Heavenly conversations in a year of Zoom classes

Ian Page, inspirational founder of what was originally Classical Opera and now goes by the collective vocal/orchestral heading of The Mozartists, wondered if his e-mail comment wouldn't look a bit pretentious out of context when I asked him if I might quote it. I'll still do so because it expressed what I've felt about those especially magical Zoom classes where musicians who haven't seen each other for some time - or even decades - find themselves together in the class and start conversing. Ian was referring to meetings with that wonderful mezzo Jean Rigby and her husband, the director Jamie Hayes, whom he hadn't seen for a quarter of a century, then with Mark Wigglesworth and Linda Esther Gray in the last Fidelio class, and added 'I've never been a particularly religious person, but it was almost like a vision of the afterlife, being able to chat about music with loved and respected friends and colleagues in a haven of timelessness!' Above, Mark (second from the right in the bottom row) is making us laugh. Ian is at the right next row up, Linda is on the left on the row above that and of course that's me second from left at the top (click if you want a bigger image).

The other three-way (four if you count myself as interlocutor) 'heavenly conversation' that brought us so much joy was between director Richard Jones and Wagnerian sopranos Sue Bullock and Dame Anne Evans. It was originally supposed to be spotlight on Richard, to talk about Act 2 of Götterdämmerung, but Sue and Anne had said they wanted to come along to see him. Sue was ready to speak, Anne had been wondering whether Zoom was for her and had asked to be a silent observer, but the other two shouted 'C'mon, Annie', so she did - and was still there at the very end as we were still shaking from emotion at her performance in Kupfer's Bayreuth Act 2. You can get a sense of the fun that was had from the below screen shot (Richard top left, Anne with a bit of husband and distinguished writer John Lucas top right, Sue centre of the second row).

So many connections made with the great and good in what now amounts to nearly a year of Zoom classes, starting out of pure necessity, have been serendipitous and charmed. I asked Ian to the Fidelio/Leonore classes because he's just released two superb CDs of 'Sturm und Drang' music familiar and obscure, and I wanted him to comment on Pizarro's raging. He then said that he'd been thinking the night before about scores he really wanted to conduct, which he was thinking about studying with a view to that, and Fidelio was at the forefront. So he came for the next four sessions. Similarly a New Best Friend made as a result of all this, the conductor (and top bassoonist) Catherine Larsen Maguire, based in Berlin, was recommended for my fourth class on the symphony, to talk about Schumann 2 and Brahms 1, and has been with us, on and off, ever since. Sometimes one of her cats, Lily, makes an appearance, though I confess the golden shot below isn't from one of our encounters.

It seems hard to believe that coming up to a year ago, I was grappling with the implications of taking my Opera in Depth class on to Zoom (we managed to reach the top of the mountain with Siegfried at Pushkin House on 9 March 2020). I was surprised and impressed by the number of students, especially the senior members, willing to give the format a try. The first class was bedevilled by poor sound quality for the excerpts, but I got some help before the second in finding how to do it perfectly. YouTube and DVD clips fell into place at a later date. The symphony course got more takers than I'd expected - after my 'Inside the BBC Symphony Orchestra' course at Morley college ended because the BBC doesn't support private classes, it had been difficult to drum up numbers for orchestral music. I'm eternally grateful to Dale Bilsland of the Wagner Society of Scotland for suggesting that, since the usual Gartmore House Ring adventure was out of the question in September, I should repeat Siegfried on Zoom. Many of the new visitors not only joined me for Götterdämmerung but have also signed up for other operas and the Russian music course which will enter its fourth term in mid-April. so we've been hitting the 60-students mark. A special debt of thanks to Kirk Davis of Southern California, who rises at 6am to join us at 2.30pm UK time: a born giver.

And so we've reached the Easter break, going out on a high with the second of my extra classes on Prokofiev's War and Peace, which ran to three hours and 40 minutes thanks to the unstinting and ceaselessly fascinating presence of Graham Vick (now a 'Sir', knighted in January) who stayed with us as I ran scenes from his 2014 Mariinsky production. He'd also been responsible for the 1991 Kirov experiment, again with Gergiev, and so was a witness to history - the new adventure beginning in the 1990s, which I also witnessed on my first visits to Leningrad as it transitioned back to St Petersburg, the shutdown well under way by 2014, when Putin invaded Crimea and an amazingly radical production had to jump through all sorts of hoops to reach the stage (I'm still surprised it did). Graham told us, among other things, that the manager of the Louis Vuitton shop below where he was staying told him that their prices were higher than any other store in the world. The Russian kleptocrats expected to pay more. Needless to see, this found its way into the 'Frenchified', corrupt world of Helene and Anatol. What I hadn't realised was that the 'retreat from Moscow' was supposed to represent the exit of western values in 2014.

It looks like boasting, but actually the below list is just a record for my own benefit of the astonishing number of visits we had from musical stars. All were happy to feel part of something at a time when isolation was the norm.

