Magdalen in March

If we’re talking about archetypal English afternoons, then I can think of nothing much more perfect than lunch in an Oxford college, a walk around the grounds in warm spring sunshine, and choral evensong in the college chapel. To paraphrase unpoetically one of Oxford’s wisest graduates, gentle reader, do not care to know/Where Russia draws his* eastern bow,/What violence is done,/Nor ask what doubtful act allows/Our freedom in this English town,/Our dining in the sun.

Last Wednesday’s freedom came courtesy of Opus Arte promoting Magdalen College Choir, starting with a CD of Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu nostri. So far I’ve only dipped, but the work is a very quirky gem, celebratory or lamentatory according to what image or incident the limb of each motet conjures up. If I’m to be honest, the evensong was a mixed blessing. I like the bright, open sound the choir makes under Daniel Hyde, very much in the James O’Donnell tradition of more robust, continental style as opposed to the rather bloodless tones of our own cathedral tradition. 

I’d moaned to Philippa Howard, our cicerona, that I much prefer singing Byrd to listening to his music, and had hoped for something Victorian and vulgar in the service, but I’d forgotten what a masterpiece his Second Service is – or rather, the ideas came back as fresh as the day we first sang them on an All Saint’s Banstead cathedral course back in the 1970s. Yet in the anthem, Quomodo cantabimus (which we never performed), I had the curious sensation that the choir was singing ever so slightly sharp throughout – a much better fault than singing flat, indicative of zeal rather than torpor, but disconcerting all the same.

The rest was unalloyed pleasure. Though arriving in Oxford on a late train, I couldn’t resist speeding on foot along a favourite route from the station to Magdalen and was just in time for lunch at the Lodgings of the President, Professor David Clary. This in itself was a privilege – thought the building is nearly all Victorian, it has treasures such as the richly detailed Flemish tapestry received by one of the early Presidents for his part in arranging the match between the ill-fated Arthur, brother of the future Henry VIII, and Catherine of Aragon; both were only 15 at the time of their wedding in St Paul's. The Cathedral claims that this detail, reproduced courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Magdalen College, represents the royal couple, though our Master's wife, who kindly gave us a tour, thought that was highly speculative.

Guests at table included former Magdalenians - if that's what they're called - John Mark Ainsley, with whom I was delighted to join in a paean to Richard Jones – JMA had just been singing in the stupendous ENO Rodelinda – and Robin Blaze, who sang from the same hymnbook on the glories of Göttingen.

I took myself off for a solitary look at the magical late 15th century cloister/quad, with its figures reproduced in the drawing of the White Witch’s stone statuary for Magdalen man C S Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - last seen with the wisteria in bloom, but against greyish skies - and then headed across the lawn towards Holdsworth's virtually unadorned New Building of 1733

and in front of it the plane tree planted in 1802 to commemorate the Peace of Amiens (this and other much more curious facts to be found in Peter Sager's Oxford & Cambridge: An Uncommon History, which I'm reading from cover to cover, having loved his outsider's take on East Anglia).

The college’s eccentric possession of a deer herd was much in evidence, horns being locked across the pastures. We stood, watched, chatted, then went in to evensong via the ever-impressive pre-chapel, which has all the major treasures - the misericords which start with a man's head peering between a lady's thighs, Piper's animals-report-the-nativity charmer stained glass and the sepia grisaille west window of the Last Judgment, designed by a London goldsmith in 1632, removed before the Second World War and not replaced until 1996, a project funded by two Californian former students. Looking back on my last Magdalen entry, I see I've got almost the same picture, but never mind.

JMA told me the chapel resonates – the G spot, as it were – to B major, for which Francis Jackson catered in the final ‘Amen’ of his canticles. 

After the service I wove my way along the seclusion of New College Lane, skirting Magdalen and New until the back of All Souls came into view with Hawksmoor’s Gothic/Baroque twin towers in silhouette

then shining in the late afternoon sun from west of the Radcliffe Camera.

And the cherry blossom was in full glory in front of St Mary’s on the High Street.

So back to London by 7pm to head for the Marylebone Hotel and talk to heavenly Anne Schwanewilms on Strauss, the role of whose Marschallin she now truly owns. We had a full 95 minutes’ conversation, during which she left me in no doubt that she’s the funniest as well as the wisest soprano I think I’ve ever had the pleasure of interviewing. Some of her comic mannerisms even reminded me of Carole Lombard, another beautiful woman with an earthy streak. Photo below by Javier del Real.

