Here comes the sun...

How the climate breakdown is affecting musical instruments, musicians and concert halls. Plus weekly roundup and Sundaynightis

The big event this week was the opening night of the Proms. I’ve written a review for the i paper - partly a comment piece on the fact that nobody is really batting an eyelid about conductors and composers being female nowadays and that this is a very good sign. In the end, though, there was so much to say about the concert itself that - oh well, read it here.

The bigger issue that night was something different: namely, that we could not have done without the air-cooling system in the Royal Albert Hall. Already there were signs that some of the instruments might be melting - a dodgy moment or two in the Ravel concerto first movement, for instance - but in the slow movement it was hard to hear Yunchan Lim’s exquisite pianissimo because of the ambient roar from above.

Here’s the concerto plus his super encore, Autumn Leaves by Joseph Kosma, which may have been wishful thinking given the ferocity of this summer.

I wonder how often people consider the implications of climatic conditions in concerts?

They take all sorts of forms. When I was a kid I took part in a local competition in January in a hall that was exceedingly chilly, with nowhere to warm up. I was playing a Bach piece full of trills. My fingers wouldn’t move. It was humiliating in the extreme and you always feel it’s your fault even when, as then, it actually isn’t.

Professionals, of course, are professional about such things. I remember Imogen Cooper giving a recital in Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, in February 1985, when it was snowing and the heating broke down. She put a cardigan over her evening dress and played Schubert like an angel in fingerless gloves.

During the Second World War the National Gallery Lunchtime Concerts carried on in the downstairs bomb shelter even when the windows had been blasted out and the roof was leaking. A clarinettist once had to try to warm up the instrument over a stove before attempting to play it. Myra Hess would play sometimes in a cardigan, other times in a fur coat.

Now we have the opposite problem. The RAH first brought in an air-cooling system of sorts in 2002, but in 2010 I was supposed to be reviewing the opening weekend of the Proms - including semi-staged performances Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Simon Boccanegra - and it was hot. In the middle of Meistersinger the distant figure of Bryn Terfel began to swim in front of my eyes and little grey dots started blotting out the scene. I had to stumble out to collapse. There was an awkward call to my editor later on. It’s the only time such a thing has ever happened to me, thank goodness, but you do occasionally hear thuds in the RAH as prommers keel over.

The audience may suffer - but imagine what heat does to musical instruments. Pianos, for a start. Like all things made of wood, they’re intensely sensitive to temperature and humidity, swelling or shrinking accordingly. Too humid and the keys are quickly covered in moisture - the player sweating of course doesn’t help. Even Sokolov was suffering the other week when I heard him in Germany. He is not one to make life easier for himself by playing in shirt-sleeves; he wore full evening dress with tailcoat, waistcoat and winged collar, and if there were occasional slips and slides, it was not surprising. The mercury would have been ready to bust the thermometer glass that night.

There were horror stories galore about Jelly d’Arányi’s beautiful Bergonzi falling foul of conditions on tour in the US in the 1920s, when air conditioning inside was icy cold and temperatures outside were baking and she had to go repeatedly from one extreme to the other. At the most basic and obvious level, stringed instruments lose their tuning easily in extreme heat. So do woodwind. That’s why I left the Ravel mishap unacknowledged in my review; I’ve heard the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s magnificent wind section so often that I don’t believe it wasn’t their fault.

What about historical instruments? I spent a wonderful day before the Prom with my honorary goddaughter Stellaria visiting Fenton House in Hampstead, which boasts a large and impressive collection of ancient keyboard instruments, from delicate spinets to hefty, highly painted 15th-century creations from Italy and Britain, and from a huge two-manual Broadwood nicknamed ‘The Duchess’ to a lavishly decorated harpsichord that may once have belonged to Handel. But the expert curators of such collections are at their wits’ end in the heatwave, because their charges are even more delicate and endangered by climate extremes than modern instruments. Interestingly, we learned, the Italian-built ones are withstanding the heat better than the British ones. Made for sunshine? They certainly sound like it.

Unlike Italian harpsichords, though, midcentury brutalist concert hall buildings are not made for these temperatures. The Southbank Centre has long had an ongoing battle to keep its concrete structures workable, though seems in relatively good shape following the most recent round of refurbing in 2018. Next, the Barbican is meant to close for a year, June 2028 to 2029, for a multimillion-pound renewal. It has only been open for about 45 years, but its infrastructure is already deteriorating. Despite many other interventions over those decades, there’s a lot that just cannot change: the concrete is still concrete and the loos are still appalling.

In Berlin, the Philharmonie, which dates from 1963, is facing a similar situation. It is supposed to close in 2032 for an eight-year, £1.15bn renovation. Where will its resident ensembles perform? Nobody seems very sure yet, any more than we know where the LSO will go while the Barbican is shut.

As for the Cologne Opera, don’t get me started. It closed in 2012 for a friendly updating. Finally, we hear, it is reopening this September with Der Rosenkavalier. It has taken 14 years.

It’s not only midcentury buildings that are suffering. In Paris, the Opéra Garnier is undergoing repair work after toxic lead contamination was discovered in the fly tower. It was supposed to close for two years in 2027; now that plan has been extended to five years. It’s part of a €450m renovation plan.

The crucial thing, however, is that lessons need to be learned. Refurbishments are a chance to make things that last and are equipped to withstand the disastrous climate breakdown we’ve unleashed upon ourselves for at least a few years or, possibly, a few decades before it kills us all.

