“ARTS AND MINDS – JOURNALS OF AN ARTS ADDICT 2007-13”
SUBSTACK EPISODE 5 March to April 2008
JOHN TUSA
“Dukey” Hussey tells lies about my BBC record; Fay Weldon on English hypocrisy; Gay cowboys in “Eugene Onegin”; Arts Council mired in bureaucracy; Terry Wogan puzzled by BBC “compliance”; New Labour and ”culture is for losers”; Howard Hodgkin on his “late period”; why the stock market never knows when enough is enough; advice on parliamentary allowances: ‘take them all’.
Two fine Russian conductors at the Barbican. Temirkanov, introspective, laconic, moody; Gergiev, outgoing, diplomat, musical entrepreneur.
Saturday, February 23. Gergiev and the Vienna Philharmonic at the Barbican. A sumptuous sound, with deep, upholstered strings. Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto is played by Yefim Bronfman with a sustained brutality that made me want to leave the hall. Gergiev followed suit and made it sound a revolting work. Then left to themselves, Gergiev and the Viennese attacked Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique”. Trouble is that it needed genuine Russian intensity, not a refined orchestra demonstrating that they can “play” with savagery if required
Sunday, February 24. The London Symphony Orchestra under Yuri Temirkanov. The noble baritone, Sergei Leiferkus, sings the songs in Shostakovich’s “Babi Yar”, the 13th Symphony. Bleak, prophetic, pessimistic, realistic, with Leiferkus’s distinctive baritone in superb shape. Gareth Davies, the LSO principal flute, says they like working with Temirkanov because he uses few words and he speaks little English. Gareth: “He stops us, says ‘why you play bah-bah-bah? No!` play ba-ba-ba. Again please.’ That’s all you need. Unlike some conductors. They talk too much!” Leiferkus says much the same thing, rolls his eyes and roars with laughter. Afterwards, Yura is purring with joy about the performance: “Shostakovich symphony – when written, such a scandal, such a scandal.”
Having lived in Britain since the age of three, I have no doubts about my nationality or my identity. I especially know the depth of my Czech identity when I respond to Czech music.
Tuesday, February 26. Nine am recording at BBC Broadcasting House for Radio Three’s “CD Review” of a bundle of Czech music CDs. I try not to sound as if I know more than I do! Probably not difficult. Dvorak Second Piano Trio - Smetana Trio give it their all, a delicious, joyous work. A discovery: Gideon Klein, aged 27 when murdered in Auschwitz, a self taught composer with freshness of ideas and a delightful lyrical gift. He wrote music because he had to, regardless of where he was. He would have hated being admired - or pitied - for ending as he did. He demanded the respect of being an artist. The thought of him giving a dozen performances of the Dvorak and Brahms piano quintets at the internment camp of Terezin breaks the heart.
One of the privileges of sitting on boards of trustees such as the British Museum was the other trustees. As each came to an end of their term, the tradition involved an appropriate “dining out”.
Tuesday, February 26. Farewell dinner to the Oxford historian, Sir Keith Thomas. I propose his health using the conceit of an imaginary conversation between DCMS civil servants deciding if Keith would be appointable as a BM Trustee today? The answer would be “no” because he fails the new “I-C-E” criteria. Yes, he is an “intellectual” but the “i” now stands for “inclusive”. Yes, he is “cultured” and “cultivated” but he does not connect to “community”. As for the “e”. Oh yes, he is ”excellent” – that’s good but he is sadly the wrong “e”. Keith Thomas is “elite”. So he’s out on all three letters and shouldn’t be appointed as a trustee. It leaves people aghast that this is how civil servants might think!
I had learned my opera as a national serviceman in West Germany in 1955 mainly at Hannover’s excellent house. Germany’s many houses innovate in a way we hardly dare to do. Admittedly with some odd results.
Thursday, March 28. To Munich for two opera visits at the Staatsoper. Excellent Mussorgsky “Khovanshchina” by Russian director, Dimitri Tcherniakov. He understands Moussorgsky, understands Russian history, understands Russian politics today.
We meet the tenor John Mark Ainsley in the interval. John Mark says we will love “Eugene Onegin” the following night. We see why. Set in a 1960s motel, the first ballroom scene is done as by the male strippers, the Chipperfields –“hommage to …”. The second “ballroom scene”– after the pre-duel night is spent by Onegin and Lensky in a double bed - homo-erotic or what? After the duel the mazurka involves a chorus of gay cowboys taunting Onegin. The final scenes have a transvestite chorus looking on. Oh dear, what a mess and indifferently sung by Russian singers who have never made it to the permanent company at the Maryinsky Theatre! I stand to cheer the gay cowboys! SO bad we loved it too.
If the question of funding the arts was in a state of constant flux, so was discussion about arts journalism and how about how broadcast editors commissioned arts programming. .
Monday March 3. Off to London College of Communication for an interview session with the journalist Rosie Millard about the state of arts journalism . I lay in to what I call the “trahison des clercs” of BBC editors who themselves go to the arts but then think it is elitist to offer them to others through programming. Also, I lay into those who talk about the unrepresentative nature of audiences! Do they go into a recital looking shiftily at the exact socio/economic/ethnic/gender mix of those attending with them?
