Europe Day Concert 2019: past midnight, still alive

And kicking, or rather dancing and riffing, in the most electrifying official finale we've had at St John's Smith Square in the past 11 years, a fine way to celebrate the fact that the UK didn't leave the European Union on 29 March. When Jonathan Bloxham, our superlative conductor, announced a Norwegian soloist for the wacky arrangement by Cristian Lolea (violin and strings) of Enescu's First Romanian Rhapsody, I ummed about the nation - not exactly EU. Then he told me it was Eldbjørg Hemsing, who wowed both live (in Bodø) and on her CD championing a concerto by compatriot Borgstrøm (the coupling on the disc is a first-rate performance of Shostakovich's First Concerto). Top notch, pure class, with a poignant unaccompanied encore of Grieg's 'The Last Spring'. The fact that she was playing with young equals, the pan-Europeans of Jonathan's Northern Chords Festival Orchestra, led to improvisatory fireworks with leader Agata Darashkaite and cellist Sébastien van Kujik.

The theme was '25 and under: young European composers', because youth seemed like a timely theme for celebration. No shortage of great examples here: Jonathan opened with the Rossini-esque first movement of Schubert's delicious Third Symphony, one of the six he completed in his teens, and as mid-point we had Mendelssohn's Legend of the Fair Melusine, the water-music of which indisputably influenced Wagner when he started his Ring in the depths of the Rhine. Both catered for a brilliant regular, first clarinettist Joe Shiner, whose first solo CD is due out soon. The wind as a whole were superb, as they have been for the past three years; flautist Sarah Miller, oboist James Hulme, bassoonist Carys Ambrose Evans and horn-player Stephen Craigen joined Joe for the best performance I've heard of Estonian Erkki-Sven Tüür's Architectonics I. Erkki-Sven had been dubious about unearthing this relatively early piece of his, describing it as 'naive', but the response of so many in the audience proved its durability.

The interpretation of Lili Boulanger's D'un matin de printemps also left others I'd come across way behind; I heard this delicate fantasy in a completely different light. Sure, it sounds like filtered Debussy, but also has more of an identity of its own than I'd thought. The other favourite choice of people I spoke to - musicians and not - was soprano Valentina Farcas's exquisite delivery of the aria 'Dopo l'oscuro nembo' from Bellini's first opera Adelson e Salvini, later reworked for Giulietta in I Capuleti e i Montecchi. Valentina was representing her native Romania, which currently holds the EU Presidency. I heard her float a gorgeous line in 'Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit', for me the highlight of the 150th anniversary performance of Brahms's Ein Deutsches Requiem in its original location, Bremen Cathedral, with Paavo Järvi conducting the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie (Matthias Goerne was at his most committed, too).

That gave plenty of promise for true bel canto style, and the way emotion informed what was sung brought tears to my eyes in a way that rarely happens for me with Bellini or Donizetti. Rossini is in a league apart, though, and Valentina returned to treat us to Amenaide's big scena 'Giusto Dio' from Tancredi. She was very sincere in her praise for the way that Jonathan provided perfect stylistic support in this repertoire, in a way - she said - that many top names on the podium have not. In fact his adaptability never ceases to amaze me. This time I didn't attend the afternoon rehearsal, so each performance gave fresh cause for wonder. A personal favourite, Elgar's 'Fairy Pipers' from the first Wand of Youth Suite, brought more period-conscious yet breathing portamento then I've heard before. So exquisite, and counterbalanced by the rugged string sound for Bartók's Romanian Dances and the Enescu.

And finally, the European Anthem, this time more truly an Ode to Joy after last year's unanticipated minute's silence at the end. The Romanian Ambassador's speech came at the end, rather than at the beginning as is customary, and gifts were distributed.

A few post-show party shots (like all the rest, with the exception of the first singer-orchestra-conductor photo, by Jamie Smith). Two Estonians, cellist and agent Maarit Kangron and violinist in the orchestra Marike Kruup, with Jonathan's girlfriend Jess Wadey;

two Bulgarians, composer Dobrinka Tabakova whose work Bell Tower in the Clouds gave such zest to last year's programme and assistant conductor Dorian Todorov;

and Jonathan - who was at his happiest this year, having hand-picked all the players he wanted and feeling more relaxed about his relationship to the music - with Eldbjørg, whom I'll see next in Svalbard.

Only sorry I didn't take a photo of my 88-year-old mum, who gamely arranged to be driven up from Banstead and back to attend her first Europe Day Concert, lovingly cared for by her goddaughter Sara while I flitted about. It was, unlike last year which had an elegiac tone, the jolliest of occasions. We're not out yet, the European Commission Representation in London lives to fight another day, and we're feeling more optimistic. Please get out and VOTE for a pro-Remain party today, those of you who can. I'm popping round to the local polling station before I depart for Sweden - alas not, like admirable Greta Thunberg, on the train. Transport around Europe is going to need some serious rethinking over the next year.

