An Evening with John Amis.R3 tonight 7.30 -10pm

[salymap]

This looks good to me, if only to be dipped into. John is 90 this year and has a lifetime of wonderful interviews, anecdotes and experiences to relate.

He talks to Louise Fryer and there are clips from some of his interviews - Britten, Copland, Hess,Herrmann, Celibidache, Grainger, Stokowski, and more.....

[antongould]

Oh yes I'd forgotten about this, very much looking forward to it.

[mercia]

indeed should be entertaining
his blog is interesting too (IMO)

http://johnamismusic.blogspot.co.uk/

[Flosshilde]

Interesting maybe, but perhaps best suited to the intervals in the live concerts we are supposed to be getting in the evenings? Wasn't there a concert anywhere worth broadcasting?

[Nick Armstrong]

Interesting maybe, but perhaps best suited to the intervals in the live concerts we are supposed to be getting in the evenings? Wasn't there a concert anywhere worth broadcasting?

Same thought occurred to me - I want to hear it very much, but in 20 minute segments as interval features might have been a better plan.

[Flosshilde]

Or why not re-broadcast complete interviews - like the one with Percy Grainger - with perhaps a brief introduction & comments from John Amis, after the concerts. Playing snippets can be very frustrating - there are bound to be some that you'd like to hear more of.

[Extended Play]

Yes, I can't help feeling that there were at least a dozen programmes struggling to get out here, each one utterly absorbing. I could have done with much more of so many of the interviews...Percy Grainger, Dame Myra Hess, Celibidache, Frankie Howerd, to name but a few.

Mr Amis remains a spell-binding speaker at the age of 90. Thank you Radio 3, and Louise Fryer, for tonight's programme: where else could we have heard such a broadcast?

Bravo, Mr Amis: thank you for a lifetime of dedicated, enlightening and often hilarious broadcasting about music and musicians. Many happy returns -- and congratulations on the news of your forthcoming marriage!

[Steerpike]

I'd like to second that Extended Play.

What a lovely and absorbing bloke JA is - and still a natural broadcaster at 90. The bolt from the blue at the end was great to hear too!

[salymap]

I've recorded it on my TV hard drive and SHALL listen in 20 minute, or so, segments. A good idea.

[ardcarp]

A fabulous programme. I had forgotten that John Amis was still alive (sorry John!) Given his incredible personal knowledge of music and musicians, coupled with his natural charm, wit and perceptiveness, why has he been off the radar in recent years? Is his way not suited to the current R3 house style? I thought Louise Fryer's 'chairing' of the programme was very good too. I agree with others that one was left wishing fervently for repeats of whole interviews.

Afterwards I could not help thinking what a Golden Age of music the first three quarters of the 20th Century was...maybe just the middle two quarters for Britain. Is this just the rose tinted spectacle of someone who was born mid-century? Or are things somehow shallower and less ground-breaking now, especially in the field of composition?

[jayne lee wilson]

Yes, Amis and Fryer are both excellent, natural broadcasters - fine vocal delivery, conversational without pretentious demotic, not a moment of condescension.

Broadly agree about British music Ardcarp, but Birtwistle has given us many fine things in the last quarter of that century, from Mask of Orpheus and Earth Dances in the 80s through to Antiphonies, Exody and more recently Night's Black Bird. Max Davies' 9th Symphony, recently premiered here in Liverpool, is one of the best things he's done for years. Sorry I haven't written much about it yet. (You can catch it at the Proms - August 23 is it? Played by Petrenko and our band again).

Others more familiar with their output might weigh in on Ferneyhough and Ades...

[mercia]

was Beecham a bit selective as to who he appointed to his orchestras?
John Amis referred to him as "anti-semitic" and doing some "evil" things, a comment that was passed over

[aeolium]

was Beecham a bit selective as to who he appointed to his orchestras?
John Amis referred to him as "anti-semitic" and doing some "evil" things, a comment that was passed over

Yes, I wanted to hear more about that. A bit odd, considering that Beecham appointed the Jewish Berta Geissmar as his personal assistant in 1936 and helped her with a British work permit during the war years.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Or are things somehow shallower and less ground-breaking now, especially in the field of composition?

Well, I shaln't challenge you to a duel ardie because if the living Brit composers most frequently broadcast on R3 are taken as representative, anyone could be forgiven for agreeing with your point here.

BUT, Jayne has mentioned Birtwistle (as fine a composer as any you'd care to mention, in my book) and I would include Ferneyhough, mentioning again how, for the first time since Dunstable, a British composer had a definite positive influence on the course of subsequent European "Art Music" (riots in Holland when BF was advertized as a visiting lecturer - without his consent - and couldn't appear). Nor Elgar, nor RVW, nor Britten (nor even Birtwistle) for all the exceptional quality of their compositions and the performances of their Music by performers outside Britain, had this influence on younger composers. And this is hardly surprising: listen to what BF achieved in the works of the 1980s: the Carceri d'Invenzione cycle is a unique exploration of how creativity and fantasy works with sound and the frictions when practicalities conflict with imagination - and the joyful anguish that results from these frictions. Each work is a perpetual round of vision, and new ideas resulting from the endeavours to realize that vision: a rigaudon between the composer's will and what the Music imposes on that will. There really is nothing quite like it!

And there is Richard Barrett, whose Opening of the Mouth becomes more and more important to me each time I hear it (by far the most creative and passionate response to Celan's poetry by any Musician - yes, far more so even than other composers mentioned in this post!) - depth, power, anger, and an acknowledgement of and refusal to give in to despair.

And Rebecca Saunders, whose Music can (and has!) reduce this gnarled old fart to tears of joy: that a composer can create such beautiful and strong sounds, such toughly serene Music, should be a cause for National celebration: this is a real achievement, a significant contribution to the Human experience - and it's stuck away in the ghetto of late-night schedules so that to only the converted can it be preached.

And James Saunders (no relation) and James Dillon and James Clark and Bryn Harrison and Chris Dench and Joanna Baille: all ploughing their individual furrows - some deeper and more successfully perhaps than others, but all breaking their own bit of intellectual land largely ignored by the mainstream that prefers Music to sound like it's always done, should be acceptable to our wives and servants and shouldn't disturb the horses.

[ardcarp]

Well, thanks for all that, Ferney. What a lot to digest and get to grips with. Disregard my comments as senile ramblings, please! But it seemed then (i.e. as a music student in the 60s) that we were walking with giants. Stavinsky and Britten were sort of household names in a way that I doubt any of the above are now.

I love this bit:

all ploughing their individual furrows - some deeper and more successfully perhaps than others, but all breaking their own bit of intellectual land largely ignored by the mainstream that prefers Music to sound like it's always done, should be acceptable to our wives and servants and shouldn't disturb the horses.