along the proms, proms, proms

Tonight at the Proms you can hear (or see, if within reach) a whole evening devoted to the music of Nitin Sawhney, with dance from Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. There's nobody quite like Nitin - he's a natural multiculti, with early musical training covering everything from classical piano to classical Indian and Flamenco; and he has a strong, focused, poetic inner strength that makes his music his own no matter what the external casing is. Should be amazing.

And on Sunday, Gotterdammerung is up for grabs, the last of the Proms' Ring evenings that have spanned the last 3 seasons. The mention of the Walkure evening still sends people into spasms of ecstasy...

My editor has been keeping me busy over this one, so here's the result from today's Indy, which should cause ACD some amusement if he can lay hands on a print copy - it's the Arts & Books Review cover feature, complete with gory-looking Norns, wielding the title SOUND AND FURY. Not my doing, but I can't imagine anything better.

Covent Garden to present UK Korngold premiere

Yes, Die tote Stadt is coming to the Royal Opera House. Not that they're risking trying to stage it themselves; instead they're taking on Willy Decker's production from Salzburg and Vienna. Thanks to Brendan for the tip-off, and to the Unofficial Korngold Website which confirms it and tells us that there will be seven performances, opening on 26 January 2009. Ingo Metzmacher will conduct and the cast is to include Nadia Michael as Marietta, Stephen Gould as Paul and Gerald Finlay as Frank/Pierrot.

Die tote Stadt, as I pointed out in a comment box the other day, has only been performed once before in Britain; in concert; by a non-professional orchestra (the fabulous Kensington Symphony Orchestra and their inspiring, Korngold-friendly conductor Russell Keable). That was a decade ago. Productions? None. This will be the UK staged premiere. I regret that I haven't yet seen this production, but am relieved that they are not taking the one from Zurich a few years ago - with Olaf Baer in high heels and black wings, 'Eurotrash' indeed - or the ghastly thing that was filmed from the Opera du Rhin and that remains the only available DVD of the opera.

Well, folks, it's about time, too. Better late than never.

Read more about the opera in Brendan Carroll's splendid introduction to the New York production, here.

A note of disturbance in Edinburgh

The Times yesterday carried this report, in which the glorious South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masakela, a veteran of the long struggle against Apartheid, expresses alarm about the way that the current South African government appears to be terrified of the power of music. Masakela has written the score for the show Truth in Translation, which is being performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

The virtuoso trumpeter Hugh Masekela claims that many of the talented musicians whose voices became symbols of protest against white domination are finding it hard to get bookings in South Africa because the ruling ANC is “terrified” of music as an agent of change.

...Masekela, 68...argues that mediocrity is being promoted in the arts in South Africa because music and theatre are seen as “catalysts” in the destruction of apartheid, and might equally shake confidence in the present regime.

“The administration of South Africa today are terrified of music. They deny it,” he told The Times. “They know that a musical commentary can put them at a disadvantage. They are not afraid of print and journalists, that is considered freedom of speech, but they are very comfortable with the absence of music.

“I am not bitter. I am disgusted...

Hitler had a Huberman record...

A report in today's Indy reveals that Adolf Hitler's personal record collection has turned up, in the hands of Alexandra Besymenski, the daughter of a Russian Red Army officer who looted Hitler's bunker in 1945.

And what's in it? Russian music like Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky, Chaliapin singing Boris Godunov, a smattering of Jewish musicians like Bronislaw Huberman...(oh yes, and The Flying Dutchman in case you were wondering). While he was forbidding his troops to listen to anything that wasn't German, he was lapping up the stuff himself.

Many of the records are scratched, indicating they were played over and over again while the war that Hitler began cost millions of lives across Europe and the wider world.

"I think my father found it astonishing that millions of Jews and Russians had to die because of the ideology of Hitler and here he was all the time enjoying their art," said Alexandra.

Read the whole thing here...

Wanted: one brave director

So there she was: the radiant Renee Fleming, in a light green gown full of sparkles and trailing a shot-silk scarf, took the stage in the Albert Hall, voice floating through the stratospheres like a golden eagle (UPDATE: Intermezzo has a photo of her, in said dress). Her Berg Seven Early Songs (actually eight - an extra one had been orchestrated for her) were ideally expressive, dark-toned, that voice blending with the sympathetic BBC Phil as a strand of its fabric; and the first Korngold aria, from Die Kathrin, was sweet and touching.

