Zooming the symphony, from Haydn to Adams

A colleague once said he used his blog as a kind of shop window for his work. Although it's absolutely not my aim here - there are no barriers, I write about what I want to and see it more as a kind of public diary - this is one of those shop-window posts. Certainly not born out of need to try and hook more punters to a course which already has so many signed up - the response from my regular list of students was very surprising, since it's usually easier to 'sell' opera than orchestral music - but out of a genuine sense of excitement about where the 11 classes might take us.

Mastering Zoom is easy - even my senior students, up to the age of 95, can manage it - but there was quite a bit of stress before I settled in the second of my Opera in Depth classes the Monday before last. First, not being able to find the camera on my computer, which took five hours of collaborative searching here at home - even my techno-wizz spouse was foxed - before it appeared after a re-start. Then the awful quality of the sound clips, which could have been solved if my two tech-savviest students had joined the test class. They showed me what to do et voilà - state-of-the-art sound for all, best using headphones.

So two out of the three (out of five) OiD classes on Strauss's Elektra so far have gone like a dream - beyond my wildest expectations in one sense, since Susan Bullock - a top Elektra all round the world, and now singing the other most challenging role, Klytemnestra - was there for most of the second class and the whole of the third, bringing extraordinary insights to every scene (for the above photo, I return to Frontline Club days, when she and Anne Evans - on the left - came to talk Isolde). The students thought our double act went very well. She'll be back, and for Madama Butterfly in the second batch of five classes. I've also just heard that Ermonela Jaho, the heartbreaker of the Royal Opera production who should have been reprising the role this summer (pictured below by Bill Cooper), will also be joining us.

Having established the special guests there, I thought I could also call upon conductors I know and respect. So delighted to say that Mark Wigglesworth, who's just conducted a Beethoven cycle in Adelaide, chose to make his appearance in the 'Eroica' class. Again I return to Frontline days and a visit which was photographed by professional (and, briefly, student) Frances Marshall.

Three other stars are expected, but not confirmed yet, so I won't pre-empt. STOP PRESS: Ian Page, who's recording a Sturm und Drang series with his Mozartists orchestra, will be with us tomorrow. ADDITIONAL STOP PRESS: so is Jonathan Bloxham, inspirational founder of the Northern Chords Festival and its superb young professional orchestra who conducted our last three Europe Day Concerts (read all about the 2019 one here).

Below are the plans for all 11 classes, just so that I have them in something I can link to rather than just on an attachment. Message me if you'd like to join for all or some: it's a bargain (I halved the usual fees because I don't have room hire expenses and Zoom is, after all, not live with great equipment to hand, so it's £10 a class, ie £5 an hour. We meet on Thursdays as from tomorrow, 3.30-5.50pm. and if anyone misses a class or has connection/sound issues their end, I can send on a recording of the whole thing. Send me a message with your email and I won't publish it, but I'll be sure to get back to you.

This list has now been updated in the light of how we progressed, and who came to visit.

1: Sonata form and instrumental novelty   7 May
Selected movements/snippets from Haydn symphonies - 22,  31, 45, 70, 83 and 101; Mozart 41, 'Jupiter' (1788) Special guests: Jonathan Bloxham and Ian Page.

2: A new and noble scale  14 May
Beethoven's Third Symphony, 'Eroica' (1803-4). Special guests: Mark Wigglesworth and Jonathan Bloxham.

3: Follow that! Scaling up and down after Beethoven  21 May
Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (1829-30) and Schumann's Second (1845-6). Special guest: Nicholas Collon.

4: Songs for Clara  28 May UPDATED
Schumann's Second (continued) and Brahms's First Symphony (1875-6). Special guest: Catherine Larsen-Maguire.

5: New/old approaches to the finale  4 June UPDATED
Brahms's Fourth (1885) andTchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, 'Pathétique' (1893). Special guest: Vladimir Jurowski.

6: The world in a symphony   11 June
Mahler's Third Symphony (1895-6). Special guest: Paavo Järvi.

7: Imagining cataclysms   18 June
Mahler's Ninth Symphony (1909-10) and Elgar's Second (1911). Special guest: Vasily Petrenko.

8: Mosaic tiles from heaven   25 June
Sibelius's Fifth Symphony in its original (1914-15) and final (1919) versions. Special guests: Kristiina Poska and Andres Kaljuste.

9: The finale question: 1920s, 1940s  2 July
Nielsen's Fifth Symphony (1921-2); Martinů's Third Symphony (1944-5), Vaughan Williams's Sixth (1944-7) and Prokofiev's Sixth (1947). Special guest: Sir Mark Elder.

10: Endgame   9 July
Shostakovich's Fifteenth Symphony (1971). Special guests: Elizabeth Wilson and Peter Manning.

