Just back from short, crazy trip to the Verbier Festival, a.k.a. HEAVEN.
I tried to get cynical about Verbier last year. Circus tricks: spot the megastars wandering about ski resort off-season, listen to concerts in a tent where you can't hear anything when it rains - and don't you DARE go through the doorway designated to the sponsors. True. Very true. The megastars do wander about. You can't help but spot them from your cafe or hotel breakfast room or when you're sauntering up and down the main hill. You stumble upon Mischa Maisky reading the daily schedule on the Place Centrale noticeboard, or Pieter Wispelwey in dark glasses heading down to a rehearsal; this morning I ended up having breakfast with the marvellous young pianist Jonathan Biss, a recent interviewee of mine who happened to be staying in the same hotel. It's also true that you can't hear the concerts terribly well when it rains - last night it poured most of the way through the Schumann Piano Quintet played by Andsnes, Znajder, Cerovcek, Imai & Wispelwey. But heck, it was wonderful anyway!!!
So it all feels too good to be true and there must be a catch somewhere. Trouble is, it IS all too good to be true, but so far I haven't quite found the catch. A few possibles regarding aspects of the youth orchestra and of course that tent, but these don't amount to much in the grand scheme of things from the audience's point of view. If your two prime requirements for heaven are the most beautiful mountains and the greatest music, Verbier is for you.
Most stunning of all: Vadim Repin, soloist for Shostakovich Violin Concerto No.1 on Monday night. That concerto isn't my favourite piece on earth, but I was completely mesmerised by him. I vowed on the spot not to miss any more of his London concerts, because hearing playing of such combined intelligence, power, finesse, magnetism and vitality is rare indeed. He doesn't do the Vengerov showmanship thing, he doesn't do the Josh Bell Learns To Ski knee bends, he doesn't force the tone like some others I could mention; instead he puts everything straight where it ought to be: the music, the instrument, the intensity, the spirit.
I followed this, the next morning, with a trip up the mountain by cable car and a lovely walk at the top, gazing at snowy peaks, listening to silvery cowbells on the local herd and the soft rustle of waterfalls, spotting tiny pink orchids and brilliant blue gentians among the meadows of wild flowers. Mountain walks are shiatsu massage for the soul; over the last few years they have somehow become essential to me. This was my one and only this year, and I appreciated every second of it.
It was tempting simply to miss the plane home and vanish into the mountainside. I failed to work out how to do so in time, however, so here I am at my desk, blogging once again.
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Saturday, July 17, 2004
Help!
OK, I admit it. I need some advice.
Today I lost something that I really shouldn't have lost. It won't kill me and it won't stop me getting to Verbier on Monday. But it's daft. And it has enough bearing on the world beyond my four walls to make me look a trifle silly. I don't know if it is entirely my own fault or if Tom has been tidying up over-zealously, since I am not a great one for throwing anything away and something appears to have been thrown when it shouldn't have been. Nevertheless...
...I have a problem with piles of paper. They sit on my desk waiting to be organised. Then they transfer to the study rocking chair and thence to the floor. Occasionally I load them, unexplored, into large plastic boxes from Ikea. Meanwhile the CDs are breeding. I honestly think they engage in some form of plastic cell multiplication when my back is turned. As for the magazines, they arrive in a rush once a month; I look through them and try to keep track of the ones that contain my articles and dispose, eventually, of those that don't...eventually......
On TV recently there was a series called 'Life Laundry'. A cheery presenter visited families whose houses had been taken over by their excessive stuff, and helped them to get rid of it. I enjoyed this mainly because I could see that my mess problem isn't so bad that I need to call in the BBC. It was also interesting to discover that most of these families had some kind of past of which they just couldn't let go and which lay at the root of the trouble.
I'm good at living in the present and I do know that it isn't good enough just to clear the study twice a year, once at Christmas and once at - er - some other time as yet to be determined. Yet the task becomes so daunting that I keep putting it off. I'd rather do anything else than face it.
Does anybody have any tips on good psychological tricks to help oneself get organised? If so, please send them my way!
Today I lost something that I really shouldn't have lost. It won't kill me and it won't stop me getting to Verbier on Monday. But it's daft. And it has enough bearing on the world beyond my four walls to make me look a trifle silly. I don't know if it is entirely my own fault or if Tom has been tidying up over-zealously, since I am not a great one for throwing anything away and something appears to have been thrown when it shouldn't have been. Nevertheless...
...I have a problem with piles of paper. They sit on my desk waiting to be organised. Then they transfer to the study rocking chair and thence to the floor. Occasionally I load them, unexplored, into large plastic boxes from Ikea. Meanwhile the CDs are breeding. I honestly think they engage in some form of plastic cell multiplication when my back is turned. As for the magazines, they arrive in a rush once a month; I look through them and try to keep track of the ones that contain my articles and dispose, eventually, of those that don't...eventually......
On TV recently there was a series called 'Life Laundry'. A cheery presenter visited families whose houses had been taken over by their excessive stuff, and helped them to get rid of it. I enjoyed this mainly because I could see that my mess problem isn't so bad that I need to call in the BBC. It was also interesting to discover that most of these families had some kind of past of which they just couldn't let go and which lay at the root of the trouble.
I'm good at living in the present and I do know that it isn't good enough just to clear the study twice a year, once at Christmas and once at - er - some other time as yet to be determined. Yet the task becomes so daunting that I keep putting it off. I'd rather do anything else than face it.
Does anybody have any tips on good psychological tricks to help oneself get organised? If so, please send them my way!
Friday, July 16, 2004
The great British amateur #1: The Piano Teacher
Can you imagine a scenario in which a skilled, specialised profession is so little regulated that anybody, absolutely anybody, can set up as a practitioner? A practitioner to whom young people return week after week, perhaps for years, to have their attitudes and expertise formed? Yet that practitioner has no qualification, accreditation or 'answerability' for what they do? If this person was a surgeon or a lawyer, that would be a national scandal. But for British piano teaching, this is normal.
One of the most fascinating things about my examiner training has been watching the different levels of ability, musicality and nerves that come through the door with the candidates. Most are nice kids who try very hard. Some of them have an unerring ear, others none whatsoever. Some seem thoroughly to enjoy playing their pieces; others sit petrified, tinkling out the notes with glassy gaze. Youngsters' attitudes to performing - and hence adults' attitudes to performing too! - are subject to influences from parents, peers and more; but the most telling instances are when a teacher enters a stream of pupils for exams and they turn up, one after the other, all exhibiting exactly the same problems.
On one of my days, five or six kids arrived in succession, each pallid with terror. Each was attempting a grade too high for his/her abilities. Not one of them could play scales, other than a basic easy major, to save their lives. They certainly couldn't sight-read (not that many can) and tried to stand about a mile away from me, with backs turned, for the aural tests. The common factor? The teacher - who must be unnerving the lot of them on a weekly basis, has no qualms about entering them for exams ill-prepared and is somehow instilling in them the idea that playing music is something to fear, not something to enjoy.
I find it terrifying to think of some of the people in charge of children's musical education. In my very first job, at Boosey & Hawkes in the educational music department, besides proof-reading scale books I had to write rejection letters to would-be composers of music for educational use, who had eagerly submitted unsolicited manuscripts hoping for instant publication. Many came from alleged music teachers who, to judge from their handwriting, presentation and general idiocity, were mentally way off the deep end and probably should have been on medication.
Regulatory bodies and recommending organisations do exist. If you're looking for a teacher, you can consult the Musicians Union or the Incorporated Society of Musicians, who will help find someone with a decent professional mandate. The music colleges and the Associated Board itself provide courses and qualifications for teachers. But there is no legal requirement for anyone wanting to teach the piano to hold such a qualification; and the too-numerous total charlatans in the profession cannot be stopped, because there is nothing from which they can be struck off.
Even some teachers who ARE accredited, who ARE members of professional organisations, occasionally purvey such crackpot ideas, such dangerous theories, such damaging and often destructive approaches, that to say the mind boggles is not putting it strongly enough. This is not solely an issue for the Great British Tradition of Amateurism: I've heard worse stories still about theoretically respected professors at such august institutions as Juilliard and the Paris Conservatoire.
But the GBTA does the charlatans too many favours. Traditions of good music teaching need decades, if not centuries, to build up, and they require formalisation and support at state level, with sensible advice from the wisest of music educators, if they are to take hold. Amateurism merely begets more amateurism. That greatest of British traditions is deeply rooted in our green and pleasant land and will take a long time to eradicate, assuming anyone ever sets about eradicating it. New Labour's music manifesto - the one that MP Boris Johnson just described, to Tom & co's delight, as 'more hot air than the wind section of the London Philharmonic' - isn't going to do much to help.
It's the taking part that matters, goes the old English maxim, not the winning. OK, we can't all win the Tchaikovsky Competition. But in music, if you are not taught the basics well enough and early enough, you will never even be able to take part. That's how music is. Get used to it.
One of the most fascinating things about my examiner training has been watching the different levels of ability, musicality and nerves that come through the door with the candidates. Most are nice kids who try very hard. Some of them have an unerring ear, others none whatsoever. Some seem thoroughly to enjoy playing their pieces; others sit petrified, tinkling out the notes with glassy gaze. Youngsters' attitudes to performing - and hence adults' attitudes to performing too! - are subject to influences from parents, peers and more; but the most telling instances are when a teacher enters a stream of pupils for exams and they turn up, one after the other, all exhibiting exactly the same problems.
On one of my days, five or six kids arrived in succession, each pallid with terror. Each was attempting a grade too high for his/her abilities. Not one of them could play scales, other than a basic easy major, to save their lives. They certainly couldn't sight-read (not that many can) and tried to stand about a mile away from me, with backs turned, for the aural tests. The common factor? The teacher - who must be unnerving the lot of them on a weekly basis, has no qualms about entering them for exams ill-prepared and is somehow instilling in them the idea that playing music is something to fear, not something to enjoy.
I find it terrifying to think of some of the people in charge of children's musical education. In my very first job, at Boosey & Hawkes in the educational music department, besides proof-reading scale books I had to write rejection letters to would-be composers of music for educational use, who had eagerly submitted unsolicited manuscripts hoping for instant publication. Many came from alleged music teachers who, to judge from their handwriting, presentation and general idiocity, were mentally way off the deep end and probably should have been on medication.
Regulatory bodies and recommending organisations do exist. If you're looking for a teacher, you can consult the Musicians Union or the Incorporated Society of Musicians, who will help find someone with a decent professional mandate. The music colleges and the Associated Board itself provide courses and qualifications for teachers. But there is no legal requirement for anyone wanting to teach the piano to hold such a qualification; and the too-numerous total charlatans in the profession cannot be stopped, because there is nothing from which they can be struck off.
Even some teachers who ARE accredited, who ARE members of professional organisations, occasionally purvey such crackpot ideas, such dangerous theories, such damaging and often destructive approaches, that to say the mind boggles is not putting it strongly enough. This is not solely an issue for the Great British Tradition of Amateurism: I've heard worse stories still about theoretically respected professors at such august institutions as Juilliard and the Paris Conservatoire.
But the GBTA does the charlatans too many favours. Traditions of good music teaching need decades, if not centuries, to build up, and they require formalisation and support at state level, with sensible advice from the wisest of music educators, if they are to take hold. Amateurism merely begets more amateurism. That greatest of British traditions is deeply rooted in our green and pleasant land and will take a long time to eradicate, assuming anyone ever sets about eradicating it. New Labour's music manifesto - the one that MP Boris Johnson just described, to Tom & co's delight, as 'more hot air than the wind section of the London Philharmonic' - isn't going to do much to help.
It's the taking part that matters, goes the old English maxim, not the winning. OK, we can't all win the Tchaikovsky Competition. But in music, if you are not taught the basics well enough and early enough, you will never even be able to take part. That's how music is. Get used to it.
Thursday, July 15, 2004
...yes, Yes, YES, !!!!!!YES!!!!!!!
See AC Douglas on Historically Informed Performance, or what isn't...
I was going to write something just like this, but ACD has got there first! SO glad I'm not the only one who feels this way, because enduring 4 years of the Cambridge music faculty in the mid-Eighties left me wondering if I was. But not any more. The turnround has arrived, and about time too. You want to hear some good Bach playing? Try Harold Samuel in 1931, playing Bach on the piano as if it's great music - not a sharpener upon which to grind the blade of yet another axe.
Another cause for celebration is the double bill at Glyndebourne of Rachmaninov's The Miserly Knight and Puccini's Gianni Schicci. Sergei Leiferkus stars in the former, Sally Matthews in the latter, Vladimir Jurowski is the red-hot conductor, production is absolutely spectacular and it's a clever pairing of works about the Evil Of Money - in front of the stonkingly well-heeled Glyndebourne-goers! Marvellous evening out. Get down there, PDQ.
I am wiped out by my last day of examiner training right now, so will sign off while I can still see straightish, if not spell.
I was going to write something just like this, but ACD has got there first! SO glad I'm not the only one who feels this way, because enduring 4 years of the Cambridge music faculty in the mid-Eighties left me wondering if I was. But not any more. The turnround has arrived, and about time too. You want to hear some good Bach playing? Try Harold Samuel in 1931, playing Bach on the piano as if it's great music - not a sharpener upon which to grind the blade of yet another axe.
Another cause for celebration is the double bill at Glyndebourne of Rachmaninov's The Miserly Knight and Puccini's Gianni Schicci. Sergei Leiferkus stars in the former, Sally Matthews in the latter, Vladimir Jurowski is the red-hot conductor, production is absolutely spectacular and it's a clever pairing of works about the Evil Of Money - in front of the stonkingly well-heeled Glyndebourne-goers! Marvellous evening out. Get down there, PDQ.
I am wiped out by my last day of examiner training right now, so will sign off while I can still see straightish, if not spell.
Saturday, July 10, 2004
Bach, pianos and a 'marauding Tartar'
ACD in Sounds and fury has an inspiring post at the moment about Wanda Landowska's playing of Bach. Nice to come across this while I'm in the process of checking out three different versions of the English Suite No.3 on behalf of a pianist friend who is performing it next week and is curious about who does what with it.
My three versions are Glenn Gould (1974), Rosalyn Tureck (1948) and Andras Schiff (1988). Each of them treats Bach with absolute respect. None of them allows their own personality to be subsumed in that respect. Instead, each individual, with all his or her quirks and idiosyncracies, joins forces with Bach to produce a unified vision of this intensely powerful and beautiful work. My personal top choice - after much chewing of cud - is narrowly the Tureck, which is available on a VAI disc called Rosalyn Tureck: The Young Visionary. She once famously said to Landowska: 'You play Bach your way. I'll play it HIS way.'
The following may be sacrilege to some, but I don't like the Gould recording. If madness and genius are as close as people say, I do feel Gould tips the balance in the wrong direction. Schiff sings and dances his way through the work in a truly uplifting spirit, achieving a little more weightiness with slightly slower tempi. I'd choose Tureck because she brings an extra awe-struck inwardness to the Sarabande, and the lightness of her articulation is staggeringly impressive, especially in the Gigue.
What I will be most curious about now is what my mate Rustem Hayroudinoff makes of it when he performs it at the Petworth Festival on 26 July. For any pianist, young or otherwise, approaching Bach is a daunting task. You have to ride on the crest of a wave that consists not only of all the arguments pro and contra playing Bach on the piano at all, but also the outstanding interpretations that have gone before you.
I should introduce Rustem to you. I first came across him ten years ago, when he was relatively new to London, fresh out of the Moscow Conservatory. He's proud to be a Tartar, from Kazan, and he happily marauds his way through life with a few assets: superlative playing, a quick brain and sharp eye and a sense of humour that spares nothing and nobody. He has so many hair-raising stories of life in Russia, people who take shameful advantage of naive youngsters from foreign parts and, not least, corruption in piano competitions, that I often tease him by saying he'd make his fortune fastest if he wrote his memoirs.
For reasons too complex to go into here, he has had some bad luck from time to time which means that he has not yet become the household name that maybe he ought to be. However, when he found a volume of Shostakovich Theatre Music arranged for piano and realised that most of it had never been recorded, it was his sheer creativity and persistence that resulted in this becoming his first solo disc for Chandos a few years ago. The disc bowled over not only me but several other critics as well with its wit and vitality and Chandos sensibly signed him up for more. Earlier this year his CD of the complete Rachmaninov Preludes came out to universal acclaim (have a look at the reviews on his website), and a delicious CD of the Rachmaninov Cello Sonata with cellist Alexander Ivashkin was hot on its heels. At last many critics are realising that Rustem has more to say - and a more beautiful way of saying it - than many far more famous note-bashers of his generation.
You can hear him, if you're in London, on the afternoon of 25 July at the Chopin Society; and at the Petworth Festival in West Sussex the next day. The programme includes a substantial Chopin selection and, of course, the Bach English Suite No.3. All his discs are available from Amazon and I can't recommend them highly enough.
My three versions are Glenn Gould (1974), Rosalyn Tureck (1948) and Andras Schiff (1988). Each of them treats Bach with absolute respect. None of them allows their own personality to be subsumed in that respect. Instead, each individual, with all his or her quirks and idiosyncracies, joins forces with Bach to produce a unified vision of this intensely powerful and beautiful work. My personal top choice - after much chewing of cud - is narrowly the Tureck, which is available on a VAI disc called Rosalyn Tureck: The Young Visionary. She once famously said to Landowska: 'You play Bach your way. I'll play it HIS way.'
The following may be sacrilege to some, but I don't like the Gould recording. If madness and genius are as close as people say, I do feel Gould tips the balance in the wrong direction. Schiff sings and dances his way through the work in a truly uplifting spirit, achieving a little more weightiness with slightly slower tempi. I'd choose Tureck because she brings an extra awe-struck inwardness to the Sarabande, and the lightness of her articulation is staggeringly impressive, especially in the Gigue.
What I will be most curious about now is what my mate Rustem Hayroudinoff makes of it when he performs it at the Petworth Festival on 26 July. For any pianist, young or otherwise, approaching Bach is a daunting task. You have to ride on the crest of a wave that consists not only of all the arguments pro and contra playing Bach on the piano at all, but also the outstanding interpretations that have gone before you.
I should introduce Rustem to you. I first came across him ten years ago, when he was relatively new to London, fresh out of the Moscow Conservatory. He's proud to be a Tartar, from Kazan, and he happily marauds his way through life with a few assets: superlative playing, a quick brain and sharp eye and a sense of humour that spares nothing and nobody. He has so many hair-raising stories of life in Russia, people who take shameful advantage of naive youngsters from foreign parts and, not least, corruption in piano competitions, that I often tease him by saying he'd make his fortune fastest if he wrote his memoirs.
