Horror and part-redemption: Ančerl and Haas

The still from an infamous film is not quite what it seems. Conductor, composer taking a bow, orchestra and smartly-dressed audience are all Jewish prisoners in Theresienstadt/Terezin. Two days later - the sickening cynicism of the Nazi propaganda machine! - they'll all be deported to Auschwitz. Few will survive. 

Conductor Karel Ančerl was one who did, though his wife and son were murdered in the gas chambers. Arriving in Auschwitz, he stood in line with his friend, said composer Pavel Haas. Mengele was ushering him on the path to extinction when Haas, weakened, coughed. 'No, that one'. And because of this obscene twist of fortune, the composer was lost to us and the conductor went on to greatness at the helm of the Czech Philharmonic. After the liberation of Auschwitz, he also found the orchestral parts - except the one for double-basses - of the work being performed in the film, Haas's Study for String Orchestra. 

Ančerl features in the film about the film, apparently not downloadable but to be found on YouTube (the title is 'The Führer gives the Jews a city' in capitals). Thankfully it is not the unadulterated propaganda exercise about happy life in Terezin. It's all in German, without subtitles, but an essential watch, if you can bear it. The great man's steely precision about the facts and circumstances is moving in itself. Needless to say several 'students' on my Zoom Czech music course were deeply involved - two had relatives who were in Terezin and/or were murdered in Auschwitz. Pictured below: members of the dressed-up Terezin audience several days before slaughter.

In every class, we've found something profoundly moving or troubling. Just think of the infant mortality and premature deaths which dogged the lives of the great Czech composers. As we moved through the decades, it became such a pattern that I felt I had to ennumerate. Smetana lost three daughters between 1854 and 1855, and his wife, who died of scarlet fever, four years later. Dvořák and his wife lost three children between 1875 and 1877. Janáček wrote in his 1924 autobiography that he would 'bind Jenůfa simply with the black ribbon of the long illness, suffering and laments of my daughter Olga and my little boy Vladimir'. No sooner had Josef Suk begun to mourn the death of Dvořák, his father-in-law, intending a five movement memorial with a triumphant conclusion, than his wife Otilie, Dvořák's daughter, also died. Thus the Asrael Symphony became a monument of almost unrelieved sadness.

Even though Bohuslav Martinů and his wife Charlotte had no children of their own, he had cause to mourn the remarkable young woman who may have been the great love of his life, conductor and composer Vítězslava Kaprálová (pictured above). Like another composer who should have gone on to greater heights, Lili Boulanger, she died at the age of 25. That was in 1940, just as the Martinůs were fleeing the Nazi occupation of Paris and marking the first stages of their difficult journey to the USA.

If, as the late, great Jiří Bělohlávek insisted, we accept Gustav Mahler as a Bohemian - he was born in Kaliště before the family moved to nearby Jihlava - then here's the most devastating chronicle of family loss of all the 'Czech' composers. Apart from the major loss of his life, the death of his four-year-old daughter Maria ('Putzi'), of the 14 children to whom his mother gave birth, six died in infancy, sister Leopoldine of a brain tumour at the age of 26, while 21-year old Otto committed suicide, and the greatest shock of all to the young Gustav, it seems, was the death of his brother Ernst of pericarditis, aged 14. On the manuscript of the work he defined as his official Opus One, the fairytale cantata Das klagende Lied, at the point where one of the two brothers in the forest lies down to rest - his sibling is about to slay him - the composer wrote 'Ernst' in the margin. Below are stanzas written out by Mahler in 1879.

Das klagende Lied got a look-in when I covered fairytales in the sixth Czech music class. Curious how events of great emotional significance have intruded on every instalment. Smetana's Má vlast, the fountainhead in so many ways, could be seen or heard in filmed or recorded concerts of special import: most recently, perhaps, when Rafael Kubelik returned to his newly-liberated country in 1990 (there are Japanese films of all the movements played by a conglomerate orchestra under him in Tyn Square, as wel as the famous sound recording of the Prague Spring Festival concert with the Czech Philharmonic). A thrilling, fast and often rough performance has been preserved from a radio broadcast of Václav Talich conducting the work under German occupation. It's so moving to hear the audience, in the midst of wild applause, break in to the Czech national anthem (which you get at the end of this excerpt - there's a complete performance on YouTube which stops before that point).

The Hussite chorale featured in Má vlast's last two symphonic poems, 'Tábor' and 'Blaník', runs through to Karel Husa's Music for Prague 1968 - I need say no more of the significance of that. Tomorrow we'll be focusing on Martinu in the 1940s but also remembering Haas and other Jewish composers who were murdered under the Nazis. I steel myself once again for a tough time and will try not to blub again. Then, in just over a week's time, it will all be over - the 10 Czech music classes as well as the 10 Opera in Depth surveys of Jenůfa and Julietta (which the students now accept as another of the 20th century's greatest operas). My thanks to visitors Nicky Spence, Mark Wigglesworth, Jana Boušková and Josef Špaček. As for the latest special guest, I can't wait to expound on the three Monday afternoon hours we spent in the company of Gerald Barry, ostensibly covering his latest operatic masterpiece, Alice's Adventures Under Ground, but roving far and wide to embrace, among other things, Miss Marple, Edward and Mrs Simpson, The Power of the Dog and linen napkins daubed with lines from Beethoven's letters. More anon.

