The rest is tonal

As the Southbank Centre works its way through the development of 20th century music along the lines of Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, I've been hearing so much to remind me that, loudly though the twelve-tone boys and their disciples may have shouted and slavishly though the acadamic establishment may have followed them, tuneful and direct serious (and, as Prokofiev put it, 'light-serious') music kept going.

My feeling that all these ways of finding new ways to say old things, properly absorbing the past - it's hardly reactionary - are just as valid as the work of the so-called pioneers, was confirmed by an interview Benjamin Britten (pictured above with Pears and Poulenc in Cannes, 1954) gave Donald Mitchell back in 1969. It's reproduced in The Britten Companion (Faber; more on the context, taking the City Lit opera class through Gloriana, anon).

Praising the emerging John Tavener - pity that promise never went further than it did - Britten said 'I think he and many of his generation are swinging far, far away now from what I call the academic avant-garde, who have rejected the past. He and many others like him adore the past and build on the past. After all, language is a matter of experience. When we're talking together, we're using symbols which have been used by the past. If we rejected the past we should be just making funny noises.'

Mitchell asks him if he is conscious of the burden of tradition. 'I'm supported by it, Donald,' comes the reply. 'I couldn't work alone. I can only work really because of the tradition that I am conscious of behind me. And not only the painting, and architecture, and countryside around me, people around me....I feel as close to Dowland, let's say...as I do to my youngest contemporary.'

Steeped in Poulenciana, and happily ploughing my way through the correspondence, I'm always aware of the sheer joy in his tradition-conscious music. He loves what he absorbs. But he also realised his limitations. He writes to a friend in 1942: 'I am well aware that I am not the kind of musician who makes harmonic inventions like Igor [Stravinsky], Ravel or Debussy [always the top names among living composers he tended to cite, along with Richard Strauss and Prokofiev, occasionally Hindemith]. But I do think there is a place for new music that is content with using other people's chords. Was that not the case with Mozart and with Schubert? And in any case, the personality of my harmonic style will become evident.'

It's been a joy to discover the Trio and the Sextet in Pascal Rogé's collaborations with marvellous French colleagues, even to hear the strange Aubade in a vintage recording where Poulenc is the pianist. In his own piano pieces, he's an interesting one: determined to capture a speedy spirit where appropriate without bothering too much about all the right notes.

As for other personal discoveries, after Tippett's Second Symphony, I found to my surprise that the First went just as deep - probably deeper in its knotty slow-movement Passacaglia variations, where there's the sort of selective scoring, in this case for three flutes above the chaconne on muted violas and cellos, which most composers can only dream of hitting on. Indebted to Graham Rickson there for digging out the old Colin Davis recordings for me.

I was heading for the second-cast Mozart Zauberflöte at the Royal Opera on Friday. But the Tuesday before, I listened to Vaughan Williams's Five Tudor Portraits to prepare the class for the BBC Symphony Orchestra concert I thought I was going to miss. I suppose I'd imagined that all five portraits were like the one I knew, the Epitaph for John Jayberd of Diss - three-minute character studies. I hadn't appreciated the brilliance of Tudor poet John Skelton's rapping doggerel and I was stunned to find not only the rollicking variety of 'The Tunning of Elinor Rumming' (a real personage depicted above handing her ale to Skelton and a priest) but above all the 20-minute requiem for Jane Scroop's sparrow Philip, slain by the convent cat Gib.

Such delicacy here, sentiment in the right sense and fresh invention just when it's needed. And this in a rather poor performance conducted by David Willcocks (sadly there's not one on YouTube as yet, though you can catch the BBCSO performance on the BBC Radio 3 iPlayer until Friday evening). I gave up my Flute ticket and went to the Barbican instead, writing about it for The Arts Desk. John Wilson and co confirmed my hunch: a masterpiece. I shed a few tears for Philip Sparrow, I can tell you, particularly in that movement's incandescent epilogue. None for York Bowen's Viola Concerto, simply because like so many second-rank works it lacks a personal identity. But that's been an exception among the 20th century surprises, which I hope just keep on coming.