For reasons too complex to go into here, he has had some bad luck from time to time which means that he has not yet become the household name that maybe he ought to be. However, when he found a volume of Shostakovich Theatre Music arranged for piano and realised that most of it had never been recorded, it was his sheer creativity and persistence that resulted in this becoming his first solo disc for Chandos a few years ago. The disc bowled over not only me but several other critics as well with its wit and vitality and Chandos sensibly signed him up for more. Earlier this year his CD of the complete Rachmaninov Preludes came out to universal acclaim (have a look at the reviews on his website), and a delicious CD of the Rachmaninov Cello Sonata with cellist Alexander Ivashkin was hot on its heels. At last many critics are realising that Rustem has more to say - and a more beautiful way of saying it - than many far more famous note-bashers of his generation.
You can hear him, if you're in London, on the afternoon of 25 July at the Chopin Society; and at the Petworth Festival in West Sussex the next day. The programme includes a substantial Chopin selection and, of course, the Bach English Suite No.3. All his discs are available from Amazon and I can't recommend them highly enough.
Thursday, July 08, 2004
wheee....
Wow! I've just learned how to insert html to make links in my text! After nearly 5 months!!! Can't quite do pics yet because Blogger recommends an online storage system that isn't compatible with Macs, but I've managed to load a link to an online picture from my Vilnius photo album into the entry about the trip and I hope this works.
Wednesday, July 07, 2004
London grumblesport
I was planning to spend this afternoon happily writing a substantial article about Faure. Instead I spent it trying to get home.
This morning I trotted off to the Barbican to interview Rostropovich. I'd met him very briefly in Vilnius - he was staying in the same hotel as me and I accosted him as 'Maestro' (which is what everyone seems to call him) when I spotted him waiting for the lift one afternoon. What a charmer he is, apart from being everyone's hero and a direct link to Prokofiev, Shostakovich and most other great Russian musicians of the 20th century. Even now I find it impossible not to be a little awe-struck by the presence of an iconic individual and the necessity to get him to talk into my tape recorder. At the end, I confessed that the cello is my favourite instrument and that if I had my time over again, that's what I would play (I've never tried it, though used to play the violin rather badly). He promptly declared that, should I ever take it up, I should let him know and he would be my teacher.
******MELT!!!!******
Thence home to write...or so I thought.
The Waterloo & City line shuttles one stop, from Bank to Waterloo, in 5 minutes. Normally. Today my train promptly broke down, sat in the tunnel for about 40 minutes and proved 'dangerous to move'. So they drafted in a train behind, moved everyone onto it and took us back to Bank to find an Alternative Route. When I finally got to Waterloo, nothing was moving there either - there was a fallen tree on a line. Today was a little wet and windy. You'd think that the one thing Britain would be able to cope with is rain...but no... Eventually I found a train whose driver had, remarkably, turned up. Got as far as Richmond, where Tom kindly fetched me. Then we sat in traffic for half an hour. Total journey time Barbican-to-sunny-Sheen: 2hrs 30mins. That was my afternoon, and my priority now is swallowing a large glass of strong red wine, rather than writing about the subtle legacy of my favourite French genius.
Perhaps it's time to take up the cello, move to Moscow and study with Maestro instead. You don't get an offer like that every day. And I understand the Moscow metro system is excellent.
This morning I trotted off to the Barbican to interview Rostropovich. I'd met him very briefly in Vilnius - he was staying in the same hotel as me and I accosted him as 'Maestro' (which is what everyone seems to call him) when I spotted him waiting for the lift one afternoon. What a charmer he is, apart from being everyone's hero and a direct link to Prokofiev, Shostakovich and most other great Russian musicians of the 20th century. Even now I find it impossible not to be a little awe-struck by the presence of an iconic individual and the necessity to get him to talk into my tape recorder. At the end, I confessed that the cello is my favourite instrument and that if I had my time over again, that's what I would play (I've never tried it, though used to play the violin rather badly). He promptly declared that, should I ever take it up, I should let him know and he would be my teacher.
******MELT!!!!******
Thence home to write...or so I thought.
The Waterloo & City line shuttles one stop, from Bank to Waterloo, in 5 minutes. Normally. Today my train promptly broke down, sat in the tunnel for about 40 minutes and proved 'dangerous to move'. So they drafted in a train behind, moved everyone onto it and took us back to Bank to find an Alternative Route. When I finally got to Waterloo, nothing was moving there either - there was a fallen tree on a line. Today was a little wet and windy. You'd think that the one thing Britain would be able to cope with is rain...but no... Eventually I found a train whose driver had, remarkably, turned up. Got as far as Richmond, where Tom kindly fetched me. Then we sat in traffic for half an hour. Total journey time Barbican-to-sunny-Sheen: 2hrs 30mins. That was my afternoon, and my priority now is swallowing a large glass of strong red wine, rather than writing about the subtle legacy of my favourite French genius.
Perhaps it's time to take up the cello, move to Moscow and study with Maestro instead. You don't get an offer like that every day. And I understand the Moscow metro system is excellent.
Sunday, July 04, 2004
Thoughts about both ends of the spectrum
I've had some extreme experiences in the past week. Back from Vilnius, I plunged straight into training for something which, if I'm accepted at the end, will be a useful new string to my bow: examining for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music. Training at this stage consists of a number of days spent with a 'real' examiner, out on the road marking 'real' exams. The last couple of days, I've trecked off at crack of dawn to do this. It's a real challenge, hard work and very interesting too.
Perhaps the nicest exams are the 'preparatory tests' - sessions for teenies who have been playing for just a few months. On Thursday we had a string of nine little violin players, aged somewhere between six and eight, taking this informal test. They have to play three tunes from memory, then two pieces which the examiner has to accompany, and then do some 'listening games' (transformed, at Grade 1, into aural tests) involving clapping, singing and listening. That day, we had a grand piano. It struck me that many kids have never seen inside one before. Instead of concentrating on their clapping along while I played, several of the kids stood beside the piano with their eyes on stalks and their mouths open as they watched the hammers going up and down!
It's fabulous to watch and listen to world-class string players like Philippe and Nobuko, their bows going hell-for-leather like rapiers, their tones projecting unique personalities and eloquent expression right to the back of Vilnius's Filharmonja. But even they were once kids who, one day, picked up a small violin for the first time. Everyone has to start somewhere. I'm learning so much from this training: you can see at once which children have been well taught and which haven't (if I had kids and lived in north London, I'd now know exactly which piano teacher to send them to!). It's sometimes said that all children are musical - but it does appear to be true that some have a more natural flair, a sharper ear, a more inherent sense of rhythm, than others.
Yesterday my brother invited me to lunch with him, his very pregnant girlfriend and some friends of theirs who have two tiny children. Feeling a tad out of things on the talk about kiddies, I sat down at the piano and tinkled away at some Chopin. Result: a fascinated two-year-old, wanting to have a go at making a noise on the keyboard. Most small children do seem to be fascinated by music and musical instruments; the challenge must be how to make it part of their lives before some stupid bigger kid at school tells them that music isn't cool. Music IS cool. Music is the coolest thing on earth - as boys sometimes discover when they hit their teens and want to impress girls. (Listen, lads, nothing pulls the girls like playing a musical instrument well. Especially the violin... or, um, is that just me?!) But by the time they realise this, it's usually too late.
Here's a little exhortation to parents who want their kids to be musical. Don't leave it to school to do it for you, because it won't happen (at least, not in Britain!). Instead, play music at home every day. Play music morning and night, on the CD player or the radio or, preferably, play it yourself on a real live musical instrument. Make it an essential part of your own life while your children are still babies, and soon they won't be able to do without it either.
Perhaps the nicest exams are the 'preparatory tests' - sessions for teenies who have been playing for just a few months. On Thursday we had a string of nine little violin players, aged somewhere between six and eight, taking this informal test. They have to play three tunes from memory, then two pieces which the examiner has to accompany, and then do some 'listening games' (transformed, at Grade 1, into aural tests) involving clapping, singing and listening. That day, we had a grand piano. It struck me that many kids have never seen inside one before. Instead of concentrating on their clapping along while I played, several of the kids stood beside the piano with their eyes on stalks and their mouths open as they watched the hammers going up and down!
It's fabulous to watch and listen to world-class string players like Philippe and Nobuko, their bows going hell-for-leather like rapiers, their tones projecting unique personalities and eloquent expression right to the back of Vilnius's Filharmonja. But even they were once kids who, one day, picked up a small violin for the first time. Everyone has to start somewhere. I'm learning so much from this training: you can see at once which children have been well taught and which haven't (if I had kids and lived in north London, I'd now know exactly which piano teacher to send them to!). It's sometimes said that all children are musical - but it does appear to be true that some have a more natural flair, a sharper ear, a more inherent sense of rhythm, than others.
Yesterday my brother invited me to lunch with him, his very pregnant girlfriend and some friends of theirs who have two tiny children. Feeling a tad out of things on the talk about kiddies, I sat down at the piano and tinkled away at some Chopin. Result: a fascinated two-year-old, wanting to have a go at making a noise on the keyboard. Most small children do seem to be fascinated by music and musical instruments; the challenge must be how to make it part of their lives before some stupid bigger kid at school tells them that music isn't cool. Music IS cool. Music is the coolest thing on earth - as boys sometimes discover when they hit their teens and want to impress girls. (Listen, lads, nothing pulls the girls like playing a musical instrument well. Especially the violin... or, um, is that just me?!) But by the time they realise this, it's usually too late.
Here's a little exhortation to parents who want their kids to be musical. Don't leave it to school to do it for you, because it won't happen (at least, not in Britain!). Instead, play music at home every day. Play music morning and night, on the CD player or the radio or, preferably, play it yourself on a real live musical instrument. Make it an essential part of your own life while your children are still babies, and soon they won't be able to do without it either.
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Vibrato in Vilnius
Back from Vilnius, reeling a bit. Four incredibly intense days of walking, looking, listening, talking, tasting, paying tribute... I'll be writing about it 'properly', but here are some initial impressions.
I went on the invitation of the Vilnius Festival, thanks (of course) to Philippe Graffin who, with Nobuko Imai, was playing the new Duo Concertante for violin, viola and orchestra by Vytautas Barkauskas. There is a great deal of interest in the place at the moment thanks to Lithuania's accession to the EU, so it seemed a marvellous 'diem' to 'carpe'.
Vilnius is a city divided both physically and mentally. The old town, paradoxically, seems newest. It has been lovingly renovated with WHF grants and is now full of souvenir shops, little restaurants and such like, including my hotel, the Stikliai, which was utterly gorgeous (though we had a day of heavy rain and my ceiling developed 3 leaks!). In a few years' time - not many - there is going to be a tourist boom here. Beyond the old city, however, the town still seems partly immured in 1980s Russia.
The most moving event, among many, was the celebration after the Duo Concertante concert on Sunday evening. 'Vytas' Barkauskas and his wife, Svetlana, invited a number of us back to their flat, where they took enormous pride in gathering and entertaining their friends, far more than most British people generally do. Svetlana prepared masses of food, with sushi in Nobuko's honour and Baron Philippe de Rothschild wine in Philippe's, not to mention an incredible home-made poppyseed cake with DUO written on it in large letters - a recipe, apparently, of 'Vytas's grandmother's. There were toasts, celebrations and conversations in an extraordinary mix of languages (Lithuanian, English, French, German, Russian, Japanese, you name it) until almost 2am. I experienced this kind of warmth and hospitality in Kiev ten years ago. It's a special approach to life: soulful, heartfelt and deeply touching. Barkauskas and I managed to communicate in French, more or less; but when we said goodbye on the last day and I apologised for my lousy vocabulary, he declared that he understands everything with his eyes, head and heart.
On Monday, however, I went to the Jewish Museum. Emerged deeply upset. We've all seen pictures and documents of the Holocaust, but being in a place where it happened - a place very different from Berlin, where memorials and rebuilding have transformed the city - made it feel desperately close. The hotel's immediate vicinity used to be the ghetto. I found the statue of my ancestor the Gaon 20 yards up the road - apparently in the middle of nowhere, but a map in the museum revealed that this open area of ill-kempt grass and Soviet-era offices was where the Great Synagogue once stood. It seated more than 3000 people and was the heart of Jewish life in the town that for so long was a renowned centre of culture, learning and art. The Jerusalem of the North. It was burned down by the Nazis and its ruins were then flattened by the Russians. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were shot in the woods at nearby Ponar.
The museum evidently runs on a shoestring. You can visit Ponar, but I didn't want to. The Gaon, topical though his memorial may be, is tricky to find. My impression of modern-day Lithuanians is that they don't know much about any of this, aren't interested and don't really see why they should be. After all, goes the argument, they were victims too (they were, of course). Even the Mr Big of the music world there - someone who has initiated a couple of festivals of Jewish music and art - said that to them, that world is something historical. Which, I guess, means something that isn't alive any longer. I met and interviewed Vilnius's one Jewish composer, Anatolijus Senderovas, who is writing a ballet score for next year's festival and is a most delightful man. By that time I felt very glad to see him.
They're missing a trick - for one thing, they could make more of their most famous musical son, one Jascha Heifetz. The stage of the Filharmonja, where Philippe and Nobuko played their new piece, was where little Jascha aged about seven made his debut. The morning before we left, several of us went to find Heifetz's birthplace, which Philippe had tracked down. No marking; no celebration. Behind the house, some ancient stables. Heifetz was not perceived as Lithuanian. Therefore, little credit is given to him - other than by crazy journalists, violinists and record producers on bizarre pilgrimmages to his back yard.
Vilnius is full of churches, packed to the rafters on Sunday morning. There is one synagogue - currently closed, apparently because of infighting in the Jewish community.
Food...Dumplings R Us. Potato pancakes R Us too...effectively latkes. Delicious, but a little goes a long way and sits heavy on the stomach. My favourite local food: cold borscht with hot potatoes. My favourite meal experienced in Vilnius: of all things, a Japanese feast on Saturday night with the Barkauskases, Philippe, Nobuko & Simon Foster. A totally international group of six people, only two of whom shared a first language (Svetlana's is Ukranian), eating Japanese food in Lithuania!
The whole trip was an experience that I will remember vividly for the rest of my life. It was part fairy tale, part nightmare, part glorious, part just all too much... More about it will emerge in due course as I start writing my articles.
I went on the invitation of the Vilnius Festival, thanks (of course) to Philippe Graffin who, with Nobuko Imai, was playing the new Duo Concertante for violin, viola and orchestra by Vytautas Barkauskas. There is a great deal of interest in the place at the moment thanks to Lithuania's accession to the EU, so it seemed a marvellous 'diem' to 'carpe'.
Vilnius is a city divided both physically and mentally. The old town, paradoxically, seems newest. It has been lovingly renovated with WHF grants and is now full of souvenir shops, little restaurants and such like, including my hotel, the Stikliai, which was utterly gorgeous (though we had a day of heavy rain and my ceiling developed 3 leaks!). In a few years' time - not many - there is going to be a tourist boom here. Beyond the old city, however, the town still seems partly immured in 1980s Russia.
The most moving event, among many, was the celebration after the Duo Concertante concert on Sunday evening. 'Vytas' Barkauskas and his wife, Svetlana, invited a number of us back to their flat, where they took enormous pride in gathering and entertaining their friends, far more than most British people generally do. Svetlana prepared masses of food, with sushi in Nobuko's honour and Baron Philippe de Rothschild wine in Philippe's, not to mention an incredible home-made poppyseed cake with DUO written on it in large letters - a recipe, apparently, of 'Vytas's grandmother's. There were toasts, celebrations and conversations in an extraordinary mix of languages (Lithuanian, English, French, German, Russian, Japanese, you name it) until almost 2am. I experienced this kind of warmth and hospitality in Kiev ten years ago. It's a special approach to life: soulful, heartfelt and deeply touching. Barkauskas and I managed to communicate in French, more or less; but when we said goodbye on the last day and I apologised for my lousy vocabulary, he declared that he understands everything with his eyes, head and heart.
On Monday, however, I went to the Jewish Museum. Emerged deeply upset. We've all seen pictures and documents of the Holocaust, but being in a place where it happened - a place very different from Berlin, where memorials and rebuilding have transformed the city - made it feel desperately close. The hotel's immediate vicinity used to be the ghetto. I found the statue of my ancestor the Gaon 20 yards up the road - apparently in the middle of nowhere, but a map in the museum revealed that this open area of ill-kempt grass and Soviet-era offices was where the Great Synagogue once stood. It seated more than 3000 people and was the heart of Jewish life in the town that for so long was a renowned centre of culture, learning and art. The Jerusalem of the North. It was burned down by the Nazis and its ruins were then flattened by the Russians. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were shot in the woods at nearby Ponar.
The museum evidently runs on a shoestring. You can visit Ponar, but I didn't want to. The Gaon, topical though his memorial may be, is tricky to find. My impression of modern-day Lithuanians is that they don't know much about any of this, aren't interested and don't really see why they should be. After all, goes the argument, they were victims too (they were, of course). Even the Mr Big of the music world there - someone who has initiated a couple of festivals of Jewish music and art - said that to them, that world is something historical. Which, I guess, means something that isn't alive any longer. I met and interviewed Vilnius's one Jewish composer, Anatolijus Senderovas, who is writing a ballet score for next year's festival and is a most delightful man. By that time I felt very glad to see him.
They're missing a trick - for one thing, they could make more of their most famous musical son, one Jascha Heifetz. The stage of the Filharmonja, where Philippe and Nobuko played their new piece, was where little Jascha aged about seven made his debut. The morning before we left, several of us went to find Heifetz's birthplace, which Philippe had tracked down. No marking; no celebration. Behind the house, some ancient stables. Heifetz was not perceived as Lithuanian. Therefore, little credit is given to him - other than by crazy journalists, violinists and record producers on bizarre pilgrimmages to his back yard.
Vilnius is full of churches, packed to the rafters on Sunday morning. There is one synagogue - currently closed, apparently because of infighting in the Jewish community.
Food...Dumplings R Us. Potato pancakes R Us too...effectively latkes. Delicious, but a little goes a long way and sits heavy on the stomach. My favourite local food: cold borscht with hot potatoes. My favourite meal experienced in Vilnius: of all things, a Japanese feast on Saturday night with the Barkauskases, Philippe, Nobuko & Simon Foster. A totally international group of six people, only two of whom shared a first language (Svetlana's is Ukranian), eating Japanese food in Lithuania!
