Howard Jacobson, I <3 you

In today's Indy, columnist Howard Jacobson says everything I would like to say about the f*****g Olympics, only he does so so elegantly that it not only makes me laugh but also makes my heart sing. Honest. Here's an extract:

"I am not blind to the beauty of the body. I have watched film – because my wife made me watch film, wishing me to see what she had seen in the flesh – of Nureyev dancing with Fonteyn. I know sublimity when it's before me. But they shake my soul to its foundations not because they are athletes but because their bodies strive to express what their hearts feel and what their minds almost dare not think. Love, of course, will always make a difference. But so will any narrative when the emotions convey it to the body. In itself the body is nothing: it is what the body serves that makes it noble."

Carmen: best of the lot

Seeing the second-to-last performance of Carmen at Glyndebourne yesterday left me convinced all over again that this opera is a complete no-holds-barred masterpiece. The performance there had grown tremendously since the dress rehearsal: huge assurance and relish from the LPO and conductor Stephane Deneve, and Tania Kross as Carmen was a knockout.

But never mind the melodies, the spectacle and the toreador costumes from Seville, it's the last scene that counts the most; and Glyndebourne just can't quite match the Covent Garden production which, as performed here by Anna-Caterina Antonacci and Jonas Kaufmann, has the most powerful interpretation of it that I've ever been lucky enough to see. Voila.

Re HD

A very nice interview re Hungarian Dances from ASWOMAN, a Hungarian online magazine, with many thanks to the lovely Erika Orban! It's in English, btw.

http://aswoman.net/en/view.php?cisloclanku=2008080001

Beware of titles

Especially those proclaiming the death of this, that or the other. Far as I can tell, in this piece from The Times, Stephen Pollard is actually saying that British music is in better shape now, with the likes of James MacMillan and Thomas Ades on board, than it's been for decades.

O ciel

Mikhail Rudy has written his autobiography, Le Roman d'un pianiste - his 'Russian story', which will be published by Editions du Rocher, France, next week. Few performers are as perfectly au fait with writing as they are with their instruments, but Micha is a notable exception and tells his tale with power and eloquence. Andy Sommer is making a film about him, too, which is due for release in the autumn.

Messiaen talks about birds

Larking about in the Lakes

Ah, summer in rural England. The Pina Coladas on the beach. The heat and sun thumping down from dawn to dusk. The trays of fresh tropical fruit spread out by the hotel swimming pool. The...

OK, never mind. While we dodged from shelter to shelter (ie pub to concert and back) we pretended that it was autumn and we were students again. The Lakes are probably the most beautiful region of England, replete with walkers, dogs and bunny rabbits, and the Lake District Summer Music festival and summer school, based at the University of Cumbria in Ambleside, makes the most of the lovely venues in the area with concerts in Kendal, Ambleside itself, nearby Windermere and, in the case of the Messiaen project, the Theatre By The Lake in Keswick. The theatre is slightly out of the village and if you turn left and walk for one minute you are indeed on the lake - Derwentwater - which may be the loveliest of all. LDSM is the brainchild of Royal Northern College piano doyenne Renna Kellaway, who has run it for more than 20 years now; it's hard to imagine a more wonderful region in which to celebrate nature and music rolled into one.

Naturally the Lakes are overrun with tourists, so it's hard to get away from the cars, not to mention Peter Rabbit. Beatrix Potter settled there after she made the big time, and the cafe in which I stopped for soup and sandwich during a post-rehearsal stroll on Saturday was piping an audio-book of The Tale of Benjamin Bunny into the ladies' loos. To make the most of the area, you need strong boots, a good raincoat, a dog, a large chunk of Kendal Mint Cake and some very warm socks. You also need a pack of sandwiches, especially if you are giving concerts, because, anywhere in provincial England, it is very difficult to find a square meal after 10pm. I know we are supposed to be part of Europe now, but there are corners of the country to which this news doesn't appear to have penetrated. Like most places outside central London.

I have to say that Sunday evening was one of the most memorable events of my life. If anyone had told me 10 years ago that on 17 August I would be performing my own play with Robert Tear, that it would be created to complement the Messiaen Quartet for the End of Time and that there'd be a team of some of the finest musicians I know playing the music, I think I'd have passed out with shock. We also very much enjoyed our pre-event event in the late afternoon, when festival boss Andrew Lucas interviewed me, Philippe and Charles about music, words and Messiaen, and the lads gave the UK premiere of an early violin and piano piece by Messiaen entitled Fantaisie which has just been published for the first time.

Pictured: top, Philippe, Charles and me by Derwentwater on Sunday afternoon; bottom, Bob and me in the dressing room before the show; middle, the Indian takeaway with which we attempted to solve the sorry-luv-the-kitchen's-closed-now post-concert conundrum when we got back to the campus on Sunday night - left to right, Charles Owen, Philippe Graffin, Hayley Wolfe (who played in the Saturday concert), Oleg Kogan and Chen Halevi. Not certain how the First Aid box got there, but I think we were hoping there might be a corkscrew inside it. The four boys and I shared a student cottage for the weekend. It was an enjoyable team-bonding experience, but being the only female resident I have now renamed the Messiaen work 'Quartet for the End of Time in the Bathroom'.

Sadly I didn't have my camera to hand for the most memorable image of all. After the lads arrived on Friday night, we headed for the pub, as one does, and being a Friday, it was full of very merry young locals. Now, a momentarily unattended cello case is not the commonest of sights in The White Lion in Ambleside, and Oleg's precious Italian instrument quickly attracted two feisty northern lasses who proceeded to drape themselves over it at some interesting angles, then turned the thing on its side, sat astride it and snogged one another. Their boyfriends took photos and promised to put them on Facebook...

It was all a very, very long way from where the Quartet itself started out: in a prisoner-of-war camp, Stalag VIIIA, near Gorlitz in Silesia in January 1941, where Messiaen and his friends performed in temperatures far below freezing, on rickety instruments, wearing what threadbare clothes they had, and clogs. Yet as it turned out, the story was closer to Keswick than we'd imagined. In the box office at the theatre, one of the members of staff is - like the woman in my play - the daughter of a former PoW. Her father was shot down over Germany during the war and was captured and sent to Stalag VIIIB, down the road from Messiaen's camp. We had tea; she showed me his letters, his diary, some photos from the time...one of which was stamped with the mark STALAG VIIIA. Incredible.

My huge and heartfelt thanks to everyone at LDSM and the Theatre who made the event possible, to my wonderful and now very bathroom-bonded quartet friends and to the incomparable Bob Tear. It was the project's first UK airing; but let's hope it will not be the last.

Swanning off to the Lakes

I'm heading for Lake District Summer Music today, where on Sunday Robert Tear and I will perform my play A Walk Through the End of Time in its UK premiere. We're presenting it as a semi-staged rehearsed reading at the Theatre by the Lake in Keswick and in the second half the Messiaen Quartet will be played by Philippe Graffin (violin), Chen Halevi (clarinet), Oleg Kogan (cello) and Charles Owen (piano). At 5pm the same day, also in the theatre, Philippe and I are doing a talk about music, fiction, music&words projects and Hungarian Dances and Philippe and Charles will give the UK premiere of a violin and piano work by Messiaen. The concert in Ambleside on Saturday night features the Razumovsky Ensemble, with Philippe, Chen and Oleg among others, playing the Beethoven Septet and Schubert Octet.

Since summer isn't happening this year in the UK, I am packing a warm jersey and an umbrella.

Back next week.

Magic? What magic?

It's mystifying to sit through the kind of evening that gives contemporary opera a bad name and find that most other people are determined to enjoy it. Maybe that was for the picnics. Peter Eotvos's Love and Other Demons, which received its world premiere at Glyndebourne the other night, has garnered rather good reviews. It also has the distinction of being the first opera Glyndebourne ever commissioned from a non-Brit, and an extra mark for being by a Hungarian; the singing is glorious (Allison Bell and Felicity Palmer particularly), Vladimir and the LPO are on cracking form in the pit and someone had some fun filming the projections.