More of the new-to-me now, which in this case is very much the old, or rather timeless. On Ascension Day (illustrated by Rublev, the illuminator of the Très Riches Heures and Perugino),  I found myself spoiled for choice between the four cantatas on John Eliot Gardiner's Bach Pilgrimage instalment. For consistency's sake, I decided to stick with my Leipzig 1725 sequence and plumped for 'Auf Christi Himmelfahrt allein', BWV 128. In that context the joyous circumstance has to make a new, at long last major-key beginning with two mellow horns dictating G major as Bach weaves a glistening fantasia around the sopranos' chorale.

Innovation appears in the bass's invocation to 'arise and with a bright sound proclaim...', accordingly replacing horns with trumpet and breaking off into recitative and arioso. Since the last of the sustained lines tell us 'not to fathom the Almighty's power', all we get in the ritornello is a brief return of the trumpet, no voice.

Alto and tenor in the ensuing aria-duet declare 'my mouth falls silent', but they instead keep on going until the lovely oboe d'amore has the final word and - unaccompanied - the last note. Even the final chorale, with its rich turn on 'Herrlichkeit', has added grace, this time in the return of the two horns, the first climbing to the heights to fill out the textures in the final gazing 'on Thy majesty for all eternity'. As Rene Jacobs, in his incarnation as one of the worst countertenors ever, is on the Leonhardt recording, let's try a newcomer, Dutch forces under Leusink.

From sacred to profane, finally, here's a plug from proud godfather for Alexander 'Betty' Lambton's sax tootling in his band Lieutenant Tango. Let's hope the irresistible danciness of  their single 'Charle Brash' brings them the fame they deserve. This old hipster-replacement here is already chanting and doofing the refrain 'Charlie Brash (doof, doof, doof)/Where's your cash? (doof, doof, doof).'

Hussey's gifts

Here's a churchman who has left the world a better place: the remarkable, or at least remarkably persuasive, Walter Hussey (1909-85). I was going to put 'the good dean', but then I read Frances Spalding in her book on the Pipers describing him as 'a conflicted person...unable to conceal his passion for boys' (not so much of a problem only if, like Britten, he never acted on it, and Spalding's turn of phrase suggests he did).

The almost-finished portrait by Graham Sutherland below hangs in Chichester's Pallant House Gallery, which we're returning to visit when it's open; Hussey chose Pallant House as the recipient of his own collection and it now has one of the best selections of British 20th century art in the country as well as a series of enticing exhibitions.

Anyway, as vicar of St Matthew's Northampton, his home town, Hussey helped to commission wonders I'd like to go and see there, chiefly a Madonna and Child by Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland's striking Crucifixion. These gave the cue for the art of the new Coventry Cathedral. The others we can hear or read at will - Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb was composed for the church's 50th anniversary, and there was other music from Finzi, Tippett. Malcom Arnold, Rubbra and Lennox Berkeley.

Auden (pictured below in 1939, some years before the commission in question)  wrote Hussey a rather tart prose Litany followed by an Anthem for St Matthew's Day - hard to find, though I've just come across excerpts in an Australian newspaper. They include an amusing-serious prayer for 'all who, like our patron saint, the Blessed Apostle and Evangelist Matthew, occupy positions of petty and unpopular authority, through whose persons we suffer the impersonal discipline of the state...deliver us, as private citizens, from confusing the office with the man...and from forgetting that it is our impatience and indolence, our own injustice, that creates the state to be a punishment and a remedy for sin'.

I'm getting carried away by Auden's drollness, but let me just also include the following: 'deliver us, we pray thee, in our pleasure and in our pain, in our hour of elation and our hour of wan hope, from insolence and envy, from pride in our virtue, from fear of public opinion, from the craving to be amusing at all costs, and from the temptation to pray, if we pray at all: "I thank Thee, Lord, that I am an interesting sinner and not as this Phrarisee" '.

Our Easter weekend visit to Themy and Eben in the Cathedral Close was the chance to find out how much we owe to Hussey, the great yet cosy building's dean from 1955 to 1977: chiefly the John Piper altarpiece, Sutherland painting and Chagall window. Arriving there as a known advocate of the new, Hussey had to tread more carefully at first with the antique sensibilities of the clergy.  The first task was to reinstate the Arundel Screen we so admired on Easter Saturday. Work on the chapel of St Mary Magdalen followed, showcasing Noli me tangere, a work by Sutherland more miniature by far than the Northampton Crucifixion or the vast Coventry tapestry.

