Brekekekex alla tedesca

They'd be more appropriate as ambient noise for Rameau's Platée than Handel's Teseo, which is what I went to Göttingen to hear. But one thing's for sure: German frogs croak and ribbet their hearts out far more than any British ones I've ever come across (if anyone can direct me to a noisy pond anywhere in my vicinity, I'd be grateful). I'll never forget the wild sounds echoing over the lakes in Dessau's shaggy park when we visited friends Lottie and Andrew there during pre-unification days, and from the perhaps slightly over-manicured water-zones of Göttingen's botanic gardens came sporadic bursts of a similarly forceful projection. I took this little film for the sound rather than the picture, but watch out for a tiny bit of frog action around the 13-second mark.



Even the blackbird seems to sing louder than ours! Anyway, this is above all for Maria-Jesus, who oddly waxed lyrical about the froggy gang-bang of my Broughton entry. It's not often you get such perfect nymphaeae in bloom with ranae to boot perching on the lily-pads or, in this case, under the flower.


The Alter Botanischer Garten provided a welcome refuge on my only, baking-hot full day's sightseeing in Göttingen. Where there's a top university, there's usually a fine botanics, and this one was planned by Albrecht von Haller shortly after the academic foundation of 1737. I'm told the staffing here has dropped radically in recent years, but it seems pretty well kept to me, and it has its shaggy zones, too, almost as wild as Dessau's. So via the gunnera


to the rose garden


where Honoré de Brabant was giving off a heavenly scent


and bees buzzed around Francofurter.


I also had a decent lunch in the Botanic's easy-going cafe, run I think by an Iranian-German, hence a good array of spicy, rosewatered tea


and cardamom coffee, both of which I sampled before hitting the best sale of cacti and associated rarities I've ever come across. I baulked at the fact that I probably wouldn't get a plant through customs. Ruefully examined the exotica that I couldn't buy before taking a look at the fern house, converted in 1910 from its original 1857 use as an orangery and recently restored to its former glory.


Then it was back into town to tick off the remaining churches and exotic housefronts. Later I hired a bike from the hotel and puffed up the hill, ostensibly in search of panoramic views down on Gottingen's towers and spires. Even though I didn't have time to find one, I did marvel at the big old trees of the Hainberg forest


and the abundant wildlife; in the early evening light deer were leaping across the path in great numbers. But I had no time for further natural wonders: Handel's Coronation Anthems and Lalande's Te Deum were summoning me to the church of St John.

Göttingen's sweethearts

The one above celebrated her 110th birthday yesterday. So it's not quite an age-old, but still a charming, tradition that students of Göttingen's Georg August University, Cambridge to Heidelberg's Oxford (or perhaps vice versa), go to the town's main square on receiving their doctorate, kiss the rather beautiful Art Nouveau Gänseliesel or Goosegirl's cheek and leave her flowers and a candle in thanksgiving. I was lucky enough to see the ritual in action, walking through town to catch the 7.55am train to Frankfurt after a happy day and a half at the Göttingen Handel Festival.


These two jolly medics, flanking three girl friends, had just gone through the motions ever so poetically (by the way, I was reminded that a first or second degree doesn't qualify you to kiss the maiden; only a doctorate will do). They hailed me, rather curious to know what anyone else was doing walking the sunny streets of Göttingen so early on a Sunday morning, we chatted and I took their photo (it felt too corny to ask them for historical re-enactment, though you can see the boys were kitted out for it). I don't even know their names, but what an echt farewell it was.

It might seem a bit forced to fanfare the other idol of the town under the 'sweetheart' label, but no doubt about it: the townsfolk love Nicholas McGegan more than ever as he comes to the end of his 20-year tenure powering the Handel Festival.



I'd come chiefly to hear him conduct Teseo in the town's ideally-sized small theatre, and indeed the orchestra was really the thing, though there were two very classy performances from Amy Freston and the flawless Robin Blaze. I also heard two fabulous events in two of the churches.

