A beautiful goodbye to my mother

Today would have been my mum's 94th birthday. She so nearly made it, had a mostly splendid final year at the best of care homes, Greenacres in Banstead (run by the not-for-profit Anchor company), visiting which was always a joy, and seemed to be recovering from a chest infection when she died suddenly on 30 December. I've stated it already: no regrets, because she never declined in to a miserable last few months, and was adored by her carers who still tell me they miss her so much.

I was delighted that one of them, the lovely Myrna Ward, spoke so beautifully at the funeral alongside the physiotherapist I got in to see her every week, Bhawna Brijwani. The idea was to get people from various periods of mum's life to follow my eulogy (which I managed to get through without succumbing to tears, or at least only briefly towards the end. I'm used to speaking without a script, but the words just flowed when I wrote). So my childhood friend Gail, whom I haven't see for years, spoke about the friendship between her mum Marie and mine, which ran from aged two to the ends of their lives - birthdays and departures were astonishingly close. In the photos below (you can always click to enlarge), on the inside front cover of the order of service: mum as a baby with her parents, as a little girl prancing on the b, as a glamorous teenager not long before her beloved mum's untimely death; with my dad; with the children who loved them as their second set of parents before I came along, cousins Diana and Michael with her and mother Edith, Sara and elder sister Sue with mum and dad. 

Liz Grover from what started out as the Young Wives' Drama Group gave a vivacious tribute, and goddaughter Sara, who gave mum so much pleasure by visiting Greenacres regularly with daughter Hanna and baby grandson Lenny, read the bit from the Bible I'd requested, the famous Corinthians passage about faith, hope and love. Inside back cover: son in the picture, born eight years after they got married, with parents at Eastbourne and in the back garden, dressed in the costume mum made for me as Sir Joseph Porter in our junior school production of HMS Pinafore, with dad holding adored Zsabo; with stepfather Ron, his dog Jinty and mum at graduation; mum and Ron at another wedding; mum with friends - Marie in Sorrento, Margaret in Cambridge and Joy, who died in 2024. That's on a boat somewhere (the only one of the two of them I could find that was any good).

Of the hymns, I had no choice but to give in to mum and her friends with 'Make me a channel of your peace' - at least the words, by St Francis, are good - but got my way with 'Lord of all hopefulness' and 'Guide me, o thou great redeemer'. And of course I organised the music, knowing that mum would have loved it, though I'm still not sure what her own personal choices would have been (I'd asked, but never got very far). I am sure that she would have loved the major participation of violinist Benjamin Baker, whom she always remembered as a brilliant young violinist of the Yehudi Menuhin School, where she and Joy ushered. Even in her last year, when I mentioned him, she cited the YMS immediately. This is Ben in rehearsal with Tom Pope, one of my oldest friends, from university days.

Tom also accompanied Ben and my other half, Jeremy, in an aria from Bach's St John Passion, and Ben in the most perfect performance of the 'Meditation' from Massenet's Thais you'll ever hear. That came after George Harcourt-Vernon led the prayers. Vicar Kate had just left on holiday, but it was a blessing that lay minister George was available, as unlike Kate he'd known both my mother and myself, when I sang in the choir during the 1970s. 

He did a wonderful job and the big worry, that the service would run over and make him late in accompanying the coffin to North East Surrey Crematorium to give a valediction, didn't materialise; he, Jeremy and Liz got there in good time, while I hosted the rather jolly tea laid on by the Mothers' Union in the Open Door cafe just down from the church. Biggest joy here was to see adorable 'Auntie' Betty Reavley, who hadn't changed at all in her sweetness even at 97, and her daughter Jill, family of my youth, and Margaret Carter's eldest daughter Marese, another playmate along with her sister Katie in early days (I now realise that though an only child, I was never without surrogate brothers and sisters). Here are Marese and Betty.

 I felt so supported, too, by four friends from Dublin who didn't know mum but came out of solidarity, and a cluster of my great university pals, pictured below (from left to right Tom, Simon - who played Debussy's Syrinx so beautifully in the service - Jo, Catherine and Mary, whose dad the Rev (later Canon) Thomas New had been such a presence (he died last year, and Mary was back in her old stamping-ground for the first time in years).

I don't mind at all if people want to watch the whole service,  filmed with excellent sound by All Saints and placed on their YouTube site. The formal part starts at 11m30s, Ben playing as the coffin is brought in with more Bach (the Andante from the Sonata for violin in A minor). If you just want to witness the musical side, the Bach aria is at 38m20s, Syrinx at 46m45s and the Massenet 'Meditation' at 1hr6m7s. The playout is also worth catching - Julie Andrews singing mum's party-piece, 'Burlington Bertie from Bow'.

The splendid floral bouquet for the coffin - I wanted purple, yellow and white - should have been collected from the church by Greenacres, wasn't and actually seemed just fine on the lawn by the porch; it lasted three weeks.

