NOTES FROM MIDDLE ENGLAND

LARGELY LITTLE; A CONCERT FOR STOKE

2012-02-11T12:15:00.001Z

You couldn’t have had a concert more appropriate than the one at the Victoria Hall last night. It opened with William Walton’s Prelude and Fugue named after the Spitfire, whose designer R J Mitchell was born in North Staffordshire and brought up in Stoke-on-Trent. There were also two works – The Lark Ascending and the fifth symphony – by Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose mother was a Wedgwood (Josiah’s great granddaughter).

But for me, the highlight was Max Bruch’s Scottish fantasy, which manages to conjure up the spirit of that country without ever descending into tartan kitsch. There are allegedly recognisable folk tunes in it, but either Bruch absorbed them completely into his style or they’re pretty obscure. I believe it should be up there with the other nineteenth century Scottishisms like Mendelssohn’s symphony.

It was actually billed in the programme as a fantasy for violin, harp, and orchestra, and the harpist of the BBC Philharmonic made his presence felt. However, as far as I can make out, the German title in the printed score includes the harp, but by the time it was premiered in Liverpool the harp wasn’t mentioned and later the work was even billed as his third violin concerto (Scotch.) This could be confusing, for there is a second and third violin concerto as well; come on, BBC Phil, good on you for playing the rarely heard Scottish fantasy, but I want to hear the other concertos next…

The star here was violinist Tasmin Little. Her sweet intonation and vivid vibrato lifted the work into a higher dimension; she never succumbed to over-indulgence in those big romantic tunes, but achieved a kind of nobility which was exhilarating.

The critics were pretty scathing about the work when it was first played; as the programme notes pointed out, George Bernard Shaw wittered on about vulgarity and sentimentality. The notes failed to add that he also said this was much superior to any British works and better than his more popular concerto number one – and considering he hated Bruch, that’s acclaim. Schoenberg was less than complimentary, and of course anything Schoenberg hated is bound to be pretty good.

The public have always loved it when they’ve had chance to hear it, and here it got a roar of acclamation, even though it must have been new to many of them. It looked awfully difficult to me (though not, of course, to Tasmin Little); that can’t be the reason violinists play it so rarely, can it?

I imagine most of the public had come to hear Tasmin Little play the Vaughan Williams Lark Ascending, a Classic FM stalwart and (apparently) the most-picked tune for Desert Island Discs. There was a very strange little programme on BBC Four last month (it’s still on the iplayer) in which Diana Rigg presented a rather superficial look at the work.

In it, Tasmin Little explained just how difficult it is, with long runs from low down to high up on the violin. It’s also difficult to keep control of those runs while trying to make the music sound rhapsodic and improvisational. Well, of course, she’s majored in English music, and this was a treat, conjuring up a whole world of hedgerows and thatched cottages enjoyed by a generation of lost boys from the First World War.

That’s the world, too, of Vaughan Williams’ fifth symphony. It’s his quietest, to the point where if you play it on the home hi-fi and get the quiet bits audible you risk knocking over passers-by on the pavement outside in the loud bits. It was good, therefore, to be able to hear the whole work without turning any knobs.

I had never been struck before by how much it owed to Sibelius, particularly in the first and last movements. It demands some brilliant horn and woodwind playing, and luckily, the BBC Phil has both.

Leo Hussain, a young conductor new to me, apparently made his name in Salzburg and Brussels. He seemed to be extremely practical in his approach, laying down a clear flare path so the orchestra landed safely on that tricky fugue in the Spitfire work, and making sure the quietness of the fifth didn’t descend into disinterest.

The strange thing is that Max Bruch, although living and working in Liverpool in the railway age, never went to Scotland. And I doubt Vaughan Williams ever visited the smoky, smelly city of Stoke-on-Trent which made the family money that freed him to study music. But then, William Walton apparently wrote the score for the The First of the Few – the Spitfire Prelude and Fugue – without ever seeing the film. And no, I don’t know what all this proves.

NOT BUTTONED-DOWN OR BUTTONED UP, THE BLACK DVORAK IS BACK IN FASHION

2012-02-09T11:10:00.001Z

Photo; Mark Cavill

Even my nearest and dearest would never describe me as a fashion icon. Especially them, actually.

But there is one small matter of style in which I have persisted, and over the years this has been in one minute and out the next. Sometimes, therefore, I might have seemed like a mere follower of fashion – but just now and then I have looked like a leader. My time has come again.

It all goes back to the days when shirts had collars of opposite magnetic polarity. Unless held down, collars would climb up your neck as if to escape. The only solution was to fit what appeared to be a plastic guitar plectrum into a small pocket in the tip.

Alas, even though I had enough of these to keep the Beatles in business, I could never find them when I put my shirt on. It may be, in fact, that the whole Merseyside music revolution came about because there was such a surfeit of unattached plectrums (plectra? plectris?)

It is certainly no coincidence that this was the moment when the shirt with the button-down collar took centre stage. And to this day I have never wavered in my devotion to this style, even when fashion has made it difficult to find.

Alas, we are going through a dry patch once more. The only button-down to be seen in most of my major shopping sources is the Oxford, a thick, blue, coarsely-woven travesty of a shirt (do they really wear shirts that rough in Oxford? Is it something to do with being an unwashed student?)

I recently tracked down something halfway decent at the tail-end of the sales in a High street chain, where they were getting rid of what now seemed to them to be an unfashionable item, but which to me was the future of shirts. I bought up the entire stock in Hanley, and managed to get the nice lady in the Stafford branch to call them in from all over Britain. Goodness knows what they thought she was doing with them. Luckily, I wasn’t stopped by the cops on the way back up the A34. “So you say these are all for your personal use, sir? I think you may be a supplier….”

Let’s hope this small stockpile lasts me until the fashion Gods decree that the button-down is back again.

All this is by way of introduction to a composer who was once deeply fashionable, completely forgotten for years, and whose time may be coming again. In the early 20^th century, no choral society worth its salt would fail to perform Hiawatha by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (confusingly named after the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.)

Sadly, both recordings of it in the catalogue appear to have been deleted. But tonight (Thursday) sees the world premiere of his only opera Thelma in Surrey, and there’ve recently been new recordings of incidental music, an early symphony, his violin concerto and the clarinet quintet.

This year sees the hundredth anniversary of his death at the early age of 37 in 1912. There are so many centenary events in the list produced by the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Foundation that the performance at Keele University last night by Emma Johnson and the Cavaleri Quartet in the Concerts at Keele series of that clarinet quintet doesn’t even get a mention. It certainly should have done, for it was tremendous. If anything will rehabilitate Coleridge-Taylor, it will be performances as passionate and well-rehearsed as this.

You may remember Emma Johnson as a schoolgirl winner of the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition. 2000, was it? Or a few years earlier? You’ll be as shocked as I was to hear it was 1984. Well, her playing is still outstanding, and she still has that erect bearing and big stage presence – she gave us an entertaining talk before the performance about this rare work.

I can only describe her playing as superbly controlled wild abandon, and far from buttoned down, or even up. Yet one of the most impressive things, it seemed to me, was the way she blended so beautifully into the quartet when she wasn’t in the spotlight.

Coleridge-Taylor was taught composition by Stanford, whose own music has been rediscovered in the past few years. Legend has it that he told his pupil that the Brahms clarinet quintet cast such a long shadow, no one would be able to produce such a work in the future without being influenced by it. Two months later, Coleridge-Taylor returned with his quintet, and Stanford declared; “You’ve done it, my boy!”

Coleridge-Taylor was apparently known in his day as the black Mahler, one reason why he didn’t go quite so out of fashion in America, where this Anglo-African (as he called himself) inspired many African Americans. Listening to the quintet, it would seem more sensible to call him the black Dvorak, for that composer was plainly the inspiration for so much of his work (Emma Johnson suggested the final movement had some of the qualities of an Irish jig, Coleridge-Taylor’s tribute to his teacher Stanford, so much of whose own work is, to my mind, marred by unnecessary jiggery. I heard it as more like Bohemian folk music.) None of that is a criticism; the world could do with a lot more Dvorak.

In some ways, I suppose, this concert was back to front; we should have started with the Brahms clarinet quintet before hearing the Coleridge-Taylor, to see if it was in fact an influence. In the event, the concert closed with the Brahms, and I have to say the other way round would have led to an anti-climax. The Brahms has never been out of fashion since it was written, and that, I guess, is the difference between great music and the merely good. This was a delightful performance, full of character and incident. But it’s a tribute to Emma Johnson and the Cavaleri Quartet that I want to hear the Coleridge-Taylor again, and soon.

Late breaking news.. the Oldie Fashion Icon of the Year is Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, who wore a brown trilby with mauve hatband, a fuchsia scarf, a lavender shirt, white cardigan, cherry red trousers and a navy jacket. Sadly, his shirt is not button-down, so my position as a leader of fashion is unchallenged.

COLD NIGHT, WARM WELCOME

2012-02-03T10:31:00.000Z

It’s fourteen months since the young Romanian pianist Alexandra Dariescu was last in Stoke-on-Trent. I wrote then that her Unique Selling Point was a sunny disposition and an ability to communicate with an audience -- both in music and in words. She chatted to us before each item in a clear, easy way, getting a couple of laughs and putting us in the mood for the music. She seemed to want to make us happy, which seems an admirable aim for an entertainer.

Well, she’s had a hectic twelve months in which she’s appeared with big names like the Royal Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the Belcea Quartet. She’s been tagged by the BBC Music magazine as a rising star. And a couple of weeks from now, she’ll be appearing at the Carnegie Hall in New York, albeit in a master class run by Andras Schiff, and sharing the limelight with four other young players. But she’s still as relaxed and bubbly as ever.

She certainly seems to have been taken to the hearts of local music lovers, who turned out to pack the Forum Theatre on the coldest night of the year so far. And like last time, it was a concert of many different styles – though with one important difference. I complained last time that the menu (her own choice of words for a concert programme) was more of a buffet than a meal; it lacked a main course. This time, she ended with a four-course belly-buster, Chopin’s third piano sonata.

Before that came some rarely played but very interesting masterpieces. She opened with Schumann’s Abegg Variations, written when he was young and optimistic, a display of adept fingering. Then she played Scarlatti’s F minor sonata, K 466, a candidate for an earworm if ever I heard one. She told us she’d fallen in love with it after seeing Horowitz play it on YouTube ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV3Avalm5KM ); her younger, more supple fingers made it even more enticing, though I love it as it was written, for the harpsichord.

Debussy’s Estampes are not that often heard, compared to the Preludes and Images, and Alexandra Dariescu had the measure of those impressionistic washes of colour.

She ended the first half with Chopin’s Andante Spianato and Grand Polonaise Brillante, a youthful work which again suited her bright, dashing style. Alexandra Dariescu projects a natural, unforced virtuosity which is very attractive (though I’m sure it isn’t achieved without hours of practice).

The second half was devoted to that Chopin sonata, a very different kettle of fish from the other works in the concert. Of course she had (apparently) no trouble playing it, but it seemed to me to lack the fire at the heart of performances like those by, say, Martha Argerich or Vladimir Ashkenazy. It’s just that the hairs on the back of my neck were not raised quite as much as usual.

But she is young, and brooding intensity is not her thing (so far, anyway); she would be quite a different pianist and person if it was. She is a great entertainer, and nobody regretted braving that freezing night to bask in the warmth of her pianism. It could have been worse, of course; Alexandra Dariescu’s mother had told her it was minus 27 back home in Romania.

VANBRUGH QUARTET HAS THE STAMP OF GREATNESS

2012-01-26T11:11:00.002Z

Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726) had the most interesting life imaginable. Born in London but brought up in Chester (to avoid the plague), he founded the Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket, wrote two restoration comedies which were quite enlightened about the role of women, spent a couple of years in India while young, was imprisoned in the Bastille and the Chateau de Vincennes in Paris, helped get rid of James the second and put William on the throne, and designed Blenheim palace and Castle Howard without any formal architectural training. His mates in the Kit-Cat Club treasured him for "his colossal geniality, his great good humour, and his easy-going temperament".

And in 1985, a highly praised quartet chose to call themselves after him. Their full name is actually the RTE Vanbrugh Quartet, for they are the resident quartet of the Irish equivalent of the BBC, and they are based in Cork. Last night they were at Keele University in the Concerts at Keele series, and they were stunning.

I suppose the programme might have been designed especially for me. I want music with excitement and drama – which often means turning to the darker side of composition, the minor. The opening and closing works – Haydn’s opus 76 number 2 and Beethoven’s opus 18 number 4 -- were both in minor keys, and the one in the middle, Shostakovich’s ninth quartet, was hardly jolly.

But the playing had that sureness of touch, that clear strength of character, which only comes with long familiarity between players.

I first discovered the Haydn on the free disc that came with the French equivalent of Gramophone bought on holiday a couple of years ago when I was desperate for music. My thanks to the Quatuor Renoir. The quartet is known as the Fifths, because Haydn plays with that interval between the notes of the opening movement (and in my store of useless information is the knowledge that in French it’s called les Quints.) It’s as a result of this I invested in a boxed set of the complete Haydn quartets, and I haven’t yet discovered any as good as opus 76 number 2 (but I’m only halfway through the box and we live in hope.)

It’s always seemed to me that we come to believe the only right way to perform a piece of music is the way we first became accustomed to hearing it. It’s a tribute to the Vanbrugh quartet that they blew the Quatuor Renoir out of the water.

The energy they put into the Shostakovich was thrilling, and this might be my next boxed set of quartets (though I don’t think the Vanbrugh have recorded them yet.)

Next, they brought the temperature down with Arvo Pärt’s minimalist Summa, a performance which has to be authentic – they’ve performed in the presence of the composer himself.

And finally, the Beethoven, in his favourite dramatic key of C minor, ending with that showy final race to the finish which the Vanbrugh brought off brilliantly.

They gave us Shostakovich again as an encore; leader Gregory Ellis said they thought they’d found a happier work of his in music from his ballet The Golden Age. It reminded the quartet of Charlie Chaplin, but I could still hear the sadness at the heart of the little clown’s chirpy music.

What I still couldn’t figure out was why the group had chosen to call themselves after Vanbrugh, so I asked them. Cellist Christopher Marwood declared it was all a long time ago, but he thought they had wanted a classical name with a link to music. Apparently, Vanbrugh, as well as being a playwright, soldier and architect, was also a keen amateur musician, forming a group with his friends called the Royal Akademy, a fact all my researches had failed to uncover.

Well, I’m sure he would have been pleased to find his name taken three hundred years later by such consummate musicians. He might have been a bit surprised, however, to find that as a result, his name features on a 55c Irish stamp.

PARAMPARA SPREADS THE WORD

2012-01-19T10:10:00.002Z

So what does Parampara say to you? I expected a trumpet and a trombone and several fanfares, at the very least.

But no; instead of representing the sound of a brass flourish, it is apparently an ancient Sanskrit term used in musical circles to describe ways of spreading the word (it says here – I’m not actually sure I understand what that means even now, and my Sanskrit is a little rusty.)

There’s not a valve to be seen. Parampara combines Kuljit Bhamra MBE on tabla – Indian tuned bongos – Jacqueline Shave on violin and John Paricelli on guitar. These talented musicians in such different fields were apparently put together by Music in the Round, the Sheffield based organisation which brings chamber music concerts to the New Vic every year, here combined with the first concert of the New Year in the Concerts at Keele series.

It was nice to see a large turnout of young people; Kuljit Bhamra apparently has a mission to demystify Indian music, and he’s been busy Parampara-ing – spreading the word -- in North Staffordshire schools all week. They seemed to be repaying his work with rapt attention.

So how did it sound? Well, given the line-up, there were inevitably bits that sounded like the Hot Club de France -- Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli – with a Bhangra backing. I don’t know how much of was improvised, but there was certainly an impression that some of it was, and for me they were the weakest moments with rather tentative playing. In fact, the numbers – twelve individual quite short items – occasionally started strongly but ran out of steam somewhere in the middle.

Nevertheless, it made for fascinating live listening, with some unexpected moments. Jacqueline Shave is a respected classical violinist, leader of the Britten Sinfonia, and her background is bound to show. Did I detect some Fauré in Parc Floral – which after all was written by jazz guitarist John Parricelli after a month in Paris? And the Highland fiddle tune which opened Machair to Myrrh could have escaped from Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy – until it went into an Eastern spin.

For me, two of the finest pieces were the final one, Dervish Dancer, and the un-named encore, both of which seemed to be operating on a higher level of musical excitement.

Music in the Round’s next appearance at the New Vic in March is Intimate Letters, featuring music by Schubert and Janacek, while the Concerts at Keele season continues next Wednesday with the Vanbrugh Quartet. Neither is likely to be as thought-provoking as Parampara.

In fact, Kuljit Bhamra declared we were quite courageous to have come to see them, such an unknown quantity (and it’s such a good idea to flatter your audience. We love it.) I think these three musicians are also pretty courageous to have headed off in this new direction. It’ll be interesting to see where the journey takes them, and it’s nice to have been around when they set off.

HERE'S LESLEY WITH THE NEW YEAR NEWS

2012-01-07T10:40:00.001Z

There’s been a double whammy of new bad news for Twelfth Night, 2012.

Apparently, we start losing the little grey cells much earlier than scientists originally thought. Everything starts to go to pot from the age of 45. The effect is plain to see in the works of Hercule Poirot. It now takes him two hours to solve a crime, whereas earlier episodes on ITV3 plainly show he used to be able to wrap it all up in an hour.

Then there’s a survey suggesting drivers with a heavy cold are as dangerous as ones who’ve had a bit to drink. This doesn’t even take into account the fact that the main ingredient in most of the stuff we take to make our colds bearable is alcohol.

“Just breathe into this bag, sir,” will become, “Ah. I see you can’t breathe into this bag because you have such a stinker you can’t actually breathe. So just sneeze into this bag, sir.”

Apparently, the effects of ageing can be alleviated by good diet and exercise. So, a triple whammy, then.

The good news is that the Hallé orchestra was performing its Viennese New year Celebration at the Victoria Hall in Hanley, and that in spite of the dire economic circumstances, the concert was a complete sell-out.

I don’t know whether you saw the concert from Vienna broadcast on New Year’s Day. For one thing, I’ve never been convinced about the introduction of ballet dancers, and this year they hit a new low. They attempted to reproduce Klimt’s iconic painting The Kiss in the Belvedere (where the painting hangs) by wrapping a couple of dancers in a blanket printed with the picture (available from all good gift shops, and quite a few bad ones, for £43.95.) It was indescribably tacky.

But the main problem with the concert was that the Vienna Philharmonic under Mariss Jansons performed with leaden precision, as if they’d eaten too much Sachertorte. In contrast, the Hallé under Wyn Davies were enthusiastic and characterful. Their Viennese new year didn’t have dancers or the Vienna boys’ choir, but it did have soprano Lesley Garrett in two different frocks.

She sang an awful lot of Lehar, but also Heuberger, Schubert and even Mozart. She doesn’t just sing, of course; she sort of projects her personality, managing to flirt with the entire audience (backed up by a very wicked Wyn Davies.) One frock was neon purple, the other one red on top and black and red beneath, and they must have been spectacular because the lady in front of me at the interval was asking her partner; “Where did she get that frock?” It was her first performance in the Victoria Hall, and she regretted she had left it so late in her career. The audience – male and female –hung on her every word.

The Hallé played a lot of Strauss, of course – Josef as well as Johann II—but also three Brahms Hungarian dances, every bit as marvellous as his symphonies but much more rarely played. It seemed to me that Wyn Davies gave them the care they well deserve, so that they sounded more Hungarian than ever before (it was instructive to compare them with the Czárdás from Lehar’s Gypsy Life played later in the programme.)

This was the first concert of the 2012 season of the Stoke-on-Trent Festival, and the hall was humming with that expectant excitement you only get when it’s full. Let’s hope the audience can forget their economic woes and flock to the concerts still to come; not to be missed are Tasmin Little playing Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy (every bit as good as the famous violin concerto) and Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending on February 10, amazing blind pianist Nobu in Chopin’s first piano concerto on March 2, Rachmaninov’s much-loved second piano concerto a week later, and Elgar’s Enigma Variations (hopefully using the Victoria Hall organ) to close the season on April 20. Then there are the solo piano recitals at the Potteries museum; Alexandra Dariescu on February 2, Paul Lewis’s love affair with Schubert on March 1, and Martin Roscoe’s definitive Beethoven on March 29.

There is one good thing about those two bits of news coming in the same week. If, like me, you’ve already lost a lot of your little grey cells, you might not, like me, be able to remember where you put your car keys, so the dangers of driving with a cold are dramatically reduced. Let no one say I’m not doing my bit to contribute to safer driving in 2012.

THE 'OLLY AND THE OATCAKES

2011-12-23T10:33:00.001Z

Christmas is a time for tradition, and I’d like to remind you of a few.

Here in North Staffordshire we have the oatcake odyssey, the spreading of these delicacies throughout the world ( a sort of thick pancake made using oats instead of flour, they deserve to be much better known than those cardboard Scottish discs.)

When I first came to this city, I was cocky enough to suggest that the only real use for this confection was to sole shoes.

At the time, my second son was very small, and the only food he would eat was spaghetti bolognaise and jam sandwiches (not necessarily at the same time.) But I had to eat my words (and even the occasional oatcake) when he took to them as if born to eat them, though he preferred them with red jam rather than bacon and cheese, as is traditional.

Well, in a few days’ time I shall be taking no fewer than 18 of these portly pancakes to London for my sons and grandchildren. And this is happening all over town; stockings throughout the world are being readied to sag with the soggy weight of presentation oatcakes as the city’s families remember the relatives who left in search of better times, and were unfortunately unable to fit a dozen cakes in their luggage, mostly because the planes wouldn’t have made it into the air.

The lady next to me in the shop was buying a dozen to take to Tenerife, where, of course, they are known as the Tunstall tapas. She was ready to pay an extra heavy luggage charge.

The second tradition in our house is my annual emergency Christmas trip to the dentist. Last time I met a guy in the otherwise deserted waiting room who looked strangely familiar. He greeted me like a long-lost brother.

“How do I know you?” I asked. “We meet every year in the dentist’s,” he said.

I missed him this year by having my disaster the week before Christmas instead, which makes a welcome change. I was trying to eat a leg of lamb, but bit a mouthful of molar instead.

The third tradition is to see Christmas songs by candlelight. Actually, this year I had planned to break with tradition by going along to the Ceramic City Choir’s sing along, but sadly they held it on the same night as the Barbara Walton Singers’ do, so I stuck with tradition.

It all started after I complained in this very blog about a show promoted as Mozart by candlelight. There was, I declared, not a single candle; it was all lit by the new-fangled electric light, and they hadn’t even bothered to buy those bulbs which flicker.

David Burrowes, conductor of the Barbara Walton Singers, told me of his annual Christmas by Candlelight concert, where, he promised me, there was more wax than Madame Tussaud’s. And indeed, it was so; Mr Burrowes said let there be light, and the candles shone upon the world, or at least, St Mark’s in Shelton.

Now the candelabra have moved down the road to the church of St James the Less in Longton. At St Mark’s, the candles were everywhere, supported by long poles of wood; apparently, it took days to set up. At St James, the candles are on the altar and tastefully arranged in groups around the pillars. To be honest, a lot of the excitement at St Mark’s came from wondering whether the place would actually burn down this year. As befits a minor character who might or might not be the son of Alphaeus (who?), the fires of St James are less spectacular, but probably a lot safer, and my wife found them very pretty.

The music was absolutely excellent; ninety minutes of largely a capella singing from the Barbara Waltons, a few pertinent readings, and five occasions when we the audience were allowed to exercise our lungs (and it almost feels like you might be part of something considerably more professional when the choir descants above your singing.)

I don’t know whether David Burrowes selects the songs to flatter his choir, or whether the choir are at the top of their game, but it was all extremely satisfying. Highlights; the Zither Carol, a Malcolm Sargent arrangement of a Czech folk tune, and a Peruvian carol which also involved some percussion (apparently written by the Incas still standing after the Spanish had killed them or given them smallpox). Lovely.

So as I suck my Christmas dinner of a pile of oatcakes by candlelight, I shall be singing Hanacpachap cussicuinin, which is apparently Quechuan (the language of the Incas) for “O tree bearing thrice-blessed fruit”. Have a wonderful Christmas.

FANTASTIC MUSIC FROM ASHKENAZY AND THE PHILHARMONIA

2011-12-10T10:38:00.001Z

Vladimir Ashkenazy, one of the greatest musicians of the age, celebrating more than fifty years before the public as pianist, conductor and even composer, has been the subject of Radio 3's artist of the week all this week.
You might have thought his fame would have meant you could only catch him in person in one of the great musical centres of the world -- Berlin, perhaps, St Petersburg or London.

But he believes that “serious music should be available to as broad an audience as possible” to quote his website – and there he is, on stage at the Victoria Hall in Hanley, large as life, in his trademark grey suit and white polo neck.

Not that he’s doing it for free, you understand. This hasn’t happened without a lot of work by promoter Mike Lloyd, and a grant from the Foyle Foundation (which, incidentally, has also recently helped the other musical bigwig in town, Glyndebourne.) The hall was packed, but even a full house wouldn’t cover the costs of such a huge star.

But we didn’t just get Ashkenazy, we also got the world’s most recorded orchestra, the Philharmonia, of which he’s conductor laureate (and incidentally, a mention of Stoke on Trent on the front page of the Philharmonia’s website. Well, they’ve managed to put Victoria Halls instead of Victoria Hall, but at least it’s a start.)

And as a clincher, we also got Valeriy Sokolov, already the subject of a documentary under the title “Natural Born Fiddler”, with a DVD of the Sibelius violin concerto and a brand new recording of the Tchaikovsky and Bartok second recently released by EMI (you can see more of him on http://www.medici.tv/#!/valeriy-sokolov).

The music was rather unusual; just two composers, Beethoven and Berlioz, neither of which are particularly associated with Ashkenazy. The concert opened with Berlioz’s overture Beatrice and Benedict, which allowed us to appreciate the orchestra’s fine strings and rhythmic security in those difficult syncopations (but the Hallé and BBC Philharmonic are just as efficient).

Sokolov once won a competition with his performance of the Beethoven violin concerto, and he made it look very easy. “I think he’s been practising,” some wag remarked in the bar during the interval.

This was a rather old-fashioned interpretation, rather grand, with lots of stopping along the way to look at the marvellous scenery. But the finale fair danced along under Ashkenazy’s baton.

He tends to use it in a straightforward up/down flick, while his left hand expresses tone and volume. Sometimes he waves his fist towards the back row, and sometimes he clutches his chest. He’s got a signal for reserved, inward, quiet playing in which he stands very rigidly with his hands at his sides.

The second half was devoted to Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, and it was really rather special. I’ve heard it said Ashkenazy is a great pianist but only a moderate conductor. Well, whatever he did, some sort of alchemy occurred, and this was a thrilling rendition of one of the most amazing works of the nineteenth century (written, as the programme notes remind us, just three years after Beethoven’s death, but from a whole new romantic world.)

Flute and oboe soloists never missed a note, the drums rocked the Victoria Hall, and the great orchestra sailed through the tricky hairpin turns with all brass blazing. In the end, the only way Ashkenazy could stop the applause was to get his leader to start an exodus from the stage.

You don’t get many weekends when Stoke on Trent really does have a cultural quarter, with Glyndebourne, the Philharmonia, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Valeriy Sokolov all in town at the same time. I might have to go and have a lie down before episodes 7 and 8 of The Killing.

SNOW BUSINESS; GLYNDEBOURNE AT THE REGENT

2011-12-07T23:57:00.002Z

keri alkema

It’s been snowing again at the Regent in Hanley. A few weeks ago it snowed on stage in Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker!; and the white stuff hits the fan again in Glyndebourne’s La Bohéme.

