Messing with the German Requiem

A marathon day on Sunday, conducting the Athenean Ensemble in the morning in Didsbury and then off in the afternoon to help out with the Manchester Bach Choir's German Requiem. I was forcibly reminded of the joy of live music, both because of the packed house for the morning concert, an event put on and enjoyed by people who care passionately about classical music, and because of the things that went wrong over the course of the day.

Even the greatest musicians make mistakes. That is part of the pressure of having to get it right now. The pianist John Lill, a man who is said to have memorised Beethoven's piano sonatas by the age of 12, once went off into the wrong key in the Emperor Concerto. A friend recalls playing 2nd Bass Clarinet in the Rite with the BBC Phil and being horrified when the 1st player began a complex duet passage a bar early - should he follow suit and spare his colleague the humiliation, or join in and risk chaos elsewhere in the orchestra? Players are quite good at covering up these things: another friend was playing in a scratch professional orchestra at a concert featuring the tenor Alfie Boe. Mr Boe came in not one but four bars early. His accompanists seamlessly and undetectably advanced four bars to cover him.

I personally never mind too much when new things go wrong in concerts - it's the old mistakes that piss me off. So when on Saturday one section of the Athenean unaccountably missed a cue at the beginning of the Clementi symphony, that seemed just part of the unpredictable thrill of the event. You can bet no-one in the audience noticed.

I said I had gone to "help out" with the Brahms German Requiem, but I'm not sure how much help I really was. "We're short of tenors, can you come and help?" is an appeal to charity which might well have been met with, "Unfortunately I am not a tenor". But this would be to ape the scene in the Clouseau film where Peter Sellers goes into a bar and is growled at by the dog in the corner. "Does your duurg bite?", enquires Sellers of the landlord. "No", replies the landlord. The dog duly comes over and bites Sellers on the ankle. "I thought you said your duurg did not bite", complains Sellers. "That's not my dog", the landlord replies.

So although I am not a tenor, I went anyway. Now there are tenor parts and there are tenor parts. Some lie mostly in the middle of the stave with the occasional foray into the upper regions. These I can manage, because during an average day I can sing several top Gs, and once, recording a jingle for a radio advert (for a housebuilding company, since you ask), managed a top A. But the Brahms Requiem is unforgivingly high, with top As aplenty, and at least once, a top B flat; I seemed to spend three hours of the afternoon and two hours of the evening shouting, increasingly hoarsely.

However bad this was, the nadir of my contribution was reached in the second fugue, where a storm of confusing information comes your way: the pitches, awkward and non-intuitive, the rhythms, irregular and non-intuitive, the register, generally out of my reach, and lastly, the language, German. I had managed this alright in the afternoon, but now, head buried in part, resolved to go for it fearlessly, bellowing my way through for two minutes, aware that it wasn't quite going as well as previously but determined to see things through to the end like a musical George Osborne. When finally the smoke cleared and the last entry had been dealt with, I looked up. The conductor was regarding his charges with an attitude of mild rebuke. I had been a crotchet out with him throughout. No wonder it didn't sound quite right.

My wife says I have been slow to admit responsibility for this. I think that's unfair. The problem is that in music no-one quite knows what's happened. The process is mysterious, and that is part of the attraction. Some performances, note perfect, are wooden. Some have flaws but come to life in a way you cannot predict. That is why the Athenean's leader told me that she found herself on the verge of tears during Siegfried Idyll on Saturday morning; and telling me about it three days later she had to wipe her eyes again. As for things going wrong, you could call in the crash investigators like they do for a motorway pile up, and still be unsure of the cause of the musical accident.

So it might have been just me that was out.

On the other hand, I could have been note perfect. Perhaps everyone else got it wrong.

Valuing Aditya Chakrabortty

"Last week", writes Aditya Chakrabortty in the Grauniad, "you, me and every other taxpayer in Britain each handed £13 to the billionaire Richard Branson". Funnily enough I heard one of Chakrabortty's colleagues, John Harris, say exactly the same thing on Any Questions last Saturday. Now I am no fan of Branson, who is just a capitalist like any other, but this is wrong. Actually it's more than wrong, it's revealingly wrong.

Chakrabortty gets his figure by taking the amount of money the Government put into Northern Rock, subtracting the amount by the figure Branson paid for it and dividing the result by the number of taxpayers. Now he clearly isn't saying that we really paid £13 each to Virgin. What he's saying is that we've given something to Virgin which is worth £13 more per taxpayer than Branson has actually paid.

