I'll think of something later

Learning the steps

2012-01-06T12:19:00.015Z

Take Frederick Ashton’s 1937 skating divertissement Les Patineurs: a trifle light as air, but oh, the complex demands that went into making it seem so. Balletic art, like any other, should conceal its difficulties, but I do find myself becoming ever more reverent in my attitude to the discipline of dance. And I wish I knew more about its steps and positions. So far my knowledge is as tentative as my gardening – I know the species I admire, in this case stunners like the multiple fouettés, the fabulous fish and fan dives, but not much in between. 2012 would be a good year for learning the vocabulary: but how – in classes, or just passively, online? At any rate I did feel last year that I shouldn’t sound off about ballet performances until I’d got more detailed knowledge about the moves under my belt.

Which is why the little extras served up on the new Ashton triple bill DVD are so meaningful. Actually it’s not exactly new, putting together a fair conspectus of Royal Ballet stars from 2004 – including Bussell and Samodurov – alongside those still very much active in 2010 (which is when Les Patineurs was filmed).

As I only have 30 words on it in a BBC Music Magazine roundup, it must be OK to rhapsodise about the bonuses to Les Patineurs, all three of which cast a richer light on Ashton's choreography to Meyerbeer's music (the Constant Lambert arrangements start so well, with extreme registers in the galumphing waltz, but don't go on to shine a la Lanchbery). You’d probably guess that the insouciant role of the Blue Boy is a toughie, but how much more respect I had for spunky Steven McRae (pictured up top by Bill Cooper) after I’d watched the rehearsal sequence in which he’s put through Ashton’s paces by self-styled caretaker of a tradition Christopher Carr. You'll need to double-click for the full picture.

I wasn't expecting it to appear on YouTube, and it wasn't there when I started writing, but now it is. Which makes some of my precis redundant, so I've hastily trimmed; but watch it through for wisdoms on the fresh up-to-dateness of the ballet, the difficulty for 1937, the breathtaking rehearsal work on the butterfly jumps which have defeated some male dancers - Baryshnikov included - though clearly not the original performer, Harold Turner. 'Head lower into the centre of the circle', urges Carr, 'legs flying round the outside...The hard bit is after you've done one set to get ready to go again.' And of course the sequence has to finish with the 'iconic' ending, 'hops in second and continuously turning until the curtain comes down'.

Well, that was clear, at least in the demonstration. And here's the Blue Boy's first solo - sadly not the number featuring the butterfly leaps - between the witty entry of the Blue Girls (Samantha Raine and Akane Takada) and the Pas de deux of the Couple in White (Sarah Lamb and Rupert Pennefather).

What's not to 'get' in that? Whereas you’d have to be a real ballet expert to understand the subtleties of Ashton’s Scènes de Ballet, third on the DVD bill – for some insiders, his finest achievement. I can sense the finer geometric points, but not as acutely as I do Balanchine’s extraordinary rendition of another Stravinsky score which dances even though it was never intended for choreography, the delectable Capriccio for piano and orchestra in its places as the second, ‘Rubies', ballet of the diverse Jewels.

Whatever the chic New York gimmick that prompted this troika of Balanchine-filtered French (to Fauré), American (to the Stravinsky) and Russian (four movements of Tchaikovsky's Third Symphony) styles, it makes a satisfying whole. There are two magical short Pas de Deux in 'Emeralds', and inevitably the prima ballerina assoluta Ulyana Lopatkina glitters aristocratically in 'Diamonds', but my heart truly leaped at the centrepiece of 'Rubies', where Irina Golub's extensions and her playful mirror-work with Andrian Fadeyev make the most immediate impression.

Technically, it's superb, but Balanchine proves once again that no choreography is worth its salt if it doesn't provide a perfect reflection of music that, in this case, is chameleonic and elusive. Which I suppose brings me back to first the notes, then the steps.

Happy endings

2011-12-30T19:47:00.019Z

Very well, Hans Sachs and Fairy Edna may have nothing else in common, but they do both help an outsider and a merchant's daughter in difficulties towards a wedding. And to be honest, the panto in Wimbledon spoke more often to my depths - or my shallows, though what's as profound as Homeric laughter? - than the Royal Opera's Meistersinger revival (the final scene of which is pictured above by Clive Barda). There were passing pleasures, all the same, in the second of the two comedies which rounded off a year rich in events.

I tried to unpluck the best from its varied tapestry in my Arts Desk 2011 choice, but even then I found I'd missed a few (how could I not have squeezed in Kazushi Ono's CBSO Mahler Resurrection Symphony?) I needn't repeat the results here except for the crème de la crème: in terms of Gesamtkunstwerk, it was a tough choice between Christopher Alden's production of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Sasha Regan's riotous but also very moving all male G&S Iolanthe, full of attractive strangers and responding well to Wilton's Music Hall magic (and there's another special event I left out - Alina Ibragimova's recital-happening at Wilton's in colloboration with the Brothers Quay. I think Sussie Ahlburg's photo was taken at the concert's first, Manchester venue, but never mind).

Thought I ought to do a quick coast back over the 2011 blog, too, for other signifiers. Nothing new about the most entertaining book I read all year, Simon Winder's Germania - others rail against its flippancy, but he makes no bones about it - or the most revelatory author, Halldor Laxness, though after Under the Glacier and Independent People, I'm getting stuck with the disconsolate whimsy of World Light. Nothing new either about all seven series of The West Wing, after which everything on telly comes across as flat and unprofitable (dipping into BBC drama, it always seems well acted but poorly scripted. And could you believe the direness of Ab Fab? I couldn't).

The places I fell in love with, either for the first time or again, are too numerous to mention, but I'll try - from Darwin's Down House, the treasures within Cologne's churches and the unpickled German small-town perfection of Göttingen to the wilds of Connemara and the Burren in Ireland, the monastery of Tioumliline, the medina of Meknes and the beautifully-sited Roman town of Volubilis (pictured above again, why not? )in Morocco and - of course, the highlight - the top of Iceland's Snæfellsjökull and its lavafields/slopes running down to a blue, blue sea. Of course the whole place would tell a different story in wind and rain, but that's not how we saw it.

Here's hoping that we do head back to Iceland's south coast in 2012. And may your year be as adventurous as you want it to be.

Bergman filming Trollflöjten

2011-12-28T17:45:00.014Z

That’s The Magic Flute in Swedish as the greatest of filmmakers (pictured on the left in the above photo) saw it, for me the best opera movie ever. Fellow Bergman buff David Thompson had kindly put together for me a few bits and pieces I’d never seen, and the other evening we got round to watching the Swedish one-hour documentary on the making of Trollflöjten with French subtitles. Would you believe the film itself still hasn’t been issued in Region 1 form, despite talk last year; I treasure all the more my Criterion copy, and I was pleased to pick up the soundtrack in an Oxfam shop - the libretto is interlaced with further Bergman commentary.

What comes across in these loosely-filmed ‘backstage’ scenes – as in the similar documentary on Fanny and Alexander – is the approach of a passionate enthusiast as well as a skilled practitioner getting right in there, with lots of laughter and freewheeling speeches, plenty of affectionate laying-on of hands (we see the director walking rather comically with the Sarastro, Ulrik Cold, and chivvying a dubious Josef Köstlinger in Tamino’s crucial later trials). It all reinforces the film’s greatest quality – that these are real people delivering their homilies and their humanity to us at very close quarters: chamber-cinema opera, in short. And that’s clearly part of the quality Bergman wanted to reproduce; one of the many magical moments is when he gets Tamino and Pamina at their first actual meeting to stare into each other’s eyes very much face to face, nearly touching but just not quite, at least not until she grasps him when Sarastro punishes Monostatos.

The other magic comes from the way the stage action moves from the truly pretty to the scarily metaphysical, but with a weather eye on all the backstage business Bergman loves to conjure in films from Sawdust and Tinsel to Fanny and Alexander and After the Rehearsal. It’s telling both that we see him examining this watercolour showing the cast preparing for a Weimar performance in 1794 under Goethe’s leadership, and that it graces the cover of the recording booklet. I didn’t find its representation anywhere else.

The documentary jumps between the sound recording, where Bergman seems to have delivered his rhapsodic observations on Mozart unselfconsciously to all and sundry

and the filming. The heart of the film, stitched together from both, is when Bergman tells the assembled company in the recording studio that the trials of fire and water remind him of Leverkühn’s meeting with the devil in Mann’s Doktor Faustus. He freely paraphrases what the devil actually says of hell – that it’s two vast rooms, one hot enough to melt granite, the other unbearably cold, between which the inhabitants rush frenziedly.

So we have the souls crying out in silent agony as they roast, and writhing at the bottom of the ocean, while all the while the flute weaves its solemn magic in total contradiction of all that visual frenzy.

Curiously the one moment that had the greatest significance of all for Bergman doesn’t figure in the documentary, though he deals with some of its points in general. This is Tamino’s questioning, after his disorienting encounter with the Speaker, whether the darkness will ever end, when the light will come, and the two answers. You may not agree with everything Bergman says here in the commentary accompanying the libretto, but you can see how deeply it affected him:

For me this is the most agitating music there is. These twelve measures involve two questions at the outermost limits of life - and two answers. When Mozart wrote this music, he was very ill, and he felt the touch of death [make of that what you will]. In a moment of despair and courage, he shouts his question: 'O dark night, when will you disappear? When will I find light in darkness?'

And then comes the answer from the chorus, clear and ambivalent: 'Soon, soon or never more'. Mozart, fatally ill, asks his questions in darkness and from this darkness he answers himself - or does he get an answer? I have never felt so close to the deepest secret of spiritual intuition as just here, at this moment.

And then the other question: 'Does Pamina still live?' The music translates the little question of the text into a big and eternal question: Does Love live? Is Love real? The answer comes quivering and hopeful: 'Pa-mi-na still lives!' Love exists. Love is real in the world of man.

It can't save the protagonist of Bergman's most frightening film, Hour of the Wolf. Here, some years before he filmed The Magic Flute, Bergman puts his own sentiments into the mouth of one of his creepiest characters. The puppet-theatre scene occurs at 5'36 into this 'dining with vampires' sequence.

Three church visits and a sermon

2011-12-22T17:57:00.016Z

Well, that's just about it: one and a half seasonal events over the past week or so - not counting panto and ballet, of course - and a third setting-foot inside a church for a bit of peace and quiet.

Events first: the Maytree fundraiser in St Botolph's Aldgate included several eloquent, touching speeches from those wonderful people involved with the 'sanctuary for the suicidal'; vivid readings including an evocation of Mole's makeshift good cheer from The Wind in the Willows, John Julius Norwich's now-familiar take on The Twelve Days of Christmas - always worth hearing when delivered as well as this - and U A Fanthorpe poems beautifully read by Adjoa Andoh; and the handbells - ah, those handbells! Such a surprisingly dulcet art, especially when applied to the little wisdom of Papageno and Pamina in the Act 1 finale of The Magic Flute.

And on Sunday after birthday revels for two-year-old Mirabel, we went round the corner with her ma and friends to St Leonard's Shoreditch.

That's right, 'as seen on TV' in the gently charming and ever so slightly subversive Rev.. The carols-by-candlelight event was packed, and mostly with young folk from the arty-bohemian vicinity - but no mocking renditions of 'Jerusalem' (if you've seen the humiliating Midnight Mass episode of Rev., you'll know what I mean).

And there may have been a sermonish speech from St Leonard's own laidback Rev., but I blush to say we didn't have a chance to find out since we left our money in the plate and exited halfway through, as intended, for a more profane supper up in Highbury. The sermon I've taken for the season was this.

Pullman's central conceit is of two brothers, one of whom is hellbent, if you'll pardon the expression, on making his sibling's not entirely good but always human words and deeds - glad Pullman doesn't go soft on the angry, militant side of Jesus - sexier for posterity. Interestingly, Jesus's most extended speech, in Gethsemane, isn't overheard by brother Christ but, of course, related by the narrator - and it distils the very simple message of this alternative story: 'as soon as men who believe they're doing God's will get hold of power, whether it's in a household or a village or in Jerusalem or in Rome itself, the devil enters into them'.

As for the death of Jesus and the resurrection of Christ - well, that's a punchline I realise I may have given away. It's clever and rings true enough for me but still feels somehow a little undernourishing.

Tuesday's church visit was made spontaneously during a visit to the ma-in-law down in Rye. I always like to do a circuit of the cobbled streets up the hill, and no matter the time of year the 'square' - more a graveyard with houses around it - at the top is quite a sanctuary. But I'm not sure I've been inside St Mary's since I was a child. Its size is surprising, with the Clare Chapel to your left as you enter and Norman remains embedded in the North Transept.

The glass is all Victorian and 20th century, but I'm developing a fondness for those later angels like the one up top (Kempe, 1896, I think). A Burne Jones design executed by William Morris & Co is dismissed by Nairn and Pevsner with one word - 'sentimental' - but it's characteristic.

I do like the big windows local literary hero E F Benson had dedicated in the late 1920s and early '30s to family members: at the east end to his parents - J's just read a book about the very remarkable mother - and in the south transept (finest of all but too dark to capture) to brother A C of 'Land of Hope and Glory' fame. The nativity of 1933 is slightly twee but colourful.

And I suppose one of the original Quarter Boys whose fibreglass replicas stand either side of the clock outside will serve as suitably seasonal cherubic ambassador of good will to all readers.

Death in the south

2011-12-19T11:00:00.015Z

Romantic their poetic aspirations and their post-mortem canonisation may have been, but there was nothing mythical about the deaths of Keats and Shelley. I thought I owed my latest, serendipitous visit to their graves in the quiet corner of Rome that is the non-Catholic cemetery by the pyramid of Cestius a bit more background reading. Daisy Hay's Young Romantics proposes not only a more social history of the way in which the lives of the Shelleys were entangled with Byron as well as the lesser figure of Leigh Hunt, but a bigger celebration of those long-suffering half-sisters Mary Shelley and Claire (Jane) Clairmont.

Keats, alas, is a marginal figure in Hay's history - a shame, since he was probably the nicest of the male pack. Hay makes it clear what a catastrophe was his last-minute bolt for Rome in late 1820 with the helper who's buried beside him, the artist Joseph Severn.

The idea was to seek a warmer clime for Keats's advanced tuberculosis, but they should never have left England: the stormy channel crossing in cramped conditions was a nightmare for a sick man, and all Severn could do in those cramped lodgings by the Spanish Steps was try and allay his friend's 'dread of never seeing [England] more' and attempt to ease a horrible death. There's still a waft of bitterness from the inscription on Keats's grave, designed by Severn and Charles Brown

though a fairer plaque is set into the wall nearby.

This is the most open, green corner of the cemetery with views over to the pyramid.

Three-year old William Shelley had been buried nearby, one of several young victims of his parents' roving around Italy. He succumbed to malaria in Rome; not long before his baby sister Clara had fallen sick on an unnecessary, hasty and uncomfortable journey to Venice, and died in her mother's arms. The cause, as with so many unhappy instances in the fates of the Shelleys, sprang from Lord Byron's unfortunate liaison with Claire, which led the Shelley-Clairmont trio to Italy in the first place. This is hardly the place to try and untangle its web, but the offshoot of that relationship was in many ways the most tragic figure of all, the little girl Allegra - separated from her doting mother after the early months, and consigned by Byron against all Claire's pleadings to a convent on unhealthy land, where she died aged five.

In all this, one thing seems clear: for all the vaunted equality of the women - for which Mary's mother Mary Wollstonecraft had fought so hard - the men always closed ranks. But how young, how untested, they all were! Mary was still in her early twenties when, having suffered miscarriages, the loss of two treasured children and several depressions which seem all too explicable, Shelley (depicted by Severn in a posthumous image above writing Prometheus Unbound in the Baths of Caracalla) was drowned in the Bay of Lerici - an inexperienced boatman in a poorly constructed vessel, the Don Juan. Shelley's preferred name had been the Ariel, which may partly account for the inscription on the grave I found so useful for my only-connect Arts Desk piece on Abbado's Shakespeare programme.

But what's in the grave? All that remained from a messy attempted cremation of the disfigured, washed-up corpse on the beach at Viareggio was an organ Hay surmises was the liver rather than the heart, and even that was squabbled over before being handed over to Mary. And there it is, cor cordium. Bit of a mystery why Edward Trelawny, Shelley's bragging friend of less than a year, should be buried alongside him; but he'd bought the plot of land, and there he was interred at the age of 88 in 1881. Mary as keeper of the flame had lived on until 1851, always doing the decent thing by her late husband and preserving a measure of immortality through her Frankenstein. Claire maintained an uneasy independence as governess and died in 1879, almost 60 years after Shelley's drowning.

From Tarby to Edna in Wimbledon

2011-12-16T13:15:00.019Z

My jaw aches. That's partly because the root-canal treatment continues weekly, with various attendant degrees of horror, but mostly because I went from a grim hour or so in the dentist's chair yesterday to laughing 'til I cried at the most relentlessly funny show I've seen since the last production of Noises Off. Yes, good people, a panto. The Arts Desk needed Dick Whittington at the New Theatre Wimbledon covered, and I went with the idea in mind that the global gigastar of Moonie Ponds, Dame Edna Everage, would be up to her usual tricks if all else failed.

She was, but how I underestimated the rest, and what a shame the ten-year-old I thought would love it turned his nose up at the idea of a drag star (my fellow child-at-heart Edwina came instead, and marked it way above the Hackney Empire panto she'd seen the previous evening). The comedy hardly ever let up; different kinds and levels of humour, all first-rate, came from Renaissance writer-director-dame Eric Potts as Sarah the Cook (alas, the only picture they sent me of him, along with the above, has the dame marginal to the Dame)

as well as Kev Orkian charming the pants off us as a stand-up Idle Jack - Charles Spencer, how could you not be amused? - and break-dancing small personage Ben Goffe. The three of them pulled off an endless - and endlessly funny - routine in the second act of which the Marx Brothers would have been proud. But here I repeat myself; read the review.

There I also self-indulgently divulged when I last saw panto in Wimbledon: as a cub scout, lured backstage by peer pressure to get Jimmy ('Tarby')Tarbuck's autograph after Jack and the Beanstalk. Strange to tell, I don't remember nearly as much about it as I do about an earlier Cinderella at the London Palladium with Cliff Richard and the Shadows, no doubt prompted by the soundtrack which I still possess.

The songs are good! And so are the Shadows' instrumental numbers. And look at young Cliff back in 1967.

I'm told I had one of my usual agonising childhood ear infections, and remember being propped in front of the black and white telly shortly afterwards. The only other panto of which I have any memory is one in which a muscle man in leopardskin underpants did his routine to the usual tune, though don't ask me where that was.

As for Wimbledon Theatre, now the New Wimbledon Theatre under the very canny management of the Ambassador Theatre Group, it hasn't changed within and strikes me now as rather beautiful and well-preserved of its ilk. Certainly the best thing I saw there in my youth, apart from very good London Transport Players shows which my grandfather, who worked for LT, always insisted we saw, was a London Festival Ballet Nutcracker. This would have been 1970 - must dig out the season programme, which I think lurks in a box in my mother's loft. Galina Samtsova and Alan Dubreuil were the Sugar-Plum Fairy and Prince Orshad-Coqueluche (that's Coughdrop to you, so much for the poetry of the Pas de Deux), but of course I was much more struck by the sets and the score. And this was probably the fullest Tchaikovsky version ever; when elsewhere has anyone seen Mother G(C)igogne, that fabulous number which ought to end the divertissement (and did in 1892; how surprised I am to find Vsevolozhsky's original design reproducable)?

