The emergency cooling system at a second nuclear reactor at the Fukushima power plant has failed, raising fears of serious accident but officials have said the low radiation levels pose no risk to human health Japan is struggling to contain a growing crisis at two nuclear power plants damaged in Friday’s huge earthquake and tsunami, as officials revealed that the emergency cooling system at another reactor had failed, raising fears of a serious accident. Government officials said the negligible radioactivity levels near the plants in Fukushima prefecture posed no threat to human health. Screening centres were being set up for people worried about exposure. Tokyo Electric Power [Tepco] decribed the situation at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant as an emergency after the cooling system failed at a second reactor at the plant. Tepco said radioation levels at the plant had exceeded the legal limit on Sunday morning. Hourly radiation at the site was measured at 882 micro sievert, in excess of the allowable level of 500, Japan’s nuclear safety agency said. The government’s chief spokesman, Yukio Edano, said the level had briefly risen 1,204 micro sievert. “There was no sudden rise in radiation because of the ventilation activities,” Edano said, adding that there was no immediate threat to human health. “We are doing the two things at the same time – venting air out of the reactor and supplying water into the reactor,” he told reporters. As authorities released steam to relieve pressure from the second overheating reactor, efforts were under way to evacuate 210,000 people living within 20 kilometres of the two plants. Among those waiting to leave was Reiko Takagi, who lives in Iwaki, about 30 kilometres from the No. 1 plant. “Everyone wants to get out of the town. But the roads are terrible,” she said. “It is too dangerous to go anywhere. But we are afraid that winds may change and bring radiation toward us.” Edano said: “There is no confusion at this point, although we appreciate that people will have to leave their homes and livelihoods behind, but there is no panic.” Efforts were also under way to cool off three reactors at the firm’s No. 2 nuclear plant in Fukushima, about 150 miles south of Tokyo. The complete failure of more cooling systems has added an additional level of danger to what was already one of the worst nuclear accidents in Japan’s history. The government has classed the accident as level four on an international scale of zero to seven. At least 22 people are known to have been exposed to radiation and were being treated in hospital, but Japan’s nuclear and industrial safety agency said that as many as 160 people may have been exposed. Tepco confirmed that the No. 3 reactor of the quake-hit Fukushima plant had lost its cooling functions. Yesterday a small amount of radiation leaked after similar problems hit the facility’s No. 1 reactor. Nineteen people were found to have been exposed to radioactivity on Sunday; three more were exposed when the roof of a building housing the No. 1 reactor exploded the previous day. Tepco said the No. 1 reactor had partially melted – the first time this has happened in Japan – and was continuing effort to cool the reactor with seawater, a procedure a British nuclear expert described as “an act of desperation”. The company notified the government on Sunday morning that the No. 3 reactor had lost the ability to cool the reactor core, and that radiactive steam was being released. Kyodo News quoted Tepco as saying that the up to three metres of MOX fuel rods were exposed above water at the Fukushima plant. Shaun Burnie, an independent nuclear energy consultant and forner head of nuclear campaigns at Greenpeace, said the presence of a percentage of fuel core loaded with plutonium MOX fuel in the No. 3 reactor posed a grave threat to the surrounding area. “Plutonium MOX fuel increases the risk of nuclear accident due the neutronic effects of plutonium on the reactor,” Burnie told the Guardian. “In the event of an accident – in particular loss of coolant – the reactor core is more difficult to control due to both neutronics and higher risk of fuel cladding failure. “In the event of the fuel melting and the release of plutonium fuel into the environment, the health hazards are greater, including higher levels of latent cancer.” The MOX fuel was delivered in 1999 and was loaded into the reactor by Tepco only last year after sitting in Fukushima storage ponds amid opposition and delays from the prefecture’s governor, Burnie said. The No. 3 reactor is the sixth facing risks because of loss of cooling water since Friday’s devastating quake and tsunami. Tepco last night filled the No. 1 reactor with seawater and boric acid to prevent criticality – or an uncontrolled nuclear reaction – hours after an explosion blew away the roof and walls of a building housing the rector. The blast is thought to have occurred when hydrogen being released from the reactor mixed with oxygen either in the air or in cooling water. Japan earthquake and tsunami Japan Natural disasters and extreme weather Nuclear power Justin McCurry guardian.co.uk
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enlarge Howard K. Smith – when journalism had an obligation to be thought provoking. Click here to view this media Back in the dim-distant past, there was a time when Broadcast journalism had an obligation to ask the thought provoking questions, especially during a time when the world was in a state of flux. How technology and communications were changing at such a rapid rate it caused some to question just where all of this was headed, and was it heading anywhere good. On this program, The Great Challenge, part of the special series CBS Radio ran in 1959, Howard K. Smith moderated a panel that covered a wide range of topics. Included on this panel were several leading journalists, critics and historians of the day, including Arthur Schlesinger , Allan Nevins , Arthur Krock , Ernest K. Lindley , Dr. Elmer E. Schatschneider and Ernest J. Hughes . The subject this episode covered was called Government And The Democratic Process, and it raised several questions over government’s role in our society and how it was looking at Foreign Policy. One question was posed about Bigness. Howard K. Smith: “Does anyone feel that the tendency towards bigness in our institutions is a menace to our democratic institutions. Big Industry, Big Labor and in fact, Big Government?” Dr. Elmer Schatschneider: ”I think Government has to be big in a time when you have so much big industry. It has to cope with this sort of thing. I think you could show that changes in the organization of the economy always, themselves in the organization of government. And I think for a reason of maintaining an equilibrium within the system. It takes a big government to cope with the kinds of problems we have.” Needless to say, there was a wide array of answers. But it’s interesting to realize that, even in 1959, the question of Big Business was just as much on everyone’s mind as Big Government was – as well as Big Military, which became the memorable basis for President Eisenhower’s Farewell address some two years later. It’s not that any of these issues suddenly appeared to us the last ten or so years. Over 50 is a bit more like it. So naturally you would assume none of this should come as a surprise. Yet it does.
Continue reading …Open Thread with The Professional Left Weekly Podcast: Newt, Wisconsin, and Plus C’est La Meme Chose
March 12, 2011 No Comment
enlarge Credit: The Professional Left Time for your weekly podcast with The Professional Left, our own Driftglass and Bluegal . Related Links below the fold. Open Thread below…: 1. Amendment 14 (Citizenship Rights), Section 4 : 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void. 2. Robert Bork and the Saturday Night Massacre . You can listen to the archives at http://professionalleft.blogspot.com/ and you can also make a donation there to keep these going. And a note from Bluegal there: SEND THE PROFESSIONAL LEFT TO NETROOTS NATION 2011 Blue Gal is applying for a Democracy for America Scholarship to help defray the costs of sending your favorite podcasters to Netroots Nation. Click here to vote for Blue Gal. And thanks!!!
