Slipped disc: July 2010 Archives

http://www.harrogate-festival.org.uk/events/mendelssohn-and-mahler/

Chatting in a BBC green room this morning with the pianist Paul Lewis - before we went onto Breakfast to discuss the perennial Proms question of clapping between movements - I was alarmed to hear that he had torn a muscle in his arm while rehearsing a Beethoven concerto last week. Paul is performing all five concertos at the BBC Proms. Cancellation was not an option. So he played on through the pain, and with barely a grimace.

That's what artists do.

Last week, I visited Maria Joao Pires after her late-night Nocturnes at the Royal Albert Hall, where she dared to play more softly than anyone I have ever heard anyone do in that vast space. In her dim-lit room in the bowels of the hall, I noticed that one of her fingers was covered by a band-aid and swollen to almost twice its natural size. Pires had played Chopin through a mist of pain. To have cried off and disappointed 4,000 eager listeners never crossed her mind.

So when I see a footballer limping off with a hamstring injury, or a tennis ace complaining of muscle strain, my natural sympathy for suffering humanity is tempered by the knowledge that these athletes are, like as not, protecting themselves from the fear of protracted injury and that their concern for the spectators who have paid vast amounts to see them is minimal.

If Mr Drogba has a pain in his groin, he should grit his teeth and get back to training. If Mr Rooney is feeling under the weather, he should run it off. And as for those Italians and Argentines who fall to the ground howling in agony when someone - perhaps - taps their ankle with a feather-light boot, they ought to be charged with misrepresentation and jailed for their display of deception. Softies, cissies and big girls' blouses, the lots of them.

A real performer plays through the pain.

The world's favourite Finnish violinist is, I'm glad to report, back on the boards. Linda Lampenius, renamed Brava when she stripped bare for Playboy, is playing with the Irish choral group Anuna and preparing a release of Christmas songs.

Interviewed in the Irish Metro Herald, she complains that the media went negative on her 'when I started doing things considered inappropriate for a serious classical musician - like modelling, acting and playing pop/rock'. Not to mention getting naked for Playboy and its legion of grubby retards.

I have, as it happens, great sympathy for Linda and have fought her corner more than once. A former orchestral player, she was the victim of cruel exploitation by salacious elements in the music industry and she has worked very hard to get back on her feet and find a career in entertainment. She was recently a judge on Finland's X Factor contest.

My Finnish is not up to much but I guess she was required, as X Factor judges are the world over, to dish out some fairly harsh stuff to the hapless contenders. In other words, she can give as good as she got.

It was not the media that derailed Ms Brava. Rather, it was her own naive decisions and the callousness of her managers. She needs to put the blame where it belongs.

Still, I'm delighted she's back on form and I look forward to her Christmas release. 

Telling all on The Lebrecht Interview this week is Marilyn Horne, one of the first Americans to bestride world opera and the diva to did most to restore Rossini to centre stage.

Hers is a story of unyielding courage and self-confidence. As a college student, she corrected Stravinsky and Hindemith on baroque singing. Fifty years ago, she stormed the German scene with one of the most powerful renditions of Marie in Berg's Wozzeck.

Against her family's wishes, she married Henry Lewis, an Afro-American bass player (and rising conductor), sacrificing her career in the segregated parts of the US. She fought for what was right and, usually, she won - as many conductors can testify.

There's a Roman clip of her on youtube singing the Liber Scriptus in Verdi's Requiem with a young Pavarotti seated transfixed behind her.

Today, in her late 70s, she runs a foundation that fosters opportunities for young American singers. Ms Horne speaks her mind as eevr in our conversation, respects no vanities, takes no prisoners. She remains a breath of fresh air in an art full of pomp.

The Lebrecht Interview with Marilyn Horne goes out tonight at 9.15 on BBC Radio 3, and is streamed on site for the next week. 

This just in from a top-end sound engineer:

Did you watch the Paul Lewis Beethoven 4th piano concerto this evening? The BBC abandoned the usual broadcast cameras and used 'Q-Ball'  cameras instead. The pictures were very poor resolution and foggy in comparison, and the obsession with close-ups through a wide-angle lens makes everyone look close as well as bulbous. What is in the BBC's heads? The cameras have a single 1/3" 2MP sensor which is comparable with the Canon camcorder we take on family holidays, and has resolution at best a sixth of that of a studio camera. I knows times are hard, but the BBC is so snotty about contractors using full broadcast grade cameras and yet they use something I would hesitate about using for cctv on sessions.

