Ten

Help - I just can't stop being blitzed. Writing this is something of the breather I need after the hammerblow of the second-act denouement in MacMillan's The Sacrifice, which in the WNO performance soon to be released by Chandos is just as unbearable as it was in the theatre when I didn't know what was coming; must get on with score-following Act Three and write the note, but it's heavy stuff. And though since the Leipzig Gewandhaus/Chailly Prom of Mahler 10 I tried two mornings of meditative silence followed by late Strauss - also a Leipzig performance, of the Second Horn Concerto with Hermann Baumann - the dark end of Great Art will insist on coming back to bite me. Never mind, there's a catharsis of sorts to come in The Sacrifice.

As there was on Monday evening, but still, I didn't sleep well afterwards and that Mahler 10 has been back to haunt me ever since. So let's just try some objectivity. I don't intend to spend long on the work itself; the clear and noble aims of Deryck Cooke in his essentially unsurpassable edition say it all (and are quoted at the head of the relevant entry over on Entartete Musik). The programme note by David Matthews, who worked on further revisions of the score with his brother Colin, further amplifies the honourable intent.

As I tried discreetly to intimate in my own LSO note on the Adagio only, also reproduced in the LSO Live recording of Gergiev's Barbican performance, I just don't understand those conductors - and there are great 'uns in their ranks, including Abbado and formerly Bernstein - who won't go beyond what the composer actually scored in full. That usually means just the Adagio, though Mahler also completed the first 28 bars of the weird and, in Chailly's performance, riveting central Purgatorio movement, and left a full-score sketch of the first scherzo. The Adagio's counterpart in the finale is so much bigger and more multi-dimensional that I can't imagine life without it. Here's Mahler's remarkable gravestone in Grinzing Cemetery, which we visited three years ago.


Alma and her daughter Manon, the 'angel' of Berg's Violin Concerto and daughter of Alma's subsequent marriage to her lover of 1910 Walter Gropius, are buried nearby, but maybe I'll save the latter image when the time comes to talk of another masterpiece. More relevant, perhaps, is the Schoenberg painting of the Grinzing funeral, which I was surprised to come across, probably on the same Vienna visit, in a marvellous exhibition at this other great man's museum:


Do I think that Mahler would have changed a lot in his short score? Of course: there are a couple of climaxes, maybe, too many in both scherzos, and if I were Mahler I'd have crossed out the slow music's struggle to make itself heard in the middle of the finale's central inferno so that its return is all the more powerful. But I'm not, and God knows he must have had his reasons.

And Chailly's interpretation? I have absolutely no doubt that he lives the experience in every fibre even more than he did when the Berlin Radio SO performance illustrated above was first issued (with Schoenberg's full-strings Verklarte Nacht) 23 years ago. I do still think, incidentally, that though it might be time for his recorded second thoughts, Chailly gets the 'second' Berlin orchestra's strings to do the most astonishing leap of love at the end of any interpretation I've heard.


I was astonished to see some folk complaining that he makes Mahler sound like Puccini - as if Puccini were in any way second rate as a master of the orchestra (he isn't, whatever your feelings about his operatic subject matter). In any case, it seems that Italians with their bel canto tradition succeed in Mahler, as in Tchaikovsky, precisely because it needs to sing: that's certainly the case with Abbado, Muti and Pappano (the latter two, admittedly, I've only heard in Tchaik, but I'd eagerly listen to Pappano's Mahler).

Is the Leipzig orchestra right for the job? Its strings are so innately, and rather introspectively, cultured, if by no means as reticent and wiry as they were in the Masur era, that I wondered if they could reach out to the Viennese heartsurges. I think they did, though I found the violas at the beginning a little poker-faced. And they didn't always follow Chailly through the multiple gear-changes of the first scherzo, where tensions ease into ecstatic if slightly manic joy.

Sure, the trumpets split a few notes - who wouldn't - but their sound was chillingly penetrating. Less so, perhaps, the horns, especially as compared to the Dresdeners and the RPO (yes, indeed) earlier this season. I wonder if the crucial flute solo emerging out of the darkness in the finale wasn't a little flat - or was that just to sound wan and lost to begin with?

Anyway, to the most controversial stroke added to the Matthews brothers' further work on Cooke: the anacrusis (can one call it grace noting?) to the big fireman's-drum thwack at the end of the second scherzo and, ever more apocalyptically, throughout the finale: da-der-duum, one might best describe it. I thought it added terror; Jill, my companion in the Arena, thought it was Mahler's faltering heartbeat (viz the opening of the Ninth). I would, as I wrote in a message to Gavin, like to know the reasoning - did drums at firemen's funerals play upbeats like this, perhaps? - but at a deeper, emotional level it more than did its work. And even though I think I know the finale pretty well by now since Rattle's live and recorded championship (not to mention the - to me - very disapointing VPO/Harding version and the rather absurd completions by others, not a patch on Cooke, I don't think), it still staggered me how the great endless melody of Mahler's metaphysical love for Alma kept on unfolding. The silence at the end said it all, and what a miracle given the size of a packed Albert Hall.

