Rufus "Anonymous" Wainwright

So singer Rufus Wainwright has written an opera, and it's going to be put on at this year's Manchester Festival.  Lucky Rufus.  Last year it was Damon Allbarn's Monkey.  A while back the London Sinfonietta was looking for a composer to work with.  Who did they go for?  Answer, Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead.  

The moral?  If you want your work put on, don't bother going to Music College, learning your craft, sending your music to people who'll never read it, going in for the same competitions everyone else is going for, trying to scrape a living while you write in the little unused corners of your spare time that aren't taken up by your domestic life.

No, instead become a pop star, because apparently that's a bit of a draw for the powers that be in classical music.  

Don't get me wrong, these people may be talented and their work may be really good.  May be. But let's face it, they got the gig because they were who they were.  If they want to see how much their talent counts for, next time let them submit it anonymously.

Finally, spare a thought for poor old classical music, poking around in the bottom of the barrel for something the public might actually pay to see. Without wishing to labour the obvious, putting on works from composers the public quite likes might be a good place to start.  Why not stop commissioning Birtwhistle and Rihm, whose stuff the mass audience cordially loathes, and encourage instead composers who care about whether the listener has a good time and can understand what's going on?

After all John Adams can't be the only one who can do it.

hypocrisy central

The Guardian has had its knickers in a twist in the last few weeks over corporate tax avoidance, running a series of self-righteous articles under the heading Tax Gap.  In its most recent scoop, it published details of transactions undertaken by Barclays to minimise its tax exposure, which the Bank promptly got an injunction to suppress.

But now what's this?  The current issue of Private Eye suggests that the Guardian's owners have been doing a little avoidance of their own.  Last year, it says, they bought Emap, a magazine publisher, via a parent company in Luxembourg and a string of offshore subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands.  The aim?  According to the Eye, to avoid paying stamp duty on the purchase of Emap shares.

Pass the sick bag. 

Looking like Brad Pitt

Over in Halifax, the orchestra's concerts are dutifully reviewed in the Courier by a lady I have never met called Julia Anderson.  Her reviews are almost unfailingly kind to the orchestra and its Music Director.  However she has described my conducting style as "energetic" so often that it came as no surprise that after last Saturday's concert - Tchaikovsky 4 and the Emperor concerto - she felt the need for a new adjective.  

This time I was "attentive".  I'm not sure I like it quite so much as "energetic", but perhaps it was time for a change.  

For the soloist in the concerto, however, one word was not enough.  Ms Anderson found Duncan Glenday both "young" and "very slight of frame".  In a dark theatre appearances can be deceptive, but although all things are relative, "young" is probably pushing it a bit for Duncan.  And when am I going to get my own descriptive just deserts?  Who knows, if Ms Anderson thinks Duncan's young, she may well feel I look a bit like Brad Pitt.  

From the back, of course.  In a dark theatre.

Yes, I was in favour of the war!

Although my experience of having been - reluctantly - in favour of the Iraq war, amidst a class of people who were overwhelmingly against it, is a subject for another time, I was reminded of it this morning by a letter in the Graun about civilian casualty figures.  One Geoff Simons, author of Iraq Endgame: Surge, Suffering and the Politics of Denial, claimed that estimates of the dead topped one million.

Of course, no-one knows how many casualties there were, but it just so happens that the only organisation that has tried to count the actual individuals killed, Iraqbodycount.org, puts the total at slightly less than one tenth of that figure, ie at about 95,000.  Now that is a lot of people, but it is a lot fewer than one million (presumably that's why it was ignored by Mr Simons), and in any event as a marker of whether the war was a bad idea or not is meaningless unless you consider "but for" test.  Ie, but for the war, what would have happened?

