BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
November 2005

Never did a musician mean so many different things to different people as Yo-Yo Ma. For some his name is synonymous with the Bach Cello Suites; for others the cross-cultural tapestry of the Silk Road Project; others again may associate him with anything from Argentine tangos to Tan Dun’s film score for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.
Ma turns 50 this year and for over 40 of those yeats he has been devouring music of every kind, captivating diverse fans with the warmth of his burnished tone as much as his character.

So what drives him to all these different musical landscapes? Does he find limits to the core classical repertoire? Or is it that he wants to appeal to that elusive beast - the mass audience? In fact, it is neither. You see, the thing with Ma is that he is simply curious. Very, very curious, as it happens. When we chat at the Sony Offices in New York City he peppers his speech with words like ‘learn’ and ‘information’ with an almost obsessive insistence. ‘Today nobody grows up listening to only one kind of music,’ he says. ‘Keeping your learning curve steep is essential to being alive. These days we have the possibility to research and understand all sorts of things in a way that has not been available before. I feel most alive when I can turn that information into knowledge and then into a passionate moment when I perform.’

This has long since been Ma’s approach to his work, bur it is perhaps his Silk Road Project, started in 1998, which is the ultimate example. After years of international touring Ma became intrigued by the relationship between musical cultures across the world. The Silk Road Project is his way of exploring them, in particular those which flourished along that ancient merchants’ route through Europe and Asia - ‘the internet of antiquity’ as Ma calls it. By undertaking extensive field work with the project’s chief executive and ethnomusicologist Ted Levin, Ma located composers and performers across the region and also instigated a composition project which encourages collaboration and exchange among Western and Eastern composers and performers. The title of the project’s first disc, When Strangers Meet, reflects Ma’s typical willingness to embrace such diversity and has seen him collaborate with performers such as Persian composer Kayhan Kalhor and pipa player Wu-Man, playing both cello and the Mongolian fiddle, the morin khuur. Whether the music gets you or not, the project has undoubtedly been a success, with continuing world tours and its latest CD staying at Number One in the US chart for 12 weeks.

Ma delights in discovering connections, and is quick to talk about how interlinked everything is: how this instrument descended from that country and ended up there, and so on. But it’s not information for information’s sake. Ma’s quest for knowledge is part of his deeply philosophical approach to life, as he explains: ‘Enlarging our view of the world means enlarging our view of our own lives and culture.’ His Silk Road mission statement sums it up: ‘Music is an expressive art that can reach to the very core of one’s identity. I believe that music can act as a magnet to draw people together. As we interact with unfamiliar musical traditions we encounter voices that are not exclusive to one community. We discover trans-national voices that belong to one world.’

If you consider the history and pathways of musical development you realise how all art forms are in flux, with each new idea adding to the whole of evolution of music. Ma’s very part in exploring everything from jazz and bluegrass (with bassist Edgar Meyer and fiddler Mark O’Connor), to last year’s recording of concertos and new transcriptions of music by Vivaldi (with Ton Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra), means he is absolutely a part of that development happening right now. Ma is loathe to pigeon-hole different genres: ‘If we get stuck on categorisation then we end up destroying the very thing that is valuable,’ he says. ‘There is no tradition which is not the result of sustained invention.’

Even Ma himself can’t be pigeon-holed. He was born in Paris, to where his parents had escaped from cultural and political oppression in China, and his family moved to New York when he was seven. His father was a musician and a traditionally strict Chinese pedagogue who versed Ma and his elder sister Yeou-Cheng in Chinese, French and music. The Ma kids were gifted from the start, and together with the sights and sounds of different countries and the influence of Dr Ma (whose PhD was on ‘the fusion of musical styles’) it’s not hard to see how the young Ma was inspired. At the age of nine he made his Carnegie debut alongside his sister on the piano and he reputedly impressed all the musicians he met, Isaac Stern and Leonard Rose among them. ‘Everybody noticed that extraordinary talent,’ Stern has said. ‘Conductors would engage him on the spot.’

Never content to devote himself solely to performing, the 11-year-old Ma decided to go Harvard to study archaeology and anthropology. A contemporary once described how Ma ‘felt it his mission to bring music to everybody’ at college and his compulsion to communicate still remains. Ma says: ‘Understanding something is one thing, but to be able to actually communicate that to someone else so that they understand it - that is what it’s all about. The idea of trying to express something that is meaningful is the basis of living.’ The student master-classes which he makes a point of fitting in to his schedule are testament to this, as was his participation in the first West-Eastern Divan workshop bringing together young Arab and Jewish musicians. But as well as performers, Ma also cherishes his communication with the audience - whether it’s at Carnegie Hall or on Sesame Street, where he has twice been a visitor. Audiences trust him, and he in turn trusts that they will join him on his journeys. (Over 50 albums and 16 Grammy Awardwinning CDs also can’t be wrong.)

Classical music is never side-lined; rather, Ma finds that after exploring other avenues, his approach to the core classics is invigorated. ‘From the Silk Road we see incredible masters who work in multiple different ways, in improvisation and composition,’ he says. ‘How freeing is that when you go back to playing a Beethoven sonata?’

