The Times
3rd August 2004

For the past six summers the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra - set up specifically for young Arabs and Israelis - has been leading something of a revolution. In playing together these young people have suddenly done the impossible - they have shared something positive with people who back at home are their enemies in war.

“Through the playing you share so many things with these people, and then your relations with them change for ever,” says Maria Arnaout, a Syrian violinist. Israeli violinist Daniel Cohen agrees: “A person growing up in Israel, with all his good intentions, would never have met a person his age that grew up in Ramallah.  The people on the other side are just an abstract notion. Now, when you talk about the conflict you automatically see a face.”

The orchestra was set up in 1999 by Daniel Barenboim and his great Palestinian friend, the late Edward Said.

This was, no mean feat. A few years back some of the Arab authorities were less than pleased with the idea that their citizens might be “normalising relations” with Israelis, but today, as Barenboim says, “They recognise that it can be beneficial to their own musical life so they almost turn a blind eye - at least they put sunglasses on.”

Each year the 80-strong orchestra meets in Seville, with its own history of peaceful co-existence between Jews and Muslims, for a month-long workshop before going on tour (they’re at the Barbican in London tomorrow). But while music is the linchpin around which everything revolves, it leads to something arguably more significant.

When the orchestra starts to play there is an intense energy which utterly absorbs anyone lucky enough to witness it. For Barenboim it only goes to underline what he has always believed: “Here, I realise on a daily basis what music actually is, and what it can mean for the human being. What we learn is that everything has to be integrated because whatever you say or whatever you play influences something else, the harmony, the balance, the tempo. And this is what our lives are about.”

Some students are sceptical on arrival and take time to open up to the others, and there are certainly difficult moments. Though Said was sorely missed this year, discussions remain an important element of the workshop and one evening the documentary Route 181 was presented by its two directors (an Arab and an Israeli).

An emotional debate ensued when several Israelis walked out, protesting at what they felt was unfair representation. Many questioned whether it was appropriate to show the film at all. But Arnaout, like Barenboim and many others, firmly believed it had been a good thing. “We don’t come here to pretend that there is no problem,” she said. “When we play I don’t want to feel that it is just a gloss.”

Despite having left the film, Cohen agreed: “You cannot really discuss these things without getting upset. They are about people who you love who are dead. But I am glad I saw some of it. Out of a potentially disastrous situation came something really wonderful.”

There is a genuine belief that this workshop makes a difference; to their lives, to their music and to the way they see the conflict. “Music opens our hearts,” says Palestinian violinist Tyme Khleifi. “When you see that everybody can do the same thing as you, that there is no difference between us. It’s like magic. You start to look positively at everything and try to understand things. You can start to connect, to heal maybe.”

Evenings seemed to last as long as days and the hot Spanish nights were never without the echo of animated chatting, a lot of laughing, and endless music. Instruments rarely appeared to be put away, whether jamming on the daraboka (an Arabian drum like the tabla) and violin or improvising Buena Vista-style jazz on piano and flute, impromptu chamber music sessions or picking out film tunes.

With so many engaging characters it is perhaps surprising that there aren’t many couples, at least not openly. But Arnaout reminds herself of the facts and admits that even if the chance presented itself she would be likely to hold herself back: “I don’t know if it would really work with the background of all the pain. But we have to think that it’s a good thing that we are even getting to be friends with each other.”

One Israeli-Arab boy who fell for an Arab girl one year told me how things became difficult because, although an Arab, he lived in Israel. After a few months the girl’s parents put pressure on her to end it and he had to agree that without leaving her country it couldn’t really have a future.

If the war has a dehumanising effect then this workshop certainly helps to reverse it. As Cohen says: “When you are here you believe it. And when you go, you have to somehow take it back with you.”

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Classical Music Magazine
21st June 2003

Tucked away from the incessant pace of Fleet Street, some of London’s finest lawyers work in the private haven of Inner and Middle Temple, a maze of cobbled alleyways leading from one magnificent building to another around the Inns of Court. At the heart of the enclave lies the 800-year-old Temple Church, one of London’s most beautiful and all the more so for its secrecy. But this June word will be out when the building hosts one of the most ambitious choral projects ever staged: an all-night vigil lasting from dusk until dawn, composed by Sir John Tavener.