But...oh heck. First, the persistent 'lento' of the score mentioned by Ed Seckerson in today's Indy is probably a result of the same very basic libretto trap that scuppered Maw's Sophie's Choice and many others: the no-brainer that words take longer to sing than they do to speak. But worse: there could have been drama, and there wasn't. The Exorcist might be the scariest film ever made, but here we had an exorcism which was frankly ridiculous - a few stylised demons in gargoyle masks wandering rather decorously about, a nun smearing red paint on Allison Bell and Nathan Gunn (yes, we do see his pecs and very nice they are) slumping in a deck chair, maybe dead or drugged or asleep. But crucially, lacking musical drama and very short on imagination. It's a missed opportunity.

As for Gabriel Garcia Marquez - there is more magic in one paragraph of Marquez's prose, more richness of imagery and allusion, more imaginative flights of wonder and more magical music in his words, than in the whole opera.

Here are some alternative views from Andrew Clements in The Guardian, Rupert Christiansen in The Telegraph and Andrew Clark in the Financial Times (closest to my response). And here's a fascinating interview with the composer by Fiona Maddocks in The Evening Standard.

My Top Ten 'Gypsies' in Literature

Over at Guardian Unlimited website you can find my Top Ten Gypsies in Literature from today (mad props to GU for linking to JDCMB!). In case you've landed here by following that link - hello and welcome!

BTW Hungarian Dances is my *third* novel, as the intro says, not my second.

Pinky piece

Here's my feature about Pinchas Zukerman from the July issue of The Strad.

Toxic waste...

Closer to home, in today's Indy the following appears in Deborah Orr's column. Topic: Vanessa-Mae and her mother.

So much for motherly love

Even though she had studied child prodigies for 20 years, Ellen Winner was visibly gobsmacked. The violinist Vanessa-Mae had just announced that her mother, Pamela, had always made her feelings clear."You're special to me," she would regularly tell Vanessa, "only because you play the violin." After a few seconds of understandable indulgence in the flannel of conversational recovery, the psychologist replied: "That's a very hard thing for a child to hear."

The BBC television series The Making of Me has illustrated that whatever field of endeavour a person excels in, the chances are that they achieved their success only because they were utterly remarkable in a number of other respects as well. Vanessa-Mae is remarkable in that she has survived her childhood at all. When she sacked her controlling mother as her manager at the age of 21, Pamela broke off all contact. She has continued to ignore her daughter ever since.

Vanessa-Mae, with some wisdom, said in an interview that her own experience of childhood has left her wary of having babies herself. She fears she would not know when to "stop pushing". How touching and sad. You stop pushing, surely, when you feel those tiny shoulders shrug out, and start encouraging as much as you can from there on in.

When I was assistant editor of Classical Music Magazine, longer ago than I'd like to admit, we all got invited to a little press launch by a lady named Pamela, who was starting a record label to promote her 10-year-old fiddler daughter, Vanessa-Mae. This supposed 'child prodigy' played a bunch of Christmas carols nicely enough on the first release. The label didn't go too far, but it didn't need to: four or five years later, there was the under-16 VM wandering romantically (or not) out of the sea in a wet t-shirt, courtesy of EMI.

I went to a post-concert dinner in Paris sometime in the mid 1990s at which an EMI exec was present, and somehow the topic of VM rolled round. "C'est la mere, n'est-ce pas?" I suggested. "Taisez-vous," came the quiet response - that's "shut the f*** up" to you and me. Ah well, must have been spot-on.

A toxic waste indeed, because mother and daughter's relationship is ruined and a wonderfully talented young girl had her entire direction warped as a result. She's a brave woman to carry on carrying on.

History lessons?

Sod the sore hand, this needs to be typed.

Autumn 1956. While the world watches the Suez Crisis, the Hungarians rise up against the Soviets and declare they want freedom. The Russians hold fire until they're sure everyone else is looking at Egypt, which they are. Then they send in the tanks, declaring that they are going to help their allies in government restore peace to the streets of Budapest. The city is devastated and the buildings bear the scars to this day. The West does nothing. They're busy with Suez, they hadn't really noticed what was going on until it was too late, and in any case the Russians say they're only trying to help. Several thousand people are killed. A democratic election is finally held there in 1990.

Summer 2008. The Olympic Games open in Beijing to an estimated global audience of 4bn. Nobody is looking at South Ossetia, where someone fired first. About a thousand people have been killed in one day. The Russians say the Georgians attacked their peacekeepers. The Georgians say that actually it was the other way round. Here in Britain, we seem more concerned about whether the UK might win an actual medal, if only bronze, in the Olympic judo. The media swallow Russian mouthing-off about how the South Ossetians are loyal to Russia and not Georgia, though the Georgian ambassador explained on the news yesterday that actually nobody could know this because the South Ossetian people had not been asked. Besides, it makes no sense: you ever heard of a majority of people in any European country being primarily loyal to the EU? Would any small country really attack a Kraken like Russia against which it knows it doesn't stand a chance? Is Russia really 'protecting its citizens'?

Of course South Ossetia isn't precisely identical to Hungary 52 years ago...but after all that Hungarian homework, some aspects of this development look unbelievably familiar. But here nobody learns much about that bit of history unless they have to, most people are off on holiday, and anyway they'd rather watch sport in, er, China.

Wake up!

Reports from:
The Independent
The Guardian
The Times

Aw shuks!

Blimey - after a rather fraught day due to hand/wrist trouble, it was evening before I discovered that the Indy has reviewed 'Hungarian Dances'!

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/paperbacks-hungarian-dances-by-jessica-duchen-887849.html

une petite pause

Will be off for a while - not on holiday, but urgently in need of reducing extraneous typing while trying to finish corrections on new manuscript. But if you are within reach of Keswick, come and see us (me, Robert Tear, Philippe Graffin, Chen Halevi, Oleg Kogan and Charles Owen) and our Messiaen project at the Lake District Summer Music Festival on Sunday week, 17 August!

Ciaociao for now...

...and now hear how a violin can sound when allowed

I stumbled over this while looking for a recording of Leopold Auer on Youtube. Apparently Sir Rog once declared on the radio that this legendary prof who taught Heifetz, Milstein and Elman didn't use vibrato...believe that and you can believe anything, especially when you hear this magical tango from another of his pupils, one Georges Boulanger. I've not come across him before, but he shows exactly what you can do with a violin when you know how. Enjoy.

Norrington 'goes too far'

Big piece in today's Observer, resulting from a furious letter from veteran violinist Raymond Cohen telling it like it is about Roger Norrington's Elgar.

Please pardon my French, but the you-must-not-vibrate-ever-ever-ever movement is a load of utter bollocks. I don't know how people have been duped by it for so long. Has everyone forgotten that Leopold Mozart in his mid-18th-century treatise provides exercises for practising something that any Grade V violin pupil would recognise as vibrato? (Yes, he calls it 'tremolato' instead, so what?) LM complains about the application of indiscriminate 'tremolato' - the implication being that in the mid 18th century string players didn't use no vibrato: they used too much! That does not mean 'you mustn't use any'. Most irritating of all is that audiences who lap it all up in good faith have been swindled.

Apropos de which, has everyone forgotten, too, that the cut-down forces of the misleadingly-named 'authentic' movement in the 1980s coincided beautifully with political funding slashes which meant fewer musicians need be employed?

Enough, already!

Bravo, Raymond, and happy 89th birthday! Now have a listen to this...

UPDATE: Monday 4 August - here's Stephen Pollard's take on the same issue from today's Times.

Meet the Three new Tenors

Here they are, fresh from today's Independent. They may not be The Three together as yet - but they are the best.