Well, it's reasonable to assume that Saddam would have remained in power; that he would have continued to butcher and starve the civilian population as previously; that on his death he would have been succeeded by one or both of his sons; and that on the eventual collapse of the Ba'ath party regime, perhaps a generation into the future, a bloody sectarian power struggle would have ensued, only this time without the Americans to hold the ring and pay for the reconstruction.  In other words, more of Saddam would probably have been deadly too, and to come to a fair assessment you need to set the war casualties against those who would have died if Saddam had been left in place.  Unfortunately, you can't count those people, because no-one knows who they are; neither can you show emotive interviews with their grieving relatives on TV.

It seems to me, contra Mr Simons, that it's those opposed to the invasion who are in denial, because, however dreadful, it was probably no worse than the alternative.  It must be hard for people like him to accept that it's because Bush and Blair ignored their protests that Iraq now has a democratic government.  

A small satisfaction then of the post-invasion period has been the way in which the case against it has unravelled in the slowest of slow motion.

Symphonie Fantastique!

You can think you know a piece pretty well, but some new things struck me after conducting Berlioz's masterpiece on Saturday night for the first time.  

Extraordinarily, the Symphonie Fantastique was written in the same period (late 1820s) as Schubert's Great C Major symphony.  But where Schubert does his wonderful best to follow in Beethoven's footsteps - Schubert lacks more than a small part of Beethoven's great gift for construction based on motivic development, but nevertheless the Great C Major is recognisably designed on the same principles - Berlioz's method is something altogether new and different.  True, there are tunes, one of which recurs throughout the work, but Berlioz is less interested in contrasting and developing these than he is in the bravura opposition of brilliantly vivid and idiomatic orchestral textures; you might even say that this is the principal constructive device.

It shouldn't work.  It should be rambling and incoherent.  But it isn't.  Why?  Partly because the above-mentioned idee fixe ties it all together; partly because the ideas themselves are so wonderful; and partly because in the second half of the piece Berlioz cranks up the rhythmic excitement so successfully after the long silences of the central slow movement that you seem to be caught up in some crazy dance, a party that's got out of hand but that no one wants to end.

Conducting long symphonies like this one, I am sometimes just relieved to have got to the final bars without mishap.  But on Saturday, admiration for Berlioz's achievement came welling up at the finish, and now I can't wait for the chance to do it again.

Institutionally rubbish?

A lot of hot air in the paper yesterday marking the 10th anniversary of Stephen Lawrence's death at the hands of racist thugs.  Was the Met Police force still "institutionally racist", as the Macpherson report had it?  

In a former life I used to be a solicitor in East London, working with largely black clients, in and out of its police stations in the early hours of the morning, dealing with mostly white police officers.  Yes, many of them were racist; but that was not because the institution was racist - in fact it had tried strenously at management level to do the right thing - it was because Met police officers tended to come from lower middle or working class backgrounds, often outside London, and thus tended to be from the social class most likely to be overtly racist and to have least personal experience of living and working alongside black people.  Moreover, because the areas in which they worked were largely black, most of the criminals were black too. So it's not hard to see how the black = criminal equation grew up in the minds of these officers.  Not that that's any excuse, mind.

I thought of this today because an independent report has looked into the death of Stuart Lubbock in Michael Barrymore's swimming pool.  And guess what?  It says that the police failed to secure the site and failed to secure crucial items which might have been used to assault Lubbock and which later "disappeared".  In all, six complaints by Lubbock's father were upheld.  

For anyone used to seeing the way the police work from the inside, the real lesson of both these cases is that the police are very often mediocre at what they do.  The Met were probably never institutionally racist, but they were certainly institutionally rubbish.

The arctic south

I spent Friday and Saturday with a friend climbing some hills either side of the A9 in the Central Highlands, an area that lacks almost all of the drama of Glencoe and the west but has something of what I imagine to be the grand scale of the Arctic tundra or the Russian steppes.  There had been heavy snowfall which was now melting, but although we waded exhaustingly through acres of slush, the ground underneath was still frozen solid.  The benevolent looking weather belies the strength of the wind - you could hardly stand upright in it. It's worth clicking on the picture to see the wonderful striations of snow, and to get the sense of the high plateau, one of the most southerly Arctic environments in the world, apparently going on forwever.