Il re Tony

You can truly be called a king of music if, having nurtured every aspect of the Royal Opera's work for an incredibly long and unstintingly successful time, you move on to take up the post of the London Symphony Orchestra's chief conductor (in 2023-4, a season in which Antonio Pappano will be at the helm of both institutions). We may be losing Simon Rattle to Munich, but we keep Pappano (pictured above at the most recent of the Royal Opera Jette Parker Young Artists concerts). And I'm glad to say that the three LSO concerts I've heard him conduct have been five-star unforgettables. 

All three have asserted British symphonies as blazing masterpieces (which we knew, but when done at this level, the impression is indelible). There was an Elgar Two with an incredibly refreshing interpretation of Beethoven's Violin Concerto from Nikolaj Znaider back in May 2016. More recently, the two hardest-hitting Vaughan Williams symphonies had knockout impact under very different circumstances: the Fourth in mid-December 2019, when its angry mood chimed with election night anxiety (merited, as it turned out), the Sixth on 15 March 2020. Consider that date: it was the last evening before all concert and theatre venues were shut down the following afternoon at 5.30pm. Those of us still foolhardy to turn up knew the blow would fall shortly; everybody, audience and players alike, felt the dying falls of Britten's Violin Concerto and the symphony's eerie epilogue as metaphors to what was to come. 

When Pappano visited my Opera in Depth Zoom course on Madama Butterfly and stayed for over two hours, having arrived in Italy and about to set off from home in the Val d'Orcia to Rome's Parco della Musica for the first rehearsals of an Accademia di Santa Cecilia Beethoven cycle, he had much to say about the three livestreamed Royal Opera events and that last full-orchestral concert. I've transcribed his comments about it.

It’s funny you mention that because we were all wondering why we were still performing; it was clear what was going to happen, but it was scheduled and people came out to hear us and see us. There was just this special feeling on stage throughout the evening, and also a sense of defending one’s right to make music at such an exalted level, like 'we're going to show whatever negativity is out there, whatever devil, whatever scourge, that we have the fight in us'. People from the orchestra came up to me right after the concert and said how extraordinary it was.

The LSO Live disc of those Vaughan Williams 4 and 6 performances is shortly to be released. I asked Michael Beek, reviews editor of BBC Music Magazine, if he'd let me cover it, and I was delighted that he said yes. I thought I'd put this up before listening, because although I know what I thought of the concerts, it's only fair not to pre-empt the CD review. 

At the same time I sent Pappano a congratulatory message about the new appointment, also still needing his address for the gift I wanted to send him as thanks for his generous Zoom time - Yoko Kawaguchi's Butterfly's Sisters (Yale), which a previous visitor, Ermonela Jaho, was very happy to receive. I thought there was no harm in mentioning that I could only think of one successor who would pay as much attention to every department of the Royal Opera as he does, Mark Wigglesworth. His very friendly reply didn't comment on that - it would have been undiplomatic to do so - but I hope that in 2024 we have two great conductors in place in London.

BBC Music Mag Awards: with a smile and a song

Happy for all the award winners at this year's ceremony, without having actually heard any of the CDs in question (the nearest I come is the world premiere of James MacMillan's Oboe Concerto, pretty much a masterpiece like all the other concertos he's composed to date). None of the candidates I'd reviewed - Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest at its London premiere, Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades from Jansons and Strauss's Symphonia Domestica along with a revelatory Die Tageszeiten from Janowski - actually won, but that's not really the point. In those categories, I don't doubt that Sakari Oramo's Nielsen is superb - his BBC Symphony Orchestra cycle was the concert highlight of last season for me - or that Pappano's Verdi Aida with dream team led by the great Harteros and Kaufmann deserves its accolade as a studio rarity in the current climate.

