There is a widely held perception, which I address in the May issue of The Strad magazine, that the violin is somehow a ‘Jewish’ instrument.

It is true of course that many great violinists were Jewish – Mischa, Jascha, Toscha Sascha. Also true that in certain important violin traditions – the French, for instance – there are few, if any, outstanding Jewish players.
So why the myth?

Here’s one of my suggestions:

The simplest answer is portability. Jewish mothers in the
Pale of Settlement did not sit their kids down at the piano. Pianos were too
heavy to take abroad if there was a threat of pogrom. Cellos, likewise.  The violin is an instrument of dispersion, a
relic of persecutions and a ticket to a better way of life. It was the Blackberry of musical transmission, the laptop of an imperilled school, the most effective instrument of ensuring that tyrannies could not destroy a tradition.

Agree?

It has been the talk of musical London for the past few days and the Daily Mail has just got hold of it with its usual spin of lawyered innuendo.

Ed Gardner, music director of English National Opera, and his trumpeter partner Alison Balsom have split up. They have a one year-old son.
All very sad.

                       photo: BBC Radio 3/flickr.com l to r: Balsom, Gardner, Charlie, presenter Sean Rafferty
Here’s the Mail, to be taken with a dose of salts. 

The board of the Philadelphia Orchestra has voted to take the company into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, presumably to protect itself against spiralling losses. The current season is $5 million down on a $46 million budget.

Philadelphia is the first of the Big Five and the largest US orchestra ever to go into meltdown. Concerts will continue for the rest of the season while a fundraising campaign is mounted. The baord hopes the bankruptcy warning can be removed by the end of the season, but the move places a huge question mark over the orchestra’s future.
More than that, it foments uncertainty across musical America.
Here’s the latest WQXR report.
The Philadelphia Orchestra recently appointed the young Canadian Yannick Nezet-Seguin as its next music director. He must be reading these reports with anxiety.

It began with a strike in Detroit, followed by a collapse at Syracuse.

Now Philadelphia is within 24 hours of debating, if not declaring, bankruptcy.
For the first time, a Big Five orchestra could go out of business.
Whatever happens tomorrow at the creditors meeting, I sense that we are in the throes of a long-delayed awakening in the US orchestra sector.
As in the Arab Spring, orchestral governance and finances have been frozen in time. There have been few new ideas – on the East Coast, at least – and sticky plaster has been applied where strategic thought was required.
Worn-out executives replaced retiring executives. The boards grew board. Musicians, like Arab politicians, became avaricious when fearful for their future.
And it’s not over yet. Not by half. Boston needs a new chief conductor, New York a new manager. Both are going down the tired old search routes. If these big bands don’t dare to break the mould, they risk being broken on the wheel of history.
This is a seminal moment for American orchestras. It could be their rite of spring.
Here’s a link to the latest twist.
And in Brazil, the revolution rages on. Where will it all end?

I had one of my periodic lunches yesterday with Sir Neville Marriner, of which not a word may pass my lips. 

Today, April 15, is Neville’s birthday. He’s 87.

Being Neville, he was just off a plane from somewhere and onto a train, always on the go, back from conducting the Academy of St Martins across Germany, the New World Symphony in Miami, some other orchestra in Poland. 
No conductor apart from Herbert von Karajan has made more recordings than Neville and none was ever so hyperactive in his late eighties, driven by the lifelong urge to provide good work for good musicians and by sheer pleasure in what he does.
There was a bulging briefcase beside his chair. ‘What’s in there?’ we wondered.
Two scores he had never conducted before. He was learning them, at 87, for a tour next year. As a favour to a friend.
Happy birthday, Neville! 

Here’s one I wrote earlier, seven years ago.

There are two UK contestants in the coming Cliburns for amateurs

One is named as Andrea de Tomas, a lawyer from London. Quick search shows up at City banking and finance firm Bonelli Erede Pappalardo, with one public recital at St John’s Smith Square. 
The other contender, seriously exciting, is Dominic Piers Smith, team leader in aerodynamics for Mercedes Formula One Team. Just shows all that revving noise doesn’t wreck your ears.
Dominic Piers Smith - Power of Dreaming

I was quietly minding my own media empire at the IAMA conference, which ends today, when a youngish man with curly brown hair came and sat next to me, waiting politely until I had finished a live paragraph on my notebook.

I recognised his name-tag from recent email exchanges, but that was it. He said ‘I wonder if you remember an invitation to a rather offbeat festival in Upper Austria some years back?’

How could I forget? I had been approached to speak at a music weekend in a monastery, with a broadcast on national radio, ORF. Irresistible. I accepted Brother D’s invitation like a shot and was packing my bags when a bug struck and I was bedridden for the weekend. 
God’s will, I mailed him apologetically. We’ll cope, he replied.
‘I am Brother D,’ said the polite young man at IAMA. ‘Or was.’
‘What happened?’ I demanded.
‘Long story…. but I’m an artists’ agent now.’
So you see, there are holy men in the music biz. You just have to dig deep to find them.

The BBC Proms were greeted with the biggest-ever burst of tweets and blogs today – not just because the world’s gone mad on social media but because the content this year feels exceptionally buzzy and live.

