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?

Master and delinquent

The master is, of course, that greatest of conductors Neeme Järvi, something of a hero for me since he set the sleepy Edinburgh concert scene ablaze when I was an impressionable student; the delinquent is not I, in what's an especially nerdy looking photo, nor even, in truth, the real subject, my just-18-year-old godson Alexander. You'll understand what I'm talking about when you read the full story further down.

All this was only part of an eventful weekend whizz between Edinburgh, Glasgow and Broughton-by-Biggar. The lynchpin was a new Scottish Opera production of a Strauss opera I hold curiously dear - Intermezzo, the barely fictionalised tale of a marital storm-in-a-teacup between the composer and his wife. It turned out to be a discreet, human and gaudily but not inappropriately Klimt-framed show, classily sung and conducted. The Arts Desk, where the review went up yesterday, wondered if I couldn't find something else to cover while I was there. And what serendipity: the finest conductor the Royal Scottish National Orchestra has known before Stéphane Denève, who's doing such great things there now, was back in Edinburgh's Usher Hall on Friday for his only programme with the orchestra this season.

It was mainly taken up with 'the Leningrad', one of the four Shostakovich symphonies out of the fifteen I don't have any sort of soft spot for. Still, it's got all the usual traits, fireworks and between-the-lines nastiness, and I knew Järvi - whose performance of it back in the 1980s was one of the few I didn't catch live with the then SNO - would do wonderful things with it. He did, above all in a last five minutes I'll never forget - and just when I'd given up all hope of Shostakovich's less than convincing finale; again, read all about it on The Arts Desk. And you can hear the Radio 3 broadcast of the whole, splendid concert for the next week on the BBC iPlayer (with thanks to Petroc Trelawny for plugging the Arts Desk review at the end).

Neeme and I were supposed to meet at 5.30, but Radio 3's presence meant that the interview got shifted to 7pm. Yes, with a concert starting half an hour later. That's often been Neeme's style - he'll talk up to a concert, unlike Gergiev who will go on and keep the audience waiting if he's got more to say - and as usual the ideas and the enthusiasm were just pouring forth. I must say that when I last saw him in London, the performances - of Taneyev and Kalinnikov symphonies - were masterful, but he looked a little tired and unhealthy. Not so on Friday. Dear Edinburgh-based friend Ruthie, to my surprise, said she'd be happy to come in with me rather than hang around for half an hour; Neeme was predictably easy about that; and R can confirm that the first thing he said was how much he'd been enjoying my blog - 'I keep going back and back, more and more' - and what a good thing it was to express what you feel about all sorts of things in life. Here I am - again, a spur-of-the-moment thought that since Ruth was there, she might as well snap us - apparently telling him that the next entry would be extremely short. Not.


The interview will eventually appear as one of TAD's Q&As, so enough of that. But I ought to try to get to Tallinn in September when the male members of the clan - Neeme flanked by sons Paavo and Kristjan - will each be conducting a different orchestra on three consecutive nights.

So what about Armadillo? Well, I haven't heard it yet but I can imagine its fusion of jazz, rock and funk must be rather accomplished; clever Alexander has just got a distinction in Grade 8 clarinet, which is about as good as it gets. The full story of the Peeblesshire debacle, which made the front page of the local rag, is a bit sad and sorry, certainly not up there with the lead story of the weekend, the London protests against the cuts which of course I was nowhere near. The gig was planned to celebrate A's 18th birthday. First it was scheduled for Stobo Village Hall, then moved to Peebles Burgh Hall owing to police and council intervention, and finally cancelled at the last minute on health and safety grounds.


A has no need to disguise his identity with the dark specs (my idea as he doesn't like being photographed and surely wouldn't want his full visage seen here). His band honourably asked for a discussion at Peebles Police Station, but authority was adamant that this decent pack posed a public disorder risk. Result? 200 young people who'd bought tickets wandering round Peebles with nothing to do but...drink. And of course, as Alexander was quoted as saying in the article, the town was 'swarming with police...yet they claim they couldn't let our gig go ahead because of staffing shortages'. One phrase in the front-page piece especially makes me laugh, in this sentence: 'Police have revealed that they recovered a bumper haul of alcohol from underage drinkers around the Peebles and Innerleithen area on Saturday night'.

A bumper haul: the state totters! Anyway, the gig has been rescheduled, so Alexander will get to celebrate his birthday in style, and now he's 18 years and one day old, he can - not that he will - drink as much as he damned well pleases. Get off their backs, authorities: young people aren't as stupid or as reckless as you imagine. Oh, and some of them think Shostakovich is pretty amazing, too.

A heart in winter

You never know what each film of Ferzan Ozpetek has in store. In Sacred Heart, he tries the visionary line. It's unsettling, beautifully filmed, challenging in every frame - even when most of what his extraordinary leading actress, Barbora Bobulova, does is simply to stare blankly. She can age or become youthful just by a flop of the hair, a widening or glazing over of those mesmerising eyes. She moves from reluctant hard-nosed businesswoman with buried family sacrets


to a confused being with a conscience - saint or schizophrenic?