Ma has become associated with Bach’s Cello Suites and returns to them again and again in performance. He learnt them two bars at a time at the age of four, under the instruction of his father. But true to form, seven years ago, he decided to explore the works beyond the manuscript. He wondered what these iconic: notes would mean to artists from different disciplines. And so the Inspired by Bach project was born. ‘The idea was to ask: what is a piece of music? I think its materiality is much more than just the notes,’ he has said. To that end he engaged a garden designer, a choreographer, a kabuki actor, ice skaters and a film-maker to interpret the work in their own way.

The word ‘Yo’ means friendship in Chinese, and Ma is very friendly and down-to-earth. Underneath,you get the sense that it is important for him to please people. The second you meet him he wants to put you at ease. And I find myself wondering, with all this constant need to explore and learn and a never-ending search for the ‘connectivity’ of everything, whether Ma has enough time to absorb it all. Doesn’t artistic genius require time to reflect? Perhaps it’s a needless concern - at any rate it is one he is aware of. ‘I’ve learnt about time and space, that there has to be a gestation period,’ he says. ‘Perhaps I’ve learnt it the hard way but I know it’s essential.’

Ma appears to be studiedly optimistic. ‘It’s harder, but it is a philosophical decision I take,’ he says. ‘I can’t bear cynicism - or arrogance. Nobody ever built anything on cynicism. To believe in something and go forward with it is hard. I see it in all the creators I know who are struggling. It’s so easy to criticise things and destroy them. We have to be optimistic: I don’t think we have a choice.’
His attitude has stood him in good stead, particularly back in the 1980s when it looked like his career might be cut short. A curvature in Mas spine was diagnosed as severe scoliosis and he was told that the operation he needed could stop him playing. With the support of his wife he escaped unscathed - and two inches taller. ‘Part of being 50 is that I’ve seen so much, and lived so intensely for so long now,’ he says. ‘One of the good things about having a limited life span is that you have a very clear idea of what you care about.’ Family life (he has a son, Nicholas, and daughter, Emily) is important to him and when considering his career he thanks them for their support in his life-long musical mission.

But our brief time is up and Ma must be whisked away to the ‘next in a long line of interviews and radio shows. As he takes his leave he is briefly introduced to a Sony employee, about to take over the reins in the Berlin office. Ma immediately plunges into a bevy of questions about where this chap would live, and what a fine city Berlin is. It is all Ma’s personal manager can do to put a guiding hand on his back and steer him out of the room.

That questing energy and interest in the world around him is unstoppable. Even 50 years from now you get the feeling that it will still be just as strong.

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Classical Music Magazine
8th May 2010

You probably started playing at the age of five.  You were good and started to get noticed at school.  The Royal Academy, Royal College, Juilliard, perhaps, naturally followed.  It wasn’t long before you were clear that you wanted to be a professional musician – music was your life.  So what on earth do you do when you suddenly discover you have a serious illness that means you may never play again? 

This horrendous predicament was exactly that faced by Canadian born pianist Janina Fialkowska – whose flourishing career faced a black hole when she discovered she had a rare and virulent cancer in her left arm.  Hers is a story of quite incredible courage, belief and stamina.  More than 30 years before her fateful diagnosis in 2002, Fialkowska’s career was riding high.  After winning Artur Rubinstein’s inaugural Master Piano Competition in Israel back in 1974 her career was launched and she became a close friend and protégé of the pianist.  Indeed, such was his total belief in her talent that towards the end of Rubinstein’s own career, he would only accept invitations to play if they were backed up by a reciprocal engagement for Fialkowska whom he hailed as “a true Chopin interpreter.”

It was within weeks of completing a huge European tour that she noticed her left shoulder was swollen.  Both she and her new husband Harry Oesterle – himself a musicologist running Germany’s leading period instrument festival – put it down to too much hard work.  ‘We laughed and said I had been playing too much Liszt!’ Indeed she thought so little of it that she went to a chiropractor rather than a doctor.  But it wasn’t long before the reality became more sinister and she was whisked off to the Sloane Kettering Hospital in New York, and after a biopsy, given the shattering news.

With more than 50 concerts a year and a debut tour of Australia coming up, the pressure to perform was incredible.  However the prospect of two grueling operations over a period of eight months made it clear that she was going to have to do what every professional dreads doing – call up and cancel.  In the first six-hour operation in May 2002 surgeons cut through a major nerve in order to remove a 12cm tumour and chunks of two separate muscles.  In spite of everything, Fialkowska refused to give up hope.  ‘I just ignored the fact that I might never play.  I guess it was a defence mechanism.  It was like a challenge which I decided I would win.’

True to herself, just one week after surgery she hauled out the Ravel Piano Concerto for left hand and ordered the Prokofiev.  No matter that she couldn’t play with that hand, she just transcribed them for her right and got to work.  The music industry in her home country of Canada jumped to and eagerly rearranged the orchestras engaged to work with her for the next season to change their programmes.  The reviews were ecstatic. 