Chakrabortty's mistake lies in the assumption that Northern Rock is worth now what the UK government paid for it in 2008, and that mistake in turn lies in a misunderstanding of what value is.

When my mother in law watches the Antiques Roadshow and some becoiffed smoothie tells a gasping matron that her 18th century heirloom might be worth £20,000, what he means is that somebody would probably be prepared to pay that sum at auction. That's the best way of attributing value: the figure someone else is prepared to pay for a thing. In fact it's the only way of attributing value.

Now turn to Northern Rock. The Government has been trying to sell it for some time, but no one else was willing to pay more than Virgin. The sum beardie paid represents its value now. Moreover the value the Government paid for Northern Rock did not just represent its status as a bank in trouble. Its value was increased drastically because if the Government hadn't bought it the knock-on effects in the UK's banking system would have been profound and severe. So Chakrabortty is attributing a false value to Northern Rock, not only because in the real world no-one was prepared to pay any more than Branson; but also because what the Government was paying for was the continued survival of the UK's banking system. And before you say, well we'd be better off without that, ask yourself how much rice and pasta you have stored in your cellar. Because if the cashpoints run out, you won't be buying any for a while.

Chakrabortty could have argued that George Osborne should have waited longer; that in a few years we'd have got more for it; that Osborne should have sought to remutualise the bank. But no. He chose instead to say that the taxpayer has given money to Richard Branson. Which is not true.

Who is Aditya Chakrabortty? He is chief economics leader writer for the Guardian. But he doesn't know what value is. Go figure.

PS A few days ago (in mid-May 2012) the National Audit Office completed its investigation into the sale of Northern Rock to Virgin.  Although concluding that the Government lost money on the sale, it said that this loss "should, however, be seen as part of the overall cost of securing the benefits of financial stability during the financial crisis".  BBC Business Editor Robert Peston commented, "For the NAO, that notional £2bn loss is probably a price worth paying: it prevented a banking collapse that could have been contagious and could have led to the demise of other banks".  I am still waiting for Aditya Chakrabortty to acknowledge this in his Guardian column.

Occupy should stay

Saw a debate on Newsnight last night between a flame-haired activist type (whose name now escapes me), and a former Goldman Sachs banker (ditto). This was in the wake of the Occupy Wall St protests being removed in New York.

The course of this debate, mediated by Emily Maitlis, was predictable enough; the Activist articulately incandescent, the Banker moderate and a bit apologetic despite the activist's attempts to interrupt. Where it got really interesting however was the point at which the Banker said, the real reason for the crisis is Socialism (gasps from Maitlis and the Activist), which is to say that governments all around the world - Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Greece - had spent too much money, not daring to tell their electorates that this spending was unaffordable.

Now personally I don't remember George W Bush's government being terribly socialist - and Dubya was an intemperate spender - but nevertheless the broader point is probably true. Governments did live on borrowed money, and they did lack the political courage to balance their budgets - after all, things were going so well, weren't they?

This infuriated the Activist, by now almost beside herself. How dare a rich banker blame the governments that had tried to protect the interests of ordinary working people? I can see that, from her shoes, hearing this kind of stuff from a besuited fat cat must have been annoying. In times of austerity, it's galling to see some people utterly unaffected. But the facts rather bear the Banker out.

In Britain, a Labour government (which I voted for) consistently ran a deficit from about 2001 onwards. Labour supporters loved the Government's economic success. We enjoyed the tax take coming from the City of London's profits, deregulated by Gordon Brown. We were not only running the economy better than the Tories, but we were rebuilding Britain's social infrastructure. And yet when recession came the cupboard was bare, and, as I have noted many times here, the Government had no choice but to go to the markets to keep the economy afloat. That we are now so dependent on the gilt markets is not their fault, but ours.

The problem for the activist and other people like her is that no amount of taxing the rich or well-paid will fill the holes in Western budgets. There just aren't enough rich people. There are many, many more middle-income earners. So while basic considerations of fairness might indicate higher taxes for the affluent, in fact doing so is gesture politics. The reality is that we were all deluded into believing that the consumer paradise would last forever, and in future we are all going to have lower standards of living.

And what alternative plans do the Activist and others like her in the Occupy movement have? What do they want?, Emily Maitlis asked. For the first time the Activist looked flustered. If I could have worked out what her answer meant I would record it here. But the best paraphrase I can supply is, None.

