Well chosen, BBC Music Magazine

I wasn't able to be at the BBC Music Magazine awards this year - too busy Snow Maidening in Paris - but at the end of my write-up of last year's ceremony, I pointed out that the Smetana Trio's disc of Martinů Trios was already on my shortlist for best of the year already (pictured above, violinist Jiří Vodička, pianist Jitka Cechová and cellist Jan Pálenícek) . It won the chamber music category at the 2017 awards, and Czechia has been going wild with excitement. What it probably doesn't know is the golden thread that led to the nomination - my Czech friend Jan sending me the disc, my pressing it on reviews editor Rebecca Franks so that it made the pages as another glorious Supraphon issue that might have been in for an award, of Martinů's Ariane and Double Concerto mentioned here, didn't.

As a Martinůmaniac, I'm of the opinion that Maxim Rysanov's disc of sonata, duos and Rhapsody-Concerto could also have won the previous year, and this absolutely delicious tetralogy of cantatas ought to do so in 2018 (that review isn't found on the hopeless BBCMM search engine).

Golden times for the reassessment of the last towering figure of the 20th century not to be widely acknowledged as such. And on 9 May you can hear Nicola Said reprise her Ariane in the final scene from that little masterpiece at this year's Europe Day Concert in St John's Smith Square. That's all I'm saying on the subject for now.

Frankly I'd have chosen the trios disc as the top award over Vasily Petrenko's Tchaikovsky Symphonies 1, 2 and 5, though I'm proud that I enthused over that one, too, in the pages of the magazine (again, the search engine on the BBCMM website doesn't locate it). The May issue had a riven choice over raves - which should be Recording of the Month, Paavo Järvi's Strauss Heldenleben and Don Juan with the stunning NHK Symphony Orchestra, or 87-year-old Bernard Haitink's latest Mahler 3? Rebecca went with Paavo in the end. And in the June issue there's going to be a spotlight on another stunner, leader of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra Terje Tønnesen's transcriptions for string orchestra of the two Janáček quartets, the First also to be heard in the context of a thrilling adaptation of Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata read in both English - brilliantly - and Norwegian by the actor Teodor Janson. It's the luck of the draw - months can pass with only three-star-max discs, and then all these glories come along at once.

Anyway, I'm proud that the magazine continues to flourish in difficult times. And now, on the BBC front, we have the Proms to get excited about - for me, it's one of the best seasons on paper for years. The launch is always fun, and that was another one I had to miss last week. A single highlight for me? Jakub Hrůša's all-Czech variations on a Hussite chorale with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on 26 August. On 13 August, before a double whammy of Rachmaninov's Second Symphony in the main Prom and the Vespers sung by the brilliant Latvian Radio Choir in the late-nighter,  I'll be talking about the composer's use of Russian Orthodox chant in his orchestral music.

A Babel of hope and possibility

The phrase is not mine but my bright young colleague Alexandra Coghlan's on The Arts Desk, penned about Berio's Sinfonia, which preceded a shattering but nuanced interpretation of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony at Tuesday night's Prom. I choose to apply it to the superlative team which gave one of the best Proms I've ever heard, our already-beloved European Union Youth Orchestra, and further, to the even younger members of nine British youth orchestras they mentored in an inspiring workshop featuring 180 young musicians on the platform of the Royal Albert Hall the morning after the EUYO triumph.

All photos here by the wonderful Chris Christodoulou, with whom I managed to have a good chat as the players lined up on the steps in front of the hall's south side. Above, below and in the last photo are some of them on Wednesday morning conducted by likeable young motivator Duncan Ward and playing to a small audience of friends, family and a handful of scribblers like me.

A big question which I intend to peck away at: why did the BBC not ask Chris to snap one of their most photo-friendly evenings? He tends to come to everything he can, but the press folk only ask him for so many Proms. More bizarrely, why did BBC Television choose not to film the EUYO concert for broadcast (Radio 3's transmission is on the iPlayer for the next month)? The fact that they'll be transmitting the National Youth Orchestra Prom is no excuse: it shouldn't be a case of either/or, but both. And what better to spell out the message that there IS a future for great orchestral music than the enthusiasm and commitment of these photogenic young players with their handsome young conductor, the already great Vasily Petrenko (replacing an indisposed Semyon Bychkov, who would also no doubt have trained them up to the hilt)? Was it politics or is there a less sinister explanation? Shame on you, Beeb - you should be helping to tell the world that this is what we're fighting for in Europe. True internationalist Sir Henry Wood would have thought so too. I asked Chris especially to snap this one for us.

Anyway, I was there on Tuesday evening with the diplo-mate - having to break his rule of avoiding all Proms, and he couldn't have admired it more - in the EU invitees' zone close to the stage, leaving Alexandra to write up the event for TAD. I didn't sway her beyond a very late message saying that if she didn't give it five stars, she would be exiled to an island of exclusively baroque music. There was no need: she'd already written the piece by then, and she touches on just about everything I would have done, very much in her own eloquent style, so I don't have to reduplicate here.