A copy arrived this morning, and just dipping into the Nile scene - I infinitely prefer the last two acts to the first two - I can tell why it's so special. Producer Stephen Johns spoke movingly of how Pappano, hearing the offstage chorus, said 'I wish my father had lived to hear this' (they played through the opera and sang all the roles when he was young). Harteros communicates so much in 'O patria mia'; it was obvious when she first appeared at the Royal Opera as Amelia in Simon Boccanegra that this was the best Verdi soprano since Mirella Freni - see the 2008 (!) blog post 'The real thing' - and so it's proved in the performances I was lucky enough to catch of Otello and Don Carlo in which she appeared.

It was a fun evening, not least because I got to sit next to my best pal in the business, Stephen Johnson, whose Behemoth Dances are (is? Must ask him whether second word is meant as verb or noun) due to be premiered in Moscow followed by first London performance in the Cadogan Hall on 12 May. He's just sent me score and preliminary sound which I look forward to seeing and hearing. We were attentive to the many splendid speakers, with editor Olly Condy kicking off with an amusing clip from Call Saul in which a character reads the first issue of BBCMM in bed, and James Naughtie being naughty as often, and presumably off the cuff with his wit. There were two oddities, though, whom I won't identify, but one seemed high as a kite and the other - well, I've got into trouble enough already referring to her as La Fragrantia (sexist? insulting? Not particularly, IMO), so let's just leave it at that.

The two live performances were totally engaging - the Schumann Quartet (pictured above), voted best newcomer (though how do you decide when there are so many first-rate quartets emerging all the time?),  in the typically quirky, quote-conscious second movement of Ives's Quartet, and Tenebrae pitch and tone perfect in Bruckner's motet 'Christus factus est' (pictured up top; had to remind Stephen that we'd sung 'Locus iste' at his wedding to the marvellous Kate). Most astonishing for me was a film of Nick Daniel with two fellow oboists playing MacMillan's Intercession for that unique combination - not even Martinů wrote for it - in honour of the composer, whom it was good to see again in person.

Best speech, no question, cellist Paul Watkin (second from left above in his Scottish Chamber Orchestra trousers - he's Welsh) claiming his award for the six Bach Cello Suites on Resonus Classics (have ordered them up). He stood up for music education in the clearest terms and  recommended learning about musical narrative from reading to children (claimed to have got through the entire Lord of the Rings with his kids); at least I know something about that from touting around Russian fairy stories to various godchildren with bits of music on cassette - that dates us - to accompany. John Eliot Gardiner's introduction was equally eloquent, showing how good he can be at heartfelt, precise tribute to a loved fellow musician. I had no idea at the time that Watkin can't play any more following diagnosis of an auto-immune condition called scleroderma; that adds post-event pathos, but it was touching enough then and there.

As far from perfunctory coda, let me sincerely hymn the praises of two discs I was sent by the performers or people close to them. If I hadn't thought much of them, I'd simply have kept stumm. That phenomenal harpist and most generous of human beings Sioned Williams had me sent a disc of works by Michael Stimpson, performed by her and the equally wonderful-on-both-counts baritone Roderick Williams in a recorded concert programme, part of which I'd been hoping to hear repeated at RIBA (in the end I couldn't make it). The Drowning of Capel Celyn I'd seen and heard in Sioned's 60th birthday concert at the Purcell Room. The song cycle Dylan is rich and varied, a marvellous introduction to some Dylan Thomas I didn't know, and all the better for the spoken passages (Roddy doesn't attempt to sound Welsh; Sioned's sing-songy native tone comes in useful for Mrs Cherry Owen). A beautifully presented disc, too.

I won't say much about the other CD because Rebecca Franks at the BBC Music Magazine has just accepted it for review. The background is important: the best of all press officers during her long stint at ENO, Jane Livingston, sent the disc to me because she wanted to support Julian Gavin, the tenor who gave so many extraordinary performances at ENO and, indeed, the Royal Opera (I saw his Don Carlo on the night when Roberto Alagna wasn't singing, and loved it). The year after he recorded this disc with his sister May (both pictured below) he was diagnosed with encephalitis, which called a halt to his international career. Val, their extraordinary mother, died only three weeks apart from their father in 2013.

