An operatic top ten...

What makes a really good opera production? I saw one the other day. It was Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades at the bijou Grange Park, an hour or so down the M3 in the Hampshire woods and fields. World-class quality in a place about the same size, seating-wise, as the Wigmore Hall; an absolute powerhouse of a Herman from the American tenor Carl Tanner and a Lisa to match from the radiant French soprano Anne Sophie Duprels. The roller-coaster score, in the hands of conductor Stephen Barlow - who knows precisely how to pace and shape the drama - swept us all along, Pushkin incarnate in music. This is an opera I've seen a number of times, yet often under slight duress of the "I really prefer Eugene Onegin" type. But this time, I fell for it wholesale and stayed under the spell throughout.

That's thanks, in no small part, to the direction of Antony McDonald. A former co-director and co-designer with Richard Jones, McDonald has become a Grange Park stalwart, and his insights into this work leave me eager to sample more from him. The production does everything that a truly excellent opera production should. It takes a problematic work and convinces you that it's a masterpiece; it takes a problematic tale and makes it almost too real; and it stays with you for days afterwards, teasing out the deeper currents of the story and pointing up the connections that undoubtedly are there, but that could easily be forgotten, neglected or lost.

Here's my Top Ten of what makes a really good opera production - illustrated by this one.

1. It pulls everything together. It makes sense; it's rounded and satisfyingly deep.

2. The majority of operas are familiar to the majority of opera-goers (sad, perhaps, but true). A good production makes you feel you're seeing it for the first time, in the best possible way.

3. Psychology is acute; action matches script, plus some. Prince Yeletsky's aria - beautifully sung by the young Dutch baritone Quirijn de Lang - is delivered to a Lisa who is slipping away from her unfortunate fiance's grasp by the minute. And he - attending the fancy-dress ball - is clad in a Pierrot ruff [pictured left] that makes him seem pitiable, even though the rest of the time he's an arrogant, entitled, sod-off aristo - and doesn't neglect to collect his winnings from the dead Herman's pile at the conclusion.


4. It's alive to semi-visible dramatic truths and draws them out, without thumping everyone over the head. For instance, Herman is totally bonkers. He's known by his friends to be obsessive; but we soon see that he's also a fantasist who has lost touch with reality. If he brandished his revolver at the Countess (a superb Anne Marie Owens, pictured right), it wasn't noticeable. Instead, she starts to succumb early in that devastating scene to clear symptoms of a heart attack. Herman is so bound up in himself that he doesn't notice. "Do you even have a heart?" he demands, failing to observe that that heart is busy killing her. When he states, later, that he brandished his gun at her and she keeled over, this is his own grandiose fantasy - it's not what actually happened, and that tells us more about him than this moment would have were it the truth. Later, we notice that the final gambling scene takes place without him knowing that his one-time pretext for undertaking it - winning money so he can "deserve" Lisa - is defunct, because Lisa has shot herself and is lying dead at the side of the stage where we can see her but he can't. He never thinks to ask where she is or what will happen to her.

5. The society in which the action takes place is all-important and enhances the action even when it is not the original. McDonald has updated the action to just-pre-Revolution Russia. As the Empress appears (in the auditorium) and the chorus pay her homage, red leaflets flutter down from above, and we don't need to pick one up to know what it's all about. The aristocrats - principally the Countess and Yeletsky - are of another era, stuck in the past; contrast the Countess's crinoline ballgown with Lisa's schoolmarmish outfit. And they behave with considerable vileness towards their underlings; it's clear why they would be hated and rejected, but they are rounded enough for us not to hate them altogether. This is a portrait of a society that has gone to pot and will soon implode: and with that goes the obsession with gambling, the drunkenness, the venality...

6. ...therefore it tells us a lot about our own time too.

7. It draws out darker psychological suggestions in the story, but lets us figure out the rest. Herman has the key to the Countess's room because it's a short cut to Lisa's room and her bed. He, though, is keener to wrest the secret of the Three Cards from the Countess, who long ago gave up her virginity for the sake of that secret. He unveils a giant nude painting of the Countess in her youth, when she was known as The Venus of Moscow. There's some correlation within Herman of the Countess and Lisa, and of the Three Cards and something sexual - and we don't learn exactly what it might be, but it's there, and it nudges our perception towards some deep-seated trigger for his madness.