If the plan to build a new concert hall in the City of London ever goes ahead - and I can’t believe it has really been shelved forever - I hope they will build it properly. There is mileage in doing things properly, whatever it may be.

Fun fact: music itself has much greater longevity than the buildings in which it is supposed to be played and heard. With the possible exception of ancient Greece.

I’ve been reading…

On the recommendation of Rosie Millard at The Arts Stack, I downloaded Caroline Fraser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Prairie Fires. Having been hooked on the books as a kid, I never took much of a liking to the first TV series and am not planning to watch the new one. But I did want to know more about the realities of her life. The books show her as a plucky pioneer girl as her family ekes out a living in late 19th-century Dakota and other states, heading ever westwards. Fraser shows us the realities: though rooted in the truth, Wilder’s books were somewhat sanitised.

The racist slaughter and displacement of the native American population, who knew how to live with nature rather than against it, is unconscionable and has hideous resonances with some of today’s situations across the world. At the same time, it can also break your heart to read that lie upon lie was told to the would-be homesteaders about the luscious possibilities of farming on land that was in reality barren and inhospitable, beset by drought, blizzards and horrific swarms of locusts that could pile up four foot deep as they ate everything within sight.

Perhaps this is why the middle area of the USA is so ready to swallow the idea that climate change is some kind of hoax - because they have always had extreme weather. Well, sunshine, you may have – but we haven’t. And now we do. This heat is something new for us. And like those droughts, like those disasters that Wilder and her family had to battle year after year from the 1870s forward, most of the problems have been caused by human beings doing the wrong thing, believing only what they want to believe, failing to be sensible, failing to do things properly, and going right ahead with their wrecking ball despite every sign that it was only going to make things worse.

And so to full circle. We could hardly hear Yunchan Lim in the RAH because the air-conditioning was so noisy. And we needed the air-conditioning. And that is why. As Barenboim wrote, everything is connected.

I’ve been hearing…

A new album from violin, piano and life partners Elena Urioste and Tom Poster entitled Thème Varié (on the Chandos label). The couple have combined, as they often do, music slightly familiar with works not at all familiar, uncovering interrelated gems along the way - this time from approximately fin-de-siècle France. The most substantial work is the Sonata by Guillaume Lekeu. Though exquisitely recorded by Yehudi and Hephzibah Menuhin in 1938, it infrequently graces actual concert halls. I’ve tried periodically to yell about it, but Urioste and Poster are the first to have listened and done anything about it, which is most touching.

It’s just out. It’s gorgeous. And it makes you wonder what Lekeu, Franck’s youngest pupil, who died aged 24, would have gone on to write had he been granted a longer life. As things are, he did leave about 50 works - though is probably most famous for having (supposedly) passed out in Bayreuth upon hearing the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde for the first time.

Urioste and Poster offer playing that is intensely alive and responsive to the auras of this fervid, supersensitive world of symbolism and subtle colour. Charlotte Sohy’s Thème Varié opens the album - no, me neither, but it is a richly conceived, atmospheric work from a composer who studied under d’Indy and Vierne and often published under a male pseudonym. Several short pieces by the excellent Mel Bonis pepper the programme, confirming my impression that she was a composer to be reckoned with. The Lekeu itself - played with vast and cherishable affection - is a monumental centrepiece, and to complete the album there are two Elegies by Saint-Saëns and a look ahead with Messiaen’s impassioned Thème et Variations of 1932 - his wedding present to his bride, Claire Delbos. Bravissimi!

I’ve been writing…

…about the LSO and Pappano for their Japanese tour; about some of Benjamin Britten’s choral music for a CD; and starting a major piece about Chopin. It’s not easy to think of something new to say about Chopin, but I am trying to bring a particular side of him to life by according it a more intense spotlight than usual. I’ve also been invited to tackle a Radio 3 Record Review Building A Library later in the year, and to talk on air in a Proms interval soon - both occasions a thrill and an honour, besides involving one of the composers closest to my heart. (Not Korngold this time.)

Got Sundaynightis?

Three of the best to look forward to this week:

• Ariadne auf Naxos opens today, Sunday 19th, at Glyndebourne. Laurent Pelly directs a new production, Robin Ticciati conducts, Rachel Wills-Sørensen is the Prima Donna and David Butt Philip sings Bacchus/Tenor, oh yes indeed. Samantha Hankey is the Composer and Alina Wunderlin sings Zerbinetta. I’m going on Wednesday.

• Proms galore. Highlight of my week is John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London on Friday 24th, a programme that includes Jonathan Aasgaard in the Walton Cello Concerto and culminates in the Respighi Roman Trilogy. If you’ve heard their recording, you will probably want to be there.

• The Buxton Festival is having a distinct ‘moment’. On Friday, everyone I bumped into was singing its praises, having either just been there or being about to go. The opera programme is very special and includes a rare staging of La Liberazione di Ruggiero by Francesca Caccini, an equally rare staging of Pauline Viardot’s Le dernier Sorcier, libretto by Turgenev, and just about to open, Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito. Buxton is Tom’s home town and we much regret that we can’t be in four places at once. I would particularly have loved to hear the Viardot.

Off to St Mary’s Perivale this afternoon, meanwhile, to channel Jelly d’Arányi with Fenella Humphreys (violin) and Viv McLean (piano). You can tune in to the livestream through the link here.