Not faded and gone

The elegy lingers on. I guess it was because Tom Moore proved so loveable and candid in company that his verses, so perfectly wedded to the Irish melodies which gave them life, still spring off the printed page. It helps to have a good context for them. That we certainly got from the lecture-recital in which Moore's biographer, Linda Kelly, gave us a taste of his life, with performers as classy as mezzo Elena Marangou, a certain diplo-mate tenor here only ever consenting to appear as J and pianist Oliver Williams infusing a savour of settings by Stevenson, Britten, Duparc (in French) and Schumann (in German). Oh, and nearly last in the programme but by no means least, a little cycle of four songs specially written for Elena (and Linda) by Greek baritone/composer Tassis Christoyannis (splendid comic Ford in Richard Jones's Glyndebourne production of Verdi's Falstaff).


Before two very different audiences, they captured, I think, something of the joy and sorrow commingled in these pieces, in which the sadness of 'The Last Rose of Summer' - the supreme achievement, surely, of Britten's selection, with the ominous questions of the arpeggiating left hand only answered in the very last bar - usually gains the upper hand. Indeed, that song seems unusually prophetic, since Moore was to lose all five of his children, his two sons of sickness serving in the wars overseas. But up until those devastating final years, he seems to have been a a truly jolly fellow - best buddy Byron wrote of their time in Venice that they 'did nothing but laugh' - and his strong moral reactions to most of the injustices of his age, as an Irish-Catholic 'slave' constantly refused his rights by England, make bracing reading. Linda has brought out all the right details, I'm guessing, in what I've so far read of her very affectionate little study.


Moore knew what he had to do with the original Irish airs, first preserved by Belfast organist Edward Bunting. He wrote to Stevenson in 1807:

The task which you propose to me of adapting words to these airs is by no means simple. The poet, who would follow the various sentiments which they express, must feel and understand that rapid fluctuation of spirits, that unaccountable mixture of gloom and levity, which composes the character of my countrymen, and has deeply tinged their music...

And so he did. There's so much to choose from, and so many versions to choose it in (Moore originally used to sing, and often to play, his own settings). Elena gave us the sheer charm of Schumann's Zwei Venetianische Lieder and Duparc's Elegie, as well as Christoyannis's very voice-friendly approach to four of the poet's earlier translations from the Greek (he was known as 'Anacreon Moore' before he became the Bard of Erin). J stuck to a mixture of Stevenson and Britten.


Investigating further, and listening with pleasure to my two CDs of Berlioz Melodies, I hope they'll both respectively be singing that master's typically idiosyncratic settings of 'La belle voyageuse' and 'Adieu, Bessy' (Bessy was Moore's wife of 41 years). I also listened to early McCormack - such freshness, allied with superb bel canto technique - and found a few telling snippets on YouTube. 'The Last Rose' came to opera singers, I guess, through Flotow's Martha, hence Sutherland's championship



and it's quite a surprise to realise that sweet Deanna Durbin was every inch the feeling artist, too.



Rosa Ponselle:



and of course John McCormack in 'The Minstrel Boy', a tough and emotional sing as J will tell you.



Anyway, I'm glad Linda has encouraged a mining of this especially rich seam. The little show, adapted and lengthened or shortened, could run and run.

A century apart

Dublin, of course, is by no means exclusively Georgian - in fact the campanile in Trinity College's forecourt, above top, is mid-19th century - just as Victoriana may not be Birmingham's sole claim to fame (the former Midland Bank on Bennett's Hill is early Victorian, designed by Rickman in 1840). Seeing the two cities a day apart, Dublin for the first time, did incline me to compare incomparables.