Introduced to John Piper by Spence and Moore, Hussey discussed with him what might be done with the high altar reredos now that the 16th century Sherburne Screen was revealed. Piper didn't much care for Hussey's proposal of gleaming enamels, suggesting instead a tapestry which he wanted to avoid approaching in 'too painterly a way' like Sutherland's in Coventry and settling on shapes rather than figures. Woven by Pinton Frères near Aubusson, the finished work has six panels. Central are symbols of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, while on either side are those of the four Evangelists matched to the four elements.

What a marvellous designer Piper would have made for Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage, on the evidence of his earth, air, fire and water. The latter two are to the right of the Tau cross, matched to Luke's winged ox and John's winged eagle (seen in the detail up top) while to the left earth joins Matthew's winged man and air Mark's winged lion (below)

Of course the installation in 1966 caused a hubbub. A canon pointedly attended the opening evensong in dark glasses. But there were plenty of others who loved it, like the Chichester resident who wrote, as quoted in Spalding's book, that she 'felt here was something glowing and alive and symbolic of what the church must and should be in the present age. It took away the feeling that Christianity is old and crumbling like the cathedral'.

I love its vibrancy, and never more than at the Easter Vigil when the lights finally went up and the altarpiece's magic was glimpsed through the Arundel Screen. J thinks it's a bit of its time, but agrees that high quality art works don't often join the old in churches and cathedrals (I think of the amateurish tapestries in Durham). Hussey also had commissioned for Chichester a window by Chagall

which is based on the celebration of the final psalm, 150: 'Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord'.

It's encouraged us to make an expedition in due course to Tudeley Church near Tonbridge, which has no less than 12 Chagall windows designed and executed over a period of 15 years.

Curiously, nothing can seem more modern in Chichester Cathedral than the two Romanesque panels in Caen limestone (second quarter of the 12th century, it's now believed) depicting Christ arriving in Bethany and the subsequent Raising of Lazarus. Those expressive heads seem both old and new. Sadly they're now behind glass, and hard to see, but we illuminated them with torchlight, which may give the faces a rather unwonted look. Thus Christ

as well as Martha and Mary.

But I digress. One final extraordinary commission, thanks to Hussey's far-sightedness, was Bernstein's Chichester Psalms. Humphrey Burton's magnificent biography of 'Lenny' quotes a letter Hussey wrote to him in which he notes,  'I think many of us would be very delighted  if there was a hint of "West Side Story" about the music'. More than a hint emerged: Burton also tells us that the 'Why do the heathens' sequence, cutting percussively into the lyric treble/countertenor solo of the middle movement, was reworked from a discarded chorus in the musical's Prologue.

There was some debate about Bernstein's slightly tricksy wish for the actual premiere to take place in New York first; Hussey soon graciously deferred. But how remarkable that soon after, in July 1965, an Anglican cathedral played host to the Psalms as sung in Hebrew. That makes them, along with all the metrical changes apparent even in the opening,

devilishly difficult as well as liberating to sing, as I know from performing them with the Renaissance Singers, organ and percussion, in Edinburgh during my student days.

Later I heard Bernstein not long before his death conduct the Chichester Psalms with the London Symphony Orchestra and then-treble Aled Jones; by that time the master was taking them a bit too slow and reverently. I met him not long afterwards, courtesy of Ted Greenfield who took me along to the Candide recording sessions in December 1989, Bernstein's last. He grabbed me by the hand, and strode towards the gents with me still locked in his grasp, fortunately soon released. But what a man! Like half the cast, he was struggling with a nasty strain of influenza that was doing the rounds and even attacked Buckingham Palace, leading Bernstein to call it 'the royal flu'. He died the following October.

Here he is, anyway, conducting the three movements of the Chichester Psalms. The coming-together nature of the piece is further emphasised in 1977 by the Berlin location, the young Austrians in the choir alongside the Vienna Boys' Choir soloist and the collaboration of Bernstein's beloved Israel Philharmonic.

Bach cantata for the week is 'Es ist euch gut, dass ich hingehe', BWV 108, for the fourth (Cantate) Sunday after Easter. Composed for Leipzig in 1725, so for performance exactly a week later than the pick of last week's three cantatas ' Ihr werdet weinen und heulen', it boasts another splendid chorus, this time at its very core: a fugue in which the theme is very briskly snatched up, that opening idea varied with an elegantly rhythmed turn or gruppetto on 'zukünftig' (the future) in the third set of 'runs'. The text of the bass's opening aria, with a lightness-of-being oboe d'amore stealing the show, is taken from Christ's so-called 'Farewell Discourse' in John 16. Strictly speaking, the 'true vine' speech belongs to the previous chapter, but it's all I need as excuse for its fascinating realisation in a 16th century eastern orthodox manuscript.

