Slipped disc

Two more publishers, Faber Music and Universal Edition, have just submitted their most performed works of the century's first decade, and you won't believe what they are.

UE, the benchmark label of modernism, has lost many of its big names - Boulez, Berio, Birtwistle, Stockhausen - to silence, mortality or other labels. The company is, as they say, under reconstruction. Only four names appear in its top ten below.

Its biggest performer over the decade was Arvo Pärt's Lamentate (2002), a homage for piano and orchestra to Anish Kapoor and his sculpture 'Marsyas'. The work has achieved 44 performances, which is highly respectable but would not get it into the top ten of other major publishers. UE needs to find some big-hitters.

Here's the list from Vienna:

A friend who is writing a play about a parent who resents his child's musical talent wonders if there is any known instance of an adult actually destroying an instrument because he or she cannot bear the child moving in an uncontrollable direction.

I've racked my brain and can't think of one. There are instances of self-harm among musicians who feel technically inadequate - Schumann, the most famous - but can anyone call to mind an enraged parent smashing a violin against a wall, or taking a sledgehammer to the piano?

I got pretty close to the edge when one of my daughters transcribed her repertory and played it on the penny-whistle, but both she and the instrument survive in good nick and I am quietly coaching her two year-old tot to exact an appropriate revenge. All in good time...

Can anyone come up with a personal or historical incicent of an older person - doesn't have to be a parent, could be teacher or priest - who took out their frustration on the object that emitted the music? All contributions gratefully received. There's plenty of space below.

It's George Washington in reverse: kiddie, I cannot tell a lie. It was me who snapped your oboe in half and stamped the trumpet into a doormat.

Three publishers in London and New York are working day and night to supply me with audited figures of their most performed 21st century works in response to yesterday's post. Or so they swear. I will pass the information on as soon as it hits my mailbox.

Meanwhile, I see that Brett Dean's opera of Peter Carey's novel Bliss is going to hit the boards next month in Sydney and Melbourne, and in Hamburg at the end of September.

Bliss the novel is an ad-man's view of the afterlife, glimpsed during a near-fatal heart attack. How this makes an opera for the big stage is a challenge for librettist Amanda Holden and I am more than a little curious to see the results.

Brett, former viola player in the Berlin Philharmonic and an all-round good guy, is a composer of considerable subtelty. He complains that he's already had to downscale the orchestration for the broom-cupboard pit of the Australian Opera. Will they never repair that wretched space?

The Sydney premiere will be conducted by Elgar Howarth, deputising for the late Richard Hickox who was hugely enthusiastic about the opera. The Hamburg show will be conducted by Simone Young, Hickox's predecessor as music director in Sydney. One way and another, this could be the great all-Australian opera.

In the final act of his London Beethoven-Schoenberg cycle, Daniel Barenboim took applause on stage with the orchestra for his Strauss polka encore and then bounded downstairs to the Clore Ballroom where hundreds of people had watched the concert free on a large screen.

After four nights of intensive music making to a sell-out crowd, Barenboim could not wait apparently to get to the invisible audience, the non-payers, the future potential.

Not many conductors can be bothered to do more than conduct. Barenboim, in his late 60s, has realised that a concert no longer has to be self-limiting. It can be an active engagement with those who attend, and those who don't.

Other maestros, take  note.

When I breakfasted on the South Bank this morning, the whole circumference was still buzzing with the energy of this compact concert series.

Three months ago I kicked off a public conversation here as to which living composers are most likely to last the test of time. You can read the results here.

The discussion, which spread into several languages, prompted soul searching and stock-taking at music publishers. One of the leaders, Boosey & Hawkes, has just sent me a list of works of the past decade that achieved the greatest number of performances.

The top ten are not what I expected. To avoid giving you a quick fix, I'll start from the foot up.

At number 10 is Karl Jenkins' Stabat Mater with 57 performances. I once described Jenkins as 'a newspaper composer' in the sense that his music is ephemeral, hot today, late tomorrow. It looks like he's proving me wrong.