The whole trip was an experience that I will remember vividly for the rest of my life. It was part fairy tale, part nightmare, part glorious, part just all too much... More about it will emerge in due course as I start writing my articles.
Friday, June 25, 2004
Bravo Bizet
I'm off to Vilnius in a few minutes. But I just had to pause to write something about how completely bloody marvellous Bizet is.
Two things brought on this sudden rush of enthusiasm yesterday. First, I'm learning the accompaniment to the Flower Song from Carmen, which I have to play in a concert in Sussex in a few weeks' time with a marvellous young singer called Andrew Clark. It's meant to be a Spanish evening - OK, the Flower Song is as francais as they come, but we're talking Carmen here, so we think we can get away with it. I know the thing backwards by ear, but to play it is totally different: one gets under the music's skin and suddenly its immense skill, its perfect expression, its economy and precision of means and all those fabulous and extraordinarily original harmonies come leaping out as if I've never noticed them before. The man was a first-rate master.
Later yesterday afternoon I was on my way to an interview in Soho and was a bit early, so I settled down in Starbucks for some iced tea. Then noticed that the Muzak was being sung in French. How nice, how Euro-friendly, how refreshing, I thought - a French crooner, albeit a rather bad one. Then - oops - I recognised the tune. Pearl Fishers Duet, of course. Hence probably Bocelli and pal. First thought: how strange that opera can be deemed accessible to the masses only if badly sung and accompanied by some dreadful pootly arrangements instead of the real thing. Second thought: poor old Bizet, if only he could have known that one day people would be hearing his music in Starbucks in Soho. Perhaps, in some way, that proves my earlier point: the man was a first-rate master and his music is going to live and live and LIVE.
OK, time to go get that plane. Back Tuesday, ciaociao til then.
Two things brought on this sudden rush of enthusiasm yesterday. First, I'm learning the accompaniment to the Flower Song from Carmen, which I have to play in a concert in Sussex in a few weeks' time with a marvellous young singer called Andrew Clark. It's meant to be a Spanish evening - OK, the Flower Song is as francais as they come, but we're talking Carmen here, so we think we can get away with it. I know the thing backwards by ear, but to play it is totally different: one gets under the music's skin and suddenly its immense skill, its perfect expression, its economy and precision of means and all those fabulous and extraordinarily original harmonies come leaping out as if I've never noticed them before. The man was a first-rate master.
Later yesterday afternoon I was on my way to an interview in Soho and was a bit early, so I settled down in Starbucks for some iced tea. Then noticed that the Muzak was being sung in French. How nice, how Euro-friendly, how refreshing, I thought - a French crooner, albeit a rather bad one. Then - oops - I recognised the tune. Pearl Fishers Duet, of course. Hence probably Bocelli and pal. First thought: how strange that opera can be deemed accessible to the masses only if badly sung and accompanied by some dreadful pootly arrangements instead of the real thing. Second thought: poor old Bizet, if only he could have known that one day people would be hearing his music in Starbucks in Soho. Perhaps, in some way, that proves my earlier point: the man was a first-rate master and his music is going to live and live and LIVE.
OK, time to go get that plane. Back Tuesday, ciaociao til then.
Friday, June 18, 2004
Orange juice, freshly squeezed, with bits
The freelance life often feels like juggling oranges. You have two hands and six oranges and you have to keep them all in smooth motion, without dropping or squishing any. The great advantage of this peculiar existence is that if one of the oranges turns mouldy, you have five left that are still OK and room to bring in a fresh one, if and when you can pick it up.
Journalism, especially in such an 'elitist' field as music, is an uncertain game that involves a lot of frustrated, ambitious, egotistical people (yeah, me too...) who may behave in unpredictable ways. Sometimes they do so at the top of major decision-making corporations, which is the scariest thing of all. For instance, the announcement that BBC Music Magazine is to be shifted lock, stock but no staff to Bristol has hit us freelancers hard in the goolies. Not that the staff have been sacked. They've merely been informed that that is what's happening to the mag and they can go with it if they want to. Unfortunately, they mostly don't.
Bristol is a lovely city: trendy, attractive, nice place to raise a family etc etc. But it's not exactly the centre of the musical universe and getting to London by train takes an hour and three quarters. So far, no editor has appeared on the scene. Daniel Jaffe, author of the Phaidon biography of Prokofiev, has bravely accepted the Reviews Editor post, but as far as I'm aware, that's it. Nobody knows quite what the future will hold.
Meanwhile I am juggling frantically with the more certain oranges in life. This week I have to review a bunch of CDs, write an article about Music for Youth for an arts-in-the-community publication, play with Tom in a charity concert tomorrow afternoon, see 'Beloved Clara' at Chelsea on Sunday afternoon, interview a top music film-maker, prepare material for two substantial articles for said BBC Magazine and organise my interviewing schedule for a five-day trip to the Vilnius Festival in Lithuania next Friday. I have to fit in meetings, a haircut and a full day's training on 23rd for a new string to my bow (of which more if I get through). Definitely feeling squeezed.
But there's good news amid the stress: 'Beloved Clara' got picked up from my Independent article by BBC R4 Women's Hour - Lucy is going to be interviewed by Martha Kearney today and the broadcast will be tomorrow (Saturday) afternoon to trail Chelsea.
Also, I'm thrilled to bits about going to Vilnius. I'm going to find my roots: I'm informed that I had an ancestor in 18th century Vilna named the Vilna Gaon, a famous rabbi, Talmudic scholar and community leader. More usefully, I am going to interview the festival directors and a wonderful composer named Vytautas Barkaukas, whose new double concerto is being played in the festival by Nobuko Imai and Philippe Graffin (who I must thank profusely for suggesting that I go there and setting up the contacts for me. Listen, Philippe, if you ever get tired of playing the violin, I shall appoint you my literary agent!).
Apparently 'thank you' in Lithuanian sounds like someone sneezing. Achoo. Or something like that. More about this after I've been there.
Journalism, especially in such an 'elitist' field as music, is an uncertain game that involves a lot of frustrated, ambitious, egotistical people (yeah, me too...) who may behave in unpredictable ways. Sometimes they do so at the top of major decision-making corporations, which is the scariest thing of all. For instance, the announcement that BBC Music Magazine is to be shifted lock, stock but no staff to Bristol has hit us freelancers hard in the goolies. Not that the staff have been sacked. They've merely been informed that that is what's happening to the mag and they can go with it if they want to. Unfortunately, they mostly don't.
Bristol is a lovely city: trendy, attractive, nice place to raise a family etc etc. But it's not exactly the centre of the musical universe and getting to London by train takes an hour and three quarters. So far, no editor has appeared on the scene. Daniel Jaffe, author of the Phaidon biography of Prokofiev, has bravely accepted the Reviews Editor post, but as far as I'm aware, that's it. Nobody knows quite what the future will hold.
Meanwhile I am juggling frantically with the more certain oranges in life. This week I have to review a bunch of CDs, write an article about Music for Youth for an arts-in-the-community publication, play with Tom in a charity concert tomorrow afternoon, see 'Beloved Clara' at Chelsea on Sunday afternoon, interview a top music film-maker, prepare material for two substantial articles for said BBC Magazine and organise my interviewing schedule for a five-day trip to the Vilnius Festival in Lithuania next Friday. I have to fit in meetings, a haircut and a full day's training on 23rd for a new string to my bow (of which more if I get through). Definitely feeling squeezed.
But there's good news amid the stress: 'Beloved Clara' got picked up from my Independent article by BBC R4 Women's Hour - Lucy is going to be interviewed by Martha Kearney today and the broadcast will be tomorrow (Saturday) afternoon to trail Chelsea.
Also, I'm thrilled to bits about going to Vilnius. I'm going to find my roots: I'm informed that I had an ancestor in 18th century Vilna named the Vilna Gaon, a famous rabbi, Talmudic scholar and community leader. More usefully, I am going to interview the festival directors and a wonderful composer named Vytautas Barkaukas, whose new double concerto is being played in the festival by Nobuko Imai and Philippe Graffin (who I must thank profusely for suggesting that I go there and setting up the contacts for me. Listen, Philippe, if you ever get tired of playing the violin, I shall appoint you my literary agent!).
Apparently 'thank you' in Lithuanian sounds like someone sneezing. Achoo. Or something like that. More about this after I've been there.
Wednesday, June 16, 2004
Back to the future II
Over three weeks on, my back is still hurting. One of Tom's medical friends in Denmark thinks I may have a slipped disc. I can't help wondering whether CD reviewers are particularly prone to this condition?!?
Monday, June 14, 2004
Yay for the global village
Just back from a long weekend in Denmark, celebrating our sixth wedding anniversary with friends in Aarhus. Tom's first job was in the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra, back in the early 1980s. He still speaks the language fluently (incredible) and loves going back. It's a delightful place, pretty and friendly, gentle and fun to be in - and the northern light is sharp and silvery and marvellous, especially at this time of year. We spent yesterday celebrating with friends who are respectively a nurse (Danish), a microbiologist (Danish) and a radiologist (originally Canadian) - walking by the sea and enjoying a bottle or two of champagne in the afternoon on a deserted beach.
In this laid-back, international context, it was depressing to hear about the strides made by the UK Independence Party in the elections the other day. The world has become such a small place that you really can't turn the clock back and pretend that it's unnecessary to team up with anybody but your own little island and its island mentality. I feel very sorry for people who can't see past the end of their own noses. They don't know what they're missing.
In the musical sphere, we're better placed than most to appreciate the benefits of the increasingly international society. Tom's orchestra has recently appointed a Hungarian, a Chinese girl, a Spaniard, someone from Holland, a French violinist, a South African and several Russians. There are several Germans already, an Italian or two and a particularly charming and infamous Brazilian cellist who seems to get tickets for the finals of every World Cup. For Glyndebourne, take all of this, add singers and stir well. Everyone is pulling together towards the same end. Everyone has concerns in common and friends are made across every boundary. Hence boundaries cease to exist.
I'm losing track of the number of international couples that we know. My brother is about to marry an Italian. Our friend Paul Lewis, hotshot British pianist, has just married the Norwegian cellist of the Vertavo Quartet, Bjorg Vaernes - many congratulations to them!! We know couples who are French and American, Russian and Canadian, Tartar and Welsh. And countless others. That's one of the best things about the modern western world: this cultural exchange is endlessly stimulating.
As it happens, I love England. I am proud of our heritage in cathedrals, great houses, beautiful gardens, pretty villages, literature, certain kinds of music, cricket on the green etc etc. But, being privileged enough to live among music and musicians, I don't see any sign of the threat that so many people in this country think that Europe poses.
When Tom moved to Aarhus, he'd spent the past few years at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, living in a cramped bedsit where he had to put coins into a meter to get any heating. He practised all the time and lived on peanut butter sandwiches and orange juice. Manchester in those days was a pretty vile place, grimy and depressed and gloomy. Then he got his job in Aarhus and suddenly found himself in a clear-aired, friendly, clean environment with a thriving cafe society, an easy-going population, lots of bicycles and thousands of Danish blondes. He thought he'd died and gone to heaven.
ALSO - ARTICLE IN TODAY'S 'INDEPENDENT' by yrs truly, about Beloved Clara and the increasing spate of music & words projects going on. Link on the sidebar.
In this laid-back, international context, it was depressing to hear about the strides made by the UK Independence Party in the elections the other day. The world has become such a small place that you really can't turn the clock back and pretend that it's unnecessary to team up with anybody but your own little island and its island mentality. I feel very sorry for people who can't see past the end of their own noses. They don't know what they're missing.
In the musical sphere, we're better placed than most to appreciate the benefits of the increasingly international society. Tom's orchestra has recently appointed a Hungarian, a Chinese girl, a Spaniard, someone from Holland, a French violinist, a South African and several Russians. There are several Germans already, an Italian or two and a particularly charming and infamous Brazilian cellist who seems to get tickets for the finals of every World Cup. For Glyndebourne, take all of this, add singers and stir well. Everyone is pulling together towards the same end. Everyone has concerns in common and friends are made across every boundary. Hence boundaries cease to exist.
I'm losing track of the number of international couples that we know. My brother is about to marry an Italian. Our friend Paul Lewis, hotshot British pianist, has just married the Norwegian cellist of the Vertavo Quartet, Bjorg Vaernes - many congratulations to them!! We know couples who are French and American, Russian and Canadian, Tartar and Welsh. And countless others. That's one of the best things about the modern western world: this cultural exchange is endlessly stimulating.
As it happens, I love England. I am proud of our heritage in cathedrals, great houses, beautiful gardens, pretty villages, literature, certain kinds of music, cricket on the green etc etc. But, being privileged enough to live among music and musicians, I don't see any sign of the threat that so many people in this country think that Europe poses.
When Tom moved to Aarhus, he'd spent the past few years at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, living in a cramped bedsit where he had to put coins into a meter to get any heating. He practised all the time and lived on peanut butter sandwiches and orange juice. Manchester in those days was a pretty vile place, grimy and depressed and gloomy. Then he got his job in Aarhus and suddenly found himself in a clear-aired, friendly, clean environment with a thriving cafe society, an easy-going population, lots of bicycles and thousands of Danish blondes. He thought he'd died and gone to heaven.
ALSO - ARTICLE IN TODAY'S 'INDEPENDENT' by yrs truly, about Beloved Clara and the increasing spate of music & words projects going on. Link on the sidebar.
Thursday, June 10, 2004
Epiphany time
Since my fellow music-bloggers are doing their musical epiphanies at the moment, I thought I'd do some too.
It's not easy, because I learned most of my music rather subconsciously. My father, who was a neuropathologist, lived for music when he wasn't at work and used to have BBC Radio 3 on all the time, from 7am onwards. So over breakfast before school I'd probably have absorbed the Dvorak Czech Suite, a Mozart concerto, a Haydn symphony, usually conducted by Dorati - ah, those were the days! - and a piece or two of Debussy or Saint-Saens. I've always been fortunate in having a good aural memory (though I'm fairly useless on visual imagination) so the BBC provided me with a basis for My Life Since Then that has proved more than a bit useful.
Dad also used to take me to the Conway Hall chamber music concerts on Sunday evenings, where I got to know the string quartet repertoire, plus various piano quintets, a trio or three and the Ravel Introduction and Allegro. The latter must have made a big impression because I have a vivid memory of watching Marisa Robles and being transfixed by the sounds she was conjuring out of the angelic contraption under her hands. I still adore the piece. The Conway Hall has a text on its proscenium arch that says TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE. Interesting contemplation material...
More vivid still, however, was something I once heard in the car coming home from the Conway Hall when I was eight. We'd come out from some string quartet performance, got in the car, Dad of course switched on R3 - and out poured the most astonishing sound. A soprano singing passionately in a weird language. An oboe; throbbing off-beat strings; and then a horn melody that transported me to a world I didn't know existed. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard, bar nothing, and I was left (so they told me) speechless.I already loved Tchaikovsky ballet music, but I'd never heard of Eugene Onegin. This was the Letter Scene. Now, however much I enjoy my French stuff, however far I travel to see Korngold's Die tote Stadt and however often I sing through the whole of The Magic Flute in my mind, there is still no opera dearer to me than Eugene Onegin.
I sometimes wonder what my father would think of Radio 3 today if he was still alive.
It's not easy, because I learned most of my music rather subconsciously. My father, who was a neuropathologist, lived for music when he wasn't at work and used to have BBC Radio 3 on all the time, from 7am onwards. So over breakfast before school I'd probably have absorbed the Dvorak Czech Suite, a Mozart concerto, a Haydn symphony, usually conducted by Dorati - ah, those were the days! - and a piece or two of Debussy or Saint-Saens. I've always been fortunate in having a good aural memory (though I'm fairly useless on visual imagination) so the BBC provided me with a basis for My Life Since Then that has proved more than a bit useful.
Dad also used to take me to the Conway Hall chamber music concerts on Sunday evenings, where I got to know the string quartet repertoire, plus various piano quintets, a trio or three and the Ravel Introduction and Allegro. The latter must have made a big impression because I have a vivid memory of watching Marisa Robles and being transfixed by the sounds she was conjuring out of the angelic contraption under her hands. I still adore the piece. The Conway Hall has a text on its proscenium arch that says TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE. Interesting contemplation material...
More vivid still, however, was something I once heard in the car coming home from the Conway Hall when I was eight. We'd come out from some string quartet performance, got in the car, Dad of course switched on R3 - and out poured the most astonishing sound. A soprano singing passionately in a weird language. An oboe; throbbing off-beat strings; and then a horn melody that transported me to a world I didn't know existed. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard, bar nothing, and I was left (so they told me) speechless.I already loved Tchaikovsky ballet music, but I'd never heard of Eugene Onegin. This was the Letter Scene. Now, however much I enjoy my French stuff, however far I travel to see Korngold's Die tote Stadt and however often I sing through the whole of The Magic Flute in my mind, there is still no opera dearer to me than Eugene Onegin.
I sometimes wonder what my father would think of Radio 3 today if he was still alive.
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
Pelleas premonitions
Attention everyone who wants to go to Glyndebourne: there are tickets =still available for Pelleas et Melisande. It's an extraordinary production with world-class singing by John Tomlinson et al and the LPO at its absolute finest under Louis Langree. And you can picnic in the interval. Book NOW - more info on the website, link on the sidebar.
What I want to know is why there are tickets. Usually you can get into Glyndebourne for neither love nor money. (Well, sometimes love, but not always - Tristan was chockablock last year and I only saw the dress rehearsal.) This year, Carmen and The Magic Flute are sold out. But not the Debussy. Nor, I believe, Jenufa or Rodelinda.
Pelleas is not easy listening. It's unbelievably beautiful, detailed, hypnotic, magical, but it's not strong on The Big Tune. It doesn't get played on Classic FM. Pelleas is like no other opera on earth, despite a few wisps of Tristan and Parsifal creeping in on occasion. It's haut-Symbolism, in which every image represents a range of unspoken allusions. That is partly why I love it so much: every time you hear it you can hear something new, something you didn't quite get a handle on before. Could it be that it is entirely lost on 85 per cent of Glyndebourne-goers?
In our consumer age, it often seems to me that people like to sit in an opera house and consume the opera. They pay their money and they take in the returns. Heaven forfend that they should do any spadework to make sure they get the most out of what they see. Why should anyone have to make an effort after paying £100 for a ticket? "I don't think the producer has read the synopsis," was one haughty comment I heard on the way out of the show the other day (Vick's circular flashback trick works wonders on Pelleas, but you can only see that if you have heard the word Symbolism before). I remember going round a spectacular Art Nouveau exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum a few years ago and hearing a woman complaining to her companion about the use of the word 'sensibility' in one of the commentaries on the wall. She didn't know what it meant - worse, she didn't see why she should.
