Musical America Blogs

by Keith Clarke

Having ditched EMI after 15 years, demon fiddler Nigel Kennedy is making a splash with his new label, Sony Classical, his first disc re-exploring Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, complete with improvisation, progressive rock, female vocals. Oh, and drums. As he gracefully explained to The Scotsman: “With Vivaldi I always think I f***ing own this music, but when I realised I was going to be touring it again, I had to do something new with it. I couldn’t do the same shit as when I done the last album.”

The something new includes an encore, “It’s Plucking Elemental,” sung by Kennedy, who introduces it with a belch.

It will all probably fan the flames of fundamentalist ire, although even die-hard traditionalists should have become inured to Nige’s wilder excesses by now.

Those of us who are long enough in the tooth to remember the clean-cut young middle-class boy who first appeared as Nigel Kennedy, with a neat short-back-and-sides and impeccable vowels, may have smiled at the in-yer-face wild boy that subsequently emerged. Ten years ago, he was upsetting then Proms chief Sir John Drummond with his plans to play the Berg Violin Concerto wearing a black cloak and Dracula make-up.

Whatever the silliness, and however much his manufactured street-kid accent grates, the one thing that Kennedy has to do to shut up all the tut-tutters is pick up the violin. He would be easy to dismiss as a style-before-substance also-ran if it were not for the fact that he still plays the violin as if his life depended on it. He could charm the pants off a dowager with a gypsy dance, bring tears to the eyes of a statue with a Bach partita. So forgive me if I don’t join in the chorus of disapproval.

by Keith Clarke

How many percussionists does it take to fill a concert hall? Just two, apparently. I am on retreat in South Wales, where on Tuesday the annual Tenby Arts Festival served up O Duo, aka Owen Gunnell and Oliver Cox, two young musicians who met at music college and put together an act that has kept them on the road for the best part of ten years.

You can expect things to go with a bang when you have two percussionists on the programme, and Gunnell and Cox certainly have what it takes when it comes to thwacking things and whipping up a storm. But the notable thing for me is the sheer delicacy of their playing. They center their act round two giant marimbas, although an extensive kitchen fills the rest of the stage. And while there is much beautifully choreographed fun and games, it is less expected to hear a serene Sarabande from a Bach keyboard Partita coming out of two massive instruments with such subtlety.

Aside from the sheer musicality bouncing off these two players, they offer an object lesson in how to take control of your destiny on exiting music college. The conservatoires are churning out talented musicians on endless conveyor belts, but the jobs market cannot hope to keep up. It takes a bit of ingenuity to create work and stay in it, so let’s have a drum roll and a crash on the cymbals to celebrate the wonder of O Duo. You can catch some their work here.

>>>

The row over the suspension of four London Philharmonic players rumbles on. The four added their names to a letter protesting the inclusion of the Israel Philharmonic in the Proms programme, adding weight to their signatures, perhaps, by identifying themselves as LPO players. This did not play well with many of the orchestra’s supporters, who are more LPO than PLO, and made their feelings known to orchestra chief Tim Walker.

His response – a nine-month ban for the four – seems harsh. In Tuesday’s Guardian, chief arts writer Charlotte Higgins opined: “The whole London Philharmonic affair has made the orchestra look unbelievably, well, stupid.” Maybe, maybe not. There will be many orchestra CEOs who sympathize. Walker, who has only recently emerged from a damaging episode when the orchestra was defrauded by its financial director, has an orchestra to run, against a backdrop of diminishing support and a general downturn. Cheesing off his funders would not be the greatest way of protecting the orchestra.

by Keith Clarke

OK, I admit it, the editor was right. I went along to the Lincoln Center production of South Pacific at the Barbican last week and had a jolly good time. It wasn’t an overnight conversion to the world of the musical, and I can’t say I didn’t look at my watch just now and again, but it was a terrific show, and I was probably the only person in the 1,160-seat Barbican Theater who didn’t know how it came out until it came out.

But as an infrequent frequenter of musicals, I do find some aspects of the experience that really stick in the craw. Most of all, why does the audience feel obliged to yack all the way through the overture? Is the music only worthy of attention when someone’s singing?

