<<  -- 3 --  Peter Dale    FROM THE HEART

At his best, Mellers flatters the reader into realising that they know, after all, more than they think they know. He talks across to you, not down. He informs, but he doesn't instruct, just as when he is involved with music he looks rather than merely sees, listens rather simply hears. And, best of all, he never loses sight of what a simply marvellous thing music is. That sense of being privileged when you hear great music -- but only as the birth-right of every human being -- is perhaps his greatest gift to his readers and what renders him so characteristically exciting and challenging and contentious and revisionary too sometimes (thank goodness).

In his most recent review for Music & Vision (hesitating to say 'last', though apparently it must be so) Mellers characteristically closes his searchingly analytical remarks about Ravel's L'Enfant and Stravinsky's Petrouchka at Opera North with a deft touch (almost parenthetical, as it happens) which, for all that scholarly magisterium, returns the music to both its primary origins in composers and performers and its ultimate goal in listeners: the human heart. He writes of Ravel 'bringing tears to the eyes'.

From the heart -- and by way of heads enormously enriched by the writings of Wilfrid Mellers -- we wish him a long, musical and thoroughly deserved retirement.