Cellists at lunchtime

Steven Isserlis (pictured pulling a Harpo face, if not quite a 'gookie', in the second picture above with my friend the wonderful pianist Sophia Rahman, who knows him well from Prussia Cove, and Kazakh cellist Bulat Tynybekov) and Olli Mustonen may be the better-known names, and their Wigmore lunchtime programme of Schumann and Prokofiev much more familiar, but Richard Harwood in his solo recital on the last day of the Music@Malling Festival had equal ingenuity in his concert planning and no less soul in his playing. 

He's pictured up top with the indefatigable driving force of Music@Malling, violinist and conductor Thomas Kemp, on the right and a film composer they both know well from session work, Frank Ilfman, outside the converted 1942, Deco-inspired Control Tower of what was once an important airfield for bomber pilots in World War Two and is now Milton Keynesesque Kings Hill. The development is ambitiously managed by the American property trust Liberty, under the aegis of which Martin Apps took all the performer photos here and which also looks after the art gallery in the converted building where the recital took place.

Attempts to get to other events of music@malling were foiled by Chelsea and Westminster Hospital messing me about midweek regarding preliminaries to my stent removal post-hospitalisation (it's happening now early on Thursday morning). So getting to hear Bach in the chapel of the marvellous West Malling Abbey will have to wait until last year. But this belated expedition was totally worth it. Failing a talk on Peter and the Wolf (too many unruly schoolkids), Tom had asked me to compere the recital, but I felt I didn't know enough about the music and didn't have enough time to mug up. So I got to enjoy it as a spectator instead.

Richard has already recorded some of the pieces he included in his programme for Resonus, Composing Without the Picture: Concert Works by Film Composers. Some were in existence already, but he also had the ambition to commission new works, working as he does with many contemporary figures in the business. Personably introducing the ones in the recital, he pointed out the interest and challenge in getting musicians used to working with sound decks and/or big orchestras to focus their creativity on one instrument for a 'serious' concert context. Frank Ilfman was there to prove the point, talking about his Walking in a sea of sands with Tom (pictured above) before Richard gave the premiere. Circling high from a low point featured in several other works, chiefly the first of Ennio Morricone's Riflessi (1989-90). Interesting technique here: Morricone writes out all the notes without stems or anything else to indicate the length - that's up to the player. Richard held up the score to show us.

For me, the absolute highlights of a never less than engrossing sequence came at the beginning and end. Having only just got to grips with Ernst Toch's Speaking Music of 1930 in the uncannily flexible throats of the Theatre of Voices at this year's East Neuk Festival, I found the three-movement Impromptu from the end of his creative life (1963) a revelatory contrast. The first movement is airily diatonic, like late Prokofiev, the second pure scherzoid entertainment, the third deeply personal and troubling. It's marked Adagio, con espressione - quasi der Letzte Kampf. Toch's own 'last struggle' was with cancer - he died not long after completing Impromptu - and the war between serenity and sheer pain is well expressed here.

In a kind of ring composition, Harwood played another diverse three-movement work by way of finale: John Williams' pieces reflecting on the Afro-American experience. In 'Rosewood' there's the crack of the whip and -according to Williams' enticing note reproduced in the recording notes - 'the sound of the old steel-fronted guitar played by some of the early workers as they tried to ease the pain of their long hours in the field'; 'Pickin'' embraces with taxing virtuoso writing for the cellist the 'side-slap' and 'shoe-slap' dances; while the slow, inward finale reflects the lullaby of Rita Dove's poem 'The Long Way North' - an eloquent way to end. I'm going to download the tracks of the recording, and I hope you might do the same.

By the time we came out of the recital, the morning rains had cleared and the sun was shining on the Control Tower and the arc of rosebeds around it.

Strange to find this contemporary way of housing thousands in deepest Kent just down the road from West Malling itself, which still feels like a pure country town, meeting the fields and woods at various points. We had a very good lunch in The Swan before abandoning the plan to walk the Pilgrims' Way - the erratic pain which can still dog me from the stent manifested itself at just the wrong time - and strolling gently around town instead. 

