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A Musical Awakening: Summer at Ladevie

(As published in Interlude, 25th June, 2020)

The titles in italics throughout refer to pieces by Claude Debussy.

‘Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige’ (‘Melancholy waltz and languorous vertigo’)
(Charles Baudelaire, Harmonie du Soir)

From my seat on the grassy terrace outside Treowen Manor in the Wye, I can see for miles. Skimming swallows keep me company on their evening forays; sheep have woken from their daytime torpor and graze quietly on boundless hillsides. The ponds at the edge of the wood below the house seem unusually deep tonight. Listen! Listen! Ondine, the water sprite is here. Above me the ancient, leaded windows are pushed wide and regretful Brahms confesses his sorrows from the old Broadwood. The students are busy, I am forty-five, and two summers ago I was married in that room. My Wye Valley Chamber Music Festival has been alive for twenty-one years.

‘Sounds and scents turn in the evening air’

Far away in Southwest France, set in the side of a verdant hill and presiding over acres of farmland, is a chateau called Ladevie. Music has long since left its walls, but thirty years ago, down on its luck, music was about to bring the magnificent old stone building back to life and in turn, that charismatic, rickety chateau was about to bring me to life. For I am not really sitting beneath the walls of Treowen at all; I am outside the old barn at Ladevie, eavesdropping on a performance of Debussy’s first book of Préludes, given by Paul Roberts. At this point, I don’t know much about Paul, but he will go on to become my teacher, still the most important person in my musical journey to date. I am eighteen and life is about the piano.

The great hall at Treowen is our barn: the perfect place for intimate music-making with a crackling atmosphere and sometimes a log fire to match. These days our kids pack the enormous window ledges when we run out of seats. Many of my most magical musical experiences have taken place in that room with musicians crammed in amongst our unusually discerning audience on ascetic wooden chairs. The air in the hall is about as full of music as a room can be, but there is no competition, no ego – or at least when those two strangers arrive they are quickly persuaded to leave. The wise old chateau shares this attitude to life’s (and music’s) trinkets: embellishments are not required. I bask on the terrace in the comforting evening heat that has been baked into the earth and talk to Ann of her life as a doctor or listen to J-P’s ballades.

The crickets hum and trees sway with the stately procession of the Dancers of Delphi. I lie back and stare up at the characteristic Quercy-style roof of the pigeonnier, rolling the stem of my glass between my fingers. Sails and Veils billow their way across the lawn. Down amongst the endless fields of sunflower and lavender, the wind on the plain is biding its time. I peer through the door at the rows of rapt audience beneath the knowing wooden beams and watch Paul coax his old Steinway to life. Next is my favourite – Sounds and scents… This barn and chateau have been here forever and I, too, have somehow been here before, just waiting for the right time to come back. Debussy has visited this place. The sounds, the scents, the wood and the stone are one, the core of a ripe authenticity never tasted before.

In a happily functional room in Birmingham, I work with my student on Liszt’s own Harmonies du Soir. I can see myself in her restless, probing questions and curious, personal and musical intensity. A feeling of despair resonates in my stomach like a silent gong; how can I show her Ladevie and reveal what it all means? But as I sit down and breathe the air, touch the keys, I am reassured that at least a few stones of the old place are safe inside me. I look at Paul’s papercut bloodstain on my copy of Ravel’s Valses Nobles et Sentimentales and the pages where an ember from one of my teenage roll-ups fell.

Ladevie was the place where piano became music, and where music became everything. Arriving from provincial Somerset with my brother Joe, we drank bitter coffee from cracked bowls and black Cahors wine from tumblers. I tasted food with a new vividness and made friends for life. Young, ambitious students shared classes and the dinner table with passionate adult amateurs and all were intoxicated by music as the juice dripped from the fat peaches or the crust of the morning baguette cracked in the hands. Paul read to us, invoking Verlaine and Baudelaire, and there were many wonderful musical moments, but his performance of the Préludes (Book I) stays inside me. Place and music were perfectly synthesised, in a manner as profound and perfect as the ocean depths of La Mer or the dazzling sunshine of The hills of Anacapri. Music was no longer just a part of life; now all of life welled up inside the music itself. This was original sin, the nascent moment that would guide all future music-making.