But she was saving the best for last. With the first notes of the great aria 'Ich ging zu ihm' from Das Wunder der Heliane, something remarkable happened. Renee didn't only sing Heliane; she became her. The tragedy, the rapture, the transfiguration - it was all there. I think everyone in my group was moved to tears. The Telegraph today speaks of the aria's 'intense, jaw-dropping beauty'.

Most think Heliane can't be staged (bad libretto, pretentious, weird, etc etc) but I'm getting the feeling that this isn't so. Because the role could have been written for Renee. She has to sing the whole thing, in an opera house. Someone simply has to stage it for her. Isn't there a brave theatre out there that will take it on? And a very brave director? We're already looking forward to the UK concert premiere of the complete opera at the RFH on 21 November (Patricia Racette will sing Heliane there). Now, I think, there's hope.

Korngold latest

Korngold fans must tune in to tonight's Prom, at which Renee Fleming will be singing two marvellous and rarely heard arias from the operas Das Wunder der Heliane and Die Kathrin. They are utterly gorgeous and I reckon there couldn't be a better voice for them. For those with digital TV, the concert will be relayed on BBC4. Failing that, you can hear it live on Radio 3 and on the Listen Again facility for the week ahead.

La Fleming, incidentally, is to be interviewed during the interval and apparently we're being encouraged to ask her questions by email. But despite trawling all the relevant BBC sites, I can't find the appropriate email address (the words 'bbc', 'impenetrable' and 'typical' come to mind, in no particular order) (or maybe I've missed it...if anyone finds the link, please send it...).

Meanwhile, if you want to hear Korngold's chamber music in a live, intense and intimate Korngoldfest, come to Norfolk in September. Norfolk, East Anglia, UK, that is. More info about the West Norfolk Chamber Music Festival can be found at their music society's site, here.

Summer reading...

I've just heard that the redoubtable A.N. Wilson has written a novel about Winifred Wagner's relationship with Hitler. Entitled Winnie and Wolf, it's due for release on 16 August. Here's the synopsis from Amazon:

"Winnie and Wolf" is the story of the extraordinary relationship between Winifred Wagner and Adolf Hitler that took place during the years 1925-40, as seen through the eyes of the secretary at the Wagner house in Bayreuth. Winifred, an English girl, brought up in an orphanage in East Grinstead, married at the age of eighteen to the son of Germany's most controversial genius, is a passionate Germanophile, a Wagnerian dreamer, a Teutonic patriot. In the debacle of the post-Versailles world, the Wagner family hope for the coming, not of a warrior, a fearless Siegfried, but of a Parsifal, a mystic idealist, a redeemer-figure. In 1925, they meet their Parsifal - a wild-eyed Viennese opera-fanatic in a trilby hat, a mac and a badly fitting suit. Hitler has already made a name for himself in some sections of German society through rabble-rousing and street corner speeches. It is Winifred, though, who believes she can really see his poetry. Almost at once they drop formalities and call one another 'Du' rather than 'Sie'. She is Winnie and he is Wolf. Like Winnie, Hitler was an outsider. Like her, he was haunted by the impossibility of reconciling the pursuit of love and the pursuit of power; the ultimate inevitability, if you pursued power, of destruction. Both had known the humiliations of poverty. Both felt angry and excluded by society. Both found each other in an unusual kinship that expressed itself through a love of opera. In A.N. Wilson's most bold and ambitious novel yet, the world of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany is brilliantly recreated, and forms the backdrop to this incredible bond, which ultimately reveals the remarkable capacity of human beings to deceive themselves.

That should keep us busy on the beach - there's no way I'm waiting for the paperback. Order your copy now...

Wilson has recently reviewed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for The Times and makes it sound positively Wagnerian. Dumbledore as Wotan, perhaps???

More about the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra

Thanks to 'Pamos' for the alert to this fascinating article by Ed Vuilliamy that appeared in The Observer last weekend. He's been to Venezuela to see the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra in action and meet some of its young players, whose aspirations and whole lives have been transformed by their involvement with music-making.

Thomas and Isolde

We had a very wonderful evening celebrating Tom's birthday at a gorgeous venue close to Glyndebourne yesterday, kindly lent by the dear friend who lives there...highlights of a heady occasion included the presence of many friends from far-flung places, champagne with which our cup overflowed, our neighbour the fabulous jazz pianist who used to play on the Queen Mary, a lot of potato salad and a chocolate cake with sparklers on top that set off our generous host's fire alarm & produced a fire engine in the drive within minutes. The hunky Sussex fireman was then accused of being a strippergram, though Tom might have been mystified by that choice.

