YouTube Xmas concert at Greenacres Care Home

Here's my 93 year old ma being wheeled by my cousin Diana and her husband Lee to the conservatory of her care home. Marvellous Greenacres mover and shaker Sarah, who's managed to fill a whole month of special events for the residents, asked if I'd repeat the format I'd used for my previous hour of YouTube clips, rather chaotic in the lounge of mum's Cornflower Wing, but in the bigger room with the bigger telly so people might be more attentive. So I braved it through Storm Darragh, and the trains and buses all obliged. Frankly I was fine with whatever happened, but the crowd stayed and folk I've never heard talk before were very effusive at the end.

I thought it might be worth repeating what I showed here, so you can enjoy your own quality hour of concerts, ballet and opera. How better to start than with the opening of Bach's Christmas Oratorio? I like the old film with Harnoncourt conducting especially because it includes the Tölz Boys' Choir.

You can, of course, enjoy well beyond what I actually played. Next, an absolute winner: the lovely Wallis Giunta singing Brahms' 'Geistliches Wiegenlied' while holding her viola-player's very attentive baby. Wallis brought her own six-month-old, Bonnie, to one of the Zoom classes on Bernstein's A Quiet Place.

Another musician I adore as a person, though I haven't seen her for years, is the personable violinist Dunja Lavrova. I love her transcription of Tchaikovsky's 'Miniature Overture' from The Nutcracker, and her explanation of why she made it.

Then, of course, we had to have Tchaikovsky's original, followed by the glowing 'Decoration of the Christmas tree' and March. You can enjoy the whole ballet score here lovingly conducted by the vivacious Yannick Nézet-Séguin during his time in Rotterdam.

Taking a break before some Nutcracker dancing, I thought it was time for more choral music. First, my absolute favourite among Christmas anthems, the 'Shepherds' Farewell' from Berlioz's L'enfance du Christ, that unforced masterpiece with which I ended this Zoom term's 'Later Berlioz and Beyond' (having moved on to Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Franck, Chabrier and Chausson, I went back to the 1850s for a seasonal finale). At Greenacres, I used the Conlon performance from St-Denis, but it's blocked for reproduction elsewhere, so here's the excerpt from back in the day when Gardiner got on with the Monteverdi forces. You can see the whole thing on YouTube - Herod is none other than the magnificent young bass Will Thomas, whose socking at JEG's hands triggered the disgrace.

A carol from King's, of course - the one I used was from 2020, with lockdown conditions still pertaining up to a point, but the filming of one of the world's great buildings is such a pleasure. Again, there's a blocking of wider use, so I'll show another.

Then the grand Pas de deux from The Nutcracker in the traditional and gaudy but still classy Royal Ballet production with my favourite of the company's ballerinas, Marianela Núñez and Vadim Muntagirov. Heard it played with such panache by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and its new Chief Conductor, Mark Wigglesworth, at Portsmouth Guildhall last Thursday.

'

I wanted to show a stretch of Richard Jones's Humperdinck from the Met, but there wasn't time, so for operatic brevity I ended with a nice potpourri from Rimsky-Korsakov's Christmas Eve as directed by Christof Loy in Frankfutt.

Footnote: I originally had the below on the list, would have squeezed in a woman composer, and not just for the sake of it: Augusta Holmès was a revelation of the 'After Berlioz' course for the incredible vigour of her symphony Roland Furieux. The version I used, with the splendid Marie-Nicole Lemieux, has been taken down, so this will do.

Happy viewing - you have potentially many hours there rather than just the one I filled at Greenacres.

Berlioz's tender masterpiece

The more I hear L'enfance du Christ, the more I love it. So I'm glad to have taken the chance of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's latest performance - the previous one, six years ago, was also miraculous - to hold a class on the afternoon of the concert. One thinks of Berlioz as a lopsided master in the larger-scale works - or at least I do when it comes to Roméo et Juliette, still the high watermark of his most futuristic orchestration, and La Damnation de Faust - but there is structural perfection in this 'sacred trilogy in three acts and seven tableaux' (the score, surprisingly, is peppered with revealing stage directions, though I wonder if that has to do with the belated 1911 staging mentioned on the title page).

