Songs for Syria in London


That header photo shows Ali Keeler in the studio cutting his new album with the Al Firdaus Ensemble. My 2015 interview with Ali ran here under the headline 'Classical musician's brave journey from Mozart to Morisco', and tomorrow (Saturday 8th April) Ali and Al Firdaus play a Songs for Syria concert at London's Conway Hall to raise funds for the Al Khair Foundation. This Muslim NGO supports children in some of the worst-affected parts of war-torn Syria, a cause made poignantly relevant by the escalating violence there.

I would very much like to be at the concert; but, sadly, weekend engineering works on the Norwich-London to mainline that have been in place for the last 20 years, coupled with rapacious Easter holiday hotel prices in London makes this impossible. Those who have enjoyed industry jollies to Hamburg and who advocate solving London's concert attendance problem by spending £675 million on the Rattlephilharmonie should reflect on the following: London's moribund and costly public transport system* and penal hotel and restaurant prices mean it is cheaper and much more enjoyable for me to fly Ryanair Stansted to Fez and stay in a decent riad to hear Ali Keeler or Mozart in Morocco. But please don't let that deter those within striking distance of the Conway Hall from supporting this deserving cause. And - dream on - diverting just a little of the social media noise being generated by the Mahler symphony on the same night as part of the Southbank Centre's literally 'Beyond Belief' festival would help fill the Conway Hall and raise some desperately-needed funds.



* To add to the problems Southern Rail who operate many of the main routes into London has a strike on the day of Ali Keeler's concert. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Also on Facebook and Twitter.

Comments

Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

David Munrow - more than early music

Image
'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. ...
Read more

Classical music must be doing something wrong

Image
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 ...
Read more

Soundtrack for a porn movie

Image
"No, you have not landed on Slipped Disc by mistake. Respected electronic music pioneer Klaus Schulze tells the story himself.  The origins of " Body Love " are quite funny. I received a call from a movie producer named Manfred Menz and I wound up becoming his principal composer for a period of time. Amongst others, I composed the "Barracuda" soundtrack for him [1978, previously unreleased on album]. This led to a friendship which lasts till today. Menz now lives in Malibu, California where I visited him a couple of years ago. Anyway, this guy calls me and asks if I would compose the score to a porn movie. I said: "Porn? Nah, I don't do that kind of thing".  As it turned out, the director of the movie, Lasse Braun, had already shot it and had used my albums " Timewind " [1975] and " Moondawn " [1976] as a kind of "working soundtrack". This was obvious because the couples in the film were moving in time to my gro...
Read more

Does Facebook really have to be this dire?

Image
Social media and its inherent dangers are forensically analysed by Jacob Silverman in Terms of Service . This book should be required reading for all social media users; even for those who already understand how Facebook manipulates news feed and sells their personal data to all and sundry to boost its $523 million profit. It makes for very frightening reading, but the fact remains that there are 1.5 billion Facebook users. Which means social media offers a powerful free (if the cost of losing control of personal data is ignored) communication platform for classical music, an artform that is struggling to widen its reach. So why is classical music's use of Facebook and other social media so dire? Classical music's Facebook users fall into two categories: those who need to sell themselves and those who don't. Those who don't need to sell themselves conform to the social media convention of circulating stories from the Guardian, BBC and New York Times that everyone...
Read more

The Accidental Pilgrim

Image
There are an awful lot of books around about the journey to Santiago de Compostela in particular, and pilgrimages in general; and let’s be quite truthful a lot of them are rather average. But one that stood out from the crowd for me was David Moore’s The Accidental Pilgrim which was published in 2004 as a paperback by Hodder Headline Ireland, and is available in both the UK and US. The serendipitous path that links these posts meant that I bought this book in the departures lounge at Stansted Airport en route to the Danish Thread Subtitled 'Travels with a Celtic Saint', The Accidental Pilgrim is the story of a 1500 mile bike ride by the author from Bangor in Northern Ireland to Bobbio in northern Italy via France and Switzerland. The journey follows in the footsteps of the Irish missionary Saint Columbanus who made the journey in the 6th Century. (Which coincidentally, and linked to other threads , was around the time that Gregorian Chant was emerging as the official musi...
Read more

