London lights, one to Brum

This is the great Dame Harriet Walter, giving a lecture at the Legatum Institute - to whom thanks for the images of her - about whether 'actresses' shouldn't just be called 'actors', about Shakespeare's roles for women, circumscribed as they are by each boy-played heroine being someone's mother, lover or wife, about how the Greeks let women stand alone, and what happened after Ibsen.

Although I didn't get to see her Brutus in the Donmar all-women Julius Caesar, some of her other performances are right at the top of my 'memorables' list, chiefly Imogen in Cymbeline when she was playing a raft of Shakespeare leads for the RSC, and more recently Elizabeth I to Janet McTeer's Mary Stuart (both pictured below).

But I had no idea she was so lucid and well-researched a writer or - this might have been more predictable - so captivating a public speaker. One not so far from here who loved that Legatum lecture persuaded her to speak at a bastion of male exclusivity which it seems I'm not allowed to mention. I was there, had the privilege of dining afterwards with Harriet and the actor husband she met working on Mary Stuart, Guy Paul, and had an idea.

I wondered if she knew the strong women of Strauss and Hofmannsthal (the Empress in Die Frau ohne Schatten was much on my mind given the concurrent run of Royal Opera performances), and we talked about that. And then I had an idea: I'd been given a budget - for the first time in my life, I think - to put together a Birmingham study day on 24 May before Andris Nelson's CBSO concert performance of Der Rosenkavalier (Soile Isokoski, Alice Coote, Lucy Crowe and Franz Hawlata head a delectable cast). The unenviable gambit to be covered between 10.30am and 3.30pm is to be Rosenkavalier, Ariadne, Götterdämmerung and Moses und Aron. Would she be willing to come and read speeches from the Marschallin, possibly Ariadne, Brünnhilde and - since she's played Brutus and set her sights on Macbeth - Moses? Would Guy be happy to play Monsieur Jourdain and Aron, maybe also Hofmannsthal's Lord Chandos? They would, and they will.

In addition Harriet has proposed two extraordinarily promising young actors taking their first steps in the professional world, Joel MacCormack and Daisy Boulton, who will read Octavian and Sophie (I want the Trio texts heard separately), the Composer and Zerbinetta in the original between-scenes backstage set-up for the opera in Hofmannsthal's original adaptation of Moliere's Le bourgeois gentilhomme. The speakers will be self on Rosenkavalier, William Mival - so good on a Radio 3 podcast we shared on Strauss's Feuersnot - on Ariadne, Michael Tanner on Götterdämmerung and my good friend Stephen Johnson on Moses und Aron (he's translated the final text Schoenberg didn't get round to setting to music)*. Does that sound enticing? If so, come along, book here.

I feel the especial liveliness of the London scene especially at the moment through the number of inspiring folk I've seen, heard and met recently. There was the delightful interview with soprano Nicole Cabell, whom I've long wanted to interview since her perfect Cardiff Singer of the World finale and her Leila in a Royal Opera concert performance of Bizet's Pearl Fishers.A truly engaging person who listens as well as talks. Here she is in the rather lovely apartment between the Barbican and St Luke's she found through Airbnb - a great alternative for performers fed up with staying in big anonymous hotels.

At the French Institute's It's All About Piano festival I was blown away by more perfection in the shape of young French pianist David Kadouch's ideally proportioned recital. This is he with festival organiser Françoise Clerc in the cafe afterwards.

And how could I resist a shot of our dear Jonny Brown, who accompanied me to the recital and was equally amazed, found nothing else to match it in the rest of the weekend, but has all the same written eloquently about the whole experience.

My colleague Jasper Rees enjoyed a revival of the play adapted from his brilliant book I Found My Horn, the chronicle of a mid-life crisis turned round through rediscovery of the instrument he'd abandoned as a 15 year old. I was unexpectedly bowled over by the staging at the Hampstead Theatre first time round; now we were virtually on top of the one man who plays many parts and the horn, too - beautifully, as 'Jasper' gathers confidence in the Mozart Third Horn Concerto - Jonathan Guy Lewis, photographed below in Trafalgar Square (artwork by 3D Joe and Max c James Lowe).

I found myself in floods of tears, not quite sure why, perhaps that quality of lost idealism regained. A special piquancy was to be sitting a few places away from Dave Lee, horn doyen whose northern accent is almost parodied by our hard-working actor as he encourages 'Jasper' to get on with it. Here are Dave, Jasper and Jonathan, snapped by I know not whom (oh, and I should mention that we saw Tom Hollander afterwards too, who'd been invited along by Jasper. His sad, infinitely expressive face in the Passion episodes of the television comedy Rev, which has suddenly risen from so-so laughs to absolutely compelling drama, should garner him awards in the TV world).

