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Last broadcast on Sat, 14 Jan 2012, 12:15 on BBC Radio 3.
Synopsis
Tom Service previews a Prokofiev festival in London and one of his rarely heard operas in performance in Glasgow. Plus American pianist Jonathan Biss, and new books on Sibelius.
Jonathan Biss – in Beethoven’s Shadow
The young American pianist Jonathan Biss has just embarked on a project to record all of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas. He tells Tom Service how he is in awe of this music, with its insurmountable challenges and definitive nature which, he says, can never be captured in a single performance or recording. Biss has written about the joys and despairs of playing Beethoven in an e-book called “Beethoven’s Shadow” and prior to his London recital – which will be broadcast on Radio 3 Live in Concert on Tuesday – he tells Tom why he enjoys the apparently impossible, almost masochistic demands of playing great music.
Photo: Jonathan Biss © Jamie Jung
Prokofiev - Man of the People?
As Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic start their festival Prokofiev: Man of the People? at the Southbank Centre, Tom finds out from the Russian conductor why we need to re-think the music of his compatriot. Prokofiev’s music has suffered the taint of its associations with the Soviet regime after he moved back to his homeland in 1933. However Jurowski believes that Prokofiev had already embarked on a radical simplicity in his musical style before he came back to Russia, and that the Soviet period is really just an extension of his core musical beliefs, and his desire to communicate with as wide an audience as possible.
Photo: Vladimir Jurowski © Sheila Rock, dressed by Ermenegildo Zegna
Prokofiev’s Betrothal in A Monastery
Prokofiev is not only being celebrated in London but in Glasgow as well, as the latest collaboration between Scottish Opera and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland is a production of his rarely-heard opera Betrothal in a Monastery, a fizzing comedy on Sheridan’s La Duenna, and the last he would complete. Tom travels to Glasgow to see how rehearsals are going and if Prokofiev’s Betrothal is a perfect marriage between two of the country’s biggest musical institutions.
Photo: Betrothal in a Monastery © Royal Conservatoire of Scotland & KK Dundas
Leonard Slatkin – Orchestras on the edge
Continuing our series of essays in which key cultural thinkers express their views on the prospects for music in 2012 Leonard Slatkin, music director of the Detroit Symphony, talks about American orchestras on the edge of survival. His own orchestra was on strike for 6 months last year but has recently come back to renewed life, with different kinds of concerts for new audiences and other communities of the city than the orchestra reached in the past. But overall, Slatkin says, the picture is grim in terms of the financial support for the art-form in the US – and yet he’s also hopeful that out of the crisis and the recession, new ideas and new energy will be found.
Photo: Leonard Slatkin © Donald Dietz
Sibelius re-considered
Three new books have recently been published that reveal new dimensions to Sibelius and Tom talks to all three authors about the necessity of rethinking this Finnish musical master. For Tomi Mäkela, Daniel Grimley and Phillip Ross Bullock we need to get past the hoary old nationalist myths of who Sibelius was: the idea that his music is essentially Finnish or Nordic, that he wrote the music of the Finnish landscape, that he was single-mindedly focused on his symphonies. All of those are only partially true but in addition we now hear about a Sibelius who loved Southern climes, who was a gregarious, even hedonistic, personality and how he was enmeshed in the culture and politics of his time.
Photo: Jean Sibelius © BBC
Broadcast
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Sat 14 Jan 201212:15
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