“I’m not going to tell anyone how much I earn, though. It’s my business,” she says. “I am not really super-rich. But I invested my money in property, not in drugs (of which she has never been a fan, she says, never mind the stories of her old drinking days), not in cars, not in fancy clothes.
She goes on: “I work hard, I really do. It’s a fluke, the amount of money I earn. It’s amazing and phenomenal that people buy my art, it’s an amazing thing.”
You can find duck legs quite easily these days in butchers and supermarkets; if not, you could just use a whole duck instead chopped into four, or buy two ducks and remove the legs and save the breasts for another meal. I get mine from Bury market.
Any dish can be improved by placing a fried egg on top of it.
2 large or 4 small duck legs
250-300g goose or duck fat
6 cloves of garlic, halved
1 bay leaf
a few sprigs of thyme
10 black peppercorns
2 medium onions, peeled and roughly diced
350g new potatoes, peeled, cooked and cut into rough 1cm chunks
salt and pepper
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tbsp breadcrumbs
4 free-range duck eggs
Pre-heat the oven to 175°C. Put the duck legs in a tight fitting pan with the duck fat, garlic, bay leaf, thyme and peppercorns. Add a teaspoon of sea salt, cover with a lid or foil and cook in the oven for about an hour and a half or until the meat is soft and coming away from the bone. Leave the fat to cool a little and strain into a container or preserving jar and store in the fridge to use for roasting potatoes.
Take a spoonful or so of the duck fat and fry the onions in a covered, thick-bottomed pan for 5-6 minutes until they are soft, stirring occasionally. Then remove the lid and turn up the heat to give them a little colour. Put them into a mixing bowl.
Heat some more duck fat in a frying pan (cast-iron, preferably) until it is very hot and cook the potatoes a few at a time on a high heat until they are lightly coloured, then add them to the onions. Remove the meat from the duck legs and cut into chunks with the skin about the same size as the potatoes. Mix well and season; add Worcestershire sauce to taste.
Divide the mixture and mould into four flat, roughly 8cm cakes with the help of a stainless steel mould or just by hand with a palette knife, then refrigerate for a couple of hours or overnight.
Press the breadcrumbs into the cakes then heat some oil in preferably a non-stick frying pan and cook for about 3-4 minutes on each side until they are golden and crisp. Keep them warm in the oven once they are cooked.
When all the hashes are cooked, fry four duck eggs, transfer the hashes to warm plates and slide a fried egg on to each hash.
This was Sir Simon Rattle’s farewell concert with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, which he led for 18 years. Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, of course. I wish I’d been there.
I only recently learned, with deep sadness, of the death of Professor Hubert Rees DFC FRS, the highly respected scientist and Second World War pilot who was reported missing in action in 1944.
The Times obituary is a fine tribute to a remarkable man who led a remarkable life.
I got to meet Professor Rees, his wife Mavis and their family through their daughter Jude (with whom I lived nearly twenty years ago) and enjoyed their excellent hospitality and generosity many times in Aberystwyth and Swansea.
Those were my drinking days, so my memories of that period are incomplete, but one thing I remember clearly is the “Doctor’s Nightmare”, an enormous fried breakfast served up in the staff bar and dining room of Aberystwyth University, a highly effective hangover cure when washed down with a couple of pints of bitter.
The “I want breakfast” scene from Joel Schumacher’s excellent 1993 film is probably the one most people remember, although there are funnier and more powerful scenes (I’m thinking of Michael Douglas’s first encounter with the Hispanic gang members, or his visit to the army surplus store).
I’m sure the reason this particular scene is so famous is that every person in the world who has ever eaten at a restaurant where there are pictures of the food on the menu can identify with it.
What makes it memorable for me is the outrageous scene-stealing performance of Dedee Pfeiffer (Michelle’s younger sister) as Sheila the Whammyburger waitress. I wonder whether she was asked to play the part this way. Anyway, just watch her.
Wagner’s music has long been easiest to take in “bleeding chunks”, and indeed in chunks which are purely orchestral, from which that is to say the singers are excluded. The reason for the popularity of such chunks is not as might at first be thought their comparative brevity, but simply the absence of singers.
Therefore the solution to the Wagner problem suddenly becomes obvious: get rid of all the singing! It is in fact the singers who, with their groping for the note, their wide vibrato, their frequent lack of correct rhythm, and their inability to sing quietly, spoil the music and are putting potential audiences off.
Just three changes, then, will suffice to render Wagner good for the 21st century:
replace all the voice parts with suitable instruments – either singly or in combination – as is already often done in the case of Isolde’s Liebestod;
display the words of the libretto (no longer sung) on a rolling screen over the stage of the opera house, or (at home) as sub-titles superimposed on the screen of one’s audio or video player – one language at a time should suffice;
introduce ballet dancers instead of the singers – dancers, freed from the obligation to warble, will be able to portray the action of Wagner’s operas in a much more effective, energetic and striking way.
Here are some of Stravinsky’s thoughts on other composers, taken from Robert Craft’s less than reliable book Conversations with Igor Stravinsky:
I remember seeing Mahler in St. Petersburg. His concert there was a triumph. Rimsky was still alive, I believe, but he wouldn’t have attended because a work by Tchaikovsky was on the programme (I think it was Manfred, the dullest piece imaginable). Mahler also played some Wagner fragments and a symphony of his own. Mahler impressed me greatly, himself and his conducting.
Rachmaninov’s immortalizing totality was his scowl. He was a six-and-a-half-foot-tall scowl. He was the only pianist I have ever seen who did not grimace. That is a great deal.
Ravel? When I think of him, for example in relation to Satie, he appears quite ordinary. His musical judgement was quite acute, however, and I would say that he was the only musician who immediately understood Le Sacre du Printemps.
Satie was certainly the oddest person I have ever known, but the most rare and consistently witty person, too. No one ever saw him wash – he had a horror of soap. He was always very poor, poor by conviction, I think. His apartment did not have a bed but only a hammock. In winter Satie would fill bottles with hot water and put them flat in a row underneath his hammock. It looked like some strange kind of marimba.
We – and I mean the generation who are now saying “Webern and me” – must remember only Schoenberg’s perfect works, the Five Pieces for Orchestra, Herzgewächse, Pierrot, the Serenade, the Variations for orchestra and the Seraphita song from Op. 22. By these works Schoenberg is among the great composers. They constitute the true tradition.
If I were able to penetrate the barrier of style (Berg’s radically alien emotional climate) I suspect he would appear to me as the most gifted constructor in form of the composers of this century. His legacy contains very little on which to build, however. He is at the end of a development.
I would like to admit all Strauss operas to whichever purgatory punishes triumphant banality. Their musical substance is cheap and poor; it cannot interest a musician today. I am glad that young musicians today have come to appreciate the lyric gift in the songs of the composer Strauss despised, and is more significant in our music than he is: Gustav Mahler.
She was just 17. She had no money, no contacts, and couldn’t speak English. She knew that she might never see her family again. And yet, on a day in 1991, Lera Auerbach decided to stay in New York City, joining the last generation of artists to defect from the Soviet Union.
Two decades later, that gifted young pianist from a small Siberian town has emerged as an in-demand international soloist and is widely regarded as one of the 21st century’s most compelling composers.
“To stay in New York was a very spontaneous decision,” Auerbach said. “I was a sheltered child, so coming to America was a shock, like travelling to the moon. But I had an intuition that this would be my chance to grow as an artist and as a person. Fate gave me a chance at that moment.”