With music education stripped to bare minimum, hundreds of TV channels offering nothing worth watching and, hovering over everything like great vultures, the mind-numbing curses of the Cool and the Correct, a masterpiece like Pelleas doesn't stand much chance. Cultural 'Sensibility' - that word one shouldn't use because someone mightn't know its meaning - is under a general anaesthetic. If I have the chance to see this production of Pelleas again, I shall do so - because God alone knows when there will be another opportunity. Are operas like this going to vanish from our stages because of audience indolence?
What I want to know is why there are tickets. Usually you can get into Glyndebourne for neither love nor money. (Well, sometimes love, but not always - Tristan was chockablock last year and I only saw the dress rehearsal.) This year, Carmen and The Magic Flute are sold out. But not the Debussy. Nor, I believe, Jenufa or Rodelinda.
Pelleas is not easy listening. It's unbelievably beautiful, detailed, hypnotic, magical, but it's not strong on The Big Tune. It doesn't get played on Classic FM. Pelleas is like no other opera on earth, despite a few wisps of Tristan and Parsifal creeping in on occasion. It's haut-Symbolism, in which every image represents a range of unspoken allusions. That is partly why I love it so much: every time you hear it you can hear something new, something you didn't quite get a handle on before. Could it be that it is entirely lost on 85 per cent of Glyndebourne-goers?
In our consumer age, it often seems to me that people like to sit in an opera house and consume the opera. They pay their money and they take in the returns. Heaven forfend that they should do any spadework to make sure they get the most out of what they see. Why should anyone have to make an effort after paying £100 for a ticket? "I don't think the producer has read the synopsis," was one haughty comment I heard on the way out of the show the other day (Vick's circular flashback trick works wonders on Pelleas, but you can only see that if you have heard the word Symbolism before). I remember going round a spectacular Art Nouveau exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum a few years ago and hearing a woman complaining to her companion about the use of the word 'sensibility' in one of the commentaries on the wall. She didn't know what it meant - worse, she didn't see why she should.
With music education stripped to bare minimum, hundreds of TV channels offering nothing worth watching and, hovering over everything like great vultures, the mind-numbing curses of the Cool and the Correct, a masterpiece like Pelleas doesn't stand much chance. Cultural 'Sensibility' - that word one shouldn't use because someone mightn't know its meaning - is under a general anaesthetic. If I have the chance to see this production of Pelleas again, I shall do so - because God alone knows when there will be another opportunity. Are operas like this going to vanish from our stages because of audience indolence?
Wednesday, June 02, 2004
Publishers be damned...
I've just been reading Alex Ross's article 'Listen to this' from The New Yorker, which you can find on his Blog. It's a superbly written, perceptive, spot-on critique of the concepts and preconceptions that are too often associated with the word 'classical'; and it serves to underline several gripes I have with the outside world's attitude to 'us', especially the attitude of publishers and bookshops.
As Alex points out, when people hear the word 'classical', they think 'dead'. Music is alive. Try telling this to the publishers of books on music. Browsing through the few remaining shelves in shops like Waterstones and Books Etc devoted to music - almost all have cut back to the bare minimum - I look at the offerings and wonder what planet these people are on. One noteworthy thing about Alex's aforementioned article is that it is so well written. There are not many writers on music with such a fine grasp of style. That's possibly why, when they exist, they get snapped up by a public that does have a hunger for intelligent writing about culture in general. Norman Lebrecht also springs to mind - even if what he says raises your blood pressure, the way he says it is so well-turned that some of us forgive him virtually anything.
Music begins where words end. Therefore expressing the essence of a musical experience in words is unlikely to be adequate. Usually it is rather worse. The bookshelves, such as they are, feature volumes intended for university libraries and perhaps the private collections of what we in Britain commonly call 'anoraks'. Publishers perceive a specialist market for books on music in which anything basically 'accessible' (awful word) or 'readable' is wide of the mark. At the opposite extreme, the number of books on classical music addressed in their titles to 'dummies' or suchlike is staggeringly large. Publishers seem to think that to want to read about music, you have either to be so intellectual that you can't bear to step outside your ivory tower, or alternatively that you regard yourself as thick. Most of us are neither.
Music books are segregated in the music shops like women in an orthodox shul. I dream of the day when my biography of Korngold will live on a shelf of mainstream biographies rubbing shoulders with Kafka and Kokoschka, and my Faure book will happily cohabit with tracts on Foucault and Flaubert. Composers have made as great a contribution to the history of culture as writers and artists, but are seen as something to be handled with kid gloves, graphs and Schenkerian analyses, kept well away from the superbug infections of the mainstream. Music is boxed out, away from literature, away from art, away from real life. (It is also boxed out of absolutely everything by lazy marketing and promotion departments...) This is not only ridiculous but also damaging.
About a year ago I made a little academic discovery... The full story will be coming out in The Strad later this year. All I can say for now is that this discovery has been lurking in the depths of fin-de-siecle Paris for more than a century, but has so far gone unremarked. Perhaps that is because music, art and literature tend to be studied in isolation from each other. If experts on certain writers also bothered to look at the lives of certain composers who were close to them, this would have been spotted decades ago. And if experts on composers looked in any detail at their contact with the writers in question, who knows what could turn up? About 110 years ago in Paris, these segregations were unheard-of. Chausson was friendly with the artist Odilon Redon. Faure married the daughter of a well-known sculptor. Pauline Viardot virtually lived with Ivan Turgenev, an opera libretto by whom her friend Brahms once rejected (!). Most of them met at each others' salons. I rather enjoy Schenkerian analysis on occasion, but what can it tell us about the way these circles of artists fed off each other's creativity and what cross-fertilisations this could have produced that we enjoy, unknowingly, today?
Here are a few recommendations of books on music that are well written, well researched, serious and still enjoyable to read:
Edward Elgar: a creative life, by Jerrold Northrop Moore
Beyond the Notes, by Susan Tomes (as mentioned the other day)
Parallels and Paradoxes, by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said
Wagner and Philosophy, by Bryan Magee
Tchaikovsky, by David Brown
The Maestro Myth, by Norman Lebrecht
As Alex points out, when people hear the word 'classical', they think 'dead'. Music is alive. Try telling this to the publishers of books on music. Browsing through the few remaining shelves in shops like Waterstones and Books Etc devoted to music - almost all have cut back to the bare minimum - I look at the offerings and wonder what planet these people are on. One noteworthy thing about Alex's aforementioned article is that it is so well written. There are not many writers on music with such a fine grasp of style. That's possibly why, when they exist, they get snapped up by a public that does have a hunger for intelligent writing about culture in general. Norman Lebrecht also springs to mind - even if what he says raises your blood pressure, the way he says it is so well-turned that some of us forgive him virtually anything.
Music begins where words end. Therefore expressing the essence of a musical experience in words is unlikely to be adequate. Usually it is rather worse. The bookshelves, such as they are, feature volumes intended for university libraries and perhaps the private collections of what we in Britain commonly call 'anoraks'. Publishers perceive a specialist market for books on music in which anything basically 'accessible' (awful word) or 'readable' is wide of the mark. At the opposite extreme, the number of books on classical music addressed in their titles to 'dummies' or suchlike is staggeringly large. Publishers seem to think that to want to read about music, you have either to be so intellectual that you can't bear to step outside your ivory tower, or alternatively that you regard yourself as thick. Most of us are neither.
Music books are segregated in the music shops like women in an orthodox shul. I dream of the day when my biography of Korngold will live on a shelf of mainstream biographies rubbing shoulders with Kafka and Kokoschka, and my Faure book will happily cohabit with tracts on Foucault and Flaubert. Composers have made as great a contribution to the history of culture as writers and artists, but are seen as something to be handled with kid gloves, graphs and Schenkerian analyses, kept well away from the superbug infections of the mainstream. Music is boxed out, away from literature, away from art, away from real life. (It is also boxed out of absolutely everything by lazy marketing and promotion departments...) This is not only ridiculous but also damaging.
About a year ago I made a little academic discovery... The full story will be coming out in The Strad later this year. All I can say for now is that this discovery has been lurking in the depths of fin-de-siecle Paris for more than a century, but has so far gone unremarked. Perhaps that is because music, art and literature tend to be studied in isolation from each other. If experts on certain writers also bothered to look at the lives of certain composers who were close to them, this would have been spotted decades ago. And if experts on composers looked in any detail at their contact with the writers in question, who knows what could turn up? About 110 years ago in Paris, these segregations were unheard-of. Chausson was friendly with the artist Odilon Redon. Faure married the daughter of a well-known sculptor. Pauline Viardot virtually lived with Ivan Turgenev, an opera libretto by whom her friend Brahms once rejected (!). Most of them met at each others' salons. I rather enjoy Schenkerian analysis on occasion, but what can it tell us about the way these circles of artists fed off each other's creativity and what cross-fertilisations this could have produced that we enjoy, unknowingly, today?
Here are a few recommendations of books on music that are well written, well researched, serious and still enjoyable to read:
Edward Elgar: a creative life, by Jerrold Northrop Moore
Beyond the Notes, by Susan Tomes (as mentioned the other day)
Parallels and Paradoxes, by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said
Wagner and Philosophy, by Bryan Magee
Tchaikovsky, by David Brown
The Maestro Myth, by Norman Lebrecht
Sunday, May 30, 2004
Back to the future
With apologies to any of you who might believe that the Almighty created the human being Perfect, I have to report that THERE IS A SERIOUS DESIGN FAULT IN THE HUMAN BACK.
Last weekend, in a flurry of 'Beloved Clara' anxiety, I spent three happy hours gardening. Monday morning I woke up and could hardly move. I've done nothing useful this week except lie on my back in 'Alexander Technique' pose trying to straighten out my spine, which isn't broken but feels as if it is. Back pain is vile. It not only scuppers you physically, but also mentally. I've written nothing (except Dulwich blog entry, pretending all was well!), read nothing, listened to nothing, been no further from the house than Waitrose (3 mins gentle stroll) and only watched one French film (Jean de Florette, which I've seen 5 times already).
When things get you down this way, you can become 'half in love with easeful death' - at least with the notion of an anaesthetic to knock you out for a few weeks. But there is one thing to live for. Music, of course.
I've spent two hours this afternoon gritting my teeth and playing the piano. I've played through the Franck violin sonata to make sure I can still play it (yes!), brushing up the Debussy 'Clair de lune' (my party piece since 1981) and reading through some of my beloved Faure's abominably tricky nocturnes. Even if my back isn't better, my soul is on the mend. As long as there is music of such overwhelming beauty in the world, it's worth being here.
Having nothing better to do, besides practising, than surf the internet, I've just come across a blog by Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, which is excellent - link under Music Friends. Alex, sorry you knew about my blog before I knew about yours, but better late than never!
Of course, one of the other things worth living for is good food. I've had some major successes with Nigella Lawson's recipes, especially the ones from 'Forever Summer'.
Actually, there's plenty to live for, isn't there!
Last weekend, in a flurry of 'Beloved Clara' anxiety, I spent three happy hours gardening. Monday morning I woke up and could hardly move. I've done nothing useful this week except lie on my back in 'Alexander Technique' pose trying to straighten out my spine, which isn't broken but feels as if it is. Back pain is vile. It not only scuppers you physically, but also mentally. I've written nothing (except Dulwich blog entry, pretending all was well!), read nothing, listened to nothing, been no further from the house than Waitrose (3 mins gentle stroll) and only watched one French film (Jean de Florette, which I've seen 5 times already).
When things get you down this way, you can become 'half in love with easeful death' - at least with the notion of an anaesthetic to knock you out for a few weeks. But there is one thing to live for. Music, of course.
I've spent two hours this afternoon gritting my teeth and playing the piano. I've played through the Franck violin sonata to make sure I can still play it (yes!), brushing up the Debussy 'Clair de lune' (my party piece since 1981) and reading through some of my beloved Faure's abominably tricky nocturnes. Even if my back isn't better, my soul is on the mend. As long as there is music of such overwhelming beauty in the world, it's worth being here.
Having nothing better to do, besides practising, than surf the internet, I've just come across a blog by Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, which is excellent - link under Music Friends. Alex, sorry you knew about my blog before I knew about yours, but better late than never!
Of course, one of the other things worth living for is good food. I've had some major successes with Nigella Lawson's recipes, especially the ones from 'Forever Summer'.
Actually, there's plenty to live for, isn't there!
Friday, May 21, 2004
Matzo pudding competition winner
Looks like nobody else knows how to make a matzo pudding any more than I do. But the prize goes to Marion Gedney of New York City, who e-mailed me to say that although she doesn't have a recipe, she thinks she knows what my father meant and hopes that it was supposed to be funny.
Marion is a clinical psychologist...
Marion, e-mail me your postal address and a CD will be on its way to you shortly!
Marion is a clinical psychologist...
Marion, e-mail me your postal address and a CD will be on its way to you shortly!
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Glyndebourne, plus newsy bits
Dress rehearsal of Pelleas et Melisande at Glyndebourne yesterday. One of those rare occasions when the first trip down of the summer is on the sort of cloudless, hot day on which the place is basically paradise. The leaves are bright May green, the hawthorn flowers are out, there are sheep in the field on the hillside. In the interval the lawns are so covered with the company friends and relations picnicking that it's like a scene from Renoir. This is my seventh year of hanging out there with Tom and I still have to pinch myself to make sure it's real. I love the dress rehearsals because the family atmosphere is so excellent. Yesterday I was in the front row of the stalls right next to the violins - had to resist the temptation to pull silly faces at Tom and to throw his colleagues sweets over the railing. Not a good idea.
Pelleas is a revival of a stunning Graham Vick production, with gold panelled walls, a floor of flowers and an incredibly claustrophic atmosphere. John Tomlinson as Golaud is the central figure and his charisma makes the story work much better than usual. Marie Arnet is a gorgeous, delicate Melisande and the lovely Louis Langree takes a robust approach to the score which I like very much. I don't believe Debussy (or Faure, for that matter) should be all elusive and floaty. This stuff comes right from the gut. Highly recommended.
BOOKS AND CDS UPDATE
Tasmin Little has recorded the Karlowicz Violin Concerto on Hyperion and if you don't know the piece, you should get a copy right away. Karlowicz was a Polish composer of the early 20th century who died terribly young and has only recently attracted much attention. About 13 years ago, I visited Krystian Zimerman in Switzerland and he played me an old Polish recording of this concerto; I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever heard. Marvellous that it's now new-minted on a mainstream label. Bravo, Taz.
Marc-Andre Hamelin's new Kapustin disc is a complete delight from start to finish. Kapustin is a rather retiring Russian who prolifically composes piano music in traditional classical forms but fills them with an astonishing, idiosyncratic, energetic jazz idiom. Charming, dizzying and virtuosic, it shows off super-cool Marc to the manner born. Also on Hyperion.
Susan Tomes has written a book called 'Beyond The Notes' about life as a travelling chamber music player. Insights into what Domus was all about and why it had to give up its dome - that was the early 80s - can you imagine anyone daring to leave a concert dome unattended overnight in the Pavilion Gardens in 2004?! Susan's a deep thinker and her philosophical reflections about the nature of musical communication and relationships in a chamber group are fascinating. From Boydell Press.
You can get all of these from Amazon via the link box on the left.
MYSTERY VIEWER IN FRANCE - WHO ARE YOU???
Dear readers, my web-counter doesn't tell me who you are but does give me a rough idea of where you might be. One reader particularly intrigues me. You've been checking in roughly twice a day. You are in France. You are logging on from UNAPEC, which Google tells me is a university. Please, whoever you are: if you can bear to, write a comment box and identify yourself! S'IL VOUS PLAIT, ECRIVEZ-MOI! The suspense is killing me!
Pelleas is a revival of a stunning Graham Vick production, with gold panelled walls, a floor of flowers and an incredibly claustrophic atmosphere. John Tomlinson as Golaud is the central figure and his charisma makes the story work much better than usual. Marie Arnet is a gorgeous, delicate Melisande and the lovely Louis Langree takes a robust approach to the score which I like very much. I don't believe Debussy (or Faure, for that matter) should be all elusive and floaty. This stuff comes right from the gut. Highly recommended.
BOOKS AND CDS UPDATE
Tasmin Little has recorded the Karlowicz Violin Concerto on Hyperion and if you don't know the piece, you should get a copy right away. Karlowicz was a Polish composer of the early 20th century who died terribly young and has only recently attracted much attention. About 13 years ago, I visited Krystian Zimerman in Switzerland and he played me an old Polish recording of this concerto; I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever heard. Marvellous that it's now new-minted on a mainstream label. Bravo, Taz.
Marc-Andre Hamelin's new Kapustin disc is a complete delight from start to finish. Kapustin is a rather retiring Russian who prolifically composes piano music in traditional classical forms but fills them with an astonishing, idiosyncratic, energetic jazz idiom. Charming, dizzying and virtuosic, it shows off super-cool Marc to the manner born. Also on Hyperion.
Susan Tomes has written a book called 'Beyond The Notes' about life as a travelling chamber music player. Insights into what Domus was all about and why it had to give up its dome - that was the early 80s - can you imagine anyone daring to leave a concert dome unattended overnight in the Pavilion Gardens in 2004?! Susan's a deep thinker and her philosophical reflections about the nature of musical communication and relationships in a chamber group are fascinating. From Boydell Press.
You can get all of these from Amazon via the link box on the left.
MYSTERY VIEWER IN FRANCE - WHO ARE YOU???
Dear readers, my web-counter doesn't tell me who you are but does give me a rough idea of where you might be. One reader particularly intrigues me. You've been checking in roughly twice a day. You are in France. You are logging on from UNAPEC, which Google tells me is a university. Please, whoever you are: if you can bear to, write a comment box and identify yourself! S'IL VOUS PLAIT, ECRIVEZ-MOI! The suspense is killing me!
Thursday, May 13, 2004
If you were...
In cover features for PIANIST magazine, I have to ask my interviewees a particular set of questions. 'If you were....... - what would you be?' I get some interesting responses - it can be surprisingly illuminating. So I thought I'd have a go at it myself. Here's the result
IF YOU WERE...
A HISTORICAL OR FICTIONAL CHARACTER - WHO WOULD YOU BE?
Franz Liszt. I think he had fun. I do NOT want to have been any of those patient, long-suffering women who struggled all their lives to be creative, like Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn or Charlotte Bronte! (Emma Bardac is a better option, as she sang well, hosted a progressive Parisian artistic salon and slept with both Faure and Debussy...but even that had its drawbacks...)
