Summer bathing places

It has become a point of honour that I must immerse myself in sea or lake if either is available on a summer trip. Hardest was the North Sea off Crail, Fife, last year, in a haar that made the outside cold too. My pal Kari Dickson, who shared the dip and came out equally sharpish, claimed it was colder than the Firth of Forth on New Year's Day, so I do get a brownie point for that one. The five ventures this summer so far have been relatively simple, though I do bear battle scars from one. Despite that, it's rather boring how everyone now goes on about 'wild bathing', with encouragement from the media. There's nothing to it once you make up your mind.

Norfolk (1) I've already covered in a post on a very full day. Most pleasant of all were the daily plunges very close to the idyllic wooden house I had to myself (and an unaffectionate cat called Sebbe) by the water at Vattnäs in Sweden's lake district of Dalarna (pictured up top with the sauna, which I didn't use).  Here's my wonderful host Gun-Britt by the shore, from the window. The lupins, by the way, are beauties, but the locals are in two minds about them - they're invasive, nothing can grow around them. But so long as they can be controlled, I'd be happy to have hosts of them around me. You just need to cut off the heads once the flowering is over to stop the seeds spreading.

I felt immediately welcomed into the bosom of the Andersson family on the evening I arrived, when folk music was being played with a friend who knows all about these things, Lars Thalén, his wife Ingela on the zither, grandson Victor as second fiddle and Victor's girlfriend Anna on saxophone.

The young 'uns were involved in Anna Larsson and Göran Eliasson's latest project in the nearby barn-theatre, a uniformly well cast and superbly played Das Rheingold; for more on that, see the Arts Desk coverage.

Weather was changeable, but that made for many magical lights on the lake - like this one, when I woke up at 5am and snapped before going back to sleep,

and this one after the rains.

Two more, one from above when we went to pick up a fellow writer from his accommodation

and the other from close up again, near to sunset (around 11.30pm, I think).

A blog entry on excursions to the wonderful Anders Zorn Gallery and House in Mora and the rift valley of Styggforsen will have to wait. A full report on my fifth Pärnu Music Festival is, on the other hand, imminent.

How I love Estonia's summer capital; even knowing that the permanent residents have a nasty habit of supporting the country's newly emergent far right, with its links to Marine Le Pen, I feel comfortable among the summer visitors who know how to have fun without the excesses of British holidaymakers. Bathing here requires a considerable wade out in the shallow waters of the eight-mile sandy bay, but it's worth it - especially at midnight, encouraged by doyenne Lucy and several other companions. The disco on the beach throbbed and twinkled boisterously, but there was also a blood-red moon rising. None of this documented, of course, but I have the usual beach pics, most dramatic on the day when I went for a knee-deep paddle and the third of the day's storms threatened beyond the dunes.

It looked so impossibly calm out at sea, despite the cumulo-nimbus forms on the horizon

that I didn't make much haste heading back in the heat - until I saw a spectacular forked lightning display up the river. And the cloud formations over the wetlands looked almost cyclonic.

So I ran through the woodland and into the Villa Katariina where we'd stayed last year, for a drink and a snack, just as the heavens opened. It was over in 20 minutes, so I just had time to dash back to the hotel and on to the evening's concert. All was calmer by the time J arrived - four days of uninterrupted sunshine. I rely on him to offer proof that I did bathe,

eventually swimming out towards the masts of the annual yacht race around the Estonian coast, and then we just water-waded along the coastline

to a river mouth this time without a hint of threat, solitary tansy in the dunes a magnet for bees,

and the shoreline cattle doing their thing as luxury yachts incongruously sailed past them.

More of our bovine friends at the water's edge were to be seen by Lake Windermere nearly two weeks later.

I had a totally wonderful time in Ambleside and Kendal, giving two talks on Shostakovich as part of Lake District Summer Music's day of events which I'll outline anon. I only had the morning of my departure free, and could have gone up to the fells, but wanted the swim so headed for the lake out of town. The National Trust is responsible for fair meadows at Waterhead

and English Heritage looks after the remains of Galava Roman Fort. Not much to see here since most of the stones were carried off for building in Ambleside, but it's an attractive setting, especially with no-one else around.

