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• Simon Hewitt Jones, Violinist

  English concert violinist. Asking essential questions about what's happening to music and the arts, and the role of the violin in contemporary world culture.

• Contact Me: T: +44 (0) 20 7060 0607 E: shj [at] courtlanemusic [dot] com W: www.courtlanemusic.com Instant: Message My iPhone

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Soprano Dima Bawab and Palestinian soloists perform the Queen of 1001 Nights aria with the Choir of London Orchestra conducted by Tim Brown at the Palestine Mozart Festival, Bethlehem, April 2007.
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Recorded in Bethlehem using the internal camera/mic of an Apple MacBook

I’m really sorry to announce this at such short notice but the recital at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge this coming Friday has been cancelled because of a major error by the promoter. I’m afraid I’ve only just learnt about this. They were extremely apologetic, but I’m sorry for the disappointment.

Obviously this is very frustrating and […]

I thought I’d come home, post some videos of the Bethlehem concert, then maybe post a kind of ‘conclusion’ post about the process of cultural ‘engagement’. But things don’t really work out like that. You can’t just move on. Besides, I can’t upload the videos for another week or so because of a YouTube problem.
I […]

The final concert in Jerusalem was a beautiful, memorable event. An unbelievably large, responsive audience. An intense performance. Some very moving playing. A gift of a dove of peace from Palestinian choirs. Several sorrowful goodbyes.
Four of our number - Palestinians - couldn’t perform. Couldn’t be there. One was the solo Ney player (a kind of […]

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RSS Users: If you cannot see the video, click here to view it on the website.

I wasn’t going to post about this:
Pearls Before Breakfast
But every music blogger and newspaper opinion person having had their $0.10, may I just ask if I am the only person not to be the slightest bit surprised by this? Interestingly, the only writers I read who really understood what was going on here are professional […]

I don’t think I ever fully introduced to you the Choir of London and the Palestine Mozart Festival, the websites of which can be found here and here respectively. I’m simply a guest of these amazing organizations (giving chamber music performances in the first week; leading the COL Orchestra in the […]

I wrote this shortly after arriving in Jerusalem, but didn’t publish it at the time.

The reality of this part of the world hits you after about three days. Everyone’s kind of found a rhythm of existence. People have adapted from sleep, recovered from travel, started rehearsing, and begun to engage with the local community; to […]

Those of you who have followed The Violin Blog for more than a few months will know that I have had quite a lot of trouble with E strings in the past. So you can imagine the panic I was in last week when, upon arriving in Jerusalem, I suddenly lost two E […]

I didn’t correctly credit Sami Hammad’s article ‘Nablus Culture’ - this was originally published in ‘This Week In Palestine’ magazine, which can be found here.

An extraordinary first concert of Mozart’s Requiem at Ramallah’s Cultural Palace is met with several standing ovations from an emotional, 600-strong Palestinian audience (The encore of Mozart’s Queen of the Night, Arabic-style, has to be heard to be believed!). We stay overnight in Ramallah’s best hotel.

Audience members take their seats at Ramallah’s Cultural […]

How do you address an audience you cannot know? Can you please everyone? (Of course not). When is it right to trivialize tragedy or disaster as a coping mechanism? What if it’s someone else’s tragedy?
What place does an outsider have to interact, engage, question, joke, empathize, become involved, stay detached? Can you laugh in the […]

After a Ramallah concert, a couple of us decided to stay late in the city with some ex-pats who were living there. We ended up at one of their houses, opposite the glamourous new Bank of Palestine building (replete with bulletholed windows…)
It got to 3am and it became obvious to me, and T (from the […]

The impression I’d got before I arrived here was that the, shall we say, highly enclosed territories, were extremely starved of culture. Though this is very much the case in Nablus - purportedly a city that has lacked even a movie theatre for over eight years - there are, at least where resources are available, […]

I just heard two colleagues reading through Wieniawski’s fun little Etude-Caprices, and remembered that David Worswick & I made an MP3 recording for the radio broadcasts that we did last December to promote the Virtuoso Violin tour.
Grab it here!:
Download Free MP3: Wieniawski, Etude-Caprice No.1 (excerpt)

And perhaps I can take this opportunity to remind you that, […]

Our host in Nablus was Sammi Hammad, an engineer who in 2005 founded Nablus the Culture, a foundation for the promotion and re-establishment of culture in Nablus. The foundation also offers music lessons to young Nablusis in collaboration with the Barenboim-Said Foundation.

Sami Hammad (right), with John Harte (director of the […]

We’re based in Jerusalem, with regular excursions to Ramallah and, in the coming week, Bethlehem. Today we are also performing Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in Nablus. (Map from Wikipedia)

From April 1st-15th, I’m blogging and videocasting directly from the Choir of London’s Palestine Mozart Festival in Israel and the Occupied Territories. If you wish to find out […]

This is a reprint of a recent article in This Week In Palestine by Sami Hammad, director of Nablus The Culture, Nablus’ new cultural centre, and our host in Nablus today.

Manshieh and Public Library

Legendary late Arab singer Oum Kulthoum

Nablus the Culture Center

Harpsicord to cross the C.P.

Manko Center and Library

Children’s Cultural Center

In the Spotlight: Nablus Culture
[…]

Today we’re visiting Nablus, one of the most isolated cities in the West Bank, and certainly one of the most dangerous. Dangerous not just because of the conflict, but also because of the standard of taxi driving…
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[in fact, shortly after I took this, two of our colleagues were caught up in […]

If you didn’t hear of the recent Apple/EMI decision to make music available for download with no DRM at all (albeit at a slightly higher price), read about it here. Sure this is good for music-lovers, but you might be wondering why there’s such a fuss, and why some people think this is so significant.
In […]

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