Shoes ripping like velcro on the sticky arena floor and restless newcomers had made it harder to focus on the Mendelssohn First Piano Concerto in the first half. But I could tell that young Palestinian Israeli Saleem Abboud Ashkar drew an effortlessly wide-ranging rainbow of colours from the keyboard. Here's a photo by Monika Rittershaus of the thoughtful young Christian from Nazareth, whose eloquent words to Helen Wallace I very much enjoyed reading in the programme.


I could also tell from what little attention I was able to give that you don't get much more authentic than the noble Leipzig timbre in the slow movement. Still, I think I'd prefer my Mendelssohn in more intimate surroundings (as I had the Second Concerto with Schiff in Oxford).

The Germans' enterprising week of Leipzig celebrations, marking chiefly the first peaceful uprisings 20 years ago that triggered the fall of the Berlin Wall and in which Masur's impassioned speech played a crucial part, continued last night at the German ambassador's residence in Belgrave Square. There was too much of a crush to see the exhibition, of striking work by Leipzig's No. 1 artist Neo Rauch, well enough (I'd like to go back), but we did grab prime seats in the L-shaped ballroom for the Gewandhaus konzertmeister Frank-Michael Erben in a Hauskonzert with a lady I presume to be his mother, Professor Mathilde Erben. Following a very moving speech - moving because he was clearly moved himself - by the Mayor of Leipzig, Erben gave a seemingly effortless and upper-register-sweet performance of Mendelssohn's F major Sonata, and proved just at home in unflashy but mostly pitch-perfect and stylishly rubatoed Kreisler and Sarasate showpieces (with the Meditation from Massenet's Thais as an encore). He was duly feted by the German ambassador and Mrs. Christiane Boomgaarden. The putative Mutti-Professor can just be glimpsed between them.


I spoke to Erben very briefly afterwards and he said, yes, the Proms are always very special. Good news: the Gewandhaus have/has just signed a contract for a Barbican residency. They're certainly quite unlike any other great orchestra in their silky refinement.

Harkada intermezzo

While I pick myself up off the floor after the Leipzig Gewandhaus/Chailly Mahler 10 Prom - metaphorically, of course, since I stood in the Arena throughout, towards the end with tears well-nigh uncontrollably streaming - and collect my thoughts, I think we need a little boisterous light relief. So this minute-and-a-half film, fuzzy I know but capturing a certain spirit, allows me once again to say mazel tov to Susannah and Jamie, whose wedding I had the rare joy of attending (and acting as an unqualified humanist 'celebrant' for) on Saturday.

There were plenty of highlights: the accordionist who preceded the bride down the open-air aisle and accompanied her in a very touching 'La vie en rose' sung to the groom, the ensuing al fresco fun in St James's Park and the great beauty of the ICA's upstairs rooms for the rest of the reception. But what swept me away was the exuberance of the Israeli dancing or harkada hour and a half.

Above is the whirl in which the bride and groom hold a hanky high above the romping guests. Later most of us joined some rather more strictly choreographed routines with an expert, very tenacious caller. I haven't sweated so much in ages, and I lost the drift of the most complicated pattern, but boy, did it feel good afterwards. If only the classes weren't on the other side of London to us. For those near Golders Green - I once lived there, and loved it - take a look at the Strictly Israeli Dancing website and go along for a thorough workout. As they say, it's got to be more fun than the gym, and everyone's welcome.

All this was in marked contrast to the emotional wear and tear of the Mahler, and of the unbearably tense and aggressive wedding in James MacMillan's masterpiece of an opera, The Sacrifice. I'm steeped in it today as J MacM honoured me by asking if I'd write the notes for the impending Chandos release.

In the meantime, for more on the Mahler before tomorrow, read Gavin Plumley's Entartete Musik site. I'll only add for now that I agree with just about everything he has to say.

Along the road to learn...

...John Patrick Norman McHennessy, the boy who was always late, met with seemingly insuperable obstacles and a rewarding denouement. I don't think it's giving too much away to say that the figures dangling above provide the punchline, which made me laugh out loud when I got to that point in this little masterpiece.


The figures are suspended from the ceiling of the Dovecot, a splendid conversion of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary Baths which I remember so well in their original incarnation. Gorilla and schoolmaster form one centrepiece of an alas now concluded exhibition which I loved to bits, Mr Gumpy and other outings - Celebrating 50 years of John Burningham's work. This is the other, a canvas of the dancing religious leaders from Whadayamean, beneath which I'm sitting on the comfy sofa kindly proffered as a resting-place at the exhibition's mid-point and waiting to read select items in the library of books equally thoughtfully provided.