Third of the vocal solos, with a second solo instrument in the shape of a violin obbligato, is the alto's 'Was mein Herz von dir begehrt'. There are interesting expressive shadings on 'Herz' and later, in the setting of 'überschutte' ('shower') and repeated notes on 'schaue' (regard). These new sentiments having run their course, there's no vocal repeat of the first section, and the short cantata is quickly tied up with the affirmative final chorale. Once again Suzuki with Gilchrist and Blaze - bass Dominic Wörner much less good, salvaged by the Japanese oboe d'amoreist - delivered the goods; on YouTube Harnoncourt is the only familiar choice.

The photos of the Piper altarpiece, the detail of the Chagall window and the Romanesque faces are mine. Sutherland portrait courtesy of the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester; the rest (I think) Wikidomain.

Back among the palms

Signing in here with Easter greetings, to catch up with last Sunday's Bach cantata - the first for weeks, of course, after the Lenten near-silence - and to explain briefly where I've been: namely in Sicily, four glorious days in Palermo, a city of whose riches I had little inkling, and three roving in the Madonie mountains. Hard to say which was more breathtaking, the civic art or the country sweep.

What's for sure is that the Normans brought to Palermo an Arabic-infused art that no other Italian city can boast. In the Cappella Palatina of the original castle, in the competitive monumentalism of Monreale and in the more intimate beauties of the Martorana church back in the city are mosaics to rival, in my view to surpass, Ravenna. Oddly there are no crucifixion scenes in the stunning chapel, but of many detailed 'pictures' Christ's entry into Jerusalem above stands out. Below Jesus, Peter and the white ass are four children throwing fronds and laying their own clothes before him. The disciples follow behind, while three bearded priests stand at the gate with townspeople of Jerusalem.

We may not be there in Palermo for the wild celebrations of Easter - our last glimpse of Holy Week was trailing behind black-hooded crossbearers and a funereal band on our way to the airport - but we did catch Palm Sunday, which everywhere in Italy other than the Vatican is a matter of olive branches rather than palms.

This processional took place in the former convent adjoining Santa Maria degli Angeli (otherwise La Gancia). The choir processed chanting 'Hosanna, figlio di David, Hosanna, redentor' to the accompaniment of tambourines. Branches raised aloft

were then sprinkled from the priest's thurible. Most of the folk seemed more concerned to get this done and be off to the bosom of the family rather than to stay for the service, which was prefaced with a processional to the peal of bells. This 23-second film is no masterpiece, but hopefully it captures a sliver of atmosphere.

We were off too, touristically eager to catch the next processional in my favourite church of the Kalsa district where we were staying, the Norman Magiana - chiefly because only the cloisters and chapel had been accessible on our first visit, and now the doors of the wonderful church were open for a service too. Again, the majority of celebrants are heading away following the little ritual.

More on all this over the weeks to come (prepare yourself for Sicilimania). The Bach cantata for the day I chose (catching up, not too appropriately, on Good Friday) was 'Himmelskönig, sei wilkommen', BWV 182, written in 1714 when Palm Sunday coincided with the Feast of the Annunciation. The lovely sound of the recorder duets with solo violin against pizzicati as the opening Sinfonia begins; it's a wonderful moment when the collective strings swell their way into the picture.

Palm Sunday celebration (Giotto's peerless Padua fresco depiction above) continues in the vivacious crowd welcome and the bass's robust if unremarkable aria. Soulful preparation for the suffering to come follows in the next pair of solos: the alto's at the heart of it all, with the solo recorder's enfolding descents even more remarkable than the vocal line, and the tenor's determination to follow the stumbling Christ on his Calvary route caught in a continuo maze that several times loses its orientation.

Then it's back to choral celebration with a fantasia on a chorale and an almost ecstatic final dance. Gardiner (my listening choice, as often): 'it needs the poise of a trapeze artist with the agility of a madrigalian gymnast - and is altogether captivating'. Here's Harnoncourt's recording.