Europe Day Concert 2017: depth and range

There, bang in the middle of what by common consent turned out to be the best Europe Day Concert to date, was the world premiere of a piece which went as deep and as high as anything on the programme: Stranded by Matthew Kaner, in which the solo violinist finally breaks away from the combative orchestra and walks offstage, still playing. A surprise which no-one expected and which in the programme note the composer hadn't divulged, but everyone got the point. Arriving at St John's Smith Square halfway through the afternoon rehearsal to hear the already great Benjamin Baker and conductor Jonathan Bloxham - my favourite twentysomething musicians* and I pictured at the after-concert party below -

rehearsing the new work with the Northern Chords Festival Orchestra, I was taken aback by the ravishing beauty of the sound (Matt's orchestration is a wonder) and the impact of the playing.

An email comment, one of many from friends, sums it up: 'a superb band - quite the best I've heard in its depth and range'. Photos here all by Jamie Smith, with the exception of the below, composer concentrating at the rehearsal, by me.

And it all went beautifully. People wept, and not just at the emotion of standing, as we always do, for Beethoven's Ode to Joy at the end of the concert (I have to add that the orchestral statement of the Ninth Symphony's big tune has never sounded better either, even if it had an extra kick after Macron used it two days earlier). The emotional depths were especially sounded in 'The Oak Tree' from Sibelius's peerless incidental music to The Tempest, Ariane's Farewell from Martinů's eponymous late masterpiece with Maltese soprano Nicola Said rising to divadom - how she's come on even in the year since I saw her perform the role at the Guildhall School -

and the metamorphosis/resurrection, Respighi's 'The Birth of Venus' from his Botticelli Triptych, swelling and all-enveloping.  Again, an e-mail accolade is worth reproducing: 'it was an extraordinary evening, beautiful, at times so exquisite (Martinů's aria) it actually hurt, dignified, wrenching'.

The theme was 'islands', Malta currently holding the presidency (the opening speeches, from Norman Hamilton, Maltese High Commissioner, and Christine Dalby, Acting Head of the European Commission Representation in the UK, were succinct and very much to the point). The programme looked good on paper. But in practice it went further than expected - so much could be taken as metaphor for the tragedy of the UK's imminent departure, even if it wasn't consciously planned as such. Again there was general agreement that not a piece failed to make its mark.

Even Maltese composer Charles Camilleri's 'Nocturne' from the Malta Suite - not the piece originally desired - provided a melancholy showcase for Jonathan's wonderful strings, making so much sound for the grouping 5.5.3.3.2 and all the nimbler as a result, as the iridescent variety of Mendelssohn's The Hebrides Overture immediately established. Communication and flexibility, assets which Jonathan has developed amazingly quickly - he's now assistant to Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra - caught everyone around me, I could see, and didn't let go until over an hour later. Sounds as if I'm exaggerating but I speak the truth when I say I haven't heard a livelier or more gorgeous-sounding performance of the Mendelssohn classic.

The strings were lovely and bouncy for Mozart, too, and we had absolute top quality from two singers currently on the Royal Opera's Jette Parker Young Artists Programme, Irish soprano Jennifer Davis and tenor Thomas Atkins (a Kiwi, like Ben). He took the less florid version of Idomeneo's 'Fuor del mar' but still adorned the da capo with extra flashes of brilliance; Jennifer had Ilia's tender-sad Act Three aria 'Zeffiretti lusinghieri', a neat follow-on to the natural settings of the soprano and tenor numbers from Nielsen's Springtime on Funen. That was deliciously done, too - Siri Fischer Hansen, administrator of JPYAP, attested to the excellent delivery of her native Danish - and turned out to be the favourite of quite a few folk in the audience. One spectator pointed out that it was all the more beautiful for being accompanied by the almost rustic vision of trees and sinking sun through the big window behind the orchestra.

Soprano and tenor rose to the French ardour of the Act 2 love duet for Nadir and Leila in Bizet's The Pearl Fishers, too - Thomas is going to be singing Don José in the Royal Opera's Peter Brook Tragédie de Carmen, and I can hear an ideal Micaëla in Jennifer already.

I still think there's no greater demonstration of genius than Sibelius's distillation of a lifetime's experience in the Tempest music. He was such a master of the miniature, and to my mind Song II, a canny orchestral adaptation of Ariel's 'Where the bee sucks', is its epitome: two short verses, the second first abbreviated and then given a surprise extension, wryly singing on two clarinets with the lightest string bounce underneath, all in a minute. Joe Shiner, destined to be either a soloist or an outstanding principal in one of the world's best orchestras (or both), and his colleague Greg Hearle brought more subtlety to their parts than I've ever heard on recorded interpretations, and Joe's belated solo in The Hebrides, as in his performance with the London Firebird Orchestra last year, brought tears to the eyes; Jonathan let him take all the time in the world over it. Joe was also the orchestral fixer, working flat out beyond the call of duty.

Flautist Alena Lugovkina - on trial, I understand, for the Royal Opera Orchestra - also excelled, and leader Zoë Beyers got to take over from Ben at key points in Stranded. Quite apart from the beauty of seeing a group of young players really enjoying and putting across their artistry - they later said how struck they were by the quiet intensity of the audience and the ecstatic reception it gave them - they were truly representing Europe, with an Estonian violinist (Marike Kruup), a Bulgarian cellist (the outstanding Michael Petrov), a Polish harpist (Zuzanna Olbrys), a Spanish first horn (Francisco Gomez Ruiz) and other nationalities in the mix (I haven't pinpointed them all). Delighted also that the other good friend I've made from first acquaintance at the Pärnu Festival in 2015, Sophia Rahman, was the pianist.

