Gone too soon: Sasha Ivashkin

When great artists take their leave in their 80s, like Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya, Abbado and Mackerras, it's time to celebrate a life well lived. When they go too soon, the feeling is much more unsettling. Even in the case of an actor familiar to me only through his chameleonic galaxy of screen personas, Philip Seymour Hoffman, the sadness weighs heavy on the soul. But learning from Gavin Dixon's blog of Alexander Ivashkin's death at the age of 65 while I was in Reykjavik over the weekend, with no-one around who knew him to share the burden, was a uniquely disorienting experience.

Having stepped in to take his place on several recent occasions - not least for the huge pleasure and honour of talking to Vladimir Jurowski's conductor father Michail before my greatest concert experience of 2013 - I found that Sasha evaded my concerned enquiries regarding his health. That was disquieting, but I couldn't press, and I put it out of mind. As it turned out he was suffering from that awful disease, pancreatic cancer.

I've known Sasha personally since he arrived here in 2000 to take up the professorship of Russian music at Goldsmiths College, where I've intermittently taught (and would have done so, replacing Sasha, this term had the workload not already been enormous). He was a gentle and humorous person to talk to, though of course intense when we conversed about the great master he knew so well, Alfred Schnittke.

His short monograph on the composer for Phaidon is an absolute model of its kind: how do these Russians, and fellow musicologist Marina Frolova-Walker is another such, write English that's much more stylish than that of so many native academics? Only a few weeks ago I serendipitously picked up a copy of  the Schnittke Reader edited by Sasha in its Indiana University Press incarnation (cover of the Russian original pictured above). a priceless reference source.

I took this photo on what was possibly the last occasion I got together with Sasha, chairing a Schnittke discussion which also included the composer's pianist widow Irina (centre), a regular recital partner, and Vladimir Jurowski*. Sasha was of course an entertaining and enlightening speaker; none of us present at his 2003 Prokofiev conference lecture-performance on the differences between Prokofiev's Cello Concerto No. 1 and its offspring, the Symphony Concerto, will ever forget it. He demonstrated how the Symphony Concerto seems more difficult to play than the original work, and yet is much easier because of the collaboration with Rostropovich on natural positioning. And Sasha had his own image of the last frenetic flight into the stratosphere, remembering the Russian image of entering heaven through the narrowest of entrances.

Unfortunately our last exchanges were unhappy ones, over our mutual dismay at the impending removal of the Prokofiev Archive from Goldsmiths to Columbia University. But I prefer to remember Sasha championing the Russian and contemporary repertoire as an outstanding cellist. Gavin Dixon's tribute ends rightly with the haunting epilogue to Schnittke's Peer Gynt ballet, another great dematerialisation for the cellist, this time with tape. Go over, read Gavin's wonderful memories as a Goldsmiths student and listen to that; but meanwhile let me give you instead the second movement of Prokofiev's Sonata for Cello and Piano encasing one of the composer's most beautiful melodies. It was a track I also chose for Radio 3 when Slava died - and that happened to be the world premiere performance, with Richter as the pianist and the ailing composer in the audience.

This was the second time I heard Sasha play the sonata with the great Dmitri Alexeev. The first was at the superb 2003 anniversary concert at St John's Smith Square organised by the seemingly indomitable Noëlle Mann. This performance took place - I think I'm right in saying - at her memorial concert, by which time we were also lamenting the loss of Prokofiev's older son Sviatoslav. I miss Noëlle especially and my unthinking first reaction was to phone her to talk about Sasha's death. It only took a few seconds to realise that of course I couldn't.

It weighs heavily with me that of the ten speakers photographed at this 2003 Prokofiev conference talk, four are untimely gone: the collegial Lynne Walker (second from left), Sir Edward Downes, Noëlle and Sasha. Sometimes life doesn't make the sense we think it should.

Sasha's cremation ceremony, open to all, will take place at Mortlake Crematorium, Kew Meadow Path, Townmead Road, Richmond TW9 4EN this coming Saturday, 8 February, at 10.40am.

*who added his own homage in an e-mail this morning (5/2) and I reproduce it here with his permission: 'the loss of Sasha Ivashkin came as a terrible shock to many of us, though some knew he was battling with cancer since last autumn. Sasha was an incredibly kind and generous person, a real all-round musician. I feel really privileged to have known him, if not for too long - I only met him after starting the LPO job in London. His support of all our projects (especially the ones devoted to Prokofiev and Schnittke) was huge and I still have the sound of  his cello in that performance of Schnittke's Second Cello Concerto in my ears! I don't think I would ever have understood Schnittke's persona and music so well without having read Sasha's book.'