We had a little flurry about this here on JDCMB not long ago, and it was all good clean fun. Trouble is, when their individual discs hit my desk recently - each in a snazzily designed shiny folder with video material, huge pics (very nice too) and all the rest - it seemed just a little too much of a coincidence. What exactly was Universal thinking of? It's not hard to guess.

This started off as speculation, plus a little wistful thinking - I'd love to hear my three top chaps sing side by side. What opera fan wouldn't? They're some of the loveliest voices on earth, and Florez and Kaufmann especially have provided some of my best-ever musical memories.

But what worries me now, after speaking to some guys from Universal yesterday, is that it may even be true.

When Domingo, Pavarotti and Carreras hit the trail, each of them was big enough and fulfilled enough artistically to withstand it. One critic I spoke to, who eventually didn't make it into the article, pointed out that certain singers (notably a soprano or two) don't care how long their voices last, but just want to do stadiums and make as much money as they can as quickly as possible. He felt that at least two of my three are much more serious artists than that and will want to be in the profession for the long haul.

But the long haul isn't the fashion. Squeeze 'em now and hang the consequences, that's the industry today. Instant gratification. And all that crap. We know this already, of course, and I think Florez and Kaufmann are strong enough, fine enough and sensible enough to plan otherwise; and hopefully it's not too late for Villazon.

I don't know about you, but I want to be at Covent Garden hearing Kaufmann sing Otello in 15 or 20 years' time. I want to watch Florez, as he gets middle-aged, grow into Rodolfo. I still want to be writing then, too, assuming I'm still alive. Long-term thinking should be what it's all about. Like a good marriage. Or sensible finance management that doesn't land the world in a credit crunch.

Today's hype-em-up, squeeze-em-dry, pay-em-trillions then chuck-em-out-into-landfill mentality totally misses the point of being on the planet. If it means we get rid faster of certain phony artists who shouldn't be there at all, then OK - but real beauty, real artistry, deep creativity, is a living entity that grows like a rose garden if you take care of it, and makes life worth living for everyone who comes into contact with it.

Blimey, guv. Time for a cold shower and a headache pill.

Muzsikas in the park

Here is Muzsikas, unplugged, at that party the other weekend! I tried to upload my own video but couldn't get it to work... fortunately another guest had the same idea.

Happy birthday!

It is Tom's birthday today, so here is a special gift from Richard Tauber. xxx

The ultimate in Hungarian dances

It was paperback publication day yesterday (follow that link for a 25% discount at Amazon...) and to celebrate here are some photos of the fabulous Hungarian folk ensemble Muzsikas at my friend Simon Broughton's big birthday party in Regent's Park last weekend. Muzsikas, who have been working together since 1973, arrived fresh from performing at the Folk Prom...

Huge thanks meanwhile to the Sussex Hungarian Society for a wonderful evening yesterday in Lewes, complete with Eva's Vineyard wine and terrific goulash, and to the Cheltenham Festival for a roof-busting Saturday night, more of which soon.

Beware of critics on a cold night

The first night of Hansel und Gretel at Glyndebourne was cold and damp, so broadly speaking, ignore the bad reviews. They only mean that certain people couldn't picnic on the lawn.

Laurent "La fille du regiment with Florez and Dessay" Pelly's junk-food-nightmare production is audience dynamite: pertinent, original, unsentimental, touching. Yes, the family live in a cardboard box; yes, the witch's house is a humungous structure made up of four supermarket aisles piled high with packets of cakes and crisps and fizzy drinks. As for the witch itself (word chosen with reason), the progress is from the humorous - the Witch's Ride is a shadowplay in which Witch tests recalcitrant broomsticks, progressively smaller, culminating in a mop - through the supermarket checkout lady from hell, to the truly loathsome: a hermaphrodite monstrosity with massive boobs and a bald pate, whom you can easily believe would cook and eat the kiddies. It's quite a relief when they get rid of her/him/it. An admirable performance by tenor Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke,

Yes, H&G is a sensitive subject for Glyndebourne, land of privilege and Pimms, where the interval is usually spent overindulging in some style. But my dear colleagues have short memories: if you think this is overdoing the point for the Glyndebourne Guzzlers, please note that it isn't so long since Graham Vick's parting present to the place was Don Giovanni gorging on the innards of a dead horse.

The vision scene with the skittering kiddies in white is indeed slightly disappointing given the transcendental and inexplicably tear-provoking marvel of the music, but there are moments of real magic elsewhere. Gretel - the radiant Slovakian soprano Adriana Kucerova acting her ankle-socks off - peers through a coloured plastic bottle drawn from the litter strewn across the dead forest, and our world turns momentarily orange and purple. Later, she takes shelter and sings huddles up under a haphazard log, vulnerable as an abandoned kitten. Irmgard Vilsmaier as Mother nearly stole the whole show: powerful presence and more powerful voice, despite the pink slacks and house-coat.

As for the obese children clustering around at the end - well, what else could come out of Planet Junk alive? If there's pain in this production, there's a good reason for it: it gets under the fat, straight to the bones.

A fun activity for the weekend

Why not devise your own Fantasy Football Prom, or several, or season, and post to the Comments box, or email them to me, and we'll see if we can beat Messrs Kenyon & Wright at their own game here on JDCMB?

It's Friday, it's mid-July, it's tonight...

...and it's the First Night of the Proms. Less celebrated than the Last Night, but musically rather more rewarding.

Read my piece from today's Indy on Everything You Wanted To Know About The Proms But Were Afraid To Ask.

UPDATE, 11.20am. Oh dear, my friend Pliable at the Overgrown Path is upset, mainly because of a passing remark about Britten. As I've explained in my response to his post, he has taken this out of context. Of course there's more to Britten than 'chilly glumness', just as there is more to Walton than 'social climbing' and a hell of a lot more to Elgar than 'pomp and circumstance', but what we were doing at the time was plugging Vaughan Williams. And 'chilly glumness' is not why there's no Britten in the Proms this year, at least I hope it isn't. In fact, I don't know why there's no Britten as I don't make the decisions. Presumably it's for the same reason that there is no Korngold, no Rautavaara, no Barkauskas, no Shchedrin and no Indonesian Gamelan. Come to think of it, I didn't spot any Birtwistle either. Everyone always wants their 'thing' better represented at the Proms.

Even in 76 concerts, you can't do everything. It really is as simple as that. If it is any comfort, I have shouted loudly about the wonders of Stockhausen, Messiaen and Elliott Carter.

What's more, it is true about the high heels. Please don't remind me of the time I wore the wrong shoes to Des canyons aux etoiles. It doesn't bear thinking about. And Pliable would presumably suffer even more than I did were he to arrive in stilettos for Saint Francis.

Lighten up, folks. This piece was meant to be fun. Or is that forbidden within a 20-mile radius of opening Proms night?

The frog prince, aka JDF

Midway through the second half of his sell-out 'recital' at the Barbican on Saturday night, Juan Diego Florez vanished. A chap in a suit appeared and had a quiet word with maestro Carlo Rizzi, who trotted after him off the podium, then vanished too. Minutes ticked by (and the orchestra, bussed in from Welsh National Opera, was probably trying to calculate what time they'd get home to Cardiff if he left it any longer). Eventually they came back and Florez made a little speech.

"Global warming," he said, "seems to be affecting tenors too these days." He had a 'frog' in his throat. A little problem of phlegm, which he was sure would be better the minute he got under a hot shower, but meanwhile there were all kinds of fluids around and the audience members in the front row opposite him should beware! Before 'Amici miei' (Italian version of 'Ah, mes amis' - and it sounds better in French), he disappeared again. Long pause. Carlo Rizzi turned to the audience and raised one immensely expressive eyebrow...

