Let me share with you a memo from a Promotions Executive at Universal Music Group:

 

Hi

I have had a request from Int Tune (Radio 3) to have Tutula Bartley on the show today to discuss Christopher Ravens sad departure and to speak of her memories of him. I don’t suppose she is around and in the UK

x

 

I have withheld the names of the parties to this correspondence and reprinted the document verbatim. At first sight, I thought it must be someone on the pop side of Universal who had never heard of Ms Bartoli and Mr Raeburn. But no: the person who wrote this missive actually works as an executive for the classical side of Universal.

She knows not Cecilia Bartoli, fancy that. What of Luciano Epiglottis, Joan Scuttlebutt and George Shorty?  Are there no limits to Universal ignorance?

Chris Roberts, head of the UCJ division, insists that Decca is still functioning and that its artists are valued assets. This memo, and much else, gives the lie to that. I must get some of those Tutula Bartley records.

Today is the funeral of Jimmy Lock, the last defender of the Decca Sound. May he rest with the immortals.

 

 

 

 

Let me share with you a memo from a Promotions Executive at Universal Music Group:

 

Hi

I have had a request from Int Tune (Radio 3) to have Tutula Bartley on the show today to discuss Christopher Ravens sad departure and to speak of her memories of him. I don’t suppose she is around and in the UK

x

 

I have withheld the names of the parties to this correspondence and reprinted the document verbatim. At first sight, I thought it must be someone on the pop side of Universal who had never heard of Ms Bartoli and Mr Raeburn. But no: the person who wrote this missive actually works as an executive for the classical side of Universal.

She knows not Cecilia Bartoli, fancy that. What of Luciano Epiglottis, Joan Scuttlebutt and George Shorty?  Are there no limits to Universal ignorance?

Chris Roberts, head of the UCJ division, insists that Decca is still functioning and that its artists are valued assets. This memo, and much else, gives the lie to that. I must get some of those Tutula Bartley records.

Today is the funeral of Jimmy Lock, the last defender of the Decca Sound. May he rest with the immortals.

 

 

 

 

John Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic had its fifth production and UK premiere at English National Opera last night. It is, I think, deepening with each exposure and every aspect of the ENO performance was polished by the experience gained by director Penny Woolcock and several cast members at the Met, Amsterdam and elsewhere.

What came over more searingly than on the DVD pre-release was the diversity of styles that Adams adopts, one for each scene of the first act. He starts with the language of Berg’s Lulu, segues into the English hymnody of Herbert Howells and Benjamin Britten and emerges in a post-minimalist instrumental patter and a vocal line somewhere between Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss. This is high opera, and no mistake, sometimes a little too high on its own aspirations.

The story of the Los Alamos scientists who conducted the first nuclear test is dramatically told. When Edward Teller informs the General that he does not know if the blast will knock out New Mexico or the whole human race, he does not exaggerate. The excitement and danger of science is everywhere in this piece, the driving force on stage. Even the drop curtain displays the periodic table.

What I miss is the sense of dislocation. The core scientists were Hungarian Jews who belong in a cafe, not a desert. Their intellectual and emotional lives are absent. Personal qualities are invisible and Peter Sellars’ script is often too wordy. Read Kati Marton for context.

Gerald Finley is outstanding as the project director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who sold his soul to the war effort, and Sasha Cooke is fetching as his wife Kitty. Both characters need more script development. A purple dress is not enough to express sexual frustration. Jonathan Veira as the General adds menace to the experiment.

ENO’s orchestra has not sounded this wonderful for a long time and the young conductor Lawrence Renes was intensity personified. The atmosphere in the house was almost epochal and the ovation for Adams was the loudest of all.

Doctor Atomic is real opera. It sets you thinking and sometimes touches the heart.

www.eno.org

 

John Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic had its fifth production and UK premiere at English National Opera last night. It is, I think, deepening with each exposure and every aspect of the ENO performance was polished by the experience gained by director Penny Woolcock and several cast members at the Met, Amsterdam and elsewhere.

What came over more searingly than on the DVD pre-release was the diversity of styles that Adams adopts, one for each scene of the first act. He starts with the language of Berg’s Lulu, segues into the English hymnody of Herbert Howells and Benjamin Britten and emerges in a post-minimalist instrumental patter and a vocal line somewhere between Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss. This is high opera, and no mistake, sometimes a little too high on its own aspirations.

The story of the Los Alamos scientists who conducted the first nuclear test is dramatically told. When Edward Teller informs the General that he does not know if the blast will knock out New Mexico or the whole human race, he does not exaggerate. The excitement and danger of science is everywhere in this piece, the driving force on stage. Even the drop curtain displays the periodic table.

What I miss is the sense of dislocation. The core scientists were Hungarian Jews who belong in a cafe, not a desert. Their intellectual and emotional lives are absent. Personal qualities are invisible and Peter Sellars’ script is often too wordy. Read Kati Marton for context.

