Kosky's Meistersinger: falling at a late hurdle

Wednesday afternoon sees the 10th and final class in my Zoom course on Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and the end should crown the work, as well as our grand finale: our special guest is Ben Heppner, who for me sings the most beautiful Prize Song of any I've heard (on the Sawallisch EMI recording: glorious sound, though my overall favourite on CD is Kubelik's. The below film is clearly from a gala, but it will certainly do). 

We've also spent a wonderful hour with Mark Wigglesworth, who conducted one of the Royal Opera revivals of Graham Vick's splendid production, and while Jane Eaglen (whom I saw as Eva at ENO, one of her first major roles for the company) had to pull out of a chat because of a crucial meeting about fundraising - she'll visit some other time - John Tomlinson will give of his time when he comes back from holiday, a very welcome postscript.

I previously covered Meistersinger when the course ran at the Frontline Club and Richard Jones's WNO production - still the best I've ever seen - was pending; he also came to talk to us. But every time it just gets richer. I don't look at previous course notes; it's important to start from scratch. This time we've been more preoccupied with the question of Wagner and antisemitism because, although I don't think it figures in this work (the comic villain Beckmesser is seen as a target, but that's been ignored by most UK directors, Jones included), Barrie Kosky, as the first Jewish director of the opera at Bayreuth, felt he had to tackle it. And I felt we had to follow some of the scenes in the DVD of his production (it's also on YouTube, by the way, but only with German subtitles). 

Felt the Wahnfried tableau restricted the scope of the Prelude, and it sets massive problems to solve: Sachs, Walther AND David among multiple Wagners; Cosima as Eva; Pogner as Liszt; Beckmesser as Hermann Levi. To his credit, Kosky makes the scenes between Beckmesser and Sachs laugh-out-loud funny. The ever- brilliant Johannes Martin Kränzle is at his most outrageous in this production. He's not at any point a Jewish stereotype, but Kosky makes the laughter freeze when the crowd turns him in to one. Personally, I'm happier with a view which treats Beckmesser as a Malvolio within a Shakespearean comedy. But I do understand why, in Bayreuth of all places, the peripheral questions need addressing. 

The point where I lose faith is when Eva enters Sachs's study - here the room in which the Nuremberg Trials were held - in Act Three. We lost the sentiment in favour of swift humour in the comparable Act 2 scene, but although I adore Anne Schwanewilms, the silly mock-girlish skipping she's asked to do defuse all the emotion in the situation. And if Michael Volle's Sachs and Klaus Florian Vogt's Walther are both aspects of Wagner, where's the crucial love triangle? I turned back to Lehnhoff's stripped-back production for Zurich Opera, and having doubted the scene's power, the tears flowed again. It was with good reason that Strauss and Hofmannsthal saw in this a blueprint for the Marschallin-Octavian-Sophie triangle in Der Rosenkavalier.

Excellent cast. Real-life couple Peter Seiffert and Petra-Maria Schnitzer keep it real, too. Some find José Van Dam's Sachs too dour, but I like the introspection, the pain is real, and he's very much an attractive older man.

Every class has brought big emotions. As Mark pointed out, every transition is a thing of wonder, and strictly speaking you could say it's ALL transition. I'm especially happy with the two hours we spent on the Act Three Prelude and the Wahnmonolog, with the help of Brian Magee's eloquent words on the Schopenhauer connection in Wagner and Philosophy to help us out. There's also another of the few really good books on Wagner which I re-read with pleasure, because all the elementary points in it are put so well - this brief but pithy journey through the opera by Catholic priest, professor and author of numerous books on literature and music M. Owen Lee. 

The art, ultimately is what matters, and among the many miracles of this great masterpiece is how it bears out all its claims with musical chapter and verse - everything is perfectly executed. Can it really be, as Mark wrote he was inclined to believe, in our initial email exchange, 'western civilization's greatest achievement'? While engaged on it, I'm inclined to believe so, Bach Passions and Mozart operas notwithstanding.