Proshchai, moya uchitel’nitsa

She always insisted, once we’d got to a certain stage, that only Russian should be spoken in the lessons, so I feel I’m bringing my dear teacher, Joan Smith, back to life and reviving our weekly hours together. Some of you will be familiar with her as Joan Pemberton Smith from the opera and song translation work she did for the record companies. She died several weeks ago after a series of strokes following a complicated illness. I hadn’t seen her and husband Jeremy very often in the past couple of years – the last time was under the sad circumstances of Noelle Mann’s funeral – but her impact has been lasting (especially since I don’t seem to have forgotten too much). I met her through Noelle, and we both sang in the Kalina Choir. So what I’d call my serious Prokofiev work coincided with making the acquaintance of two women who were quite extraordinary in their different ways.

I hadn’t thought we would actually be reading any classic Russian literature in the near future when we began, but within a year we tackled Chekhov’s Rothschild’s Violin. And rather foolhardily, bearing in mind all the Church Slavonic in it, went on to Pushkin’s Boris Godunov as well as various short stories by Paustovsky and Zoshchenko. Joan did rather reproach me that after two or so years battling out to Chislehurst, I didn’t go back for weekly readings of Eugene Onegin, though I did work through it on my own.


Yet though she could be schoolmistressly strict at times, she was fundamentally a genial person and what I remember most is the way her face would light up with special enthusiasms. So I’m glad the top photo was found by Fiona McKnight of the Prokofiev Archive, since one of the two I had didn’t catch the smile, and in the other she’s wearing the ridiculous I-See-You-Jimmy tam-o-shanter with attached red wig hat we foisted on all those who came to sup as a kind of visitors-book record.

At her short memorial service the other Monday, I learnt a few things about Joan I didn’t know as well as reviving the memory of others I did. Born in Leicester in 1929, she won a scholarship to read classics at Cambridge; and as this was only just after the war, she was one of only two women studying her subject (our shared classical training was one of the most helpful aspects to the teaching; Joan could explain the grammatical workings in a way I could understand, as perhaps a native speaker might not have done). Over her years as librarian and teacher, she took a Russian course and soon became an enthusiastic proselytizer. She’d get her little groups to sing Russian folksongs to her guitar accompaniment; she apparently escorted parties to every corner of the then-Soviet Union when it was far from easy to plan travel arrangements. She even played in a balalaika orchestra (this I didn’t know).

Her Czech friend Zdena read a very lovely and fitting Yesenin poem (alas, not in Russian as well as translation, because the minority feared the majority of non-Slavic speakers wouldn’t understand). Failing the possibility of getting a Kalina Choir recording played, I thought the Song of Simeon from the Rachmaninov Vespers would be a fitting piece against which to sit and contemplate. And generally, as the best of these things can be, it was a time to remember fondly, if still tearfully, rather than to wail overmuch.


I ought also to recall one other person of whom I was extremely fond who died this year (may that be the last, please), my good university friend Jerry’s father Michael Pratt, QC. This was, for me, a rather strange concatenation of events: after my Mahler 2 talk at Birmingham, a distinguished white-haired gentleman who looked vaguely familiar came up and asked if I recognized him. Edinburgh? I thought of tutors, drew a blank and then just in time realized who it was (we can’t have met in decades). He’d seen my talk listed in the CBSO programme and came along specially. He took me for a drink with his delightful old friend after the concert, and I was amazed at the sharpness of his memory, the ability to recall details about our happy university days which I’d completely forgotten.

Probably Michael had at that time been a bit of a replacement father figure; it would have been only a couple of years since I’d lost my own. Certainly his generosity knew no bounds, and though we all ribbed him for being, as we saw it, a frightful old reactionary, he was a lot wiser and more complex than that. Read more about him by a colleague who knew him better than I did in the Birmingham Post. Anyway, about a month after that reunion, on 21 June, he died of complications following a heart attack. And I felt a sense of wonder that I’d been able to see him, and that our meeting had felt so meaningful even before what subsequently happened.