Luckily, we had wrapped up warm and had our hankies ready, for this exciting, romantic, and beautifully wintry opera is just about the weepiest there is. The bit where Rodolfo and his new love Mimi split up because she’s too ill is just heart-breaking, and particularly moving in this performance.

The set is a scaffolding bridge above a rotating stage, which contains the room shared by a group of starving and freezing students.

One of them – Rodolfo – meets and falls for the girl next door – Mimi -- who’s suffering from terminal TB (cue Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen).

Temporarily in funds, they all go out on Christmas Eve to the Café Momus; there’s a busy and colourful street scene, including a cast of thousands, fire eaters, stilt walking reindeer and even a band of Santa Clauses.

Natasha Jouhl as Musetta
credit Robbie Jack

This version directed by David McVicar – last seen in Stoke on Trent seven years ago -- is unfortunately in modern dress. There’s a bit of unnecessary drug taking, and it’s set in Soho rather than Paris. Everyone has somehow forgotten the existence of the National Health Service; a quick trip to the walk-in centre could have destroyed the entire plot.

But somehow any reservations are swept aside by the vigour of the young cast and the splendour of the music.

Natasha Jouhl sing the sexy goodtime girl with a heart of gold – Musetta – with relish and a cutting edge; hard to believe this is the newcomer who stepped in at the last minute to sing in Cosi Fan Tutte on this very stage in 2006.

David Butt Philip

It’s becoming a tradition in Stoke-on-Trent. This time David Butt Philip stood in for an indisposed Bryan Hymel as Rodolfo, and wowed the crowd with his full and Italianate tenor. Actually, his boyish looks brought a new dimension to the role; his Rodolfo came over as callow and weak against Mimi’s undying love.

She’s sung by American Keri Alkema, whose magnificent voice filled the Regent with little apparent effort. And I must mention Vincenza Taormino’s strongly characterised Marcello, the man who despairs of the flirty Musetta.

Puccini’s music is sometimes undervalued because of its hugely melodic content (there are few operas like this one, where everyone hums the themes in the toilet in the interval.) But the Glyndebourne on Tour Orchestra, conducted with pace by Jeremy Bines, brought out every nuance of this superb score.

Last year, it was the snow outside the theatre that proved a problem. Undoubtedly it deterred a lot of people, and may be one reason why Glyndebourne has brought only one opera instead of three this year. The other reason, of course, is a cut in the Arts Council grant.

I well remember how Glyndebourne argued the case for spreading the wonders of opera to a new audience when they first came to Stoke on Trent, but of course, when push comes to shove, this is the only place on their tour where they’ve cut the number of operas. I’d love to have had the chance to see Handel’s Rinaldo and Donizetti’s Don Pasquale as well, like the people of Woking, Milton Keynes, Norwich, Plymouth and Wimbledon.

Ah well; at least the opera they have brought is the most popular one in the world, and in a performance which could melt permafrost. It’s not to be missed.

CHRISTMAS COMES BUT THREE TIMES A YEAR

2011-12-03T22:44:00.000Z

Being a bah humbug sort of person, it’s very rare for me to feel Christmassy this early. I always used to work right up to Christmas Eve, barely finding time to get down the garage to buy my wife her Christmas box.

But the Keele Chapel Singers – and the iced Christmas cake in the interval of their concert in Keele Chapel -- have managed to bring me an early glimmer of seasonal cheer.

This was a collection of fourteen items, ranging from early plainsong to a carol written just this year by John Rutter (The Colours of Christmas, and as rewarding for the audience as it plainly was to sing.)

The first half was mainly Bach and Mozart, highlighting the clean, bright soprano of Natalie Windsor, whose voice with little vibrato is ideally suited to this eighteenth century music.

Charmian Baskeyfield’s oboe playing, weaving around the voices, was a bonus.

The second half started with some very modern works by James Macmillan and Arvo Part, which sounded as difficult for the choir as for the audience – though Chris Akhurst’s trumpet playing in a Macmillan motet was outstanding.

Glynis Brewer sang a number from Handel’s Messiah sweetly, and the programme ended with four excellent Christmas songs.

Actually, if you’re a child in Holland, you do get excited this early. On December 5^th you leave out your boots to be filled with presents by Sinterklaas. A Dutch friend of my son has revealed this fact to my grand-daughter, who had her shoes off before you could say St Nick. It’s to be hoped she doesn’t meet anyone Russian, for their celebration is on January 7^th. She’d love to make Christmas last two months.

KEMPF FIRES UP THE STEINWAY

2011-12-02T09:41:00.000Z

Every jazz fan knows just how exciting it is to hear a great artist improvise. There’s the thrill of hearing a familiar tune manhandled, the anticipation of where it will go next, and the shiver of fear that it all could go terribly wrong. So it was a great idea of pianist Freddy Kempf’s to devote his Harding Trust Piano recital in Hanley’s Forum theatre to improvisations.

Of course, this being a classical, not a jazz, concert, these improvisations were all written down and there was no danger – especially with Kempf at the piano – that they could run out of ideas. His website reveals that, though he lives in Berlin, he’s actually been in Manchester for the past few days carefully rehearsing. His skill, of course, lay in playing these improvisations as if he was making them up as he went along, a rare and delightful ability.

It also introduced us to some rarely heard music, and for those like me who respond to melody, there were plenty of tunes about. I also get the impression it’s the sort of music Kempf likes playing; it allowed him ample opportunity to show off. And if you’re that good, why not?

The concert’s first half brought us Beethoven’s sparkling variations on the tune of what would become the final movement of the Eroica symphony, and then he launched at high speed into that elusive Schumann masterpiece, Kreisleriana. The second half featured Rachmaninov’s take on Bach’s third violin partita, a lovely mix of classical poise and romantic fervour.

Then there were two of Liszt’s reminiscences; first of Donizetti’s melodic Lucia di Lammermoor, followed by Mozart’s Don Giovanni. This was great stuff; I can’t help feeling that, had Mozart heard it, he would have been astonished at Kempf’s virtuosity while doubled over with laughter at the huge pomposity with which the famous arias were introduced, and the extra curlicues and twiddly bits added to those great tunes.

His encore brought a ripple of laughter, the laughter of recognition, for it was a Chopin etude, as featured in his recent series on BBC4 filmed in a French chateau.

I see from Freddy Kempf’s website that he loves cars and drives an Audio Quattro. As Gene Hunt might have said, he can certainly fire up a Steinway.

NUTCRACKER! IS A CRACKER

2011-11-23T09:57:00.001Z

The first snow of the winter fell in Hanley last night, and two thousand people were delighted.

This was because the very realistic fake snow fell on the stage of the Regent Theatre, at the end of a scene in which the dancers of Nutcracker! (Mustn’t forget the trademark exclamation mark) appear to be skating on a frozen lake. This delightful bit of theatre brought a gasp from the audience – as indeed did several other scenes, like the splitting of the Victorian orphanage or the revealing of the massive cake.

So, twenty years after Matthew Bourne’s wacky version of the Tchaikovsky ballet first hit the boards, it retains its capacity to surprise and delight. I myself have seen it at least three times, but was still captivated.

Checking my records, it seems it must have been as long ago as 2008 since I last saw it, and this time it seems sharper, brighter and funnier than ever before.

Our last outing of the conventional Nutcracker (note; no exclamation mark) was this summer, when English Youth Ballet did a reasonable job. But if you want to see a conventional Nutcracker for Christmas you’ll have to go off to Manchester or Birmingham; and I doubt whether it will be anywhere near as satisfying as the Bourne version.

Basically, Bourne has re-imagined the opening third of the ballet to a Victorian orphanage where the dancers perform as poor children under the cruel yoke of Dr Dross, the Matron his wife, and their son and daughter Fritz and Sugar. Keep your eyes peeled, because something is always going on in the background, where the dancers give full rein to their brief to act like spoilt brats.

Visiting governors hand out presents which are cruelly snatched from the children after their visit, but Clara’s dolly suddenly comes to life as Prince Bon-Bon. The scene changes to the frozen lake and then to Sweetieland, where Petipa’s Characteristic Dances (Sugar Plum Fairies, Cossacks, Arabs, etc.) are replaced with Bourne’s much more catchy Marshmallow Girls, Gobstoppers, and Liquorice Allsorts. There’s still room, however, for several sweet pas de deux and some clever choreography.

And Tchaikovsky’s marvellous music remains, tunes which are instantly recognisable but almost impossible to hum (or is that just me?). We don’t get a live orchestra, alas, but we do get one of the most realistic and full sound systems ever heard at the Regent (I think they must have got fed up with me banging on about the need for decent sound). The bass in particular is so good, there was a small earthquake in the Potteries Shopping Centre. Entire families could have lived in the giant speaker boxes.

If you’ve seen this before, you’ll want to see it again to remind yourself just how good it is, and if you haven’t seen it before, you’ve missed a very sweet treat. The girls in the seats in front of us had a huge boxful of sweets to hand around, and never had it seemed more like the right thing to be doing during a performance.

STAR CONDUCTOR DROPS IN FOR CHAT AND SYMPHONY

2011-11-12T10:52:00.000Z

credit mark mcnulty

Those brought up in the era of Karajan or Toscanini might believe conductors sit on high pedestals and talk only to God and Beethoven. But times have changed.

One of the most respected conductors of his generation, Vasily Petrenko, was prepared to have an informal half-hour chat with his audience in Hanley before his concert with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra at the Victoria Hall on Friday night.

He proved to be not only approachable, but also a totally committed musician and a fascinating raconteur with a fine command of the English language (he is, of course, an honorary Scouser and does a fair imitation of that accent.)

His latest successes have been a series of widely praised recordings of symphonies by Shostakovich. He told us that one of the factors was that he, like Shostakovich, was from St Petersburg – or Leningrad, as it was then. He was able to tell us the whole history of how the city came to be built.

We also learned just how little he and his orchestra got for these hit recordings on a bargain label – and he’s wise enough about the ways of the recording world to believe many people are waiting for the complete boxed set to come out to save even more money.

Musically, we learned that he wants to play more Scriabin, complete with a light show (Scriabin suffered from – or delighted in synaesthesia – a condition in which notes relate to colours. I don’t suppose even Petrenko would aim for Mysterium, Scriabin’s intended week-long performance including music, scent, dance, and light in the foothills of the Himalayas that would somehow bring about the end of the world in bliss. That would solve the economic crisis, I guess.)

Petrenko has been spreading the case for English music in his travels around the world, playing Elgar in San Franscisco for the first time since the seventies. He told us there’s a recording of Elgar’s first symphony on a company’s shelf somewhere; I’d just love to get my hands on that (he doesn’t feel anyone has yet done the symphonies justice.)

But what about the concert, I hear you cry?

It opened with the melodic but rarely played Grieg symphonic dances (except for number two, which was used in the film The Railway Children). They’re often under-valued, but Petrenko believes they should be up there with the dances of Brahms and Dvorak. They were a revelation, heart-warming and invigorating.

Kathryn Stott was the soloist in Mozart’s last piano concerto. This was obviously a happy collaboration. I loved her absolute simplicity in the central movement, and the jaunty way she launched into the finale, matched by the orchestra.

And to end, everybody’s favourite Sibelius symphony, the fifth. I find with some interpretations that that the final movement with those swans beating their wings across northern skies is so powerful that movements one and two are just preparation. Vasily Petrenko seemed to me to achieve real grandeur in the climaxes of the first movement as well.

Somehow, during his chat, we got on to the history of the conductor’s baton.

Originally, it was a stick to beat time, but conductors started shortening it after the French composer Lully hit his foot, got an infection and died. At that time the conductor faced the audience, but one of the Strausses turned his back on the nobility after a row and the orchestra found it was rather good to have the conductor facing them.

There’s apparently an Italian orchestra where the front row of players wears glasses to this day – whether they need them or not – after Toscanini lost his hold on the baton and poked a player in the eye.

And he told us about a trip to Sweden with Valery Gergiev, who caused a stir in the papers by conducting with a toothpick. He told the newspapers the shorter baton concentrated the players’ minds, and was heavily quoted. He confided afterwards to his fellow Russian Vasily Petrenko, “Actually, I forgot to pack my baton.”

*Over dinner (yes, I had linguine alo scoglio with him, and believe me, he was much better than I was at eating pasta without getting it all over himself), he told me an even better story than mine about musicians getting on planes with instruments (see Mr Cello goes to Paris.).

Apparently, one well-known airline which shall be nameless had drawn up a list of which instruments were allowed on board and which had to go in the hold. A viola player was extremely fed up to find violins were on the list, but his instrument was taken off him.

Imagine his surprise to see the double bass player carrying his instrument on board. “How did you manage that?” he asked. “Oh,” said the bassist, “I told them it was an oboe. It was on the list.”

MR CELLO GOES TO PARIS

2011-11-10T10:56:00.001Z

Vienna’s tourist board uses the slogan, City of Music. Michal Pepol, cellist of the world renowned Royal String Quartet from Poland, tells a very different story.

Like many artists, he sees his instrument as an extension of himself, and when he has to travel with it, he buys it a proper person ticket so it can sit beside him on the plane. You’d think the city of music could understand that. But as he tried to fly from Vienna to Manchester to give a concert at Keele last night, a lady at Vienna airport refused to allow Mr Cello to board.

The poor instrument was consigned to the hold – of the wrong plane. The Royals spent an anxious five hours at Manchester airport waiting for it to return from its jaunt.

The problem wasn’t just the cello. In its case were the scores for the concert. Keele University managed to find an alternative cello without any trouble – but tracking down the first string quartet of the Polish composer Gorecki, written in 1988, would test even the best of music libraries.

Luckily, Mr Cello eventually turned up in Paris, and was reunited with his player in time for a terrific Concert at Keele.

What’s noticeable about the group is its balance. I wouldn’t want to underplay the roles of Izabella Szalaj-Zimak and Elwira Przybylowska, first and second violin, but inner voices are given plenty of weight, partly thanks to some fine viola playing by Marek Czech. Indeed, the group were at pains to explain to us how they achieved the right sound for Gorecki’s quartet, an endearingly technical explanation enlivened by a practical demonstration.

There was a time when Gorecki’s third symphony was practically a Classic FM jingle, played incessantly. It’s no use pretending the Gorecki quartet is as approachable; there are some fearsome discords and sections of coruscating, mechanistic string attacks.

Nevertheless, it has a clear programme, “already it is dusk”, from a Polish poem, “A prayer for children going to sleep”. It’s easy to hear a troubled lullaby attacked by what the poem calls “wicked devils, who especially under cover of darkness, profit from their cunning.” Maybe I should listen to it again…

They started with my favourite Mozart string quartet, K421, another of those exciting works in a minor key like the 20^th piano concerto. And they ended with Tchaikovsky’s wonderful first quartet, the home of one of his best tunes ever, the andante cantabile.

The Royals are, of course, on a mission to spread the fame of Poland’s composers, so they gave us as an encore a delightful little song by Karlowicz. I notice, incidentally, that I last came across them in 2006 when they played a quartet by Bacewicz in Lichfield Cathedral. I see I enjoyed it but never did buy the record, alas.

Back in Keele, Michal Pepol, reunited with his cello, played the concert with visible vigour and enthusiasm, though it was noticeable how sternly he ripped errant hairs from the wandering instrument’s bow.

ULWGMS GALORE PLAYED WITH GUZZO

2011-11-04T09:39:00.000Z

For one moment at the Stafford Gatehouse last night, I thought the Manchester Camerata had found a solution to falling attendances at classical concerts.

As we sat in the café waiting for their show to begin, a large man in an evening suit, wearing sunglasses, passed slowly through the room. He looked around menacingly, as if about to press gang anyone without a ticket.

I was wrong, however. There was an amateur production of Bouncers about to begin in the Met studio at the Gatehouse.

Not that the Camerata has any need of such help. This was a good turnout for a cold, wet November evening; but then, what a programme.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, whoever thinks up the Camerata’s concerts deserves a medal. Mendelssohn’s violin concerto was the central attraction here – but not THAT one. You can see someone at the Camerata thinking; everybody loves the Mendelssohn violin concerto, but we’ve done that a lot – so let’s give them a different one.

Mendelssohn wrote it when he was just 13, but then, he wrote one of his masterpieces, the octet, at 16. Believe it or not, it was virtually unheard until the 1950s, when Yehudi Menuhin rescued and championed it.

I have heard it before; one of the joys of the CD revolution is the huge numbers of recordings of forgotten works, particularly unjustly unknown lesser works by great masters (ULWGMs, I call them). Mendelssohn’s concerto in d minor for violin and strings seems to me to fall into that category.

But you wouldn’t have known that from the passionate way it was played last night by Giovanni Guzzo, the Camerata’s leader, who was conducting while playing the solo violin part. While it was going on, you were prepared to believe this was actually no less than a forgotten masterpiece, for Giovanni Guzzo himself seemed to believe in it absolutely. He played with music scores open on two separate stands—but he didn’t appear to need to look at either of them. He gave the impression he’d been playing the work, and loving it, for years.

The rest of the concert was no less distinguished. It opened with Mendelssohn’s tenth string symphony, another ULWGM (he might have been as old as 15 when he wrote this. Over the hill, really.) Giovanni Guzzo played this from his leader’s seat, but he conducted it with every fibre of his body. His teachers must have despaired of his ever sitting still at school.

Strictly speaking, Rakastava – The Beloved – is an early Sibelius work as well, though the version for string orchestra played by the Camerata dates from later in his career. Again, it’s an ULWGM (pronounced UGLUM, if you’re interested), and one I shall have to get off my shelves and play again as a result of this performance, which put it right at the centre of Sibelius’s sound. It was also noteworthy for a nifty performance by Giovanni Guzzo on the triangle, while conducting. Is there anything this man cannot do?

The second half was devoted to Mahler’s re-working for a full string orchestra of Schubert’s string quartet, Death and the Maiden. This is what you might term the opposite of an ULWGM; a great masterpiece made into something considerably less impressive by the intervention of a later composer, or maybe two (the Mahler version was never actually finished, and the version we have was edited by David Matthews, himself a respected composer.)

Maybe it’s just the recording of the work I have, but the string orchestra version of the quartet seemed to me to soften and beautify what is a very dark, disturbing and raw piece. Not that I’m saying it wasn’t well worth hearing, particularly since the Camerata strings seem to me to have stepped up several gears since last time I heard them. That, too, must be a tribute to Giovanni Guzzo; it was plain from the smiles on the orchestra’s faces at the end that they just adored playing for him.

It was nice to see the Gatehouse buzzing last night, but there was a downside. My regular reader will know my addiction to ice cream from the Red Lion Farm, which seems unobtainable anywhere else. Alas, the café had sold out of the original flavour completely, and I was forced to eat strawberry flavour. Let me tell you, it wasn’t an ULWGM.

A BLOW TO HENRY FROM FONTANELLA

2011-11-03T09:57:00.001Z

Fontanella play for Blue Peter

Last night’s concert at Keele came as a bit of a blow. Well, several blows, actually.

There are certain historical musical facts you think you’re sure of, and one of them is that King Henry VIII wrote Greensleeves. We were told by the recorder quintet Fontanella that though he wrote as many as 33 tunes, none of them was Greensleeves.

They played four of his works – The King’s Balade, Pastime with Good Company, Departure is my Chief Pain and Taunder Naken (no, me neither), but none of them was half as good a tune as Greensleeves. Were Henry alive, I’m sure he’d have the heads off the troublesome five women making up Fontanella quick as a flash.

It didn’t stop them playing Greensleeves; indeed, Annabel Knight’s arrangement of a 17^th century version was the highlight of the first half of the concert, a riot of interplay between the instruments.

This brings me to my second blow. Not long ago, when I was young and forced to blow down this tube (a fine preparation for later life, no doubt) it came in one size; descant recorder. I did once get my hands on what might have been a treble or tenor recorder, but once I learnt it needed a completely different fingering system I gave up.

But I counted at least 20 different recorders on stage at Keele’s Westminster Theatre. There were tiny ones like piccolos, big ones with a kink, tubular ones with flat tops, and most impressive of all, one huge one half as tall again as the players themselves. This is not to mention a whole family of recorders which looked like long boxes made of light coloured wood, which we were assured did not come from Ikea.

Blow number three, then, is to do with blowing. Surely it must take an awful lot of puff to get a note out of these massive implements? Yet none of the group appeared to be out of breath or even turning red, though several were coughing and a lot of antiseptic wipes were used (every job has its health and safety issues.) Fontanella told us a lot about the music – and it was good to hear the performers explaining their work – but I still wanted to know more about the mechanics.

We were honoured to have a world premiere at the concert, and in the presence of the composer, Steve Marshall. This was a short work with a commentary, called Dinosaurs, using those long boxes, which turned out to be modern recorders designed by someone called Herbert Paetzold (see pic).

One of their oddities is that they seem very clattery, something I would have thought you would have avoided if you were designing an instrument from scratch, but obviously Mr Paetzold doesn’t consider this a problem. Steve Marshall used this drawback to very humorous effect. Think Peter and the Wolf, and given the fascination kids seem to have for dinosaurs, this could be a big hit in schools.

The group were at pains to assure us that Geoffrey Winters’ Conversations was not avant-garde, but it went beyond my comfort zone. I suppose I was hoping for some attractive nineteenth century romantic music, which I believe the group would have played well, but of course there isn’t any; the instrument completely disappeared in the nineteenth century was forgotten for most of the eighteenth as well.

Nevertheless, it was plain that what Fontanella did play, they played as well as it could be played. They ended with Autumn Leaves, which revealed their ability to swing, and as an encore the Pink Panther, oddly endearing in this strange new guise without trumpets and drums.

All in all, it was a fascinating if somewhat deflating evening. Another revelation was that Henry owned no fewer than seventy-five recorders. I’d have thought they were a rather tame pursuit for such a roistering monarch, but no doubt it came as a relief after a hard day’s womanising, warring and wassailing. I bet a few of them had their mouthpieces chopped off, though.

GOING FOR BAROQUE; THE CERAMIC CITY CHOIR

2011-10-15T23:14:00.001+01:00

North Staffordshire’s Ceramic City Choir is bigger than either Vivaldi or Handel would have expected to perform their works, and of course it’s a mixed choir; Vivaldi’s was all-female. And you’d be looking at St Georges in Newcastle for a long time before you were reminded of La Pieta – where Vivaldi ruled – or the church of St Lawrence near Edgware in North London – for which Handel wrote his Chandos anthems.

(It was the parish church of the magnificent mansion Canons, where Handel worked for Henry James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, who managed to rack up a fortune equivalent to £58 million today. Unfortunately, he did it by speculating on the stock exchange, and he was wiped out by the South Sea bubble affair. No good checking with the National Trust; Canons had to be sold off stone by stone, though bits of it are to be seen in front of the National Gallery.)

Nevertheless, Saturday night’s concert of Vivaldi and Handel was a thoroughly satisfying evening.

For one thing, there was a pair of star soloists – soprano Anna Gillingham and counter-tenor Robert Cross. The moments when they sang together, as in the opening G minor Magnificat, their voices weaving around each other, were magical. And in three solo items from Handel operas, Anna Gillingham showed us she could sing both seduction and desolation, while Robert Cross showed he was not afraid of comparisons with the famous Andreas Scholl by singing “Ombra mai fu”, better known as Handel’s Largo.
I've praised Glyn Aubrey before; here, he was under-used, but his light, well-projected tenor voice added distinction to the Magnificat.

In the orchestra department, this was the first North Staffordshire outing of the Darwin Ensemble, a new chamber group based at Lichfield cathedral. Helped by a discreet continuo from Newcastle’s own Ian Riddle, it gave the singers a lively, sympathetic backing, with some outstanding trumpet and oboe work. The unusually long orchestral introduction to the ninth Chandos anthem was a joy.

The downside of having a large group of singers is that they have to work really hard to stay lively and together. Conductor Oliver Neal Parker is to be congratulated on driving them on. The upside is that so many singers can produce a real impact – as they did in the Gloria which opened the second half of the concert.

This is now a far more popular work than the Magnificat, and I felt the Ceramic City Choir were at their happiest in it.

Walking back to the car with those Glorias ringing in my ears, I could almost have been back in Venice, had the churchyard not been so dry.

DEMIDENKO TAKES HANLEY BY STORM -- IN SPITE OF VOLCANOES AND CYCLONES

2011-10-13T22:44:00.000+01:00

The hard part is getting Nikolai Demidenko to a piano. Last time he was due to perform in Stoke on Trent, an Icelandic ash cloud intervened (I can’t for the life of me remember whether that was the 2010 ash cloud or the 2011 one.)

And I read that his concert in Hong Kong on September 29 – just a fortnight or so ago – had to be cancelled because a tropical cyclone grounded his flight.

However, neither volcano nor cyclone troubled the crowd at the Forum in Hanley last night, at the first of this year's Harding Trust piano recitals. But Demidenko played a storm.

You could bottle him and sell him as cough mixture. The North Staffordshire audience is famous for its sandpaper throats and phlegmatic noses, but there was not a sound to be heard except the exceptional playing.

He warmed up with Liszt’s first ballade, then let rip in the second, playing those tricky left hand figures with precision and strength.

Then Chopin; five nocturnes played virtually without a break. Chopin may be under-rated because so much of his work is in miniature form; this five-piece programme elevated the nocturne into a magnificent new, larger structure.

After the break came Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. I confess that I first heard this work in Ravel’s orchestration, and thought I preferred it that way. But Demidenko’s extreme clarity and precise touch revealed just how original and advanced the Mussorgsky piano work is. Modest Mussorgsky – who died an alcoholic at 42 – had very little to be modest about. Demidenko laid into the massive chords of the Great Gate of Kiev as if he was building it himself.

And as encores, a Chopin mazurka to clear the palate, and the extreme, dextrous simplicity of Scarlatti to send us home.

I’m surprised, actually, that either volcano or cyclone can have any effect on Demidenko at all, since he is himself a force of nature.

BOCKING WITH THE BEAUTIFUL BEAST

2011-10-11T10:57:00.003+01:00

You have to be pretty confident about your skills before you try ballet dancing at the New Vic. It is a theatre designed for performance in the round, the chief selling point of which is that audiences are never more than a few feet from the stage.

I would think it’s quite a challenge for actors, but for dancers even more so.

In point of fact, Ballet Cymru (once known as Independent Ballet Wales) survived that close scrutiny last night without putting a foot wrong, as far as I could tell. We could see the dancers’ facial expressions, a real gain. They didn’t appear to breathing even slightly more heavily after their athletic feats, and not a trace of perspiration appeared on their brows.

But feats there certainly were, from big leaps by the boys to delicate tracery from the star ballerina Olga Petiteau (I think it was her, though we weren’t given cast lists). Darius James is to be congratulated on clean, effective, story-driven choreography.

Their subject was Beauty and the Beast, which seems popular at the moment. Northern Ballet are doing it in December, and you can catch Birmingham Royal Ballet (who have been doing it since 2003) at the Lowry in January. (I’ll be side-tracked here into wondering why Birmingham Royal Ballet can go to York and Durham, apparently, but not to North Staffordshire. Was it something we said?)

The question is, what do you do about the music? To me it seems one of the most important parts of a ballet operation, but, alas, neither Tchaikovsky nor Prokofiev tackled Beauty and the Beast. Personally, I’ve a lot of sympathy for the Northern Ballet solution, which is to poach bits of Bizet, Debussy, Poulenc and Saint-Saens (though I’m not clear about how they hold them together.)

Birmingham Royal Ballet have gone for music from Canadian composer Glenn Buhr, which I haven’t heard.

Ballet Cymru have chosen Welshman David Westcott.

The programme for Ballet Cymru costs £4 but tells you very little about the thinking behind the work. I see from the internet that Westcott’s music is described as “Bartok through the ears of Jerry Goldsmith.” I detected very little Bartok here, though that astringency and spikiness would have been welcome at times.

