Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2025 i BBC Music Magazine

Back when my sister and I were studying piano and violin respectively at the Royal College of Music, I remember her practising ‘Ondine’ from Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit. Thankfully, the strains of this notoriously difficult work – at all hours of the day – never put me off the French composer’s music. If anything, I fell in love with his modal scales and unresolved dissonances, his air of danger, romance and mystery. This month we celebrate 150 years of Ravel, a composer inextricably linked with the impressionist movement – but for whom the label always felt an uncomfortable fit. On page 30, Paul Riley discusses why there was so much more to a man whose works encompass everything from the Spanish-infused Boléro to the jazz-influenced Piano Concerto in G,…

4th: Woodrow Wilson is inaugurated as the 28th president of the United States, following his defeat of incumbent William Howard Taft and former president Theodore Roosevelt in the November election. In a break from tradition, Wilson insists that there should be no inauguration balls to accompany the occasion, as he believes that they are inappropriate for an event of such gravity. 4th: After a dash to complete it in time, Fauré’s Pénélope is premiered at Monte Carlo Opera, conducted by Léon Jehin and with soprano Lucienne Bréval in the title role. Based on the final books of Homer’s The Odyssey, the opera does not prove a huge success at its premiere, but its first performance in Paris two months later will enjoy a much better reception. 12th: Lady Denman, wife…

We’ve all had a Robert Frost moment. I mean the experience described in probably his most famous poem, The Road Not Taken. Frost recalls coming to a fork in a road, not knowing where either path will lead. The choice is symbolic, of course. In the American poet’s famous last line: ‘I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.’ I encountered my first fork in the road when I was seven and my dad offered me piano lessons or violin lessons. We couldn’t afford both. I chose piano – and, as the man wrote, that has made all the difference. The piano led to the organ, and that sent me in a completely different direction – musically, socially, even psychologically – from if I…

John Andrews The ever-curious conductor tells Rebecca Franks about his passion for introducing audiences to lesser-known composers – and to their cultural and historical contexts ‘My mission is to help people to rediscover their curiosity and their love of novelty,’ says John Andrews. ‘That’s not just about minor composers, it’s also about new composers. It’s about the fact that when the repertoire we revere was being written, it was in a culture where new works were produced every season. London in 1730, Vienna in 1780, Milan in the 1840s – you would see new works. I would love to kindle in modern audiences just ten per cent of that readiness to go into a concert hall and be surprised and delighted in the unexpected.’ That, in a nutshell, is what…

‘He is more serious than he was, but is not yet serious enough.’ Thank goodness Gerard Hoffnung didn’t take to heart that verdict from his Highgate School house tutor. And nothing better summed up the adult Hoffnung’s sense of humour than the Royal Festival Hall music festivals carrying his name, which he masterminded in 1956 and ’58. Musical luminaries joined in the fun. Peerless French horn player Dennis Brain agreed to play… a concerto for hosepipe. Malcolm Arnold wrote his Grand, Grand Overture featuring three vacuum cleaners and a floor polisher. Hoffnung played his ‘Stradivarius tuba’. As Festival Hall general manager Ernest Bean put it, Hoffnung ‘didn’t visit the Festival Hall. He invaded it with gales of laughter.’ It seemed as if Hoffnung’s hugely popular cartoon caricatures of singers, instrumentalists…

ARCHIVE CHOICE A rare bit of Korngold These unreleased recordings of the composer’s Symphony are both flawed and fascinating Korngold Symphony in F sharp Erich Wolfgang Korngold (piano); Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana/John Mauceri Supertrain STR062 92:35 mins (2CD) ‘First movement!’, shouts a strongly-accented voice, before counting out loud the silent first beat and unleashing a furious assault on a fairly average piano. The voice belongs to Erich Wolfgang Korngold, playing a piano version of his only Symphony from 1952, in a private recording perhaps intended as a guide for conductors. Korngold’s grandson found the delicate acetate discs and transcribed them for John Mauceri when he was preparing to conduct the Symphony. His 1997 Swiss radio recording is part of the package here and is also previously unreleased. Powerful and unpredictable,…

Paul Riley Music journalist ‘Sometimes in music only precision, poise and perfection will hit the spot, and that’s the moment to reach for Ravel. From exquisite palate-cleanser to supreme sophisticate, he’s a composer for all eventualities.’ Page 30 Hannah Nepilova Writer and editor ‘As someone who grew up listening to Afro-Cuban drumming as she fell asleep at night, Odaline de la Martinez knows a thing or two about rhythm. Discussing her seven favourite pieces of rhythmical music was a treat.’ Page 20 Tom Stewart Music journalist ‘Pierre Boulez’s music can sometimes feel as inscrutable as the man himself, so I enjoyed going back to his scores, writings and recordings to explore the mind of one of the 20th century’s most influential musicians.’ Page 64…