The final gesture is to get mum's ashes placed as near as possible to dad's beneath the west tower of the church, and to have a small headstone made. There will be one more little ceremony for that. Meanwhile, warmest thanks to everyone who came, participated or just watched live or later. Finally, here's a repeat of mum still looking elegant on her 93rd birthday, the photo I used for the back cover of the order of service.

Happy 94th, mum - we won't forget you. 

YouTube Xmas concert at Greenacres Care Home

Here's my 93 year old ma being wheeled by my cousin Diana and her husband Lee to the conservatory of her care home. Marvellous Greenacres mover and shaker Sarah, who's managed to fill a whole month of special events for the residents, asked if I'd repeat the format I'd used for my previous hour of YouTube clips, rather chaotic in the lounge of mum's Cornflower Wing, but in the bigger room with the bigger telly so people might be more attentive. So I braved it through Storm Darragh, and the trains and buses all obliged. Frankly I was fine with whatever happened, but the crowd stayed and folk I've never heard talk before were very effusive at the end.

I thought it might be worth repeating what I showed here, so you can enjoy your own quality hour of concerts, ballet and opera. How better to start than with the opening of Bach's Christmas Oratorio? I like the old film with Harnoncourt conducting especially because it includes the Tölz Boys' Choir.

You can, of course, enjoy well beyond what I actually played. Next, an absolute winner: the lovely Wallis Giunta singing Brahms' 'Geistliches Wiegenlied' while holding her viola-player's very attentive baby. Wallis brought her own six-month-old, Bonnie, to one of the Zoom classes on Bernstein's A Quiet Place.

Another musician I adore as a person, though I haven't seen her for years, is the personable violinist Dunja Lavrova. I love her transcription of Tchaikovsky's 'Miniature Overture' from The Nutcracker, and her explanation of why she made it.

Then, of course, we had to have Tchaikovsky's original, followed by the glowing 'Decoration of the Christmas tree' and March. You can enjoy the whole ballet score here lovingly conducted by the vivacious Yannick Nézet-Séguin during his time in Rotterdam.

Taking a break before some Nutcracker dancing, I thought it was time for more choral music. First, my absolute favourite among Christmas anthems, the 'Shepherds' Farewell' from Berlioz's L'enfance du Christ, that unforced masterpiece with which I ended this Zoom term's 'Later Berlioz and Beyond' (having moved on to Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Franck, Chabrier and Chausson, I went back to the 1850s for a seasonal finale). At Greenacres, I used the Conlon performance from St-Denis, but it's blocked for reproduction elsewhere, so here's the excerpt from back in the day when Gardiner got on with the Monteverdi forces. You can see the whole thing on YouTube - Herod is none other than the magnificent young bass Will Thomas, whose socking at JEG's hands triggered the disgrace.

A carol from King's, of course - the one I used was from 2020, with lockdown conditions still pertaining up to a point, but the filming of one of the world's great buildings is such a pleasure. Again, there's a blocking of wider use, so I'll show another.

Then the grand Pas de deux from The Nutcracker in the traditional and gaudy but still classy Royal Ballet production with my favourite of the company's ballerinas, Marianela Núñez and Vadim Muntagirov. Heard it played with such panache by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and its new Chief Conductor, Mark Wigglesworth, at Portsmouth Guildhall last Thursday.

'

I wanted to show a stretch of Richard Jones's Humperdinck from the Met, but there wasn't time, so for operatic brevity I ended with a nice potpourri from Rimsky-Korsakov's Christmas Eve as directed by Christof Loy in Frankfutt.

Footnote: I originally had the below on the list, would have squeezed in a woman composer, and not just for the sake of it: Augusta Holmès was a revelation of the 'After Berlioz' course for the incredible vigour of her symphony Roland Furieux. The version I used, with the splendid Marie-Nicole Lemieux, has been taken down, so this will do.

Happy viewing - you have potentially many hours there rather than just the one I filled at Greenacres.

To those who still buy CDs...

...you could support our stalled, languishing and penniless (though still ever creative) musicians at this time. Remember that all the from-home concerts they do are for the love of it, to feel that they're still performing and reaching out even if that 'magic triangle' of live music as defined by Britten - composer, performer(s), audience - has temporarily vanished.

This ties in well enough with some of the discs I've been listening to over the past weeks. Perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that Bach, being both of the essence and worth hearing over long sequences, has been top of the list, and the absolute highlight I wrote about yesterday on The Arts Desk - 90 glorious minutes of Jeremy Denk taking us through the workings of five Preludes and Fugures from The Well-Tempered Clavier. I didn't know about it when I worked my way through the five CDs of the two books just released on the Orchid label by a pianist I hadn't heard of before, George Lepauw.

These are very personal readings, full of rubato and the kind of tense-and-release which won't please those who like their Bach crisp and even. But somehow with this composer you always know when his interpreters are in a deeper zone. I've said it before, but much as I like Vikingur Ólafsson's intelligent programming on his Bach disc, I wouldn't have given it the kind of awards it garnered. At the time I went straight across to hear young Martin James Bartlett and grand maître (no need to call her maitresse) Idil Biret, and there was the thing-in-itself, the very essence, reached as in the best of transcendental meditations. Denk is there, too; I've written more than I should about his inspiring masterclass, so just go over to The Arts Desk, read if you like and if you don't, just click on the link. As I also wrote there, I suspect that were Denk to record all 48, that would probably push aside all the other Well-Tempered Claviers I have, just as his Goldberg Variations did - until Beatrice Rana came along. There are, in any case, infinite varieties of interpretation in this endlessly re-discoverable music; it just depends on which appeals most to your temperament. And Lepauw was also filmed in Weimar's Jakobskirche; I've yet to see the online documentary/performances.

Orchid, the CD label which took on this project, seems to hit the nail on the head every time. I have friendly email exchanges with its main man, the excellent violinist Matthew Trusler, and so I'm maybe partisan; but every CD that comes along strikes a chord, makes me sit up and listen even if I'm dipping in casually. When Matthew told me that fellow violinist Jack Liebeck's Brahms was exceptional, I listened - and I agree (I haven't plucked up the courage to listen to the companion Schoenberg Concerto yet; I need time and a score). Such perfect intonation, just the right degree of fantasy. And the oboe playing of Alison Teale in the slow movement - the players of the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Andrew Gourlay are all credited in the booklet - is superlative, and it all sounds so good (no surprise when it turns out the producer was Andrew Keener). The cover photo, by the way, and the ones of JL in the booklet, are by my good friend Kaupo Kikkas, inspired as usual, in this case to include Jack's adorable dog.

It was a coup for Orchid to 'get' Gabriela Montero, possibly because it agreed to her own Piano Concerto No. 1, 'Latin', appearing on the disc alongside Ravel's G major - and whilst the latter is impeccably detailed and alive, rich and full, the Montero work is also beguiling, immediately communicative. I like the programming of Yu Kosuge, too; she's halfway through her 'Four Elements' series with 'Fire', taking us from hearthside meditations by Tchaikovsky and Reger to the more dangerous flames of Liszt, Scriabin, Falla and Stravinsky; there were some real rarities on the 'Water' disc too.

Trusler buys into the quirky: Kottos is a quartet of accordion (Bjarke Mogensen, whose duet arrangement with Rasmus Schjærff Kjølle of Stravinsky's Petrushka on the same label is a firm favourite), recorder (Pernille Petersen), cello (Josefine Opsahl) and bouzouki (Christos Farmakis), in beguiling arrangements of Skalkottas, Lyadov (quirky choice, the Eight Russian Folksongs), Grieg, Bartók and Vaughan Williams, inter alia. It works!

But enough spotlight on Orchid. Another CD of a transcription that works superbly was given to me at the end of Quatuor Zaïde's wonderful concert with Fiachra Garvey in the small but perfectly-formed first Vauxhall Festival. They featured a 1792 quartet arrangement of the Queen of the Night's second aria in their Mozart first half, and it turns out it's one of 19 movements selected from The Magic Flute, featured on a disc which also has the nuance-perfect interpretation of the bold G major Quartet, K387 I heard in the concert. If this clip doesn't sell the Flute idea to you, nothing will.

The Zaïdes make the G major masterpiece sound incredibly modern, but what they do is nearly all in the score. I look forward to their next CD, which will follow a similar format with a Beethoven quartet (one of the first, Op. 18 set, I think) followed by the stunningly effective string quintet arrangement of the 'Kreutzer' Sonata I heard played by Sheku Kanneh-Mason and friends at the Highgate Festival. Sheku, by the way, is still staying loyal to the groups he played with before he became really famous: he'll be trying out the Dvořák Cello Concerto for the first time in October with the Fantasia Orchestra conducted by Tom Fetherstonhaugh, with whom I heard him play the Haydn C major.

Sticking with quartets - of which I've played a lot in lockdown, trying to stick to quieter music out of consideration for my neighbours (though there's no placating the passive-aggressive lady downstairs, who goes to the council and the estate office before she speaks to me) - there's a mellow beauty from the Stamic Quartet, showing what a superb craftsman and original melodist was Karel Kovařovic in his three works for that format (he's usually only known as the conductor who initially failed to recognise Janáček's genius). Easy listening, in a sense, but none the worse for that. My thanks to an incredibly generous Czech friend, who deserves a medal for his services to Czech music as he sends me and The Arts Desk's Saturday classical CDs columnist all the latest (I've also been spellbound by a disc of Janáček piano works from Jan Bartoš, and Martinů's "Incantation" Concerto from Ivo Kahánek with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra under peerless Jakub Hrůša ).

Symphonic music has been in abeyance, for neighbourly reasons given above, other than the discs I've been reviewing for the BBC Music Magazine and a chance to correct the unpleasant flavour left by Maxim Emelyanychev's over-speedy-to-breathlessness performances of Beethoven Five and Seven with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (my last excursion, to Edinburgh in early March). The players clearly love ME, and their recording together of Schubert's Great C major Symphony helped me to understand why.

It's full of personality, but (unlike the Beethovens) never too wayward. So I'd better give the team another chance. Ticciati he is not, but he's clearly a force to be reckoned with - though in the hit-and-miss Currentzis league. To watch both in action is almost unbearable. Meanwhile, I hope the rather better all-rounders among young conductors I know will be able to pick up where they left off, along with all other musicians and performers in general. This is a very hard time for them and I suggest you donate if you can to a relevant set-up of your choice; my favoured targets so far have been the City Music Foundation and the National Youth Orchestra. Meanwhile I leave you with an earworm from a disc I've played two and a half times in recent weeks: from Shai Wosner's marvellously programmed 'Impromptu' CD, Gershwin's Impromptu in Two Keys. It's accompanied here by a neat little film which has a special poignancy now that stricken New York is in lockdown. Those streets were made for walking...

Four last happenings

By 'last',  I mean 'for now' - the big shutdown happened, on the 'advice' but not the command of a weak government, on Monday afternoon - and under 'happenings', I include two concerts and two operas. At three of the events there was a decent distance between audience members (because so many didn't come), and at all four the astonishing phenomenon of hardly any coughing or fidgeting. A background of intense silence makes so much difference to a live performance: it really is the ideal of Britten's 'magic triangle' (composer, performers, spectators).

Such was very noticeably the case with Masaaki Suzuki and his Bach Collegium Japan giving a heart-piercing and unflinchingly dramatic performance of Bach's St John Passion at the Barbican on Tuesday 10 March. I've written about the concert on The Arts Desk (likewise the ENO Marriage of Figaro on Saturday evening and the stunning LSO concert on Sunday, a searing farewell as it turned out, which is why the lion's share of this article will be devoted to the new opera already covered on TAD). Images up top and when we come to Denis & Katya by Clive Barda.

What I haven't mentioned was the splendid lunch some time back now hosted by the concert manager of Masaaki and his equally delightful (and talented) son Masato, Hazard Chase's James Brown*, in a very pleasant, intimate room of 2 Brydges Place. I went not to be wooed, but because I already respect Suzuki senior so completely and wanted to talk Bach with him - that we did, and so much else besides. Pictured above clockwise from 7 o'clock are James, Moegi Takahashi of BCJ, my good friend of a fellow writer Nahoko Gotoh, James's hyper-efficient and engaged daughter Damaris Brown, who's one of the best PRs, Masato, Martin Cullingford of Gramophone, Masaaki, Roderick Thomson also of Hazard Chase and myself.

Had I not gone, I wouldn't have learnt about the extraordinary cantatas-plus lunchtime event Masaaki was giving with superb Royal Academy of Music students the following afternoon, nor that Masato had taken up the (unadvertised) conductor-harpsichordist's place in a Milton Court concert that evening as part of the Barbican's Bach weekend (not a fan of Benjamin Appl's, and that seeming prejudice was only fed by the event, but MS's part in it was beyond reproach. Both events reviewed here).

Bach-crazy as I always am especially after events like that St John, I was doubly delighted to be able to turn to the new BCJ recording of the St Matthew Passion - perfect in (eco-friendly) presentation and a similarly direct interpretation. Perhaps I should return to it at a closer-to-Easter point when I have time to listen more carefully, but it will certainly have a place of honour on the shelves alongside Gardiner and, yes, Klemperer (for the opposite pole, which is fine if the intensity is there). Another passion-play of sounds took place in the same venue the night before the shut-down: an LSO  programme which was already impressive on paper, of Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis and bludgeoning/desolate Sixth Symphony separated by another deep masterpiece, Britten's Violin Concerto. No praise could be too high for the performers; for review link, see above.

Having been spellbound by Philip Venables' opera 4:48 Psychosis, a powerful setting of Sarah Kane's amazing play, I was keen to see his latest work, premiered and toured (for a bit, before the ban set in) by the always enterprising Music Theatre Wales. Denis & Katya came to the Southbank's Purcell Room for two nights, and I went to see it with my excellent colleague Alexandra Coghlan (Stephen Walsh had already covered its Welsh opening for The Arts Desk).

Well, Venables, this time in conjunction with a layered text from Ted Huffman, has done it again. Within the 70 minutes of Denis & Katya we never meet the two Russian teenagers who barricaded themselves in a summer cabin, shot at the TV set, a police van and even the visiting mother of one of them, all the while broadcasting their antics on the video app Periscope to the damaging responses of online watchers. With his more lyrical episodes, Venables makes one's heart ache for the waste of life at the end of it, mired in the unknown: did the 15-year-olds kill each other, or were they killed by the police (such a possibility in Russia, alas)?

There are only two singers, Emily Edmonds and Johnny Herford, who set up the action with a spoken prologue and then take on, singly or together, the roles of teacher, friend, neighbour and others in variously treated words (Russian included). Four cellists from the London Sinfonietta at both sides of the acting space add their propulsion to timed beeps on a video conversation about a programme on the subject, a kind of rondo theme to begin with. New expressive kicks come with the pacing round of a medic, and finally the deliberate lack of any film footage is broken with a film of a train leaving the station at Strugi Krasnye, where the catastrophe took place. The later stages are formed by a kind of passacaglia which gets twisted by tonal descents and a grim plunge (oddly parallel to the terrifying final descent of Sean Shibe's electric guitar in Georges Lentz's Ingwe), just as the train journey takes us into darkening woods.

So the structure is as sure in effect as the substance. This is another utterly gripping music-theatre piece from Venables which is here to stay, pity and terror held in perfect counterpoise. There was abundant laugh-out-loud wit in Joe Hill-Gibbins' staging of Figaro, which I'm so glad reached its one and only performance on Saturday night, but less of the necessary depth in the later stages. Visually, it was spare, but a gift to the photographer, so in addition to the photos which punctuated the review, I've included a further gallery of Marc Brenner's splendid work for ENO - head over to The Arts Desk for the cast.

In one last burst of careful indulgence, if that's not an oxymoron, I was totally buoyed up by a fifth spectacle, of the Titian poesie at the National Gallery on its last day before closing for the foreseeable future; but that's for another blog entry. UPDATE: I ought to add before I do the full works that the Gallery was mostly deserted, but the Titian exhibition room was fuller than I'd anticipated - though it was still possible to keep 2 metres away from everyone else. Empty West End freaked me out and I won't be cycling into town again for the foreseeable future.

*Update: I am so shocked and saddened to hear that the management agency has just gone into voluntary liquidation. I know that James and his team were honourable people; I don't know the circumstances, but the current horror must have everything to do with it. 

CDs of 2018: public gongs, private pleasures

Last month's BBC Music Magazine Awards helped me to get to grips with what the panel - on which I served for the 2017 selection, not this year's - thought essential listening from the glut of five-star CD reviews. Out of the two I'd reviewed, the one sure winner - Adams's Doctor Atomic - didn't get the Opera award and the other which I wouldn't, when it came down to three choices - Ádám Fischer's Mahler One in his Düsseldorf cycle - took the palm  in the Orchestral category. And Sean Shibe was superseded for the second year running, this time when an even more inventive and ground-breaking mix of ancient and modern, the softLOUD programme, was the option.

Predictions were that in this public vote, social-media-savvy Vikingur Ólafsson would triumph among the three instrumentalists on the final list. Not only that, but he took the Disc of the Year award for his fascinating Bach sequence (up top, he's third from left with Sara Mohr-Pietsch, his shorter double Gareth Malone and BBCMM Editor Olly Condy).

I like and respect Ólafsson. He speaks persuasively and with dignity, and writes well too. I enjoyed meeting him in Reykjavik at his impressive summer festival in 2016. On 1 May he played a 45 minute sequence of works from the 77-minute CD without interruption to an audience of mostly young people in the Royal Albert Hall. Yes, the sound was amplified - much better, as the Proms constantly prove, to hear a solo piano without sonic assistance in that vast space, drawing the listener in - and what followed after the interval seemed to me pretty dire, movements from Bach's Cello Suites muzaked by cellist Peter Gregson, appearing with a group of fellow cellists and a double-bass player, perfectly good in themselves.

Ólafsson, though, has integrity. His palette is varied, his fast runs astoundingly even. But even while I admired both the sequence and especially his own arrangement from Cantata BWV 54, 'Widerstehe doch der Sunde'. It's on YouTube but doesn't seem embeddable here, so here's a link. But to find the missing spiritual inscape you only had to turn to İdil Biret's selection of Bach transcriptions by her great mentor Wilhelm Kempff. Here are the elusive space and the fuller sonority  that I, at any rate, want from this music. Just one example will have to do here, though you can find others.

I heard that interiority again at the start of young Martin James Bartlett's debut disc 'Love and Death', with Busoni's transcription of 'Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ', BWV 177. But I jump ahead of myself into 2019; that CD deserves proper consideration in its entirety. As far as the awards ceremony was concerned, I wanted to hear viola-player Antoine Tamestit, one of my favourite live performers of 2018 for his walkabout interpretation of Berlioz's Harold en Italie at the Proms with John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, in Jörg Widmann's Viola Concerto and again in late Debussy chamber works shared with other very impressive musicians. Tamestit is among the other award winners, trophy on piano, in the below photo taken from above in Kings Place's Hall One.

Cellist Laura van der Heijden, winner of the Newcomer Award (and pictured on the right behind Tamsin Little), has produced a thoughtful disc of works by Russian composers from 1948 with Petr Limonosov; introducing this former BBC Young Musician of the Year winner, Julian Lloyd Webber reminded us tartly of the gulf between the first competition, shown on BBC One, and now, when it's ghettoised (though thankfully other events have come along to give the phenomenal Sheku Kanneh-Mason the wider acclaim he deserves),

Last year I heard some imaginative programming on CD which either didn't make it to the above shortlist or, in one case, was released a few years back (but I make no apologies, since the experience dates from the time of discovery).

Another musician who thinks very carefully about his concert and CD programmes is Israeli pianist and composer Matan Porat. Lux engages 12 pieces to take us from dawn to night. Gregorian chant is followed by Schumann, or framed between Bartók and Beethoven; Adès' Darkness Visible makes a startling sequel to Liszt's Harmonies du soir, superbly done.

I was so pleased last year to make the acquaintance of Estonian pianist Kärt Ruubel, twin sister of violinist Triin; their joint lunchtime recital in Berlin's Konzerthaus was an unanticipated highlight of my time at a Baltic festival there. Triin is especially keen that the works of Johann Jakob Froberger, subject of a musicological paper she wrote to complete her piano studies at HMT Rostock, should be heard alongside Handel and Bach, and so they are in her debut disc. The Lamentation in F minor has become a firm favourite; there's an extraordinarily modern progression or two, the play of major and minor is beguiling, and the freedom of Ruubel's playing adds to the freshness.

There are several candidates for 'world's greatest horn player', and Radek Baborák is certainly up there. Creative in so many spheres. he has followed up the expected Mozart Horn Concertos with a perfectly programmed two-CD set of other Mozart horn music. Movements make up other possible 'concertos', the second disc ends with the Sinfonia Concertante for wind and orchestra which I've long had a soft spot for, and the 12 Duos for two French horns are split across the discs and shared with no less a master than Radovan Vlatković. The set also includes some of the most exquisite high-register playing I've heard, and some wacky cadenzas.

The set of longer standing was a gift from our dear Latvian friend Kristaps Ozoliņš, understandably a fan of the astounding native youth choir Kamēr. Latvia's abundance of folk songs about the sun led to the commissioning of 17 'World Sun Songs' from international composers, among them Leonard Desyatnikov, Dobrinka Tabakova, Giya Kancheli, Peteris Vasks and John Luther Adams (the stunning Sky with Four Suns that launches the second CD). 

There is no stronger choral tradition than Latvia's in the world; I experienced it writ very large indeed last summer and I've just heard the superlative Latvian Radio Choir give one of the best programmes of contemporary works in the stunning surroundings of Tartu's St John's Church as part of the Estonian (this year World) Music Days festival. But that's another story. 

Bach and Dante: hellish trials, heavenly light

So while I reached the Empyrean with Dr Scafi and Professor Took at the Warburg, and got to the end of reading Paradiso shortly afterwards, serendipitously just prior to visiting the Ravenna Festival, the one-Bach-cantata-per-Sunday scheme bit the dust again, this time on the first Sunday after Trinity. I'd already accumulated a backlog, which just got too much with so many summer weekends away.

It does seem good, though, to end on a very rich masterpiece which I also got to hear in John Eliot Gardiner's second Bach cantatas concert in the Barbican's rich Barbican weekend (alas, the only one I could make). BWV 20, 'O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort', had to be a big statement - it launched Bach's second Leipzig cycle on 11 June 1724 (thus another image of the Thomaskirche from my first acquaintance with it last December). 

No-one could write about this thunderbolt of invention better or with more inside knowledge than Gardiner, and he does so in Music in the Castle of Heaven, pages 313 to 317 (I recommend you read it all, of course).

It is an astonishing piece, one that sets the tone for the whole cycle and sums up so many of the original features we will encounter - a new range of expression, the use of operatic technique to enliven the doctrinal message and wild contrasts of mood....We seem to be already in the death-throes of the Trinity season, not at its start - but then Bach's was an age that had a taste for apocalypse and the theme crops up regularly and unexpectedly.

What, in  briefer terms, does Bach serve up? First a choral fantasia in the form of a French overture, starting with an astonishingly original idea and freezing us in our tracks on a diminished seventh, followed by heart-quaking fragments in a slower middle sequence. What an effect the three stammering oboes have at this point. No idea whose performance this is, but good to have the score accompanying the opening chorus on YouTube.

A tenor aria with a turbulent bass line and sorrowing strings 'piles on the agony' (Gardiner). The bass seems to shift into an almost comical light for the over-assertions of 'Gott ist gerecht', but we are back with pain and grief with the alto's tragic chromatic number. The coda, piano, for strings alone reprising what's been sung, is a subtle dramatic coup.

After this, prefaced by a hymn stanza, the preacher would have given his sermon. His the prerogative to make the transition to a very different mood, striking with the huge range of bass backed up by trumpet and strings. To my ears it outdoes Handel's 'The trumpet shall sound', but maybe familiarity has bred a certain taking-for-granted of that magnificent aria. There's a very expressive 'repent ye' alto solo, and then what struck in the Barbican concert, almost whispered throughout, as one of the most extraordinary, dramatic inventions in all the cantatas.

I have to quote JEG on this, since he clearly thinks so too:

It is not very often that Bach resorts to lurid pictorialism of the Hieronymus Bosch kind; yet, in the ensuing duet delivered to the errant programme as though by Bunyanesque angels (alto and tenor), he treats us to a ghoulish cameo of 'howling and chattering teeth', of the ominous approach of the hand-drawn hearse as it clatters across the cobbled street. Successions of first inversion chords over a disjointed bass line in quavers with parallel thirds and sixths in the voice parts give way first to imitative and answering phrases, then to an anguished chromaticism evoking the bubbling stream and the drop of water denied to the parched rich man. The voices join for a final flourish. We hear the gurgling of the forbidden water and the continuo playing a last furtive snatch of the ritornello. Then, dissolve...fade out...silence. Extraordinary.

This performance isn't a patch on Gardiner's, and I've got so used to hearing top mezzos and contraltos on the Rilling set that the countertenor doesn't please me much, but it's helpful to see what Bach is doing in the score.

There is light at the end of the concluding chorale, but the overall impression is one of disruption - and total, timeless genius. I may have given up this year, but I'll be thrilled to pick up where I left off in June 2019, sticking to the 1724 sequence.

In my last post yoking Bach and Dante, I was worried that our Warburg discussions about selected cantos of Paradiso were more interesting than the poetry in question. All that changed when Dr Scafi read, and Professor took reflected upon, Canto 17. We are in the heaven of Mars, moving upwards through concentric circles of planets, where we meet Cacciaguida, who died before Florence turned, in Dante's view, to the bad. This is the chance for our poet to lament the moral decline of his beloved city and to make the third, last and most explicit reference in the Divina Commedia to his own exile.

Cacciaguida, 'gazing at the point to which all times are present', makes this prophecy to Dante:

Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta
   più caramente; e questo è quello strale
   che l'arco de lo essilio pria saetta.

Tu proverai sì come sa di sale 
   lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle
   lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale. 

E quel che più ti graverà le spalle, 
   sarà la compagnia malvagia e scempia
   con la qual tu cadrai in questa valle; 

che tutta ingrata, tutta matta ed empia 
   si farà contr' a te; ma, poco appresso,
   ella, non tu, n'avrà rossa la tempia. 

Di sua bestialitate il suo processo 
  farà la prova; sì ch'a te fia bello
  averti fatta parte per te stesso. 

You will leave behind everything loved most dearly, and this is the arrow that the bow of exile first lets fly. You will learn how salty tastes the bread of another, and what a hard path it is to descend and mount by another's stairs. And what will most weigh upon your shoulders will be the wicked, dimwitted company with whom you will fall into this valley, who will become utterly ungrateful, mad and cruel against you, but shortly after they, not you, will blush. Of their stupidity the outcome will provide the proof, so that for you it will be well to have become a party unto yourself.

The literal translation, as in previous blog instalments, is by Robert Durling, though I haven't scanned it as he does. Shall find it impossible to read more 'literary' versions, having once seen the unreproducable beauty of the Italian.

Dante, as ever, is sure of his place in history, perhaps in all eternity. Caccaguida advises him to 'make manifest your whole vision', however galling that may be at first to those with a guilty conscience. And in fact he didn't suffer in his wanderings for long, coming under the wing of the Lombards and then finding his final haven in Ravenna.

His destination as the pilgrim of Paradiso, though, is the Empyrean, and a brief vision of God in the final Canto, 33, which must have had some impact on Cardinal Newman in The Dream of Gerontius. As we move towards the greatest luminosity, Dante coins ever more neologisms - 'trasumanar', 'transhumanizing', the most famous of all, was actually introduced in 1.70 and begins to be properly realised in Canto 30 - and finds ever more poetic ways of saying 'I lack the words to describe what I saw' (the last two are in 33, lines 54-7 and 120-2).

Finally, within 'three circles, of three colours and one circumference' - the Trinity - he sees 'what seemed to me painted with our effigy'. Does this mean that man/mankind is the last vision - that, as Professor Took put it, 'central to the Godhead is the human project', that neither God nor man should be alone? I love, as usual, his summation of Dante heading 'into a plenitude of proportionate understanding and ultimate love'.