Jerry Goldsmith, on the other hand, scored Hollywood films from Star Trek to LA Confidential, and the score for Beauty was certainly good at reinforcing mood and highlighting developments. The highlight was the waltz at the end of the first half, which seemed to me to have a real character of its own.

Ballet Cymru’s innovation is in the nature of the Beast, which has none of the usual hairy, squat quality, but is nonetheless very scary indeed.

It’s a massively tall creature with the head of a bull. The height is achieved by the use of modern so-called jumpstilts which allow the user to stand and move with stiff little runs. This makes the beast appear shy and reticent in spite of its size, which works very well as a character trait. The Beast's lumbering movement contrasts beautifully and movingly with Olga Petiteau’s slim, small, fast-moving figure, and their pas de deux is delightful.

And so we come to my word of the week; BOCKING. This is, apparently, the 21^st century sport using these small stilts to perform gymnastic feats. It looks like hard work to me, but then, I’ve never bocked and I’m not about to start now…

SAD TO RECORD that the Bolshoi Theatre in the Russian capital Moscow takes precedence over the Victoria Hall in Hanley... No, seriously though, Vassily Sinaisky, who was due to conduct the City of Birmingham symphony orchestra in Hanley next week, has a day job as chief conductor and music director of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. This month was due to feature the re-opening of the main stage there after five years of rather controversial re-furbishment. I'm not sure what's happened, but I understand Maestro Sinaisky will be in Moscow instead of Hanley next week.
His place will be taken by Michael Seal, associate conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, who will no doubt get the Potters' seal of approval.

SAD TO RECORD also that they couldn't find anyone better than me to act as MC when Vassily Petrenko does a pre-match talk before conducting the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra at the Victoria Hall on November 11. So make a firm date to come along to the Victoria Hall and ask questions of this fascinating figure, or I can see I'll end up having to ask all the questions myself....

HIGHLY STRUNG CONCERTS AT KEELE

2011-10-07T16:10:00.000+01:00

WHICH ONE IS THIS?

OR IS THIS ONE?

Last week I celebrated the rousing start of the Stoke-on-Trent Festival, when Juanjo Mena and the BBC Philharmonic set the Victoria Hall alight.

I was ready to ease myself gently into the next big event in North Staffordshire’s musical life, the start of regular Wednesday Concerts at Keele on October 19 with the chamber orchestra London Concertante playing Gypsy Strings (and if you ever wanted to know what a Rumanian Fry-up tastes – or rather, sounds -- like, the Keele University chapel is the place to be).

But in fact, an Opera Gala tomorrow (Saturday, October 8) night is being billed as the start of this year’s Concerts at Keele. Students from the Royal Northern College of Music will be accompanied on the piano by James Vaughan in a programme ranging from Mozart to Andrew Lloyd Webber via Gershwin and Puccini.

That range of musical treats is typical of the Keele Concerts.

There’s one of the top string quartets of today – the Royal – playing Mozart and Tchaikovsky (November 9) but there’s also the Fontanella recorder quintet (November 2) with music allegedly by Henry VIII (and who’s going to argue?)

We get the chance to hear a new work premiered by Eniko Magyar and Timothy End at a Viola & Piano Recital on November 16, and Pantagruel are promising a semi-staged performance of renaissance music with both citterns and gitterns (there seems to have been a word shortage in medieval times).

You’ve not heard either? Well, apparently citterns are two a penny, but until 2002, there were only two gitterns known to have survived. A third was then discovered in a medieval outhouse in Poland. But if you want to know what they sound like, you don’t have to go that far; just get over to Keele University on November 23.

MAESTRO OF SPAIN, WE ADORE YOU

2011-10-01T11:20:00.001+01:00

It happens every summer. I always forget just how loud a full symphony orchestra can be. The Victoria Hall shuddered delightfully on Friday night to the first concert of the new season of the Stoke-on-Trent Festival, featuring the BBC Philharmonic under its brand new chief conductor, Juanjo Mena.

He’s Spanish, so, appropriately enough, the concert was called “Spanish Fiesta”. Indeed, the evening was so balmy that had I an orange instead of an oatcake, I could have been in Seville rather than Stoke-on-Trent.

And the concert was like a platter of tasty tapas – lots of highly-flavoured bits and pieces.

The concert opened with two suites from the ballet, The Three-Cornered Hat, by De Falla. This is a fizzing firework of a piece, with tricky rhythms and 3D orchestration, but the BBC Philharmonic were totally in control of it and Maestro Mena was in charge of them. He seemed to be declaring; this is now MY orchestra, and they’ll even play the fandango if I ask them.

Next, the less easily digested concierto in modo galante for cello and orchestra by Rodrigo. It was less immediately attractive than his more famous one for guitar, apart from a big tune in the slow movement. Cellist Asier Polo, a name new to me, produced a smooth, sweet tone and some fine finger work.

The second half was dedicated to Spanish works by Frenchmen.

Indeed, so un-Spanish was Bizet that, when asked if he would be going to Spain to get the right flavour for Carmen, he is said to have replied; “No, that would only confuse me.”
A few weeks ago the New Vic gave us Carmen the drama without its orchestral body; this time, we had Bizet’s colourful Carmen Suite, the music without the drama. You wouldn’t have believed it wasn’t Spanish.

And finally, Juanjo Mena tightened the screws on Bolero, a work by a fellow Basque, Ravel, even if he was from the wrong side of the French border. It’s always been a hit with the public, though some critics have been snide about its repetitious nature and even Ravel called it “an experiment.” Maestro Mena threw some amazing shapes, bobbing and weaving around the violins as he drove them to dig ever deeper into their strings.

Now, I’ve got a reasonable hi-fi, and I play it very loud when the neighbours are out. Or perhaps it’s the other way round.

But when the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra launched into the final, crashing notes of Ravel’s Bolero at the Victoria Hall, bits of me untouched since last May were deeply thrilled. Finally, that’s what I was looking for. Welcome back, guys.

18 REASONS TO BE HAPPY

2011-09-17T16:01:00.003+01:00

Stoke-on-Trent’s Christmas present is coming early this year.

One of the greatest young violinists of the day – Valeriy Sokolov – with several CDs and a DVD to his name already -- will be performing the Beethoven violin concerto in Hanley on December 9.

But just look at who’s also on the stage of the Victoria Hall with him. We’ll be hearing the great Philharmonia Orchestra, and no less a conductor than Vladimir Ashkenazy, one of the greatest maestros in the world, associated with no fewer than five famous orchestras, and still making recordings as one of the world’s top pianists as well.

Vladimir Ashkenazy was born in Gorky in the Soviet Union in 1937 (pub quiz moment -- it went back to its old name of Nizhny Novgorod in 1990) but came to prominence when he won second prize in the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1955 and the first prize in the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition in Brussels in 1956. He shared the first prize in the 1962 International Tchaikovsky Competition with British pianist John Ogdon – and met his Icelandic wife there.

He came to London to live in 1963, but is now an Icelandic citizen living in Switzerland. I can confidently predict he’d never heard of Stoke-on-Trent before being snapped up by impresario Mike Lloyd – but he’ll no doubt get the tremendous welcome the city’s Festival is famous for.

But that’s not all, of course. No doubt Vladimir Ashkenazy will get a welcome…. But he’s no stranger to many international venues.

Not so Nobuyuki Tsujii, the sensational blind pianist whose European debut was actually, unbelievably, in the Victoria Hall (and although his latest disc features a German orchestra, the picture on the front was actually taken there.) Nobu must have enjoyed the way we greeted him, for he’s in Hanley again on March 2 next year, playing Chopin (and I see the concert includes some whizzy Bernstein as well.) When I reviewed his concert, I got emails from all over the world; he has fans everywhere.

In all, there are 14 orchestral concerts and piano recitals in the series, from the BBC Philharmonic with its new conductor Juanjo Mena (September 30) to the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic with Kathy Stott at the piano in Mozart (November 11), from Lesley Garrett celebrating the new year with the Hallé orchestra (January 6) to Tasmin Little’s Lark Ascending (February 10), from the Enigma Variations (April 20) to the best of Schubert with Paul Lewis (March 1) and Beethoven with Martin Roscoe (March 29).

No need, then, to make the trek to Liverpool, Manchester or Birmingham to see the classical stars. They’re available at a reasonable price just up the road. They do say this is going to be a hard winter; well, at least, there’s something for us classical buffs to look forward to.

MEANWHILE, JUST DOWN THE A34...

This Friday (September 23) sees the return of music to the Gatehouse, in Stafford.... and an evening which would be more at home in Budapest, for it is called Viva Hungary!
We saw the new music director of the Manchester Camerata, Gabor Takacs-Nagy (I seem to have lost all his accents down the back of the sofa) last year, but now he's formally taken up his role. The concert isn't quite as exotic as that name may suggest, with two pieces of Haydn and a bit of Bartok and Liszt, but it sounds very satisfying. And it features the pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, no less, a man who has no fewer than two out of three nominations in the latest Gramophone concerto recording awards.
The Camerata's other outings to Stafford come on November 3, with the OTHER Mendelssohn violin concerto (what, you didn't know there was another one? ), March 14 with everyone's favourite Mozart piano concerto (Elvira Madigan), and on April 27, you can fall in love with Tchaikovsky falling in love with Italy in his Souvenir de Florence.
So there you.. from Budapest to Florence, a veritable tour of Europe from your seat in the Gatehouse, and local ice cream at the interval as well.

BIZET'S CARMEN GETS AROUND

2011-09-14T10:14:00.000+01:00

Now number 3 in the list of most performed operas in the world, Carmen was such a disaster on its premiere in Paris that it probably accelerated the death of composer Bizet from a heart attack at the tender age of 36. So I guess it’s somewhat redundant to suggest its updating would have given its composer a heart attack.

Chris Monks, who thought this version up in 1998 while at the New Vic, now runs Alan Ayckbourn’s Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, from where this latest production comes. I’m indebted to the Guardian for the story of how he began re-imagining operas. Faced with the prospect of a school production of the Mikado, he realised he hadn’t enough money to buy even plastic armour. But he knew where he could lay his hands on cricket bats and pads for next to nothing, so he re-wrote The Mikado around them.

At first sight Carmen is a radical re-telling of the story. Carmen now works in a supermarket in a run-down shopping centre instead of a cigarette factory and is drawn to a glamorous Italian football star instead of a bullfighter. Don Jose is now Johnny Jay, an ex-army security guard. The Toreador’s song is now Tony Amor’s song; do you see what they did there? The language is English, not French; instead of an orchestra we get a hard-working keyboard player and cast members who double up on sax, trumpet, clarinet, flute and French horn.

But in fact, most of the story and the feel of the opera remain intact.

Carmen’s philosophy of life – the Habanera – is pretty much a straight translation of the original song. If anything, I’d be happy to hear more of Chris Monks’ inventive original moments such as the witty Girls’ Night Out and couplets like Tony Amor the Sicilian/ For whom we paid ninety million.

Bizet’s outstanding tunes come across with all their original power, but I really do miss the full orchestral dress of the opera, in spite of the hard work of Richard Atkinson and his team (but it’s great fun to spot moments like Loveday Smith sneaking off from the stage to play French horn in full night club gear). The ear adjusts once you accept the singers are not from opera but from the world of musical comedy (but then, Chris Monks considers Carmen the foundation of all modern musicals). There are, however, still a couple of standout voices – Neil Moors as Tony Amor and Jennifer Rhodes as a sweet Michele (and she’s pretty good on the flute, too.)

Carmen herself, Caroline Keiff, has the looks and the hair for the part, though I can’t help feeling she could be nastier. Gareth Kennerley as Johnny Jay, the strong man brought low by love, seems a little weak, though I’ve always seen Don Jose as a bit of a wimp, so maybe it’s the part.

So the ultimate question; does the re-imagining work? The theatre was almost full, and certainly not with opera buffs – bow ties and glamorous frocks were not in evidence – so it produced an exhilarating evening’s entertainment for a large number of people not accustomed to opera. It’s fun and it’s gripping, and you’ll come away whistling those tunes.

Bizet himself would probably have been fascinated that his attempt at re-inventing opera – which changed it for ever -- should itself be re-invented for theatre in the round in a northern holiday resort and a British Midlands town.

The icing on the cake is that if you present the programme, you’re entitled to a free glass of wine at the Golden Grid Fish restaurant. Ah, reading it again, I now notice that’s in Scarborough. Pity.

(Carmen is at the New Vic until Saturday, September 24.)

BUXTON FESTIVAL; AT THE OPERA COMIQUE WITH MIGNON

2011-07-11T23:59:00.001+01:00

Toulouse-Lautrec; Ambroise Thomas
conducting

I was in France a couple of weeks ago, watching a TV programme celebrating 40 years of opera at the Choregies d’Orange, when eight thousand people pack into this tiny French town which has one of the world’s few remaining Roman theatres (not, I stress, an arena like Verona). A woman came on and sang Je suis Titania, a number from Mignon, by Ambroise Thomas, and I, like most of the audience, was enchanted. Why had I never heard of this opera? Why, indeed, had I never even heard of Thomas?

Well, I got some of the answers at the Buxton Festival, for this is the third of the operas the Festival is staging this year.

Actually, one of the answers is in the programme. Goodness knows I’m as willing as the next man to accept a daft operatic plot, but the synopsis for this one covers two detailed columns (Saul has three quarters of a column and even Maria di Rohan only one and a half.) It’s based on Goethe, and is a pretty tragic affair until the final pages, when there‘s a happy ending (though there‘s just a moment when you wonder if this is going to turn into a different sort of opera altogether).

Luckily, this performance is in English, and even then there are subtitles, and with strong direction from Annilese Miskimmon you can easily follow what’s going on. It’s a strange little tale which harnesses child exploitation, abuse and deprivation to love and circuses.

The music is equally mixed, ranging from musical comedy to something with the strange beauty of Debussy, and there‘s a wealth of ear-catching melody.

Another of the reasons why it isn’t better known must be the problem of casting Mignon herself. She has to appear young and waif-like at the beginning and at least partly woman at the end. But the part is written for a mezzo-soprano -- normally the product of, shall we say, a more mature singer of greater stature than the part allows.

Well, Wendy Dawn Thompson manages to square that particular circle, slim and boyish in the first two acts with hair flat to her scalp, turning into a more grown-up bob in the third. Oh, and she can sing as well. Her solo in the first act where she pines for her former home in Italy was very well received indeed.

Her tragic waif role is made even more difficult because it’s up against the part of Philine, a man-grabbing coloratura soprano who sparkles and shimmies through the available boys. Gillian Keith is absolutely credible in that part; indeed, seeing her sing the show’s big number -- I am Titania -- (and my new ear-worm) while ascending the stage on a quarter moon would make you finally see the point of musical comedy.

Ryan MacPherson, as Wilhelm, has a lovely lyric tenor with which to be upright and strong, while Laertes, Andrew Mackenzie-Wicks, gets quite a high proportion of the laughs. Lothario, a homeless man searching for his lost daughter (and guess who that turns out to be) grows in strength vocally as he gets nearer to finding her.

I enjoyed this immensely, and much more than I expected to; the right tone is very difficult to achieve in such an old-fashioned work. A lot of the praise must go to Andrew Greenwood, the conductor, the Northern Chamber Orchestra and the Festival Chorus, who swept us along in this nineteenth-century treat. Two days ago we could have been in Naples; here, they took us to the Opera Comique in Paris.

How one loves to embarrass one’s children (before you become an embarrassment to them.) My eldest son was a good-looking boy with golden hair, and when we went to France waitresses would pat him on the head and mutter, “Mignon.” He generally turned red.

How even more embarrassed he would have been to have known that Mignon, presumably the character from the which adjective derives, is, according to an article in the programme, “of unstable gender, a boyish young girl, a waif-like girl in boy‘s clothes.”

Well, he grew up, had two kids and generally turned out all right, though of course he’s still a bit mignon to his mother and me. The opera isn’t bad, either.

Mignon is at Buxton on July 16,19, 22 and 26.
Not to be missed; Prom 4 next Sunday, puts Dresden in Stoke on Trent on the map, when the BBC performs Havergal Brian's first symphony, known as the Gothic. It involves over a thousand people including Susan Gritton soprano, Christine Rice mezzo-soprano, Peter Auty tenor, Alastair Miles bass, the CBSO Youth Chorus, Eltham College Boys' Choir, Southend Boys' and Girls' Choirs Bach Choir, BBC National Chorus of Wales, Brighton Festival Chorus, Côr Caerdydd, Huddersfield Choral Society, London Symphony Chorus, BBC Concert Orchestra, and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales all held together by conductor and brave man, Martyn Brabbins. It lasts for almost two hours. Alas, there are no seats left, but you can stand -- or stay home and listen on the radio. Grand.

Brian was born in Dresden in 1876 and Elgar was a fan, but little of his music was ever heard during his lifetime (which appears to have been long but pretty miserable.)

BUXTON FESTIVAL; SAUL MUSIC

2011-07-11T11:02:00.001+01:00

Saul and the Witch of Endor"
by Jacob Cornelisz van Oostanen (1526)

We were looking after our three year old granddaughter the other day, and her dad had left the radio on 6Music.

"I don't like this music," she announced.

"Neither do I," I said, and turned over to Radio 3.

They were playing one of the brightest and bounciest of Handel arias.

After due consideration, my granddaughter announced; "I like this music. It goes both ways."

Now strangely, I knew just what she meant. There's a wonderfully catchy quality about the best of Handel which is positively life-enhancing.

And there are plenty of those moments in Handel's oratorio Saul, the second of the fully-staged works opening the Buxton Festival.

Everybody loves the Messiah, so why not Saul? It's the same composer, the same librettist, Charles Jennens, and the same Bible. Yet Messiah is performed all over the place, but Saul is a rare beast.

The answer, of course, is that Saul is from the Old Testament, and it's about a jealous and fire-breathing God of the sort most of us -- even those still with some religious beliefs -- no longer recognise.

It's about what happened to David after he slew Goliath (he married Saul's daughter Michal, got pally with his son Jonathan, and then took over the country when Saul and Jonathan were killed in battle. Saul was apparently punished because he defied God by sparing the lives of some other race after a battle.) The work seems to suggest the ancient Israelites were bloodthirsty, racist and vicious.

Maybe it was different in 1739 when people knew their bible, and when the story of a fallible king brought down by his own lack of self-control, to be replaced with a commoner, had a strong resonance in the story of the early years of our own dear royal family.

Handel created the oratorio Saul because the audiences for Italian opera were dwindling. What director Olivia Fuchs has done is turn Saul into an opera to increase its dramatic impact and re-awaken interest in its tragic strength.

She draws parallels with events after the second world war, when, she says in a note in the programme, there are issues about how a nation establishes itself as a superpower, and how artists and critics are seen s possible threats to the system.

Personally, I can't see any of this in the story, but it does allow designer Yannis Thavoris to dress everyone in marvellous 1940s gear. The curtains open on a massive stone war memorial with a throne on top, and the superpower in question is plainly the United States (How Excellent Thy Name is sung to a banner showing an A-bomb explosion...)

David appears to be dressed as a flyer, and makes love to Saul's daughter Michal on the presidential desk in the oval office. The great scene of mourning, incorporating the Dead March, has a parade of flag-covered coffins all too reminiscent of Iraq and Afghanistan.

A lot of the story falls on the hard-worked Buxton Festival Chorus. Choreographer Clare Whistler has devised ways of getting them moving around the stage and using hand signals to keep the interest up.

And then there's the music. Handel wrote some very unusual music for this work, using a harp, huge kettledrums, a carillon, and three trombones (which had to be imported from Germany specially.)

Performing here are Harry Christophers and the Orchestra of the Sixteen, and I have never heard a baroque orchestra sound so good. I can't believe the orchestra at the King's Theatre was as good as this, even with Mr Handel himself at the keyboard. We get a harp solo and an organ concerto as well as the orchestral work, and the oboe and harpsichord tickle the ear. Alas, Mr Christophers seems to have been unable to borrow the kettledrums from the Tower of London, as Handel did in 1738.

Anne Marie Gibbons was suitably youth-like, with a strong, firm voice, as David. Jonathan, Robert Murray, had a cold, we were informed, but if he sings like that with a cold, goodness knows how good he is without one. Jonathan Best as Saul anchored the whole production, his strong bass voice often belying Saul's internal agony. Elizabeth Atherton and Ruby Hughes as Saul's daughters looked like 1940s film stars and sang like sirens (Merab's -- Elizabeth Atherton's -- solo, Author of Peace, brought the house down.)

Away, then, with music which goes only one way. If you want to go both ways, you'll have to get to Buxton for a Handelian treat.

Saul is at Buxton on 13, 17, 21 and 24 July.

Tonight (Monday) sees the first night of Mignon by Ambroise Thomas, an opera comique with an amazingly complicated and ludicrous plot. They're brave, that Festival. It must be something in the Buxton water.

Nice to hear that Robin Ticciati is to become the new music director of the Glyndebourne Opera Company. Regular readers -- well, The Regular Reader -- may remember that we last met in Cafe Nero in Hanley (I say last as if we might ever meet again...). The question is; will he remember his trip to Stoke-on-Trent, and will he have any control at all over where Glyndebourne on Tour travels to? Little did the guys at Nero know the quality of their macchiato might determine the future course of culture in the city. But as we know, coffee and culture are inextricably linked.

BUXTON FESTIVAL; I'LL NEVER STOP SAYING MARIA

2011-07-10T10:55:00.001+01:00

Donizetti was a one-man opera factory. He seems to have produced an average of two a year for most of his short life, yet he is known for only two or three -- La Fille Du Regiment, L'elisir d'amore, and Lucia di Lammermoor -- and even a couple of those were unheard just a few years ago. (You can catch Lucia, incidentally, at Clonter Opera near Congleton on July 23.)

But the good folk at the Buxton Festival -- the very excellent folk -- seem to have taken it upon themselves to resurrect the other sixty or so operas. We've already had Roberto Devereux, in which Elizabeth the first abdicates in favour of James the first (well, as the Tudors and Camelot prove, historical accuracy can be over-rated in a drama.)

Then they brought us Lucrezia Borgia, now so respectable that even English National Opera has had a go at it recently. The opera's respectable, I mean, not Lucrezia.

And back from the dead at this year's festival is none other than Maria di Rohan, the master's penultimate attempt at immortality.

As always, Buxton seem to have mastered the trick of finding a neglected opera just as other people start remembering it as well. It's had recent performances in America and Ireland, and a run-through at the Royal Festival Hall.

None other than the Teatro Donizetti in his home town of Bergamo is due to have a go at it this October.

But Buxton have got there first -- and beautifully-- to open this year's Buxton Festival.

It's a tale of domestic melodrama driven by national events, against an urgent timescale (hence the impressive, overbearing set of a giant clock and its cogs) -- reminding me in its feel of nothing less than Tosca.

Musically, it seems to me to be the best of Donizetti, foreshadowing Verdi. Gone are many of the bel canto traditions; there's less singing for the sake of it, less trilling and swooping, more plot-driven development in the excellently paced solos and duets, and nothing outstays its welcome. Maybe it has, equally, fewer of those set-piece solos which can define an opera, though it's certainly not without great melodic interest (there's even a solo for Maria which starts as if it's going to turn into his most famous number, Una furtiva lagrima ).

The opera starts with the back story played out silently over the overture, setting the dramatic tone for an exciting evening involving duels, romantic letters and secret passages.

Spookily, Velasquez painted a lady with a fan (now in the Wallace collection in London) which might be the real Maria di Rohan (see picture), and she bears a remarkable resemblance to Mary Plazas, the Maria of Buxton. This is appropriate, since Mary Plazas really does inhabit the role, with first class acting and singing (though of course she was also a first-class Lucrezia and memorable Elizabeth.) Apparently, however, the real Maria was not the faithful, tragic heroine here depicted so beautifully by Mary Plazas, more a bit of a sexy schemer.

The cause of all Maria's troubles, the Count of Chalais, the lover she can't forget, is given the necessary allure of a fine Italian tenor voice by John Bellemer. His friend and rival, her husband, the Count of Chevreuse, is played by William Dazeley in a lithe, manly baritone, and there's a trouser role for that excellent mezzo Mirouslava Yordanova in the shape of Armando di Gondi, who causes a duel by maligning Maria's reputation. Such is the domestic nature of this opera, the Festival Chorus have time to nip home after the first act, but they make a fine sound before leaving.

The Northern Chamber Orchestra under Andrew Greenwood, the retiring Artistic Director, turn the beautiful Buxton Opera House into something any resident of Naples or Milan would understand. The cellos -- which Donizetti uses a lot -- seem particularly fine, but the whole sound, enhanced by the intimacy of this small house, is gripping.

As I said, good on Buxton for resurrecting another forgotten Donizetti opera. But at the current rate it'll be 2099 before they do the lot. They're going to have to do better than that; if I'm to see them, I'll need resurrecting as well by then.

Maria Di Rohan is on at Buxton on July 12,15,20, 23 and 27.

It's the first night of Handel's Saul tonight (Sunday) and Thomas's Mignon on Monday.

But there are lots of other wonderful things.... on the opera front, Bampton Classical Opera have Cimarosa's comedy The Italian Girl in London (July 18,23), Music Theatre Wales are doing Greek (July 14,25), the work that made the name of Mark-Anthony Turnage, and the superbly named Monteverdi's Flying Circus comes from the Armonico Consort (July 13,21) -- and yes, it does feature Monteverdi's music.

Musicians range from violinist Tasmin Little (July 22) and pianist Kathryn Stott (July 18) to the Fibonacci Sequence (July 27) and Tango 5 (July 13).

And then there's the literary side, with names like Alan Titchmarsh and Ellen MacArthur.

Buxton got more money, rather than less, in the recent Arts Council review. I wonder why?

FLYING THE FLAGS FOR THE LAST NIGHT

2011-06-25T23:08:00.000+01:00

Down in London, they haven't even had the first night of the Proms yet (it's on July 15.) But here in Stoke-on-Trent on Saturday we were already celebrating the Last Night of the Proms -- yet another example of the go-getting forward-thinking attitude of the Potteries.

Actually, this was rather a special Last Night, on Armed Forces Day, in aid of Help the Heroes, and with a strong presence from Stoke-on-Trent city council.

It started, appropriately enough, with Walton's Spitfire Prelude and Fugue. This is a work whose time appears to have come; a few years ago it was never played at all, but it's on Classic FM all the time and I see it's due to be played in the Victoria Hall again next February by the BBC Philharmonic. It really out-Elgars Elgar, and I love it.

It's a shame the conductor and master of ceremonies, Timothy Henty, didn't seem aware of the local connection, but he developed a good rapport with the audience and even managed to control our clapping during the Henry Wood Fantasia on British Sea Songs -- something not even the conductor of the London proms can always manage to do.

But then, as was plain from our performance of Jerusalem (even though I still don't know what it's about), we were a highly musical bunch.

I did think at one point we were going to have our allies represented musically, with La Traviata and Gianni Schicchi from Italy and songs from Carmen and Romeo and Juliet for France (and Spain).

The glamorous Jo Appleby sang them with a big voice which held its own even against the full might of the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra -- pretty much the Royal Philharmonic with white jackets instead of black ones.

But we also got the William Tell overture (the Swiss remain obstinately neutral) and the Polonaise from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin (don't mention the Russians.)

Vaughan Williams' Folk Song Suite in the first half made a nice foil to the Wood sea songs, and the general pattern of the music was a fast, noisy number followed by a slow, quiet one -- a formula which seemed to leave everyone happy.

But of course most of us were there for the final flag-waving, which we proved to be enormously good at. There'll be almost a thousand people in Stoke-on-Trent watching TV on September 10, the date of the other Last Night, searching the house desperately for the flag they bought in June.