Maybe it was because I only had one sunny hour at liberty in Birmingham before rushing off to give another last-minute pre-performance talk for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra that I relished it all the more, and didn't experience any deflating sense of provincialism as we did at the start of two days in Dublin as our raffle-won weekend break. The CBSO concert, by the way, was very fine: Vedernikov of the Bolshoy knows how to pace and maneouvre his way through Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony, though the inner pain didn't always come through, and best of all was the phenomenal and seemingly effortless Steven Osborne, razor-sharp alongside the orchestra in a revelatory Shostakovich Second Piano Concerto: no fatuous showcase, no sentimentality in the slow-movement melody, full of surprisingly scary things and the kind of thunderous orchestral pianism Stephen with a ph, Mr. Hough, simply can't muster. I took this photo from Steven with a v's website, so I hope the link suffices.


Anyway, Dublin does have Georgian splendours in the south of the city, but so bigged-up are they that we couldn't help feeling disappointed after Edinburgh, Bath or - that major serendipitous discovery last summer - Bristol. The main problem is the lack of uniformity in the jumbled colours of brick and stone. Best, perhaps, are the peaceful squares, though the big city gardens are also Victorian - St Stephen's Green and my favourite just to the south, the Iveagh Gardens laid out by Ninian Niven in 1865, by virtue of its total peace and quiet. Above this monumental pile of rocks a freaky feathered friend sang beyond the loudest, wildest variations of any known blackbird.


On the way to meet the splendid Puffin Moynihan for a drink at the Shelbourne Hotel - a meeting which led to much the best chunk of our weekend - we also found ourselves enticed into the church founded by Cardinal Newman for the catholic university, Our Lady Seat of Wisdom. An intriguing Italian-style excrescence added shortly after the church's founding in 1856 sits alongside Georgian university houses.


It's no more an anomaly, I suppose, than the Burne-Jones windows which are the real selling point of Birmingham Cathedral, built in 1715 (this west window of the last judgment was added in 1895).


I guess I had a better time in Birmingham's resplendent Old Joint Stock Pub, full of locals late on a Thursday afternoon



than we did in what should have been a comparable gem in Dublin, Bewley's Tea House (we had to go to honour beloved Dame Beulah and Thomas). The building and its various salons still have their innate charm, but the ladies who owned it sold it to a chain and once-proud Bewley's now serves up lumpy scones with ersatz jam and cream. We had to tell the nice Polish girl who served us - Eastern Europeans stock the service industry here, because the Irish are generally too grand these days to condescend*, but that means the legendary native welcome isn't easy to find - that it was simply horrible, since she asked.

One black mark. One more for the pretentious hotel they'd put us up in, a vast affair ill-advisedly decked out in Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen swags and dusty, purple covered high chairs. And another for the biggest tourist rip-off going, nine euros each to see two pages of the Book of Kells at the end of an OK orientation guide. Beautiful Celtic illumination indeed, but the page I really wanted to see wasn't on display:


Fourth black mark for a substandard Italian meal, which did at least allow us to sit out on a terrace under braziers, and horrid though the hotel was, we got an undisturbed night's sleep albeit in a stuffy room with the window shut. The next morning, after a noisy hotel breakfast shared with screeching hen party women from Manchester, we headed straight for the National Gallery of Ireland, and found fault with that too. What a huge collection, with some real treasures - three marvellous Guercinos courtesy of Sir Dennis Mahon, a wall of superb Goyas, some fine Dutch interiors with a Vermeer very much as the centrepiece - but how higgledy-piggledy and badly lit. Jack Yeats is an artist I'll be dodging in future, though I loved Orpen's portrait of Count ('Cunta' in Gaelic) John McCormack.


We could easily have passed a museum-packed time had we hung around in Dublin the full weekend, but a much more enticing prospect was in store - a trip to stay with Puffin in the courtyard cottage of Huntington Castle, Clonegal, meeting into the bargain its exotic flora and fauna. Next instalment follows in due course.

*and the young 'uns who do serve can be very impertinent. As I couldn't get an answer at Trinity about the two gigantic trees in Library Square, I asked in the Tourist Information Office. The two girls giggled and said 'are you having a laugh?' I wasn't, and I've since found the information I wanted online, thank you very much.