There was a time when Britain woke up to orchestral crises over breakfast—save the Philharmonia, the LSO, the Royal Philharmonic, whichever band had outshot its finances and faced a visit from the grim receiver. Orchestras, we were led to believe, were our national heritage and each and every one of them had a special character that required preservation. No more. London orchestras in a blind testing can seldom be told apart one from another and their repeat-visa conductors are so faceless that, were you to ask passengers on the Penge omnibus (it’s the 176), the only one they could possibly name is Simon Rattle, maybe because he’s English and a Sir.

The odds against a London orchestra ever being famous again are roughly equivalent to Charlton Athletic winning the FA Cup, something they last did in 1947 when the Philharmonia was in its first season. The difference? You can still read about Charlton Athletic’s performance in the papers every weekend. The Philharmonia? Hardly ever.

Orchestras have sunk 80,000 leagues below the radar and they have no clue what they might do to arise once more as interesting, useful and—what’s the word?—woke members of society. Esa-Pekka Salonen, the departing Philharmonia chief, tried new technology. Result: glazed eyes. The LSO plays once a year under pigeon droppings in Trafalgar Square. The tourists like it. The locals walk on by. Who conducted? No one knows.

The last maestro to win popular acclaim died earlier this year amid fond chuckles and snobbish disparagement. André Previn never inspired the overwhelming confidence of musicians. The LSO leader John Georgiadis recalls in a new Amazon-available memoir, Bow to Baton, that he responded to Previn’s appointment with the declaration: “I greet this news with utter dismay!”  Things got no better:

Previn didn’t rate high on technique. And although he had made a favourable impression nobody in the orchestra other than desperate directors considered him a suitable candidate for chief conductor
. . .  Soon there was a detectable loss of authority emanating from the podium . . . However, the flip side to this general concern over playing standards was that it quickly became apparent that the public were taking to Andre very well, and when the BBC began to use him for a very successful TV series it was soon obvious that his relaxed manner and fluent humour would be a great asset to the orchestra in this medium.

And so he was. Previn had a Hollywood wife, wore a Beatles crop and Carnaby Street suits and was quick with a quip. His Christmas 1971 sketch on The Morecambe and Wise Show drew the biggest audience for any conductor since Toscanini died; his less-viewed return to the show a year or so later sparkled with perfect delivery of football one-liners. When Eric said he had played the Grieg concerto last time they were on together, Andre shot back: “You would have been better off playing Luton.”

He complained bitterly about being made to look ridiculous on the show, but he embraced the absurdity with such enthusiasm that it smacked of pure calculation on his part. Previn, as Georgiadis describes him, could be a crabby little man, concerned for his creature comforts and the dignity of his office. But he was heart and soul a showman who, like all crowd-pleasers from Handel to Louis Armstrong, knew where to find the public G-spot and when to stop tickling.

Watch him on that barely-rehearsed Christmas show and you will see not only the most perfect gag timing since the metronome’s invention but also Previn’s dewy-eyed respect for Morecambe and Wise as masters of comic choreography. A maestro of any vanity would never have put himself in their hands. “It took me 20 years to build up my reputation as a musician,” Previn chides Eric, “and in five minutes you made me into a complete nonentity.”

That line rings so painfully true one has to wonder why André agreed to do the show at all. If not for personal gain—and it took him the rest of his life to live down Eric’s “Mr Preview” tag—then he must have done it primarily for the benefit of his orchestra, to project its role in public entertainment, neither elitist nor remote, and nonetheless essential. Georgiadis, who had more reasons than most to dislike him, concedes that Previn’s 11 years were “a high point in the LSO’s history”.

Which prompts the question: can anyone do it again? Not the Finns, that’s for sure. They have one joke between them and it’s about shoelaces. Nor are other modern maestros much use when they step off the box and into the public arena. Gustavo Dudamel has been on Sesame Street and Andris Nelsons can throw a mean baseball to open the Boston sporting season but that’s pretty much the limits of the present crop’s public engagement.

Unless you count Yannick Nézet-Séguin, music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera, who has lately been doing the rounds of daytime television studios chattering away about the playlists that he makes for his cats when he’s away from home. Cue for a few jokes? Depussy? Furr Elise? Cathetique Sonata?

No, he’s being purrfectly serious. That’s how bad it has got.

The post Who’s the next Mr Preview? appeared first on Standpoint.

A monumental biography—1,300 pages in two volumes from the University of Amsterdam Press—tries to set matters right. The life’s work of Dr Frits Zwart, director of the Netherlands Music Institute, the book almost loses Mengelberg in a pile of humdrum correspondence and social engagements that yield neither incident nor passion, excitement or humanity. Mengelberg seems to lack much by way of personality. He would not have been the first dull man to be a great conductor—think Hans Richter, Karl Böhm,  Adrian Boult—but he was liked by Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, who did not tolerate bores, so there must be more to him than meets the archivist’s eye. And, if you read enough hundreds of pages, there is. Deep in this work of worship—one chapter is titled “The Undeniable Importance of Conductor Willem Mengelberg”—lie two dark secrets that make this very Dutch maestro seem, at once, much more human and also more odious than we had ever suspected.

To start with, he was not very Dutch. Both parents were German. They sent the gifted fourth of their 16 children to study in Cologne. At 20, Willem was made general music director of Lucerne in Switzerland. Four years later, in 1895, he returned to Amsterdam as principal conductor of the Concertgebouw orchestra, a young ensemble of no significance. Mengelberg welded it into a winning team by means of what Zwart describes as “rehearsal, endless rehearsal”. With no limits to the time he could spend, he bored musicians into submission with dreary harangues and constant repetition. His method infected their collective DNA. Even today, you will find Concertgebouw players earlier on stage for rehearsal and better prepared than those in any other orchestra.

Strauss and Mahler were so impressed that Strauss wrote Ein Heldenleben for Mengelberg, saying he knew no other orchestra that was up to its demands. Mahler, meanwhile, said there was no one else to whom he would entrust a symphony with greater confidence. If, on recordings, Mengelberg delivers the most breathless opening of the fourth symphony and the quickest Adagietto in the fifth, we may safely assume that he did so with the composer’s authority. Mahler, when in Amsterdam, stayed in Mengelberg’s house.