But things elsewhere were not so straightforward.  The Australian tour idea dissolved. ‘I lost out on that,’ she says flatly. ‘There was never any question of saying ‘oh well we’ll hold the concerts for when you get well’ or inviting me back.’ To make matters worse, a lack of personal connection had encouraged Fialkowksa to leave her US manager just before the onset of her cancer and now she had no agent.  Finding a new one was proving impossible.  ‘They just didn’t want to know.  They wouldn’t touch me with a 10-foot pole,’ she recalls grimly. The stark reality was that with the cancer lingering over her no agent was prepared to take the risk.  ‘They weren’t sure that I would play again - That I would ever be able to maintain a career.’

Because her type of cancer was so rare the second operation in January 2003 required pioneering surgery, the likes of which had never before been performed in the States.  The surgeons were to detach a muscle from her back, pull it up and reattach it under her left shoulder blade giving her a completely new muscle to do the job of the three muscles which had been removed.  It was her only hope for ever regaining the use of her left arm. 

This time there was to be no leaping back to the keyboard.  Fialkowska was forbidden to move her arm for five months, except with a physiotherapist – she even had to sleep in a brace.

They were tough times, even for one so determinedly positive.  ‘I stopped listening to music, it was just too much for me,’ she remembers.  ‘One day I put on a disc Solti conducting overtures with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and suddenly I lost it and cried and cried.  This was my music – this was my passion.  It was like looking into this desperate black hole.’

Nonetheless, Fialkowska showed her mettle again.  During recovery she wrote a book of memoirs about her life, particularly about her friendship with Rubinstein, and she put renewed efforts into her longstanding music out-reach charity, Piano Plus. 

While the industry at large may not have given her a shoulder to cry on, the support she received from her fellow musicians was tremendous.  ‘Every day from wherever he was in the world I got an email, or a phone call from Emanuel (Ax).’  Angela Hewitt, Imogen Cooper, and Geoffrey Swann were also a wonderful support; ‘always asking, caring, phoning, writing.’

Finally the doctors allowed her to try and start moving her arm.  Germany’s renowned centre for prosthetics, The Hessing Clinic, designed her a special brace which held her left arm up to the keyboard.  She hated having to wear it – ‘It made me feel uncomfortable and handicapped’ she remembers – but she knew it was a vital part of her recovery.  Alongside highly specialised physiotherapy and many slow painful hours of exercises, with the help of ‘Brace Kelly’ Fialkowska set about the arduous task of re-teaching her hand to play.  She could keep her hand at the keyboard for short busts but the most immediate problem was that she could only move her arm laterally, and with a very small range. 

For a Liszt, Chopin and Brahms aficionado this was not good but typically she came up with a solution; to play the baroque works which only required the centre of the keyboard – Bach and Mozart in particular. ‘My heart sank a little bit when I thought I couldn’t get far enough down to the left to play Chopin.  Beautiful as [those other works] were I really hoped I could get as far as Chopin.  That was my absolute goal.’  Bit by bit, as strength and movement allowed, she returned to her old repertory.

It was clear to her that she needed to get back into the game, and as her life’s passion she wanted nothing more.  With no agent, her husband took on the task of booking her concerts. ‘The industry is extremely unforgiving.  Competition is great and I knew to make a comeback I had to do it as quickly and as dramatically as possible.’  No wonder then, that in January 2004 she included the Chopin B Minor Sonata in her triumphant and emotional two-handed return to the stage.

You might have thought that would be where the story would end.  But for Fialkowska there were still several more mountains to climb.  For almost two years of performing she had been cancer-free until one heart-stopping day she found out her cancer had returned, this time in her lung.  It came back not once but three times – in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

Such devastatingly bad fortune seems unjust on many levels.  Having succeeded in making a big-splash comeback in 2004 in spite of everything, it was particularly unfair to be faced with her career in jeopardy again.  Husband Harry’s work as her agent was paying off and concerts in North America were building up fast.  While she never hid the fact she was ill again, she certainly didn’t want to broadcast the fact that her cancer had returned. 

The lung operations were agony.  ‘To get to my lungs they had to go through my ribs – they didn’t dare go through my back because they didn’t want to ruin my new muscle.  It was far more painful even than the arm operations.

‘In effect you can call it luck that the lung cancers fell in the summer where there was less work so I didn’t really have to cancel that much each time,’ she says. Luck? Not a word that springs to mind.  But such was her desperation not to miss out again.  It was as if the music industry was becoming as much of a battleground as the hospital. 

It doesn’t seem right that an artist of such considerable talent can feel so much at the mercy of the wheels of the industry.  But of course ‘The show must go on’ and the hard fact is that for every person whose career falls down, for whatever reason, there is someone else to step into the limelight. 

Naomi Wayne, chief executive of BAPAM – the British Association for Performing Arts Medicine – has seen this problem time and again.  ‘Performers are terrified their career will be halted because of their problem, if the industry finds out.  Often people will play through the pain to keep their injuries a secret.’ 