The Symphony

Class 1: Haydn with Jonathan Bloxham and Ian Page

Class 2: Mozart's 'Jupiter' and Beethoven's ‘Eroica’ with Mark Wigglesworth and Jonathan Bloxham

Class 3: Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique with Nicholas Collon

Class 4: Schumann's Second and Brahms's First with Catherine Larsen-Maguire

Class 5: Brahms's Fourth and Tchaikovsky's ‘Pathetique’ with Vladimir Jurowski

Class 6: Mahler's Third with Paavo Järvi

Class 7: Mahler's Ninth and Elgar's Second with Vasily Petrenko

Class 8: Sibelius's Fifth and Nielsen's Fifth with Kristiina Poska and Andres Kaljuste

Class 9: Martinů's Third, Prokofiev's Sixth and Vaughan Williams's Sixth with Mark Elder

Class 10: Shostakovich's Fifteenth with Elizabeth Wilson and Peter Manning

Class 11: Adams's Harmonielehre with Catherine Larsen-Maguire

Russian Music 1: Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition with Samson Tsoy; Tchaikovsky piano music with Pavel Kolesnikov

Russian Music 2: Stravinsky’s Petrushka with Gergely Madaras; Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring with Andrew Litton; Scriabin with Alexander Melnikov and Peter Jablonski (Peter was driving to a recording session at the time but made a beautifully produced short film from his home in Sweden).

Russian Music 3: Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk with Elizabeth Wilson; Prokofiev ‘War Sonatas’ and Shostakovich Second Piano Trio with Steven Osborne and Boris Giltburg; Prokofiev’s violin sonatas with Alina Ibragimova and Benjamin Baker.

Opera in Depth Summer term: Strauss’s Elektra with regular commentary from Susan Bullock, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly with three separate visits from Ermonela Jaho, Antonio Pappano and Mark Elder

Wagner’s Siegfried (Wagner Society of Scotland) with John Tomlinson

Opera in Depth Autumn term: Wagner's Götterdämmerung with Susan Bullock and Richard Berkeley-Steele, John Tomlinson, Anne Evans and Richard Jones

Opera in Depth Spring term: Beethoven's Fidelio/Leonore with Elizabeth Watts, Jay Hunter Morris, Ian Page, Linda Esther Gray and Mark Wigglesworth

Prokofiev's War and Peace, two extra classes: Graham Vick

These wonderful people have all come along for the love of music. I do like to send them various thanks, preferably books. My good Estonian friend Kaupo Kikkas could be called upon to supply the book of his Ansel exhibition to three contributors I knew would appreciate it. I won't mention the third yet because it needs to be a surprise, but the first two delighted recipients were Jay Hunter Morris, mighty Met Siegfried, whose YouTube film of the amazing Souper Jenny Kindness Tour he undertook with wife, son and friends around America showed me they'd visited the big natural wonders, and Boris Giltburg, who's a talented photographer as well as a great pianist. Kaupo sent me shots of the notes and dedication - this one to JMo.

And now, time to gather forces again, and enjoy what looks like it might be a rather clement Easter break. We return on 19 April to begin the summer term of Opera in Depth with Britten's Albert Herring and Mozart's La clemenza di Tito (coinciding with a new production at the Royal Opera: director Richard Jones and conductor Mark Wigglesworth have promised to visit us - hopefully together). Russian Music 4 begins with the shadow of the Zhdanov trials of 1948 on 22 April. If you'd like to join, drop me a message here with your email; I won't publish it but I shall respond.

Six bests in nine days

Namely as good as it can get in theatre (Simon Stone's radical adaptation and production of Medea for Internationaal Theater Amsterdam at the Barbican); in concerts (the two London Symphony Orchestra stunners to celebrate Bernard Haitink's 90th birthday - Mozart and Bruckner on Sunday, Dvořák and Mahler on Thursday); in fiction (putting my thoughts together on Robert Menasse's polyphonic masterpiece The Capital as well as meeting him last Friday); and in opera, stupendous results at the highest level of performance in Birmingham Opera Company's site-specific Shostakovich Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in the Tower Ballroom on the edge of Edgbaston Reservoir. To which I should add the perfection of a small gallery - major collection, handsome surroundings - in the shape of the Barber Institute on Birmingham University's campus. The below is merely the atrium to the superb deco concert hall; most of the masterpieces are in the rooms on the next floor, but even here we have a famous Rodin and a Chola bronze of Natarajan.

Much to say about the Barber collection, but now now. I need to take a break and simply digest after all that writing for The Arts Desk, and as there were too many good production/concert/rehearsal pics around that would otherwise go to waste, why not use some of them? The one below by Sanne Peper, of the stupendous Marieke Heebink as Anna, a contemporary Medea of excess vitality, and Aus Greidanus Jr as Lukas (Jason) with their two sons, is one I couldn't use in the review because the boys were different. And perhaps it's a bit of a spoiler as to how the ash which starts falling on the blindingly white stage two thirds of the way through gets deployed.