Mengelberg, who in the first half of his career was idolised by the Dutch public, was powerful enough with politicians to veto the creation of an opera house, fearing it might siphon off his musicians and subscribers. He held a second job as conductor in Frankfurt-am-Main and was a sought-after guest in London, Paris and Rome. Through the 1920s he was chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic, a situation that turned sour when Toscanini stepped in as joint conductor. Back home the Dutch grumbled about his absence and about the lack of Dutch music in the Concertgebouw. Mengelberg did not conceal his contempt for Dutch composers or, for that matter, for the whingeing Dutch, whom he compared unfavourably to the obedient Germans. He had few friends, and no lovers. We know that now for sure.

Zwart reveals that Mengelberg was sexually inert, to the point where he fixed up his wife Tilly in a years-long affair with his nephew, Rudi. The liaison wagged many musical tongues, but was never publicly acknowledged. Tilly, on their 22nd wedding anniversary, wrote to her husband, “If you do not complain—neither will I—and I will personally add that I am very grateful . . .”

Consider, then, the lie that Mengelberg lived. All-powerful to musicians and public, he was a eunuch in his own home, without a friend to call his own. Had Mahler known, he might have sent him to Sigmund Freud. Mengelberg instead found other satisfactions, sublimating his dormant libido in an unbridled adoration of powerful men.

He worshipped Mussolini and collected picture postcards of Adolf Hitler. He was rude about Jews and, when the Germans invaded his country, gave an interview to the racialist Völkischer Beobachter, announcing his joy at the occupation: “We stayed up all night, ordered champagne and celebrated that great hour. It was truly a great hour . . . Europe awaits a new future.”

To the Dutch Telegraaf, he said: “I confess to the crime of being pro-German . . . My forefathers were Germans . . . and since when is it a crime in the Netherlands to be pro or anti something?” Arrogant and heartless, he did little to save Jewish musicians from deportation and was seen rather too often in the company of the music-loving Gauleiter Arthur Seyss-Inquart. If he expressed any distress it was for the loss of half of his audience who deplored his collaboration. As late as April 1945, Mengelberg was still collecting Hitler pictures. He was in his mid-seventies when he retreated to Switzerland and 80 when he died.

Flawed personality that he was, Mengelberg is nonetheless a formative figure in orchestral history, a man whose psychology still affects the Concertgebouw’s relations with its conductors. The orchestra is presently headless, having summarily fired its last music director over media allegations of sexual hyperactivity and then buried the dispute beneath a Dutch duvet for a future musicologist, 50 years from now, to shake out. Just another misjudgment.

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This kind of mass transition is rare, so much so you’d have to go back to 1990 when Bernstein and Karajan died. Then, it was about generational shift. Now, it’s about gender politics.

The mechanics of hiring a music director remain much the same. A manager stacks the next two seasons with new faces to see if any of them impress sceptical musicians sufficiently to get a callback. The candidates will be overwhelmingly white and male. But that’s where thing have shifted. Every music organisation has an equal-opportunity obligation. None has yet shortlisted an ethnic-minority conductor (and you might well ask why), but all are now looking at women as a priority, not least because the talent pool has finally exploded with candidates of outstanding communicative power.

Before I scan the runners and riders, step back with me for a paragraph or so to 1990 when the only woman conductor you ever saw was collecting fares on the buses on comedy TV. Women never got far up the orchestral ladder. Jane Glover, highly intelligent and a future Governor of the BBC, became music conductor of a chamber ensemble, the London Mozart Players. Symphony orchestras simply ignored her. Iona Brown, Neville Marriner’s chosen successor at the Academy of St Martin-in the Fields, suffered a similar blight. Sian Edwards, a graduate of the Leningrad Conservatoire, was made principal conductor at English National Opera in 1993, a high tide mark for women in British music. Edwards lasted just two years, undermined by intolerant players and a floundering administration. She now teaches conducting at the Guildhall.

The breach came in 2002 when Marin Alsop was appointed by the Bournemouth Symphony, rising five years later to the Baltimore Symphony. “My name Marin is not that common,” she said recently, “so people sometimes didn’t know that I was a woman. I could tell that by the surprised look they had when I arrived on stage.” Alsop, 62, has gone on to conduct the BBC’s Last Night of the Proms and many of last year’s Leonard Bernstein tributes. This year, she takes up a new post as chief conductor of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra in the most reactionary of musical cities. That is a sign of how drastically things are changing.

While Alsop was banging her head on the English glass ceiling, a cheery Australian, Simone Young, was tipping German scales. Daniel Barenboim’s assistant at Bayreuth, she conducted the Vienna State Opera in high heels while eight months pregnant. She recorded Wagner’s Ring cycle and the complete works of Bruckner. In 2005 she was named Generalmusikdirektor (GMD) in Hamburg, presiding there impressively for a decade. Now 58, she shuttles between Europe and Australia, balancing a guest conducting schedule with the family priorities of her 95-year-old mother and her first grandchild, something I could never have imagined of any of her male predecessors. In the history of musical suffrage, Young and Alsop go down as the breakthrough acts.

Still, nothing happens overnight in the stuffy world of classical music and it would take a second wave to open up the podium across a wide front. In 2012, a Lithuanian, 26 years old, landed the lowly post of second Kapellmeister at Salzburg’s town theatre. That summer, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla entered the Salzburg-Nestlé conducting competition and ran off with first prize. The trophy came with a foot in the door to major orchestras. Mirga — this is not male condescension, that’s how she likes to be called — joined Gustavo Dudamel’s staff at the Los Angeles Phil, where her ambitions were stoked by the orchestra’s feminist president, Deborah Borda. Hardcore LA players were soon telling me that she was something special. The Salzburg theatre promoted her to music director.

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, seeking a successor to Andris Nelsons, tried her out in July 2015. “The orchestra were unanimous,” said its manager, Stephen Maddock. “They said she was the clearest conductor they had ever worked with.” What musicians saw — aside from fizzing energy and incontestable musicality — was that Mirga was entirely sui generis, an instinct-driven artist who would rather hold a post-concert singsong in her dressing room than attend a sponsor’s drinks party. Gender was never an issue: she was too different in too many other ways. Her appointment as CBSO music director commanded the BBC morning news and the front page of The Times.

Raised in post-Soviet confusion, Mirga lacks conventional inhibitions. You see her drive orchestras forward with shivering gestures of pleasure, climaxing a symphony with arms and legs akimbo, like Freddy Mercury on speed. Mirga holds nothing back at work, everything in personal space. In interviews, she gives nothing away. Turning up heavily pregnant in Birmingham, she refused to disclose the father’s name, or if she was even in a relationship with him. Three months after the baby was born she was back at work with her mother as minder. When the baby needed more of her time, Mirga cancelled the New York Philharmonic. She listens to a few music sages such as the Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer but mostly keeps her own counsel. Everything about her is 21st-century — her reckless positivism, her daring, her lifestyle. She is a rainmaker who has made all things possible for women on the podium.