It is understandable – a musician’s life revolves around a career completely bound up with their identity and they want nothing to put that at risk.  Wayne has frequently seen players create a unique technique so that they can literally play around the problem, something which Fialkowska has also done to an extent, moving her body around to help her arms.  To a degree this is of course a sensible solution, but Wayne is convinced that the impact of this can cause many more serious problems. To that end BAPAM has a team of doctors and specialists including leading orthopedic surgeons, physiotherapists and rheumatologists as well as a team who hope to redress the lack of health education specific to performing artists.

Of Fialkowska’s lung operations she says pragmatically: ‘I just didn’t want to miss out on concerts.’  After the last operation in 2007 she performed the Chopin E Minor just 6 weeks later.

Fialkowska is not unrealistic.  She thinks it was ‘predictable’ that things were tough, but she is frank when she describes the industry as ‘cold and calculating’ and wishes it was not so.  ‘I wish there were a few more idealists in the administrative side of the music business,’ she says.  ‘[These days] it really is much more of a business and much less an artistic idealistic endeavour.’

On top of the emotional difficulties the threat of financial ruin is a serious pressure on those who suffer a set back in their career.  In Fialkowska’s case – with six operations including the biopsy and two years out of work, as well as Harry having a whole year out of work to be with her – the costs before US health care reforms were extortionate.  If she hadn’t just inherited some money after her mother died, she believes she would have lost her home.

David Sulkin, Chief Executive of the Musicians Benevolent Fund is no stranger to musicians facing difficulties in their careers.  ‘There is no finger of blame here,’ he says with reference to Fialkowska.  ‘But I think the profession itself doesn’t really reflect on what it does to its performers.  [I think] the industry could be helped to be much more thoughtful about the way it behaves.  She might expect some loyalty from the administrative side of the industry.  The fact was she was suddenly untouchable when she actually needed support, love and respect.  You’re either earning and making money for your agent or you’re not.  It’s very cruel.’

Unknown to Fialkowska her situation is exactly the sort that the Fund could have helped.  It gives out approximately £2.5 million each year to musicians facing all sorts of problems, from young players, to those with career difficulties, right up to pensioners in need of help with housing.

Fialkowska happily describes herself as from the old school in the way she plays and in the way she thinks.  ‘I strongly believe that classical music was never meant to be a money-making business.  There is something wrong about that whole concept.’  She cites Rubinstein who famously never asked for a fee greater than what could be taken at the box office and who, even up to his last tour of England was playing in smaller towns such as Farnborough and Huddersfield.

‘There’s a terrible attitude now. People go and see concerts, they don’t go and hear them.  It’s different.  I really believe it’s changed that much.  There is now so much emphasis on marketing and publicity and that is something I truly had no knowledge of.  Luckily Harry did and does.’ 

Fialkowska started her career in the ‘Rubinstein age’ – she inherited his managers, the Hurok Company, many of whom started their careers in the early 20th Century – and mockingly describes herself as ‘a dinosaur’.  Although she was completely off work for only two years, her illness represents a watershed.  “Either I want to play or I don’t,” she admits.  To that end she has hired an independent PR agent to publicise her UK dates.  The very thought is clearly still alien to her; ‘If someone had suggested to Rubinstein forty years ago that he needed a publicist he would have laughed in their face.  But these days it’s necessary.  That’s been a big eye opener.’

Fialkowska is still on the look-out for a European agent. Having started her career with agents falling into her lap it’s not so easy now as a middle aged woman in the middle of her career.  It’s something which is understandably a little hard to swallow.  ‘What is difficult is that by now I would have thought it would no longer be necessary – that it would all be automatic.’

The thing which keeps her going of course, is music itself. ‘There will always be musicians who are musicians out of love of music and there will always be a core audience that will love to come to concerts for the music and for no other reason - that I’m convinced of.  It makes me more determined than ever to keep on playing.’

Last month Fialkowksa was given the all clear, and she’s now celebrating three years of being cancer-free.  Until then she has really been living day by day, waiting for the tests every few months and knowing that while she continued to build up her career, the whole thing could come crashing down at any moment, again.  ‘There was always the thought – what if they find something?  But now my next appointment is nearly a year away I know everything is going to be ok.  I am looking into the future for the very first time.’

There is much to look forward to.  She has 50 concerts scheduled for 2010 including a welcome return to the UK and the world premiere of a Chopin-inspired piano concerto Prelude Variations written for her by John Burge.  Her double-album of Chopin etudes & sonatas will be re-released in June and she has plans to make a disc of lesser-known Liszt pieces next year.

Her current release Chopin Recital (ATMA Classique) reached No.1 on Amazon’s best-seller list over Easter and has had rave reviews.  Amid a predictable sea of Chopin anniversary releases, hers has been described as ‘without doubt one of the most beautiful contributions’ (Frank Siebert, FonoForum Germany) with ‘nothing more enjoyable or recommendable’ (Andrew Clark, Financial Times).  ‘Wrap your ears around the real thing,’ Norman Lebrecht said.

While things have been quite impossibly tough for her, and remain unfairly so at times, Fialkowska’s refusal to give up in the face of adversity is inspiring.  She is feted for her warm, intimate playing, eschewing unnecessary theatrics.  Similarly she speaks in a quiet and self-effacing way, brushing off difficulties.  Underneath it though, there is iron strength. ‘In these tremendous life and death situations you suddenly realise what you are capable of and what you are not capable of.  The most important thing is once you know all about yourself, go on and think about other people – thinking about other people, like Harry, is really what got me through it.’

