Dino Powell

Every now and again, sitting in the cinema as the final credits roll, I see that the music for the film I've been watching was by John Powell. It happened to me yesterday when I took my youngest daughter to the cinema. Seeing John's name makes me smile because twenty years ago I was at College with him. A small bloke, handsome in a slightly chubby way, he had the most dazzling white teeth: if there was ever a Brit who didn't need his teeth fixed to make it in Hollywood, Powell was the man. He displayed no outstanding talent for composition, but worked hard in the Trinity recording studio, was easy to get along with, and was quite good at just about everything.

How did he get into films? It must have helped that he was close friends with Gavin Greenaway, son of Roger "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" Greenaway, a luminary in the world of advertising jingles. And Hans Zimmer famously got Powell the job of scoring his first movie, the John Woo action thriller Face/Off starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage. But you don't get a second job by doing the first one badly, and I think John deserves his success. He can do a bit of Holst, a bit of Strauss, some Copland, some electronica. In fact, as he demonstrated at College, Powell can do just about everything quite well.

Sometimes when I'm sitting there I think, "Should I be feeling envious that he writes film scores that are heard all over the world, whereas I'm just a moderately successful classical composer and conductor of amateur orchestras?" On the whole, no. John must be rich; he lives in sunny L.A. But I've got drink in the house and money in the bank too, and I quite like it here in rainy Manchester.

But there is one thing I envy him. Composing is an isolating and isolated business. Sometimes you get asked to write pieces, but a lot of the time you write something just because you want to, not knowing for certain whether you'll be able to persuade anyone to put it on. John, on the other hand, must feel loved when he gets the phone call. It may not be real love, but it's pretty close and it must make him feel pretty good.

Would I like it if someone rang me up and said, "We're willing to pay you a lot of money to write some music which will be heard by millions of people all over the world"? Yes, I think I would. But - and this is where John Powell and I part company - I might not like it quite so much if the music I had to write was the soundtrack for Ice Age 3 - Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

Whingeing Aussies

When I came home for an hour on Saturday between rehearsing Bruckner's 4th Symphony in the afternoon and performing it in the evening, I'd intended to rest. But the Test Match had reached such pitch of tension that I had to sit and listen to the denouement instead. After being outplayed comprehensively, England managed to hang on for the draw; needing to take only one more wicket to win, the Aussies simply ran out of time .

Amidst scenes of great drama, two things left a sour taste in the mouth. The first was the time-wasting of the England physio and 12th man, making spurious visits to the middle to use up a few precious minutes. The second was that the Aussie captain Ricky Ponting should have chosen to complain about it.

What a hypocrite! Firstly, he would have done exactly the same. Secondly, when did the Australians sign up to the Corinthian ideal? Or did I miss something?

No, for the men who invented sledging, the moral high ground is a long way up and far, far away, lost in the clouds and unattainable by those in the baggy green caps.

Celebrity Composers

It was perhaps predictable that, after posting a month or so ago about the forthcoming performance of Rufus Wainwright's opera Prima Donna at the Manchester International Festival, my wife would buy a pair of tickets and insist we go. "I'll be miserable", I protested. "Either it'll be brilliant, in which case I'll be jealous, or it'll be dreadful, in which case I'll be furious". But my objections were in vain, and off we went last night to the packed Palace Theatre.

Actually Prima Donna was neither brilliant nor dreadful, and I was neither jealous or angry. Wainwright is clearly a very talented guy, and about a quarter of the opera worked really well. OK, a lot of it sounds like Puccini, but perhaps better so than Birtwhistle, and there is after all a lot of Haydn in Mozart. A lot of other bits reminded me of no-one at all.

As for the remaining three quarters, the word which sprang to mind was amateurish. Wainwright cannot write a climax and does not know how to make the music move forward. He doesn't always know how to write music which underscores and amplifies the (fairly melodramatic) story, often serving up the bland at what should be the most gripping moments (the suspended dominant chord when the heroine may or may not be about to chuck herself from the window ledge perhaps the most memorably dreary example). Some of his writing for voices is leaden and unsympathetic (just because tenors can sing high doesn't mean you have to make them sing high all the time). It came as no surprise to read in the score that Wainwright had needed the assistance of an "orchestration assistant". I read this as meaning, "Rufus doesn't know how to score for orchestra, so we'll get a guy in who does".

The truly depressing thing about Prima Donna is not that it is no good at all, but that all these superbly professional people - the singers, designers, producers and orchestra all aquit themselves honourably - had been put at vast expense at the service of someone who is essentially an inexperienced amateur. Why? Because Wainwright is famous; the fact that he is famous for doing something else does not seem to have bothered the people who commissioned his piece. This is exactly the same mistake as that made routinely by the chairmen of football clubs, who appoint managers thinking that because they were good at football they must also be good at management. Bobby Charlton, John Barnes, Paul Gascoigne and many others tried it and failed. The best managers in the English league on the other hand in the last few years - Fergie, Mourinho and Wenger - were all average or worse as players. The gifted player like Mark Hughes who makes a good manager is an exception.

So now as well as celebrity managers we have celebrity composers. Is Leona Lewis writing an opera? Not so far as I know. But her agent should get onto it as soon as possible, because I'm sure that the organisers of some arts festival somewhere would like to hear from her. I am available if she needs an orchestration assistant.