Incandescent Enescu

How I wish I'd devoted more than just two Monday afternoons of the Opera in Depth course this term to George Enescu's Oedipe. I knew the viscous sounds of the three symphonies, and the clearer lines of the neoclassical orchestral suites, but I'd postponed taking down from the shelf where it had sat unwrapped for so long the classic EMI recording with José van Dam, Brigitte Fassbaender, Gabriel Bacquier, Marjana Lipovšek, Barbara Hendricks and Nicolai Gedda with Lawrence Foster conducting the Monte Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra. Listening to it along with a handsome vocal score loaned by the Royal Opera turned out to be a revelation, and I don't think there could have been a better sonic guide.

From childhood fascination with a set of 78s featuring the young Menuhin playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto and Enescu conducting - let me hasten to add that it was the era of 33rpms, but we had an old wind-up gramophone which I used to spend hours playing with -  I learned that Enescu had been a similar prodigy. But not only that: Cortot (pictured with Enescu above) thought he was a better pianist than most, and he had a phenomenal musical memory. There are plenty of testimonies to prove that he really could go to the piano and play any part of Wagner's Ring without hesitation. In his youth, he was, at least to judge from this remarkable photograph, very beautiful.

Menuhin, whose 100th birthday we celebrate this year, sums it up idiosyncratically in his preface to Noel Malcolm's George Enescu: His Life and Music:

If it is possible for the reader to imagine a man with an encyclopaedic mind which never forgot anything he hear, or read, or saw in the course of his lifetime and could recall instantaneously and play in the most incandescent way any work from Bach, Wagner to Bartók; if the reader could imagine that mind allied to the most generous and selfless of hearts in a human being with a nobility and beauty of build, of presence, romantic in the lineaments of his face, and always propelled by a creative genius whether in speaking, teaching, conducting, playing the violin, the piano, and, very particularly, in composing, the image would still not be complete; a man full of humour (and a most amusing caricaturist) as well as deep philosophy, conversant with the languages and literatures of Europe and England, a man imbued with the highest forms of chivalry and earth-loving patriotism - this would be the teacher I had since I was eleven, continuously for two years, then again for five years and then intermittently over the years that were left to us together. No book can do justice to a man of this breadth and nobility...he remains for me the most extraordinary human being, the greatest musician and the most formative influence I have ever experienced.

Just to listen to the classic Menuhin/Enescu/Monteux recording of the Bach Concerto for Two Violins is to share in that hypnotic, or rather mindful, spell. I played the slow movement in class the other week, and I can't speak for the students, but I know I was overcome with that deep-level feeling one gets in the best meditations.

Menuhin said of Enescu's Third Violin Sonata that simply reproducing all the demands in the astonishingly detailed score was hard work enough - not even Mahler or Puccini were more specific. 'Dans le caractère populaire roumain' accounts for the extraordinary writing: this is Enescu's own very haunting distillation of folk fiddling from his native Romania, with its unique fusion of Arabic, Slav and Hungarian music. Delighted to find a version of his own recording with fellow Romanian Dinu Lipatti that also includes the score so you can see exactly what's going on.

Enescu completed the Third Violin Sonata in 1926; work on Oedipe took virtually the whole of the Twenties. There are some connections, not least in the oriental scales of eastern European folk music which surface in some of Oedipe's more lamentatory passages (and there's a lot of lamentation). In Act 2 Oedipe sings a folk-like curse with the same quarter-tones marked into the score that also appear in the sonata. But how to describe the opera as a whole? It's colossally ambitious. Originally Enescu asked from his librettist, the poet and dramatist Edmond Fleg, a text based on Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannos and Oedipus at Colonus, but didn't care for the two-part slab that resulted. So that was compressed and two more acts were added, dealing with celebrations of Oedipus's birth and Tiresias's dire prophecy in the first, the slaughter of Laios at the crossroads and the scene with the Sphinx in the second.

At the end of the first class, once I'd played the introduction and opening scene following a cross-section of Enescu's other works, a student said 'it sounds like nothing else' (since then, another has added that she faced the forthcoming Royal Opera production with trepidation, because the score alone on the recording conjures such phantasmagorical images. La Fura dels Baus will surely find strong ones, but they may not be the ones in the mind's eye). I agree - there are fleeting touches of Debussy and Ravel, but altogether it's a more original score than a comparable contemporary opera like Szymanowski's King Roger.