Despite remaining in pain 80% of the time she repeatedly astounds her doctors as her arm continues to improve, some six years on.  ‘I was told that it would plateau after two years but I am playing pieces this year that I absolutely couldn’t play, even three years ago.  In a way the difficulties of the comeback have been beneficial to me.  If it had come too quickly I wouldn’t have been able to do it and I could have injured my arm again.’

Throughout her life Chopin has been at the heart of her work and soul and it is fitting that his anniversary has coincided with her, full return to the stage.  She says simply, ‘The day that I realised I could play Chopin again was one of the happiest days of my life.’

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BBC Music Magazine
January 2008

Written by Michael Church.  Photography by Nina Large

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BBC Music Magazine
August 2009

After the success of last summer’s BBC TV series Maestro, even Granny might be able to name one drum and bass artist.  Back in August, Goldie and his trademark gold teeth took to our screens to learn to conduct and to battle it out against seven other celebrities.  Despite his punchy, powerful final performance of Beethoven’s Fifth, Goldie came second (comedian Sue Perkins waving the winning baton) but the experience has given him the taste for more.  So this summer he’s back – not on the podium, but as the composer of a Proms commission and the subject of a two-part documentary on BBC One charting his composing journey.

Is this a serious undertaking, or an exercise in popular entertainment, I ask him?  Not one to mince his words, Goldie makes it clear he means business.  ‘People may have expected me to make a token drum and bass (D&B) record with an orchestra playing on top of it,’ he tells us, ‘but I might as well have stabbed myself in the neck.’

There’s a snag though.  Despite being a major D&B pioneer, Goldie can’t read or notate music.  Composing for a full symphony orchestra will require a new approach…plus some help from a few friends.  Led by Ivor Setterfield, Goldie’s conducting mentor from Maestro, various expert teachers are using a variety of techniques including getting Goldie to sing in a dictaphone and recording and mixing ideas. On one day the whole orchestra was assembled to show Goldie the palette of instruments as his disposal.

‘At first I was daunted by it,’ he admits.  ‘In my D&B world I have blocks of text and colours – like bubbles of sound - but this is different because these bubbles have notes inside them and you have to make them work together.  People in my world know my language.  Ivor knows it now; one look and he knows what I am asking for.  I couldn’t do it without these guys.”

Composer Anna Meredith, who wrote a work for last year’s Last Night suggested one of her own compositional techniques - making a visual map of the work. Goldie liked the idea and it provided the same anchorage that a score might for a traditional composer.  Goldie’s ‘score’ is several metres long, and shows the piece’s structure and orchestration, with symbols and colours.

With a collaboration that involves so many different people, the question arises:  when does the work stop being Goldie’s alone?  Setterfield treads carefully: “The trouble is if it sounds very good, people will say he didn’t write it, No, he couldn’t physically put the notes down on the page, but if he is saying”I want a lower note” and then sings the note – well then he is the composer.’

Key to the whole process has been the notation software Sibelius, which enables a composr to hear what he’s written by arranging it into an orchestral score.  What would classical purists make of that?  ‘Do you think for one second that if Beethoven had Sibelius he would write everything down?’ suggests Goldie.  In the electronic world, music can be created in a moment – it’s this immediacy that Goldie believes has driven the genre so far forward – and the instant results that Sibelius offers are something he thinks classical music needs.  ‘I find it tragic that there are so many young composers writing all this music and they never get to hear it,’ he says.  ‘If the classical world is going to change then we need something like a regular Friday night concert programme where you get all the new composers in the land and just hear new pieces of music.’

Bringing his work to life with the orchestration has been a highlight for Goldie, who describes it as ‘alchemy’.  There’s a sense of ambition realised.  Since being introduced to the works of Gorecki several years ago, he claims that orchestral music has been a part of his psyche and the rhythmic strength and repetition of US minimalism has become a favourite - Goldie pays homage to John Adams’ Common Tones in Simple Time in part of his new piece.

You get the feeling that on some level Goldie feels his own music has been misunderstood.  When he took his seminal album, Timeless, to America, they didn’t know which radio station to play it on and he describes the track ‘Sea of Tears’ as having ‘an orchestra wanting to get out’.  His following album included one track, ‘Mother’, which is a full hour long – a concept that the electronic world couldn’t get its head around.  ‘If I’d been given the freedom, or if it had come from Philip Glass or Steve Reich maybe people would have said ‘this is fantastic, let’s expand the idea!”’

He may have had his moments but Goldie insists he isn’t nervous about the premiere – and the last thing he wants to do is conduct it.  “No way! I couldn’t spend nine months doing it and then f*** it up on stage! Not having to conduct means I can concentrate on creating the music.  I’m so happy.  People are gonna hear it and they’re gonna want to hear it again and again.’

