The analgesic boy choir Libera, latest addition to the writer's 'crossover creatures'.

According to their website boy choir Libera’s music is a ‘sound for a new time’ and contains ’shimmering, mystical chords and ecstatic harmonies’. Yeah, whatever! I saw them today on the TV clad in their white robes and talking about their latest album Peace (Luxury Edition) like some kind of celestial boy band. There’s no doubting that these lads can sing a bit but the anodyne strings and synthesiser schmaltz that totters precariously over a pseudo-disco drum loop doesn’t do it for me. In fact the thing that bothers me most is not the music but the identity of the sevengali behind them. Admittedly the group is a ‘not for profit’ organisation so I suppose their operators can’t easily be accused of manipulation but I add them to my ever-growing list of ‘crossover creatures’ who inhabit those dark and dangerous lands between popular and classical music.

I wonder what kind of people buy Peace (Luxury Edition)? I suppose if analgesic, innocuous ersatz choral music is your thing you might, but perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps it’s me! Perhaps there are some people with taste who buy such albums, but surely if you want a decent choir at Christmas (or indeed at any other time) aren’t you better off buying an album by the choir of King’s College Cambridge or even avoiding the kids entirely and going for something by The Sixteen. Better still, get hold of a copy of William Mathias’s Ave Rex - that’s real Christmas music.

After reading this you’ve probably already condemned me as as nothing more than a musical grumpy git. Maybe I am but I’ve finished my rant now. I rest my case.

Maria Callas - one of Eric's thunderbolts

Eric is my father-in-law. He is nearly eighty years old now and still fairly ebullient and good-humoured mostly, but at times rather cantankerous. There are bits of his life that I do know about – his career in the Royal Navy, service during Suez and later tracking Russian trawlers in British water – and other bits that he’s kept quiet, not because he doesn’t want anybody to know about them but because he’s just a quiet bloke.

I get the impression that, although he spent 32 years in the navy, the sea isn’t really in his blood. He is a man of the arts. Other than Eric’s study I can’t remember where I’ve seen as many art books in one place. His collection of art slides, reproductions of painting from galleries he’s visitied all over the world, total about four thousand in number. He has lectured on art history too and his mind is nothing less than a mental archive of art facts. But what I have only just found out about him is his love of music.

I know he likes music of course, but on the occasions when I see him we tend to talk about other things, practical matters, family stuff and the like; music doesn’t really figure. Only in the last couple of months have I discovered another facet of his character. He mentioned in passing something about opera and his favourite singers – top of the list is, and always has been, Maria Callas. But almost as an afterthought he talked about a whole series of concerts that he’d been to featuring top-notch singers, conductors and soloists: Jussi Bjorling, Gigli, Kathleen Ferrier and Nicolai Gedda. I wanted to know everything about those concerts and I questioned him until until he was sick of talking to me.

I’m too young to have seen those singers, but what an experience it must have been! If you’ve got older relatives who are in any way keen on the arts, find out what they’ve done and who they’ve seen. You might be surprised.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. Browsing through reviews of Paul Lewis’s cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas I came across these little gems:

Lewis has a marvelous gift for sweet lucidity and joy, and above all for melody: the most demanding passages quite simply sing (which is actually no simple thing since it is so rare) and are never merely notes achieved, no matter how brilliantly. I feel as though Lewis has given us a glimpse into Beethoven’s heart and we find something hitherto hidden but which he reveals with such grace. I wish I could do Paul Lewis as much justice in my description as he has done the composer by his playing.

And there followed further generous outpourings of adulation and veneration. Then came this…

This is a disappointment, especially in the light of its enthusiastic critical reception on both sides of the pond. It is cautious, careful, circumspect, earnest, responsible and dull. There is no sign here that Beethoven is dealing out bold strokes. Instead the composer comes off as plain and palatable. And that we know he was not. Fine sound of an exceptional instrument: wasted.

