Eye prayer answered?

When we lit candles in the little chapel of Aghia Paraskevi, high in the mountains of north-west Samos, it was to remember our dead on All Hallows' Eve. But the saintly one was there to protect or heal the sight of her supplicants, as the many votive offerings indicated.


I didn't think then that I would need eye protection, and if I got it, it sure worked in mysterious ways. As you no doubt read, I damaged my left eye and its vicinity quite seriously in the bike-smash less than a fortnight later. But for one thing, it could have been a lot worse, and for another, the circumstances led me to the Western Eye Hospital and a brief if painful laser treatment for my torn left retina. Which I suspect had been there before, from the rather inert comments of an ophthalmologist a couple of years ago. So it could very well have led, I was told, to a detached retina, which in turn can lead to sight-loss. In this respect, if you're superstitious - and there's a bit of that left in even the most rational of us - you might draw the irrational conclusion that Aghia Paraskevi was indeed my protectress.


The point of all this is to say that yesterday the maxillary unit of Northwick Park - the fifth hospital I've been to over the past few months - gave me the all-clear on the sinal fracture. The CT scan - the second, more detailed one after the first had got lost in translation (!) - revealed what we needed to know, that it was only the frontal wall, and not the rear one as well, which had been smashed. So I can have cosmetic surgery if I want - I don't - and all else I need to do is watch out for odd sinusitus as 'ten years down the line' I could develop a cist in the crack, so to speak.

In the meantime, I need to get on to Southwark Council about the truly ridiculous situation with the post in the middle of the end of the inadequate cycle lane south of Blackfriars Bridge. If only to stop it happening to someone else. Here's one of my photographic evidences, together with the brand new helmet I hate so much, but which I'll be wearing on even the smallest cycle excursion. Bear in mind I was coming from the other direction, looking ahead to the pedestrian crossing which weirdly shares the lanes. Do I have a case?


It was hard getting back on the bike several Wednesdays back after months of inaction - and I hadn't been anticipating any psychological fallout. But as I found with a frustration that verged on tears, I'd lost the knowledge, cars seemed alarming and threatening, which they actually were on an afternoon of full moon. That I stopped, anyway, to admire on the Southbank, having shucked off the cares and got back into the swing after half an hour.


Too much information? Not interested? Well, I don't want to sound ungracious, but while a decent few here did react to the earlier announcements, it does surprise me how little acquaintances give a dam(n). All I'm saying is that, dear fellow bloggers, if you had an accident like that you can be sure I'd join the comments to show a bit of solidarity. But I'm not you and, let's get it straight, friends on the blogosphere aren't real friends. Though several here have at least proved the exception, and I'm so glad to have made their acquaintance.

Hopefully not self-pity, this, only the way it is. Just as in the real world, reactions have ranged from the truly concerned, horrified and angry ('WHY weren't you wearing a helmet?') to the indifferent or the unheeding. Might I just add one general deduction from experience, though, which isn't quite the same thing as sympathy but comes into the same field of involvement: if you admire something someone's done or written, always tell that person - write, e-mail, go backstage if it was that good. Spread the love around.

The tragic crown

It goes, I think - and I find, to my surprise, that there are folk who think otherwise - to Derek Jacobi for a Donmar King Lear I was so desperate to see that I completely forgot to book for it, had to pass on a matinee ticket offered at the last minute two Thursdays ago (Berlioz Romeo examples were still filling my time and mind - coronation results below) and only just caught in the live screening at the Gate Notting Hill - one of hundreds, I gather, worldwide - a week later. All photos of the Donmar production here by Johan Persson for the company.

The singular circumstances of that event I rather opportunistically captured, hopefully to the greater glory of the actors' professionalism, on The Arts Desk. But I ought to enumerate, if only for my own memory (as if I could forget), the range and breadth of Jacobi's greatest challenge. There was a potent sense of time passing for me, as his Hamlet was the first I saw, aged 15 (with my dear old dad just departed, coincidentally enough, and a tricky stepfather not so far in the future) at the Old Vic in 1977. I knew then, without comparisons to make, that it was the greatest, and so it has always remained in my mind. Forgive the fuzzy image of the programme here - mine is still buried in the maternal attic, I hope.