Even if you knew none of this, I'm certain that the extraordinary emotional fervour of Gavin's very distinctive voice - lyric verging on the helden - would impress; and the songs, too, are late romantic in style and yet, it seems to me, genuinely inspired at times, with melodic writing of truth and beauty. It's useful to have settings of Housman's A Shropshire Lad which offer just as much as Butterworth's. More in the July issue of the BBC Music Magazine.

There, too, you should find my review of a disc which has sent me giddy with delight, the Smetana Piano Trio's recording of all Martinů's major works for that combination. This is already on my shortlist for best of year, and I can't stop playing the ecstatic dance-finale of the Third 'Great' Trio.

Last week in pictures

Monday: occasionally sublime silent filmmaking up to and including this scene

but hell thereafter

D. W. Griffith's monstrous-fascinating, ultimately unforgivable 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation, from Civil War to Klu Klux Klan, released on Eureka DVD.

Tuesday: dazzling total theatre

Chiwetel Ejiofor (pictured left with Daniel Kaluuya as Joseph Mobuto) gives a towering performance as Patrice Lumumba in Joe Wright's hyper-imaginative production of Aimé Césaire's A Season in the Congo at the Young Vic.

Wednesday - unique opera salon - and Friday - public performance, almost as sublime

Renée Fleming, by no means the only great thing about the Royal Opera's concert performance of Strauss's Capriccio.

Wednesday afternoon: noble portraiture

Franz Hals's portrait of an unknown man, seen in a quick visit to the National Gallery to look at the paintings on loan from Birmingham University's Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Room One.

Thursday: transcendental pianism

Yevgeny Sudbin surpasses himself in Liszt and Scriabin at the Wigmore Hall.

Saturday matinee: beyond-bad drama

Gabriel, a dire new play by Samuel Adamson at Shakespeare's Globe only partly redeemed by trumpeter Alison Balsom and Purcell's music.

Saturday evening: first-class conducting, singing and playing, music so-so

Antonio Pappano conducts his superb Accademia di Santa Cecilia forces in second-drawer Verdi at the Proms.

Sunday: a much-needed day off, including quality time with J's adorable godson Frankie, his brother Charlie and dad Nick Hills from Amsterdam lounging around the Victoria and Albert Museum's courtyard pool (the perfect place if you have to be in central London on a baking day). J went to the second performance of Capriccio and, I'm relieved to say, loved every minute of it.

Thanks, anyway, to The Arts Desk for making most of my visits possible. And for that same institution I'm soon to plunge into the wretched Albertine colosseum again for the first two instalments of Wagner's Ring as conducted by Barenboim. Siegfried and Götterdämmerung will be sacrificed to The Turn of the Screw and A Midsummer Night's Dream up in north Norfolk at the weekend*, by which time Donner will have swung into action and our glorious heatwave will have crumbled into rainy days, I'm told.

Consequently I thought I'd throw in one of Frederic Church's admirable sketches, much better than his (over) finished paintings and previously in the NG's Room One before the Barber selection took over, of cumulo-nimbus clouds over his home, Olana, for Sue. As she knows, I and New York friend John Morris experienced an almighty storm up there, from which we sheltered in the porch, watching the fork lightning all over the Hudson Valley.

As for the end of our summer idyll here, never mind; we've had our vision and everyone except harrassed mothers seems to be the sunnier of temper for it.

*23/7 Now that I'm reeling from the diamond-cut magnificence of the Rheingold, I'm sorrier than I thought I would be about missing the last two instalments. But that doesn't stop me anticipating the Brittenfest with the keenest pleasure.

Photo credits: A Season in the Congo: Johan Persson; Capriccio: Catherine Ashmore; Yevgeny Subin: Clive Barda; Gabriel: John Haynes; Pappano at the Proms: Chris Christodoulou

A fish-sermon transmogrified

With apologies to Veronese for the acidification of his St Anthony preaching to the fish

Praise be to the BBC Symphony Orchestra for programming Mahler’s Second Symphony and Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia less than a week apart in December, and making our life on the City Lit BBCSO course that much more fun. Famously, or infamously, the giddying centrepiece of Berio’s 1968-9 experiment takes the carcase of Mahler’s Scherzo and allows other music from Bach to Boulez to batten on it, against a barrage of song and speech from the eight vocalists (originally the Swingle Singers). Mahler's tempo indication, In ruhig fließender Bewegung (With quietly flowing movement), is also used by Berio.

