Talkabout: Strauss, Prokofiev, Stravinsky

Put a week's silence here down to busy talk scheduling - crazy, in fact, but the subjects were desert island pieces (original 1912 design for the domain of Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Ariadne above by Ernst Stern), so I wanted to do them all. Sunday was the first mad day. Having to be at Glyndebourne for a 10.30am talk, with a sound test well in advance, meant it was worth staying over on Saturday night to avoid a very early start from London. I was also able to fit in an interview the previous lunchtime with Katharina Thoma, director of the Ariadne auf Naxos which has just opened, and Kate Lindsey, the mezzo singing the Composer. Delightful company, as you can glean from the way-too-long but I hope interesting Arts Desk Q&A. I get to see the show when I talk again at Glyndebourne on 2 June.

Thoma took her central production idea from the fact that Glyndebourne was used as a wartime home for evacuee children. It looks idyllic as they run gay through green meadows, but no doubt the trauma always lurked.

Though it seems from another archive photo that there was no lake in the 1940s, and of course no new opera house, otherwise not a great deal has changed. Of course a smooth lawn now takes the place of the meadow, but the goalposts suggested that fun and games were still to be had before the season opened last Saturday.

The relatively new garden regime takes time to have its full effect: there aren't nearly as many varieties of exotic tulips as there used to be, but enough to make a pre-season May visit special.

The tree peony in the formal garden used to be in full spate on study days, but this year's slow progress means it's only budding, ready to burst.

Notoriously variable in its featured artists - remember the dreadful 'portraits' by Adam 'Son of Harry' Birtwistle? - Glyndebourne has made an odd choice this year. You'll be taken aback by Sean Henry's standing or sitting lifesize figures in polychrome/bronze dotted about the place (Bryn as Wanderer is the one I didn't see), and generally I don't mind them, but I'm not at all sure about 'Catafalque', the recumbent man out on the lawn. He certainly changes perspectives like this one from the Ebert Room where the talks take place.

So I took the audience on a whistlestop tour of Strauss and Hofmannsthal's three Molière projects, starting with Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme as Der Bürger als Edelmann in 1912. On the downloadable Glyndebourne podcast the plot's the thing, shorn of the Sunday talk's background complexities. It's very likeably presented by Margaret (aka Peggy) Reynolds and has been well edited by the delightful Mair Bosworth. I talk on it alongside an expert on commedia dell'arte and that great gentleman Michael Kennedy, whose Master Musicians book led my teenage self deeper into Strauss.

On Sunday, playing Pavarotti as the Rosenkavalier tenor singing 'Di rigori armato il seno' seemed like a good place to start alongside the same text delivered by an Italian Singer(ess, so it's armata) in Lully/Molière's Ballet des Nations. Hopping between Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Version 1 and the more familiar 1916 all-operatic Ariadne meant some fun in comparing Zerbinetta's whole-tone-higher, longer original crazy coloratura aria with the one we usually get.

There wasn't time to feature the cod-Turkish ceremony of Hofmannsthal's 1917 Bürger-minus-Ariadne (I'll never forget the late Peter Allen's take on it in his Edinburgh University staging of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme for Les Escogriffes, which involved a swimming pool and actors in Kermit and Fozzy Bear masks: genius, it seemed at the time). But the first musical programme which Glyndebourne dramaturg Cori Ellison had devised, under the aegis of the lovely people in the Education Department, made amends with the Madrigal alongside two numbers from the 1912 incidental music - Monsieur Jourdain's little doggerel song, which I'd played in sequence with the original composer's aria 'Du, Venus' Sohn', and the pretty neoclassical duet for shepherd and shepherdess - as well as, from the opera, Harlequin's serenade and, from the Prologue, the Composer's ode to music.

As always with the young singers involved, you think, if the covers are this good, can the artists they're covering be better? That was true of all three singers, accompanied by repetiteur Helen Collyer: soprano Lucy Hall, mezzo Carla Dirlikov (pictured above by John Myers) - who pulled out all the stops for her big number, acting and all - and a fine young baritone, Daniel Shelvey.

I'd have loved to stay and hear Hall and Collyer in two Zemlinsky songs with Hofmannsthal texts, as well as Margaret/Peggy's 'mythical sisters' talks - the afternoon was devoted to the other new production, Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie - but a taxi was waiting at 11.55 to whisk me to Lewes station and the train back to London for a 3pm event.

