Music and Opera

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

It is 0422, pitch black outside and pouring with rain. The candles are being extinguished one by one as the last of the congregation leave the chapel. They look tired but determined. I notice that, for the first time in my adult life when awake at this hour, I am sober. We have just sung the night Office of Lauds, which began at 0400, in the chapel of Keble College Oxford. Matins, which we sang at 0100 in Christ Church, is already a dimming memory, soon to be further overlaid by Prime, Terce and Mass, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline, each sung at its traditional time throughout the 24 hours.

If you want to make yourself unpopular with a classical musician, bring up the subject of performance anxiety. You can ask soloists how they remember tens of thousands of notes, so long as you make it sound like flattery. But don’t ask how they do it in front of an audience of strangers and critics without dying of fright. Because some of them nearly do. And they don’t like to talk about it — their own nerves, that is; other people’s are fair game. The world of classical music can be as Darwinian as the tennis circuit. Memory lapses are not forgotten. The Wigmore Hall holds a special terror, because

The third concert I went to at Lucerne last week was under two aegises: first ‘Faith’, the theme of this year’s Festival, and second ‘Pollini Perspectives’. Maurizio Pollini coined this phrase or concept several years ago, as indicating his project of giving concerts in which he combines music we know and love with music we don’t know and hate — not that he put it in those terms, but that’s what it amounts to. The latter is always in the first half, naturally. At Lucerne it was not Maurizio, but his gifted pianist son Daniele who took part in the first half, which was the first performance of Carnaval Nos

Faith is the theme of this year’s Summer Festival in Lucerne. Not that I would have guessed it from the three concerts I went to in the Concert Hall on consecutive evenings last week. But the programme books insist on it, and there are, besides the musical events, lectures and discussions on Faith, with a cardinal and theologians participating. Why the need to justify having a festival, inflated prices for tickets, hotels, etc. being taken for granted by the majority of the well-heeled patrons? And how many of the patrons are led to reflect more intensely than they normally do on the nature of Faith, or of their faith if

Eternally fresh. That’s how Grieg’s Piano Concerto is described by programme notes, Classic FM, etc. Though, to be honest, eternally stale is nearer the mark. No 19th-century warhorse has been submitted to such regular thrashing since it was written in 1868. In the early days of the Proms, where I heard it last week, they would sometimes schedule it twice in one season. Don’t get me wrong: the work is a masterpiece. Edvard Grieg’s only masterpiece, indeed, which is sad, considering that he composed it at the age of 25 and produced nothing of comparable stature in the remaining 40 years of his life. It begins with a drum roll

Do rock stars buy life insurance? If so, there must have been payouts aplenty this summer, as several more breathed their last. Levon Helm of The Band croaked in April, followed in May by Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch of the Beastie Boys, the famed session bassist Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn, and Donna Summer, no longer feeling love, or indeed anything very much. Then, a couple of weeks ago, it was the turn of Jon Lord of Deep Purple, whose terrifying white ponytail I once spotted at a River Café quiz. Although his team didn’t do very well, you could see that he was the sort of person you would want to have

The Myerscough report about the future funding of the BBC, entitled Delivering Quality First, is another classic in the long-running serial about how everything will be much better once the Corporation has made further cuts to its staff and programming. This one, which follows on from another published what seems like just the other day, is the direct result of the BBC having acquiesced in freezing the licence fee until 2017 while taking on new costs, such as the World Service and the switchover to digital services. Two thousand jobs must go and this time the funding of the Performing Groups — the five full-time orchestras and the BBC Singers

The story of Allegri’s Miserere has probably become the most engrossing myth that great art of any kind has to offer. From the mists of time when it was first heard, through the threat of terrible punishment — excommunication — to those who might betray it, to the touch of divine intervention that Mozart brought it, it has everything to stimulate the pens both of those who want to rationalise it and those who are more inclined to fabulate on an inspiring theme. It helps that the music itself is so powerful, to which many figures, past and present, have paid tribute: Mary Shelley, for example, described how ‘the soul

What does a producer do on a record? I have often wondered this, as the evidence suggests that they either do (i) too much, or (ii) not enough. The heavy rock producer Steve Albini legendarily limits his contribution to switching on the equipment and pressing ‘record’. The band bashes out the song, Albini switches off the equipment and everyone goes for a hearty lunch. By this studied policy of non-intervention, Albini seeks to reproduce a band at its most raw and primal. You don’t go to him if you want fancy keyboard fills or a symphony orchestra wheeling away in the background. Indeed, Albini is so fast that he ‘produces’

 Another of the grand old men of country and bluegrass music has picked his last. Doc Watson has died, aged 89. Here he is with Earl Scruggs at Doc’s place some years back.  And here he is more recently singing Amazing Grace:

More than 11 years after getting sober, memories of my more disgraceful drunken nights can still make me blush with shame. Waking up in a police cell with no idea how I came to be there was a low point and so was being discovered unconscious in the pouring rain under the shrubs in a neighbour’s garden. In the mercifully rare moments when I find myself dreaming of a drink, it is the thought of such dark times that helps keep me on the straight and narrow.  But of one long drunken night I have only the fondest if admittedly befuddled memories. It happened in 1996 on a press junket.

When the Possum made it to the stage he was pretty good. Here he is at the Opry some time in the late 90s crooning away with Tennessee Whiskey.