Haitink was photographed at the first of the two 90th birthday concerts by Robert Allan. You'd need to watch the film formerly on the LSO website to observe his superb control and vigilance - my friend Joe Smouha beautifully described 'the architecture spun from those tiny movements at the end of the baton' - but there's a sense of that here, albeit in a more genial moment.

The Khovanskygate experience of 2014 told me that Graham Vick's Lady Macbeth would be opera at its communicative best. Sure, every production of it I've seen - Pountney's twice at ENO, followed by Tcherniakov's, Jones's twice at the Royal Opera - has hit hard; but the closeness of one's promenading self to the action, the involvement of all strands of Birmingham society in the chorus and acting group, make this an unrepeatable experience. I got there early because they'd asked if I would prep a group of young volunteers on how to blog their experience (it actually turned out to be how they'd present their enthusiasms about the project on camera, but we quickly adapted and I got something very different out of each - to be blogged about here very soon). This shot I took of a warm-up gives some idea of the venue, which they'd further deconstructed. The orchestra platform is left, the first stage for the action, the Izmailov kitchen, to the right.

And we need a couple more production photos, by Adam Fradgley/Exposure, of the amazing Chrystal E Williams as Katerina/'The Wife'. Up top, she's despatching her inopportunely arrived husband Boris (Joshua Stuart). Here she is again, first liberated,

then deserted by that shit Sergey/'The Lover' (Brenden Gunnell).

I'm more and more drawn to Birmingham, even if it did vote for Brexit by a narrow margin (would it now, I wonder?) , and however messed up the city centre. There are so many hidden delights, and each time I go I discover one or two more. It has one of our most vibrant cultural scenes, that's to be sure. Now, if only BOC could think of Prokofiev's War and Peace...problematic, I know, because Part One is largely chorus-free. Maybe that could be done in a smallish theatre and then Part Two could be theirs in another extraordinary big venue, both with the CBSO. Or perhaps The Fiery Angel with Williams, whose upper range could certainly handle the crazy role of Renata. Anything is possible with this company.

After Pelléas, Ariadne and Tito

'Ah! I breathe at last!...I thought for a moment that I was going to be ill in those enormous vaults.' Following Pelléas's cue as he emerges onto a sunlit terrace after a terrifying time in the depths of the gloomy old castle, I think most of us in my Opera in Depth course at the Frontline Club were glad to get out into the sunny streets of Paddington after the last of four and a half Monday afternoon immersed in the world of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande. Some of us will be staying in the light for Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos next Monday. Pelléas was hard emotional work, though. It's probably the most exquisitely refined and orchestrally ravishing operatic score ever written, but as a drama more cruel and harsh than it is soft and beautiful.

We've been aware of its multiple meanings, but above all how it functions both as the most straightforward triangle - as Richard Jones put it to me when I first met him as he was working on the ENO production, 'two men fall in love with the same woman, with disastrous results' - and as so much more, partly intimated by Arthur Symons: 'we have two innocent lovers, to whom love is guilt; we have blind vengeance, aged and helpless wisdom; we have the conflict of passions fighting in the dark, destroying what they most desire in the world'.

Ascribe that first to Maeterlinck's nightmarish play, following his obsession with the destruction of the young by the old. Of course Debussy completely transfigures it with his music of nature, reaching its most dreamlike, minimalist, barely-audible apogee in the scene at the grotto by the sea. But he knows how to unleash the full harshness  - at the end of Act Three and in Act Four, in the scenes of the insanely jealous Golaud's abusive cruelty to his son and wife, the musical violence is extreme. This made an interesting comparison with the pathology of the protagonist in Verdi's Otello, on which we'd spent the first five and a half weeks of the summer term - the difference being that Golaud has real cause for his jealousy, whereas Otello does not.

As well as snippeting sound recordings by Désormière - the classic and text-unsurpassable 1941 recording with Irène Joachim and Jacques Jansen - and by Karajan, featuring an superb José Van Dam and Frederica von Stade, we stuck for visuals with the 1999 Glyndebourne production by Graham Vick on DVD. I'm kicking myself that I never saw it at the time; apart from possibly being the most visually arresting production ever seen at the Sussex house, with its flowers under the floor, spiral staircase and peeling gold walls, the focus on nuance from John Tomlinson, Christiane Oelze and Richard Croft is ideal for video close-up. We came away devastated from the tower scene (Mélisande actually hangs backwards from a huge deco light, as you can see in the DVD cover up top) and, yesterday, from the disturbing death of Act 5, as quiet and strange as the lovers' unaccompanied 'je t'aime'/'je t'aime aussi'.