Refreshingly, and rare in a composer who as a Darmstadt terror in the 1950s declared war on the past, Berio’s care in never letting the Mahler movement go under for long through his 11-minute movement makes us think even more of the original's extraordinary modernism. Herrgott, to think it was composed in 1893 (and last night in a stunning LPO concert which I’ve eulogized over on The Arts Desk, we had further food for wonder in how much of the mature Schoenberg Strauss pre-empts in the fabulous labyrinth of Don Quixote, premiered only three years after the Resurrection Symphony).

It seems that by 1893, when he gave shape to three of the Second Symphony's five movements, Mahler had already written the song from the folk-anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn which the symphonic scherzo daringly expands. St Anthony of Padua’s sermon to the fish for voice and piano needed working up instrumentally, which Mahler did alongside the scherzo in the fertile summer preceding his ‘flash of inspiration’ that the Second Symphony should be crowned by Klopstock’s 'Resurrection' chorale-text.

The gist of this slithery satire is that the piscean congregation listens open mouthed to the sermon, only to go on and behave as before – surely a connection with the human hurly-burly suggested in the symphony, against which a ‘cry of disgust’ proves powerless. Here's the song, which happily precipitates a belated tribute to the late, great Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Have patience with the delayed start and the background buzz.

The futility of action seems to be part of Berio’s point, too, and there's an aqueous undertow which seems to refer both to Mahler's song and the first-movement quotations from Claude Levi-Strauss's Le cru et le cuit, which relates water-myths to musical forms. If Berio is dissing the waltz-crazy decadence of the 19th and early 20th centuries, it has to be said that his multiple references sound marvellous. I only picked up some of them on a first hearing: several waves of Debussy’s La Mer, the Part One conclusion to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and a bit of woodwind dancing from Agon, Strauss’s Rosenkavalier morphing into Ravel’s La Valse, a bar of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, the drowning in Berg's Wozzeck. But here too are Schoenberg’s Peripetaia from the Five Orchestral Pieces, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, the idée fixe from Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (still can’t hear it), Webern, Hindemith, Boulez’s Pli selon pli…that’s by no means the full list.

Meanwhile the amplified voices pick up Mahler’s tunes or recite Beckett (The Unnamable), student slogans from ’68, Joyce, lines from Berio’s notebooks. Sometimes the text is pertinent (‘Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on'; ‘there was even, for a second, hope of resurrection, or almost’), more often it just sounds like radio interference. The head spins with so much going on at once, which is surely the point. I can’t wait to hear it live at the Barbican on 7 December. Jiří Bělohlávek's long term Mahler cycle with the BBCSO has been one of the best so far, so his Resurrection on 1 December should be remarkable, too. In the meantime, here's the Berio centrepiece from Pappano with Swinglers at the Proms.

Roman fountains

Only one of the dozen I notched up on my noon-to-dawn trawl through Rome features in Respighi's Fontane di Roma, and I was sorry not to pay a fleeting return tribute to the Trevi (nor, for that matter, to the Piazza Navona nor my favourite, the exquisite little turtle fountain in the Jewish quarter, the cleaning of which my fellow-blogger Willym expounded upon so eloquently while he was living there). Bernini's Triton of 1642 rather disappointed me when I first made its acquaintance quite some time after hearing the tone-poem - lonesome in a rather lugubrious sloping square, and ungraced by the tumbling cascades of nymphs Respighi's music suggests (let's have Toscanini in that number before we eventually put together all four musical pictures in two performances by the orchestra I went to hear).