It was the only art-outing of our flying visit to the Edinburgh Festival - unless you count two minutes whizzing irritatedly around the late Eva Hesse's crumpled 'test-pieces' at the Fruitmarket Gallery before heading for the ace cafe. The Spanish spectacular Ruth convinced us to give a miss, and Burningham we only discovered because our hostess Caroline recommended that we had a look at what had been done at the Dovecot, which is primarily a home for weaving in an attempt to make Edinburgh even more of a crafts city than it was before.

Did I know Burningham's work before? Only vaguely - I think I may have been shown Avocado Baby, the charming tale based on Burningham's own experience of rearing an eczema-prone child on avocados and finding it gave her extraordinary strength (the baby in the book hurls burglars downstairs). Yet like other artists whose work is primarily illustrative - Bawden, Ravilious, Sendak - Burningham's art deserves setting apart on wallspace in an exhibition, here all around the upper gallery of the weaving centre.

In the 1960s he did some striking posters for London Transport, kicking off his love of landscape which he says he could always keep complex while the figures and their narrative became simpler in his children's books. Apparently he was feted for illustrating Ian Fleming's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - his own flying car has as much idiosyncrasy as the one in the very different film (and forgive the flash, but it adds an Icarus-near-the-sun quality, don't you think) -


but also created, with his own pithy prose, Borka the goose with no feathers, Trubloff the balalaika-playing mouse, Canonball Simp the circus dog and Mr Gumpy among many. I reckon Troubloff especially, and probably several others, would make the perfect subject for a children's opera along the lines of those the Finns have been commissioning as inspired by Mauri Kunnas's dog-oriented epics (I'm thinking about this a lot because I've at long last been able to write up my trip to Savonlinna for the BBC Music Magazine).

Now Jonathan Cape have done Burningham proud with a beautifully-presented monograph (text, again, by Burningham himself in the form of autobiography).


I took delivery of a copy today and I reckon it's one of the few big picture books where I'll devour every word as well as every image. Hearty congratulations on your 50 fabulous (in the original sense) years, Mr. Burningham! I wish I'd got to know you earlier.

Why, I wonder, has this entry called up a Google ad for 'one tip of [sic] a flat belly'? Could Avocado Baby have summoned it? Others have been more pertinent...

George Crumb's vasty deep

They may look like plankton at the bottom of the ocean, but it's only the inescapable Albert Hall acoustic mushrooms bathed in a blue light for Friday's Late Night Prom, as was the entire platform for a performance of George Crumb's Vox balaenae (Voice of the Whale). More light and context, please:


Vox balaenae was the only one of the American genius's works I'd heard live before, in an Aldeburgh Church performance which made Thomas Ades's Trio pale by comparison. An electric flute makes whale noises, complemented by electric cello and an amplified piano which acts as bedrock. A 'sea-nocturne' provides the benediction and coming-together. And this cathartic final-blessing effect was equally true of the two other Crumb pieces in the Prom. All three were written between 1969 and 1971. Stargazer George is 80 this year, and has never believed in churning it out. 'I don't think it's a good thing to create less than good music in a world that's full of a lot of indifferent music', he says. How wise. Here he is in the first of his wonderyears, 1967, posing with the score of his Pulitzer Prize-winner (photo courtesy of the Crumb family via the BBC):


This one's more recent, of GC standing in what looks to me like a Danish town, though I may be wrong (any more information about this and whom to credit gratefully received):


First at the late night Prom we had Night of the Four Moons. Our friend the majestic Hilary Summers, that rare bird the true contralto, ranged wide in the Lorca settings before joining Nash Ensemble flautist Philippa Davies, banjo player Steve Smith and vibraphonist Chris Brannick somewhere in the recesses of the Albert Hall for the simplest of Berceuses while that best of cellists Paul Watkins was left onstage to sound what Crumb calls the 'music of the spheres'. Very much of the essence, and how these wonderful soloists, two of them joined by the quiet mastery of Ian Brown in the whale music, honoured the careful writing Crumb allocates to each.

Equally moving was the last of more Lorca settings in Ancient Voices of Children, conducted along with Four Moons by Diego Masson. Another great soloist to add to the mix, oboist Gareth Hulse; another extraordinary vocalist, Claire Booth, working wonders on the Spanish; and even the soprano deputed to take the role of a treble, Amy Howarth, did a great job. There weren't many of us in the hall to succumb to the spell, but succumb I think we all did. Don't miss the BBC Symphony's Crumb 'Total Immersion' day at the Barbican on 5 December.

Sensitive connections of the Crumb song-cycles to Mahler's Kindertotenlieder in the evening's earlier Prom would have been more potent if only Matthias Goerne hadn't been such a bitter disappointment, to me at any rate. I was expecting tear-jerking, hallowed wonders from the baritone whose German songs discs (if not his rather soft-edged Wozzeck) had impressed me so much.

