Grade 1 Violin

  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...

  The man from the backwoods of Saskatchewan, Jon Vickers really did embody the Heldentenor type. All those open spaces, fresh air and physical challenges appeared to be the breeding ground for dramatic singers. So it was not considered strange or exceptional when such a type was added to the Covent Garden company in 1957. At that time British theatre companies could employ guests from the Commonwealth and did so. When we joined the Common Market as it was then, we had to employ European artists leaving Commonwealth ones out in the cold as 'aliens.'  Vickers was a great success from the start. In 1959 he recorded 'Messiah' with Sir Thomas Beecham. The story goes that Vickers was apprehensive of this collaboration and apologetically told him that he wasn't like a normal British tenor at which Beecham said 'Thank God for that.' Indeed, Beecham was so impressed he ruined a great take by exclaiming to Vickers 'You're good!' I saw Vickers in many role...

  Brian McMaster was and is a fantastically knowledgeable surveyor of the cultural scene. He is also a brilliant executive and wonderful human being. He has occupied many of the great offices of the operatic and musical state: first at EMI, then the English National Opera, Welsh National Opera, Vancouver Opera and Edinburgh Festival. When starting his 15 years at WNO he took the company to a new level at the forefront of operatic activity almost at a stroke. For a description of the opening production of his era see my post on Harry Kupfer.  The company went from there to performing The Ring at Covent Garden, and to guest appearances at Leipzig, Dresden, Paris, New York, Tokyo and Milan - at La Scala no less. This hasn't been repeated either by the WNO or any other company I can think of. Brian is motivated by Art. He thinks first of what would be the greatest imaginable project and then how to realize it. When the subject of how to pay for it comes up he says 'we'll raise ...

  I thought I had recognised a new income stream in my early years of agenting. Why not bring prominent stage directors into Opera? No one else was doing it. The standard of opera production in those days in the UK was rather uninspiring in the main. People such as John Copley, Michael Geliot and others were not to be compared with Strehler, Visconti or Wieland Wagner. We did have first rate and even great theatre and cinema directors. My first foray in this direction was to tempt Terry Hands into the opera house. At that time, Terry was at the height of  his career. He was co-director of the Royal Shakespeare Company with Trevor Nunn and had been the first British director to work at the Comedie Francaise. I was enormously impressed by his cycle of Shakespeare's history plays at the Aldwych.  I no longer remember how it happened but this operatic career took off like a rocket with 'Otello' for the Paris Opera to be conducted by Georg Solti with Placido Domingo singing hi...

Charming man, adorable even, Toru Takemitsu was the leading Japanese composer of his day (1930-1996). He came from a very modest family of which his grandmother had been Spanish, a fact of which he was very proud. He told me that he had not heard any Western music until towards the end of the war when he could pick up broadcasts of American dance music in secret while serving as an extremely young soldier. there was also a gramophone lacking a needle so one had to be improvised from a piece of bamboo. The experience in the army he described as 'extremely bitter.'  After the war Toru worked for the Americans but went down with Tuberculosis for a long time during which he listened to as much Western music as possible. Traditional Japanese music invoked unpleasant memories. At the age of 16, self-taught, he 'began writing music attracted to music itself as one human being. Being in music I found my raison d'etre as a man. Choosing music clarified my identity.' As early...

  It's all so long ago so I don't remember how I met Daniel Revenaugh. He was an American conductor who had come to London to record Busoni's Piano Concerto with the RPO and John Ogden. He was a Busoni freak. I was to become one too but I drew the line at hiring an orchestra and recording his works. Revenaugh invited me to visit him in Jacksonville Florida where he had just been made Chief Conductor of the orchestra there. It must have been in 1969 because he had decided to programme all 9 Beethoven symphonies for the Beethoven year of 1970.  Jill and I went to Jacksonville to follow this lead. What we found there was another world altogether. Revenaugh drove us around in his sporty Mercedes I think it was, explaining that in terms of area, Jacksonville was the largest city in America. He took us to the top floor of one of the few skyscrapers and introduced us to some prominent citizens at a sort of club there. He also introduced us his business manager with the wonderful n...

  Another of my early links to the musical world came though my parents' friendship with Sally and Kenneth Snowman who in turn were friends with the soprano Adele Leigh. In fact Adele had given me Toscanini's recording of Beethoven's 2nd and 4th symphonies for my Bar-mitzvah. I treasured that record. It was of of the first in my collection.  Adele had a noteworthy career singing in the world premiere of Tippett's 'Midsummer Marriage' for example and many other roles at Covent Garden. She had become a member of the company at the age of 19. She was very beautiful and appeared in musicals and variety as well as opera and operetta. Towards the end of her career at Covent Garden I remember seeing her as Oktavian in Rosenkavalier. She had sung Sophie under Erich Kleiber previously. On starting the agency I thought the decent thing to do was to present Adele in a 'Liederabend' at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Sadly she was not singing well by then and also the hal...