There's one objective truth here - that no living actor I've ever encountered has produced a wider vocal compass or more extreme dynamics (Alex Jennings and William Houston - where on earth is he these days? - came close). That makes for an operatic experience in which the music is all in the voice, and which veers between theatricality and heart-stopping truthfulness. And much as I will always remember Kathryn Hunter's Lear as the best I'd seen on stage up to this one, Jacobi led me to the somewhat sexist conclusion that even an actress can't do so much across the octaves. Because, of course, Jacobi has access to the falsetto too. Which he uses to highlight not only the old-womanish, verging-on-senility of the foolish, fond old man but also the heartbreak of 'O, let me not be mad' (who didn't want to weep at that point, I wonder?) and the banshee terror of 'howl, howl, howl!'

Speeches lit up, as did everything in Grandage's crystal-clear, blinding-white production, like I've never heard before - the quiet desperation of 'O reason not the need', the disarming crescendo of the curse on Goneril, the coup of a whisper after the soundscape storm in 'Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks'. And 'Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are' was one of many revelatory turning points - perhaps the most crucial, the first point at which true understanding of the lives of others seemed to strike home. The mad scene, which is where our transmission broke up, forcing Paul Jesson's Gloucester and Gwilym Lee's Edgar to repeat their Dover cliff duet with greater intensity, came across with exemplary crispness.


All this would have been less shattering had it not been conducted in tandem with a superb group among the actors, above all Ron Cook's Fool who made every 'riddle' intelligible (just seen him burnt to a cinder in Simon Pegg's surprisingly hilarious cop movie spoof Hot Fuzz).


You understood the two elder sisters not so much as ugly by name and nature but as warped daughters of a capricious father, with superb differentiation between Gina McKee's cold 'un Goneril (right) and Justine Mitchell, perhaps the more interesting characterisation, as a Regan with banked hysteria bursting out in terrifying degrees.


The Cordelia, Pippa Bennett-Warner, spoke the verse beautifully, fine promise for an eloquent leading lady in waiting.


Even the handful of weaker actors never quite let the side down: Grandage's pace and clarity always kept the focus where it was supposed to be. So while I felt his Glyndebourne Billy Budd restricted the possibilities and dimensions of Britten's psychological study, this was surely a liberation for the actors and the limitless possibilities of Shakespeare's text.

So. You may now have heard the Saturday Library choice for Berlioz's Romeo et Juliette - six days left on the BBC iPlayer to listen, if not - unShakespearean in the sung word but never in spirit. The gold crown, one of three, went to Gardiner's comprehensively vivid survey.


As yet there's a degree of confusion over its download status, but I was assured at the time that there were places on the net where that was possible. Apparently Universal rectifies the situation tomorrow, though this is a case where I'd like to have the CDs with their booklet for clarification of the various alternatives*. Anyway, I still have equal fondness for Sir Colin's first performance, another download-only; it was only the uniform first-class quality of JEG's soloists and Monteverdi Choir which tipped the balance.


In such programmes, the final choice is the sop to the public; but it's never so clear-cut. Truth to tell, I'd like my Romeo Alone movement from Monteux, the Love Scene from Davis in Vienna and the Mab Scherzo from Boulez (with Munch, so unexpectedly ham-fisted elsewhere, a close second). I also lay claim to my copy of the Toscanini NBC performance, too. Surely never was there a work offering so many different stylistic choices, movement by movement. Every orchestral work I hear after it seems a bit overstuffed at the moment.

*I'm told this is feasible, at the standard price, from ArkivMusic.com.

Auguries of Spring

That alien visitor the sun shone yesterday, but not on Wednesday when I essayed a grand walkabout in town, from BBC Broadcasting House at midday to the Barbican at night. I felt the liberation was justified because recording the Building a Library on my now-adored Berlioz Romeo et Juliette - listen on Saturday morning at 9.30am or on the iPlayer for the following week - meant it was properly done; I can't relax the weeks of adrenalin-fuelled work until I can be sure that the voice has held out long enough to record the script.