And I bet few of you have seen the English sailor's dance in the divertissement. Which as it resurfaced many years later on CD, turns out to be John Lanchbery's arrangement of Tchaikovsky's sketches for a Gigue or Jig. That was class, and I'm sure I sensed it: no Nutcracker since, other than Matthew Bourne's reinvention, has come anywhere close for me.

Emperors and popes: mostly bad, some mixed

2011-12-14T11:17:00.019Z

What a sorry but enticing saga is the history of Rome – rather oddly told, it has to be admitted, in Robert Hughes’s popular and understandably art-skewed book bearing the city's name as title. Odd and skewed since, once the glory days and the era of the Grand Tour are over, Hughes seems to be stumped for specifically Roman material and goes tramping all over Italy, and sometimes the rest of Europe. He’s also no Simon Winder – see one of my endless paeans to Germania – in that the personal flavour of the Prologue gets lost in the chronological, if still selective, account that follows.

Yet Hughes can be entertainingly wrathful on the grandeur and follies of emperors and popes. He questions, as any good historian must, the story of Rome as told entirely from a Christian perspective. Horrible things happened to the early Christians, to be sure; but equally horrible and worse tortures lay in store for the so-called Pagans (a term I had to reassess, since of course it embraces so much of the humanities) under the so-called Christian emperors.

I do like the sound of the emperor Julian – some ‘Apostate’; it simply transpires that the fledgling Christianity didn’t speak to him; but he never went round stoking any fires under the believers.

Besides, one forgets that Julian’s predecessor Constantine wasn’t exactly a ‘Christian emperor’ in the all-embracing way we think of it. Tolerant of the Roman majority and no zealot after his ‘vision’ at the Ponte Milvio, he was nevertheless another of those family monsters – putting his own son by an early marriage to death on the accusation of a later wife, boiling her alive in the hot-room of the palace when it turned out she’d lied. No wonder mamma Helena sublimated her sorrow by going off round the middle east buying up bits of cross and less easily transportable objects.

Much worse for history, though, was the later, forged ‘Donation of Constantine’ which gave free rein to papal infallibility. And it’s no surprise, of course, that most of the later popes wallowed in luxury and persecuted the faithless with a zeal that puts even Caligula and Nero to shame. But here the paradoxes accumulate, especially since many who would seem to us the worst have given us Rome as we so wonderingly know it. Most likeable to a libertarian is Leo X, Giovanni de’Medici, who kept a pet elephant, led a shameless gay sex life and honoured scholars and poets.

But his feckless spending led to that sale of indulgences, posts and art treasures which gave his polar opposite, Martin Luther, fuel to his rightful indignation. Nevertheless I know which I’d rather invite to an ideal dinner party.

Even the anti-religious Hughes has mixed feelings about the ‘manic-impressive’ Sixtus V. Stalin could hardly have done a better job on purging the criminality which beset Rome when Sixtus, born Felice Peretti, came to power in 1585.

He drove many of the spectacular lines we see through Rome today, often at the expense of the classical, with which he held no truck – other than to show its inferiority to Christianity; the tale of the dragging of the Egyptian obelisk from the back of St Peter’s to stand at the centre of the square in front takes on Neronian dimensions. He also stuck a statue of St Peter, cast from melted-down classical bronzes, on top of the magnificent Trajan’s column. As Hughes reports, ‘in dedicating the statue of Peter, His Holiness explained that such a monument as Trajan’s could become worthy to bear the effigy of Christ’s Vicar on Earth only if it were rededicated in the cause of the Catholic Church – an astonishing piece of casuistry’.

Another tale chills the blood but simultaneously warms one’s spirit to know that ordinary Romans did sometimes fight back: here's what followed an accusation carried out in the traditional dialogue between the messages posted on the old statue called the Pasquino (a BC Greek sculpture of Menelaus) near the Piazza Navona and those on the river-god Marforio outside the Travertine Prison (now at the entrance to the Capitoline Museums on the Campidoglio). Let Hughes tell the tale:

…one day during the reign of Sixtus V Pasquino was seen wearing a horribly filthy shirt. Why, Marforio wanted to know, did he wear such a stinking rag? Because Donna Camilla was the pope’s sister, who in her humbler days had been a washerwoman but had just been ennobled by His Holiness.

There was a limit to what great figures would endure from Pasquino, and this crossed the line. It got to the ears of Sixtus, who let it be known that if the anonymous satirist owned up to writing it, his life would be spared and he would receive a present of one thousand pistoles, cash. But if anyone else found him out and denounced him, he would be hanged. Naturally the nameless graffitist – for who was going to turn down such a reward? – confessed. Sixtus V gave him the money and spared his life, but unsportingly added that ‘We have reserved for Ourselves the power of cutting off your hands and boring your tongue through, to prevent your being so witty in future’. But nothing would shut Pasquino up; he had a hundred tongues and two hundred hands. The very next Sunday he was seen draped in a freshly laundered, still-wet shirt, to dry it in the sun. Marforio wondered why he couldn’t wait until Monday. ‘There’s no time to lose,’ said Pasquino, thinking of His Holiness’s taxation habits. ‘If I stay until tomorrow perhaps I’ll have to pay for the sunshine’.

Anyway, it’s Sixtus we have to thank for some of Rome’s avenues and the fountains I much admired on my dawn walk back to Termini the other Monday. But as far as the human cost is concerned, compared to all this, the caprices of Pio Nono in the 19th century and Mussolini (and Berlusconi) in the 20th seem like childsplay.

15/12 - a neat addition from Banksy and his disfigured cardinal in Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery. Read about it here, or just enjoy/abhor the seasonal sentiment I've extrapolated: 'The statue? I guess you could call it a Christmas present. At this time of year it's easy to forget the true meaning of Christianity - the lies, the corruption, the abuse.'

A great Britten symphony

2011-12-12T12:19:00.018Z

Had he not styled it a Sinfonia da Requiem, and run its three continuous movements - 'Lacrymosa', 'Dies Irae' and 'Requiem Aeternam' - at a highly compressed 20 minutes, Britten's early masterpiece would be officially up there with Elgar's and Walton's two symphonies and the best of Vaughan Williams's nine, not to mention the darker monuments of Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Britten's two, showing he could achieve symphonic continuity outside the opera house, are this and the even thornier Cello Symphony for Rostropovich, which I love yet more dearly. This CD is an indispensible one, though Rattle's recording of the earlier work is one of his best.

Our new Rattle, Ed Gardner, dared to harrow us with the Sinfonia da Requiem right at the start of another BBC Symphony Orchestra blockbuster event on Saturday, and you can hear the results this afternoon on Radio 3; for some reason, broadcast has been delayed, but it will soon be on the iPlayer for the next week. My colleague and perceptive Britten scholar Alexandra Coghlan reviewed the concert for The Arts Desk. As I'd discovered for the class, and consequently for the pre-performance talk, there were several points of connection with the other epic bookender, Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, which I haven't heard in concert for years. That reminds me I ought to get to the John Martin exhibition soon; his doomy canvases used to appeal to my adolescent love of extremes.

The links? Not only were Walton in 1929 and Britten a decade later young men still in their twenties when they set out on adventures which changed course; both works start - though Walton's takes time to settle - in a D minor lament. Britten's resolves in D, Walton's in the relative major, F, with jazzy accents to the last and a hint at the tritone which, of course, holds the tension to the end of Britten's later lamentatory masterpiece, the War Requiem.

Much to illustrate in the talk, then - too much bearing in mind the BBCSO brief of covering all bases, which meant a not unwelcome injection of what I could bring to bear on the three fascinating Sibelius orchestrated songs in the programme - 'On a terrace by the sea', much blacker than its title suggest, also holds tritonal terrors and modernistically anticipates the Finn's Fourth Symphony by some years - and Sibelius's little suite of incidental music to another Belshazzar's Feast, modest but personal as ever. One thing I hadn't realised at the time was that Sibelius made his orchestration of the Twelfth Night setting 'Come away, death' just before his death in 1957. Delighted to find it on YouTube in Jorma Hynninen's performance. I'd been blown away by his performances of the songs when I was preparing the talk, and though Gerald Finley was fine and cut through a sometimes very heavy orchestra, he doesn't have Hynninen's lower centre of gravity.

All the more fascinating, given the terminal circumstances of the arrangement, that the last chord leaves matters unresolved. 'Komm nu hit, död' ties in two other dying composers' significant end-pieces, Rachmaninov's piano transcription of Tchaikovsky's 'Cradle Song', written in the year of the junior master's birth, and Stravinsky's instrumentation of two pleading-with-God Wolf songs.

So it was quite a death-haunted programme as we enter the silly season; and we can still go deep this Friday when that phenomenal Sibelius interpreter Jukka-Pekka Saraste conducts Sibelius's Sixth and Seventh Symphonies. Why the Bosch above? Well, partly because the Sinfonia da Requiem is a triptych, too, though with a fast-motion hell at the middle, and partly because that Dies Irae's fluttertonguing flutes and muted brass delineate Boschian creatures while not forgetting to hothouse the terror and weave in on alto sax the ever-changing lament of the first movement (it achieves resolution in the finale, but not a falsely triumphalist one).

Such details would have led me to guess that the work was influenced by Shostakovich's even more harrowing Eighth Symphony, were it not for the fact that the Russian masterpiece had not been composed at the time of the English one's belated premiere. That took place under Barbirolli in New York in 1941, the Sinfonia having been unsurprisingly exiled from the concert for which it was commissioned, a 200-player celebration of Japan's 2,600 year old empire at which Richard Strauss's noisy occasional-piece Japanese Festival Music WAS performed, and at which the Nazi salute was held during the playing of the Japanese national anthem. Once again, the unwitting Strauss was in the wrong place at the wrong time; but so would Britten, and Britain, have been, had the Japanese royal representatives not objected to his 'gloomy', 'discordant', 'Christian' and of course very uncelebratory work of youthful genius.

Protests great and small

2011-12-11T13:38:00.015Z

I little thought, when Tunisia set the democratic trail blazing at the beginning of the year, that 2011 would draw to a close with Putin-dominated Russia joining the party. But there they were south of Moscow's centre, about 50,000 of them, all protesting against parliamentary elections that no-one seems to doubt were rigged.

The top photo was swiftly placed on Wikimedia Commons by one of those ever-growing people whose courage we can't begin to grasp, Dmitry Mottl; below it is a kind of Where's Willy? shot by Brian Rybolt - who also took the next image - in which I am one of quite a few grinning gleefully not (knowingly) at the camera but at the fabulous Henry Goodman's witty song-plea to keep Gaby's Deli safe from needless obliteration by the ghastly Westminster City Council. Here's Henry with the owner, Gaby Elyahou, at the more or less impromptu 'Cabaret Falafel' on Thursday afternoon, where they were preceded by another wry ditty from Gaye Brown.

It's a drop in the ocean, yet equally reliant on force of numbers - as well I know in the dismal lack of response to save the black poplar trees on the south side of our gardens from a very dubiously reasoned execution - and once a London landmark is gone, it's gone for good. Daquise, unchanged since Coronation Year, outlived plans to redevelop the row of shops by South Kensington but then had a horrid makeover by New Polish Prosperity and is now unrecognisable. Here the proposition is to replace thriving Gaby's, which caters for salt-beef addicts and vegetarians alike, with a 'Strada-like chain restaurant', of which there are already hundreds in the West End. My colleague Judith Flanders set the ball rolling on The Arts Desk, clarifying the situation: sign the petition, please.

And I hope we'll have sound and/or vision of Henry's speech and song up soon. With that easy charm which makes everyone instantly jolly, he remembered sitting in Gaby's at various times with Jeremy Irons, Alun Armstrong and Ute Lemper. Whose image on the Chicago poster next to the cafe here - my pic as they were assembling for an outdoor shot - is both apt and a reminder that Gaby's is tied up with the soul of West End theatreland.

Then I was off, buying myself on the way a Chinese pork bun and a strong Italian espresso from other Soho stalwarts, to pure escapism and the fabulous Anne Schwanewilms digging luminously deep into Mahler at the Wigmore. But what a year it's been for people power. Not always successful - pray, or whatever it is you do, for the Syrians - and often with an ambiguous outcome; yet I can't remember a time in my life where the tide of the world seemed to turn so momentously in such a potentially hopeful direction. More, no doubt, to follow in 2012.

Old-age troubles Tranströmed

2011-12-10T11:50:00.015Z

I've not read enough on the biographical side about Liszt to know if he died in despair. But his later years were not happy ones, as a clutch of photos including the above underlines. An earlier chasm opening up from the loss of two children must have deepened, and - naturally prone, it seems, to depression - he knocked back the absinthe. But unlike Rossini or Sibelius, he kept on composing, and left us some of the most forward-looking fragments of gloom or despair in all 19th century music.

The suspended or abandoned tonality wasn't exactly new - check out certain Chopin - nor was he first off the line in developing the whole-tone scale (only last week I heard another American academic trotting out the line that it was really Debussy's invention, but of course it goes way back to Glinka in the 1840s and possibly earlier). But I've been hearing these epigrammatic mood-musics this week in compelling recitals by Louis Lortie and Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and while Lortie made an epic balance of all-Liszt light and shade, Aimard's all-grey-to-black first half was quite a lowering experience, slipping in though he did neutral Wagner as well as unconsolable early Berg - straight out of Liszt's Nuages gris - and late Scriabin. Here's Aimard's most striking contribution - the one where the whole-tone scale and not just the tritone lollops about - Unstern! sinistre, disastro (only approximately translateable as Dark star! Sinister, disastrous)

So, no consolation for the old Abbe, nothing of Verdi's Falstaff fugue or Strauss's sunset song. By another of those many online serendipities, though, my blogger-ideal Susan Scheid on Prufrock's Dilemma - ie endlessly curious, responsive, encouraging one by an articulate enthusiasm to explore more - introduced me to a poet I'd heard of but never read, the Swedish visionary - and I hope I don't use that word lightly - Tomas Tranströmer. 80 this year, he's just received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Sue's informed post was on his attitude to Haydn, the stroke that in 1990 partly inhibited movement down his right side - encouraging Swedish composers to write left-handed pieces to keep his love of piano-playing going - and a real masterpiece of a poem, Schubertiana.

So I sent off for the latest collection immediately. Do read Sue on the essence of Schubertiana, which contains for me the most profound written sequence on what music can do for struggling man, but let me get to my point. Which is that between recitals, I was able to read Sorgegondolen in Robin Fulton's translation. The poem which gives this collection, written in the year of Tranströmer's stroke, its title is centred around Liszt's two pieces both called La lugubre gondola, composed while he was staying in Venice's Palazzo Vendramin between November 1882 and January 1883.

The host was his son-in-law and junior by less than two years, Richard Wagner, whose death on 13 February 1883 the gondola pieces supposedly forecast (Liszt also wrote a musical epitaph, which Lortie included in his Italian journey). Hence the 'two old men' of the poem's first line, 'staying by the Grand Canal/together with the restless woman who married King Midas/the man who transforms everything he touches into Wagner' (Cosima, naturally). Tranströmer intersperses his visions of that Venetian trio with three 'Peep-holes, opening on 1990', counterpointing his own dreams during a more clinical near-death experience. But of course it was the lines on La lugubre gondola which struck me and came in useful for the Aimard review. I hope I'm permitted to quote them more fully, as I did in a message on Prufrock's Dilemma; sadly this format doesn't permit the right indentation.

Liszt has written down some chords that are so heavy they ought to be sent
to the mineralogical institute in Padua for analysis.
Meteorites!
too heavy to rest, they can only sink and sink through the future right down
to the years of the brownshirts.
The gondola is heavily laden with the crouching stones of the future.

My YouTube choice would have been the interpretation of Krystian Zimerman, but these extremely evocative performances have the benefit of the score put up by the loving poster.

Redemption? I reckon it comes both through how these pieces can be programmed - Aimard was perhaps too austere in his first-half grimness - and how we approach them. Tranströmer does indeed transfigure, and what a contrast in those blue eyes (at least as captured in the cover photo for the New Collected Poems), that unsentimental glimmering optimism, to poor old Liszt. I'm reminded of what another great writer, Stefan Zweig, wrote in The World of Yesterday of another great composer, Richard Strauss, who was 68 when Zweig worked with him on the comic opera Die schweigsame Frau:

At first his face impresses as almost banal...But only one glance into the eyes, those bright, blue, highly radiant eyes, and one instantly feels some particular magic behind this bourgeois mask. They are perhaps the most wide-awake eyes I have ever seen in a musician, not daemonic but in some way clairvoyant, the eyes of a man fully cognisant of the full significance of his task.

Bukovinan yesteryear

2011-12-08T09:22:00.013Z

It was, as so often, Simon Winder in his exuberant meisterwerk Germania who made me eager to read something else, in this case Gregor von Rezzori's The Snows of Yesteryear. It's an awful title, as Winder points out, though of course much better in the original French, hence my liberty of reproducing the Gallic edition to preserve Villon's original ('yesteryear' was Dante Gabriel Rossetti's parallel neologism in his translation, I just found out). In fact the original Blumen im Schnee seems even weaker in English, 'Flowers in the Snow', but has the virtue of sounding more elegant in German than 'Die Schnee von vergangenen Jahr', which somehow sounds better when Strauss and Weill set the line to music.

Which is a lengthy preamble to recommending a modest but striking group of memoir portraits mostly huddled in Bukovina, that pungent, mixed-up eastern European borderland which found itself first in the Austrian empire, then in Romania and later still in the Soviet Union (presumably now it's mostly part of an independent Ukraine). Rezzori is probably right to start with the most outlandish figure in his young life, the nanny or wet nurse Cassandra - possibly so called, the author thinks, at the monastery where his father found her.

For quite apart from such unbelievable, avowedly innocent pagan antics as frolicking naked with the household dogs, Cassandra is a symbol of that multi-ethnic melting-pot which changed between the wars and, by the time of the second, beyond all recognition. Coming from a hamlet in the Carpathian mountains, Cassandra, 'who spoke no language properly, expressed herself in snatches of Romanian, Ruthenian, Polish and Hungarian, as well as Turkish and Yiddish, assisted by a grotesque, grimacing mimicry and a primitive, graphic body language that made everyone laugh, and that everyone understood'.

Rezzori places himself clearly within the historical faultlines that ran through his family. Purely through the chance of being born in 1914, he was set apart from the Habsburgian assurance-turned-neurosis which bedevilled his mother and, especially, his ill-fated older sister:

She had been born before the general proletarization of the postwar era, in a world that still believed itself to be whole, while I was the true son of an era of universal disintegration. The foundation of her good breeding lay in the self-assurance, however deceptive, of an imperium basking in glory and resting on a punctilious system of rules of comportment and behaviour. In contrast, I grew up in the dubious shakiness of one of those successor states described, rather derogatorily, as the Balkans. That this would give me the advantage of a more robust psychic makeup, which greatly facilitated my adaptation to our changed circumstances, in due time received dramatic proof.

Rezzori deals either harshly or objectively, according to how you read him, with all his family members, but clearly views his broadminded Pomeranian governess, 'Bunchy' (from her name, Strauss), with greater love or rather kindness as the most civilizing influence. I'm not sure I like him and it would be overstating the case to put his literary talent up there with Zweig or Joseph Roth. But he does evoke with presumed truth and vividness a part of the world, also evoked in the later chapters of Claudio Magris's masterly Danube, that comes to seem increasingly attractive as a travel option now that so much of our beloved Middle East is out of bounds.