But more of that in the Arts Desk piece on Sunday. Let's just catch my not-as-good-as-the-professionals glimpse of 'Nic', as they call him, sporting his newly-pinnedVerdienstkreuz am Bande, the Cross of the Lower Saxony Order of Merit.


He's standing on the staircase of the Old Town Hall, and appropriately the furthest of the three figures on the wall to the left has 'ars longa, vita brevis' inscribed above. Although the Town Hall was built on the site of an even older one in 1270, it's gone through various modifications which do nothing more than show its consistent vitality and usefulness, including the plastering of the Great Hall in 1883, and a very fine job the artist has done, I think. The coats of arms above the main friezes are those of the Hanseatic league, to which Göttingen belonged from 1351 to 1572. Lübeck and Braunschweig have the central position, though of course the heraldry stretches further to Riga and my beloved Visby (to which it looks as if we're not destined to return after all this June).


The figures have links to the rooms around which they're positioned. I love the Meistersingerish significance of this craftsman, who could well be goldsmith Veit Pogner.


A minstrel prances down the staircase


and the young newlyweds outside the former registry office might be Eva and Walter.


Not without significance to Wagner's opera, perhaps, since the people's will has usually been paramount here. The citizens rebelled against the councilmen's favourite fountain design at the end of the 19th century and got their way with the Gänselieselbrunnen. By the way, Gottingen was one of the few German towns to be spared flattening in World War Two - so was Heidelberg, leading many to speculate that the Germans left off Oxford and Cambridge in some kind of sick deal - so there's plenty to see. I'll return to churches and housefronts anon.


But I'm still in a Handel mood: it might have been that, or sheer overtiredness, that made me enjoy the Philharmonia concert on Sunday night less than I might have done. The pre-performance talk with Vasily Petrenko went fine, though the fun was a bit more at my expense than I'd anticipated, with VP playing to his Liverpudlian fans who'd come down specially to see him. But I do reckon Simon Trpceski - a pianist I usually love for his brio and communication - whizzed far too much through Tchaikovsky's Second Piano Concerto. And it was unforgiveable of him to insist on the Ziloti two-thirds-cut slow movement, especially as the Philharmonia leader Maya Iwabuchi and her cellist counterpart Karen Stephenson did so gloriously well in what little they had to play.

This morning I listened to 'special guests' Kennedy and Isserlis with Donohoe for Barshai (EMI), which only underlined more than ever what a bad mistake it had been to cut it: the solo strings lead the bullish virtuoso into a whole new world, and he/she needs that time to stay there. Wrong to wrench it out of context, perhaps, but in case anyone's reading who was also there and didn't think it was a great piece, here's a crackly old Melodiya recording of the first violin/cello duet before the piano enters (which is where Sunday night's performance essentially started; and we didn't get the central angst on display here, or the later string cadenzas, either, which you can hear in Part Two).

Connemara folk

Not quite Connemarans all, the entertainers at David and Gwendolen's wedding - and certainly not the madrigalians, instrumentalists and Tom Mooreists during the service, self included - but carpenter, fisherman and anecdotalist Jackie Coyne, pictured above leading us on a Sunday afternoon walk around the Renvyle peninsula, certainly is. The two big family names hereabouts are Coyne, as in the name above the splendid pub in Tully Cross


and Joyce, though 'Joyce Country' proper is some way to the east.


Jackie's tour turned out to be not so much an exposition of local geology and history as of family chronicles, but so entertaining were they all that nobody minded in the least. And he quickly gauged from the stragglers that a spurt up the hill wouldn't do, so we stuck to the white sand beaches, which since I'd struck off in the opposite direction that morning was fine by me.


Great gobbets of seaweed washed up on the beach reminded me that one of the few occupations by which the Connemarans used to live was kelp-gathering - especially, as Tim Robinson's helpful if slightly oversold* Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness tells me, 'when continental sources of alkali for glass-making and linen-processing were cut off during the Napoleonic Wars'. The trade declined thereafter when cheaper sources were found 'in the saltwort marshes of Spain'.


