Saturday, September 05, 2015

Magic Mountains 3: a return to Lucerne

After visiting Gstaad (my review of this is over at Amati.com) I took an interesting train journey across the country to check out the latest developments in the mighty Lucerne Festival, which is still the big sibling to every other festival in Switzerland. It has introduced free pre-concert concerts: totally relaxed events, but with no compromise on the music-making. What I love about Lucerne (among many other things) is that although it could easily rest on its laurels, it never does so. 

My report is in today's Independent, but in the Observations section which isn't online. Director's Cut below. 


Lake Lucerne - from a former visit. It rained too hard for photos this time.

Torrential rain is driving down upon Lake Lucerne, but despite the soggy conditions a sizeable queue is forming outside the KKL (the Concert and Convention Centre Lucerne). Music-lovers bearing all shades of macs and umbrellas crowd under the waterside building’s substantial overhang, waiting to be admitted to the Lucerne Festival’s latest innovation: 40 Minutes, essentially a short pre-concert concert. But it’s a performance with a difference. It’s absolutely free.

Michael Haefliger, the festival’s artistic and executive director, intends this brand-new series to offer the public “music without borders”. “We want to attract everyone,” he says, “without any limits.”

It would have been easy for this long-established Swiss festival, founded in 1938, to rest on its plentiful laurels – after all, it is fairly evident, looking around Lucerne, that there is no lack of cash here. Yet Haefliger, surrounded over the years by such vital figures as the composer Pierre Boulez and the late conductor Claudio Abbado, has continually instigated new developments to refresh and renew the artistic programme and its audiences. This is the latest – and it seems to be working. Word has spread fast. Performances are held at 6.20pm in the KKL’s smaller concert space, and when the doors open it is chockablock in a matter of minutes.

The ambience is radically different from the more formal concerts in the main hall. The normal seating is complemented by some bean-bags at the front, which are rapidly snaffled by a few alert children. When the audience comes in the orchestra is already on location, the players wearing mufti and chatting to one another or practising quietly; present, too, are soloist and conductor, again in everyday clothes, ready to perform just one piece.

But there’s no compromise on quality. I am hearing the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, conducted by the 86-year-old grand maestro Bernard Haitink, with violinist Isabelle Faust the soloist in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No.5. This is as world-class as anything in the entire festival. First, the music journalist Malte Lohmann, acting as host, interviews Faust and Haitink for the audience, discussing with the former the agonies and ecstasies of playing Mozart and with the latter his special relationship with this orchestra.  

Perhaps the key to the success of 40 Minutes is that the atmosphere is informal, the tone relaxed, but the artistry incomparable. There’s talk, but no talking down. 

Monitoring may be needed to see whether 40 Minutes helps to recruit new audiences for the big concerts too, but the demand is obvious, and with no excuse not to come in and give it a whirl, it’s hard to imagine why anyone wouldn’t. Lucerne doesn’t need to give away concerts for free – but it has the luxury of being able to do so, and one hopes that the effort will pay dividends in the long term, encouraging first-timers with nothing to lose. Other venues could do worse than follow suit.

The Lucerne Festival continues until 13 September. http://www.lucernefestival.ch


Friday, September 04, 2015

The Goldberg Variations: changing the world for 70 minutes

András Schiff plays Bach at the Proms. Photo: Chris Christodoulou

If we didn't have the BBC, guys, we wouldn't have this: András Schiff playing the Bach Goldberg Variations at the Proms, fabulously filmed, televised yesterday and available to watch on the iPlayer
for 29 more days, here. I was away in Switzerland on the day itself, 22 August, and am glad to be able to experience it after the event.

It's playing in which not just mastery but wisdom, balance and humanity shines out of every note of this intimate music, in which the Royal Albert Hall is somehow transformed into András's living room - and in which a state of grace seems to surround the pianist and, with him, us, the listeners. In the introductory interview with Kirsty Wark, András explains that it doesn't matter whether or not you are an atheist or religious, or in what way; Bach was, and you have to enter that zone if you're going to play his music. In he goes. And during those 70 minutes of the Bach's duration, the world changes.

Do yourself a favour. Hear it today. 

UPDATE: The filmed version of this performance is unfortunately not available outside the UK, but readers overseas should hopefully be able to access the audio-only recording on the iPlayer, here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b066zjyt

Thursday, September 03, 2015

Music to aid refugees

I offer some strong words today over at Amati.com about the refugee crisis - and inspiration from organisations such as Musicians Against Borders who are collecting musical instruments to donate to those stranded in the Calais 'jungle'. http://magazine.amati.com/149-comment/comment-music-aid-refugees.html

Tuesday, September 01, 2015

Chi-chi talks about Chineke!


Fascinating chat with the one-woman dynamo Chi-chi Nwanoku, double bassist, broadcaster and mover and shaker, about the new orchestra she has formed. Chineke! is Europe's first symphony orchestra made up entirely of black and minority ethnic players, devised to showcase and support the talent of these underrepresented musicians.

With a ringing endorsement from Sir Simon Rattle, and with Wayne Marshall on the podium, the orchestra hits the Southbank for its first concert on 13 September, opening the concert with the Ballade by the wonderful Anglo-African composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. It also features the Elegy: In Memoriam - Stephen Lawrence by Philip Herbert, and concludes with the Brahms Variations on a Theme of Haydn and Beethoven's Symphony No.7.

I went round to see Chi-chi (and her lovely cat) the other week and the article is in the Independent today. Read it here. Tickets for 13 September are going fast, so book soon.

Monday, August 31, 2015

Orphée et Eurydice: grief and catharsis at the ROH

(This was originally for the Independent's Observations section the other day.)


