Jabberwocky/Jaseroque/Jammerwoch/Barmaglot

As noted after I'd reeled out from the concert premiere of Gerald Barry's Alice's Adventures Under Ground in 2016, the composer sets the greatest absurdist poem I know in French, German and Russian. Having been struck again - twice - by Barry's genius in Antony McDonald's perfect Royal Opera production, I thought I'd do a trawl for readings of translations on YouTube. The only good one I found is the Russian version.

There's also, however, a consummate delivery of the original, savouring every word, from the great Christopher Lee.

Since I could spout the first two stanzas at will, I made an effort to learn it all by heart, and it's surprising how it trips off the tongue. Martin Gardner in The Annotated Alice compares the best nonsense poetry like this to abstract art, and in both, he suggests, the artist should not struggle too hard to try and find connections which should flow unconsciously; as he points out re the likes of Getrude Stein and the Italian futurists, 'when the technique is taken too seriously, the results become tiresome'.

I seem to have spent a lot of time hanging around the Royal Opera House even when I wasn't going to see the show in the main house (which I did first on the press night - and wrote about it for The Arts Desk - and then to see the second of the two casts on Sunday at noon. Production photos here by Clive Barda). Saturday was a case of no good deed going unpunished; on Friday, I'd arranged with my beloved but scatty friend Edsy to meet her, husband Kit and goddaughter Mirabel plus various friends between shows (they had tickets for both). In the morning I fixed up a time for a backstage tour of props by my pal the wonderful Nicky Spence, since he does such a superb job here.

He was happy to oblige; his sister and her children would love it too. Yet despite four emails and five phone messages, Edsy was not to be contacted in time - I didn't see them come out of the earlier showing and the opportunity passed. Found them later; she'd lost her mobile IN DECEMBER. But this is boring for the reader; the fact that Mirabel and Kit weren't going to the second showing meant I could take them to Blade Rubber Stamps next to the London Review of Books shop and treat her to a Tenniel of her choice. I gave J this one and it's quite fun to sign off with when it comes to sending cards from the two of us.

In the end she preferred a row of (non-Tenniel) lizards to be reproduced in rainbow print. I left father and daughter at the British Museum, where Friends of the Earth were protesting BP sponsorship of the Troy exhibition (I'd been, didn't learn much I didn't already know, but it's a good education for lots of folk) with a wooden horse.

What followed turned out to be a long walk on the beautiful sunny afternoon before Storm Ciara struck - J was getting it in Galway at the same time - from the BM to the length and breadth of Bermondsey High Street before I took a bus from outside the Tower of London and then a tube to King's Cross for the 7pm Aurora Orchestra concert. For a start, it was good to see the first crocuses in Bloomsbury Square.

Had planned to go home for a couple of hours, but Temple tube and the District Line were closed, so I admired the first blossom by the Thames

 

and the dropped into Two Temple Place for a so-so exhibition of women collectors of fabrics (any excuse to see the rooms, but not quite sure where Yinka Shonibare's ship fits into it all),

crossed Blackfriars Bridge

to join the hordes from the Southbank Walk to London Bridge, then via some of the back streets to trendy Bermondsey - can anyone identify this astonishing yellow-flowering tree? -

followed by a pop in to the Eames Gallery - excellent linocut prints by  Gail Brodholt, excellent urban scenes though I especially liked the motorway perspectives, and covet this one -

and the White Cube where the latest Anselm Kiefer exhibition had so stunned us the previous week (need to post on that anon). The spaces are filled, spectacularly enough from one perspective though not from many as the Kiefers achieved it, with mew works by Cerith Wyn Evans, including fig. 0 in white neon.

Coffee at the south end of the street, which I hadn't reached before (we always stop at Pizarro for lunch),

 and then I noticed full moon rising.

I reckoned it would look even better on the river, and though it had risen further by the time I got to Tower Bridge it was still complementary to the rest of the twinkling lights.

Flash, when on, is erratic in doing its stuff; when it does, the image is sharper and of course the background darker.

Sunday was very different. I gave myself bags of time to struggle through the storm and catch a tube back to Covent Garden, though it came immediately, and missed the downpours both ways (they came later). So glad I caught the 'other' (not second or B) cast, because the two with the most to sing were piu brilliante: Nicky, going for broke in his last performance(s) as the Mad Hatter and others, and Jennifer France, who beamed out what I'm told are 98 top Cs with fearless brilliance. Here our two national treasures are with Robert Murray as the March Hare and Carole Wilson as the Dormouse.

A few more favourite tableaux: Carole's Cook and 'wah wah wah' chorus,

the Looking-Glass Train scene,

and very near the end.

Claudia Boyle and Sam Furness in the previous cast were excellent, but these two were off-the-planet fabulous. So were the brass, perfecting their tuckets and galops under Finnegan Downie Dear - cool as a cucumber, Nicky later told me. I wasn't intending to intrude after, but he appeared from the stage door just as I was heading down Floral Street (I'd been chatting with the wonderful Elizabeth Wilson, so good to see here there. She's taken part in recordings of some of Barry's chamber works). Then Joshua Bloom, such an excellent Humpty, appeared on his way to his last performance, and La France with a friend. Here's a happy group pic in the storm.

