"If they start shooting, whatever you do, don't leave the synthesizer behind"

Fasten your seatbelts: in Gramophone, the Russian pianist Rustem Hayroudinoff has spilled the beans about his studies at the Moscow Conservatoire in the last days of the USSR.

It's a hair-raising read: from what eight-year-olds had to do in rhythm classes - it could make the UK's Grade VIII examiners blanch - to queuing for practice rooms at 5am in -30 degrees, plus the restaurant band job that Rustem turned down after learning the vocation of the clientele (the quote in our heading gives you a clue). Immense demands, yet equally gargantuan rewards: for all its challenges, this was the best musical training on earth.

If you've been through typical British school and college musical studies, you might be pretty sobered to consider the level of expertise that Moscow expected of its students. No wonder they tended to wipe the floor with everyone else at competitions...

Not to put too fine a point on it, it makes most of us look like complete amateurs (nothing wrong with being an amateur, of course - unless you want to be a professional.)

Rustem's CDs have often grabbed five star reviews and some of his Rachmaninov recordings have become "benchmarks" for BBC Music Magazine, which shortlisted him for its Instrumental award a couple of years back. But he doesn't give that many recitals, so a chance to hear him isn't to be sniffed at. This Saturday Rustem plays at St John's Smith Square.

He introduces the programme himself from the microphone. It's focused on contrasts between JS and CPE Bach, Liszt's devilish and saintly modes, and Rachmaninov's extraordinary Sonata No.1, which is based on the 'Faust' legend but is rarely performed, compared to the Sonata No.2 (possibly because it's too difficult!). Do come and hear him.

More about Rustem from the Cross-Eyed Pianist blog here: a frank, ferocious chat in which he doesn't mince his words about the music business in general...

Here's an interview, an extract of the Rachmaninov Sonata No.1 and an Etude-Tableau, from Canadian radio:

Kaufmann on Wagner and anti-Semitism

[First of all, wanted to let you know that I'm on BBC Radio 3's IN TUNE today between 5 and 5.30pm, talking about the Royal Philharmonic Awards shortlist, which is being announced this afternoon.]

In an interview with Mannheim Morgenweb the one and only Jonas Kaufmann talks about - among other things - Wagner, anti-Semitism and how to separate them. Below are a few  highlights (any mistakes are either mine or Google Translate's) and the whole thing in German is here. In case you didn't know, he is giving a recital with orchestra in London at the Royal Festival Hall on 21 April including arias by the anniversary boys Verdi and Wagner.


... it appears that you currently working a lot on your piano. Optical illusion?

Kaufmann: No, do not be fooled. I lay on the soft and subtle sounds at least as much value as the large and dramatic. An old rule for singers is: only those who have a sonorous piano can develop a healthy forte. But this concerns not only technical matters, but above all the artistic.

What position do you refer in the matter of Wagner? Can you separate the wonderful work of vile anti-Semites?

Kaufmann: Wagner's anti-Semitic writings and his self-esteem will always be a stumbling block. Even militant Wagnerians wish sometimes that he had only composed, and not written so much. But as for your question, I think you should separate work and man, just as one should distinguish the anti-Semitism of nationalists like Wagner from the antisemitism of the Nazis.

Does that work?

Kaufmann: The fact that Wagner's works have been abused by the Nazis does not alter their artistic importance. They belong to the greatest. Many Jewish artists who were expelled by the Nazis from Germany and Austria have also recognised this: singers like Friedrich Schorr had no problem with Wagner being performed at the Met. And someone like Daniel Barenboim has long worked for the performance of Wagner in Israel to be allowed. 

How to get into Wagner: your five-point plan

Here's a piece I wrote for Culturekicks about how to get into Wagner, complete with a twist in the ginger tail. Enjoy! http://www.culturekicks.co.uk/2013/04/09/your-five-point-wagner-plan/

Where were you yesterday?

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie. Gone, gone, gone. Where were you when you heard the news? Ironically enough, I was in the reception area of Voice of Russia UK Radio, ready to take part in their culture show 'Curtain Up' with one of the first - possibly the very first - Russian pianist who sloped away from the USSR to study in London. The lovely Rustem Hayroudinoff is playing at St John's Smith Square on Saturday 13 April and is now a professor at the Royal Academy of Music.

