7 November, 1917 and Prokofiev

Tomorrow will be Revolution Day on BBC Radio 3 - it's the actual anniversary of 'Oktyabr', Russia in those days having a calendar which was 13 days behind the one operating in the west. I've scripted a selection of what I think are very vivid excerpts from Prokofiev's diary for 1917, editing down ruthlessly if regretfully to fit five three-minute sequences which will pop up during the day - don't know when exactly - read by Sam West. I hugely admire Anthony Phillips' three-volume labour of love - not only has he translated everything, but the footnotes are a literary marvel in themselves - but as I was going about excerpting it struck me that he didn't always stick to the pith of Prokofiev's laconic style.

So I translated myself, indebted to his lead, and the work took me in to the thick of February Petrograd, where Prokofiev's curiosity led him around the seemingly random heart of the action around Liteiny and Nevsky Prospekts, Palace Square and the Fontanka Canal during the first Revolution of the year. He spends five pages meticulously detailing the movements of people, soldiers, Cossacks and revolutionaries, chronicling his route so that if you know the centre of St Petersburg well, you can follow it exactly.  For my selection, I started with a picture of his musical and social life in early 1917, leading up to the first of the disturbances. When it came to the full account of the evening upheavals on 27 February, I had to edit down substantially. I thought I'd insert a couple of the passages you won't hear read tomorrow, because they're equally good and vivid. 

Again I found myself on the Field of Mars – only now it was much darker. On the far side of the square, by the Troitsky Bridge, a crowd was shouting ‘Hurrah!’. Firing was audible. I quickly made my way, almost running, across the square. I wasn’t wearing galoshes, and my feet slipped on the icy pavement. At one point I slipped so badly I could hardly keep upright and grabbed at the arm of a passing colonel He quickly turned around to see me. I said, ‘I’m sorry, I seem to have alarmed you’.  The colonel replied, ‘On the contrary, I was alarmed that you might fall’. And he continued: “Why are you running? The bullets will catch you anyway. Look, I’m not hurrying’.

I could have answered him that if one crosses a square in one minute rather than three, then one has three times less chance of being hit by a bullet. But I was not in the mood for debate, and said: ‘Yes, but I’m in a hurry’, bowing and moving on...Having come near to the ‘Mir isskustva’ Exhibition Hall, I thought that it might be easier to go and spend the night at Dobychina’s, since there so much firing on the palace side that it seemed pointless to carry on that way. At first I resolved to slip along the Yekaterinsky Canal; it seemed quiet there and there was no reason to expect a disturbance on that street.  

As soon as I reached the canal, than there appeared on the other side a crowd of soldiers surrounded by workers. They were shouting and singing, and heading towards the Field of Mars. Clearly this was a part of the army that had gone over to the revolutionaries’ side. Making use of the fact that the canal was between us, I quickly made for the Church of the Saviour of the Blood, reasoning that in the case of gunfire breaking out, I would be able to shelter behind its walls. I asked people I met if it was possible to cross Nevsky, and replies varied: some said it was possible if one ran quickly, others said it was frightful. One woman said: ‘Don’t go there. There are folk on the rooftops firing their revolvers at anything they encounter.'  

I didn't give this much credence and pressed on. People appeared out of the darkness like greyish ghosts. I decided that I too must appear like a ghost, and they couldn't possibly fire at every phantom.

Regrettably I also had to skip some vivid details Prokofiev gives of the morning after, only mentioning in passing how he helped to save a plain-clothes policeman from lynching. 

There are plenty of photos and paintings of officers and policemen being arrested - the one above brings it all specifically to life, though the below painting of generals being carted off is vivid reportage too.

So here's the text in question.

On the Fontanka huge fires were burning fiercely. They were destroying the home of a divisional police chief. Out of a third floor window flew green sofas, tablecloths and whole cupboards full of papers. The cupboards created a specially strong impression as they slowly hovered over the window sills before toppling over, wheezing somewhat, and falling to the pavement, straight into the bonfire. The cupboard would break up, the glass doors shattered into pieces and whole swarms of papers rose upwards in the fire and the wind above the entire building. The crowd made a spiteful racket. Cries were heard: ‘bloodsucker! It’s our blood you’ve been sucking!’ I did not sympathise with the mob. The violence depressed me. I wondered whether the policeman’s family had escaped the pogrom. 

In the afternoon mama and I went to look at revolutionary Petrograd, which had taken on a very festive air. At Gostinny Dvor there was another incident involving a policeman: I saw how two students were dragging off a fat old grey-haired man in civilian clothes, accompanied by an infuriated crowd who were crying out ‘A plain-clothes copper!’ People came running from all directions to look, and I thought it would not go well for him. Then someone shouted ‘ no lynch law!’ and now I too started to yell ‘no lynch law!’ Some folk joined me, but others cried out ‘Kill him!’ and pushed their fists into his face. He tried to speak, but it seemed saw nothing in front of him. One of the number of us who had been against lynching cried: “surround him with soldiers!’

But the soldiers couldn’t force their way through the enraged mob. The policeman was on quite a high-level section of pavement, a few steps away from me. With all my strength I pushed backwards and repulsed a few folk from the pavement. The soldiers managed to rush into the clear space and reached the policeman. Thus he was separated from the crowd and was more or less safe. I found Mama and we went on our way. 

In my last sequence, I tried at first to take the pith from the rest of Prokofiev's diary entries for the year, but could only in the end summarise his time in the country outside Petrograd working on the 'Classical' Symphony and the First Violin Concerto without a piano, and his river trip down the Volga and Kama. I did manage to slip in his crucial decision to turn back to sunny Kislovodsk in the Caucasus, where he'd been staying with his mother, when his train met another in slushy Minelniye Vodiye carrying grim reports of the cities to which he was heading. And the final entry for the year is pithy, too.

For documentary realism on the October Revolution, silvered with artistic mastery, you have to watch as much of Eisenstein's October as has been assembled in recent years. I didn't realise what a total masterpiece it is until I saw it at the Barbican the other week with a special live 'performing version' of Edmund Meisel's original score, though there's actually no such thing since what he composed wasn't used in Leningrad or Berlin. 

What Bernd Thewes has done from close examination of the manuscripts for 90-piece orchestra - on this occasion, the LSO - is nevertheless a marvel, and though no composer could ever reflect Eisenstein's montage whizzing, in this case around the gorgeous objects in the Hermitage, where he had free rein in 1928, the blocks of mechanistic sound fitted the film supremely well. Three cheers to Kino Klassika for presentation of this giddying spectacle. Much more about it here on The Arts Desk.

UPDATE (10/11) My producer, Michael Rossi, has sent me a link to the six clips, which you can listen to here. They should be among the highlights by Monday. I heard some splendid things on the day itself. Tom Service's afternoon guests included Marina Frolova-Walker - she's always perfect on interesting chapter and verse - and he played some extraordinary music, including a sequence of shorter avant-garde pieces and the UK broadcast premiere of Mosolov's riotous Symphonic Poem. Katie Derham had a balalaika player and a theremin among the visitors to In Tune, and the Royal Liverpool Phil performance of Shostakovich's Sixth Symphony in the evening was excellent.

Nicolai Gedda (1925-2017): just the ticket

Not just the ticket with his autograph, in fact, but - more important - the intense memory of hearing him sing the most perfect of Donizetti 'Una furtiva lagrima's at the age of 72. Though there's no date, it must have been 1997. The researcher at BBC Radio 3's In Tune seemed rather pleased to have hit on that memory when she rang me up yesterday afternoon - I even took the ticket straight off the CD shelves in front of me to look at it while we spoke. My phone chat with the delightful Sarah Walker is here on the iPlayer for the next 28 days (at 40m15s), and there's an excerpt in a soundclip, presumably there in perpetuity, which they put up pronto after the live broadcast. Image below from the Warner archive.

Had there been longer I might also have mentioned how he was on one of the very first opera LP sets I borrowed as a, maybe, 10 year old from Sutton Music Library. I'll be honest and say I was attracted by the cover, which showed Reri Grist's Gilda looking at Cornell MacNeil's stricken Rigoletto in a mockup of a renaissance room with bunches of fruit on the table (if memory serves). Gedda, of course, was Verdi's Duke of Mantua on the LP set.

Wish I'd seen Gedda on stage (only caught the concert and later the Bernstein Barbican performance of Candide in which the veteran NG played three small roles). Searching YouTube as well as CDs on the shelves, I found this interesting: two performances of Lensky's aria from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. The first - the one played, I believe on In Tune - was made when Gedda was 28, and is soft and intimate

while the second is much fuller, very stylish albeit matched to a poor quality and rather pointless film in which he's miming badly and seems to be addressing Zaretsky as the one he's saying farewell to rather than Olga.

Freud Museum memories on Radio 3

Coming up on New Year's Day at 18.45, Breaking Free: Freud versus Music, Stephen Johnson's examination of the great man's singular relationship to music. The programme is available here, I assume for more than the usual 28 days as that proviso isn't given. Delightful producer Elizabeth Arno, pictured with Stephen above by me in the famous Maresfield Gardens study (yes, in case you didn't know, that's yer actual couch behind - Berggasse 19 has a copy), asked the folk at the Freud Museum who might represent their side of the argument, and Ivan Ward, who arrived as part of the new batch of 'Museum Educators' towards the end of my group's stint, recommended me.

It was a trip down memory lane in more ways than one. I first met Stephen, now my best pal in the music fraternity, during my year at the Freud, which means both the work and the friendship date back 30 years (ouch). Though the blurb says it was my first job, that's not right; I'd spent a year as Assistant Editor on the beleaguered, shoestring-run Music and Musicians and had just gone freelance, with a book on Richard Strauss to finish. The three days a week at the Freud, sponsored by the Manpower Services Commission - I found the job at Golders Green Job Centre - was just right (pictured below: bin in Maresfield Gardens covered with Freud Anniversary stickers).

Not only that, but it will always be my most meaningful time in some kind of 'office'.I even got to put on a concert of Freud-related works, a sandwich of analogous works - Mahler's Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen in the Schoenberg arrangement, with J as soloist, and Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony - flanked by the only music Freud seemed to care for, Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni, in excerpts arranged for wind. My friend Andrew Constantine brought his Bardi Ensemble from Leicester and I reckon it was a pretty good concert in Belsize Park Town Hall.

I'd completely forgotten that I'd even given a talk on Freud and Music in the museum, and only when Ivan printed out select quotations was my memory jogged this time to realise that Freud actually references Walter's Morgentraumdeutungweise via Sachs.  Now that there's a catalogue of the 3000 plus books in the library we were also able to find two short psychoanalytic studies of Wagner operas, both of them gifts so hard to tell if Freud read them or not.

More of the issues you can hear in the complete programme, where I'm proud to stand alongside some fine figures in the psychoanalytic world as the more gossipy lifestyle commenter. We'll see what's there, but the main point is that we spent a very jolly couple of hours in the Museum and as always I sensed that extraordinary centredness and serenity that comes from standing in the downstairs rooms, left as they were at Freud's death by keeper of the flame his daughter Anna.

Stephen and Elizabeth needed to get down to editing business afterwards, so I took myself to Louis up in Hampstead, the Austro-Hungarian cafe, which never changes, for a coffee and cake and then wandered down ever-idyllic Flask Walk in peak Autumntime (as pictured above, looking up towards the local school) to Burgh House for a bowl of appropriately autumnal pumpkin soup

via an affectionate cat, appropriate since Stephen and his wife Kate were recently bereaved of the most characterful feline in the world, Agatha (I always called her A-GAA-the a la Freischütz) and we'd been talking about their new pair. Freud's favourite animals were chows, and he recalled that while stroking one of them, Jo-Fi, he found himself humming, 'unmusical as I am,' 'Dalla sua pace' from Don Giovanni - 'on her peace of mind mine also depends'. The words of the melody unconsciously summoned, he would argue in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, usually had a significance.

Anyway, it's nice, after a rather thin year for me on Radio 3, to be featured in something on New Year's Day. May 2017 be a good one for all, as 2016 has been for me on the personal and work levels albeit a horror on the world front - Brexit, Trump and Aleppo offset in tiny ways by victories for Sadiq Khan as London Mayor and LibDem Sarah Olney overturning the wretched Zac Goldsmith's 23,000 majority in Richmond Park. The fight against Fascism is going to be a hard one, but we've got to get tougher.

Happy 70th birthday, BBC Radio 3

Just a quick one so I don't let the big day pass unrecorded here. I had the good luck to be in a studio of beloved Broadcasting House, Portland Place on Tuesday morning, recording the script for my Building a Library on Elgar's Falstaff (due for broadcast on Saturday 8 October). Before I lifted on to the table the ancient script rack of which I'm so fond, which seems to have made its way upstairs from the old days in Studio B14, I found pages left by the estimable Rob Cowan, Mensch and stalwart, whose seat I was occupying. You probably can't see the name on the top of the page, but it's his.

Having got everything 'in the can', I had a quick chat with my vivacious producer Olwen Fisher and sound engineer Michael Bacon about the status quo. It's just such a joy that recording BaL is exactly the same as it ever was - that's to say, you discuss the script and any tweaks needed with the producer, then go through recording it with all the music examples in place as you devised them. So in reading it you still get something of the right tempo and inspiring snippets to give your voice the necessary reactive kick.

That hasn't always been the case elsewhere; some years back on the World Service, for instance, I had a discussion with Patrick Harrild, principal tuba player of the LSO, about our favourite recordings from the orchestra's first 100 years; we never got to listen to the chosen snippets of each other's choices, so we couldn't react properly. There have been moves to economise here too by trying to stop the full playthrough, but so far the Record (formerly CD) Review team have staved it off (and they don't think it would save much time anyway).

I rejoice, because that means studio work for Record Review is as it always was, with a civilized timeframe and knowledgeable folk as editors. It changed for the worse during the Gambaccini era, but they realised they were losing their core listeners and not gaining any of Classic FM's, so back it went to the old format and we non-celebrities came back in from the cold.

Which means it's been 29 happy years for me, starting with a review of Sawallisch's recording of Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten, with a few bumpy interludes thereafter, and some wonderful studio meetings, like the one above with the late, great Bob Tear - then aged 71 - and Elaine Padmore, Petroc Trelawny chairing. Topically, one of the three books we discussed was Susie Gilbert's excellent Opera for Everybody: The Story of the English National Opera. Once past the last two productions to be conducted by ENO's adored but honourably departing Music Director - Don Giovanni opening tomorrow night, can't wait, and Lulu - that particular story may go downhill rapidly.

But I digress. Returning to the subject of the 70th birthday celebrations,  I hear there are exciting things going on at the Southbank Centre, but I only saw an empty Radio 3 studio in a glass box when I went to Salonen's stupendous Philharmonia Stravinsky concert on Wednesday, so must find out more.

Coming soon: two mythic giants

Which is a way of advertising six classes of the new Opera in Depth season on Mozart's Don Giovanni and my forthcoming BBC Radio 3 Building a Library on Elgar's Falstaff (broadcast date 8 October). Let's get the basic info down for the first, since it starts on Monday 26 September. Runs for ten weeks, Mondays 2.30-4.30pm, at the wonderful Frontline Club in Paddington. We devote the first five weeks to Don G before moving on to Shostakovich's The Nose (covering two or three weeks) and Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (one or two). Mark Wigglesworth is down to return on 14 November, having by then moved on to Berg's Lulu at ENO. If you're interested in joining, try this email: david.nice@theartsdesk.com

While it's hard to love the Don Juan of Tirso de Molina and the Don Giovanni of Mozart, who could not have more complex feelings about Shakespeare's greatest (semi)comic creation? Elgar understood his dualities and wrote the most perceptive 'analytical essay' for the Musical Times of September 1913. Novello helpfully reprinted it as a little booklet, which I treasure.

As this most magnificent of tone-poems illustrates, Elgar had no time for what he saw as the 'caricature' of The Merry Wives of Windsor but couldn't praise too highly the creation of Henry IV Parts One and Two, whose death is described so vividly by Mistress Quickly in Henry V. Thus part of Elgar's second paragraph, using Professor Dowden and Maurice Morgann to speak for him:

The real 'Sir John Falstaff is a conception hardly less wonderful than that of Hamlet.' This complexity has been summed up by Morgann as follows: 'He is a character made up by Shakespeare wholly of incongruities; - a man at once young and old, enterprizing [sic] and fat [not sure what the duality is there, mind you], a dupe and a wit, harmless and wicked, weak in principle and resolute by constitution, cowardly by appearance and brave in reality; a knave without malice, a lyar without deceit; and a knight, a gentleman and a soldier, without either dignity, decency, or honour.'

Dare I say the opposing qualities would have appealed to a typical Geminian like Elgar? They account for why in part Falstaff is also a self-portrait (cue this surprising photo which Graham Rickson sent me today).

Everything is in perfect balance - the humour and extroversion versus the introspection of the dreamer, darkness and light, programme music and pure symphonism. The climaxes of the Gadshill exploit, battle and aggressive coronation march sit well around and between the heartbreaking dream interludes - and if those don't have the right degree of inwardness, any recording is going to fail. That helped me to make distinctions and to jettison half-good performances at key points. But more I cannot say, of course, until the programme's aired.

Some years ago I was asked to give a talk comparing Falstaff with Strauss's Don Quixote. There are so many points of correspondence between the man Strauss hailed as 'the first English progressivist' and the Bavarian tragicomedian (another Gemini, of course). I had a wonderful time on Wednesday evening hearing the English Concert in two Quixote-related works; should have got to know Telemann's Le Burlesque de Quichotte long ago, but what a light-footed charmer it is, made all the richer by Danann McAleer's reading of what turned out to be the poetically archaic Victorian translation of Cervantes by John Ormsby. Maybe that's the version I should turn to next - for like War and Peace, Don Quixote should be revisited at least every 10 years.

It's in fact been nine years since I last covered Mozart's Don Giovanni in what was then my Opera in Focus class. Now we coincide with the first and last fling of what ought to be a perfect partnership, Mark Wigglesworth conducting and Richard Jones directing a new production at English National Opera (oh, what wouldn't we all have given for the original plan that the duo should share The Gondoliers, a work Carlos Kleiber in all seriousness would have conducted at ENO if they'd taken him at his word). I look forward to all the film references Richard revealed in a special-preview ENO talk with Christine Rice and myself, bearing in mind that he had given each of the cast members a special DVD. Clive Bayley, the Leporello, got The King of Comedy.

Which made me buy a copy and watch it for the first time. What a masterpiece of discomfiture and a prophecy of the insane pitch celebrity culture has already reached. Astonishing performances from De Niro as the man who won't let go, Jerry Lewis as the man without humour - and Sandra Bernhard as the fan from hell, getting her big break from Scorsese.

Hoping that Richard will come along again to the Opera in Depth course. Looks likely, but he's usually elusive until closer to the time, and of course totally preoccupied with Don G at the moment.

Living with Shostakovich 9

Recorded my Building a Library script Tuesday last for broadcast on BBC Radio 3's Record Review (as CD Review has now been re-named), 9.30am this coming Saturday morning. Obviously I'm not going to give anything away about interpretations, but it's the first time I've found myself with a neat set of examples that didn't need editing down and down - in fact the total came to several minutes under the three-quarters-of-an-hour mark, but I felt I'd communicated what I wanted with all the right connections. The only drawback, as on previous occasions, was that several respectable middle-of-the-road versions didn't make the script.

How did I feel at the end of two months with this most curious of Ninth Symphonies, having suggested it in the first place? Surprisingly churned up, with the darkest portions of the work running round in my head. Never believe anything the public Shostakovich said about his works. He knew he was going to get stick for not producing a triumphal ode to the end of the war after the externalised tragedy of the Seventh and the much deeper soul-searchings of the Eighth. Even so, to describe the Ninth as being 'dominated by an airy, serene mood' is absurd.

Amazing how the fallacy has clung to so many of the liner notes for the 28 recordings I listened to. Doing a Building a Library on those alone would be fascinating in itself.I jotted down some of the plums, won't shame the writers by naming them in just a few examples: 'unquestionably the wittiest and most cheerful of all his symphonies'; 'tiny, undramatic and transparent'; 'the composer really is celebrating the end of the past years of war'; 'a pronouncedly classical piece full of enchanting cheerfulness and bright colours...innocuous traditional symphonic close'. Pictured below: the nearest portrait of Shostakovich I could find to the year of the Ninth: the composer at Bach celebrations in Leipzig, 1950.

If you tot up the passages of unequivocal cheerfulness, they total less than three minutes out of an average 23. And even that's doubtful: note the sarcastic trill in the opening, Mozart-Haydn theme. Outer movement developments are fierce, even violent; the transformation of the finale's neutral main theme into a goosestepping parade should be terrifying. I'm not proposing any Ian MacDonald-style 'Stalin subtexts' here - he goes too far in suggesting that the slow movement sheds 'crocodile tears of mourning'. The clarinet melody is a sad, limping waltz, no two ways about it, preferably taken at a moderato pace sufficient to show that, not as an Adagio, but there are persuasive examples at the much slower pace.

As for the bassoon solo, as tragic and lamentatory as its cor anglais equivalent in the Eighth Symphony? One proponent of 'happy symphony' concedes it could be 'a homage to the dead on a day of general rejoicing'. But, in the words of the dubious Shostakovich in Testimony, they are beating the symphony to rejoice. That's not my fancy, it's there in the dissonances and the chromatic twists added to initially straightforward material. Below: Monty with Marshals Zhukov and Rokossovsky and General Sokolovsky of the Red Army leaving the Brandenburg Gate in 1945.

One should never forget that Shostakovich's aim is to entertain as well as to chasten, to give the orchestra its rewards - and all the woodwind have their moments in the sun (though the oboe's is very brief). It's a wonderful, a perfect work, especially in dialogue with its vast(ly different) but similarly five-movement predecessor - in both the last three movements run without a break - and I hope something of that perfect originality comes through on Saturday. Any Building a Library worth its salt should be as much about the subject as the performances, taking you through the piece and pointing out its treasures, and a short symphony is in many ways the perfect candidate for that.

Top image: Shostakovich's greeting to Sibelius on his 80th birthday, inscribed with formal congratulations and a quotation of the finale's main theme. Snapped during my heavenly five hours at Ainola; discussed in context here

Seasonal notes

That's notes in both senses - purely musical ones, and writing about the music, which I was honoured to do for two releases of the highest quality. Actually both came out last year, but top Norwegian ensemble Music for a while's Canticles of Winter didn't get pushed/distributed here until recently (they came close to a deal with Deutsche Grammophon). My excellent friend and colleague on The Arts Desk, Graham Rickson, echoes most of my thoughts in the first of his Christmas CD roundups here. 

As for what I felt on listening to the white-label copy, that's in the liner notes, and if they smack to you of gush, they're certainly not insincere. I really was bowled over by that chance encounter with Tora Augestad and her phenomenal players at a late-night cabaret in Stavanger, bought their Weill CD - one of the best, if not the best, I know - and got sent the selection of Dowland and other classics transformed. It's high time the group made their UK debut, preferably at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. This is an ensemble of equals, and if there's a better, cooler jazz trumpeter than Mathias Eick I don't know him. Stian Carstensen's accordion also adds sharp icicles, and not just to the group's second version of 'Der Leiermann' at the end of Schubert's Winterreise (very different from the first). Canticles of Winter tends to the dark, chilly side, but it's none the worse for that.

All brisk brightness, on the other hand, is the third and last of Neeme Järvi's complete Tchaikovsky ballet recordings with the Bergen Philharmonic for Chandos. I'm not so much proud of these notes as grateful to Chandos for letting me do what I'd always wanted - a number by number synopsis pointing out the specific nature of the musical genius in each. Good news, too, is that the equally idiomatic and characterful concert performance of The Sleeping Beauty Act Three from Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra has been recorded for release on the RLPO's own label.

Finally, if you want a big aural binge in the lazy days between Christmas and New Year, let me reinforce what I had to say about two big Stravinsky boxes on BBC Radio 3's CD Review (four days left to listen on the iPlayer). Several friends have already bought the DG box on the strength of what they heard, and while Stravinsky's own performances are of infinite fascination on Sony, and the presentation much more sexy/nostalgic,

the variety of interpretations here is no doubt richer, and gives an interesting perspective on the range of approaches to Stravinsky over 80 years. Excellent value for money, too, I'm told. And it should be pointed out that neither edition is 'complete' - several key arrangements of other composers are missing though not, on DG, the essential, telling transcriptions of two Wolf songs right at the end of Stravinsky's life. I was pleased with the radio segue into the chromatic first of them from the dodecaphonic In Memoriam Dylan Thomas.

Happy listening, and season's greetings, with a second plea for charitable giving to Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS). Circa 3,500 would-be migrants lost their lives at sea this year, another 30 hitting the news today. Even one would be too many.

Fabulous Fučik

Picture if you will the delightful Sarah Walker - the BBC Radio 3 presenter, not the veteran singer - doing a drum majorette routine in the studio with an invisible baton while the liveliest of marches goes out on air. I think - I hope - we all got infected by the glittering spirit of Julius Fučík (1872-1916) as conducted, con molto amore as is so obvious, by Neeme Järvi, and played so brilliantly by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra on Chandos.

The disc was one of my two picks for an orchestral new releases stretch on last Saturday's CD Review (still available to listen to on the BBC iPlayer for another couple of weeks; our slot is around the 1.16 mark, though I also very much liked what I heard of  Hannah French's Building a Library on Haydn's Trumpet Concerto as we waited to go live on air). The other choice was a Mahler 6 from Daniel Harding, not a conductor I've found more than middle-of-the-road before, but with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra he's fired up and has a lot to say. And the cover gimmick of heartbeat ECG and hammerblow frequency is a good one.

Sarah chose the two Brahms Piano Concertos from Barenboim and Dudamel on DG, a recording which I found almost impossible to listen to in its ponderousness after the flights of Robin Ticciati in the First Symphony and now, on CD, Stephen Kovacevich's versions with Colin Davis when he was still plain Bishop. Sarah's other disc, the Schoenberg arrangement of Brahms's G minor Piano Quartet and his Accompaniment to a Film Scene, with Marc Albrecht conducting the Netherlands Philharmonic, was much more to my taste, and the Accompaniment came in useful when I was illustrating Shostakovich's original first interlude in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk to my Opera in Depth students - it's just possible he knew Schoenberg's work in 1931.

The Fučík selection - I know, how easily the finger goes on the keyboard from c straight to k - really is quite a sequence, with excellent notes to match by Nigel Simeone (though even he can't unearth all the programmes - what, for instance, are the Marinarella and Miramare Overtures, miniature tone poems, all about?) It's a real New Year's Day concert of overtures, marches and polkas with plenty of novelties like whistling, anvils and farting bassoon. Andrew McGregor did a spot check on that venerable Viennese institutions and found that Fučík, Prague-born son of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and very much part of the K&K set-up, had never featured.

He had an interesting peripatetic life as bassoonist and military bandmaster, working in two Prague theatres as well as in Sisak (in Croatia), Sarajevo, Budapest and Berlin. I find it piquant that the most conventional of the marches, Under the Admiral's Flag, was played at Trieste's naval yard in 1911, with Archduke Franz Ferdinand present, for the launch of the Dreadnought battleship Viribus unitis (the Austrian navy not being something that figures much, for obvious reasons).

Certainly the waltzes are up there with Josef Strauss's for sheen and beauty, if perhaps not quite the same degree of memorability. The lessons of Dvořák, Fučík's most famous mentor, shine in the woodwind writing both there and in the Marinarella Overture, where Rusalka seems to glide out of the water. But if we're talking about tunefulness, Fučik probably has the distinction of being the most-played Czech composer ever through his 'Grande Marche Chromatique' Entry of the Gladiators; intriguing to learn that it was partly written to serve the new chromatic possibilities in valved brass instruments. It's a proper riot in the full-orchestral garb on the CD; the little harmonic sideslip in the trio tune is typical.

Fučík can't resist giving little kicks to his melodies, whether in syncopation, harmony or orchestration. Uncle Teddy is such fun, with Bohemian thirds and sixths to boot, and I love the eastern European otherness of Hercegovac; but undoubtedly the one on my brain, which I partly got played on the show, is the cheerful-making Florentiner March, supposedly mimicking the chatter of an Italian girl to which her man - an Austrian officer - grunts back 'Jawohl' on two low notes. The polkas are fine, too, especially The Old Grumbler with the bassoon (the RSNO's David Hubbard, excellent) getting under the dance's feet as well as joining it. So is it going to take a Czech conductor of high status to appear in Vienna on January 1 and get these pieces included? And if that doesn't happen, wouldn't Neeme make a marvellous New Year's Day master?