8. The design (also by McDonald) and lighting (Paul Keogan) mesh together and match the music and the concept. And this is a concept production, but it's so good that you don't realise it at the time.

9. Attention to detail is magnificent. That matters more than ever at Grange Park, because the audience is so close to the stage that everyone can see everything. Tomsky's narrative in act I (sung by the excellent Roman Ialcic) is a case in point: he brings his storytelling to life by casting himself and one of his several pals in its roles, and becomes quite carried away when proferring an illustrative kiss. The pal's astonished exchange of looks with the other pal is priceless.

10. None of this would work were the performers not up to it. The casting is superb. Set-piece moments - like Polina and Lisa's duet (brava to the fulsome Polina of Sara Fulgoni) - are able to shine, with stagecrafted images that match their emotional content.

And now for something completely different. This is the beginning of another version altogether of The Queen of Spades - starring Anton Walbrook and Edith Evans, with music by Georges Auric. Spot one motif that pays tribute to Tchaikovsky's leitmotif for the three cards...

Read More

How Cage sets you free

I'd have loved to be at the Aldeburgh Festival for John Cage's Musicircus the other day. It looks like a heap of fun. Below, my piece from Saturday's Independent, trailing the event, with an extra para or two, and a wonderful photo of festival artistic director Pierre-Laurent Aimard, posted by Aldeburgh's doughty tweeters, trying out a new piano-playing technique...

I'm a closet Cage fan. Long story, but it involves mushrooms, meditation and Sonatas and Interludes, not necessarily in that order. He deserves a much, much bigger piece than I can deliver today, but I hope this is better than nothing, at least to start with. Glad that he's getting a whole Prom more or less to himself this summer.

Here goes...

He has been termed music’s greatest iconoclast. But now, in his centenary year, is the composer John Cage going mainstream? 

His Musicircus [was aired on Saturday] at the Aldeburgh Festival; later this summer, a whole evening at the Proms is devoted to his works. Classical music doesn’t get much more mainstream than that. Yet in his lifetime, often struggling for a living, balancing on an idiosyncratic tightrope between classical music, eastern philosophy, visual art, contemporary dance (his partner was the choreographer Merce Cunningham) and ‘chance operations’, Cage (1912-1992) might have regarded this outcome with incredulity. 

Cage’s outlook could scarcely have been more different from Benjamin Britten’s, on whose territory Aldeburgh is founded. It wasn’t just Cage’s prepared pianos, plucked cactuses and so forth that upset the establishment; more than anything, it was the way he incorporated into his music the notion of chance – eliminating the creator’s ego and instead making choices with, for example, the I Ching. This was the opposite of what most composers do; avant-gardists of the mid century like Pierre Boulez and Iannis Xenakis were promptly alienated.

Musicircus is not a concert but a “happening”: as many different performances as possible go on at the same time, piled together in one big-top-like area, while the public wander about. “You won’t hear a thing. You’ll hear everything,” Cage once explained, hoping that attendees would “get the joyousness of the anarchic spirit”. At Aldeburgh, the ensemble Exaudi and sound artist Bill Thompson promise[d] to “throw open the doors and let the sound stream out”. 

Cage’s most famous creation is 4’33 – four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. The point isn’t the irony of a musician playing nothing. It is that we listen to whatever we hear, experiencing the world and our consciousness as music. 

Anarchy, joy, chance and fun aren’t precisely traditional elements of classical concerts – but isn’t it time we grew into them? In his quirky way, maybe Cage can set us free.

Read More

BRIGITTE ENGERER, 1952-2012

Tributes have been pouring in following the death of the French pianist Brigitte Engerer at the age of 59. She had been suffering from cancer for several years. I've always loved her playing and have long felt she deserved far greater recognition on the international scene than she received during her lifetime.

UPDATE, 26/6/12: Obituary of Engerer from The Telegraph.

Below is a short interview with her from French TV, and further info below. (Alas, I have no interview of my own to run here, so this statement is provided by her record company, harmonia mundi).

PARIS — French virtuoso pianist Brigitte Engerer, known for her brilliant interpretations of French and Russian repertoire, died in Paris on Saturday at the age of 59, her agent said in a statement.

