There are still several places available for my workshop KICK-START YOUR WRITING this Saturday, 28 February. If you'd like to attend, please get in touch PDQ! Links et al are in the relevant bit of the sidebar! The next one will be in late March.
I am very glad to report, somewhat smugly, that the inaugural workshop seems to have helped to spark one attendee into creating one of the best new blogs I've seen in quite a while, LondonJazz...
UPDATE: It appears that Sundays may generally be preferred to Saturdays. If anyone would like to come along in March but would find Sunday 29th better than Saturday 28th, please let me know - this one is still movable!
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Cleopatra to wed real-life Cesar of Glyndebourne
It's official, as reported by Slipped Disc, Opera Chic and Classical Music Magazine: Danielle de Niese is going to marry Gus Christie, hereditary head honcho of Glyndebourne and until a few days ago almost certainly the most eligible divorcee in Sussex. We are shedding a sentimental tear over this; they looked the picture of happiness last summer, draped over the picnic rugs together in what there was of the sunshine. Bless. And congratulations!
To celebrate, here is Danni as Cleopatra tying the knot with Giulio Cesare (sung here by Sarah Connolly) on stage at Glyndebourne...
To celebrate, here is Danni as Cleopatra tying the knot with Giulio Cesare (sung here by Sarah Connolly) on stage at Glyndebourne...
Sunday, February 22, 2009
MAD PROPS TO THE SUNDAY TIMES!!
BLIMEY, guv! Bryan Appleyard has been picking the 100 best blogs for The Sunday Times and there is JDCMB, up there with the best o'th'best in the Performing Arts section! Mr Appleyard evidently has yet to discover the joys of Korngold, but what the hell - there's nothing so much fun in life as having a 'strange bias'.
Thanks to my beloved Hungarians for alerting me to this with a congratulatory email. I hadn't read the ST today because I've spent most of the morning, er, blogging. About Russian pianists.
A very happy JD is now looking forward to JDCMB'S 5TH BIRTHDAY coming up NEXT SUNDAY, 1 March. But I can't decide what to do to celebrate... Any ideas, folks?
Thanks to my beloved Hungarians for alerting me to this with a congratulatory email. I hadn't read the ST today because I've spent most of the morning, er, blogging. About Russian pianists.
A very happy JD is now looking forward to JDCMB'S 5TH BIRTHDAY coming up NEXT SUNDAY, 1 March. But I can't decide what to do to celebrate... Any ideas, folks?
Sokolov cancels
The other day I promised some less good news about another Russian pianist, and here it is: Grigory Sokolov, who was to have played at the Royal Festival Hall on 29 April, has cancelled his appearance due to visa trouble. The hoops that the British government is demanding artists jump through in order to perform here have now been set so high and made so unpleasant that it appears he has better things to do with his time than bother with them. He just won't come here.
It's OUTRAGEOUS that such bureaucratic claptrap should keep one of the greatest pianists on the planet away from the musical capital of the world! And please don't start writing in to JDCMB with sanctimonious comments about keeping out terrorists - we've had plenty growing up right here in Blighty, and they tend not to be concert pianists, let alone ones of Sokolov's stature.
Consolation prize: Sokolov is to be replaced by Angela Hewitt, who will perform the Bach Goldberg Variations. I'll be interviewing her on stage before the show.
It's OUTRAGEOUS that such bureaucratic claptrap should keep one of the greatest pianists on the planet away from the musical capital of the world! And please don't start writing in to JDCMB with sanctimonious comments about keeping out terrorists - we've had plenty growing up right here in Blighty, and they tend not to be concert pianists, let alone ones of Sokolov's stature.
Consolation prize: Sokolov is to be replaced by Angela Hewitt, who will perform the Bach Goldberg Variations. I'll be interviewing her on stage before the show.
Dreaming on
I've been wondering for a couple of days how best to describe Double Dream, the glorious evening of two-piano bedazzlement from the Russian classical virtuoso Mikhail Rudy and the jazz supremo from Ukraine/Norway Misha Alperin.
The project started life about seven years ago and launched with a beautiful CD, which gives you the idea - take a range of classical works, pass them back and forth at high heat, watch them grow and transform like chemical crystals under waterglass. The concert caught on and the pair have travelled the world with it (most recently Sydney); now, after years of working together, they're at their peak both individually and as a duo. Each maintains his own identity, but together they are more than the sum of their parts. And Double Dream is more than just a concert.
Kings Place was its ideal London home: it has the perfect acoustic of the Wigmore, the space, high-tech capabilities and delicious new-wood aroma of The Sage, the intimacy of, if not quite Ronnie Scotts, then almost. Double Dream is enhanced by creative lighting, opening in darkness (Schumann's Prophet Bird, its feathers in textures you've never encountered before), later blazing into floor-level red for a Prokofiev Toccata adaptation that could have had the startled composer on his feet, cheering, wondering why he hadn't thought of all that himself.
Throughout, a giant screen is poised above the pianists, split in two - one half for each Misha - showing close-ups of hands or faces, Alperin's extraordinary plastic features morphing through vocal ad-libs as he plays and Rudy smiling quietly to himself, his partner and us. The pianists face each other across the Steinways, but the video reverses this: when the images meet in the middle of the screens, a peculiar creature appears apparently with one back, four feet and four very busy arms.
