Voyaging around my father

Today would have been my father's 90th birthday. Instead, he has been dead for over 22 years. This is his obituary, by his colleague in neuropathology, Professor Francesco Scaravilli. 

My parents, Leo and Myra - very, very young.

I don't think I'd be doing what I'm doing now if he hadn't personally ensured that I had such a thorough musical education. However fine your teachers at school - assuming you were lucky enough to enjoy any music tuition there at all - nothing could have replaced the steeping in matters musical that I received at home. Here, to commemorate his birthday, are the top 10 things I learned from him.

1. He and Mum didn't only march me off to piano and violin lessons: they helped me practise, and Dad in particular. I remember the torture of sitting at the back of the first violins on Sunday mornings in the Jewish Youth Orchestra (yes, really) for a term or two, trying desperately to read my way through Dvorák's Symphony No.8. It was hopeless. It's bloody difficult and I was about 13 and doing my Grade VI, and I love the sound of a violin beautifully played, but I never got along too well with doing it myself - I'd turn oddly muddled above 3rd position and couldn't work out which fingering did what on which string, plus the high frequencies used to do my head in.

Dad shut himself in the study with me, a music stand and the violin part. He didn't play the violin, but he did play the piano well and knew how to practise systematically. And we slogged away, slow bit by slow bit, over and over again, gradually increasing, and it was utter torture and misery, but at the end of the session I could actually play the first page. I can't remember whether I still could by the next Sunday, but I dropped violin lessons for a couple of years not long afterwards.

2. My school was a tube ride away, so it was a 6.40am alarm clock every day. Radio 3 used to begin broadcasting at about the same time back then - was it 6.30am? 7am? - and the first thing Dad did in the morning was to switch on the radio in the dining room. He'd often drop me at the station on his way to work and the radio would be on in the car too.

So by the time I was on the platform at Finchley Road I'd likely have heard the equivalent of a whole concert. First thing on a Wednesday, perhaps something like Mozart's Symphony No.29,  Rossini's Petite messe solennelle, a quick slice of Stravinsky, and a Beethoven overture, going by in rapid succession. If you're fortunate enough to have a musically retentive brain, this is how you learn the repertoire. And occasionally there'd be some incredible piano playing. Who's that? Maurizio Pollini? Wow! Martha Argerich? Isn't she amazing? And listen to that, this new young pianist who just won the Chopin Competition, what did you say his name was - Krystian Zimerman? Let's go and hear him when he plays in London next year.

Yes, the radio was on all the time, playing music round the clock, and I soaked it up like the proverbial sponge. And occasionally I'd find Dad in his favourite chair, wrapped in a rug, listening over and over again to the same piece of music. He'd sit there comparing all his recordings of Brahms's Second Symphony, just for fun. Building a Library missed a fine potential contributor.



3. If you know your way well around the chamber music scene in London, you'll know that at the Conway Hall in Red Lion Square there are chamber concerts early on Sunday evenings. Dad used to go to the lot. When I was about 8, he started taking me along. Sometimes I was bored, sometimes I loved them. But that's where I must have heard most of the string quartets by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert before the age of 14, and I also remember the Ravel String Quartet, which I adored, and the Introduction and Allegro (I think Marisa Robles was playing the harp). Borodin 2 enchanted me and once I think we heard a four-hands concert by the pianists Anthony Goldstone and Caroline Clemmow, who became firm favourites of my mum's. Sometimes it was cold in there and often I was the youngest person by about 40 years, but life wouldn't have been the same without it.

And opera. It took me longer to get to grips with opera because there were no surtitles in those days, but I will never forget going to Count Ory at ENO and Dad virtually rolling in the aisles, weeping with laughter.

4. I remember my first orchestral concert, when I must have been about 8: the Royal Philharmonic conducted by Rudolf Kempe, with Miriam Fried the violin soloist. They played the Berlioz 'Roman Carnival' Overture, the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto (I think) and the Dvorák 'New World' Symphony and I spent a lot of time staring at the flautist (Susan Milan!) and wondering how she could stand the noise sitting in front of the brass like that. For a couple of weeks before the concert Dad taught me the music. We listened to it all on LPs and he showed me how to follow the scores. Myth-scotching moment: reading music is very easy to learn when you're a child. I learned when I started piano lessons, age 4. It is not elitist, it is not particularly complicated and all you need is someone to show you how it works when you're young enough not to have swallowed the rubbish other people spout about it.

Please note, it was a Sunday afternoon, so there was no school or work, and we could actually go to a proper concert like this. Not 'children's concerts' - the very small me would certainly have turned my nose up at any such notion ("Hello there, children! Are we all having lots of fun today?" ugh.)

This plan seems such a no-brainer to me when concert organisations wonder how to get in younger punters that I often wonder what planet they're on. You want your concerts attended by families, with working-age parents, children, even grandparents who mightn't like late evenings? Do concerts on Sunday afternoons! Simples.