A heart in winter

You never know what each film of Ferzan Ozpetek has in store. In Sacred Heart, he tries the visionary line. It's unsettling, beautifully filmed, challenging in every frame - even when most of what his extraordinary leading actress, Barbora Bobulova, does is simply to stare blankly. She can age or become youthful just by a flop of the hair, a widening or glazing over of those mesmerising eyes. She moves from reluctant hard-nosed businesswoman with buried family sacrets


to a confused being with a conscience - saint or schizophrenic?


I can't really say more without giving the film's totally unpredictable trajectory or mysteries away. Ozpetek's usual gay themes don't feature (though the cast does include the most unreally handsome priest I've ever seen). It's a gem: watch it in a double-bill with Le Fate Ignoranti, which would have to follow as redemptive romance. That's a desert island gem of the alternative society. But this one bored itself deeper in my unconscious and gave me very strange dreams. And Ozpetek's up there for me, among living European filmmakers, with Julio Medem and Arnaud Desplechin.

I'm not fishing for connections when I say it just struck me how like our shadowlands heroine were the features of Lynne Walker. I had such a shock when a mutual contact at the Halle told me she'd died last week. He'd already alerted me that she was quite seriously ill; I presumed chemotherapy might be doing the trick, didn't contact her as he didn't really want her to know he'd told me. And now I wish I had.


Lynne has been quite a companion in our profession over the years. She never much liked me pointing out that I was a mere student when she ran the press affairs of the Scottish National Orchestra - that aged her somewhat, she thought, though she always looked attractive and youthful - yet it was through her open arms that I got to interview Neeme Jarvi for the student newspaper ('an Estonian with SNO on his boots' ran the headline).

Subsequently Lynne took on a lot of editing work to complement her own lively writing, and we had such a healthy working relationship. Looking fondly through our emails, I'm amazed how many from her are titled 'thanks': she always responded to copy, which is sadly rather rare in the business. In fact we agreed between us that one should always tell someone if a piece or a performance has had an effect (I'm still harping on that theme).

We also shared a few pre-performance talks - she was quite a forceful interviewer - and a panel discussion at the end of the momentous Prokofiev celebrations at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, in 2003. How it makes my heart ache to look at the below picture and to realise that of the four personalities featured only Prokofiev's composer-grandson Gabriel is still with us. That, of course, is Ted Downes with Noelle Mann to his left, a lovely shot of both of them.


And here's the whole line-up, since Fiona McKnight of the Prokofiev Archive sent these pics over on request. Also in the 'cast' are Sasha Ivashkin at the end of the table, David Fanning to my right and my hero Michael Kennedy on my left.


Happy memories, but now a great sadness. There are some farewells, like the glorious Westminster Abbey thanksgiving for Joan Sutherland on Tuesday, where you can't feel too regretful because an existence has had its natural span. Lynne's and Noelle's hadn't, though both lived full lives. My thoughts to Gerald Larner.

Peter Hofmann: off to Valhalla

Yes, he was a very 70s/80s kind of crossover guy with a spectacular mullet (the LP above, by the way, with the then Mrs H, is rather good), and the voice wore out quickly under heldentenor strain but, gosh, was Peter Hofmann handsome of form and voice as Siegmund in the revelatory Chereau production of Wagner's Ring at Bayreuth. He died earlier this week, at the very untimely age of 66, and if there's a hall for heroes out there, he'll be part of it.

Vivid memories flooded back of how I came to know the Ring, an act a week on television, as a student in early 1980s Edinburgh. How we used to look forward to the next instalment of our operatic soap, as did over a million others. I remember being so worked up after Dame Gwyneth's curses as Brunnhilde in Act 2 of Gotterdammerung that I had to run around the New Town block a couple of times afterwards (ah, youth!) And there was the revelation that, after tricksy Rheingold, Act 1 of Walkure contained the most passionate love music ever. Not sure if I'd heard Jessye Norman and then Linda Esther Gray sing Sieglinde in concert at the Usher Hall by then, but Chereau's Ring was the full dramatic thing, and how electric seemed the connection between Jeanine Altmeyer and Hofmann. Darn it, they even looked like brother and sister with their pleading close-together eyes.

Alas, YouTube only has the two set-pieces and not the magnificent pulling of the sword from the tree. So probably the best choice is the reaction of Hofmann's life-devoted hero to the death-announcement of Jones's Brunnhilde in Act 2.



While we're on the subject of commemorations, I should say that yesterday did not pass unobserved; nice young people were out in force selling AIDS ribbons for the Terence Higgins Trust. Will has several poignant connections to make on his blog.


I'll just leave it at a nasty piece of negativity: the award for Shit of the Year must be shared equally between Cardinal Bertone ('I have been told recently that there is a relationship between homosexuality and paedophilia. That is true. That is the problem', April 2010) and Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard, the head of the Belgian church, for his published remark that AIDS was 'a sort of inherent justice' for a promiscuous lifestyle. Typically, it was his spokesman, describing him as a motorist driving the wrong way when everyone else is travelling in the opposite direction, who resigned; as far as I know the Archbishop is still squatting toad-like in his powerful position. Only in the Catholic Church...

And a reminder that the memorial concert for our dear Noelle Mann takes place next Wednesday in the Queen Elizabeth Hall: a fabulous programme, including perhaps the greatest living interpreter of Prokofiev's Sixth Piano Sonata, Dmitry Alexeev, reprising his 2003 performance and Goldsmiths forces tackling the colossal Semero Ikh cantata. I'll be singing in the choir for the two Russian liturgical pieces, remembering Kalina days with Noelle in charge. Further details here on the Arts Desk, with links to booking. There's also a gathering at Deptford Town Hall the following evening to remember Noelle in words.

Prince Andrey greets the Spring

As I left Noelle after what turned out to be our last meeting at the end of February and said goodbye to her husband Chris at the edge of Greenwich Park, I was struck by a gnarled old tree (a Spanish chestnut, I think) looking out over London from the top of the hill*.


I snapped it without any thought for a telling link. But as I walked up the other side of the park yesterday towards the Church of Our Ladye Star of the Sea for Noelle's funeral service, I couldn't help remembering how bitterly cold, if intermittently bright and promising, it had been on that late winter morning, and how green and lush now on a not quite balmy May day.




And then I knew what it all reminded me of: Prince Andrey Bolkonsky in Part Three of Tolstoy's War and Peace twice noting an oak on his estate . Here's what the oak tree tells him on his first visit:

'Spring and love and happiness!' this oak seemed to say. 'Are you not weary of the same stupid, meaningless tale? Always the same old delusion! There is no spring, no sun, no happiness! Look at those strangled, lifeless fir-trees, everlastingly the same; and look at me too, sticking out broken excoriated fingers, from my back and my sides, where they grew. Just as they grew; here I stand, and I have no faith in your hopes and illusions'.

And then again in early June, after his visit to the Rostovs at Otradnoye and his first glimpse of Natasha:

The old oak, quite transfigured, spread out a canopy of dark, sappy green, and seemed to swoon and sway in the rays of the evening sun. There was nothing now to be seen of knotted fingers and scars, of old doubts and sorrows. Through the rough, century-old bark, even where there were no twigs, leaves had sprouted, so juicy, so young that it was hard to believe that aged veteran had borne them.

'Yes, it is the same oak', though Prince Andrey, and all at once he was seized by an irrational, spring-like feeling of joy and renewal. All the best moments of his life of a sudden rose to his memory.

Much of this is cleverly condensed by Prokofiev and his new love Mira Mendelson in the first scene of his operatic War and Peace. Hvorostovsky's Andrey will certainly do to express the sentiments, though as this is a dimly filmed Tokyo performance, the subtitles, I'm afraid, are in Japanese, and the lovely opening theme, drawn from Prokofiev's abandoned incidental music for a stage adaptation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, has its wings clipped.



Well, as Tolstoy and Prokofiev knew only too well, such feelings don't last; joy and sorrow merely alternate. Although Noelle's funeral service, which turned out to my surprise to include a full Catholic eucharist, couldn't have been more elegantly organised - and of course our dear friend had a hand in the arrangements herself - it did prove more emotionally draining than I'd anticipated.


Wonderful to hear recordings of Noelle conducting the choir in which I once sang, the Kalina, and the Goldsmiths Chamber Choir in Russian ecclesiastical music by Arkhangelsky, Chesnokov and Kastalsky (we had the basses and the lingo, GCC a much surer sense of tuning and brighter sopranos). Deeply stirring, too, to hear Chris and son Tom deliver eulogies. Afterwards some of us sat to hear through to the end the Borodin Quartet's performance of the bittersweet slow movement from Borodin's Second String Quartet.

Wish I could have stayed on for the reception, since I'd fondly glimpsed old faces from Goldsmiths and didn't have time to talk - foolishly, perhaps, I was off to teach my Meistersinger class. But Noelle, with her motto of constant activity, would have approved of that. Also I thought I might have been unwise in clinging to an evening arrangement to see Khrzhanovsky's Brodsky fantasia-film A Room and a Half, but that turned out to be exactly the right sort of beatific masterpiece. More on it soon.

Oh, and if anyone who couldn't attend would like me to send them an order of service, I took five extra copies, so do let me know.

*Chris, on seeing this, told me that it was Noelle's favourite tree. Spooky, no?

Farewell, Noëlle

My dear, inspiring, vivacious, combative and energetic friend Noëlle Mann, doyenne of Prokofiev events and studies in recent years, died peacefully at home yesterday with her husband Chris holding her hand. There they are above. Astonishingly, I took that photo only two months ago, when Noëlle was already in extreme pain from the cancer she'd borne unknowingly for about eight years and with honesty during the shorter time she had to consciously manage it.

We realised I might not see her again, though I very much wanted to; despite her fatigue, she talked with her usual clarity and determination about tying up Prokofievian loose ends, trying to think of anyone she hadn't contacted on the organisational front, and very much wanting to know what was going on in the world. Frankly, I was expecting to be upset by how she'd changed, but she looked very much her old animated self, and the eyes had all their characteristic inquisitive sparkle. It was, paradoxically, an inspiring visit.

I first met Noëlle when I was about to embark on at least the background work for my book and she had just launched the Prokofiev Archive at Goldsmiths College (don't ask me which year that was). I liked her directness and her immediately engaging warmth - though I have to say that there were times in the early stages, as in any passionate friendship, where we might have hit a reef, since she could certainly give offence, and I was all too ready to take it. Once we'd overcome that, she enriched my life in so many ways: as conductor of the Kalina Choir, which I promptly joined and where I also met my Russian teacher, Joan Smith; as instigator of great confluences like the massive anniversary celebrations in Manchester in 2003; as editor of Three Oranges, a composer journal way above the usual standards, invaluable in the furthering of Prokofiev studies; and simply as a good friend, keeping me company during my big year of research at the Archive, coming to dine here with the ever-supportive and involved Chris and holding two big summery birthday parties in the garden of her son's house near Blackheath.

Later gatherings were rather valedictory, as she retired from Goldsmiths College, where she loved her students and they her, and withdrew from the Archive, handing over to the dependable and immensely likeable Fiona McKnight (it says much for Noëlle that she won undying loyalty from the people she needed around her). The gathering before the Barbican premiere of the Mark Morris/Simon Morrison 'original' Romeo and Juliet was huge fun, but retrospectively tinged with sadness: not only Noëlle but also her close friends Ted and Joan Downes, whose assisted suicide came as such a cruel shock to her, are no longer with us. But here she is on that occasion, beaming as ever with the invite for this Serge Prokofiev Foundation 25th anniversary bash, designed by the also-pictured Serge Junior, son of Sviatoslav and grandson of the composer.


As I told Chris this morning and seemed to startle him in what seemed to be a positive way, she came into my mind several times yesterday because it was - officially at least, though room for doubt exists - Prokofiev's birthday. Knowing that the end was close, I was thinking it would be rather grand if she could manage to take her leave on 23 April. And she did. Life without such a huge personality won't be the same, but now I just have to make more headway with that second volume, which will of course be dedicated to Noëlle.

I should have added when I first wrote this that my thoughts go not only to Chris but also to Julia and Tom and their families, who brought Noelle a lot of joy in recent years. There's a photo Noëlle showed me on our last visit of her with little Lina which is one of the loveliest I've ever seen.

Finally, an optional homage, encouraged by Serge's poetry below. I'd been sending Noëlle and Chris CDs of music I thought might provide some gentle support, and that helped me rediscover the wonderful Poulenc songs disc which I excerpted some way below. I think our grande dame bien-aimee would like the bittersweet levity of another great lady, Felicity Lott, in 'Les chemins d'amour'. Yours to take or leave, as you wish (though if you take it, it's best viewed fullscreen by clicking and going to the YouTube format). It's helped me to shed a few fond tears.