Six bests in nine days

Namely as good as it can get in theatre (Simon Stone's radical adaptation and production of Medea for Internationaal Theater Amsterdam at the Barbican); in concerts (the two London Symphony Orchestra stunners to celebrate Bernard Haitink's 90th birthday - Mozart and Bruckner on Sunday, Dvořák and Mahler on Thursday); in fiction (putting my thoughts together on Robert Menasse's polyphonic masterpiece The Capital as well as meeting him last Friday); and in opera, stupendous results at the highest level of performance in Birmingham Opera Company's site-specific Shostakovich Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in the Tower Ballroom on the edge of Edgbaston Reservoir. To which I should add the perfection of a small gallery - major collection, handsome surroundings - in the shape of the Barber Institute on Birmingham University's campus. The below is merely the atrium to the superb deco concert hall; most of the masterpieces are in the rooms on the next floor, but even here we have a famous Rodin and a Chola bronze of Natarajan.

Much to say about the Barber collection, but now now. I need to take a break and simply digest after all that writing for The Arts Desk, and as there were too many good production/concert/rehearsal pics around that would otherwise go to waste, why not use some of them? The one below by Sanne Peper, of the stupendous Marieke Heebink as Anna, a contemporary Medea of excess vitality, and Aus Greidanus Jr as Lukas (Jason) with their two sons, is one I couldn't use in the review because the boys were different. And perhaps it's a bit of a spoiler as to how the ash which starts falling on the blindingly white stage two thirds of the way through gets deployed.

Haitink was photographed at the first of the two 90th birthday concerts by Robert Allan. You'd need to watch the film formerly on the LSO website to observe his superb control and vigilance - my friend Joe Smouha beautifully described 'the architecture spun from those tiny movements at the end of the baton' - but there's a sense of that here, albeit in a more genial moment.

The Khovanskygate experience of 2014 told me that Graham Vick's Lady Macbeth would be opera at its communicative best. Sure, every production of it I've seen - Pountney's twice at ENO, followed by Tcherniakov's, Jones's twice at the Royal Opera - has hit hard; but the closeness of one's promenading self to the action, the involvement of all strands of Birmingham society in the chorus and acting group, make this an unrepeatable experience. I got there early because they'd asked if I would prep a group of young volunteers on how to blog their experience (it actually turned out to be how they'd present their enthusiasms about the project on camera, but we quickly adapted and I got something very different out of each - to be blogged about here very soon). This shot I took of a warm-up gives some idea of the venue, which they'd further deconstructed. The orchestra platform is left, the first stage for the action, the Izmailov kitchen, to the right.

And we need a couple more production photos, by Adam Fradgley/Exposure, of the amazing Chrystal E Williams as Katerina/'The Wife'. Up top, she's despatching her inopportunely arrived husband Boris (Joshua Stuart). Here she is again, first liberated,

then deserted by that shit Sergey/'The Lover' (Brenden Gunnell).

I'm more and more drawn to Birmingham, even if it did vote for Brexit by a narrow margin (would it now, I wonder?) , and however messed up the city centre. There are so many hidden delights, and each time I go I discover one or two more. It has one of our most vibrant cultural scenes, that's to be sure. Now, if only BOC could think of Prokofiev's War and Peace...problematic, I know, because Part One is largely chorus-free. Maybe that could be done in a smallish theatre and then Part Two could be theirs in another extraordinary big venue, both with the CBSO. Or perhaps The Fiery Angel with Williams, whose upper range could certainly handle the crazy role of Renata. Anything is possible with this company.

Two Thursdays in Birmingham

Three cheers for Chiltern Railways, is the first thing to note. Leaving from one small and charming station, London's Marylebone, travelling in comfort through pleasant countryside and arriving in another gem, Birmingham's Moor Street, is a much needed easing into the concrete jungle that is the centre of the city. The original building could so easily have been lost, but it's had a nostalgic face-lift, which includes the signage, and it has a very good coffee shop. Turn left and you hit the insoluble mess of the Bull Ring, but if you cross the road and head up the hill, you can be in the square around the Cathedral in minutes.