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BBC Music Magazine
August 2007

With all the talent in the highest echelons of the musical firmament you wouldn’t expect there to be any competition at the talentless end of the musical rainbow.  But that’s what’s happening up in Edinburgh ever since the invasion of The Really Terrible Orchestra.  The band of hopeless players has become so popular that they are having to stop recruiting new members of what amounts to title more than a group of musical illiterates.

All this awfulness began 12 years ago as a parents revenge.  So fed up with their constant ferrying of talented children to and from music lessons, choirs, rehearsals and concerts, a group of parents decided to start up some music making of their own.  The fact that they hadn’t touched an instrument in decades, and could only read music if it didn’t stray into the leger lines did not to deter them.  ‘Had any of us been sufficiently good at music we probably would have found our way into a proper orchestra,’ says founder member Peter Stevenson. ‘But we thought, just because we are severely damaged musically, does that mean we aren’t allowed to play music?’

So they enlisted the help of their children’s choirmaster, the conductor Richard Neville-Towle.  These days he spends much of his time conducting the leading Scottish ensemble Ludus Baroque, but even then he wasn’t convinced there was much merit to their plan: ‘I really didn’t want to do it.  The idea is to make music beautifully and that clearly wasn’t going to be possible with them.’  The first gathering included the writer Alexander McCall Smith and his wife Elizabeth, whose musical children had foxed them.  It turned out to be such good fun that they made it a regular meeting.  The Really Terrible Orchestra was born. 

Soon doctors, lawyers, bankers, and teachers around the city were dusting off instruments from the attic and to join. ‘There was a sheer delight in playing music with other people when by rights one should not be entitled to, not having the musicianship to justify it,’ says McCall Smith, who owns over 30 different wind instruments but can barely play any of them.  Since auditions were not appropriate there was never going to be any balance in the orchestra - whatever instrument you played was welcome.  ‘If I decided that I was giving up the piano and going to come in one day with an accordion, I could still sit somewhere and have a go,’ says the RTO pianist Margaret Anderson, a retired GP.  The RTO now has 60 squawkers and Stevenson regrets turning away ten Terribles each month.

In the tradition of all esteemed conductors the players bestowed an honorary knighthood on their own leader, Neville-Towle.  Sir Richard, as he is affectionately known, is key to their ‘success’.  His sharp banter keeps everyone entertained and negotiates the fine line between nurturing the little skill they have, and letting them all enjoy the experience.  ‘I’m not here to create anything beautiful.  My job is to make it fun for the players,’ he says, adding wryly, ‘If you put pressure on them they get completely flustered and play even worse, so getting them to do something again is counter-productive.’

You only have to witness them in rehearsal to hear what a job he has on hiw hands.  Tempos are decided by what they can play, not by the music: as Neville-Towle adds admits, ‘the score is merely a guide, it is by no means something we strictly adhere to.’

‘We’ve had other very good guest conductors, but the serious ones don’t work quite so well because they do get frustrated.  We are indeed very frustrating,’ says Susie Stevenson, percussionist and wife of the chairman Peter.  McCall Smith, for example, refuses to play anything which has a C-sharp in it, and it is not uncommon for members of the orchestra to be playing completely the wrong piece without noticing.  Ever resourceful however, the orchestra have developed a system where players can sub-contract tricky bars to others in their section.

‘Sir Richard’s capacity to get into the brains of people of our limited talent and treat us the way we want to be treated is very skilful,’ says Peter Stevenson.  There is, however, a serious point lurking behind the chairman’s words.  ‘I don’t want to be humiliated and upset by being given music I can’t play,’ he says.  ‘The problem with amateur groups is they often play music that is too difficult for them.  The good amateur would like you to believe that you want to go and hear them for the pleasure of hearing music played well, but the trouble is they are offering a poor man’s version of a professional orchestra and it will inevitably be inferior.’  The RTO on the other hand makes no such pretension: ‘We can say that the RTO is simply the leading orchestra of its genre in the world.’

Finding the right music for the group has often been tricky but it’s not for lack of offers: eight different composers have been compelled to write works for the group, with varying success.  “Competence is not a word in out vocabulary.  If the music is too hard for us, we will just sulk,’ says Winnie Wood, maths teacher and RTO bassoonist.  Composer and bandmaster, the late Douglas Mackay understood the group best, arranging huge swathes of music which forms RTO’s core repertoire.  Concerts might include ‘Winter Wonderland’, Strauss’s Pizzicato Polka, and a favourite is the 1812 Overture (or the last 43 bars of it).  Mackay’s own composition Mma Ramotswe written after McCall Smith’s literary heroine, is another signature piece.

McCall Smith admits that an orchestra would make a brilliant place to set a book and though he hasn’t yet been tempted, another of his heroines, Isabel Dalhousie, has been to an RTO concert in one of her books.

The concerts are major events in the Edinburgh calendar.  They sell out in days and perform to packed houses.  Crucially, all concerts are preceded by a free wine reception in which audience members are encouraged to drink as much as they can to numb the ears.

