Oliver Gilmour

Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music, by John Lucas Damn awful thing, what! [The Ring] — Barbarian load of Nazi thugs, aren’t they? ‘No one can honestly maintain that the lives of musicians make exciting reading’, claimed Beecham in his autobiography, A Mingled Chime. If you were to have a wager, you would put it on Tommy Beecham to defy the odds. He was kaleidoscopic. He described his own book as ‘demi-semi-autobiographical’, and said that ‘it’s mingled because it concerns everything under the sun’. He might have added that it is also mangled. Beecham was an embroiderer, ‘a natural dissembler’ in John Lucas’s phrase, and many familiar stories do not feature in this impeccably researched biography.

Was Sergey Prokofiev a better diarist than a composer? We embark on this new volume with the 23-year-old enfant terrible living in St Petersburg. We are there during the ten days that shook the world, and although initially unshaken, Prokofiev escaped the turmoil of revolution and in 1918 headed for San Francisco. The following years take us to most of the rest of America, as well as to Paris, London, Barcelona and Tokyo. Both volumes of diaries — the previous one, Prodigious Youth, covering 1907-1914 — are beautifully presented and meticulously annotated, representing an extraordinary achievement by their translator Anthony Phillips.

Jean Sibelius was an epic figure: an orignal who never strove for originality. Not for him the frippery of a Stravinsky (‘with his stillborn affectations’) or the artificial contrivances of Arnold Schönberg. Sibelius was his own man, and a deeply human one, moved and moulded by the harsh Finnish landscape. This gave his music a rugged and austere quality, prompting the composer to reflect, ‘My orchestration is better than Beethoven’s and I have better themes than his. But he was born in a wine country — I in a land where surmjölk [curdled milk] is in charge.’ Sibelius was not an arrogant man. As Andrew Barnett reveals in this fine biography, he was full of contradictions and self-doubt.

Sitting at Stamford Bridge at the weekend, Chelsea trailing Bolton 0-1, I reflected on the nature of 11 brilliant players and their manager. After Mourinho’s half-time talk, Chelsea scored four goals in 10 minutes. There are inspiring and uninspiring gaffers. If he were a conductor, José Mourinho would be a virtuoso, but what does this imply? Passion, charisma, sensitivity, psychological insight and a spiritual dimension are all vital, but perhaps Otto Klemperer, one of the subjects of this impressive book, succeeded in subsuming all this into a simple phrase, ‘the power of suggestion’, in a 1969 interview: ‘The art of conducting lies, in my opinion, in the power of suggestion that the conductor exerts — on the audience as well as on the orchestra.