Verdi's Aida, of course, is a different case - the kind of plot all too familiar from early 19th century Italian opera, but ah, the music, the orchestration, the great string of duets! The writing is as masterly as that of its late successors Otello and Falstaff. I've had trouble persuading some students we should spend five Mondays on it, still more that G&S's The Yeomen of the Guard deserves two (I'm splitting the second half of term between that and Britten's The Rape of Lucretia. 

We start tomorrow (Monday 3 October), probably hitting 'Celeste Aida' before we get to 'Morgenlich leuchtend' on Wednesday. Full details here - click to enlarge.

Thursday's non-operatic course this term is devoted to the symphonies of Elgar, Vaughan Williams (the bulk of the classes) and Walton. I thought after the Russians, Czechs, Hungarians and Finns it was time for British - I hesitate to say Engish - music to have a look in. I wanted some words of commendation different to Sue Bullock's for the opera course - and Mark wrote what I'm sure he thinks, so proud of that. Again, click to enlarge.

Onwards! I hope a few more will be tempted to join up; good numbers for the opera course, fewer for the symphonies, but that's always been the case.

Zooming the symphony, from Haydn to Adams

A colleague once said he used his blog as a kind of shop window for his work. Although it's absolutely not my aim here - there are no barriers, I write about what I want to and see it more as a kind of public diary - this is one of those shop-window posts. Certainly not born out of need to try and hook more punters to a course which already has so many signed up - the response from my regular list of students was very surprising, since it's usually easier to 'sell' opera than orchestral music - but out of a genuine sense of excitement about where the 11 classes might take us.

Mastering Zoom is easy - even my senior students, up to the age of 95, can manage it - but there was quite a bit of stress before I settled in the second of my Opera in Depth classes the Monday before last. First, not being able to find the camera on my computer, which took five hours of collaborative searching here at home - even my techno-wizz spouse was foxed - before it appeared after a re-start. Then the awful quality of the sound clips, which could have been solved if my two tech-savviest students had joined the test class. They showed me what to do et voilà - state-of-the-art sound for all, best using headphones.

So two out of the three (out of five) OiD classes on Strauss's Elektra so far have gone like a dream - beyond my wildest expectations in one sense, since Susan Bullock - a top Elektra all round the world, and now singing the other most challenging role, Klytemnestra - was there for most of the second class and the whole of the third, bringing extraordinary insights to every scene (for the above photo, I return to Frontline Club days, when she and Anne Evans - on the left - came to talk Isolde). The students thought our double act went very well. She'll be back, and for Madama Butterfly in the second batch of five classes. I've also just heard that Ermonela Jaho, the heartbreaker of the Royal Opera production who should have been reprising the role this summer (pictured below by Bill Cooper), will also be joining us.

Having established the special guests there, I thought I could also call upon conductors I know and respect. So delighted to say that Mark Wigglesworth, who's just conducted a Beethoven cycle in Adelaide, chose to make his appearance in the 'Eroica' class. Again I return to Frontline days and a visit which was photographed by professional (and, briefly, student) Frances Marshall.

Three other stars are expected, but not confirmed yet, so I won't pre-empt. STOP PRESS: Ian Page, who's recording a Sturm und Drang series with his Mozartists orchestra, will be with us tomorrow. ADDITIONAL STOP PRESS: so is Jonathan Bloxham, inspirational founder of the Northern Chords Festival and its superb young professional orchestra who conducted our last three Europe Day Concerts (read all about the 2019 one here).

Below are the plans for all 11 classes, just so that I have them in something I can link to rather than just on an attachment. Message me if you'd like to join for all or some: it's a bargain (I halved the usual fees because I don't have room hire expenses and Zoom is, after all, not live with great equipment to hand, so it's £10 a class, ie £5 an hour. We meet on Thursdays as from tomorrow, 3.30-5.50pm. and if anyone misses a class or has connection/sound issues their end, I can send on a recording of the whole thing. Send me a message with your email and I won't publish it, but I'll be sure to get back to you.

This list has now been updated in the light of how we progressed, and who came to visit.