At least this was a show that stayed on the non-cheesy side of cheesy. And in an idiom that lives on its foot-stomping, up a key, play to the gallery conventions, that says a lot. Heaven knows, it’s bad enough in the opera when the chorus trips on spraying rose petals, but musicals really know how to lay the schmaltz on thick. This South Pacific didn’t, and I’m grateful. And the rest of our party wept buckets, so it must have been good.

>>>

The BBC’s in-house safety adviser has published a new report on protecting musicians’ hearing and come up with some useful suggestions. Sit further apart, it tells musicians. No doubt concert platforms on your side of the pond are generously proportioned, but in the UK if players start spreading out the brass will be tumbling off the back risers and the first fiddles will be back in the green room. Another helpful suggestion is that musicians should alleviate the effect of having their hair parted by the brass by chewing gum. But so many people go to see a concert as well as hear it, and televised high-definition relays tend to go in for dramatic close-ups of the players. Is the great British public ready for the vision of a symphony orchestra masticating its way through Mahler?

Meanwhile, another report, from Toronto, suggests that playing a musical instrument throughout life is likely to ensure better hearing into old age. This is good news for those of us who have managed to do that, and we live in hope that it will also protect us from muscular pain, tone up our brains, and stave off those “Where the hell did I put the keys” moments.

by Keith Clarke

If you’re in the classical music business and say you don’t much care for musicals, everyone just assumes you’re a musical snob. So I shall be turning up at London’s Barbican Theater tonight for the Lincoln Center production of South Pacific wearing as much of a smile as I can muster. But truth to tell, when it comes to musicals, a little goes an awfully long way for me.

True, I took to Showboat, and always include a few numbers from it in my let’s-scare-the-neighbors soirées, but Jerome Kern’s great (though overlong) score is an honorable exception.

I blame my lack of enthusiasm for musicals on a traumatic childhood. In my vulnerable early teens, we lived in a bungalow built on a former hop field in the county of Kent. Hop fields are jolly useful, because they produce the wherewithal for producing the fine ale that the Brits are famous for drinking warm. Bungalows have their uses, too, of course, but the problem with ours was that the design of the new housing estate meant that each pair of dwellings had bathrooms facing each other.

That need not have been a problem but for Ken Tripp. He was our neighbor, a salesman for a local floor tile company, and an enthusiastic member of LAMPS (the Local Amateur Musical Players – still going strong after all these years, and currently preparing a production of The Producers). They always seemed to have a new show in production – Carousel, White Horse Inn, you name it – and Ken’s favorite rehearsal venue was the bath tub.

So I would be minding my own business, enjoying a peaceful soak, when this awful whine would start up, like a troubled bison approaching at speed through the woods: “Ooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaak! Lahoma where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain.” And so on and so on.

What was worse, I didn’t just have to suffer the rehearsals. My parents were good, neighbor-supporting folk, who thought we ought to book tickets at the local town hall for every production and sit through the whole damned show.

No doubt this South Pacific will be my moment of epiphany. Certainly the editor of this site suggests that I should stop only at murder to get tickets. And we’re making up a party for a family birthday, the birthday boy in question being a dyed-in-the-wool South Pacific fan, so expectation is running high. Wish me luck.

>>>

The hi-jacking of the Israel Philharmonic Prom last week by protesters got all the column inches they may have wished, though rather less support. The UK communications minister Ed Vaizey, who was in the audience, tweeted: “Demonstrators seem to have turned entire audience pro-Israel.”

It was the biggest such rumpus in the Royal Albert Hall since Rostropovich played the Dvořák cello concerto with the USSR State Symphony Orchestra in 1968 on the very day that Russia’s tanks rolled into Prague. I was in the audience for that, and have never heard such a highly charged performance, the Russian cellist playing through tears.

The Palestinian protest has at least served to get some issues debated, and as is usual when the placards come out in the UK, it was not without its moments of humor. I particularly enjoyed the vision of one lady of a certain age mounting her own personal counter-campaign against the protesters, cuffing one of them round his neck with her walking stick.