On ambition

Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) in Billions (Season 7, Episode 2, 11:45):

If a fella doesn’t have his eye on something, how’s he gonna know where he’s going?”

Loud Living in Cambridge

I was most fortunate this week to hear Jan Lisiecki in an outstanding recital at the West Road Concert Hall, Department of Music, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, on 26 February 2024, in a concert sponsored by Camerata Musica Cambridge. West Road Hall is a fine modern hall with very nice acoustics, and was fully packed. The hall management turned off the lights over the audience (as in a theatre), which should happen more often. Perhaps that darkness helped create the atmosphere of great seriousness this performance had. I later learnt that this recital was the twelfth time in the series that Mr Lisiecki had played the Preludes program.

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Oratory at Nudgee

This is a short post to record for history a very fine speech by Mr Oscar Roati, School Captain of St Joseph’s Nudgee College, Brisbane, Australia, at the Investiture Ceremony for the 2024 Senior Class on 24 January 2024. Apparently, his father Alex Roati was a Vice-Captain and his two brothers were both Captains of Nudgee. The speech can be seen here, from minute 41:20.

Vale: Peter Schickele (1935-2024)

The composer and musician Peter Schickele, manager of that lesser-known last son of JS Bach, PDQ Bach, has just died. He was heavily influenced by Spike Jones, whose music was a strong presence in my household growing up. With the death last year of Barry Humphries, it feels like the 1950s may now just have ended.

From his obituary in The New York Times, Mr Schickele is quoted as having said in an interview with the Times in 2015:

“Years ago I used to watch Victor Borge, still concertizing in his 80s. And it never occurred to me that I would do the same. I’m amazed that P.D.Q. has gone on for 50 years.

It just goes to show: Some people never learn.”

Owning the day

Australian chef and restaurateur Bill Granger (1969-2023) died on Christmas Day of cancer. Although he did not invent avocado on toast, he certainly popularized the breakfast dish through his restaurants in Sydney, London and elsewhere. In an interview with the AFR earlier this year, he is reported to have said:

I grew up in Melbourne, and when I moved to Sydney, I was shocked by its morning life. People were on the beach, walking through the park, owning the day. It felt very Australian, very optimistic. I think avocado on toast is optimistic.”

Transcendent music

Some years ago, I compiled a list of purposes that may motivate composers, performers or listeners of music, under the heading What is music for?

An objective that may motivate many performers is that of reaching a transcendent state, as the Russian-Israeli pianist Boris Giltburg, describes here. His blog post was written after he had performed all five Beethoven Piano Concertos with the Brussels Philharmonic (under Thierry Fischer) across three evenings, in February 2020 (blog entry of 18 February 2020):

The high point for me was No. 4, during which I experienced something which until now I’ve only felt while playing Russian music: a kind of floating, when your brain disengages or splits in two. One (small) part is alert and following the performance, and perhaps directs the musical flow a little bit, the other (much larger) part is completely sunk into the music, experiencing it in a kind of visceral, instinctive way which precludes logical thinking and seems wired directly to your deepest feelings, without any buffers or defenses. After that concerto I was drained, bewildered, exhilarated – a complete mess. But what an unforgettable night.”

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Concert Concat 2

This post is one in a sequence which lists live music I have heard, as best my memory allows, from the Pandemic onwards. I will update this as time permits. In some cases, I am also motivated to write about what I heard.

Other posts in this collection can be found here.

  • Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy in a 4-hands 1-piano recital to a fully-packed Wigmore Hall, London, 14 March 2024. The music included:
    • Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (4-hands) (1911-1913)
    • Lyonya Desyatnikov: Trompe-l’oeil (2023)
    • Schubert: Fantasie in F Minor D940 (1828)

    This was an outstanding performance, which I was very fortunate to hear. The piece by Russian composer Lyonya Desyatnikov was a commission in 2023 for these two pianists by the Aldeburgh Festival. There were two encores, the second a Bach chorale.

    I am pleased the performers are both happy to break staid convention in their clothes, although the multiple layers they each wore would not, I think, have been that comfortable to perform in. (Thanks also to GM and AD for fascinating conversations this evening. I am grateful to AD for recently introducing me to the powerful music of Desyatnikov.)

  • Mikhail Bouzine in a superb recital that felt like a happening, at the Steinway Hall, London, 13 March 2024, to a packed audience of about 40 people. The event was entitled “The Happier Eden” and included a great variety of works, all relating to love, particularly to love of oneself. The program and the notes of the shoeless performer are shown in the photographs here.


    The concert began with Mirror by Fluxus artist George Brecht, in which Mr Bouzine walked in front of the audience holding up a large mirror for the audience to see ourselves: a good start to a program mentioning Narcissus. I have long admired the subversive whimsy of Brecht, and this work was in that spirit. The theme throughout the evening was love, and so we heard Dimitri Mitropoulos’ Beatrice, and the swooniest rendition of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 16 in G major I have ever heard. Here was a composer – and a performer – who had been in love.