A BOOK?
'I Capture the Castle' by Dodie Smith. My favourite book. I've read it about 350 times and never get tired of it. (Available via Amazon, link on left.)
A FILM?
'Les enfants du paradis' - French masterpiece from the 1940s starring Jean-Louis Barrault and Arletty. Now available in snazzy DVD (see Amazon).
A PIECE OF MUSIC?
Unfair!! But - on balance - Faure's Piano Quartet No.1 in C minor
A TYPE OF FOOD?
Chocolate - preferably Green & Black's Organic, absolute minimum 70% cocoa solids
A WINE?
An excessively fine 1976 red Bordeaux
A QUALITY?
Enthusiasm
A FAULT?
Over-enthusiasm
What about you? Try it and put the results in a comment box!
IF YOU WERE...
A HISTORICAL OR FICTIONAL CHARACTER - WHO WOULD YOU BE?
Franz Liszt. I think he had fun. I do NOT want to have been any of those patient, long-suffering women who struggled all their lives to be creative, like Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn or Charlotte Bronte! (Emma Bardac is a better option, as she sang well, hosted a progressive Parisian artistic salon and slept with both Faure and Debussy...but even that had its drawbacks...)
A BOOK?
'I Capture the Castle' by Dodie Smith. My favourite book. I've read it about 350 times and never get tired of it. (Available via Amazon, link on left.)
A FILM?
'Les enfants du paradis' - French masterpiece from the 1940s starring Jean-Louis Barrault and Arletty. Now available in snazzy DVD (see Amazon).
A PIECE OF MUSIC?
Unfair!! But - on balance - Faure's Piano Quartet No.1 in C minor
A TYPE OF FOOD?
Chocolate - preferably Green & Black's Organic, absolute minimum 70% cocoa solids
A WINE?
An excessively fine 1976 red Bordeaux
A QUALITY?
Enthusiasm
A FAULT?
Over-enthusiasm
What about you? Try it and put the results in a comment box!
Sunday, May 09, 2004
The morning after
A certain air of smugness prevails in the Duchen-Eisner household this morning - and it's not just Solti the cat.
The concert went fine. Lovely atmosphere, gorgeous church with warm, pleasing acoustic, small but terrifyingly knowledgeable audience and on the whole we played pretty well.
Odd difference between how things feel and how they sound. The second movement of the Franck felt about half the speed that it actually went, to my astonishment, and the whole concert had a nice 'seat-of-the-pants' feel to it. Tom sounds gorgeous in the chuch acoustic, the balance seems to have been just right, the heating was on, the piano stayed in tune and everyone hugged us at the end.
Strange, too, to remember that I've not done anything remotely comparable to this since 1988. When Tom started doing little recitals three or four years ago, I was too scared even to attempt to play things like the slow movement of the Grieg C minor Sonata and the Dvorak Sonatine. I don't know quite what happened in the interim. But it certainly feels like progress. Perhaps there's something to be said for walking up those mountains...
And no hangover this morning - simply the need to sleep for a week. Which we can't...because Tom is rehearsing Pelleas et Melisande for 6 hours today and I have 3 features to finish by next weekend. Back to real life!
The concert went fine. Lovely atmosphere, gorgeous church with warm, pleasing acoustic, small but terrifyingly knowledgeable audience and on the whole we played pretty well.
Odd difference between how things feel and how they sound. The second movement of the Franck felt about half the speed that it actually went, to my astonishment, and the whole concert had a nice 'seat-of-the-pants' feel to it. Tom sounds gorgeous in the chuch acoustic, the balance seems to have been just right, the heating was on, the piano stayed in tune and everyone hugged us at the end.
Strange, too, to remember that I've not done anything remotely comparable to this since 1988. When Tom started doing little recitals three or four years ago, I was too scared even to attempt to play things like the slow movement of the Grieg C minor Sonata and the Dvorak Sonatine. I don't know quite what happened in the interim. But it certainly feels like progress. Perhaps there's something to be said for walking up those mountains...
And no hangover this morning - simply the need to sleep for a week. Which we can't...because Tom is rehearsing Pelleas et Melisande for 6 hours today and I have 3 features to finish by next weekend. Back to real life!
Saturday, May 08, 2004
Climb ev'ry mountain...in south London
When we go on holiday, we usually head for Swiss mountains, which Tom immediately wants to go up. I love mountains. I love the air, the atmosphere & the views. I don't much like having to walk up such steep slopes, though, often in intense summer heat, for hours on end. Somehow it's always the same: Tom striding on ahead in his Thomas-of-Arabia anti-sun headgear, with me gasping along behind, trying to keep up and stopping for water every 10 minutes. And the question hangs in the air: why walk when you can take the cable car?
Playing the Franck sonata feels somewhat the same. This afternoon, with just three and a half hours to go before Our Concert Begins, I'm wondering who is the bigger sadist: Cesar Franck or my husband? Why am I doing this when I could sit back and listen to someone else instead? Why did I let him cajole me into this in the first place?
Seriously, guys, how do you do it? How do you COPE? My shoulders hurt, my arms hurt, my hands hurt and a good night's sleep without waking up at 5am thinking 'Oh My God, Franck!' would be very welcome indeed. I'm behind on my feature-writing and keep telling various e-mail correspondents that I'll get back to them after 8 May when I can think straight again. There are musicians out there who play 80 concerts a year - some do more - and to have to feel this way one day out of every 4, on average, would be my idea of living hell. Perhaps you get used to it if you do it all the time? Or perhaps you simply have to be the sort of person who enjoys it. The sort of person who will always walk up a mountain instead of taking the cable car, however hard it feels at the time, for the sheer thrill of Knowing You've Done It.
The things you have to contend with and remember to do...Making sure the heating is ON in the church (it may be May but it's all of 12 degrees out there today, and raining), taking in lamps, an adapter and an extension lead, trying to get the most out of what is really a very nice, rather elderly Bluthner without making the poor thing collapse, attempting to rehearse Franck while the church flower ladies do their stuff with cellophane and bubble-wrap and their children run athletics races unchecked among the pews. Making sure your brother, his heavily pregnant girlfriend, his 11-year-old son, his new Italian mother-in-law who speaks no English and the honorary auntie who introduced you to your husband leave Hampstead together in plenty of time to get to Clapham (to Hampstead dwellers, Clapham=ends of earth). Wondering how you can even go to a piano, let alone touch it, when the audience contains at least three concert pianists and the editor of Classic FM Magazine. Remembering to pack chocolate, bananas, spare tights, a cardy and a portable blowy heater.
Never mind. It'll all be over soon. Except...Tom wants to do Faure next.
Oh my God. Faure...
Playing the Franck sonata feels somewhat the same. This afternoon, with just three and a half hours to go before Our Concert Begins, I'm wondering who is the bigger sadist: Cesar Franck or my husband? Why am I doing this when I could sit back and listen to someone else instead? Why did I let him cajole me into this in the first place?
Seriously, guys, how do you do it? How do you COPE? My shoulders hurt, my arms hurt, my hands hurt and a good night's sleep without waking up at 5am thinking 'Oh My God, Franck!' would be very welcome indeed. I'm behind on my feature-writing and keep telling various e-mail correspondents that I'll get back to them after 8 May when I can think straight again. There are musicians out there who play 80 concerts a year - some do more - and to have to feel this way one day out of every 4, on average, would be my idea of living hell. Perhaps you get used to it if you do it all the time? Or perhaps you simply have to be the sort of person who enjoys it. The sort of person who will always walk up a mountain instead of taking the cable car, however hard it feels at the time, for the sheer thrill of Knowing You've Done It.
The things you have to contend with and remember to do...Making sure the heating is ON in the church (it may be May but it's all of 12 degrees out there today, and raining), taking in lamps, an adapter and an extension lead, trying to get the most out of what is really a very nice, rather elderly Bluthner without making the poor thing collapse, attempting to rehearse Franck while the church flower ladies do their stuff with cellophane and bubble-wrap and their children run athletics races unchecked among the pews. Making sure your brother, his heavily pregnant girlfriend, his 11-year-old son, his new Italian mother-in-law who speaks no English and the honorary auntie who introduced you to your husband leave Hampstead together in plenty of time to get to Clapham (to Hampstead dwellers, Clapham=ends of earth). Wondering how you can even go to a piano, let alone touch it, when the audience contains at least three concert pianists and the editor of Classic FM Magazine. Remembering to pack chocolate, bananas, spare tights, a cardy and a portable blowy heater.
Never mind. It'll all be over soon. Except...Tom wants to do Faure next.
Oh my God. Faure...
Thursday, May 06, 2004
Winners and losers?
To the Dorchester last night for the Royal Philharmonic Awards. Each year the ceremony is held there, along with a rather fine black tie dinner. The glitterati of the London musical world mostly show up, even if the musicians who win the prizes are generally busy giving concerts somewhere else. It's always fun to bump into your ex-bosses, meet people you've known by sight or repute for years, and some who you haven't, and discover that you're wearing the same dress (if in a different colour) as the 'acting editor' of BBC Music Magazine.
The line-up of prizewinners this year was relatively inspiring. Among them, the late Susan Chilcott won the singer's award - she died about six months ago of breast cancer, only in her early 40s, leaving behind a small son and some stunning recordings. Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra took the large ensemble prize, and so it should have; an Israeli pianist and Palestinian violinist stood side by side on the platform to accept the award and got a tremendous ovation. Lump in throat time.
I'm on the chamber music panel. Our winner, the Belcea Quartet, was taking the prize for the second time, but it's well-deserved: they're an extraordinary young group, each one sensitive and intelligent yet together somehow greater than four individuals. I'm not sure what happened to our citation, however. The speeches may have been truncated for the benefit of Radio 3 (the awards will be broadcast tonight), but on reflection it would have been nice to point out that the Belceas got the prize not only because they do education work and commission new music. They won also because they are bloody marvellous musicians who inspire everyone who hears them.
There's political correctness and political correctness, of course. This was a mild case. But the thing that really got up my nose was something that the excellent LSO Animateur said, accepting his Honorary Membership of the RPS. Apparently it's a wonderful thing that the LSO has put its finances into appalling shape by building St Luke's, its new educational/rehearsal centre in the City.
I don't think that's a wonderful thing at all: I think it's shameful that a great orchestra is forced to spend its money in this way. Such facilities should be the right of every orchestra - and the government should be paying. In fact, the government should be providing proper, consistent, across-the-board musical education in schools in the first place - instead of forcing musical organisations to put their energies (and money they can't afford) into work that can only reach a few kids for a limited time. The much-vaunted education and outreach trend is little more than an apology for the lack of good musical education in this country. It's trying to fill a round hole with a square plug; even if it inspires the few it reaches, for a short time, it can't do the job that's really needed.
I shall get on the subject of English Amateurism, Lousy Music Courses and the rest of it - not to mention cowboy building contractors - another time. But while we're on awards, I should report that little Benjamin didn't win Young Musician of the Year the other day. The prize went to a gorgeous 16-year-old violinist, Nicola Benedetti, who played Szymanowski exceeedingly beautifully, performs like a seasoned professional and is absolutely ready for a career. General consensus seems to be that they made the right choice. Benjamin got the necessary exposure but won't be subjected to undue pressures of prizewinning too early. Who knows, perhaps he'll come back and win the next one.
The line-up of prizewinners this year was relatively inspiring. Among them, the late Susan Chilcott won the singer's award - she died about six months ago of breast cancer, only in her early 40s, leaving behind a small son and some stunning recordings. Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra took the large ensemble prize, and so it should have; an Israeli pianist and Palestinian violinist stood side by side on the platform to accept the award and got a tremendous ovation. Lump in throat time.
I'm on the chamber music panel. Our winner, the Belcea Quartet, was taking the prize for the second time, but it's well-deserved: they're an extraordinary young group, each one sensitive and intelligent yet together somehow greater than four individuals. I'm not sure what happened to our citation, however. The speeches may have been truncated for the benefit of Radio 3 (the awards will be broadcast tonight), but on reflection it would have been nice to point out that the Belceas got the prize not only because they do education work and commission new music. They won also because they are bloody marvellous musicians who inspire everyone who hears them.
There's political correctness and political correctness, of course. This was a mild case. But the thing that really got up my nose was something that the excellent LSO Animateur said, accepting his Honorary Membership of the RPS. Apparently it's a wonderful thing that the LSO has put its finances into appalling shape by building St Luke's, its new educational/rehearsal centre in the City.
I don't think that's a wonderful thing at all: I think it's shameful that a great orchestra is forced to spend its money in this way. Such facilities should be the right of every orchestra - and the government should be paying. In fact, the government should be providing proper, consistent, across-the-board musical education in schools in the first place - instead of forcing musical organisations to put their energies (and money they can't afford) into work that can only reach a few kids for a limited time. The much-vaunted education and outreach trend is little more than an apology for the lack of good musical education in this country. It's trying to fill a round hole with a square plug; even if it inspires the few it reaches, for a short time, it can't do the job that's really needed.
I shall get on the subject of English Amateurism, Lousy Music Courses and the rest of it - not to mention cowboy building contractors - another time. But while we're on awards, I should report that little Benjamin didn't win Young Musician of the Year the other day. The prize went to a gorgeous 16-year-old violinist, Nicola Benedetti, who played Szymanowski exceeedingly beautifully, performs like a seasoned professional and is absolutely ready for a career. General consensus seems to be that they made the right choice. Benjamin got the necessary exposure but won't be subjected to undue pressures of prizewinning too early. Who knows, perhaps he'll come back and win the next one.
Monday, May 03, 2004
Matzo pudding competition!
One or two of you have asked 'What on earth is a matzo pudding?' and - other than the obvious Fuss Over Franck - I have to admit I've never tried one. SO: the person who posts on the blog the best-ever Matzo Pudding Recipe will receive a free surprise CD from me! Closing date: 21 May 2004.
Sunday, May 02, 2004
Cesar Franck and the matzo pudding
Is giving a concert simply all in a day's work to most pros? For those of us who do a handful of concerts a year and really ought to be doing something else, it sure isn't. Our Clapham gig is next Saturday and I do find myself wishing that I could fast-forward through to Sunday morning (well, maybe Monday, to avoid hangover) - to have the satisfaction of having done the concert without having to experience the excruciating mental pain of sitting at a piano in front of an audience, being obliged to play the Cesar Franck Violin Sonata straight through, up to tempo, without too many wrong notes...
Last week, the pianist Paul Hamburger died; he was one of the great accompanists. His obituary in The Guardian quoted him as having said that the hardest thing he ever had to play was the opening of the Franck's second movement. So there we are, it's not just me creating what my father would have called (bless him) 'a matzo pudding'.
Yesterday, however, produced something intriguing. We watched a programme on TV about the BBC Young Musician of the Year - a sort of condensed version of the semi-finals, showing the winners of each section and filming them at home, etc etc. There was little Benjamin, practising his Ravel G major concerto with a metronome and looking completely calm. Next, just as the percussion was coming on, the phone rang: it was Daniel Hope, who I'd been trying to get hold of for an interview earlier on. I talked to him for a while and got some amazing stories of the things he has to deal with on a day-to-day basis - among them, replacing the Berg Violin Concerto with a Brahms sonata at the last moment because an orchestra in South America had copied out its own parts for the concerto and the publisher was threatening to sue for music piracy...Blimey, as if playing the violin isn't tough enough in the first place! Evidently he has never a dull moment - indeed, perhaps he thrives on the adrenalin. It's all about attitude in the end, isn't it?
When I'd finished talking to Daniel, Tom was practising. He declared he'd been inspired by the kids on TV and wanted to play the beginning of the Franck again. We started with the intention of playing 2 pages, but before we knew it we'd gone through the entire thing and played it better than ever before. At the end, Tom said: 'It's amazing how much you can learn from watching an 11-year-old!'
SAD NEWS - an e-mail yesterday from pianist Lars Vogt telling me of the death of Boris Pergamenschikow, the Russian cellist. Quite a shock - Boris was 55 and had been very much in the thick of musical events, tremendously sought after as soloist, chamber music player and teacher. He had had cancer for two years. Another lesson in attitude. Don't go around making 'matzo puddings', because you are wasting energy you could be putting into achieving all the things you want to achieve in what is necessarily limited time.
Last week, the pianist Paul Hamburger died; he was one of the great accompanists. His obituary in The Guardian quoted him as having said that the hardest thing he ever had to play was the opening of the Franck's second movement. So there we are, it's not just me creating what my father would have called (bless him) 'a matzo pudding'.
Yesterday, however, produced something intriguing. We watched a programme on TV about the BBC Young Musician of the Year - a sort of condensed version of the semi-finals, showing the winners of each section and filming them at home, etc etc. There was little Benjamin, practising his Ravel G major concerto with a metronome and looking completely calm. Next, just as the percussion was coming on, the phone rang: it was Daniel Hope, who I'd been trying to get hold of for an interview earlier on. I talked to him for a while and got some amazing stories of the things he has to deal with on a day-to-day basis - among them, replacing the Berg Violin Concerto with a Brahms sonata at the last moment because an orchestra in South America had copied out its own parts for the concerto and the publisher was threatening to sue for music piracy...Blimey, as if playing the violin isn't tough enough in the first place! Evidently he has never a dull moment - indeed, perhaps he thrives on the adrenalin. It's all about attitude in the end, isn't it?
When I'd finished talking to Daniel, Tom was practising. He declared he'd been inspired by the kids on TV and wanted to play the beginning of the Franck again. We started with the intention of playing 2 pages, but before we knew it we'd gone through the entire thing and played it better than ever before. At the end, Tom said: 'It's amazing how much you can learn from watching an 11-year-old!'
SAD NEWS - an e-mail yesterday from pianist Lars Vogt telling me of the death of Boris Pergamenschikow, the Russian cellist. Quite a shock - Boris was 55 and had been very much in the thick of musical events, tremendously sought after as soloist, chamber music player and teacher. He had had cancer for two years. Another lesson in attitude. Don't go around making 'matzo puddings', because you are wasting energy you could be putting into achieving all the things you want to achieve in what is necessarily limited time.
Friday, April 30, 2004
That was the week that was...
Quite a week, this one. The morning after the prodigy wonder on TV, some major drama took place at the LPO: Maria Joao Pires cancelled her Chopin Second Concerto at about two days' notice. What pianist can fly in and play this piece in just 48 hours?
