Leonskaja embraces the Pärnu spirit

Shouldn't pre-empt too much the Pärnu Music Festival piece I owe The Arts Desk for the fourth successive year, this time ahead of the Estonian Festival Orchestra's Prom on Monday (for which, I'm proud to say, I played my campaigning part). UPDATE (13/8) - here it is. But I have to recapture the amazement of turning up at the first concert of the week, less than an hour off the coach from Riga, to be knocked sideways by the opening work on the programme. From the website, we knew to expect the excellent Eldbjørg Hemsing in Massenet's Meditation from Thaïs and Saint-Saëns's Introdcution and Rondo Capriccioso, as well as the Järvi Academy Sinfonietta in Musica Profana by Lepo Sumera, the Estonian composer whose symphonies knocked me for six in the 2016 and 2017 Estonian Music Days.

The rest, however, had been put together over the past week. Elisabeth Leonskaja, my goddess among pianists, here to play the Grieg Piano Concerto with the Estonian Festival Orchestra - which she did, with unique deep musicianship, last night - decided she wanted to get involved with the players in chamber music. Hence Beethoven's early Quintet for piano and winds, also like you never heard it before nor will again. Two of my other favourite players in the world, EFO regular clarinettist Matthew Hunt and horn master Alec Frank-Gemmill, were there alongside her, to my amazement - Matt (pictured with Leonskaja above - all photos by the superlative Kaupo Kikkas) knows her well and they sea-bathed together at 8am on several mornings -

plus two other superb wind players not known to me, José Luis Garcia Vegara (whose playing in La Valse last night was out of this world) and bassoonist Jesús Villa Ordóñez (much Hunt humour about 'playing with Jesus').

'Lisa' wanted broad, floated playing, taxing the winds to the very extremes of their breath control, but she was right to ask for it. As for how good it was, don't ask me but rather Triin Ruubel, co-leader of the EFO but unable to travel with them this year because of her advanced pregnancy. I met her on my way into the hall here yesterday to witness Arvo Pärt listening to a rehearsal of his Third Symphony - it's that kind of place - and she said she had to leave the concert after the Quintet because she had 'never heard a more perfect performance in my life'.

The following evening, Triin contributed to the unearthliness of a real underrated near-masterpiece, Eduard Oja's Piano Quintet, which Leonskaja had also undertaken to learn and more or less conducted from the piano: stunning, unforgettable. That's the two of them above with Triin's fellow violinist Adela-Maria Bratu. But that, and the rest of this amazing week, must wait until later coverage... Next, however, was this, from yesterday's rehearsal of Pärt's Third Symphony. Photo by Karima Morooka Elsamny.

To the Mendelssohn House

On my first visit to Leipzig back in December - I can't believe it took so long before I saw the city - Bach had to be the priority. And he was a kind of starting-point this time, because the Nikolaikirche was his second home after the Thomaskirche, and I found myself on the fifth floor of a hotel with perhaps the best view I've had in any city; namely of the church, which filled the entire window.

I could see it at sunset

and at sunrise

and besides, the street has a row of wonderful second hand bookshops which I spent some time in on my last visit. The square was now devoid of its Christmas market stalls but there was the solitary palm column mirroring the ones within the Nikolaikirche, its shadow serving as a kind of sundial on the building where Wagner went to school (there's a Wagner Museum in the basement, nicely laid out, but it had no treasures and didn't teach me anything; I whizzed around it rather quickly).

Leipzig would have to be the mecca for musicians in terms of its astounding heritage - Bach, Schumann, Mendelssohn, young Wagner - and it treasures its orchestra. I was here for the inauguration of already-great Andris Nelsons as the 21st Gewandhauskapellmeister, about which I've written on The Arts Desk. Needless to say, the whole city viewed this with pride in a way that would be unimaginable here - can you imagine Simon Rattle plastered over Kings Cross to celebrate his return to the UK as principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra?

Note, too, it's 'Andris', like 'Mirga'. A PR friend of mine found this cheesy, but I disagree - it suggests all the breaking down of boundaries since the Call-Me-Maestro era, and Andris is the most genial and natural of conductors.

