Christodoulou at the Proms

Any reasonably accomplished professional photographer could take a good symmetrical shot like the above, of this year's First Night of the Proms: the Royal Albert Hall and what the BBC sometimes rather garishly does with it at Proms time do the rest of the work. But Chris Christodoulou is no run-of-the-mill man with a camera. He's done some marvellous portraits of conductors in action. Photogenic Dudamel handed it to him on a plate, but last year he also caught, among others, Andris Nelsons looking like I've never seen him before (gurning, to whit).

Actually the problem these days is whether you can get past the artists, and more usually their agents, with a really good, unusual shot. I heard only last week of a certain soprano at the Garden who wouldn't approve any photos of her other than alone - and since she was singing with arguably the greatest, most charismatic singer alive, that was a bit of a problem. Others want airbrushing. But I guess these two images of the great conductors in charge of the first two nights passed untainted. Here's modest, profoundly musicianly Jiri Belohlavek getting reasonably fired up by Mahler's Eighth.


It's always a treat to hear such a piece in such a hall, yet all bar one of the soloists really let it down, as I've regretted on the Arts Desk. No such problems with the Meistersinger line-up the following night. I'd decided to give it a miss so we could hold a birthday lunch for our good friend Niki and go to a birthday drink in a pub in Kentish Town in the evening. Surprise, surprise, when I found the BBC4 relay was delayed until 7pm, I stayed in and had another little weep as Bryn, Mandy and even a much better Raymond Very pulled at the heartstrings. 'Wach' auf' was a tearjerker, too: the WNO Chorus's final tribute to their homegrown superman before the dream team disperses for ever. What a shame, especially since fabulous Lothar Koenigs and the orchestra had just get better, but as Richard Jones said when he came to the class, that's the ephemeral essence of theatre. Chris has captured Koenigs well here.


On Sunday, all eyes must have been on Domingo, because Chris's only shot of Pappano is not a flattering one. He may have a good shot of photogenic Vasily Petrenko, too, but that concert last night I missed as I'd been sent to the first night of the Bolshoi summer season at the Garden hot on the heels of putting Wagner's masters to bed in the eleventh and last class of the City Lit term. Spartacus was fabulous, wild, OTT but never to be forgotten. Here's rising star Ivan Vasiliev, a big boy for 21, and all those shields, photo this time by Marc Haegeman for the Bolshoi.

Holy German art

Yes, that would certainly include - and right at the top of the list alongside Wagner - Gustav Mahler, whose 150th birthday we celebrate today (and I still haven't got to the omphalos, Jihlava).* As Paul Steinberg's brilliant dropcloth for Richard Jones's still simmering-in-the-mind production of Wagner's Meistersinger left us in no doubt, 'heilige Deutsche kunst' extends from Bach and Beethoven to Brecht and Bausch, embracing all German-speaking 'imaginers', as Jones calls them. You can enter the Welsh National Opera competition to guess (or know) all the faces in the collage by e-mailing the answers to marketing@wno.org.uk or post them to WNO. As the above photo seems to be cropped you'll need to get hold of the original postcard. And I confess I still haven't by any means sussed them all.

Great Jones, only visionary of our British theatre (as I keep saying, and I mean it), came to talk to me and the students on Monday. He raised so many interesting points I hadn't even thought of, and here's no place to ennumerate them, but I will add that he told us - in response to one of many articulate questions from my bunch, of whom I was inordinately proud - how a couple of German intendants who came to see the show found this all-inclusive perceived 'apology' for Wagner's definition harder to swallow than we Brits. While we heave a sigh of relief and say, at last we've moved on from the Wagner-and-the-Nazis question, they still seem to be mired in it, perhaps because they haven't been able to discuss it in their own art properly until recently. And then what do you get? Stodgy, trad films like Downfall. Hate to sound superior, because it's their issue, but they still have some way to go.

