Norfolk Churches Walk 2023: Norwich preludial

The others seem more surprised at me than I myself, on Saturday six plus weeks after my big op: in heat that peaked at 32 degrees, we covered the churches of Norwich central north on Saturday, and collected 24 including the Cathedral. Which I know well, but never more intimately than on Friday afternoon, when our lovely hosts Kate and Fairless (pictured above in the cloisters) accompanied us to a 'festal' Evensong. Before I go further, because you might just flick down the pictures, let me tell you here that for a change, I'm raising money for Maggie's this time, because of the support they've given me over the past year. 2022, Loddon to Surlingham, was for the Norfolk Churches Trust as usual, but I'm taking a little holiday from asking friends for the same old cause, excellent though it is. You can give as little or as much as you like to Maggie's - UPDATE: Gift Aid gets them far more if you go to 'donate' on the main website here -  via bank transfer using these details

Maggie's Centres

Bank: Bank of Scotland

Branch: 38 St Andrews Square, Edinburgh, EH2 2YR

Account: 06049705

Sort Code: 80-11-00

And add XLDN so that it goes to the West London centre I love so much. Drop me an email so I can keep track of totalling.

Norwich Cathedral, of course, I know well. The glorious edifice's added spire is visible from the garden of K and F, but more of the building is clearer a little further along the road. Friday was hazy; we were luckier with the blue skies on the day of the walk.

Then - and this is one of the two most atmospheric approaches, the other being through the Water Gate at Pull's Ferry a bit further along the Wensum, a much better way of getting in to town from the station than the rather dreary road that leads directly upwards and bends round - we crossed the medieval Bishop Bridge into Bishopsgate . We passed the Great Hospital, where the religious part of St Helen's would be our starting-point next morning, and round the East End, past the grave of Edith Cavell, 

and into the cloisters, where I wanted to be reacquainted with the handsomest of Green Men.

The cloisters were begun in 1297 with the wing featured up top and including this particular Green Man, and finished c. 1430 with the north wing. pictured below; the Black Death interrupted the stonemasons' work.

The special beauty of the interior proper is its unbroken beauty from east to west, even if that has two different periods matched throughout: the massive Norman outline, inaugurated by Herbert de Losinga in 1096, at the lower levels, with several patterned pillars the equal of those in the nave of Durham Cathedral, while the vaults of nave and chancel date from the late 15th and early 16th centuries, after the wooden roof burned. These are very much its glory, though the bosses here need a good zoom lens or binoculars to see in detail.

We made straight for the back row of choir stalls shortly before 5.30 evensong began, and the sets are among the finest in England (as I hadn't previously realised). Obviously I didn't snap during the service, but went back to capture something of the carved bench ends on both south and north sides. One day I'll have time to tip up the seats to see all the misericords, but one of the most inventive was showing, so that will have to do for now.

The choir had just begun the new year, and there were quite a few unsurpliced novices among the trebles, looking a bit dazed, as well they might be in their first week. The music was ambitious: Sumsion's Responses; James MacMillan's Short Service, simple with a bit of signature token Celtic twiddle thrown in for the trebles at 'He hath filled the hungry with good things', and an extended 'Amen' in the second Gloria; Britten's vivid treatment of the Hymn to the Virgin, composed while he was a pupil at not-so-far-away Gresham's School. This being The Day of the BVM (as well, incidentally, as the anniversary of the Queen's death and de facto Charles's accession, plus our friend Fr Andrew Hammond's 60th birthday - we celebrated it last night at the Garrick Club), we all processed to the Bauchon Chapel for a blessing and some fine Tudor polyphony in the form of Parsons' Ave Maria. 

Afterwards we were allowed to linger (sometimes the officials usher you out straight away). A cat seemed perfectly at home in the chancel

and this was a good way to see the Norman-Tudor achievement throughout. As Peter Sager writes in his magnificent East Anglia, 'nowhere else in England has the Norman outline been so perfectly maintained, and rarely is there such an harmonious link with the Gothic. On the Norman crossing tower

is a Gothic spire;

above the Norman nave is a Gothic vault - different architectural styles inspired by the same spirit.