The new season at the Royal Opera House opens with a collaborative effort unusual enough to seem a tad startling. Orphée et Eurydice, by Christoph Willibald Gluck, is an 18th-century classic of the first order, mingling singing, dance and orchestral interludes in the service of a timeless Greek myth. To realise it, the theatre is opening its doors to the Israeli-born, London-based choreographer and composer Hofesh Shechter and his company of 22 dancers; and also to the conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner and his orchestra and chorus, the English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir. The celebrated Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez sings the title role, the British soprano Lucy Crowe is his Eurydice, and the production is co-directed by John Fulljames and Shechter.

It is Shechter’s first venture into opera – and he is on board because he simply fell in love with the Gluck. “I was offered work in opera before and refused,” he says. “I have to feel I’m connecting with the music when I make dance for it and when I heard this I felt there was something about the simplicity of it that seemed to lend itself to dance. Often operatic music can feel very busy, or doesn’t leave enough space for the imagination. Something about Orphée, though, is pure, spacious and open. I really love it and I was very curious about how my style of movement would fit with it and how it would bring other qualities and feelings into my material.”

This collaboration is a new departure for John Fulljames, too: “I have no choreographic training, and this is Hofesh’s first experience in opera, so I think there’s a good complementarity there,” he remarks. “One of the most important things about Hofesh is that he’s not only a choreographer; he’s a musician. He’s unique amongst choreographers at his level in that he not only makes his own choreography, but usually he also writes his own music – so it’s been fascinating for him to work with existing music and to respond to it in detail.”

When Orphée’s beloved Eurydice dies, the demigod travels beyond the grave to try to bring her back, aided by the power of his music. The story, suggests Fulljames, is at heart all about coming to terms with the loss of a loved one.

“I love this opera’s directness,” he says. “It’s extraordinarily undecorated. So much opera risks being sentimental or melodramatic – but this is the opposite. Gluck strips back everything in order to get to an emotional truth: he’s interested in exploring grief and the relationship of love to loss. You really understand love when you understand loss. I think the piece is an extraordinary study of the grieving process, going through stages of anger and betrayal and eventually reaching a point of acceptance about loss. Its consequence is coming to a much greater understanding of love.”

With all this to relish, the joy of hearing Flórez sing the aria immortalised by the great English contralto Kathleen Ferrier in translation as “I have lost my Eurydice” can only be a bonus. 

Saturday, August 29, 2015

1984: a love story

The other day I was talking to Northern Ballet's lead dancer Toby Batley about his new role as Winston in Jonathan Watkins's new ballet adaptation of 1984 and what shocked me was that he said people had kept asking him in anxiety if it wasn't going to be all dark and depressing.

1984? Of course it's bloody dark, I thought, and why ever not? What's wrong with dancing the dark? How has ballet reached a point at which if it's not all tutus and glitter and fairy-tales, people are anxious?

Anyway, dancer, choreographer and composer all told me that actually it's not too dark for ballet. It's a love story. A dark love story. So is Romeo and Juliet.

I've written a feature for The Independent on the new piece and it's in today's edition.

1984 opens in Leeds next week. See it!



If you go to a ballet that tells a story, chances are that you will see a fairy tale, a pastoral idyll, or one of an apparently endless stream of different Alice in Wonderlands. Dance does offer meatier dramas – Romeo and Juliet, Manon or Mayerling, for instance – but there is undoubtedly room for more, and especially for work that tackles gritty contemporary classics. 

At Northern Ballet a quiet revolution has been taking place in the past decade or so as the company – now 45 years old – has created a fount of new narrative works, most choreographed by its artistic director, David Nixon. Among these are Wuthering Heights, Cleopatra and The Great Gatsby. But next comes a very different production: a new adaptation by the choreographer Jonathan Watkins of George Orwell’s novel 1984

Tobias Batley as Winston. Photo: Guy Farrow
It portrays, famously, a dystopian society dominated by Big Brother’s surveillance, subjugating the individual mind and experiential truths to Party lines perforce. The hero, Winston, enters into a rapturous love affair with his co-worker Julia, only to find himself trapped for betraying the system; under torture his will is broken. Though the book’s concepts are household names – thought crime, Big Brother, Room 101 – it might seem a tough story to express in movement alone; and more disturbing is the idea that some might consider it too dark for dance. Has the medium been primarily associated with escapism for too long?

Tobias Batley, who dances Winston, partnering Martha Leebolt as Julia, insists that 1984 is not all gloom. “Many people have voiced their worry that it’ll be a dark and depressing ballet,” he reflects, “but it depends what you take away from it. We’re focusing strongly on the central love story. When I read the book for the first time, years ago, that was the most important part for me. 

“There’s something incredible about this secret love between Winston and Julia,” he adds, “but it has so much power behind it because it’s uplifted by the contrast with all the darkness outside. Of course it ends tragically – but Romeo and Juliet is also terrible at the end. The saddest thing is that Winston and Julia are at the absolute height of this love, feeling it’s perfect and they’re safe, and then the floor just drops out from under them. It’s heart-wrenching when you realise that they have been watched all along. It’s a very touching role to play.”

Watkins himself first told Batley about 1984 when they were both teenagers at the Royal Ballet School: for this young Barnsley-born choreographer, the novel has been a long-standing obsession. “I wasn’t a great reader when I was young,” Watkins says, “but I was somehow drawn to this book and I remember reading it on the train on my way back from Yorkshire to White Lodge [the Royal Ballet’s junior school in Richmond Park] of my own accord. It inspired my earlier work in a wider sense. This idea of realising it in a narrative ballet has been bubbling away and I knew I was going to be doing it sometime.” 

Tobias Batley and Martha Leebolt as Winston and Julia. Photo: Guy Farrow
Then came the perfect opportunity: an approach from Northern Ballet, which encountered Watkins’s dance version of Kes (based on Barry Hines’ novel A Kestrel for a Knave) when it was staged last year at the Sheffield Crucible. “I thought 1984 would be a really good fit for them because of their dancer-actor capabilities,” says Watkins. “They’re an amazing group of artists and they’re very committed to it.” For the company’s 45th birthday gala earlier this year, he also created “a much more light-hearted piece, based on some Stanley Holloway monologues – a really quirky celebration of the north.”

