Love James Galway? Don't miss this!

James Galway has a very big birthday this year and BBC4 has just screened a new documentary directed by Brendan Byrne about his life and work, entitled Being James Galway. It went out last night, is repeated on Friday on BBC4 at 8pm, and is also available on the BBC iPlayer, here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0555wj1/being-james-galway

Interest declared: yours truly was called upon as a talking head. But really the best things about it are the substantial quantity of musical performances; the historical footage, including film of Galway playing with the Berlin Philharmonic, and under Leonard Bernstein; the Belfast-born flautist's own inimitable personality and humour; and a beautiful familiar voice-over, whom I recognised but couldn't identify. Turns out it's Jeremy Irons...

The real thing...

If you know my novel Hungarian Dances, you'll know I have a bit of a bee in the bonnet about this type of violinist... Roby Lakatos is the real thing: the descendent of Janos Bihari, the great primás who created many of the melodies snaffled by Brahms and Liszt, but more to the point, an utterly sensational violinist. The morning after his Barbican concert with the LSO last week, I interviewed him for The Amati Magazine.

Read it here - and do come and hear him in the bijou setting of the Langham, London, at the Amati exhibition on 29 March. Booking here. It is my very great pleasure to be introducing the ensemble on the night. (Good excuse for a new frock, too.)

Brecht and Weill: the bite lives on

Here's a piece I wrote for The Independent about Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which opens at the Royal Opera House on Tuesday. It's never been staged there before and it's about time. It stars Sir Willard White, Anne Sofie von Otter, Christine Rice and many more, and is staged by John Fulljames with a new translation by Jeremy Sams.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/brecht-has-lost-none-of-his-bite-how-the-message-from-a-1920s-opera-resonates-today-10094014.html

This exploration of the opera's themes by Will Self is well worth a watch, too.

International Women's Day: Violin Legend #1

This recording is pretty good quality for 1928. This was the year in which votes in the UK were extended to include all women over 21 (not only those over 30). Here is the incredible Jelly d'Arányi - pupil of Hubay, great-niece of Joseph Joachim, inspirer of Ravel's Tzigane, Vaughan Williams's Concerto Accademico, certain bits of Bartók and much more - playing Brahms's Hungarian No.8. Happy International Women's Day!

International Women's Day: World Piano Legends #2

Just found online the radio broadcast from 1963 in which John Amis interviews the glorious Dame Myra Hess, whose cut-glass accent and irrepressible humour are firmly in place. She remembers what happened when she took a "wrong turning" in Brahms 2 with Sir Henry Wood in 1908, a concert for which she received the "large fee" of 3 Guineas. "Sometimes I was ten and six to the good!" she declares of her mother's book-keeping.

Beecham, she says, was "impossible, because you never knew when you were going to get a rehearsal". And he was "terribly naughty", she adds, performing without the score in music that he didn't always know terribly well.

She reveals, too, that she used to play her own cadenzas, but the manuscripts were now "destroyed and burned". And she talks a good bit about the National Gallery wartime concerts.

Fab quote: "If Mozart isn't spontaneous, it's dead."