Watch Julian Jacobson's Beethoven Marathon live today!

Assuming this works, you should be able to watch Julian Jacobson's extraordinary undertaking today - all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas in one day - in the livestream below, starting at 9.15am London time. (If for any reason it doesn't work, here is a link to one that should.) To donate to Julian's chosen charities, WaterAid and The Connection at St Martin's, please click here. And if you missed the original post, read it here.

Break a leg, Julian!

Watch live streaming video from marathonman at livestream.com

My autumn & winter schedule

Here are some dates for your diaries, fresh from my writing desk: a brand-new words&music concert, a brand-new play, more HUNGARIAN DANCES. Please come along! (The info is also in the sidebar, but certain people are telling me to put it somewhere more prominent...)

ALICIA'S GIFT: THE CONCERT OF THE NOVEL - new!

Starring Viv McLean (piano) (left) & Jessica Duchen (narrator).

A concert adaptation of my novel, lifting the lid on the world of a child prodigy pianist trying to grow up. Music includes Chopin, Debussy, Ravel, Viv's famous performance of Rhapsody in Blue, and a little surprise to end (clue: I have to practise...). News story in International Piano, here.

World premiere: 9 November, Musical Museum, Kew Bridge.To book tickets, call Houben's Bookshop, Richmond-upon-Thames, 020 8940 1055 or Yvonne Evans, 07889 399862. Ticket price includes a tour of the museum's amazing collection plus a glass of bubbly.

13 November, Kensington & Chelsea Music Society

27 November, Vernon Ellis Foundation, 49 Queen's Gate Terrace, SW7. Info from Yvonne: 07889 399862.

8 December, St Mary's, Perivale

15 December, Burgh House, Hampstead, NW3. Tickets from Yvonne: 07889 399862.

18 January, Soirees at Breinton, Woking


SINS OF THE FATHERS - new!

World premiere of my first full-length play, exploring the relationships of Wagner, Liszt and Cosima: rehearsed reading starring John Sessions (right) and Sarah Gabriel. 24 November, Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond-upon-Thames. Part of the International Wimbledon Music Festival. NB - the performance is sold out, but please watch for returns/standing room!


HUNGARIAN DANCES: THE CONCERT OF THE NOVEL

A dazzling journey in words and music through the 20th century, following the story of Mimi, a Hungarian Gypsy violinist who becomes a famous classical soloist, but at a terrible personal price... Works by Bartok, Dohnanyi, Brahms, Ravel, etc.

27 October, 7.45pm, Teesside Music Society.
Bradley Creswick (violin), Margaret Fingerhut (piano), Jessica Duchen (narrator). (Team pictured left)

27 January 2014, Hungarian Cultural Centre, Covent Garden
David Le Page (violin), Viv McLean (piano), Jessica Duchen (narrator). Special performance for International Holocaust Memorial Day.

2 March 2014, St Mary's, Perivale: again, Dave, Viv & muggins.

Marathon man and the Beethoven challenge

He says himself, "It's basically bananas". Nevertheless, the pianist Julian Jacobson is about to play all 32 Beethoven sonatas in one day. From memory. For charity. On Tuesday 15 October 2013, 9.15am – 10pm at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, London. The aim is to raise money for WaterAid and St Martin-in-the-Fields’ ‘The Connection at St Martin’s’ that gives crisis grants to people in need across the UK.  You can make a donation here. 

The whole day is being live-streamed on the Internet, and (drumroll) I hope that you will be able to watch it right here on JDCMB. (This assumes that I can get the technology to work.)

What's without doubt is that Julian's a brave man. I asked him some questions...

JD: Julian, you're playing all the 32 Beethoven sonatas in one day, from memory?!? How and why did you cook up this extraordinary idea?

JJ: Thanks Jessica. Well, it's actually my third marathon - and it will almost certainly be my last! By around 2001 I had done five complete cycles over the normal seven or eight concerts (once over ten, as they were lunchtimes), from memory except that I sometimes used the score for the "Hammerklavier". One day the idea suddenly came to me: "I wonder if it's actually possible to do them all in a day..." I counted up the timings and found that, by omitting most of the exposition repeats, it was just about manageable. And from then on the idea wouldn't let me go. 

I thought I'd do it just once, and that was in St James's Piccadilly in October 2003, for WaterAid as this time. A Beethoven lover, Mr Tom Glaser, was at that performance and booked me for a repeat performance in 2004 at the Harrow Arts Centre. And I thought that would be that, and I remember driving back down to London yelling to my companion "Hooray, never again!". But a couple of years ago I began to wonder if I had it in me to do it one more time, as a tenth anniversary and because I'm 65 this year! So here we are.

