Paying for Mr Pappano

In the wake of Arts Council cuts, it was no surprise to read press reports the other day that the BBC is willing to talk to other beleaguered arts bodies about orchestral funding. Whilst inherently sympathetic to their plight, I was reminded of another story last week about the salary earned by Antonio Pappano, MD at Covent Garden. I forget the exact figure commanded by Mr Pappano, but the sum which has stuck in my mind is £690,000. Now Pappano is no doubt a fine musician, but is he really worth the best part of £700k? To put it another way, could another musician, perhaps equally fine, have been found to do the job for, oh I don't know, £500k? £300k? Might not Pappano himself have been prepared to do the job for a lower sum?

For my work on the day of a concert an amateur orchestra generally pays me about £250 (yes, that's £250, not£250k). I am not suggesting that I could do as good a job as Mr Pappano (although I'd be willing to give it a shot), but one thing I have learned since I started conducting is that there are, even in amateur music circles, an awful lot of very fine conductors out there. And that's just in NW England. The idea that there is only a small group of people in the world who are capable of leading a top opera company (or a professional symphony orchestra, whose conductors are paid comparable sums), and that salaries like Mr Pappano's have to be awarded to secure their services, is pure tosh. The reality is that in every country there are dozens and dozens of terrific musicians who would do the job for less. Some of them would do it for next to nothing. If I did not have to eat, I would organise, rehearse and conduct great music free of charge. In fact if I had to, I would crawl over broken glass to do it. The experience is its own reward.

Why does any of this matter? Surely it's up to the ROH to decide how much it pays its Music Director? Well no. Firstly, Pappano's salary is obscene when compared with the wages of the players, which will be less than a tenth of the amount (extras at one of Manchester's professional orchestras are paid about £100 per day, and I believe it's among the most generous). Secondly, there's something rather horrible about anyone earning this kind of money when many ordinary people, who couldn't afford to go to the Royal Opera even during the good times, are losing their jobs.

And thirdly, the ROH receives public money. Yes, you and I are paying taxes in order to help the Royal Opera pay Mr Pappano £690k p.a. That makes me feel quite bad.

Should any organisation which has so little idea how to run a tight financial ship that it pays its chief the best part of a million quid a year really be getting a penny from the public purse?

in the shadow of the wizard

During the interval of a concert on Saturday, my mother came across a crusty old battleaxe she knows from her weekly French class. This lady, starchy, faintly condescending, played the fiddle professionally in various London orchestras thirty or forty years ago. They agreed that it was a fine concert - they'd just heard a performance of Mozart's magisterial Sinfonia Concertante in E flat K364 by the Athenean Ensemble - and after praising the soloists, Jonathan Martindale and Lucy Nolan, my mother's friend singled out the conductor, who had apparently done a fine job too. For Mum, fifty odd years of disappointment fell away in a moment, all the effort and sacrifice of parenthood made worthwhile by the open goal now facing her. "Actually, he's my son", she said.

I have conducted the Sinfonia Concertante once before, in a half-empty Victoria Theatre in Halifax. But here in Didsbury every seat in the church was taken, and there were people standing at the back; at the end, a kind of roar went up from the audience, the sort of response you very rarely get at a classical concert, and one I don't think I've ever heard whilst conducting (and I've done some rabble rousing stuff, from Bruckner to John Williams and back via the Dambusters March). What an exceptional piece K.364 is, and what a privilege for me, Lucy, Jonathan and the players, to walk, for the half an hour it took to play it, in the long shadow of the Salzburg wizard.

Caliban's Day

The biggest belly laugh in the production of Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art comes when Humphrey Carpenter, arriving to interview W.H. Auden, is mistaken by the elderly poet for a rent boy. "But I'm from the BBC", expostulates Carpenter, to general hilarity. That this sub-Terry and June bit of knockabout should be the funniest line says a good deal about the standard of the rest of Bennett's play.

Of course, technically it isn't his play, but a play which one of Bennett's characters has written entitled Caliban's Day, which we see being rehearsed backstage at the National Theatre. The dried-up Auden, a randy, unwashed intellectual bully, is visited by Benjamin Britten, an old friend from the 1930s, and in the core of the inner play the pair of them muse on art and sex (to no great effect, I thought, but that's not the point of this post). The Caliban referred to is the rent boy, who (once we gratefully realise is not going to be fellated by Auden onstage) acts as an antidote to the clipped vowels and middlebrow intellectualising of Bennett's protagonists.