    Cornelius Cardew’s Memories of You involved Mr Bouzine making various sounds, for example, dropping a biro on the floor, swirling the biro around a coffee mug, and playing two brief recordings from a phone placed inside the end of the piano. I imagine these were personal memories of someone dear to the performer.

    Dear to me is my late and greatly-missed friend, French composer Christophe Bertrand. I was therefore delighted by the inclusion of his beautiful piano work Haiku. In the context of this program, the sounds of this work were those of a babbling brook, water flowing gently over stones, as Narcissus looked at his own image in the water.

    This was a brave and intelligent program played forcefully and with the strong emotions that passionate love entails. The evening was enchanting.

    Christopher Axworthy’s review and photos of the happening are here.

  • Jonathan Ferrucci playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations at King’s Place, London, 11 March 2024. This was a superb performance, to a packed hall. Mr Ferrucci’s playing was warm and spirited, and not in any way austere, as performances of Bach sometimes are.

    At the very end, Mr Ferrucci kept his hands on the keys and his feet on the pedals for many seconds after he finished playing, which thankfully stayed the applause. I was pleased that he gave no encore, and spoke no word the entire evening, so that the sounds in our minds at the end were those of Bach. He had presented us Bach’s music, all of which was wonderful, and only the music, nothing else. I was elated for some time afterwards, as the recipients of my many late-night messages that evening can attest.

  • Frank Dupree and the Philharmonia Orchestra, London, under Santtu-Matias Rouvaki in a concert of Russian music, Royal Festival Hall, London Thursday 7 March 2024. The program comprised:
    • Glinka: Capriccio Brilliante (Spanish Overture #1)
    • Kapustin: Piano Concerto #5 (UK Premiere)
    • Borodin: Symphony #2
    • Rimsky-Korsakov: Capriccio Espagnol

    I attended in order to hear Kapustin’s concerto, not any of which I have heard before. The performance of Mr Dupree and the Philharmonia was very good. I was not so pleased by the music, though. The concerto is written in a jazz style – or rather, many jazz styles, all very populist. It struck me as the composer showing off his knowledge of different jazz sub-styles, and I could not hear any overall coherence or structure, or development (at least, not on a single hearing).

    Mr Dupree was called back for an encore, and his encore piece was much more impressive than the concerto. He arranged for 6 percussionists (including the conductor) and a double-bass player to join him, and together they played a version of “Caravan”. Dupree started by plucking the strings on the piano until the other players were around him, then played the piano, and at one point turned around to face the others and switched to playing bongos, then back to the piano. The encore was much more exciting than the concerto, and Dupree seemed to be more excited by it. People now gave him a standing ovation (which they had not done before).

    Having people to meet, places to be, instruments to practice, I could not stay for the second half. An earlier post about different arrangements of Caravan is here.

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Acknowledgments of Country

It has become commonplace in the last two decades for public meetings or gatherings in Australia or of Australians elsewhere in the world to open with an Acknowledgment of Country statement. This is a statement thanking the traditional indigenous community who inhabited the land on which the meeting is being held, and (usually) expressing respect to the traditional elders, past, present and emerging, of that community. Last night, for instance, a panel discussion held at King’s College London on the topic of the upcoming Voice Referendum began with such statements from several of the invited speakers acknowledging traditional custodians of parts of Australia where where they had grown up or studied. I have also witnessed such statements at private meetings and internal organizational meetings in Australia, even when these events were held online.
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The personality of Robert Mugabe

I have remarked before that Robert Mugabe was one of the best orators I have ever heard. I am not alone in having been impressed. Below is an assessment of Mugabe’s oratory and personality, by Zimbabwean journalist Jan Raath, published in The Times (London), 12 November 2017, under the headline, “Forty years ago, I too was beguiled by Robert Mugabe, the young guerrilla leader”.

I will treasure the events of yesterday afternoon for the rest of my life. I had driven to the Harare international conference centre to hear a rather dry debate on the impeachment of Robert Mugabe, the man I have been covering for this newspaper since 1975.
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Recent Reading 20

The latest in a sequence of lists of recently-read books, listed in reverse chronological order.

  • Stuart A. Reid [2023]: The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination. Knopf. Much of this I knew, from Larry Devlin’s book. What was new to me were the machinations of Belgian governments in their former colony, before and after Zaire’s Independence.
  • Michael Smith [2016]: Foley: The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews. Biteback Publishing. An inspiring story about a British spy and immigration official in pre-War Berlin, who was willing and able to facilitate the safe passage of many German Jews, both to Britain and to British Palestine. He often did so by bending the rules he was supposed to enforce, for example, accepting promises of future payment (IOUs) rather than the actual financial transfers he was required to verify existed before issuing visas for British Palestine.
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