On my first visit, I was looking for a bite to eat before heading to see the final rehearsal of friend Susie Self's new opera, Quilt Song, at the Old Rep Theatre where her grandfather John Drinkwater's play Abraham Lincoln had been premiered 100 years ago to the day of her own first performance. The extra prompt to go and lend support came from Nina Stemme, to one of whose children Susie is a godmother, who when I met her in Stockholm and mentioned Susie, immediately asked 'when are you going to Quilt Song - 19th or 20th?' (she went on the Saturday, between performances in the Royal Opera Ring. Quite a friend).

More on that in a moment, but I should add that next to the rather stylish old pub opposite the Cathedral I'd visited before there had opened a Syrian eatery, Damascena, rather like our own beloved Jaffa Bake House on the North End Road in that it evokes similar such establishments in Syria and Lebanon. I returned the following Thursday for an early lunch, and it was just as good and even livelier.

Quilt Song is an ambitious project. Quite apart from the fact that Susie is composer, singer, co-director, conductor (of all those scenes in which she doesn't appear) and video artist, the work itself runs the gamut of styles in its inclusivity.

There are pop songs for the 'Universal Choir' and students from Birmingham's Ormiston Academy, incorporating some rather portentous words from Drinkwater's play,

some intricate instrumental music for the core ensemble of 12 players and the loveliest writing, I think, for the Alma Guitar Trio, working for their degree at the Birmingham Conservatoire by performing together.

Maureen Brathwaite sings Rosa Parks, chief subject of the opera's motto 'we have more in common than that which divides us' - epitomised also by another great woman who gave expression to it, Jo Cox, "drawn" as the Muse of the Poet (John Drinkwater, no less, embodied by Susie). She's sung by soprano Elizabeth Cragg, already pursuing a successful career. Brathwaite and Cragg pictured with members of the chorus on the 'bus' below.

The other solo voice belongs to James Blake, the bus driver who ordered Rosa Parks to move from her seat to make way for white people, sung by tenor Tristan Stocks, who also doubles as the Jo Cox figure's murderer.

He's allowed his transformation in a very Tippettesque second part where as Charon he rows souls across the river Styx to a street party.

Bear in mind that I only saw the final rehearsal. It did, though, allow me to send Susie a string of notes which I hoped would be helpful. Clearly as it stood - and I had to leave shortly before the end to catch my train back to London - the show was about 15 minutes too long, and Susie did in fact make a cut before the first of the two official performances where I thought it should be, in the 'Street Party' sequence. I hope she also got the other singers to clarify the text more; she herself, a superb mezzo, is always exemplary in that respect. She puts much of this down to her teacher, Josephine Veasey. As she wrote, 'I literally speak on the pitches rather than employ a singing mode. This is totally radical and for some singers too controversial an approach. They like singing too much!'

Otherwise, bravi tutti for giving so professional account of a big and at times complicated work. I thought Susie's videos especially striking and though I wasn't too sure about co-director and dancer Marina White Raven's later interjections - as the bird of death? - I found her physical expression in the opening sequence striking.

A week later, I returned to Birmingham - this time arriving before noon - to give a pre-performance talk at Symphony Hall on Sibelius and his First Symphony, taking a journey around it and the works that led up to it. I was amazed by the crowd assembled on the second foyer level (rehearsal was ongoing in the auditorium so the usual venue wasn't available, and I much preferred the alternative). Sitting on chairs and on the floor, standing, looking up from below (the microphone made it all audible from other foyer spaces), they were amazingly attentive and asked interesting questions. I told one or two that we don't get this level of attendance in London, probably because we have five orchestras and thus a less loyal following; the response was that the audience feels part of the CBSO family. Splendid.

As was the first half of the concert: to hear the orchestra in that best of venues is always like encountering music with the lid off, and Wagner's Flying Dutchman Overture as conducted by Vasily Sinaisky made a superb start. Then Benjamin Grosvenor (pictured below by Patrick Allen/Opera Omnia) in Mozart's C major Piano Concerto, K467.  He has it all - the most elegant trilling after Paul Lewis, a crisp, beautiful treble and a rich bass in perfect counterbalance, originality but never eccentricity of phrasing, an ear for what the orchestra's doing.

Alas, I couldn't stay for the Sibelius; I had to get back and prepare for the next day's start of talks around Shostakovich's fifteen quartets. Which took me back to Birmingham, this time Grand Central, and on to Bromsgrove. But that's another story, due a post soon.

