Ten days of great Zoom visitors

I rely upon the kindness of great performers for adrenalin highs in my Zoom classes, and a recent run has, though I say it myself, been spectacular on both the Opera in Depth and Mahler 1 courses - I might as well drop the names right now: Anna Larsson, Golda Schultz, Robin Ticciati and Mark Wigglesworth. You may need to click to enlarge a lot of these screenshots, and I've tried to reduce them to a cross-section rather than the full crowd, but above, bottom right, is glorious Golda, part of a very special duo of visits. 

Robin Ticciati decided he'd like to see us between final rehearsal and first night of the sensational (opera production of the year?) Dialogues des Carmélites at Glyndebourne, and for it was better since I wouldn't be prone to gushing about the first night, so overwhelming that I took the liberty of snapping a full company bow, Ticciati and director Barrie Kosky included.

I reviewed that here on theartsdesk; you might conversely say I'd drunk the Ticciati kool-aid, but what I think of as the professional relationships I have with the great and good are based on total respect in the first place. Of course I'm at liberty to say if there was a style mismatch, or I didn't think the work was quite as great as the performer did - The Wreckers, prepared at the very highest level, was a case in point. But we know how Poulenc's masterpiece - one of the greatest in all opera - never fails, even if I wasn't prepared for the cruelty and devastation of Kosky's vision. 

After a very excited RT phoning on Thursday to say he was ready to talk, Friday's visitor was very reflective - clearly tired, but so friendly with everyone, and so eloquent as ever. He talked, among other things, of the joy and necessity of being there at the start of rehearsals, how inspiring Kosky was in his first speech to the company, the special nature of silences (something that had struck me when I first met him, sharing a panel at the end of a study day on Jenůfa, which he conducted on the Glyndebourne tour) and finally - very movingly - the nature of home. Which is now, for him and his wife, very much Sussex. Over six years in Berlin, he loved the experience of living in the city but never felt entirely at ease with the level on which he could converse in German. And the Glyndebourne experience is, at its best, the most enriching you can have in the operatic world.

Golda, whose presence was due to another positive spirit who's just joined my course, Julia Noakes, was bright and bouncy on the Monday afternoon. She'd had the day after the first night to come to herself, and the parallels with the down-to-earth, forthright, empathetic and incorruptible Madame Lidoine, the second Prioress, whose arrival brings a breath of air in to the claustrophobic world so emphasised in Kosky's production, are striking. Golda thought of becoming a nun at 17, but her priest-advisor suggested her gifts might be used on other ways. And so they are. A marvellous human being in every way. I'm going to segue to my next guest via two production shots, cropping to emphasise the connections (credits: Glyndebourne image, Richard Hubert Smithl Garsington image, Julien Guidera, I think - I got sent three different sets of photos). It's amazing how strong an image is a reassuring hand laid on another, and Schultz's Lidoine does that in Kosky's production, more than once.

It's also a very moving moment in Bruno Ravella's Garsington production of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos when Young Woo Kim's Bacchus places his right hand on top of the left hand of Natalya Romaniw's Ariadne.

I'd never been more moved by this scene. and never heard a Bacchus as good live. The South Korean tenor is adored by his colleagues, another blithe spirit, as I think one can tell from his performance on stage. In my review for theartsdesk, I suggested that though Carmelites and Ariadne are very different operas, the respective Glyndebourne and Garsington achievements are on the same extraordinary level - thoughtful production, perfect cast, and radical but perfect conducting: in this case from my long-term generous visitor to the classes Mark Wigglesworth. 

I enlisted MW's help in my Mahler 1 course, covering Symphonies 1-5, Das klagende Lied and the earlier songs (the second term, starting in late September, will deal with 6-9, Kindertotenlieder and Das Lied von der Erde). He's conducting the BBC Philharmonic in the First Symphony at the Proms on 18 July, but was heavily involved in Ariadne rehearsals when we covered that. So just before the last of the 10 classes, on movements 3-5 of the Fifth, he visited for a more general discussion, but again with fascinating chapter and verse (I must summarise at some point, but need to watch again).

