Runnicles: best after Berglund

In Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony, that is (and only connect: Paavo was left-handed and so is Donald). I flew up to Inverness for a mere 20 minutes’ talk on this and Sibelius’s links with Beethoven, very much interconnected in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s programme with mighty Donald (how lucky they are in the commitment to his homeland of one of the world’s best conductors).

The flight passed over snowy Cairngorms and flights of geese beneath before a taxi sped me to the town on the river Ness, rushing at high level past my hotel and the Eden Court Theatre on the other side where the concert was held. The place enchanted me in the bright, cold weather with only the occasional snowstorm, enhanced by the knowledge of those mountains to the south and no major settlements to the north.

I last came here with dearest Lottie in 1983 to join the Scottish Chamber Orchestra on its steam-train trip to the Kyle of Lochalsh (the best perk of being the SCO’s ‘student publicity officer’). We stayed in the youth hostel which, my taxi driver told me, has since burnt down, leaving enough of a shell to save and within which, perhaps, to rehouse the museum, currently stuck in a concrete box. His lilting accent reminded me of the Invernessian charm. News of my business there, and mention of Sibelius, led him to tell me of a Scot he knew called Greig who lived in Norway and reversed the e and i.

We could live here, I foolishly thought, enticed by the nearness of wild nature and the fact that on the Saturday morning before my early afternoon flight I walked half way to Loch Ness along river and canal, greeting lots of locals – cheery at the sun, no doubt – with their dogs: any town where the country is so imminent has my vote. Lewes would probably be a more practical suggestion but heck, a castle here wouldn’t cost half our flat thanks to the insanity of the London market.

Alas, I left my camera behind and my mobile phone was in transit from Aix-en-Provence, where it had fallen out in a taxi, so no shots of the fast-flowing river or the thousands of snowdrops and crocuses along the way. Here’s a generic photo of the Eden Court – no architectural masterpiece, but you get a sense of its riverside setting.

As for talk and concert, I thought I’d better draw the threads suggested by the programme together: Sibelius and Beethoven, the painstaking path both took to the final results (Beethoven 9 finale, Sibelius 5 versions 1 and 3). Runnicles’ coup, after a first half balancing a Sibelius Finlandia which was never overbearing even from my second-row seat with an intonation-perfect, meaningful-in-every –note Alina Pogostkina as soloist in the Beethoven Violin Concerto (still boring to me despite that), was to follow the end of Sibelius 7 with Beethoven’s Leonora Overture No. 3 (the same C major). My blind spot for so many Beethoven scores meant I still didn’t find it as meaningful as the Sibelius symphony, but that was a beauty of a performance, every tricky tempo change seamlessly negotiated and the climaxes falling where they should. Delighted to find this sketch on sibelius.fi.

Predicting success from what I knew of Runnicles' flexible style, I’d made an unfavourable comparison in the talk with Rattle’s Sibelius cycle so fresh in my head: this is a work that Donald knows how to negotiate, on a first attempt by the way, and Sir Si, for all his strengths in Sibelius 1, 2 and 4, doesn’t. A lady in the interval ticked me off for setting one above the other, and she did it with typical Scots abruptness, not prepared to hear me out. But against that, there were five folk with whom I had really lovely conversations, including the local worthy who remembered Neeme Järvi unveiling the plaque to the new theatre. That wasn’t all to the good: the theatre had lost several hundred seats in the revamp, meaning that they couldn’t afford many visiting orchestras because they couldn’t sell as many tickets as they had before.

Still, this event was packed. A fine crowd; they deserve more music up there. And I loved meeting the very thoughtful and friendly Donald as well as Alina (pictured above) afterwards, thanks to the kind offices of the excellent Andrew Trinick. I mentioned the superb performance she gave of Widmann's Violin Concerto in Bamberg and our conductor was keen to hear a recording of it.

Now I’m in Glasgow after another talk, another great concert, enjoyed with the adored godchildren studying here, Evi and Alexander. I hadn’t intended to write about it but was so impressed by the sound coming from the orchestra under Mexican conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto that I just have, with a disclaimer, for The Arts Desk.

Work proceeds inspiringly on listening to all the Sibelius 4s for Radio 3’s Building a Library: halfway through I’ve found one which will be hard to beat, a real surprise to me at any rate. But I can’t say more about the performances; suffice it to say that being immersed in this dark, if not black, work has not been depressing – past an early dip, extrovert performances raised my spirits and the perfect construction amazes me more and more.

Another seminal work of  around the same time, Schoenberg’s Three Pieces for Piano Op. 11, was beautifully argued in word and performance by young Jordanian-born, British-trained pianist Karim Said (pictured above) the other week. The circumstances were remarkable: an evening at Lady Valerie Solti’s house, organized by Norman Rosenthal. Said was promoting his new album on Opus Arte, hence my invitation from the recording company.