I have some sympathy with the Occupy movements. It was never fair in the good times for CEOs to get billions while their immigrant cleaners got peanuts (and paid tax at a higher rate), and it's even less so now. CEOs are too close to the people who decide what their remuneration should be, and shareholders have too little influence over the process. I have a few shares here and there, and a couple of times a year I get a letter telling me I've earned a £17.50 dividend. No one has ever told me, "And by the way, if we hadn't been paying the CEO 9 million, you'd have had £175.00 instead". What's needed to curb the City's excesses is greater transparency over the pay process and better regulation than the botch job put in place by Gordon Brown.

But there is a broader point. I also have grave doubts about the eternal-growth project upon which our prosperity is said to depend. Growth will come in future in the markets with growing populations, perhaps India in particular. But if the population is going to carry on growing and we are all going to get more affluent, more and more resources will be used up and more and more of the planet will be despoiled. My principal objection to Wall St and The City is not that its occupants are greedy or unprincipled, but that they are part of a system to which we are all bound and which is probably not sustainable.

So actually the Occupy movement needs to do some hard thinking. What does it want, and what would a future without growth look like? How could it be made to work fairly? The authorities in New York and London should not be kicking the protestors out. It should be making them stay there until they can think of some coherent solutions.

M Barnier and the ratings agencies

At the end of October I wrote about a report that one Michel Barnier, EU internal market commissioner, had proposed - idiotically in my view - that "Credit rating agencies could be banned from downgrading countries in the eurozone's bailout scheme ..." The Grauniad's piece continued, "Presenting his proposals to reform trading in financial derivatives on Thursday, Barnier suggested the ban could be extended to downgrades of countries negotiating to join the bailout."

So far, so financially illiterate. The ratings agencies are merely the messengers. It isn't their fault that so many countries have borrowed too much money.

Now what's this in the Torygraph this morning? " ....the outspoken commissioner [Barnier] was forced to concede on his controversial proposals to introduce a temporary ban on sovereign debt ratings under bailout circumstances. Until the last moment, Mr Barnier had insisted the new proposals would include some form of a ban. But after meeting fellow commissioners, Mr Barnier acknowledged no final agreement had been reached, adding a proposal could be reintroduced later."

Commonsense breaks out in EU. I need to sit down and rest a while.

Muslims against Crusades - a liberal speaks

Why oh why did the Government feel it had to ban Muslims against Crusades last week?

Leaving aside the ease with which the ban can be circumvented (change of name being an inconvenience for the Islamists perhaps only to the extent that it necessitates fresh website design), banning an organisation because of what its members think is inherently bad.

Banning Muslims against Crusades will not alter the way its members feel. What kind of democracy is it where the majority can make illegal being a member of any group it feels is beyond the pale? It may seem OK if you don't like the people on the receiving end (and I revile the poppy-burners as much as anyone), but what if it's your group that's getting the ban?

The intellectual stimulus behind this anti-democratic move seems to me to date from Mrs Thatcher's decision to ban the broadcast of IRA leaders' voices. We were reminded of how ridiculous this was every time the actors reading transcripts of their words appeared on News at Ten. Muslims against Crusades are entitled to their views. I find them offensive, but that's the price I pay for my right to be offensive too. Prosecute them for what they do, not what they say or what organisation they belong to.

Gosh. I have come over all liberal. And about Islamists to boot.

Dr Doom redux.

Lo and behold the very next day Italian debt goes above 7%. What I'd like to know is, when does Italy next have to go to the markets? To be clear, the 7% is the figure at which existing debt is changing hands, and whilst that doesn't affect Italy directly, it does give an indication of the price the country will have to stump up next time it wants to roll over some of its old stock. In Britain these things are handled by the Debt Management Office; whatever its Italian equivalent, I wouldn't mind having a look in their diary. That will be an interesting day.

Megan Greene, colleague of Dr Doom, Nouriel Roubini, was kind enough to email a response to yesterday's post. Basically we agree. She thinks that either the ECB will have to step in, or alternatively create fiscal union, double quick. But that's if the object is to save the Euro; she writes, "I don't think that should be the end goal". I don't think that can be the end goal.

In reply to Ms Greene I offered to give Dr Doom a few tips, just in case he feels his sooth-saying has lost its edge.

PS According to the Torygraph the next Italian bond auction is tomorrow. Oh dear.

Dr Doom and William Hill

Italy is in trouble. Just how much trouble may be inferred from the fact that the interest it must pay on bonds is nudging 7%, and this when it is running into a two-year period during which it must roll over about a quarter of its vast debts. 7% was the magic figure which tipped Greece, Ireland and Portugal into bail-out territory. But these were relatively small economies whereas Italy's is much much bigger, far to big to rescue with the Eurozone's pifflingly small 400 billion euro bail out fund. Attempts to leverage the fund with input from the BRICS countries have come to nothing; somewhere in a departure lounge or munching airline food, Christine Lagarde is roaming the world trying to find countries whose citizens don't have a state pension at all willing to pay into a fund to help those whose populations can retire at 55. Good luck with that, Christine.