11 Symphonies in all but name   16 July
John Adams's Harmonielehre (1985) and Naive and Sentimental Music (1999). Special guest: Catherine Larsen-Maguire.

Ansermania

Ernest Ansermet's recording with his Orchestre de la Suisse Romande of Chabrier's Joyeuse Marche is a desert island track of mine: the precise brio instantly puts one in a jolly mood, the perfect curtainraiser to any concert of recorded music. His complete Delibes Coppélia was my top choice on BBC Radio 3's Building a Library. But I hadn't listened widely to the non-French repertoire in his 314 Decca recordings. Preparing for a Proms Plus homage on Thursday afternoon, I found myself constantly taken aback by the freshness, the combination of firm rhythmic definition and freedom, in  classical and romantic works. Not what one would expect from a Professor of Mathematics, but Ansermet was anything but rigid in his logic as an interpreter.

In the end a brief digression on that subject got edited out for the interval broadcast, which you can hear about 58 minutes into the Prom as available for a while on the BBC iPlayer (and I recommend it all). Listeners had just heard Debussy and Ravel, and were about to hear Stravinsky's Petrushka, so that remained the brief. But how I would love to have illustrated the perfect gait and spareness of the first movement in Ansermet's recording of Haydn's Symphony No. 22, 'The Philosopher'. In a fascinating documentary made during a rehearsal you can see here:

Ansermet says every Haydn symphony should be respected for its unique character, that there is so much more beyond the basic classical forms. The focused power of his Beethoven Fifth, Seventh and Ninth is also surprising. The studio performance of the Seventh's finale is one of the glories of the recording world; I haven't had time yet to watch the whole of the below film, but it's another of those unanticipated pleasures that YouTube constantly gives us.

Many sound files only reached me from Universal - which holds the Decca legacy but can't, it seems, get hold of it so easily - just as I was about to set out for Imperial College on Thursday afternoon, but the listening will go on. One of the tracks I did get to excerpt especially impressed our players - the second of the Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, silky but clear, with the necessary acidic jabs of pain. Here, also wonder of wonders, is a film of him conducting the OSR in La Valse.

The players weren't so fond of the Petrushka excerpt I chose - from the later, 1957 stereo version rather than the feted 1949 recording. A bit messy, yes, but so spirited.

I'd like to have included the white heat of Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Finale - like the Beethoven, one of the best interpretations I've ever heard of a very familiar work - and more of Ansermet's perfect sympathy with dance music.

The relationship with Stravinsky (Ansermet pictured below with him and Prokofiev) is fascinating. It ran smoothly from the early days of the Ballets Russes - Ansermet took over from Monteux, called up for active service in 1915 - until 1938, when they fell out over a cut Ansermet insisted upon in the ballet Jeu de cartes. Much of the correspondence in Craft's Volume One selection is businesslike, but there's a touching commendation from Stravinky in 1919, after an OSR rehearsal of the new Firebird Suite, of how well Ansermet understands contemporary music, in that he doesn't approach it differently from 'music of the past'.

Schoenberg and his system Ansermet did not, would not, understand, and it's shocking to read in his huge study of musical aesthetics how he links the aridity with the 'Jewish question'. And that was in 1961! I won't sully the entry with quotations (and there's a still worse one in an earlier article on how Schnabel played like a Jewish banker). Still, I found that the Hannah Arendt Institute was promoting a conference on the holistic approach to music we find in Ansermet's magnum opus. A nicer way to end is to quote his fundamental tenet:

It is easy for a conductor to fill a musical phrase with feeling, because one can do more or less what one wants with a musical phrase. In any case, it is easier to do than to find the correct feeling, the one that puts the phrase in its context and takes account of its contribution to the piece as a whole...It is the interpreter's job to assimilate as much as possible the feeling which the composer turned into music, and to express it in such a way that the listener can hear it in terms of melody, harmony, rhythm and tempo. I have made my choice. First I imagine the musically sensitive listener. Thus I have faith in the listener, just as I have faith in the music, and the two things hang together. My idea is that the listener is able to understand and so all I need to do, in so far as I am able, is to let the music speak, without recourse to the sort of effects that one can always produce, but at the expense of the truth.

Leonskaja embraces the Pärnu spirit

Shouldn't pre-empt too much the Pärnu Music Festival piece I owe The Arts Desk for the fourth successive year, this time ahead of the Estonian Festival Orchestra's Prom on Monday (for which, I'm proud to say, I played my campaigning part). UPDATE (13/8) - here it is. But I have to recapture the amazement of turning up at the first concert of the week, less than an hour off the coach from Riga, to be knocked sideways by the opening work on the programme. From the website, we knew to expect the excellent Eldbjørg Hemsing in Massenet's Meditation from Thaïs and Saint-Saëns's Introdcution and Rondo Capriccioso, as well as the Järvi Academy Sinfonietta in Musica Profana by Lepo Sumera, the Estonian composer whose symphonies knocked me for six in the 2016 and 2017 Estonian Music Days.