It did, I had fun, so after a bite to eat at Leon's and a necessary purchase of Bronnley's lemon soaps from Liberty's (Leopold Bloom did the same at Sweny's of Dublin in the 'Lotus Eaters' episode of Ulysses, I learnt long after taking a fancy to them) I took the Nash way to St James's Park. Where the first snowdrops were finally out.


A park worker asked me if it was true that a snowdrop had fetched £300 on eBay. I said I had no doubt, because galanthophiles will pay that much for a rare species - though I feared these were not in that category. Saluted a black swan


the pelicans on the island


and the first blossom


and went to meet the diplo-mate at Europe House where a new Slovenian exhibition requring 3D specs had just gone up. Through the park by the Houses of Parliament, peppered with grotesque Mexican statues


and then via Southwark to Borough Market, where I did my favourite shop - beans from the Monmouth Coffee Company, salami from the Piedmontese stall and crabmeat from the fish stand, where Whitby is queen of the seas.



And so eventually to the Barbican to be exhausted by Belohlavek's Mahler 6, where there were two divas (at least) in the audience - Linda Esther Gray (my guest, and now dear friend) and Anja Silja (Jiri's guest). The one thing I didn't manage to enlarge upon in the Arts Desk review was why I think the Allegro energico should always be followed by the scherzo, which it wasn't that evening:

1) It's a 3/8 replay of the opening march, in the same instrumentation;
2) The second subjects, Alma and the children respectively if you believe what she says, appear in the same keys - first F major, then D major;
3) The Andante is really only won when you've been through the two ordeals, and if you buy the children-in-the-sand image of the Scherzo, then the quotation from the Kindertotenlieder in the slow movement can only come after their Grimm-like annihilation;
4) The half-hour finale is too much after the grim scherzo.


Belohlavek - pictured above by Chris Christodoulou - made the best possible reasons (2 versus my 4, see the review) for the reverse order, but I'm still not convinced. But no matter, it was a shattering evening. What with that and the Jacobi Lear screened live on Thursday, I've been reeling. Which I can't exactly say about Weinberg's The Portrait at Opera North in Leeds tonight. But I'm jumping ahead of myself - more anon.

Dudamel dissects Beethoven's dithyramb

What a relief it was to have Gustavo Dudamel's galvanizing Friday lunchtime workshop with young London musicians in the airy Hawksmoor surroundings of LSO St Luke's (all photographs here by Rosie Reed Gold) to offset against his all too earthly LA Phil Mahler Nine that night. I was able to do what, for want of a more polite term, is known as a shit sandwich of a review for The Arts Desk as a result.

Not that the Mahler was at all badly played, and it even rose to something more spiritual in a not inappropriately pressurised finale. But to see what the messianic motivator could achieve with musical youth - and he, or rather the Venezuelan sistema of which he is the most media-friendly representative, has everything to do with the future of classical concerts - would have made even the sceptics melt.


What I couldn't do for TAD, given the double-review, was enumerate his points. And I'm not sure I can very well now, as my notes are fairly illegible. But I want to try, if only to preserve the essence of those scribbles in the memory. To be honest, he could have gone through the same shtick with any group of players. But the point is that it got results, and it left everyone - players, audience, media hacks - all grinning inanely.

And so, after an approximate if exciting playthrough of the final Allegro con brio of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, Dudamel took it apart so that we could all see how it worked. First, the opening rhythm, short and clear, 'like striking a match', then the main idea, with more tension and less bow, an 'arrogant I want!' - and how revealing it was to hear every strand in the textures as he got each group to play separately. The second group of eight bars was too slack: more precision needed. Then the legato phrase, even throughout - no dropping off as the phrase came to an end, and no slowing down in the expressivity: 'there's no need to play rubato if you're playing espressivo. And with vibrato, please - without, it's empty, sad' (not sure Gardiner et al would agree). Then the famous phrase, which he'd used in our phone interview about the Tchaikovsky Fifth, about 'swimming in a honeypool'. Underneath the lyrical phrase, the second violins needed to sound almost rebellious. The tremolos had to be put across with as much bow as possible.


