classic rock

NEW Listen to recent live performances by the Allegri Quartet

2011-03-06T17:32:00.000+07:00

“…the shimmer and grace and intelligence of this ensemble is riveting”.

The Independent on Sunday

***NEW*** Listen to recent live performances by the Allegri Quartet

The Allegri Quartet is Britain's longest-running chamber music ensemble, sustained over six decades by successive generations of the finest international performers. Their reputation for distinctive and stimulating interpretations is rooted in tradition yet alive to contemporary trends.

A commitment to refreshing the repertoire had led the Allegris to give more than 60 world premières since 1964, including specially commissioned pieces by leading composers such as James MacMillan, Colin Matthews and Anthony Payne.

The Allegri Quartet also plays a key role in training the next generation of string and chamber music players, and enjoys long-standing teaching residencies at Durham University, the University of East Anglia, Nottingham, Bangor and Middlesex.

Forthcoming Allegri projects include two complete Beethoven string quartet cycles at Kings Place in London and the Holywell Music Room, Oxford.

Rock

2011-03-06T17:29:00.000+07:00

The Missing Link is Joseph Joachim, lynchpin of the split in Romantic music that made everyone go a bit Brahms and Liszt. Daniel Hope has been delving into the influence of this legendary violinist and I recently had a lovely interview with him about it. A somewhat truncated version is in today's Indy, which does make it clear that if Brahms hadn't nodded off at a crucial moment, the whole history of music might have been different... Below please find the Director's Cut - complete with some Youtube of the great Joachim himself, who lived just long enough to make a few short recordings...

He’s the missing link of musical Romanticism: a man of uncompromising ideals, the greatest violinist of his day and an accomplished composer. Yet today Joseph Joachim is barely remembered. Because he was more famous as a performer than as a creator, he has slipped behind his closest friends in terms of repute. And since those friends included Robert and Clara Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Felix Mendelssohn and -- for a while -- Franz Liszt, perhaps it’s no wonder.

Now, though, the British violinist Daniel Hope (right) is setting out to restore Joachim to his rightful place as the lynchpin of music-making in the Romantic era, with a new CD entitled The Romantic Violin. And it’s not a moment too soon, for some of the 19^th century’s crucial musical developments revolved around this extraordinary, and extraordinarily cantankerous, artist.

The idea, Hope says, has been bubbling away for years. Joachim (1831-1907) lived long enough to make a few gramophone records towards the end of his life; Hope’s fascination began when he heard those recordings as a child. “By then he wasn’t in his heyday, but there was something very distinct about his sound,” says Hope. “His exceptionally pure tone always intrigued me.”

He found that Joachim’s name “just kept popping up” as dedicatee of countless works, including the Brahms Violin Concerto and pieces by both the Schumanns. As he learned more, Hope was “amazed by the breadth of talent Joachim had, not just in playing the violin but in forging new approaches in musical expression, making new programmes, rediscovering the Beethoven Violin Concerto. He was tremendously interested in poetry, the arts, humanity in general, and he embodied the Romantic spirit more than any other violinist.”

As a child prodigy, the young Joachim was dandled, metaphorically, on the musical lap of Mendelssohn, who was not only his mentor but conducted a performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto in which Joachim, aged 13, was the soloist. “Without that performance, the concerto might have disappeared,” says Hope. “Until then, violinists had treated it as little more than an exercise. But Joachim played the music as he felt it. It must have been a complete revelation.”

Liszt, then honorary kapellmeister to the court in Weimar, persuaded the still teenaged violinist to become leader of his orchestra in 1848. There Joachim joined Liszt’s group of young disciples for several years. But another friendship soon came about which altered matters considerably: that with Johannes Brahms, two years Joachim’s junior.

It was Joachim who famously provided the 20-year-old Brahms with a letter of introduction to Robert and Clara Schumann, a meeting that profoundly affected the course of Brahms’s life and music. But just before that, Brahms went to see Joachim and Liszt in Weimar. This had a different result, equally lasting. When Liszt played his B minor Sonata to his assembled students, Brahms made a crucial faux pas: he fell asleep. His lack of sympathy with Liszt’s style was a sign of things to come.

What ensued later was the so-called ‘War of the Romantics’, which split the aesthetic of new music in Europe into two separate directions. In one camp were Liszt, Wagner and their followers, determined to create “the music of the future”, shaking up old preconceptions about style, harmony and structure; in the other camp, Brahms, Joachim and Clara Schumann, among others, deplored such iconoclasm and showiness.

