Farewell, Van Cliburn

Van Cliburn, the American pianist legendary for winning the Tchaikovsky Competition in the USSR in 1962 despite the Cold War , has died at the age of 78. Here's a colourful obituary from the Telegraph. The story goes that Krushchev said "Is he the best? Then give him the prize..."

Here are some tributes.

First, thanks to Mark Ainley of The Piano Files for sharing this link of unusual footage from France. After it, the last movement of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No.1 from Moscow in 1962, conducted by Kirill Kondrashin. Van Cliburn may have played his last movement now, but he will never be forgotten.

AND - UPDATE - in our final selection, Van Cliburn appears as a Mystery Challenger on What's My Line?, stumping the team with a brilliant fake Hungarian accent...

Keith Jarrett is coming to town

Tonight Keith Jarrett plays the Royal Festival Hall. I've been a bit snowed under and a bit under the weather this past week and managed to miss my own article about him in the Indy the other day. Here it is. Director's cut below. It isn't an interview, regrettably. Not for want of trying...he just wasn't up for it, and if he's not gonna talk he's not gonna talk, so there we go. But I'm grateful to Jazz Record Requests presenter Alyn Shipton and super multigenre pianist Simon Mulligan for giving their insights into his nature and influences. 

To me Jarrett is more than a jazz pianist; he is a pianist to put beside any of the greats in any genre.  So it's really a shame that he clashes tonight with Andras Schiff playing Mozart concerti next door at the QEH. Wouldn't it be nice if we could persuade them to do a duet later?

Keith Jarrett is giving a solo concert at the Royal Festival Hall. Spread the word! Except that the word has already spread and the tickets have flown. 

What makes one man and a piano fill a hall for solo improvisation, let alone an individual with a reputation for stopping mid-flow to harangue his audience? Well, Jarrett, 67, is a legend for a good reason. His improvisations well forth from heaven knows where, driven by a depth of conviction that’s unmistakeably his, producing sounds that won’t have been heard before and won’t be repeated. It’s as if he is plugged in to a celestial battery charger, and we, listening, connect to that astounding energy by proxy. 

He performs not just with his hands and arms, but with his whole body, his shoulders curving towards the keyboard as if microscopically examining every squiggle of melody. He emits hums, whines, groans. He sits, he stands, he wiggles. Some find him mesmerising. Others say he is best experienced with eyes closed. 

He reaches audiences that other jazzers don’t. Hardcore classical pianophiles, those who flock to hear artists such as Martha Argerich or Krystian Zimerman, are often drawn to Jarrett for his extraordinarily expressive musicianship and the variety of colour he draws from the instrument. Jarrett had a top-level classical training in his native Pennsylvania, and the virtuoso technique he developed has certainly fed in to the unique way he uses the instrument. He thinks contrapuntally, horizontally, involving many lines and layers of music, often embedding a theme in the middle of a wide-spun texture, and allowing a new section of thought to grow organically out of a small pattern in one that’s gone before. And he’ll squeeze every drop of potential out of that motif before moving on to another. 

Unlike most jazz pianists (Chick Corea excepted), he has recorded classical repertoire too: solo Bach, Mozart piano concertos and Handel suites. He has even made discs playing the organ and the clavichord. This year, while his schedule includes solo improvised recitals and trio performances with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, the loyal ECM label with which he has long worked is also tipped to be releasing a new album in which he performs the Bach sonatas for violin and keyboard with the violinist Michelle Makarski.

ECM has put out his solo improvisations from Vienna, La Scala Milan, London/Paris (Testament), Carnegie Hall, Tokyo and Rio, to name but a few, helping to widen his already huge cult following. Of his massive discography, though, the Köln Concert of 1975 is still perhaps the best-loved recording, having become the biggest-selling solo album in jazz history. Strange, then, to think that, looking back, Jarrett has said he would have done certain things about it differently. He doesn’t stand still. Turbulent episodes of his life affect his creative bent; he has been remarkably open about this, saying in interviews soon after his divorce in 2010 that difficult times were “a source of energy” that he could draw on in his music-making.