The rest, however, had been put together over the past week. Elisabeth Leonskaja, my goddess among pianists, here to play the Grieg Piano Concerto with the Estonian Festival Orchestra - which she did, with unique deep musicianship, last night - decided she wanted to get involved with the players in chamber music. Hence Beethoven's early Quintet for piano and winds, also like you never heard it before nor will again. Two of my other favourite players in the world, EFO regular clarinettist Matthew Hunt and horn master Alec Frank-Gemmill, were there alongside her, to my amazement - Matt (pictured with Leonskaja above - all photos by the superlative Kaupo Kikkas) knows her well and they sea-bathed together at 8am on several mornings -

plus two other superb wind players not known to me, José Luis Garcia Vegara (whose playing in La Valse last night was out of this world) and bassoonist Jesús Villa Ordóñez (much Hunt humour about 'playing with Jesus').

'Lisa' wanted broad, floated playing, taxing the winds to the very extremes of their breath control, but she was right to ask for it. As for how good it was, don't ask me but rather Triin Ruubel, co-leader of the EFO but unable to travel with them this year because of her advanced pregnancy. I met her on my way into the hall here yesterday to witness Arvo Pärt listening to a rehearsal of his Third Symphony - it's that kind of place - and she said she had to leave the concert after the Quintet because she had 'never heard a more perfect performance in my life'.

The following evening, Triin contributed to the unearthliness of a real underrated near-masterpiece, Eduard Oja's Piano Quintet, which Leonskaja had also undertaken to learn and more or less conducted from the piano: stunning, unforgettable. That's the two of them above with Triin's fellow violinist Adela-Maria Bratu. But that, and the rest of this amazing week, must wait until later coverage... Next, however, was this, from yesterday's rehearsal of Pärt's Third Symphony. Photo by Karima Morooka Elsamny.

Happy Europe Day

Let's just celebrate it to the full while we can - probably for the last time on the scale of the usual Europe Day Concerts held in St John's Smith Square for the past ten years. Do stay with the above film until it breaks out into Andrew Manze's Lully/Rameauification of Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' setting*. We were lucky to have the brilliant Rachel Podger with us in 2016, and I'm happy to share another piece of good news today: Irish soprano Jennifer Davis (pictured below at the 2017 Europe Day Concert), who sang Nielsen, Mozart and Bizet so well alongside tenor Thomas Atkins as our Royal Opera Jette Parker Young Artists participating last year, is to take on the role of Elsa in the RO's new production of Wagner's Lohengrin next month.

Very sorry for the delightful Kristine Opolais, who's had to pull out and has had a tough time of it recently, but hoping this will launch Jennifer properly on the international scene.

We'll also be waiting with nervous anticipation to discover how the best guitarist I've ever heard, Sean Shibe, fares at tonight's Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards: he's been nominated as one of three in two of the categories. We hope he'll hotfoot it over for the post-concert party at St John's, but if not, we'll raise a toast, whether he wins or not.**.

Tonight's programme is about 'Crossing Borders' - Mozart into Spain and Italy, with tenor Ben Johnson and soprano Jenny Stafford also sharing half of Britten's homage to Rimbaud, Les Illuminations, Dobrinka Tabakova transporting us to the Dolomites with her Bell Tower in the Clouds, fellow Bulgarian Michael Petrov as soloist in Bruch's Adagio on Celtic Theme for cello and orchestra, Massenet in Spain, Sullivan in Venice and a grand final flourish from Jonathan Bloxham and the Northern Chords Festival Orchestra, superlative last year, in Brahms - the homaging of Swiss alphorns is the pretext for the finale of his First Symphony. Its big theme will set us up nicely for the model, Beethoven's, always an anthem worth standing for.

*Most recent update (11/5): this year's Ode to Joy and a bit of the intense silence after it is now up and running as a film here. The rest will follow in due course.

**Brief update (10/5): Sean won the RPS Young Musician award. Congratulations, and what great choices throughout (meaning that I agree with them). Meanwhile, a phenomenally well executed Europe Day Concert at St John's hit the heights before ending on an elegiac note as the Ode to Joy was followed by a one-minute-plus silence, ended only by someone's mobile phone going off. We vowed that there will be another next year, however difficult it may be to raise the money.

Full report of the latest Europe Day Concert ere long.

BWV 3

Having got the long-festering cri de coeur of the previous entry off my chest (forgive the mixed topography), let's turn the water into wine by backtracking (or Bachtracking) to Wedding at Cana day (detail above from Duccio; below, Tintoretto's version). Last Sunday's Bach cantata looks from the numbering like it might be an early one, but it continues the strain I've been finding especially wonderful in the new works for the Leipzig year of 1725.