Florez sang beautifully anyway, most of the time. When he was singing at all, that is (the programme, entirely bel canto to help launch JDF's new album, consisted of six short arias and five long overtures). That voice was still that voice; but what was missing was the sense of effortlessness, the flying honeypots of exquisite legato that we remember from La fille du regiment, the total technical security which makes his singing such a joy. When he wasn't turning on the charm and making the audience laugh, he looked uncomfortable, holding on to the chrome rail around Rizzi, his expression visibly anxious.

What happened? I have a little theory.

Saturday night wasn't especially warm - this summer has been c*)p, wet, miserable and chilly, and that evening was no exception. But the Barbican was heaving. The concert hall was sold out, with a queue for returns. So, too, was the theatre, which is staging the massive hit Black Watch, also with a queue for returns. The restaurants were busy, and the foyers and bars teeming. And, in the concrete bunker of the Barbican, there was no air.

I felt it pretty badly in the audience - rarely have I been so relieved to get out into the rain - and I can't imagine how the performers must have felt. Well, I can, as my companion for the evening had friends in the orchestra and we went backstage to say hi. "It's really hot out there..." they said, clustering around the water bottles.

The Barbican's artistic programme is one of the best in the entire world. But it's not my first choice of venue for a fun night out. Twenty-one years ago, I bottled out of the Barbican-based Guildhall School of Music and Drama after only three weeks - long enough to start thinking that the place might have a bad case of 'sick building syndrome'. The Guildhall - which I'm glad to say is now constructing a state-of-the-art new block over the road, due to open in 2011 - is directly above the Barbican's car park and we all suspected that the CO2 was wending its happy way up into the school and our lungs. What's certain is that there wasn't one day during those three weeks in which I didn't go home with a headache and nausea. The Barbican itself, meanwhile, seems to have a ventilation problem, not to mention a serious lack of natural light. There was no air in that hall on Saturday night. No wonder Florez was feeling froggy.

As a cheerful footnote, my companion assessed the frog prince and his gleaming smile, then remarked that he looked like one of those footballers who are brought on at the end of the match to do the penalty shoot-outs and win the game without having played it.

Here's JDF himself singing 'Ah, mes amis' in the Laurent Pelly production of La fille du regiment last year in Vienna.

The Observer asks...

..."Is it curtains for critics?" This article asks whether bloggers are putting the pros out of business.

It ignores several big points:

1. A number of bloggers are also professionals in their field.

2. A lot of critics are amateurs. Total amateurs.

3. The issue is focusing attention on the role of the critic as never before. Until arts blogging came along to show that commentary is both wanted and needed, newspapers could shed critics and arts coverage with equanimity. Perhaps they need us more than they thought.

Present blogger/critic is happy to send own list of credentials to anyone who wants it.

Carmen reviews

The Glyndebourne Carmen seems to have gone over better than I thought it would. Here are a few responses from the press:

The Independent: "This is an evening where Carmen improvises her castanet rhythms on Don José's body. If you don't believe me, start phoning for returns."

The Times: "Too often, these days, Carmens are pale, thin, complicated girls: more at home, one feels, in the Bodleian Library than a Seville fag factory. So it’s fun to find one with the hair of Shirley Bassey, the figure of Barbara Windsor, the strut of Tina Turner and the freneticism of a go-go dancer paid by the wiggle."

The Guardian: "This production, first seen at Glyndebourne in 2002 with Anne Sofie von Otter in the title role, still awaits principals who can make the most of what it has to offer."

Here's my £0.025p on the subject.

Tania Kroll as Carmen? A sizeable, jolly, smiley, girl-next-door type at first view - why do all these men go for her rather than most of the rest of the chorus? Well, she's a terrific actress - that helps. She has a good, musical, intelligent voice with fine diction - unremarkable and no way sensual enough, but she puts other aspects of the character first. She is fabulous - the best one yet in this third-time production - at putting across Carmen the Gypsy: the outsider, the free-thinker, keeping herself slightly to herself at the edge of the proceedings, going her own way no matter what. By the end, she was devastating.

Brandon Jovanovich as Don Jose? Problem: the last one I saw was Kaufmann at Covent Garden. But Jovanovich is as hefty a fellow as this Carmen needs, and comes across as a jolly dangerous bloke with one mighty whopper of a big voice. I know it's dangerous to start talking about eating hats, but this guy should probably be Siegfried. We will certainly be hearing more of him. But could someone please give him some French coaching, PDQ?

Kate Royal as Micaela? That was the one really great performance I mentioned the other day. Some of my colleagues said they found her difficult to warm to - but that's the nature of Micaela, that's why Jose gets seduced by a sexpot, because Micaela is not one. There was a sense of true terror behind her aria in the mist, and she seemed to inhabit character and voice to perfection.

Oh, and Escamillo? Forgot about him. Perhaps they wanted him to come across as a D-list fading celebrity ripe for conscription to the worst of Big Brother or that thing in the jungle, but...

The biggest surprise in the write-ups is the universally positive response to the conducting. Yes, the orchestra sounds good - it always does these days. But Deneve (who looks uncannily like a cross between James Levine and Marge Simpson) takes tempi that are often on the leisurely side and compared to the fizz that Philippe Jourdain brought the original run with von Otter, this version definitely left the best bubbles for the interval champagne. Carmen is a long evening, but if it's well done it doesn't feel it. This one did. Very.

Bravo Taraf

At The Spectator blogs, Clive Davis picks up on the Roby Lakatos video I posted the other day, but also quotes a piece about the Roma in Italy from The Times, which rather typifies the skewed light on minority communities that the media likes to use to gain sales. I was objecting to a lot more than fingerprinting, as the piece we quoted from The Independent made clear. Because the situation is a lot more dangerous than that.

As a follow-up, here is a powerful piece of writing by Romanian author Mircea Cartarescu.

And above, an extract from Tony Gatliff's film Latcho Drom about the Romanian Roma band Taraf de Haidouks (we saw them at the Barbican in June last year). World-music expert Ben Mandelson and I get to be their curtain-raiser at the Cheltenham Music Festival on Saturday week, 19 July, which is an honour.

Mamma Mia!

And if you think the cello story is good, just try this one, from Indy on Sunday - scandalissimo indeed! Puccini will never be the same again...

"It was Puccini's pursuit of women that created the great crisis in his life. This is a tale of infidelity, jealousy, vengeance and despair. It goes a long way towards explaining the composer's fallow period. Its repercussions are still being felt on the lakeside today."

The story of Mrs C...

This adorable story about Piatigorsky comes, rather unexpectedly, from the inimitable Robert Fisk, who devoted his Saturday column in the Indy to certain gems of information provided by his readers.

'...there arrives another letter from Ms Somervil-Ayrton, remembering how I once sat next to the late Mstislav Rostropovich en route to Beirut with what he called his "wife" – his sacred cello – on the seat beside him. Did I know, asks Ms S-A, the airline story about Piatigorsky, "who had the reputation Rostropovich has now"? I fumble for my massive, 2,239-page edition of the Norwegian K B Sandved's The World of Music, a weighty heart attack of a book wherein, on page 1622, I find "Gregor Piatigorsky, Russian-American cellist, born 1903". He began life by playing at his local cinema, but at 14 was engaged by the Imperial Opera in Moscow. At the revolution, smugglers got him out of Russia, leaving him stripped and penniless in Poland but he became first cellist in the Berlin Philharmonic and toured the US in 1929 where Samuel Chotzinoff wrote that in his hands "the cello loses its limitations, his playing is as light and brilliant as if he were playing a violin".

Now back to Ms S-A who writes how Piatigorsky "was shopping around for an airline that would carry his cello free of charge – as he was sick of all the hassle and expense ... he managed to find one – 'Of course, Mr. Piatigorsky – of course' – and went on the appointed day to pick up his tickets. To his surprise, they proudly presented one for himself and one in the name of Miss Cello Piatigorsky. I think he had to pay anyway...".'

Here comes Carmen...