Enescu never overloads or prolongs the climaxes and seems - though it's premature to judge from a recording - to have a perfect sense of pace, especially in the third act which can be directly compared in its subject-matter to Stravinsky's deliberately semi-frozen (but oh so emotional at points) Oedipus Rex. Oedipe's three Act III sweeps of revelation feel totally organic. We've still got the fourth act to look at - cramming it in tomorrow alongside a first look at Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest, moving from the ridiculously sublime to the sublimely ridiculous.

I'd like to draw your attention to the scene with the Sphinx. Sadly this example begins with her first utterance - I'd prefer it to come in with her awakening, the fluttering of giant wings outdoing the hallucinations of Strauss's Herod in Salome - but the music for the scene itself is suitably discombobulating and ends with an upward glissando on the musical saw. The accompanying text is brilliant; provided with a translation alongside here, it shows you what a brilliant twist Enescu and Fleg gave to the myth. The standard mythic question ('what walks...' etc, used in Turnage's jokier Greek) is replaced with one which allows Oedipe to reveal both his heroism and his hubris. And the death of the Sphinx hints that she will have the last laugh.

Finally, let's go back to 1909 and the spark that lit Enescu's fire - his visit to the Comédie-Française to see the great French actor Jean Mounet-Sully (1841-1916) as Sophocles's Oedipus. Enescu declared that when, over a decade later, he tried to give musical voice to the self-blinding, it was Mounet-Sully's terrible cry that he had in mind.

And those eyes - well, you can see how tragedy-mask big they were for expressing the role even better in this everyday photo.

Of course you've got to love Enescu aged 70 for impersonating the performance. I lifted this from Malcolm's book, so I hope that's OK.

I was looking for film of Mounet-Sully - there are a couple of silent extracts, not online - and came across Jean Cocteau reciting his memories of a similar shock to Enescu's on encountering the actor as Oedipus at the Comédie-Française. Cocteau was 12 at the time but recreated the experience towards the end of his life with the utmost vividness. I like the look of the specially-produced little book he made on the subject.

Who would make a great Oedipus today? I haven't seen one (Alan Howard was nowhere near) and the only British actor I can think of with the range is Chiwetel Ejiofor. Certainly bass-baritone Bryn Terfel would be ideal for the opera. Johan Reuter is down to sing the role at Covent Garden - on the evidence of his performance as Nielsen's Saul in Copenhagen last year, he'll certainly be up to the challenge of an operatic role originally written with Chaliapin in mind. That greatest of basses declined since his vocal powers in his mid-60s wouldn't, he felt, have been up to the mark. Anyway, it was a surprise connection to the opera we'd just reluctantly left behind this term, Musorgsky's Boris Godunov. Can't wait for Monday week (14 March), when Richard Jones, Boris director, and Barry, no less, join me at the Frontline Club for what the composer described to me as a 'Twin Peaks' event.

Runnicles: best after Berglund

In Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony, that is (and only connect: Paavo was left-handed and so is Donald). I flew up to Inverness for a mere 20 minutes’ talk on this and Sibelius’s links with Beethoven, very much interconnected in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s programme with mighty Donald (how lucky they are in the commitment to his homeland of one of the world’s best conductors).

The flight passed over snowy Cairngorms and flights of geese beneath before a taxi sped me to the town on the river Ness, rushing at high level past my hotel and the Eden Court Theatre on the other side where the concert was held. The place enchanted me in the bright, cold weather with only the occasional snowstorm, enhanced by the knowledge of those mountains to the south and no major settlements to the north.

I last came here with dearest Lottie in 1983 to join the Scottish Chamber Orchestra on its steam-train trip to the Kyle of Lochalsh (the best perk of being the SCO’s ‘student publicity officer’). We stayed in the youth hostel which, my taxi driver told me, has since burnt down, leaving enough of a shell to save and within which, perhaps, to rehouse the museum, currently stuck in a concrete box. His lilting accent reminded me of the Invernessian charm. News of my business there, and mention of Sibelius, led him to tell me of a Scot he knew called Greig who lived in Norway and reversed the e and i.

We could live here, I foolishly thought, enticed by the nearness of wild nature and the fact that on the Saturday morning before my early afternoon flight I walked half way to Loch Ness along river and canal, greeting lots of locals – cheery at the sun, no doubt – with their dogs: any town where the country is so imminent has my vote. Lewes would probably be a more practical suggestion but heck, a castle here wouldn’t cost half our flat thanks to the insanity of the London market.

Alas, I left my camera behind and my mobile phone was in transit from Aix-en-Provence, where it had fallen out in a taxi, so no shots of the fast-flowing river or the thousands of snowdrops and crocuses along the way. Here’s a generic photo of the Eden Court – no architectural masterpiece, but you get a sense of its riverside setting.

