Saturday, June 18, 2005
Heatwave...
I've done some very nice interviews this week, including composer Jonathan Dove (for Indy) and violinist Nikolaj Znaider (for Strad) - both great guys and terrific musicians in totally different ways. It's a relief to get back to normal and not have to play the piano. Summer is shaping up super-hectic, which hadn't been the idea - I am supposed to sit at my desk and write my new book, not go gadding off to four or five different festivals, but that's life... I shouldn't complain since I will be returning to Vilnius and Verbier and adding some more.
Too hot to carry on thinking now. Will try again soon...
Sunday, June 12, 2005
Coming up for air
Final concert was at Woodhouse Copse in the hills near Dorking, Surrey - a fabulous place with a marvellous acoustic, a delicious Steinway and the most beautiful gardens. They are going to stage Dido & Aeneas there in early September and it's well worth a visit.
Meanwhile, RITES OF SPRING has gone back to its publisher with my final edits...next thing will be proofreading in a few weeks' time.
Have been too absorbed in all this to blog about Krystian Zimerman's amazing recital at the Festival Hall last Thursday...but will try to correct this soon. He IS amazing. He's really, really amazing.
Proper blogging to resume once I've got my breath.
Monday, June 06, 2005
Aw, shucks....
Lack of blogging here this week is not only down to practising but also to the fact that I have to finalise the text of my novel NOW. It is about to go off to be typeset, which means that anything that I don't change now will probably outlive me on a shelf somewhere. Today I also had my first glimpse of the "blurb", or draft for it, that will go on the back cover. When I started my 'professional' life, thinking it would be nice to combine music and writing, I never thought that I'd find myself preparing my "first" novel for typesetting AND doing my first full-length, ticket-selling recital since student days within the same WEEK at the age of - oh well, never mind...
As if that wasn't enough, my brother got married on Saturday!
By the end of this week, both novel and concerts will be complete and I can get back to blogging in earnest.
Thursday, June 02, 2005
The Elgar conundrum
Tom & Jess Elgar house
Originally uploaded by Duchenj.
Here's a picture of me & Tom outside the Elgar Birthplace Museum yesterday. If you've never been, go and see this place - it's wonderful, full of treasures, exquisitely maintained by a team that knows its Elgar inside out and backwards.
Our concert was in the visitor centre and I can say, rather smugly, that it was quite full...We got interviewed live on BBC Radio Hereford too! Most flattering of all was that Elgar's great-niece turned up. And she told us all about the time she met Uncle Edward when she was a little girl.
Well, the evening seems to have been a real success. We got home about midnight feeling exceedingly pleased with ourselves.
Here's the conundrum: beforehand, for weeks, I felt FRIGHTFUL. Lots of those last-thing-at-night conversations with Tom in which I came up with many permutations of "Why the hell are you making me do this? I'm a writer, for God's sake!" During the journey to Worcester, I found myself wishing that the car would break down or I'd collapse or - well, anything rather than have to do the concert. But then afterwards I felt FABULOUS. This was a day we'll both remember fondly for the rest of our lives. As Tom says: "Of course it's always easier to do nothing, but..."
So there we are. It's torture. It's misery. And now we can't wait to do it again. Ridiculous? Totally. True? Oh yes.
Elgar would have been 148 today. Happy birthday, Uncle Edward!
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Our concert on Friday 10 June
Woodhouse Copse
Holmbury St Mary
Surrey
RH5 6NL
England
Email: woodhousemusic@dsl.pipex.com
Phone for enquiries: 01306 730403
Fax: 01306 730956
And our programme:
10 June 8p.m - 'Entente Cordiale', a recital
Tom Eisner, violin
Jessica Duchen, piano
EDWARD ELGAR (1857-1934): Violin Sonata in E minor
Allegro, Romance (Andante), Allegro non troppo
Sospiri
La Capricieuse
Interval
CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862-1918): La plus que lente (arr. Leon Roques)
GABRIEL FAURE (1845-1924): Violin Sonata No.1 in A major, Op.13
Allegro molto, Andante, Allegro vivo, Allegro quasi presto
This is what we're playing at the Elgar Birthplace Museum tomorrow (1 June) as well, 7.30pm start.
SATURDAY 4 JUNE UPDATE: We've dropped the Delius piece & are replacing it with Elgar's 'Sospiri'. Nothing personal about Freddy - and I'm sorry to lose my lovely reading about when Elgar visited Delius in 1933 and told him what it's like to fly in an aeroplane - but we've played the Legende rather too much and it sort of doesn't work any more. Besides, Sospiri is just wonderful and nobody ever plays it.
Monday, May 30, 2005
Conductor cat in residence
Solti on the bench
Originally uploaded by Duchenj.
I am hostage to my piano again - recital with Tom at the Elgar Birthplace Museum on Wednesday 1 June, a.k.a. the day after tomorrow. So, in the absence of anything refreshingly new to blog about, here is a picture of Solti, our conductor cat in residence. Sir Georg does love to sit on the garden bench of a sunny afternoon.
Thursday, May 26, 2005
More about yesterday
I could say a few things too, but I'm not going to.
I spent yesterday evening there listening to Rustem Hayroudinoff playing the socks off the complete Etudes-Tableaux by Rachmaninov. I've admired Rustem's playing for years and have always felt angry that he's not had the attention he deserves, except in a vote of confidence by Chandos, for which he's made three recordings (his Dvorak Concerto, with the BBC Philharmonic and Noseda, is just out).
What we heard last night was the performance of a mature and deep-thinking artist who understands Rachmaninov's mind as if from the inside and delivers his music in the finest Russian tradition with a huge, deep, beautiful tone and superb elan, which increased as the recital progressed. The great E flat minor number was an exceptional treat. What I loved most was that he did not shy away from Rachmaninov's big emotional issues. It's often seen as an asset to be 'cool' about such things and not accentuate the emotional content of such intensely romantic music. Rustem, thank heavens, doesn't seem to agree with that. He sounds as if he is confirming what I have come to feel too: that if you deny great feeling, you deny life, never mind music, its essential meaning. That doesn't mean that the playing was 'over the top', however - rather, it was profoundly felt and totally sincere.
Here's a nice review from The Classical Source.
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
It's all happening here...
Will report back on anything further I hear about this. Meanwhile I am off to...yes, the Wigmore Hall itself, where Rustem Hayroudinoff is about to play a great deal of Rachmaninov.
Monday, May 23, 2005
"2005", the opera
This got me thinking:
1. I didn't change my view, because I didn't have one. I'd read the libretto and thought it excellent; I'd ploughed through all the background material provided by the ROH, which told me that the team involved were thoroughly professional; but I had had no access to even a note of the music. So I didn't make a judgement in my Indy article, because I had nothing to judge.
