Zooming Mahler ii: greater darkness, brighter light

On 12 October, I embark on the second batch of ten classes in my Mahler Zoom course, beginning with the grim marches of the Sixth Symphony, ending in the peaceful resolution of the at-one-with-the-world heartleap in Deryck Cooke's performing version of the Tenth Symphony (and completed it must be). 

The first term led me to the surprising realisation that of the first five symphonies, I love the Fourth the best, simply because it's absolutely perfect. You could say that in the Second and Third Mahler dares more, but it's a harder challenge to make them work. 

Edward Gardner pulled off Saturday night's performance of the 'Resurrection', launching his London Philharmonic Orchestra's 2023-4 season. I was going to give it a miss, because sitting on my special cushion isn't easy at the moment, and I always feel a bit outside the first movement - not a good start. But then our conductor turned out to be a born writer in his First Person on the symphony for theartsdesk. I was sold, and I'm so glad I went. I endorse everything my colleague Rachel Halliburton writes about the performance. The rare spectacle of the whole audience rising within seconds of the end was absolutely deserved, even if the choral climax does tend to have that effect. (Both images by Mark Allan).

Delighted to say that I met Ed by chance on the terrace of Oslo's stunning Opera House while I was there in June for Pekka Kuusisto's Shostakovich one-off with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. He was very warm in his friendliness, so I asked if he might come along as guest, as Jonathan Bloxham and Mark Wigglesworth did last term - and I hope Catherine Larsen-Maguire, having pulled off the rare feat of what sounds like a spectacular performance of the Seventh with the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland, will do so for the Seventh. I gave Ed the option of any of the others and he chose Das Lied von der Erde. Let's see who else might come along. 

I know it can never be quite like the line-up during the ten classes on the symphony I ran during lockdown - the busiest of conductors like Vladmir Jurowski, Paavo Järvi and Antonio Pappano actually had the time then - but we've built up a fair bit of goodwill. Do join us - all the details are on the flyer below (click to enlarge).

Into the woods with Wagner's Siegfried

Perhaps I should more accurately have put 'flying through the forest', since the first four Mondays of my Opera in Depth class kept us buoyant in unpromising times. There's so much wit and spirit about young Siegfried's rapport with his scheming foster-father Mime, such galvanising energy about the forging scene, that it was hard to be downcast by dismal circumstances leading up the 31st (and including it; more of what I did on the day anon).

Such are the insane demands on the Heldentenor singing the most taxing role in the rep - Stuart Skelton, talking to me for the Wagner Society, said it was tougher than Tristan, and he'll never take it on - that I've only seen two Siegfrieds live who both lasted that act and looked goodish (in one case) and close to perfect (in the other): Siegfried Jerusalem in the Kupfer production for Bayreuth (image from Act 2 up top), and more recently Stefan Vinke at the Royal Opera, not the loveliest voice but the only other hero to make us leave the auditorium in the interval spinning with exhilaration. Fine actor too.

To guide the class, I've had none but the best for company. Delighted to find that Jay Hunter Morris (pictured above in the first of two Metropolitan Opera photos by Ken Howard) looks and sounds the part, though Robert Lepage's Met production doesn't really have enough Personenregie infill; it seems to rely on the dramatic intelligence of Hunter Morris and his Mime, Gerhard Siegel (also a Siegfried of yore, Vinke told me at another Wagner Soc talk).

Good to have a video-suggested forest and running water, too, but the ineptness of the lighting (too many follow-spots, video strips on faces) lets it down.

Even so, I'll be returning to the Met DVD for the middle of Act 2. After we'd eased in with Hunter Morris and Siegel, I reverted to the Chéreau Ring for the meetings of Donald McIntyre with Heinz Zednik's Mime and Hermann Becht's Alberich (the Licht- and Schwarz-Alberich similarities are brilliantly realised here, as they were in Richard Jones's Royal Opera Ring). The Forging Scene could only be Jerusalem's with Graham Clark's acrobatic Mime - we took the Kupfer production's Act 1 from the second part of the riddle scene (John Tomlinson's Wanderer superb, of course) to the end of the act, where Barenboim takes the last stretch at such a lick, Clark vocally and Jerusalem tapping-wise just keeping up with him. Terrible shame this clip doesn't go to the end, but you see how infilled the production is.

