Three Kings, Three Rhinemaidens

Epiphany today brings Casper, Balthazar and Melchior, though not in the Bach cantata for the day (but here they are in Dürer's Adoration of the Magi anyway),

while on Monday in the first of this term's Opera in Depth course classes we embark on a four-year journey through Wagner's Ring, starting in the depths of the Rhine with Woglinde, Wellgunde and Flosshilde (pictured here by Arthur Rackham teasing Alberich).

Cantata first. This time in 2013, on my first attempted Bach cantatas journey, it was the resplendent BWV 65, 'Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen', decking out the arrival of the kings with the panoply of strings, two oboes, two oboi da caccia and two recorders. Clearly Bach wanted to do something completely different for the following year in Leipzig, 1725. BWV 123, 'Liebster Immanuel, Herzog der Frommen' continues at its heart two deeply expressive arias - as in BWV 65, also for tenor and bass. The tenor's expressively emphatic  refusal to be daunted by the 'cruel journey of the cross' is  underlined by two oboi d'amore (such a different sound from the caccia variety, for inwardness, of course).

I don't for once buy John Eliot Gardiner's description of the bass's 'Lass, o Welt, mich aus Verachtung' as 'one of the loneliest arias Bach ever wrote' - how can it be when the flute hovers above the voice and the continuo line, and the major key prevails? Admittedly the text of the outer sections is bleak, and there's a plaintive cadenza in one of the settings of the word 'Einsamkeit', 'loneliness'. The opening chorus is in the dominating minor, but in a lilting 9/8 with pastoral trills and grace notes for the wind, and the concluding chorale, in another flowing metre, ends piano. Another treasure at the highest level.

So looking forward to my second Ring journey in the 28 years I've been taking an opera appreciation course. Our Rheingold half of term - the second half is devoted to Janacek's From the House of the Dead to tie in with the new Royal Opera production, now conducted by regular Opera in Depth visitor Mark Wigglesworth - links with Vladimir Jurowski's four-year adventure at the Royal Festival Hall. Das Rheingold is on 27 January; predictably, tickets are like gold dust. Singing Alberich for the first time is Robert Hayward, who came to the Frontline Club at the end of last term to talk to us not only about his Wagner roles but also - since we had just brought it to an end after five weeks which confirmed for me that it's even more astounding than I used to think - about Musorgsky's Khovanshchina.

Last autumn Robert sang the role of Ivan Khovansky in the revival of David Poutney's Welsh National Opera production (pictured above by Clive Barda for WNO shortly before the prince-in-decline is assassinated. He was also very nearly in the superlative Prom performance conducted, and never better, by Semyon Bychkov).

Robert also portrayed the Walküre Wotan in Opera North's semi-staged Ring, as involved and moving a performance of that killer role as any I've seen.

He says it will be interesting to find the humanity in Alberich, as he has also done with Ivan Khovansky and Scarpia, a role which he says could happily sing in three runs a year for total contentment.

Here he is with me at the Frontline - should have got a student to snap us spontaneously while we were in conversation. But you get the idea, that he's a very affable, modest and down-to-earth person. Extraordinary that he started out as a counter-tenor - he is going lower, which is to say higher, by the year.

You can see him in the Barbican performance of Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle with Rinat Shaham and the National Youth Orchestra conducted by Mark Elder tomorrow night. Here's what Robert Beale thought of yesterday evening's Manchester performance on The Arts Desk. Meanwhile, if you're willing or able to come to this term's Opera in Depth, just leave me a message here with your email - I won't publish it but I promise to respond. Further details here in The Wagnerian (my own flyer is rather different).

UPDATE (7/01) - the first Sunday after Epiphany, its subject Christ lost and found by his parents in the temple (cue another Dürer above) follows directly on its heels this year, so here we are with the next in line to the one which moved me so much - the (by contrast) three-quarters bright BWV 124, 'Meinen Jesum laß ich nicht' (it was performed on 7 January in 1725, too). I find it intriguing that Bach should carry over one oboe d'amore from BWV 123, because the context is wholly joyful this time - you'd have thought he'd want a straight oboe, but maybe this exquisite variety creates an extra sense of intimacy against the horn-doubled cantus firmus of the opening chorus (Rilling's oboists, as I've already mentioned, are superlative). The pain comes in the tenor's 'Und wenn der harte Todesschlag', so very operatic with the jabbing repeated notes of the strings to which the oboe d'amore and the voice respond. Operatic, too, is the bass recitative, with its chromatics and it run on the word 'Lauf'. The soprano/alto duet which follows is sheer dancing delight, albeit with only continuo complement. Delicious, of course, from Arleen Auger and Helen Watts - what a joy these soloists are on the Rilling set.