It was more than simply an exotic experience of French music in France, although of course there is something deliciously genuine about sitting under the same stars and tasting the same wine as the composers and poets with whom you are drawing your inspiration. The experience transcended a teenage rite of passage, despite our tender age and readiness; I sensed this because I have known the feeling since (and of course before). Until this point, my life of piano festivals and competitions had not yet met a tangibly supportive audience or family of colleagues; I had received my share of compliments, but was often playing to win. How miraculous, then, to listen to Spencer playing Rhapsody in Blue or Steve playing Beethoven’s PathétiqueSonata and suck the marrow from the music through, and with them. This communal spirit has often since proved elusive, even at Prussia Cove in Cornwall, apparently the inspiration for the course at Ladevie. The barn was a perfect space for intimate music-making, where Paul’s grudging old Steinway eventually yielded up its perfect, bell-like sounds.

Musicians must be master manipulators of time; we begin each performance with a knowledge of the end, simultaneously piecing together our interpretations as linear narrative, mosaic and cyclic structure. Furthermore, all music converses with other music, deriving its delicious multiplicity of meanings (in the absence of words) from an almost infinite and constantly shifting web of intertexts. After all, who is Beethoven without Haydn, Bach or Bernstein? Or Debussy without Liszt and Rameau? In a Birmingham coaching we notice how a passage in a Dvořák piano trio simultaneously allows us to experience time from all three possible vantage points, a nostalgic violin melody looking back, urgent inner parts imbuing palpable, present excitement and the piano’s bass drawing the music inexorably forward into a future return to the opening material. Musicians know that memories can be yet to come and that we can look forward to a return to the past. Why might not this wisdom apply equally to place? When I performed the first book of Debussy’s Préludes in my final graduate recital in the utilitarian concert hall of the Guildhall School, those attending carefully would have heard the slow crescendo of the crickets and smelt the sultry perfume of the barn and terrace. My most treasured musical compliment came when a friend commented that my performance at London’s Wigmore Hall was ‘just like being at Treowen’. In saying this, of course, my friend recalled the occasion on which Paul played Debussy at Ladevie – even though he wasn’t there.

Chamber music was revealed to me as the ideal embodiment of this kind of intense, sincere music-making where heart and head are both integral to a living musical organism. I rushed off with a little band of like-minded souls and set up a festival in the Wye Valley amongst winter snows and log fires. Ladevie was not only for the summer, after all. I found a place where memories were not only in the past and in which a future could be made. I didn’t meet Sara, my wonderful, literary wife, until I was nearing my fourtieth birthday.

Now she enters the long drawing room at Treowen in her bridal dress and my heart dances. She walks slowly towards me as Joe plays Strauss’s Morgen! at the Broadwood: ‘and tomorrow the sun will shine again’. She does not know it, perhaps until now, but she has joined me at Ladevie. Life is perfect, full of juice and promise.

‘Resounding through all the notes, 
In the earth’s colourful dream, 
There sounds a faint long-drawn note, 
For the one who listens in secret.’
(Friedrich Schlegel. Printed at the head of Robert Schumann’s Fantasy in C, Op. 17, for Clara Wieck)

How Beethoven continues to fuel the creativity of composers today

 (As published in Gramophone, 31st May 2019)

Introducing Vol 2 of 'Beethoven Plus', where new music is inspired by Beethoven's Violin Sonatas

In 2014, Krysia Osostowicz and I were working on the cycle of 10 Beethoven Sonatas for Violin and Piano, on that kind of musical high that comes from immersion in the depths of fathomless art. We began talking about what we could do to mark out our cycle from the many that have come before; this repertoire is central to any serious violin/piano duo’s work and performing these 10 works side-by-side has become de rigeur. How would we join a tradition that included Oistrakh/Oberin, Szigeti/Arrau, Kramer/Argerich, and indeed which is being constantly updated? – at least three new versions have come out on disc in the intervening five years.

By May of 2015 we had commissioned 10 composers to write a short partner piece to one of the sonatas and were walking on to the stage at Kings Place in London to give the first concerts in a cycle that now consisted of 20 works, and a vibrant conversation across two centuries. Almost all the composers we approached were incredibly enthusiastic to join the project. Beethoven clearly still exerts his power, nearly 200 years after his death. This month, after further performances of the complete cycle in towns as far-ranging as Aberdeen, Oxford, Sheffield, Bristol and Cambridge, culminating in a series at the brand new Cedars Hall in Wells, which we recorded live, our second double album is released on SOMM Recordings, completing the set.

