Meknes medina: streets, gates, fountains

It's become a point of honour on this blog, whether anyone's interested or not, that I try to do justice to any town or city I've visited and adored. So I felt that my April and May entries on Morocco's most genial civic treasure needed completing by a tour around the area in which we spent most time, unhassled and often pleasantly lost - the medina or walled old town of Meknes.


Of course it's not on the scale of glorious, once-wealthy Tunis or Fes, but it has enough authenticity and charm to make it a place to return to again and again. We took three or four trails in different directions, with an excellent French guidebook on loan from Mona and Simon at the Riah Lahboul, so forgive if the details here are relatively hazy. Mona especially recommended the rather run-down but fascinating area of the Mellah Qdim, once the old Jewish quarter - the new Mellah has a modest synagogue frequented by a small community - via Berrima, where her family still lives. You sense the change in building styles once through the arch that separates the Mellah from the Medina proper. Here there are more balconies and handsome old houses, most in a state of disrepair


and the striking scallop fountain which, like all the others, is still very much in use.


It's worth exiting the Mellah by the old Jewish cemetery (closed whenever we happened to be in the vicinity) to go out and look at the Bab el Khemis


built by the Almohades but substantially elaborated by our tyrannical Moulay Ismail - who did have one thing in his favour: religious tolerance. The inscription reads: 'I am the gate of the fifth day, open to all races whether from the east or the west'.


Back on the Sekkakine, another old arch leads to the tailors' quarter


and there are also iron and metal workers along the main street


as well as several old musical instrument shops, several inside the Bab Djedid.


Turn right here and you're in the quietest and - to me - most suggestive part of the medina, with quite a few white minarets including that of the Berrima Mosque


a fascinating glimpse of 'sky' in a ruined building


old alleys with twisting vines


and another old fountain by the Serraria Mosque. The lady washing her clothes is helpfully colour-co-ordinated.


Eventually you'll meet up with one of the main streets of tailors' shops via an alley with my favourite coloured walls


where you can either turn left and head for the Bab Berdaine, designed by Moulay Ismail as the main entrance to the Medina and almost as grand as the Bab Mansour which dominates the main square



or if you were to go right along the narrow main drag with its high booths you'd reach a pretty open area dominated by a welcome shady tree beneath which the traditional furniture-painters work.


Much silk weaving goes on around here. The threads adorn the shop booths


and the clatter of machines can be investigated, if you wander into one of the old foundouqs. Worth watching this little film for the evocative sound.



Now we're back in the heart of things, with more tourists to boot, around the Great Mosque


with its splendid doorways


and the Medersa Bou Inania nearby.


We didn't visit, but we did go inside the old vizier's palace that now houses the Dar Jamai Museum.


The courtyard is better kept than the museum. Visitors' comments in the book were way over the top - 'this is the best museum I've visited in Morocco' etc - or perhaps there's nothing in better nick, but good as the collection is, with some fabulous garments and the cedarwood painting in the old harem rooms,


it's badly in need of renovation. But it seems that, thanks to the interest of the now-beleaguered king, quite a bit of the medina has been tarted up - which, perversely, I also didn't feel quite comfortable with. But there's no pleasing a tourist randy for antique, and at least this is very much a working old town, with the relaxed attitude to furriners that comes with that.

Everyone's a winner...

...in the final of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition. Well, let's say four out of five: there was one who had me leaving the room. And perhaps I don't even have the right to judge, because apart from a stunning clip of Russian mezzo Olesya Petrova posted on Jessica Duchen's blog, I hadn't seen any of the competitors until tonight, when it was a definite telly fixture. My fellow blogger Jon Dryden Taylor has kept us all entertained reporting with his usual eloquence 'as live'.

Credit where it's due first: Moldovan soprano Valentina Naforniţă's win was as much of a surprise to me as it was to those loveable diva commentators Joyce DiDonato, who'd been knocked out at an early stage the year of an unworthy winner, and Nicole Cabell, 2005 'Singer of the World' and a much classier soprano than detractors seem to think. But who could begrudge Naforniţă the two trophies, from audience and judges respectively, as depicted in Bryan Tarr's photo for the BBC above?* After all, this is as much about promise as it is about realisation, and though she ended up trying Lucia, Rusalka and Gounod's Juliette for size in turn, and seemed to improve as she progressed, the main thing is that the only-just-24-year-old, to use that inevitable cliche, lives the music.

