Sometime in September the first request comes in; Can you
select a disc/performance/artist/work which, in your opinion, is the finest of
the year? As most magazines and
newspapers run a retrospective of the year which includes some mention of
classical music, there is no need for this blog to do the same, and it is
certainly not my intention to turn this into the electronic equivalent of those
round-robin Christmas epistles which have come in for such a pasting by the
media this year. I’m not sure why they
have suddenly been made the source of so much ire. Like women priests and gay marriage, I have
no basic philosophical objection to round-robins, I just object to the kind of
people who indulge. Women priests are so
often, in my experience, aggressive to the point of outright hostility in their
proclamation of their right to administer the sacraments, while those who feel
the need to make a public display of their same-sex relationship all too often
hide behind outrageous self-parodies involving silly clothes and affected
voices. Similarly, those who send out
round-robins usually lead lives of such terminal dreariness that they seem to
find pleasure in afflicting their boring existence on those whose lives are
much more interesting. Not that all
round-robin writers fall into that category.
The end of this year was much darkened by the absence of the annual
missive from my old friend Donald Hawksworth.
Donald and I first met when he was on an extended ABRSM examining
tour of the Far East in 1987. He lived a
truly eventful life and his annual letters detailing his multifarious activities
over the previous 12 months were best read with both a stiff whisky and a world
atlas to hand. He was an insatiable traveller
who, usually travelling on a shoe-string and relying on strangers he met along
the way to accommodate him and point him in the right direction, managed to
live life, as they say, to the full. I
recall the momentous year when, while on an examining tour of Malaysia (he was
at Taiping at the time), he was informed by that his house in Scotland had been
completely destroyed in a gas explosion.
Upset only by the loss of his Steinway, Donald realised there was no
point returning to Scotland until the house had been rebuilt, and sending instructions
to various people back home, he set off on a world tour which took him to the
Philippines, just in time to get caught up in a military coup, to Fiji, just in
time to find himself half-way up an erupting volcano, to New Zealand, just in
time to catch a major earthquake and finally to the USA, where he got caught up
in a major shoot-out between police and drug dealers. All this was recounted in Donald’s round-robin
almost as an afterthought – for him, the interesting thing were the people he
met and the mountains he climbed.
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| Donald Hawksworth (1930-2012) |
Donald’s death in April was just one of many sad things
which led to my regarding 2012 as about the worst year in living memory. But while I could bore everyone with tales of
woe and despondency, without a shadow of doubt, nothing has been so depressing
that a goodly dose of decent music could not lift my spirits, and it is in
gratitude to the unfailingly uplifting effect certain recordings, performances,
compositions and musicians have had on my year that I offer this personal retrospective
of 2012’s musical highlights.
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| Naxos 8.573049 |
Even as I write, I am relishing a lovely disc of music by Gabriel
Jackson. Beautifully sung by the
ever-magnificent Vasari Singers and magically recorded on the Naxos label in
the chapel of Tonbridge School, the headline work is the Requiem, and while
that might seem an antidote to any feelings of joy, so richly expressive is Jackson’s
writing and so warmly affectionate is Jeremy Backhouse’s direction, that the
overriding mood is one of profound optimism and contentment.
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| My Choral Disc of 2012 - LSO0728 |
But much as I am enjoying that disc, the choral disc which
most effectively lifted my spirits this year and which has been a constant
companion ever since I first heard it, was a splendid account of Fauré’s
Requiem. (I assure you this obsession
with Requiems is not symptomatic of a fundamentally depressed state; just a reflection
of the ultimately uplifting nature of these composers’ response to these
age-old texts.) Here we have another of Britain’s
excellent choirs, Tenebrae, conducted by Nigel Short. With members of the London Symphony Orchestra
adding more colour and depth that one normally expects to hear from a performance
of the John Rutter arrangement of the work, what really makes this disc so
tremendous is the Bach pieces which precede the Fauré. On their own, they receive decidedly
uninspiring performances. But the
cumulative effect of Bach plus Fauré is to shed a whole new light on the
latter, bathing it in a glow of such radiance that one cannot but be profoundly
moved.
