That excellent music critic David Mellor, has compiled a list of his top 10 classical CDs of 2006. I thought it would be worthwhile taking a look at them:

1. La Clemenza Di Tito, the Mozart opera, is favoured in two recordings, both excellent : the first by Sir Charles Mackerras, the other by Rene Jacobs.

2. Also by Mozart and conducted by Mackerras is the recital Tutto Mozart.

3. Best reissue is (again) Mozart’s Complete Piano Concertos by Murray Perahia.

4. Best instrumental is Stephen Hough’s Spanish Album, which is “a real connoisseur’s choice”.

5. Best Concerto is Vivaldi’s Violin Concertos, which presents five that have never been heard before, played by violinist, Giuliano Carmignola.

6. Best historical is Jascha Heifetz’s 1930’s recording of the Sibelius concerto, conducted Sir Thomas Beecham.

7. Best orchestral is Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony with Polish maestro Anthony Wit.

8. Best chamber is Martha Argerich And Friends with music from the 2005 Lugano Festival, including two Rachmaninov masterpieces.

9. A special award goes to label Lyrita, pioneers of off-the-beaten-track recordings of British music.

10. CD of the Year goes to the 1955 Bayreuth Ring, issued for the first time in four sets by Testament, and originally recorded by Decca.

A splendid top 10 indeed.

When Sir Paul’s tone Poem Standing Stone was first premiered, and then released as a CD in 1997, it attracted a very mixed reception, which is fair enough. In fact I rather like to see the musical purists get their underwear in a bit of a twist when they try to tell us how bad something is, how derivative, how shallow, how it sounds as if it has been written by a committee, and, how dare you step over the musical boundaries and try your hand at ’serious’ music. In other words elitism at its worst. And believe me if there was a decree from No 10 and the White House tomorrow that all music be left in the hands of the purists, then music, all music, would die very quickly, and good riddance because none of it would be worth listening to.

And McCartney’s Standing Stone is worth listening to, and more than once.

Sir Paul’s first recorded effort at ’serious’ composing (as if composing hundreds of popular songs was not serious for goodness sake) was his 1991 Liverpool Oratorio which I remember as a tremendously moving piece of work that quite naturally showed the influence of Elgar (who made the oratorio his own in the early 20th century), but to my ears much more that of Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax, plus a good helping of John Tavener and Malcolm Arnold, who were, and are, masters of assimilation, as is McCartney - you only have to listen to Sgt Pepper, the early Wings recordings, and some recent solo McCartney, to understand what I’m getting at; and without assimilation art, any art, cannot move ahead, cannot be creative.

And it’s the same with Standing Stone, McCartney’s first real stab at a symphonic piece. It worked in October 1997 when it was premiered and released, and it worked last night when, with Hilary, I listened to it again.

This is what McCartney has to say about Standing Stone in the liner notes to the CD…

” I’ve spent much of the last four years composing what has now become my second large-scale classical work, the symphonic poem Standing Stone. Unlike the Liverpool Oratorio which features prominent roles for four solo singers, Standing Stone relies entirely on colours and effects drawn from the orchestral and choral forces. With no soloists to propel the “story” and to help keep me on track throughout the writing of about 75 minutes of music I wrote a poem in which I try to describe the way Celtic man might have wondered about the origins of life and the mystery of human existence…”

And it is there that we have the secret of this piece of wonderful music - that of man wondering what life is all about. It’s the same secret we discover when we look at Anthony Gormley’s 100 iron men looking out to sea from Crosby beach - their solitariness, their stillness and their fortitude. It is what we hear in this music, especially in Part 9, where McCartney introduces a melody of such simplicity and beauty that it almost breaks your heart (which has come from a good deal of contemplation and experience), and what we hear too in the music of Sir Malcolm Arnold who, like McCartney, was criticised by those damned purists for being popular. And the more I listen to Standing Stone the more I realise that Arnold has undoubtedly been a greater influence (consciously or subconsciously) than any other composer on McCartney’s symphonic music, but not in a negative sense. The underlying echoes of Arnold (Sir Paul might disagree) come through to me as a kind of homage to a man who shared many of Sir Paul’s ideals and beliefs, and, like Paul, wrote music from the heart.