2. That's the problem with writing about world premieres before they happen. Nobody can guarantee what they're going to sound like.
3. What really 'narked' me about some of the writing in the British press was that some of my respected colleagues decided to trash the thing BEFORE they'd heard a note, simply because a) Maazel was paying for some of it himself, b) he'd never written an opera before, c) some unnamed source in the ROH had told The Guardian that it was 'crap' (unnamed sources are so useful, aren't they?! I've only ever used one once - years ago, in a piece for The Guardian... Long story for another occasion). The tone of these writers were such that anyone would have thought Prince Charles had tried his hand at writing an opera - not someone who has been highly respected in the musical world for nearly half a century and is currently musical director of the NY Philharmonic. I seem to remember that once upon a time someone accused of a crime used to be innocent until proven guilty. That's a principle I like to uphold. OK, so the outcome wasn't so great, but it did look like it was worth giving the thing a chance.
Anyway, I'm not really a critic. I am now - oh yes yes yes - a NOVELIST! At the kitchen table I am currently surrounded by piles of pages from Novel No.1, just back from the copy-editor. I've got two weeks to finalise the text before it goes to be typeset. Anything I don't change now will outlive me on a shelf somewhere. In between wondering whether a reference to cafe latte has to be italicised, whether the cat really says 'miaow', not 'meow' and whether the Russian character is still too much like - oh, never mind who - I've been pinching myself and wondering how this happened at all. Someone has EDITED my NOVEL??? Someone actually agreed to publish it? I am dreaming, aren't I?
Perhaps one day it'll be a good source for an opera called "2005". If so, I shall choose the composer myself.
Friday, May 20, 2005
Don't give up the day job, Maestro
The staging was brilliant. The singing and acting were stunning. The orchestra sounded marvellous. The libretto is well written and well constructed and you could hear all the words, rendering the surtitles (yes, for an opera in English) redundant. We even had the voice of Jeremy Irons doing the telescreen propaganda. Yes, the quality of the performance and the production were absolutely world class, Royal Opera House at its very finest. But the music....oh deariedeariedear.
When I read the libretto, when writing that mega-article, I'd visualised the whole thing in my head and my ears. Unfortunately, what I imagined turned out to be rather more exciting and moving than the sounds that assailed us yesterday. A few of my gripes are that sensitivity to words was non-existant (silly repetitions, amateurish stresses, lack of imagination), colouristic imagination was equally lacking (one thing I liked - the single coloratura singer over a few phrases of the Big Brother chorus - but that was it), dramatic moments that should have been moving or at least touching were not, because the music was so ineffective, the pace never seemed to vary and when it did it was unbelievably crass (build up to climax of scene two by getting faster and raising the pitch. Yawn.) Etceteraetceteraetcetera.... I must concede that my various colleagues who panned this thing were dead right: it should NOT have been put on at Covent Garden.
Tom nodded off after the first 15 minutes. The only time he began to look interested was when he thought the leading lady was going to get her kit off, but she didn't.
Didn't anyone tell Maazel how 'Oranges and Lemons, Say the Bells of St Clement's' goes? He could have got the correct tune from any ice-cream van. Or is it perhaps under copyright?
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Old music never dies, it just loses its appeal...
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Speed date
Does this mean I could drive at c150 mph coming back from our Elgar concert in Malvern on 1 June without fear of reprisal? I shall officially be a concert pianist that evening, after all - and we'd be home in an hour.
Monday, May 16, 2005
Mystery on the coast
One cynical soul of my acquaintance pointed out the event's uncanny similarity to a wonderful British film called 'Ladies in Lavender' in which a handsome young Polish violinist is shipwrecked on a beach and rescued by Maggie Smith and Judy Dench, who then a) nurse him back to health, b) help him establish his career, c) fall in love with him, despite being 50 years his senior... If you were a pianist, says my pal (not that I am...), and you wanted publicity above everything else on earth and you'd seen that film, what would you do? I pointed out that the Piano Man, picked up on 7 April, has apparently not spoken at all and I don't think I could go for 5 weeks without saying a word. To which said pal remarked, "well, YOU wouldn't..." - which could, of course, mean a multitude of things.
Apparently the response to the BBC appeal has been immense, so the mystery may yet be unravelled. All of us in the blogosphere will be watching for developments with eagle eyes.
Friday, May 13, 2005
What one learns...
Stephen Kovacevich had very kindly offered to let us do a 'play in' at his place to help us prepare for our recitals in June. It's one thing to play in your front room for the neighbours, quite another to play in an unfamiliar room on an unfamiliar piano in front of a group of frighteningly musical friends: one step further towards the Real Concert Setting. So along we went.
Oh, the things one learns...
Strange how after just two days the programme came out sounding entirely different. The Elgar Sonata went like a dream - it came together as never before and said everything we wanted it to say. The Delius Legende now goes faster than it used to; one friend who particularly loves it thinks we should slow it down again. There was much to be pleased with in the Faure A major sonata (and yesterday was Faure's 160th birthday!). But one notices other matters in this context that were never apparent before.
This is particularly true of energy and pacing - applying not only to the music but to oneself. Mistake number one: practising and rehearsing for three or four hours in the morning, then practising at Stephen's place for an hour and a half before the 'performance'. We were, obviously, knackered before we began... As for the flow of energy in the music, our programme involved two high-emotion sonatas with the Delius as a breather in between; and we thought that finishing with three short Debussy numbers and two Elgar salon pieces would work after the Faure. But the Faure is such a high-energy piece that after it the pace simply sagged and we felt we never got off the ground again. With the help of two clever and experienced friends at the end, we've decided to lose all the Debussy except possibly La plus que lente, to drop Elgar's Sospiri and to finish with the Faure. (Fine with me - as long as I don't have to start the entire programme with the ant-heap of a piano solo that begins that sonata, anything is OK.)
It was afterwards that the weird things started happening. Notably, Tom collapsed. Why? The hot room? The exhaustion? Something he'd eaten? First he started feeling odd and turned a greenish shade of white. Then he cut his finger on somethingorother and there was rather a lot of blood, which made me come over queer too (I'm idiotically squeamish about blood), then he went to the bathroom and fainted briefly, and I sat in the kitchen with my head down trying not to faint in sympathy; then someone bandaged up Tom's finger, after which he lay on the landing with his feet up saying he felt better and then he had to go and be sick and then somehow we got him out of the house, into the car and home. Stephen was marvellous about it...poor guy, I wonder if that will be the last time he offers to let friends perform at his home......
Whatever we learned yesterday, I'm glad that we learned it at a 'dress rehearsal' rather than the 'real' concerts. Hopefully in two weeks' time, we will have sorted out the programme and will be able to keep away from our instruments for the better part of the day. And I hope that finally the end will justify the means.