I can't really say more without giving the film's totally unpredictable trajectory or mysteries away. Ozpetek's usual gay themes don't feature (though the cast does include the most unreally handsome priest I've ever seen). It's a gem: watch it in a double-bill with Le Fate Ignoranti, which would have to follow as redemptive romance. That's a desert island gem of the alternative society. But this one bored itself deeper in my unconscious and gave me very strange dreams. And Ozpetek's up there for me, among living European filmmakers, with Julio Medem and Arnaud Desplechin.

I'm not fishing for connections when I say it just struck me how like our shadowlands heroine were the features of Lynne Walker. I had such a shock when a mutual contact at the Halle told me she'd died last week. He'd already alerted me that she was quite seriously ill; I presumed chemotherapy might be doing the trick, didn't contact her as he didn't really want her to know he'd told me. And now I wish I had.


Lynne has been quite a companion in our profession over the years. She never much liked me pointing out that I was a mere student when she ran the press affairs of the Scottish National Orchestra - that aged her somewhat, she thought, though she always looked attractive and youthful - yet it was through her open arms that I got to interview Neeme Jarvi for the student newspaper ('an Estonian with SNO on his boots' ran the headline).

Subsequently Lynne took on a lot of editing work to complement her own lively writing, and we had such a healthy working relationship. Looking fondly through our emails, I'm amazed how many from her are titled 'thanks': she always responded to copy, which is sadly rather rare in the business. In fact we agreed between us that one should always tell someone if a piece or a performance has had an effect (I'm still harping on that theme).

We also shared a few pre-performance talks - she was quite a forceful interviewer - and a panel discussion at the end of the momentous Prokofiev celebrations at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, in 2003. How it makes my heart ache to look at the below picture and to realise that of the four personalities featured only Prokofiev's composer-grandson Gabriel is still with us. That, of course, is Ted Downes with Noelle Mann to his left, a lovely shot of both of them.


And here's the whole line-up, since Fiona McKnight of the Prokofiev Archive sent these pics over on request. Also in the 'cast' are Sasha Ivashkin at the end of the table, David Fanning to my right and my hero Michael Kennedy on my left.


Happy memories, but now a great sadness. There are some farewells, like the glorious Westminster Abbey thanksgiving for Joan Sutherland on Tuesday, where you can't feel too regretful because an existence has had its natural span. Lynne's and Noelle's hadn't, though both lived full lives. My thoughts to Gerald Larner.

Black eye from the maestro guy?

Hardly (for the true cause see the previous entry) - I've only ever written glowing things about Stéphane Denève, another of those already great conductors in place around the UK. And I went up to Scotland to interview him on the strength of admiring two Proms - a best-ever Debussy La Mer a couple of years ago, jampacked programme this September culminating in a super-refined Respighi Pines of Rome - in which he conducted 'his' Royal Scottish National Orchestra. I'd also been impressed by the wonders he achieved with Prokofiev's score in a DVD Love for Three Oranges and by the colours he wrought in a Philharmonia performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade - no casual showpiece performance, that.

So first to Edinburgh, where I had the huge pleasure of hearing the same team's Berlioz Symphonie fantastique in the company of my dear friend Ruth and godson Alexander, who was thrilled to bits to hear the complete work since he'd only played the just-to-be-decapitated clarinet in the 'March to the Scaffold'. And he sussed it all out about the idée fixe without knowing the whole programme.


It was a fresh and daunting new take on the piece, which Denève has conducted twice before with the orchestra: you can read why in my Arts Desk review. And good to hear a first half working better in the dry acoustics of Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall than it had in the Usher. That questing spirit Frank Peter Zimmermann had returned to Szymanowski, though from what I understood him say over lunch, he'd usually prefer to play the rather so-so Second Violin Concerto alongside the more luminously intriguing First.

He was coming for lunch with the Denèves after our interview, which went swimmingly (good lord, 80 minutes to transcribe - that'll be a task). And I was due to be whisked off elsewhere by the RSNO's superbly efficient and friendly Communications Manager Danny Pollitt (who took these pix). But then I saw to my amazement that the other guest was my old friend Peter Schele whom I'd got to know from his Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra days (only connect - he fixed for me to join their Estonian tour with Neeme Järvi. And Neeme was, of course, the previous truly great conductor of the then-SNO).

So thanks to Peter, lunch invitation chez the Denèves in Pollockshields was generously extended. Though Swedish, Peter is more English than I am in outlook ('Shelley' to us): he was over for a feast of Coward and Wilde plays in London and to see these friends up north, and he comes from the same place in Sweden as Stephane's charming wife Åsa (the Denèves, by the way, have a two-and-a-half year old daughter, Alma, who is the most confidently bonny, serene child I think I've ever encountered - she welcomed us all and didn't seem to mind my bruiser. Then proceeded to count up to twenty in perfect French). Here's Åsa, having put Alma to bed for her afternoon nap, with conductor husband and their good pal Frank Peter:


The shiner had, of course, to be photographed since several folk had been disconcerted by the shut-eye shot in the previous entry. And it's already made terrific progress. The RSNO's Danish assistant conductor Christian Kluxen, whom I met in the interval of the Glasgow concert, thought it was a birthmark...which is perhaps better than being mistaken for a 'fat drunk'*, as my dear mama commented on the earlier photo. Other reactions have ranged from '!!!!!' - I said I hoped at least one stood for sympathy - to nannyish reprimand.


I'm still a bit wonky and the shakeup is rather long term, but I guess the squint will vanish over time.

*she now says she said 'fat chunk' - ie of face.