Patrick Maxwell
(He/Him)
As seen in:
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Liberal Democrat Voice,
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Covers:
Foreign policy, economic policy, domestic policymaking.
Doesn't Cover:
Sport.
Writer and journalist. Contact: patrick.g.maxwell@gmail.com For TheArticle, Big Issue, London Magazine, Politics.co.uk, Classical Music Daily.
Articles by Patrick Maxwell
How French was the music of Duruflé?
It’s been said that between Bach (d.1750) and Messiaen (b.1908) no music of note was written for the organ. There’s something, if not everything, in that claim. (It omits Saint-Saëns and Bruckner, for a start.) But it’s certainly also true that Messiaen was only one of a number of inspiring composers for the instrument in France at the start of the twentieth century, as French organ music took off in the years around the Second World War. Maurice Duruflé was primary among them.
Running from the facts: what is the Lithuanian manager hiding?
Photo: Lithuanian marketing professional Ovidijus Jurevičius. The issues of disinformation and Russia’s hybrid warfare have long been examined in depth, particularly in the Baltic states, where the Russian Federation is already resorting to military pressure. Unidentified drones enter Lithuanian airspace, forcing the parliament to take decisive action. Russian politicians, supported by a majority of their population, now openly declare that the Baltics should return to Russia’s sphere of influence.
Tremendous energy and engagement from Igor Levit at Wigmore Hall
Star pianist Igor Levit came to fame playing the masterworks of his native Germany. It was perhaps no surprise, then, that Schumann was the highlight of his scintillating recital at Wigmore Hall, but it still felt like an impetuous discovery for both performer and listener. Levit performs with consummate musicianship. His interpretations of Schumann, Chopin and Schubert are undoubtedly original, but it's not controversy that Levit’s playing engenders.
Bismarck, Disraeli and the Suez Canal
On November 17, 1869, a seminal moment in world history occurred which has largely been forgotten. The Suez Canal was opened by Ishmail Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt. One onlooker prophesied that it would be “the artery of prosperity for Egypt and the world”. The other country that was certainly deemed likely to prosper, though, was France.
Spotlight. Eclectic Music. Patrick Maxwell enjoys works by British composer Piers Connor Kennedy
PATRICK MAXWELL enjoys works by British composer Piers Connor Kennedy '... accuracy and panache ...' The English bass Piers Connor Kennedy is one of the newest members of The King's Singers. He sings with a beautifully deep sonority perfect for that international group. He is also a renowned composer. The Choir of St Peter's College, Oxford have not recorded much, but their disc of Kennedy's music is a very welcome addition.
A rousing Resurrection Symphony from the Hallé at the Proms
Mahler’s Second Symphony is a piece almost written for a concert series like the BBC Proms and a space like the Royal Albert Hall. It does bring challenges, however. Mahler is a fastidious taskmaster. Wild in its contrasts and ecstatic in its expression, the piece needs great pacing and skill to work in palatial Victorian surroundings. The size of the orchestra, and its numerous offstage elements, offer issues of coordination easy to miss amidst Mahler’s monument to immortality.
Scintillating Bruckner from Wigglesworth and the BBC Scottish
Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony made its composer’s international reputation in 1884. In many ways, it is the quintessential work of the composer’s symphonic output, containing the grandiosity of the Eighth, the rhythmic energy of the Sixth, and the harmony of the Fifth. It is long – we have to wait for thematic material to come together – but not quite as long as the church organist-composer holds us in suspense during some of his other works.
What does Keir Starmer still believe in?
Sir Keir Starmer is coming up to a year as Prime Minister. There won’t be too many celebrations. For one thing, the man himself always insists on moving on with things, “getting the job done”, enacting “change”. That’s one of his primary characteristics, at least according to the interesting if hagiographical biography by Tom Baldwin, published last year, a few months before his election as Prime Minister.
