The Quarrymen, pre-Paul

Martin’s Christmas present to Martin was a complete set of the Beatles’ remastered LPs. Two years ago the Westlakes went to Liverpool and were treated to a guided tour of all of the Fab Four’s haunts by a local guide. This tour, which included a visit to the place where John and Paul first met, sparked a serious reading up on their history, and now George Martin’s cover notes to the remastered disks add further information. I remain fascinated by the way in which two such musical geniuses (that’s not to do down George) met up in the way that they did, leading to such a prolific partnership, with each drawing so much from the other. It wasn’t just that they were prolific (though they were – they could come back from an intensive tour and write all the songs for a new LP in a few weeks). They were also so professional, both as musicians and as singers (including all those distinctive harmonies). As their music and popularity progressed, George Martin’s notes show how they went from being slaves to being masters of the music industry. Their first album, Please Please Me, was recorded in just nine and three-quarter hours (including a song they didn’t use), and they had to work in the EMI studios to the bureaucrats’ rhythm (from 10.00 till 13.00 and from 14.30 till 17.30). The fourteen songs on With The Beatles, their next LP, were recorded in just 28 hours, spread over six days. By contrast, Rubber Soul took over a hundred hours. By then, morning studio sessions had been abandoned and afternoon sessions could go on all night long. Revolver, recorded just three years after Please Please Me took an unprecedented 300 hours. George Martin’s notes also explain well how the Beatles persistently explored the technological frontiers of the recording industry. Those who were there on Saturday, 6 July 1957, prosaically, at the Garden Rose Queen fête at St. Peter’s Church in Woolton, and witnessed John’s first meeting with Paul could hardly have imagined what would happen next.

Antonio Vigilante

This evening, as a guest at a most enjoyable dinner party, I found myself sitting opposite the Director of the United Nations’ Office in Brussels, Antonio Vigilante. We started off talking about the trauma of Haiti. Antonio mentioned that he had lived through several big earthquakes and that, indeed, his home town had been badly hit by one. Since he had already told me he came from Campania, I guessed it was Lioni. That was 23 November 1980, not long after I had arrived in Italy (in Bologna) as a student. It made a huge impression upon us students. The ‘quake went on for 90 seconds. Three thousand people died. We tried to volunteer our help, but there was little we could do. If you go here you can see some photographs of the damaged towns and villages. People were still in temporary cities of tents and prefabricated cabins when we drove through two years later. Like me (I think), Vigilante is a passionate supporter of his organisation and its cause but also like me (I think) is a fervent reformist. Unlike me, though, Vigilante has spent 21 of his 23 years with the organisation working in the field and this has tempered his idealism. All too often, he argued, catastrophe serves as a necessary catharsis for reform that was previously obvious but unattainable. I would like to believe that people can see the need for reform without experiencing the reason why first. But we both agreed that we need visionary statesmen/women like we’ve never needed them before. So where are they? Obama stirs with his oratory, but is chained to majority management in Congress. Any others? We had an excellent debate. It felt like being at university again – only this time I suspect we knew a bit better what we were talking about.

Today the EESC’s Communication Group met and its guest speaker was Claus Sorensen, Director General of the European Commission’s DG for Communication. He came with a reassuring and positive message. The emphasis in the new Commission will not be on communication so much as on communicating. Indeed, he had come hotfoot from a meeting of the private staff of all the future Commissioners where he had implored them to think about the communication aspects of their work as from day one.

This afternoon I attended a meeting of the Committee’s enlarged Presidency (an informal meeting of the President, Vice-Presidents and Group Presidents). There were several ‘money matters’ on the agenda: the consequences of the Lisbon Treaty in 2010 and the draft 2011 budget among them. All of the institutions are facing a sort of double whammy at the moment. Because of the economic and social crisis, voters and governments will quite rightly want to be tough on the institutions. At the same time, though, the Lisbon Treaty expects the institutions to do a lot more. Of course, there are always economy gains to be found and further ‘negative priorities’ can always be identified. But at a certain stage doing more with less will lead inexorably either to doing less or to doing less well.

Today I had the privilege of paying a final tribute to Jan Olaf Hausotter. The BBC headlines were ‘snow brings chaos to German motorways’, and that was something of an understatement. We battled through blizzards and blockages, with crashes and overturned lorries all about us. Once, the autobahn was closed to allow the snowploughs to do their work, but thanks to the heroic driving skills of Pierpaolo, we made it and, though we missed the first part of the funeral ceremony, the epic nature of our journey (over six hours) somehow seemed fitting for the occasion. Hungen is a small town in the Lande of Hesse, in the centre-west of Germany. The Lutheran chapel was crammed to the rafters. There were terribly touching tributes from Jan’s fiancé, Caroline, from his brother and sister, his childhood friends, his university friends, a room mate from Fletcher, and his school teacher. A heroically large contingent of his Bruges contemporaries had made it through the blizzard and I had the honour of speaking from the Bruges perspective (the text is below). There was beautiful music; Teleman, Bach and Debussy. And because of all of this there was a general recognition among us all that Jan Olaf Hausotter had been very special. A wonderfully eloquent metaphor, in English, came from his Fletcher contemporary, who likened individuals to trees whose branches intertwined. Jan, said the contemporary, had left behind a forest of friends. A UN flag was draped over Jan’s coffin, and that was perhaps the most eloquent of symbols. For throughout the world, similar ceremonies of grief and remembrance are surely being held, in places much like Hungen, to commemorate the very many UN personnel who, like Jan, lost their lives in trying to make a difference to the world.

