A perfect end to the festivities.
Lovely a capella singing, a little too much vibrato.
Background here.
Our family has particular reason to be grateful to the National Health Service on this Christmas Day.
Meet the hospital team that has just outsold Bieber.
And here’s the national NHS chorus, fighting political interference and public complacency to save the dream.
Bless them.
And join them in song.
Newly rediscovered footage. A seasonal treat.
Tip: Play Nimrod as you watch.
The Tchaikovsky finals pianist is presently storming Russia with his own music, a new sonata for cello and piano.
He told Russian TV:
‘I knew that if I go to the finals of the Tchaikovsky Competition I would be invited for concerts but I did not imagine I’d be so in demand and that Russia would love me. The concert in the Chamber Hall is particularly important to me – it’s a prize from the critics.
‘This is the Russian premiere of my sonata, I wrote it a month ago. Composing music is an amazing process. You have to completely erase your ego, to become empty, a bystander and allow the music to flow through you and out of you.’
Report here.
… is the Henri Dutliieux, at Belfort, France. The buildings were completed this year at a public cost of €6,326,000, in time for the composer’s centenary year.
Makes Juilliard look a bit urban and 20th century.
Photos © Eugeni Pons
If things get really dull with the family you, too, can make one of these:
Like this:
And this.
Here’s how.
For your festival contemplation, here are some truly unforgettable moments of live performance, including Jon Vickers’ indelible response to a persistent cougher.
Some may be familiar but they lose nothing in the retelling.
Enjoyed that? There’s more here.
In my year-end essay for Standpoint magazine, I reflect on the opera houses in my life – all of them, except La Scala which used to make itself virtually inaccessible unless you knew someone on the inside, preferably backstage.
It has taken me more than half a century of dedicated opera-going to get to the source of it all, and before I start making excuses let me say it was La Scala’s fault. That house made itself harder to get into than Hatton Garden’s jewellery vaults.
Back in the pre-email era, if you ever managed to get someone to answer the switchboard in Milan the response was invariably a blast of machine-gun Italian comprehensible only to a highly-trained Donizetti comprimario. And, if you were lucky enough to get put through to the press office, you met levels of self-importance and xenophobia rivalled only at Bayreuth. It took me a while to appreciate the anguish of press people who, passionate about art, worked as mediators between the irreconcilable forces of artistic vanity and democratic transparency. But I digress.
Read on here….
Our featured artist.… beyond compare.
A gift from the DSCH Journal. Listen here.
One of the highlights of my year was spending a summer afternoon and evening with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, working on Mahler’s ninth symphony. Alert, hungry, funny, courteous and tolerant of my bad jokes, these young musicians – few of whom may become adult professionals – represented everything one could wish for in citizens of the next generation.
They went on to give performances of the ninth symphony in London and Berlin at a standard that was above and beyond what we are led to believe of the Vienna Philharmonic in Mahler’s day.
I’d love you to meet these 163 young musicians, aged 11 to 19. Click on their profiles here.
And check out their next concerts:
Saturday, 2 January – Leeds Town Hall
Sunday, 3 January – Barbican, London
Monday, 4 January – BBC Radio 3 broadcast