Had to raise the old 'is Flieder lilac or elder' question again. Richard didn't face it directly, but by talking of the heady sex-magic - my phrase, not his - which the scent seems to work on Sachs, he would seem to incline to the elder-as-aphrodisiac theory. Anyway, having been in enchanted Visby, I can tell you that Sweden, or at least Gotland, is a place where lilac and elder DO flower simultaneously around midsummer; everywhere else, including Nuremberg, lilac is over. But here's the ocular proof:



My thanks to the quietly brilliant Jan Brachmann for drawing my attention to the lilac as I walked around Visby in a bit of a daze.

Can anyone identify this plant, another heady smeller, high on the hill above the Baltic?


I reckon Visby would make a marvellous setting for an outdoor production of Meistersinger, moving from venue to venue. We could start in the Domkyrkan (seen behind the elder in the first picture) - though the modern glass might be a bit of a problem - and move on to Transhusgatan near the botanics for Act 2. No linden is close to hand, but I do think Magdalena-as-Eva could appear at this rose-flanked window.


Then it would be out on to the flowery heath for the final pageant.

And if you want to celebrate Mahler's birthday, what better way to do it than to watch what is bound to be the deepest, most meaningful First Symphony, a just-released DVD of last summer's Lucerne Festival/Abbado performance. Better not enlarge on it now, since my BBC Music Magazine review hasn't yet appeared, but I'll just say, buy it and watch it over and over: you won't regret it.


The third in the great triumvirate, Richard Strauss, also deserves a mention. I hadn't intended to see the revival of David McVicar's very bloody, Salo-esque Salome, but as I was talking before it last night and the Arts Desk hadn't covered it in my absence, I went on to the show after my half-hour Linbury 'performance', and marvelled, as with the ENO Tosca, how a great performance makes you respect the score as the real mover and shaker. Angela Denoke redeemed the tonally awful Nadja Michael performance from the first run, too. More over on The Arts Desk.

Led me to think of all the Salomes I've seen. In a crude nutshell, the ones I can call to mind are: Behrens (goddess), Barstow (goddawful), Tierney (not bad at all), Barker (vocally lustrous, good acting too), Some American in Wales (forgettable, but did bring a bit of tenderness to the final scene), Ewing (dreadful), Gwyneth (vocally tops, acting less good), Malfitano (squally, bit wild in the acting too), Michael (vocally the pits). And now Denoke (almost as good as Behrens, not quite, but probably the most detailed characterisation I've seen).

Finally, on a sobering note, my NBB (New Best Blogfriend) Minnie reminded me in the most eloquent way possible that today may be Mahlerday, but it's also an occasion of sober commemoration. Her focused anger is, at least in my opinion, fully justified. Do take time to read what she has to say.

*but hang on - is it just me or is Mahler really missing from that assemblage of just about all Austro-German greats? Unmoeglich!

Bergmen

Again, apologies for the unproclaimed absence: I've been in Faro - really should start adopting the accents here, the nearest pronounciation we can get is 'Four-er' - the magic-scary Swedish island of Prospero Ingmar Bergman ever since he landed there in 1960 and decided to film Through a Glass Darkly on the coast near what would become his home.

To Four-er was invited a select 'delegation of international journalists' to observe and participate in the annual Bergman Week. And here we all are, a harmonious bunch of diverse temperaments, outside the Damba barn which served first as the studio for the interiors of Scenes from a Marriage and then became Bergman's private cinema. Can you imagine the awe and emotion of being a dozen or so spectators in the fifteen-seater, sinking into the chairs around the one with the cushion that must always be left empty - that of the Meister?

The assembled company, left to right, consists of Mike Goodridge (Screen International, London, lately the mag's LA man), Jan Brachmann (Berliner Zeitung, the chap to talk music with when film chat became a bit too arcane for me, an amateur in I hope the best sense), Gerald Peary (Boston Globe, genial old-school maker of a well-received documentary about American film critics), some creature in pink minding his head on the threshold of the sacred shrine, Satyen Bordoloi (Indo-Asian News Service, Mumbai, enthusiast and photo-taker extraordinaire), Li Hongyu (Southern Weekly, Beijing, and a tidy roommate in one of the campsite capsules they housed us in for the four days), Peter Rainer (NPR, LA, just assembling thirty years of film criticism into a book and big anecdotalist of time with the greats) and Roman Volobuev (Afisha Magazine, Moscow, brain and memory the size of a planet, chainsmoker, individualist and a former colleague of Anna Politkovskaya, of whom he had some revealing things to say).