'The Late Gothic fans of the vault spread out like palm leaves from the Norman columns. Here too timber was replaced by stone [the timber spire was destroyed by a hurrican in 1362]; the vaults of the nave in the middle of the 15th century, the choir c.1480

the transepts afer 1509'. The building was virtually empty, but awaiting the arrival of Norwich School pupils and their parents for a prizegiving ceremony.

There was pleasant evening time to kill before we went to celebrate Fairless's 70th birthday at Bishop's Dining Room - simple fare, but every aspect of the experience good - so we walked down to the Adam and Eve, 'probably Norwich's oldest pub', which would be perfect and rural if it weren't for the city car park opposite.

And it has to be better in every way than the disastrously named Lollards [sic] Pit over Bishop Bridge (1342, nearly demolished in the 1920s, can you believe), which seems to glory in the burning of heretics. In the 16th and 17th centuries the unfortunates were incinerated in a chalk pit on this side of the Wensum.

We figuratively roasted on our walk the next day, but amen to the cool of each and every church which welcomed us. I'll write it all up when I have more time.

Magdalen in March

If we’re talking about archetypal English afternoons, then I can think of nothing much more perfect than lunch in an Oxford college, a walk around the grounds in warm spring sunshine, and choral evensong in the college chapel. To paraphrase unpoetically one of Oxford’s wisest graduates, gentle reader, do not care to know/Where Russia draws his* eastern bow,/What violence is done,/Nor ask what doubtful act allows/Our freedom in this English town,/Our dining in the sun.

Last Wednesday’s freedom came courtesy of Opus Arte promoting Magdalen College Choir, starting with a CD of Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu nostri. So far I’ve only dipped, but the work is a very quirky gem, celebratory or lamentatory according to what image or incident the limb of each motet conjures up. If I’m to be honest, the evensong was a mixed blessing. I like the bright, open sound the choir makes under Daniel Hyde, very much in the James O’Donnell tradition of more robust, continental style as opposed to the rather bloodless tones of our own cathedral tradition. 

I’d moaned to Philippa Howard, our cicerona, that I much prefer singing Byrd to listening to his music, and had hoped for something Victorian and vulgar in the service, but I’d forgotten what a masterpiece his Second Service is – or rather, the ideas came back as fresh as the day we first sang them on an All Saint’s Banstead cathedral course back in the 1970s. Yet in the anthem, Quomodo cantabimus (which we never performed), I had the curious sensation that the choir was singing ever so slightly sharp throughout – a much better fault than singing flat, indicative of zeal rather than torpor, but disconcerting all the same.

The rest was unalloyed pleasure. Though arriving in Oxford on a late train, I couldn’t resist speeding on foot along a favourite route from the station to Magdalen and was just in time for lunch at the Lodgings of the President, Professor David Clary. This in itself was a privilege – thought the building is nearly all Victorian, it has treasures such as the richly detailed Flemish tapestry received by one of the early Presidents for his part in arranging the match between the ill-fated Arthur, brother of the future Henry VIII, and Catherine of Aragon; both were only 15 at the time of their wedding in St Paul's. The Cathedral claims that this detail, reproduced courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Magdalen College, represents the royal couple, though our Master's wife, who kindly gave us a tour, thought that was highly speculative.

Guests at table included former Magdalenians - if that's what they're called - John Mark Ainsley, with whom I was delighted to join in a paean to Richard Jones – JMA had just been singing in the stupendous ENO Rodelinda – and Robin Blaze, who sang from the same hymnbook on the glories of Göttingen.

I took myself off for a solitary look at the magical late 15th century cloister/quad, with its figures reproduced in the drawing of the White Witch’s stone statuary for Magdalen man C S Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - last seen with the wisteria in bloom, but against greyish skies - and then headed across the lawn towards Holdsworth's virtually unadorned New Building of 1733

and in front of it the plane tree planted in 1802 to commemorate the Peace of Amiens (this and other much more curious facts to be found in Peter Sager's Oxford & Cambridge: An Uncommon History, which I'm reading from cover to cover, having loved his outsider's take on East Anglia).

The college’s eccentric possession of a deer herd was much in evidence, horns being locked across the pastures. We stood, watched, chatted, then went in to evensong via the ever-impressive pre-chapel, which has all the major treasures - the misericords which start with a man's head peering between a lady's thighs, Piper's animals-report-the-nativity charmer stained glass and the sepia grisaille west window of the Last Judgment, designed by a London goldsmith in 1632, removed before the Second World War and not replaced until 1996, a project funded by two Californian former students. Looking back on my last Magdalen entry, I see I've got almost the same picture, but never mind.

