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Film music has to work first time, or the film will probably flop. Few 'serious' composers have that skill. I remember a documentary where the same bit of silent film was shown twice, with different accompanying scores: the one auguring disaster, the other whipping up a farce - both instantly effective. We have to 'get it' immediately, and allow ourselves to be carried along by it. Jazz has to hit the spot first time - both melody and mood. Pop has to 'get' you in the first couple of seconds. Maybe 'establishment' music doesn't always need to hit the spot first time; I rather tend to find that the music is more likely to prove enduring if it seems to need a few repetitions before it reveals its secrets to me. Each and every genre begs for skill, artistry and inspiration. The composer or performer has to meet you where you are. Only you know if he met you. You are the only judge. You're the king - the musician is your troubadour. No-one's opinion is any more valuable than your own. Imagine the skill and inspiration needed by the pianists who accompanied silent movies. Apart from having to churn out the obvious descriptive effects, they mostly relied on a huge repertoire of snippets from familiar classics. Tom and Jerry or the Simpsons often do this; and if these were your only culture, you'd be soaked in the classics without knowing it, and would probably be surprised how much you might enjoy going to concerts. A huge amount of film music from the great years (like we played at our Christmas at the Movies gig) is extremely complex and dissonant. The Wizard of Oz has an astounding score; and the mythology underlying that particular story is truly profound. But you don't need arty farty explanations to enjoy the movie, as countless millions will testify. If I hear anyone being snobbish about the Wizard of Oz, I'll punch them! Did you see that Judy Garland footage over Christmas - what a performer! What's more, she showed the very quality that you can hear from the guys who played those scores - a total full-bloodied commitment. Whole body stuff. They sound like they are playing for their lives. It could almost be exaltation in their very own musical skill. Here's some of the best orchestral playing you'll ever hear - and not a deified conductor in sight! (Cue for another rant?)

With my mind still full of the success of the 'Russian Winter' series, I'm thinking about these things. Look what Rachmaninov wrote to Nicholai Medtner (a composer Rachmaninov admired greatly and to whom he dedicated his Variations on a Theme by Corelli Op. 42): "I've played the Op. 42 variations about fifteen times, but of these fifteen performances, only one was good. The others were sloppy. I can't play my own compositions! And it's so boring! Not once have I played these all in continuity. I was guided by the coughing of the audience. Whenever the coughing would increase, I would skip the next variation. Whenever there was no coughing, I would play them in proper order. In one concert, I don't remember where, some small town, the coughing was so violent that I played only ten variations (out of twenty). My best record was set in New York, where I played 8 variations. However, I hope that you will play all of them, and won't 'cough'." (The coughers got the little they deserved......they threw away the chance to discover joy in what he was playing.) He was scarred from previous maulings, unsure of himself, scared of boring people. He even went on to approve cuts in his longer pieces, like in the 2nd symphony. Who did this mauling? History is littered with the fatuous comments of well paid commentators. Who was the critic who was so dismissive of his 1st symphony that the poor man was reduced to: "I felt like a man who had suffered a stroke and had lost the use of his head and hands"? This paralysis lasted for three years. The 'famous' composer, Cesar Cui, described the symphony as "The ten plagues of Egypt"! (Who Cui.....?..... I hear you retort.) Mendelssohn wrote Chopin off........did Chopin care? But what did this hammering do to Rachmaninov? It broke him! Maybe he was stronger after he glued himself back together? Anyway, his was the last laugh - look how popular his stuff is now.

One of my highlights this season was playing in the original version of his 4th piano concerto - the first hearing for me. The critics had slated this at its premiere, so he withdrew it and revised it twice. Here's something he said later in his life: "The new kind of music seems to be created not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt." (The phrase 'brain junk' slipped into my mind as I read that....) "Exalt". There's a word to conjure with. What did he mean? Few, maybe none, have ever matched his achievement in combining performing and composing at the highest achievable international level - his brain power was way up in the top end of the genius zone - as a consummate performer he knew, hands on, what wouldn't work (he could even interpret the coughing while he was playing) - he'd done meditation, protesting, analyzing, reasoning, calculating and brooding (lots of brooding in his early compositions).......he was looking to a new horizon. Do you 'exalt' in your life? If you don't, should you? Do you want to? Would you be embarrassed if someone caught you at it? Well, I'll confess: I exalt.......a little.....somethimes. Though you might not notice. I'll tell you when you might catch me at it: during Bruckner 9 (we play it on the 5th March), during Sibelius' Kullervo symphony, during Rachmaninov's 1st symphony, during Nielsen's 4th symphony ...... Beethoven was very good at it (imagine being deaf and having to do it on one of those antique shop 'fortepiano' things). Whatever this 'exalting' is, I'm not trying to suggest that it's everything - but Rachmaninov might have the key to something very important here. Think about what inspires exaltation for you. Tell me a piece of atonal music that evokes exaltation in you - that's not meant to sound negative - I am interested to hear from you. There's plenty of atonal music that I love; but atonality doesn't seem to lend itself to exaltation. Where does the problem lie? Is it that exaltation is not something that lends itself to analysis? Is it a spontaneous reaction, a welling up of joy - joy in some sort of shared humanity thingummy? If I'm listening only with my head, will I miss the point? Will that moment pass, like a missed bus? Music is 'the moment'. Whole body stuff. Where is the source of this exaltation? Will you find it on the paper of the written music, or does it flare up at the moment when inspired composition meets inspired playing - with an open-minded audience? Stehpen uses the word 'surrender'. Can you exalt if you don't first surrender? QED. Take the opening of the last movement of Rachmaninov's 1st symphony. All of us of a certain generation will know it only too well because of its long tenure as a theme tune for Panorama (pace Cui) - it's probably irretrievably devalued now. But it must have been truly startling at the premiere. Of course the audience wouldn't have known how to handle it, and, maybe, if we had been at that first performance, we probably wouldn't have felt like loosening our starched collar and responding to its extraordinary call to passion.........this call from a young upstart composer.......... like being dragged out onto the dance floor by someone you don't want to be seen with. Would we have slunk down into our plush chair, hoping not to be noticed? King Cui had the right to think or feel whatever he wanted. How has history judged him? Narrow minded, with a very tight mental sphincter? A final example: does anyone remember a televised Messiah, in which many of the arias were arranged for bill-topping jazzers, crooners and pop singers? For sheer vitality and communication they blew us starchy collared musos off the pitch. Handel would have been beside himself with joy......maybe even exalting. Mind you, if you're snobbishly inclined.......watch out, I've still got my sleeves rolled up.

Anthony