Take the tablet

To Cadogan Hall for the world premiere of Stephen Goss' 'interactive' Piano Concerto played by Emmanuel Despax and the Orpheus Sinfonia under Thomas Carroll. The interactive element invites the audience to view scenes illustrating Goss's score on i-pad or tablet computer, but a steward, unaware of the arrangement, admonishes the web-journalist in front who has permitted the singing cellist and me to look over his shoulder. We see sun on buildings in the first movement Fanfare, with the silver tuba beaming bright agile rays above pounding percussion, and a cityscape across water with Despax splashing jazz-inflected chords like a wading duck.  The Moto Perpetuo is enhanced by blurred images of coloured balls, its six-eight motion fired by the xylophone's hard wood chatter and the piano's feverish tinkling. The desert floats across the mini-screen in the Adagio which begins with a still, slow cadenza for the piano's ruminating chords. Four horns awaken the strings to a dawn scene on the i-pad, the latter's lulling tone to fields and skies and Despax vibratoing a finger on a key for only visual effect.  The Presto Finale sets off to a starting pistol forte less dramatic than we have been promised. The piano flies with the clarinet while fireworks appear and everyone counts like mad Carroll's darting baton. The images are nothing the imagination itself could not produce and instead of enhancing the concerto's modernism, they rather confirm its tradition, its four-movement form, its tunes, its comforting chords. Whether this really represents the entertainment of the future, when we will be surrounded by, coddled by,  bombarded by manifold sensory delights, remains to be seen.
     

Opersa without a Home

To the British Film Institute (BFI) for Streetwise Opera's The Answer to Everything. The cast of homeless people wear suits and wield briefcases as they assume the roles of delegates at a cheesy corporate conference to launch the solution to the housing crisis: an indestructible eco-friendly house brick. We the audience are also delegates wearing lanyards handed out with the tickets, borrowing neckties if we have come without and singing the action song The ten Principles of Good Business with a gesture for loading the photocopier like a martial arts move. Robert Gildon is the conference front man Steve Hedges grinning inanely like a sweaty Frank Spencer and gladhanding everyone with oleaginous bonhomie. With a range of abilities from mellifluous to tone-deaf like any random crowd, the cast sing the company song to the tune of Gounod's Soldier's Chorus. Half the performance is filmed which justifies the venue. The brick breaks and the conference disintegrates. The crowd, some toothless, becomes menacing as they enact a scene from Britten's Peter Grimes, powerfully sung by tenor David Pisaro. The show is performed with great commitment by a cast treasuring every moment. It is funny and moving and clearly worth every penny of the charitable investment which which supports the company.         

For Shakespeare's birthday, I wear the costume my mother made from her red velvet curtains. I play some lascivious pleasing music on the lute in Southwark Cathedral while Arthur Smith recites the opening lines of Richard III - Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York / And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house / In the deep bosom of the car park buried...... with a few changes to reflect the recent discovery of the last Yorkist king's skeleton beneath the letter R (for reserved) painted on the tarmac of a municipal facility in Leicester. I sing Dunstable's O Rosa Bella for the Wars of the Roses. The singing cellist sings Dowland's Away with these self-loving lads for Richard's serial doing away with members of his family, Flow my tears for the murder of the princes, Where sin sore wounding for his acknowledgement that he is up to his neck in it, and Leonard Cohen's Who by fire for Richard's death for want of a horse. I play a Vuvuzela fanfare for the start of the battle, managing three notes from the instrument which traditionally plays only one. This is now the twelfth of such celebrations for the birthday of the Bard given in the building which his company knew as St Saviour's and where they worshipped. Shakespeare, himself lived on the other side of the river. His brother Edmund, though, is buried in Southwark as is the actor Richard Burbage. Recording his funeral, the scribe wrote in the record book, 'Exit Burbage!' as a joke.   