1: Sonata form and instrumental novelty   7 May
Selected movements/snippets from Haydn symphonies - 22,  31, 45, 70, 83 and 101; Mozart 41, 'Jupiter' (1788) Special guests: Jonathan Bloxham and Ian Page.

2: A new and noble scale  14 May
Beethoven's Third Symphony, 'Eroica' (1803-4). Special guests: Mark Wigglesworth and Jonathan Bloxham.

3: Follow that! Scaling up and down after Beethoven  21 May
Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (1829-30) and Schumann's Second (1845-6). Special guest: Nicholas Collon.

4: Songs for Clara  28 May UPDATED
Schumann's Second (continued) and Brahms's First Symphony (1875-6). Special guest: Catherine Larsen-Maguire.

5: New/old approaches to the finale  4 June UPDATED
Brahms's Fourth (1885) andTchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, 'Pathétique' (1893). Special guest: Vladimir Jurowski.

6: The world in a symphony   11 June
Mahler's Third Symphony (1895-6). Special guest: Paavo Järvi.

7: Imagining cataclysms   18 June
Mahler's Ninth Symphony (1909-10) and Elgar's Second (1911). Special guest: Vasily Petrenko.

8: Mosaic tiles from heaven   25 June
Sibelius's Fifth Symphony in its original (1914-15) and final (1919) versions. Special guests: Kristiina Poska and Andres Kaljuste.

9: The finale question: 1920s, 1940s  2 July
Nielsen's Fifth Symphony (1921-2); Martinů's Third Symphony (1944-5), Vaughan Williams's Sixth (1944-7) and Prokofiev's Sixth (1947). Special guest: Sir Mark Elder.

10: Endgame   9 July
Shostakovich's Fifteenth Symphony (1971). Special guests: Elizabeth Wilson and Peter Manning.

11 Symphonies in all but name   16 July
John Adams's Harmonielehre (1985) and Naive and Sentimental Music (1999). Special guest: Catherine Larsen-Maguire.

An audience with Siegfried

I'll admit I had my doubts about interviewing Heldentenor Stefan Vinke for the Wagner Society. I'd only heard a touch-and-go tenor solo in Mahler's Eighth at the Proms; I asked the keen young organiser, Henry Kennedy, if I could wait and see until I'd reviewed the Royal Opera Siegfried in the recent revival of Keith Warner's Ring cycle. After all, it would be ungallant and embarrassing to be sitting there with him if I'd written anything adverse.

My doubts were more than banished: this was easily the best Siegfried I've heard after Jerusalem's in Kupfer's Bayreuth Ring. A colleague whispered in my ear at the end of Act One, 'I shouldn't be saying this to another critic, but that was sensational, wasn't it?' - and it was. Though at the beginning of Act Two he was recovering from an allergy attack in the interval, Vinke had all the extraordinary stamina needed to come out sounding fresh as a daisy in the final duet with Nina Stemme's  Brünnhilde- indeed, it's the only time I've heard that with both singers sounding equally good. Talk  photos courtesy of the Wagner Society's Ben Tomlin - I'll spare you the ones of me gesticulating, but I rather like them for once - while the images of the Royal Opera Ring are by Bill Cooper.

Unsurprisingly, given his well-acted characterisation, Vinke turned out to be a supremely intelligent and engaging person. Which leading Wagner singer isn't? Well, both he and Stemme the following week in Stockholm could mention one exception each to the general rule of collegial Wagner singers (though they didn't name names, and I didn't press). But they both agreed that, yes, supportiveness and team spirit were paramount in Wagnerworld.

How I wish this interview had been recorded, since all he had to say was fascinating and often very funny (Wagnerians need a sense of humour too - look at Birgit Nilsson)  It turned out that, though the splendid idea of Siegfried's kissing Mime on the top of the head before rushing out into the forest in Act 1 was Warner's, the likable characterisation was one with which Vinke was in agreement. He certainly doesn't see the young hero as brute or born killer, more wild child who has the intuition and intelligence to learn from his experiences in a way we should find touching.