To play devil's advocate for a moment, this couldn't have happened without Thatcher. The persuasive diplomatic relationship she built with Gorbachev helped to lead to perestroika, the fall of the Iron Curtain and a new freedom of movement. Rustem came to London in 1992; a decade or two earlier, he'd have had to 'defect' instead. Some other Russian musician friends who moved to London around the same time got married in the late 1990s and celebrated by lunching with their parents at the Ritz. And there at the next table was Thatcher. That made their day: they adored her for what she'd done for their country. (Yesterday, Thatcher died at the Ritz, after suffering a stroke. Or, as one major news website succinctly misprinted, a 'strike'.)

Many of us Brits felt she did more for Russia than the UK. Newspaper reports this morning expose the lingering and indeed widening divisions she left behind. I was 13 when she came to power and the impact of watching the changes that took place under her rule ran deep. Everything my parents believed in and that had brought them to London rather than the US (escaping apartheid South Africa in the 1950s) was brought into question in her era. The value of collective rights and the dignity of human beings per se was under fire: from then on, all that mattered was the price of something, not its worth. The central bricks that held together the moral fibre of Britain were kicked out of its wall. The mess the UK is in now can be traced back to a fundamental change of philosophical attitude that took place here in the 1980s: it became morally legitimate to put the grubbing of money ahead of any vision of what to do with it to make a better, more beautiful world.I don't doubt that Thatcher sincerely believed in "the trickle-down" effect - but after 30 years, the limitations of the notion are all too clear.

The NHS, the Arts Council, school buildings, public transport, which crumbled to shreds through lack of investment during the Thatcher years and reached rockbottom under John Major - everything that required an input of public money was slashed to pieces. In the arts, many of our finest institutions, including all the London orchestras, were sliced to the breadline. Doesn't anyone remember the later sticking-plaster of "stabilisation funding"? Has everyone forgotten the Hoffmann Report? As for London itself, the GLC was abolished wholesale; the capital city became just a conglomeration of boroughs with a broken heart instead of a full-scale identity, greyness instead of pride, infrastructure crumbling and homelessness rife. Doesn't anyone remember the South Bank's Cardboard City in the middle of the roundabout where the IMAX is now? Has everyone forgotten the Poll Tax Riots? And the Miners' Strike?

What miserable, shattering, hideous, divisive years those were. How tenderly the British right-wing still clings to them today.

It's been left to the country's fine playwrights to preserve the subtleties of Thatcher: the essence of the character, the paradoxes, the personality and the shadings of good intention that illuminate the person behind the nation's favourite punchbag ("I blame Thatcher"), though she is probably so with good reason.

As Michael Billington writes in today's Guardian, part of her legacy is that "we are still having to argue that subsidy of the arts is a fruitful investment rather than a frivolous expenditure".

We're all human. That's the only lesson, in the end.  But we should be making the best of that, and helping others to make the best of it, too. That should mean expanding minds, not shrinking them; broadening lives, not narrowing them; bringing people together, not dividing them; opening us up, not closing us down; singing, not silencing.

Now I'm off to the BBC Music Magazine Awards and am happy to leave anyone who doesn't already know with the happy news that Natalia Osipova is joining the Royal Ballet right here in good old London. We must be doing something right.

(UPDATE, Thursday 11 April: listen to this speech about Thatcher by Glenda Jackson, MP and former great actress, in Parliament. She tells it exactly as I remember it.)

Friday Historical: Beethoven's Triple in Moscow, 1970

Heads up, first, to a feisty performance of this extraordinary piece at St George's Hanover Square yesterday. The Orpheus Foundation's mission is to help young musicians bridge the gap between finishing college and finding their way into the profession by providing orchestral performing experience with the Orpheus Sinfonia. Yesterday their cello soloist was one of their increasing number of success stories: born in Belorus, Aleksei Kiseliov played with the ensemble for several years and, besides winning a number of prizes, he has now been appointed principal cello of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Beethoven's Triple Concerto features a virtually irrational workout for the cello, which has to undertake all manner of stratospherical pyrotechnics, but Aleksei stayed cool as can be, maintaining exquisitely beautiful tone throughout. Expert contributions, too, from his fellow soloists - the fine young violinist Benjamin Baker and our neighbour-in-SW-London Anthony Hewitt, who was in volcanically eloquent mode at the piano.

Since giving that talk a couple of weeks ago, I've been preoccupied with Beethoven. It's too easy to take him for granted. Rather than musing at length, though, let's hear some...

So here are the Triple's second and third movements, played live in Moscow in 1970 by David Oistrakh (violin), Sviatoslav Richter (piano) and Mstislav Rostropovich in "that" cello part. Kirill Kondrashin conducts the Moscow Philharmonic in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory.