Early Spring in Chichester

Blooming rushes on apace now, but three weeks ago in mid-February, this scene by Chichester city walls was a novelty and the day was a one-off glory, the first on which we had the chance to sit outside for lunch with friends Eben and Themy and their young organist friend Tim Ravalde in the Cathedral Close.

A weekend excursion to Edinburgh had been called off when Neeme Järvi cancelled what would have been a Tchaikovsky spectacular (Hamlet Overture and Manfred Symphony). 80 this year, he's been having trouble with his knees and as yet won't sit to conduct (I'm only glad it's nothing worse). So a Saturday excursion was in order. Having met Pallant House Gallery CEO Simon Martin and learnt that this was the last weekend to catch the exhibition he'd curated, The Mythic Method: Classicism in British Art 1920-1950, it seemed like a good opportunity to visit the much-praised gallery and see friends at the same time. Illustrated below, Meredith Frampton's Still Life (1932).

The Pallant is a kind of self-contained village in Chichester's South-East Quadrant, with several grand 18th century houses. Pallant House of 1712 is easily the most imposing.

It had the nickname of 'Dodo House' from the stone birds atop the gatepiers (bad shots, Nairn and Pevsner tell us in the Sussex volume of The Buildings of England, at ostriches which feature on the family crest of the architect, Henry Peckham).

The Mythic Method, housed in five rooms of the new wing, was a fine show, though the quality of the artists proved variable. Bloomsburyite work was good, William Roberts' from the late 1920s somewhat repulsive, but curious in its depiction of scenes like this Judgment of Paris (© Estate of John David Roberts).

There was a room tenuously linked to Venus recumbent, but the best was probably in the last two rooms: curious photographs of society women as Greek and Roman goddesses etc by Madame Yevonde with this Edward Burra, Santa Maria in Aracoeli (© Estate of the Artist c/o Lefevre Fine Art Ltd, London) having a wall to itself

and some excellent Henry Moores just beyond, The Three Fates of 1948 possibly best of all, with a good Ceri Richards, The Rape of the Sabines (Saudade).

The main collection didn't take long, though it's well displayed and Graham Sutherland's portrait of that dedicated collector and Chichester Dean Walter Hussey reminded us why the gallery came into being with his bequest as its centrepiece.

What took me by surprise was stumbling across a travelling show mounted by the Sidney Nolan Trust to mark the centenary in the great Australian artist's birth, Transferences: Sidney Nolan in Britain. This turned out to be its first day at Pallant House and the serendipitous highlight, connecting strangely with Anselm Kiefer's Walhalla at the White Cube Bermondsey. Nolan takes semi-mythic Australian figures and stories and makes something haunting out of them. There were no complete series, but enough Ned Kellys to give that thread a kick - a rusty suit

as well as quite a few versions of Nolan's - sorry, I have to use the word - iconic painted Kelly, which made art critics start at his first show in 1955,

and a haunting framework for Kelly's death mask, Death of a Poet, seen through the glass case featuring the costume design for the Chosen One in Kenneth MacMillan's Royal Ballet Rite of Spring

Burke and Hare's journey through the middle of Australia is imagined with one or t'other of the explorers stripped naked

and the curious tale of the escaped convict who liberated the shipwrecked Mrs Fraser from her ordeal on what is now called Fraser Island off the Queensland Coast - she later shopped her lover in London and made money at a fair recounting her story - represented by three canvases, the first two of which immediately showed me something special was afoot when I walked into the central reception room of the house with the staircase beyond. Not sure about the frieze or the pine cones on seats, though.

The one on the right is Convict in a Billabong (University of York, © Sidney Nolan Trust), the Nolan which had the strongest impact on me.

There's also a surprise homage to Britten, who became a friend, in a painting of John the drowned apprentice in Peter Grimes.

Nolan often used spray paint, too, strikingly so in a self-portrait, Myself of 1955, which is slightly hidden, almost under the stairs.

St John's Church, an elongated octagonal building of 1812-13, is only a few streets away.

Pevsner/Nairn is harsh: 'Neither beautiful nor lovable, but almost unique in its unaltered extreme Low Church plan'. It's been restored by the Churches Conservation Trust, and looks good inside, except for the pictureboard they've used to represent the organ (not sure whether that's been taken away for restoration or isn't due to reappear at all).

The finest feature is the 'huge free-standing three-decker pulpit' of American black birch.

The lower desk was for the clerk; the Minister would conduct the service from the middle desk and ascend to the upper pulpit for his sermon. Hogarth's The Sleeping Congregation shows us two tiers in operation.