I had the day of the concert free to cover everything I hadn't seen on that first visit, and I managed a great deal of it. Namely morning in the superbly designed MdBK (Museum der Bildenden Kunste, in other words the main art gallery), for which another blog entry will be necessary, a pausa in the Stadtcafe Riquet

where I couldn't resist a photo of the table with the best Mohntorte (poppyseed cake) I've had next to the Cafe Frauenhuber in Vienna

and then an afternoon walk following part of the Leipzig Music Trail, helpfully studded with symbols on every pavement. It led me, about five minutes past the Gewandhaus on the other side of the ring road, to Königstraße 3, a large house built in 1843-4 as part of a new residential district.

In August 1845, the 34-year-old Mendelssohn, who over the previous decade had transformed the Leipzig Gewandhausorchter into a thing of wonder,  moved into the very substantial apartment on the first floor with his wife Cecile and four children. The building and garden were in a fairly ruinous state before the International Mendelssohn-Stiftung took it over and planned a hugely impressive restoration in the 1990s.  I love it that certain parts of the building, namely the old staircase, need careful treading

and the modernisation of the rest, starting with a reception desk and coffee shop manned by really friendly young women, is a treat. The nine main rooms on the first floor have been reconstructed with meticulous taste. It helps that Felix Moscheles left several watercolours of the rooms just after Mendelssohn's death, on Cecile's invitation, including - most important of all - the study where he composed Elijah.

What we have now isn't identical, but the bright yellow combines with the sunshine that flooded the apartment on the freezing cold and ice-windy but brilliant afternoon I visited.

 
It's important to see Mendelssohn's idols in the busts of Goethe and Bach, for whom he did so much during his time in their shared city of music.

 
Much else is in the Biedermeier style. The room opposite has most of the original furniture, including a cabinet containing bronze statuettes of Voltaire (which you can see on the right) and Rousseau

 
and though you can't see it from the way the rooms are arranged and cordoned, a small-scale colour reproduction of Titian's Assumption in Venice's Frari hangs above the recamiere here.

The Music Room which hosts regular events has been lovingly restored in careful application of paintwork, reconstructed stove and chandelier and careful work on the 1830 trumeau.

Objects on permanent loan from the Museum of the History of the City of Leipzig are sensitively presented, many of them in pull-out drawers below some prize exhibits. This is the 16 year old Mendelssohn's translation of Terence's Andria as 'The Maiden of Andros', with which he surprised his teacher Heyse. The work of 'F****' was published by Heyse with an introduction in 1826.

Multitalented Felix was also an accomplished watercolourist, and having seen many of his views of Switzerland in a book of Swiss landscapes given to me by my Zurich-based friend Lottie, I was delighted to see even more of the originals given a room to themselves here. Rather fond of this unfinished view of a tree-lined promenade in Interlaken. Mendelssohn had little confidence in his ability to draw figures, which is why the lady remains sketchy.

A nice creative touch is the use of the kitchen to display Mendelssohn's travels in a series of commemorative plates

with an introduction which made me especially happy:

Upstairs are the Archive devoted to that great man and Gewandhaus presiding genius for many years Kurt Masur

and, more important still, a series of rooms devoted to Felix's fabulously gifted sister Fanny, named throughout as Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel. Her artist husband gracefully adorned many of her manuscripts,

and I sat in one of the rooms listening to a recording by Lauma Skride (sister of Baibe, who was playing in the Berg Violin Concerto later) of three movements from her piano series Die Jahr, a predecessor of Tchaikovsky's The Seasons (which of course should be The Months). No small talent, this. It is saddening to read in the exhibition of how her brother prohibited her from publishing her music. The same old story of male dominance which pertained to Alma Mahler, whose husband made it clear there weren't room for two composers in one household. That document is highlighted, but there is also plenty of memorabilia here too, not least from time spent in Rome.

The garden has a recent bust of Mendelssohn

and a chastening exhibition in the outbuilding of Mendelssohn and the Nazis. I was saddened to see a picture of Strauss conducting under a giant swastika as late as 1938 - I have been too much the apologist for the extent of his compliance with a regime he hated - and there's also the shocking story of Beecham and the LPO visiting Leipzig in 1936, laying a wreath at the foot of the statue on 9 November, only to return the next day to find it gone. To his credit, the Mayor resigned in protest at this disgrace. A reproduction of the statue was placed in 2008 at the back of the Thomaskirche (this from my first visit last December)

and Mendelssohn has left us a watercolour of the church for which Bach composed so many of his cantata masterpieces.

