Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson

Shura Cherkassky aged 14 with his father and mother, November 1923

at the St Petersburg Conservatoire. He left Russia in 1917 with permission to return, which he did for the first time, somewhat apprehensively, in 1927 while living in France.

During the visit, he travelled south to give concerts in Kiev, Kharkov and Odessa. Seeing Kiev again, he was reminded how beautiful the city was, despite the damage inflicted on it during the 1917 Revolution and its aftermath. Kharkov and Odessa were less well favoured. Odessa’s Hotel Bristol, now the Red Hotel, was decidedly shabby. The city’s trees had been cut down for firewood. And most of the grand villas remained very much as the Bolshevik artillery had left them.

There were the human scars, too. The sister of Prokofiev’s young amanuensis György Popa-Gorchakov had tried to flee Bolshevik-controlled Moldova by swimming the River Prut to claim asylum in Romania. Seized by the Bolsheviks, she was taken to Odessa, where, now barely speaking, she was studying medicine in what Prokofiev in his diary calls a state of ‘almost feral distrustfulness’.

We can’t know what losses Odessa and its famous Jewish community suffered in those years, though we do have the names of some of the city’s more celebrated musical survivors, all children at the time. Emil Gilels, Nathan Milstein, David Oistrakh, Sviatoslav Richter and the last of the old-school conjurors of keyboard magic, Shura Cherkassky. Quite a list.

I’ve just played a much-treasured LP which preserves a recital that Cherkassky gave in London in 1975. It ends with as heart-easingly beautiful a performance of a Schubert Piano Sonata – the A major, D664 – as you’re likely to hear.

We’re lucky to have it. As Cherkassky told The Oldie back in 1993, it was as an over-inquisitive, but happily rather short, nine-year-old in Odessa in 1917 that he’d avoided death by millimetres when a stray bullet from the street fighting below the family apartment grazed his scalp and embedded itself in the wall behind.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON WHOSE TUNE IS IT ANYWAY?

Whenever Ed Sheeran’s name is mentioned, I feel a tug of guilt, as I’m sure anyone who describes themselves as a ‘creative/content-provider’ does.

As you will recall, the ginger-nutted goblin has just won a copyright case in the High Court over his 2017 hit Shape of You. The case was about a grime artist’s claims that the hook of Sheeran’s track was strikingly similar to the hook refrain of his 2015 song Oh Why.

Why, oh why my guilt? Well, m’lud. I’ve written probably millions of words. Not all of them are mine.

Like many, I am a light-fingered snapper-up of unconsidered trifles I feel I can incorporate into the soufflé of my own oeuvre.

For example. I was listening to a BBC Radio 4 programme back in 2008 about the effects of the financial crash on Ireland, and the phrase ‘haves and have-yachts’ dropped from the lips of one of the Irishmen interviewed.

‘I’ll have that,’ I thought, as I was planning a novel written from the perspective of a jobbing journalist who lives in trendy Notting Hill but isn’t married to a hedgie manager/oligarch/ media mogul and is poorer by many noughts than her neighbours – ie me.

My coinage was hailed as rare genius, and I never admitted I hadn’t invented it myself. Even now, I feel I should pay royalties to the man from West Cork I stole it from.

Luckily I’d heard it on the radio – so I got away with it. Ed Sheeran wasn’t the first artist – nor will he be the last – to fight a plagiarism lawsuit. They are now plaguing the industry. The locus classicus remains George Harrison, who had to stump up half a million in 1987 to the Chiffons for copyright infringement of their 1963 hit He’s So Fine, inspiration for his later ditty My Sweet Lord.

Artists are being sued all over the shop. Forensic musicologists are working eight days a week to ascertain whether one rock’n’roller has copied another. Dua Lipa is fighting off not one but two claims that her hit Levitating is substantially similar (the test of plagiarism) to other songs.

To my mind, all these lawsuits miss the point. As a long piece about it on Slate.com points out (see how careful I am to attribute?), when it comes to music it’s all about the vibe – so hard to define or isolate. It’s almost impossible to prove whether any similarity is copying or coincidence.

I’m not prone to treacly sentiment, but surely the test of a pop song is not whether a few bars of the score look the same on the page. It’s how it makes you feel.