As the late afternoon light was still good, I decided to do a full circuit of the city walls. There's a walk, but little wall, on the edge of the South-East Quadrant, covered in crocuses.

Charming little gatehouse at the end with more birds on pillars - you could be in a village at this point.

Then you cross the main north-south street and find excellent views of the Cathedral circumnavigating the South-West Quadrant.

On the west side, parallel with a noisy by-pass, the cathedral's detached bell tower also comes into view.

Leaving the road behind, and passing the site of the house where Eric Gill lived and worked for many years, you reach the most striking part of the walk, in that you're now following the ramparts. Snowdrops were here in modest clumps on the banks

and the first daffodils were making their appearance.

Crossing North Street, the wall girding the North-East quadrant overlooks the backs of 19th century terraced houses.

Then you're in Priory Park, with Greyfriars a 'very noble fragment' (Pevsner/Nairn) of the refounded Friary, completed in 1282.

Called the Old Guildhall and used for wedding receptions and other functions, it was locked, but the west front looked rather splendid, catching shadows of the trees in the sun like the walls themselves.

There's a promising looking cafe in the park with an aviary in front full of demented budgies, but it was closed by 5 so I walked back into town for tea and then on for evensong. The choir was small (12 trebles, two voices per each lower part) but absolutely superb - finer, it has to be said, than Gloucester Cathedral's choir which I've just heard when down there for a talk on Rachmaninov's All-Night Vigil. The main difference was in the delivery of the Psalm - meaningful, with one especially interesting chant, in Chichester, lacklustre and dutiful in Gloucester.  'Wood in F' was a Mag&Nunc we always enjoyed singing in All Saints Banstead, but I'd never observed its skillful touches, what, as Tim said afterwards, gives a sudden twist to Victorian business as usual. The Glorias are, well, glorious, and brought a tear to my eye both times. And it's always a pleasure to sit within sight of the Piper reredos (better make clear this was an after-'show' shot; I wouldn't take photos during a service).

I had a chance to examine some of the misericords in the vicinity of where I was sitting. 'Vivid and varied enough,' declares Pevsner/Nairn, but not of the highest standard. Not really the point with misericords, is it? One's looking for eccentricity and grotesquerie and these deliver.

Afterwards there was just time to take a quick walk around the building I'd spent longer looking at when we were last here. Pevsner and Nairn are right - 'without any doubt it is one of the most lovable English cathedrals...It is a well-worn, well-loved, comfortable fireside chair of a cathedral - St Francis, not St Bernard: St Augustine of Hippo, not St Augustine of Canterbury'.

One final bonus - there was even a nice little independent cafe in the station, still open at 7pm, while I waited for the train back to London. The perfect city day out.

Hussey's gifts

Here's a churchman who has left the world a better place: the remarkable, or at least remarkably persuasive, Walter Hussey (1909-85). I was going to put 'the good dean', but then I read Frances Spalding in her book on the Pipers describing him as 'a conflicted person...unable to conceal his passion for boys' (not so much of a problem only if, like Britten, he never acted on it, and Spalding's turn of phrase suggests he did).

The almost-finished portrait by Graham Sutherland below hangs in Chichester's Pallant House Gallery, which we're returning to visit when it's open; Hussey chose Pallant House as the recipient of his own collection and it now has one of the best selections of British 20th century art in the country as well as a series of enticing exhibitions.

Anyway, as vicar of St Matthew's Northampton, his home town, Hussey helped to commission wonders I'd like to go and see there, chiefly a Madonna and Child by Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland's striking Crucifixion. These gave the cue for the art of the new Coventry Cathedral. The others we can hear or read at will - Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb was composed for the church's 50th anniversary, and there was other music from Finzi, Tippett. Malcom Arnold, Rubbra and Lennox Berkeley.

Auden (pictured below in 1939, some years before the commission in question)  wrote Hussey a rather tart prose Litany followed by an Anthem for St Matthew's Day - hard to find, though I've just come across excerpts in an Australian newspaper. They include an amusing-serious prayer for 'all who, like our patron saint, the Blessed Apostle and Evangelist Matthew, occupy positions of petty and unpopular authority, through whose persons we suffer the impersonal discipline of the state...deliver us, as private citizens, from confusing the office with the man...and from forgetting that it is our impatience and indolence, our own injustice, that creates the state to be a punishment and a remedy for sin'.

