Top 10 CDs of the year for festive gifts

We all need cheering up at the moment. This year I've been working on an opera libretto (with Roxanna Panufnik, for Garsington 2017) on the theme of war, which has involved consulting former members of the armed forces, including one amazing man who served on the front line in Iraq. The story of the horrors he went through there will stay with me forever. Now off we go to Syria...

To provide a little light relief from the grim news, you might want to listen to some good music, or buy some for your friends and family to enjoy.

As your midwinter festival of choice approaches (please choose from Christmas, Chanukah, pagan fertility celebration, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, anything I've inadvertently forgotten, and December Birthday - mine is, er, the latter)... here are the best discs that have come my way for review, or simply for listening, this year. I list them in no particular order. Where comments are in quotation marks, they are from my reviews for BBC Music Magazine or Sinfini.


Schumann: Etudes Symphoniques Op.13, Kreisleriana Op.16, Toccata Op.7

Nelson Goerner (piano)

Zig-Zag Territoires ZZT352

"To hear Goerner navigating Schumann’s variety of textures with so much delicacy, good sense, beauty of tone and rapt atmospheres is a treat indeed." 

Saint-Saëns: Piano Concertos Nos 2 and 5

Louis Schwizgebel (piano), BBC Symphony Orchestra/Fabien Gabel (no.2) and Martyn Brabbins (no.5)

Aparte AP112

"Louis Schwizgebel, currently a BBC New Generation Artist, won second prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition in 2012...[he] displays his fine feathers like a vivid young peacock. His touch is gorgeously singing and wonderfully delicate, but can sharpen to serious bling when occasion demands – and he applies it judiciously."

Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No.2; Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No.1

Beatrice Rana (piano)

Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia/Antonio Pappano

Warner Classics 0825646009091

"In the hands of Rana – who as it happens is the same age as Prokofiev was when he wrote it – the Second Piano Concerto becomes a white-hot volcano of intense expression."

Rachmaninov: Music for Two Pianos

Symphonic Dances Op.45; Suite No. 1 in G minor, Op.8; Suite No.2, Op. 17; 6 Duets Op. 11; Romance and Waltz in A; Russian Rhapsody in E minor

Martha Argerich (piano), with Nelson Goerner, Lilya Zilberstein, Gabriela Montero, Daniel Gerzenberg, Anton Gerzenberg, Alexander Mogilevsky (pianos)

Warner Classics 0825646235940 (2 CDs)

"If you like extremely lively Rachmaninov, you will love this. Martha Argerich joins forces with a host of starry younger pianists, live in concert, for a feast of Rachmaninov’s works for two pianos and/or multiple pianists."

Time Present and Time Past

Alessandro Scarlatti: Variations on ‘La Follia’; Górecki: Harpsichord Concerto, Op.40; CPE Bach: 12 Variations on ‘Les Folies d’Espagne’; Geiniani: Concerto grosso in D minor after Corelli’s Op.5 No.12; Reich arr. Esfahani: Piano Phase for Two Pianos; Bach: Harpsichord Concerto in D minor, BWV1052

Mahan Esfahani (harpsichord), Concerto Köln

DG Archiv Produktion 479 4481

“'I am often subjected to all sorts of assumptions about historicity and authenticity and what is right and what is wrong and what can’t belong. I see my recordings as a way of refuting all of that,' Mahan Esfahani writes. At this rate he’ll simply leave others standing – or, perhaps, combing through the embers."

Chopin: 24 Preludes, Op.28; Nocturne in C minor, Op.48 No.1; Piano Sonata No.2 in B flat minor, Op.35; Polonaise in A flat major, Op.53

Seong-Jin Cho (piano)

DG 479 5332

"Oh joy – a new Chopin Competition winner who can really, seriously play superb Chopin." 

Lutoslawski: Piano Concerto; Symphony No.2

Krystian Zimerman (piano), Berliner Philharmoniker/Simon Rattle

DG 4794518

Coruscating intensity and brilliance from the pianist for whom this great concerto was written. Refulgent glow from the BPs.

Coleridge-Taylor: Violin Concerto in G minor; Delius: Suite for Violin and Orchestra; Haydn Wood: Violin Concerto in A minor

Tasmin Little (violin), BBC Philharmonic/Andrew Davis

Chandos CHAN10879

Little and Davis do this rare British repertoire proud. Coleridge-Taylor's Violin Concerto is one of his most beautiful works, not perfect but often very rewarding, especially the gorgeous slow movement. 

