Thank you, Bowen!

On the day Sir Paul and the "Boss" were performing in Vancouver, and UK pianist Stephen Hough was being re-discovered at the Chan Center, the Bowen Island Arts Council took a big risk for its season opener!

Fortunately, more seats were added and the recital enjoyed full house. Thanks to Mariana Holbrook's hospitality, we received a warm island welcome and gauging from the audience reaction, it was returned through the music making.

Since the program was about Russian music, I have chosen two rarely heard pieces as video highlights: Schnittke "Five Aphorisms" and an Encore by Mikael Tariverdiev "Two in a Café" from the classic Russian film "Seventeen Moments of Spring".

The recital was advertised in the local press, here in Bowen Island and far away in Omsk, Siberia! A world wide coverage!

One year anniversary

On November 22 we'll celebrate the pluralism of CBC Radio 2 and its flagship classical program "Tempo".
A year ago, after 3 years of radio silence, and after an official complaint to CBC executive Mark Steinmetz, its producer played an extract of my first CD. They chose "Gnomus" from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Since then, nothing.
As we guessed when the New 2 was introduced, independent classical musicians in Canada are the first casualty of the classical music schedule shrinkage and between gate keeping and friendlies peddling, the rest of us will not be heard on the very radio our taxes sustain.
2 minutes 54 seconds of air time in 4 years and 3 CDs later! Ah, isn't that wonderful to feel the support of the public broadcaster to develop your career?
Thank you CBC Radio 2!

The Horowitz Steinway is back!

Today I got reacquainted with an old friend who was visiting Vancouver, courtesy of Tom Lee Music: number 314503 or simply 503, a.k.a. the Horowitz Steinway.
In 2005, I enjoyed the ease, fluidity, singing tone and power of this instrument and it was a pleasure to spend another hour with it as I am preparing the Bowen recital less than a week away.
I also have been working on Bach's D Minor Concerto BWV 1052 for an upcoming concert next year, so it was interesting to test the "work in progress" on this Steinway.
So for fun, here is a short video of the encounter.



P.S.: This year though, the touch felt different, not as effortless. I blamed my memory at first but then I just learned that someone tampered with the action and altered the instrument before it reached Vancouver. This is truly unfortunate and hopefully, Steinway's top technician will be able to bring it back to its former glory. 

Naxos, Laxos...

Recently interviewed by CBC Paolo Pietropaolo, host of the program In Concert on Radio 2, the founder of Naxos Records, Klaus Heymann was quizzed about the future of classical music.

What we have to do now is get those young people into concerts and into opera houses — and orchestras have to do more to make concerts attractive to young people. Why do the musicians have to wear tuxedos and all this formal attire? Why can’t they play for young people in jeans and T-shirts? If I just want to listen passively to music, I can do it at home. I can watch the Berlin Philharmonic digital concert hall in high definition surround sound in my home. Why go to a concert hall unless something is happening there?

As if what happened in a concert hall depended on the musicians' attire... Has the live experience of classical music become so dull and predictable, that the only way to save it depends on garments? What else? The brand of snacks sold at intermission?

There are the boards, which very often consist of elderly people who want the traditional overtures, concertos and symphonies with no clapping between movements and no clapping during the music. There are the musician unions who don’t want any change, and don’t want to go outside the concert hall to teach underprivileged children in schools. And then there are the reformers, who realize things have to change if orchestras are to survive.

No clapping DURING the music is a problem now? Really, is making noise during the performance considered LISTENING "actively" as opposed to "passively" when quiet? This line of advocacy must consider the act of listening in itself, without external demonstration, as an equivalent to sleeping to imagine that noises improve listening! Why not then record the music and the noises while at it, like audience laughter's in sitcoms, and see who'll buy that Naxos Beethoven comedy sonatas?

As for going to schools, my husband recalls vividly his experience in 1968, in France, in the public school of a communist run Paris suburb, when an orchestra visited the school and played an educational program about... Richard Wagner! It was fantastic so Heymann's reformers have not invented anything.

What's dying is a certain idea of the classical music business and it is those who drove it to the ground who are now trying to find scapegoats in order to mask their own lack of creativity in programming (where are Schnittke's symphonies?), their marketed flashy outfits, suggestive curves and name peddling, and forget about the only thing that will bring people to tears: content.