Festive Oslo

Not surprisingly given that Norway furnishes Trafalgar Square's Christmas tree every year,  its capital has a fair share of illuminated firs - no less than seven that I saw outside and within the National Theatre (pictured above, National Opera below the first photo) when I began my Peer Gynt foray for The Arts Desk with a lunchtime performance of Ibsen's flexible epic as adapted by brilliant director Alexander Mørk-Eidem.

I think I've assembled all the details necessary for the big piece, but frustratingly I can't find anything much online about the building or its marvellous collection of portraits beyond the fact that it was the work of Henrik Bull and opened in 1899 with a festive programme which included Ibsen's An Enemy of the People on the first two nights, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson's Sigurd Jorsalfar on the third. If we know the latter at all, it's through Grieg's heart-of-oak Homage March. So it's odd to see the statues of the two men flanking the building in equal stature. Ibsen's the one we recognise, of course.

The handsome lobby has the fifth tree.

Should have gone round the foyer spaces and staircases during the interval with my notebook, left inside the auditorium. The statue here is of early-ish Ibsen heroine Hjørdis.

Of the actresses featured, I can only tell you that this is Liv Ullmann - I failed to note the artist -

and though I identified a few playwrights and actors, I picture knowingly only a fine portrait of the Master, on loan from the National Gallery I loved so much on my first visit earlier in the year.

Otherwise, all I can do you are people and portraits, the former a very mixed bunch as the matinee was full of school groups, lively and vocal around the performance, extremely attentive during it - as how could they not be, given such a stunning and lively show.

Curiously none of the production pics shows the controversial painting which forms the backdrop for this Peer Gynt's devastating coup, corresponding to the storm for Peer's homecoming in the original. Norwegian-based Vanessa Baird's To Everything There is a Season caused a storm in the wake of the Breivik attacks in the city and on Utøya island, despite the fact that the toppling buildings and falling paper had been painted before it. Debate continues as to whether it should continue to hang in a public space, so all credit to Mørk-Eidem for making it part of his commentary on the point at which Norway could never be the same again. There's a reproduction of part of the original canvas over on the Arts Desk.

 Who knows what Ibsen would have thought of that? I hope he would have welcomed only one of many approaches to his endlessly fascinating myth. This time I got, as originally intended, to the House-Museum, which I've also written about in the Arts Desk piece. Two peripheral pleasures I didn't mention, or expand upon, were the tiles in the gents' loo, including Ibsen's specimens of handwriting,

and another tree or shrub of sorts for the natural ecosystem in Old Ekdahl's loft in The Wild Duck as realised by artist Lucie Noel Thune, who's been a friendly correspondent since my visit.

Only when close up do you realise it's constructed of hundreds of duck eggs. A nice complement to the real wild duck wandering the black glass box of my year's theatrical highlight, Belvoir Sydney's production - another wonderful adaptation - of that great and ambiguous play.

Jüri Reinvere's opera, the premiere of which I saw at the National Opera the following night, makes more explicit reference to the Breivik attacks at the same point as Mørk-Eidem does in his production of the play. Here Peer imagines he takes the Troll King's 'be yourself - and to hell to the rest of the world' to its natural, Breivikian extreme of indiscriminate shooting. The music there is at its most powerful, so I bought it as most of Oslo, apparently less interested in the score than in the situation, has not. I had reservations about some of the work, but I respect Jüri's right to treat it from his own unique perspective. I've met him twice - once through Berlin critic Jan Brachmann, when he came to the local cafe, and a second time after I'd seen the play - informally, not for an interview, though it was helpful to have his perspective in mind.

Then it was off to a splendid theatrical happening rivalling the play Peer Gynt, all thanks to this intriguing screen I saw as I was passing the Norwegian Theatre.

The result was even more amazing than I'd expected, a Hamlet like no other inhabiting a unique world - more about it over on the Arts Desk piece.

There remained only the event for which I'd been invited back to Oslo in the first place. Audience members were invited to a post-show party in the foyer on the first night of the operatic Peer Gynt only to find they had to listen to the speeches without a drink in hand unless anyone had bought one: that's a first for me. Anyway, there was always the tree in the splendid foyer - which I wrote about in my first Arts Desk piece on Oslo - to feast on.