Jonas Kaufmann: The Puccini Album

Orchestra dell'Accademia Nationale di Santa Cecilia/Antonio Pappano

Sony Classical 88875092492

One for the Kaufmaniacs, if they haven't got it already, which they probably will have, but hey - this is the vocal album equivalent of a year's supply of chocolate with 90 per cent cocoa solids. 

Biber: The Rosary Sonatas

Rachel Podger (violin), Marcin Swiatkiewicz (harpsichord/organ), Jonathan Manson (cello/viola da gamba), David Miller (theorbo/archlute)

Channel CCSSA37315

Extraordinary music, complex and symbolic and penetrating; playing that offers real empathy and peerless attention to detail. This is anything but easy baroque listening, and all the more rewarding for that.

Tribute to a beloved musician

Tonight the pianist Lorraine Banning is giving a recital at the 1901 Arts Club (which is near Waterloo station) in tribute to her late husband, Raymond Banning. Raymond - a charming, funny, brilliant and delightful man whom I remember well from my days as editor of Classical Piano Magazine back in the 1990s - was tragically struck by a form of early onset dementia in 2010. He died exactly three years ago, aged only 60.

Lorraine's recital is a memorial to him on the anniversary of his death and will raise funds for two of the charities that supported him: the Tibbs Dementia Service and the British Association for Performing Arts Medicine.

Besides music by Granados, Debussy and Bizet, the programme includes the world premiere of S G Potts' The Raymond Variations (Set 1) - Variations on the Andantino Theme from the Raymond Overture by Ambroise Thomas.

Box office 020 7620 3055.

Breakthrough: First female conductor wins titled post in a BBC orchestra

Xian Zhang. Photo: Benjamin Ealovega

Here's a gentle crack in the glass overhead: Xian Zhang has been named principal guest conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. This is the first time ever that a conductor who happens to be female has been given a titled post with one of the BBC's five orchestras. Note the date: December 2015.

Zhang, 42, has also recently been appointed music director of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and has served as music director of the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi since 2009. Her debut performance in her new BBCNOW post will be on 27 September 2016.

She is interviewed by Tom Service in The Guardian today.

I talked to her last year for Classical Music Magazine's 'Meet the Maestro' series. Here are a few choice quotes:

Zhang, 40, has been at the helm of the [Milan] orchestra – which is known at home as simply La Verdi – for five years, the first woman ever appointed music director of an Italian symphony orchestra. She says that has witnessed a sea-change in attitudes. “In the beginning it was like no-man’s land – or no-woman’s land!” she laughs. “People here had never seen a woman conductor before. Of course I arrived without realising that. It was probably better that way, because otherwise I would have been way too intimidated.”...

....As for what she wryly terms “the woman conductor question”, Zhang suggests: “It’s a matter of time. I think the public is in general very open, but orchestras and people who work in this environment have to be perhaps less self-protective – this is stopping more progress from happening earlier. They don’t necessarily have to be positive about it, but at least to be neutral and see if people are gifted before considering if they are a woman or a man.” In Milan, though, she has spotted a surprise advantage. “A quintessential point in Italian culture is that people greatly respect a mother figure,” she says. “Maybe that helped me to be accepted as conductor of an orchestra. It makes sense! When I first arrived I was seven months pregnant with my first son, so that was how people saw me for the first time. At my first concert after my second son was born, some of the audience gave me presents for the baby. I was so touched.”

Read the whole interview here...

NOTE (4 December): A certain amount of Twitter chatter has questioned whether this counts because JoAnn Falletta was principal conductor of the Ulster Orchestra from 2011 to 2014 and the Ulster Orchestra receives some money and broadcasts from the BBC. So let's get this straight: the BBC tells me that the Ulster Orchestra is not "a BBC orchestra" because it is not managed by the BBC. It is an independent orchestra and it has a broadcasting deal. "Principal guest conductor" meanwhile remains a post of significant prominence, one that is held in other UK orchestras by the likes of Daniel Harding (LSO), Pinchas Zukerman (RPO) and Markus Stenz (The Hallé).

Dear JDCMB readers, please get to know this piece

This is the Geistervariationen - literally, 'Ghost Variations' - by Robert Schumann, written at the end of his compositional life just before his incarceration in the asylum at Endenich. Please familiarise yourselves with it. If you read JDCMB regularly, you're going to be hearing a lot more about it in 2016.

The heavenly performance above is by Grigory Sokolov.

Sibelian surprises

So, review from Friday night continued: Susanna Mälkki conducted Sibelius 1 in the second half (after Beatrice Rana's glorious playing in the Prokofiev Second Piano Concerto in the first).