As, in a slightly stagier way, did Birmingham-based Meeta Raval, who travelled in the opposite direction from a stunningly artistic and well-phrased Trovatore Leonora to a not-quite-desperate Manon Lescaut and a Strauss "Beim schlafengehen" which was more impressive for breath control than tone quality. And, boy, is tone quality the optimum with Petrova. Hers is no doubt the most beautiful instrument, and as Borodina wanes a little, Petrova's is the right voice to step into her silver shoes, if she can sort out the top. Still prefer the clip from Vienna which Jessica posted, so here it is again.



As for baritone Andrei Bondarenko, he was the hot favourite with everyone I'd spoken to, and I guess I was just a tad disappointed that the legato doesn't quite enjoy the cello-like timbre of the great Hvorostovsky; the pronounced vibrato gets a bit too much in the way. But he's utterly believable, comfortable in his own skin, and changes character with a minimum of fuss. His choices in the earlier round were probably better, and he did say that he felt tonight he was only at 70 per cent, so here's that strand.



Korngold was in Naforniţă's previous performance, too, and though the voice isn't settled, you watch her with delight.



As with Shcherbachenko two years ago, cheekbones and glowing musicality have it, though she's not as rounded a singer yet (no wonder; she's a good deal younger). And what a top-quality competition this is in every way: distinguished judges, nice Welsh people making humble and sincere speeches, fluent and non-irritant presentation (the only thing I wonder is whether Petroc should have spoken of Bondarenko singing 'in his native Russian' when he's Ukrainian, but we all know what he means). The best thing of all is that there is, or should be, no rancour at who wins, since we're not talking about teenage girls choosing a pretty, bland crooner over an obvious star, Adam Lambert in American Idol. But that never harmed his career, and all of these finalists will be getting good work, so does it matter?

On which note, I feel I have to sound the trumpet again for the two superlative singers I heard in Christ Church Spitalfields last night - mezzo Stephanie Marshall in a new van der Aa piece, and - a total revelation to me - young South African born Sarah-Jane Brandon, winner of the 2009 Kathleen Ferrier Awards, as the voice of childlike heaven in Mahler's Fourth, albeit the exquisite chamber version arranged by Erwin Stein.


I meant it when I said I've never heard it sung better in concert, and that's saying something.

And finally, since there were no can-belto gentlemen in tonight's finale, let's celebrate a yes-he-can egging on of a closet singer with star potential in what's undoubtedly been the most fun experience of the week. I went expecting to grimace through the musicalisation of Lend Me a Tenor at the Gielgud Theatre; yet though the musical itself isn't quite top notch, the way it's done is irreproachably brilliant and zesty. More raving on the Arts Desk. Here, in a production photo by Roy Tan, is Damian Humbley's shy Max Garber learning to unlock his inner Caruso with a little help from Michael Matus's equally charming Tito Merelli.


*and why the suspicion, which I've since seen voiced, about winning over judges and audience with revealed emotion? It's different from emoting, which the operagoing public at least senses and doesn't like, and it has to be the most important factor. You can have huge personality and not the world's greatest voice, and you'll do deservedly well - viz Danielle de Niese - but if your sound is the greatest and you don't communicate, forget it. I should add, by the way, that Petrova's lovely soul shone through, too.

Dalek days

Kuda, kuda vy udalilis...Where, oh where, have you gone, golden days of my youth, when I used to cower behind the sofa at the sound of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's Doctor Who theme and still more at daleks and cybermen (Jon Pertwee era, if you must know)? And here I am, ahem, several decades on, celebrating my birthday at Grange Park, where in among the watery fantasy of Dvorak's Rusalka were to be found reminders of that timeless and long-running telly masterpiece.


I know they incorporated the above tardis in last year's suitably wacky production of Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges, but did the Doctor Who team film here? The elusive Wasfi Kani was not to be tracked down to ask, but I'm thinking it would be a creepy location for one of the weirder journeys into the past. William Wilkins completed the job in 1809 for the then Lord Ashburton, whose descendent still strolls on in front of the prosecenium arch and tells jokes with huge charm (some compensation this year for the absent black labrador Ellie, whose retirement from the stage was marked with a real shaggy-dog story).