Any comment from BBC vision control?

There's further discussion starting here.

1 Why has the Welsh Assembly voted £250,000 for Bryn Terfel's private festival when Welsh National Opera faces devastation by cuts?

2 Was the UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt 'really looking forward' (his words) to the DCMS staff awards when he's planning to sack half the workforce?

3 Who thinks a committed pornographer is a fit and proper person to own a British national television channel? (see question #2, perhaps)

4 Why is a summer breezer allowed to advertise itself as 'Britain's first classical music festival' when its headliners are crossover divas Katherine Jenkins and Russell Watson? Shouldn't it be sued for false trading by the BBC Proms?

5 WTF is Deborah Voigt doing singing Annie Get Your Gun at Glimmerglass?

6 WTF is Renee Fleming doing altogether?

7 Which soprano says she hits her top by clenching her bottom?

8 How does Placido Domingo get away with a $6m Ring deficit at LA Opera?

Post your answers (and more questions) in the space below.

I did not want to be the first to mention it, but it now appears to be public knowledge on music sites that Anthony Rolfe Johnson was suffering from Alzheimers in the last years of his career, and died of it this week.

The symptoms were first noticed in 1998, on a Spanish tour with Sir Neville Marriner. There were further lapses in Munich at the Staatsoper when he played Emaeus in Monteverdi's Ulisse in 2001. 'His confidence began to suffer enormously,' writes a trusted colleague, 'and over the following couple of years he slowly withdrew from singing altogether and had virtually retired by 2004.'

We should salute Anthony's courage in carrying for so long with that disability, and the even greater heroism of the colleagues who supported him. He was a generous and popular man, and his fellow-artists did their best to keep him going.

Nevertheless, the loss is tragic. To lose a great singer with the voice intact in his early 60s is cruel and horrible. In the memory of Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Let's do our best to help the scientists who are working on better diagnostic tools and an early cure for Alzheimer's. Let's do it now.  

The latest withdrawal from the BBC Proms is Sir Colin Davis, officially on health grounds. My understanding is that he has asked to be released from engagements during a period of family mourning.

His absence, coming so soon after the deaths of Sir Charles Mackerras, who was down for two Proms, and Anthony Rolfe Johnson casts a pall on an otherwise glorious musical summer - a reminder of our fragility and mortality. Sombre times, indeed.

BBC press release:

Matthias Bamert to replace Sir Colin Davis at BBC Proms

Monday 9 August, Prom 32, 7.00pm

Sir Colin Davis has announced his withdrawal from all his European Union Youth Orchestra engagements on health grounds, with extreme regrets.

He was due to conduct the EUYO at the BBC Proms on Monday 9 August.

The concert will now be conducted by Matthias Bamert who has appeared regularly at the Proms since his debut in 1985. The programme remains unchanged: Tchaikovsky's Fantasy Overture Romeo and Juliet, Janácek's Taras Bulba and Berlioz's Harold in Italy.

The viola soloist in the Berlioz is Maxim Rysanov who returns to the Proms on the Last Night in 2010.

The Proms continue until 11 September 2010, and full up-to-date information on the season is available at bbc.co.uk/proms.

Proms concerts are live on BBC Radio 3

That fine singer Anthony Rolfe Johnson died yesterday, aged 69. He had been suffering for a while from a degenerative condition. Former colleagues were first to post the sad news.

Johnson appeared all over the world in Bach and Handel oratorios and Mozart operas. He was a memorable Peter Grimes and he sang Aschenbach powerfully in Death in Venice at the Metropolitan Opera, New York. In Brussels, where he was a popular Pelleas, he created the role of Polixenes in Phililippe Boesman's version of A Winter's Tale.

Coming so soon after the lamented death of Philip Langridge, it marks the start of the passing of a golden generation of English singers. Sic transit gloria mundi.

To lose one vice president, as Oscar Wilde so aptly put it, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness.

