It is now

All over, the Proms, that is. Except for Radio 3 repeat broadcasts and iPlayer remains, which give you three days to hear Noseda's shatteringly beautiful, fleet-footed Mozart 40th and the singular Dorothea Roschmann in Robin Holloway's Schumann/Mary Stuart treatment (not going to give its full name here). Above are soprano, composer and conductor in the nearest I got to a big farewell. Chris Christodoulou took the picture, and I'm so pleased he came up with a gallery of the season's wackiest conductor shots for The Arts Desk. No-one catches the moment better than this. And the piece is cross-referenced to list all our reviews of the top Proms.

Highlights out of the 16 I attended? Well, there were good things even in the most familiar places. Number One remains the Dausgaard Danish Prom with the Langgaard Music of the Spheres centrepiece. I enjoyed Ashley Wass in the Foulds Dynamic Triptych, and his conductor Donald Runnicles' ineffable way with the slow movement of a curious Elgar One; Julia Fischer, peerless in the Shostakovich First Violin Concerto with Jurowski and the LPO; the revelation of Stravinsky's Threni under Atherton; bits of the Sondheim evening, though not the whole; the moving-to-tears semi-staged Hansel and Gretel under Ticciati; and all of last Monday night, from Deneve and Lewis to Spinosi, Jaroussky and Lemieux (that late nighter gets my special rosette for most unexpected gem of the season, maybe the entire year, let's see). Only saw the Meistersinger on the box, owing to a Saturday of afternoon parties, but of course I'd been there in Cardiff and Bryn should be showered with awards for performance of the year, whatever else happens between now and Christmas.


Heard odds and sods of the Last Night on the car radio driving back to King's Lynn from Castle Acre, our final destination after what turned out to be 18 and a half miles and 14 churches on our annual walk. Full report with pics to follow. The Onegin Polonaise didn't sound good enough for Belohlavek, and it turned out to be from the Ulster Orchestra in Belfast. There was a soporific guitar piece, a very classy Thais Meditation solo from the leader of the BBC Philharmonic, and Dame Kiri sounding sluggish but still rather youthful singing 'O mio babbino caro' in the park. We only caught the Chabrier Marche Joyeuse from the second half as the car pulled in to old Lynn, but how I love that piece (especially in Ansermet's recording).

And the Prommers - don't moan about them, please. They raised what now stands at an unfinalised total of £90,400 for musical charities - the Musicians' Benevolent Fund, the CLIC Sargent charity which helps to provide music therapy for children with cancer and the Otakar Kraus Music Trust which does the same for children with special needs and their families. Do you know, some joyless bastard on the Radio 3 messageboards complained about the 'self satisfied' chant the Arena crew gave out every night to keep the audience informed. And was duly rebuked by a regular telling him that it was a legal requirement by the hall and the BBC. Bravo, anyway.

Talking of legal requirements, blogger Intermezzo seems to have received an apology from the Royal Opera over its litigious objections to her using production shots. I came up against the same barrier last year, when I wanted pics of Lulu, only to be told they didn't allow bloggers to use the press images. But they thought they might make an exception if I sent them the copy. I did; they never responded. Later I used a Rosenkavalier image and was told by the press office to remove it immediately. It all seems so foolish as this is free publicity, surely; and no other arts institution I've encountered has ever raised the slightest objection. Mind you, I can see there's a grey area about curtain-call photos, and anyway I find them deeply boring. Unless, of course, they're taken by the consummate Mr. Christodoulou.

The show's not over...

etc. And even then, I've still one more Prom to go tonight. Would have been quite happy, though, to take my leave with the quite unexpected fireworks of Monday's late-nighter featuring the ravishing-toned Philippe Jaroussky and irrepressible true contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux (pictured above for the Proms by Chris Christodoulou, who also took the below shots and whose copyright they all are. We hope he'll be featuring in an Arts Desk Proms photo retrospective on Saturday).

