From October 2020: This past UK Daylight Savings weekend there was a sizeable rise in the number of visits to my blog, “I’ll Be Dead Before You Break My Heart”, and I attribute this directly to the kindness of some person/s in letting my beloved John Wilson know about that perfect screenshot of him at the Royal Academy of Music. Visitor #1 from the UK was particularly intriguing. Visitor #1 may have started clicking on my postings as early as Friday night, and was almost certainly the same person who came back for more the next night, Saturday, returning for three more hours on Sunday morning. What was most gratifying is that Visitor #1 actually seems to have taken the time to read my postings, especially my more thoughtful ones, the ones where I talk about John and his work in the Classical Repertoire. (Visitor #1 almost certainly was the one who also downloaded my memoir of the nutty Gyllenhaals, which was doubly gratifying.) Whether or not Visitor #1 is the #1 Reader I’ve yearned to capture for 2 1/2 years [now 6 1/2 yrs, ed.], I’m stoked, and I intend to go on writing, and writing better, for John’s sake—but also for The Old Man, Mamoulian’s sake, who once told me, “Love with style, but also with a little sadness for the suffering involved.”
From 2021: About 15 or so years ago, I was somebody’s plus-one on an industry pass to go to a preview of the showbiz biopic Beyond the Sea, which was being shown in a really good theater with an above-average sound system. I wasn’t a particular fan of Bobby Darin or even of Kevin Spacey (for all that he is the definitive Jamie Tyrone of our generation and frankly I don’t care about anything else); actually I just wanted to find out how cheesy the production could get. Well honestly, it did start off pretty cheesily, every element that should’ve contributed some genuine worth—like, you know, the lead acting, the directing, design, (makeup! prosthesis!) etc—was utter bad-phony, not good-phony, bullcrap…and then they struck up the soundtrack orchestra…
If I could’ve exclaimed “Holy mackerel!” out loud the moment that gorgeous snap hit my ears I would’ve exclaimed it out loud, but you don’t do that at an industry screening, so I exclaimed it in my mind. I hadn’t heard a commitment like that coming from a track orchestra in a very long time. This was no session, no pick-up crew, this was one tight unit, and they were hitting the musical values like nobody’s business. I vowed to remember the name of this bright new conductor-arranger—which of course I promptly forgot (There are a lot of John Wilsons in the world, as Anthony Burgess would be the first to tell you) and didn’t remember again until last May. Recorded by my darling and his O for the Warner Bros film at Pinewood Studios, 2003. A 2006 Grammy nominee in the Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media category (composers Charles Trenet-Jack Lawrence, arranger Dick Behrke, producer Phil Ramone). Available on Rhino Records, that notorious niche label, and I really must find out who at Warners moved it to that catalog.
Above: Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s suite “Scheherazade” conducted by John Wilson and played by the Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra. They’re all exemplary; that first violin is fantastic.YT video here.
From 2021: The flick Holly Does Hollywood is fictional, of course, a fictional movie in the world of a real movie called Body Double, which was conceived and executed by the man who in an ideal world would be king of Hollywood, Brian De Palma.
De Palma’s affectionately knowing, utterly non-patronizing visit to pornland is a bit of a fantasy, of course. No flick I ever did or saw had a budget big enough to afford a mirror ball, let alone an MGM-size dance floor (though Damiano’s later movies came close). But scale aside, De Palma understood the thing that kept nearly all of us, cast and crew, jazzed while we were being pushed to get out product, and that is: When you are making a porn movie, you are making a movie.
Now, every so often I’d remember this. I’d be in the middle of a take, and like a klieg wash switching on I’d suddenly become very aware of everything around me: the lights, the mikes, the crew, the director, the luxuriously gorgeous surroundings (half my films were done in those sumptuous private homes in Marin County), the smooth-skinned, sweet-smelling people touching me, the amused audience (most of the homeowners would hang around watching us film)—and the realization would thrill me so perceptibly I would be open to the moment and I’d like to think it showed up in my performance.