For soundclip excerpts, I was spoiled for choice: Remedios, Dempsey and above all godlike Norman Bailey on the ENO English-language Ring, now on Chandos;

bits of Melchior on various recordings;

Suthaus and Patzak for the sake of Furtwängler's Rome conducting; Domingo amazingly good in an excerpts disc with Pappano conducting the Royal Opera Orchestra (he's best in Siegfried anyway, I think); Hotter with Clemens Krauss, Bayreuth, 1953; for Act 2 Scene 1, Thomas Stewart and Zoltan Kelemen with Karajan and the Berlin Phil.

That took up the second half of Monday's class. In the first, we had a visit from the wonderful Tom Eisner. long-serving (30 plus years) first violinist in the London Philharmonic Orchestra, whom I know through his wife Jessica Duchen. Unusually curious for an orchestral musician (though the ones who came to talk at my BBC Symphony Orchestra course were, too), he has long rehearsal break chats with Vladimir Jurowski, who can talk about everything under the sun except sport (not a problem for either of us). There were four full days of rehearsals for Siegfried, and it showed right from the start - see my review for The Arts Desk - and when they embark on the full Ring in January, there will be three rehearsals before Xmas and then two weeks. Here's Tom at the class, happy to show the message on the back of his mobile while I flourish the Dover score of Siegfried.

We know that Jurowski is a phenomenal preparer, and also that he likes to place his players carefully. There was nearly a riot some years back when he wanted the double basses centre back, continental style, but they now prefer it. For Siegfried there were many extra players, making the numbers up, for instance, to sixteen first and sixteen second violins as Wagner stipulates, but Jurowski wanted only 12 each to play much of the score. It was, of course, a concert highlight to have superlative new guest principal horn Nicolas Mooney step forward to shake hands with Kerl's Siegfried and embark on his magnificent solo. Tom had hoped to bring him along on Monday for a reprise, but he was off to Belgium.

Needless to say it was the lazier players who asked to be on the back two desks...not Tom, of course. He said that the violas have it tougher than the violins, but it's still an endurance test, the toughest bits being Siegfried's outbursts over the sleeping Brunnhilde ('Das ist kein Mann', etc). Gossip about the singers was interesting but not repeatable here (he liked them all but was scared of one). The full works next January/Feb will be phenomenal, though we hope for some cast changes. Not, certainly, Adrian Thompson's Mime, Robert Hayward's Alberich or Elena Pankratova, tackling Brünnhilde for the first time. Here she is with Jurowski, Kerl and the players in the second of Simon Jay Price's two images reproduced here (there were so many to choose from).

Meanwhile we'll have ENO Siegfried Richard Berkeley-Steele coming to talk the Monday after next, and I'm working on two illustrious possibilities, about whom it would be precipitate to speculate. Then in the summer term, on to Elektra and Madama Butterfly. I hope the members of the Wagner Society who'v taken my class numbers up to 36 will stay on...

Dyre desire of Light

Heading his manuscript copy of The Dream of Gerontius, Elgar quotes John Florio’s translation of Virgil via Montaigne:  ‘Whence so dyre desire of Light on wretches grow?’ One of James MacMillan’s themes in his lecture for the Royal Philharmonic Society yesterday was how we wretches today, whether religious in the narrow sense of the word or the wider, still desire the light that music’s most transcendent passages can offer us. Actually, that sounds impossibly pompous, as JMacM’s soft-spoken, reasonable speech, eschewing all mention of himself in that visionary tradition, did not. I couldn’t quite work out the connection between his opening thoughts on Blake as an example of a broader visionary vein in English art and his central assertion of the importance of Roman Catholicism in Elgar’s life and work, but it was all food for thought. Bust of Beethoven in my shot below there to mark the RPS's 200th anniversary.

