Zooming the symphony, from Haydn to Adams

A colleague once said he used his blog as a kind of shop window for his work. Although it's absolutely not my aim here - there are no barriers, I write about what I want to and see it more as a kind of public diary - this is one of those shop-window posts. Certainly not born out of need to try and hook more punters to a course which already has so many signed up - the response from my regular list of students was very surprising, since it's usually easier to 'sell' opera than orchestral music - but out of a genuine sense of excitement about where the 11 classes might take us.

Mastering Zoom is easy - even my senior students, up to the age of 95, can manage it - but there was quite a bit of stress before I settled in the second of my Opera in Depth classes the Monday before last. First, not being able to find the camera on my computer, which took five hours of collaborative searching here at home - even my techno-wizz spouse was foxed - before it appeared after a re-start. Then the awful quality of the sound clips, which could have been solved if my two tech-savviest students had joined the test class. They showed me what to do et voilà - state-of-the-art sound for all, best using headphones.

So two out of the three (out of five) OiD classes on Strauss's Elektra so far have gone like a dream - beyond my wildest expectations in one sense, since Susan Bullock - a top Elektra all round the world, and now singing the other most challenging role, Klytemnestra - was there for most of the second class and the whole of the third, bringing extraordinary insights to every scene (for the above photo, I return to Frontline Club days, when she and Anne Evans - on the left - came to talk Isolde). The students thought our double act went very well. She'll be back, and for Madama Butterfly in the second batch of five classes. I've also just heard that Ermonela Jaho, the heartbreaker of the Royal Opera production who should have been reprising the role this summer (pictured below by Bill Cooper), will also be joining us.

Having established the special guests there, I thought I could also call upon conductors I know and respect. So delighted to say that Mark Wigglesworth, who's just conducted a Beethoven cycle in Adelaide, chose to make his appearance in the 'Eroica' class. Again I return to Frontline days and a visit which was photographed by professional (and, briefly, student) Frances Marshall.

Three other stars are expected, but not confirmed yet, so I won't pre-empt. STOP PRESS: Ian Page, who's recording a Sturm und Drang series with his Mozartists orchestra, will be with us tomorrow. ADDITIONAL STOP PRESS: so is Jonathan Bloxham, inspirational founder of the Northern Chords Festival and its superb young professional orchestra who conducted our last three Europe Day Concerts (read all about the 2019 one here).

Below are the plans for all 11 classes, just so that I have them in something I can link to rather than just on an attachment. Message me if you'd like to join for all or some: it's a bargain (I halved the usual fees because I don't have room hire expenses and Zoom is, after all, not live with great equipment to hand, so it's £10 a class, ie £5 an hour. We meet on Thursdays as from tomorrow, 3.30-5.50pm. and if anyone misses a class or has connection/sound issues their end, I can send on a recording of the whole thing. Send me a message with your email and I won't publish it, but I'll be sure to get back to you.

This list has now been updated in the light of how we progressed, and who came to visit.

1: Sonata form and instrumental novelty   7 May
Selected movements/snippets from Haydn symphonies - 22,  31, 45, 70, 83 and 101; Mozart 41, 'Jupiter' (1788) Special guests: Jonathan Bloxham and Ian Page.

2: A new and noble scale  14 May
Beethoven's Third Symphony, 'Eroica' (1803-4). Special guests: Mark Wigglesworth and Jonathan Bloxham.

3: Follow that! Scaling up and down after Beethoven  21 May
Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (1829-30) and Schumann's Second (1845-6). Special guest: Nicholas Collon.

4: Songs for Clara  28 May UPDATED
Schumann's Second (continued) and Brahms's First Symphony (1875-6). Special guest: Catherine Larsen-Maguire.

5: New/old approaches to the finale  4 June UPDATED
Brahms's Fourth (1885) andTchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, 'Pathétique' (1893). Special guest: Vladimir Jurowski.

6: The world in a symphony   11 June
Mahler's Third Symphony (1895-6). Special guest: Paavo Järvi.

7: Imagining cataclysms   18 June
Mahler's Ninth Symphony (1909-10) and Elgar's Second (1911). Special guest: Vasily Petrenko.

8: Mosaic tiles from heaven   25 June
Sibelius's Fifth Symphony in its original (1914-15) and final (1919) versions. Special guests: Kristiina Poska and Andres Kaljuste.

