Musical America Blogs

by Keith Clarke

The Royal College of Music always keeps its music staff busy, but it looks like the lawyers might be earning their keep on its latest offering. Lisbon Contemporary Music Ensemble is visiting with the world premiere of a new one-act opera “based on the real-life events surrounding Dominique Strauss-Khan.”

A press release outlines the plot: “A middle-aged businessman arrives at a hotel run by a concierge who promises to provide him with anything he could possibly desire. Fearing the best years of his life are over – despite a loving wife at home – he finds himself haunted by ghosts of desire and jealousy. Accepting the concierge’s offer, a young maid soon arrives at his suite. However, she later claims she was savagely attacked, while he protests his innocence.”

With fresh allegations swirling around the former International Monetary Fund chief, he will probably be too busy to turn up in South Kensington to judge the artistic merits of the piece.

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If you were going to try and get inner-city teenagers interested in classical music, would you start with a three-hour piece about the crucifixion by a long-dead German? That is the brave plan of Suzi Digby, aka Lady Eatwell, who has launched an enterprising scheme – Vocal Futures – to sign up some 1,500 young ambassadors worldwide and build an online community to spread the word about classical music via Facebook and Twitter. The whole thing kicks off with three performances of the St Matthew Passion in a London bunker designed for testing concrete, launching a project which then goes on to Los Angeles, Cologne, Shanghai and Johannesburg. Read all about it at http://www.vocalfutures.org/

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This completes my tour of duty on the MusicalAmerica blogspot, which I hope has given some kind of idea of the musical world as seen from a London perspective. I shall still be popping up at the sharp end of the site for as long as the editor puts up with me, but from the blogosphere it’s cheerio. As the BBC presenter John Ebdon used to say, “If you have been, thanks for listening.”

by Keith Clarke

On the day that she receives Gramophone’s Lifetime Achievement Award at London’s Dorchester Hotel, mezzo-soprano Dame Janet Baker gives a fascinating interview in today’s Telegraph [click here].
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She reveals her regret at how when Karajan contacted her agent, the legendary Emmie Tillett, to book Baker for the Salzburg Festival, he was sent on his way because the mezzo had a prior engagement.

It’s a familiar story, for regret seems to be Baker’s middle name. She regretted that it took the opera establishment so long to book her for the big roles. She regretted, as she tells Rupert Christiansen in this Telegraph piece, that “musicians weren’t, as I had naively assumed, always the nicest or easiest people to work with.”

And the regret went deeper, for a singer who has always been more interested in honesty than public relations. In a radio interview some years ago, the presenter asked her, looking back over her career and its cost to her personal life, had it all been worthwhile? There was a long silence before she said, simply – no, it hadn’t.

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A recent survey revealed that 90 per cent of UK surgeons have music playing in the operating theatre as they work. Of those, about half worked the scalpels to up-tempo rock music, 17 per cent favored pop, and 11 per cent classical. Plastic surgeons played the most; ear, nose and throat specialists the least.

The question is, which piece of classical music would you want blasting away as the surgeon set to work? Top choice for pop fans is easy: Rolling Stones, Let It Bleed.

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.

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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.

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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.