Then it occurred to Hilary - who has recently started a campaign to save Gormley’s ‘Another Place’ at Crosby - that McCartney’s Standing Stone is effectively the soundtrack to Gormley’s magnificent work on that haunted, industrial, almost derelict beach, and that McCartney’s wonderfully evocative, emotional music must, somehow, be performed there.

Any thoughts on how we can make it happen?

Standing Stone, recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra, and conducted by Lawrence Foster, is available on EMI Classics (USA link or UK link).

Sir Paul McCartney’s latest classical work, Ecce Cor Meum, Behold My Heart, a work for chorus and orchestra, will be premiered on Friday 3rd of November at the Royal Albert Hall, London. It is also available on EMI Classics.

Steve Newman

No, I didn’t say that. It was a German, Oscar Adolf Hermann Schmitz, way back in 1904. Not so long ago that it doesn’t still wound.

Schmitz — or Fritz, as Sun readers would cry — had this to say of the land that bore Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Purcell, Parry and Holst :

England, he said is “Das Land Ohne Musik” — the land without music.

Thankfully, the country now has a champion. A man of many parts, a journalist and former editor of one of our top weekly magazines; a Member of Parliament and Shadow Minister for Higher Education, no less.

Step forward Defender of the Faith (musical variety) … (drum roll) : Boris Johnson.

A little late, we might murmur into our gins and tonic. And is he the best man for the job? After all …

But don’t look a gift horse in the mouth … even if Boris’s foot is already in it.

Enough of prelude and overture. Read Boris in his own words Here.

1921 - 2006

With the death of Sir Malcolm Arnold the musical world, and not least the English musical world, lost a composer of huge vision and inclusiveness who was also the last link with those composers who came to prominence in the first half of the 20th century, most notably (in respect to their influence on the young Arnold) Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax, William Walton, and perhaps to a lesser extent Edward Elgar - although in Arnold’s lush orchestrations and his ability to move from boisterousness to slow melancholy - which matched his own unstable schizophrenic nature - we do hear the influence of the Worcester born composer.

But there was another and perhaps more important musical influence on the Northampton born Arnold, namely that of Louis Armstrong who he managed to see and hear in Bournemouth in the 1930s when that most famous of jazz musicians was on a European tour fronting a band made up of British and European players. Such was the influence on the youngster that he persuaded his father (a wealthy Methodist shoe manufacturer) to buy him a trumpet.

Such was his ability with the instrument that when Arnold won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in 1938 he decided that, apart from studying composition, he would also make the trumpet his main academic pre-occupation, and a means of earning a few bob when he sat in with a few jazz bands in the evening.

After graduating from the RCM he joined the London Philharmonic and soon became their principle trumpet.

Although a fine player Arnold’s main ambition, and passion, was to become a composer, an ambition that had been encouraged by Duke Ellington who’d met Arnold in a Bournemouth tea shop (the seaside resort was a major pre-war venue for visiting American jazz musicians) in the 1930s. And we can hear in Arnold’s work that wonderful freedom of expression that inhabits the best of jazz, plus the ability and ingenuity to do what might appear at first listening to be musically incorrect (as the case with Ellington) plus humour - which is a hallmark of both Arnold’s and Ellington’s work. What we also hear in Arnold’s work - a skill he would use to good effect in his film music - is that of tight section work (another jazz element) and an ability to swing like the devil when he needs too (with the trumpet often leading) which is something most classical composers fail so miserably at.

At the outbreak of World War II Arnold registered as a conscientious objector, but in 1944 changed his mind and joined the army where, after months of hard training, he was found to be unfit for active duty and attached to a home regiment as a cornet player in the band.

Such was Arnold’s indignation at not being allowed to fight (and having to play in such a lowly outfit as an army band after the dizzy heights of the London Philharmonic) that he shot himself in the foot (a serious offence that could have put him in a tough army prison for a couple of years), which brought about his discharge. It was also one of the first signs of what became increasing bouts of clinical depression and attempts at suicide.

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