Quicker than Barcelona with Fabregas or Beckham when a camera’s pointing his way, the London Philharmonic Orchestra has locked its two conductors into long contract renewals. Vladimir Jurowski has signed on til mid-2015 and Yannick Nézét-Séguin til mid-2014.
This is good business all round. The rising Juro, 38, also music director at Glyndebourne, is attracting lots of US interest. Yannick N-S, 35, is music director in Rotterdam and the first Canadian baton to win international attention.
In a boom economy, their agents would be sifting million-dollar bids. But the US orchestral sector is presently catatonic with fear, Europe has caught Greek pneumonia and both young men have still a lot of rep to master before they step up to a major league club.
Better for them to weather the recession in London’s diverse and uniquely competitive musical economy before emerging strengthened into the long-promised recovery. Smart maestros are staying put in 2010.
My first university lecture in Sociology, long ago, dealt with the official abuse of data and quoted Mark Twain’s famous aphorism (which he attributed dubiously to Benjamin Disraeli): ‘There are lies, damned lies and statistics’.
The account of UK classical record sales in 2009 from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) calls that admonition gloomily to mind. If you believe the BPI, two Universal labels now command more than half the UK market. Deutsche Grammophon and Decca have a combined 58 percent share, way ahead of plummeting rival EMI, which is down to 9.2%.
But that depends what you call ‘classical’. The BPI counts as classical pretty much anything that comes its way from major classical labels – including Katherine Jenkins’ pop smooch, TV talent show winners, Bryn Terfel singing Andrew Lloyd Webber, Il Divo, Sarah Brightman and the Band of the Coldstream Guards. All a label has to do is label a title Now That’s What I Call Classical, and into the stats it goes.
The real market is rather different. While DG and tacked-on Decca have gone on an all-out grab for overnight sensations, EMI Classics has reclaimed the classical high ground with a list that is free of gimmicks and, at times, ear-prickingly original. It has a raft of new stars in Natalie Dessay, Kate Royal and Philippe Jaroussky and it is signing them young and longterm. It is, in other words, behaving like a classical label.
So why has it lost market share? Fact: it hasn’t. On the classical side, EMI’s figures are looking so good that (I gather) parent hedge fund Terra Firma has given the go-ahead for further signings. There is a discernable bounce feeling at EMI, and that doesn’t come from trailing in the charts.
Overall, consumer habits are changing and the BPI-rated classical share of a shrinking UK market is down to just over 3 percent, little more a quarter of where it stood in the 1990s CD boom. But making a living in classical music is about building audience loyalty. You don’t get that from TV constests, from Andre Rieu or even from Kathleen Jenkins sings for our boys in Afghanistan. There are many reasons why Lang Lang quit Deutsche Grammophon, but one of them is that its former prestige as a classical label no longer counts for much.
Claudio Abbado has been admitted to a clinic in Berlin for treatment that is likely to last several weeks, according to his doctor’s statement. The conductor, 76, had a large part of his stomach removed a decade ago in the course of cancer treatment, shortly after stepping down as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic.
His musical recovery has been miraculous and his Mahler performances with his own hand-picked orchestra at the Lucerne summer festival have been a cultural highlight of the European calendar.
The undisclosed illness has obliged Abbado to cancel a sentimental return next month to La Scala, where he was music director from 1968 to 1986, and there is no suggestion at this point that he may also pull out of Lucerne. Three years ago, he cancelled all engagements ‘in the near future’, but bounced back within two months. Everyone who cares about music will be praying that his present recovery is just as swift and complete.
But who fills in while Abbado is out? There is an opportunity here for a 30-something to step up. In the absence of Mariss Jansons, who is undergoing cardiac care, his fellow-Latvian and only pupil Andris Nelsons has leaped in at the Vienna Opera and various German venues. Being a good pupil and a decent man, Nelsons insists that he is only keeping the seat warm for Mariss’s return, but the appearances have greatly boosted his continental career, beyond the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, where he is music director.