If a director wants a different view, then he expects to be told why, as he was by Graham Vick, whose ability to listen, think over and return to explain, one way or the other, he very much admires. It was clear he had no respect for Frank Castorf at Bayreuth, who could never come up with a convincing justification for his random ideas. We listened to Vinke in the end of the forging sequence on the Seattle recording, complete with rhythmically accurate hammering - not possible, he said, at Kirill Petrenko's fast tempo in Germany - and he reacted by acting a lot of it out while listening: critical, but not unduly so, of what he'd achieved there. I can't embed it but it's here, and worth a listen.

Vinke loves working with the top Mime of our time, Gerhard Siegel, who's also sung Siegfried, and will listen to his suggestions; at one point. Siegel asked why he was wearing himself out with so much stuff before a big entry, advising him to save himself a bit, which he did.

Conductors: he made an interesting comparison between Antonio Pappano, who marks out key points but allows singers some freedom in between before everything comes back in line, and Kirill Petrenko, who controls more bar by bar, note by note: he prefers the former, but respects both approaches.

Trained in organ studies and choral music, Vinke has a firm favourite in the concert repertoire - Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, which following its heyday when Strauss commended Elgar as 'the first English progressivist' at the 1902 Lower Rhine Festival in Dusseldorf, still meets with resistance in Germany (so do the symphonies; so does Sibelius, so Elgar's in good company). Still on the list? The Emperor in Die Frau ohne Schatten, coming soon, and the time when he can sing Loge, Siegmund and Siegfried in a single Ring cycle (two of the three are imminent). Lively responses to some interesting questions, and then he was off on a rainy Saturday afternoon to indulge his kids in shopping down Neal Street. Great guy.

No-one portrays Waugh better than Waugh

So it was time to be back on the Waugh path after a break following consecutive reading of the first seven novels (in between, I took my time to get through A L Kennedy's Serious Sweet, which was rewarding; more on that anon). I started with a rather unsatisfying biography by Philip Eade. It's entertaining enough, if not the racy read reviews claim, on the early years in a newly-developed Hampstead (a reminder that all suburbia was a building site once). Where I get stuck is in the endless focus on unrequited (or unwanted) romances with women after the early gay phase. The letters quoted on this subject are surprisingly dull, especially when they supplant much-needed detail on trips abroad. There comes a point where you actively dislike the man: his famous rudeness, his snobbery and cultivation of the aristocracy, the conservatism which seems so at odds with the often anarchic fantasy of the novels.

Towards the end it gets interesting again as the gulf between seeming and being opens up, and Waugh writes his most autobiographical novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, written in 1956/7 about a spell of madness four years earlier. I turned to that immediately, fascinated by what Eade cites as its exact reproduction of what happened to drugged-up Waugh on a disastrous sea journey. This is no mixture of fact and fiction, from what I understand of the correspondences between reality and the creation of 'Pinfold', a 50-year-old novelist at an odd juncture in his life. In fact Waugh himself confirms the exactness in a 1960 BBC Face to Face interview: the specific three minutes are to be found here and the full interview here.

The first chapter and a half ('Portrait of the artist in middle-age' and the start of 'Collapse of Elderly Party') features some of the most precisely-penned and unsparing self-revelation I've ever come across from a creative artist. The infuriating and yet often endearing codger that emerges from Eade's biography is ruthlessly and amusingly exposed:

His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz - everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime*. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. There was a phrase in the thirties: 'It is later than you think', which was designed to cause uneasiness. It was never later than Mr Pinfold thought. At intervals during the day night he would look at his watch and learn with disappointment how little of his life was past, how much there was still ahead of him. He wished no one ill, but he looked at the world sub specie aeternitatis and he found it flat as a map; except when, rather often, personal annoyance intruded. Then he would come tumbling from his exalted point of observation. Shocked by a bad bottle of wine, an impertinent stranger, or a fault in syntax, his mind like a cinema camera trucked furiously forward to confront the offending object close-up with glaring lens; with the eyes of a drill sergeant inspecting an awkward squad, bulging with wrath that was half-facetious, and with half-simulated incredulity; like a drill sergeant he was absurd to many but to some rather formidable.