“I feel that narrative dance can appeal in a much more reflective, modern way, with resonance for the times in which we’re living,” Watkins says. “That’s why I wanted to use 1984. And in the book there is that mass control of groups of people by the Party, that military uniformity of a group – what better way to show that than in dance? For me there’s lots of scope in that balletic platform.” The single most difficult thing, he remarks, was deciding which elements of the book to leave out.

“It’s nowhere near ‘too dark’,” he comments. “I don’t understand why we can’t approach a ballet like a newly written play. Why can’t it be relevant to our times now? It’s great to have escapism, but it’s also great to see something that we can reflect on. As for the times we’re living in, everyone knows there’s surveillance up to the hilt, so it feels like the concepts it touches on already can relate to your life now. That makes sense to me as an artist and a creative, regardless of whether it’s dark. Life is dark.”

Watkins began his career with the Royal Ballet in London, but left two years ago for freelance pastures new. His work draws on a cocktail of influences, mingling his first-rate ballet training with the impact of film and theatre. On his website you can watch several short dance films that he made a few years ago for Channel 4, bringing the language of ballet right into the here and now. One, entitled Sofa, portrays a dance epiphany for a beer-bellied bloke during a solitary night in; another visualises the interior world of a young man listening to music while waiting for a bus. His Kes (“Everyone in Barnsley knows the Ken Loach film,” he remarks) made a powerful impact, not least for the sheer audacity of the idea. 

Through his passion for spoken drama Watkins got to know the composer Alex Baranowski, who was working on a range of productions at the National Theatre, as well as writing music for films such as Hamlet, starring Maxine Peak, and the BAFTA-nominated McCullin. The pair have collaborated on several projects, including Sofa amd Kes; for 1984 Baranowski has created a new 100-minute score. 

He and Watkins worked intensively together on the scenario, he says, batting musical and dance ideas back and forth by email and in coffee shops for a good year. “Musically we were very conscious of not being big and down and dark, especially with the cells before Room 101,” says Baranowski. “There’s a relatively long scene with the prisoners who’ve been accused of thought crimes and so on, whom Winston meets. We chose to be quite minimalist, using textures of sounds and noises – rather than, for instance, relentless minor chords and big drums. We rewrote each scene about three times, trying to figure out the best way to tell the story. Sometimes Jonathan would send me a video of the movements he was working on and it’s amazing to find that when I’ve put in a little beat or a drum or a clarinet flourish, he’ll work that into the movements. It’s wonderful to work with a live orchestra and I’m using it for all it’s worth, with all its different noises and textures.” 

And so a new generation of choreographers and composers like Watkins and Baranowski may now reinvent narrative dance for the 21st century, unafraid to engage with the grittiest and darkest of dramas. Bring it on.



1984 opens at the West Yorkshire Playhouse on 5 September, then tours. For full details and booking, visit http://northernballet.com/?q=whats-on

Thursday, August 27, 2015

Free Kavakos!

Yuri Temirkanov (left) and Leonidas Kavakos (right) can be heard live from Annecy right here, tomorrow

Free Kavakos? Why are they holding him?

OK, just kidding. But you can indeed watch and listen to the fabulous Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos for free on JDCMB tomorrow. We are live-streaming a concert from the Annecy Classic Festival, in a webcast shared exclusively with us by Medici.tv. Kavakos is playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto and Yuri Temirkanov conducts the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra. The second half consists of something rather special that may surprise regular readers of JDCMB.

The performance starts at 21:00 French time, so in the UK it will begin at 8pm and in New York 3pm. Further west, I'm sure you can work it out for yourself.

Fingers crossed that I've got all the technology correctly set up...

Monday, August 17, 2015

Magic mountains 2: Into the woods, with the Strausses


A double-bass player walks to work in the Taiswald

I started to go to Pontresina with my parents at the age of 12, more years ago than it's seemly to admit. This mountain resort in the Engadin, south-east Switzerland, with its open, sunny aspect and jaw-shattering scenery became their favourite summer haunt; over the decade that followed I must have been there with them for at least six or seven summers. But I hadn't gone back since 1988 and both my parents are long dead.

This being a slightly difficult, landmark, stock-taking sort of year, I had an attack of nostalgia and wanted to visit once more, just to make sure it was still there, still real, and still as good as my romanticised imagination and memory has been making out.

It wasn't. It was far better. And there was no getting away from the music.

Every day, I remembered, there used to be a free concert in the woods, from 11am to 12 noon. The spot is called the Taiswald: a pine glade near the start of the mountain pathways, where the audience can assemble on benches to listen to an hour-long chamber programme of old-style favourites, lollipops, operetta medleys, arrangements, concerto extracts and more. I dreaded walking that way and finding the place had fallen into disuse. Switzerland seems quiet at the moment - the exchange rate could well be decimating  tourism - and after all, people don't go to concerts any more, if the doomsayers are to be believed.

Well, they do here. The Taiswald is flourishing. More than a hundred people came to the Camerata Pontresina's concert on Friday, a programme full of juicy tidbits like Offenbach's Overture to Orpheus in the Underworld (which I haven't heard since, probably, my last visit to the Taiswald), Johann Strauss's Music of the Spheres Waltz and Fischer's delicious South of the Alps Suite. Some things have changed with the years: for instance, there's now a printed booklet displaying the programmes for the whole summer. Similar outdoor series take place in nearby towns and villages, among them St Moritz and Sil Maria. The concerts are organised by an impresario in St Moritz who, I'm told, has a personal library of the arrangements.