In 2003 I used the score just for the "Hammerklavier"; in 2004 I did the lot from memory as I intend to this time. It's not even that I particularly adhere to the custom of playing from memory, either for myself or certainly for anyone else (except that one's students still have to do it, poor things), but it doesn't seem quite like a real marathon performance if I just put the books up there and read through them all. And there IS something of the "stunt" about it, I'm very aware of that, some musicians think it's not really a serious venture at all, and I insist that it's for charity. Though of course I will play it all to my best ability!  

JD: What do you think is the single most difficult thing about it?

JJ: Keeping going! Not losing concentration, avoiding thinking what I have already played or am going to play, Monitoring hands and back to ensure they hold out.

JD: Any special favourites among the sonatas? 

JJ: Op 101. Then some overlooked gems like Op.79. The "Appassionata" remains permanently sublime.  

JD: How long has it taken you to learn them all and how have you been preparing for the big day? 

JJ: I claim to be the only Beethoven pianist - if I may call myself that - who learnt the "Moonlight" and "Pathétique" at the age of 45! I would never learn the popular pieces in the first part of my life. I hatched the idea around 1989, by which time I'd played perhaps 12 of them. Firstly I learnt the "Hammerklavier" and played it at Dartington, as I felt there was no point in even considering a Beethoven cycle until I had that under my belt, or at least vaguely attached to the buckles. (I had already done op 101, 109, 110 and 111). Then I put the idea on ice till I got my job as Head of Keyboard Studies at the Welsh College in 1992. At that point, with the security of a salary, I planned an initial couple of cycles and spent the whole summer vacation of 1994 learning all the rest.

Preparing for the big day: impossible to know how to do it really! Mainly I've been going through them all in decreasing time spans, so I started around six months ago to re-study every one, then worked through them all again in a few weeks, then over about ten days, and now just in four days. A short while ago I stopped listening to any other pianists, and indeed to most other music, in order to concentrate entirely on my own performances "right or wrong".

JD: Tell us a little about the charities you've chosen to support.

JJ: I'm a long-term supporter of WaterAid: firstly I love the work they do, as water is such a fundamental need and it is something we can actually do something about, and then it is a very well run charity that I feel happy about giving extra support to. The Connection does vital work among the homeless and I've been impressed by the care and thought that goes into their activities and projects, also by the dignity with which they treat the people they are helping. It's a homegrown charity, whereas WaterAid is largely active in the third world, so they complement each other nicely.

JD: And there's a live stream on the Internet? How do you feel about that?

JJ: Apprehensive! And that I will try to put it out of my mind. The point is to increase the amount of money for the charities.

JD: Anything else you'd like to tell us about the task ahead?

JJ: Well, I really won't do it again! I mean, it's basically bananas. I've had fantastic support from friends and family. A few people have said they'll come for the whole day to follow Beethoven's progress throughout the 32 sonatas and that's a nice thought. And, when it comes down to it, the fundamental thing is that the music is immeasurably great and wonderful: Beethoven had such creativity and he never repeated himself (as he was well aware). Whatever I feel about the marathon aspect, I love the music, and every sonata, every movement, has given me intense pleasure to re-study.

Here is Julian's donations page again. 

Protecting music education: a vital message from the ISM

The ISM has emailed today with the following message. Please support their call!
Take action now to protect music education
Thank you for supporting the Protect Music Education campaign. We still don’t know for certain whether or not funding for music education hubs in England will continue after 2015. Whilst the schools budget has been protected from cuts, the Education Services Grant is to be cut by £200 million: that’s almost four times what the Government will be spending on music education by 2015! We have asked the Government to confirm their continued support for music education; whatever the reply, we need as many people as possible ready to fight to protect music education.   Here is what you can do to help today:   1. Tell us why music education matters to you With more than 30 music organisations now backing the campaign, from the Music Industries Association through to NMC recordings and Conservatoires UK we now want to hear what you have to say! Each organisation has contributed approximately 100 words on the importance of music education and we want you to do the same - all you need to do is tell us why music education matters to you by using the forum on our petition page. For some inspiration, our newest supporters, Yorkshire Music Education Service said: 'The inspirational work done by music educators across the country transforms the lives of young people every day. The effect of music on personal development is phenomenal - it promotes dedication and teamwork, and can provide a lifetime of enjoyment. It is essential that ring-fenced funding to support high quality music education is retained - without it, access will be diminished and our society will be poorer for it.' We now want to hear why music education matters to you!   2. Tell others about the campaign As well as telling us about the importance of music education, you can also encourage others to sign up. Ask your pupils, parents, friends, family and colleagues to sign up to the campaign today. And you can tweet about the campaign and tell people about it on Facebook using the #protectmusic campaign hash tag.   Thank you again for your support. Please spread the word about the campaign as wide as you can. Together we can make an impact on Government policy and ensure that music education is protected for the generations to come.