Susanna Mälkki. Photo: Simon Fowler

About halfway through I opened my programme to check something. I was wondering if it might be a different version of this symphony - an early draft, or perhaps an unknown revision? - because I was hearing things that I'd simply never noticed before. But no, it was Sibelius 1 through and through; it's just that Mälkki (who is herself Finnish, was principal cello in the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra for several years, and studied conducting with Jorma Panula) took an approach that was light years away from the heavy-duty baked sponge pudding that we so often chew through in this work. All manner of detail became audible; the tempi didn't hang about, because they don't need to; and the pacing of the energy worked a small miracle in the finale.

Sibelius's First Symphony is often, very often, compared to Tchaikovsky - and certainly there are similarities. But Tchaikovsky, well performed, can pay tribute to that composer's passion for Mozart; and here, too, one became aware of the music's classical-era roots: the taut organisation of the four movements, the light-footedness of the lightning bolts near the start, or the timpani-led scherzo. I can't remember how many times I've heard the slow(ish) movement played as a dirge dragging its way through snowy darkness as if it's got frostbite, or the said scherzo thundering along like a herd of elephants. Not necessary; and not so for Mälkki.

The rhythms danced through that scherzo, the energy let the music fly rather than sticking its soles to the ice, and in general the up-tempo approach kept everyone on their toes - while some details that in other hands are blurred emerged sparklingly clear with spot-on ensemble from the good ol' LPO. The finale's big tune is so often milked for every last shred of intensity from its first appearance; instead, it came out warm, strong and dignified, but didn't let rip until the music had built convincingly up to its ultimate appearance third time around, when Mälkki let it go straight for the jugular. This made absolute sense, as well as a superb shape.

But above all, one could hear the layers of texture that make the symphony shimmer from within: the throbbing cross-rhythms at the bottom of the orchestra, destabilising anything that might even consider becoming four-square; the florid harp details lending unexpected glimmers in different cross-rhythms against that Big Tune.

This wasn't a Deeply Tragic View of Life or a Violently Romantic Vision Plunging Into Permafrost Gloom. This was a thrilling first step into the symphonic world by a composer who was going to break extraordinary new ground and was already well on his way. Brava, Mälkki: it was like hearing the piece for the first time.

She has recently been appointed principal conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic and starts there in the 16/17 season. They're on to a very, very good thing. Meanwhile, here's hoping she comes back soon.

The concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and you can hear it on the iPlayer for another 28 days, here.

Beatrice Rana: A Star is Born

Meet the 23-year-old pianist from Puglia who is sweeping to stardom. She's on the latest cover of PIANIST magazine (my interview with her is inside) and last night she took the RFH by storm in her concerto debut there, playing Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No.2 - one of the darkest and most emotionally daunting in the repertoire.

Beatrice met its challenges with seemingly effortless virtuosity. She caught an ideal mix of intense expression and mercurial modernism, rising cool-headed to the challenges of the giant cadenzas and the perpetuum mobile scherzo. Fine rhythm, grace, elegance and huge reserves of fire all had their place in this performance, which brought the house down and sparked a vivacious Bach encore (the Gigue from the B flat major Partita).

I was amazed, talking to her for the interview, that she was so young. She's mature beyond her years, ferociously intelligent and mentally well organised. She went to a high school in her native Lecce, Puglia, that specialised in science. Question: if you weren't a pianist, what would you be? Answer: Space Woman! I'd love to be an astronaut or an astrophysicist. Her parents are both pianists, her sister a cellist and her grandparents makers of that fabulous strong south Italian red wine that she remarks is "not for aperetif!" And she says her dog tends to leave the room if she's not playing well.

Last year she entered the Van Cliburn Competition because she wanted to see if she could "upgrade" her career. She duly downloaded silver medal and the audiences' hearts and now she has recorded the Prokofiev, along with Tchaikovsky 1, with Tony Pappano conducting, for Warner Classics. It's a stunner. After last night, I can only urge you to go and catch her if she comes to a hall near you.

Last night's concert was conducted by Susanna Mälkki, of whom more later on...

Music Into Words, 2 February 2016

Delighted to have been invited to join the panel for this interesting evening, devised and presented by pianist, teacher and writer Frances Wilson (who blogs as The Cross-Eyed Pianist). It takes place in the Court Room of the Senate House, London, 2 Feb, 7pm. Tickets are £5, and it's free to students. Further details and booking here.

Is writing about music really like "dancing about architecture"?