Once upon a time all this had been thought diverting, People quoted his pungent judgments and invented anecdotes of his audacity, which were recounted as 'typical Pinfolds', Now, he realized his singularity had lost some of its attraction for others, but he was too old a dog to learn new tricks.

What follows, by way of narrative, is rather odd and occasionally a bit tedious: just as dreams often seem interesting only to the subject, the hallucinations Pinfold/Waugh experiences/experienced on the ship bound for India are only fitfully gripping and not often funny, though they do throw light on his persecution mania and his fear that people see him as an old poof, a snob, a coward (Waugh was not the third, at least). The steering back to 'normality' is beautifully done, as is the brief portrait of his calm and sensible wife. A one-off, and Nicholas Lezard makes further fine observations in his Guardian review here.

Made me think of a similarly divided Englishman, Elgar, and the gulf between his squirearchical persona as another middle-class chap aspiring to be a nob and the turbulence of his symphonic music (the first and third movements of his Second Symphony and the symphonic poem Falstaff are perhaps the equivalent of Waugh's Pinfold madness).

*In above-linked review, it's interesting to learn that Waugh thought a Francis Bacon painting would be the best cover illustration for the novel.

Don Giovanni and Falstaff: choices

So you may have listened to the BBC Radio 3 Building a Library on Elgar's Falstaff by now, but if you haven't, it would be unkind of me to blazon the front runner amongst a mostly fine selection to the rooftops. Which is why I've chosen an image of Elgar the conductor, historical choice from 1930, above, after Klemperer and Mackerras, whose recordings of Mozart's Don Giovanni have so far been my lynchpins in the first three of five Opera in Depth classes I'm devoting to the opera.

And of course I'm in seventh heaven, living and breathing Mozart for so much of the week. I must also say that for all its skewered brilliance, Richard Jones's ENO production didn't affect me as deeply as revisiting Deborah Warner's take for Glyndebourne. I've always admired it the most for taking what I'm convinced is Mozart's and Da Ponte's line in the first scene that when a girl says no she means no. Does it have to be a woman director who has the courage to accept this? Besides which, the students agreed that Gilles Cachemaille is a very convincing seducer with an edge.

We all loved the first scene with Zerlina, so softly persuasive with the bizarre on-the-spot suggestion that she marry him; so convincing that Juliane Banse's gorgeous virgin feels like she's in a dream; so clever to have Giovanni dress her rather than undress her, putting on the wedding accoutrements instead of taking anything off.

As for Klemperer, I ordered up his recording thinking I'd want an extreme opposite to Mackerras's perfect and mostly brisk pacing. But I ended up mostly convinced: when I talked it over with Stephen Johnson, who was staying here on Wednesday night before we travelled up to my old workplace the Freud Museum to record for a Radio 3 documentary on  Freud and music, he pointed out the energy of Klemperer's rhythmic articulation, which means that slow rarely feels slow (he used the example of playing OK's Fidelio, and his wife Kate being smitten and surprised that it felt faster than it actually was). Of course there are exceptions rather beyond the pale - his late Mahler Seventh and Cosi, for instance - but this Giovanni brims with energy. And I love the battle of two intelligent basses, Nicolai Ghiaurov and the great, underrated Walter Berry as Leporello, rising to three when the statue of the Commendatore (Franz Crass, also magnificent) comes to dinner.

Here, too, we 'bought' a mezzo Elvira, Christa Ludwig, and Mirella Freni is at her youthful best as Zerlina. Curious that there are two married couples featured - Ludwig and Berry were still together when the recording was made, Ghiaurov was yet to wed Freni (I wonder if the wooing began in the studio here). So, paraphrasing RuPaul, it's a case of 'Klemperer's Don Giovanni - bringing couples together'.

