Stephen Hough plays Four Sea Interludes

A couple of weeks ago one of my daughters sang in the first night of the Proms.  In case this sounds like a large claim, her role was a small one amongst hundreds, being part of the combined forces of the Halle Youth Choir along with a host of others from around the country.  But this family involvement meant that I scanned the TV listings for the first night coverage with more interest than usual, and I was startled to learn from the Guardian that, amongst other unlikely sounding propositions, the pianist Stephen Hough was going to play the Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes.

It's in the nature of Proms programming that occasionally something wacky gets put on, and I thought, "I had no idea Britten had made a piano version", rather than, "Flippin' Grauniad.  Can't get anything right".

In the event, as going to the concert revealed and as this week's Private Eye reports, Four Sea Interludes was in fact played by the BBC SO; Hough merely ran his fingers over the Rach / Pag Rhapsody and the Lutoslawski version of the same tune (he was fantastic).  The Eye says the listings mistake arose because the broadsheets don't employ many people who know anything about classical music; and that this is because the papers don't print much about it.  What the Eye didn't say is that this was because most people aren't interested in classical music, and the papers can't sell the advertising space.

Why is that?  Amongst a whole host of reasons is the sad fact that since the 1960s in this country the repertoire has failed to renew itself in the way it did in the past.  New pieces have not been played and come into the repertoire.  Only a handful of the Second Viennese School pieces, whose influence dominated music in the last century, have managed it (the Berg Violin Concerto - now name four others).  None of them come remotely close to emulating the joyous acceptance of Elgar's Symphony No. 1, which received over a hundred performances in the year after its first.  Conductors and administrators have programmed music by composers the public didn't like.  Unsurprisingly the public has turned its face away.  As a whole, it has become disengaged.  The mistake in the Guardian's listings is symptomatic.

A week or so later the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra played a piece in the Proms by Helmut Lachenmann, described by the Radio 3 announcer as "one of Germany's leading composers".  God help them.  It's worth remembering that the Great Serialist Terror began several decades earlier across the Channel, and has not died out there yet.  I listened dutifully to Lachenmann's piece.  It was rhythmically tedious, ugly and one-paced.  It made a half-hearted attempt at sonic invention, but got nowhere near the felicity and verve of, say, Dusapin, nor indeed of the new dance records they play at my gym.  It was grim, dull and unpleasant.  And putting a worldwide audience off classical music.

Sadly, there are plenty of composers out there who are writing stuff the public do like, and I'm not just banging my own drum here - I listened today to a Piano Trio by Matthew Taylor on Spotify.  Excellent.  I can't wait to hear some of his orchestral music.  Sadly, none of it seems to have been put on at the Proms.

George Osborne - dancing like a baboon

His public utterances may have been modest and self-effacing, but inside George Osborne must have been dancing a little jig, thumbing his nose and baring his behind like a baboon.  Yesterday's GDP figures show the economy growing at an annualised rate of 2.4%, nothing exceptional, but steady and with power to add, a sign, if you like, that things might be returning to normal.

Ed Balls, on the other hand, must have been gritting his teeth as he welcomed the good news, rather like the Australian spin bowler Nathan Lyon, dropped in favour of Ashton Agar only to see the rookie score 98 batting at No. 11 in the first Test.  What little I heard of Balls on the airwaves yesterday suggested that he was rather struggling to find a coherent way to criticise the Chancellor, and the headlines this morning indicate that the best he could do was point out that this was the slowest recovery from recession for a hundred years.  You can almost hear the voters yawning.

Actually there is something Balls could have said - if the Government had done what we suggested, this moment would have come sooner.  It's taken three years for the economy to register significant growth, and we would have managed it quicker.

And that's probably true.  But there are two things to say about that.

The first is that Ball's growth would have been achieved by more borrowing, which comes at a price, and higher public spending, both of which would have meant that a Balls Chancellorship would have been very unlikely to accomplish even the modest deficit reduction Osborne has managed.  The picture would have been one of Government spending spiralling out of control.

The second is that although Osborne's cuts have been very modest overall, they have nevertheless involved shedding hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs (alongside the creation of many more in the private sector), a fundamental shift in the balance of employment in the UK which is merely a taste of things to come.

