http://www.harrogate-festival.org.uk/events/mendelssohn-and-mahler/

 

Mendelssohn and Mahler

Lecture by Norman Lebrecht

Thur 29 July | Royal Hall | 2.30pm

Music historian and award-winning novelist Norman Lebrecht offers a radical interpretation on the Jewish nature of Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler. Mahler converted to Christianity to become head of the Vienna Opera, but always sought to explain his peculiar identity. ‘I am three times homeless,’ said Mahler, ‘as a Czech among Austrians, an Austrian among Germans and a Jew anywhere in the world.’ Mendelssohn left his Jewish roots, composing the wedding march and partnering Queen Victoria at the piano. Hear Lebrecht argue how his active suppression of his Jewish heritage is inherent to his trag

Chatting in a BBC green room this morning with the pianist Paul Lewis – before we went onto Breakfast to discuss the perennial Proms question of clapping between movements – I was alarmed to hear that he had torn a muscle in his arm while rehearsing a Beethoven concerto last week. Paul is performing all five concertos at the BBC Proms. Cancellation was not an option. So he played on through the pain, and with barely a grimace.

That’s what artists do.

Last week, I visited Maria Joao Pires after her late-night Nocturnes at the Royal Albert Hall, where she dared to play more softly than anyone I have ever heard anyone do in that vast space. In her dim-lit room in the bowels of the hall, I noticed that one of her fingers was covered by a band-aid and swollen to almost twice its natural size. Pires had played Chopin through a mist of pain. To have cried off and disappointed 4,000 eager listeners never crossed her mind.

So when I see a footballer limping off with a hamstring injury, or a tennis ace complaining of muscle strain, my natural sympathy for suffering humanity is tempered by the knowledge that these athletes are, like as not, protecting themselves from the fear of protracted injury and that their concern for the spectators who have paid vast amounts to see them is minimal.

If Mr Drogba has a pain in his groin, he should grit his teeth and get back to training. If Mr Rooney is feeling under the weather, he should run it off. And as for those Italians and Argentines who fall to the ground howling in agony when someone – perhaps – taps their ankle with a feather-light boot, they ought to be charged with misrepresentation and jailed for their display of deception. Softies, cissies and big girls’ blouses, the lots of them.

A real performer plays through the pain.

 

Chatting in a BBC green room this morning with the pianist Paul Lewis – before we went onto Breakfast to discuss the perennial Proms question of clapping between movements – I was alarmed to hear that he had torn a muscle in his arm while rehearsing a Beethoven concerto last week. Paul is performing all five concertos at the BBC Proms. Cancellation was not an option. So he played on through the pain, and with barely a grimace.

That’s what artists do.

Last week, I visited Maria Joao Pires after her late-night Nocturnes at the Royal Albert Hall, where she dared to play more softly than anyone I have ever heard anyone do in that vast space. In her dim-lit room in the bowels of the hall, I noticed that one of her fingers was covered by a band-aid and swollen to almost twice its natural size. Pires had played Chopin through a mist of pain. To have cried off and disappointed 4,000 eager listeners never crossed her mind.

So when I see a footballer limping off with a hamstring injury, or a tennis ace complaining of muscle strain, my natural sympathy for suffering humanity is tempered by the knowledge that these athletes are, like as not, protecting themselves from the fear of protracted injury and that their concern for the spectators who have paid vast amounts to see them is minimal.

If Mr Drogba has a pain in his groin, he should grit his teeth and get back to training. If Mr Rooney is feeling under the weather, he should run it off. And as for those Italians and Argentines who fall to the ground howling in agony when someone – perhaps – taps their ankle with a feather-light boot, they ought to be charged with misrepresentation and jailed for their display of deception. Softies, cissies and big girls’ blouses, the lots of them.

A real performer plays through the pain.

 

The world’s favourite Finnish violinist is, I’m glad to report, back on the boards. Linda Lampenius, renamed Brava when she stripped bare for Playboy, is playing with the Irish choral group Anuna and preparing a release of Christmas songs.

Interviewed in the Irish Metro Herald, she complains that the media went negative on her ‘when I started doing things considered inappropriate for a serious classical musician – like modelling, acting and playing pop/rock’. Not to mention getting naked for Playboy and its legion of grubby retards.

