Peter Phillips

Thursday

5 May 2016
Peter Phillips

Last words | 5 May 2016

This, my 479th, is to be my last contribution as a regular columnist to The Spectator. I have written here for 33 years and 4 months, a way of life really, and one I have greatly enjoyed. I thank Auberon Waugh in absentia for suggesting me to Alexander Chancellor in the first place; and Charles Moore for keeping me on in the early years, once we were up and running. I also thank three quite exceptional arts editors: Gina Lewis, Jenny Naipaul and the doyenne of these pages, Liz Anderson. Things have moved on from my habitual think pieces, outraged rants, ad hominem demolition of palpable idiots written in the back of aeroplanes. Perhaps if I had shot less often from the hip I would have been saved some of my more unfortunate calls to order, like the occasion I was summoned to Buckingham Palace for a dressing-down, resulting in the imposition of the Official Secrets Act.

Last words | 5 May 2016

Thursday

7 Apr 2016
Peter Phillips

Modernist cul-de-sac

The intransigence of Maxwell Davies, Boulez and Stockhausen is coming home to roost. Here were three composers, famous if not exactly popular, who called many shots by the time they died yet whose works were little loved in their lifetimes by the concert-going public and stand little chance of performance now they are dead. How was such imbalance possible? The intransigence had a lot to do with it. People thrill to a bold stance, and they don’t come much bolder than Boulez and Stockhausen in the Sixties. To be fair, Max was a very British version of this attitude. When Boulez died, the French press focused on a national hero whose main achievement, it seemed, had been to impress generations of foreigners while building monuments in Paris, as a true Frenchman should.

Modernist cul-de-sac

Thursday

25 Feb 2016
Peter Phillips

ENO must go...

Last week Darren Henley, chief executive of Arts Council England, revealed that opera receives just under a fifth of the Arts Council’s total investment in our arts organisations, which amounts to many millions of pounds. Yet it accounts for ‘between 3 and 4 per cent of live audiences in theatres’. How can these figures possibly be justified? Especially when the art form is so obviously a plaything of the wealthy. Once upon a time there was an organisation that had the intention of providing opera at reasonable prices to the less well-off. It was based in a poor part of London, where it pursued its ideals by presenting everything in English and emphasising the dramatic aspect of its chosen repertoire. From these roots the English National Opera has grown, which helps to explain why it is now in such trouble.

ENO must go...

Thursday

28 Jan 2016
Peter Phillips

Sound and fury | 28 January 2016

No one is consulted. No one is held to account. No one has the authority to turn it off. How is it that muzak has slipped through every legal control? The blame, I’d say, lies with those who are frightened of silence — with those who spend more money in shops that buzz to a friendly background hum, and laugh too loudly when all around are mute. To moderate their visceral fear of the quiet they cling to cheaply produced, intellectually demeaning and superficially comforting sub-music. Muzak comes in various forms — piped, performed live, and through other people’s headphones, when you can’t actually hear pitched sounds, only a desiccated, insistent beat. Live it can be most memorable. Everyone must have their least favourite story.

Sound and fury | 28 January 2016

Thursday

31 Dec 2015
Peter Phillips

Murder, he wrote

The allure of Carlo Gesualdo, eighth Count of Conza and third Prince of Venosa, has been felt by music-lovers from the humblest madrigal singer to the likes of Stravinsky, Boulez and Werner Herzog. Now, just three years after celebrating the 400th anniversary of his death in 1613, his birth in 1566 gives us a second chance to remind ourselves of that heady mix of murder and chromaticism that so famously characterises his life and work. For most classical composers the music is the way into the biography. Beethoven’s deafness becomes interesting once one has got to know the Missa Solemnis. Enquiry into the circumstances that surrounded Mozart’s death begins with hearing the Requiem. But when it comes to Gesualdo the biography takes over, and for many people the only interesting thing about the music is that it exists.

Murder, he wrote

Thursday

5 Nov 2015
Peter Phillips

Fantasy on ice

In this exciting new era of Spectator cruises I have been put in mind of a dream event long in the planning: to hear Allegri’s Miserere on ice, specifically on the ice of Antarctica. A number of things came together to put this on my bucket list, from the thought of dressing up like penguins (as usual) while we sing to penguins, to reading in the press that the Tallis Scholars ‘have performed on every continent on the planet except Antarctica’. I want to fill a boat with like-minded enthusiasts and adventurers, and set off from South America via the Falklands to the Antarctic Peninsula, hoping to make a landing and a concert at Paradise Bay. The plan is to fly from the southern tip of Chile (Punta Arenas) or Argentina (Ushuaia) to Port Stanley, from where the chartered boat will sail for the five necessary days to the Peninsula.