Where did Cavaradossi paint the Attavanti?

2011-12-06T10:18:00.014Z

You reckon you know, and in terms of what Puccini, Giacosa and Illica wanted from the first Roman location of Tosca, you'd be right: the huge Church of Sant'Andrea della Valle near the Campo dei Fiori and the Palazzo Farnese. When I last went inside some years ago, I didn't find it up to the artistic scratch of its other grandiose near-neighbours, Sant'Ignazio or the Gesu. But I read that Domenichino had a hand in the decoration, so maybe I need to take another look.

The point, though, is that productions like Catherine Malfitano's generally clear and human one for ENO (Gwyn Hughes Jones's Cavaradossi and Henry Waddington's Sacristan pictured above by Mike Hoban) don't need to aim for massiveness when Sardou's original play gives them another cue. His first directions are for 'The Saint Andrew of the Jesuits Church in Rome'. By which he means the much smaller, more perfect church of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale.

Sardou continues: 'Architect Bernini: fully curved arches above large plain pillars of white marble with red veneer'. So he knew it; and I do, too, and love its oval perfection almost as much as Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane just down the road. But again I haven't been inside for some years, so I'm grateful for these Wiki images.

Changing the location does give a designer the option for a tighter, less blowsily Baroque setting for Act 1. But of course the several Toscas filmed on location always use the bigger church. Why, in these, does Domingo's Cavaradossi have to be such a bad artist? In the first film, with dubbed soundtrack (but better singing) his Attavanti Magdalen is a piece of Woolworth's soft porn. Never mind the 'art'; feel the quality of the singing.

And enjoy Gigli as a lighter Cavaradossi, though I've come across none - and we heard about ten snippets from various 'Recondita armonia's in the second of our five Tosca class at the City Lit - who sings the opening piano against dolcissimo strings as requested.

I'm most in love with the blooming, sensuous love-triangle of Carreras, Ricciarelli and Karajan among the sound recordings of this act. What ardour in the second half of the love duet.

Anyway, on my four-hour trek across Rome, I did suddenly think I should pay homage once more to each of the opera's venues. Sant' Andrea della Valle was closed at 3pm, of course, but here's another, this time rather modest Roman fountain before it.

Next time a tour of the Palazzo Farnese - apparently they're more frequent than they used to be - is essential to see Annibale Carracci's profane ceiling fresco celebrating 'the triumph of love' with the coruscating cortege of Bacchus and Ariadne, well evoked in Robert Hughes's Rome.

Where Scarpia's room might be is an irrelevance. Again, in Sardou's La Tosca Act 4, it's a much sparser affair in the Castel Sant'Angelo; in Act 2 we have the grand Farnese reception which takes place offstage in the opera, complete in the play with Queen Marie-Caroline of Naples (who faints at the news of Napoleon's victory), the Marquis Attavanti and Paisiello. A sun-lit sidewall

and the back view from the Via Giulia

should ring the changes. And finally, of course, the Castel Sant'Angelo once again, which glowed rather benignly in the late afternoon sun.

Three seasonal suggestions

2011-12-05T14:44:00.015Z

1. If you’ve planned a trip to Mali, don’t cancel completely because of what you’ve read in the news. I’m not trying to drum up more business for our dear Sophie’s fabulous mud hotel in Djenne if I say that you should perhaps think of following Foreign Office advice and not venture north to Timbuktu – as we did a couple of years ago (Sankore Mosque pictured above) - or to the annual music festival in the desert, but instead spend time (if you hadn’t already planned it) chez Sarin at the Hotel Djenne Djenno. I imagine the singular Maison Rouge at Mopti would not be out of bounds either.

Weirdly – and I’ve no idea on what intelligence these things are decided – the FO’s danger line seems to include Djenne in the no-go area. But the fact is that the recent debacle which happened in Timbuktu only has one other counterpart south of the Niger, in Hombore, and the circumstances of that kidnapping are dodgy, I’m told. As Sophie points out, the isolated situation of Djenne and the fact that it has to be reached by ferry would make it difficult for would-be terrorists to make a quick getaway.

I wonder if the favourite part of our trip (apart from staying with Sophie in Djenne, of course) – a journey down the Niger on a pinasse from Timbuktu to Mopti, scene from which pictured above – would be ill-advised these days. Shame; but bigger shame on the extreme Islamist movement which is decimating Mali’s fragile tourism. One plus is that you might see less of the haughty French tour-groups who ruined our time in Dogon country. The whole France-Mali relationship has long been highly dubious with respect to the way that the French consulate seems to have been punishing its former African colony by advising its citizens not to go; but it’s true that Mali needs to take a tougher stance on harbouring terrorists.

2. Sophie’s equally inventive artist-friend, and one of our most loyal, the wondrous Cressida Bell (pictured above with the selection of designs, and choice, for the cover of the latest London Review of Books), has just hosted an open-studio weekend along with other artists in Hackney, always a treat. The neighbouring shops proudly put out a flyer saying ‘as seen on TV’; you know what that means. But I enjoy a jaunt to Clarence Mews and get a kick from the vibrant fabrics; so in this instance my advice, rather than plea, is to take a look at Cressida’s online shop for a few gift ideas. In case you're wondering, the below shot was taken after close of business on Saturday, when many of the silks had been sold. But it still looks very colourful.

3. There are plenty of non-seasonal events still to absorb – I’m going to a string of master-recitals this week – but by Wednesday 14th, if you’re in London and free, you might feel sufficiently in the mood to attend an event organized by another dynamic friend. It’s ‘a celebration of Christmas’ at St Botolph without Aldgate (not to be confused with the one without Bishopsgate), adjacent to Aldgate tube station, a splendid place for a concert.

The event is in aid of the very worthwhile charity Maytree, which provides a London sanctuary along with counselling for the suicidal. Check out the charity’s website.

Star, keynote speaker, call her what you will, of the proceedings is actress Adjoa Andoh, who featured in Clint Eastwood’s film Invictus and may be a familiar telly face from Casualty, Eastenders and Dr Who. Other artists include the Belair Wind Quintet, the Hawthorn Singers and a team of hand-bell ringers. Audience participation, wine and mince pies included; 7.30 start, tickets a bargain at £10 on the door or online here. Hope to see some of you there.

Roman fountains

2011-12-02T10:19:00.019Z

Only one of the dozen I notched up on my noon-to-dawn trawl through Rome features in Respighi's Fontane di Roma, and I was sorry not to pay a fleeting return tribute to the Trevi (nor, for that matter, to the Piazza Navona nor my favourite, the exquisite little turtle fountain in the Jewish quarter, the cleaning of which my fellow-blogger Willym expounded upon so eloquently while he was living there). Bernini's Triton of 1642 rather disappointed me when I first made its acquaintance quite some time after hearing the tone-poem - lonesome in a rather lugubrious sloping square, and ungraced by the tumbling cascades of nymphs Respighi's music suggests (let's have Toscanini in that number before we eventually put together all four musical pictures in two performances by the orchestra I went to hear).

Yet shortly after dawn, in a more or less unpeopled space with less traffic roaring around it than usual, our marine conch-blower did look rather impressive. This time, though, I fell for the more intimate water-tricklers. Robert Hughes, in the latest Roman popular history which I've just starting ploughing into, reminds us that there was no natural water pressure in the ancient city to provide cascades, just modest tumbles via the several aqueducts that sloped, and in some uneven places were persuaded by tunnels to slope, into the centre. Two re-used mascheroni first, then, one on the wall that separates Santa Sabina from the Parco Savello on the Aventine, designed by Giacomo della Porta in 1583

and the other, which you must forgive me for repeating from the first walking-tour piece, at the prettiest end of the Via Giulia

commissioned by the Farnese family living in the famous palace which now backs on to the street, and which of course has a rather splendid fountain of its own in the square on the other side.

I'll save up the modest effort in front of Sant'Andrea della Valle for a Tosca ramble and jump to early next morning, when I passed Bernini's Barcaccia being cleaned in the rosy dawn (but it rarely photographs well)

and climbed the hill past the Triton to the four commissioned by the 'manic-impressive' (thank you, Robert Hughes, who paints a terrifying picture of him) Sixtus V between 1588 and 1593, giving their name to Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. Three are by that Pope's great planner Domenico Fontana (would you believe): Juno

the Arno

and the Tiber

while the fourth, Pietro da Cortona's Diana, is seen from a distance in context.

Fontana as master of Sixtus V's most grandiose projects was also responsible for the Fontana dell'Acqua Felice with Moses in the middle, terminus of the clean-water viaduct of that name. This has had the clean-up the four down the road still need, and attempts to work on Santa Maria della Vittoria with the famously agonial-ecstatic Bernini St Teresa within are graced by a contrasting piece of advertising.

Well, that was it before I reached a different sort of terminus in time for the 7.52 train to the airport. But, as I wade my pleasurable way through eight CDs of mostly treasurable archival material from the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, let's see as well as hear the orchestra on happy home-territory form in Respighi's Fontane as equally divided between Pappano for the first two

and the ever-underrated Pretre (I'm sure it is) for a very vivacious Trevi at noon and the Villa Medici at sunset.

Ken's last dance

2011-12-01T10:44:00.013Z

I've been trying to put together a coherent picture in my head of what I really think about Ken Russell's films since news of his death broke earlier this week. And the light went on when someone said his music-and-image sequences were the forerunners of the best-made pop videos. Those are the elements which will stick in the mind for the right reasons.

By and large, though, he tended to reduce distinguished actors to the level of self-indulgent amateurs (I tried to watch Women in Love recently, and gave up after the first 20 minutes which reminded me of nothing less than Monty Python's spoof of Salad Days; one expected a croquet mallet through the heart and spurting comedy blood at any minute). One exception to that rule was an astonishing debut by young actress Imogen Millais-Scott in Salome's Last Dance (pictured above), the only one of his later films I've seen all the way through. Heavenly Imogen spoke Wilde's verse so musically (as you can hear as well as see in the YouTube excerpt below); imagine my surprise when she turned up some years later reading a lesson, very beautifully, at two friends' wedding in the depths of the Oxfordshire countryside. Anyway, all the stuff in the film about the performance in a male brothel wasn't as irrelevant as that sort of thing could be in Ken's films.

Otherwise, kudos to him for his bold fantasy-riffs on Mahler - there's a very haunting early wood-with-white-horse scene set to music from the Third Symphony - and Tchaikovsky in The Music Lovers, again hit-and-miss but with some very telling music-and-vision sequences (I dimly remember a nice fit with something, quite unexpectedly, from another Third Symphony, the 'Polish').

Maybe those early Monitor films were striking at the time, too, but I didn't quite see what all the fuss was about over the Elgar rhapsody when I caught up with it many years later. I remember laughing for all the wrong reasons over his much later Vaughan Williams documentary - a scene for each of the symphonies, wasn't it, in one of which poor Ursula wandered in front of an army of tanks. Though there was a rather imaginative matching in some other doc - sorry to be so vague - of a steam train chugging through the English countryside to Elgar's Introduction and Allegro for strings (seemed silly to start with, but the central fugue made sense.

Yes, there was a decline. I timidly abstained from going to see the reported dog's dinner that was his ENO Princess Ida (love the piece too much, perhaps, though I don't see how it could ever be staged these days), and he wrote some truly dreadful though fitfully amusing opera criticism (many a time was I seated near His Flamboyant Noisiness).

What's most regrettable, though, is how not enough of his work is available on DVD; hence my approximate memories above. So praise be to YouTube for filling in the gaps: here's Salome's failed seduction of John the Baptist, the word-music backed up by threefold reprises of 'The Young Prince and Princess' from Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade (and a bit of The Golden Cockerel for good measure).

Maybe that official-reissue dearth will be remedied now Ken's gone. After all, the sheer eclecticism is something (who else would film both Sandy Wilson's The Boy Friend AND rock opera Tommy?) And I have yet to see The Devils, with those incredible-looking sets by Derek Jarman, another British original who died, unlike Russell, far too young.

My afternoon with Valery

2011-11-30T13:55:00.011Z

I've known longer waits than Sunday afternoon's predictably leisurely build up to the Gergiev interview I'd been asked to conduct and write up for the Concertgebouw (which he visits early next year for the first time since 1995). There was the 1991 hanging around in the antechamber to his Mariinsky - then Kirov - office, fascinating to watch the various petitioners come and go; the all-day will-it-won't-it-happen anticipation of a second interview which eventually ended up at 1am in a bedroom of Petersburg's Astoria Hotel; the third wait culminating in a speed along the Neva to the Gergiev family home; and the interviews snatched during the two intervals of an extraordinary Mariinsky concert (viola concertos by Kancheli and Gubaidulina framing a Mahler Six conducted straight through with barely a pause between movements).

You might think me a bit of a masochist if I say it's always worth it. But so responsive, rather than on-transmit, is our Valery that something unexpected usually transpires. Besides, the journey, as it were, can be as interesting as the arrival, and never more so than on this occasion. Columbia Artists Management had suggested I show up at 1pm after the Barbican morning rehearsal and said they'd confirm it. They didn't, weren't to be tracked down, so I blagged my way backstage and then had to furnish a business card for the suspicious trio who greeted me. This seemed to conjure up Columbia's vice president (and Gergiev's manager) Doug Sheldon, who took me in to the conductor's room. And there a lively discussion on various players and halls was to-ing and fro-ing between a very engaged Gergiev and four other musicians including - the one I thought I recognised, and he helped me to place him - heldentenor Simon O'Neill.

Simon needed a short session to sing a bit of Siegfried through with Gergiev, and outside I met a colleague I haven't chinwagged with for some time, vivacious Tommy Pearson, who's made films with VG and wanted to nab him to discuss 3D projection among other things. So it transpired that Valery, Tommy, Doug, the LSO's digital marketing manager Jo Johnson and I all piled into a waiting car at 2.20. The driver had a rather treasurable rendition of the maestro's name stuck up on the window; I needed to edit this shot so as not to put egg on the face of the car-hire firm.

And so we all had a splendid risotto in Charterhouse Square, a lively batting to and fro between us all and Valery curious as ever to know what we thought of this and that. We discussed the Hochhauser tours and visa problems - no prizes for guessing how VG sorts out his - Abbado in Rome (Gergiev was conducting the Santa Cecilia orchestra on the day Claudio arrived for rehearsals), film music, ballet v opera at the Mariinsky and what I thought of Deborah Warner's ENO Onegin which Gergiev will be conducting when it arrives at the Met (I could only be diplomatic and say it might be very different, which no doubt it will be, with Netrebko and Kwiecien).

Also had a good chat with the others while Valery went off to discuss future LSO seasons with its managing director Kathryn McDowell. Then back he came - clutching Muti's recording of the Scriabin symphonies, which may or may not be a clue as to what's in the pipeline - off my other lunch companions went and we finally had our interview at 5pm. Whereupon Gergiev, who had been so delightfully freewheeling and curious though seeming to crumple physically somewhat after his spruce demeanour four hours earlier, spoke with perfect focus and diplomatic charm about the Concertgebouw, Dutilleux and Leonidas Kavakos (who'll be playing the Sibelius concerto). I left exhilarated, as always, and the evening's concert, with the gorgeous Anne-Sophie Mutter on riveting form in a Gubaidulina masterpiece, was much more than just the icing on the cake.

Love this photo of all three artists at an earlier recording session for the work (Gubaidulina centre) by Harald Hoffmann for DG - included it in the Arts Desk review but can't resist repeating it here.

From noon to dawn in Rome

2011-11-29T09:53:00.022Z

Which is to say, from Piramide seen here at about 12.15pm to the Piazza del Popolo at 6.20am the following morning. What a serendipitous city it is. I'd been racking my brains for a Shakespeare connection in Rome to go with the Arts Desk piece on Abbado's Tempest/Lear programme I was due to see the night of my latest day in the city. And what happened? The airport bus, contrary to the promise of the ticket sellers, landed us quite a way from the centre, at Rome Ostiense Station (perhaps because it was a Sunday, and many of the main roads were blocked to traffic). But there was Cestius's pyramid gleaming in the autumn midday sun, and beyond it one of my favourite spots in all Rome, the non-Catholic cemetery outside the walls where Keats and Shelley's heart are encased. And there, of course, on Shelley's stone, are inscribed lines from Ariel's song 'Full fathom five'. I had my link among the tombs of this glorified cat shelter, its supremely indifferent living inhabitants still well fed by the charitable organisation so reliant on donations from English felophiles especially.

Better still, though, was such an auspicious start for walking the city from a place that isn't often open (and at 1pm the Roman picnickers and the handful of tourists were all very politely sent packing). Well, I'd better save a few discoveries for a separate cemetery piece, and trace my four-hour route as succinctly as I can. My options were to branch off for a lunch in an excellent little restaurant we know in Testaccio, or head up the Aventine, another relatively quiet glory of Rome. And as time was short, I wanted to be the all-devouring tourist again. So up it was from the park behind the Post Office where Russian ladies were all dining off tinfoil on the benches and past the relatively modern sanctuary of Sant'Anselmo where plainsong is still sung so beautifully and the little garden alongside the Romanesque campanile of Santi Bonifacio ed Alessio

to one of my favourite churches, Santa Sabina, strictly a basilica, with its beautiful prototype Corinthian columns - curiously not palimpsested from ancient Rome, but constructed specially for the occasion.

The Parco Savello next door leads down an avenue of pines

to one of the best views in the city, and as close as I wanted to get this time to St Peter's.

A quick lunch at a friendly cafe on the Viale Aventino, and then up to pay homage to the obvious, barging through the hordes of Chinese tourists, Indians touting identical forms of tripod-souvenir (do they ever sell any?) and South American panpipe bands. The old Romans would have seen auspices in the flocks of birds above the Arch of Constantine and the Colosseum

though apparently the migratory rush-hours at this time of year are seen as threatening by present-day citizens; men in white bodysuits stand on the hospital island making frightening noises through megaphones to stop the flocks from shitting on the earthlings. I was also surprised to see Italian twitchers down by the Tiber. But not before I'd headed via Largo Argentina to the three Tosca locations I know pretty well - though I've only been inside overdone Sant'Andrea della Valle (not on this occasion). Retraced old steps past the Campo dei Fiori, the Palazzo Farnese and the Fontana del Mascherone on handsome Via Giulia. The mask and the basin are ancient Roman objects re-used by the Baroque.

One thing I'd not done on previous visits was to step down to Tiberside and walk between the Ponte Sisto and the Ponte Cavour. Which in effect meant spectacular views from several angles of the Castel Sant'Angelo.

Finally it was up the tacky end of the Via del Corso to the Piazza del Popolo, from outside which I made the big mistake of taking a tram northwards to the hotel near the Parco della Musica. I should have finished off the walk, but I wanted to check my route for the reverse journey early the following morning. Which meant that when I enquired of a local on the tram whether the stop I thought I wanted was indeed 'Ankara Tiziana', he must have misheard and thought I wanted 'Tiziano', three further on.