  Starting out on a career in whatever field, you need to have a point of entry. My family were professionals (doctors, lawyers), businessmen etc. so the musical world was not something familiar to me or to them. Nonetheless we knew people who knew people who had some involvement in that area so naturally I grasped at those straws. They were interesting but not very productive. For example my father knew a doctor, I think a Paediatrician in Boston called Max Tennis who knew 'Hurok's man' there. I forget the name of 'Hurok's man' but I went to Boston in the days when I was trying to get a start and met Max Tennis and his contact in the Hurok organization. Tennis was a tiny almost spherical old man. No doubt he was eminent in his field but you wouldn't have guessed it. He was also a bit creepy. We took a taxi somewhere and my newly acquired wife, the beautiful Jill Kravitz, Max and I found ourselves on the back seat of a taxi. Jill was in the middle with Max o...

  Nikolai Golovanov was a terrific conductor whose recordings of Wagner overtures and preludes is astonishing. It is a bit like having a Russian army artillery regiment in your sitting room, such is the unrelenting power of the brass and general force of approach. Wikipedia puts it thus; Based upon the evidence of his recordings,   Golovanov's characteristic performance mode was full-blooded and nearly vehement in tone, with a powerful, almost overloaded sense of sonority, and extreme flexibility in matters of tempo, phrasing and dynamics. Others have characterised his approach as heavily controlling after the manner of Toscanini , excessively wayward in the way he often ignored the markings in the written score to suit his own inflated sense of musical importance, and generally self-indulgent in the extreme. The timing of the orchestral ensemble often suffered in trying to keep up with his inconsistent and demanding beat. Maybe, but certainly exciting. As Chief Conductor of t...

  I first heard the name Yuri Lyubimov when the famous event occurred at the Paris Opera in which he was to direct 'Pikavaya Dama' with Rozhdestvensky conducting. He had devised an unconventional production but news of this had leaked out and the Bolshoi conductor Zhuraitis got wind of it (I think he may have been conducting ballet at the house at that time) and denounced the whole thing to the Soviet authorities who promptly pulled the plug on Lyubimov. Rozhdestvensky resigned in solidarity. Many years later Rozhdestvensky was to conduct 'Pikavaya Dama' at the Opera Bastille after all in a semi-unconventional by Konchalovsky I think. Returning to Lyubimov who was considered one of the greatest directors in the USSR, an invitation was made a very long time after for him to direct 'Crime and Punishment' at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. Lyubimov took the opportunity to defect. The Russians were furious. There was talk of Lyubimov's 'crime' and how he...

  Ernest Fleischmann was a formidable person to be reckoned with in the musical world. Jewish, born in Frankfurt and brought up in South Africa he had studied conducting, decided he was not Toscanini and proceeded to take it out on any conductor who was not up to it thereafter. He became manager of the London Symphony Orchestra in the 1960s and under him, the orchestra enjoyed its heyday as London's top orchestra and one of the world's best. He achieved much, bringing in Pierre Monteux as Principal Conductor at the age of 86 in 1961. Monteux insisted on a 25-year contract with an option to renew for another 25 years. Those were the days. After Monteux, in 1967 Fleischmann was appointed Manager of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.  The LSO meanwhile appointed Andre Previn as Principal Conductor going from the sublime to the not so sublime if you ask me. In Los Angeles, they had appointed Georg Solti as chief conductor but when he found out that Fleischmann has invited Zub...

  After working for Lina Lalandi (who was Greek 'thorough and thorough' as she would say) at the English Bach Festival and founding our agency with Andrew Rosner, I was invited by Norman Rosenthal and his colleague Christos Joachimides to be in charge of the music section of something called 'The Greek Month in London, Aspects of Contemporary Greek Culture.' If memory serves, this was in 1975. The idea was to celebrate the end of the Junta and the new democratic Greek state but it was thought that such a festival would have greater international resonance if it took place in London rather than Athens. London was at that time one of the great artistic capitals of the world. I'm not sure you could say that these days. Thanks to Lina Lalandi I was already familiar with the Greek music scene, or as familiar as I could have been without actually ever having gone there. Norman and Christos did most of the work and left the music programme and its administration to me.  Th...

  A true gentleman and lovely person, the French agent Michael Rainer was very kind to me and we worked together very well. His father had been an agent before him. During the war he was in the Rainer office in New York and joined the army there. At the liberation of Paris he parachuted into France and was able to be re-united with his parents. He represented many great artists including Rubinstein, Serkin, Van Cliburn, Karajan, the Stern Istomin Rose trio, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Birgit Nilsson, Joan Sutherland etc. One of his great strengths was his minute reading of every contract - something I cannot be accused of. At the end of his career he wanted me to take over the general management of Sylvain Cambreling which I was happy to do. I never managed to establish the same kind of relationship with Cambreling. How could I? Michael had represented him from the start of his career and was a kind of father figure to him. We had a couple of years collaboration only. When it came to an...