Labour’s Margaret Hodge has made a very stupid speech on arts institutions/events, those that are socially inclusive where everyone feels at home, and those where they don’t. The Royal Festival Hall is there; why? Because the director Jude Kelly has told her it is. So is the British Museum! Why? Because I imagine Neil MacGregor has told her. No mention of the Barbican, the organisation with the highest BAME audience statistics in the UK! But her real clanger is to say the BBC Proms aren’t “inclusive”! The sky falls in under a pile of derision with great letters in “Times” and “Guardian” ridiculing her. Even Gordon Brown has to step in and say the Proms are perfect.
I have a multiple set of connections with the C 20 Czech composer Leos Janacek. He is Czech – that’s good. He is totally original – better. He is distinctive and elusive. He is difficult to get right.
Wednesday, March 19. Evening a rather odd concert with Andras Schiff and the tenor, Philip Langridge. Schiff plays Janacek’s sequence, “The Overgrown Path”. It was all perfectly correct but didn’t sing of the Huckvaldy countryside in north Moravia where Janacek had a house. (During the interval, the critic John Amis, tells of an American translation of “Overgrown Path” which came out as “The Weedy Sidewalk”!) But after the interval, Langridge and Schiff get together on “Diary of a Young Man who Disappeared”. Now we’re in business. I’m not sure the sixty years plus Langridge can act broken hearted passion. But boy can he sing it, ending with two terrifying top notes of complete impulsive joy. But the real revelation is Schiff who reveals the volcanic drama of the work with astonishing intensity
For most of my time as Managing Director of BBC World Service from 1986-92, the Chairman of the BBC Governors was Marmaduke (”Dukey”) Hussey. I regarded him as arrogant, snobbish and almost prejudiced against the BBC. While he was formally always polite to me, I finally discovered what he really thought of me from an unexpected source.
Monday, March 24. Fred Emery, onetime Political Editor of the Times, whom I suggested as the person to write Hussey’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) has sent me two references from Hussey’s own memoirs about me. One, that I had exactly the same contract as the infamous John Birt-ite “Armani-gate” contract ie a contract with my company! Was it true? Totally not! I had no company! Two, that I had launched a blistering (public) attack on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and this made me unfit to be BBC Director General. I checked with my former deputy at World Service, David Witherow. He can remember no incident that fits such a charge. David says : ”In fact our relations with the FCO were rather good in your time!” I point out that three months before I left BBCWS, David Gilmore, then Permanent Secretary at FCO said to me : “You are a great nuisance. But would you like to run the British Council?” I declined but have always cherished the offer. Annie is furious that the old bore, snob, bully Dukey has` “traduced” me in this way.
A rather odd lunch given by the arts folk at the ”Daily Telegraph” for the “arts world”. My reward is the company, Fay Weldon, the novelist, Terry Wogan, the broadcaster, and high class arts gossip.
March 26, 2008 Sit at lunch with Fay Weldon, wonderfully wicked. We agree that if we are trying to define “English characteristics” as Gordon Brown is, then one of them must be “hypocrisy” which the English do instinctively, effortlessly. But it is not all bad; it also protects people from cruelty. I add to the list of true “English characteristics” – cussedness, stubbornness, refusal to be pushed around, and a sense of community that exists on their terms not the state’s.
Terry Wogan, also at the lunch, doesn’t do a blog: “I’m on the air for two hours every morning! What else do I have to say?” He would hate to be a right (or left-) wing radio shock jock, with the “freedom” to say what he wants. I suspect he sees, correctly, that it does not represent freedom but a kind of tyranny, always saying the same thing. He observes burgeoning BBC bureaucracy - eg “compliance editors”, compliance with what? – with benign and slightly distant incredulity.
We have long admired the mezzo, Alice Coote. When she decided to take on Schubert’s epic song cycle, “Winterreise”, generally the prerogative of tenors and baritones, it was time to take special notice.
Friday, March 28. Annie and I have supported Alice Coote and Julius Drake’s performance of ”Winterreise”. It is breathtaking in its intensity, control, drama, expressiveness, understanding, tone, colour, sound range and – anything else. For some, it will be too expressive; for some, she will move too much, act too much on the stage; for others, she occasionally swoops up to a note. They will be quite right – and wholly wrong. For this is a “performance”, alive, daring, passionate, engaged, committed, with her voice under total expressive and total technical control. Tonight, Alice arrived as a fully fledged artist.
Concert going was the opportunity for endless discovery.I had heard of the French composer, Henri Dutilleux but knew little of his music.
Wednesday, April 2. To Wigmore for a Dutilleux celebration by the Nash Ensemble at which the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal will be presented to the old boy . Musically, a triumph – Yan Pascal Tortelier gets the strings to launch into Dutilleux’s “Mystere”, a huge piece that almost breaks the Wiggie’s acoustic.
I ask John Studzinski, the banker and arts philanthropist, why the City/Wall Street are so bad at getting out when they have made “enough” from a particular stock market run? Answer: “Because someone else is still in there betting the run will continue so why have you chickened out?” JT: “Isn’t there some concept of ‘enoughness’?” Studz: “No, because you couldn’t quantify it!” That explains a lot.
