Music and the spirit of place

Nicholas Kenyon has been Director of the BBC Proms from 1996 to 2007, he takes over as managing director of the Barbican Centre arts complex in October, and today delivers the Hesse Lecture at the 2007 Aldeburgh Festival. His subject is 'changing tastes and changing programmes over 60 Aldeburgh Festivals and 80 years of BBC Proms, the story of the post-war Festival movement, and the unprecedented changes that now challenge all aspects of classical music.'

Although tastes and programmes have changed, Aldeburgh remains a great international music festival. It is still personal, distinctive and inclusive, and those are the very characteristics that defined the seasons of the great Proms directors such as William Glock and John Drummond. Aldeburgh eschews fads and composer anniversaries, and instead challenges with the best new music. Aldeburgh ignores the touring brand-name orchestras with their jet-set maestros and tired war-horse programmes, and instead commissions innovative work such as Yoshi Oida's acclaimed production of Death in Venice, and the multi-media Elephant and Castle. And in Thomas Adès, Aldeburgh has an artistic director who refuses to trade in spin, who is internationally recognised as an artistic visionary, composer and performer, and who is a man of culture.

By contrast, at the BBC Proms Nicholas Kenyon has presided over a festival that has become increasingly anonymous, bland, and exclusive. In a July 2006 Guardian interview Kenyon listed the following among his achievements as Proms director - big screen TVs in Hyde Park, text-message information service, digital television relays, avoiding positive discrimination in favour of women composers (think about it), lots of guest orchestras from Europe and the US, and 'taking people with us'.

In his 1960 essay Landscape and Character Lawrence Durrell wrote 'the determinant of any culture is after all - the spirit of place.' This spirit of place in hugely important in music, and we find it in Bach's Leipzig chorales, Haydn's London Symphonies, the works of the Second Viennese, Manchester and Darmstadt Schools, and elsewhere. Aldeburgh has a very powerful spirit of place, and it has nothing to do with Suffolk fishermen and windswept beaches. It is about passion for new music, passion for inclusiveness, and passion for the visual arts, architecture and new media.

The BBC Proms no longer have a spirit of place. You can experience them at home on the radio, around the world via the internet, or anywhere, anytime - in a park near you. The Proms no longer offer a personal vision, instead they present the 'cookie cutter' programmes of the touring orchestras. The Proms are no longer a music festival, they are a global entertainment brand that stands for audience friendly and risk averse programming.

When you stand in front of Snape Maltings you see the place shown in the photo above. But you also feel the spirit of music from the Renaissance to the contemporary, of the visual arts from Barbara Hepworth to the latest video installations, and of culture from Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, through Mitslav Rostropovich to Thomas Adès, Mira Calix and Tansy Davies.

I hope Nicholas Kenyon feels that spirit today.

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Holiday weekend - Aldeburgh

Mstislav Rostropovich relaxes against Benjamin Britten's Alvis in Aldeburg. The photo is undated but was probably taken in summer 1961. Now take a drive through Britten's Aldeburgh, but be careful, the composer was a notoriously speedy driver. Which prompts the question - is classical music too fast?
Photo from Humphrey Carpenter's book Benjamin Britten, A Biography (Faber ISBN 0571143253). Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "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

Rostropovich – reaching out for the music

There are three ways of knowing a thing. Take for instance a flame. One can be told of the flame, one can see the flame with his own eyes, and finally one can reach out and be burned by it – Sufi scholar.

Some of us are told of music, some of us can see music, but Mstislav Rostropovich, who died today age 80, reached out and was burnt by it. I first met him after he conducted a wildly exuberant performance of Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony with the Snape Maltings Training Orchestra in 1977. Rostropovich had a long-standing relationship with the Aldeburgh Festival, and with its founder Benjamin Britten, who had died the previous year. This relationship had produced the Cello Symphony, the Cello Suites, and a Cello Sonata, all of which Britten wrote for the Russian cellist.

Back in the 1970s I was working for EMI, and Slava’s relationship with the company went back to 1956 when he recorded the Miaskovsky Cello Concerto. In 1974 Rostropovich and his wife, soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, left the Soviet Union, and the following year he recorded the two Haydn Cello Concertos, with Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, in the Henry Wood Hall in London for EMI.

At that time EMI’s famous International Classical Division, which had been founded by Walter Legge, was housed in modest offices in Hanover Square, just off London's Oxford Street, I was EMI’s international marketing manager working for the division’s director, Peter Andry, who had masterminded several legendary ‘east meets west’ recordings, including Karajan’s Dresden Meistersinger and the Berlin Beethoven Triple Concerto with Richter, Oistrak and Rostropovich.

