Youth is when you fly economy class

'Naxos, which pioneered discs for a fiver, counts every penny. Five-star treatment is a rarity. "In our company, even with conductors, it goes by age. Below 50, you travel economy; above 50, you travel business class; above 60, you can travel first class. That's the way it has to be"' - says Naxos founder Klaus Heymann in an interview in today's Guardian. My photo shows a sub-50 Kyung-Wha Chung and André Previn on a tour flight. But when your net worth reaches £190 million you travel in your own jet.
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The art of the animateur

I am a great fan of the late John Drummond, and have quoted him, here, many times. But, I blame Drummond for the present decline in presentation standards on BBC Radio 3. In 1987, when he became controller of the network, Drummond changed the role of the presentation team from 'neutral' announcers to presenters who, in his own words, could "communicate enthusiasm and knowledge".

Drummond's change was well intentioned, but terribly misguided. It has been responsible for a disastrous sequence of presenters from Paul 'music for lovers' Gambaccini in the 1990s to Petroc Trelawny and his colleagues today, whose idea of communicating enthusiasm and knowledge is to regurgitate half-digested chunks from a children's encyclopedia of music. The disease isn't just confined to the radio. BBC TV's Classical Star, which is fronted by Radio 3 presenters Charles Hazlewood and Chi-chi Nwanoku, has been described by an eminent musician as 'an obscene pantomime that plays games with the feelings of young, talented and vulnerable people'.

What John Drummond failed to see was that presenters who can communicate enthusiasm and knowledge for classical music without turning it into 'an obscene pantomine' can't be trained. They are born with the skill, and they are very few and far between. 'Presenter' is an inadequate and devalued word for describing such a rare person. Instead I suggest the French word 'animateur' - someone who really brings their subject to life.

Radio 3 should abandon its present crop of 'classical jocks'. It should return to an enthusiastic but neutral presentation style. It should learn from Radio 4, which has avoided the 'chummy' presenter trap, and by so doing has retained its integrity, and its audience. Radio 3 should allow the music to speak for itself. Which is something it has forgotten how to do. And it should search for a few great animateurs to bring classical music back to life, both on radio and television.


The BBC need look no further than their own archives to identify the DNA of a great animateur. David Munrow's Pied Piper radio programme was broadcast four times a week for five years in the 1970s. Munrow (above) delivered enthusiasm and knowlege in huge quantities without compromising scholarship or integrity. Pied Piper brought early music to life for a generation, and I, and many others, are indebted to him for that. Munrow also branched out into television with his very successful Ancestral Voices programme, and he started to develop a career as a conductor. Munrow did so much as an animateur of classical music, and he promised so much more. Alas, he took his own life in 1976, aged just thirty-three.

Television was the medium of choice of another great animateur, André Previn, whose BBC TV programmes reached millions without sinking to the depths of Classical Star. The photo below shows Previn with Carlo Maria Giulini on the set of the television programme 'Who needs a conductor?' Previn also animated classical music in the States with his 'Previn and the Pittsburgh' TV series.


Leopold Stokowski pioneered the role of the animateur in the States, and he worked his magic in the days before television dictated the media agenda. Disney's full length 1940 feature film Fantasia brought classical music to life for millions, and is still regarded today as pivotal in introducing a new audience to serious music. Fantasia was Stokowski's brainchild, and he appeared on screen in a sequence which is seen being filmed in the photo below. (Picture credit Disney Productions).


When television replaced the movies as the entertainment medium of choice Leonard Bernstein took over from Stokowski' as animateur par excellence. Bernstein's famous Young Person's Concerts attracted huge television audiences for an extraordinarily wide range of repertoire, with his broadcast on Christmas Day 1967 reaching an astonishing twenty-seven million viewers.

I have in front of me the programme for the November 2 1963 telecast of a Young Person's Concert - Moussorgsky Prelude to "Khovantchina", Randall Thompson Scherzo from Symphony No. 2, Walter Piston Suite from "The Incredible Flautist", and Brahms Academic Festival Overture. Contrast that with this perceptive comment from fellow blogger Jessica Duchen about BBC TV's Classical Star - 'The most depressing thing about the programme is the way that the music itself is sidelined and chopped up. Evidently our friends at the Beeb don't think that viewers can cope with a whole movement of Mendelssohn.' My header photo shows Bernstein with members of the audience after a Young Person's Concert, and they don't seem at all phased by a whole movement of Randall Thompson. Lenny was a true animateur if ever there was one.