May they all be reunited in the inevitable revival as soon as possible.

A Beethoven trifle for a time of feasting

No, not one of those ever more elliptical Bagatelles, but a Gerald Barry concoction for Christmas Day, images of which he sent to me as a morning surprise and has given me his kind permission to reproduce here. No prizes for guessing why the trifle is called '5', though funnily enough the image reached me upside down, prompting me to quip that the only thing it brought to mind was one of Janáček's musicalised Czech words (like the example he gives in one of his essays of an old woman calling a chicken, 'na, pipinka, [na, na]'.

Proof that the confection hath a bottom.

And a chance for me to spill a bean or two ahead of 2016 choices. Classical and Opera picks are due out on The Arts Desk tomorrow and Thursday, and I hope I can get round to doing a selection of a few CD oddities here. One which I'll flag in advance, Barry's typically off-kilter homages to Beethoven and other whimsies, I've already reviewed for the BBC Music Magazine - rather typically, it doesn't seem to have made it to their online directory of reviews - and have played three times already.

Needless to say I'm not the only one on TAD who thought the UK concert premiere of Barry's Alice's Adventures Under Ground was an operatic highlight of 2016 (and see the slightly daft entry on using 'to berserk' as a transitive verb). Hoping that next year might give us a production, but there would have to be animation in it to keep up with the velocity which is its chief characteristic (we got score directions flashing past on the supertitling). I thought that brilliant company 1927 would do the trick; Barry has been interested in the work of Barrie Kosky, who collaborated with 1927 on his Komische Oper Zauberflöte, so maybe there's the answer.

Gerald Barry approves 'to berserk' (transitive)

It came to me after I'd written the bulk of my review of Gerald Barry's wondrous-rapid Alice's Adventures Under Ground - its UK premiere at the Barbican which sent most of us away in a state of barely-suppressed hysteria. I know you can 'go berserk', in homage to the old Norse berserkers of that name - noun, obviously - who went wildly into battle in a trance that made them impervious to wounds and wearing only animal skins ('berserk' equals 'bear shirt', pictured in an engraving of an historic relief above). Didn't Barry apply the technique to Lewis Carroll? So why shouldn't there be a specific transitive verb?

A picturesque digression before I get to the point. Two berserkers were set the Herculean task of clearing a route through a lavafield on the Snæfellsnes peninsula of Iceland in 982 AD, as described in the Eyrbyggja Saga - hence its name, Berserkjahraun. A fascinating place, and this is my pretext for putting up another couple of pictures of it following one of the blog chronicles about a most extraordinary holiday.

As for 'berserking' the Alice books, I applied the notion to my subheading; my editor questioned it. Maybe I'd better paraphrase his argument - put simply, he didn't think it could work as a verb. Could I come up with anything clearer? My response: 'I decided I like it. Since MacMillan has a piece called The Berserking, I think it can [work as a verb]. Let's be adventurous'. That didn't go down too well - think of the reader, was the response. Pause for a noisy interlude: I was going simply to put up the cover of the recording of MacMillan's work - his first piano concerto, in effect - but since it's on YouTube, let's have the whole thing. The composer in his note points out that the berserkers essentially shot themselves in the foot, since their stupor left them 'vulnerable to a more stealthy attack'. How very like his fellow countrymen now, he adds, in sports and politics.

Anyway while I'm usually amenable to change, I stuck fast on this, and emailed the composer - we've had friendly correspondence since he came to my Opera in Depth class to talk about The Importance of Being Earnest. Let's call it a 'professional friendship', no bar to being critical if I didn't like something he'd written (I started out not understanding anything about The Intelligence Park in the year of The Sunday Correspondent, but was bowled over by The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and I still think Earnest is a masterpiece - one of the three best operas I've seen close to their premieres. The others being Adams' Nixon in China and MacMillan's The Sacrifice).

I asked Gerald, 'Do you approve of it as a verb?...In your spirit'.And the response came back (which I'm sure is straightforward enough to be reproducible) 'I certainly do approve! Berserk is THE word! Thank you!'

So there. And long life to Alice (pictured above, the male quartet from its cast of seven, looking cuddly rather than berserkish in one of two pictures I didn't get to use of Robert Allen's Barbican selection: Allan Clayton, Peter Tantsits, Mark Stone and Joshua Bloom). The UK premiere was a definite highlight of 2016 for me- (but I refuse to draw up a list just yet; we've got two more weeks of events, including a Royal Opera premiere for Robert Carsen's production of Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier).

A colleague thought it might be a peg below Earnest simply because Barry's genius there was to subvert a classic text, and Carroll couldn't be any wackier in the first place. I think the subversion is in the speed, selecting the most bizarre parts of the two books, removing Alice's logic and her Oxford background and whizzing through each volume in 50 minutes apiece. Now - how on earth is anyone going to execute the stage directions at such high velocity? My money would be on the company 1927, which incorporates real figures within animation. Let's see.