Its force turns out to have been centripetal. The anecdote of how the Shepherds' Farewell originated in a few bars of organ music inscribed in a friend's visitors book when Berlioz was bored by the others playing cards is well known. Bang at the centre of the work, it acquired movements either side for the little miracle that is now Part Two, 'The Flight into Egypt'.

Then, with the encouragement of Leipzig success, followed a sequel; and finally a prequel, the daring idea to start in darkness with the psychology of Herod, the uneasy ruler, adumbrated by three trombones and then two trumpets and two cornets for a brief climax of violent fanfaring before all the brass bar the horns disappear for the rest of the drama. Matthew Rose was at his most engaged in the Barbican performance (in the second of three photos by Mark Allan), and sounds very handsome indeed in the broadcast, unmissable on the BBC Radio 3 iPlayer.

I love especially the idea, realised in both BBCSO performances, that the worst, the bass role of Herod, should be doubled up with the best, the Ishmaelite carpenter who welcomes in the refugee family in Sais, Egypt, when all others have turned away the 'vile Jews'. Isn't this, even more than the Bethlehem story, the ultimate message for our time, compassion for strangers in need? Musically, it's underlined by the most anguished movement, with Berlioz's hallmark wail of diminished sixth to fifth, giving way to the beautiful bustle of the Ishmaelite household orchestral fugato and the exquisite ease of the trio for two flutes and harp which is especially striking in concert when, their labours nearly over, the rest of the performers can just enjoy the virtuosity and grace of a consummate handful?

And then that final, unaccompanied chorus, in which the fourth dimension - the angel choir that concludes each part - begins a descending-scale Amen twice completed by the tenor and the onstage chorus before the last benediction, pppp. This is Berlioz's gift to be simple in his own unique way; and how much he adds, in this most delicately scored of his works, to give a twist: the F to F flat within the A flat serenity of Mary's first apostrophe to her child, the orchestral coda of that number which reminds us of the bitter undertow to all the sweetness.

How wonderful, then, that the last major concert of the year I heard should have been Ed Gardner's loving performance. This work brings out the sensitivities of those singers who have a special dedication - especially true of Karen Cargill (I'll say it again, the great Berlioz interpreter of our time), Robert Murray and Matthew Rose. You felt that all three were tapping into the essence, and in that the BBC Symphony players, that exquisite woodwind department especially, were their equals. The interpretation will be in my 'best of concert year' for The Arts Desk tomorrow; meanwhile, here's the opera retrospective.

Representations of the Flight into by Bassano, Giotto and Carpaccio

An Ishmaelite welcome

It's the best part of the Christmas story, or rather the one according to Berlioz, Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus, having escaped the most obscene horror, arrive in Sais, Egypt, close to starvation. In the third part of L'enfance du Christ, they are rejected by Egyptians and Romans in the town with the same cry: 'away with you, filthy Jews!' An Ishmaelite father, however, welcomes them into a lively household.

The gist of what he sings is 'come in, poor homeless people, relax, eat, drink, listen to this sweet music'. And heaven on earth it is indeed, the trio for two flutes and harp. This is enough to reduce anyone to tears at such a point in Berlioz's gentle drama, if they haven't been weeping already (I was, nearly all the way through the BBC Symphony Orchestra performance the other week). The best I could find on YouTube has the harp replaced by a guitar, but the three players - from left to right, Armin Egger, Chia-Ling Renner-Liao and Wolfgang Renner - aren't bad at all, even if the 'transcription' is a little eccentric and spare at times. Enjoy, and happy holidays.

The grail

Here's one I prepared earlier, now let out of its cage. Look no further if you haven't listened to my Building a Library on Parsifal, just broadcast, and you're postponing revelation until you catch it on iPlayer for the week, or whatever this clip facility now up and running might be (17/!2: my producer tells me it should be 'up there until the end of days', or of the BBC, whichever comes first. There's also a podcast, which you can download here). I'll even stick in a further grail image, 'the one', ho hum, in Valencia Cathedral, to delay a glimpse of the winning cover.

