Enclosed garden, open park

As I wandered towards the black rectangle that is this year's (11th) temporary Serpentine pavilion in Kensington Gardens, I dimly remembered that it was something to do with plants. But I put that out of mind as I walked into the dark corridors (for in fact if you approach alongside the main building, there are no display panels to tell you what it's all about) - only to emerge with a pleasant surprise in the kind of thing Ketelbey wrote squidgy music about. For this was indeed a monastery garden of sorts.




Swiss architect Peter Zumthor tells us that he has long dreamed of a hortus conclusus, as the medievalists and he call this sort of thing, enclosed on all sides and open to the sky. The 'meadow garden' itself, designed by Dutch landscaper Piet Oudolf, is remarkably lush for so short-term a visitor. Around it you sit and bake and - Zumthor hopes - talk to your neighbour. Well, it does ring the changes on what's been here before, but I'm disinclined to linger when what's beyond is so much more spectacularly beautiful. On Tuesday afternoon, when I had to pedal to the Albert Hall to pick up some off-the-beaten track Rachmaninov scores from the visiting BBC Philharmonic, the path open to cyclists seemed very inclined to inspire a green thought in a green shade


and Albert's monument does provide such a spacious terrace opposite the Albertopolitan colosseum, crazy and grandiose though it seems to celebrate a Saxe-Coburg Gothan on this scale ('I still feel some lingering discomfort', wrote Mark Twain in 1872, 'that this princely structure was not built for Shakespeare - but after all, maybe he does not need it as much as the other).


And the imperial statuary is a bit ludicrous if you stop to think about it, too, but done at a high level, and its white marble continental allegories did gleam so in Tuesday's late afternoon light.


Thus the camel of William Theed's 'Africa'


the elephant of J. H. Foley's 'Asia'


and Europa on her bull as executed by Patrick Macdowell when one Gibson refused.


The steps are a pleasant refuge in intervals of Proms and (on Wednesday, when I persuaded Juliette, straight back from Tunis, to join me for a long but pleasant haul) between them. But can't park and hall/BBC co-ordinate? We were rudely chucked out of our brief idyll at 9.45 as a recorded voice of a gruff Scot from a passing van told us that the park was closed and we were to make our way to the nearest 'turnstile'. I was pleased to see everyone looking sluggish about it, and the park attendants sheepish, as we shuffled off to drink in the Imperial College bar until the 10.15pm recommencement.

Marshalling the crowds for the Proms is obviously tough work, but do some of the attendants have to be so officious? I was persecuted by one for downgrading from my seat to a deliciously underpeopled arena for the late-night event, but when I told him to lighten up - and was a bit surprised by my own tone of voice - he ambled away (my self-appointed censor would like it to be known that he thinks this is bullying, lawbreaking and unsympathetic to people doing a difficult job; I beg to differ). And then it was all joy. I've written it all up on The Arts Desk, but I'm inclined to linger since the great Chris Christodoulou, photographing for the BBC throughout the festival, sent me through some snaps I wasn't able to use on TAD. Here's Sir Andrew 'Lord Hee-Haw' Davis so obviously having fun.


The evening improved by degrees from Tasmin Little's underpowered Elgar Violin Concerto (good orchestral touches, shame about the soloist)to SAD's fab Grainger In a Nutshell - great to hear it live for the first time - a Till Eulenspiegel brilliantly adapted to tricky acoustics, and the late-night Grainger Plus jamboree. Ah June Tabor, June Tabor, you are now my muse: the Maria Callas of the folk world, and I'm not being ironic. How one soft, low voice, beautifully miked, can create magic in the Albertine wastes. This is she back in the 1970s, a perfectly-modulated balladeer.



La Tabor's appearances were too short if undeniably bittersweet, but there wasn't a musician on that late night stage who - unlike our underinspiring violinist - didn't put across his or her case with maximum charm and communication. The style of the Kathryn Tickell Band may not usually be my scene, but I loved the glamorous smallpipes lady and I loved her fellow musicians (pictured here guitarist Joss Clapp, fiddler Peter Tickell, Kathryn, accordionist Amy Thatcher).


Three cheers for the Northumbrians and Geordies who put their heads together to shape this event. Percy would have doffed his cap and kissed their hands, I'm sure of it. And at last I've heard an all-good Prom this year. Do watch it when it's televised on BBC Four on 14 August.

Roll on, Percy

Better half of one evening in four among the Kings Place Grainger celebrations was a pianola demo by Michael Broadway "playing" Grainger. And he was right in what he said: there's some artistry in operating the machine, as befits a London College of Music-trained organist and viola da gamba player (some leap!). The visible demonstration reminded me a bit of our friend Cynthia Millar and her ondes martenot (back for a Messiaen Turangalila next season).

