Zooming Mahler ii: greater darkness, brighter light

On 12 October, I embark on the second batch of ten classes in my Mahler Zoom course, beginning with the grim marches of the Sixth Symphony, ending in the peaceful resolution of the at-one-with-the-world heartleap in Deryck Cooke's performing version of the Tenth Symphony (and completed it must be). 

The first term led me to the surprising realisation that of the first five symphonies, I love the Fourth the best, simply because it's absolutely perfect. You could say that in the Second and Third Mahler dares more, but it's a harder challenge to make them work. 

Edward Gardner pulled off Saturday night's performance of the 'Resurrection', launching his London Philharmonic Orchestra's 2023-4 season. I was going to give it a miss, because sitting on my special cushion isn't easy at the moment, and I always feel a bit outside the first movement - not a good start. But then our conductor turned out to be a born writer in his First Person on the symphony for theartsdesk. I was sold, and I'm so glad I went. I endorse everything my colleague Rachel Halliburton writes about the performance. The rare spectacle of the whole audience rising within seconds of the end was absolutely deserved, even if the choral climax does tend to have that effect. (Both images by Mark Allan).

Delighted to say that I met Ed by chance on the terrace of Oslo's stunning Opera House while I was there in June for Pekka Kuusisto's Shostakovich one-off with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. He was very warm in his friendliness, so I asked if he might come along as guest, as Jonathan Bloxham and Mark Wigglesworth did last term - and I hope Catherine Larsen-Maguire, having pulled off the rare feat of what sounds like a spectacular performance of the Seventh with the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland, will do so for the Seventh. I gave Ed the option of any of the others and he chose Das Lied von der Erde. Let's see who else might come along. 

I know it can never be quite like the line-up during the ten classes on the symphony I ran during lockdown - the busiest of conductors like Vladmir Jurowski, Paavo Järvi and Antonio Pappano actually had the time then - but we've built up a fair bit of goodwill. Do join us - all the details are on the flyer below (click to enlarge).

Berlioz's tender masterpiece

The more I hear L'enfance du Christ, the more I love it. So I'm glad to have taken the chance of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's latest performance - the previous one, six years ago, was also miraculous - to hold a class on the afternoon of the concert. One thinks of Berlioz as a lopsided master in the larger-scale works - or at least I do when it comes to Roméo et Juliette, still the high watermark of his most futuristic orchestration, and La Damnation de Faust - but there is structural perfection in this 'sacred trilogy in three acts and seven tableaux' (the score, surprisingly, is peppered with revealing stage directions, though I wonder if that has to do with the belated 1911 staging mentioned on the title page).

Its force turns out to have been centripetal. The anecdote of how the Shepherds' Farewell originated in a few bars of organ music inscribed in a friend's visitors book when Berlioz was bored by the others playing cards is well known. Bang at the centre of the work, it acquired movements either side for the little miracle that is now Part Two, 'The Flight into Egypt'.

Then, with the encouragement of Leipzig success, followed a sequel; and finally a prequel, the daring idea to start in darkness with the psychology of Herod, the uneasy ruler, adumbrated by three trombones and then two trumpets and two cornets for a brief climax of violent fanfaring before all the brass bar the horns disappear for the rest of the drama. Matthew Rose was at his most engaged in the Barbican performance (in the second of three photos by Mark Allan), and sounds very handsome indeed in the broadcast, unmissable on the BBC Radio 3 iPlayer.

I love especially the idea, realised in both BBCSO performances, that the worst, the bass role of Herod, should be doubled up with the best, the Ishmaelite carpenter who welcomes in the refugee family in Sais, Egypt, when all others have turned away the 'vile Jews'. Isn't this, even more than the Bethlehem story, the ultimate message for our time, compassion for strangers in need? Musically, it's underlined by the most anguished movement, with Berlioz's hallmark wail of diminished sixth to fifth, giving way to the beautiful bustle of the Ishmaelite household orchestral fugato and the exquisite ease of the trio for two flutes and harp which is especially striking in concert when, their labours nearly over, the rest of the performers can just enjoy the virtuosity and grace of a consummate handful?

And then that final, unaccompanied chorus, in which the fourth dimension - the angel choir that concludes each part - begins a descending-scale Amen twice completed by the tenor and the onstage chorus before the last benediction, pppp. This is Berlioz's gift to be simple in his own unique way; and how much he adds, in this most delicately scored of his works, to give a twist: the F to F flat within the A flat serenity of Mary's first apostrophe to her child, the orchestral coda of that number which reminds us of the bitter undertow to all the sweetness.

How wonderful, then, that the last major concert of the year I heard should have been Ed Gardner's loving performance. This work brings out the sensitivities of those singers who have a special dedication - especially true of Karen Cargill (I'll say it again, the great Berlioz interpreter of our time), Robert Murray and Matthew Rose. You felt that all three were tapping into the essence, and in that the BBC Symphony players, that exquisite woodwind department especially, were their equals. The interpretation will be in my 'best of concert year' for The Arts Desk tomorrow; meanwhile, here's the opera retrospective.