But what did we get? Occluded tone, faulty technique mirrored in bizarre stage swaying as awkward as Bostridge's, and as in his case hampering rather than assisting expression. The first dismay came with how in the first song he failed to take that ineffable phrase 'Als sei kein Ungluck die Nacht gescheh'n' and its counterparts over the top. I can't help hearing La Baker in this, but I did just turn back to Quasthoff to hear how it ought to work in a man's voice. And I don't care, this is my blog and not a newspaper, so I can say what I like and you can think it partisan or objective as you please: J's performance in Trebbio a couple of years ago, albeit with piano accompaniment by the inestimable Kurt Ryz, was a hundred times better than Goerne's. On Friday night I sat down in the arena halfway through and only tuned in again when the horns and the trombones spread balm at the very end.

Let's face it, though, this Prom belonged to Jonathan Nott and the extraordinary results he drew from the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra. I didn't need to raise questions of the EUYO's age in the last blog entry, nor do I with the GMYO. It still has invaluabe output from its founder, our adored Claudio Abbado, and in the October issue of the BBC Music Magazine you'll find I've just sprinkled five stars over every category for their filmed concert together of Mahler's Fourth Symphony and Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande.


Abbado, I bet, would be jolly proud of Nott's work if he tuned in for the televised prom or the Radio 3 broadcast (as he still can, of course, for the next six days). Ligeti's Atmospheres, haloed in the capricious colosseum, was as compelling a performance as any I've heard in this Proms season, even if it didn't segue into the Mahler as Jurowski's performance last year did into the bassoon solo of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Some of us were a little too discombobulated by Goerne to enter the world of Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces, but those too the GMYO played as to the manner born, with superb solos in the second movement.


What, for me, signalled that Nott is up there among the dense constellation of young and youngish conductors currently dazzling us was his no-foot-wrong interpretation of Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra. The following-through and rounding-off of phrases in his clear direction, a trait he shares with Jurowski, negotiated all the potential difficulties. And there were sounds I've never heard from any orchestra live in this work: the specific tone of the double-basses in the twelve-note fugue representing science's hampering effect, the fire-spitting of its rapid counterpart, the sheer joy in a tuning-perfect waltz solo from leader Carolina Kurkowski Perez. OK, so the GMYO violins soaring in ecstasy can't quite mimic the Berlin Phil, but still, Nott's phrasing helped them enormously.

The Albert Hall once again played its luminous part in reminding us that this is an astonishing piece for any age, but especially for the 1890s when it first hit the world; little wonder if the young Bartok firmed up his composing resolve after hearing a performance.

Planets revolve around Grafenegg

Or they did on a slightly humid, storm-threatening summer night near the Danube, when the European Union Youth Orchestra and Andrew Litton came to the oaky estate and its glitzy newish open auditorium to show the Austrians that Elgar, if not Holst, is well up to the mark of Bruckner and Mahler. How long ago it seems, now that autumn advances, and in a way it is; I apologise for the delay, but half-decent photos have only just arrived from the EUYO to complement the very few I took.

And why the Copernicus? Because this is the International Year of Astronomy, which has brought us the Proms' well-meaning resuscitation of such one-day butterflies as Casken's Orion over Farne (Vivier's Orion, as Colin Dunn or Dnnu, whatever he thinks he's called, helpfully amplified in a message below, was much more interesting). So, a little further up the Danube, the overwhelmingly beautiful baroque library of Melk Abbey


was hosting a fascinating exhibition of 16th and 17th century astronomical treatises, a page of one of which I take the liberty of reproducing above. The temporary display enhanced the gorgeous globes symmetrically placed on either side.


We'd never have got to see Melk had it not been for a rainy Sunday morning, scuppering Tommi and Martha's idea of packing us all into their little motor boat and showing us that treasurable region of the Wachau from mid-Donau range. So we used the ubiquitous car instead, which did mean that we had quality time admiring the 14th century statues of Christ and the twelve apostles below the organ at the Pfarrkirche, Spitz,


observing its dappled tower from above the village,


discovering a naive and tiny medieval Pieta in another Pfarrkirche magically located atop lovable Weissenkirchen


and hitting the justifiably (but not, on an August Sunday afternoon, overly) touristic gem of Durnstein in the clearing skies of late afternoon. The walk along the Danube past the blue baroque tower of the Stiftskirche - occasioning memories of Rastrelli in St. Petersburg - brought real peace to the end of a hectic day.



But I jump ahead. Our Danube weekend began at Krems. It has one of the best cake shops in Austria (just by the station, curiously), three fine churches, hugely impressive 16th century sgraffito on a big house and quaint old streets winding up the hill to vineyards with great views over to the monastery of Stift Gottweig on the other side of the river
.