9: The finale question: 1920s, 1940s  2 July
Nielsen's Fifth Symphony (1921-2); Martinů's Third Symphony (1944-5), Vaughan Williams's Sixth (1944-7) and Prokofiev's Sixth (1947). Special guest: Sir Mark Elder.

10: Endgame   9 July
Shostakovich's Fifteenth Symphony (1971). Special guests: Elizabeth Wilson and Peter Manning.

11 Symphonies in all but name   16 July
John Adams's Harmonielehre (1985) and Naive and Sentimental Music (1999). Special guest: Catherine Larsen-Maguire.

Discovering Danco through Ansermet

Continuing to dig in to the huge discography (300 plus Suisse Romande recordings for Decca alone) of Ernest Ansermet long after the BBC Radio 3 discussion of his legacy - the edited version still to be heard for the next few days on the BBC iPlayer here starting at 53m27s - I ordered up five discs from the Australian-based Eloquence wing of Decca, not least to explore his few opera recordings. And here I came across a voice I only previously knew through the Josef Krips Don Giovanni and Erich Kleiber Figaro, Brussels-born Suzanne Danco. Her lyric soprano is not so light as ever to be dubbed 'soubrette' - she sang Ellen Orford at La Scala, Marie in Wozzeck and Mimi - but it's the personality in everything she sings that shines through.

Anyone, for instance, who gets annoyed with poor Mélisande - abused, Maeterlinck would have us assume, by her previous lord and master Bluebeard before Golaud discovers her lost in the forest - might find this characterisation stronger than usual. There's certainly nothing wan or wispy about it, and you hear the pain creep in when Debussy needs it. As for the whole of this 1952 Pelléas et Mélisande, I think this may be the most compelling version I've ever heard on CD - I wish I'd known it when I spent six Monday afternoons on the work for my Opera in Depth course.

The classic Désormière recording of over a decade earlier is also very speech-melody conscious, and there will possibly never be a better Pelléas than Jacques Jansen (Ansermet's Pierre Mollet is also excellent). But here the sound is so much better, and Ansermet, preferring a forward sense of movement throughout to 'burn off the mists' long before Boulez, makes his strings sigh with pain and love. You can more or less understand, with even just a little French, what's being sung about just by listening without a libretto. Quelle clarté! I'd still turn to some recent recordings for further beauty of orchestral texturing, but I simply don't want to listen to a non-French cast who doesn't understand every nuance.

It's curious to see Danco get top billing in Ansermet's recording of Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges when in fact she sings not the role of the reactive child but the meltingly beautiful aria of the picture-book princess. Again, the pointillist detail of Ansermet's interpretation as captured in the bright old Decca recording is fabulous (even if the last chords of the Five O'Clock Foxtrot seem not to be fully scored) and here's Hugues Cuénod excelling, too, as old man Maths. Danco and her Golaud, Heinz Rehfuss, turn up in the aurally otiose L'Heure espagnole, too. But she's most bewitching in the Deux mélodies hébraïques - the first of which gives the strongest sense of the power she can unleash when necessary - and Shéhérazade. So full of charm and meaning, again, even if not as luxuriously upholstered as the classic version with Régine Crespin. Which I had quite forgotten is also an Ansermet/Suisse Romande special. Real gap in the library there - must correct.

On the same set there's the first of Ansermet's Boléros with the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra. a good couple of minutes more leisurely than his Suisse Romande version. I was glad to find out that his recording of Hérold's Zampa Overture is lurid with character, explaining why I was so obsessed with this piece as a child (I took out the Ace of Diamonds LP of French overtures at least twice from Sutton Library). And the Haydn revelation continues with renewed admiration for the mixed moods of Symphony No. 83 (the hen-peckings follow a dark start) and the charm of No. 84's finale (funny how the un-soubriquet-ed symphonies often seem to be overshadowed) in the set of 'Paris' Symphonies. The discoveries keep on giving.

On a very un-French footnote, I also confirmed for myself the total-classic status of this recording of Britten's first opera, operetta, musical, call it what you will. 

