Harrison & Harrison - Organ builders in Durham

Recently Laura and I visited Harrison & Harrison in Durham, builders of organs, who are two-thirds of the way through the long and expensive process of restoring the organ in the Royal Festival Hall.

More of a craft workshop than a factory

I had no idea that the making of organs was so complex.  Most of the materials and methods used have been unchanged for hundreds of years, and the various craftsmen evidently took enormous pride in their work, paying as much attention to surfaces that would be invisible once the organ is constructed as to those that are on show.

Laura turned out to be very useful as an assistant on the tour.  It's a good thing she has been paying attention in her piano lessons.

Laura playing the organ                                               photo: Matt Freeman

Directing Laura at the keyboard is William McVicker, curator of the organ at the Royal Festival Hall, who also led the tour.  The couple behind the organ are my friends Mike & Kim Wilson - Mike first visited Harrison & Harrison about 60 years ago as a young boy to watch them manufacture the Festival Hall organ in the first place. He was very happy to be here again!  Perhaps in 60 years' time Laura will be here to watch the second restoration.

Somehow both William, and Harrison & Harrison, knew it was Laura's 12th birthday, providing birthday cake and as you might imagine a rather wonderful rendition of Happy Birthday To You on more than one organ!  Even more excitingly, Laura was then given the opportunity to make her own organ pipe.

Laura welding a lead and tin organ pipe                  photo: Matt Freeman

She first helped to weld a pipe (see above) following which we took the pipe to the "voicing workshop" where a voicer makes adjustments to the pipe to tune it properly.  It's a very specialised profession, and each voicer makes their own tools with which they make the minutest adjustments to the metal of the pipe.  The pipe started as a rather out of tune F sharp,  but once voiced (see below) was a very melodic F.  Looking on at the voicer is Brent Hansen, a governor of the Southbank and former boss of MTV Europe.

Voicing Laura's organ pipe

Not perhaps the most usual way to spend a birthday, but certainly one Laura won't forget.

Happy 12 year old (flower a present from Mike & Kim)

At Sadler's Wells

I seem to have been at Sadler's Wells quite a lot in the last month or so:

• 19th September - San Francisco Ballet
• 11th October - Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet
• 16th October - Rambert Dance Company

Other than reinforcing my view that I prefer the middle of the Stalls to the First Circle - you kind of feel more engaged with and enveloped by the gesamtkunstwerk aspect of contemporary dance in the Stalls, my main observations are:

All three dance companies have the most amazing and gifted dancers.  The obvious virtues of the lead dancers aside,  Hannah Rudd (a recent recruit to the Rambert) and Sasha de Sola (in the Corps de Ballet of the San Francisco Ballet, just promoted to soloist in 2012) both have that hard to describe "you know it when you see it"  quality of grace and ease which will probably have them become leading dancers in due course.

This was Cedar Lake's first visit to the UK.  Although it apparently started as a vanity project for the Walmart heiress, it's turned into a very fine dance company.  I will definitely book tickets for their next trip here.

But the overall impression I was left with was that the two American companies had the great luck each to show only pieces of new choreography (the standouts being Christopher Wheeldon's "Within the Golden Hour" for the West Coasters; and Hofesh Shechter's "Violet Kidd" for the East Coast company) and these really allowed the dancers to flourish.

The Rambert by contrast seems to have had a much more hit and miss record recently with new choreography, and the best piece of their evening was the revival of Merce Cunningham's 1975 "Sounddance".

It would be lovely at some point to see the Rambert programme 3 or 4 brand new pieces in one evening.  Their dancers deserve the opportunity.

Bach Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin

Just back from one of my regular haunts - the Wigmore Hall - where violinist Alina Ibragimova was playing Bach's Sonatas and Partitas as a late replacement programme.  I took my friend Nick, who has been away in Denmark for the last four years and hasn't heard her play before.

I on the other hand have been to quite a lot of her concerts this year:

• 1st October - with her Chiaroscuro Quartet at Bob Boas's house in Marylebone playing Mozart string quartets in D Minor and D Major

• 25th July and 1st August 2012 - with Cédric Tiberghien at Vernon Ellis's 49 Queen's Gate Terrace playing Schubert works for violin and piano

• 28th June at the Mansion House with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, playing Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor

• 28th April - with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican playing Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa

• 29th February leading the Academy of Ancient Music at the Wigmore Hall playing Biber, Bach and Vivaldi 

At the interval Nick said "she's a bit of a superstar, isn't she?"

I've heard Alina play the Sonatas and Partitas before.  Every time it's a revelation.  She has the ability to portray profound emotion through what in theory is quite unromantic music, showing the Sonatas and Partitas, and particularly Partita No.2 in D Minor, to be one of the pinnacles of achievement in Western Civilisation.