Fantasy on ice

Thursday

1 Oct 2015
Peter Phillips

Diary of a music competition judge

Monday (21 September): to St John’s Smith Square for the opening night of the London International A Cappella Choir Competition, which happens to coincide with the 2,000th concert of the Tallis Scholars, broadcast live on the BBC. This is a coincidence, since when we planned the event a year ago it was far from hitting precisely that round number. The inevitable reshuffling of dates since then has come out in favour of veracity, not that anyone but me, the keeper of the database, would have known. Or cared, probably. It is a big occasion which we made all the harder for ourselves by having to travel back that same day from a show the previous evening in Barcelona; and then choosing to sing a devil of a mass by Sheppard for the first time.

Diary of a music competition judge

Thursday

3 Sep 2015
Peter Phillips

Bad conduct

To be honest, my friendship with Michael Tilson Thomas hasn’t gone quite as I had hoped. It started in February 1990, when he chose a Tallis Scholars track for one of his desert island discs. This was a movement from a mass by Josquin des Prez, that he said (apparently impromptu) was music which ‘completely comforts me and brings me into a state of tranquillity’. I thought I might have found a new messiah. For many years now I have had the hope of meeting an orchestral conductor who is prepared to take on the challenges of performing a major work from the unaccompanied choral repertoire. Of course there have always been those who have included choral society-type singing in their symphony programmes. I mean those immensely complex a cappella masterpieces of the Renaissance which wouldn’t know an orchestral instrument if they saw one, and can last 20 minutes without a break.

Bad conduct

Thursday

30 Jul 2015
Peter Phillips

Orchestral infallibility

Watching the Berlin Philharmonic going into conclave to choose a successor to Simon Rattle — after countless hours of secret discussion they have chosen Kirill Petrenko — reminds one of little less than the election of a pope. In both cases the expectation is the same: the organisations are so iconic that they must continue into the future without a hitch and without question. Whatever sort of job they are doing, or have done, they have become too much a part of normal life to be abolished. Why is it that symphony orchestras of any standing are expected to survive indefinitely, where smaller musical organisations, though they may be just as established, are not? What are the long-term prospects for the Monteverdi Choir after John Eliot Gardiner retires? Or for Christopher Hogwood’s Academy of Ancient Music — Hogwood has recently died, and a succession has taken place, but AAM is hardly being financed out of the public purse.

Orchestral infallibility

Thursday

9 Jul 2015
Peter Phillips

Première league

This year the Proms are to stage 21 world premières and 11 European, UK or London premières. It is good to see the corporation continuing its mission to encourage new music, though some think they overdo it. I heard one of our leading keyboard players say that when he was asked to première a piece recently, he replied that he would rather dernière it. Clearly the BBC takes a more hopeful view. The most eye-catching new work in the series, leaving Whitacre out of it for now, will surely be the Fourth Symphony of our latest musical knight, Sir James MacMillan. MacMillan has described the piece as ‘abstract’ and ‘infused by ritual’, with allusions to the music of his great (arguably greatest) Scottish predecessor, the renaissance composer Robert Carver.

Première league

Thursday

4 Jun 2015
Peter Phillips

Evolutionary road

As Sepp Blatter has so affectingly remarked, the organisation he formerly headed needs evolution, not revolution. There is a consensus that this is also what David Pickard will bring to the Proms, when he takes over after this season. Of course, Pickard’s job is going to be more complex than Blatter’s ever was. The challenge for Pickard is that however hard he tries to please most of the people most of the time, the modalities of running the Proms mean that he cannot be friends with everyone — and for him there will be no short cuts. What do we expect from the Proms these days? Despite all the flurry in the press pack, the underlying formula has actually become quite fixed in recent years. It remains an overwhelmingly classical music series, with a balance struck between completely unknown modern music (part of the BBC’s commitment to living composers); very big projects, such as the Ring cycle; a judicious sprinkling of well-loved favourites; a dart at one or two whacky out-of-the-box events, like the Radio 1 rapper prom this year; serious neglect of music written before 1700; and an ever-increasing involvement with modern technology, which this year extends to a Proms app.

Evolutionary road

Thursday

30 Apr 2015
Peter Phillips

Mexican wave

Tours that start in Mexico have a nasty habit of repeating on one. Of all the British groups touring in the United States at the moment, we were the only one to launch our efforts there. But the upshot is that, two weeks later and safely in New York, I am still directing a sea of unnaturally white faces. I am often asked what happens when someone falls ill on stage. The answer is that they leave it, while trying to give the impression that this is all part of the evening’s entertainment. The resulting sense of unease can be felt by everyone in the room, but is perhaps worst for the conductor, whose job it is to fashion an interpretation out of people whose minds are surely elsewhere. The Tallis Scholars were in Mexico City for the Festival del Centro Historico de Mexico, under new management since last year.

