Here, to mark the day, is 10 minutes of Melvyn Bragg’s SBS television profile.

Note the clarity and literacy of Melvyn’s script. All too rare on telly, these days.

photos: (c) Betty Freeman/Lebrecht Music and Arts

And here, more recently, is Tommy Pearson’s filmed interview.

 

The visual arts and public enlightenment have been thrown out of Whitehall by the Hulture Secretary and put under the management of Arts Council England. There is no perceptible cost saving and not much change of personnel.

It just gives more power to the bumbling ACE and more misery to artists and readers. Here‘s the press release.

Jakob Hrusa is the new top man at the Royal Danish Opera. He starts work immediately and assumes the title of music director in September 2013.

A protégé of Jiri Belohlavek, Hrusa has earned his spurs at Glyndebourne as director of the touring opera.

He has just turned 30 and is going places, fast.

The Royal Danish Theatre website does not list a previous music director. The house is mired in a drugs scandal at its ballet company that the present administration has persistently refused to address.

Cathy Graham, head of music at the British Council, was telling me the other day about her trip to Afghanistan to foster grass-roots efforts to restore music education, banned under the Taliban.

When she described the first music school in Kabul, I had an irresistible urge to share her story. Cathy has written the text below and taken the pictures. Since her visit, the British Council has been the target for a massive Taliban attack.

The first music school in Kabul

(c) Cathy Graham

It felt like sitting in a particularly accessible Headmaster’s office in any lively school at the beginning of term.  The door kept opening and a head would poke round with an essential piece of information or a question.  Sometimes it was a parent, sometimes a teacher, sometimes a child.  The atmosphere was buzzing and you never knew quite what to expect next.  In many ways it was hard to believe I was sitting in Kabul in the first music school to open post-Taliban; in other ways it was impossible to forget.

I had arrived two days earlier on a flight from Dubai at exactly the time a pastor in Florida was burning the Koran.  In retaliation, the worst attack against a UN compound in Afghanistan had just occurred in Mazar-i-Sharif, a NATO military base had been attacked on the outskirts of Kabul, and I was driven to the British Council compound where I was grounded for several days in what was then a safe haven, waiting for the unrest to settle in the city.

Eventually it was possible for me to travel through Kabul, making contacts with arts organisations, learning about the reality of their every day existence and looking for opportunities to create bridges with the UK.  The dry, dusty city, bathed in weak sunshine and surrounded by high mountains had a beauty and a charisma that exerted a strong pull. I had heard that Afghanistan gets under the skin of a traveller, but I had never expected it to happen so quickly.  But the combination of the landscape and the dignity and hospitality of the people I met was a potent one.

And nothing affected me more strongly than experiencing the first steps of a nation reclaiming its musical heritage and developing its musical future through investing in the talent of young children at the Afghan National Institute of Music.  Founded by Dr Ahmad Sarmast and opened in 2010 with the assistance of Afghanistan’s Ministry of Education, it is housed in the old School of Fine Arts.  The number of students currently stands at 150, though the ambition is to take in 300 between 10 and 20 years of age, half of whom will be girls.

Dr Sarmast received his education at the Moscow conservatoire, continuing his studies in Australia where he was exiled for many years and where he has a Phd in Afghan music from the University of Monash.  He returned to Afghanistan in 2006 to see the impact of the years of war and discrimination against music, and to see how he could start to repair the damage done during a period when music was banned.  With his formidable vision and energy he is building a future based on music as a healing power – half of ANIM’s students are war orphans from the streets of Afghanistan – and its ability to provide revenue for both the country and for musicians.

Generous funding from many bodies, notably the World Bank, has provided classrooms, store-rooms of instruments, computers with Sibelius software and hand-crafted furniture made from local materials.  The one area where the school still needs help is with teaching staff – not only for the students, but also to train the teachers.  The curriculum is based around Afghan and Western classical music – though extracurricular activities already include a rock band and a jazz band – and every lesson is taken by two teachers, one a qualified teacher from outside the country, and one Afghan.  Dr Sarmast hopes that after the first five year period he will have trained enough teachers to operate with an all-Afghan teaching corps.

I will never forget witnessing the first rehearsal of ANIM’s newly-formed Wind Band, featuring probably the first female saxophone player in Afghanistan.  I had to leave at the point when two young horn players, hidden behind the bulk of their instruments, were trying to hone in on the same note. And on the way out, I managed to capture on camera a young girl’s look of happy anticipation on her first day at the school.