Everything went smoothly, receptions included. Now everyone can enjoy the aftermath of a job superbly done and look forward to the CD.

*Left out one other - the prodigiously talented Ed Picton-Turbervill, formerly organ scholar at St John's Cambridge who graduated with a Double First in Music, celebrating the launch of his book on the trees of the Backs by playing the Goldberg Variations this coming Saturday. The Bach evensong following an afternoon picnic and the launch at St John's may involve him too, I don't know. Genius, anyway. Ought to include my dearly beloved godson Alexander Lambton, too, whose sax contributions to various classy bands are well above the average.

Well chosen, BBC Music Magazine

I wasn't able to be at the BBC Music Magazine awards this year - too busy Snow Maidening in Paris - but at the end of my write-up of last year's ceremony, I pointed out that the Smetana Trio's disc of Martinů Trios was already on my shortlist for best of the year already (pictured above, violinist Jiří Vodička, pianist Jitka Cechová and cellist Jan Pálenícek) . It won the chamber music category at the 2017 awards, and Czechia has been going wild with excitement. What it probably doesn't know is the golden thread that led to the nomination - my Czech friend Jan sending me the disc, my pressing it on reviews editor Rebecca Franks so that it made the pages as another glorious Supraphon issue that might have been in for an award, of Martinů's Ariane and Double Concerto mentioned here, didn't.

As a Martinůmaniac, I'm of the opinion that Maxim Rysanov's disc of sonata, duos and Rhapsody-Concerto could also have won the previous year, and this absolutely delicious tetralogy of cantatas ought to do so in 2018 (that review isn't found on the hopeless BBCMM search engine).

Golden times for the reassessment of the last towering figure of the 20th century not to be widely acknowledged as such. And on 9 May you can hear Nicola Said reprise her Ariane in the final scene from that little masterpiece at this year's Europe Day Concert in St John's Smith Square. That's all I'm saying on the subject for now.

Frankly I'd have chosen the trios disc as the top award over Vasily Petrenko's Tchaikovsky Symphonies 1, 2 and 5, though I'm proud that I enthused over that one, too, in the pages of the magazine (again, the search engine on the BBCMM website doesn't locate it). The May issue had a riven choice over raves - which should be Recording of the Month, Paavo Järvi's Strauss Heldenleben and Don Juan with the stunning NHK Symphony Orchestra, or 87-year-old Bernard Haitink's latest Mahler 3? Rebecca went with Paavo in the end. And in the June issue there's going to be a spotlight on another stunner, leader of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra Terje Tønnesen's transcriptions for string orchestra of the two Janáček quartets, the First also to be heard in the context of a thrilling adaptation of Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata read in both English - brilliantly - and Norwegian by the actor Teodor Janson. It's the luck of the draw - months can pass with only three-star-max discs, and then all these glories come along at once.

Anyway, I'm proud that the magazine continues to flourish in difficult times. And now, on the BBC front, we have the Proms to get excited about - for me, it's one of the best seasons on paper for years. The launch is always fun, and that was another one I had to miss last week. A single highlight for me? Jakub Hrůša's all-Czech variations on a Hussite chorale with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on 26 August. On 13 August, before a double whammy of Rachmaninov's Second Symphony in the main Prom and the Vespers sung by the brilliant Latvian Radio Choir in the late-nighter,  I'll be talking about the composer's use of Russian Orthodox chant in his orchestral music.

Off-piste CDs of 2016

Probably all the interesting ones are bound to be off-piste, and the smaller labels have all the best tunes now. The disclaimer is that my listening has been very partial, all the discs here until the Prokofiev footnote are ones that didn't make it to the BBC Music Magazine (or rather one did, but not in a review from me) and as a Martinů addict I'm bound for the second year running to choose a disc that furthered my knowledge of a score I hardly knew. In the case of Ariane, his one-act operatic swansong, it was good to hear it first live earlier this year in an intriguing staging by Rodula Gaitanu for the Guildhall School. But undoutedly Simona Šaturová and Tomáš Netopil (pictured above) have the edge in a concert performance from Essen released by Supraphon.

The structure is mysterious: a lovely, light prelude which gets repeated a couple of times suggests a commedia dell'arte treatment of the myth, like Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Ariadne auf Naxos. But Martinů's source is Georges Neveux, the author of Juliette ou La clef des songes, which of course elicited from Martinů one of the great operas of the 20th century. The action takes place entirely on Crete, and the Minotaur is the self that Theseus needs to slay, saying goodbye to the potential happiness of a marriage to Ariane.

Without the Guildhall's studio-broadcast setting and Nicola Said's convincing Maria Callas lookalike - based on the news that Martinů thought La Divina would sing the role of Ariadne - the essence of the myth became clearer to me simply in listening. And it seemed abundantly clear that with its central theme of man and woman not understanding each other it would make the perfect prelude in a double-bill to Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle (the music for the Minotaur even resembles that score's more violent passages). Šaturová is exquisite in the big but tender final monologue, and the tenor who sings in the Prologue is beguiling, too. Always a joy, or the opposite in a good sense, to hear Martinů's most acclaimed masterpiece, the Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Timpani and Piano, though it's one of his most light-less pieces - for catharsis, I had to go and put on the finale of the Third Symphony, one of the most transcendental endings to any symphony, with a touch of ambiguity right at the end.