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| My Record of 2012 - ODE1191-2D |
That, though, was not my personal record of the year. That accolade goes to a two disc set of
orchestral music by Erich Korngold.
There’s a sumptuous account of the Sinfonietta,
which is wonderful enough, but there is also the first ever recording of the
complete incidental music for Much Ado
About Nothing. Ingeniously scored
for a chamber ensemble (with a prominent part for harmonium) this is, for me,
the great musical discovery of the year.
Sitting on a train held up interminably by flooded tracks in some
God-forsaken part of northern England, all sense of anxiety vanished whilst
listening to this lovely and ingenious music.
A glorious performance from the Helsinki Philharmonic under John Storgårds, and a ravishing recording to
boot on the Ondine label.
There were plenty of music eccentricities which brightened
up my year. Not the least of these was
the sight of Singapore’s Orchestra of the Music Makers performing Delius’s Paris at the Cheltenham Festival. Turning up at one of England’s most twee
towns on the wettest July day ever recorded, with an 11 hour flight and minimal
sleep behind them, playing Delius to an audience with an average age of 70 all
of whom knew the work far better than anyone on stage, was a pretty ridiculous
spectacle. On top of that, conductor Chan
Tze Law managed almost to fall off stage when a misguided stage hand moved the
stairs away, and pianist Melvyn Tan could barely see the orchestra or conductor
from his position in the corner of an ante-stage. Nevertheless, the orchestra won over the
audience and while I know they can, and usually do, do a lot better, I suspect
many Cheltenhamers went back to their sodden homes feeling uplifted. The weirdness didn’t stop there. At the post-concert receptions, Singapore’s
High Commissioner to the UK put the final gloss on the evening by proclaiming
that, for Singaporeans, Cheltenham was synonymous with “young girls and fast
horses”. Ah, that all diplomats showed
such contempt for political correctness.
The ultimate sadness for me in 2012 was being obliged to
leave my beloved Singapore and, especially, my work with the students at the
Yong Siew Toh Conservatory. Without a shadow of doubt, I can say that my
brief time at that fine institution was about the happiest of my life, and certainly
it was among the more musically
enriching. My former students continue
to keep themselves in my consciousness with a welter of kind and informative
emails, but it is their musical prowess which lingers longest in the memory. One of the best performances I experienced
there came in one of the Monday concerts given in March. This included a performance by Chinese
pianist Zheng Qingshu, who almost convinced me that Liszt was worth listening
to. She gave a great performance of the
Second Concert Etude, and I don’t recall ever having been so uplifted by
hearing Liszt before.
Much of the sorrow I have experienced this year has emanated
from Malaysia. My home for several
decades, I saw it rise and then fall musically, witnessing, towards the middle
of the year, it hurtle towards self-destruction. All that we had dreamt of and worked for fell
apart, those of us who cared enough to comment were subjected to vicious verbal
(and in some cases physical) abuse, and it seemed as if serious classical music
in Malaysia had gone forever. But among
the students populating the music department at Middlesex University, I came
across Isabella Pek, and a lengthy tutorial with her suddenly made me realise
that there was still hope in the face of the self-inflicted carnage from
Petronas. Isabella is a competent
composer and arranger, very good at her duties in RTM of arranging music and
adapting Malaysian melodies for popular public consumption. In most Malaysian eyes, that would be good
enough. But her bosses in KL decided
that she would benefit by studying overseas and, eschewing the mind-numbing
mantra “Malaysia Boleh!”, gave her a grant to enable her to spend time at
Middlesex studying composition from foreign experts. I am not sure what I admire most; the
intelligence shown by the RTM people in sending one of their composers to the
UK in order to expand her horizons, or the determination of Isabella both to
show her bosses that their money has not been wasted while refusing to abandon
the style of writing which has so obviously satisfied Malaysian audiences. Both of these I find incredibly uplifting.
2013 can barely be less grim for me than was 2012, but I sincerely
hope that all of you who read this will have a very successful and happy and
healthy 2013. You can be sure of lots of
interesting stuff to read here on this blog – even if it can never quite live
up to the fascinating glimpses of world life as viewed by the late, great
Donald Hawksworth,
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