There's been a lot of nostalgia about during the last few days in music broadcasting circles in Cardiff, since the news of the death of J Mervyn Williams was announced.

"Merv" was Head of Music at BBC Wales in the heady times of the first half of the 1980s. St David's Hall in Cardiff opened in 1982, as the Welsh fourth TV channel, S4C, went on the air. Merv was in charge of all the broadcast output of the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra, and his growing TV department, in which I worked, produced many programmes for the BBC and S4C. Cardiff Singer of the World was Merv's invention - he is remembered here on the competition website, and you can also read his own account of his fight to make it happen.

Merv was a man of contradictions. He excelled at BBC meetings, but his best deals were made over his legendary lunches. He loved to develop new talent, but also to work with established artists. He was a geographer, but had no sense of direction, once famously nearly driving Sir Colin Davis the wrong way up a dual carriageway. He was brilliant at working internationally, but hated flying (Merv had therapy for this, and convinced the therapist to share his phobia rather than curing it - or so the story went).

He was a talented executive producer of TV outside broadcasts, but tense and uncomfortable when directing them. Whilst recording Verdi's Four Sacred Pieces in Gloucester Cathedral, Merv became increasingly impatient during the change of set-ups. When the lighting director explained that it took time to move lights up and out of the way, Merv commented that it would be "quicker to lower the cathedral".

Running the department, he was a dictator, but a benevolent one. Merv always had time for lively discussions with all his staff, particularly during the weekly outings to the BBC Club. He was an eccentric, whose best ideas came to him in the bath, or sitting on an upturned waste paper bin, shoeless, puffing on a cigarette.

Merv's famous exhortation to the first Cardiff Singer competitors was 'Don't compete - make music!' - surely a contradiction, as they were all hoping to win! Merv wasn't a performer himself, but he knew that you couldn't do well if you were trying too hard. You just had to throw everything into your performance.

Merv left the BBC to form one of the first and most successful independent production companies in Wales. We missed him sorely when he left the BBC, and now his passing marks the end of an era.

Thanks, Merv - diolch yn fawr.

Viv Goldberg worked in a number of roles in the BBC for many years, both in TV production and orchestral management. Closely involved in Cardiff Singer of the World since its inception, latterly as Interactive Producer and programme book editor, she now runs her own company, Viv Goldberg Media

• The upper photo shows soprano Karita Mattila, who won the first Cardff Singer of the World competition, and who went on to become one of the world's leading operatic artists.
• The lower photo shows Mervyn Williams backstage at Buxton Opera House during a recording of 'Dennis O'Neill and Friends' for BBC2, sometime in the mid-80s. 
• You can read a Welsh language obituary here.

 

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Books and records ...

My bag of new CDs has turned up a particularly satisfying package in the form of a double-disc set from arch-violinist Leonidas Kavakos. It features the Violin Concerto with the Camerata Salzburg, which he conducts from the fiddle, and it is a beautifully judged performance: lovely tempi, clear textures, sweet and intimate tone. The second CD is of the two piano trios, in which he's joined by cellist Patrick Demenga and pianist Enrico Pace. They produce all the whooshing élan, drama and joy that you could wish for.

Kavakos's technique - for those of us who are violin buffs - is fascinating; I suspect he is inspired in certain ways by accounts and pictures of the playing of Joszef Joachim, whose bow arm does what most of our violin teachers told us not to do, allowing the shoulder to relax to the point that the elbow appears to droop. Kavakos is, furthermore, from a family of Greek folk musicians; he once described to me how he learned the joys of collective music-making from them (this was an interview for The Strad some years ago). Evolving his approach to tone, I feel he has favoured what one could call European Intimate over New York Force; quality and finesse are valued ahead of sheer volume. In combination with his intense musicality and intelligence, this goes a long way towards making his Mendelssohn a special experience.

Meanwhile Sheila Hayman's very fine documentary, Mendelssohn, the Nazis and Me, is now out on DVD. I'm reviewing it for BBC Music Magazine so we'll post the full review once it's out, but let's just say for now that it is a must-see job.

Check back at Felixcitations soon for more information on a new book about Fanny Mendelssohn, plus a little about another composer's anniversary which didn't make it to the big guns this year but really, really should have ...

 

Marginal scribbles or buried treasure?

The Juilliard School in New York is in the throes of completing a complete revamp worth $200m. Among the features of the new and much enlarged space will be a secure archival storage space for its collection of music manuscripts and according to a report in The New York Times, this in turn is about to be enlarged: in 2006 Bruce Kovner, the Juilliard's chairman and vice chairman of Lincoln Center donated a collection of 138 manuscript treasures to the school. He's a music-loving billionaire hedge-fund trader. One might at first think that the donation took place just in time, given the events of the past year, but now there's more news: he has donated two more, one of which is Beethoven's 'Kreutzer' Sonata, the other of which is a proof of Mendelssohn's Elijah.

It's an engraved proof copy of the piano and vocal score, with Mendelssohn's corrections and scribbles in the margin. And it could be anything but marginal: if he did more than correct a few 'typos', it could provide some real insight into his thought processes... To access it you do not have to be a full-time academic: it has been photographed and digitized to be posted online, together with the rest of the collection at juilliardmanuscriptcollection.org.

According to the NYT, Bruce Kovner has every intention of continuing to buy manuscripts for the Juilliard. I hope that any City traders and bankers reading this will perhaps consider some similar good usage for their forthcoming bonuses.

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On Breakfast this morning (prompted by an article in today's Guardian) I asked any children or teenagers listening to the show to text in their favourite pieces of classical music. What a response! A wonderful, surprising and hugely encouraging list of works has emerged that reveals a lot about how we learn to love music.

In a recent top ten poll of children's favourite classical works, reported by Tom Service in The Guardian, John Williams' Harry Potter score and Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf won the hearts of the young. From the flurry of texts from eager thumbs that came in almost immediately, it was clear that children's musical tastes are as rich and varied as those of the adults who listen to BBC Radio 3.

There was a broad sweep of popular works you'd expect to see, like Vivaldi's Four Seasons or Johann Strauss II's The Blue Danube. Some suggestions, like Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King and Mussorgsky's Night on a Bare Mountain, are obvious favourites for children - they appeal because of their vivid orchestration and narrative power, not just because they're familiar from television. But there were also some really unexpected selections: a Bartok piano sonata (from a listener aged 15), the Barber violin concerto (aged 16) and the mad scene from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor (aged 18).

Reading between the lines, I'm struck by how these young people first came across the music they love. I think it confirms something I've always known: that nothing beats performing music as a way of falling in love with it. I'm sure the 10-year-old cellist who adores Bach's solo suites is learning to play them, or at least aspires to; and I bet the same is true of the 9-year-old who wanted to hear a Mozart piano sonata. I'm tickled pink by the text from a young chorister whose favourite piece of music is Rubbra's Magnificat in A flat - not an obvious choice, and definitely not one that would make it into a top ten chart! But it's music that he knows, that he loves to sing, and that he's open to loving without the preconceptions and reservations that come, inevitably, with musical knowledge and with age.

So, a spontaneous and unregulated sample of youngsters listening to Radio 3 one rainy November morning loves the music of Honegger, Haydn, Bernstein, Poulenc, Sullivan, Khatchaturian, Zelenka, Shostakovich and Elgar. Their ears are obviously wide open. The trick, and the challenge, will be to keep them that way.

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