Yet I shouldn't omit to mention that the problems of the modern Austria (and, boy, they have a few) had only just intruded. Earlier that week in Krems a boy in his early teens had been shot dead by the police in a dramatic case of authoritarian over-reaction, and Austria was divided over whether the police - and the ones I met in Krems struck me as deeply unpleasant, probably very much on the defensive - had any justification. There were youth protests in every town, and several days later, looking across the mini-river from Vienna's Stadtpark, I caught this sign of the times ('Polizei ermordet 14-jahrigen - kein vergeben, kein vergessen'):


Well, trouble or not, I liked Krems, if not its rather heavy (in more ways than one) populace. But the best was to come that evening. With an hour and a half to spare before the concert, we drove just beyond Grafenegg up the gently vineyarded slopes to Feuersbunn am Wagram, where T and M were seeking out one of their beloved Heurigen. We found the only one open at the end of the local Kellergasse. Here our dear Viennese friends model with a characteristic spread.


Every village in the region has a Kellergasse, a long street just outside the centre lined with the cellars of the local wine producers. Feuersbrunn's is one of the largest, boasting over 250 cellars.


The owner of the Heuriger - where we consumed, as you can see and as is the rule in granting a licence for these summer drink-and-eateries, cold meats and cheese with our wine and grape juice - was happy to take us to his cellar. The temperatures plummeted as we descended and furtively wandered mysterious dank caverns lined with barrels


as well as bottles covered in vile black fungus known as kellerpilz.


Shall I be obliquely unsound and say this brought to mind all sorts of horrors? And need I say more than reproduce what I read as a cracking line in Sasha Baron Cohen's Bruno - more on the Austrians and that in my last mittelEuropean blog entry to come - and laughed out loud: 'I want to live the Austrian dream - to find a partner, buy a cellar and raise a family'.

Anyway, like Pelleas, I was glad to come out into the sunshine, and down the slope we drove to Grafenegg. Our happy heuriger hour left us little time to examine the mock-Gothic castle, so we headed straight for the impressive Wolkenturm where later in the season the VPO, OAE, LSO and Budapest Festival Orchestra were due to appear. Here an EUYO double bassist and horn player move towards it in the first of two photographs by Claudia Prieler


We took our seats next to the assembled 'VIP's and the ever-impressive doyenne of the EUYO, Joy Bryer, who hosted amiable interval drinks in the park. I can just make out Martha standing in red and the backs of our other three heads near the bottom right.


And here's one by me of the crowd with the moody skies and folly-castle as backdrop.


Litton worked with Kim Sargeant of the EUYO to provide a thoughtful theme of England-meets-Italy-and-the-Universe programme. Very much the heart of it was Elgar's In the South to follow Walton's Scapino Overture in the first part. For all the impact of the Wolkenturm's design, the sound still isn't ideal: woodwind don't project enough, percussion, celesta and harps maybe a bit too much. Take note, Charles Hazlewood, in promoting outdoor events, that big orchestras NEED a warm acoustic, however lovely it is to enjoy music al fresco.

Still, Litton projected great romantic warmth in the Elgar. It was surprisingly broad, a long way from Elgar's own interpretation, but also made much the deepest impact of the evening, with the 'Fanny Moglio' tune on the clarinets and the gorgeous 'canto popolare' of the solo viola meltingly beautiful. During the twilight mood between boisterous Edwardians in Alassio and tramping ancient Romans, a flock of geese soared vocally overhead, ducks quacked in the lake and the threatening sky turned pink.

For The Planets, Venus obligingly shone during her musical message of peace. Then the skies clouded over again before Neptune, which brought a twinge of disappointment until an orange harvest moon rose between the trees to the left of the auditorium. Of that disappointment there was then a far greater twinge, more a grimace, at the unmagical singing of the Wiener Singakadamie ladies - stray voices, dodgy tuning, so that one was glad when the door was closed (by Kim) ever so artistically on them at the end. Litton's interpretation could have done with more focused fire, I thought, and my mind wandered as it had not in the Elgar. Might have been Mrs. Bryer's champagne.

Memories returned, too, of a more flashing, iridescent Planets from Martyn Brabbins and the BBCSO at last year's Proms, the day we learned of Tod Handley's death. That was a great tripartite challenge which worked; I'm so glad I experienced the Xenakis Pleiades with its attendant riot then, and sorry I missed this year's comparable happening on Wednesday. But I did get to the latest Proms triple whammy last night. Not sure the programme would have lured me, but of course Vladimir Jurowski conducting his London Philharmonic did, and I guess the interconnectedness of the programme was mostly his idea.

It all came together when I was least expecting it, in Zimmermann's Dialoge, a new experience to set alongside last year's Pleiades. Out of the seeming randomness, brilliantly executed by Jurowski in awesome, technicolor teamwork with live-wire pianists Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich, came nightmarish quotations of Debussy's Jeux - earlier brought into sharper than usual focus alongside Ibert's outrageously camp Bacchanale - and a Mozart piano concerto (Aimard and Stefanovich had just played the K448 Sonata for two pianos, not with Argerich's fantasy, inevitably, nor the aristocratic poise of Britten and Richter, but the handful of quirks in the piece showed up well). Though the whole thing was shown on BBC4, and should be available online, no photographer was there for the BBC, so I'll have to make do with all three artists in accustomed publicity shots.