As Pevsner/Lloyd puts it, 'Wilkins added to his encased [17th century] house a Parthenon portico of tremendous pathos: six Greek Doric columns wide and two deep, facing E and overlooking the lake. This was one of the first determined credos in the coming Grecian mode, highly exacting and far from domestic'.


Much as I find Grange Park the most otherworldly of the summer opera locations, - yes, the braying is always a minus at all of them - and second in quality only to Glyndebourne, it's still frustrating to be so contained within the limited grounds of this semi-ruin, and not able to walk down to the lake


since Rusalka's watery realm seemed to demand it. Actually this wasn't the most magical of stagings, much as I love Anthony McDonald as a designer. Read why not on The Arts Desk. I think, too, I must have got the more world-class of Tristans running this month, though all credit to Grange Park for attempting it. But after so long, you have to ask yourself the question - do you really want to see the operatic masterpieces done with a perfectly good second-cast team?

Anyway, below is Alastair Muir's Rusalka photo of Clive Bayley, in good voice as the Merman (cf Vodnik) with the three tree nymphs augmented intelligently by three dancers - though I missed the breast-waggling wildness of Melly Still's feral creatures at Glyndebourne, and in fact can't wait to see that show again when I go to give a second pre-performance talk on 14 August.


As for 'how old D Nice?', same reply as for the famous Cary Grant telegram: 'old D Nice fine: how you?'. Let's just say I am not of quite as venerable an age as the two Americans I most admire, with birthdays either side of mine - Aaron Sorkin, whose West Wing continues to astound us every time we have an evening in, and (only a few days older than the diplo-mate) Barack Obama. It is, of course the big 5-0 for all three this year. And we had a lovely day, thank you, poking around Winchester in the afternoon mizzle - more anon - and dining on the Grange's as usual excellent fare in crumbling splendour (lobster and prawns for me, a la Rusalka), served by an especially attentive waiter ('I'm Rory, and if there's anything you need, just let me know').

Göttingen: churches and facades

In a couple of weeks I'll be exploring for the first time one of Göttingen's twin towns, Cheltenham, which as a johnny-come-lately spa visited by Handel - only connect - shortly after its development by one Captain Skillicorn presumably doesn't have the medieval legacy of Germany's great university town. Not that Göttingen's old churches haven't been majorly restored compared to many of ours - and this, I'm told, not due to bombing (only two per cent of the town was affected in WW2, allegedly as a pact between enemies: spare Oxford and Cambridge, we won't touch Göttingen and Heidelberg). Anyway, you have to be charmed by the attempt to revive the candy columns of the 1480s in the Jacobikirche, Lutheran St James, still evangelising its good works. The gaudiness extends to the west porch.


Alas, the tower was under scaffolding, so that famous view of four churches from the marketplace was incomplete, and there was no climbing to the top. But the essential treasure is the Wandelaltar. Its outer panels show the legend of St James, the 'Sunday side' the life of Christ. When I visited the 'Festtagsseite' was on display, with statues of the prophets. Not of the sharpest, this image, but I wasn't going to use flash in the church.


The church also has the water-regurgitator from the tower, which stood outside the museum for some years and seems pleasurably pagan in this context.


A little way up Weender Strasse, past the drug addicts and down-and-outs who gather for Jacobikirche charity, is No. 62, built by cloth merchant Jürgen Hovet in 1549, abounding in mermaids and green men as well as biblical figures.





Most of the neighbouring buildings date from the 1860s.


Raphael Hahn's family at No. 60 showed its pride not only with two dates but also with stars of David. Weh mir, why do the teeth in the windows remind me of Olivier's sadistic dentist in Marathon Man?


It's worth remembering at this point that in the 1930s, along with the synagogue, the university's great tradition of science and mathematics was systematically destroyed by the Nazis. 'Jewish physics', symbolized by Einstein, had to go. In 1933 Göttingen lost most of its greatest academics. I found them duly listed, so the names must be recalled: Max Born, Victor Goldschmidt, James Franck, Eugene Wigner, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, Emmy Noether, Richard Courant...

Still, the university flourishes up to a point, and it has the usual necessary core of radicalism (young Germans do really make me very optimistic for the future). Up the Rote Strasse, a medieval home for a casino - which at least shows that Göttingen isn't pickled in tourist aspic -


gives way to what looks like a jolly student squat.