At 9, with 59 performances is James MacMillan with O Bone Jesu (2002) for chorus.

At 8, the countdown quickening on 62 performances, it's Michael Daugherty: Raise the Roof (2003) for timpani and symphonic band (or orchestra).

At 7, Magnus Lindberg has been doing well at the Los Angeles and New York philharmonic orchestras with 67 hearings of Gran Duo (2000) for woodwind and brass.

At 6, it's Elliott Carter: Dialogues (2003) for piano and large ensemble, played 70 times.

Into the top five now with John Adams: The Dharma at Big Sur (2003) for electric violin and orchestra, 72 concerts.

At 4, a big surprise, 80 performances of Detlev Glanert's opera, The Three Riddles (2003).

Number 3, an even bigger shock, Glanert's comic opera Jest, Satire, Irony and Deeper Meaning (2000), seen 83 times. Who would have included Henze's star pupil as a contender?

At 2, it's Christopher Rouse, American hero, with Rapture for orchestra (2000), 97 plays.

And the winner is, you'd never have guessed, in the red corner, the Welsh dragon Karl Jenkins with a breath-taking 311 performances of his 2004 Requiem. I owe Mr Jenkins a retraction: his music may still be played when the last newspaper has bitten the dust.

Let's digest those stats. John Adams, who is Boosey's top earner, is getting many more performances of earlier and more trenchant works than the slippery Dharma. But where in the list, I wonder, are the prolific Peter Maxwell Davies and the ever-interesting Harrison Birtwistle, both stars of the Boosey stable? Where, above all, is Steve Reich?

It appears from that Reich's Cello Counterpoint almost made the cut, as did two further works of Adams, On the Transmigration of Souls and the opera Doctor Atomic, along with two concertos by Lindberg and a collection by my Melbourne cobber, Brett Dean.

These are, of course, the results of just one big publisher. Nevertheless, they are indicative of a trend towards the simplistic satisfactions offered by the former ad-man Jenkins, as distinct from the more serious contemplations of post-modern genre leaders.

If other publishers care to send their results to norman@normanlebrecht.com, I will attempt to compile a list of all-time hits of the Noughties. Chester, Universal, Faber, Peters - it's time to come clean - you've got til the weekend. Ades, Glass and Rihm musy be in the running.

Anyone else you think needs to stand up and be counted?

This just in from Eric Dingman, president of EMI Classics:

I'd like to add some points for the discussion...

No sooner had I broken the Chinese pianist's label switch on Bloomberg than Google flashed up his new deal with Bombardier, makers of Lear jets as its brand ambassador for 2010. 'Flying on Bombardier business jets allows me to reach audiences worldwide faster, well-rested and focussed,' explained Lang Lang. So I guess we won't be bumping into him again in the Easyjet departure lounge.

Before these coups, Lang Lang was in Davos last week, lecturing world and business leaders on 'enrichment through music'. The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger thought he had 'nothing very much to say'. More likely there was nothing much he wanted to say as brand Lang Lang builds its global reach. The pity of it was the his presence at Davos rather eclipsed that of Gabriela Montero, the Venezuelan wonder whose improvisatory pianism presented a real lesson for world leaders on how to play their way out of recession.

So what's driving Lang Lang? Setting aside 21st century greed-is-good theology, people who know him well tell me he wants to be taken seriously. At DG, he did not feel that top brass gave him the respect they showed to Argerich, Pollini and Zimmerman - unsurprising, given the length and depth of their achievements, but Lang Lang at 27 is a man in a hurry to be top pianist. At Sony he will find little competition, except from the semi-retired Murray Perahia. 

The refreshing aspect of Lang Lang is that he has no hidden agenda. Next time I see him, if I ask him what went down at DG, he'll be open, frank and engagingly undiplomatic. Buttoned-up Sony, who are refusing to comment on the deal, should be aware that their new catch is dynamite in more ways than they perhaps anticipated.  