The musicians arrive to play here from all over Switzerland - we met a cellist from the Zurich Opera, a fine young clarinettist who's studying in Lucerne, and of course the double bassist above. They must contend with the vagaries of the elements - Friday was blowy, with commensurate effect on the music on the stands, which they dealt with by using clothes-pegs (though if the weather is too awful the concert takes place in the church or cinema instead). And the trains go by, whistling, and the dogs trot past, barking, and occasionally newcomers arrive, open mouthed with surprise at finding such an eccentric pastime taking place in the forest - and sometimes they sit down to enjoy the music. As for the piano: it lives in the pavilion year-round, winter included. It still sounds relatively OK.


Camerata Pontresina preparing to play in the Taiswald

The Taiswald, it turns out, is an old and proud tradition. It has been going since 1909; in 2009 centenary celebrations were duly held. Among those who came across it and sat down to listen many decades ago was Richard Strauss - who was apparently scandalised by hearing an arrangement of a Mozart symphony for quartet and said it should be forbidden!

Strauss. I didn't realise how important Strauss was to me. I just never thought about it. I took him for granted. But the fact remains that the first piece that switched me on to orchestral music in earnest was his Don Juan. I was given a ticket for a Royal Phil matinee at the RFH when I was 12 and it opened with the tone poem, which I'd never heard before. When it flew out at us, the energy lifted me and held me up and I remember falling head over heels in love with the whole thing on the spot. I wanted to be part of it. Don Juan swept me off my feet. Eventually, having not managed to become part of an orchestra myself, I married a violinist who was - and in whose background Strauss features prominently. Tom's great-grandfather was a Berlin businessman with a summer house in Bavaria, not far from Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and he knew the composer well; indeed, was a Skat-playing companion on summer evenings by the lakes.

Last Friday, we went to listen to a talk in the Hotel Saratz by the Swiss singer, musicologist and moderator Claudio Danuser about Strauss's connection with Pontresina. When Strauss's villa in Garmisch was requisitioned by the Americans at the end of the war, Strauss and his famously cantankerous wife Pauline took off for Switzerland. They moved hotels frequently because Pauline, true to form, kept falling out with the staff. But the family-run Saratz in Pontresina was a special favourite. Claudio had interviewed the proprietor about Strauss's stays there and was full of fascinating stories - among them, the Taiswald occasion mentioned above. Another time, the couple walked into the dining room and found musicians accompanying dinner. "Richardl," said Pauline, "play some Johann."

In the hotel garden is a wooden pavilion with a view across to the mountains of the Val Roseg, along which a favourite walk can be taken. It was in this structure in 1948 that Strauss completed the last of the Four Last Songs to be composed - 'Beim schlafengehen', ultimately the third in the set. I've always felt there is nothing in all 20th-century music that can quite compare with the beauty of this song and its violin solo.

The pavilion in the Hotel Saratz garden, where Strauss finished 'Beim schlafengehen'


So the elderly Richard Strauss was looking out at the Val Roseg as he worked on it. You can't really see the view in this photo, as it was very cloudy, but on a good day, when you are walking along it, the valley looks like this:


The Val Roseg, Pontresina

A mere 30 years later, there we were, me and my mum and dad, in the hotel next door. And in its garden, gazing at the same view as Strauss, without knowing it. I remember staying in a garden-floor room that must have been just a few metres away from that pavilion. Aged 14 I felt there was something in the air itself that was galvanising to creativity and I'd sit in the garden scribbling my attempts at novels by day and, by night, having the extraordinary dreams that one has at high altitude after dayfuls of fresh air and mountain walks. With no clue about Strauss - or anyone else, for Hermann Hesse apparently came here too, and Thomas Mann, and so on.......

It sounds matter-of-fact and so-what-anyhow to tell the story; but when something and somewhere and someone and that music have been as much part of you as your own nose for such a long time and you then learn something new about how it all connects, it feels quite another matter.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
 
-- TS ELIOT, 'Little Gidding'


Here's the Strauss - sung by Nina Stemme.





Sunday, August 16, 2015

Return to the magic mountains 1: Manon Lescaut in Munich

You may think you're on holiday. It depends, though, what you mean by "holiday". I've been away for two and a half weeks, but this time has been brimming over with music, serendipity and a good few marvels of both. Every day has brought something new, a character from past or present, a startling contact or renewal, a joy or amazement, a revelation or insight or several, and I may need to take them one at a time...

I headed first for Munich and the Bavarian State Opera, steamy in the midst of a massive heat wave; here the final night of the annual Opera Festival brought Jonas Kaufmann and Kristine Opolais together again for Puccini's Manon Lescaut, relayed to the city on big screens and webcast to the world. This was the production by Hans Neuenfels that at the start of the season saw Anna Netrebko drop her participation, citing "artistic differences".

The square outside the Bavarian State Opera prepares for the relay

It's a bit of a mixed bag. The relationship of Manon and Des Grieux and its development is by far the most convincing element, and so it should be; the final act, the two of them in extremis, is a searing tragedy, full of struggle - Manon's passion fighting against the invasion of death, thumping the ground to bring back her despairing lover to her side. Opolais blossomed vocally and dramatically in the role to an even greater extent, perhaps, than she did at Covent Garden last year; Kaufmann simply soared along at the summit. Fine singing throughout in the supporting roles and chorus - but I am not sure I will ever get my head around the necessity for this chorus to wiggle about in fat-suits and pink wigs. Alain Altinoglu's conducting too brought patchy results: the opening tempo felt extremely fast, and some of the accompaniment was too loud, but often - not least in the intermezzo - it held a gorgeous eloquence.

Here Neuenfels, Altinoglu, Opolais and Kaufmann explore and explain the concept and the challenges of the opera.