Marking anniversaries may be a crude way of classical programming, but they do give us the excuse to listen to fabulous lesser-known music, says Tom Service Pop – actually classical – quiz lovers: what connects all of the following pieces of music? Stripsody; Sinfonia; Socrate; Sur Incises. They’re all pieces you’ll hear a lot this year, and not only because of their revitalising brilliance across genres, from solo vocal music to orchestral theatre. That’s because the wheel of time has turned towards their composers this year, as the classical music world does what it always does and deigns to celebrate composers only when their anniversaries hit a big fat round number: a centenary, sesquicentenary or diamond jubilee. That’s why you only hear Beethoven’s music in years that rhyme with 1770…

Howard Shore has won three Oscars for his Lord of the Rings music, two for Best Original Score (The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King) and one for Best Original Song (Return of the King’s ‘Into the West’). He is one of an exclusive club of composers who have been honoured at the Academy Awards. In fact, it’s 90 years since the first Oscar for what was called ‘Best Scoring’ made its debut at the 7th Academy Awards on 27 February 1935. One Night of Love (below) took home the first scoring prize, presented to Columbia Pictures’ head of music Louis Silvers – early ‘Scoring’ nominees included films with adapted music and musicals, often overseen by a roster of composers. As films changed, so did the…

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Composer of the Week is broadcast on Radio 3 at 4pm, Monday to Friday. Programmes in March 2025 are: 3-7 March Ravel 10-14 March Ruth Crawford Seeger 17-21 March Handel and the Crown 24-28 March Gustav Mahler ARNOLD SCHOENBERG IS DEAD is the title of a 1951 essay by Pierre Boulez, who would have turned 100 this month. Schoenberg had indeed just died, but Boulez’s memorial pulled no punches. While the Austrian’s 12-tone method had effectively liberated composers from the system of keys that had governed them for some four centuries, he had flinched, Boulez thought, before he had finished the job. The responsibility now fell to Boulez and others of his generation, he argued, to finish what Schoenberg had started. Born in Montbrison, close to Lyon, Boulez was the last…

Building a Library is broadcast on Radio 3 at 3.30pm each Saturday as part of Record Review. A highlights podcast is available on BBC Sounds. The work ‘I could not hold back my tears. I knew nothing, I understood nothing. But my natural instinct was violently shaken by this expressive music echoing through my every pore’. The writer is Louis Vierne, and the ‘expressive music’ he describes was conjured by César Franck, playing on the Cavaillé-Coll organ at the Basilica of Sainte-Clotilde in Paris. The year was 1881, and Vierne was just eleven at the time. He was, he later wrote, a child of ‘almost unhealthy sensitivity’, severely sight-impaired from birth and subjected to a ‘continual tenderness’ from his parents. Small wonder, then, that the mystic swirl of sound he…

Welcome We’re wishing Simon Rattle a belated Happy 70th this issue, with two excellent recordings made with his Bavarian colleagues, one of which is our ‘Orchestral Choice’, plus a wealth of great recordings gathered by Warner Classics in a celebratory digital collection (see ‘Unboxed’). Rattle has always been a great collaborator, so he would probably approve of the musical communion at the heart of Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s latest project, Exile (see ‘Recording of the Month’, opposite). And continuing the theme of perfect partners, there’s some sumptuous Schumann from Alina Ibragimova and Cédric Tiberghien. Rarities, too, this issue with little-known Italian piano concertos, an opera which is long overdue a dusting off, and the usual gems in ‘From the Archives’. This month’s critics John Allison, Nicholas Anderson, Terry Blain, Kate Bolton-Porciatti, Garry…

Simon Rattle has just celebrated his 70th birthday so, while you’re raising a glass, why not delve into Simon Rattle – The Roaring Seventies (Warner Classics 2173261148). It’s a digital-only collection of highlights, so we’re ‘unboxing’ figuratively in this case, but with 100 tracks and about ten hours’ worth of listening, it’s certainly a generous release. The selection features over 40 years of recordings, made with both the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic for EMI and Warner Classics. The programme is varied, featuring everything from the Beethoven symphonies to a cracking Nutcracker. Joining Rattle and the orchestras is a strong line-up of solo stars, too, including the late Lars Vogt, Renaud Capuçon and Sarah Chang. Happy Birthday, Maestro! Released to mark conductor David Atherton’s 90th birthday last…

Write to: The editor, BBC Music Magazine, Eagle House, Bristol, BS1 4ST Email: music@classical-music.com Social media: contact us on Facebook and X (Twitter) LETTER of the MONTH When less is more In February’s Letters page, George Leef shares Dalia Stasevska’s regret that ‘music is so easily obtained that many make little effort to appreciate it’. However, I disagree with him that ‘there is no solution to this’. During a period of mental illness, I have often found it hard to concentrate on music and so listen to much less. This is frustrating, but it means I hear more of arguably the most important kinds of music – silence, the music of nature and that which I make myself. I now relish the nurturing richness of silence, which pianist András Schiff…