The choice, for the first time in my 20-odd years of doing the programme, was totally obvious. So many folk have said to me over the past few months, 'of course you'll go for Knappertsbusch '62'. I thought I would when I listened again to Hans Hotter as Gurnemanz in Act One. But it became ever clearer to me as I listened to the three 'Kna' Bayreuth Parsifals currently doing the rounds - also including his first, from 1951, and his last of 1964, not long before his death - that I didn't want this kind of hard-hitting so often.

Kna's style does make for magnificent pinnacles - Hotter's 'O wunden-wundervoller heilige Speer' ('62) and George London's 'Erbarmen' in Act 1 ('51), Jon Vickers' 'Amfortas! Die Wunde!' in Act 2 ('64) - but what I've always sought since Haitink showed me the light at Covent Garden, conducting Bill Bryden's mostly intelligent production, is a naturalness that doesn't need to reiterate the spirituality and grandeur. As Mark Wigglesworth remarked when he came to talk to my Opera in Focus class the other week, Parsifal gives and gives while Tristan simply takes and leaves you exhausted. A great conductor needs to guide and give space where necessary, of course, but not to impose his (I await a 'her') will.

Which the great Rafael Kubelik never does. A few clever folk knew of this 1980 studio recording's existence but I certainly didn't before I came to listen and nor did my Parsifal-crazy producer Clive Portbury. He agrees that it's incomparably the best of what we have.

Runners-up I don't need to mention again here, but I do urge you to see the DVD of Hans Hollman's Zurich production. It would qualify alone as the only document of Haitink's conducting, but it's also the most quietly moving staging I've seen, trusting to the singers' stillness in the outer acts and - most important of all - respecting the transcendence of the grail ritual for all the suffering that surrounds it. The vital antidote, in short, to Stephen Langridge's Royal Opera horror. The students all thought so when I screeened Act Three in an extra class on Monday, and many wiped away the tears that simply hadn't flowed at Covent Garden.

I have a feeling that might happen when the Met production with Jonas Kaufmann comes out on DVD in February; from the images I've seen it appears much more in the right region than the one we're enduring in London. In the meantime, snap this up while you can; Gatti's conducting won't surpass Haitink's, and probably won't come anywhere near.

Alas, there are no clips on YouTube so I'll move sideways to seasonal seriousness. On the same Tuesday when my preparation schedule had been eaten up by the flying visit to 'do a telly', I took the BBC Symphony Orchestra class through two very different responses to the Flight into Egypt story, tied in with the chance to hear the two works in question tonight and tomorrow afternoon. Berlioz's painfully beautiful, intimate L'Enfance du Christ located the narrative close to the centre in the hands of the tenor 'Evangelist'. We had Anthony Rolfe-Johnson returning to life so scrupulously for John Eliot Gardiner, but all I could find on YouTube was Alain Vanzo not at his considerable best for Jean Martinon. So let's make do with that.

Like Britten's best poetry compilations, John Adams's El Niño would be admirable just as a sequence of magical words tellingly juxtaposed, without even  taking into account the extraordinary music which of course layers it still further. I look forward to experiencing it tonight without Peter Sellars' stage 'realisation', so enervating when the 2000 Paris original came to London. Adams for his supernatural epilogue turns to the charming and naive Gospel According to Pseudo-Matthew for a rest beneath a rather unusual palm tree, and juxtaposes it with the last of the stunning Mexican poems by Rosario Castellanos, a revelation to me.

As the soundclip doesn't offer a translation of the Castellanos poem, I take the liberty of reproducing it here:

Lady of the winds,
heron of the plains,
when you sway
your waist sings.

Gesture of prayer
or prelude of wings,
you are the cup into which the skies
pour one by one.

From the dark land of men
I've come kneeling to behold you,
Tall, naked, alone.
A poem.

So the text resounds and melts into a single repeated word in the mouths of  children - 'poesía'.

15/12 What a weekend it's been. My Arts Desk reviews are now up of El Niño here and of L'Enfance du Christ here. Don't whatever you do miss the Radio 3 broadcast of the ineffably moving Berlioz performance on the iPlayer here for the next week.