The Young Professor
I had a musical afternoon in Birmingham, thanks to my friend Charles Barwell, who arranged for me to visit the Elmhurst School for Dance and then the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Elmhurst is the only purpose built ballet school in the country, and it’s remarkable. It moved, after eighty years, from Camberley to Birmingham to link up with the Birmingham Royal Ballet. It was great fun, the children and teenagers are remarkable, completely focused, disciplined and dedicated. An organisation to be proud of.
The CBSO is doing well also. Run by Stephen Maddock, who is, annoyingly, a year younger than me, and even more annoyingly has been doing this very important job since he was 30, the CBSO does a huge amount of local education work (NOT “outreach” which is a word that must and should be banned), as well as, of course, first class music. We had supper with Elspeth Dutch, at 26 one of the best horn players in the country and a visitng professor at the Conservatoire, and the double bass player Julian Atkinson. Musicians are horribly badly paid in this country, about half of what their counterparts in Germany and the USA get. It was all finished off with a concert including Elgar’s Cello Concerto, with the soloist Alisa Weilerstein (she’s only 24!), which, by coincidence, had been in the opening night repertoire of the CBSO in 1920.