I have, as it happens, great sympathy for Linda and have fought her corner more than once. A former orchestral player, she was the victim of cruel exploitation by salacious elements in the music industry and she has worked very hard to get back on her feet and find a career in entertainment. She was recently a judge on Finland’s X Factor contest.

My Finnish is not up to much but I guess she was required, as X Factor judges are the world over, to dish out some fairly harsh stuff to the hapless contenders. In other words, she can give as good as she got.

It was not the media that derailed Ms Brava. Rather, it was her own naive decisions and the callousness of her managers. She needs to put the blame where it belongs.

Still, I’m delighted she’s back on form and I look forward to her Christmas release. 

Telling all on The Lebrecht Interview this week is Marilyn Horne, one of the first Americans to bestride world opera and the diva to did most to restore Rossini to centre stage.

Hers is a story of unyielding courage and self-confidence. As a college student, she corrected Stravinsky and Hindemith on baroque singing. Fifty years ago, she stormed the German scene with one of the most powerful renditions of Marie in Berg’s Wozzeck.

Against her family’s wishes, she married Henry Lewis, an Afro-American bass player (and rising conductor), sacrificing her career in the segregated parts of the US. She fought for what was right and, usually, she won – as many conductors can testify.

There’s a Roman clip of her on youtube singing the Liber Scriptus in Verdi’s Requiem with a young Pavarotti seated transfixed behind her.

Today, in her late 70s, she runs a foundation that fosters opportunities for young American singers. Ms Horne speaks her mind as eevr in our conversation, respects no vanities, takes no prisoners. She remains a breath of fresh air in an art full of pomp.

The Lebrecht Interview with Marilyn Horne goes out tonight at 9.15 on BBC Radio 3, and is streamed on site for the next week. 

Telling all on The Lebrecht Interview this week is Marilyn Horne, one of the first Americans to bestride world opera and the diva to did most to restore Rossini to centre stage.

Hers is a story of unyielding courage and self-confidence. As a college student, she corrected Stravinsky and Hindemith on baroque singing. Fifty years ago, she stormed the German scene with one of the most powerful renditions of Marie in Berg’s Wozzeck.

Against her family’s wishes, she married Henry Lewis, an Afro-American bass player (and rising conductor), sacrificing her career in the segregated parts of the US. She fought for what was right and, usually, she won – as many conductors can testify.

There’s a Roman clip of her on youtube singing the Liber Scriptus in Verdi’s Requiem with a young Pavarotti seated transfixed behind her.

Today, in her late 70s, she runs a foundation that fosters opportunities for young American singers. Ms Horne speaks her mind as eevr in our conversation, respects no vanities, takes no prisoners. She remains a breath of fresh air in an art full of pomp.

The Lebrecht Interview with Marilyn Horne goes out tonight at 9.15 on BBC Radio 3, and is streamed on site for the next week. 

This just in from a top-end sound engineer:

 

Did you watch the Paul Lewis Beethoven 4th piano concerto this evening? The BBC abandoned the usual broadcast cameras and used ‘Q-Ball’  cameras instead. The pictures were very poor resolution and foggy in comparison, and the obsession with close-ups through a wide-angle lens makes everyone look close as well as bulbous. What is in the BBC’s heads? The cameras have a single 1/3″ 2MP sensor which is comparable with the Canon camcorder we take on family holidays, and has resolution at best a sixth of that of a studio camera. I knows times are hard, but the BBC is so snotty about contractors using full broadcast grade cameras and yet they use something I would hesitate about using for cctv on sessions.

 

Any comment from BBC vision control?

 

 

There’s further discussion starting here.

This just in from a top-end sound engineer:

 

Did you watch the Paul Lewis Beethoven 4th piano concerto this evening? The BBC abandoned the usual broadcast cameras and used ‘Q-Ball’  cameras instead. The pictures were very poor resolution and foggy in comparison, and the obsession with close-ups through a wide-angle lens makes everyone look close as well as bulbous. What is in the BBC’s heads? The cameras have a single 1/3″ 2MP sensor which is comparable with the Canon camcorder we take on family holidays, and has resolution at best a sixth of that of a studio camera. I knows times are hard, but the BBC is so snotty about contractors using full broadcast grade cameras and yet they use something I would hesitate about using for cctv on sessions.