A shame the impersonations of a certain conductor weren’t filmed as well as sound-recorded; I wonder how I’ll transcribe them for the Arts Desk Q&A, due to appear just before her Barbican concert appearance with Sarah Connolly, Lucy Crowe and Mark Elder conducting the LSO (Rosenkavalier excerpts only, alas, but don’t miss them). La Schwanewilms was here for another Wigmore recital, which I went to hear the following evening but didn't review simply because most of the programme was the same as the one I'd covered back in December 2011; even so, her spellbinding narrative skills proved hair-raising in Liszt's 'Die Loreley' and achingly sorrowful in Mahler's 'Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen'.

Much on my mind at the time of the interview was Die Frau ohne Schatten, that extraordinarily hard-to-stage fairy tale creation of Strauss and Hofmannsthal. Anne compared the two productions in which she’d appeared as the Empress – central to Christof Loy’s magic-free psychological study at Salzburg, which she bought though some of her friends didn’t, and coping at the Met with sets so tricky that they sent her to hospital on one occasion in the late Herbert Wernicke's resurrected show: that yielded pretty pictures, she said, into which the singers had to fit as best they could. She came a cropper several times on her mirrored glass slope, pictured below, and on one of those occasions had to make a visit to a New York hospital.

Claus Guth’s Royal Opera production, previously seen at La Scala, strikes a miraculous halfway house between psychoanalytic probing and the supernatural. I’ve waxed lyrical about it over on the Arts Desk and hope to go again towards the end of the run. The cast is uniformly excellent, led by Emily Magee’s sympathetic Empress (pictured below with father Keikobad in another of CliveBarda’s excellent photos).

Communicating with the CBSO’s Richard Bratby about it, I thought he hit the nail on the head when he remarked that he’d never realized what a desperately sad opera it is – and that includes the apotheosis, which worked for me here as never before. I even had a dream the same night about the court-room fantasy which is one of its more extraordinary later tableaux.

As it happened, talks with two fascinating women framed the Oxford visit, making for an exceptional 24 hours. On the Tuesday evening Sioned Williams, principal harpist of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and one of the world’s great soloists, came to talk – and did she just – to my City Lit class about the music she’s been commissioning for her 60^th birthday year.

Such wisdom and passion here about the infinite variety of so-called ‘contemporary’ music, above all how you the artist have to find what you like and go with that, and by the same token the composer must know your own special skills and abilities (which of course is how Britten always worked). I was pleased to see Paul Patterson as one of Sioned’s invitees (her very friendly Iranian husband Ali Hosseinian, whose compatriots' music she continues to champion, was there to offer technical assistance, too).

I wish I’d recorded it all – but Sioned, who had been ill and thus wasn’t able to bring her harp this time, will be back in September close to her special anniversary concerts. I’m relieved to say that her home remortgaging to pay for the commissions will now be partly offset by a grant from the Park Lane Group.

*I'm afraid Putin's lies and macho posturing have forfeited the feminine article of Mother Russia, but it was ever thus. The poem, of course, is my favourite, 'A Summer Night' by W H Auden.

Three Oxford colleges

And the good news is that most of the inmates favour the Lib Dems, at least according to my adorable mole Carla of Magdalen, who gets to vote for the first time. No doubt there's a neoBullingdon bunch of hearties who actually like the look of Cameron's smug face, as Carla's boyfriend and his mates emphatically do not. But I think I'm right in saying that Oxford central is surefire Lib Dem territory, as my own borough, sadly, is not.

Until I took the train to Oxford on Saturday and read The Guardian from cover to cover - something I very rarely do - I felt honour-bound to take one of two options: vote Green, because that was the only party which bothered to reply to my local ecological concerns, or Lib Dem. Then Polly Toynbee told me I must bow to an imperfect system and vote tactically. So it's Labour again, though I seethe with resentment at injustices both here and nationwide. The die is cast. But PLEASE don't think your vote doesn't count, or all parties are the same. The fact that we live in a flawed democracy is such a luxury.