An event exploring the wide variety of writing about classical music today

Concert and opera reviews, academic writing, music journalism, programme notes, blogging and musicians who write about music

• Guest speakers - including author and music journalist Jessica Duchen, academic, writer and blogger Dr Mark Berry (Royal Holloway, University of London), blogger Simon Brackenborough (who blogs as Corymbus), and The Guardian's Imogen Tilden.
• Q&A and discussion session 
• Networking opportunity

Tuesday 2nd February 2016
7-9pm

Arts funding cuts would be a "false economy" - Osborne

There've been some surprises of the better kind in the chancellor George Osborne's autumn statement. Here's what he said about the arts today.

Please note, the small print that follows in the days after these "good news" statements often contain other surprises: how the ACE will decide to divvy up its allocation remains to be seen. Peter Bazalgette, Chair of the ACE, has apparently described the funding settlement as "astonishing" (according to the BBC's arts correspondent Will Gompertz).

Britain’s not just brilliant at science. It’s brilliant at culture too.
One of the best investments we can make as a nation is in our extraordinary arts, museums, heritage, media and sport.
£1 billion a year in grants adds a quarter of a trillion pounds to our economy – not a bad return. So deep cuts in the small budget of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport are a false economy.
Its core administration budget will fall by 20%, but I am increasing the cash that will go to the Arts Council, our national museums and galleries.
We’ll keep free museum entry – and look at a new tax credit to support their exhibitions and I will help UK Sport, which has been living on diminishing reserves, with a 29% increase in their budget – we’re going for gold in Rio and Tokyo.
The Right Honourable Member for Hull West and Hessle has personally asked me to support his city’s year of culture – and I am happy to do so.
The money for Hull is all part of a package for the Northern Powerhouse which includes funding the iconic new Factory Manchester and the Great Exhibition of the North. In Scotland, we will support the world famous Burrell Collection.
While here in London we’ll help the British Museum, the Science Museum, and the V&A move their collections out of storage and on display.
And we will fund the exciting plans for a major new home for the Royal College of Arts in Battersea.
And we’re increasing the funding for the BBC World Service, so British values of freedom and free expression are heard around the world.
And all of this can be achieved without raiding the Big Lottery Fund as some feared. It will continue to support the work of hundreds of small charities across Britain.

Here is the DCMS's response to the statement, which all looks pretty positive. It points out: "Less than 1 per cent of total government expenditure goes to culture, media and sport; sectors which account for almost a sixth of the UK economy." It does not contain one word about a new concert hall, which is also interesting.

Smells like opera?

Scented on the horizon: a new Cav & Pag at the ROH, opening on 3 December complete with passion, murder, incense and...baking?! My piece is in the Indy today.

Damiano Michieletto rehearses Paglicacci. Photo: Catherine Ashmore

This was a lot of fun to write and I am only sorry to have missed recently a cookery opera (Lee Hoiby's Bon Appetit) in which mezzo-soprano Emma Curtis baked a gluten-free chocolate cake on stage and the audience could eat it afterwards. 

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/pagliacci-and-cavalleria-rusticana-smelled-any-good-operas-lately-a6745636.html

Hall of mirrors?

The results of the feasibility study into the mooted new concert hall in the City of London are due out, I hear, (two months late) on Wednesday.

In case you missed it when the whole thing began back in February, here's a piece I wrote over at The Amati Magazine, wondering whether the project is a) a political football, or b) a vanity project, or c) the results of remotely joined up thinking about the needs of London's cultural life, or music education, or d) an attempt to kill off the Southbank (presumably together with all its ensembles - has the LSO ever quite forgotten that murderous 'superorchestra' plan?), or... what exactly? We need a hall, but we don't need it at any price.

...How ironic that some of the people behind this ambitious, “mostly” privately-funded new project should be the very same that effectively killed plans to transform the Southbank Centre into an more attractive, state-of-the-art location.
Is this hall not a hall? Is it a political football, intended to prove the worth of private finance over public and therefore of right-wing attitudes over left?
Conspiracy theories aside, what’s certain is that, far beyond the Square Mile, budget cuts to local authorities – necessitated by Osborne’s austerity policies – are threatening music tuition for thousands of children around the country who cannot afford to pay for private lessons...

Read the whole thing here. 

But many things have changed since February - above all, this past week. In the light of the terrorist attacks in Paris and the current outcry over the projected gigantic cuts to policing here, the idea that a new concert hall costing in the region of several hundred million pounds could be given a significant injection of government money to get it underway would perhaps not be guaranteed to go down exceedingly well with the general public.

And with costs doubtless spiralling, where is the money really going to come from? What chance that the lifeblood of government funding might be sucked out, vampirically, from other arts organisations in London in order to build a super vanity project?

