On the day they booed Zuma

...I was summoned with three hours' notice to the BBC News 24 studios. The reason was loosely connected, I guess, with that surprising incident at what turned out to be a big party to celebrate Nelson Mandela's life (and incidentally I can't see under such circumstances why the hypocritical Daily Mail, glimpsed this time in the back of the cab they sent to ferry me back and forth, is at it again, condemning Obama's 'selfie', aligned with glamorous Danish PM and not so glam Cam, after he'd given such a wonderful speech).

So to the cause of my command performance. There had been booing at La Scala - che sorpresa - following what looked like a rather inventive new production of La traviata by hit-and-miss genius Dmitri Tcherniakov, and the news folk seemed most interested in the fact that tenor Piotr Beczala (pictured below by Johannes Ifkovits) had also got a boo or two. Full focus was on him, apparently, because he Facebooked that he'd never return to sing in Italy after that experience. 13/12 Inside information tells me that it happened because he wouldn't pay a claque to cheer him, so they booed instead. I did raise this possibility on the telly, but dismissed it because it seemed unlikely that, say, he and Damrau could possibly have been at loggerheads - and the claque phenomenon usually involves one leading singer hiring folk to diss the other.

I explained that as I hadn't been in Milan or at the livescreening I couldn't comment authoritatively, but they wanted me there all the same for a live sequence at 4.17pm and drummed up George Loomis, who had attended, to appear in the Paris studio. He looked comfortable there with a lovely view of the Eiffel Tower, whereas I was a bit overawed by the new television centre headquarters behind the much more familiar (to me) old Broadcasting House. My own shots are all a bit fuzzy as I didn't want to disturb with flash.

There were hordes of people around reception, plus paparazzi outside waiting for Katy Perry (about whom I know only the name and what she does). Then I was whisked down a corridor overlooking the largest newsroom in Europe - impressive and Metropolis-y - towards the studio where Tim Willcox was sitting behind a familiar desk.

To makeup first, and a chat with a lovely lady who told me how they're all on freelance contrasts, shocking. And then to the vast studio where there were only a man who pinned on my mike, two cameramen and Tim. I never spoke to him properly, got a nod as I sidled into a chair beside him and double-checked the pronunciation of 'Beczala' (Bechawa). I'd hoped there would be more about Tcherniakov, but it was mostly about tenors and why this one was booed.

From the excerpts on YouTube, I've no idea (why): Beczala, as I know, has style and musicianship most tenors with voices anywhere near as good as his completely lack. 'De' miei bollenti spiriti' is lovely, and done while rolling out pastry with Damrau's Violetta, a perfect image of domesticity (though as with other supposed soliloquies in the opera Tcherniakov breaks the rules and gives the singer a springboard for reaction). If anything's to be criticised it would be the heavier of conductor Daniele Gatti's tempi, though the Italians don't seem to have noticed those.

Despite pushing the voice dangerously in the public denunciation of Violetta, Beczala didn't crack - though he does on a wicked clip from a 2012 production of Gounod's Romeo et Juliette in a YouTube series called 'Perle nere' - 'black pearls'. Botha is on there too so Beczala is in fine company; it happens to the best. I want to see the whole of the show now - especially intrigued why Damrau is fancy-wigged as Jean Harlow in Act One and as 1970s Bette Midler in II.ii when the essential look is contemporary.

Anyway, I was walking back to the taxi from the rather intimidating TV HQ when nice co-ordinator Victoria Sill ran after me. BBC World Service had seen the live couple of minutes, liked it and wondered if I'd come back in to do a radio slot. Great: this would at least double my earnings (£50 'disturbance fee' for the telly). Typically, this interview was more relaxed and I had fun chatting to Newshour presenter Tim Franks.

Wonder if anyone saw the News 24 snippet - I just have, since Victoria very efficiently sent me the film without my even having to ask - but the radio chunk, neatly edited, is downloadable here (my bit's right at the end of the 'US Cuba Handshake' instalment). Probably the iPlayer version is the better long-term bet as the big programmes tend to be up for a year. For the next two and a half days, there's also Radio 3 iPlayer access to my chat with treasured colleague Marina Frolova-Walker and Music Matters presenter Tom Service on Stephen Walsh's excellently written but oddly marketed/presented book about Musorgsky and the Five.

Not much to add about mighty and compassionate Madiba, except that while dining on superb Indian dishes at friends Anupam and Paul on Sunday I brought up Peter Tatchell's equivocal response - which was that Mandela was unquestionably a great man, but from the great we expect so much, and he could have done more when it came to speaking out against Mugabe -  apparently he never did - and dealing with HIV/AIDS in South Africa. To which Chris Smith, aka Baron Smith of Finsbury, the first out gay MP and so a bit of a hero of mine*, responded that the day after he'd proclaimed his own HIV status, he got a message asking him to call Nelson Mandela and on ringing the number found the man himself on the end of the line. No other major figure showed that kind of solidarity at the time.

