Malala

Last March I attended the Commonwealth Day Service in Westminster Abbey. Queen Elizabeth looked radiant, belying her 88 years by walking up stairs unaided, as did Prince Phillip,now into his 90's. They are both amazing and seem to have endless energy and interests. The principal speaker was Malala Yousafzai, who has just won the Noble Peace Prize. Her classmates were seated just in front of us, and Malala stood with her Lady Principal in the aisle as the audience filed in. She goes to school in Birmingham, having been brought to the UK for medical treatment by Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Westminster is a difficult space to see anyone, but I walked to the front where an
attendant showed me where the Queen would sit (at the very end of the Choir, on a huge oak chair) and where Malala would speak (from the huge pulpit) and indeed she was right
in front of us. When the Royals came in (we had been seated for over an hour) all we saw was the tops of their hats, as everyone of course stood up. I must say, hearing "God Save the Queen" with full organ blasting away with full choir and congregation made for a real tingle. Elizabeth is very dear to my generation. We saw her often as a young lady in the newsreels during the Second World War, and followed her as she joined the Women's Auxiliary Territorial Corps and learned to be an auto mechanic! Her father George VI told her she couldn't just sit around the palace, much to her delight. When she married Prince Phillip we got up before dawn to hear the service on the radio.

Malala is a force. Her speech was obviously the words of a 16 year old girl, but the power of her presence is very forceful. She has the aura of one chosen to lead. She gives basically the same message over and over, mainly that it is everyone's right to be educated...and of course as a professor and artist, I have always had the same goal. There is something of the miracle in hearing such a young voice give life to this hope for universal knowledge.

Since she has won the Noble Peace Prize, the articles about her have revealed the double edged sword she has experienced in her homeland of Pakistan. While she is revered by millions, she is reviled by many as being an embarrassment to her government, and the product of a publicity driven father and others out for financial gain. They say her father writes all her speeches, that she is a weapon of Western Agents out to shame Pakistan and some go as far to say that her shooting was all an arranged affair. I know this sounds crazy, but in the turmoil of present day Pakistan very believable. The fact that she has risen above all this is a tribute to the truth of her message.

A few days after returning home I read in the London Telegraph that the Queen has made known her discomfort with the short set of stairs that leads up to the choir in Westminster. I remember looking at them while standing at the front with the nice lady attendant, and wondering why they looked so steep and no visible rail. I am always looking for rails these days....funny what you noticed as you approach 80. The Queen is
terrifically spry for her age, but I agree with her! Give us rails and we can conquer the World!

":LONDON CALLING . . "

"Thank you so much for giving such a wonderful performance at the
church and for your generosity in donating the proceeds to the
on-going series. You are indeed fortunate to have so many close
friends who support you in London and they likewise in your talent
for enthusing an audience with anecdotes and consummate playing.
A rare gift!"
Simon Markson
London, October 2014


Trans-Atlantic travel these days is crowded and impersonal, everyone's head buried in
the Web. Its odd seeing everyone looking down, and dangerous too. Its almost a new
kind of public space, where you have to assume the person coming at you like a rocket
doesn't care if you land on your behind, while they plunge ever forward, looking for
who knows what.

With this as a backdrop, 15 days in London is always a thrill. Once there, the vibe becomes what you will. Piccadilly is always jammed, the main artery that connects
Hyde Park with Piccadilly Circus. If you want a view of the current world population, just sit on a bench and watch as the huge tide of humanity passes by. Escape is always
close at hand in London, a few steps can take you into the vast green spaces of the parks, or just to side streets that suddenly become neighborhoods where the city seems far away.

My particular path usually takes me along the C2 bus route, a rather charming flashback
to a more sedate London of years ago. It runs from Victoria, around Berkeley Square, and then Upper Regent's Street to the outlying Parliamemt Hill Fields, where you can walk up the path to overlook the City of London, St.Paul's dome still dominating the horizon just by sheer presence alone, even through huge modern towers are rising everywhere.

I hop off at Albany Street, an almost hidden corner of London, where street life seems that of decades ago. Markson Pianos and I have a long history. When I took a sabbatical in 1969, I rented a small piano from them for my room, and over the years I have used their practice rooms for concert preparation. They are the largest piano rental operation in London, and one has to get use to the continuous moving of pianos in and out. It's a bit like "The Piano Shop Around the Corner", but on a bigger scale. I always love being around the piano restoration area. Young women are entering this once male dominated area, and this has brought a whole new atmosphere with it.

Five years ago, Markson Pianos established a concert series in the nearby Saint Mary Magdalen Church, an imposing Gothic style church, although build in the Victorian Era.
In late September I did a recital for them, returning to the series after three years.
The price of a ticket includes a glass of wine at the close, and that makes for a genial atmosphere. The "Suite Bergamasque" was a huge hit with the audience, and one forgets its more than "Clair de lune", which, by he way, gains immensely by it's surrounding pieces. It is also quite long, as Debussy took his time. The "Passepied" is nine pages, and no place to ever take your hands off the keys.

I played a group of pieces from British films from the 1940's, including the haunting "The Dream of Olwen" by Charles Williams, who also wrote the theme song for "The Apartment". A rarity was the "Cornish Rhapsody" by Hubert Bath, and it is quite virtuoso and involved. The biggest rarity was "Tomorrow" from "The Constant Nymph", the long unseen movie with Joan Fontaine and Charles Boyer, recently re- discovered by Turner Classics.The composer of this is none other than Erich Korngold, who by this time had established himself as one of the greatest composers in film, after fleeing the Nazi invasions in Vienna. We forget that Korngold was hailed as the "New Strauss", and his music has legions of admirers.

As a present to my London friends, I made an arrangement of three classics about the City, including "A Foggy Day in London Town", "Limehouse Blues" and "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square". It was fun weaving a portion of each song into the next one, ending in a series of stacked chords (the way Marian McPartland showed me decades ago), and of course, the chimes of Big Ben at the close. I was almost too clever, but my goodness, how they loved it.