Tyrolean with massage balls

This is one of the most engaging composers of my generation - heck, he's even a bit younger than I am: Innsbruck-born and mountain-based Thomas Larcher, whose overwhelmingly dramatic Violin Concerto had its first UK performance at the Barbican on Friday with the glorious violinist who gave the Vienna premiere, Isabelle Faust, and the phenomenally gifted Kazuki Yamada, also turning up in London for the first time with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, who seem to adore him.

I went over the top trying to give my impressions of the concerto on the Arts Desk, so I won't expand here except to explain that the massage balls are rolled around the piano strings towards the eerie end of the piece (apparently you can hear the effect a lot better in one of Larcher's chamber works, which I can't wait to discover, and maybe on the iPlayer broadcast of the concert - you have five days left to listen; don't miss any of it).

I met Thomas for ten impression-packed minutes of my pre-performance talk, having earlier been misinformed that he wouldn't be appearing as his English wouldn't be up to it. Regardless of the fact that it was bound to be better than my German, nothing could have been further from the truth: he speaks clearly, directly and idiomatically, a composer completely sure of his aims and effects, though never in a big-headed way (he's also a very fine pianist, student of my goddess Elisabeth Leonskaja in Vienna).

We talked about the expanding and contracting effects of time in the piece, its two riveting dramas - I'd just heard it for the first time in rehearsal - and the inevitable impact of the mountain scenery onto which Larcher looks most days from what the programme biography told us is an 'architectural prize-winner' of a modernist home. That left me a mere quarter of an hour to go through some of the more remarkable features of the Rachmaninov Second Symphony, but the stepwise, orthodox chant-based element did seem to strike some of the audience as novel (those, that is, who didn't get up and clear off after the little composer interview, bit rude, I thought, especially as they couldn't have told then if I was going to be boring or not).

The BBC Symphony Orchestra have been on a real roll, starting the year with John Wilson in Hollywood classics and reaching a zenith of hard work - sectional rehearsals and all - for the Ferneyhough day which was so enthusiastically received by my idiosyncratic colleague Igor on The Arts Desk (I couldn't pass the chance to see Turnage's Anna Nicole that evening). In fact as I was ennumerating the orchestra's various triumphs with the Elgin Trio from the orchestra, who came to play for my lucky class on Tuesday, their viola-player, Kate Read, said how good it was to actually think it over and realise, yes, it's been good - they're so busy not just with the concerts but also with studio recordings (including, that very day, Delibes' gorgeous Sylvia ballet music with Yamada) that they rarely have time to take stock. Here, anyway, are the Elginers in the far from dreary City Lit board room where we meet - Kate centre with violinist Anna Smith and cellist Michael Atkinson.


They played through elements of the programme they're giving on the last Saturday of the month - I need to check details - an early, mostly Mozartian Schubert trio movement; the first and last movements of Martinu's first, mostly fierce and not easily identifiable-as-him string trio from his Paris years; and ineffably beautiful arrangements of Bach's three-part inventions; if anything, the F minor No. 9 sounds even more expressive on strings than it does on the keyboard. As I said, I'd be happy to have that at my funeral - not that I'm planning on going anywhere, and in any case the list changes from month to month... Told viola-playing Ruthie in Edinburgh about these, since her quartet is temporarily a trio, and they took them up immediately with delight, already having the trio-version of the Goldberg Variations in their repertoire. Dmitri Sitkovetsky's recording of his now celebrated version, 'in memoriam Glenn Gould', with Gerard Causse and Misha Maisky, is one of the CDs I take off the shelves most regularly.

Trio for the end of plenty

In a week where we all found out how much we're going to suffer from the cuts - the poor more than the rich, as usual*, the arts, adult education - we had three distinguished visitors from the BBC Symphony Orchestra to the course at the City Literary Institute, hotfoot from the meeting in which they'd learned how they might be affected.

How we adored violinist Anna Smith, viola-player Kate Read and Michael Atkinson, cellist of the suspended-due-to-pressures-of-child-rearing Merchant Quartet (one of four from the orchestra which had already been to play to us). I hasten to add, by the way, that I took the above not great photo while they were warming up, not during their performance. Might not this be the best possible advertisement for these non-vocational, purely appreciative courses which could be the first to fall under the axe - despite the fact that, filling up as we do on the first day of booking, we more than pay our way?

