“They turn the Rite Of Spring back into theatre - you could reach out and touch it. One of the most exciting performances I've ever seen”
- Stephen Tobolowsky, actor and director

Outside of Hollywood action movies, it is not usual to announce the release of a trailer as though it were news. In this case, though, we venture to suggest that it is. Classical pianists Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe have been reinventing the art of the classical music video for years, building a seven million-strong following on YouTube and winning an Emmy nomination (with their version of Schubert's Erlkönig) through their bold and wildly creative imaginings.

We learn some of the vivid details about their latest, THE RITE OF SPRING, through the trailer - snatches of fantastical images are seen, insects crawling on the pianists' hands as they play, dancers cavorting hypnotically around the musicians, lights, colours, streamers, petals ascending into the wind, a gallery's-worth of images that promise to brand themselves on the viewers' memories. In a shoot that crossed the United States and saw its protagonists filmed, variously, from an airplane in the Californian desert and naked in the ocean at night, there has rarely been a classical music film that has gone to anything like these lengths to get close to the composer's own shockingly vivid creation.

The trailer can be viewed here.

As previously announced, THE RITE OF SPRING will be released in segments (as it is composed), one every two weeks starting from the date of the work’s centenary, It will be free to view on YouTube at Anderson & Roe’s channel from May 29…

For any press queries, please contact James Inverne at james@inverneprice.com Tel: +44 (0)7870 203181.

“An epic journey
of struggle and sacrifice,
risk and renewal,
and the worlds that exist without and within.

Two outsiders shed their exterior identities,
unveiling their true selves.

Brave the elements
Shed the material
Become one with Nature”

Classical pianists Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe are different. A piano duo who have attracted legions of new fans with their virtuosic and acclaimed arrangements of popular hits (such as their “Billie Jean” cover or their Star Wars Fantasy), they are musicians who bring the care and stunning imagination of brilliant indie filmmakers to their YouTube music videos, pushing the form forward. Case in point: their Schubert Lied-turned-horror-film Der Erlkönig – which, as we go to press, has just been nominated for an Emmy Award.

If they attract full houses across the US and internationally with their live shows, they have made an art of presenting classical music on YouTube, producing and directing videos that have been viewed by millions. “We cater our performances to the venue, whether it be a concert hall or online, and as such, we design our YouTube videos to potently deliver the spirit of the music in a bustling graphic environment,” says Anderson. But even they have never previously attempted anything on the scale of The Rite Of Spring.

To be released in segments (as it is composed), one every two weeks starting from the date of the work’s centenary, Anderson and Roe’s Rite takes the viewer on an epic journey but one that finally mirrors the primeval nature of the work itself. Starting in traditional concert trappings, the performers become gradually sucked into a ritualistic spiral that sets them immersed in a troupe of dancers, crawled on by insects, lost in a hallucinatory world, naked in the ocean, or alongside an antique instrument ablaze in the desert. What is real? What is imaginary? One thing is for sure - theirs is a striking, strident view of music that ripped apart the culture of its time, and this film proves it can still unsettle and thrill us today. In this year of the Rite’s centenary, this interpretation will leave a mark – a scar? – and, perhaps, help to redefine it.

THE RITE OF SPRING will be free to view on YouTube at Anderson & Roe’s channel from May 29…
Watch Anderson & Roe’s Emmy-nominated video Der Erlkönig here.

Notes for Editors:
* California-based Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe are among the most exciting, groundbreaking piano duos performing today, with nearly seven million page views on their YouTube channel and a busy national and international touring schedule

* Their YouTube music video, Der Erlkönig, has just been nominated for an Emmy Award

* THE RITE OF SPRING uses a cast of 21, and involved a shoot that criss-crossed the U.S., from Los Angeles and New York to Palm Beach, South Carolina and a Southern Californian desert, even involving filming from an airplane – a “Making Of” documentary will be released at a later date

* THE RITE OF SPRING is conceived, edited, co-filmed, produced and performed by Anderson and Roe. As if that weren’t enough, while filming a scene with an organ in the ocean, Greg Anderson’s large toenail was completely ripped off! No animals were harmed while filming. Just the toenail.

* Their most recent album, “When Words Fade,” was released by the Steinway label and spent nearly a dozen weeks at the top of the Billboard classical charts

* They recently announced an “Anderson & Roe”-branded publication deal for their piano duo arrangements with Alfred Music Publishing

* Alumni of The Juilliard School (where they met), they have broadcast on MTV’s Total Request Live, NPR’s All Things Considered and From The Top, APM’s Performance Today, and KBS’ Classic Odyssey. They left an indelible mark at their alma mater, directing the 2004 performance project “Life Between The Keys” and appearing on the Sounds of Juilliard CD celebrating the school’s centennial year

For any press queries, please contact James Inverne at james@inverneprice.com Tel: +44 (0)7870 203181.

It has been a good month for the Salomé Chamber Orchestra. Another sell-out concert in their residency at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, a large profile piece about their founders – star violist David Aaron Carpenter and his violinist siblings Sean and Lauren Carpenter – in Sunday’s New York Times and, just announced, a high-profile concert with John Legend as part of Yahoo! On the Road, billed as the world's first mobile entertainment and innovation festival.

The event will take place this Friday May 3rd in New York City at the United Palace Theater. For details of performance streaming, locations and updates visit www.ontheroad.yahoo.com, follow @YahooOnTheRoad on Twitter, or like the Yahoo! On the Road Facebook page.

Salomé and Legend have previously performed together, with great success, in spring 2012 at Salomé’s Lincoln Center gala. Lauren Sarah Carpenter, Salomé’s Executive Director, says, "Salomé stands for getting the greatest music to people everywhere, not just those who regularly come to concerts. We're thrilled about playing New York City with the Yahoo! On the Road festival - not least because it reunites us with the fabulous John Legend, whose fantastic performances we still remember from when we all played together at Lincoln Center last summer."

John Legend is one of the most popular music entertainers in the United States. A nine-time Grammy Award winner, he was named as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people and his debut album Get Lifted sold more than three million copies worldwide. His new album Love in the Future (executive produced by Kanye West and Dave Tozer) is scheduled for release in 2013. His Shoe Me Campaign organisation fights poverty around the world and he was honoured with the 2010 BET Humanitarian of the Year award.

The Salomé Chamber Orchestra was just named “one of New York’s top young groups” in an extensive New York Times profile. They play classical and other musics to the highest standards, while aiming to enrich the lives of people who don’t normally go to concerts. They have played with the likes of, from the classical world, conductors Christoph Eschenbach and Alan Gilbert, guitarist Sharon Isbin and violinist Daniel Hope. From the pop music world they have performed with Rufus Wainwright, Natasha Bedingfield, John Legend and others. In 2012 they inaugurated the first annual Salomé Music Festival in the East Hamptons, shortly after welcoming former President Bill Clinton as special guest at their gala concert at Lincoln Center. They are committed to supporting important causes through their music and have recently concluded a tour of California entirely devoted to worthy charities.

Watch an encore (the new Murka Variations by Alexey Shor and Oran Eldor) from Salomé’s recent Metropolitan Museum of Art concert with David Aaron Carpenter here.

And you can read the New York Times profile of the Salomé founders here.

For any queries or to book the Salomé Chamber Orchestra and/or David Aaron Carpenter, please contact James Inverne at james@inverneprice.com Tel: +44 (0)7870 203181 or Sean Bickerton at sean@inverneprice.com Tel: Europe: +442033724425, North America: (800) 530-3318.

Notes for editors:

The Salomé Chamber Orchestra was co-founded by the Carpenter siblings, Lauren, Sean and David Aaron Carpenter. It is comprised of the top graduates from the Curtis Institute, Juilliard, Princeton University, and Yale University. Salomé’s mission is to present classical music as relevant to today’s younger generations, while at the same time joining with philanthropic organizations to directly help those in need via charity concerts and events.

California-based Lara Downes, widely acknowledged as a trailblazer in reinventing the solo and chamber piano show, will present the first in her new concert series, The Artist Sessions at the famous Yoshi’s Jazz Bar in San Francisco. The monthly series will present some of the world’s leading classical musicians in innovative contexts – in short, every concert will have its ‘story’.

First up is Lara herself, alongside guests the San Francisco Quartet and Rik Malone, host of Classical KDFC. The evening will be based around music of exile and Lara’s own new album Exiles Café (on the Steinway label) – the album was CD of the Week simultaneously on WQXR and WFMT and shortly afterwards on Classical KDFC. Downes is in the midst of an extensive North America tour of Exiles Café.

Also on the bill for later in the series are Christopher O’Riley (May 29), Gabriel Kahane (Sept 5), Awadagin Pratt (Oct 17), Theo Bleckmann (Nov 14), Dan Tepfer with Lara Downes (Dec 12), Alexandre Da Costa (Jan 16), Mohammed Fairouz (Feb 27), Zuill Bailey with Lara Downes (March 11), Anthony de Mare (March 25) and Matt Haimovitz (April 6). Cocktails and supper will be offered during the performances, as will full dinners in the adjacent award-winning new-style Japanese restaurant.

Yoshi's is one of the foremost venues for music in the US. Originally opened by Yoshie Akiba, her husband Kaz Kajimura, and chef Hiroyuki Hori as a restaurant, it soon became as well-known for its jazz. What started as a sideline to entertain diners became the main event. Showcasing international stars such as Chick Corea, Ravi Coltrane and Jack DeJohnette, it has become a pacesetter on the US jazz scene. The Artist Sessions aims to do the same from the classical music standpoint for Yoshi's San Francisco.

Watch Lara Downes's new music video, Tango from the Exiles Cafe - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy7-CJmtN3U

For booking or media enquiries please contact James Inverne in the UK office at james@inverneprice.com, or on +44 7870 203181, or Patricia Price in the US office at patricia@inverneprice.com or on +1 509 9955546. For US media enquiries directly related to "Exiles Cafe" please contact Amanda Sweet at amanda@bucklesweetmedia.com or on +1 347 564 3371.

Notes for Editors

* Lara Downes is long-term Artist In Residence at the prestigious Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at University of California Davis. Her performances have been heard on NPR's "Performance Today", WNYC's "New Sounds", All Classical FM, WFMT Chicago and WBGO's "Jazz Set" among others

* Her recordings have been called, variously, "magical" (NPR), "addicting" (The Huffington Post) and "something magnificent and different" (Sequenza 21)

* She has worked with many fellow leading American artists, among them Lara St John, Zuill Bailey and Rachel Barton Pine. Commissions for Downes have come from Aaron Jay Kernis, David Sanford and Benny Goson among others, while she has enjoyed cross-genre collaborations with the likes of former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove, choreographer David Grenke, video artist Glenda Drew and director/chorographer Mindy Cooper.

* Downes is the Founder and President of the 88 KEYS Foundation, a non-profit organisation that fosters opportunities for music experiences and learning in America's public schools, and she nurtures next-generation musicians as curator of the Young Artists program at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at University of California Davis. Lara Downes is a Steinway Artist.

By Jana Hanchett

While the stodgy classical world bemoans its diminishing cultural relevance, Lara Downes is embracing the 21st century. “I feel grateful to have grown up in a generation that has faced the absolute end of an era,” the Bay Area-based pianist says.

Downes sees the end of one era as the beginning of the next, and she uses contemporary technological savvy to create a welcoming space for classical music in today’s culture. Her website is far user-friendlier than many classical sites, and her blog offers her own probing interviews with other pianists and insightful experiences. Downes also provides easy access to her music by posting her music trailers on YouTube and offering her albums on Spotify. In concert, she often uses a Bluetooth-enabled pedal to turn the score pages on her iPad, rather than employing an old school paper score.

Giving herself the freedom to play from the score instead of from memory provides a common-sense solution to the challenges of contemporary times.

“We’re not working anymore in an age in which an artist tours all year with one or two recital programs, a repertoire of maybe 12 or 15 pieces per season (or beyond), and an interface with audiences that involves solely playing those pieces, bowing, and going back to the green room!” Downes explains. “So the ability to relate to the printed page in real time, to make spontaneous choices, and to allow for a broader focus, is critical. I think that the technological advances to support these changes are happening in perfect timing. Playing from digital scores is just easy, convenient, and aesthetically lovely. My only problem is that my kids believe that the iPad belongs to them, and I’ve had a reminder about expiring credits for one of their games pop up on my screen in the middle of a concert!”