Potatoes grew in seaweed-rich soil; but then the famines struck. Herring, mackerel and salmon fishing came and went. In the early 19th century, too, writes Robinson, 'the farmers of Meath needed all the calves Connemara's thin pasture could breed, to fatten on their richer grasslands'. Some cattle remain. I didn't see this one - the warning was on the gate in the opposite direction from which I'd come (presuming that farm tracks with no 'keep out' signs on them were fair walking territory once the road left the coast), with no matching admonishment on the other side -


but there were several grazing contentedly on the uplands.


But of course it's the sheep and their lambs that keep the farms going.


The once natural co-existence between land and livestock is being carefully reasserted but - adds Robinson, a touch piously - 'there is one monstrous contradiction at the heart of this caring programme and that is the slaughter of the innocents, exemplified by those 500 Cleggan lambs torn from their mothers, packed into lorries and taken off to an abattoir every spring'. Delicious, Connemara lamb on a plate, I blush to add. And we all love to see them gambolling in the fields by the sea, as I did on a morning walk around the head of the peninsula.


Cushier comforts were to be had, at least from 1917, in the old house at Renvyle. In that year it was bought by Oliver St John Gogarty, surgeon by profession but jack of many other trades including verse, and the very same 'stately, plump Buck Mulligan' who launches Ulysses as a not entirely worthy companion for Stephen Dedalus (Gogarty did indeed share a Martello Tower outside Dublin with fellow Trinity College student James Joyce). The original house was burnt down in the troubles of 1923 - Gogarty was a Sinn Feiner but despised de Valera - and rebuilt by 1930, though ghosts continued to visit, or so W B Yeats's spiritualist wife George asserted. There is still a haunted room - number available on application - but it seems a rather robust and common-sensical place to me. And clearly by the time this bust was made, Gogarty, who died in New York in 1953, was plump no more.


Within his walls resounded quite a wedding party, spread over two nights, with dancing to The Controversial Allstars. On the first we loved watching talented young Emma O'Sullivan, daughter of the hotel's superb head chef, repeating the kind of performance which got her to the final of Ireland's Got Talent. This is the real Sean Nos, Irish traditional dancing, without the influx of the stiff arms-by-sides mongrel. First and last of the films are a bit dark, forgive, but you get the lively gist.



Nicer, of course, to see the arms free, but Michael Flatley did a grand job bringing back his own form of Irish dancing and how it now flourishes among the kids. Here are some of the older members of Cosa Beoga ('Little Feet' in Gaelic) from Abbeyknockmoy, who came along the following night. Haven't got the boys doing fabulous things with brooms, and the feet are rarely visible from my open-window coign of vantage, but you see how good they are.



Last, but by no means least, David had managed to lure veteran fiddler and traditional singer Dessie O'Halloran over from his native isle of Inishbofin to sing a few numbers. J was especially delighted by an old favourite, 'Come down from the mountain, Katie Daly'. Here's verse 10 or so.



This man is a national treasure. I had a chat with him over breakfast and learnt that he'd lived for many years in my native neck of the woods, Surrey, patio of England, in Chessington, no less. I love the way these guys - Jackie, too - get a hold of your Christian name and then proceed to address you confidentially by it as if they've known you all their lives.

We did our own dancing, too, with Jackie calling, and I worked up an alarming sweat (though as always felt better for it the next day). Later the bride and groom were chaired while a rabbi friend sang, and his wife played the violin.


Much to celebrate, then. But how sad to learn that on the very same day as we were having such fun at an all-inclusive traditional wedding, Russian gays and lesbians were banned from marching to celebrate their love. The Mayor of Moscow wouldn't give them the same licence he granted to Neo-Nazis, can you believe, who duly weighed in with the violence when they went ahead anyway. I'm not surprised, but shame on you, mother Russia. And three cheers for the prevailing good in long-hidebound Ireland.