I'm getting carried away by Auden's drollness, but let me just also include the following: 'deliver us, we pray thee, in our pleasure and in our pain, in our hour of elation and our hour of wan hope, from insolence and envy, from pride in our virtue, from fear of public opinion, from the craving to be amusing at all costs, and from the temptation to pray, if we pray at all: "I thank Thee, Lord, that I am an interesting sinner and not as this Phrarisee" '.

Our Easter weekend visit to Themy and Eben in the Cathedral Close was the chance to find out how much we owe to Hussey, the great yet cosy building's dean from 1955 to 1977: chiefly the John Piper altarpiece, Sutherland painting and Chagall window. Arriving there as a known advocate of the new, Hussey had to tread more carefully at first with the antique sensibilities of the clergy.  The first task was to reinstate the Arundel Screen we so admired on Easter Saturday. Work on the chapel of St Mary Magdalen followed, showcasing Noli me tangere, a work by Sutherland more miniature by far than the Northampton Crucifixion or the vast Coventry tapestry.

Introduced to John Piper by Spence and Moore, Hussey discussed with him what might be done with the high altar reredos now that the 16th century Sherburne Screen was revealed. Piper didn't much care for Hussey's proposal of gleaming enamels, suggesting instead a tapestry which he wanted to avoid approaching in 'too painterly a way' like Sutherland's in Coventry and settling on shapes rather than figures. Woven by Pinton Frères near Aubusson, the finished work has six panels. Central are symbols of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, while on either side are those of the four Evangelists matched to the four elements.

What a marvellous designer Piper would have made for Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage, on the evidence of his earth, air, fire and water. The latter two are to the right of the Tau cross, matched to Luke's winged ox and John's winged eagle (seen in the detail up top) while to the left earth joins Matthew's winged man and air Mark's winged lion (below)

Of course the installation in 1966 caused a hubbub. A canon pointedly attended the opening evensong in dark glasses. But there were plenty of others who loved it, like the Chichester resident who wrote, as quoted in Spalding's book, that she 'felt here was something glowing and alive and symbolic of what the church must and should be in the present age. It took away the feeling that Christianity is old and crumbling like the cathedral'.

I love its vibrancy, and never more than at the Easter Vigil when the lights finally went up and the altarpiece's magic was glimpsed through the Arundel Screen. J thinks it's a bit of its time, but agrees that high quality art works don't often join the old in churches and cathedrals (I think of the amateurish tapestries in Durham). Hussey also had commissioned for Chichester a window by Chagall

which is based on the celebration of the final psalm, 150: 'Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord'.

It's encouraged us to make an expedition in due course to Tudeley Church near Tonbridge, which has no less than 12 Chagall windows designed and executed over a period of 15 years.

Curiously, nothing can seem more modern in Chichester Cathedral than the two Romanesque panels in Caen limestone (second quarter of the 12th century, it's now believed) depicting Christ arriving in Bethany and the subsequent Raising of Lazarus. Those expressive heads seem both old and new. Sadly they're now behind glass, and hard to see, but we illuminated them with torchlight, which may give the faces a rather unwonted look. Thus Christ

as well as Martha and Mary.

But I digress. One final extraordinary commission, thanks to Hussey's far-sightedness, was Bernstein's Chichester Psalms. Humphrey Burton's magnificent biography of 'Lenny' quotes a letter Hussey wrote to him in which he notes,  'I think many of us would be very delighted  if there was a hint of "West Side Story" about the music'. More than a hint emerged: Burton also tells us that the 'Why do the heathens' sequence, cutting percussively into the lyric treble/countertenor solo of the middle movement, was reworked from a discarded chorus in the musical's Prologue.

There was some debate about Bernstein's slightly tricksy wish for the actual premiere to take place in New York first; Hussey soon graciously deferred. But how remarkable that soon after, in July 1965, an Anglican cathedral played host to the Psalms as sung in Hebrew. That makes them, along with all the metrical changes apparent even in the opening,

devilishly difficult as well as liberating to sing, as I know from performing them with the Renaissance Singers, organ and percussion, in Edinburgh during my student days.

Later I heard Bernstein not long before his death conduct the Chichester Psalms with the London Symphony Orchestra and then-treble Aled Jones; by that time the master was taking them a bit too slow and reverently. I met him not long afterwards, courtesy of Ted Greenfield who took me along to the Candide recording sessions in December 1989, Bernstein's last. He grabbed me by the hand, and strode towards the gents with me still locked in his grasp, fortunately soon released. But what a man! Like half the cast, he was struggling with a nasty strain of influenza that was doing the rounds and even attacked Buckingham Palace, leading Bernstein to call it 'the royal flu'. He died the following October.