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Turn again, kitty
In fact, Solti is planning to write to Whittington to ask him to intercede with his eminent keeper to the following effect. Since cats are the best de-stressers in Britain, they make an invaluable contribution to their owners' quality of life and therefore to the country's economy. Spend between 15 and 30 minutes a day playing with and cuddling your kittycat and you will feel like a new individual. Your mood and therefore your work can only improve as a result. Therefore, argues Solti, all cat-keeping costs - including vet bills, reduced-calorie-formula cat food, scratching posts, sheepskin kitty beds and catnip mice - should be made available tax-free. And self-employed cat owners should be able to tax-deduct the lot. Please, Whittington, he meows, ask Susan to present this to Tony at the first possible opportunity?
The runthrough, by the way, ran. Another one tomorrow...
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
If I were a real pianist....
So guess why I'm not a (real) pianist? That's why.
Tom and I have our first runthrough of our Entente Cordiale programme tonight. It's an enormous source of stress for me, but of absolutely no significance to anyone else because we're just playing to a bunch of terribly obliging neighbours in our front room! Nevertheless, it's had me practising all morning, then lying in bed with churning stomach all afternoon, eating far too much chocolate, breaking out in those patches of dry skin that I get on my face and hands when I'm stressed, and, worse, having to tell my editor at the Indy that actually no, I can't turn round the piece he wants me to do by the end of tomorrow. (He's nice. He's letting me do it next week instead. Thank heavens.)
Of course every musician undergoes stress over their concerts, but the proportion of reward to anguish has to be such that it's worth it. Even 40% stress and 60% reward would tip the balance in favour. What I undergo is 80% stress and 20% reward - and the latter only if things go well. If I make stupid mistakes, that proportion goes down. All I can say today is that it seemed a good idea at the time, when we planned it all last autumn, but now that the season is upon us, I would rather be doing ANYTHING but this. But until the end of 10 June, I am a prisoner to my piano.
"It is the three-legged monster that doth mock the meat it feeds on..." as Shakespeare might well have said.
Friday, May 06, 2005
Beethoven and the Ghost of Hampton Court
Thanks to this festival, there's a feast for book-lovers in Kingston this month. My agent is among a number of publishing professionals taking part in a discussion on May 9th called 'Writing: a suitable job for a woman?' [answer as I see it: it's not a suitable job for anybody, but we do it because we just have to do it...'] and novelist Maggie O'Farrell is among the literary luminaries, on May 25th. Full details at the website.
Meanwhile, I've discovered a blog for pianophiles: Pianophilia written by Bart Collins. Bart has a plethora of interesting stuff up there, including the complete list of contestants for the Van Cliburn Competition, links to the forthcoming Chopin Competition in Warsaw and a fab story about how the new Pope's piano couldn't get into the papal apartment on the Vatican top floor! Adding you to blogroll right away, Bart.
The sun is shining and Labour has been re-elected, but with a vastly reduced majority. Our local Lib Dem candidate, Susan Kramer, won comfortably in this constituency. Tom had the appropriate orange sticker on his violin case and I was extremely tempted to scrub out 'Susan' and write 'Gidon' instead (and alter the appropriate A to E, of course). But - aren't I good? - I didn't do it.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Votes count
Remember, my sisters, that Mrs Pankhurst and her comrades used to chain themselves to railings, and worse, for the sake of winning women the right to vote. Now you must use that right, or else democracy is dead.
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
Big Brother is listening to you...or not
I can't help reflecting that the vast majority of new operas are actually crap. As they always have been. The immortal strains of La Boheme, Die Meistersinger and even Don Giovanni were always the tip of the iceberg. For every successful and enduring opera, there must be at least 20 that bite the dust the minute they are aired. As they say, you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince, and you have to listen to a lot of contemporary crap before you find something that really is worth the money that its company has devoted to it. Tom Ades's operas do so well that I've never yet been able to get into one, so I can't judge them. But in the meantime, I was less than thrilled by Nicholas Maw's 'Sophie's Choice', a Covent Garden commission which had its moments but which I would be quite happy never to hear again. As for Birtwistle - well, really, the amount of money that must have gone into HIS operas really doesn't bear thinking about. Critics love them, for some reason best known to themselves; but I have never yet met one member of the general public who regarded them as anything but 'crap'. Other works I remember sitting through include 'Golem' by John Casken (at the QEH, admittedly) and Robin Holloway's 'Clarissa', hampered by a fearful production at ENO donkey's years ago; both could usefully have been left in peace in someone's bottom drawer. All of these together must have cost the public purse a lot more than £0.5m and frankly Maazel's work has as good a chance as any of them of making an impact or, more likely, not. Does the Guardian really think that it's better to have Covent Garden fork out the full subsidised whack for officially approved, establishment-accepted crap? Crap is still crap, whoever foots the bill.
Meanwhile Andrew Lovett writes to me from Cambridge about his new opera with digital video, 'Abraham on Trial' , which DOES sound interesting. World premiere is at The Junction, Cambridge, on 20 May. Full details here. As usual, the really creative stuff does not take place within the establishment heartlands.
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Slogsville
morning: scribble scribble scribble.
afternoon: practise practise practise.
early evening: exercise.
dinnertime: try and eat something healthy.
In just a few weeks life is going to seem easier, once our concerts are out of the way. But preparing for them (1 & 10 June, plus some very scarey runthroughs next week) makes me wonder how on earth people do this all the time? The vast majority of my friends are professional musicians and I'm mystified as to how they can follow the sort of hectic schedules they have, deal with the stresses and strains of public performance (not to mention their own personal standards) and the associated travelling and admin, a certain amount of teaching to help pay the bills, and trying to have a life too? To me the psychological fright is the worst thing: knowing that on x day at y hour you have to stand up in z venue and play something as close to downright perfect as is humanly possible and there is no way round this but straight through the middle.
Meanwhile there are individuals in the world who have nothing better to do all day than log into blogs they're not interested in and waste everybody's time and energy, including mine, by posting daft comments. For this reason I am disabling the comments function for the time being. It's a pity, what more can I say. My apologies to the rest of you. Normal service will be resumed at some point.
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Proms news
I came the closest I have ever been to embracing 'Old Nick' when I turned to the very last page of the listings. There, under the heading LAST NIGHT OF THE PROMS, I saw a magic word I never expected to see: KORNGOLD. Yes, they are doing Korngold at the Last Night - the suite from The Sea Hawk! And they are starting the second half with it, which means that it will be broadcast live on BBC1 and all over the world to an audience of millions if not billions. It would have been very undignified to turn a cartwheel in the middle of the Proms launch, but I can't say I wasn't tempted.