This is the east quarter, with the most ancient of the churches, Albanikirche, founded before 1012, a reminder of the old town.


Also in this quarter is the neoclassical Aula of the University in Wilhelmsplatz, overlooked by their and our William IV, his plinth healthily defaced


and the Junkernschränke in the splendidly named 'Bare Foot Street' once trodden by shoeless Franciscans. Built in 1446 but substantially remodelled a century later, it boasts a jutting oriel - though nothing, of course, to compare with fabulous Schaffhausen - and its brightly-repainted figures, like those of No. 62 Weender Strasse, are the German fantastical equivalent of our roof-bosses (think Norwich Cathedral especially) and misericords.





Gosh, I'm going on here in my attempt to cover all the poles, but better take a glimpse south to the much-restored St Michael's with its neobaroque tower, with the Schwarzes Bär serving up black beer (pun intended, of course) in the foreground


before moving on to the Johanniskirche as taken from Paulinerstrasse. Its unequal towers were used for different purposes - the south as the belfry, the north for the watchman to sound the fire alarm.


It was here that we heard the great blaze of Handel's coronation anthems - duly reported in my Arts Desk 'letter from...' - alongside rather less individual Lalande, expertly done by the nice young choristers and Musica Alta Ripa ensemble seen in a festival publicity shot.


I could have continued with photoreportage of the late-night venue, the Marienkirche, which is perhaps the most suggestivo of all, but you may be relieved to hear I'd stopped snapping by then and was just enjoying the mellow near-midnight vibes.

Hallelujah Adams

For many folk I've spoken to, Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise has become a bible of information about 20th (and 21st) century music. It's extremely well-written if necessarily biased towards what the author likes, to judge from what I've dipped in to (what, not a word about Jimmy MacMillan?), but for authenticity it can't beat John Adams's autobiographical journey through the thickets of what he calls 'the partisan orthodoxies and prejudices that dominated my generation'.

Yes, he was there when Boulez ruled with his dogma, 'a technocrat bristling with all the gleaming armaments of his specialized field'. He was bewitched by the freer experimentation of Cage and company: was it any more than 'Dadaist doodling'? Much more, he fairly concedes, but judiciously lists its limitations. He was engaged by the promise of minimalism, describing Reich's early work as 'a sound world that was carefully organized, musically engaging and sensually appealing...To me, it felt like the pleasure principle had been invited back into the listening experience'. The cabin'd aspect of minimalism, Glass's static brand especially, is then tactfully touched upon.

But Adams was also beguiled by the best of the popular music of his time, by the revelation and the long-term promise of Wagner when driving along listening to Act 1 of Götterdämmerung, and later by Peter Sellars's eclectic knowledge of musics outside the 'western hegemony'. The book also offers lucid clarification of the issues behind his operas, from Nixon and Mao in '72 through the Palestinian problem to a terrific exposition of nuclear power and the diverse branches to the basic Indian spiritual fairy-tale of A Flowering Tree.

If you don't think you have time to read the entire book, the short last chapter, 'Garage Sale of the Mind', is the best ever precis I've read of the crossroads at which we now stand, the notion that complexity isn't necessarily progress but that easy promise isn't the solution either. This fits with the swivels of his own all-embracing musical language: the other week I reeled again at the daring, gnarly counterpoint of his Chamber Symphony in a dazzling performance by the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon, and loved going back and listening to the CD again.


It was looking up what Adams had to say about the Chamber Symphony as a result that finally led me to read the book from cover to cover.

I realise how many of the scores I still need to catch up with: being a bit of a sucker for stylish CD presentation - which in this case sometimes features wonderful nature studies by the composer's photographer wife, Deborah O'Grady - I have to update with the Nonesuch releases following on from the Earbox, including Son of Chamber Symphony. I'm not saying every work is a masterpiece, but it's always engaging, never dull. The world is a much better place for Adams's music.And the wordsmith continues to do good with an inspirational speech to students, reproduced in full on his blog.


Anyway, I'm proud of my Earbox, which I got the great, easygoing man to sign along with my '88 Edinburgh Nixon in China programme after we'd done a fun talk before one of his BBCSO concerts. And I'm proud, too, that he said to the admin as we came off stage: 'he's really good, you should ask us to do this again'. But that's blowing my own trumpet in the manner of some of my esteemed but not very modest fellow-bloggers...