First of the visitors, and absolutely not least, was the great Anna Larsson. I used a mixture of DVDs for complete movements, and when it came to the Second and Third Symphonies, it had to be Abbado in Lucerne; AL is his mezzo/contralto soloist in both, on stage from the beginning and engaging directly with the audience sans score. and she confirmed that these performances were beyond any others. 

I'm glad my New York student Alan compared her with Christa Ludwig and asked if they'd met, because we had a fascinating chronicle of how Abbado, having first heard Larsson in audition, told Ludwig she must hear her. Intense sessions followed. Here's another performer with feet firmly on the ground, colleagial and warm (we'd become friendly when I visited the musically excellent Rheingold she facilitated in the barn of the family farm in Dalarna, in which she sang both Fricka and Erda). But then I think it's true of (nearly) all artists who are truly at the top of their profession: they are secure in what they do, and generosity flows from that. 

Finally, a sadness. Sondra Arning's son gave his mother the present of joining these classes. She has been a vibrant contributor, with so much to say about all the music she experienced and - as a singer - participated in while living in New York. Soon her husband Patrick also joined up; they both attended both courses this term, sometimes on separate screens, sometimes together (as pictured above). Having made some pithy observations as usual, Patrick had to leave the last Mahler class early to go to see his doctor. On the Friday he felt il in an interval at the Wigmore Hall, where they were regular visitors. He died of a massive heart attack on the Saturday. A huge shock to everyone, above all to Sondra - they had been married for 51 years - but in one way, since he'd reached a great age, a blessing, as there was a lot wrong with him and cancer had just been detected. 

Patrick will be with us in spirit when we embark on the summer course, Wagner's Parsifal, in association with the Wagner Society of Scotland (it's a while back that I began an adventure which began with the first two Ring operas up in the Trossachs, the last two online, followed by Tristan and Meistersinger). More on that, and the season proper, anon.

Remain with Tillmans

24/6 Any updates in the comments (do add if you feel like it). I haven't the spirit to put up another piece on this craziest of days.

My New Best Friends in the Gildas Quartet reacted with this photo to the Wolfgang Tillmans-designed T-shirt I wore at a fascinating mini-conference on press and young artists organised at the Goldsmiths' Centre in Farringdon by the City Music Foundation. I could only stay for an hour because I had to rush to get a tube, bike, train and bus to Garsington for what turned out to be a first-class Idomeneo (an opera, incidentally, by an Austrian about Greeks and the forerunners of the Turks with an Italian libretto, performed by Brits and one Australian, with a Swedish conductor, and I'm making a guess, though I can't find it confirmed anywhere, that vivacious assistant conductor and chorus 'master' Susanna Stranders is Danish).

That was a shame, since the CMF artists seemed like a lively group, and I know and admire several, like the pianist Samson Tsoy, already. The panel consisted of lovely Maddy Castell from the BBC (below, foreground left), Kimon Daltas, Editor of Classical Music and sometime contributor to The Arts Desk (right) and myself. The Gildas Quartet are on the left.

It was a rush beforehand, too - had to go and pick up two of the T-shirts designed by Tillmans by cycling via the Serpentine Gallery, where I had a lively chat with the very nice woman in the shop. She thought I should flout the 'antiquated dress code' of Garsington by displaying one or t'other, but of course in the end I didn't have the nerve, merely opening my white shirt to reveal the message to selected punters. Here are the shirts sported by model, the simpler message first

and the one I really like, which - since I took the shot in the mirror as the others didn't work well - needs interpreting: 'No man is an island. No country by itself'. I hope to get to wear it after today by simply adding a 'd' to 'Vote' at the bottom.