Mexican wave

Thursday

2 Apr 2015
Peter Phillips

Our hero worship of Bach is to blame for rubbish like ‘Written By Mrs Bach’

My impression that Bach has come to rival Shakespeare as a flawless reference point in the cultural life of the nation has recently received some further corroboration. Remember the fuss that some academics, in the hope of recognition, created around the authorship of the bard’s works and where it got them? I don’t know how far the non-specialist public has been swayed by the BBC4 television programme entitled Written By Mrs Bach, but the Earl of Oxford came to mind as I watched it. The claims in the programme are so obviously rubbish that I would have thought the average film company might have thought twice about filming it, let alone the BBC airing it. But if it hadn’t been Bach in question no one would have taken it up.

Our hero worship of Bach is to blame for rubbish like ‘Written By Mrs Bach’

Thursday

26 Feb 2015
Peter Phillips

There’s nothing wrong with getting into Thomas Tallis on the back of Fifty Shades of Grey

Great works of art may have a strange afterlife. Deracinated from the world that created them they are at the mercy of what people think is important centuries later. Nothing shows this more clearly than the contribution that Tallis’s ‘Spem in alium’ has made to Fifty Shades of Grey. In case you are none the wiser, ‘Spem in alium’ is probably the most complex piece of music to come from the 16th century, and just possibly from any century. Written for 40 independent voices, it is unlikely to be sung with every note in place, though any sort of approximation shows just how majestic it is. Whether this was in the mind of E.L. James when she had her lovers do what they liked to do while listening to it, I cannot say; but its title is mentioned in the book, and the Tallis Scholars’ recording did very nicely on the back of it.

There’s nothing wrong with getting into Thomas Tallis on the back of Fifty Shades of Grey

Thursday

29 Jan 2015
Peter Phillips

Spotify: saint or sinner?

We have all read about the current woeful state of the CD industry — how it is 28 per cent down on last year, which was 25 per cent down on the previous year, and so on — but do we know why? Is it the endless financial crisis? Or is it that CDs, as a concept, are knackered? And this is despite the fact that more people are taking an interest in recorded music than ever before. The villain of the piece is of course the internet. Where previously the music one wanted was not available without going into a shop and buying it, now there is every chance that there will be a version of it somewhere on the net, which you can listen to for nothing. If it happens to be on YouTube, you may get visuals as well, or a score to follow.

Spotify: saint or sinner?

Thursday

1 Jan 2015
Peter Phillips

Does anyone have the balls to bring back castrati?

One of the most complete bars to the authentic performance of both baroque opera and some renaissance polyphony is the current unavailability of castrati. There isn’t much to be done about it of course, but we might regret that we can no longer hear a sound which, at its best, fascinated all who did hear it. And we don’t know what that sound was. The two famous and unique recordings of Alessandro Moreschi, made in old age in 1902 and 1904, give us some clues, but can hardly represent the sound of the greatest 18th-century practitioners. There are some pointers in contemporary reports. Gounod went to the Sistine Chapel in 1839 and got hooked on the sound of Palestrina being sung by a choir that included castrati: ‘This austere, ascetic, passionless music, with an intensity of contemplation that bordered on ecstasy,’ he wrote, going on to refer to the ‘firm attack, verging on harshness of those special voices .

Does anyone have the balls to bring back castrati?

Thursday

4 Dec 2014
Peter Phillips

Why Church music is back in vogue - and squeaky-gate music has had its day

One of the growth areas of contemporary music is in setting sacred texts. It might be thought that I had a special interest in claiming this, but in fact what I am about to describe represents a sea change in recent practice. Where there was once ‘squeaky gate’ (or ‘dripping tap’) music — as very dissonant writing used to be called — many leading composers are now writing in a style that is at least tonal and can occasionally seem almost naïve. There was a time when the first performance of a recent commission struck fear into the most broad-minded listener. We used to brace ourselves for horror and were rarely disappointed. In those days, the struggle to write more atonally than the next man was palpable. No self-respecting composer would pen a concord if he wanted to be taken seriously by his peers: to do so was to be compared to those who made soft-harmony arrangements of famous melodies.