So who do you believe and what should I do? The latter reviewer dismisses the recordings as aphoristic and featureless yet to the first it seems the sun shines out of Mr Lewis’s piano lid. Do I use my Gramophone Classical Guide as my vade-mecum or use it in place of lavatory paper when the soft stuff runs out? Because a conclusion is impossible to reach, I become irritable, snap at my wife and torment the cat. (I am ashamed to say that in a fit of sudden irascibility that stemmed from reading reviews I once attempted to superglue milk bottle tops to the bottoms of its paws.) But is my first mistake to consult anyone else at all? If you subscribe to Spotify your problems are solved; just spend a few blissful hours listening to the relevant versions of the works you’re planning to buy and Robert, as they say, is your proverbial parents’ brother. If you haven’t got the aforementioned software, it really doesn’t matter that much does it?

What is a bad recording? These days there are very few of them. I mean, of course, a recording that is badly balanced or sounds as though it was recorded in a sports hall, or underwater, or your downstairs toilet. The rest is down to taste and I’m not sure that we should let the critics have the monopoly on that. Because a pianist is a little too light with his sforzando chords or the tempo of an orchestral tutti isn’t fast enough should we dismiss the work entirely? And some critics do. By all means dust off your metronomes and follow the score if you want to check precision but almost all of the classical music buffs I know are collectors of recorded music and very few of them also have a library of sheet music to rival their CDs. I doubt also whether many of us, unless we are professional musicians, have the time to scrutinise a work in that much detail, fascinating though it is to do. If you know what you like then it’s worth searching for, I suppose. Spotify comes into its own here; being able to listen to different versions of a work is a boon, although they don’t have them all.

Too often in the past I have discarded CDs of works I know well because they don’t compare with the one I’m used to regardless of whether it’s ‘good’ or not. I have always used my 1975 LSO/Previn version of Orff’s Carmina Burana as a benchmark by which to judge all other versions of that monastic romp. Recently my son played me some of the version he has (by someone forgettable on the budget label Naxos). There was absolutely nothing wrong with it, except that it was different to mine. The emphases and tempi were different but the playing was decent and the recording was okay. What the music was attempting to get past was my own prejudice: that the Previn version was, in my opinion, the best and therefore anything else should be dismissed.

Are we, dear reader, too attached to readings of works that are, say, similar to those we have grown up with? Are we wary of holding out the olive branch to versions that are a little bit different? An advertising campaign for a well-known UK supermarket chain uses the phrase ‘try something different today’. I going to swallow my own prejudice, along with that rare breeds pork pie, and do just that.

And Jim Tavare with double bass:

And the legendary Victor Borge:

And who could forget this?:

On September 15th it will be exactly 30 years since the death of jazz pianist and composer Bill Evans. Arguably no other jazz musician has influenced the course of modern music quite as much.  The freshness of his tone and melodic line, and the individuality of his voicings made him unmistakeable. Even the hundreds of jazz-pianist-clones who have tried to play like Evans never quite manage to sound like him.

Bill Evans was born in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1929 and, like many jazz musicians, was classically trained. He was awarded a music scholarship and attended Southeastern Louisiana college, graduating with a degree in piano performance and teaching. After a spell in the army Evans took postgraduate studies in composition at Manne’s School of music and worked mainly in New York alongside such notables as Charlie Mingus, Art Farmer and George Russell. His debut album New Jazz Conceptions, featuring the track ‘Waltz for Debby’, probably his most famous composition, was a financial flop but it led to greater recognition and in 1958 Evans joined the Miles Davis sextet. Although he stayed with the group for only eight months his influence was great. He left to focus on his own career but returned in 1959 to record the seminal album Kind of Blue.

In the early sixties Evans formed, with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, what many consider to be the best trio of his career. The death of LaFaro, aged twenty-five, in a car accident cut short one of the most fruitful partnerships in jazz history. Evans was particularly affected by it and did not work for several months afterwards. In the early 70s came a brief period of musical and personal stability with a trio consisting of Puerto Rican bassist Eddie Gomez and Marty Morell which lasted until the latter’s retirement in 1975. Towards the end of the decade Evans’s long battle with drug addiction began to take its toll - he had been a heroine addict since his spell with the Miles Davis band and although he had kicked this drug his addiction to cocaine was the one that finally killed him.

