Anthony Marwood and Aleksandar Madžar at the Melbourne Recital Centre

Last Saturday 17 November I attended a wonderful violin and piano recital at the Melbourne Recital Centre: the British violinist Anthony Marwood and the Belgrade-born pianist Aleksandar Madžar playing a program that included two old favourites: Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata and Debussy’s wonderful Violin Sonata, both of which I had in multiple versions by the time I left university.

I first became familiar with the Kreutzer Sonata in my first year at university, when my mother’s friend May Richardson (neé Drabsch) offered to lend me her ten-inch vinyl record of David Oistrakh and Lev Oborin playing it, saying she thought I would enjoy it, which of course I did.

By the time I left the University of New England I had also acquired on vinyl:

-  My own copy of Oistrakh and Oborin

-  Jascha Heifetz and Brooks Smith

-  Yehudi and Hephzibah Menuhin

-  Josef Szigeti and Béla Bartók (famous recording of a 1940 concert in the Library of Congress)

-  The wonderful recording by Zino Francescatti and Robert Casadesus

Over the years I have also acquired on CD, in no particular order:

-  Yehudi Mehuhin and Louis Kentner

-  David Oistrakh and Frida Bauer

-  Fritz Kreisler and Franz Rupp

-  Georg Kulenkampff and Wilhelm Kempff

-  Josef Szigeti and Claudio Arrau

-  Adolf Busch and Rudolf Serkin

-  Isaac Stern and Eugene Istomin

-  The abovementioned recording of Josef Szigeti and Béla Bartók

With the Debussy the story is pretty much the same. I first acquired a ten-inch vinyl of Josef Suk and Jan Panenka, and by the time I left university I had also acquired

-  Isaac Stern and Alexander Zakin

-  Josef Szigeti and Béla Bartók (another item on the 1940 Library of Congress program)

Subsequent acquisitions on CD are:

-  Ginette Neveu and Jean Neveu

-  Kyung Wha Chung and Radu Lupu

-  Arthur Grumiaux and István Hajdu

-  Yehudi Menuhin and Jacques Février

-  Christian Ferras and Pierre Barbizet

-  and of course Josef Szigeti and Béla Bartók on the Library of Congress recording

I digress, but all of this is by way of saying that I am not altogether unfamiliar with these works: I have listened to them up hill and down dale over many years, by a variety of great interpreters. It is therefore a great pleasure to be able to say that Marwood and Madžar played them extraordinarily well. I went to the concert with high expectations and was not disappointed. These men have been playing together for years, and it shows – they come across as two people playing together, almost a single instrument, rather than one person accompanied by another. They played with great confidence (if you’ve practiced enough you can take risks with crescendi etc), and Marwood’s phrasing and intonation were superb.

I might add that it is a pleasure to have the opportunity to go to a recital at which some of the greatest pieces in the repertoire are performed really well. Not every concert needs to be “challenging” or “confronting” or to “take us out of our comfort zone”. There is a reason why the great works have staying power, and for my money I would like to hear more of them in live performance.

50 years of The Australian Ballet

Congratulations to our national treasure The Australian Ballet, celebrating today the 50th anniversary of its first public performance, a production of Swan Lake, with its opening night on 2 November 1962.

For an earlier tribute and a bit of history, see The Australian Ballet: Graeme Murphy’s Nutcracker.

For the Swan Lake photo gallery on the Australian Ballet website, see here.

Eula Beal sings Bach

I am indebted to fellow blogger Andrew Catsaras (twitter handle @AndrewCatsaras) for the link to this splendid YouTube item of Contralto Eula Beal singing Ebarme Dich from Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, conducted by Antal Dorati, with Yehudi Menuhin playing the solo violin parts.

Hear it here.

When you have finished listening to that, check out Andrew’s blog at http://andrewcatsaras.blogspot.com.au/ - always worth a look.

Yellow Earth

Hearing former Melbourne Film Festival Director, Ronin Film co-founder and all-round movie buff Geoff Gardner speaking on ABC Radio National’s Movie Time this afternoon reminded me of the debt owed to Geoff by cinema-goers everywhere for his role in stimulating the distribution of fifth generation Chinese films in the West.

