´óÏó´«Ã½

(First, please note: I'm not about to lock horns with any critic - 'all opinions are equal', as I was ranting about in my last blog.) But: 1) We got a standing ovation - the audience seemed to have had a great time. They were a small audience; classical crossover is a bit off-centre in Celtic Connections. 2) The show had a good buzz to it - many of us felt that. The French mayor was there with his entourage, and the bi-lingual stuff made it all feel nice and important. 3) Was the event about more than the music? Yes. Things were going to be lively with a large bunch over from Catalonia, not prepared to settle for less than having a great time - which would include letting rip in support of their compatriots. 4) OK, we didn't play our best - for a number of reasons - I'm not going to argue about that. However, there's things other than technical accuracy that make an exciting event. So: If "music is the moment" (as I was ranting on about in my last blog) then we had good moment. Fun was had. And: We performers did our job, whatever we felt about what we were playing. Enough of the blandishments........I have my own gripes: 1) A large chunk of the programme was given over to a demonstration lecture about the Catalan instruments and players - fine? That stuff could have been in the programme notes, which would have let the players loose to give us a twenty minute jam (that huge Catalan oboe thing is only ever allowed out on day release with a special license). Much, much more fun could have been had. The amount of folk music talent on stage, Scottish and Catalan, deserved far more exposure. 2) I agree that these classical crossover ventures are prone to cringe worthy mediocrity - often offering you the worst of both worlds.

I remember when Menuhin started getting it together with the likes of Ravi Shankar and Stéphane Grappelli. True greats, all of them - but pairing up? Well.......I loved it anyway. Was the sum greater than the parts? Definitely not. Menuhin sounded really clunky - beautiful but clunky. Oil and water. He was trying to do somebody else's thing. Nobody is born a great artist; total dedication is required - assuming you're lucky enough to get the right nurture to start with. You might just about manage to imitate an Oscar Peterson, Cleo Lane, Ustad Vilayat Khan, or whoever; but however good you are, you won't cross over and become a genius in another genre. So much for the performers; what about the compositions? The same applies. A Dave Heath was never going to be a Bartok - I was never going to be a Casals. Which brings me to a concert we did a few years ago in the Tramway - a crossover gig with the Hungarian group Muzikas. Were you there? After the concert I walked around in a daze saying things like, "We just played in the best concert in the hemisphere!" As I hadn't attended all the other concerts in the hemisphere I was obviously indulging in a bit of hyperbole - but you'll realise how I felt. I was knocked out by Muzikas. Their thing includes re-creating much of the folk music that Bartok and Kodaly so laborious collected in the early nineteen hundreds - work that quickly became a driving force in composition and education. They reconnected classical music with its blood supply. (Very interestingly, Bartok still felt the need to 'invent' folk tunes for his more serious classical compositions - he was wary of putting real ones in the mix.) Muzikas are consummate performers, brimming with vitality. We played Bartok's Roumanian Dances (known by all of us in various arrangements), Muzikas played the 'originals', and we sort of mixed and matched them between us. We (the classical guys) sounded terminally clunky. Even without our starchy collars - we still sounded clunky. Oil and water. But great fun was had. I was also stirred to my quick: just how far have we strayed from 'real' music? Has classical music lost sight of something very, very important? Deep, deep down, is this what I should be doing? Is this what musicians like me are born for? These Muzikas musicians were so alive - they communicated at a million volts. Nothing 'wasn't that nice, dear' about those guys. If you weren't totally tumbled by them, you were probably dead.

So, should the question be: "What am I going to expect from this event?" Here's Casals: "Music must serve a purpose; it must be a part of something larger than itself, a part of humanity ". That Muzikas concert didn't have enough of them doing their thing, and didn't have enough of us doing what we do best. But it was an overwhelming event. Maybe the event was part of a process - cross fertilisation (or some similar nerdy phrase). It was certainly part of my process - unforgettable. I've been listening to the Dave Heath piece on iPlayer - hey, it's fine! The Song of the Birds comes over like an icon carried aloft during a fiesta, overshadowing the hi-jinks on the street below (as Casals himself is just such an icon for cellists like me). Parts of it remind me of the cellist Yo Yo Ma's Silk Road Project. Ma has crossed himself with just about every musical species on the planet, and he seems uniquely able to 'become' the other. It's all about the journey, or the process; though some of his wacky couplings have spawned great standalone music. This evokes an abiding image for me: Marco Polo's servants, with their instruments, sitting with Kublai Khan's servants, with their instruments - not a word in common, having a jam, and a ball, and a dram, and lots of fun. Lots of loose collars. Have you heard Yo Yo Ma or Joshua Bell doing Bluegrass with the bassist Edgar Meyer? It's the meeting and the mix that's fun, which is what Bluegrass is - it would be wrong to expect 'great' composition. The irrepressible Catalan gamba player Jordi Savall and his band of compatriots have just released an amazing crossover project: 'Jerusalem, City of Two Peaces' - three thousand years of Jerusalem's history told in music. (What a time to release it). Jewish, Persian, Islamic and Christian traditions - Hebrew, Arabic, Ladino, Turkish, Armenian, Greek, and Latin all mixed up together, even in the same song. Music can talk clearer and deeper than words, and defuse rage, and re-affirm humanity, and be fun (and when I'm Secretary General of the UN I'll pass a law forcing people to play music together before they start bombing each other).This project is his peace offering, and he won't make a penny out it. What about Catalonian Casals' peace offering? What was his plea all about when he played Song of the Birds all those hundreds and hundreds of times? With the screams of Guernica ringing in his head, he had exiled himself and dedicated his work to helping the hundreds of thousands Catalan refugees escaping into France. He gave up touring and, in particular, refused to perform in any country that acknowledged Franco........for him, impartiality was collusion: "I consider that we owe to England and America the situation in Spain . . . They abandoned us." If he played nothing else, if he said nothing else, this piece summed up his life's work ......... a quaint folksy crossover? Did we get the message?

Anthony