Why Church music is back in vogue - and squeaky-gate music has had its day

Thursday

30 Oct 2014
Peter Phillips

Peter Phillips is mugged by a gang of Praetorius-loving six-year-old girls in China

We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how good they are at business, perhaps finding the prospect of them rushing into our world rather daunting. However, a part of this process has been the sudden curiosity there for western art-forms. Not long ago the idea of a tour of China by a European early music group would have seemed completely fantastical. What space was there in a country which for many years had allowed only eight ‘model plays’ to be publicly staged — all of them about the achievements of the army — for the votive antiphons of Tallis, or the Passions of Bach? Not everyone in that vast country is ready for such delicacies yet, but a light has begun to shine.

Peter Phillips is mugged by a gang of Praetorius-loving six-year-old girls in China

Thursday

2 Oct 2014
Peter Phillips

Christopher Hogwood: the absolutist of early music

The death of Christopher Hogwood has deprived the world of the most successful exponent of early music there has ever been, or is ever likely to be. It has also reduced by one the quartet of conductors who have been called ‘the Class of ’73’, a term coined by Nick Wilson in a recent study of the early-music revolution of the 1970s and 80s. It refers to four groups that were founded in that year that are held to have changed the face of modern concert-giving: Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music; Trevor Pinnock and his English Concert; Andrew Parrott’s Taverner Choir; and my own Tallis Scholars. Of these it was Hogwood who had the most immediate impact and commercial success. It is also fair to say that his recordings are the most numerous, but least played, of all the Class.

Christopher Hogwood: the absolutist of early music

Thursday

4 Sep 2014
Peter Phillips

Enough ‘themes’ at festivals

One might have expected the streets of Edinburgh, especially at festival time, to bear some evidence of the political struggle currently engulfing our nation, but in fact there was none at all. Apparently, the arguments for and against independence have to be traded on the doorstep and not in the street, which, to those visitors who anticipated fireworks, almost amounted to a vacuum. However, it meant that the streets could be made over to the customary bewildering number of stand-ups, advertisements, students handing out leaflets (they come at you these days on roller-skates, pirouetting as they approach), and thespians of every type. The most decorated stand-up of the moment is Timothy Vine, the first person ever to win the Dave TV one-liner competition twice (‘I’ve decided to sell my Hoover .

Enough ‘themes’ at festivals

Thursday

31 Jul 2014
Peter Phillips

Was Elgar’s The Kingdom an attempt to write a religious Ring Cycle?

To go from the second day of the England v. India Test match at Lord’s to the Albert Hall for the opening night of the Proms was to make a journey that a chosen few might find enviable. Nonetheless, different though the two activities are, there were some similarities. For example, the arena at the Albert Hall, where the Promenaders stand, fills up more or less to capacity before the seats around it attract a single occupant, these seats being taken at the last possible minute before the start of the concert. Exactly the same thing happens at Lord’s: the pavilion is filled while the rest of the ground remains empty until seconds before the start of play. The reason is that the Promenaders and the MCC members do not have numbered seats, and have to jockey for a good view of the performers, the regular public having a reserved space.

Was Elgar’s The Kingdom an attempt to write a religious Ring Cycle?

Thursday

3 Jul 2014
Peter Phillips

Roger Wright’s legacy at Radio Three – and his one big mistake

Roger Wright’s precipitate departure from both Radio Three and the Proms came as a surprise. At first the news was that he would go at the end of the season, but then it became apparent he was leaving at the beginning of it. Whatever his reasons may have been — and one sympathises with the idea of a carefree summer holiday after all these years — it brings Edward Blakeman, who becomes acting director of the Proms during the interregnum, deservedly into the limelight. Wright, meanwhile, will become the chief executive of the Aldeburgh Festival from September. Wright has been the controller of Radio Three since 1998, and has been in charge of the Proms since 2007. Sixteen years in charge of planning at a major radio station is a long stint, and his decisions, inevitably, have not pleased everyone.

Roger Wright’s legacy at Radio Three – and his one big mistake

Thursday

5 Jun 2014
Peter Phillips

Why it’s good to remember that Bach could be a tedious old windbag

When I was first learning about classical music, 50 years ago, the scene was more streamlined than it is now. Beethoven was king, with Brahms and Mozart next in line, and Haydn slowly establishing himself. Mahler was the new kid on the block; Bruckner was largely unknown and mistrusted. If one wanted the full symphony orchestra experience in late romantic music, it was to Tchaikovsky that most promoters turned. Tchaikovsky cycles, Beethoven cycles, Haydn’s ‘London’ symphonies, Mozart’s last three symphonies were the way to guarantee a crowd, with general knowledge of all Beethoven’s music — string quartets, piano trios, Lieder — at an all-time high. Now Bach is king. In fact, he is more than king: he is pope and emperor rolled into one, speaking for sacred and secular music enthusiasts alike.