Which got me well and truly lost, since it was off my maps, in a rather interesting residential part of Rome. I even walked in ignorant curiosity past Zaha Hadid's amazing new MAXXI (Museum of the 21st Century) building, but was too flustered and time-conscious to stop and check it out. Including the two old ladies who sent me off in the wrong direction to Piazza Mancini when I was in fact nearly there, no-one I asked was able (or, in most cases, bothered) to identify the Largo in which the hotel was situated until finally a kind young couple walked me there. The Hotel Astrid, run by Best Western, was a convenience stop organised by the Accademia, but really I can't recommend it too highly: the staff were delightful, the rooms refurbished and (around the courtyard at least) quiet, the lift not working but the grand (Edwardian-era?) marble staircase splendid, the cafe on the top floor - though I had to leave too early to breakfast there - graced with superb views over the Tiber to St Peter.

And the Parco della Musica is spectacularly state-of-the-art, too, with a huge book/CD shop, fine cafe and outdoor space before Renzo Piano's three copper-domed halls which doubles as an amphitheatre in the summer.

The concert I don't need to recapitulate here, but I must also praise the simple, excellent restaurant I went to with Nicky Thomas afterwards, La Vignola, where the waiter apologised for the lack of porcini but showed us instead a basket of freshly gathered mushrooms. Another plus is that you can eat locally well away from the tourist trail, so good food is guaranteed.

One last bonus: as the tram got me back to Piazza del Popolo at 6.15 the next morning, I had enough time to skip the Metro and walk to Termini for the airport train. Which meant another stroll down (or up) memory lane, past the Spanish Steps with the rosy dawn and the crescent moon still showing behind the Virgin on the Colonne dell'Immacolata

and up past Bernini's Triton

as well as the four other water-figures by Borromini's fabulous San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, illustrated - 2/11 update - in a later 'Roman fountains' post.

Nothing had prepared me for the chaos at Fiumicino - at least 500 travellers waiting for a single x-ray baggage security check - or the one-and-a-half-hour delay when, in some panic, I finally got to my flight with an official five minutes before take-off. But that's all part of the authentic Italian experience, too: what is it they say? ALITALIA = Always Late in Takeoff, Always Late in Arrival. Anyway, I did get back to London with just time enough to stop off at home and pick up my teaching stuff for our fourth Tosca class at the City Lit. But I'd had my 18 hours of Roman vision, and really hadn't expected to be so smitten afresh by a city I thought I could almost take for granted.

Tchaikovsky's elusive Tempest

2011-11-25T11:09:00.021Z

Well, have you ever heard this most imaginative of ‘symphonic fantasias’ live in concert? I hadn’t until Sunday, when I reckon a trip to Rome – with which I fell headily back in love with again after a long absence from a city I thought I knew well enough not to swoon over any more – would have been worth it for twenty-odd minutes of Abbado magic alone. The man IS Prospero, for God’s sake, as one of the violinists of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, sharing the concert with Abbado’s Bologna-based Orchestra Mozart, suggested in a roundabout way (‘it is not conducting, it is a Shining’). That the second-half attempted synching of various Shostakovich musics for King Lear with butchered fragments of the masterly Kozintsev film didn’t work is neither here nor there, and certainly not here in this instance because I must hold fire until I’ve got the Arts Desk piece sorted for tomorrow. Anyway, here's an Accademia-furnished photo from the occasion in the interim.

The point is just to say how ashamed I was to have forgotten Tchaikovsky’s most supernaturally beautiful Shakespeare fantasy. Heck, it’s not even on that 60-CD Brilliant set (I wonder if someone got confused with the earlier orchestral work based on Ostrovsky’s play about Katya Kabanova, The Storm?). But it seems to have been a constant in Abbado’s rep: there are two recordings, with the Chicago Symphony and then the Berlin Phil. There’s also a clip on the BPO’s website of a live performance from some time back, sadly not the bit I would have chosen, but worth seeing.

But none of Abbado’s previous performances could quite have had the tear-jerking, jaw-dropping tonal beauty which enveloped us on Sunday in the very first bars within the spectacular panavision space of Renzo Piano’s big hall. That’s a good little snippet to play blindfold to a listener and ask him or her to guess the composer (I think I might have gone for Sibelius, whose own Tempest music is peerless): this is the isle, and the sea around it, full of mysterious noises. Here’s one in the best sound I could find on YouTube – the Toscanini radio broadcast, alas, sounds awful - conducted by Eliahu Inbal

The lovers’ music may be rather more tied up with Tchaikovsky’s sense of yearning for happiness than about the more innocent Ferdinand and Miranda, but how it ravishes on each appearance (such scoring – and we’re talking the youngish Tchaikovsky of 1873 here).

Ariel and Caliban, too, he gets exactly right. Only the development is a bit perfunctory alongside the final, perfected version of Romeo and Juliet. But I salute the composer’s courage in ending where he started, with the island magic. A great piece, worthy to set alongside Sibelius’s late universe of illustrative numbers. I also dug into Sullivan’s incidental music, and there are some winsome dances there.

Tchaikovsky’s genius burned brighter than anyone had led me to believe last night when Neil Bartlett’s production of The Queen of Spades for Opera North played in the Barbican Theatre. Perhaps I was overcompensating for the sheer unfathomable blandness – Toby Spence excepted - of Deborah Warner’s fuzzy, traditional ENO Eugene Onegin; but I did find myself swept up in the tension that takes hold halfway through and, in the right hands, doesn’t let up until the final requiem.

At first I wondered. Richard Farnes’s way, though accomplished, with the doomy Prelude seemed a bit too leisurely: would there be enough narrative sweep in the drama proper? That soon surfaced, but then Kandis Cook’s multipurpose cheapish set with its moveable walls didn’t seem amenable to atmosphere and wasn’t always well lit. It did the opening garden scene a disservice but worked for Lisa’s room, the party

and the Countess’s bedchamber. And soon a not too laboured pattern emerged in Bartlett’s production – a thousand times clearer and more definite with the characters than Warner’s over at ENO. In every little diverting scene or number, somebody’s out of step or mood with the conformist, and usually uniformly costumed, group: a bullied boy soldier, unhappy Lisa when Paulina and the girls try to entertain her, the affianced couple in the party intermezzo, Yeletsky in the gambling room, even Tomsky himself, a bit of a seedy outsider – though not quite as much, of course, as poor Herman.

Whom I pitied, as one should. I know the never over-finessed big tenor of Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts has run into difficulties up top; he needs time out to firm it up with a good coach or teacher, I don’t think it’s too late, and the middle range remains strong as well as diction-clear. Nor are he and statuesque Orla Boylan ever going to be Love’s Young Dream.

But I’m not sure Tchaikovsky, already bending Pushkin’s cynical story overmuch, intended that. The more truthful a production, and the pithier the translation – by unfairly maligned Martin Pickard, as in the Onegin, this time with Bartlett’s collaboration - the more artificial their stock protestations in the first love scene are going to seem.

What the English text does stress is that the third man seeking the Countess’s three-card secret is a lover as well as an obsessive, and this is novelly played through thanks to Jo Barstow’s incredible characterization. She made very little impact in the nothing-doing Zambello production at Covent Garden, but here she moves through a succession of bewigged mannequin poses

to reveal the woman who still thinks she’s beautiful and alluring – and in this case, remarkably, is, as she uses her dancer’s arms to shed the years in the Gretry aria. Its second verse even out-pianissimo’ed the immortal Felicity Palmer in the classic Glyndebourne production. And Herman’s persecution, more a wooing until he pulls his pistol out (make what you will of that), is as compelling as her death and her sensuous ghost-appearance.

As for Orla – well, I adore her. I heard hardly any of the avowed pitching problems last night, and she does the stricken pathos of the Canal Scene better than any soprano I’ve seen on stage (and more on disc, like Gergiev’s Guleghina, tire at this point; Boylan’s strong semi-dramatic voice doesn’t). The smaller roles all mean something, as none did in the ENO Onegin. William Dazeley's very fine Yeletsky (in the shot below right taking on Herman's final challenge) suggests he'd have been a much better choice of Onegin over at ENO. I liked the contraltoid Paulina of Russian-born Alexandra Sherman - though the 'Chloe' to her 'Daphnis' in the pastoral was poor - and wondered who was singing the excellent Gouvernantka telling off her charges so charmingly in Act 1 Scene 2. It turned out to be that veteran characterizer Fiona Kimm.

The final scene maintains the tension Bartlett and Farnes have established from the bedchamber encounter onwards, helped out perhaps by the second of two cuts (bit of a shame to lose some of the only authentic Pushkinian lines in the gambling-den romp, but never mind). Farnes has true music-theatre instinct; though the Opera North violins need a few extra members, the orchestral sound is strong and true and survives the hideously dry Barbican Theatre acoustics. And there was no problem in having most of the brass and the timps on either side of the stage. What a great and inventive opera it is, even in its padding; and Bartlett saw to it that even the extra stuff tied in well. And thank God - after the leaden waits in Warner's Onegin - for fluid scene changes. Can’t wait for Ruddigore tonight.

Production photos of Opera North's Queen of Spades by Bill Cooper

Seeking the Queen Beech

2011-11-24T12:11:00.015Z

It's been quite a week for soul-food even outside the musical sphere: Durham, Rome (more anon) - and, by no means least on the list, the Chilterns. I've been wanting to go and gawp at some of the biggest, most awe-inspiring trees in the country since reading Richard Mabey's Beechcombings, but a succession of dull or busy Saturdays got in the way. Then, after it had seemed, as Eliot put it in Murder in the Cathedral, as if golden October had well and truly declined into sombre November, we had a patch of brilliant late-autumnal weather. And so, perhaps a bit late after Saturday lunch, we took a half-hour train journey from Euston, got out at suburban Berkhamsted and, armed with Ordnance Survey Explorer Map, headed for Frithsden Beeches.

We were there to enjoy the beauty of Berkhamsted Common on the Chiltern ridge, one of those free-for-all stretches of land which miraculously escaped enclosure over the centuries, and rather more specifically to search for a gigantic tree that rather paradoxically is a needle in a forested haystack, one I'd expected to be signposted, especially after its transient spell of fame in one of the Harry Potter films. It isn't, praise be, but we certainly happened to be in the right vicinity when I asked one man and his dog the whereabouts of the Queen Beech.

I can't do better than Mabey in his page two description of this 'antic and indomitable matriarch':

It seems elephantine, an impossible mass for a living thing. It is, I guess, between 350 and 400 years old: two centuries of being repeatedly beheaded for firewood, two more as a picturesque monument. It grew up in the open, unrestricted by other trees, and its long low branches trail out like the arms of a giant squid. Its trunk is vegetable hide, a mass of burrs, bosses, wounds, flutings, fields of scar tissues congealed around the points where the branches were lopped.

There's more - about what lives within and on it, about the extraordinary attempts by forestry professionals at a misguided recent era in tree history to fell this 'insult to the forester's craft', this health hazard and nuisance; an 'epic local uprising' saw that one off.

Now, unlike then, there are no notices other than footpath or bridleway signs - and since there are so many options, it's hard to know which way to turn. We came straight out of the north side of Berkhamsted Station, walked past the ruined castle

and headed to the ridge past a farm, fields of horses and the odd lovely oak

towards the south entrance of the wood

which was still glowing in the late afternoon sun

and rich in mushrooms.

Yet once we headed towards what we were explicitly seeking, Frithsden Beeches, rather loosely marked on the map, the sun barely snuck through the high treetops. There was one splendid glade of beeches to the right of the path, with clear signs of nature's gnarled reaction to all that coppicing

and J thought due north was the solution

until the man and his dog put us right and led us to the spot. Nearby, slightly less pachydermal sisters of the Queen like this one

bore some monstrous black fungal growths well worth viewing

but Her Majesty was indeed the one to stop and wonder at, for a good half-hour.

Could nature and necessity between them, not art, really have created this? Even her mossy roots against the bed of shed leaves are impressive.

The sun was quickly setting, so we proceeded some distance along the Hertfordshire Way on the ridge before doing the circuit back via Northchurch

the last bit in a very magical, damply autumnal dark. But here's another resource on London's doorstep which we really ought to discover much more. For easy-access country walks we've always headed to my old stamping-ground of Surrey, or the Sussex Downs; but the Chilterns are no less unique.

Hard times for the little man

2011-11-23T09:44:00.020Z

Germany in 1932 is both the setting and the place/time for the writing of Hans Fallada's Little Man, What Now?, but the artistically enhanced realism depicting a rather nice young couple trying to make ends meet while the economy crashes around them rings alarm bells today (and no doubt always has since then, in some parts of the world). Unemployment had risen since 1929 from 1.4 million to 6 million, wages had fallen by 50 per cent and social welfare was in tatters, a bureaucratic system made it difficult if not impossible for the poor to claim their dues - and Hitler was poised to take power, most plausible (for some) of a bad bunch of politicians.

All photos of 1932 here courtesy of the Bundesarchiv, which has a huge selection on Wikimedia Commons. The writing on the wall in the tenement shot up top, between the Nazi and communist flags, reads 'first food, then rent' - a slight ringing of the changes on Brecht's 'erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral' ('first comes a full stomach, then come ethics').

Not that you'd really be aware of the ultimate stormcloud about to burst in 1933 from the little world of Fallada's novel, apart from the presence of the odd Nazi in various institutions. The focus is on the personal realm in which the novel's hero, Pinneberg, and his adorable young wife Lammchen (no umlaut in the English translation), almost exclusively exist, though her backbone seems to come from a politically committed family. Quickly recovering from the news that Lammchen's pregnant, they marry and move to Berlin to lodge - at a cost - with Pinneberg's louche mother, soon find they have to flee to more secluded lodging, and depend on the young man's job as a very good salesman in a department store. The couple will have to mind every mark - it's no mere social documentation that Lammchen draws up a meticulous sheet of expenses - even if they want something as basic as an evening out (though they do go to the cinema, and see a film that's anything but escapist).

Emma Pinneberg, sweet-natured Lammchen, is one of the most plausible good characters in any novel, with a core of steel and an unassailable sense of what's just and fair. Her husband is more complex, if not necessarily more interesting, and many of the most striking passages in the novel deal with his sense of, and sensitivity to, the insecurity of his position. There's a troubling early scene where the doting husband, having just got a job thanks to the string-pulling of his mother's dodgy lover, stands in a desolate autumnal Kleine Tiergarten among the unemployed waiting for they know not what.

Externally, he didn't belong to them, his outer shell was smarth. He waa wearing the reddish-brown winter ulster that Bergmann [his previous employer in a provincial town] had let him have for thirty-eight marks, and the hard black hat, also one of Bergmann's, no longer completely in fashion, the brim's too wide, so shall we say three marks twenty, Pinneberg?

Externally, then, Pinneberg did not belong to the unemployed, but internally...

He had just been to see Lehmann, the head of Personnel at Mandel's department store; he had gone to get a job and he'd got one, it was a simple commercial transaction. But as a result of this transaction Pinneberg had the feeling, despite the fact that he was to become a wage-earner again, that he was much closer to these non-earners than to people who earned a great deal. He was one of them, any day he could find himself standing here among them, and there was nothing he could do about it. He had no protection.

He was one of millions. Ministers made speeches to him, enjoined him to tighten his belt, to make sacrifices, to feel German, to put his money in the savings-bank and to vote for the constitutional party.

Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn't, according to the circumstances, but he didn't beliecve what they said. Not in the least. His innermost conviction was: they all want something from me, but not for me. It's all the same whether I live or die. They couldn't care less whether I can afford to go to the cinema or not, whether Lammchen can get proper food or has too much excitement, whether the Shrimp [the child they're expecting] is happy or miserable. Nobody gives a damn.

And all these people standing around in the Little Tiergarten, and a real zoo it was, full of proletarian animals rendered harmless by lack of food and lack of hope, they shared the same fate. Three months' unemployment and - goodbye, reddish-brown overcoat! Goodbye to any prospects for the future! Jachmann [his mother's lover] and Lehmann could have a quarrel on Wednesday evening and suddenly I'll be worthless again.

Despite the hopeless tone here, and the notion that you carry the seeds of your own failure if you perceive it despondently from the start, there's some humour throughout. Not least when Pinneberg's distinguished fellow-salesman takes him along to a naturist evening at a local baths and, in a marvellous tragicomic scene, he has a melancholy conversation with a stocky Jewish middle-aged lady who sadly and matter-of-factly tells him of the daily abuse she faces. The scenes of Pinneberg's anxiety when Lammchen stumbles to hospital to give birth and the awkward domesticity with the Shrimp are charming, too.

As is Lammchen, always - real enough not to be too good to be true.

Fallada must have drawn all this from a life which had even more severe problems that Pinneberg's, though it seems he was never on the breadline in the same way. I can imagine this would make a marvellous TV adaptation, as it's mostly dialogue. There was indeed a 1934 American film starring Margaret Sullavan, which I'd love to see, even though I imagine it must be compromised in some details.

That as much as anything, due to its Jewish artistic team, counted against Fallada in the eyes of the Nazi regime. And then, of course, we have the terrifying but always human picture of Alone in Berlin. This author is one of the greats, Tolstoyan in the way that seemingly unsympathetic characters become more likeable when you least expect it. Ultimately it's the humanity of the central couple and the way they face their vicissitudes - or, in Pinneberg's case, don't always face them - that makes Little Man, What Now? unique.

Durham night and day

2011-11-22T08:54:00.028Z

Or, if you prefer, come rain, come shine. The rain fell not last week but on Durham’s first LUMIERE festival two years ago; the biggest brolly in Matthew Andrews's top picture belongs to the diplo-mate and gives a good plug to the European Commission which made a substantial contribution to feature European artists (this year, 30 of them from nine member states plus two from elsewhere). The sun shone, on the other hand, on the day this year’s jamboree officially began, giving us the perfect autumn take on the cathedral from the surrounding, wooded banks of the River Wear.

I’ve written about Artichoke’s inspired advocacy of a great civic-pride event that turned out some fine art too over on The Arts Desk, so this is a chance just to rhapsodise intemperately about one of England’s most perfect small cities, and certainly its most imposing, awe-inspiring – though not necessarily its most beautiful – cathedral. I hadn’t returned since the early 1980s, when I was part of a group of Edinburgh fellow-students who travelled down to hear friend Ruthie’s brother Patrick Addinall play the Haydn Trumpet Concerto in the cathedral with his then orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic. We then all drove off – in a minivan, can memory serve me correctly on that one? - to spend a night at the Addinall homestead in Carperby, Wensleydale.

I’d been to Durham for the first time a few years before that, to audition and be auditioned by the university town through the UCCA process. It was second on my list; Oxford, the first, I’d flunked in fifth-term entrance attempt. York wouldn’t consider being third, but it was the fourth – Edinburgh – which I'd already seen a month earlier and loved at first sight. Durham had charm but much as I enjoyed my weekend jaunt, staying with my ma’s goddaughter who was studying there, I couldn’t really envisage being walled up with only the occasional excursion to Newcastle for the Big Arts. Edinburgh had two orchestras and an opera company – that was vital at the time. And I’ve never regretted a moment.

Still, I wonder what being in such a beautiful place as Durham for so long does to your psyche. Certainly I’d never thought of it as more like an Italian walled city, and the cathedral towers as not so much grim-grey – Walter Scott’s description of the 'mixed and massive piles', as inscribed on the Prebends Bridge – as the sandstone colour they really are.

The enchanting walk along the forested riverside – all a perfect nature reserve thanks to cathedral ownership – allows 280 degree perspectives around the building. Actually the towers are later than I thought, 1500s rather than Norman like the bulk of the building – but all is so massy in intent that it seems pure Romanesque in feeling if not in reality.