Glenn Gould was also both a great musician and a great animateur, and I have already written about his love affair with the microphone. His radio programme The Art of Glenn Gould ran for forty-eight weeks in the mid 1960s in Canada, and covered everything from the Moog synthesizer to Mozart, and in 1974 he produced a ten week series on Schoenberg. In the late 1960s he turned to television, starting with a series of four Conversations with Glenn Gould in a co-production with the BBC. His television work became as arcane as his radio documentaries, with the hour long The Well-Tempered Listener creating a complex visual montage of Bach's music. Gould's main succeses were in the technically more flexible medium of television. In 1970, in a neat tribute from one great animateur to another, Gould produced the acclaimed Stokowski: A Portrait for Radio. The photo below shows him at work in the recording studio.

Sadly one match of animateurs that seemed to be made in heaven didn't work out for Gould. In April 1962 he played the Brahms' D-minor concerto with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic. Conductor and soloist disagreed over Gould's spectacularly slow tempi, prompting Bernstein to deliver an apparently critical pre-performance talk. The two animateurs never performed together again, although this was due as much to Gould's self-imposed exile from the concert hall as to any long-term animosity between the two flamboyant musicians.


Last week I told the story of Radio 3 presenter Sarah Walker, who was caught out (in more ways than one I suspect) when a helpful CD player added a fifth movement to Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony. Ms. Walker's CV tells us that in 1995 she completed a PhD in English experimental music. That's the problem. She, and her fellow BBC presenters may have the right qualifications on paper. But, in practice, they fail dismally; both as neutral announcers in the manner of the great Cormac Rigby, and as animateurs in the manner of David Munrow. It's not me that's saying it. It is the audience statistics.

The composer Jonathan Harvey knows a thing or two about experimental English music. He has worked at IRCAM and written a study of the music of Stockhausen. His Mortuos plango, vivos voco for eight channel tape was created at IRCAM, and uses computers to manipulate the sound of the great bell at Winchester Cathedral. It is one of the masterpieces of electronic music, and in the notes for it the composer writes:

In entering the rather intimidating world of the machine I was determined not to produce a dehumanised work if I could help it, and so kept fairly closely to the world of the original sounds. The territory that the new computer technology opens up is unprecedently vast: one is humbly aware that it will only be conquered by the penetration of the human spirit, however beguiling the exhibits of technical wizardry; and that penetration will be neither rapid nor easy.

We're all trying to be too clever. We've forgotten the importance of the human spirit, except when we are trampling it underfoot on BBC TV's Classical Star. We've missed the point that digital technologies, new books, internet radio and blogs alone are never going to attract a new mass audience for classical music. But great animateurs can.

The good news is that the art of the animateur is not dead. The opening of this autumn's Lincoln Centre season in New York was transmitted live on network television. The TV presenter was that indominatable human spirit Itzhak Perlman (photo below, credit Allegro films), and his words about the telecast are a lesson for all of us.

"Television was how I came to the States (to appear on the Ed Sullivan show - Pliable) and I've always felt very comfortable doing it. Of course, there are battles. Television will always err on the side of making something not quite as classy as it could be. I try to put my foot down because people in the mass media often don't give audiences credit. To bring a large audience to a piece of serious music and make it accessible does not mean reducing it in any way. And I've learned that if something is good, even if it is a little difficult, people will get that it is good."

Writing in the Cambridge Review in October 1957 Peter Laslett, founder of the Open University, described the BBC Third Programme as "a sevice which is literally the envy of the world". Fifty years later the service is in danger of becoming the laughing stock of the world. It doesn't need rocket science, or expensive technology, to reverse the decline. It just needs John Drummonds ill-judged presentation changes to be reversed. And it needs the BBC to remember the words of that great animateur Itzhak Perlman - "If something is good, even if it is a little difficult, people will get that it is good."


Now read how John Drummond and Leonard Bernstein just didn't hit it off.
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Dance is not an inferior art form

For too many people – especially musicians – dance is considered an inferior art form, less valuable than spoken theatre and less important than opera. However, to my mind it was one of the key areas of artistic innovation and audience growth in the twentieth century, and without Diaghilev (right) much of the innovation would not have happened.