Three soloists have given us outstanding discs. Emily Pailthorpe, wife of flautist Daniel and a top oboist in her own right, makes almost as good a case for a new work by Richard Blackford as she does for the adorable Strauss Oboe Concerto, and it's good to hear some of the BBC Symphony Orchestra wind players alongside here in Janáček's Mládí. Perfect programming; three cheers to Champs Hill Records.

Dunja Lavrova is a most delightful person whose acquaintance I made at the Pärnu Festival this summer where she and harpist Jana Boušková managed not to disappoint (to understate the case) with their Saint-Saëns Fantaisie after the predictable brilliance of Matt Hunt, Triin Ruubel and Sophia Rahman - a good friend of Dunja who brought her in to share the Pärnu spirit - in the best Bartok Contrasts I ever expect to hear. The premise of My Dusty Gramophone is to record violin and piano, or violin solo, miniatures in the style of the old Jascha Heifetz recordings which inspired her. In other words, with the violin very close to the microphone. And her beguiling style or styles withstand the rigorous inspection. I love her legato line in Rachmaninov, and it's good to have the Schumann Intermezzo from the FAE Sonata.

STOP PRESS: Dunja's just put up a YouTube present for her mother which is fun. Introduction included, since I love her delivery and sha'n't forget her and Sophia throwing their heads back and roaring with laughter at the big final party in Pärnu. As she says, you can zoom forward to 2'04 for the music.

Since I met him as a fellow jury-member for the Orkestival competition of school orchestras in the Concertgebouw earlier this year - a real highlight of 2016, and I'm over the moon to have been asked back - Jeroen de Groot has released a beautifully produced two-CD set of Bach's solo sonatas and partitas. I promised him I'd set aside a morning to listen properly before we met in Amsterdam, which I did on Wednesday morning, and was delighted to announce last night how impressed I was.

This is playing you can't possibly have on in the background as mellifluous, objective Bach. De Groot writes in his booklet of how much he respects the 'untouchable' phenomenon of Henryk Szeryng. His own major teacher Herman Krebbers tended to that aspect, making him learn the Bach works by heart as part of a large repertoire - 'but it was not very clear to me what to do with it'.

Then he saw a documentary on Glenn Gould and the Goldberg Variations, which showed him the way to an individual approach. With the prize money from winning at the Oscar Back Concourse de Groot went to study with the great Sandor Vegh, linking back to a tradition which included Joachim and Liszt. Vegh's words in interview which de Groot reproduces in the booklet should be carved out for every interpreter:

Music is a creative art, but so is the interpretation of it. The expression is revived in every musical phrase, and this is different every day. There are mysterious powers, vibrations and radiations that influence my feeling and that I, humble being that I am, cannot grasp at all. I can only say I have good days and bad days.

I assume that de Groot regards the day, or days, on which he recorded the sonatas and partitas, as among the good. The sound is so centred and golden, with the instrument matched to a baroque bow, that the graded forcefulness of the playing never grates. Here he is playing the most famous 'track' of all the solo violin music, the Preludium from Partita No. 3 in E.

There's immense power of expression throughout the two discs, and I love it all - though I'd be inclined to listen in four instalments as there's so much to take on board. And I'm happy to hear it over and over again - a treat to set alongside the Christmas Day 1723 assemblage of glorious Bach on the Dunedin Consort Magnificat disc which I discovered only last week.

Disc of the year hit the mat as late as this December, but I was in no doubt that it's the one, since anyone who storms the heights and conjures all the half-lights in Prokofiev's overwhelming masterpieces the Sixth and Eighth Piano Sonatas can be called a true Olympian, and Alexander Melnikov is one in a million. The sound allows for shattering force, too. More than that I can't say as this one is for the BBC Music Magazine and the review has yet to appear. As there are presumably two more instalments to come, more of this in 2017, please. I'd like to hear the entire Prokofiev piano works from grand master Melnikov.

Shouldn't really presume to make 'best of' choices in genres other than classical and opera, as I didn't see so much theatre, film and art. But I do know that the two December Saturdays devoted to great women in the theatre - the Donmar Shakespeare Trilogy and two consecutive performances of Mary Stuart with Juliet Stevenson and Lia Williams swapping roles (pictured below by Manuel Harlan) - were as exhilarating and thought-provoking as anything I've seen in the theatre.

Disappointing cinema-going earlier in the year was offset by finally catching up with Anomalisa, that astonshing animated meditation on alienated man and a woman in a million, on the telly. And William Kentridge's Deep Time at the Whitechapel Gallery was as full of wonder as any exhibition I've seen. Thought I'd written about it here, but apparently not; must go again and follow it up.

And that's my year's picks over and done with. You can read my Best of Classical 2016 on The Arts Desk here and Best of Opera here.

BBC Music Mag Awards: with a smile and a song

Happy for all the award winners at this year's ceremony, without having actually heard any of the CDs in question (the nearest I come is the world premiere of James MacMillan's Oboe Concerto, pretty much a masterpiece like all the other concertos he's composed to date). None of the candidates I'd reviewed - Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest at its London premiere, Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades from Jansons and Strauss's Symphonia Domestica along with a revelatory Die Tageszeiten from Janowski - actually won, but that's not really the point. In those categories, I don't doubt that Sakari Oramo's Nielsen is superb - his BBC Symphony Orchestra cycle was the concert highlight of last season for me - or that Pappano's Verdi Aida with dream team led by the great Harteros and Kaufmann deserves its accolade as a studio rarity in the current climate.