As soon as we began to receive the new works we realised that not only was Beethoven still an inspirational figure for 21st-century composers, but also that their work was shedding new light on his sonatas. Jonathan Dove’s ebullient Ludwig Games, conceived as a glorious ‘upbeat' to the First Sonata, finds fertile ground in Beethoven's short, motoric cells, which suit his brand of minimalism perfectly. Peter Ash, in his A Major Chase, raises even more interesting questions in his response to the Second Sonata. How could it be that a work described on publication as ‘Learned, learned, ever learned... a piling up of difficulty upon difficulty’ (Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung) can prompt a response that Ash describes as ‘Bartók meets Tom and Jerry’? These two references, updating Beethoven with their 20th century resonances, probe further: is Ash's an ‘authentic’ response at all if it is so far removed from Beethoven’s contemporary reception? Well, yes, so it seems, if latter-day interpreters are to be trusted. All of the artists that I consulted, each of whom had performed the entire cycle of sonatas, found humour to be one of the defining characteristics of this particular Beethoven work. Could it be that Beethoven’s music is funnier today than it was in 1798? Or that Beethoven’s humour resonates more in 2015 than it did when it was new to its listeners? Or perhaps we are now laughing at something else associated with Beethoven’s world and 200 years of troping and myth-making that have intervened. In any case, Ash's brilliant work, fugue and all, echoes long into the Beethoven Sonata when we play them side-by-side.

Ash is not the only one of our new composers who seizes upon Beethoven’s sense of humour. In Mehlschöberl, Jeremy Thurlow picks up on his love of puns, nicknames and linguistic games; indeed his title, a kind of savoury dumpling dish, was a term of endearment bestowed upon Beethoven by his friends.

Turning to other examples, Kurt Schwertsik writes a complex and deeply moving response to the songful and enigmatic Sixth Sonata, written when the first signs of deafness were becoming apparent and Beethoven was experiencing acute personal trauma. On The Way to Heiligenstadt uses a classic Beethovenian narrative of struggle and redemption as its programme. Judith Bingham takes the Fourth Sonata, an often angry and disturbed work, and responds with searching lyricism in The Neglected Child, a title borrowed from Lewis Lockwood, who points out how rarely this sonata is performed. Bingham's piece plays as counterpoint to Beethoven’s highly charged score, drawing out both the instability and more benevolent side within it. Matthew Taylor finds Beethoven as challenging and virtuosic as ever, writing a Tarantella Furiosa that takes the whirlwind finale of the Kreutzer Sonata and adds a turbo charge that always leaves Krysia and me out of breath by the end. The Spring Sonata’s proportional perfection and effortless melody provide inspiration for a gem from Huw Watkins and Beethoven’s mastery of formal procedure draws a response from David Matthews who, in his Sonatina, maps the structure of the last sonata in miniature. The hypnotic Air by Philip Ashworth and Elspeth Brooke’s multicoloured Swoop complete our brilliant line-up of partner pieces.

So it seems that whether via the notes on the page or the legends that surround the man, Beethoven is as inspirational a figure as ever in our postmodern age. Beethoven Plus is certainly a cycle like no other. We hope you enjoy discovering it as much as we have enjoyed performing it.

'Beethoven Plus', Vol 2 is out now on Somm Recordings. For more information, please visit somm-recordings.com

A Convivial Celebration of Piano Chamber Music in Birmingham

(As published in Interlude, 18th November 2018)
 Daniel Tong

Daniel Tong

The first Birmingham International Piano Chamber Music Festival takes place next week, 20th – 23rd November, at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. The result of months of planning, incorporating a competition for young chamber ensembles, this promises to be one of the highlights of the musical year. I cannot wait to join world-class colleagues, who are travelling from far and wide, to meet and make music in our brand new Conservatoire building.

The Festival represents everything that the Conservatoire and I hold dear in terms of inspiration, learning and a collegiate ethos that breaks down traditional barriers and hierarchies: for instance, all of the young ensembles taking part in the Festival are really already winners, having been chosen from over forty entries in eleven different countries at our preliminary auditions. They will all give a recital as part of the festival and take part in masterclasses. Whilst in Birmingham they will forge many musical friendships and have the opportunity to experience myriad approaches to music-making, as well as showcasing their own talents, in concerts live-streamed on the RBC web platform.