Representations of the Flight into by Bassano, Giotto and Carpaccio

Wagner and Weill: trouble in Paradise

Well, Brecht's brilliant 20th century mythic invention of Mahagonny was only ever a paradise for fools, and the trouble in Wagner's Nuremberg is idealistically remedied by Mastersinger Hans Sachs. So there's no contest in terms of the feelgood factor, and as I've already reported, folk have been coming out of Richard Jones's near-perfect ENO production feeling transfigured (as my pal Edwina put it, 'over-friendly to people on the underground'. I remember a similar sensation after seeing Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire at the now-defunct Lumiere Cinema a block away from the Coli). I should have left John Fulljames's Royal Opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny blackly misanthropic about the Saturday night folly all around, but it was no more than usually irritating, and I was just disappointed that the show hadn't been as hard-hitting - or as funny - as Brecht and Weill originally made it.

This Mahagonny packs almost as few punches as Alaska Wolf Joe (Neal Davies) in his unequal boxing match with Trinity Moses (Willard White), perhaps the worst handled of all the group scenes in a production which has none of Jones's precision in blocking and physical expression. The Royal Opera Orchestra sounded tight enough, but more of the music needed to fly; despite the jazzy trumpets and the excellent onstage saxes-for-sex sequence, I was disappointed for once in one of my heroes, Mark Wigglesworth, for not sweeping it along more, or hitting hard with the total anticlimax of what should be a hair-raising apocalypse at the end. The impression, then, was of Germanic ponderousness - a trait of which Wagner shows not a hint in the five hours of Mastersingers, especially when done as superbly and clearly as it was at ENO.

How hard, then, to try and explain to my disappointed students who had seen it that the fault doesn't lie with any lack of inspiration in the work itself. People still misunderstand Brecht's text as outmoded propaganda spelling out the obvious, whereas it's not only painfully topical - the parallel with today's climate change crisis didn't need to be laboured as it was by Fulljames - but also pithily poetic and freighted with black humour. In that respect Jeremy Sams' translation was streets ahead of the production for sharpness.

The refrains of smoking, whisky, fishing and girls (ie sex for cash) in Mahagonny Version I are musical in themselves; the 'everything is permitted' gamechange that brings in the dollars for Version II provides the opera's finest musical sequence - very little of it in the original 25-minute 'Songspiel' - and culminates in what should be the terrifying clause 'so long as you can pay for it' - and if you can't, it's the electric chair for you. I should have been distressed by the execution of Jimmy Mahoney (read McIntyre, in this English language version) execution distressing, but it simply felt as glib and flat as so much else in the production.

Then there was some fatal miscasting. The (again usually just perfect) Anne Sofie von Otter was sometimes near-inaudible as the Widow Begbick, who needs to be a redoubtable old lag, a mezzo matron with a juggenaut of a chest voice like Astrid Varnay in the old Met production. And it doesn't matter whether or not Jimmy is good looking, as Kurt Streit undoubtedly is - though the wig gave him an unappealing Stringfellow effect - when the burning question is whether he's really up to the Heldentenorish demands. In that respect both Peter Hoare (Fatty) and Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts (Jack O'Brien) would have cut the mustard much better than Streit, a lightish lyric with a now-shot top. Willard White was inaudible half the time and didn't seem very committed to a role which could be played with relish.

The star was Christine Rice, a mezzo in a soprano part, who brought typical nuance to Jenny's two big numbers. Why any promising young voices were needed for her 'girls' beyond the chorus beats me: Anna Burford, Anush Hovhannisyan and Stephanie Marshall, among others, were even more wasted than star voices mostly are as Mastersingers beyond the roles of Beckmesser, Kothner, Pogner and Sachs. The best of it, other than Rice? Es Devlin's container set and Finn Ross's consummate video projections, way above the average. They may give a sense in Clive Barda's photos for the Royal Opera of a livelier show than was in fact the case.

One other thing: if Fulljames wanted to extend the world of the opera into the audience, he should have gone further. Once the night of the hurricane is past, and anything goes in Mahagonny, it should in the auditorium and the foyers too. Friends were ticked off by an usher for eating in a box, and I wondered whether the girls in front would return to the mobile phones another usher had told them to switch off five minutes into the first half. Fortunately the dilemma this might have provoked didn't pertain, for they were quiet and attentive to the end, and cheered vociferously, with special warmth for Anne Sofie. The Royal Opera should have produced a tabloid programme, too, along the lines of the brilliant accompaniment to Phyllida Lloyd's scathing Donmar Threepenny Opera, to give free to what Dame Edna called the 'paups' up top. Perhaps too much would be lost in advertising if they were to sacrifice the usual programme, which with its ads for luxury flats, jewellery, investment management and Rolex watches makes an especially ironic counterpoint.