Now here's Megan Greene, a colleague of Dr. Doom, Nouriel Roubini, on the Today programme telling it like it is. "I think there are only two possible ends to this crisis. One is the ECB stepping in, providing massive amounts of credit easing. The other is fiscal union. It would be illegal for the ECB to become the lender of last resort. If it were to happen, someone would take it to court and win that case. Germany just wouldn't allow the ECB to start printing money."

Ms Greene undoubtedly knows a great deal more about economics than I do, but I think she is wrong about this. There are three possible ends, not two.

The ECB could step in, start printing money and use it to buy Italian bonds, but as she says that's unlikely for political and legal reasons; it's also true that fiscal union (of which an interventionist ECB would be a fundamental part) would be necessary to make monetary union work, and might actually do so. But fiscal union would be a seismic shift in the way the Eurozone operates; it would need negotiation, consensus and ratification by national parliaments. Even if these things were forthcoming, and even if the leadership so far glaringly absent from this debacle were miraculously to appear, they would take time to arrange. But the bond markets won't wait.

That's where my third possibility comes in. A third way it could end would be by the Euro collapsing. At this stage that seems to me to be most likely. William Hills are apparently offering 2/1, or thereabouts, that Greece will have left the Euro by the end of 2012. These would have struck me as generous odds even if the bet had specified the end of 2011. I can't see any way in which Greece will still be in the Euro by the end of 2012. This has got to be worth £50 of anyone's money.

Birtwhistle, Beethoven and John Adams

I found myself thinking about Harrison Birtwhistle last night. I'll explain why in a minute. I had gone to the Bridgewater to hear the Halle play John Adams' Harmonium, a piece I'd never heard before, although it's over thirty years old now. Harmonium is a long three-movement setting of John Donne and Emily Dickinson for choir and large orchestra, and opens the way it means to go on with the voices ululating gently and the instruments pulsing in and out. I liked it, although not as much as my wife and another (female) friend did. One of them enquired of Adams, "Is he still alive?", as if she intended to fly straight out to California and offer to have the composer's babies.

Even in the States, where there's more of a tradition of user friendly classical music, writing such a defiantly tonal piece in 1980 required some courage; in Britain it would have been an act of profound radicalism; at that time only John Tavener, with whom I was shortly to begin studying, was doing anything remotely similar. I wished I had heard it as a student: my own path back to tonality would have been so much easier to tread.

Someone involved with writing music inevitably finds responding to an unfamiliar work more problematic than a lay listener: you always bring a critical ear. Like many pieces written for a big orchestra, Harmonium does not (for me) let enough silence in; silence is like the white paper a watercolourist leaves blank to let the light shine through. Composers with a lot of instruments on the page are very reluctant to have them doing nothing. You generally couldn't hear the words; and although that might have been the Halle choir's fault, I think it was probably Adams'. The piece was perhaps a bit more boring than it needed to be. I went to sleep twice in it, woken each time by the music - which tended to linger on a pedal point for long periods - shifting to a new plane.

The other piece in the concert was the Eroica. I found it striking that Beethoven's harmonic language - an almost childishly simple conflation of triads and diminished sevenths - nevertheless enabled him to create a structure that was not only engaging, dramatic and touching (all things true of Adams's piece too) but also of granitic strength and cohesiveness. The ideas were worked through; when they were exhausted the piece finished and it felt right that it was doing so. The movements of Harmonium, by contrast, rather petered out. Like a badly performed Bruckner symphony, you didn't feel it ended because it had to; the movements could have been shorter or longer without the listener feeling particularly surprised. Whatever else he had done - and how the original audience must have been relieved to find a piece of contemporary music so ravishingly beautiful - Adams certainly hadn't found a way of making his tonal language an instrument of structure. Does it matter? Maybe not. My tastes lie in that direction though, and I think it can be done, even on the langourously slow-developing harmonic steppes of American minimalism.

But back to Harrison Birtwhistle. I thought of him because it struck me that our most celebrated composer is one whose music is broadly disliked by the public, to the exent that venues secretly give tickets away to make attendance figures look better, whereas the American way (without public subsidy) has produced a composer like Adams, who fills concert halls and whose music is broadly loved. What an indictment of the British way of art.