Engerer "played with some of the very best", said Concerts de Valmalete, and "brought all of her talent to what was a continual quest for musical truth".

French President Francois Hollande said in a statement he was "saddened" by the news of her death and said Engerer's "talent... honoured France".

Engerer always "supported young musicians... while pursuing a remarkable international career", he said.

"We will all remember her great personal bravery" in "fighting the illness that took her from us."

Engerer had been battling cancer for several years.

Born on October 27, 1952 in Tunis, Engerer started playing the piano at age four and went to study at the Paris Conservatory at the age of 11.

In 1969 she left Paris for the Moscow Conservatory, which gave her a deep affiliation with the works of Russian composers, including Tchaikovsky's "The Seasons" and Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition". She would later release recordings of both.

"A part of her became Russian," her agent said.

Stanislas Neuhaus, her teacher at the Moscow Conservatory, once described Engerer as "one of the most brilliant pianists of her generation".

"Her playing is characterised by its artistry and romantic spirit, its depth, the perfection of her technique and her innate ability to reach the listener," he said.

Invitations to perform as a soloist with some of the world's top orchestras took Engerer from Berlin, Paris and Vienna to Japan and New York's Carnegie Hall, playing under conductors including Daniel Barenboim and Gary Bertini.

Her life was "an unremitting search for musical truth to which she gave all her talent", the Concerts De Valmalete said.

A fan of chamber music, Engerer also regularly performed with other instrumentalists such as the violinist Olivier Charlier and the cellist Henri Demarquette.

She was well-known for her high-profile four-hand piano performances with Russian pianist Boris Berezovsky.

Engerer gave her last concert on June 12 at the Champs-Elysees Theatre in Paris playing Schumann with the Paris Chamber Orchestra, 50 years after first playing in the prestigious venue.

She received a number of honours, including the French Legion of Honour, and in 2011 was given a lifetime achievement award by the French music industry.

Read More

Wisdom in Lucerne, with Bernard Haitink

At Easter I went to Switzerland to listen to Bernard Haitink's conducting masterclasses at the Lucerne Festival Academy. Three intensive days of fascination later, the mystery of the maestro was in no way reduced. If anything, quite the opposite. Never has it been clearer that the sound of an orchestra changes entirely, depending on the person standing up and waving the baton in front of them; it does so immediately; and it is almost impossible to explain it. I talked to Maestro Haitink and some of his students about what the masterclasses mean to them, and found myself learning a few little lessons in the process. My feature about it all is in Radar with today's Independent. Slightly shortened for space, though, so the director's cut is below.

As an exciting footnote, I'm glad to say that the other week I ran into the youngest of the students, Duncan Ward, at the OAE Night Shift concert and he tells me he's been assisting Simon Rattle in Berlin on, among other things, Die Walküre. Watch that space.

WISDOM IN LUCERNE, WITH BERNARD HAITINK

It’s a training experience like no other. Twenty of the world’s brightest young conductors have come to the Lucerne Easter Festival, Switzerland, hoping to be chosen for a masterclass with Bernard Haitink. Of those 20, seven make the final cut. Their task: in front of the veteran Dutch maestro and a fascinated public, they must conduct the Lucerne Festival Orchestra.

There, though, any resemblance to The Apprenticeends. This is not a competition and it’s anything but cut-throat. All 20 youngsters, selected from 150 applicants, listen to the course;  they all have a chance to conduct, not just the final seven. It is like Hogwarts for conductors, with Haitink, a legend in his own lifetime, serving as benevolent Dumbledore to the lot. 

“I supervise them, give them my ideas and see if it suits them and if it helps them,” Haitink, 83, remarks with characteristic self-deprecation. “I can’t work miracles. But there are so many wrong ideas about this profession that it doesn’t do any harm when a conductor who has a certain amount of experience tries to share it with younger people. It takes an enormous amount of energy, but I enjoy it.”

Would-be conductors are at a disadvantage compared to instrumentalists: they can’t practise easily because their instrument consists of 50-80 highly trained humans. That gives this course extra value even before Haitink has said a word. “The chance to work with an orchestra like this one is something we don’t normally have as students,” says Antonio Mendez, one of the final seven; he hails from Spain and is studying in Germany. “To do Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra is really a rare thing.” (Since Easter, Antonio has won second prize in a major conducting competition in Denmark)

Each participant has prepared four set works: Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony, Schumann’s Manfred Overture, the first movement of Bruckner’s Symphony No.7 and Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite. The chosen seven each have half an hour per day to strut their stuff. 