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As he prepares to bring an Italian orchestra to England, Antonio Pappano talks about the musical soul of Italy – and why he no longer wishes he was called Tony Smith… I wonder whether Antonio Pappano would have succeeded as a conductor if, as he wished when he was a teenager, he’d been called Tony Smith? On the podium, Pappano – music director of the Royal Opera in London and of Rome’s Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, whose orchestra he brings to Manchester, Birmingham and Basingstoke this month – embodies Italian gusto. Rehearsing, he is liable to ask for a crisper rhythm by saying the music should sound like spaghetti cooked “al dente”, gritty not mushy; he likens the tone of his Santa Cecilia orchestra to the colour of Amarone wine, made in the Veneto with dried grapes. “Lots of sugar, a very high alcohol content,” as he said, smacking his lips, when we talked in Rome last year. Pappano’s slightly tubby physique ought to be an advertisement for these culinary pleasures, but he sweats off the calories in performance: conducting opera, he needs to replace his sticky, puddled shirts at the end of every act. He even chews while beating time – a ruminative tic, I suspect, not evidence that he’s actually eating. Yet this man for whom music is an Italian meal happens to have been born in Epping in 1959. His father had migrated to London from the south of Italy and worked in restaurants while moonlighting as a vocal coach for singers. At school in Pimlico in those more monocultural days, Antonio was teased for possessing an exotic name with too many open vowels, which got mockingly garbled into Pappino or Pappone. Anxious to merge with the anonymous mob, he begged his parents to change their name to Smith. When he was 13, the Pappanos moved to America. Sent to a new school in Connecticut, Antonio was again a misfit: “It took my brother about two days to lose his English accent, but I never got rid of mine.” He escaped the school bullies by growing up fast. By the time he was 16 he was already a working man, playing the piano for his father’s students, at choir practice in local churches, and in a cocktail lounge. “I did the whole gamut of music,” he told me, throwing his arms out wide to encompass all that tingling, twangling, resonant air. “I loved playing three-minute show tunes in the cocktail bar, though it hardly prepared me for the five-hour Wagner operas I conduct today!” In his 20s he moved back to Europe, and – now defining himself as “an Italo-American English boy” – served as Daniel Barenboim’s assistant at Bayreuth. His conducting debut was in Oslo in 1987; five years later he became the music director of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, where his colleagues frenchified his name by re-accenting it as Páppanó. After a decade he returned to London with his American wife, also a vocal coach, to take over from Bernard Haitink at Covent Garden; now, once again, he was Tony. Up to this point, Italy had played no part in Pappano’s career and little enough in his life, though the country is stamped on his face. He may not be Roman but his nose is, while the dent on his forehead is a souvenir of a childhood holiday spent with his grandparents in the family’s ancestral village in Campania. “I fell while I was playing, and hit my head on the pavement edge. The village had no doctor, so they carried me down the street to the barber, who closed the hole with sealing wax, not stitches! I’m a tribute to rustic medicine.” Then in 2005 the Accademia – founded in 1585 by pope Sixtus V, who made the church composer Palestrina its first president – hired Pappano as the principal conductor of its orchestra, at the time in the doldrums. The appointment was his belated homecoming. “In middle age,” he beamed, “I’m discovering my Italian roots. Until now I didn’t really know what I was, though I found it easier to be Italian-American than Anglo-Italian. These days I feel I’m acquiring a real Italian identity, joking with the players in their language – though they’re always correcting my errors, since I never learned Italian. At home with my family we spoke a patois, a language of our own that was the southern dialect of my parents with English words and American slang mixed in.” Last year on BBC4 Pappano undertook an operatic tour of Italy, bobbing ebulliently on the Grand Canal and bawling a gondolier’s serenade. In publicity photographs for his orchestra, he has been promoted to a Roman icon, posing – though in person he is affable and earthy, not at all imperious like many baton-wielders – next to a crumbling chunk of stone incised with the initials SPQR, standing for Senatus Populusque Romanus, signature of the ancient republic. But working in Rome has acquainted him with the more chaotic aspects of Italian life, nerve-wracking for someone used to the more disciplined habits of the north. “The guys in this orchestra need handling. I love their virtuosity and the theatrical spell they can weave when they’re playing instrumental music. They have qualities you can’t translate – panache, brio. But rehearsals can be temperamental. It doesn’t come naturally to them to concentrate or to sustain a tone, and I tell them that it takes me four sessions to get results I’d achieve immediately with my orchestra at Covent Garden. It’s not that they’re less good, it’s just the result of what I call their endless yap-yap-yap. So I’m trying to make them more German, without taking away their native swagger.” When performing Respighi’s symphonic poem Pines of Rome – included in the Manchester concert this week – Pappano also indulges the unlovable Italian hobby of shooting songbirds during the autumn, a small reminder that a Roman holiday once consisted of watching lions gore Christians at the Colosseum. During his residence in Italy, Wagner fumed about this cruel habit, and thought the silence in the countryside proved that music had fled to Germany. Italians may be lustily passionate, but they are not sentimental: anything that moves is fair game, especially if it is edible. In his musical description of the rustling nocturnal pines on the Janiculum Hill, Respighi included the song of a nightingale; convinced that orchestral players could never compete with the bird’s lyrical rhapsody, he insisted that a recording of an actual nightingale should always be used. “Ah,” said Pappano, “we don’t do it that way! One of our technical guys is a hunter, and he has an elaborate collection of whistles, lures that trick birds out of hiding so they can be shot. He hides in amongst the orchestra, and he’s our decoy nightingale.” The Santa Cecilia’s season opened with concert performances of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell , an epic of Swiss nationhood composed in French for the Paris Opéra; on the poster, Pappano gamely impersonated the son of the archer William Tell, sceptically eyeing the apple pierced by an arrow that was propped on his head. “There’s something about Rossini,” he said after the final rehearsal, “that gives you a sense of the ideal Italian character type – his measured elegance, his modishess, his exhibitionism… though of course nowadays most of these qualities are on display in the work of clothes designers, not musicians! Yet at the time people called Rossini ‘il Tedeschino’, the little German, and thought he wasn’t Italian enough, just as Puccini, who for us is so Italian, turned away from the native tradition and followed Wagner’s example – all those dark-hued symphonic harmonies in his later operas. Verdi worried that the generation of composers that came after him would betray Italy. It’s still a problem for musicians: with a symphony orchestra you inevitably think of doing Beethoven, Brahms and Mahler.” With the Royal Opera, which his matey conviviality revitalised after the departure of his aloof, abstracted predecessor Bernard Haitink, he has performed an eclectic repertory that includes the recent, joyfully scandalous premiere of Mark-Antony Turnage’s Anna Nicole . But he hinted, with a guilty twinge, that he may have neglected his own patrimony. “I’ve done productions of Wagner, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Britten and Birtwistle at Covent Garden, but maybe not as many of the Italian classics as they expected me to.” He will make amends in future seasons, conducting Verdi’s Otello and his French grand opera Les vêpres siciliennes along with Puccini’s Trittico and Manon Lescaut . More works by Rossini – the feminist comedy L’Italiana in Algeri and the majestic Babylonian tragedy Semiramide , which for Pappano is Rossini’s Aida – are on Pappano’s wish list, and he thinks that Covent Garden should have a new production of those loud, lachrymose shockers, Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci . The Santa Cecilia is one of the few Italian orchestras not confined to an opera-house pit. It is a national treasure, but is there enough national music for it to play? “True, my first concert here had nothing Italian in it. But gradually we’re restoring the repertory that’s been neglected, and we’re adding to it by commissioning a work from a contemporary composer every season.” Pappano has returned to the baroque period in a new recording of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater , out next week. It’s a plangent, agonised performance, with Anna Netrebko and Marianna Pizzolato emoting at the foot of the Cross – a reminder, like Pappano’s recent CD of Rossini’s Stabat Mater , that in Italy religious faith is an operatic drama of despair and jubilant recovery. He has also not been snobbish about recognising the work of current composers best known for their film scores. Last Christmas he performed a cantata by Ennio Morricone, who wrote the violently metallic soundtracks for Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, and in February the orchestra played Nino Rota’s dance suite from Visconti’s The Leopard . “There’s an enormous nostalgia in Italy for the 1940s and 50s,” Pappano explained. “The films of de Sica or Fellini seem to come from simpler, happier times. Cinema Paradiso sums that up, and Morricone’s music brings the lost paradise back.” The Leopard caters to a deeper and perhaps more painful nostalgia: quotations from Verdi accompany the story of a Sicilian aristocrat who shrewdly compromises with an upstart democracy during the Risorgimento, the campaign to free Italy from foreign occupation. Although the Santa Cecilia tour commemorates the 150th anniversary of Italian unification in 1861, it’s questionable how much there is to celebrate in the country’s subsequent history. Was the Risorgimento really a resurgence? Liberators like Garibaldi and Cavour hardly expected the advent of Mussolini or of Berlusconi, the perma-tanned magnate with re-afforested hair who recruits babes for his “bunga bunga” parties from the inane game shows on his television network. “Well,” said Pappano, “it was not so long ago that all these separate provinces gave up their autonomy, joined together, and started to speak more or less the same language. Rome may have been here for ever, but Italy is a very new idea. There’s a lot of cynicism now, but Italians still have a kind of utopian hope, and it’s rooted in music – for instance, in Verdi’s patriotic choruses.” The best loved of these is “Va, pensiero”, the homesick lament of the slaves in Nabucco . It supposedly served as a political protest during the Risorgimento; it is now always encored in performances of the opera, and functions as Italy’s unofficial national anthem. In his television series Pappano conducted it in the open air in Naples, with a chorus of hundreds and an audience of thousands, all of whom fervently sang along. Why, I asked, does this piece have such emotional appeal? “Italians don’t have unity as one of their traits,” Pappano replied, returning to his comment about the peninsula’s makeshift unification. “They’re individualists, like the players in my orchestra. ‘Va, pensiero’ grabs them because it offers a respite from that: for once they can do something together – and it’s all written in the middle voice, so anyone can sing it!” Italy’s political and cultural institutions are mostly in disarray, like Roman ruins with their feral cats. Despite that evidence of carefree civic irresponsibility, a chorus, like an orchestra, is a model of co-operation; perhaps music may yet be able to unify this melodious but unharmonious country. Classical music Opera Peter Conrad guardian.co.uk
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A week of events to celebrate International Women’s Day only highlights the fact that classical music – and composing in particular – remains a curiously male preserve. But the exceptions are growing in number… Try this test. Write down all the women composers you know of. No, don’t run away. Given the nature of this column, stick to contemporary classical. Too hard? OK, include anyone, past or present, who has written religious, symphonic, chamber, vocal, choral, operatic, electro-acoustic works. To make it simple, film and TV scores are allowed too. Still zero? You’re in distinguished company. The Guardian ‘s 100 Most Inspiring Women this week, marking the 100th International Women’s Day, featured not one. In a confined space, however, the panel chose from an even tinier breed, naming a female conductor ( Marin Alsop ) as the classical exemplar. Before you start huffing, this is only marginally lower than the percentage the BBC Proms manages most years, ranging from one out of 43 conductors in 1989 to a miserable one out of 63 in 2010 (according to a report by Women in Music ). Prejudice? Misogyny? Lack of habit or confidence or education? It’s all these things; a different topic but not unrelated and impossible to ignore. Classical music, however much it has changed for the better, remains a predominantly male haven. This is a numerical truth, not the prelude to a rant. Yet it seems baffling, if not shocking, that even now we still use the two words – “woman” and “composer” together as a collective noun, whereas it has long been out of date to refer to Barbara Hepworth or Tracey Emin as “women artists”. It’s a century since Dame Ethel Smyth composed “The March of the Women” (1911), which she conducted through the bars of her cell in Holloway prison with a toothbrush. That remains the single most famous observation about a “lady composer”. Merely mention Smyth’s habit of dressing in tweeds, smoking cigars and falling in love with Virginia Woolf and you can see why she hasn’t become a usable female-composer archetype. Many more know the tale of the toothbrush than have heard her music. Today you can rapidly correct that omission. Comedian-conductor Sue Perkins will direct an all-women’s orchestra in Smyth’s anthem as the culmination of this weekend’s Women of the World (WOW) festival at the Southbank Centre. All week, indeed, women’s music has been in the spotlight. Last Tuesday, the PRS for Music Foundation, which currently has a female membership of 14 %, launched Women Make Music , “a unique funding opportunity for women music creators”, including jazz and rock, with assistance worth up to £5,000, to “raise awareness of the gender gap and encourage new collaborations”. The aim, according to Sally Taylor, chair of PRS for Music, is to “encourage more women to come forward”, and “to promote role models for the future”. You may think this itself is a retrograde step. Let’s go back to that test. Did you total the fingers of one hand? Not bad. With the BBC Proms a useful benchmark, you could qualify as a programme adviser. When the new season is announced next month the cry will go up, as it does each year as surely as the huntsman’s tally-ho: “Where are the women composers?” And a spokesperson will rush in with some sticking-plaster statistic: one more than last season, two more than the year before. Better anyway than 2006: total nil. 2008 was a redemptive high, with six females out of 117 composers, or 5%. If individuals themselves feel variously angry or ambivalent at being given a helping hand – the same arguments are rehearsed each year for the Orange prize despite the healthy number of women writers – most understand the need for consciousness-raising action. “It’s a delicate balance,” agrees Janis Susskind, publishing director of Boosey & Hawkes. “None of the women composers I deal with like being singled out. It’s more about vigilance, about noticing that there’s no woman on a list. Why not? Are we satisfied? How could things be different?” We can guess the myriad reasons, domestic, financial, educational, for their absence in the past. Nuns wrote music for their own use, famously the 12th-century Hildegard of Bingen . Later, many high-born women who sang or played wrote their own music, especially songs. But with the idea of a profession being lowly, so their talent remained uncelebrated. Some hid behind pseudonyms, like the stylish “Mrs Philharmonica”. Most were forgotten until the explosion of gender studies began to vitalise the forgotten history of women. Aaron Cohen’s International Encyclopedia of Women Composers (1987) managed to gather 6,000 entries. Even having written a book on Hildegard, interviewed many modern pioneers from Elizabeth Maconchy to Minna Keal to Judith Weir and followed the subject fairly closely, I still only recognise about two dozen names. The idea that composition was a male preserve haunted even those who were demonstrably good at it, such as the formidably gifted Clara Schumann , who said it was not a job for women. She devoted herself to helping her composer husband. Today, at