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Doubly important
One influential practitioner of the double bass (Déja vu, July) was Paul Simon’s father, Louis. When the future pop star was growing up, Louis was a professional musician, playing double bass in nightclubs and in the studio during the taping of TV variety shows like The Garry Moore Show. Paul and his brother Eddie would stay up past bedtime and watch, in the hopes of catching a glimpse of their dad in the background. Louis grew disenchanted with the lot of a freelancer, so went back to school, eventually becoming a professor of education. He is no longer with us, but his
double bass stands in the corner of Paul Simon’s office. Paul’s path took a
different direction, but having a musician for a father was surely formative.
And, I’m wondering, how
many Simon and Garfunkel fans familiar with the song ‘Baby Driver’ realise the opening line ‘My daddy
was the family bassman’ was autobiographical? David English
Acton, MA, US
Late appreciation
I was upset to see the news of David Lloyd-jones’s recent death and the relative lack of newspaper coverage. To me, this conductor was a giant of the first order. His extraordinary work with Opera North provided tremendous and unexpected experiences in Newcastle during my formative years. Moreover, his massive array of impeccably prepared recordings of British music – the Bax and Stanford symphonies, the Alwyn, Bliss and Rawsthorne orchestral works, Vaughan Williams’s Job and the single symphonies of Moeran and Dyson – shed light on an important aspect of this country’s heritage. Like conductor Vernon Handley, he was a musician who should have been knighted.
Geoffrey James, Ponteland
Happy anniversary
Your July issue 100 Notable Proms was really informative, and as a Prommer since 1970, I remember attending several of the 100 – especially notable were David Munrow’s Early Music gig from 1970, and the stupendous 2013 Wagner Ring with Daniel Barenboim, when I drove 200 miles return four times in the week to stand through the whole experience. You did miss one significant date, however. That was
Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius on Sunday, 11 August 1974. It was at the Royal Albert Hall that day that I met someone who is now my wife and, 40 years later, on 11 August 2014, the RAH generously upgraded our tickets into a box, and gave us champagne in the interval to mark our 40th anniversary of meeting!
Martin Kimber, Winchcombe
Memorable Mahler
I was lucky enough to be in the Albert Hall on 10 September 1987, when Leonard Bernstein conducted the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, preceded by Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto played by Peter Schmidl. I’m obviously not alone in finding the concert memorable, as the BBC staged a ‘recreation’ of the concert on 19 August 2018, with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Thomas Dausgaard, and the clarinettist Annelien Van Wauwe. And I was lucky enough to be there again. I can’t pretend that the recreation aroused the same excitement as the original performance. But how much of that excitement was genuinely musical, and how much was generated by the ‘big names’ of the glamorous conductor and orchestra in 1987? It is not easy to say.
Donald Mackinnon, Newport
Historic moment
10 September 1987: the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. His Prom debut and symbolically important – an orchestra that dismissed its Jewish players because of the Anschluss with Nazi Germany in 1938 and banned Mahler’s music until 1945 now, 42 years later, playing music by a Jewish composer under a Jewish conductor. It was great to hear the rebroadcast of this Prom on Radio 3 during the archive season in 2020. An unforgettable performance. Raphael Gee, via email
Wistful Sargent
I’m glad that you acknowledged the important role of Sir Malcolm Sargent in your 100 Notable BBC Proms feature, in particular his 70th-birthday concert. I was present at that concert and especially remember his impassioned conducting of Elgar’s Second Symphony. Sargent’s reputation seems to have suffered since his death, but the touch of glitz and glamour that he brought to the Proms was just what was needed in the drab immediate post-war decades. He and the BBC Symphony Orchestra got through a huge amount of music, albeit not always harmoniously, when they were the principal orchestra in the series. By 1965, however, he was starting to seem like a figure from the past. In his programme notes for the symphony, he wrote of Elgar, ‘He lived in an age when dignity of behaviour, nobility of character, love of one’s country etc., were qualities accepted as being admirable. And there is something to be said for this. Their opposites are not so attractive.’ Despite his optimistic view of the symphony, Sargent’s words now seem wistful and sad. My most vivid Proms memory, however, is not of Sargent but is from August 1967 and involves the BBCSO under Barbirolli in an extraordinarily intense account of Beethoven’s ‘ Eroica’ Symphony. Your feature evoked good memories of happier times. Thank you. Peter Phillips, Swansea The editor replies:
Many thanks to our readers for sharing your memories of BBC Proms past – we thoroughly enjoyed stirring a few of them up. Hopefully, the 2022 season is currently providing many more.
A minor mistake
Piano Concerto No. 23 in A minor (Leif Ove Andsnes interview, August)? I don’t think so. The Concerto is in A major, Mozart’s warmest key. Casting the Andante in F sharp minor was startling enough. Christopher Morley, Halesowen
Star quality
For many years, most of your reviews of new recordings have had two star grades attached, for quality of the performance and quality of the recording. But two things have changed over the years that suggest a possible change: the introduction of e-editing techniques, which can render nearly all recordings more than adequate, and the increasing prominence of new music and compositions from composers whose work has been almost entirely forgotten. Perhaps it is time to keep the rating for quality of the performance but to replace quality of the recording by quality of the music? Presumably, very few of your readers need to be sold on the merits of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, but Santoro, Jolivet and Leclair might be a different story. Thus a potential purchaser or listener could appreciate more guidance on whether a given disc is worth the price or the time.
Virginia Trimble,
Irvine, CA, US
Listen carefully
Your August issue contained a number of references to people who listen to classical music while studying or reading, as well as one alleged music-lover preferring to listen in his car. Surely one of the essential requirements for the enjoyment of classical music, in whatever format, is for an audience to listen to the performance, rather than just hear it in the background. By all means enjoy Haydn while studying, working or eating, but do not imagine that you are listening to him: you are simply hearing Haydn.
Graham Evans,
St Leonards-on-sea