Modern instances

Beethoven: a large cuddly dog
Caesar: a salad with croutons
Calvin: a comic strip boy
Chekhov: navigator of the Starship Enterprise
Churchill: an agreeable stuffed dog
Hamlet: a cigar
Hobbes: Calvin’s sardonic stuffed tiger
Homer: Bart’s Dad
Madonna: an ageing rock star
Melba: a dessert with peaches, raspberries and ice-cream

Leading, directing, conducting?

The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment has been advertising its recent concert series as “Look! No conductor”. I caught them at my favourite venue, St George’s in Bristol.

Now in itself doing without a conductor is not a new thing. Neville Marriner “directed” rather than “conducted” the Academy of St Martin in the Fields from the first desk in the early 1960s – and many have followed in his footsteps.

What was special about this OAE gig was that three different soloists directed the orchestra. First Stephen Isserlis (together with his cello) directed Haydn’s scintillating last symphony, No 104 (The London). Then the violinist Isabelle Faust directed and played (meltingly beautifully) Mozart’s third violin concerto. And finally, Isserlis and Faust were joined by the American fortepianist, Robert Levin, in Beethoven’s Triple Concerto (for violin, cello, piano and orchestra).

Who knew that this could be such an exciting work? And who on earth was directing? Well, so far as I could tell, leadership switched constantly between the three soloists, with Levin perhaps doing most.

But when they started the second movement, none of the soloists moved a muscle. It was the OAE’s leader, Kati Debretzeni who discreetly beat them in. I suspect that there were other leaders at work around the orchestra that I didn’t spot.

That’s how orchestral music can be. Completely collaborative. Just like chamber music. And jazz, of course.

Pianist, composer and conductor

I suppose this combination was quite common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms…

But more recently? Benjamin Britten comes to mind.

A major talent of this kind for the future is Alissa Firsova, who led a performance at the Royal Academy of Music in London on Monday. She opened by playing and directing Mozart’s great A major Piano Concerto K488 and followed this by conducting the first London performance of her own “Freedom” Clarinet Concerto. She ended with Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Altogether an amazing achievement.

Currently a conducting student at the Academy, she had around her some dazzling young talent. Anna Hashimoto was the clarinettist and soprano Fiona Howell the soloist in the Mahler. The orchestra seemed to be a gathering together of Firsova’s student friends from the Academy. They were extraordinarily good.

I first met the then teenage Alissa several years ago, introduced by clarinettist Mark van de Wiel, who brought her clarinet quintet “LOSS”, played by the Philharmonia Soloists at our local village music festival in King’s Sutton. And she has been coming back ever since.

A name to watch.

Exploring the “founding myth”

The school that I went to had an extraordinary musical culture which went back to the earliest days of its establishment as a boarding school in the mid-nineteenth century.

In 1864, the pioneering headmaster of Uppingham, Edward Thring, was looking for a new director of music. The English composer, Sir William Sterndale Bennett, was commissioned by Thring to find him. He went to the place in Germany where he had studied, the Leipzig Conservatorium. There, amongst others, he asked the advice of the violinist leader of the Gewandhaus orchestra, Ferdinand David. David had given the premiere of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, and was a close friend and associate of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms.

Ferdinand suggested that his own son, Paul David, would be appropriate for this new post. Paul was just 25 years old with little or no English. He travelled to England in company with one of his father's most gifted pupils, Joseph Joachim, who was by this time already one of the most famous violinists in the world. (Joachim was to give the first performance of both Brahms’s and Bruch’s first Violin Concertos.)

Paul David inspired high standards of music at the school - a tradition which persists to this day. By no means an outstanding composer, nevertheless he was a fine violinist, and he wrote much music for the school. He continued to teach at Uppingham for some 40 years.

Joachim (above, by Adolph von Menzel), who frequently made concert tours in Britain, would always go to the school deep in the English countryside to visit his friend and to do some coaching. He even played in the back row of the violins in the school’s string orchestra. He had made his debut in England in 1844 playing the Beethoven concerto under Mendelssohn - and his final performance of this same work was given at Uppingham in 1905 at the opening of the new concert hall.

Fittingly, Paul David was succeeded as head of music at Uppingham by William Sterndale Bennett’s grandson, Robert, who continued to maintain and develop musical standards for a further four decades.

Among the many distinguished musical pupils who have emerged from the school are the folklorist Cecil Sharp, the composer EJ Moeran and the violinist leader of the Lindsay String Quartet, Peter Cropper.