But even times when he had no energy at all have made a difference. Stricken with ME (chronic fatigue syndrome) for about two years from 1996, he found himself scarcely able to play. When he returned to his instrument in gradual stages, he effectively relearned his technique, assessing his sound and style and developing a less “aggressive” touch. Once his recovery was underway he spoke of how the illness had forced him to concentrate on the deeper “skeleton” of his music and remarked that he felt he was “starting at zero and being born again at the piano”.

The aims remain simple, though. Jarrett has said that his intention in his solo recitals is, first, to come up with interesting music and, secondly, to make sure that that interesting music isn’t something he has come up with before. 

Alyn Shipton, presenter of BBC Radio 3’s Jazz Record Requests, made a series of radio programmes about Jarrett soon after the pianist had recuperated from ME. “He always says he has no idea what is going to happen in the concert,” Shipton relates. “And with the neurotic perfectionism that only he could apply, he records all his performances, listens back to them, then says he tries to erase them from his mind so that they won’t affect his future ones.” 

His influence on successive generations of jazz musicians has been immeasurable. Simon Mulligan, a British pianist who plays both classical concerts and jazz, says that Jarrett is prime among role models for him and his peers. “It’s Jarrett and Herbie Hancock,” Mulligan remarks. “We all call them Keith and Herbie. I know I’ve been influenced by the way he shapes the arc of his music, and the detail, such as his ‘portamento’ playing when he decorates the run-up to a melodic note like a singer. And in terms of touch, he is one of few people who can really make the piano sing.”

But Jarrett’s outbursts against his audience are no fun (although there’s a spoof Twitter account, @AngryJarrett, that apes them). “He’s convinced that coughing is a sign of boredom and that if you’re really concentrating on the music, you don’t cough,” Shipton comments. “He doesn’t cough while he’s playing, so, he thinks, why should they cough if they’re listening? What people dread is that moment when something that’s going well suddenly falls in on itself and he jumps up and says ‘I’ve seen a red light, there’s a camera! If you want to remember a concert, you remember the music, you don’t remember it visually...’”

Audiences today, accustomed to social media-savvy performers who encouraging filming, uploading and sharing, sometimes forget that musicians are well within their rights to demand to control their own material, and to concentrate on creating it. Distraction can wreck everything they are trying to do. According to Shipton, Jarrett’s CD Radiance, recorded live in Japan, is missing a section “because he lost his rag so badly with the audience, three quarters of the way through, that the last part was no good and he couldn’t issue it”.

ECM might record this London appearance too. So, if you go, remember: don’t cough, don’t take photos and for goodness’ sake don’t attempt to smuggle in a recording device. Another tip: don’t leave too quickly at the end. Sometimes his encores of jazz standards can be almost the most entrancing moments of all.  

Keith Jarrett, The Solo Concert, Royal Festival Hall, 25 February. Box office: 0844 875 0073

My first opera...

I've enjoyed taking a trip down an operatic memory lane for Sinfini, plus talking to a range of celebs about their first experiences of opera and what got them hooked - among them ballerina Zenaida Yanowsky, actor Henry Goodman and comedian Rainer Hersch. Read the whole thing here: http://sinfinimusic.com/uk/features/2013/02/my-first-opera-curtain-up/



What follows is a further ramble on the topic...

Thinking back, I owe my whole opera thing to my parents, who never talked down to me about music when I was a kid. They seemed to know how to encourage an enthusiasm without piling on undue pressure and when I picked up that Magic Flute box (tempted by the picture: left) and wanted to know what was in it, my mum showed me how to follow the translated text as if it was the most natural thing in the world (it was the classic Klemperer recording, in German, without dialogue). It was good of them to put up with my unfortunate singalongaluciapopp tendencies, too.

I’m not surprised they bought me an alternative. This was easier: just one LP, in English, much of it positively designed for singing along. It was The Little Sweep by Benjamin Britten: the story of a group of children and their nanny who rescue a small boy chimney sweep from his abusive employer. It was easy to follow and impossible to forget. Nobody ever seemed to perform it, though. At the time, I had no idea there could be anything sinister in a song about a boy in a bath and I still find myself humming that syncopated, swingy waltz melody now and then. I’ve never once seen this opera live. A footnote: one of the child singers on that recording turned up in my year at university and we used to have a whale of a time playing violin and piano music together (he’d swapped the voice for the fiddle long before). I enjoyed the notion that I’d cut my musical teeth by inadvertently listening to my duo partner singing.