Yet shortly after dawn, in a more or less unpeopled space with less traffic roaring around it than usual, our marine conch-blower did look rather impressive. This time, though, I fell for the more intimate water-tricklers. Robert Hughes, in the latest Roman popular history which I've just starting ploughing into, reminds us that there was no natural water pressure in the ancient city to provide cascades, just modest tumbles via the several aqueducts that sloped, and in some uneven places were persuaded by tunnels to slope, into the centre. Two re-used mascheroni first, then, one on the wall that separates Santa Sabina from the Parco Savello on the Aventine, designed by Giacomo della Porta in 1583


and the other, which you must forgive me for repeating from the first walking-tour piece, at the prettiest end of the Via Giulia


commissioned by the Farnese family living in the famous palace which now backs on to the street, and which of course has a rather splendid fountain of its own in the square on the other side.


I'll save up the modest effort in front of Sant'Andrea della Valle for a Tosca ramble and jump to early next morning, when I passed Bernini's Barcaccia being cleaned in the rosy dawn (but it rarely photographs well)


and climbed the hill past the Triton to the four commissioned by the 'manic-impressive' (thank you, Robert Hughes, who paints a terrifying picture of him) Sixtus V between 1588 and 1593, giving their name to Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. Three are by that Pope's great planner Domenico Fontana (would you believe): Juno


the Arno


and the Tiber


while the fourth, Pietro da Cortona's Diana, is seen from a distance in context.


Fontana as master of Sixtus V's most grandiose projects was also responsible for the Fontana dell'Acqua Felice with Moses in the middle, terminus of the clean-water viaduct of that name. This has had the clean-up the four down the road still need, and attempts to work on Santa Maria della Vittoria with the famously agonial-ecstatic Bernini St Teresa within are graced by a contrasting piece of advertising.


Well, that was it before I reached a different sort of terminus in time for the 7.52 train to the airport. But, as I wade my pleasurable way through eight CDs of mostly treasurable archival material from the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, let's see as well as hear the orchestra on happy home-territory form in Respighi's Fontane as equally divided between Pappano for the first two



and the ever-underrated Pretre (I'm sure it is) for a very vivacious Trevi at noon and the Villa Medici at sunset.

Brave new world

Could you think of a better use for Buoso Donati's money than the rosy future of these two incandescent young things - Ekaterina Siurina's Lauretta and Francesco Demuro's Rinuccio as pictured by Bill Cooper for the Royal Opera - in one of my desert island operas, Puccini's Gianni Schicchi? Wouldn't you put them on top of a wedding cake and eat them? And, yes, they sang as spiritedly as they acted.

If we've learnt one new thing about Schicchi in the past few years, it's that the comic payoff is so much richer if it comes after the Seineside hell of Il tabarro and the foolproof pathos of Suor Angelica, a true trittico indeed. And on Monday night Richard Jones, the only visionary director of our times (I've said it before and I'll say it again), pulled off the feat of connecting the three operas in far from obvious ways, using three of our best set designers, no less. Perhaps I was over-subtle in what I detected they had in common, since these things - the bedclothes, the shadows and - in Tabarro and Schicchi - the impersonation of a dead figure wrapped in a sheet/cloak by the same singer (Lucio Gallo) - weren't picked up by others. Read all about it on The Arts Desk.


Some bloke accused me of lacking objectivity in saying that I might have warmed to Ermonela Jaho's pharmaceutical nun if I'd been able to see her face better - and, yes, doesn't she look lovely in the above photo? But I thought it WAS objective to announce where I'd been sat (in the balcony, seemingly demoted by RO press after swanning in the stalls). And what you can or can't see does make a difference. In any case, the problem with Jaho is the tight, vibrato-y voice which just won't open up for the crucial 'Senza mamma'. Here's the greatest performance of it I've ever heard, Callas included: Scotto's on the Maazel recording.



People who said they usually squirm at Suor Angelica - I never have in the opera house, always wept buckets - found they warmed to the Royal Opera take, Jaho included, but that was Pappano, Jones and Puccini all doing their stuff, surely. The kid business as radically rethought here was, I reckon, more rather than less moving than usual.