Berry even trumps the superb Alessandro Corbelli, Mackerras's Leporello, in the Catalogue Aria. And the recits are no less brilliant, though of course Mackerras has the greater sense of theatrical pace. We'll be turning to Giulini for the great Quartet and the most ineffable Trio in the middle of the Act One finale. Otherwise, curious how simply wrong early Don Gs were in the conductors' approach to tempi - Andante should never mean Adagio, and Mozart's Andante is brisker than, say, Brahms's (another Johnson apercu).

So, two more weeks and then on to The Nose, with an interpolated visit from Mark Wigglesworth. Seeing Shostakovich's first opera last night reminded me that quite a lot of it doesn't pass muster without the visuals, and Barrie Kosky failed to lift a couple of rather otiose scenes. But there are certainly flashes of genius like the dancing multiple noses (pictured above by Bill Cooper for the Royal Opera). My current earworm, though, is Britten's Billy Budd, which Opera North did so clearly and unforgettably. That was a worthwhile trip to Leeds.

By happy coincidence after we'd finished recording at the Freud Museum yesterday, we walked up to Hampstead and passed the site of Severn House, where Elgar composed Falstaff inter alia. The plaque is getting tatty; how about a proper light blue roundel? Freud has one, after all.

Final teaser with spoiler warning: this is how the Building a Library top choice looked when I first bought it on LP. If you don't want to know whose the performance is, don't read the small print.

Our anti-Polish deplorables

So my best barometer of what's happening to anyone who’s come to live, work and pay taxes here in the UK is my friend Magda, who also happens to be our hard-working and superbly well-organised cleaner.I ask her every Monday if she's had anything adverse happen to her or to anyone she knows.

The pressure is clearly mounting. At first she only recorded two official problems. Her niece, recently arrived from Poland, was turned down for working at Pret a Manger because they said they were uncertain about the situation post-Brexit. She actually got a job at Wetherspoons (ironically, since the owner was/is fiercely pro-Brexit. Yet the company has explicitly stated that it will carry on employing Eastern Europeans). To get her National Insurance number she went to the local Job Centre. The woman there was hostile and sarcastically incredulous – ‘you’ve only been here ten days yet you have somewhere to live and a job?’ – and didn’t put down on the form that she had a job but that she was applying for one.

Today's news was worse. The 8-year-old daughter of one of Magda’s friends has been traumatised by an incident on the 41 bus from Tottenham Hale to Archway. She was travelling to a Polish Saturday School with her parents, three friends of the same age and her three-year-old brother. She speaks English with her schoolfriends but her brother is too young to communicate other than in Polish. So they were speaking their own language as they went to get off the bus at Crouch End when a couple in their sixties said 'why are you still here? Go home! Fuck off back to Poland.' The rest of the people on the bus did/said nothing. Olivia wants to know ‘why do these people hate us?’ and is sufficiently upset not to want to go back to Saturday School.

Magda says that about 20 per cent of her friends have gone back to Poland, including a friend who ran a hairdresser's but has closed down business. They are afraid not so much for themselves but for the kind of hostility their children face at school.

I wanted to believe these incidents were isolated, but when they're directly reflected in the lives of the Poles I know, I fear it has to be commonplace. So I'm disgusted and feeling helpless. But I've reported the incident - three hours later the police arrived to take details, and the rest will be up to Magda's friend - and the more people do so, the more we stand a chance of stamping out the apparent licence to abuse which Brexit - with the help of the right-wing press, shame on them - has unequivocally encouraged. If people only do what they did before, think vile things but keep them to themselves and their circle, less people will be hurt or, worse, murdered. It's a minority, but it's enough to drive these admirable folk away.

An afterthought - I'd forgotten about this one: how about something from the Ukippers' misplaced idol Elgar? His Polonia of 1915, a perfectly fine occasional piece composed to support Polish refugees... And it will teach you the Polish national anthem into the bargain. Sad to report that beleaguered country as a good deal worse than us on its current record for taking in refugees. None of the leaderships of the so-called Visegrád Group within the EU is good, and Hungary's is marginally worse than Poland's, but that's not saying much.