“Some teachers might try to make everyone do things the same way that they do,” says Gad Kadosh, a French-Israeli conductor currently working as a vocal coach at the Theater für Niedersachsen, Hildesheim. “But Maestro Haitink works with each of us as an individual, trying to bring out the best in everyone.” Haitink’s techniques certainly keep the youngsters on their toes.

Usually (to generalise) a conductor gives the beat with his/her right hand, using the left to aid direction and amplify expression. Having decided that Anton Torbeev is using his left hand to excess, Haitink grabs his wrist in mid flow: the Russian student must finish the piece with his right hand alone. [Do have a look at Anton's blog.] Then, with Kadosh, Haitink does the opposite, asking him to conduct only with his left; the result sounds marvellous, apparently to Kadosh’s own surprise [photo, right]. 

Another student is startled when Haitink removes the score from under his nose halfway through a piece: he must continue from memory. “I could see that you know it,” Haitink explains afterwards. “Looking at the score was distracting you. Have confidence!”

In the most common traps, the practicality of Haitink’s advice proves its worth. “Not so holy,” he says, stopping a student after a few phrases of Bruckner. The massive Seventh Symphony’s opening inspires too much reverence; if the tempi slouch, the energy will soon flag. Haitink gently encourages him to think less of the heavens and more of the mountains. He takes the baton and demonstrates: at once the sound changes, the music becoming supple and vivid. “It’s a long symphony,” he points out. “Don’t make the brass play full out even more than they are – they will be exhausted halfway through.” 

Then there’s a recurrent question about focusing the movements. “Don’t move so much,” Haitink exhorts a student whose flailing limbs are not helping the orchestra: a particular flute entry is late every time. “Concentrate the energy.” He demonstrates – and with one flick of one finger of Haitink’s left hand, the flute is spot on.

Isn’t it alarming to feel Haitink’s eye upon your every move? “Not at all,” declares Zoi Tsokanou from Greece, the only girl in the top seven [photo, above right]. “His energy is all about ‘Let’s make lovely music’. He gives us a lot of trust and a lot of love – there’s no need to be afraid.” Her animation and assurance in the Schumann overture inspire the orchestra into giving her a spontaneous round of applause.

JonathanMann, from the UK [photo, left], says that the course has been “one of the most exciting experiences of my life so far”. He has already started his own orchestra, the Cardiff Sinfonietta. What does he feel he’s learning here? “Maestro Haitink mentioned that sometimes the simple things are the hardest to do,” he says. “Holding a pause a little longer or getting a really quiet sound from the orchestra – those tiny things can make the difference between a good performance and a great one.” 

Another youthful Brit, Duncan Ward, is in the final 20 and is asked to run through the Schumann one afternoon. Having studied with (among others) Ravi Shankar in California [photo, right], Ward especially enjoys Haitink’s anecdotes about the great conductors of the past, such as Bruno Walter and Willem Mengelberg: “The Indian tradition passes everything down aurally from guru to pupil,” he points out. “This is a little similar – the sense of a contact point with those great figures is fabulous.”

The course is short, but its effects long-lasting. “We will always have Maestro Haitink’s comments with us,” says Gad Kadosh. “There is so much to think about that we won’t be able to integrate everything fully right away; maybe not in a year, maybe not even in ten years. But I think that much later these ideas will pop back to us and maybe the next level of learning will happen.”

The conductor’s art is not exactly demystified by listening to Haitink teaching. “Every conductor gets a completely different sound from an orchestra,” says Antonio Mendez. “It’s something you just can’t explain.” And it’s completely true, hearing the transformation of the sound from student to student. Nobody could come out of this audience believing that a conductor just waves his arms about. 

Life lessons are here, too: concentrate energy on the essentials, rather than expending it on diffuse peripheries, and maybe the rest follows. This class isn’t just about conducting. This is the getting of wisdom. 