And so we moved on past the west façade of the cathedral, accompanied by autumnal rowers

And dazzling beechscapes.

I couldn’t resist a peek into the church on the left bank, as it were, in the district named Elvet or ‘Swan Island’. St Oswald’s was opened for us by a nice chap from Leeds up to earn a bit of cash from festival stewarding – ‘the organeer’s in there practising, I’m sure he won’t mind if I let you in’. The church is most interesting, perhaps, for its dedication to the Northumbrian king who founded Lindisfarne. He ties in with two other local saintly worthies – Hild of Whitby, whose day it happened to be, and Aidan – and his head was brought to Durham in the coffin of the man who made Durham rich through pilgrimage obeisance, St Cuthbert. Ford Madox Brown’s window executed by William Morris & Co. shows Oswald felled at the Battle of Maserfield.

Other than that, the church seems to have been much loved and tended since the mid-19th century, when vicar Dr Dykes of hymn-composing fame imbued it with the spirit of the Oxford Movement. I liked the feel of the place, and especially the late 16th century chancel screen and the 15th century poppyhead bench ends in the choir.

Then round the head of the Wear’s horseshoe and across the Arup bridge which had looked so wonderful by night with Canadian artist Peter Lewis’s Splash tumbling from it (another photo by Matthew Andrews, much better than mine).

Heading up to the porch, we met Artichoke press officer Anna Vinegrad, who said how amazed she was by the daylight appearance of Cedric Le Borgne’s Voyageurs lining the South Bailey that winds down to the river around the cathedral. So we had to take a look, and she was right. By day

and by night (didn’t get to see these in the dress rehearsal, alas).

I especially liked the wraith-like figure on a garden wall, barely decipherable in the autumn morning sunshine (though I put up a clearer image from the side in the TAD piece).

Equal to the splendour of the Lindisfarne Gospel projection on to the cathedral in the nocturnal Crown of Light by Ross Ashton with its dynamic soundscape from John Del’Nero and Robert Ziegler were the rising and falling of medieval glass

though little remains inside the cathedral itself. What there is has been fabulously arranged in the Galilee (Lady) Chapel at the west end where the Venerable Bede is buried, my favourite part of the building with its imposing chevroned arches.

Alas, no guide tells us what’s what in the glass, but could this be Oswald?

And the trumpeting angel is splendid

along with the surreal arrangement of fragments.

By day, the suspended miners’ vests of Compagnie Carabosse’s installation detracted a bit from the massy space; nothing can outshine those massive incised pillars.

But the ball of fire in the central tower was a good addition

and by night, you can see how magical the illuminations looked both in the nave

and in the cloister.

I must say the cathedral’s been a bit tackified by most of its own more recent art; by all means inject a living contemporary presence, but make sure the craftsmanship is at least partly equal to what’s gone before. Anyway, the evensong I attended – choir-wise disappointing after recent Hereford and Christ Church Oxford experiences, for an all-girl treble section just doesn’t make the same sound – incorporated thanksgiving for the Cathedral Broderers, who were all trooping off to the Gothic Nine Chapels behind the altar for the extension of the service. I discreetly slipped out at that point, but I’d be happy to spend more hours in and around this most extraordinary of edifices.

Nightshots of LUMIERE all copyright Matthew Andrews except the last, from the plinth of Jacques Rival's tongue-in-cheek snow-shaker ridiculing of the pompous Marquess of Londonderry statue in the Market Square; that and the rest of the photos (interior ones all sans flash, please note) are mine.

Proshchai, moya uchitel’nitsa

2011-11-19T09:46:00.010Z

She always insisted, once we’d got to a certain stage, that only Russian should be spoken in the lessons, so I feel I’m bringing my dear teacher, Joan Smith, back to life and reviving our weekly hours together. Some of you will be familiar with her as Joan Pemberton Smith from the opera and song translation work she did for the record companies. She died several weeks ago after a series of strokes following a complicated illness. I hadn’t seen her and husband Jeremy very often in the past couple of years – the last time was under the sad circumstances of Noelle Mann’s funeral – but her impact has been lasting (especially since I don’t seem to have forgotten too much). I met her through Noelle, and we both sang in the Kalina Choir. So what I’d call my serious Prokofiev work coincided with making the acquaintance of two women who were quite extraordinary in their different ways.

I hadn’t thought we would actually be reading any classic Russian literature in the near future when we began, but within a year we tackled Chekhov’s Rothschild’s Violin. And rather foolhardily, bearing in mind all the Church Slavonic in it, went on to Pushkin’s Boris Godunov as well as various short stories by Paustovsky and Zoshchenko. Joan did rather reproach me that after two or so years battling out to Chislehurst, I didn’t go back for weekly readings of Eugene Onegin, though I did work through it on my own.

Yet though she could be schoolmistressly strict at times, she was fundamentally a genial person and what I remember most is the way her face would light up with special enthusiasms. So I’m glad the top photo was found by Fiona McKnight of the Prokofiev Archive, since one of the two I had didn’t catch the smile, and in the other she’s wearing the ridiculous I-See-You-Jimmy tam-o-shanter with attached red wig hat we foisted on all those who came to sup as a kind of visitors-book record.

At her short memorial service the other Monday, I learnt a few things about Joan I didn’t know as well as reviving the memory of others I did. Born in Leicester in 1929, she won a scholarship to read classics at Cambridge; and as this was only just after the war, she was one of only two women studying her subject (our shared classical training was one of the most helpful aspects to the teaching; Joan could explain the grammatical workings in a way I could understand, as perhaps a native speaker might not have done). Over her years as librarian and teacher, she took a Russian course and soon became an enthusiastic proselytizer. She’d get her little groups to sing Russian folksongs to her guitar accompaniment; she apparently escorted parties to every corner of the then-Soviet Union when it was far from easy to plan travel arrangements. She even played in a balalaika orchestra (this I didn’t know).

Her Czech friend Zdena read a very lovely and fitting Yesenin poem (alas, not in Russian as well as translation, because the minority feared the majority of non-Slavic speakers wouldn’t understand). Failing the possibility of getting a Kalina Choir recording played, I thought the Song of Simeon from the Rachmaninov Vespers would be a fitting piece against which to sit and contemplate. And generally, as the best of these things can be, it was a time to remember fondly, if still tearfully, rather than to wail overmuch.

I ought also to recall one other person of whom I was extremely fond who died this year (may that be the last, please), my good university friend Jerry’s father Michael Pratt, QC. This was, for me, a rather strange concatenation of events: after my Mahler 2 talk at Birmingham, a distinguished white-haired gentleman who looked vaguely familiar came up and asked if I recognized him. Edinburgh? I thought of tutors, drew a blank and then just in time realized who it was (we can’t have met in decades). He’d seen my talk listed in the CBSO programme and came along specially. He took me for a drink with his delightful old friend after the concert, and I was amazed at the sharpness of his memory, the ability to recall details about our happy university days which I’d completely forgotten.

Probably Michael had at that time been a bit of a replacement father figure; it would have been only a couple of years since I’d lost my own. Certainly his generosity knew no bounds, and though we all ribbed him for being, as we saw it, a frightful old reactionary, he was a lot wiser and more complex than that. Read more about him by a colleague who knew him better than I did in the Birmingham Post. Anyway, about a month after that reunion, on 21 June, he died of complications following a heart attack. And I felt a sense of wonder that I’d been able to see him, and that our meeting had felt so meaningful even before what subsequently happened.

Every cut a little death

2011-11-18T14:00:00.017Z

Brutal chops in a couple of large-scale works I've heard over the past ten days reminded me of what Sviatoslav Richter had to say, recounted with warmth by his one-time duo partner Elisabeth Leonskaja when I had the huge pleasure of interviewing her at last year's Verbier Festival. We were talking about various approaches to the Schubert sonatas and I said how surprised I was, much as I liked the lady's general approach, by Imogen Cooper's omission of the exposition repeats in the Big 'Uns. Like D960, for instance, where by missing out the eight bars linking back to the first-movement repeat, she deprived us of essential music including a terrifying new appearance of the subterranean rumble which threatens the movement's stability.

Anyway, according to Leonskaja re Richter, 'If someone did not play a repeat, his question was: "You don’t love Chopin? You don’t love Schubert? Why?" [Does humble pupil voice] "Yes, I love it." "But why don’t you repeat?" And very often he said, "You know, for the public everything is interesting, only for the musicians is it not interesting to repeat." '

So I would have the same question for, of all people, that ardent champion of his fellow Czechs' music Jiří Bělohlávek when, last Thursday evening, I heard him reducing the admittedly long and involved symphonic poem I discussed below before the concert had taken place, The Golden Spinning Wheel, by about a third: 'You don't love Dvořák? Why?' Admittedly an elaborately descriptive piece such as this has its problems, but if you're going to do it, do it properly and, ideally, give a short introduction drawing in the orchestra to play a few signpost-snippets to help unacquainted listeners.

I'm assuming Bělohlávek must also do the same in his Chandos recording of The Noonday Witch, for again the timing comes out about five minutes shorter than the Rattle interpretation, which is one of Sir Si's finest achievements in terms of both colour and - surprising, but in this instance true - phrasing. At any rate, no-one would cut The Wood Dove, the most Mahlerian of the pack and very much more to the point. But I love all four; whatever the scene being depicted, Dvořák's genius for melody and unorthodox orchestration seems to burn at its brightest.

A more familiar casualty, and in this instance conductors take the cue from the doubtful composer himself, is Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony. It would be ungracious of me to cite the recorded performance I've just written the notes for, and been edited for my pains in pointing out what's not so good about the cuts in question.

Suffice it to say this isn't the first time I've heard a Russian slashing and burning the work. Yuri Ahronovitch many years ago took us aback by cutting the finale short with a straight reprise of the first-movement coda, denying Tchaikovsky's Manfred the very unByronic redemption which usually comes as a stick-in-the-throat apotheosis (though Vladimir Jurowski convinced me it could work).

That doesn't worry me as much as the lopping of some decidedly strong stuff earlier, especially in the finale's underground orgy. Ever since I deduced that the voices in the central fugue depict the five tempter spirits, I've doubled my pleasure in it; but in any case I reckon Tchaikovsky is unfairly lambasted for the few fugues, or fugatos, he does write; they seem to work pretty well to me. And much as he may have thought of dropping three of his four Manfred movements, much of the invention here is as fine as anything he wrote, and certainly unique in terms of orchestration.

On a not entirely unrelated note, I've followed a convoluted trail to watch some very significant threads and patches of what may be Sibelius's Eighth Symphony as performed by the Helsinki Philharmonic under John Storgårds. Wouldn't it be wonderful, as I wrote at the end of this Arts Desk Buzz piece, if Saraste could append these startling fragments to his upcoming instalment in the BBCSO's Sibelius cycle?

An independent Icelander

2011-11-13T10:57:00.005Z

Bjartur of Summerhouses is the unlikely hero of Halldor Laxness’s most famous novel, Independent People. He's not a bad man, but a difficult and stubborn one, who loses in one way or another two wives and a surrogate daughter through bloody-mindedness. Is his story one of a farmer surviving doggedly in the face of a mythic curse he affects not to believe in, or the age-old – and, alas, still topical – struggle-in-vain of a have-not against the bunch of smug have-it-alls who, Laxness insisted, still ruled the Icelandic roost in the mid 1930s?

Independent People is rich and ambiguous enough to hold both these elements in play, and so much more. I'm hardly surprised after the more off-piste singularity of Under the Glacier. This earlier masterpiece's staggering humanity makes you care for the self-sufficient sod who blinds himself to the possibility of wider sympathy until the end of the novel. It’s a typically understated victory when he finally looks at his daughter’s younger child and utters ‘Heavens, what a helpless-looking object…Yes, mankind is rather a pitiful sight when you come to look at it as it is in actual fact’. And Bjartur has persistently refused to look ‘actual fact’ in the face as he clings on to his croft and his livestock in a remote Icelandic valley.

Yet for all that he’s a worthy object of our sympathies. I never quite warmed to Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show, because the heroine can be such a cold character; the author meant her to be so, but somehow failed to involve us into the bargain. Bjartur has his attractive sides, all paradoxical. He’s a gruff plain-speaker and a poet, an old-fashioned one obsessed with rhymes rather than content, who nevertheless keeps alive in a snowdrift by reciting all the epics he knows, ranging from the heroic to the erotic. And he loves his sheep more than anything else, which of course leads to tragic results for both other people and a poor cow who makes a memorable appearance half way through the novel.

The other characters’ consciousnesses zoom in and out of the picture, often with such incomparable vividness that you wish you saw more of them. Perhaps my favourite chapter comes at the beginning of the second part, where the seemingly endless time between waking and dawn on a winter’s day for an imaginative young boy is so evocatively conjured. Laxness could have written an entire novel through this character’s eyes alone had he wanted. But Nonni and his spiritual sister, Asta Sollilja, for all that we see into their souls, disappear from the canvas for whole swathes. And the elder brother Gvartur comes into focus at a late stage, just when you think Laxness has no interest in him.

Unfolding a terrific yarn over time, this masterpiece doesn’t always communicate its ironic side effectively, though that may be something to do with J A Thompson’s translation. The irony can be overwhelming from the moment Laxness takes us through the profitability of the First World War’s slaughter for the Icelanders, and on to the snares of the banks and the co-operatives which made ‘interest-slaves’ of so many in the 1920s and 30s. But this is still fascinating, for it proves that little has changed either in Iceland – prophecies of 2008 are rife – or here. The scene where Bjartur meets a protester in town and belatedly realizes they’re brothers under the skin, the dispossessed against authority, could have been written today.

And, yes, it hit me with some force yesterday, listening to a debate about the worldwide demonstrations on the World Service, that we really are at a make-or-break junction in history. The opponents were putting their views across about the sometimes unbelievably courageous folk of the Arab Spring as contrasted with the Occupy movement in the relatively privileged west. A very prim young man argued that the protesters in the Middle East were fighting for democratic institutions which we’ve had for hundreds of years, and which he thought the Occupy group simply wanted to dismantle. Not dismantle, said his brilliant opponent, an Arab professor at an American university, modify. The system’s broken, it needs changing; Republicans and Democrats are in total deadlock; after the last crisis the bankers all went on as before, but they no longer can.

I’d agree with that. And I thought it was all crystallized brilliantly by another pro-democracy speaker from the University of Hawaii, who said the common link between these very different fights going on in different parts of the world was the discrepancy between expectation and reality. It really is as simple as that. We have indeed created a lost generation of educated young people, many of whom will be lucky when they come out of university to get a job stacking shelves. They should be glad of that, said the prim young man. They deserve better, said the Arab and Hawaiian academics; we’ve never had a greater capacity, through technology and innovation, to deliver work for all, and we don’t know how to make it function any more. I agree with them on that too, of course. Interesting times indeed: adapt and/or change, since going under isn’t an option for humanity.

The Icelandic landscape photos are mine; image of some 9000 G006 demonstrators at Austurvollur was taken in Week 6 of Iceland's Kitchenware-Revolution protests in October 2008.

Not so heroic

2011-11-11T11:45:00.008Z

Encouraged by the film of The Passenger, left unfinished with director Andrzej Munk's untimely death in 1961, I looked out more Munk on DVD. Eroica (1957) is a strange little diptych about anti-heroic in the Second World War, its symphonic rhythms ironically evoking Beethoven. The artwork on the Czech DVD combines both elements more successfully than the cheap, American-based Polart copy I was nevertheless pleased to pick up for a small sum.

Of the two 'movements', Scherzo alla Polacca translates least well, I think, to a non-Polish viewer; there's a kind of humour here verging on the clownish which I didn't quite get, though I like the basic premise of a small-time black marketeer who drinks too much and gets caught up with the Resistance. Edward Dziewonski's slightly less than loveable rogue wanders into all sorts of scenarios where explosions and sudden murders seem almost incidental to his trivial preoccupations.

Ostinato lugubre, on the other hand, is haunting. The murderous monotony of life in a prisoner-of-war camp is intensified in a plot where the inmates need to believe in the heroism of an officer who supposedly escaped but is, in fact, hiding above a false ceiling in the barracks. The desperation of his insubordinate friend triggers the inevitable tragedy. In no way does this connect with the first 'movement' other than in its contrasting darkness. But its atmosphere is unique, and as with The Passenger one can only be aware of the film's proximity in time to the events it dramatises. There's a score by Jan Krenz very much of its era, but once it's set the mood of each 'movement' it plays discreet second fiddle to Munk's singular brand of realism.

Ballad without words

2011-11-10T11:30:00.014Z

Apparently every Czech schoolchild knows (or used to) at least partly by heart the verse fairy-tales of Karel Erben, just as every Russian schoolchild knows (or used to) Pushkin's Tale of Tsar Saltan and Golden Cockerel. We don't, and English translations are extremely hard to find, so what Dvorak was trying so uniquely to do in his symphonic poems of the 1890s may be even more liable to misunderstanding.

That, and what I construe to be the dead hand of the prescriptive 1950s, decreeing that all music which tells a story is suspect and that therefore any but the most established tone-poems are doomed to extinction, may account for why I've never heard The Golden Spinning Wheel and its companion pieces, no less wonderful in orchestration and invention (The Wood Dove, The Noonday Witch and The Water-Sprite), in the concert-hall. In fact it's a marvellous couple of days for hearing great music live for the first time; last night I revelled in the LSO's championship of Nielsen's Flute Concerto and Zemlinsky's The Mermaid, and wrote about that enterprising event on The Arts Desk.

So tonight I'm going to hear how The Golden Spinning Wheel pans out in live performance, and our BBCSO class is actually in quite a lather about a fabulous Czech programme which only Jiri Belohlavek could mastermind. More of the rest anon, but a word or two about The Golden Spinning Wheel. What I'm hoping is that Belohlavek will give an introduction with musical pointers, because unless you know the story you could well be lost in its nearly half-hour span*. And the subtlety of the technique will pass all of us who don't know Erben's poetry by. For Dvorak has set the text to music with the words merely implied - a pioneering idea which may have encouraged Janacek in his search for naturalistic speech-melodies. I don't know of how much of the piece this is true, but I enjoyed listening to my pal Stephen Johnson's eloquent BBC Radio 3 Discovering Music on the work, where he points out that the very first hunting-theme sets the opening two lines ('Okolo lesa pole lan,/hoj jede, jede a lesa pan').

This is music that tells a story at every point, and while the invention is superlative throughout, if we don't know it, we'll be lost. It's true there's a kind of rondo form, with a clutch of forest rides as the link, but the repetitions will certainly be puzzling without the story. I'm delighted that there's a complete film of Tomas Netopil conducting an Italian orchestra (it doesn't say which one) so that I can give the pointers in the shape of a few timings.

No trouble identifying the beginning: a king riding through the forest. He stops at a cottage to ask for a drink of water and falls instantly in love with the maiden Dornicka, who brings him the water and returns to her spinning wheel. Her music is as lovely in the heroine's in that great opera Dvorak had yet to write, Rusalka, and uniquely scored (cor anglais, four solo second violins and one first, before clarinets proceed with the spinning - 2'28 in the film).

The King has to ride back later and ask Dornicka's stepmother for her hand in marriage. We can tell she's a wicked old bag (the oboe pops the request, clarinets and bassoons cackle back - 6'31).

