Beauty awakens

Oh, the mainstream ballet world: don't you despair of its innate conservatism, the genteel brides (and queens) of dance who cry horror at anything seen onstage which couldn't have appeared before 1950? Now that a DVD release has made revisiting the Royal Ballet's controversial Maria Bjornson-designed Sleeping Beauty of the early 1990s possible, it makes me very angry to see how little the dancers had to accommodate themselves to the allegedly treacherous sets, how absurd it was to claim that the mannerist pillars in the Prologue went against the angles of the company at the curtain in anything but a good way.

True, Aurora has to negotiate the steps on her entrance, preventing the ideal capricious flight. And the fairy-tale characters in the Third Act need to walk down them or sit on them. But all the essential dance takes place on a flat stage. And did the ballerinas not swoon at every little detail of their never-to-be-repeated costumes, every last sequin beautifully observed by the perfectionist Bjornson?


I'm glad the great lady, who died so pointlessly young, has an online website devoted to her art, the Maria Bjornson Archive. My thanks to its friendly guardians for allowing me to reproduce most of the pictures featured here, including the one for the Breadcrumb Fairy above. And my awed respect to a person I wish I'd met, as well as to Anthony Dowell who stood by her in his careful fusion of innovation with tradition.

I've only been given 40 words in a ballet DVD round-up for the BBC Music Magazine to comment on Opus Arte's third Royal Ballet Sleeping Beauty, so I take the opportunity to enlarge on it here. This is the only Sleeping Beauty I've seen to make the rare patches of action flame into life: the emergence of Carabosse's entourage from under the skewed banqueting table, the thorny forest that covers the castle, the winter panorama against which the Lilac Fairy and the Prince travel to their destination.


There's also more music here than we currently get in the painstaking but slightly frigid revival of the 1946 Messel-designed extravaganza. It's conducted on the DVD with surprising panache by Barry Wordsworth and what violin solos remain are superlatively taken by dashing Vashko Vassilev (though I was amused to hear the clarinet coming back in again with his Crystal Fountain variation when he should have had his eye on the coda of the Pas de Six. Groundhog Day?)

Anyway, the Act Three March is there in 1994, and this is the only time I've ever seen Tchaikovsky's brilliantly scored, modernist 5/4 variation for the Sapphire Fairy danced (the rhythm does, admittedly, make Petipa's classical tradition buckle). I'd still like to hear all one hundred bars of the 'sleep' entr'acte and, while the Wolf is there in Act Three


as splendidly adorned as Puss in Boots and the White Cat, Cinderella, her Prince and Hop O'My Thumb are deprived of their piquant numbers. I guess you can never have everything in a staged Beauty.

This one, in any case, is executed at the highest, aristocratic level the imperial style demands. It's a feast of exquisite dancing, from the fairy-tale variations of Deborah Bull, Leanne Benjamin and Errol Pickford among others equally good to the gorgeous picture-book Florimund of Zoltan Solymosi and the poetry incarnate of Viviana Durante's Aurora. Cojocaru, in the latest production, may be a more realistic teenager, but not a better ballerina. This is the Beauty to buy as a Christmas present for children, whether dance-mad or not. And adults will be spellbound by the visual extravaganza, as our guests of all ages were when we watched the Perrault divertissement on Sunday afternoon.


I can't tire of hearing those Act Three character-sketches in which Tchaikovsky's happiest genius reaches its high watermark. Jollity is a keynote in the early work the Royal Opera is calling The Tsarina's Slippers, opening tomorrow: so much rumbustious fun in the gopaks for Gogol's witch and devil, as well as plenty of slightly melancholy humanity for the lovesick smith Vakula and his capricious Oksana. I've enjoyed myself writing the historical and musical note for the programme, so I won't repeat myself here, but I will give you a taste of the picture book designs, which along with the choreography for the many dances will hopefully raise Francesca Zambello's production aloft. Here are two of Mikhail Mokrov's backcloths for the never-never Ukrainian village



and Tatiana Noginova's costume designs for seasonally adorned village children.


More designs here on The Arts Desk, with an accompanying interview by Ismene Brown.

I don't doubt that this will finally put Cherevichki, as Tchaikovsky called his lavish revision of Vakula the Smith, up there as a comedy to offset the greater lyrical depths of Eugene Onegin, Mazeppa and The Queen of Spades.

Privyot i s rozhdestvom...

The last trees of summer

As the very last leaves fall from the London planes outside the window, I thought an arboricultural intermezzo might not go amiss. I never managed to wax lyrical about the trees of Zurich, enjoyment of which was much enhanced by using Walburga Liebst's Von Baum zu Baum: ein Fuhrer zu besonderen Baume Zurichs before leaving it behind as a gift for our generous hosts. In the Old Botanic Gardens auf der Katz she led us up the hill to the towering Osagedorn


and down again to Sorbus latifolia in full bloom.



Thomas Mann's residence, which I blogged back in August, has a robust Platanus orientalis outside its front door


while another graces the Botanic Gardens in Vienna.


Outside the city, the most welcome sight to me: beech woods on the ascent of the Raxalp.


Back in Blighty, I look fondly on this old copper beech as our Norfolk churches walk took us from Tilney to the Wiggenhalls.


Dawyck in the Scottish Borders will still be showing off its splendid evergreens, but the rowans and silver birches up the hill will have lost fruit and leaf if not lichen.




Coming home, I must end on a sober note. I've never stooped to mention the constant battles we have here with our management. In the latest outrage they told us that the 21 black poplars on the boundary were causing subsidence to a row of poorly-constructed garages and needed to be cut down because the insurers had insisted on it.

We asked to see the documentation; insufficient proof was provided. We asked the council to intervene; it also failed to see the evidence it wanted and placed a tree preservation order for an interim period of six months so it could investigate. While this was set up, the felling began unannounced. We lost six trees before the council could physically slap the order on the tree company employed. Now the management has prevented the council from distibuting its TPO notices around the blocks, claiming their letter had falsely stated that the gap was visible from the local park. Here's the ocular proof that it is - bad for the residents, bad for the park users, bad for the loss of bird- and bat-friendly nooks and crannies.



Dull pictures, I know, but they give some idea of what we've already lost in an afternoon's unadvertised hacking, and what we will continue to lose if we're not all vigilant.

Schnittke: darkness and light

We could be in for a tough time. When Alfred Schnittke, Shostakovich's natural heir, moved away from the anything-goes 'polystylism' of his earlier works - balancing gritty contemporary music-drama, skewed quotations or stylisations of his famous predecessors and popular styles on a knife edge - and into the valley of the shadow of death, his works became more skeletal and austere. Whether or not a whole day of undiluted Schnittke, which is what Vladimir Jurowski's extraordinary festival offers us on Sunday, will work remains to be seen and heard.


Don't miss a chance to hear at least a couple of the programmes to come: details here.

No doubt about it, though, Jurowski's decision to launch the 'Between Two Worlds' fortnight at the Royal College of Music last night was an electrifying coup. I've written all about it for The Arts Desk. Inevitably Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony licked the two Schnittke works in the first half, but then Schnittke hit back with an early masterpiece, the First Concerto Grosso. Jurowski generously tacked it on to the programme to give students a chance to be heard by their confreres before Sunday's performance. As Head of Performance Planning at the RCM Simon Channing said in his introduction, we were to think of what turned out to be a three-and-a-half hour event as akin to one of those Viennese marathons in which Beethoven (an invisible presence in this programme) participated.

I met Schnittke in 1993. The Gramophone interview is here (albeit in somewhat garbled autoform). My Russian then wasn't up to scratch, so Irina Brown came along to interpret. We both remember this as perhaps the most profound meeting we've had with a creative artist. He was very frail, but his statements were crystal-clear and rather forbidding, until a smile from time to time lit up his by then ascetic countenance.