This one was unmissable: Denis Kozhukhin playing all three of Prokofiev's titanic so-called 'War' Sonatas (6-8, composed between 1938 and 1944). Because the feat required a bigger rest-up time during the interval between the Seventh and Eighth Sonatas, the Southbank's The Rest is Noise team, having liked what they heard of my Paris 1910-1930 taster, enlisted me to talk for about 15 minutes while Denis prepared for the final hurdle. Classical Music Programme Manager Ben Larpent took the following photos; obviously the pianist could only be snapped after his performances.

Kozhukhin's interpretations were much as I'd found them when I reviewed his Onyx CD for the BBC Music Magazine's May issue: fabulously nuanced and with an uncanny skill in bringing out the tone-colours of different simultaneous lines. For me there was too much sustaining pedal in developments - not at all Prokofiev the pianist's style - and something reined in about the outer movements of the Sixth and Seventh Sonatas, though the latter's central Andante caloroso moved me to tears.

Just as well, perhaps, because my talk started - with credit to friend and so-collegial fellow Prokofievian Daniel Jaffé, whose singing-teacher then-wife Frith spotted the correspondence - with its obvious-when-you-hear-it resemblance to Schumann's 'Wehmut' from the Op. 39 Liederkreis. And of course this is one of those coded references to suffering which we used to think were exclusive to Shostakovich. Eichendorff's text begins 'I can sometimes sing/As if I were happy,/But secretly tears well up/Which free my heart', and ends 'no one can truly feel the anguish of my song's deep sorrow'. I don't need to add any more about the context except to repeat what I've written elsewhere, that according to his older son Sviatoslav, Prokofiev never talked about the terrible years 1936 and '37 to anyone, at least in the children's hearing.

Anyway, having a captive audience in the middle of a concert opened me up to a taste of my own reviewing medicine, so it was a relief to find that Colin Clarke on MusicWeb's Seen and Heard International approved. Quite a few enthusiastic listeners were unusually willing to come up and chat at the end of the concert, perhaps because they could see where I was sitting. And I got to meet the ever so nice Roger Vignoles, who said he'd heard Schumann when Kozhukhin played the movement, but couldn't place what exactly until I did it for him.

The glory, of course, was the pianist's: the end crowned the mighty work with the best of the three performances, as on the disc, of the Eighth, with its huge tarantella-cum-march finale majestically tying up the pain with the biting humour. Here's Kozhukhin introducing the sonatas.

My desert island disc of that, by the way, is the incomparable Sviatoslav Richter's, but this interpretation was very fine indeed. And Kozhukhin's way of terracing the sound came across beautifully in the only possible encore - Bach, but arranged by Ziloti (the B minor Prelude). There's certainly no harm in featuring the pianist who gave the premiere of the Eighth Sonata, Emil Gilels, in this ineffable lowering of temperatures.

Actually Kozhukhin's own performance of this gem, also to be heard but not seen on YouTube, is just as magical in its way.

With only a couple of days in London - more talking, this time in the Gloriana class - I flew up to Glasgow on Wednesday afternoon and back on Thursday night, since I had to be off to my beloved Göttingen and its Handel Festival the following morning. This way I didn't get to stay for the concert in which Matthias Pintscher conducted the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which I was discussing earlier in the evening; another quick whizz after another talk was again the order of the day. But I did get to see Scottish Opera's new G&S, The Pirates of Penzance, to which I took godson Alexander on Wednesday night and which I reviewed for The Arts Desk. Here's the consummate Richard Suart's Major-General pirated, picture for Scottish Opera by KK Dundas.

In short, although the cast and orchestra were mostly excellent, the Savoy wit and wisdom drowned in a stream of gags by a director who didn't trust his material. I enjoyed rather more my haggis and chips sitting in warm sun on Sauciehall Street before the show. Ah well; Alexander got the point that the text is dazzlingly witty - who but Gilbert would rhyme 'Aristophanes' with 'Zoffanies'? - and the music stronger, quite often, than the Italian opera it spoofs.