Tim Walker, the LPO chief exec, made an inspired choice: Nelson Goerner, Argentinian, in his early 30s, an Argerich protege and one of the younger pianists I most admire. Personally I felt that the conductor, Emanuel Krivine, could have given him a little more space to breathe, but he played wonderfully, with a clear and singing tone and a super balance between energy and poetry. I interviewed Nelson a couple of years ago for International Piano and found him delightful, completely unpretentious and straightforward yet someone who 'really knows' music. He's short in stature but great of heart. We hope he'll come back soon.
The same concert was important to me as well: this was my LPO debut. At last they asked me to write some programme notes! Dearly as I love my orchestra-in-law, it's impossible, if you go to lots of their concerts, not to notice that most of their programme notes have been recycled over years and years, and are now a little dated and not quite the thing for a modern audience... So I hope that that policy is changing and it was wonderful to have the chance to research this programme - four of my biggest favourites, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Ravel and Debussy.
Programme notes are the only thing a music journalist can write and then see a hall-full of people actually reading. My most frightening programme note moment: a few years ago I did notes for a Faure song series at the Wigmore and arrived one evening to spot, a few rows in front of me, Vikram Seth...
A BIG PARTY last night to launch the 2004 Proms, and great fun it was. There's a 'silk road' strand to it, which involves Yo-Yo Ma's latest world-music ensemble, and as the British Library is having a silk road exhibition, the party happened in the British Library foyer, crowded but buzzing. Lots of champagne, beer and truly excellent canapes - and of course this is one of the prime music biz networking events of the year. Even Norman Lebrecht was there.
In between talking gossip and scandal, frustration and excitement and Who Did What To Whom, proms director Nick Kenyon ('old Nick' to the biz) announced a programme that I for one think looks a lot of fun. A few things jumped out at me: Truls Mork playing the Dvorak concerto, Paul Lewis playing some Mozart, the Glyndebourne Prom with the scrumptious Vladimir Jurowski conducting the Puccini/Rachmaninov double bill from the forthcoming season, and, rather to my satisfaction, lots of Elgar! No Faure or Korngold, of course, but you can't have everything...I keep hoping....
MEANWHILE, MANY THANKS to everyone who dropped me a line to wish my shoulder better. Glad to say that it is making excellent progress, under the ministrations of a fabulous local physiotherapist who also looks after the British Olympic rowing team.
Tim Walker, the LPO chief exec, made an inspired choice: Nelson Goerner, Argentinian, in his early 30s, an Argerich protege and one of the younger pianists I most admire. Personally I felt that the conductor, Emanuel Krivine, could have given him a little more space to breathe, but he played wonderfully, with a clear and singing tone and a super balance between energy and poetry. I interviewed Nelson a couple of years ago for International Piano and found him delightful, completely unpretentious and straightforward yet someone who 'really knows' music. He's short in stature but great of heart. We hope he'll come back soon.
The same concert was important to me as well: this was my LPO debut. At last they asked me to write some programme notes! Dearly as I love my orchestra-in-law, it's impossible, if you go to lots of their concerts, not to notice that most of their programme notes have been recycled over years and years, and are now a little dated and not quite the thing for a modern audience... So I hope that that policy is changing and it was wonderful to have the chance to research this programme - four of my biggest favourites, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Ravel and Debussy.
Programme notes are the only thing a music journalist can write and then see a hall-full of people actually reading. My most frightening programme note moment: a few years ago I did notes for a Faure song series at the Wigmore and arrived one evening to spot, a few rows in front of me, Vikram Seth...
A BIG PARTY last night to launch the 2004 Proms, and great fun it was. There's a 'silk road' strand to it, which involves Yo-Yo Ma's latest world-music ensemble, and as the British Library is having a silk road exhibition, the party happened in the British Library foyer, crowded but buzzing. Lots of champagne, beer and truly excellent canapes - and of course this is one of the prime music biz networking events of the year. Even Norman Lebrecht was there.
In between talking gossip and scandal, frustration and excitement and Who Did What To Whom, proms director Nick Kenyon ('old Nick' to the biz) announced a programme that I for one think looks a lot of fun. A few things jumped out at me: Truls Mork playing the Dvorak concerto, Paul Lewis playing some Mozart, the Glyndebourne Prom with the scrumptious Vladimir Jurowski conducting the Puccini/Rachmaninov double bill from the forthcoming season, and, rather to my satisfaction, lots of Elgar! No Faure or Korngold, of course, but you can't have everything...I keep hoping....
MEANWHILE, MANY THANKS to everyone who dropped me a line to wish my shoulder better. Glad to say that it is making excellent progress, under the ministrations of a fabulous local physiotherapist who also looks after the British Olympic rowing team.
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
BBC Young Genius of the Year?
He's like a Mini-Mee of John Ogdon: a plump 11-year-old Essex boy with a brace on his teeth. 'Benjamin, what did you enjoy most about it?' a bemused Stephanie Hughes asks him. 'Um, being in front of an audience and playing to them, 'cos that's what I like doing,' comes the answer, half smiled, half mumbled. Just before this exchange, little Benjamin has been out on the platform, playing the piano with a maturity of expression and beautiful roundness of tone that any 30-year-old pro would be proud of.
Yes, it's the BBC Young Musician of the Year again and this is exactly what it's for: discovering talents like that of Benjamin Grosvenor, who's clearly destined for great things. Of course he's only 11 and has a long way to grow, but most of us know a genius when we hear one.
But there's controversy going on too, and it's not about Benjamin or even the competition itself, which is always controversial ("exploiting young people to make good telly"?). It's the way it's being shown. The final is on BBC2 on Sunday 2nd May, but the semi-finals this week are only on digital channel BBC4 and most of the population can't get BBC4. Marginalisastion of the arts, everyone shouts. (Apologies to my international readers: here in Little Britain we habitually fall between floorboards and then spend more time howling that it hurts than we do filling in the cracks.)
I don't want the arts marginalised any more than anyone else does, but I do have a problem with that viewpoint. First, the digital channels are brand new. The idea that moving the YMoY semis to a new channel means a downward shift in arts policy from the Beeb itself is a little shaky - presumably if they had had a digital channel to move this to 10 years ago, they would have done so. Secondly, the snail's pace at which the government wants to convert all TV to digital and switch off analogue (by 2010?) means that people haven't much incentive to spend £99 on a digital box. Yet when you think how much your average Brit usually spends on a night out in the pub binge-drinking, £99 doesn't sound so much. BBC4 is an arts channel. Those of us who pay our licence fee but loathe panel games have never had one of those before.
Of course a performance like Benjamin's should have been on terrestrial national TV. However, one doesn't generally expect to hear anything like this on YMoY. 'Historical' moments don't come often and while the other young pianists on the show were very talented, they didn't make me stop cooking dinner. Most years, that's how most of the players are. But when young Benjamin gets out there to do his concerto on Sunday, BBC2 will indeed be there. And with any luck by Monday morning he's going to be a household name.
Yes, it's the BBC Young Musician of the Year again and this is exactly what it's for: discovering talents like that of Benjamin Grosvenor, who's clearly destined for great things. Of course he's only 11 and has a long way to grow, but most of us know a genius when we hear one.
But there's controversy going on too, and it's not about Benjamin or even the competition itself, which is always controversial ("exploiting young people to make good telly"?). It's the way it's being shown. The final is on BBC2 on Sunday 2nd May, but the semi-finals this week are only on digital channel BBC4 and most of the population can't get BBC4. Marginalisastion of the arts, everyone shouts. (Apologies to my international readers: here in Little Britain we habitually fall between floorboards and then spend more time howling that it hurts than we do filling in the cracks.)
I don't want the arts marginalised any more than anyone else does, but I do have a problem with that viewpoint. First, the digital channels are brand new. The idea that moving the YMoY semis to a new channel means a downward shift in arts policy from the Beeb itself is a little shaky - presumably if they had had a digital channel to move this to 10 years ago, they would have done so. Secondly, the snail's pace at which the government wants to convert all TV to digital and switch off analogue (by 2010?) means that people haven't much incentive to spend £99 on a digital box. Yet when you think how much your average Brit usually spends on a night out in the pub binge-drinking, £99 doesn't sound so much. BBC4 is an arts channel. Those of us who pay our licence fee but loathe panel games have never had one of those before.
Of course a performance like Benjamin's should have been on terrestrial national TV. However, one doesn't generally expect to hear anything like this on YMoY. 'Historical' moments don't come often and while the other young pianists on the show were very talented, they didn't make me stop cooking dinner. Most years, that's how most of the players are. But when young Benjamin gets out there to do his concerto on Sunday, BBC2 will indeed be there. And with any luck by Monday morning he's going to be a household name.
Saturday, April 24, 2004
Mostly dead pianists and slidey violins
Got a nice message yesterday from a friend in New York saying he'd post a comment here, but only if I wrote something about Long-Dead Musicians. So here we go.
With so many historical recordings widely available, and many modern ones intensely uninspiring, it figures that we're listening more and more to the former, even becoming obsessed with them. When 'International Piano Quarterly' first started up, I found it difficult to spot any mention in it of a pianist who was alive. But then, when I came to write my big survey of 51 recordings of the Chopin B minor Sonata, guess which I chose...yes, dead pianists, namely Lipatti and Cortot. Still, I wouldn't like to deify the dead for the sake of it; it's unfair to the living. I reckon that pianists like Zimerman, Argerich and Sokolov can give anyone six feet under a jolly good run for their money.
Recently I put together a CD for fun, just a few of my favourite things...The recordings date from 1928 to 2003: the oldest is Myra Hess playing 'Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring', the newest Gil Shaham's Faure Album, and my top favourite is the Waltz from Rachmaninov's Suite No.2 for two pianos, recorded in Moscow in the 1940s by Alexander Goldenweiser and Grigori Ginsburg. Some of the musicians on my CD are indeed long-dead - Thibaud and Cortot, Mravinsky, Gerald Moore - and others play as if maybe they ought to be...the pianists because they have profundity, beautiful tone and imagination, the violinists because they SLIDE. There's nothing on earth that kicks out the bottom of my stomach like a slidey violin. (That vulnerability has got me into serious trouble on occasion... and may partly account for my marriage...)
What do the old-time musicians have that modern-day ones don't, other than acoustic crackles? This is, naturally, a massive oversimplification, but here's my theory:
* They lived through harder times, when people were not shielded from the realities of death, disease, war etc. Better perspective on life and its emotions = better perspective and more depth in music.
* They didn't have TV to trivialise everything. Or spin doctors, air travel, marketing executives and a music industry run largely by people who either have been selling frozen food or ought to be.
* They were, on the whole, deriving interpretations from times and influences far closer to the composers they played than today's musicians. And nobody tried to tell them that they weren't allowed to play Bach on the piano, or with vibrato & portamento on the violin.
I could go on like this for ages, but instead, here are a few recommendations:
Jacques Thibaud and Alfred Cortot playing Faure's Violin Sonata No.1 (1931)
Cortot playing just about ANYTHING - sod the wrong notes, listen to the tone and the drama (this man once worked as a repetiteur in Bayreuth)
Rudolf Serkin, the Busch Chamber Players and Adolf Busch playing Mozart Piano Concerto No.14
Pablo Casals playing the Bach cello suites. And, speaking of cellos, anything recorded by Emanuel Feuermann.
That recording of Menuhin aged 14 playing the Elgar violin concerto with Elgar conducting
Toscha Seidel and Erich Korngold playing Korngold' Much Ado About Nothing Suite. Yummy.
With so many historical recordings widely available, and many modern ones intensely uninspiring, it figures that we're listening more and more to the former, even becoming obsessed with them. When 'International Piano Quarterly' first started up, I found it difficult to spot any mention in it of a pianist who was alive. But then, when I came to write my big survey of 51 recordings of the Chopin B minor Sonata, guess which I chose...yes, dead pianists, namely Lipatti and Cortot. Still, I wouldn't like to deify the dead for the sake of it; it's unfair to the living. I reckon that pianists like Zimerman, Argerich and Sokolov can give anyone six feet under a jolly good run for their money.
Recently I put together a CD for fun, just a few of my favourite things...The recordings date from 1928 to 2003: the oldest is Myra Hess playing 'Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring', the newest Gil Shaham's Faure Album, and my top favourite is the Waltz from Rachmaninov's Suite No.2 for two pianos, recorded in Moscow in the 1940s by Alexander Goldenweiser and Grigori Ginsburg. Some of the musicians on my CD are indeed long-dead - Thibaud and Cortot, Mravinsky, Gerald Moore - and others play as if maybe they ought to be...the pianists because they have profundity, beautiful tone and imagination, the violinists because they SLIDE. There's nothing on earth that kicks out the bottom of my stomach like a slidey violin. (That vulnerability has got me into serious trouble on occasion... and may partly account for my marriage...)
What do the old-time musicians have that modern-day ones don't, other than acoustic crackles? This is, naturally, a massive oversimplification, but here's my theory:
* They lived through harder times, when people were not shielded from the realities of death, disease, war etc. Better perspective on life and its emotions = better perspective and more depth in music.
* They didn't have TV to trivialise everything. Or spin doctors, air travel, marketing executives and a music industry run largely by people who either have been selling frozen food or ought to be.
* They were, on the whole, deriving interpretations from times and influences far closer to the composers they played than today's musicians. And nobody tried to tell them that they weren't allowed to play Bach on the piano, or with vibrato & portamento on the violin.
I could go on like this for ages, but instead, here are a few recommendations:
Jacques Thibaud and Alfred Cortot playing Faure's Violin Sonata No.1 (1931)
Cortot playing just about ANYTHING - sod the wrong notes, listen to the tone and the drama (this man once worked as a repetiteur in Bayreuth)
Rudolf Serkin, the Busch Chamber Players and Adolf Busch playing Mozart Piano Concerto No.14
Pablo Casals playing the Bach cello suites. And, speaking of cellos, anything recorded by Emanuel Feuermann.
That recording of Menuhin aged 14 playing the Elgar violin concerto with Elgar conducting
Toscha Seidel and Erich Korngold playing Korngold' Much Ado About Nothing Suite. Yummy.
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
A trumpet for Saint-Saens
Just back from the opening concert of Steven Isserlis's Saint-Saens Festival at the Wigmore. One of those glorious evenings where you come out feeling glad to be alive.
A few highlights were the very, very young clarinettist Julian Bliss playing Saint-Saens's incredibly beautiful clarinet sonata of 1921 (sounds 100 years earlier), Josh Bell pulling out the pyrotechnics in the Rondo Capriccioso and, of course, Carnival of the Animals, complete with Ogden Nash verses suitably doctored for the occasion:
"When a clarinettist leaves the stage
It's not because he's under age!
He's lurking round behind that wall
About to do his cuckoo call."
And Steven's 'Swan' could have made Pavlova cry.
It feels very nice to have had some small part in spreading the word about this festival (see link to my piece in the Indy the other day) as it's something I really believe in. It's going to be marvellous - concerts include Steven and Pascal Devoyon playing the cello sonatas, concertos at the Barbican tomorrow and a programme of songs devised by Graham Johnson - next Tuesday, 27th April, still a few tickets available! The festival goes on until mid-May and finishes with a grand jamboree on 18 May to raise funds to start a Saint-Saens Society. Full details at the Wigmore Hall website.
But dare I make one tiny complaint? I didn't see any musicians in the audience. Yes, there were a handful of children and some 'young people', no doubt dragged in for the nice 'animals' piece. Otherwise, this was the Wigmore Hall Friends Incorporated (mostly over-65s from Highgate), plus a few music business types (the ones who look straight through you until you force them to acknowledge your existence) and, of course, sponsors. Not that I'm objecting to the extraordinary fact that a Saint-Saens Festival could suddenly become THE Place To Be Seen. But it's a conundrum for the Wigmore Hall, which seats about 550 and doesn't have room for everyone who'd want to go. The hall can't expand because that would wreck everything - the intimacy, the atmosphere, the acoustic. Isn't there any way to get more 'ordinary' music lovers into a concert like this?
Never mind. Three cheers for Camille Twinkletoes! I shall tell my mobile phone company that I'm only going to accept the free upgrade if I can have a handset that plays the 'Carnival of the Animals' finale. And you know someone's made a difference to the publicity when, on the way to such a concert, you hear a busker at Waterloo playing 'The Swan'!
A few highlights were the very, very young clarinettist Julian Bliss playing Saint-Saens's incredibly beautiful clarinet sonata of 1921 (sounds 100 years earlier), Josh Bell pulling out the pyrotechnics in the Rondo Capriccioso and, of course, Carnival of the Animals, complete with Ogden Nash verses suitably doctored for the occasion:
"When a clarinettist leaves the stage
It's not because he's under age!
He's lurking round behind that wall
About to do his cuckoo call."
And Steven's 'Swan' could have made Pavlova cry.
It feels very nice to have had some small part in spreading the word about this festival (see link to my piece in the Indy the other day) as it's something I really believe in. It's going to be marvellous - concerts include Steven and Pascal Devoyon playing the cello sonatas, concertos at the Barbican tomorrow and a programme of songs devised by Graham Johnson - next Tuesday, 27th April, still a few tickets available! The festival goes on until mid-May and finishes with a grand jamboree on 18 May to raise funds to start a Saint-Saens Society. Full details at the Wigmore Hall website.
But dare I make one tiny complaint? I didn't see any musicians in the audience. Yes, there were a handful of children and some 'young people', no doubt dragged in for the nice 'animals' piece. Otherwise, this was the Wigmore Hall Friends Incorporated (mostly over-65s from Highgate), plus a few music business types (the ones who look straight through you until you force them to acknowledge your existence) and, of course, sponsors. Not that I'm objecting to the extraordinary fact that a Saint-Saens Festival could suddenly become THE Place To Be Seen. But it's a conundrum for the Wigmore Hall, which seats about 550 and doesn't have room for everyone who'd want to go. The hall can't expand because that would wreck everything - the intimacy, the atmosphere, the acoustic. Isn't there any way to get more 'ordinary' music lovers into a concert like this?
Never mind. Three cheers for Camille Twinkletoes! I shall tell my mobile phone company that I'm only going to accept the free upgrade if I can have a handset that plays the 'Carnival of the Animals' finale. And you know someone's made a difference to the publicity when, on the way to such a concert, you hear a busker at Waterloo playing 'The Swan'!
Saturday, April 17, 2004
Injury time
I'm getting a taste of Life on the Other Side. It hurts.