Carmen opens at Glyndebourne today, so here's a taster of the production, a David McVicar classic - gritty, powerful and very real. If you're going this year, you'll see a totally different cast from this, which dates from 2002 and features von Otter as Carmen. I couldn't find any Youtube video of the glorious costumes for the toreador procession in the last act, which were apparently sourced from the real McCoy in Seville, but the whole thing is available on DVD.

Having attended the dress rehearsal, I'm not yet at liberty to give detailed views (why-oh-why didn't I take a pseudonym while I could?!) but let's just say this: there's one really great performance plus a couple of surprises; the dramatic side is fabulous; and at times you may feel the need for caffeine. More about it soon...

Calling Townsville...

I should have been sunning myself on the beach or the Great Barrier Reef today, because tomorrow A Walk Through the End of Time has its English language premiere...on the other side of the world, at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville, Far North Queensland. The Tropic Sun Theatre Company is performing it in an atmospheric church, so I'm told, the Fibonacci Sequence will play the Messiaen Quartet and the event is apparently sold out. I'll look forward to a full report from down under afterwards...

A tender memory of my late sister, Claire, who once summed up her experience of holidaying in Queensland and the GBR as 'Watch 'em by day, eat 'em by night'. (Fish. The best.)

That dress was little?

After all the fuss about the Little Black Dress in Ariadne auf Naxos, I have to report that said dress is a long-sleeved, ankle-length, opaque and voluminous gown. Flatteringly cut for best cleavage effect, but still not precisely 'little'.

Apart from that, the opera, which we saw last night, was a marvel from start to finish. It was the last performance in the run - sorry, but it was the only one for which hubby was free (some of us get in trouble if we go to operas by his great-granddad's cards buddy without him). Deborah Voigt's natural radiance and beauty shone out; and when she lets rip on those top notes Covent Garden floats several hundred metres into the air; if she sounded a tad less secure in the lower registers, frankly I am not complaining. (She wasn't matched by her tenor, not remotely, and frankly I am complaining about that...see Tosca comments, back to front as it were).

The rest of the cast was a knockout. Gillian Keith as Zerbinetta, a cross between Twiggy and the Queen of the Night, cast a silvery legato that wouldn't have disgraced an ondes martenot; every last decoration proved an expression of her daffy and vulnerable character. Thomas Allen made the very most of the Music Master, suggesting unspoken hidden depths to the personality as well as out-tenoring the tenor; best of all, to my ears, was the mezzo Kristine Jepson as The Composer, her flights of fantasy a source of magic to the Act 1 ragbag of characters, but her voice a revelation to those of us out front, a soaring, creamy Straussian that we'll run back to hear anytime we can. Oktavian, please! Special applause to luscious solo violin Vassko Vassiliev and SIR Mark Elder down t'pit. (Yes, Mark Elder got a knighthood. No, Vernon Handley didn't...)

A couple of passing thoughts. First, Hoffmansthal's letter to Strauss that is quoted in the programme should cause some raised eyebrows today - all that stuff about 'high' and 'low' understanding and how the two performing troupes are so far apart in this respect that they'll never understand each other; reading it, one feels he holds Zerbinetta and co in some contempt. Yet the opera comes across with wit, sympathy and tenderness to all, each side's viewpoint beautifully balancing the other and sparking perfect ironies. Intriguing.

Secondly, when Korngold wrote the final duet of Heliane, it would seem he was actually trying to write the final duet of Ariadne. He must have identified with Act I of this opera like the blazes, and he'd have been an impressionable teenage prodigy when it first appeared. He threw the line about preferring to throw his work into the fire at Strauss himself once - it won his battle, whatever it was (there were many). There you go.

The Tomcat is justifiably proud of his great-granddad's pal. In this household, one can't help remembering the family legend about the time they all went out to dinner in Bavaria and Mrs Strauss threw a tantrum when her choice of main course was not available and the waiter offered her an alternative of char (in German, Saibling, a kind of trout): "I don't want that bloody fish!" she shouted.

Solved? Yeah?

The Indy today has one of those articles that pop up from time to time claiming to have solved the mystery of why Strads are the best.

Leaving aside the claims of Mr Guarneri del Gesu, one of the most gorgeous violin sounds I've encountered recently came from Christian Tetzlaff, whose tone in the Brahms concerto brought tears to the eyes simply by existing. Strad schmad, he plays a modern violin made by Peter Greiner in Germany.

It ain't what you've got, etc etc. Views, folks?

Summertime

Summertime, and the blogging is easy...It's 1 July, the new manuscript has been delivered, the sky is blue, and here is Jascha Heifetz. Enjoy.

A plea

Pliable at the Overgrown Path has a powerful and moving post about the current horrific plight of the Roma in Italy, in which he also describes the origins of Bartok's Romanian Dances and links to this article from yesterday's Independent. Here in the midst of happily multicultural London, it's horrifying to think that such inhumanity is taking place so nearby.

Not that we have a leg to stand on. Less than a decade ago there was an influx in London of Roma from eastern Europe - Slovakia or Romania, I think - who were seeking to escape the persecution and discrimination they'd been experiencing there. They used to beg on the Underground and elsewhere and the tabloid press laid into them with full complement of teeth and claws. After a year or so, they vanished. Presumably they were deported - back to the persecution that will always do its utmost to prevent them from escaping their deprived situation.

Here is a history of the Roma from the Patrin Web Journal.

Whatever happened to that old-fashioned notion that human beings have human rights? Hungarian Dances, which features a Hungarian Roma-descended heroine, has been contracted by publishers in Hungary and Romania as an anti-racist novel, but I wish it could have proved less timely.

As a tribute to the musical achievements of the Roma, here is the astonishing Roby Lakatos playing Hejre Kati, one of the most famous Gypsy melodies that dates back to the legendary violinist Janos Bihari, of whom Lakatos is a descendant.

Die Meistersinger von London, aka...

...the Worshipful Company of Musicians, which rather remarkably invited me to their gala Midsummer Banquet last night and asked me to make a speech on behalf of the guests.

For the benefit of our friends overseas, I should explain that the City of London's Livery Companies date back to the 15th century if not earlier, and were a form of early trade union. The musicians' organisation started off as a Fellowship of Minstrels (read about its history here). These Companies still exist and range through everything from Stonemasons to Water Conservators; each has its own tradition of medieval pageantry and ritual, and you kind of have to be there to believe it's true.

The evening was held in Stationers' Hall - an exquisite building tucked away behind St Paul's Cathedral, rebuilt in the 1680s after the Great Fire. It was an astonishing affair - like something straight out of Die Meistersinger, complete with ceremonial robes, a fanfare to play us all in, a sung Grace, extremely good food and a Ceremony of the Loving Cup. During the course of the evening we enjoyed a fine performance by two extremely gifted young musicians - soprano Laura Mitchell and guitarist Milos Karadaglic - and the Master, Leslie East, presented the Company's Gold Medal to Sir Richard Rodney Bennett. Among the other guests we were delighted to encounter such distinguished beings as conductor Stephen Barlow and his absolutely fabulous wife Joanna Lumley, violinist Madeleine Mitchell, conductor Ronald Corp and a number of the musical philanthropists who help to make the musical world go round - part of the Company's raison d'etre is to help fund scholarships for young musicians.

In his own excellent speech, Leslie speculated on the way that, in 300 years' time, researchers looking into the history of the Company might discover a report on a blog by a novelist and music journalist describing the evening in terms not so far removed from that which graced reports of its dinners three centuries ago. And perhaps not much has changed.

So - if you're reading this in 2308, a very warm greeting from us all here in the 21st Century! And a huge thank-you to the Company for a truly splendid evening.

Here's my speech.

Master, wardens, aldermen, liverymen and fellow guests!

It’s a great honour to be here tonight and to speak at such a sumptuous dinner.

It’s a special delight, too, to see Sir Richard Rodney Bennett here as the Company’s special guest. Like all of us, I’ve been enjoying his music for many years in all its shapes and forms – he must be one of the most polymorphous composers working today. And his presence is a wonderful excuse to take a very brief look at what it means to be a composer at all, but especially now, in the first years of the 21st century, an era of extraordinary change.