I've written at some length about this on The Arts Desk, and as little as possible about the - now I can say it - well-nigh-disastrous wind band event that followed (I tried to be diplomatic, but got much nastier comments for leaving half way through, something I've never done before while writing about something). I've so far bitten my tongue there when I wanted to respond that the article was supposed to be about Grainger on the 50th anniversary of his death- which was yesterday - and only about those players inasmuch as they reflected The Glory of Rome and the Christian Heart, an antiwar fantasia (they didn't). And so this is, too.

I put up something on the blog about PG's weird, warped greatness after Bengt Forsberg wowed us with To a Nordic Princess as an encore (!) at the Wigmore. That prompted me to read up and listen (to most of the 19 CDs in Chandos's collection) preparatory to a piece that in the end didn't happen. Anyway, it got me loving the wind-band pieces which Percy came to after his time as a US army bandsman (the nearest he was prepared to get to the war given pacifist convictions completely lost on Friday's players).


And I do continually marvel at Percy's pianism, both on the recordings he made - what a shame there's not more film of him in loose-limbed action - and the Duo-Art piano rolls. Loved the rollicking In Dahomey and the wacky Holbrooke pieces Mr. Broadway featured in his programme - and, of course, a special affection goes to a transcription he didn't include, the Rosenkavalier Ramble. Which I first heard played by that passionate proselytizer Ronald Stevenson at the 1982 Aldeburgh Festival when I was a Hesse student.

I'll nae forget Stevenson, in the audience for one of the Grainger concerts he wasn't playing in, tapping us youngsters on the shoulder and saying 'did Stravinsky ever write a melody like that?' Well, actually he did, I'll be hearing one such tonight when the Berlin Phil and Rattle play Apollon Musagete; and the two composers have more than a little in common. As they do with Strauss, but that's another story. Anyway, since both Rosenkav's 100th birthday and the Grainger anniversary have almost coincided, here it is, the free fantasia on the final duet. I have a suspicion the role doesn't match what sounds to me like the Nimbus studio recording, but the sound is good, anyway.

Not forgetting Delius

The trouble is, I tend to have done just that over the past few years. Can't remember when I last got to grips with a disc or a live performance of the Bradford-born German's music: probably the time I seemed to be alone in liking Julia Hollander's much-lambasted ENO production of Fennimore and Gerda in the good old days of the Sunday Correspondent (Jane Livingston of the press office seemed to be eternally grateful for that, which is how I maintained my tenuous foothold there for a while). Yes, it was the one in which Sally Burgess climbed into the piano. But Mackerras kept a stream of beauty alive in the orchestra, and having seen the far more insipid St Louis version at the Edinburgh Festival as an underwhelming introduction, I was grateful for the strengths of this one.

Now it's time to prepare the BBC Symphony students for Sir Andrew Davis's performance of The Song of the High Hills next Friday. Can you believe I've never listened to the work before, although the Mackerras CD has been sitting on the shelves - Appalachia I do know and love - and the late Christopher Palmer, whose typically 'only connect' study of the composer I'm reading at long last, thought Song Delius's supreme masterpiece.

On a first hearing without a score, I wasn't so sure; more detailed study on Tuesday morning may yet change my stereotypical resistance to music that just seems to drift. I did, though, stop swimming in the Delian soup and really listen to what turns out to be the section where Delius writes 'The wide far distance - The great solitude'. The wordless chorus which was the composer's passport to infinity ever since he heard Negro spirituals from afar on the Florida orange grove he managed in the 1880s, the Grieg-like freshness of the woodwind writing and the celestial string drift: if these aren't visionary, I don't know what is.

It all stems from Delius's many walking expeditions in Norway. I'd love to follow in his footsteps but I only - only! - have Alps, Apennines, the Hindu Kush and the Western Ghats to evoke a parallel sense of high, remote solitude.


The above and below don't quite fit - in fact I was in Verbier - but they'll accompany well enough Delius's letter to his wife Jelka in June 1896 from the Jotunheim. He wrote: 'the sun sets at about 8.30 behind the mountains and huge shadows begin to creep across the valley: at 10.30 only the tops of the hills covered with fir trees are lighted by the sun's rays and stand out as if in gold. Then everything disappears in a mystic half-light, all very dreamy and mysterious - it is light enough to read and to distinguish every detail at the other end of the valley and on the mountain tops.'


Of course I didn't have his insomnia from the sun rising again at 2.30am, though I've experienced that in Ostrobothnia, St Petersburg and Faro in midsummer. Translated into music, the expression is one of regretful chromatic transience. Constant Lambert was right to say that in masterpieces of the first order we don't separate harmony from melody, rhythm and orchestration. His example of a (then) contemporary composer who did everything, Sibelius, loomed in all his glory in a half-extraordinary Philharmonia concert I heard conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen on Thursday.