Clearly bathing where the Romans would have done so wasn't ideal, so I found a rocky outcrop in nearby Borrans Park.

A warning about a rather nasty blue-green algae in the lake made me wary, but the damage actually came from a rock which left me with a black toe - amazing how quickly the bruising went down with Arnica cream. Didn't much like the oozy weeds twisting around my legs either, but otherwise managed to keep swimming towards the boats and back. It was a sticky but mostly rain-free weekend; the bad weather only set in when I was sitting on Windermere Station for the train to Oxenholme and thence back, uneventfully, to London. A week later, and there would have been trouble.

We were very much on the fringes of that while staying in North Norfolk with our friend Jill for the Southrepps Music Festival - the best yet, that I've experienced, at any rate, with unsurpassable performances from, among others, Ben Baker (best Bach Chaconne either I or David Parry have ever heard live), festival doyen Ben Johnson (peerless in Britten's Serenade, with the equally magnificent Martin Owen and Parry conducting a first-rate string group led by Ben), guitarist Sean Shibe creating his usual hold-your-breath magic, Jonathan Bloxham on a flying visit as cellist in breathtaking Mendelssohn Second Piano Trio - ah, that chorale moment! - and two young pianists, Martin James Bartlett and Daniel Lebhardt who both dazzled in two different concerts on the same day and who, I kid you not, cast an erratic Martha Argerich at the Proms last night in the shade, for fine tuning with colleagues, at any rate.

But there are also the swims, walks and crab/lobster lunches at the Overstrand shack to be accommodated. We managed two of the three on Saturday afternoon, but high winds and sea swells meant friend Cally and I didn't take the plunge then. You can see the white horses here,

and just over this cliff with the last of the Alexander there had been a big collapse in June.

Anyway, we got our bathe on Sunday lunchtime between Bach/Mendelssohn and an excellent lunch at the Vernon Arms back in Southrepps. Thus the beach

and the view from above on the walk back.

In about a month we return for our annual churches walk. The gifts of these wonderful retreats just keep on giving - but I hope, in terms of fundraising for the Norfolk Churches Trust, we give back a bit too.

Post-Pärnu listening

You'd think I might want a break from music after six glorious nights of it in Estonia. Not a whit; to return to the Pärnu Music Festival was to fall in love with a group of superlative musicians all over again, and to get to chat to some lovely folk I haven't spoken to there before. While I await the continuation of the party at the Prom tonight, I've been listening around the experience during a relatively lazy day at home.

A perfect morning palate-cleanser was the CD utterly delightful Japanese viola player Mari Adachi gave me, called Winterreise because at its heart are transcriptions of nine songs from Schubert's cycle. Some work better than others in their wordless context; better to hear the naturally introspective voice of the viola in such subtle hands, beautifully partnered by pianist Ryoko Fukasawa, than a singer who doesn't inscape properly. Best of all, for me, was to hear Mari soar in Schumann's Andante and Allegro, and there are some very original touches in the Schubert 'Arpeggione' Sonata. I won't forget her exquisite Pärnu performance, poised halfway between stage and organ, of Tõnu Kõrvits' Wanderer's Song.

This is also a good excuse to use a few more specimens from Kaupo Kikkas's comprehensive Pärnu photo-gallery - it won't be the last time - so here's the admirable Kõrvits last Wednesday, receiving the Lepo Sumera Prize awarded annually to a composer who has made an outstanding contribution to Estonian music.

Of all the orchestral performances, it's Lutosławski's Concerto for Orchestra as curtain-raiser (!!) to the second EFO concert which has stayed with me, so I put on one of Christoph von Dohnányi's better Cleveland recordings, razor-sharp. 

What a total masterpiece this is, in shape as well as colour and idea. Is it heretical to wish that Lutosławski had written more in the same vein - did finding his own voice entail a certain arcane quality I don't always 'get' or warm to? On which note, Paavo told me the other night that Boulez came backstage after a performance he (PJ) had conducted of the Concerto for Orchestra. He'd never heard it before, though he knew WL's later works very well.