CRACKING NUTCRACKER

2011-06-25T11:22:00.001+01:00

photo bridget hearne

Neve Campbell is a highly successful Hollywood star, most famous for the Scream series of films; but can she dance?

I ask because the other Neve Campbell certainly can. She is the young star of the Nutcracker at the Regent Theatre in Stoke on Trent, and she's a fine budding actress as Clara, the girl who gets the Nutcracker for Christmas. She's just 13, I understand, and from Derby. Watch out, Neve 1.

English Youth Ballet was set up in 1998 by Janet Lewis MBE to give young dancers the chance to perform in full-length classical ballet with professional leads.

Eight times a year, EYB turns up in a different town, and rehearses and performs with a different young cast in each one.

I frankly just can't imagine the logistics of this. It must involve getting thirty youngsters from different ballet schools, some of them very young indeed, to do the same thing at exactly the same time, when they've been practising separately.

One of the people who must take credit for this achievement is Julianne Rice-Oxley, last seen in Stoke on Trent at the Victoria Hall back in the winter as a dancer with the Johann Strauss Gala. That should give all these wannabe ballet dancers pause for thought; even for stars, the business isn't all silver tutus and glamorous dates. It also involves cold January nights in Hanley.

Here, Julianne is the Sugar Plum Fairy and Clara's mother, with fine work on the pointes, and she has some attractive pas de deux with the athletic Oliver Speers. But she's also credited as choreographer and Ballet Mistress, so I guess she must have more than a bit to do with getting the best out of the young performers. .

Well, it works. All right, there are occasional rough edges when not everything is quite together. Some of the steps the young performers are asked to do are simple, but when thirty of them are doing it together the stage sparkles.

It helps that the costumes are lovely and varied, and the sets are basic but adequate.

I have, however, to make my usual comment about the music. The restricted range and low volume of the reproduction does no favours whatsoever to some of Tchaikovsky's loveliest works; I suspect the dancers would have been even better if they'd been inspired by the sound.

The scene stealers here are undoubtedly the youngest dancers of all, who are billed as dolls. They are cuteness personified, and their little robot dance would make any adult go ahhhh.

Obviously, every parent of the hundred or so children in the cast will have to go and see their beloved up there on the stage.

The question is; would you go along to see the show if you didn't have a child in it?

I think it's at least as entertaining as the Russian Ballet of Siberia, who make regular annual visits to the Regent. There's also a good sense of humour on show, and a feeling that everyone is enjoying themselves immensely.

Which is more than can be said for the TV programme I might have been watching instead; Andy Murray fighting for his life against an unknown Croat. Is it just me, or is he turning into Tim Henman?

*Nutcracker by English Youth Ballet is on again at 1430 Saturday afternoon and 1930 Saturday evening. Saturday night I'll be at the Last Night of the Proms at the Victoria Hall.

CAMERATA SAYS BYE-BYE BOYD

2011-05-28T09:55:00.000+01:00

Almost ten years ago, a star oboist made the Manchester Camerata an offer it couldn't refuse. At his concert with them in Ellesmere Port, he'd perform on the oboe in the first half if they let him conduct in the second -- and they'd save the conductor's fee.

The cash-strapped Camerata jumped at the buy one, get one free offer, and the rest is history.

Douglas Boyd admits he has had no formal conducting training, and this career change came as a sort of mid life crisis. Very few oboists have made it on to the rostrum, and these days the young lions have been to conducting school and through endless competitions.

He was influenced by two conductors of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, where he had made his career. One was Claudio Abbado, whose performances were always amazing, but who mumbled through rather boring rehearsals, the other was Nicholas Harnoncourt, who knew every last detail about the music and the composer, and taught the performers a lot.

But one lesson Douglas Boyd had learnt, he said, was to be himself; orchestras spotted it very quickly if conductors were trying to copy someone else’s style.

Speaking to the audience before Friday night’s concert at the Stafford Gatehouse, Douglas Boyd’s style came over as affable, approachable, and down to earth, but fired with a determination to make the best music possible. I think he’d be good on TV if he wanted to go that route.

He has managed to make the Camerata world-class and a successful recording ensemble, while squaring some sort of circle; it's an orchestra that's not just happy but determined to perform in places like Doncaster, Ulverston, and -- yes -- Stafford, an interesting contrast with many of Britain's top ensembles who find touring a necessary evil.

Unfortunately, he leaves as music director just as the budget is cut by ten per cent. He acknowledged this was "only" ten per cent; many bodies have had larger cuts. But he admitted it had a large impact on the Camerata's already tiny budget.

Contrast this with his "other" group, the Musikkollegium Winterthur in Switzerland. They have long holidays, great pensions, and --crucially -- no less than twice as long to rehearse. Douglas Boyd carefully restrained himself from suggesting they might be a little spoilt.

Not that any cuts were visible on Friday night... indeed, quite the opposite. The Camerata fielded a larger than usual orchestra, around forty, soprano Eleanor Leadbetter, the Ladies of Manchester Chamber Choir, and the imposing John Savident, formerly butcher Fred Elliot in Corrie.

Douglas Boyd said he wanted to make every concert an event, and this was. It opened with Mendelssohn's wonderful violin concerto in a nervy, fleeting performance from the Camerata's new leader, Giovanni Guzzo.

We were then treated to almost the whole of Mendelssohn's magic music for a Midsummer Night's Dream, in which John Savident plainly relished narrating and performing most of Shakespeare's characters.

It was a very special climax to a special ten years -- though Douglas Boyd suggested he'd be back as a guest conductor at some point if he can find a window between Garsington, Glyndebourne and Zurich operas and the orchestras of Dallas, Detroit and Seattle.

Another quote; "The Camerata refreshes the concert halls other orchestras cannot reach." A good enough epitaph, I feel.

ALISON TRUMPETS END OF FESTIVAL SEASON

2011-05-14T09:32:00.001+01:00

Alison Balsom admitted she was up until 3.30 a.m. the morning of her appearance at Friday's concert in Stoke-on-Trent, celebrating her award as Female Classical Artist of the Year at the Classic Brit Awards (she won awards in 2006 and 2009 as well, incidentally).

She then got up to appear on Breakfast TV at nine o'clock, before making her way to the Victoria Hall to perform the Haydn trumpet concerto with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.

And since it isn't on her latest disc -- Italian Concertos -- but on one she made back in 2008, one assumes she had to find time to bone up on it before she took to the stage.

She played it brilliantly, of course. She seems to have access to shades of tones ordinary trumpeters can't find. She looked very good, too, in a black and white off-the-shoulder number.

The concert opened with Elgar's Introduction and Allegro for strings, which demonstrated that the BBC Philharmonic's Chief Guest Conductor Vassily Sinaisky has the grasp of the English idiom and the flexibility to implement it. It also showed just how good the strings of the Philharmonic now are.

And the concert closed with Tchaikovsky's final symphony, the Pathetique. Since Sinaisky, like Tchaikovsky before him, is a music professor in St Petersburg, this must be mother's milk to him. Nevertheless, it was a noble and restrained performance of a work that can easily get over-wrought.

Its closing, dying notes were appropriate for the Gala Finale of what has been yet another amazing season of the Stoke-on-Trent Festival (though there's still a Last Night of the Proms to come on June 25.)

You may have noticed how many people's names reflect their jobs, as in Mr Bun the Baker. It can't just be coincidence, surely, that Usain Bolt is world 100m and 200m record holder or that Bob Flowerdew and Alan Titchmarsh are both famous gardeners. My favourites are J.W.Splatt and D. Weedon, urologists who published several papers on incontinence together.

Well, balsam is defined by my dictionary as "any agency that heals, soothes, or restores." So Alison Balsom is yet another example of what is known as nominative determinism.

PS The awards have now become Classic Brits rather than Classical Brits, apparently because classical is too fearsome a word and would put people off. Much as I agree that there's only good music, whatever form it comes in, I really can't find it in me to approve this sop to crossover.

It certainly can't be a marketing ploy, since no one in Stoke on Trent has any Alison Balsom discs on sale (and you wonder why HMV is doing so badly.)

PPS If you want to see Alison Balsom get her award, the Classic Brits are on ITV1 on Sunday, May 29, at 1030 p.m.

RUSSIANS DANCE FOUR BY FOUR AND MELT HANLEY HEARTS

2011-05-11T16:02:00.000+01:00

Cast your mind back a few months. There was more icing on Britain than on a royal wedding cake, and all we wanted was a 4x4.

Well, it seems the Russians have cracked it. They've fitted four wheel drive to the Imperial Ice Stars.

That can be the only explanation for their amazing speed and agility on the frozen stage of the Regent Theatre in Hanley.

But that's not all. They're also ballet dancers, and they manage to combine this speed with elegance.

I seem to remember that when Britain was frozen we all went out in grey layers; the Ice Stars wear more than a hundred different outfits, many of them quite sparkly. Often the men appear to have forgotten their cardigans and the ladies their thermal undies.

When Odette -- Olga Sharutenko -- first meets her prince -- Andrei Penkin -- she not only dances on ice with him, she flies on a nearly invisible wire and even appears on her toes in ballet shoes. Mind you, there are no extra gimmicks in the second half when the prince and Odette dance with Odile, Olena Pyatash, but Andrei Penkin still manages some quite astonishing double lifts.

I see I was scathing about the Russian Ice Stars (any relation?) when they brought us their Cirque de Glace last September; music poor, story absurd, plenty of action but not a lot of dance. I was also, I see, not altogether fond of the music written specially for the Imperial Ice Stars' production of Cinderella on Ice back in 2009.

The story in this production of Swan Lake is not quite as you might remember it; there's a sword fight and a happy ending. The black swans are all male and threatening and the white swans female, though there‘s quite an air of menace when they swirl around each other on stage.

The sound quality is disappointing by comparison with the sound Matthew Bourne produced for his Cinderella in February, but the music is wonderful; Tchaikovsky at his finest. Eamon D'Arcy's sets are quite elaborate for a touring production, and there are enough scene changes to keep things interesting.

Actually, the most exciting moments are in the encore, when the Ice Stars seem to throw off the shackles of a classical production and throw each other across the stage. It must be rehearsed, but it doesn't look it. It brought the Hanley audience to their feet.

A word of warning, however; there's quite a cool draught off the stage, and you'll need a warm coat. But you should be all right without your winter tyres.

NEXT Interesting to note, incidentally, that the Aurora Orchestra, whose founder and conductor Nicholas Collon we heard in Stafford the other day, has won a Royal Philharmonic Society award.

Friday sees the gala finale of the Stoke-on-Trent Festival series, which has been yet another notable success. The BBC Philharmonic under Vassily Sanaiski is performing Tchaikovsky's Pathetique; but all eyes are bound to be on Alison Balsom...

STAFFORD GETS CAMERATA'S ROYAL WEDDING GIFT

2011-04-30T09:34:00.000+01:00

Much to her parents' concern, my small granddaughter has been entranced by all things pink and princessy since she was a baby.

She was miffed not to be invited to the Royal wedding, and she inquired of her Daddy if there were any princes of her own age -- three and a half.

The Manchester Camerata was in Stafford on wedding day with an antidote to the lashings of sugar which had been pouring out of the TV and radio speakers all day. They brought astringent music from the country which turned its back on the Royals several hundred years ago -- the United States of America.

This was the first full orchestral concert in the renovated Gatehouse theatre. The seats are much more comfortable, though still not designed for the larger rear, and it all feels a lot more secure. I hadn't realised, but apparently the old seats were designed to be temporary, so that the area could be completely cleared for dances.

Although the changes were small, I thought I detected an improvement in the theatre's acoustic. It was, it seemed to me, much more open, less compressed, and with more treble and bass. On the other hand, acoustics are more of a black art than a science, and my impression could simply be a result of the kind of music being played.

There was Stravinsky in edgy neo-classical mode, his Dumbarton Oaks concerto, John Adams' seminal minimalist Shaker Loops, and Copland's heart-warming Appalachian Spring.

All of this music seemed to me to be a real challenge to both players and conductor, being full of complex rhythms and unusual entrances and exits. However, it was a challenge easily met by visiting conductor Nicholas Collon.

I am of an age when policemen are getting younger, but I had not expected the same phenomenon of conductors.

Nicholas Collon looks very young indeed, but he has already founded his own orchestra -- the Aurora Orchestra -- a bold and brave step in this difficult age. He plainly relished the complexity of this music.

He brought with him the Aurora's leader Thomas Gould to lead the Camerata, and they polished off the complex works as if they were their everyday fare.

The odd man out, with no apparent American link, was Schubert's sonata for Arpeggione. This instrument was the dodo of the musical world, the bastard child of a cello and a guitar, which disappeared forever only a few years after its invention.

Musicians since, however, have decided that the sonata is too good a work to go down with the Arpeggione, and it has been re-arranged for everything from viola to flute. This was the first time I had heard it for violin solo and string orchestra, in an arrangement by Dobrinka Tabakova.

I have to really feel sorry for the good people of Manchester, who aren't getting this work in their version of the concert, and will be missing a real treat.

Tabakova has created a twenty-minute Schubert violin concerto, here given full advocacy by Thomas Gould. It starts out with all the flair of the Mendelssohn (yes, it's that good), has a first-class Schubert tune in the haunting slow movement, and is only let down by an adequate but less emotionally strong finale.

I wouldn't be surprised if it gets recorded, and is a big hit.

Thinking about it afterwards, the plot of the ballet for which Appalachian Spring was written is in fact a wedding in Pennsylvania. At its heart is the great hymn tune, 'Tis a Gift to be Simple. Maybe, after all, this was in fact the Camerata's secret wedding message to William and Kate.

MUSIC CUTS; TRIO BECOMES DUO, THREE OPERAS SLASHED TO ONE

2011-04-13T22:27:00.000+01:00

Peter Cropper

Martin Roscoe

Many of us thought it was too good to be true when Glyndebourne announced that it would put Stoke on Trent on its touring list. Turns out it was.
Glyndebourne on Tour has announced that instead of a week of world class opera, we're getting just one opera in December, La Boheme.

It's my (and everybody's) favourite opera -- but we saw this production in 2004 and since then even the touring Eastern Europeans have given us a good performance of it.

Glyndebourne is blaming its decision on poor audience figures and Arts Council cuts.

Now cuts are, of course, a brilliant way of getting rid of inconvenient expenditure, if you don't want to trek from Sussex to the far north.

The poor turnout can be partly explained by last year's appalling weather during that particular December week. But there's also a publicity gap; time and again I find myself telling people who go to Manchester or Birmingham about the things Stoke-on-Trent has to offer.

Mike Lloyd's Stoke on Trent Festival has proved you CAN attract and build an audience for classical music. As I remarked the other day, more people saw the last BBC Philharmonic concert in Stoke-on-Trent than in Manchester.

It's also noticeable that the Glyndebourne cuts only apply to Stoke-on-Trent; none of the other venues share the pain.

Yet places like Woking and Wimbledon, also on the tour, should not be getting any subsidy at all. The suburbanites there have ready access to vast amounts of opera in London; all the subsidy does is make it easier for Glyndebourne to compete with the Royal Opera and English National Opera (not to mention things like Holland Park Opera).

Here in Stoke on Trent, we really need that help. It's interesting that Glyndebourne is to carry on educating schools in North Staffordshire about the value of opera, just as it takes it away from them. No doubt that's to do with the way the grants are structured.

I don't imagine the council, perceived by the government as both left wing and ineffectual, will be able or would want to make an effective protest against the Glyndebourne decision. But YOU should, if you have any interest at all in the cultural life of Staffordshire. I suspect Glyndebourne needs little excuse to pull out of Stoke-on-Trent altogether.

Music In The Round, based in Sheffield, has also been hit by the Arts Council cuts. It's received a grant smaller than last year and a fifth smaller than it wanted.

We were assured, however, that it was illness and not cuts that led to the Cropper/Welsh/Roscoe trio being replaced by the Cropper/Roscoe duo at the New Vic. We all wish the cellist, Moray Welsh, a speedy recovery.

Pity; I was really looking forward to the lovely but rarely heard Tchaikovsky trio, which makes up for the rubbish 2nd and 3rd piano concertos (oh all right, I'll give you the second movement of the 2nd.) Remind to hear it in Holmes Chapel on October 22nd, by which time Mr Welsh should have recovered, we hope.

But I’m sorry, Moray, we weren’t at all short-changed. Peter Cropper told us he’d only learnt of the problem at nine the morning of the concert, and he admitted he’d chosen works he and his colleague Martin Roscoe would enjoy playing. But that meant we enjoyed them too.

Arguably, there are more masterpieces written for the combination of violin and piano than for trio, and Peter Cropper and Martin Roscoe played four of them. I am in their debt for introducing me to Mozart’s violin sonata K304, which, it turns out, has one of the master’s greatest tunes in the slow movement.

And their playing of the Franck sonata, the best thing he ever wrote, was magic.

They enjoyed egging each other on, and joshing each other (Cropper kept moving his stand to make sure he really was playing in the round. He said he’d asked where he should move it to next after the interval, and Roscoe had suggested the foyer....)

It was two old mates doing what they loved best. It could have been flying pigeons; it happened to be making wonderful music.

Moray Welsh’s absence has given me a great idea.

Perhaps if Glyndebourne left out a few of the minor characters from Handel’s Rinaldo and Donizetti’s Don Pasquale they could bring to Stoke-on-Trent all the operas they’re taking to Woking, Milton Keynes, Norwich, Plymouth and Wimbledon.

THE OTHER HAYDN; A FAMILY AFFAIR FROM THE BARBARA WALTON SINGERS

2011-04-10T09:31:00.000+01:00

Michael Haydn

Music often runs in families. My own dear father was noted for tickling the ivories at the tennis club; my sister is a very good violinist and I do a celebrated Chopsticks.

Mathias Haydn was a wheelwright by trade, but he played the harp. The eldest son Josef was a musical genius and one of the greatest composers of the eighteenth century; but his brother Michael, now almost forgotten, earned his living as a musician in Salzburg for more than forty years (and at least until 1800 was probably better known there than Josef, who worked miles away in the remote Esterhazy castle.)

The Barbara Walton singers were kinder to Michael than history has been by devoting a concert in Stoke Minster to what they called "The Other Haydn."

In fact, the concert opened with a bright, brilliant and bold bit of Weber, one of Michael Haydn's students, and the first half closed with the concerto for orchestra and natural trumpet by Michael Haydn's friend Leopold Mozart.

Adrian Woodward, trumpet player with the small but splendid 18th Century Sinfonia, gave us a fascinating talk on how his instrument worked, and demonstrated how to get something delightful from a bit of pipe with a couple of holes in it.

He explained that the natural trumpet was trumped in the 18th century by the clarinet. So maybe, given their difficult relationship, it isn't pure coincidence that Leopold wrote a natural trumpet concerto and one of his son's best works was a clarinet concerto.

So what of Michael Haydn? Well, kind though the Barbara Walton singers had been, they were also very unfair by opening the second half with the Little Organ Mass by his brother Josef. Quite simply, in invention and imagination it was in a different league, and even the glorious trumpets and drums of the final Missa Sancti Gabrielis by Michael Haydn failed to convince.

But it was a brave and clever venture by artistic director and conductor David Burrowes, who gave a convincing and authoritative reading of music which can't have been at all familiar. Natalie Windsor's clear and tuneful soprano shone brightly, Ann Wetton's contralto and Michael Redfern's bass voices gave a firm grounding to the sound, and as always, Glyn Aubrey's ringing tenor was very welcome.

The Barbara Walton singers were strong and secure, as if they had been singing this music all their life.

The musical gene goes on, by the way. My nephew is a wonderful flute player, and if I don't manage to stop them, my sons play the ukelele.

STEPHEN SEALS SEASON; NOBU LOOKS TO HANLEY

2011-04-01T10:33:00.000+01:00

Stoke-on-Trent's music lovers were out in force at the Forum in Hanley for the final piano recital in the Harding Trust season. Hard times do not faze them; you might be surprised to learn that 350 more people saw the BBC Philharmonic's last concert at the Victoria Hall in Hanley than at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester the next night.

But then, we keep getting stars as shiny as Stephen Hough, whose concert displayed every colour from barnstorming to heartbreaking. Two days ago he wowed Philadelphia.

Last time he was in town, some fifteen months ago, I commented that his programme was like a sandwich. Here, too, the crusty bread of Beethoven's Moonlight sonata and Liszt's B minor sonata were wrapped around some very exotic but tasty Scriabin and Janacek.

His Beethoven was a very fleet feat; indeed, I worried for him as he launched into the fearsome final movement. But it wasn't too fast at all, simply exhilarating.

This time, Stephen Hough spoke to us with a few very perceptive words about the concert. The items were all, he said, strange sonatas -- works which didn't follow conventional rules.

Janacek's sonata "From the Street" was bound to be a little odd since he threw it in the Vltava River; only the first two movements survive. In its way, it was as revelatory as the last Janacek work we heard in Hanley -- his opera Jenufa brought to us by Glyndebourne.

Then we had Scriabin's fourth and fifth sonatas. Stephen Hough told us that Scriabin's music was like updated Chopin, and that helped me follow what could be quite weird and rambling (though gloriously played).

The Liszt was quite exceptional; did the composer himself play it with such majesty and authority?

What seemed plain throughout the concert was that Stephen Hough was enjoying himself as much as we were enjoying him, and as if to underline this, he played no fewer than three encores -- Chopin, Ravel and Debussy.

Our cup ran over, which seemed a good way to end a season.

Incidentally, Hanley's star is rising in the East as well. You may remember that the pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii, Nobu to his friends and fans, who has the status of a rock star in Japan, made his British debut at the Victoria Hall last December. The photographs of that concert adorn his latest CD, which is selling like hot cakes in Japan.
So will he return to Hanley? Watch this space....

BBC PHILHARMONIC RUSSIAN TO ENTERTAIN

2011-03-25T23:13:00.000Z

ALBAN GERHARDT

Emerson, Lake and Palmer used to open their concerts with Stravinsky's Firebird suite, so why not the BBC Philharmonic? I only know this because I accidentally bought the pop group's live album in a sale, and wore out the opening track.
Why it works so well as an opener is that it progresses from very soft to very, very loud. On most discs, if you set the level so you can hear the opening notes you'll have the neighbours banging on the wall come the final chords.

Hearing it live at the Victoria Hall in Hanley was therefore a very fulfilling experience, with every subtle dynamic clearly audible, thanks not least to some fine conducting from the BBC Philharmonic's new chief conductor, Juanjo Mena. It'll be interesting to see how the BBC Radio 3 engineers cope with its range.

Then we heard the well-known cello concerto by Wilhelm Fitzenhagen. What? You've never come across him?

What happened was that Tchaikovsky was undergoing one of his many personal crises when he wrote his Variations on a Rococo Theme for Cello and Orchestra, so he left it to the cello soloist, Fitzenhagen (or Fitzhagen -- both forms seem to be used indiscriminately), to get it ready for publication.

Imagine his surprise to discover that the cellist had not only scrapped one entire movement, but switched the order around and changed a lot of the linking material.

As is normally the case, Juano Mena and Alban Gerhardt played the Fitzhagen version -- it wasn't until 2004 that the original was even published in the West.

It's Tchaikovsky pretending to be Mozart, and sometimes can seem less than the sum of its parts. But Gerhardt brought a loving sweetness to it which made it very attractive.

It would be nice to hear it as Tchaikovsky intended, though.

It was great to hear the final item, Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, in the same concert as the Firebird. Rimsky taught Stravinsky, and hearing the works together made it suddenly clear just how much the student learnt from his master -- the spotlighting of solo instruments, the big, lush moments, the exotic eastern melodies.

Both works gave ample opportunity to the BBC Philharmonic to demonstrate just what a bunch of soloists they are.

Juanjo Mena conducted with his body as well as his soul. Gianandrea Noseda, the Phil's previous chief, is a hard act to follow, but I wouldn't like to bet on who would win Strictly Come Dancing.

I see that the progressive rock band Yes used the Firebird to open concerts as well, and one Vincent Montana, Jr, recorded a disco version in 1977 with the Salsoul Orchestra, calling the piece "Magic Bird of Fire". I'm rather glad I didn't buy that one.

HANDEL WITH CARE AS CONDUCTOR SAYS GOODBYE

2011-03-20T10:30:00.000Z

Matthew Willis

Saturday night's performance of Handel's Messiah at the Victoria Hall in Hanley was by way of being a farewell to conductor Matthew Willis. He's been the much loved and respected conductor of the Keele Bach Choir for the past ten years, though he's still only in his mid-thirties.

His musical star is rising rapidly, and he feels he has to follow it to the Big City. But at least he left North Staffordshire with a memorable performance; this really was Handel with care.

Actually, Matthew Willis must know this work intimately. I see from the archives that he conducted it at the age of just 20 at St John's, Smith Square, in London -- and that was said to have been a highly acclaimed performance.

How clever of Handel to write something that works just as well as a Christmas oratorio -- which is how we heard it from the Ceramic City Choir last December -- as an Easter one. And you can perform it with a choir of a hundred and thirty and a small orchestra, as the Ceramics did, or with fewer than fifty singers and an orchestra of more than twenty, the excellent Northern Chamber Orchestra, like the Keele Bach Choir.

The Keele advantage was that all the performers could fit on to the small stage of the Victoria Hall, and the back seats and organ could be screened off, improving the acoustics. Even better was that the four parts of the choir were split up across the stage, separating them by space as well as music.

And it wasn't until the final Amen that I realised the soloists were cleverly seated at the front of each of their choirs, so they could lead out their troops into that complex interweaving of notes.

Matthew Willis was alert to every nuance of the music, and the whole performance had the dramatic force of a Handel opera.

Those soloists were all exceptional, though I found the rich and deep alto voice of Louise Poole most to my liking. Soprano Helena Dix was bright and sparkling; tenor Sam Furness forthright and full, and George von Bergen's bass unusually expressive.

A big hand, too, to assistant music director Treona Holden, who wielded a portable organ to good effect. I realise this was completely authentic, but it's down to my romantic tendencies that I'd occasionally have liked to hear the big bass sound of the Victoria Hall organ.

It was interesting to notice how many of the audience refused to accept tradition and stand up for the Hallelujah Chorus. Matthew Willis told us the tradition started because this was the moment when George the Second entered after supper, though other versions of this story are also available (the one I heard was that he woke up suddenly, thought it was all over and stood up to leave.).

He insisted we all stood and sang the Hallelujah Chorus together. It was not as easy as it sounds; and that, I guess, is as good a description of any of the art of Matthew Willis.

NEXT Friday you can get lost at sea as the new conductor of the BBC Philharmonic, Juanjo Mena, shows off with Rimsky's Shehezerade, as part of the Stoke-on-Trent festival.

WARM WELCOME FOR SIBERIAN SWANS

2011-03-18T10:37:00.002Z

KRASNOYARSK

Like swallows, the Russian State Ballet of Siberia head south every winter. And some of them, when they alight on the stage of the Regent theatre in Hanley, turn into swans.

Apparently the recent success of the film Back Swan has caused a lot of people to remember just how much they like classical ballet, and I'm sure the Siberian performance of Swan Lake on Saturday will be well attended.

But I was please to see a big turnout for the much more interesting, more modern, and less frequently seen opening ballet, Romeo and Juliet

It was worth it for Juliet alone. The lovely Anna Aulle has been a principal dancer with the Siberians since my records began six years ago. But her grace and agility are as remarkable as ever, and she easily gave the impression of a girl of the young age Shakespeare specifies.

Her Romeo, Ivan Karnaukhov, was strong, athletic and handsome, and they seemed to generate some real warmth when they were dancing together.

As we know, the devil has all the best tunes, and it seems all the best dances, too; Kirill Litvinenko's Tybalt was remarkably physical.

Then there's Prokofiev's music, which is absolutely thrilling. The live orchestra under Anatoliy Chepurmoy was a little rough and ready, but that only made the music even more exciting and Russian.