I fell for Eugene Onegin on the car radio, but seeing it in the theatre aged about ten (starring a young soprano named Kiri Somethingorother) left me colder than I'd hoped it would. It was all a bit static, it was hard to hear the words and I couldn't work out why on earth Tatyana fell for Onegin in any case, as he wasn't exactly an appealing kind of chap. 

Eventually live performance did enchant me – but not as you might expect. It was comedy, courtesy of English National Opera. The gods in Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld perching on their clouds; Lesley Garrett stripping off as Adele in Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus; and above all, the sight of my father reduced to complete screeching, weeping helplessness over the nuns in drag in Rossini’s Count Ory. This could only happen in the theatre. And when it happened, there was no point resisting. 

Interesting to see that while a lot of my interviewees cite Mozart and Puccini as their ways in to opera, Ed Gardner thinks those aren't such a good place to start. He plumps straight for Shostakovich and Janacek. 

 

Friday Historical: purple Brahms patch with d'Aranyi, Hess and Cassado

This extraordinary recording from 1928 has finally popped up on Youtube. Here's the second movement of Brahms's Piano Trio in C, Op.87 played by Jelly d'Aranyi (violin), Myra Hess (piano) and Gaspar Cassado (cello).



As I understand it, these sessions - this Brahms and also the Schubert B flat Trio (with Felix Salmond on the cello) - were Hess's first recording. She and Jelly d'Aranyi worked together for some 20 years, giving countless recitals at the likes of the Wigmore and Queen's Hall, but these trios seem to be the only surviving example of their collaboration.

Sometime in the war years, it appears that they must have had a massive fallout. Serious enough that in Hess's biography by Marian McKenna, d'Aranyi - her duo partner for two decades - is afforded just one mention, in passing. I've met a number of people who knew one or the other, sometimes both, yet nobody seems sure exactly what went wrong.

The music world is full of these situations, of course, and in the end it's immaterial since the result, unfortunately, was the same whatever the cause. But when you hear the fine blend of their sounds, d'Aranyi's mellifluous charm sparking against Hess's wit and intelligence, the flow of detail and infinite shading of ideas that takes place in their music-making (it's even more obvious in the Schubert, incidentally), it seems little short of tragic that their every move was not captured by microphone - and that their partnership has somehow been wiped from history.

Mantel-piece explains a key principle of story structure

Anyone who's been on my Total Immersion or Kickstart writing days will recognise, from the part where we talk about story structure, the concept that the Hollywood screenwriting guru Robert McKee terms 'the negation of the negation'. This, essentially, is a double-and-then-some twist of the knife in the guts of your story's principal theme. It can be difficult to pull this off - but here's a perfect example, from real life. 

Supposing your story is, at background level, about freedom of speech in a western democratic country. That is the value, the ideal, that is at stake. The opposite of that, obviously enough, is censorship. But the negation of the negation goes a twist or two further than the opposite, and here it is to have the leader of that free country publicly rebuke a writer for writing something that she never actually wrote. 

Get it? Yes, thought so. Oh, and compound it by having the leader of the opposition do the same thing.

It's one thing for the Mail to misrepresent a thoughtful article by a great novelist; but it's quite another for the PM himself to weigh in, on the side of the tabloid, without checking the author's actual text, which is freely available to read, and doesn't take that long, and doesn't require a doctorate in astrophysics to understand in its proper context. Sensible perspective in an editorial from The Guardian here. 

What does this mass hysteria say about our "culture"? How can people be persuaded to look at empirical fact, rather than rushing en masse to throw verbal stones at the latest individual at whom The Finger Has Pointed? Often it turns upon innocent people who are trying to do the right thing yet find themselves on the receiving end of trumped-up, mendacious, manipulative and usually self-interested claptrap. Is this really so far from the Manchester cover-up, notably the alleged attempt in 2002 to blacken the character of Martin Roscoe for whistle-blowing?

I would like to write an episode of British Borgen (yes, it sounds better in Danish) in which a top UK author sues the Prime Minister for defamation and wins.