Gerald Finley is outstanding as the project director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who sold his soul to the war effort, and Sasha Cooke is fetching as his wife Kitty. Both characters need more script development. A purple dress is not enough to express sexual frustration. Jonathan Veira as the General adds menace to the experiment.

ENO’s orchestra has not sounded this wonderful for a long time and the young conductor Lawrence Renes was intensity personified. The atmosphere in the house was almost epochal and the ovation for Adams was the loudest of all.

Doctor Atomic is real opera. It sets you thinking and sometimes touches the heart.

www.eno.org

 

She was only doing her job.

She was a late stand-in for the pregnant  Nicole Kidman.

She was just obeying director’s orders.

She would prefer to be remembered for films she made after the war.

Kate Winslet cannot be faulted in The Reader. She spoke the lines she was given and acted to the best of her immaculate ability. I did not intend here to diminish her triumph.

My problem is with the film itself, specifically with David Hare’s clumsy and anachronistic script which dispels whatever intellectual quest was to be found in Bernhard Schlink’s novel into a simplistic bluperint for vindication.

As a stand-alone, the film could be dismissed as an aberration. But allied to other historically distortive works of the moment, in particular to Jonathan Littell’s odious novel The Kindly Ones, The Reader leads a dangerous drift towards even-handedness in the treatment of the Nazi attempt to wipe out large sections of the human race.

Instead of regarding the Holocaust as a matter of pure evil, we are invited to understand mass murderers, to sympathise with their situation – ‘I am a man like other men … a man like you’, says Littell’s perpetrator – and to regard the victims as either dispensable or insignificant.

Once the wickedness of Hitler’s plan is compromised in this way, it is only a short step to acceptance that there must have been good and bad on both sides, just cause for the victims to be killed. We are on the threshhold here of moral equivalence.

That Oscar gave great pleasure to millions of racists and revisionists. Kate Winslet ought to feel some shame for accepting it. A visit to the Holocaust Museum would be a good start on the road to reflection.

She was only doing her job.

She was a late stand-in for the pregnant  Nicole Kidman.

She was just obeying director’s orders.

She would prefer to be remembered for films she made after the war.

Kate Winslet cannot be faulted in The Reader. She spoke the lines she was given and acted to the best of her immaculate ability. I did not intend here to diminish her triumph.

My problem is with the film itself, specifically with David Hare’s clumsy and anachronistic script which dispels whatever intellectual quest was to be found in Bernhard Schlink’s novel into a simplistic bluperint for vindication.

As a stand-alone, the film could be dismissed as an aberration. But allied to other historically distortive works of the moment, in particular to Jonathan Littell’s odious novel The Kindly Ones, The Reader leads a dangerous drift towards even-handedness in the treatment of the Nazi attempt to wipe out large sections of the human race.

Instead of regarding the Holocaust as a matter of pure evil, we are invited to understand mass murderers, to sympathise with their situation – ‘I am a man like other men … a man like you’, says Littell’s perpetrator – and to regard the victims as either dispensable or insignificant.

Once the wickedness of Hitler’s plan is compromised in this way, it is only a short step to acceptance that there must have been good and bad on both sides, just cause for the victims to be killed. We are on the threshhold here of moral equivalence.

That Oscar gave great pleasure to millions of racists and revisionists. Kate Winslet ought to feel some shame for accepting it. A visit to the Holocaust Museum would be a good start on the road to reflection.

My heart sank to see Kate Winslet getting the best actress Oscar for her role in The Reader. Nothing to do with her acting, which was restrained to the point of inertia, nor to the way she looked on screen, which was seductive as ever.

The problem is the subject and the present context. The Reader is one of a present wave of works that is retweaking the Holocaust to a perpetrator perspective. The most pernicious is Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones which retells the war through the eyes of a Jew-killer.

The Reader is not far behind, suggesting through Winslet’s performance – as I have written in a Littell review in today’s Evening Standard – that ‘a persuasive Kate Winslet conveys in her curvaceous nudity and expressionless enunciation the ugly falsehood that concentration camp murderers were ordinary people like you and me, only prettier.’

The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levi takes issue on rather different grounds with Tom Cruise’s revisionism in Operation Valkyrie. And I have further problems with Daniel Craig, in Defiance, as with Bernhard Schlink’s original novel.

What we are dealing with here is not Holocaust denial. Far from it. The common angle of approach of all these works is to suggest that anyone can commit genocide – you, me, or the girl at number three. The danger here is not delusionism on an Iranian Ahmedinejad scale. Rather it is the normalisation of a maniacal moment in history – a normalisation which, if it is allowed to persist unchecked, will assist and precipitate the next holocaust.

Kate Winslet did her job as an actress. She won an Oscar. She is moved to tears by that accolade.

