Music for a few

Not that any of these fine performers would have had any objections to playing and singing to as many folk as possible. But I count myself immensely privileged to have been among a select crowd for three heartwarming events over the past month-and-a-bit. First came my young friend Ed Picton-Turbervill performing Bach's Goldberg Variations in the comfortable surroundings of the Master's Lodge within St John's College Cambridge prior to the launch of a beautiful and original book (more on that anon).

Then I was in the lucky position, following our very own Europe Day Concert, of hearing four more extraordinary musicians from the Royal Opera's Jette Parker Young Artists Programme in a Nordic programme at St Clement Danes' Church, starting with American soprano Francesca Chiejina accompanied by Artistic Director David Gowland (photos of this event courtesy of Roger Way).

Last week, on a hot evening, a standing crowd mostly made up of so-called 'classical industry' folk was supremely responsive to the irresistible exuberance and art-concealing-art sophistication of Norwegian violinist Bjarte Eike and his 'Alehouse Boys' in another evening of hyper-crossover at the very highest level (photos in this instance by Matthew Long).

Ed had already played the Goldbergs once already before a packed house on the previous evening. This one was for friends and family, lucidly paced so that brilliant fanfares really did steer us towards a natural ending. He speaks so well on music too, and justified prefacing the Bach with the favourite piece about which he'd written the dissertation which went towards his double first. It's one I love to bits too, Brahms's A major Intermezzo, Op. 118 No. 2 and with a flair for potent programming, EPT went straight on to the Bach, having asked us not to applaud.

We left the family to a picnic which eventually got broken up by a heavy downpour and went for sausages in a nearby pub, then I to the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences and Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, about which I should write more, but here in the meantime - in case I don't - is a view from above of the totem pole and other ethnographic treasures in the MAA's big upstairs room.

Back to the Master's Lodge for a reception and presentation. Facsimiles were generously provided for those of us who didn't have the dosh for either version of the big specially-printed original. Which was open at the end of the dining table where our copies were also lodged for collection.

Talking Through Trees is a free ramble - mythos rather than logos, the author tells us - around the splendid specimens, great and small, of St John's substantial territory by the Cam, with which EPT as arborialist supreme (climbing included) entered into intimate communication while an organ scholar at the college (he's now studying in Heidelberg and debating whether to go into environmental work or train as a doctor).

Each short paragraph has a number by it indicating its place in the chronological order of writing  (beginning, consequently with 219 followed by 79, 179, 80 and so on. I believe this was a hint taken from How to Make a Human Being: A Body of Evidence by Christopher Potter, who came to lunch at our place with Ed and his then partner Kristaps). What kind of a work is it? 'As a book is to a booklet, so this "treetise" is to a pamphlet. It is therefore a "pamph" '.

EPT is often poetic. I give you a brief sample, about the Wordsworth Oak: 'The finest feature of this Oak is undoubtedly its bark. Under tremendous pressure as it expands outward from the cambium, it buckles and snaps into rocky canyons, rivers of clefts that spread across the smooth surface of the tree'. But he can also be witty - having quoted four lines of Wordsworth which, after lofty inspirations by Gerald Manley Hopkins and Ovid via Ted Hughes, made me titter, he comments 'If it were not by Wordsworth, I would never have put that nasty piece of doggerel into my pamph'. Here's the author alongside his original benefactor Lady Margaret Beaufort.

When six years ago (ouch!) I went to Eton to talk on Prokofiev at this enterprising scholar's instigation - his father told me at this meeting that he'd pushed him forward after my Salome talk at Covent Garden to make the invitation - he told me he was saving his pennies to buy the very special books produced by a press in Wales. This was The Old Stile Press, and this is his first publication in conjunction with them, generously funded by the moneybags college and illustrated with woodcuts by Angela Lemaire, a regular OSP collaborator.