Just a few points of my own, then: first, that I've never heard a more detailed, coherent or intelligent performance of the baggy-monster Fourth. Petrenko, at times sexy-sinuous, at others rhythmically taut, amazingly so in the Berio, drove a line through Shostakovich's most outlandish orchestral work without ever being over-emphatic.

There was much more more lyricism than we've come to expect, more sheer fun in the concerto-for-orchestra parade of solos and groups, while never losing sight of the terrifying overall rhetoric. And what an extra layer of emotion there was in hearing a first-half work which seemed to think that 'classical' music had shattered into fragments, never to be pieced together again, and an even greater masterpiece ending in total annihilation, and finding them in the hands of a future which is as bright performer-wise as it is in the new wave of post-Darmstadt, post-modern composers who are no longer afraid of the kind of cornucopia Shostakovich loved so much.

I've written about the Inspire Workshop event over on TAD, but the BBC were slow in getting Chris's pictures over to me, which is how I can indulge in a few more here. That was fun, but the EUYO concert has burned itself on my heart as what will have to be the most extraordinary Prom this year, however much of excellence is no doubt still to come.

Young and old alike must rejoice that today is the 100th anniversary of Tove Jansson's birth, a special day she shares with her Moominpapa (anyone's guess), the diplo-mate (thirtysomething, of course) and his mother Wyn (86, doing pretty well by the sea yesterday). Shot of the last two at St Leonard's from behind only due to privacy wishes.

I raise my special Hemulen mug to the great author, and like to think of her like this below in 1956 on her special island with her partner Tuulikki Pietilä and her beloved mother Signe Hammarsten-Jansson, the 'Grandmother' of the volume I most often gift, The Summer Book  (remember this to young Sophia, countering the child's insistence of 'a big, enormous Hell': 'You can see for yourself that life is hard enough without being punished for it afterwards. We get comfort when we die, that's the whole idea').

 
Tove would approve last Saturday's outing to Holland Park and Will Todd's splendid opera for children Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (or should that perhaps be 'New Adventures') with goddaughter Mirabel. I managed to sneak in a picture of her with the lovely Fflur Wyn, Alice personified, to the Arts Desk review, but felt it might be overload there to include Keel Watson's very friendly Caterpillar

and the family bear of long wear and tear, Special/Spesh, occupying the White Rabbit's cage in the opera's Grimthorpe Pet Shop.

Fortunately they all lived happily shortly after: Spesh was released to join Mirabel,  ma Edsy and auntie June for tea and scones chez nous.

Göttingen's sweethearts

The one above celebrated her 110th birthday yesterday. So it's not quite an age-old, but still a charming, tradition that students of Göttingen's Georg August University, Cambridge to Heidelberg's Oxford (or perhaps vice versa), go to the town's main square on receiving their doctorate, kiss the rather beautiful Art Nouveau Gänseliesel or Goosegirl's cheek and leave her flowers and a candle in thanksgiving. I was lucky enough to see the ritual in action, walking through town to catch the 7.55am train to Frankfurt after a happy day and a half at the Göttingen Handel Festival.


These two jolly medics, flanking three girl friends, had just gone through the motions ever so poetically (by the way, I was reminded that a first or second degree doesn't qualify you to kiss the maiden; only a doctorate will do). They hailed me, rather curious to know what anyone else was doing walking the sunny streets of Göttingen so early on a Sunday morning, we chatted and I took their photo (it felt too corny to ask them for historical re-enactment, though you can see the boys were kitted out for it). I don't even know their names, but what an echt farewell it was.

It might seem a bit forced to fanfare the other idol of the town under the 'sweetheart' label, but no doubt about it: the townsfolk love Nicholas McGegan more than ever as he comes to the end of his 20-year tenure powering the Handel Festival.



I'd come chiefly to hear him conduct Teseo in the town's ideally-sized small theatre, and indeed the orchestra was really the thing, though there were two very classy performances from Amy Freston and the flawless Robin Blaze. I also heard two fabulous events in two of the churches.

But more of that in the Arts Desk piece on Sunday. Let's just catch my not-as-good-as-the-professionals glimpse of 'Nic', as they call him, sporting his newly-pinnedVerdienstkreuz am Bande, the Cross of the Lower Saxony Order of Merit.


He's standing on the staircase of the Old Town Hall, and appropriately the furthest of the three figures on the wall to the left has 'ars longa, vita brevis' inscribed above. Although the Town Hall was built on the site of an even older one in 1270, it's gone through various modifications which do nothing more than show its consistent vitality and usefulness, including the plastering of the Great Hall in 1883, and a very fine job the artist has done, I think. The coats of arms above the main friezes are those of the Hanseatic league, to which Göttingen belonged from 1351 to 1572. Lübeck and Braunschweig have the central position, though of course the heraldry stretches further to Riga and my beloved Visby (to which it looks as if we're not destined to return after all this June).