But it was largely due to Joachim that the split became unreasonably vitriolic. A letter he wrote to the generous Liszt in 1857, refusing his invitation to perform in a festival in Weimar, simply beggars belief:

“Your music is entirely antagonistic to me,” he wrote. “It contradicts everything with which the spirits of our great ones have nourished my mind from my earliest youth. If it were thinkable that…I should ever have to renounce all that I learnt to love and honour in their creations, all that I feel music to be, your strains would not fill one corner of the vast waste of nothingness…”

Joachim thus ratched up the heat of the ongoing arguments and set the tone for much of what followed from the likes of Wagner himself and (on the side of Joachim and Brahms) the notorious critic Eduard Hanslick. But why was he so bitter?

It could be that the crux was Joachim’s own longing to be a finer composer than he was. Two of his most beautiful works feature on Hope’s CD, but alongside his friends, his music pales by comparison and he would have been the first to admit it. Perhaps because of that inward disappointment, he was a tortured soul.

His letters often reflect the dark side of his nature: he possessed the capacity for hyper-criticism of his nearest and dearest that often goes with great sensitivity and perceptiveness. For instance, despite his closeness to Brahms he would not demur from describing him as ‘egotism itself’ to a friend. His marriage to the singer Amalie Schneeweiss ended in acrimonious divorce (a rare decision in those times); that in turn sparked a serious fallout with Brahms.

But it was the Liszt incident that changed the future of music. “If Joachim had not split with Liszt,” says Hope, “the Liszt Violin Concerto would not have been forgotten; and there might have been one by Wagner. Instead, we have Brahms, Schumann, Dvorák, Bruch…”

Nothing wrong with those, of course; and Joachim’s input requires attention, especially for Bruch’s Concerto No.1, which opens Hope’s CD. “In its first version the concerto wasn’t a success,” Hope says. “Bruch then enlisted Joachim’s help, because with his fame and his ability he could save pieces. Sure enough, he revised it radically.” The concerto partly owes its popularity to Joachim’s rewrites. “And in terms of German Romantic sensibility, it reaches a zone beyond any of the others.”

Joachim’s attitude to Romanticism was quite unlike our general notion of it today, which is closer to that of Liszt and Wagner. “It’s interesting that Joachim was the violinist whose tone was the purest,” says Hope. “It’s like listening pure emotion. Other violinists who recorded around the same time couldn’t sound more different -- perfumed, beautiful, fantastic playing, but showy. That is how Romanticism, as we define it, happened; but it has little to do with what the Romantic movement was really about.”

The CD, Hope says, is the starting point for many of his concert programmes and projects this year. He is never less than snowed under: shortly his third book, Toi Toi Toi, is being released -- “a chronicle of musical superstitions and disasters, including my own,” he says -- and he’s about to assume a new festival directorship in Mecklenburg, Germany. That makes it all the more impressive that he’s spending so much time and effort focusing attention on Joachim. Stand by for some seriously amazing music-making. The CD is out tomorrow.

Here is Joachim himself in the Bach G minor Adagio, recorded in 1904. An ultimate Friday Historical.

Aladdin's Cybercave

2011-03-06T17:27:00.000+07:00

(FURTHER UPDATE: Norman Lebrecht told me he'd had virus complaints about the recordings, but a distressed message from Brompton's tells me that there's no reason this should be so and that the intention is simply to issue the best historical recordings for free.)

How to win a lot of musical friends very fast: offer free historical recording downloads, just like these ones here. British auction house Brompton's has uploaded a music library which, for historical recording junkies like me, can only be described as an Aladdin's cybercave. Legendary string players all: Huberman in the Beethoven Concerto. Jacques Thibaud in Mozart. Rabin plays Ysaye. Sammons plays the Elgar Concerto. The Budapest String Quartet, Kreisler, Heifetz, Gioconda de Vito, the gang's all there. On your marks - get set - register! (Unless you're in America, which cannot access the collection because of copyright.)

It's amazing how we take the availability of historical recordings for granted, though. When I was a student, back in the 80s, they were rare nuggets of gold-dust to be run to earth on LP in Garon Records (conveniently it was 3 minutes from my bedsit) or dug out, remastered and reissued on those new-fangled CDs from mysterious sources by those in the know, eventually coming to light on labels like Pearl, Biddulph and EMI References. I will never forget the first time I heard a recording of Rachmaninov. I was in Oscar Shumsky's front room outside New York sometime in 1986 and he asked me if I had heard Rachmaninov's playing. When I admitted I hadn't, the great violinist brought out a big, cherished box of LPs and put on some of the preludes and song transcriptions. We all sat there as if hypnotised - partly by reverence at the notion of listening to this beloved composer playing his own works, in person, and partly by the playing itself, rich-toned, multi-nuanced, many-voiced, the phrasing as vocal as Chaliapin. Magic.

While it's fantastic to be surrounded on a regular basis by recordings of the golden greats, it's also good to remember that we have to keep valuing them. On the other hand, if you're a performer today, the downside of all this means that you have to compete for an audience not only with the living, but also with the dead. There are some great musicians around today, too. I hope to be very near one of them this weekend...