In 1984 I was Deputy Secretary of the Department of Trade and in that capacity accompanied Prime Minister Bob Hawke on his February 1984 visit to China.  Australia’s exports to China were fairly limited in those days, the principal products being wheat, wool and iron ore.  China was still emerging from the Cultural Revolution and only in the early stages of the policy of “opening to the outside world” which began in 1979.

A number of opportunities began to open up as a result of Hawke’s visit and I found myself a regular visitor to China following up on an increasingly diverse portfolio of opportunities.

After the 1984 Federal Election we had a change of Minister. Lionel Bowen moved on to become Attorney-General, and John Dawkins became Minister for Trade.

Early in 1985 I went to see Dawkins about the China trade agenda. I had a cordial but pretty forthright conversation with him. I said that a lot of things were happening in the trade and economic relationship with China, most of them were his responsibility but a lot of people in other parts of government were climbing onto the bandwagon and he needed to assert himself or things would become very untidy.  I said that it would be a good idea for him to designate someone in his office to be responsible within the office for all matters relating to China so that we would have a single point of contact with whom we could liaise and whom we would keep up to date.

I went on to say that I would be making another visit to China shortly and as I would be going around the various Ministries and central agencies that were important to our objectives in China, if his designated adviser were to accompany me it would be a good opportunity for him to gain a first-hand view of what was going on.

Dawkins thought for a while and nominated Geoff Gardner, who had just joined his staff as an adviser.

A couple of days later Geoff rang me to say that he was aware of an interesting sounding Chinese film which had been completed a few months before but had never been cleared for release, apparently because there was some political ambiguity in the film that made it a bit problematic for release to domestic audiences. It was in a sort of limbo land – it had neither been released nor refused permission. Basically, the Culture Ministry was wondering what the hell to do with it.  Geoff wondered whether it would be possible for us to arrange to have a look at it while we were in Beijing.

I replied that if there were anyone who could organise that it would be our Senior Trade Commissioner in Beijing, Dr Jocelyn Chey, who had had a previous posting in the Australian Embassy Beijing as Cultural Counsellor and who knew everyone who was anyone in the Chinese cultural scene. I got in touch with Jocelyn, and by the time we arrived in Beijing the viewing was all set up.

That film was Yellow Earth (see here), Chen Kaige’s directorial debut, with marvellous cinematography by Zhang Yimou.

I was unable to make it to the screening unfortunately but Geoff and Jocelyn did, and they told their Chinese hosts that they thought it would do well in Australia.  This must have been an attractive proposition for the Ministry of Culture because it would enable the film to be released without engaging the political problems with domestic release, and it was an opportunity for the Ministry to earn hard currency.  In those days, despite growing international reserves, China still thought of itself as a country desperately short of hard currency and individual ministries were always chronically short of it.

Arrangements for the film’s distribution were made fairly quickly (presumably with the assistance of the redoubtable Andrew Pike of Ronin Film, who was running Canberra’s Centre Cinema in those days) and the world premiere of Yellow Earth was held in the good old Centre Cinema, with Chen Kaige in attendance.  I had the great pleasure of seeing it at last on that occasion.  So don’t believe what you read on IMDb suggesting it got its first airing on 10 September 1985 at the Toronto Film Festival – Canberra was the place, I would guess in about June or July 1985.

The film was a great success, and went on to greater things, and as a result of that success we were treated to that succession of electric shadows from China directed by Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine) and his colleague Zhang Yimou (Red Sorghum, Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, Shanghai Triad, The Road Home and The House of the Flying Daggers).

I am not suggesting that those films would never have seen the light of day without Geoff’s intervention, but that is how the story began, and I for one am deeply grateful.

New records from overseas

New Records from Overseas was the title of a Sunday morning ABC radio program hosted by Ralph Collins, a former ABC music librarian with an enormous knowledge of music, who hosted his own program for about thirty years from the 1960s. In the days that we were establishing a garden at our first house in Macquarie in the ACT, we listened to it without fail on the large portable radio that my parents had given me for my 21^st birthday.