For those dotted rhythms, piano, punctuated by forte chords (B in my score), he got the strings to play first the pianos, then the fortes, then put them together (gosh, that worked). Referring to the woodwind's sustained harmonies in the first big crescendo beginning at bar 90, he quoted Barenboim as to how the 'harmony is so important for the intensity of the rhythms - the changes give the intensity to build the rest of the phrase'. Towards the end, there was some dissent about whether Beethoven wanted ff or fff - it depended which score you were using, Dudamel didn't have one for this and he could have done with it occasionally, but anyway he wanted the fff. And for the ultimate crescendo, everyone had to rise to their feet with the growing excitement - such fun to watch - and then reproduce that inwardly, as it were.


I've already written about the epilogue-speech Dudamel made on being presented with a cake two days after his 30th birthday. The ideas were none the less moving for being reiterated, since he means them: music is a fundamental human right; playing in an orchestra is the best model for a good society; remember this joy when you've lost it doing routine work in your 30s or 40s; and try to carry out even the smallest tasks with passion. Yes, I buy that.

More on heavenly Margaret

I've said most of what I wanted with a few YouTube sound-clips on The Arts Desk, and in a footnote to the Rosenkav celebrations here. But since I haven't stopped listening, in between Berlioz snippeting, to the great lady, here are just a few words on Margaret Price, whose death last Friday marked the departure of yet another of the 20th century's great voices (in fact, if I remember rightly, when asked by the BBC Music Magazine for my own list of 20 great sopranos a couple of years ago, I put her third after Maria and Joanie).

I had a crazy idea of going down to the small seaside town in Wales where she bred dogs like the golden retrievers above - photo courtesy of Malcolm Crowthers - to bend the knee, but it's too late now. In any case, the voice is the thing, and what a lot we have to remember her by. I've noted that I still need to get her French chansons disc, and the latest Wigmore CD - I was there, and still count it the greatest song recital of my life - but I think I've got a fair few of her performances on disc and LP.


These three are perhaps the most treasured. The Wigmore Hall 1971 recital embraces what Roger Neill regards as a Price peak, Liszt's Three Petrarch Sonnets. Such strength combined with such radiance is, I think, unique among sopranos, and exactly what we got in her Wesendonck Lieder (that was when I went off the rails and hazarded for the Guardian that she was probably 'the most complete soprano of our time'). Yet equally good, and more unexpected, is her way with Russian in Musorgsky's The Nursery - and indeed, she does catch the child within without the archness. Some of the other songs on the LP - Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Rossini - didn't make it onto CD, so the original's worth keeping.

Surprisingly, much of the song repertoire isn't as yet to be found on YouTube. I was also reminded of her achievements in English rep - Mary's 'The Sun Goeth Down' in Elgar's The Kingdom, the eerie voice in Vaughan Williams's Pastoral Symphony and Cathleen in his not-so-hot Riders to the Sea (only the contralto, Helen Watts, really gets the goods here). Now I need to reinvestigate her Schubert and Schumann. This is something, though: the loveliest Lied ever written, Mahler's 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen', sung by the most beautiful voice - and what ineffable long lines towards the end.

Genius and tyrant

Without Louis XIV, no gardens at Versailles, I guess, and no landscaping genius like Andre Le Notre (pictured first, of course) to be given the means to create them against all the odds of the king's capricious interference. But it struck me, reading Ian Thompson's excellently written book The Sun King's Garden how perplexing are the links between autocracy and the right for us pygmies to enjoy the best of everything (and the public have been doing that for free in Versailles' great outdoors since the French Revolution). I feel, once again, like young Hyacinth in Henry James's The Princess Casamassima , wondering at the great works of art but vexed at how they came into the world.


Writes Thompson in his Epilogue:

What difference does knowing the history of this place make to its enjoyment? Do we admire it less when we realise that it was a piece of propaganda and an expression of power? Are we troubled when we read that thousands of troops gave their lives in a futile attempt to get the fountains to run all day? Knowing that an immense amount of toil and suffering went into the creation of Le Notre's masterpiece can only increase the grip that this serene and stately place exerts upon the imagination. There is not a single tree alive at Versailles that was planted in the time of Le Notre, and even some of the statues are copies or restorations - the lay viewer has no way of knowing - yet the sense of continuity is palpable.