Abbado, however, has no obvious substitute. If the music business runs to form, it will plunk in some Zubin Mehta or Lorin Maazel to please the front-row fat-cat donors. But if the future of music matters to summer festival organisers, they should be rummaging among a talented crop of up-and-comings, all in their 20s and 30s, certainly the most gifted pack since Abbado, Muti, Levine and Barenboim were strutting their youthful stuff.
I could name names, but I’ll save them for another post.
It was a cheap and hackneyed way of filling three pages. After the new Tory culture secretary Jeremy Hunt made his inaugural speech, the Guardian newspaper asked heads of UK arts institutions to respond. All did so in the same fawning tones as they used only last month with the outgoing Labour secretary – and you can hardly blame them since a large chunk of their budget is dependent on government whim.
The lone exception was Liz Forgan, chair of Arts Council England, who nannyingly instructed ‘every member of the government to go out and actually experience an art event… preferably in the company of someone under 12.’ Liz, a diehard Labourite, is due for the chop and her organisation will not long survive unreformed.
Six spots below we meet, in large type on the pages of the Guardian and uncorrected on its website, somebody called ‘John Betty’ of English National Opera, who has yet to cross my radar. Could they possibly be referring to John Berry, ENO’s artistic director?
Berry is one half of the team that brought ENO back from a near-death precipice. He is well known and liked across the arts and he can – I can vouch from many communications – spell his own name. How on earth did the Guardian transform him from robust Berry to rather wimpish Betty? Did some unpaid intern, pushing the free copy onto three pages, think it looked better that way? Was there no journalist on duty? Should Peter Geld (sic) be worried about his next policy statement from the Met? And Gerard Mortuary?
I guess John will get an apology in the next few days, but I wonder who’s next for a Grauniad lapse. The German Chancellor cannot know how close she comes nightly to being mistaken for a lewd medieval object while the White House must be offering bedtime prayers that the organ of British left-rectitude does not headline its master as ‘President Osama’.
It’s all part of a great Grauniad tradition. As Gustav Mahler famously said of the Vienna Opera: ‘what passes for tradition is usually an excuse for Schlamperei (sloppiness).’ Obviously, he was another satisfied Guardian reader.
Yvonne Loriod, second wife and longterm widow of the composer Olivier Messiaen, has died near Paris, aged 86. An intense and introspective pianist, she was only ever referred to as the wife or widow of a great man.
Loriod undertook that role with due humilty, appearing mostly in performances of her husband’s music. When one saw her in concert in the Turangalila symphony, Messiaen’s most popular work, it was a reminder was that she was the original object of his frustrated sexual desires during the long period of first wife’s physical and mental decline. Yvonne’s sister, Jeanne, often played the ondes martenot in the same work. It was a family show.
Yvonne married the devoutly Catholic Messiaen in 1961; he died in 1992. I never heard Yvonne utter a syllable of regret about her secondary status as wife and relict. On the contrary, like many widows, she devoted the years of mourning to securing posterity for her husband’s music. I did wonder whether in her heart of hearts she might not have hankered for a separate identity. There is a Youtube clip of her playing part of the Alban Berg piano sonata which suggests she had extensive interests beyond Messiaen.
Be that as it may, Loriod revelled in her role as relic, much as the good Veuve must have done when the great champagne maker Cliquot predeceased her. Sic transit gloria mundi.
A short obituary of Yvonne has appeared online in Le Monde. My more sceptical assessment of Messiaen can be read here.
Word has broken at the Cannes Festival of final casting for the film of my first novel, The Song of Names. Hoffman and Hopkins have signed up to play Dovidl and Martin in an international production, directed by Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog).
The Hollywood Reporter was first with the story. Shooting is scheduled for later this year and release for 2011. Further details will follow as soon as I am allowed to disclose them – especially, how the music is going to work since it is so integral to the story. The score will be by Titanic composer, James Horner.
The producer, Nick Hirschkorn, has moved mountains to make this happen in a climate when the big studios are slamming down the hatches and the little ones are trying to make movies on minuscule budgets.
