Grade 1 Violin

  Last night I dreamt someone had commissioned me to write a piece for an upmarket magazine on my recommendations for recordings readers might add to their collections. On waking up it seemed so real I couldn't tell if it was genuine or not so I began listing all the recordings I have found essential to my mind by composer from A - Z. In no way is this meant to be a 'building a library' kind of survey; just recordings I couldn't live without. I wrote a little Forward: People have described studio recordings as Electronic Music. I think there is some truth in that. Recordings of live performances are fundamentally different. They are witnesses to an event whereas studio recordings are an attempt to re-create a live event without any blemishes or imperfections. They also tend to take place in fundamentally different acoustics and so lack atmosphere. It is hard to re-create the atmosphere and excitement of a live performance in the studio and many studio recordings turn ou...

  Bartolomeo Merelli (1794–1879) earned the sobriquet ‘Eagle of the Impresarios’ for his skill, vision and refined taste. Unlike his competitors, Merelli was an accomplished musical scholar and librettist, and his name is indelibly tied to that of the greatest Italian opera composer, Giuseppe Verdi. Merelli was born in Bergamo, the Lombard city which also happened to produce many of the greatest composers and singers of the era. In his hometown, he studied under the German composer Giovanni Simone Mayr, initially contemplating a career as a musician. He first made his mark as a librettist, writing for his Bergamasc colleague Gaetano Donizetti, as well as Mayr, Nicola Vaccai and others. In 1830 Merelli entered the murky world of impresarios by taking over the  impresa  at the small theatre of Varese. In 1836, Merelli had his big break when he won the concession for Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, which he held on to until 1850. While that theatre was the most important house of...

  Philip Eisenbeiss has written an excellent book on Domenico Barbaja. In the following thumbnail he summarises the story he tells so well but there are some details I think he should have incorporated such as Barbaja having had dealings with Beethoven and Schubert when he controlled the Opera in Vienna and the fact his rebuilding of the Teatro San Carlo, Naples was within a year and from his own pocket. Here is Philip's summary; Domenico Barbaja in Naples in the 1820s Credit: Eisenbeiss, Philip (2013).  Bel Canto Bully Only the most hard-boiled opera lovers could name the leading impresarios of today: Peter Gelb of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Alexander Pereira of La Scala of Milan (formerly of Zurich Opera and the Salzburg Festival) and possibly Stéphane Lissner of the Paris Opera (formerly of La Scala). Some might even remember Sir Rudolf Bing, who ruled over the Met (old and new) with an iron fist for over twenty years and wrote two successful memoirs. And yet these...

 Philip Eisenbeiss writes (and I couldn't put it better myself): Of the three great impresarios of 19th century Italy (Domenico Barbaja, Alessandro Lanari, Bartolomeo Merelli), Lanari stands out as the one who commissioned the most operas that have lasted to this day: Gaetano Donizetti’s  Lucia di Lammermoor  and  L’Elisir d’Amore , Vincenzo Bellini’s  Norma  and  Beatrice di Tenda  and Giuseppe Verdi’s  Attila  and  Macbeth . Lanari also deserves the prize for running the largest number of theatres between 1820 and 1850: Milan’s La Scala, Venice’s La Fenice, Naples’ San Carlo, Florence’s La Pergola plus the theatres of Verona, Mantua, Faenza, Padua, Arezzo, Ancona, Lucca, Senigaglia; and the list goes on. In an era when the country was crazy about opera, Lanari controlled more theatres than anyone else. Born in a small town in the Marches region, he started early as an impresario of smaller stages until he moved to Florence where h...

  Adorable people in the Musical World are few and far between. I used to joke that my memoires would be entitled 'Ghastly people I have known.' Hans Werner Henze was one of the adorables. It was my old violin teacher Michael Tillett once again who first mentioned Henze's name to me. Together with his mention of the name of Karlheinz Stockhausen I was suddenly connected to the German avant-garde of that time, the 1950s.  It was thanks however to Michael Vyner of the London Sinfonietta that I actually met Hans. Michael had been acting as Henze's agent and wanted to divest himself of that function. I was of course delighted to take on his conducting activities although he was not a great conductor. Composers are always interesting as interpreters of other people's works however and I remember a Mahler 5 with an interesting and persuasive take on the last movement. Hans explained to me that this movement was problematic unless you saw it as a fable. Telling a story. A ...

  I only met him once though I knew him well thanks to his distinguished career at the Edinburgh Festival, Covent Garden, English National Opera and Opera North of which he was the founder. Everything he did was with distinction.  He was actually quite approachable for a grandson of George V. and 1st cousin to the queen. Only once did I hear anything to suggest he was 'royal' in nature as well as in fact. I believe that a visitor to his office at the ENO was told by his colleague Edmund Tracey not to disagree with anything he said but to tell Edmund later.  I only met him once. In that meeting we were discussing a contract for the Australian soprano Eileen Hannan. Eileen was there. Harewood asked her 'You're not Irish are you?' Eileen replied that she was not. 'Good, because I hate the Irish,' said Harewood.  I thought that was a bit rich coming from someone in his position. What if I had gone to the newspapers about that? Of course I didn't say anything...