The late and lamented John Drummond gives musicians food for thought as they search for new audiences in the 21st century. Taken from his autobiography Tainted by Experience (Faber, ISBN 0571200540). And I can only echo Drummond's thoughts on dance. My love of those 20th century masterpieces, Prokofiev's five piano concertos, was sparked by seeing a modern dance performance to the extraordinary First Concerto back in the 1970s at Sadler Wells. I cannot exactly remember the company, but am pretty sure it was Ballet Rambert. Which does prompt me to ask why we don't hear Prokofiev's wonderful piano concertos and violin concertos more often? Are they simply a victim of the current love affair with everything Shostakovich?

For the five Prokofiev piano concertos look no further than the bargain double CD with Vladimir Ashkenazy playing and André Previn conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. The recordings date from 1974 and 1975, and Previn was released from his exclusive EMI contract specially for the sessions as Ashkenazy wouldn't record them with anyone else. Decca house producer Ray Minshull was in charge, and the venue was the late and lamented Kingsway Hall. The First Concerto plays as I write and, sorry to be a bore, but they don't make CDs like that anymore. The Kingsway Hall had acoustics to die for, and was venue for many classic recordings including Britten's own interpretation of his War Requiem. The hall was last used for recording in 1984, and was demolished in 1998, to be replaced by a faceless international hotel.

Now read about an inspirational 21st century dance company.
Image credit - Portrait of Sergei Diaghilev by Valentin Serov (1904). Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Whatever happened to Howard Hanson?

Back in the late 70’s, when I was going through my post-Mahler phase, two LP’s were on my turntable a lot. They both featured works by composers who were then unknown in the UK. The first was ‘Chuck’ Gerhardt conducting the National Philharmonic Orchestra (a crack session band comprising front desk players from the leading London orchestras) in Howard Hanson’s Symphony No 2 “the Romantic.” (See photo of Hanson to above). This is a wonderfully passionate account that is playing on vinyl as I write. It eclipses any subsequent recordings including the composer’s own interpretation on Mercury. The wonderful 12” RCA Gold Seal LP sleeve has a beautifully atmospheric black and white Christian Steiner (see footnote) shot of Hanson on the cover smoking a politically incorrect cigarette. CD jewel cases certainly killed the art of record sleeve design stone dead!

The second LP was Rudolf Kempe’s world premiere recording of Erich Korngold’s F Sharp Symphony with the Munich Philharmonic (Photo of Korngold to right). Again an RCA record, this time with a superb colour photo of Alma Mahler’s bust of Korngold on the sleeve. I have put the LP on as I write, the Munich brass blazes in the scherzo with a sound that puts any of the subsequent digital recordings to shame.

Both symphonies are fine romantic works, but certainly not masterpieces. Today the Hanson is largely forgotten. But the Korngold is quite well known, and attracts the attention of conductors such as André Previn. Is the Korngold really that much better music, or is it just musical fashion? And whatever happened to Howard Hanson?

If you don't know Hanson's music, and the romantic repertoire is your scene, it is well worth exploring. Here is a brief taster from the second movement Andante con tenerezza from his 2nd Symphony which has one of the best tunes in the symphonic repertoire... .

The Korngold Symphony is better known, but still let's remind ourselves of that thrilling scherzo...

Footnote - I know Christian Steiner's work as a photographer of musicians, but didn't realise he was an accomplished player himself. Here is an extract from his excellent web site:

Steiner, after graduating from the Berlin Hochschule fur Musik, won several national competitions in Germany and it was one of these awards which first brought him to New York to further his piano studies. He comes from a long line of musicians. His father was a member of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and his brothers were members of the Berlin Philharmonic. Steiner made piano recording with RCA-Reader’s Digest, and was a guest soloist with orchestras in Berlin and New York; more recent engagements at the keyboard include performances with the Berkeley Symphony under Kent Nagano, and with the National Symphony or Mexico. He also performed chamber music with members of the Berlin Philharmonic Octet and recitals with his late brother Peter in Europe and the USA. Among the singers he has collaborated in recital are Jessye Norman and Carol Vaness. In addition, Steiner is the artistic director of The Tannery Pond Concerts, a summer chamber music festival in the Berkshires.

If you enjoyed this post take an overgrown path to A direct line to Britten