Thursday was mostly spent indoors working on the Glyndebourne interview transcription and brushing up the material for the talk. But I did have an hour off walking from the ever-welcome aBode Hotel in Bath Street to City Halls. En route I had a plate of oysters fried in polenta

sitting outside at Glasgow's oldest established restaurant, Rogano, inspired design-wise by the art deco of the Queen Mary back in 1935.

The Duke of Wellington outside the Gallery of Modern Art, traditional target for Glaswegian malarkey, is no longer traffic-coned as he was in February but sports a rather sinister face mask (representing what I couldn't make out).

I took in some rather remarkable Victorian/Edwardian architecture around the City Halls in Candleriggs, all nicely tarted up for this fashionable zone. Again, I'd love to know more about what I was seeing, though I've just identified the eccentric turret in the middle as part of a former warehouse in Brunswick Street 'designed in the baronial style by architect RW Billings in 1854 for J and W Campbell'. The City Chambers are seen in the centre of the bottom picture.

Then I ensconced myself in a dressing room backstage at the City Halls to work, courtesy of Douglas Templeton and Andrew Trinick,

popping out for Pintscher's rehearsal of The Rite. Such efficient use of the time available, such professional dovetailing, such clarity and character; the firm basis would have allowed for any amount of extra intensity in the performance. Must set aside time to listen to the broadcast of the event proper available on the BBC Radio 3 iPlayer (a more than usually generous three weeks left to catch it).

In the talk, I tried to offset the perceived modernism of Stravinsky's score and Nijinsky's choreography at the premiere 100 years ago this month with the music's roots in folk music and Musorgsky (the opening piping - I love Saint-Saens's remark in 1913, 'if that's a bassoon, I'm a baboon' - is a reworking of shepherd Gritsko's reed-playing at the end of the Sorochintsy Fair version of Night on a Bare Mountain).

So, after the most stressy of the week's travels, on to a more relaxing ambience in Göttingen where I wasn't required to hold forth and concert treasures - if not this year's opera - offered plenty of soul food. More on that anon, but let's connect by having William IV less stylishly debunked by the students of the university he so splendidly enriched just before his death in 1837 than the Duke of Wellington is by the Glaswegians.

 

23/5 Oh yes, and Wagner was a nifty four times 50 on the day of posting. How could I have forgotten? Anyway, I'm not in the mood at the moment (and a concert conducted by Sir Andrew Davis, of all people, hardly seemed like the best way to celebrate). There will be nothing but Wagner for me at the end of the year, for reasons I'm still not at liberty to divulge.

The rest is tonal

As the Southbank Centre works its way through the development of 20th century music along the lines of Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, I've been hearing so much to remind me that, loudly though the twelve-tone boys and their disciples may have shouted and slavishly though the acadamic establishment may have followed them, tuneful and direct serious (and, as Prokofiev put it, 'light-serious') music kept going.

My feeling that all these ways of finding new ways to say old things, properly absorbing the past - it's hardly reactionary - are just as valid as the work of the so-called pioneers, was confirmed by an interview Benjamin Britten (pictured above with Pears and Poulenc in Cannes, 1954) gave Donald Mitchell back in 1969. It's reproduced in The Britten Companion (Faber; more on the context, taking the City Lit opera class through Gloriana, anon).

Praising the emerging John Tavener - pity that promise never went further than it did - Britten said 'I think he and many of his generation are swinging far, far away now from what I call the academic avant-garde, who have rejected the past. He and many others like him adore the past and build on the past. After all, language is a matter of experience. When we're talking together, we're using symbols which have been used by the past. If we rejected the past we should be just making funny noises.'

Mitchell asks him if he is conscious of the burden of tradition. 'I'm supported by it, Donald,' comes the reply. 'I couldn't work alone. I can only work really because of the tradition that I am conscious of behind me. And not only the painting, and architecture, and countryside around me, people around me....I feel as close to Dowland, let's say...as I do to my youngest contemporary.'

Steeped in Poulenciana, and happily ploughing my way through the correspondence, I'm always aware of the sheer joy in his tradition-conscious music. He loves what he absorbs. But he also realised his limitations. He writes to a friend in 1942: 'I am well aware that I am not the kind of musician who makes harmonic inventions like Igor [Stravinsky], Ravel or Debussy [always the top names among living composers he tended to cite, along with Richard Strauss and Prokofiev, occasionally Hindemith]. But I do think there is a place for new music that is content with using other people's chords. Was that not the case with Mozart and with Schubert? And in any case, the personality of my harmonic style will become evident.'