Clive has caught all the tableaux served up, which isn't always the case with press photographers. No images, on the other hand, could quite convey the wonder and the fun of the ENO Mastersingers. Overwhelmed on press night by my second viewing of Jones's production, with addition, after the Welsh National Opera original, I bought tickets for the last night and persuaded godson Alexander to take a break from his Glasgow studies and come down for a couple of nights to see and hear Wagner at its best.

The response was as good as I'd hoped. In a recent email, he wrote:

I still catch myself humming excerpts from Meistersinger several times a day. Such an excellent performance of a great work. I'm still baffled by how the time flew and the music continued in this marvellous sweeping curve for the entire time. I think that your hand in my musical education has reached staggering new heights, the extremity of which I never anticipated. All I want to do now is see more Wagner.

You see, my boy, how time becomes space. I'm only disappointed he didn't mention the Wurst we consumed in the interval at Herman ze German in Villiers Street. Companion Jill suggested we went there in homage to the opera, where David sings to himself, when he can't get Sachs to look up from his book the last act - alas, not accurately rendered in the ENO translation - 'if only I'd put away the sausage and cake first' and later, directly to Sachs,'would you like to try the sausage now?' Here are three of our company including equally ecstatic friend Edsy.

Needless to say, Jones's wit and craft had not palled (on Saturday, I kept thinking what he might of made of Mahagonny, a piece right up his street - though part of his genius is that one can never second-guess the ideas. I can't imagine, for instance, how research on Russian cannibalism is going to feed in to his Royal Opera Boris Godunov). Among the singers, Nicky Spence was on much better form as David than he had been on the first night - no problem at all with the top notes on the 11th - while Rachel Nicholls, though the spread is still a bit worrying for one so young, and the vocally tireless Gwyn Hughes Jones as the young lovers (pictured below in one of Catherine Ashmore's shots for ENO) seemed much more relaxed.

From a seat in the Upper Circle which proved acoustically wondrous - Alexander thought the strings must be miked, so lustrously did they bloom at climaxes - and perfectly good visually, I got more out of the Act Two kerfuffle, especially with David and Beckmesser flitting by at the back.

Our already great new Sachs Iain Paterson was suffering from a heavy cold but clearly has the technique and the generosity of spirit to carry him through (he sounded less tired at the end than Bryn Terfel had in the Prom performance of the WNO production). It seemed even more of a miracle how Ed Gardner knew what to do with the score at every point, breathing with the singers throughout (I may be mistaken, but I thought James Cresswell's Pogner was singing meaningfully in even longer phrases than before). Gardner brought the players onstage at the end. I'd hoped the press office would have a shot; they didn't, but another source which shall remain nameless (certainly not me, as I never take photos at the end).

It's a good enough representation of a source of joy which will feed the community of Mastersingers fans for months, if not years, to come.And, of course, a further yah-boo-sucks to the narrow, jargon-fixated minds at the Arts Council.

Parsifal all autumn, Fidelio anew

So I am now leading my not-so-secret band of 30 acolytes at the City Lit through ten classes on what Mark Wigglesworth recently declared in an email to be 'the greatest opera by the greatest composer' (he has promised us a visit). Well, it depends what you want, but after three decades' acquaintance I'm certainly more open than I used to be to the possibility that Wagner's Parsifal is the most spiritual. And I had better keep liking it because in early December I record a Building a Library for Radio 3's CD Review on this of all works. Not my choice, and a very surprising offer, but under the circumstances - and soulfully primed by the incredible Proms performance - I can only rejoice.

Ask me if I still do by 14 December, the broadcast date. But I welcome the journey ahead, be it strewn with thorns as well as roses. With the third class looming next Monday, we've still only got to the end of the Prelude after so much setting up, so many glances back at Tannhäuser, Lohengrin and Tristan. Preparing ahead to Gurnemanz's long opening narrative, I was surprised - using René Pape with Gergiev conducting Mariinsky forces in glorious sound - to discover that what had felt like the first ten minutes of the opera proper had lasted nearly half an hour.

The famous 'time becomes space' syndrome is largely due, I realised, to the special setting-up effect of the Prelude's vasts. I liked what I heard of the Mariinsky recording - past achievements of the increasingly alarming Ossetian are permitted here, live events are not - and of Marek Janowski's performance. But I stick unyieldingly, for sound and sense, to Bruno Walter's concert version with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. It isn't on YouTube, and I know that background silence should really be an integral part of the experience, but I'm fascinated by Walter's 1927 version with the Royal Philharmonic, not least for the strings' extraordinary use of portamento.

Now we at last tackle the sources. My Penguin copy of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival is full of significant markers sticking out of the book, yet I have no memory of having read the whole. It's so funny and quaint and ungainly, reminding me why Cervantes made fun of such romances with their silly names and aims in one of my two favourite books of all time, War and Peace being the other (Pope Francis, whose demi-Tutuesque promise I must reflect in another post, also cites Don Quixote as his No. 1 and among films he loves La Strada, Roma, città aperta and The Leopard. No poker-faced prelate he).