The first I heard of this monumental idea was 18 months ago when Stephen Layton, organist and director of music at the Temple, casually mentioned that a new work was being written for the Temple Church, to be performed by the Holst Singers and the men and boys of the Temple Church Choir and entitled The Veil of the Temple. Moreover, it was to be the longest choral work ever written, sung by 150 people throughout the night as one continuous candle-lit vigil, complete with Tibetan horns, bells and incense imported from a Greek monastery on Mount Athos.

The reaction was one of awed bemusement. But it did not take long before Tavener ring tones could be heard on some of the choristers’ mobile phones (a sure sign of allegiance) and Layton held everyone’s attention by peppering otherwise unrelated rehearsals with hot-off-the-press pianistic snippets of the great work to come.

Music of this length and proportion requires some serious organisation. Layton duly commissioned a complex Microsoft Access database into which he has entered every detail of the work, the number of bars in each section, corresponding number of parts, time at which each part will be sung, position in the church and so on. It has been a serious labour of love and taken hundreds of hours to produce, but each singer now has a personal schedule ‘so that they can all move from a to b and still go to the 100.’ Resting and eating times are also scheduled, to the relief of the participants, and call times are given to the minute.

In February this year everyone involved was introduced to the fearsome database first hand when they gathered for a workshop with Layton and Tavener himself, which certainly gave them a real sense of what lay ahead. ‘One objective of this day was to get the singers really to believe it was worth doing and get their enthusiasm. It also gave both John Tavener and me the chance to work on it first hand,’ Layton says.

Taking part as a member of the choir, official photographer for the event and author of this feature gave me a good appreciation of the Veil’s multiple dynamics. The work is very much conceived for the space of the Temple and its unique acoustics, and the workshop allowed some useful discoveries. Layton has taken Tavener’s original positions as starting points to spread the sound right around the building - voices in the 12th-century round church blend with those from the triforium high up above, small choirs dotted about the chancel, chanting as singers move down the aisle and so on. Such free rein is testament to the tremendous trust between the two men.

‘In a way it is a closer collaboration than I have had in the past,’ admits Tavener. ‘Stephen is very musical and has a remarkable grasp of the work.’ Piles of letters dating back to February 2002 show how thoughts and ideas have developed between them, including discussion over which passages might best become one of the 12 or so anthems to be extracted from the Veil for separate publication (something implicit in the commission).

Unusually for Tavener the texts cover many religious perspectives, starting with the most recent revelation of God in the world of Islam and ending with the most ancient, Hinduism, while Christianity, in particular Christ’s ascension, provides the main thrust.

The work has eight cycles, which grow ever more layered and complex as they progress through the night. The eighth includes the Upanishad Hymn, Tavener’s answer to Parry’s Jerusalem – a massive, chorale-like outburst with Hindu chanting, timpani, brass and the full gamut of singers. From start to finish basic musical cells are not so much developed as expanded in a manner not dissimilar to Indian Ragas, and the composer points out the severe mathematical construction which underpins it all since with a work this size he insists, ‘it can’t just be an outpouring’.

The Veil is subtitled A journey to the centre: just as the darkness outside will turn to the first light of dawn, so Tavener hopes the listeners’ journey will take them towards the ‘realisation of self’ in the final cycle - represented symbolically by soprano Patricia Rozario (a Mary Magdalen type figure) physically unveiling herself. ‘I consider the very end to be going beyond being to the infinite,’ says Tavener. ‘The audience don’t have to experience that change cerebrally but inside themselves somehow. That’s why I feel quite strongly that they keep in touch with the sounds happening through the night.’

Mystical rhetoric aside, Tavener is not immune to some of the practicalities of such an event. Greek vigils allow a measure of moving about and Tavener is keen for his London audience to follow suit. ‘If I can lead that sort of thing, I will. They can’t just be sitting there or they’ll get thrombosis,’ he says. The second all-night performance on 4 July will also be relayed out to giant screens in the Temple Gardens where it is hoped that 2,000 people will gather to experience the event al fresco. A food village will be set up to satisfy the midnight munchies, as will lines of Portaloos, and a team of St John’s Ambulance officers will be on hand in case of any problems. To the relief of those at the Temple a separate production crew has been brought in to sort out the logistics of all of this including rigging up microphones for a BBC Radio 3 broadcast of the concert version on I July, and managing all manner of lighting effects and staging. ‘You could say it is a kind of religious music theatre,’ Layton remarks.