Invitations to comment are usually met with a blank, but if you know of anyone - Polish or other - who's been affected like Magda's friend, do write about it below. It's important to have these things documented.

Coming soon: two mythic giants

Which is a way of advertising six classes of the new Opera in Depth season on Mozart's Don Giovanni and my forthcoming BBC Radio 3 Building a Library on Elgar's Falstaff (broadcast date 8 October). Let's get the basic info down for the first, since it starts on Monday 26 September. Runs for ten weeks, Mondays 2.30-4.30pm, at the wonderful Frontline Club in Paddington. We devote the first five weeks to Don G before moving on to Shostakovich's The Nose (covering two or three weeks) and Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (one or two). Mark Wigglesworth is down to return on 14 November, having by then moved on to Berg's Lulu at ENO. If you're interested in joining, try this email: david.nice@theartsdesk.com

While it's hard to love the Don Juan of Tirso de Molina and the Don Giovanni of Mozart, who could not have more complex feelings about Shakespeare's greatest (semi)comic creation? Elgar understood his dualities and wrote the most perceptive 'analytical essay' for the Musical Times of September 1913. Novello helpfully reprinted it as a little booklet, which I treasure.

As this most magnificent of tone-poems illustrates, Elgar had no time for what he saw as the 'caricature' of The Merry Wives of Windsor but couldn't praise too highly the creation of Henry IV Parts One and Two, whose death is described so vividly by Mistress Quickly in Henry V. Thus part of Elgar's second paragraph, using Professor Dowden and Maurice Morgann to speak for him:

The real 'Sir John Falstaff is a conception hardly less wonderful than that of Hamlet.' This complexity has been summed up by Morgann as follows: 'He is a character made up by Shakespeare wholly of incongruities; - a man at once young and old, enterprizing [sic] and fat [not sure what the duality is there, mind you], a dupe and a wit, harmless and wicked, weak in principle and resolute by constitution, cowardly by appearance and brave in reality; a knave without malice, a lyar without deceit; and a knight, a gentleman and a soldier, without either dignity, decency, or honour.'

Dare I say the opposing qualities would have appealed to a typical Geminian like Elgar? They account for why in part Falstaff is also a self-portrait (cue this surprising photo which Graham Rickson sent me today).

Everything is in perfect balance - the humour and extroversion versus the introspection of the dreamer, darkness and light, programme music and pure symphonism. The climaxes of the Gadshill exploit, battle and aggressive coronation march sit well around and between the heartbreaking dream interludes - and if those don't have the right degree of inwardness, any recording is going to fail. That helped me to make distinctions and to jettison half-good performances at key points. But more I cannot say, of course, until the programme's aired.

Some years ago I was asked to give a talk comparing Falstaff with Strauss's Don Quixote. There are so many points of correspondence between the man Strauss hailed as 'the first English progressivist' and the Bavarian tragicomedian (another Gemini, of course). I had a wonderful time on Wednesday evening hearing the English Concert in two Quixote-related works; should have got to know Telemann's Le Burlesque de Quichotte long ago, but what a light-footed charmer it is, made all the richer by Danann McAleer's reading of what turned out to be the poetically archaic Victorian translation of Cervantes by John Ormsby. Maybe that's the version I should turn to next - for like War and Peace, Don Quixote should be revisited at least every 10 years.

It's in fact been nine years since I last covered Mozart's Don Giovanni in what was then my Opera in Focus class. Now we coincide with the first and last fling of what ought to be a perfect partnership, Mark Wigglesworth conducting and Richard Jones directing a new production at English National Opera (oh, what wouldn't we all have given for the original plan that the duo should share The Gondoliers, a work Carlos Kleiber in all seriousness would have conducted at ENO if they'd taken him at his word). I look forward to all the film references Richard revealed in a special-preview ENO talk with Christine Rice and myself, bearing in mind that he had given each of the cast members a special DVD. Clive Bayley, the Leporello, got The King of Comedy.