The act of killing from 20,000 feet

Image
Today's Guardian reports the attempted suicide bombings at UK airports under the headline ' A plot to commit murder on an unimaginable scale' . Any attempt to take human life is abhorrent, and thank heavens the alleged plot was foiled. But let us not forget that killing on an unimaginable scale by aircraft is not the monopoly of any one ideoology. ' As German fuel supplies dwindled in the autumn of 1944 and into the final months of the war, aircraft were grounded, tanks halted, training for replacement pilots could not be maintained, and most of the new and highly effective Messerschmitt 262 jet-fighter aircraft (photo above), of which over 1,200 had been produced by the end of 1944 and which might have considerably prolonged the war, had neither fuel to fly nor trained pilots to fly them. The ME 262s were anyway extremely fuel-hungry aircraft, and those that went into action had to be towed to their end of their runways to conserve fuel, cows were used to do the towin...
Read more

Master musician who experienced the pain of genius

Image
On that sleeve for his 1985 recording of the Goldberg Variations , Scott Ross is seen standing in the grounds of Château d'Assas in Languedoc. It was here that many of the harpsichordist's great recordings were made. Then, as today, the château dwelt in the twilight zone between grandeur and dereliction, and thirty years ago the recording sessions were regularly interrupted by the sound of rats scurrying across the floor. Scott Ross was born in Pittsburgh in 1951, and moved to France with his mother following the death of his father in 1964. He studied at the conservatoires in Nice and Paris, and first came to Château d'Assas in 1969 to give music lessons to the grandson of its owner Mme. Simone Demangel . When an early music academy was established at the Château d'Assas, Scott Ross gave masterclasses and became a frequent visitor. At first he stayed in a room in one of the towers, but from 1983 he rented a small house across the road from the château. The photos b...
Read more

The art of the march

Image
Why are marches the poor relation of classical music? Writing my earlier post about the cuts at the BBC World Service reminded me that during my time at Bush House the march Lilliburlero was used as the World Service identity signal . The tune of Lilliburlero (also spelt Lillibullero ) is usually attributed to Henry Purcell but probably orginated as an Irish folk melody. Lilliburlero is one of the marches on the LP seen above which was recorded in 1967 for the World Record Club division of EMI by Sir Adrian Boult and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Other marches on it include John Philip Sousa's Stars and Stripes and Liberty Bell , the Battle Hymn of the Republic and Eric Coates' Dam Busters . For reasons that totally escape me it appears the only CD transfer was as a Sony release in 1999 . Despite the unlikely repertoire this disc is prized by Boult afficionados for its superb performances and sound and is well overdue for re-release. The unlikely combination of Sir...
Read more

Lise Meitner - the forgotten Lady Atomic

Image
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...
Read more

Classical music and the roots of slavery

Image
Over the years I have played a modest role in promoting the causes of musicians of colour and women musicians , and I believe the UK should remain in the EU . However today I am less sure where I stand on these issues: because I have been alienated by the single issue fanatics on both sides of all three debates. The latest example is a petition to drop Rule, Britannia from the Last Night of the Proms as "it is offensive in today's society". Chi-chi Nwanoku is a prominent signatory of the petition, explaining her reason for signing as "This offensive song is no longer relevant of our times. It's presence serves to hold us back". Chi-chi Nwanoku is founder of Europe's first majority-BME classical ensemble the Chineke! Orchestra and has done much invaluable work advocating the cause of musicians of colour. Now regular readers will know I am not exactly a fan of the Last Night of the Proms. But..... It is not often I agree with Norman Lebrecht . Howe...
Read more