Results tagged “berlin” from Slipped disc

Jonathan Carr, who died last week near Bonn, was an astute political journalist and a musical enthusiast of expert knowledge and sound judgement.

He brought an aesthetic perspective to his professional occupation and a shrewd political eye to his musical researches, adding a dash of wit that made him constantly readable.

As Germany correspondent for the Financial Times and, later, bureau chief for the Economist, Jonathan saw just about every Meistersinger in 30 years, and held Rafael Kubelik's 1967 Munich production with Thomas Stewart as Sachs to be supreme.

He forged a musical bond with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, becoming his biographer. Two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he wrote an essay foretelling German reunification. Both the FT and Economist have published warm tributes, here and here.

As a friend, he was both giving and undemanding. In 15 years, I never experienced an awkward moment in Jonathan's company or heard an empty phrase from his lips. He was a true idealist, living to the full the values he held important and dear.

I gave him the title for his first musical biography, The Real Mahler. He delicately declined my suggestion for the second - The Wagner Gang - preferring The Wagner Clan as the more decorous option. Unmoved by reputation, he maintained a critical independence that, in its occasional severity, was always tolerant of human weakness.

Journalists are generally not the best advertisement for their vocation. Jonathan was. 

The BBC are running a bought-in film tonight in Alan Yentob's Imagine series on Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. It offers 'intimate' insights into the workings of the crack band and its fabulous maestro as they are cheered to the rafters on a Far East tour.

Well, believe that if you like. Rattle was recently re-elected chief conductor by a political manoeuvre and a narrow margin that some of his opponents in the orchestra are continuing to question. As for the Far East raves, did anyone look at the ticket prices? They were ten times above the means of ordinary Japanese, Korean and Chinese working people, even more expensive than in Berlin.

A tour by the Berlin Phil in the Far East is an occasion for Asian corporate society to congratulate itself on cultural refinment, and for the orchestra to augment its copper-bottomed salaries and expense account.

These issues will understandably not be raised in Alan Yentob's egregious series, a corner of television that is notorious for soft-focus, cuddly profiles of 'Al's Pals' and is the BBC's only documentary insight into the arts.

Notwithstanding all these reservations, the inclusion of Rattle and Berlin at this stage seems strangely off the pace, given that their progress has stagnated while a new conducting generation is striking sparks in London, Liverpool, L.A., Birmingham, Toulouse and Paris. That's where the current action is. The BBC has lost its nose for cultural reporting.