What artistic treasures – one never knows if it’s legit to list them or not – and what unshowy good taste, much like the lady herself. She came to the rescue when I asked where Strauss, at whose funeral Solti conducted the Trio from Der Rosenkavalier where the ladies famously broke down one by one and came back in again to reach the end -  was among the pictures in the music room. The photograph in question – the old composer on his 85th birthday celebrations working with young Georg (Valerie referred to him throughout as ‘Solti) – seemed to have disappeared. She found me an unsigned copy, wonderful to see. Naturally it's not available, but I think - I may be wrong - that this photo of Strauss conducting also dates from the time of the celebrations.

A portrait of Thomas Mann led to a conversation about Joseph and his Brothers, which I’ve just begun and, contrary to fearful expectations, am bathing in its serene mythic re-interpretation. ‘Solti’ read one of its four books every summer holiday, and when he finished, went straight back to the beginning. I can already understand why.

Said’s concerts will always be a success if he presents them as revealingly as he did this one, explaining why the Schoenberg shouldn’t be seen as difficult music: how it should waltz and entertain. In that small space, the resonance of the Steinway could be overwhelming, and it is perhaps a little too often on the CD too; a few more genuine pianos wouldn’t go amiss. But there’s no doubt about Ashkar’s lively intelligence, re-creative art and knack of good programming. The Berg Sonata actually made sense and flew by for once rather than sounding like an improvisation, though the improvisatory quality was still there and the becalmed ending seemed like the goal of all its labours. Fabulous neoclassical Enescu, too. The promotion did its work: I’ll be seeking Said out from now onwards.

Poland's recent past

One of the many things taught me by my dear Viennese friend Trude Winik (1909-1998), who lost her father in the First World War and her mother, brother and sister to the camps in the Second, was that the past is always present so long as the person who experienced it lives on. In Trude's case it was a guilt which haunted her every day, that she survived when the rest of her family didn't. Now a gripping family history, Matthew Zajac's The Tailor of Inverness, and a film about life two decades or so after the end of World War Two, Ida by that superb filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski who had already given us two very different and equally fine British movies, Last Resort and My Summer of Love, remind us that the past lives on in the next generation too.

It was serendipity that I came across The Tailor of Inverness among the books sold alongside the box office in Inverness's Eden Court Theatre the day before we watched the DVD of Ida - in turn, the day before it won the Best Foreign Language Film category in the Oscars (not that one cares for any ceremony which omits Mike Leigh's masterpiece Mr Turner from the main categories - I rant about that in my DVD review for The Arts Desk).The blurb made it sound interesting, but more especially I liked the idea of supporting a local publisher, Sandstone Press. More in the next post of why I was up there last weekend.

I don't know how much I can say about book and film without giving crucial information away. Both are thrillers in the sense of revealing surprise informaton - and Ida has a gut-wrenching twist about two-thirds of the way through for which I was completely unprepared, so you should be too. Both remind us that few folk escaped from the maelstrom of the war in central Europe uncompromised, let along unscarred. Zajac Senior came to Britain in 1948, married an Englishwoman and settled in Inverness where he made a success as a tailor after early vicissitudes.

Son Matthew (pictured on the cover of the book and above, by Murdo MacLeod, playing his father) speaks simply but rapturously of summers with his uncle in Lesna, south west Poland, a place of natural plenty. The kindness of relatives and friends is an overwhelming constant throughout, and helps him weather the revelations when they come. Suffice it to say that as an accomplished actor with his own theatre group, he made an Edinburgh Fringe First winning play about his journey of discovery which toured to the places he visited, Poland and Ukraine, among others. He writes:

It seemed right to me to take the story back to its origins, but I was nervous about how it would be received [well, as it turned out]. I was conscious that it could be viewed as a presumptuous act, for a foreigner to have the gall to tell Poles and Ukrainians their own story. But my previous trips to Ukraine in particular had told me that this was a story which had rarely been expressed on a public platform. The shock of the war and subsequent 45-year Soviet stasis retained their grip. The fear of speaking out which was endemic to the old Stalinist culture meant that many people, particularly in the older generations, still had a policeman in their head.

These are the same preoccupations of Ida. Framed as the kind of 1960s Polish art film the director remembered from his youth, in the square format then common, every scene is composed with an aching beauty, and there's a special affection for the bands of that time (the love-interest saxophonist is very handsome, too). Like any great film from the European masters, it has remarkable performances - in this case the contrasts and symmetries played out by Agata Trzebushowska's ambivalent Ida and the magnetic Agata Kulesza as Wanda, communist functionary with a painful secret.

Also as in any great film, the music is kept to a minimum; the actresses and the cinematography carry it all. I don't think I want to write any more: just see it.