A few days later, discussing the issue of the fat-suits and other potentially dubious details with friends who loved the production, I tried to see it their way: it shows Manon and Des Grieux defying convention, a pair of individualists in a world in which everyone else looks and behaves the same (except, presumably, for the Dancing Master, who turns up bearing some resemblance to an orang-utan, perhaps a refugee from Munich's old Rigoletto production set on the Planet of the Apes). As the introductory film declares, Manon and Des Grieux are seeing the world around them as nothing more than a preposterous installation compared to their love. Yet Jonathan Kent's production at Covent Garden last year spoke far more to me of the darker truths of this story in an incarnation for today's world, where it remains the most "relevant" opera of them all.

So what's the essential problem with Manon Lescaut? It could just be that the original book is a short, terse, taut, action-packed, 18th-century thriller. It shows us Des Grieux torn apart by his passion for a girl who wants to have her cake and eat it and whose charm makes her attractive, but who is more anti-heroine than sympathetic lead. Romanticising her never quite works, and that is not the fault of Puccini, nor of any director: it's simply that Abbé Prévost's novel is too finely wrought to allow such a metamorphosis. Maybe that is why this opera, which blossoms with phenomenal music from start to finish, still does not have quite the same currency on the stage as Madame Butterfly or La Bohème. If any director has found a way to make the drama work 200 per cent, I haven't yet seen it.

More on the joys (?) of Regietheater shortly - from Bayreuth.

But even with all these reservations, it was a tremendous performance and an unforgettable evening. Oh, and if you'd managed to get backstage at the Staatsoper that night and you had this photo, you'd put it on your blog too.



Wednesday, July 29, 2015

On holiday

My holiday, however, involves a Jonas-and-Kristine fix in Munich on Friday night and Tristan at Bayreuth on Sunday. So I might end up writing something about some of it, wifi willing. Failing that, I leave you with this...

Saturday, July 25, 2015

Cheering up with the Wonderland Blues



Before all that rain started, we spent a gorgeous afternoon at Opera Holland Park, under the leaves in the Yucca Lawn groves, watching Will Todd's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It's on until 1 August, so assuming we're clear of the rain, do try and catch a show.

It's one of those rare delights that holds little kids riveted, yet their parents equally so: a sassy adaptation of the characters and elements of the story, plus an eclectic take on the music with everything from gospel through a hint of zany modernism to something edging towards Somewhere Over the Rainbow (and try the Wonderland Blues above, starring the larger-than-life Keel Watson as the Caterpillar and super Fflur Wyn as Alice).

Wonders in Aliceland. Photo by Alex Brenner


The sets are dotted around in different spots beneath the trees; your ticket is a cushion and you take it with you to sit on on the ground, moving around between scenes. Full marks to the orchestra - known as the Alice Band - for shifting too, and to the cast for marshalling us all into the right places at the right time.

And in this environment, after a while even the most hardened critic/opera fan begins to shake off the old encrustations of cynicism and overwork grumpiness and...well, if you're surrounded by entranced four-year-olds, eventually you begin to feel like one yourself. And you discover anew that 'opera' scrubs up as enormous fun: a good story well told, through top-notch music and singing and movement and drama and costumes, all live in front of you. What a refreshing and welcome joy with which to see in the rest of the summer.

This show, incidentally, has legs. Though OHP commissioned it two years ago, it's travelling excellently and will be at the Linbury in November. A CD (as above) is now available too. More info about cast, performance dates, etc, here.

Friday, July 24, 2015

Glamour time - are we listening or looking?



I took part in a discussion for the US radio station WQXR's programme Conducting Business about playing the glamour card in classical music. Have a listen above.

More info here.

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Farewell to a wonderful clarinettist



The clarinettist John McCaw, always known personally as Jack, has died at the age of 96. He lived opposite us.

We had no idea, when we moved to our house back in the last century, that he was there. Virtually every clarinettist I've come across since then had at some point been to our street for lessons with him. He was principal clarinet successively of the Philharmonia and of the London Philharmonic, many years ago (and would always watch with much amusement as Tom zoomed out of our front door with instrument case and raincoat to catch the train to Glyndebourne). He was well known as a soloist, and made the recording above of the Nielsen and Mozart concertos with the New Philharmonia and Raymond Leppard in, I believe, a single day.

He can be heard in innumerable recordings, including, if I remember rightly, the Elgar Cello Concerto with du Pré, Barenboim and the LPO (1967), the Nielsen Symphony No.5 conducted by Jascha Horenstein and apparently with Placido Domingo singing 'La vita e inferno' from La forza del destino. In 1977 he played the Mozart Concerto at the Proms with the Philharmonia under Riccardo Muti. He also championed the works of Joseph Holbrooke.

Jack was born in New Zealand at the very end of the First World War and came to live in the UK a few years after the end of the Second, when he was about 30. He and his wife, Ann, a pianist, had lived in their house for more than 50 years.

He was a vivid, sparky character with an unfailing wit, a great deal of charm and, we hear, little patience for nonsense from conductors. He was meticulous, house-proud and a keen gardener. Even when he was over 90 we would see him on a step-ladder with an electric saw, trimming his hedge into a perfect oblong.

For friends and former pupils wishing to attend his funeral, I am told that it will be at Mortlake Crematorium on Tuesday 28 July at 4pm.

We will miss him very, very much.

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

What killed Erich Wolfgang Korngold?

Michael Haas, author of the book Forbidden Music - about the generation of Jewish composers murdered, obliterated or exiled by the Nazis - was curator at the Jewish Museum in Vienna of a fabulous exhibition about Julius and Erich Wolfgang Korngold several years ago. He has now posted on forbiddenmusic.org a very substantial essay entitled The False Myths and True Genius of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, lavishly illustrated with both visual and aural material.

It is wonderfully written and the story emerges powerfully with all its complex, baffling and ultimately tragic elements in sharp relief. Did Korngold die too young because of the stress caused by his own sense of "irrelevance"?

Do give it a read. And a listen.