Women conductors: encore furore

In an excoriating piece for the NPR blog, Anastasia Tsioulcas shreds the latest sexist remarks against women conductors - which include comments by the head of the Paris Conservatoire, for heaven's sake - and says that women in the classical music industry must start speaking up in earnest. Read it here.

You might like to know that my Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman Conductor has had more hits than any other post on JDCMB ever, in nearly a decade, and still rising.

Speaking isn't enough. We have to do something. Here is my idea from about a year ago. I still think it's a good one. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/sexism-with-strings-attached-8197972.html?origin=internalSearch

Verdi bicentenary: Anja Harteros and Jonas Kaufmann in Don Carlo

It's Verdi's bicentenary today and as everyone is choosing their favourite bits, here is one of mine. I've been lucky enough to hear these two in this opera twice this year - once at Covent Garden, once in Munich. Life in music just doesn't get any better than that.

Alexei Sultanov plays Tchaikovsky's 'October'

An exquisite performance of 'October' from The Seasons by Tchaikovsky, performed by the late Alexei Sultanov.

This loss of this young Russian pianist was one of the great tragedies of the music world in recent years. He was the winner of the Van Cliburn Competition in 1989, aged only 19, and died in 2005 at only 35. His full story is here.

When is a bat not a bat?

When it's a turkey. Here's my review of the new Die Fledermaus at ENO.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/reviews/opera-review-die-fledermaus--english-national-opera-london-coliseum-8852067.html

Odd that Bieito's thought-provoking Fidelio was booed and this one wasn't, though the applause was little more than "well done for trying".

We may need a moratorium on jackboots at the opera. Terry Gilliam got away with it in The Damnation of Faust because of the general brilliance of the whole; and The Passenger, by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, was the real thing and couldn't do without them - though notably failed to sell. But in Die Fledermaus? This is getting silly. Next time someone brings gratuitous Nazis into an opera production, I might just stand up in the auditorium and start singing 'Springtime for Hitler'...

There's a serious point to this. If productions fill up with Nazis the minute anything is German or Austrian, it is lazy thinking and becomes a cliche. And if Nazis are reduced to a cliche on the operatic stage, it devalues the horrors that they (and other fascist/totalitarian regimes) have perpetrated. It devalues their victims. Enough, already.

Why THE REST IS NOISE festival will change concert-going forever

The second part of the Southbank Centre's year-long celebration of the music of the 20th century kicked off on Saturday. And as it did so, the venue released figures that prove beyond reasonable doubt that this extraordinary festival, The Rest is Noise, has not only been succeeding in attracting new audiences, but doing so as if there is a tomorrow after all. 

In short, three-quarters of people booking for these concerts  had not bought tickets for a contemporary classical event at the Southbank before. The place has sold more than three times as many tickets for contemporary classical music during the festival than they did in 2012. About 39 per cent [update] of those booking for concerts had not been to any classical concert at the centre before, and one in three people booking the whole-weekend tickets had never been to the Southbank Centre before at all.

The wake-up call is so loud that The Rest is Noise amounts to a virtual thump on the head for the musical world - or, indeed, a kick on the backside. We can't afford to ignore such numbers. And that's why programming may never be the same again. 

There's been a buzz around The Rest is Noise unlike anything I've encountered within these hallowed (?) portals in 40 years. The RFH was bursting at the seams for Britten's Peter Grimes on Saturday night, but the ferment of activity in the surrounding weekends of events - like this one devoted to the Britten centenary, including films, talks, more concerts (Noye's Fludde notably), 'bite' events (15-min talks on different yet related topics) - also feels more like the Edinburgh Fringe or Hay-on-Wye than a stuffy old arts centre. Hopefully those last four words are ones we'll never have to see together henceforth.