And Nina Stemme was there too, having wandered in unsuspecting with her family to explore the house as tourists during the afternoon, fresh from the Tristan dress rehearsal the day before; we rushed to add them to our guest list. Beg, borrow or steal a return for this production - it is one of the greats - and Nina towers at the top of it, surely one of most glorious Isoldes around. Above, the birthday boy with his Isoldegram.

Of course, Wagner's first draft was called Thomas and Isolde, but his publisher said that the sales and marketing department advised changing the hero's name to something not associated with tank engines. :-)

Talking about...

...the latest singing sensation to be signed up by Universal - baroque singer Elin Manahan Thomas's first solo CD 'Eternal Light' went straight into the classical charts at no.2. She can really sing, but isn't she in danger of being marketed as the thinking person's Kathryn Jenkins? She says not, but do the pictures say otherwise? Here's my interview with her from today's Independent (under the occasional Talking Classical column). And here's her website, so have a listen to her rather lovely voice.

It's Tom's half century today!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TOM!

We are off for a day of celebration, to include a posh lunch and the purchasing of rather a lot of cheese.

The pic was us in Argentina last year. We haven't changed too much since then, though are currently less tanned.

And the sequel is...

... this. Go here and click on 'Listen' for Track No.9, entitled ISOLDINA. Marc-Andre Hamelin performs and the music is by Clement Doucet after, er, Big Richard.

Note from Technotwit: ambitious attempts to plant the music directly into this post have failed.

Grande Cornish

Certain members of the orchestra not a million miles from here are blaming our freak storms on the fact that they're about to launch into Tristan und Isolde at Glyndebourne, the emotional power of which is inducing the weather to imitate the opera's setting, Cornwall. I couldn't possibly comment... but here's a sneak preview of Nina Stemme singing the Liebestod. Tristan opens next week - with La Nina a climatically appropriate choice for the lead. A further taster to get everyone in the mood will follow tomorrow.

Jerry Hadley, 1952 - 2007

Having learned of the tragic death by suicide of the American tenor Jerry Hadley, the best I can do is refer you to the post by La Cieca and the discussion that follows it. There is also an obituary in The New York Times. Everyone who heard Hadley will treasure the memory of a wonderful voice and superlative performer.

Is it true that artistic, creative souls are especially prone to depression? I reckon depression is common across the board - I've known accountants, management consultants and many others who've suffered it. But the depressed artist remains the most potent symbol, because he or she brings such joy and comfort to others while experiencing a living hell.

Schiff shape!

One of the delectable things about writing booklet notes for CDs is that now and then you're assigned a task you like; and you get the disc at the end of it. This morning a box of dizzying delights hit my desk as a result of one such job: a set of reissues from Warners of Andras Schiff playing concertos and chamber music - no fewer than nine discs.

OmG, which to play first?! The Bartok piano concertos with Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra? Schubert trios with Yuuko Shiokawa and Miklos Perenyi? The Dvorak Piano Quintet with the Panochas? Beethoven, Mozart and the fascinating Sandor Veress... Solution: close eyes, shuffle discs and pick the one at the top. It's the Dvorak. Heaven.

"...Schiff always puts the music first and last. In a world obsessed with superficiality, image, anti-intellectualism and short-term thinking, Schiff continues to stand proudly for the opposite, offering a voice of reason and artistic integrity."

A couple of weeks ago Andras was awarded the Royal Academy of Music Bach Prize. He'll be starting his Beethoven sonatas cycle in the States this October - Ann Arbor, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York - I've recently done an interview with him about this for Carnegie Hall's Playbill, which I'll post as soon as it's available online. And you can still hear his lectures about the sonatas from the Wigmore Hall on The Guardian's webcast.

Please excuse me while I gloat, worship and purr, all at the same time.

Bartok goes back to Romania

Do have a look at this fascinating article in today's Independent about Taraf de Haidouks, the Romanian Gypsy group I went to hear at the Barbican a few weeks ago. Here's an extract:

"It's all in the body language. They'll pull close together as if drawing around a fire, goading each other towards dizzier tempos and ornamentations. It's a game-playing delivered with fatalistic abandon, shifting its weight and shape from one passage to the next, delivering moments of outrageous serendipity."