As if that wasn't enough, Philippe has his Proms debut on 9 August, playing the Coleridge-Taylor Violin Concerto, which, if I'm right, is getting its first Proms airing since its British premiere in 1912. About time too - for both of them. Paul Lewis is also in an overdue spot: he'll be playing Lambert's The Rio Grande on the Last Night, something he was scheduled to do in 2001 but was bumped out by the replacement programme that was put on after September 11.
Otherwise, plenty of goodies to tempt us all to Kensington through the summer: 'themes' include Fairy Tales, especially Andersen (why couldn't they have told me this 6 weeks ago?!), The Sea, the End of the War (they'll be playing Gorecki 3 for the first time) and some Big Stuff including a Royal Opera prom of Die Walkure, complete (and oh my, it stars Placido Domingo and Waltraud Maier). The first night features Tippett's A Child of Our Time. New(ish) works by Turnage, Ades, MacMillan and Sørensen, to name but a few, and prime-time soloists include Leif Ove Andsnes, Christian Tetzlaff, Viktoria Mullova, Manny Ax and Anne Sofie von Otter.
No doubt there'll be complaints from everyone else about why there isn't more of this, that or the other, but I reckon the Proms team, generally speaking, is doing a fantastic job against all the odds.
ADDENDUM: 10pm. I knew it: here we go, here's what Norman Lebrecht has to say about English music or lack of it. And it's a darn good read: I for one never knew that Alan Rawsthorne got together with Constant Lambert's widow... Stormin' Norman asks why everyone else has forgotten about these guys' centenaries falling this year and, of course, blames British orchestras for ignoring them. Isn't it more the case, though, that Certain Bigwig Composers, even long-dead ones, now have entourages rooting for them with guns blazing, while others aren't so lucky? Or didn't build the appropriate power-base while alive? Or upset the wrong people in the wrong way (drinking like a fish and getting sacked for it doesn't help). The truth is that composers need someone to fight their corners.
Monday, April 25, 2005
Monday again
Meanwhile, it's come to my notice that several artists' websites have quoted my reports on the relevant people's performances - a Sokolov site is the latest (though I can't read it on my Mac). If blogging is now so quotably quotable, what does this mean for the future of music critics in newspapers?
Friday, April 22, 2005
showing off dreadfully...
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Fiddlesticks...
I met another fiddler the other day - one with a difference. This one grew up to be a conductor. And the conductor turned into a composer. Now 75, he is about to have his first opera performed at Covent Garden and very scarey it sounds too. I got an emergency call last week asking me to interview him the same afternoon...well, I dropped everything and legged it to the Royal Opera House. The maestro was singularly charming (rather more so than a certain other gentleman I interviewed not long ago who answered questions monosyllabically - usually with "no" - before I'd finished asking them) and I read the libretto with hair standing on end. "1984" doesn't sound like an obvious subject for an opera, but the dramatists have certainly done Orwell proud; now we'll have to wait and see what the music is like... My article should be in the Independent on Friday or Saturday. Meanwhile, the Royal Opera House website has more details. Lorin Maazel's 1984 opens on 3 May.
Afterwards, I told Tom that this is what a violinist can achieve if he puts his mind to it. I don't think he was too pleased.
ADDENDUM, 21 APRIL 9.30am: here's another view on Maazel's 1984 from the inimitable Norman Lebrecht. He's concerned with rather different matters, but I agree with him that there should be far more of a buzz surrounding this event than there has been so far. Not sure exactly when my Indy piece will appear - it may not be tomorrow after all, since they are running something else of mine.....
Saturday, April 16, 2005
Sokolov: this is what it's all about
Do you remember what tomatoes are supposed to taste like? Sometimes you go to the Mediterranean - Israel, Italy, the south of France - and you eat a tomato that has just come off its plant, as red as a garnet and with a flavour as rich as if it's been ripened inside a volcano. And you think 'ah...I remember now...that's what it should taste like.' Not the pallid greenhouse (conservatory?) ones we buy in the supermarkets here. Somehow you know - as if you're remembering, even if you've never actually eaten one like this before - that this is the real thing and that nothing else passing for a tomato can ever taste as good, because this tomato has grown to be everything a tomato can and should be.
Sokolov's playing is like that.
It's difficult even to decide where to begin. Tone quality, I suppose, is as good as anywhere. Sokolov is a hefty fellow and he uses big gestures. His tone is massive and mountainous when he lets rip, but at every dynamic level it keeps its richness and beauty. In the first arpeggio of the Schubert A major Sonata D 959, the first piece on his programme, the quality of tone was so pure and smooth and magical that I found tears in my eyes from that alone. And although he's a big bear of a man, he can be as graceful as a ballet dancer (take the hand crossings in the Schubert) and create sounds as delicate as a hummingbird. He often chooses to play slowly and deliberately, to the point of idiosyncrasy; but the most rapid, filigree, spidersweb playing of the Chopin Fantasie-Impromptu proved that he does only what he chooses to do.
Then there's the way he orchestrates at the piano. If every piainist played this way, we'd have no need for orchestras, because this instrument turned into a one-man Berlin Philharmonic (or perhaps Moscow). Who knows how he does it - but the subtlest shift in weight or nuancing brings in a new character, a newly invented instrument, a new notion or emotion that can suddenly cast everything you've just heard in a revelatory new light. The second half was all Chopin: the impromptus, the two Op.62 Nocturnes and the Polonaise-Fantasie; the G flat impromptu, taken about half the speed most people take it, had a tenderness and profundity that could stop hearts and the B major nocturne glowed from within, filled with deep, unimaginable colours.
But then, just when you thought you'd heard it all, he unleashed the Polonaise-Fantasie. It was like listening to an entire Tolstoy novel compressed into a few pages of music - so expertly structured that when the climax arrived it emerged as a shattering apotheosis that blew the emotional horizon away into something resembling heaven. I wasn't the only one moved past reason by this - one of my dearest friends, a piano-world professional, tells me she simply burst into tears at the end because she had never realised that the Polonaise-Fantasie could be played like that. Nor, I reckon, had the rest of us.
This was an evening that showed what art is for and what art truly is. It's all real; it does exist; it is possible. Every shade of nuance, every grand-scale emotion that you never quite believed in, is absolutely true; to experience them is the ultimate reality of being human; this is love in its most pure and ecstatic form and to transmute it into artistry is something worth living for and worth dying for. This is why we have great art and why we need great art. Nothing else should do.
ADDENDUM, 17 APRIL: Here's a review of the concert. from Ying Chang at Classicalsource.com.