Which is the same jazzed-up open-to-the-momentness I thought I saw in John Wilsonone evening when I was trawling online for classic show tunes and stumbled onto my bonny in a 2012 BBC-TV clip, commanding the podium in the middle of the Royal Albert, surrounded by an orchestra of eighty and an audience of 6,000, conducting a hot piece of Jule Styne and shimmying like a brazen hussy. And when I say shimmying like a brazen hussy, understand: I’m the brazen hussy he was shimmying like. I fell in love with him on sight—just like the songs and movies go, an arrow went straight to my heart—because I recognized him. I got his number, so to speak.
Above Melanie Griffith and Craig Wasson: The Liverpool group Frankie Goes to Hollywood, who made their initial splash in 1984 (dig it) with the best stroke song ever written, “Relax”. Of course it was banned by the BBC.
I don’t mean to read a lot into this, maybe he did start out with a migraine or a toothache. More probably, I think he’s thinking differently (that is, more “seriously”) about things nowadays. Eight years have passed between those two appearances, after all, and I’m sure he’s gone through a number of internal changes during that time and made some interesting decisions which we will all, in time, learn about. It would be a sad thing if it’s John himself who thinks it now “unseemly” for him to shimmy in public anymore (I’m not the only one to have noticed his gorgeous limey shimmy), but it would be a sadder thing if John might be taking the nudge-nudge hints and advice of others to heart.
I don’t know what I did to please the gods but on one October morning in 2020, somehow, I took a perfect screenshot of John conducting, while watching the (UK time) 7:30pm performance of the Royal Academy of Music (Finzi, Strauss). “Metamorphosen” is from his new album on Chandos.
It’s John’s “I mean business” look that keeps me going. Above: John conducting the Sinfonia of London in Strauss’s “Metamorphosen” (Chandos, 2022)
Since John’s management has long ago ditched his site johnwilsonconductor.com I went over to Bachtrack to find this info, and will probably end up going there and elsewhere evermore for more info on my bonny lad’s—w or w/o his Sinfonia of London—performances. (I also have John on Google Alert, plus I donate to the Royal College and the Royal Academy to get their email newsletters, plus I follow the Sinfonia and RTE on Facebook…plus if he’s scheduled to play movie music somewhere I can get that info from Juliet Rózsa…)
Know why I like this picture? ‘Cause there’s a devil face in the red vainly trying to get at my beloved through the impenetrable white light of my love. So there, John. I told you The Queen of Heaven had her eye on you
UPDATE! Some kind soul in the UK (probably my travelling writer friend Helen Ducal, and if it is you, Helen, thanks!) subscribed me a few days ago to the John Wilson & Sinfonia of London website, which promptly sent me the ballot ClassicFM put out for best classical recordings of 2023. So okay, I voted for his Vaughan Williams but NOT his compleat Oklahoma! out of respect for the memory of my old boss, Rouben Mamoulian, who John—prompted I’m sure by the BBC—saw fit to throw a little shade on when he conducted R&H back in 2010. (John’s still my guy, though. I’m sooo used to snarky artistic types.) So I’ll probably be getting the SoL schedule as they know it. But I still have to hunt up his other appearances.
The dates link to the ticket sites. The other highlights link to available recordings and YT appearances.
Sat 27 Jan 2024 19:30 Sheldonian Theatre Oxford, UK Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra Leonard Elschenbroich (cello)
From June 2023. Sorry for my shaky handwriting but while listening to this I had a fantasy that gave me the giggles: John being interviewed by my favorite ohne palones—prime purveyors of the gay-gypsy-theatrical patois called polari—Julian and Sandy. Played of course by the inimitable Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams on Round the Horne. (This more-than-usual musical episode of Kenneth Horne’s 1967 radio show also includes Rambling Syd Rumpo, the Fraser Hayes 4 singing off-key not on purpose, and the screamingly funny takeoff sketch, “Young Horne with a Man”.)
Now John, John / Glorious John, I know that you know, and I know that you know that I know, that my long-distance lovemaking to you is being observed by a few; not many, just a few. So this rundown is for them, love:
Here are the main points I took away from this podcast: “What I do try to do as a conductor is carry my sound around with me… It’s almost—I don’t really feel comfortable talking about because you know music is basically a doing thing and not a talking thing… My deepest musical creed is wrapped up with how an orchestra sounds…” Which pretty much confirms what I’ve suspected all this time about him.