So who’s reaping the rewards? A short nose ahead of the rest is Karina Canellakis, 38, from a Greco-Russian New York family. Mentored by Simon Rattle, she is about to become chief conductor of the Dutch radio orchestra and is favoured to succeed Leonard Slatkin in Detroit. “I didn’t see anyone who looked like me on the podium,” she explains, by way of motivation. Like Mirga, she shrugs off questions about women in music. “Just go ahead and do it,” she says.

The fastest advances are being made in Belgium and Holland. Antwerp’s symphony orchestra has installed Elim Chan, 32, from Hong Kong, a winner of the London Symphony Orchestra’s conducting competition. Chan, who is also principal guest in Glasgow, lets slip injudicious comments about “girl power”. She is so focused on the music that afterwards “I remember thinking: did they even enjoy it?” Unusually at this early stage, she insists on working with youth orchestras.

The Liège opera house is now in the hands of Speranza Scappucci, 45, a former assistant to Riccardo Muti. Scappucci conducts every season at the Vienna State Opera. Effervescent and engaging, she is talked of as an outside candidate for the vacant Concertgebouw orchestra. In Finland, Susanna Mälkki had to wait until her late forties before becoming chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic but she also has a post in LA and there’s no holding her back. She is a specialist in new music: I once saw her conduct a concert in which she had commissioned every single work, an act of visionary imagination. Also rising is Dalia Stasevska, 35, newly named principal guest at the BBC Symphony Orchestra and soon to be a fixture at the summer Proms. Stasevska is married to a rock musician who happens to be the great-grandson of Jean Sibelius.

There are now so many women on the rise that I’m at risk of turning the rest of this article into a catalogue aria. Briefly, then, others to watch are Xian Zhang, 43, music director of the New Jersey Symphony and principal guest with BBC Wales; Han-na Chang, 33, ex-Qatar Phil, now Trondheim Symphony; the prodigious Joana Mallwitz in Nuremburg, at 32 the youngest GMD in Germany; the Estonian Kristiina Poska, 40, who’s been named GMD in Basle; Gemma New, a New Zealander with jobs in St Louis and Dallas; and Marta Gardolinska, 30, a Polish apprentice at the Bournemouth Symphony.

There is also the exotic phenomenon of Barbara Hannigan, a Canadian soprano who is conducting major orchestras around the world; and the jury’s-out case of the Mexican Alondra de la Parra, 35, music director of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, Australia, who, while spectacularly televisual, has lately received appalling reviews in Berlin. Last month, the charismatic Yannick Nézet-Séguin, music director in Philadelphia and at the Metropolitan Opera, announced an unprecedented six women guest conductors for his next concert season — Alsop, Canellakis, Glover, Mirga, Mälkki and the French mezzo-conductor Nathalie Stutzmann.

The causes of this ascendancy are twofold — public expectation and occupational evolution. Like general practice in medicine, playing in an orchestra has become more amenable for women than a freelance or solo career. The Vienna Philharmonic, last of the diehard all-male orchestras, now has a dozen women, some in principal positions. US orchestras are steadily approaching gender equality. The more women players, the more likely orchestras are in future to vote for a female conductor.

Orchestra managers earn brownie points with state and private sponsors by hiring women. Agents are trawling for female batons. Dallas Opera has a programme designed to train women conductors. The Philharmonie de Paris has launched a conducting competition next year, open only to women. Covent Garden has put on a course for “female musicians in the UK with an interest in conducting opera”. Its music director, Pappano, talks of bringing about “long overdue changes within a creative environment”. The LSO has four women conductors in its next season. What’s not to like?

Two reservations, as it happens. As an observer who has long kicked against the musical pricks in the interest of fair play, I am hearing complaints from men that they face an uneven playing field. Not at the top level. where selection is Darwinian, but in bread-and-butter jobs in university towns where political correctness and lazy thinking have tilted the balance against men.

My other concern is that, for all the pressure to promote women, where are the ethnic minority conductors? Agents are not interested and orchestras only see what is served up by the agencies. So far as I can tell, only two have been taken up by major agencies — the American Roderick Cox, winner of a Solti fellowship, and the British Salzburg-Nestlé 2017 winner Kerem Hasan. Unless there is equality of opportunity across the board, the positive discrimination of women will be tainted by other inequalities.

As for the future, I predict that, ten years from now, Mirga or Canellakis will be music director of the New York Philharmonic and Scappucci will be pushed (no one goes willingly) into the hot seat at La Scala. The battle for women in music is almost won. Ethnic minorities should not be made to wait.

The post Women storm the podium appeared first on Standpoint.

Listen, I tell my companion, listen to where it all begins. Recall the opening chords, rising like dawn mist over a summer lake, an immersive impression, delicate in colour and immovably present. This particular sound sets the tone for every performance, assuring us that, come what may, elemental excellence will never waver. This orchestra is the custodian of house quality.

Never mind who’s conducting, never mind if a third of the players missed whatever short rehearsal was allocated for a revival, never mind if one singer or other is having an off-night, this orchestra will drive the opera securely to final curtain. And, with applause still ringing, the players will rise to their feet, shake hands with neighbours on either side and rush to catch the last tram home, knowing that half of them are back on rehearsal duty at nine the next morning.

Faces might change from one night to the next in a pool of 150 players, but the consistency of sound is guaranteed. A poor conductor might distend the tempi; he cannot affect the timbre. During weeks when two-thirds of the opera musicians are touring Japan as the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the remnant core plays on with no audible loss of quality, fortified by students of the principal players, eager to inherit. More than headline singers or directors, it is the orchestra and chorus that are the bedrock of a world-class opera house — and that is what London perpetually fails to grasp.

The first rule of UK opera governance is: trim the payroll. In recent years, the number of players in the Royal Opera House orchestra was whittled down to half the size of the Vienna pool before critics noticed a deterioration and adjustments were made. There are now a hundred players listed on the website, but you don’t need to be an HR consultant to know this is not enough to cover the normal toll of holidays, sickness, maternity and sabbaticals. The ROH orchestra is dependent on casual labour. Hang around the artists’ entrance any late afternoon and you will see freelancers emerging with London’s top rehearsal fee and no loyalty to the house. The reverse is doubly true: by relying on itinerant players the ROH sends out a message that it does not treasure the orchestra as its essence.