Here he is, anyway, conducting the three movements of the Chichester Psalms. The coming-together nature of the piece is further emphasised in 1977 by the Berlin location, the young Austrians in the choir alongside the Vienna Boys' Choir soloist and the collaboration of Bernstein's beloved Israel Philharmonic.

Bach cantata for the week is 'Es ist euch gut, dass ich hingehe', BWV 108, for the fourth (Cantate) Sunday after Easter. Composed for Leipzig in 1725, so for performance exactly a week later than the pick of last week's three cantatas ' Ihr werdet weinen und heulen', it boasts another splendid chorus, this time at its very core: a fugue in which the theme is very briskly snatched up, that opening idea varied with an elegantly rhythmed turn or gruppetto on 'zukünftig' (the future) in the third set of 'runs'. The text of the bass's opening aria, with a lightness-of-being oboe d'amore stealing the show, is taken from Christ's so-called 'Farewell Discourse' in John 16. Strictly speaking, the 'true vine' speech belongs to the previous chapter, but it's all I need as excuse for its fascinating realisation in a 16th century eastern orthodox manuscript.

Third of the vocal solos, with a second solo instrument in the shape of a violin obbligato, is the alto's 'Was mein Herz von dir begehrt'. There are interesting expressive shadings on 'Herz' and later, in the setting of 'überschutte' ('shower') and repeated notes on 'schaue' (regard). These new sentiments having run their course, there's no vocal repeat of the first section, and the short cantata is quickly tied up with the affirmative final chorale. Once again Suzuki with Gilchrist and Blaze - bass Dominic Wörner much less good, salvaged by the Japanese oboe d'amoreist - delivered the goods; on YouTube Harnoncourt is the only familiar choice.

The photos of the Piper altarpiece, the detail of the Chagall window and the Romanesque faces are mine. Sutherland portrait courtesy of the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester; the rest (I think) Wikidomain.

Bach according to Gardiner

Monday was a day for finally meeting extended deadlines after much gadding about, so I couldn't attend the Albert Hall Bach marathon brilliantly masterminded by the nearly-septuagenarian John Eliot (photographed in action above and further below by the ever-dependable Chris Christodoulou). But his Easter cantata recordings have been a constant presence in my own, much slower listening marathon this year so far, and earlier in the week we caught up with his BBC 2 documentary Bach: A Passionate Life.

The title may seem a tad lame, but JEG delivered what he promised, contradicting the image we know so well of the rather stern, bewigged 61-year-old with a wealth of fiery, inspired excerpts - and not always the expected ones - from a cornucopia of masterpieces. Gardiner's father, by the way, used to own what may have been a second version by the artist Elias Gottlob Haussmann of the famous portrait, since bought by an American.

I was not so well versed about Bach's life as to know, for instance, that he was flung into prison at the end of his Weimar time. Oh, those tyrannical patrons! At least he wasn't executed, like other musicians. We learned how his difficult, even paranoiac temperament was formed by major family bereavements in his youth (a psychologist popped up, sometimes stating the obvious). JEG's chilly ambles around snowy towns gave a good sense of each, especially Eisenach with its castle where Luther had earlier walled up.

Above all, what a difference to have a presenter who knows in depth what he's talking about (and I'm not talking about hugely irritant, self-admiring and patchily knowledgeable telly regulars like Andrew Graham-Dixon, who started out so well but has become unwatchable, in my eyes at any rate). This, though it could have extended to at least another episode, was up there with Antonio Pappano's Opera Italia - and more recently John Adams as eloquent speaker had the lion's share of Mark Kidel's also too-brief portrait.

You'd not actually know from Gardiner's demeanour here that he raises the blood pressure of many a performer (I know two who won't even let me mention his name in their presence, and there's an unsavoury joke or two floating around). He interacts keenly with talking heads from other fields, some perceptive, some less so. He brings helpful details and images to the performances with trusted musical friends, though we still never get a piece from start to finish. Kati Debretzeni gave us some phenomenal violin playing, and I liked the smiley approach of soprano Julia Doyle. There's no doubt that Bach's his God, as he should be every sentient being's.

As his extended note on the Easter set of his Bach pilgrimage reveals, Gardiner is especially passionate about the all-choral Easter Sunday cantata (let's follow Duccio altarpanels for the three celebratory days). 'Christ lag in Todesbanden', BWV 4, is a pre-Leipzig masterpiece - Bach composed it for his probationary audition at Muhlhausen in 1707 - and the first I've come across to be written entirely for choral voices. The narrative is not about the resurrected Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene in the garden, that scene so movingly set by Adams in The Gospel According to the Other Mary. Instead Bach sets all seven verses which Luther wrote to the old hymn, dealing with the struggle that's already taken place, and so there's little of the expected Easter jubilation.