The perfect excursion ended with a special Evensong in St John's Chapel. As I've remarked before, the choir and its director are infinitely superior to those of King's College (sorry, Father Andrew). Once in a while they incorporate a Bach cantata with college instrumentalists into the service. This time we got not only 'Bleib bei uns', BWV 6, but also Vivaldi's Magnificat and, to frame the service, the Adagio from Bach's Concerto for Three Violins, BWV1064 and the Overture from the Orchestral Suite No. 4. Then we left the young 'uns to their parting and went over the road for a cheap and cheerful Chinese with Fr Andrew (who's just, incidentally, been filmed singing with Courtney Act. You'll either know that name or you won't. Suffice it to say that Season Nine of the series in which Australian drag superstar Courtney was a finalist way back when has just come to an end. I can't say I cared who won this time, but certainly the best lip-syncher took the crown).

The profane was the order of the afternoon at St Clement Danes on 9 June, though the power of love is well expressed by Sibelius and Grieg, among others. And how rapturously through the lyric-soprano gold of Francesca Chiejina, starting the programme with songs from  Grieg's gorgeous Op. 48.

Any fast vibrato here is offset by luminosity; I can't wait to hear her in Strauss. And as the picture tells us, she really engages with the audience. It's something that Korean tenor David Junghoon Kim and Ukrainian baritone (or so he now advertises himself; I would say the near-miss with 'Erlkönig' and the lower-register beauty of his Lange Müller 'Diset hede' suggests he's still very much a bass-baritone) Yuriy Yurchuk have yet to do (Yurchuk pictured below). Augen! Eyes, please, gentlemen!

 
But that's why they are, or in Yurchuk's case have/has been, on the YPYAP programme, to develop their performing skills. And facing an audience at closer range in a song recital is perhaps more daunting than acting on stage. The quality of their instruments was never in doubt for a moment, and even if Kim's 'Ich liebe dich'/''Jeg elsker dig' seemed a bit stretched out for the spontaneous effusion of rapturous love it ought to be, the climax was pure operatic-tenor bliss. Here he is with conductor-repetiteur James Hendry, who made exquisite work of two Aquarelles by Niels Gade.

Gowland was impressive, too, in Stenhammer's epic B minor Fantasy, though the sound of the piano made me guess either Yamaha or Fazioli; Yamaha it was. Never understood why Richter favoured it for Rachmaninov. The rebuilt Wren church acoustics are over-reverberant, too, but it's a splendid place to be with its RAF accoutrements and what I also guessed correctly to be a Grinling Gibbons pulpit (sadly not quite visible here).

And so to a venue with which I fell in love immediately, the Bush Hall, a converted Edwardian dance venue on the Uxbridge Road which I have my eye on for a future party. The ensuing photo courtesy of the BH website.

Not only was this the perfect place for Bjarte Eike's blissfully unamplified 'Alehouse Boys' - in other words players from his Barokksolistene and friends - but the atmosphere was one of the most extraordinary I've experienced in any sort of concert. I've heard them in action twice before, and each time - at the Spitalfields Festival and in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse after Barokksolistene's The Image of Melancholy programme - it was wonderful, but this rose if possible even higher.

First, let it be said (again) that all the artists are not only at the top of their game but absolutely charming - and not just the Norwegians (I have to say that for me the cherry on the cake this time was the absence of a certain English vocalist who is not quite in the same league and lacks their total ease. Note to players: stick to the unique vocalising of viola-player Per T Buhre). You do wonder whether a woman or two might join the boys, but as they're all in touch with their feminine side there are no worries about it being just a 'blokey evening'.

Add to that an audience of folk in the know, ready to go with anything, and you had the most amazing symbiosis - we 'Prommers' knew when to clap along, when to keep silence on a moment's notice, how to respond so that the 'magic triangle' Britten talks about of composer, artist and listener really was at its most magnetic.