‘Fightingat a Schoenberg concert. Audience members slap one another. Police clear the hall.’ These were the headlines in the German-speaking press the morning after a concert at the gilded Musikverein in Vienna on 31 March 1913. For some reason, pandemonium erupted among the venue’s elegant clientele that evening. Fists and insults flew, and the event quickly garnered the infamous moniker ‘Skandalkonzert’, with ‘Watschenkonzert’ (‘Slap concert’) as a no less inglorious alternative title. So what exactly happened? The road to 31 March had, in fact, been paved with good intentions. A 24-year-old writer, Erhard Buschbeck, had organised it, hoping to boost the profile of a rising young generation of Austrian composers (known nowadays as the Second Viennese School), in particular its leading practitioner Arnold Schoenberg. The Wiener Konzertverein Orchestra (forerunner of…

THIS MONTH Julian Bliss clarinettist CONCERT HEAVEN John Mackey Divine Mischief Julian Bliss (clarinet); The Baylor Wind Ensemble/Eric Wilson The Midwest Clinic, Chicago (Dec 2022) I commissioned a concerto for clarinet and wind ensemble by John Mackey and we were in the first few months of it being performed and played. We had the opportunity to perform at a band and orchestra conference in Chicago, called The Midwest Clinic, with the Baylor University Wind Ensemble. They’re one of the best. We were on tour, on the way to Chicago, and the conference was going to be cut short a day because of an impending snowstorm, and we were due to play on the last day! Baylor is very well known and has a good reputation, so a lot of people…

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In September 1929, making amends for a previous celebration marked by scandal, the Basque country honoured its most famous musical son with a ‘Grand Festival Ravel’. There were concerts in St-Jean-de-Luz and Biarritz, fandangoes were danced, a pelota tournament organised, the Quai Ciboure was renamed Quai Maurice Ravel. A plaque was placed on the composer’s birth house, and a presentation commemorative medal struck. Ravel enjoyed himself – though he evidently gave the unveiling of the plaque a miss. The Commune doesn’t bear a grudge. In 2020, pianist Bertrand Chamayou established Festival Ravel, a late-summer event that honours the Ravel legacy in a wide-ranging programme that stretches from the Baroque to the present day. Celebrated too, and lending context, is the rich cultural heritage of the Basque country itself. Hailed for…

Memorable movie moments are burned into our consciousness thanks in no small part to music that has been expertly crafted. Its intricate timing creates the rhythm of the action we see and underlines the emotion of everything we feel; it even tells us things that are hidden beneath the surface. But which score has done it best since film music, as we know it, emerged from Hollywood in the early 1930s? It would be the easiest thing in the world to give you our take, but that just wouldn’t cut it. Who better to decide than those who know exactly what it takes? We asked film and television composers on both sides of the Atlantic to tell us which scores would be in their top five of all time, and…

The record for the world’s longest echo in a man-made structure was set in 2012, deep underground in the Scottish Highlands. Technically, despite the wording in the Guinness Book of World Records, what was measured was the reverberation – but it’s still gone down in history. The sound of a starting pistol fired in the Inchindown tunnels of a disused oil depot took 75 seconds to die away, the figure officially certified. And while that number is for all frequencies of sound, at certain frequencies the reverberation time was even longer: 112 seconds. ‘Never before had I heard such a rush of echoes and reverberation…,’ Trevor Cox, the professor of acoustic engineering behind the milestone, told The Independent. ‘The sound just goes on and on and on.’ Cox also played…

As a boy, I was at Rydal School in North Wales. One evening in 1956, when I was 12, our music master Ernest Bradfield called to us to watch some music on television – a broadcast of the first Hoffnung Music Festival. I nearly died, I laughed so much. It was all so ridiculous and crazy, yet there was also the sheer thrill of hearing a full-size symphony orchestra both playing marvellously and having a laugh. Sometime later we were taken to a concert at Rhyl Town Hall, which included Prokofiev’s ‘Classical’ Symphony. I remember sitting waiting for something humorous to happen, which it never did, and yet the thrill of hearing that symphony stayed with me. It’s no exaggeration to say that the 1956 Hoffnung concert opened the floodgates…

Early style Boulez began his career as a composer in the 1940s with a series of thorny works that belong firmly to the sonic world of the Second Viennese School: Schoenberg, Berg and, in particular, Webern (above). Total serialism He graduated from the above to ‘total’ or ‘integral’ serialism, controlling every aspect of his music mathematically so that no pitch, dynamic, duration or even tempo marking acquired more importance than another. This phase was relatively brief, but its legacy throughout Boulez’s career was what he described as a ‘formal unity of a work of art’. Chance Ironically, Boulez’s highly organised and meticulously planned serialist scores often sound like elements of them have been generated by chance. Perhaps inspired by his friend John Cage, he began using chance in his music…

