Blind spot

Do you have a mysterious and slightly embarrassing musical blind spot? One of mine is for Dvorák, whom I don’t need to be told is a great composer. Maybe it was overexposure to the New World Symphony as a child; or maybe I’m unreasonably irritated by his Czech bounciness, just as some people write off Vaughan Williams because he reminds them of that jibe about the ‘cowpat school’. Anyway, it’s a problem.

One way to tackle a blind spot is to listen to a superlative recording of a work by your ‘difficult’ composer. So, a couple of weeks ago, I bought a CD of Dvorák’s Cello Concerto played by Pieter Wispelwey and the Budapest Festival Orchestra conducted by Ivan Fischer. The live performance was incandescent and Wispelwey the ideal soloist. But still: not quite there. And then I remembered that there’s a chapter devoted to the concerto in a book called Talking About Music (1977), by the broadcaster and composer Antony Hopkins.

The book is based on the best musical talks I’ve heard in my life. They ran regularly on Radio 3 and other BBC channels for 36 years from the 1950s to the 1980s; I caught the tail end of them as a teenager and they more than made up for the lack of music lessons at my school. Hopkins’s scripts were pitched at an adult audience but with the odd smudge of schoolboy humour. For example, he told us that the Trio of the Scherzo of Schubert’s sublime B flat Piano Sonata was ‘a subtle example of the village-band joke. All the lads are playing quietly except for old Joe on the tuba, whose isolated notes stand out like discreet farts at the vicarage.’ Thanks to that observation, I can never listen to the sonata without thinking of flatulence.