Russell to Mosley, January 1962

It's frustrating that few politicians can write or say to Trump what Bertrand Russell in his 90s expressed with such elegant concision to Oswald Mosley*.

Obama's loyalty to the dignity appropriate to his high office is understandable. But it's painful to watch. I look forward, in one way only, to the moment when he relinquishes it, when he can - as he has already intimated - say all the things that have been denied him as President. Clearly his successor has no such qualms about dignity and is still churning out his semi-literate Twitter attacks. Well, maybe he will learn the hard way.

Can other politicans stop saying 'let's wait and see' and call Trump out for what he represents? This Irish senator, Labor MP Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, clearly can, but he's in a minority.

I share my dear American friend Sue Scheid's focused anger against everyone who voted for any candidate other than Hillary Clinton. All were deluded, and all are responsible for threatening to send the world to hell in a handcart, or a dumptruck, choose your vehicle. Those who did so and are protesting can do what they want but in my opinion they forfeited that right.

Fortunately it also seems, to judge from two strong features in today's Guardian, that the tide is turning against the insidious liberal notion that both this and Brexit were the result of the dispossessed kicking against the elite. And can the press stop using the word 'alt-right' and call it by its proper name, fascism?

We will watch him every millimetre of the way and fight back, or at least from the UK try to help enable others to do so.

Update (21/11): so far the President-elect's actions, apart from the horrendous people he's been appointing as his inner circle, have been to lash out on Twitter against a TV chat show and a Broadway musical.  And this is the man who promised to fight IS?

*Transcript in case it's too small to read:

22 January 1962

Sir Oswald Mosley,
5, Lowndes Court,
Lowndes Square,
London, S.W.1.

Dear Sir Oswald,

Thank you for your letter and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.

I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.

I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.

Yours sincerely,

Bertrand Russell

Don Giovanni: treasure trove

Referring specifically to the very surprising new Sony recording with a crack cast and the maverick Teodor Currentzis conducting the Perm Opera Orchestra which goes by the name of Musicaeterna; and more widely to the succession of great recordings we've heard of the ensembles, duets and arias throughout the past six weeks of my Opera in Focus class at the Frontline Club (other choices here).


I hadn't heard the two previous instalments in Currentzis's Mozart-Da Ponte cycle, and approach him warily. Much of what he says in the booklet interview is plain wrong, facts included. And I don't buy it for a minute.

But, as with the Stravinsky Rite of Spring, which has embarrassing poetry by our polymath to accompany it, what matters -the performance - is amazing. Working my way through the opera scene by scene, I was constantly looking for the best, the liveliest, the most fine-tuned to this difficult drama. And though the Currentzis set only arrived unsolicited by the time of Class 3, I found myself pressing it into service time and again.

It was invaluable, in short, for the fizziest 'Fin ch'han dal vino' (as much for the orchestral bristling as for Dimitris Tiliakos), the funniest and most vivid representation of the three orchestras in the Act One finale - full of ornaments as well as pointedly sour tuning-up - and the earlier part of Act Two, with two mandolins participating in the Serenade. Most of the big set-piece arias have their moments, and interesting ornamentation in da capos, but perhaps only one is up there with the considerable best on disc - tenor Kenneth Tarver's 'Il mio tesoro'.

Here are both sweetness and Italianate ardour. It's also the only recording I know where the singer actually manages 68 notes in a row at the midpoint - albeit many of them semiquavers - in a single breath (Tauber actually breaks halfway through, despite received wisdom, though maybe McCormack does it - need to check that) and stylish adornments on the return.

That's now my absolute favourite. There are other clear front-runners for various highlights: Sutherland for Giulini in 'Or sai che l'onore', a fusion of Popp and Freni in the two Zerlina arias, Kiri te Kanawa for Davis in 'Mi tradi'. Nicolai Ghiaurov and Walter Berry are both essentially basses, so when you add Franz Crass's Commendatore into the mix, the Klemperer recording is jet-black vocally and hair-raising orchestrally. I've come back round to admiring that indomitable master's clarity and energy even in his later performances, so much so that I ordered up the big EMI box set of the symphonic canon which I loved so much at university. It's been a constant source of nourishment in these dark days.