It’s true, we do tend to shunt Elgar’s Catholicism rather to one side, even in discussing the composer’s most overt assertion of his faith in Gerontius (though what more do you want than the Jesuits’ ‘A.M.D.G’ - ‘Ad majorem Dei Gloria’, ‘To the greater glory of God’ - at the top of the above page?). But perhaps it’s also true – a point not addressed yesterday – that the Catholic fervour which came from Elgar’s mother, and certainly not from his staunchly Anglican father, dwindled in later years. I can’t find the quotations I want, but I still have the hunch that the 'single short remark' Elgar made to Ernest Newman on his deathbed so ‘terrible’ that the younger man never repeated them to anyone might have been ‘I lost my faith in God’ (more frivolously, on hearsay, I’d wish it to be ‘I always preferred young men’, but no more of that).

No matter; the speech threw up plenty of points for discussion and, as Jude Kelly in fine presenting fettle said, we could have sat and talked for another hour. Nice to chat briefly to The Man afterwards, and I’m hugely looking forward not only to hearing his Oboe Concerto again in Glasgow on Friday – he will be elsewhere – but also his new Viola Concerto, due to be premiered by Lawrence Power as part of The Rest is Noise festival. I think I’m right in saying, at least from checking the index, that Alex Ross in his book of that name doesn’t give a single mention to MacMillan, one of the major voices in music today – and one of my two favourites (Adams being the other, of course).

Two hours later, I was in the chair alongside venerable composer Anthony Payne, whom of course we have to thank among other things for that rather miraculous realization of Elgar’s Third Symphony, and Heather Wiebe, Virginia academic newly arrived at King’s College London. Our moderator was Tom Hutchinson of the RPS, and the theme, supposedly, was 'The Edwardian Empire: Society and Culture', obviously with special reference to the performance of Gerontius due to follow in the Royal Festival Hall.

I was wrong in thinking that Heather was there as the cultural historian; she, too, is a musicologist, this time specializing in Britten. So we all had to readapt as we launched our little presentations by way of a start. Frankly, I think the esteemed AP should have gone before me, for clearly I’d stolen some of his thunder with the line about Elgar the European; but I also managed to contrast that with the perceived notion of the court composer to Edward VII. And in any case, Anthony was so genial, wise and good at batting the ball back and forth that it all became a delightful discussion in praise of our composer’s terrific originality. Maybe an antagonist could have stirred it all up more productively, but we had fun – even if I seem to have blanked out chapter and verse in all the after-euphoria (hoping there’s a recording. 15/7 Just discovered there is, here on soundcloud, thanks to The Rest is Noise festival's impressive soundarchiving. James's talk is there too).

We were all of us, JMacM included, seated in what’s supposed to be the royal box for Elder’s performance in the evening. I can’t say it moved me much. This conductor works so hard on revelatory textures, gleaming in the hands of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and is a superb chorus master, there with every word for the LPO Chorus and the Clare College Cambridge singers who served as the semichoir. But he doesn’t strike me as having the natural tempo rubato which late romantic music like this requires. Everything seems dotted and crossed with excessive precision; you can see the wheels at work. And sometimes he’s just too slow, in the tradition of his beloved Goodall, which sank the Angel’s Farewell for me, resplendently as the ever-dependable Sarah Connollly delivered it.

I did love Paul Groves’s hard work on extracting every inch of meaning from Cardinal Newman’s text, though, and in pushing his far-from-Helden voice to the right limits of agony and exultation when needed. The clarity of this truly world-class score came across beautifully. But for me, the desired light never quite shone. Have gone over to Sakari Oramo’s Birmingham recording at home to find out what was missing, and there is all the magic in all the right places.

So, from ‘A.M.D.G’ to Bach’s ‘S.D.G.’ (‘Soli Deo gloria’, ‘Glory to God alone’). Much less heavy weather results from this week’s Sunday cantata (someone told me Radio 3 is following the same calendar as I am; I had no idea). ‘Alles nur nach Gottes Willen’, BWV 72, is one of the short cantatas for the third Sunday after Epiphany* - short, it's argued, because the choir would have got very cold at this time of year; they were allowed to slope off before the hour-long sermon. Lucky them; in my treble days we had to sit and read Commando comics under the desks.

God’s will as exemplified, perhaps, in the day’s reading from Matthew 8 about Christ's healing of a leper (mosaic above from Monreale), is all there is to it. So it makes for a rather complacent sequence, shorn of questioning or suffering The striking minor-key launch of darting, rather agitated strings slightly undercuts the chorus’s sentiments (‘All only according to God’s will’); the music was re-used, not so interestingly in my opinion, at the start of the Gloria in Bach’s G minor Mass, BWV 235.

The alto reaches to the still-lively heart of the cantata. His/her recitative turns to arioso in the nine lines beginning ‘Lord, if thou wilt’ and moves almost seamlessly into the aria with the addition of two solo violins to the cello and continuo line, fugueing in one of the ritornellos. There’s a simple, dancing soprano number and a chorale based on a text by Albert, Duke of Prussia and an old French theme used in a cantata of the previous year, 1725. There – I’ve got off lightly this week**, but I’m looking forward to being tested rather more by JSB in weeks to come. Here's another from Suzuki's Bach series, Robin Blaze replacing Sara Mingardo whom I heard on another instalment of John Eliot Gardiner's Bach Pilgrimage 2000.

*As 'Uncle Toby' points out below, I've got my church calendar in a muddle. This year we miss out on the third and fourth Sundays after Epiphany. This is Septuagesima, so I'll have to add another cantata. But that gives me the excuse of two more (fourth Sunday and Sexagesima) next week.

**Clearly not. The Septuagesima candidate I have to hand is 'Ich hab in Gottes Herz und Sinn', on an altogether grander scale. Shall do my duty willingly some time this week

Concert afterchat: bells and Poe

At the end of his hard working week with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and just after Rachmaninov’s serene epilogue to all the doom of Poe’s funeral bells had sent us floating down from the Festival Hall, a beaming and relaxed Vladimir Jurowski joined me for a post-concert dialogue in the RFH’s ballroom zone. That’s another prime pick from Chris Christodoulou’s Proms shots above – we annually present a selection on The Arts Desk – which seemed like a better lead than the diplo-mate’s loyal phoneshot of the afterchat, though here it is anyway.

We talked about the weird disappointment of this brilliantly planned Bells ‘n Poe programme having been cancelled a month ago on what should have been its first airing: the lights failed at the Usher Hall during the Edinburgh Festival so – no concert (and they’d even flown in a baritone to replace indisposed Vladimir Chernov at 24 hours’ notice). VJ mused on The Bells’ ill-starred history - it has a reputation, it seems, somewhat akin to the Scottish Play - despite its highest place in the composer’s self-esteem, starting with the misplaced dedication to Mengelberg who’d only just dissed the work (hard to understand why). 

Although the ‘choral symphony’ has plenty of light and shade, it fascinates me especially how Rachmaninov goes beyond the bleak finality of Poe’s death-ode and provides the most levitational – I have to repeat that word, especially in the context of Saturday’s performance – conclusion imaginable. Jurowski remembered, as so well do I, Svetlanov’s last concert with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and how, knowing he was very shortly to die, the great man stretched out the transcendence to seeming infinity. That searing event has been issued on CD, but isn’t on YouTube, but another classic Russian recording is, albeit somewhat oddly via a crackly LP rather than the CD transfer – Kondrashin’s Moscow Philharmonic stunner. The final Lento lugubre begins at 23’36; the levitation comes at 32’40 though needs to be prefaced with at least a bit of the preceding gloom to have its due effect.

Here's some more of Poe's text if you feel like accompanying your listening with a bit of authentic English-language flavour (though even enlarged, it's not always easy to decipher):

VJ seemed pleased with his own matured interpretation of a work he loves: I mentioned the exceptional balances in the glitter of the sleigh-bells movement, and he felt that tenor Sergei Skorokhodov and the amalgamated London Symphony and London Philharmonic Choirs had really, for once, come through the orchestral busy-ness. He wanted a feeling of exultation, not craven terror, in the ‘Alarm Bells’ movement: this, after all, was 1913, when the imaginative anticipation of sweeping away the old order was far from the horrifying reality it would become.

I was impressed how little Jurowski repeated of what he’d recorded for the LPO’s website, where he expounded so eloquently on the place of bells in Russian culture as the only instruments heard in Orthodox services and on the Russification of Edgar Allan Poe. Even so, he is clearly so involved with the poetry of Konstantin Balmont, Poe’s distinguished Russian (hyper) translator, that he had more to say about this silver-age master. We to- and fro-d a bit about the other bell pieces on the programme, post-war collages by Shchedrin and Denisov which I think I’ve written just enough about on the Arts Desk review. Curiously there is a performance of Denisov's impressionistic Bells in the Fog on YouTube, though alas the audience is not as receptive to its cusp-of-silence beginning as Saturday night's crowd was.The big picture, by the way, is of Sofia Gubaidulina, for me the greatest voice of contemporary Russian music.

Jurowski also passionately defended the other Poe-inspired piece on the programme, Myaskovsky’s Silentium. As he pointed out, the Poe fable of a man who can withstand anything the Devil throws at him except silence is a tale for our times, perhaps even more so than for the late 1830s when it was written. So far as the symphonic parable is concerned, there’s a loyal Jurowski family connection with the honourable, somewhat lugubrious Myaskovsky, and I couldn’t help but admire the dogged sombreness of this early piece, so often mentioned in the correspondence with Prokofiev. Jurowski sticks to the line that ‘Myaskusya’ develops his symphonic ideas better than Prokofiev, who was often openly dismissive of his musical substance – as was I when VJ conducted the Sixth Symphony, a work I’d been hoping to like as well as I had on a first recorded hearing.

So I suspect VJ was being a bit naughty in passing a passionate Myaskovsky admirer’s question about why we didn’t hear more of the 27 symphonies over to me, and what I thought might be the problem. But I voiced my mixed feelings about the unevenness and deferred back to him again, since he’s spent time studying the works as I have not.

Come question time, I was glad one lady took us back to the earlier concert in the week, and – observing how the players seemed to have a whale of a time in the ‘symphonic picture’ drawn from Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten - asked whose selection it was. Jurowski’s, of course, and I’m glad we agreed on the awfulness of Strauss’s own ‘fantasia’, which VJ pointed out contains much of the worst music in the opera. There was another great critical split along the lines of the Martinů divide on how effective this much more interesting selection was; having accepted that we weren’t going to get the voices, I tried to enjoy it for what it was, and found myself seduced by all those odd extra instruments on full display: the Chinese gongs, the glass harmonica (pictured below in hands-on by Thomas Bloch; no working one in either of the big Russian cities, Jurowski told me about a performance there), the four tenor tubas. It gave me a fresh perspective on Strauss’s extraordinary score, and you can’t ask for more than that. 

Coming up: three titanic programmes from the tireless Jurowski, linking British and Russian attitudes to ‘War and Peace’, marking the bicentenary of the Battle of Borodino and 70 years since the premiere of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony. It should be amazing to hear the Russian National Orchestra tackle Vaughan Williams’s Sixth – VJ reports that Muscovite audiences were stunned by that unique, drifting finale – and combined Anglo-Russian forces in Shostakovich 7. Too much choice this week, alas: to be loyal to my BBC Symphony Orchestra class, I have to attend that band’s first concert of the season tomorrow and miss Jurowski’s Prokofiev War and Peace scenes: not too great a wrench when the alternative is to hear Jukka-Pekka Saraste conduct Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony and the peerless Alice Coote singing the most beautiful song in the world, Mahler’s ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’, among the Rückert Lieder. 

Image of a lighthouse bell in Primorsky Krai in Russia's far east above by V Kotelnikov, courtesy of Russian language Wikipedia

High time for clemency

I'm rather arbitrarily comparing big and small here, and in the case of the small, Israel may have been the starting point but is no longer the issue (snapped that White Rabbit in Jerusalem's Mane Yehuda district two years ago, by the way - is it a Banksy?)

Obama's UN veto on Palestine strikes me as the biggest disappointment yet, on a par with his inability to intervene in the greatest horror last night, the execution of a man who remained innocent until proven guilty (what's the saw? Better twenty guilty men go free than that an innocent man should hang).

Anyway, one shouldn't be surprised about the USA's intractable association with Israel: in came a telling statistic from Peter Phillips that the Israel Philharmonic indeed gets little funding from its own government but - surprise, surprise - has most of the shortfall met by America. And don't get me wrong: I do believe that in some respects Israel remains a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. But in the areas where it so flagrantly isn't, there must be room for self-examination and not just the kneejerk assertion that anyone who says there's a serious problem must be anti-semitic. We well know, though, that no rational argument is possible here, it's been too deep wired over thousands of years.

As it happens, the Israel Philharmonic doesn't really figure any more in the case of 'the LPO four', the orchestral musicians who put their signatures to a petition in the Independent seeking the boycott of the IPO's visit to the Proms. The grey area which remains is whether it was they or the organisers of the petition who appended 'London Philharmonic Orchestra' to their names and professions. If it was the players - and this should have been properly established by due process - than an emphatic public caution from an organisation which should not have been linked with the cause was totally justified.

What remains indefensible is the decision to bar the players from all activity with the orchestra, first for nine months, now for six. Big deal. As I wrote in an email to LPO chief executive Timothy Walker yesterday - you can send one, too, to timothy.walker@lpo.org.uk - 'a suspension, even if only for six months, is extreme, and reflects badly on nobody but the orchestral management'.

No reply as yet. Last night I was harangued by a person closely associated with the orchestra for trying to raise the issue as objectively as I could in the LPO's opening concert of the season, as if it had no place even in interval chit-chat. Anyway, I attended - some of my colleagues returned boycott for boycott - with the intention of giving the great Jurowski's latest piece of daredevil programming its due, but also of raising the peripheral issue, in my Arts Desk review, and have done just that. VJ, incidentally, did what he thought he could to plead for the players but doesn't feel beyond making his point that more is within his remit as principal conductor.

I was, of course, relieved that there were no protests in the hall, but deeply disappointed that no-one had the decency to support the players by issuing leaflets in the foyers. The gist should have been, 'enjoy the concert, but be aware of the issues' - the line taken by protesters at the BP-sponsored Trafalgar Square live screening of the Royal Opera Cendrillon. This eco-ballet, Swan Lake as parable of swans in oil, photo courtesy (I trust) of the Indymedia UK website, did not 'disrupt the event' as the site claims; it took place half an hour before curtain up.


I didn't catch the quarter-hour happening, as I arrived just before official 'curtain up'. I did, however, get a very witty and articulate leaflet. But on Wednesday there was nothing before or after the concert. That's sad.

23/9 Update: 117 signatories in a letter to the Telegraph, including Mike Leigh and Miriam Margolyes, have expressed their outrage. I don't think they've approached it from quite the right angle, but they've made their feelings known. And Timothy Walker - who still hasn't responded to my email - tells the Telegraph: 'This all became an issue when we started to receive emails and letters from supporters, a lot of whom are Jewish and felt that the players were taking an anti-Jewish position. Some said they weren't going to come to the concerts or give us any money.' Hmm - that says rather more than it should, doesn't it? And I believe two of the players in question are Jewish, so what does that make them - self-hating?

Tombsongs

Only connect - Berlioz's first score of total bloody-minded genius, La mort de Cleopatre is really about Juliet after all; and so it's back to my idee fixe of last month. I listened to it again - Janet Baker with Alexander Gibson, both electrifying - in preparation for tonight's pre-performance talk before the LPO concert conducted by the electrifying Yannick Nezet-Seguin, another born galvanizer, with statuesque Anna Caterina Antonacci as the serpent of old Nile. Do come along to the main Festival Hall auditorium at 6.15 and I'll take you through some of the extraordinary sounds Berlioz gave birth to, in later composers as much as in himself. It's a help that Ravel, the other greatest orchestrator of all time, shares the programme.