It was good to see the church in daylight, and especially the glory in the chancel which I hadn't been able to note at last year's music@malling evening event - the Brett monument, of alabaster with black Ionic columns and a rather striking shrouded skeleton

as well as a creepy black Batman-style winged skull on the wall behind the recumbent couple

and (also creepy) a kneeling child behind their heads.

The repainting is gaudy but presumably not unfaithful 

and there's a fine sedilia to the right.

I couldn't find out much about the arms in the glass of one of the chancel's north windows - update: Tom tells me they belong to the Douce family who lived in a big house close by - but I like it anyway.

The light between the rains drew attention to the church tower (Norman base, attractive spire dating from 1837)

and its graveyard's situation on a hillock with the North Downs in the background.

No visible rainbows then, though we saw plenty amid downpours on the train journey back. But the sun held for our strolls down lanes

and around the Abbey, a very historic institution founded by that same Bishop Gundulf of Rochester responsible for the White Tower. In the 18th century Frazer Honeywood incorporated a new home into the ruins, and since 1916 an order of nuns has been established here. Which means that you can only go in during festival specials, but it's fun to glimpse the tower

and walk around the perimeter, which includes a handsome barn (where Sophia, Tom and another cellist, Adrian Bradbury, had performed as Chamber Domaine the previous afternoon)

and a fine fringe of beech trees

while walking back into town along Swan Street you pass a fountain where the abbey stream emerges.

Turner depicted this and other abbey views. The tower to the left of his image, courtesy of Tate Britain, is now more or less concealed by trees (maybe we'd better come here in the winter).  

The 15th century exterior of the gatehouse is fine too.

My dawdling meant we just missed one of the every-half-hour trains back to London, but sitting on a platform bench in the sun wasn't a hardship, and the Spanish chestnuts above were showering down their riches.

Monday afternoon's delights I've recounted in full on The Arts Desk, but it's good to be able to note the serendipity of Sophia's having performed the astounding Prokofiev Cello Sonata with both Steven and Bulat, and to record how well the Schumann strand tied in with a little book of deep thoughts and practical advice, namely this:

It's hard to choose my favourite nuggets - Steven selected several of his own in a neat little preview, also on The Arts Desk - because everything's good here, not just Schumann's maxims but also Steven's footnotes, which of course are a lot longer but manage to be personable and witty without ever tipping over into the arch. The keynote is immense personal affection and admiration - 'I'm writing this book because I need to profit from Schumann's wise advice as much as any other reader!'. It should be a well deserved moneyspinner and a perfect stocking-filler, and Faber's presentation is delectable, but there's plenty of profundity and knowledge lightly worn. To be re-read at regular intervals. 

Don Giovanni: the beginning and the end

Or rather, after Mozart's Overture and before the survivors' final sextet. Aren't these two scenes - Donna Anna rushing out of her father's house with Giovanni in hot pursuit, and the libertine's final meeting with the statue of the Commendatore - the big question marks for any director today? Richard Jones in his typically challenging production for English National Opera, stunningly conducted by Mark Wigglesworth, approaches them very much on his own terms - the first, for me, questionably, the last with characteristic off-kilter genius. Production images above by Robert Workman featuring Christopher Purves, Clive Bayley and James Cresswell.

The sticking-point, in every production I've seen since Deborah Warner's at Glyndebourne, is (as I put it in the Arts Desk review) male directors' refusal to believe that when a girl says no, she means no; in other words to accept that Don Giovanni, in disguise as Don Ottavio in the dark, is essentially trying to rape Donna Anna when she finds out it's not her fiance and starts hollering blue murder.