A hilarious blog by Gareth Davies, principal flute of the London Symphony Orchestra, tells what really happens when a conductor is unwell. In this instance, Sir John Eliot Gardiner was puking in Paris five minutes before curtain and the players were trying to remember Plan B.

Read it here.

Happily, conductors are made of sterner stuff than tennis aces - witness Rafa Nadal wussing out of the Australian Open - and Beethoven is better at concentrating the mind than another set against Andy Murray. The end result was that the piccolo player got a free beer (she often does, I hear, and well deserved).

I once heard Franz Welser-Möst heaving his guts out in the interval of a Tokyo concert. He returned from the flush to give a Beethoven Fifth of reckless intensity, so edgy that no-one's insides were safe. That's music - you feel something, and you share it with others.

The last time Hilary Hahn topped the classical charts, I reported that she was selling fewer than 500 copies a week. This time, after an appearance on the Tonight Show, Anne Midgette writes that she's selling fewer than 1,000 - still peanuts on any pop scale.

Anne quotes a Sony man who says classical accounts for three percent of US record sales. No longer. It's below two percent, and most of that is made up of non-classical crossover. Real classical music is way below the Nielsen rating line.

This stark and unchaing reality makes the Grammy classical awards materially irrelevant, even if one were to agree that Michael Tilson Thomas's account of Mahler's eighth symphony was the best thing to happen in the past musical year.

So where do classical recordings sell? Not in America, that's for sure. South Korea, as I have written elsewhere, spends most per capita on classics - 18 percent of all music sales are classical. Close behind is France, with 9 percent of the music market.

What that means is that a French newcomer like Renaud Capucon or David Fray can be guaranteed bigger sales and national fame than a US star like Hilary Hahn, no matter what network show she appears on. Much the same is true for Hungary, Austria, Germany, Finland and even the UK, all of which mantain high public profiles for classical musicians.

That leaves the American classical artist in a quandary. With domestic support in steepling decline, more and more may be advised to build their careers in another country. 

At ten o'clock this morning (Friday, Jan 29) at the Royal Festival Hall, Daniel Barenboim began his attempt to rekindle the Beethoven intensity of his London piano cycle of 2008.

Over the next four nights he will perform the five Beethoven piano concertos in conjunction with the orchestral works of Arnold Schoenberg. Tickets for two of the concerts sold out within minutes. Some 900 Londoners bought the cycle outright and demand for the whole has been so heavy that the hall opened its general rehearsal to the public this morning and will screen a live relay - free to all comers - in the ballroom downstairs.

If you are anywhere near the South Bank, get down there for as many as possible and certainly for the last on Tuesday when Barenboim will play the third Beethoven piano concerto, give an illustrated talk on the intractable Schoenberg Variations for Orchestra and then give a full performance of the Variations. The aim is maximum public engagement and if the atmosphere is anything like it was two years ago, these concerts should be unmissable.

The rehearsal was little more than a touching up of tricky turns in Schoenberg's 1905 Pelleas und Melisande, a D-minor suite that shares much of its tonal language with the preceding Verklärte Nacht. This is not Arnie at his most challenging and the Staatskapelle played as if it were late Brahms.

The orchestra of the Berlin State Opera is an exceptionally fine band without as much brand recognition as you might expect from having Barenboim as conductor for life. I have heard them before, in Vienna and Berlin, and noted that the players do not project their individuality as powerfully as the all-stars of the Berlin Philharmonic, or as empathetically as the London Symphony Orchestra. There is something stubbornly low-key about them.

Perhaps it has to do with the players being state Beamter - civil servants with a safe pension. Although this was a public rehearsal, several players dressed as if they were out gardening - one violinist in a loud, checked shirt, another in short sleeves, a harpist in an orange sweatshirt with a red jumper thrown over the back of her chair. Attentively as they played, the attitude was all wrong. With a chance to command a world stage, the orchestra turned out so casually as to suggest lack of ambition. Perhaps they were mis-advised.