last, the landscape is changing. There’s a groundswell of action: the Barbican’s next Total Immersion (9 April) is devoted to Korea’s Unsuk Chin , belatedly a big name. Women fill composition classes in conservatoires as never before. They are securing top composer-in-residence positions (see panel below), with a rash of talent, born in the 1980s, now finding voice. We don’t always help ourselves, and I speak collectively. Men are supposedly keen on women but I couldn’t find one to accompany me to an “all-women composers” concert on Tuesday, or a female friend, come to that (pancake duty, either cooking or eating, was partly to blame). Fortunately others filled the church of St Andrew Holborn for Beneath These Alien Stars, a concert for International Women’s Day. The large, enthusiastic – mixed – London Oriana Choir chose from across the centuries to show the variety on offer, impressively mastering 17 works new to them, including a UK premiere, Talk Show by Elena Kats-Chernin (b 1957). She has achieved her own celebrity by writing the current Lloyds TSB music . The cruelly short-lived, blazingly talented Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) was faithfully represented in the lush, radiant “Hymne au Soleil”. Sally Beamish’s “God of the Moon” and works by Karin Rehnqvist and Cecilia McDowall, as well as Judith Weir (subject of a festival in Manchester last week) and Roxanna Panufnik (new associate composer with the London Mozart Players), stood out. This expressive choir, conducted by David Drummond, who devised the programme – yes, a man – gave Jocelyn Pook ‘s “Mobile” as an encore. It wittily incorporates a “nana na na” representation of the Nokia theme as if to announce, whisper who dare, that women can be, in the best sense, musically sharp. So now that the alibis and inequalities have gone, all doors are open. Still we cannot escape the unanswered, unfashionable and, certainly, uncomfortable question: for all the many good, even excellent women composers, why has there not yet been a great one? Where is the possessed, wild-eyed, crackpot female answer to Beethoven, who battled on throught deafness, loneliness, financial worry and disease to create timeless masterpieces? The answer, and I run for cover even raising the matter, may lie in biology or even psychopathology. If one should arrive, what a cry of joy and relief will be heard. And in this brave new world, that toothbrush will grow into a lightweight, perfectly balanced baton and those prison bars will prove, after all, to have been the work of nurture not nature. Classical music Fiona Maddocks guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …A week of events to celebrate International Women’s Day only highlights the fact that classical music – and composing in particular – remains a curiously male preserve. But the exceptions are growing in number… Try this test. Write down all the women composers you know of. No, don’t run away. Given the nature of this column, stick to contemporary classical. Too hard? OK, include anyone, past or present, who has written religious, symphonic, chamber, vocal, choral, operatic, electro-acoustic works. To make it simple, film and TV scores are allowed too. Still zero? You’re in distinguished company. The Guardian ‘s 100 Most Inspiring Women this week, marking the 100th International Women’s Day, featured not one. In a confined space, however, the panel chose from an even tinier breed, naming a female conductor ( Marin Alsop ) as the classical exemplar. Before you start huffing, this is only marginally lower than the percentage the BBC Proms manages most years, ranging from one out of 43 conductors in 1989 to a miserable one out of 63 in 2010 (according to a report by Women in Music ). Prejudice? Misogyny? Lack of habit or confidence or education? It’s all these things; a different topic but not unrelated and impossible to ignore. Classical music, however much it has changed for the better, remains a predominantly male haven. This is a numerical truth, not the prelude to a rant. Yet it seems baffling, if not shocking, that even now we still use the two words – “woman” and “composer” together as a collective noun, whereas it has long been out of date to refer to Barbara Hepworth or Tracey Emin as “women artists”. It’s a century since Dame Ethel Smyth composed “The March of the Women” (1911), which she conducted through the bars of her cell in Holloway prison with a toothbrush. That remains the single most famous observation about a “lady composer”. Merely mention Smyth’s habit of dressing in tweeds, smoking cigars and falling in love with Virginia Woolf and you can see why she hasn’t become a usable female-composer archetype. Many more know the tale of the toothbrush than have heard her music. Today you can rapidly correct that omission. Comedian-conductor Sue Perkins will direct an all-women’s orchestra in Smyth’s anthem as the culmination of this weekend’s Women of the World (WOW) festival at the Southbank Centre. All week, indeed, women’s music has been in the spotlight. Last Tuesday, the PRS for Music Foundation, which currently has a female membership of 14 %, launched Women Make Music , “a unique funding opportunity for women music creators”, including jazz and rock, with assistance worth up to £5,000, to “raise awareness of the gender gap and encourage new collaborations”. The aim, according to Sally Taylor, chair of PRS for Music, is to “encourage more women to come forward”, and “to promote role models for the future”. You may think this itself is a retrograde step. Let’s go back to that test. Did you total the fingers of one hand? Not bad. With the BBC Proms a useful benchmark, you could qualify as a programme adviser. When the new season is announced next month the cry will go up, as it does each year as surely as the huntsman’s tally-ho: “Where are the women composers?” And a spokesperson will rush in with some sticking-plaster statistic: one more than last season, two more than the year before. Better anyway than 2006: total nil. 2008 was a redemptive high, with six females out of 117 composers, or 5%. If individuals themselves feel variously angry or ambivalent at being given a helping hand – the same arguments are rehearsed each year for the Orange prize despite the healthy number of women writers – most understand the need for consciousness-raising action. “It’s a delicate balance,” agrees Janis Susskind, publishing director of Boosey & Hawkes. “None of the women composers I deal with like being singled out. It’s more about vigilance, about noticing that there’s no woman on a list. Why not? Are we satisfied? How could things be different?” We can guess the myriad reasons, domestic, financial, educational, for their absence in the past. Nuns wrote music for their own use, famously the 12th-century Hildegard of Bingen . Later, many high-born women who sang or played wrote their own music, especially songs. But with the idea of a profession being lowly, so their talent remained uncelebrated. Some hid behind pseudonyms, like the stylish “Mrs Philharmonica”. Most were forgotten until the explosion of gender studies began to vitalise the forgotten history of women. Aaron Cohen’s International Encyclopedia of Women Composers (1987) managed to gather 6,000 entries. Even having written a book on Hildegard, interviewed many modern pioneers from Elizabeth Maconchy to Minna Keal to Judith Weir and followed the subject fairly closely, I still only recognise about two dozen names. The idea that composition was a male preserve haunted even those who were demonstrably good at it, such as the formidably gifted Clara Schumann , who said it was not a job for women. She devoted herself to helping her composer husband. Today, at last, the landscape is changing. There’s a groundswell of action: the Barbican’s next Total Immersion (9 April) is devoted to Korea’s Unsuk Chin , belatedly a big name. Women fill composition classes in conservatoires as never before. They are securing top composer-in-residence positions (see panel below), with a rash of talent, born in the 1980s, now finding voice. We don’t always help ourselves, and I speak collectively. Men are supposedly keen on women but I couldn’t find one to accompany me to an “all-women composers” concert on Tuesday, or a female friend, come to that (pancake duty, either cooking or eating, was partly to blame). Fortunately others filled the church of St Andrew Holborn for Beneath These Alien Stars, a concert for International Women’s Day. The large, enthusiastic – mixed – London Oriana Choir chose from across the centuries to show the variety on offer, impressively mastering 17 works new to them, including a UK premiere, Talk Show by Elena Kats-Chernin (b 1957). She has achieved her own celebrity by writing the current Lloyds TSB music . The cruelly short-lived, blazingly