Classical musicians, even the ones that have little interest in jazz, will have heard of Evans, in fact, once heard his playing is never forgotten. The fusion of startlingly voiced jazz chords and classical Debussy-esque harmony over a floating melodic line is a combination that is instantly recognisable. His ability to reharmonise the chords of jazz standards and come up with something infinitely more stunning is evident in his recordings of tunes such as ‘How About You?’ and ‘My Romance’ (both from the album Waltz for Debby). Check out this clip of Evans performing ‘My Foolish Heart’.  

Evans’s jazz has a logic about it that makes it easy to understand. As classically trained musician I spent more time trying to understand Schoenberg, Charles Ives and Richard Strauss’s harmony than I did Bill Evans’s ; there’s an inevitability about the structure, the changes and the voicings but there are also many surprises – juxtapositions of chords, unusual vaguenesses or rootless passages underneath little turns of melody that make you smile. The image of Evans, hair slicked back and geekily bespectacled, hunched over the piano concentrating intently is one that contradicts the openness and tansparency of his music. Its sense and rationality is drawn from elements of jazz, classical and ethic music and melds them into something of immeasurable beauty and sensitivity. If by some chance you aren’t familiar with his music you really ought to do something about it. In fact, Evans’s second album Everyone Digs Bill Evans is aptly titled, because everyone does.

Select discography

New Jazz Conceptions (1956 Riverside) The first of Evans’s albums featuring Teddy Kotick (bass) and Paul Motian (drums)

Everybody Digs Bill Evans (1958 Riverside) Already it’s clear the direction that Evans is taking with his music. Block chords are beginning to be replaced in places by a more fluid line supported by Sam Jones (bass) and Philly Joe Jones (drums).

Portrait in Jazz (1959 Riverside) The first album to feature Scott LaFaro on bass. Motian plays drums once again. The rapport between these musicians is a almost tangible.

Kind of Blue (1959 Columbia) Evans is the pianist on four out of the five tracks on this seminal album. The chords for the track ‘So What’ are to the jazz pianist what the ‘Tristan Chord’ is to the classical musician.

Waltz for Debby (1961 Riverside) A classic album again featuring LaFaro and Motian arguably contains some of Evans’s best playing. Includes the tracks ‘My Foolish Heart’, ‘Waltz for Debby’, ‘Detour Ahead’ and ‘My Romance’.

How My Heart Sings (1962 Riverside) Chuck Israels plays bass on this trio session. Motian remains on drums.

Conversations With Myself  (1963 Verve) A solo album with Evans using several channels of overdubbing on each track with interesting results.

A Simple Matter of Conviction (1966 Verve) Excellent trio album with Eddie Gomez (bass) and Shelley Manne (drums)

The Bill Evans Album (1971 Columbia) Grammy award winner. Evans uses a Fender Rhodes electric piano on some songs but check out the incredible track ‘Twelve Tone Tune’ – serial jazz composition (of sorts!). Has Gomez on bass and Morell on drums.

You Must Believe in Spring (1977 Warner Bros) Gomez on bass again but with Eliot Zigmund on drums. The wonderful ‘B Minor Waltz (for Elaine)’ shows that even though Evans’s health was waining his musical intelligence was not.

Should this be the fate of all fortepianos?

I wonder whether the seeds of my obvious uncultivated crassness (I’m sure some readers will see this blog post as nothing less than that) were sown during my primary school years. Perhaps it was because I was pressganged into joining, aged seven, the school ‘orchestra’, forced to dress like a pillock and play ’Ode to Joy’ in the recorder ensemble. But the apogee of my primary school musical career came with a performance of Schubert’s ‘Die Forelle’ transcribed for zithers and kazoos. Perhaps it is this that has blunted the edge of my enthusiasm for musical accuracy. My induction into classical music was based, at least when I was very young, on my mother’s modest record collection. Discs of Dinu Lipatti, Solomon and Wilhelm Kempff (see my previous blog Dr Who and the Piano Titans) rubbed shoulders with Klemperer, Furtwangler, Katherine Ferrier and Maria Callas. I had no idea about whether or not these versions were authentic, historically informed or played on period instruments. I wasn’t bothered about it then and I’m still not that bothered now.