Worth adding a few more of Tillmans' manifestos to the ones I've already posted. The list of hostile names on the Brexit side has become more piquant, though of course Trump with his unequivocal support for Out - is he really coming to the UK today? - isn't there yet.

and the messages crystal-clear.

As a recent reminder of the darker forces at work, just read this on my main source of information about Russia, The Interpreter: some vile misfit has been insinuating to a state-owned TV channel that the murder of Jo Cox might have been a put-up job. Negativity knows no bounds. Yet in all the nastiness of the past weeks, there's been more resourceful humour. This one I like

as well as one aimed at the oldies who are most likely to vote Brexit - 'Vote Leave on Friday'.

But enough - though it'll be on my mind all day, and at the first night of Jenůfa at ENO before we go on to some gathering or other. A few calming floral scenes from Garsington, which obliged with sunshine after the rains and before the big storm last night.

Finally, one good piece of news: Jonathan Bloxham, very talented cellist and conductor, and my guest at Garsington last night, has just been appointed Assistant Conductor at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. What a wonderful time to start, with Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla taking over as Principal Conductor; sure she'll be a wonderful mentor, too. Nice to end, as I began, with a take on the young musicians who give us such massive hope for the future.

Winter blooms and summer nostalgia

The daffodils shaking their golden heads in front of Old St Peter, Stockbridge, in Hampshire shouldn't have been doing that on 29 December. It's almost as outlandish as the psychedelic garden of light sprung up in Leicester Square for this weekend only, courtesy of Lumiere in its first London incarnation* (we've loved the Durham takeover featuring many of the same installations, to be pictured in their West End locations in a future post).

I ought briefly to record a more natural winter scene above Stockbridge, where we walked around the Iron Age hill fort of Woolbury Ring with friends Alfredo and Oscar. The beeches which surround it looked splendid showing their shapely bare bones below a sky of scudding clouds.

So obviously the problem has been global weirding in cahoots with the El Nino effect. December was way too mild - not to mention destructively wet, though the south had none of the north's flooding problems this time - and only now have we resorted to overcoats and having the heating on for long. General trends would seem to include the early blooming of camellia 'Debbie' in the back yard, pipping last year's record by several weeks (4 December was the first unfurling this time, pictured on the 6th).

while the scented South African and Madeiran pelargoniums in one of the window boxes are still blooming (though in lieu of two frosty nights I brought them in on Thursday).

Our Christmas Day walk from home to Kensington Gardens to walk adored Teddie before heading back to Lancaster Gate for lunch with him and his family threw up some oddities on the way. Not least a bumble-bee nectar-quaffing at this plant in Bramham Gardens, an Earls Court square which could teach our dismal set-up here a thing or two. I seem to have missed the bee with each shot, but I can assure you it was there.

Strolling up to the park via the very desirable residences of Launceston Place, we found the jasmine out and smelling fragrant already (and this, of course, is not the winter-flowering, yellow variety).

The park made more seasonal sense, with its skeletal trees showing off their handsome structures, and plenty of mud for Ted to wallow in. Here he is having greeted us near the Round Pond, the little darling who's set off such a Sehnsucht in me for a cockapoo resembling to some degree my beloved childhood poodle Zsabo.

But I'm supposed to be on the subject of flora, not fauna. And that will do for the winter spate so far. An excursion to Kew this afternoon involved many more wonders, and frozen ponds, but we can wait for that.

What I can't wait for is to revisit a few so far unmentioned blissful summer scenes of 2015, the more so since most of these involve timely, profuse blooms and the pics have been sitting on my computer waiting selective exposure when they really need to be filed away on my external box. First comparison to segue back into the floral world is between the sea at St Leonards on Christmas Eve (a very successful visit to J's mum taking her to our new favourite spot, the marvellous Kinoteatr Cafe with its restored 1913 cinema and collection of 1950s Russian art) and a summer scene further north. While J collected Wyn from her dementia care home, I strolled along the front towards Hastings.