For me, an incident away from the recording studio showed the difference between Rostropovich and other superstar musicians. We decided to celebrate the release of the Haydn record by inviting Slava to the EMI offices in 1977 to present him with the lavish EMI-Pathé gatefold edition of the concertos. The visit summed up Slava’s approach to life - energy, enthusiasm, passion, but above all a love for music and a love for the human race. He made sure he spent time talking to all the background staff who rarely came into contact with the artists, yet alone superstars. We were working with many other great musicians at the time, but the prospect of Herbert von Karajan visiting our offices, yet alone hugging a secretary was unthinkable.

Others will document Rostropovich’s career and achievements in more detail, and in particular his work defending human and artistic freedoms. We are fortunate that he leaves such a fine recorded legacy as a cellist. He went on to achieve much as a conductor, but the electricity he radiated from the podium was difficult to transfer to recordings. I can remember discussions at EMI as to whether his 1970s Tchaikovsky Symphony cycle should be remastered, as the pressings somehow lacked the frisson of the actual performances.

In the later years his energy was occasionally misplaced, and his fee as a conductor became an obstacles with some promoters, restricting his appearances at important series such as the BBC Promenade Concerts. The last time I saw him was in London several years ago with the Lithuanian Ballet, when he conducted a staged performance of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet that ended with a bizarre mis en scene with Rostropovich joining the dead lovers on stage in the final bars.

Mstislav Rostropovich will be remembered as a genius with the cello and baton, as a champion of human rights, as a consummate ambassador for music, and above all for his love for humanity. He truly reached out and was burnt by the music, let us celebrate that today.

Slava's Russian roots informed everything he did, now read about Western takes on Russian music.
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Music is in the soul of Russia

Stephen Moss tells it like it is in his Guardian music blog, and links to On An Overgrown Path:

It is of course distressing news that the great Russian cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich is seriously ill in a Moscow hospital. Long may this remarkable performer and life-force live. I once shared a lift with him on the morning after a concert he had conducted in Milan, and his extraordinary energy was apparent even then - at 7.30am, following a party that had gone on into the early hours. A bear hug from "Slava" leaves you winded: his commitment and passion, for life and for music, are legendary; listen to him perform the Bach cello suites or conduct Tchaikovsky's ballets, and you will soon realise why he has been a towering presence in music-making for half a century.

How many other ailing classical musicians would make the news in the way that Slava has? And an even more pertinent question: if Slava were British, would our head of state or prime minister have made a special trip to hospital to wish him well, as Russian president Vladimir Putin is said to have done recently? Somehow, I can't imagine the Queen or Blair rushing to be at the bedside of Charles Mackerras or Colin Davis or Janet Baker if, perish the thought, they were seriously ill in hospital.

In Britain, the link between culture and politics is less umbilical than in Russia. The part serious art plays in national life and the taste of our leaders is also rather more restricted. Perhaps if Lester Piggott had a life-threatening condition, our racing-mad Queen would gallop to his aid; and Blair would, presumably, want to be there if, say, Noel Gallagher was stricken with something terrible. But Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr, Peter Maxwell Davies? Even the Master of the Queen's Music would, I suspect, only get a card.

Putin is said to be fond of the popular classics - Tchaikovsky and Schubert have been mentioned - and also claims to have read a good deal of Russian literature. This may just be spin. But I like to believe it is true - that the steely-eyed but sweet-faced former KGB colonel really does have a penchant for great music and a soft spot for Slava, who is also a political hero in Russia for standing alongside Boris Yeltsin in the face of a communist coup in 1991. And that this represents something profoundly Russian - the sense that music is in the soul of this great nation. That what is now thought of as a country of oligopolists and mafiosi, poverty, hunger and exploitation, is still, at heart, the land of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Horowitz, David Oistrakh, Maxim Vengerov ... and on and on. Russia has given more to music-making in the past 120 years than any other country.

The close link between politics and art has a downside, as Shostakovich discovered when Stalin began to take an over-critical view of his work in the 1930s. But I almost prefer that to the indifference of our own leaders, who wouldn't know a Tintoretto from a traffic cone. Thatcher, Major, Blair - do they have an ounce of artistic interest between them? No wonder the Millennium Dome's celebration of culture on New Year's Eve 1999 was such a fiasco: it was organised by a political class for whom great art has no value. Whose budget is to be slashed so the Olympics can get its billions? Why, the Arts Council of course.

Soviet communism proved to be a disaster, but boy did it take the arts seriously - Jade Goody and Cat Deeley would not have been major figures in Smolensk circa 1938. And I don't suppose President Putin is perfect, but he certainly knows a great musician when he sees one - and somehow finds the time in what must be a busy day running his chaotic country to tell a sick man what he has meant to Russia.

Meanwhile back On An Overgrown Path let's remember that Dmitri Shostakovich dedicated both his cello concertos to Mstislav Rostropovich. Listen, and see, Rostropovich talking about Shostakovich and the composition of Cello Concerto No 1 via these BBC Radio 3 online resources.
Rostropovich on playing to Shostakovich
Rostropovich on the Cello Concerto no. 1

And now read more about the musical tastes of our politicians
Photo credit Lavandeira jr/EPA. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "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