Britain has public spending commitments which were unaffordable during the very best of good times (Governments ran deficits during almost all the period of growth between 1992 and 2008, the longest in British history) and are disastrously so now.  As Frank Field wrote as long ago as 2004, governments in the future are going to have to provide better public services with less money, not more.  Osborne would probably argue that it was good to get this process under way as soon as possible.

If you look back at the Blair/Brown period, perhaps the cruellest thing about it was the creation of expectations regarding public sector services and employment which could not conceivably be sustained. Unwinding those expectations (and those jobs) is going to be one of the most painful things the UK is going to have to do in future.  If the obligation of government is to provide a system of support for the needy which is the best it can possibly be within the constraints of affordability, no policy of the Brown years I can think of showed the slightest sign of having factored in the latter consideration.

John Inverdale - defending the indefensible

The French tennis player, Marion Bartoli, was not, said John Inverdale, a looker.  Cue outrage from all quarters.  Of course Inverdale was wrong to say what he did, but it's important to work out why.

All of us, even those as long in the tooth as me, make judgments every day about the attractiveness of the people we meet.  It's what nature has fitted us to do.  We are hard-wired to be on the look out for a mate, and internally or otherwise, we are always sizing them up.  Have Inverdale's critics never looked at a passer-by and thought "I don't fancy her much" or "he's alright"? Of course they have. They are crashing hypocrites.

The key words here are "internally or otherwise". Whilst it's OK, inevitable even, that we should judge other people's appearance, articulating our conclusions about them is rude.  It's probably crass to complement someone on their beauty nowadays; certainly it is to do the reverse; disparaging them on air to an audience of millions is about as rude as you can get.

Inverdale has issued a sort-of apology, and Bartoli appears to have sort-of accepted it. Personally I wouldn't fancy a job which requires you to extemporise live, and where one lapse can get you fired.

It's funny how some of the most ardent advocates of tolerance can, when given the opportunity to be tolerant towards people they don't like, be the least forgiving of all.

The Ashes - waiting for the wheel to turn

After England have won the first two Ashes Tests the press (and perhaps particularly the Australian press) have assumed the teams are ill-matched and the rest of the double-header series (three here, five down under in the winter) is a forgone conclusion.  This may be premature.  England won comprehensively at Lords and by a whisker at Trent Bridge.  Had things worked out only very slightly differently it might have been one-all, in which case the papers would have been telling us how evenly matched it all was.

But if you assume it's going to be as one sided as the press, on modest evidence, thinks it is, what accounts for the disparity between the teams?  Well, when we were getting beaten comprehensively in the 90s it always struck me that the difference was that the Aussies had the two best bowlers on either side, Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne, the latter one of the greatest cricketers ever to take the field.  England now have one of the best swing bowlers in world cricket, Jimmy Anderson, and probably the best spin bowler, Graeme Swann.  You would expect England to win.  The batting on both sides looks quite fragile, although England look to have more players who can play a long innings, and we haven't yet seen a contribution from Cook and Pietersen.

A lot of the column inches devoted to Aussie bashing has focused on the popularity of the one-day and T20 formats Down Under.  The thesis goes that those used to the short form of the game don't develop the mental strength and resilience required to bat all day, and that hit-and-giggle cricket doesn't foster the purity of technique required to survive at Test level against better bowling attacks.  Certainly if you watch Shane Watson playing round his front pad (an LBW waiting to happen), you could be forgiven for sympathising with that view.

But I prefer the simple explanation of one Dirk Nannes, a former Australian T20 player, skier, businessman and saxophonist.

"Too much is read into it,that it's the demise of Australian cricket, that it's the end", writes Nannes in the Grauniad today.

"But the wheel will turn and the Poms will be crap again".

I'm afraid he's right.

Wrong sort of growth redux

So the economy is growing again.  And, having spent the last couple of years predicting that the Chancellor would never get any growth unless he changed tack, the usual suspects - BBC, Grauniad, even the Torygraph - are pointing out now that it's the wrong sort of growth. 

The doomsayers are partly correct. What we need are investment and exports rather than consumption and borrowing.  But there are four things to say about that.  

