This year’s Handel Festival at Göttingen has a new president, the result of internal political changes in Lower Saxony. Last year, the state’s minister-president Christian Wulff was upgraded to president of the German nation. His replacement, as both Saxon ruler and Handel festival chief, is a conservative CDU politician by name of David McAllister, a 39 year-old lawyer and member of the Volkswagen board.

McAllister has yet to come to prominence outside state boundaries, but it’s only a matter of time. He’s the first leading German politician in memory to be half-British – his father was a Glaswegian civil servant attached to the Royal Corps of Signals in West Berlin – and David is fluently bilingual and holds both nationalities. He took his bride to Loch Ness in August 2003 and got married in a kilt. Some speak of him as a future German chancellor.
More interesting at the moment is his personification of the German-British duality of George Frideric Handel who, though raised in Halle, was tied to the Hanoverians of Lower Saxony, who went on to become Kings and Queens of England. David McAllister brings out a welcome British streak in the all-German Handel Festival of Göttingen, unifying its disparities. I’ll let him stand me a drink the next time I’m there.

Watching a BBC4 rerun last night of John Bridcut’s thoughtful bio-doc of England’s iconic composer, I was puzzled by an early clip of a young woman conductor I had never clocked before. But, knowing the frugal way that Bridcut builds his films with few inessentials, it was only a matter of time before her significance was revealed.

Natalia Luis-Bassa is her name (here’s her website) and the causes of her enthusiasm went unexplained, though it appears she leads a couple of orchs in the north of England and has won an award from the Elgar Society. 
Home in Caracas, she was conducting the Elgar second symphony with the Simon Bolivar national orchestra and the zeal with which those musicians blew away the old pomp and circumstance was a wonder to behold. My eyes opened even wider when I saw the ruminative young dude sitting, lips pursed, just behind Natalia’s left shoulder.

                                                                             &n
bsp;       &n
bsp;      photo: wikipedia
And there he was, Gustavo Dudamel, the Dude himself, soaking up English music like a citizenship candidate in a seedy Brighton language school. His first Elgar – who knows? But don’t be surprised of the man with the big moustache finds his way into the Dude’s LA playkit in the coming seasons.
Here’s Natalia conducting Elgar 2nd on Youtube.