Venturing to a piano in public is about the dumbest thing someone in my profession can do. Since I have to pass judgment on other people's musical achievements, trying to perform myself is asking for trouble. Still...playing the piano + marrying professional violinist = concerts. My colleague Olly Condy, dep ed of Classic FM Magazine, has asked Tom and me to give a recital in a series at the church where he's organist, St Paul's, Clapham. With rash delight, we chose the Cesar Franck sonata, which happens to have one of the nastiest piano parts in the repertoire.
Upshot: headache. Except that it's not so much headache as shoulder ache.
About six weeks ago my shoulder started hurting and it's got worse. I've eliminated various other activities that could have caused it - weight training (oh yes), carrying the shopping, carting around big handbags full of books...but with the concert a few weeks away, I can't cut out the piano; and the more I practise, the clearer it is that Monsieur Franck is to blame. So the heat is on - the Deep Heat.
It's so easy, from our usual position as happy listeners, to forget what an intensely physical thing playing a musical instrument is. Musicians are 'dreamers of dreams', absorbed in a world of beauty, spirituality and moral edification.....aren't they? No way. They're like Olympic athletes. The more I practise, the more spurious my privileged position as reviewer feels. Does ANYONE who doesn't play have ANY idea how DIFFICULT it is? It takes your whole body, your whole mind, your whole spirit, your whole heart, and if you emerge unscathed in each department you are damn lucky. Hey guys, dear musicians, I take my hat off to all of you.
I'm seeing the physiotherapist later this week and after our concert I can close the piano until I'm better. Spare a thought for the professional musicians who can't stop - no play, no pay. How many of them are pushing on through pain like this in front of oblivious audiences and critics? How many of them ever find the backup, support and understanding they need?
I'll never forget the nightmare I had as a student in Cambridge when I got tendonitis. In those days (1986), nobody had heard of RSI...Over 18 months I experienced:
* Sports injuries clinic - ultrasound.
* GP - anti-inflammatory drugs.
* Different GP - diagnosis of glandular fever-type virus.
* University Counselling Service - recommended for Neurotic Music Student Who Thinks Her Arm Hurts. Sat there telling long-suffering counsellor that my arm hurt.
* Chiropracter - mad Yorkshireman with chips on both shoulders who'd missed his true vocation (butcher). Nearly fainted in Newnham College afterwards.
* Acupuncture - no fun if you don't like needles. Emerged with bruising which, I'm assured by those who swear by acupuncture, isn't supposed to happen.
* Packet of frozen peas, wrapped in tea towel - applied to sore arm daily.
* Finally I bought a little bottle of homeopathic remedy for pains in ligaments. Two weeks later I was better. As I don't really believe in homeopathy, this was quite a surprise, but thank goodness it worked.
I was lucky then. Hundreds are less lucky. My toast today is to them. And my plea to everyone else is: just think a little more about what has gone into the creation of the performance you are listening to.
Venturing to a piano in public is about the dumbest thing someone in my profession can do. Since I have to pass judgment on other people's musical achievements, trying to perform myself is asking for trouble. Still...playing the piano + marrying professional violinist = concerts. My colleague Olly Condy, dep ed of Classic FM Magazine, has asked Tom and me to give a recital in a series at the church where he's organist, St Paul's, Clapham. With rash delight, we chose the Cesar Franck sonata, which happens to have one of the nastiest piano parts in the repertoire.
Upshot: headache. Except that it's not so much headache as shoulder ache.
About six weeks ago my shoulder started hurting and it's got worse. I've eliminated various other activities that could have caused it - weight training (oh yes), carrying the shopping, carting around big handbags full of books...but with the concert a few weeks away, I can't cut out the piano; and the more I practise, the clearer it is that Monsieur Franck is to blame. So the heat is on - the Deep Heat.
It's so easy, from our usual position as happy listeners, to forget what an intensely physical thing playing a musical instrument is. Musicians are 'dreamers of dreams', absorbed in a world of beauty, spirituality and moral edification.....aren't they? No way. They're like Olympic athletes. The more I practise, the more spurious my privileged position as reviewer feels. Does ANYONE who doesn't play have ANY idea how DIFFICULT it is? It takes your whole body, your whole mind, your whole spirit, your whole heart, and if you emerge unscathed in each department you are damn lucky. Hey guys, dear musicians, I take my hat off to all of you.
I'm seeing the physiotherapist later this week and after our concert I can close the piano until I'm better. Spare a thought for the professional musicians who can't stop - no play, no pay. How many of them are pushing on through pain like this in front of oblivious audiences and critics? How many of them ever find the backup, support and understanding they need?
I'll never forget the nightmare I had as a student in Cambridge when I got tendonitis. In those days (1986), nobody had heard of RSI...Over 18 months I experienced:
* Sports injuries clinic - ultrasound.
* GP - anti-inflammatory drugs.
* Different GP - diagnosis of glandular fever-type virus.
* University Counselling Service - recommended for Neurotic Music Student Who Thinks Her Arm Hurts. Sat there telling long-suffering counsellor that my arm hurt.
* Chiropracter - mad Yorkshireman with chips on both shoulders who'd missed his true vocation (butcher). Nearly fainted in Newnham College afterwards.
* Acupuncture - no fun if you don't like needles. Emerged with bruising which, I'm assured by those who swear by acupuncture, isn't supposed to happen.
* Packet of frozen peas, wrapped in tea towel - applied to sore arm daily.
* Finally I bought a little bottle of homeopathic remedy for pains in ligaments. Two weeks later I was better. As I don't really believe in homeopathy, this was quite a surprise, but thank goodness it worked.
I was lucky then. Hundreds are less lucky. My toast today is to them. And my plea to everyone else is: just think a little more about what has gone into the creation of the performance you are listening to.
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
My favourite festival
I've been to a few, Salzburg and Verbier included, but this one took the biscuit. And the chances are you won't have heard of it.
I haven't been able to write about this anywhere 'official' yet, because editors tend to say 'Where on earth is that?' when I tell them I had a great time in...St Nazaire. Fair enough: a depressed, sometime-shipbuilding little town on the Loire Atlantique coast of France, blasted to pieces (mainly by the Brits) in the war and a long way from the glitz and glamour of gay Paris doesn't sound like a prime-time travel feature to anyone. And if you have heard of St Nazaire, chances are that it's because there was a fearful accident there last November when a gangplank leading onto the new oceanliner Queen Mary II (which was being built there) collapsed and 15 people were killed falling onto the dry dock.
If, however, you want to join my campaign for Real Music, this is the place to go in September. The festival was founded 14 years ago by my friend, interviewee and favourite fiddler Philippe Graffin [see South Africa etc]. Last September he assembled a marvellous group of musicians to perform a set of fascinating programmes build around the idea of 'L'invitation au voyage' - appropriate because the building of the Queen Mary II was the most significant thing to have happened in St Nazaire in years. 'L'invitation au voyage' largely took the form of a pairing of English and French music; there was also the world premiere of David Matthews's specially-commissioned setting of the Baudelaire poem of that title.
It was only there, listening to Yuzuko Horigome playing The Lark Ascending with piano accompaniment in the beautiful chapel-turned-art-gallery where most of the concerts happen, that I realised how little British music is known outside our little island. The enthusiastic local audience lapped it up, but had never heard it before. The same went for Elgar's Sospiri, the centrepiece of the final concert. That was an event in itself: a large warehouse, right next to the nearly-finished Queen Mary II, was transformed into a concert hall for the evening. Despite a rather unusual acoustic, it proved a stunning setting. The audience was bussed in from the town and some people apparently queued all day to get there first and be in the front row.
Why is this my favourite festival? There are no 5-star hotels or gourmet oyster bars; no mountain views or hang-gliding; no composer house museums, specially made chocolates or champagne tents for corporate sponsors. And there's no pretentiousness, no posing, no money for marketing, no big-name circuit recitalists playing their year's programme for the hundredth time. Just wonderful, imaginatively devised concerts played by fantastic musicians for mainly local audiences who'd never get the chance to hear it otherwise. St Nazaire may not be the prettiest of French towns, but it's friendly, the locals love their festival, the food is excellent and the local wine splendid - and there's also a wonderful beach! It's genuine, it's real and it deserves all the attention it can't afford.
This year's St Nazaire Festival - the official title is Consonances - takes place from 18 to 25 September and some exciting Russian stuff was being planned last time I checked it out. See the link for more info.
I haven't been able to write about this anywhere 'official' yet, because editors tend to say 'Where on earth is that?' when I tell them I had a great time in...St Nazaire. Fair enough: a depressed, sometime-shipbuilding little town on the Loire Atlantique coast of France, blasted to pieces (mainly by the Brits) in the war and a long way from the glitz and glamour of gay Paris doesn't sound like a prime-time travel feature to anyone. And if you have heard of St Nazaire, chances are that it's because there was a fearful accident there last November when a gangplank leading onto the new oceanliner Queen Mary II (which was being built there) collapsed and 15 people were killed falling onto the dry dock.
If, however, you want to join my campaign for Real Music, this is the place to go in September. The festival was founded 14 years ago by my friend, interviewee and favourite fiddler Philippe Graffin [see South Africa etc]. Last September he assembled a marvellous group of musicians to perform a set of fascinating programmes build around the idea of 'L'invitation au voyage' - appropriate because the building of the Queen Mary II was the most significant thing to have happened in St Nazaire in years. 'L'invitation au voyage' largely took the form of a pairing of English and French music; there was also the world premiere of David Matthews's specially-commissioned setting of the Baudelaire poem of that title.
It was only there, listening to Yuzuko Horigome playing The Lark Ascending with piano accompaniment in the beautiful chapel-turned-art-gallery where most of the concerts happen, that I realised how little British music is known outside our little island. The enthusiastic local audience lapped it up, but had never heard it before. The same went for Elgar's Sospiri, the centrepiece of the final concert. That was an event in itself: a large warehouse, right next to the nearly-finished Queen Mary II, was transformed into a concert hall for the evening. Despite a rather unusual acoustic, it proved a stunning setting. The audience was bussed in from the town and some people apparently queued all day to get there first and be in the front row.
Why is this my favourite festival? There are no 5-star hotels or gourmet oyster bars; no mountain views or hang-gliding; no composer house museums, specially made chocolates or champagne tents for corporate sponsors. And there's no pretentiousness, no posing, no money for marketing, no big-name circuit recitalists playing their year's programme for the hundredth time. Just wonderful, imaginatively devised concerts played by fantastic musicians for mainly local audiences who'd never get the chance to hear it otherwise. St Nazaire may not be the prettiest of French towns, but it's friendly, the locals love their festival, the food is excellent and the local wine splendid - and there's also a wonderful beach! It's genuine, it's real and it deserves all the attention it can't afford.
This year's St Nazaire Festival - the official title is Consonances - takes place from 18 to 25 September and some exciting Russian stuff was being planned last time I checked it out. See the link for more info.
Friday, April 09, 2004
Pilgrims' progress - to Malvern
Just back from an Easter trip to the frozen north...well, north of Watford. On the way up to the in-laws in Buxton, we took a detour to Malvern. I'd always wanted to go there to pay homage to a secret favourite: Sir Edward Elgar.
Being effectively English, by birth if not blood, I feel, as so many of us do, that maybe there's something a little shameful about actually liking music by certain English composers. But Elgar is glorious: paradoxical, personal, heart-rending. His public face can be deeply irritating - even he didn't like what became Land of Hope and Glory - but when he turns inward and shows you his heart, he is up there with the finest of his day. My personal favourites: the Piano Quintet, Serenade for Strings, Violin Concerto, Cello Concerto, Sospiri and even a symphony or two.
The Malvern Hills - a bizarre, dramatic hump in an otherwise flattish landscape - provided the backdrop to Elgar's inspiration. The views are stunning and the atmosphere remarkable. It feels like a place to stand back from life and look at everything from above and beyond: at once distanced, provided with perspective, yet also thrown back upon yourself and your own thoughts. You seem to gaze at life through both ends of the binoculars at the same time. Is this perhaps how Elgar saw it too?
He is buried in the graveyard of St Wulstan's Church, Little Malvern. We went there and found the grave adorned with vases of daffodils. Tom got out his violin and played Salut d'amour for him.
The Elgar Birthplace Museum, just west of Worcester and north of Malvern, is the cottage where the composer first saw the light of day. His daughter Carice bought it and turned it into a museum in (I think) the 1970s, with, on show, his writing table, plenty of photos, some letters and memorabilia and the prettiest of English country gardens full of daffodils and apple blossom. An additional Visitor Centre offers an excellent display telling the story of his life and containing some amazing manuscripts including the Second Symphony. More info via link on the left.
Additional insight for Faure fanatics like me: Elgar and Faure had the same British patron - Leo Frank Schuster - who once gave a party for the two of them together. They both sported fabulous moustachios and there are moments when they even sound alike.
A visit to Malvern and the Elgar Birthplace Museum is highly recommended for all Elgar fans, closet or otherwise. We don't make enough fuss of our few composers in this country!
Being effectively English, by birth if not blood, I feel, as so many of us do, that maybe there's something a little shameful about actually liking music by certain English composers. But Elgar is glorious: paradoxical, personal, heart-rending. His public face can be deeply irritating - even he didn't like what became Land of Hope and Glory - but when he turns inward and shows you his heart, he is up there with the finest of his day. My personal favourites: the Piano Quintet, Serenade for Strings, Violin Concerto, Cello Concerto, Sospiri and even a symphony or two.
The Malvern Hills - a bizarre, dramatic hump in an otherwise flattish landscape - provided the backdrop to Elgar's inspiration. The views are stunning and the atmosphere remarkable. It feels like a place to stand back from life and look at everything from above and beyond: at once distanced, provided with perspective, yet also thrown back upon yourself and your own thoughts. You seem to gaze at life through both ends of the binoculars at the same time. Is this perhaps how Elgar saw it too?
He is buried in the graveyard of St Wulstan's Church, Little Malvern. We went there and found the grave adorned with vases of daffodils. Tom got out his violin and played Salut d'amour for him.
The Elgar Birthplace Museum, just west of Worcester and north of Malvern, is the cottage where the composer first saw the light of day. His daughter Carice bought it and turned it into a museum in (I think) the 1970s, with, on show, his writing table, plenty of photos, some letters and memorabilia and the prettiest of English country gardens full of daffodils and apple blossom. An additional Visitor Centre offers an excellent display telling the story of his life and containing some amazing manuscripts including the Second Symphony. More info via link on the left.
Additional insight for Faure fanatics like me: Elgar and Faure had the same British patron - Leo Frank Schuster - who once gave a party for the two of them together. They both sported fabulous moustachios and there are moments when they even sound alike.
A visit to Malvern and the Elgar Birthplace Museum is highly recommended for all Elgar fans, closet or otherwise. We don't make enough fuss of our few composers in this country!
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
Mayerling. Twice.
As a teenager, I used to be a ballet nut and now - after a long gap - I've resumed. Discovering a few friends who are also ballet nuts is a help - one of my more depressing experiences was watching my husband nod off quietly while Alina Cojocaru performed the Rose Adage, and discovering afterwards that he didn't know the story of The Sleeping Beauty. Upshot is I've been to see 'Mayerling' twice in two weeks.
'Mayerling', based on the true story of Prince Rudolf, heir to the Hapsburg empire, and his suicide pact with his teenaged mistress Mary Vetsera at the Mayerling hunting lodge, is real dance theatre. It achieves theatrical coups that you might not think ballet could deal with - the subtle (and less subtle) relationship between Rudolf and his ex-girlfriend; the frightening cross-currents in the various pas de deux (on his wedding night, after he has terrified his bride Stephanie with his favourite foreplay toys, a pistol and a skull, why does she still run after him and fling herself, literally, around his shoulders?); and ultimately the meeting of soulmates, even if those soulmates are people that most of us wouldn't want to go within 100 miles of. It makes you care passionately about the most unappealing of all possible characters, and cry when they kill each other. How does Kenneth MacMillan do it?
MacMillan was nothing short of a choreographic genius, but the answer - in part - has also got to be the music: Liszt, patchworked together by the expert arranger John Lanchbery. The late Lanchbery was a one-off. He made numerous arrangements for Frederick Ashton: La fille mal gardée, The Tales of Beatrix Potter, A Month in the Country and more. For 'Mayerling', he carefully selected, orchestrated and tailored to MacMillan's needs a tremendous range of Liszt - we spotted Soirees de Vienne, the Faust Symphony, Vallee d'Obermann, Funerailles, Chasse-neige, Harmonies du Soire, Paysage, a Valse oubliee, the Mephisto Waltz (brilliantly used in the tavern scene) and much more. Liszt was an inspired choice of composer - apart from the fact that he knew and performed to this whole bunch of mad, ghastly Hapsburgs, his music can steep you in romanticism and make you suspend your early 21st-century ironic detachment like nobody except possibly his son-in-law Wagner. Lanchbery is an undersung musical hero and deserves a standing ovation in his own right.
'Mayerling' is a powerful, at times devastating evening out - frighteningly exhilarating and cathartic - and I can't recommend it highly enough. Book online at the Royal Opera House link left.
PS - Delighted to find a Comment posting from harpist Helen Radice, a fellow classical music blogger. If you enjoyed the post about musicians' mad travel schedules, try hers - you ain't seen nothing yet! Link on the left.
'Mayerling', based on the true story of Prince Rudolf, heir to the Hapsburg empire, and his suicide pact with his teenaged mistress Mary Vetsera at the Mayerling hunting lodge, is real dance theatre. It achieves theatrical coups that you might not think ballet could deal with - the subtle (and less subtle) relationship between Rudolf and his ex-girlfriend; the frightening cross-currents in the various pas de deux (on his wedding night, after he has terrified his bride Stephanie with his favourite foreplay toys, a pistol and a skull, why does she still run after him and fling herself, literally, around his shoulders?); and ultimately the meeting of soulmates, even if those soulmates are people that most of us wouldn't want to go within 100 miles of. It makes you care passionately about the most unappealing of all possible characters, and cry when they kill each other. How does Kenneth MacMillan do it?
MacMillan was nothing short of a choreographic genius, but the answer - in part - has also got to be the music: Liszt, patchworked together by the expert arranger John Lanchbery. The late Lanchbery was a one-off. He made numerous arrangements for Frederick Ashton: La fille mal gardée, The Tales of Beatrix Potter, A Month in the Country and more. For 'Mayerling', he carefully selected, orchestrated and tailored to MacMillan's needs a tremendous range of Liszt - we spotted Soirees de Vienne, the Faust Symphony, Vallee d'Obermann, Funerailles, Chasse-neige, Harmonies du Soire, Paysage, a Valse oubliee, the Mephisto Waltz (brilliantly used in the tavern scene) and much more. Liszt was an inspired choice of composer - apart from the fact that he knew and performed to this whole bunch of mad, ghastly Hapsburgs, his music can steep you in romanticism and make you suspend your early 21st-century ironic detachment like nobody except possibly his son-in-law Wagner. Lanchbery is an undersung musical hero and deserves a standing ovation in his own right.
