Greta Thunberg? Not a patch on child prodigy Alma Deutscher
Hate pushy kids? Same here. It’s Tuesday evening. I’m heading to a concert in Soho, Manhattan. My phone chirrups a message announcing; “It’s Greta Thunberg’s World”.
No it bl..dy well isn’t. At least, not yet. And her “Hail Mary” movement – are the handlers now trying to upstage the Catholic Church? – can keep “hailing” all it likes. If I could work out how to unsubscribe from the oxymoronic “Intelligencer” – just one of a raft of in-thrall news feeds peddling her stream of simplistic eco-drivel – I would. I big-finger fruitlessly instead.
Forget it. This concert is more important. Tonight’s bill at New York classical music station WQXR’s performance studio, The Greene Space, in deepest Soho, features a performance by Alma Deutscher playing violin and piano. Nothing astonishing there, except it’s a curtain raiser to her already sold-out debut at Carnegie Hall on December 12th.
There, she will perform a violin concerto, selections from a new opera version of Cinderella, a piano concerto, and an orchestral concert waltz, “Siren Sounds”. All are her compositions. Amazing!
At Carnegie Hall Ms. Deutscher will appear alongside The Orchestra of St. Luke’s, conducted by British born baroque legend, Jane Glover. The Orchestra of St Luke’s has been mis-described as “New York’s hometown band”. It is no such homey thing. It is one of the most respected baroque ensembles anywhere on the planet. More amazing!
She has composed sixteen works, including two operas, “Sweeper of Dreams” and “Cinderella”. Discography includes three CDs, the latest being the recently released “My book of Melodies” on Sony Classical. Shades of Mendelssohn’s “Songs my Mother Taught Me”. Even more amazing!
Surely the Carnegie Hall appearance must mark the apex of Ms. Deutscher’s long career?
Not a bit of it. Turns out she’s another pushy kid! Alma Deutscher is, mind bogglingly, only 14 year of age. She first played the piano when she was 2 and picked up a violin at the age of 3. That was in 2007/8 – aeons ago.
I have stripped this introduction – pace Thunberg invective – of adjectives. adverbs, hyperbole and the slew of Mozartian comparisons that customarily adorn reviews of Ms. Deutscher’s playing and composing.
The fact that she is a prodigy is the unavoidable elephant in the room, beyond contradiction, maybe defying understanding, but it needs no distracting adornment. For the quality of her musicianship, whatever her age, invites comparison with well-established concert performers. That counts more than marvelling at the mystery of her early onset maturity.
Her compositions are original, astonishingly polished, promising much to come as, rolling down the decades, her style evolves. To do her real justice it is important to strip away the hype focused on her youth now threatening to engulf her. She is not a fairground freak from “America Has Talent”. She is a musical force for the future in the making.
On Tuesday evening she performed a live broadcast for WQXR. Their Greene Space studio accommodates a tightly packed audience of 50. I was sitting in the second row – I’d bought a VIP ticket (50 bucks) – ten feet from the gleaming black Italian Fazioli grand piano on which she was about to perform. It was a better vantage point than I can ever hope to secure in Carnegie Hall.
In the run up to transmission I was introduced to Hugo Deutscher, Alma’s father. I shook his hand. He was preoccupied, clearly in no mood to chat. I didn’t trespass. Deutscher père is a slight, diffident man, an academic linguist. He, or his wife, Janie, accompany Alma on tour, much as Leopold Mozart chaperoned Wolfgang Amadeus from court to court across Europe three hundred years ago. Damn!! A Mozart allusion.
I had the sense these performances were more tense for Mr. Deutscher than his daughter. When I glanced across at his corner seat during the fervent applause and whoops that greeted each completed work, he remained completely still, expressionless, seemingly detached.
I wondered about the life choices he and Janie have made to nurture Alma’s talent. She is educated at home. School was too dull. Her ever-churning mind consumes more than any conventional school could provide. The family moved from Basingstoke to Vienna. I’ve got nothing against Basingstoke, but it seems like a no-brainer.
Alma’s musicianship is nurtured by a global network of teachers, deploying all the artifice of modern communication – playing on each other’s pianos via a Skypy Instagrammy Drop Box thingy. Imagine Mozart and Beethoven holding jamming sessions on Baroqueobox: “Ah, Ludwig, bring your harpsichord closer to the microphone. I’m not sure about you starting that symphony with just four notes”.
Alma is announced and appears on stage. There is no artifice. She wears an unremarkable, white frock; something that would not seem out of place at a Long Island kids’ party. Her hair is restrained by a subtle Alice band. Her motion on stage is characterised by a barely suppressed urge to add a skip to her gait. Her expression is mobile, eyes sparkling.
Elliott Forrest, WQXR’s veteran presenter, does not fall into the fatal trap of condescension. Alma weighs each response carefully, her speech patterns are mature and thoughtful. She has been round this race track of explanation many times before.
Asked about the inspiration for her music Alma is straightforward. At the age of 4 she started improvising on known themes. Then, she began to express the melodies surging like a spontaneous spring in her head, especially when she was twirling her skipping rope – the one with the silver tassels. When her mind cleared of other things – the detritus of everyday life – it filled with music.
At 6 she was developing musical ideas, adding accompanying parts and shaping narratives. The easy bit is thinking about melody. It is hard work to control and develop it.
She sketches her music in a make believe world, Transylvanian, populated with Grimm characters and courtly composers – Antonin Yellowsink, Shell, Greensilk, Bluegold and Ashy. She is unabashedly prepared to lay bare for inspection childhood fantasies most of us have probably entertained, but cringe to acknowledge. I know what she means. I used to think John Major was a serious politician. But I’m over that now. Don’t tell.
Alma’s piano playing technique is elegant, her hands lifting gently from the keys in the classic Hanon style, allowing a lightness of touch and the emphasis of melodic line. Hanon – a sort of Bismarck of pianoforte technique – was a terror of my youth, brandished as an awful exemplar by my long suffering spinster music teacher. When I went looking for him to seek revenge for years of exercises I was disappointed to learn he had died in 1900.
In both her violin and piano work Alma’s effortlessness impresses. The instruments seem mere extensions of her mind. Asked if she was nervous before performing she looked puzzled and replied, “Why should I be nervous”? Her virtuosity is hard wired in her being.
Her reworking of the Cinderella plot for her opera was inventive – not a simple, smug recasting in modern times for “relevance”. The slipper is gone. The Prince and Cinderella are musicians – one with the words of a song, the other with the music. When they bring them together – Bingo! No glass slipper needed. With sarcastic sleight of hand the Ugly Sisters are portrayed as manipulating operatic divas. I predict that the work will be increasingly performed by small opera companies, as it can be produced on a manageable scale, won’t break budgets and will attract audiences.
And there is a broader point. Melody in opera died in 1943 with Rachmaninoff. We entered an era of dissonance, Sturm und Drang with a vengeance. Alma Deutscher’s sell-out concerts are a cautionary tale for opera house managers faced with declining numbers of “bums on seats”. Maybe melody matters.