Music going back to nature, or rather the managed nature of a London park, can make you think and feel quite differently about great composers’ responses to the world around them.
It is hard to believe that it’s really happening! Despite a few bumps along the way, Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber, one of the greatest Lieder duos of our time, will open the 20/21 Wigmore Hall Season tomorrow night in a programme of Schubert and Berg. This is the first of 100 concerts between now and Christmas.
Wonderful as the livestreamed Proms are for players working together again and for viewers/listeners who wouldn’t be able to get to the Royal Albert Hall even if they could be admitted, I’d sacrifice them all for one evening of live musical communication like this.
After the success of BBC Radio 3’s live lunchtime broadcasts from the Wigmore Hall, live music is now kicking off again north of the border, with four concerts broadcast from City Halls, Glasgow, presented by Kate Molleson.
No happy family, surely, was ever quite like this one. Love and mutual respect bound up with music-making at the highest level make the Kanneh-Masons of Nottingham a role-model for this country in times of trouble, with their reiterated message that music is for everyone, something to be shared at every level.
After a devastating drought, even a light shower can feel like something of a miracle. Under normal circumstances, a 60 minute lunchtime piano recital from the Wigmore Hall would represent wholly unremarkable business as usual for BBC Radio 3.
This is as close as we’re going to come now to the real festival experience. The enviably well-funded Bergen International Festival is serving up on average three or four events a day, livestreamed from atmospheric venues around the city and all available for a month.
It seems like a different world when the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle gave a full concert to an empty hall as the world began to go into lockdown. Now, on continental Europe at least, orchestral musician plus the occasional star conductor and soloist(s) are cautiously reuniting in smaller numbers, though still as yet without a live audience.
The great Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau noted of 1920s Berlin that "itimes of trouble, people seek a better life in culture". But what if that culture can no longer be accessed live?
Six weeks ago, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation announced that it the winner of its prestigious and extremely valuable main annual prize for 2020 "to a composer, performer, or scholar who has made outstanding contributions to the world of music" will be the viola player Tabea Zimmermann. She commented to an interviewer that what mattered to her most was neither well-paid concert appearances nor playing in large halls, but rather to be involved in things that are interesting for what she called their "Inhalt".