The genius of the adult Mendelssohn

To the Albert Hall on Friday for the all-Mendelssohn PROM concert given by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.

Mendelssohn has suffered through most of my lifetime for the mistaken belief that he was a genius as a child and teenager, but somehow lost it all as an adult. How wrong this is.

Certainly he was the most brilliant composer from a young age, even out-performing Mozart in childhood. But, as this concert showed so clearly, he retained his talent well into adulthood.

On Friday we were given two overtures – “Ruy Blas” and the more rarely performed “The Fair Melusine” – the Violin Concerto which the great fiddler Joachim described as “the heart’s jewel”, and his fifth symphony, the “Reformation". All of them were written in adulthood with an evolved, grown-up aesthetic, but no signs of decline.

So how did this reputation grow up? Probably it was the result of dreary, overblown performances. None of that was on view on Friday from the scintillating Leipzigers.

And how good to see a young Sydneysider, Tahlia Petrosian, among the violas. Is she the first Australian to play in that great orchestra since the teenage Alfred Hill in late 1880s?

The delusions of innovation process

One of the core beliefs that inhabit organisations is that problems will be solved by the adoption of a whizzy new process. It’s simple, attractive… and almost always WRONG.

At one stage, a major multinational client adopted a “funnels and gates” approach to managing innovation projects. This was imported from flavour-of-the-month academics at Harvard Business School. The company was reorganised in line with the new process and training programmes were implemented at major expense worldwide.

I remember, shortly after the start of that voyage, having a meeting with the senior manager responsible for implementation of the programme, and endeavouring to surface with him some of the cultural issues that seemed to me to lie behind their difficulties with innovation.

“Don’t worry about all that,” he told me. “This new process will solve all those problems.” Of course, it didn’t. And the cultural issues remained as critical roadblocks. So innovation performance remained, at best, static.

At a general level, another Harvard Business School professor, psychoanalyst Abraham Zaleznik, addresses the problem head-on. He observes that management’s obsession with impersonal processes distorts reality, and that “depersonalised relationships” become the heart of “management mystique”, with the result that “you tend to lose sight of what you are doing”.

Tips for sitting through Wagner

I rather stumbled across the Kiwi blogger, From the Choirboy Motel. He’s full of things that I’m interested in, and he writes really well, but at a length that I sometimes find difficult to stay with.

Recently he’s been diving into the many hours of Wagner – not in the opera house, but at screenings of the New York Met’s Ring cycle. It’s an exciting journey for him, full of new insights, including the demolition of many received ideas about the work. It certainly brings back my own entry into Wagner’s wacky world some forty or more years ago.

Then, after several paragraphs of almost Proustian length, he shares with us “three handy hints on how to make it through”:

1. Sensible shoes
2. Chocolate raisins
3. Aisle seats

So succinct. So valuable. Wish I’d known this several decades ago.

Here’s the whole piece: http://choirboymotel.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/gotterdammerung-aka-god-damn-its-done/

The Real King Lear

I notice that Tom Stoppard has spoken recently of the late John Wood as “truly my favourite actor”.

I first saw him in the debut production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the Old Vic in the 1960s. Then, brilliantly, in Travesties, which was written by Stoppard for him.

But for me he was the indelible Lear.

I had first seen King Lear as a teenager at school, directed by the extraordinary Gordon Braddy and starring David Allister (then David MacDonald). But I was far too immature to get it then (as I do so personally now).

So when I became involved with Sam Wanamaker and Shakespeare’s Globe, I made up for lost time, seeing a dozen or more different Lears in eighteen months, many of them our most celebrated actors. It was John Wood at the RSC in 1990 that seemed to me to be Lear.

He died aged 81 a year ago this month. A great actor, but no celeb.

The illusion of measurement and control

The notion that control of a business follows from measurement is a fallacy.

What’s the mantra? “If you can’t measure it, you can’t control it.”

It’s a comforting illusion.

My colleague, Bill Boggs, famously responded to a client in a workshop, who had just put out the usual line, with: “I’ve been measuring my d**k since I was fourteen and I still can’t control it.”

Did you know that in Britain there’s an Institute of Measurement and Control. Wonder how they are doing with the Boggs question?

Florrie Forde’s lost Blue Plaque

In 2006 I proposed to English Heritage that they put up one of their Blue Plaques in London to the music hall legend, Florrie Forde. They were enthused and started the apparently long and arduous task of researching her life and work and homes.

Florrie was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1876 and ran away from home at sixteen to Sydney to go on the stage. There she was seen by a British star of the day who was touring Australia, GH Chirgwin and, encouraged by him, moved to London, where she made her debut at three separate halls on the same evening.

Her inexhaustible vocal power and engaging personality equipped her ideally to become queen of the music hall chorus-song – amongst them “Down at the Old Bull and Bush”, “Hold your hand out, naughty boy”, “She’s a lassie from Lancashire”, “Oh!Oh! Antonio”, “It’s a long way to Tipperary”, “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag”, “Daisy Bell” (Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do…), “I do like to be beside the seaside”, “Fair, Fat and Forty” and many more. She was also a famous Principal Boy in panto and starred in the first Royal Variety Performance in 1912.

Florrie Forde died in Aberdeen in April 1940 after entertaining wounded sailors. What a trouper. In his curmudgeonly poem, “Death of an Actress”, Louis MacNeice recalled her “elephantine shimmy” and “sugared wink”.

Here she is, very movingly, in the flesh: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYWygJSetbA

Now, six years on from my original proposal, English Heritage has just dropped her from their shortlist, with the explanation that their budget has been cut and that anyway she lived mostly at Shoreham-by-Sea in Sussex. While she was working? I don’t think so.

And what took them six years to discover this? No wonder their budget has been slashed.

Ten more things I like

The playing (and singing) of Chet Baker
South Indian cooking
The Leaves of Southwell
Being a groundling at Shakespeare’s Globe
Walking in Old Shanghai
The prose of Patrick Leigh Fermor
The brief life of peonies in flower
Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen
Test cricket at Adelaide Oval
Writing in my office at home

How about you?

Churchill, Froude and the English-Speaking Peoples

The recent book Mr Churchill’s Profession: Statesman, Orator, Writer by Peter Clarke is fundamentally about the writing of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples and the beliefs that surrounded it.

It made a great impact when it was published in four handsome volumes in the mid-1950s. Churchill came to believe that the shared language, culture and history of the English-speaking peoples provided a platform for the future beyond Empire. Of course, his mother was American.

This was an idea that had first gained wide currency with JA Froude’s Oceana of 1886. A celebrated English historian, now substantially forgotten, Froude travelled extensively through South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and America in 1884-85. The Australian historian, Geoffrey Blainey, has written: “I know of no travel book of the nineteenth century which paints our part of the world with such brilliant prose… his best sentences are music.”

At the heart of Oceana, Froude could see that a centralised imperial model would not do, the colonies “will never submit again to be ruled from England”, and that America would clearly have a greater and greater role in all things.

Neither Froude nor Churchill called for formal political union, but the cultural heritage (which now includes the Indian sub-continent, much of South-East Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere) has been, as they envisaged, immense.

Above: Oceana (1897) by the Australian sculptor Bertram Mackennal