I've also ordered up the Chrétien de Troyes version which inspired Wolfram, so bathing in chivalry will be obligatory from now on. As to interpretations of the opera, we've only just begun.

After unhappy experiences with Calixto Bieito's productions of Don Giovanni and Un ballo in maschera at English National Operas, his Parsifal was not one I thought I wanted to see. But then last season's Carmen, for all its flaws, changed my mind. And in the same way his Fidelio is touched with genuine vision as it gathers weight.

Three things drove me to want to see the ENO takeover of the Bavarian State Opera production despite warnings: Ed Gardner's conducting, especially in the Leonore No. 3 Overture which I haven't heard live for so long, Emma Bell's Leonora and the intelligence that a string quartet descends in cages to play the slow movement from Beethoven's Op. 132 Quartet - shorn of the bouncy bits; no one ever seems to jump for genuine joy in Bieito's world - after 'O namenlose Freude'. All production photos for ENO by Tristram Kenton.

This last was more compelling that I'd anticipated - indeed, moving to tears as a symbol not just of the quiet intimacy between husband and wife which the noisy duet can't achieve but also of freedom in chains: physically the players are contained, but the incredible sounds the Heath Quartet achieve reach out as the music of the spheres. It's actually the first time I've ever wept in a late Beethoven quartet movement, and the intimacy of the couple who haven't been able to express themselves properly in song alone, at least while it holds, adds to the sense of painfully private emotion.

At first the variously lit glass and steel labyrinth of Rebecca Ringst's design seems like an overwhelming concept that dwarfs the singers. Bieito seems to have no idea what to do with the unwanted characters of Marzelline and Jaquino (poor Sarah Tynan is just left to despair all over the place, with, what is it, red lipstick or blood smeared around her mouth for no intelligible reason). James Cresswell's Rocco animates the space with a well-projected bass, Philip Horst deflates it again as a woofy, self-harming Pizarro. David Pountney's English translation is banal and sounds so old-fashioned.

Yet as usual in the work, if you've got a great Leonora, everything soars upwards from 'Abscheulicher!' onwards. Emma Bell has an odd technique, a rather hollow choral-mezzo-ish sound at times, a little like Kathryn Harries used to sound with a similar mixture of hits and frays in the totally different voice of the upper register, but she projects the text with such urgency that you're won over. At times it truly is heroic. And the Prisoners' Chorus works with the voices coming at you from all levels at the front of stage, Leonora distributing photographs of her disappeared husband. This I liked.

Everything comes down to ground level for the dungeon scene. The labyrinth flips to suggest that we're heading into the depths of the earth. Perhaps it was this that allegedly prompted Gardner to throw in the towel, only to be held to his contract (a ruckus confirmed by him, again allegedly, in a pre-performance talk). Maybe a compromise was reached, for the creaking happens before the Act 2 Prelude, not during it. Last night we had a second Florestan in the absence of Stuart Skelton (pictured here), Bryan Register, a bright but genuine heroic tenor who just made the ridiculously strenuous vision music. Lovely line in the trio; not much of an actor.

Still, it all flowed, despite inept attempts at applause. A weakness, Bieito's attempt to get the singers to declaim portions of eloquent texts by Borges and Cormac McCarthy when these would have been better amplified or video-projected, had dwindled; the music took over, Gardner always lucid and keenly springing. Leonora's acid attack on Pizarro got round the usual awkwardness of a too-long freeze at the trumpet call.

The 'Heilige Dankgesang' remained the höhepunkt for me: why can't we hear the Heath Quartet's Tippett/Bartok series in the UK? Nor was the ambiguous parade-ground scene the mess I'd read about: Roland Wood's Joker-Fernando had his moment, the open-ended suggestion of government-forged manacles of a different sort after supposed liberation worked well. The blank cards with 'free' scrawled on some of them offered a symmetry to the 'disappeared' photos of the First Act, just as the quiet of the quartet echoed the only still point of Act One, the celebrated chorus. This is the kind of joining-up I always love about a more consistent genius of the stage, Richard Jones.

How often have I seen this opera fail - at Covent Garden, here at ENO under Graham Vick - and yet Bieito really had something to say at times, and said it unforgettably. Kudos. And who knows,  I may end up enjoying the Christopher Alden Fledermaus more than expected, though I'm not going to see it until after my pre-performance chat with Christopher Cook next Wednesday; much as I love the froth on CD, at least the Boskovsky and Carlos Kleiber sets, it has NEVER worked on stage for me and I don't want to slam the prison door decisively shut before I speak.