Having been disappointed with so much about the Wilton's mishandling of Paul Bunyan, despite some excellent casting, I came home, and confirmed the work's masterpiece status thanks to a cast under Philip Brunelle that puts it across with exemplary clarity (that word again, not so evocative in English).   

Ansermania

Ernest Ansermet's recording with his Orchestre de la Suisse Romande of Chabrier's Joyeuse Marche is a desert island track of mine: the precise brio instantly puts one in a jolly mood, the perfect curtainraiser to any concert of recorded music. His complete Delibes Coppélia was my top choice on BBC Radio 3's Building a Library. But I hadn't listened widely to the non-French repertoire in his 314 Decca recordings. Preparing for a Proms Plus homage on Thursday afternoon, I found myself constantly taken aback by the freshness, the combination of firm rhythmic definition and freedom, in  classical and romantic works. Not what one would expect from a Professor of Mathematics, but Ansermet was anything but rigid in his logic as an interpreter.

In the end a brief digression on that subject got edited out for the interval broadcast, which you can hear about 58 minutes into the Prom as available for a while on the BBC iPlayer (and I recommend it all). Listeners had just heard Debussy and Ravel, and were about to hear Stravinsky's Petrushka, so that remained the brief. But how I would love to have illustrated the perfect gait and spareness of the first movement in Ansermet's recording of Haydn's Symphony No. 22, 'The Philosopher'. In a fascinating documentary made during a rehearsal you can see here:

Ansermet says every Haydn symphony should be respected for its unique character, that there is so much more beyond the basic classical forms. The focused power of his Beethoven Fifth, Seventh and Ninth is also surprising. The studio performance of the Seventh's finale is one of the glories of the recording world; I haven't had time yet to watch the whole of the below film, but it's another of those unanticipated pleasures that YouTube constantly gives us.

Many sound files only reached me from Universal - which holds the Decca legacy but can't, it seems, get hold of it so easily - just as I was about to set out for Imperial College on Thursday afternoon, but the listening will go on. One of the tracks I did get to excerpt especially impressed our players - the second of the Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, silky but clear, with the necessary acidic jabs of pain. Here, also wonder of wonders, is a film of him conducting the OSR in La Valse.

The players weren't so fond of the Petrushka excerpt I chose - from the later, 1957 stereo version rather than the feted 1949 recording. A bit messy, yes, but so spirited.

I'd like to have included the white heat of Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Finale - like the Beethoven, one of the best interpretations I've ever heard of a very familiar work - and more of Ansermet's perfect sympathy with dance music.

The relationship with Stravinsky (Ansermet pictured below with him and Prokofiev) is fascinating. It ran smoothly from the early days of the Ballets Russes - Ansermet took over from Monteux, called up for active service in 1915 - until 1938, when they fell out over a cut Ansermet insisted upon in the ballet Jeu de cartes. Much of the correspondence in Craft's Volume One selection is businesslike, but there's a touching commendation from Stravinky in 1919, after an OSR rehearsal of the new Firebird Suite, of how well Ansermet understands contemporary music, in that he doesn't approach it differently from 'music of the past'.

Schoenberg and his system Ansermet did not, would not, understand, and it's shocking to read in his huge study of musical aesthetics how he links the aridity with the 'Jewish question'. And that was in 1961! I won't sully the entry with quotations (and there's a still worse one in an earlier article on how Schnabel played like a Jewish banker). Still, I found that the Hannah Arendt Institute was promoting a conference on the holistic approach to music we find in Ansermet's magnum opus. A nicer way to end is to quote his fundamental tenet:

It is easy for a conductor to fill a musical phrase with feeling, because one can do more or less what one wants with a musical phrase. In any case, it is easier to do than to find the correct feeling, the one that puts the phrase in its context and takes account of its contribution to the piece as a whole...It is the interpreter's job to assimilate as much as possible the feeling which the composer turned into music, and to express it in such a way that the listener can hear it in terms of melody, harmony, rhythm and tempo. I have made my choice. First I imagine the musically sensitive listener. Thus I have faith in the listener, just as I have faith in the music, and the two things hang together. My idea is that the listener is able to understand and so all I need to do, in so far as I am able, is to let the music speak, without recourse to the sort of effects that one can always produce, but at the expense of the truth.