It's been a joy to discover the Trio and the Sextet in Pascal Rogé's collaborations with marvellous French colleagues, even to hear the strange Aubade in a vintage recording where Poulenc is the pianist. In his own piano pieces, he's an interesting one: determined to capture a speedy spirit where appropriate without bothering too much about all the right notes.

As for other personal discoveries, after Tippett's Second Symphony, I found to my surprise that the First went just as deep - probably deeper in its knotty slow-movement Passacaglia variations, where there's the sort of selective scoring, in this case for three flutes above the chaconne on muted violas and cellos, which most composers can only dream of hitting on. Indebted to Graham Rickson there for digging out the old Colin Davis recordings for me.

I was heading for the second-cast Mozart Zauberflöte at the Royal Opera on Friday. But the Tuesday before, I listened to Vaughan Williams's Five Tudor Portraits to prepare the class for the BBC Symphony Orchestra concert I thought I was going to miss. I suppose I'd imagined that all five portraits were like the one I knew, the Epitaph for John Jayberd of Diss - three-minute character studies. I hadn't appreciated the brilliance of Tudor poet John Skelton's rapping doggerel and I was stunned to find not only the rollicking variety of 'The Tunning of Elinor Rumming' (a real personage depicted above handing her ale to Skelton and a priest) but above all the 20-minute requiem for Jane Scroop's sparrow Philip, slain by the convent cat Gib.

Such delicacy here, sentiment in the right sense and fresh invention just when it's needed. And this in a rather poor performance conducted by David Willcocks (sadly there's not one on YouTube as yet, though you can catch the BBCSO performance on the BBC Radio 3 iPlayer until Friday evening). I gave up my Flute ticket and went to the Barbican instead, writing about it for The Arts Desk. John Wilson and co confirmed my hunch: a masterpiece. I shed a few tears for Philip Sparrow, I can tell you, particularly in that movement's incandescent epilogue. None for York Bowen's Viola Concerto, simply because like so many second-rank works it lacks a personal identity. But that's been an exception among the 20th century surprises, which I hope just keep on coming.

More of the new-to-me now, which in this case is very much the old, or rather timeless. On Ascension Day (illustrated by Rublev, the illuminator of the Très Riches Heures and Perugino),  I found myself spoiled for choice between the four cantatas on John Eliot Gardiner's Bach Pilgrimage instalment. For consistency's sake, I decided to stick with my Leipzig 1725 sequence and plumped for 'Auf Christi Himmelfahrt allein', BWV 128. In that context the joyous circumstance has to make a new, at long last major-key beginning with two mellow horns dictating G major as Bach weaves a glistening fantasia around the sopranos' chorale.

Innovation appears in the bass's invocation to 'arise and with a bright sound proclaim...', accordingly replacing horns with trumpet and breaking off into recitative and arioso. Since the last of the sustained lines tell us 'not to fathom the Almighty's power', all we get in the ritornello is a brief return of the trumpet, no voice.

Alto and tenor in the ensuing aria-duet declare 'my mouth falls silent', but they instead keep on going until the lovely oboe d'amore has the final word and - unaccompanied - the last note. Even the final chorale, with its rich turn on 'Herrlichkeit', has added grace, this time in the return of the two horns, the first climbing to the heights to fill out the textures in the final gazing 'on Thy majesty for all eternity'. As Rene Jacobs, in his incarnation as one of the worst countertenors ever, is on the Leonhardt recording, let's try a newcomer, Dutch forces under Leusink.

From sacred to profane, finally, here's a plug from proud godfather for Alexander 'Betty' Lambton's sax tootling in his band Lieutenant Tango. Let's hope the irresistible danciness of  their single 'Charle Brash' brings them the fame they deserve. This old hipster-replacement here is already chanting and doofing the refrain 'Charlie Brash (doof, doof, doof)/Where's your cash? (doof, doof, doof).'

Liza and the cockroaches

What on earth could they have in common? Only one thing, according to Minnelli's co-performer the singer/pianist Michael Feinstein: when the world ends, they'll both still be here. It's one of a  hundred pithy comments in one of the best interviews with any artist I've read, written by Marcelle Bernstein for, of all things, Saga Magazine.