The sheer obstinacy of the players pays dividends in various ways, not least that they somehow manage to secure concert venues which would be the envy of many professional ensembles.  Early concert highlights included the Village Hall in Pittenweem, but the group have since gone on to glory at The Queen’s Hall and Usher Hall in Edinburgh, and most recently Edinburgh Castle, where they miraculously managed to navigate the red tape of both Historic Scotland and the army in order to stage the event.  Only 60 audience members were allowed in to the Great Hall and, to top it off, the RTO managed to convince major general Euan Loudon, the former general officer of the commanding division and now chief executive and producer of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, to take the lead role as soloist in Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘I am the very model of a modern Major General’ – complete with a wry, new text.  Two Pipers in full battle dress of the Regiment of Scotland also joined them (looking bemused) for the orchestra’s version of ‘Highland Cathedral’.

Ten years on and with increasing press coverage, they are probably the best -known bad orchestra in the world. ‘We love all this press because it makes us feel more important than we really are,’ quips one player.  ‘I’ve got some friends who are accomplished musicians and they are always amazed that we get more exposure than we do,’ says clarinettist Christine McKechnie.  Their notoriety owes much to McCall-Smith, whose own fame has been great since the publication of his loveable No. 1 Private Ladies’ Detective Agency stories.  During book tours he often talks of the RTO and this had led their CD to be broadcast on Radio CBC in Canada, ABC Radio in Australia and even the USA’s National Public Radio as part of McCall Smith interviews.  Fan mail has come in from all corners.  ‘In the US they find it funny and odd.  Out there you don’t do anything to lose – the idea is that you should be a winner so the RTO is what they would describe as an orchestra of losers.’  McCall Smith prefers to describe the ensemble as ‘an orchestral Eddie the Eagle.’

You could think that the total breakdown of their performance of Mackay’s ‘All at Sea’ was a kind of staged theatrics, but you couldn’t invent the look of terror on most of the player’s faces.  ‘Even if the sound did one day become better,’ McCall Smith muses, ‘we would still be a great study in concentration.’  Of course when things do go wrong the audience is delighted and Neville-Towle is quick to capitalise on it.  ‘We know that if things go wrong we can make a joke of it and everyone loves that.  You can twist the event from something that could be dull to being something that is a hoot to watch.’

However despite all the tongue-in-cheek joking this isn’t an orchestra playing for laughs.  In work and home one has to be together’: there is no time for messing up when only the best will do.  The RTO provides a haven where slipping up is the norm and where mistakes are given an encouraging pat on the back.  ‘It’s very liberating to be allowed to do something badly, but still enjoy doing it,’ says McCall Smith.  The real humour of the RTO comes from the face that these people, often from Edinburgh’s highest professional and academic circles, are trying their hardest to get it right…but almost never do.  And that’s strangely comforting…

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The Times
18th February 2005

“There is never a dull atmosphere here. It sparks,” Valery Gergiev says with a somewhat tired but friendly smile. It may be 1am at the Maryinsky Theatre in St Petersburg but the day’s work is still very much in progress - staff are buzzing all around and meetings are taking place as if it were a normal Tuesday afternoon.

Gergiev is now 51, but he was just 25 when he started conducting performances at the Maryinsky, or Kirov, as it was then known. He was appointed artistic and general director in 1996. Since then he has become something of a national hero, propelling the company back into the limelight - it performs several concerts at the Barbican in London next week - that had been occupied by the Bolshoi Opera in Moscow for years.

His decisions have not always been greeted with delight, but colleagues attest that however hard he pushes others, he pushes himself harder. It’s undoubtedly his strongly focused vision that has steered the company to such success. He is quite simply the oxygen of the Maryinsky. A frenzy of activity is whipped up as he blazes around the house - never without a bevy of people at his heels, each one needing a moment with “Maestro”. It’s hard to imagine how he fits in the Rotterdam Philharmonic (where he’s principal conductor) and the Metropolitan Opera in New York (principal guest conductor).

When you sit in the Maryinsky auditorium, resplendent in its deep-blue velvet and gold, it’s overwhelming to think of all the musical battles won and lost on this stage. Verdi composed La Forza del Destino for the house in 1862 and the first Russian school of opera effectively began here with Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar in 1836. Then there were countless premieres from Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Stravinsky (who was born just across the street).

Gergiev has championed the work of many of these artists, particularly his fellow Russians, with insatiable curiosity. In 1989, shortly after his appointment as artistic director, he staged a Mussorgsky festival featuring all the composer’s operas. Similar events followed that reached into the furthest corners of Prokofiev and Rimsky-Korsakov’s work.  “Only a handful of Russian operas, maybe Onegin, Queen of Spades, more recently War and Peace, are really famous. But there are so many other great operas which people need to know about,” he insists.

Thanks to the Maryinsky’s worldwide tours, audiences from La Scala to the Edinburgh Festival have also had the chance to discover some of these rarities. Back in 1995 Gergiev took a semi-staged production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh to the Barbican. It was still the early years of Gergiev’s reign, the Soviet regime wasn’t long gone and the Russian economy was in crisis. “It was a huge deal for us,” he recalls. “Big emotion, big importance, big effort and big logistical problems - but it, worked somehow.”