talented Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) was faithfully represented in the lush, radiant “Hymne au Soleil”. Sally Beamish’s “God of the Moon” and works by Karin Rehnqvist and Cecilia McDowall, as well as Judith Weir (subject of a festival in Manchester last week) and Roxanna Panufnik (new associate composer with the London Mozart Players), stood out. This expressive choir, conducted by David Drummond, who devised the programme – yes, a man – gave Jocelyn Pook ‘s “Mobile” as an encore. It wittily incorporates a “nana na na” representation of the Nokia theme as if to announce, whisper who dare, that women can be, in the best sense, musically sharp. So now that the alibis and inequalities have gone, all doors are open. Still we cannot escape the unanswered, unfashionable and, certainly, uncomfortable question: for all the many good, even excellent women composers, why has there not yet been a great one? Where is the possessed, wild-eyed, crackpot female answer to Beethoven, who battled on throught deafness, loneliness, financial worry and disease to create timeless masterpieces? The answer, and I run for cover even raising the matter, may lie in biology or even psychopathology. If one should arrive, what a cry of joy and relief will be heard. And in this brave new world, that toothbrush will grow into a lightweight, perfectly balanced baton and those prison bars will prove, after all, to have been the work of nurture not nature. Classical music Fiona Maddocks guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
Meet April Bloomfield, the girl from the Midlands who’s head chef in New York’s hottest restaurants and counts Jay-Z and Bono among her best customers Try April Bloomfield’s oyster pan roast and other recipes Is it possible to know you adore someone before you even meet them? I think not, generally. If a girlfriend told me she had the hots for a man on whose face she had never clapped her eyes, let alone planted her lips, I would say: keep calm, dear, and step away from the pinot gris. On the other hand, it occurs to me, this freezing cold morning in New York, that I’m rapidly developing a powerful crush on a young chef called April Bloomfield. This woman is, I am increasingly certain, my idea of heaven. How do I know? It’s her cooking. Believe me when I tell you that her food is extraordinary. I don’t mean extraordinary in a Michelin-starred look-at-these-truffled-potatoes kind of way (though she has two Michelin stars: one for the Spotted Pig in Greenwich , the other for the Breslin, in the Ace Hotel in Midtown). Nor do I mean extraordinary in a Heston Blumenthal this-mackerel-pops-like-Space-Dust kind of way. I mean only that it is extraordinarily delicious. You eat her burgers and her scotch eggs, her sweetbreads and her chowders, and all you can think is that you will never taste their like again anywhere else. It’s a thought that is distinctly misery-inducing, given that I live in London, and she works here, in Manhattan. I am going to meet Bloomfield tomorrow. Today, I am in the John Dory Oyster Bar , the newest of her three Manhattan restaurants (it, too, is in the Ace Hotel), where I am eating lunch with her business partner, Ken Friedman, a tall, rather haphazard man who used to manage bands including the Smiths and UB40. Friedman has a somewhat wobbly attention span. Last night, for instance, when I was eating my supper in the Breslin , alone, he sought me out, ordered a glass of wine, and told me that he would keep me company (when he arrived I was in the middle of my starter, a superlative salad of pears and candied walnuts). Five minutes later, though, he excused himself – “I just need to talk to someone for one moment” – and never returned. But on one subject his focus is never less than laser beam sharp. Friedman thinks that April Bloomfield is a genius, and he would like the whole world to know it. Which is why he is insisting that I try the entire menu. And what a menu it is. Sam Sifton, the picky restaurant critic of the New York Times , has said that Bloomfield’s chorizo-stuffed squid is among the best things you can eat in the city and, having tasted it, I cannot think that he could possibly be wrong. Bloomfield stuffs her squid with paella rice which she has first cooked with chorizo, red pepper, onion and saffron. The squid is then seared to give it a crust, and placed on a soft bed of white beans – Bloomfield is “obsessed” with beans – dressed in creme fraiche, and topped with coriander and smoked tomatoes tossed in sherry vinegar, olive oil and palm sugar. It’s incredible – though not, perhaps, quite so punchy and addictive as her toast piled with anchovy paste, or her escarole salad, made of raw hearts and pickled outer leaves, both of which bedazzle with top notes of lemon, anchovy and parmesan. I could go on and on like this. The oysters. The razor clam ceviche. The Nantucket Bay scallops. And its crowning glory? That would have to be her oyster pan roast, a homage to the famous dish served at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station. A pan roast is a soup, cooked in an old-fashioned metal contraption; Bloomfield’s version turns oysters, their liquor, cream and tarragon into a nectar so heavenly, you sip it and expect to hear harps, and comes with a thin, crisp slice of toast over which is spread unctuous but golden sea urchin butter in rolling waves (“the sea urchin roe butter is to make the dish more oceanic,” its creator will tell me later, “because cooked oysters don’t really keep that cucumber-y taste”). The story of the odd couple, Ken and April, and how they rose to the very top of New York’s dog-eat-dog restaurant scene is the stuff of legend by now (or if not legend, then at least of long profiles in the New Yorker ). Friedman is 52, and grew up in California, where he attended Berkeley until he dropped out to become first a concert promoter, then a manager, and finally a talent scout for Arista. It was during his years in the music business, entertaining his artists at New York’s best restaurants, that he grew passionate about food. Sometimes, observing this passion, his friends would suggest that he open a place of his own. A few of them – Michael Stipe of REM was one – even said they would invest. One day, he finally took them at their word. He had turned 40; he no longer got off on music the way he used to; hell, he had nothing to lose. In 2003, then, Friedman began his new career. Another of his investors was Mario Batali , chef patron of Babbo and other celebrated joints, and good friend of Gwyneth Paltrow and other foodie stars. It was Batali who spotted Bloomfield’s talent. Well, sort of. It happened like this. One day, Jamie Oliver flew in. Batali, a pal of his, and Friedman, a keen anglophile, took him out for the evening. According to Batali, Oliver was their man. The plan was to put the alcoholic thumb screws on him. Alas, even after a few drinks, Oliver could not be persuaded. He did, though, suggest that they meet a young British sous chef at his old employer, the River Cafe. Her name was April Bloomfield. Bloomfield flew out to New York, which she had never visited before, for an interview. A little to her surprise, this consisted of a 10-hour marathon during which she and Batali and Friedman ate at some of the city’s best known restaurants, among them the Union Square Cafe, the Carnegie Deli, and Batali’s own Babbo. No doubt Batali was impressed by Bloomfield’s appetite. Mostly, though, it was her war wounds that pleased him: a missing fingernail, scars on her arms. “It means she’ll sacrifice her body,” Batali is supposed to have said. “She’s a star. I can tell.” They offered her the job. Bloomfield handed in her notice, and moved to the US, where she spent the summer working at Alice Waters’s restaurant, Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, to familiarise herself with American ingredients. Then she headed to New York where, in the fullness of time, she and Friedman opened their gastropub, the Spotted Pig. The menu was meaty, and rather British. But the house speciality – cheeky, this – was a burger served one way: rare, on a brioche bun, with roquefort. Did the punters love it? Yes, they did. Pretty soon, the Spotted Pig was rammed: a favoured hang-out of hipsters and celebrities alike. To this day, bagging a table requires the patience of Job. April Bloomfield, a quiet, unassuming girl from Birmingham, had succeeded where the likes of Gordon Ramsay and countless other shouty, macho British chefs had always failed: she had taken Manhattan by storm. April Bloomfield is small, preternaturally cheerful, and extremely single-minded. This is not to say, however, that she was determined to be a chef right from the start. She was born in Birmingham, in 1974. Her stepfather was an engineer, and her mother, who