Lest you think that the man who made About All These Women would have been sorely disappointed by the all-male clan, we did have feminine company in the shape of the smiley Kajsa Guterstam, International Project Manager of the Swedish Institute, and the fabulously informative Pia Lundberg, Head of the International Department of the Swedish Film Institute, who chose the four new Swedish films we had the privilege of seeing in advance screenings in the private cinema. There were also the very emotional and truthful Liv Ullmann, who hadn't been back to the island since Bergman's death three years ago, and the daughter she had with IB, the novelist Linn Ullmann (I'm looking forward to reading A Blessed Child, which has more than a little of the Faro flavour about it, she told us). Anyway, here Pia and Kajsa join the throng along with Trutz von Ahlefeld, another genial guide around an island he knows well.


No time to download the bulk of my own pics yet, but I must just stick in two to show the extremes of this island, so mediterranean in parts in high summer but with the potential for the ultimate bleakness, the isle of death as IB once called it. The south and west coasts are mostly like this, with viper's bugloss purple-blueing the landscape:


while the north-west coast is lined with rauks - sea stacks - and pebbly beaches with fossilised coral in the stones. They tell us Faro broke away from Africa, hard as that may be to believe, and this is the result.


All these were locations for a clutch of Bergman's most lacerating movies, but I'd better save all that for my Arts Desk piece, due for next Sunday. Now I must get the tenth and last of my Meistersinger classes in shape. We'll whizz through the final revels in an hour because before that Richard Jones is coming to talk. Hope he's just as pleased as I am to know that in the listening room cum study of Bergman's home at Hammars is the (I think) Knappertsbusch recording.


Inevitably an important work for a creator who knew that nothing vital comes about without a touch of Wahn to prompt it.

Solstitial

Being driven back in smooth style the day after reeling joyously from the longest celebration of Midsummer in all opera, we were drawn as if magnetically to the standing stones of Avebury. Of course it didn't take us long to realise that the opposing forces of then-genial police and ruddy travellers with their cohorts of dogs and children in tow had gathered to celebrate the solstice. A little further on, beyond Marlborough before joining the mundane motorway, we saw this very midsummery down covered in poppies.


St John's eve and day, the Johannisnacht and -tag which see chaos incorporated into order in Wagner's 16th century Nuremberg, are of course slightly later - 23/4 June rather than the longest day of the year, the 21st - but it comes to much the same thing. I never thought to see a Meistersinger with a Hans Sachs as great as Norman Bailey, possibly the most remarkable performance I've ever seen on a stage, but Bryn, essaying the role in its entirety for the first time with Welsh National Opera in Cardiff, certainly was, in his own very different way. The result of spending ten weeks on this Meisterwerk with my City Lit students rubbed off in a review as long as a dissertation for The Arts Desk. I make no apology.

On the way back we made a return visit to stay over at the dreamlike house of one of our companions in Lacock. I've dealt with it before here, but that wasn't midsummer, so the gardens were at their peak this time. We went back to Lacock Abbey for the benefit of our fourth friend, and Deborah and I wandered in the fairly new botanical zone, not a patch on hers but at least boasting a gorgeous liriodendron or tulip tree in flower.


Idyllic lunch followed. The usual strawberries are of course in season


but have you tasted the little white ones? Deborah has a whole carpet of them in her garden, and she duly gathered the latest crop. They're much like the pink wild strawberries, but they do look rather different:


And now it's head down to get the script for my Building a Library on Delibes's effervescent Coppelia ready for Radio 3's CD Review. As I stepped in at the last minute, it's being recorded just before the broadcast on Saturday. I adore the work more than ever, but I've had to sacrifice other pleasures to get on with the task, including tonight's Royal Opera first night for the new Laurent Pelly production of Massenet's Manon. The hedonist with a heart is to be embodied by her glitzy alter ego, Anna Netrebko. Never mind, I've had my vision for the week, month, year with that Meistersinger.