The costumes were bright and colourful, but distinctly odd at times. The Prince of Verona appeared to have copied his gear from Elton John in the Seventies, while the moment when the ladies of the court stripped off their flowing robes to reveal latex playsuits was memorable.

The fights were highly stylised, so not very exciting, and there were an awful lot of strange hand movements. At one point it looked like they wanted to semaphore the story.

I thought the massed gang of death figures just clumsy; the point was hammered home rather than pointed up (and if the poison Juliet took was only meant to mimic death, why were they there at all?)

No matter; it was an enjoyable evening with great music and some lovely moments from the principals.

Consider this; temperature in Stoke on Trent, a mild nine degrees; spring is in the air. In Krasnoyarsk, which the Russian State Ballet of Siberia calls home, it's minus 16. But at least the snow is only "light". No wonder they keep coming back.

(Sleeping Beauty tonight, Friday; Swan Lake tomorrow, Saturday; but I'm all danced out so it's Handel's Messiah for me tomorrow night. )

(LATER) The costume department responsible for Sleeping Beauty was obviously frightened by a cavalier. So big are the lace collars Charles the first would have laughed his head off, which I suppose would have saved the executioner a trip.

But, as I observed in 2006 when this production last came to Stoke on Trent, the tutu count is high, shiny and multi-coloured. The principals work hard -- a different prince since 2006, but the same reliable Princess Aurora, Maria Kuimova.

The musicians were perhaps more at home with Tchaikovsky than Prokofiev, and there's so much good music even outside the big tunes we know and love.

On the way to the show I heard comedian Holly Walsh on Radio 4 extolling the educational virtues of fairy stories. Sleeping Beauty, she said, had taught her that a kiss from a stranger was a good thing when you've passed out.

LEWIS SHINES IN SOLD-OUT SCHUBERT

2011-03-11T10:11:00.000Z

What pianist Paul Lewis likes to do is stick to one composer at a time. He refines his performances with a series of concerts before committing them to disc. It allows him to get right inside the skin of a composer; and for the audience, it's normally a revelatory treat.

Five years ago, the last time he was in Stoke-on-Trent, he was in Beethoven mode. The Forum theatre in Hanley became part of recording history, because his concert there was one of the performances which helped him produce a series of acclaimed discs of the sonatas.

Those discs were on sale in the interval at the Forum on Thursday night, and they'd all gone before we'd drunk our coffee.

Now his obsession is Schubert, and on Thursday he was back, once more in the Harding Trust piano recital series, with a concert devoted to that tragic figure. This latest tour began in February in Southampton, and he'll be visiting Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland and Japan and Australia over the next two years. He's going to15 cities, including London, Liverpool, Oxford, Bristol, Perth, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Melbourne, Rotterdam, Bologna, Florence, the Schubertiade in Schwarzenberg -- oh, and Hanley..

The concert was completely sold out, and half as many customers again were turned away.

And all this is for a pianist who believes absolutely in the importance of the music, not the performer. He refuses to be any sort of a showman, and plays as if the music is coming straight from Schubert to us.

Wonderful though that this, I would love to have heard his views on the music he was playing, which he must have researched thoroughly.

This was all late Schubert -- the apparently unfinished (but maybe just abandoned) D840 "Relique" sonata, the D946 Three Pieces, and the D850 sonata. The composer had already been diagnosed with the disease which would kill him at 31, and beneath these delightful melodic surfaces are deep, dark undertows where monsters lurk.

Paul Lewis played the music with the familiarity of long acquaintance, pointing every phrase perfectly and revealing those hidden depths.

For an encore, we had the delightful little Hungarian melody.

I understand he's already agreed to come back next season, when he will be halfway through his Schubert odyssey; book your tickets now, and start saving your pennies for the discs which look like doing for Schubert what he's already done for Beethoven. And remember, you heard it here in Hanley first.

NEXT A multi-town collaboration brings Poulenc's Gloria and Rutter's Magnificat to St Michael's, Coppenhall, Crewe tomorrow (Saturday.) Uttoxeter Choral Society and Sandbach Voices come together to apply more than a hundred voices to the music. But in Hanley, next week is ballet week. On Tuesday, the streets will be cluttered with tots in tutus as English Youth Ballet searches for 100 talented boys and girls to take roles in a professional production of The Nutcracker with an audition on stage at the Regent Theatre. The Russian State Ballet and Orchestra of Siberia are making their annual pilgrimage to the Regent to give us Romeo and Juliet (Thursday), Sleeping Beauty (Thursday), and Swan Lake (Friday). Rumour has it the film Black Swan has created a huge demand for proper ballet; I'll be checking the takings. And since it never rains musically but it pours, Saturday also sees a not-to-be- missed performance of Handel's Messiah by the Keele Bach Choir and Matthew Willis.

GERMAN TRIO TAKES THE BISCUIT

2011-03-08T11:26:00.000Z

Gottfried Leibniz was a late 17th century philosopher and mathematician, who even designed what looks very much like a computer. He declared that music "is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting".
He also worked out that we live in the best of all possible worlds -- and for this had the mickey taken out of him unmercifully by the French philosopher Voltaire in his book Candide.

But his work on calculus is still, apparently, important today, though not to me. I failed the A level.

He worked mostly in the German city of Hannover, whence our own dear royal family, and that, it seems is where students Nicholas Rimmer (a former BBC Young Musician piano finalist, born in Wigan), violinist Hwa-Won Pyun and cellist Lena Wignjosaputro got together to form the Leibniz Trio in 2005.

They've just won the important German Music Competition in Bonn, (it sounds very grand -- a music competition for the whole of Germany, no less) which includes cash and a CD deal.

Last night the Leibniz Trio pleasured the human minds at the New Vic (and such a pity there weren't more of them.)

What was amazing was their total grasp of the three different styles of work -- Viennese classical with the Haydn A flat trio Hob XV:14, French impressionist with the Ravel trio (a friend said it was like hearing Van Gogh in music), and Bohemian with Dvorak's F minor Op.65.

The Haydn was appropriately perky in movements one and three, but poignantly pizzicato in the second.

Its first English performance was, appropriately enough, in Hanover square, with the piano part played by the boy wonder Hummel. Haydn was so moved he lifted the boy up and gave him a kiss in front of the audience. Maybe that's why the piano trios Hummel wrote when he grew up are among his finest works.

The Dvorak, written soon after the death of his mother, was dark and melodic.

But for me, the revelation was the Ravel, which gripped from beginning to end. It was one of those occasions when you thought; "Oh, right. So that's how it's meant to sound."

The group were talent spotted by Peter Cropper himself and signed up for his Music in the Round series. That gives them quite a seal of approval; they are like John the Baptists (Johns the Baptist?) to Peter Cropper, who is at the New Vic on April 13 with his own Cropper/Welsh/Roscoe Trio.

The name of this trio may also, of course, be a tribute to Germany's most popular biscuits, Leibniz-Keks. The group did look hungry for success.

NEXT Paul Lewis who wowed us with Beethoven brings us Schubert on Thursday at the city museum. But it's apparently sold out. You could beg.

PS I am occasionally available now on dead wood as well.... The Staffordshire Evening Sentinel is using a heavily edited version of these reviews. My fame, like my waistline, is spreading.

MAGNIFICENT MOZART POWERFULLY PLAYED

2011-02-26T10:58:00.000Z

Mozart was probably trying -- as usual -- to impress and confound his Dad who was in the audience when he first played his startlingly original piano concerto number 20 one February day in 1785.

This dark and dramatic work is, for me, Magnificent Mozart, and, happily, that was the name given to the latest concert in the Stoke-on-Trent Festival series.

The English Chamber Orchestra, with Stephanie Gonley directing from the leader's chair, were awake to all the concerto's sudden contrasts and jarring cross-rhythms.

John Lill, at the keyboard, played it with unfussy precision, opening out into magnificence in the cadenzas.

But when I conduct this in my front room, I have to say I want even more passion. Luckily, I have an amplifier with knobs on.

The concert had opened with a little Divertimento, in that old cultured, elegant style the new concerto seems to replace.

I can't ever recall hearing that at a concert before, and it showed off the high quality of the English Chamber Orchestra's strings. Some of the first discs I bought -- those big black things -- feature this orchestra, and its strings are just as good now as then.

Unusually, John Lill came back after the interval to play Mozart's final piano sonata. His precise placing of quiet notes in the slow movement was thrilling in the big space of the Victoria Hall, as he broke the concentrated silence.

The concert ended with Mozart's final symphony, number 41, The Jupiter. Here the contrasts and rhythms were even more pointed than in the concerto, with Stephanie Gonley driving her colleagues hard, bobbing and weaving in her chair. The drums and trumpets which had been, for me, too muted in the concerto here sang out over the orchestra in triumphant conclusion.

Mozart's father Leopold, damning with faint praise, declared the concerto excellent. But more importantly, the great Joseph Haydn was in the audience as well, and he told Leopold his son was the greatest composer he knew. That seems like a pretty conclusive seal of approval.

THE MUSIC STUDENTS CAME OUT FOUR BY FOUR

2011-02-16T22:29:00.001Z

You probably have to find three musical friends before you can even apply to the Royal Northern College of Music these days. For if the students go in one by one, they come out four by four.

Off the top of my head, I can name three world-class string quartets made up of recent graduates -- the Navarra, the Finzi and the Elias. Last night we heard the latest, the prizewinning Heath (class of 2002.)

They managed to squeeze an appearance at Concerts at Keele in between the Wigmore Hall, Madrid, Vienna, and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, not to mention a tour of North Italy next month. .

They opened with the Haydn F minor quartet, Op. 20 No. 5. Regular readers will know I recently treated myself to a boxed set of all the Haydn quartets. I've come to the conclusion that though they’re all worth the money, Haydn sometimes finds an extra strain of inspiration (particularly in a minor key). This is one example.

The Heath Quartet were punchy and vigorous, yet delicate and melodic in the beautiful third movement, which could be an operatic aria. It allowed Oliver Heath to wind his solo violin lines around the lovely siciliano accompaniment.

I love much of Benjamin Britten's music (the violin concerto, the sea interludes, Simple Symphony etc) but find some of it difficult -- for instance, his first string quartet, which came next. The quartet plainly think it's a masterpiece and play it with absolute authority. I must have another go at it.

And finally, the Brahms string quintet (with the help of Adam Newman on the extra viola) revealed a huge hole in my musical knowledge. I not only don't have a disc of it, I've never heard it before. I'm confident that, thanks to the Heath, I heard it at its best, but I shall be round the shop in the near future with my pennies clutches in my sweaty hand. .

It's too late for the Heath Quartet, who've just made their first disc. But if I ran a record company, I'd be up at the Royal College with contract and pen, waiting for the next four through the exit.

BOHEMIAN NIGHT AT THE JUBILEE HALL

2011-02-14T10:20:00.000Z

I seem to recall that the last time I was in Stoke's rather beautiful art deco Jubilee Hall was at a lunch given by the city to celebrate a visit by the man who was expected to be our next prime minister, one Neil Kinnock. As we all know, that turned out badly, and the steak dinner didn't live up to expectations either.

However, the North Staffordshire Symphony Orchestra managed to exceed expectations in its concert at the hall on Saturday night.

The highlight was a lively and forthright performance of the Dvorak cello concerto, with soloist Graham Morris. He was quoted recently in the Sentinel as saying the wonderful melodies just get better and better each time you hear them, but I take the opposite view; I am so scared of finding this wonderful work too familiar that I don't dare play it at all on the hi-fi.

So I was able to take full advantage of Graham Morris's dramatic, clean and loving way with it, backed up by a North Staffs Symphony Orchestra at the top of its game.

The acoustic in the Jubilee Hall can be challenging, since it exposes every note played and has little resonance. The upside is that you could hear every nuance of Graham Morris's fine tone.

The evening had opened with Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Festival Overture, which revealed the NSSO's brass might have stepped straight off the Russian steppes.

And all hail the orchestra for ending with that rare masterpiece, Dvorak's fifth symphony. Conductor Peter Stallworthy whipped them into producing a real dramatic impact in the finale, which banished memories of the rather tentative violin playing in the previous movement.

At the end of the concert, the orchestra's president, Munroe Blair, appealed for more people to give money by becoming Friends, as times are so hard at the councils which have been their main support.

He insisted the orchestra -- which began in 1903 as the Potteries Orchestral Society in a shed in Burslem -- would continue nonetheless.

But you can’t help feeling that after all that time, there shouldn’t be any threat at all to such a unique organisation.

NEXT I've been neglecting Keele, so I'll be there on Wednesday for the Heath String Quartet and an extra viola...

NEW PIANO HITS THE RIGHT NOTE

2011-02-03T23:00:00.001Z

Artur Pizarro doesn't just play grand pianos. The Portuguese virtuoso collects them as well. Apparently he has a Bechstein, a Broadwood, an Estonia, a Gaveau, a Longman & Broderip, a Petrof, and a Steinway.

Where on earth does he keep them all? Does he go round and play a sonata on each one every day to keep them in trim? And who does the dusting?

For his recording of Granados' Goyescas, he chose a Blüthner, but when he played the work last night at Hanley's Forum Theatre in the Harding Trust Piano series he drove a Yamaha CFX.

It was only wheeled on to the concert platform last year after twenty years of development. I gather it costs about the same as a luxury sports car, and indeed, it was fast, responsive, open and beautifully finished.

Artur Pizarro plainly adores this music, which he told us he remembers his grandmother playing. It paints pictures from the deep south, beguiling and languid.

The second half of the concert was devoted to Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, and lovely though it was, I couldn't banish the memory of just how striking it is in its original orchestral dress.

For an encore, we got Ravel's Vocalise without the vocals. Altogether, a concert of unusual music, lovingly played.

Yamaha say "The CF Series pianos are characterized by a wide palette of tonal colours and the ability to create the most subtle expressive nuances." Yes, well, if Artur Pizarro is playing; if it's me, maybe not so much.

NEXT I'm indebted to members of the University of the Third Age Musical Appreciation class for what seems to be a strange and rather unpublicised move by Vue cinemas... Tuesday night they're showing a live broadcast from Paris of the ballet Caligula (music, it seems, partly by Vivaldi); and on March 5th and 8th they're showing the Royal Opera's version of Carmen in 3D (watch out for the bulls!!!) Technology, eh.
Percussion players O Duo are at Keele Concerts Society on Wednesday, and cellist Graham Morris is playing the Dvorak concerto with the North Staffordshire symphony orchestra on Saturday night.

BOURNE HAS A BALL; CINDERELLA AT THE REGENT

2011-02-02T10:33:00.000Z

Last week I went to see Black Swan, and was deeply disappointed. The film piles cliché upon cliché, both visually and in the stilted dialogue. There's actually very little dancing in the film, which is a good thing. I bow to no-one in my admiration for the lovely Natalie Portman, but she plainly isn't a dancer. And the film ends with quite the worst recording of a symphony orchestra I've ever heard (though that may have been the fault of the cinema.)

Suffice it to say that in my house, we give TV films a ten-minute test, and Black Swan would have failed it if we'd been at home.

No; save your pennies for some real dancing. Cinderella at the Regent Theatre in Hanley is a vivid, exciting, stylish bundle of tricks with all the stops pulled out.

Matthew Bourne's particular genius is to re-imagine famous works in different dress -- Carmen in a Californian garage, Nutcracker in a children's home, Swan Lake with men instead of women. Cinderella is set in wartime London, with the main characters taking on some of the aspects of movie stars -- the wicked stepmother as Joan Crawford, the prince as an RAF pilot reminiscent of David Niven in A Matter of Life and Death, even a very obvious reference to Brief Encounter at the end.

Oh-- and this Cinderella has three brothers (one of them a foot fetishist) as well as two not-so-ugly sisters.

That it works is partly down to some breathtaking sets from Lez Brotherston. The impact and movement is really extraordinary; everything is there, from an apparently fully operational steam train to a bomb-blasted Café de Paris which rebuilds itself before your very eyes.

Then there's the music. I've written before about the poor quality of the sound when a troupe can't afford to field a full orchestra. I remember saying that the theatre had to realise it was up against the cinema, where multi-speaker sound is an everyday experience.

Here, Paul Groothuis, the sound designer, has gone for subtle but effective surround sound and what is clearly high-grade reproduction equipment. The orchestral recording is full, deep and precise, and indeed, because the whole production is so cinematic, it's almost as satisfying as a real orchestra would be.

But it needs to be, because Prokofiev's music is simply wonderful. It's every bit as good as the music for the better known Romeo and Juliet (the theme music for The Apprentice) with memorable melodies and exciting scoring. You won't be whistling it, for the themes develop in far from simple ways, but you will be plagued by memories of it as I am now. Luckily, I have a disc.

And so to the actual dancing, which is that peculiar Bourne beast, somewhere south of ballet but north of musical theatre. There are flashes of genius in all three acts; Cinderella's dance with a dummy which turns into her dream pilot, the bit at the Café de Paris where she dances with three men at once, the Salvation Army couple in the realistic-looking underground station; I could go on.

Kerry Biggin is suitably plain as Cinders but sparkly as Cinderella, and she always moves like a ballerina; her guardian angel Christopher Marney dances up a storm; Sam Archer as Harry, the pilot, is impressive in his character studies (as a dummy, for instance); Michela Meazza’s desperate wooing of the young men at the Café de Paris as stepmother Sybil is very well observed.

As always, though, Bourne's dancers really triumph when the stage is full of movement; marvel at the sheer energy on show, but blink and you'll miss some clever action at the edges.

One final thing about Cinderella, not the movie; not only is it in 3D so real it could be actual people up there, but you don't even have to wear those silly spectacles.

JANUARYITIS HITS VIVALDI'S FOUR SEASONS

2011-01-29T11:49:00.000Z

Ee, I've been bad. I normally do get a touch of Januaryitis, but I've been ill for the whole month this year. It started as a cough, went on to be a sore throat, reverted to a hacking pestilence and ended up with a massive snot-rattling cold.

Things got so bad I dropped in to the drop-in centre in Hanley one afternoon. A lady doctor who seemed not to speak a lot of English didn’t actually tell me what was wrong with me, but doled out some antibiotics of such a basic type they tasted mouldy; Fleming may have had a hand in their production.

I went to my own doctor as well. "Oh yes," he said, "I felt so bad with it I had to take yesterday off." Not a lot of hope for a cure there, then.

This may be why the first impression of the European Union Chamber Orchestra in Hanley last night was --well -- underwhelming. Fifteen players in the Keele chapel where we last saw this orchestra back in October is one thing; but fifteen in the Victoria Hall, designed for the big romantic orchestras of the nineteenth century, is quite another.

I've also got used to the raw, beefy sound of baroque instruments in music of this period. Maybe it was where I was sitting, but the bass line was very weak and the harpsichord continuo didn't make much of an impression.

Oh all right, the disease is making me grumpy. What's that? Even grumpier, then.

For the concert opened with a perfectly fine, if very modern, performance of Vivaldi's concerto Il gardellino, the Goldfinch.

The soloist was Daniela Koch, in her early 20s, who's already won all sorts of prizes for her flute playing. I'm sure the Red Priest himself would have welcomed her into his orchestra in Venice (though of course the girls there were the unwanted children of the aristocracy).

In this work, and in Bach's second suite, she was a model of accurate finger work, superb breath control, and fluid phrasing. This was elegant and light-fingered playing, culminating in the famous Bach badinerie at exactly the right speed to make it seem breath-taking without losing any of the notes.

In between the orchestra played a fairly rare piece of Mozart, his divertimento K138. Again, it was a very elegant performance, but I could have done with a lot more pointing in that great second movement tune.

The second half was devoted to Nicola Benedetti playing the whole of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, and here I got that feeling of improvisation, of the soloist creating the work as she went along, that I missed in the first half.

Maybe, of course, it's the way Vivaldi wrote it; but Benedetti's fine and fiery work at the Strad must also be a factor.

The audience had determined not to applaud until the end, but couldn't help breaking out into spontaneous applause at the end of the presto of Summer. Benedetti was plainly please about this, and she repeated that astonishing central movement of Winter, where the soloist spins her line above plucked strings, as an encore.

I last saw her playing this at the Lichfield Festival last year. There, the sound was compromised by the huge echo of the cathedral, and the continuity of the movements broken by the reading of poems between them. So it was very welcome to hear the work complete in this way, though of course, Vivaldi may have wanted a movement performed every Tuesday at daybreak. Nobody knows. So much for historical authenticity.

And don’t think I can’t hear you muttering at the back there. What I’ve got isn’t man flu at all; it’s more like Superman flu. And it's left me feeling as if I still have Kryptonite rammed up my nose.

NEXT The Smetana Trio are playing Beethoven, Dvorak and Brahms at the Abbotsholme Arts Society on Monday night; Alexandra Dariescu is the pianist at the Keele Concerts Society on Wednesday, and Portugal's Artur Pizarro is playing on Thursday night at the Forum in the city museum. Or you could squeeze into the Met Studio in the Stafford Gatehouse on Thursday to hear some violin and piano music from members of the Manchester Camerata. This will be a bit of light relief for them after tonight's (Saturday's) massive live performance of Beethoven's ninth -- choral -- symphony; if you can't make it to Manchester, you can catch the final movement on your computer via Medici tv (you could invite a few friends round to sing along....)

But the big event next week is Matthew Bourne's new staging of Cinderella at the Regent; it starts on Tuesday at eight with matinees on Wednesday and Saturday. Although the music's by Prokofiev, the ballet is re-staged in World War Two in London; it should be unmissable.

NOW WE'RE ALL STRAUSSED OUT

2011-01-14T12:04:00.001Z

Who'd have thought there would be enough Strauss lovers in Stoke-on-Trent to sustain two concerts full, six days apart?

Last week we had the Hallé with Forever Vienna; this week it was the Johann Strauss Gala at the Victoria Hall.

The orchestra was less than half the size, the percussion section replaced by a man with a drum kit, and the conductor, David Juritz, had to multitask, playing the violin as well as speaking to the audience.

But where the Hallé was aiming for the plush orchestral sound of a Viennese New year's Day concert, the Strauss Gala orchestra produced the sound of a ballroom band. And this was appropriate, for the major difference was the presence last night of eight dancers.

Their biographies reveal them all to be classically trained, which showed even though they were mainly ballroom dancing. Their whirls and flounces gained an added frisson from being performed so very close to the edge of the tiny Victoria Hall stage.

Helena Rose's frocks were bright and attractive, and from where I was sitting I could even see that the undergarments were entirely appropriate -- nineteenth century long frilly knickers.

Some considerable thought had been put in by choreographer Christopher Hampson to making sure every number had its own character. One featured early telephone dating -- quill pen dating, actually -- which goes tragically wrong when the boy runs off with the waiter; in another little tale, we see the conductor fall out with the percussionist over whether he should be playing "cuckoo" or "oocuck."

David Juritz last graced the Victoria Hall at the head of the Mozart Festival Orchestra, and he seemed to have grown immeasurably in confidence and style since then (well, a gruelling touring schedule of more than 25 dates back to back will do that for a man.) This time neither he nor his orchestra had to wear a wig, which must have been a welcome change. He justifiably got a big round of applause for his solo -- Kreisler's fake Bach praeludium.

The soprano Amy Freston managed at least three costume changes for her numbers, and because of the layout of the stage, she was able to bring an attractive sense of movement to her singing (appropriate, since she apparently trained first as a dancer.)

And in fact, there was little overlap between the Hallé and the Strauss Gala, apart from the obvious Blue Danube and Radetzky March, which just goes to show just how much Strauss wrote.

In fact, I did wonder if the show was going to break with tradition when the orchestra struck up the Radetzky at the end of the first half. But no, they simply played it at the end of the second half as well. David Juritz declared we were the most stylish clappers of their tour, insisting insincerely that he didn't say that to every audience. Still, I reckon that with a couple more goes, we could begin to clap in the right places.

I suppose that with André Rieu having five albums in the classical top ten at once the appetite for Strauss (what's more, among people who wouldn't normally go to a classical concert) has been well proved. Me, I've been fighting an uncontrollable urge to waltz around the kitchen while eating whipped cream. No more Strauss till next January, eh.

NEXT Next Wednesday sees a new joint venture as the Keele Concerts Society starts its new season... but at the New Vic Theatre in Newcastle. The outstanding chamber group Ensemble 360 -- performing in the round, you see what they did there -- is promising some lovely but unusual quintets by Howells and Stanford. On Saturday afternoon, Keele Bach Choir is preparing for its March performance of the Messiah by holding a Messiah Moment at Holy Trinity, Eccleshall. Next Wednesday's first Keele Concert actually at Keele features Eclipse, which apparently links early classical and gypsy music and includes a flamenco dancer. They certainly cast a net (castanet? see what I did there?) wide at Keele. And on Friday January 28 Daniela Koch and Nicola Benedetti are soloists in Vivaldi with the European Union Chamber Orchestra; that sounds like a winner.

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

2011-01-08T11:02:00.000Z

It's amazing how well the Hapsburgs, hereditary emperors of the massive Austro-Hungarian Empire, adjusted to democracy. When I covered European affairs for the BBC, Count Otto von Hapsburg was actually a member of the European parliament. A colleague asked one day if he'd caught the Austria-Hungary match on TV the night before.

"No," he replied, "who were we playing?"

Last night's concert in Hanley by the Hallé orchestra was called "Forever Vienna", but there was quite a bit from Budapest, the second city of the empire. Not least was the appearance of the cimbalom, a Hungarian instrument, under the capable hands of Chris Bradley, principal percussionist with the Orchestra of Opera North (who also proved to be a dab hand with a champagne cork).

The cimbalom appears to be a close cousin of the xylophone, which probably explains why it was hidden up the back of the orchestra with the rest of the percussion. This was a shame, for its pungent and unusual sound was a bit submerged. Pity the orchestra couldn't have managed Kodaly's lovely Hary Janos, in which the cimbalom is the star.

The MC for the evening was conductor Timothy Redmond. I confess I've never come across him before, but he has a big hit record in France with the RPO accompanying cellist Ophélie Gaillard in a collection of arrangements of pop classics ("Dreams", on the Aparte label.)

He proved to be an ideal music companion, confident and friendly, with some neat music stories (and plainly a special place for the Hungarian Emmerich Kalman, who I've also never heard of, but whose song "I hear gypsy fiddles" went through every Hungarian cliché in the book, apart, that is, from any gypsy fiddling. Strange. ).

His conducting was secure and lively, much more so than Franz Welser-Most, who conducted this year's New year's concert from Vienna, a man who looked on telly as if he'd had a hard New Year's Eve and just wanted it all to be over so he could go back to bed.

(And while we're on the subject, am I the only one who noticed just how much time the camera spent fawning on one member of the audience, the Emir of Qatar. His country had just been given the chance to stage the world cup and here he was being awarded two of the most hard-to-get seats in the world (they're handed out by lottery). Was it a two-for-one deal, perhaps?)

But I digress. One thing the Victoria Hall concert has that the Musikverein one doesn't is a singer, and in this case it was the celebrated Mary Plazas. She chose to use a little judicious amplification, but up against an orchestra of more than sixty it's not surprising. She gave us some of the obvious hits -- Lehar and Zeller -- as well as a few unexpected ones -- that Kalman number and Gershwin's slick "By Strauss."

As expected, we all clapped too loudly and in the wrong places throughout the Radetzky march, and went home thoroughly satisfied.

Well, maybe not. For there are now two sort of Johann Strauss in the world; first, the Hallé and Vienna Philharmonic approach, in which it's all about the music, and second, followers of the André Rieu way, involving dancers, fancy costumes and brightly lit sets.

Next Thursday, then, we get the second sort of Strauss, with a Johann Strauss Gala. Same hall, same music, different frocks.

Maybe it's a coalition plot to get us all waltzing into 2011 so we just won't notice the bad stuff. VAT going up? Give 'em more polkas!