Good Friday was our first day back, and much as I'd have loved a day at home before gadding off again, the soloists and ensemble of a St John Passion at the Barbican proved too strong a lure. Almost too moved to write coherently after it, I struggled to put the experience into words here for The Arts Desk. I'm sending off my tenner to support the recording they still need to raise £5,000 for: such a line-up only happens once in a blue moon. Here, finally, is Lotto's sumptuous take on the Crucifixion, still a church altarpiece in a very out-of-the-way and extremely friendly village of the Marche, Monte San Giusto, which we caught on one of our May walking trips in the Sibillini.

Liza and the cockroaches

What on earth could they have in common? Only one thing, according to Minnelli's co-performer the singer/pianist Michael Feinstein: when the world ends, they'll both still be here. It's one of a  hundred pithy comments in one of the best interviews with any artist I've read, written by Marcelle Bernstein for, of all things, Saga Magazine.

There are two special reasons to welcome the interview. One is that it's very close in time to the nearly-67-year-old's unforgettable appearance in the Southbank's The Rest is Noise festival on Saturday, an occasion which I'd viewed with some apprehension but which turned out to be one of the great showbiz testaments to an indomitable spirit (the only other evening I can remember quite like it was Nina Simone's appearance in the same hall back in 1999). I count myself very lucky to have got in via The Arts Desk, for which I duly raved; I wouldn't have risked £40-£100 on a ticket*, though as it turned out the event would have been worth every penny.

The other reason is that the interview contradicts all the press baloney about a tragic life. It's been a tough one at times, no doubt, but the only real sadness I can see here is of an artist who, like her mother, is loved by everybody she touches but not, as she deserves, by one single person. But that's showbiz: the devouring, slightly vampiric fans demand all, and boy, do they get it. Minnelli's torch song should surely be Sondheim's ' I'm Still Here'. He wrote new lyrics specially for Barbra; why not do the same for Liza? For the sake of the truth, I have to say she no longer looks like she does in the above photos, but it was amazing to see the years fall away as Friday night's show hit ever new highs.

What I had to pinch myself most about was that I was hearing that very same Americanized Sally Bowles whose screen renditions of 'Life is a Cabaret' and 'Maybe This Time' had become so legendary singing those very same songs, with different inflections but just as much meaning and vitality, possibly more. 'Liza's at the Palace', filmed a couple of years ago, is as close to our night as I think film will provide, though her delivery of the key song was not quite the same. I thought I'd put up the original film version

and the Palace's 'Life is...' revisited. Stick with it because the Elsie sequence is both much more poignant than the original and shot through with an earthier humour.

If you got to the end of that, you'll understand why I've ordered up the DVD.

Bob Fosse's film of Cabaret came out when I was 10 years old. There was no possibility of seeing it then, but I remember walking past the big cinema in Sutton wondering why it was X certificate and why a man as well as a woman in the photos on the wall was wearing so much make-up. Later it coincided with a golden time in the summer term of my first year at Edinburgh University when we all revelled in a fortnight of working on a production of the stage musical, so different from the film.

I've written about this in the Bedlam Theatre 30th birthday tribute way back, but I can't resist a recropped shot of our dear Mary New (now Amorosino and living in Washington with husband Roberto and two of their three wonderful children - Alexandra, the eldest, has followed her ma to Edinburgh University) as Sally Bowles.

If truth be told, she was of course much closer to Kander and Ebb's (and of course Isherwood's) Sally, this vicar's daughter who sidled up one evening to the Rev (by then Canon) Tom New, sitting at one of the beer barrels, with the 'Don't Tell Mama' song-lines, 'you can tell my papa, that's alright, 'cos he comes in here every night'. Well, those of us who were in it will never get the nostalgia for such a time out of our systems. But by any standards the movie is a classic, probably the musical I'd choose in a list of top ten films. Evviva Liza!

It was quite a weekend of experiencing divas in spheres other than the operatic: Liza on Friday, 'anarchist cabaret performer' Meow Meow as Jenny in The Threepenny Opera on Saturday - not a patch on Allison Bell's Polly, though she looked extraordinary - and singer-songwriter Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond  as Anna in The Seven Deadly Sins on Sunday. This last concert had an only-connect programme which also included necessary - though dreary, if mercifully short - dodecaphonic Schoenberg and wonderful Hindemith: hardly box-office nectar, you'd have thought, and yet the audience was packed with young people. Clearly The Rest is Noise festival on the Southbank must be marketing itself well.