Neeme Järvi: from 1980 to 80

If only I could have made the entire, exceptionally long stretch of Pärnu Festival this year to hear Neeme Järvi in his 80th birthday year conduct the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, and - I gather - an encore with the Academy Orchestra in the first week as well as what I did hear in the second - four terrific concerts from the Estonian Festival Orchestra and its soloists. Alas, Proms duty as speaker called on the intervening Sunday so I couldn't get out there - starting in Latvia, a country I'd never visited before - until last Monday. It's looking as if I may have to wait until next February when Järvi  père is scheduled to conduct the work he's always pleaded to do at the Proms, Tobias's massive oratorio Des Jona Sendung (Jonah's Mission), in Berlin. Well, he told me that the knee problems which had stopped him returning to his beloved Royal Scottish National Orchestra earlier this year - I was all set to go - seem to be sorted, so fingers crossed.

He was, of course, a benevolent presence at the last night in Pärnu, where after the concert older son Paavo, the festival's presiding genius, generously and movingly feted his father as the critical guiding spirit. I got to have a chat with him at the party, and was especially happy with my day's discovery - a copy of one of his 1980 Melodiya recordings of Haydn's symphonies. He's holding it above, flanked by Paavo's two daughters Leah and Ingrid, with Mrs J, Liilia, to the right (two special Pärnu pals can just be made out in the background - New Best Orchestral Friend, horn-player Catherine Eisele, and the wonderful administrator/bassoonist Tea Tuhkur looking on). And an official photographer - not sure who, since this is from a batch on the Estonian Festival Orchestra's Facebook page - caught me leaning earnestly forward from my seat at the feet of the master.

Two of those LPs were released, the rest suppressed and his name wiped from the record when he emigrated to the west later that year. It was also when I first got to hear this then unknown-to-me conductor and orchestra (the Gothenburg Symphony) under circumstances which I explained a couple of years back on the blog. No harm in reproducing a second time the photo taken of him outside the Gothenburg Concert Hall, also from 1980.

Neeme expressed surprise when I showed him the LP, and assumed I'd brought it from London. The circumstances under which I came to it seem serendipitous. I'd bought two Melodiya box sets from the shop on Pärnu's Supeluse, the main road to the beach - one of The Barber of Seville with the great Kozlovsky as Almaviva and Mark Reizen as Basilio, conducted by Samosud,

and the other of Prince Igor with - as I thought - of Lemeshev, Reizen again and Melik-Pashayev conducting. But when I got it back to the hotel, I saw that the booklet actually listed two recordings, and this was the later one under Ermler, which I have on CD. So I took it back and, just as I seemed to be drawing a blank for a replacement - other Melodiya boxes with fun designs turned out to be Soviet pressings of Callas in Lucia and Toscanini's Otello - the shopkeeper brought out another pile of classical LPs. Neeme's early Haydn happened to be among them. Of course I had to get him to sign it some 37 years later.

The performances, which I listened to this morning, are full and spirited, not at all over-romanticised in any way; and of course the humour is fully appreciated.

As Estonian Festival Orchestra clarinettist supreme - and one of the handful of the world's best - Matt Hunt pointed out once we'd rolled on from the concert hall to the nexus of festival socialising, the Passion Cafe in the old town, what wouldn't most of us give to be 80 and propping up a bar at 3am? Neeme finally left shortly after that time to another speech by Paavo, to which he graciously responded,

shared another laugh with Matt and Paavo,

and headed off down the street supported by stick and loyal son (here's leader Florian Donderer, of whom Neeme thinks so highly, heading towards me. With apologies for the poor quality of the night shots - with or without flash, they don't come out very well, but there's no alternative record).

It seems a shame that because I wasn't there, I won't be able to use pictures of NJ's earlier appearances on the Arts Desk piece when it's ready, especially as they were taken by resident masters, Kaupo Kikkas (the first below) and Taavi Kull (the third), with one of many excellent complementary and equally professional shots by David Kornfeld (the intervening triple portrait). So the blog will do. Here he is conducting the brilliant young Academy players at the end of the concert shared by the various conductors on the Masterclasses he takes annually (see some pics from last year here),

with fellow masterclass takers Leonid Grin and Paavo,

and with Paavo at the end of the concert.