For the nostalgic visitor to Oxford, though, such questions are suspended. I'm deep in Dorothy L Sayers's most autobiographical novel, and probably her masterpiece, Gaudy Night, in which Harriet Vane, writer of detective novels, returns to her old college in middle age for a 'gaudy'.

If only one could come back to this quiet place, where only intellectual achievement counted; if one could work here steadily and obscurely at some close-knit piece of reasoning, undistracted and uncorrupted by agents, contracts, publishers, blurb-writers, interviewers, fan-mail, autograph-hunters, notoriety-hunters, and competitors; abolishing personal contacts, personal spites, personal jealousies; getting one's teeth into something dull and durable; maturing into solidity like the Shrewsbury beeches - then, one might be able to forget the wreck and chaos of the past, or see it, at any rate, in a truer proportion. Because, in a sense, it was not important. The fact that one had loved and sinned and suffered and escaped death was of far less ultimate moment than a single footnote in a dim academic journal establishing the priority of a manuscript or restoring a lost iota subscript. It was the hand to hand struggle with the insistent personalities of other people, all pushing for a place in the limelight, that made the accidents of one's own personal adventure bulk so large in the scheme of things.

But she doubted whether she were now capable of any such withdrawal. She had long ago taken the step that put the grey-walled paradise of Oxford behind her. No one can bathe in the same river twice, not even in the Isis. She would be impatient of that narrow serenity - or so she told herself.

We lapped up that 'narrow serenity' after a lunch in the converted church that is Freud's cafe - mediocre food (including an unspeakable crumble), superb atmosphere and service (though not, of course, in this crumbling shrine, of the religious sort).


Worcester College was open for the afternoon, that 18th century 'ornamental pile' adding to the monastic buildings of the former Gloucester College, of which the medieval south side of the Quad remains (back side pictured above). The handsome north range, seen here from the Hawksmoor-inspired facade, dates from 1753-9.


The gardens were glorious, even on a bitterly cold May afternoon, with water everywhere


and a lovely walk along the lake with its overhanging horse chestnuts.


After a quick dip into the Ashmolean, it was time for evensong in Sir George Gilbert Scott's overlofty Exeter College Chapel, modelled on Paris's Sainte Chapelle


though of course with glass that can't compare. There is, however, a splendid Morris tapestry of the Adoration of the Magi, partly designed by Burne Jones, the first of ten, one of which (from Manchester) I reproduce below.


The purpose of attending evensong was to hear not so much the rather strident choir of girls and men but an address by Michael Symmons Roberts, whose libretto for MacMillan's The Sacrifice I've so admired. Jimmy was also in Oxford on Saturday for the premiere of a new choral work - as I only later twigged having seen from afar a familiar face at the Berlin Phil concert, and ascribed it to a half-remembered German musician (stop press: Jimmy told me at last night's world premiere of the Violin Concerto that it couldn't have been him). In a muddying acoustic, Symmons Roberts read several of his poems dealing with the practicalities of resurrection: what would Jesus and Jairus's daughter have had to eat? The short, pithy poems came from his collection Corpus, which I've just ordered up.


Then we decided to drop in on Magdalen and see if Carla was about. She was, and took us exuberantly on a tour. It's a college I've always wanted to see, and never until now succeeded. The cloister is probably the most beautiful in Oxford, though Christ Church, of course, has a different, loftier claim.


The sculptures which adorn it don't get so much as a mention in my Pevsner, though they're famous for inspiring C S Lewis, fellow for many years, to transform them into the statues which adorn the White Witch's courtyard in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Everyone loves the twins.


The chapel was mostly restored, heavily but well, by Cottingham in the early 1830s, but its antechapel has some splendours, including the grisaille windows of 1632


and a set of very characterful misericords. Of course I snapped the lot, as it's my obsession, but I'll take the liberty of only reproducing a grotesque face and one particularly naughty specimen.



As for famous forbears, T E Lawrence was here; C S Lewis lived in the New Buildings of 1733


and Oscar Wilde had a room on the High Street side, though no one seems sure which one it was. Carla, of course, fell in love at first sight with the whole place and its deer park, which is why she chose it. And very happy she seems to be there, too. Ah, the young. It won't be long now before the godchildren are aiming for Oxbridge, so I'm much looking forward to bringing Evi, Alexander and Rosie May on a visit.