Much more to say on this, but the advertising point here is that we move on and for the next two Mondays, I've added two extra one-off classes on Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos (24 July) and Mozart's La clemenza di Tito (31 July), tying in with the Glyndebourne productions (scene from the Ariadne opera in the 2017 revival, image by Robert Workman). Same time, 2.30pm-4.30pm, location a private house generously loaned by a friend just down the road from our usual venue. the superb Frontline Club. If you're interested in coming along - or indeed if you're interested in next season's course, which will start with La bohème, including (I hope) another visit from Richard Jones, he director of the new production due at the Royal Opera - leave a message here with your email. I won't publish it but I promise to reply.

War, peace and love

This last post of the year looks forward to 10 hours of War and Peace on Radio 4 tomorrow, but mainly back to the last great treat of 2014. Love is the only way to describe what so many of us feel about Tolstoy's complicated creatures, and how we respond, too, to Prokofiev's gift for homing in on scenes and lines to bring them fully to life in operatic terms. Tough love is how I might define Graham Vick's second interpretation of the opera 23 years on from the groundbreaking 1991 Mariinsky production; as he told us when he came to talk to my Opera in Depth students at the Frontline Club, he'd been romantic and relatively young when he first tacked the epic then, and now he saw both Natasha's near-breaking on the corrupt society wheel as well as Andrey's endless sufferings in a much harsher light. Production shots here of the 2014 Mariinsky War and Peace, starting with Aida Garifullina's Natasha and Andrei Bondarenko's Andrei falling in love at the ball, by Natasha Razina and Valentin Baranovsky.

We got to see this endlessly resourceful and perfectly realised take on Tolstoy and Prokofiev as an extra to my ten classes, making extra space from 12.30 to 4.30pm on a mid-December Monday. It was the final highlight of a year which I and my Arts Desk colleagues have chronicled, live-wise, in as much detail as we could: concerts round-up here, opera top 11 here.

All bar one of the students were knocked for six by Vick's special putting-it-together, even without subtitles (those will, of course, appear, when the DVDs are released some time next year, as they must be). It was going to take a superlative portrayal of Natasha to budge my allegiance to one of the greatest singing actresses of the last three decades, Yelena Prokina, but the less tutored and polished Aida Garifullina's performance is just that, in a slightly different way. Graham had spoken of her being, well, just a natural: even if she doesn't always know what to do with her body and hands, the face speaks every emotion - and her beauty even surpasses Netrebko's back in 2000; we had better beware that an oligarch doesn't lock her up in an ivory tower. Which would be a loss as the voice, too, is a beauty, warm and vibrant, as telling as Prokina's of what she's singing about.

The first part, which Prokofiev was at one point urged to call Natasha Rostova, charts her enchanted falling in love with Andrey followed by the unnatural pressures under which she's put in their year-long separation. Vick gives us the moonshine as wonderfully as Konchalovsky did in 2000, all the more heart-flipping since we first see Andrei Bondarenko's Prince contemplating suicide before the voice in the night air turns his thoughts to spring again. 'One must believe with all one's soul in the possibility of happiness' runs the Tolstoyan line on the blackboard.

In the next scene he's lost years, smiling, rapt in love as who wouldn't be with this Natasha at the ball?

Then the fall. Graham was right: in a contemporary setting, it's all the more disturbing. In today's society, the feckless set led by Helene and Anatol would be off of their faces on cocaine, as we see the lady of the beautiful shoulders in the washroom of Scene Four and the lads in the planned abduction scene.

For Vick, it's all about consumerism, the mores of the I Want It Now generation; fur coats suggested by gypsy Matryosha's sacrifice of hers dangle spookily from the heights, to be predictably replaced by hanging corpses once war begins, a billboard offsets the tank that's mostly present, while Anatol's limo provides a useful prop for Pierre to bang his head against and slam the door into him. It's good to see the rake as a feckless young man: Ilya Selivanov is a superb actor and has a golden tenor voice of the kind the Russians produce in droves.

'War' is harder to pull together, especially if you insist, as Gergiev still does, on the complete score (for me, Tim Albery's ENO production provided the best solution to judicious cuts, shedding most of the later Soviet ballast). Vick's fluent parade wings us brilliantly from suggestions of the Ukrainian conflict - it remains a miracle how in today's Russia he got away with a socialist realist poster of happy peasants in yellow, white and blue, later bespattered  -

- to the canonization of Kutuzov (veteran Gennady Bezzubenkov), unpacked from a museum crate

and holding the council of war at Fili with other Russian commanders in 1812 costume ( '450,000 dead' is chalked up on the blackboard). Compare Vick's tableau with a late 19th century painting.

Natasha's scene with the dying Andrey is fascinating to compare with the 1991 version, which was a proper deathbed scene. One of my students didn't get the Carousel idea of Andrey as spirit trying to communicate with a bewildered Natasha in worker's gear; I thought it was shatteringly moving and gravely beautiful, since both protagonsts are remarkable singer-actors ('I will no longer exist' is the Tolstoy phrase he's chalked up here).