Likewise, all jury members will perform in Festival concerts and teach in masterclasses, drawing attention to music’s endless depth and essential, beautiful subjectivity. I hope that what will emerge is a realisation that the concepts of ‘better’, ‘correct’ or ‘wrong’ are ill-used in art, even within the context of a competition. The only thing that the jury have in their favour is experience. Otherwise we share the stage and learn from one another. The preliminary round yielded eight young ensembles of a remarkably high standard of artistry and I do not expect decision-making to be easy. That said, a panel of seven seasoned musicians (and a record producer) will probably come to some sort of consensus about the performances that they felt were most successful on that day, at that time, in that hall. One young ensemble will be heading to play at the Wigmore Hall in London, organising their debut recording with Resonus Classics and embarking on a year-long mentorship programme.
 
 Royal Birmingham Conservatoire © Hufton & Crow

Royal Birmingham Conservatoire
© Hufton & Crow

We all know the pitfalls associated with competitive music-making: the pressure to play all the notes right, which stifles artistry; the potential for powerful jury members to influence decisions; the emotional strain upon those who don’t make the cut. But a competition can also be the most open of forums in which to allow different voices to be heard. To those who might question the ethos of a competition within a festival celebrating so communal an art as chamber music, I tend to ask whether the event would have been more open had I merely invited my friends? Or invited recommendations for young artists from a circle of colleagues? Obviously not. As mentioned, everyone who entered our competition was heard. The preliminary round jury (who, save myself, were not the same as the jury next week, to avoid any pre-judgements) used a blind scoring system. An exceptional level of playing was already on show, even at this stage.

In the evening concerts, my colleagues and I will play music that follows three threads: Firstly the Schumann and Mendelssohn families, where the Gould Piano Trio and my own London Bridge Trio will play D minor trios by Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, and Katya Apekisheva, Michael Gurevich and Christoph Richter will play Robert Schumann’s trio in the same key. A gifted young group of RBC students will also play Clara Schumann’s trio as part of the festival (see below). Secondly we feature Brahms, RBC Head of Keyboard John Thwaites will be taking centre stage in performances of the colossal A major Piano Quartet and F major Cello Sonata (with Christoph Richter) by his most beloved composer. Michael Gurevich and I will also contribute Brahms’s extraordinary G major Violin Sonata. Our final programming strand draws together English music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from Bridge and Britten to James MacMillan and a brand new work by Colin Matthews. Alice Neary, Benjamin Frith and Robin Ireland will be amongst the performers here. The opening concert and competition Grand Final will be live-streamed by Classic FM.
 
 London Bridge Trio

London Bridge Trio, 2018

Alongside all this, and possibly most importantly of all, the Festival brings huge opportunity to RBC students and the people of Birmingham. All events are very affordable and free for students. A daily programme of masterclasses will give many RBC students the chance to benefit from the experience of the visiting artists and there are also two concerts to showcase the fabulous chamber music taking place at the Conservatoire. Students from the Royal Academy of Music, Guildhall School of Music & Drama and Trinity Laban will also be joining us to play in masterclasses and experience the festival.

Whatever happens, I expect to emerge next Friday inspired, exhausted and perhaps a little wiser too.

Daniel Tong, Head of Piano in Chamber Music, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire

Alternative Biography

This post is dedicated to late developers everywhere. The more I become involved in working with young people, the more inclined I feel to let them into a few secrets regarding what life is actually like.

So, in the spirit of an alternative Christmas message, I thought I'd publish a new page on my website. Those wise life coaches and yoga gurus are forever telling us how failure is the best teacher: how to embrace disappointment and lead a multi-dimensional life which is rich in experience. How to let go of the pressure to succeed.

"Yeah, whatever", one may say. I often did. But I hope this will be of some little use to a few people (young and not so young) who love music as much as I do and want to make a life out of it.

The world of music can be like so many Christmas baubles: immaculate photos of beautiful people, playing perfectly and effortlessly, and smiling, as Sviatoslav Richter once put it, like idiots. If you want to click over to my biography page you can read about gushing, five-star reviews, performances on the country's biggest stages, invitations to curate music festivals, my own (obviously flourishing) events and a wonderful, rewarding teaching position in Birmingham. It's true but it's publicity. I am a lucky man. I enjoy daily inspiration through musical experience of endless depth and am living my childhood dreams. I've started writing my PhD and new chapters are opening.