Bernard Haitink returns to the Lucerne Festival with the Vienna Philharmonic on 14 and 15 September. More details: http://www.lucernefestival.ch/en/

Read More

Friday Historical: Treasures of Russian Ballet

First, though, a quick look at the kick-off of the London 2012 Festival yesterday, with the Big Concert next to Stirling Castle in Scotland by Gustavo Dudamel, the Simon Bolivar Orchestra and the kids of the Big Noise in Raploch, which seems to have gone down a storm, so to speak....Yes, it rained.  Of course it did. It wouldn't have been Scotland on the summer solstice otherwise, would it? ;)

We have guests staying, so I'll have to catch up with the concert on TV later, but a snatched glance at the box mid-Beethoven revealed a bedraggled crowd and a lot of damp, shivering Venezuelans getting a hands-on taste of what we still seem to call "Dunkirk spirit". The total effect, though, has been something very, very different.

Here are two reviews that capture the soul of what this extraordinary night was all about. From STV Entertainment and The Telegraph . One calls Beethoven's 'Eroica' Symphony a 'set' (and why not? It works). The other tries to make the concept fit Tory ideology (slightly odd, but hopefully useful). Yet the same atmosphere of joy, passion and transformation comes through both, loud and clear. This shows that El Sistema does reach places that others cannot and is essentially transcendental: you don't need traditional musicological vocabulary or any particular political stance to get the message. Music changes lives. It does. It's been proved again and again. And it could be the biggest force for positive change in society as we know it - if only we were willing to take that message on board and deliver the goods. As The Guardian's review mentions, Richard Holloway, chairman of Sistema Scotland, says: "This will only mean something if it is peppering the whole country." I hope that someone is listening in Westminster.

Medici TV - for which JDCMB readers can, as you know, enjoy a special 15% subscription discount - has a documentary on El Sistema available to watch online: Music to Change Lives, directed by Maria Stodtmeier and Paul Smaczny.

And now, more from Medici for our special Friday Historical - a quick escape from Olympic rain into the magical world of Russian ballet, with a new film bringing together extracts of some of the 20th century's biggest stars. Treasures of the Russian Ballet includes footage of Galina Ulanova in Swan Lake, Alla Sizova in The Stone Flower and Maya Plisetskaya and Vladimir Vasiliev in Don Quixote - and much more besides. The majority of the extracts were filmed at the ROH, incidentally, and are accompanied by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.


New! Treasures of the Russian ballet on medici.tv.

Read More

JD on R4

I'm on BBC Radio 4's The World at One today, talking about the London 2012 Festival. Do tune in.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/

Read More

Heat and light...

Kicking off the Olympic cultural festivities in style, The Dude and his Simon Bolivár Orchestra of Venezuela are back in Britain. Dudamel & co are taking over the Royal Festival Hall this weekend (concerts to be streamed live on The Guardian website, btw), and right now they’re in Raploch, Scotland, visiting the Big Noise project – Sistema Scotland’s own take on the Venezuelan music education scheme, revolutionising children’s lives through the making of music (an illuminating read about it here). We can see this concert on TV tomorrow, live on BBC4. 

But one question remains: why are we all so potty about Venezuelan young musicians when the UK has plenty of its own?

Britain’s got talent. And the real talent has little to do with Simon Cowell, but everything to do with our youth orchestras. The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain is a prime training ground for the best young orchestral musicians in the country; to hear them is to be bowled over and out by the standard of their playing, and the passion and dedication they show for their music.

Nor are they alone. The National Youth Orchestra of Wales claims to have been the first national youth orchestra in the world. The National Youth Orchestras of Scotland, the NationalYouth Choirs and the award-winning National Youth Choir of Scotland are all flourishing. The Aldeburgh Young Musicians, based at Snape in Suffolk, takes around 40 talented kids aged ten to 18 from the East Anglia area and provides them with high-level courses in school holidays, treating them not as children, but as young artists who compose, conduct and perform their own music. 

What’s the matter with us, then? Why do we fête the Venezuelans instead? What on earth do they have that we haven’t?

It would be easy to say “Nothing”. It would be easy to pretend that the Simon Bolivárs are all show and no substance: the twirling basses, the football shirts, all that Latin heat and light. But, though it pains me to say it, there is something. And it’s the other way round. It’s something that we have that they don’t have that’s the cause.