You can see Downes’s attitude – and iPad – in action twice this weekend. On Saturday, April 13 at 7:30pm, Classic Pianos hosts Downes’ new Steinway-label debut recording “Exiles‘ Café.” A cozy cheese, pastry and wine reception follows. Then on Sunday, April 14 at 4 pm, Reed College presents Downes’ “Between Two Worlds: Music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold.” The concert features a conversation with Kathrin Korngold Hubbard, Korngold’s granddaughter. John Hubbard, the husband of Korngold’s granddaughter, joins Downes on cello.

The connections Downes creates between classical music and the modern world promote necessary discussions. Downes’ CD cover for her “Exiles’ Cafe” sparked intense debate on classical music authority Greg Sandow’s blog; the stodgies and the modern art lovers went head-to-head on defining authentic, appealing artistry. Downes jumps right into these conversations and disarms everyone with her honesty and wit.

Exploring Exiles

Downes’ relevance to 21st-century audiences stems not just from her authentic use of the common technological language, but also from her thoughtful pianism, so evident in her most recent album “Exiles’ Café.” The problem of exile spans centuries, and on the CD, which explores lesser-known works by composers like Chopin, Milhaud, Bartok, and Weill who were forced to leave their homeland and wander the world, Downes provides fresh insights by including works by contemporary composers. “I think that for me, especially, because at heart I’m a storyteller through my music, my work with composers helps me to bring musical narratives to life in very wonderful ways. ‘Exiles’ has brought me into a great friendship with the very young composer Mohammed Fairouz, who is doing absolutely extraordinary things, and we’re working together now on several commissioning projects.”

Downes’s contemporary approach to classical music extends beyond performing and commissioning new music, and using modern means to bring it to listeners. She’s also finding new ways to reach new audiences for her music. Downes recently created a new series in San Francisco called The Artist Sessions at Yoshi’s that enables dialogue between audiences and musicians who are on the cutting-edge of creating and performing compelling, classical music. “It’s another way for artists to take charge of the future and to contribute what we’ve learned as performers to the design of programming, the influencing of tastes and trends, and the development of new audiences,” she says.

That take-charge attitude is why Downes, like the exiled composers she admires, has been able to convert challenges – in her case, the changes rocking the classical music field – into opportunities, and explains her gratitude at having entered the field at the outset of a new era. “My teachers watched the structures they knew and relied on fall apart, in terms of government support for the arts, the recording industry, the dwindling (or changing, as I prefer to see it) audience for concert music,” she recalls. “Their doom and gloom informed us early on that if we wanted to make a life in music, we would have to actually make one, not just wait for one to happen. So we are out there on the front lines, directing our own projects, creating our own concert series and festivals, producing our own recordings, forming collaborations, and most of all making an audience for what we do. I think that, despite the challenges, this is right and good.”

Space is limited for Lara Downes’s “Exiles’ Café” concert on Saturday, April 13 at Classic Pianos, 3003 SE Milwaukie Ave. Portland, OR 97202. Reserve tickets by contacting Peggie Zackery at 503.546.5622 or peggie@classicportland.com; tickets are $15 adults, $10 students.

The all-Korngold concert on Sunday, April 14, is at Eliot Hall Chapel, Reed College, 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland, OR 97202. Tickets are $15, in advance or at the door. However, anyone can get a ticket for $8 by following Downes on all her social media accounts: Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Bring your smartphone with you the day of the concert to get this discount.

“I can do nothing but think of you…” – Johannes Brahms, letter to Clara Schumann in 1855, the year he started composing his First Symphony in earnest

In a fascinating new concept, John Axelrod (2012 ICMA Award winner and winner of the ResMusica “Best Classical CD of 2012”) is to spearhead a multi-year exploration of the relationship between Brahms and the woman he loved, Clara Schumann, as depicted in their music. “If you listen to the Brahms symphonies,” says Axelrod, “each of them seems to inhabit a completely different, though connected, character. Then, if you listen to the songs of Clara Schumann, they also fall clearly into a very similar four moods. I believe that Clara’s own personality is in those songs, and so if that is true, it is also possible to think of the four Brahms symphonies as portraits of Clara – four different aspects of her.”

To explore this idea, four CDs will – for the first time - each pair a Brahms symphony with its ‘matching’ set of five of Clara’s Lieder. And to illustrate it further, there will be four different world-class singers as Clara, each a different voice-type (including one man!) - a fitting project to start in 2013, the 180th anniversary year of Brahms’s birth. Says Axelrod, “Brahms loved, and he was beloved – and they shared what Clara once called in her diary, ‘the most beautiful mutual understanding of two souls’. That is there in his symphonies, it finds its image in her songs.”

In the symphonies, Axelrod will conduct the Grammy Award-winning Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi (who, says Axelrod “truly play Brahms con amore”) and in the songs he will accompany from the piano. For the first release, in September 2013, the second and fourth symphonies will be coupled with songs sung by, respectively, Ana Maria Martinez and Indra Thomas. The second set of two symphonies and Lieder will be issued in 2014. The producer for the recording is multiple Grammy Award-winner Michael Fine, and fellow Grammy-winner Wolf Dieter Karwatky is engineer.

“This is a major release for Telarc, and perhaps one of the most fascinating we’ve ever done,” says Telarc’s Vice President of Marketing Jason Linder, “John Axelrod has not only emerged as one of the finest conductors of today, he is also one of the music world’s great innovators and both sides of him come together in this concept.”

For more information on John Axelrod and these recordings, please contact James Inverne on james@inverneprice.com, or on +44 (0)7870 203181. For more information on Telarc, please contact Amanda Sweet on amanda@bucklesweetmedia.com, or on +1 (347) 564-3371.

Notes for Editors

* John Axelrod is Principal Conductor of the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, as well as Music Director of the Orchestre National des Pays et des Loire (ONPL). A former pupil of Leonard Bernstein, he is one of today’s most in-demand conductors. Recent recordings include a much-praised Berlioz and Ravel disc with Veronique Gens and the ONPL for Ondine Classics (which led respected US broadcaster Tom Manoff to write, “Just when I was beginning to worry about the future of classical music, I’m discovering new great conductors [like John Axelrod]”), “American Serenade” (“5 stars” – Diapason) with the ONPL and violinist Rachel Kolly d’Alba (Warner Classics), and Gorecki’s Third Symphony with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra for Sony Classical.

He regularly conducts other leading orchestras including the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Chicago Symphony and NHK Symphony and conducted the La Scala premiere of Bernstein’s Candide. He recently conducted a world tour with superstar pianists Lang Lang and Herbie Hancock. He has been fascinated by challenging musical preconceptions since his early days in Houston when he founded the boundary-breaking “Orchestra X”. His book, “How Great Music Is Made, Or Not” was recently published to critical acclaim in German by Schott-Henschel and will be published in English later this year.

* Ana Maria Martinez is one of the most admired lyric sopranos working today, singing in many of the world’s premier opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Los Angeles Opera. She frequently works with Placido Domingo, in both of his guises as singer and conductor. She scored a particular success recently as Dvorak’s Rusalka at Glyndebourne, a show that was both live-streamed online and issued on CD.

* Indra Thomas, a more dramatic-voiced soprano, opened the BBC Proms in 2006 and has sung with the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera. She is especially noted as a leading Aida, a part she has sung around the world, from Chicago’s Lyric Opera to the Bregenz Festival to London’s Royal Albert Hall.

* The Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi was founded in 1993 by Vladimir Delman, and subsequent music directors, conductors emeritus and principal guest conductors include Riccardo Chailly, Carlo Maria Giulini, Rudolf Barshai, Helmut Rilling and Wayne Marshall. Xian Zhang is the current Music Director, John Axelrod the Principal Conductor. The orchestra’s recordings have won success and awards, including a Gramophone Award, Classic FM People’s Choice, the Choc de l’Annee and, in 2010, the Grammy (for “Verismo Arias” with Renee Fleming).

Lara Downes is a progressive. That phrase has become over-used, has even lost its meaning somewhat, but in her case it is entirely appropriate. As she explains in the below interview with IPMC’s James Inverne, quickly realising that the usual piano recital track wasn’t for her, she drew inspiration from the visual arts world to redefine what a piano concert could be – and in so doing she has won a devoted following, not least among other musicians. Her concept shows, from “13 Ways of Looking at the Goldberg” (which joined Bach with variations from today’s leading composers) to “Long Time Coming” (a look at the way Duke Ellington inspired fellow composers and how they all provided the soundtrack to mid-Depression America) and her latest, “Exiles Café” (about which more below) have put her at the forefront of American innovators.

Her new CD, “Exiles Café” (released in the US last week and already featured as "New release of the week" for both WQXR and WFMT, and charting on Amazon, it will reach Europe in the coming months) takes as its cue the cafes and bars where composers in exile would find and be creatively fuelled by the immigrant musical communities in their adopted home (watch the trailer here - .http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0WehsRnJPA). The album is issued on the Steinway label, with a companion download release of the complete – and rarely recorded – Korngold Piano Sonata No 2. Downes is about to take to the road for a North America, 11-city tour of “Exiles Café” in concert, with destinations including New York, Vancouver, Seattle, Buffalo, Toronto and others. She is also developing the concept as a multimedia show for later this year. In an impassioned, often amusing conversation she told James Inverne the reasons why she sought an alternative track as a performer…

LD: One of the interesting things about what we think of as the solo piano recital is what a short life-span it has. That format only goes back to Liszt, which is not that long. And yet the traditions are so firmly entrenched and have gotten so rigid. Even as far as the idea of performing by memory, to the way the performer and the audience interact (or don’t), the way were expected to dress. It’s all from that very short window in history.

JI: So this frustrated you?

LD: Many curiosities were buried inside me, and within the standard ambitious music student track I was on. And I was thinking about music only in one way – playing it and understanding it and performing it the best I could. And everything else that I was very serious about in life and in the world was somehow separate to that. After finishing school I was feeling some frustration with that but it’s the path you’ve been on since you were tiny so you don’t really question it. But I had my epiphany at the Guggenheim Museum in New York one year.

There was a special exhibit there called “The American Century”. It was a retrospective of the 20th century in American art and for every piece of art in the show, rather than the usual short notes, it went deep into all of the social and cultural currents that were happening at the time, found parallels, it all awoke something in me, in the way it made me experience what I was seeing. And at that time I had just come to American 20th century music.

So I went into this whole new way of thinking, with the desire to recreate that experience with music and in front of audiences. For the first time, I thought of concerts as more than a big virtuoso piece surrounded by smaller pieces. So I developed the show “The Americans”, which looked at American music from the turn of the 19th century and this was my attempt to create a story about my country and the last century through the literature of music.

It was premiered in a protected place – this was right after I had come to University of California Davis. I was asked to take an artist residency, which I still hold there, and no parameters were put on it. But in the context of a university community it felt both of interest and ballsy because for everything I was exploring there was somebody on campus who was an expert. But I did it and it was tremendously successful and the interactions with audiences were totally different than anything I’d experienced before. They weren’t just coming up to me afterwards and saying I was a fine pianist, the show opened up fascinating conversations! And I didn’t look back after that.

In the context of this long-term residency I wanted to look outside of just a musical structure and try to create those cultural and social connections over and over again. And I’ve done that now with everything from Robert Schumann to Duke Ellington, and now music of exile.

JI: So it was a conscious decision, but did you have to force yourself into a different mode, as it were, or did it feel natural?

LD: Everybody who has a forum to do so, a privilege to do so, explores their true interests eventually. Look at Yo Yo Ma, he could play the Dvorak concerto every night for rest of his life. But he constantly explores new things, and all of us who think about music in a global way, who make it really part of a larger experience of being in the world, are driven somehow outwards from practising – you spend so much time in the practice room. And that becomes habitual and you have to do it of course, but the idea of where you look for inspiration about who you’re going to be as an artist when you exit that room is fascinating.

JI: You were one of the first in the US to start creating these kinds of progressive piano shows. Does it still feel such a leap?

LD: It’s been such an interesting 10 years. I was talking with the Calder Quartet the other day, who are known for being very experimental with repertoire, and they were saying how fast these performance practices have become comfortable and widely accepted. When we started doing things that felt very adventurous there wasn’t a model. You were putting together new ideas and hoping that someone was going to understand and like them. There is a place and audiences for this kind of work now. It’s moving so fast!

You know, some of my colleagues who did this kind of work feel that at school we were growing up in a time of decline, where all our teachers were bemoaning the loss of the world that they knew. They took for granted the idea that the work wouldn’t be there for us, so we never expected very much! And those of us who have been proactive – well, it has been rewarding and exciting and the notion that you can have power in determining what and in what context you will play is exciting. And now today’s young people are looking at us as the establishment.