Which made me buy a copy and watch it for the first time. What a masterpiece of discomfiture and a prophecy of the insane pitch celebrity culture has already reached. Astonishing performances from De Niro as the man who won't let go, Jerry Lewis as the man without humour - and Sandra Bernhard as the fan from hell, getting her big break from Scorsese.

Hoping that Richard will come along again to the Opera in Depth course. Looks likely, but he's usually elusive until closer to the time, and of course totally preoccupied with Don G at the moment.

Pictures from a presentation

Awards ceremonies are always best approached with circumspection – not difficult in this case, as I hadn’t heard a single one of the ‘winners’ in the BBC Music Magazine’s final list for 2013 – and then you can only be pleasantly surprised.

As I was on Tuesday afternoon. I’ve written up the event for The Arts Desk, homing in on what most interested me. The three strands of live performance were bound to take the lion’s share, yet there was no contest from Janina Fialkowska and even the charismatic Angelika Kirchschlager; Mei Yi Foo swept us all away with the canny choice of pieces by Gubaidulina, Unsuk Chin and Ligeti from her Best Newcomer award-winning disc ‘Musical Toys’.

She was snapped brilliantly by the BBC Music Magazine’s photographer, John Millar, both in action (above) and alongside some of the splendid Kings Place artwork (the shot I used over on TAD). I thought Millar’s top shot was of Jacques Imbrailo, Mark Padmore, Foo, Berlin Phil cellist Olaf Maninger and the so compelling-to-look-at Kaija Saariaho (a thoroughly sincere person always willing to give of her time, as I know from a short acquaintance). I used it over there, but I can’t resist including it here too

especially as it’s followed by formality, with Janina Fialkowska joining the picture.

Several other photos I couldn’t accommodate, or they didn’t tell the story I wanted. One is of Tony Hall and Sir Mark Elder head to head

before S’Mark swept the board with his Halle recording of Elgar’s The Apostles. This too I have yet to hear, but I didn’t much care for the same team’s The Kingdom, nor indeed for S’Mark’s Goodall-in-Wagner approach to Elgar, who always seems to me to need much more sweeping along, especially in oratorios like these. But we’ll see. 

A few more photos: here’s Mark Padmore looking moved, as indeed he was, talking about Bach as a lifelong companion and the uncanny inspiration of Peter Sellars.

And composer Dai Fujikura, interesting sound-maker in the concert I caught of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Japanese day, quirkily setting up Foo, whom he obviously admires.

As for ‘Musical Toys’, I thought it might just be through her canny choice of repertoire that Foo triumphed, but having listened to the disc a couple of times, I hear so much imagination in the distant voices of the Gubaidulina, while the Chin is technically terrific, and you should really try out the later Ligeti pieces when the notes of the chromatic scale begin to accumulate (he starts with one, ends with all twelve).

It was serendipity that the first unknown personage I was led up to, via the constantly popping-up Sebastian Scotney and David Fraser of ECM, happened to be the founder of Foo’s intriguing new label Odradek and also a pianist, John Clement Anderson. He lives in Pescara and so – with him, I’m presuming – does one of the other pianists featured on the label, Pina Napolitana from, yes, Naples, whose all-Schoenberg disc I need to hear at leisure with a score. Already, though, I’ve been hooked by another featured artist, Domenico Codispoti. 

His Liszt B minor Sonata was bound to feel just a little straightforward with Khatia Buniatishvili’s crazy interpretation still ringing in my ears, but he’s clearly a real poet, as the Petrarch Sonnets clearly show. And what’s haunting me is a Granados piece from Goyescas I’m ashamed to say I didn’t know, El amor y la muerte. This is the image, from Goya's Los Caprichos. 

The ‘ballad’builds around Goya's moment. A young man is dying in the arms of his beloved after losing a duel. The strength of the will to live ebbs and flows alongside the woman's sad consoling song, which breaks the heart before the final darkness falls, at least in this performance. Such profundity. If Odradek carries on at this level, it should have a few more award-winners on its hands. How delighted I am to find that the company has put up a film of Codispoti playing this very piece. Give it your full attention; and if you don't, you'll probably find as it develops that you drop anything you're doing.