Next year, if I'm invited back (and even if I'm not), I have to do it all. In the meantime, coming home was not such a bump since back at the Proms I heard a good-in-parts Schoenberg Gurrelieder from Rattle, a glorious Bach triple whammy on Sunday very much crowned by the best St John Passion I've ever heard live and last night another exceptional Balt, Lithuanian Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, conducting 'her' City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in a dazzling programme. The future looks good in hands like this. Photo courtesy of Chris Christodoulou/BBC.

And now for two concert-free nights with some time for digestion of abundant riches.

UPDATE (24/8) The full Arts Desk report on the Estonian Festival Orchestra's concerts in Pärnu and Jūrmala is now up and running.

More great guests at the Frontline Club

Following his final performance as the best Music Director of English National Opera in my memory, Mark Wigglesworth paid another visit to my Opera in Depth class at the Frontline Club in November.

Student Frances Marshall, a professional photographer who recently took stunning photos of the wedding of a certain bass friend and the Salzburg love of his life, brought along her camera and caught a couple of great shots, including the one above, which another visitor, Susan Bullock, thought was Mark to the life - pensive, deep-thinking.

More recently, spending what now turns out to be nine glorious Monday afternoons on Der Rosenkavalier, we were blessed to have Dame Felicity Lott coming to talk Strauss. Distinguished film and documentary maker David Thompson managed some pics from his seat front left.

And last week Richard Jones returned with typically off-centre thoughts on his Glyndebourne Rosenkavalier. This photo is of a previous visit as I didn't want to wear him out with student paparazzi. He's a lot smilier these days, so wry and funny.

Fortunately the wisdom of all three is captured, with their consent, on my mp3 player - I hope I'll have cause to revisit and transcribe some time. The main thing to mark is the departure of Messrs Wigglesworth and Jones from the ENO fold - the present CEO hasn't earned the respect of either, and should be ashamed of herself for letting them go. So much to lament here. This season's Don Giovanni was their first collaboration, and while Mark is never lost for words to praise his colleague, Richard said he was - adding only, 'what class'. When he said that he wouldn't tackle the other two Mozart/Da Ponte operas, I asked him, not even with MW? Oh yes, with him, definitely, came the reply. We've also lost the collaboration on The Gondoliers - a work Carlos Kleiber longed to conduct at ENO, gospel truth - and Elektra.

FLott still has the performer's instinct - she's havering over whether to play the Devil in a Belgian company's Stravinsky Soldier's Tale, in the French she speaks so beautifully, and to see her react to recordings of Crespin and Lehmann, as well as the recording she made of the Rosenkavalier Trio with Dessay, Kirchschlager and Pappano, was very, very moving. So were her readings of three texts I'd translated. Memories of C Kleiber were so precious - always the greatest for her, as well as for the rest of us watching their Vienna Rosenkavalier on DVD. No wonder she can't tolerate slow, maudlin tempi for the Marschallin. He used to sign himself 'Uncle Greifenklau' after the relative the Marschallin tells us she's intending to visit. Huge fun - he looks it on screen - and very amusing anecdotes, including one about Pavarotti replacing the usual Italian Tenor for a performance. You can imagine he didn't take to the Kleiber style.

It's also encouraging to hear all three guests speak so warmly and enthusiastically of the best young performers coming through the ranks. FLott had been giving masterclasses at the Carnegie Hall under Marilyn Horne's guidance, did a wicked impersonation of a young soprano hitting that rapturous Strauss Lied 'Cäcilie' as if it were a nagging lecture, complete with witchy finger-jabbing. But clearly she's kind and supportive to the talented. It will do the wonderful Miranda Keys good to know how much FL admired her Duenna, and of course she's a great admirer of Louise Alder, now learning her trade in Frankfurt. The future is golden, so long as there's financing to follow it.

Which allows me to slip in a photo featuring some of my favourite twentysomething musicians. The Philharmonia Friends in the interval of Paavo Järvi's utterly engaging concert with the Philharmonia the other week didn't know what hit them when youth and beauty, a mixture of Estonians and Brits, stepped into the Level 5 reception room. The lights of the former Chelsfield Room turned them green, so I made the pic black and white (the focus isn't great as we were being hurried back to our seats and the flash wouldn't go off).