A copy arrived this morning, and just dipping into the Nile scene - I infinitely prefer the last two acts to the first two - I can tell why it's so special. Producer Stephen Johns spoke movingly of how Pappano, hearing the offstage chorus, said 'I wish my father had lived to hear this' (they played through the opera and sang all the roles when he was young). Harteros communicates so much in 'O patria mia'; it was obvious when she first appeared at the Royal Opera as Amelia in Simon Boccanegra that this was the best Verdi soprano since Mirella Freni - see the 2008 (!) blog post 'The real thing' - and so it's proved in the performances I was lucky enough to catch of Otello and Don Carlo in which she appeared.

It was a fun evening, not least because I got to sit next to my best pal in the business, Stephen Johnson, whose Behemoth Dances are (is? Must ask him whether second word is meant as verb or noun) due to be premiered in Moscow followed by first London performance in the Cadogan Hall on 12 May. He's just sent me score and preliminary sound which I look forward to seeing and hearing. We were attentive to the many splendid speakers, with editor Olly Condy kicking off with an amusing clip from Call Saul in which a character reads the first issue of BBCMM in bed, and James Naughtie being naughty as often, and presumably off the cuff with his wit. There were two oddities, though, whom I won't identify, but one seemed high as a kite and the other - well, I've got into trouble enough already referring to her as La Fragrantia (sexist? insulting? Not particularly, IMO), so let's just leave it at that.

The two live performances were totally engaging - the Schumann Quartet (pictured above), voted best newcomer (though how do you decide when there are so many first-rate quartets emerging all the time?),  in the typically quirky, quote-conscious second movement of Ives's Quartet, and Tenebrae pitch and tone perfect in Bruckner's motet 'Christus factus est' (pictured up top; had to remind Stephen that we'd sung 'Locus iste' at his wedding to the marvellous Kate). Most astonishing for me was a film of Nick Daniel with two fellow oboists playing MacMillan's Intercession for that unique combination - not even Martinů wrote for it - in honour of the composer, whom it was good to see again in person.

Best speech, no question, cellist Paul Watkin (second from left above in his Scottish Chamber Orchestra trousers - he's Welsh) claiming his award for the six Bach Cello Suites on Resonus Classics (have ordered them up). He stood up for music education in the clearest terms and  recommended learning about musical narrative from reading to children (claimed to have got through the entire Lord of the Rings with his kids); at least I know something about that from touting around Russian fairy stories to various godchildren with bits of music on cassette - that dates us - to accompany. John Eliot Gardiner's introduction was equally eloquent, showing how good he can be at heartfelt, precise tribute to a loved fellow musician. I had no idea at the time that Watkin can't play any more following diagnosis of an auto-immune condition called scleroderma; that adds post-event pathos, but it was touching enough then and there.

As far from perfunctory coda, let me sincerely hymn the praises of two discs I was sent by the performers or people close to them. If I hadn't thought much of them, I'd simply have kept stumm. That phenomenal harpist and most generous of human beings Sioned Williams had me sent a disc of works by Michael Stimpson, performed by her and the equally wonderful-on-both-counts baritone Roderick Williams in a recorded concert programme, part of which I'd been hoping to hear repeated at RIBA (in the end I couldn't make it). The Drowning of Capel Celyn I'd seen and heard in Sioned's 60th birthday concert at the Purcell Room. The song cycle Dylan is rich and varied, a marvellous introduction to some Dylan Thomas I didn't know, and all the better for the spoken passages (Roddy doesn't attempt to sound Welsh; Sioned's sing-songy native tone comes in useful for Mrs Cherry Owen). A beautifully presented disc, too.

I won't say much about the other CD because Rebecca Franks at the BBC Music Magazine has just accepted it for review. The background is important: the best of all press officers during her long stint at ENO, Jane Livingston, sent the disc to me because she wanted to support Julian Gavin, the tenor who gave so many extraordinary performances at ENO and, indeed, the Royal Opera (I saw his Don Carlo on the night when Roberto Alagna wasn't singing, and loved it). The year after he recorded this disc with his sister May (both pictured below) he was diagnosed with encephalitis, which called a halt to his international career. Val, their extraordinary mother, died only three weeks apart from their father in 2013.

Even if you knew none of this, I'm certain that the extraordinary emotional fervour of Gavin's very distinctive voice - lyric verging on the helden - would impress; and the songs, too, are late romantic in style and yet, it seems to me, genuinely inspired at times, with melodic writing of truth and beauty. It's useful to have settings of Housman's A Shropshire Lad which offer just as much as Butterworth's. More in the July issue of the BBC Music Magazine.

There, too, you should find my review of a disc which has sent me giddy with delight, the Smetana Piano Trio's recording of all Martinů's major works for that combination. This is already on my shortlist for best of year, and I can't stop playing the ecstatic dance-finale of the Third 'Great' Trio.

The way up

...facilis descensus Averno;
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
hoc opus, hic labor est.

The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labour lies.