Finally, a proper listen at last to the earlier, composition-wise, of the two Arvo Pärt discs Paavo brought out with the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra in the early 2000s, for which I wrote the liner notes. That battle towards the essence reached after a five-year silence was so hard-won. I now find most affecting the early children's cantata My Garden - almost a parody of Young Pioneering, certainly ambiguous; the end of the Second Symphony too. 

I'll be lucky to hear the Third tonight for the third time in five days (I was also lucky to be at the rehearsal where Pärt played an active part in the process, pictured above). It's a work I've known to some degree since Järvi senior's 1989 Prom performance, and I'll be listening, hopefully, with even greater awareness.

14/8 update: the Prom, which Pärt attended to the audience's huge delight and surprise (photos by Chris Christodoulou), was mostly a spectacular success. My Arts Desk colleague Boyd Tonkin is reviewing it, so we'll see what he thinks*. Paavo and the orchestra mastered the tricky acoustics of Albert's colosseum, from where I was sitting, at any rate, in a box with the Estonian Ambassador; textures had maximum clarity, phrases high definition, and the pianissimos were magical - PJ seemed to have taken heed of Barenboim's maxim that in this hall, you draw the listener in rather than push out. The Pärt symphony, now with a halo around the sound, moved me more than ever, and the Sibelius had more space than in Pärnu. 

The liability was the gifted but oddly narcissistic Khatia Buniatishvili. While Leonskaja found fresh depths in every line of the Grieg Concerto in Pärnu, making it sound like a new work, Buniatishvili was self-regardingly soft-loud, slow-fast. Murderously fast in the finale, which ceased to be a dance. I heard that she'd adopted a completely different tempo in the rehearsal. And it was disconcerting to see her descend from a high trill with the right hand and flick her hair out of her eyes with the left.

Our genius clarinettist Matt Hunt's phrasing in the Sumera encore, playing with the space but always joining the notes with supreme musicianship, was everything Buniatishvili's insane encore - Debussy's Clair de Lune - was not. Heck, the moon could have done an entire revolution around the earth in the time that took.

*Second update: he loved it, and writes so eloquently. 

Leonskaja embraces the Pärnu spirit

Shouldn't pre-empt too much the Pärnu Music Festival piece I owe The Arts Desk for the fourth successive year, this time ahead of the Estonian Festival Orchestra's Prom on Monday (for which, I'm proud to say, I played my campaigning part). UPDATE (13/8) - here it is. But I have to recapture the amazement of turning up at the first concert of the week, less than an hour off the coach from Riga, to be knocked sideways by the opening work on the programme. From the website, we knew to expect the excellent Eldbjørg Hemsing in Massenet's Meditation from Thaïs and Saint-Saëns's Introdcution and Rondo Capriccioso, as well as the Järvi Academy Sinfonietta in Musica Profana by Lepo Sumera, the Estonian composer whose symphonies knocked me for six in the 2016 and 2017 Estonian Music Days.

The rest, however, had been put together over the past week. Elisabeth Leonskaja, my goddess among pianists, here to play the Grieg Piano Concerto with the Estonian Festival Orchestra - which she did, with unique deep musicianship, last night - decided she wanted to get involved with the players in chamber music. Hence Beethoven's early Quintet for piano and winds, also like you never heard it before nor will again. Two of my other favourite players in the world, EFO regular clarinettist Matthew Hunt and horn master Alec Frank-Gemmill, were there alongside her, to my amazement - Matt (pictured with Leonskaja above - all photos by the superlative Kaupo Kikkas) knows her well and they sea-bathed together at 8am on several mornings -

plus two other superb wind players not known to me, José Luis Garcia Vegara (whose playing in La Valse last night was out of this world) and bassoonist Jesús Villa Ordóñez (much Hunt humour about 'playing with Jesus').

'Lisa' wanted broad, floated playing, taxing the winds to the very extremes of their breath control, but she was right to ask for it. As for how good it was, don't ask me but rather Triin Ruubel, co-leader of the EFO but unable to travel with them this year because of her advanced pregnancy. I met her on my way into the hall here yesterday to witness Arvo Pärt listening to a rehearsal of his Third Symphony - it's that kind of place - and she said she had to leave the concert after the Quintet because she had 'never heard a more perfect performance in my life'.