E minor dominates. The composer's identity pops up as the violins leap free towards the end of the opening Sinfonia. The choral writing is stunning and extraordinarily varied. Gardiner makes much of the semitonal wail Bach fashions by altering two notes of the original hymn, and I love the 'syncopated riff' that bursts forth on the 'Halleluja's in verse one. Gardiner is right to invoke the atmospheric austerity of Bergman's The Seventh Seal as Luther narrates a time when Death held sway and Bach matches the chill (sopranos and altos, verse two). Christ's rout takes time and is splendidly physical; then in verse 5 the basses play priests, their line culminating in a long-held top D, after which exultant and dancing delights mark the victory - but still, at the end, in E minor. Here's Harnoncourt's recording on YouTube.

There's not much to say about the Easter Monday and Tuesday cantatas. Both 'Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen', BWV 66 and 'Ein Herz, das seinem Jesum lebend weiss', BWV 134, were presented as part of Bach's first Leipzig Easter of 1724. He had laboured on the mighty St John Passion for Good Friday, and revised 'Christ lag in Todesbanden' for Easter Sunday. So it is understandable if, given the jubilant tone of the continuing celebrations, he simply adapted two secular works written during his time in Cöthen under the benign (and significanly non-Lutheran) Prince Leopold.

BWV 66, for road-to-Emmaus day, was originally a birthday serenade, with the allegorical figures of Happiness and Fame transformed here into Hope and an initially craven, finally self-transcending Fear. There's plenty of brilliant, 6/8 dance music for alto and tenor. Ditto in BWV 134, its first incarnation a New Year piece of 1719, where the tenor gets another movement Gardiner describes as 'Passepied-like', and - a bit of irreverence here - amuses with the bark-like as well as Bach-like refrains of 'Auf, auf!'. Duccio shows us the day's theme of Christ appearing to the Apostles (it can't be the Last Supper because Judas is absent).

Gardiner points out the 'Brandenburg-like swagger and rhythmical elan' of Bach's midway duet (the six great concertos as well as the other major orchestral and instrumental works were also written during his happy time with the Calvinist prince, if not all specifically for Leopold, of course). 'Those years in Cöthen seem to have been the happiest in Bach's life'. Amen to that. Here's Leonhardt for 'Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen'

and Rilling for 'Ein Herz, das seinem Jesum...': far from ideal, but the only alternative had Rene Jacobs as the alto, and do you know how awful he was? Not much better as a conductor, IMO. Anyway, this also gives us Piero della Francesca's wonderful depiction of the Resurrection, which I've still to see in out-of-the-way San Sepolcro.

Our Easter music came courtesy of the choir and splendid (uncredited) organist of Chichester Cathedral. The Saturday evening service was remakable less for the mass setting and anthem -  Flor Peeters' Missa festiva and Messiaen's O sacrum convivium - than for the telescoped vigil-variation on the Orthodox darkness to light theme: we began in pitch black, the choir lit their candles, we lit ours and later the lights blazed on John Piper's fabulous altarpiece as glimpsed through the 15th century screen. The commission of the first and the replacement of the second were the work of Chichester's most inspirational dean, Walter Hussey, about whom I must write more at a later date. Photo taken, I hasten to add, after the service.

The balance of first-class contemporary artwork - if 1966 can be called 'contemporary' - with the old tuned in nicely with a sermon to which I listened for once. The theme was how the Gospels begin with elderly people -  Elizabeth, Anne, Zacharias, Simeon - waiting for a change, until by the time of the Resurrection the new generation surrounds the risen Christ.

Our hostess Themy, whom I joshingly refer to as 'a Christian in Parsee's clothing', found me some more short, clear sermons to read by a man of the greatest common sense and humility, Eric James, a major guiding light for her but sadly no longer with us. Don't misunderstand me: my agnosticism remains the same, but I warm to essential Christian wisdom when I can find it.

Sunday's Eucharist, to which we are heading in the above picture, revealed one of the best masses I've ever heard, and never knew before  - Kodaly's Missa brevis: did that man ever write a dull piece? - and a resounding triumph for the organist, who rounded off the previous movements from Vierne's Second Symphony with the dizzying jubilation of Bach's G major Prelude and Fugue. So we came full circle to the god of music again.