Sure enough, the stepmother and her daughter, riding with Dornicka through the forest (8'47), murder her (9'58), cutting off her arms and feet, plucking out her eyes and for some obscure reason taking the body parts to the palace, where the 'false Dornicka' - see Odette/Odile - marries the King. He goes off to war. Meanwhile, a mysterious old man finds Dornicka's torso in the forest (brass chorale, 15'16) and sends a boy to the palace to ask for the body parts (innocent flute, 15'55). This is where you have to know why the process is repeated three times: the boy gives a golden spinning wheel in exchange for the feet, a golden distaff for the hands and a golden spindle for the eyes. The old man restores Dornicka to life.

The King returns from the wars, his wife plies the golden spinning wheel - and it creaks out the awful truth (22'20 - shades of Mahler's Das klagende Lied, where a flute made out of a murdered youth's bones reveals a fratricide). The King finds Dornicka in the forest and they live happily ever after. Somehow Dvorak passes over the wicked women's being torn to pieces by wolves in hot pursuit, but he needs to get to the end in as lush and jubilant a manner as possible.

Tonight's concert will conclude with another, earthier tale - Janacek's Taras Bulba - which is going to connect neatly with a much later work by Martinu, his Rhapsody Concerto for viola and orchestra. Like so many of the exile's great later works composed in America, Martinu's modest little masterpiece harps on the cadence we know as the 'Julietta chords', from their emancipating role in that fantastical masterpiece of an opera (which I've just heard Richard Jones will be staging for ENO next season, hurrah).

Did Martinu mean by the chords to evoke his lost love, the talented composer Vitezslava Kapralova, who died at the tragically young age of 25 in 1940? We'll probably never know; Martinu had to cover his tracks even for his biographer, Milos Safranek, so as - I guess - not to further wound the feelings of his French wife. But the fact is that the 'Julietta chords' first turn up at the end of Taras Bulba. So they could equally well signify the rapture of Czech liberation, and of what his homeland meant to Martinu.

At any rate most of the later works are shot through with significant quotations, or near-quotations, and I spotted another in the second movement of the Rhapsody-Concerto: a poignant recollection of the lyrical second theme in the first movement of Dvorak's American Quartet. For some strange reason a good performance of that isn't on YouTube, only the first movement in the magnificent interpretation of Josef Suk with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Neumann. The Julietta chords are all over this movement, too, starting seconds into the piece.

The second movement is the more dynamic and unpredictable of the two; amazing the use Martinu makes of rattling side-drum in postponing the ultimate peace, though that does come. It's a good time to remember all those geniuses, as well as all the rest of suffering humanity, displaced by war. Given that Remembrance Day is tomorrow, I'll leave you with a recording of perhaps Martinu's best-known orchestral work, the memorial to the Czechs massacred by the Nazis in Lidice.

*He didn't. Instead he cut the work by a third, leaving my students puzzled as to what was going on. All this now detailed in the Arts Desk review.

Norfolk churches: royal gifts

2011-11-09T11:49:00.009Z

I've owed those concerned the total for some time, but now that we've conferred, I'm happy to announce that the four of us who did our 19-mile, 16-church walk in September raised £1,026 between us for the Norfolk Churches Trust. Mary Heather of All Saints Burnham Thorpe, Nelson's church where our dear, late Mary Dunkerton was church warden right up to her final illness, will take in the money this weekend. Apologies to those of you whose cheques have been sitting apparently idle over the past few months - they should be cashed soon.

Meanwhile, any excuse to return to the gem of our eighth annual walk, the early 15th century stained glass of St Peter West Rudham - the ideal candidate, as I wrote at the time, for this sort of generosity since it's maintained by the Churches Conservation Trust. I focused on Christ showing his wounds and one of the angels in the earlier blog, but here's their context

plus another angel from the middle of the three windows with the old glass in.

Happy memories, in this very grey November week, of the church in September

and a bit more medieval glass, intriguingly collaged by a Victorian benefactor, in St Mary Colkirk.

Thanks to all concerned, and onwards to the next walk in 2012, when we've decided we ought to cover some of the giants in the Norfolk Broads.

Old-new Glasgow

2011-11-07T09:03:00.019Z

On recent visits to Glasgow, I’ve found myself confined to the more or less unchanging scene up on the hill, around the Theatre Royal, the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and the soulless, inadequately acoustic’ed Royal Concert Hall. It would have been so simple to stroll eastwards from Queen’s Street or Central Stations and examine the newly done-up Merchant City of the plain, but I haven’t done that since I was a student and it was still something of a no-man's-land.

My loss, as it turns out from this most recent trip. The nice folk at the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra spearheaded by Andrew Trinick - always the best of people to work with, so good to see him again after our BBC Symphony days together - must have thought I was overdoing the compliments about the City Halls. I was in fact genuinely amazed by what’s happened here since those (pre-Royal) Scottish National Orchestra concerts, Järvi blasting us with Shostakovich 4 while before it in the interval little old ladies in their tea-cosy hats sat by the windows of the 1950s-feeling cafeteria.

In effect, the main hall of 1841 has essentially been rebuilt and raised from scratch, with a lovely, airy feeling to its white walls and plastered balcony. Arup associates enhanced the acoustics by opening up the coffered ceiling (photos, by the way, since I forgot my camera, are from the BBCSSO and – further down – via GoMA and The Skinny). The audience, to judge from Thursday’s experience, is of all ages and hugely enthusiastic; there’s a buzz here I’ve never felt at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall. The folk at the RSNO, now consigned Glasgow-wise to acoustic hell up on Buchanan Street, can only look on enviously at the Musikverein-style shoebox perfection and point out that the 1100-seater hall, with room for a maximum of 90 musicians on the platform and no resident organ, is too small for what they do.

Which it nearly is for some of the BBCSSO’s noisier scores. But I loved the way the foundations shook with the thundering chorale at the end of Sibelius’s Second Symphony – a generally lithe, no-nonsense interpretation from Ilan Volkov (pictured below in the hall with the orchestra at an earlier concert), which nevertheless gathered quite some intensity through that strange slow movement. And connected, in the wrigglings of the coda there, to the death-throes of Berlioz’s Cleopatra – handsome of voice – true oaky mezzo - if monotonous, colour-wise and a bit pitch-dodgy in the shape of Ruxandra Donose; as usual, the orchestra had the lion’s share of Hector’s shock tactics – the thrummed accompaniments to the three-trombone funeral dirge, the incredible final shudders.

The Berlioz in turn made a muscly complement to the wispier trills and mysteries of Debussy’s Saint Sebastian fragments. And there was a generous bonus, too, in the shape of Julian Anderson’s Eden, starting and ending well with mesmerizing folky-ancient string solos, in between sounding well but not sense-wise adding up to much for me. Though I have to say my godson Alexander, whom it was such a treat to host for an evening now that he’s started a new life as a student at Glasgow University, was excited by it all and told me chapter and verse why.

He also enjoyed some of the sounds I dug out for the 1911 talk. And I loved the lecture-space, a room apparently rediscovered, Danny Pollitt of the RSNO told me the next day, during the renovation work on the building.

Down south at the Barbican’s Fountain Room – much as I prefer it to the hall for the ability to establish a rapport with the audience at pre-performance talks - I nearly hit my head on the low ceiling and remain unlit on the platform; here there’s space enough to accommodate another full house and lighting that is almost phosphorescent. And the streets around Candleriggs take on a light and elegance that felt to me, unless I was hallucinating, a bit Parisian.

With a couple of hours to spare the next morning before catching the train back to London, I was heading for the St Mungo Museum of Religious Art and Life but got unexpectedly waylaid by the delights of GoMA, Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art housed in a splendid neoclassical building in the same grid as the City Halls.

The ground-floor interior had been turned into what the brochure rightly describes as ‘a twenty-first century sculpture court’. My thanks to photographer Nick Milligan and his work in The Skinny for permission to reproduce the next two images.

The artists, all from Glasgow, have been yoked together under the aegis You, Me, Someone Else, and the blurb struggles to link artworks made from found objects with finished products in wood, metal and plaster, but never mind; all have the space they need and some complement the building in surprising ways, like Andrew Miller’s wood and rope chandelier

and his tower of lampshades seen in the wider shot. The most resonant object for me was Lorna Macintyre’s Apollo.

The mythic symbol of sun and music speaks through a disarmingly simple conjunction of a wooden bass, a lyre-like bent metal rod, a harp string and a ball covered in gold leaf. Stravinsky, I fancy, would have approved.

Downstairs at GoMA is a well-used library with coffee-shop attached, while in Gallery 2 Alasdair Gray’s impressions of Glasgow in 1977, when he was commissioned by Elspeth Gray of the People’s Palace to encapsulate the city as he saw it then, showed me a side of the writer-artist I didn’t know from his book illustrations to Lanark and the like.

There’s energy in the big four-part panorama of a single street, and I’d have been delighted to be one of the worthies and/or locals he portrayed. Shame so little of this seems to appear on the web. It can be found in a book that’s just come out which I’d rather like, A Life in Pictures, but it seemed a bit expensive at £35 – the price to pay for good book production, I guess. Anyway, the exhibition was well frequented by allsorts, just as I remember a Kelvingrove display of 19th century architectural designs back in the early 1980s being attended by a whole range of citizens, and the People’s Palace dotted with proud oldsters explaining to their grandchildren the significance of the ordinary objects lodged within. A city with plenty of spirit still, to be sure – as Alexander, one of its most recent citizens fresh from the sleepy comforts of the Borders, is happy to attest.

1911

2011-11-05T10:41:00.028Z

That was the theme upon which I had half an hour to expound before the second in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's 1911 series in Glasgow's glitteringly refurbished City Halls on Thursday evening (more on the revelation of this virtually new venue, and the concert, in the next post).

Of course it's a subject which throws up further astonishing links the longer you have to think about it, and even as I was putting the finishing touches to my dozen examples, the year of Alexander's Ragtime Band turned my thoughts to checking what Ives was up to. Sure enough, it was then he composed The Fourth of July, third movement in the Holidays Symphony and the trickiest polytonal melee of the lot ('I did what I wanted to, quite sure that the thing would never be played , and perhaps could never be played' - it finally was, for the first time, in Paris on 21 February 1932 - 'although the uneven measures that look so complicated in the score are mostly caused by missing a beat, which was often done in parades').

Even in terms of what DID get performed in 1911, the musical list is perhaps the most impressive of any year. I turned to the treasure-trove chronology of Slonimsky's Music Since 1900 to compare the premieres of the twelfth year with those of the first. In 1900, the lucky public got Tosca (a lively start in January), Finlandia, The Dream of Gerontius; in 1911, another start-of-year blast with Der Rosenkavalier, Scriabin's Prometheus, chunks of Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe as well as his L'heure Espagnole, Sibelius's Fourth Symphony, Elgar's Second, Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, Debussy's Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien and Stravinsky's Petrushka (the latter two respectively graced by designs from Bakst and Benois below).

In terms of the as yet unperformed, you can add to the list Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle, from which I took the vision behind the Fifth Door and Judith's blank response as a paradigm of the splendour-and-misery dichotomy of music in 1911, and the fourth of Webern's Op. 10 pieces, composed on 19 July, 'scored', Slonimsky sums up, 'for clarinet, trumpet, trombone, mandolin, celesta, harp, small drum, violin and viola , containing 6 1/3 measures in 3/4 time lasting 19 seconds according to the metronome mark.' (Boulez takes 22).

That made a neat contrast to the Mozart-minuet-for-breakfast that turns into a sensuous 19th century waltz in Der Rosenkavalier (taking advantage here of one of the Roller designs the Austrian National Library in Vienna gave access to during its all too short Rosenkavalier centenary exhibition).

Other polarities I used - analogous, I hope, to the Somov/Schiele split up top (both portraits painted in 1911) - were Debussy's whole-tone versus diatonic in Le Martyre, the slightly unsatisfactory 'fragments' from which were being performed in the concert; Stravinsky's tritone-into-bitonal basis for riven puppet Petrushka versus the white-note-y Russian Dance in the ballet; Sibelius's tritonal obsession in the Fourth Symphony versus the light and airy 'Way of the Lover' in Rakastava; and the dissonant nine-note scream in Mahler's Tenth as contrasted with the great string leap leading to a final becalmed F sharp major at the end of the symphony - if only to prove that human love, in the shape of 'to live for you, to die for you, Almschi' as written beneath it, was the ultimate triumph for Mahler. Who of course died on 18 May that year and was buried in Grinzing cemetery as painted by Schoenberg (an image I've already evoked on this blog, but worth repeating).

The one issue I took was with the doomy nature of the BBCSSO's blurb: 'immense change was afoot...accelerating towards the cataclysmic events of 1914...the end of the empire...the angst-ridden music of middle Europe...a time of great foreboding'. True, the world was worried by Germany's rush to arms

but once more I take my new bible on the subject, Simon Winder's Germania, as gospel against the notion that everyone sensed the world as they knew it was about to crash and burn. Winder maintains that the Habsburg end of things needn't quite have shattered in the way it did had the Austrian Empire not been tied to 'the cretinous and wholly unrealistic aims of the Germans'. He points out Vienna's pioneering brand of 'luxury modernism' and argues it could, and should, have continued to carry on defining European style and idea:

It seems more rational to be angry than mournful that a war of such a peculiar kind would end all this. The final movement of Berg's extraordinary Three Orchestral Pieces, with its lurching, macabre military march, written in the spring and summer of 1914, is generally seen as a brilliant premonition of the conflict to come - but nobody could foresee such a thing. It would be as plausible to criticize Klimt because his paintings incorrectly presaged a future mostly filled with half-nude society hostesses.

The example I took from 1911 parallel to Winder's Berg was from the Rondo in Elgar's Second Symphony, namely that juggernaut of a summer-garden ghost resurrected AntiChrist-like from the first movement. David Pownall's play Elgar's Rondo posited it as a prophetic vision of soldiers marching to their doom on the battlefields of the First World War, which may have been justifiable dramatic licence; but to me it's a private nightmare of the riven, troubled Elgar. Below is the late lamented Sir Edward Downes's performance, posted on YouTube by someone who seems to find the movement happy and joyful (though one commenter contradicts that). The apocalypse I refer to starts at 4'44, though of course the Rondo is nearly all chromatically unsettling.

At any rate a month after the unsatisfactory premiere of that divided symphony, Elgar's splendid and far from harmonically placid Coronation March for George V and Queen Mary was performed. It was recorded in abridged form - it's awfully long, probably the only reason why it doesn't join the Pomp and Circumstance Marches on concert programmes - by Landon Ronald in 1935, a year after the composer's death, for the Silver Jubilee of the same couple. Which I would compute as being 1936. In which case, as J pointed out when I played him the black-white examples, here would be another case of a significant time three years away from a big cataclysm.

Sibelius's 'Virgin' Symphony?

2011-10-31T09:56:00.015Z

We’re talking not any of those Kalevala maidens from Luonnotar to Aino, depicted above evading old man Väinämöinen in an early triptych by Sibelius’s friend and contemporary Akseli Gallen-Kallela, but the BVM, no less.

The news was broken to me by that nice BBC man Mark Lowther, bounding up enthusiastically at the interval of Friday night’s concert (which I was reviewing for The Arts Desk, but had been determined to catch under any circumstances). Had I heard what conductor Sakari Oramo had to say about new research on the Sibelius Third Symphony, in which he was about to conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra? I hadn’t, but Mark gave me the gist and I caught Oramo succinctly mentioning it again in the broadcast between Luonnotar and the symphony.

In short, says Oramo, ‘this music or material of it was originally part of an oratorio project about the Virgin Mary, and you can I think relate to a lot of this music thinking it has a religious – albeit it is a pagan-religious or folk-religious – background, and I think this explains a lot of the chorale textures, it explains the nature of the final hymn.’

Indeed – hurrah for ongoing Finnish scholarship, and how frustrating that unless we master that impossible language, the rest of us are shut out from the more interesting developments until someone like Oramo draws our attention to it. Anyway, that’s enough to justify inclusion of a couple of images from the Barbara altarpiece by the north German Master Francke, which resided in the church in Kalanti from about 1410 to 1883 and is now in Helsinki’s National Museum of Finland.

Not that the news changes the essential character of the symphony, which has the feeling of a journey like the earlier ones in the Lemminkäinen Suite and En Saga. But how difficult to put one’s finger on what makes this music strike so profoundly, apart from its deep-wired structural surprises (what an amazing solution to let the chorale out of the bag in the finale when he does). I found myself in tears minutes into the second movement, which for swathes does little more than oscillate around an intermezzo-like, runic melody. Järvi's Gothenburg performance is one of the few to capture the same sort of inscaped magic.

I’d been in a gloomy mood all week, mostly triggered by ongoing dental surgery, and this lifted me completely as Chailly’s Beethoven on Wednesday couldn’t.

Same goes for Luonnotar, the Finnish creation myth as adapted from the Kalevala, and illustrated above and below by Gallen-Kallela. The depicted stanzas deal with Luonnotar/Ilmatar’s floating on the water and her raising of a knee for a teal to nest on.

From the teal’s egg are fashioned the solid earth, the lofty arch of heaven, the sun (its yolk), the moon (its white) and the stars (its speckled shell). I’ve written enough already in the Arts Desk piece about the BBCSO/Oramo partnership with the wonderful Mrs. O., Anu Komsi, who’s previously dazzled us with twin Piia in Salonen’s Wing on Wing. There’s communication for you. Mattila amid wavescapes will do here (be patient with the opening soundtrack, which fades before the music begins), but Friday night's performance was even more extraordinary, and the communication cried out to be seen as well as heard.

Komsi WAS the Virgin of the Air cast plaintively upon the waters, and earlier she even convinced me that there might be more to Saariaho than what so briefly tickles the ear: here was substance as well as texture. But of course it’s Sibelius who still sounds freshest and continues to give perhaps the greatest spiritual sustenance of any composer I know. I still count those four hours spent last March at his home of Ainola (pictured again below - this of course is where he composed the Third Symphony), prompting four entries starting with this one, as among the most impression-filled of my life. And Sibelius's unflagging genius - the miniatures are as individual as the compressed epics - has come to feel like the strongest of all musical companions through life.

In mycological mood

2011-10-29T11:57:00.018+01:00

I thought better of calling this post 'the fruits of hidden sex' (though no doubt some sad searcher may still be disappointed as a result of my still managing to slip the line in here). The mushroom itself is, forgive the mixed metaphor, the tip of the iceberg, like the wonderful if hallucinogenic (I'm told) fly agaric fungi posing picturesquely on the edge of the drive to our dear friends' residence of Chapelgill, Broughton, in the Scottish Borders. Very near them is the world's first cryptogamic sanctuary, established in the Heron Wood of Dawyck Botanic Gardens with beech

and Scots pine now seeming as much at home as the native oak and holly. My Collins dictionary leaves 'cryptogam' at 'any organism that does not produce seeds, including algae, fungi, mosses and ferns', but we're talking sex, the vast underground network of decay-speeding and new lifing of which the mushrooms are the brief visible manifestation.

And this was a deceptively early autumn flourish, at the very beginning of September, after which of course we returned to late-summer heat and dryness. Dawyck is the place for what it calls 'a dynamic community of native mosses, lichens and liverworts'

many of which flourish on the stonework around the garden.

But Heron Wood feels like a place apart. About a third of the garden's 1,055 species of fungi* are to be found here, and on our September visit we could well believe it.

I've since had it confirmed that this is the tasty Boletus edulis, certainly a bolete.