The Thursday of my arrival (at midnight) was one of those crazy excursions I occasionally indulge in. That meant catching a morning train to Birmingham for a lunchtime pre-performance talk for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra before Andris Nelson's afternoon concert of Schumann's Piano Concerto with Stephen Hough and Bruckner's Seventh Symphony, the main thrust of my talk (though I started with Schumann's Rhenish opening as the example of a more usual sort of symphonic start). In a tight schedule, the rehearsal had only just finished when I came on to the concert platform for a brief sound check - and there was Andris discussing a point with CBSO leader Laurence Jackson.

He and Stephen were as friendly as I'd expected from the few words we exchanged. Also had a good chat with my main inviter and now, I hope, friend Richard Bratby who organises the talks; I'll be sorry to see him go early next year but the good thing is that he may be freed up to review CBSO concerts, inter alia, for The Arts Desk. Sadly I couldn't even stay for the first half of the concert as I'd left my passport at home, which in the end meant only a brief excursion before going on to Gatwick for the Oslo flight.. I'd like to have spent longer in Birmingham not only for that but also because the Christmas Fairl there seemed so jolly.

All I had time for was a ridiculously large plate of fried onion flower which caught surprised comments as I stood dipping it in garlic mayonnaise.

Then off to the train, and on to two and a half days in Oslo which were as gloomy as the weather in Birmingham, and of course much colder, with no more than a dusting of the snow which had made the first visit such fun. I can at least say I've seen the sun in that city, if only on rising at 9.30am - as I know from Iceland in January, it's the mornings which remain dark for so long - in my hotel room on the 32nd floor, looking east to the hills

and south to the Opera House and the harbour.

Anyway, we're sitting tight for once over Christmas itself, maybe off for a bit in the New Year. Happy holidays to all, with a final tree, or rather shrub, greeting: for the first time ever, camellia Debbie in the back yard has flowered unseasonably early, allowing me to display it alongside a couple of our Indian hand-painted Santas. An e-card on the same theme will be reaching those whose addresses I've not been able to track down.

The best lack all conviction

while the worst are full of...well, probably not passionate intensity, but the impression of it is enough for some. The fact remains that Farage, loathsome as he may be, is A Personality and journos seem to love him, while they still turn down factual pieces about the EU's essential nature. Oh dear, Cameron, Clegg, Miliband...is it surprising that Ukip got away with murder? The main parties should have been spelling out messages like this

and, on a smaller scale, this

instead of which we heard little, as usual, about the calm, sane facts which would highlight an imperfect but well-meaning institution. Let's put it into perspective: a majority in this country WANTS the European project to continue, as do 75 per cent of the French. This is not a wipeout, it's a warning to get the message out there. And it might not be a bad thing if, given far right and left wingers now in some of the seats, the complacent elements were forced to limited compromises which would show the Greeks, for example, that they mean good and not harm.

In the meantime, after all the unsavoury facts about Ukip's representatives emerging in the papers over the past month, people still vote for it. Which means they're either disenfranchised old codgers, bigots, covert racists, hatemongers who think their day has come and it's time to have a bonfire of 'all that political correctness', or just plain stupid. Wake up, people! Would I be quite so rude to my Tory confreres? Absolutely not. Just check out what Ukip stands for, set grinning Farage aside for a moment and take a careful look at its spokesmen down in the cesspit. Farceurs like John Lydon Sullivan, who tweeted 'I rather often wonder if we shot one "poofter" (GBLT, whatevers), whether the next 99 would decide on balance, that they weren't after-all' (sic). There's an inspired rejoinder to this from my blogpal Jon Dryden Taylor here.

I'll leave you with the superb Stewart Lee* whose act was sent to me by friend Peter. For some reason the YouTube clip isn't downloadable so watch it here. The deliciously orchestrated wind-back-history 'they come over 'ere' rhetoric which is the heart of this genius turn starts around 2'57.

Bloody Latvian, coming over 'ere, knocking a national treasure into best-ever shape (Andris Nelsons pictured above by Richard Battye); bloody Finn, bloody Austrian, stealing plum Strauss roles from our girls and boys. Read my Arts Desk review of the Birmingham concert Rosenkavalier. Perfect it wasn't, but when it delivered, it was the tops. More anon on the preceding German Opera Discovery Day in the classy CBSO Centre: a palpable hit, I think I can say, with Dame Harriet Walter and other superb actors (plus two fine singers and pianist) saying they learned from the lecturers, said lecturers stunned and moved (to tears, in my case) by the performers.

