Iffley on the Isis

'Isis' as in the Thames from its source in the Chilterns to Dorchester in Oxfordshire,  but more specifically in the environs of Oxford. I should have followed its route years ago from near Christ Church Meadows up to this prettiest of villages - swamped at weekends, I'm told - and one of our most remarkable churches. We approached it on this occasion from the new home of our friends (and newlyweds, though far from newly together) Juliette and Rory, Fellow of Magdalen College, where he currently teaches in the Department of Oriental Studies, though soon he'll be off to take up a new post at Durham University. Very tempting that you can be out in the country within five minutes. I'd especially wanted to see Iffley Meadows which, like Magdalen, are famed for their fritillary display at this time of year, but in neither were the snakeshead bells flourishing. In fact we didn't see a single one other than in someone's front garden, but at least I'd had my vision in Kew a few days earlier.

Iffley soon looms into view with the church beacon-like above the Isis

and you approach via a series of bridges

and islets with a series of locks, an attraction in itself, before walking up the hill to the Church of St Mary the Virgin. We ended up approaching it from above, with a good view downwards to the Rectory, the ground plan of which is 12th-13th century, though its (Tudor?) brick chimneystacks are the most impressive feature from the outside.

Primroses were flourishing in the shade as we approached from the north-east what Pevsner calls 'a magnificent little church, lavishly decorated with sculpture'.

The first door you see from this side is the north one, of three from the time of the church's building (1170-80, courtesy of the wealthy St Remy family), with scallop capitals - plain compared with what's to come, though treasurable enough in itself.

Then you round the corner and are struck by the fabulous west door pictured up top. The ensemble looked like this in the 1830s

and you'll see that the Perpendicular Gothic window has now been replaced by what is deemed 'a successful reconstruction of the original Romanesque oculus, carried out by the architect and antiquarian J. C. Buckler in 1856' (the church guide I bought is superb and well illustrated, though a bit pricey at a fiver).

Not quite sure about the application of limewash to this and the south door. It was applied in 1981, with a 'new sheltercoat by Sally Strachey Historic Conservation' added in 2017.

The gable was raised in 1845; the detail around the top window is in tune with the authentic work below.

As the guide neatly describes it, 'the ceremonial doorway at ground level is flanked by blind niches with moulded arches. This doorway has three continuous orders, one decorated with chevron, one with beakheads on a spiral roll moulding and the third with beakheads on a plain roll', best seen here

and, later when the sun was fully on them, the two orders of beakheads in closer range.

Around and above are medallions containing sculptured figures and beasts, starting in the above photo with Aquarius, Pisces and Virgo. Close up on Virgo with ?gryphon? below.

In the centre, a dove (for the Holy Ghost), followed by the Lion of St Mark.

Now let's head in through that door, now the main entrance of the church. leaving J, Juliette and Rory in the sunshine on a bench where one could spend many happy hours with a good book - on a quiet weekday, at any rate (and no-one else came or went for the whole time we were there).

Looking east, the whole is of unity and  a rich perspective which the photo doesn't quite capture, looking towards the sanctuary through two tower arches with Tournai marble octagonal shafts.

The first 'cell' as approached this way is the Baptistery. There's a fine unsculpted font, also in Tournai marble, and the rose window glass is fine, of 1856 by the firm of John Hardman & Co, but in tune with medieval precepts.

Much more remarkable, though, are the two contemporary artworks which fill the Romanesque windows here. In the north window, Iffley resident Roger Wagner's inspiration happily mixes Christ on the cross, a tree in May blossom and the river of life.

Especially felicitous is the flock of sheep by the river under the blossom. Very Samuel Palmerish in design if not in colouring.

Opposite it is the more famous design of John Piper, a very unusual treatment of the Nativity executed by David Walsey. At its foot there's a quotation from Christopher Smart's 'Rejoice in the Lamb' (set to music by Piper's good friend Benjamin Britten), and in this Tree of Life, the cockerel crows 'Christus natus est' ('Christ is born'), while the goose asks 'Quando? Quando? ('When? When?'), the rook replies 'In hac nocte' ('On this night'), the owl hoots 'Ubi? Ubi?' ('Where? Where?) and the lamb baas 'Bethlehem! Bethlehem!'. I'd seen a reproduction before but didn't know it was here.

I missed the Gothic angel high up in the Nave - a detail of this fine one in Oxford's oldest parish church, St Michael, which I visited the previous afternoon, will have to do -

but not the Coat of Arms of John de la Pole after his marriage in 1452-3 to Elizabeth, sister of Edward IV and Richard III (hence the Tudor rose).

Here's a view looking westwards from the tower

and beyond is the Romanesque sanctuary (now the chancel) with its fine boss at the centre of domical vault, depicting a winged serpent entwined and animal heads at each of the cardinal points, and pinecones pointing outwards towards the chevroned vaulting.

The sedilia seems to have been installed late in the 13th century, after the death of the anchoress Annora. Her cell may have been behind where the aumbry and piscina (beyond) are now.

And so out into the brighter light - though the church is far from dark on a sunny day - and to examination of the third glorious door, on the south (also limewashed).

Its fine state of preservation may be due to the fact that it stood within a porch which was removed in 1807. Here, as in the north door, there are three orders and a band of rosettes, but again the detail is fascinating. Here you might make out Samson and the lion, Ourobouros and a bird with a snake (in the slightly over-exposed middle band),

Curiouser are a merman,

a green cat (rather than a green man)

and a beast seemingly trapped behind a pillar.

And so we strolled back down to the Isis

and walked back along the other bank to lunch with Juliette and Rory, after which we went our separate ways - J in a cab to the station, I along the river this time Oxford bound, to catch the trusty Oxford Tube.

Soon the dome of the Radcliffe Camera and the tower of St Mary came in sight, with Merton Chapel's tower through the trees

and Magdalen's, the noblest, across Christ Church Meadows.

I passed Christ Church

where the previous evening we'd heard half of a superb Evensong with the choir still in residence (though university term time had ended, the cathedral school boys keep this one going). There I heard for the first time Kenneth Leighton's Mag and Nunc of 1959 (his 'Magdalen Service', no less); you hear where MacMillan, a slightly older contemporary of mine at Edinburgh University, got some of his juicier chord sequences from. The Leighton work is counterintuitive in that neither Gloria is a blaze, but they're all the better for that. And why only half a service? Because we were due at Worcester College at 7 for a dinner to celebrate the Irish presence in the Oxford Literary Festival, and I'd forgotten that Saturday evensongs are longer than the ones in the week.

So - returrning to the Sunday retreat - round towards Magdalen

and time for a quick spin around the Botanic Gardens, courtesy of my Kew card. They're slow to come to life in early spring, as I remember from previous occasions, but there are the daffs, of course, Merton tower in the distance,

some splendid miniature tulips on the Alpine rockery

and the last of the magnolias in profusion (I realise I haven't bored you with the magical glade in Kew Gardens yet).

In 24 hours we found ourselves in front of another fine church facade, this time that of the Duomo in Sarzana, quickly reached from Pisa Airport en route to Lerici and Tellaro on the Ligurian coast. But that chronicle is for another day.

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.