Three months after parting company with A& R chief Stephen Johns, EMI Classics today sailed ahead without Graham Southern, V-P Catalogue, who looks after backlist releases, including such current triumphs as the phenomenal Mahler box.

Graham, I understand, left of his own volition, a pretty brave thing to do in these tricky times. He told friends he was unable to put up with management-speak from the hedge-trimmers who run the company.

Here's the internal memo from his boss, announcing his departure:

Dear Classics colleagues,

The conductor Riccardo Chailly, in the first of this year's series of The Lebrecht Interview on BBC Radio 3, was slightly needled when I suggested he lacked the stomach for a fight, and perhaps the ultimate edge of ambition.

Chailly, 57, is music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. He was supposed to be director of the city opera as well, but he backed out when a new production chief was installed. Previously, he walked away from the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam after 15 years.

He has not ruled at La Scala, where his father was once artistic director, and he has never headed a US orchestra, despite early triumphs in Chicago. But his eyes lit up when I pressed the point and he specified that he was in talks with 'one of the great American musical institutions'. Ronald Wilford, the CAMI boss, is now his personal agent and an announcement on Chailly in America can be expected before the leaves change hue.

No need to speculate which orchestra is in his sights. It's the one whose chief conductor is prone to most cancellations.

No need, either, to doubt his aptitude. Chailly is, technically and imaginatively, one of the foremost living conductors. If I had to choose someone to conduct for my life, he would be first in the frame.

Still in his 50s, and slimmed down after a heart scare, Chailly is full of energy and ideas, fluent in English and wonderfully refreshing in his very lack of career calculation. I have always rated him above his noisier contemporaries. A winter job on the East Coast would be just the ticket to establish Riccardo Chailly where he has long belonged - at the very top.

You can hear The Lebrecht Interview tonight on Radio 3. See here for more information.

Zarin Mehta, executive director of the New York Philharmonic, was paid $1 million last year, down from $2.6m the year before. No reflection on his efforts and achievement. The previous sum included 'deferred compensation' - which suggests he has been stacking up his bonuses over several years.

Apart from Deborah Borda in Los Angeles, who also runs the Hollywood Bowl, Zarin Mehta is the highest paid orchestral executive in America and, hence, the world.

A million bucks seems an awful lot of money for managing a band. What has Zarin Mehta done before? Managed another band in Montreal and the festival in Ravinia. Before that, he was an accountant.

In the August issue of The Strad magazine, out now, I discuss the skill sets required to run an orchestra and wonder why more musicians don't step up to the plate. It's a well-paid job with a good pension plan and it brings in many times what most players, who study for years to perfect their craft, can dream of earning. Rocket science, it ain't. Job security is great: very few orchestral managers ever get the sack. I know some who cling to the job for 25 years and more, never taking a risk or venturing an original idea.  

So why aren't there more candidates for the role? And why aren't Philharmonic musicians telling their board that when Mr Mehta, 72, hangs up his abacus, the next boss should be picked from the strings?

Read more in The Strad.

The Russian-French film by Radu Mihaileanu has received a sniffy ride from British critics, none more disdainful than the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, who dismissed it as 'cheesy Europudding' and clung to its icy French starlet, Mélanie Laurent, as his lifebelt in an ocean of schmaltz.

My own impression was heading down much the same alley once I saw a pair of hands that attempted to simulate conducting and a rom-com plot that left no cliché unturned. The story of a Bolshoi conductor, demoted to office cleaner because he refused to fire Jews and then exacting revenge by taking a fake Bolshoi orchestra to Paris, seemed too slight and contrived to sustain a full two hours.

But once past the early clichés, the film delivers an acrid commentary on a totalitarian system that turned into a gangster state, and on the way western nations collaborate with Russian robber barons. The oligarchs on screen sent a chill up my spine and I gave silent thanks that I do not work for a newspaper that is owned, as two British dailies are, by an unrepentant KGB man.

And when the demoted conductor, the sombrely defeatist Aleksei Guskov, gets to work over vodka with the icy French violinist, there was a real rush of emotion which, underpinned by the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, put a serious spike in my Kleenex shares. Mlle Laurent, as the violinist, is equally convincing: she was coached by the excellent Sarah Nemtanu. 