When Jess met Valery...

2011-03-06T17:24:00.003+07:00

My interview with Valery Gergiev is out now in today's Independent. Read it all here.

Among other things, I asked him whether - since he can move mountains to make things happen in Russia - with his LSO hat on, he would also fight for the continuing health of our arts scene here.

"Not only if I am asked," he says at once. "I am always ready to do it – and whatever possible will be done at the right moment. When a new government comes in, it takes up to a year to understand what the promise is, or was; then what the reality is; and the big economic reality outside. Nobody can grant any country or city in the world a leadership for five years unless there is a very dynamic process of thinking, not only about economic developments, but also cultural developments; if these become nationally important then they become also globally important. I believe that the LSO, the Royal Opera House and the British Museum are national symbols...

... "Support for cultural institutions should not become smaller and smaller – it's dangerous," Gergiev declares. "It's not going to be the American way in the UK." He points out that the tradition for private philanthropic support for the arts in the US has been in place for more than 100 years.

"Many great institutions there have been supported for decades; sometimes more than 50 per cent of their strength comes from individuals' or corporate support – which now is also changing. It would be very dangerous and naive to think this will happen overnight in the UK, to think that the state support for certain arts institutions can reduce because the individuals' contribution will increase. I am afraid both will reduce. And that would be deadly."

Do late works really sound late?

2011-03-06T17:23:00.001+07:00

My column for the March issue of Standpoint Magazine is based on the pre-concert talk I gave for Mahler's Ninth Symphony in Birmingham a few weeks ago, in the CBSO's My Mahler series. The question - which also takes in Mozart, Schubert, Schumann and a bit of cultural conditioning - is whether a composer's late works sometimes really do 'sound late', even if the composer is not exactly over the hill. And if they do, why and how is this possible? No answers on postcards, but I hope you enjoy the piece.

Butterflitting...

2011-03-06T17:21:00.001+07:00

I was at the opening night of Madam Butterfly at the Royal Albert Hall - here's my review from today's Independent. Thoughts about the whys and wherefores of this are butterflitting about. This very popular in-the-round and sung-in-English production has a job to do and it does this very well. The singing was pretty damn good. David Freeman brings out some acute psychological detail that enhances the drama, too. But there was so much that got up my nose: the amplification, the dragging pace, the way that the setting just swallows the silken embroidery of the score's detail, and I have a job to do too, so I have to say so.

And yet... I took along my niece, who'd never heard it before, and she was entranced. The thing is sold out and they've scheduled extra performances. It's a chance for thousands of people to discover Butterfly in a (supposedly) user-friendly place, sung in the vernacular (even if you can't hear many of the words) and in a production that doesn't muck around with concepts but just tells the story, which is quite enough on its own, thanks. This is all a Very Good Thing. So I feel extremely churlish about grumbling. But I know the score well, I love the opera to pieces and this is the only time I haven't had to get out my hanky at the end. Which means it doesn't deliver enough.

What do you think? Am I being fair?

A Farewell to Fodor

2011-03-06T17:20:00.001+07:00

The news has just reached me (via Norman Lebrecht's Slipped Disc) that the violinist Eugene Fodor has died, aged 60. He claimed to be Heifetz's last disciple, though some others say he wasn't. He also had the more dubious accolade of being my weirdest-ever interviewee.

I met Eugene in spring 1994. At that time I was in crisis after the death of my mother that February and to get myself through I'd taken up a yoga and meditation system that involved vegetarianism, ashrams, a guru and so forth. Eugene was in town to play at the Wigmore Hall and The Strad wanted an interview, so I went up to Muswell Hill to talk to him. About ten minutes into the interview, some of his remarks began to ring bells: he practised yoga and meditation, he said, but it wasn't a religious thing, just a spiritual one that enhanced the &c&c&c. It turned out, of course, that we were doing the same method, had the same guru... and along came the Sanskrit passwords and greeting, after which we were supposed to be best buddies. He turned up that week at the Thursday evening central London "satsang" and kindly offered anyone there who wanted to go free tickets for his Wigmore recital (somewhat to the consternation of his concert manager, I think).

During the interview he talked a lot, very movingly, about Heifetz, the Tchaikovsky Competition and why violin playing is a form of mysticism; we discussed technique and he showed me a trick he had of putting resin on the fingertips of his bowing hand to enhance control (this didn't go into the article). He said nevertheless that were I to ask any questions about the allegations of substance abuse or his arrest, he'd stop the interview there and then. So we talked violin. I wrote an article that eventually was entitled "Fodor's Guide to Violin Playing", which you can read on his website.

