Celebrating Graceland

For the Graceland Prom by Ladysmith Black Mambazo I wasn’t in the hall (late night Proms are late), but listened online the next morning. It sent me whirling back 38 years to a hazardous patch through which this music helped me more than anything or anyone else.

I didn’t often buy pop albums, but Graceland (1986) was different. My parents were South African; they moved from Johannesburg to London in the 1950s. They held strong anti-Apartheid views; my father, who had done his medical training and early experience at ‘Wits’, Baragwanath and a mission hospital in the Limpopo Province, refused to go back until the system was brought down. I know how much the mingling of cultures in this album meant to them. They loved the singing of the township choirs and had an absolute passion for Miriam Makeba. (Below: she sings with Simon in 1987.)

The intense symbolism of Paul Simon and Miriam Makeba singing together may possibly be lost on some younger people today, but for our generation (many of us went to a huge rally in Hyde Park for the imprisoned Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday in July 1988), it could shred us on the spot. Graceland, and the collaborations it brought, meant hope. It signalled the possibility of change. It demonstrated that with enough collective effort and solidarity, we can genuinely create a better world.

I’m aware that my own 1988 encounter with Graceland involved what’s politely called ‘first-world problems’. The mishaps of my student years are nowhere beside the horrors of South Africa before the fall of apartheid. It’s profoundly uncomfortable to consider that contrast now, and embarrassing to consider it worth reflecting on the significance of this album to me personally, even more so given my roots.

Sometimes, though, the universal becomes personal. Sometimes we all need to tap into a force that can help us even if we don’t understand how or why, because sometimes there’s no other option. That’s what Graceland did. That’s why I want to write about what happened, in the hope that it’ll be useful.

On the distant Planet Jess in 1988, on the side furthest from the sun, just before my final recital for my MusB exam at Cambridge, I decided - after six years of fighting to attempt it - to stop trying to be a pianist. ‘Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts!’ [Beckett, Waiting for Godot]

Oh, diddums.

There’s a hierarchy of painful experience with which families affected by political persecution, extreme violence, exile or the Holocaust have had to live for a long time, and which rubs off on others whose consciences take it up in sympathy. It tends to render ‘first-world problems’ meaningless.

It’s true, we should count our blessings. Studying music is one of the greatest privileges available to those fortunate enough to have families and schools that let them - or that shove them in that direction, more common when Oxbridge is involved. So if you have trouble with it, no wonder they’ll probably call you a spoilt brat.

Tennis elbow? Tough; it’ll get better. Glandular fever? It won’t kill you. Loathsome course, misogyny, sexual abuse? Shut up and get the bloody degree. Manipulative, gaslighting boyfriend dumped you? Good riddance! How dare you think you have problems while this world has held Auschwitz, Hiroshima and ‘all the starving children in Africa’ - which is what some people used to say in the 1980s?

Your little life is not immune to bashes and buffets. Nevertheless, however much it hurts, if you consider Auschwitz, Hiroshima or the Sharpeville Massacre, you feel you don’t have a leg to stand on. And no emotion that you feel can be valid: anger is mocked, sorrow can’t be ‘real’, and even joy is simply self-indulgence.

My Student Years That Go Wrong probably deserved a billboard to themselves on the Tube. What a farce. And now, with a fortnight to go before my final recital, I’d disintegrated into a puddle of concert nerves. Most musicians, even if they’re nervous, thrive on those nerves in some way; maybe the payoff of success is great enough to make it worthwhile. I didn’t. Do I really want to live like that? I took the decision that this would be my last recital; I’m not going to put myself through it any more. In the end, the concert went well, but I didn’t change my mind.

About a week after the exam, one evening I started crying for no obvious reason and couldn’t stop for three days. During which I listened to Graceland over and over. Not Beethoven or Schubert. Graceland.

First-world problem. Surely we have no right to feel such upset over, oh dear, the prospect of not playing the piano any more? Auschwitz! Africa! Go and do something worthwhile instead, you useless, selfish nobody!

I had no idea why Graceland was the music I needed just then. But I did know that Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo were there for me, on the turntable, when it seemed that nothing else was. I’d reached the end of a road. Perhaps it led to Graceland.

Last October, I heard an interview with Paul Simon. He explained it. He said: ‘Eventually, I understood that the song is about why we are travelling to Graceland - to find out how to get healed.’

Thank you, Paul Simon. That was it.

Mercifully, it’s nearly four decades ago and I know I made the right decision, though the songs can plunge us back into the memories. What remains is the music, and the healing. And hope of a better world on the other side.