One-offs: El Niño and The Nose

I'm actually referring to one-off classes from the past two weeks of my Opera in Depth course, but Adams' Christmas oratorio/opera and Shostakovich's Gogol extravaganza are both unique even in their composers' outputs (top images: Mujer de Mucha Enagua, PA'TI XICANA, 1999, as it appears on the cover of El Niño's indispensible first recording, and the 2012 tapestry The Nose, with Strawberries, executed by the Stephens Tapestry Studio, Diepsloot, Johannesburg, to a design by William Kentridge - part of the wonderful exhibition Thick Time at the Whitechapel Gallery, which I have yet to write about).

Adams was to go on and enrich the biblical-mythic aspect of his music in an even more complex work, The Gospel According to the Other Mary, while Shostakovich had another shot at Gogol in the 1940s, trying to set his play The Gamblers word for word, but gave up (there are Gogolian touches in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, too). Before I pass over what we talked about Shostakovich-wise the week before last - the Adams experience has rather eclipsed it - I must at least put up one more image taken by Bill Cooper of the best thing about Barrie Kosky's Royal Opera production, the multiple dancing noses.

Curiously I felt that the single class on The Nose was actually enough - I'd started by intending three - while I wanted at least another two-hour session on El Niño. All the students who spoke up seemed to fall in love with Adams' piece on the spot.  None had seen the overloaded UK premiere with Sellars overegging an already elaborate pudding with a film that hadn't been timed to fit the music; Adams admits the many shortcomings of that first production when it opened at the Chatelet in his indispensible autobiography Hallelujah Junction, which I wrote about on the blog back here). 

I started where Adams does in Chapter 12 of that beautifully written confessional, with what he calls 'the ecstatic shuddering and quivering of violins and jubilantly exclaiming voices' of Handel's 'For unto us a son is born' from Messiah. He goes on to write about the WASPy images of Christ and his disciples from his childhood, his mother's move from the Episcopalian to the Unitarian Church, and how its 'moral and intellectual training', though fine, seemed too close to Plato, Voltaire and Bertrand Russell and didn't feed his need for the 'spiritual truths' of religious mystery and miracles (the latter my own sticking-point with the New Testament). Elsewhere, to Michael Steinberg he confided 'I envy people with strong religious backgrounds. Mine is shaky and unformed. I don't know what I'm saying, and one reason for writing El Niño was to find out.'

It almost goes without saying that, as in so many of Adams' works, the light and the dark are in constant tension. That's best summed up, perhaps, in Mary's response from the St James Gospel when Joseph asks why she is weeping one moment, laughing the next, and she replies: 'It is because I see two peoples with my eyes,  the one weeping and mourning, the other rejoicing and glad'. Only the simplicity of the final children's chorus, a setting of Rosario Castellanos' A Palm Tree, offers any kind of resolution to the two-edged use of the title, 'El Niño' as both 'the child' and that phenomenon of capricious weather - though this too, one feels, is provisional: the naive leading us back towards innocence and away from the sentimental. 

Like Steinberg. I'm indebted to Adams for introducing me to the poetry of Castellanos (1925-74), one of the world's greats, it would seem - and which of us, in the UK at least, knew her work before? On the original recording, it's the incandescent Lorraine Hunt Lieberson who intones the sinuous, Spanish-faithful setting of Castellanos's childbirth chronicle,  'The Annunciation'. The interplay of poems by Castellanos and other Spanish-language writers with Biblical texts and their curious offshoots is as masterly as Britten's interweaving of the Latin mass for the dead with Wilfred Owen in War Requiem, and sometimes more ambivalent. The choruses are shattering, the writing for Dawn Upshaw stunning - more than the pure-voiced Mary of Part One, it's her anguished delivery of 'Memorial for Tlatelolco', the most hard-hitting of the Castellanos poems included, which packs the biggest punch, along with music of breathtaking complexity. This, of course, is the work's 'massacre of the innocents', the flipside of the radiant birth. More on the 1968 horror here.

But Adams also has the gift to be simple: I prefaced it with the mixture of St James' and the Latin Infancy Gospel depicting Joseph's amazement at how the whole scene stands still for the birth, sustained strings and pinprick piccolos backing up Willard White's superb natural declamation. And of course we had to end where Adams does, with the finale genius interweaving of the Pseudo-Matthew narrative where the Holy Family is fed and watered by a palm tree obedient to the Christ Child alongside the final Castellanos poem. And naturally the Flight into Egypt becomes the part of the Christmas tale which perhaps has most resonance today given the plight of those millions of refugees fleeing death and destruction.

All this makes us anticipate Adams' own performance with the LSO on Sunday all the more, even though it's only two years since I was blown away by the first performance I heard to present the music in its unadorned glory. Meanwhile, only a couple of hours after I'd finished Monday's class, quite a few of us had moved on to the Barbican for something completely different - the European premiere of Gerald Barry's Alice's Adventures Under Ground. Read all about it on The Arts Desk. The magnificent seven singers are pictured below with Thomas Adès conducting the Britten Sinfonia; image by Mark Allan.

Gerald had promised to follow up his first visit to the class earlier this year with another, but a final rehearsal yesterday afternoon meant that wasn't possible. Never mind, he'll be back soon, not least - I'm certain - for the first UK staging of his new opera.