Those entails credits. Vladimir, I am asked to note, was 'dressed by Ermenegildo Zegna', which seems unlike him but no doubt publicity had its own ideas, and photographed by Sheila Rock; the photo of Tamara Stefanovich is by Manfred Eisler; and Guy Vivien placed Pierre-Laurent Aimard in appropriate context.

Back to the Zimmermann, I guessed, too, that the third reference, to the 'Veni creator' chant by a standing trombonist, would find its crown in the chorale of the Brahms First Symphony, and that point undoubtedly came with the three trombones between horn solo and big tune in the finale. Jurowski promised when I interviewed him for the September issue of the BBC Music Magazine that, once he turned to Masur's romantic repertoire with the LPO, they would all be looking at it in a new light, and this was truly the case.

Brought up on Furtwangler, I expected perhaps more space to drive home the development climaxes of the outer movements, but this was lithe and muscled throughout. Maybe the approach would be better suited to the RFH than the diffusing effect of the Albert Hall, but still, you had to respect it. The third movement came as a rather fast and embattled prelude to the ultimate drama. If all this needed some intellectual, if not emotional, adjustment, like Jurowski's radical Tchaikovsky Pathetique last season, the slow movement took wing immediately as Jurowski floated the soul of that endless, across-the-barline song which for me is Brahms's greatest gift. This was the orchestral equivalent of the Argerich experience. Perfect rubato, ineffable control, all of it embodied in the great man's clear and expressive conducting style. If he doesn't go to Berlin after Rattle - who, for me, is a great colourist, programmer and animateur but has nothing like Jurowski's sense of the long line - I'll eat my hat. Unless, of course, he doesn't want to, which would be typical. After all, it would be very hard to leave an orchestra with whom you can conduct Tristan and Falstaff at Glyndebourne before going on to Brahms, Mahler and Schnittke...

The next entry will be shorter, I promise.

Bourne at the rainbow's end

Piling off the bus from Hawick, where we'd spent twelve hours with the Clough family at the end of a long Borders weekend, our first Edinburgh destination was the Traverse Theatre, and a real pot of gold, the first part of A Life in Three Acts, in which Bette Bourne talks to Mark Ravenhill about his extraordinary life.

I'd only been dimly aware of Bourne's pioneering 'queer theatre company' Bloolips , and I don't think I'd seen him on stage until his astonishing performance as the Nurse in the previous (and by all accounts better) Globe Romeo and Juliet. What was so revelatory about the characterisation then was that, although obviously en travesti, he eschewed all camp mannerisms and mugging. His Nurse was far and away the most real personage in the play.

So reading an enthusiastic review over breakfast in Chapelgill, Broughton, we determined to catch at least part of this modest trilogy. Ravenhill has written eloquently of the importance both of memory - he 'lost' three weeks of his life after a major epileptic seizure - and of the vital historic part Bourne and co have played in making our lives easier. Here's la Bourne with Ravenhill as photographed by David Gwinnutt for the Traverse.


Bourne is funny, touching, transfixing - his confidential way of turning to individuals in the audience is the best kind of theatre - and of course ad libs as the fancy takes him. We, for example, were treated to three jokes told by drag queens in the Vauxhall Tavern. One's clean fun, one's naughty, one's overtly obscene, so I'll go for the one in the middle. 'My first husband was a gynaecologist. He used to look at it. My second was a psychiatrist. He used to talk to it. My third was a philatelist. Ooh, I do miss 'im'.

Jokes apart, there was plenty of thoughtfulness, and Bourne also turns out to have been an impressive classical actor. We heard a recorded excerpt from a speech in Edward II, which he said was a turning point: 'that wasn't me, I was always putting on a straight role'. Act One took us through his childhood and teenage years finding out what 'gay' was up to the watershed of the first political meeting he attended at the LSE. Acts Two and Three can be caught at the Soho Theatre later this month - we'll be there.

By more serendipity (current buzz-word, sorry, there's no other), we saw the divine Bette again later that day, having left the King's Theatre precipitately. Whoever saw the Monnaie production of Monteverdi's Ritorno d'Ulisse directed by William Kentridge and thought it would make a fine centrepiece to the 2009 Edinburgh Festival must have been devoid of sight and hearing. I've seen beguiling puppetry, namely in the RSC's Shakespeare Venus and Adonis, but you need master puppeteers to give the creatures life. Here the singers who stood by their alter egos always detracted from the Thunderbirdish figures, and their techniques for the most part left a huge amount to be desired (though the Penelope, Romina Basso, was distinctive and Julian Podger warmed to Ulisse after a dodgy start as Human Frailty).