Diva and devotion combine in the only Bach cantata of this Lenten season. For Oculi Sunday,  we have only one specimen, for alto and strings without so much as a concluding chorale, 'Widerstehe doch der Sunde', BWV 54. The soloist's low notes, like the F sharp to which 'übertünchtes Grab' ('whitened sepulchre') descends in the recit, sound much more butch coming from a real contralto rather than a countertenor.

 
Besides, Nathalie Stutzmann is another of those truly great artists who stand out in any crowd of soloists. We haven't seen nearly enough of her in the UK recently.  The recorded performance I heard, with John Eliot Gardiner's Bach Pilgrimage team in one of England's most beautiful churches, Norfolk's Walpole St Peter (reverenced on the blog via two visits, briefly here and more extensively here), reminded me that I ought to go out of my way to see her when the opportunity arises.

'Eyes' Sunday gets its name from the first word of the psalm introit for the day, oculi (Vulgate Psalm 24 verse 15: 'mine eyes are ever towards the Lord'). The New Testament reading from St Luke deals with Christ's words on the casting out of devils. Holbein's woodcut was the only image I could find on the subject.

Georg Lehms' text for this Weimar cantata is one of Bach's crappiest: what's this about being felled by a curse for violating God's majesty? How very Old Testicle. Never mind: there's originality as usual in Bach's five-part string writing (divided violas). I don't, unlike Gardiner, hear dissonance in the opening chord (dominant seventh over tonic pedal), only a novel suspension which means postponing E flat major until the eighth bar. The chord pulsing seems to me calm and confident rather than evangelical; though there's darkness and dislocation in the middle verses' veering to the minor.

Stutzmann makes more of recitative than any of the other singers I've encountered in my own Bach cantatas pilgrimage so far; and in the final aria she echoes the strings' chromatic fugue subject so nobly. We'll have to make do on YouTube with a jaunty Andreas Scholl (low notes not as full as Stutzmann's, of course) and Herreweghe's Collegium Vocale, but that's not a bad second best.

*Nothing for an event like this. To indulge his daughters' love of total crap, one father forked out £400 for three tickets to see Justin Bieber the other night. They were rewarded by the cute but anodyne star's turning up two hours late, way past most of his audience's bedtime.

Auguries of Spring

Deep in the late winter freeze, it's hard to believe that last Friday I and friend Cal were sitting outside warmed  by the sun at the Chelsea Physic Garden, where in snowdrop week the excellent, if chaotically run, Tangerine Dream cafe serves up some of the best cakes in London. An hour later, the sun vanished for the weekend.

The lure for galanthophiles is the pretext for the 'psychic garden' opening to the public for a week in February - though of course members can come and go as they please. I hadn't renewed my subscription owing to high dudgeon at what they'd done to the south-eastern corner of the garden: once a glade with winding paths in marked contrast to the formal, educational beds elsewhere, and now a bleak suburban patio to show off medicinal plants. Still, the trees remain and the magnolias are in bud.

As for the snowdrops, there were more clumps in Brompton Cemetery as I cycled through on my way

but you do get a chance at the CPG to see their subtle differences up close in the 'theatre' by the statue of Sir Hans Sloane. This is galanthus plicatus 'Dionysus'

and this 'Trym'.

There's also one unpoetically called 'Grumpy' because it's down at the mouth. On the humorous front, I was taken in at first by this cactus in the little greenhouse abutting the house, though a little suspicious of anything of the sort flourishing in Wales and the Shetland Islands.

Cal laughingly put me right and touch confirmed this was indeed Notacactus.

Our lovely friend Pia Östlund, brilliant graphic designer for the CPG and elsewhere, was offering an all-day workshop on 'the lost art of nature printing'. Simple: you take your leaf or flower, ink it up with a roller between a folded piece of baking paper and then press in on to a folded card so that you get both sides of the leaf/flower in symmetry.

The subtlety of the leaf design comes through in all its glory, and of course it can be very different on each side. Geranium leaves work very well, I thought. Sadly I've lost both my specimens; either I threw them out with the bag in which Pia returned a Bergman DVD with a tiny snowdrop, or they're buried somewhere in this room. But I think it would be a good thing to take up for greeting cards at home. 

Pia was inspired by Victorian books which had made use of nature printing, sometimes via more complicated techniques. Here's Pteridium aquilinum in Thomas Moore's 1857 tome on tree ferns, nature-printed by Henry Bradbury.