For some listeners the search for authenticity is of paramount importance. If the orchestral forces used aren’t exactly of the type and number that Beethoven or Haydn or Bach intended, or the banjos are overdone in the Verdi Te Deum they will dismiss the performance out of hand. An argument has been raging for some time about whether or not Sir Roger Norrington is correct to ban his orchestra from using vibrato in works composed even as late as the twentieth century and, following on from that, an interesting discussion took place on Twitter last week on whether you could play Mahler and Elgar works without violin portamenti. Unthinkable in my opinion, but an even more fallacious case is made by those who dismiss the modern grand piano sound as inauthentic for performances of music written before about 1840.

Authentic though it is, the fortepianos on which Beethoven and Mozart composed their works sounds as though they belong in the saloon of a western film than in the concert hall. I have never been able to come to terms with the early piano’s thin tone and twangy bass notes that are more suggestive of Dodge City than nineteenth-century Vienna. So why should we even bother with these relics? As historical curios they are interesting but can’t compare with the modern Steinway. In his essay ‘Notes on a Complete Recording of Beethoven’s Piano Works’ Alfred Brendel states that ‘whenever we hear Beethoven on a present-day instrument we are listening to a sort of transcription’ and goes on to say that he believes a modern concert grand ‘does better justice to most of Beethoven’s piano works than the Hammerklavier: it’s tone is far more colourful, orchestral and rich in contrast, and these qualities do matter in Beethoven, as can be seen from his orchestral and chamber music… It’s sound, dynamics and action have surprisingly little in common with the pianos of today.’ Our modern day ears are attuned to the sound of the concert grand and even if the purists don’t find it completely pukka, the beauty of its tone and the ability of that sound to carry, even in the biggest concert halls, make it much more preferable than the honky-tonk instruments that the musical sophists seem so keen on.

The battle continues to rage about whether classical music should be played on period instruments and as long as there is classical music I don’t think it will ever be resolved. I can take any amount of period strings, lutes, viols, crumhorns, sackbuts, shawms and ophecleides and the rest, in fact I actually prefer baroque keyboard music to be played on the harpsichord rather than a modern piano. The UK alone boasts some astoundingly good PIPEs (Period Instrument Performance Ensembles): The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Fretwork, The English Baroque Soloists, The Rose Consort, The New London Consort, The Taverner Consort, Collegium Musicum 90, The Academy of Ancient Music, The Frolick, The English Concert and The Hilliard Ensemble to name but a few. But fortepianos? Why bother with them? I suggest they all be broken up and distributed as a practical contribution to the pensioner’s Winter Fuel Allowance.

The only known photograph of Chopin

I wonder if the originality of Chopin’s music is overlooked these days. Glenn Gould famously denounced Chopin’s music as ornamental and trivial and other critics have dismissed his salon-based oeuvre as nothing more than ‘music for the ladies’ but actually, there’s more to it than just a pretty tune. The inherent melodic nature of a Chopin piece belies a harmony more complex than meets the ear and even the humble mazurka, like some peasant wench newly brought to polite society, its characteristic Polish Lydian fourth beautifed and given an exotic glamour, can stand up to scrutiny of the drawing-rooms of Paris. In the words of a nineteenth-century critic from La France Musicale: ‘Chopin is unique as a pianist – he should not and cannot be compared to anyone.’ He might even be able to make you cry.

 This week I was privileged enough to see the Bolshoi Ballet perform at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. I have to say I’m no ballet expert but I don’t think I’d be upsetting anyone by suggesting that, generally speaking, the form tends to be the preferred by the ladies.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that men don’t and cannot appreciate it; I thoroughly enjoyed the performance and marvelled at the skill and beauty of the dancers as much as anyone but I still don’t understand it. To a sixteen-stone ex-rugby player like me, girls skittering along daintily on their toes and men doing impossible leaps (and making it look as easy as reaching up to change a light bulb) is more arcane and mysterious than any other athletic or musical endeavour. For me, learning to pole-vault whilst playing the trombone would probably be easier than attempting an entrechat, or even, if it comes to that, trying to understand or describe what one is. As a musician the bulk of my enjoyment in ballet comes from the music.