A trivial detail? I don't think so. These signs register a statement of intent. Smart declares aspiration. Shlokhy says, who gives? Barenboim should bring his tailor to the next rehearsal. It would be a shame if the excellence he has achieved were not to be given the best frame.

BBC Radio 3 will relay all of the Beethoven-Schoenberg concerts over the next week or so. Already at the opening rehearsal there was a sense of something numinous in the making.

The imbroglio - wonderful word, reminiscent of Dutch masters and Borgia Popes - let me start that sentence again.

The imbroglio that has been festering around Melbourne's Recital Centre inestimably beautiful recital centre has finally been tackled by its political overlords.The chief executive, Jacques de Vos Malan, has departed only three months into his second contract and a sage pair of hands, Joe Carponi, has been hauled out of retirement to deal with the financial deficit.

Malan's contract was renewed, I was told, because the politicians did not want to admit to a terrible mistake. The Centre had been losing money and Malan's solution was to turn it from a well-planned concert environment into an open-for-hire garage.

I reported the troubles here and the Age has taken up the story (see here), reflecting a growing public concern. The Arts Minister Lynne Kosky resigned last week and the chairman Jim Cousins will step down in March. A clean sweep is on the cards.

The only 21st century chamber music hall in the southern hemisphere, Melbourne has been, until now, an opportunity missed. The board promises an 'international search' for a new chief executive. I hope they search harder than the Sydney Opera, which barely made an international phone call last time it sought a boss. I have three top candidates Melbourne ought to be considering if they want the centre to succeed.

Meantime, the right move has been made. There is a chance of light and beauty to shine beneath the antipodean sun. Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, who endowed the hall, should be satisfied with the outcome. 

What people can and cannot do during a concert came up this morning on the BBC's Today programme, according to a respondent to my previous posting:

A similar theme was taken up by (Vladimir) Jurowski on this morning's "Today" programme on R4. Audiences at the OAE's(Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment) Roundhouse gigs should be allowed to drink beer and eat crisps, apparently.

I'm all for a relaxation, but crisps? Honestly... Still, I would rather depend on the decency of my neighbour not to rustle & crunch than be told hat to do by an officious theatre or concert hall, I agree. Mind, they could just be clever and not sell crisps at the bar.

One of the best comments was from one of the two players interviewed, who commented (I paraphrase loosely) that audience members should be able to do what they like - once they are there, it's the performer's responsibility to make the performance so engaging, so musically thrilling, that the audience are compelled to listen.

The real difficulty, I guess, is getting bums on seats on the first place; once we can get them in the concert hall, it's the artists job to make them want to come back again. Sadly I've seen all too-many concerts where the players frankly can't be bothered. That's not going to encourage repeat visits.

Myself, I'm less pessimistic. True, every time I see the NY Philharmonic and some of the stuffier German orchestras, my heart sinks back into my boots at the display of antediluvian attitudes. But players in many other orchestras are changing their tune in terms of how they relate to an audience. The tone of the London Symphony Orchestra's blog is just one of these new forms of engagement. I find them greatly encouraging. And you?

Richard Morrison, the Times music critic, had an eye-popping experience in New York. At a Philharmonic concert, he relates in BBC Music magazine, 'audience members were allowed - nay, encouraged - to "live blog" or "live tweet" comments to each other, or their "followers" in the world outside, during the performances.'

Indeed they were, and we have read much about it elsewhere. What struck me here, though, was Morrison's use of verbs and inverted commas to signify his distance - nay, disdain - from the ghastly modern practices he encountered. The idea that tweeting could be allowed, let alone encouraged in the sacred space of a concert hall is intolerable to a traditional listener.

His horror was aptly conveyed by a headline - Should an audience be allowed to tweet and blog during a concert? - that says all you need to know about the persistence of patrician, nay authoritarian, attitudes in 21st century classical music.

Most concert halls, the moment you enter, do not let you forget who's boss. Go here, do that, switch off, please don't, be considerate. You may cough between movements and discreetly fart, but do not applaud until signalled to do so and above all do not signify your response on an electronic device until you have departed the premises, preferably until you have read the authoritative review next morning in a respectable newspaper and have been told what you are supposed to think.