STOP PRESS (5/10) or rather something that slipped my mind: I'm talking on Mahler and Opera tomorrow (Sunday 6 October) for the Gustav Mahler Society of the UK at the airy, attractive Austrian Cultural Forum in Knightsbridge, 11-4. I'm interesting myself in unexpected areas of the subject, so I hope I can communicate that. Full details on the Mahler Society website here.

Berg and Chabrier: scum and froth

In Berg's case, I'm referring to the way downtrodden soldier Wozzeck is perceived by his crazy 'superiors' in what remains, perhaps, the 20th century's most shattering opera. And Chabrier's orchestral works, which I revisited as the most joyous corrective to trauma, may be frothy, but isn't that ability to lift rather than lower the spirits through melody and orchestration just as profund in its way?

As for the portraits above by Schoenberg and Manet, I couldn't resist a bit of quality artistry applied to musicians after what struck me as a rather bad Bryn portrait leading a blog entry elsewhere. I left a rudely jolly, or jolly rude, comment yesterday, wondering why musical portraiture is so poor these days (Adam Birtwistle's Glyndebourne stint being much the worst - at least this one's recognisable) but publication was not forthcoming, nor do I think it will be. Don't take it personally, Jessica, it's only my opinion, and apologies if I was treading on any personal sensitivities.

Praise-laden warnings were rife about Carrie 'A Doll's House' Cracknell's production of Wozzeck for English National Opera: this will bruise and amaze you, they said. And they were mostly right. Dominating all was Edward Gardner's finest run at the Coli since Peter Grimes and Der Rosenkavalier (if only because all three operas demand the ultimate in their different ways). A perfect guide through Berg's spider-web of unforgettable themes, Gardner also gave the most achingly late romantic expression to the tragedy: you were never allowed to forget how much came out of Strauss and Wagner. So many folk had related how the two unison crescendos after the murder shook them to the core, which they did, and the, yes, D minor summary pressed the tearduct button from the off.

Not everything about Cracknell's update worked for me, but all of it was thought through (photos by Tristram Kenton for ENO). There's nothing in Büchner's stunningly modern 1837 Woyzeck or in the opera which follows it so faithfully about the barracks boys seeing active service, but post-traumatic, post-Afghanistan stress disorder is a way of making Wozzeck's delusions instantly understandable. The child was too old for the final scene to have its full effect. Nor had there been  any outdoors for Wozzeck and friend Franz picking up sticks or for the climactic scenes by the lake with a rising moon. But these last had their own fearful impact.

Wozzeck no longer wades into a lake - or an immersion tank (Warner) or a vat of baked beans (Jones) - to retrieve the knife with which he's killed Marie; he cuts his throat at the kitchen table. I couldn't look. But certainly the sense of claustrophobia reached its peak here. And the aftermath, with the Doctor (ex-Wotan James Morris) and the Captain (Thomas Randle, still in good all-round shape) looking outwards from downstairs, played its part in chilling the blood (the two pictured with Leigh Melrose's Wozzeck in the centre below).

All the performances were strong, although I found Sara Jakubiak's Marie a tad undercharacterised, and Melrose could have made some of his longer lines more beautiful; the delivery was mostly very loud, the acting beyond reproach.

At the end, it wasn't my legs but my arms which had turned to jelly. I physically couldn't clap. And apologies to Guy, if he's reading this, for stonewalling him at the end, because I couldn't, didn't want to, speak for a good fifteen minutes afterwards.

It's too late to catch it now - the last performance was on Saturday - but, avoiding The Perfect American like the plague as I am (shutters down on Glass, and only Glass), if you want a rather more unexpected roller-coaster ride in an interval-less hour and forty minutes, go see Richard Jones's slyly skewed production of Ibsen's Public Enemy - aka An Enemy of the People - at the Young Vic. Having reviewed it for The Arts Desk, I should go again before it ends on 8 June. Below, the Stockmann brothers, played by Darrell D'Silva and Nick Fletcher, at loggerheads; photo for the Young Vic by Keith Pattison.

Nothing like a good dose of Chabrier to warm the blood, though. I was given the disc of orchestral plums at the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande's Festival Hall concert with the great Neeme Järvi the evening after I went to see Wozzeck. Järvi's not-of-this-world partnership with Boris Berezovsky, a pianist I've long wanted to hear live, in an unorthodox Grieg Piano Concerto turned out to be the highlight (the two pictured below at the concert by Jas Sansi), though there were masterly things as always about his Tchaikovsky Pathétique, including the best 5/4 waltz I've ever heard.

It was time for nostalgia: as in 1980, when a then unknown-in-the-west Järvi brought the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra to London, an encore was Arvo Pärt's Cantus to the Memory of Benjamin Britten (in 1980, I'd never heard any of Pärt's music). That had the same slot last night. If only the audience, full of Swiss watchmakers, had applauded more vociferously, we might have had Chabrier as a second encore on this occasion (back in 1980 it had been the Alla Marcia from Sibelius's Karelia Suite).