The King's was stifling, the experience enervating, so after 45 minutes of torture we sought an exit - and landed up at an alarmed security door. Had to creep back through the auditorium, found the front - and out came Bette. He'd been struck by a bad cough, but - 'oh, how I hate puppets', and agreed that the whole thing was dreary beyond words. So he graciously consented to be snapped, and very gorgeous he looks too.


The purpose of being in Edinburgh was to spend quality time with the lovely Caroline Boyle and her husband Alan in their Hanover Street flat with stunning views over the Firth of Forth and the New Town, including St Stephen's Church in the Stockbridge direction


as well as my old home in Dundas Street.


We were also there to visit Ruthie in the Gilmerton house and studio we hadn't so far seen. After a Wednesday lunch in her fair company, we headed back to the centre of town and managed a few more festival events.

As Caroline and Alan were holding a party in our honour that evening, I couldn't make the Scottish Chamber Orchestra concert in which Sir Charles Mackerras was to conduct the chorus-and-orchestra version of Haydn's Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross. So I asked if I could attend the afternoon rehearsal, and the answer was affirmative. Then we heard beloved CM was ill and wouldn't be conducting. The poignancy was reinforced by the poster in which he is the symbol of the musical festival:


Well, my thoughts were certainly with him as I got to know this restrained but for that reason all the more moving Haydn work. Garry Walker did a fine job shaping and balancing in the rehearsal. The SCO Chorus (Scottish Philharmonic Singers in my Edinburgh days) phrased the a cappella 'words' to perfection, and you couldn't have a better line-up of soloists, capped by the soaring, musically attentive Rebecca Evans with Christine Rice subduing her tones to blend appropriately. I spoke to la Evans at the end, and we both hoped and prayed that Sir Charles would be well enough to conduct her in that near-perfect McVicar production of The Turn of the Screw when it returns to the Coli in November.

There was just time before the soiree to see Trestle Theatre Company's play about Lola Montez in which Ruth's friend, flamenco guitarist Ricardo Garcia, was providing a constant musical narrative. His subtle musicianship is a joy, and he was abetted by the sexy flamenco dancer - of course the word 'sexy' is redundant in the company of 'flamenco dancer' - Frederic Gomez from Barcelona's Increpacion Danza. Ruth had previously taken this picture of them doing their stuff on the Royal Mile:


The play was a lot more entertaining, and concise, than the disappointing Max Ophuls film. Lola was splendidly taken by the actress Georgina Roberts, a lady with a vocal range of several octaves and, like Bette, very good at engaging the audience. In fact there were plenty of subversive cross-dressing parallels with the Bourne event: most of the men in Lola's life, from royalty to chancers, were vividly impersonated by Fiona Putnam, and Fred subdued his macho flamenco persona to play 'Lolita'. Here's Roberts' Lola in extremis, with Ricardo in the background:


Julie, Ricardo's partner and manager whom I hadn't seen since student days, told us there was a late-night flamenco jazz event in the main Freemasons Hall above the basement venue for Lola. So, as the party had all but dissolved by 11pm, we persuaded our hosts and one of the guests to join us, parting company on the way at George Street with the most inspirational figure of my student days, albeit never my tutor, alas, Dr. Roger Savage, who directed me in a Kurt Weill triple bill and would have supervised my ph.D if I'd got my act together. How wonderful to see him again and be animated by his only-connectedness.

The second show found adaptable Ricardo in more flamboyant mode with a percussionist, a guy on synths and Fred, mostly accompanying until he took centre stage with a thrilling demo of flamenco fused with tongue-in-cheek hip-hop. Of course the shaking buttocks in red satin, which woke J from an exhausted kip, had nothing to do with our enjoyment...

How to begin on Finnegans Wake

Make your way to the Museum Strauhof in one of Zurich's prettiest streets, the Augustinergasse. Arrive just before 7pm any Thursday, ring the bell if necessary, climb the narrow wooden staircase to the James Joyce Foundation on the top floor, and there you will no doubt be greeted by that doyen collector of Joyceana Dr. Fritz Senn. Joyce of course was in Zurich for several extended periods, not least towards the end of his life when he was working on Finnegans Wake. This photo of JJ by the Limmat comes courtesy of the Foundation's website.


But back to Augustinergasse on a Thursday evening. For the next one and a half hours you can join Dr. Senn, Joyce experts and students from various walks of life in conjecturing the meaning of no more than a couple of pages from the world's most baffling novel.

It's surely the only way to deal with Finnegans Wake, and if it sounds heavy-going, nothing could be further from the truth. For a start, reading out loud highlights its vigorous poetic prose. Joyce's playfulness is reflected in Dr. Senn's limerick-telling, the bawdy jokes of a German/Swiss gentleman well versed in the Koran and the general level of laughter around the table. Although I'm not yet a Joycean myself - this may have changed my mind - I was able to bring a little bit of my own curiosity to the discussion, namely when we got to 'Maye faye, she's la gaye, this snaky woman' and Melusine, much on my mind of late, kicked off a discussion on mermaids.