It goes without saying that if it wasn’t for composers, none of us would be here tonight, because western classical music wouldn’t exist. Music may be a God-given gift, but it’s also a man-made art: every tune you whistle, every mobile phone jingle you hear, every song you sing with your kids in the car, has at some point been thought up and written down by a composer. It’s so easy to take music for granted these days that it’s equally easy to forget what an extraordinary phenomenon the ability to compose good music really is.

It’s peculiar enough to create a substantial piece of work in any medium. Writing novels can feel like an insane undertaking at times, especially when you find you have to research 80 years of Hungarian history, but at least words and language are everyone’s staple diet of communication. Writing music is a more extreme sport, because music begins where words end. To create music means working with a raw material that is much more elusive yet also much more direct in the way it reaches the audiences’ emotions. That’s why composers often leave me feeling quite simply awestruck.

For about two minutes, when I was about 17, I thought I wanted to compose. Actually I was put in a corner at metaphorical gunpoint and ordered to write a setting of a psalm for a big school event. But when I got to university, it started to look like a less appealing option. This was the mid Eighties. First, I was a girl, and the rather monastic atmosphere around the composer cliques left one in no doubt that one was not precisely welcome. But even if you got past that, the resistance to the idea of melody or harmony was another matter. A composer friend knocked on my door one day badly in need of tea – his teacher had just told him he ‘thought too much about the way his music sounded’. I know there’ll be resistance and dispute over this, but I am speaking according to my own experience and observations: a quarter of a century ago there was a distinct feeling that there were party lines to toe. We were all in thrall to a perceived sort of historico-political imperative to write serialism, modernism et al, and if you didn’t, you were A Bad Person. The fact that not many people wanted to listen to the results didn’t seem to be a problem, because Beethoven was misunderstood in his day and alienated his audiences, therefore if nobody likes your stuff, you are obviously the next Beethoven... Fuzzy logic, perhaps, but certainly the secret was to épater les bourgeois. Shock those dreadful middle classes out of their appalling complacency!

Anyway, the bottom line was that I had no talent. So I gave up and sat back to see whether this new batch of would-be Beethovens would be Beethoven. Most of them weren’t. My friend who needed tea ended up appropriately enough in China... learning to play folk instruments. I’d loved his music and it still breaks my heart that he – and innumerable others – were so alienated by their supposedly educational experiences that they fled the country, or composition, and sometimes music itself. It wasn't serialism or modernism that was to blame, of course - some of the greatest composers of the 20th century used these - but rather the stranglehold they were permitted to exert over all possible alternatives. Living composers desperately need support, and prime among that support must be open ears and open minds on the part of the people who make the decisions.

Meanwhile, everyone seemed to have forgotten that while 'epateeing' les bourgeois may be fun, les bourgeois are on the whole the ones who buy the tickets. And sooner or later, they vote with their feet – and their wallets. Musicians, contrary to popular opinion, are human beings and have to eat.

In the last fifteen or twenty years, there’s been a radical shift in the new music world. First, if you’re a girl, it’s not such a problem any more. The roster of women composers is growing fast – while the Judiths Weir and Bingham have blazed an inspiring trail in this country, younger composers like Roxanna Panufnik, Errollyn Wallen and Tansy Davis aren’t far behind. Meanwhile the range of styles available to composers has never been greater. Back in the seventies and eighties, composers with the versatility to range from jazz to classical to film to pop used to keep their activities strictly separated. That’s no longer the case.

One of my special passions is the music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who started off as a child prodigy in Vienna a hundred years ago and ended up becoming the founding father of the Hollywood film score. He once said: “Music is music, whether it is for the stage, screen or rostrum. Form may change, the manner of writing may vary, but the composer needs to make no concessions whatever to what he conceives to be his own musical ideology.” He was speaking in 1946, but even if he was right, the attitudes of the time didn’t perceive it that way. He was dismissed as ‘a Hollywood composer’ – back then a deeply damning term – because his serious music sounded like film music; although the truth was actually that film music sounded like Korngold, who invented it in his own personal style.

It took decades to break down that barrier, but Korngold’s best opera, Die tote Stadt is now firmly back in the international repertoire and will have its UK stage premiere at Covent Garden in January – an indication that those proscriptive attitudes have relaxed. So, how did this change happen? First, the Minimalists in America essentially went back to the drawing board and created a new, basic and accessible language which caught something of the eighties and nineties zeitgeist and achieved a huge impact with audiences; secondly, the fall of the Iron Curtain meant that composers from the eastern bloc could come to the west and we could explore the richness and spirituality of their works; thirdly, cheap air travel has – while it lasts – meant extraordinary ease in exchanging ideas with a wealth of musical traditions around the world. And information is so easily available on the internet, in print and in person that the range of potential influences open to a composer is infinite.

We’re poised, I reckon, on a kind of communicative cusp – our means of disseminating information and art is changing faster than we are, and part of the challenge for any creative artist is simply keeping up and making the new mediums work with you rather than against you. Youtube is just the beginning and ten years from now it will look antiquated. Probably two years from now it will look antiquated. Finding a personal voice in the face of an world that’s so fragmented and varied may never have been harder – but as ever there’s nothing that stimulates creativity so much as a challenge. Maintaining artistic individuality in the face of globalisation isn’t easy. But as ever, the ones who will succeed are the ones who can meet the challenges of their times head on in the strongest way and with the greatest integrity.

All this is really just a long way of saying that music remains the greatest gift and the greatest miracle of human creativity. Therefore musicians are a worshipful company indeed. It’s a joy to celebrate with you tonight the art that we all love so much.

So, on behalf of your guests I am very grateful for your hospitality this evening and I would ask my fellow guests to join me in a toast to the Company!

Stop press: Ida Haendel is in town

Don't miss Ida Haendel at the Wigmore Hall tonight! She is performing with pianist Olga Sitkovetsky and members of the Razumovsky Ensemble and Academy in a very rare London recital. Box office: 020 7935 2141. Also, do try to get to Anna-Liisa Bezrodny's 6pm Razumovsky Young Artist Recital - she is an absolute delight.

I will write up the Kernis and Rorem performance asap, but as I'm supposed to deliver my next manuscript to Hodder rather soon - like, er, next week - it mightn't be immediate...

Songs from West and East

It may not be the easiest time to sell American music in London, given the all-time low popularity of that president. But hey, he's going soon and it's no reason not to enjoy the fascinating music of Samuel Barber or the European premiere of a new song cycle by Ned Rorem, one of today's finest composers of art song. An team of excellent young musicians are presenting a programme that is exciting, fresh and (especially for the Wigmore Hall, which is largely back to its old conservative ways) new, on Sunday evening, spearheaded by prizewinning pianist Marisa Gupta.

The Rorem cycle is called Aftermath - Ten Songs on Love and War and sounds, to put it mildly, topical. Super baritone Thomas Meglioranza sings it, and Brilliant Sky, Infinite Sky by Aaron Jay Kernis. Those of you in Australia, by the way, can hear him soon in the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville on 9 July when he sings the baritone songs in our Turgenev-Viardot programme The Song of Triumphant Love. Programme also includes music by Gershwin arranged by Heifetz, with violinist Hayley Wolfe, and Barber's excellent Excursions.

Meanwhile Patricia Rozario is gearing up to a wonderful recital programme in the City of London Festival on 3 July, bringing together songs of longing for the East by Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn with some powerful Tavener (the Akhmatova Songs, written for her), a new cycle by Param Vir on poetry by Rabindranath Tagore (also written for her) and some folk songs from Goa. Read my piece about her in yesterday's Indy here.

Merci pour la musique!

