And in June I began to realise the full consequences of Covid 19 and lockdown for musicians – their well-being, livelihoods and income – and live music, and those who organise it, and love it, and began to feel despondent. Though there are various things I continue to do, with varying degrees of commitment, the buzz I have got in the last few years and which has made my life more interesting has come from live concerts and operas, live theatre, cinema, eating out and travel; none of these look remotely possible in the short to medium term. There are, I am sure, huge numbers of creative ideas around as to how to manage this situation, but not many of them seem consonant with making money – I went to a ‘Virtual Reception’ with the Halle Orchestra, on Zoom the other day, as I am in a small way a supporter, and Mark Elder was talking about the idea of hiring the Bridgewater Hall for the evening, and doing a programme of say an hour and a quarter three times over, with a distanced audience of 400 at each show. But the problem goes beyond this – outside London, classical music relies disproportionately on the over 70’s, who are highly unlikely to turn up to anything any time soon until there is a vaccine. I fear we are looking at a setting back of the clock in classical music terms to the 60’s – few touring orchestras, relatively little happening outside London, no ‘garden opera’ outside Glyndebourne – and that it will take beyond my lifetime for things to develop towards the degree of richness and depth that we were experiencing 3 months ago. But maybe I am being pessimistic – I hope so…….
I do remember also thinking about what I had learned from lockdown – in some ways depressingly little. Yes, I do feel I have slowed down in a way that’s positive. If I look back on the first week of lockdown – and let’s say that’s from Sat March 21 to Sat March 28, during that period I would have been:
– Going to a performance of R Strauss’ Elektra in Birmingham and staying the night there
– Running a Teaching and Learning Committee of the School Governors locally
– Helping as a steward in a Philosophy Café event at Sheffield Cathedral
– Attending a ‘Leading your Governing Board’ training event in Chesterfield
– Giving a talk to a group of Methodists in Wakefield about my experiences in Palestine
– Going to a concert of late Beethoven piano sonatas by Steven Osborne in Sheffield
– Facilitating a talk by Keith Warner (Director Covent Garden ‘Ring’, 2003-2018) and Barry Millington (Wagner scholar) in Manchester about staging Wagner
This is all pretty manic, and I have enjoyed myself just as much sitting in the garden reading most afternoons. But I am not sure I have had any massive spiritual experiences or vast revelations. I am probably fitter than I’ve been for a long time, and I realise I could easily combine maintaining that degree of fitness with the sort of activity outlined above. I’ve made some nettle wine, which is a new one on me
Norman Lebrecht was having a real go around the same time at the South Bank Centre https://slippedisc.com/2020/06/why-londons-south-bank-needs-to-go-bust/?. I think this is – to my regret – probably true. It is difficult to see what the South Bank is doing for its grant given that presumably orchestras and artist management companies are paying for the hall hire of specific gigs, and its multitude of food outlets are entirely commercial in nature. I went to another Halle Orchestra Virtual Reception where they were talking about the Bridgewater Hall, which operates much more commercially, grounded essentially on middle-of-the-road rock concerts; until social distancing was totally eased, the BH could not afford to be anything other than mothballed (ie even if the Halle could perform there to a socially distanced audience and at a loss, it wouldn’t be possible). Lebrecht also posted rumours about the BBC halving its orchestras from 4 (BBC Symphony, BBC Philharmonic, BBC NOW, and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra). I can see the logic of this – the strength of the Halle, as it would be for the Liverpool and Birmingham Orchestras is that they have really strong local emotionally-grounded support – among the London orchestras probably the LSO only has something like that. There was sad one moment in the Virtual Reception – Joyce Kennedy, the widow of Michael, a well-known Elgar and Vaughan William scholar based in Manchester who’s in her 80’s, said she was worried she would never get to hear another live concert again…….
There were also these sorts of articles appearing in the press – both rather depressing.
and
And in May I remember thinking about things I’ll do when all the Covid-19 stuff has finished. I really want to do another tour of some European opera houses and concert halls. In 2015, on vacation from Pakistan I sent a glorious 8 days in Austria and Germany – two days in Vienna seeing the sights but also going to the Opera and seeing Don Giovanni (excellent and intelligent production) and then Anna Nebtreko in Eugene Onegin – I’d not seen her before and she was really fantastic as Tatiana. A memorable evening – and it certainly does no harm to have the Vienna Philharmonic in the pit. Then I went to Munich to hear two of the Munich-based orchestras playing music by Shostakovich, Beethoven, Prokofiev and Hindemith, conducted by Valery Gergiev and Vladimir Jurowski. Then to Dresden, for a competent Tosca, and a work by Lortzing called Der Wildschutz. This is one of those things – like much of Elgar and VW – that doesn’t seem to travel well beyond its ‘native’ borders. Lortzing’s work seems to be, on the basis of what I heard, a sort of combination of Gilbert and Sullivan and someone like Weber – still tremendously popular in Germany but completely unknown in the UK. Everyone listening to it in Dresden seemed to be enjoying it a lot more than I did – not that it’s actively rebarbative, but rather just a bit boring…..But then, I tend to feel a bit the same about G&S…..although I enjoy ‘Patience’, where I understand something of the context (Wilde / Pre-Raphaelites), and some of the lines are really quite funny. And then I went to Leipzig….I’ve talked about my Bach experiences there before but I also went to a ‘family’ performance of the Leipzig Gwendhaus Orchestra and Sir Roger Norrington performing parts of Elgar 1 – a rather bizarre experience, with kids crawling around all over the place, and a measure of disruption – plus the orchestra didn’t play the whole thing. But it was still wonderful to hear that great orchestra play Elgar – as impressive as Barenboims’s Elgar 2 with the Bellin Staatskapelle at the Proms in ?2018
In April, normally the time when the Proms prospectus comes out, I remember thinking ….It would be nice if there are still some Proms this year….Although there was something like a 30 year gap when I didn’t go to them, I went to anywhere between 6 and 45 Proms each year between 1968 and 1982, being based in London, and, as I say, have managed 6 or so a year since about 2010. I had some wonderful, wonderful evenings in the 70’s – listening to Boult conducting Elgar 1 and 2 was an experience I shall never forget – a man who heard as a student the first performance of the 1st Symphony conducted by Richter at the Halle in 190?8….. I sometimes think about this sort of experience when engaging – not that I do that often – in arguments about the text of the New Testament. Granted that it’s doctored in various ways, nevertheless when I think about a New Testament being written between 69-120 AD and Jesus dying in about 33AD, here I am in 2020 remembering vividly how Boult conducted Elgar, a work he first heard in 1908, I heard in 1969 and he was born in 1890. That’s a much longer time span of remembrance than eyewitnesses in the New Testament…………Here’s Boult conducting bits of Dream of Gerontius with Peter Pears – https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=43&v=L1NG7fGX0iA&feature=emb_title. Incidentally, at the same time as thinking about the Proms, I decided to bought a ticket for Rattle/LSO performing the Dream of Gerontius in Jan 2021, in a spirit of optimism (misplaced as it happens) ………..
Re Elgar and oratorios –The Kingdom and The Apostles are both wonderful. The Kingdom I have known since a teenager from the Boult recording but I had never heard The Apostles live until 2012 when it was performed by Mark Elder and the Halle in Manchester. I had flown in from Dubai in the morning, wondered whether to go to the performance and was really glad I did – I was sitting in more or less the front row and was really knocked back by it – such memorable choral writing, so many glorious melodies. It took me a couple of days to recover……..
John's musical journey 