How else would these pieces get an airing beyond the world of CD? In my ideal concert, I think I'd have the Joyeuse Marche, with its lopsided rhythms and raucous glitter, at the start. Or would it be España, with its obsessive harping on the home key offset by orchestration as fabulous as Ravel's (a great admirer)? And could I have the lurching of the Fête polonaise from Le Roi malgré lui as my encore?

The recording which won me over was Ansermet's second (1964) Chabrier selection with the same Swiss orchestra; although that remains a key spirit-lifter, and its Fête polonaise swaggers in different places, Järvi has his own brisk glitter, a few characteristic charges at the ends - España especially - and he introduced me to a couple of works I'd never heard, including the early (1874) Lamento, making a persuasive, atmospheric case as always. Ansermet's 1964 Joyeuse Marche is here; never mind the Paris picture show.

So for me it's the Poulenc thing all over again. And here, too, I want to read the letters, from what Roger Nichols in his typically piquant note quotes or intimates. How about this from Chabrier's observation of local women by the Spanish seaside:

On the beach, those señoras possessed of a well-developed bosom often have trouble remembering to do up their costumes securely. From now on I shall  carry buttons and thread with me. To be of service is my greatest desire.

As for the intimations, thus Nichols on the Fête polonaise: 'in a letter still barely printable well over a century later, Chabrier whimsically envisaged turning the stage into an orgy, and then hiring a hypnotist to come and calm everyone down'.

Well, it wasn't all sunshine and roses; the later years before Chabrier's death from syphilis, Nichols tells us, were unhappy ones. But never understimate the power of the greatest light music to spread joy. We need it for our good health as much as we need Wozzeck for an understanding of the human condition. Oh, and happy 100th birthday, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Done my bit on that already, though happy to hear it again this year.

Haneke, Bergman and last rites

I finally caught up with Michael Haneke's Amour last night at the Curzon Soho, the first unquestionable masterpiece I've seen in the cinema since Des hommes et des dieux*. Let's first dismiss the Oscars nonsense, written up with a touch of saeva indignatio by the marvellous Matt Wolf: I haven't seen the other 'competitors' in the Best Actress category, but it was absurd that the unsparing, unsurpassable Emmanuelle Riva, just turned 86 when she arrived in Los Angeles, should walk away empty-handed. Actually she should have been up for a joint award with the equally remarkable Jean-Louis Trintignant (pictured with Riva above and below), her loving husband of the watchful gaze in the film. But who cares?

I can't add much of value to what my colleague Emma Simmonds and the first of her commentors write on The Arts Desk. The film is simply note-perfect (well, except in the very minor detail of the right arm placement above hands which we don't see on the piano keyboard - sometimes in the wrong area of the instrument - which is odd, since a very, very fine pianist, Alexandre Tharaud, appears in the film as himself). Having had the humiliating experience of watching Haneke's Hidden from the back row of the Gate Cinema Notting Hill, and not seeing the crucial detail in the tableau at the end, we sat in the front this time and were enveloped by every detail of the old couple's flat in which, after an unforgettable early scene in a concert hall, the film entirely takes place. I wept very nearly uncontrollably when Trintignant's carer tries to get his love to drink water - no more details needed - but came out feeling not exactly purged but clear-headed, almost serene.

Comparisons are odious and probably unnecessary, but I couldn't help wishing my idol Ingmar Bergman in his last film, Saraband, had asked as much of his senior couple, Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann (pictured; the Fårö post relevant to all this, one which as I think I've written before is closest to my heart, is here). Actually the scenes between them are very touching, but on a first viewing I found some of the old self-disgust packed into the father-son dialogues melodramatic and the handling of music in the film slightly clumsy alongside Haneke's unstinting truth and his less theatrical take on performing artists.

On the other hand, Amour is rather like those earlier Bergman masterpieces Wild Strawberries, Cries and Whispers and Autumn Sonata (Ingmar and Ingrid, no relations and no great friends, pictured above) in that it puts you through the mill and leads you by the hand whole and perhaps a little wiser out the other side. The difference is that you can argue about what you liked or didn't like in Bergman; whereas I should like to meet the individual who finds anything to challenge in Haneke's work of real, honest genius. How amazing that films like this, without any music other than that played in real time, should still be made.

I've been using the word 'flawless' quite a lot over the last couple of weeks: it's also applicable to two concerts I reviewed on The Arts Desk within six days of each other: a brilliantly programmed one by Edward Gardner conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra and another which was simply electric all the way through - despite the challenges of Bloch's not-so-great Schelomo - thanks to conductor Thomas Dausgaard and a simply stunning cellist I've not heard before, Jian Wang (pictured below by Xu Bin).

