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.

Composing at 98

On Tuesday I went to the UK première of Elliott Carter’s Clarinet Quintet at Richmond Concert Society, played by the excellent Endymion, the clarinettist being the brilliant Mark van de Wiel.

The thing to note is that this extraordinary outpouring of creativity comes, not from a young man, but from a ninety-eight year old American who has been composing for seven, maybe eight, decades. He is a sprightly 102 now and is regarded by many as the world’s greatest living composer.

Of course, Carter is not alone. Among others, Bach, Brahms, Liszt, Wagner, Verdi and Vaughan Williams composed much of their finest music in old age.

And Janacek, who created several of the greatest operas of the twentieth century, didn’t really get going until he was past sixty.

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.