The attitude at English National Opera is rather worse. The ENO orchestra was reduced to chamber size, around 50, under a previous administration. It is now back to 70 players, but that’s not enough for Wagner, or for most modern music. So ENO trawls in the casuals who can’t get gigs at ROH.

The results are there to be heard. Beautifully as the ROH or ENO orchestra may play on occasion, regular attenders are aware of small imperfections, lapses of accuracy and intonation. And once people start listening out for flaws the suspension of disbelief is gone, along with the assurance that they are sitting in a world-class establishment.

This is not rocket science. Of all James Levine’s achievements in 41 years as music director of the Metropolitan Opera, the greatest is his establishment of a permanent, proud, well-paid pool of orchestra players who play as much for each other as they do for the audience. At La Scala, where an in-house academy grooms the next generation of players, the music director, Riccardo Chailly, takes the orchestra on tour as the Filarmonica della Scala. That esprit de corps, that swagger, is what gives an opera house the consistency of high performance.

Why London has refused to understand that principle is not just down to budgetary pressures. At root, it’s a question of class. In Vienna, a Philharmoniker member has social status. A principal player or concertmaster is treated in downtown cafés with respect verging on deference. Sacher’s, fully booked, will always find a table for a Philharmoniker (I can vouch for this from recent experience). The Austrian Republic requires the Vienna Philharmonic to play at presidential inaugurations. The orchestra is a premier state asset.

London’s opera houses are governed by bankers and bosses, adorned by a few relics of the landed gentry. These boards regard the orchestra and chorus as service workers, subject to contract and cuttable as required. The idea that the pit players are more important than the stars is anathema to the City’s bonus culture, risible even. When respect is denied, confidence sinks. The musicians do their best, but that’s why London can’t be like Vienna.

Which is not to say that all is as sweet as Sachertorte on the Ringstrasse. A socialist minister of culture, Thomas Drozda, has decided to interfere with the management of the opera. Drozda, a former Burgtheater executive, told the Staatsoper chief, Dominique Meyer, that he will be replaced in 2020 by a Sony record boss, Bogdan Roscic, a man with no experience in casting an opera. Meyer, an affable French-Alsatian, has over the past ten years nudged the Vienna Philharmonic towards gender equality and achieved a ticket sales record of 98.7 per cent. Roscic, confrontational to a fault, has already indicated that he wants to reduce the repertoire and, if possible, the payroll.

The Vienna Opera is entering a new age of uncertainty. Its future is taking on the authentic colour of the swirling, muddy Danube. These are testing times. Accustomed to abrupt regime change, the Philharmoniker believe they will ultimately prevail in the years ahead. One can but live in hope.

On which sombre fermata, I bring down the curtain on my Standpoint residence after five happy years. The magazine and I are moving apart, politically and creatively. It has been good to know you.

The post Opera’s Essence Is The Orchestra appeared first on Standpoint.

“What was?”

“Status Quo. I was fifteen.”

“Ah.”

“And now he’s dead, Rick Parfitt.”

“Terrible year.”

“I’m writing a novel,” she went on. “Every chapter taken from a George Michael song. He’s gone, too.”

I grasped what she was trying to say. We measure our lives in the musicians we loved, each mortal loss a milestone in our own short term on earth, each death a diminution of our intimate selves. You would know, if I asked, where you were the night John Lennon was shot. You may also have been among the million who jammed the streets of Paris at news of the death of Barbara, bard of solitude, or the several millions who thronged Cairo when word spread that Umm Kalthoum was gone. We shed tears when musicians die, more than we do for a cousin or a neighbour, because theirs is the elixir that elevates humdrum lives, allowing an ill-paid shop assistant to dream of her future Nobel Prize for Literature.

It doesn’t quite work that way with classical musicians. Of all the sombre losses of 2016, Leonard Cohen and David Bowie loom larger in most minds than Pierre Boulez, Peter Maxwell Davies, Neville Marriner or Nikolaus Harnoncourt for the simple reason that serious music, lasting half an hour or more, does not furnish our lives with anything like the shot of a three-minute song or an iconic album cover.

The Observer critic Fiona Maddocks has written a wonderful little book, Music for Life (Faber, £12.99), in which she selects 100 works that, to her mind, have the freeze-frame quality of a Robert Capa photograph or a Le Corbusier design. Her selection is sensationally eclectic, including esoteric gems by the cruelly murdered Canadian Claude Vivier and the suppressed Chicagoan Florence Price alongside a plucked lament by Dowland and a flash of Shostakovich defiance. The author describes her pack as “music to carry you through”, a first-aid kit that should be stocked in every pharmacy. It provides an instant remedy for almost every urgent physical need.

The music fails, however, to measure our lives. You may possibly remember the first time you heard “Rhapsody in Blue”, but unless you met the love of your life in the next seat or were dragged out of the concert hall to jail, it is unlikely that you will stop in your tracks each time the work is played or someone tells you George Gershwin is dead. “I don’t have to believe that if I don’t want to,” said the novelist John O’Hara, drawing a shrewd line between the immortal and the ephemeral (once hailed as “the real Scott Fitzgerald”, O’Hara sadly joined the latter category). The death of a composer or a classical pianist is not a life-halting event, and never has been since Beethoven died.

Part of this is to do with lifespan. Classical musicians tends to live longer. We remember them old rather than young. When they vanish, it seems a natural event, except in the case of those who, by some cryonic illusion, remain forever young in our minds.

In October 1982 I persuaded an editor at the Sunday Times to send me to Paris for an interview with Daniel Barenboim, who would turn 40 the following month.

“Impossible,” said the editor. “He’s a 13-year-old in short trousers.”

“Actually,” I replied, “he’s got a grown-up job as music director of the Orchestre de Paris.”

I spent an intense afternoon with Barenboim — intensity is his default mode of communication — talking mostly about his childhood, to which he seemed preternaturally close. Israel was much on his mind. “There was a quality of life there in the 1950s that I have never found anywhere else,” he enthused. “We were all committed to an idealism, to building a new country, a new society. We would laugh at girls in my class who wore make-up or high heels: it seemed irrelevant and decadent. Much of my self-confidence stems from that childhood in Israel.”

He went on to speak about the plight of the Palestinians and the hardening attitudes of successive Israeli governments, but what struck me then, and in further conversations down the years, was how resourcefully he had frozen the boy he once was into a perpetual source of strength for the great musician and public personality that he would become. Everything he has done — whether conducting at Bayreuth or being music director of the Berlin State Opera — has been built on the moral basis of the perceptions he imbibed as a child in a marginal Mediterranean country.