The rise and rise of AstraZeneca
Remember AstraZeneca? They were the superheroes of the pandemic, coming to the rescue with their relatively safe and uncontroversial vaccine in the depths of the second lockdown of winter 2020-21, simultaneously justifying the Government’s serendipitous investment right at the start of the coronavirus outbreak. If there was a British success story among the general failures, it was “AZ”. Since 2020, the firm has only grown, and is now one of the biggest in Britain by market capitalisation.
So, farewell then, Seumas Milne: where are the Corbynistas?
Remember Seumas Milne? Karie Murphy, anyone? Right-wing journalists used to fill dumb days at the office by re-reading Milne’s archived Guardian articles in praise of the USSR. It seems these central figures in the ill-fated regime of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party are destined merely for the footnotes of the first history books. In 2019, Channel 4 named Milne as one of the two “Men Who Really Run Britain”.
Restless but unsatisfying Mendelssohn from Eschenbach and the Oxford Philharmonic
It’s fair to say that the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra divides opinion. Their repertoire is limited and Music Director Marios Papadopolous is known more for his business acumen than his penetrating interpretations, cultivating a quite remarkable group of donors. This allows the orchestra to entice big names onto its podium at the Sheldonian Theatre: Maxim Vengerov, Víkingur Ólafsson, Martha Argerich among others. On a beautiful spring evening on Thursday, it was the turn of Christoph Eschenbach.
It’s the economy, stupid: why Harris got it wrong
How could they all, especially Kamala Harris, get it so wrong? Donald Trump’s easy path to victory is largely a matter of ”margin of error”. Or so we were told by many of the pundits who saw what all thought to be a whisker–thin election margin turn into a comfortable victory for a buoyant Republican Party. There are many reasons why this has happened.
Who will be Oxford’s next Chancellor?
Roy Jenkins said that the role of Chancellor of Oxford University was one of “impotence assuaged by magnificence”. No wonder that Imran Khan, incarcerated in his Pakistani prison cell, is so up for it . Khan’s surprise bid has been the highlight of an otherwise uninspiring contest, ever since Chris Patten announced his resignation in July.
Brilliant Bruckner from Berlin at the Proms
Member ratings This article has not been rated yet. Be the first person to rate this article. Kirill Petrenko is often said to be the best conductor in the world and his band, the Berlin Philharmonic, the best orchestra. Why is this? For style, pace, virtuosity and true interpretation, their joint rendition of Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony on Sunday night gave a decent answer. It is the 200th anniversary of Anton Bruckner’s birth this year.
Macron and ‘Macronism’ aren’t finished yet
The disappointment which greeted the far-Right with France’s parliamentary election results on July 7 has been hailed as a victory for the country’s progressive Left. Supporters of Marine Le Pen and her young National Rally president Jordan Bardella have proclaimed that the victory of their party will be only a matter of time.
London’s Great Estates
I: The Portmans of Marylebone We have forgotten just how much Britain’s capital owes to the Great Fire of 1666. The linking of Westminster with London proper and the creation of the West End had ramifications far beyond Wren’s new churches and a spruced-up Covent Garden. The Fire helped to put paid to the London plague, and also opened up large new spaces – acres and acres of fields to the north of the Thames – which were eagerly brought into the property spree.
Sargent: major artist or slave to fashion?
I wonder what it must have been like to have been a sitter for one of the portraits of John Singer Sargent. He apparently used to oscillate between studious concentration and bursts of energy, where he might go off to play the piano in the drawing room of whichever grand or stately home he was visiting to fulfil a latest commission.
Tolstoy’s search for truth: ‘The Kingdom of God’
Member ratings This article has not been rated yet. Be the first person to rate this article. What to make of Tolstoy’s non-fiction? Unparalleled as a novelist, indeed adored across the literary world for the craftsmanship and the insight of his fictional worlds, Tolstoy’s political and philosophical works have become something of a sideshow and a neglected footnote to War and Peace and to Anna Karenina.
Starmer’s policy challenge: pensions, tax, housing
Most important politics is dull. That is why the story of one supposed Chinese spy roaming around Parliament gets ounces more attention than the fact that many schoolchildren cannot attend their schools because of widespread institutional neglect, and why speculative tales about Boris Johnson’s personal diary are given far more column inches than the pros and cons of new plans for restructuring NHS management.