You can read what I thought about it here. And it seems like an appropriate place to thank the Arts Desk for pushing me in unpredictable directions, since a baroque late-nighter of Vivaldi, Telemann, Handel and Porpora isn't something I'd have chosen to go to myself. Especially after a Prom I truly did want to hear, the RSNO concert of Berlioz, Beethoven, MacMillan and Respighi, because I knew what to expect from the wonderful Stephan Deneve. I stayed on to hear fiery Corsican Jean-Christophe Spinosi and his Ensemble Matheus only because colleague Alexandra had to call off due to the tube strike. And like most, though not all, of the audience, I found Spinosi's febrile intensity irresistible, especially in the final stamping, hollering tziganery of the Corelli Concerto for recorder and flute. Here he is sparring - as I gather he does to the point of fisticuffs - with his players


and with his delightful soloists after an anything-you-can-do adaptation of a Vivaldi aria for rival divo/a/s. One BBC Messageboard contributor even thought that Jaroussky and Lemieux were giving us a Kenneth and Hattie after all that refinement and passion.


Anyway, the Proms are nearly over for the year but the Arts Desk has barely begun. That I hope nourishing source of thought and feeling, which has given me free rein to dip into theatre, ballet, cinema and TV as well as my familiar stamping grounds, celebrates its first birthday today. I'm a little younger than that in TAD terms, but I feel old in contributions. Here's to hoping it continues to take off and finally earn us a crust or two as well as the sheer, sometimes indulgent pleasure of culture-vulturing at length.


Oh - and happy Rosh Hashanah, too!

Careful the things you do...

...children will see and learn. Yes, I know, Sondheim gets preachy here, and preachier still in the climactic 'No-one is alone' as Into the Woods goes all gooey, though I swallow even the latter from direct performers like Jenna Russell in Regent's Park or Jacqueline Dankworth on the London cast recording, which I finally bought off Amazon in an attempt to relive two happy performances. It was that production's director Richard Jones, by the way, who told me in an interview that he parted company from Sondheim in the last stages - 'because it's just not true that "no-one is alone" ').

But it's a sound enough message when linked in - as everything in that uniquely planned, symmetrical score is - with an earlier passage (the Witch's 'Children won't listen'). And it seems to be the message of an almost unequivocally dark masterpiece, Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, which we finally saw at the weekend. The setting is rural Germany on the eve of the First World War. The first thing to say is that subject and cinematography are one: the dazzling, digitally-enhanced whites of summer party and harvesting scenes, the near-black interiors. Good may flourish in the dark, when for instance the teacher-hero plays the harmonium by gaslight to soothe the distress of his just-dismissed governess girlfriend, and white can be bad, like the painted door behind which the pastor punishes his dysfunctional children.


It's a bit like Bergman, but with less humanity (only the honest narrator and his slightly freaky-weird love fumble towards honest living, though you feel the powerless women of the various households want to help). Indeed, the scene where the doctor tells the midwife he's been sleeping with of his disgust for her smacks of the hapless uncle and his wife in Fanny and Alexander. But there you get to understand why Carl's become the way he has. The parents in Haneke's world are just symbols, it seems, of a decadent old-world, sado-masochistic discipline and carefully concealed abuse that the anarch-children serve to mimic or to challenge. For the whole drama to remain shrouded in mystery, it depends on the victimised children not to identify their attackers, and maybe I found that a bit hard to buy.

Yet the atmosphere of unease is compulsively suggested from the start, and there's something in common with James's The Turn of the Screw, about which the wisest comment I read was that the Governess wants the children to be too good, and the 'ghosts' want them to be too bad. And the performances in The White Ribbon, from the kids especially, are haunting and real. There's a clip on YouTube of the unforgettable scene in which the doctor's young son questions his sister about death.



Taken in the round, it's a masterpiece, and I can understand why Abbado was so impressed that he wanted Haneke to direct a new production of Berg's Wozzeck.

The debate about how much children will listen, see and learn has been a bit stoked up by sundry productions of Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel. Laurent Pelly's reasonably light-of-touch Glyndebourne take on consumerist wastefulness came to the Proms last night, all its messages intact in the semi-staging and all involved glistening and shining under the silky baton of Robin Ticciati.


