YouTube Xmas concert at Greenacres Care Home

Here's my 93 year old ma being wheeled by my cousin Diana and her husband Lee to the conservatory of her care home. Marvellous Greenacres mover and shaker Sarah, who's managed to fill a whole month of special events for the residents, asked if I'd repeat the format I'd used for my previous hour of YouTube clips, rather chaotic in the lounge of mum's Cornflower Wing, but in the bigger room with the bigger telly so people might be more attentive. So I braved it through Storm Darragh, and the trains and buses all obliged. Frankly I was fine with whatever happened, but the crowd stayed and folk I've never heard talk before were very effusive at the end.

I thought it might be worth repeating what I showed here, so you can enjoy your own quality hour of concerts, ballet and opera. How better to start than with the opening of Bach's Christmas Oratorio? I like the old film with Harnoncourt conducting especially because it includes the Tölz Boys' Choir.

You can, of course, enjoy well beyond what I actually played. Next, an absolute winner: the lovely Wallis Giunta singing Brahms' 'Geistliches Wiegenlied' while holding her viola-player's very attentive baby. Wallis brought her own six-month-old, Bonnie, to one of the Zoom classes on Bernstein's A Quiet Place.

Another musician I adore as a person, though I haven't seen her for years, is the personable violinist Dunja Lavrova. I love her transcription of Tchaikovsky's 'Miniature Overture' from The Nutcracker, and her explanation of why she made it.

Then, of course, we had to have Tchaikovsky's original, followed by the glowing 'Decoration of the Christmas tree' and March. You can enjoy the whole ballet score here lovingly conducted by the vivacious Yannick Nézet-Séguin during his time in Rotterdam.

Taking a break before some Nutcracker dancing, I thought it was time for more choral music. First, my absolute favourite among Christmas anthems, the 'Shepherds' Farewell' from Berlioz's L'enfance du Christ, that unforced masterpiece with which I ended this Zoom term's 'Later Berlioz and Beyond' (having moved on to Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Franck, Chabrier and Chausson, I went back to the 1850s for a seasonal finale). At Greenacres, I used the Conlon performance from St-Denis, but it's blocked for reproduction elsewhere, so here's the excerpt from back in the day when Gardiner got on with the Monteverdi forces. You can see the whole thing on YouTube - Herod is none other than the magnificent young bass Will Thomas, whose socking at JEG's hands triggered the disgrace.

A carol from King's, of course - the one I used was from 2020, with lockdown conditions still pertaining up to a point, but the filming of one of the world's great buildings is such a pleasure. Again, there's a blocking of wider use, so I'll show another.

Then the grand Pas de deux from The Nutcracker in the traditional and gaudy but still classy Royal Ballet production with my favourite of the company's ballerinas, Marianela Núñez and Vadim Muntagirov. Heard it played with such panache by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and its new Chief Conductor, Mark Wigglesworth, at Portsmouth Guildhall last Thursday.

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I wanted to show a stretch of Richard Jones's Humperdinck from the Met, but there wasn't time, so for operatic brevity I ended with a nice potpourri from Rimsky-Korsakov's Christmas Eve as directed by Christof Loy in Frankfutt.

Footnote: I originally had the below on the list, would have squeezed in a woman composer, and not just for the sake of it: Augusta Holmès was a revelation of the 'After Berlioz' course for the incredible vigour of her symphony Roland Furieux. The version I used, with the splendid Marie-Nicole Lemieux, has been taken down, so this will do.

Happy viewing - you have potentially many hours there rather than just the one I filled at Greenacres.

Dazzling Bach for a jubilant Christmas Day

There's only one CD you need for the happy morning, and I've just been blown away by it. I blush to say it was sitting in the great pile of to-be-heards, but after Monday's only half-satisfying Bach concert from the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists under Gardiner, I needed to listen to the most blazing of all Magnificats again. This performance, like Gardiner's, uses the original E flat major version with Christmas interpolations, and it goes further - attempting to reconstruct Christmas Day 1723 in Leipzig's Nikolaikirche.

That means the brilliant John Butt and his Dunedin Consort launch exhilaratingly in to Giovanni Gabrieli's Hodie Christus natus est before giving us Bach's Cantata Christen, ätzet diesen Tag - the only one with parts for four of those silvery baroque trumpets - as well as several organ preludes and a thrilling congregational chorale version with organ improvisations in between the lines on Von himmel hoch.

What quickly became clear - in the Magnificat, as soon as the first solo, 'Et exsultavit' - is that Butt likes to use soloists of real character who also sing in the eight- or ten-strong choir; two of Gardiner's to-the-fore sopranos, tenor and one of the basses seem in retrospect to have been all the more inadequate alongside singers here capped by the wonderful Joanne Lunn (pictured above by Andrew Redpath), with her distinctive and carefully applied vibrato just right even for the choruses. She's also the star of the more recent Dunedin/Linn Christmas Oratorio, which I also listened to, all six cantatas in sequence, more or less at a single sitting. Gardiner's Archiv classic is never going to disappear from the shelves, not least because of Anthony Rolfe Johnson and Anne Sofie von Otter, but again there's refreshment from the small choral forces used here.