Thursday, April 14, 2005
Hotting up in the blogosphere
I wonder whether our own LPO has thought of having its own blog.....A few years ago, long before blogging had really begun to take off, I began to write a little book called 'Married to the LPO'. I wrote about 100 pages and my agent kindly sent it off to a few publishers, all of whom said thanks but no thanks, it's too much like a diary. I didn't realise that what I was writing was, effectively, a blog! Sadly, it ended up joining the stack of manuscripts confined to the attic.
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Fab CDs
As promised, details of Philippe Graffin's new recital disc: release date is now 18 April. Entitled in the shade of forests: the Bohemian world of Debussy, Ravel, Enescu, this is a disc that could only have been devised by a violinist with more than his fair share of intelligence and creativity, and the musical result is just as exciting, with Philippe's improvisatory sense of fantasy and glorious tone expertly partnered by the French pianist Claire Desert. The programme's inspiration is the image of the gypsy wanderer so long associated with the violin in its purest, most instinctive form, and the way that that image has inspired the three composers involved.
Enescu's Impressions d'enfance begins the disc, imbued with the notion of the wandering minstrel fiddler that Enescu carried with him to maturity; then there is, of course, Ravel's Tzigane, but played as you've never heard it before. Philippe and Claire employed not only the 'lutheal' - the mechanism, akin to a prepared piano, that provides the piano with a range of stops to evoke the sound of the cimbalom, the guitar and many stranger beings - but the original lutheal, fitted into a small 1919 Pleyel grand in the Musical Instrument Museum in Brussels, on which the piece enjoyed its very first recording. Sounds completely different from Dan Hope's also excellent recording ('East Meets West'), which involved fitting the machine into a modern Steinway. The 1919 instrument sounds more like a guitar than a harpsichord and meshes into some extraordinary, mesmerising soundworlds with the violin. Then comes the Ravel 'posthumous' sonata (a beautiful early work written for the composer to play with Enescu while both were students of Faure) and, last but not least, Debussy's complete works for violin and piano: not only the wonderful sonata, but also an early Nocturne & Scherzo that Philippe has reconstructed himself, and a batch of lovely pieces - two preludes and two songs - in arrangements, approved by Debussy, by the American-Hungarian violinist Arthur Hartmann. With superlative presentation, a thorough and fascinating booklet written mostly by Philippe himself and, above all, matchless, poetic, 500%-committed playing from both artists, this is Avie Records' latest must-have.
Marc-Andre Hamelin has an amazing new CD out: Albeniz's Iberia, complete, filled out with more treats from this ever-underrated but truly astonishing Spanish composer-pianist. Albeniz himself realised just how difficult Iberia was - apparently he considered it virtually unplayable and almost destroyed the manuscript for that reason. Thank heavens he didn't. And thank heavens for Marc, someone who can not only play it but can imbue it with the poetry, evocativeness, warmth, passion, earthy rhythm and sheer, lush gorgeousness that it deserves. I couldn't get enough of this, especially since I once entertained fond ideas of learning 'Triana', only to find my eyes crossing in front of my nose at the sight of the termite-heaps of notes that comprise the score. You'd never guess its fiendish complexity from this apparently effortless rendition, filled with wit and colour and dreamlike beauty bringing out every inch of the extensive French influence on the composer. If Debussy liked to sound Spanish, then Albeniz liked to sound like a French symbolist (except that he, of course, had just a little too much of a sense of humour!). Iberia is a one-off - there is nothing else quite like it in the piano repertoire - and I think this new recording is likely to be regarded as definitive for some time ahead. It's Hyperion's Record of the Month, and they're not wrong.
More soon.
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
A warm welcome...
A little while ago, I wrote a short piece for SOUTHBANK magazine about a sort of concert-experiment in which the performers were planning to use a machine to produce Infrasound. This involves soundwaves of such low frequency that the human ear can't hear the result. But, apparently, you can feel it. One theory suggested that this weird experience is the physical reality responsible for sensations of being haunted. Wouldn't surprise me if the Octobass was just one step along from this.
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
Meltdown
Of course, one is very, very lucky to experience even one of these three bricks, let alone the whole lot, within around 24 hours. It's not that I'm complaining. I've simply been lost for words.
Friday, April 01, 2005
Meet the Vuillaume Octobass
Octobass
Originally uploaded by Duchenj.
My blog stats tell me that I've had a few hits from various people seeking information about the Vuillaume Octobass. So here it is. We visited it last November in Paris, where it lives at the musical instrument museum in the Cite de la Musique. (We did NOT use a flash to take this photo!) It's a most extraordinary contraption and its controls work via pedals which unfortunately aren't quite visible here. Apparently the famous French luthier Vuillaume made it according to specifications from Berlioz (I think). I'm not entirely sure why Berlioz wanted one - but if anyone was going to, it WOULD be him, wouldn't it?! By the way, I share his birthday.
Thursday, March 31, 2005
urgh...
Meanwhile, my sympathies to the person who found my blog through a search on the words "fell in love with my violin teacher"...
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Wagnerama
It's easy to think that the Ring carries some kind of curse - mainly because it's so expensive - but anyone who does believe in a celestial conspiracy theory around it would have found grist in their mill yesterday. For the first time EVER, the BBC decided to televise a complete Wagner opera live - Walkure from the ROH, (it showed Rhinegold, not quite live, the night before). So guess what? Wotan - the redoubtable Bryn Terfel - went sick. And they only showed Act 1, which of course doesn't feature him. Acts 2 and 3 will pitch up at some point when Bryn feels better and the Beeb can clear another slot. I was most upset as I'd kept the evening free for the treat of seeing this - and the first act was absolutely stunning.
I hope that the Curse of the Ring leaves ENO in peace on Saturday's opening night, because I have press tickets for once. I haven't seen Gotterdamerung live since the week after Margaret Thatcher resigned...
Sunday, March 27, 2005
Heaven is...
I came out with a volume of Mallarme poems, but arranged so cleverly that it's hard to understand why it's not done more often. As well as copious notes, it includes both the original French AND an English translation, printed side by side. It makes perfect sense. Standard practice for opera libretti and Lieder in CD booklets, of course, but not elsewhere. Normally we have to buy just one or the other; and, if you're me, you either miss all kinds of words and nuances in the original through not knowing the language well enough, or you feel the lack of the poem's native music when it's lost in translation. I had a quick hunt to see if anyone had done the same for Rimbaud or Baudelaire, but they hadn't.
Oxford is wonderful. I often wish I'd gone there instead of the other place, where the wind comes straight from Siberia.