JMA told me the chapel resonates – the G spot, as it were – to B major, for which Francis Jackson catered in the final ‘Amen’ of his canticles. 

After the service I wove my way along the seclusion of New College Lane, skirting Magdalen and New until the back of All Souls came into view with Hawksmoor’s Gothic/Baroque twin towers in silhouette

then shining in the late afternoon sun from west of the Radcliffe Camera.

And the cherry blossom was in full glory in front of St Mary’s on the High Street.

So back to London by 7pm to head for the Marylebone Hotel and talk to heavenly Anne Schwanewilms on Strauss, the role of whose Marschallin she now truly owns. We had a full 95 minutes’ conversation, during which she left me in no doubt that she’s the funniest as well as the wisest soprano I think I’ve ever had the pleasure of interviewing. Some of her comic mannerisms even reminded me of Carole Lombard, another beautiful woman with an earthy streak. Photo below by Javier del Real.

A shame the impersonations of a certain conductor weren’t filmed as well as sound-recorded; I wonder how I’ll transcribe them for the Arts Desk Q&A, due to appear just before her Barbican concert appearance with Sarah Connolly, Lucy Crowe and Mark Elder conducting the LSO (Rosenkavalier excerpts only, alas, but don’t miss them). La Schwanewilms was here for another Wigmore recital, which I went to hear the following evening but didn't review simply because most of the programme was the same as the one I'd covered back in December 2011; even so, her spellbinding narrative skills proved hair-raising in Liszt's 'Die Loreley' and achingly sorrowful in Mahler's 'Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen'.

Much on my mind at the time of the interview was Die Frau ohne Schatten, that extraordinarily hard-to-stage fairy tale creation of Strauss and Hofmannsthal. Anne compared the two productions in which she’d appeared as the Empress – central to Christof Loy’s magic-free psychological study at Salzburg, which she bought though some of her friends didn’t, and coping at the Met with sets so tricky that they sent her to hospital on one occasion in the late Herbert Wernicke's resurrected show: that yielded pretty pictures, she said, into which the singers had to fit as best they could. She came a cropper several times on her mirrored glass slope, pictured below, and on one of those occasions had to make a visit to a New York hospital.

Claus Guth’s Royal Opera production, previously seen at La Scala, strikes a miraculous halfway house between psychoanalytic probing and the supernatural. I’ve waxed lyrical about it over on the Arts Desk and hope to go again towards the end of the run. The cast is uniformly excellent, led by Emily Magee’s sympathetic Empress (pictured below with father Keikobad in another of CliveBarda’s excellent photos).

Communicating with the CBSO’s Richard Bratby about it, I thought he hit the nail on the head when he remarked that he’d never realized what a desperately sad opera it is – and that includes the apotheosis, which worked for me here as never before. I even had a dream the same night about the court-room fantasy which is one of its more extraordinary later tableaux.

As it happened, talks with two fascinating women framed the Oxford visit, making for an exceptional 24 hours. On the Tuesday evening Sioned Williams, principal harpist of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and one of the world’s great soloists, came to talk – and did she just – to my City Lit class about the music she’s been commissioning for her 60^th birthday year.

Such wisdom and passion here about the infinite variety of so-called ‘contemporary’ music, above all how you the artist have to find what you like and go with that, and by the same token the composer must know your own special skills and abilities (which of course is how Britten always worked). I was pleased to see Paul Patterson as one of Sioned’s invitees (her very friendly Iranian husband Ali Hosseinian, whose compatriots' music she continues to champion, was there to offer technical assistance, too).

I wish I’d recorded it all – but Sioned, who had been ill and thus wasn’t able to bring her harp this time, will be back in September close to her special anniversary concerts. I’m relieved to say that her home remortgaging to pay for the commissions will now be partly offset by a grant from the Park Lane Group.

*I'm afraid Putin's lies and macho posturing have forfeited the feminine article of Mother Russia, but it was ever thus. The poem, of course, is my favourite, 'A Summer Night' by W H Auden.