The sheer length of the Veil is likely to be its hardest selling point but Layton is adamant that with the right approach it will be a great experience. ‘You don’t go to an all-night vigil as a music critic,’ warns Layton. ‘You go as somebody who wants to be in tune with the spirit and with yourself That means you should judge such a thing as the Veil as a spiritual event in a church and not a piece of concert music in the concert hall - I think once you make that distinction with a lot of Tavener’s music it really comes into its own.’

Such an event and the possibility of internationally released CDs will undoubtedly raise the profile of the Temple Church, something which its organisers aim to take full advantage of. Although music has had a colourful history at the Temple and the choir has been featured on BBC TV (for the sound track to Gormenghast) and radio it has been decades since it really enjoyed really widespread recognition as it did in 1927 when the forward-thinking Temple organist Sir George Thalben-Ball captured the attention of HMV which recorded Mendelssohn’s O for the wings of a dove with Ernest Lough as treble soloist. It became one of the first great hits, and is still in the playlist now having sold over five million copies. ‘Without harking back endlessly,’ says the Reverend Robin Griffith-Jones, Master of the Temple, ‘it is viable to say that we are looking for the Ernest Lough moment for the new century.’

By courting public attention and interest both Layton and Griffith-Jones hope that an endowment might eventually be set up to ensure that music at the Temple, specifically the choir, continues to thrive. It is currently funded by the incredible generosity of the Inns themselves, which on top of looking after their church provide salaries for Layton, his assistant James Vivian and a singing teacher as well paying for the 12 Temple men, and two thirds of the school fees required to attend the City of London School for the 18 young choristers. Ideally the endowment would ensure 100% scholarships for years to come, thereby allowing any talented boy to enjoy such an education without being held back by financial disadvantage.

Layton himself was never destined for a public school education but it was this system of scholarship that sent him first to The Pilgrims’ School, as chorister in Winchester Cathedral Choir and then on to Eton. He is passionate about preserving the choral tradition and sees these choirs at the very heart of British music making:

‘We are providing something for young children here which is extremely precious. An important function for these choirs is to sing the great music that has been written by composers in this country, Purcell, Byrd, Tompkins and indeed Tavener. If those choirs with their young boys don’t continue to perform it where will the men come from who are going to sing the music in years to come?’ He provides an analogy between a Holbein painting and piece of music by Byrd, both from the same period: the Holbein is put in the National Gallery and preserved for the nation forever, but the Byrd needs more than just an air conditioned room - it needs people to perform it. ‘So we’ve got to look after the performance of this art, otherwise we could find that in 50 years’ time, if such choirs were on the wane, we wouldn’t be able to sing it. It would die and that would be a tragedy.’

While Layton is much in demand across Europe as a conductor he explains that the Temple is central to his work. ‘The work that one does with little children is like getting your knees dirty. It’s not as glamorous as conducting the John Passion at ENO but I owe it to the institutions that gave me the chance to at least spend some time in my life doing this kind of work,’ he says. ‘And I believe that without doing it we are compromising the future of British music - it’s as dramatic as that.’

The 12 anthems taken from the Veil will be a huge contribution to the British choral repertoire and will turn the Temple into the major commissioner of church choral music in the last 100 years. It is incontestable proof that now, at any rate, the choral tradition is alive and kicking.

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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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Classic FM Magazine
December 2005

If you have ever sung in a choir, the chances are you will have chirruped your way through something by John Rutter. His carols are as common as mince pies at Christmas, and with nearly 200 works in the catalogue (100 of them recorded) translated into French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Estonian, Russian, Japanese and Korean, his music
seems to get everywhere.

But when we meet at the annual convention of the Association of British Choral Directors (Rutter is vice-president) in Guildford, Surrey, at the end of August, the overwhelming impression of this prolific artist is of humility. ‘Singing has always thrilled me,’ Rutter says. ‘As a schoolchild, singing brought me more joy than anything. I was rather shy and awkward but choral singing gave me solace and confidence.’