Burning off 2016 on a Dutch beach

It was a bit of a jolt, coming out of a friendly New Year party of seven - gezellig is the Dutch word for such a happy time, a less overused equivalent to 2016's Danish hygge - and heading at around 2am for the promenade at Scheveningen with its eight-mile sandy beach. I'm sure our lovely hosts Cornelius and Marina, great people doing fine work for the world, and their daughter Emma won't mind a contrasting shot here, with friends Machteld (Max) and Nick left and right and J's legs, just to show what we left behind.

After an inadvertent tour of The Hague, Max drove towards the big bonfire Scheveningen holds every year, but the harbour routes were blocked. Which meant a detour through a slightly scary-seeming part of town - deserted braziers flickering in a cul de sac of rather mean-looking houses by egalitarian Dutch standards - before she could park the car to let us get out and overlook the beach. I had that urge one gets when spellbound by big blazes to walk down and get a closer view.

Most of the fireworks which had given us such a spectacular display from the balcony of Emma's bedroom

had been spent, leaving a red mess underfoot

and the champagne, too, had been consumed

but the fierceness of the fire could hardly have been much diminished from its midnight status

and I guess it was only possible in an open space of this magnitude, with folk still walking along the sea's edge (don't ask me why this untouched-up red is so pronounced).

The impression will remain, pictures regardless: a sort of paradigm for our current uneasy time of coming out of our bourgeois comfort to face an angry world (with shades of Brunnhilde's purifying Immolation at the end of Gotterdammerung). Having looked up a report of the full event, I see that the pre-fire pile-up, which always has to be the highest in the Netherlands, is even more substantial, a tower of wooden crates: have a look at this report. Meanwhile, here are a few seconds of fire in action.

Would love to have seen the following morning's ritual, where thousands of swimmers in orange caps rush into the freezing-cold sea. But Amsterdam called; we got back at about 4am, where godsons Frank and Charlie were winding up a modest party. Here's another domestic shot of gezelligheid at the apartment on the lovely Sarphatipark, where the boys are working on marking in their many travels on a big map (mother Max has worked for KLM for many years now).

And a morning shot of adorable li'l Johnny, an engaging cross between Shih-tzu and Maltese Terrier, in one of his two favourite spots. The fireworks had rather traumatised him, and the crackers were still going off the following day.

I owe hopefully not too laborious accounts of our first-time excursions to Delft, Den Bosch, Gouda, Utrecht and the enchanting village/town of Buren on the only sunny day of our stay. But let's end this one with our New Year's Day trip to the Rijksmuseum, to see the transformation and more of the collections.

There were some stunning, unpostcarded objects I want to picture here eventually, but let's stick to two which are topical, from the new medieval and Renaissance galleries on the ground floor. As yesterday was Epiphany, how about this carved-wood riot of Magi and attendants from Adriaen van Wesel's altarpiece in the Chapel of the Confraternity of Our Lady, St Janskerk, Den Bosch?

And as a symbol of sorrow for the woes of our world, here's a Mater Dolorosa in the centre of the gallery.

Despite such pensive moments, it was a happy way to spend three hours of an otherwise lazy day between late rising and more gezellig gatherings with Max, her two sisters Eline and Dorette - friends we've known almost as long as Nick and Max - and Orfeuo, travelling in from Arnhem to see us, at the Concertgebouw Cafe.

Three kings, two good men

There’s no point in saying ‘now here’s a gem’, because I suspect that with each Bach cantata I discover this year there will be treasure.  But Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen (All they from Sheba shall come) BWV 65, the Epiphany conclusion of JSB’s first Christmas cycle for Leipzig in 1724, has an especially rich, jewelled instrumental cortege for its three wise men (Bassano's sumptuous depiction of the homage illustrated above).