The film, for all its vagaries, is more than just another rom-com. It tells a kind of truth, depicting classical music as it often can be - brutal, callous, humiliating, conciliatory, political and, just when you are ready to walk out on it, uplifting in the most unexpected ways. See what you think. Here's how I described it on Front Row last night. 

It goes on UK release this week. 

On Sunday night, BBC Radio 3 will broadcast my hour-long documentary In Search of Gustav Mahler, an old-fashioned piece of radiocraft that tries to create a sound picture from Mahler's locations, using the voices of living individuals whose lives were changed by his music.

You can hear it at 21.30, after the Proms concert, and streamed online for a week.

But here's the fun stuff: On the R3 website, producer Jeremy Evans has posted video out-takes of me on Mahler location and at work with our participants. You can hear a scholar discussing comic rituals at Viennese funerals and see how Mahler did his schoolwork. There should also be an audio clip of a jam session I had with Uri Caine, exploring subliminal Jewish influences in Mahler's work.

Go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tnwp. Enjoy.

If you'd like to order the book, click here.

The new controller of BBC Radio 4, one of the key roles in British civilisation, is to be the little-known Gwyneth Williams, formerly of the BBC World Service and, prior to that, editor of the high-prestige Reith Lectures.

Ms Williams beat such high-profile contenders as Front Row presenter Mark Lawson and business editor Robert Peston, both favoured by the outgoing controller, Mark Damazer. Peter Barron, one of Newsnight now with Google, was a staff pick.

Here's the official c.v:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/biographies/biogs/worldservice/gwynethwilliams.shtml

She looks like another serious thinker, which can only be good for the brand,

The BBC will dedicate a Proms concert in his memory. Glyndebourne, where he conducted Cosi fan tutte only last month, will commemorate him tonight. Sir George Christie, past director of Glyndebourne, said: 'The passion he brought to his performances - which he tempered with scholarly research - combined with his devotion to and belief in the composers whose works were entrusted to him and his baton set him apart from the others. He never imposed himself between the audience and the composer and this in turn commanded total devotion to and belief in him. He embraced a huge spectrum of the repertory, but it was his performances of Handel, Mozart and Janáček which stick most adhesively in my memory....and he was an enchanting man.'

The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic recalls his 'outstanding interpretations' on record of the nine Beethoven symphonies, while the Scottish Chamber Orchestra remembered a relationship of 20 years in which he showed 'almost unparallelled mastery of music across a huge range of styles and periods.'

Tony Faulkner, record producer, pays tribute here to his 'inexhautible energy' and to the amount that everyone who worked with Charles Mackerras learned from this delightful artist and man.

Sir Charles Mackerras, who has died aged 84, was a nice man and near-neighbour. We would exchange a sunny wave and an occasional chat on morning walks along Hamilton Terrace.

Never an assertive personality, Charlie was often underrated by orchestral musicians and had a wretched time as chief conductor of English National Opera in the 1970s. But the musical results spoke for themselves.

His achievements, in my view, are twofold. He was the first, after Neville Marriner, to seek fusion between period-instrument practice and modern orchestras, achieving wonderfully transparent Mozart and Beethoven performances, especially with his last ensemble, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. He had been due to work with them this summer at the Edinburgh Festival (he was also down to conduct a Viennese Night at the BBC Proms the week after next and, never a narrow mind, he was irrationally fond of Gilbert and Sullivan.)

His greatest breathrough, though, was to introduce Janacek to the English-speaking world. A fluent Czech-speaker after studies in Prague with Vaclav Talich in 1947, he joined the Sadlers Wells Opera in London and, in 1951, conducted the first Katya Kabanova outside continental Europe. It paved the way for Rafael Kubelik to conduct Jenufa at Covent Garden and for Mackerras himself to record the complete Janacek operas with a stellar cast on Decca.

It took Katya another 40 years to reach the Met but by then most of Janacek was being staged the world over and Charlie's contribution was near-forgotten. It could be said that he did more for Janacek than anyone other than Max Brod, his original German translator.

To bring a great composer back to life is more than most conductors can ever hope to do. Charles Mackerras did that, and we should be eternally grateful for his courage and persistence. He will be eulogised as Australia's greatest conductor (which he was) but the greatness of Mackerras was the ease with which he overcame the barriers between nations, languages and periods in the history of  music. He was truly a citizen of the world.