  I worked with Harry Kupfer during and after the days of the DDR where he was a cultural mascot. However, I never heard any political word pass his lips. He was amiable and of course eminent. A small boyish figure he smoked a pipe in the way intellectuals did in those days. His years at the Komische Oper, Berlin were worthy of his predecessors Walter Felsenstein and Joachim Herz. I remember seeing his production of 'La traviata' in which Violetta dies literally in a gutter. He was invited to direct 'Elektra' as the opening production of Brian McMaster's era at the Welsh National Opera. The company had by then only just become fully professional and the audience could be described as innocently provincial.  Unbelievably to readers today, the premiere of this quite avant garde and hard-hitting production was preceded by the playing not just of God save the Queen but also the Welsh National anthem! What did the Welsh audience think? They lapped it up. Great success. L...

When Joan Sutherland scored her spectacular success as Lucia in 1959 it is forgotten that she was succeeded by another Australian soprano called June Bronhill. Bronhill didn't have the same impact as her compatriot but she was a worthy successor.  Since then when it looked as if great Lucias grew on trees, they appear to be few and far between. Today, few have the high note at the end of the Mad Scene for a start. One marvels at the fact that Covent Garden has two (one great the other good) on their roster in those days. Incidentally, I heard a story that on the night of Sutherland's triumph with applause contnuing entirelt through the interval between acts 2 and 3, the publsher and Covent Garden habitue Victor Gollancz was heard to say on coming down the stairs of the Crush Bar (disparagingly) 'She's just another Melba.'  Nellie Melba was yet another great Australian Lucia of course.  

    On leaving school I enrolled at tthe Albrech Ludwigs Universitat, Freiburg im Breisgau for a Sommersemester studying 'Germanistik' in an effort to polish my German. As in so many towns in Germany there was an opera house, the Staedtische Buhnen.  By then my experience of opera had been limited to Covent Garden, Sadlers Wells (ENO) and the Edinburgh Festival with a side-trip to Las Scala in its heyday. I just couldn't believe what was going on in  Freiburg.  There was a 'Fest' company of a few singers, One each of soprano, Mezzo, baritone and bass but no tenor if I remember correctly. The GMD was Hans Gierster, a business-like but unsubtle 'Zackmeister.' With such slender means you would find the same singer singing Brangaene who had sung Fiordiligi the week before.  Performances of Italian opera were particularly horrible. When not in German ('Gilda sings 'Giovanna, es ist mir bange,) Italian suffered particularly from the teutonic tendancy to ...

  After leaving school and before going to university I spent 8 months as 'Assistant de langue anglaise' at the Lycee mixte de Libourne to improve my French. Libourne is 30 odd kilometers from Bordeaux so one of the first things I did was to check out the season at the rather beautiful opera house there, designed by Victor Louis: 'his masterpiece, the Grand-Théâtre in Bordeaux  the largest theatre in pre-Revolutionary France. With its impressive colonnade of 12 huge Corinthian columns and its elegant Neoclassical vestibule and symmetrical staircase lit by a glass dome, this building became the model for subsequent French theatre buildings and was the prototype for Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera House.'  (Wikipedia). The theatre was a bit run-down in those days and would much later be restored to its former glory. The musical programme was even more run down. First impressions were deceptive. On a big poster outside the theatre were it seemed to me the names of some...

As for so much, I have to thank Gustav Leonhardt for introducing me to 17th century French Viol music. He had reccomended the wonderful Kuijken brothers, Sigiswald (violin), Barthold (baroque flute) and Wieland (Viola da Gamba). Wieland played music for Viola da Gamba by Le sieur de St. Colombe (nobody knows his christian name!). Marin Marais and others. I was immediately blown away by the incredible romanticism (yes, romanticism!) and expressive freedom of this music. Apparently, it is written without bar lines.  I don't think there is anything like it is music at any other time or place. The Viola da Gamba is not a precurser of the 'cello by the way but a much earlier instrument mainly used in the context of domestic music making as its tone is not large. It fell out of favour for at least 200 years before Arnold Dolmetsch and later Wieland, Jordi Savall and others championed it from the mid-twentieth century on. 

I recall the South African tenor Joesph Gabriels with feelings of guilt and sadness. This is the story: The English National Opera were planning a new production of Don Carlos with their musical director, Sir Charles Mackerras conducting. Quite late in the day they found temselves without a tenor for the title role. I had heard of a great South African tenor called Joseph Gabriels so I proposed him to the ENO and they agreed to have him audition for Sir Charles in the summer break when the conductor was on holiday in Italy. A cinema was rented for this audition and all arrangements for a pianist etc were made. Gabriels made the journey specially and sang the audition whereupon he was given the part.  Joseph Gabriels was a sweet man, absolutely charming and with none of the issues which sometimes make artists difficult for a manager to handle. He was he told me a 'Cape coloured' and therefore unable to perform with the white South African opera company or indeed with a black com...