Previous posts: Jan – a Tribute (21 January) and Haiti Horrors (13 January)

Continue reading

Una bella bestia

Over the past two evenings Valery Gergiev treated us to some very special Mariinsky magic at the Palais des Beaux Arts. Yesterday, 27th January, we heard a sublime rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet overture, followed by Borodin’s 2nd Symphony, and rounded off with Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite, Sheherazade. Tonight, it was a beautiful piece of Mussorgsky, ‘Dawn on the Moscow River’, that I had never heard, followed by Shostakovich’s First Symphony and then Tchaikovsky’s 4th Symphony. It was a wonderful display of the riches of Russian composition and of the mastery of the Mariinsky orchestra but also of the genius of Gergiev. Watching him conduct is a real spectator sport, with his big hands and fluttering fingers. It is, a friend said, as though each finger controlled a different section of the orchestra. He has a number of tics. One is to pull closed the lapels of his jacket, as though it has suddenly got cold in the concert hall. Another is a hangover from the time when he had constantly to claw back his then long hair. The hair has gone, but Gergiev still makes the same clawback motion after periods of energetic conducting. Listening to the music, one can identify similar tics – Tchaikovsky’s distinctive strings, for example, but in the Mussorgsky piece I could hear exactly the same musical depiction of Moscow’s church bells as he was later to use to such brilliant effect in Boris Godunov.

At nine this morning I was on protocol duty downstairs, waiting to welcome Dutch Princess Laurentien to the ‘art and climate change’ event I wrote about yesterday. The security services stood beside me as we awaited the Princess and her escort. At about five past nine a Mini with Dutch number plates drove into sight and parked by our back door. Out popped the princess, who had driven herself. She has always been committed to literacy (she is the UN Envoy for Literacy) and cultural causes and generated considerable media interest last year when she published a children’s book, Mr Finney and the World on its Head, designed to educate children to be environmentally aware. It was a lovely and unepexcted start to a very, very busy day.

Artists, scientists, policy-makers...

The European Economic and Social Committee’s headquarters building is a busy place. There are always meetings – of study groups, of sections – and conferences going on, and many of them are very interesting. As Secretary General, I realise I cannot be everywhere, but sometimes I have great pangs of regret about not being able to attend or participate in particular events. That happened today with regard to a very special event on art and climate change co-organised by the Committee’s Sustainable Development Observatory and EUNIC (the EU National Institutes for Culture) and the European Commission (the Directorates-General for the Environment and for Research), together with Tipping Point and the British Council. No less than 130 artists, scientists and policy-makers came together for two days and just a month after Copenhagen to debate this topic using a variation of the ‘open space’ method in which our Committee has become expert. If you want to get a flavour of the event, though, take a quick look at the blog of our Vice-President for Communication and Culture, Irini Pari, here.

Helga Trüpel, MEP

In the early afternoon I accompanied the Vice-President of the EESC, Seppo Kallio, who happens also to be the President of the EESC’s Budget Group, to the European Parliament to meet the EP’s rapporteur for the institutions’ budgets for 2011. This was a courtesy call designed to elicit early indications from Parliament’s side about the likely parameters within which the institutions will probably have to work in drafting their 2011 budgetary bids. The landscape is changing. The new budgetary procedure established by the Lisbon Treaty provides for only one reading, where once there were two, and as matters currently stand the smaller institutions will be excluded from the conciliation procedure foreseen thereafter. On the policy side, none of the institutions could anticipate the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in their draft 2010 budgets last year and so now they are considering whether to introduce supplementary budget requests. This is a particularly important issue for the EP, which has seen its powers grow considerably, but it is also important for the other bodies. Then there is the ongoing crisis. Even though there may be perfectly legitimate and strong reasons for requests for big increases in 2011, the institutions know already that the member states in the Council would find it very difficult to approve large increases in a crisis year. So; in a sense it’s the usual balancing act between calculated real requirements and political possibilities, but with even greater rigour than in previous years.

A  few minutes ago I was informed by his family that Jan’s body, recovered from the rubble of the UN’s Haiti mission, had been formally identified. As with any sudden and unexpected death (I am sure), it is difficult to accept that somebody so recently, physically present (in my office on 4 January, to be precise) and full of such enthusiasm and a simple desire to do good in the world could be snatched away so abruptly and so brutally. Having lost a sibling myself back in the mists of time, I have an inkling of the profound grief that his family, his fiancée and his friends must be going through now. It is terrible to think, as we must, of that grief multiplied a hundred, maybe two hundred, thousand times. So many people, so many good people, have been lost prematurely and cruelly. But here I would like to pay simple tribute to Jan, a beautiful human being who thought only of doing good and of bringing good to the world. In his passing away, as in his life, he is an immense tribute to his family. My heart goes out to them and to his fiancée and to his friends.