Spotlight. Plain Strange. Patrick Maxwell watches and listens to the new Deutsche Grammophon Blu-Ray disc of Wagner's 'Götterdämmerung' from Bayreuth
PATRICK MAXWELL watches and listens to the new Deutsche Grammophon Blu-Ray disc of Wagner's 'Götterdämmerung' from Bayreuth 'The singing and the playing are largely excellent, but this is not the greatest production available ...' Ah, Bayreuth.
CD Spotlight. Truly Unique. Patrick Maxwell pays homage to a 1955 Parsifal from the Bayreuth Festival
PATRICK MAXWELL pays homage to a 1955 Parsifal from the Bayreuth Festival 'All these impressive voices, heard here in their prime, combined with Knappertsbusch's wonderful orchestra, make a sound which is truly intimate and doubly intense.' This wonderfully worshipful recording of Wagner's most worshipful opera takes something of a pride of place in the post-war recordings of high German Romanticism.
Why the Proms may yet save British classical music
The British do seem to have a peculiar problem about praising their nation’s most valued assets for what they are. I like to call it the “James Anderson problem”: imagine the universal adulation which would be accorded to England’s most successful fast bowler if he were to come from any other cricketing nation. The reaction to the BBC Proms is another symptom of this strange malaise of collective self-deprecation.
Jurowski’s debut at the Proms
The Russian conductor Vladimir Jurowski, whose family now lives in Berlin, has a track record of promoting music ever so slightly off the beaten track. If you thought you knew Tchaikovsky, then the Manfred Symphony might come as something of a surprise, as may those bits of Stravinsky’s oeuvre that haven’t made the popular cut.
Mahler’s farewell and Rattle’s last bow
Sir Simon Rattle finished his tenure as the Chief Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra last night with one of the most moving concert experiences you will find in the world of classical music today. Such statements as the one I have just made are easy to come by today, in a world of twenty-four hour entertainment, even among the plethora of emotive advertising which surrounds the concert programmes of the main British orchestras.
Paradise at the Proms: Rattle’s role in British music
There were an outrageously large number of unfilled seats at the Royal Albert Hall last night for Sir Simon Rattle’s penultimate concert with the London Symphony Orchestra. “Well, they’re all just philistines,” said one elderly Prommer to me. I had expressed exasperation at the lack of enthusiasm for what was, if nothing else, one of the most revealing Proms of this year’s season. The reason for the gaps must have been the music on offer.
At the Proms, the Russians are back
“No more Tchaikovsky symphonies!” cried Simon Rattle when he first came to the Proms in the 1970s. Well, although the occasional burst of the likes of Messiaen or Lutosławski does occur in the Albert Hall from time to time, it’s still the sweeping narratives of the Romantic symphonies that still take pride of place every summer. And they fill the seats, too: Rachmaninov, Elgar and Tchaikovsky have recently packed out the Hall more than I’ve ever seen.
Chinese capital and English football
That the state of the domestic Chinese economy is no longer something Western Europe is able to pass by seems obvious, amid all the ink spilt over the growing ambiguity of the Continent’s relationship with Xi Jinping’s government.
Startlingly Fresh and Very American
PATRICK MAXWELL is impressed by Maurice Abravanel and the Utah Symphony Orchestra's Tchaikovsky '... impassioned string playing and vibrant conducting.' A fair amount of serious writing about Tchaikovsky starts by staking its claim to writing about such a composer in such a way at all. It's fair to say that the reputation of Russia's supreme melodist took something of a hit from those who took against his extraordinary popularity in twentieth century America.
An Important Historical Document
PATRICK MAXWELL listens to Vaughan Williams conducting Vaughan Williams '... a typically ebullient and undogmatic interpretation of two central works of Britain's most popular composer.' The life of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was exceptionally long and saw some of the most far-reaching, dramatic and fundamental changes in the makeup of the society into which he had been born.