The Music Trail, meanwhile, leads one on to the Grieg Memorial Centre in the next block. Grieg was the guest of publishers Abraham and Hinrichsen during his Leipzig stays. 

With opening hours limited to Friday afternoons and Saturdays, there was no chance of visiting, so I contented myself with the sight of the plaque and a bust in the neighbouring garden. 

The building which housed the former Peters Music Library is nearby, too, and then you come to the splendid Museum complex including the Museum of Musical Instruments and the graveyard at the back where Bach was originally buried (members of the Mendelssohn family, too), but that was locked and I had no time on this visit to see the oldest fortepiano, so on I pressed to the apartment in which Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck spent the first year of their marriage, on the first floor of Inselstraße 18.

This is a far less lavishly maintained museum than the Mendelssohn-Haus; perhaps more has gone into the Schumannhaus in Bonn. But it had an old-fashioned charm, one of domineering father Wieck's pianos

and a rather less period-conscious assemblage of copies of reproductions favoured by Schumann

as well as an equally well-maintained staircase.

Time for the evening's concert was drawing closer, so I headed back via the Wagner memorial behind the Opera House, surrounded by snowdrops

and the frozen pond below it.

There will be plenty more of that ice in my next photojournal - I've recently returned from Bodø, well above the Arctic Circle in Norway, and that really was a winter wonderland.

Bergen curators

Norway, Denmark, marriage, Sicily: these are my excuses for slim pickings on the blog for the past few weeks, and I've got a lot to catch up on. All three places yielded the most wonderful times, but maybe my happiest memories in terms of meeting new people who seemed just as interested in me as I was in them (Danes not great in that respect, or maybe it's a politeness thing) have come from the trip to Bergen.

You'll probably recognise the open, friendly face up top: it belongs to Leif Ove Andsnes, who met me in the cafe of one of the four galleries by the central lake, Lille Lungegårdsvann, and who curated two concert specials I'll never forget (Sibelius melodramas plus in an old masonic hall, Kurtág and Liszt in Grieg's villa at Troldhaugen, with the composer's own Steinway as centrepiece: read all about them on The Arts Desk). The ladies in the middle are curator of the Ole Bull House-Museum on Lysøen island Berit Hogheim and the most comprehensive, disciplined and enthusiastic of guides there, Inger Carter. And below them is Sigurd Sandmo, whose titles are Director of the Composers' Homes (around Bergen) and Director of the International Edvard Grieg Piano Competition, standing on the roof terrace at Troldhaugen.

All four are Bergen trained or raised and gave me the greatest insights into this wonderful town, cut off from inland Norway until the late 1980s (I think there was a road from Oslo before then, but that was it). Indeed, the tendency before that was to be closer to England and Scotland over the seas than to the heart of the homeland, to which there were no passable roads before the big changes came.

I owe most in terms of extending the information to Lysøen (Kieron Tyler, it turned out, had got there before me on his trip to Bergen's Jazzfest). Ole Bull has to be one of the most fascinating figures in the history of music: probably because his music died with him, all bar a few pieces he composed for the violin, and he hailed from before the era of the gramophone, only Norwegians really know him as an heroic figure. Clearly a showman too, but a true democrat who never forgot the people to whom he should really be playing.

I want to read a biography of the great man, but Inger certainly gave us some choice details. Bull Senior ran the Swan pharmacy in Bergen, founded in 1595 (I'm told the swan sign is still there, but didn't have enough time to seek out the shop). In 1818 at the age of 8, talented young Ole auditioned for what would in time become the Bergen Philharmonic, becoming its leader at the age of 10 (I think I've got this right, if that's what Inger meant by 'first violinist'). He picked up his love of folk music playing with the locals on his grandmother's farm, and skived off school to play with the "slustril" folk (=sour milk, regarded as low-graders in Bergen society). In 1851 he co-founded the first native-language theatre in Norway and the following year engaged 23 year old Henrik Ibsen as artistic director. On the site now stands a grandiose 1911 building with a bug-eyed statue of Ibsen outside.