The open door to death is all the more striking now that (2/1) I've heard the radio dramatization, which reminds us that Andrei talks of it in his last days, and how a spiritually exhausted Natasha longs to go through it later in the novel. Here she remains onstage through the final fallout, a further demand successfully carried by Garifullina the actress, to end up sitting opposite Pierre at a bare table in the final moments.

No superlatives are too much for what's been achieved here, least of all in 2014 St Petersburg. In short, Vick's panorama eludes being tied to any one war, any particular era, just as in his Birmingham Khovanskygate (it even has elements of the audience integration so crucial to that once-in-a-lifetime experience). Some see this as faulty vagueness, but it's a lot harder to bring off than one dogged centripetal idea.

I didn't watch the livescreening in the summer simply because I was sure it had to become some sort of nationalistic pageant. But that was to reckon without the trust placed in Vick by Gergiev, who goes a small way towards redeeming his rant against the Ukraine and his unapologetic, unthinking equation of homosexuals with paedophiles (for which, come the end of 2014, he's clearly never going to apologise). Clearly a divided soul who's signed a Faustian pact, but when he conducts well, as he does here, there's still a touch of genius.

At the same time as the first term's classes came to a close, I got to the end of reading my first book of military history, Dominic Lieven's Russia Against Napoleon. The reality probably lies somewhere between Tolstoy's view of history as chaotic flux and Lieven's chessboard, but the facts as Lieven arranges them are an interesting counterbalance.

The biggest importance of the history is that it restores an overview based on research in Russian as well as French archives, one in which the French retreat from Moscow in 1812 is only the first stage in a strategy to push them back as far, as it turned out, to Paris in the campaigns of 1813-14. And the movers behind all this are seen to be Alexander I, whom Tolstoy gave scant credit for planning ahead, and Barclay de Tolly (striking how many non-Russian names figure in the high command of the Russian army - how confusing when they have French names like De Langeron).

Even so, old Kutuzov remains a hero of sorts for his very restraint: a seasoned fighter knew better than to waste soldiers in unnecessary battles and skirmishes. His response was partly pragmatic - without an army, there would be no Russian nation - but it also stands in opposition to the younger hotheads who thought they'd be hailed as heroes for sacrificing whole divisions in impulsive onslaughts. But how like a nursery-room battlefield with toy soldiers Lieven makes so much of it sound: thousands are lost in this or that fight, and if that also means wounded and deserters, it's still shocking in its casualness and frequency.

Ultimately, the real truth lies with the human perspectives of Pierre or Nikolai Rostov on the battlefield: what on earth is all this for? By the way, in looking for images I was surprised to find so many 're-enactments' by Vereshchagin, one of the great war artists, probably most famous for his pyramid of skulls.

This is such a good cue for the Napoleon-at-Borodino scenes in the novel and opera, where by the way the sole survivor of the 1991 cast, Vasily Gerello, was still in splendid voice in 2014 and even more magnetic.

I'll be curious  to hear what remains tomorrow in Timberlake Wertenbaker's 10-hour adaptation on BBC Radio 4*. I slightly baulk at 'dramatisation, since I don't see how you can dispense with Tolstoy's authorial voice. They did that the last time, and I gave up sharpish. I may do so again in the morning, but I've cleared a space and taken a long walk this afternoon in anticipation of being glued to the 'wireless' all New Year's Day. The cast is extraordinary and I'm delighted to note a happy reconciliation. Harriet Walter recommended Joel MacCormack fresh out of RADA for my German Romantic Opera Discovery Day in Birmingham, and wonderful he was too:  they're re-united as Drubetskoy mother and son.

That was a highlight of my year, my first ever 'curatorship', and another was Harriet saying yes to recording chapters of War and Peace for my class, not to mention doing so with such spellbinding sensitivity. On which note I can't resist reproducing the alternative shot (with rather than without flash) of a serendipitous meeting just after one such session: another heroine of mine, Birgitte Hjørt Sorensen 'as seen in' Borgen, had dropped in to see Henry IV and they were as happy to meet each other as I was to snap them both.

Happy 2015/ s novim godom/bonne année a tous

*Review now up on The Arts  Desk here .

Great guests

'Great' is a term I hope I don't splash about too much, but it's always good to know who or what truly stands out, especially in the musical and operatic world where standards are generally so high already (one can't make the same generalisation about theatre).  I stick by the publicity blurb I wrote for the flyer to advertise Sioned Williams's lecture-recital at St Andrew's Fulham Fields: she IS one of the world's great harpists. And Graham Vick enters the pantheon of top directors - not that it's overstocked, in my opinion - above all for his pioneering work on opera involving the community in Birmingham. As chronicled here and on a BBC Radio 3 chat with Tom Service, I went for the first time this year, to see the Big Top Khovanskygate, and it was certainly up there with the most extraordinary operatic experiences of my life. A total immersive experience, on our feet for three hours plus and no compromises - full CBSO, no miking, quality singers, chorus bolstered by professionals.