And not only for the music. A thousand thanks to everyone who helped to make the Hungarian Dances concert yesterday a rip-roaring runaway success. Thanks to Vernon Ellis, Veronica Davies and the Queen's Gate Terrace Concerts for accepting us into the series and hosting the event in their beautiful salon, and for all their hard work. Thanks to Janine for some very "different" canapes: transforming Hungarian cuisine into finger food is no small order. Overwhelming thanks to Ilona for her sensational Austro-Hungarian biscuits, expert page-turning, and astonishing tranquility backstage throughout; ditto for Linn, who was able to keep her head when all about her might have been losing theirs; and ditto to Kate and Marissa from Hodder. Thanks to the team from omusic TV - more of which, I hope, in due course. Thanks to everyone in the audience for being so tolerant when I succumbed to brain-loss and forgot their names. And most of all to Philippe Graffin, Claire Desert and Tom, who pulled out all the stops on violins and piano and put up with me reading stuff in between the pieces.

I think Sir Alan would have been pleased.

Pictured, Philippe and Tom in full flood of Bartok Violin Duos.

Tomorrow...

...is the Hungarian Dances concert. Please excuse me while I go and have a quick shake. I'll be back later in the week. Anyone still wanting to book can do so by following the link in the sidebar.

An artist's choice: endorse designer gear, or play in a prison?

Here's a pseudo-profound thought for Sunday brunch. When someone makes the celebrity big-time as a classical musicians, should they popularise the face of classical music and making it look 'cool' by modelling designer gear? Or would they do better to take music where it doesn't usually go and show how much good it can do?

Opera Chic reports that Lang Lang has endorsed some Adidas trainers. You can wear his name in Chinese on your heels.

I remember the day - some years ago - when I went to heaven and back at Lang Lang's concerts. A Mendelssohn piano concerto, light as a hummingbird. A Wigmore recital full of variety and marvel and love. Hats off, folks, a genius, I said. Then it all went pear-shaped. No idea what happened, but he zoomed way off the deep end in a Rachmaninov concerto in Verbier, and it just hasn't been the same since. So if he fancies going down a different route to make money, that's fine with me. We should let all the megastar names who've made the big time and become warped in the process do their modelling and endorsing et al, and make way for the real musicians who are quietly working themselves into the ground for the sake of their art.

Tonight, one of the less-blingy artists who's in it for the music is indeed getting some prime media attention: our own violin heroine Tasmin Little is the subject of The South Bank Show! Tune in and see her playing everywhere from Stratford-on-Avon to a Brighton hostel for the homeless and Belmarsh Prison on her Naked Violin project.

Finally, just have a look at this article from today's Independent on singing for peace in Darfur. Music has that much power. So what are its most famous practitioners doing endorsing trainers?

Rant over. off to practise my readings for Tuesday now.

Return of the little black dress...

Mad props to whichever clever being at the Independent thought up the headline A SVELTER BELTER for my piece today about the glorious Deborah Voigt, who is back at Covent Garden next week after an eight-year absence to sing Ariadne auf Naxos, complete with THAT little black dress.

Here's one of the cuter promotional videos I've encountered:

Mary Whitehouse moment...

Having missed The Minotaur at Covent Garden, I watched it on TV yesterday - yes, BBC2 actually decided to show an entire brand-new opera by Birtwistle from the Royal Opera House on Saturday night at prime time (so full marks for that).

I ended up hiding behind the sofa. Honest to goodness, guv, I haven't seen anything so scary since the Daleks, or anything so horrific since Downfall.

Of course, it was fantastic - amazing singing and great performances from everyone and especially John Tomlinson and Christine Rice, huge power in the music even if it's tough on the ears and brain (I liked the use of the cimbalom), and the libretto is very striking indeed. I was just relieved not to have been locked into a Bayreuth-style pew for the duration and I really don't think they should have shown it before the watershed.

Could someone over the Pond please tell us something: are Birtwistle's operas performed much in the States, and how do they go over? Ditto for Germany, France and Italy?

Tragic deaths of Halle Orchestra couple

I'm sorry to have to report that Halle Orchestra musicians Mike and Dorothy Hall have been killed in an avalanche while on a walking holiday in the Pyrenees. Full story here.

Mike, a violinist, was a student alongside my husband a few decades ago and Tom describes him as one of the most positive and supportive people he knew. Dorothy was a cellist. I never met them, but after a wonderful phone chat with Mike I made him one of the 'case studies' in a piece I wrote about orchestral life a few years ago.

Why didn't he just turn the guy into a flautist?

My eye was caught today by this story from The Times about 'the cellist of Sarajevo', who is extremely upset by a novel called, er, The Cellist of Sarajevo. The author, Steven Galloway, raises some interesting points in the article about how to draw the line between fiction and reality, eg whether you have to pay off the latter if creating the former. (His book raises even more interesting questions about this. I am in the middle of it at the moment and feel, so far, that it straddles both fiction and reality, therefore satisfies entirely as neither.)

But what excellent publicity...

Tosca, or Why the Best is the Enemy of the Vaguely OK

It was one of those Cloud 9 moments: a man on a ladder starts to sing, the sound hits you in the gut and you undergo some kind of out-of-body experience...The ladder was on stage at Covent Garden, the man was Cavaradossi, aka Jonas Kaufmann and I am still afloat 14 hours later.

The trouble with placing a voice like Kaufmann's centre stage in Tosca, though, is that you need a soprano and a baritone who function at the same artistic level. Not to mention a conductor who knows what his singers are doing. Micaela Carosi as Tosca looked gorgeous and has a big voice, but she proved irritatingly mannered - too much swooping and mucking about with vibrato and lack of - and though she milked 'Vissi d'arte' and got a huge round of applause, it left me faintly chilly. Paolo Gavanelli as Scarpia looked great, but had neither sound nor charisma to match - you kept thinking he was probably quite a nice guy underneath. Paul Wynne Griffiths, in the pit, didn't seem to have liaised much with the chorus master and he and Kaufmann parted company rather drastically several times.

Kaufmann bowls out his black-coffee tenor tone as if it's the easiest thing on earth: it's dark, delicious and leaves you unable to sleep. And he can act, too. He simply showed the others up.

The production, by Jonathan Kent, does what it says on the tin. This is the most classic Tosca you could hope for. Beautiful designs, correct period setting, no monkey business other than that explicitly stipulated. A Tosca for tourists, I thought, trying hard to wish for something more imaginative. But it looks so good that it was impossible to keep thinking that...and I liked the attention to detail: Cavaradossi descending the ladder on a descent in the orchestra, and running up the stairs on an ascent, or a soldier putting out a cigarette at the beginning of Act III with a flourish of light matching a squiggle on the flute.

As for Kaufmann - please, G-d, if you're there, take good care of this guy. Let that voice stick around for a long, long time. It's proof that miracles exist.

There is a video on Youtube of him singing 'E lucevan le stelle' in a TV show, but I think he is best in operatic context, which shows the full range of what he can do. So here he is in the Flower Song from Carmen at Covent Garden last year. Enjoy.

The Apprentice Concert Manager

With two weeks to go until our Hungarian Dances concert-of-the-book, I've somehow acquired a whole new respect for concert managers. Meanwhile I've got hooked on The Apprentice. So here, with apologies to Sir Alan Sugar, the BBC and the French language, is a little JDCMB take on the proceedings...


(Prologue: darkness: Jess asleep, feverishly tossing and turning...)

Voice-over: One book. One concert. One CD. One chance only. Four people are coming to South Kensington to make their dream come true: the awesome uniting of fiction and music. But to bring this dream to fruition, these artistic celebrities must learn to work together, even if they are married...

(Morning. Phone rings. Dishevelled Jess answers.) Disembodied secretary voice: Sir Alan would like you to meet him at Queen's Gate Terrace. The car will be there in half an hour.