Bull's violinistic prowess was compared to Paganini's, but alas he left no recordings and his fame, internationally at least, ended with his death. A handsome fellow, he caused the ladies to faint in recitals and carried a bottle of smelling salts (here in a glass case) to revive them.

His travels and success abroad became so legendary that Ibsen modelled, at least in part (and I hope only in part, because though he was quite a philanderer, Bull seems to have been something of a Mensch), the character of Peer Gynt on him. Peer's travels in Egypt coincide with the fact that Bull climbed the Cheops pyramid in Giza and played his famous folk variations on top. Wish there was a photo of that. In America he set up an (ultimately unsuccessful) Norwegian farmers' colony in Potter's County. His second wife, after an unsuccessful first marriage to a genteel Frenchwomen he'd met in Paris while studying with Vuillaume, was Sara Thorp, a senator's daughter (he was 60, she 20). And then, with daughter Olea in tow, they came to settle on Lysøen.

He bought the entire, 12 km long island. A farm had been there since 1670, but a new home was needed and in collaboration with the architect Conrad Fredrik van der Lippe, he designed a 'mini Alhambra' with a Russian onion dome and stars of David, Indian suns and Arabic symbols woven into the main room's fabric.You can see at least two of them here.

30 local carpenters worked on the project using wood from the island. The Bull family took up residence in the summer of 1873. Eight years later he returned, ill and exhausted from yet another American tour, to die in the Villa Lysø. Sara, a talented musician, played the Mozart Requiem on the piano - his own invention, a piano that would not need tuning, needed tuning after two months, but there was no possibility for that so it was converted into a large piece of furniture - and he died clutching his favourite flora (and Norway's national symbol), a bunch of heather. The house remembers this in its various arrangements.

Ole's granddaughter Sylvea kept the house on, visiting regularly from the States, and in 1974 she turned it over to the Bergen division of the Norwegian Society for the Protection of Ancient Monuments. Though the main room - a splendid concert hall where, alas, I wasn't in time to catch a recital -  and an annex museum room are all there is to see, that's quite an 'all'. Many of his splendid violins are here, including a Guarneri, and his Amati turned up recently, to be given an inaugural recital. The silk flag from New York mixing the Norwegian design with the stars and stripes was his most treasured memento.

My own time on Lysøen was very special indeed, thanks to the convivial company of Inger and Berit, who took me off to the bijou cafe for waffles and coffee before I took a walk round the back of the house

up to the island's highest point

and back through verdant woods and a silent lake to the villa.

Then we returned to the fun ferry steered by a retired Norwegian navy man, saw the house shining on the island from the mainland docking point at Buena Kai

and drove back to Bergen. I had just enough time to buy more fresh fish at the harbour before a revelatory concert in the wonderful old Håkonshalle of the castle given by the young Norwegian string group Ensemble Allegria and the phenomenal Lawrence Power (both concert photos by Thore Brødreskift).

And then, with a rainbow appearing over Bergen harbour, it was into  another taxi to Troldhaugen for my own private tour of the grounds with Sigurd before the 10.30pm concert (which I've written more about over on The Arts Desk). This is the villa c.10pm, and the distant mountain outlines could still be seen against red in the sky through its windows nearly two hours later

Would love to have heard a recital in the new concert hall too, with its view down to Grieg's composing hut and the lake

which we then went to see via the oddly Mycenean tomb

on which Edvard's and Nina's names are carved in quasi-runic letters

but 40 of us in the house was something unique and unrepeatable. Here's my own shot of Grieg's piano before the recital began.

Bergen's in-town museums are splendid, too. I met Leif Ove in the cafe of KODE 2, but I'd spent hours in 3 and 4. 3 has the superlative collection of Rasmus Meyer to complement its own Munch collection, second only to the one in Oslo. The artist was prolific but never less than a true original; I was fascinated by the self-portrait he painted while in a classy asylum - from this time onward his paintings became more optimistic and colourful - but sadly no postcard was to be obtained. Good old Wikimedia, then.

Which other Norwegian artists impressed? Harriet Backer, certainly, in just a couple of pics from a whole wall of her stuff - still all those domestic scenes about which Munch complained, but this is rather lovely -

and a new wing devoted to Nikolai Astrup, sometimes too gaudy and sentimental, but a good chronicler of Norwegian happy days.