Firstly, when it becomes clear that an economy is going into recession, people tend to rein in their spending, cementing the downturn in place.  But the reverse is also true.  To some extent the economy is now growing because people think it is starting to grow again.  It's better than nothing.

Secondly, the Government's Funding for Lending and Help to Buy schemes have scarcely had time to have a massive impact.  I think they're a mistake - particularly Help to Buy - but I don't think they will have done much to foster growth thus far.

Thirdly, even the wrong kind of growth can have a knock on effect which is beneficial to the economy.  It might, for example encourage companies sitting on huge profits to start investing again.

Lastly, the Chancellor's critics need sorting into two piles.  On the virtuous side, pundits like Jeff Randall and Jeremy Warner in the Torygraph were pointing out that Gordon Brown's growth was unsustainable years ago. At least they were consistent. But where was Robert Peston during the Brown glory years? Where was Stephanie Flanders? I don't remember anyone on the Centre Left apart from Larry Elliott in the Graun (and me, as long ago as 2004!) pointing out that the emperor had no clothes.  

The critics weren't just wrong about Osborne's success.  They were wrong about Brown's failure too.

Nigel Farage, Egypt and the ECHR - misunderstanding democracy

Faced with a choice between Mohammed Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood and some stooge from the old regime, Egypt's voters installed the former, many of them holding their noses at the same time.  Now it's all gone wrong.  Morsi turns out not to have been a one-nation conciliator after all, imprisoning journalists, shutting newspapers and packing the committee devising a constitution with his own supporters.

But if Morsi was naive to expect Egypt's newly energised voters to bear this high-handedness for long, so too were his opponents.  You can argue that Morsi's own conduct undermined his democratic credentials, but try explaining that to the hundreds of thousands of supporters who will only see that between them the army and opposition have torn down a democratically elected government.  To be replaced by what?  This is not the greatest start to the new Egypt, and it might have been better if the opposition had instead just gritted its teeth and waited for the next election.

One of the arguments used to oppose the 2003 invasion of Iraq was that the Iraqis had no democratic tradition and would be unable to cope with the forbearance democracy requires of its citizens.  It looks in Egypt as if that argument might be vindicated; as if people who might have been expected not to know any better in theory, actually didn't know better in practice.

Speaking of naivety, the European Court of Human Rights has outraged a section of cross-party opinion (including David Blunkett, the Blairite former Home Secretary) by striking down the UK's life-means-life prison sentence as "inhuman and degrading".  A bevy of mass murderers took HMG to Brussels to argue successfully for a system of review after twenty five years.

To be clear, a review system strikes me as the better option, but the ECHR's decision vividly shows up everything that's wrong with the EU.  It's a decision made by unelected judges which strikes down a law made by the British Parliament, elected by you and me.  Parliament has democratic legitimacy.  The ECHR has almost none.

A close family member, who still practises law, sighed that at least the judges could have had an eye for the political sensitivities; instead their decision is a disaster for Euro-enthusiasts and manna from heaven for UKIP; and this at a time when it looks as if we will get an in-out referendum in the next couple of years. But, she said, at least it shows the judges aren't interested in the political consequences of their decision.

Perhaps. But to me that lack of interest essentially means lack of accountability. We didn't elect the ECHR; nor did we elect the people who put them in place; none of which would matter if they hadn't struck down a law passed by our Government.  And if you don't like the Government, reflect that it's not the Government they're striking at, but its electorate.  Us in other words.

Ah, says my close family member, but the ECHR is just doing what UK Courts do all the time with the common law.  To explain, Britain's highest courts have long done a certain amount of legal interpretation, which essentially involves making law.  Rules on the degree of intent required for murder for example, or for the warning a judge must give a jury where the prosecution relies solely on identification evidence, were for years known to lawyers by the names of the cases in which the judges made the rules (Caldwell and Turnbull respectively).  Whole branches of law, from judicial review to medical negligence were essentially made up by the courts.

But there is the world of a difference between interpreting statutes passed by Parliament, which is what our courts do, and striking those statutes down, which is what the ECHR has done.  If Parliament doesn't like the law-making decisions of our courts it is at liberty to pass statutes overriding them.  Or rather it was.  This ruling shows that even that is no longer true.