CERAMIC CITY CHOIR CELEBRATES BIRTH OF THE BIG CHEESER

2010-12-12T12:06:00.000Z

My three-year-old granddaughter has recently been taught to sing Away in a Manger, incorporating the bit about Little Lord Cheeser asleep in the hay. Given that she has hated cheese ever since she discovered food came in different flavours, her willingness to sing this shows a great deal of seasonal goodwill to all men.

There was a lot of it around last night at the Victoria Hall in Hanley as well, as the Ceramic City Choir and Orchestra da Camera performed a well-drilled, straightforward, version of Handel's Messiah.

There is, of course, no right version, since everyone and his dad, Mozart included, has had a go at re-writing the work; but these days performances tend to be split between those with small, sprightly forces and those with huge choirs and full orchestras.

It seemed to me the Ceramic City Choir under the reliable Oliver Neal Parker had managed to both have its Christmas cake and eat it, with a tiny baroque-sized orchestra (smaller even than the numbers which first performed it in Dublin in 1741) reinforced by Ian Riddle's sensitive playing of the big Victoria Hall organ, using four soloists with experience in opera from this period, but with practically the full strength of the 130-strong membership of the choir in those glorious choruses.

The star soloist was undoubtedly our own Denise Leigh. I've seen her reported as saying that Handel is her favourite composer to sing, and her pure, ringing soprano, with very little vibrato, did him proud. Alto Yvonne Lea seemed less at ease, particularly in her lower register; perhaps because she seemed to be looking down at the score most of the time, she failed to project as hoped.

Joseph Cornwell's light tenor is ideally suited to Handel (indeed, he was on the disc of Acis and Galatea which won the Gramophone's baroque vocal award in 2000). Oliver Hunt is a founder of the award-winning Stile Antico and his bass was warm and agile.

Oliver Neal Parker kept the chorus on its toes, though there were some hairy moments in those final big fugues. It was at its best in the light and bright sound of "For Unto Us a Child in Born". It was uplifting and thrilling.

Messiah had its first run-through in Chester as Handel waited for the Holyhead boat to Dublin. This was something of a disaster, since the cathedral chorister who claimed to sight read admitted he didn't necessarily mean at first sight.

But the work was so big a hit in its first performances in Dublin that gentlemen were asked to come without swords and women without hoops in their dresses so more could be packed in to the hall. Handel, who had been deeply in debt, was delighted.

Alas, the Victoria Hall wasn't packed for last night's performance, though there were few hoops or swords in evidence. Nevertheless, it was an occasion much enjoyed by all concerned; there was a uniting sense of English history as we all stood dutifully for the Hallelujah chorus in a tradition stretching right back to George the second (who may have simply woken with a start and stood up to leave.)

I suppose I'd better get out and look for some Christmas presents. We tend to go for £10 presents in our family (for adults, that is; children can be spoilt rotten, particularly if they sing Away in a Manger.) I scored something of a triumph last year with my raid on the pound store; nine presents (the tenth pound went on wrapping paper.) We're still using the pens and the Hyacinth did grow in its glass vase.

I was hoping to do it again this year, but my wife has revealed a coup of her own. She's planning to get my present or presents from a charity shop. It could be an exciting Christmas.

NEXT Those of you who started humming as the orchestra struck up “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth” should be in St Mary’s Church in Nantwich on January 8 next year. Nantwich Choral Society have what they describe as a “Come and Sing” Messiah. I would be there myself if I wasn’t an absolute coward.

NOBU FEVER HITS HANLEY

2010-12-11T12:19:00.000Z

Many years ago at a posh do I sat next to a leading light of the West Midlands motor industry (when it still had a little left.) He'd drunk a lot of Scotch whisky with Japanese salarymen and had discovered why they were obsessed with Scotch but couldn't drink more than a glass without falling over.

In the ancient world, he pointed out, there were only two ways of making water safe to drink; to boil it, or use alcohol to kill the germs. The West had gone for the beer option, and built up a resistance to booze over the generations (though you'd be hard put to believe that in Hanley on a Saturday night); the Japanese had gone for tea, and therefore just couldn't take their drink.

I quote this story simply to reveal just how fascinated we are but how little we know about this modern, rich, democratic society which has almost nothing in common with America or Europe.

As well as strangely cruel TV game shows, it apparently has a large, thriving scene of western classical music, for instance; but the leading label, Avex Classics, in spite of its English name (derived from Audio Visual Experts) doesn't seem to be for sale in Britain.

This may explain why I've never heard of conductor Yutaka Sado, who has an exclusive recording agreement with this label, and pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii, who has made several recordings for it. However, Nobuyuki -- Nobu to his friends and fans, apparently -- has the status of a rock star in Japan; Time magazine called his acclaim "Nobu fever." His website is http://www.nobupiano1988.com/english/index.html.

We should be very honoured, then, that Nobu's first performance in the UK was last night at the Victoria Hall in Hanley, with the BBC Philharmonic. He played Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto with a great deal of finesse, always rhythmically alert, and highly responsive to orchestral dialogue, but with surprisingly little barnstorming. It was a fine, considered performance.

At 21, Nobu is quite small and looks younger than his age, but he obviously has fingers more than able to cope with Tchaikovsky's demands. He has a way of swaying his head as he plays which makes him look like he has an antenna for picking up the music from some celestial sound wave.

The audience at the Victoria Hall welcomed his performance with a roar and went on to grant him their ultimate accolade -- foot-stamping. He hugged his mentor Yutaka Sado, whose eyes seemed a little wet. This is nothing; at the Thirteenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, where he first came to the notice of western audiences, people leapt to their feet, and jurors were moved to tears

For, inevitably, any performance involving Nobuyuki Tsujii is bound to be an emotional experience. He has been blind from birth.

Nobu went on to play an encore he’d apparently written himself in a sort of crossover style, which I found less welcome (why not Gershwin if that‘s the sort of stuff he wants to play?)

Let's pass on to the rest of the concert. Yutaka Sado apparently conducts regularly in Europe, and is principal conductor of the Orchestra Lamoureux in France. But what's more remarkable is that he was once assistant to no less a person than Leonard Bernstein.

It obviously made an impression, for his conducting seems rather similar; big left-arm grabs and a tendency to leap at moments of high excitement. (I see they've issued a DVD of those wonderful old TV lectures Bernstein gave; I must ask Santa.)

He gave us Bedrich Smetana's Bartered Bride overture and Dvorak's ninth symphony -- from the New World. What unites them, of course, is their basis in Czech folk music, and Sado seemed to me to be very alive to the complex rhythms of that background (and rhythm was never far from Bernstein's genius, either.) These were very fine performances, and they allowed the BBC Phil's first class woodwind to show off as well.

I see a Japanese restaurant has opened up in Stoke, a town I never previously suspected of having a Japanese quarter, especially opposite Lidl. I must make an effort to get down there for a bit of raw fish.

Yet another example, I fear, of our failure to understand the Japanese; my gourmet friends tell me there's a lot more to it than that.

NEXT Just two weeks to Christmas, and the goose is getting fat. Tonight (Saturday) the Messiah from the Ceramic City Choir will put me in the right mood; on the 17th there’s a big band version of Christmas music; and the Barbara Walton singers are taking their candles to Draycott-in-the-Moors on the 18th and St James the less in Longton on the 22nd.

TOP OF THE POPPEAS; GLYNDEBOURNE'S THIRD OPERA

2010-12-03T10:55:00.000Z

Just in front of the stage, the huge frets of three theorbos (theorbi?), a sort of lute with an extra stick, wave around like the masts of some ancient barque. At either end of the fifteen-strong orchestra there is a harpsichord; the conductor, Jonathan Cohen, a man of many parts, uses one of them, as well as playing a small organ and managing to conduct with the spare hand he doesn't have.

Someone is playing a lirone; several people are playing dulcians or recorders; and that fellow at the back is on the violone, a sort of cello with shoulders.

Are we in the Regent Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent or the Teatro Santi Giovanni e San Paolo, Venice, in the 1642–43 carnival season?

That is where the opera, the Coronation of Poppea, one of the first in the world, had its premiere; nearly four hundred years later, Glyndebourne on Tour has brought it and the whole paraphernalia of baroque music to Hanley.

By, they liked a strong tale, those old Venetians. Most of it is well after the watershed -- an on-stage murder and several attempted ones, a forced suicide, a bit of torture, several sex scenes, cross-dressing galore and a heroine who spends the whole time in her negligee.

I thought I had a bone to pick with Glyndebourne, for the part of Poppea -- the lady in silk -- was played at HQ by Danielle de Niese, and all the publicity shots for the Stoke on Trent appearance of the opera used her image. I've explained in an earlier review how addicted I am to her appearance in the DVD of Handel's Julius Caesar, and for one glorious moment I thought she might be coming to Hanley.

She didn't. But Christiane Karg, making her Glyndebourne debut, is no poor substitute. She wore the negligee well, and her clear soprano voice revealed exactly why she was declared Young Performer of the Year by a respected opera magazine last year.

Lucia Cirillo is every inch her lover the Emperor Nero (Nerone), a small, evil Godfather with a strong and penetrating mezzo-soprano voice. Christopher Ainslie (Ottone) has one of the strongest countertenor voices I've heard. Louise Poole as the jilted Empress Ottavia has an awesome deep mezzo which appropriately fits her anguished singing. Paolo Battaglia’s very special bass voice makes the death of the philosopher Seneca very moving.
But the music does take some adjusting to. By the time of Handel, a century later, you could easily pick out a bit of recitative followed by a song with a clear beginning, middle and end.

Here, however, apart from the unusual sound of so many plucked instruments (there's a harp as well), you don't at first hear anything resembling a traditional melody or aria. The whole work appears to be one long musical tapestry from which numbers emerge for a few minutes before returning to the mix.

That makes the final duet between Poppea and Nero even more impressive, for here there is a definite, repeated tune (which has predictably turned into an ear-worm, of course.)

I did suggest this might the most interesting of the three operas Glyndebourne had brought us this year, and so it was. It got by far the biggest roar of applause at the end, and I think we were all totally astonished by what we had seen.

You almost expected to walk out and find the streets full of canals, like Venice in 1642. No, they were full of snow, as usual.

NEXT Keele Bach Choir perform on Saturday night when there‘s a final outing for Glyndebourne‘s Don Giovanni; next Friday, the BBC Philharmonic are in town with yet another rising piano star in Tchaikovsky's first concerto; and the day after comes a big Christmas treat -- the Ceramic City Choir unwrap their Handel's Messiah.

DIVA RISES FROM CINDER'S ASHES

2010-12-02T11:29:00.000Z

There was something very Christmassy about plodding through the snow to see Rossini's version of the Cinderella story at the Regent in Hanley last night. And how wonderful to be able to welcome a new star to the firmament.

Allyson McHardy hails from Oshawa, Ontario, so I guess weather like ours made her feel right at home. Her appearance as Cinderella is her Glyndebourne debut and apparently her first tour of England as an adult. She's quoted in the programme notes as looking forward to meeting people and seeing the England that lies outside of London. Alas, I fear this may be her only opportunity, for a talent like hers is bound to be snapped up at the highest level, and that inevitably means the capital.

What can I say? Her mezzo voice is creamy and appears unstressed right through its range; her acting, from feisty servant girl to noble princess, was entirely natural; she has a strong stage presence; and she made Rossini's tricky twiddly bits appear perfectly normal.

Mind you, she was backed by an incredible range of talented people -- many of them also on stage with Glyndebourne for the first time, and so attuned to each other in a way that, perhaps, old hands wouldn't be.

That's not meant, however, to be any sort of criticism of the wonderful Jonathan Veira, he was Falstaff when Glyndebourne last came to us a year ago; in La Cerentola he's Don Magnifico (Baron Hardup, to you) and in much the same way is deep of voice and slick of comedy.

Luciano Botelho from Brazil is making his Glyndebourne debut as the prince Don Ramiro, and his fine Italian tenor is a complete foil to Allyson McHardy's voice. Joan Martin-Royo as Dandini sings well but is an even better comic (I guess he's going to end up so much in demand in his home town, Barcelona, that we won't see him too often); the ugly sisters, Anna Siminska and Victoria Zaytseva, are far from ugly vocally, and avoid the temptation to turn the opera into a panto; Paul Whelan as Alidoro, a cross between Buttons and Fairy Godmother, is deep of voice and tall of height in a very interesting way.

For the musicians, I use the Wacky Races test. If you're of a certain age, or have children that age, you'll remember the cartoon refrain "Catch that Pigeon", for which they plundered Rossini. If the playing reminds me of the cartoon, it's wrong; here, the carefully use of graded sound levels and speeds by Thomas Blunt brought a welcome freshness. All praise Jonathan Tunnell's cute cello continuo interjections, too.

There was a bit of a pile-up last night at the cloakroom as we gathered to collect our snowshoes, sledges and reindeer. The lady from Cheadle seemed to be planning a detour via the North Pole.

Then we went out to slide down Piccadilly. No doubt the government's investigation into why the highways haven't been cleared won't extend to the pavements.

Roll on February, when we get to see the Matthew Bourne version of Cinderella, with Prokofiev's marvellous music. Maybe the snow will have let up a little by then.

NEXT Tonight, perhaps the most interesting of the three Glyndebourne operas we're seeing this season; The Coronation of Poppea by Monteverdi. It's all about lust and depravity. That should keep us warm.

AND NOT SO QUIET FLOWS THE DON: GLYNDEBOURNE AT THE REGENT

2010-12-01T10:54:00.001Z

Mozart's Don Giovanni is an extraordinary work for any century, but for the eighteenth, it's astonishing.

It tells the story of an aristocratic serial womaniser, accompanied by a grouchy manservant who hates his master but would quite like to be him. We meet a gaggle of women whose complaint isn't so much that they've been wronged by the Don but that he's abandoned them afterwards. There's a walking statue (or in the Glyndebourne on Tour production, a zombie), the fires of hell (or in the case of Glyndebourne on Tour, two fires), and, of course, some of the best tunes ever written.

This is a very black comedy, and the Glyndebourne on Tour version is blacker than most (literally, too; Mark Henderson and Keith Benson's seduced lighting must be saving the Regent Theatre in Hanley a mint.)

The evening opens with a tour de force; a massive, painted, revolving box which opens to reveal everything from a cathedral (wonderful impression of a painted ceiling) to a room full of broken floors. It's mighty impressive, and carries the story along as you wonder what comes next.

As soon as the orchestra strikes up those forbidding chords at the opening of the opera, you just know everything will be all right musically. The orchestra is rich and deep, and moves swiftly under the baton of Leo McFall (do you remember him as a finalist in the BBC's Young Musician of the Year in 2000? Nice to see he's got on.) Some nice work on the fortepiano, too, from Nicholas Bosworth.

The singing is outstanding, even if there are moments when the balance between orchestra and soloist is on the edge (but singers have to work really hard to cross the Regent's wide open spaces and huge orchestra pit.)

Natasha Jouhl as Donna Anna projects gloriously; Robert Gleadow's Leporello is a fine bit of comic acting as well as revealing a deep, glossy voice; Emanuele D'Aguanno as Don Ottavio impresses with a true Italian tenor; Eliana Pretorian is a sexy tease of a Zerlina; and I'd like to hear more of the rich voice that is Callum Thorpe's as Musetto.

So we come to the Don Giovanni of Audun Iversen.

Jonathan Kent's original Glyndebourne production has been revised by Ashley Dean, but it's still set in the 20th century. It was a nice conceit for the Don to take Polaroid pictures of his conquests, but that puts the date in the 70s when I'm sure the intention was to make it the 50s.

Setting it in modern dress immediately removes the whole subject of class, and renders irrelevant the Don being a gentleman and "one of us" (which is why the women are so ready to be seduced by him).

Right from the start, we know this Don is bad right through; instead of dispatching Anna's father in a fair, skilled, sword fight, he bashes his head in with a statue -- and keeps on bashing. No wonder the Don was roundly booed by the audience at the end, panto-style. I've always seen the role as somewhat more subtle.

Given these restraints, Audun Iversen does a good job, suave as George Clooney, as attractive to women as James Bond (though not half so brave), and with a strong baritone presence.

I confess I first saw this opera at the Estates Theatre in Prague, where it was first performed in 1787 (no, I'm really not that old, honest, I saw it when the theatre was rebuilt in the 1980s). In those dying days of communism, ordinary people in Prague were able to buy tickets for very little, and then flog them to the tourists. I think we paid all of £10 for two, though we were so far up in the Gods we could have done with the Hubble telescope, never mind opera glasses.

No matter; that performance, in eighteenth century dress, conducted by Charles Mackerras, has inevitably coloured my view of performances ever since.

So given my bias, I'm happy to report that the Glyndebourne Don is exciting, fast-moving, well sung and gripping. It managed to take my mind off the weather completely for three and a half hours.

NEXT Don Giovanni is repeated on Saturday at the Regent; tonight's (Wednesday's) opera is Rossini's La Cenerentola (Cinderella) and tomorrow (Thursday) it's The Coronation of Poppea by Monteverdi.

Elsewhere, the final concert of the season at Keele Concerts society tonight features jazz, and on Saturday the Keele Bach Choir have Saints and Sirens. Sounds interesting.

ALEXANDRA STRIKES A HAPPY NOTE

2010-11-26T10:41:00.000Z

Sometimes I'm glad I never took up the piano professionally (all right, you can stop sniggering now, l do know it was never going to happen). I mean, the competition seems to get fiercer and fiercer. There's a new young piano star through here every few weeks.

A few weeks ago we saw Hong Xu powering through Rachmaninov's first piano concerto with the Hallé; back in March there was Ching-Yun Ha; and last night's young lioness was Alexandra Dariescu. Born in Romania, trained at the Royal Northern College of Music, this 25 year old has already won a whole shelf full of awards and prizes.

Alexandra Dariescu's main selling point appears to be a sunny disposition and an ability to communicate with an audience -- both in music and in words. She chatted to us before each item in a clear, easy way, getting a couple of laughs and putting us in the mood for the music. She seemed to want to make us happy, which seems an admirable aim for an entertainer.

To that end, she promised us something for everyone -- Bach, Ravel, Chopin, Beethoven and Debussy. She liked her concerts to be like a menu, she said.

As a starter, the Bach, his third partita, demonstrated her amazing technical ability, with every note exactly placed, the pulse constant, and the dances which make up the work skipping brightly across the keyboard.

Abandoning the forecast programme, she went on as a palate cleanser to the Ondine movement from Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit, perhaps the opposite of the Bach work but acknowledged as even more difficult. Again, her composure in those rippling waves of sound was stunning.

She ended the first half with Chopin's fourth ballade, and opened the second with the two opus 27 nocturnes. I notice she's won an award for her Chopin, and of course there was no doubting her skill, but I wondered if passionate introspection was really her thing.

She promised us -- and gave us -- wit in Beethoven's opus 31 number 3 sonata, stressing those sudden outbursts that are part of Beethoven's character, and even making the audience laugh out loud in the scherzo at the recurring theme. That's a rare skill.

To end, Debussy's L'Isle joyeuse -- the happy island -- seemed to conjure up the atmosphere of the entire concert; we'd all enjoyed ourselves. And for an encore, an outrageous piece of Romanian showmanship, a bacchanal by a countryman of hers.

It was a lovely and varied meal, but was I the only one just wondering where the meat was in this menu? I know -- I'm just an old-fashioned carnivore. But I do like to sink my teeth into something chewy.

There'll be a second chance to hear her on February 2, when she's appearing at Keele Concerts Society with some of the same music, though I notice there's some chunky Liszt as well.

Of course, at 25, Alexandra Dariescu may already be over the hill. There is already a host of new young piano stars waiting in the wings. If you're at Wolstanton High School on Saturday, you'll be able to hear Xinxuan Cindy Li play Mozart's 23rd piano concerto with the North Staffordshire Symphony Orchestra. She's just 13.

NEXT Big night, Saturday, for Uttoxeter Choral Society as well; they have Rutter and Schubert with an orchestra. And next week -- I'll say it again, for it's worth a repeat plug -- Glyndebourne on tour hits the Regent Theatre. It's operatastic.

COMPOSING A SUITABLE RESPONSE; FINNISSY AT KEELE

2010-11-25T11:28:00.000Z

Going to a classical music concert in the 21st century generally means listening to the music of composers long dead.

It wasn't always so, of course. Imagine nipping along to the King's Theatre in the Haymarket to see the first ever performance of Mr Handel's new opera Rodelinda; strolling along to the new Casino in the Spiegelgasse in Vienna to hear the latest symphony by Herr Mozart; or you could have seen Beethoven himself jump into the air as he conducted his new seventh symphony at a charity concert for wounded soldiers.

So all hail the Keele Concerts Society for commissioning a new work from this year's president, Michael Finnissy. We were there at the University's Westminster Theatre last night, ears agog, to hear the world premiere of his piano quartet. As a special treat, the composer himself, complete with multi-coloured scarf, was present to tell us all about it (imagine being able to ask Wolfgang why he'd gone for the clarinets in number 40); and he cannot have wanted better advocates than the famous Frith Piano Quartet.

Michael Finnissy writes in his programme notes that his starting point was an examination of the two piano quartets Brahms wrote in 1861-2, though he admitted on the night that he ought to apologise if he had given the impression it would sound anything like Brahms.

It didn't. It opened intriguingly with long, sinuous lines from the viola and cello, but then the strings just kept on playing while the piano tinkled a series of apparently unconnected notes (unconnected either to the quartet or to each other). Without phrases or melody, trying to understand what was going on was like trying to climb a glass wall. Occasionally there would be a crescendo, but I couldn't see what had led to it.

The middle movement was rather more interesting. Michael Finnissy refers in his notes to the famous gypsy finale of Brahms' opus 25, and there was definitely something folksy going on in the plucked strings.

The third movement reverted to that glassy surface which I couldn't penetrate.

There was more modern music in the programme in the shape of Alfred Schnittke, a Russian who died in Germany in 1998. This was an eight minute piano quartet movement based on an early work by Gustav Mahler; the Friths also played the first movement of that work, which Mahler abandoned.

It was difficult to see what it was about the forgotten Mahler work which attracted Schnittke, but this powerful, dramatic, discordant music was effective if not very attractive.

Interestingly, Michael Finnissy asks in his president's message for us to consider why we need music. Well, one reason is to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and the Friths did it again and again as they played Brahms' piano quartet opus 26 with authority, power and passion. Their fierce attack and commanding sound didn't preclude delicacy in the second movement. I was transported (another musical effect.)

Obviously, Mr Finnissy had a very different response to this masterpiece, for his own work appeared icy and cerebral, but I never got the chance to ask any questions. I was, and remain, puzzled. Maybe that's what Mr Finnissy intended.

Incidentally, works in the Three Counties Art Exhibition are on show outside the Westminster Theatre, and are well worth a visit. I take my hat -- though not my gloves -- off to Martin Eldridge, joint winner with his prescient picture, "Snow on the M6." He should be doing the weather forecast on the telly.

NEXT To Hanley library tonight (Thursday) for a piano recital by Alexandra Dariescu, a rising Romanian star; on Saturday Keele Chapel singers' autumn concert features advent and Christmas pieces by Vivaldi, Rutter and Wilson.

The final event of the season at Keele Concerts Society is a jazz concert by the Michael Garrick Sextet next Wednesday; the new season starts at the New Vic on January 19, 2011 (yes, 2011. And just the other day I was talking about the Millennium as a recent event.)

But next week is all about sex, murder and intrigue. Yes, Glyndebourne on Tour is back with three of the greatest operas -- Rossini's Cinderella (there's an invitation to a Christmas panto if ever I heard one), Mozart's Don Giovanni (great tunes, great philandering), and Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea (if you saw the TV series Rome you'll find yourself right at home.) I'll be there; you should be.

AN ELGAR OF A DAY; JAMES EHNES PLAYS THE VIOLIN CONCERTO

2010-11-13T10:31:00.001Z

Friday, November 12 was Elgar day for me. Well of course, just about any day is Elgar day, come to that; I can listen to his music morning, noon and night. But on Friday I actually did, and that's unusual even by my standards.

In the morning, I managed to catch up with a Europa Concert given in Oxford by Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Philharmonic a week ago, and featuring a performance of the Elgar cello concerto by a cellist new to me, Alisa Weilerstein (still very moving, but very different from the way his wife Jacqueline du Pré used to play it, and well worth seeking out; it's on the BBC's iplayer until Tuesday, so you haven't got long.)

In the evening I recorded to watch later a new documentary about Elgar which apparently reveals he had hidden depths; hmm, no surprise there, then. But there's a cast of famous musicians involved and new revelations about his love life, and we all love a bit of gossip.

And while that programme was going out on BBC4, I was in the Victoria Hall in Hanley listening to one of the great modern exponents of Elgar's violin concerto -- James Ehnes -- performing it live with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Andris Nelsons.

It was just two days from being exactly a hundred years since the first performance of a work which still hasn't quite got into the international repertoire in the way I believe it should.

I love this work so much that I even listened to Radio 3's broadcast on Thursday night of the anniversary performance on Wednesday in Birmingham by the same forces.

The violin concerto, I feel, is a work in which the noble braveness of going on has to be balanced against the basic hopelessness of life and the nostalgia for a golden time we really know never actually existed. But it's long and difficult, and no doubt that's why it isn't as well known internationally as it should be; with people like James Ehnes taking it up, I'm sure that's about to change. His performance is quite magical; totally on top of every twist and turn, absolutely at one with those difficult Elgarian pauses and accelerations. Live, there was even more.

In Hanley, James Ehnes was dressed for dinner at Downton Abbey, in full Edwardian white tie and tails. He's not a showy player; he stands upright and firm, legs akimbo, and produces these wonderful sounds from his Strad. That stance fitted this work brilliantly; Elgar the Edwardian gentleman who was actually a heart-on-sleeve artist.

I thought James Ehnes' performance on the radio -- the one in Birmingham -- on the cool side, over-emphasising the nobility. But in Hanley it came over as a natural restraint, a shyness even, which made the work even more poignant and moving.

The audience stomped their feet, the ultimate Hanley accolade, and he gave us a little Bach to cleanse our palates.

This was one difference from the Birmingham concert, which had ended with an encore of Strauss's Salome. The Birmingham concert had also opened with Strauss, the suite from Der Rosenkavalier.

But in Hanley we got something far more to my taste; Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet. Andris Nelsons explained that this was by way of being a trailer for the CBSO's new disc (coupled with the sixth symphony.)

We could have been in St Petersburg or Moscow; it was a masterly performance of a great work, sort of concentrated Tchaikovsky. Nelsons leapt and twisted as he illustrated every new phrase or direction. I did wonder if he'd been working on the strings, since they seemed to me better than I've ever heard them before, with a Russian glow.

It's also ninety years since the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was formed; its first official concert was conducted by no less a personage than Sir Edward Elgar on November 10, 1920.

That's the official reason why they also played Haydn's quite rare 90th symphony, but it may also be because Andris Nelsons likes a laugh. The symphony has a fake ending; it stops dead, then starts up again just as the audience begin clapping.

It seemed to me the audience in Hanley was less caught out than the one in Birmingham; it either means we knew what was going to happen and were wise enought to wait, or we're a bit on the slow side. You decide.

NEXT Tonight (Saturday) Clonter opera's annual gala starts at 7; Nantwich choral society has An evening with Mr Handel at St Michael's Church, Coppenhall; on Wednesday, the sympathetic singers of Voces8 are at the Keele Concert Society, and on Thursday the Medieval Baebes (that's the amazingly medieval way they write it) are at the Gatehouse in Stafford. Wednesday and Thursday sees something very special for the young musicians of North Staffordshire; they'll be competing at Wolstanton High School in a sort of Classical Young Musician of the Year, working closely with the Manchester Camerata. Everybody concerned should be very proud of themselves.