Monday, July 20, 2015

Meet Operalia winner Lise Davidsen

Last night the Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen scooped first prize (women) in Placido Domingo's Operalia competition, held this year at the Royal Opera House, London. The men's prize went to Ioan Hotea of Romania.

Here is Lise in Strauss's 'Ruhe, meine Seele':


And Norwegian/Danish speakers can enjoy an interview with her here; and more Strauss (from Ariadne) a little way in.



Saturday, July 18, 2015

Pinch me - I'm doing a concert with Peter Donohoe

I can't quite get my head around this one, but Peter Donohoe has invited me to his festival in Fishguard to give a performance of the Alicia's Gift concert with him, week after next.

Repertoire will be tweaked as appropriate - the Scriabin Sonata No.5 will have the party-piece spot in the second half. There's the Ravel duet to conclude, though, so, yeah, I have to play a duet with this guy whose playing I have admired enormously ever since hearing him on the radio for the first time as a teenager, so it is a scary if also thrilling prospect. Last year when I was in Moscow I heard Peter play Rach 3 at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, with that same Scriabin as an encore - a stunning, unforgettable concert.

Alicia's Gift is on Tuesday week, 28 July, at St Peter's Church, Goodwick, at 2pm. More here. 

Here is Peter playing Rach 3 at the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1982...




Friday, July 17, 2015

None shall sleep listening to this

Trailer for Jonas Kaufmann's new album of Puccini. What other singer could possibly promote a new album with a recording of Caruso and get away with it?

Resistance is pointless. Turn up the volume and wallow.

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Rare Terence Judd footage from Tchaikovsky Competition 1978

This is rare footage - apparently now viewable for the first time since the year it was filmed - of Terence Judd, the young British pianist who took his own life a year after winning fourth prize in the 1978 Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition. Here he is playing in the prizewinners' concert. Please listen, remember, think.

Thanks to Angelo Villani (who incidentally has made target for his own recording) for bringing it to my attention.

Programme with timings:

01:28 - Shostakovich Prelude and Fugue no. 15, op. 87
06:36 - Scriabin Etude op. 42 no. 5
10:58 - Ravel Miroirs, La Vallée des cloches
17:45 - Barber Piano Sonata in E-flat minor, op. 26, Fuga: Allegro con spirito
23:27 - Liszt La Campanella

RIP Alan Curtis

Last night we heard of the sudden death of the musicologist, baroque revival pioneer, harpsichordist and conductor Alan Curtis at home in Italy at the age of 81. To say that the music world is in mourning is not saying enough.

I am feeling shell-shocked because I had an email from him only three days ago. I was interviewing him about a major project he was preparing for a tour of Australia - a pasticcio opera, the first that he had composed himself - and he sounded full of enthusiasm, vigour and humour, looking forward with joy to what would have been his first visit to Australia, where he was going to work with a group of fine young musicians.

He will be sorely, sorely missed.




Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Et bien, mes amis...

Today is Bastille Day - hence known, phonetically, as Le Cat-orze Juillet. And it happens to be Ricki and Cosi's birthday. My kittens are already 1 year old.

Mostly they get along. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes Ricki steals Cosi's food. Sometimes she washes his ears for him. And sometimes they have boxing matches.

So here is a little French song starring two French cats to celebrate. (If you're not into cats and humour, please just log off.)

Monday, July 13, 2015

What can orchestras learn from André Rieu?

Please don't choke on your muesli - the above was the title of a particularly lively session at Classical:NEXT a couple of months ago, featuring two brilliant, provocative and stirring speakers - Mark Pemberton from the Association of British Orchestras and Claire Mera-Nelson from Trinity Laban College. Such was the smell of utter distaste and the sight of desperate squirming in the conference room that I felt I just had to write something about it. The resulting piece was in the Independent a few weeks back, but here it is again just in case.

And surely the least we could do is have a Simon Rattle souvenir mug?



For many music lovers, André Rieu, the Dutch violinist and so-called modern Waltz King, is an irresistible attraction. He and his orchestra, performing light, tuneful classics and crossover – are not only about music, but also showbiz. They often top the classical recording charts. And they’re loved, loved, loved.

Except in hardcore classical music circles, that is. If you want to see a roomful of those administrators squirm, show them a Rieu performance and ask what the orchestral world might learn from his runaway success.

That’s what happened at the trade fair and think-tank Classical:NEXT, held recently in Rotterdam, during a session exploring business models for orchestras, led by Claire Mera-Nelson, director of music at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, and Mark Pemberton, director of the Association of British Orchestras. Still, nobody could help noticing one thing about Rieu and co: the audience. People of all ages having a great evening out, maybe dancing, singing along, cheering freely, visibly feeling welcome and happy.

Rieu, the charismatic focal point, talks to them, introduces his music and musicians, ceaselessly communicates with his public. And they keep coming back for more. Every aspect and every second of the show contributes to that experience.

André Rieu Teddy Bear - from the Waltz King's merchandise shop
 The violinist and leader as cult personality is a notion that goes back at least to the 18th century; arguably, all Rieu has done is reboot it for the 21st. Why, then, the resistance? It’s that old chestnut – art versus entertainment. These terms have long seemed mutually exclusive. Must they always remain so? Could attendances be increased and orchestras’ incomes be lifted by taking a leaf or two out of Rieu’s modus operandi?

This doesn’t mean copying his style, but noting the way he achieves his aims from behind the scenes. “Rieu’s concerts are filmed with multiple cameras,” Claire Mera-Nelson points out, “and most of them are on the audience. They then analyse the reactions in minute detail. If something doesn’t play well with the audience, they never repeat it.” Rieu’s success is all about setting out to understand his audience and making sure he gives them a good time.