Needless to say Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke's bald, hairy-bellied fright of a Witch (pictured above with the definitive Hansel of Alice Coote by Chris Christodoulou for the Proms) set some chins wagging, and one old bloke accosted us at the end to tell us he'd walked out in disgust. But children can take it. And of course we all oohed and aahed at the semi-staging's solution to the vast supermarket-sweep 'house' of the original production: a mini Albert Hall. But of course! Yet who'd have thought it - and I wonder what Sir Henry would have made of Rosina Leckermaul sticking her pink wig on his bust. Had a good laugh like the rest of us, I hope.

Wanted: home help for Nuremberg cobbler

It's up on YouTube, and the BBC put it there: the comic highlight of last week's Sondheim Prom. To get the gag, and the headline, you'll have to hang around for the last of the four or so minutes, when the most famous living Welshman other than Tom Jones sashays along with the rest and even does a little skip (especially nice choreography there). The others are Simon Russell Beale, Daniel Evans and the delicious Julian Ovenden. Best go full-width by clicking on the screen once you've set it going and flipping over to the site.

I put this and the following at the bottom of the Arts Desk review, but since I only discovered them yesterday, and many Proms have passed under the bridge since the piece went up, they might have gone unnoticed, so here's an extra shrine for them.



Seeing Dame Judi in close-up highlights what an unflashy star she is, already preparing to launch straight into heartbreak from the minute she steps on to the platform to receive the roars of the crowd (for some reason the entry seems to have been shorn since I last looked). And I repeat what I think we discussed earlier: not having much of a singing voice doesn't matter if you have the right sense of musical timing. Have you ever heard 'the one that I wanted' done with greater yearning? Takes me back to her treasured Sally Bowles in Cabaret - a performance I'm too young to have seen on stage, but delighted to have it captured for posterity on the original London cast recording. Here she is back in 1968.


It's certainly a bit irritating to be told that she and our Stately Homos Fry and Beale are National Treasures, and to hear how the home counties roar at anything they do, but there's a good reason for it.

Late night Lamentations

In between the Proms' Mahler marathons - both of which I gave a miss, as you can only really hear the Third, Fourth and Fifth Symphonies live once a year, and I like to think I'm choosing carefully - came a late night special of great significance. One of Stravinsky's most ambitious endgames, the serial Threni setting some of the lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah (in Latin) had never been performed at the Proms before, and neither I nor my illustrious one-time unofficial animateur Dr Roger Savage had ever heard the word made flesh, as it were.

It was time to do them justice, too. Stravinsky biographer Stephen Walsh gives a lively if not topographically entirely correct account of the 1958 premiere in Venice's fabulous Scuola Grande di San Rocco, the Tintoretto masterwork which I first had almost to myself on a bracing cold January day some years ago. The 76-year-old Stravinsky conducted the first performance, by all accounts not very well, beneath the moving-to-tears Crucifixion in the upper Sala dell'Albergo.


Writes Walsh: 'An audience of five or six hundred - mainly press, the international set, local grandees, and a handful of first-nighters able and willing to pay twenty dollars for a seat - crammed into the long rectagular salon, deadening the acoustics, and exposing still more the spareness and severity of Stravinsky's Jeremiad'.

Well, the acoustics of the Albert Hall certainly aren't deadening, and my stylish colleague Igor Toronyi-Lalic probably has a point in his Arts Desk review when he writes that 'one should feel as if one is choking on the relentless suffering. In the Royal Albert Hall such feelings couldn't reach us...The many close-knit serial canons needed to feel like boa constrictors winding themselves around your chest inexorably, squeezing the life out of your lungs.'


Superb prose, that, but Igor may have been sitting further back than I was. From my coign of vantage, it wasn't suffocating but it did have a spellbinding impact. And when John Tomlinson opened his mouth, you heard serial lines as great lyrical phrase-making. Years of playing Musorgsky's Boris had not been wasted, as Roger pointed out, though it does amaze me that the leading Wotan of the late 1980s and early 1990s is ready to humble himself and join the line. What a great patriarch artist he still is. Chris Christodoulou wasn't snapping at the late night prom, but here's a recent shot by Robert Workman. Just a little in common with the Kizhi ikon of Jeremiah up top?