5. Exams. Oh my God, exams. Well, I had to do them, and I think that may be what gave me nerve complexes about performing. These days I will happily stand up and speak to a concert hall of 500 people without a quiver, but just don't ever make me play the bloody piano... But Dad was kind. He would ferry me there and back, put up with my nerves – "Don't make such a matzoh-pudding of it!" he'd say – and when it was all over we'd go to a record shop and I'd choose the ones I wanted. Not even that could quite erase the memory of standing in the ladies' room somewhere in the RCM soaking my hands in a basin of hot water, which was the only warm-up available. I still shudder every time I go in there.

6. Music lessons. For years and years and years, Dad would ferry me to my piano lessons and usually sat outside in the car while I was being put through my paces. He must have had the patience of an angel. Because he also ferried me to violin lessons until I fell out with the instrument.

Occasionally he was rewarded with a surprise. My piano teacher for about eight years was Patsy Toh, the Chinese pianist who lived with her husband Fou Ts'ong in Hampstead and later Islington. In the first house, Patsy had a teaching studio upstairs while the big Steinways were downstairs. One day, when I was about 10 or 11, I arrived on Saturday afternoon to hear some sublime Schubert emanating from behind that closed door. "That's Richter in there, practising," Patsy whispered to me. I'd sort of heard of Richter and I knew Dad would be impressed. I hurried out to the car, where he was sitting listening to Radio 3, and said "Dad, Richter's in there." I never saw him run as fast as that again. While I was doing Hanon and Grade Whatever upstairs, the great Russian continued his world of Schubert beneath and I think Dad sat in the hall with his ear to the door.



7. I once tried to refuse to go back to university, because I hated the music course and pretty much everything about the place. (Actually I wanted to go and study piano in New York.) I think I was virtually manhandled into the back of the car with my suitcase and bags of books and files and shoehorned into the bedsit on Jesus Lane. I had tendinitis, glandular fever, fear and loathing. Many years on, I think it's good I stayed, because I got a very decent degree plus a one-year postgrad thing, I know how to write a fugue (for what that's worth), and it is definitely healthy, on principle, to stick with your creative projects and finish them properly. He made me do that and it's something I insist upon to this day - hence Odette, finished at last after 26 years. I do regret not going and studying piano in New York, but that's another issue.

8. There were certain things Dad used to do that I don't think anybody else would have dared try. He was a quiet, unassuming personality. He was rather shy, and definitely chary of British society traditions. But if someone was in trouble, he would step in and try to find a solution. Once we had a close friend who had lived in Britain for many years, gone back to his native USA, and then returned to the UK a year or two later to take up a new job. Unfortunately, the company he was to work for had screwed up his work permit, so he arrived at Heathrow without it and they promptly wanted to deport him. He owned a small flat in the middle of London and was renting it out - to someone who was a high-level civil servant. Dad took it upon himself to get the phone number of this important gentleman, call him and ask him to intervene. Although this didn't sort the whole situation, which was the result of a singularly incompetent company, it meant our friend was not confined to an airport cell, but was permitted to stay at our house until such time as. (Happy ending: friend got the necessary permit and job, eventually.)

9. The more I hear about the Vilna Gaon, an ancestor of sorts according to family legend, the more like Dad he sounds. He was a leading figure in the Jewish Enlightenment in Lithuania, not a rabbi but a kind of Talmudic sage, a wise man who led by principle and writing and example. He was, as I understand it, a polymath with a wide knowledge base ranging from science to music, and his thinking was the opposite of the mystical Chassidic approach (which is kind of happy-clappy-feel-it-in-your-bones). Academic exactitude, logical argument and realistic precision were uppermost and if that seems antithetical to the idea of religion, I think he was one of the few people, perhaps along with Moses Mendelssohn, who showed that it didn't need to be. We need more of this characteristically Enlightenment thinking today and less of the believing-in-gut-reaction-alone stuff because, frankly, look where the recent vogue for that has got us.

10. I miss him. Admittedly, Count Ory aside, he could be strict, rather joyless (as teenagers we weren't allowed short skirts or make-up - my sister defied both, but I didn't - and pop music was banned at home to the point that I even used to watch Crackerjack with the sound turned right down, and when my brother gave me a Glenn Miller LP for my 18th birthday, it was radical.) But where would I have been without him? Anything I have done, anything I am, anything that has worked in my life, I owe to him. And I miss him like the blazes, every day still, after 22 years. He has two grandchildren who remember him, but probably not all that well, and two younger grandsons he never met, but who resemble him, one in capacity for scientific application and the other, littlest one, in an instinctive musical overflow.

It seems so unfair that he should have been taken from us all so early. He could still have been here now.

Thank you, Dad. Today we should have been celebrating your big birthday. We will do so and hope you can see us raise a glass to you tonight.

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.

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. 

"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/

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.