Bennett wants us to like Auden - funny, rumbustious, unrepentant - and so he has to make us tolerate his use of male prostitutes. So the rent boy is not a damaged individual, a victim of childhood sexual abuse or a drug addict. He isn't even a boy. No, he's a jolly outgoing charmer in his twenties who just loves to service eminent washed-up poets whose trousers smell of urine.

I found this male version of the old tart-with-a-heart lie both creepy and repellent.

What did the critics make of it? The man from the Times wrote that Bennett's depiction of the rent boy was " an unconvincing shovelling of A Sympathetic Member of the Working Classes into these cosy proceedings, to make some point about inequality, social injustice and so forth. It’s all as woolly as a Marks & Spencer cardie." But he still gave it four stars.

My wife's theory, that Bennett is a national treasure and therefore immune to criticism, was borne out by the Telegraph - "Alan Bennett, that most cherished of national treasures, is now 75", began its five star review. The Guardian didn't mention the rent boy at all: Michael Billington gave it four stars.

I was at school with someone who ended up as a rent boy. More typical than Bennett's evasion, he was a sad individual who died of Aids before he was 30.

myth-busting # 3

Although posting twice in two days risks giving the impression that I don't have enough work to do, I can't resist debunking an argument heard a few times recently, and that I suspect we're going to hear a lot more of as the cuts bite.

Here's a correspondent in the paper, one Lynne Alderson, pointing to research from France showing that that the 2009 Picasso exhibition in Aix-en-Provence "earned 62m euros of additional income for the town" against a measly investment of only 6m. So the government "should look to the long-term financial benefits of spending in the arts".

I'm as well-disposed to arts funding as the next person, but this just won't do. For starters, what would have happened to that 62m if it hadn't been spent in Aix? Would it have been kept under the mattresses of hundreds of middle-class culture-loving households the length and breadth of France? Would the bien-pensant have said to themselves, "We were going to spend this money, but because that Picasso exhibition didn't go ahead, we're now going to keep it stashed away"? Of course not. They'd have stuck it in the bank, invested it, or spent it somewhere else. So the money might not have gone to Aix, but it would have gone somewhere and someone would have made use of it.

But there's more. What if instead of spending the money on a Picasso exhibition the French government had spent it instead on, oh I don't know, something like tax breaks for Research and Development in industry? Now that wouldn't just have sucked in money from French consumers, it would ultimately have brought in money from overseas via exports.

So whilst Paris not spending 6m Euros at all would probably still have brought a 62m Euro benefit to the economy, spending 6m on something not related to the arts might have brought in a still greater benefit.

Those of us with an artistic interest to declare are not famously good with numbers: "bean-counters", we sneer at the accountants, satisfied that if they know the price of everything, we alone know its true value. Yet all the above is flippin' obvious to anyone bright enough to tie their own shoelaces, and its truly depressing to see that there are still people reliant on slip-ons and velcro amongst both the Guardian's readership and the people that edit the paper.

Not ..... not .... NOT ACACIA AVENUE!

"Osborne's benefit reforms will force thousands into ....", began a Guardian headline wail yesterday. Into what, I wondered - poverty? Prostitution? Voting Tory?

Well no. It appears that changes to housing benefit rules might make some people move out of inner cities and into - cue sharp intake of breath - the suburbs.

I know. I know. The poor dears. Flood, famine, pestilence are bad; but the suburbs? Is there no limit to the beastliness of these ravening deficit-cutters?

Truly there is one destination the metropolitan media elite fears more than Gin Lane, Death Row and the good-intention-paved Road to Hell combined.

For the love of God please spare them from Acacia Avenue.

myth-busting # 2

Continuing my credit-crunch guide.

2. The best way to shrink a deficit is to have people in work paying taxes.

I found this gem in an article by Jonathan Freedland in this morning's Grauniad.

It sounds plausible until you think about it. If Freedland is right and HMG spends a million on wages, the taxes it recovers and the benefits it saves will come to more than a million. So the Government should be increasing public spending rather than cutting it.

According to Freedland's logic, the more people the Government employs, the less money it will need to spend.

If only Governments the world over could grasp this simple principle, no economy need fall into recession ever again, and no Government would ever have to run a deficit.