When I emailed Chris to ask if he'd mind my mentioning and/or naming him - and of course he didn't - he added: 'one of the things that had prompted me to say something publicly...was his speech after his son's death when he said we can only defeat HIV by being open about it, and talking about it'.

That personal touch sounds typical - lovely slot in the middle of Tuesday's World Service coverage - yes, I'm a fan of that station, for all its recent changes - where the daughter of a white activist remembers Mandela not only coming to their Camden home at the time of her father's funeral, but staying for tea and interrupting a speech to say hello to a neighbour he knew. At last tears did come to my eyes after all the generalised - if well deserved - eulogising. There's a fine tribute from colleague Jillian Edelstein on The Arts Desk, describing her experience of photographing Mandela in 1997. Here's her shot of a man we usually see smiling and extrovert rather than pensive.

10.10am: Jillian just emailed back with another image, which appeared in today's Guardian. Of course we need to see both sides of the great man.

Well, he is gone, but this great one isn't, and continues to do active good in the world. As, I think we're agreed but with greater reservations, is Time Magazine's figure of the year, humble Francis.

*Speaking out against a possible ban on gay employees in Rugby, he said: 'Good afternoon, I'm Chris Smith, I'm the Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury. I'm gay, and so for that matter are about a hundred other members of the House of Commons, but they won't tell you openly'.

The people are the heroes now

How could old production-rocker Peter Sellars not recall in interview that line of Alice Goodman's breathtakingly poetic libretto for John Adams when Nixon in China was screened worldwide the day after the fall of Mubarak? In fact the Met re-staging of an operatic masterpiece was even more vital for the history and the lessons of revolutions, violent or peaceful. By the way, I wasn't at the talked-up 'premiere of the year', Turnage's Anna Nicole, last night. I'll see it next week, and I expect it to be at the very least extremely well sung, played and staged (by Richard Jones the only genius of the theatre); but on previous form I can't imagine that Turnage, excellent when at his fitful best, hits the heights of Adams, who's given us the only core-repertoire grand opera of the past two decades*.

Nixon's ambiguous, often metaphysical dimensions show us that the euphoria of the moment always yields to a more complex aftermath. After the adrenalin charged 'gambe's/cheers and the salute to Washington's birthday of the big summit dinner between Americans and Chinese that cold February of 1972 (picture by Ken Howard for the Met)


come the private idealism of Pat - still, I think, the greatest soprano scene of the late 20th century, so affectingly done by Janis Kelly - and the reign of terror of Madame Mao. And the last act comes to seem like the opera's greatest achievement in its polyphonic interaction of the five private individuals, wondering 'how much of what we did was good?'

Those questions still resound in Egypt, of course, and resonate for Libya, Iran, Bahrain, the list goes on. What we can continue to do, for the moment, is marvel at the predominance of goodwill, how an educated middle class informed how well motivated were the crowds in Tahrir Square, how amazing that the young took charge and went around tidying up the streets and cleaning the anti-Mubarak slogans off statues once they'd got their way. The pride and optimism are incredible, whatever's still to come. I recommend an excellent programme I just heard on the BBC World Service, covered, as it should be, by a highly articulate Arabic reporter, Magdi Abdelhadi. All this, too, is possible: maybe we need the language-ignorant BBC reporters on the spot for the crisis, but afterwards, why not give the people closest to their people a voice?


The Trafalgar Square photos come by presumed courtesy of Amnesty UK, who shared them with us its supporters. I asked to use a couple here, but as I still haven't had a reply after three days, I'll take that as a yes and add any further credits if so requested. Anyway, Amnesty and human rights organisations worldwide should be feeling good about all this**. I felt that optimism at the end of last year, which I was amazed to see written off as a quiet one when WikiLeaks, for better and for worse, took charge and students here promised more protests. And much as I resist all pressures to tweet and to go on Facebook, I see their phenomenal influence where it counts, too. Interesting times indeed, and mostly in a good way.

*Not quite incidentally, the best and most detailed essay I've read on Nixon in China is to be found on Daniel Stephen Johnson's blog.

**20/2 As they must be, and I certainly am, reading about one promising volte-face in oppression-threatened Hungary: the Budapest Metropolitan Court's overturning of a police veto on extending a gay rights march in June. I read the articles of the European Union rulings with especial interest, and hope that sort of thing will be enshrined in law in Egypt and other countries soon.