Yet even if my mycological studies were to continue, I'd never trust myself to distinguish the edible from the poisonous - remembering especially an incident on Samos last autumn when our Polish friend Lydia identified a rare, delicious specimen only to be told by a local Greek lady that it was deadly. She thought this might be to discourage furrin pickers, but we weren't going to take the risk.

Anyway all you'd get from Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric, would be quite a trip. That too I'm not hazarding. But very pretty they looked too, flourishing under the beeches on the hillside in Broughton, ignoring the farmer's fencing.

After this I was keen to join the 'fungal foray' at Kew on 18 October, but it was booked out twice over. I can't praise Kew too highly, though, for responding so rapidly to my requests yesterday, when I decided to take an excursion in search of the yellowish coral fungus named there by George Massee in 1896. Clavaria kewensis is now Ramaria stricta, and the information lady put me straight in touch with mycologist Dr. Bryn Dettinger. While waiting the return of Martn Ainsworth, he confirmed my bolete and told me he'd seen a clump of Ramaria stricta on the east side of the Banks Building.

The trouble with that is that it's strictly private and punters can't get anywhere near the east side. Never mind; here's a Wiki shot of the fabulous beast to show what I missed.

That said, no visit to Kew is ever wasted. I didn't see a single fungus anywhere, and believe me, I looked. But I did come across one of the autumn glories, the Italian maple, Acer opalus, looking splendid both without

and from within.

The ubiquitous parrots along the Thames were flagrantly displaying themselves nearby; whatever the damage to treetops, who could resist that flash of green?

Sundry other maples were doing their stuff

and Aesculus flava, the sweet buckeye, provided more perspectives from within.

It was curious to walk around the woodland in the semi-darkness before closing time at 6pm. Geese, ducks and other woodland birds had truly taken over the gardens. But the fungi's above-ground flourishings all, it seems, were gone. Next time I need a reliable guide.

*Kew boasts around 2,750 including lichens. Its magazine article continues: 'To put the figures into context, there are around 2,100 native flowering plant and fern species in the UK, and around six to seven times as many fungi. It is this ration (developed by David Hawksworth) that underpins the now generally accepted figure of around 1.5 million fungal species estimated to live on Earth'.

Glyndebourne: autumn chats

2011-10-26T13:10:00.020+01:00

Two visits on two very different days, to talk before the GOT (Glyndebourne on Tour) performances about two operas a little outside my comfort zone. It did me good to find more in Donizetti's score for Don Pasquale than had ever properly met my not especially attentive ear - especially when that was borne out by Enrique Mazzola's crisp, elegant conducting - and to try and find out what makes Rinaldo, Handel's first Italian opera for London, truly tick. As it does in Robert Carsen's clean, clear and often very funny production, though several folk who'd been to the talk expected me to go along with them in the intervals that the show was 'very silly'. And, of course, I disagreed.

Except, of course, that the operatic rehashing of a romantic slice from Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata is silly in the first place, and Carsen is spot-on: this is schoolboy crusader 'history', so to have it as one unfortunate pupil's fantasy works well. Especially given the director's painterly eye, his refusal to fall into the trap of chucking in too much business to fill up the da capo arias and not to trust the singers, the minimum of gags very well choreographed by Carsen's regular collaborator Philippe Giraudeau.

The reviews seem to have taken it all a bit too seriously, and not to have realised that any links with David Alden's gobsmacking ENO schoolyard production of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream were purely coincidental (both were being worked on simultaneously). 'Crusaders' on bikes to give energy to the Act 1 bravura curtain, 'Venti, turbini' - now there's genius, especially as it looked rather lovely under a full moon and since counter-tenor Christophe Dumaux is good but not Iestyn-Davies-electrifying in show-off mode (Rinaldo production photos by Alastair Muir).

Loved the sirens all mincing impersonations of schoolgirl Almirena, the 'siege' of Armida's castle in a chemistry lab, the elaborately timed soccer-match battle with a globe as the ball. Laurence Cummings kept a superb orchestra moving and shapely, not always with enough space for everyone on stage to maneouvre. All the singers did a good job, but the really outstanding ones - though Isabel, my companion for the evening, smitten by Dumaux, will disagree - were Joshua Hopkins's Argante (such a tough sing, but handled with confidence and nicely decked out in his splendid if nonsensical entrance aria by three of the opera's four trumpets) and Elizabeth Watts's Almirena.

I'd prepared the punters for various takes on 'Lascia ch'io pianga', from 'classical Barbra' Streisand (which several seemed to know before I cut her mercifully short) to Cotrubas and Bartoli, with an interesting detour via the aria in the second of its two earlier homes, as 'Lascia la spina' in the 1707 cantata Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, very stylishly da capo'd by Ann Hallenberg. But la Watts surpassed them all, I reckon, in her thoughtful ornamentation. We also had a bit of a laugh in the talk with Horne and Podles in 'Venti, turbini', and I found myself being irreverent about the whole set-up - without, of course, having seen the Glyndebourne production in the main season, as had many in the audience, which is healthily irreverent, too, but not insensitive or without its moments of pathos.

The history of the Queen's Theatre Haymarket premiere 300 years ago is, in any case, absorbing in itself and could well have filled up the half-hour pre-performance talk with anecdotes from Addison and Steele. I perceived a certain irony, though I may be wrong, in Steele's observation of the castrato playing Rinaldo in 1711, Niccolo Grimaldi detto il Nicolini: 'every limb an every finger contibutes to the part, inasmuch that a deaf man may go along with him in the sense of it. There is scarcely a beautiful posture in an old statue that he does not plant himself in, as the different circumstances of the story give occasion for it'. Well, autre temps, autres moeurs, I guess. We think this is Nicolini in Marco Ricci's Rehearsal for an Opera of 1709.

Don Pasquale's creation at Paris's Theatre Italien in 1843 is no less interesting, given that three of the four main singers had created a furore in Bellini's I Puritani eight years earlier. You can well imagine the self-regarding Tamburini

being miffed that the supposed cabaletta to his first cavatina went to the buffo, Lablache, pictured below with Giulia Grisi in Puritani

and I'd love to have seen what Grisi made of Norina-as-Sofronia's celebrated persecution and slapping of her old 'husband'. There was fun enough in the spat between Ainhoa Garmendia (good, bit soubrettish) and Jonathan Veira, all you could want in a not overdone, relaxed and easy-going Pasquale (great photo by Bill Cooper).

No need to regurgitate what I've written about the show over on the Arts Desk, so let's just wind back to a sandwich by the lake on a glorious autumn afternoon just before I went off for the soundcheck, the beech trunk more visible now that the thickets by the lake have mostly moulted

and apples in the orchard glowing red in the sun

while the view from the Ebert Room seemed much as it had been back in August.

Yesterday was blustery and - eventually - wet, even if the herbaceous border that looks out over the big lawn running down to the ha-ha is still surprisingly well flowered.

It did, though, feel like the equivalent of a seaside resort out of season that we had to stand and eat our sandwiches on one of the covered levels in the second interval. But both shows were well up to Glyndebourne-in-high-summer standard.

The little things

2011-10-24T14:06:00.012+01:00

I've never read a more entertaining, laugh-out-loud 'history' book than Simon Winder's Germania. Who could not but agree with him that most of the potentates who've called the shots throughout the centuries are anything but a bunch of demented sociopaths (he is generous with the exceptions)? It could all have been a bit brittle and wearing, this stance, were it not for the author's likeable personality and his willingness to stick his neck out for what he loves and cares about.

Which amounts to the civic by-products of all this instability: the handsome works of art commissioned by the worst people, the way that anything lovable has a way of squeezing itself in between the lines of horrible history. To sum up 'the pleasure and vigour of the pre-1914 world', Winder chooses his favourite painting, August Macke's Walterchens Spielsachen (Little Walter's Playthings) in Frankfurt's Städel Museum. I hadn't seen it, so I had to look it up and illustrate above. Having described it well in words, Winder sums up:

There are thousands of grander, more brilliant pictures in the world, but I'd settle for Little Walter's Playthings, not least for its revolutionary role in making guinea pigs an acceptable subject for portraiture. Macke spent his entire, short life creating paintings of happiness - shops, souks, parks, parrots, beautiful hats, all in the most surprising and lovely colours. He was killed in Champagne a few weeks into the war, which of course is where the problem begins.

Not that it hadn't begun again and again before in what we now call German history. As for after, when it comes to 1933, Winder declares that 'anecdotal facetiousness has to get out of the way and simply stop'. So he does, justifying as his cut-off point the fact that all the people who made Germany such a rich and rare place to be either emigrated or were murdered. Yet I wish he'd write another book on the continuing paradoxes of post-1945 'Germania', which of course he includes tangentially via his own multiple visits.

Those are what make such seemingly unbearable earlier grimnesses such as the Thirty Years War so bracing to read about. Winder meditates on the stuffed horse of Sweden's Gustavus Adolphus he's seen in Ingolstadt's city museum. Via an hilarious meditation on the usual experience of such civic institutions, he gives us the background and tells us how Gustavus narrowly escaped death in Ingolstadt when his horse was shot from under him before finally meeting it at Lützen. Here's the aside which especially flavours the anecdote: 'This sort of lucky escape is such a common cliché of history books that it is tempting to think of a parallel version which would privilege the horse: so that later, at the Battle of Lützen, "the horse's rider was shot from over him" would be a happy and much-whinnied at outcome'.

The first of Winder's three little chapters on the Thirty Years War made me look at images of more pictures, this time by an artist I'd never heard of steeped in the horrors of that time, Sebastian Vrancx. Alas, his execution is generally less accomplished and creepy than Winder's narrative of these 'highly disturbing images of powerlessness'. But I did find one which seemed sufficiently strange and right, of monkeys and cats in military uniform.

I could go on citing the pleasures of Germania, the many books I have to read and places I need to see which Winder has so enthusiastically recommended. But I'll stop by giving his final inimitable turns of phrase to a theory which Tolstoy put more cumbersomely in his diaries. The context is praise of the Biedermeier generation, 'the first timid attempt at bourgeois civil society, a sort of limbering up for us all now just sitting in a happy pile watching television', and praise for the 'time of quiet consolidation':

Just as most Europeans after the Second World War were, if given the chance, just sitting around in family groups and buying consumer goods, so the new rulers were able to preside over a generally rather dozy population. Indeed, a parallel history of Europe could be written which viewed family life and regular work as the essential Continental motor of civilization. Then war and revolution would need to be seen by historians as startling, sick departures from that norm of a kind that require serious explanation, rather than viewing periods of gentle introversy as mere tiresome interludes before the next thrill-packed bloodbath.

Worth applying, perhaps, to film and TV. I always remember Emma Thompson asking whether that splendid Ang Lee movie Sense and Sensibility wasn't closer to life as most of us experience it than the latest thriller or gangster movie. By the same token - bearing in mind that the only TV we watch is a string of catch-up episodes on J's iPad - isn't Come Dine With Me a bit more of the essence than generic, if well acted thrillers like Spooks and Hidden, which seems to me from a non-TVcentric perspective ridiculously overpraised? At any rate, it's always pleasantly surprising to be charmed on CDWM by the likes of Bobby Davro, a character one had written off (with little knowledge or interest, it has to be said) as a complete numpty.

St Paul's: what's the problem?

2011-10-22T13:00:00.020+01:00

If you haven't been down to Paternoster Square, you might have a rather grim, media-fed image of the Occupy London protest camp outside St Paul's. I was surprised when I went there on Wednesday to find that the neat and tidy tents were well to the left of the main entrance; the steps up to the two doors, and the entire area around Queen Anne, are completely clear, and welcome as ever was to the hordes of tourists who are now busy snapping the interlopers. When I went back yesterday evening on my way to the Hvorostovsky recital at the Barbican, the path to the side door which leads to the restaurant and shop had also been cleared.

So far, too, it seems, all is extremely well organised: the toilet facilities, the cooking area, the 'Star-Books' stall run by those against the preposterous closure of the libraries. Sure, there isn't one point being made here, and some are bound to be distinctly fuzzy; but it's an arena for ideas. I saw no hint of the off-their-heads ferals who made Parliament Square such a dodgy place to be earlier this year.

But is it safe? St Paul's, having officially told the police to clear orf from protesters who so far show no signs of making trouble, and fielding a clergy many of whom are fundamentally sympathetic, now says it has to close its doors. It didn't make a very clear case for this yesterday, only loosely citing 'health and safety' issues*. The protesters countered that they'd checked with the fire brigade, which apparently has no problem. Worse, the 'first closure since the Blitz' line kow-tows to the worst kind of Daily Mail 'national shame' mentality.

That said, it's clear that there are some potential hazards here, and the main one - that the violent fringe could hijack the cause - is certainly problematic if, as I understand it, St Paul's is liable for anything that happens on its territory. But sadly this hasn't been spelled out properly so far and the cathedral has only itself to blame for vague publicity.

Today, incidentally, you probably won't be hearing from a closed cathedral the thunderous sounds of Liszt's Prelude and Fugue on BACH on the mighty organ - the chromatic upheavals of which contributed to my being sick in the porch of Norwich Cathedral in the early 1980s. As Jessica Duchen reminds us, it's the exact 200th anniversary of the Hungarian's birth. Here he is looking across to the cumbersome facade of the Esterhazy Palace at Eisenstadt (the inscription on the other side is rather odd, claiming Liszt as foremost son of Austrian Burgenland).

And here's his Blauer Salon in Eisenstadt's splendid Landesmuseum, reassembled lock, stock and barrel from the Schottenhof in Vienna.

I really don't have any Desert Island Discs for the occasion, unless it be Arrau in the Benediction de Dieu or Margaret Price in the Petrarch Sonnets, two of which Hvorostovsky spun rather beautifully in last night's recital. Most of the rest I can take or leave - my loss, I know; but so much Chopin last year spoiled me for returning to Liszt's piano music and finding it wasn't as miraculous, under all the wrappings, as I used to find it. Postscript: but then I listen to Cziffra in the Transcendenal Etudes, and I start changing my mind again...

*I've received further clarification from the St Paul's publicity department on what these problems consist of. They list:

· Presence of unknown quantities of flammable liquids.

· Smoking/drinking within the tented areas.

· Potential gas safety within the catering facility.

· Compromised free fire exits, usually open now closed but manned.

· Slips, trips and falls exacerbated at night with cover of darkness.

· Due to the darkness issues on North side, use of naked flame lighting.

· Sleeping risk within the tented area, if fire should break out.

· Public heath issues

a Sanitation

b Food hygiene

c Rodent/pest issue

· The issues of rope/guy-lines attached to trees, bollards, lamp standards possibly causing injury to face/neck/upper limbs and trips on low level guy-lines.

· VIP security due to camp protest.

All of which I can see the point of, but two questions remain: whose land is this (one recent report suggested it was a patchwork of St Paul's, City of London and free-for-all territories)? And exactly how does this rebound on entering and using the cathedral - is the fire risk too great?

A little light ondes music

2011-10-20T09:34:00.011+01:00

Never heard of a composer called Pierre Vellones (pictured above with Maurice Martenot in 1936)? Neither had I until Tuesday evening, when Cynthia Millar, friend and doyenne of that singular Messiaenic bird the ondes Martenot, paid my BBC Symphony Orchestra class at the City Lit a visit. I hope it doesn’t put into the shadow the magnificent light she shed on her long-standing acquaintance with the role her instrument plays in its most monumental incarnation, the Turangalila Symphony, nor all the splendid work she’s done as composer for films and TV, to say that the real revelation was a piece of light music – by Vellones.

A bit of an epoch-maker, as it turned out, since the delightfully dotty Vitamines - a precursor of a light-music piece I think is a real gem, John Malcolm’s Non Stop, better known as the old ITN news theme – was one of two pieces Vellones wrote for his friend, fellow cellist and of course inventor Maurice Martenot as early as 1935. Along with the 'Valse tzigane' Split, it featured both saxophones and the ondes as I’ve never quite heard it before, staccato rather than swoopily legato (though we did also hear a piece of music for TV Cynthia had written which emulated that approach). So here’s the Columbia a-side

pursued in more leisurely style by Split, with the ondes in more familiar mode.

These are two that, we agreed on Tuesday, the fabulous John Wilson could resuscitate with pleasure. And were we to flick back a few years, courtesy of the miracles of YouTube, we could also listen to a more serious Fantaisie Vellones wrote for ondes and piano.

It seems to me there’s almost as much mileage to be got out of the singular histories of these two grands amis as from the story of Lev Termen, the creator of the theremin.

Which is of course operated quite differently from the later ondes – by adjusting finger and arm movements in a force field. The ondes Martenot comprises a keyboard (monodic), the ribbon (ruban) in front of it threaded through a metal ring controlling portamenti and glissandi

and of course the three speakers, of which the most attractive to behold below is the palme, with its lyre-like arrangement of 24 tuned strings.

Nevertheless the artistry, especially in matter of manipulating dynamics and vibrato, makes the ondes irreplaceable by the plain old synthesizer or computer. And the same goes for the theremin. I take the liberty of reproducing another gem since one of my most treasured CDs, The Art of the Theremin, has gone walkabout. It features the great Clara Rockmore, Vilnius-born violinist pupil of Leopold Auer turned theremenist, accompanied by Nadia Reisenberg. What Rockmore achieves in Rachmaninov’s Vocalise is, of course, long-breathed beyond the wildest dreams of any singer, though several friends guessed it was Callas when I played it to them source unknown.

Ultimately, though, it’s back to Messiaen. You can hear Cynthia in a double whammy at the Barbican – Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bucher conducted by Marin Alsop on 4 November, followed by the BBCSO performance of Messiaen’s Turangalila on the 5th. She’s also doing interesting experimental work at Snape Maltings with her nephew, a dubstep guru turned ambient specialist (I was really impressed with what she played us of that). But we have to end with Turangalila, and the loony tune of the ‘Joy of the Blood of the Stars’ movement, which despite its complexity and resources isn’t so very far removed from Vitamines… There are only two movements on YouTube of the amazing Prom in which Cynthia joined Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Andrew Davis and a typically gigantic National Youth Orchestra, but this will do.

Depressive apocalypse

2011-10-18T14:44:00.022+01:00

Anything Lars von Trier makes is worth seeing - anything (and I know, all that nonsense he spouted at Cannes, which is so crucifying to watch, led a lot people to turn their backs on him, and in a sense who can blame them?) I couldn't steel myself to see Antichrist, though one day I shall, and I can well believe those who say it's not as sensationalist in its horrors as others make it out to be. It was even a bit of a task to get to Melancholia, as I'll admit it rings true to the not so distant past, but I knew we had to go, and to see it on the big screen which, by and large, we've all but abandoned other than for special events in recent years.

Funny, that, how certain modes of being feel right at one time and not another. We used to make a regular Monday thing of it after my classes - tea in Bertaux, a film at the Curzon Soho (at least since the Metro and the Lumiere gave up the ghost), a Chinese meal afterwards in the New World. Maybe cinemas are noisier, less pleasurable to visit than they used to be; I know the Empire Leicester Square is a no-go zone because of the shattering volume which even destroyed our pleasure in The Incredibles and The Life Aquatic, which shows how far back we're talking. As for the audience, I'm kinda glad I wasn't there (J was) when our friend Hen challenged the chatterers throughout a Whiteley's screening of Malcolm X with 'shut the fuck up and you might learn something'. She would like you all to know that it worked.