JI: Do you feel though that the music world is still obsessed with big names?

LD: Well that’s partly to do with issues of communication by artists and by presenters. The normal brochure you get from a concert series has a list of artist names and information about the music they’re going to play, and that’s all. So it had better have Yo Yo Ma’s name in there otherwise why would you be interested to read the brochure? If names are all that are there, they need to be names you recognise! Yet compare that to the kind of effort put into any new TV show or movie – you get a completely rounded picture of what the film is about and evocative imagery. It’s not like you get a brochure in the mail that says, ‘New movie - fine actress - $88 subscription!”

But technology is changing and artists are becoming very savvy and they have been driven to find new ways to communicate and illustrate what it is they do.

JI: Do your concept ideas come from the music, or do you find the pieces to fit the concept?

LD: It goes both ways, because either a piece of music leads me to think laterally or I have a more narrative-based idea that drives me to music. In the case of “Exiles Café” that’s a circular project because originally my thoughts came from two points – I had done a concert series at a Jewish Cultural Center in San Francisco and part one of the series was called “Exodus” and was about Jews who had left Europe and came out to Hollywood, and that was my introduction to Korngold and his colleagues. And I thought that quite aside from the story about people and history, what happened musically out of all if that was fascinating. Because they brought music here and applied it to a new medium, film. So musically that was a really powerful idea. Then a few years ago at a Chopin bicentennial event I was talking to some retired generals and diplomats and they were saying how much Chopin represents Polish patriotism; so this idea of how a symbol of a place can come out through a person’s music took hold.

And with all of these projects I discover so much. Not least, in “Exiles Café”, the preludes of Paul Bowles. I didn’t know too much about Paul Bowles’s music, I knew him more as a writer. Fascinatingly though, while his writing about the experience of being an ex-pat is so dark, in the music he was transmitting his experiences in a much more romantic, positive way. It is free of that despair that we associate with his writing. You know he wrote that wonderful quote - “Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveller belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.” Maybe in his writing he was one, in his music the other.

JI: What do audiences say to you after your shows? You said that they continue the conversation, but do they articulate what these kinds of concept shows mean to them?

LD: Someone says to me every time I perform, “I never knew classical music could be presented like this”. It sounds ridiculous but outside of the major urban centres these kinds of shows don’t get done that often. Yet I’m not doing anything that extreme, it’s just about putting things in context. What they do also say though is that it opens up new ways of hearing, and I’ve had that experience myself, through my own creative process.

For booking or media enquiries please contact James Inverne in the UK office at james@inverneprice.com, or on +44 7870 203181, or Patricia Price in the US office at patricia@inverneprice.com or on +1 509 9955546. For US media enquiries directly related to the "Exiles Cafe" album please contact Amanda Sweet at amanda@bucklesweetmedia.com or on +1 347 564 3371.

Notes for Editors

* Lara Downes is long-term Artist In Residence at University of California Davis. Her performances have been heard on NPR's "Performance Today", WNYC's "New Sounds", All Classical FM, WFMT Chicago and WBGO's "Jazz Set" among others

* Her recordings have been called, variously, "magical" (NPR), "addicting" (The Huffington Post) and "something magnificent and different" (Sequenza 21)

* She has worked with many fellow leading American artists, among them Lara St John, Zuill Bailey and Rachel Barton Pine. Commissions for Downes have come from Aaron Jay Kernis, David Sanford and Benny Goson among others, while she has enjoyed cross-genre collaborations with the likes of former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove, choreographer David Grenke, video artist Glenda Drew and director/chorographer Mindy Cooper.

* Downes is the Founder and President of the 88 KEYS Foudation, a non-profit organisation that fosters opportunities for music experiences and learning in America's public schools, and she nurtures next-generation musicians as curator of the Young Artists program at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at University of California Davis. Lara Downes is a Steinway Artist.

•Gheorghiu to star as Zerbinetta in Ariadne Auf Naxos at the Glyndebourne Festival – flagship new production
•“Songs From The Art Nouveau” to feature music by Richard Strauss, Ravel, Zemlinsky and Respighi – follows the acclaimed
“Arias For Anna De Amicis”
•"Songs From The Art Nouveau” mini making-of documentary just released to YouTube
“Gheorghiu amazes with her vocal assurance, put at the service of an infallible musicality…the penetrating intelligence (and) the truthful realism of her feelings…are dazzling.” Diapason magazine

Romanian soprano Teodora Gheorghiu, one of the fast-rising stars of the classical music world, is looking forward to a first half of 2013 that will see her Glyndebourne debut and the follow-up to her “Arias for Anna De Amicis” CD (conducted by Christophe Rousset, which was named CD of the Week by BBC Radio 3 several weeks running, and CD of the Month by Opera Magazine). The new recording will also be on the Harmonia Mundi-distributed Aparte label and pairs Gheorghiu with the prize-winning Israeli pianist Jonathan Aner.

The album, “Songs From The Art Nouveau”, examines a cultural period which is often discussed in terms of visual arts and other genres but rarely music. And yet, says Gheorghiu, art nouveau sensibilities are present in the work of some the composers of the time and collected together, as here, a movement can be discerned. The art songs included on this disc – by Zemlinksy, Richard Strauss, Respighi and Ravel – examine music’s own art nouveau across Europe, with languages ranging from German to Italian to French to Greek. “I absolutely love art nouveau and wanted to bring this period of history of art alive in music”, says Gheorghiu.

To mark the announcement of the recording, a short “making-of” documentary from the sessions has been released to YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8skXoD5jwg). The album will be released on 8th April in the UK, 19th April in Germany, and releases in other territories including the US will follow.

In May 2013, Gheorghiu then makes her debut at the prestigious Glyndebourne Festival, singing – more Strauss - Zerbinetta in Ariadne Auf Naxos. Katharina Thoma’s new production will be a flagship of the Glyndebourne season, and marks the last new production to be conducted by Vladimir Jurowski as Glyndebourne’s music director. There will be 14 performances from 18th May. The production also stars Sir Thomas Allen and Soile Isokoski. So an exciting start to 2013 for the young Romanian soprano, and that’s only the first half of the year…!

Teodora Gheorghiu is represented by Inverne Price for strategic management (her general manager is Markus Koch at Hilbert Artists), and for public relations. For enquiries please contact James Inverne (james@inverneprice.com) in the UK, or Patricia Price in the US (patricia@inverneprice.com ). Full biography – http://www.inverneprice.com/artist.php?id=tgheorghiu&aview=bio

Notes for Editors
* Originally a flautist, Teodora Gheorghiu was until recently a company principal of the Vienna Staatsoper until leaving to go freelance
* The great tenor Jose Carreras was one of the first to encourage her singing career when he was judging a contest that she didn’t win, and he insisted that she should have done and personally awarded her a scholarship equal to the value of the prize (she went on to win that competition in a later year)

* She has sung under the batons of some of the world’s leading conductors, among them Christophe Rousset, Franz Welser-Most, Bertrand de Billy, Marco Amiliato and John Axelrod, and alongside great singers including Neil Shicoff, Juan Diego Florez and Leo Nucci

* She will sing a special performance of “Songs From The Art Nouveau” on March 21st as part of the prestigious Paris Book Fair

* Teodora Gheorghiu is supported by the Pan Foundation For Music

Over the last decade, the San Francisco pianist Lara Downes has made several recordings around some stimulating themes, including “American Ballads” as interpreted by a broad swath of composers, and “Dream of Me,” featuring various nocturnes and reveries.

Downes’s latest album, "Exiles' Café," focuses on the concept of music written in exile, expressed through short pieces by composers including Chopin, Milhaud, Bartok, Weill, and Rachmaninoff. As Downes recently explained, “cafes have historically housed and sheltered exiles and emigres in every corner of the globe, through so many journeys and displacements." In other words, think Cafe Centrale or Les Deux Magots, rather than your typical chain coffee shop.

Displacement due to war and political turmoil is a major thread. Two of Chopin’s Mazurkas -- Op. 6 No. 1 and Op. 68 No. 4 -- reflect his 18-year exile in France, prompted by revolution in his native Poland. Bartok's three Hungarian folksongs from the Csik District were composed in 1907, long before he was exiled in New York, but they have the spirit of nostalgia for a simpler place and time.

The gathering war clouds of the 1930s forced many composers to leave for the United States. Among those featured here are Kurt Weill and Erich Korngold, and while the latter composer is represented with an early work (a movement from his Second Sonata in E major of 1910), Weill’s Lost in the Stars hails from 1949, and is heard in an arrangement by New York pianist-composer Jed Distler.

Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev both went into exile around the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917-18; the former is represented with his Fragments, the latter with the Pastoral Sonatina in C major. Among the album’s gems are two Dumkas by Bohuslav Martinu, a composer who spent a greater proportion of his life in exile from his native Czechoslovakia.

Finally, not to be overlooked is Mohammed Fairouz’s Piano Miniature No. 6, “Addio,” a piece which draws on his Arab-American roots. Downes plays with a sensitivity and alertness to the many styles represented on "Exiles' Cafe."

Exiles' Cafe
Lara Downes, piano
Steinway and Sons
Available at Arkivmusic.com

The medal, originally sculpted by Julio Kilenyi (and hailed as “the most impressive portrait of the master that has as yet appeared”) was first given in 1933, and has been awarded to Botstein for his “exemplary work in furthering the understanding and appreciation of the life and work of Anton Bruckner”. The society cited Botstein’s outstanding performances on the podium and also noted that he “has shared with his audiences a rich and diverse mixture of editions and versions of Bruckner’s symphonies that are not often performed.”

Botstein, who declared himself to be “honoured…the connoisseurship and commitment of the Society has helped to maintain Bruckner’s music as a vital part of the current orchestral canon”, received the award at a ceremony last weekend, preceding his Bruckner concert at the Peter Norton Symphony Space in New York City. Leon Botstein’s recordings with the American Symphony Orchestra of Bruckner’s symphonies 1, 3, 4, 7, the Mass No 3 and Psalm 150 are available for download.

It comes at a busy time for Botstein. Apart from the LA Times proposal, Botstein has recently – also in that city, coincidentally - been invited by Gustavo Dudamel to conduct his Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl later this year, as well as Dudamel’s Simon Bolivar Orchestra in Venezuela. A collection of Botstein’s essays on great composers will, it has also just been announced, be published in Germany by Zsolnay Und Deuticke this spring. And yesterday’s concert was part of the American Symphony Orchestra’s 50th anniversary season, and Botstein’s 20th as its music director. Watch a clip of Leon Botstein conducting the ASO in Bruckner and discussing the relationship between Bruckner and Wagner, on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx5d8aJBn0w.

For queries (including booking enquiries outside of the US) please contact James Inverne at james@inverneprice.com, or on +44 7870 203181

Notes for Editors

* Leon Botstein is the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, the president of Bard College and founder and co-artistic director of the Bard Music Festival, also conductor laureate of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra

* He has conducted many of the world’s leading orchestras including the London Symphony, London Philharmonic, BBC Symphony, NDR-Hamburg, NDR-Hannover, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, St Petersburg Philharmonic, Budapest Festival Orchestra and Bamberg Symphony

* Of his many recordings (for labels such as Chandos, CPO and Telarc), that with the LSO of Gavriil Popov’s First Symphony was Grammy Award-nominated, while his American Symphony Orchestra series has sold in excess of 105,000 downloads

* Leon Botstein is the editor of The Musical Quarterly and the author of numerous articles and books. Other accolades he has received include the award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Harvard University’s prestigious Centennial Award, and the Cross of Honour, First Class from the Austrian government.
Leon Botstein is represented by Inverne Price for public relations and for booking enquiries outside of the US.

Enjoy a melodic festive season with Inverne Price artists.
As Christmas gets underway, it’s the traditional ‘best of’ lists time! We make no pretence at impartiality here at Inverne Price Towers, but as we have some incredible artists among our clients – both for management and for PR-only ­- we thought we could make as good a list as any just from their releases over the last year. So, with your new Christmas MP3s or CD players at the ready, have a browse! Some of these artists also still have dates available in 2013/14 so, if you’re a presenter, please feel free to contact us and you can hear them in the flesh! A free CD with each booking (maybe).

John Axelrod
Berlioz Les Nuits d’ete etc. (Veronique Gens, soprano, ONPL, Ondine)

The critics say…
Best Classical CD of the Year – ResMusica
“Pure ravishment…five stars” – The Guardian
“Just when I was beginning to worry about the future of classical music, I’m discovering great new conductors [like John Axelrod]” – Tom Manoff, WPR

Gorecki, Symphony No 3 (Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Sony Classical)

The critics say…
“This new version…is excellent in its own way…the very end glows to a radiant forte” - Gramophone
…and recently out, “American Serenade” with Rachel Kolly d’Alba, just awarded five stars in Diapason.
IPMC represents John Axelrod for PR and management in the US, UK and Scandinavia.