*I think I love this man. From his Wiki entry:

'Lee caused controversy on his If You Prefer a Milder Comedian tour with a routine about Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond. Referring to Hammond's accident while filming in 2006, in which he was almost killed, Lee joked, "I wish he had been decapitated and that his head had rolled off in front of his wife". The Daily Mail termed this an "extraordinary attack" and, having been doorstepped by a Mail journalist, Lee quoted the routine by replying "It's a joke, just like on Top Gear when they do their jokes".

'Lee subsequently explained the joke:

' "The idea of what's acceptable and what's shocking, that's where I investigate. I mean, you can't be on Top Gear, where your only argument is that it's all just a joke and anyone who takes offence is an example of political correctness gone mad, and then not accept the counterbalance to that. Put simply, if Clarkson can say the prime minister is a one-eyed Scottish idiot, then I can say that I hope his children go blind." '

Watch the 'it's only a joke, just like on Top Gear' sequence here - because this one is downloadable. If you don't have the patience for the full works, zoom in at 6mins to see bully and sidekick impersonated.

London lights, one to Brum

This is the great Dame Harriet Walter, giving a lecture at the Legatum Institute - to whom thanks for the images of her - about whether 'actresses' shouldn't just be called 'actors', about Shakespeare's roles for women, circumscribed as they are by each boy-played heroine being someone's mother, lover or wife, about how the Greeks let women stand alone, and what happened after Ibsen.

Although I didn't get to see her Brutus in the Donmar all-women Julius Caesar, some of her other performances are right at the top of my 'memorables' list, chiefly Imogen in Cymbeline when she was playing a raft of Shakespeare leads for the RSC, and more recently Elizabeth I to Janet McTeer's Mary Stuart (both pictured below).

But I had no idea she was so lucid and well-researched a writer or - this might have been more predictable - so captivating a public speaker. One not so far from here who loved that Legatum lecture persuaded her to speak at a bastion of male exclusivity which it seems I'm not allowed to mention. I was there, had the privilege of dining afterwards with Harriet and the actor husband she met working on Mary Stuart, Guy Paul, and had an idea.

I wondered if she knew the strong women of Strauss and Hofmannsthal (the Empress in Die Frau ohne Schatten was much on my mind given the concurrent run of Royal Opera performances), and we talked about that. And then I had an idea: I'd been given a budget - for the first time in my life, I think - to put together a Birmingham study day on 24 May before Andris Nelson's CBSO concert performance of Der Rosenkavalier (Soile Isokoski, Alice Coote, Lucy Crowe and Franz Hawlata head a delectable cast). The unenviable gambit to be covered between 10.30am and 3.30pm is to be Rosenkavalier, Ariadne, Götterdämmerung and Moses und Aron. Would she be willing to come and read speeches from the Marschallin, possibly Ariadne, Brünnhilde and - since she's played Brutus and set her sights on Macbeth - Moses? Would Guy be happy to play Monsieur Jourdain and Aron, maybe also Hofmannsthal's Lord Chandos? They would, and they will.

In addition Harriet has proposed two extraordinarily promising young actors taking their first steps in the professional world, Joel MacCormack and Daisy Boulton, who will read Octavian and Sophie (I want the Trio texts heard separately), the Composer and Zerbinetta in the original between-scenes backstage set-up for the opera in Hofmannsthal's original adaptation of Moliere's Le bourgeois gentilhomme. The speakers will be self on Rosenkavalier, William Mival - so good on a Radio 3 podcast we shared on Strauss's Feuersnot - on Ariadne, Michael Tanner on Götterdämmerung and my good friend Stephen Johnson on Moses und Aron (he's translated the final text Schoenberg didn't get round to setting to music)*. Does that sound enticing? If so, come along, book here.

I feel the especial liveliness of the London scene especially at the moment through the number of inspiring folk I've seen, heard and met recently. There was the delightful interview with soprano Nicole Cabell, whom I've long wanted to interview since her perfect Cardiff Singer of the World finale and her Leila in a Royal Opera concert performance of Bizet's Pearl Fishers.A truly engaging person who listens as well as talks. Here she is in the rather lovely apartment between the Barbican and St Luke's she found through Airbnb - a great alternative for performers fed up with staying in big anonymous hotels.

At the French Institute's It's All About Piano festival I was blown away by more perfection in the shape of young French pianist David Kadouch's ideally proportioned recital. This is he with festival organiser Françoise Clerc in the cafe afterwards.