Barenboim will turn 75 this year — “I don’t have to believe that if I don’t want to” — and the controversies he has aroused both on the intractable Middle East conflict and Europe’s refugee crisis have tended to occlude the uniqueness of his position. He stands today as the only classical musician whose voice is heard by world leaders, the only non-pop musician of measurable consequence.

At 75, he is full of vigour and initiatives. Chancellor Merkel has just opened his Barenboim-Said Academy in Berlin — “an experiment in utopia”, bringing together young talents from around the Middle East to play an undefined pathway to peace. The late literary scholar Edward Said was the formative intellectual influence of his life. Said has been widely contested as a fantasist whose Palestinian identity was concocted. Barenboim is an artist who functions more by instinct than by rationale. His judgments are governed by a desire to achieve beauty and a recognition that, when all is said and played, it is only music that is being made, powerful but ephemeral.

The boyish naivety Barenboim has preserved — only the beloved cellist Slava Rostropovich had a comparable quality — is what makes him a musician not just of his own time, but specifically of a time in his youth when all was possible and hopeful and life-improving. He remains a believer in the possibility of good in the world. At 75, he has managed to stay forever young.

The post Forever Young appeared first on Standpoint.

If only this persuasive thesis were applicable to modern music. Among composers of the 20th century and beyond there is an irreconcilable rift between those who believe that every note has relevance to the human condition and those who maintain that music is just notes and combinations of notes, with no broader significance. On the one hand you have Gustav Mahler, who sought revelation in every symphony. On the other is Richard Strauss, who said he couldn’t see why he needed to be redeemed.

The schism runs on between Schoenberg, who weighted every phrase with the burden of history, and his student Webern, who pursued symmetry to the exclusion of all else. It divides Shostakovich, who encoded secret messages in his scores, from Prokofiev, who wrote perfect, sometimes vacant, cadences. At its most extreme, it draws a line between the ethereal works of Pierre Boulez and the earthiness of Luciano Berio, György Ligeti and Leonard Bernstein. There is no middle ground: music either has meaning, or it has none.

All of which explains why, try as I might, I cannot love the music of Claude Debussy. There, I’ve said it. Forget about getting a French passport if Brexit casts me adrift. My Légion d’Honneur is no longer in the post. I may be half-French but I’ll never be a Frenchman because I cannot love Debussy. Mostly, I cannot abide him.

A great composer by the definition that his music is unmistakably his own, inventor of “musical impressionism” and the strongest influence on French music from his day to ours (no Debussy, no Boulez), Debussy fails to stir fever in my veins or conflict in my brain. His music has the intellectual nutrition of a Montparnasse meringue, easily bought, consumed on the spot.

His style emerges, fully formed, in the G-minor string quartet of 1893, where an aggressive opening statement is neither developed nor contradicted but vaguely repeated from various angles and left to shimmer away, a thing of beauty and no depth. The quartet pulses with rhythms Debussy acquired in Russia and plinks with hints of a gamelan he had heard at the Paris Universal Exhibition. Since Impressionism was the order of the day, the work was bracketed with the masterpieces of Cézanne, Pissarro, Monet and Seurat, though lacking their disruptive capacity. It was the only string quartet Debussy ever attempted, a vehicle of convenience to establish his maison de mode.

Breakthrough followed with the 1894 Prelude to a Faun’s Afternoon, a work that lit no fires until Nijinsky choreographed and danced it for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1912, causing an erotic sensation that drew shameless condemnation from the bourgeois composer.

The opera Pelléas et Mélisande, a shocker in 1902, took its hair fetish from Parsifal while stripping textures to negligée suggestiveness, devoid of Wagner’s heavy breathing. Along with the rippling La Mer (1905), these fin-de-siècle works are the foundations of Debussy’s fame. At no point does Debussy conceive a theory of music. What he seeks, he tells Stravinsky, is “pure music” — music that is uncontaminated by engagement with human beings and ideas. Music without meaning.

In the great controversies of his lifetime Debussy was determinedly disengaged. In the Dreyfus trial, when every other French composer took sides, mostly the wrong one, Debussy’s only known comment was to complain that it impinged on his personal comforts.

A serial philanderer with women of lower class, he finally settled down with a banker’s wife who had been Gabriel Fauré’s mistress. He had few musical friends, savaging many of his colleagues in newspaper reviews, saving special venom for Maurice Ravel, who gave him nothing but respect. Like many great composers, he was an egotist of a high order and not a very nice man.

If he has a saving grace, it appears in 1917 when, dying of rectal cancer, he wrote a sonata for violin and piano that yearns for lost things, a remembrance of temps perdus. Along with parallel sonatas by Elgar and Janáček, it is one of the most honest accounts of a citizen’s helplessness in war. Debussy died in Paris in March 1918, the crump of long-range German guns his last conscious sound.

Invitations have begun to land for the centenary year and my wastebin is bulging. Wild fauns will not drag me to Garsington Opera’s new Pelléas production in June, nor to the Vienna State Opera’s revival that same month. If I take the sea air at Eastbourne, I shall give a wide berth to the Grand Hotel, where Debussy wrote most of La Mer. On the Bois du Boulogne, his final home, I shall pay no respects.

My dislike of Debussy — more pronounced than of any other important composer — is as much analytical as it is aesthetic. His denial of meaning is the antithesis of Frankl’s search for meaning, a complacency so far removed from my view of the world that I can do nothing but acknowledge it and move on. Pure music, which begins with Debussy, infects the modernist mainstream to the point where it becomes impermissible to express any message in music. You had only to hear Boulez denounce Shostakovich as “reactionary” to understand how effectively Debussy sanitised music of the possibility of meaning.

And it’s not just composers who deny meaning. In a video homily the other day Daniel Barenboim recalled hearing Edwin Fischer analyse the finale of Beethoven’s seventh piano sonata (Op 10/3) as the acme of humour, while Claudio Arrau considered it the depth of tragedy. That being the case, Barenboim concluded, music can have no intrinsic meaning beyond its notes.

I find that so wrong. The marvel of music, as Mahler discovered, is that one phrase can convey multiple, contradictory meanings, a mirror of human psychology. Debussy denied that. I’m done with Debussy.

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Mengelberg was banned from conducting in 1945 for hobnobbing with Holland’s Nazi rulers and, specifically, for an interview he gave to the Völkischer Beobachter in 1940, saying he had drunk a glass of champagne the day his country capitulated to the Germans. You can see why the Dutch don’t like to be reminded of this pivotal figure in their music history and why the rest of the world has consigned this brilliant, often contrarian interpreter to the margins of public memory.

