This, from the CBS News series 60 Minutes, is really fantastic. An ex-pilot in Kinshasa founded a symphony orchestra - starting from zero, with no musicians, instruments or teachers... I think Gareth Malone and the Military Wives have a little competition! (Sorry about the car ads...it's worth waiting for.) Thanks to Marshall Marcus for drawing attention to it.
Monday, April 9, 2012
Here's my review for The Independent of two rather amazing concerts in the Lucerne Easter Festival. Plus some snaps. (And more soon...)
*****
LUCERNE EASTER FESTIVAL: Cappella Andrea Barca/András Schiff, 29 March 2012; Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra/Mariss Jansons, 30 March 2012
Outside Lucerne’s lakeside concert hall, the KKL, a boat ride offers itself as the “Whisky Schiff”. Inside the auditorium, though, stood another Schiff: András, in maestro mode. With his hand-picked chamber orchestra, the Cappella Andrea Barca, plus the Balthasar Neumann Choir and a fine complement of soloists, he presided over a rare Bach treat for the Lucerne Easter Festival: the B minor Mass, the composer’s last choral masterpiece, never heard as often as it deserves compared to the ubiquitous St Matthew Passion. Schiff, one of today’s pre-eminent Bachians, encouraged his colleagues through a heart-warming celebration of the Mass’s multi-faceted spiritual world: the infectious dance rhythms, the exultant grandeur of the Sanctus, the almost graphically word-painted Crucifixus, and a subtle, sober Agnus Dei from mezzo-soprano Britta Schwarz which turned the music inward towards its reflective close. At two hours without a break, despite spry tempi, it still seemed over too soon.
The next evening the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra packed an extravagant number of players on to the platform, and their quality of sound – with galvanising seriousness of purpose from their conductor, Mariss Jansons – hit clean between the eyebrows. This was the orchestral equivalent of the Munich Oktoberfest, larger than life and almost scarily well organised.
The 26-year-old Norwegian rising star Vilde Frang was soloist for Bartók’s Violin Concerto No.1, a bittersweet work that the composer produced as a love gift for the violinist Stefi Geyer (she reciprocated affection for neither him nor the piece and never played it). Frang offered a suitably intimate interpretation, displaying a fresh and intuitive sense of timing, besides evident intelligence, wit and grace. She has won this year’s Credit Suisse Award, which gives her a concert in the summer Lucerne Festival with the Vienna Philharmonic. We’ll hear much more of her.
Jansons’s account of Beethoven’s Overture Leonora No.3 was a transfixing paen to liberty. And what a luxury it was to hear Brahms’s Fourth Symphony played with 18 first violins, ensemble exceeding the merely exemplary, and section principals worthy of concerto status – flautist Philippe Boucly delivered a profoundly moving solo in the passacaglia. The symphony became an all-out monument to Brahms’s tragic view of life. Jansons embraced the full measure of it, body and soul.
Saturday, April 7, 2012
(Above: Maxim Vengerov plays and talks on BBC Radio 3's In Tune the day before his Wigmore comeback concert...don't miss it, even if you missed the concert.)
Being Maxim Vengerov at the Wigmore Hall the other night must have been rather like being Barack Obama winning the US election. The weight of expectation had to be all but inhuman. Vengerov's comeback concert - to which his appearance as stand-in for Martha Argerich two weeks ago was an unexpected warm-up - couldn't have announced more clearly that the violinist means business. It is some six years since an injury grounded him. Since then, he's discovered life beyond four strings and a bow, from conducting to dancing the tango. He's taken up a new post as Menuhin Professor at the Royal Academy of Music and he has recently married Olga, sister of the violinist Ilya Gringolts. The couple now have a baby daughter.
It's a long way from prime prodigy to professor and proud papa; and even if Vengerov didn't exactly need to grow up - we'll never forget his magnificent performances in his teens and twenties - then he has certainly matured. The showmanship has by no means vanished, as his encores, Brahms's Hungarian Dance No.1 and the Wieniawski Scherzo Tarantelle, proved (so why did the dear old Wigmore audience get up and start going? I reckon he'd have been ready to keep playing for a good while longer...). But the bulk of the recital was weighty fiddle fare: the Bach D minor Partita, the Handel D major Sonata and Beethoven's 'Kreutzer' Sonata, which Vengerov is privileged to play on the 'Kreutzer' Stradivarius. Kreutzer himself never played that sonata; that was his loss.
