Music maestro, peas... and aubergines and carrots and cucumbers...
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25 November, 2007 08:34
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The generations-old parental admonition to "stop playing with your food" cuts no ice with a group of 11 Austrian musicians who will perform at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival tomorrow. They are members of the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra and they create their instruments from fresh produce bought before every gig - using celeriac bongos, leek violins, recorders carved from carrots and the multi-vegetable ‘cucophone' (assembles from a cucumber, carrot and sweet pepper)to play everything from contemporary jazz to classical favourites.
The group prefer organic produce and use highly sensitive microphones to pick up the subtlest crunch of onion skin or squeak of lettuce leaves. Members promise that their performances will ‘appeal to all the senses', and at the end of most concerts the audience is offered fresh vegetable soup made from the instruments...though hungry fans in Huddersfield tomorrow will be disappointed. Yes! You guessed it - local Health and Safety regulations (which presumably don't have a specific clause about making a meal out of your radish marimba) mean soup cannot be made or dished up...even without the parts the orchestra have blown on.
"We prefer to use organic vegetables," says Ulrich Troyer one of the Orchestra's founders, "but sometimes it is hard if certain vegetables are out of season or if we are playing in countries where they are hard to find. We have to be realistic." He doesn't say whether organic vegetables make better instruments.
"We got the idea one day in 1998 while we were cooking and chopping tomatoes," adds his fellow co-founder Nicklaus Gansterer. "We got fascinated with the sound the chopping made, and from that moment we have started to hear music in a new way."
VVO performs 20 to 30 times a year around the world, including benefit concerts for vegetable workers in Southern Spain, who the musicians say endure "inhumane conditions".
And their gigs are gaining in popularity as well as getting bigger. They played the Festival Hall in London 2004 and their shows in Vienna regularly sell out. The music ranges from reinterpretations of Strauss to nonelectronic electronica. They have covered Kraftwerk's Radioactivity and have even produced a house music track, Greenhouse, using pumpkin and celeriac to create a thumping bass rhythm.
And presumably they were never told by their parents not to play with their food...
‘Mother Russia' gives birth to quintuplets...in Oxford
The odds against giving birth to identical quintuplets are in the vicinity of 55 million to one - or about the same as those of a woman bearing sextuplets - while, thanks to advances in gynaecological care, the likelihood of all of them surviving have improved a hundredfold since the five identical Dionne quintuplets hit the headlines in May 1934. Their birth and survival was an international sensation, and their Canadian parents reaped a small fortune in sponsorships...though little good it did the five girls whom, in later life, complained of abuse and ill treatment and an unhappiness that, for most of them, lingered through much of their adult life.
At the other end of the scale, the five Walton girls born in Ohio 28 years ago had such a happy childhood and home life that, although they left the family home when they were 18, all but one have drifted back to the nest and are living happily with mum and dad. The fifth sister, who "is in a relationship" lives only four miles away and joins her siblings for at least three home-cooked meals each week.
In fact - probably thanks to IVF treatment - multiple births are increasingly frequent and, as far as Atlas has been able to establish, the quins born to a Russian mother in a UK hospital last week were the third set of quintuplets born in the Western world this year. In February this year a woman gave birth to four boys and a girl in the Gaza Strip. The following month a woman gave birth in Pennsylvania in the US to three boys and two girls.
However, the Russian mother's five girls were the first quintuplets born in Britain since 1995 ..though three boys and two girls - Conor, Amy, Cian, Rory and Derbhail - were born to Kevin and Veronica Cassidy in 2001 at Dublin's Rotunda Hospital.
The Moscow music teacher's treatment was financed by a group of Russian philanthropists after doctors in the Russian capital advised her to abort some of her quintuplets. This week she was "recovering well" after giving birth 14 weeks early to the girls in the early hours of last Saturday at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.