Virgil Aeneid Book 6  lines 126-9, English translation by Dryden

This blog is rarely the place for the confessional, but I did vow that once I felt like my old self again, I'd stop puzzling some of the more inquisitive readers here as to the reason for the latest absence (long-term followers will have noticed the others; the 'episodes' began, for the first time in my life, shortly before I began this blog). After two and a half years of good health, far too much of 2012 was devoted to what I'd call not so much the black dog as the black hole. Around its edge were the constant modicum of working when I could, premature attempts to re-enter the public arena in April, and a return to teaching in September which soon felt natural. We managed trips to friends in the west during the spring and a wholly successful walking holiday around Chamonix in August which proved how crucial a part exercise plays in temporarily raising the spirits.

Even so, full wellness didn't return until November.

The mechanisms and triggers of these devastating episodes I still fail to understand. Did the trauma of extended dental work including a three-hour tooth extraction kick it all off, as I felt it had when the first crisis began six or so years ago? Was it the full impact deferred to the middle years of a bereavement in adolescence - the death of my father when I was 15? Well, in psychotherapy we've been through all that, raised aspects I hadn't considered - how not a single person really asked how I was, since all focus was on looking after mother; how maybe these spells from the mid-forties onwards have been a kind of identification with my unhappy father, disabled for the five years between his first stroke and his second, sitting at home feeling useless. Now I don't think we'll get any further along that line, though who knows?

Still I don't feel equal to defining the abyss. I need others to do it for me. Gwyneth Lewis in Sunbathing in the Rain, 'a cheerful book about depression',  approaches it poetically; Lewis Wolpert's Malignant Sadness and Andrew Solomon in The Noonday Demon add to the stock of understanding. With the qualification that all-enfolding love never deserted me - and I would insist that my best of men saved me, as before - Solomon's opening definition of depression does the job:

It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connections to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself. Love, though it is no prophylactic against depression, is what cushions the mind and protects it from itself. Medications and psychotherapy can renew that protection, making it easier to love and be loved, and that is why they work...In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaningless of life itself, becomes self-evident. The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance.

All I know is that on examination of the terrible times, there were oases of love and reassurance, even enjoyment, however much a casual glance back suggests nothing but the black. All this may seem strange since this is mostly a blog about enthusiasms, and, yes, I do love life with a passion when I'm well. Everything in the alternative state is a negative of that, a reversal. Two borrowed ways of defining it have been to say that I lost my soul, and that I joined the ranks of the undead (since at its most seemingly unendurable it did indeed feel like a fate worse than death, which you think about so often in the negative state; I don't believe anyone who denies this). Is there more than a touch of the bipolar? Very possibly. Each doctor, psychiatrist and psychotherapist seems to have different theories. It's not a science, but to be sure it needs medical supervision. If simply mentioning all this helps someone out there, then it's been worthwhile: don't be afraid to ask if you think I can be of use, though I don't suppose I can say more than, endure, this too will pass.

Anyway, here I am back in the midst of abundance, and in the few months of full enjoyment I can easily pick out a list of highlights. There were a few earlier in the year - chiefly an isolated excursion to English National Opera to see my beloved Rosenkavalier, and though there was a veil or two between me and my usual enjoyment of it, I could tell that this was a superlative revival, vivaciously conducted by Edward Gardner with perhaps the most successful third act I've seen. Sarah Connolly trumped her first Octavian at ENO, Amanda Roocroft had the bittersweet presence the Marschallin needed and John Tomlinson's chief asset as a vintage Ochs was his sheer ease on stage. But the voice which blew us away was Sophie Bevan's, blooming every time her Sophie hit a high ecstatic line. Here she is with Connolly in the Presentation of the Rose (photo for ENO by Clive Barda).

Richard Jones's staging of Martinů's Julietta was the next operatic highlight, drawing very few negative criticisms from anybody other than about the quality of the music and its subject, in which I was happy to join battle on the rapturously positive side. Below, three mini-Michels and the 'real' he (fabulous Peter Hoare) photographed for ENO by Richard Hubert Smith.

I seem to have struck very rare Royal Opera gold in July to catch Anja Harteros's long overdue return to the house. Her Desdemona shone Venus-starlike in a Verdi Otello which also included the right-sounding sort of protagonist in Alexanders Antonenko and magnificent work, as ever in the Italian rep, from Pappano and the Royal Opera Orchestra; shame about the Iago and the lame old production.

It was hard work getting to Glyndebourne for The Cunning Little Vixen, especially as that opera's glorious message wasn't chiming with me at the time, but I reckon Melly Still did a good job on the production. A much happier experience later in the year was talking again at a study day on The Marriage of Figaro while the Glyndebourne tour was kicking off at its home base, and loving the mostly superlative cast of the subsequent performance as well as Jonathan Cohen's vivacious conducting.

December brought my only Wagner live other than the surprisingly satisfying experience of hearing Mark Wigglesworth scale mountains in De Vlieger's potted Ring for orchestra. If any operatic event in anniversary year is better than the Fliegende Holländer in question, I'll feel lucky: Bryn Terfel covering all expressive and dramatic bases as an astounding Dutchman was equalled by Anja Kampe and Matti Salminen in the visiting Zurich Opera concert performance.

Mezzo of the year second time running for me is sublime Alice Coote (pictured above by Ben Ealovega), for her Mahler Rückert Songs with Saraste and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and her Purcell, Handel and Britten Phaedra alongside the splendid Britten Sinfonia. Violinist Catherine Martin (pictured below) revealed afresh the strange beauties of Biber's 'Rosary' Sonatas between homages to Bach's Orgelbüchlein in the Tower.