Each pianist has a solo spot: Alperin improvised his way to a tremendous pitch of excitement that somehow drew in an unexpected extract of Rodeo, among other things; Rudy took Petroushka's fairground scene, one of his great party pieces, and, while playing it as written, managed to make it sound improvised. Many pieces are Alperin's own - catchy, irresistibly rhythmic, deliciously virtuoso. And in their far-flung net the pianists trap the shadows of a Chopin mazurka, fleeting moments of Janacek, the silvery gleam of a Haydn adagio. What playing. What creativity. What magic.
On Thursday, the second night of his Piano Dialogues days at KP, Mikhail Rudy joined forces with the actor Peter Guinness, with whom he collaborated a couple of years ago for the British version of The Pianist, his play for actor and pianist based on Wladislaw Szpilman's memoirs. This time it was Janacek and Kafka: the latter's beautiful, quirky Letters to Milena, warm and touching and painful by turns, in which the author traces his love affair with his much younger, married translator.
Kafka and Janacek, the two great and not very bouncy Czechs, never met, but proved a perfect match nonetheless, to the point that from time to time it was almost difficult to remember that it wasn't Janacek who wrote the letters (which half-suggest, like a slightly distorting mirror, Janacek's passion for Kamila Stosslova). Micha paired music and words with inspired sensitivity, grasping the subtlest shades of emotion to match and amplify in the most heart-wrenching moments of In the Mists, the Piano Sonata and extracts from On an Overgrown Path. Again, masterly and unforgettable.
As a finishing touch, each evening the St Pancras Room hosted a screening of a new documentary about Micha, entitled Mikhail Rudy: Portrait of a Pianist, directed by Andy Sommer and narrated (English version) again by Peter Guinness. It's a moving and at times harrowing account of his journey from Soviet Russia to Western triumph and makes all too clear the immense personal cost of such a move - alienation from one's family, a reunion almost too late.
Rudy and Guinness will be doing a two-week run of The Pianist in the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester in June. Meanwhile I am trying to learn as much as possible from their presentation so that we can attempt to make the Hungarian Dances event - similar in format, if not content - perhaps half as beautiful.
The project started life about seven years ago and launched with a beautiful CD, which gives you the idea - take a range of classical works, pass them back and forth at high heat, watch them grow and transform like chemical crystals under waterglass. The concert caught on and the pair have travelled the world with it (most recently Sydney); now, after years of working together, they're at their peak both individually and as a duo. Each maintains his own identity, but together they are more than the sum of their parts. And Double Dream is more than just a concert.
Kings Place was its ideal London home: it has the perfect acoustic of the Wigmore, the space, high-tech capabilities and delicious new-wood aroma of The Sage, the intimacy of, if not quite Ronnie Scotts, then almost. Double Dream is enhanced by creative lighting, opening in darkness (Schumann's Prophet Bird, its feathers in textures you've never encountered before), later blazing into floor-level red for a Prokofiev Toccata adaptation that could have had the startled composer on his feet, cheering, wondering why he hadn't thought of all that himself.
Throughout, a giant screen is poised above the pianists, split in two - one half for each Misha - showing close-ups of hands or faces, Alperin's extraordinary plastic features morphing through vocal ad-libs as he plays and Rudy smiling quietly to himself, his partner and us. The pianists face each other across the Steinways, but the video reverses this: when the images meet in the middle of the screens, a peculiar creature appears apparently with one back, four feet and four very busy arms.
Each pianist has a solo spot: Alperin improvised his way to a tremendous pitch of excitement that somehow drew in an unexpected extract of Rodeo, among other things; Rudy took Petroushka's fairground scene, one of his great party pieces, and, while playing it as written, managed to make it sound improvised. Many pieces are Alperin's own - catchy, irresistibly rhythmic, deliciously virtuoso. And in their far-flung net the pianists trap the shadows of a Chopin mazurka, fleeting moments of Janacek, the silvery gleam of a Haydn adagio. What playing. What creativity. What magic.
On Thursday, the second night of his Piano Dialogues days at KP, Mikhail Rudy joined forces with the actor Peter Guinness, with whom he collaborated a couple of years ago for the British version of The Pianist, his play for actor and pianist based on Wladislaw Szpilman's memoirs. This time it was Janacek and Kafka: the latter's beautiful, quirky Letters to Milena, warm and touching and painful by turns, in which the author traces his love affair with his much younger, married translator.
Kafka and Janacek, the two great and not very bouncy Czechs, never met, but proved a perfect match nonetheless, to the point that from time to time it was almost difficult to remember that it wasn't Janacek who wrote the letters (which half-suggest, like a slightly distorting mirror, Janacek's passion for Kamila Stosslova). Micha paired music and words with inspired sensitivity, grasping the subtlest shades of emotion to match and amplify in the most heart-wrenching moments of In the Mists, the Piano Sonata and extracts from On an Overgrown Path. Again, masterly and unforgettable.
As a finishing touch, each evening the St Pancras Room hosted a screening of a new documentary about Micha, entitled Mikhail Rudy: Portrait of a Pianist, directed by Andy Sommer and narrated (English version) again by Peter Guinness. It's a moving and at times harrowing account of his journey from Soviet Russia to Western triumph and makes all too clear the immense personal cost of such a move - alienation from one's family, a reunion almost too late.
Rudy and Guinness will be doing a two-week run of The Pianist in the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester in June. Meanwhile I am trying to learn as much as possible from their presentation so that we can attempt to make the Hungarian Dances event - similar in format, if not content - perhaps half as beautiful.
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