 

Any comment from BBC vision control?

 

 

There’s further discussion starting here.

1 Why has the Welsh Assembly voted £250,000 for Bryn Terfel’s private festival when Welsh National Opera faces devastation by cuts?

2 Was the UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt ‘really looking forward’ (his words) to the DCMS staff awards when he’s planning to sack half the workforce?

3 Who thinks a committed pornographer is a fit and proper person to own a British national television channel? (see question #2, perhaps)

4 Why is a summer breezer allowed to advertise itself as ‘Britain’s first classical music festival’ when its headliners are crossover divas Katherine Jenkins and Russell Watson? Shouldn’t it be sued for false trading by the BBC Proms?

5 WTF is Deborah Voigt doing singing Annie Get Your Gun at Glimmerglass?

6 WTF is Renee Fleming doing altogether?

7 Which soprano says she hits her top by clenching her bottom?

8 How does Placido Domingo get away with a $6m Ring deficit at LA Opera?

Post your answers (and more questions) in the space below.

1 Why has the Welsh Assembly voted £250,000 for Bryn Terfel’s private festival when Welsh National Opera faces devastation by cuts?

2 Was the UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt ‘really looking forward’ (his words) to the DCMS staff awards when he’s planning to sack half the workforce?

3 Who thinks a committed pornographer is a fit and proper person to own a British national television channel? (see question #2, perhaps)

4 Why is a summer breezer allowed to advertise itself as ‘Britain’s first classical music festival’ when its headliners are crossover divas Katherine Jenkins and Russell Watson? Shouldn’t it be sued for false trading by the BBC Proms?

5 WTF is Deborah Voigt doing singing Annie Get Your Gun at Glimmerglass?

6 WTF is Renee Fleming doing altogether?

7 Which soprano says she hits her top by clenching her bottom?

8 How does Placido Domingo get away with a $6m Ring deficit at LA Opera?

Post your answers (and more questions) in the space below.

I did not want to be the first to mention it, but it now appears to be public knowledge on music sites that Anthony Rolfe Johnson was suffering from Alzheimers in the last years of his career, and died of it this week.

The symptoms were first noticed in 1998, on a Spanish tour with Sir Neville Marriner. There were further lapses in Munich at the Staatsoper when he played Emaeus in Monteverdi’s Ulisse in 2001. ‘His confidence began to suffer enormously,’ writes a trusted colleague, ‘and over the following couple of years he slowly withdrew from singing altogether and had virtually retired by 2004.’

We should salute Anthony’s courage in carrying for so long with that disability, and the even greater heroism of the colleagues who supported him. He was a generous and popular man, and his fellow-artists did their best to keep him going.

Nevertheless, the loss is tragic. To lose a great singer with the voice intact in his early 60s is cruel and horrible. In the memory of Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Let’s do our best to help the scientists who are working on better diagnostic tools and an early cure for Alzheimer’s. Let’s do it now.  

I did not want to be the first to mention it, but it now appears to be public knowledge on music sites that Anthony Rolfe Johnson was suffering from Alzheimers in the last years of his career, and died of it this week.

The symptoms were first noticed in 1998, on a Spanish tour with Sir Neville Marriner. There were further lapses in Munich at the Staatsoper when he played Emaeus in Monteverdi’s Ulisse in 2001. ‘His confidence began to suffer enormously,’ writes a trusted colleague, ‘and over the following couple of years he slowly withdrew from singing altogether and had virtually retired by 2004.’

We should salute Anthony’s courage in carrying for so long with that disability, and the even greater heroism of the colleagues who supported him. He was a generous and popular man, and his fellow-artists did their best to keep him going.

Nevertheless, the loss is tragic. To lose a great singer with the voice intact in his early 60s is cruel and horrible. In the memory of Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Let’s do our best to help the scientists who are working on better diagnostic tools and an early cure for Alzheimer’s. Let’s do it now.