Like BWVs 123 and 124, for Epiphany and the first Sunday thereafter, 'Ach Gott, wie manches Herzeleid' begins with  a choral movements offering heavenly roles for oboe(s) d'amore. And maybe it's only because I heard this one recently that I think it the most amazing of all. Maze-y, too; though the cantus firmus of the basses is doubled with trombone, what goes on above and around includes some of Bach's most giddying harmonic progressions. I'd call it gorgeous and sensual, though it's essentially there to underline the 'deep affliction' and 'sorrow' out of which mankind must struggle. Nevertheless the key is that bright A major which will return in the duet of soprano and alto before the final chorale (Gardiner calls that the 'most winning music' of the cantata, but I disagree again - it's chaste compared to the opening number, for all the dancing vigour of a typical upper-voices duet, and the oboes d'amore double the violin line).

The water which must be turned into wine - Bach doesn't even make a passing reference in this cantata for the day of the Cana reading - is there, in complex form, in the recitatives and the bass aria, deliberately uneasy in its writing, with plenty of minor seconds and accents on 'angst' and 'pein'. It's so beautifully negotiated by the finest bass-baritone on Rilling's set, Philippe Huttenlocher, whom I also remember as an excellent Papageno. Though I'm equally happy to visit Gardiner's set now for Gerald Finley.

More revolutionary, if not necessarily greater, is another No. 3, Beethoven's 'Eroica' Symphony. I joke with my young pal Jonathan Bloxham that I'm collecting his Beethoven cycle; 6 and 7 he conducted with shining graduates, while this excellent concert in the beautifully situated church of St Mary-at-Hill down Lovat Lane close to the Monument was with the hard-working mostly amateur players of the Hertfordshire Chamber Orchestra.

Still, he got the same energy levels, powerful accents - those repeated chords in the first movement I've never found more impressive -  and some fine phrasing, while the general approach is one I like best, fast-moving but never rushed. What's interesting is where the challenges lie for amateurs - all those pattery string notes in the scherzo, the constant chatter of the finale, which meant the first half of the symphony, the 'heroic' side, was better than the second. But it was all good.

Fabulous, too, to hear Jonathan as cellist-conductor duetting with his confrere at the Yehudi Menuhin School and the Guildhall Michael Petrov in Vivaldi's G minor Concerto for two cellos (amazing finale, sounds like syncopated Elgar). Michael, who came here from Bulgaria as a teenager and seems to me to have unaccented English, has a natural projection and golden sound which bode well for his appearance at what may be the last Europe Day Concert on 9 May - Bulgaria has just taken up the Presidency of the European Council (and the first and third photos were taken by Jonathan's assistant Dorian Todorov, another Bulgarian and forging a parallel career as conductor). Full steam ahead now.

Brilliant Bulgarians marked the new Presidency of the European Council, also at St John's Smith Square, on 9 January.  Mastery in any sphere is to be applauded, and though I'm not sure I would sit through more than about 45 minutes of a jazz duo like the Wladigeroff Brothers, I found the sound if not always the substance (the compositions were mostly theirs) compelling - not least because St John's, from the back row at least, turns out to be a fabulous acoustic not just for piano but also trumpet.

Scions of a distinguished composing family - grandfather Pancho is a big figure in Bulgaria - Alexander and Konstantin aren't just brothers; they're identical twins, and the statement that music in their blood isn't just an empty cliche. There were some stunning novelty moments; Alexander at several points played two trumpets at once, in Roma-style thirds (pictured above in the second of three photos by Jamie Smith). The range of 'horns', too, made for some surprising changes of timbre, along with some splendid forays into 5/4 and 7/8 time.

Even so, it was just as well that they were offset by the London Bulgarian Choir. An amateur group, its women have been trained by the vivacious Dessislava Stefanova to sing in that open manner familiar in many eastern folk choirs (I missed the throat singing at the beginning). Brave of them and the Wladigeroff Brothers to try their own, poppy version of the Ode to Joy sung in three languages, but the musical highlight of European co-operation for me was one on film, Swiss animation brilliantly timed to a very lively number.

Meanwhile, BWV 3 seems to be one of the few from the Rilling cantatas series on YouTube. I see from the last time I tried to embed performances that many eventually vanish. And I do recommend that you buy the big 71-CD box. But this will show you why I like the interpretations so much.

Europe Day Concert stars: progress report

Well, two of the many twentysomethings who made this 9 May in St John's Smith Square the best yet, at any rate (pictured above at the event by Jamie Smith). Our conductor Jonathan Bloxham, now in his second year as assistant conductor to Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, set St Paul's Covent Garden alight with the London Firebird Orchestra - young professionals, see here - in one of the two best Beethoven Seventh Symphonies I've heard live (the other was Haitink's with the Concertgebouw, so not bad going). My thanks to John Naulls for stills from his film of the concert, which I've used wherever possible.

