About some of today's players

Happy Europe Day! Please tune in to the 12th Europe Day Concert livestreaming from St John's Smith Square. This is Jonathan Bloxham's fourth as conductor, and he's assembled an army of generals. Many are as much stars in their own right as our tenor, Luis Gomes. As I was climbing the spiral staircase to the gallery for yesterday's afternoon rehearsal - as co-curator I had the privilege to join a handful of others - I heard Luis let rip with a golden top note in the aria from Godard's Dante. and the tears started to flow (quite apart from anything else, I haven't heard live music other than five singers in a church since December).  

So let's meet some of the talent. Pictured above with the heads of Luis and Jonathan are Thomas Gould of the Aurora Orchestra and Sini Simonen of the Castalian Quartet (Finnish). Kate Suthers leads the seconds as she does those of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Here's a ten-second clip of violins blazing in a well-known passage during the rehearsal: Jonathan worked so hard on projection in this official finale.

Principal viola is Tetsuumi Nagata of the Piatti Quartet, who often plays with the Nash Ensemble, Cellist 1 Tim Posner, sometime principal of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. The double basses are Estonian Siret Lust, regularly in the Philharmonia, and Thomas Wynter whom I last saw online in Chineke!'s Wigmore chamber concert. They're pictured below with Lorraine Hart playing the cor anglais and cellists Steffan Morris and Peteris Sokolovskis.

Flautist 1 is Amy Yule, just appointed principal of the Hallé Orchestra, and oboist 1 Olivier Stankiewicz is co-principal of the London Symphony Orchestra. 

Clarinettist Anna Hashimoto is a rising star soloist. 

Nikolaj Henriques (so young looking!) is principal bassoon of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; he also played in an earlier Europe Day concert when he was principal of the European Union Youth Orchestra. Among the brass - with the luxury of four horns this year, essential for the Sibelius stunner which launches the programme, trumpeter Richard Blake, also CBSO section leader and trombonist Pete Moore, LSO co-principal and once youngest ever BBC Young Musician of the Year.

12 European countries are represented within the orchestra, and nine European composers in the programme. It's going to be glorious. Be there online at the time if you can; if not, watch later.

Snyder's recent history: inevitable v eternal + hope

The first of many intriguingly phrased ideas in Yale Professor Timothy Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom is the notion that 'the politics of inevitability', the belief in the progress of capitalism and/or history, is collapsing, or has collapsed, in the face of 'the politics of eternity', 'manufacturing crisis' and 'drowning the future in the present': 'eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling' . Perhaps it might better be called 'the politics of neverland', and of course its chief manipulator is Vladimir Putin.

Snyder's orderly chapters positing a series of oppositions offer essential summaries of how we got into this mess, going back beyond the essential turning point - Putin's essential failure in the Russian election of 2012 and how, to deflect, he spread his country's latest breakdown worldwide in an increasingly successful strategy - to roots in Russia, America and Europe.

If you only read one chapter, as a European it would have to be the third. Only a master historian could take us so succinctly to the essence of the EU project. He then points out that 'the EU's vulnerability was the European politics of inevitability: the fable of the wise nation', the fact that not only young east Europeans but others everywhere else on the continent - and above all in Britain - were not educated to see that their countries were doomed 'by structure' 'without a European order...As a result, the fable of the wise nation made it seem possible that nation-states, having chosen to enter Europe, could also choose to leave'.

Revelatory and gobsmacking to me was Putin's manipulation of fascist ideology, starting with a 'philosopher' of whom I knew nothing, Ivan Ilyin. Lest one thinks this overstated, the quotations from Putin and Kremlin pundits show how it became state ideology. State scumbags' laughable running-down of western countries as subject to Satanic gays and Jews, their fantasy of Eurasia with Moscow at its centre appealing to an imagined 'primal Slavic experience', would be funny if it hadn't gone down well with the Russian people. And all this because Ukraine decided to throw in its lot with a properly European future.

The most jaw-dropping example here is of the Izborsk Club, inaugurated in September 2012, chief point of its manifesto 'Russia does not need hasty political reforms. It needs arms factories and altars'. A lunatic fringe? No, a club of heroes according to the Kremlin:

One of Russia's long-range bombers, a Tu-95 built to drop atomic bombs on the United States was renamed 'Izborsk' in honour of the club. In case anyone failed to notice this sign of Kremlin backing, Prokhanov [fascist novelist and Izborsk Club founder] was invited to fly in the cockpit of the aircraft. In the years to come, this and other Tu-95s would regularly approach the airspace of the member states of the European Union, forcing them to activate their air defence systems and to escort the approaching bomber away. The Tu-95 'Izborsk' would be used to bomb Syria in 2015, creating refugees who would flee to Europe.

