Wednesday, December 07, 2011

Apart from the Sarah Lund sweater...

...Aarhus is a rather civilised place where the arts are concerned. I returned with a green Sarah Lund sweater from the Christmas market, having passed a pleasant weekend with someone who is finding life and atmosphere there pretty agreeable.

The town has a state-of-the-art concert hall with Artek acoustics that seats about 1,200 and was opened only a few years ago. This to supplement its older (though not much older) hall, which now houses opera. The new building includes a specially built pop auditorium and a chamber music hall. Have a look at some more designs here. Next door is a museum of modern art on the top of which is a "rainbow" promenade: you walk round in a circle admiring the panorama of the beautiful old seaside city, enwrapped by a succession of different colours.

The orchestra, when I arrived, was in the middle of an unusual Italian concert featuring a lot of Respighi and a piano concerto by Nino Rota (Benedetto Lupo was soloist). This programme was given twice. The orchestra rarely rehearses more than four hours a day and many weekends are free, the principal concert evening being Thursday. Taxes and prices are high in Denmark, but the orchestral salary is higher after tax than comparable jobs in the UK, which would entail many more hours and more antisocial ones, though fewer allocated to each programme. The orchestra is state-funded, so need not be in thrall to a dictatorship of sponsors or the fear/loathing of them (contrast, for example, with India and the 2012 Olympic Games - they have been burning an effigy of Lord Coe over this - or Alice Oswald and the TS Eliot Prize) and the job carries with it conditions that British musicians barely dream of, such as pensions. Backstage, there's a succession of soundproofed practice rooms and a comfy common room with tea and coffee on tap as long as you wash up your own mug, and many of the players stick around for a drink after the show. They seem to get along with one another quite well.

The town's conservatoire is also accommodated in the new concert hall complex. Students attend free of charge. European students, indeed, can all attend free of charge, assuming I have understood this correctly. It's hard to get your head around it when you reflect that our British conservatoires, along with all arts courses in the country, have just been wiped off the face of the state-funded map.

Owning a car in Denmark is exceedingly expensive, so the city is not at all congested. There's a goodish network of buses and people cycle a lot, with a succession of properly planned and well-organised cycle lanes. The city centre, around the gorgeous and very ancient cathedral, is full of little cafes and ancient timber-framed buildings with deep window casements. Generally the interiors are very well heated and properly insulated from the cold climate.

You can walk through the beech woods by the sea and enjoy a cup of fabulous hot chocolate in the old restaurant in the forest. There's a set of exercise equipment by the side of the path which you can use for keeping fit - go for a run, do some weights exercises and move on. The equipment has not been stolen and remains unvandalised.

It's not London. It is cosy, calm and contented. Staggering degrees of contrasted wealth, poverty and greed don't seem to apply. There isn't all that much going on in terms of cultural adventure, but family time is a major priority. Parents might even take their children to the modern art museum on a Sunday, or go for a walk together. They mightn't be obliged to work 24/7 leaving their kids to fend for themselves at the local fast-fat takeaway. People seem happy.

That's not to say there are no problems. I know there are problems, having met people from ethnic minorities who were experiencing them, while other friends have been made redundant and jobs are in short supply. There are cuts, too: the bus timetable, for instance, seems to have been decimated, and one friend tells me there's a lot of knife crime, though matters like "a lot" are relative and I am a Londoner. Nevertheless, the contrast between there and here hammers home quite how far we have travelled down some very silly and self-destructive paths indeed.

Music students, if you don't want to enter your adult life in debt up to your back teeth, you could do worse than start learning Danish. I find the language pretty difficult - it is so "swallowed" that relating what's written to what you hear is kind of awkward, though we could try watching The Killing with Danish subtitles as good way to get started. Someone tells me it's really quite easy. Just like English, only 1000 years out of date.