My end is going to be another beginning, which I've described on the musical front on The Arts Desk: Ravenna, where Dante could not have been unaffected by the dazzling domes of light, whether in the blue-and-gold intimacy of Galla Placidia's Mausoleum - pictured at the top of the post - or the lofty heights of San Vitale.

On this visit, my second since leaving my last Interrailing pal in the city's youth hostel and making my first independent travel in 1982, I fell in love with Dante's final resting place. On, then, eventually, to those most heavenly of mosaics.

Bergman on holiness, music and death

I originally posted this, which because of what the master says is one of the most important entries here to me - as is my Fårö report with respect to The Arts Desk - eight years ago, on 16 July 2010. The actual 100th anniversary, 14 July, almost passed me by yesterday- it was only because there seemed to be so many Ingmar clips up on LinkedIn that my memory was revived. Happy to reproduce this again, because I still find IB's words intensely moving.

Not a day passed when the master didn't think of all three [holiness, music and death]. So it was quite an experience after the visit (hopefully numinous images from which I reproduce throughout) to return to Bergman on Fårö, one of the five detailed films Marie Nyreröd made with him at the very end of his life, and find that he had whittled down his often unruly thoughts to essentials. No doubt his 'demon of control', as he put it, made sure what went alongside the interviews in terms of film clips, how he was filmed and where; and why not?

The first chunk is from when he takes Nyreröd into that wonderful little cinema at Dämba and shows her and us a very specific clip, from Private Confessions (1996). This is Max von Sydow's Bishop Jakob being asked by Pernilla Ostergren's character whether he believe in God. His answer:

Don't use the word 'God'. Say 'holiness'. There's holiness in everyone. Human holiness. Everything else is attributes, disguise - manifestation and trickery. You can never capture or figure out human holiness. At the same time, it's something to cling to. Something tangible, lasting unto death. [Bach's 'Jesu, joy of man's desiring' is heard] Whatever happens then is hidden from us. Only poets, musicians and saints may depict that which we can but discern: the inconceivable. They've seen, known, understood - not fully, but in fragments. For me, it's a comfort to think about human holiness.

The projectionist stops the film. Bergman turns to Nyreröd and adds his commentary:

We've been talking a lot about the religious aspects of my oeuvre. And really we should try to concentrate it, and instead of our sitting stammering through an explanation, I think the Bishop here has put it succinctly. He says exactly what I feel: that we shouldn't talk about God but about the holiness within man. And that through the musicians, the prophets and the saints, we've been enlightened about other worlds. Particularly through music, of course. We ask: 'where does music come from?' I've asked so many musicians, famous and less famous, why we have music, where it comes from. And the strange thing is that they've never had a proper answer.

The film cuts to Bergman putting a recording of the Sarabande from Bach's Fifth Cello Suite on the turntable at Hammars.

Let's cut ourselves to the final question.


I wrote a film about death...The Seventh Seal. It was excellent therapy. Sometimes the things you do, the things you write, can be therapeutic. And this was. [sighs] But then something curious happened. What happened was that I developed an abscess with early signs of blood poisoning and the swelling had to be cut away. That was done at the Sophiahemmet Hospital [in Stockholm, where he had lived as a child]. I felt a little prick and then nothing. Eight hours of my life, you see, were completely obliterated. I was hypersensitive to the anesthetic and they'd given me too much. This fascinated me because I thought, 'is this what death is like?'. You are a light that's lit, and then one day it's extinguished. There's nothing, no flame left. So death is nothing to be afraid of. It's something exceedingly merciful, something magnificent.


So having understood that, I lived a contented life. I noticed that my daily thoughts of death could be brushed aside. They always came, especially during my hour of the wolf just before dawn, but I could dismiss them by telling myself they were nothing. From being something, suddenly I'm nothing. I liked the idea. And then came [sighs, trembles] - the big problem. The devastating problem. That was when Ingrid [his last wife of 24 years] died almost exactly eight years ago.


And logically, I said to myself, I'll never see Ingrid again. She's gone for ever. But the strange thing is that I feel Ingrid's presence, especially here on Fårö. Acutely. And I think, I can't feel her presence if she doesn't exist, can I? [rubs his left eye nervously] So this operation was a chemical reaction. It wasn't a real death, but an artificial reaction. In actual death, maybe Ingrid is waiting for me and she exists. And she'll come to meet me [the film cuts to an essential monologue from Bergman's last film, Saraband] I accept that I'm going to meet Ingrid, and I've completely erased that other nightmare thought that I'll never again meet her. I acknowledge the fact that I'm going to meet Ingrid.

Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala 92 years and two days ago*, and died on Fårö on 30 July 2007, four years after these films were made.

*100 years ago yesterday as far as the update is concerned.