Giulini, for all his slightly old-fashioned aristocratic stateliness, gives the best Act 1 Quartet and Finale Trio as well as the Act 2 Sextet; I always get shivers at the modulation to the Anna-Ottavio entry. Desert island tracks all, and with Schwarzkopf, no less, usually a bête (or should that be tête) noire of mine.

Tomorrow we conclude with the statue scene and its aftermath, enriched as much was last week by sideways looks at the Gazzaniga version with the Bertati libretto which Da Ponte used as his model. There's a very lively recording of that, sans recits, by Bruno Weil and his Tafelmusik ensemble. Then in sweeps the hero of the hour, and the year, Mark Wigglesworth, to cover Mozart, Berg and Shostakovich. If you'd like to drop in for this one-off - which may well be Mark's last talk as ENO Music Director - as he still is until the end of the Lulu run, at least in my books, just as surely as Obama remains in the Oval Office. There are comparisons to be made between the micro- and macrocosms.

Thursday's journey into night

So I did it more or less right by my own hard-to-keep standards on Wednesday, sticking to a vow not to read the news or listen to the radio, and - as described in the previous post - the personal good took over. Not only that; an evening at ENO witnessing Wigglesworth's last fling in the magnificent Kentridge-designed and -directed Lulu proved not to be the heavy weather I'd expected, but a rigorous and ultimately exhilarating focus on what you can achieve by working through a score like Berg's to the very highest standards. I'm going again on Saturday and taking godson Alexander, down here from Scotland on a visit. Pictured below by Catherine Ashmore, another artistic take by William Kentridge to set alongside the Maleviches which have served me well.

Yesterday, not so good. Started fine by trying to get my teeming thoughts on Lulu into order. But then I gave way not only to reading The Guardian but getting involved in commenting on LinkedIn articles. For God's sake! Do I never learn? I kept away from Facebook and Twitter exactly because of this intemperate desire to sound off. And of course when it comes to talking about Trump you're going to come up against the semi-literate trolls. This one can string a sentence better than many, but oh, the instant insults come so easily. Indulge me while I reproduce the exchange, under a piece by Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament which also brought forth such lovely comments as one recommending the purging of  'libtard pollutants' and another opining that 'an execution of a couple of assholes ie bill n hillery [sic] would be a good start'.

David Nice
Writer, lecturer and broadcaster on classical music

Can we just stop using the word 'respect'? It was inappropriate for the Brexit referendum result and it's ludicrous to apply it to Trump.

[redacted]
Contributor at American Patriot; OurCivics; American Thinker; LinkedIn

imbeciles like you need to go to your safe places so that you do not get your feelings hurt, cream-puff. At least have the intellect to not support scandal ridden criminals if you are going to even mention respect.

DN: Well, well. We can expect a lot more of this filth now. This is clearly a thread to avoid. Of Turkish origin, Mr [redacted], as your name suggests? Then all the more shame on you for supporting a racist and a xenophobe.

KO: Trump is neither a racist nor a xenophobe (heck, he is married to a foreigner, moron!).  Advocating for a nation that respects its laws (immigration included) is no xenophobia or racism.  He never said all Latinos were criminals.  He was talking about the 35% of our prison inmates that happen to fit that bill.  Basic intellectual honesty demands that one see that much.  As you comprehend nothing of the business world, learn how business people think so that you do not buy in to idiotic talking points.[...]

DN: Big assumptions there, Mr [redacted] Please don't talk of intellect or honesty. Or have the disrespect to call someone else a moron or a cream-puff. And now this cream-puff is going to float away...

And of course there's always that option. I should have taken it sooner on one other thread, but I was curious to see if I could have a dialogue with someone who thought differently. I made the mistake of asking a young woman advertising herself as an 'Environmental Scientist' what she meant by some organisational jargon which meant nothing to me and oblique talk of sheep and elephants (turns out Democrats and liberals like myself are sheep, Trump's people the elephants, supposedly in a good way, though of course pachyderms on the rampage cause a lot of damage).

That was like talking to a person who appears sane but then says something so outlandish that you suddenly realise he or she isn't. In this case I got back the reply 'Enough with donkey empathy, your [sic] a victim of feigned political diligence and you have never have to watch an oversight committee get canned for something really important. You are a sheep that has never stood for anything...you have never had a cause, you have never really followed politics, you have never cared enough to get involved.'

Much she knew about me. Another nice person jumped in with 'Allyson will...grind you up' and as an articulate afterthought just put up one word, 'punk'. I congratulated those two and a third for taking a leaf out of Trump's rulebook of classic bullying and left. This, like the catalogue of much direr abuse catalogued in the twitter page of Day One in Trump's America (admittedly not all of it verifiable), has the imprimatur of Trump's encouragement to express hatred. We can expect much, much more of it in the years to come: the Brexit licence to abuse 'foreigners' multiplied infinitely and extended of course to the LGBT community (a regular contributor to Parterre noted how he was walking down a New York street and out of a car came 'hey, faggot! How do you like your new president?')

You'll see I manage not to put up that unbearable visage, and much as I approve this German headline I have to cut off the picture below it.

Worth having on link-record, though, the list of 'the 282 places, people and things Trump has insulted on Twitter' in today's New York Times.

As for the nature of the roughly 25 per cent's 'revolution'*, I'm having problems with my anger when friends parrot the 'disenfranchised lashing back against the elite' as the chief cause. For me, this liberal self-beating-up is one of the reasons why we are where we are. Let's say an unthinking 'lashback' may be a contributing factor - ironic that in the cases of Brexit and Trump, the vote was for a far worse 'elite' than the liberal one - but a breakdown of the demographics doesn't show anything so simple. The driving forces were racism and xenophobia pure and simple (though of course there are social reasons behind that). I'd like to see more in the press from the psychological perspective. But foreign correspondents do politics, not psychology. And since I'm not a politician and don't have to be diplomatic, this is about the gist of it for me.

That and an astonishingly prescient comment from H L Mencken in 1920.

That seems to be not quite the original quotation; I wish he'd written the 'narcissistic' bit but it seems not. Here's the full context: 

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Anyway, back to black Thursday. Things brightened much later in the day with the mother of my young viola-playing friend Andrew Lavelle sending me a soundclip of him playing Bloch in a Juilliard masterclass. Here he is again - the original context comes in this entry - from a spontaneous mini-recital after one of my Frontline Club opera classes.

Andrew and Amanda were two people I'd unaccountably left off the list when I sent an email, with several links, to all American or America-based friends I could think of. The young will have their day - but how long, o Lord, how long? I only wish I could have held on to the delusion that half of America doesn't want this. But since a staggering 46.9 per cent didn't vote, it's only a quarter.

So what to do? Ignore social and wider media, get out into the fresh air and go walking, like Hillary with her dogs and the lady who met her while out with her daughter (the photo taken above, which I assume I reproduce with the Facebooker's blessing, is a real spirit raiser, unless you wish Hillary dead or in jail, of course). Then, replenished, get back to not accepting but fighting, find out how to turn anger into power - which, as one civil rights organiser put it 'takes discipline and focus'. And make sure you're in good physical and mental state before you plunge in. I promise a slow drip of nature shots from various walks in the entries to come.

On which final note, here's another shot from Spetses, by day this time, taken like the sunrise image in the previous post only last Sunday (can it be? A week is a long time in politics). And I've only just found out that Hydra, the further of the two islands in the distance, was beloved by Leonard Cohen, whose 'Joan of Arc' just hit me with the force of revelation. Maybe he, rather than Bob Dylan, should have got the Nobel Prize for Literature

*Bearing in mind the 46.9 per cent of eligible voters who did nothing - pointed out lower down in the piece - that leaves both Clinton and Trump on points of 25 per cent each (HC, of course, having the lead by some 800,000 votes to date, with some counting still to go).