Their new album, Maskarada, is just out and features their version of Bartok's Romanian Dances and the waltz from Maskarade by Khatchaturian, among other pieces of magic. Most of the album involves their reinterpretations of classical works that were inspired by, or borrowed from, folk and Gypsy music.

Pillow fight at the Proms

Yesterday's Prom with the English Baroque Soloists & Monteverdi Choir mixing and matching with Buskaid's Soweto Strings Ensemble, and the Compagnie Roussat-Lubek from France with Dance for All from a township near Cape Town, was unlike anything I've seen at a Prom in the (various) decades I've been attending them - or, indeed, anywhere else.

From the most authentic of the schmauthentic in the baroque Franco-Latin pronunciation of Andre Campra's long-forgotten and very beautiful Requiem in the first half, to the reinventing of Rameau as a traditional African miners' gumboot dance at the end of the evening, this concert was a revelation, a marvel and an inspiration - and a statement about how the most apparently disparate of cultures can come together and be united through the shared joy of creating sound and movement...

That's where the pillow fights came into it. It would be so easy for an event like this to become portentous and preachy, but that was never going to happen: the Compagnie Roussat-Lubek, founded by two dancers who trained in mime, circus and acrobatics as well as ballet, offered such quirky imagination, from orange frock coats to pillow fights to a ballerina in a false nose tossing glitter over the tenor, that joyousness remained uppermost for its own sake. Then in came their secret weapon: a cherubic, curly-haired little boy, who we reckoned couldn't be more than 4 years old yet performed with the assurance of all the adult dancers on the stage with him. Imagine the noise in the RAH!

As for the Soweto Strings Ensemble, they sounded every bit as good as the English Baroque Soloists. Their director, Rosemary Nalden, is an EBS alumna and has trained her ensemble with perhaps an even greater unanimity of style; their physical engagement with the music and seriousness of purpose was second to none. Samson Diamond, the leader, currently studying at the Royal Northern College of Music (pictured above right), could just be a young artist to watch out for. And from time to time, a fiddler or two put down his or her instrument and stepped out to join Dance for All.

The energy left me awake most of the night, cherishing the image of some of the finest baroque players and singers in Britain sharing the stage with inspirational youngsters and marvellous dancers, in a musical world where everything, at last, is possible. John Eliot Gardiner picked up the little lad and hugged him as if he were standing to be president. An evening to remember, forever.

A symbol of the future? If so: oh, yes, please.

(Oh - no, JEG, we don't want you to be president, we want you to keep conducting things like this, hope that clarifies it, hugz, jdxxx).

Rameau is/was a complete genius. Never got him before. Get him now.

Read JEG's own account of the story behind the story here.

Hear the concert here.

This thing called The Proms, once again

It's Friday 13th and the Proms open tonight. I've managed to write a substantial piece about the forthcoming programme without grumbling about the Royal Albert Hall's acoustics, sightlines or temperature, and trying very hard to be enthusiastic since there is some great stuff to be heard. The Independent is running daily 'Promcasts', previewing every concert.

A few little updates since blogging has been taking a back seat for the past few weeks. Differences in Demolition sold out and went beautifully; the critics enjoyed it, but mostly missed the point, with the exception of Neil Fisher in The Times. Tristan is in rehearsal for Glyndebourne and Tom is coming home high as a kite after playing Wagner for 6 hours a day, not to mention practising. An interesting experience to undertake remedial, editorial-hawkeye work on book while the Liebestod is going hell for leather in the living room. Alicia's Gift is out and about in paperback and had some nice reviews in various magazines. The Messiaen play is complete and is being translated.

More here as soon as possible.

Book signing this week

ALICIA'S GIFT is out in paperback on Thursday 12 July and that day I'll be at Waterstone's in Richmond, Surrey, to sign copies at 12 noon. All welcome!

Noye's flooooood

Apologies to anyone who read my blithely confident post about weather-forecasting via the first Glyndebourne dress rehearsal. The theory was that if said day was cold and wet, the rest of the season would be hot and sunny. I'm forced to revise this: if that day is so cold and wet that you have to picnic with a flask of soup in the car, the rest of the season will be soggy and frightful. Last year we had a hosepipe ban. This year, nobody's needed a hosepipe since April.

I'm reminded of a song about Noah's Ark that we used to sing at school: "It rained and poured for forty daysywaysy, everyone was going crazywaysy" (or similar). Solti is already wondering which local cat to invite to keep him company when we build the boat - suspect he has his eye on Scarlett, the pretty long-haired tabby from No.10.