MANCHESTER CAMERATA ON FIRE FOR THEIR NEW CONDUCTOR

2010-11-06T11:18:00.000Z

Bonfire night. Fireworks outside the Gatehouse Theatre in Stafford and inside as the Manchester Camerata was put through its paces by its music director designate Gabor Takács-Nagy. You probably expected me to use that line, but clichés become clichés because they express a truth.

It was the maestro's first appearance in Stafford with his orchestra-to-be (there's a final appearance at the Gatehouse in May with Douglas Boyd, the man who's meant so much to the Camerata; not to be missed.)

He began by conducting the audience. What I mean is, this is a man so accustomed to expressing himself through his arms and fingers that he used them just for talking, as he told us about Mozart.

For conducting, he used them even more, carving the notes out of the air, pulling them from the violins and pushing them into the brass.

His background is in the string quartet -- he helped found and was leader of the famous Hungarian Takács Quartet. I think that showed in his attention to detail; he was continually adjusting bits of the orchestra to produce the sound he wanted.

In this case, the concert was called "Spirit of Mozart", and he was surely full of it. His overture to Don Giovanni was full of strong accents and explosive moments; the Jupiter symphony, number 41, was swift and strong, apart from the third movement, which was slower and with much more swing than I've heard before. It somehow re-created the atmosphere of a grand Viennese ball.

But the most remarkable for me was his conducting of Elgar's Introduction and Allegro for Strings. It seemed to be completely free of the excesses of "English" performances, without slides, pauses or emotional hesitation. It was just a fine re-creation of a first-class composition which ought to be in the international repertoire. The Camerata's strings fought hard to respond to his vision.

Also outstanding was the performance of Mozart's 23rd piano concerto, K488, the one which opens and closes in bright sunlight, but has an astounding, troubling slow movement which digs deep into some pit of introspection.

The soloist here was also new to the audience in Stafford; well, actually, she was new to any audience in Europe. After starting her career in China, she moved to the United States in 2000, and her trip to Europe is apparently her reward for winning the gold medal in the Virginia Waring International Piano Competition. Remember, we saw her here first.

She's plainly completely at home in front of an orchestra, responding to them and playing precisely with them. She flung off the runs and scales which make up so much of the work with fluid ease, and her strong left hand was there to point up the phrases. Could she have put more into that slow movement? But then, could anyone fully do it justice?

She's contracted at the moment to work with the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra. I must confess I'd never even heard of Jacksonville before, but it's apparently the largest city in the United States in land area. It has even more rain than Manchester, but is in Florida, so has warm winters and very hot summers. Hmmm.... Manchester or Jacksonville... which is best? She'll be back.

Now you might have thought that because I blog, I have some idea about what goes on inside this box of tricks. You'd be very wrong.

The Camerata sent me an email the other day about their latest venture. Their concert on October 23 was put on the big screen in the middle of Manchester, and streamed live on Medici.tv. I was told it would be available to watch on there for sixty days.

Of course, it wasn't as simple as that; it never is, with computers. Even using the search function, I couldn't find any trace of the concert on Medici, but eventually tracked down a notice that it would be appearing soon on their video on demand section. It'll be worth a look.

In the meantime, I had discovered a website where I could watch high-quality videos of classical music, some of them for free. Unfortunately, I was watching them on my laptop, anti-socially, in the back room.

I sat my wife down in front of the TV and showed her this wonder.

I pointed out that sometime soon this would be integrated with our living room telly, and a whole new world would be opened up.

As soon as she sat down, the whole thing froze. It was uncanny.

"It doesn't work," she said triumphantly.

I'm thinking of selling her to the Americans for electronic warfare.

NEXT The Keele Philharmonic and North Staffordshire symphony orchestras get together tonight for a charity concert at the Victoria Hall (that poor roof, raised again). Next Wednesday's concert at Keele features Florian Kitt on the cello and Rita Medjimorec on piano, while the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is in Hanley on Friday for an outstanding treat; James Ehnes playing the Elgar violin concerto. As I said in my preview, take a hanky.

HOLDING A CANDLE TO VIVALDI

2010-11-05T10:33:00.000Z

The Mozart Festival Orchestra were last here two years ago. Then, they were playing Mozart; last night it was the Baroque's Greatest Hits followed by Vivaldi's Four Seasons.

But the basic problem hasn't changed. Both events are advertised as being By Candlelight, and there is not a candle to be seen.

It seems that health and safety laws trump the ones relating to advertising standards, though the Barbara Walton Singers still manage to give us the full candlelit experience every year (this year on December 22 in St James the Less Church, Longton).

But last night at the Victoria Hall in Hanley they hadn't even bothered to buy the sort of candle bulbs that flicker realistically, and the house and stage lighting was just as normal.

Come on, you old curmudgeon, I hear you cry, they wore eighteenth century costumes and wigs, didn't they? Wasn't there even one guy who appeared to have enterprisingly made his suit from a pair of curtains?

Yes, even the ladies wore wigs. There were no ladies in orchestras in the eighteenth century, and I do think dangly ear rings with male wigs were not worn outside the confines of one's own bedchamber.

The evening is run from the violin by David Juritz, the former leader of the London Mozart Players, who's also director of the Johann Strauss Orchestra, so he'll be back in the Victoria Hall in January.

Technically, he's absolutely superb, with a clean, full tone and fast fingers. The Presto of the Four Seasons' Summer, for instance and the final allegro of the Bach double violin concerto were absolutely first class, exhilarating and uplifting.

Alas, the slow movement of the Bach and the aria from Handel's Rinaldo featuring soprano Rachel Nicholls were unfortunately spoilt by some technical problem with the microphone (I was sitting next to the loudspeaker, too); I suppose, after 250 years, you can't expect them to work very well.

The microphone is so that David Juritz can talk about the music, and I welcome this approach, even if he has some way to go before he matches seasoned raconteurs like John Wilson. The laughter that met his remarks about castrati suggest the audience's level might be lower than he thought.

But the performances by trumpeter Crispian Steele-Perkins were simply lovely and lively, and when he got together with Rachel Nicholls for Handel's "Let the Bright Seraphim" the performance ignited.

I did hear someone in the interval remarking that they were playing as if they had a bus to catch, and indeed, they have to be in Dublin by tomorrow. It is, however, the modern way not to linger in this music, as was often done one or two generations ago, and the excitement was certainly racked up by David Juritz's displays of virtuosity.

But I did find myself wondering if Vivaldi expected the Largo of his Winter concerto to be played Allegro, and when Albinoni's Adagio became Albinoni's Presto.

Well, this tour is the work of enterpreneur Raymond Gubbay, who must believe that wigs on heads equals bums on seats, and there's no doubt a good time was had by a not inconsiderable crowd. I wouldn't like you to think, in spite of my comments, that I hadn't enjoyed every minute; I'd go anywhere to hear the Four Seasons, and have.

No, the big disappointment of the night was geographical, not musical.

Ever since the comedy sketch including that phrase "And now a message for those of you in the north... it must be terrible for you" people have been looking for the place where the north ends and the south begins.

I've always considered Stoke-on-Trent irredeemably northern, whereas Stone has southern pretensions, so we‘re looking at somewhere around Barlaston, I reckon.

Well, according to the programme, the Mozart Festival Orchestra Vivaldi by candlelight tour is split between a northern orchestra and a southern one; and Stoke-on-Trent, like Tunbridge Wells and Basingstoke, gets the southern orchestra.

I could see the value of my house rising by the minute. I was practising saying words like "supper" and "baaaath".

Alas, as my wife pointed out, the southern orchestra has no women in the first violins or cellos, whereas the northern orchestra does -- and there they were on stage. It was a simple mistake in the programme.

Ah well, I had the music to console me.

NEXT The Manchester Camerata are in Stafford tonight with their new conductor, Gábor Takács-Nagy , and a stunning programme including Mozart's 23rd piano concerto. Wigs will not be worn, nor candles lit.

AWAKENING TO AN APPRECIATION OF DANCE; RAMBERT AT THE REGENT

2010-11-04T11:10:00.000Z

Last night I got a crash course in modern dance. And if you, too, want to know what extraordinary and wonderful things the human body can do, I urge you to get down to the Regent Theatre in Hanley to watch the Rambert Dance Company.

The evening opens with Hush, in which a family of six clowns dance everything from a pas de deux to a hoe-down. I suppose what strikes you immediately is the precision and rigour of the movement; you get the impression every single moment of the dance has been thought about (and I‘m sure that‘s not a false impression, either).

Frankly, it makes almost everything we’ve seen before on the Regent’s stage look old-fashioned. Here are shapes and moves which throw a whole new light on what’s possible in dancing.

I wouldn’t want to miss Matthew Bourne’s Cinderella, which comes to the Regent in February, but I feel I now have a frame of reference which will help me understand what he’s doing.

It’s also, incidentally, very funny, nailing every cliché of family life (I loved the bit where they finally get the kids to bed, only to have them wake up and demand attention.)

Choreographer Christopher Bruce says the work is a response to the CD Hush by Bobby McFerrin and Yo-yo Ma, which covers a wide range of styles from the Swingle Singers to Vivaldi.

Inevitably, therefore, the evening opens with that recorded music. It’s only after the first interval, with the newest work, Awakenings, you realise what you’ve been missing -- live music.

Tobias Picker’s score, played by a very professional fourteen piece chamber orchestra, starts with some very challenging material, loud and dissonant, but strongly rhythmic. Stick with it, because the score gets more melodic as it goes on. It includes a meltingly beautiful pas de deux and some themes which seem to owe a lot to Aaron Copland. By the end, I was impressed and wouldn’t have minded hearing the music again.

If, like me, you never saw the 1990 film Awakenings on which this dance is based (I have issues with Robin Williams) you don’t actually need to buy the programme. It all stems from a book by Dr Oliver Sacks recounting the use of a new drug to bring back to life patients frozen by a horrific virus. Unfortunately, any slight mistake in the dosage condemned the patients to repetitive tics or unexpected movement.

But on the other hand you could just ignore the plot and enjoy an amazing twenty minutes of outlandish but impressive movement by a crack team of dancers, choreographed by Aletta Collins.

Another interval, and then the final piece -- A Linha Curva -- which is just a riot of colour and action. Itzik Galili manages to re-create the whole exciting, infectious spirit of Brazil on stage in Hanley without slipping into any samba and carnival clichés (though there is a lot of wiggling of Lycra-clad bottoms).

The lighting is very clever indeed, and the work of the four live musicians on every sort of percussion imaginable is stunning.

Some of this work appears to be spontaneous. If so, it’s a spontaneity only achieved at the expense of very hard work (witness the amazing moment when one dancer spins and the other leaps over and under the flying leg.)

The Regent was full last night with a lot of young people, presumably from the area’s many dance schools. They were silent during the performance -- presumably sitting there as open-mouthed as I was -- but rightly very vocal indeed in their appreciation of this skilled entertainment.

Now they’ve all got something to aim for.

NEXT vivaldi by candlelight and in costume at the Victoria Hall tonight. I shall arrive by gondola down the Trent and Mersey canal.

KEELE; BATTLE OF THE SAXES

2010-10-28T11:21:00.000+01:00

I must have been walking around with my ears closed. When I heard that Keele Concerts Society had booked an all-female saxophone quartet, Kintamarni, I expected some sort of novelty act. A quartet of saxophones! How quaint!

But a little research reveals that since Adolphe Sax (a famous Belgian, no less) invented his instrument back in 1840, families of saxophones have sprung up all over the world.

In America alone, the Tiptons from Seattle, Amherst from Buffalo, the Chicago, New Century, Prism, Rascher, Texas, Transcontinental and Capitol are all busily blowing away. In France, the Habanera and Quasar quartets have sophisticated websites. There's the Alliage, Clair obscur, and Deep Schrott in Germany, and the Amstel in Holland. Switzerland has the Konus -- though apparently Kintamarni had a big success earlier this year at a music festival near Zurich, so Konus had better watch out.

Strangely, Kintamarni doesn't appear to have a website of its own, though Sarah Field, its leading light, certainly does. From it, I learn that she plays trumpet as well as saxophone, has appeared with Sting and Seal, and a month ago was on a French TV show.

So Kintamarni is a pop group, then?

Well, Sarah Field makes a point of saying that she's played Hummel's trumpet concerto on the south bank as well as appearing at the Brit awards with Westlife. As the concert at Keele went on, I began to believe that for this group, it genuinely was all music. There was no "crossover"; they just played anything that worked.

So what does a saxophone quartet sound like? They opened with a complicated bit of Elliot Carter, a fanfare from his Canonic Suite, and made it plain there was to be no sleeping on our job as audience.

It's a loud. sometimes raucous sound which fills a room completely from top to bottom, yet somehow remains smooth and homogenous.

Keele seems to have the local franchise for music by Jean Françaix; it's the only place I've ever heard any (even Radio 3 doesn't play him.) As always, I think I must do more about hearing more of his quirky, funny, very French music.

Kintamarni played his little quartet for saxophones, with a melodic, nostalgic central slow movement which could be a Classic FM hit, given half a chance.

Then we heard some Piazzolla, appropriately enough when the quartet sounds at times like a very big accordion. The first half ended with Will Gregory's High Life, written for the Apollo saxophone quartet, another Manchester group which it seemed was the Kintamarni's inspiration.

The second half opened with a tricky piece of music with a middle eastern flavour, Under the Veil by Nigel Wood, went on through Gershwin (the traffic in American in Paris all there), took a swerve through a delightful folk song suite by James Rae (another candidate for last night of the Proms), and ended up with a Celtic Suite by Gavin Whitlock which managed to avoid the worst fiddle-di-dee-isms.

I guess taking a breath must be very important to a saxophone quartet, but by the end the audience wanted to take one too.

Maybe the reason I wasn't aware of the existence of saxophone quartets is that I'm the wrong generation. Ours came to believe that four guitars beat four of anything else.

But our parents must have been very aware of the sound. For the encore, Kintamarni played In the Mood, and we were suddenly translated to a village hall where boys in uniform were dancing with girls in home-made dresses as the Second World War raged outside. Every big band of the past had a sax quartet like this.

I was tempted to salute Kintamarni.

NEXT The Keele concert next Wednesday is the wonderful Elias Quartet with Britten, Beethoven and Mendelssohn. But equally unmissable is Rambert Dance on their Awakenings tour with a live orchestra, no less, over at the Regent in Hanley. It’s all good.

HOUSTON, WE DON'T HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THE HALLÉ

2010-10-23T10:53:00.001+01:00

First, a footnote. Yes, I know that doesn't sound right.

I finally went to see the doctor about my gammy foot. He gave me some pills and sent me off to the hospital for an X-ray. I dutifully put my £2 in the gold-plated parking meter and handed in the doctor's form to the nurse on duty.

"We don't do that any more," she told me dismissively.

"This is an X-ray department? You mean you don't X-ray things, or is it just feet?"

"Feet. Your doctor was told in July."

"He obviously wasn't listening. I don't think you mentioned it to me."

I was left in the position of returning with a letter to my doctor, telling him what naughty boys we'd been. And the foot? Don't ask.

On the face of it, the concert last night at the Victoria Hall in Hanley should have been as much of a disaster as my trip to the doctor's. We're constantly being told how conservative (with a small "c") the people of North Staffordshire are about their music. And here was a concert with an unknown conductor and soloist, playing one unknown work, one not often performed, and one rather "modern" -- less than 80 years old. But there were two unusual factors; we'd already heard the first and last items in January, and this time it was the Hallé.

The hall was packed, and the concert was glorious from beginning to end.

It opened with Rachmaninov's The Rock, an early work hardly ever heard, except in Stoke-on-Trent. The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain introduced us to it in January.

It is wonderfully Russian, though you might have thought Borodin or Rimsky-Korsakov rather than Rachmaninov.

Then we had his first piano concerto, heard a lot less than the second, third, or Paganini variations (but I'm not expecting to hear the fourth anytime soon, either.) At the piano was Hong Xu, a young Chinese player just out of New York's Julliard School and already scheduled to record at the Wigmore Hall in 2012.

As we've come to expect with these young lions, the performance was technically amazing; every note placed with crystalline clarity, and those huge chords rattled off with machine gun accuracy. But Hong Xu obviously feels at home with Rachmaninov, too (he made his concerto debut with the second at just 16). He phrased the concerto beautifully, without making too much of a song and dance about it; or to put it another way, I really wanted to see him let himself go occasionally.

The National Youth Orchestra also brought Shostakovich's fifth symphony to the Victoria Hall in January, in a performance from which the roof is only just recovering. The Hallé was inevitably less noisy -- there are three times as many players in the youth orchestra -- but also much more refined. It was still a sonic spectacular.

From the barely trembling violin sounds to the amazing percussion, the symphony tested every section of the orchestra, and found them completely up to the task.

Conductor Hans Graf, originally from Austria, is music director of the Houston Symphony in Texas (I see he's back on the podium there on November 18 with Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin.) His style is to stand very upright before the orchestra and give clear instructions with both hands. He seemed a bit stiff at first, becoming more animated as the concert went on (maybe reflecting the complexity and impact of the final movement of Shostakovich's powerful symphony.)
But there was no doubting his rapport with the orchestra.

I notice, incidentally, that he wore the same style of black silk tunic suit as Gianandrea Noseda and Stephen Hough. It can't be just coincidence that the conductor from Texas was kitted out like musicians from Britain. Is there a special shop in Manchester knocking these things out? And are civilians allowed to buy them? I think I'd look quite smart in one, even in my slippers.

COUGH, SPLUTTER I was delighted to get a message from Steven Osborne after I relayed his thoughts on coughing during concerts. You may remember that his comments during his concert in Hanley suggested he was a lot more relaxed than me about the problem. He says; "The points I tried to make about coughing, which maybe I didn't do quite exactly enough, were firstly to cough in between pieces, even if it feels like breaking the atmosphere (better than in the middle of a piece); the bit about not minding coughing too much was a bit of attempted psychology - I could feel people starting to get tense about the worry of coughing, and that's the absolute worst thing for promoting it. When it's clear people are not going to be able to completely restrain themselves because of illness, I think the best thing is just to try and put everyone at ease; if the audience know the performer is not silently seething, I think it helps everyone relax."

I can't help but salute his patience and fortitude; silently seething, that’s me all over. At least we agree on doing it between pieces rather than (apparently) uncannily finding the quietest possible moment in the score.

STEVEN OSBORNE; A PIANIST NOT TO BE SNIFFED AT

2010-10-22T11:19:00.000+01:00

I've been feeling a right heel lately. No, I mean, I've got a bit of a problem with my right foot. I keep getting shooting pains up towards my ankle and I'm having to limp.

A friend told me she'd had it and the doctor had told her it was something policemen used to get a lot from pounding the beat. Obviously, it's not that common any more (I believe they now get gearstick elbow.)

It was a real problem at last night's concert in Hanley given by pianist Steven Osborne, for he was foot-tappingly good. It was obvious from the start that one of his many strengths was a precise rhythmic power.

He began with two bagatelles by Beethoven. Miniatures, maybe, but complex and exacting works whose rhythms were tricky even to listen to.

Then from miniatures to one of the longest works of all; Schubert's last sonata, D960. I still find the opening movement slips away from me as I try to grasp its overall shape; but what wonderful melodies spin by as it does.

For me, the moment of truth was when Steven Osborne played that little repeated tune at the end with more perky jollity than I've heard before.

I could hear the world keep trying to overwhelm the spirit of the composer -- that tune -- with worry and pain, but it kept on coming back jauntily through it all.

There were more pictures to come after the interval; Debussy's Preludes. Steven Osborne told us the tale of La Serenade Interrompue (The Interrupted Serenade); he saw a Spanish guitarist playing in a square, interrupted when someone fell over him. Then a band starts up across the square, and he tries to play louder and louder against it.

He painted more pictures with his hands, and we sat spellbound. At the end, he played the massive chords of La Cathedral Engloutie (The Drowned Cathedral) and we heard the mighty organ play beneath the waves.

After that, I confess that the Rachmaninov Preludes made less of an impact, though of course they were terrifically played. I commend you to Steven Osborne's website, http://www.stevenosborne.co.uk/, one of the best I've seen, with pictures, a blog, and plenty of music. On it you will discover that his disc of the preludes was a nominee for the Gramophone and Classical Brit awards, rated outstanding by the International Record Review, Gramophone editor's choice, BBC Music Magazine instrumental choice, Times, Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph CD of the week, Musical Opinion record of the month and a prizewinner from Deutschen Schallplattenkritik. I was just dazzled by Debussy, I think.

The applause was long and loud, and we got one of Steven Osborne's own compositions as an encore. It was a jazzy little number which spoke of laid-back music-making in smoke-filled night clubs.

Steven Osborne had begun the evening by apologising for not being Imogen Cooper, who was scheduled to perform before she damaged her elbow. It's a miracle that Mike Lloyd managed to catch Steven Osborne as late as Monday as he passed by on his way from his Scottish home to a date with the BBC and a Wigmore Hall performance in London. I understand one key factor was his discovery that his friend Paul Lewis was performing for us later in the season -- their disc of Schubert duets is due out next month.

Mr Osborne managed to throw a spanner in the concert works before leaving. I was writing a few weeks ago about whether clapping between movements is a good thing. But here comes another controversy.

After an audience member in the front row had to walk out spluttering when his cough got completely out of hand -- or hands -- Steven Osborne declared he didn't mind coughing, and if you had to do it, you should do it rather than try to control it, which made it much worse.

"My own mother has had a bad cough for twenty years," he declared.

Well, personally I find it really annoying when people explode in concerts; and of course, it's always in the quietest moments. But now no less a figure than Steven Osborne has taken the wind out of my sails, what can I say?

Except, perhaps, pass the hanky.

NEXT The Hallé tonight with even more Rachmaninov... I can feel a romantic Russian evening coming on..

HARD TIMES BUT THE MUSIC PLAYS ON

2010-10-21T10:48:00.001+01:00

Times is hard, as Charles Dickens almost said. Police forces throughout Britain will find their budgets so cut that they can no longer afford to put bobbies on the beat. Ah. And councils will be forced to reduce rubbish collection to -- say -- as little as once a fortnight. Tell me it isn't so.

But certainly, thousands of jobs will go. I believe many displaced civil servants are at this moment gathering in Whitehall before marching to Jarrow.

Abroad, things aren't much better. The French are revolting, the Greeks have lost their marbles, the Italians are too busy sniggering at Mr Berlusconi to do any work, and the Germans are fed up with having to keep things going.

Culture and the arts are, naturally, bound to be the first to come under the beady eyes of the cutters, since no one can work out quite what they do or what they're for.

So it's a great pleasure to see a full chamber orchestra opening a new season of the Keele Concerts Society, just as it did last year.

I get the impression from the carefully worded introduction by Alexandra Scott, the artistic director, that the Arts Council has contributed less... but that that Keele University has come up trumps. It's got to be an asset to have professionals playing music regularly on campus... though few students ever turn up at the concerts. Strange, that.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, later concerts in the weekly series are likely to be challenging, but last night's, by the European Union Chamber Orchestra, was just lovely from beginning to end, enough to make you forget the horrible headlines.

Two late romantic works -- Elgar's Serenade for Strings and a tuneful miniature nocturne by Fauré -- surrounded some great eighteenth century music, Mozart's first violin concerto, Haydn's Trauer symphony, and as an encore, a movement from Mozart's 29th symphony.

Given Britain's troubled relationship with the European Union over the years, it's nice that the orchestra was right inside the idiom of Elgar's masterpiece. Their feel for the right speed and accents was delightful.

Just a few weeks ago in Stafford, I heard the new leader of the Manchester Camerata, Giovanni Guzzo, play and conduct Mozart's third violin concerto, and here was Matthias Wollong doing the same for the first (and the EU orchestra do it standing up, too.)

Matthias Wollong chose to have the music available on a low stand (though he didn't look at it much) whereas Giovanni Guzzo played from memory. This may be why I had the impression of a more free and responsive performance from Giovanni Guzzo -- or it may just be that the third concerto is so much better than the first. If only Mozart had written as many violin concertos as he did piano ones.

I take out of the equation the fact that Matthias Wollong dropped his bow in the final movement. Accidents happen, but I confess in all the years of concert going I've never seen this one happen before. The orchestra and soloist recovered magnificently.

Haydn's 44th symphony is known as the Mourning symphony because he asked for the slow movement to be played at his funeral.... but actually, it's a symphony full of vivacity and melody. The orchestra responded beautifully, and the encore movement from the early Mozart symphony pointed up nicely the difference between the sound of Mozart and Haydn.

The European Union Chamber Orchestra seems not to be facing cuts; indeed, it's due back in North Staffordshire next January, this time conducted by Hans-Peter Hofmann (though an EUCO cellist vouchsafed last night that neither he nor Matthias Wollong would be conducting on that occasion. Mysterious.)

The European Union indeed seems to support a collection of orchestras -- this one, which apparently has the Staffordshire franchise, is not to be confused with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe which are both offshoots of the European Union Youth Orchestra (and don't even mention the European Union Baroque Orchestra.)

Never mind the wine lake and the grain surpluses -- it seems that, in spite of the hard times, Europe has a music mountain. That certainly strikes the right note with me.

NEXT Steven Osborne is managing to fit in Hanley between the Proms and the Wigmore Hall tonight -- pity Imogen Cooper is poorly (she broke her arm in the summer) but Steven Osborne is far more than second best. I believe he's planning some Schubert, Debussy and Rachmaninov. We'll be overdosing on the Russian this week, since he looms large in the Hallé's concert at the Victoria Hall on Friday night. That's OK by me.

AN OLD TESTAMENT TO THE CERAMIC CITY CHOIR

2010-10-17T12:01:00.001+01:00

Confession time again (what else is a blog for?) I acquired a copy of Mendelssohn's oratorio Elijah some ten years ago.

I believe it fell through a crack in the space-rime continuum when BBC Radio Stoke moved house.

Of course, it's still on long-term loan. Any DJ who wants it back can have it ("Well, pop-pickers, today's special tip for the top is a little number from Sir Neville Marriner and his band called Elijah... see you in two hours.)

The problem is, I've never actually listened to it.

Why did I acquire it? Well, I know how important this work is. It was written to be performed in Birmingham in 1846, and was a huge hit, even attracting royal approval from Victoria and Albert. Without it, there would have been no Parry, Stanford, Stainer, Sullivan (he won a scholarship funded by the famous soprano Jenny Lind singing the part in Elijah written for her), or, ultimately, Elgar.

So it's sat there for ten years under M, eyeing me reproachfully, a full two-disc old-fashioned box set untouched by human cd player. Even at rock bottom -- nothing new on the shelves, reduced to replaying all the Mozart piano concertos in reverse order -- I've never reached for Elijah. He would probably have rained down a plague on me.

It could be that I've never found the two hours necessary to sit down and listen to it. It could be that I was totally put off by the idea of an oratorio featuring a fire-and-brimstone old testament prophet prepared to put people through Hell on earth so they don't go there later.

So this was the state in which I went to see the Ceramic City Choir perform the work at, appropriately enough, the Victoria Hall in Hanley.

Well, the first reason for avoiding Elijah went out of the window. I was obliged to pay proper attention for two hours.

What I found was an unfailingly tuneful, uplifting and powerful piece of music, presented here with passionate conviction by some two hundred people working together (though it has to be said there were 270 people in the chorus alone for the first performance.) And while I still can't sign on for the old testament story, and I still don't think it's Mendelssohn's best work (his opus 80 string quartet has more real passion in one movement than in the whole two hours of Elijah), the music and the occasion were enough to carry me through.

Where do I start with the praise? Oliver Neal Parker, the conductor, is unshowy by some standards, but his strong right arm gives all the exact measures such a large body of performers needs. He held them all together heroically.