Next year, my partner Sara and I are getting married. This actually feels like a really worthwhile place to have got to. The alternative version of the journey up to this point follows. The contrapuntal reading to my official biography, as Daniel Barenboim would have it.

Daniel Tong was born in Cornwall where he lived in a small village. When he was seven, his family moved to Somerset where he enjoyed success in local music festivals and people realised that he may be a talented pianist. But when he was 11 he received his first setback; applying for the specialist music scheme at Wells Cathedral School (where his brother, a brilliant pianist, was already a pupil) he failed to get in. No matter, he managed to be accepted a couple of years later and enjoyed all the privileges of specialist music education. He reached the concerto final of the Mid Somerset festival where he was soundly beaten by a recorder player, but at 16 he got through to the televised semi-final of the BBC Young Musician of the Year piano section. Sensitive handling of emotionally complex youngsters was not a particular strength of the education system at the time, despite the excellent and well-meaning staff. Daniel was pronounced in first place after the semi-final. The final was two days later. A hasty 'lesson' was imposed, not by his own teacher, involving quite a lot of writing on his precious score in pen (pen!). Daniel was uninspired in the final and had memory problems. He didn't win. [I must add here that the other finalists were very fine pianists and there's no suggestion that I would, or should have done!]

"Tong played as if he was still in the rehearsal." (The Strad)

Next stop was an international competition in Germany, Daniel's first such event. In preparation he practised for 10 hours a day. He walked onto stage, had a bad memory lapse and immediately eliminated himself from the competition within seconds. Back at home and ready for the next step, music college, Daniel travelled to London for his auditions. He failed to get into the Royal Academy of Music where, despite the playing going well, he experienced a particularly unpleasant interview. The member of staff in question was clearly unimpressed by Daniel's discussion of different composers' musical temperaments and was possibly looking for more routine answers. We will never know. "That's life", thought Daniel and luckily got into the Royal College of Music.

In his second year at the RCM, where he had done ok and won a prize or two, Daniel went to his piano lesson and played some Ravel. His teacher didn't have anything to say. Daniel concluded that either he was a genius or he had outgrown his teacher. Thinking the second more likely, whether or not it was true, he transferred to the Guildhall School. This was a positive move and a couple more awards followed (despite one of his performances being branded a "disgrace" by an eminent teacher, not his own, when be played some scales wrong) but shortly it was time to decide what to do after graduation. Daniel applied for the postgraduate course at GSMD where he failed to gain a place. The slightly maverick head of department took him aside and had a chat, concluding that if Daniel could manage a first in his undergraduate final recital, he'd be allowed to continue his studies. No pressure then, but he appreciated this. It was a real chat with a real person. The day of the recital approached, nerves were tense, the necessary mark was achieved. Perhaps more enjoyably, the external examiner from a rival institution commented that "we don't get playing like that at the RAM". Taking this as a compliment, Daniel enjoyed a small but significant moment of success.

Daniel auditioned for the BBC as a chamber musician and was given a platform on their Young Artists Scheme, but when he undertook the same audition as soloist, he had a other problematic memory lapse. The panel's comments were extremely complimentary and unanimously positive but these mistakes ultimately mean failure. Daniel did not progress. A brainwave shortly followed and Daniel now rarely plays from memory. He attended another audition for an international scholarship where the panel openly argued about his performance in front of him. Fanny Waterman was despondent about his lack of adherence to the score. Everyone else seemed to have enjoyed his Beethoven Sonata. The result: another failure. Another brainwave struck and Daniel realised that music was a very subjective thing.

Of course there were successes to punctuate the failures, and failures to puncture the successes, but Daniel was (and is) a musician at heart. He continued learning and with it, hopefully, improving. This is not one of those types of confessional blogs, but a major change in attitude, resulting in distinct artistic and personal improvements, was only achieved after several years' worth of conversations with a very clever psychoanalyst. As ever, this is all work in progress. As everything is. Always.

"Who will buy [this CD]? Not I". (Gramophone)

Daniel Tong - Pianist

Daniel Tong was born in Cornwall and studied in London. His musical life is spent performing as soloist and chamber musician, as well as directing two chamber music festivals. He has appeared at many of the foremost British venues and festivals – Wigmore Hall, South Bank Centre, St Georges Bristol, Birmingham Town Hall, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh as well as the Cheltenham, Aldeburgh and Edinburgh Festivals.

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