David's Blog

Do we need professional music critics? And if so, what for? My eye was taken by a discussion kicked off by Norman Lebrecht asking the question, so here’s my £0.02 worth.

The best place to start, I think, is the viewpoint of the average newspaper reader (or website visitor) with an interest in classical music. I’ll leave aside the question of publications which are geared to the trade and are mainly read by musicians: those involved in the business have a set of needs and interests that are quite distinct from those of the general public.

Yesterday was a good rainy night in, so we settled down to watch Verdi's La Forza del Destino on Met Player.

La Forza isn't performed all that often. Its page in our database shows just one production coming up next year, at the Vienna Staatsoper, compared to the usual wall-to-wall La Traviata and Rigoletto and several of lesser known works like Simon Boccanegra and Macbeth. I can't understand why: for my money, it's got the greatest opera overture ever written, packed with memorable themes that are then woven into the fabric of the music in the rest of the opera. It even has its place in popular culture, with one of the main themes having been used for the classic French movie Jean de Florette (improbably scored for chromatic harmonica and played by the incomparable Toots Thielemans) and thence finding its way into British beer commercials for Stella Artois. The plot is the usual Verdi mix: standard operatic melodrama to keep the censors happy coupled with some underlying hard edges for anywhere who cares to look a bit closer: in La Forza, these are about racism, family bigotry and superstition.

The performance on Met Player dates from 1984, conducted by a very young-looking James Levine. The first thing that's unmissable is Levine's energy - big hair, flailing arms and a death-defying tempo as he races through the overture. The TV direction and editing has been done by someone who knew the music very well: every cut is perfectly in place to the bit of the orchestra that you want to see for that particular moment in the music.

When the curtain goes up, we find Leontyne Price as Our Heroine Leonora. Price's voice is in tremendous, authoritative form. It's a big, rounded voice, without a hint of harshness, quite unlike anyone I know who's singing today - something like hearing a baritone an octave or two up. The rest of the cast are in equally sparkling form, with Leo Nucci a suitably malevolent Don Carlo, and the show stolen by a young and gorgeous Isola Jones as the gypsy Preziosilla, looking for all the world as if she's just stepped in from the set of Carmen (which later became her "signature role", according to her agent's bio). The other characters are excellently sung, from Our Hero to the ill-fated father to the dodgy friar.

OK, so the acting is a bit wooden - more of a series of tableaux than any attempt at actually portraying the characters. But Verdi's music comes up trumps, making the performance a truly memorable one: this is an opera that ought to be performed a lot more often. At $3.99 a throw for a night's rental, I think it's a steal!

6th December 2009

P. S. If you don't have the Internet setup for Met Player, this performance is also available on DVD:

Ian Rosenblatt is a man with a mission: to bring top quality bel canto singers to those bits of a London audience who can't quite cope with going to see them at Covent Garden, either from the expense or because they're uncertain about the whole ritual. His series of "Rosenblatt Recitals" is now in its tenth year, and has a record of top quality meaning what it says - Juan Diego Flórez, currently one of the hottest tickets in opera, gave his first ever London recital in a Rosenblatt event.

It's not surprising to see Stravinsky ballet suites at the Proms: after all, they're standard components of the orchestral repertoire even when they're not being danced. But yesterday's prom, I thought, was far more exciting than anything an orchestra could manage.

This was the 11am "Chamber Prom" at Cadogan Hall. Our appetiser was Simon Trpčeski playing Chopin Mazurkas and a selection of Mendelssohn Songs Without Words with elegance and delicacy, to be followed by the main course: Stravinsky's Rite of Spring played on two pianos by Ashley Wass and Simon Crawford-Phillips.

One of our fellow-twitterers asked about what's a good set of pieces to start listening to Bach's music. We thought about it, and decided that there was no earthly way of answering the question in a 140 character tweet.

Actually, Bach wrote so much in so many styles that the answer very much depends on where you're coming from. In particular, if you're a devout Christian, you start at a very different place than if you're not. To start with, here's a selection of my more secular favourites:

Our first prom of the season last night: the Glyndebourne production of Purcell's Fairy Queen, transplanted for the evening to the rather less intimate surroundings of the Royal Albert Hall.

Our last three opera outings have been to edgy, depressing dramas (Katya Kabanova, Il Cabeza di Bautista and Susannah), so when friends invited us to Garsington Opera, we were more than happy to go to a bit of light-hearted escapism in the form of Rossini's La Cenerentola. You know what you're getting with Rossini: tunes you can hum on the way home, nicely fashioned crescendos (and, indeed, accelerandos) for the overture and various points in the middle, and a suitable quantity of fast-talking quartets/quintets/sextets, which strike me as the 19th century Italian equivalent of today's rap music.

The thing I love most about Paris is that I always end up walking around a lot, and I’m never sure quite what I’m going to find. So on the trip back to the hotel last night, in a small side-street near the Place des Vosges, my eye was taken by the shop window of one Joséphine Vannier, announcing itself as “chocolat artisanal”. This is chocolate as you’ve never seen it: the window was packed with a display of beautifully crafted musical instruments, sculpted in chocolate. I can’t even begin to imagine how the surface finish was done (how exactly do you do a sunburst guitar finish in confectionery), but you can see the general idea in the picture.

Today is the 200th anniversary of Haydn's death, and in celebration, his oratorio The Creation (Die Schöpfung) is being performed in concert halls and churches across the world. We went to one a day early, namely last night's performance at St Martin-in-the-Fields in the heart of London by the Belmont Ensemble. Lurking in the back of the concert hall, however, was the ghost of another great anniversary of the year: Charles Darwin. Let me explain.

A trip to another heartwarming charity in a Kensington living room last night, namely "Awards for Young Musicians". Their raison d'être is the feeling that there's a lot of wonderful music education around, but it's mainly accessed by middle class families who have both the means and the desire to get their kids into classical music. But there's also a lot of musical talent in families who simply can't scrape together the money for good teachers or for a decent quality instrument, and AYM tries to fill that gap, a little bit at a time.

As I navigate the angst of our times about the dire situation of classical music, I can't help being struck by the fact that in the heyday of Beethoven, Schubert and co, people bought their chamber and instrumental music to perform at home - and fairly ordinary people at that (well-off, that is, but not professional musicians in any way). The effort required to learn that level of skill seems terribly high by the standards of what the average bourgeois family can manage today: you just can't see people popping round to the local music shop to buy a Britten or a Philip Glass quartet to play in the evening.

In a rash moment a few months ago, I offered to do some recording for Jocelyn Freeman, who's studying piano at the Royal Academy of Music - rash because although I used to run an audio equipment company, I'm not exactly a recording expert and I've never done this sort of thing before, and while I love our piano dearly, it is a Yamaha upright - not exactly crème de la crème.