Armenians in Jerusalem

In Jerusalem's 'collection of alienated islands', as my current literary hero Amos Elon describes it, the Armenian Quarter seems most at peace with itself, and inhabited by folk who have tried to be as co-operative with Israelis and Palestinians as possible. Of course that's not always easy to maintain. Recently a couple of ultra-Orthodox boys spat at two Armenians in the street. The response to this apparently unprovoked insult was a punch in the head, and the immediate consequence threatened deportation for the Armenians. Their church rallied the other Christian communities in Jerusalem to threaten non-co-operation if the deportation went ahead, and a crisis was averted.

Not that the Armenians are any more immune to the daftness of sectarianism than any of their rival religions. In the apartheid supermarket that is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, they once literally kicked out a Greek Orthodox Christian from one of their services. And you see this ladder?


This is no ordinary ladder (I feel like the father in Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, weaving a fantasy about a bedroom stool to the awestruck children). One tale has it that the Armenians used it to grab a breath of fresh air at a time when all re-entries were taxed by the Ottomans. The ledge, though, is claimed by the Greek Orthodox. So the ladder can't be removed until the dispute is solved - which presumably will be (like so much else in Jerusalem) never.

Even so, the Armenian Chapel of St Helena with the fairly recent floor mosaic pictured above seems to me the most peaceful and spiritual part of the Holy Sepulchre bazaar. The walls on the staircase leading down to it are marked with hundreds of crosses made by medieval pilgrims.


Decidely the most positive religious experience we had in Jerusalem was our twofold visit to the Cathedral of St James in the heart of the Armenian Quarter (which accounts for one sixth of the old city, housing a national population of no more than 1800).


The public is only admitted first thing in the morning and at 3pm, when the service is held by a group of chanting, black-cowled monks. Calls to prayers are announced by beating on the wooden


and metal


bars either side of the main entrance, dating from the time when no Christian bells were permitted to be sounded in Jerusalem. The rules mean what they say: a monk will come along and tap your legs if you've dared to cross them.


After the service, we joined a privileged tour of the quarter given by our hostess Juliette's good friend George Hindlian, an encyclopedia of information about Armenian life in Jerusalem. We got to see the curious tiles in the Chapel of Etchmindzin, dating from the early eighteenth century and fired, like the curious eggs above the lamps, in Kutafya, Turkey.


Here's Salome, dancing for John the Baptist's head in Turkish shoes (forgive the fuzziness, but I found no reproductions of this elsewhere).


Then we walked around the convent behind St James's, encountering curious Armenian schoolchildren and a pair of young men, one of whom was explaining to the other that 'Sweden isn't close to Armenia' (the tour party was Swedish).


We saw one of those many flexible sites, the olive tree to which Christ was supposedly bound, but not, alas, the museum, which is currently under restoration. It contains the greatest collection of Armenian manuscripts outside Yerevan, and much about the infamous World War One massacre by the Turks which gave Hitler his cue (well explored in Michael Arlen's Passage to Ararat). I feel privileged to have seen the Armenian wonders of Akdamar, Ani and Isfahan - George, who has no official passport, would love to go.

Let's end my over-extended Jerusalem bulletins with the usual strange compound of religions. This is sunset at St Anne's Church just inside the Lions' Gate. Sitting by the ruins of Bethesda, all you hear at this hour is the Ivesian melee of muezzins chanting from the Muslim Quarter.



Again, a deceptive peace seems to reign over this meeting of religions. But you'd have to be a fool to believe in it. I close with more from Elon:

A few regard the profusion of denominations and sects in Jerusalem as merely eccentric or picturesque. Others insist that, taken together, they constitute the city's unique sense of place. That spirit might itself be called into question. Beyond the comforting, utopian generalisations that imagination, prejudice and vanity might set free, there are human beings living in the city - Jews, Moslems and Christians - ordinary people who, though diligent and forever on the alert, have often been crushed and plundered clean in the relentless intensity of local history. No-one really knows the full human and emotional cost of living in a violent house divided against itself. The price is surely high, but no-one knows the exact amount paid in terms of psychological entanglements, debilitating compensations and illusions.

They're still living

That's Judith's stunned response at the devastating climax of Bartok's hour-long masterpiece Duke Bluebeard's Castle. It has less of an impact if, as in Daniel Kramer's new ENO production (photographed throughout here by Johan Persson), it's obvious from the fifth door onwards that SPOILER ALERT the children who inhabit Bluebeard's basement must have a mother, or mothers. The revelation can only come as an anticlimax, even if musically Edward Gardner's firm conducting of the ENO Orchestra still drives home the pity and the terror. Kramer aims to shock with the final tableau, but for me it would have been a little bit laughable if only the children hadn't still been onstage. As with Keith Warner's use of the child in his skewed Royal Opera Wozzeck, you felt anxious about the long-term mental well being of the younger participants.

Kramer wants to have it both ways, trying to carry on the mythic resonances of the story while restricting Clive Bayley's Bluebeard to a twitching psychopathic Josef Fritzl, a schwarz-Von Trapp who lines up his family just like Christopher Plummer in the film Austrians still haven't taken on board.


I knew what to expect from Agnes Kory's review on the musicalcriticism.com website - quite an honour for a knowledgeable Magyar to flag my programme article as 'exemplary' - so I suppose I was trying to see the good in the concept, prepared as I was for the production's restrictive aspect. As I wrote in the piece, both Bartok and his librettist Bela Balazs harped on their essential loneliness and the difficulty of true understanding between Mars-men and Venus-women. This is no more just a drama about a sick pervert than The Turn of the Screw is just a study in paedophilia. Kramer would have done well to take note of Balazs's words reproduced in the programme: 'Explanation is like an x-ray: it shatters shape and form...True poetry is true seduction'. But how could you begin to be seduced by Bayley's monster?

Still there was no fudging the balance of power which shifts temporarily from still, menacing Bluebeard in the first half to hysterical, aggressive Judith in the second. Kramer drew strong performances from Clive Bayley - much better than usual - and the intense Michaela Martens.


And if you couldn't quite understand why Judith would have fallen in love with such an obvious nutcase in the first place, I guess her attraction might have been the will to understand such extreme psychopathology. With the keys clear embodiments of painful access to Bluebeard's locked up soul, the lake of tears was especially powerful. And yes, I did weep a bit myself and reeled out at the end on jelly legs. But was that because of the innate power of this ambiguous score, which refuses to locate good or evil exclusively in either character, rather than the production's limiting vision? I will say one thing: Kramer clearly listens to the music, reflecting it both in his characters' actions and in the shifting stage pictures, evocatively designed by Giles Cadle.

It was Gardner's idea to pair Bluebeard with its junior by two years, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which Bartok touted around the Budapest Opera House during the long-delayed rehearsals for his opera. An inspired twinning: containment versus explosion. Yet director-choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan came no nearer to the massive implications of Stravinsky's colossus than any other choreographer I've seen (and I'm still desparate to get hold of a copy of Pina Bausch's version, which Stephanie Jordan concluded our Pre-Prom Stravinsky chat with Chris Cook by describing as much the best of all).

Some of the images from Fabulous Beast's invocation of an Irish ritual have stayed with me: the shaman lady, the bloodthirsty dogheads threatening the girls in pretty dresses


the mob's violence first towards the young man


and then towards the quasi-sage


and of course the final sequence of cocks in frocks ushering in the sun.


The trouble is that while I liked the rhythmic stamping, so much jittering, twitching and flailing doesn't quite fill the energy of the music. The ends of both the first part - which would have to be re-named 'humping the earth' - and the second just didn't build. From my limited experience dance, ancient or modern, rarely does. So half the time I was watching Gardner as he drew beautifully full and rounded solos from the ENO woodwind, rising to the snarl of massed brass and some especially virtuosic playing from the tuba. Five stars for enterprise, then, but only three for the dramatic execution.

The dark side had its lighter moments in Bryn's 'Bad Boys' concert. You can read what I thought about this celebration of effortless charisma here in my first Arts Desk review. I've just listened to the CD, which contains exactly what we missed at the core of the RFH performance, Sweeney's terrifying 'Epiphany' - and yes, much to my surprise, Anne Sofie von Otter COULD play Mrs Lovett when Deutsche Grammophon get round to recording the whole thing, which they must. Terfel rises to the challenge of the grand finale by pulling off the feat of Commendatore, Giovanni and Leporello as the statue arrives to drag the rake off to hell.