It's amazing that as much has survived of at least some of the 17th and 18th century garden design (there's been an ongoing project to restore Versailles to how it looked late in Louis XIV's reign). The Sun King built up such avowed wonders as the Grotto of Thetis, only to pull them down and replace them with another testament to vanity. Sheer hubris, much of it. Little did I grasp in late December when I looked down towards a frozen Piece d'Eau de Suisses, expanded from a village duck pond to a giant mirror of water the size of nearly 40 football pitches, what Madame de Sevigny - her letters are next stop - described as 'the prodigious mortality of the workmen, of whom every night wagons full of the dead are carried out...'. That makes it more than usually monument-like in winter.


Worse was the attempted diversion of the River Eure to keep up the water supply - still short - for the profusion of fountains, which led to an estimated 10,000 dead from malaria and accidents (no health and safety in those days). While the big-lake men had been Swiss guards, these were staple army cannon-fodder, and their deaths led to a shortage in the imminent, disastrous military campaign.


Autre temps, autre moeurs, to be sure. But thankfully we can all take our pleasure here, as at Vaux-le-Vicomte, Fontainebleau and Chantilly - three places we're going to see with friends Laurence and Bertrand in the spring. When rhe river gods and goddesses will, of course, no longer be trailing icicles from their mythological personages.


About these, incidentally, I learnt something else from Thompson: their handsome recumbent poses were designed so as not to block a clear view across the parterre to the great avenues below and beyond. Obvious, perhaps, but striking.

Happy birthday, Quinquin

Herrgott in Himmel, I nearly forgot that my favourite opera of all time and certainly the one I know best from head to toe, Strauss and Hofmannsthal's 'comedy for music' Der Rosenkavalier, is a hundred years old today; it took Gavin Plumley's homage - albeit with a clip of perhaps my least favourite Marschallin after Schwarzkopf, the over-indulgent Renee - on his Entartete Musik blog to remind me. Silhouette of Strauss and Hofmannsthal above by Bithorn, from the time it was shown in the Strauhof Museum Zurich's excellent exhibition 'Das Libretto'.

This is not, as they sing in the opera, quite what we'd hoped: I'd thought an annotated Rosenkav might make an intelligent coffee-table book for 2011, but there was much dragging of heels from a certain quarter, and then it was too late. Nor is there any chance for the seasonal warming of winter cockles this year, at least in the UK (what were you thinking of, Covent Garden and Mr. Pappano?)

Still, it's a time for Marschyesque reflection: almost too many great performances on stage and screen to recall. I can't quite choose an overall favourite on disc, though I guess the palm would have to go to the classic Erich Kleiber version.


I have a special affection for the Philips set, where the score is conducted like chamber music by Edo de Waart and Flicka shines as Octavian, and for the super-sumptuous if super-slow Bernstein offering. On DVD, there's no Marschallin more gorgeous and intuitively wonderful than Kiri's, though Gwyneth runs her close in the old Bavarian State Opera film: silence, you text-scoffers, and tell me in the following snippets if our often indolent Kiwi is slapdash or lacklustre with the meaning. Then along came Anne Schwanewilms's angry-beautiful redhead, and we all fell in love, I think, with that performance in an otherwise less than top-notch Dresden-in-Japan production. Sadly it's not snippeted decently on YouTube.


Best Octavians? For me, Fassbaender and Troyanos on DVD; on stage, a young Garanca in Vienna, terrific against Martina Serafin's gorgeous Marschallin - another redhead - though the creaking rep production left everyone to their own devices (lovely lady FLott said that the first time she met one of her Octavians at the Staatsoper was when she woke up in bed beside him/her). And the rest are usually good, with few matching the visual and vocal ideal of a young Sophie so well as Barbara Bonney, who seems to have stayed the girlish course for longest. I never thought Kurt Moll would make such a funny Ochs, but he does in the Met DVD, though for sheer classy delivery, dare I once again mention my good friend Peter Rose?