She should be ashamed of her role and afraid of its insidious influence on warped and vulnerable minds.   

My heart sank to see Kate Winslet getting the best actress Oscar for her role in The Reader. Nothing to do with her acting, which was restrained to the point of inertia, nor to the way she looked on screen, which was seductive as ever.

The problem is the subject and the present context. The Reader is one of a present wave of works that is retweaking the Holocaust to a perpetrator perspective. The most pernicious is Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones which retells the war through the eyes of a Jew-killer.

The Reader is not far behind, suggesting through Winslet’s performance – as I have written in a Littell review in today’s Evening Standard – that ‘a persuasive Kate Winslet conveys in her curvaceous nudity and expressionless enunciation the ugly falsehood that concentration camp murderers were ordinary people like you and me, only prettier.’

The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levi takes issue on rather different grounds with Tom Cruise’s revisionism in Operation Valkyrie. And I have further problems with Daniel Craig, in Defiance, as with Bernhard Schlink’s original novel.

What we are dealing with here is not Holocaust denial. Far from it. The common angle of approach of all these works is to suggest that anyone can commit genocide – you, me, or the girl at number three. The danger here is not delusionism on an Iranian Ahmedinejad scale. Rather it is the normalisation of a maniacal moment in history – a normalisation which, if it is allowed to persist unchecked, will assist and precipitate the next holocaust.

Kate Winslet did her job as an actress. She won an Oscar. She is moved to tears by that accolade.

She should be ashamed of her role and afraid of its insidious influence on warped and vulnerable minds.   

James Lock’s funeral will take place this Friday in Golders Green and Christopher Raeburn’s the following Friday in Amersham. I guess the Universal Music Group will send a wreath or two.

After repeated inquiries from musicians and members of the music profession as to why Decca had not issued any notice of the deaths of its last backroom legends, an external publicist was contracted to put together a press release at the very end of the working week – and almost a week after Jimmy died.

The press release, needless to say, was as personal as a parking ticket. It was constructed around a paragraph from Universal Classics and Jazz chief Chris Roberts, who gave no intimation of having met either man. Its opening sentence, a semi-literate sales blurb, is about as far you need to read:

Christopher and James’  legacies are incalculable as both worked for decades on hundreds of recordings that will always be listened to and enjoyed by millions of people.

How absolutely miserable that none of the remaining staff at Decca was allowed by the bonus-chasers at Universal head office to offer anything like the personal tributes that former colleagues are contributing here and elsewhere.

 

James Lock’s funeral will take place this Friday in Golders Green and Christopher Raeburn’s the following Friday in Amersham. I guess the Universal Music Group will send a wreath or two.

After repeated inquiries from musicians and members of the music profession as to why Decca had not issued any notice of the deaths of its last backroom legends, an external publicist was contracted to put together a press release at the very end of the working week – and almost a week after Jimmy died.

The press release, needless to say, was as personal as a parking ticket. It was constructed around a paragraph from Universal Classics and Jazz chief Chris Roberts, who gave no intimation of having met either man. Its opening sentence, a semi-literate sales blurb, is about as far you need to read:

Christopher and James’  legacies are incalculable as both worked for decades on hundreds of recordings that will always be listened to and enjoyed by millions of people.

How absolutely miserable that none of the remaining staff at Decca was allowed by the bonus-chasers at Universal head office to offer anything like the personal tributes that former colleagues are contributing here and elsewhere.

 

Valerie Solti has posted a fond tribute to James Lock on the Gramophone website.

And an aide of Luciano Pavarotti has been in touch to say how much he loved Jimmy and Christopher Raeburn, staying in touch almost till the day he died. 

If any readers want to share personal memories of Jimmy and Christopher, from within the Decca studio or one of those famously indiscreet lunches, do use the comment space below as a message board.

If your life was changed by one of their records, likewise let us know.

I don’t expect Universal Music Group to commemorate their legacy.

 

LATE EXTRA:

a  friend in London, who was at the Royal Festival Hall last night, reports :-


Zubin Mehta dedicated last night’s performance of Bruckner 9 with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra to Christopher.
 
Mehta spoke movingly about him to the audience.

Valerie Solti has posted a fond tribute to James Lock on the Gramophone website.

And an aide of Luciano Pavarotti has been in touch to say how much he loved Jimmy and Christopher Raeburn, staying in touch almost till the day he died. 

If any readers want to share personal memories of Jimmy and Christopher, from within the Decca studio or one of those famously indiscreet lunches, do use the comment space below as a message board.

If your life was changed by one of their records, likewise let us know.

I don’t expect Universal Music Group to commemorate their legacy.

 

LATE EXTRA:

a  friend in London, who was at the Royal Festival Hall last night, reports :-


Zubin Mehta dedicated last night’s performance of Bruckner 9 with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra to Christopher.
 
Mehta spoke movingly about him to the audience.