One commentator reckons the additions to the usual strings and continuo – two each of horns, oboes da caccia and recorders – respectively stand for gold, frankincense and myrrh (associated with embalming; apparently recorders were especially connected with funeral music).  John Eliot Gardiner, whose 6 January 2000 performance in Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche I’ve just heard, associates the recorders with ‘the high pitches..[of] oriental music’ and the oboes da caccia with eastern ‘shawm-like double-reed instruments (salamiya and zurna)'.

Whatever the significance, the pairs gild a splendid opening processional with a hint of drone bass before the chorus parts’ canonical entry, and the tenorial singularity of the oboes da caccia (model illustrated below) dances around the bass aria.

The diamond, though, is the tenor’s number. We’ve moved from the splendid gifts of the magi to the ‘humble heart’ offered by the reciter, with ‘the gold of faith, the frankincense of prayer, the myrrh of patience.’ As if to show how rich the non-material gifts can be, the three pairs plus two violins play delightful little one-bar figures off against one another in a lilting 3/8. This is more opulent and multicoloured even than the kings' opening procession.

Bach's choice of concluding chorale, set to a French 16th century tune, begins with the first line of what we know as ‘O God, our help in ages past’. Another great gift then, infinitely more memorable than the compromised Bach concert at Kings Place I heard last Thursday (which won't stop me going to more with different ensembles in KP's Bach Unwrapped series). Here's another Harnoncourt performance on YouTube so you can hear what I've been writing about - though nothing can match the trumpet-like splendours of Gardiner's horns.

One strand of the Christmas reading was to devour the rest of Ludmila Ulitskaya’s works so far translated. The two books in question are diametrically opposed in style. The Funeral Party is a novella I shall read again, engaging as it is from first paragraph to last. It's a quirky evocation, in the manner of the last act of La Bohème but more cheerful, of friends gathered in a New York attic round a dying Russian émigré artist, Alik, a free spirit whom everyone adores (and we do, too, thanks to deft strokes from Ulitskaya) His crazy wife and former lovers among the women initiate rather haphazard events such as the consecutive visits of a priest to give the last rites and a rabbi. The death seems inevitable, and not to be feared; the burial is followed by a funeral party which turns out, as all such should, to be a vibrant celebration of a life.

Throughout, Ulitskaya’s skill is in the little things that the characters say and do. There’s not much room for any of this in the relatively epic Daniel Stein, Interpreter. It’s a curious semi-fictional testament to Oswald Rufeisen, a Polish Jew who saved others while working for the Gestapo as an interpreter before emigrating to Israel and becoming a Carmelite priest. He’s clearly a good man, and Ulitskaya uses his reconciliatory words and deeds as a reflection on the riven religious factions in the beleaguered holy land. It seems that Stein/Rufeisen visited his old friend Karol Wojtyla in the Vatican and encouraged him to recognize Israel – I had no idea the Catholic church didn’t until then – and to be the first pope ever to visit a mosque.

The problem is that because reflections on Daniel/Dieter are mostly testaments in epistolary form, we miss the more immediate human idiosyncrasy which is Ulitskaya’s strength in the three other books of hers I’ve read. The scope, ranging from 1930s Poland to the 1990s, is certainly ambitious, though I can think of other masterpieces which convey the theme of what entails true Christian goodness more succinctly (that wonderful French film Of Gods and Men remains a benchmark). And I don’t know whether Daniel is supposed to have a fault, but for me it inevitably comes when he fails to acknowledge the right to inclusion of a parishioner’s gay son, protesting that homosexuality is beyond his understanding because ‘women are so beautiful, so attractive’, and advising the mother to send her son away from home so that he doesn't trouble her. So much for Christ-like acceptance.

Interesting, isn’t it, that just because a novel takes a big theme like the Holocaust and the Jews in Israel, that doesn’t make it more of a masterpiece than one which adopts a slice of life and infers the larger resonances from what’s done and said in its duration. The Funeral Party is for me the masterpiece of the two (and has the advantage of such simplicity that, like Chekhov’s stories, I imagine I could struggle through it in the Russian). But I still want to read everything Ulitskaya has written, especially the novel Vladimir Jurowski selected in his typically challenging summer reading list for The Arts Desk back in 2011, Imago. Hopefully that's next on the list for translation.