It was a warm summer evening. The trees outside the open windows rustled in the breeze and the bells of several nearby churches went crazy for a while. Afterwards I chatted to Dr. Senn and a very knowledgeable Joyce scholar, Ron Ewart, formerly (or presently still, I couldn't quite make out) of St. Gallen University. Ron told me there's a lively Joyce week every year in Trieste. Hey, couldn't that be a good way of getting to know both the city and the writer? Count me out for the Joycefest, said J, though I'll come to Trieste and do my own thing. Vedremo.

Then it was time for Dr. Senn and a student to clear up and shut the windows


and most of the party adjourned for a drink (I trust not to the former James Joyce Pub, which has been tarted up beyond recognition, we're told, and could be any fashionable bar anywhere). I couldn't join them as we had to catch the train early next morning for Vienna. And I did so want to go back. But maybe we should start up a Finnegans Wake reading group in London. Anyone like the idea? Know if there's one already, and if so, where? It's the only way to deal with this otherwise impossible masterpiece.

I shouldn't neglect to say that the Strauhof, home for various literary events, was hosting an exhibition on 'The Libretto', which you can still just catch before it closes on 6 September. Heading up the stairs earlier that Thursday to make enquiries about the famous free-for-all seminars (Ulysses on Tuesday evenings, by the way, if you're in Zurich), I hadn't been inclined to pay 10 euros for such a showing (what's to see, after all, I thought, in a libretto exhibition?) But I was arrested by Stern's wonderful designs for the original Strauss/Hofmannsthal Ariadne auf Naxos in the first floor hall - firmly on the walls, not popping out as depicted in this photo provided for the exhibition from the Freies Deutscher Hochstift/Frankfurter Goethe Haus:


So we paid our money and were rather impressed. The Strauss-Hofmannsthal section had pages of original poet-typescript-and-composer-amended libretto for Die Frau ohne Schatten, inter alia. Best of all, I've never had the chance to hear snippets from Hoffmann's Undine, as I had hoped to do for the Offenbach Contes classes at the City Lit, and there were excerpts from four scenes to listen to in the first room. All they confirmed were that Hoffmann was no Weber when it came to the other-worldly. Didn't know the premiere had enjoyed such lavish Schinkel designs, either. Here's E T A depicting himself as his alter ego Kapellmeister Kreisler with the score of Undine on the spinet (again, courtesy of the Strauhof, copyright the Staatsbibliothek Bamberg).


It brought back happy memories of my most treasured read last year, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr. I've been pursuing the next in line of Hoffmannesque succession with the very lively Penguin biography of Hans Christian Andersen by Jackie Wullschlager. A birthday present from master abridger Isabel Morgan, it can be warmly commended in turn to anyone interested in that period of European history and the arts, since Ms. Wullschlager gives such vivid background.

Gay? Bisexual? Sexually timid? A lifelong virgin to men (perhaps) and women (certainly)? Many such questions remain unanswered, though Wullschlager has Andersen's frank correspondence to underline his passionate relationships with several handsome chaps. The Jenny Lind link is ambiguous; though the Swedish nightingale could not return Andersen's affection in anything other than a sisterly fashion, he does seem to have been worked up to an erotic lather after his meetings with her. The master storyteller's singular features are well captured in this photograph by Hanfstaegel taken in July 1860:


Of course the stories are the thing, and never was a writer more autobiographical through the medium of the fairy tale. Alongside the biography I read Wullschlager's Penguin selection, translated with what for aught I can tell seems like exceptional spirit and directness by Tiina Nunnally.

The most famous tales are, of course, exquisite, above all the cruel and poignant Little Mermaid - it was my Rusalka quest which set this all off - and The Nightingale (even Stravinsky's opera gives little hint of Andersen's poetic phantasmagoria and his nature-descriptions). Later in his life, Andersen's more adult tales become very troubling: pre-Kafkaesque in The Shadow, even more nightmarish in Auntie Toothache. I'll expound no more, but urge you to read them with a mature eye for a unique literary style if, like me, your childhood was touched only by hearsay, the Danny Kaye film and those rather well-made East German-originated TV 'Tales from Europe' - I'll never forget The Snow Queen in that telling - rather than by reading the real thing.

Finally, since we're still in nymphish mode, the tragic tale of Rusalka as so superbly recounted at Glyndebourne had a now-celebrated realistic interruption the other week when the glorious Ana Maria Martinez fell into the pit and was saved by stalwart Santiago Sabino Carvalho's cello. Glyndebourne has her personal angle on the mishap here. It's been quite a time of diva disaster-transformed-into-trouperdom, what with Joyce DiD and all (now happily out of plaster, she tells us).