Echoes from China
We've been back a week. Those sights and sounds left hanging around in my brain (ear worms) have quietened down, the jet lag has gone..... and the Beeb's busy doing its Big China Thing. There's no let up. Playing Mendelssohn's Scottish to pretty small audiences in stunning new concert halls seems to pale somewhat, compared to the sheer range of exciting and vital China stuff the ´óÏó´«Ã½ is putting out. Someone commented that we'd had sell out audiences – none of them were – most were just about OK, a couple were embarrassing. However, the tour was as exciting as any tour that I have done, and all those who turned up went away smiling. I haven't got it in for old Felix, I'm as aware of and as sensitive to the greatness of his music as anyone. But I want to summarize some of the questions that I threw up in my blogs from China. Those fantastic concert halls blew my mind. They're screaming out, "Think, imagine, innovate!" Is there a risk that one or two of them might become dusty white elephants in fifteen years time? Are they just going to be museums for the informed élite? I was about to visit the big museum in Hong Kong (stunning new building in the spectacular new water-front concert hall complex), and the friend I was with commented, "I can't face any more Chinese porcelain". Unwittingly, that summed up the dilemma. I'd be the last person on the planet to undervalue the need for museums and public libraries. But. At the end of a long and insignificant career in orchestral playing I find myself obsessing over and over about what it is that we're supposed to be doing. So often we seem to be sitting there performing stylised and anaesthetized versions of nineteenth century music. Don't misunderstand me, I'll never tire of Beethoven 5 or the Grieg piano concerto. Is the lifeblood of music going to be museum curatorship? Some of it, yes. What is the future of creativity – performance and management? We play music from about 150 years of European tradition. Is this tiny stratum of European culture the final destination of global musical art? After a hundred years not one piece by Schoenberg has made it to the charts (though you might catch Verklärte Nacht on Classic FM). None of the 'names' of the twentieth century has established any sort of popularity. I'm neither saying that they should, nor that you should like their stuff. I'm just posing the questions. When I joined the orchestra in '69 we played more first performances than we do now. Before virtually every first performance I groaned to myself, "Are we actually going to hit you with this stuff?" The cerebral stuff that was so 'fashionable' at that time was mostly dire, meaningless and an insult to the vocation of a performing musician. Not one of us had any faith in what we were about to play. Are the players all ignorant proles who don't know anything about music? So, have we all retreated into the safety of museum creativity – just keep showing the same stuff, carefully polishing it up so that it looks its best, and leave new music outside in the ghetto where it belongs? Mercifully, a lot of recent new music is trying to re-connect. But great damage has been done. You don't trust us anymore. You've had your ears and brains battered by nonsense, and your mind is justifiably closed. I'm not a reactionary old codger! I love working with composers, I'm fascinated by new music, and I never tire of hearing new ideas and sounds. Bringing a new composition to life gives me as much of a buzz as any aspect of our job. Some of what we have to play is going to be duff, that's inevitable, but that's never going to be a reason to stop being open. I often hear the cry, "I don't understand that stuff". The chances are that if you don't understand something, someone is speaking nonsense. And that goes for a lot of contemporary art. Hey, enough of us are intelligent enough to know the difference – n'est-ce pas? Tune into Lucy Duran's World Routes on Radio 3, and you'll often hear completely untrained musicians absolutely letting rip. Forget the strangeness of the sounds – and they can be strange – tune into the human being behind it. This week she was the far side of the back of beyond in south west China recording a bunch of human beings (that's you's and me's) playing bits of grass and leaves – you could hear that they knew where music is at. Listen to Hilary Hahn playing the Schoenberg violin concerto (now, there's some odd sounds) and you'll hear a musician letting rip – really making music, really telling you a story. Are you ready for it? That's me finished my drum banging bit. But it just so happens that this weekend we have a four day open house at the City Hall, which is the biggest single outreach event that the orchestra has ever done. There's all sorts of goodies on show, including our good selves, so come along – and let's hear what you think.
An abiding image from our trip to China: the crowded streets of Shanghai, a city of 20M, one of the zazziest cities in the world, thousands of young people out on the streets, and on one a T shirt with 'YOU CHOOSE' emblazoned on it. Here, in the west, that would simply be a bit of woolly teen-think, there, in China........? Have you heard, they've started a massive educational programme in which, by the stadium-full, they are learning to shout louder in English to make sure they are understood – they've learned something from us, then?
Anthony