The basic numbers were the mix as I've experienced it twice before, but the special charm and 'liveness' is in the improvisations. I well remember how Fredrik Bock can turn his guitar flamenco, what artistry we get from double-bass player Johannes Lundberg, the exhilarating foot-stamping and leaping of genuine oddball Steven Player.

I'd hoped to take along two of the godchildren, who couldn't make it in the end, but 17-year old Lucien with his mum Clare, who's disappointed to know that Bjarte is a married man, along with the two very switched-on sons of my friend Joe Smouha, left me in no doubt that this absolutely works for everyone. A stunning evening. The band is back at the Globe in October, this time in the big O rather than the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, but they also need and deserve a late-night gig at the Proms. In the meantime, do buy their CD. I have certain reservations about the vocals for reasons stated above, but I've made my own mix with soulful numbers from Eike's CD masterpiece, The Image of Melancholy, and that to me is perfection.

What better way to end than with a YouTube 'taster' for the disc which includes several very typical improvisations? Obviously they have to issue a DVD next. But being there's the thing.

Also in Rattle week...

...I heard performances wonderful not just in parts - like the second of Sir Si's Sibelius series concerts with the Berlin Phil, very much a curate's egg - but as a perfect whole, and - apart from the Philharmonic Octet Berlin without Rattle at the QEH on Friday night, consummate - in less expected places (pictured above, two of my star performers throughout the week, violinist Julia Hwang and pianist Dmitri Alexeev).

Personally, I think I'd have chosen the Alexander Ivashkin Memorial Concert on Thursday night, even had I not worked with Sasha and loved what I knew of him, over Rattle's last Sibelius concert at the Barbican and Salonen conducting Ravel at the Festival Hall. The reason? A very rare chance to hear Russian master pianist Alexeev in action. The last time I caught him was partnering Sasha in Prokofiev's Cello Sonata at beloved Noëlle Mann's memorial concert*, and before that with Sitkovetsky in the First Violin Sonata as part of the Prokofiev 2003 concert she organised at St John's Smith Square. Here are all three, at I know not what event.

Brahms's late piano pieces have been obsessing me recently; I've played Nicholas Angelich's set over several times. And I've never heard Op. 119, with its extraordinary mixture of the elegiac, the light-as-air and ultimately the heroic, live in concert. Alexeev did not disappoint in finding the connections between the four pieces, in ranging from introspective heartbreak to unusual pride and strength.

But this was a concert in which everything made some kind of deep mark or another. True, Alexeev made the Steinway sound like an altogether different instrument from the way Boris Berman played it (Berman pictured above on 12 February; young photographers Alice Andrewartha and Sergey Kryuchkov will have to forgive me for not disentangling which photo is whose). His Prokofiev Seventh Sonata was just too loud to start with. But I've rarely heard a more shatteringly powerful account of the great slow movement, moving from Schumann stylised to the tolling of bells and the keening of human grief. The other ultimate depth came from the framing of the concert by cellist Nicolas Altstaedt, starting with perfect privacy in Schnittke's Klingende Buchstaben based on some of the notes in Ivashkin's full first name of Alexander.

In discussing the programme with that wonderful pianist Danny Driver - who wowed us with fellow Goldsmiths pianist Andrew Zolinsky in two pieces from Shostakovich's Op. 6 Suite, as good a performance in its way as anything on the programme - I suggested that the only possible ending could be the 25-minute epilogue to Schnittke's ballet Peer Gynt arranged for cello, piano and tape, winding its way into infinity. Irina Schnittke was to have played the piano part. But Altstaedt found it too much to prepare in so short a time, and his ineffably simple but profound substitute, the Allemande and Sarabande from Bach's Fifth Cello Suite, led to at least two minutes' silence. Unfussy, infinitely private and of the essence, his playing led me to go home and try and find something comparable among my sets. Two I threw out on to the regifting pile as being so wide of what I now want in this music; only Yo-Yo Ma came close.

