Monday 18 December 2000

Last week turned into a bit of a Haydn-fest. Besides the Harmoniemesse with the SCO, which was deadly dull on the first night, but livened up a bit on Friday, Melvyn Tan was in town playing a lunchtime date at the RSAMD, finishing off a flurry of BBC programme-making activity on my part. I'd persuaded him to play the fortepiano, even though he really concentrates on what I call 'big black piano' these days. And he gave a wonderfully reckless and dramatic performance, taking huge risks, and drawing all kinds of musical colours out of the instrument. If something didn't quite come off technically (and there were plenty of things that didn't) he'd just try something else even more outrageous. 

He played the big Haydn E flat sonata and Beethoven's op10 no2, which I learned for my Grade 8 exam 20 years ago, and it was such a relief after the good-natured but sterile experience of playing for a certain conductor (see previous entry), to hear someone equally good-natured not be ashamed to communicate their personality through their playing. Emboldened by this and some great sushi, I improvised tastefully but extravagantly throughout the Rameau suite that evening, and drew some smiles from the rest of the band, and, once, even from the conductor. Whoa - music as communication - this actually seemed like a radical idea after the previous night.

My other BBC activity in the last few weeks has been making Opera in Action for Radio 3. This is an interesting challenge for me, as although I've got nothing against opera itself, I find the culture that surrounds it repellent and I avoid it at every opportunity. Still, I had the chance to book some fun contributors, especially the promoter Raymond Gubbay talking about classical music in a world without subsidy, and the frail but utterly charming John Mortimer on Mozart's greatest librettist Lorenzo da Ponte and his working methods: sex, drugs and recitative basically.

On Saturday I dashed over to Edinburgh in the evening to hear The Bach Players at St Cecilia's Hall. Nicolette Moonen, who runs the group, is an occasional guest leader of ConCal and is a wonderfully organised player, always a delight to work with, as she makes things easier rather than more difficult. Paul Nicholson gave a great account of the difficult bits in Brandenburg 5 on the fake Kirckman harpsichord that lives in the Russell Collection - I went round to see him at the end to discover he'd already gone to catch the night bus to London, as he had to play the organ for a service the following morning. Glamorous huh? I was surprised to find Alison McG was playing cello, and even more surprised to see she was playing a whole Bach cello suite (and from memory) - she hadn't mentioned the concert at all at lunch the other day. Mysterious people, these cellists.

After the concert, Grant O'Brien, curator of the Russell Collection took me aside with a conspiratorial look in his eye, and said 'come upstairs'. In the Gallery, beside the two most famous French harpsichords in the collection, sat another, made in the same street in Paris around the same time in the 1770s. Richly decorated with unusual delicacy, it looked astonishing, covered in mischievous Cupids, and the few notes that worked sounded pretty remarkable too. It's being looked after for someone (this is where I get oblique) with a view to being restored to its full glory and playing condition - Grant told me with some glee that one just like it was recently sold at auction for £3 million. It seems to have been taken from France to another far corner of the globe as loot at the end of WW2.

In amongst all of this, I bumped into James Waters from the Edinburgh Festival backstage in the Queen's Hall. After giving me his opinion of the concert (which I won't reproduce), he said it would be mid-January before they could give us a decision on The Gentle Shepherd for next year's Festival. So limbo continues there.

Today I got a copy of John Harley's new book on Orlando Gibbons in the mail, and was delighted to discover not only that a little paper I published 5 years ago is in his bibliography, but that he also discusses its contents, on Gibbons's solo songs. I'm in four footnotes - does that make me an academic? He did spell my name wrongly though.