Back to the time of year. Pancakes were consumed last night, and now Lent begins - as I'm very well aware with my Sunday Bach cantata ritual coming to a temporary halt until Easter*. Last Sunday was Estomihi or Quinquagesima. Its New Testament reading from Luke 18 verses 31-43 finds Christ not only healing the persistent blind beggar in Jericho - represented here by Duccio and an exquisite Rembrandt drawing - but also making the first announcement of his impending passion to the disciples. 

'Herr Jesu Christ, wahr' Mensch und Gott', BWV 127 followed directly on the heels of the earth-shaker I chose last week in the Leipzig 1725 calendar. Recorders (I like flauti dolci) soften the floridity around the opening chorale setting, very sensitive to 'endlich starbst' and 'bittre Leidung'. The tenor's fluid recit sets the scene for a total charmer - and a big soprano solo at last (on the Suzuki recording I heard, the estimable Carolyn Sampson). The vocal line of  'Die Seele ruht in Jesu Händen' is complemented by a glorious oboe obbligato and supported by staccato chords from the recorders and pizzicato continuo. In a wonderful moment, the word 'Sterbeglocken' ('bells of death') brings in pizz. strings.

More typical contrast in Bach follows: the bass solo is another of those half-recits which break into arioso. It's the Last Judgment, so sound the trumpet, but only in sporadic animated bursts. It tumbles to earth and signals destruction, but Christ offers comfort. So, of course, does the closing chorale which ends with a sleep of sweet dreams. Here's Herreweghe on YouTube.

*not because I'm observing Lent by not listening to/playing music, but because Leipzig did.

Shakuhachi dreaming

Preparing the students on my City Lit BBC Symphony course for the orchestra's Total Immersion day of Japanese music, who better to ask back than flautist and shakuhachi player Richard Stagg? Some of us last saw him in 2008 when the course was still running at Morley College, and he was about to leave the BBCSO for an independent existence.

From the above, you'll guess if you don't already know that the shakuhachi is not a type of mushroom (thanks, Fiona M) but the Japanese bamboo flute with a haunting sound all its own; the name actually means '1 foot 8' in Japanese imperial measurement. So Richard brought along not only a couple of shakuhachis - many of which he now makes himself from a special kind of bamboo that grows in the mountains outside the major cities - but also specimens of 2 ft 2 and 2 ft 4, equating to our alto flute.

But then I think even the basic instrument sounds rather alto-fluty in its hollow, whispering lower register. Watching Richard in action was fascinating: as there are only five holes, and the shakuhachi has a range of two octaves, pitch and chromatics, including quarter-tones, can be changed by the angle of the head - up or down, while more discreet side to side gives the degree of vibrato. Embouchure can change pitch and tone, and it's a devil to master the end-blown technique (Richard says his fledgling pupils have good days and bad, when barely a sound will come out). The bore has to be specially shaped in the making or the scale won't function.

The repertoire dates back to the monks of the 9th century, especially the mendicants with their begging bowls (one tune is called '1,2,3, return the bowl'), but having been passed down by oral tradition was only notated between the 17th and 19th centuries. Kurosawa Kinko is the big name among collectors. Most of the pieces Richard played were extremely free, with vivid trills and slide, though 'Kumoi Jishi', the 'Heavenly Lion Dance', was loosely in 6/8. 'Rokudan' comprises the six steps of the title, each 27 bars long; it cropped up again in the Okeanos concert yesterday. The scales can vary, but the shakuhachi has to adapt itself to the Japanese pentatonic scale favoured by stringed instruments and singers. Here's a track played by the man Richard says is the great shakuhachi master, Kifu Mitsuhashi, whom I had to miss on Saturday evening.

The shakuhachi sounds wonderful alone, but the Yamato Ensemble with which Richard plays also includes the thirteen-stringed koto, something like a zither, which comes in different sizes,

and the three-stringed shamisen played with a plectrum.

Both players would traditionally sing along and in the first track on the disc which I needed no encouragement to buy at the end of the session, I was struck by how the shakuhachi, weaving around the voice as well as joining it, behaves like the obbligato instrument in a Bach cantata (only connect below). Here's a track from another of the Yamato Ensemble's CDs.