In Tirso de Molina's The Trickster of Seville, the fountainhead of all Juans/Giovannis, there's no doubt in the first scene that Duchess Isabel believes she's trysted with Duke Octavio in the dark - Tirso doesn't exactly sympathise, since sex before marriage even with the 'right' man wasn't on in the Golden Age of Spanish drama - or that Doña Ana in Act 2 thought she was giving up her honour to the Marquis of La Mota (also a cad, incidentally), not a 'murderer' (and not just of honour, for of course it's her father, Don Gonzalo, who shortly gives up the ghost).

Is there any reason to doubt Donna Anna's vivid struggle in Mozart's music? The sheer energy of it was woefully at odds with Kasper Holten's decision to have Anna and Giovanni taking a pleasant post-coital stroll at the Royal Opera. We also got off to a sub-Bieito start in Ole Anders Tandberg's inept Stockholm production, with the two having sex in a toilet while Leporello peered under the door (the aftermath pictured above, I presume, by the same photographer whose images I used in the initial piece, Markus Gårder). Jones's sado-masochistic play while the Commendatore prepares to have sex with a prostitute next door may have been more convincing, but like those directors, he makes his Donna Anna insincere when protesting in 'Or sai che l'onore', and generally devious.

These are signs of our times, just as the sanctification of Anna as angel got the better of 19th century writers. And there's often a kind of implied sexism made implicit in the late William Mann's otherwise sound The Operas of Mozart when he writes that about Anna that  'it would be beneficial to her personal growing-up if she had been pleasantly raped by Don Juan (as some writers on Mozart's opera assume, I think optimistically).' Well, it hardly needs spelling out that there's nothing pleasant or optimistic about a rape. Why has it taken a woman to get it right? Only Deborah Warner at Glyndebourne has shown us a distressed rather than a relaxed or protest-too-much Donna Anna. That's still the production I admire the most.

As for where to end, it can't be an option to remove the final gathering of survivors and leave it at Don Giovanni going to hell. A group of students for whom I put together a programme of music-history classes were sceptical about the epilogue until I showed them Warner's compelling final thoughts on the discombobulation of those left behind. Holten clearly never liked it; when I saw his Royal Opera production first time round, the voices came from behind a screen; for the revival , I gather, he cut it altogether. Jonathan Kent in the most recent Glyndebourne production seemed happy for cuts within the ensemble - hard to miss that final exchange between Donna Anna and Don Ottavio - while Jones keeps the full ensemble but has his own masterly solution. Which I'm glad to say no critic I've read so far has had the meanness to divulge.

Meanwhile, we've kicked off Don Giovanni at the Opera in Depth class with a preliminary circling-round, not least listening to some of Gluck's amazing music in his 1761 ballet. A fandango got reused by Mozart for the Act 3 wedding ceremony in Le nozze di Figaro, but the stunner is the final sequence, which gives us some idea that Mozart's Sturm und Drang didn't come out of the blue. Gluck transferred the final 'Dance of the Furies' to the Paris version of Orfeo ed Euridice, in which guise we find it here - sans the trumpets which make Bruno Weil's performance with Tafelmusik, the one I used, so exciting.

Happy 70th birthday, BBC Radio 3

Just a quick one so I don't let the big day pass unrecorded here. I had the good luck to be in a studio of beloved Broadcasting House, Portland Place on Tuesday morning, recording the script for my Building a Library on Elgar's Falstaff (due for broadcast on Saturday 8 October). Before I lifted on to the table the ancient script rack of which I'm so fond, which seems to have made its way upstairs from the old days in Studio B14, I found pages left by the estimable Rob Cowan, Mensch and stalwart, whose seat I was occupying. You probably can't see the name on the top of the page, but it's his.

Having got everything 'in the can', I had a quick chat with my vivacious producer Olwen Fisher and sound engineer Michael Bacon about the status quo. It's just such a joy that recording BaL is exactly the same as it ever was - that's to say, you discuss the script and any tweaks needed with the producer, then go through recording it with all the music examples in place as you devised them. So in reading it you still get something of the right tempo and inspiring snippets to give your voice the necessary reactive kick.