I could even have joined the solitary bather, it didn't looked that cold. But even in the height of summer it took me two days to find the opportunity to dip in a freezing North Sea on an expectedly delightful return visit to the East Neuk Festival. Here's the lovely Debra Boraston who accompanied me on the first walk along the beach at the bottom of Cambo House's glen.

and J, to whom I was showing Fife coastal delights for the first time, on the same beach close to midnight.

It was too cold to sit and drink wine on a rock, as I'd done with friends Julie and Andy at the same time last year. So we made a leisurely retreat past the seaside alders at the bottom of the valley.

Cambo House's walled garden is Eden, a substantial enough one to live in and one of the largest in Europe. John Luther Adams's hornfest for the festival's closing event could not quite outstrip the beauty of the location itself, and though the communal experience was wonderful, having the garden to one's self on a sunny morning was even more remarkable.

A river (more a rivulet) bisects it

and my favourite zone is a kind of meadow thick with poppies of various types.

Peonies were thriving here several weeks later than down south

and I need to suggest the humming of innumerable bees with a bumble on a thistle.

Plenty more of those on the coastpath from Cambo to Crail.

and poppies galore edging the fields near the sea at Cambo Barn, cleared annually of its potato crates to house top notch concerts in superb acoustics.

Cue another big walled garden, the one at Garsington you get to see if you take a vintage bus from the cricket pavilion. Ed(wi)na Ashton came with me to see Intermezzo and wondered alongside at the white display

and the multitudes of Papaverum orientalis

while Deborah van der Beek joined me for Death in Venice, the more successful of the two shows I saw there in 2015. While we missed the last bus to the walled garden owing to my bigger transport problems, Deborah still managed to enjoy the peonies in the re-creation of Ottoline Morrell's original Garsington jewel at the side of the excellent Wormsley Pavilion.

Not that they could possibly have exceeded her own, snapped while she and husband Andrew were staying at her late mother's home in Corsham while flood-damaged Cantax House, Lacock was being restored. The wisteria around a rather smaller pavilion is a delight too.

A similar complement over at Lacock

where the peonies frame some of Deborah's sculptures

and foreground her topiaried lady.

We went for an excursion to see the gardens of Bradford on Avon on open day, and though none of them quite compared to Cantax, the situations gave wonderful tiered views going up the hill from the river and the Saxon chapel alongside the church.

as well as glimpses of fine Georgian facades behind flower-covered walls

and a walk we took up another hill and out into the country for the last of the gardens. I've not done Bradford justice from three wonder-filled visits; but we'll be back. Meanwhile, deep sigh for the summer past, and hope with only a few months to wait now before the first flush of blooming. In the meantime we live for more cold, bright days like yesterday - when Kew was a miracle of sharpness - and head off to more Lumiere pockets in different parts of town.

*Just read that the lights had to be switched off last night (Saturday) because of overcrowding - victim of its own success, clearly. We intend to go to Kings Cross tonight. UPDATE: when I got to Kings Cross, the queues down the tube were so horrendous I turned back. But I did see the big miracle, the colouring of Westminster Abbey's West Front, and loved the atmosphere of the crowd around the aquarium phone box by Grosvenor Square. All this to be picture-chronicled anon.

City, country

Midsummer weekend was one of extraordinary contrasts. That Saturday afternoon I joined a rainbow of humanity - veterans, babies, folk of all colours and creeds (or none) - around Shoreditch's Arnold Circus for the 'happening' of Pulitzer prize-winning composer David Lang's Crowd Out! for 1,000 local performers (in the end it was more like 600, but in future it could fill Wembley Stadium). Among those snapped by official photographer James Berry was our dear friend Julie (far right in top pic, with nephew Rowan third from right), down from Scotland to stay with us and  see another show in the Spitalfields Festival which by total coincidence I happened to be attending anyway.

For the Sunday I'd decided - and persuaded the diplo-mate, who came very reluctantly but exited happy enough - to brave the braying plutocrats of Garsington Opera: partly because I hadn't seen its new home on the Wormsley Estate, chiefly because I thought that underrated director Daniel Slater might have an interesting take on Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen.