Charles Mackerras, born Shenectady, New York, 17 November 1925; died London, 14 July 2010

Just in case you thought that British television was dying of an excess of originality, the independent company Channel 4 News has copied the BBC in appointing a culture editor, as distinct from an arts corespondent to upgrade its creative profile.

Where the BBC replaced the excellent Razia Iqbal with the flailing Will Gompertz, C4 have introduced an arts filmmaker from Melvyn Bragg's disbanded South Bank Show team. Matthew Cain has a nose for a story and the skill to turn it around. He may be an arts insider but, despite the SBS tendency for celebration, he can be expected to apply scrutiny to some of the shadowier corners of the industry, which Gompertz cannot. It's a good appointment.

The only regret is that C4 has dropped its veteran arts correspondent Nick Glass, who covered the waterfront with commitment and expertise - whenever the dumb-down clucks on the network allowed him a sliver of airtime. I hope he finds something better to do.

Kirill Karabits, the go-ahead young conductor in Bournemouth, is welcoming survivors of the Chernobyl disaster, close to his Ukrainian home town, to his forthcoming concerts.

Shocking as it is to hear that a new generation of children is being treated for the aftereffects of Soviet negligence 24 years ago, it is warming to know that they are not forgotten.

Details in the press release, below;

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra hosts Chernobyl children at free schools concert

Over 4,000 local schoolchildren to perform song celebrating 200 years of Bournemouth

On 13^th and 14^th July, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra will perform four schools concerts in Poole, presented by the BSO/J.P. Morgan Children's Composer, Paul Rissmann.  Over 4,000 schoolchildren from schools across Dorset, Poole and Bournemouth will attend the concerts free of charge.

At the Wednesday afternoon concert the audience will include a group of children aged just 10-12 from the Russian town of Belarus, a country still affected by the Chernobyl nuclear fallout, who are in Poole on a recuperative holiday.  This has a special resonance for Kirill Karabits, the BSO's Principal Conductor, who is originally from Kiev, only some 50 miles from the children's home town.  When he heard that the group, who speak no English, were to come hear the orchestra play, he recorded a special video welcome in Russian, to be played to them before they hear the concert.   

BSO Community Musician Andy Baker will meet the children in the morning to lead a workshop on the music that is to be played.  One piece he will explain to them is an interactive song, B200, written by Paul Rissmann with the help of Year 4 pupils at Muscliff Primary School, which celebrates the bicentenary of Bournemouth.  Schools across the county have been learning the words and music and will perform the song accompanied by the full orchestra.

Jacky Thorne, BSO's Head of Communications said, "The BSO is delighted to be making such an important connection with Chernobyl, and looks forward to performing its renowned school concerts to so many young people in Dorset."

For further information, please contact Helen Tweedy at Albion Media

020 7495 4455 helen@albion-media.co.uk

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra: http://www.bsolive.com/

Chernobyl Children Life Line: http://www.ccll.org.uk/ho/

Albion Media: http://www.albion-media.co.uk/

Editors' Notes

Concert Details

Tuesday 13^th July

10:15 & 13:30

The Lighthouse, Poole

Wednesday 14^th July

10:15 & 13:30

The Lighthouse, Poole

Ottawa's new summer festival, titled above, opened with an octogenarian pianist who put us all to shame, a string quartet at the peak of its powers, a big soprano on the comeback trail and this hardworking writer in keynote lectures on three successive days.

If you want to know what really happened, go to the Emerson Quartet's lively blog.

http://artistled.wordpress.com/2010/07/07/july-7-esq-season-wrap-up/

Here's a sample:

Finding dinner proved an enormous challenge as nothing was arranged for us again, like Ravinia. Although Menahem (Pressler)'s page turner called ahead, the place she sent us to turned out to be closed, and we wound up at an un-airconditioned, noisy place where we dined on dried-up burgers and soggy French fries. But the meal mattered not: what was really extraordinary was to listen to Norman Lebrecht - whom we had invited to join us - ask Menahem about his teachers and mentors. Lebrecht: "Did you know anyone who knew Brahms?"  Pressler: "But of course!" And the conversation went on like that into the wee hours and would have continued had I not reminded Menahem of his impending concert the next day.