Melanie Spanswick's book So You Want to Play the Piano? seems to have hit a chord with the market. She first published it herself a few years ago, but now it's been taken up by Alfred Music Publishing, revised, expanded and relaunched and it's just hit the shelves. I thought it was a great idea in the first place, so I've asked her to write us an introduction to the revised edition. Over to Melanie:
So You Want To Play The Piano? has been revised, considerably expanded and republished in a second edition by Alfred Music. When I first wrote this book (back in the Summer of 2011), I had a fairly clear idea of what I wanted to achieve; which was to assist those who had never played the piano before in making important decisions about various crucial aspects at the start of their musical journey. The book is therefore useful for prospective students, beginners and all those up to and around intermediate level. However, it may also provide helpful information for piano teachers at the start of their careers.
The second edition is larger (A4 size) and much more comprehensive. Twelve chapters take the prospective student on a journey from the very beginning, examining the reasons for playing, how to ascertain the best instruments for beginners (or those who may be looking to upgrade), locating and deciphering the best or most suitable piano teachers, as well as discussing many other considerations which often crop up at the start.
Twenty-two piano tutor books are examined (both familiar and new books) and a selection of further publications are also listed, with a section dedicated to supplementary educational methods (such as the Kodaly and Suzuki methods). Another chapter indicates what can be expected from the first few lessons. Piano basics are covered in chapter eight; with advice relating to posture, hand positions and how to avoid common errors regarding rhythm and note learning. Piano technique is decoded in chapter nine, which discusses wrist flexibility, finger independence, touch, dynamics, and pedalling.
I’ve focussed on piano exams too, as many students wish to work their way through graded exams, so there is ample information regarding the most popular examination boards in the UK and abroad, and each exam component is explored with practice suggestions for scales, sight-reading and aural, as well as (hopefully) useful tips for preparing pieces. The book concludes with chapters on composers and suitable repertoire (for beginners up to and including intermediate level), and performance practice, competitions and festivals.
Littered with musical examples and photographs, as well as lists of recommended practice materials and a '5 points to remember' box at the end of every chapter, summating the most essential and relevant points, I hope piano students everywhere will find this book beneficial.
The ongoing crisis at English National Opera is provoking much thought, soul-searching and protest. The current plan on the management side is to cut the chorus's pay by 25 per cent. The chorus, not surprisingly, is balloting for strike action.
Most people who go to ENO or who have performed with the company are all too aware that the chorus is the absolute life-blood of it - and it is not least their magnificent singing that has made so many of ENO's performances so outstanding over the past years. Some singers have remarked that the planned cut amounts to a good deal more than 25 per cent in practice, and that with the costs of family life, accommodation and travel in the capital, such a cut would make it unviable for them to continue in their jobs.
Meanwhile, a change.org petition is gathering signatures, including many from leading singers who have starred on the Coliseum stage, not least Sarah Connolly and Stuart Skelton. Soprano Susan Bullock has commented: ‘So much damage has been done to this wonderful company in recent years, and it is now time for it to stop. Wake up ENO Board before it is too late and fight for the company you are supposed to represent. Do not allow the heart to be ripped out of it by administrators who have no clue about opera. You can’t expect high quality performances from a broken company, nor do you deserve them if you persist in making these cuts.’ Mark Wigglesworth, who is in his first season as music director, has strong words about the company's present and future in today's Guardian. He is at the helm for a revival of The Magic Flute, in Simon McBurney's edgy and fascinating production. Do read this.
And the company is currently advertising for an artistic director...
Meanwhile, I've been having a look back at where the company used to be. It has been very easy for people to use John Berry's artistic directorship as a punchbag, and ditto for Peter Bazalgette, who has recently announced his resignation from the chair of ACE (in a former life he was on ENO's board himself). But things have been volatile at the Coli for decades. It seems an endless cycle of boom and bust. Mostly bust.