The UK’s orchestras have become comparatively good at inventing innovative ways to attract different attendees and shake up concert formats; earning money is more vital for them than for those in European countries that still offer more sizeable state subsidies. Yet even now you’ll notice some orchestral musicians slouch on to the platform apparently with little understanding that they are performers the minute they’re on stage. That’s just one basic mistake that Rieu’s players don’t make. For the crucial two-way energy between performers and audience to ignite, the very least the latter needs is a smile of acknowledgement from the former.

Moreover, the audience’s experience does not begin with the first note of music. It starts as soon as they arrive at the hall – and it’s then that you need a sense of occasion, a welcoming ambience, ease and efficiency of finding refreshments, cloakrooms and loos, comfortable seating both inside the hall and in the foyers, and much more besides. Rieu’s audiences wave flags, sport merchandise and participate by purchasing these – either online or presumably at the event – thus acquiring a sort of personal stake in the goings on. It might look like tat, but its effect goes oddly deeper. You mightn’t want to wave a flag in a Mahler symphony, of course, but if the LSO were to start selling Simon Rattle mugs when he becomes music director, I’d happily take one home.

Instead, UK concert venues often exude the enervating, impersonal ambience of railway stations or conference centres. Even regulars dislike this, so how offputting must it be to newcomers? I don’t mind admitting that I attend some venues with a sinking heart on every occasion, however marvellous the performances they host. And art-focused orchestras and concert halls could address all these matters without sacrificing a jot of musical integrity.

The biggest names – Daniel Barenboim, Simon Rattle or Jonas Kaufmann – will always sell out. But such stars are few in number; the rest of the time, to create that great night out that keeps people coming back, matters beyond musical substance must contribute to making the audience feel welcome, happy and part of the event.

“The atmosphere, the welcome, the whole package is what we’re offering as ‘entertainment’,” Mark Pemberton points out. “You have to focus on the audience. We so often focus on the art – yet we are so dependent on the people who go to hear us play! What are we doing for them? It’s time for marketing departments to look at the qualitative aspects of their experience.”

This issue is not going to go away. Today musicians have such intense competition for people’s leisure time that unless they understand what works – and do a bit more of it – punters may vote with their feet. Those wanting a head start must find new ways to know their audience, and know them well.

Sunday, July 12, 2015

Open air spectaculars - or muddy field gigs?


Hope you enjoyed that all-star Munich outdoor opera concert t'other day. I've been having a chuckle over Amanda Holloway's piece over at Sinfinimusic.com about the highs and lows of summer spectaculars, from "extreme page-turning" to dive-bombing herons, so delved into my archive to find something I wrote for the Independent a few years ago on a similar topic. As the clouds are gathering today, it seems worth rerunning.

At the Waldbuhne, of course, they seem to have a way of getting it right, sparklers and all...but closer to home, it's low-flying Smarties and birdshit in the harp...






......What could be nicer than a classical summer spectacular? To the audience, it’s the perfect night out: take some friends, a picnic and a bottle of wine and enjoy some beautiful music in the leafy open air. Maybe the evening will finish with a thrilling firework display. But be warned: the duck noises you hear during the slow movement of the symphony may not actually emerge from a duck. It could just as easily be a disgruntled musician lurking behind the scenes with a quack machine, bent on sabotage.

At their best, outdoor summer concerts are fun for everybody, including the musicians in the orchestra. At their worst, though, the conditions in which the players have to operate, combined with awkward journeys, long, difficult programmes often catastrophically under-rehearsed, all for payment that’s little better than an insult, can mean that disgruntlement is the best they can hope for. A “rank-and-file” musician is usually paid a flat fee of £80 for such a day, including the performance, one three-hour rehearsal and the time it takes to travel to often out-of-the-way venues. These concerts are known in the profession as “muddy field gigs”. But the freelance musicians I spoke to were so anxious about complaining of the way they’re treated that they asked me to change their names, citing the risk that “we might never work again”.

The biggest hazard – which will come as no surprise – is the British “summer” weather. We’ve all shivered our way through such concerts under umbrellas. Jane, a harpist, recounts, “You spend a lot of time leaping around after the sheets of your music as it blows away! One time it rained so hard that a lake formed in front of the stage and outside buses were turning over in the mud.” Michael, a violinist, recounts stories of driving rain across the platform during Rossini’s William Tell Overture (“Never had the storm music seemed so appropriate!”) and doing gigs “wearing long-johns and jeans under my concert suit”.

Jane faces all kinds of extra problems in transporting her instrument: harps are large, expensive and heavy. “I always try to drive the harp up to the stage’s back entrance and once I drove over the central power cable and all the electricity went off! I often have to be towed back to the road afterwards because otherwise I get stuck in the mud with the car wheels going round and round. And if you’re on a beach you have to watch out for the tides.” Worse, “a few weeks ago a bird shat on my harp. Right into the mechanism. It’s almost impossible to clean it out.”

Indignities don’t only come from birds. One violinist recalled a “Last Night of the Proms” programme during which his valuable Italian instrument was damaged by some flying Smarties from the audience. Another musician had just experienced an outdoor concert in the north of England at which an excessively jingoistic presenter, clad in Union Jack outfit and hat, had found it amusing “not only to make quips slagging off ‘frogs’ but also to pick out members of the orchestra to humiliate. He was saying to the audience things like, ‘This is Mary, she got her roots done just in time for this evening’ or ‘This is Lizzie, she’s pregnant – ooh, we know what you’ve been doing!’ Nobody ever asks if a presenter peddling racist attitudes and personal insults is OK with us and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.”

So much for the compères – what about the star turns? A big-name singer earns thousands or upwards for a big outdoor gig, while the orchestra plays for peanuts. That’s fine, says Jane – as long as those soloists really can sing. “I did a concert with one famous singer who actually couldn’t. He’d had to have some of the music transposed down because he couldn’t reach the high notes. We started off laughing, but by the end he was so bad, and being paid so much, that it stopped being funny. He was kind to us in the band, but at one point in the rehearsal he declared, ‘Sorry, I’ve got some technical problems,’ and the first horn called out, ‘We all know that, mate!’”