Love the Mimi-seamstresses at work on the quay in Il tabarro. One, I noticed from the cast list, was Jones regular Michelle Wade of Maison Bertaux fame (how's it doing? Our Bertaux phase seems to have passed - it just got too ludicrously expensive). And the set design put Ultz absolutely on a par with current (well-deserved) darling Miriam Buether's kiddies' hospital and John Macfarlane's floral-wallpapered Florentine apartment. Love, too, those dayglo costumes by Nicky Gillibrand (one constant throughout).


It would take a really bad Schicchi for me not to chuckle indulgently at every jot and tittle; this one, staging-wise, was as taut and perceptive as it gets. As I've written before, we put it on at City Lit 23 years ago; David Edwards, who graduated to bigger things at the Royal Opera and elsewhere, gave it a Sicilian-mafia look with lots of scrumpled pieces of newspaper as decor. I was Marco, a relative who can't really stand out (Robert Poulton at the Garden didn't; though Alan Oke's Gherardo, thanks to nightmare-retro costuming, certainly did) but has as much fun as anyone being on stage nearly the whole time.

The fabulous Vasiliki Fikaris, dear Vassa (where is she now?), was la mia moglie. The diplo-mate, subsequently the best of Escamillos at City Lit before moving up the register to be the greatest Florestan at St John's Smith Square (I kid you not, but then you could say I'm partial), sang Maestro Spinelloccio. Our relationship began in the enchanted air of a summery Edinburgh - my city - when we took it to the fringe with the Rehearsal Orchesta.

So it's 'our opera', and I've loved it irrationally ever since, though I'm still convinced that Puccini's comic timing is extraordinary - if anything even better than Verdi's in Falstaff - and as Pappano proved, the score never stops yielding up more secrets (that bassoon for the bowel movement!). Though Bryn was his usual charismatic self as Schicchi when the Jones production first appeared, il maestro has to be Alessandro Corbelli, who plays the cunning peasant as an extra member of the Marx Brothers (watch for gookies).

Corbelli was good in a messy Met production, but incomparably better for Annabel Arden at Glyndebourne, Jurowski conducting. Watch this segment - sorry about the Japanese subtitles - for Rinuccio (Massimo Giordano) setting up his entrance and Lauretta (Sally Matthews) persuading him to stay and sort it. Jones treated 'O mio babbino caro' rather seriously: maybe Lauretta really will throw herself in the Arno if she can't marry her Rino, clearly Gallo's Schicchi cares for her more than life itself. In the Glyndebourne Schicchi, she's the sweetest of manipulators. Battleaxe cousin Zita is, of course, Felicity Palmer, playing her rather elegant, though Elena Zilio at Covent Garden is my favourite (her solo 'lllllladrrrrrrro' to Schicchi once the lawyer's gone brings the house down). Enjoy - and don't forget to listen to the Radio 3 broadcast of the Royal Opera production on Saturday.

Two cheers for three cantons

That oath on the Rütli pictured above by one-off Fuseli - there's a great Swiss-born artist for you - and ingeniously composed by Rossini for different choruses representing the ‘men of three cantons’ was an absolute highlight when I heard Chelsea Opera Group perform Guillaume Tell in concert last year and fell in love with it properly. At last night’s Prom,I wasn’t quite so convinced: the performance was undeniably sleeker and more nuanced, as you’d expect from a great animator-conductor like Antonio Pappano who’s been performing this operatic swansong with his Accademia di Santa Cecilia for quite a few years now. But it may well have been the alienating effect of being too far right and above the orchestra in the treacherous South Ken colosseum which made me feel far less involved than I had been in the Queen Elizabeth Hall with COG’s valiant effort. Yesterday I found myself longing instead for the way Verdi does the whole oath stuff so much better.