Actually I also owe Graham a debt for introducing me to Britten's Billy Budd and tackling the crucial gay issues in it back in the 1980s. When we talked together at the Opera in Depth class the other week, I said it had such an impact because it was the first time I saw it. 'And do you not think that might have been because my production was actually rather good?', he said, not boastfully but with a secure sense of his own worth (it was; only Tim Albery's since has come close).

Sioned first, anyway. She came with harp to St Andrew's Fulham Fields, where I'm running monthly classes linked to the BBC Symphony Orchestra courses as before, chiefly because after the City Lit debacle I still very much wanted to cover the Nielsen symphonies Sakari Oramo is conducting this season. Some of the players also volunteered to make appearances as before: cellist Michael Atkinson is getting the Merchant Quartet back together to work on Sibelius's great Voces Intimae Quartet, possibly a Nielsen too. And Sioned wanted both to make up for the fact that when she'd last come to the City Lit, it was at the end of a serious illness and she hadn't the strength to bring the harp too, and to reflect on her brilliant Purcell Room concert of six new works for harp commissioned by herself (read the Arts Desk rave - which is absolutely not because I know and like her).

So this time we brave few got the benefit of her insights into the differing virtues of the commissions. The harp is perhaps the trickiest of all instruments for a composer to know the strengths and limitations thereof; Paul Patterson, who came along as stalwart supporter again, and perfectionist Michael Finnissy are masters of the art, where one of the other works had asked the impossible and impractical and a great deal of collaboration was necessary.

We heard movements and selections again, often with an illuminating running commentary on what was going on pedal and string-wise; and the biggest triumph was to get screen and sound working - if only you knew how brinksmanlike that was - for Dominic Murcott's Domestica. I found it even richer second time around, knowing now that the domestic sights and sounds were filmed, oh so artistically, by Magali Charier in Sioned's and Ali's home, and that the ticking clock slows down (you don't sense this, or at least I didn't, at the premiere, though you do feel that the harp contributions become more introspective and poetic).And, small in number though the audience was this time, St Andrew's turns out to be a wonderful venue for subtlety and magic.

Graham's visit to my Opera in Depth course at the Frontline Club has trailed a host of wondering messages from the students which have left me in no doubt of his special connection. He spoke very movingly on the sense of change since he first directed Prokofiev's War and Peace at the Kirov, as it then was, when he was still a relative youngster full of romantic idealism back in 1991 (thanks to Peter Maniura, that first visit when Leningrad was turning back into Petersburg proved a bridge for me to devoting middle life to great Sergey Sergeyevich).

Now he wonders at how modern the music is, and was keen to redress weaknesses he'd felt in the characterisation of Prince Andrey (this time played by Ukrainian Andrey Bondarenko, his Glyndebourne Onegin and the one singer on whom he actually insisted). He wanted to refer back to Austerlitz and to keep the war in the peace sequence, and the private scenes more prominent in the war half.

The second collaboration with Gergiev originated in a mad idea to do the opera on the Edinburgh Tattoo parade ground during the Festival. 'And just as when you have to think a low note when you sing a high one, or sit if necessary on stage as if you were rising up, I wanted to make it about three people.' The project failed for lack of money, but Gergiev was insistent on Vick coming back to the Mariinsky for his roughly ten-year reassessment of Prokofiev's opera (with Andrey Konchalovsky's beautifully realised but heavily cut version in between). Graham says he was surprised at Gergiev's request for an openly gay director with a track record of controversial productions.

And yet Gergiev gave him total carte blanche. Going for the contemporary meant endless meetings with lawyers about what could and couldn't be represented on the Russian stage, but Vick says he fought tooth and claw, and succeeded in nearly everything. Even, note, in the slipped-in yellow, white and blue of the screens above, played out to the choral ode in the New Year's Eve ball scene, and returning in the 'war' sequence spattered with blood.

Anyway, it all happened; he hadn't heard from Gergiev what he thought - according to Caroline of the Mariinsky Friends, he was delighted - because the conductor only appeared for the final rehearsal. Even so, Vick thinks that things have now gone so far in Russia that he would have to think twice about returning. I can't wait to see the whole thing at the Frontline on Monday week.

The other great personage who's been keeping us company through the ten two-hour classes on War and Peace - for we've been following Graham's 1991 production on DVD alongside Francesca Zambello's Paris Opera show - has been Dame Harriet Walter (seen above in the first of Helen Maybanks' photos for the Donmar Henry IV). As you'll have read if you've been following the blog, she consented to my amazement to read those chapters or sequences of Tolstoy's novel which parallel Prokofiev's more or less faithful setting of them, and she's done it beautifully. I was especially moved the other week, recording Pierre's confrontation with Natasha after the failed elopement and Natasha's encounter with the dying Andrey, to find her stopping, going back and finding a depth in the speeches that was moving to tears. We reach the last two scenes on Monday so I'm looking forward to editing her last contribution for that.