The best recording David Sanger (organ) Meridian 723721415129 The great is, they say, the enemy of the good, and that is certainly the case with David Sanger’s interpretation of Vierne’s Organ Symphony No. 1, which stands head and shoulders above a strong field of alternative versions. Part of the reason is the outstanding quality of the recorded sound. Taped in 1977 at the tail-end of the analogue era, Sanger’s performance benefits from the superbly balanced engineering of Meridian label founder John Shuttleworth and the expert oversight of producer Edward Perry (who started Hyperion Records three years later). Together they capture a satisfyingly punchy, ripe-toned picture of the Anneesen organ at St Peter’s Italian Church, Clerkenwell, London. Sanger’s interpretation of the Symphony is wonderfully forthright and cogent. In his hands, the…

JAZZ CHOICE Ella lights up the stage An unreleased 1960s live recording offers us a reminder of the First Lady of Song’s prowess Ella Fitzgerald The Moment of Truth – Ella at the Coliseum Ella Fitzgerald with members of the Duke Ellington Orchestra Verve 00602475664192 Ella Fitzgerald’s manager Norman Granz built both the Verve and Pablo labels around her work, yet it seems there’s still more to this story. This 1967 recording was discovered in Granz’s personal library, which is clearly intriguing, but it also happens to be a perfect example of what Ella did and how she did it. It’s all here: the flawless diction balanced with heartfelt emotion, the effortless range and flow, and the natural warmth and character of her voice that allowed her to make any…

Candid – Conversations on Women in the Music Industry Sammy Stein IPN 217pp (pb) £16 The concept behind this book is revealed in the subtitle and in that sense it does exactly what it states. Current opinions are taken from a breadth of women connected with the music industry, and an impressive list of professionals is drawn on, together with a useful brief biography of all contributors. Drawing on all the threads of the wide-ranging discussions is obviously challenging; it mostly works well, though occasionally results in some rambling patches. That said, two overarching themes seem to emerge; that women who work in pop appear to suffer from more blatant misogyny than those in, say, classical or jazz – the reasons for which are fairly obvious; pop music is as…

MARCH’S RADIO 3 LISTINGS Schedules may be subject to alteration. For up-to-date listings see BBC Sounds and iPlayer 1 SATURDAY 6.30-9am Saturday Breakfast 9am-12noon Saturday Morning 12-1pm Earlier…with Jools Holland 1-2pm Music Matters 2-4pm Record Review 4-5pm Sound of Cinema 5-6pm This Classical Life 6-9.30pm Opera on 3 from Royal Opera House. Janáček Jenůfa 9.30-10.30pm Music Planet 2 SUNDAY 6.30-9am Sunday Breakfast 9am-12pm Sunday Morning 12-1.30pm Private Passions 1.30-3pm Music Map 3-4pm Choral Evensong 4-5pm Jazz Record Requests 5-6pm The Early Music Show 6-7.15pm Words and Music 7.15-8pm Between the Ears Barton Hill Listens In 8-10pm Drama on 3 Hamlet 3 MONDAY CHOICE 6.30-9.30am Breakfast 9.30am-1pm Essential Classics 1-2pm Live from Wigmore Hall 2-4pm Classical Live 4-5pm Composer of the Week Ravel 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm Classical Mixtape 7.30-9.45pm Radio…

THE QUIZ Roam around Rome with this month’s ten questions… 1. Whose opera Giulio Cesare in Egitto was first performed at the King’s Theatre in London on 20 February 1724? 2. In which 1924 symphonic poem do we visit the Villa Borghese, a catacomb, the Janiculum and the Appian Way? 3. Which 1946 opera takes its title from a notorious crime committed by Tarquinius Sextus, son of Roman ruler Tarquin the Proud? 4. In Roman times, what sort of instrument was a) a buccina; b) a cithara; c) a sistrum? 5. From which Roman landmark does Tosca throw herself to her death in Puccini’s 1900 opera? 6. Which notable musical event took place at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome on 7 July 1990? 7. The mezzo-soprano pictured above was…

One of today’s most versatile conductors, Martyn Brabbins is highly regarded as a champion of British and contemporary composers. Previously music director of English National Opera and soon to become chief conductor of the Malmö Symphony and Symphony Orchestra of India, he also enjoys long-standing relations with ensembles including the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, with whom he has recorded Tippett’s opera New Year, recently released on the NMC label. Music affects us in so many different and individual ways, and the connection we have to it is profoundly inexplicable. I can’t choose a favourite anything, let alone music, so the pieces I pick out when I think back may not be special to me above all others, but they do have a certain resonance to my life. My dad had…