And how could I resist a shot of our dear Jonny Brown, who accompanied me to the recital and was equally amazed, found nothing else to match it in the rest of the weekend, but has all the same written eloquently about the whole experience.

My colleague Jasper Rees enjoyed a revival of the play adapted from his brilliant book I Found My Horn, the chronicle of a mid-life crisis turned round through rediscovery of the instrument he'd abandoned as a 15 year old. I was unexpectedly bowled over by the staging at the Hampstead Theatre first time round; now we were virtually on top of the one man who plays many parts and the horn, too - beautifully, as 'Jasper' gathers confidence in the Mozart Third Horn Concerto - Jonathan Guy Lewis, photographed below in Trafalgar Square (artwork by 3D Joe and Max c James Lowe).

I found myself in floods of tears, not quite sure why, perhaps that quality of lost idealism regained. A special piquancy was to be sitting a few places away from Dave Lee, horn doyen whose northern accent is almost parodied by our hard-working actor as he encourages 'Jasper' to get on with it. Here are Dave, Jasper and Jonathan, snapped by I know not whom (oh, and I should mention that we saw Tom Hollander afterwards too, who'd been invited along by Jasper. His sad, infinitely expressive face in the Passion episodes of the television comedy Rev, which has suddenly risen from so-so laughs to absolutely compelling drama, should garner him awards in the TV world).

It was a flawless tour de force from our principal actor; a rather surprising modesty, or perhaps a less unexpected diffidence, forbade Jasper to allow anyone to cover the play for TAD. But a very enthusiastic Evening Standard review appeared a couple of days ago, only four weeks late.

I was going to leave it at that before the internet went down at 3pm on Friday - thank you, Talk Talk, you made for a stressy 24 hours plus. But now I'm elsewhere until this evening, I can take the opportunity to prolong the abundance. On Friday afternoon I interviewed the astonishingly articulate Pretty Yende, South African soprano now a favourite at La Scala and the Met. The 'peg' for the Arts Desk interview due in a couple of weeks' time is that she's giving a recital at the Cadogan Hall on 15 May (her Royal Opera debut is fixed but she can't yet reveal what it's to be).

I couldn't help comparing our conversation to the one I'd had with heavenly Anne Schwanewilms earlier in the year, now up at great length on The Arts Desk: both sopranos have huge amounts of wisdom and self-knowledge, but the difference lies in youth and maturity, between Schwanewilms' great experience and Yende's awareness of how far she has to go.

Finally, I shifted everything to hear the last two instalments of the Jerusalem String Quartet's Shostakovich cycle after Wednesday's performance: quartet playing doesn't come any greater than this.

To add to the Arts Desk rave about Wednesday's concert, I'd say that Thursday night's tumultous conclusion to the Twelfth, reiterating the major despite all the dissonances and tone-rows, capped even the victory cavalcade of the Ninth and made an equally satisfying resolution to suffering x 3. Sophie came again and once again conferred 'rock and roll' status on a chamber performance.

She was also stunned by the endgames and rites of the Fifteenth Quartet last night, as was I: never have I concentrated more fiercely, though there were two peaks in this concert. One was violinist Alexander Pavelenko and cellist Kyril Zlotnikov searing their way towards the moment of tenderness (the Braga 'Angels' Serenade' which Shostakovich had orchestrated in his plans to make an opera of Chekhov's The Black Monk? Mahler linden-tree? Janáček?) in the Fourteenth's slow movement. The tender serenade returns, of course, with fragile radiance at the end. The other was the astounding resonance of the solos in the Fifteenth's funeral march, which is where the tears started to flow uncontrollably.

Makng space for that, and a talk to the Friends of the Jerusalem Quartet beforehand, meant coming down to Gloucestershire a day late, and missing beautiful country weather, but I'm here now in the arcadian Uley Valley among fewer people, but an abundance of surprisingly untimid ewes and lambs. This, apparently, is Eglantine and her offspring.

*Stop press (9/5): we've now got two singers and a pianist from the Birmingham Conservatoire to deliver 'Du Venus Sohn' as it appears in the original 1911 Hofmannsthal adaptation and Harlequin's Serenade, plus a couple of Strauss songs. And Alice Coote, one of my very favourite singers, has expressed friendly readiness to pop in and chat Octavian if rehearsals and rest-time permit.