As I was down to cover the opening night of the English National Opera Traviata for The Arts Desk yesterday, I only managed to get to the late afternoon event in the 'Total Immersion' day. Presentation was rather lugubrious at first: the rather reserved (British) members of the extraordinary group Okeanos included two rather introverted seeming balding guys with specs, and there were no introductions to the traditional sequence. Then they played to their strengths, the creation of contemporary repertoire. Four of Dai Fujikura's Okeanos pieces, although they were more about sound than substance, brought out the best in the strange meetings, dominated by the hainting sound of the shō, best described as a 'free reed instrument' made up of seventeen pipes - a kind of portable organ.

Fujikura's Cutting Sky, a dialogue between plucked viola and koto, riveted in the hands of Bridget Carey  and Melissa Holding, who later gave a dazzling cadenza. That was in a haunting stretch of improvisation drawing in our friends Anna Smith and Mike Atkinson from the BBCSO and students from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (Maaike van der Linde astounding on bass flute). It was a very crepuscular hour and twenty minutes among the serious-minded in the Barbican Hall, but I treasured it all the more when thrown into the hurly-burly of elbowing first nighters at Traviata later. Anyway, if you want an ideal introduction to old and new Japanese music I can't recommend too strongly this disc with ideal annotations by Makoto Hasegawa and Richard. Not difficult to guess that he's the second player from the right.

Back on terra firma, I decided to build on last week's mistake and listen to two Bach cantatas today: one to cover the fourth Sunday after Epiphany, for who knows when that will happen again (I bet someone does, but please don't bother to let me know), and one for Sexagesima. The first, 'Jesus schläft, was soll ich hoffen?', BWV 14, was written for Leipzig in 1724; Bach was not to compose another Sexagesima offering for a decade. I agree, again, with John Eliot Gardiner's notes for his Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, the best possible guide: this is as operatic a response to Jesus's calming of a Galilee storm (the New testament reading for the day) as it would possible to imagine. Illustration wise, we could have more Backhuizen after Tuesday, but let's turn to Delacroix.

The opening is a plaintive lament for alto with lacerating minor-second keenings from the strings and recorders poised rather gently above. Quite a challenge for the soloist, this, twice asked to hold a low B flat for ten slow beats as he or she sees 'with ashen countenance death's abyss gaping wide'. Countertenor William Towers on the surely unsurpassable Gardiner recording manages it to perfection. A dissonant tenor recitative sustains the mood of humanity lost without Christ's guidance; then the storm breaks in rushing violin waves, freeze-framing on the tenor survivor.

The bass takes on the role of the reassuring Christ, almost placid in an arioso before more surges (strings in octaves) meet his greater authority in a number bringing back the beloved oboes d'amore. From the quiescent end to the closing chorale all is calm assurance. The elemental music, though, outdoes even the buffets of the Septuagesima spectacular I covered on Tuesday. Let's have Sigiswald Kuijken's La Petite Bande on YouTube for a change.

'Erhalt uns, Herr, bei deinem Wort', BWV 126, for Sexagesima Sunday 1725, has a militant hymn text kicked off by Luther who asks the Lord to 'deflect the murderous intent of Popes and Turks' - no wonder when I looked up this cantata on YouTube, the entries were led by Evangelical films. The malign elements are, I suppose, related to the bad seeds in this Sunday's Parable of the Sower, seen below left in Brueghel the Elder's great landscape.

The chorale text runs through the cantata, as in Tuesday's choice, heard as before in the sopranos in the trumpet-capped opening chorus and punctuating an original recitative-chorale in which alto and tenor take it in turns to comment on Luther's lines, which they both sing. Both the tenor and bass arias have surprising elaborations in their middle sequences (the tenor's on 'erfreuen' and 'zerstreuen', the bass's on 'verschlingen', to make the battle against the adversaries all the more emphatic). The inspiration I've been singing round the house is the bass's number, with the continuo rushing down the scale before dropping an octave and trying, Sisyphus-like, to clamber up again - totally appropriate illustration of 'bombastic pride' falling to earth to be swallowed up by the abyss. Curious, too, the irregular line-setting of the final chorale with its elaborate Amen. Here's Harnoncourt with some quality voices in tow.

Next week I promise a few digressions from purely musical themes. It's got a bit inward-looking, I know, and some folk don't like that. But the kind of blog I prefer is where one writes as one wants, not what one thinks an audience wants to hear.