Another bonus in place of the Schnittke was the Andante cantabile from Tchaikovsky's First String Quartet, played with introspective simplicity by the Goldner String Quartet (pictured above). But it was also vital to have students from Goldsmiths College involved. Mark Shanahan worked wonders on the Chamber Choir (he told me afterwards how, getting them to harmonise Bette Midler and really working on fullness of sound) in the big early-Rachmaninov liturgical setting Ever-vigilant Mother of God.

And the Goldsmiths Sinfonia (pictured above with Sasha's photo on the easel to the right) settled from a less than unanimous opening to cool style in Prokofiev's 'Classical' Symphony. Grandson Gabriel came up with a real winner, Outta Pulsor from his Suite for Cello Nonet, originally a multitrack work for one cellist, the fine player and film composer Peter Gregson who led this group (had a fascinating conversation with him later over supper about film music). This time Outta Pulsor was graced by nine players, some of them originally brought together by Sasha's wife Natalia Pavlutskaya, also a cellist and teacher (at Trinity, hence the name TrinityGold). Really distinctive melody, fascinatingly shaped textures around it. Below, some of the cellists with conductor Andrew Morley.

I love Natalia: she reminds me of everything that's best about the Russian character: the intense warmth and affection, the talent, the discipline. I was, as I said in the opening speech she'd asked me to give, very surprised and incredibly honoured when she asked me to be involved. I had no idea that she and Sasha apparently respected me, as of course I did him (I didn't know Natalia at all well when he was alive). But she welcomed me like a long-lost friend and invited me to the after-performance supper, too. Here we are being very genuinely affectionate at the pre-concert drinks - thanks to Alice for that. OK, so it's grimace and paunch from me, but it shows you the kind of person Natalia is, I hope.

An evening rich and wonderful beyond belief, still to be properly digested over the months to come.

Another exceptional person I adore is a younger mover and shaker. I met Ed Picton-Turbervill when he came up to me after a Salome talk I'd given at Covent Garden and asked me if I'd go and talk at his school. The results are recounted some way down this blog entry. Since then we've become, I hope, good friends, and here he is nearly at the end of his three years as an Organ Scholar at St John's College Cambridge.

Over five weeks ago J and I went up to Cambridge at his invitation to hear a late Epiphany spectacular in the chapel - the above pic of Ed by his college's famous bridge and the wing where he resides was taken on that visit. We returned on Valentine's Day to catch the last event of nine - all FREE - in the St John's Music Festival curated by EPT, who modestly appears nowhere in publicity or programmes to take the credit.

I begged to be excused from that Saturday's St John's evensong as I was keen to sample King's, and sit in the choir pews there, which we did in style thanks to Research Fellow Hanna Weibye, loveliest of colleagues as dance critic on The Arts Desk. I also wanted to hear beloved Herbert Howells. But what I'd been told was right - King's can't match St John's for choral splendour. The men are far too loud for the boys and it can't be healthy for Stephen Cleobury to have been in place since 1982, with the contract running until (at least) 2019. Anyway, he beats rather than shapes, which was what impressed me so much about Andrew Nethsingha at St John's.

After the service. we found ourselves treated to rather fine illuminations outside King's, part of Cambridge's e-Luminate festival. Its website is a bit messy, so I gathered that the rainbow colours projected onto arches were the work of Jack Beccegato Zero.

but didn't find out who did the more dynamic work on the later ensemble to the north. It really has to be seen in action, but you get the idea here.

Everyone seems to hate the Victorian tower of St John's, but I'd rather it was there than not, and the illuminations did a good job on it.

The evening concert, which reflected the festival's theme of 'the old made new' both in its programme and by taking place in St John's Divinity School, Victorian Gothic recently restored to lavish effect, didn't start until 8pm. That gave us a problem that if we stayed for the second half, we'd miss the last convenient train back to London. So we only caught the first, and in a way I'm glad because it ended on such a high. Accomplished piano duo Marie-Noëlle Kendall

and Patrick Hemmerlé were giving two world premieres, starting with Robin Holloway's Soldered Schumann, an attempt to give new life to the Schumann Andante and Variations in B flat which he and Britten both regard(ed) as a noble failure. The Andante is itself lovely stuff, but Holloway's emendations struck me as rather ungainly doodlings, and you can call me arrogant or deluded if you like but his contribution really was the sort of thing I used to improvise on the piano in my better moments.