Sadly, following the devastating attack on the British Council offices in Kabul six weeks ago, the safe haven where I found refuge no longer exists.  However, it makes me very happy indeed that in spite of that the British Council is in a position to explore ways in which it can support ANIM on its journey to maturity.  In contributing to the development of ANIM’s teaching staff, we have the chance to leave a long-lasting mark of friendship in the face of near-insurmountable challenges.

I promised you the results of the 2011 Ig-Nobel awards for improbable science – and you will not be disappointed.

The outstanding winner, for me, the medicine prize for outstanding research in

“The Effect of Acute Increase in Urge to Void on Cognitive Function in Healthy Adults,” Matthew S. Lewis, Peter J. Snyder, Robert H. Pietrzak, David Darby, Robert A. Feldman, Paul T. Maruff, Neurology and Urodynamics, vol. 30, no. 1, January 2011, pp. 183-7.

A far more pressing piece of research, especially for musical situations, than the runner-up

“Inhibitory spillover: Increased Urination Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains,” Mirjam A. Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop, Psychological Science, vol. 22, no. 5, May 2011, pp. 627-633.

But see the list for yourselves.

My ovulating sopranos were submitted too late for this year’s awards, but I’ve been promised a shortlisting in 2012.

I’ve received word that Valentina Lisitsa, watched by millions on youtube, is about to give an unscheduled Liszt recital here

in a 12th century village church on the outskirts of London. St Mary’s, Perivale,

is a popular venue with young artists trying out new rep on a fine concert grand. Val will be there this Wednesday at 7.30. Tickets are £10 at the door. No on-line sales. Critics are distinctly unwelcomed.

I can’t even advise you how to get there, having only ever been driven in by car. It’s on the western edge of London. Go. Val’s worth it.

You would expect a major record company to supply sound with its product, wouldn’t you?

Well, it seems to be beyond the present skill set of EMI, as the poor old label lies on the Citibank chopping block.

This week, EMI launched The Callas Effect – a compilation of old tracks and pics – and put up a four-minute trailer on youtube.

Without sound.

Watch it here.

Not a peep.

Next time I get asked out to lunch by EMI, I’m taking sandwiches.

First Seiji Ozawa‘s comeback plans were stymied by a severe health setback.

Now Tadaaki Otaka, artistic director of Tokyo’s New National Theatre, has cancelled his only conducting commitment this season, citing arm and neck problems. He will be replaced in Salome by Ralf Weikert.

Happily, Otaka expects the arm and neck to be well enough to conduct less arduous symphony concerts.

But I guess NNT will be joining the long line of opera houses looking for fresh artistic leadership.

The enterprising Ealing Festival are putting on Ligeti’s 100 Metronomes as part of their Hungarian theme, but can’t lay hands on the full 100 at short notice. West London, it appears, is low on metronomes.

If you have one to lend and you live on the Central Line (or thereabouts), drop a line to the artistic director, gillian.spragg@gmail.com.

If you don’t have one, a spare conductor might do…

Oh, and if you haven’t heard the Ligeti masterpiece, don’t miss.

Mark Gorenstein, who caused a stir by abusing an Armenian soloist at the Tchaikovsky competition, has been dismissed from his post with the Svetlanov Orchestra by the Russian Ministry of Culture.

Last week, most musicians in Gorenstein’s orchestra refused to come off the bench in rehearsal – a kind of Carlos Tevez routine, though by players far less well paid.

The standoff lasted four hours, with Gorenstein sitting almost alone on stage. Now the Minister of Culture, Alexander Avdeev, has told the Interfax agency that “the confrontation in the orchestra has reached a level so high that no other solution was possible.”

Gorenstein has been dismissed.

Here’s the report (in Russian). The players have told the ministry they want Valery Gergiev or Alexander Lazarev as their next chief. Some hopes.

 

Specifically, they are inviting anyone to submit a remix of their recording of the first movement of Mahler’s first symphony. As radical as you like. The site’s here.

Personally I have no problem with Mahler retakes by the likes of Matthew Herbert.

But this competition lacks focus. What, exactly, are the Berlin Phil trying to achieve – except, perhaps, to seem trendy?

I have it on the authority of his record producer and good friend Paul Myers that the Canadian piano legend was deeply smitten with the music of David del Tredici. He called A Final Alice (conducted by Solti) ‘Mahler on acid’, a perfectly euphonious compliment.

Paul has a further secret to share about Glenn’s attire:  ‘Whenever he was to be photographed, he would, as instructed, arrive with a clean shirt, still in its pins and wrappings, but he didn’t own a tie, so what you saw was what I was wearing.’

(c) Don Hunstein/Lebrecht Music&Arts

Sony has just released a boxed set of Glenn on TV. Check those ties. Paul was ever a natty dresser.