A poster on CiF destroyed Freedland's position more pithily than I could. He wrote, "Not if their salaries are being paid from money the government has borrowed".

brassed orf

Retaining an endearing capacity to surprise after nearly 20 years in the post, my wife - born Hampshire, educated Portsmouth, Oxford and Bar School, London - has recently exhibited a passionate enthusiasm for brass bands. On Saturday I volunteered to go with her to the Bridgewater for a Brass Band Gala Concert featuring Brighouse and Rastrick, Black Dyke and Fodens (Q - What is the difference between between a Concert and a Gala Concert? No, I don't know either).

Some miscellaneous impressions from a neophyte:

1. The audience was even older than the average Halle audience.

2. Judging by the repertoire, you could be forgiven for thinking that modernism had never happened. On the downside this meant that some of the repertoire was woefully unambitious and footling. On the upside, the amount of new repertoire, enthusiastically played and greeted, showed that Brass Band culture is alive and well, unashamedly directed at the enjoyment of both players and audience, and entirely free from the stifling intellectual navel-gazing that acts as a thick layer of cobweb around modern classical music. In particular, Peter Graham, Professor at Salford, has evidently written some very skilful and breathtakingly exciting band music.

3. The actual sound of the ensemble is surprisingly mellow, at least to those of us used to wincing as orchestral brass comes crashing boisterously into the room. I'd attribute this to the preponderance of tubas, both large and small: a rounded and almost woolly timbre, comforting as hot cocoa.

4. The only bandsman/woman not wearing a lurid military tunic was a percussionist with Brighouse & Rastrick, who turns out to be one Minesh Patel, a percussion teacher resident in Leicester. What a player Mr Patel was, but could the chaps (all chaps in B&R) not club together to buy him the proper outfit? But perhaps Patel needed his arms unencumbered for his unrestrained and witheringly accurate assaults on the xylophone.

5. My tastes must be getting lower and lower - a favourite moment was an arrangement of a Mario Lanza tune. "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is", wrote Noel Coward.

6. Judging by the hairdo of Aussie conductor David King, the mullet has not yet become taboo down-under. And please don't tell me he was wearing it ironically. Or, worse still, that it's making a come-back.

A right load of Kok?

Another interesting night at the Proms, with Rattle and the Berlin Phil's Viennese evening. No, not Strauss and Lehar, but Wagner, Strauss R, and the Second Viennese School.

First, you can knock Rattle for some of the musical decisions he makes, but not his means of executing them - every gesture considered and to the point, even in the more complex stuff. Valery Gergiev please note: enough with your gurning and flailing already.

As for the repertoire, I am afraid that I am no friend to the Second Viennese School. Music is meant to be enjoyed, not admired, and I just don't like listening to this music enough. I can see that it's very well done for what it is (and Berg in particular was clearly a supremely talented musician); I imagine it would be fun to conduct, and perhaps fun to play. But to listen to I find it ugly, restless and cold.

Schoenberg and his disciples would no doubt have told you they were broadening music's expressive range, and in some of Berg's work that's true (the Violin Concerto; but I can't think of anything else). What they were really doing, however, was chucking the baby out with the bathwater - there's more emotional and psychological contrast in Mozart's simple major and minor triads than than in this music. By excluding tonality more or less completely (and later on by excluding regular rhythm), it painted itself into a very small corner indeed.

Some of the quieter episodes have a kind of chilly beauty, but aside from this what else is there to enjoy? The routine crunching dissonances? Not for me. There is a desperate narrowness of affect; I find the music lacks breadth and contrast, the ability to present the listener with a variety of emotional and psychological landscapes. Even in these early pieces serialism's tell-tale constriction was there - already the reliance on timbre as a means of imparting life and contrast. But timbre is not enough as a constructive device, and there is a meandering quality to the music that I think due to lack of harmonic direction. Harmony without poles lacks magnetism; hence the reliance of legions of 20th Century composers on texture to get them to the finishing line. Hence the ever expanding orchestras and esoteric instruments.

I've always felt too that there was little mileage in the argument that this music was a necessary response to the political times. After all, war, famine and pestilence were not new things; they have always ravaged Europe. And modernism had reared its head in the form of Mahler's Ninth Symphony and Strauss's Elektra long before the Archduke Ferdinand was shot. It was a period in which composers were finding Romanticism unsatisfactory, and looking for other means of expression: Sibelius had already used a simpler, subtler style in his 3rd Symphony (1907); the darkness of his 4th (1911) is attributed to a diagnosis of throat cancer rather than fears of war. Strauss himself put expressionism behind him with Rosenkavalier (1911), and never went back.