With financial support from organisations such as the London-based Maryinsky Theatre Trust the company’s fortunes have certainly changed, but if you missed Kitezh back then you have the chance to see it again when the Barbican celebrates the tenth anniversary of that first visit with three concert performances including Kitezh, Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Les Noces, plus Shostakovich’s The Nose.

“There is something about Kitezh which is even more Russian than other operas: the colour and sound of the chorus, the Russian text itself - there is a certain sadness, a mystical power which I adore,” he says.  The Nose, Shostakovich’s scarcely performed first opera was condemned by one critic as “an anarchist’s hand grenade” after its premiere at the Maryinsky in 1930, but Gergiev is confident that even the most experienced London listeners will be enlivened by these works. Just as English troupes have a certain way with Britten or Purcell, it is a thrilling experience to see Gergiev and his company performing their native repertoire.

“Everyone who sings these works really understands what they mean. It’s not just about the tempo or the rhythm - some words are even difficult to translate and yet we feel a lot about them and so the right character comes out.”

Young talent has become an increasing priority for Gergiev in recent years as his founding of the Maryinsky Academy of Young Singers, run by his sister Larissa, and the Youth Orchestra attest. “So many young people disappear before they even begin to fulfil their potential, so I really like to do it. It’s a process full of joy but of course you can sometimes be very disappointed when someone doesn’t develop into what you expected.”

He is also investing in the Maryinsky’s future with the building of two new spaces another opera and ballet auditorium to be known as Maryinsky II and a new concert hall, Maryinsky III, due to open in 2008. The extension will be built just opposite the original theatre on the other side of the Kryukov canal. It will be a vast geometric casing of gold-coloured glass and steel, reflecting 21st century progressive Russia, with a bridge linking it to the imperial past.

Gergiev’s devotion to his country was highlighted recently by his work with the children of Beslan after last year’s terrorist attack on a school, and a fund-raising concert at the Coliseum in London. Brought up in Ossetia himself, he clearly felt the atrocity acutely, and is not keen to talk much about it. “I acted simply. Today too much is said about projects, roles and plans. When it comes to a tragedy of this size people shouldn’t talk; they should just do. I would much rather be anonymous and help but it’s very hard in the short term.”

As he considers the past decade Gergiev’s face draws into a frown of concentration, his remarkable energy boils and bubbles intensely just beneath the surface.  “I love the balance of the theatre and its history, the city and its history and the country and its history - all those complexities. It just works,” he says. “Perhaps that’s why we can understand so many of these Russian operas better than others.”

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The Times
23rd March 2007

As far as instruments go, the saxophone has had a rough time of it outside the jazz club.  Not long ago no shopping centre was complete without that never-ending desperate saxophone Muzak.  Then there was the overblown, stone-washed schmaltz that the Eighties loved to wallow in.  But then there is the 34-year-old saxophonist and composer Christian Forshaw.

Forshaw was trained, and still describes himself, as a classical saxophonist.  He now heads the saxophone department at the Guildhall School of Music.  “But I knew I wanted to do something different,” he says.

“I wanted to create an environment where I could take the kind of music and playing that was personal to me and explore something new.”  His records collection was heaving with what he describes as “intense music”, including Mahler, Radiohead and Joni Mitchell.  At the other end of the spectrum his days as a choirboy in his home town of Knaresborough, North Yorkshire, also echoed in his mind.

Forshaw began arranging hymns and playing his saxophone in churches, where he explored a blend of church organ, saxophone and vocals. The result was his first, self-recorded, self-produced album, Sanctuary.  It included Forshaw’s arrangement of Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence, a 17th-century carol.  The track was picked up by Classic FM and Radio 3’s Late Junction, and the disc has now sold 8,000 copies: an unprecedented success for an unpromoted classical release.

More than that, Mortal Flesh was performed at the funeral of one of the London bombing victims.  The mother of the woman who died was the Rev Julie Nicholson, the vicar who said that she couldn’t forgive her daughter’s killers and resigned her mission.  Forshaw’s music became a consolation to her.  On another occasion a woman told him that her mother, dying of cancer, had asked for Sanctuary to be played over and over again in her final hours.

It wasn’t long before Sony offered Forshaw an exclusive four-album deal.  Every musician’s dream?  Not for Forshaw, as he worked on his second album, now entitled Renouncement.  “They wanted easy listening.  But the hymns and songs that I have arranged are so perfect and fragile in their original forms that they take longer than anything else to get right.  They aren’t the kind of thing that I can churn out to order.”

He told Sony about the woman who had died of cancer.  “One of the executives wrote down, ‘Explore funeral market’,” he recounts deadpan.  “It was a rather pathetic recognition of how shallow the whole world was.”

After months of waiting he has reacquired the rights to Renouncement and set up his own record label, Integra, to release it.  It was s simple decision:  “Everything I create I want to be 100 percent happy with, so I have to be in control.”

So do Sanctuary and Renouncement, replete with hymns and a celestial soprano, offer otherworldly consolation?  “The world and the things we go through are so far from perfection, and often so painful, that you almost can’t bear it.  There is an element of that in my music.  But the fact that it can connect with people sometimes, maybe that is perfect.”

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