Snyder doesn't just state and imply, he can get very angry. In the fourth (Ukrainian) chapter, 'Novelty or Eternity', he paints such a moving picture of Ukrainians of all ages flocking to join the citizens of the Kyiv Maidan that I wish I'd gone out to witness this incredible event before the Kremlin triggered the massacre (that it was oddly reported in the UK press is explained later by Snyder). Then he unleashes his ire on the lie machine that would deny the achievement:

Russians, Europeans, and Americans were meant to forget the students who were beaten on a cold November night because they wanted a future. And the mothers and fathers and grandparents and veterans and workers who then came to the streets in defence of 'our children'. And the lawyers and consultants who found themselves throwing Molotov cocktails. The hundreds of thousands of people who broke themselves away from television and internet and who journeyed to Kyiv to put their bodies at risk. The Ukrainian citizens who were not thinking of Russia or geopolitics or ideology but of the next generation. The young historian of the Holocaust, the sole supporter of his family, who went back to the Maidan during the sniper massacre to rescue a wounded man, or the university lecturer who took a sniper's bullet to the skull that day.

Our great chronicler of conscience is also a master of coining the right phrase: 'implausible deniability' for the Kremlin's lies (I remember the first time I realised that Putin was going to break all rules of international diplomacy, when in early 2014 he declared 'we have no intention of rattling the sabre and sending troops to Crimea', then did just that; 'schizo-fascism' ('actual fascists calling their opponents fascists'); 'cruci-fiction' for Alexander Dugin's outrageous lie about a three-year-old boy crucified by Ukrainian soldiers in Sloviansk, which drummed up volunteers to fight for Russia in eastern Ukraine from all over the former empire; 'strategic relativism' for faltering Russian state power trying to hold on by weakening others, the 'winning' of 'a negative-sum game in international politics'; 'sado-populist' ('a populist...is someone who proposes policies to increase opportunities for the masses, as opposed to the financial elites. Trump was something else: a sado-populist, whose policies were designed to hurt the most vulnerable part of his own electorate').

Then there's the myth of 'Donald Trump, successful businessman', saved by Russian money from 'the fate that would normally await anyone with his record of failure'. Let's just hope that fate has merely been delayed, and is coming soon, to the Horror Clown, Nigel Farage, Arron Banks and many others.

Marching for togetherness, with optimism

I've never been on such a good-natured processional (in fact I haven't been on nearly enough protests in my lifetime, but I'm beginning to catch up). You could argue this one was about many things: a celebration of 60 years of peace in most of Europe, on a significant birthday for the EU; about remembering what happened close to the end of the route on Wednesday, and showing what the undaunted spirit of those who came from all round the country for the occasion is all about; certainly about our anger at the Brexit railroading of May and Co, with attendant ingenuity in the more indignant banners. But one thing's for sure - our experience of it was wholly positive, including the delight in walking the closed-off thoroughfares of the West End.

We were lucky to turn up at Hyde Park Corner about 40 minutes after the official start; nothing had moved, and we were ushered to what turned out to be the front of the march. All these pics were taken on J's phone, as my beloved camera had crashed to the ground while I was trying to photograph Bunyan's tomb a couple of weeks ago, and is in for an expensive repair to the zoom lens.

And so round into Piccadilly

where the rise gave a good view backwards

and down towards St James's Palace, where a good shot of J in his yellow waistcoat can't be used here, alas, though this one of three ladies will do,

then along to Trafalgar Square. We hadn't been able to meet up with my goddog Ted and his owners, who as it turned out had gone home after waiting for an hour and a half at the start, but it was good to see so many canines present or represented - note the banners to the left, including 'this cavapoo is pro-EU'.

Funny how few folk we met whom we knew - just a couple we'd become acquainted with last Saturday over Ted's owners' first 'Shakshuka Club' lunch, just after this heading into Whitehall

where although the space for walking became much more generous, we could still see the procession behind stretching back as far as the eye could see, and led by this most vocal of groups

and forward to Parliament Square,

where, securing a place on a traffic island rather than in the Square itself, we heard a policeman saying that the tail-end of the march was only just leaving Hyde Park Corner. And oh, the hosts of golden daffodils, such a nice touch on a glorious spring day.

Couldn't hear the speeches, starting with Alastair Campbell, and from memory of the last lot, they didn't promise to be too inspiring - and very short on the diversity/women front - though Nick Clegg, by all accounts, did a good job. In any case, we had to head off to the National Film Theatre cafe to meet our friends Nats and Danni, who'd come up specially from Bournemouth. Glorious to sit in the sun; happy thereafter and in one's sleep to thrive on the memories of a togetherness which will survive whatever happens next. Estimates of attendance range between 100,000 and 500,000: not bad. We are Europeans first, citizens of the world second, Brits third, and nothing's going to change that. Fingers crossed for the French and German elections - it's looking hopeful.