Friday, March 25, 2005
Fiction schmiction
I ploughed through Janice Galloway's 'Clara' - like 'Longing', it is of course about the Schumanns. I had my doubts about it, though most people do seem to have loved it and it is a great achievement, exquisitely written too. I felt that she dodged all the difficult issues, however - whereas Landis jumps straight in with both feet, speculating almost immediately about whether Brahms could have been the real father of Felix Schumann. My main complaint over 'Clara', however, was that although it is poetic, it is also over-intellectual and pretentious and although it paints the most fabulous picture of a Schumann who is totally, utterly, stupendously nuts, it never truly touches the heart. The same is true - as far as page 60 - of 'Longing', which on the other hand tries to be poetic but never quite makes it. Its self-conscious intellect, clumsy sexual symbolism and a style that attempts much but doesn't flow easily prevents any real identification with the characters. What's more, unlike Clara, the writer doesn't seem to have managed to assimilate his research into a fictional world of his own. Footnotes that take about third of a page spin you off at a tangent and there's nothing more offputting in fiction than constant reminders that it is based on fact. It's like flying a plane without retracting the wheels.
Most other novels about composers that I've read have been about Beethoven and Mozart. I hated Leslie Kenton's 'Ludwig' so much that it put me right off even trying John Suchet's multi-volume effort, though I've been told it's rather good. There was a book about Mozart writing Don Giovanni in Prague that was quite fun but, in writerly terms, somewhat amateurish. I haven't ventured into Anthony Burgess's 'Mozart and the Wolf Gang'...or a more recent book called 'Igor and Coco' (what more can one say?).
Here's the nub of the problem: either the fictionalised biographies of composers appeal to the head and not the heart - perhaps because of a perception that their potential market loves to be intellectually pretentious - or else they are just plain awful. The question is WHY? Is that what comes of trying to base a novel on fact? Or is it more the case that in musical spheres we all have our own mental images of our heroes and don't particularly like to take on board someone else's interpretations of them? I don't know, but I do know that the tempting scenarios that whisper to me from the 19th century need to be handled with extreme care and are probably best left alone.
Thursday, March 24, 2005
A nice book quiz from Helen
1. You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
See Helen's excellent explanation of it. Safe to say, it involves memorising a single book.
I'd choose Dodie Smith's 'I Capture the Castle' - which I love so much that I've nearly memorised it anyway.
2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Yes. I think a few of the men in my past were actually fictional, because their real selves turned out to be very far removed from who I'd thought they were. If you see what I mean.
3. The last book you bought is:
'Longing' by JD Landis. A novel (yes, another one) about Robert and Clara Schumann. I'm currently stuck, around page 60.
4. The last book you read:
'Ferruccio Busoni: A Musical Ishmael' by Della Couling.
5. What are you currently reading?
'My Sister's Keeper' by Jodi Picoult.
6. Five books you would take to a deserted island:
Vikram Seth: 'A Suitable Boy'
Ian McEwan: 'The Child in Time'
George Eliot: 'Middlemarch'
Tolstoy: 'War and Peace' (though if 'Anna Karenina' could be appended to it, that'd be nice)
A very large book of poetry, including as much as possible of Keats, Yeats, Eliot and Ted Hughes, ideally with some Verlaine and Rimbaud and Baudelaire thrown in in the original French, and some Lorca, preferably translated...does this book exist or is it the poetic equivalent of iTunes?
7. Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons)? And Why?
Will think about this and do it later because the people I wanted to suggest have already done it!
Monday, March 21, 2005
In today's Indy...
Very fired up today by Tasmin's glorious performance of the Elgar Violin Concerto last night with the LSO and Richard Hickox. What an extraordinary piece it is - with an intensity that transmutes from mood to mood but never really lets up. Tasmin really went for it: wonderfully secure, beautiful eloquent tone, deeply involved in every moment of the work, and with a particularly impressive sense of ensemble with orchestra and conductor. She did indeed make the piece very much her own, as I thought she would; the result was that it seemed part of her and she seemed part of it. Fabulous.
I just wish the Barbican was a nicer place to spend a Sunday evening.
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Roger's rare bit of Mozart
The press release contains a fabulous quote from Sir Roger:
"It's interesting to hear this kind of 'second generation' historically informed playing: modern instruments, but completely digested performance practice, with pure tone of course from the orchestra, a very slight and informed vibrato from the violinist, and phrasing from everyone in sight! What a joy to realise that you can play stylishly with any instrument, whether new or old, and that 'early music' is in the mind rather than the hardware."
So has Sir Roger Norrington JUST NOTICED that early music is all in the mind?! Some of us could have pointed this out 20 years ago, and indeed have been trying to do so ever since... Never mind, it's a lovely recording.
Dates for the diary
20 March (this Sunday): Tasmin is playing the Elgar Violin Concerto with the LSO at the Barbican, conducted by Richard Hickox. I think this just might be "her" piece to a T...Book here.
28 March: release date for Philippe's stunning new CD from Avie Records. Hear Ravel's Tzigane as you've never heard it before! More details when it hits the shelves.
9 April: the London Philharmonic is, quite incredibly, giving a concert at the RFH that includes BOTH Korngold AND Faure, with Ravel thrown in for good measure! I'm not sure that I've ever encountered My Two Boys sharing a programme before, let alone with my orchestra-in-law. Emmanuel Krivine conducts and the programme is Korngold's Schauspiel Ouverture, both the suites from Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe and, to close, the Faure Requiem.
5 May: oh boy, trust Jess to clash with the (likely) general election...I am doing an open interview with the pianist Robert Taub at Kingston University as part of the Kingston Readers' Festival. Our title (an inspiration from Bob!) is 'Beethoven, his ears and you'. Bob is in the middle of that piano Everest, performing the complete Beethoven sonatas, so we'll start from there and see where we get to. More details of venue and how to get there when it appears on the website.
22-25 May: Tom joins the Razumovsky Ensemble for three of their concerts in a festival deliciously entitled Bacchus & Apollo in the middle of a vineyard close to Bordeaux. Lucky Tom!
25 May: Rustem Hayroudinoff plays the complete Rachmaninov Etudes-Tableaux at the Wigmore Hall. Since Rustem is one of the most sincere and engaging pianists around, especially in Rachmaninov, this should be quite an event.
1 June: Tom and I give the official Elgar Birthday Concert at the Elgar Birthplace Museum at Broadheath in Worcestershire. Our title is Entente Cordiale and we'll be playing - yes! - English and French music, including the Elgar Violin Sonata, the Faure Violin Sonata no.1 and some lovely stuff by Delius and Debussy. Book here!
10 June: As above, but this time in Music at Woodhouse in Surrey, close to Dorking. Wonderful venue, gorgeous gardens, a spot well worth discovering...More details here.
9 June: Krystian Zimerman plays the Royal Festival Hall. Do NOT miss this concert!!!
That should keep you going for a bit. Us too, for that matter.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Booked up...