He did - the utterly compelling Claire Booth as Vixen Sharpears with her Fox, Victoria Simmonds, pictured above by Clive Barda, a shot I had permission to crop to landscape for the Arts Desk review - and though many in the crowd were coming up with the usual absurdities ('I think I heard a tune at the very end'), the site is vast enough to escape and have, in our case, an entire formal garden to yourselves.

Two people had quite separately told me that the Wormsley cricket pitch is 'the most beautiful in the world'. I scoffed: how could the humble Chilterns envelop anything as lovely as a pitch on much higher ground? But I have to admit that as we got off the punters' bus at the pavilion, what spread out before us in a substantial valley, with hills on the other side and behind us, was picture-perfect. This shot doesn't catch the amazing green chessboard squares to the side.

Tea in one of the marquees overlooking it was enough to pre-empt a pricey supper under the aegis of the Jamie Oliver empire (we hadn't brought a picnic). The very friendly Clare Adams, one vital bulwark of the Garsington experience, offered to give us filled rolls and cookies for the interval: our solitude consuming it in the formal garden, with only very loud birds and the distant sound of the children in the opera playing football over the hedge, couldn't have been lovelier. And, as in the old garden to the side of the former Garsington marquee, there were still peonies.

We also got on a fine vintage bus - the smell of leather and plastic is so evocative - to stroll around the walled garden, actually only about ten minutes' walk away, as it happened.

This was peak season for philadelphus - mock orange with its heady scent - and delphiniums delighted in by innumerable bees,

foxgloves integrated into the formal planning

and poppies (though just wait until I get round to documenting the walled garden at Cambo House in the East Neuk, albeit - being cameraless - dependent upon the photography of others).

A few more peonies were flourishing by a flint wall

and the rose garden was at its height too.

Outside the gate

a bird of prey hovered overhead

and on the other side, a beech wood leading up the slope evoked Hukvaldy, where Janáček began and in effect ended his life: in fact the territory is even closer to that beloved, rolling homeland than Glyndebourne.

The Opera Pavilion of steel, timber and fabric, designed by Robin Snell with cues from Japanese kabuki buildings, deserves all the awards it's received, chiefly from RIBA.

Inside it's spacious - plenty of leg room, wide seats, unlike the old provisional marquee - and acoustically wonderful: maybe the back wall helps, but I could hear every orchestral texture. Fewer strings certainly helped. And there's just enough of a view of the profuse garden to the right, as there was of course at Garsington Manor. The punters? Well, J is right, of course: tax the rich more and you could afford another opera house truly for the people.

Yet I like what Douglas Boyd is doing on the artistic front: I wrote the notes for a weekend of talks, readings of recently unearthed poems by Siegfried Sassoon - who of course had connections with the old Garsington and Lady Ottoline Morrell -  and concerts (Beethoven, Schoenberg, Bridge) called Peace in Our Time, which I wish I could have attended. Next year there are new productions of Strauss's Intermezzo, which wasn't taken seriously enough at the old house, and Britten's Death in Venice. Now what will the tuneseekers make of that?

I'd been surprised to find myself among the green at the previous day's Spitalfields Festival join-together. I knew I had to head up from Spitalfields to St Leonard's Shoreditch, the church which featured in the superlative television comedy Rev. But I had no idea that just behind it is a bandstand (and a fixed ping-pong table) in a beautifully planted central garden.

This is Arnold Circus, centre of London's first big social housing project. In 1890 the East End rookeries were swept away by the London County Council under a new Housing Act. "So conveniently situated and nicely laid out is the Boundary Estate', writes Harold P Clunn in the only comprehensive volume of the many I possess on London, 'that many people would doubtless prefer it to Fulham or Barnsbury as a place of residence'.