That hasn't always been the case elsewhere; some years back on the World Service, for instance, I had a discussion with Patrick Harrild, principal tuba player of the LSO, about our favourite recordings from the orchestra's first 100 years; we never got to listen to the chosen snippets of each other's choices, so we couldn't react properly. There have been moves to economise here too by trying to stop the full playthrough, but so far the Record (formerly CD) Review team have staved it off (and they don't think it would save much time anyway).

I rejoice, because that means studio work for Record Review is as it always was, with a civilized timeframe and knowledgeable folk as editors. It changed for the worse during the Gambaccini era, but they realised they were losing their core listeners and not gaining any of Classic FM's, so back it went to the old format and we non-celebrities came back in from the cold.

Which means it's been 29 happy years for me, starting with a review of Sawallisch's recording of Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten, with a few bumpy interludes thereafter, and some wonderful studio meetings, like the one above with the late, great Bob Tear - then aged 71 - and Elaine Padmore, Petroc Trelawny chairing. Topically, one of the three books we discussed was Susie Gilbert's excellent Opera for Everybody: The Story of the English National Opera. Once past the last two productions to be conducted by ENO's adored but honourably departing Music Director - Don Giovanni opening tomorrow night, can't wait, and Lulu - that particular story may go downhill rapidly.

But I digress. Returning to the subject of the 70th birthday celebrations,  I hear there are exciting things going on at the Southbank Centre, but I only saw an empty Radio 3 studio in a glass box when I went to Salonen's stupendous Philharmonia Stravinsky concert on Wednesday, so must find out more.

A great Irish essayist

Not Swift, or probably any of the other names that spring readily to mind. I confess I hadn't heard of Hubert Butler until J came back from an evening devoted to him with a documentary I have yet to see at its core, clutching two of those beautifully produced books of essays which Notting Hill Editions do so well (I first read Thomas Bernhard in that format).

As a well-travelled multilinguist and a voice of Europe's terrible 20th century upheavals - he was born in 1900 and died in 1991 - Butler had a special angle to what he wrote. Hannah Arendt famously called it 'the banality of evil', and Butler - who sums up the essence of Eichmann in an essay if you don't think you can face Arendt's stupendous Eichmann in Jerusalem - puts it differently, time and again. 'It is the correlation of respectability and crime that nowadays has to be carefully investigated,' he writes in cool understatement.

The figure and the constellations around him who seem to sum it up most closely for Butler are Ante Pavelitch (we now write 'Pavelić'; pictured above), 'probably the vilest of all war criminals', the Croatian fascist dictator and leader of the terrible Ustaše movement, his Minister of the Interior Andrija Artukovitch (Artuković) and the Catholic clergy, most closely a Franciscan order, complicit and active in their crimes.

I don't think I knew of the enormity of all this - Pavelić features as a cool monster in a work of genius faction with odd ties to Butler, Curzio Malaparte's Kaputt - but Butler states it coolly: in 1941 the Croatian government, dedicated to the extermination not only of the Jews but also of fellow-Christians, the Serbian Orthodox, 'introduced laws which expelled them from Zagreb, confiscated their property and imposed the death penalty on those who sheltered them. Some 20 concentration camps were established in which they were exterminated'. The figures are of 30,000 Jews and 750,000 Orthodox massacred, some 240,000 Orthodox forcibly converted to Catholicism. Even if these figures are exaggerated, it was the most bloodthirsty religio-racial crusade in history, far surpassing anything achieved by Cromwell and the Spanish Inquisition' (below, Pavelitch and Archbishop Stepinac, Butler's paradigm of 'an ambitious, rather conventionally minded Croatian' capable of plentiful 'twists and turns...to keep pace with history').

Butler's special line of inquiry - and he was ostracised by the Irish establishment for establishing the truth - was to find out how and why Artukovich spent a year being sheltered in Ireland. The Franciscans provide the connection, though those to whom he spoke seemed ignorant of Artukovitch's status as a refugee war criminal and had, along with most clerics in Rome, 'been highly confused by what was happening in Croatia' (but this is an ironic swipe, because he goes on to point out that only one man in pursuit of the truth, Cardinal Tisserant, 'had a clear idea').