Asked about narrative structure, Graham Swift described his approach as musical. He feels his way through the structure according to emotions, he explained (this is a rough paraphrase, by the way), and suggested that the emotional charge associated with different parts of the book is something close to music because it is beyond the words themselves; it has to exist as a driving force before the words come into being.
This does ring some kind of deep bell at the back of my mind and somehow relates to my pre-caffeine musings about the relationship between music and writing the other day. Would a composer set out to write a piece of music without having a pretty good sense of the kind of structure he/she wants to create?
For my new book, I've mapped out a detailed skeleton of What Happens When to guide me through the maze. RT and GS yesterday both said that they don't do this, however. A novel is an adventure and must be approached with an adventurous spirit, suggested Swift. They both have a good idea of where their story is going, but are willing to be diverted to some extent as they make discoveries along the way. I was reassured to hear that Malcolm Bradbury used to go for the skeleton approach!
Meanwhile spring is beginning here in London. The daffodils are coming out and Solti the cat is going nuts (even though he's been 'done'). It's a time for hope and for clearing out the filing cabinets and for thinking ahead rather than back. Nice...
Friday, March 11, 2005
Preoccupied with poetry
Speaking of poems, I saw a terrific poem on the underground the other week - on the Jubilee Line heading for Waterloo after a Wigmore Hall gig - and now I can't a) remember the name of the poet, b) remember the name of the poem, or exactly how it went, c) find it on the Poems on the Underground website, d) find it anywhere else either. It's a recent poem and in it the poet is trying to rent out his heart, as if in a newspaper property ad. Is this a consequence of getting older - that one's brain turns into a Swiss cheese? If I encounter it again, I shall copy it out.
More consequences of The Book Contract: I am now allowed to acknowledge openly that poetry, literature, indeed fine writing generally, means every bit as much to me as music. The two are, after all, closely related. I'm not going to start analysing how and why, or waxing lyrical about it either, certainly not before I've had my second cup of coffee. But I do wonder if it has something to do with precision of structure - the way content and form unite in a unique manner to make a statement that is both entirely personal and entirely universal.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Midweek
I should really have been in the Royal Festival Hall listening to Mahler 6 right now, but the Tomcat has injured his back pulling the bag out of the kitchen bin (I kid you not) and has had to take some time off work. Bad backs are a nightmare, as I know only too well from my experience last May, and there's no way on earth I'm going to let him sit in one spot with fiddle at the ready for 6 hours' rehearsal a day in his current state.
More alarming is that I'm not so sorry not to be at this concert. Mahler 6 is Tom's favourite of Big Gustav's output, but it's one of those symphonies that leaves me thinking, 'Come on, Gus, go see Freud and stop inflicting all this angst on your poor old listeners...' And friends in the band tell us that the Maestro (or is it Madame Piano Soloist?) insists they play the Mozart piano concerto with no vibrato. Not even on the long notes, as is recommended by Leopold, if someone had but bothered looking.
How come Leopold provides exercises for practising what we today call vibrato, several years before Wolfgang was born, and gives ample indication that the fiddlers around him were using FAR TOO MUCH WOBBLE HABITUALLY, and conductors still come along bright eyed and bushy tailed telling orchestras to use NONE? Nine times out of ten, it sounds frightful. What I want to know is, how many of them have so much as glanced at this text, let alone dared to form their own interpretations of it based on facts rather than hearsay?!?!? To judge from the squeaks and moans being emitted by some of today's highest profile musicians, not a great many.
Thursday, March 03, 2005
On the town, on the news?!
I mean, really. This is great stuff. Why on earth shouldn't an opera company do it? That way we can hear the music played as well as it ought to be, singing that is above the average school production (which was the miserable level of what I heard when I went to see 'West Side Story' in a major London venue a few years ago) and enjoy a wonderfully refurbished opera house without having to nod off while someone tootles through some bel canto twiddling, and without wanting to commit rapid hari kiri after subjecting oneself to Berg. I know what I'd rather see. And hey, I'm supposed to be educated and well-informed about opera. Some famous composer (whose name I can't remember at this time of evening) once said that there are only two kinds of music, good and bad. Implication, ditch the stupid classifications that cater only for the ubersnobs. I say, bring on the Bernstein!
Monday, February 28, 2005
One year on...
I don't know exactly how many visitors I've had during this time because I've had some ructions with webcounters along the way (there's now an invisible one!), but currently I'm averaging about 100 visitors per day. There's usually a dip at weekends, which suggests most of you log on at work! :-). I had my highest number of hits when I posted a picture of my cat, Solti!
There have been hits from 59 different countries from Los Angeles to Taipei to Chile to Kyrgystan.
I've discovered that bloggers are marvellous, strong-minded, helpful and idealistic people! You're marvellous, the lot of you! Some will go to extraordinary lengths to help out other people whom they've never met and wouldn't recognise if they bumped into them. Everyone experiences - I think - a sense almost of relief that blogs exist. This is a medium in which you really can speak your mind and nobody can tell you what your opinions ought to be.
Having so said, I'm still astonished at the way anonymous viewers hiding behind self-appointed watchdog-type nicknames are simply waiting to leap out of the woodwork to tear you to shreds the second you dare to admit that you don't like Christmas...
My most unlikely referrer was probably: http://ecksteingirlsbasketball.blogspot.com/. And some of the strangest Google queries that have led people to the site have been, in no particular order: 'Where can I find magic mushrooms in Scunthorpe'; 'latkes en francais' (please note, they taste the same in both languages!); 'Serkin rowing' (did he?); 'Ukranian poppyseed cake'; 'Real tomcat meow recordings sound effect download' (is that what my husband is doing in his spare time?!?); and last but by no means least, 'violin fetish' (erm, not unreasonable, this...)
Of course, the danger is that one uses a blog as a way of keeping friends and family scattered all over the place up to date with one's news - so apologies to anyone who's found they get fewer e-mails from me these days - don't worry, I still love you all!
Finally, I wish I could say that my book deal is the result of blogging, but it isn't. I started that book over a year before starting the blog and the fact that it's going to be published is the result of little more than a fantastic agent and some extremely good luck!
Sunday, February 27, 2005
Any suggestions?
I need:
to be able to type on it easily (often typing on a laptop keyboard feels like playing the harpsichord when you're used to a Steinway);
plenty of battery time
something as light and carryable as possible
broadband internet connection anywhere/everywhere (I know there's a term for this, but can't remember it)
to get at e-mail no matter what & send large files via e-mail
readable screen
it would be nice to play CDs & DVDs on it
Would be nice if it was Mac compatible in some way. I adore my iMac, which is safely rooted to my study desk, but am not sure that I want to fork out the necessary ££££s for the laptop equivalent!