As for talk and concert, I thought I’d better draw the threads suggested by the programme together: Sibelius and Beethoven, the painstaking path both took to the final results (Beethoven 9 finale, Sibelius 5 versions 1 and 3). Runnicles’ coup, after a first half balancing a Sibelius Finlandia which was never overbearing even from my second-row seat with an intonation-perfect, meaningful-in-every –note Alina Pogostkina as soloist in the Beethoven Violin Concerto (still boring to me despite that), was to follow the end of Sibelius 7 with Beethoven’s Leonora Overture No. 3 (the same C major). My blind spot for so many Beethoven scores meant I still didn’t find it as meaningful as the Sibelius symphony, but that was a beauty of a performance, every tricky tempo change seamlessly negotiated and the climaxes falling where they should. Delighted to find this sketch on sibelius.fi.

Predicting success from what I knew of Runnicles' flexible style, I’d made an unfavourable comparison in the talk with Rattle’s Sibelius cycle so fresh in my head: this is a work that Donald knows how to negotiate, on a first attempt by the way, and Sir Si, for all his strengths in Sibelius 1, 2 and 4, doesn’t. A lady in the interval ticked me off for setting one above the other, and she did it with typical Scots abruptness, not prepared to hear me out. But against that, there were five folk with whom I had really lovely conversations, including the local worthy who remembered Neeme Järvi unveiling the plaque to the new theatre. That wasn’t all to the good: the theatre had lost several hundred seats in the revamp, meaning that they couldn’t afford many visiting orchestras because they couldn’t sell as many tickets as they had before.

Still, this event was packed. A fine crowd; they deserve more music up there. And I loved meeting the very thoughtful and friendly Donald as well as Alina (pictured above) afterwards, thanks to the kind offices of the excellent Andrew Trinick. I mentioned the superb performance she gave of Widmann's Violin Concerto in Bamberg and our conductor was keen to hear a recording of it.

Now I’m in Glasgow after another talk, another great concert, enjoyed with the adored godchildren studying here, Evi and Alexander. I hadn’t intended to write about it but was so impressed by the sound coming from the orchestra under Mexican conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto that I just have, with a disclaimer, for The Arts Desk.

Work proceeds inspiringly on listening to all the Sibelius 4s for Radio 3’s Building a Library: halfway through I’ve found one which will be hard to beat, a real surprise to me at any rate. But I can’t say more about the performances; suffice it to say that being immersed in this dark, if not black, work has not been depressing – past an early dip, extrovert performances raised my spirits and the perfect construction amazes me more and more.

Another seminal work of  around the same time, Schoenberg’s Three Pieces for Piano Op. 11, was beautifully argued in word and performance by young Jordanian-born, British-trained pianist Karim Said (pictured above) the other week. The circumstances were remarkable: an evening at Lady Valerie Solti’s house, organized by Norman Rosenthal. Said was promoting his new album on Opus Arte, hence my invitation from the recording company.

What artistic treasures – one never knows if it’s legit to list them or not – and what unshowy good taste, much like the lady herself. She came to the rescue when I asked where Strauss, at whose funeral Solti conducted the Trio from Der Rosenkavalier where the ladies famously broke down one by one and came back in again to reach the end -  was among the pictures in the music room. The photograph in question – the old composer on his 85th birthday celebrations working with young Georg (Valerie referred to him throughout as ‘Solti) – seemed to have disappeared. She found me an unsigned copy, wonderful to see. Naturally it's not available, but I think - I may be wrong - that this photo of Strauss conducting also dates from the time of the celebrations.

A portrait of Thomas Mann led to a conversation about Joseph and his Brothers, which I’ve just begun and, contrary to fearful expectations, am bathing in its serene mythic re-interpretation. ‘Solti’ read one of its four books every summer holiday, and when he finished, went straight back to the beginning. I can already understand why.

Said’s concerts will always be a success if he presents them as revealingly as he did this one, explaining why the Schoenberg shouldn’t be seen as difficult music: how it should waltz and entertain. In that small space, the resonance of the Steinway could be overwhelming, and it is perhaps a little too often on the CD too; a few more genuine pianos wouldn’t go amiss. But there’s no doubt about Ashkar’s lively intelligence, re-creative art and knack of good programming. The Berg Sonata actually made sense and flew by for once rather than sounding like an improvisation, though the improvisatory quality was still there and the becalmed ending seemed like the goal of all its labours. Fabulous neoclassical Enescu, too. The promotion did its work: I’ll be seeking Said out from now onwards.