No, the truth is surely that the human desire for novelty in the context of what looked like a worn-out idiom was as much responsible for Berg and Webern's experimentation as anything going on in the fields of Flanders; that and a desire to scandalize the conservative Viennese bourgeousie (surely the dreariest of motivations any artist can experience).

Whatever musicologists might say, there is no prescribed correct response to the times you live in. Each of us is free to respond in the way we like. The American critic Joe Queenan once wrote that he had personally responded to the threat of nuclear annihalation by listening to more Bach. I'm with Queenan on this.

In a way the most instructive thing associated with the evening (apart from the sublime Prelude to Act I of Parsifal, which sent me scurrying to the internet to look out the score), was the interview Rattle gave to the BBC in the afternoon. In it he recounted Felix Kok's story (Kok was for many years CBSO leader under Rattle) of turning up one day in 1948 to an orchestral rehearsal in, I think, the Kingsway Hall, London. The players had no idea what they were going to play or with whom. Then the door opened and in walked Wilhelm Furtwangler and Kirsten Flagstad. The music on the stand seemed to consist of four short orchestral pieces. There was no title, and no composer's name on the handwritten parts. However Kok said that as they began to play and Ms Flagstad to sing, they knew they were in the presence of greatness; and as millions of ordinary people have since discovered, the music was by Richard Strauss, and now bears the title Four Last Songs.

emotional tourism

Writing in today's Guardian, Martin Kettle bangs the drum for Rattle conducting Mahler 1 at the Proms tonight, thus calling to mind Frederick Delius's famous quote. "Now it is Sibelius", wrote Delius - this was in the 30s, I think - "and when they are tired of him it will be Mahler or Bruckner".

And lo it has come to pass. Why Mahler now? My answer would be that we live in an age of rampant individualism, and what Mahler serves up is a brilliantly realised justification of the self, with all its inward-looking narcissism. He offers listeners the sense that their lives are full of passion, drama, heroism, struggle and grief. But this is a partial truth at best, a distortion at worst. Most of life involves more quotidien activities like going round the supermarket, washing up, making sure your children have done their homework. Opportunities for glory and heartbreak are, perhaps fortunately, relatively few and far between for most of us.

Our lives are not like Mahler imagines them, and to sit and listen to one of his symphonies is to experience a form of emotional tourism. It makes us feel more important, but that shouldn't blind us to the essential falseness of the experience. I wouldn't quite go along with Aaron Copland, who compared listening to Mahler to watching a very great actor walking along the street pretending to be a great composer, but do I see what he was getting at.

This is not to say that Mahler was not an outstanding musician, nor that the 6th Symphony is not a perfectly realised piece, nor that he was a very great orchestrator (but parts of Das Lied are horribly overscored and in general Mahler leaves no pudding under-egged). It merely means that judged by the very highest standards, in contrast to Bach, Beethoven, Brahms or the Salzburg Wizard, what Mahler is saying panders to an unattractively self-centred aspect of humanity which currently dominates western cultural traditions. The essential hollowness of Mahler's vision is embarrassingly clear in the finale of the 7th (even, I would say, in the finale of the 5th). Only a virtuoso conductor can make Nos. 2 and 8 sound anything but rambling and incoherent. Virtually all of his symphonies could have been half an hour shorter without being any worse.

Sibelius has much more to say about the relationship between man and nature; he also has the gift of writing profound and subtle light music, which Mahler (and virtually everybody else) lacks. The Dane Carl Nielsen has much more to say about what it means to be a person, and how to live your life with courage and dignity. He also said it a lot more pithily, and having said it, shut up about it.

None of which means that I won't be listening tonight. It merely means that I'll be switching over every now and again to watch England -v- Bulgaria on ITV. Now that promises to be an emotional roller-coaster.

breakfast surprise

I nearly choked on my cornflakes this morning when I read this (try and guess the author):

"There is nothing progressive about a government who (sic) consistently spend more than they can raise in taxation, and certainly nothing progressive that endows generations to come with the liabilities incurred by the current generation. There will need to be significant cuts in public expenditure, but there is considerable waste in public expenditure."

Any ideas? Some Tory hawk? Lord Tebbit? Roger Scruton?