David Aaron Carpenter
Kraus, viola concertos, world premiere recordings (Tapiola Sinfonietta / Nisonen, Ondine)

The critics say…
“Carpenter is a sensitive and knowledgeable guide through these works, which he plays as if they’ve always been with him.” - Gramophone
IPMC represents David Aaron Carpenter for general management and PR

Mark O’Connor
“America On Strings” (OMAC Records)

New album from the iconic, Grammy-winning American violinist and composer – recently issued, reviews not yet received.
IPMC represents Mark O'Connor for management outside of North America.

Alexandre Da Costa
“Fire and Blood” (Montreal Symphony Orchestra / Pedro Halffter, Warner Classics) JUNO Prize winner

The critics say…
“Panache and rhythmic punch” – BBC Music Magazine
IPMC represents Alexandre Da Costa for general management and PR.

Lang Lang
“The Chopin Album” (Sony Classical)

The critics say…
“An exhilarating blend of poetry and power” – The Independent
“His Grande Valse Brilliante is brilliant indeed; so are the cascading double sixths in the eighth etude in D-flat major…Lang Lang’s grin and enthusiasm are genuine: he simply loves playing his piano, communicating the joy of music.” – The Times
IPMC represents Lang Lang for strategic PR.

Sergio Tiempo
Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No 1, Liszt Totentanz etc. (Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana / Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky, Avanti Classics)

The critics say…
“It is no exaggeration to say that he may well be the most dazzling and spontaneous pianist of his generation. At every point he turns the heat up to near boiling point…his octave technique is superhuman…every bar sparks with a fearless, vivid and audacious life, and no other recent version of the Tchaikovsky comes within distance of this…a record in a thousand." – Gramophone, “Editor’s Choice”

“Tango Rhapsody” (with Karin Lechner, piano, Avanti Classics)
Tango fireworks from Tiempo and his sister Karin Lechner. Recently issued, reviews not yet received.
IPMC represents Sergio Tiempo for general management and PR

…and we look forward to more great recordings from these artists as well as other IPMC artists such as Leon Botstein, Lara Downes and Teodora Gheorghiu in 2013. In the meantime, everyone at Inverne Price wishes you a wonderful festive season!

For further information/enquiries please visit www.inverneprice.com or contact James Inverne on james@inverneprice.com.

Carpenter will play Schnittke’s intensely moving viola concerto, under the NSO’s revered chief conductor Christoph Eschenbach. They have previously recorded the work (named “Editor’s Choice” by Gramophone), and have performed it with the Dresden Staatskapelle. In 2012 Carpenter caused a sensation playing the work in Brazil with the Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra.

The Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center dates are part of a high-profile series of dates for Carpenter. 2012 has seen the launch of the Salome Festival in East Hampton, hosted by the violist and his Salome Chamber Orchestra – and featuring guest performer Rufus Wainwright. David Aaron Carpenter and Salome also hosted a gala concert at Lincoln Center which saw Carpenter play alongside Eschenbach and Alan Gilbert and featured, as guest speaker, former US President Bill Clinton. Upcoming appearances include the Verbier Festival, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a German tour with Soloists of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and a tour of Southern France with the Orchestre National des Pays et de Loire (ONPL).

Of the New York and Washington dates, David Aaron Carpenter says, “It has always been my dream to play a great concerto at Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center. And going there to play with such a conductor as Maestro Eschenbach, with such a fine orchestra and with such a profound masterpiece as the Schnittke concerto is that dream come true. Rostropovich was a legendary musician for my generation, a great role-model, and I will do my utmost to make my performance of music by his great friend Alfred Schnittke a worthy tribute to Slava.”
To mark this announcement, David Aaron Carpenter has released to YouTube a scintillating video of the Salome Chamber Orchestra playing Piazzolla, from this summer’s Salome Festival, which can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thd6OhRYPx0.

David Aaron Carpenter’s recording of the Schnittke Viola Concerto (together with his recording of the Elgar Cello Concerto, transcribed for viola) is on Ondine Classics. His performances of the work with the NSO will be on May 3rd at Kennedy Center, Washington at 8pm, and on May 11th at Carnegie Hall, New York at 7.30pm.

Notes for Editors

David Aaron Carpenter is widely considered one of the most talented and charismatic musicians of his generation. As a priority artist for Ondine Classics he has recorded three discs, under conductors Christoph Eschenbach and Vladimir Ashkenazy - his most recent, the world premiere recording of three recently rediscovered viola concertos by Joseph Martin Kraus. Appointed a Rolex Protégé, Carpenter is also the only violist ever to win the Leonard Bernstein Prize (in 2011), and has played with leading orchestras around the world, from the Philadelphia Orchestra to the Philharmonia. He regularly plays alongside front-rank soloists such as Leonidas Kavakos, Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Yo-Yo Ma, and is a regular at the Verbier and Schleswig-Holstein music festivals. Carpenter is artistic director of the Salome Chamber Orchestra.

David Aaron Carpenter is represented by Inverne Price for general management and for public relations. For enquiries and bookings please contact James Inverne (james@inverneprice.com) in the UK, or Patricia Price in the US (patricia@inverneprice.com ).

It began on Wednesday evening with Éric Champagne’s Mouvement Symphonique No. 1, a collage of sketches too brief to offend and too dull to impress that disappeared against Barber’s remarkable Violin Concerto and Shostakovich’s expansive 10th Symphony. The Champagne did not appear in Friday’s repeat performance — the symphony’s programming this year is inspired.

Conductor Vasily Petrenko made an outstanding debut as reedy guy in tails. Whatever he is doing with that ridiculous left arm, it works, and the orchestra sounded as bright and focused as a Ritalin kid counting eyebrow hairs. Violinist Alexandre Da Costa joined for the Barber. He gave a phenomenal performance that exuded unusual humility and a focus on the conductor. Their concerto emerged with aching, frank and sensitive beauty, the gruelling final movement impressing us enough to demand a rare mid-concert encore — the elegant Nana Sefardi lullaby by Lorenzo Palomo that Da Costa played in an impromptu trio.

So we had high hopes for the Shostakovich. At least it would be loud enough to drown out the weeping after Da Costa. And it was. Petrenko beat the hall like a mule.

Crucially, it never got out of hand. In what could be the best 40 minutes of music we hear this year, Petrenko brought out the terror of the work without sacrificing its subtleties. The 10th begins ambiguously, rumbling, searching for its thematic anxiety before diverting to the cataclysmic second movement. That filthy, wild business concluded, the next two — a risky length to play without a break — are wry with reflection. This is difficult music to listen to at home so I recommend a screaming brass section that you can’t turn off.

The following evening’s reprise of Angèle Dubeau’s Violons d’enfer presented a smattering of devil-themed music with the understatement of a United Russia victory rally. The small all-female string ensemble played fun and loose while Mario Saint-Amand glided around declaiming satanic bon-mots and Dubeau took bows, alone, after each of the eleven pieces.

The program was stuffed with big violin moments that numbed the effect of a typical violin concerto — a rush as the solo bursts out the familiar melody and expectation blooms into release. My adrenal gland gave up after a dozen of these highs and the light show became fascinating.

I have suggested vandalism in this column. I am no purist. I believe that classical music is a living art, but Thursday’s campy spectacle of LEDs, voice-overs, and rehearsed banter was an inane distraction from the interesting parts of the program — arrangements of themes from video games. They were not mind-blowing but they were brave and original to put onstage. This mass classical music has enough potential — especially in Montreal — that we could have had a truly experimental evening based on it.

© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/Petrenko+outshines+Dubeau+light/7634006/story.html#ixzz2EO9aToue

Please email your c.v./resume to Patricia Price (patricia@inverneprice.com). Full-time and part-time positions considered. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Closing date: 7th December 2012

Salary: Depending on experience

Location: Flexible

Performing is a mission for Botstein (a recent performance in Fairfax, outside Washington, pushed conductor and orchestra to the limit, as they braved post-hurricane chaos to keep the show on - the performance, he concedes, was not one for the ages, as they were all exhausted and starving, but "bringing music to those people, especially after they had been through the trauma of Hurricane Sandy, that was the important thing"). It is learning, it is enlightenment, it is life.

For the latest in Inverne Price’s “Artists In Conversation” series, Botstein discusses that mission, and the surprising musical locations to which it has led him…

JI: You’ve devoted much of your life to bringing into the spotlight works that are little-known and little-played, and you’ve done it in about as committed a way as possible – very often either at Carnegie Hall with the American Symphony Orchestra or, also with the ASO, at the Frank Gehry-built hall at your Bard Summerscape Festival, in Bard College. Where did this commitment come from?

LB: I was lucky to have as teacher the violinist Roman Totenberg, who just died at the age of 101, and he did a lot of new music – Milhaud, Barber, Szymanowski. These were people I’d never heard of as a 12 or 13 year old. So it was his example of not only playing the standard repertoire but his incredible curiosity for new music, or for unknown music. An émigré who had come to the US in his twenties, he had this fantastic ability to bring new repertoire to the table, to the student.

'You view a mythic world where you cannot sift fantasy from reality...'

Then also I had emigrated as child to the US with my parents. And when you grow up as an émigré you see a vanished world, a world that has been destroyed in the sense that the entire context is altered. You learn that in a discontinuous culture where the ravages of a war and in the case of the Jews the destruction of an entire community – the European Jewish community – result in a kind of mythical distance between reality and fact. The old world is a mystery you can’t locate, especially in the Cold War age where Eastern Europe was blocked off to those of us in America. So you view a mythic world where you cannot sift fantasy from reality.

You realise as part of this that people’s lives and careers were ruined. Some were unfairly forgotten – there were a few of winners amongst the émigrés – Hindemith or Schoenberg or Kurt Weill, but then there were many more who had once had great careers who couldn’t get a foothold in the US. Same in England with people like Hans Gál. People of enormous talent, players and composers, were displaced. And you realised how fragile, how fickle, how utterly political fame and career advantages may be.

JI: Perhaps some had a particular capacity for self-promotion?

LB: There was this whole huge array of people who had exaggerated images of themselves. And then there were those who were modest people in modest circumstances, yet whose greatness and achievements are daunting. Alexander Zemlinsky died in obscurity in New York in 1942!

JI: So as an émigré child this struck you as unfair? You already perceived this?

LB: I had Totenberg and also the Romanian conductor Jonel Perlea to guide me in this,. But yes, my empathy as a child was to rescue great talents from our own fickle memories and from historical reputations as formed by fashion. I developed a fierce curiosity about that which you could no longer find, which seemed to have been wiped out, that don’t appear in the standard textbooks.

Then, as a student at Tanglewood in 1967 when I was 20 I noticed record jackets in the store with pictures of performers in profound poses – the Karajan phenomenon – and the names of the composers were barely noticeable. There was a tremendous shift of emphasis to the performer and to the endless repetition of the same repertory. And I know already that the history of music was told in an entirely distorted way.

'I became determined to rectify the fact that, in our line of work,
we’ve put most of the things worth reading out of print'

JI: Were there any great early discoveries?

LB: When I trained as a scholar, after having studied the concert-going life of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, I was flabbergasted to stumble upon details of the last concert conducted by Brahms in 1875. It was an oratorio by Max Bruch called Odysseus (a piece I recorded years ago and have done several times). All I knew about Bruch was his Kol Nidrei and the violin concerto. I got curious and began to browse in libraries, and came across one jewel after another! I became determined to rectify the fact that in our line of work, we’ve put most of the things worth reading out of print! It would be like the book industry only having a few novels out there. Or to put it another way, most of the rooms of the museums of the art of which we are curators have been closed. To give a sense of proportion, it would be like shutting all but five of the rooms of the 200 or however many there may be at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

JI: Has the fact that recording has become in many ways easier helped?

LB: In the early years of digital there was a wacky effort to record without rehearsal as much out-of-the-way repertoire as possible and that did as much harm as good. I have to often tell singers and players not to listen to those recordings!

JI: You have been conducting neglected masterpieces for many years now – which have stayed with you as the unforgettable discoveries?

LB: So many, and often they have changed my views of the staple repertory. For instance, my whole perspective on Aaron Copland was changed by preparing Regina by Marc Blitzstein. We think of Copland as quintessentially American, yet working on Regina made me realise that Copland is a kind of refracted view of American music.

