What makes a good performer?

'A bad performer wants people to say how good he is. Good performers want people to say how good people are' - Robert Lax
Kurt Masur, who said “I don’t want to be called a ‘wonder', the wonder is the music” died on December 19th 2015 aged 88. The quote comes from Robert Lax's introduction to his poetry cycle The Circus of the Sun.

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David Munrow - more than early music

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'David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London transformed our view of medieval music. The impact of their performances far surparssed any that had gone before: by demonstrating how medieval music could sound normal, they created a niche for it in the concert hall and on record that it has never lost' ~ From Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's notes for Music of the Gothic era May 15 2007 is the thirty-first anniversary of the death of David Munrow. His contribution to the acceptance, understanding and performance of early music almost defies summary. He was born in 1942, and learnt the bassoon and recorder as a child. Between school and university he travelled and taught in South America , and started the collection of ethnic instruments that were to give him, and the world, a new perspective on early music making. He read English at Pembroke College , Cambridge, and was encouraged by Thurston Dart to take an active role in the music-making of that most musical of cities. ...
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Classical music must be doing something wrong

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Classical music's website of choice Slipped Disc  today runs a story on the latest RAJAR UK radio listening figures . This story states that a "...record number of individual hours was spent listening to [BBC Radio 3]. They must be doing something right". Which is good news; but only for those who believe that facts should never stand in the way of a good story. Because simple arithmetic shows that BBC Radio 3 is not doing very much right, while UK classical radio in its entirety is doing something wrong.   In the quarter ended September 2024, BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM audiences were 2.039m and 4.416m respectively. Which gives a total audience for the two classical stations of 6.455m. For the same quarter in September 2023 the audiences were 2.002m and 4.467m, giving a total classical radio audience 12 months previously of 6.469m.  So BBC Radio 3's "something right" turns out to be a fractional increase in its audience year on year, and a contribution ...
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I loathe crooners and swooners

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Reading today's news trivia reminded me of a passage in Arthur Koestler 's 1960 book The Lotus and the Robot . References to the "under-privileged classes with their undeveloped tastes as consumers of mass-culture" may not sound well seven decades later. But Koestler was a brilliant man with important things to say, and he said them well; most notably in his 1940 novel Darkness at Noon . This, together with Animal Farm and 1984 , was essential reading for a generation of intellectuals falling out of love with the Soviet Union.    In the following passage from the epilogue of The Lotus and the Robot  Koestler reflects on how the Westernization of Eastern cultures is being superseded by another form of cultural osmosis. Despite being written in 1960, Koestler's thesis is, sadly, so very true in today's digital culture. Because as King Charles' 2025 Birthday Honours remind us, there has never been fewer creative talents facing a vaster audience of consume...
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Lise Meitner - the forgotten Lady Atomic

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Today's successful switch-on of the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland takes us down an overgrown path that leads from a masterpiece of contemporary music via the Manhattan Project to the forgotten lady seen in my header photo. Legend has it Manhattan Project scientists working on the atomic bomb at the uranium-enrichment plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee listened repeatedly to Nicolas Slonimsky's recording of Edgard Varèse's Ionisation . Scored for thirteen percussionists Ionisation , like many of Varèse's works, takes its title from science. Today ionisation, which is part of the process of nuclear fission, is irrevocably linked with weapons of destruction and the work of Robert Oppenheimer , the so-called Doctor Atomic . But the study of radioactivity and nuclear physics predated the Manhattan Project by decades and many of the key research figures were committed to the peaceful application of their work. One such figure was Lise Meitner wh...
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Classical music's biggest problem is that no one cares

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Soundtrack for a porn movie

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The Accidental Pilgrim

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Today it is different. The steady war of propaganda avalanches loosed by press, radio and film makes it impossible for the thought to hear itself. It wavers, weakens and ends up in resignation. And the worst of it is that the evil is not confined to the "totalitarian" parts of Europe, but that it is spreading and infecting the intellectual life of all nations with a strange anarchy mixed of doubt, discontent and confusion. That extract is from a lecture given in Paris by the the Czech writer Franz Werfel in 1937. The evil that Werfel spoke of forced him, together with his wife Alma - seen above - to flee Vienna a year later and follow an arduous path to freedom in California. For part of their journey they had to walk - with Alma carrying the autograph score of a Bruckner symphony - along the torturous path seen below. The path is in the region of south-west France where the hills known as the Albères reach the Mediterranean. These hills are the eastern extension of the P...
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Master musician who experienced the pain of genius

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