Misha in Manchester

Talk of the town this weekend is Russian pianist Mikhail Rudy's stage version of The Pianist, which opens for a two-week run at the stunning Manchester International Festival today. Misha has written a piece in The Guardian's arts blog about how/why he's doing this, and there is an excellent feature in The Sunday Times too.

The show has already had tremendous success in France, capturing the public imagination in a very positive, encouraging way (it's not all Kismet out there, thank God). Combining music and words is far more difficult that it looks, and Misha and his team appear to have hit the nail right on the head.

Mess o'potamia

Back. Have been in Denmark, eating fish...more of that when I've copied the photos properly.

So, where were we? Well, a big thank-you to everyone who wrote in support of the Kismet feature! The Times has its own take on the thing today (my dear readers will recognise the quoted critic, which could perhaps have been attributed more precisely), and they've interviewed Luther Davis (90), the surviving member of the original team. Ho-hum, here's what he says about the Baghdad problem:

“There’s a line in the song Not Since Nineveh in which Lalume sings ‘Don’t underestimate Baghdad!’ Now we were discussing how to deal with this in the current situation. Should we get rid of it, or downplay it? No, my suggestion was to lean on it heavily, to really belt it out. In a way it reminds you that Baghdad isn’t just a war zone, it’s a place that’s been full of real human beings for millennia.”

Er, right...Read the whole thing here. The headline is good.

UPDATE, 9pm: OOOH, the fur is flying backstage!!! This is what happened while we were away...and the first preview has been put back a night...

A few essentials

I'm rather 'under the snow' at the moment, hence lack of posting, but wanted to present a few essentials while I can:

The Nigel Osborne opera I went to see in Mostar, Differences in Demolition, is absolutely wonderful: a work full of heart and soul, with hardline modernism set beside glorious lyrical melody in a way that feels entirely natural. Goran Simic's libretto - the first work he has undertaken in English - is so full of wonderful poetry that I'm thinking of framing the copy that I now have. The production is poetic too, and the singing and playing superb - amazing how many different sounds can emerge from an accordion. The work as a whole seemed to have grown out of the soil of Bosnia itself. It will be at Wilton's Music Hall, near Tower Bridge, on 10, 11 and 12 July, as part of the City of London Festival, performed by Opera Circus. Do yourself a favour: go and see it.

The Pavarotti Centre in Mostar, however, is in financial difficulty. It opened its doors in 1997 and still offers the only clinical programme of its type in the world specialising in treating war-traumatised children and PTSD. But as things stand, the entire music therapy programme may have to close due to lack of funding. As Nigel Osborne explained during our trip, this treatment is very cheap and very effective and does a huge amount of good, but it doesn't 'fit into any boxes' and bureaucratic purse-string holders simply don't understand it - even though the methods pioneered there are being applied now in many other countries. They need support, both moral and financial.

Finally, my current snowdrift involves rewriting a play - with three months to go till the premiere - and a novel in one month flat. See you soon, I hope...

Now, have a look at the sensational young Chinese bass Shen Yang, who has just scooped the Cardiff Singer of the World prize.

And gluttons for punishment can read in today's Independent what I really think about English National Opera doing Kismet.

Back to Mostar...

This slide-show of pictures from Mostar is unfortunately not a Jess original but lifted from YouTube. But here's much of what I saw, the place I was staying (the gorgeous Ottoman Muslibegovic House with the courtyard and carved windows is a guest house as well as a tourist attraction) and some of the kind of thing I heard: the music is a typical sevdah song performed by the famous band Mostar Sevdah Reunion, some members of which were apparently at the premiere of 'Differences in Demolitions' on Saturday, joining in the standing ovation, so I'm told. Enjoy.

My old friend...

I was told yesterday that an old friend and musical partner of mine from university days, Phanos Dymiotis, died in March in a car crash.

Phanos, a Greek Cypriot, was one of the brightest guys in the Cambridge music department when I got to know him. I remember him as a witty, warm, unassuming, self-contained and slightly enigmantic character; he was both an excellent composer and a brilliant violinist - the sort that's so brilliant that he could play the socks off the Saint-Saens Havanaise in a concert, but again with knobs on at the end of the post-concert party. He got a 'double first' (anyone who's survived the Cambridge music tripos will know that that takes a lot of doing), then headed for postgraduate studies at Princeton; last time I heard of him, several years ago, he was freelancing as a violinist in New York. I haven't heard any of his music for many years, but he had won a number of prizes and it sounds as if he was finally gaining the recognition I am certain he deserved.