You can see the Graceland Prom on TV on 15 August.

• The Hallé Orchestra’s Prom, which Kahchun Wong conducted. A glistening transcription of Ravel’s La vallée des cloches by Colin Matthews, full of genuine bell sounds, was the opener. (Interestingly, I reckon there are more overture-concerto-symphony Proms than usual this year and they, er, can work rather well.)

Next, Alexandra Dariescu played the Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra by Nadia Boulanger. Excellent to see such an ovation for an artist of top-notch charisma and virtuosity whose devotion to championing women composers and underrated repertoire has never wavered in the face of growing stardom. Not many of us had encountered this startlingly inventive work before, and while I doubt it will find a concert niche any stronger than other too-short concertos, it’s intriguing to hear music by the person who taught so many of the 20th century’s greatest composers.

Finally there was Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2, a work so enchanting that I will take it any day over most other symphonies of its time. Gorgeous playing, too: the Hallé is a sleek, even, well-balanced orchestra and Wong is seriously impressive. I could quibble with some of his choices: some over-leisurely tempi and the tendency to grind nearly to a halt for supposed emotional impact (which, as I say again and again and again, does not work). But he left us marvelling afresh at what completely wonderful music this is, and that’s always the sign of something worthwhile.

Is that symphony perfect? I think so. Technically stunning, full of the most inspired ideas, exultant, contrasted, rich-textured, wonderfully orchestrated, it’s like a Turgenev novel in which you can’t remove even one tiny element without damaging the whole. When I think of the scorn poured upon Rachmaninoff by the old midcentury snobs, I do wonder what planet our music world was on. Looks like Rachmaninoff is one of the spaceships on which we’re finding our way home again.

• Trio, a novel about Schumann, Clara and Brahms by Boman Desai. It is a vast book, alternately riveting and maddening. The main characters are well delineated; you feel that the writer knows them like his closest friends. The bulky, blue-eyed Schumann, the clever, thinking-on-her-feet Clara, the brusque Brahms and the great-mannish Liszt are there with you in person. Though harbouring occasional technical reservations, I’ve found much to admire and enjoy, and must confess to being unable to put it down. Right now I’m over 400 pages in, but only half way through. Schumann has died and there are increasingly plentiful references to Cosima and Wagner, so it is clearly more than a trio that’s unfolding; could it be the entire panorama of the war of the Romantics? Let’s see what happens in the next 400 pages.

• An interview with Gabriela Ortiz, the magnificent composer of Revolución Diamantina, which is at the Proms on Wednesday. It’s in the Sunday Times and online here (£).

• A piece dealing with a thorny health issue for musicians. It should be out next week - I’ll link to it then.

• Some record reviews, including certain piano works by Lili Boulanger that I didn’t know and am overjoyed to hear. The finished things will be in BBC Music Magazine in due course.

• Another week, more great Proms ahoy. Monday 10th August: Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the massed forces of the Juilliard School and the Royal Academy of Music in a stunning programme of Stravinsky, Bartók and the Berg Violin Concerto with Vilde Frang as soloist (and listen out for Tasmin Little’s chat with the R3 announcer in the interval). The Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel have two Proms on Tuesday 11th and Wednesday 12th August; the Ortiz is in the second. Thursday 13th, the BBCSO/James Gaffigan present the UK premiere of Wynton Marsalis’s Concerto for Orchestra, plus Gershwin and Barber. There’s more to explore too, and everything is broadcast live on Radio 3.

• At Opera Holland Park on 13, 14 and 15 August there’s a guest run from the dynamic actor and music drama creator Tama Matheson and pianist Jayson Gillham, who after a triumphant production about Beethoven last year have turned their attentions to Tchaikovsky: Child of Glass. Bringing together music, biography, drama and ballet, this production was shortlisted for an RPS Storytelling Award and promises to be unmissable. Co-starring actors Suzy Kohane and Oliver Holland plus Téo Debreuil from the Royal Ballet. Booking here.

• Next weekend I’m off to Gstaad for the Menuhin Festival. Excited about this, though anxious too, as we are hearing Mahler 1. I am superstitious about Mahler 1. Every time I hear it, something awful happens a day or two before or after. Honest, guv. Sometimes this holds true even if I refuse to go (eg, just before Lockdown), or if there’s something different but related (Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen, two days after Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine). In Gstaad, the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Iván Fischer are playing it, and I love them so much, and Tom thinks superstition is daft. I hope he’s right. So we’re going. Help! Stay safe, everyone.