Pole Dancing

Well, not really dancing. His Excellency, Dr. Marek Prawda, mark the truth, simply tapped his foot. The Polish Ambassador to Germany sat next to Joachim Sauer, the quantum chemist better known for being the husband of Angela Merkel. It was good to know that while the cat was tearing her hair out in Cannes, the mouse was out to play. It gives a sense of normalcy to all the talk of crisis. Sort of like the band playing on while the Titanic went down.

The event, part of a broad programme to mark Poland’s presidency of the EU – something between a poisoned chalice and an empty cup – was a performance by the ‘I, Culture’ Orchestra, made up of bright young things from Poland, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, at the Berlin Philharmoniker. Conducted by Sir Neville Marriner, they fairly charged through Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F minor. Apart from one stripling who appeared, from the way she was coughing into the back of her viola, to have a sharp case of tuberculosis, it was a wholesome affair that gave one a mite of hope that young people might actually turn into fairly decent old people. Indeed, if I hadn’t seen them all smoking outside the stage door afterwards, looking cowed and ill-postured, I would have called them an elegant lot.

Sir Neville, who is ageing gracefully

There was one moment of extraordinary drama. After Arabella Steinbacher had finished chopping into Karol Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No. 1, the chamber emptied for the obligatory interval. Toward the end of this hiatus, before the audience had re-assembled, fully ready to clap in all the wrong places, a hero appeared. Tall, broad-shouldered, with long, dark hair, this gallant fellow appeared on stage clutching a ball-gown clad young bassoonist. The fragile blond, with head thrown back and bosom heaving, completed a picture fit for a Mills & Boon cover. He carried her, over-the-threshold style, across the stage, her broken foot discreetly concealed, before gently lowering her into her seat. She then sat and waited for the rest of the orchestra, for what must have seemed like an age, embarrassed in the manner peculiar to pretty teenagers, but with the scattered audience who had stayed for the break now firmly in her corner.

The performance was rousing; Marriner was respectively exhaustive, exhausting, exhausted. Occasionally someone took the opportunity to shake hands with the dignitaries. I even saw a man click his heels and bow. This venue never ceases to surprise in its anthropological delights.

Apparition in Birdland

There’s only one way to improve a martini, and that is to have a commodious throat breathe a saxophone over it. Now, there are saxophone players and there are others for whom the horn is an extension of their souls. Most of these people are dead.

One such dead man is John Coltrane, whose ghost I half expected to see mooching around Birdland. Nevertheless, I wasn’t prepared for a living, breathing, reincarnation of the man, his essence, and his tone. Ravi Coltrane embodies the very posture of his father, forcing one to shake one’s head in disbelief. In a set that navigated between the energetic and the melancholic, Coltrane’s muse was explicitly his mother. His four-piece ensemble played music by her, for her, and to her. If this wasn’t a direct line to the ‘60s, I don’t know what could be.

Too often in great cities with great pasts, historic venues have become merely tourist traps. If I’m honest, I expected Birdland to be just such a hokey hole. I am happily disabused.

Bang A Drum!

Last night was Yutaka Sado’s debut at the Berliner Philharmoniker. If the stories are to be believed, it was his stated dream when he was in sixth grade one day to conduct this orchestra . His dream surely came true last night, as he tried, with a little help from Shostakovich’s 5^th Symphony, to blow the roof off the Philharmonie. This was prefaced by an extraordinary performance of Tōru Takemitsu’s From me flows what you call time, for five percussionists.

It's rare to find an image quite so fitting, but this juxtaposition, of Time and Shostakovich, really sums up last night's performce.

Men like to bash things in anger at times, and we occasionally thrill to the sound of the blood pumping in our heads. But regular readers will know that I resist modern Western culture’s demand always and instantly to be gratified. It was fitting, therefore, to wait for the thumping Soviet march of Shostakovich; to be led there by a supreme exercise in control. Percussion, in a way perhaps more accessible to the watcher, to the listener, than with other musical instruments, is force controlled. It is striking, literally, on various levels of delicacy, intimacy even, in order to give emphasis to what we may happily and not inappropriately think of as the Big Bang.

The performance of Takemitsu’s piece made the best imaginable use of the entire sound space of the chamber, defining the score in terms of location as well as in pitch, volume, and tempo. Truly, it was a four-dimensional performance, with the five percussionists answering each other across the orchestra. There was a cosmic eeriness to the score, assisted ably by the dressing of each of the percussionists as, apparently, psychedelic dentists. The audience was brought to the edge of its seat, but whether to listen the more carefully, or in preparation to run, I am not sure.