Ludwig Minkus (1826-1917)

The performance was of Don Quixote with music by Minkus; you’d be forgiven for not knowing his name - I hadn’t heard of him before either. Ludwig Minkus, born in 1826, was an Austrian who made his name as a violinist, in fact he was something of a child prodigy and became principal violinist at the Vienna Court Opera. In 1853 he emigrated to Russia to take up the post of conductor of the orchestra of Prince Nikolai Yusupov; in 1856 the principal violinist of the Moscow Imperial Bolshoi Theatre and, by 1864, was Inspector of the Imperial Theatre Orchestras and until about 1886 he was one of the most sought-after composers for the ballet in Russia. How come hardly anyone has heard of him these days? When I listened to his music I understood why.

I think I must have expected music as sophisticated as Tchaikovsky’s or Glazunov’s; passages that evoke the darkest of emotions or the fleeting lightness of a sprite,  instead Minkus’s offering seemed to be little more than a series of supercharged waltzes and polkas in traditional Viennese style. My subsequent research on Minkus revealed that he was replaced by a certain Mr Tchaikovsky mainly because audiences, and choreographers, were demanding a more intricate, innovative and expressive kind of music, something more theatrical and dramatic - music that would unify the whole ballet experience in much the same way that Wagner had done with opera. I sat in my ROH seat wanting the same musical sophistication as Richard Strauss’s titular tone poem but, I have to say, was a little disappointed.

But whatever I thought about the music, it was still a thrilling and spectacular evening. I’ve put my rugby boots in the bin for good. I’m just off to practice my demi-pliè.

When I say Lulu I don’t mean the diminutive Scot with the whining voice who belted out ‘Shout’ in 1964, I mean the opera by Alban Berg. It’s a work that has haunted me for decades and I keep coming back to it like a hopeless junkie.

I first came across the opera while investigating serial composition techniques and heard Berg’s violin concerto. It was twelve-tone music, but twelve-tone music wasn’t supposed to sound like this. It was lush and romantic, nothing like the harsh discordant stuff I’d heard before. It was strangely fascinating and I had to hear more. I found recordings of the Piano Sonata, the String Quartet and the Lyric Suite. I was astounded by the opera Wozzeck and then, a few weeks later, I heard Lulu. It was like a slap in the face. I had heard nothing like it before.

It’s not a comfortable opera by any means. It’s not a work you can put on in the evening while you relax with a glass of wine; it makes great demands of the listener and it makes you think. The subject isn’t attractive either – it’s forbidding and tragic, and the role of Lulu herself is at once both a victim and a parasite. The highly individual music parodies classical forms, dovetailing freely composed episodes with serialism and the result is haunting, captivating and shocking all at the same time. The plot is preposterously complicated: Lulu, an ex-prostitute is having her portrait painted. Her husband, Dr. Goll walks in while she is having sex with the painter and collapses in shock and dies of a heart attack. Lulu later marries the painter but is dogged by admirers and hangers-on, one of whom is Dr. Schon a newspaper editor. The painter commits suicide after finding out that his success is due to Dr. Schon’s secret patronage and about Schon’s previous affair with Lulu. Later still Lulu finds success as a dancer but Dr Schon realises that he cannot live without her, despite his engagement to another woman. After marrying Schon who is jealous of her other admirers, they argue and Lulu shoots him. She is arrested and convicted but escapes from prison assisted by the Countess Geschwitz and makes her way to Paris with Alwa, Dr Schon’s son. Wanted for the murder of Dr Schon, Lulu is blackmailed by an acrobat and a Marquis but is betrayed and manages to flee with Alwa before the police arrive to recapture her. The scene moves to London where Lulu, now working as a prostitute, is living in poverty with Alwa and the mysterious tramp Schigolch (who may be Lulu’s father). The Countess arrives before Lulu returns with a client who refuses to pay in advance for sex and kills Alwa in a struggle. Lulu, unmoved by the killing, goes out and returns with yet another client, who is actually Jack the Ripper, murders Lulu and the Countess as well. Ridiculous? Of course, but then so are many other opera synopses, but listened to within the context of the music the plot makes sense; the music, listened to in the context of the plot, makes more sense. If you’ve never heard it before I can only urge you to listen. Clicking on the clip below will give you a little taster!

The astounding Deutsche Grammophon set of Lulu with Teresa Stratas in the title role.

