Music to my ears
What the classical world has been listening to this month
John Simpson BBC News world affairs editor
In the past months I’ve been revisiting Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra – it’s the first bit of classical music I can remember latching on to. I loved its clear melodic lines and that lovely dark brown voice of Malcolm Sargent doing the commentary. When I was a kid, it did seem to be written for people like me, which I felt was important. Britten had an understanding of how the younger mind works, and I’ve felt a certain amount of gratitude since.
The First World War had a profound effect on my family. I find that a lot of my interests, literary and musical, are attached to that war. Butterworth’s
The Banks of Green Willow has a gentleness that I find very affecting. I listen to it quite often and it has a very calming effect. You get a sense that Butterworth took an impression of the English countryside with him to his death at the Battle of the Somme.
I’ve got an affection and admiration for the older people who didn’t have to go and join up, but did. Ravel was one of those. His piano suite Le Tombeau de Couperin is about his friends who died in the First World War which I find profoundly moving. Its gentleness, which perhaps points to a togetherness about the men throughout their experiences, seems all the greater given that he knew what they had been through. And also… I’ve just finished reading Max Hastings’s Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive
War. I’d put this book ahead of everything he’s written to date – he reported on the whole course of the war, mostly for the BBC, and this book has the kind of insight that only being there can give you.
John Simpson co-presents episode 2 of Our Classical Century on BBC Four; see radiotimes.com for broadcast date and time
Olga Stezhko Pianist
Recently I’ve been immersed in a lot of world music. A record that sparked my interest is the Voyager Golden Record, the album sent up in the Voyager spacecraft in 1977. It’s a collection of a few dozen tracks combining western classical music with world music and sounds from across the globe. My favourite piece on there is ‘Kinds of Flowers’, which is played on the traditional gamelan and is placed in between one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and a piece of Senagalese percussion music.
I collaborated with the jazz trumpeter Byron Wallen on piano-gamelan-trumpet arrangements of some of Debussy’s pieces, and his last album,
Meeting Ground, is one I listen to a lot. He links Gnawa, which is music from North Africa, with funk, swing and dub. The title track is the perfect meeting point between contemporary music and traditional forms.
I’m Belarussian, and my identity is hugely influenced by the country’s language and its history – it’s unique, rich and largely unknown to the rest of the world.
I loved Britten’s clear melodic lines and the dark brown voice of Malcolm Sargent
When you listen to world music, you always then want to revisit the music of your own country and your own people. As a child I was taken to a folk theatre in Minsk called Gostsitsa, and now I listen to a playlist of folk music from this theatre, which has been reinterpreted.
And also… I went to the Oceania exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts three times. It explores how the people of Oceania connect the past with the present. My favourite artefact was a wooden sculpture of a deity that looked like its stripped-back geometric shape could have come from the hand of Picasso. It was a powerful reminder that we take inspiration from everything around us and from history.
Olga Stezhko’s new disc of Debussy, ‘Et la lune descend’, is out now
Zane Dalal Conductor
Whenever I’m in the UK, I make a point of attending choral evensong where I revisit and rediscover an extraordinary wealth of music. Recently I got to hear Palestrina’s
Missa Papae Marcelli and have since been enjoying the recording by the Tallis Scholars. If you are a busy musician and sometimes want to step back to ground zero, it’s ideal – it readjusts your mind, and cleanses and fills your soul.
There are some extraordinary recordings available of Rachmaninov playing his own works, including his piano concertos. One fascinating new release is that of him playing his Symphonic Dances on the piano – it’s taken from some recordings of him made at an impromptu gathering in 1940. It gives a tremendous insight into this music and a glimpse of a technique so focused and unerring from those enormous hands.
Part of my mission and passion in Mumbai is to bring the pleasures of orchestral music to a wider audience. In particular, I want to find something that can keep the millennial age-group away from their mobile devices, and get them to lie in the darkness and listen. Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony is my choice, and no performance captures it better than the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan. I’m prepared to bet that a first-time millennial listener will be forever changed, as I was, on hearing it. And also… I’ve made a hobby of reading about US Constitutional Law, the history of it and the court that is charged with upholding its virtues. Sloan and Mckean’s The Great Decision: Jefferson, Adams, Marshall and the Battle for the Supreme Court has been a good read. Engrossingly written, it traces the early happenings of US jurisprudence, the appointment of John Marshall as chief justice in the early 19th century and the monumental emergency of judicial review – it is a lesson in tactics and diplomacy.
Zane Dalal conducts the Symphony Orchestra of India on its tour of the UK, on 19, 20 and 22 February