Since we would meet in the break between Saturday matinees and evening performances of Henry IV at the Donmar, I was very conscious of that background. Not that I'd have missed Phyllida Lloyd's production for the world, but I pushed that little bit harder to get tickets and finally saw it the other Saturday. Folk have been split down the middle about it, but I found it electrifying - perhaps all the more so since I hadn't seen, more fool me, the Julius Caesar also set in a women's prison; but the use of simple props and the evocation of the background seemed to me utterly fresh and always pertinent.

This was true ensemble work, rather unconventionally so since there were beautiful verse-speakers like Harriet's King, Jackie Clunes's Owen Glendower and the fabulous Ann Ogbomo as Worcester, seen here in confab with the 'enemy'

alongside new talent, in one way less experienced but in another thrillingly immediate. I couldn't get it out of my head that  Jade Anouka's Hotspur - even with an arm in plaster - wasn't some hyperactive, gifted but undirected black teenager from South London.

She was heartbreaking, especially so in the scenes with Sharon Rooney's Lady Percy, That's not a role that usually makes a huge impact, but as young, stressed, poor mother, the characterisation went straight to the heart- with an astonishing touch of physical knockabout added to the mix.

For me, there were no false notes. Falstaff, maybe, should be posh, but since he was being played by a prison inmate the take still worked in conjuring him as a sarf London wideboy; I laughed a lot not only at the fear of a burst balloon in the Gadshill episode, but the muttered remembrance of it as nightmare when Falstaff dozes behind the arras. The music was superbly placed and apt, the company routines brilliant, the whole thing pacy and vibrant. And the inclusion of two key scenes from Part Two added on to a fairly complete Part One was a fair compromise, short of having both in two performances - which I'll be seeing when the RSC production arrives at the Barbican, though I don't expect it to communicate quite as well as this.

A guest who will certainly be great has been staying with us in two spells. Eszter Bránya from Kecskemet, Hungary, Kitty Lambton's former classmate when the family spent a year out there, celebrated her 19th birthday here with a delicious cardamomy cake from the Swedish bakery Bagariet complete with a Carluccio's firework candle. Our young violinist came first for consultation lessons and then for auditions at the Guildhall and the Royal College of Music - successful in the first, waiting to hear about the second, though she went straight through to the scholarship second round - and all I'll say for now is that her tone is dark and powerful, from hearing her practise, her attitude incredibly quick and responsive, her dedication that of a serious artist. She'll go far, no doubt about that.

Tonight I have a great guest for 10 minutes of my 6pm talk before the BBC Symphony Orchestra concert conducted by one of the best, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, at the Barbican. He'll be presenting together the revolutionary Part Two of Berlioz's Romeo et Juliette,  Prokofiev's shattering Third Symphony and Dramatis personae by the BBCSO's Artist in Residence Brett Dean (pictured above). Brett will be joining me hot off the plane from Australia; I look forward hugely to meeting him. 

Khovanskygate: Utopia, actually

It's been a poleaxing week, in a good way - working backwards, revelatory later Tippett from the phenomenal Steven Osborne and the poised Heath Quartet at the Wigmore last night, an exhausting but instructive and probably unrepeatable double bill of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters, with many of the same Russian actors in both, on Thursday - and my introduction to the unique world of Graham Vick's Birmingham Opera Group in the Freedom Tent of the People's Park, Cannon Hill on Tuesday. Courtesy of BBC Radio 3's invitation, it was an evening I hope I'll remember clearly for the rest of my life. All the following production photos are by Donald Cooper.

The Utopia I mean certainly isn't the solution of Musorgsky's Old (here True, in other words religious extremist) Believers, a desperate and far from positive mass suicide. In fact all propositions fail in the world of Khovanshchina, set in a time of troubles in some ways like our own transitional, confused and confusing age, as Vick and his translator Max Hoehn understand so well. No, I'm referring to the possibilities realised in this astounding project, above all the unbelievable success of involving local people of all creeds and colours as chorus and actors and bringing us all as standing, shunted-around spectators to the table of a hopeless debate about the future.

Vick's genius, as I said in a rather stunned aftermath recorded for yesterday's Music Matters (also available as a download for the next month), is to save the ubiquitous contemporary references - now obligatory in both Khovanshchina and Boris Godunov, full of tiresome cliches in Calixto Bieito's world-today production now out on DVD - from being just about Russia now, where as Vick points out the past has become the present again. I did feel, incidentally, that as featured on the neat little Radio 3 survey he was a touch craven in interview to say that Britain is actually worse: let him try living under Putin, rather than just dropping in as he's about to for his second production of War and Peace at the Mariinsky, which will have to steer clear of similar controversy* (I was there in 1991, as Leningrad was turning back to being St Petersburg again, for his first).