The harnessing of so much power is like the coiling of a spring. Let it go, and the energy flies everywhere. Sado conducted Shostakovich like a man physically emptying the music onto his players. He breathed every note. The percussionists, restored to white tie and tails, took up the cudgels and batted back the volleys from his baton with the sound of artillery fire. Not for the faint of heart, this. The audience was roused and genuinely, for once justifiably, impressed. Sado had conducted the essence of the masculine, in all its reason and studied control, and also in its violence.

A Musical Education, Part III

Returning again to the Berliner Philharmoniker, I couldn’t help feeling that something was up. This was a night of debuts – young men emerging from a youth spent practicing – and it was full, like them, of promise. Yet further to my prior assertion that casualness in appearance breeds casualness in performance, last night offered some kind of proof.

I do not wish to detract from the the young soloists, for although the are already a long way down a path to greatness, they are nevertheless young. With youth comes the expectation of a certain attitude. Adrien Boisseau, but twenty years old (he looks a mere fifteen), chopped at his viola as if it were an electric guitar, and he a rock god. Perhaps Leo Smit, whose concerto for viola and string orchestra he attacked, would have approved. Inevitably, control was a tricky proposition for the more serene notes. The other debutant was Pierre Génisson, a mid-twenties clarinetist from Marseille, who cut the figure of a man looking for a jazz dive, unexpectedly finding himself in front of a symphony orchestra. With swagger, he seemed to shrug, and turned out Debussy’s première rhapsodie with impressionistic aplomb. The instrument occasionally got lost in Max Bruch’s concerto for clarinet, viola and orchestra in E minor, played into Génisson’s feet in a soundscape that lacked balance.

 

Pierre Génisson

Adrien Boisseau

The detractions of this evening were twofold. First, the audience (as usual); second, the orchestra (but it was the audience’s fault). Up in the gods, a large group of adolescents whispered and giggled throughout the concert. Although some distance from me, their twitterings were perfectly audible and distracting. The lengths to which concert-hall designers go to make sound travel behoove us to shut up and listen, lest our own sound travels. This rudeness was heightened at a pause between movements, during which a cacophany of coughing rang out. These pauses are the appointed time for the clearing of the throat, but it is not mandatory! The opportunity to stamp their presence on the evening appealed to the assembled youth, who extended their spluttering for a full minute, causing giggles and mutterings throughout the hall. The young maestro, Krzysztof Urbański, stood, arms aloft, waiting patiently for the audience to button it. You could see the orchestra rolling its collective eyes and wishing the stage would swallow them up.

This lack of respect clearly affected the musicians. The final piece, Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, a difficult composition, seemed at times to overtax some parts of the distracted orchestra. I am often given to wonder if concert musicians hate the people who pay their salaries. After all, they turn up in white tie for a formal event, and a bunch of teenagers, amongst others, turn up to watch (for they fail to listen) in what barely passes for streetwear. The incongruity of the whole affair was made more stark by the appearance of the compère, looking for all the world as if he’d come straight from another job as a football pundit: sack-jacket black worsted suit with belted, low-slung trousers, a greenish shirt and loud orange-striped tie. It was just as well that I couldn’t really understand this man, for I wouldn’t have listened in any case. The room exuded a casualness that was totally inappropriate for the event, and I think it took its toll. My companion and I tried our best to rise above, remaining serious and attentive. But seriousness and attentiveness, when things are not as they should be, only make one more aware of the lack of those qualities in one’s midst. It was a shame, for there was here on display a sense of what seriousness can achieve when admixed with diligence and talent. The example of young virtuoisity was, I fear, largely lost on the examples of young concert goers.

Unrattled at the Philharmonie

We turned up at the wrong house. Amateur mistake, you might think, but I thought this guy was a big draw. Turns out he was next door, and a cosy little gathering it was. As it transpires, the night was all the better for it.

Over in the Philharmonie, Leif Ove Andsnes was giving his first orchestral performance as pianist in residence. Simon Rattle, who is the chief conductor, had sent out a message to the Japanese people, with whom there are great connections in the classical music world. There was a feeling of necessity about the atmosphere – an overwhelming sense that it was important to carry on. We only got as far as the lobby and ticket touts. In the Kammermusiksaal next door, Ray Chen was about to wow a half-filled room.

Photo: Altmann, Beer

Ray Chen was born in 1989. It’s enough to make you swallow your tongue. 1989! This young man plays the violin like he was born with it attached to his arm. It is absolutely a part of him. He won the Yehudi Menuhin Competition in 2008 and has become hot stuff ever since. I can’t for the life of me think why the room wasn’t full, but I’m willing to bet that the acoustics were all the better for the lack of German girth. We were treated to a virtuoso evening with the young star, whose selections absolutely showed off his depth of skills to the enraptured audience. Some of them were so taken aback that they coughed noisily through all the most delicate and quiet moments of emotion poured into his Stradivarius. The rest of us held our breaths for two hours.