All the players were keen to stress that “muddy field gigs” can be useful and, on a good day, enjoyable. They’re an excellent way for young musicians to jump in the deep end, learn the repertoire and perform it on minimal rehearsal (“after which anything seems easy,” comments one musician). “You never know which the good gigs are going to be,” Michael remarks. “The ones that sound the most glamorous are frequently the worst, while ones that you might think will be dubious can be wonderful experiences. One of my best was a free local authority gig near Huntingdon with a little chamber orchestra. It was cold, but we had the most fabulous show. That was because the conductor, John Wilson, was terrific. He insisted on us using loads of vibrato to get a big, fat, Hollywood tone – it sounded fantastic, it was great music-making and the audience loved it.”

Sometimes, though, it’s just too much to take. “Once we were in a big park at the end of the season when the weather was chilly,” Michael recounts, “and it was a bad date all the way through. There was a generator the size of a lorry churning out diesel fumes right next to the stage. We had a huge programme, almost three hours of music, including ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ which sounded ludicrous on a tiny orchestra with virtually no rehearsal. I was sitting on the inside third desk [row] of the first violins and the lighting strip stopped just in front of us so my desk partner and I couldn’t read our music and we got colder and colder – lighting helps to keep you warm.  As the evening went on, my desk partner became more and more furious. And at the end, in the 1812 Overture, the fireworks were right next to us and when one huge one went off beside us, he just lost it. In front of 6,000 people. He stood up in the middle of the piece, got his fiddle case out from under his chair, wiped down his violin and bow meticulously with a cloth, put them away, jumped off the stage and went home! Afterwards he thought he’d be sacked. But he’d had such a terrible evening and been so angry about it that the management didn’t dare go near him.”

But these highly trained, accomplished and dedicated musicians agree that the worst indignity of all is that audiences will come to a concert like this and assume that “that’s what classical music is”. “Some outdoor concerts are good,” says Jane. “But usually you turn up, you freeze, you have only a top-and-tail rehearsal, there’ll be a bad soloist who’s married to the director, and it’s amplified so you don’t know what it really sounds like. These concerts are part of our job, they’re good experience, people enjoy them and we shouldn’t be too precious about them. It’s a fun evening. But surely not at the price of people thinking that that’s all there is to classical music?”

Saturday, July 11, 2015

Dante's piano inferno: three days to go

The pianist Angelo Villani, an astonishing Australian-Italian artist based in London who's featured strongly in these posts before, is raising funds for his debut album. It's a superb programme based around Dante's Inferno, featuring Liszt's Dante Sonata, Angelo's own transcription of Dido's Lament from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, some rare music by Hans von Bülow, and a fantasia on Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, uniting keyboard versions by Bülow, Liszt and Angelo himself. I've written his sleeve notes.

Angelo's burgeoning career was cut short in his teens by an injury to his right hand (karate is to blame). After 25 years and consultations with hundreds of specialists, he has been able to resume playing and his comeback began in 2012 with a debut recital at St James Piccadilly. This will be his first CD.

He's now found 77 per cent of the cash he needs, but with three days left, there's still a good bit to go...please help him!

Here's his Kickstarter page.

Proms are upon us

I've written a vaguely grumpy piece for the Independent about why this year's Proms programme feels just that bit meh. I've only done this because I love the Proms and I want them to be purrfect.

Let's just explore the business about the Proms' new music on TV a little more, as a lady from the press office has sent me a lot of information.

The Proms contains no fewer than 30 pieces of music that are receiving world, European, UK or London premieres. This is an admirable count and one would expect them to be proud of it and wish to relay those works to the widest possible audience on TV.

Last year several composers of my acquaintance were utterly shell-shocked to discover that while the Proms in which their music was being done were to be televised, their pieces had been cut from the TV broadcast and moved to a designated area for new music online. At this year's Proms press launch, Edward Blakeman was challenged about this and he offered a robust defence of "curating" Proms for the TV audience (the concept of "curating" is maybe a topic for another time).

Apparently this year 16 pieces of music will be filmed for online only, but just three of those are new works. Apparently I am therefore off the mark to say that "certain pieces of music that are filmed will be viewable online only".

The three new works that will be filmed but not televised are by John Woolrich, Tansy Davies and Luca Francesconi. (So: certain pieces of music that are filmed will be viewable online only.)

The full TV schedule for the Proms is online here.

Here is how new music from the Proms on TV will look:

New music really is an important part of the Proms television offer across BBC Two, BBC Four, CBBC and online this year. New commissions by Gary Carpenter (world premiere of BBC commission Dadaville) and Eleanor Alberga (world premiere of Arise, Athena!) feature in the live First and Last Night TV broadcasts on BBC Two. New music is also broadcast within BBC Four’s weekly curated programmes on Thursday, Friday and Sunday evenings throughout the festival including: a concerto and recital series on Thursday evenings which will devote an episode to the world premiere of HK Gruber’sInto the open… and also feature the world premiere of Hugh Wood’s BBC commission Epithalamium; a series on Friday evenings featuring European premieres of works by Jonathan Newman and Eric Whitacre; and an 8-part symphony series presented by Sir Mark Elder and Katie Derham on Sunday evenings which will devote 5 episodes to 20th century music, 2 episodes to new symphonic works (the first Proms performance of Brett Dean’s Pastoral Symphony and the world premiere of James Macmillan’s BBC commission, Symphony No. 4) and the world premiere of Anna Meredith’s BBC commission Smatter Hauler. The London premiere of Anna Meredith’s Connect It will also be included in the broadcast of the Ten Pieces Prom on CBBC.

So, it looks as if around a third of the new/newish pieces will find their way onto our TV screens in one form or another, which is good news. Thanks, chaps.