Here are three violinists - Marike Kruup on the left and her partner Benjamin Baker, second from right, as well as Jess Wadley next to him; a cellist turned agent, Maarit Kangron; a bassoonist who's also a brilliant organiser, Tea Tuhkur, my most delightful companion for the evening; and a cellist turned conductor, Jonathan Bloxham (also boyfriend of the glamorous Jess).

The programme deserves more than a mention. The first half worked at a level of communication and humour you don't often encounter, here in Haydn's Symphony No. 101 ('Clock') and Beethoven's Triple Concerto, a piece that normally loses me for whole swathes. No chance of that with Christian and Tania Tetzlaff making chamber music alongside Lars Vogt. If you sometimes strained to catch it, that was no bad thing. And what an absolute masterpiece the Haydn is, like all its late counterparts.

If Paavo's Nielsen Sixth (the conductor pictured above by Jean Christophe Uhl) wasn't the greatest performance I've heard live, that was probably because the Philharmonia, or at least its strings, needed another rehearsal or two to truly let rip. But as an interpretation, it brought out all the timely mania and discombobulation in this amazingly modernistic piece, a beacon, surely, for Shostakovich in his Fourth and Fifteenth Symphonies (though I've never found any evidence that DDS knew it).

But I digress. Back, finally, to the visitors. Jones's Rosenkavalier is returning to Glyndebourne next year - I already knew this - though directed by his very talented assistant Sara Fahie. He'd like to change quite a bit in Act One and wouldn't stay for the screening of the Levee, which he thinks needs more focus, though the students loved it. It was good to hear him standing up for Tara Erraught, and interesting to hear him say that it should have been Glyndebourne's responsibility to back her up; as he rightly points out, she has a fabulous gift for comedy, especially as 'Mariandel'. 

Sad to hear that the great Lars Woldt, perhaps the most lovable oaf of all Ochses, has retired from the role now. Here he is with Erraught, Ochs and Octavian being kept apart by Kate Royal's very attractive Marschallin - a photo by Bill Cooper of the 2015 production. The Feldmarschall in the left of the two portraits on the wall, by the way, is a former member of the stage crew, much admired by Richard, who took off for a year to travel round the world.

And then, of course, we went on to the end of the act with FLott and Von Otter, neither needing direction - nor did they get it from lazy old Otto Schenk - to communicate supreme eloquence, with Kleiber as the dramaturg. This version on YouTube breaks things up into 10 minute chunks, and there are no subtitles, but it does have the advantage of starting at the crucial soliloquy.

Three more glorious weeks to go, then all too little time on Rimsky-Korsakov's The Snow Maiden. Summer term will be devoted to Otello and Pelléas et Mélisande - contact me if you'd like to come by leaving a comment here with your e-mail; I won't publish but I promise to get back to you. Special guests TBC. Will Jonas sing the Moor? Kinda sad he cancelled the one concert in the Barbican residency I was going to - though as fellow critic Neil Fisher pointed out, 'I really can't wait to hear a tenor sing the Four Last Songs' is not a comment you're ever likely to hear...

Dazzling Bach for a jubilant Christmas Day

There's only one CD you need for the happy morning, and I've just been blown away by it. I blush to say it was sitting in the great pile of to-be-heards, but after Monday's only half-satisfying Bach concert from the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists under Gardiner, I needed to listen to the most blazing of all Magnificats again. This performance, like Gardiner's, uses the original E flat major version with Christmas interpolations, and it goes further - attempting to reconstruct Christmas Day 1723 in Leipzig's Nikolaikirche.

That means the brilliant John Butt and his Dunedin Consort launch exhilaratingly in to Giovanni Gabrieli's Hodie Christus natus est before giving us Bach's Cantata Christen, ätzet diesen Tag - the only one with parts for four of those silvery baroque trumpets - as well as several organ preludes and a thrilling congregational chorale version with organ improvisations in between the lines on Von himmel hoch.

What quickly became clear - in the Magnificat, as soon as the first solo, 'Et exsultavit' - is that Butt likes to use soloists of real character who also sing in the eight- or ten-strong choir; two of Gardiner's to-the-fore sopranos, tenor and one of the basses seem in retrospect to have been all the more inadequate alongside singers here capped by the wonderful Joanne Lunn (pictured above by Andrew Redpath), with her distinctive and carefully applied vibrato just right even for the choruses. She's also the star of the more recent Dunedin/Linn Christmas Oratorio, which I also listened to, all six cantatas in sequence, more or less at a single sitting. Gardiner's Archiv classic is never going to disappear from the shelves, not least because of Anthony Rolfe Johnson and Anne Sofie von Otter, but again there's refreshment from the small choral forces used here.