Vengerov switched bows for the second half. Not that it was possible to see, from the murky depths of the Wigmore Critics' Cattery, the precise nature of the bow he used for the Bach and Handel - it seemed pointier, and the sound it produced was more forced and less lovely. With the D minor Partita, though, Vengerov reclaimed the stage on which he first stormed London. From long, stark note number one, delivered with head raised and turned away from the instrument, the space was his, the sound all his own; the music unfolded like a water garden uncurling its wonders from within. The Chaconne was as muscular and idealised as a Michelangelo sculpture.
Joined by his regular duo partner, Itamar Golan, Vengerov created a different soundworld for the Handel: this was genial music-making for friends, in contrast to the inward soliloquies on which we seem to eavesdrop in solo Bach. Delicious with piano accompaniment, drawn with soft and deft strokes, tastefully decorated, it conjured a sepia-toned environment that didn't project outwards so much as invite us all in.
But it was the Beethoven that stole the show. Vengerov and Golan never played safe, working at tempi on the edge of the possible in that crazy first movement development, with dynamics that blazed, and electricity that flared, flickered and illuminated by turns. Uniting a composer's inner ethos with the nature of the physical sound has become something of an under-rated art, but that's what they did: the eloquent richness of Vengerov's tone and its soaring conviction was Beethoven, with all his idealism and defiance alive and well. That's the mysticism of which music and its finest exponents are capable. And as an address from a newly returned president in a musical White House, it couldn't have been more inspiring.
The concert was recorded for BBC Radio 3 and I think it is going out on 29 April. Also projected for the Wigmore Live record label.
Bravo, Maxim! It's good to have you back.
Friday, April 6, 2012
It's kind of ironic that this piece is out today, because a week ago, listening to Bernard Haitink coaching young conductors in Lucerne on Bruckner's Seventh, I ended up with the thing on the brain for 36 hours solid. It was the first time - and I mean the first ever - that I started thinking that there might be something more under the hot air after all... Anyway, short version is in the paper now, but in case it is not quite outrageous enough for you, here is my original.
I don’t like Bruckner. I may be a classical music journalist, a trained musician and so on, but I remain deeply, pathologically allergic to the Lumbering Loony of Linz. I’ve lost count of the well-meaning friends, relations and colleagues who have made it their personal mission to “convert” me. Alas, each attempt has been counter-productive. (Right, a photo on a postcard of the LLL. Pretty, isn't he?)
BRUCKNERPHOBIA
I don’t like Bruckner. I may be a classical music journalist, a trained musician and so on, but I remain deeply, pathologically allergic to the Lumbering Loony of Linz. I’ve lost count of the well-meaning friends, relations and colleagues who have made it their personal mission to “convert” me. Alas, each attempt has been counter-productive. (Right, a photo on a postcard of the LLL. Pretty, isn't he?)Know that feeling when you meet somebody at a party and you realise at once that the chemistry is all wrong between you? Everyone else is sucking up to him like crazy, so you’re aware that either you are missing the point, or this person is Fearfully Important, or perhaps there’s some instance of the Emperor’s New Clothes going on. But one thing’s certain: it’s not going to work. That’s me and Anton Bruckner.
An old music exam question helps to articulate the problem: “Brahms termed Bruckner’s masterpieces ‘symphonic boa constrictors’. Discuss.” So, here goes. Bruckner’s symphonies are stiflingly, crushingly oppressive. Once you’re in one, you can’t get out again. Spend too long in their grip and you lose the will to live. They are cold-blooded and exceedingly long, and they go round and round in circles. They swallow you whole, and you may need to go to sleep for three days afterwards because of the indigestion. The ratio of hot air to brain is heavily skewed towards the former. And though there may be a heart in there somewhere, it’s hidden under a lot of very slithery scales.
A vast amount of Bruckner is in the concert schedules this season, and it’s all Mahler’s fault. Gustav Mahler had two anniversary years on the trot, with the result that orchestras have been playing his magnificent but limited output of symphonies continually since 2010. Now nobody wants to hear them again for the proverbial month of Sundays. Most full-scale symphony orchestras have been scared off Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert by “historically informed” ensembles; Schumann, Mendelssohn and Brahms knew the value of concision; Tchaikovsky is over-worn and Shostakovich sometimes requires extra spending on extra players for unusual instruments. All that somewhat limits alternative Big Symphony choices to the efforts of Herr Anton.