Double-checked with BBC Radio 3 folk to make sure the cello wasn't miked; from where I was sitting in the hall, the sound was the biggest I've ever heard emanating from that instrument, but so refined. Here's the man I need in order to pay attention to every note of the Bach cello suites. What a happy coincidence with Bergman to find so inward and low-vibrato a performance of the Sarabande from the Second Suite (there was bags of vibrato, incidentally, in his hair-raisingly intense Schelomo, as you would expect, so it's a question of adapting the style).Both film-makers would surely be moved by this, though the Sarabande of Bergman's film is the one from the Fifth Suite.

*If we're including comic masterpieces, and why not, then Julie Delpy's Two Days in Paris qualifies. We soon caught up with the sequel, Two Days in New York, and laughed almost as helplessly in places, though it's such a loss that Delpy's mother died when the filmmaker/actress had already planned out the film, an event which made her change course. The enlarged role for the nightmare sister with an awful boyfriend in tow to some extent fills the gap.

A great Britten symphony

Had he not styled it a Sinfonia da Requiem, and run its three continuous movements - 'Lacrymosa', 'Dies Irae' and 'Requiem Aeternam' - at a highly compressed 20 minutes, Britten's early masterpiece would be officially up there with Elgar's and Walton's two symphonies and the best of Vaughan Williams's nine, not to mention the darker monuments of Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Britten's two, showing he could achieve symphonic continuity outside the opera house, are this and the even thornier Cello Symphony for Rostropovich, which I love yet more dearly. This CD is an indispensible one, though Rattle's recording of the earlier work is one of his best.


Our new Rattle, Ed Gardner, dared to harrow us with the Sinfonia da Requiem right at the start of another BBC Symphony Orchestra blockbuster event on Saturday, and you can hear the results this afternoon on Radio 3; for some reason, broadcast has been delayed, but it will soon be on the iPlayer for the next week. My colleague and perceptive Britten scholar Alexandra Coghlan reviewed the concert for The Arts Desk. As I'd discovered for the class, and consequently for the pre-performance talk, there were several points of connection with the other epic bookender, Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, which I haven't heard in concert for years. That reminds me I ought to get to the John Martin exhibition soon; his doomy canvases used to appeal to my adolescent love of extremes.


The links? Not only were Walton in 1929 and Britten a decade later young men still in their twenties when they set out on adventures which changed course; both works start - though Walton's takes time to settle - in a D minor lament. Britten's resolves in D, Walton's in the relative major, F, with jazzy accents to the last and a hint at the tritone which, of course, holds the tension to the end of Britten's later lamentatory masterpiece, the War Requiem.

Much to illustrate in the talk, then - too much bearing in mind the BBCSO brief of covering all bases, which meant a not unwelcome injection of what I could bring to bear on the three fascinating Sibelius orchestrated songs in the programme - 'On a terrace by the sea', much blacker than its title suggest, also holds tritonal terrors and modernistically anticipates the Finn's Fourth Symphony by some years - and Sibelius's little suite of incidental music to another Belshazzar's Feast, modest but personal as ever. One thing I hadn't realised at the time was that Sibelius made his orchestration of the Twelfth Night setting 'Come away, death' just before his death in 1957. Delighted to find it on YouTube in Jorma Hynninen's performance. I'd been blown away by his performances of the songs when I was preparing the talk, and though Gerald Finley was fine and cut through a sometimes very heavy orchestra, he doesn't have Hynninen's lower centre of gravity.



All the more fascinating, given the terminal circumstances of the arrangement, that the last chord leaves matters unresolved. 'Komm nu hit, död' ties in two other dying composers' significant end-pieces, Rachmaninov's piano transcription of Tchaikovsky's 'Cradle Song', written in the year of the junior master's birth, and Stravinsky's instrumentation of two pleading-with-God Wolf songs.

So it was quite a death-haunted programme as we enter the silly season; and we can still go deep this Friday when that phenomenal Sibelius interpreter Jukka-Pekka Saraste conducts Sibelius's Sixth and Seventh Symphonies. Why the Bosch above? Well, partly because the Sinfonia da Requiem is a triptych, too, though with a fast-motion hell at the middle, and partly because that Dies Irae's fluttertonguing flutes and muted brass delineate Boschian creatures while not forgetting to hothouse the terror and weave in on alto sax the ever-changing lament of the first movement (it achieves resolution in the finale, but not a falsely triumphalist one).


Such details would have led me to guess that the work was influenced by Shostakovich's even more harrowing Eighth Symphony, were it not for the fact that the Russian masterpiece had not been composed at the time of the English one's belated premiere. That took place under Barbirolli in New York in 1941, the Sinfonia having been unsurprisingly exiled from the concert for which it was commissioned, a 200-player celebration of Japan's 2,600 year old empire at which Richard Strauss's noisy occasional-piece Japanese Festival Music WAS performed, and at which the Nazi salute was held during the playing of the Japanese national anthem. Once again, the unwitting Strauss was in the wrong place at the wrong time; but so would Britten, and Britain, have been, had the Japanese royal representatives not objected to his 'gloomy', 'discordant', 'Christian' and of course very uncelebratory work of youthful genius.