First Sonata for Solo Violin: Adagio (Autograph 1720)

I won't go on any more because I am conscious I am sounding a bit obsessive!

As a footnote, was a guest of the Britten Sinfonia at the Barbican for their 20th birthday concert on 27th  October, which included the Bach Concerto for two violins, strings and continuo in D.Minor.  The violinists were Alina Ibragimova and Pekka Kuusisto.  Very good interplay between the violins, and altogether a very happy concert - amongst other things on the programme was Joanna MacGregor settings of Louis 'Moondog' Harding.  No, me neither, but here's the link to some info.

dOCUMENTA (13) - Kassel

We dropped in at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel for a couple of days on our way back to London from Copenhagen.  

There's almost too much to see, and in that sense it is as overwhelming as Frieze.  But as a once-in-five-years event perhaps it can be forgiven for trying to cram everything in.  For me the memorable pieces were:

1.  Ryan Gander's "I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorise (The Invisible Pull) 2012"  - a contemplative piece that simultaneously achieves highly abstract with extremely visceral.   The work occupies the entire, large, ground floor of the Fridericianum - the space is completely empty apart from wind.  As you walk in you think "someone left a window open, that's a nice cool breeze" and then you realise that the wind has been modulated, and as you move around the space it takes on different qualities.  There's places where it is even quite a strong wind.  And absolutely no evidence at all anywhere of how this apparent act of defiance of physics has been achieved.   A very unusual piece activating sensations that normally aren't part of the aesthetic process.

2.  Nedko Solakov's installation in the Brothers Grimm museum - Knights (and other dreams).   The artist's unfulfilled childhood dreams included being a drummer in a rock band, flying helicopters, and being a knight.   So at the age of 55 he has managed to combine all 3 of these activities into an engrossing, charming and ultimately very happy installation.

Playing drums in a suit of armour

I'd not come across him before, his paintings are also fantastic, and rather more darkly political than the drumming.

3.  There were so many artists being shown one could write very long lists.  I particularly noticed   Khadim Ali's The Haunted Lotus 2011-12 - a piece made of 4 paintings in gouache and gold leaf making reference to the Taliban and their destruction of religious symbols.

The Haunted Lotus

I'll no doubt be returning to Kassel in 2017 for the next instalment.

Performance art highlights of the last 18 months

Performance art highlights of the last 18 months

I have a file of ticket stubs for most of the concerts I go to, and at the beginning of 2011 I got the box out and wrote down which concerts I had enjoyed most in 2010 (here) .   Slightly late, here’s the next installment of that, covering what I have enjoyed most in 2011 and the first half of 2012.

What are my ticket stubs telling me? First perhaps are the statistics:

2010:    89 concerts and dance performances

2011:    68 concerts and dance performances

2012:    42 (in the first six months)

So I don’t think my appetite is flagging – I was away for work quite a lot in 2011 which possibly explains the apparent slight reduction in my obsession, and perhaps the lateness of this post.

Of the 100 or so performances from the last 18 months, the one that remain most vivid in my memory are:  

1.   Chamber music from Debussy to Crane – 16^th October 2011.  The high point not only perhaps of the last 18 months but perhaps also one of the high points of my life - a concert at the Southbank with music especially for my 50^th birthday!  I had commissioned Laurence Crane to write a quintet for Piano and Strings which was played with verve and style by Andrew Matthews-Owen and the Brodowski quartet.  The concert also included Debussy’s settings of Baudelaire’s cinq poemes sung by Anne Sophie Duprels; Shostakovich’s 8^th String Quartet, and some further little compositional hommages to my increasing age.  All the musicians were on fire – the Shostakovich in particular must be the best rendering of it I have ever heard.  My birthday quintet has turned out to be a sought after piece that other ensembles wish to play and I gather even record (I have been so far to Amsterdam with Laurence to hear it performed by the Ives Ensemble, and trips to Montreal, Utrecht and Oslo beckon).  So what started as a small idea for a birthday has blossomed into a musical foundation now on its ninth commission (Link to the Foundation)

2.  My second commission was to ask Gavin Higgins to write a piece to accompany ice-skating.  He decided to set an Oscar Wilde poem to a brass band instead, and this was premiered on 28^th January 2012 at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.  Absolutely amazing to hear the Tredegar Town Band in their full Salvation Army mode suddenly stop that, and start playing Gavin’s contemporary melancholic but waltz timed piece. With one’s eyes closed you would not have known it was a brass band at all, as they sounded instead like a particularly colourful and beautiful orchestra.  It’s a profoundly beautiful thing that Gavin has created, and I’m looking forward to helping the brass band get it recorded and out onto CD.

Violin section

3.  As part of the Bath International Music Festival Alina Ibragimova played Bach in the Assembly Rooms on 4^th June 2011.  I took a train to Bath and back merely to sit in the second row of this concert and bask in the magic that is Alina playing the entire Partitas and Sonatas for violin.  Her interpretation of this music seems to me to embody the entire range of human emotion, to the extent that I find it difficult to listen to anyone else play it.  I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it is what it is. 