There are two special reasons to welcome the interview. One is that it's very close in time to the nearly-67-year-old's unforgettable appearance in the Southbank's The Rest is Noise festival on Saturday, an occasion which I'd viewed with some apprehension but which turned out to be one of the great showbiz testaments to an indomitable spirit (the only other evening I can remember quite like it was Nina Simone's appearance in the same hall back in 1999). I count myself very lucky to have got in via The Arts Desk, for which I duly raved; I wouldn't have risked £40-£100 on a ticket*, though as it turned out the event would have been worth every penny.

The other reason is that the interview contradicts all the press baloney about a tragic life. It's been a tough one at times, no doubt, but the only real sadness I can see here is of an artist who, like her mother, is loved by everybody she touches but not, as she deserves, by one single person. But that's showbiz: the devouring, slightly vampiric fans demand all, and boy, do they get it. Minnelli's torch song should surely be Sondheim's ' I'm Still Here'. He wrote new lyrics specially for Barbra; why not do the same for Liza? For the sake of the truth, I have to say she no longer looks like she does in the above photos, but it was amazing to see the years fall away as Friday night's show hit ever new highs.

What I had to pinch myself most about was that I was hearing that very same Americanized Sally Bowles whose screen renditions of 'Life is a Cabaret' and 'Maybe This Time' had become so legendary singing those very same songs, with different inflections but just as much meaning and vitality, possibly more. 'Liza's at the Palace', filmed a couple of years ago, is as close to our night as I think film will provide, though her delivery of the key song was not quite the same. I thought I'd put up the original film version

and the Palace's 'Life is...' revisited. Stick with it because the Elsie sequence is both much more poignant than the original and shot through with an earthier humour.

If you got to the end of that, you'll understand why I've ordered up the DVD.

Bob Fosse's film of Cabaret came out when I was 10 years old. There was no possibility of seeing it then, but I remember walking past the big cinema in Sutton wondering why it was X certificate and why a man as well as a woman in the photos on the wall was wearing so much make-up. Later it coincided with a golden time in the summer term of my first year at Edinburgh University when we all revelled in a fortnight of working on a production of the stage musical, so different from the film.

I've written about this in the Bedlam Theatre 30th birthday tribute way back, but I can't resist a recropped shot of our dear Mary New (now Amorosino and living in Washington with husband Roberto and two of their three wonderful children - Alexandra, the eldest, has followed her ma to Edinburgh University) as Sally Bowles.

If truth be told, she was of course much closer to Kander and Ebb's (and of course Isherwood's) Sally, this vicar's daughter who sidled up one evening to the Rev (by then Canon) Tom New, sitting at one of the beer barrels, with the 'Don't Tell Mama' song-lines, 'you can tell my papa, that's alright, 'cos he comes in here every night'. Well, those of us who were in it will never get the nostalgia for such a time out of our systems. But by any standards the movie is a classic, probably the musical I'd choose in a list of top ten films. Evviva Liza!

It was quite a weekend of experiencing divas in spheres other than the operatic: Liza on Friday, 'anarchist cabaret performer' Meow Meow as Jenny in The Threepenny Opera on Saturday - not a patch on Allison Bell's Polly, though she looked extraordinary - and singer-songwriter Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond  as Anna in The Seven Deadly Sins on Sunday. This last concert had an only-connect programme which also included necessary - though dreary, if mercifully short - dodecaphonic Schoenberg and wonderful Hindemith: hardly box-office nectar, you'd have thought, and yet the audience was packed with young people. Clearly The Rest is Noise festival on the Southbank must be marketing itself well.

Diva and devotion combine in the only Bach cantata of this Lenten season. For Oculi Sunday,  we have only one specimen, for alto and strings without so much as a concluding chorale, 'Widerstehe doch der Sunde', BWV 54. The soloist's low notes, like the F sharp to which 'übertünchtes Grab' ('whitened sepulchre') descends in the recit, sound much more butch coming from a real contralto rather than a countertenor.

 
Besides, Nathalie Stutzmann is another of those truly great artists who stand out in any crowd of soloists. We haven't seen nearly enough of her in the UK recently.  The recorded performance I heard, with John Eliot Gardiner's Bach Pilgrimage team in one of England's most beautiful churches, Norfolk's Walpole St Peter (reverenced on the blog via two visits, briefly here and more extensively here), reminded me that I ought to go out of my way to see her when the opportunity arises.

