Thursday, October 04, 2018

London Piano Festival: one plus one equals a hundred

Charles Owen & Katya Apekisheva. Photo: Viktor Erik Emanuel
I had a whale of a time at the London Piano Festival opening last night, trying to puzzle out what makes the duo of Katya Apekisheva and Charles Owen quite so special. It's just one of those crazy things: even if there's an argument that they are such different pianists that together they have a kaleidoscopic range at their disposal, there's also something magical about the chemistry. What's more, Kings Place has a new Steinway and it sounds pretty bloody marvellous. I''ve reviewed the concert for The Arts Desk. Read the whole thing here.

Can't help remembering my hideous experience on last year's opening night when I got the cough from hell in the middle of the Rachmaninov Suite No.2. Blissful breathing this time. phew.

Lots more LPF to go: Konstantin Lifschitz tonight, Leszek Możdżar tomorrow, on Saturday a full afternoon and evening of Paul Roberts Debussy lecture recital, Pavel Kolesnikov and a two-piano gala bringing in Margaret Fingerhut, Stephen Kovacevich and Samson Tsoy, and finally Alexandra Dariescu, ballerina and virtual reality for The Nutcracker and I on Sunday afternoon.

Wednesday, October 03, 2018

In praise of Barbara Strozzi



Tomorrow evening I'm doing a pre-concert talk with Franck-Emmanuel Comte, conductor of the French baroque ensemble Le Concert d'Hostel-Dieu who are performing at the Institut Français in South Kensington. Above, you can hear an extract from the concert: Heather Newhouse sings Barbara Stozzi's L'Eraclito amoroso. Within just a few bars, the centuries collapse: every woman has been through this experience; each one of us can identify with every note. (Incidentally, in this video interpretation there is also a very wonderful cat.)

Like her compatriot Monteverdi, and her teacher, Cavalli, one gains the impression that there is nothing Strozzi will stop at in her music to bring out the ultimate degree of emotional expression. The unusual thing is that here is a woman writing music about a woman's raw, impassioned, devastating experience, in the 17th century. Monteverdi and others wrote of women's lost loves, and very effectively (try this), but there's an edge to Strozzi's lament which seems to rise from the depths of the soul - and unlike Monteverdi's Ninfa, she's unobserved by men calling her 'Miserella'.

Strozzi was termed "the most prolific composer - man or woman - of printed secular music in Venice" of her day. A poet as well as a composer, and a mother of four, she remained unmarried; she was the mistress of a patron of the arts who was the father of three of the children. Jealous contemporaries said she was a courtesan and the one famous portrait of her shows her with one breast exposed. The reality seems to have been that she was a phenomenally gifted artist who had been encouraged and well educated in music by her father, the librettist Giulio Strozzi. She was supposedly adopted, but most likely the illegitimate daughter of Strozzi and a family servant. An 'outsider', therefore, in terms of social position and artistic inclination, she forged a remarkable and individual path as a musician, with enormous tenacity.

Tomorrow's concert explores not only Strozzi, but also the French composer Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre and Strozzi's similarly prolific compatriot Antonia Bembo, also a pupil of Cavalli. Heather Newhouse sings, the cellist is Benoît Morel and Franck-Emmanuel Comte is at the harpsichord. Our talk is at 6.30pm and the concert at 7.30pm. More details and booking here. 

Monday, October 01, 2018

"Salome, dear, not in the fridge"

Allison Cook as Salome, with placcy bag
Photo: Catherine Ashmore

As I slunk homewards from ENO's opening night, a friend on Twitter kindly sent me the above headline. It's from an anthology of winning entries to competitions in The New Statesman, edited by Arthur Marshall, and cheered me up somewhat.

Not that ENO's Salome would have needed to worry, because there wasn't much evidence of a severed head at all: just a placcy bag that for all we know might have contained a large cauliflower. One's cynical side considers it's probably cheaper than constructing a replica head of Jokanaan.

I love good reinterpretations of operas. Like science fiction or magical realism (in which I've been learning a thing or two recently), they need to create consistent worlds, to make sense within those worlds and, if stretching disbelief, make us believe one big thing by getting the small things right. The denouement has to be stunning, too, to make everyone feel they have suspended that disbelief for a good reason.

Under the circumstances, a radical feminist interpretation of Strauss's Salome should be eminently possible, especially with such a fine actress as Allison Cook in the title role. The story contains plenty of potential: a young woman, her sexuality awakened, frustrated, abused and finally twisted beyond redemption, is destroyed by men's attitudes to her - brutal religious fundamentalism on one hand and the incestuous lust of her stepfather on the other.