I first interviewed Howard Hodgkin a decade ago for my series of extended BBC Radio Three conversations. I loved his rich, “brown” voice, his gentle manner, his honesty in describing all the uncertainties surrounding his painting. He has a gentle ”teddy bear” quality, cuddly to sit next to.
Thursday, April 3. Gagosian Gallery at King’s Cross for Howard Hodgkin’s latest collection of “big” paintings. I like them; they seem freer, the forms recognisable but the paint laid on with a dash, a swagger and, I swear, an anger I have not seem before. Classically, his “emotional mood” paintings have had a reconciled glow to them. These are strong, assertive, unreconciled and all the stronger for that. Do they have a “late period” quality to them, assuming the whole late period idea isn’t simply sentimental and totally un-art-historical? Howard sits gloomily on a bench. “Will you tell people to come? Do you think they will? I do hope so!” He really is an Eeyore!
At a supper at home, the guests are our favourite kind; journalists and politicians with a journalistic questing mind. Annie loves getting them “with their elbows on the table”.
Friday, April 4. We discuss MPs` allowances, and the ethics of it. Jim Naughtie, the broadcaster, points out that years ago, a Prime Minister told MPs:“We’ll never be able to pay you properly but we’ll give it to you through allowances!” So here we are as a result. Years ago, when Christopher Tugendhat, previously a UK Commissioner in Europe, first became a peer, he went to talk things over with the Lords’ administration office. “If I may say so, My Lord”, said the official, “My advice to you (about allowances) is to take them all!”
Faced with a speech to write for the annual gathering of the Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM), I am momentarily stuck for a theme. Then I find that an article in the “Guardian Review” gives me a way in.
Saturday, April 5 . Reviewing a book about ”Hyper Parenting”, Fiona Millar, Alistair Campbell’s partner, confesses that she played Mozart to her in utero baby hoping it would become a fiddler. This is now regarded as a huge family joke, she writes, “in a family where no child has ever picked up a musical instrument, and where, certainly among the male members of the family, culture is for losers, and infinitely less preferable to an evening in watching sport on the tv”. So there it is, straight from the domestic scene of the inner Blairite circle – “culture is for losers!”
One of the running questions of the time, or perhaps of most times, was why the governing bureaucracy of the arts, Arts Council England (ACE) was not as supportive of the arts as it should have been. They just followed government priorities and modish fads too slavishly. Would the new general Secretary, Alan Davey, be more effective.
Wednesday, April 9. Big BBC Proms launch at the Royal College by the director, Roger Wright. The BBC may be short of cash, but it sure knows how to throw parties. The first person I meet is Alan Davey, still new at the Arts Council. How are things going? He smirks. It comes out. “ I’m trying to get them to think about the arts and arts values. Their minds seem to be filled with other thoughts!” “Such as?” I prompt helpfully. “ They’re filled with bureaucracy and bureaucratic habits!” JT: “But that’s what you talked about at least 18 months ago!” “Yes, and it’s even worse than I thought.” The deep bureaucratisation of the ACE that the previous team of Peter Hewitt, Sarah Weir and Christopher Frayling permitted, undertook and allowed is far worse than anyone dared to fear.
I meet the “period instrument” conductor and guru Roger Norrington next; “scrubbing clean” the nineteenth century cobwebs from C 20 orchestral performance practice. Roger: “No vibrato. Brahms or Bruckner without vibrato, which they did not know, is totally different. Modern orchestras aren’t even internally consistent. The strings play with vibrato, the wind don’t. I play with the Stuttgart Radio orchestra – it’s a transformation!” The documentary film maker Tony Palmer is there, stoking up the controversy over his proposed Vaughan Williams documentary which the BBC rejected on the grounds that someone did not think “Mr V.Williams” was important enough. The BBC threatened to sue over this but as Tony says he has the letter, they backed off.
The judges panel had got rid of the pretentious, the ambitious, the opportunistic from the George Orwell PrIze for political literature. In my experience of prizes, the greater pleasure is less in choosing the best and more in chucking out the mediocre.
Thursday, April 24. Evening to the Orwell Prize Ceremony. The awards go well – good applause for Raja Shehadeh’s “Palestine Walks”, a dear sweet gentle person. I was angry as I read it but thought why should I be angry when the author isn’t? Raja said he got rid of his anger by writing about it. The final chapter where he tries to put himself in the position of a Jewish settler and nearly succeeds is almost saintly. Monica Lewicka – of “Ukrainian Tractors” and “Two Caravans” – has a wicked sense of humour. When I first mention her name, she calls out ”not Monica Lewinsky”. I reply: “I bet you’ve used that one before!” She has. Her now slightly ga-ga Dad shows visitors the ”Ukrainian Tractors” book and says admiringly: “How could anyone know so much about Ukrainian tractors and planes?”. It is of course about him. I do the citation for Clive James, who gets a lifetime award, and do part of it in his famous “ sing-song” delivery. Clive says it is a better impersonation than Rory Bremner who couldn’t get the intonations right.
2,902 words 8 June 2024