The highlights of the evening in this beautifully intimate chamber were Giuseppe Tartini’s Devil’s Trill, Bach’s Chaconne from the Partita for solo violin No. 2 in D minor, and Henryk Wieniawski’s Saltarelle in A minor, which frankly left me feeling giddy. You know me: I’m highly critical of audiences at this kind of event. This one, apart from the one or two who gave the impression of being terminally ill, was there because they really knew something. The reception started warmly, and grew ever more affectionate. The largely empty room raised enough noise of appreciation to gain two encores, and the young Chen treated us to his sense of humour, his German, and his beaming smile. Would that all performances were so utterly worthwhile.

In the audience a few seats down from me was a mother with a young daughter, aged about 5. The little girl fidgeted a bit, but was largely engrossed in the movement of Chen’s fingers, and carried on his melodies. I love to see children being exposed to such things, especially when they seem to realise that it is important. Knowing how to behave as an adult comes from childhood experience, or else is dearly bought. This young one looked inspired, and gave Mr. Chen a standing ovation. It was clearly not her first time. And so a musical education has begun, to her great benefit, and, should she be the next Ray Chen, also to ours.

A Musical Education, Part II

Of all the badly taught subjects the boy experienced at school, music was the worst. He despised music lessons, for they seemed to have nothing to do with musical experience. In the latter days of Thatcher, music education was on the verge of being abolished (along with drama and art), and what was left – two hours a week were shared by the EPA (expressive and performing arts: a way of making one subject out of three) – was not even close to resembling education. 

On each desk was a small Yamaha keyboard, complete with headphones. In his way, the teacher must have been a genius: twenty-five teenagers were left unguided with noise making machines, but with their headphones on they neither talked nor made any other audible sound. Most of the lesson was spent fiddling with the stored playback of these machines. Then we would gather round to sing collectively. Everyone knew the possibilities, and competed with each other for quietness:

‘Stop!’ bellows the music teacher. ‘Somebody here sounds good’. The class begins an awkwardness of foot shuffling and an intent staring at the ground. The music teacher’s finger is outstretched and scanning the ensemble.

‘You! You boy! I think it is you!’ The boy visibly winces and shrinks into his clothes. Everyone is looking, happy it is him and not them. They are not sympathetic. The culture of this room has led them to see the pain of others as the nearest thing to pleasure.

‘Sing! On your own! Let’s hear it!’ The piano starts up. It is Kumbaya, or On the roof, or Raining in my heart. It doesn’t matter. The teacher only knows how to play fortissimo. The boy’s voice has died to a whisper. Any unintended essence of the carefree that had before led him to sing out has now shrivelled. There are giggles from the ensemble. The teacher makes it last the eternity of a whole verse.

‘Pathetic!’ he shouts. ‘Everyone, start again’. And so it went on, interminably.

Never has music been so without joy, or teaching so lacking in substance, so damaging to the confidence. Happily, the boy never connected these dreadful hours with the real, lived experience of music. At home he sang from the moment he woke. He rifled his parents’ records, and listened intently to John Peel at nights, his head under the covers. Peel was his real music master. There was a Yamaha keyboard in the house, similar to those in the school, but at home the boy taught himself to play, learning how to read music by himself. Utterly unguided, the emerging man had music in his heart and could do nothing but follow the beat.

A man must have a musical education. He may have to fall back on his own resources to get it.

What People Do In Pubs; Or, The Berlin Kneipe

Rejoice, all ye young choiring throats, round our table rings a roundelay, hey-dey-dey-hey-dey-dey, round our table rings a roundelay. Three times three is ni-i-ine, we swig our drinks like swi-i-ine, three times three and one is ten, let’s swig another one like men – two, three, four, six, seven.

            Who is that standing at the milling-bar, the swilling-bar, the rilling-bar, who is that smiling into the smoky stink-hole? (Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz).

Any man who lives in a city, and I mean really lives in a city, rather than merely working or commuting through such a place, will own that a city can always surprise. In a major capital one can never know everything, and while we may think of certain networks of streets as forming ‘our’ patch, we are nevertheless driven by the mystery of the place. Beyond the well-trodden path of tourists and the attractions they seek lies the dark urban world of the inhabitants, made bright by the light of their spirits. Let us follow a Berlin local now, and see where we end up.

We are at the door of a pub, an Irish pub apparently, in Kreuzberg, in the south. The door is iron, the frontage shabby and uninviting. No tourist would ever come here, but nor would the Prenzl’berg hipsters and, we gather, that is why it is good. There is a moment’s hesitation, for we know of only two kinds of Irish pub: the kitsch plasticity of the formulaic boozer, bedecked in made-in-China ‘authentic’ Irish breweriana and giant TV screens, and real pubs in Ireland. This one is called Mrs. Lovell, and we wonder if there is an intended illusion to Mrs. Lovett, the meat-pie making accomplice of Sweeney Todd. For a moment we are glad that we have already eaten. Suspicions fly away as the door is pushed inwards and a cloak of smoke envelopes us and, through the gloom, smiling eyes and mouths greet us as old-friend newcomers. This is not an Irish pub; it is a living room with a bar, and the hosts are happy we came.

