Notes from a long flight

For us fearful-in-turbulence flyers, gorging on the in-flight entertainment film and TV is not a bad way to take our minds off the thought that there's nothing between the plane and … no… stop thinking about it. On my recent jaunt to Canada, I caught up with the Steve Jobs biopic. I've become increasingly cynical about big-budget silver-screen dramas portraying real lives, which tend to sentimentality (the instagram-filtered Theory of Everything) or simplification (the partial whitewash of The Imitation Game). Good, imaginatively-filmed documentary is just so much better. Anyway, however much the tranquilising glass of red wine gave me er, rose-tinted glasses, I found Aaron Sorkin's smartly scripted take on the Apple entrepeneur's story to be compelling from start to finish.

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Once back on terra firma (hallelujah!),  it was good to hear that the film even convinced one of the two tech geeks in my family, my Dad – although Apple fiend that he is, he could also point out the liberties that had been taken in the name of art. Computers were always a part of my childhood, as was watching Formula One with Dad. Now, if you want to really see how to do biography on film, watch Senna. It features so much previously unseen, close-up real-life footage of the ill-fated Brazilian driver that you start to wonder if it was faked. (It wasn't.)

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The aesthetics of technology was a theme explored in Steve Jobs, and the importance of artistry found its way in at other moments too. At one point, the famously difficult and demanding Jobs tells Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, of the time he met the conductor Seiji Ozawa, at Tanglewood. Jobs asks Ozawa what a conductor does that a metronome can't. (Beat the living s*** out of you, replies Wozniak.) The conductor's answer was more philosophical, and I hope, for sake of orchestral musicians everywhere, more realistic: 'The musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra.'

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Seiji Ozawa clearly moves in famous circles. A book just out chronicles his conversations about music with the great Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, himself a lifelong music fan. I've not had a chance to read the whole book – perhaps on the next long-haul flight – but it begins in minute detail, picking apart a remarkable concert at Carnegie Hall in 1962. Leonard Bernstein turned to the audience to explain that he didn't at all agree with the interpretation of Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 1 that he was about to conduct. Bernstein added: 'I have only once before in my life had to submit to a soloist's wholly new and incompatible concept, and that was the last time I accompanied Mr. Gould.'

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Glenn Gould was an obsessive, visionary maverick, who first made a splash with his 1955 recording of JS Bach's Goldberg Variations. A fascinating documentary Genius Within: the Inner Life of Glenn Gould lets us in on his tricky private world and tries to trace the roots of his unique talent. And the Canadian pianist's career was shaped by his strong interest in technology: he withdrew from live concerts in favour of the studio, championed post-production work done on recordings, and believed that one day we would all be able to edit our own recordings (as we now can, easily, on our PCs and Macs). Interesting, then, that JS Bach was reputedly Steve Jobs's favourite classical composer, that the two Gould Goldberg Variations recordings of '55 and 1981 his go-to versions. 'The first is an exuberant, young, brilliant piece, played so fast it’s a revelation,' Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson. 'The later one is so much more spare and stark. You sense a very deep soul who’s been through a lot in life. It’s deeper and wiser.”

A Banff panorama from Sulphur Mountain

Banff

I've just been lucky enough to go to Banff, Canada for work. What a stunning place! I'll be writing a feature about the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and the Banff International String Quartet Competition 2016 for BBC Music Magazine's November issue. The music and musicians were as inspiring as the views. Some wonderful musical discoveries were made over the past few days, and I'll keeping a lookout for many of the quartets I heard.