'Eyes' Sunday gets its name from the first word of the psalm introit for the day, oculi (Vulgate Psalm 24 verse 15: 'mine eyes are ever towards the Lord'). The New Testament reading from St Luke deals with Christ's words on the casting out of devils. Holbein's woodcut was the only image I could find on the subject.

Georg Lehms' text for this Weimar cantata is one of Bach's crappiest: what's this about being felled by a curse for violating God's majesty? How very Old Testicle. Never mind: there's originality as usual in Bach's five-part string writing (divided violas). I don't, unlike Gardiner, hear dissonance in the opening chord (dominant seventh over tonic pedal), only a novel suspension which means postponing E flat major until the eighth bar. The chord pulsing seems to me calm and confident rather than evangelical; though there's darkness and dislocation in the middle verses' veering to the minor.

Stutzmann makes more of recitative than any of the other singers I've encountered in my own Bach cantatas pilgrimage so far; and in the final aria she echoes the strings' chromatic fugue subject so nobly. We'll have to make do on YouTube with a jaunty Andreas Scholl (low notes not as full as Stutzmann's, of course) and Herreweghe's Collegium Vocale, but that's not a bad second best.

*Nothing for an event like this. To indulge his daughters' love of total crap, one father forked out £400 for three tickets to see Justin Bieber the other night. They were rewarded by the cute but anodyne star's turning up two hours late, way past most of his audience's bedtime.

Antic Saturday

That was a crazy one, Saturday 9 February, very much crowned by Mark Rylance's matinée anti-idol of a Richard III (production photos by Simon Annand). The day's trajectory became seriously complicated when Gillian Moore, Head of Classical Music at the Southbank Centre, rang up late the previous afternoon to ask if I could step in for Tom Service, who'd gone down with the norovirus, to give a talk in the Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer. When? In 19 hours' time, at 12.30pm, for an hour. On what? Paris 1910-1930, the latest subject in The Rest is Noise festival of 20th century music.

Well, that I could do, basing it around what I knew of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes - quite a bit - and Prokofiev's viewpoint on the city as a resident in the 1920s. Gillian wanted me to include a fair amount of music from the concerts that were about to be performed. I replied that at such short notice I'd have to make do with what I'd got on the shelves. Fortunately I did have a copy of Antheil's Ballet Mécanique, and a CD of Josephine Baker, so that covered two essential requirements.

The preparation time, though, was short. I couldn't sacrifice a Friday night reunion with old Edinburgh University pals, two of whom had already arrived to stay from Washington and Cardiff. It turned out to be a wonderful evening, 15 round a big table at the Joy King Lau in Soho, including superstar Kerry Richardson of Bedlam Theatre Cabaret fame (now 'in telly') whom I hadn't seen for over 30 years. And a milestone in one way at least: the first time the six of us who spent a golden year together in 32 Dundas Street had sat down to eat together since 1982.

I got back predictably lateish, didn't sleep much and was up at 7am to start preparation. Half way through, the CD I'd started to burn with the extracts failed. And a second, a third, a fourth. A faulty pack. At 10am I pedalled furiously to Hammersmith, bought a decent set of CD-Rs and rushed back. Got to the Queen Elizabeth Hall at 12.10pm with 20 minutes to spare for a quick soundcheck. The Southbank team couldn't have been more soothing or friendly - and that includes the sound man, who must be the first of his ilk to say how much he'd enjoyed it at the end.

I had fun (and kinda glad Ben Larpent, Southbank Classical Music Programme Manager, documented the occasion, however weird I look with right arm flapping. Maybe I should have gone for Josephine's Banana Dance look). What a great audience - some seated in front of the stage, others eating at tables, including a jolly mother and baby.

Jude Kelly did the same relaxed, thoroughly professional job of introducing and questioning at the end I'd noted at James MacMillan's talk the previous week. I'd been asked to give some substantial excerpts, though obviously my playlist was quite different from the one Gillian had set up in The Guardian. I thought I'd keep a record of it here. To keep it short I won't list the recordings used.

Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (1913) - introduction compared with Musorgsky's shepherd-boy pipings at the end of the Sorochintsy Fair interlude we know as the epilogue to Night on the Bare Mountain; the 5/4-6/4 tune for the Spring Rounds compared with the 11/4 finale of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Snow Maiden; Procession of the Sage (polyrhythms) and Kissing the Earth (The Sage). (Image above: one of Roerich's designs for the original production).

Ravel: Ma mère l'oye - Beauty and the Beast, in the orchestral arrangement of 1910/12

Ravel: Rapsodie espagnole - Habanera, starting with four-hand piano version of 1895 and morphing into the orchestral arrangement of 1908

Stravinsky: Etude pour pianola (1917)

Antheil: Ballet Mécanique (1922-30 - opening (four-pianola version; see end of blog entry for later performance with film)

Satie: Parade (1917) - sequence with typewriter, pistol-shots and siren (photo: Picasso's designs for the American and French managers)

Milhaud: La création du monde (1923) - jazz fugue

Josephine Baker - 'J'ai deux amours' (1930)

Prokofiev: The Prodigal Son (1928-9) - final theme

A question or two, and then I had 20 minutes to whizz over the Thames to the matinée of Richard III. I've already begun to treat of this (in superlatives) in an earlier blog entry under that very funny photo of Rylance's king bearing a 'No Parking' traffic sign. I wish I'd caught the latest of his celebrated post-run speeches, but even at the penultimate show he managed to praise the first of the double-cast princes who were taking their leave and to say, with his usual tear-jerking sincerity, what a joy it had been for all of the actors to see so many kids in the audience.

There must have been more, of course, in the initial Globe run. I'd heard that MR took time to warm to his chameleonic impersonation after a family bereavement, but by the end of this Apollo Theatre transfer he was absolutely in his element from the very first speech. The voice has a greater range now - he can be bass-baritonal as well as his usual tenorial self. He had the extraordinary way of fixing on the stalls and on us in the upper circle so that you got the feeling he was looking directly at you. The laughing, and laughter-making, player of the first half became the deadly psychopath of the second, though, so that the roaring audience fell very silent.

The other joy of Tim Carroll's production, every inch as good as his Twelfth Night which I didn't dare see this time after fond memories of four Globe performances, was the teamwork. Maybe Johnny Flynn as Lady Anne was vocally a little weak, but the other 'ladies' couldn't have been better. James Garnon, whose star quality first shone at the Globe in Carroll's otherwise disappointing Dido, Queen of Carthage and flamed as James I in Brenton's Anne Boleyn, metamorphosed from a dignified Duchess of York into a plausible, noble successor to the throne at the end. Finest of all was Sam Barnett's Queen Elizabeth.

With Barnett and Rylance, the spat between bereaved mother and child-murderer was hair-raising: I'd never thought of it as one of the great scenes in Shakespeare, but I do now. The battle stuff that followed can drag; never for a moment here, with the rivals in their tents deftly intercut and the ghosts of the slain gathering round Richmond to despatch York.

 I came out wishing that after all I could stay on and see the same company + S Fry (not a draw for me personally after earlier, marvellous Malvolios) in the Twelfth Night production I knew and loved so well. But Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky beckoned over at the Barbican, with live accompaniment from the BBC Symphony Orchestra under a meticulously synchronising Martyn Brabbins pretext for The Arts Desk review. I've seen this version three times live now, and the film many more, and I seem to have got past the stage of scoffing at the propagandist black-and-white of Nevsky as compared to the more nuanced Ivan the Terrible.

On this occasion I simply admired the actors' superb handling of their types. Nikolay Cherkassov's prince is so handsome and stirring, of course, but it was marvellous to hear the audience laughing so readily at Nikolay Okhlopkov's buffoon. A rich ending to a teeming Saturday; and on Sunday I was rescued from having to review Novello's Gay's the Word when I arrived at Barons' Court to find the District Line inoperative and the Piccadilly Line recently  closed by a 'person under a train' - and that in itself was understandable on a cold, deluging February afternoon.

Grand finale - only connect: Eisenstein thought Fernand Léger's 1924 film to accompany Antheil's Ballet Mécanique was 'one of the true masterpieces of cinema'. I'm not sure how well it synchs with the music, which only joined it in the 1990s (and in the later version where the pianos are all but drowned out by the percussion and 'special effects'). But it's quite something to have both together.