So what do we have that's worth seeing on YouTube (remember, to get the full picture on each of the below, you'll need to click on the moving image)? Kiri with Solti when the Schlesinger Covent Garden production was still fresh, ravishing and, yes, thoughtful in the Act 1 soliloquy:



Then let's switch to Gwyneth and Fassbaender in that classic Munich production, superlatively well conductor by Kleiber junior:



and back to Kiri, this time in a tired old Met staging which has just been issued on CD, and the fustian doesn't matter since the four leads find such meaning in interacting with each other. And though Levine has been quite a grand conductor of the score, his lavishness never holds up the proceedings like Thielemann's. The Sophie is Judith Blegen, no ingenue but still vocally very fine. Shame the whole thing stops at the end of the trio.



So raise a glass of old Tokay if you would to a complex masterpiece that's kept all the moaners on the run for a century now and retained its central place in a warhorse repertoire against the odds.

29/1 Very much on a related note, and as I mentioned in the reply to Jon below, the most beautiful Mozart/Strauss voice ever, Dame Margaret Price, died yesterday at the age of 69. I've written a brief tribute on The Arts Desk, and may add more here over the next few days. As always with these losses, such balm to be able to listen to her greatest recordings - and they are legion - by way of response.


I'm impressed that the BBC News website has a tribute among its headlines - as, of course, it should, but that kind of thing hasn't been happening recently. Are opera and classical music returning centre-stage as newsworthy?

Psychedelic Berlioz

It's been a hyperaesthesic, diverse ten days in London by any standards: a Spanish/Argentinian fiesta, Arab-Andalusian music (more below), the greatest violin-and-piano duo I've ever heard in the concert hall, gay men stripping off above the Stag pub in a truly terrible adaptation of Schnitzler's La Ronde, Russian women on their way to Siberia as well as hoping to get to Moscow, and even a glut of short films made by schoolkids about their pets, environment and sporting enthusiasms at East Finchley's Phoenix Cinema on Saturday afternoon (reason: the European Commission sponsored the project). But what's truly been thrumming through my brain and making me wake up early is the length/breadth of Berlioz's Romeo et Juliette.

I'm listening to about a dozen recordings - not all available or quotable - for Radio Three's Building a Library (transmission due on 5 February, assuming I've recorded it by then). And such is Berlioz's incredible invention that from hour to hour the ideas and themes in my head that won't give me any peace shift from one movement to another. His 'dramatic symphony' is the musical equivalent - and from 1839! - of Joyce's Ulysses in that for each 'scene' he makes a stylistic fresh start. Structurally, thematically, orchestrally and vocally there's nothing like it in the whole repertoire (Wagner was hugely impressed, if with mixed feelings, but he took the revolution in a whole different direction).

Clearly it's not my place to discuss the various recordings yet, but what's changed in my attitude to the piece? Chiefly the usefulness and originality of the vocal outer portions: I understand better why Berlioz wanted to set up the drama to come with his Greek chorus and soloists, and why the big operatic final scene dominated by Friar Laurence with the massed choirs (below cartoon by Dore) has to be; even though clearly it's disproportionate to Shakespeare's intentions, it makes good musical sense.


I'm also amazed by the interconnections, which mean that any movement or set of movements is diminished when heard out of context.

And what are the most feverish ideas that have seized hold of me? The start - that fabulous fugal idea, the first four notes of which were taken up, surely not coincidentally, by Prokofiev for the equivalent aggressive gesture of his Knights/Montagues and Capulets. The way he manages to write a tiny scherzetto of simple ingenuity for tenor, choir and very selective orchestra which, while it deals with the same aerial substance, is utterly different from the main scherzo devoted to 'Mab, queen of dreams'.


Which I still love best of all - its lopsided phrase-returns once the main buzzing theme has been clearly stated, the wistful cor anglais-led trio which so influenced Verdi for Nanetta's entry as queen of the fairies in Falstaff, the dream hunting-horns, the exquisite use of the antique cymbals Berlioz had first tried out in Naples' Archeological Museum (what magic there is in those three notes, p, then pp, then ppp, before they make the supernatural welkin ring).