People keep telling me to try again with Bruckner. But I have, time and again. Memories flood back. My first Bruckner symphony, No.4, which I attended with my parents, aged 14: even my father, who was a Gramophone subscriber and did like Bruckner, slipped into a gentle slumber. Or standing through the same symphony (giving it another chance, you see) at the Proms in a sweaty gallery amid a busload of very puzzled Italian teenage tourists. Or the time I sought refuge with a pal after some boyfriend trouble, and she put on the slow movement of the Symphony No.7 to console me, and I fear I rather distressed her by saying it sounded like ‘Three Blind Mice’ upside-down. This movement, by the way, was the music played on German radio when they announced the death of Hitler.
Reflections of composers’ personalities usually emerge, in one way or another, in their music, and Bruckner (1824-1896) is no exception. He was obsessive compulsive. He had a counting mania – to the point that he would stand under a tree and count its leaves. It’s not excessive to say that he was a deeply repressed and dysfunctional individual. He had little or no personal life – occasionally he tried to propose to teenage girls – and he's thought to have died a virgin. Legend suggests that he slept in protective clothing because he suffered “nocturnal emissions”.
Now, the thing about good composers – and I don’t doubt that Bruckner was one, even if I personally don’t like the results – is that the better their techniques, the more their music is connected to their inner landscape, whether directly or metaphorically. What does Bruckner do when approaching a climax? He builds up and up, with frantically scrubbing strings and blaring brass, and repeats a phrase, again and again and again. He tries, tries and tries and then – he stops. He gives up and does something completely different instead. Make what you like of that.
He was profoundly religious, inspired by God, inspired also by nature. “That’s the sound of the Alps! Can’t you see them?” an enthusiast might exhort. But actually all I can see is the conductor’s bald patch and a lot of tremolandi-playing musicians risking RSI. Monolithic and magisterial, cry the fans – though I’m still puzzling over why these qualities should be deemed attractive. On the contrary: devoid of affection, sensuality, humour, empathy, irony, indeed most qualities that usually add up to an intelligent, well-rounded human and humane personality, Bruckner sounds like the sad, emotionally stunted bloke in the anorak who lurks in the corner of the library reading sci-fi. Pitying a composer is fine, but you don’t have to like his music just because you feel sorry for him.
When I was asked to choose my top “most boring masterpiece” for a round-up in BBC Music Magazine last year, I picked the Symphony No.7. It is the most frustrating of the lot, because in the opening minute and a half or so, good old Anton presents one of the most glorious inspirations ever to hit a composer and his audience – only to fail quite spectacularly to follow it through. All that opening’s sunrise-like, mystical beauty dissipates into plinky-plonky, counting-the-notes, closing-passage twiddles. And then you have to sit through the remaining 68 minutes.
One preternaturally brilliant colleague once listened with some sympathy when I confessed my Brucknerphobia. It’s not you, he said; it’s the conductors. It’s the legacy of the Nazi era’s preferred style – Hitler adored the works of Bruckner, who evinced plenty of 19th-century, church-supported, anti-Semitic leanings and came from state-approved Austrian “peasant stock”. But, my friend went on, this style does him a disservice. If today’s maestri were not still possessed by the misconceived notion that Bruckner must sound monolithic and magisterial, they might slim down the sound, move on the pace, bring out the counterpoint – and Bruckner would be transformed. Go and hear Claudio Abbado, he said.
He may be right. But frankly, there’d be no point sitting in an Abbado concert, for which tickets are habitually like gold-dust, wishing I’d stayed home to do the ironing instead. I’ve been trying to like Bruckner for 30 years. I have not once succeeded. Life is just too short. Off to set up the ironing board now.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
My Internet is back, so very quickly, before it vanishes again, here's a little newsround.
Don't miss this blog by conductor Michael Seal, who tweets as @batonflipper, about how Andris Nelsons dropped out of the CBSO tour and he had to step in at an astounding 20 minutes' notice. There followed a massive programme with Jonas Kaufmann singing the Kindertotenlieder. By all accounts Michael did magnificently. Is this his big break? Let's hope so. Interesting, too, to hear about how Der Jonas responded when a member of the audience shouted at him after his first song to step forward because they couldn't see him...