The gist is that 'if Artukovitch had to be carried half way round the earth on the wings of Christian charity, simply because he favoured the Church, then Christianity is dying. And if now, for ecumenical or other reasons, we are supposed to ask no questions about him, then it is already dead'. Butler enlarges on this in an early 'Report on Yugoslavia'. Deploring the 'hysterical adulation...poured forth by almost all the leading clergy upon Pavelitch', he adds:

As I believe that the Christian idiom is still the best in which peace and goodwill can be preached, I found this profoundly disturbing. I doubt now [1947] whether it is even wise for us to use the language of Christianity to the Yugoslav till all the vile things which were said and done in the name of Christ have been acknowledged and atoned for. I think the bitter hatred which is felt for the Churches in Yugoslavia is inflamed by all the lies and dissimulation about these things, by the refusal to admit that the Christian Church during the war connived at unspeakable crimes and departed very far from the language of Christ.

And in the central essay which gives Notting Hill Books' volume its title, 'The Invader Wore Slippers', he returns to the issue:

I felt that it was not the human disaster but the damage done to honoured words and thoughts that was most irreparable. The letter and the spirit had been wrested violently apart and a whole vocabulary of Christian goodness had been blown inside out like an umbrella in a thunderstorm.

The wider point being made in 'The Invader Wore Slippers' is how 'the moral problems of an occupation' turn out to be 'small and squalid'. Ordinary people are expecting jackboots; 'the respectable Xs, the patriotic Ys and the pious Zs' are unprepared for 'carpet slippers or patent leather pumps'. The Guernsey occupation is elegantly left to speak for itself - 'events for an October day in the first year of occupation [in the Guernsey Evening Post]: "Dog biscuits made locally. Table-tennis League of Six Teams formed. German orders relating to measures against Jews published. Silver Wedding anniversary of Mr and Mrs W J Bird."...Lubricated by familiar trivialities, the mind glided over what was barbarous and terrible.'

Not that the occupiers aren't skilful at winning complicity by double games. At one point Hitler is quoted on how to use the Church as his propagandists: 'Why should we quarrel? They will swallow anything provided they can keep their material advantages'.

Depressing instances abound. But Butler sees hope in the behaviours of small nations in which 'the Wicked Man is not yet woven so scientifically into the fabric of society', citing the ways Denmark and Bulgaria found to evade giving up their Jews in the Second World War. He praises the local community spirit, and in a long, brilliant interlude, 'Peter's Window' writes of his time living with a Leningrad family in 1931. Normality is celebrated, but its obverse is warningly inserted:

These are the things we talked about in Leningrad in 1931: spoons, buttons, macaroni, galoshes, macaroni again. I don't believe I ever heard anyone mention Magnitogorsk [pictured below: Komsomol meeting there the same year] or the liquidation of the Kulaks or any of the remote and monstrous contemporary happenings to which by a complicated chain of causes our lifestyle and our macaroni were linked.

At the end of that decade Butler was in Vienna working frantically with those admirable people the Quakers - he was not one himself - to find as many Jewish citizens as possible places abroad. He writes that, strangely, he was happy because all his faculties were engaged, and 'most people tied to a single job or profession die without exercising more than a tenth of their capacities'? The essay, after giving a devastating portrait of an Austrian Butler brought to Ireland, wheels round again to questions of the Catholic Church's role in World War 2.

So, an admirable man who acted in the maelstrom. But we wouldn't read him if his style wasn't so pure and, in its elegance, so capable of the sudden devastating sideswipe. His writing is the polar opposite of Patrick Leigh Fermor's flowery prose, and though I find the precision hard to emulate as an incorrigible sub-Jamesian, I salute it. Now to the volume of Ireland-based essays, The Eggman and the Fairies.