And violinist Benjamin Baker, soloist in what turned out to be the first serious Brexit piece, Matt Kaner's Stranded and recently covering himself in glory along with pianist Daniel Lebhardt in the Wigmore Hall, essayed his first Berg Violin Concerto with the enterprising Salomon Orchestra back in St John's Smith Square.

That's Ben above with fellow Kiwi and conductor Holly Mathieson in St John's Footstool after the concert. While I felt that all she could do with her amateur players, given limited rehearsal time, was to keep them together in the Berg - one of the casualties with such a group is dynamic nuance, though Ben's work was assured and beautifully focused throughout - I can't thank her enough for letting us hear Franz Schmidt's Fourth Symphony. I'm totally in love with the E flat major Second after Bychkov's Vienna Philharmonic Prom performance and the subsequent recording- which should be BBC Music Magazine disc of the year if I have anything to do with it (and I do, on the team of judges for the forthcoming awards) -

and so I was looking forward to this.

And it has to be said that what the Salomons do especially well is create the warm, rich kind of ensemble ideal for late-romantic works (boding well if Jonathan can get his way and conduct them in Strauss's An Alpine Symphony next year). The brass are rather splendid, the strings make a cohesive sound and Mathieson seemed in perfect command of the Fourth's stately progress (afterwards, she said tellingly that she realised she'd applied too much rubato in her previous performance of the work - it just goes). Not having heard it on CD for years, nor consulted the programme note, I found it a magnificent, slowly dying beast, briefly rallying in a fantastical scherzo (the least successful movement for the Salomons, for obvious reasons of nimble manouevres). It turns out to be a memorial for his daughter Emma, who had died in childbirth the previous year (1932), but it's also one of the very last flourishes of a vanishing age - only Strauss had more to offer, right up to 1949.

Schmidt was also seriously ill when he composed the symphony, but he lived on until 1939, which is unfortunate since it left him under the shadow of the Nazis in more ways than one. Born in Pressburg/Pozsony/Bratislava - now, of course, the capital of Slovakia, but then essentially Hungarian, as were Schmidt's mother and his half-Hungarian father - he was Mahler's favourite cellist in the Vienna Court Orchestra (though not the leader of the cello section, he played most of the solos). His output is small but everything I've heard is individual and quickly recognisable (not least in the Magyar/Roma gruppetti or turns, more profoundly in the startling harmonic progressions and the catering, in the orchestral works, to what I think of as the Vienna Philharmonic sound).

Unfortunately he got taken up by the Nazis, though seemingly with no desire for it, and left a cantata for them unfinished in favour of two chamber works for the one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein. I can only think that this is why he's been seriously underrated as a symphonist. The Fourth, certainly, doesn't 'whore after the public taste', as Ingmar Bergman put it, and is even uningratiating, but it has total integrity, and I can't thank Mathieson (pictured below) and the Salomons enough for letting us hear it live.

Jonathan Bloxham must take up the baton for Schmidt, too - he's interested - and he has to join Ben in the Berg, with such supreme orchestral musicians as clarinettists Joe Shiner and Greg Hearle, whose sensitivity would be crucial in many of the dialogues with the violin. There was certainly another remarkable partnership on display the previous Tuesday, with Belarus(s)ian cellist Aleksei Kiseliov in Saint-Saëns' First Cello Concerto.

What an adorable and concise piece this is, with its startling central minuet led by muted strings (neoclassicism in 1873!) Kiseliov was so nimble and personable; the orchestra flowed with him to perfection, I have to say that Jonathan as cellist made an even better job of 'The Swan', his encore, at last year's Southrepps Festival, but then Kiseliov was probably knackered by then, and it always sounds better with the original piano accompaniment.

It was a big programme. Must say I was more impressed by the first oboe (James Hulme) than the perfectly good flute in Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, but the woodwind were uniformly fine as before. Soprano He Wu has ideal stage presence but a rather fast vibrato for the line of Leila's aria from Bizet's The Pearl Fishers, and though her comedy was spot-on in Offenbach's Doll Song (pictured below) - rhythmically timed eyelash-flutters included - I'm not convinced she's a natural coloratura. One who is, incidentally, Maltese soprano Nicola Said, who moved everyone so much as Martinů's Ariane in the Europe Day Concert, will be singing her first Lucia with Fulham Opera next month.

Beethoven Seven, though, induced the delirium it should. For some, it was too fast in parts, but I admired it all - the second-movement Allegretto needs to remain of a piece with the rhythmic bounce of the other movements - and Jonathan conducted with attaccas for each movement throughout. Mirga, whose Beethoven Five at the Proms has the same freshness and focus, would have been delighted (hope she gets to see the film).