Movie rights in The Song of Names were sold well before it won a Whitbread Award in 2003. This development has been a long time coming to fruition, but all the sweeter to see it happening in a time of such harsh financial realism.
More background can be be found here.
And here’s some rapid comment from New York magazine.
England’s football team threw away its best chance today by announcing Marks & Spencer as supplier of the official team suits. Trust me, nobody wins anything in an M&S suit.
Socks? sure. Underpants? unbeatable. Sweaters? sometimes. But M&S suits have a quality of undesign that make them crumple in all the wrong places and hang like carboard from the rest. Take a look at the squeamish looking team pics released today:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/men/article7127380.ece
Examine what is professionally known as the lunchbox area. Does that look wearable? I am not a fashion fanatic like opera chic nor a professional footballer, but I know the cut of a good jib and M&S just ain’t got it.
You might as well send Wayne Rooney out to play in carpet slippers for all the good these suits will do to England’s chances next month. Who chose that austerity grey, that cheap-look crimpline, those bus-conductor lapels?
Which feeble-minded football official did that scuzzy deal with a high-street chain renowned for everything but its suits? As a cultural commentator, I face many difficult and challenging questions of taste, but this isn’t one of them. It is a total absence of taste.
And this is a team with an Italian in charge, for heaven’s sake. They’ll be a laughing stock on any street in Milano.
Get those suits off before the team gets on the plane.
MORE NEWS JUST IN from operachic: Apparently the Italian team are wearing Dolce & Gabbana underpants – at least until they step into the shower, as this video demonstrates.
How can out boys compete with D&G in M&S suits, I ask you!
Although it has yet to be announced, it seems certain that Ed Vaizey will become Minister for the Arts in the Cameron-Clegg government. Before Ed gets too excited, he should know that it is a lowly job from which no minister in my memory has emerged with much credit.
A middle-ranking civil servant at the Culture Department was telling me the other day about how he was asked to write a paper for a former Minister for the Arts, whose blushes I will spare by withholding his identity. All I need to disclose is that he was a schoolteacher before he went into politics. The official did what was required and was surprised, the following day, to be summoned for a carpeting by the Permanent Secretary of the Department.
‘I have received your paper back from the minister,’ said the PS.
‘Ye-es?’ quavered my guy.
‘It has come back with corrections. In red ink. There appear to be errors of syntax and spelling.’
‘Terribly sorry, Permanent Secretary…’
‘Oh, don’t worry about it, dear boy. The poor minister has nothing better to do. Nothing at all.’
Love the Times front-page pic today of Lady Warsi, the new Conservative Party chair, posing in front of 10 Downing Street with her handbag at her feet and her coat slung across a railing but still within the frame.
Where were the fixers, the photo-oppers, the spinners and mind-benders who controlled all such occasions under the New Labour regime that is alreader deader than do-dos? Mandy, Campbell, crunch-buckets and soil-splashers would never had allowed such a thing.
One of the most refreshing aspects of the new government is that ministers can dare – for a while, at least – to be themselves, coats and all. Gone are control freaks, along with all the flunkeys, bag carriers, coat hangers and political advisors – gone as the snows of yesteryear (is that Pushkin? someone help me out).
Less cheering is the news that the Times, having worked them to death in the election, is getting rid of ten percent of its editorial staff to stem haemmorhaging losses. Next year’s Times content will be written by interns. And can you find today’s front page pic online? I couldn’t. It’s confusion as usual in the daily rags.
Although arts chiefs uniformly support Labour at election time, their backing this year was half-hearted. After 13 years of Blair-Brown rule, there is appetite for change at the top of the arts and the new regime can deliver several benefits.
1 Mitigate Cuts
The outgoing government had warned arts organisations to expect ten percent budget hits in each of the next three years. Much of that has been put into repertoire planning. What the new government can do is make sure it does not exceed the Labour cuts and, where possible, softens them.
2 Fairness
Jeremy Hunt, the new Culture Secretary, had told organisations to expect equal pain. That was the wrong message. Everyone must have prizes (or punishment) was Labour’s message. The new regime must make it clear that it takes clear decisions and rewards merit.