worked at home, painted china bonbonnieres for the West Midlands enamel firm Halcyon Days. Safe to say that it was not a foodie household. “I grew up with cheese sandwiches,” she says. “And my mum’s steak, which she would fry without any salt; it always came out grey. My nan’s cooking was my favourite: loin of pork with crackling and stuffing. We would eat the leftovers, the pork cold, the stuffing hot. Even today, I love that contrast between hot and cold.” At 16, April decided to join the police force, a decision based mostly on her love of Cagney & Lacey . It was only when she realised she’d left it too late to apply to the cadet scheme that she changed her plan. Just as her mother was asking her what she planned to do with her life, in walked April’s sister, who was at catering college, in her chef’s whites. Maybe I could give cooking a go, she thought. “But when I walked into college, and saw the kitchens and smelt the spices, I knew I would give it 110%. I was just blown away.” Her first job was at a Holiday Inn in Birmingham. By this time, her sister was working at Launceston Place in London. “I knew I didn’t want to stay in Birmingham,” April says. “I wanted something more. I asked my chef: ‘Could you give me a few double shifts? I want to know what it’s like to work really hard.’” Apparently, it was rather enjoyable, and six months later, she left, having landed a job at Kensington Place, whose kitchen was then in the hands of Rowley Leigh. She followed that with a job at Bibendum – she still talks of Simon Hopkinson, “such an elegant cook, so particular and clean and efficient”, with deep reverence – and another at Roscoff in Northern Ireland. By the time she returned to London. for another stint at KP, and then a job at the Brackenbury, she knew both that she had progressed amazingly, but also that she still had a lot to learn. Where next? “I used to lie in bed thinking about the River Cafe, because I’d watched their TV programme. I remember watching Rose [Gray, the restaurant's co-founder] cooking cavolo nero. She pureed it with the best olive oil and cheese. I went to work the next day and immediately made it.” A friend worked at the River Cafe, so Bloomfield called her, and said she wanted to move. “They told me to come in, and I loved it from the moment I tasted the food. It was this pasta… I had to peel these walnuts. I’d never seen a wet walnut. My fingers were burning, but I was so happy. We made a sauce from the walnuts, some bread, the water I’d blanched them in, some pesto and some spicy oil. Tossed it into some tagliatelle. When I tasted it, my palate moved to a higher consciousness. I actually thought: what have I been doing for the last 10 years? I was so worried I wasn’t good enough to get a job there.” We are talking in the back of a car, on our way back from visiting a farm in the Catskills. One of the legacies of her time at the River Cafe is a reverence for ingredients, and April is convinced that, in the long term, the only way she can get her hands on the very best produce is to grow it herself (New York’s top chefs fight ruthlessly for veg at the Green Market in Union Square). So, she is looking to buy a farm: “It’s important for my soul, and for my passion.” Driving the car is Scott Boggins, who was the “culinary farmer” at the French Laundry in California, and now works for April full-time (he will manage the farm once they find the right place). Also, Ken, who is staring hard at his Blackberry (a couple of movie stars are having a party at the Spotted Pig tonight, but they have demanded that staff sign a non-disclosure agreement, and Ken is furious). Did she and Ken agree right from the start on what kind of food they would serve at the Pig? “Not really. He wanted to do tofu hot dogs. I was very concerned. I sent him an email telling him what I was most passionate about, and I ended it by saying: look, I might not be the right chef for you.” Ken promptly backed off, and has left her alone ever since. He deals only with front of house, leaving April, who is emphatically not a schmoozer, to get on with her work. This suits them both. Is she as severe as people say? The mythology is that Ken has a secret store of mayonnaise, which he dispenses surreptitiously to customers who want it on their burgers. She laughs. “I did once tell a customer that they couldn’t have a burger without cheese. I’m not severe. I’m just firm. I’ve learned to be OK about it if they want their dressing on the side. But I won’t substitute or add anything; I don’t mix and match. It slows down the kitchen, and it’s not how I want to work.” From the front of the car, comes Ken’s voice. “I know now that mayo on a burger is naff, unless you’re from Montreal or Belgium,” he shouts. Then he goes back to stabbing at his Blackberry. Last night, I spent the evening in the kitchen at the John Dory watching April during service. She made for an amazing sight: quiet and smiling, but also about as finickety as it is possible for a chef to be. I could watch her clean whelks all day. At one point, dissatisfied with their taste – she is an enthusiastic rather than a merely dutiful taster – she tipped seven plated servings of scallops back in a basin and began seasoning them all over again. Most impressive of all, though, was her relationship with her young, hipster staff. Bloomfield doesn’t bark orders; she makes suggestions. Is her relationship with her chefs as good as it seems? “I think I’m probably a control freak, but if I trust them, it’s collaborative. They’re all hugely talented. I can’t be everywhere, but I’m always in one of my kitchens, and hopefully I’m motivating and inspiring. We want to grow with our chefs. If one of them has an idea, and we can help them, well, I think that would be good.” She is an American citizen now, but she longs to do a restaurant in London; certainly, there will be more restaurants, and thus more openings for her staff, in the future. Naturally, I put her calm, kindly manner at the pass down to her gender. But she isn’t so sure. Nor does she have a view on whether it is more difficult for women to succeed as chefs. “You just have to work hard; it doesn’t matter whether you are a man or a woman. I didn’t come in to this thinking I was a woman in a man’s world, and if I was ever on the receiving end of anything [sexist], I probably just pushed it to the back of my mind and got on with it. The only thing I would say is that when I was offered [a stint on] pastry, I said no. I didn’t want to be stereotyped.” Our conversation begins to tail off: the gloaming and the sense of anti-climax in the car are doing their work (the farm, all clapboard and rickety outbuildings, wasn’t right for April and Ken; they want a beautiful place, so people can stay and attend cookery classes). But then April perks up. “Why don’t we go to Blue Hill Stone Barns for dinner?” she says. This is an exquisitely swanky restaurant and farm on an old Rockefeller estate just outside New York; its chef Dan Barber is a pioneer of the farm-to-table movement. So, this is what we do. When we pitch up, it is 5.20pm. The restaurant opens at 5.30pm. We wander in. None of us is dressed for fine dining. April is in a parka, jeans and her beloved Birkenstock clogs, Scott is in his lumberjack gear, Ken is in sneakers as per usual. But April has decided: we are going to have a great treat. While we wait, we sit in the bar and drink cocktails. In her deep leather armchair she says: “I’m so happy.” We go to our table. By now, April has been recognised; several staff tell her how happy they are to see her. Obviously, we will be having the tasting menu, and no arguments. Dan Barber appears, and shakes her hand ecstatically. It’s as if the pope is visiting the archbishop of Canterbury, or something. Then the food starts arriving: innovative and ravishing. But I can’t take my eyes off April. I’ve always found it peculiar how few chefs seem truly to like eating. April, though, treats every dish with the relish of a child opening an Easter egg. First, she examines it, pondering what tricks are involved in its composition. Then, she tastes it, very carefully. Finally, once she has its measure, she scoffs whatever is left. I wish I had a camera so I could photograph her delicately picking the cheeks from a cod’s head. “Isn’t this beautiful?” she says, over and over. After our feast, we walk to the car, ice crackling, smiling and replete. What did you think? I ask. “Amazing,” she says. I am struck by her Brummie accent. It has emerged at last, released by a good dinner, like a genie from a lamp. Chefs Food & drink New York United States Rachel Cooke guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Meet April Bloomfield, the girl from the Midlands who’s head chef in New York’s hottest restaurants and counts Jay-Z and Bono among her best customers Try