Detail could have been blurred at such speeds but never was; articulation, not all of it as expected, proved flawless throughout. Perhaps a mistake to add an encore downer, Sibelius's Valse Triste, but then Jonathan does like to follow in Paavo Järvi's footsteps. Not his fault if I've heard it too often in the past two months. Still, the exhilaration remained - huge congratulations to all.

Mastery in two bars

And by two exceptional, mature artists still in their twenties, my (now) good friend the New Zealand violinist Benjamin Baker and Hungarian-born pianist Daniel Lebhardt. It's slightly frustrating that I can't with a good conscience review Ben's concerts on sites like The Arts Desk any more - last time I legitimately did so was here - but this is my blog, so my rules, and you can believe what I write or not.

What I do know is that after 30-plus years in the business, I can tune into what's truly exceptional from a performer pretty quickly - whether it's in the all-ears circumstances of a recital or on those occasions where I put a CD on for pleasure, not for review - though there is pleasure, of course, in that too, but I'm always sitting there with a score, which in the former instance isn't usually the case. There something idiosyncratic and strongly communicative in the playing makes me stop and listen more intently. A PR sent me some Beethoven violin sonatas discs on DG featuring an artist she thought I might like to interview, Francesca Dego. Perfectly cultivated playing, nothing special, so - no thanks. Whereas in Ben's and Daniel's performance of Beethoven's "Kreutzer" Sonata in a Young Classical Artists Trust Wigmore lunchtime recital last Tuesday, there was individuality from the start. And, it especially struck me, in two specific bars, starting with the last one here.

You couldn't take them in isolation; all musical argument springs from the relationship between one note and another. I was just wondering at the way both achieved a unanimous, atmospheric diminuendo on the final unison F of the central Andante con variazioni (above), fading to nothing, when Lebhardt burst in with the ff A major chord that launches the Presto finale.

Perfect timing, and the essence of drama in musical extremes.

It was a perfect pairing with Janáček's typically fierce, jagged and shining Violin Sonata (remember that Janáček also based his First String Quartet on the horrific drama of Tolstoy's novella The Kreutzer Sonata - I'm hoping that Ben's pal from Yehudi Menuhin School days, Jonathan Bloxham, might feature Terje Tønnesen's string orchestra arrangement of that in next year's Northern Chords Festival, with Ben and Daniel on hand to play the Beethoven original. Violinist and conductor/cellist teamed up, of course, at this year's superlative Europe Day Concert).

Fierceness and painful beauty were in perfect balance here - and the duo have been playing it a lot recently, not least on a tour of China. The encore was a surprise, serious and not showy - I was guessing some homage to Tchaikovsky or other, but by whom I couldn't guess. It turned out to be a Dumka by the young Janáček. Here's a film of Ben in the Sonata with another partner, Shir Semmel, at Ravinia's Steans Music Institute.

Ben's next London concert sees him tackling another Everest - Berg's Violin Concerto - in a fabulous programme from the Salomon Orchestra at St John's Smith Square on 16 October which also include's Schmidt's Fourth Symphony. Having heard the Second at the Proms - Vienna Phil under Bychkov, embodied now in a sensational recording - I can't wait to experience that one live, too.

À la joie/To Joy/An die Freude

Update (10/5) - the Europe Day concert preview had to be temporarily removed yesterday, but here it is again, with a footnote to the effect that the quality of last night's playing, singing and the music itself - including the stunning new work by Matt Kaner - went deeper and higher than I could possibly have imagined. Everyone I spoke to was profoundly moved, and absolutely everything worked. More on that anon. Now, back to the original post.

For me, the moment when a tear came to the eye: Macron took to the podium to the strains of the European anthem, Beethoven's setting of Schiller's Ode to Joy in his Ninth Symphony. Tomorrow at the Europe Day concert in St John's Smith Square, we'll be standing for it with a special emotion. Happy to repeat this rather unusual arrangement by Andrew Manze when Rachel Podger led the European Union Baroque Orchestra - leaving its UK base thanks to Brexit - at last year's concert.

And I think the programme will please: on a theme of islands, since Malta holds the presidency at the moment. As well as a movement from the Malta Suite of Charles Camilleri, we'll be hearing island music from Mendelssohn (Overture The Hebrides), Mozart (two arias from Idomeneo), Nielsen (two songs from Springtime on Funen), Sibelius (five pieces from his incidental music to The Tempest), Bizet (the Act 2 Love Duet from The Pearl Fishers), Martinů (the final monologue from Ariane), Respighi ('The Birth of Venus' from the Trittico Botticelliano) and a new piece by composer Matt Kaner for violin and orchestra, Stranded. A truly European menu.