Er, no. It's Lord Myners, former Labour minister. The quote concludes - " I have seen that (waste) in my own experience as a minister".

Remember him saying anything like that when he was in office?

No, I don't either.

myth-busting # 1

Credit crunch myths - a guide for the Left.

1. "It was all the bankers' fault".

Because after all, no-one could have possibly predicted that when left to their own devices bankers would go for short-term gain and self-enrichment ahead of economic stability, could they? What next? Bears defecating in the woods? And the Government had no idea whatsoever that the City was parcelling up mortgage obligations and selling them on the open market; it had no idea that high-street lenders were offering 125% loan-to-value on houses, or that with so-called Lie To Buy (oh OK, Self-Certification) mortgages you could write any income you liked on the application form and no one would ever check whether it was true or not.

I'm wearied by my own irony - of course HMG knew about all these things; and did nothing about them. Why? Because the going was good, that's why. The City was booming, the High Street was thronged with shoppers, unemployment was low, house prices were buoyant (removed by one G Brown from the measure used by the Bank of England to target inflation), tax revenues were flooding into the Treasury coffers and then out again into the public sector. What was not to like? After all, the Chancellor told us he had put an end to Tory boom and bust. Where could bust possibly come from?

The Government rode the wave of debt like a surfer who can't believe there are rocks ahead. But rocks there were, and when the economy hit them Brown discovered a new variant on Keynes - borrow when the good times are rolling, and when the bad times come, borrow even more. And so the debt piles up, or at least it does as long as the gilt markets will carry on lending to us.

All the bankers fault. Yeah right.

nostalgia not what it used to be shock

I should have known when, a couple of years ago, there was a minor kerfuffle in the media about the thirtieth anniversary of punk - the features, the documentaries, the grizzled veterans, the ubiquity of Billy Bragg - that following hard on its heels would come the New Romantics. And here they are: a dramatisation of Boy George - the early years - on TV; the reformation (no, not that one) of Duran Duran (or is it Spandau Ballet? Or both?) - anyway, the reunion tours, the features, the documentaries, the ubiquity of some style guru or other. And so wearyingly on.

I have an interest to declare here, because I was a punk before you were a punk (perhaps: at least I was a punk after seeing the Stranglers play at the Doncaster Gaumont on June 16th 1977, a date that must have changed my life because I've remembered it for all this time). And after the stripped-down truth-seeking rawness of the best that punk had to offer, the mincing synthesisers (Ooh Vienna!), awful clothing, awful haircuts and vacuous partying of the New Romantics signalled less of a new dawn than a return to the proggish self-indulgence of the 70s. Plus ca change.

Other people's nostalgia is usually less attractive than your own, but my dislike of this latest outbreak is tempered by a chastening recollection. My generation, in its forties and fifties, in power in TV, in the newspapers and in politics, looks back fondly on its funny clothes, its hairstyles, the drugs it took and the music it listened to. What did my parents look back on in their flabby nostalgia for their own glory years? The austerity of the war and the struggle against Hitler.

Ignoring the critics

A review by Andrew Clements of James Macmillan's trumpet concerto in this morning's Graun has put my back up.

 Clements wrote "(The soloist's) virtuosity was unfailingly impressive, MacMillan's mix of bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch as depressing as ever".

 It's worth pausing for a moment to savour the use of language here. Note that Clements doesn't say, "MacMillan's mix of bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch was as depressing as ever". No. The was is in the previous clause praising the soloist, and we the readers carry it by inference into the criticism which follows.

Why so shy Andrew? Surely you don't lack the cojones to come right out with it?

Note also that MacMillan's bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch are taken as a given. Clements has no room to persuade us that MacMillan's music features such qualities, preferring to record his own reaction at finding those things.

As ever with criticism, this is opinion masquerading as objectivity. After all, one person's bombast is another's grandeur, and my kitsch may well be your expressiveness.

But these are run of the mill objections to art criticism, I hear you say. Fair enough. Yet what irked me about Clements's snide little put-down was not the inherent weaknesses of the shabby trade it reveals, but the sheer lack of manners and class.  Whatever else you can say about MacMillan, it seems pretty certain that he is ten times the musician Andrew Clements is. Does the critic not feel even moderately embarrassed to find himself excoriating in print someone who has forgotten more about the composer's trade then he himself will ever know?

Sibelius once said, "Ignore the critics. No statue was ever erected to a critic."

 If only it were so easy.