News blackout day

The not unexpected culmination for the worst year in human history during my adult lifetime. A lot of angry, uneducated and impoverished people unable to see the better side of globalism, as well as plenty of dumb f**s with a ten second attention span. Now - possible spoiler - let's hope the trajectory follows the final stages of Roth's The Plot Against America. I'm just not tuning in to the media for a while.

Meanwhile, here's sunrise last Sunday morning in Spetses, after the only good piece of news about our own beleaguered country reached us. The church bells summoned me early to our friends' terrace. Though I suppose the old saw about red sky in the morning might have applied in retrospect. This morning the weather in Blighty is miserably in tune.

One must cultivate the garden and not let the lemmings pull the other half of us over the cliff.

STOP PRESS (12.30pm) On the garden-cultivation front, there is some consolation. I just heard from my good friend Ben Baker, emailing on a flight (the last?!) out of America, that he's been awarded first prize in the Young Concert Artists auditions in New York (they've yet to update the website, but there's a jolly picture of him with the other finalists). What's more he's coming back to head up to Birmingham for our mutual friend - and Ben knows him shall we say a little better since they were fellow students at the Yehudi Menuhin School - Jonathan Bloxham's first major concert with the CBSO, where he's assistant conductor. Here they are (Ben on left) at a stunning Warehouse event I reported on earlier this year.

Jonathan was asked to step in a couple of weeks ago - his first official appearance is later in the season - and he's conducting the symphony which won him the approval of the CBSO players at his audition, Mozart's 38th ('Prague'). The great Piotr Anderszewski also directs two Mozart concertos from the keyboard. Wish I could be there, but it's the first night of Berg's Lulu at ENO tonight. Toitoi to Jonathan and details here if you're free.

I'm with Her...and her

Vital message from American royalty - short but to the point. Not that any of RuPaul's fans should need encouraging. Nor, I imagine, will any American readers need telling...



Over here, nothing exemplifies our own sorry state of affairs than this shrewd comparison (in case anyone's been Rip Van Winkling, the judges ruled that Parliament must be consulted before the Conservatives trigger Article 50 to leave the European Union). You are encouraged to tear up complimentary copies of the Daily Mail on British Airways flights.

City parks in Autumn

I count myself lucky to have caught so much rus in urbe over the past month or so, especially in Edinburgh and Leeds. There's also a virtue in seeing the same parts of London parks and gardens across the seasons, above all Kew Gardens, the Chelsea Physic Garden, Kensington Gardens/Hyde Park and Chiswick House Gardens (one of several sphinxes pictured above).

First stop is the most recent cockapoo/spoodle etc 'meet', usually held on the last Sunday of each month around the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens. My heart belongs to naughty Ted, of course, looking especially pert here

but it was also good to be able to introduce him to gentle Max, and their owners to each other. Max is circumspectly enquiring about the endless rough and tumble Ted enjoys, fangs out in play, with his best friend Archie

and I have to say the cutest 'poo of the morning had to be this shaggy one year old, just adorable.

After the break-up, and coffee outside the Serpentine Gallery, I went to look at the other pavilions erected for the first time nearby - better as an ensemble than individually, and offering good perspectives. This one is through Yona Friedman's modular structure

while Kunlé Adeyemi's Summer House is an inverse replica of Queen Caroline's Pavilion, seen beyond its central arch.

This year's star by the Bjarke Ingels Group, sixteenth among the best of the main Serpentine Pavilions, is now being dismantled. I feel lucky to have caught it for the last time on the most perfect afternoon.

Another blue-sky afternoon shed light on some Danish* junior bandsfolk who'd piled off a bus by the Albert Memorial and entertained me on my way to a Monday Opera in Depth class.

Meanwhile Kew's star attraction, the Hive, looks good in all weathers. I've devoted enough time to it already so no more pics from within, just a distant glimpse

and some pictorial reminders that when we last visited, the bee-friendly herbaceous borders were still going strong.

It's also the first time I've seen a gaggle of those most beautifully marked of all ducks, the Mandarins.

Not sure I'd clocked what the female of the species looked like either.