There’s a comedy night, for instance, and a performance of what might claim to be a bigger symphony than Mahler’s eighth – Havergal Brian’s Gothic.
But the event that got me leaping out of my seat is a late-night extempore concert given by Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra on September 2. Apparently, Ivan hands around sheets with about 300 named works on them and the audience get to choose what they want to hear.
Interactive, or what? Can we tweet in our choices? That would be so summer of 2011…

Some months ago I received a Facebook message from a bright young artist complaining that his agent understood neither him nor his instrument.

He wanted to make direct contacts with the BBC Proms and record industry with some specific propositions that seemed to me both viable and attractive. I sent him the email addresses of two people I thought might be of like mind and was nicely thanked for my modest intervention.
The end result, announced today, is that Mahan Esfehani will be giving the first solo harpsichord recital in the 116-year history of the Proms. It’s on July 18 at Cadogan Hall, and I couldn’t be more thrilled.
The agent, by the way, said: ‘well, that negates us, doesn’t it?’
Guess so.
MahanEsfahani022.jpg
photo: (c) Marco Borggreve, all right reserved (borrowed with permission from Mahan’s website)

The world premiere of the Sonntag segment from the late Karlheinz Stockhausen’s epic Licht opera cycle has just been staged in two parts in Cologne.

Here’s a first review (in German, with Google translate)

photo: Oper Köln


The Berlin Philharmonic 3-D performance of Mahler’s first symphony and Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances goes on release in 60 cinemas around the UK in May.

It is an opportunity to witness one of the world’s great orchestras at the peak of its form in a technology that is evidently too challenging for Bayreuth.
My reservation, expressed last week on the BBC’s PM programme, is: at what cost? The Berlin Philharmonic is the most heavily subsidised orchestra on earth, by the state, the city and some very blue-chip sponsors.
They can afford to have themselves filmed in 3-D and put around the world at at time when other orchestras are suffering severe cuts and several – Syracuse in upstate New York is the latest – are going to the wall.
One orchestral manager described this initiative to me as ‘cultural imperialism’.
Your views?
Here’s some video: 


And here’s the press release:
BERLINER PHILHARMONIKER – A MUSICAL JOURNEY IN 3D
TO BE SHOWN IN CINEMAS ACROSS THE UK FROM MAY 9TH
www.amusicaljourney3d.com
SIR SIMON RATTLE CONDUCTS MAHLER & RACHMANINOV
It is almost 100 years since the Berliner Philharmoniker became the first orchestra to record. Since 1913, it has been at the cutting edge of technological developments like broadcasting concerts, recording complete symphonies and operas on Schellack, Longplay and later Compact Discs – always using the latest techniques. What better orchestra than the Berliner Philharmoniker to be the first to bring concerts to cinemas in 3D?
HELGE GRUENEWALD, ARTISTIC ADVISOR, BERLIN PHILHARMONIC
With their latest digital venture Berliner Philharmoniker – A Musical Journey In 3D, the Berlin Philharmonic is reviving the great tradition of filming classical concerts. A cinema first A Musical Journey enables audiences not only to experience the concert from the front row of the stalls but – thanks to 3D – from a seat in the middle of the Orchestra.
Arguably the finest orchestra in the world, the Berlin Philharmonic under the baton of principal conductor Sir Simon Rattle will be heard performing Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 and Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances. Mahler’s First Symphony is filmed in Singapore’s spectacular Esplanade Concert Hall, whereas for Symphonic Dances the producers, together with director Michael Beyer and cameraman and co-director Tomas Erhart, have developed a series of miniature stories based on the composer’s original titles for the movements “midday, sunset, midnight” that translate the music into magnificent 3D scenes.
Director Michael Beyer commented “The change between the two settings ‘orchestra’ and ‘Singapore’ respond to the tunes, tempi and dance impulses of Rachmaninov’s score. Chinatown, breathtaking Western architecture and the Hindu temple in 3D together with all aspects of life, work, leisure and spirituality make the spectator believe that he is not only an observer, but in the middle of music and life.”
As many as eight 3D and HD cameras were used in making this film, together with cranes, dollies and tracks. The cameramen came from Germany, the technology and technicians from Tokyo and New York. This large-scale project also received considerable local support in terms of personnel and equipment, with as many as 50 people working on the sets at any one time.
Berlin Philharmoniker : 2
Funded by the Media Board of Berlin-Brandenburg and STB, Berliner Philharmoniker – A Musical Journey In 3D is distributed by Arts Alliance Media and will be shown in 64 cinemas from Poole to Dundee between Monday May 9th and Sunday May 29th.

Well, a man has to go when a man has to go. 

So there I was at the IAMA urinals, stuck between two classical music biz fixers and going, as it were, with the flow.

Now there are good agents and bad agents, and they are often one and the same person, showing one face or the other as the situation demands.
I had just heard one of them declare that in 46 years he had thought of nothing but how to help his artists get their talent to the widest possible audience, oblivious to his recent efforts to sell the whole batch of them into corporate bondage. 
An oxymoron? A contradiction in terms?
Not at all. He was being perfectly true to himself and his chameleon occupation. 
It so happened that an eminent concert artist, past winner of the Tchaikovsky Competition, had put in a request to attend our IAMA session. The answer was No. Plain No.
The music business does not like artists to see it all unbuttoned. That’s why slipped disc is obliged to perform a natural function between the two dichotomies. 
As if I needed to tell you that…