4.   Alina Ibragimova (again) and the Quay Brothers, 16^th July 2011.  At the Manchester International Festival Alina played solo violin pieces by Bach, Berio, Biber and Bartok while promenading through the dark oak and books of the medieval Chetham’s School of Music Library, the Bartok piece accompanied by a film from the Brothers Quay and the smell of decaying books.  She seems to play as though for herself not for us, and one participates not so much as the audience but almost voyeuristically.  Utterly evocative, and it introduced me to Berio’s Sequenzas which I had not heard before and have now absorbed completely.  I’ve also mostly as a result of this concert got to know quite well Alex Poots, director of the Manchester International Festival, and am in the process of helping him set up a commissioning circle to support the Festival in the future.

5.   Nicola Benedetti and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, 2^nd November 2011 at the Festival Hall, playing the Brahms double concerto for Violin and Cello.  The LPO seem to be going from strength to strength.  It’s the effect of Jurowski in part, although this particular concert was conducted by Christoph Eschenbach.  The really memorable aspect is Nicola Benedetti’s ability to command an orchestra.  Quite unlike Alina (her peer at the Yehudi Menuhin school) whose gift is to play with a technical and emotional precision for herself (see above), Benedetti plays with an expansive extroversion for the audience.  It’s really fantastic to watch.

6.  The BBC Symphony orchestra playing Arvo Pärt at the Barbican on 28^th April 2012.   Many of my knowledgeable contemporary classical music friends are quite sniffy about Arvo Pärt, viewing him as a “one-horse pony” and a populist sell out.  I’d come back to the UK especially for this concert, I admit more drawn by one of the soloists than by the music, and indeed the high point was watching, as well as listening too, the interplay of Alina Ibragimova and Barnabas Kelemen – the two violin soloists playing Tabula Rasa.   To put this in some historical context, it was written in 1977, only a year after Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians.  We’ve been too exposed to Pärt’s tintibulation as the backdrop to every moody TV drama going, but this concert was in the end a timely reminder that Pärt is an important composer who has produced significant music of complexity, originality and beauty.

Enough with the strings, let’s dance!

7.  Hofesh Schechter – Political Mother, the Choreographer’s cut, 11^th July 2011 at Sadler’s Wells.  It’s like being consensually assaulted by a rock band. Powerful and over the top, one’s senses overloading.  A definite antidote to some of the more tentative aspects of the art form.

8.  New Movement Collective – 2 productions, the first at the Architectural Association in September 2011 which was a sort of Andy Warholian happening involving dance, film, objects and beautiful people, and quite possibly the grooviest moment I had in the whole of 2011.   I liked it so much I helped to support the second (“Casting Traces”) at Testbed1 in Battersea in July 2012 – an immersive dance piece that used Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy as its kicking off point. It was an absorbing, unusual and successful piece.  I shall be encouraging the members of the collective to give up their day jobs. (http://www.newmovement.org.uk/)

9.  Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra at the QEH on 29^th November 2011 played a mixed programme of Grieg, Shostakovich and Mozart.  One of the true highlights of the year.  This chamber orchestra is amazing, and has true vitality. They all play standing up.  Definitely one of my new favourites.  They are collaborating with the Sydney Dance Company (see below) in October 2012 but only performing in Oz.  I might have to get on a plane.

10.  Raphael Bonachela’s Sydney Dance Company performing 6 Breaths, and LANDforms on 3^rd December 2011 also at the QEH. It’s perhaps only when you don’t have something you realise what you are missing; when Raphael moved to Sydney 3 years ago London lost one of its best lyricial choreographers.  I’m rather hoping that eventually he might come back to run one of the companies here, but the dancers he has in Sydney are truly brilliant, so he may have no reason to do so.

11. Christian Blacksaw playing Mozart’s Piano Sonatas Nos. 3,4,5,10 and 13 at the Wigmore Hall on 23^rd May 2012. This concert was a revelation – I had not previously heard his playing, nor was I that familiar with Mozart’s Sonatas.  He played so beautifully, thoughtfully, teasing out phrasing one might not have imagined inhabited the music.  A transcendental experience of time slowing down for two hours.  I have tickets for all his future performances!

12.  Finally, the Ninagawa Company’s Cymbeline (by Shakespeare of course) on 29^th May 2012, Barbican.  A play which in English can be quite dull really worked well in Japanese! It was quite a surprise to discover that not understanding the words helped one to understand the narrative better.  A bit like watching operas in Italian perhaps.

Gaugin at the Tate Modern

Gauguin.  Not my favourite artist.  I think it's the vague recollection of posters of semi-dressed women pinned up on the walls of my boy's boarding school making liking Gauguin seem somehow a bit adolescent.