'Mayerling' is a powerful, at times devastating evening out - frighteningly exhilarating and cathartic - and I can't recommend it highly enough. Book online at the Royal Opera House link left.
PS - Delighted to find a Comment posting from harpist Helen Radice, a fellow classical music blogger. If you enjoyed the post about musicians' mad travel schedules, try hers - you ain't seen nothing yet! Link on the left.
Saturday, March 27, 2004
Wonderful books old and new
Hooray for the internet!
Good books on music are ever rarer and go out of print ever faster. When I was researching my Faure book, I stumbled across a volume in the Barbican library called 'Saint-Saens and his Circle' by James Harding. Published in 1965, it brings the era and its personalities to life with a vividness and elegance that eludes most of the more musicological writers. Of course, it's long out of print. I'm currently working on a piece to trail Steven Isserlis's Saint-Saens Festival, which begins next month, so a couple of weeks ago I headed for the Barbican to refresh my memory. Got there to find the library was closed...when it should definitely have been open. Westminster Music Library has strange opening hours which don't suit me too well. Local authority libraries here in South West London don't seem to have heard of Saint-Saens.
But I now have my own beautiful, good-as-new copy of this elusive little book, thanks to the internet. Devoted buyers and sellers of second-hand books have spurred on the creation of a number of sites that pull together huge numbers of second-hand book dealers all over the world - among them abebooks.co.uk (I also like usedbookcentral.com but it's based somewhere in the American mid-west and most purchases get sent there first!). You can search for a title or author and at once up comes a list of those outlets which have one to sell, everywhere from Leigh on Sea to Nebraska. You can write to the bookseller, or simply order and pay online and a day or two later the book is at your door - in this case, for the same price as two or three train trips from Mortlake to the British Library. I've also run to earth a long out-of-print biog of Turgenev by V S Pritchett and a lovely hardback of Turgenev's letters.
Now all I need is time to read them!
Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, a brand new book arrived in a parcel from Classic FM Magazine: 'Claude Debussy as I knew him' and other writings by Arthur Hartmann. I hadn't come across Hartmann before, but it seems he was a well-known violinist in the first half of last century and knew everyone who was anyone; he was also blessed with the ability to write beautifully about his acquaintances. Born in Philadelphia to Hungarian parents, Hartmann did, however, reinvent himself, writing his own press releases and making out that he too was born in Hungary - even, apparently, speaking with a phoney foreign accent and apologising for his English! (But we know musicians who do this even today...). It includes a number of letters from Debussy and Emma Debussy to Hartmann, as well as meaty chapters about Hartmann's teachers Ysaye and Loeffler. A treasure of a book, published by University of Rochester Press.
Good books on music are ever rarer and go out of print ever faster. When I was researching my Faure book, I stumbled across a volume in the Barbican library called 'Saint-Saens and his Circle' by James Harding. Published in 1965, it brings the era and its personalities to life with a vividness and elegance that eludes most of the more musicological writers. Of course, it's long out of print. I'm currently working on a piece to trail Steven Isserlis's Saint-Saens Festival, which begins next month, so a couple of weeks ago I headed for the Barbican to refresh my memory. Got there to find the library was closed...when it should definitely have been open. Westminster Music Library has strange opening hours which don't suit me too well. Local authority libraries here in South West London don't seem to have heard of Saint-Saens.
But I now have my own beautiful, good-as-new copy of this elusive little book, thanks to the internet. Devoted buyers and sellers of second-hand books have spurred on the creation of a number of sites that pull together huge numbers of second-hand book dealers all over the world - among them abebooks.co.uk (I also like usedbookcentral.com but it's based somewhere in the American mid-west and most purchases get sent there first!). You can search for a title or author and at once up comes a list of those outlets which have one to sell, everywhere from Leigh on Sea to Nebraska. You can write to the bookseller, or simply order and pay online and a day or two later the book is at your door - in this case, for the same price as two or three train trips from Mortlake to the British Library. I've also run to earth a long out-of-print biog of Turgenev by V S Pritchett and a lovely hardback of Turgenev's letters.
Now all I need is time to read them!
Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, a brand new book arrived in a parcel from Classic FM Magazine: 'Claude Debussy as I knew him' and other writings by Arthur Hartmann. I hadn't come across Hartmann before, but it seems he was a well-known violinist in the first half of last century and knew everyone who was anyone; he was also blessed with the ability to write beautifully about his acquaintances. Born in Philadelphia to Hungarian parents, Hartmann did, however, reinvent himself, writing his own press releases and making out that he too was born in Hungary - even, apparently, speaking with a phoney foreign accent and apologising for his English! (But we know musicians who do this even today...). It includes a number of letters from Debussy and Emma Debussy to Hartmann, as well as meaty chapters about Hartmann's teachers Ysaye and Loeffler. A treasure of a book, published by University of Rochester Press.
Friday, March 19, 2004
Coleridge-Taylor and South Africa: a personal testament...
Written through a growing pile of tissues...My work doesn't often induce tears, but this is an exception.
Philippe Graffin's new CD landed on the doormat yesterday, fresh from Avie. As I mentioned before, it's the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Violin Concerto's world premiere recording plus its perfect companion piece, the Dvorak. Philippe is accompanied by the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Michael Hankinson.
Accompanied by WHAT, you ask?
The JPO was founded in 2000 after the disbanding of the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra. It represents a desperate struggle to keep classical music alive in South Africa at a time when the country is beset by vast and terrifying problems. Sheer determination on the part of the musicians seems to be behind this phoenix rising from the ashes of a cultural relativism from the state that is understandable but depressing. This is the JPO's first commercial recording. The booklet photos prove that the orchestra is racially mixed; their playing proves that they pull together towards one goal; and Coleridge-Taylor - racially mixed himself and with 'more talent in his little finger' than the rest of his composition class had in their entire bodies, according to his teacher, Stanford - is the perfect figure for this debut.
I got involved with this CD through a set of extraordinary coincidences. Back in August 2002, I was doing some freelance sub-editing for The Strad and on my desk landed an article about the history of the Coleridge-Taylor Violin Concerto, by the American president of the Maud Powell Society, Karen A. Shaffer. It was fascinating, but the editor felt it needed a little tweaking and some extra background. This was entrusted to me and I ended up taking it home to edit and research there. It was published in the November 2002 edition.
A year later, Philippe told me that he was about to record the concerto. That's funny, I said, I've still got an article about it by someone else on my computer, here it is by e-mail.... After another six months, I was thrilled to get a surprise call from Simon Foster asking me to write the booklet notes.
But it's only now that I've seen and heard the finished CD that the significance of this project has really hit me - and its significance for me personally.
My parents were both born in Johannesburg and left in the 1950s. They were both music-lovers, brought together by their passion for music and the lack of such enthusiasm in those around them. My mother once told me that she'd had the opportunity to come to London to study at the Royal Academy of Music and her father refused to let her go. They hated apartheid and also longed for the music, opera and ballet that was available to them in London. Later, when I was growing up, all my parents' friends in London were South African emigres too, many of them exiled for political affiliations, involvement with anti-apartheid campaigns or educational activities and consciousness-raising in the townships. My father, a neuropathologist, later told me he was an outside consultant in the Steve Biko inquest.
My father had studied at the University of the Witwatersrand - which happens to be where Philippe and the JPO made this recording. Dad refused to go back to South Africa for several decades; in his last years, however, after the fall of apartheid, he took to spending the winters in Cape Town. I spent two weeks there with him in 1996 when he was already terminally ill - a time that now provides treasured memories.
That visit was my first since childhood. I've always shied away from South Africa and all it represents for me and my family. A massive sense of guilt at my family background; a revulsion at the country that could invent and keep in place such a horrific system for so long; a hatred of the philistine outlook and lack of cultural appreciation; the introversion of so much of the Jewish community (even before I was 18 my grandfather was on at me about marrying a nice Jewish boy); the rift between my own interests and those of so many of my cousins, who no doubt think I'm barking mad. South Africa is a loaded issue.
So, when Philippe said to me last December, 'Don't you want to go to South Africa?' I could only say that I didn't. Yet any journalist with half a brain would have looked at this project and headed straight for Heathrow. As Philippe says in his introductory note, vast numbers of black children in South Africa are now learning the violin - he's seen this for himself - and he compares it to the ghettoes of Vilna and Warsaw where so many great violinists of the past originated. Many Jewish emigres from Lithuania went to South Africa; did they in some way bring passion for the violin with them and take it into the townships? Among those Lithuanian emigres were my father's grandparents...
This could have been a massive story: the concerto, the orchestra, the kids...and I didn't do it. Now I'm wondering whether anyone else will either. If not, it's tragic.
And yet, I find that I've ended up being a small part of a production that would have represented the fulfilment of my parents' dreams, had they lived to see it. In Johannesburg, where this CD will probably sell well, there are many people who remember them and will recognise our name. Can one dedicate booklet notes in a CD? If so - these are dedicated to the memory of my parents: Myra (1932-1994) and Leo (1928-1996).
That's why I've been having a good howl today.
Philippe - if you read this - thank you.
Philippe Graffin's new CD landed on the doormat yesterday, fresh from Avie. As I mentioned before, it's the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Violin Concerto's world premiere recording plus its perfect companion piece, the Dvorak. Philippe is accompanied by the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Michael Hankinson.
Accompanied by WHAT, you ask?
The JPO was founded in 2000 after the disbanding of the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra. It represents a desperate struggle to keep classical music alive in South Africa at a time when the country is beset by vast and terrifying problems. Sheer determination on the part of the musicians seems to be behind this phoenix rising from the ashes of a cultural relativism from the state that is understandable but depressing. This is the JPO's first commercial recording. The booklet photos prove that the orchestra is racially mixed; their playing proves that they pull together towards one goal; and Coleridge-Taylor - racially mixed himself and with 'more talent in his little finger' than the rest of his composition class had in their entire bodies, according to his teacher, Stanford - is the perfect figure for this debut.
I got involved with this CD through a set of extraordinary coincidences. Back in August 2002, I was doing some freelance sub-editing for The Strad and on my desk landed an article about the history of the Coleridge-Taylor Violin Concerto, by the American president of the Maud Powell Society, Karen A. Shaffer. It was fascinating, but the editor felt it needed a little tweaking and some extra background. This was entrusted to me and I ended up taking it home to edit and research there. It was published in the November 2002 edition.
A year later, Philippe told me that he was about to record the concerto. That's funny, I said, I've still got an article about it by someone else on my computer, here it is by e-mail.... After another six months, I was thrilled to get a surprise call from Simon Foster asking me to write the booklet notes.
But it's only now that I've seen and heard the finished CD that the significance of this project has really hit me - and its significance for me personally.
My parents were both born in Johannesburg and left in the 1950s. They were both music-lovers, brought together by their passion for music and the lack of such enthusiasm in those around them. My mother once told me that she'd had the opportunity to come to London to study at the Royal Academy of Music and her father refused to let her go. They hated apartheid and also longed for the music, opera and ballet that was available to them in London. Later, when I was growing up, all my parents' friends in London were South African emigres too, many of them exiled for political affiliations, involvement with anti-apartheid campaigns or educational activities and consciousness-raising in the townships. My father, a neuropathologist, later told me he was an outside consultant in the Steve Biko inquest.
My father had studied at the University of the Witwatersrand - which happens to be where Philippe and the JPO made this recording. Dad refused to go back to South Africa for several decades; in his last years, however, after the fall of apartheid, he took to spending the winters in Cape Town. I spent two weeks there with him in 1996 when he was already terminally ill - a time that now provides treasured memories.
That visit was my first since childhood. I've always shied away from South Africa and all it represents for me and my family. A massive sense of guilt at my family background; a revulsion at the country that could invent and keep in place such a horrific system for so long; a hatred of the philistine outlook and lack of cultural appreciation; the introversion of so much of the Jewish community (even before I was 18 my grandfather was on at me about marrying a nice Jewish boy); the rift between my own interests and those of so many of my cousins, who no doubt think I'm barking mad. South Africa is a loaded issue.
So, when Philippe said to me last December, 'Don't you want to go to South Africa?' I could only say that I didn't. Yet any journalist with half a brain would have looked at this project and headed straight for Heathrow. As Philippe says in his introductory note, vast numbers of black children in South Africa are now learning the violin - he's seen this for himself - and he compares it to the ghettoes of Vilna and Warsaw where so many great violinists of the past originated. Many Jewish emigres from Lithuania went to South Africa; did they in some way bring passion for the violin with them and take it into the townships? Among those Lithuanian emigres were my father's grandparents...
This could have been a massive story: the concerto, the orchestra, the kids...and I didn't do it. Now I'm wondering whether anyone else will either. If not, it's tragic.
And yet, I find that I've ended up being a small part of a production that would have represented the fulfilment of my parents' dreams, had they lived to see it. In Johannesburg, where this CD will probably sell well, there are many people who remember them and will recognise our name. Can one dedicate booklet notes in a CD? If so - these are dedicated to the memory of my parents: Myra (1932-1994) and Leo (1928-1996).
That's why I've been having a good howl today.
Philippe - if you read this - thank you.
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
Fame: are they gonna live forever?
Great musicians...oh yes, they exist and many of them are properly recognised. Argerich, Barenboim, Zimerman, Lupu... But the way the wheels of the music business turn, on the next strata down there's a lot of confusion about who is a great musician and who simply looks good on a front cover or has a journalisable hobby such as keeping fierce wild animals. The famous artists are not necessarily the great ones; and vice-versa.
Andrew Clements wrote an absolute stinker of a review about Leif Ove Andsnes in The Guardian the other day, saying, basically, that he can't see what all the fuss is about. Andsnes is a really sweet guy and various of my female colleagues think he's gorgeous. But compare him on purely artistic grounds to a pianist like Grigory Sokolov...hmmm...
Hopefully, if you're reading my blog, you already know who Sokolov is. In case not: he is a big Russian bear of a pianist, a one-time protege of Gilels. His face on a poster is not going to make teenagers swoon, but he is the one pianist I've heard in the last couple of years who has made me rethink everything I ever thought about the piano. His playing is so intense, so concentrated, so beautiful and so wide-ranging in style, dynamic and imagination, from Couperin to Prokofiev, that most others look pallid in comparison. He has a following among the cognoscecnti. But shouldn't people be queuing out past the Thames to hear artistry of this calibre? Meanwhile I've heard about one award a few years ago that involved a shortlist of fine musicians...allegedly selected not least because they also looked good on magazine covers.
I don't think there's any secret about any of this - the music business has worked like this for years - but it does get up my nose because it seems that the way to have your piano recital album hit the charts is now to hug wolves in your spare time. With too many competitions and too much corruption in the awarding of prizes, means of making sensible, independent choices about rising stars have diminished somewhat. Therefore decisions about who gets the recording contracts and the promotion campaigns seems to be increasingly a matter of one person's whim somewhere at the top of a company. That person has to know what they're doing and one can't help wondering, occasionally, whether they really do.
Actually they know exactly what they're doing. But that doesn't always involve signing up musicians on artistic grounds alone.
On that merry note, I'm off to Berlin to interview one of the exceptions: Daniel Barenboim.
Andrew Clements wrote an absolute stinker of a review about Leif Ove Andsnes in The Guardian the other day, saying, basically, that he can't see what all the fuss is about. Andsnes is a really sweet guy and various of my female colleagues think he's gorgeous. But compare him on purely artistic grounds to a pianist like Grigory Sokolov...hmmm...
Hopefully, if you're reading my blog, you already know who Sokolov is. In case not: he is a big Russian bear of a pianist, a one-time protege of Gilels. His face on a poster is not going to make teenagers swoon, but he is the one pianist I've heard in the last couple of years who has made me rethink everything I ever thought about the piano. His playing is so intense, so concentrated, so beautiful and so wide-ranging in style, dynamic and imagination, from Couperin to Prokofiev, that most others look pallid in comparison. He has a following among the cognoscecnti. But shouldn't people be queuing out past the Thames to hear artistry of this calibre? Meanwhile I've heard about one award a few years ago that involved a shortlist of fine musicians...allegedly selected not least because they also looked good on magazine covers.
I don't think there's any secret about any of this - the music business has worked like this for years - but it does get up my nose because it seems that the way to have your piano recital album hit the charts is now to hug wolves in your spare time. With too many competitions and too much corruption in the awarding of prizes, means of making sensible, independent choices about rising stars have diminished somewhat. Therefore decisions about who gets the recording contracts and the promotion campaigns seems to be increasingly a matter of one person's whim somewhere at the top of a company. That person has to know what they're doing and one can't help wondering, occasionally, whether they really do.
Actually they know exactly what they're doing. But that doesn't always involve signing up musicians on artistic grounds alone.
On that merry note, I'm off to Berlin to interview one of the exceptions: Daniel Barenboim.
Friday, March 12, 2004
Korngold rides again
Opened The Guardian this morning to find a massive article about Erich Wolfgang Korngold and his two finest operas, Die tote Stadt and Das Wunder der Heliane, staring back at me. By Martin Kettle! Not a moment too soon, EWK's going mainstream. There's a new production of Die tote Stadt in Berlin, which seems to have prompted this latest article, and the year 2007 will mark the 50th anniversary of his death and the 110th anniversary of his birth. Read Martin's article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,1167046,00.html
Someone needs to do something about the anniversary. Lots of people need to do lots of things. Most of all, someone needs to stage Die tote Stadt in Britain. In its illustrious lifetime, this absolute bloody masterpiece has received just one concert performance in Britain - by the Kensington Symphony Orchestra, essentially a bunch of highly talented amateur musicians (extremely good it was too!). Last year I badgered Glyndebourne about it for all I was worth, only to receive the rather glum outlook that the orchestra pit probably isn't big enough.
Come on, ENO, come on, Covent Garden, what are you waiting for?
Someone needs to do something about the anniversary. Lots of people need to do lots of things. Most of all, someone needs to stage Die tote Stadt in Britain. In its illustrious lifetime, this absolute bloody masterpiece has received just one concert performance in Britain - by the Kensington Symphony Orchestra, essentially a bunch of highly talented amateur musicians (extremely good it was too!). Last year I badgered Glyndebourne about it for all I was worth, only to receive the rather glum outlook that the orchestra pit probably isn't big enough.
Come on, ENO, come on, Covent Garden, what are you waiting for?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)