As for the Welsh, well, how do they do it? Let's just name a top list of Margaret Price, Dame Gwyneth, Bryn and their seemingly immortal counterparts in the world of popular entertainment, Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey. To end on a lighter note, yes, the latter two are still very much living and delivering the goods. I saw Shirl on the telly the other night; what vivacity, what a trouper! To think that in my childhood my parents would always turn down the sound on the TV whenever she came on, and laugh at her gesticulations. Here she has the stage to herself for 'I Am What I Am', still on my mind after John Barrowman's towering performance last week, before our hero comes on to join her.



Better still is this collaboration between Tom and Bryn. 'Green, green grass OF home', please, poster, but otherwise, I've no complaints.

Bugles sang

What else could it be, on Remembrance Day? And this clip from 1993 is fraught, for me, with sadness for the gap I still feel Slava has left behind him. The late Richard Hickox is there too, conducting the LSO chamber ensemble. It also reminds me that Bryn was a natural from the start. Whatever circus lies in store with his 'Bad Boys' concert tonight at the Royal Festival Hall, my first assignment for what I genuinely believe to be a responsible, highly professional new online arrival in the shape of The Arts Desk, this proves Terfel has always been one of the great singers of this, indeed any age.

As for the War Requiem, I won't be hearing it live this year. Any performance has to be remarkable; last year's with Pappano and Royal Opera forces in the Albert Hall fitted the bill and quenched my thirst for the foreseeable future (by strange coincidence, there in that entry is a photo of another great musician we've lost, Sir Edward Downes). I can't believe I used, in my arrogant adolescence, to be sniffy about Britten's public face in the piece. Even just as a textural juxtaposition of Latin mass and Wilfred Owen poems, minus the music, it would have been a valid statement. As it stands, I can only echo Shostakovich's repeated assertion that this was one of the monuments of the 20th century, comparable only to Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (which Shostakovich held in pride of place).

My admirable colleague Jonathan Swain compared recordings of the War Requiem on last Saturday's Building a Library. This link is a fridge note to myself that I have to catch it before it disappears from the 'Listen Again' facility in three days' time, and so should you. Of course I do know which version Jonathan chose, and although I'm sure he has sufficient integrity not to have regarded it as a foregone conclusion, how could it have been otherwise?

So, to conclude, the only possible 'One ever hangs', complete with very sensitive montage. Love the voice or hate it, you have to give Pears the palm for that final 'Dona nobis pacem'. Vishnevskaya told me this single phrase was the epitome of great artistry for her.

You who are girt with ice

By strange serendipity, I was pedalling around town on my way to round off my six City Lit classes on Turandot, with Liu's final 'Tu che di gel sei cinta' very much on my mind. And here was the wall of ice melting away in Belgrave Square just outside the German ambassador's residence. I hereby copyright my own production of Turandot, which will feature exactly that - a wall of ice which steadily dissolves throughout the evening. Whether or not I'll set it in divided Berlin and include a Chinese restaurant remains to be seen. But I do think another wall will be ominously under construction as the impossible lovers celebrate their final victory.


I imagined that most of this symbolic gesture would be mere water on the street by the time I was able to get there. But no, there on a helpfully chilly November day some of it still splendidly remained. A dead ringer for the irrepressible Fat Boy in The Pickwick Papers accosted his fellow cyclist: 'good, innit?' Somewhat surprised to be addressed, I rather patronisingly asked sonny if he knew what it was for. 'Well, I sees the German flag opposite and that notice, so I puts two and two together'. He'd come across it on the way to school, 'when there was lots more', and had come back specially. And he wanted to see what would be left tomorrow (that is, today). Rather more fun company, I think, than hanging around with diplomats earlier in the day.


Diplomats were out in force for the Hungarian Cultural Centre's 10th anniversary celebrations the previous evening. Elbows every side of me entering the beautiful room in Covent Garden reminded me of the saying that if you go through a revolving door in front of a Hungarian, the Hungarian will always come out first.

And, golly, had they pulled a star. Tamas Vasary at 76 is still very much a live wire. Who needs the frosty objectivity of a Brendel when a player like this can whirl you through Schubert's 'Wanderer' Fantasy and make exhilarating sense of it all? He always likes to talk, apparently, and most of us were more than happy to listen to his animated discourse


especially since he would zoom to the piano with extraordinary abruptness and plunge straight into the 'Moonlight', the 'Wanderer', two iridescent Debussy preludes and a dizzyingly authentic Kodaly Dances of Marosszek (did Hungary's second composer ever write a dull piece?) Vasary played for Kodaly, he told us, and all the master said at the end was 'Servus', as he shook his hand. Our Austrian friends felt sure this meant 'welcome, you're one of us'.

I thought it was gracious of him to play on a Broadwood piano with one very faulty A flat, and to curtail his talking and even, for heaven's sake, his second encore for the eating and drinking. The food came second to the company, so I'll do a quick Tatleresque photo run. Here on the right is Mrs. Vasary, the distinguished Hungarian ballerina Henriett Tunyogi, with the adorable director of the French Institute and EUNIC Chairman Laurence Auer.


I see from an article by Jann Parry that Henriett has even danced to her husband's performance of the Beethoven 'Hammerklavier' Sonata. She's obviously first class, as leading dance critic Parry tells us. Now, here's vivacious Ildiko Takacs, the director of the HCC


and last, but by no means least, those great impresarios Lilian and Victor Hochhauser flanking the lady who was instrumental in setting up the HCC ten years ago, former number one Hungarian newsreader Katalin Bogyay.


I was especially delighted to greet the Hochhausers as I'd seen their daughter Shari Greenberg only a week earlier in Jerusalem. Shari and I became friendly through e-correspondence over my articles for the Bolshoy and Mariinsky programmes (those editors who make a personable effort to show their approval are very few and far between). She and her husband David took us to a lecture-recital at the Jerusalem Music Centre delivered by son Yoel and his fellow members of the Carmel Quartet. Here are Yoel, violinists Rachel Ringelstein and Lia Raikhlin and cellist Tami Waterman.


Yoel's narrative connected Mozart and Verdi through the once-thorny issue of opera versus chamber music. The spirited performances underlined beautifully how each composer comes up with a finale of total genius: arguably Mozart's best and quirkiest set of variations in the Allegretto non troppo of the D minor Quartet, K421, and Verdi's determination, in his less consistent quartet, to show what he can do technically as well as tunefully in his concluding Scherzo-Fuga. Yoel has just left with his family to live in the States, but will be back in Jerusalem with the Carmels for another pairing, of Haydn and Bartok, on 21 December.

One wall is down, another grows

On this day of celebration for Berlin and the world, it might seem curmudgeonly to raise the indignities of another wall. I can only say that I came back from Jerusalem infinitely more pessimistic about the possibility of any steps forward in the middle east peace process, and infinitely angrier (forgive me, my good Israeli friends) about the denial of basic human rights to Palestinians. Rory, our host, reminded me of the words in Israel's 1948 Declaration of Independence, which all too often seem to have been forgotten:

The state of Israel....will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex.

Well, I know that Hamas and other extremists have made it very difficult. Many Palestinians, according to those who wish them nothing but the best, are truculent and resentful even with their helpers. But how do you justify a wall that cuts off a farmer's land from his home, a playground from its school? Why are the Palestinian villages so wretchedly poor and subject to loss of vital supplies, including water, at any time? Juliette drove us around one of them at dusk, overlooking part of the wall


which is clearly visible from the Mount of Olives.


We didn't get to Bethlehem, where the wall is most obvious (it was a choice between that and Masada). So we didn't see the now-famous Banksy murals which play amusingly on freedom and repression. The most familiar image is of a child being floated aloft by a bunch of balloons. And Pavel Ryszawa put this photo on wikimedia, for which thanks.


The nearest I got was this wall in Mane Yehuda. The meaning of Tenniel's White Rabbit is unclear to me - late for what? But it's certainly striking.