That day in the East End did make me wonder. Sure, no big park is in striking distance, but I further sensed what I'd felt at a Huguenot Festival last year, that there's a really diverse community here, and that even the new money sweeping in from the City is going to obliterate entirely the old pockets of character. And how hip did I feel when, as we hit a nearby Shoreditch cafe on the estate, I was hailed by none other than super-cool Brazilian Henrique Paiva, leading former habitue of Sophie's salons, and his girlfriend Yasmin. He got Rowan to photograph us against embossed wall art just over the road.

Then it was back to Toynbee Hall - which, as a place of good works by Oxford graduates since 1884, is another slice of social history - to hear the first third of the music-theatre triple bill I'd missed the previous evening.

More inner-city regeneration a week and a bit later on with an invitation to attend the opening of the House of Illustration at the back of Kings Cross. First came Kings Place, and I remember scoffing when one of its movers and shakers declared that the whole area would become a thriving civic centre in a few years. It's well on the way, and with St Martin's College of Art and Design now occupying the warehouses going to rack and ruin some time back, and the square in front deckchaired and big screened for Wimbledon it felt like a very pleasant place to be on a warm summer evening. The standing figure in the picture is godson Alexander, down for a big celebration the night before, about which more anon.

And this is us walking down the newly opened pedestrian tunnel to Kings Cross tube. I just found out more about it: it's called Pipette and was created by Miriam Sleeman and Tom Sloan. The length of this 'LED integrated lightwall' breaks a record, apparently, at 90 metres. Hope no-one messes it up.

The exhibition opening couldn't have been blither: is there anyone who doesn't love the illustrations of Quentin Blake? The exhibition opened my eyes to so much more than his work for Roald Dahl - oh, those Twits! - including drawings for Candide, which I wanted to buy for Alexander but couldn't, a fascinating Russell Hoban story and Michael Rosen's Sad Book, a way of trying to come to terms with the death of the author's 18 year old son. That I did manage to buy on the spot. These are the pages that break my heart.

Blake, a very sprightly 81 in his trademark white shoes, made a lovely, natural speech, as fine in its way as the extraordinary motivational rhetoric of Joanna Lumley.

Another city/country 'only connect: before a stupendous Owen Wingrave at the Aldeburgh Festival, smoked salmon sandwiches with the divine Maggi Hambling and ever-affectionate Tory Lawrence just down the road. Danger - artist(s) at work (though when isn't Maggi, love her to bits, slightly dangerous?)

Of course I curse myself for having left the camera which contained photos of studio work on the platform at Watford Junction the other week, where it was not, alas, handed in. So I'm reliant on the few shots J took on his iPhone, including the above and just one - with Maggi's immortal scallop all too distant, as am I photographing it in vain - of Aldeburgh beach on a splendid birthday.

The camera loss was the infuriating end to a lovely afternoon. I'd promised to take my young friends Ed and Kristaps to see the Queen Beech, the gigantic result of endless pollarding, on the forested common above Berkhamstead. We'd even fixed the date when a National Trust lady left a comment on my blog about the first, Mabey-inspired expedition, telling me that the great tree had finally given up the ghost after hundreds of years. Its life is to be celebrated and in a sense - as Mabey would be the first to say - it takes on a new existence as home to fresh fauna, fungi and birds. Awe-inspiring as it once was - a reminder here -

there was something splendid about its fall, the orangey-red bark and the pollarded globules inspectable on an easy clamber. Which Ed and Kristaps, keen barefoot walkers and tree climbers, were keen to do. Here's one of the few shots Ed took, relying on me only to be let down.

And this is where I draw the line. Our young, barefooted nature-lovers were soon shinning up a standing beech nearby and twigging that the platform would be a perfectly good place to spend the night. I was content to study the bracket fungus on its trunk.

And all this chimes nicely with a new bout of reading more Robert Macfarlane, being struck afresh by how he spoke as he writes at an extra-musical event of the East Neuk Festival. Which ought to be the next stop but one here.