(Queen's Gate Terrace: masterclass in full swing under the chandeliers).
Sir Alan: This beautiful salon is in the heart of musical London, two minutes from the Royal Albert Hall. You want to make a recording, but you need to raise some capital to back it. This place seats 110 people and offers a top-notch series of recitals and masterclasses. Here is your task: you're going to put on a concert. The one who makes the most money wins. Of the rest, one of you will get fired.

Jess, Tom, Philippe and Claire: Yes/oui, Sir Alan.

(Cut to: JDCMB home base: much activity, with Solti getting underfoot. Jess designing flyer on computer, Tom taking memory stick to Prontaprint.)

Claire: J'ai des concerts a Paris. A bientot!
Philippe: J'ai des concerts a New York. A bientot!
Tom: It'll soon be Glyndebourne.
Administrator: What a lovely idea your concert is. Have you decided what you'd like to do about catering?
(Fatalistic fanfare) Jess (shocked): Catering?!

(Music: signature tune to the latest Nigella Lawson series)
(Cut to: Jess in supermarket, selecting ready-made canapes. Cut to: Jess & Tom at home, eating them.)
Tom: Yuck.
(Cut to: Jess in Budapest, musing over menus and buying the Gundel Cookbook. Then discovering she got the wrong one and it's all in Hungarian.)

(Cut to: Jess at the gym. Enter Friendly Caterer on the next machine)
Friendly Caterer: We could do cold cherry soup in espresso cups!
(Dreamscene: guests tippling from espresso cups, spilling pink gloop on beautiful wooden floor...)
Friendly Caterer: Have you thought about Hungarian wine?
(Cut to: Jess bringing home Hungarian white wine from supermarket, sampling it, then doubling up with heartburn.)
Philippe: I 'ave to practise. A bientot!
Tom: I'd better learn those Bartok Duos.
Jess: At least I don't have to play the bloody piano.

(Cut to: Tom practising. Cut to: Philippe practising. Cut to: Claire practising. Cut to: Jess on phone to publisher.)
Publisher: Very nice, dear, sorry we can't help to pay for it. By the way, why is your next manuscript so late?

(Cut to: Jess putting a post advertising the concert on JDCMB. Cut to: email from famous singer requesting ticket. Cut to: date - 1 April.)

(Music: The Beatles, With a little Help from my Friends)
(Cut to: Tom wheeling and dealing around the Festival Hall, the supermarket, the train, Glyndebourne and the dentist. Cut to: concert bookings spreadsheet, numbers rising)
(Cut to: Jess doing mass emailing. Replies arrive: "great, two comps please.")
(Cut to: Jess on phone to Philippe, conversation inaudible but cartoon images flying around of weeping Pound signs being eaten alive by grinning Euros with blood-stained teeth.)
(Cut to: concert promotion in Hungarian Cultural Centre brochure. Cut to inbox: email arrives - in Hungarian.)
(Cut to: Jess rips up cover and experiments with different titles. English Dances. Italian Operas. French Letters.)

(Cut to: Philippe and Tom rehearsing Bartok Duos.)
Tom: Blimey, he's amazing!
Jess: So are you, darling.
Tom: I've sold loads of tickets. What about you?
Jess: Erm, I've sold some.
(Cut to email from famous singer, who is not an April Fool joke after all, requesting another ticket.)
Tom: I'm going to get that job with Sir Alan, and sod the rest of you! Just wait until we get into the boardroom...
Solti: Meow.
Philippe: J'ai des concerts en Afrique-du-Sud. A bientot!
Friendly Caterer: Is there anywhere to park in South Kensington?
Tom: Maybe we can sell copies of your book and make a donation to the project from the sales.

(Cut to: Jess on phone to warehouse)
Warehouse manager: Congratulations! The Hungarian Dances hardback has sold out.
Jess: But I've only got one copy left! And I'm going to have an audience of 100 people - and no books?!
Publisher: Very nice, dear. Rather than reprinting the hardback, we'll print the paperback early.
Jess: Oh, that's so wonderful of you, I'm terribly grateful, you are wonderful lovely people.
Publisher: No problem, dear. We should receive copies on 19 June...
(Cut to: Jess staring at concert date, which is 17 June. Cut to: Jess trawling Internet for cheap copies of own book.)
Publisher: We'll find some somewhere, don't panic... By the way, why is your next manuscript so late?
Jess (running in circles, flapping arms): Don't panic, don't panic! Help!
Solti: Meow?!

(Cut to: The candidates assemble at Sir Alan's office. Ominous woogly Apprentice music.)
Sir Alan's secretary: You can go through to the boardroom now. (Cut to: the boardroom.)
Sir Alan: Philippe and Claire, you're great musicians. You can go back to the house.
Philippe and Claire: Merci, Sir Alain. A bientot!
Sir Alan: So...Tom and Jessica...Today one of you will get fired. Who's sold the most tickets, Margaret?
Margaret: Tom has, Sir Alan.
Sir Alan: Tom, well done. How did Jessica bear up through the task?
Tom: Sir Alan, my wife means well, but to be honest, Sir Alan, selling is just not her cup of tea. She's only a writer. I've been left with doing all the hard work while she sits in her study making up stories. Everything that's been good in this task is down to me, and (sob) I have to play second violin on the night, too!
Sir Alan: Jessica, give me a good reason why I shouldn't fire you.
Jess (defensive): Sir Alan, I devised the concept, which is totally unique, I've made a four-page script out of a 400-page book, I worked out the programme as a team with Philippe, I've found a caterer who for an excellent price can transform soupy, stewy Hungarian cuisine into finger-food, I've found a good wine deal, and none of this would even be happening if I hadn't written the book. I believe at the end we will have a package that will be immensely attractive to the public. It has total artistic integrity. And only we could have done this - as the special team that we are.
Sir Alan (shaking head): And do you think you'd last even two minutes in my organisation? You haven't got a bloody clue. (points finger) Jessica, you're -

(Cut to: Jess sits bolt upright in bed, gasping and sweating: it was all a dream...)
Solti: Prr.

HUNGARIAN DANCES: THE CONCERT OF THE NOVEL is at 49 Queen's Gate Terrace on 17 June, 7 for 7.30. Booking details here.

Guess who's birthday?

29 May 1897, Brno.
xxx

Interview with Dudley Mo- I mean Krystian Zimerman

75 minutes before beginning a phenomenally demanding programme, Krystian Zimerman, cool as proverbial cucumber, effected a sudden and unexpected transformation into Dudley Moore. This natural-born stand-up comedian (the sit-down version) within seconds had our very substantial audience in stitches.

It's not quite the same without his impeccable timing, but here's one of the anecdotes. Krystian went to Bonn to have a look at Beethoven's hearing aids. Apparently bones can transmit a range of high frequencies that most of us can't hear, and Beethoven had a special stick that he held between his teeth and placed against the piano, so he could actually 'hear' more frequencies than anyone else can normally register. Krystian decided to try this at home. At 4am his wife went to look for him and found him hunched over the piano wearing a motorbike helmet (to cut out noise), stick in teeth...

For anyone who's curious about the switchover of keyboards, here's how it works. K plays Bach. Applause. K bows and exits stage right, while, stage left, enter piano technician. Technician unscrews something under the piano, takes off the top and puts it down, unslots keyboard in a few seconds and carries it out. Returns with other keyboard, slots it in, replaces top, does up screws, exit stage left to applause, while, stage right, enter K, who goes to piano and begins Op.111. Easy peasy. And it sounds utterly different. It's about overtones and voicing. The overtones for the Bach are glittering and penetrating even when K plays with the lightest of touches. The Beethoven is like switching from etching to oil painting: duskiness, darkness, ethereal nuance like candlelight. And K's range of colours in the Szymanowski Variations has to be heard to be believed: the sort of crescendo from nothing to everything that just when you think it can't go further, promptly does... But as K says, dynamics do not depend on loudness.

Blimey, guv. It was quite a night.

BTW, the pic was taken during the sound-check - the handbag didn't join us for the talk.