There are four splendid soloists - soprano Jennifer Davis and tenor Thomas Atkins from the Royal Opera's Jette Parker Young Artists Programme, Maltese soprano Nicola Said to reprise the Callas-alike Ariane she sang at the Guildhall last year (pictured above with Josep-Ramon Olivé as Thesée by Clive Barda) and the supremely cultured violinist Benjamin Baker. Jonathan Bloxham, currently assistant to Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducts his Northern Chords Festival Orchestra. What can I add except to say that I'm very excited at the prospect. And in the meanwhile, it's Springtime for France (and thankfully not for Hitler, though Madame will still be causing trouble in the years to come). How better to mark it than with the beautiful paulownia tree outside La Cité metro a couple of weeks back?

Meanwhile the stranded monsters gaping lie, but still capable of great harm. Their provenance is wittily suggested by this juxtaposition - by whom, I know not, but it attracted quite a bit of attention when I put it up on LinkedIn. Well done, whoever.

Quatuor extraordinaire

Classy cellist Lydia Shelley's mum Mary Hill, a very fine pianist and good friend via J's time with her when she ran the Abbey Opera course, encouraged us to come to her (Lydia's) current quartet's first UK concert at a packed Wigmore Coffee Morning (yes, they still serve sherry). We both remember Lydia - second from the right above, I'll introduce the other players later - as a bairn and are mighty proud of her. Mary pictured below smiling, also second from right, with Lydia's cello case in the foreground at the gathering afterwards, because I fear she's a tad out of focus in the otherwise better shot further down.

Quatuor Voce (both publicity shots, I think, by Sophie Pawlak) is as good as it gets in the quartet world, reminding me how anyone who attends chamber music festivals around the world knows that there are so many first-rate quartets whose names deserve to be as well known as those of the chosen few. QV is the complete package - wonderfully blended, subtly responsive to each other in a way that's a pleasure to watch (and the fact they happen to be good-looking doesn't do any harm) and full of insights which made me hear a Beethoven quartet I thought I knew quite well in a fresh light.

In fact most of what they revealed is there in the score of Op. 18 No. 6, but I've not often heard it reproduced so faithfully, nor with a freshness that made one feel the shock of the new not just the famous convolutions of the 'Malinconia' Adagio but also in the way the slow movement's minor-key sequence seems about to start up again a second time, but turns radiantly to the major, only to get cut short, and in the deliciously lopsided Scherzo's four bars of minor surprise on the way back from the trio. Other than that, all the little dialogues and original figurations were etched in with such refinement, grace and (where appropriate) humour. You couldn't ask for more.

Needless to say, more audience members found Bartók's First Quartet - also on their new CD, which I have to get - the most engaging of the two on the programme. I have to say its direction is sometimes opaque, none the less fascinating for all that but quite hard work on a Sunday morning. The QV took on, appropriately, a completely different identity, though still with the same built-in subtlety, and stunned in the whirling dance music. Quite a seventh-day work out. When I met them in the restaurant along the road to which we'd retired, I told the quartet members (pictured above, violinist Cécile Roubin second from left, viola-player Guillaume Becker centre, violinist Sarah Dayan two along to the right, Lydia between Sarah and her - Lydia's - ma) that I want them back for all the Beethoven and Bartók quartets. And of course I meant it. Over to you, Wigmore Hall.

More great guests at the Frontline Club

Following his final performance as the best Music Director of English National Opera in my memory, Mark Wigglesworth paid another visit to my Opera in Depth class at the Frontline Club in November.

Student Frances Marshall, a professional photographer who recently took stunning photos of the wedding of a certain bass friend and the Salzburg love of his life, brought along her camera and caught a couple of great shots, including the one above, which another visitor, Susan Bullock, thought was Mark to the life - pensive, deep-thinking.

More recently, spending what now turns out to be nine glorious Monday afternoons on Der Rosenkavalier, we were blessed to have Dame Felicity Lott coming to talk Strauss. Distinguished film and documentary maker David Thompson managed some pics from his seat front left.

And last week Richard Jones returned with typically off-centre thoughts on his Glyndebourne Rosenkavalier. This photo is of a previous visit as I didn't want to wear him out with student paparazzi. He's a lot smilier these days, so wry and funny.

Fortunately the wisdom of all three is captured, with their consent, on my mp3 player - I hope I'll have cause to revisit and transcribe some time. The main thing to mark is the departure of Messrs Wigglesworth and Jones from the ENO fold - the present CEO hasn't earned the respect of either, and should be ashamed of herself for letting them go. So much to lament here. This season's Don Giovanni was their first collaboration, and while Mark is never lost for words to praise his colleague, Richard said he was - adding only, 'what class'. When he said that he wouldn't tackle the other two Mozart/Da Ponte operas, I asked him, not even with MW? Oh yes, with him, definitely, came the reply. We've also lost the collaboration on The Gondoliers - a work Carlos Kleiber longed to conduct at ENO, gospel truth - and Elektra.