I love the woodcuts especially - there was a wall of Beltane fires in oils, but not I think anything like this:

And the reproduction doesn't quite catch the uncanny light of 'Clear June Night'.

There's a big Astrup exhibition coming to the UK in 2016. I think you'll be rather impressed if you don't know his work.

In between the various KODE buidings on the city's inner lake

is the Kunsthalle, and this was hosting the festival's main exhibition, about which I wanted to write on TAD but didn't have the space. Featured artist Ane Hjort Guttu's new body of work, and let's use the words of the blurb, investigates 'issues of power, freedom, the role and responsibility of the artist as well as the possibilities and limitations of political art'. All these are well distilled in her 46 minute film Time Passes. A timely piece of work given the current Norwegian debate on the prohibition of begging on the city streets and the question of the (very large) number of Romanian Roma folk. The earnest and ever so slightly humorless art student Damla (played by actress Damla Kilickiran) takes up a place near Bergen's station with an articulate and touching Roma woman whose thoughts are duly given as she sits in the public library.

Damla starts out 'sitting' as an artwork for her studies at the college, but withdraws as she becomes more troubled about its possibly exploitative value. The film itself is not without lightness of touch - I love the students' discussion about Breughel's Landscape with Icarus and how Auden sees it in 'Musée des Beaux Arts' (very germane to the film's subject: ordinary life goes on alongside immense suffering).

We last see Damla at her friends' graduation exhibition, in a space which mirrors the one we're sitting in (I'm pleased with this picture, but I wish I'd caught a good frame from the film, too, though it's just possible it might be the last scene so the room within a room would be appropriate).

Time Passes is also a hymn to Bergen, for all the problems of everyday life, and Leif Ove celebrated it, too, in his interview narrative of his early days here. I didn't have a chance to reproduce much of what I transcribed on TAD, so this seems like a good place for it. 

There was a Czech teacher at the Bergen Music Conservatory, Mr [Jiří] Hlinka, whom I got to hear about. I came as a 15 year old and had some private lessons from him, and he said you should come over next year and start at the conservatory. So I did, and he was a very important inspiration to me. I was a rather shy, introverted boy from a provincial island, I didn’t have professional musicians around me, I needed someone to show me the passion and commitment and life of music, someone every day telling me the importance of contrasts in the music, the storytelling, showing me all the possibilities. It had such an impact on me and made me realize I couldn’t do without music. He was into the Russian school, whatever that actually means, maybe there is a system at least for children, or the sense of movement at the keyboard. But anyway he had played for Gilels and even once for Richter, who was also my idol in the first years. Later on I changed my tastes and came to know Lipatti, Michelangeli and many others, and became much more diverse, but first I was crazy about Richter.

Bergen was important because I’d never heard a professional orchestra – well, as a 14 year old I played with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, and the Mozart D minor Piano Concerto was my first experience of hearing these sounds. But then I came here and first concert I went to had Mahler One in the second half, and I was blown away, I thought is this what an orchestra can do? Simply to come and hear it and get those impulses, getting to love the orchestra, getting to love chamber music, because in my first year at conservatoire I played with a viola-player, a mezzo-soprano, and I loved that and used as much time on that as my solo studies, almost. It was a tiny conservatoire, under 50 students, and the quality was up and down, but I had a great teacher, I was so dedicated, as a piano student music was the only thing in life for me during the first few years

The festival was a very important inspiration. In 1987 students could sign up as volunteer ushers, which meant you got a free seat. I look at the programme for that year now, and there was so much going on, so many singers - Lucia Popp, Katia Ricciarelli, Teresa Berganza; in the Håkonsaal [pictured below with the Borodin Quartet] they had a great singer every night. 

Four or five song recitals also blew me away. That was so exciting, we felt that the world came to our little town. Now it's not quite as unique in Norway as it was then, it really was the national event. It still holds that position, it's still the biggest arts festival in the Nordic countries, I think. But then it made such an impression. It remains a bit of a fairytale for me.

And 'fairytale' is exactly what his two concerts with friends young and contemporary - Sibelius's magic mix of spoken poetry and instrumental magic, Kurtág's kaleidoscope of quasi-naive fantasies with Liszt's sighs and swoons - will always remain for me. But what we still need to explore are the mountains and glaciers inland. I caught only a glimpse of them on the flight back.