April Bloomfield’s oyster pan roast and other recipes Is it possible to know you adore someone before you even meet them? I think not, generally. If a girlfriend told me she had the hots for a man on whose face she had never clapped her eyes, let alone planted her lips, I would say: keep calm, dear, and step away from the pinot gris. On the other hand, it occurs to me, this freezing cold morning in New York, that I’m rapidly developing a powerful crush on a young chef called April Bloomfield. This woman is, I am increasingly certain, my idea of heaven. How do I know? It’s her cooking. Believe me when I tell you that her food is extraordinary. I don’t mean extraordinary in a Michelin-starred look-at-these-truffled-potatoes kind of way (though she has two Michelin stars: one for the Spotted Pig in Greenwich , the other for the Breslin, in the Ace Hotel in Midtown). Nor do I mean extraordinary in a Heston Blumenthal this-mackerel-pops-like-Space-Dust kind of way. I mean only that it is extraordinarily delicious. You eat her burgers and her scotch eggs, her sweetbreads and her chowders, and all you can think is that you will never taste their like again anywhere else. It’s a thought that is distinctly misery-inducing, given that I live in London, and she works here, in Manhattan. I am going to meet Bloomfield tomorrow. Today, I am in the John Dory Oyster Bar , the newest of her three Manhattan restaurants (it, too, is in the Ace Hotel), where I am eating lunch with her business partner, Ken Friedman, a tall, rather haphazard man who used to manage bands including the Smiths and UB40. Friedman has a somewhat wobbly attention span. Last night, for instance, when I was eating my supper in the Breslin , alone, he sought me out, ordered a glass of wine, and told me that he would keep me company (when he arrived I was in the middle of my starter, a superlative salad of pears and candied walnuts). Five minutes later, though, he excused himself – “I just need to talk to someone for one moment” – and never returned. But on one subject his focus is never less than laser beam sharp. Friedman thinks that April Bloomfield is a genius, and he would like the whole world to know it. Which is why he is insisting that I try the entire menu. And what a menu it is. Sam Sifton, the picky restaurant critic of the New York Times , has said that Bloomfield’s chorizo-stuffed squid is among the best things you can eat in the city and, having tasted it, I cannot think that he could possibly be wrong. Bloomfield stuffs her squid with paella rice which she has first cooked with chorizo, red pepper, onion and saffron. The squid is then seared to give it a crust, and placed on a soft bed of white beans – Bloomfield is “obsessed” with beans – dressed in creme fraiche, and topped with coriander and smoked tomatoes tossed in sherry vinegar, olive oil and palm sugar. It’s incredible – though not, perhaps, quite so punchy and addictive as her toast piled with anchovy paste, or her escarole salad, made of raw hearts and pickled outer leaves, both of which bedazzle with top notes of lemon, anchovy and parmesan. I could go on and on like this. The oysters. The razor clam ceviche. The Nantucket Bay scallops. And its crowning glory? That would have to be her oyster pan roast, a homage to the famous dish served at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station. A pan roast is a soup, cooked in an old-fashioned metal contraption; Bloomfield’s version turns oysters, their liquor, cream and tarragon into a nectar so heavenly, you sip it and expect to hear harps, and comes with a thin, crisp slice of toast over which is spread unctuous but golden sea urchin butter in rolling waves (“the sea urchin roe butter is to make the dish more oceanic,” its creator will tell me later, “because cooked oysters don’t really keep that cucumber-y taste”). The story of the odd couple, Ken and April, and how they rose to the very top of New York’s dog-eat-dog restaurant scene is the stuff of legend by now (or if not legend, then at least of long profiles in the New Yorker ). Friedman is 52, and grew up in California, where he attended Berkeley until he dropped out to become first a concert promoter, then a manager, and finally a talent scout for Arista. It was during his years in the music business, entertaining his artists at New York’s best restaurants, that he grew passionate about food. Sometimes, observing this passion, his friends would suggest that he open a place of his own. A few of them – Michael Stipe of REM was one – even said they would invest. One day, he finally took them at their word. He had turned 40; he no longer got off on music the way he used to; hell, he had nothing to lose. In 2003, then, Friedman began his new career. Another of his investors was Mario Batali , chef patron of Babbo and other celebrated joints, and good friend of Gwyneth Paltrow and other foodie stars. It was Batali who spotted Bloomfield’s talent. Well, sort of. It happened like this. One day, Jamie Oliver flew in. Batali, a pal of his, and Friedman, a keen anglophile, took him out for the evening. According to Batali, Oliver was their man. The plan was to put the alcoholic thumb screws on him. Alas, even after a few drinks, Oliver could not be persuaded. He did, though, suggest that they meet a young British sous chef at his old employer, the River Cafe. Her name was April Bloomfield. Bloomfield flew out to New York, which she had never visited before, for an interview. A little to her surprise, this consisted of a 10-hour marathon during which she and Batali and Friedman ate at some of the city’s best known restaurants, among them the Union Square Cafe, the Carnegie Deli, and Batali’s own Babbo. No doubt Batali was impressed by Bloomfield’s appetite. Mostly, though, it was her war wounds that pleased him: a missing fingernail, scars on her arms. “It means she’ll sacrifice her body,” Batali is supposed to have said. “She’s a star. I can tell.” They offered her the job. Bloomfield handed in her notice, and moved to the US, where she spent the summer working at Alice Waters’s restaurant, Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, to familiarise herself with American ingredients. Then she headed to New York where, in the fullness of time, she and Friedman opened their gastropub, the Spotted Pig. The menu was meaty, and rather British. But the house speciality – cheeky, this – was a burger served one way: rare, on a brioche bun, with roquefort. Did the punters love it? Yes, they did. Pretty soon, the Spotted Pig was rammed: a favoured hang-out of hipsters and celebrities alike. To this day, bagging a table requires the patience of Job. April Bloomfield, a quiet, unassuming girl from Birmingham, had succeeded where the likes of Gordon Ramsay and countless other shouty, macho British chefs had always failed: she had taken Manhattan by storm. April Bloomfield is small, preternaturally cheerful, and extremely single-minded. This is not to say, however, that she was determined to be a chef right from the start. She was born in Birmingham, in 1974. Her stepfather was an engineer, and her mother, who worked at home, painted china bonbonnieres for the West Midlands enamel firm Halcyon Days. Safe to say that it was not a foodie household. “I grew up with cheese sandwiches,” she says. “And my mum’s steak, which she would fry without any salt; it always came out grey. My nan’s cooking was my favourite: loin of pork with crackling and stuffing. We would eat the leftovers, the pork cold, the stuffing hot. Even today, I love that contrast between hot and cold.” At 16, April decided to join the police force, a decision based mostly on her love of Cagney & Lacey . It was only when she realised she’d left it too late to apply to the cadet scheme that she changed her plan. Just as her mother was asking her what she planned to do with her life, in walked April’s sister, who was at catering college, in her chef’s whites. Maybe I could give cooking a go, she thought. “But when I walked into college, and saw the kitchens and smelt the spices, I knew I would give it 110%. I was just blown away.” Her first job was at a Holiday Inn in Birmingham. By this time, her sister was working at Launceston Place in London. “I knew I didn’t want to stay in Birmingham,” April says. “I wanted something more. I asked my chef: ‘Could you give me a few double shifts? I want to know what it’s like to work really hard.’” Apparently, it was rather enjoyable, and six months later, she left, having landed a job at Kensington Place, whose kitchen was then in the hands of Rowley Leigh. She followed that with a job at Bibendum – she still talks of Simon Hopkinson, “such an elegant cook, so particular and clean and efficient”, with deep reverence – and another at Roscoff in Northern Ireland. By the time she returned to London. for