Threni proceeds to give just a glimmer of grace. As Igor puts it, the 'low persistent industrial plant-like rumble of the four male voices' - admirable baritone-turned tenor Alan Oke on top - yields to 'light at the end of the Threni tunnel...of a distinctly weak, bled sort'. So moving, the bare unison woodwind and the discreet choral contribution. David Atherton, conducting 'his' London Sinfonietta and BBC Singers, couldn't have made a better case for this, nor for the airy games of Stravinsky's choral(e) variations on Bach's 'Von himmel hoch'. They sounded dangerously like the frilly Lully arrangement of Strauss's Bourgeois Gentilhomme courante, composed over 40 years earlier, though I doubt if Strauss would have given just the odd puzzling note or line to his players. I warmed to it more than to Daniel Hyde's delivery of the original Canonic Variations on the Albert Hall organ, which didn't quite flow and seemed to embrace the longest rallentando I've ever heard in the fourth variation.

Still, these late-night proms, as I've said before, really do have a special atmosphere, whether the hall is full (Pires in Chopin Nocturnes) or half-empty (the Scottish Chamber Orchestra's wind serenades). If you go to the previous concert, as I remember doing with Andris Nelsons and the CBSO's Firebird before JEG's Bach Motets, you really do feel as if you're at the best music festival in the world.

Two for Mahler

With thanks to 'Schopenhauerian' on the BBC Message Boards, who posted the link, and acknowledgment to Gavin Plumley over at Entartete Musik, who I belatedly recalled put up the same YouTube song some time back and who's another almost as much in love with Sondheim as he is with Mahler, let's hear it for Lainey and yet another variation on her immortal toast from Sondheim's Company. 'Two for Mahler' is acknowledgement that at the end of this post you can hear another interpretation proposing 'one for Mahler', Sondheim's bottoms-up to another anniversary boy. In her terrific one-woman show, the divine Stritch told us that at the time of the Company premiere, she thought 'a piece of Mahler's' might be a slice of cake you went round to Mahler's Broadway deli to consume after 'a matinee, a Pinter play'.

This, anyway, in keen anticipation of tonight's Proms birthday tribute including Bryn Terfel, Maria Friedman and Dame Judi's immortal rendition of 'Send in the Clowns'. When I saw her play Desiree in A Little Night Music at the National, it struck me how you don't really need a great singing voice for this - Glynis Johns didn't have one either - but you do need an impeccable sense of musical timing and/or freedom (which Sian Philips as the matriarch didn't seem to have). Would so love to have seen Angela Lansbury on Broadway - again, the nuancing seemed wonderful from what I've heard. Do listen to this remarkable octogenarian talking to Mark Coles on the BBC World Service's Strand programme. Now that she's left the run, who's going to take her part but - Elaine Stritch. Bernadette Peters will now play the Zeta Jones role. Worth a trip? Perhaps, if only I didn't find Sondheim's second act a let-down after the bewitching Bergman original.

Talking of veterans, if only they'd bring in Cleo Laine tonight to sing 'I'm Still Here'. Her performance of it on the vintage 'Cleo sings Sondheim' CD, one of our most played, is up there with Elaine's. One Dame who wouldn't be singing, but might do a nice line in presentation, is the recently-maligned Julie Andrews. What a knockout performer she was, though, right up to the catastrophe. If you doubt it, watch '(Not) Getting Married Today' from the Sondheim anthology Putting it Together. The picture quality ain't great, to put it mildly, but the sound is just fine.



In the meantime, let's end with another consummate performer giving a different take on 'The Ladies who Lunch', Carol Burnett. Anyone see the 'spiders' episode of the Larry Sanders Show in which she tells her host she saw his balls? Quite apart from that, I reckon it was the funniest episode ever. Anyway, that's not on YouTube, I guess for copyright reasons. Here's Carol. I need a bit of cheering up* anyway after the farrago of last night's Zandonai car crash at Opera Holland Park.



Sunday press: you can read the Arts Desk review of last night's semi-spectacular here. Plus another of Chris Christodoulou's photos since I can. No need, I guess, to signal the stars?


* Did I say cheering up? Watched it through to the end and it's wrist-slitting time...

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.

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.