Charles Ives at Bridgewater Hall

A few years ago, I came across a piece by the American composer Charles Ives and I fell in love with it. It is titled The Unanswered Question and starts off with a faint melodious section played by the strings. Whilst the piece initially flirts with romanticism, within a few bars a dissonant call from the brass overlays the strings. As the strings continue, a signal trumpet call gains strength and is undercut by a wood wind theme, subversive to both strings and its brass brothers in arms. (there is a NYPhil version on youtube here)

Charles Ives (1878-1954)

The piece is only less than 5 mins long but it is impressive and leaves one with a fully painted mental picture. Ives' music, it seemed to me back then, was like a painting by Edward Hopper, only that Ives was painting outside urban scences where Hopper wanted to look into the inside of people's places from outside.

That Ives composed radically metropolitan scences shows even more clearly in his piece Central Park in the Dark. If you did not know the title, the ever increasing noise of urban sounds swelling to a mighty explosion in the piece would leave you in no doubt that you are in the middle of a city.

What Ives manages however is to portray the fragile contrast between a city's harmonic background bordering on silence and the discordant hubbub that surrounds us on a daily basis. The piece starts off in near silence with the strings once again setting the scene, this time less melodious, giving off a whiff of a metalic sound. As the wood winds intermittently intersect with the strings, the scene still remains distant in sound and impact on the listener.

Next, the flute takes up a theme and hovers above strings and wood winds. None of them even attempt to merge or meld into one coherent whole. Finally a singular violin and a piano furnish additional moments of urban sounds, until all climaxes in pandemonium as we know it from the streets of New York.

Ives added a beautiful note of contrast as the musical tumult cuts out suddenly and the strings are heard to continue to the very end of the piece. It creates a moment of surprise as you realise they have been there all along, no matter how loud the city was.

The piece's crescendo is difficult to play (there is a Bernstein/NYPhil version here). In particular, what appears like an unwanted disturbances of the strings by random noise actually requires careful calibration of the sound levels. The BBC Philharmonic conducted by John Storgards gave their all but at times it was not quite enough. In particular, as the flute and piano starts to overlay the string theme, the string section needs to be low enough, almost whispering, so that flute and piano are recognised as distinct voices. The Bridgewater Hall has a decent acoustic but the orchestra did not quite pull it off. From where I sat in the centre of the stalls the flute was not quite audible and the single violin, played sensitively by the concertmaster, did not quite emerge as different from the main body of sound.

It was more a confluence of music rather than a caleidoscope of discrete notes from different players. Still, it was amazing to hear this piece live for the first time.

The evening also contained a muscular rendition of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, delivered with gusto by Peter Donohoe. I prefer the version for Jazz orchestra over the full orchestral arrangement (by Ferde Grofe) but both Donohoe and the BBC Orchestra gave a spirited performance which made me tap along with my foot.

The evening ended with George Antheil's Symphony No. 6, a pleasing piece of work sitting comfortably somewhere between Stravinsky and Shostakovich and a composition by George Walker called Lilacs. Walker set his music to Walt Whitman's 'When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom'd'. Joshua Ellicott gave it a rounded sound, perhaps at times struggling against an overwhelming orchestra, and it made me wish to hear more from this song cycle.

The evening concert was recorded for broadcast on Wednesday 14th Feb as part of the BBC Radio 3 in Concert Series. So you can tune into BBC Radio 3 next Wednesday at 7.30pm to hear it or catch up with it on BBC iPlayer.

Why Andy Burnham will never be health secretary (again)

Labour has built its electoral strategy for the May election around the NHS. That made sense given it polls strongly on the NHS. Yet, its NHS policy boils down to only two components: a robust rebuttal of the so-called 'privatisation' of the NHS and a proposal to integrate health and social care provision. Both are looking increasingly too weak to function as the main pillar of a general election strategy and here is why.

'Privatisation' is a serious concern for many people in the UK. Labour has read the polls carefully and consistently identified the Health and Social Care Act 2012 as being widely discredited. Andy Burnham, the Labour's shadow health secretary, built his health care policy around the repeal of the Act. This has brought him plaudits from people who dislike tampering with the NHS. However, the agreement around the rejection of the Act is brittle and insufficient to act as long term policy. And the electoral appeal of 'anti-privitisation' rhetoric does not extend much further than Labour's core supporters. In addition, repealing the Act may also quickly emerge as disruptive to the fabric of the NHS. The 'anti-privatisation' agenda could thus become tarnished with exactly the same brush as the Act itself: endless re-organisation of the health care service.

Going nowhere - Labour's Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham (Foto: EPA)

To offer something positive, Burnham suggested to integrate health and social care. Yet, his proposal, three years in the making, still remains obscure. Health care through the NHS is free, whilst social care is means tested. Burnham's proposal was riddled with contradictions and he knew it. So, with only slightly more than 2 months to go to the general election, he has still not spelled out how the integration of the NHS and social care is to be achieved. The policy remains a shell at best.

Cue George Osborne. On Thursday, the Chancellor announced that Greater Manchester will have direct control over the entire NHS budget for its area. In 2017, the elected Mayor of Manchester will assume full responsibility for social care and health care provision for almost 3 million people. It's hard not to see this as a preemptive stroke of genius by the Chancellor (and a snub to Burnham by the local Labour councillors who did not even bother to inform him about the imminent agreement). Without having to fill in the detail of HOW to integrate health and social care, Osborne has given local authorities the powers to embark on integration as a local response to local problems.

The consequences are devastating for Burnham. As the consensus around his 'anti-privatisation' rhetoric becomes increasingly fragile and reveals its ideological thrust, his other main policy proposal is stuck in the mud of detail. In the meantime, Osborne devolves health care budgets to local authorities, strengthening the narrative around local accountability without having to provide any detailed health care policy on the complexities of integration.

The upshot is that Labour's health policy hangs by a thread and so does Burnham's political career. During his tenure as shadow health secretary he has failed to develop any significant and substantive policy proposals and the Labour leadership knows this. Their entire electoral strategy was built around the NHS and Burnham has left their flank undefended and open to attack. He is likely to pay the price for this blunder.