Search results for ""author jessica duchen""

The strangest detective story in the history of music – inspired by a true incident.A world spiralling towards war. A composer descending into madness. And a devoted woman struggling to keep her faith in art and love against all the odds.1933. Dabbling in the fashionable “Glass Game” – a Ouija board – the famous Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Arányi, one-time muse to composers such as Bartók, Ravel and Elgar, encounters a startling dilemma. A message arrives ostensibly from the spirit of the composer Robert Schumann, begging her to find and perform his long-suppressed violin concerto.She tries to ignore it, wanting to concentrate instead on charity concerts. But against the background of the 1930s depression in London and the rise of the Nazis in Germany, a struggle ensues as the “spirit messengers” do not want her to forget.The concerto turns out to be real, embargoed by Schumann’s family for fear that it betrayed his mental disintegration: it was his last full-scale work, written just before he suffered a nervous breakdown after which he spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital. It shares a theme with his Geistervariationen (Ghost Variations) for piano, a melody he believed had been dictated to him by the spirits of composers beyond the grave.As rumours of its existence spread from London to Berlin, where the manuscript is held, Jelly embarks on an increasingly complex quest to find the concerto. When the Third Reich’s administration decides to unearth the work for reasons of its own, a race to perform it begins.Though aided and abetted by a team of larger-than-life personalities – including her sister Adila Fachiri, the pianist Myra Hess, and a young music publisher who falls in love with her – Jelly finds herself confronting forces that threaten her own state of mind. Saving the concerto comes to mean saving herself.In the ensuing psychodrama, the heroine, the concerto and the pre-war world stand on the brink, reaching together for one more chance of glory.

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Agile, flexible and never afraid of controversial innovations (such as abandoning traditional ‘black tie’ evening dress for its players or giving amplified concerts with creative lighting at the Hammersmith Apollo), the LCO has surfed the waves of history. It has travelled from the early days of broadcasting – which other orchestras shunned, fearing it spelt the end of ‘live’ music – through the difficult days of the Second World War, when London’s largest concert hall was bombed, and the thrill of being invited to play at the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in 2011, to a triumphant return and reinvention after the Covid-19 pandemic when its comeback programmes included Concerto for Turntables by the composer Sergei Prokofiev’s grandson Gabriel Prokofiev, featuring DJ Mr Switch. Author and music critic Jessica Duchen traces the LCO’s history from the beginning under its founding conductor, the entrepreneurial Anthony Bernard from London’s East End, whose contacts included Britain’s first female MP, the American Nancy Astor (who kindly lent her house for the orchestra’s first concert) and leading composers like Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams, up to its current Artistic Director, Christopher Warren-Green, who ensures the LCO continues to delight its devoted audiences at home and abroad with an eclectic and diverse programme of music. Over the years it has performed dozens of world or UK premieres by composers including Stravinsky, Falla, Delius and even Mozart. This engaging book teems with entertaining stories: the composer who relished riding naked on a motor bike in the Gloucestershire countryside, the oboe player who taught her daughter’s boyfriend, Paul McCartney, to play the recorder for a much-loved Beatles song, and the times the LCO travelled the length and breadth of the US in a country & western tour bus straight out of Nashville. It adds up to a fascinating celebration of over 100 years of classical music, as well as giving unique insider glimpses into this vibrant and much loved orchestra.

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