The title of this program comes into my head whenever a parcel arrives from my CD supplier of choice, Presto Classical.

A particularly content-rich package was awaiting me when I arrived home on Thursday evening. It contained three Sony boxed sets which are currently available at a discount and which seemed too good to pass up:

-  The Budapest String Quartet plays Beethoven  (8 CDs)

 The complete cycle of Beethoven’s sixteen quartets

-  Arthur Rubinstein Plays Brahms (9 CDs)

 The two piano concerti (No. 1 with Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, No. 2 with Josef Krips and the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra)

The three piano sonatas

The three violin sonatas, with Henryk Szeryng

The two cello sonatas, with Gregor Piatagorsky

The three piano trios with Henryk Szeryng and Pierre Fournier

The three piano quartets and the marvellous Piano Quintet in F minor with the Guarneri Quartet

Shorter solo pieces – the ballades, intermezzi etc.

-  Robert Casadesus plays Mozart (5 CDs)

Piano concerti nos. 15,17 and 21-27, all with Gerge Szell and the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra

Piano Sonata No. 12 in F Major K. 332

Concerto for Two Pianos in E-flat major K. 365 (with wife Gaby Casadesus)

Concerto for Three Pianos in F major K. 242 (with Gaby Casadesus and son Jean)

(both of the above with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra)

Quintet for Piano & Winds in E-flat major K. 452 (with the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet)

The above 22 CDs delivered to my doorstep for a mere $A75.59. It will take me a while to play through that lot.

Presto Classical’s discount offer on Sony boxed sets lasts until 4 May. See the full range here.

A brief trip to the Southern Highlands

Last week I took the opportunity of a trip to Sydney to accept an invitation from my friend Harry Pidgeon to spend a couple of days at his home at Bundanoon in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales.

One of the highlights of a wonderful couple of days in a beautiful part of the world was a visit to the fortieth annual meeting of the Southern Highlands Carriage Club, which brings horse-drawn carriage enthusiasts from all over NSW. On the day we visited the cone racing was on – time trials through a series of witch’s hats with balls mounted on them – cause one of the balls to fall and you lose points.

We passed the time of day briefly with the lady in the first photo, who told us she was from Parkes. “Parkes?” I said. “Would you happen to know a man named Terry Hunter?” “Of course”, she replied. Terry Hunter was a contemporary of mine in Wright College at the University of New England, who has spent the last thirty years working in the family real estate business G. Hunter & Company Pty Limited. Small world.

The following day Harry took me, a friend of his and a couple of our other former school classmates to the croquet lawns at Exeter, to receive instruction in the ostensibly sedate but quietly vicious game of croquet. That proved to be great fun, and we continued until bad light stopped play. From left to right in the photo below are former classmates Harry Pidgeon, Hugh King and Philip Bailey.

For more on Harry Pidgeon see Harry Pidgeon at Cooks Hill, Harry Pidgeon exhibition: Naturally touched and Harry Pidgeon's opening at Cooks Hill.  For more on Philip Bailey, see Yehudiana: Reliving the Menuhin Oddysey and Bailey on Menuhin at Killara.

A la mode frangourou

Calling all foodies: I am indebted to my friend James Belshaw for drawing my attention to Sophie Masson’s wonderful blog at http://alamodefrangourou.blogspot.com/ .

Enjoy (and don’t forget you heard it first from me!).

My favourite moussaka recipe

Yesterday I made an eggplant moussaka (mousakas melitzanes), something which I don’t do as often as I should. It is pretty labour intensive; working alone you won’t have much change from three hours, and that is before you start the cleaning up. Every time I do this I realise why I don’t do it more often, but it is worth it both because it is a wonderful dish and because the two of us get about four meals out of a dish that is nominally one serve for six.