It was a flawless tour de force from our principal actor; a rather surprising modesty, or perhaps a less unexpected diffidence, forbade Jasper to allow anyone to cover the play for TAD. But a very enthusiastic Evening Standard review appeared a couple of days ago, only four weeks late.

I was going to leave it at that before the internet went down at 3pm on Friday - thank you, Talk Talk, you made for a stressy 24 hours plus. But now I'm elsewhere until this evening, I can take the opportunity to prolong the abundance. On Friday afternoon I interviewed the astonishingly articulate Pretty Yende, South African soprano now a favourite at La Scala and the Met. The 'peg' for the Arts Desk interview due in a couple of weeks' time is that she's giving a recital at the Cadogan Hall on 15 May (her Royal Opera debut is fixed but she can't yet reveal what it's to be).

I couldn't help comparing our conversation to the one I'd had with heavenly Anne Schwanewilms earlier in the year, now up at great length on The Arts Desk: both sopranos have huge amounts of wisdom and self-knowledge, but the difference lies in youth and maturity, between Schwanewilms' great experience and Yende's awareness of how far she has to go.

Finally, I shifted everything to hear the last two instalments of the Jerusalem String Quartet's Shostakovich cycle after Wednesday's performance: quartet playing doesn't come any greater than this.

To add to the Arts Desk rave about Wednesday's concert, I'd say that Thursday night's tumultous conclusion to the Twelfth, reiterating the major despite all the dissonances and tone-rows, capped even the victory cavalcade of the Ninth and made an equally satisfying resolution to suffering x 3. Sophie came again and once again conferred 'rock and roll' status on a chamber performance.

She was also stunned by the endgames and rites of the Fifteenth Quartet last night, as was I: never have I concentrated more fiercely, though there were two peaks in this concert. One was violinist Alexander Pavelenko and cellist Kyril Zlotnikov searing their way towards the moment of tenderness (the Braga 'Angels' Serenade' which Shostakovich had orchestrated in his plans to make an opera of Chekhov's The Black Monk? Mahler linden-tree? Janáček?) in the Fourteenth's slow movement. The tender serenade returns, of course, with fragile radiance at the end. The other was the astounding resonance of the solos in the Fifteenth's funeral march, which is where the tears started to flow uncontrollably.

Makng space for that, and a talk to the Friends of the Jerusalem Quartet beforehand, meant coming down to Gloucestershire a day late, and missing beautiful country weather, but I'm here now in the arcadian Uley Valley among fewer people, but an abundance of surprisingly untimid ewes and lambs. This, apparently, is Eglantine and her offspring.

*Stop press (9/5): we've now got two singers and a pianist from the Birmingham Conservatoire to deliver 'Du Venus Sohn' as it appears in the original 1911 Hofmannsthal adaptation and Harlequin's Serenade, plus a couple of Strauss songs. And Alice Coote, one of my very favourite singers, has expressed friendly readiness to pop in and chat Octavian if rehearsals and rest-time permit.

Pitch-perfect protest

I'll admit I was wary of joining a demonstration after so long; even years ago I only ever went on Pride marches, which I stopped attending when the whistles got too much and a BBC producer told me how he'd got tinnitus from an ex blowing one in his ear. J thinks I was on the Section 28 protest when they shut us in a garden, but I have no memory of that.

Anyway, the reason I went this time was simple. After three months of silence, having been targeted for lending his name to Putin's re-election campaign and failing to make any sort of comment on the murderous  new anti-gay laws in Russia, Valery Gergiev had finally produced a statement to prove he was gay-friendly. It was amusingly summarised in a tweet by Philip Hensher: 'Some of my best friends are gay. I don't support institutional homophobia. I leave that up to my friend Putin.'

Weak or not, the statement would have been enough for me had he not, in the time between the Met, Carnegie Hall and San Francisco Opera protests and this one, gone and put his foot in it about the anti-gay laws in Russia, which anyone who cares about human rights must abhor. He was quoted in the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant as saying 'In Russia we protect our children. These laws are not about homosexuality, they concern paedophilia'.

Now if he misunderstood, or was misquoted, he's had plenty of time to put the record straight. But he hasn't. And having reeled at a casually-muttered remark about 'child molesting' by an older relative of my now-godson when I was bouncing the baby A on my knee, I have a personal reason for seeing red at such equations.

So, in spite of having had so many amiable and fascinating meetings with Gergiev over the years, I still went along to the Silk Street entrance of the Barbican before his second performance of Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust (I was speeding off at 7, the time the concert was due to start, to the first night of the dismal Magic Flute at ENO). I'd feared they might get it wrong: it would have been totally misleading to have banners saying Gergiev was homophobic, because I don't believe for a minute that he is.

As it turned out, what needed to be said was said. The orchestrator was the slightly scary but admirable Peter Tatchell, and he'd pitched it, I think, just right. It was peaceful and - as this very fair Guardian report points out*- 'civilised' but 'loud' as the African contingent, aptly there to protest similarly appalling human rights records in Uganda inter alia, backed up Tatchell in chanting 'Gergiev! Stop supporting Putin!' - some coaching occasionally needed on pronunciation - and the stress-curious 'SOME people ARE gay! GET over IT!'.

Chanting isn't really my thing, so I joined in a little less than lustily. But I was happy to accede to Peter's request to hand out leaflets, which again were correctly worded, and it rekindled memories of what it's like to be rejected, in this case by a fair few haughty concertgoers.

Anyway, the sparklers and the huge diversity of the protesters (the three above in a photo from the Tatchell Foundation) added to the festive, non-aggressive air. Unfortunately the whole thing was grievously misreported by Melanie McDonagh in a feeble Spectator blog as being inside the hall where she could barely make out cries of 'shame' (the hall event had taken place a week earlier, when Tatchell courageously held the platform for a minute before, not during or after, the concert). The pretence of being there, which she has not retracted?  Journalists lose their jobs for less. But I'm not even going to link to her invective; that would only help to give the right-wing rag the clicks it so badly needs.

As for my own 'open letter' to Gergiev's response on The Arts Desk, it felt strange and initially rather lonely. None of my musical colleagues was willing to lend support, with two against - the usual argument, 'why this and not x' - and three not wanting to go public; not a single contributor showed any solidarity. But then, as I could see from the bottom right column of the main page, there were plenty of supportive tweets from the likes of Jessica Duchen, Petroc Trelawny, Richard Bratby and - proudest of this - a lovely short eulogy from my oboist hero Nicholas Daniel. So it was clearly the right thing to have done. I don't blame the silent majority, but 'Halldor', commenting on the TAD latest, put it all rather beautifully. I select a few choice sentences:

The all-smiles, "you were marvellous" culture of the classical music world is deeply ingrained in all of us. And so many well-meaning, liberal people are deeply invested in Gergiev's prestige. So responses to real stand-up-and-be-counted moments like this are awkward, embarrassed; people wish it'd just go away, they lose patience, and don't think matters through.

Curiously but unsurprisingly even as I was turning the article's screw on what the consequences of the 'anti-paedophilia' law had been, Queer Nation New York reported the latest hate crime from Moscow with appropriately angry artwork.

Will this specific issue go away? Not until our conductor retracts or qualifies that awful statement. No-one's asking him to renounce Putin; that's just not possible in the present climate. But as to one PR's frenzied declaration that Tatchell is trying to ruin Gergiev's career, no chance, and that's not what any of us wants.

Rather more productive relations with musical Russians came thick and fast in the weeks around the protest. I loved interviewing Michail Jurowski, Vlad's dad, before what I think must go down for me as the most extraordinary concert of the year so far. I hope the LPO releases the recording of our talk, because he was fascinating about the distinguished visitors to the  intellectual household in which he grew up - Vladimir Senior was a respected Soviet composer - and on how as a teenager he played piano duets with Shostakovich. Michail Vladimirovich's wife took this photo in his dressing room, where he nearly talked himself out before the half-hour under the public eye. It gives some idea of how many staves the score of Schnittke's First Symphony often has to encompass.

As for the work in action, what a jaw-dropping masterpiece. I knew as I listened to Rozhdestvensky's outlandish recording with the score that morning that, unless the performance were to go badly wrong, there'd be an instant standing ovation, as there had been from the young in VJ's LPO performance of the Third Symphony.  And there was. Read about it on the Arts Desk review.

I was trembling with emotion even before we heard it: in the interval my companion for the evening Roger Neill introduced me to the vivacious, brilliant and hugely talented Alissa Firsova, and she introduced me in turn to her mother, Elena and the great Dmitri Smirnov. Elena was at both the world premiere of Schnittke's First in the 'closed' city of Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod, sadly in the news again recently owing to the awful plane crash there) and then, after the work's 12-year ban was lifted, at its second performance in Moscow - not nearly as good, she thought. Dmitri enlightened me as to why, though we found it extraordinary, the performance of Lutoslawski's Cello Concerto wasn't quite right in the light of Rostropovich's premiere performance (I heard Slava play it with the LSO; neither then nor in Truls Mork's interpretation earlier this did it have anything like the impact we got from Johannes Moser's piece of music-theatre). Here are all three in the foyer.

After  my Wigmore Hall talk in the Bechstein Room on quartets by Haydn, Britten and Shostakovich to be played by the dazzling Belcea Quartet, I realised that I'd been standing in front of the anniversary hero whose First String Quartet knocked me for six, so I got one of the punters to take a snap. Afraid I asked him to cut out Elliott Carter, not an idol of mine..

Fourth talk in a row was an introduction to Sakari Oramo's first official concert as new chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra: part setting-up of Shostakovich's First Piano Concerto and Mahler's First Symphony, with good links between the popular ditties in both, part conversation with Tristan Murail, whose two new pieces going under the collective title Reflections/Reflets were being given their world premiere. I was slightly apprehensive of talking to a composer with whom I wasn't sure I'd be in total sympathy, but the deep sound the minute the work began in rehearsal that morning captivated me. In our chat TM soon relaxed and became surprisingly bonhomous dealing with an charming old gent in the front row who asked about tunes. Murail's the one to look apprehensive in this picture, and I set  myself up as a candidate for another episode in 'great British dentistry' by the webtroll I've been ignoring, but it's the only one, so it will have to do.

The DDS trail has continued with two talks to the Friends of the Jerusalem Quartet (photo below by Marco Borggreve) around that amazing foursome's Shostakovich cycle. I only managed to hear the third concert in the first series, of quartets 4, 5 and 6, but from the very first bars it was obvious that these are the natural successors to the old Borodin Quartet in the powerful reserves they can draw on and their unique flexibility and tonal quick-changes. Five was, of course, the stunner, and the Sixth brought the redemption of romance just as I'd anticipated.

I have to say that cellist Kyril Zlotnikov's my favourite, not just for his handsome profile but also for the infinitely cultured sound he makes and the aristocratic, readable expressions which match the mood of the music in question.

And on the Friday I got to talk to the wonderful Boris Giltburg the morning after his stunning Queen Elizabeth Hall recital. He's a real Renaissance man, currently translating Rilke into Hebrew, and his command of English was astounding in his ability to articulate complex thoughts on space and silence in the previous evening's performance of Prokofiev Eighth Sonata. More on that anon. Here's Boris in the lobby of the St Pancras Hotel, which I also need to eulogise in due course.

One concert I wasn't sorry to miss was the five-hour epic of the Philip Glass Ensemble. A very treasured new student of mine who did go knows what I think of Glass, and drew this image of how he imagined I'd have been at the event. I've taken the liberty of setting it on the computer alongside a photo of the composer from that concert.

Only six days to go now before I hand in the script for the Radio 3 Building a Library on Parsifal, which explains why I've done so little blogging over the past couple of weeks.  That and visiting my poor old mum in hospital: she broke her hip en route to tests for a heart operation which should have taken place last week. Came out on Tuesday night, was in appalling pain at home and is now back in St Helier, which is where I'm heading now before further doses of Parsifal and Kundry.  And still loving every minute of this infinitely fascinating work - 'the greatest opera by the greatest composer' declares Mark Wigglesworth, who comes to talk to my City Lit opera class on Monday. Rich times indeed. And something to celebrate - many of Greenpeace's Arctic 30 who've spent far too long in jail in Murmansk and St Petersburg already, were released on (exorbitant) bail. Here's Ana Paula Alminhana Maciel from Brazil at the time of her liberation yesterday.

Yet fellow activist Australian Colin Russell is being held captive at least until February. Why him? No-knows. And like he says,

Sign Greenpeace's latest petition to keep the pressure up on urging Colin's release and the abolition of charges here.

29/11 update: Colin was released on bail today. The regular Greenpeace bulletin showed a joyous picture of him outside the St Petersburg prison embracing fellow activist Faiza Ouhlasen.

The 30's troubles are far from over, though. They've still only been bailed and could yet be sentenced. Remember the fate of their fellow 'hooligans', the girls of Pussy Riot. I'm sure, though, that the pressure will be maintained on Russia from the rest of the world.

*'One well-dressed man apologised for leaving early because he had to get to The Magic Flute across town at the Coliseum.' Guess who? I was wearing the same psychedelic flowery tie which always comes out on special occasions, like our civil partnership party, because it was the nearest thing I own to anything rainbowy. I also wore it last Friday to Dame Edna's gala launch at the London Palladium. Gladdie pix pending; in the meantime you'll have to read my Arts Desk review, possums.