Small wonder that the coming generation refuses to accept classical music as part of its cultural spectrum. This is an art form that must urgently change its language, its top-down mode of address, if it is to have any kind of audience in the future.  

LATE EXTRA: Perhaps concert halls need to consider separate seating for electronics users. If, like me, you might resent being distracted by someone tweeting in a concert, you should be able to book a n on-tweet seat, just as you can book a non-smoking floor in most hotels

I was sitting in an Indian restaurant the other evening managing a family birthday when an ooze of canned botulism smacked my eardrums and I summoned a waiter for edification. What I heard was not to be dignified with the noun 'sound'. It was a conflation of Beatles songs and one or two Abbas played on a synthesiser that seemed to have been set on penny-whistle mode.

'What the-?' I demanded.

'It's the rabbis,' said the waiter, by way of apology.

'How the-?' I exploded.

'When they gave us a kosher licence, they forbade us to play Indian music because it might have women singing,' he explained. 'They said we could only play the discs they permitted. I'm so sorry, we can't change it.'

Now I've been in the writing game long enough to know never to get into a fight with men in black coats, but this is the first time they have strayed onto my musical patch and I am - you may take this literally as you like - damned if I'm going to let organised religion take over the function of music production and criticism.

What's more, if the best the rabbis can do as DJs is stamp their seals on pre-masticated Beatles, I will definitely book my afterlife in the nether regions. Heavens above! You mean to tell me Paradise is going to be some kind of Sartrean Huis Clos where I am confined for all eternity with musical nullity? Get me outa there.

I was on the verge of sending the nice young waiter a little light Webern for the amusement of his rabbinic supervisors when one of our birthday party pointed me to a link that suggests the kosher blight is spreading. According to failedmessiah.com, a Charedi insider website, rabbis in Jerusalem have been issuing edicts as to what is permissible in music, and what not.

In future, apparently, instrumentation will need to be 'respectful' of the words, percussion should be used sparingly, the saxophone is 'indecent' and any 'misbalance (sic) between rhythm and melody creates negative feelings'. You can tell these guys have been through a crash course in Schenkerian analysis.

The new rules apply, for the moment, only to producers who need a rabbinic seal on releases of Jewish music, but it won't be long before we'll all be checking our record collections to see if they are kosher enough to keep in the house. Rhapsody in Blue? Indecent. Mendelssohn violin concerto? Blatant apostasy. Mahler 9? Disrespectful. Frank Sinatra? Neil Sedaka? Stephen Sondheim - downright negative, at the very least.

Go on - you try. Be holier than I. Ban some music. Let's keep our records kosher. 

The most pleasing aspect of Vilde Frang on first sight is her resistance to typecasting. On the eve of an international record launch, with hedge funds rising and falling on her success or failure, the Norwegian violinist has held out against makeover pressure.

She appears with rare wholesomeness in harvest-ready wheaten hair that falls below her shoulders and an unshadowed hint of plumpness in her cheeks. Before she plays a note, we know there is nothing affected about this artist.

Upstairs at London's Foyles bookshop, for a browser audience unprepared for rigour at the end of a winter's working day, she delivers Bartók's sonata for solo violin with prodigious intensity, missing some of its world-weary humour but compensating with a brisk empathy for its rural song fragments. Written for Yehudi Menuhin by the cancer-stricken composer in American exile, the sonata is tough on fingers and intellect, half an hour long. The attention was unbroken by a single cough.

In a classical recital hall, Frang would have been applauded for courage and accomplishment, and punctuated by tubercular outbursts between movements. In a bookstore, she achieved communication with people unprepared for what she played.

These are promising signs for a young woman of 23, at the start of her career. Comparisons and antecedents can be eliminated. Although mentored by Anne-Sophie Mutter from the age of 10 with financial support and the loan of a French instrument, Frang has nothing like the Mercedes-smooth sound of her patron, nor does she present herself for any kind of catwalk. She looks more like a folk singer than a classical star, and that's no bad thing.