The recipe which follows is taken from Sophia Skoura’s The Greek Cook Book, translated and adapted by Helen Georges, Crown Publishers Inc., New York 1967.  If you do exactly as you are told (including following the added comments by me) you will achieve a pretty good representation of the wonderful moussakas that were made for us when we enjoyed the generous hospitality of a Greek family in Athens (friends of my sister-in-law) during the early 1970s.

½ cup butter or vegetable oil

700 grams chopped meat (I use ground topside)

2 tablespoons chopped onions (I use one reasonably large brown onion)

½ cup white wine

700 grams ripe tomatoes, peeled and strained (I use two 400g tins of chopped tomatoes with no added salt or herbs; if you so this, be sure to drain them well or your recipe will end up a bit wet and you will have to spend additional time reducing it)

2 tablespoons chopped parsley

Salt and pepper to taste

1.4 kg of eggplants

Oil for frying

1 recipe Béchamel sauce (see below)

1 cup breadcrumbs

½ cup of grated Parmesan cheese

2-3 tablespoons melted butter

My first step does not appear in Sophia’s recipe and opinions vary about it but I think it is essential to get rid of some of the sharper flavours in the raw eggplant. I start by slicing the eggplant into slices about ¼ inch (6-7mm) thick, putting the slices in layers in a colander, sprinkling each layer with salt as I go. This makes the slices sweat some of the juice they contain.

Place half the butter or oil in a frying pan (I use a mixture of both).  I then sauté the onions gently until they are glassy (again you are driving off the volatile compounds that give the sharper flavours before combining the onions with anything else). Then add the ground meat. Stir to crumble the meat and cook until brown.  Add the wine, tomatoes, parsley, salt and pepper (I don’t find it necessary to add salt) and bring to a simmer. Simmer until the liquids are absorbed.

Wash and dry the eggplant slices – wash them very thoroughly to get make sure you get rid of as much free salt as possible.  Fry them in good olive oil.  You don’t need to cook them – they will spend enough cooking time in the oven – again you are wanting to drive off the sharper flavoured compounds so that you are left with the gentle flavours of the eggplant. Fry them at a reasonable heat, and keep enough olive oil up to them to enable proper heat transfer from the frying pan. If the pan is too dry you will tend to singe the surface without heating them through – but at the same time, try not to saturate them with olive oil. The aim should be to get them translucent and just starting to brown without burning.

For this operation you need to fry them in a single layer, removing the individual pieces as they are ready. You cannot tip them all into the pan at once.  Place the fried eggplant slices on a platter as they come out of the pan.

Arrange half of the eggplant slices in even rows on the bottom of a medium-sized baking pan. Sprinkle with half the breadcrumbs. Add half of the cheese to the chopped meat, mixing it in well; spread this on top of the eggplant.  Add another layer of eggplant, and set aside while you make the Béchamel (see below).

Cover the dish with the Béchamel. Sprinkle the remaining cheese on top, then the remaining breadcrumbs. Drizzle with melted butter. Bake for 30-40 minutes in a pre-heated 350° F (170°

 C) oven until golden brown.

Béchamel sauce

6 tablespoons butter (120 grams)

7-8 tablespoons flour

4 cups milk, scalded

1-2 egg yolks (I use two)

Salt and pepper to taste

Melt the butter, without allowing it to brown. Gentle heat is everything in this game. Add the flour slowly, mixing constantly, to make a smooth buttery paste without lumps. Remove from the heat. Slowly mix in the scalded milk – mix it in a little at a time so that you are just thinning the paste without having two distinct phases (paste and milk) which will be much harder to combine.  Return to the heat and stir until the sauce thickens. Beat the egg yolks well, and add them with salt and pepper to the mixture, stirring constantly until blended (I usually stir a few spoons of the mixture one at a time into the egg yolks so that I do not raise their temperature too suddenly, then stir that mixture into the rest of the Béchamel mixture.

This is now ready to be poured over the moussaka.

Stern and Oistrakh play Vivaldi

Some time in the summer of 1961-62, having completed my first year of undergraduate science at the University of New England, I went record hunting and was delighted to discover a recording, on the old Coronet label, of two of my favourite violinists, two of the greatest violinists of the time, Isaac Stern and David Oistrakh, playing four Vivaldi concerti for two violins.