The BBCSO pulled off a sequence of well-programmed concerts but the LPO carries on reaping the rewards of a central intelligence in the shape of their music director Vladimir Jurowski. Hard to choose from his through-planned events, which will continue in 2013, but the last of his programmes I heard this year still resonates, with a spellbinding revelation of Grisey's Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (Four chants for crossing the threshold) enveloping hyper-agile soprano Allison Bell in a host of original sonorities. The Mahler Five that followed was absolutely fresh, too, as one has come to expect from VJ.

Theatre - I saw too little, though the Young Vic Three Sisters came to seem like a masterpiece of rethinking alongside the music-drenched pantomime of the Vakhtangov Company's enervatingly wilful Uncle Vanya (wish I'd seen Lucy Bailey's Print Room Vanya). So glad, all the same, to have been along to five of the Globe to Globe shows, top of the list the Maori Troilus and Cressida and the Hindi musical version of Twelfth Night (photo below by Simon Annand).

And we did a bit of catching up the week before Christmas with the still-sparkling second cast One Man, Two Guv'nors and a Sondheim treat which has been top of many critics' lists, Merrily We Roll Along at the wonderful Menier Chocolate Factory.

Now I feel more like the youthful Frank and Charley  (Mark Umbers and Damian Humbley pictured by Tristram Kenton above), starting out at the end of the show with wide-eyed optimism. Here's to a much better 2013 - and may yours be what you wish of it.

Ballad without words

Apparently every Czech schoolchild knows (or used to) at least partly by heart the verse fairy-tales of Karel Erben, just as every Russian schoolchild knows (or used to) Pushkin's Tale of Tsar Saltan and Golden Cockerel. We don't, and English translations are extremely hard to find, so what Dvorak was trying so uniquely to do in his symphonic poems of the 1890s may be even more liable to misunderstanding.

That, and what I construe to be the dead hand of the prescriptive 1950s, decreeing that all music which tells a story is suspect and that therefore any but the most established tone-poems are doomed to extinction, may account for why I've never heard The Golden Spinning Wheel and its companion pieces, no less wonderful in orchestration and invention (The Wood Dove, The Noonday Witch and The Water-Sprite), in the concert-hall. In fact it's a marvellous couple of days for hearing great music live for the first time; last night I revelled in the LSO's championship of Nielsen's Flute Concerto and Zemlinsky's The Mermaid, and wrote about that enterprising event on The Arts Desk.

So tonight I'm going to hear how The Golden Spinning Wheel pans out in live performance, and our BBCSO class is actually in quite a lather about a fabulous Czech programme which only Jiri Belohlavek could mastermind. More of the rest anon, but a word or two about The Golden Spinning Wheel. What I'm hoping is that Belohlavek will give an introduction with musical pointers, because unless you know the story you could well be lost in its nearly half-hour span*. And the subtlety of the technique will pass all of us who don't know Erben's poetry by. For Dvorak has set the text to music with the words merely implied - a pioneering idea which may have encouraged Janacek in his search for naturalistic speech-melodies. I don't know of how much of the piece this is true, but I enjoyed listening to my pal Stephen Johnson's eloquent BBC Radio 3 Discovering Music on the work, where he points out that the very first hunting-theme sets the opening two lines ('Okolo lesa pole lan,/hoj jede, jede a lesa pan').


This is music that tells a story at every point, and while the invention is superlative throughout, if we don't know it, we'll be lost. It's true there's a kind of rondo form, with a clutch of forest rides as the link, but the repetitions will certainly be puzzling without the story. I'm delighted that there's a complete film of Tomas Netopil conducting an Italian orchestra (it doesn't say which one) so that I can give the pointers in the shape of a few timings.



No trouble identifying the beginning: a king riding through the forest. He stops at a cottage to ask for a drink of water and falls instantly in love with the maiden Dornicka, who brings him the water and returns to her spinning wheel. Her music is as lovely in the heroine's in that great opera Dvorak had yet to write, Rusalka, and uniquely scored (cor anglais, four solo second violins and one first, before clarinets proceed with the spinning - 2'28 in the film).


The King has to ride back later and ask Dornicka's stepmother for her hand in marriage. We can tell she's a wicked old bag (the oboe pops the request, clarinets and bassoons cackle back - 6'31).

Sure enough, the stepmother and her daughter, riding with Dornicka through the forest (8'47), murder her (9'58), cutting off her arms and feet, plucking out her eyes and for some obscure reason taking the body parts to the palace, where the 'false Dornicka' - see Odette/Odile - marries the King. He goes off to war. Meanwhile, a mysterious old man finds Dornicka's torso in the forest (brass chorale, 15'16) and sends a boy to the palace to ask for the body parts (innocent flute, 15'55). This is where you have to know why the process is repeated three times: the boy gives a golden spinning wheel in exchange for the feet, a golden distaff for the hands and a golden spindle for the eyes. The old man restores Dornicka to life.


The King returns from the wars, his wife plies the golden spinning wheel - and it creaks out the awful truth (22'20 - shades of Mahler's Das klagende Lied, where a flute made out of a murdered youth's bones reveals a fratricide). The King finds Dornicka in the forest and they live happily ever after. Somehow Dvorak passes over the wicked women's being torn to pieces by wolves in hot pursuit, but he needs to get to the end in as lush and jubilant a manner as possible.


Tonight's concert will conclude with another, earthier tale - Janacek's Taras Bulba - which is going to connect neatly with a much later work by Martinu, his Rhapsody Concerto for viola and orchestra. Like so many of the exile's great later works composed in America, Martinu's modest little masterpiece harps on the cadence we know as the 'Julietta chords', from their emancipating role in that fantastical masterpiece of an opera (which I've just heard Richard Jones will be staging for ENO next season, hurrah).