Travel in a time of football

I haven't seen a good match in years, which is not to say that I wouldn't be drawn in if I were at the house of a friend who wanted to watch the World Cup. But I don't think I'll easily forget where I happened to be when key games took place. How many years ago was it when England played the Cameroons in the quarter-final and I was sitting in the since-defunct Lumiere Cinema with six other people watching Eric Rohmer's A Tale of Springtime?

This year I've been on the move or in a theatre while the action was being played out. On Wednesday I had to give a talk in Leicester - station depicted above - before one of Temirkanov's three major Prokofiev/Tchaikovsky concerts with the Philharmonia (I caught the first programme in London and wrote it up for The Arts Desk; and all I'll say about it here is that the man is surely the greatest Tchaikovsky conductor still living).


So at about 3pm I strolled up to Barons Court tube - too hot to cycle to St Pancras - and caught diverse roars through open windows and outside The Curtains Up pub (never sure how they mean that to be punctuated). But from Barons Court to Kings Cross on a surprisingly packed underground and from St Pancras to Leicester on a fairly busy train, not one whimper of news about the match's progress. As I strode up the hill towards De Montfort Hall, it was impossible to tell who'd won. A couple of twats in tall England hats lurched around noisily, but gave no hint of victory or defeat. It wasn't until I was in the hall that I found out.

Anyway, Leicester is worth a quick digression, though I still haven't had time to see the Curve (was still in the middle of the Coppelia script on Wednesday, and had to rush back to meet Ruth and friends after her Cork Street opening, more of which anon). The concerts have a loyal if ageing following, and while I spoke they were unveiling a new memorial sculpture in memory of a Philharmonia friend:



The walk to the hall through the back streets is leafy and pleasant, the odd rolling drunk or drug addict excepted. I love the railings of the bizarrely if aptly named Oval Square.


And so back to London that evening in an atmosphere of calm, and a nearly full moon above St James's (the clock time, like the one in the photo further down of Trieste's Caffe San Marco, is of course way out).


There was, though, a midsummer madness in the air around Piccadilly owing to the Cork Street bacchanalia. Doziness reigned the next morning as I pedalled to the BBC to record the Building a Library programme. A white van man nearly knocked me off my bike as he turned without indication across the cycle lane and into Earl's Court. Sundry specimens of erratic driving compounded the feeling that the Englanders were hung over after celebrating the match.

Finally - thank God, they're out now - there was the question of negotiating London before and after the England v Germany match. Our only chance to catch the ENO Tosca, and it started at the memorable hour of 3pm. Must have been more exciting than England's trashing - in fact I was almost delirious after Act One, mostly with the sheer pelt and skill of Puccini's theatricality as projected by Amanda Echalaz and Julian Gavin - unquestionably the most convincing lovers I've ever seen in this opera - and by Ed Gardner's sensuous-pacy work in the pit (what beauty in the orchestral postlude to the love duet).

Act 2, in ex-diva Catherine Malfitano's period setting, went through most of the usual motions but had a few ideas of its own, and Michaels Moore was almost convincing as an elegant, sex obsessed sadist (the basic dark-baritone timbre hasn't weakened over decades, though the detached low notes don't come out well). Loved the way Echalaz's poor girl broke down after the murder and got frightened by the roll of drums anticipating the execution. The line in her 'vissi d'arte' ('love and music' as ever was in Edmund Tracey's well-wearing translation) was a little disrupted by the vibrato which could quickly become a problem, but she soars thrillingly and she's such an intelligent singer. The final touch, an artistic death, was superb and banished memories of Jane Eaglen looking like Robbie Coltrane in drag lumbering up the ramp to flop off (though that was her heyday, and how superbly she acted with the voice then). Both production photos of the current ENO production here by Robert Workman.


Echalaz's was easily the best Tosca I've witnessed since Nelly Miricioiu's in the early 1980s, and I'd love to see her as Salome. Ma guarda, cara, guarda.

By the opera's half way mark, it was impossible to tell whether Julian Gavin's ringing 'vittoria!' ('victorious' in the translation) was being echoed in the streets.


At the second interval it was all a bit quiet to start with. Then police vans started shooting up Charing Cross Road, sirens blaring. The nice man in Pret a Manger told me the bad (good?) news - 4 to Germany, 1 to England. Then we saw a pack of angry youths with feral, scrunched up faces looking for trouble.

Yet I have to say that over in Trafalgar Square after the show, despite the heavy police presence,


if you hadn't known of England's defeat, you'd have thought the fans were celebrating.




Note Yinka Shonibare's splendid newcomer on the Fourth Plinth.

Once through Admiralty Arch, it was the usual summer-in-the-city Sunday scene of brass bands and tourists ambling along the cycle lanes. The hot but glorious weather might just have taken the edge off the disappointment. Well, come on, Ghana.