The figures have links to the rooms around which they're positioned. I love the Meistersingerish significance of this craftsman, who could well be goldsmith Veit Pogner.


A minstrel prances down the staircase


and the young newlyweds outside the former registry office might be Eva and Walter.


Not without significance to Wagner's opera, perhaps, since the people's will has usually been paramount here. The citizens rebelled against the councilmen's favourite fountain design at the end of the 19th century and got their way with the Gänselieselbrunnen. By the way, Gottingen was one of the few German towns to be spared flattening in World War Two - so was Heidelberg, leading many to speculate that the Germans left off Oxford and Cambridge in some kind of sick deal - so there's plenty to see. I'll return to churches and housefronts anon.


But I'm still in a Handel mood: it might have been that, or sheer overtiredness, that made me enjoy the Philharmonia concert on Sunday night less than I might have done. The pre-performance talk with Vasily Petrenko went fine, though the fun was a bit more at my expense than I'd anticipated, with VP playing to his Liverpudlian fans who'd come down specially to see him. But I do reckon Simon Trpceski - a pianist I usually love for his brio and communication - whizzed far too much through Tchaikovsky's Second Piano Concerto. And it was unforgiveable of him to insist on the Ziloti two-thirds-cut slow movement, especially as the Philharmonia leader Maya Iwabuchi and her cellist counterpart Karen Stephenson did so gloriously well in what little they had to play.

This morning I listened to 'special guests' Kennedy and Isserlis with Donohoe for Barshai (EMI), which only underlined more than ever what a bad mistake it had been to cut it: the solo strings lead the bullish virtuoso into a whole new world, and he/she needs that time to stay there. Wrong to wrench it out of context, perhaps, but in case anyone's reading who was also there and didn't think it was a great piece, here's a crackly old Melodiya recording of the first violin/cello duet before the piano enters (which is where Sunday night's performance essentially started; and we didn't get the central angst on display here, or the later string cadenzas, either, which you can hear in Part Two).

Vot tak syurpriz

Or, 'Oh, what a surprise', and since the black eye is a thing of the past now, it must be something to do with my unexpected guest above. In brief, I was waiting in the Festival Hall wings on Wednesday to go on and do my stuff about Shostakovich 11, with nice snippets from Britten, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, the Red Army Choir and three of the main man's symphonies lined up, when along strolls the impending concert's conductor, Vasily Petrenko. Well, it was nice to meet him for the first time and all that, but as he hovered, it suddenly occurred to me: 'you're expecting to join me, aren't you?' And, having read a piece of information on his agent's list as a command to appear, he was.

An opportunity too good to miss, and worth the sacrifice of everything I'd prepared. So, quick thinking: two chairs, please, and a mike that would catch both of us. And we winged a half-hour interview, which I think went rather well, because Liverpool's great Russian import is the most relaxed and thoughtful of speakers. Out went the music examples, though I did still want to make the point that, though the symphony was written over 50 years ago and casts further back to the 1905 St Petersburg massacre, its significance continues, or did for two of my oldest and most treasured City Lit students before their respective deaths at the ages of 87 and 96. They may be gone now, but their memories live on in me.


Martin Zam's father was there in Palace Square, and wondered why the history books never reported the events as they unfolded: chiefly, that the soldiers fired into the trees to try and disperse the crowds, unwittingly killing the children who were perched up there, which triggered the panic. And Trude Winik always loved Shostakovich's Eleventh best because she used to sing the revolutionary funeral song quoted by violas in the slow movement, 'Eternal Memory' ('Unsterbliche Opfer' to Trude), in red Vienna's Socialist Youth Movement during the 1920s. So when I hear it, I always think of Trude, who lost her father in the First World War and the rest of her family to the camps of the Second World War.

Thanks to the LPO below for alerting me to the quick putting-up of the talk on its website as a podcast. As for yet another astonishing performance of a symphony I never used to care for, read about it in my Arts Desk review.

I asked the LPO's Alison Jones to snap me and VP together. The specs reflect because my non-reflective ones got smashed in the bike crash.


The top picture was taken, serendipitously, by a professional - photographer Mauro Fermariello, son of our adored Clara, who came along as my guest with mutual friend Cally. He was amused by my red socks, which he said would have got me lynched in conventional Italy - and certainly I hadn't worn them for effect, since I'd been expecting to stand behind a lectern. I took a look at Mauro's website, and there are treasurable images in every gallery. He gave me the green light to put up some of my favourites here. A dog basking in the sun at Pompeii:


musicians at La Scala


with trumpets to cue a quick mention for Martin Hurrell's visit to the students on Tuesday accompanied by partner Liz Burley, the BBCSO's fabulous orchestral pianist, celesta and (as she amusingly told us) virgin organist on a needs-must tour featuring Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra. Martin played fluegelhorn and piccolo trumpet as well as the regular in a dazzling rendition of a piece by Aratunian.

And, last but by no means least, two of glorious Clara, nearly 85, under the heading 'Terza Eta'.



Auguri to our dama di grandezza in Napoli.