The hospital said more than 18 doctors and nurses working in five teams were on hand when the girls were delivered by Caesarean section. They range in weight from 1lb 13oz to 2lb 2oz and are said to be doing well. The woman, who has been cared for by the Oxford Fetal Medicine Unit at the hospital, had contacted experts at the unit after refusing to undergo selective terminations in Russia on religious grounds.
Live births of such a large number of babies are extremely rare, with the risks to the mother judged to be "considerable". The majority either miscarry or the babies are born so early they cannot survive. The mother was said to be particularly high risk and received intensive treatment to prevent her from delivering sooner.
Mr Lawrence Impey, who led her care, said: "I'm very pleased to be able to help this delightful family and that they asked the John Radcliffe Hospital to look after them. Mother is recovering well and the babies are doing well."
The hospital said two of the baby girls have now been transferred to Queen Charlotte's Hospital in London after a team there offered to help. The babies will be cared for in Britain until they are strong and well enough to return to Russia with their parents.
Seven-year-old chemistry prodigy seeks university place
The history of the Western world is littered with so-called child prodigies. In some, such as Mozart, the flames of
infant genius continue to burn brightly into adulthood; in others they stutter and die. Sufia Yusof disappeared from Oxford University - where she was admitted to study mathematics when she was 12 - after writing her third year exams. Her disappearance prompted a widespread manhunt, and when police eventually found her she blamed her parents whose high expectations had placed too much pressure on her. She did not finish her studies and, instead, found work as an administrative assistant with a construction firm.
infant genius continue to burn brightly into adulthood; in others they stutter and die. Sufia Yusof disappeared from Oxford University - where she was admitted to study mathematics when she was 12 - after writing her third year exams. Her disappearance prompted a widespread manhunt, and when police eventually found her she blamed her parents whose high expectations had placed too much pressure on her. She did not finish her studies and, instead, found work as an administrative assistant with a construction firm.
Ruth Lawrence, on the other hand, graduated from Oxford on 1985 with a first class degree in mathematics when she was still 13. She is currently a mathematics professor in Israel. Chessplayer Bobby Fischer became a grand master when he was 15 and went on to beat the Russian world chess champion Boris Spassky, earning UK kudos at the height of the Cold War.
Educational experts and child psychologists reckon that it is relatively easy for universities and other educational institutions of higher learning to cope with prodigy mathematicians and musicians as their size doesn't constrain them in the way that a student of chemistry or physic or medicine might have problems with benches or equipment. However the experts also believe that the lack of a normal childhood can do irreparable long-term psychological damage
Violinist Vanessa-Mae, who with £36 million in the bank last year became the wealthiest British entertainer under 30, began playing the violin when she was 5 and was soon regularly appearing on TV. But Terence Judd, who made his first appearance as a classical pianist with the London Philharmonic Orchestra when he was 12, threw himself to his death off Beachy Head just before Christmas in 1979. He was only 22.
In fact prodigies need gentle nurturing the experts say, and the parents of seven-year-old Ainan Cawley have a particular problem, for he could be the youngest university student yet...if they can find a university which will accept him as a chemistry student. Ainan passed his O level in chemistry when he was six and is currently ready to sit his A levels in the subject. One university has already turned him down because its laboratory benches are too high for him to reach.
His English father and Singapore mother claim that Ainan could construct complex sentences before he was a year old and, according to his father: "By the time he was a toddler he would seek out science books in the library, showing a preference for dense texts with complicated illustrations of scientific matters."
He denied that child prodigies were doomed to failure at university and claimed it would be unfair to allow his son's mind to "stagnate" if he could not progress with his studies in chemistry.
Chemistry Professor Tim White of Singapore has no doubt that Ainan is a "child chemistry prodigy".
"He has an excellent grasp of the subject - he is well able to write and balance equations, draw molecular formulas, understands the chemical properties, knows about radioactivity and so on. Clearly a normal school would be incredibly frustrating for him," he said. But there were also "considerable logistical barriers" to finding the seven-year-old a university place.
Chemistry is an experimental science and unlike gifted child musicians and mathematicians, quite special requirements would be needed," he added.
Meanwhile, the search for a place goes on...
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