Other simple but unusual ideas are of the essence: the distant dance-thrumming of the timpani and the tambour de basque before the aggressively brilliant Capulet ball and the offstage choral transformations after it, the vocal recitatives that punctuate the opening and love scenes, and the pitting of one-note chorus against deeply eloquent orchestral laments for Juliet's cortege (it's no mere gimmick that the roles are reversed half way through).


These are just random jottings while I'm in the thick of it. And now, if you please, Boulez (hmm) calls, followed by the mighty Munch.

Moroccans in Notting Hill

True, there's already a large Moroccan community, in Ladbroke Grove and the splendid Golborne Road, to be precise. But until Wednesday night, I doubt if they had been treated to such distinguished musical visitors as the members of the Fez (Arab-)Andalusian Orchestra, pictured above at the Tabernacle for the BBC by Simon Jay Price (who also took the next four photos below). It was the central part of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's Diverse Orchestras Week 2011, and it turned out to be far and away the best of the cross-cultural meetings I've attended. Read all about the riotous evening on The Arts Desk. While the highlight was hearing pure tradition in the hands of the world's best exponents, I still can't get over the dazzling appearance and the soulful musical sound of the BBC Family Orchestra, players of all ages, abilities, colours and presumably creeds.




Unfortunately I can't go to Maida Vale tonight to hear the Fez men's second concert, this time with the entire BBC Symphony Orchestra - I have a date with Russian women in a Siberian labour camp, courtesy of Moscow's visiting Sovremennik Theatre - but I look forward to the broadcasts.

We'd been well primed for the visit on Tuesday, with a guest appearance on my BBCSO course at the City Lit from Dr. Carolyn Landau, ethnomusicologist and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at King's College London> A pioneer of the brilliantly organised website collecting Moroccan memories in the UK, Carolyn is the perfect mix of precise knowledge and passionate enthusiasm, so I learnt a lot about the different types of Moroccan musics and hope she'll be able to set up a little course on Music and Islam at the Lit.

I felt better prepared to understand the stunning Fez Andalusian players' preparatory improvisation on their chosen maqam or mode, and much enriched by knowing that each singer/player does his own arabesques around the theme, which may sound haphazard to western ears but once you get used to it can be heard for what it is, a healthy form of heterophony. The group's consummate lead singer, Aziz Alami Chentoufi, is pictured here second from the right. How could you not covet, as I do, a pair of the yellow slippers, apparently rather expensive because of the (saffron?) dye.


On Tuesday, we had a whistlestop tour around the leading types of performance in Morocco, dictated to a certain extent by the divisions of its mountain ranges, with examples provided from the splendid collection of the much-travelled Jean Jenkins. You can hear them in 'the map' section of Moroccan Memories. I was especially fascinated by the Gnawa or sufic music, originating from sub-Saharan Africa, Mali included, as this old postcard reveals.


There are haunting sounds here - the low tones of the gumbri, a three-string bass lute (not pictured in the above line-up, but an essential component these days), and the hypnotic clashings of the qaraqub, iron castanets. The idea is that the sick person to be treated dances until he or she falls down in a faint, and we saw something of this in a film provided by one of Carolyn's colleagues.

Too much to report here, but watch this space: Carolyn has some friends who've just done up a Riad in Meknes, running short courses in cookery and things cultural. Whether or not we take any of those up, or just stay there before going on to hike in the Atlas Mountains, I can't say yet, but I feel a trip coming on.

Lisztomania

Or rather, mania with Liszt attached. I wasn't expecting to be quite so stunned by the new DVD of Kenneth MacMillan's Mayerling; having seen Edward Watson as a rather pallid Romeo, I'd never imagined he'd be up to the mark of syphilitic, gun-toting, sado-masochistic Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria (not telling you the true-to-life plot if you don't already know it). But that's the intriguing thing about dancers, as with singers, that some roles just fit them like a glove. I wish I'd understood this earlier in life.