Would Holloway's Silvered Schubert be the same? I've had the privilege of finding out from the recording Ed sent me, but on the evening I was so bowled over by Hwang's performance of the original Fantaisie for Violin and Piano with ex Pembroke College Organ Scholar James Drinkwater that I knew nothing could actually surpass it.

Anyway, Hwang (pictured again above, good publicity shots) and Drinkwater made such a persuasive case for the Fantaisie that I wouldn't hear much said against it: she with her burning intensity and pitch-perfect technique, he with crystalline runs and supreme elegance. What's Holloway's beef with it?

...that nothing after the opening is worthy of it [this is the wraith-like violin theme against shimmering piano, not easily transcribed for two pianos, and so much is violinistic that its point in rearrangement is lost]. Especially the Variations, which dissipate rather than gather - above all in not providing a minor version [ie variation] to search the lovely Lied more deeply.

Well, the song itself ('Sei mir gegrüsst') certainly lives up to the opening in the lovely modulations taken here by the piano alone, and the variations preserve the lightness of the whole premise by some ethereal filigree (very difficult to make light of it, but these two did). Holloway's elaborations, in the recording I've listened to, are also pretty in a more music-boxy sort of way. But his gawky late-romantic interjections are not, and the minor-key variation he supplies disintegrates into doodlery. His extended 'Apotheosis' for the return of the opening sounds horrid to me, overdone with Lisztian-style tremolos.

The interjection of another song, 'Death and the Maiden', is cleverly combined with the rhythm of the finale, but it's too heavy and long-winded for the Fantaisie's airy premise. As for the material of the finale, which seems to me typical Schubert at his most penny-plain but very much himself, I don't find this 'harum-scarum' 'vapid' (Holloway's note again) and the transition to the song reprise has a marvellous key change- C to A flat - which I find again so typically Schubertian. All this is lost in Holloway's flummery and by the end you're screaming for it to stop (which probably means that I was, even listening to the recording). I don't find anything tiresome or overlong in the Schubert original (about 20 minutes to Holloway's inflated 35). I went home and marvelled at the recording by Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov. The first interpretation to be recorded, by Adolf Busch and Rudolf Serkin, remains one of the greatest: here it is.

Forgive all this length but I wanted to argue the case so that Ed can see I thought about it properly (I know  he likes the Holloway much better than I do, and he should be proud of having hosted the world premieres). The main thing is that the evening featured two very good performances and one superlative one (the Fantaisie proper), and it made me engage with why the work isn't, in my opinion, deeply flawed.

Several wonders since then - Nielsen from Oramo, Sibelius from Runnicles in accord with the Inverness setting - but those will have to wait until the next instalment.

*Shin-ichi's remark below about Sasha's performance with Dmitri Alexeev at Noelle's memorial concert gave me courage to view the whole performance again on YouTube. There's an interesting story here in that I proposed playing at least part of the Prokofiev central movement within my introduction the other Thursday. I utterly respect Natalia's artistic integrity, reflecting and standing up for Sasha's, in that she said he felt he hadn't had enough time to prepare on that occasion. So we didn't play it in the concert.

Yet I'd like to take the liberty of putting up for the second time on this blog the Moderato - Andante dolce movement, because as I said the other Thursday, it seems to me to encapsulate both Sasha's wry humour in the outer portions and his generosity of spirit in the great, beautiful Prokofiev melody at the very centre.

Actually these two's performance also convinced me of what's 'inside' the finale too, and that follows on this time round. If you like what you hear, don't hesitate to watch the entire performance.