A great deal has happened in the choral world since then. For one thing Rutter remembers the day when he was an undergraduate at Clare College, Cambridge and women were admitted into the choir. ‘Everything changed overnight! The choir went from a rather growling male voice sound to having soaring sopranos. Suddenly everything became possible.’

But back in the 1960s and 70s when 12-tone serialism was de rigueur in Europe, it was in the US that Rutter’s music was most warmly received (he subsequently married an American). ‘I feel at home in America because there is a great openness. People didn’t get too worried about “isms” over there, so I could actually write tunes and use key signatures! But things have changed in the UK too and I think there is a much healthier climate for composers now than 40 years ago.’

What makes Rutter so popular? ‘He is a brilliant communicator, in his conducting as much as his composing,’ says Sarah Beedle, one of the Guildford event’s organisers. And as he leaps about the crowd with boundless enthusiasm it’s easy to see her point. Ralph Allwood, director of music at Eton College, agrees: ‘I don’t think anybody has done what he has done for choral music. And his music is just a delight to sing - there are those searing melodies and always the kind of key changes that get you right in the gut.’

Rutter’s critics may say his music is sickly-sweet and derivative but it is an over generalisation to say all of his work is singalong stuff. The Magnificat and Te Deum are more substantial works, and the harmonic language in Hymn to the Creator of Light, for example, leans towards an almost Brittenesque richness. It is his talent for matching music to a particular occasion or group that has produced such a huge range of repertoire. To him, ‘it’s a bit like bespoke tailoring. You are trying to make a suit of clothes for somebody you have measured up to be worn at a specific event.’ He adds, with a typical mix of self-deprecation and realism: ‘It may not necessarily be a path to greatness but at least it helps in arriving at something suitable.’

And that’s the crux of the matter. Rutter has made his career out of writing practical music for children, choral societies and churches rather than going for one-off high-profile works for the concert platform. It’s the people he wants to please, not the critics. The fact is that in a world where many composers write works ‘inaccessible’ to the untrained ear, Rutter’s music goes straight to the listeners’ hearts. His Requiem, written after the death of his father, is a case in point.

‘I don’t think you should start out by trying to be a crowd pleaser, but neither of my parents were musicians so I couldn’t explain music to them in technical terms,’ he says. ‘Maybe I wanted to reach out more because of that. When I was writing the Requiem, I thought: “Why would I want to shut my own father out of this?’” The work proved so popular that it reputedly had 500 performances in the first six months of publication.

Writing the music is one thing, but for Rutter this has always been coupled with innate business savvy. ‘In effect a composer is a small business of one,’ he insists. ‘We haven’t been on a payroll since the 18th century. You have to make your own opportunities.’ He was quick to hook into the 1980s CD boom for which he specifically set up his ‘recording’ choir, the Cambridge Singers, which makes discs on the label he created for it, Collegium Records. Collegium Publishing is the sister company that (alongside Oxford University Press) has produced numerous tomes, including all his own works and anthologies of other popular choral pieces

The future holds plenty of possibilities for Rutter, who celebrated his 60th birthday in September by conducting his own concert. He has promised a cello concerto for Julian Lloyd Webber and a harp concerto for Catrin Finch, and Liverpool is keen to involve him in a ‘cast of thousands’ piece to celebrate its status as European Capital of Culture in 2008. There may even be an opera in the offing, a genre he has wanted to explore since the success of Bang! his children’s opera.

If some say Rutter’s music wears too much of a smile, it also has the ability to provoke incredible outpourings of emotion and the composer receives a huge number of letters from people all over the world thanking him for his music and telling him how it has given comfort in times of distress. ‘That’s not necessarily what music is for nor why one should write it, but it does make you feel that there is a lot to be said for being a composer,’ he reflects. ‘It is one of the greatest rewards.’

His latest album, The Gift of Music, premieres a piece of the same name. It turns out that Rutter was so moved by a letter he received from a lady whose husband was suffering from Alzheimer’s - they had sung together all their lives before he became ill - that he composed the piece for her. She had no idea until he wrote to tell her. The gift of music, indeed.

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