The Orchestra da Camera, which does a lot of this sort of work with amateur choral societies, entered fully into the spirit of the performance; great work by the trombones, incidentally. After a shaky start, James Gower got the measure of the Victoria Hall and projected cleanly (very clear diction, I thought); and Rita Cullis, standing in for Julie Moffat, was reliably strong. Heather and Janet Wardle and Beth Williams from the Leicestershire Chorale were suitably angelic -- and would find a ready home in Mozart's Magic Flute.

But the moments when the hair went up on the back of the neck were when everyone sang together, the Ceramic City Choir and the Phoenix singers from Leek, backed up by the full orchestra and Ian Riddle on the Victoria Hall organ adding the third dimension -- an experience unobtainable from any hi-fi at home.

Turns out that was just what I waiting for, and maybe why I hadn't played the discs. And now, knowing how it could sound live, maybe I never will. I wonder if they'd like them back?

NEXT A busy week for me... On Wednesday, the first of the new season of Keele concerts with the European Union Chamber Orchestra; on Thursday, the wonderful Imogen Cooper opening the Harding Piano Trust season at the city museum; and on Friday, Rachmaninov and Shostakovich from the Hallé.

LATE NEWS FROM THE KEYBOARD
First, the bad news; Imogen Cooper had a fall in the summer and damaged her arm, had it in plaster, and can't yet play properly (we wish her well and hope for a full recovery.. and a trip to Hanley sometime soon!!)Now the good news; Steven Osborne has stepped in to play the recital...he's driving down from his home in Edinburgh. It'll be a different programme but, I'm sure, equally distinguished...

MUSIC BEGINS AT 40

2010-10-12T12:26:00.001+01:00

So how would you celebrate your fortieth birthday? How about an engraved giant beer glass, or an inflatable zimmer frame? Perhaps a personalised football book or cufflink box?

Well, Keele Concerts Society is celebrating its fortieth season this year, and has come up with the ultimate present to itself... a piece of original music. And who better to write it than the society's new president, Michael Finnissy?

It's a piano quartet, and it'll be performed for the first time on November 24 by the Frith Piano Quartet. No doubt Mr Finnissy himself will be on hand to explain why it's called 1861-2; is that how old he feels in a morning?

Michael Finnissy wrote works called English Country Tunes, but they have little to do with Vaughan Williams or Percy Grainger. The instructions for one are Unsettled (violent and reckless), and a quick look at YouTube reveals that's just what they are.

So the piano quartet might be a bit challenging.

But then, one of the qualities of Keele Concerts Society is to broaden the mind.

For instance, how about an all-female saxophone quartet playing My Funny Valentine? That's Kintamarni on October 27.

Maybe you'd like a flamenco dancer (Eclipse, January 26 next year), an evening of percussion (O Duo, February 9) or Chinese New Year celebrations (Silk and Bamboo, February 23)?

More conventional classical music is also to be had... and such a marvellous lot of it. The concerts start a week on Wednesday with the European Union Chamber Orchestra playing Elgar, Mozart, Fauré and Haydn.

They continue every Wednesday thereafter with everything from a rarely heard and undervalued cello sonata by Chopin (November 10) to quartets by Beethoven and Mendelssohn (performed by a group whose records have been very highly praised, the Elias Quartet, on November 3) and quintets by Brahms, Mozart and Dvorak (February 16 and March 2 next year.)

There's a special concert jointly with the New Vic by Ensemble 360 on January 19 next year. I suspect its existence owes a lot to the need for both organisations to save money; but the good news is we'll get to hear some rare Stanford and Howells.

It certainly seems that the Keele Concerts Society

http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/mu/pdf/Keele%20Concerts_2010-11.pdf

is still as vibrant and inventive at 40 as it was in its youth. And at £12 a concert it compares favourably with such glamorous 40th birthday presents as microwaveable Cozy-Boots (£14.95) or Sunshine in a Jar (£19.95.)

MOZART IN STAFFORD; PLAYED WITH GUZZO

2010-09-29T22:37:00.000+01:00

It's getting hard to keep up with Manchester's music scene. Just as Gianandrea Noseda steps down from the BBC Philharmonic (see Farewell Symphony), Douglas Boyd leaves the Manchester Camerata (though he comes to Stafford next May for his farewell concert). Mark Elder over at the Hallé must be getting a bit restless.

And with the Camerata, it's not just the conductor who's changing; there's also a new leader, Giovanni Guzzo.

The Camerata obviously decided we might be overwhelmed if we had to cope with two new people at once. So last night in Stafford we were introduced to Giovanni Guzzo as he gave his first concert as leader; the new conductor comes later.

Giovanni Guzzo was not content, however, just to lead the Camerata. He brought a programme of early Mozart to the Gatehouse so that he could conduct from the leader's chair -- and he also played the violin while conducting Mozart's third violin concerto.

There was no doubting who was in charge and controlling events.

Giovanni Guzzo, though of Italian origin, was lucky enough to be born in what is clearly one of the most musical countries in the world, Venezuela (home of El Sistema and Gustav Dudamel). He got a first at the Royal Academy of Music in London and has played for the Queen, world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and last night, for the good people of Stafford. He's just 24 years old.

Mind you, Mozart was just 15 when he wrote the Divertimento in F, K 138, which opened the concert, 19 when he wrote the third violin concerto, and 18 when he wrote the symphony no. 29 which came after the interval.

The works came in ascending order of genius.

Giovanni Guzzo played throughout without written music, and he was plainly well inside the eighteenth century idiom, clean and incisive but not lacking in expression. His team threw off the outer movements of the Divertimento as if they were indeed diverted, but made every note of the big tune in the slow movement count.

The leader was plainly in his element in Mozart's third violin concerto. It was a performance to make you think you had maybe underestimated this early work.

After the interval, an octet played Last Round by Osvaldo Golijov, apparently in memory of the great Argentinean composer Astor Piazzolla. It was, frankly, at the edge of my comfort zone, but I'd have loved them to have played some actual Piazzolla.

The orchestra ended with Mozart's 29th symphony, one of his early masterpieces, and for this they played standing up. Is this a new trend? And why didn't they stand for the Divertimento? Anyway, if it was intended to increase the orchestra's projection and focus, it seemed to me to work just fine.

The musicians applauded Guzzo almost as much as we did. Plainly, this will be a winning combination.

I must admit that I had been wondering if Stafford's relationship with the Camerata was souring.

It looked as if the Camerata's appearances in the New Year were reduced to two duos -- violin and piano on February 3 and cello and piano a month later. In fact, these are just delightful extras -- held in the new Met area -- just to keep the music playing while the Stafford Gatehouse is done up. There's actually finance for two more years.

The Camerata is back in full swing in April and May. There's also a Family Creativity Day on Sunday, November 14 (it sounds such fun I think I'll adopt a child between 7 and 11 so I can attend), Sarah Whittingham is taking on the role of Stafford's musician in residence giving informal recitals and talks all over the place (is that her busking in the town centre?) and there's a special invite to the Camerata's home, the Bridgewater Hall, in January, to see the end of the group's acclaimed romp through the symphonies of Beethoven.

It's the ninth this time, and not even the renovation is going to give the Gatehouse enough room for that many singers and players.

But for the moment, it's roll on November the fifth. That's when we get introduced to the new conductor Gabor Takacs-Nagy, who I'm told is the guy to set the podium alight on Bonfire Night.

DON'T MISS If you missed Rossini's Cinderella as performed by Clonter Opera near Congleton during the summer, it comes back on Saturday, October 2 before going to London. There's what sounds like an interesting talk and concert on the afternoon of Saturday, October 9th at the Hanley museum about the music and literary relationships between the Midlands and Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century. And the Ceramic City Choir and a cast of thousands will be raising the Victoria Hall roof on October 16 with Mendelssohn's mighty Elijah. It was written for Birmingham; they should be able to hear it easily that far away.

FAREWELL SYMPHONY

2010-09-26T11:07:00.000+01:00

And so we say farewell (or perhaps arrivaderci) to Gianandrea Noseda, the conductor with the most expressive back in the business.

It's his last season as Chief Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic, the backbone of the Stoke on Trent Festival at the Victoria Hall. Next year he becomes Conductor Laureate, but three different conductors will be appearing with the orchestra in its next three visits to Hanley in December, March and May.

Maestro Noseda leaves behind him an orchestra at its technical peak -- as good as any in the world -- and one which manages to do both unusual and out of the way repertoire (20 Chandos discs) while rejuvenating the central European tradition (his famous downloads of Beethoven in 2005). I am myself currently in love with the works of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, whose only previously known work was "Susanna's Secret" (she smoked, apparently.) Thanks, Noseda and the BBC Phil for Chandos 10511.

Well, this final concert brought out all the strengths of that combination. For a start, there was a surprise late entry of unusual repertoire. The second half of the concert opened with four extra percussionists on stage -- not what we would expect for Beethoven's fifth symphony.

"We've found a new edition," Maestro Noseda confided. No, really though, it was setting the scene for Rachmaninov's Capriccio on Gypsy Themes, Op. 12 (Caprice Bohémien), which wasn't in the programme.

However much of a surprise it was to the audience, it was also one to the BBC Phil. Maestro Noseda confessed they'd only learnt it four days before.

It certainly didn't sound like that, as they whizzed through this big, melodic work (officially 18 minutes, but Maestro Noseda reckoned he could do it in 17. We shall miss his wit as well as his back.) It's an early work, but not without the Rachmaninov fingerprint.

The concert opened with a fiery performance of the overture to Verdi's Force of Destiny, Noseda's hands karate chopping the air to produce those fateful opening chords. Then it was on to Grieg's piano concerto, when Stephen Hough produced all the right notes in precisely the right order.

Stephen Hough produces a blog much more famous and read by many more people than this one (curses) and, interestingly, he's had quite a lot to say recently about clapping between movements (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/stephenhough/100046725/dont-feel-you-have-to-clap-between-movements/).

There was a smattering of applause after the opening movement, which he acknowledged with a smile and a nod even though he apparently doesn't approve. He even gave us a little Debussy encore -- and if you want more, he's back at the city museum on March 31 next year.

After the Rachmaninov, we finally got the Beethoven 5th, a performance as crisp and fleet as one by any early instrument group. Gianandrea Noseda's syncopated shoulders were in full flow as he brought out the complex rhythms of the second movement.

Now I shall never get to ask him what the rules are for using the stick. He stuck with it throughout the Beethoven, started the Grieg with it but abandoned it halfway, and didn't even look at it for the Verdi. I think it's to do with his level of passionate abandon.

His successor as Chief Conductor, Juanjo Mena, undergoes the Hanley Test on March 25 next year with Rimsky-Korsakov's Schehezerade and Stravinsky's Firebird -- definitely one for your diary.

Incidentally, I see the Victoria Hall is now selling lobby in the atrium. Or was it atrium in the lobby? Tasty.

/

FIRE AND ICE AT THE REGENT

2010-09-23T10:01:00.001+01:00

Apparently there are many people in the world who just don't believe in Evolution. I imagine there are large stretches of the United States where the Russian Ice Stars won't be able to perform the show Cirque de Glace, which tells the story of evolution. I was surprised not to find creationist pickets outside the Regent last night.

Well, I'm here to tell you some of the stunts are indeed pretty hard to believe.

I was particularly struck by the one where a big chap hung off the end of the foot of a lady performing the splits in mid-air. Luckily he held on tight as she whirled around, or several rows at the front of the audience would have been struck by him as well.

You may wonder why I've strayed from my classical music beat to go to Cirque de Glace. My brief includes dance as well as music, and I'm looking forward later in the year to the Rambert Dance Company and the Siberian state ballet at the Regent.

Cirque de Glace is actually the work of the Russian Ice Stars, who in the past have brought us some exhilarating versions of classical Russian ballet on ice. This, however, is not the same sort of thing at all.

I suppose the clue is in the title -- Ice Circus.

They've adopted some circus moves to make the ice skating even more exciting, incorporating lots of aerial work, and there are certainly some breathtaking moments.

They tell the story of the first 42 billion years in around 40 minutes, which perhaps leaves out a few minor points but touches all the key moments in sketches like "A World in Formation", "A Goddess is Born", and "Life Evolves".

Who knew that the volcanoes which formed the world apparently spewed from the raw heat of a disco in Ibiza? Who knew that the caveman invented the hula hoop all those hundreds of thousands of years ago?

Phil Waters is given credit for the script. I can't warm to his portentous and pretentious rhyming narration, believing, as I do, that the thing which most separates us from the animals is the ability to have the occasional laugh.

I'm not altogether sure his scene, "Festival of Fire", described as Man Worships Mother Earth and her greatest gift, was actually meant to recall religious wars and the burning of martyrs instead (maybe that was an accident of the musical accompaniment.)

But I am sure the second half is unrelievedly grim, covering everything from "man worships a new god -- money" to "Slash and Burn" and melting glaciers. Don't worry -- it all ends happily with a Festival of Life. Hmmm.

The music (by Stu Shaw and Steve Millington) is certainly not classical, ranging from a big song which recalls Hair through ambient numbers to pop and disco. It's not my scene, but it doesn't seem to me to be very inspired. The effect is somewhat lifted by the appearance of drummer Joe Blanks, originally from Stafford, who does some very lively on-stage drumming.

Maybe I'm falling into the trap of taking it all too seriously, as it does itself. If you want to see twenty attractive and athletic young people at the height of their game doing some astonishing things, this is the show for you; you certainly won't be bored.

You won't be having the caramel ice cream, however. Strangely, it appeared to have melted and had to be withdrawn from sale. Surely they can't have just chipped all that ice on stage straight out of the chest freezer?

FOIE GRAS MUSIC; PREVIEW OF THE STOKE-ON-TRENT FESTIVAL 2010-2011

2010-09-14T17:23:00.000+01:00

Last week in a French supermarket I saw a cauliflower for £3.50.

It was not dusted with gold. It wasn't even dusted with cheese. Just a straightforward Cyprus Colewort, not even a Romanesco (they're the fancy ones with yellow-green pyramid-shaped curd. Yes, I had to look it up. I now know more than I ever wanted to about cauliflowers.)

Imagine my surprise on visiting Hanley market when I returned to Britain. Cauliflowers there were just 60p. I could have kissed the girl on the stall as I bought my bargain brassica, though of course such behaviour is another difference between France and England. I restrained myself.

Yet another great bargain in Hanley is a season ticket to this year's Stoke-on-Trent Festival.

What it means is you don't have to go to Birmingham or Manchester to hear great music, played by leading soloists and orchestras. Mind you, since they started building the new Tesco in town, it's probably easier to get to Birmingham or Manchester than Hanley. But look at it like this; the prices are a lot lower than in the big cities, and the Victoria Hall sounds better than many more famous concert halls.

The season opens on September 24 with the BBC Philharmonic playing Verdi's Force of Destiny overture, which should be enough to wake up any spiders from their summer rest (as played at the Proms). Then it's the Grieg piano concerto, with Stephen Hough. It's an old warhorse, but Hough if anyone will have something new to say about it. It'll also be a chance to see the Phil's boss, Gianandrea Noseda, in his final season with the orchestra.

The highlights of the rest of the season for me include;

Take-a-hanky day, Friday, November 12, when James Ehnes and the CBSO play Elgar's violin concerto (did you see him on telly playing Bruch's first with the BBC Phil at the proms?);
Who he? day; new star Hong Xu joins the Hallé under equally new Hans Graf for a Rachmaninov piano concerto on October 22-- and it's the rarer number 1;
Ladies' day at the Victoria Hall on January 28 next year when flautist Daniela Koch and violinist Nicola Benedetti will both feature in Vivaldi concertos;
Welcome-back-an-old friend day when John Lill indulges in a Mozartfest next February 25; not just Mozart's most dramatic and exciting concerto, no. 20, but also a mature and tuneful sonata K576;
Blow it -- there goes another season as the wondrous Alison Balsom plays Haydn's trumpet concerto on May 13 2011 in the gala finale.

But wait; what do I see? The nine concerts of the main festival aren't the final word. There are three special events; two to get you in the mood for Christmas -- the Syd Lawrence Orchestra on December 17 and Handel's Messiah on the 11th -- and a Last Night of the Proms on June 25.

Alongside the Stoke on Trent festival's orchestral music is a series of five very special piano recitals at the city museum's Forum theatre, now a very comfortable and quiet performance space. It also doubles as a cinema, however, and the screen is often left in place during concerts; I often wonder how these great pianists would react to a silent movie suddenly appearing behind them.

And make no bones about it, these are great pianists; Stephen Hough is back as a soloist in the new year (wow -- Janacek and Scriabin; makes up for the Grieg, I guess), as is Paul Lewis, whose Beethoven discs have been selling like hot cakes (though for Hanley he's switching to Schubert).

But for me the highlight is Artur Pizarro on February 3, with an astounding concert of Granados and Prokofiev.

By the way, the French cauliflower came in at about the same price as 200grams of foie gras. And that's what the Stoke on Trent festival is all about; foie gras music at cauliflower prices. And you don't even have to go to France.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

2010-08-03T10:25:00.000+01:00

Just because I normally write about classical music doesn't mean I can't be silly sometimes. After all, Mahler rarely went out without his red nose, and Wagner's knock-knock jokes are now the stuff of legend.

With Spamalot at the Regent Theatre in Hanley, the silliness started early. Normally, the press are offered a small glass of something in the hope their reviews will be, like them, more mellow. This time we got a can of Spam (who knew it had a ring pull these days?) Luckily, my wife had brought her smaller handbag, the one that makes the Tardis look like a garden shed. I can't help feeling, however, that my welcome would have been greater had the Spam been liquidised and fermented.

The theatre was packed, mostly with people from the Monty Python generation, which pretty much coincides with the Beatles generation (or, since this is the work of Eric Idle and John du Prez, perhaps we should say the Rutles generation). And although there are tunes here which sound like those from a conventional musical, I swear I heard Let it Be in there somewhere.

Actually, as well as being the story of Arthur and the Knights of the very, very round table, this is also an anti-musical. The funniest moments for me were "The Song That Goes Like This" (so good they sing it twice) -- the words nailing a particular type of musical number -- and the Diva's Lament -- in which the Lady of the Lake bemoans the fact that she appears to have been written out of the show. There's also a wicked dig at Andrew Lloyd Webber; an easy target, some might say, but is that any reason not to try?

Of course, if you are of the Monty generation, you will recognise much of the material. There's a certain joy in being able to say the words along with the cast (and some people in the audience did), while other bits are like old friends glimpsed suddenly through a crowd. "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" is actually a terrific song, though it was even funnier sung in its original home at the end of the Life of Brian.

And everyone can sing (who knew Marcus Brigstocke had a voice?) While Hayley Tamaddon and Simon Lipkin take the mickey out of the musical big number, it's easy not to notice that they are actually good enough to sing that big number successfully. There's even a live band; shame they had to be hidden away at the back of the stage (had they done something wrong? I know they're musicians, but are their habits really that bad?) So musically it's all very successful.

The big question is; is it funny? Being myself of Pythonable age, I am bound to say yes. But it also has that quality of a really good panto, right down to audience participation; and above all, it's very good natured.

Strangely, opposite the theatre, a new gay bar was being opened last night. It was called Polari, that British gay slang first given a public airing in the antique Radio 4 show Round the Horne (I'm Julian, he's Sandy). With Spamalot as well, it was like a 60s night down Piccadilly. Some of the regulars at Polari might like to cross the road to see a show which features Sir Lancelot coming out of the closet in a gilt posing pouch.

Without all this, Piccadilly, Hanley's theatre district and arts quarter, could have been looking a little sad. Many shops are now closed, and boarded over with large posters advertising the Staffordshire Hoard. They'll be the Staffordshire Hoardings, no doubt.

THE LUDWIGS GET AROUND TO MOZART AND BEETHOVEN

2010-07-14T22:53:00.000+01:00

Whenever I'm starved of live music, I turn to composers I'm unlikely to hear anywhere else but in my front room.

So it is that I've spent some time recently in the company of Sergey Ivanovich Taneyev (1856-1915), the teacher of Scriabin and Rachmaninov and the pupil of no less a figure than Tchaikovsky (though when Tchaik came to visit he was banished to the next room where there was a chimney if he wanted a smoke.)

Taneyev gave the premieres of nearly all Tchaikovsky's piano works, but his own compositions have never really caught on; and let's face it, they aren't going to be coming to a concert hall near you anytime soon.

Now I have to say that I like to listen to the work of minor composers; they're less memorable. Once I've heard a Tchaikovsky symphony I can remember how it goes; with Taneyev, every listening session is a new experience.

So why persevere? Well, listen to the scherzo of his piano quintet (DG 00289 477 5419) and tell me that doesn't rock. What's more, in the second tune, there's a sort of nobility which is -- dare I say it -- almost Elgarian.

Seeking more of that, I went for his first and third symphonies (Naxos 8.570336) and was rather disappointed. Bits of it sound like Tchaikovsky without the tunes, alas.

Better by far is the fourth symphony (Naxos 8.572067) which again has Elgarian moments -- or maybe it's that Elgar is the English Brahms and Taneyev was known as the Russian Brahms.

I even tried his suite de concert (Hyperion CDA67642) which is forty minutes of fiddling around (well, it would be, wouldn't it?). However, the disc also includes a twenty minute gem, the violin concerto by Arensky, so there's a whole new field of research....

When it comes to live music, I'm happy to hear Mozart and Beethoven, particularly when it's music I don't know. And particularly when it's played by the likes of the Ludwig string trio -- Peter Cropper, late of the Lindsays, James Boyd, and Paul Watkins -- at the New Vic (part of the Music in the Round series.)

They opened with Mozart's duo for violin and viola, K424, which Peter Cropper suggested was written for (very gifted) amateurs to play at home. We could have been in an 18th century drawing room... though we were actually in a 19th century chancery court. The set of the New Vic's latest (and very successful) production, Dickens' Bleak House, was still in evidence. Peter Cropper apologised for not clearing up.

He also pointed out that Mozart had managed to make the duo sound like a quartet at times by clever double-stopping... and he suggested this might be

the way forward for composers in this age of austerity.

I was very taken by the first movement of Beethoven's opus 3 string trio, with its vivid syncopation. I shall be looking that one up again. Nice that I'm still finding new tunes by Beethoven after all these years listening to classical music.

After the interval they played Mozart's Divertimento K563, which they consider one of Mozart's greatest chamber works. They play it like that, too; their delight in the music and passion for it is stunning.

The turnout was bigger than I've known for the New Vic's chamber music nights. Perhaps other people felt, like me, a little starved of live classical music in the past few weeks.

Incidentally, Taneyev is possibly the first composer to have set texts in Esperanto. Given that the office and admin centre of "Esperanto-Asocio de Britio" (the Esperanto Association of Britain) is just down the road in Barlaston, maybe this wouldn't be such a bad place for a Taneyev concert after all...

NEXT This Saturday sees 14 finalists competing to be Staffordshire Young Musician of the Year at the Gatehouse Theatre in Stafford. The prizes are being presented by Hannah Roberts from the Manchester Camerata -- who'll be bringing along her cello. It looks as if piano, as always, is everyone's favourite instrument -- though there are a three violinists, a couple of clarinettists and sax players as well as cornet, bassoon and flute. Great stuff.

The following Saturday there's an organ prom in Hanley at lunchtime, and in the evening Clonter Opera near Congleton starts its summer run of Rossini's opera Cinderella -- La Cenerentola. It's on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday of that week before returning in October and going on to the Britten Theatre in London. If you can't wait for November/December when Glyndebourne comes to Hanley, and also does Cinderella (you wait for years, then...), this could be the answer -- and you can take your own picnic.

BUXTON HANDELS MAGIC OPERA

2010-07-13T10:51:00.002+01:00

Handel's opera Alcina is set on a magic island. Last night it was set in a magic theatre, Buxton opera house. The interval didn't appear for an hour and a half, and, knees creaking and back aching, I was still eager to get back to my seat for the final half hour.

Some of you might have noticed -- oh, all right -- both of you might have noticed that I had been unusually silent before the arrival of the Lichfield and Buxton festivals. I'd been unhappy to miss two good concerts -- by the Barbara Walton Singers and the North Staffordshire Symphony Orchestra -- but both had happened at weekends, when I need special dispensation.

I wouldn't want you to think I'd gone without music, however. One of my recent joys has been the DVD of Glyndebourne's 2006 production of Handel's Julius Caesar -- Giulio Cesare in Egitto to give it its full title (Opus Arte OA 0950 D). I'm not the only one to find this an amazing joy -- it was Gramophone CD of the month, recommended by BBC music magazine, and a best seller of the year at one of the biggest classical music websites. It's a production full of life and vivacity, with great costumes, big sets, and the gorgeous, all-singing, all-dancing Danielle de Niese as Cleopatra. If there were any justice, she'd be selling more discs than Kylie.

And even in the eighteenth century, it wasn't enough just to sing. Here are the stage instructions for Act II, scene one, of Alcina; "With lightning and thunder, the mountain crumbles, revealing Alcina's delightful palace."

In 1735, Covent Garden had fancy stage machinery which could achieve just that.

Buxton Opera House barely has room for a stage, never mind a mountain. The set is a simple box covered in pictures of Italian cypresses, which eventually opens out magically into a villa. The costumes are sort of nineteenth century, though with a fantastical element which suits the opera.

The lighting -- Tina MacHugh -- is a triumph, fitting every moment of the convoluted plot perfectly and reflecting the mood of the drama.

Nor is there any dancing in this production, though there is a little rolling on the ground. Nevertheless, presumably thanks to director Annilese Miskimmon, everyone looks perfectly at home on stage, doing precisely what they need to do to convey meaning.

What the Opera Theatre Company has done is simply allow Handel's glorious music to do all the work. This Irish group is not afraid to have just one person on stage singing their hearts out.

Of course, this is only possible if the singing and playing is first-class. Nicholas Kok's baroque orchestra is very small (just nine) but perfectly formed; there are many magic time-stopping moments involving just the singer and one instrument. I'll pick out the cellist for special mention (Joseph Crouch.)

So it's all down to the singers. Let's say first of all that I normally object to opera in English, simply because the act of singing changes the way people move their mouths and it often makes words unintelligible (I didn't catch a lot of the witty new translation of the Barber of Baghdad.) Here, everyone is at pains to make sure we know what the words are (though it has to be said a lot of the plot is in the recitatives, where it's easier to be clear). The exception is the otherwise splendid Stephen Wallace; I'm quite prepared to believe his high voice is not achieved by the unsavoury methods employed in the eighteenth century, but something nasty has been done to his vowels.

Sinéad Campbell-Wallace's ice maiden witch, Alcina, has a full and expressive voice (her "Oh my heart" was a triumph); Emma Morwood as Morgana is clear and clean, with outstanding projection; Stephen Wallace is an outstanding exponent of this new, trendy, counter tenor voice. Doreen Curran is perfectly cast as Bradamante, the woman warrior, and her voice is interesting and very tuneful, if occasionally quieter than I would have liked. Mark Millhofer is a dark and devious Oronte, and Julian Hubbard as Bradamante’s sidekick Melisso is suitably manly.

Alcina came at a difficult time for Handel, embroiled he was in an opera house war, and it perhaps never quite got the acclaim is should have done first round. I suppose he’d have been somewhat surprised about it being a hit more than 250 years later in a northern spa, but there was no doubting the way the audience felt last night.

NEXT Catch Alcina on July 16 and 21. The Buxton Festival goes on until July 25 -- and there are still more operas to come, as well as everything from a literary series to walks. The Lichfield Festival goes on until July 18; everything from the BBC Philharmonic to comedian Rich Hall to play for there.

Back in the non-festival world, the Ludwig Trio will be playing Beethoven and Mozart at the New Vic on Wednesday, and if you’re in Nantwich on Thursday lunchtime you might want to pop along to St Mary’s to hear former Manchester Camerata leader Richard Howarth in a summer lunchtime concert at 1230.