He's been around, but not playing the violin: an injury has kept him away from the fiddle on a sort of enforced sabbatical. But now he's back at last. Maxim Vengerov is on In Tune on BBC Radio 3 today, playing and talking, sometime after 4.30pm. Tomorrow he'll be giving his first Wigmore Hall recital for around 20 years, with Itamar Golan at the piano. I was at that last one, and I will never, ever forget it. He was 14 and there, on stage, was a spotty schoolboy playing for all the world like Jascha Heifetz. I am sure everything will be different now - have the intervening decades mellowed him, or will he be that same virtuoso daredevil? It's a comparatively restrained programme: Handel, Bach and Beethoven - but of course music doesn't get any greater than the Bach D minor Partita and the Beethoven 'Kreutzer'. Go, Maxim, go!
That, in case you wondered, is a view from the pit at the Bavarian State Opera, Munich, where our Tomcat is currently working, having taken extra time away from London. His own enforced sabbatical (rather different from Vengerov's) has done him the power of good - and the particular ironic trajectory by which this Buxton-raised son of German-Jewish refugees from Berlin fetches up in Munich, playing Wagner's Parsifal at Easter, is something that you couldn't make up. The orchestra is fabulous, he says, with no weak links; it functions with plenty of space, great facilities, grown-up attitudes and, not least, crack football teams for both sexes. Right now he's being shown the town by Wilhelm Furtwangler's great-grandson, who happened to be sitting next to him on the plane.
BATONFLIPPER'S BIG BREAK
THE RETURN OF MAXIM VENGEROV
WHERE'S TOMCAT?
He's here:
That, in case you wondered, is a view from the pit at the Bavarian State Opera, Munich, where our Tomcat is currently working, having taken extra time away from London. His own enforced sabbatical (rather different from Vengerov's) has done him the power of good - and the particular ironic trajectory by which this Buxton-raised son of German-Jewish refugees from Berlin fetches up in Munich, playing Wagner's Parsifal at Easter, is something that you couldn't make up. The orchestra is fabulous, he says, with no weak links; it functions with plenty of space, great facilities, grown-up attitudes and, not least, crack football teams for both sexes. Right now he's being shown the town by Wilhelm Furtwangler's great-grandson, who happened to be sitting next to him on the plane.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Greetings from my Blackberry. Phone line fault has rendered my home an internet-free zone, which is a right neck-in-pain in my line of work. You realise how horribly dependent we've all become on the wretched thing. Hope we can get it sorted soon, after which normal service will be resumed.
In case you weren't sure, the post about music critics auditioning for Gergiev was an APRIL FOOL treat.
In case you weren't sure, the post about music critics auditioning for Gergiev was an APRIL FOOL treat.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
"There's a general feeling amongst musicians that standards of assessment are dropping," said a source close to Gergiev. "We feel it is only fair that the public should be confident that people passing judgment on seasoned artists' professional achievements actually know what they are talking about.
"We cannot have a situation in which, to take a hypothetical example, a pianist might be condemned by a critic who cannot play a note and could consequently be stirred by dubious motivations, such as professional jealousy of another critic who has expressed a contrasting opinion of that artist. We believe that making each critic perform for the panel will not only test their own innate musicianship - and hence the integrity of their judgments - but will also give them a degree of empathy for their targets and the process that each of those musicians undergoes every time he or she is on stage."
In response, a spokesperson for the critics (who prefers not to be named) voices words of protest: "We believe that good critics, first and foremost, must be good writers," she declares. "I have met excellent musicians who can't tell the difference between "their" and "there" and who, frankly, have no clue where to put their apostrophes. Some of them can scarcely spell their own names, let alone the words "persuasive", "occasionally" and "Massachusetts". The musical profession, having concentrated its training on the perfection of performance, sometimes neglects the general education of budding performers to a very unfortunate degree. Consequently, you cannot expect a good musician necessarily to be a good critic. This panel will test only one part of the picture, and not necessarily the best part."
But the die is cast and we're all going to have to audition for Gergiev. So I'd better go and practise. They've promised I will be permitted to play Bach on the piano.
Happy April.
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