Walls and divisions confront you everywhere in Jerusalem. It's odd to think that you are regularly zigzagging a now invisible green line, a very different proposition to the one in Nicosia. Tellingly, the compound which lodged thousands of jammed-together Russian pilgrims in the 19th century now houses political prisoners.


Of course we shouldn't forget the greatest justification of the state, represented by these walls of files in Yad Vashem's Hall of Names.


I'd like especially to remember my dear late friend Trude Winik, who in 1977 registered on the Pages of Testimony her mother Hedwig, brother Josef and sister Elisabeth, deported from Vienna to Minsk on 6 May 1942 and murdered in Treblinka.

I didn't see, in the two all-too-short hours we spent there, any record of the established zionists' harsh attitude to the Jews who flocked there after the liberation of the camps; apparently they looked down on them scornfully as 'soapies'. What the museum does splendidly celebrate, which takes one out of the morass so much misery might induce, is the triumph of the individual, both in the filmed stories of survivors - the Imperial War Museum is good on this too, as I discovered taking godson Alexander round when he was 11 - and the countless non-Jewish organisations and families who helped. Even in Poland, whose shocking percentage of deported Jews compared to every other country I'd never taken on board, a group achieved the salvation of thousands. And there was a splendid section on the Jewish men and women who joined the doughty Ukrainian and Russian partisans. One, incidentally, is the mother of a friend of our friends in Jerusalem. Since those years living in the forests, she refuses to go near a mushroom.

Anyway, the site is impressively designed, and no-one visiting Jerusalem should fail to devote as much time as possible to it.


Now I'm off to Belgrave Square to see the melting wall of ice.

Chaz and Ben

Lord Britten would surely have forgiven Sir Charles all his past innuendoes and applauded his magnificent return to the fold if he could have seen the nearly-84-year old tearing into his most concentrated masterpiece, The Turn of the Screw, in the Coliseum revival of David McVicar's English National/Mariinsky Opera production. It prompted me to look back at what Mackerras had to say about his chequered career with the Britten establishment when I interviewed him for Gramophone in 1992 during the Gloriana sessions (and, yes, they were still amusing themselves in the control room with the notorious 'young boys...bottoms' text to the horn tune of the Serenade).

The great man, seen above in the first of several production photos by Clive Barda, returns from enforced time out to endorse Claudio Arrau's assertion that old age brings with it not the expected serenity but renewed intensity. The feral cannonades of the jungle drums beneath the Governess's coach-rocking journey to Bly, the shrill edge of the church bells and the sensual clamour of the night ensemble all bore that out. And the players must surely have been responding to Sir Charles's meticulous ear in their many nuanced solos.

Problems remain with the production, and looking back on what I wrote when I first saw it two years ago, they're much the same: the interfering scene-shifters/servants who ruin the stillness of the climactic interlude in Act One, the boards which creak under Quint's all too mortal feet, the over large spaces to fill - with panels that reminded my companion Edwina of bistro windows - and the unsubtle underlining of the children's unambiguous involvement with the 'ghosts'. I worried that Nazan Fikret, now surely in her late teens, would be too much the Infant Phenomenon as Flora, but her intense performance is still riveting even in the later, Linda Blair moments.


Only the males are slightly under par: Hugh Beckwith, the second Miles, remains too stiff and of course it's hard for a treble to project into the Coli vasts, while Michael Colvin's energetic Quint is too much the Quasimodoish Hammer horror and far from the seductive Andalusian serenader Britten surely had in mind at times.

Britten's taxing vocal battles/duets between powerful women mean that both Ann Murray and Cheryl Barker challenge Rebecca Evans's more dreamily lyrical Governess to rise to their searing levels. Evans floats lines with Mozartian perfection and acts the lady's nervous collapses very well indeed


but doesn't convey any innate neurosis in her voice and on this occasion didn't move me in the final scene (though other folk I respect were in tears at the end). I'd love to see what the lustrous Barker might make of the sinning-or-sinned-against dilemma; and isn't it time to welcome the ever-waxing Sue Gritton, who's just been wowing Cheryl's compatriots down under as Ellen Orford, to the role? Neil Armfield's village-hall Grimes looks fascinating.



Our friends in Sydney have been obsessing on this show, and it would seem with good cause. Read the polyphony of praise in the 'scrapbook' of Prima la musica (with thanks to Sarah Noble for alerting me to the Gritton gold nugget above).

Now, it's time for In the Cage, and I don't mean another of great Henry's short stories (good, by the way, to see another James lover come out of the closet in John Adams's surprising blog).


I'm going to make an odd comparison, but I do think that Britten's opera would have fitted far better in the relatively intimate space of the Playhouse Theatre where a reduced-scale but pretty perfect Cage aux folles is currently playing (production photos of the Cagelles and John Barrowman by Catherine Ashmore). And the other thing to say is that I not only laughed myself silly but shed a few more tears at Thursday's performance than I had the night before (and don't get me wrong, Britten's shocker can reduce me to pulp).


This was in no small measure due to the show-stopping heft of John Barrowman's 'I Am What I Am' and feelgood 'The Best of Times'. But I must reveal my ignorance and say how the whole, iron-fist-in-lurex-glove event took me by surprise. I either never knew, or had forgotten, that the songs were by Jerry Herman of Hello, Dolly! and Mame fame; but the penny was already dropping when one of the first act numbers reminded me of that hit song from Mack and Mabel so irresistibly sung by Bernadette Peters.

And, yes, the old-fashioned sweetness coats a show about gay togetherness, alternative families and acceptance of all sorts which hit the French cinema in, can I believe it, the late 1970s and took on a new lease of life when the great Harvey Fierstein wrote the book for the musical. There's an excellent article in the programme by Michael Coveney in which Fierstein tells us how he 'fought to cast homosexuals in the roles - if you stand up and sing "I Am What I Am" without feeling your sexuality and your persecution right down to your painted toenails it's never going to be quite the same thing'.

It would be fair to say that the lovely Barrowman, such a great role model even if he is gifted with an unusually pretty face and such fine teeth, does feel it down to his 'painted toenails', that Simon Burke as his loving keeper is just as good and touching, that the rest of the cast sing, camp and act their socks off. Here are Burke's Georges and Barrowman's Albin trying to play it straight for the son's girlfriend's family, with Syrus Lowe's maid/miniMozart Jacob incapable of doing so.


Anyway it all ends, as the Broadway show never could, with a passionate, tender kiss. So what's most extraordinary of all is that some members of my mother's village coven, several of whom have hitherto behaved more like the genteel vomiting ladies in Little Britain, can't get enough of this and keep going back. She's in for a treat when she sees it for the first time next week.

Because nothing can live in it

The Governess's succinct explanation in Britten's The Turn of the Screw, and her charge Flora's stilling, harp-flecked invocation of the Dead Sea which prompts it, ran over and over in my head as we plunged to the lowest point on earth. Any illusion that we were more or less alone in this wilderness was shattered as we entered the nearly-full underground car park at the Masada National Park headquarters. At first full sighting, though, the last stronghold of the Jewish army against the Romans in AD 73 remained impressive.


There are two approaches to this cliffhanger: from the west, where the Romans' siege ramp can still be clearly seen, and from the east. Having started on the wrong route, which gave us an unexpected glimpse of an ibex, we took the latter option, shunning the hordes waiting for the cable car and heading up Wadi Masada for the Snake Path.


The path has its name, according to the historian Josephus's celebrated and romanticised account of the siege, 'because of its narrowness and constant windings; it is broken as it rounds the projecting cliffs and often turns back on itself, then lengthening out again a little at a time, manages to make some trifling advance. Walking along it is like balancing on a tight-rope. The least slip means death; for on either side yawns an abyss so terrifying that it could make the boldest tremble'*.

Well, I doubt if Josephus ever went to Masada, for even given the present securing, stepping and broadening of the path, it can't ever have been that scary and the ascent takes about three quarters of an hour. It does give spectacular views over the salt pans and the Dead Sea.