Besides, quite apart from my ignorance of too many of the cantatas, I blush to say I never knew the Magnificat as well as I should do until Monday. A sheer live hearing of it was miraculous enough to keep any of the passing (solo) disappointments at bay. And on Tuesday I heard the St. Lawrence String Quartet play Haydn's Op. 20 No. 2 in C major for the first time live: it knocked me for six, especially the 'Capriccio' Adagio, much more than John Adams' new String Quartet No. 2. Found a performance almost on the same high level from the Quatuor Mosaïques, so here it is: probably best to listen to the whole of the first movement so that the shock of the second properly registers, though if you've only time for novelty, go to 10'13.

So much great music to hear, so little time to hear it in. Again, I'm reminded of Shostakovich commenting on the Borodin Quartet's championship of the Soviet new 'but have you played all of Haydn's quartets yet?' Have I listened to all the Haydn quartets and all the Bach cantatas yet? Not by a long way, though I have fitful spells of trying to rectify the situation. If only I could play a stringed rather than a wind instrument, and go off and try the quartets out with friends.

In the meantime, here's a very cannily put together film giving the background to the  Christmas 1723 disc. Full marks in that it starts off with one of the most original numbers in the Magnificat, the 'Suscepit Israel' for two sopranos, alto and first trumpet.

Cantatas by the calendar

I guess what triggered the cantata-hunt this time was having to miss out on the Trinity College Choir/OAE St John’s performance of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio on the Saturday before Christmas (I was pledged to a marvellous party instead, though we did get to the classiest of Messiahs in the same mini-festival the following evening). So on the day we turned to John Eliot Gardiner’s recording and I realized it could be parcelled out over six days’ worth of what in effect are discrete cantatas. After three days, that meant cheating slightly by leaping forward prematurely to the Feast of the Circumcision (New Year’s Day, the deed illustrated in Bellini’s lovely painting above), the first Sunday of the year and Epiphany.

Snip-day itself marked a proper start, which I intend to follow each Sunday, or as close to it as schedules allow (it’s a good way of getting to know the church calendar, too). I had three options, and the one most readily to hand was BWV 41, Jesu, nun sei gepreiset, in Masaaki Suzuki’s BIS recording with the Bach Collegium Japan. That entailed going back a decade from the mid-1730s cornucopia of the Christmas Oratorio to the Leipzig chorale cycle of 1725. Maybe there’s nothing as giddying as the weird harmonic progressions at the start of the Oratorio’s Epiphany cantata, but the treasury of obbligato solos is here, too, and one short but telling combined recitative where the bass is dramatically amplified by an urgent chorus on the line ‘Der Satan unter unsre Füße treten’ (‘May Satan be trodden under our feet’).

Unlike the oratorio, there’s no narrating Evangelist, so nothing about the snip ceremony (Signorelli's version above). Instead, this is a straightforward thanksgiving celebration of the new year, beginning with a 16th century hymn melody embroidered by three exultant trumpets and three oboes as well as leaping strings and continuo. Its novelty is an adagio episode when the chorus reflects on having ‘in good peace’ fulfilled the old year. The oboes adorn the soprano aria; to accompany the tenor’s central sentiments Bach asked for a cello piccolo, which Suzuki tells us was played laterally by a first violinist. His version uses a small five-stringed cello. Here’s the complete cantata in the old Harnoncourt recording on YouTube

Our quiet January the First turned out serendipitously well. The New Year’s Day concert from Vienna was a bit of a damp squib, without the esprit of Jansons or even Mehta (quite a pleasant surprise a couple of years ago), and certainly nowhere near the classic Carlos Kleiber or Karajan experiences. I can’t make Franz Welser-Möst out: he’s quite an elegant conductor, but Danube water rather than blood seems to flow in his veins. No comparison, then, with Kleiber's 1989 or 1992 concerts, both of which are absolutely complete on YouTube. I've been listening to the sound recording of the second, and recommend especially the ideal waltz, which as so often comes from Josef rather than Johann I or II: Dorfschwalben aus Österreich, beginning at 14'40.

Yesterday we had ze laughing, Austrian style, in the one 'comedy' routine of the programme proper – FWM self-consciously dolling out pertinent toy animals and a Valkyrie helmet, inter alia, to the orchestral soloists in the interminable Carnival in Venice variations (weren’t they more fun a couple of years ago?). And the percussionists' lame dialogue in the encore Plappermäulchen Polka, my favourite thanks to the lines we gave it on holiday in Venice with the godson and his little chatterbox sister, felt uncomfortable too. Verdi's Don Carlos ballet frolic put some of the Strausses' tamer stuff into the shade, including a dull Quadrille on mostly banda stuff from Macbeth and Rigoletto amongst others. I learnt one thing – that one of Stravinsky’s two ballerina-moor waltzes in Petrushka comes from Lanner's otherwise dreary Styrian Dances. The women count in the orchestra remains lamentable and inexcusable - two violinists sharing a back desk, harpist and third flute were all I saw (though that's considerably more than in the 1992 concert above).

The day was bright, so we walked from South Ken up to the meeting of the parks, around the Serpentine and via the human zoo of the Winter Wonderland to Marble Arch. J’s long expressed desire to see the latest Bond movie, Skyfall, was thwarted at the Odeon here, but we found it was on at Whiteley’s so continued the walk westwards and arrived just in time. Mendes's accomplished direction was much what I expected, the obligatory opening chase crowned by bikes on the roof of Istanbul's Covered Bazaar, but graced throughout by a Henry IV Part Two feeling of ‘I grow old’, and requiring the ever-dependable Dame Judi to be more than her previously cool M. The consummate performance in a good line up, though, surely comes from Javier Bardem, funny and hugely charismatic, out- (but not over-)acting our muscular but battered hero.