But if that was what was going on in Adena Jacobs' production, it didn't quite work. Herod is an almost pantomime Father Christmas - red and white cape over a gold vest and bare legs - bringing Salome jewels wrapped in big bright parcels with bows on. Jokanaan is first revealed wearing pink stilettos. There's a lot of pink, à la Anna Nicole, but including a decapitated pink horse, suspended upside-down spilling entrails that turn out to be pink and purple flowers. There's a lot of blood around, meanwhile, but it's pink too. In the midst of this, Salome is good at yoga, but leaves the heavy-duty moves to four lookalikes, also clad in black bikini bottoms and blonde wigs, who help out with the Dance of the Seven Veils. ("Twerking," my companion mused. "So 2013.") And there's a lot of sexuality, whether the self-pleasuring of the lookalikes, or what happens when the close-up live film projection of Jokanaan's mouth is turned on its side and begins to resemble something else, with teeth.

Some might object to all of this on principle; conversely, a lot of people seemed to enjoy it very much. I have no problem with the components (with the exception of the dead horse, which reminds me of Graham Vick's Glyndebourne Don Giovanni from last century and therefore seems derivative, and besides, I can't bear it when bad things happen to animals). But I'd like to know whether it really adds up to more than the sum of its, um, parts. I found no particular revelations within it and three days later I'm still musing over exactly what insights we were supposed to gain.

Strauss keeps right on being Strauss and sometimes all one could do was listen, because Martyn Brabbins was working such high-octane intensity with the ENO Orchestra that they swept all before them. The magical, lustrous scoring shone out, the pacing magnificently managed. David Soar's charismatic Jokanaan had his moments, but at other times the range sounded too high for him; Cook's Salome, too, offered a lower voice than suits the role's stratospheres. Supporting roles were all excellently sung. Michael Colvin as Herod gave a fine performance despite the Santa Claus coat, and Susan Bickley's Herodias - dignified and still at the centre of the whole - was perhaps the best of all the many ideas.

Go and see it for yourself, if you can. It's certainly a memorable evening. https://www.eno.org/whats-on/salome/



Friday, September 28, 2018

And here it is...

HERE IS THE BBC RADIO 4 WOMAN'S HOUR POWER LIST 2018: WOMEN IN MUSIC. 

We were 4 judges, from different corners of the music world: Jasmine Dotiwala, Catherine Mark, Kate Nash and me. We had 40 places across the board, to encompass all genres. Under the circumstances, it felt good to get so many representatives from the classical world in, often at a high placement. We can't please everyone, of course, and some people are now busy being indignant - though this is possibly because they think we should have been doing something we hadn't set out to do in the first place.

This list wasn't about fresh-faced charm, talented young performers and composers, or even the latest entrepreneurship. This was a POWER LIST. It's something BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour does every year, exploring a different industry each time. The fact that this year they elected to turn the spotlight on the music world is telling: these are indeed crucial, seismic times for women in music.

So the criteria were power and influence: celebrating the women who in the past year have been driving necessary change in the music business - whether that means Beyoncé (no.1) as feminist and activist as well as top-selling artist, Vanessa Reed of the PRS (no.3) persuading 120+ festivals worldwide to sign up to 50-50 gender parity in performing line-ups and new commissions, from 2022, Chi-chi Nwanoku (no.9) single-handedly creating and propelling to fame the UK's first majority-BAME orchestra, Chineke! with its transformative effects, or, further down the list, the tireless efforts of Deborah Annetts campaigning for the rights of musicians via the ISM, or the way Edwina Wolstonecraft has programmed International Women's Day celebrations on Radio 3 - a station on which one used to go for weeks or months without hearing a note written by a woman - raising many consciousnesses by so doing.

Gillian Moore, director of music at the Southbank Centre (no.6), leads from the front, championing women in music in every way and blazing a trail in new music programming; Kathryn McDowell at the LSO is a long-term thinker and has effected Simon Rattle's appointment, which in turn may - if all goes according to plan - help to spur the creation of a new hall with top-notch education facilities. Anna Meredith is an astonishing, genre-bending composer, with an approach that sets an example to a whole new generation. Violinist Nicky Benedetti is a tremendous campaigner for music education at a time when it's never been more necessary - she could, after all, have concentrated solely on her own stellar career, but she doesn't. Marin Alsop is a household name, more so than any other conductor who is female: you need to see it to be it, and there she is on the podium, for all to see. Alice Farnham has created a course to encourage more and more women to take up conducting, something that will soon bear transformative fruit.

So basically I think we got it right, even if we'd all have liked the list to be three times as long. A lot of wonderful names ended up on the cutting-room floor, because there wasn't the space. I won't tell you who they all were, but I will just say that the one I was most sorry to lose is arguably the world's greatest living pianist and has been a role-model for younger musicians for at least 40 years. And, um, we left out Madonna.

You can please some of the people, some of the time. Over and out.


Thursday, September 27, 2018

WOMEN IN MUSIC POWERLIST: THE BIG REVEAL


It's tomorrow, Friday 28 September live on BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour. We're live at Maida Vale Studios at 10am. Please join us! Jenni Murray presents, Jasmine Dotiwala and I will be representing our panel of judges, and a lot of our Top 40 will be with us to celebrate. The Powerlist covers women who are changemakers, leaders and role models in all manner of musical fields, so no doubt there'll be plenty of controversy about who's on it, and who isn't.

Was it difficult? Was. It. Difficult.

Do tune in if you can. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bkpjrk