On the way up we encountered a large party of Israeli youth descending - nothing remarkable about that except that all, including the youngest who looked about 12, were carrying machine guns. Masada has entered the national mythology as the place where the inhabitants committed mass Waco-type suicide rather than surrender to slavery. In this it's thought that Josephus embroidered for the sake of a cracking good rhetorical speech, but like so much else in the distant past, it's now taken as the solemn truth and the oath of allegiance is frequently sworn at the top.

Whatever the historical reality, Herod's palace and fortifications on the top are mighty impressive.


In the south there's the largest of the cisterns which kept the community well watered


while the western palace has a couple of colourful mosaics.


There's also a columbarium for the pigeons which kept Herod's folk well fed.


Nowadays one still sees the occasional pigeon, but the most vocal and fearless inhabitants are these birds, some kind of starling but with an attractive orange stripe to mark them apart as a special desert breed.


It was bucketing in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv; we had instead a dramatic dust storm. So the views on the descent were even more dramatic


with the distant salt pans glowing in shafts of sunlight against the black.


A dip in the Dead Sea after this proved irresistible. We drove past En Gedi, which hostess Juliette assures me is like a Black Sea resort in the communist era, and on to a still surprisingly busy Mineral Beach. Couldn't get near the mud bath for raucous Americans


but floated somewhat uneasily in the lethal cocktail (no swimming or splashing permitted). It's not a new sensation for me - I'd also bobbed in the soapy waters of Lake Van - and J paraphrased Dr Johnson by declaring 'worth doing, but not worth going to do'. Masada, however, was a different story. The desert scene haunts me still.

*Thanks to Shari Greenberg for so generously presenting me with the Penguin Classics translation on our last day in Jerusalem.

VinCEEro? VinceRO!

The accepted custom on the money note of 'Nessun dorma' is to hold on to that top B for as long as you can. Franco Corelli (poutingly gorgeous above, in his Calafian Astrakhan) does, of course, and in extending my Monday 'Opera in Focus' class survey to see and/or hear more on YouTube, I found Alessandro Valente clinging to it so long that he drops off what ought to be the full bar of top A on the final 'ro'. What Puccini asks for is an accent on a quaver's worth of B, while the orchestra makes a poco allargando, so that the stress falls where the word demands, on the last syllable.

Is this mere pedantry? Well, not exactly. Puccini tended to mark every detail in the score, so if he'd wanted the B to be so heroically held, he'd have put a tenuto above it. And as one of my students enthusiastically observed, 'vinceRO!' sounds so much more determined and, well, natural. She only had the opportunity to hear it because I finally found a tenor who does exactly what's in the score - Aureliano Pertile, who made his Scala debut in 1918 so could have sung at the Turandot premiere but didn't (I wonder why not, since he was Toscanini's favourite tenor. By the way, Caruso never could have sung 'Nessun dorma' for the simple reason that he'd been dead for five years by the time of the first performance). I take the liberty of liberating Aureliano's amiable image from the earlier Turandot entry to give him the palm here.


What of Pertile's 'Nessun dorma' as a whole? Well, he tends to sing sharp in his virile excitement - always better than flat, don't you think? - but there's never any doubt that he can make the killer lines, starting ''Ma il mio mistero e chiuso in me' and all around Es, F sharps and Gs, a hellish tessitura.

My resident heldentenor explained to me how lighter voices like Gigli and Bjorling have trouble with these phrases, and how even the heavier ones have to clamp down in order to get to the end without cracking. In the class, we heard Bjorling, heroic but uniformly forte, followed by Heppner as baby tenor, so sensitive to the atmosphere at the start but very careful with the killer passage. Then we moved on to Charles Kullmann, singing in German with no trouble at all at any point (the class's favourite; Charles Craig, whom I later dug out on an old LP, is almost as good). Pertile's what-Puccini-wanted demo came between splendid heroics on the top B from Joseph Schmidt - who sings 'vinhairo' to get it - Corelli and, of course, Pavarotti, who remains a golden example of how to deal with the passaggio.

Sadly, while he set a splendid stadium example, he gave rise to an outrageous band of pygmies either crooning at a lower pitch (Russell Watson) or wowing the crowds with a far from solid attempt at real tenorism (Paul Potts, whom I've only just watched - needless to say he dominates 'Nessun dorma' on YouTube). On the other hand, an old bird of boundless charisma can get away with replacing Pav and doing her own thing. Do stay with Aretha beyond the mangled Italian of the first phrases, and if you have an open mind you should enjoy her.



Let's end, though, with another tenor who was so much the real thing but tends to be overlooked because of his popular bent, Mario Lanza. This badly lip-synched extravaganza from the 1956 film Serenade, with flashbacks featuring the ladies in the drama, Joan Fontaine and Sara Montiel, sounds good to me, a bit more robust than the feted 1948 Hollywood Bowl version.



Having found out a little more about Serenade - not least that the gay character played by Vincent Price originally appeared in the novel as the singer's first love-interest - I'm curious to see the whole thing. Apparently the Otello Act 3 Monologue is a high point of Lanza's career.

When we dead awaken...

...it'll be a mighty squeeze in the cleft which Zechariah prophesied will open up in Jerusalem's Mount of Olives. Which is why the Jewish graves are so hugger-mugger on the slopes, offering instant fast track to resurrection for Robert Maxwell, of all people, among others. If I've collated correctly, the city's glorious Dome of the Rock, never to be seen at close quarters by the majority of Israelis, will of course be swept away and the third temple at last re-established on the spot.

Unfortunately, it's not just the lunatic fringe which takes this literally - even if I doubt whether many Israelis share the ultra-orthodox interest in genetically engineering a red heifer without a single white hair as one prerequisite for the great day. Nor are many willing to wait on God's will. In the mid 1980s a group consisting of Knesset members, estate agents and lawyers calculated the placing of dynamite at each of the Dome's eight corner pillars. Arrested only just in time, they got off lightly for a plot which, if successful, would have triggered an Armageddon of regional if not global proportions; none of the organisers served more than four years in prison. One told the courts very matter of factly how the third temple would descend from the skies the minute the Dome was reduced to rubble.

Jerusalem is an always stimulating, sometimes oppressive place to be even for a week. As its finest poet, Yehuda Amichai, wrote,

The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams
like the air over industrial cities.
It's hard to breathe.

Paradoxically, I found myself breathing most freely on Temple Mount, Haram es-Sharif, the Muslims' 'noble sanctuary' and the site of the first and second Jewish temples which were razed to the ground, leaving only Herod's massive base. Against its western wall Israelis come to bewail the temples' destruction at their most sacred place.


It was a bit of a fairground when we visited, sundry bar mitzvah ceremonies proceeding with much guying, dancing from the men and ululating and sweet-throwing from the women behind the barrier.


Having undergone one queue, we came out and joined another at the only one of the Haram's gates currently open to non-Muslims in the day's two brief windows of opportunity (we took the 12.30-1.30 slot). Security was especially tight owing to recent protests - in the midst of one of which a journalist friend of our hosts had her jaw broken by a stone - but once beyond the wooden ramp and the mercifully dormant riot shields


we did indeed seem to enter a kind of paradise in which the crowds quickly dispersed. The centrepiece is of course the late 7th century octagonal Dome, not a prayer hall - that function is served by the Al-Aqsa Mosque to the south - but a shrine to house the putative rock on which Abraham determined to sacrifice his son (Isaac in the Old Testament, Ishmael in the Koran).


Its lower walls of white veined marble and upper tiers of glazed tiles, originally commissioned by Suleyman the Magnificent to replace the original mosaics, exist in perfect harmony with its perfect proportions beneath the dome itself, now of anodized aluminium rather than gold.


Yet what brings tears to the eyes is not so much the building, the interior of which is currently closed to non-Muslims, as its place at the heart of the most breathtakingly beautiful man-made terrace I've seen. For sheer spaciousness and light-filled splendour it even outstrips the centre of Isfahan and the Omayyad Mosque in Damascus. It's also in such marked contrast to the Crusader gloom of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, though that offers weird fascinations of its own (of which more anon). Approached by eight flights of stairs surmounted by elegant archways or qanats, the sanctuary contains other more gem-like buildings, among them the Dome of the Spirits,


the Dome of the Ascension marking the culmination of Mohammed's night journey which makes this the third most sacred Muslim site


and the exquisitely decorated Dome of the Chain, its purpose unclear (though it may have been a small-scale prototype for the main building).