29/03 The Day of Wrath is here. What better to counter the sending of Article 50 than this magnificent one and a half minutes of what Europe stands for?

Elgar the European

No doubt those Little Britainers who want to batten down the hatches against Europe will be using ‘Nimrod’ or Pomp and Circumstance yet again as the background to their frothing diatribes. Which makes me mad because no composer was more of a true European, or for that matter a true citizen of the world, than Edward Elgar (and I’m talking not of his conservative outer life but his musical world-within-world). He may have suffused his scores with the essence of Worcestershire/Herefordshire woods, hills and rivers, but that hardly amounts to callow nationalism, and it's one of the reasons I love him so deeply.

Forgive me if I repeat myself, but ‘Nimrod’ is a classic example of misrepresentation. It’s actually the portrait of an Anglicized German, A J Jaeger (pictured below), and has its roots in a summer evening conversation Elgar held with his beloved publisher friend about Beethoven’s slow movements. The result is, of course, based on the Adagio cantabile of the ‘Pathétique’ Sonata. So, music about a German based on a German. The stout and steaky tune seconds in to the first Pomp and Circumstance March? Listen to the 'Cortège de Bacchus' from Delibes’s Sylvia, a movement cited by Elgar in a different context, and you’ll hear where the rhythmic idea comes from, note for note (though not pitch for pitch). Bizet and Massenet are other strong influences.

Elgar’s phenomenal orchestration came partly from his many trips to Germany to see Wagner’s operas. There Richard Strauss hailed him, after a performance of The Dream of Gerontius, as ‘the first English progressivist’. His love of Italy follows Strauss’s example in the ‘concert overture’ (essentially tone-poem) In the South, and surfaces elsewhere when least expected. During the First World War, he didn’t so much thump a narrowly patriotic tub as show his musical solidarity with Poland and Belgium. 

More than anything, Elgar is truly international and a world-class composer, as my City Lit students agreed when we looked at the First Symphony and went to hear Andrew Litton's outstanding interpretation of it with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican. Unfortunately my effusions over Cockaigne the following week - I was amazed to find it has no less than eight memorable themes - were undermined by the bizarre performance of it, which I heard on the Radio: the aptly named Long Yu dragged every slow passage out to an eternity. Inside information told me that the interpretation clocked in at 2m40s longer than the longest previous BBC performance (they keep records of timings, helpfully). 

Which for a 15-minute piece is absurd, of course. Elgar as conductor or Boult will put you right. Boult's Cockaigne was twinned on the original LP with the most opulent recording of the Second Symphony (though it was Boult's classic 1944 recording that I chose on Radio 3's Building a Library).

Anyway, I hope I can enlarge on some of the international and/or European aspects when I join Anthony Payne and Dr Heather Wiebe in a Royal Philharmonic Society discussion before Saturday’s performance of Gerontius.  It’s dauntingly titled  The Edwardian Era: Empire, Society and Culture, and as I can’t contribute too much to that, I’ll be hoping to sound the trumpet for Elgar as part of a wider musical movement. Also hoping to catch James MacMillan’s earlier talk exploring ‘what role faith and mysticism have in artistic vision’.

All the above is loosely connected with Cameron’s long-awaited speech today. To paraphrase a friend of a friend, what it comes down to is a case of one foot forward, two feet back, half a foot forward again: a) the European Union is OK; b) no it’s not, they all have to dance to our tune and if they don’t we’re not playing; and c) actually we’d better play after all. In a muddled message that will generate years of uncertainty, the upshot is that he renegotiates terms to get some of the UK's powers back, and then asks the British people whether they like that or not. That doesn’t account for what happens if, as seems likely, he fails to get what he wants from the other EU countries.

At least the pro-Europeans are beginning to get their voices heard in the surrounding kerfuffle. It’s high time someone of eloquence spelled out the advantages of Europe to counter all the falsehoods in the Mail and the Torygraph (apparently the press office at the European Commission sends correction after correction to the papers, but they never listen – not even the Guardian, which for some reason is giving the appalling Farage houseroom as a funny guy).

So – cue lots of facts and links – let’s try and set the record straight. If this first fact were spelled out, people might begin to think differently. It’s this: that the size of the administration is NOT bloated, as most people believe. The entire staff of all EU institutions, agencies and other bodies totals 55, 000. The Commission on its own employs 32,000 people – smaller than the staff of Birmingham City Council.

Are EU civil servants overpaid? Hardly. According to one source, ‘comparative studies confirm that the remuneration package…is similar to what is offered by other international organisations that employ expatriate staff. In fact, for many job profiles the EU civil service offers the lowest entry-level salaries amongst international organisations’.

