BOOKS

MATADOR PUBLISHING

Jacksons, Monk & Rowe and the Brodsky Quartet: The Formative Years Jacqueline Thomas

328PP ISBN 9781803133096 MATADOR PUBLISHING £12.99

After two books by violist Paul Cassidy – one about his early life in Derry, the other detailing his 40 years in the Brodsky Quartet – here is his wife, cellist Jacqueline Thomas, to tell us about the first decade of the quartet’s half-century.

It is an astonishing tale and Thomas is surely right to claim primacy as the longest-serving female quartet cellist, although the group as a whole will have to keep going a while longer to beat the Panocha Quartet’s 54 years so far.

The tragic thing is – and Thomas makes this point several times – that in today’s UK with its philistine government, the conditions that created a string quartet with members aged 10 to 12 can never be repeated. You have only to hear a few editions of Desert Island Discs to notice the decline in music education standards.

The miracle took place in the seemingly unlikely location of Middlesbrough, the town on Teesside in North Yorkshire best known for its football. But music was well supported and the Thomas siblings who formed the top and bottom of the then Cleveland Quartet, Michael and Jacqueline, came up via the usual youth orchestra route.

It was a riotous upbringing, with eight children plus a skeleton in the cupboard who revealed himself as an extra half-brother. Dad and Mam were almost over-supportive and the ‘Big House on the Corner’ rang with music from morning to night. One drawback was that Dad thought women could not be creative.

The Brodsky Quartet at Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music in 1982, just after Paul Cassidy joined the group

Thomas quotes copiously from her teenage diaries, some entries amounting to Too Much Information. Her opinion of Wolfgang Schneiderhan will make his admirers’ hair stand on end. As she grows musically, she encounters misogyny and abuse, especially at the Royal Northern College of Music.

The Cleveland Quartet metamorphoses into the Brodsky and goes through the hoops of competitions – she is wrong about the Portsmouth contest being the first one – and defections, although fellow founder Ian Belton still occupies the all-important second violin chair.

She and I could have good arguments about ‘democracy’ in quartet playing (sooner or later someone has to turn on some great violinism in Beethoven first violin parts), standing up to play and trying to straddle both pop and classical worlds. But no one could argue with her observations on listening within a quartet – and 50 years is a great record, however you look at it.

‘What is life without music?’ she asks. ‘Looking back on the experiences I had as a child – and so many like me – how can governments so callously make cuts and undervalue this most important art form?’ She might have added that a century of research has established how good music is for children’s development.

Her reproof to journalists about the meaning of ‘crescendo’ should be emblazoned across newsrooms and studios up and down the country. On the other hand, she is strangely vague about Henry Wood’s Sea Songs and appears not to know that noble song Tom Bowling (she should listen to Yorkshire’s Walter Widdop).

She clearly did not get on with that great musician Milan Škampa and there was no need to caricature his way of speaking. She misspells Grieg, composer Antony Hopkins and even the Monkees. She also over-uses adjectives – we do not need telling that Yehudi Menuhin’s career was ‘illustrious’.

Enough of quibbles. Her memoir is well illustrated with two sections of photographs on art paper and is mostly well written in a Molto vivace style. And that strange title for the book? ‘Jacksons, Monk & Rowe’ was a rather convoluted nickname bestowed in her childhood by Dad.

TULLY POTTER

The Well-Tempered Cello: Life with Bach’s Cello Suites Miranda Wilson

245PP ISBN 9781629920474 FAIRHAVEN PRESS $18.95

This is an unusual book. Yes, it is about Bach’s Solo Cello Suites, and its six parts correspond to the six suites, but it also takes you through the life of its author in a series of autobiographical episodes woven together with the music.

Aged 30 Miranda Wilson, newly appointed professor of cello at Idaho University, set herself the challenge of studying and performing in one concert all six of the Cello Suites from memory. The book ends as, aged 38, she walks out on stage to do just that, in the lead concert of the Idaho Bach Festival.

Each of its six parts has a title of the author’s creation (Part/Suite no.2 is ‘The Night of Sorrow’, Part/Suite no.5 ‘Discord’) and is then further sub-divided into six sections, each headed by the title of the movement within the suite – Prelude, Allemande etc. These sections always contain something about the movement from the player’s perspective, but then go off on a whole range of interesting diversions – the question of whether a Sarabande should be played as if it is being danced, what cellos were like in Bach’s day, 19th-century editions of the Suites, Schenkerian analysis – as well as linking them to her own experiences and Bach’s own life.

I found the book very readable and enjoyed the author’s humour and honesty. There is no index – you are left to discover the scholarly nuggets as you meander your way through Wilson’s life, from starting on Bach’s G major minuets as an eleven-yearold growing up in New Zealand, to mastering Suite no.6 on a newly commissioned carbon-fibre fivestring cello in her late thirties.

Miranda Wilson with her five-string cello

UNIVERSITY OF IDAHO CREATIVE SERVICES

MITCH WEISS

Those who are already familiar with the Cello Suites, particularly as players, certainly have a head start with this book. There are no music examples or illustrations, and I found it helped to have a copy of the music alongside me when reading it. Wilson is up front about the practical difficulties she encounters – working on the tuning in the E flat major Suite with its many left-hand extensions, for example – and I found it fascinating to read about her first attempts at playing Suite no.6 on her long-awaited and debated five-string cello.

JANET BANKS

Crossing Bridges Mark O’Connor

428PP ISBN 978137450016 MARK O’CONNOR MUSIK INTERNATIONAL $29.99

There can be little doubt that Mark O’Connor is a major figure in American music. Highly accomplished on several instruments, he has made his greatest impact with the violin – or as it is affectionately more often called in traditional American settings, the fiddle. His influences have included country, bluegrass, jazz and classical, and he has evolved a technique and personal style that has elicited high praise from critics and major musicians – including such figures as John Williams and Yo-Yo Ma.

Crossing Bridges, a memoir of O’Connor’s early life, explains how he started on the fiddle relatively late, aged eleven, but soon came under the tutelage of fiddle great Benny Thompson, and eventually jazz legend Stéphane Grappelli. Even as a child he won many fiddle contests and became known as a prodigy. It might have seemed from the outside that life was wonderful for this highly talented young man, but in fact he experienced many difficulties. He was severely bullied at school and had a dysfunctional home life with an abusive, alcoholic father and an ill mother. Music was his salvation but even accounting for that, he lost his way for a while as he resisted expectations to keep repeating successful formulas for country fiddling contests.

O’Connor developed a strong need to go his own way and make his own personal synthesis from different influences. Music making in any form lost its allure for a while, whereas skateboarding became a passion with him for some time and a brief stint with skiing resulted in a terrible accident that almost ended his career. He eventually got better and emerged more mature – and more determined than ever to be himself.

All the above and much more is told in detail in O’Connor’s memoir.

The highly accomplished fiddler and teacher Mark O’Connor

Written in a conversational style, it almost conveys a feeling that the reader is sitting next to a fellow passenger on a long journey who is sharing the story of his life. This flow gets interrupted, however, by frequent quotations from critical reviews extolling his talent. Some interesting facts sometimes emerge from these quotations but it gets a little tedious after a while. These passages are printed in a different typeface and can easily be skipped if desired.

The book comes with a very nice accompanying CD covering the same timeframe as the memoir, including some spoken commentary from a very youthful O’Connor. At one point there is a charming plea from young Mark asking to be forgiven for some mistakes, as he had only been playing fiddle at that point for four months!

RAPHAEL KLAYMAN