Besides, quite apart from my ignorance of too many of the cantatas, I blush to say I never knew the Magnificat as well as I should do until Monday. A sheer live hearing of it was miraculous enough to keep any of the passing (solo) disappointments at bay. And on Tuesday I heard the St. Lawrence String Quartet play Haydn's Op. 20 No. 2 in C major for the first time live: it knocked me for six, especially the 'Capriccio' Adagio, much more than John Adams' new String Quartet No. 2. Found a performance almost on the same high level from the Quatuor Mosaïques, so here it is: probably best to listen to the whole of the first movement so that the shock of the second properly registers, though if you've only time for novelty, go to 10'13.

So much great music to hear, so little time to hear it in. Again, I'm reminded of Shostakovich commenting on the Borodin Quartet's championship of the Soviet new 'but have you played all of Haydn's quartets yet?' Have I listened to all the Haydn quartets and all the Bach cantatas yet? Not by a long way, though I have fitful spells of trying to rectify the situation. If only I could play a stringed rather than a wind instrument, and go off and try the quartets out with friends.

In the meantime, here's a very cannily put together film giving the background to the  Christmas 1723 disc. Full marks in that it starts off with one of the most original numbers in the Magnificat, the 'Suscepit Israel' for two sopranos, alto and first trumpet.

Brave new (musical) world

I mean that in the genuine original sense of Shakespeare's Miranda, not ironically like Huxley. Among the many good deeds in a naughty world - and it's never seemed more horrible, in my lifetime, than this year - are the enterprises of young musicians like violinist Ben Baker and conductor/cellist Jonathan Bloxham. It's been my greatest pleasure to follow the trail from the East Neuk Festival, where, having arrived the night before the Retreat players' second concert, I only just met Ben, via Pärnu, where he was playing in the superlative Festival Orchestra along with Jonathan who was also on the conductors' course, to Southrepps and several Wigmore Hall recitals.

In all of which there was no need to talk of promise: the complete, sophisticated musicianship is totally there already. And it made a nice farewell to a great musical year earlier this month to attend their 'Christmas Charity Concert' in The Warehouse, Waterloo (both photos of orchestra, conductor and soloist by Boris Bizjak). Voluntary donations were to go to as fine a charity as any worth your attention, Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS), to which I'm also going to give all the money we save on stamps and cards by sending e-season's greetings.

The young - in some cases very young - orchestra of students and graduates made as fine a job as any I've heard of Mozart's Figaro Overture, Barber's Adagio for Strings and Haydn's 'Surprise' Symphony, with Sibelius's Valse Triste as an encore (Jonathan following in the footsteps of master Paavo Järvi in Pärnu). All the more remarkable on three hours' rehearsal that afternoon. Jonathan has an elegant conducting style and is getting to grips with the individual rubato so essential to conductors of quality (several famous ones don't have it, and never will). Ben played the second of Beethoven's Romances for Violin and Orchestra, usually a bit mundane but not in the hands of this supreme, understated master. Friends I'd invited along were wild with enthusiasm at the quality.

I'm not sure that goddaughter Mirabel (pictured above with Jonathan, Estonian violinist Marike, mum Edwina and friend Caroline) would have gone quite that far, but in attending her first grown-up concert - an hour without interval seemed manageable, and so it proved - she took it all in, especially the 'surprise' of Haydn's slow movement, such a brilliant symphonic treat. Having won the hearts of several girls in the concert with the big eyes noted by Jonathan and Ben, she was also perfectly socialised in the after-concert drinks, running up to the box and putting in extra pound coins, chatting to perfect strangers. She's also more recently, courtesy of John Savournin, had 'Happy Birthday' sung to her by the cast of Charles Court Opera's panto Mirror Mirror at the King's Head Theatre, about which I've heard great things and which I can't wait to see in the interstices between Xmas and New Year.

Ben will be playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto at the next Warehouse concert, 28 February, 6.30pm.