brisbane hate

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Ivan Turgenev I learned, a little late, that today is the bicentenary of one of the writers I love best: Ivan Turgenev. (Some give the date as '9 November new style', though; take your pick.) He's perhaps the quieter, undersung hero of Russian literature, sometimes submerged under the tidal waves of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky and the rest. Yet to encounter his novella First Love is to find a work so perfect that it encapsulates an ideal story structure before anyone thought there was any such thing, and - perhaps more importantly - there is not one spare paragraph in it. I once attempted to abridge it for reading with music and it simply couldn't be done. Remove any tiny element and the edifice is wrecked. Ballet-lovers are - as so often with rare music and literature - better informed than many of us. A Month in the Country is probably seen more often in Frederick Ashton's beautiful Chopin-filled interpretation than as Turgenev's original play, at least in th...

My Top 10 ODETTE FAQs... Q: Ooh, Odette? The World War II spy? Or Proust? J: Er, no. Swan Lake. Q: The Tchaikovsky ballet? So did you go to Russia to research it? J: Actually, the book's set in a university town in East Anglia in 2018. Q: So it's, like, real fiction? J: Well, one of the main characters turns into a swan every day, so, yep. Q: How did you get the idea? J: I had this recurring dream about looking for my Swan Lake book, and it was never there, so I thought I might write it... Q: Maybe I should get it for my 9-yr-old daughter. She's mad about ballet. J: Well, it's not really suitable for 9-yr-olds, and there's no actual ballet in it. Q: If there's no ballet, what's it about? J: Outsiders. How we treat them. How they respond to us. How we change each others' lives. How much responsibility do we have to look after other people?   Q: And it's for which age group? J: Adults, though could probably be enjoyed by the young adult market. Q: But...

I just photographed the packaging of my latest assignment While I'm writing this, I ought to be writing a CD review. Yes, my copy for BBC Music Magazine is late. Why? Because yesterday I spent so long picking and scratching and scrubbing at the plastic wrapping on the CD I have to review, trying to get the damn stuff off, that I found myself virtually shaking with rage and had to go and make a nice cup of tea to calm down, and then the phone rang, and then the plastic was still on the bloody disc, and... OK, OK, I exaggerate. In fact, my copy is late because I am still agonising over what to say about the recording's content. But I do wonder: what is the earthly use of wrapping CD boxes in clear plastic which then has to be removed and, crucially, "thrown away"? Given the state of my study bin, I can't imagine the state of CD-wrapper landfill sites. Add to that the amount of the stuff that results from a single trip to the supermarket - plastic packaging, sometime...

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Tomorrow, Saturday, in central London, the biggest anti-Brexit march ever is taking place. Starting at noon in Park Lane and ending with a rally in Parliament Square. People are coming in from all over the country to be part of it. Some friends have said to me "I'm not going because it won't make any difference and they won't listen to us...". To which I can only respond: I understand, but that is not a reason not to go. Everyone who can go needs to be there. A million+ people on the streets of central London yelling that we want to save our youngsters' futures, and our own, can't go wholly unremarked by the rest of the world - though the only people who seem not to understand how desperately dangerous the current situation is are our own government. Think about it. At present, the Northern Ireland boundary issue looks insurmountable, given the different directions the various pressure groups (DUP, 'ERG' etc) are pulling Theresa May. The chances ...

You know...when you go to the Last Night of the Proms and fall abruptly in love with a composer you know of, but don't know well, wonder where he (in this case) has been all your life, and then someone offers you a guest post by the world expert on that composer about a rare work that's he's just unearthed and edited? It is with great delight that I welcome Professor Jeremy Dibble to JDCMB with his chronicle of preparing Charles Villiers Stanford's Mass Via Victrix 1914-1918, Op.173 - the composer's personal response to the First World War - for its world premiere complete performance on 27 October. The concert will be recorded for broadcast on BBC R3 later, and a commercial recording is in the works for next year. Thank you, Professor Dibble! JD Stanford’s Mass ‘Via Victrix 1914-1918’ Op. 173  A guest post by Professor Jeremy Dibble Born in Dublin in 1852, Charles Villiers Stanford was born into a community of brilliant Anglo-Irishmen in the mid-nineteenth centur...

Today would have been my father's 90th birthday. Instead, he has been dead for over 22 years. This is his obituary, by his colleague in neuropathology, Professor Francesco Scaravilli.  My parents, Leo and Myra - very, very young. I don't think I'd be doing what I'm doing now if he hadn't personally ensured that I had such a thorough musical education. However fine your teachers at school - assuming you were lucky enough to enjoy any music tuition there at all - nothing could have replaced the steeping in matters musical that I received at home. Here, to commemorate his birthday, are the top 10 things I learned from him. 1. He and Mum didn't only march me off to piano and violin lessons: they helped me practise, and Dad in particular. I remember the torture of sitting at the back of the first violins on Sunday mornings in the Jewish Youth Orchestra (yes, really) for a term or two, trying desperately to read my way through Dvorák's Symphony No.8. It was hopele...

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Charles Owen & Katya Apekisheva. Photo: Viktor Erik Emanuel I had a whale of a time at the London Piano Festival opening last night, trying to puzzle out what makes the duo of Katya Apekisheva and Charles Owen quite so special. It's just one of those crazy things: even if there's an argument that they are such different pianists that together they have a kaleidoscopic range at their disposal, there's also something magical about the chemistry. What's more, Kings Place has a new Steinway and it sounds pretty bloody marvellous. I''ve reviewed the concert for The Arts Desk. Read the whole thing here. Can't help remembering my hideous experience on last year's opening night when I got the cough from hell in the middle of the Rachmaninov Suite No.2. Blissful breathing this time. phew. Lots more LPF to go: Konstantin Lifschitz tonight, Leszek Możdżar tomorrow, on Saturday a full afternoon and evening of Paul Roberts Debussy lecture recital, Pavel Kolesniko...

Tomorrow evening I'm doing a pre-concert talk with Franck-Emmanuel Comte, conductor of the French baroque ensemble Le Concert d'Hostel-Dieu who are performing at the Institut Français in South Kensington. Above, you can hear an extract from the concert: Heather Newhouse sings Barbara Stozzi 's L'Eraclito amoroso. Within just a few bars, the centuries collapse: every woman has been through this experience; each one of us can identify with every note. (Incidentally, in this video interpretation there is also a very wonderful cat.) Like her compatriot Monteverdi, and her teacher, Cavalli, one gains the impression that there is nothing Strozzi will stop at in her music to bring out the ultimate degree of emotional expression. The unusual thing is that here is a woman writing music about a woman's raw, impassioned, devastating experience, in the 17th century. Monteverdi and others wrote of women's lost loves, and very effectively ( try this ), but there's an edge...

Allison Cook as Salome, with placcy bag Photo: Catherine Ashmore As I slunk homewards from ENO's opening night, a friend on Twitter kindly sent me the above headline. It's from an anthology of winning entries to competitions in The New Statesman, edited by Arthur Marshall, and cheered me up somewhat. Not that ENO's Salome would have needed to worry, because there wasn't much evidence of a severed head at all: just a placcy bag that for all we know might have contained a large cauliflower. One's cynical side considers it's probably cheaper than constructing a replica head of Jokanaan. I love good reinterpretations of operas. Like science fiction or magical realism (in which I've been learning a thing or two recently), they need to create consistent worlds, to make sense within those worlds and, if stretching disbelief, make us believe one big thing by getting the small things right. The denouement has to be stunning, too, to make everyone feel they have suspe...