Prokofiev needs your help

Gabriel Prokofiev - grandson of Sergei and a terrific composer and groundbreaking figure in his own right - asks for our input in a new book project about the alternative classical scene. Please jump in!

'We Break Strings'

Is a book of photos, interviews & essays charting the rise of the alternative classical music scene in London.

This 144-page, high-quality book is the first time that the contemporary classical scene in London has been properly investigated in a single printed document. Photographer Dimitri Djuric's photos give a unique insight into the London scene, and writer/blogger Thom Andrewes remarkably thoughtful and thorough text investigates the social, cultural and aesthetic implications of the scene.

Thom spent months interviewing many of the people involved, and Dimitri spent over 2 years photographing events. Thom was very careful to get a really balanced and wide view of the scene; so that the book reveals the amazing diversity of approaches that are been taken to presenting classical music in new ways.

Please visit the kickstarted page to find out more about the project & support it:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/909891721/we-break-strings-the-alternative-classical-scene-i

Classical music rarely gets the printed visual representation that other genres of music & art-forms get, and having witnessed how much this 'alternative' classical scene has grown over the last ten years - it feels like the right time to share this growing new movement in contemporary classical music in a visual form, and I think this book will really help get more people interested in the music & the scene.

We have launched the Kickstarter project in order to fund the printing of the book. But, we've been very generous with the Kickstarter 'rewards', and on Kickstarter you can actually buy the book in advance for less that it will cost once it is officially released in November. But, you are welcome to donate more to the cause if you wish, and we also have bigger rewards such as exclusive prints from the book, and guest-passes to Nonclassical events…

Please pass on this email & the kickstarter link to everyone you know - it's a unique chance to discover more about a significant new development in classical music - and we still need to raise much more funds to cover all the costs.

FILM OF FAURÉ, 1913

I just came across the site of Cmusic.org, which here posts 14 rare bits of footage of some early 20th-century composers and conductors of note (Saint-Saëns and Shostakovich among them). While recordings exist of Fauré playing his own music, I've never before seen actual film of my beloved Monsieur Gabriel, aka The Archangel, and got quite choked up on viewing this.

He slightly resembles an elderly, nervous and rather unwell Charlie Chaplin. In fact this was 1913, 11 years before his death; he would have been about 68. One can't help suspecting he was in the process of smoking himself into his grave. But look at those twinkly eyes.

Better together

Scotland has decided to stay after all, which is nice. Above, a picture of me and Murray McLachlan finishing the Alicia's Gift concert at Chetham's last month with clear proof that a Scot and an Englishperson can cooperate rather beautifully when given half a chance. Murray hails originally from Aberdeen and is now head of piano at Chet's.

Speaking of Alicia's Gift, the first of several for the new season finds me reunited with Viv McLean this Sunday at 4pm at Westminster Cathedral Hall, courtesy of the Chopin Society. We're very honoured to be part of such a distinguished series - and are looking forward, additionally, to the wonderful tea that habitually follows these recitals. Do please come along and join us. Info and tickets here. (and more about the book here.)

By way of a taster, here's Viv playing Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which features in the programme alongside the likes of Chopin, Granados, Falla, Debussy and Ravel.

How Ealing Studios predicted Britain's breakaway state

Here in sunny London we don't get a say in the future of our own country after today's Scottish referendum on independence, so I thought we'd relax and have a laugh while we wait for them to get their act together. Here's how the Ealing Studios predicted a breakaway state within the UK back in 1949. The score, incidentally, is by the fabulous Georges Auric.

No tittering at Anna Nicole

Went to Anna Nicole last night at the Royal Opera House, and took with me an American friend who was seeing it for the first time. She thought Richard Thomas's libretto was brilliant, which it is, and she laughed at the jokes, of which there are many.

At the start of the interval, the besuited guy in front of us turned round and told her to stop laughing.

Problem: this opera is meant to be funny.

The librettist would have been overjoyed to get such a positive reaction (elsewhere in the house sharp intakes of breath could be heard around some of the filthier lines). So would the composer. So would the performers; there's nothing worse than uttering something that's meant to be hilarious and eliciting...well, polite silence.

Meanwhile the management is doing its best to open up access and encourage wider appreciation of its artforms. Nobody I know in the echelons of musical performers and creators is remotely stuffy or elitist; everyone, but everyone, wants the audience to enjoy their work. The whole music world is falling over backwards trying to open itself up to bigger, broader audiences.

But frankly, if other opera-goers won't let people laugh at the jokes, what hope is there? All that effort - straight down the drain. Deity-of-choice [to quote the opera], help us all.

This incident is a nice little supplement to the time a critic was spotted telling off a small African-American child in the RFH (remember that?) and the occasion on which another one told me and my niece to stop laughing at a Prom - the incident being a pianist who as his post-concerto encore played a fugue on a Lady Gaga song, and my niece was the only one of us who actually knew what it was. If I've personally encountered such situations three times in just a few years - and I am press, for goodness sake - then I shudder to think what other people are being subjected to out there.

My friend, incidentally, comes from Detroit, which is one reason she laughed so much - for her, the portrayal of the background to Anna Nicole's trailer-trash early life rings all too true. Now she lives in Berlin and is one of the more vital movers-and-shakers in the classical music world. She sees it as her mission to help find ways for this industry to move ahead in new directions, a forum where the community of music-makers around the world can work together to create an innovative, forward-looking future. Her organisation is called Classical:NEXT. Bring it on.

[UPDATE: For those who are still not sure what Anna Nicole is all about, here is a preview from the ROH. It's a tragicomedy by Mark-Anthony Turnage, based on the true story of Anna Nicole Smith. The end is desperately sad, but the first half is full of wit and wordplay. The librettist Richard Thomas also wrote Jerry Springer: The Opera]