I trust, ladies and gentlemen, that you are familiar with the theory behind method acting? Roughly speaking (and I’m no expert) rather than simply imagining you are a criminal gangster and acting in a film, you actually rob a bank as part of your research and stay in character throughout the duration of filming. Or something like that anyway. Robert De Niro famously trained as a boxer for his role in Raging Bull and gained the appropriate physique and skills associated with the pugilistic art. This of course made his performance more realistic and is a landmark in method acting. I haven’t actually seen one of his other famous films, Taxi Driver, but I imagine he did a fair amount of minicabbing around Brooklyn for that one. Probably. Back to that later.

Of course in 21st century classical music, its no longer enough to simply do concerts, you know, an overture, a concerto, a symphony plus interval drinks. Now we all have to have marketing to keep up with other more fashionable art forms. I don’t think that this is a bad thing-if you are passionate about something and want to tell people about it, then its a busy world out there with lots of other distractions. You have to shout about it these days. Its not a new idea, but we often have themes, like many arts organisations. Of course we have always had concert series devoted to the works of one composer. Over the last few seasons, we have had Mahler with Valery and Beethoven with Haitink. Those of you who visit the LSO website will have noticed the various themes, like “Love Brahms?”-well, yes, as you asked.

If you were at the concerts in the Barbican last week, you will have noticed the Emigre series where we programme works of composers who left their homelands. It was a fascinating evening with the Stravinsky symphony in 3 movements and the Scheonjberg Violin Concerto played magnificently by Nicolaij Zneider. The second half of the concert was Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances. I had a chat with Valery the other day about the emigre series and it was very interesting to hear him talk at length about the way leaving your homeland can affect you. In case you were wondering, this wasn’t a random conversation in the corridor, it was a lunchtime talk in St Lukes. Of course all three of the composers had very different experiences and all of them ended up living fairly close to one another in Hollywood funnily enough. However Rachmaninov left a pre revolutionary Russia whilst Stravinsky left a rather different homeland and you can hear the difference in the pieces in the concert.

We played last night in Belgrade, not as part of the emigre series, but the Rachmaninov was played none the less along with… yes, Prokofiev 5. Whilst Prokofiev wasn’t an emigre, he certainly travelled around a lot in his time-at least until his passport wasn’t renewed. Now if you have been reading my blogs over the last 6 months, you will have noticed that they have been popping up with alarming regularity. You will also notice that I often divert from descriptions of the concerts as it is very hard to think up yet more ways of describing how terrifying the Classical symphony is. Only 3 more by the way-boy are we going to have a drink after those! Anyway, I digress again. The reason there are so many blogs, so many sentences and so many words is that there have been so many tours! As my long suffering, patient and beautiful wife pointed out as I unpacked one case and packed another, I have spent more time out of the country than in it in the last 2 months. Which is where we get back to method acting or in our case method music. What better ensemble could you ask for to play the music of emigres, than an orchestra made up of people from every corner of the globe who spend a huge amount of time away from home. Music can make you feel a lot of things, but when you play those searing bitter sweet lines of Prokofiev and Rachmaninov on tour, and you long to be at home with your family, they take on an extra depth. It’s hard on us, but quite something for you.

When I spoke to Valery, I asked him if he thought that Rachmaninov had an idealistic vision of an old Russia which no longer existed. A Russia which he saw through rose, rather than red tinted spectacles, and did he think that this came through in his music? And did he think that Stravinsky had a more realistic view because of his different experience in Russia, and did this come through in his music?

Valery paused and thought for a while. I then expanded my theory. I explained that my father left a small mining village in Wales in the 1960’s. There wasn’t really any work, the mines were closing and he moved to England. I often wonder when he expresses a fleeting thought that one day he might move back home, whether he would be disappointed to find a very different place from the Wales of his childhood. I wonder whether this meant that he had an idealised view of a past which was no longer there. Did Valery think that this was a similar kind of thing which some of his Russian emigre composers had been through?

Valery paused again and then roared with laughter. I asked him why he was laughing. He said

“I love that you compare the suffering of the Russian emigre composers with your father having to move from Wales to live in England!! That is so funny!”

I thought about it and realised how stupid I had been.

Rachmaninov had it easy.