Why it’s good to remember that Bach could be a tedious old windbag

Thursday

1 May 2014
Peter Phillips

British choirs can’t match up to those from abroad

To curate a festival these days is to put oneself in the firing line. There is every chance that all one will earn is the charge of stirring up apathy. It is a risk; and there will be no knowing how it has gone until it is much too late to withdraw gracefully. In the recently concluded first edition of the London International A Cappella Choral Competition, held at St John’s Smith Square, it could have gone either way. What will stick in my mind is how the wind got behind it round about day three, so that by the end a packed house could go mad at a Spanish victory. My original idea had been to help give St John’s some new profile in this era of Milton Courts and Cadogan Halls and, quite separately, to hand some leading choirs and vocal ensembles the chance to sing in London, which is notorious for being the most difficult capital in the world in which to land a paid singing gig, let alone attract an audience.

British choirs can’t match up to those from abroad

Thursday

3 Apr 2014
Peter Phillips

The mean, bullying maestro is extinct – or should be

W.H.Auden once wrote: ‘Real artists are not nice people. All their best feelings go into their work and life has the residue’ — which puts those who aspire to be artists in a bit of a quandary. Is it a measure of one’s success as a ‘real artist’ that one is not a nice person? Is it in fact possible to be a real artist and a nice person? And, if it is not, is it better to be a real artist or a nice person? Auden, who was speaking from first-hand experience, implies that it must be one or the other. By the time he wrote this, Auden was sure of his standing both as an artist and as a person. His friends might say that he was a nicer person than he thought he was, but no one was going to say he was not a great artist.

The mean, bullying maestro is extinct – or should be

Thursday

27 Feb 2014
Peter Phillips

Less subsidy means better music

One of the unlooked-for side effects of the financial crisis has been what might be called the desocialising of music funding. Whereas once many arts organisations could expect to survive solely on public money, just recently there has been an almost unseemly rush to tap private sources of cash. The time lag between the original catastrophe and the realisation that oblivion may be just round the corner is probably explained by the disinclination of politicians to dump high-profile organisations overnight. But now, finally, there is no escape. Philanthropists the world over are besieged. This would make such a lovely subject for a university student in the US, on one of those privately endowed humanities research programs, assuming he or she could get their heads around the concept of taxpayers being obliged to support élitist endeavours.

Less subsidy means better music

Thursday

30 Jan 2014
Peter Phillips

How Claudio Abbado bridged old and new

Not long ago the great conductors of classical music were general practitioners. They expected to give satisfactory interpretations of music written from the beginnings of symphonic composition to the present day, and audiences took it for granted that, if they knew what they were doing with Mozart and Beethoven, they could be trusted with Handel and Stravinsky. Their orchestras adopted the same approach and, within a narrow definition that bespeaks a more innocent age, everyone was content. There was little concern that Handel would not have recognised the sound that the instruments of the modern orchestra was making; and no one was disturbed that the big hero figure out front with the histrionic gestures was an anachronism, liable to overblow the delicate textures of both Handel and Stravinsky.

How Claudio Abbado bridged old and new

Friday

3 Jan 2014
Peter Phillips

Could this be the year of C.P.E. Bach?

Looking through the list of composers who celebrate some sort of anniversary in 2014 is a depressing business. I don’t think I have ever seen such an anonymous collection of small-time nobodies, and yet for them to appear on a list at all suggests that they did something of note, and that someone has heard of it. The only really big name to qualify is that of Richard Strauss, who was born 150 years ago. Often half-centenaries seem a little forced, not worth the fuss; nonetheless I anticipate there being some fuss about this one, since the cupboard is so bare. The Proms, to take one example, seem annually to live off the biggest-name anniversarians, who are pointed up in colourful articles in the brochure, with photos and learned round-ups of what it’s like to perform the music in question.

Could this be the year of C.P.E. Bach?

Thursday

5 Dec 2013
Peter Phillips

A century before Miley Cyrus, it was male performers — like Nijinsky — who bared all 

While the airwaves resonate with celebrations of Britten’s birth, I cannot help thinking that what was happening in Paris at that very moment was light-years away, not only from Lowestoft, but also from London. The cultural distance between the two metropolises can never have been greater than it was in 1913, and one can only imagine what Lowestoft was like then. The Britten family home, where Benjamin was born, is still standing, but it gives few clues to the life the family lived — inevitably restricted not only by location but also by lack of money. His father had once had the dream of becoming a gentleman farmer, but in the end had to settle for being a dentist. Cut to Paris, where the most glamorous if not notorious episode in the history of classical music was unfolding.

A century before Miley Cyrus, it was male performers — like Nijinsky — who bared all 
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