Which they won't if hard-campaigning City Lit Principal Peter Davies has anything to do with it. And we've been through worse with a previous Tory government which threatened to close us down altogether. I'm still not clear on what future, and what cut-percentage, adult education faces, as it's low down the list on the reporting. Watch this space**.

In the meantime, the BBCSO trio - believe it or not, the second group of its kind that's come to the course in less than a year - played us a work I'd never heard, Dohnanyi's Serenade.


Like Korngold, young Erno was a prodigy who kept on ploughing the same late-romantic furrow, and rarely sounded the native woodnotes like fellow countryment Bartok and Kodaly. Yet within those bounds the Hungarian can surprise. The Serenade of 1902 starts in orthodox if piquant fashion, bringing the viola to the fore in the lovely second movement. But the scherzo and finale run chromatically wild, and the heart of the work is the Theme and Variations, ending ethereally as the viola floats between violin weavings and cello pizzicati. We loved that movement so much that I cajoled the trio into playing it again at the end.


In between, we asked the usual probing questions, and found out that Anna and Mike were in two different minds about the Roxburgh premiere the other week (Kate had taken the week off, which may have been as well as it was one of the hardest the other two had ever experienced). Good to hear a detailed defence of certain aspects of it from Mike, when all we've had so far are invective and abuse on the Arts Desk site. He added that they'd found the Elgar Falstaff, which has been out of their rep for some years, much harder to play.

All three enthused about the winner of the Besancon Conducting Competition they'd been the resident orchestra for: not since Bychkov at the 2009 Proms had a conductor so amazed them, along with judges and audience, as Japanese newcomer Kazuki Yamada. You heard the name here first, and don't miss his first concert with the BBCSO on 4 March 2011. Here, sure enough, is the performance they especially raved about - the first movement of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique at Besancon (UPDATE: removed from YouTube by spoilsport Yamada).

Talking of astonishing young 'uns, BBC New Generation Artist Khatia Buniatishvili, a 23 year old Georgian pianist and protegee of Martha Argerich, will be playing the Chopin Second Piano Concerto at one of the orchestra's Maida Vale concerts (as well as a Wigmore lunchtime on 1 November which I'll have to miss).


She stunned some of us, and infuriated others, at Stephen Kovacevich's 70th birthday concert on Sunday evening. True, the Liszt sonata was tumultuous and very fast - a criticism of Buniatishvili's playing generally, I've noticed - in the demonic torrents. But she makes such a full, rich sound and shows such painful sensitivity in the few moments of redemption that I was won over with tears in my eyes - and a pain in the gut from the way she seemed to be punching it, not unpleasurably (masochistic me). And I was right at the back of the hall...well, these are exciting times, and Buniatishvili is going to be around for many years to come. Here's another YouTube clip from the BBC, of Khatia playing the finale of Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata:



Finally, there's something to celebrate tomorrow when the BBC Symphony Orchestra marks its 80th birthday with a megaconcert including two new or newish works (by Saariaho and Stephen McNeff. Wagner's Flying Dutchman Overture, which launches the programme, was the first work in the BBCSO's inaugural concert under Adrian Boult on 22 October 1930; early the next year Stravinsky came to play and Ansermet conducted the orchestra in his Rite of Spring, ending tomorrow's proceedings.

Fascinating to read, in Nicholas Kenyon's hopefully to-be-updated history of the orchestra, of wartime musical policy. In 1941 its credo was headed, albeit somewhat pompously, by 'Creative Principle: Music is an ennobling spiritual force, which should influence the life of every listener'. A message that needs to be reinforced, perhaps differently worded, today. Here's a bit of elegiac respite after all that hectic music: Elgar's sad little Sospiri, Boult conducting the BBCSO in Bedford during the war (UPDATE: also removed, who knows why, as it's out of copyright).

*compelling piece here by Johann Hari in today's Independent. If you haven't the patience to read it all, how's this for clarity: 'There is one stark symbol of how unjust the response to this economic disaster caused by bankers is. They have just paid themselves £7bn in bonuses – much of it our money – to reward themselves for failure. That's the same sum Osborne took from the benefits of the British poor yesterday, who did nothing to cause this crash. And he has the chutzpah to brag about "fairness." '

**Second footnote courtesy of Peter Davies: 'we will not know the actual implications for us until 21 Nov, when the Department issue the "grant letter" spelling out their exact priorities and funding for next year.'