FLott still has the performer's instinct - she's havering over whether to play the Devil in a Belgian company's Stravinsky Soldier's Tale, in the French she speaks so beautifully, and to see her react to recordings of Crespin and Lehmann, as well as the recording she made of the Rosenkavalier Trio with Dessay, Kirchschlager and Pappano, was very, very moving. So were her readings of three texts I'd translated. Memories of C Kleiber were so precious - always the greatest for her, as well as for the rest of us watching their Vienna Rosenkavalier on DVD. No wonder she can't tolerate slow, maudlin tempi for the Marschallin. He used to sign himself 'Uncle Greifenklau' after the relative the Marschallin tells us she's intending to visit. Huge fun - he looks it on screen - and very amusing anecdotes, including one about Pavarotti replacing the usual Italian Tenor for a performance. You can imagine he didn't take to the Kleiber style.

It's also encouraging to hear all three guests speak so warmly and enthusiastically of the best young performers coming through the ranks. FLott had been giving masterclasses at the Carnegie Hall under Marilyn Horne's guidance, did a wicked impersonation of a young soprano hitting that rapturous Strauss Lied 'Cäcilie' as if it were a nagging lecture, complete with witchy finger-jabbing. But clearly she's kind and supportive to the talented. It will do the wonderful Miranda Keys good to know how much FL admired her Duenna, and of course she's a great admirer of Louise Alder, now learning her trade in Frankfurt. The future is golden, so long as there's financing to follow it.

Which allows me to slip in a photo featuring some of my favourite twentysomething musicians. The Philharmonia Friends in the interval of Paavo Järvi's utterly engaging concert with the Philharmonia the other week didn't know what hit them when youth and beauty, a mixture of Estonians and Brits, stepped into the Level 5 reception room. The lights of the former Chelsfield Room turned them green, so I made the pic black and white (the focus isn't great as we were being hurried back to our seats and the flash wouldn't go off).

Here are three violinists - Marike Kruup on the left and her partner Benjamin Baker, second from right, as well as Jess Wadley next to him; a cellist turned agent, Maarit Kangron; a bassoonist who's also a brilliant organiser, Tea Tuhkur, my most delightful companion for the evening; and a cellist turned conductor, Jonathan Bloxham (also boyfriend of the glamorous Jess).

The programme deserves more than a mention. The first half worked at a level of communication and humour you don't often encounter, here in Haydn's Symphony No. 101 ('Clock') and Beethoven's Triple Concerto, a piece that normally loses me for whole swathes. No chance of that with Christian and Tania Tetzlaff making chamber music alongside Lars Vogt. If you sometimes strained to catch it, that was no bad thing. And what an absolute masterpiece the Haydn is, like all its late counterparts.

If Paavo's Nielsen Sixth (the conductor pictured above by Jean Christophe Uhl) wasn't the greatest performance I've heard live, that was probably because the Philharmonia, or at least its strings, needed another rehearsal or two to truly let rip. But as an interpretation, it brought out all the timely mania and discombobulation in this amazingly modernistic piece, a beacon, surely, for Shostakovich in his Fourth and Fifteenth Symphonies (though I've never found any evidence that DDS knew it).

But I digress. Back, finally, to the visitors. Jones's Rosenkavalier is returning to Glyndebourne next year - I already knew this - though directed by his very talented assistant Sara Fahie. He'd like to change quite a bit in Act One and wouldn't stay for the screening of the Levee, which he thinks needs more focus, though the students loved it. It was good to hear him standing up for Tara Erraught, and interesting to hear him say that it should have been Glyndebourne's responsibility to back her up; as he rightly points out, she has a fabulous gift for comedy, especially as 'Mariandel'. 

Sad to hear that the great Lars Woldt, perhaps the most lovable oaf of all Ochses, has retired from the role now. Here he is with Erraught, Ochs and Octavian being kept apart by Kate Royal's very attractive Marschallin - a photo by Bill Cooper of the 2015 production. The Feldmarschall in the left of the two portraits on the wall, by the way, is a former member of the stage crew, much admired by Richard, who took off for a year to travel round the world.

And then, of course, we went on to the end of the act with FLott and Von Otter, neither needing direction - nor did they get it from lazy old Otto Schenk - to communicate supreme eloquence, with Kleiber as the dramaturg. This version on YouTube breaks things up into 10 minute chunks, and there are no subtitles, but it does have the advantage of starting at the crucial soliloquy.

Three more glorious weeks to go, then all too little time on Rimsky-Korsakov's The Snow Maiden. Summer term will be devoted to Otello and Pelléas et Mélisande - contact me if you'd like to come by leaving a comment here with your e-mail; I won't publish but I promise to get back to you. Special guests TBC. Will Jonas sing the Moor? Kinda sad he cancelled the one concert in the Barbican residency I was going to - though as fellow critic Neil Fisher pointed out, 'I really can't wait to hear a tenor sing the Four Last Songs' is not a comment you're ever likely to hear...