Sacred and Profane

To Ludgate hill, to stand attendance on Margaret Thatcher's funeral procession. I am behind a man with a CND bag whom I think is going to be trouble but his girlfriend has Union Jack earrings and I am wrong. I wait an hour and a half and am only intermittently entertained by the bandsmen and women of the Royal Marines for the second time in a week as they march up the hill playing the slow movement of Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata and down with instruments silenced save for the black draped drum. The crowd is six deep when the gun carriage arrives. The pretty girls from HMS Neptune stare at the ground, their blonde buns incongruous next to the barrel of their AK 47. Many in the crowd raise an arm in what would be a fascist salute if they were not holding a digital camera. A brave girl at the back seizes her opportunity. She shouts, 'Anyone read 1984? It's a great book!' as if the departed hadn't inspired the fall of Communism. The political ignorance of the young is astounding. She changes tack. 'Ugh, yuck, yuck, yucky people! Ugh, yuck!' she calls to the sombre mounted militia accompanying the corpse and observing 'Ugh yuck, he's got a tiger skin!' of the drummer, excited to spot a cause she knows about. The coffin enters the cathedral and I find a pub with the telly on. Some customers chat, but most come in to watch the obsequies. In a most extraordinary meeting of sacred and profane, I drink a pint of Guinness during anthems by Purcell, Brahms and Faure, the hymns To be a pilgrim, Love Divine and I vow to thee my country, the Lord's Prayer, the words of the funeral service and the Bishop of London's sermon.

Marines Move Without Moving

To the Royal Albert Hall for the annual Mountbatten Festival of Music and a concert given by the Royal Marines Band. A lesser organisation might have overdone the associations with Margaret Thatcher but she is mentioned only with reference to the Corps' attendance at next week's funeral. Tact is appropriate: peacekeepers know by experience that the world has many different views.

The choreography is slick. The fanfare trumpeters march on to a beat tapped out by a lone percussionist. The angle at which the trumpet is held is uniform and the moment and speed exact at which it is unhesitantly raised to the lips. The corps of drummers stirs the warlike nerve. The pith helmets shading expressionless faces make the musicians anonymous. The horizontals of stick to nose and verticals of arm to drum satisfy the longing for neatness and they resemble clockwork dolls. A select group plays high-pitched mini-drums with sticks which have a lighted end like ET's finger. They modernise, but some aspects of drill never change. They give nothing away emotionally. Even the guitarist in the Queen medley, dressed in his full regalia, plays the wailing solo accurately, but his face remains unmelted. The drum kit player at the heart of the orchestra, encased in perspex to protect the ears of the sensitive ranks of wind players, remains deadpan. Their combatant colleagues doubtless slit throats without grimacing. Musicians are only stretcher-bearers in war, but they surely carry out that duty too with unmoved eyes.

Girls were admitted in 1992. A third of the band is female. A brilliant female violinist with her male accompanist on the marimba performs Monti's Csardas. Three girl singers perform a tribute act to the Andrews Sisters, the last member of which died this year. The harmony is slightly unbalanced by the mixing desk - the whole concert is amplified - but in Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy the singers move with allure enough to invade a cadet's dreams for a month. The jazzing of military marches may be America's greatest contribution to war.    

Thatcherism is not about monetary policy, shopkeeper economics, Hausfrau morality,  or the get-rich-quick culture, but the refusal to be bullied. Margaret Thatcher stood up to the public school mysogynists of the Conservative party, the undemocratic Unions, the terrorist IRA, the invading Argentine army and megalomaniac local councils, all of which relied on the power of numbers if not the threat of death to get their way.

She set an example that many, even unwittingly, followed. Composers stood up to the serialist dictators and mixed pleasing tonality with their once uncompromising tone rows. Performers would not be pigeon-holed, played and sang opera and Broadway, broke with concert conventions in their apparel and manner. Small record labels refused to be dominated by unwieldy multi-nationals. All these are examples of Thatcherism even when the protagonists would never have called themselves Thatcherites.   

Young Musician Contest Feeds Back and Audience

To Buckinghamshire for the semifinal of the Rotary Club Young Musician Competition. A twelve-year-old Oriental pianist called George wins the instrumental section. He can barely see over the piano lid. His mother and he approach the judges after the winners' photographs. 'Feedback,' she demands. 'George not happy after,' she says of her boy's reaction to his own performance. The judge leafs through his notes and manages to point out a few imperfections. George should hold back a little at the start of La Campanella. Try for a real legato at the recap. I adopt a similar approach on the singing cellist's behalf. 'Would it be possible to have some feedback, please?' I say to the classical representative on the panel. The others are a jazzer and a musical comedy specialist. 'Ah yes,' he says, we worried that she tries to force too much and there was a tuning issue in the first song.' She is not to go through to the final and our run is at an end. Nice tea, though. One makes conversation with other parents. Keep talking and move slowly towards the cake, as Homer Simpson asides. There are cinnamon whirls, Danish pastries, flapjacks and chocolate fancies. No doubt the dining improved once Rotarians removed the bar against women members. A soft-spoken Scot tells us there's one Buckinghamshire Club with eighty per cent women. The judges still select the only male vocalist for the final. He's an eighteen-year-old in a tuxedo and the glint of a brace in his beaky beam which in victory he cannot suppress.