I always thought that going to Tahiti had made him paint like that. All those colours.  However, the Tate exhibition shows something else, which is that he was a painter of unique and driven vision.   It turns out he always had painted a bit like that.  My favourite picture in the exhibition was one he did of his daughter asleep, at a point where his life was still eurocentric.

Girl sleeping, Paul Gauguin

To quote the Guide Michelin: "worth a visit, but not a detour".

Britten Sinfonia at the QEH – October 18th

To the Soutbank in the evening for the (almost) premiere of a new concerto by James MacMillan written for his friend, Nicholas Daniel the oboist.

One of the main strands of contemporary classical music is the formal minimalism of composers like Reich and Cage.  My friend Laurence Crane is part of that tradition, and would point to eg: the sculptures of Donald Judd or the paintings of the abstract expressionists as his inspirations.   The other significant strand, to which MacMillan belongs, is a more flowery and colourful world, the extreme edge of which tends towards cacaphonic discordance.  Think Harrison Birtwhistle.

Anyway, the MacMillan oboe concerto was a surprisingly rich and lovely piece of music.   Full of colour.  MacMillan is very religious, and the first time I think we’d come across his music was in Winchester about 15 years ago when we stumbled on a violinist and a pianist rehearsing a haunting, sparse, John Taverner like piece in an otherwise empty cathedral.

MacMillan conducted the concert with vigour, and well deserved the favourable response from the audience.

I met both MacMillan and Nicholas Daniel at a drinks party after the concert.   Nicholas was full of excitement about the piece, and explained that it had been incredibly difficult to learn as it was written as a palindrome.   Literally.  The notes for the oboe part in the third movement were precisely the same as those of the first movement, but reversed in sequence.    One really could not have told from listening to it, but it made me slightly revise my allocating MacMillan to the flowery end of contemporary music – it’s a very abstractly formal proposition he’s set out in the score.

As a footnote, the final piece in the concert was Shostakovich’s chamber symphony No 1 Op 110a, which is in fact a rearrangement by Rudolf Barshai of the String Quartet No.8 in C minor Op.110, a piece which will be in a concert I hope to sponsor next year.   More on that in due course.....

Trisha Brown Dance Company at the Tate Modern – October 18th

Trisha Brown reformed her dance company about a year ago, and her dancers were performing some of her early works from the 1970s over the weekend at the Tate. Loved the first piece – it involved 4 women going through a preprogrammed series of movements, and 4 men rather nonchalantly occasionally moving them into different orientations or positions - such as standing, lying down, leaning against the wall and so on. The piece was 20 minutes long, and there was a droll moment near the end where 2 of the women had been positioned lying on the floor in a way that meant their preprogrammed movements brought their lips into contact with each other. The dancers did very well to restrain their mirth.


My impression of the dance was that it was partly about the power of men over women, a view particularly heightened by the casualness with which the men were moving the women around, and the apparent passive submission of the women to this. I talked to one of the company after the performance, who was surprised by this observation – she thought it was much more about the deterministic power of movement to overcome the capricious intervention of men.

In general the Tate Modern seems to be getting better and better at curating dance pieces, and the turbine hall and galleries make a great location.

Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes (V&A)

I was fortunate to be given a tour of the Diaghilev exhibition at the V&A last week by the curator, Jane Pritchard.   It's a very full exhibition, and if you go it deserves a trip of at least 2 hours. Link here: V&A

What struck me most were the extraordinary set and costume designs by artists such as Matisse, Picasso, Rouault, and in particular de Chirico.

De Chirico designs for Ballets Russes

It started me thinking about whether designs for dances now have similarly drawn on the leading visual artists. There's examples such as Julian Opie and the Royal Ballet, and Anthony Gormley's work with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui at Sadler's Wells.  I'd like to see some more abstract artists interact with costume design! 

Anna + Peter - swing project 1

On 30th September I went to the launch of Anna + Peter's new exhibition  - Swing Project 1, at frac (fonds régional d'art contemporain) in Reims. Here's the link:  frac.

I've known Peter well for 25 years.  I'd helped him set up his first art exhibition in Lyons in 1986 with our friend the photographer Trevor Key.

The pieces Anna and Peter have made are fascinating, both as objects in themselves but also as a performance piece appealing to those voyeuristic tendancies.  Watching the Reims art crowd tying themselves up in a piece made from mirrors and bondage straps, or sitting in the observation booth like purple space, I realised that the art wasn't the pieces so much as watching people interact with the pieces.

A purple box into which you can get

Excellent dinner afterwards, followed by a party. Met some very interesting people include Tom Burr, the American sculptor, who is going to be the subject of the next exhibition at frac (and also made what was I think one of the best pieces I have just seen at Frieze, shown by galerie neu).