Music

More than 11 years after getting sober, memories of my more disgraceful drunken nights can still make me blush with shame. Waking up in a police cell with no idea how I came to be there was a low point and so was being discovered unconscious in the pouring rain under the shrubs in a neighbour’s garden. In the mercifully rare moments when I find myself dreaming of a drink, it is the thought of such dark times that helps keep me on the straight and narrow.  But of one long drunken night I have only the fondest if admittedly befuddled memories. It happened in 1996 on a press junket. Disney was opening its new animated film of The Hunchback of Notre Dame not in Paris, but in New Orleans, with its famous French Quarter.

It is a glorious moment in the life of any music-loving parent when your progeny develop their own fierce musical tastes, and start looking rather askance at yours. My case may be extreme, as my two children have had to put up with my music for years. As previously mentioned in these columns, my tinnitus makes it all but impossible for me to work in complete silence, and I have become accustomed to playing up to a dozen CDs a day to get anything done. As a result, daughter (12) and son (10) find other people’s houses eerily quiet, even if someone is digging up the road outside and a Boeing 747 is strafing the rooftops. Maybe surprisingly, exposure to unceasing pop music has not put them off it for life. Instead, they seem to have noticed that I like A Certain Sort Of Thing.

The arrival of the Proms prospectus, with its glamorous pictures of the stars of today, makes me wonder how much those very palatable-looking people are costing the BBC. The question is prompted by the style of the photography — the sexing up of the Weapons of Mass Destruction dossier has nothing on how string players enjoy curling round their instruments. It is all a far cry from the stolid, besuited look classical musicians used to affect, as if one could trust them to get their passagework right while delivering mature interpretations of intellectually taxing repertoire. The modern version says nothing if it doesn’t say expensive. The issue of what the leading names in classical music can charge was addressed recently in an article in Classical Music magazine.

A few weeks ago, feeling stale and stressed, I escaped to our dilapidated cottage in Dorset for a few days on my own. When I was younger, and especially when I was drinking heavily, I often felt ill at ease in my own company, but these days I get on quite happily alone, though I sometimes worry that I talk to myself too much, and wonder whether I am going slightly mad in my old age. I once read that it’s OK to talk to yourself, but there might be cause for concern if you find that you are answering yourself back. I do that all the time. If I am going mad at least it is a contented kind of dottiness, and walking on the cliffs, eating seafood at the splendid Hive Beach Café in Burton Bradstock and drinking endless cups of PG Tips did me the world of good.

The death of Gustav Leonhardt at the age of 83 brings to an end the career of one of the giants of the early music movement. As an organist, harpsichordist and conductor he was long at the forefront of the experiments and revelations that the drive to perform music on period instruments made possible. He will be remembered for being fearless in his single-minded pursuit of what he thought his chosen repertoires required. And he was producing peerless recordings of those repertoires right from the beginning which — one forgets — was in the late ’40s. The term ‘early music’, and its demanding fellow traveller ‘authenticity’, have had a long innings.

In April, for the first time in ages, I am going to a wedding. At least it will make a change from all the funerals. The middle-aged pop fan feels this all the more deeply, because few of our favourite musicians seem to make old bones. Or, more accurately, they make old bones, but at three or four times the speed that everyone else does. Some of these rock deaths are relatively mundane: falling down stairs (Sandy Denny), car crashing into a tree (Marc Bolan), ski-ing into a tree (Sonny Bono). Others are bizarre. It was Chicago’s guitarist Terry Kath, of course, whose career came to a premature end during a boozy game of Russian roulette. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘it’s not loaded.

The Choirbook for the Queen, which has recently been launched, is a remarkable initiative, involving most of the leading Church musicians of our day and many philanthropists besides. The idea behind it is simple enough: to put together a collection of anthems (I use the word precisely) to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, with the added intention of showcasing ‘the excellence of choral writing and the continuation of the choral tradition by cathedral choirs and other choral foundations around the country’. Already in place is a plan for 80 of our cathedral and collegiate choirs to sing two of these anthems each this year, some to be broadcast on the BBC.

Whisper it ever so quietly, but I think we might just be through the worst that winter has to throw at us. I’m writing this down in Dorset, and though there was a ferocious wind at West Bay, whipping up huge waves that broke spectacularly over the pier, and a peculiarly spiteful heavy shower, precisely angled so that the rain penetrated deep into my left ear as I walked along the prom, it was nothing like as cold as it has been. Better still, the roadside verges in our village of Netherbury are blessed with beautiful clumps of snowdrops, planted by the brilliant local wildlife photographer Colin Varndell and a team of volunteers, which lift the spirits whenever you see them. I no longer feel the need to crawl into bed and hibernate whenever I have any time off.

There is only one place these days where the music of Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924) sends its hearers into reliable ecstasy, and that is in choirs and places where they sing. Otherwise he is something of a bust. Despite having written seven symphonies, nine operas, 11 concertos (including three piano, two violin, a cello and a clarinet), eight string quartets and countless songs, piano pieces and other chamber works, he is now celebrated for a tiny fraction of his output. Stanford himself thought that to be renowned as a composer of Anglican Church music was not enough. He wanted to be measured alongside international (i.e., German) stars, and so went to Berlin to study with the leading teachers of the day, and in particular to meet Brahms.