But there were very few folk the last time I went to the commercial cinema, to see Of Gods and Men in Mayfair - our popcorning neighbours were soon stunned into silence - and even fewer at the Curzon Chelsea on Sunday evening. I was glad we saw both in the right circumstances. What to say about the extraordinary collision of two themes in Melancholia without regurgitating the little plot there is? Kirsten Dunst rings frighteningly true as Justine, a pretty girl first sinking into, then deeply sunk in, a depression that may or may not give her oracular knowledge of the impending world's end (Dunst admits to having been there, like von Trier; everything she does feels authentic). There's a second, pivotal contribution from the strange, mumbly but compelling Charlotte Gainsbourg (pictured up top with Dunst in the first of Christan Gesnaes' images). There are also good flanking performances, not least from the very lovely Alexander of the hugely talented Skarsgård tribe - I barely recognised Papa Stellan - as the new husband Justine apparently loves.

But it's von Trier's personal trajectory which amazes. Yes, the opening sequence is one of the most spellbinding in cinematic history; yes, the dysfunctional wedding does go on, but certainly every time the Tristan Prelude - the only music in the film other than incidental stuff at the reception - resurfaces, expect staggering imagery. Could von Trier have handled the Bayreuth Ring after all, or is his own imagination too big for other people's fantasies? It was a bit worrying, of course, that he snips bars out of Wagner here and there, not least for the denouement, where he leaps so quickly to the climax of all that unquenchable yearning that I laughed when I shouldn't (nervously? Not sure). But the music, and the sounds of near-silence, certainly add to the metaphysical dimension, and the concentration on this hermetically sealed world of the big house by the sea is harrowing.

Unique, unrepeatable, probably indescribable. I see in any case that I haven't made a good job, but I'm a bit wonky anyway from three and a half hours moving between the dentist's chair and waiting room as the poor woman tried to deaden an inflamed nerve to get a tooth out. I am, apparently, the most intractable case she's ever had, though at least she finally believed me that the nerve in question was causing all the trouble, when she at last got through to tackle it head on. Seems to tie in well with all this, somehow, especially as Durer's allegorical depressive seems to have a bad case of toothache and as I sat through Melancholia worriting about the pain in the lower right corner of my mouth. That, of course, added to the edginess of the viewing experience.

Lord Henry of Chiswick Park

2011-10-16T10:22:00.013+01:00

It’s only his aristocratic bearing that prompts me to give the famous – or so I learned – heron of Chiswick House’s fabulously restored gardens his title; to several folk passing over James Wyatt's beautiful 1788 central bridge, he’s well known as plain ‘Henry’: celebrated for sensing the arrival of his most regular feeder from the other end of the park, and for being fed by a Chinese lady with chopsticks. It was an unexpected bonus to an afternoon off; Friday was such a blue-sky day – and more autumnal than our recent heatwavy Indian summer – that I took a couple of hours out and cycled along the river, which usually means either to Chiswick or to Kew. This time I rolled up the drive of Lord Burlington's Palladian villa to be greeted by the guardian sphinxes and the facade shining in the sunlight.

Anyway, here’s Henry at closer quarters perched elegantly but somewhat perilously on a delicate branch of a fir tree overhanging the lake, intermittently and not so elegantly dropping his load into the water.

His local fame is only possible thanks to the fact that the grounds are open to all; the domesticated canine life was almost as interesting as the birds on the lake.

I can’t have walked around the grounds properly since the extensive English Heritage-advised restoration was completed in June of last year. I seem to remember the Inigo Jones gateway Burlington bought from that collector of collectors Hans Sloane and had transported to Chiswick under wraps; not so now.

And here, at last, after long fencing-off, is the completely renovated Victorian conservatory with its legendary collection of camellias. Joseph Paxton started here before going on to bigger things. Again, it all feels like part of a limited-admission stately ‘ome set-up, whereas it’s a facility for everyone who lives locally to drop in and use. They even have several of the original vases of coade stone.

I've only just learned about Eleanor Coade (1733–1821), who made her living flogging architectural decorations and garden ornaments to stately homes made from an artificial stone which was subsequently named after her. There's a fine river god at Ham House, and the above vase is the real thing, too; the replicas in the early 19th century Italian garden look equally splendid.

It remains dotted with heavily-scented roses still blooming in mid-October.

In another recently-renovated formal garden stands a replica of the Venus de'Medici on an intricately carved Doric column which I find a bit more interesting.

Lord Burlington's model was Hadrian's villa at Tivoli, from which he seems to have liberated several of his statues.

Burlington’s Ionic temple was one of the first buildings to be renovated, and even without its original surrounding orange trees it still looks handsome from several perspectives

not least those of the nearby spiders.

And so via the bridge, Henry and the south alleys back to the house

and bike. I must say the whole renovation has lifted the gardens to a new acme of free-to-all perfection. Some of the planting seems a bit questionable and virginal, but give it time. And the café, since it’s run by the impeccable Company of Cooks, livener-up of institutional fare from the Southbank Centre to the Royal Opera House, may be many folk’s first reason for coming here; and why not?

Munk's Passenger

2011-10-14T12:05:00.019+01:00

Weinberg's opera The Passenger is, as we've seen for ourselves, an admirable, honourable attempt to grapple with the human issues of Auschwitz: what keeps the soul alive in an inmate, how strong are the instincts both for freedom and to forget (especially in the oppressor). It has, as I've insisted - and some won't even grant it that - masterly scenes, but overall still seems to me too unwieldy for anything like masterpiece status.

Whereas I'd be far more inclined to bandy that phrase about with respect to the (absolutely non-operatic) film by Andrzej Munk now available on Second Run DVD. It's much closer - as the author said to me when we met at the London Coliseum on the opera's opening night - to Sofia Posmysz's original autobiographical novel. Its unfinished status raises more questions than answers; Munk was killed in a car crash on his way to Lodz to look at film designs on 21 September 1961, shortly before what would have been his 40th birthday.

To complete a necessary memorial, Andrzej Borowski filmed extra scenes in Auschwitz, while the portion of the drama set on the liner Batory, where former SS overseer Liese Alexandra Slaska, pictured below) comes face to face with her spiritually indomitable one-time charge Marta, had been shot but not to Munk's satisfaction; so stills alone were used - incredibly effectively - against a commentary written by two Polish School acolytes.

The result is that it's the present which seems unreal, while the mundane brutality of the camp comes across in all its chilling casualness, heightened by the almost unbearable use of the site 15 or so years after its abandonment. Chinks in the guards' armour are briefly evoked with the subtlety that only cinema can convey: Liese's expression suddenly changes from hard to worried as she looks through the fence at people on their way to the gas chambers; later, in a close-up on one such processional, a young soldier lets a little girl stroke his Alsatian dog, and again for a moment his face softens before he realises what he's supposed to be doing.

Marta, who of course has such a strong and radiant voice in the opera, hardly speaks. Yet when, processing past a woman being ritually humiliated to stand semi-naked, she says 'head up!', it's all we need to know about her sense of pride and refusal to bow to Liese's 'help'. Marta is superbly played, with nearly all expression in the eyes, by Ewa Mazierska.

Liese's account of their relationship, in the present editing, seems to unfold in two narrative flashbacks: once as soft-pedalled economy with the truth, the second time to reveal the sadism which develops from her own sense of not being loved, as Marta is by Tadeusz. This, too, is summed up in a single moment - when she enviously takes the flowers sent to Marta on her birthday, and walks away along the fence with them.

It's all accountable only moment by moment, and I'm still left wondering exactly what the trajectory of Posmysz's book might be. Which means that we have to fight all the harder to get it translated into English, as we discussed with her interpreter at the reception before the ENO premiere. Anyway, here the lady is, so elegantly dressed and gracious, in much-needed colour after all that harsh black and white.

And you can hear Weinberg's The Passenger in a recording from the Bregenz Festival (which means, in German, Russian, French, English, which all serve it well) on BBC Radio 3 tomorrow at 6pm. I mull over opera and film with Andrew McGregor before and between the acts. Curiously, tonight BBC 4 also screens Terry Gilliam's much more questionable, but fitfully brilliant, holocaust-related ENO production of Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust.

Reykjavík: little big city

2011-10-13T11:25:00.034+01:00

It could so easily have been an Icelandic anticlimax. After a voyage around the glacier-topped volcano of Snæfellsjökull, one of the most impact-ful things I've ever done, and a glimpse into the interior, at least as far as the Hraunfossar waterfalls, might not the capital - previously only driven around in a nightmarish hire-car starter experience - be a bit of a disappointment?

That it turned out anything but was partly due to insights into musical life and people gleaned from the doyenne of the new Harpa Concert Hall, Steinunn Birna Ragnarsdóttir (that's to say, simply 'Steinunn' to all), and partly because our big full day there saw half the extra-Reykjavik population of Iceland - not large, about 300,000 - flood into the city for the annual giant open house, which included the official inauguration of Harpa (the reason I was invited in the first place). Plus the fact that this really does feel like a friendly small town with domestic architecture to reflect that, but also offering food and museums of world-class city standard.

Why now, by the way? Because a colleague has been writing up Harpa's Björk extravaganza, running at the moment (wouldn't have minded seeing that); and because I hadn't intended to let the Iceland experience - the biggest impression of the year - slip without amplifying what I've already written about the musicfest on The Arts Desk.

I reckon that even if you only had the conventional package weekend, you'd get a sense of this extraordinary country. The very fact that the journey from Keflavik airport lands you straight in one of the various lavafields is a good start. And even the Blue Lagoon, our only obligatory experience of mass tourism on the way back and a monstrously overpriced if well maintained set-up, is still quite something if you haven't experienced better. Though the current Mayor of Reykjavik, comedian Jón Gnarr, promised - and took pleasure in breaking that promise, I heard him laconically say on the World Service - to make all hired towels at thermal baths free of charge, which would save you over £10 for a start (no doubt this wouldn't have applied to tourist traps anyway).

The location itself in 'smoky bay' - like all place names in Iceland, the city's means something - would also give a flitting visitor intimations of what's beyond. We even saw our beloved Snæfellsjökull glowing in the sunset from the swish Harpa restaurant on the first night.

The big day began with the 29th annual Reykjavik marathon, caught as we strolled towards Harpa for a morning meeting with Olafur Eliasson and the acousticians.

All the work-y stuff I'll leave you to read about on The Arts Desk, but we ought to see a few more shots of this incredible building with its basalt-imitating 3D glass front and sweeping staircases

with the windows offsetting a couple of new premieres open to all in the foyer, featuring Iceland's flotilla of harps

a couple of carefully-placed trombonists

and, outside, the campest Chinese acrobats I'm ever likely to see.

The whole arts-centre experience is on the kind of scale any city would be proud of (and indeed a group of Manhattan architects were there to see if they could achieve a similar, viable riverside project). Yet Reykjavik's choicest central living-spaces are intimate indeed, rather like village London (but nowhere near as expensive, relatively speaking, or so I'm imagining). Take the street in which our splendid Hotel Holt was situated, Bergstaðastræti. It really merits a blog entry of its own, but since I can't say more about the little corrugated-iron, wooden and stone houses along it other than to draw your attention to Reykjavikaners' love of little things in the windows - Moomintrolls from Finland seem especially popular - there's nothing to do except to show and contrast.

On open day, the street was out in bring-and-buy sales. In some little pockets you'd find music thrown in too, though perhaps I should use inverted commas since the likes of the incredible amplified screaming and drumming which broke a quick afternoon rest wasn't exactly that. No matter; it was all offered up with love, and the likes of Pollianna ('Let me sing and I'm happy' it says on the front of her card) karaoki-ing 'I am what I am' while pancakes were served had undeniable charm.

Elsewhere games of giant and portable chess were rife

and don't ask me what these mummers intended.

There was, in short, too much to catch on festival day. Would have loved a hug from a policeman in the main drag and a dance to an accordion band, less sure about 'Surface Appearances' in which 'a well-dressed couple panhandles and collects bottles to recycle'. But I did think I ought to see at least one museum in 24 hours - a tour of medieval manuscripts in the Þjóðmenningarhusið had to bite the dust - and so I crossed the fields of cars and negotiated endless barriers to reach the Þjóðminjasafn Íslands - that's National Museum of Iceland to us - which in addition to medieval and Renaissance treasures was hosting an exhibition of carved drinking horns

and then past another residential district with odd taste in door plaques

to the compelling horrors of the Einar Jónsson Museum next to the big church on the hill.

What was going on in the mind of Iceland's best-known sculptor (1874-1954) I know not, and perhaps you don't need to grasp the meaning of his allegories; but 'Rest' this isn't.

Jónsson designed the ugly but striking building to house his giants with Einar Erlendsson. It's a fine situation on the hilltop, with an intriguing, narrow spiral staircase the only link between the different levels, and the sculptures in the garden seem happiest; here a crowd of international students were busy pavement-chalking (again, oh, don't ask why). In the even more imposing white concrete Hallgrimskirkja, congregation and choir were well in to a six-hour marathon of psalms. I do like the building both without and within, which reminds me a bit of Guildford Cathedral, though less hospital-clinical.

The chaos of Icelandic organisation turned our evening somewhat pear-shaped, though we forged our own itinerary by making sure not to spend too long at the reception hosted by comedian-mayor Gnarr in the 1909 Höfði on the harbour, famous for the Reagan-Gorbachev summit of 1986.

Our little function was less ambitious, though there was a rather charming ceremony in which native American Indians from Seattle presented the mayor (pictured below) with something significant in wood.

Whereupon we swiftly retired to eat in Harpa, and watched the sun finally sink below the horizon at about 9.30pm.

Happy memories of a near-Utopian city, or so it seemed on a day everyone seemed to enjoy in late summer. I can't wait to go back and see the volcanoes of the south coast.

Maestrissimo Claudio and crazy Anton

2011-10-11T10:01:00.021+01:00

Here he is at the Festival Hall rehearsal, in one of four characteristically superb shots by Chris Christodoulou: Claudio Abbado, the greatest, with the score of one of the 19th century's weirdest symphonies, Bruckner's Fifth. Its wackiness can only seem the more pronounced in a performance of such freedom, suppleness and colour-consciousness as the one we got last night from Abbado's ever-flexible Lucerne Festival Orchestra on the Southbank: indeed, that made me wonder if there wasn't a case for going even further, totally over the top, because I nearly laughed out loud at several spots in the outer movements.

Just as well, anyway, because I can't take solemn, ponderous Bruckner interpretations. His individuality seems to me to lie in his riven quality, the way religious assurances always crumple. In the Fifth, the usually problematic (for me, again, I stress) Bruckner finale is replaced by a brilliant solution: first the clarinet's cheeky broom sweeping the old ideas away, then the tear-jerking brass chorale at the point when everything seems to have run out of steam. Abbado made no attempt to paper over the cracks, but he did pursue the chamber-musical quality that had been the chief virtue of the Schumann Piano Concerto in the first half.

As in a late Mozart concerto, Schumann's woodwind have as much of the glory as the soloist, and Mitsuko Uchida is too good a listener and collaborator not to let the fabulous Jacques Zoon and his fellow-flautist shine. The Lucerne Festival Orchestra has certainly got through first oboists - first Albrecht Mayer, then Kai Frombgen, now Lucas Marcias Navarro (wasn't there a Berlin veto thing which led to the calling upon the Concergebouw principal?) - but they're all the world's best and Marcias Navarro led the way with incredible projection last night.

If Mitsuko occasionally charged with just a hint of panic at the thicker flurries, her sensitivity and clarity of phrase-turn made it all worthwhile. And it was surely a lucky escape that Abbado had fallen out with the unmusical Helene Grimaud before the festival performances - what a substitute!

I'm coming to love most in Bruckner those twilight zones where only a handful of woodwind play. Again, Zoon had the dove's share of the best, supported only by two clarinets and bassoon at one point in the slow movement, sharing a chuckle with first violins where you really couldn't see the joins. That came in the Scherzo's trio, a Landlerish miracle as it dewily came across last night which I'd rather hear repeated than the whole damned outer portion: it's at points like this that I cry out inwardly for Mahler's constant evolution.

But Bruckner is what he is, and as Sibelius - another true original - pointed out, it may be messy, but it's always authentic. As was this interpretation (authentic, that is, never messy) from the greatest conductor-orchestra team of our time. Look at the photogenic players, who glowed and hugged each other with genuine warmth as they always do after every performance with Abbado.

Wish I could go again tonight, when Mozart's 'Haffner' Symphony replaces the Schumann, but, alas, I'm teaching - Bruckner 4, as it happens, in preparation for Belohlavek's BBC Symphony performance next week*. Less of a rush, deo gratias, than yesterday, where I biked in to meet the players of the Pacifica Quartet (more on them anon) in the Wigmore at 3, taught my Passenger class at the City Lit, whizzed back to the Wigmore to do the pre-performance talk with the Pacificas, then pedalled off to the Southbank. Only Abbado could have made me miss the first instalment of the PQ's Shostakovich cycle, but I'll catch the second on Thursday.

*later - ouch: my students reminded me it's tomorrow (Wednesday 12). Just as well they did as I'm supposed to be giving the pre-performance talk...Fortunately there's just enough time to prepare.

The ace

2011-10-10T08:47:00.012+01:00

No question about the top choice in Radio 3's Building a Library this time - and don't read on if you still have to hear it on the BBC iPlayer - which, if you live in the UK only, I'm told, applies for the next five days - and don't want to know the outcome. We're not allowed to say 'winner', and usually I end with two or three versions with which I'd be equally happy for different reasons. But tenor Georgi Nelepp (pictured above) would be enough to stake out the 1952 recording of Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades as easily the best.

His sensitivity, even production, characterisation and fabulous diction leave Atlantov - a more heldentenory Hermann on no less than three recordings, if you like that sort of thing, which I did at the end of the first scene and throughout the last - Grigorian (for Gergiev) and the rather interesting Peter Gougaloff (for Rostropovich) way behind. Grigorian, by the way, wore a powdered wig like the one Nelepp sports below in the very traditional Mariinsky Queen of Spades I saw in St. Petersburg, but was allowed to take it off, I seem to remember, for the filming, as it had turned him rather into the Frog Footman of Lewis Carroll's Duchess.

Decisive in the choice, though, was Melik-Pashayev's conducting: incredibly nuanced, getting superb articulation from the Bolshoi Orchestra and pacing unerringly. For once, the Pastoral of the Faithful Shepherdess that falls like a true 18th century intermezzo halfway through the opera doesn't outstay its welcome. Other recordings may have even better Tomskys and Yeletskys (Leiferkus and Hvorostovsky for Ozawa), but none comes close overall.

If you want the classic, you'll have to buy the 60-CD Tchaikovsky Edition, but it's to be found, I'm told, in some places for less than a pound a disc. There are other operatic rarities - The Oprichnik, The Maid of Orleans, The Slippers and The Enchantress are all here - though inevitably the performances are variable. I've just been listening to the Ansermet versions of the ballets which, though often cut, have such esprit.

Briefly, then, more Russian stuff this week. Tonight I interview the Pacifica Quartet (pictured above by Anthony Parmelee) in a Wigmore pre-performance event before the launch of their Shostakovich cycle; and next Saturday I plague the airwaves again, talking to Andrew McGregor about Weinberg's The Passenger before a Radio 3 relay of the Bregenz premiere. But the highlight of the week is somehow bound to be the two-concert appearance at the Festival Hall of the world's greatest living conductor, Claudio Abbado, with the world's greatest players, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra.