City parks in Autumn

I count myself lucky to have caught so much rus in urbe over the past month or so, especially in Edinburgh and Leeds. There's also a virtue in seeing the same parts of London parks and gardens across the seasons, above all Kew Gardens, the Chelsea Physic Garden, Kensington Gardens/Hyde Park and Chiswick House Gardens (one of several sphinxes pictured above).

First stop is the most recent cockapoo/spoodle etc 'meet', usually held on the last Sunday of each month around the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens. My heart belongs to naughty Ted, of course, looking especially pert here

but it was also good to be able to introduce him to gentle Max, and their owners to each other. Max is circumspectly enquiring about the endless rough and tumble Ted enjoys, fangs out in play, with his best friend Archie

and I have to say the cutest 'poo of the morning had to be this shaggy one year old, just adorable.

After the break-up, and coffee outside the Serpentine Gallery, I went to look at the other pavilions erected for the first time nearby - better as an ensemble than individually, and offering good perspectives. This one is through Yona Friedman's modular structure

while Kunlé Adeyemi's Summer House is an inverse replica of Queen Caroline's Pavilion, seen beyond its central arch.

This year's star by the Bjarke Ingels Group, sixteenth among the best of the main Serpentine Pavilions, is now being dismantled. I feel lucky to have caught it for the last time on the most perfect afternoon.

Another blue-sky afternoon shed light on some Danish* junior bandsfolk who'd piled off a bus by the Albert Memorial and entertained me on my way to a Monday Opera in Depth class.

Meanwhile Kew's star attraction, the Hive, looks good in all weathers. I've devoted enough time to it already so no more pics from within, just a distant glimpse

and some pictorial reminders that when we last visited, the bee-friendly herbaceous borders were still going strong.

It's also the first time I've seen a gaggle of those most beautifully marked of all ducks, the Mandarins.

Not sure I'd clocked what the female of the species looked like either.

When I was a student in Edinburgh throughout the early 1980s, Calton Hill was very rarely a destination. Now that I stay a night or so a year at the quiet and cosy Parliament House Hotel when attending a Scottish Chamber Orchestra concert, it's on the doorstep and that whole east end of town, which gives way to so much nature, has become a stamping ground (hence the visits to the two exhibitions I wrote about recently). On this occasion I had the best room of all, right at the top, with a view directly across to the Dugald Stewart Monument on the hill which Robert Louis Stevenson used to chastise Edinburgh for commemorating Robert Burns less lavishly

as well as towards Salisbury Crags with the old Parliament Building in front

and Leithwards; here's a perspective slightly further round from the top of the hill which extends past Stockbridge and the New Town just as far as the top of the Forth Rail Bridge.

Calton Hill is now a popular tourist destination (I don't remember it being especially so in the 1980s), and in September the Chinese were flocking to Edinburgh. Yet I can only be proud of how beautiful this all is. Nobody minds now that William Henry Playfair's Grecian National Monument, begun to commemorate the fallen in the Napoleonic Wars, was left unfinished in 1829 and once dubbed, inter alia, 'the Pride and Poverty of Scotland'.

The central wing of Playfair's 1818 City Observatory is handsome

but I like better still the little temple on its east side.

Part of the building has now been requisitioned for Collective, an art group which was using one room to display the work of Hamish Young, homaging the Carrara marble quarries.

As for the views over which Stevenson waxed so lyrical, the classic one is with the Dugald Stewart Monument in the foreground looking west down Princes Street towards the castle

while looking over to Arthur's Seat,

you can well believe you're in the deepest Scottish countryside at one viewpoint, with no hint of the buildings in the valley between.

Holyrood Palace looks very handsome from above

and it was there I headed for the first of two superb exhibitions I've already chronicled in some detail. On the previous evening, I took a customary stroll from Parliament House Hotel to the Usher Hall via George Street and Princes Street Gardens

with the sun dazzling the eyes from due west, silhouetting the monument to the Royal Scots Greys Regiment.

A fortnight later I took another pleasant train journey north, this time to Leeds to review Opera North's excellent new production of Britten's Billy Budd for The Arts Desk. I stayed with fellow contributor Graham Rickson and his partner and daughter in Chapel Allerton, a good place to be based for an excursion to what Leeds claims is the largest public park in Europe, Roundhay. Surely Richmond** must be bigger? No matter, there are so many gems studded around the park, not least Canal Gardens over the main road

and somewhat Chelsea Flower Show-ish recreations of famous sites like the Generalife of the Alhambra.

But the main glory is the sweep from the Mansion,

where I had excellent Eggs Benedict and smoked salmon for lunch, down to the Waterloo Lake. The kid on the pavement and her brother had been assembling neat rows of conkers.

Connecting to the Greek Revival on Calton Hill, Thomas Nicholson, who bought an estate which had once been a Norman hunting ground, had his residence begun in 1811. In another link, former soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars worked on the construction of  the lower lake, hence its name.

As well as this Swan of Tuonela, there were plenty of Indian families sitting in the sun.

The walk back was a match for the beauties of Richmond Park or Hampstead Heath

with autumn crocuses flourishing in the shade

and plenty of green around the gate, outside which I took the No. 3 bus back to the centre of Leeds and (eventually) the train home.

By way of a Chiswick coda, the final snaps record a bike ride last Saturday afternoon, taken for exercise's sake since we'd postponed our Pilgrims' Way walk until Sunday. A wise decision, as it turned out, but the grey light in the park

cleared as I cycled back, the setting sun lighting up trees by the Thames

and the tower of Chiswick Parish Church

with some fine rose-lit clouds over the river.

Next photojournal stop: the walk from Borough Green to Trottiscliffe Church and Neolithic barrow and back - real countryside.

 *Laurent in a comment below had noticed the flag, which I hadn't, and pointed out the correct nationality. I had 'German' because that was the language on the side of the bus from which they'd dismounted.

**Digression re Richmond Park: bring it on, my new Europe-friendly party of choice, and away with you, craven scaremonger Zac Goldsmith. High hopes for this one.

Portrait of the artist as opportunist

OK, so that's me messing round on the Leeds Grand Theatre stage, as snapped by my Radio 3 interlocutor, the ineffable Christopher Cook. But I'm talking about Chartkov, lonely protagonist of Nikolay Gogol's The Portrait as translated into music by Mieczyslaw Weinberg (aka Moysey Vainberg) in 1980. The opera, clearly, is no straightforward rendering of the short story, in which the portrait of a Satanic old moneylender is absolutely key throughout. That supernatural aspect wasn't much liked by critic Belinsky, whose more prosaic understanding of a central message about artistic compromise is shared by David Pountney in the Opera North production (the four production photos below by Bill Cooper).

In other words, he sees it more or less exclusively about what happens when a painter sells out, only to discover too late what dedication to real art is all about. Which is fine, up to a point. I like Pountney's central conceit, brilliantly supported by the sets and costumes of Dan Potra, that we start in a rainbow-oiled artist's studio in Petersburg c.1830


only to move forward to what society painters would have had to do in the Socialist-Realist world of the 1930s


and on to Warhol in New York.


That's fine. But, as has become Pountney's wont in more recent extravaganzas, the message is muddied. What are we supposed to make of the cracked-mirror 'portrait', the fact that the old moneylender with the evil eyes never appears, let alone steps out of his frame, to balance the vision of the artist's psyche muse, a leggy girl in bedshirt and high-heeled red shoes? Plus there are some declining old voices in the ensemble: Helen Field's is unbearable to listen to after a while, and I don't think it was just Peter Savidge's temporary indisposition which made his crucial, Death in Veniceish hymn to the true artist in Act Two so unpleasant to listen to (it's a tough sing, and we got a much better stand-in on Thursday, who sadly won't be heard on the broadcast).

Nevertheless it's tenor Paul Nilon's evening, and while this time he didn't have a character as interesting as Michel in Martinu's Julietta to get his teeth into, he did as good a job as he could to stop us wishing that the great Langridge had got hold of the role twenty or so years earlier.


So what of the music? A second hearing, not least because Rossan Gergov got far more impassioned and well-phrased playing out of the Opera North Orchestra than on the previous performance we'd heard, suggested pseudo-profundity in the last act when I'd been led to hope there might be real depths here. But Weinberg still finds inspired touches: the Lamplighter's ever more haunting ballads, in a simple vein that this composer could do so well, the muted violin solo for the evanescent Muse and the symphonic sweep from the A major eulogy in praise of the dedicated artist to Chartkov's panicky peripetaia. It never comes close to the operatic riches I heard once again in Saturday's Met screening of Adams's Nixon in China, so evidently a masterpiece even back in 1988 when I first heard it. But it's stageworthy and interesting. And the more I hear of Weinberg's music, the more I come to respect this composer who lived so much in Shostakovich's shadow after arriving in the Soviet Union from Poland.


Some of this I managed to say in our boxed conversation as we looked out on the splendours of the beautifully-restored Grand Theatre (above) before and during the show: we'll see what transpires when the Radio 3 broadcast is aired in May. I must say that I had a jolly time as always with CC - seen here framed -


as well as with producer Sam Phillips - who indulged me in a second visit to Hansa's Gujarati vegetarian restaurant, where I did indeed get to meet the great lady as I'd hoped - and the rest of the team. And, yes, I love Leeds now; though it seems unfortunate that Opera North couldn't have done more to fill the many empty seats in the Grand with young folk (I saw none on either visit). This is just the sort of piece that could have fired up many a school project.