Other favourites? Hartmann’s symphonies. Popov’s First Symphony, which made me rethink Shostakovich’s relationship with Stalin – it was gratifying to be Grammy nominated for that one for my recording with the London Symphony Orchestra. The oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri by Schumann. The Book With Seven Seals, and the opera Notre Dame by Schmidt. Suk’s Asrael Symphony. I’d love to do these again! And soon we’ll do on stage the first performance of the Tanayev Oresteia. Bruch’s oratorios are just terrific. I could fill many concert seasons, easily, with little-known works which require no apology.

JI: You enjoy programming the rare works next to very famous ones, which of course gives context. But do people rank them against each other, do you think?

LB: We have a nasty problem in our business, which no other art form has – it’s as if you have a wife or lover and the first question someone asks is, “How does she compare to Greta Garbo?” But no-one reads a book and puts it down because it isn’t Middlemarch! We hang paintings with ease in our galleries, homes, museums that are not the Mona Lisa.

But when you do set works alongside each other you can get a wonderful sense of the rhetoric of music, its communicative logic, its grammatical and syntactical, mechanisms. I’m doing a program in New York entitled “What is a masterpiece?” and we’re featuring three symphonies all written or revised within a year or two of each other – the First Symphony of Heinrich Hertz-Sonneberg who was a friend of Brahms, a little-known symphony by a very famous composer which will be Dvorak’s Fourth, and then a famous symphony by a famous composer which will be Brahms’s Fourth, all in minor keys. Now there’s no taking away from the fact that the Brahms is a great piece. But is it better? Who cares? Who asked?

'The idiocy of textual faithfulness, it’s a historical fraud'

JI: Does taking this historical view – should it – affect the playing style?

LB: Oh, when you look at modes of interpretation it gets even worse! In the theatre world people will do incredible things to Hamlet or Macbeth, cut them, interpret them in ways that will outrage conservative or bore radical theatregoers at either extreme. Critics will spill enormous amounts of ink considering these issues. But in music the range of interpretation is so constricted – the idiocy of textual faithfulness, it’s a historical fraud. And they all sound the same!

JI: A historical fraud?

LB: Nobody in the Nineteenth Century thought that the printed text was an entire and complete set of instructions for the performer. That nonsensical idea was created in post-World War One Twentieth Century modernism. Yet a Chopin text or a Schumann text was a map for the performer, it says where everything is located but not exactly how to get there. Just because there’s a dynamic marking – that’s the most important instruction from the composer but not the entire set of instructions.

So the kind of connection that enables musicians to shape a piece to its particular audience is in danger of being lost. Expressive gestures change in music just as acting in a silent film looks grotesque to us now, whereas it didn’t to the audience that first watched it. The vocabulary of expression does change. So the fingerings in a Mahler score, they tell you something about the expressive vocabulary that Mahler was using. When you imitate that now there’s a slight danger of rendering the work antique. That’s the quandary period instrument musicians face. If you want to communicate what you believe the argument of the music was to its contemporary audience you might have to use different means. Don’t forget, Elgar orchestrated Bach as did many others. Liszt himself embellished what he played, whether it was a Beethoven sonata or whatever. Pianists improvised between movements and to before starting a piece. So there’s a world in interpretive practice which we now shun as a form of immorality or prostitution.

But that’s exactly why people still remember the great conductor Celibidache because at least he had the guts to do something interesting. I once heard the most distended Don Juan from him and I was on the edge of my seat! There was a Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony on the same program which is still going on! Totally fascinating! I was with a very well-known conductor who was outraged. I was thrilled!

JI: Do musicians ever resist this kind of approach?

LB: Only if you go to a deeply conventionally-minded orchestra in their conventional repertory. I got in trouble once with a German orchestra that was not going to do the Beethoven Eroica in the way that I thought it should be done. They were used to an older-fashioned romantic style which I disagreed with. But usually musicians are relieved when a conductor actually has an argument to be made. If your arguments are good and not arbitrary and you treat the musicians as respected colleagues, they’re game.

Leon Botstein is represented by Inverne Price for PR. For enquiries please contact James Inverne (james@inverneprice.com Tel: +44 -0- 7870 203181) or Patricia Price (patricia@inverneprice.com).

Leon Botstein conducts Carl Czerny's First Symphony, with the American Symphony Orchestra - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzN9xPBcCis

For information about Inverne Price Music Consultancy please visit www.inverneprice.com

Indeed, Tiempo’s very individual interpretations and dazzling technique have won him effusive reviews. His recording of Liszt’s Totantanz and Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto earlier this year was named Editor’s Choice by Gramophone, where Bryce Morrison wrote, “it is no exaggeration to say that he may well be the most dazzling and spontaneous pianist of his generation. At every point he turns the heat up to near boiling point…his octave technique is superhuman…every bar sparks with a fearless, vivid and audacious life, and no other recent version of the Tchaikovsky comes within distance of this…a record in a thousand.” Similarly, the Sunday Times wrote of that disc, “A pianist of electrifying brilliance.”

His new recording, for Avanti Classics, is with his sister and fellow-pianist Karin Lechner (of their last recording together, Gramophone’s Jeremy Nicholas commented, “without doubt one of the most electrifying recordings of four-hand piano music I have ever heard”). The new disc, called Tango Rhapsody, takes its title from a new work by Federico Jusid that actually uses choreography as well as music – the pianists act as much as they play, as can be seen in a free bonus DVD, and from the taster video attached to this email. Watch this space for details of live performances of that work in 2012.

Now, for the latest in Inverne Price’s “Artists In Conversation” series, Sergio Tiempo discusses the links between dance and music with James Inverne…

JI: There’s an historical link between dance and music – I remember when Steven Isserlis released his famous Bach Suites recording on Hyperion he talked about how those suites were all about dance forms. Your new album is called Tango Rhapsody and is dedicated to that dance form. But before we talk about that specifically, I wonder if being born in Venezuela means that you have dance hardwired into your musical psyche?

ST: It’s inevitable, when you live in Venezuela you listen to salsa and merengue all day long, on the radio, whenever you go out it’s playing somewhere, it’s a big part of the day-to-day culture. You almost feel embarrassed if you can’t dance a bit! Actually when I was much younger and had my first girlfriend, this is when I was living in Brussels, I felt so bad that I didn’t know how to dance. So she was the one who taught me to dance salsa and merengue and it was exhilarating! Because it was fun, yes, but also I felt I was finally going back to my roots somehow. I never learnt to dance the tango though, despite taking some classes. It’s ways more difficult.

JI: Does that awareness of those dances spill over into your piano playing, even when you’re not playing Latin music? You play a lot of Chopin, for instance.

ST: It probably does spill over, not consciously but subconsciously. The rhythmic intuition that one has is mostly influenced by the way you move. And this is certainly linked to dancing. I’ve always been amazed at how many classical musicians just can’t dance! But even those who can’t dance are very drawn to it in some way or another. There’s an inevitable link to the body.

JI: You mean while you’re playing, you feel it in your body? Physically?

ST: Definitely. For me, there are several forms of pleasure that you have when playing. One of them is the physical aspect. There are pieces that are physically pleasurable to play because they feel right in your body. Of course the big difference with this and dance is that we’re sitting down as pianists. But it is, still, a different form of dance. Playing the Rachmaninov Third Piano Concerto is intensely pleasurable physically, for example. Although his Second Concerto much less so. I don’t know why there’s that difference between two pieces by the same composer. The Third just falls more comfortably into place. I suppose also a physiological thing, and I’m sure it’s not the same for everyone. The way I’m physically built, it makes a better marriage somehow.

JI: How far can we push this dancing link?

ST: It depends on the piece. With Bach, even though the Cello Suites which you mentioned may have been conceived as dances originally, it’s very difficult for us living in this day and age to actually feel the dance in it, as we dance different kinds of dances now. But when you play pieces that use dance forms which people are actually still dancing nowadays, you are obviously influenced by what you have seen and heard.
And yet in Piazzolla, for one, we have a composer who in a way went beyond the traditional dance kind of tango, so the dance in it is already sublimated. In which case that whole link to dancing is almost indirect. It’s like in Ravel’s La valse. Of course it’s based on a waltz, but there’s nothing particularly dance-like about it, in terms of the kind of waltz we whirl around the floor to. So you never lose the link to dance and probably the rhythmic framework is always there, but the way in which it’s danced – I mean the musical language itself - keeps evolving.

JI: On the new disc you and your sister, the pianist Karin Lechner, play – and act, as you dramatically interact with each other, slamming your hands down on each other’s piano strings, she storms out at one point – a new tango work, the titular Tango Rhapsody. What was the idea with composer Federico Jusid. Is it dance or is it music or is it drama or all three?

ST: Federico wrote Tango Rhapsody to go beyond what we know of tango in the most popular sense, to make it a real dramatic interpretation. Of course, he keeps the link with pop culture, but the thing with pop culture in general is that the strength of symbols within it have to do with your own experience of life. Which is why it’s so interesting when you see the very different ways people interpret the idea of tango in different parts of the world, the images it evokes. For a Dane, the tango may be passion and sensuality and fire, whereas for an Argentinian it will be anger and betrayal and almost misogyny. I stereotype, but the point is it’s different in every place, and this work delves into many of those associations.

JI: So context is vital?

ST: The real content of the music is purely emotional. The framework and the context is very influential but the content is, and I think should be, always emotional. So every performer and the circumstances of every performance will influence it.

JI: Just how influential is the context in terms of the performance? For you, the performer, I mean.

ST: When you play, you are your own world. There is no context anymore. It doesn’t matter where, though it can matter with whom. Playing Ginastera’s First Piano Concerto at the Hollywood Bowl recently was a huge feeling for me, because of the artistic relationship I have with Gustavo and the orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was unbelievable. But it was huge not because of where I was or even who they were, but for what they were doing and the link we had between us. That influenced me hugely. The audience is important of course, but even there, of course you are always aware of the feeling in the audience, but it’s amazing to what point one connects to something so deep inside yourself – while you are playing, it makes you almost impermeable.

Sergio Tiempo is represented by Inverne Price for general management and PR (except in the case of China, which until the end of spring 2013 will be handled by Intermusica). For enquiries please contact James Inverne (james@inverneprice.com Tel: +44 -0- 7870 203181) or Patricia Price (patricia@inverneprice.com).

In the latest of James Inverne's "Artists in conversation" interviews, Mark O'Connor riffs on the art of improvisation, and explains why it's not just creative - it's crucial...

JI: You’re a passionate educator, and a very successful one, with your own violin teaching method and string training camps around the US – even teacher training. But there’s an obvious point of fusion between your teaching and your playing activities, and that’s improvisation. Why do you feel it to be so important? Why for kids, why for adults?

MO’C: Three reasons. One – it’s nice for musicians to be creative, but it’s not necessary for every single musician to compose the music that they perform on stage, or even the majority of it. So when does a musician express creativity if they’re not composing all the time? Improvisation allows them to experience it. It’s a natural extension of a musician’s life, to be creative in that way.

Two – in order to play American music at the highest level, you would have to have some improvisation training or you’re not going to be in the running. It could be jazz, rock and roll, hip hop, contemporary music in classical settings, the improviser is going to have a leg up over the musicians who doesn’t improvise at all.

Three – For students, a lot of students learn better if there’s a creative process in their lessons. Just as on occasion we encourage young children to make up their own sentences and place the words in the sentences in the way they would wish to, we could also do that with musical notes but usually we don’t. Therefore, while most people have a very easy verbal communication with each other because they were creative with their words right from the beginning, it’s much more difficult to have a musical conversation with someone if it isn’t written down on a script.

JI: The great musical theatre lyricist Tim Rice once told me that people don’t appreciate lyricists because everyone more or less knows how to use words, but that composers have a mystique around them because so few people are trained in how to put notes together. Do you think that if more people were musically literate composers might be somehow less celebrated in that sense?

MO’C: Great lyric-writing is just as great as great melody-writing. The fact that most people can write words down on a page makes it even more thrilling when someone comes up with a great lyric that we can all appreciate. So I think it’s the opposite – more people appreciate a good lyric than a good melody. They understand better how it words so they better comprehend what has been accomplished.

JI: Among your many classical compositions is your “Improvised Concerto”. How does that work?