So. Not only is the first part of the Cleopatra monologue hardly what the Prix de Rome judges were looking for in 1829 - it breaks up, it modulates restlessly, the aria proper never settles - but the ensuing 12/8 Invocation, vintage Berlioz, is really a preparatory study for Juliet's death (though its inspiration and final shudders are completely different from the tomb scene in the 'dramatic symphony').


Wrote Berlioz to a friend: 'I wish you could hear the scene where Cleopatra wonders "how her shade will be received by the shades of the Pharaohs entombed in the pyramids". It's awesome, tremendous! It's the scene where Juliet meditates on her entombment in the vault of the Capulets, surrounded alive by the bones of her ancestors and the corpse of Tybalt: the growing dread, the thoughts that culminate in cries of terror, accompanied by cellos and basses plucking the rhythm [which he writes out]. Oh!, Shakespeare, Shakespeare!'

Indeed. And this is another Berlioz inspiration where the music, if not the text, does the Bard justice. Anyway, I'm looking forward hugely to the performance. Better dash now, but if you can't make it, here's the peerless Dame Granite in the second-half Invocation:

Vot tak syurpriz

Or, 'Oh, what a surprise', and since the black eye is a thing of the past now, it must be something to do with my unexpected guest above. In brief, I was waiting in the Festival Hall wings on Wednesday to go on and do my stuff about Shostakovich 11, with nice snippets from Britten, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, the Red Army Choir and three of the main man's symphonies lined up, when along strolls the impending concert's conductor, Vasily Petrenko. Well, it was nice to meet him for the first time and all that, but as he hovered, it suddenly occurred to me: 'you're expecting to join me, aren't you?' And, having read a piece of information on his agent's list as a command to appear, he was.

An opportunity too good to miss, and worth the sacrifice of everything I'd prepared. So, quick thinking: two chairs, please, and a mike that would catch both of us. And we winged a half-hour interview, which I think went rather well, because Liverpool's great Russian import is the most relaxed and thoughtful of speakers. Out went the music examples, though I did still want to make the point that, though the symphony was written over 50 years ago and casts further back to the 1905 St Petersburg massacre, its significance continues, or did for two of my oldest and most treasured City Lit students before their respective deaths at the ages of 87 and 96. They may be gone now, but their memories live on in me.


Martin Zam's father was there in Palace Square, and wondered why the history books never reported the events as they unfolded: chiefly, that the soldiers fired into the trees to try and disperse the crowds, unwittingly killing the children who were perched up there, which triggered the panic. And Trude Winik always loved Shostakovich's Eleventh best because she used to sing the revolutionary funeral song quoted by violas in the slow movement, 'Eternal Memory' ('Unsterbliche Opfer' to Trude), in red Vienna's Socialist Youth Movement during the 1920s. So when I hear it, I always think of Trude, who lost her father in the First World War and the rest of her family to the camps of the Second World War.

Thanks to the LPO below for alerting me to the quick putting-up of the talk on its website as a podcast. As for yet another astonishing performance of a symphony I never used to care for, read about it in my Arts Desk review.

I asked the LPO's Alison Jones to snap me and VP together. The specs reflect because my non-reflective ones got smashed in the bike crash.


The top picture was taken, serendipitously, by a professional - photographer Mauro Fermariello, son of our adored Clara, who came along as my guest with mutual friend Cally. He was amused by my red socks, which he said would have got me lynched in conventional Italy - and certainly I hadn't worn them for effect, since I'd been expecting to stand behind a lectern. I took a look at Mauro's website, and there are treasurable images in every gallery. He gave me the green light to put up some of my favourites here. A dog basking in the sun at Pompeii:


musicians at La Scala


with trumpets to cue a quick mention for Martin Hurrell's visit to the students on Tuesday accompanied by partner Liz Burley, the BBCSO's fabulous orchestral pianist, celesta and (as she amusingly told us) virgin organist on a needs-must tour featuring Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra. Martin played fluegelhorn and piccolo trumpet as well as the regular in a dazzling rendition of a piece by Aratunian.

And, last but by no means least, two of glorious Clara, nearly 85, under the heading 'Terza Eta'.



Auguri to our dama di grandezza in Napoli.