24 hours in Lyon

A flying visit, to see Wagner at the Opéra, which turned out to be not so much the keenly-anticipated 'Fura dels Baus Tristan' as one which was the most satisfyingly sung, acted and played across the board of any I've encountered live. Arrived Friday noonish, headed over the Saone and settled on the first good-looking place for lunch I could find - which turned out to be the Restaurant Un Saint-Jean hiver at No. 14 Rue de Lanerie, partly because the building has one of the finest sculptured Gothic facades in the old town


and partly because the lunch menu promised Lyonnais specialities straight from the market. And excellent the first two courses proved - a salad of foie de volaille followed by andouillette (not to all tastes, but I'm a bit of an offal man). Dessert not so good, or maybe the wrong choice, three minis fatta in casa with coffee. Food theme continued with a whizz around Vieux Lyon trying to take streets I hadn't walked before - hence along the appropriately statued Rue du Boeuf


with another old carved shop 'sign'


up to the heights, this time skirting the Roman ruins and finding an odd little park in a zone populated by that unattractive species, the French schoolkid


and back via the bourgeois shopping centre with its great doorways


and a splendid (though no doubt less so in the multiplex interior) Pathe cinema.


It might have been the grey, muggy and intermittently rainy afternoon, or my own overtaxed mood, but I found Lyon on a second visit rather tired and skanky. I asked my taxi driver about the Somerset House-style fountains in the Place des Terraux which had so sparkled on a winter visit, and he told me they'd been broken for a long time and no-one had as yet attempted to fix them.

Anyway, a journey inside the belly of the black, shiny whale Jean Nouvel has made of the 1830 Opera House is always a striking, if rather claustrophobic experience. It suited the dream-world of La Fura dels Baus's Tristan vision rather well (production photo by Bertrand Stofleth showing the marvellous Ann Petersen recumbent)


And, happily transported by the first act - the second less so - I enjoyed standing at the long, light bar of the preserved 1886 foyer


as well as looking down on it from above.


One other plus: I've never had a quieter night in a hotel than in Room 407 of the Hotel des Terraux, built on the site of a graveyard which my ancestor Huguenots ransacked: a bit dark, since the only window looks on to the courtyard, but not a sound did I hear from midnight to 8am. Thus returned a little refreshed, after so many early rises and late nights, for the wedding on Saturday. Oh, and I do recommend splashing out on a trip to see an opera in Lyon: in this instance you would have heard a Tristan you'd have been happy to encounter anywhere in the world, Bayreuth included, at a ticket price of anything from 5 to 95 euros.

Fulham wedding walk

More nuptials, this time taking us from the westernmost shores of Connemara to the steps of Fulham Town Hall, strewn here post-ceremony with rice and rosepetals (incidentally Henry James called our neck of the woods 'the western wastes', and although cachet was implied when the Victorian developers renamed it 'West Kensington', it's really North Fulham). Hélène and Olivier were married in the rather splendid council chamber, the mostly French guests amusingly looked down upon by portraits of local worthies and George V as well as a well-executed set of Anglo-historical stained glass windows ranging from Alfred the Great to the Fulham potteries (est. 1672). The groom's brother, a harpist with the French National Radio Orchestra, spun silk around the waiting group. This is where the banns for our own civil partnership were posted, but since we wanted to be among the first to be legal in the UK, we actually signed up in Camden. There were at least as many gay guests as straight at this one.

The promenade made us see the route in a new light.


I've never been that fond of the North End Road market, where you can't pick your own fruit, or couldn't the last time I tried, but it's improving, with a good falafel stand and an excellent French deli van on Fridays and Saturdays for the (us) BoBos*. The Iranian/Iraqi shops are good for supplying my handful of signature dishes.


Crossing between the bed and pawn shops, the nuptial cortege entered our enclave with its cruelly pollarded London planes and central gardens unvisited by non-residents, thanks to factional self-interests, during London Squares Open-Day Weekend


and wound up at the Pear Tree Pub just by Charing Cross Hospital.


The larger institution is all too well known to us, but the pub was not; I'll certainly breakfast and lunch there now.

*bohemian bourgeoisie