In a recent interview for The Strad, I asked Levon Chilingirian, leader of the Chilingirian String Quartet, what he thought about this. He and his three colleagues visit Caracas regularly to coach the students of El Sistema in chamber music. “One aspect which is very different from here,” he says, “is that they don’t have any limits set for them.” Many children learning music in the UK work their way through the Associated Board grade exams system by hook or by crook. “Mostly by crook as far as I can see,” Chilingirian adds. “It can be a case of: ‘You do your Grade V this year and next year I’ll give you a nice present when you do Grade VI’. And if you suggest to someone that they might learn a particular piece, they’ll say ‘No, no, that’s Grade VII and I’m only Grade IV.”

That doesn’t happen in Caracas. Chilingirian met a young violinist who’d been learning for only a year, but brought the Bruch Violin Concerto No.1 to a lesson and was determined to perform it with an orchestra soon afterwards. The group also told me about a 23-year-old taxi driver who, bored with his job, met some youngsters from El Sistema, heard about their work and decided to become a cellist, having never touched an instrument before. “Nobody said ‘You can’t’ - so he did it,” says Chilingirian. “He’s a very accomplished player.”

Music exams in Britain are an extremely mixed blessing. On the plus side, they provide a target to work towards, a chance for youngsters to prove themselves and gain a sense of achievement. The exams set by the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in particular are a global success story, a system embraced wholeheartedly in countries the world over, notably the Far East.

And yet, and yet... How many people in the UK have horror stories to tell about childhood music exams? How many youngsters who might have gone on to enjoy making music socially are left with a terror of performing after an unfortunate sojourn in the exam room? How many have had a bad experience and given up, because working for an exam is no fun at all? For many of us, these exams are our first-ever try at playing to other people, and an unhappy start can leave deep scars.

This set-up is satisfactory for very few. The examiner has little space to write notes and very, very little time in which to do so. Sight-reading tests rarely bear any relation to real music. The pieces offer a bit of choice, yet so little that often a child has to spend months practising something that he or she doesn’t even like – and then, of course, it often sounds like it, too. And sometimes a candidate’s chin wobbles or the eyes start to brim, but an examiner can’t take time to reassure them, because the system is a conveyor belt - the next candidates are in the waiting room building up their own store of nerves and mustn’t be kept waiting. This is an exam all right. But is that any way to make music?

It’s worth reflecting that in a target-oriented, achievement-focused society blighted by the class-ridden nature of the education system, children have to be very lucky to find themselves making music for the sake of enjoying it. Oftener than not they do so to please their parents, to win a music scholarship (few parents realise the hard work involved in that), to pass exams that will allow them to go on and pass more exams. It’s all about measurement and competition. But for El Sistema, it’s about personal and social transformation. 

Maybe it’s no wonder that many successful British professional musicians of my acquaintance never went through the graded exam system at all; if someone is more than averagely talented, exams quickly become an irrelevance. Do they hold the students back? I believe so. Just think about scales. You could learn them all. But if your grade prescribes only a certain number of them, you’re probably going to bother learning just those few, aren’t you? Levon Chilingirian is right: music exams instil the sense of an invisible ceiling that we dare not shatter. Rarely are we encouraged to chuck out the exam books, find a piece of music we love and damn well learn how to play it, even if it’s by Rachmaninov. That would be real motivation: a passion from within.

Plenty of other ways exist to learn and make music, and plenty exist in the UK. There’s Colourstrings, for example – a Saturday morning music school derived from Zoltán Kodály’s famous Hungarian system in which every child first learns to sing; they subsequently develop excellently trained 'ears'. The kids perform to one another in relaxed concert days, play in ensembles together early on and seem confident with their instruments.

And now we have pockets of El Sistema too: with enthusiasm for these schemes taking root around the country - the Big Noise in Scotland and In Harmony across England, in centres including Lambeth, Liverpool and more - there’s hope that our youngsters may also discover, like the Venezuelans, that making music is about joy, life and love. Not about quaking in your shoes alone with your half-size violin in a chilly school gym in Hatch End.

The Venezuelans are back? Bring 'em on. We need their inspiration. It’s working. It needs to work some more.

UPDATE, 5.40pm: This is clearly ringing some bells, and not just in the UK. Try this post by John Terauds from Musical Toronto: http://musicaltoronto.org/2012/06/20/music-exams-can-be-limitations-instead-of-goals/

Read More