On a lower level near the Sabila Gate is the Fountain of the Mamluk Sultan Qaitbey


which we admired briefly before being summoned at deadline time, and ushered out into the bustle of the Old City.

So not for the first time I feel a bit like the protagonist of Henry James's The Princess Casamassima, wondering at the beauty of these great artistic creations but troubled by their genesis and their fragility under the present situation. The following morning I found myself boiling over with anger reading the description in Amos Elon's superb Jerusalem: City of Mirrors about the attempts to destroy such a masterpiece. But you could also see where that frustration came from; after all, events which happened centuries ago seem to be yesterday's grievances in Jerusalem. The simple fact is that no community here lives at peace with its neighbour. There are many more incredible stories and symbols of religious hairsplitting which I'll try and find time for. And I guess I'd better address the tricky question of Jerusalem today. But that's enough for now.

Jenufa: mill wheel as fate

There it is in the very first bar of Janacek's Jenufa (Her Stepdaughter, as the 1955 vocal score I bought second-hand in Prague still calls it), the sound of the revolving mill wheel. Janacek went and checked it out, finding his own musical equivalent in the shape of a low xylophone, not a typical sonority for 1903/4 (Strauss two years later was still calling it a 'wood and straw instrument' for Salome, though of course Saint-Saens had got there several decades earlier with his rattling bones). And the mill wheel still revolves at Glyndebourne as ominously as it did back in the late 1980s when Nikolaus Lehnhoff's ageless and, for me, unsurpassed production first stunned us all. Here it is backstage, where we caught a glimpse of it on a whistlestop tour kindly organised for nine-year old Lucien and his mother Clare before the schools matinee of Falstaff.


It's something of a miracle how the latest Glyndebourne on Tour team manages to come up with a Jenufa revival offering as many resonances as Lehnhoff's previous line-ups, among the casts of yore the unforgettable Anja Silja as the Kostelnicka, Roberta Alexander and later Amanda Roocroft as Jenufas to make stones weep, Langridge as the febrile Laca. But it has. Perhaps I have a little foreknowledge from seeing the way Robin Ticciati worked with the covers the previous Sunday (see below). Anyway I'm convinced that much of the latest power comes from his close liaison with singers on text, meaning, pacing, nodal points of expression and above all the power of holding a silence. There were three such heart in mouth moments in the harrowing second act, and one to cap them all between the C major blaze to which the Kostelnicka goes to face judgment, leaving the maddened village lads to wreck her property, and the radiant, harp-rippling B flat initiating Jenufa's and Laca's final determination to face whatever the future holds together.

Ticciati's view is softer but not weaker than the rawness Mackerras has always brought to this score. He makes you hear passages in a completely different light: you understand not only the glow of love Jenufa emanates, but also the sensual power of Steva - for once a truly handsome chap and beautifully sung to boot by Brno born Pavel Cernoch, the drunken swagger of the first act (in the first of three GOT production photos by Alastair Muir)


yielding to the youthful fear of the Kostelnicka in the second.


There were also heart-stopping beauties in unexpected places, like the lovely little chorus in which the village girls lead the restrained but still fun-loving Jenufa in the last act. Ticciati's insistence on clear-sighted truth is awe-inspiringly matched by Anne Mason's Kostelnicka. Anja left indelible phrases behind, but Mason can find different qualities: more tenderness, generosity of spirit and, in her final speech, a core of emotional strength which made me sit up ramrod straight in my seat.


If Giselle Allen didn't pierce the heart in every gesture or phrase, her depiction of Jenufa's development and especially the laser-like focus shared by Peter Wedd's Laca in the final scene were just as impressive as the different characterisations of her predecessors. All the smaller roles were flawlessly delineated.

'It's an earthquake', promised the taxi-driver ferrying us back to Lewes Station the previous evening, to which I have to add a pat-on-the-back comment from a gentleman who'd been to the study day and brought four friends along to my condensed talk on Saturday because he'd been 'thunderstruck'. I think the kids at the special showing of Falstaff would mostly have said 'awesome' in response to Richard Jones's gag-laden and consistently resourceful evocation of 1940s Windsor (I can't wait to see his Annie Get Your Gun). Brownie points to Katie Tearle and her super team in the Education Department for making the afternoon work so well.


I'll be brief about this: it was just a marvel to hear the enthusiastic roars of youth, their minute-long applause at the laundry-basket antics long before the curtain came down, their attentiveness to the forest magic in which Elena Tsallagova produced the most perfect singing of the evening as a Nannetta who, for me, scored over Adriana Kucerova in the main season (I may just have heard the delightful AK on an off night). Here she is with her very good Fenton, Nicholas Phan, photographed by Bill Cooper.


As for the rest, well, the tricky ensembles need tightening and Jonathan Veira has everything going for him except that he isn't Christopher Purves, the Falstaff of the production's first showing. But he's charming, has pathos and knows how to work an audience.


There have been a few economies for the tour: the swan and the Eton schoolboys have gone. But I don't remember Mistress Quickly snatching a discreet kiss from a lady who turns out to be her lady at the end of the superb Windsor High Street scene. Lucien, ever unpredictable, especially liked that transitional tableau, though of course he had also been in ecstasies of delight anticipating Sir John's come-uppance in the casa Ford, inevitably the highlight of our earlier excursion to the Globe Merry Wives of Windsor (when it would have been the Page household, but I managed to dissuade Lucien from harking back to Shakespeare when he was earnestly trying to sort out his Alices, Megs and Nannettas in the synopsis).

Anyway we were fortunate that the rain held off for our walk across the ridge after a bookshop browse and a stop at the deservedly popular Bill's in Lewes. We were also lucky with a briefly sunkissed picnic followed by a stroll around the lake, now very much plunged in autumn after the late-summer feel of the previous Sunday.


What fun, too, to see the lawn turned into an endlessly reconfigured school playing field.


On Jenufa day the rain was seeping through the Ebert Room roof and only at half-time could we venture much outside. But the magic of Glyndebourne holds in any season.

29/10 The films of the Discovering Music on Musorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition are now up and running, linked as I write from the main Radio 3 webpage. They're supposed to be there in perpetuity, unlike the abridged radio version, which has already had its seven days of extended life. Ashley Wass's more substantial and hyper-poetic playing, of the Musorgsky miniatures 'Une larme' and 'Au village', comes in the background sequence, following my contextual blether which starts a couple of minutes in, and we pop up again towards the end of the 'analysis' film. My feelings about speaking spontaneously and then finding I'm up there indefinitely for all to see are ambivalent; of course I'd edit myself. But it could have been a lot worse.

The only way is Up

What I suppose I mean is that there's no going back on the unsentimental presentation of human loss in this little masterpiece, issued - wonders will never cease - under the Disney aegis but made by the Pixar geniuses who brought you Monsters, Inc. Indeed, if we're talking about rank, I'd be tempted to slip this in just above that earlier jeu d'esprit and even alongside both Toy Stories.

In any case, Up is unique. The heroes are a grumpy old man and an annoying chubby child, with cute relief from an exotic bird and a talking dog. Within minutes, the narrative takes you through the senior hero's life, sensitively touching on his wife's loss of a child and later her death. Can you believe parents have complained about this? I echo Maurice Sendak's 'ya boo sucks' sentiments to similar cries of 'too scary' about the cinematic version of Where the Wild Things Are (even if I can't imagine that timeless work extending to a full length film). And I quote John Burningham on a private view of the film based on his book Granpa:

When the picture of the empty armchair came up on the screen a small voice in the front row asked 'Where's Granpa?' The adults each side of me reached for their handkerchiefs. The children, however, were able to accept the ending without tears.

Up, anyway, embraces a huge, far from facile optimism and great visual beauty. It does everything a great work of entertainment, dare I say of art to boot, ought to do: it makes you laugh, cry, reflect. And there are no cheesy songs; the musical score, except in the stock conflict sequences, is sensitive and sweet. I'm not sure if any of this was enhanced by the 3-D version we saw in Brixton's Ritzy Cinema; that was just an optional extra to an already dizzying experience.