Did Martinu mean by the chords to evoke his lost love, the talented composer Vitezslava Kapralova, who died at the tragically young age of 25 in 1940? We'll probably never know; Martinu had to cover his tracks even for his biographer, Milos Safranek, so as - I guess - not to further wound the feelings of his French wife. But the fact is that the 'Julietta chords' first turn up at the end of Taras Bulba. So they could equally well signify the rapture of Czech liberation, and of what his homeland meant to Martinu.

At any rate most of the later works are shot through with significant quotations, or near-quotations, and I spotted another in the second movement of the Rhapsody-Concerto: a poignant recollection of the lyrical second theme in the first movement of Dvorak's American Quartet. For some strange reason a good performance of that isn't on YouTube, only the first movement in the magnificent interpretation of Josef Suk with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Neumann. The Julietta chords are all over this movement, too, starting seconds into the piece.



The second movement is the more dynamic and unpredictable of the two; amazing the use Martinu makes of rattling side-drum in postponing the ultimate peace, though that does come. It's a good time to remember all those geniuses, as well as all the rest of suffering humanity, displaced by war. Given that Remembrance Day is tomorrow, I'll leave you with a recording of perhaps Martinu's best-known orchestral work, the memorial to the Czechs massacred by the Nazis in Lidice.



*He didn't. Instead he cut the work by a third, leaving my students puzzled as to what was going on. All this now detailed in the Arts Desk review.

Elevated Martinů

Who, among 20th century composers, really solved the problem of a clinching symphonic finale? Triumph became difficult: in that respect, only Nielsen 5 is up there for me. But in terms of more ambiguous resolutions, I think of Shostakovich 8 and 15, Vaughan Williams 6 - and now Martinů 3*. It hit me with the force of revelation on Saturday, and I could hardly stop weeping.

Why? Because, having had his expected syncopated Allegro thrash, Martinů unpeels sad and exultant layers of beauty only briefly anticipated in the central Largo of this embattled symphony. It's going to sound dull if I just enumerate them, but I will: the tortured writing for the violas which climbs ever higher in search of release; the simple oboe figure - and then the above, what Patrick Lambert described to me on Saturday as 'sheer elevation' of a very transcendent kind. It's the concerto-grosso principle of bringing a solo string quartet to the fore, but having each player's section colleagues as muted back-up. You get that in a very moving passage of the Fourth's great slow movement, too. But this is even more complex, enriched by rippling harp, staccato piano and flutes, burbling clarinets.

And that's not all. It momentarily comes as a bit of a shock when the woodwind start brightly fanfaring in the symphony's goal-key, E major. But the massed triumph is short-lived, buffeted by discords. The strings hold on to the chord, but in three curt protests, the piano insists that perfect peace can't be left unchallenged.

This odd apotheosis is further complicated by personal quotations: the famous chords from the opera Julietta - by way, conscious or not, of Janacek's Taras Bulba - which mark out the hero trying to hold on to the memory of his first encounter with the voice of his beloved


and the desolation of a little three-note figure from Dvorak's Requiem, which Martinů knew through its quotation in his teacher Josef Suk's Asrael Symphony. There it marks the double loss of Suk's father-in-law, Dvorak, and then their beloved Otylka (Dvorak's daughter and Suk's wife).


I don't think it's too fanciful to hear the end of the Third as Martinu reaching out again to the great love of his life, the brilliant young composer Vitezslava Kapralova, who died all too young in the truly awful year of 1940, shortly after Martinů had come to realise that he had to leave Paris following the Nazi invasion. There he is, right, with her and her father above. It was a love of which his biographer, Milos Safranek, even if he was fully conversant with the facts, couldn't speak without wounding Martinu's long-suffering wife. The next few years gave all too little breathing-space to reflect, but out of the terrible depression of early 1944 came the Third Symphony. Its performance on Saturday I shall never forget, my first concert-hall acquaintance with this masterpiece. Attached as I am to my Bamberg/Jarvi recording, I'll be glad to hear how it emerges on the impending CD set of Martinu symphonies taken from these live performances.

On Friday, the unknown (to me) quantity of Lawrence Renes leads the currently overworked BBC Symphony Orchestra in tackling the other truly colossal memorial of the 1940s, Shostakovich's Eighth - a shattering monument twice the length of Martinu's, and very different.


I'm wary about going, because Rostropovich's last Barbican performance of it with the LSO, mercifully captured on the above CD, went as deep as it's possible to go in a symphony. Well, we'll see. What's for sure is that both symphonic endings give us some sort of qualified optimism after all that anguish.

22/4, post-midday: for those of you anxious to know about these things, the programme for the 2010 Proms is now up and running on the BBC website. I daresay I'll get into it again when it happens, but very little has me jumping up and down with excitement the way that the Belohlavek Martinů cycle or anticipation of Jurowski's performance of Myaskovsky's Sixth Symphony in the season proper have. JEG is doing Martinů's Fantaisies Symphoniques somewhere in a jampacked Czech Phil Prom but not, if you please, at the end, which is the only rightful place for it.

*an afterthought - perhaps I should have said post World War One, because Sibelius 5 provides another sturdy specimen of the triumphant, and the Sixth another example of beautiful ambiguity.