We played the Faure A major Violin Sonata together once (a lunchtime concert at Emmanuel College), and enjoyed many of those priceless student moments with our many mutual friends - the Guy Fawkes Day fireworks and fun-fair on Midsummer Common, the Darwin College May Ball where we danced together to a Glenn Miller band at dawn, and late-night winter wanders across town from concerts/celebrations along the frosty grass on the Backs. Sadly, we lost touch after university, as too often one does, and despite many good intentions of correcting that, I never got round to it...

Phanos, a fond farewell from London. We'll never forget you.

UPDATE: Drew McManus covered this, I now discover, back when it happened in March. There is also a very moving tribute to Phanos by another friend, here. Here is the site of the Mariner String Quartet, of which he was a member. And more information at this Baltimore news site.

Phanos was the victim of a drunk driver, whose car hit his in a head-on collision and who also died at the scene along with his 19-year-old passenger. I also found a clip of a news item on Youtube. Nothing I say about tragedy, drink, irresponsibility, government bans or anything else is going to make any difference, so I shall shut up and go and cry instead.

Wham!

It's The Firebird, it's the Royal Festival Hall, and I nearly fall out of my seat. It's loud. It's clear. You can hear the harp from the back row of the rear stalls. Some of the players used to describe the RFH acoustic as 'pigeon hitting wall'. Now the pigeon bites back.

The dear old place looks more or less the same inside, with some crucial differences - a bigger stage, more acoustical aids, less carpet; there's a tad more leg room in the rows and each seat is equipped with a little metal ring for holding your drink (assuming they decide to let the audience take some in). The foyers are magnificently open and glassy, the spaces giving maximum light and making the most of the river views; the bars and the new-look first-floor restaurant are sleeker and shinier; and mercifully, we're told, there are twice as many ladies' loos as before.

If there's a downside to the acoustic, it's that while every note of the celesta can be heard bright and clear, so can every cough, rustle of sweet paper, watch alarm, hearing aid and mobile phone. Two seconds into The Firebird, a mobile phone playing Mozart's 40th rang out across the double basses. Vladimir Jurowski called a halt...such is life...

Musically the evening was a mixed bag: I suspect that it was too worthy for its own financial aims. I'm mystified as to how anyone could programme world premieres by Julian Anderson and Harrison Birtwistle, load the programme up with Ligeti and Ives, and expect people to fork out £500 for a ticket. If you charge those prices, you have at least to pull some rabbits out of some hats, or at least a Gheorghiu or Terfel or Kissin or two (the biggest wigs last night were the three conductors, none of whom is a household name, though Vladimir will be soon). Maxim Vengerov was in the audience. He should have been on the platform and on the publicity. People with big money like big stars.

The Anderson will no doubt be praised to the skies (and already is in today's Independent), but it struck me as typical establishment-approved modernism with vaguely poncy establishment religious connotations ('Alleluja', all right, already) that wasn't celebratory, interesting, inspired or original and fulfilled no function greater than Parry's 'I was glad', which would have done the trick better last night. The Birtwistle was a reworking of a funeral lament that he wrote in memory of Michael Vyner (former chief of the London Sinfonietta) 18 years ago - which has its place, but surely not in a celebratory reopening concert? Birtwistle's place in our house is in the kitchen: we have a Glyndebourne fridge magnet of him. It's usually upside down, and is very useful for holding shopping lists.

Ligeti and Ives, while more interesting, still tend to scare people away from buying expensive tickets. And after imbibing as much champagne as you can swallow in 20 minutes, does anyone really want to listen to pootly Purcell? Oh dear. Still, Ravel's Bolero, played by representatives of all four resident orchestras - the LPO, the Philharmonia, the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, around 120 players, with Marin Alsop having a great time on the podium - did indeed raise the roof as the grand finale, and Richard Morrison notes in today's Times that the sound in the last movement of Beethoven 9 (given with its original words this time) made the lights flicker.

Afterwards there was an extremely glittery party in and around the ballroom, and the champagne continued to flow...It's fantastic that the arrival of the nearest thing we now have to a world-class concert hall should be seen in with such a tremendous celebration. There's no doubt that it's certainly become a world-class venue. The weeks ahead will say more about the sound.

UPDATE, 13 June 8.36am: 'Mad props' to Vanessa Thorpe from (gasp) The Guardian for linking here. She was sitting next to the owner of the errant mobile...