For those who really care, the four concerti are:

-  Concerto in D minor RV 514 (F.1, No. 100)

-  Concerto in G minor RV 517 (F.1, No. 12)

-  Concerto in C minor RV 509 (F.1, No. 98)

-  Concerto in D major RV 512 (F.1, No. 41)

This is joyful music, and the two maestros are clearly enjoying themselves playing together – and I mean playing together, neither trying to dominate. Stern plays first violin in two of them, Oistrakh in the other.

The collaboration between these two artists, both Ukrainian born but Stern a resident of the United States from the age of one, and Oistrakh a citizen of the Soviet Union, was a bigger deal in the circumstances of the day than it might appear in 2011.

The two men had first met in Brussels in 1951, when Isaac Stern attended the Queen Elizabeth of Belgium violin competition. David Oistrakh was one of the judges.

The Cold War kept a tight grip on Oistrakh’s ability to travel to Western Europe and the United States. It was a tense time. The Soviet Union conducted its first atomic test in 1949 and its first thermonuclear test in 1953, the year that Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed on charges of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. A nuclear arms race was in full swing, the United States was in the grip of the McCarthy era, and we all lived in the Strangelovian world of nuclear armed bombers being on permanent alert.  Cultural exchanges were not high on the agenda of either side.

Nevertheless, in 1955 Oistrakh gained permission to travel to the United States, and gave a concert at Carnegie Hall that was lauded by American music celebrities not only for the quality of Oistrakh’s musicianship but for being one of the first breaches in the Iron Curtain. Isaac Stern, eleven years Oistrakh’s junior, attended the concert and described Oistrakh as “a musician who did great honour to the violin with his playing.”

It was during this 1955 Oistrakh visit to the United States that the two men collaborated on recording these four Vivaldi concerti, with Eugene Ormandy conducting members of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

My vinyl recording is now almost half a century old, and I have long wondered why it had never been re-released on CD.

Happy to report, this evening while browsing the Presto Classical website I discovered that in December 2010 these marvellous recordings were released on CD by Sony, the heir to the Coronet label. Also on the CD is a recording of The Four Seasons by Anshel Brusilow, who was concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra under Ormandy from 1959-66.

The recording may be accessed here on the Presto Classical website.

Szigeti and Bartok at the Library of Congress

On 13 April 1940 a remarkable concert took place, a performance by two émigré Hungarian musicians, great musical figures of their day, the violinist Joseph Szigeti and the musicologist, composer and pianist Béla Bartók.

Both musicians had only recently arrived in America.  They had been deeply concerned about the repressive regime of Admiral Horthy in their native Hungary and the advance of Nazism and Italian fascism. Bartók forbade the broadcast of his works from stations in, or beamed to, Germany and  Italy in the 1930s, Szigeti refused to appear in Germany after 1932. As the situation in Europe grew worse, both of them decided to emigrate as a necessary protest. Szigeti left Europe at the end of 1939, and Bartók attended Szigeti’s final Budapest Concert, which included his Portrait, Op. 5.

Bartok, although determined to leave before Hungarian surrender to what he called “bandits and assassins”, proceeded at a somewhat less hurried pace. He sailed to America just in time for the April 1940 concert, and returned to Hungary in May to settle his affairs, giving his own farewell concert on 8 October.

The program for the Library of Congress “Sonata Recital” was a wonderful one:

-  Beethoven: Sonata in A major, Op. 47, “Kreutzer”

-  Bartok: Rhapsody No. 1 for Violin and Piano

-  Debussy: Sonata for Violin and Piano

-  Bartok: Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano

We are fortunate that this historic concert was recorded and the sound quality is quite good.  I acquired it on vinyl in 1965, but it has been released on CD. I acquired the version released on Vanguard Classics (ATM CD 1583) a few years ago.  That edition seems to have lapsed, but a Hungaroton release (HCD 12330) is available from Presto Classical here.