Dinu Lipatti

My lifelong love of the music of Wagner and its inextricable links with an ex-girlfriend that I described in my last blog post seems to have caused some amusement to readers. But isn’t it true that our fondest musical memories tend to be those that are bound up with personal relations?

Radio 4′s Desert Island Discs is based on that very idea. And, even though I may not have liked them at the time, I still have a fondness for the pieces I studied at school; the arias from La Traviata my mother played to me as a child still make me smile, and the Four Last Songs will be forever linked to a teenage holiday to Switzerland even though Richard Strauss was German and lived in Bavaria!

I can’t play the piano very well but my mother was a decent player and I suppose it is for that reason that I have a fondness for the instrument. My childhood years were full of recordings of Dinu Lipatti, Solomon and Wilhelm Kempff on discs played repeatedly on the living room stereogram that was the size of a small wardrobe. At secondary school I fell under the influence of my music teacher, one Chris Holmes, mostly because he was a fabulous pianist – he had his own jazz trio and played in various clubs and pubs in the Manchester area. At school he would spice up dreary assemblies by adding jazzy chords and little syncopated riffs to the hymns and, even more impressively, he could play the Rick Wakeman accompaniment to ‘Morning Has Broken’ exactly as it is on the Cat Stevens single. I was crestfallen when he informed me and my classmates that he was moving to another school and we even tried to bribe him to stay. Needless to say he wasn’t tempted by the results of our whip-round which totalled £3.26.

Mr Holmes was replaced by Mr Phil Smith, a middle-aged Bohemian with long hair and who wore cravats and pastel-coloured jackets. The ‘A’-Level music class comprised four students, including myself, and those heady days of study were greatly boosted by two things: 1) Mr Smith looked a lot like Jon Pertwee, the actor who played Doctor Who in the 1970s, and 2) The music stock room bore more than a passing resemblance to the exterior of the TARDIS. Needless to say our tour de force, when Smithy disappeared into the cupboard to get records or scores, was to hum the Doctor Who theme tune in four part harmony, a ditty which we continued to perfect throughout the year. Silly maybe, but it did increase our scores in aural tests. Mr Smith did have his good points, though. He, like Holmes, was an excellent pianist and we spent our lunchtimes hanging around the music room while he played Beethoven sonatas and pieces by Brahms and Schumann, lapping up his playing like a bunch of desperate winos.

Since then my musical taste has broadened, as has my knowledge of the great players, but this week I attempted to put my pianistic luminaries into some kind of order of merit and it proved to be a ticklish task. In a recent poll in BBC Music Magazine 100 concert pianists voted for who they thought were their top three piano greats. This was interesting on two counts, firstly because of who figured, and secondly because of who didn’t, but I’m pretty sure the pollsters must have had as difficult a time as I had trying to order them according to merit. Top of the ivory-ticklers was Sergei Rachmaninov, closely followed by Arthur Rubinstein, but notable by their absence were Maurizio Pollini and John Ogden, both favourites of mine.

The problem with a poll like this is that picking just three pianists is impossibly hard. I wouldn’t necessarily choose Murray Perahia to play Debussy, nor would I opt for Walter Gieseking to play Mozart. Lipatti’s Chopin is, for me, supreme, but I wouldn’t neccessarily book him to do a concert of Bartok or Prokofiev – I’d get Martha Argerich to play those. (I know, I know! I wouldn’t be able to book Lipatti at all now because he’s dead, but I’m speaking hypothetically, you understand). So my list of piano titans would have to include at least six different pianists to cover the various eras of classical music. And who do you get to play your Beethoven sonatas? One of the progressive young Turks - Stephen Kovacevich? Paul Lewis? James Rhodes? All fine pianists in their own right, particularly when interpreting Beethoven, and for me just as convincing as Brendel, Arrau, and Barenboim.

In my fantasy piano concerts I’d want Walter Gieseking to play Debussy, Dinu Lipatti to play Chopin, Murray Perahia to play Mozart, Edwin Fischer to play Bach. Richter to play Shostakovich. And the Beethoven? It has to be the prodigiously talented James Rhodes. But have all these pianistic comets had as much influence on my musical upbringing as Chris Holmes, Phil Smith or my mother? I think not. Those titans from my school days held more sway over my subsequent musical development than any amount of listening to records or concert going.