Nevertheless, Mengelberg demands to be remembered, more perhaps now than ever. He was a prototype music director who bowed to the requirements of an evil regime. If you thought that doesn’t happen any more, look now at Russia and Venezuela and you will see history doubling back on its tracks, as if nothing has registered from the recent past, nothing was learned.

Mengelberg’s defence was that he was German by heritage and he preferred German culture to Dutch provincialism. Uninterested in the world beyond his scores, all he wanted to do was carry on making music in an exemplary concert hall, oblivious to the murder of some of his musicians by the occupation government. He could not be held accountable, he argued, for the Nazis being Nazis. He just carried on doing his job regardless of the noises outside.

He represents one modus vivendi for a powerful music director in a totalitarian state. The other is Wilhelm Furtwängler, whose cover story, forensically exposed in Ronald Harwood’s play Taking Sides, was rooted in a profound, perhaps overdeveloped, sense of personal responsibility. Furtwängler maintained that his duty between 1933 and 1945 was to uphold the highest level of German civilisation as comfort and shelter for a troubled nation, preserving the best of what was German for a post-Hitler renewal. Unlike Mengelberg, Furtwängler risked his position to extricate a number of people from concentration camps and help them flee the country. He did not suppress his conscience. He carried on doing his job, aware of all that was going on around him — and in spite of it, like the tragic curator of antiquities who stayed in Palmyra when the Isis desecrators rode in.

Both of these survival strategies were flawed. Mengelberg’s lacked conscience. Furtwängler refused to recognise that his presence at the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra reinforced Adolf Hitler’s sense of cultural destiny. Both conductors served the devil and both got off lightly, neither spending a night at risk or in jail. (The Palmyra curator, Khalid al-Assad, was beheaded for his heroism.)

Fast forward to present times, different places. The Venezuelan government subjects its citizens to starvation and mob rule. It is represented on the world stage by a conductor, Gustavo Dudamel. The Russian state, headed by Vladimir Putin, has invaded Ukraine and commits war crimes in Syria. It can call on the conductor Valery Gergiev to justify its actions by affirming cultural superiority. There are obvious parallels to past collaborationists.

In the case of Dudamel, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and one of the most exhilarating talents on the world stage, there are several shades of grey to be taken into account. A boyhood protégé of the former government minister José Antonio Abreu, Dudamel was barely 18 when the klepto-socialist Hugo Chávez came to power, imposing “revolutionary” rule on his country. Chávez had one saving grace: he embraced Abreu’s Sistema, praising its programme for teaching musical instruments to deprived children as proof of his regime’s commitment to abolish poverty. Dudamel believed what Abreu told him and, as he began to conquer world orchestras, let himself be used as a poster-boy for the regime. At Chávez’s funeral in March 2013, he wept openly.

Since then, he has avoided criticism of the failing Maduro government, not least because his family still lives in Venezuela. Dudamel, now 35, is caught between a rock and a hard place. He recently expressed the hope that El Sistema might somehow help Venezuela recover from its present plight, possibly a coded hint for post-regime realities: “I work every day to ensure that once Venezuela moves beyond this current crisis,” he told President Obama, “El Sistema will continue to rise and empower those who otherwise would have no dreams.” His vision sounds eerily resonant of Furtwängler’s faith that symphonic music could renew the German nation after Hitler.

For Valery Gergiev, there are fewer justifications. A rare conducting talent who made the Mariinsky Theatre shine in the post-Soviet rubble, he has been progressively compromised by his friendship with Vladimir Putin, a connection that goes back to 1992 when Putin was deputy mayor of St Petersburg and spent his nights at the theatre. Gergiev, now 63, utilised Putin’s fondness for the arts to expand his own domains from St Petersburg out to the Primorsky Opera on the Pacific coast. Putin, in return, uses Gergiev as an apologist for state atrocities, sending him with a live-streamed orchestra to celebrate the Russian “liberation” of Palmyra. Gergiev, who maintains a Western job as music director of the Munich Philharmonic, has been reduced to recycling Soviet apologetics in his interviews, claiming that the West will never understand Russia and should not apply its hypocritical ethics to an existential crisis.

Gergiev has become unrecognisable from the internationalist I knew in the 1990s, the idealist who believed in art and the power of ideas. His performances have become uninteresting, often unrehearsed. His talent factory has dried up; Anna Netrebko is the Mariinsky’s last star. This is a maestro who mortgaged his soul. Putin turns to Gergiev for cultural vindication and Gergiev loyally obliges with a benediction. Collaboration is alive and well in the 21st century.

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Word of their presence flashed around the kibbutz. Farm workers, mostly new refugees from Hitler’s Germany, former doctors and lawyers, converged on the dining hall in khaki shorts and denim overalls. “Maestro,” cried one, “in the Eroica symphony, what tempo does Beethoven require in the finale?” “When does one require an e-flat clarinet?” asked another. Toscanini turned in wonderment to Huberman. “Amazing country,” he exclaimed. “Even the peasants here know music.”

The story, received at first hand, stuck in my mind because what Toscanini had unwittingly stumbled upon was what every musician seeks most, namely a public that is as passionate and knowledgeable as themselves. Pierre Boulez called it l’idéale audience, a listenership so avid it practically sucks the music out of artists. Most performers go through their entire lives without ever encountering an audience of this intensity. I think I may have found one a few miles up the road from Toscanini’s.

The Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival took place for the 19th time last month in the first fortnight of September, a short window when the summer festivals are over and the autumn season has yet to kick off. Most musicians hit the beach. The audience-seekers head for Jerusalem.

The first thing they encounter is silence. In four days of concerts, twice a day, I did not hear a single cough. “The best concentration anywhere,” says Elena Bashkirova, the festival’s artistic director. Programmes are unyieldingly highbrow. Concerts contain at least five major works and last two-and-a- half hours. There are no encores. The public leaves the premises deep in thought. “The quality of the public is unique,” says Bashkirova. “If I put on something difficult, Boulez or Carter, they don’t complain. On the contrary, people come to me and say, ‘Please keep doing this, we want to learn’.”

No need to look far to find the cause of audience commitment. Jerusalem feels abandoned by the arts. Split between Arabs and Jews and, among Jews, between westernised and fundamentalist communities, the cultural and intellectual sectors are fleeing to Tel Aviv, a city that never sleeps and embraces diversity. Jerusalem, says Bashkirova, is “isolated, like an orphan”.  Her festival is the city’s sole window on world-class performance. The audience is self-selecting, the atmosphere almost one of siege.