I had a chat with Jude Kelly (artistic director of Southbank Centre) and Gillian Moore (head of music) about what they've been trying to do with The Rest is Noise, and why. You may remember that a few years ago Daniel Barenboim did the complete Beethoven sonatas cycle at the RFH in two weeks. At the time, I wrote this article, declaring that the runaway success of the series proved that what really draws audiences in is anything but dumbing down: instead, we long for the big, immersive, profound experience, where you give a lot and reap more than you sow. It turns out that this wasn't a coincidence.

"When I first came in as artistic director, the first thing that happened in classical music was that an agent said Barenboim was going to do the Beethoven sonatas over a year," Kelly says. "I said: no, let’s do it over a fortnight. They thought that was too much to offer; I said no, that’s what we want to do. And it was a huge success. That gave me the courage to think that these big ideas are what we should be championing." 

Gillian Moore adds: "The idea of programming 20th-century music boldly and constantly is for me so strong – I’ve always tried to do that. But this is a very big idea that really can help us achieve it. Linking with Alex Ross’s book, we’re not slavishly following it, but using its atmosphere as a stimulus. It’s all about putting music in its cultural context of history, science, what was happening, what people were thinking, at the time."

She continues: "Music is not isolated from the world of ideas. Sometimes in classical music we can behave as if it’s its own thing, going along on tram tracks without relating to intellectual ideas. But talk to any composer about politics or life sciences and it absolutely does. So to appeal to people who are culturally curious, but who might think classical music is not for them, especially 20th-century classical music, we are talking about more of our music being linked to broader cultural questions." 

(This relates to another of my own old bug-bears - about the isolation of musical biographies in bookshops, tucked far away from the general biography section which might feature writers, artists, philosophers and actors, among others. That's where musical creators and performers belong, too. Nowadays, of course, you're lucky if you can even find a bookshop.)

Kelly, who has been artistic director of the centre since 2006, says she is often struck by how many extremely well-educated people, interested in theatre, politics, economics, history, science and more, tell her that they never attend concerts of classical music. "But all of that makes up music - so let’s contextualise the whole thing," she says. If you only want to listen to the music, that's fine, of course; but now there has to be a further option as well. 

"I can't speak for other places, but for Southbank it provokes the question that doing a single concert with no other information around it other than programme notes isn’t a proper offer," she says, when I ask what the implications are for future programming. "If any of the orchestras want to do that, it means their assumption is that the audience is already familiar with the repertoire or are certainly very comfortable with classical music. 

"My passion is about how you reach lots of other people who aren’t familiar and aren't comfortable. Obviously just playing the concert in itself hasn’t been doing that. I’m very committed to extending this idea of the wide open school, the offer to do music studies and history studies and science studies all in one go - and making the live performance of music and contemporary dance and contemporary art a central way of understanding  how our societies work."

Having had no thorough academic musical education at college level, she adds that when she wanted to fill in the gaps, the solution she was looking for simply didn't seem to exist: "a course on how you learn and understand the history of classical music". This education is what's been lacking; this is why so many people, when you tell them you're involved with classical music, look afraid and say at once, "I don't know much about classical music". That absence of knowledge intimidates them and, instead of proving an attraction to learn something, it keeps them away. 

"I’m interested in the fact that people are excited by the complexity of science and the complexity of ecosystems, but classical music, which is a version of all of that, stays away from them," Kelly says. "We’ve partly got ourselves to blame - the art industry has often spoken in language that suggests this is for people with fine feelings or that you have to go on some sort of escalator before you can get there and people don’t know what the starting point is." 

"I think we’ve got to be much more welcoming and much less judgemental," Kelly adds. "I think we can seem judgemental about people who don’t know much about classical music. We should say, 'Great, if you don’t know anything about it then you won’t have any prejudices...'" The Rest is Noise website is a huge bonus where this is concerned, preserving many of the talks, "bites", etc, on demand. Visit the Explore section here.

The bonanza of this festival, which includes study evenings, "breakfast with..." sessions exploring the technical workings of music, screenings of films, events for children, and countless other elements, may not be easy to replicate elsewhere - though I'm sure that this is just the beginning for the Southbank. Still, the thinking, and the resulting sales, carry a few big, strong simple messages for all. It's about having courage to think big and to lead from the front. "The big lesson for me is about the scale of an idea," says Moore. "Sometimes you have to do something really big and bold for it to cut through." 

The full programme for the rest of the Rest is here. And now we've reached the point where many of the composers are alive and some of them are kicking. We can certainly expect to see Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Sofia Gubaidulina in London in person for good chunks of the next part. 

What of the future? Don't dismiss this event as a one-off. What's become clear is that the rest is just not noisy enough.