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

Debussy and friends aid Japan

I've just been to see the pianist Noriko Ogawa about her Debussy festival in Manchester in January. Together with the BBC Philharmonic and friends, she is exploring the cross-currents between Debussy and Japan - the influence of oriental culture on the composer and his influence, in return, on Japanese composers of the 20th century and today. Fascinating stuff and I'll be explaining it all at more length soon. But Noriko was in Japan at the time of the earthquake on 11 March - you may have seen her speaking about it from Tokyo on Newsnight - and she has been hard at work fundraising via concerts and other means for the victims of the earthquake and tsunami, which left vast numbers homeless and deprived of their livelihoods. She has had some Black Cat greetings cards specially designed - each one costs £2 and all profits go to the Japan Society Tohoku Earthquake Relief Fund. If you haven't done your Xmas cards yet, here's the purrfect chance. Right, one of the four images. You can buy them online here. Debussy, by the way, used to frequent the club Le Chat Noir in Paris.

Monday, December 05, 2011

The End of Time: 9 January 2012

No, it's not another bleak economic forecast, nor an attempt at the Rapture... Actually it's my Messiaen project, which has undergone a surprising rapture of its own, being resurrected by a dynamic concert manager, a superb team of actors and a quartet drawn from the creme-de-la-creme of young British musicians. Please book soon for our showcase performance at Bob and Elizabeth Boas's beautiful salon in central London on the evening of 9 January. All details below.

The End of Time
Monday 9th January 7pm
22 Mansfield Street W1G 9NR


THE END OF TIME is a unique project, matching drama and music:
a one-act play, A Walk through the End of Time, written by Jessica Duchen  and read by Susan Porrett and Patrick Drury

presented before a performance of Olivier Messiaen's great Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps with:

Viv McLean - piano
Tamsin Waley-Cohen - violin
Gemma Rosefield - cello
Matthew Hunt - clarinet
The performance starts at 7.30 pm with drinks at 7pm.
There will be drinks and canapes afterwards at about 9.30pm
Tickets are £25 (£5 for students) with all the proceeds going to the Nicholas Boas Charitable Trust.


 Seating is strictly limited in this intimate venue so you are advised to get your tickets early.
TO BOOK:
1. Contact Mr. Robert Boas by email:
boas22m@btinternet.com
(Payment to: The Nicholas  Boas  Trading Co. Ltd)

2. Alternatively you  can book through Yvonne Evans: 07889 399 862

You may also wish to make a separate donation to The Nicholas Boas Charitable Trust
 

Friday, December 02, 2011

Top of my Liszt: Roger Daltrey...

Someone was away, so guess who landed the column The Week in Culture for today's Independent...?

It was the perfect excuse to do a music-film equivalent of one of the "literary smackdowns" that are so popular on Twitter right now. Pick your Russell: Ken, or Simon R Beale? Now, I love Simon dearly. And Sir Mark. And Dr Deathridge, whose lectures at Cambridge were absolutely the best back in 1986. But just try watching an episode of BBC4's Symphony series back to back with Lisztomania. Just try it...

Who would ever come up with a thing like this now? But of course, nobody would have done so before Ken Russell, either. Here's one of the milder episodes for this week's Friday Historical: Liszt and Marie a la Charlie Chaplin and Edna, in a recollection of love's young dream and its gradual destruction, while the great song 'O lieb, o lieb' is sung by Roger Daltrey. A Friday Historical that is only 36 years old, with a singer who is very much still with us. But historical because it's unlikely that any comparable thing will ever happen again.

Thursday, December 01, 2011

It's all going nuts at the ballet

Wall-to-wall Nutcrackers this year, left, right, centre, north and over the Pond too. I mean, how many do we need? My article asking this is in today's Independent (and this morning it has made it to the front page of the Indy website): http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/the-nutcracker-its-all-going-nuts-at-the-ballet-6270098.html

Meanwhile - with impeccable timing - my dear friend "Entartete Musik", aka Gavin Plumley, has started a Nutcracker advent calendar today. It's wonderful! Find it here.

Overkill? Let's add to it. Please welcome those gorgeous former Royal Ballet stars, Lesley Collier and Anthony Dowell, in the great pas de deux.