The venue, the YMCA, is an island of tolerance, where skull-capped Orthodox Jews mingle with unbelievers, Christian Arab couples pose for wedding photographs and fitness freaks use the gym. Contradictions abound. The concert hall, domed like a mosque, has a perfect acoustic for small ensembles. A rooftop carillon, played by a professor of clinical psychology, summons the faithful 20 minutes before the start of concerts.

The origins of the festival go back 60 years, to the day a girl called Dorit had to share her school desk with a new kid, Daniel, from South America. Dorit Beinisch went on to become president of the Israeli Supreme Court—“our Lord Denning,” lawyers call her—the last recourse against illegal acts by the government and armed forces. Dorit’s lawyer husband, Yeheskell Beinisch, is a former orchestral trombonist who played in Klemperer’s last Mahler Ninth. Her schoolmate was Daniel Barenboim. He married a Russian pianist, Elena, daughter of the formidable pedagogue Dmitri Bashkirov. When the two couples, Barenboim and Beinisch, got together for dinner in Jerusalem, someone suggested they should start an informal summer gathering in a small theatre where musicians could play for the fun of it, unpaid and out of the limelight. Overwhelmed by audience demand in the tiny Khan theatre, it grew into a festival at the YMCA. Musicians are still unpaid, unconcerned with status. International stars clamour to be included. Elena and Yeheskell Beinisch are co-directors.

The opening concert this year packed three Beethoven works between a Shostakovich quartet and a Schubert trio. The second recital conjoined trios by Shostakovich and Galina Ustvolskaya to a set of Mahler songs and a Bruckner quintet. Rainer Honeck, the Vienna Philharmonic concertmaster, led the Bruckner. When the Argentine pianist Nelson Goerner called in sick for a song cycle, he was replaced at an hour’s notice by the outstanding Kirill Gerstein. Beside the fierce concentration, there is a languid informality about the festival that allows musicians to drop in and out without penalty.

New talent is blooded. Edgar Moreau, Pablo Fernandez and István Várdai gave a stunning foretaste of future cello virtuosity. There was a first chance to hear the Queen Elisabeth winner Plamena Mangova, a radiant pianist from Bulgaria. András Schiff, Matthias Goerne, Menahem Pressler, Baiba Skride and Alexander Sitkovetsky were among the headline acts. I overcame an aversion to Max Reger in a performance of his lyrical and even humorous string trio. Another anniversarist, Ferruccio Busoni, was heard more in Jerusalem than at the BBC Proms.

The unanswered question, and it has been ringing between my ears ever since I left, is: why can’t music always be like this? Why can’t it be at this level of seriousness? Why have audiences lost the capacity to sit in a concert without shuffling their feet, clearing their throats, fiddling with their mobiles and wishing they were elsewhere? What happened to our ability to listen?

Bashkirova thinks her ideal audience arises from a particular Jerusalem tension which drives the rest of the world to distraction. She may well be right. But I can’t help blaming a music industry that reduced the art to ubiquity. We are never more than an arm’s length away from a masterpiece, on record or online. We are never more than a short flight away from any piece we might wish to hear. Music has lost value. We have forgotten the effort that it requires, as performer and listener. I found it again in Jerusalem.

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Not one person in authority in British arts, not a single one, believed that Brexit would be a good thing. And the view from the grass roots is even gloomier, judging by messages from thousands of professional musicians on my social media. I promised to make no predictions, so let’s wait and see.

What is incontrovertible, however, is that when the summer festivals end and the real world reopens its box-office everything will have changed. Horizons have shrunk. Expectations are shorter, ambitions curtailed. Lines of disengagement are being drawn.

Which, let it be clearly stated, is no bad thing. Over two decades of relentlessly rising standards and prices in public spectacles, be they sports or arts, there has been a rising sense of resentment that an essential value is being lost. The Monday night that Arsene Wenger fielded a 16-man Arsenal squad that did not contain a single English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish player in a red shirt was the night — February 14, 2005 — the music died. Wenger claimed vindication when his motley crew won 5-1 over Crystal Palace but something was broken that night. The connection between players and public, the assumption that professional footballers were essentially local lads with a twinkle in their toes, was blown apart by borderless squads of bloodless character.

As in sport, so in the arts. The spirit was sacrificed in the pursuit of a nebulous excellence. For reasons never to be understood, the summits of British arts were yielded to outsiders. Two Australians were hired to run the new Millennium Centre in Wales and a third to lead the Edinburgh Festival, none with distinction. Entire casts at English National Opera — the English, National Opera — were supplied by an American “consultant”, a maven called Matthew Epstein with a predilection for American strivers and a few from the Baltic states who came cheap, and sometimes good. ENO, designed as a nursery for English talent, became an X-Factor for all-comers. 

The director of the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, is a Dane, Kasper Holten, who has done many good and brave things over the course of six years without ever winning the confidence of a once-passionate audience or of an eternally nervous board. Some of the directors he brought in were revelatory; others were drawn from the Eurotrash school of Regietheater that has, in recent years, reduced Bayreuth to an audience laughing-stock. Holten’s departure next March will leave the ROH in a quandary shared with the rest of the country: where the hell do we go from here?

I wonder why no one batted an eyelid when an open recruitment process resulted in the new director of the British Museum, Hartwig Fischer, being a German art historian, just like the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Martin Roth, who was Fischer’s predecessor in Dresden. Both are highly accomplished curators. But the role of these institutions is to reflect the British nation first unto itself, and then unto the world. That mission got lost somewhere between the boardroom, the executive head-hunters and the EU directives on equal opportunity and free movement of labour.

Brexit provides a chance to reflect on these erosions of identity and to demand a correction. Without flirting with xenophobia or protectionism, it is worth remembering the great Maynard Keynesian postwar cry for indigenous self-sufficiency — “Let every part of Merrie England make merry in its own way!” — a slogan that first stirred British arts from their bucolic slumber. The Brexit era is the time to demand that opera houses train more British-born singers, instead of sending them to learn their trade in Germany’s 80-odd opera houses. The need is long overdue to nurture a generation of administrators who are young, gifted and rooted in their native culture rather than living off a bulging phone file of international connections.