Yet in life Delius was a man of many parts and unexpected vigour, at least in his earlier years: a synagogue singer in Jacksonville, a Nordic walker of Wordsworthian stamina, Nietzschean sensualist since his Leipzig days and in Paris the friend of Munch, Strindberg and Gauguin. Your eyes don't deceive you: that is indeed Nevermore up top behind Delius in the portrait painted by his wife Jelka in 1912. The Tahitian reclined above the mantelpiece in the home Fritz and Jelka shared in Grez sur Loing and now she's in the Courtauld (and presumably, at this very moment, in the Gauguin exhibition). The colours below don't seem at all right, but wikimedia copyright-free images are not to be sniffed at.


The wonder of Palmer's monograph is that it covers all this, and makes extraordinary connections with other spirits of the age. Grainger is an obvious one, as one of the many folk who served the paralysed, blind and testy composer in later years. I've already been getting excited by discovering more of his music in preparation for next year's anniversary.


Today, in fact, on a wet Sunday which kept us indoors, The Song of the High Hills made me turn to Grainger's two extraordinary Hill Songs. Their original wind-band arrangements I found on a stunning Chandos disc which is a typical Grainger ragbag, including as it also does his 'rambles' on Dowland's 'Now, o now I needs must part' and Bach's 'Sheep may safely graze' as well as another epic oddity, The Power of Rome and the Christian Heart. Often quirky, sometimes too meandering just like Delius, never boring (unlike Delius, at least to my ears, occasionally).

It was Grainger who compared Delius to Duke Ellington, and thanks again to Palmer for making me seek out the awkwardly-titled Transblucency, with its wordless soprano melding into trombone and duetting with clarinet.



So much more to discover on the Palmer trail, not least several direct comparisons recommended between Delius and Gershwin, the music of Karg-Elert and the film scores of Bernard Herrmann (it was the diplo-mate, in fact, who came into the room while I was playing the first of the North Country Sketches and declared it sounded like a Hitchcock soundtrack. Not as deaf, then, to orchestral as opposed to vocal beauties as he professes). In the meantime, for the class I have to balance The Song of the High Hills with a work I love to distraction, Elgar's Falstaff. The human and the natural should make good bedfellows in Friday's concert.

In praise of Percy

No innuendo is intended, though given Percy Grainger's voracious and distinctly dodgy sexual obsessions it could be. Anyway, I'm currently deep in a bout of Graingermania. This has been quite a week for hearing great stuff I've never come across in the concert hall before. Saturday was the Alpine peak, perhaps of the year: Martinu's most consistently powerful symphony, the Third, in the penultimate instalment of Belohlavek's BBCSO Martinu symphonies cycle. Thanks, Thomas and Hedgehog, for 'spreading the love around' in your comments to the previous entry. But what led to a more recent re-discovery was maverick Swede Bengt Forsberg's inclusion of Grainger's To a Nordic Princess as the first of his two encores in last Wednesday's recital.

As a result, I dug out my CDs of Martin Jones and the man himself in all the works Grainger 'dished up for piano', and I started reading John Bird's biography. Bird's prose makes for very sober reading alongside the mad screeds of Percy himself, but still, what a life! Even before he appears in the world, there's crazy Rose, the mother from hell, wishing good thoughts on her unborn child by banishing her hapless hubby from the boudoir and fixating on a statue of Apollo at the end of the bed. Whatever problems Percy subsequently had - not least the appalling flagellation which he openly wrote about wishing to apply to small children, so thank God he had none of his own - can be laid at Rose's door. Peter Carey should write a novel about the relationship between those two; maybe Jane Campion could make a film of it.

The fact remains, though, that for all his psychobluster and inconsistencies, PG seems to have been a natural man, the freshest of composers and a master pianist. I'm now listening to his performance of Chopin's Third Piano Sonata, and I reckon the slow movement is my favourite now, while the finale is the most vivacious ever. What a shame there's not more film of his playing; I could only come up with this less than minute clip from a documentary. It's worth seeing, if only for the extraordinary flying motion.



Grainger was inspired by Eugen D'Albert during his student time in Frankfurt: 'when I saw D'Albert swash around over the piano with the wrong notes flying to the left & right & the whole thing a welter of recklessness, I said to myself, "That;s the way I must play". I'm afraid I learnt his propensity for wrong notes all too thoroughly.'

As for his own compositions, I was knocked for six by the In a Nutshell Suite, where cowpat pastorale goes off the rails into Schoenberg/Ives territory, and then on for another six glorious minutes. Had a YouTube clip of Grainger's deepest slow movement in its orchestral version conducted by Rattle, but I now see that's been removed 'due to third party infringement'. Shame.

I worked out that next February will be the fiftieth anniversary of Grainger's death. I don't see his bracing and prolific output featuring in any of the major orchestras' rep, but let's see what happens.