So what was I doing watching Up at the pictures in the first place? I doubt if I'd ever have gone had it not been for the fact that I needed to meet friend Simon's partner Patricia, an actress of no small reputation, to get her to record three scenes from Timberlake Wertenbaker's adaptation of Jenufa, the Gabriela Preissova play which inspired Janacek's now much better-known opera (strictly speaking, the original title of both the play and the opera was Her Stepdaughter, which throws the emphasis on to the Kostlenicka, portrayed below by the wonderful Paola Dionisotti). What I thought of the first UK production, which cried out in vain for a West End transfer, is here. It looks from the Faber website as if you can still get hold of copies of the play.


Suffice it to say that Simon was taking daughter Evie and her friend Tanisha to see Up, and we tagged along, afterwards resorting to Simon's car down some noisy Brixton sidestreet trying to get the speeches right. The aftermath I hardly dare report on, other than to say that another Simon, the hard-working sound and vision man at Glyndebourne, is still trying to retrieve the information from a recalcitrant minidisk. I've had it with those machines; technician Simon is going to set me on the right path when next we meet.

So to another film with some resonance, the Flemish director Johan Grimonprez's singular take on a divided Alfred Hitchcock in Double Take.


Presented by the personable Jonathan Romney at the London Film Festival on Friday, this has fascinating things to say about the divided soul and the doppelganger - partly springing, it was later suggested, from the Belgian split/division between French and Flemish. The film makes a lot of the likeable man who was Hitchcock's official double, and all that is amusing, especially the play on Hitchcock's 'McGuffin' appearances in his own films.


I liked, too, the conversation with an older self taken from a Borges story. I was less convinced by the links to world events at the time, from Khrushchev's bizarre off-air spat with Nixon to the Cuban missile crisis and, ultimately, beyond. Still, this made a musical counterpoint and it did make me keen, in a nervous kind of way, to see The Birds again with fresh eyes.

Let's end with another fantasy of genius, Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick or Lonesome No More!


Surely this dystopian tragicomedy has the best back of jacket blurb ever, which I'll use to intrigue you:

Wilbur Swain and his twin sister Eliza are so hideous, helpless and vile in their infancy that their parents are forced to rear them in the seclusion of a nearby asteroid. But behind their idiotic facade, this monstrous pair possess a joint intelligence capable of outstripping the most advanced computers.

Now, as America collapses into anarchic decline, and pin-size Chinamen pollute the atmosphere, President Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain sits in the ruined remnants of the Empire State Building and tells the extraordinary story of his life and times.

Partly to prove to you that I've read beyond, can I quote my favourite of many excerptable passages? Wilbur tells us about the anti-loneliness ('Lonesome No More!') campaign which wins him the presidency:

I said that all the damaging excesses of Americans in the past were motivated by loneliness rather than a fondness for sin.

An old man crawled up to me afterwards and told me how he used to buy life insurance and mutual funds and household appliances and automobiles and so on, not because he liked them or needed them, but because the salesman seemed to promise to be his relative, and so on.

'I had no relatives and I needed relatives,' he said.

'Everybody does,' I said.

He told me how he had been a drunk for a while, trying to make relatives out of people in bars. 'The bartender would be kind of a father, you know - ' he said. 'And then all of a sudden it was closing time.'

To find out more about Wilbur's scheme for a network of relatives, and the concomitant reason for 'Daffodil-11', get your copy here. I'm only a salesman when I believe passionately in the 'product'. And I realise that 'I believe passionately' has become marketing jargon, but does that hijacking make it any the less valid?

Went the day well? I should say. This is my idea of a break after many hours writing a programme article on another weird tale, Bluebeard's Castle, for the English National Opera. So engrossed was I that when I finished I guessed it was lunchtime; it turned out to be 4.20. Strange sensation.

Red and Ellie go to Glyndebourne

Red went to hear Tristan* in late summer.


Biped Ellie attended an autumnal study day on Janacek's Jenufa.


In case you think I've taken leave of my senses, this can pass as performance art - a homage to the vivacious Edwina Ashton, who came with me to Tristan and whose partner Kit sent Red along (he's really Mr. Red, but I am permitted to be on intimate terms). Edwina makes life-size animal costumes in the style of children's toys, dresses up in them and re-enacts the futility of life: a squirrel absently sifting nuts, a Sisyphean dung beetle struggling to push a ball upstairs, a mouse aimlessly sifting through a fashion magazine on the beach. These films have real pathos, believe me. In a forthcoming drawn animation, her first, she creates a 'bad tempered, removed and extremely precise elephant living in a crumbling hotel on the shores of a Swiss lake'. That would be Mr. Pantz, aka the Reverend Panticules and others, her own familiar. You can see she is as much of a one-off in her descriptions as in her art. Adorable Edna!

She took me to the Zoo Art Fair in Shoreditch last Friday, down a dark alley guarded by a luminous angel (the film grain is my attempt at art).


To be frank, I enjoyed the Dickensian warehouse stairs and rooms more than the video shows, but I liked the authenticity of the young people in Edna's quarters, in marked contrast to a lot of the fakery on display at Frieze (or so I'm told). Here she is by her little display, part of the Bristol Works/Projects 'pavilion'.


Anyway, while Ellie - manipulated up above by a bemused Amy Bere of the Glyndebourne Education Department - preferred the lake, I was very happy to be part of an amazing all-day event in the Ebert Room. This matched collaborating with the inspirational Vladimir Jurowski and Daniel Slater on Prokofiev's Betrothal in a Monastery a couple of years ago. After me came moderator Julian Broughton, under the aegis of whose University of Sussex Community Engagement Centre the day took place. As a composer - in this case a re-composer - he gave us a vivid demonstration of how 'In tears' from Janacek's On an overgrown path would sound if conventionally shaped. Then, after an excellent early Christmas dinner in Nether Wallop, we re-convened with key members of the creative team working on the Glyndebourne Touring Opera revival of Jenufa.

We heard three covers, all of whom we were soon wanting to see in the complete opera. Miranda Keys sang Jenufa. She has a beautifully modulated lyric-dramatic soprano, heading towards the territory of Beethoven's Leonora, which she'll be singing in a few years' time. Miranda is an Aussie, and the funniest singer I've met. She could easily have a career in stand-up, and her earthy, no-nonsense approach to plot and characterisation never became arch or brittle thanks to a respect for the drama's searing essence. Then, between reducing us all to helpless laughter, she became the patiently suffering heroine at the drop of a hat.

With vivid support from pianist Duncan Williams and the occasional spur of the moment staging by assistant director Paul Higgins, the scenes worked upon were Jenufa's Act One reproaches to the feckless Steva, two very different exchanges with Laca, the man who's always loved her, and the opening of Act 2. The formidable Kostelnicka was Svetlana Sozdateleva, whose Lady in Waiting I well remember soaring in the ensemble of Verdi's Macbeth (she sang the mistress on tour). Chris Lemmings was Laca. He started off in the Glyndebourne chorus with J all those years ago, and by all accounts was a much better Caliban than Herr Bostridge in Ades's The Tempest. Here are all three after the session, Miranda on the left.


Like his colleagues, Chris seemed to understand the difficult Czech text perfectly - the covers had been engaged a mere three weeks ago, so that made it doubly impressive - though how transformed their phrases became after Robin Ticciati's suggestions. Young and loveable Maestro T is obviously another Pappano in the making, passionately involved with every line and able to grasp the essence of the language as Janacek reproduces it in speech melody. This is Ticciati's first Janacek, and he even had a coaching session with great Sir Charles, Janacek's earthly representative. I find it very moving to think of a major talent still in his twenties working with the octogenarian Mackerras. Continuity and tradition thrive.

Here's Robin clasping the precious full score.