Go down to the Coliseum after dark and you get swept up in pre-revolutionary ferment. The place is packed out, even for non-pops such as Verdi's Falstaff and Janácek's From the House of the Dead. The lobbies heave with men in windcheaters and ladies in print frocks, solid Labour types who come to the Coliseum two nights a week, no matter what's playing. There are schoolboys, unchaperoned by teachers, booked in of their own initiative. There are young couples of every gender-pairing and whole families, grans to tots, out for a birthday treat. No one has paid more than £25 a seat and some are in for less than a fiver.Inside the auditorium, the tension that mounts with any good drama explodes in roars of solidarity as, during curtain calls, a company member steps forward to advocate the case for survival. These appeals began spontaneously on the night of Smith's statement, when the new music director, Paul Daniel, delivered an emotional defence speech. "We have a very special platform of work," said Daniel, "and a very, very strong case for making opera as we do."
The audience is different today. So is the company. On the latter side, ticket prices are higher, considerably so; on the former, many people's incomes are less secure, more pressurised and less likely to be spent on opera seats two nights a week. Generally, loyalties are less pronounced. The company faced low ticket sales for "non-pops", even when they were as fine as Vaughan Williams's A Pilgrim's Progress and Martinu's fabulous Julietta directed by Richard Jones. And people are scared to step forward and speak up. Today does anybody dare to take the stage after the performance and tell the audience what's going on? Does the audience dare to roar its support for its beloved operatic family? I hope they will, if they haven't already. Because if they don't, it would be a sign of our cultural shift compared to 19 years back: the crushing of dissent, or self-censorship out of fear of it. Laugh if you want to, but there's a lot of this around and we ignore it at our peril.
Across the road from Hampton Court Palace, down a little gravel side-street, you'll find the beautiful mansion known as Hampton Court House.
An historic venue with beautiful gardens and mysterious grottos, it is now home to an adventurous independent school, whose headmaster, Guy Holloway, has been much in the news of late for advocating a later start to the school day for teenagers, whose natural body rhythms make it seriously difficult for them to get going in the early morning.
Viv McLean and I, fresh from a gorgeous afternoon at St Mary's Perivale yesterday, are off there tomorrow evening for an Alicia's Gift performance - at a place in which the pressures facing gifted youngsters is all too relevant. The hour-long concert will be followed by a discussion in which Guy and I will be joined by Hugh Mather, artistic director of St Mary's Perivale, to consider the whole matter of child prodigy musicians.
Do join us - and you can book in advance here. Hampton Court House is about ten minutes walk from Hampton Court Station and you can arrive for a pre-concert drink any time from 6.45pm for a 7.30pm start.
OK, I know this may cause a few splutterings and shouts of "preposterous" and "piffle", but this story has been bugging me like one of those planets you can't see, yet whose presence is indicated by the tugs of energy around the encircling orbs. It's a theory, nothing more. I may have added two and two and made 130. I just think it's worth a little look.
In short: was Monostatos Mozart's revenge upon the person who was probably the only man of colour he encountered within his own circles as a young man - someone happier and more successful than he was, someone of whom he had reason to be jealous at one of the most terrible times of his life? Namely, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges? Here's my theory and the reasoning behind it in the Independent. (Incidentally, this could put a slightly interesting slant on the Queen of the Night, too.)
First, here's Covent Garden's solution to the Monostatos problem. We find many remedies for that in the opera world - but little explanation of why they might have been there in the first place.
Above, Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, the 29-year-old Lithuanian conductor whose appointment as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is being cheered across the globe, including in Los Angeles where she is assistant conductor at the LA Philharmonic.
In Birmingham she will be successor to no lesser personage than Andris Nelsons - who has risen since he was chosen by the musicians there to become one of the most sought-after of international maestri, and with good reason. The CBSO has a way of picking some rather fine musicians as its music directorsL Rattle, Oramo and Nelsons are quite an act to follow, so hopes ride high for Mirga. She was, apparently, chosen unanimously by a committee of players, board members and management.
A gentle reminder: she will be the only female music director of a UK professional orchestra when she takes up the post - unless someone else makes another appointment very quickly - but what's evident is that she has been effectively "auditioned" by the orchestra in some extra, late-scheduled concerts along with other exciting potential appointees such as Omer Meier Wellber, and chosen absolutely on merit.
Here she is talking to In Tune on BBC Radio 3 about her appointment and the CBSO itself. "They are open to every impulse. It is a gift for a conductor." http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03hlm60
Here is a piece by Imogen Tilden in The Guardian about her, her appointment and her background.
We look forward to hearing a very great deal more of her in years ahead.
If you missed me and Marin Alsop on BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour yesterday, you can listen to it online, here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06z4w7r. We're the very first item on the programme, talking about the bizarre story of the Schumann Violin Concerto, its suppression and its recovery, and Marin's view of the music, and my novel. But with much regret, we didn't meet Helen Mirren in the Green Room!
Meanwhile, we all enjoyed the excellent discussion evening, Music into Words, on Tuesday at Senate House. It proved extremely stimulating and seems to have got everyone's grey matter into a tingle. Simon Brackennorough talked about his site, Corymbus, and why he created it; Mary Nguyen revealed that she attended 64 operas last year, blogging and reviewing for online outlets; I took a fond look back to the days of galley proofs and cowgum, marvelled over the opportunities the internet has brought our way and speculated on the likelihood that writing about music really is like dancing about architecture. Imogen Tilden of The Guardian told us about some of the harsh realities of traditional print journalism.
Audience questions were plentiful and fascinating and prompted revelations from the fact, cited by Simon, that medieval historians are a lot better at social media than the traditional classical world (with the possible exceptions of Stephen Hough, Steven Isserlis and Peter Donohoe); and when asked who we are writing for - who our "internal reader" really is - a temporarily psychoanalytical reaction revealed to me that mine is actually my mum (even though she died 22 years ago next week).
A few weeks ago I went to listen to Marin Alsop giving masterclasses for young women conductors and had a terrific interview with her. She is not one to pull her punches on "the women conductors thing". The piece is in the Independent today, ahead of her concerts with the OAE in Basingstoke on Thursday and the Royal Festival Hall on Saturday - the one with the Schumann Violin Concerto.
I'm delighted to say that she and I will be on BBC Radio 4 'Woman's Hour' tomorrow to talk about the story of the Schumann Violin Concerto. Plus I'm now joining the panel for the pre-concert talk at the RFH on Saturday (5.45pm) where we'll be discussing music, mental illness, Schumann, the Concerto and more.
Marin Alsop's selfie at the Last Night of the Proms
Some conductors who are female are outraged if one raises “the women conductors thing”. Why are we still talking about this? Isn't it time to forget it and just get on with making music? Alsop, though, faces the issue head on – and she is perfectly happy to bring it out into the open. “People ask why a course like this is necessary, and I think it's a disingenuous question,” she says. “It's only necessary because of the reality. It's not something I'm making up. I'm just reacting to the landscape.” There is no point, she suggests, trying to deny that there are too few women conductors, or that they face problems different from those experienced by their male colleagues – both in terms of that glass ceiling protecting prestigious posts and in how the details of their artistry are perceived. “Because I have quite a thick skin, I don't mind being the one out front, trying to elbow my way in,” she adds. “But I think, as that person out front, it's important for me to create a pathway for people coming through. I don't want it to be so hard for the next generations.”
I have a busy week ahead! Please come and join in if you can make it to any of these. One, of course, only involves your kitchen radio.
TUESDAY, 2 FEBRUARY: MUSIC INTO WORDS
Fran Wilson of The Cross-Eyed Pianist has organised a wonderful evening at Senate House, Bloomsbury, in which five speakers - academic Mark Berry (Boulezian), blogger and editor Simon Brackenbury (Corymbus), journalist Mary Nguyen, Imogen Tilden of The Guardian, and I - will be speaking about the agonies and ecstasies and everything in between of writing about music, and doing our best to answer audience questions. Is it really like dancing about architecture? The event is now sold out, but you can still take part by tweeting your questions with the hashtag #musicintowords. More info at the Facebook page here.
THURSDAY 4 FEBRUARY: JD & MARIN ALSOP ON BBC RADIO 4 'WOMAN'S HOUR'
I'm honoured to be joining Marin Alsop in the Woman's Hour studio to talk about Schumann, the Violin Concerto and Jelly d'Arányi. The confluence of GHOST VARIATIONS and the OAE's performance of the concerto on Saturday night seems a perfect excuse and I'm really pleased this is happening. Listen online here.
SATURDAY 6 FEBRUARY: SCHUMANN VIOLIN CONCERTO
It's the Schumann Violin Concerto at the Royal Festival Hall! I'm looking forward to attending this with a group of GHOST VARIATIONS supporters. (You can also hear this programme in Basingstoke on Thursday 4 February.) http://www.oae.co.uk
SUNDAY 7 FEBRUARY: ALICIA'S GIFT AT ST MARY'S, PERIVALE
Viv McLean and I are giving the first of our three February ALICIA'S GIFT performances - 3pm at St Mary's Perivale, my favourite "sacred space" place. The 12th-century church, tucked away behind the A40, is worth a visit in itself, but it's a fabulous venue to enjoy music at intimate quarters, so if you're a west Londoner or you just fancy coming to check it out, please join us. The programme also includes some gorgeous songs from soprano Sarah Gabriel with Viv at the piano. The story of the child prodigy pianist Alicia and her impact upon her family forms the second half of the concert. Admission free, with a collection at the end.
TUESDAY 9 FEBRUARY: ALICIA'S GIFT AT HAMPTON COURT HOUSE
Viv and I are taking ALICIA'S GIFT to Hampton Court House - an extraordinary historical venue across the road from Hampton Court Palace. It's a magnificent mansion that these days is home to an interesting international school whose headmaster, Guy Holloway, has been in the news recently advocating a later start to the school day for teenagers. After the performance we're having a panel discussion about child prodigies, in which Guy will take part along with myself and Hugh Mather, artistic director of St Mary's Perivale, who I'm sure has encountered prodigies aplenty. 7pm arrival for 7.30pm, tickets available on the door.
Speaking of prodigies...I'm mildly disconcerted to discover that the latest on the scene, little Alma Deutscher, has a father who shares a name with that of my Alicia. Besides sharing her own initial. This is pure and mere, if weird, coincidence. She was born in 2005, the year I started writing ALICIA'S GIFT. Alma has been playing her own violin concerto with some big orchestras and has been signed up by Askonas Holt aged 10. Here's what happened when David Lister at the Independent met her last week.
Lost already? You're in a sort of French Monty Python with very good music, coming up fast at Covent Garden. Chabrier's L'Étoile opens Monday. Had lovely chats with director Mariame Clément and conductor Sir Mark Elder for a short and sweet feature in today's Independent.
Here's one of the most beautiful bits of the music, the 'Romance de l'étoile':
The king, the pedlar, his lover, the astrologer, Chris Addison and a glass of green chartreuse… Lost already? Welcome to the absurd fantasy world of Emmanuel Chabrier’s L’étoile (The Star), which opens at the Royal Opera House on 1 February.
It’s rare for the Royal Opera to venture into French 19th-century operetta – but they’ve picked a good one. Chabrier (1841-1894) has long languished in the shadows of his contemporaries, among them Saint-Saëns, Massenet and Fauré – and it is excellent to see him back in the limelight. He was well known in his day for his charm, wit and technical brilliance both at the composer’s desk and at the piano. He was friendly with Degas and Manet and collected impressionist art; he was conducted by Richard Strauss, referenced by Stravinsky, admired by Ravel; and his bright-hued orchestral work España even impressed Mahler. His music’s perfectionism, refinement and lightness of touch (L’étoile even includes a Tickling Trio) mark him out as a creator of the highest calibre. Yet like many musicians blessed with a rare gift for writing good comedy, he longed to compose serious opera and later produced a Wagnerian-style drama entitled Gwendoline.
Posterity seems to prefer L’étoile. As its conductor at Covent Garden, Sir Mark Elder says, “The operatic repertoire is so full of wonderfully powerful, tragic melodramas that it’s lovely, especially in winter, to have a fantastical, bizarre, mad comedy instead. The music is so full of colour, contrast and wit that for a first-time listener it’s irresistible.”
Though neglected throughout the 20th century, L’étoile has begun to shine once more in the 21st. In recent years it has been popping up in opera houses around Europe, with airings in Geneva, Berlin, Frankfurt and Amsterdam, among others; a few weeks ago its overture featured in the Berlin Philharmonic’s Saint Sylvester concert conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.
But one reason that perhaps we don’t hear enough French operetta generally is that stylistically it’s so difficult to pull off. “It has to have sensuality, but it also has to have verve and attack,” says Elder. “It mustn’t be heavy, yet it must have great brilliance.”
According to the production’s director, Mariame Clément – who is making her Royal Opera debut with it – we can expect “French operetta meets Monty Python”. For her the big challenge is to bridge the gap between Chabrier’s world and that of 21st-century opera-goers – and that is why Chris Addison, star of The Thick of It and Mock the Week among much else, is treading the boards alongside the singers. “The story is very French,” says Clément, “full of misunderstandings, affairs and disguises, a very convoluted plot - but what it has in common with British humour is the nonsense of it! Monty Python is a frequent reference in our staging.”
“With surtitles, speed and style it’s possible to be very entertaining,” Elder confirms. “And I can promise you that we’ve got some surprises for everyone.”
L’étoile, Royal Opera House, London, from 1 February. Box office: 020 7304 4000
I've been to a marvellous party (as Noel Coward would say) - held by EdmissionUK, the international higher education and cultural consultants, for the company's tenth birthday. The idea for the evening, according to its head honcho Lewis Owens (who is also the author of Like a Chemist from Canada, the play about Shostakovich in Oxford, performed last summer at the Royal Academy of Music), was to put a large group of creative people - musicians, writers, technology people, historians, academics, record producers, you name it - in a room together with some drinks and give them a chance to be creative together.
We had speeches from, among other people, the inimitable James Rhodes, who pointed out in terms I simply cannot reproduce online that the visionary plan for music in education that was produced at official levels around five years ago could not have collapsed more spectacularly if it had tried. The idea, he reminded us, was that every schoolchild in the country should have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument, and to take their learning to higher levels if they wished. Gone. Today, the "40 per cent" of children learning an instrument that the government likes to remark on might actually consist of three children in a class of 30 learning the ukelele for 20 minutes a week in a group. Schools in impoverished areas of the system can't afford the facilities to buy, store or insure instruments. James mentioned that he had offered to give £25k of his own to a school he visited to help set up some music facilities, but was told that any money donated would go straight into numeracy or literacy instead.
That budget for the suggested new London concert hall - he cited £400m, though the consultation said £278m, but I'm not sure anyone quite believes the lower figure - would amount to five years of musical education for the entire country. Our own generations, he said, grew up taking music in school for granted, but this has been systematically eradicated with nothing counting in school assessments now except literacy and numeracy, even though learning music can aid both and can be beneficial in all manner of other ways, as has been proven and proven again. He worries not about where the performers for that new hall will come from in 20-30 years' time, he remarked, but where the audiences will come from. A whole generation is growing up without a clue about what music really is. This despite the fact that the creative industries are apparently growing at around twice the speed of any other sphere of contributions to the UK's economy and are worth about £10m per hour.
It's down to all of us to do something about this, since the chances of the government doing so are looking remote. What can we do? To begin with, keep on keeping on. Keep playing, composing, recording, writing, getting our stuff out there and making as much noise as we can about it.
At the same time, the Barbican, the Southbank Centre and the Wigmore Hall have all announced their 2016-17 seasons this week, and they are humdingers filled with wonderful, inspired ideas and many of the greatest musicians in the world. And the number of alternative venues has never been greater - fizzing initiatives like Nonclassical, Club Inégales and Multistory are alive and flourishing in the clubs of Hoxton. I wonder if we have any idea how lucky we really are here in London? The question is: how do we bridge the ever-widening gap in the middle, between the marvels that are brought to this still-fabulous city and the vast swathes of people who don't even know that it exists?
Incidentally, I asked James if he'd like to post the text of his speech here on JDCMB, but he said he hadn't written it down. I do think that if more musicians could learn to present speeches as strongly and eloquently as he does, that would be of considerable value.
In one of those strange counterpoints, I've found words from a very different pianist, from a bygone age, proving that our concerns are nothing new, and that over the decades, probably the centuries, those in music have been tussling with these same issues and finding little more effective than allowing people the chance to actually hear the music.
Here are a few words from Dame Myra Hess, from her speech at the lunch following the presentation of her honorary degree at Cambridge in 1949, looking back at her extraordinary series of lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery that took place during World War II. (If you ever get a chance to see Admission: One Shilling, written by Myra's great-nephew Nigel Hess and performed by Patricia Routledge and Piers Lane, please do - it's fabulous...)
She told the story of a young sailor she met after the war, who told her that he had stumbled upon the concerts by chance and found it "a damned good show".
"He then told me that by the end of the war six of them, Petty-Officers, whenever they had a day's leave, would never miss an opportunity of coming to the concerts. This is only one instance of what must have happened thousands of times. The opportunity then existed for people to discover that something had been missing from their lives; nobody told them that a Beethoven or a Mozart Quartet was high-brow, or beyond their understanding; they just sat back, listened, and a new world opened to them."
She went on to explain exactly why it was vital to "enlarge the scope of public music-making", thus: "In times as unsettled as our own, music can have a profound influence for good. It is unfettered by the barrier of words, and needs no translation; and therefore it is one of the great forces that can bring people together in mind and spirit." She then wondered how this could be achieved and said that she hoped "the forces of habit and prejudice in the musical world" would give way in due course to "a more enlightened view of our present needs".
That was 1949 - nearly 77 years ago. We're still wondering now. I will give that beloved angel of a pianist the last word.
If you haven't yet signed up to support Ghost Variations, now's your chance: delighted to say that we're 85% of the way there after only ten days! Just need to swing that last 15% before it can be full steam ahead. There's a nice range of pledge rewards, and a few places remain on the Early Bird Special which involves a trip to hear its central work, the Schumann Violin Concerto, at the OAE's 6 February concert at the Royal Festival Hall with me and fellow supporters. Marin Alsop conducts and the soloist is Patricia Kopatchinskaja. This has to be booked BY THE END OF SUNDAY 31st please.
...with the first-ever virtual reality orchestra (an initiative with the Philharmonia) and a year-long festival with the LPO called Belief and Beyond Belief, echoing the concept of the groundbreaking The Rest is Noise cross-genre festival.
A few other points of seriously good news:
• Chineke! is to be an associate orchestra, HOORAY!
• There's a new ticket scheme for the under-30s, plus 1000 free tickets available to young concert-goers across the season
• The start of a three-year collaboration with Mitsuko Uchida
• International Orchestras visiting include the Budapest Festival Orchestra, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and Cape Town Opera
• A 2017 New Music Biennal, a new contemporary music festival celebrating young composers
• Pianists giving recitals include Benjamin Grosvenor, Yuja Wang, Richard Goode and Maurizio Pollini among others. And Lucas Debargue, who made waves last year at the Tchaikovsky Competition, will be performing with the LPO.
• The OAE's highlights include Bach with the legendary Masaaki Suzuki.
• A major series of live film scores - an increasingly popular phenomenon - including an improvised organ accompaniment to Hitchcock's The Lodger.
It's heartening - with the roll-out of fabulous programmes for 16-17 at the Barbican the other day, and now all of this - that despite everything, our cultural institutions can still produce exciting, attractive, fresh and inspiring programming at the highest international level.
Did you know that the UK's creative industries are worth, to the economy, £10m PER HOUR? Apparently our creative sphere is growing at twice the rate of anything else. So keeping it on the rails, dear government, is really quite a good idea, please note.
If you went to the HD cinecast of the Royal Ballet in The Two Pigeons and Rhapsody last night, you might still be under the spell of Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The Royal Opera House web department asked me to write something about the composer and here it is.
Taster:
When music magazines compile lists of the Greatest Pianists of All Time (or similar impossibilities), Sergei Rachmaninoff is often named as number one. As both composer and performer, he was unrivalled, matching inspiration with craftsmanship, brilliant technique with rigorous personal standards.
His contemporaries, on hearing him play, often remarked on the beauty of his tone quality, its singing nature and its variety of colour. ‘That is the most important thing for me in my interpretations, colour’, he once explained. ‘So you make music live. Without colour, it is dead.’
The Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, the work to which Frederick Ashton’s ballet Rhapsody is set, exemplifies the joint marvel of Rachmaninoff’s crafts as composer and pianist. The piano writing – terrifically difficult – requires grace, flexibility, precision, tenderness and, of course, colour, within a casing of dazzling virtuosity. Ashton matches it throughout the ballet with the extravagant demands he places upon his dancers.
Rachmaninoff’s mastery, though, had a psychological dark side...