It was a coup in every way to field four fine black singers, three basses and a tenor, to make the power struggle more suggestive of America (and even of the Middle East: Joseph Guyton's coke-sniffing, gun-toting Andrey could be modelled on the sons of several bloody-handed tyrants dead and alive). As are the Christian fundamentalists, while the protesting men evoke Occupy and our own deep trouble with the bankers.

The European riot police are believable, but it's hard to imagine our own bobbies behaving so wildly. But the scene where the Streltsy are harangued by their wives is fun until it all goes sour, so why not enjoy a bit of fantasy with that? Of course it's anything but fun when the young Peter I's advisers show their fangs and dodgy liberal Golitsyn is sent into exile, forced to strip off as he and his supporters are hustled into a van by all-too-familiar balaclavaed gunmen. Shame there wasn't a publicity shot of this scene; perhaps it wouldn't serve Vick's impending trip to Russia too well. Another clever touch, incidentally: while the True Believers wear T shirts bearing the slogan 'Not In This World', a 'terrorist' takes off his combat gear to reveal the slogan 'In This World'

All this takes place on at least a dozen acting spaces inside the huge tent. But there are none of the compromises you might expect. As far as I could tell - and I don't know the work inside out - this was a complete performing version of Shostakovich's orchestration concluded by the quieter ending Stravinsky and Ravel put together for Diaghilev in 1913. There were no supertitles and no amplification. There was a full City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra on a raised platform, fluently conducted by Stuart Stratford; the brass made such an immediate impact that I guessed without knowing that we were hearing Shostakovich's unmistakeable work, and the opening 'Dawn on the Moscow River' rose slowly out of the hubbub, soon stilled, like the most beautiful of morning mists.

We get no further respite of that sort until the final gathering of the True Believers, with whom we now sympathise even though we know what they've stood for.  The gathering apocalypse is also chillingly evoked in Ron Howell's choreography by the perverted sexuality and forced nightclub dancing of far-right leader Ivan Khovansky's failing campaign before his murder

In the earlier stages there's plenty of spirit and humour. I've always been a bit bored by the opening scene until the big bass and tenor Khovanskys appear; not here with Paul Nilon's superlative Scribe-as-hack-journalist. And the meeting of princes with Old Believer Dosifey in Golitsyn's palace becomes a riveting telly debate with humorous touches from Jeffrey Lloyd Roberts, his every word superbly projected.

Often, of course, you don't get the line up of sacred monsters you'd expect at the Mariinsky or Bolshoy, but each fine singer is totally inside his or her role. Guyton (pictured above) shows huge promise as an Andrey Khovansky verging on heroic-tenor territory, and Claudia Huckle's Marfa, seen below with Keel Watson as 'father' Dosifey, plays the confused young girl with some moral sense superbly. Her pianissimos in the final scene draw us in still further. I'm not entirely sure about the final solution, but you can't really have a big fire in a tent.

So I'm not exaggerating when I say that not only have I never seen a more gripping Khovanshchina, I've also never experienced a more involving or singular evening at the opera. And it really is for everybody, as the reactions of all sorts on the way out proved. I hope it's filmed or televised; but if not, then I bear in mind Richard Jones's wise words about his Welsh National Opera Mastersingers - that theatre should by its nature be both ephemeral and unforgettable. Ironic in retrospect, because that production is being revamped for English National Opera next season (as we know from Wagnerians gathered to raise funds at the Coliseum, though the formal press announcement of the 2014-15 season is due early tomorrow morning).

One final footnote, framed by photos from a second protest outside the Barbican before an LSO/Gergiev concert once again orchestrated by that superb tactician Peter Tatchell: I recommend you read my brilliant colleague Ismene Brown's commentary on and translation of an interview with Vladimir Medinsky, Russia's horrifying 'Culture Minister' (my inverted commas)  - the same who said Tchaikovsky was not gay. Read more on the sort of creature we're talking about in this 2012 article  - a ridiculous individual in a dangerous position of power not to be confused with the even worse new media controller Dmitry Kisilyov, who is famously on camera declaring that gay people 'should be prohibited from donating blood and sperm. And their hearts, in case they die in a car accident, should be buried or burned as unfit for extending anyone's life.'

So Zhdanovshchina beckons all over again, this time with the veneer of democratic vocabulary Putin has already used to lie and manipulate over Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. Parallels with Hitler's Germany ludicrously exaggerated? I think not.

*It didn't.GV proved courageous in sticking to his contemporary take, and probably won't work in Russia again. He lent me the DVDs of the production, my impressions of which are here, for my Opera in Depth classes, and came to talk to us about it - an inspiring and, of course, at times controversial speaker.