Six or eight of us from the meditation centre went along to the Wigmore. The Strad, meanwhile, had asked me to review the recital. Fodor's technique was dazzling indeed in the showpieces; with a powerful sound and remarkable security, he inspired much enthusiasm in a very impressed hall. But the Brahms sonata was deeply uncomfortable, not least because he seemed to be at war with his pianist, who looked on the point of collapse. I congratulated him backstage, escaped home and wrote an honest review of what I'd witnessed.

A week or two later I was staying with my father when the phone rings and there's Eugene. The magazine had a new editor who, for reasons that escape me, had agreed to fax my unpublished review to the artist when said artist requested it. Eugene wasn't too happy. So he had written another one. Couldn't we run that instead? Probably not, I said. He faxed it through. To say that the writing was not my style would have been putting it a bit mildly. And for some reason I didn't much like the notion of putting my name to a non-review of a concert written by the performer himself, even if we did both have the same guru and Sanskrit greeting. The contrite editor was on my side and my review appeared as written. Eugene rang again. Dad told him I was out. Not long afterwards I looked at his website. There upon it was his own review of his own London recital. (It isn't there now.)

I didn't go back to the meditation centre. It was revealed, not long afterwards, to be a very dubious organisation indeed, so Mr Fodor had done me a great favour. A strange man, but a wonderful violinist. I shall never forget him.

On the way to 'Let Me In'

2011-03-06T17:19:00.000+07:00

No, not the vampire movie. We came up with the title well before posters for the horror film hit the London Tube. Our Let Me In is a wee bit different from that. It will be premiered by the magnificent choir Chanticleer in California on 26 March and given a number of performances in the environs during the ensuing week. It's an a cappella choral piece by Roxanna Panufnik, one of three new works commissioned from different composers by the American choir for a project based on episodes in the life of Jesus. They'll perform them alongside existing music by Part, Gorecki and Mason Bates. And if you're wondering how a nice Jewish girl who likes Richard Dawkins and scribbles for the JC ends up doing the words, read on...

When Rox (who's Roman Catholic) asked me for a poem to set, I think my first words were "You do know I'm a Jewish atheist, don't you?" Of course she did - we've been great friends for more years than I'd care to state - but the human element of the story was, she felt, more important than the faith. Having selected the childhood of Jesus as her patch, she'd read the Gnostic Gospels (I wanted to know if there were some Agnostic ones too) and settled on a story in which the boy Jesus meets a grieving mother whose child has died. He resurrects the baby. As a mum of three, Rox was deeply drawn to the emotions of this tale. And she was well aware that I know more than I'd have liked to know about bereavement.

The project soon turned into one of those creative onions in which you peel off one layer only to find ten more with ever-stronger flavours underneath. I suggested that we set the narrative in the early Jewish community in which the Gnostic Gospels suggest it could have taken place (eg, in one of the other stories, to which we make passing reference, our lad is told off for making clay birds on the Sabbath).

I filled the first part of the poem with imagery from the traditional rituals of Jewish mourning: the covered mirrors, the torn robes, etc. But the twist is that the mother is nearly losing her mind in her grief and won't allow anyone into the house to sit with her. A boy appears outside, calling: "Let me in!" The crowd are suspicious: they have heard frightening stories of this child's uncanny powers. But so has the mother: she opens the door, recognising he is the one person who could help her. He does. The baby is returned to life. Amid general jubilation, the boy slips away unnoticed.

But how to depict the background in the music? Rox wrote to the marvellous Professor Alex Knapp, expert on Jewish traditional music, who talked us through early settings of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. We visited Jackie, a cantor in North London, who offered even more detail on the topic and sang some to us, her voice carrying exactly the focus of spiritual energy that I think Rox was hoping to find in these powerful chants. The earliest version that could be traced was a Yemenite melody infused with a rawness and intensity that grabbed us both by the innards. This Kaddish runs through the first part of the piece.

So far I've heard Let Me In only on Rox's Sibelius computer, but on first listening I was bowled over by the emotional oomph in her harmonies and the way the vocal lines rise up through the keening pulsation of the texture, rather like trying to find one's way through a forest of exotic plants. It's a story to be told - but also to be felt in the gut. Rox has just been appointed as the London Mozart Players' first associate composer. They're in for a treat.

As for the movie...well, I didn't go because I don't get on with that kindathang. But it was nice to see the title of our piece plastered all over the walls at Bond Street Station.

Meanwhile it's turned out there's still another Let Me In! Here it is...

Daniel Hope & the Missing Link

2011-03-06T17:15:00.001+07:00

Here is Joachim himself in the Bach G minor Adagio, recorded in 1904. An ultimate Friday Historical.

Daniel Hope & the Missing Link

2011-03-06T17:14:00.001+07:00

Here is Joachim himself in the Bach G minor Adagio, recorded in 1904. An ultimate Friday Historical.