The fact that the ECHR is almost entirely staffed by non-British judges is not the most important point, but it doesn't make the process any more attractive either.

No-one who values democracy can relish the prospect of a small unelected group of people telling the British electorate, via the medium of its Government, what it can and can't do.  Somewhere in a saloon bar near you, Nigel Farage must be laughing his head off.

Wagner, the Moonlight Sonata and cultural foreshortening

At a performance of Opera North's wonderful Siegfried a few days ago, a friend of mine, not a Wagnerite but willing to be converted, asked when the music was written.  Oh, mid 1800s, I said, guessing.  This turns out to have been broadly true, though Wagner abandoned Siegfried for a decade after writing Act II to attend to the small matter of writing Tristan and Meistersinger.

This morning I googled the term "cultural foreshortening", and was pleased to find no reference to it on the net.  I might therefore claim to have coined it.  This is my name for the phenomenon, analagous to the visual foreshortening effect where something far away seems closer than it actually is, where a piece of culture created a long time ago is ubiquitous now and therefore seems contemporary.  If I were to pick a piece of music pretty much at random, Albinioni's Adagio is familiar to us in a dozen contexts as backdrop to modern life, in lifts, in supermarkets, films, adverts so that it might have been written twenty years ago.  In fact, given that it was expanded from an Albinioni fragment by an Italian academic in the 1950s but is widely accepted as a piece from antiquity, the Adagio might in fact be quite a good example of how this works.

But it isn't just music which has become familiar through its public repetition.  Even novelties can seem contemporary.  From the invention of the printing press onwards, accelerated by the public library, the gramophone record, the photocopier, the internet and now Spotify, a process has been set in train by which today virtually all the music ever written or recorded is available at the touch of a button.  We live in an age where all music is contemporary.

As a composer I'm interested in the consequences of this.  Much though I dislike post-modernism, which at its worst tends towards a kind of nothing-much-matters aesthetic, it seems to formalise the idea that there is no such thing as an absolute style.  Recently I conducted a symphony by a pupil of Haydn, Paul Wranitzky, which probably hadn't been played in the last 200 years. It wasn't as good as Haydn, and I would be surprised if it gets an outing in the next couple of centuries, but one of the striking things about it was how like Haydn it was.  You really could have been listening to one of the middle period extrovert C major symphonies, the Maria Theresa perhaps.  And this is similarity of style is also true of Mozart and Haydn: most of us who scrape a living round the fringes of classical music can tell the difference between the two composers, but most of us can also remember occasions when, confronted with a work we didn't know, we got it humiliatingly wrong.

I guess my point is that awareness of the possibility of other styles undermines one's faith in the idea that there is just one way of writing.  Classical music has quite often been prepared to look back (and I'm not just thinking of obvious examples like the Holberg Suite or Dumbarton Oaks, but also of pieces like Brahms 1st Piano Concerto, in which Bach's music is woven into the fabric of what was offered as a piece of new music).  Periods of stylistic hegemony have become increasingly rare, and the Great Serialist Terror, which dominated new music in the middle years of the 20th century, was in the end undermined by the gramophone record, which prevented great composers like Sibelius from oblivion, no matter how unfashionable they were with critics and academics.  We now live in an era where music is surprisingly plural, where minimalists rub shoulders in concert programmes with ageing post-Webernists and thrusting young Spectralists.  I think this is partly because of the old music which is all around us, which seems nevertheless new, and which teaches us above all else that there is more than one way of doing things.

If Beethoven had been born in a cave at the end of the last ice age would he have written the Moonlight Sonata?  Of course not.  Music is a product of the composer's personality, sure, but also of the prevailing cultural, social and political atmosphere, the technological resources available and factors harder to quantify like the quality of light and landscape.  There was nothing inevitable about the Moonlight Sonata.  

What this seems to me to signify is that we should feel free to write what we like, in whatever style we like, responding to the music of the past in whatever way we like, co-opting some parts of it and discarding others.  In two hundred years no-one will care whether what we did was fashionable or not.

Knowing when Wagner wrote Siegfried is only a very small part of the pleasure to be had from listening to it, and my friend's astonishment at its modernity, considering it came only about twenty years after Beethoven's death, must be an even smaller part still.  These things matter mostly for musicologists.