Westminster Abbey and its Choir: singing Elizabeth into eternity
Member ratings This article has not been rated yet. Be the first person to rate this article. When the world focuses its eyes on London, Westminster Abbey and the memory of Britain’s longest-reigning monarch this Monday, they will be glancing at a different world. For two hours, the pomp and pageantry, the sacred solemnity of state, will be accompanied by the music of one of the world’s oldest choirs.
Symphonic Maturity
PATRICK MAXWELL listens to Sibelius symphonies '... the wind and brass playing is pristine throughout.' I'm never quite sure what conductors feel they are going to get out of yet one more recording of Sibelius' symphonies. They're certainly seat-filling, in their own modern-but-non-modernist way. The music often seems an idyll from the anguished outburst and despairing gulfs of the last centuries' first two decades.
Solace to Listeners
PATRICK MAXWELL listens to a box set of John Barbirolli's Elgar recordings for Warner Classics '... a musical artefact which still tells us how Britain's most famous composer really can sound like ...' Edward Elgar still seems to inhabit an ambiguous place in English culture.
Music and the pity of war
“My subject is War, and the pity of War”, wrote Wilfred Owen. “The Poetry is in the pity.” Since his death in 1918, Owen has become this country’s prime war poet. In the cultural conceptions of the First World War, it is the mockery and brutality of Owen’s verse which has implanted itself in a nation’s consciousness, much more than any edicts of Lord Kitchener or orders of Douglas Haig.
What can the West do?
“Give peace a chance. Too many people have already died.” “The prayers of the world are with the people of Ukraine tonight.” The first of these statements is from António Gueterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations. The UN reminds us that its purpose is to prevent conflicts between major global powers. Today, as Russian troops seek to occupy a sovereign Eastern European country, much as they did in the last global conflict, those words look prissy at most.
Keir Starmer is beating Boris Johnson — but Labour is still losing | TheArticle
British politics, as Sir Keir Starmer will tell you, is an irrational game. After two years of mismanaged crises, scandalous parties and private shenanigans, a policy vacuum and Parliamentary revolt, Boris Johnson is still Prime Minister. If there were ever any “rules” of politics, Johnson has broken them. More remarkably, the Leader of the Opposition has played by them to the letter, and yet he still faces an electoral quagmire and the prospect of years of opposition and internal disquiet.
How do we conceive of music? | TheArticle
Music is, for most, a commodity. This fact has disturbed musicologists, performers and dilettantes since it became as much. For those, especially, who see it as the highest art, the idea of music as a cultural product does not chime well with conceptions of greatness, genius or artistic integrity.
A Cabinet of dissent
Does Boris Johnson run the country? Probably not. Ask the right wing of the Conservative party and they’ll say Britain is controlled by the evil scientists of Sage and that their once-sainted leader is in thrall to every whim of Professor Chris Whitty and his scaremongering graphs. Ask the Opposition or most Guardian writers and they’ll reply that in fact it’s the opinion of the Telegraph leader page and the hard-right of his Cabinet that he cares about most.
The unpopular populist: a PM unfit to govern
Boris Johnson has run the Conservative Party in his own image. After the baleful era of Theresa May’s leadership, there was a reason Tories chose him – notoriously flippant about ideology, personally magnetic – over the undoubtedly serious-minded if uninspiring Jeremy Hunt. They needed a leader who could win votes, and fast, and who would pursue Brexit to its completion without concern for many of its implications.
Stephen Sondheim is dead — and with it his art | TheArticle
The death of a great figure can empty the soul of a country. Yeats died to empty “Ireland of its poetry” — and the death of Stephen Sondheim on Friday has emptied America of some of its music. Here was a composer who not only changed the status of twentieth-century musicals but redefined a genre for himself: a figure rare enough in cultural life, able to satisfy the most easily pleased theatregoer and musical snob in equal measure.
The sacking of Geordie Greig: who controls the ‘Daily Mail’?