What we see is what we hear - an organic artist, unmoulded by the music industry, ready to go wherever her gift may lead, and lacking in all pretension. Her debut recording of Prokofiev and Sibelius violin concertos is out this month. 

Over the last eight months, while finishing a book and doing as little journalism as I liked, I took a long, cool overview of the media and made some changes in my life.

One of them was to think niche. After 15 years of writing a weekly column and 30 of being tied to mass-market newspapers, I felt an urge to speak directly to a specialist readership.

Writing for newspapers is great fun and I don't intend to give up, but there is a sacrifice involved every time you put a piece into a paper that is read on commuter trains. Many of the specifics get lost.

Any name that is not a household one has to be explained at sentence length. Every technicality requires a paragraph - and in that paragraph you need to grip the reader's eye with connective generalities. Compromise comes with the job.

What I wanted was to engage more closely with people who knew what I was on about and needed to know more. So when an opportunity arose to write for folk who come with strings attached - players, teachers, students and dealers in violins, violas, cellos and the lower growlers on double-bass - it chimed perfectly with my personal inclinations.

From next month, I shall be opening a conversation with readers of The Strad, a 120-year-old magazine whose 55,000 readers know exactly what they want from a professional journal. More than other music monthlies, which cater to people with a general liking for sounds, The Strad is about life on the fiddle - hardcore information for a hard-headed profession.

Contrary to common practice, I shall withhold my column from the internet. This is a closed conversation. The only way you can enter is by buying a physical copy of the Strad or, taking out a subscription.

Where the conversation will open out is on the magazine's website, presently being upgraded. I'm looking forward to getting low down and dirty on the fingerboard. In economic crisis, players are the last to know what's going on around them. One of my plans for the coming year is to tell is as it is.

Over the last eight months, while finishing a book and doing as little journalism as I liked, I took a long, cool overview of the media and made some changes in my life.

One of them was to think niche. After 15 years of writing a weekly column and 30 of being tied to mass-market newspapers, I felt an urge to speak directly to an expert readership.

Writing for newspapers is great fun and I don't intend to give up, but there is a sacrifice involved every time you put a piece into a paper that is read on commuter trains. Many of the specifics get lost.

Any name that is not a household one has to be explained at sentence length. Every technicality requires a paragraph - and in that paragraph you need to grip the reader's eye with extraneous generalities. Compromise comes with the job.

What I wanted was to engage more closely with people who knew what I was on about and needed to know more. So when an opportunity arose to write for folk who come with strings attached - players, teachers, students and dealers in violins, violas, cellos and the lower growlers on double-bass - it chimed perfectly with one of my personal urges.

From March, I shall be opening a conversation with readers of The Strad, a 120-year-old monthly whose 55,000 readers know exactly what they want from a professional journal. More than other music magazines, which cater to people with a general liking for sounds, The Strad is about life on the fiddle - hardcore information for a hard-headed profession. In a parlous economy, players are all too often that last to know what's really going on. 

Contrary to common practice, I shall withhold my column from the internet. This is a closed conversation. The only way you can enter is by buying a physical copy of the Strad or, better still, taking out a subscription.

Where the conversation opens out is on the magazine's website, http://www.thestrad.com, presently being upgraded. I'm looking forward to getting low down and dirty on the fingerboard. All too often people who write about music gets distanced from the source. One of my plans for the coming year is to reach back into roots, and reconnect.

Jackie Wullschlager, Chagall's recent biographer, reviewing the newly discovered crucifixixon image in the Financial Times, suggests that it has obliged her to rethink the artists's Jewish engagement, as well as the role of Jewish art in the 21st century.

Here's a pull-out quote:

His work, and indeed this show, raises the whole vexed question of whether there is such a thing as Jewish art, and in turn whether a Jewish Museum of Art has a role in a multicultural society.

And here's the whole, penetrative piece:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b0b23b4a-fbe0-11de-9c29-00144feab49a.html