MO’C: I wanted to place improvisation as an art form front and centre in a classical music setting. I’ve had lots of opportunities over the last 20 years to put my improvisations on stage via the cadenzas in my own concertos. And the feedback that I get from both musicians and audiences is one of sincere interest in what I’m doing at those points and how I’m doing it - how did I learn it, how am I able to make it different at every concert and so forth. So for my ninth concerto, now called “The Improvised Violin Concerto” I decided to turn my whole concept on its head and not provide any cadenzas, but make the entire meat of the composition about improvisation from the soloist. The orchestral parts are all written so there’s no improvisational training necessary from the orchestra to put this piece on stage. Yet you don’t get a feeling that the orchestra is stuck someplace and I’m freewheeling,. I tried to bring the idea of improvisation and how I would compose a modern concerto closely aligned with each other, to provide a completely new sound for classical music.

JI: Is the solo violin part really completely different in every performance?

MO’C: If I played “The Improvised Violin Concerto” 10 times you could dissect any measure of the piece and the notes would be completely different from one performance to the next. That’s not to say that I’m thinking about overarching ideas and tonalities. In fact I have a chord sequence that I’ve got mapped out so I can stay accurately in the harmony, or at least know the harmony and if I depart from it I know that I’m doing it on purpose. So I’ve got a road map of tonality that I can use to keep me honest throughout the 40-minute piece, while I’m improvising.

Another way I guide myself through improvising an entire piece, in this case 5 movements, is that I emotionally described each section of the concerto. So emotionally I know where I’m going and once again I know if I want to play with that emotion and reinterpret it from what I did in the previous concert, maybe bring some irony to that description then at least once again I have a roadmap so my decisions are deliberate.

It can be something as simple as “with energy” or “reflective”, words like that. Then there are also rehearsal letters in the score. Rehearsal letters have two purposes. For a musician in the orchestra they tell them where to start rehearsing! But to a composer or creative musician in this sense, rehearsal letters can mark off the moments of change in the music and help you to keep track of the roadmap in terms of form. So I know that for instance if I’m improvising and am starting at letter A, say, I need to keep up the energy all the way to letter D, when the mood changes. So I can see the road ahead of me and these things remind me of what I’m doing.

JI: Can musicians get blocked, would you say, if they don’t improvise?

MO’C: I would say most musicians instinctively want to be creative, but a lot of teachers try to teach very conservative music that’s written down, that never changes, that’s not supposed to change. Ever. Yet the teachers try all these techniques with very young students – even, “let’s stand for our lesson today!” or, “let’s twirl around while we play the violin!”. Dressing differently. Good! All that’s fine. Except that we’re being creative in almost everything we’re trying to do here except the music itself. If you spoke to a lot of musicians and if they’re honest they would say that they would like to be able to improvise – and if they can or cannot it all depends if they got that training when they were young. And that’s why I offer the O’Connor Method, which brings in some creativity in conjunction with learning how to play the notes, right from the very beginning.

Mark O'Connor is represented by Inverne Price for management in all territories outside of North America. For enquiries please contact James Inverne (james@inverneprice.com) or Patricia Price (patricia@inverneprice.com). For North America please contact his general manager, Mark Alpert at CAMI (www.cami.com).

Full biography 

Mark O'Connor plays "The Improvised Violin Concerto"  

Mark O'Connor plays his "Double Concerto" 

For information about Inverne Price Music Consultancy please visit www.inverneprice.com

Dear Mr. President,

As an American Conductor and ambassador for American Music, I, like many of my colleagues, have championed the music of Charles Ives and other great American composers. Especially in Europe where I am based.

It has come to my attention that Charles Ives' house in Redding, CT. is under threat of demolishment. Such a thought pains us as musicians and as Americans. As Ives is considered the grandfather of American Classical Music, the loss of his home as a historical site would be a great loss to American culture.

Could you imagine the Austrians destroying Mozart's house? Or the Germans bulldozing Wagner's Bayreuth? Or Parisians pillaging the house of Ravel?

We have already lost George Gershwin's home in 2005. Charles Ives' home would be a greater loss. Where else can music lovers go on pilgrimage in our country to pay respects to the man who opened doors to all of us?

I know you appreciate jazz. Many composers, from Mingus to Miles credit Ives as an influence. Bernstein, my teacher, adored his music. And for those politicians on the right who care not for culture, let them be reminded that Ives also pioneered our insurance business. Ives also made money, not only music.

So please do the right thing to preserve his house and save it from destruction. Doing so would show that you and our politicians on the local, state and federal level recognize that not only music matters, but also our shared heritage.

I have supported you in the past. Please give me a greater reason to keep doing so.

I write this open letter to call on all American musicians to write to your local, state, and federal politicians to protest the destruction of Charles Ives' house. Let's save American music and remember where it all began.

John Axelrod
Music Director, Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire
Principal Conductor, Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano 'Giuseppe Verdi' "

Like colleagues such as Michael Tilson Thomas, Marin Alsop and David Robertson, John Axelrod has often performed the music of Ives and indeed has frequently brought it to Europe. On that continent, he has performed works by Ives in France, Italy, Germany, Poland and Switzerland.

For any queries please contact James Inverne (james@inverneprice.com, Tel: +44 7870 203181) or Patricia Price (patricia@inverneprice.com, Tel: +1 509 995 5546).

“As a musician who has just turned 30, Lang Lang is of his generation – but it’s not only his generation who spend much of their lives communicating through Twitter, Facebook and the rest,” says Inverne Price’s James Inverne, “So many of us now live much of our lives online, and Lang Lang uses these new media channels excitingly to spread the word about the world’s greatest music. And in so doing, he touches millions with his own talent.”

The company will work with Lang Lang and his colleagues at CAMI Music, Sony and elsewhere both on day-to-day interactions and on developing bigger online projects. “There’s so much that Lang Lang can do – I know from our work together when I was editor of Gramophone and brought him in as guest editor for an issue, that his is an incredibly lively mind, and his drive to perform is steered by passion for the music and by his vision to bring that music in interesting ways to as many people as possible. And of course, since I first saw him, at the Verbier Festival, I’ve been a great fan of his playing.”

Driving the collaboration for Inverne Price will be experienced social media specialist Matt Herman, who will be working in close partnership with company co-director Patricia Price, from Inverne Price’s US office. Says Herman, “"Social media is such an exciting and evolving tool for connecting artists with their fans, colleagues and causes. Given his nearly unprecedented global reach and proponence of new technologies, there's no one better to leverage the power of this digital medium than Lang Lang. We're thrilled to help bring Lang Lang's music – and classical music in general – to an even wider audience in engaging and compelling ways."

For any queries please contact James Inverne (james@inverneprice.com, Tel: +44 7870 203181) or Patricia Price (patricia@inverneprice.com, Tel: +1 509 995 5546).

Notes for editors:

Lang Lang is one of the world’s most-admired classical pianists. He regularly performs in many of the most prestigious classical music venues and with most of the major orchestras, from the New York Philharmonic to the Berlin Philharmonic and London Symphony. He has been seen by millions of television viewers performing at events such as the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Concert and the football World Cup, as well as appearances on The Today Show, The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, Good Morning America, CBS Early Show and 60 Minutes among many others. Lang Lang’s 30th birthday was recently celebrated with a grand concert at the Telefonica O2 Centre in Berlin.

Lang Lang has become the face of numerous global campaigns, and an ambassador for various brands and causes – among them Steinway, Sony Electronics, Telefonica, Volkswagen Group and UNICEF. He records exclusively for Sony Music Entertainment.

Central to Lang Lang’s work are his extensive efforts to bring music to the lives of children. This he does through activities as various as mentoring young talented pianists, performing for children in hospitals, giving recitals in remote communities and to raise awareness of charitable causes. Lang Lang’s charitable efforts led to the launch of the Lang Lang International Music Foundation, committed to children and music education. So much effort does Lang Lang pour into this area that, as he noted after the Foundation launch event, “I have taken on a second career!”

Inverne Price Music Consultancy was started earlier this year by former Gramophone editor and Time arts correspondent James Inverne in the UK, together with leading music industry professional Patricia Price (formerly of Allegro Music Group, Executive Director of Portland Piano International) in the US. It provides arts consultancy, PR and full artist management services, all rooted in the artist’s unique vision.

For any queries please contact James Inverne (james@inverneprice.com) or Patricia Price (patricia@inverneprice.com).
For information about Inverne Price Music Consultancy please visit www.inverneprice.com

JI: When people discuss violin music, they tend to immediately think of the Russia and the Austro-Germanic schools. Spain doesn't really seem to have a central place in that repertoire, and when non-Spaniards do think of Spanish music, they think perhaps of a picture-postcard musical world. You have lived in Spain for some years now and played a great deal of Spanish music. And when I think of your playing, I think of intensity, of a kind of riveting concentration. Nothing could be further from the busman's holiday approach...

ADC: Spain in the last 20 years has seen a musical renaissance, since the birth of this incredible school where I studied - the Reina Sofia School of Music, where they chose the best teachers they could possibly find, like my teacher Zachar Bron who also taught Maxim Vengerov and Vadim Repin. People like Zubin Mehta and Lorin Maazel recommended these teachers and themselves would come and help to nurture this school. When I studied there, I was able to play for and with Maazel and Yehudi Menuhin. Couple this with the fact that after the dictatorship finished, a clutch of new orchestras were formed which brought in a lot of fine violinists from places where the training was very strong - from Poland, Russia, Romania. And they formed this core of excellent musicians who've been working in Spain now for 20 or 25 years, and so the level of music-making in Spain is very high.

  So much for the modern times. But you also mentioned this whole idea of musical schools. I myself studied the Russian school with my Russian teacher, but Spain has been a powerhouse for so many musicians. The first figure to come to mind is Sarasate, a great virtuoso but a composer whose music is often only viewed as virtuoso. He really championed Spanish culture and put in his violin repertoire traditional dances from all the regions of Spain. So when one plays Sarasate, more than being a good technician one has to know about these regional cultures and the fact that they are very different from one another - Catalunya, Andalucia, Valencia, the North, they all have different cultures, even different languages, different musics, different traditions. I've played Sarasate a lot and recorded a CD of his music for JVC, so do tend to think of myself as an expert in Spanish music, but more than anything because I've lived in Spain for 14 years and understand the people.

JI: Some of the composers we tend to think of as part of a 'Spanish school' weren't actually Spanish.

ADC: Sarasate influenced other composers. In a couple of weeks I'm recording Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole. It's a French piece of course, but Lalo's parents were from Spain and it's a view on Spain, OK with the eyes of a foreigner, but somebody who had an understanding. So I hear it as a tone-poem for violin and orchestra about what Spain really is, not just the typical French characteristics of lightness and beauty.

JI: Spain isn't light and beautiful? I suppose there is the bullfighting...

ADC: Spanish people are far more complex than we tend to think of, as foreigners. And the bullfighting gives us one insight into the culture, and so into the music. Seen from outside we think of it as savage and old-fashioned. But they bring a nobility and pride to it - pride in making every detail of the bullfighters and their environment immensely precise, and it's a tradition that requires a lot of preparation. It's not something that just happens. It's all at a very high level, and it has a great cultural depth to it. They prepare as carefully as a musician would prepare a concerto. So of course the music that is inspired by this, it's not light music, it's far more profound.

  So with the Lalo, there are two movements that are light, but three of the five are really hard-core, really deep. Most of the versions I've heard, including from some of the all-time great violinists, bring to it a very light feeling. But it's completely the contrary! Very strong, the strength of standing in front of the bull that is about to try and kill the matador, but to just hold that moment, to hold the eyes, the tension. The strength of being powerful with traditions because traditions in Spain are everything. Change even a slight thing in a tradition and to the Spanish this is a drama. To be so strong with tradition needs a lot of power, and you cannot find that power if you think of the music as light or fast. A conductor told me once, "If you play and you accelerate in Spanish music, it just shows fear. Play slow, hold your tempo, it shows strength." That's the key element for me.

JI: So tempo is key?

ADC: You have to be strong about the rhythm. In flamenco music for instance, rhythm is everything, you can't be floppy with it. The way Spanish composers write is always somehow inspired by the traditional flamenco music, it's always there somewhere.

JI: People often compare Spain and Italy, but the way you describe the Spanish approach to tradition, that precision, instead calls to mind the Japanese.
  
ADC: They are very similar im some ways. Some of the best flamenco dancers are Japanese, and the same with flamenco guitar players. They come to Spain to learn the style and thenthey return home and have a huge following.

JI: Can you define exactly though the relationship between the pure Spanish musical traditions and the European core classical traditions?

ADC: It's a fascinating relationship. We misunderstand Spain also sometimes by comparing it to Latino music, but Spain as a country in Europe has the same structural guidelines that have always been alive in romantic and post-romantic music in the rest of Europe. Granados and Albeniz and others had European mentors. The structure is always there more than we would think, except that they feel this power I spoke of and let it go in a sometimes unfocussed way.