What has the EU/EEC ever done for us? Please read this dazzling list in a letter from Simon Sweeney to The Guardian. That should do the trick. And the TUC is in no doubt of what our government’s up to here. At an Executive Committee Meeting on 15 January it declared that ‘the Government wants to take away the rights working people have gained over the last thirty years from the European Union. Social Europe has provided working people with more equality, more protection from redundancy, more information about what's happening at their workplace, as well as a shorter working week and paid holidays. The Government wants to take that away from working people, and make them work longer hours for less pay’. It goes on to point out the obvious, that Cameron’s ‘dithering’ will play havoc with our economic interests.

If you’re still with me, the full facts of EU policy can be found here (economic benefits), here (social and employment policy) and here (working time directive). Unfortunately I'm probably preaching to the converted, but it's good to have chapter and verse in hand. Now we need a really charismatic apostle to go out and fight the good fight to halt the re-feudalisation of blinkered Blighty: a recommendation also made by Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski in his Blenheim Palace speech last year, full of further strong arguments from a man who might have been expected to be a Eurosceptic.

Finally, a reconciliatory footnote. 50 years ago this Tuesday de Gaulle and Adenauer joined their countries' hands together again by signing the Elysée Treaty. The BBC put up a lovely little piece about a song that encapsulated a respect regained: 'Göttingen', French chanteuse Barbara's hymn to the German university town she adored (and which I came to love at first sight two Junes ago). The sound version of the song in French there (Barbara also recorded it in German) is the best, but here's a filmed performance to complement it.

No fooling with Maurice

When friends Lars and Jan bought tickets for a pub-theatre adaptation of E M Forster's coming-out classic - J's battered but treasured old paperback copy, not long after publication, is illustrated above - I was wary. Some of the worst productions I've ever seen have been above or below the bar: sub-student Genet at the White Bear in Kennington, some nightmare the name of which I forget at our local, the Curtain's Up, in which Nazis stagily pondered the Final Solution in a dank basement (Sara Kestelman was in it, for the playwright's sake, and did her charismatic best to dignify the whole farrago). At least the latter was where we first met our now great muse and Djenne Djenno doyenne Sophie Sarin, having been asked to take her to something to cheer her up at the time. Well, we laughed, but for the wrong reasons.

Pleasantly surprised, then, by our visit to the Stag in Victoria, though, and at times amazed. Roger Parsley and Andy Graham had taken all the significant one-to-ones from the novel and, not stinting on the intellectual name-dropping, given them space to breathe. So, for a start, there was naturalistic dialogue for the actors to get their teeth into. Which they did with varying success; but there could be no doubt about Adam Lilley's hero. A bit of an everyman, by no means unattractive, this Maurice grew convincingly from wide-eyed schoolboy to priggish student to real man.


He had some fine actors to spark off. Not so much Rob Stott's Durham (pictured left above - all production photos by Derek Drescher), who looked the intellectual-nervous type but didn't quite sound it, though he cried convincingly; oddly, the scenes with Persia Lawson's very touching sister Ada had more fire.


There were two consummate cameos from Jonathan Hansler, giving the audience confidence in the start and popping up as the soft-spoken hypnotist Mr Lasker Jones who gets the most famous line ('England has always been disinclined to accept human nature').


And the Scudder did not let us down, unless you're fixated on Rupert Graves's cute young thing in the Merchant-Ivory film (I'm not). Bright-eyed and responsive, fight man Stevie Raine's gamekeeper seemed plausible enough on first acquaintance


and in a sweet bed scene, rather less raunchy than I suspect the Above the Stag Theatre regulars are accustomed to seeing.


Intelligent use of music, practical costuming and adaptable lighting in Tim McArthur's seamless production added to the pleasure of the close-up experience, though if this Maurice transfers - and I hope it will - it'll need a better backdrop than the boarding-house walls. The show's been completely sold out and there aren't even any tickets left for the extended run, which ends on Saturday. I wish it a bright future, especially as these excellent actors can't have made much money even with full houses of 60 or so every night.

Had a bit of a shock last night, apropos of our Bedlam Theatre nostalgia trip. Remember how I apologised to director David Bannerman, wherever he might be, for dissing the second-week revue which helped us young things to bond in mirth agin him? Well, where he was last night was on the telly, being snapped at by Paxman on Newsnight as he spoke up for the risible UK Independence Party. So this one-time would-be man of the theatre and scriptwriter who back then sported a dodgy moustache is now one of those 'fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists', as even Cameron denounced them back in 2006; more than that, he's the right-hand man of Nigel Farage, so embarrassing in his recent European Parliament attack on the president of the EU Council. It's official, then: for the Edinburgh class of 1980-84 Bannerman (who's added 'Campbell' to his surname thanks to a distant connection with the more famous liberal) IS Widmerpool from Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time.

On which note, and by no means unconnected to the English prejudices exposed in Maurice, let me leave you with a gem, Dan and Dan's 'Daily Mail song'. You'll need to go over to YouTube to see 'both' Dans, but the essential visuals are leftscreen. Enjoy.