Let's see what happens on Wednesday. I wouldn't rule anything out. The only thing that can usually be guaranteed where British governments and the arts are concerned is that sometime, somewhere, somehow, there'll probably be an almighty cockup.

The virgin Mikado

Richard Suart as the Lord High Executioner, doing his Little List. Photo: Sarah Lee

Confession time, folks. I have never seen The Mikado before. OK, maybe the first half on TV when I was about ten, but no more. Indeed, I have never even been to a professional performance of a Gilbert & Sullivan. A depressing am-dram Iolanthe about 30 years ago served as ferocious deterrent and our school performance of The Pirates of Penzance hadn't helped set up a positive impression, especially not when the big co-ed up the road was doing the St Matthew Passion and we, in the  Ladies' Seminary complete with lacrosse sticks, were stuck lumping through a G&S in which there are in fact only two female roles.

But G&S is - well, if you're fond of clever words (tick) and great tunes (tick) and desperately silly stories that nevertheless have a nugget or two of gold at their core (tick), and you love things that look pretty on stage (Jonathan Miller's production for ENO is simply gorgeous, darlings), and some really good singing too (tick), then what's not to like? The Miller production has been boomeranging back and back and back to the Coliseum since 1986, clocking up nearly 200 performances. Last night the man himself was there and went on stage to take a bow; the devoted audience gave him a standing ovation.





The words are indeed clever. Favourite lines include the idea that if you're going to masquerade as a Second Trombone, "you have to take the consequences". The Lord High Executioner's Little List of contemporary cruelties knocks the spots off Have I Got News For You and included on this occasion a fine predictive-rhyme swipe at our prime minister (hint: the word we heard was "dig" and we can imagine what would have followed...), alongside various demolitions of Nicola Sturgeon, Jeremy Corbyn and anything that remains of the Lib Dems.

The tunes are fabadabadoo. After all, I even conscripted one of them for kitten purposes a year ago.



The Jonathan Miller production has precious little to do with Japan, but that is true of the piece itself; so the black-and-white art deco approach complete with tap-dancing waiters and Yum-Yum looking strikingly like Ginger Rogers is all fine with all of us. The press info tells us it is supposed to be an English seaside hotel of the 1930s, but to me that idea says "miserable depression-era burned toast" - this stage set more resembles the Savoy, as well it might.

The nuggets of gold at the heart of the story? First of all, who could resist the ultra-romantic idea - delivered, of course, with irony aplenty - that it is better to enjoy one scant month of marriage to your true love and then die than never to wed her/him at all? Then there's the Lord High Executioner who finally reveals that he's so soft-hearted he couldn't even kill a bluebottle. And the one person who does have a chance to "soliloquise" with an aria all alone on stage is Katisha, the much-maligned Older Woman, who is the only character with a modicum of rounding out and a few specks of actual wisdom, which in this particular La-La Land is in short supply.

Singing is brilliant: Mary Bevan as Yum-Yum and Anthony Gregory as Nanki-Poo were ideal casting, Graeme Danby as Pooh-Bah was wonderfully convincing and Robert Lloyd managed the extra weight as the eponymous Mikado magnificently. Richard Suart's Lord High Executioner and Yvonne Howard's Katisha both seemed to be having the time of their lives.

So what's not to like? Why did I come out feeling "OK, been there, done that, would buy the t-shirt if there were one, but I don't have to see it again"? The evening felt very, very long and it didn't fly and sparkle and do that champagne-bubble thing that you want from operetta. And it wasn't just because in this day and age all the beheading jokes felt a bit close to the bone [sorry]. It felt like a half-open prosecco that's been in the fridge too long without a stopper. Tempi were often a little sluggish, except when they inadvertently galloped; several singers seemed to be trying to push things along, except on the occasions - including 'Three Little Maids' - when they had to step on it a bit to keep up. If only operas had previews to play themselves in, like theatre...

I have that feeling, which I had also over Jonas Kaufmann's Berlin album, that lightness of touch is fast becoming a lost art. Light music needs to be...lightly handled. Any screenwriter will tell you that comedy is the hardest thing of all to pull off - as will most actors - as it is all about timing. It is bloody difficult to do it well. And I am starting to wish that ENO would not throw its fine young conductors in at the deep end, getting them to do things like The Magic Flute, Die Fledermaus and, indeed, this for their debuts. Fergus Macleod, the incumbent Mackerras Fellow young conductor, whose house debut this was, is a highly gifted young maestro and I look forward to hearing him many more times in the future, in different, less niche repertoire.