People in pubs these days typically are there only to drink. There is nothing else to do. Gone are the days when a man met his chums at his local in order to recapitulate the terms of friendship through play and camaraderie. Cards, dominoes, even darts, are now things of the past. In the age of ‘Rockband’ nobody can play an instrument, and we sit and stare at plasma screens without sound, voluntarily hypnotised by the moving images, for we have nothing to say. Men used not only to smoke and to drink, but to philosophise about smoking and drinking. A pipe or a cigar was not idly consumed but relished; scotch drinkers and real-ale drinkers savoured. Now we drink to excess the ditch water served up to us so as not to taste it, and we occupy our mouths with the acrid tar of whatever comes cheapest simply because our jaws are idle.

Not so at Mrs. Lovell, whose proprietress is, we gather, a Berliner of said name. The man of the house, English so far as can be gathered, says only that he is ‘from Mum and Dad’ when probed about his origins. Between them, they orchestrate an evening full of song and laughter, in two languages, based squarely on a steady rhythm guitar, the raspy voice of a smoky larynx, and the percussive innovations of a man in leather and snakeskin trousers, whose kit included a single tom, a wooden table and a glass ashtray. From the darkness of a back room a man emerges with a saxophone, breathing heavily through it at first and then bending it up through the smoke and finding a clear soprano tone that shines like a light through the fog. Two men at the bar produce ukuleles and join in, and shortly enough the room fills with locals, who greet each other as long-lost pals and immediately join in song. The evening is not planned. A capella renditions of Mackie Messer and Goodbye Johnny are incongruously mixed with a choppy Dirty Old Town and a weirdly out of place Another Brick in the Wall. Everyone is experiencing an unadulterated, unregulated delight. The room smiles. The pub dog pads from table to table, wet-nosing the guests as if to say ‘stay’, and dancing barmaids – dancing because they can’t help it, not because they’re supposed to – keep the glasses filled. The Guinness is as it is meant to be, and all is right with the world.

We leave with reluctance, for soon the trains will stop running. Savouring the outside air for a minute, we duck underground and head home. We miss the last connection from Alexanderplatz, but somehow having to walk home from here, on this night, seems only right.

A Musical Education

And perhaps a man brought out his guitar to the front of his tent. And he sat on a box to play, and everyone in the camp moved slowly in toward him, drawn in toward him. Many men can chord a guitar, but perhaps this man was a picker. There you have something – the deep chords beating, beating, while the melody runs on the strings like little footsteps. Heavy hard fingers marching on the frets. The man played and the people moved slowly in on him until the circle was closed and tight and then he sang “Ten-Cent Cotton and Forty-Cent Meat.” And the circle sang softly with him. And he sang, “I’m leaving Old Texas,” that eerie song that was sung before the Spaniards came, only the words were Indian then.

And now the group was welded to one thing, one unit, so that in the dark the eyes of the people were inward, and their minds played in other times, and their sadness was like rest, like sleep. He sang the “McAlester Blues” and then, to make up for it to the older people, he sang “Jesus Calls Me to His Side.” The children drowsed with the music and went into the tents to sleep, and the singing came into their dreams.

And after a while the man with the guitar stood up and yawned. Good night, folks, he said.

And they murmured, Good night to you.

And each wished he could pick a guitar, because it is a gracious thing.

(John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath).

The power to enchant; to bring together; to bond through common voice; to discover humanity through melody; to bare one’s soul to strangers and thereby to gain their confidence: this sounds like a rare power. But such is the power of the musician, and particularly the guitarist. I have had the pleasure to be the man in Steinbeck’s description on a number of glorious campfire-lit nights in dusty America, and in those moments of shared song, and in the thrilled eyes of the listener who discovers you can play his favourite ballad, I have experienced something akin to pure joy.

It is a long road to that moment, of pain and practice, of failure and frustration. To play fluently, spontaneously, and with abandon, takes years of deliberate action, muscle memory, and dedication. Hours each day of tuneless fumbling, the sound near to the dying wails of a wild animal. No one wants to listen to you, or even to be around you in your obsessive and compulsive need to get it right. But the glimmer of a future moment, when the sparks of a fire will be sucked into a sky untainted by another manmade light, and when the assembled faces of new friends and old will hang on every note, convinces you that the struggle will be worth it. And not only for you.

To play is to have learned to play. And to learn to play is to understand that life does not come ready made. One doesn’t necessarily need a music teacher, but one would be strongly advised to get a musical education.