John, fire of my loins, I respect your process.
Now, as heard on Monty Python:
Fantasia on “Greensleeves” Ralph Vaughan Williams, composer Barbirolli Conducts English String Music RCA, 1963 first issue The Sinfonia of London John Barbirolli, conductor
EXTRA! Here are 2 interviews with John from BBC 2 Radio: one (8 min long) from 24 April 2016 with Michael Ball, and one (4 min long) from 4 November 2013 with Steve Wright.
From February 2023: The three composers whose works appear in this album are interconnected—Ravel was a mentor to Lennox Berkeley, and Berkeley to Pounds.
Adam Pounds studied privately with Berkeley in London during the late 1970s, and in his own music has perpetuated the firm commitment of the two earlier composers to clarity and accessibility in everything they wrote.* His Third Symphony was written in 2021 and is a response to the national [UK] lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Pounds states that the piece captures the ‘sadness, humour, determination and defiance’ which everyone faced at this time—not least musicians. Scored for relatively modest orchestral forces, the work is dedicated to Sinfonia of London and John Wilson, who give the work its world première recording.
February 14. Greetings of the day, my love. This is my gift to you this year: A sexy song by Erik Satie, plus a mashup of you conducting Vaughan Williams’s “Sea” Symphony in Birmingham with the classic print by Hokusai (1760-1849), “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”, which is actually getting some likes over at my DeviantArt gallery.
Above the mashup of Hosukai + John conducting Vaughan Williams’s “Sea” Symphony, find counter-tenor Yoshikazu Mera’s exquisite rendering of Erik Satie’s cafe melody, “Je te veux”.
Ars gratia artis. Or art for the sake of the artists*. I love you today and all days.
For the Big Band medley: “Skyliner” – Barnet / Charlie Barnet; “Take the A Train” – Billy Strayhorn and vocalist Joya Sherrill / Duke Ellington; “Let’s Dance” – Gregory Stone (based on von Weber’s “Invitation to the Dance”, orchestrated by Hector Berlioz) / Benny Goodman; “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” – Irving Berlin / Ray Noble; “Begin the Beguine” – Cole Porter / Artie Shaw; “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” – Ned Washington and George Bassman / Tommy Dorsey; “Midnight Sun” – Hampton and Sonny Burke / Lionel Hampton; “You Made Me Love You” – Monaco and McCarthy / Harry James; “Moonlight Serenade” – Miller / Glenn Miller; “Peanut Vendor” – Moisés Simons / Stan Kenton; “Woodchoppers Ball” – Joe Bishop / Woody Herman; “One O’Clock Jump” – Count Basie / Count Basie.
This is the kind of music ID-ing I used to do when I was 18 and a night solfeggist at ASCAP, John.
Composer Andrew Cottee is the show’s orchestrator-arranger.
My beloved John Wilson returns to the Royal College of Music to conduct the RCM Symphony Orchestra in Rachmaninov’s orchestral work in three movements. The last major orchestra composition completed by Rachmaninov, the suite is based around motifs found in Russian ecclesiastical music.
NEW! John’s 4-Part 2023 Video Interview on Marquee TV
From 4 May, 2020. For two years, longing formy beloved John Wilson has impinged on my usual output of actual writing, which once dealt mostly with The Assassinations+the occult and I have got to channel that particular energy somewhere…
Maurice Ravel described his work, written in 1919: “Through whirling clouds, waltzing couples may be faintly distinguished. The clouds gradually scatter: one sees at letter A an immense hall peopled with a whirling crowd. The scene is gradually illuminated. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth at the fortissimo letter B. Set in an imperial court, about 1855.” In the accompanying podcast bonny John asserted that “La valse” is about social disintegration. Another reason for me to get into his head. Above: Audio of John conducting the Sinfonia of London in this piece for Chandos (2022).
Above Spacey: 
Above John: 
Maurice Ravel described his work, written in 1919: “Through whirling clouds, waltzing couples may be faintly distinguished. The clouds gradually scatter: one sees at letter A an immense hall peopled with a whirling crowd. The scene is gradually illuminated. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth at the fortissimo letter B. Set in an imperial court, about 1855.” In the accompanying 
"I'll Be Dead Before You Break My Heart" 