The following evening, Triin contributed to the unearthliness of a real underrated near-masterpiece, Eduard Oja's Piano Quintet, which Leonskaja had also undertaken to learn and more or less conducted from the piano: stunning, unforgettable. That's the two of them above with Triin's fellow violinist Adela-Maria Bratu. But that, and the rest of this amazing week, must wait until later coverage... Next, however, was this, from yesterday's rehearsal of Pärt's Third Symphony. Photo by Karima Morooka Elsamny.

To Kihnu island

Whenever you mention Kihnu to any Estonians, they will reply with words to the effect that 'this is a very special place'. As has been acknowledged by UNESCO, which has given it exceptional status not because it is a very beautiful island - there are many such others in the Baltic archipelago - but in order to safeguard its cultural heritage. We'll see what that means anon, but suffice it to say that the hard work in this respect has been done by Mare Mätas, our guide for the day, who has run the Kihnu Cultural Space Foundation at UNESCO's instigation since 2004. Here she is at her jolliest with her some of her motley charges on their keenly-anticipated excursion from the Pärnu Music Festival, photo courtesy (as several of the best ones here are, and I'll credit them duly with his initials) of my Dutch colleague Thiemo Wind.

Born on the island, Mare studied law and practised it for 10 years in Tallinn. But like so many other Kihnu men and women, she remained tied to the island and decided to devote her life instead to preserving the unique traditions. This strategic place has seen so many changes of occupancy  - four in 40 years during the 16th century, namely Denmark, Poland, Russia and Poland again, then Sweden, then many hardships in the 20th century where unfavourable weather conditions saved the Kihnu people from deportation to Siberia in 1949 like so many Estonians. Yet the inhabitants have managed to keep a balance between past and present. Folk traditions and handicrafts have inevitably become a tourist attraction, and there were rather more visitors in high season than I suppose I had expected, but the majority are Estonians, and all seemed to observe the rules of responsible tourism.

We took a private boat from a mainland jetty - very choppy with some enormous ups and downs, but bearable out on the sea-sprayed deck where I held on on for dear life and got a commendation of good seamanship from hardy Norwegian Stein Eide (TW). If you can enlarge, you'll see a spider on my left sleeve which wouldn't leave me alone - not that I minded.

The harbour has views across to what looks a bit like a Pacific atoll, but with pine rather than palm trees on it. Further and closer sights in addition to the top image follow.

Mare met us and we all piled into a truck which drove us through pinewoods

and around the fields with grazing cattle in the north of the island (TW)

until we came to a stop at a group of houses with a wooden theatre and extraordinary naive artworks on the fence. Extraordinary to see van Rompuy with the Eurostars around him: has a Brit ever painted him? He's visible here between Mare and our splendid co-ordinator and friend, Estonian cultural representative in London Kersti Kirs, with Kiwi Kyle Macdonald on the left.

Several of Estonia's leading actors were here preparing for an evening extravaganza of drama, singing and dancing. I'm told they all take off to perform open air theatre around the country during the summer months, just as the musicians are all at festivals with their friends. I envied them their quarters here, with fish hanging outside the window.

The women of Kihnu tend to drive motorbikes, sometimes unlicensed: here Mare is doing a demo with Jasper Parrott in the sidecar and Lucy Maxwell-Stewart joining in.

Mare took us into the art studio to show us more naive work, much of it by islanders. This is a valuable document of women sitting in around a coffin before a funeral.

Back in the truck (TW),

we headed to the lighthouse on the southern Pitkänä peninsula. 'It was brought here in 1864 from England,' declares an Estonian entry on line, 'dismounted, and was reassembled on site. It is one of four cast iron lighthouses that remain standing on our shores.'

A friendly Pole who came here on holiday fell in love with the place and now lives here in a stone hut at the foot of the tower to tend the lighthouse. Here he is with Kersti and Jasper at the top of the tower

with its views out to the spit,

westwards to swans bobbing on the sea

and northwards, with swallows soaring and diving and screaming below us.

Appealing lights reflecting coloured glass

and fading paintwork

add to the usual magic of a lighthouse, and at the foot of the staircase the usual merchandise - dried fish and knitwear - was for sale,

Now we drove back for the centrepiece in the museum opposite the church, which was built in 1784 as a Lutheran place of worship but now has a small Orthodox onion dome atop the spire at the command of Nicholas I.

In 1846-7 most Kihnu inhabitants converted to Russian Orthodoxy. Things seemed to have stayed that way. Hence the handsome Estonian Orthodox journals

and the iconostasis. Kyle and I seem to be mirroring each other in our curiosity (TW).

We were summoned to the museum for songs and dances. It's brightly decorated with more naive and children's art

including an upper frieze of seals. Of course I love this rainbow specimen.

Had thought we were going to get a special show of traditional culture, but we packed in happily with Estonian and Swedish fellow-visitors. And the ladies really enjoy what they do, put all their heart and soul into it, which is hardly the same as national dances put on dutifully for endless tour parties. This is the core of Mare's guardianship, and of course she joined in the dancing.

One distinguishing feature of the costume is the banding of the dresses, with brighter or darker colours according to circumstances. Mare's dress had quite a bit of black in it, since she was still officially in mourning for the recent death of her grandmother. But as that lady died at the respectable age of 97, Mare thought she could change it quite soon.

The colourful cotton fabrics for the aprons, which are donned by married ladies (the plain uncovered dress is for virgins), used to come from Russia, but now they've found a good source in America. All this heritage is passed on in the Kihnu school curriculum, which includes learning 60 folksongs by heart. One simple wedding song with an infinite number of verses - of course we didn't grasp the meaning - is supposed to date back 2000 years (though I'm not sure how they know).

This sweet girl was rather shy and serious looking for the most part, but she began to smile when she played a solo waltz on her accordion. Aged 10, she's a junior champion in Estonia and has won all sorts of prizes.

The last number was what sounded like a rather horrid ballad about a rebellious wife being punished. The Estonian audience members in the room all knew the refrain and joined in. Anyway, these songs and dances are part of the wedding ritual which still survives here. I was reminded very much of Stravinsky's Les noces (Svadebka). The songs and rituals are conducted over three days in the bride's home, where there about two to three hundred guests, and the groom's, where there are on average 200. Gifts are distributed from a dowry chest and the bride's girlfriends  help her with the knitting, needlework and making of special belts.

After the presentation, we toured the museum, where several of the elders continued their knitting (second photo TW)

Layout was simple and strong, with a special section devoted to Kihnu-born writer and historian Theodor Saar (1906-84). The cabinets include his notation of folksongs

and of runes, the results of research in which he published in a well-respected book (only available in Estonian, unfortunately).

These brooch designs are very handsome.

In the fabric room, Kersti - who was born on a bigger island, Saaremaa, but had never visited Kihnu before - met up with a friend she hadn't seen since college days, when they studied to become primary school teachers. This lady returned to her native island to do just that, and is very content.

This custom of going out in the big wide world to get an education and maybe practise a career for some years before returning reminds me very much of the Icelanders. Except, of course, that Kihnu is a very small place with, at the moment, about 33 children who go off to Pärnu  to study in the secondary schools at the age of 15 or 16. Division of labour between the sexes is that the men still go to sea from April to October while the women work on the land. The women do more dancing because the men are embarrassed to join in until after dark when they've had a drink or two.

We went on to a simple lunch in pleasant surroundings

and then whiled away a pleasant couple of hours down by the harbour before the time to get the ferry back. Jasper, Stein and I swam in very warm water, others (guess who in this case?) took their rest beneath the handful of nearby shrubs.

Clouds on the horizon suggested a change of weather imminent - and indeed, it rained most of the last full day back in Pärnu. So we were lucky to have had our vision under such perfect conditions. A final glimpse of the island from the ferry which took us back to the mainland, then, with Sir Jasper (left) dozing in the sun.