another stint at KP, and then a job at the Brackenbury, she knew both that she had progressed amazingly, but also that she still had a lot to learn. Where next? “I used to lie in bed thinking about the River Cafe, because I’d watched their TV programme. I remember watching Rose [Gray, the restaurant's co-founder] cooking cavolo nero. She pureed it with the best olive oil and cheese. I went to work the next day and immediately made it.” A friend worked at the River Cafe, so Bloomfield called her, and said she wanted to move. “They told me to come in, and I loved it from the moment I tasted the food. It was this pasta… I had to peel these walnuts. I’d never seen a wet walnut. My fingers were burning, but I was so happy. We made a sauce from the walnuts, some bread, the water I’d blanched them in, some pesto and some spicy oil. Tossed it into some tagliatelle. When I tasted it, my palate moved to a higher consciousness. I actually thought: what have I been doing for the last 10 years? I was so worried I wasn’t good enough to get a job there.” We are talking in the back of a car, on our way back from visiting a farm in the Catskills. One of the legacies of her time at the River Cafe is a reverence for ingredients, and April is convinced that, in the long term, the only way she can get her hands on the very best produce is to grow it herself (New York’s top chefs fight ruthlessly for veg at the Green Market in Union Square). So, she is looking to buy a farm: “It’s important for my soul, and for my passion.” Driving the car is Scott Boggins, who was the “culinary farmer” at the French Laundry in California, and now works for April full-time (he will manage the farm once they find the right place). Also, Ken, who is staring hard at his Blackberry (a couple of movie stars are having a party at the Spotted Pig tonight, but they have demanded that staff sign a non-disclosure agreement, and Ken is furious). Did she and Ken agree right from the start on what kind of food they would serve at the Pig? “Not really. He wanted to do tofu hot dogs. I was very concerned. I sent him an email telling him what I was most passionate about, and I ended it by saying: look, I might not be the right chef for you.” Ken promptly backed off, and has left her alone ever since. He deals only with front of house, leaving April, who is emphatically not a schmoozer, to get on with her work. This suits them both. Is she as severe as people say? The mythology is that Ken has a secret store of mayonnaise, which he dispenses surreptitiously to customers who want it on their burgers. She laughs. “I did once tell a customer that they couldn’t have a burger without cheese. I’m not severe. I’m just firm. I’ve learned to be OK about it if they want their dressing on the side. But I won’t substitute or add anything; I don’t mix and match. It slows down the kitchen, and it’s not how I want to work.” From the front of the car, comes Ken’s voice. “I know now that mayo on a burger is naff, unless you’re from Montreal or Belgium,” he shouts. Then he goes back to stabbing at his Blackberry. Last night, I spent the evening in the kitchen at the John Dory watching April during service. She made for an amazing sight: quiet and smiling, but also about as finickety as it is possible for a chef to be. I could watch her clean whelks all day. At one point, dissatisfied with their taste – she is an enthusiastic rather than a merely dutiful taster – she tipped seven plated servings of scallops back in a basin and began seasoning them all over again. Most impressive of all, though, was her relationship with her young, hipster staff. Bloomfield doesn’t bark orders; she makes suggestions. Is her relationship with her chefs as good as it seems? “I think I’m probably a control freak, but if I trust them, it’s collaborative. They’re all hugely talented. I can’t be everywhere, but I’m always in one of my kitchens, and hopefully I’m motivating and inspiring. We want to grow with our chefs. If one of them has an idea, and we can help them, well, I think that would be good.” She is an American citizen now, but she longs to do a restaurant in London; certainly, there will be more restaurants, and thus more openings for her staff, in the future. Naturally, I put her calm, kindly manner at the pass down to her gender. But she isn’t so sure. Nor does she have a view on whether it is more difficult for women to succeed as chefs. “You just have to work hard; it doesn’t matter whether you are a man or a woman. I didn’t come in to this thinking I was a woman in a man’s world, and if I was ever on the receiving end of anything [sexist], I probably just pushed it to the back of my mind and got on with it. The only thing I would say is that when I was offered [a stint on] pastry, I said no. I didn’t want to be stereotyped.” Our conversation begins to tail off: the gloaming and the sense of anti-climax in the car are doing their work (the farm, all clapboard and rickety outbuildings, wasn’t right for April and Ken; they want a beautiful place, so people can stay and attend cookery classes). But then April perks up. “Why don’t we go to Blue Hill Stone Barns for dinner?” she says. This is an exquisitely swanky restaurant and farm on an old Rockefeller estate just outside New York; its chef Dan Barber is a pioneer of the farm-to-table movement. So, this is what we do. When we pitch up, it is 5.20pm. The restaurant opens at 5.30pm. We wander in. None of us is dressed for fine dining. April is in a parka, jeans and her beloved Birkenstock clogs, Scott is in his lumberjack gear, Ken is in sneakers as per usual. But April has decided: we are going to have a great treat. While we wait, we sit in the bar and drink cocktails. In her deep leather armchair she says: “I’m so happy.” We go to our table. By now, April has been recognised; several staff tell her how happy they are to see her. Obviously, we will be having the tasting menu, and no arguments. Dan Barber appears, and shakes her hand ecstatically. It’s as if the pope is visiting the archbishop of Canterbury, or something. Then the food starts arriving: innovative and ravishing. But I can’t take my eyes off April. I’ve always found it peculiar how few chefs seem truly to like eating. April, though, treats every dish with the relish of a child opening an Easter egg. First, she examines it, pondering what tricks are involved in its composition. Then, she tastes it, very carefully. Finally, once she has its measure, she scoffs whatever is left. I wish I had a camera so I could photograph her delicately picking the cheeks from a cod’s head. “Isn’t this beautiful?” she says, over and over. After our feast, we walk to the car, ice crackling, smiling and replete. What did you think? I ask. “Amazing,” she says. I am struck by her Brummie accent. It has emerged at last, released by a good dinner, like a genie from a lamp. Chefs Food & drink New York United States Rachel Cooke guardian.co.uk
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enlarge DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the NFL Players Association. I don’t begrudge NFL players one penny. After all, they can get one injury and their career goes up in smoke. More importantly, they’ve much more likely to suffer early-onset Alzheimers disease, and that means very expensive health care and support services. What a shame that the NFL is so reluctant to negotiate in good faith: The National Football League descended Friday into turmoil as negotiations between owners and players broke off, setting up a potentially lengthy court battle that could have serious consequences for both the league and the sports business in general.. After spending seven-plus hours negotiating in Washington, D.C., in a 17th day of mediation, leaders of the NFL and the players union said late Friday afternoon that talks had stalled and blamed the other side for the meltdown. Shortly thereafter the union filed paperwork to decertify and 10 players, including stars Tom Brady and Peyton Manning, filed an antitrust lawsuit against the league. The suit seeks to prevent the owners from locking out the players. But the league locked out players as of midnight Saturday. “Significant differences remain,” said DeMaurice Smith, the union’s executive director. “We worked hard,” said NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who dismissed the players’ litigation. “Ultimately this is going to be negotiated.” The league said on Saturday that it was “taking the difficult but necessary step of exercising its right under federal labor low to impose a lockout of the union, ” and called on the union to return to negotiations immediately. Decertifying as a union allows the players to sue the NFL on antitrust grounds. Such litigation is not allowed during collective bargaining .
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