There is a case to be made for emphasising our differences. Germany and France provide high levels of arts subsidy as an undebated civic right. In Britain, that right, earned by Keynes 70 years ago, has to be justified anew with every change of government — and it won’t come easy with Theresa May, who summarily dismissed the two leading arts advocates in the previous Cabinet, George Osborne and Michael Gove. No matter: the arts in Britain have been honed by struggle. That is our natural habitat.

We need to re-examine the sullen dependency culture fostered by a tick-box Arts Council and support the eccentric growth of country house opera — first Glyndebourne (1934), then in rapid succession Garsington (1989), Longborough (1991) and two rival Grange Park companies (1998, 2017). All are subsidy-free inspirations of a British landscape and climate. Many believe that Longborough’s Ring cycle, conceived in a country barn, was truer to Wagner’s humanist intention than anything seen lately at Bayreuth. Similarly, the Eugene Onegin I saw this summer at Garsington was the most elevating ensemble performance I have ever seen of that autumnal Russian tragedy.

“Always,” chanted Monty Python, “look on the bright side of life.” And we must try. Still, the risks and losses of the Brexit future cannot be ignored. British arts are already being shut out of European councils. Insularity is being simultaneously embraced by the Brexiteers and forced upon us by dyspeptic former allies. Opportunities are shutting down. British arts face loneliness and self-doubt, their greatest challenge since the Second World War. It is an hour for blood, toil, sweat and — copious — tears. 

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The first time I heard Daniil Trifonov I wrote that he was “a pianist for the rest of our lives”. This is the rarest of species, an incontrovertible elite. Vladimir Horowitz defined the breed when he burst onto the West in the 1920s with dazzling fingers and an air of fragile permanence. Sviatoslav Richter, impermeably private, left a similar impression when the Soviets finally let him out in 1960.

Nameless others flattered briefly to deceive. Dozens more enjoyed delirious success and an adoring public. But Horowitz and Richter were the rainmakers of the piano, the ones who changed the weather. And I had no doubt, on first hearing or since, that Daniil Trifonov belongs to that mighty handful, that exclusive kuchka of colossi.

What is it about Trifonov that sets him apart from all other pianists? He is, on first sight, the least modern of artists. He wears a dark suit, black tie, often uncomfortably. On stage, he hunches over the keyboard, unaware of the audience. If he uses a score, he is quicker to turn pages than the fastest of attendants. He makes no pause between pieces, stifling applause for an hour or more.

In return, he delivers a modern benefice, the kind of concentration that has all but vanished from our tweet-shattered attention spans. The tension when Trifonov plays is breathless. And, within that grip, he finds narrative where none previously existed. He is the first pianist I have ever heard who plays a set of Chopin Études as if reciting for the first time a Tolstoy novella.

The sound is almost secondary. He often prefers a Fazioli piano to a Steinway, finding its clipped precision best suited to his cloud formation of sonority and silence. No musician since John Cage has used silence so creatively, or sound with such economy. No point asking Trifonov where this idea comes from: it is inimitably his own.

The focus can be terrifying. In a power-cut concert with Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra, Trifonov carried on playing his part long after the lights went out. Twice I have seen him play with serious injuries. On the first occasion, he tripped on a step, coming out of a yoga session, and suffered mild concussion. On the second, he played a full Wigmore Hall recital in surgical strapping after damaging his wrist in an over-enthusiastic photographic session for his record label.

I sat with him once at dinner after an arduous concert, urging him to eat more than half a desultory lettuce leaf on his plate. Daniil said he felt no hunger. He had worked all morning with a technician trying to “voice” a Fazioli for the 2,788-seat, acoustically frigid Royal Festival Hall. By noon he was talking of trying a Steinway when the Fazioli man finally came up with the right balance. The rest of the afternoon was spent testing it. By 5pm, when Daniil was satisfied, it was too close to the concert to take more than a sip of water without risking discomfort. Afterwards, he was too uplifted to eat. The immersion in music renders him oblivious to most human urges. He is a one-off.

The son of two musicians, born in March 1991 in the closed military zone of Nizhny-Novgorod, he lost a milk-tooth during his first concerto performance and did not meet a foreigner until he went to Moscow to study with Tatiana Zelikman at the Gnessin School of Music. Zelikman, pupil of a pupil of Richter’s teacher Heinrich Neuhaus, had a private collection of American piano LPs. The boy devoured them. At 18, Zelikman cut him loose, sending him to study in Cleveland, Ohio, with Sergei Babayan.

This was selfless and remarkably shrewd. Babayan is a Russian-Armenian of flexible capabilities who showed an intuitive understanding of Daniil’s gifts and the time he would require to develop them. It was a no-pressure relationship and there were few distractions in Cleveland to deflect Daniil from his studies. He made friends, found a girlfriend, listened intently to America’s finest and most consistent orchestra.

A year in, Babayan decided Daniil was ready for the five-yearly Chopin Competition in Warsaw. He wasn’t. In a tough field, he took fourth spot (officially third) behind a Russian, Yulia Andreeva, a Lithuanian and an Austrian.

The next year, he flew to Tel Aviv for the Arthur Rubinstein Competition. At his first performance, a friend of Rubinstein’s said, “We have a genius here.” Daniil made a clean sweep of the prizes.

Weeks later, he won the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, the first fair and open contest since the fall of Communism. But instead of staying to enjoy vodka toasts and the blessings that Valery Gergiev, the competition president, promised for his future, Daniil headed back to his teacher. When Babayan moved to work at Juilliard in New York, Daniil went too. From time to time, they played four-hand in public. Beyond Babayan, Daniil chose his mentors wisely: Gidon Kremer, Martha Argerich, Menahem Pressler.

Each time I have heard him is an advance on past performance. Dismissive of the tinsel life of the virtuoso pianist, he reserves time for composing and other discoveries. He has formed a recital partnership with the German baritone Matthias Goerne, a symbiotic exploration of poetic visions. In their last set of mortality songs by Berg, Schumann, Wolf, Shostakovich and Brahms, they gave 90 minutes without interruption to a hall that barely dared to draw breath.

Daniil has no small talk and few extra-neous interests. I would never subject him to the ritual of a media interview. You cannot be sure if he understands a question, so particular is his processing of information. And when he finally delivers a hesitant answer you have to pinch your thigh hard to remember that he is just 25 years old, a soul steeped in a millennium of music, an innocent abroad, perhaps that very Russian creature — a yurodivy, a holy fool.

He is, by any measure known to me, in a class apart. After hearing Daniil Trifonov play, I cannot listen to any other pianist for days after. Whenever he plays, I want to hear more. And we will, we will. For the rest of our lives.

The post The Sound Of Silence appeared first on Standpoint.