3 Consistency
Labour changed Culture Secretary three times in two years, showing how low the arts ranked in its priorities. The new team needs to stay in place for at least three years.
4 Support
Tony Blair hated opera, classical music and most high arts. Gordon Brown wasn’t interested. Even Cool Britannia was disowned when pop stars trashed a Downing Street reception. A night at the opera by Cameron or Clegg would send a strong signal of support.
5 Abolish bureacracy
The Blair-Brown years will be remembered as a time when arts company chiefs spent more time filling in forms than attending rehearsals. Most had to do with activating Labour policy on education, social integration and equality. Orchestras were asked to report how many Afro-Asian immigrants attended their concerts. Amazon forests were felled to fuel Labour’s paper trail. The new government should let the arts focus on the arts and leave social policy to the political wonks.
6 Restore freedom
Under Labour the arts were yoked to government policy. A Culture Department official, Alan Davey, was sent to run the Arts Council, whose chairmen were Labour donors or supporters. The Council is discredited and should be devolved and scrapped. But first it must be depoliticised. A change of faces at the top will be necessary, and well received.
The coming years are going to be hard going for British arts, but loosening central controls – abandoning control freak machinery – would create a new modus vivendi that allows the arts to flourish and government to appear enlightened. It can be done.
Germany’s two senior composers have not exchanged a civil word in 30 years. Hans Werner Henze and Helmut Lachenmann are natural antipodes. Henze is expressive, extravert, gay, socialist and rich. Lachenmann is ascetic, precise, married to a Japanese pianist, and a professor at Harvard.
They have been sworn enemies since Henze, in some published musings, attacked Lachenmann for writing musica negativa. The pair then had a ding-dong on Stuttgart Radio in which the less flamboyant composer felt he was given insufficient chance to counter the accusation. Since then, they have co-existed in uneasy silence, broken by the occasional barbed letter to a music magazine.
So there was a certain anxiety when, this week, the Royal College of Music called in its patron, Prince Charles, to present Henze with an honorary doctorate in a ceremony attended by Lachenmann.
Whether it was something in the air, as Cameron and Clegg were forming Britain’s first coalition government since the war, or whether the two old gents were simply looking for someone else who spoke German, to everyone’s astonishment Lachenmann marched up to embrace Henze and the pair chatted away happily into the night – a reunion captured by photographer Chris Christodoulou (pictures here and here).
Now before you all go ooh, ahh and why should I care?, this is a very big deal indeed in the annals of German music. It’s rather like Bach and Handel bumping into one another at the eye doctors and declaring eternal brotherhood, or Wagner inviting Brahms to Bayreuth and greeting him with a great big kiss. With tongues.
It’s a breakthrough moment, a dawning of sweetness and light, a time for happily ever after, a lesson to us all. So who’s next? A hug from Barenboim to Thielemann? Boulez sending an 80th birthday card to Stephen Sondheim? All the Wagner family having lunch together? Any London orchestra saying nice things about another? Let’s not get carried away…
Jeremy Hunt has been announced as Secretary for Culture, Media and Sport in the new Con-Lib British government. He will also inherit the separate and unnecessary job of minister for the Olympics, a seat created by Gordon Brown to keep Tessa Jowell off the dole.
Merging the roles makes sense. It may also create savings in two obese organisations.
Hunt is culturally literate and fiscally severe. He has told heads of arts organisations that there will be no exemptions from the imminent cuts. The successful will be treated as harshly as the failures, at least in the first sweep. He may need to revise that line.
In the election run-up, Hunt promised not to abolish the Arts Council, a bureaucracy that lost all independence under Labour and became an arm of government. That pledge, too, might be ripe for reconsideration. In the first instance, he will need to depose the Arts Council chair, Liz Forgan, a card-carrying Labour loyalist.
The arts element of the 2012 Olympics will also be high on the agenda. Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, has his antennae out for political capital.
Watch this space for more.