Clearly 35 words on it in a BBC Music Magazine ballet round-up wasn't going to be enough, so I was lucky to have a chance, simultaneously, to write about Liszt and the use of his music in the ballet by John Lanchbery for the Royal Opera and Ballet website, readable here. I think the site looks good now as well as, let's hope, reading informatively and being well cross-referenced).

That fellow Jack, as Lanchbery's pals knew him, really was more of a great man than most people seem to have recognised. I adore his work on Tales of Beatrix Potter - which he came to the flat to talk about shortly before he died, tinkling away on the ivories of our on-loan Steinway Boudoir Grand to demonstrate - and La fille mal gardee. The Liszt potpourri is perhaps even more sensitive a selection. There are works already scored by Liszt, who God knows was not on the whole the greatest orchestrator, including the opening of A Faust Symphony which serves as brooding deathmotif throughout; but Lanchbery also does a pointedly weird job himself on some of the quirkier piano miniatures. Anyway, read all about it over there.


As for the latest cast to take up MacMillan's grim gauntlet, what an ensemble it is. All the ladies create a real sense of character - not just the scary-ambitious Mary Vetsera of Mara Galeazzi (pictured with Watson above in the first of two Royal Ballet production photos by Johan Persson, in a Pas so physical you fear her body might snap) and Sarah Lamb's calculating Marie Larisch but also the poignant ones, Iohna Loots as poor Princess Stephanie (dancing another weird Pas de deux with Watson's Rudolf below) and Cindy Jourdain's hot-and-cold Empress Mother. There's a dazzling, sexy cameo from Steven McRae, too, as royal cabbie Bratfisch. Otherwise the whole thing works against what I always thought the principle of ballet was, to froth up, instead stripping down to the skull beneath the skin. Very scary. I can't wait for it to come back into the Royal Ballet rep.


And of course it's the Liszt bicentenary, as if you could possibly have missed that already, as well as Hungary's controversial six-month EU presidency (it looks as if Sarkozy and Merkel may already have plied a restraining effect upon Hungary's truly awful new government). I have no regrets about missing the wonderful Budapest Festival Orchestra under Ivan Fischer on Sunday, simply because while no doubt that was a five-star occasion - my pal Ed Seckerson certainly loved it, and so did the diplo-mate - the duo of towering violinist Leonidas Kavakos and revelatory pianist Enrico Pace over at the Wigmore would have to merit five and a half. More anxious to hear a masterpiece not often played live, Prokofiev's First Violin Sonata, in such hands rather than the relatively known quantities on the BFO programme, I chose to write about the recital for The Arts Desk; I'm still reeling from it and thinking over especially the plains of heaven Kavakos and Pace trod in Schubert's C major Fantasy.

Anyway, there's plenty more Liszt on the horizon (all they had on offer at the Southbank was the First Piano Concerto, another dubious choice for Stephen Hough, but Fischer had already done several of the not-great tone poems as well as anyone could expect at the Barbican several years back). Mayerling has sent me back to some of the sources, not least the Harmonies du soir of the transcendental etudes which serves as a climactic Act 3 Pas de Deux. Bertrand in Paris was going through a Cziffra craze, some of which rubbed off on me, so here's the phenomenal Hungarian master surmounting a peak of pianistic art:



Before we go on to more Cziffra, a less overheated interlude - one of the many great works which wouldn't have fitted into the decadent, hothouse environment of Mayerling, Les jeux d'eaux a la Villa d'Este. This performance was recorded in 1928 by my personal favourite among Liszt interpreters, Claudio Arrau.



Cziffra leads me on to the opera we're spending seven or so weeks on at the City Lit, Wagner's Tannhauser. We're already having an intriguing time in the two Venusbergs of 1845 and 1861, so here's the Liszt transcription of the Overture from Tannhauser's second hymn of praise to Venus to the end:



And just as an ironic encore, since there's been so much talk of this since we discussed it at Susie and Michael's on 2 January, another overture transcription with a difference: Hindemith's Overture to The Flying Dutchman as Played at Sight by a Second-Rate Spa Orchestra at the Village Well at 7 O'Clock in the Morning.
A little of it goes a long way until it breaks out in a Strauss waltz, but what effects from a mere string quartet.