Any advice would be greatly appreciated...
Saturday, February 26, 2005
Catching up
Tom has been on tour - Ljubljana, three places in Germany beginning with F and, to end, Basel. The major excitement seems to have been some official list that was circulated to the orchestra inadvertently revealing everybody's normally well-concealed middle names and dates of birth. Plus lots of snow, beautiful European shoebox concert halls and excellent audiences, Tom says, and stunning performances by their soloist, Christian Tetzlaff, who makes a more beautiful sound on his inexpensive modern fiddle than most others do on Strads. It ain't what you've got, it's what you do with it.
I went to hear Piotr Anderszewski at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Wednesday. Completely sold out, and not an easy programme at all - the first half was the Bach French Overture and the Szymanowski Metopes (Chopin took up the second half). Glorious playing, especially the Poles; most of all, the Chopin B minor Sonata. Once again, anyone who insists that audiences are declining should really have been there; they should also note that Grigory Sokolov's next recital, which is not until 15 APRIL, is ALREADY sold out. Which is no less than this absolutely unbelievable artist deserves. I'm glad he's gaining the prestige that is his due.
Meanwhile I am staring at my computer screen with increasing terror at the idea of what I soon have to do with it...
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Insomnia
A few scattered snow showers earlier this evening didn't stop me getting to the Wigmore Hall to hear Gidon Kremer, who was playing there for the first time in 21 years. Not only a fantastic chance to catch him in an acoustic that flatters his sound - I've only experienced him before in the RFH and the Verbier tent - but also a marvellous, apparently eclectic but well-planned programme that would actually have worked nearly as well in Ronnie Scott's. Lots of exciting contemporary & near-contemporary stuff based around the influence, in one way or another, of Bach. With Kremer was the Russian percussionist Andrei Pushkarev, who blended wonderfully with Kremer's intelligence and driven conviction, but nearly stole the show with his own fabulous, jazzy transcriptions for vibraphone of some of Bach's 2-part inventions. I was on the edge of my seat all the way through. And I think Piazzolla is TOP.
Kremer seems to perform as he does not because he's a violinist, but because he's a thirsty, questing, creative musician in every sense. So many violinists seem to be hung up on purely violinistic questions: wonderful sound, great technique, etc, which on this instrument are so complex that they risk becoming an end in themselves. Kremer goes way beyond that. Some of us loved his Bach Chaconne - completely unbaroquey, completely Kremer, completely convincing (apart from some odd upbow retakes that puzzled me a bit). Others didn't. Why is it that some concert-goers hear a so-called baroque fiddler play this thing with a curved bow and no vibrato and instantly think that anything different from that has nothing to do with Bach?!? (I was, as you can see, eavesdropping on the row behind...) That's the amazing thing about Bach, as Pushkarev proved on his vibraphone: this music can take any number of arrangements, updating, adaptation etc etc and still emerge as strong and vital and marvellous as it was the day it was written.
No wonder I can't sleep.
Images are haunting me too of snowflakes on Oxford Street - the only thing that can turn that place into something magical - and poems on the underground and half-glimpsed parallel universes and eleventh dimensions that, I understand, may exist, but then again may not.
Friday, February 18, 2005
Celebrations...
I do have to stop daydreaming and do some serious writing now...life goes on and so do the music magazines!
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Underdog schmunderdog
I do have to take exception, though, to the journalist's description of Tom's orchestra, the London Philharmonic, as the 'underdog' among the top 5 London orchestras. Everyone gets the names confused now and then, but the LPO is really in pretty good shape (one sole section currently lets it down with depressing regularity, but I'm not really allowed to write about that...suffice it to say that it ain't the violins!). No, the real underdog is actually the Royal Philharmonic - which is absolutely tragic.
This once great orchestra, founded by Sir Thomas Beecham, gave the first Royal Festival Hall concerts I ever went to. I'll never forget, aged 12, sitting in the RFH listening to them playing Strauss's Don Juan and feeling the socks flying from my feet as the trombones glistened and the bows scrubbed...I remember thinking, 'I want to be part of this...' - little suspecting that, instead, I'd someday marry someone who was! But today the RPO has been left out in the cold in terms of government funding. The LSO gets the lion's share, and its home in the Barbican in the City of London enables it to have around double the cash of any of the others. No wonder it sounds good. The LPO and Philharmonia share a residency at the RFH and get decentish government money at the next level down. They both sound jolly good too. The BBCSO is a law unto itself, as ever: sometimes it sounds great, sometimes it doesn't, but it's not often to blame for the latter as its raison d'etre is its often weird and taxing programming. But the RPO, not having a high-profile residency (though it does have a new Chelsea base at Cadogan Hall now), gets such paltry funding that it has to resort to many of the most miserable kinds of orchestral gigs to make ends meet. It sounds and feels seriously demoralised. A pal of mine played a concerto with them out of town a year or so ago - I went along, and sitting in a draughty, miserable hall in which I was the youngest person by 40 years, listening to a draughty, miserable orchestra, was really sad, especially when I remembered how they had sounded all those years ago. It's not that they don't try - they certainly do - and I have the greatest respect for the way they soldier on. But I think they are trapped in a vicious circle and I don't know how they can get out of it.
The LPO is off on tour to Germany, Switzerland and Ljubljana next week, with Paavo Berglund conducting and soloists including cellist Pieter Wispelwey and violinist Christian Tetzlaff. They'll have to wrap up warm because it's -11 degrees in some of these places. Tom & I tried to check the forecasts for Ljubljana on the internet last night. After trying to spell it three times, we had to give up and try 'Slovenia' instead.
British technotwit
The website demands that you register, and when you're doing so it wants to know your phone number and your home state & zip code. British phone numbers have the wrong number of numbers, it seems, and the 'home state' is required but only gives you a list of American ones to choose from! Therefore nobody outside the happy USA can ever read this newspaper! Since many of you guys are American, and I've adored the place every time I've been there (with the possible exception of Fort Worth), I'll keep my blogmouth shut about Bush, protectionism, isolationism et al. Suffice it to say that if anyone could possibly E-mail me the article, copied & pasted in to a message, I'd be most grateful!
Smugness still reigns supreme over here...today we are having our celebration dinner and I am also going to do something that I have been promising myself for a couple of decades. I decided, when I was about 18, that when my first novel got accepted, I would buy myself a cashmere sweater - and would not have one until then. And I never have. So we are going to a cashmere sweater shop before dinner. The big decision: black or violet?
Monday, February 14, 2005
Valentine news!
Details will follow in due course. Tom and I are treating ourselves to a very posh dinner to celebrate, but not until Thursday.