*hardly his fault if the (mostly Irish) reviews quoted on the back cover lead one to expect a masterpiece - 'one of the best non-fiction prose writers currently at work', 'an imperishable monument', 'one of the great polymaths of our time', 'one of the finest of contemporary prose stylists', 'Robinson writes...with extraordinary beauty' - when surely it's just rather good, one of many such travel books? But book reviews are ever thus, and you usually only have to trace the connections to find a friend. Is this more rife in that world than in any of the other arts-reviewed groups?

Happy 30th birthday, COE

Three stills from a publicity film by Alexandru Gherman - reproduced with thanks - were all I could muster to accompany a little paean for the Chamber Orchestra of Europe’s vivacious birthday concert at St John’s Smith Square the other Monday (bit of a hobby-horse of mine, about musical organisations not engaging photographers for special events: can you believe there were no shots for the Bell-Frank-Zimmermann-Denk-Isserlis team at the Wigmore’s 110th birthday bash on Wednesday?)


Anyway, a joyous event the COE concert turned out to be, and though my speculation that Abbado was going to be the mystery guest conductor proved wildly out, it was fascinating to see how far these crack players could go without a stick-waver at all. Mozart’s 29th and Figaro Overture I could understand – even there, a maestro might have been helpful for the occasional upbeat – but surely they weren’t going to attempt Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony by themselves? But wait – there was Vladimir Jurowski sitting down in the stalls. In fact he was drafted in for the encore, a lovely touch: 30 years ago at the inaugural concert James Judd pulled mover and shaker Abbado out of the audience to conduct Rossini’s overture to La Cenerentola, and here it was again, blissfully crescendoed and nuanced beyond belief in those perky little bittersweet woodwind solos I love so much.

But the Classical was rather magical, too – bright and clearly articulated, like the rest of the programme. How could one not be reminded of the conductorless orchestra who played it when Prokofiev made his first visit to the new Soviet Union in 1927, Persimfans (= Perviy Symphonicheskiy Ansambl' bez Dirizhora= first symphonic ensemble without a conductor). It did well, but hardly lasted long. They even played the Scythian Suite. Co-founder Arnold Tsukker wrote a book about the first five years which I'd like to get hold of - but not at the online asking-price.


Anyway, on Monday there was – to my ears, at any rate – a radical rethink about the Bach Double Concerto; you could forget that famous slow-movement image of two planes in a clear blue sky. But the partnership of founder-leader Marieke Blankestijn and Lorenza Borrani, who wasn’t even born when the orchestra kicked off, with their fellow strings couldn’t have been more exhilarating.


Good, too, to see some familiar faces including cellist Willie Conway, whom I knew vaguely from Edinburgh days, horn-player Nicholas Thompson, double-bassist Enno Senft and, in the audience, that fabulous oboist (and not at all bad conductor) Douglas Boyd. Now all we need is to see more of them here - which, at last, we can do when Haitink conducts two all-Brahms Proms with Ax as soloist in the piano concertos.

Finally, happy 30th birthday to me and the bigger stars of the Bedlam/Edinburgh University Theatre Company production of Cabaret, the rehearsal period for which I recall as the happiest time of my youth (not of my life, of course). I wrote all about it quite prematurely at the beginning of the year, and used up most of the production photos then - the one of Andy Beale as Hitler youth I really can't justify, for fear it might end his distinguished medical career - so how about a truly embarrassing reminiscence for Sally Bowles and Fraulein Kost (real names withheld, but I love them both dearly)? Cramond beach party during Cabaret fortnight, May or June 1981, fashions - Simon Bell's jacket and the trainers dishonourably excepted - courtesy of the second-hand clothes shops in Stockbridge.

Chelsea: eye of the storm

Never been to the Chelsea Flower Show before, never going again, but I would say that a glimpse of meconopsis baileyi, the Himalayan blue poppy we know so well from Dawyck in the Scottish Borders, as part of a truly well-thought-out display at the heart of it all made the crush worthwhile.