Geordie Greig (above) has been sacked as Editor of the Daily Mail. He has lasted only three years in the job. Where his predecessor, Paul Dacre made winding up the “liberal elite” a favoured pastime, Greig took the paper away from its niche as the bastion of Middle England right-wingery (pro-Brexit, pro-NHS, anti-immigration, click-bait heavy) and into the more liberal heartlands of moderation.
Xi’s China is the West’s most formidable foe. Jens Stoltenberg knows this. Does Boris?
It has been said before that history moves like tectonic plates. If so, they are shifting like never before. The West has largely been defined by its conflicts; over the last 100 years fascism, communism, religious terrorism have been the main scourges of liberal democracy, the Second World War mainly doing away with the first, the Cold War the second, and the third dealt but a flesh wound by America’s War on Terror this century. An easy analysis puts them in order – 1945, 1989, 2001.
Intimacy and Intensity
Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper at the Oxford Lieder Festival impress PATRICK MAXWELL Well, dear reader, it doesn't get much better than this. I cannot have been the only one inside St John's Church in south Oxford on Monday night to feel that the best of British classical music had somehow been distilled into the powers of two performers giving an hour of music from a musical world utterly different from our own to a sparse, silent crowd.
Keir Starmer’s identity crisis is also Labour’s
It is often said of the most notorious politicians of former days that, despite their wildcard views, at least “you knew what they stood for”. Such frankness from leaders can, of course, go either way. Jeremy Corbyn never did himself many favours whenever his true views were revealed, and garnered all of his temporary popularity from the recycled slogan and the games of public messaging.
The madness of King Charles
In the not-to-all-distant future, the face of this country will change. Decades have been spent speculating about what King Charles III (if that is the name he chooses) will do with his power, whether the monarchy can survive Elizabeth Windsor’s demise, and how he will “reshape” the Crown in his own image. Throughout all that time, never has a consensus emerged that any of us really want the man to replace his mother.
Boris Johnson has removed the deadwood - but all his opponents as well
When Dominic Cummings announced his intended revolution in the corridors of Whitehall at the start of Boris Johnson’s reign, he promised to remove the shirkers and slackers, the bureaucrats and bores who had dogged British politics for too long. The new cabinet was to possess the greatest minds in parliament, who would be able to sort through the quagmire of Brexit, radical legislation and legal uproar, and even handle something like the pandemic which would soon throw the system into chaos.
Utterly Different
Schubert's 'Winterreise' by Markus Schäfer and Tobias Koch, reviewed by PATRICK MAXWELL 'Both performers are very good musicians.' Classical music is a niche world, and Lieder another niche inside that.
Chaos in the concert of powers? Henry Kissinger and the fall of Kabul
What does Henry Kissinger think? It is a question many have asked about successive crises, ever since the former Secretary of State was removed from office in 1977. It is one which his lengthy retirement has given him plenty of time to answer, while bringing in the big bucks as well. The obituaries have been in store for decades, doubtless with their predictable headlines of the “ ultimate practitioner of Realpolitik”.
Afghanistan debate highlights crucial role of Commons in democracy
Democracy depends on division. Leaders, such as president Biden, invoke unity to collect a few spare votes and hide under an all-encompassing banner. But politicians must stand for something, and if they are interested in progress of any sort, division is a necessary evil, not a cowardly good. Searching for a ‘consensus’ of some kind merely obscures any hope of that progress, especially when the lure of the ballot box lets politicians fall over each other to show how undivisive they really are.
The government’s online safety bill is another unseen power-grab
For a government which spends so much political capital on decrying the attacks on free speech from the ‘woke’, a new law to stick a pin in the heart of free speech legislation seems a strange twist of fate. Yet that is what the draft online safety bill proposes to do, handing out extraordinary powers to regulators and Silicon Valley companies while it’s at it.
Johnson’s electoral coalition is as wide as it is thin. What chance a Lib Dem revival?
Heralds of a realignment in British politics are as frequent as they are bogus. Most of the time, they take up space in the column inches of papers and journals seldom read by the electorate so decisively described, and fizzle away almost as swiftly as they were devised.
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