He's clearly a collegial chap, taking the time to talk to a very independent-minded 18 year old who'd just finished her week at Glyndebourne on work experience and was heading to Cambridge next year after travelling (I enjoyed chatting with her on the journey back to London). And there were warm hugs before we took a taxi to Lewes Station. Don't miss the GTO performances of Jenufa, listed here and starting at Glyndebourne on Saturday afternoon, when I'll be talking again.

Well, the future is in many good hands as far as already first-rate conductors go; so much, as I keep saying, for the maestro myth. Alerted by the Isserlis sisters at a Diaghilev talk on Wednesday, I only just caught Yannnick Nezet-Seguin (photo by Marie-Reine Mattera, courtesy of the Southbank Centre)


in Haydn with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment at the QEH the following evening.

It was as bracing and novel in every phrase as his SCO Prom had been. 'Do hope you enjoyed Yannick as much as we did?' asked Annette Isserlis in a recent e-mail. Didn't I just. A hairsbreadth away from fussiness, his approach works because musicality pours out of everything he does, and he seems completely sincere. Quibbles first: why play the whole Trumpet Concerto on a period instrument? It's asking for trouble, and the admirable David Blackadder clearly got that more often than was comfortable for the listener. Why not demonstrate the wonderful open sound of the old trumpet in an excerpt and then turn to the reliable modern counterpart? Because this is the OAE, I suppose.

But the symphonies came across as even more of a treasury of quirky invention than usual. There was real peasant earthiness in the Surprise's scherzo. All of the Military (100)was delirious delight. Tears of joy came to my eyes in the finale and in at least three places throughout No. 104. Heck, I've been going on too long so I'll ditch the details and leave you with a picture of YNS passing a glass of red wine to leader Margaret Faultless - what a shame we can't see her lovely smiling face - at the 'Night Shift' performance later that evening.


I'd have liked to stay and see how the young and trendy enjoy themselves with the new approach to classical music, but the earlier blockbuster was quite enough.

One final plug: the Discovering Music on Musorgsky's Pictures at an exhibition which I shared with Charles Hazlewood and Ashley Wass is coming up quicker than I anticipated, on Radio 3 this coming Sunday at 5pm. Don't know yet about the webcast film, which should be there in perpetuity once it appears.

*chiefly the Liebested. Sorry, I just thought of that one. Yet in fact I did meet a man who came to the Royal Opera for that alone. I know because we'd persuaded a friend to move into a seat which had been empty for two acts, and just before the third began, in he came. 'I only ever come for the Liebestod', he said. Right, at £100 plus a shot. He was duly rewarded by Gabriele Schnaut singing it nearly a tone flat.

Czechs in the USA

I like to think the hyper-brilliant finale of Martinu's Second Symphony is a soundtrack to the composer, pictured above with pianist pal Rudolf Firkusny on the left in Central Park, striding the streets of New York like Gershwin's American in Paris. Yes, it's a dazzling showpiece, at least in the last two movements, but there's introspection, too, in the slow-movement homage to Dvorak and Janacek. I find it incredibly moving and troubling the way the Bohemian/Moravian strain peters out. But Martinu was mindful of his fellow Czechs in Cleveland who commissioned the work, so he gave them a few good tunes to hum.

In a footnote to the 'MMMMM' entry, that distinguished polymath Colin Dunn expresses his surprise and relief to find that Jiri Belohlavek's performance of the Second with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on Friday didn't come as an anticlimax to the First. Certainly it's lighter and briefer, but it does the D major joy thing like no other symphony. Indeed, I think I even prefer the radiant final chord to the noisier, looser tumult at the end of Mahler Five.

But shouldn't the symphony have come at the end of a long and daunting programme? Swapping it with a quick-witted and woodwind sharp Till Eulenspiegel would have given us depth as well as energy after the Adagio of Mahler 10 (and made sure that anyone caught out by the controversial 7pm 'live on Radio 3' start wouldn't have missed the most unusual component). I still don't understand conductors like Jiri who won't do the whole Cooke-fleshed-out adventure; Mahler's finale takes us much further than his first movement. Still, the BBCSO's Adagio was translucent and painstakingly lit up in its delicate final stages.

I must confess it was the only part of the evening where tiredness took over and I phased out of a few minutes early on. I'd done the pre performance talk and Ann McKay had been whisking me around the Barbican to sort out the BBC box chat with Petroc Trelawny. It made a big different to have the window wide open so we caught the full dazzle of the Martinu and the sheen of Strauss's Four Last Songs.


Some were less than overwhelmed by the delivery of Anne Schwanewilms (photographed above by Johanna Price). I can only say that I find her poised, silvery and sometimes deliberately slivery sound a beguiling alternative to the fuller bodied tone of Christine Brewer or Anja Harteros. All three are the great Strauss sopranos of our time, to which some would add a fourth, Soile Isokoski (and yet more a fifth, Renee Fleming, who can be fine when bad taste doesn't get in the way). Radio 3 listeners missed a visual treat as the statuesque Schwanewilms stood, a vision in purple, with total physical ease and radiated assurance. What a far cry from the angular, technique-defying antics of Bostridge, Kozena and Goerne.

Belohlavek seemed to be keeping the orchestra right down for his soprano; at times, that rarest of events in the Barbican acoustics, a genuine pianissimo, drew us right in to the magic. And we could take it for granted that Schwanewilms would phrase longer and bolder - and at some dangerously slow tempi - than most other interpreters. Full marks, too, to a hushed audience who held the silence. I always remember my English master at school, the adorable Lionel 'Tibby' Bircher, sighing 'lovely lady, lovely lady' over Desdemona, and I feel the same about muse Schwanewilms (who'll be singing Otello's long-suffering bride at the Barbican in December). Do catch her Marschallin on this DVD, which I went overboard about in the BBC Music Magazine. The production swims in and out of focus, but our Anne is alert to every nuance, and the camera loves her.


A quick reminder: you can hear the concert, complete with Petroc and I blethering away, on the Radio 3 iPlayer for the next two days. I'm cut off in mid interval flow - you'll then need to pick up Part Two for the Mahler Adagio and Strauss's Till.

BBC Symphony contrabassoonist and sometime third bassoon Clare Glenister returned to our course at the City Lit last night. Her painstakingly prepared theme was the bassoon as the comic of the orchestra, with Shakespeare at the core. Live, she played us Alan Ridout's Caliban and Ariel as well as Falstaff's sack-soaked solo in Elgar's marvellous symphonic poem. She'd spent all Saturday recording herself three times over in Granville Bantock's The Three Witches.


Next time we expect a Glenister x 4 rendition of Prokofiev's Scherzo humoristique. On which theme, Clare also played us an American spoof of Peter and the Wolf adapted for four bassoons. Bird, cat, duck, Peter, wolf and huntsmen are all...bassooons. Grandfather, who winds up the narrative muttering about Darwinian natural selection, is...a sopranino recorder.

Clare is an interesting and interested person, who participated in drama classes at the City Lit - Shakespeare's Nurse is a cornerstone of her rep - and is currently doing a degree course in which she hopes to perfect her Norwegian (brought about by a desire to read Ibsen in the original). She stayed for our Martinu chat, and wants us to point out to the management that the four-work programmes are killers for the players, and that less (ie three works) might be more. Many of us agreed, having stumbled from Martinu One in almost uncomfortable fatigue. These programmes look marvellous on paper and make for absorbing listening on Radio 3, but perhaps they're a bit much for orchestra and attentive audience alike.

And now it's time to put Martinu to bed for a few months (how long the interval befor Jiri returns for symphonies 3-6). In the meantime, I must turn my attention to Janacek's Jenufa for a Glyndebourne study day on Sunday (do come if there are places left - Robin Ticciati's also featuring, and singers will be performing bits of the opera with piano accompanument), and to Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle for an ENO programme note. All good but emotionally demanding stuff. And my previously announced intention to go for the happy and gentle was demolished by reading Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata, one of the most devastating and upsetting novellas ever written.


It's essential reading that may have you viewing marital relations quite differently in the first fifty pages. Then, thanks to the device of the unreliable narrator, it becomes much more ambiguous and open-ended, as always with Tolstoy. And to think that all this hit the world before Freud and Ingmar Bergman.