You have to negotiate the circles of hell first. The outer ones are the worst: garden furniture, statuary and rusty tortured metal of unsurpassable hideousness. 'Aspirational lifestyle rubbish' said J lugubriously, and it actually got worse once he'd made his exit and I tried to see what all the crowds were flocking to on the south side: the ludicrous plant lift 'modelled on Avatar', and what else I know not, because being caught in the thick of the jostling Middle English throng, I turned turtle and backed out. It was a little better in the grassy dell, where a brass band was playing an arrangement of the first, second and last movements from Mackerras's glorious Sullivan potpourri Pineapple Poll, but the refreshments on offer weren't much better than the garden ware.

The central marquee improves in terms of scent and display, though it doesn't do too much for species all jammed together. Thus hyacinths (in May?)


digitalis cum papaver


lupins in abundance


and pitcher plants with Darwin's beloved drosera.


Then I found something I liked: the stand of Kevock Garden, 'alpine, bog and woodland specialists'. The Rankins who run it head off to the wild parts of the world to see what they're selling in situ . I even bought a catalogue.


And here, at the quiet eye of the storm, was meconopsis, which I know my friend Kurt Ryz will be glad to see. Indeed, he probably has them thriving in his Finchley garden; I envy him his success, since the ones we transported from Chapelgill, Broughton, failed to thrive.

Irish rock

From the cliffs of Moher with their shale and sandstone


across the grikes and clints of the Burren's limestone pavement


where it meets the sea above Fanore


to the beaches of Connemara, defined by Wittgenstein, who spent some time there trying to throw off his mind-forged manacles, as 'one of the last pools of darkness in Europe'. A greater authority than I pre-empts the need to sum up this unique region of lakes, bogs, mountains and sinuous coastline as anything more than one of 'great geological complexity', though the distant bulk of Mweelrea in Mayo is a primeval mix of sandstone and ignimbrites (ie volcanic rock preceding the Ice Age glaciation of Connemara).


This last was our ultimate destination on a meandering, mostly coastal route from Shannon Airport, which I bravely - and mostly pleasurably - drove after a couple of years away from any wheel other than a bicycle's. I can't really recommend the Moher experience unless you've never seen big cliffs before; it's like the Land's End ship o'fools except that you can't carry on walking away from the hurly-burly as the coast path either side of the over-signposted and gravelled routes is privately owned (where was the National Trust when Ireland needed it?) But I can't wax lyrically enough about the Burren or Connemara.

We ended up enveloped by the relaxed country-house environment of the hotel at the end of the Renvyle peninsula for the two-day nuptial celebrations of our lovely friends Gwendolen (Welsh pa, Irish ma) and David (of the Darcy tribe of Galway).


More about wedding and ceili(dh) anon. I just want to take one step further north, as we shall do more extensively, and at greater leisure, when we return, to the most majestic stretch of all: Ireland's only fjord, Killary Harbour, sundering the sandy beaches and gentler inclines of north Connemara from the dramatic mountains-to-the-sea of Mayo. The water gets progressively deeper from sea to harbour, which is why - we were told by one of the local wedding guests - German U-boats used to lie low there. We parked the car by a farm on the south side and just walked along a track through the lush sloping fields of Foher townland, decimated by the famine; it all seems so gentle and welcoming in late spring that it's difficult to picture the hard life.


The depths of the fjord make it perfect for mussel farming; birds had scattered shells along a stretch of the path.


Connemara sheep aren't your usual timid breed: they eye you inquisitively and unflinchingly. And I know, from the wedding banquet, that Connemara lamb is the best.


With all too short a time between wedding events, we came closer to the imposing rocks of Mweelrea, rising to 2688 feet


and turned a corner to look out to sea


before returning to the next stage in the festivities via an insanely beautiful route along Lough Fee.


The invasive rhododendron, along with the New Zealand flax, is an import by the Mancunian who built the huge pile of Kylemore Abbey, but so long as it can be kept in check, it does provide splashes of colour in the landscape. This from our last day, when the progress from rain and wind to mostly-sun was finally complete.