Several friends were a bit puzzled, too, that I’d flagged up Act 2 as far and away the greatest of the four. It didn’t sound it, and that may have had quite a lot to do with accomplished soprano Malin Bystrom – my pal Igor on The Arts Desk hits the nail on the head when he says that her 'buttery voice had a tendency to melt away just as you were beginning to believe in it' – not having a great rapport with star tenor John Osborn. I take it all back re the tenor: he was vocally even stronger than the compelling Mark Milhofer for COG, and cut through the Albert Hall oilslick effortlessly, but ultimately the voice wasn’t quite as singular nor the introspective moments as sensitive. As I think perhaps you can just about gauge from this soundclip of Milhofer singing 'Asile hereditaire' on YouTube - maybe from that very performance, it doesn't state the source.



The crucial solo of the fisherman Ruodi has also found its way onto YouTube from the COG performance, where Luciano Botelho's tenor made more of an impact than the perfectly good Celso Albelo last night. COG fixer Duncan Orr certainly knows where to find them.



Now I’m going to say something which, if I were on reviewing duty, would have me taken out and shot, and rightly (I’ve only ever left one event halfway through during my official critical years – a beyond-bad military band massacre of Grainger earlier this year – and incurred a stream of invective for saying so). What I decided to do at the end of Act 2 was to go home and listen to the rest on the brand-new Pappano recording.


Why? Artistically speaking, because I thought I’d rather hear Gerald Finley in Tell’s famous command to his apple-topped son, ‘Sois immobile’ than the grainy oldster Michele Pertusi, taking over for the Prom. That also meant I didn’t get the live sensation of Osborn’s top Cs and C sharps in the cabaletta to ‘Asile hereditaire’ (still think Milhoffer did a better job here, from the evidence of the recording). But I reckoned that from where I was sitting I wasn't getting the full impact of a live performance anyway.

Personal reasons: didn’t want to leave the diplo-mate pining at home - yeah, right - for longer than I had to, and needed to provision at Whole Foods (a rare luxury, and boy is it overpriced) before it shut at 10pm. How bourgeois and shallow can you get? Here's what I left behind - the Accademia looking sweepingly elegant and sounding better under Pappano than I've ever heard it. The photo is by Chris Christodoulou, whose professionalism leaves most others standing: for TAD, we get pictures in the interval, if possible, and at the end. Quite apart from all that, he's the best; the photo gallery of conductors which he kindly supplied to TAD last year shows his range superbly. Helps, I suppose, that the BBC Proms office is so well resourced.


Anyway, the serious listen to Acts 3 and 4 was postponed until this morning. And then, of course, I had a shock: on the recording, as in the Prom (or so the programme informed us), Pappano had cut the women’s woodwind-accompanied trio and the prayer in Act 4. Crazy: this is some of the most sensitive music in the score, and I see when I look back on the review that I loved the trio as a 'moment of stillness' in the COG performance. You get it all here, albeit in Italian, in Muti’s La Scala performance, Studer leading the way – and, no, it isn’t anything to do with the Italian version; these numbers were part of the French original.



Naughty Maestro P. Especially as the lovely Pat Bardon at the Prom would have been deprived of her finest moments. Never mind; this was certainly an event worthy of the first Proms weekend, and gave huge pleasure to everyone I spoke to.


The ending, of course, is unexpectedly glorious, and absolutely worthy of Turner's pioneering take on Switzerland from a quarter of a century earlier (that was Ruskin's visionary view of Lucerne's old walls above, by the way): a new dawn for 1829, except that Rossini had already sung his major operatic last...Here it is in the same Scala version.



One bonus to the COG experience: Pappano conducted all the ballet music, including the Act 1 Pas de Six better known in its Britten arrangement as the first of the Matinees Musicales but conducted here by Toscanini. Why the fryup picture I've no idea, but the sound is decent enough:



Think we ought to see Toscanini conducting a version of the Overture that begins with unison cellos, not the solo who so spellbindingly launched last night's prom. But stick with it for some extraordinary results later.



And That Galop sprang more lamb-like with Pappano. I have to end on a splendidly vulgar note with the sublime Australian yodeller Mary Schneider segue-ing naughtily between Tell, Carmen and Orpheus. Thanks to our friend Phillip Thomas for introducing us to this. Enjoy.