When I work with established organizations who wish to create change in some way, I always encourage them first to re-examine their “founding myth”. So often it has a profound influence on the current situation, usually quite subconsciously. At Uppingham, it’s not so hard to find.

Rehearsal as a creative activity

I’ve always loved rehearsals. Probably somewhat more than performance or presentation. It’s a time when current ideas cross over with experimentation, so it can be a highly creative process.

In music, the first rehearsal that I remember was at school. It would have been around 1959 and I would have been fifteen.

Walking across the quad one afternoon, I could hear an orchestra playing in the hall, wandered in, and discovered Sir John Barbirolli rehearsing his wonderful Hallé Orchestra from Manchester. Rather shamefully, I don’t remember what the work was. What I do recall vividly was a dynamic sense of collective trial and error. And Barbirolli’s genial cajoling of the players to give of their best. His voice I can hear now – deep, authoritative but warm, the hint of a chuckle.

He struck me as an ideal leader figure. At one moment Barbirolli jumped down from the conductor’s rostrum and took the principal cellist’s instrument from him in order to demonstrate how he wanted a certain passage to go. Cheers and laughter from the players.

Ever since that time, I’ve attended rehearsals whenever I can. In fact for several years now I have an arrangement with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment that, in return for bits of work that I do with them, from time to time I can sit in on their rehearsals. To watch a great conductor working with a brilliant group of musicians is a real thrill for me to this day.

And as our little music festival kicked off this weekend in King’s Sutton, one of the greatest pleasures has been to see and hear Alissa Firsova (above) coaxing our restored 1872 Broadwood into giving voice again.

She played, exploring and polishing, for some four hours before finally giving her brilliant concert – Beethoven’s last sonata opus 111, Scriabin’s Poèmes, Bartok’s rarely performed Elegies and Schumann’s Faschingsschwank aus Wien (Carnival Jest from Vienna) opus 26.

Norio Ohga: A Life Driven by Music

What an amazing man Norio Ohga was.

Born in 1930 in Nuzumu, Japan, after the war he graduated in music in Tokyo and then in Berlin, training as a baritone and set to become an opera singer.

Unhappy with the sound produced by Sony’s tape recorders, he wrote to the company and complained – and was hired by one of Sony’s co-founders, Akio Morita. For a while he led a double life – with the company and singing – but eventually decided to concentrate on Sony, eventually becoming president and chairman, leading the company from 1982 to 2003.

Most famous for his championing of the revolutionary CD – he insisted that it contain at least 74 minutes of music so that the whole of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony could be accommodated – he also made major acquisitions in the entertainment field, including Columbia Pictures and CBS Records, turning Sony into a leading global player.

Not at all the typical grey-suited Japanese businessman, Ohga was outgoing and flamboyant. He suffered a stroke while conducting the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in Beijing in 2001.

He died 23 April, aged 81.

First you win it. Then you lose it.

A common theme in business is this: the initial innovator becomes leader in their field and then in time becomes change-resistant, believing that the things that made them great will keep them up there for ever.

Of course, in time they get overtaken by a new pretender who arrives with new breakthroughs that trump the original competitive advantage.

A great example is the piano manufacturer, Broadwood. Their founder, the Scottish cabinet-maker, John Broadwood, came down to London in 1761 aged 33, learned the relatively new skills of piano-making there, and made a number of important discoveries that enabled his pianos to produce a stronger, more resonant sound and to retain their tuning better.

The consequence was that Broadwood had a clear competitive edge, both for concert performance and for playing at home, becoming dominant market leader worldwide. His pianos were used by all the great players – Haydn, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann and Liszt among them.

Then, in the late nineteenth century, along came the iron frame (pianos up to that time had been wooden framed), and this, combined with innovations in the keyboard action of their pianos, enabled the German-American firm, Steinway, to emerge and overhaul Broadwood. A leadership position they hold up to this day.

Nevertheless, the massive sound that a modern instrument can generate is not the sound that those composers would ever have heard. So the fact that the church in our local village has a fine, well-restored Broadwood grand of 1872 means that we can still hear their music on the sort of instrument that the composers themselves wrote for and played.

And we’ll be doing just that at our village music festival at King’s Sutton in June – played by a swag of world-class pianists, some of them re-discovering these sounds for the first time.

King's Sutton Music Weekends are on 17-19 and 25-26 June. Performers will include: Alissa Firsova, Kenneth Hamilton, Bela Hartmann, Christopher Windass, Viv McLean, Sally Wilson and Mark Kruger.