  But it's so interesting when Spanish composers play with these structures. For instance, Lorenzo Palomo, a wonderful Spanish composer who lives in Berlin, wrote a concerto I recently performed, for violin, guitar and orchestra. That's very rare because the violin and the guitar are not natural partners, but Palomo integrated the two. He took the traditional Spanish gypsy guitar style - not the same as classical guitar - and mixed it with the classical style, And similarly the violin moves in and out of its usual classical style and then into the gypsy style, usually the province of the Spanish guitar. In itself, it's a fascinating comment on Spanish music!
  
Alexandre Da Costa is represented by Inverne Price for general management. For enquiries please contact James Inverne (james@inverneprice.com), Robert Norman (rob@inverneprice.com), or Patricia Price (patricia@inverneprice.com).

 Full biography

Alexandre Da Costa plays De Falla -

For information about Inverne Price Music Consultancy please visit www.inverneprice.com

Inverne Price was fortunate to secure the services of one of the world's leading designers, Paul Lussier. Paul had worked with James Inverne at Time Magazine, where James was European Performing Arts Correspondent and Paul was Art Director. As well as Time, Paul's impressive design credits include Roberto Cavalli, Carlos Miele, books for (Vanity Fair Fashion And Style Director) Michael Roberts, and Town And Country. 

"Inverne Price is my first music-related logo and I wanted to deliver something at once classic and contemporary.", says Lussier. "I was inspired immediately by violas and found a beautiful one designed by the illustrious violin maker Gasparo da Salò (1542-1609). Needless to say, it was so beautiful, I was tempted to run a detail of the viola itself. The f-holes and the curves in the viola are a very tempting graphic device (Man Ray comes to mind) and I tried some options but settled on the curve alone of the viola."

And so the curve formed the central motif of the logo, but transformed into something more general. There's motion, the sense of a journey echoing Inverne Price's stated mission to convey the narrative arc of its artists' careers, rooted in the vision of its musicians. And of course, adds Lussier, as he worked on it he realised it had become something else, something equally central - "A sound wave".

You can enjoy more of Paul Lussier's work at his website, www.paullussier.com.

And it was the music of Bernstein that Inverne Price's James Inverne discussed with Axelrod. More precisely, what the composer's obsessive quoting from other works tells us about his own vision...

JI: There's a nice point near the end of Leonard Bernstein's On The Town where the characters say how they'll meet another time and repeatedly sigh a little "Ah, well". It's a clear reference to the end of Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier. Is that Bernstein being clever-clever or is it important to understand his layered references to other composers he loved throughout his works?

JA: It's essential. If you don't recognise - as Bernstein told me, the 52 pastiche references of other people's music in his work, then it's impossible to properly understand his intentions. He had an original voice, this is something I've learnt, and that voice came about by some kind of cocktail of Beethoven, Hindemith, Ravel, Shostakovich, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, throw in a few others. Everyone, basically. He found his unique voice in the optimism of the post-World War Two period in America, where the optimism in his music found a resonance with the audience of its day, particularly his musical theatre music, and even the jazziness in the Serenade and some of his other music. Candide is based on a whole sarcasm about optimism, it's kind of a farce on the subject.

Yet the more serious side of Bernstein had more trouble being accepted. Even Mass, which had such a populist streak and with so many quotations of other people's music (and not just classical music), had such a serious concept behind it, a kind of liturgical mass for the flower-power generation. And it was too serious for the people of his time. Just as his Kaddish Symphony and The Age of Anxiety were too serious for their time.

So they wanted Bernstein's music to reflect the optimistic mood of the US having just won the war and with the explosion of the middle class. And with his smile, and his charm on TV, the idea that he might be anxious over the state of the world or his relationship with God seemed at odds with the image of him as the quintessential optimist writing mambos and fugues and riffs. If you don't know the influences on him, it's impossible to fully understand him.

JI: It's an interesting time to discuss this, with the issue of composers accused of plagiarism being discussed in a way that visual artists, say, are never subjected to.

JA: Every great painter copied the old masters before they could fine their own voice. Bernstein kept doing this his whole life. He takes quotations and adapts them, discombobulates them and puts them into a structure and form that makes sense in his own composition. Some composers just plagiarise, and a composer owes it to the public to offer something with an original idea.

JI: So it's OK to quote other musics if it's part of a scheme, if it leads the artist somewhere new and true?

JA: This gets to the crux of it all. Why is Brahms thought of as the musicians' musician? Because Brahms's music was composed regardless of the romantic sentiments or his own emotional state at the time. The music was composed and the concepts emerged from the writing of the music itself. Brahms doesn't go into writing symphonies with a programmatic idea already in mind, he composes the symphonies - under the influence of Beethoven, Schumann, Berlioz and others, but first and foremost he is creating music from which emotions and programmes can then be derived. That is the exact opposite of someone like Bernstein or Mahler. In Mahler's case, for all the absolutism of his music and the connections between his works, he had ideas for programmes in mind that he would bring into the music, so the music would reinforce a pre-existing emotion. Like Berlioz with the Symphonie fantastique, or Wagner, Mahler reinforces a programmatic idea. Bernstein is of that school, that before pen is put to paper, the emotion and the programmatic idea is there and brought to the compositional process.

So it is no wonder that Bernstein is searching through a library of musical references and resources to complement the emotions or ideas that he already had in mind. All of this reminds me of what he said to [the lawyer, writer and Holocaust survivor] Samuel Pisar when Bernstein said to him that he wanted to write an opera about the Holocaust. Sam said that it is impossible to dramatise people going to the gas chamber. "Then," said Bernstein, "I need you to rewrite my Kaddish symphony and make that about the Holocaust." So he would not hesitate to take a piece of music he himself had already composed and set it to meet that preconceived idea."

JI: There's that wonderful film where Bernstein is seen rehearsing Mahler with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, berating them for not taking it seriously enough, for not putting enough energy and emotion into the playing. And there are those who take a Stanislavskian approach to Mahler, in other words that the players are expected to take Mahler's markings as a signpost but then to throw themselves further along that route emotionally, in a very method acting kind of way! But would it be true to say that with the kind of programmatic music you describe, Mahler and Bernstein, it requires and rewards a more intense focus on the very specific emotional direction that does Brahms?

JA: The answer is yes, although ultimately the music is the music and speaks for itself. Much of the music that Bernstein loved came out of the later 19th century when the tone-poem was the ideal of orchestral form to many ears. It was anyway the standard form for a composition to succeed - the tone poem was to classical music what pop songs are today - so there is explicit drama there. But it's important to understand that people approach Brahms's music with an understanding about the music itself. They approach Mahler's symphonies with an understanding about Mahler the man as much as the music. And something of that is true about Bernstein.

Finding a balance between security in the notes we play and emotional freedom in expressing those notes, that is indeed like method acting. You are in the moment, you derive your expression and your action from the moment that you're in, and so every Mahler performance will be different because every moment is different and Lenny loved that idea because unpredictability and spontaneity can naturally to him. And it's essential to interpret his own music in the same way one would interpret Mahler's or Shostakovich's music. In other words taking the programmatic idea, delving into the composition and for every moment that you're in, finding the emotion derived from the music. And the Kaddish is the best example of that.

John Axelrod is currently writing a book about Leonard Bernstein's music. His book about the culture of the orchestra will be published this summer. He is represented by Inverne Price for the US, UK and Scandinavia (for other territories please refer to his general manager Elisabetta Longardi at Resia Artists) and for public relations.

Axelrod conducts Bernstein's Kaddish 

Full biography 

Although her repertoire encompasses Richard Strauss and Mozart, and while it is important to her that recitals, concerts and Lieder are just as prominent in her music-making life as is opera, one sense that everything for her voice pivots around her great love, bel canto. And this, suggested Inverne Price's James Inverne in an interview for this release, is interesting - because the heavier Italianate repertoire, Verdi and Puccini, seem in some ways to have lost ground to their resurgent bel canto countrymen Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini. In that when one asks many of today's leading sopranos, from Anna Netrebko to even Angela Gheorghiu, to describe their ‘home territory' vocally, the answer is often more Lucia di Lammermoor and less Tosca...

TG: Bel canto, my feeling about it, is that it gives you the possibilities to discover the freedom in the voice, to find the freedom in the tone and contact with the text.

JI: But the text in many of the bel canto operas is nowhere near as complex as, say, Richard Strauss or Wagner, or even what the likes of Boito brought to Verdi later.

TG: Yes but even if sometimes the text is a little bit old-fashioned and not so important in that absolute sense, it has its own style. In Bellini's La Sonnambula, for instance, you cannot say that the plot is brilliant, but in Amina's two big arias, the text has great significance. It works. So you look at these operas in general and you can say that there are important points in the opera and the rest must be a little bit noisy! But the point is that there are those important textual or plot points.

There's a musical flow to the writing of the text as well. Look at Rossini's Barbiere, there is some sort of character development that goes on there. So it becomes a matter of weighting.

JI: Bel canto means "beautiful singing" and we think of it as Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini - those are the giants and then there are others hovering about. But if we are to think of you as a bel canto singer, does it fit - at a time when singers are often pigeon-holed - that you sing other composers, some much earlier?

TG: First of all there's a great difference even between those three composers you mention. Each has his own style. But all forms must start from somewhere and bel canto can be traced all the way back to Porpora. The form is maybe not yet defined but that's where it starts, and it's important to note that Porpora in his day was a very important singing teacher. He knew at a very deep level how the voice works, how it is structured, and he composed music especially for his pupils. So he had an awareness of breathing, both of how the singers breathe and of how the music itself must breathe.

JI: Breathing, that comes back to that idea you mentioned of weighting, then?

TG: Breathing is the single most important thing in singing, and in life of course! But that's right, the ways and the times when the music and the texts in bel canto connect, that's all a kind of musical breathing, and it breathes with the way your heart and your mind works. So it started with Porpora, and then we had to wait until Rossini to have the bel canto style climbing right to the top.

JI: So bel canto is a healthy approach to singing? That might explain why so many singers cling to it, even when sometimes it's not really for them as much as they might think!

TG: Listen to how the great Italian singers approach bel canto, pure and seemingly simple. Listen to Montserrat Caballe, perhaps the queen of bel canto. The line is so pure, she breathes like she's simply talking, you don't see much effort. It tempts you to say, "It's very easy", but it isn't. First you have to go to the basics. So I started to read a lot about singing, everything seemed incredibly complicated and there was so much information. But little by little things started to be clearer and then I started to feel all this information in my body, and slowly I also started to feel a way to make it free and, yes, simple. And that is the key to bel canto.

It is the basis for all kinds of singing. You can sing German music with the bel canto technique. If you know how to sing with a good bel canto style you can sing almost everything with it. If you have the voice. Not all voices are bel canto voices, and there are other approaches. Bel canto is a very good base, but you have to always and first follow where your voice leads you. The style chooses you.

Teodora Gheorghiu is represented by Inverne Price for strategic management (her general manager is Markus Koch at Hilbert Artists), and for public relations. For enquiries please contact James Inverne (james@inverneprice.com) or Robert Norman (rob@inverneprice.com) in the UK, or Patricia Price in the US (patricia@inverneprice.com ).

Full biography 

Teodora Gheorghiu sings "Una voce poco fa" 

JI: So you believe that the viola's relatively small repertoire, at least as far as the standard canon of acknowledged 'greats' is concerned, is almost an accident of history?

DAC: Well, historically the violin and piano were always the most celebrated solo instruments. At least, they were expected to be standard solo instruments. Great virtuosi emerged for them, while there were limited numbers of violists of that calibre, and so one way for the composers to find an audience for their music was to give it to these star soloists. But it's sometimes forgotten that Joachim and Paganini were great violists as well as violinists, and many of the great composers have been proficient in the viola - Monteverdi, Handel, Beethoven, Paganini as I said, Mozart, Hindemith. Dvorak was a professional violist in orchestras in Prague. The list goes on and on.

All of which suggests that the reason they wrote so much music for violin and piano has to do with the famous soloists of the day. If we'd had champions of the viola at the time with large audiences we would have had more jewels in the viola repertoire.

JI: Yet there are more than are commonly played, correct? You've just recorded three of them, for Ondine...