When I was a student in Edinburgh throughout the early 1980s, Calton Hill was very rarely a destination. Now that I stay a night or so a year at the quiet and cosy Parliament House Hotel when attending a Scottish Chamber Orchestra concert, it's on the doorstep and that whole east end of town, which gives way to so much nature, has become a stamping ground (hence the visits to the two exhibitions I wrote about recently). On this occasion I had the best room of all, right at the top, with a view directly across to the Dugald Stewart Monument on the hill which Robert Louis Stevenson used to chastise Edinburgh for commemorating Robert Burns less lavishly

as well as towards Salisbury Crags with the old Parliament Building in front

and Leithwards; here's a perspective slightly further round from the top of the hill which extends past Stockbridge and the New Town just as far as the top of the Forth Rail Bridge.

Calton Hill is now a popular tourist destination (I don't remember it being especially so in the 1980s), and in September the Chinese were flocking to Edinburgh. Yet I can only be proud of how beautiful this all is. Nobody minds now that William Henry Playfair's Grecian National Monument, begun to commemorate the fallen in the Napoleonic Wars, was left unfinished in 1829 and once dubbed, inter alia, 'the Pride and Poverty of Scotland'.

The central wing of Playfair's 1818 City Observatory is handsome

but I like better still the little temple on its east side.

Part of the building has now been requisitioned for Collective, an art group which was using one room to display the work of Hamish Young, homaging the Carrara marble quarries.

As for the views over which Stevenson waxed so lyrical, the classic one is with the Dugald Stewart Monument in the foreground looking west down Princes Street towards the castle

while looking over to Arthur's Seat,

you can well believe you're in the deepest Scottish countryside at one viewpoint, with no hint of the buildings in the valley between.

Holyrood Palace looks very handsome from above

and it was there I headed for the first of two superb exhibitions I've already chronicled in some detail. On the previous evening, I took a customary stroll from Parliament House Hotel to the Usher Hall via George Street and Princes Street Gardens

with the sun dazzling the eyes from due west, silhouetting the monument to the Royal Scots Greys Regiment.

A fortnight later I took another pleasant train journey north, this time to Leeds to review Opera North's excellent new production of Britten's Billy Budd for The Arts Desk. I stayed with fellow contributor Graham Rickson and his partner and daughter in Chapel Allerton, a good place to be based for an excursion to what Leeds claims is the largest public park in Europe, Roundhay. Surely Richmond** must be bigger? No matter, there are so many gems studded around the park, not least Canal Gardens over the main road

and somewhat Chelsea Flower Show-ish recreations of famous sites like the Generalife of the Alhambra.

But the main glory is the sweep from the Mansion,

where I had excellent Eggs Benedict and smoked salmon for lunch, down to the Waterloo Lake. The kid on the pavement and her brother had been assembling neat rows of conkers.

Connecting to the Greek Revival on Calton Hill, Thomas Nicholson, who bought an estate which had once been a Norman hunting ground, had his residence begun in 1811. In another link, former soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars worked on the construction of  the lower lake, hence its name.

As well as this Swan of Tuonela, there were plenty of Indian families sitting in the sun.

The walk back was a match for the beauties of Richmond Park or Hampstead Heath

with autumn crocuses flourishing in the shade

and plenty of green around the gate, outside which I took the No. 3 bus back to the centre of Leeds and (eventually) the train home.

By way of a Chiswick coda, the final snaps record a bike ride last Saturday afternoon, taken for exercise's sake since we'd postponed our Pilgrims' Way walk until Sunday. A wise decision, as it turned out, but the grey light in the park

cleared as I cycled back, the setting sun lighting up trees by the Thames

and the tower of Chiswick Parish Church

with some fine rose-lit clouds over the river.

Next photojournal stop: the walk from Borough Green to Trottiscliffe Church and Neolithic barrow and back - real countryside.

 *Laurent in a comment below had noticed the flag, which I hadn't, and pointed out the correct nationality. I had 'German' because that was the language on the side of the bus from which they'd dismounted.

**Digression re Richmond Park: bring it on, my new Europe-friendly party of choice, and away with you, craven scaremonger Zac Goldsmith. High hopes for this one.