DAC: There are thousands of works written for violists, though many haven't been found. And yes, a good example is the works to which you refer, three concertos by Joseph Martin Kraus who was nicknamed "the Swedish Mozart". The fact that these concertos were just discovered, wrongly catalogued, in a library in Germany, proves what an incredible amount of music there is out there. It needs champions of the viola to find and perform them. There also, by the same token, plenty of great viola concertos from various periods that we do have - just take a look on Wikipedia! - but few are ever programmed. It's time to take a strident leap and let the viola find the place is deserves as a true solo instrument.

JI: Is this why you transcribe favourite concertos composed for other instruments, as a way for the instrument to grab the spotlight?

DAC: There's an interesting historical argument to be made that, as I say, composers gave works to the star musicians of their day and so it was about getting the music performed rather than the specific instruments it was given to. Look at the Dvorak Cello Concerto from the violist's point of view, look at its range - it's perfect for a violist, extremely comfortable, whereas for a cellist it's a bit awkward. You can almost see Dvorak's thought patterns and perhaps he picked up his viola and played a few notes from time to time while he was composing it. There are various similar instances where I feel the composers would have had their violas to hand. Because also the viola is the middle voice of the orchestra, in terms of physical placing and of sound. It sees what the other instruments are doing and the viola gives you a great all-round understanding.

But I only transcribe when there's a written sanction from the composer himself. With the Elgar Cello Concerto, Lionel Tertis asked Elgar if he could write the transcription and Elgar gave him permission. And then Elgar wrote to Tertis after the performance applauding the violist's work and saying how well it worked for the viola. So to see a letter like that is to understand how the composers felt about issues of sonority. And if you understand sonority, surely you better understand the composer. Why did Beethoven transcribe the violin concerto for piano? Why did Bach transcribe works? It brings us back to that central debate - did they write for a soloist they were fond of or were they inspired by an instrument?

And to come back to your question, to encourage presenters to take a chance of giving violists the stage, works that are recognisable make a real impression - staple repertoire but with a different sonority. From there, well, the viola repertoire is there and we violists want to put out all this incredible music that hasn't been heard!

David Aaron Carpenter is represented by Inverne Price for general management and for public relations. For enquiries please contact James Inverne (james@inverneprice.com) or Robert Norman (rob@inverneprice.com) in the UK, or Patricia Price in the US (patricia@inverneprice.com ).

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David Aaron Carpenter recording the Elgar Cello Concerto for viola 

None of which is the usual context in which one encounters a new orchestra. But as Salome's name is unusual (something of an in-joke - they play without a conductor, hence no head and so we come to Salome) so is the outlook of its players. Inverne Price's James Inverne asked two of Salome's three co-founders, Lauren and Sean Carpenter, about what's wrong with the presentation of classical music, and how Salome is trying to get it right.

JI: Something, in a very constructuctive way, is clearly bugging you guys.

LC: Our generation of musicians are far from complacent about the way classical music has been managed. There's something unsatisfying for many of us about the usual dynamic - you go to a concert, you leave after two hours and in many cases you kind of forget what just happened. The concert experience as it stands is unfulfilling to us. So as young, socially active and innovative people working in music, we want to change that experience in creative ways.

We want to get beyond the ephemeral nature of many classical concerts. And one way to do that is to offer an experience on the scale of an event. Using a financial model of not-for-profit status and a mission to collaborate with other non-profits, we're able to bring together shared resources and in so doing reach often new and untapped audiences. Lots of musicians of our generation are very open to new projects, and new kinds of projects, even new mediums - we're happy working with dance, with actors, visual artists. And we're happy to use technology to our advantage.

JI: So how does that work in practice?

LC: Well for our 30 May FEED Foundation concert, for instance, we're working with Alan Gilbert and Christoph Eschenbach, but also with John Legend and Deborah Bedingfield. So a lot of people won't come for classical music, but because we're juxtaposing the styles we hope that we'll find a new audience there for the classical - and it's being streamed online.

SC: We're unashamed about going out to find new audiences. Last week on the popular TV programme here, Dancing With The Stars, Joshua Bell played part of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. Some said it was a sell-out. But he played Vivaldi, a classical piece, albeit with people dancing to it, and in so doing he reached a new audience. We're most likely going to play with Josh this summer. There's a lot more of that kind of reaching out to new audiences going on in Europe. In the US you have to be 60 or older to go to a concert it seems, and that disturbs us.

JI: Well the UK invented crossover, they say.

LC: But there's a difference. We went to talk to Renee Fleming last year and she said there's a big distinction between something that's purely pop - she'd just made a rock album - and real crossover. Her rock album, she said, was rock, not crossover. And we take that view. If we're going to do a concert we may do a purely classical piece and a pure pop piece. That's fine to us. Crossover music is also fine but it's not what we do. And whatever we do we want to do it the best it can be done - working with high quality acts like Rufus Wainwright, who's playing with us this summer, and John Legend. That's how you make magical art.

SC: Look at Yo-Yo Ma.

LC: Yes, he can play tango, bluegrass, classical and be really great and pure whichever he does.

JI: Certainly your photo shoots aren't run of the mill!

LC: We're trying to be relevant to our generation. The last shoot, the one that appears on our website at the moment, was of a vampire orchestra because vampires are hot in pop culture right now. Next time it might be Greek gods, or 1960's Mad Men style. Great musicians have often been ingrained into pop culture - Karajan, Bernstein and Callas were all style icons of their times. And there are lots of things you can do creatively to help speak to your culture that way.

The Salome Chamber Orchestra is represented by Inverne Price for general management and for public relations. For enquiries please contact James Inverne (james@inverneprice.com), Robert Norman (rob@inverneprice.com), or Patricia Price (patricia@inverneprice.com). The 30 May gala concert for the FEED Foundation will take place at Alice Tully Hall in New York and will be streamed live over the web - keep an eye on www.inverneprice.com for details.

Full biography 

The Salome Chamber Orchestra performing with Sharon Isbin 

JI: Everyone knows, or think they do, that to sing Wagner or Verdi or any kind of grand opera takes an immense amount of technique, artistic honing and certain kinds of physical honing. But when they think about the other things you do, like electronic music, we classical fans (and contrary to sterotype there are opera fans who like electronic music) tend to think of it as lightweight, technically speaking.

NF: For any genre of vocal music, it's all about the idiom. And when you're talking about idioms the voice is either suited for something or it isn't. A genre I don't sing is gospel, because it doesn't sound right for my voice. Other than the fact that I can riff, there's nothing about my voice that suits it. As opposed to opera, where when I wake up in the morning I know that once I've warmed up it just works. And it's the same for other kinds of music, say, house. It's much more relaxed and chilled than opera, but because my voice has a certain kind of fluidity it's not much different or more difficult to sing than the way I'd sing a quiet passage in Verdi, albeit Verdi needs more vibrato.

It's about what the voice is suited for. People are so used to - pigeon-hole is the wrong phrase - quantifying vocalists in certain kind of ways. This one sings Verdi, this one sings Mozart, people are quick to put style monikers on voices. I've sung a lot of different types of things and for each thing, the voice needs to sound exactly how that genre should sound. As for technical approach, if your technique is in place the voice, again, just works. And in the contemporary non-classical stuff I don't have to think about stamina, or not having the volume or the piano or whatever. It's just asking what my voice can naturally do and manipulating the sound.

JI: That last comment makes it sound like we're moving into the arena of sampling - of course it's not exactly the same but my point is that it sounds as if the non-classical stuff is about textures, about playing with vocal textures.

NM: It can become a bit about textures but it depends. With music that's more hard-driving but still not classical, so dubstep or a hard-hitting electronic type of thing it does require more intensity of sound, if not the full Wagnerian spectrum of loudness. And even for something like chillout music, there are challenges. For chill out, for me anyway, and this is perhaps more a function of what I aesthetically prefer, I don't like anything to sound too relaxed. So even for chillout, or lounge, I like something that still has a certain degree of intensity, in which case it's a matter of weighting the level of intensity. Because it's not the same kind that I would have for Dutchman or Wotan or Scarpia. But you bring intensity nonetheless. Because in the non-classical the mic is right there, there's no way to avoid it, and it's about making sure that everything one does on the small scale has large-scale intensity.

JI: Is it easier than opera or classical concerts?

NF: In some ways it's more difficult. When you're on stage with 3,000 people in the audience there's a lot the audience won't hear. Dutchman's big moments, for instance, are largely about getting the sound out with the proper volume and intensity with the words floating on the tone to hit bthe meaning and subtext and that's all you can do. Whereas if it's just me in a small venue, with a calm beat and maybe some violins in the background and some electronic sounds, I have to step up much more to make sure people pay attention to what the voice is doing. The feeling, the intensity, the emotion and the atmosphere, they're all down to me. And bear in mind that in a club setting it's not as formal as a concert hall or opera house so people can get up to walk around, or eat and drink, talk to their friends. So there has to be much more focus to get people to see what's happening musically.

JI: And in those intimate settings the miniature carries much more weight. It sounds like the difference between theatre and film, say, where theatre rewards the grand gesture and film rewards intensity in miniature.

NF: Yes, it is like theatre and cinema. But an opera house is much more like the Roman Colisseum of old, because in opera everything is exploded so huge, especially with the sort of stuff I generally sing, it's about as far from small-scale as you can imagine! And I like the big scale with Wagner and Verdi. I like being overwhelmed by the sound and the emotion and the subtext and the drama of the whole thing. So I go from that to the contemporary music in the different type of setting, and there are parallels with recording, where the receptors are so close, everything is heightened and everything is visible. Everybody sees everything. On a big stage people see maybe 50 per cent of what you do with your body and nothing of want you do with your face. So in the small space there can't be any space between what I feel about the material and what I put across.

JI: Are you talking about a method acting approach? That you need to actually feel the sentiments in the songs?

NF: I'm not a method actor. And I'm an acting singer rather than a singing actor, so I'm not particularly a fan of method acting. I don't care what the person actually feels compared to what they put across. But it is important to identify with the character. Not to like them necessarily, but to identify.

When I first sang Verdi's Iago I thought the music was gorgeous and that would get me through. But then I couldn't identify with that sociopath! Until about halfway through learning the score, I suddenly realised that he doesn't actually do all that much to directly make anything bad happen to people during the opera. He tells maybe three or four lies and the rest is people unravelling in front of him because he gave them a little push. And I started to view him differently and consequently everyone else in the opera differently.

Now as I say, you don't have to like everyone you play but there has to be comfort on stage. You have to do all the hard work about how you move, what you do when, and then after that is when you start to test yourself. 85 per cent of it is the work you do offstage and 15 per cent is the work you do onstage. That realisation also started with Iago.

JI: So it's about interpretive comfort?

NF: Well coming back to intimate-scale contemporary stuff, someone once said that doing a Lieder recital is just you and your personality. I don't think that's always the case because some songs are a different kind of person narrating. But for contemporary, especially because I write most of what I sing, it really is myself. I would say I relax into it but it's about feeling comfortable with it (relaxation is dangerous on stage because there's only so far you can go until relaxation degenerates into sleep, which isn't what you want people to do when you're on stage!

With this connection I'm talking about, if it is already there with the material, there's nothing that feels as though I can't just live it and breathe it, immediately. The contemporary music I choose to do, it flows. It very much flows.

Nmon Ford is represented by Inverne Price for strategic management. For enquiries please contact James Inverne (james@inverneprice.com), Robert Norman (rob@inverneprice.com), or Patricia Price (patricia@inverneprice.com).

Full biography 

Nmon Ford, 'Nocturne' 

Nmon Ford, Walkure Wotan 

James Inverne left the august review magazine rather abruptly last October.
Gramophone has not noticeably improved since his departure, but James has not let grass grow beneath his size 10s. Tomorrow, we hear, he's launching his own agency with some very serious talent on board.
First to sign was David Aaron Carpenter, hottest viola of the 21sr century, winner of last year's Leonard Bernstein prize. David has a new, new New York ensemble, the Salome Chamber Orchestra. They are under James's management, too. (Why Salome? They play headless...).

The US conductor John Axelrod, another Lenny protégé working in France and Italy, has joined up.

Some new names - the Canadian violinist Alexandre Da Costa, British pianist Sam Haywood, Rumanian soprano Teodora Gheorghiu (no relation) and the Panamanian baritone and tenor (a Domingo copyright) Nmon Ford. A big voice.

But the signing that pleases me most is the return to the concert stage of the great British tenor David Rendall. You may have read on Slipped Disc last month that David's career was shattered in 2005 by a stage accident in Copenhagen. James read the article, got in touch with David, and has arranged to relaunch him on the concert platform. What a heart-warming way to start a new business. I wish them both every success.
The website, live from tomorrow, is.... www.inverneprice.com.