A week of jaunts around live concerts and opera

I never expected to notch up seven live events in a single week under present circumstances (just think - if I lived in Scotland, which in so many ways I'd like to do, the indoor total would still have been zero). The fate of live concerts and opera still hangs in the balance, but on the basis of making hay while the sun shines - as it still does in what now amounts to 11 days of Indian Summer, starting with our Norfolk Churches Walk of which I owe a big account to come - I'll have last week to live off in the memory for a long while to come. Plus a barrage of reviews to help remember chapter and verse: I've linked to them here as the days unfold.

The Wigmore Hall finally opened its doors to a limited audience: all smoothly run, with handwash and temperature-taking from the friendly folk at the door, and then perfect placing of punters. There were two seats between me and Fiona Maddocks at Monday's lunchtime concert, but we still managed to have a good chat before Alban Gerhardt and Markus Becker took flight.

With very little pressure workwise on Monday, I left the Wiggers on a long central London meander to reclaim my bike, which I'd left at Victoria Station the previous week. Coffee and a bun from Ole and Steen first, then a falafel wrap sitting outside in a spookily quiet Old Compton Street opposite the Admiral Duncan (closed) and Algerian Coffee Store (open - my objective for passing that way, being able to buy my usual).

I'd hoped to pop in on Michelle and co at Maison Bertaux but it was firmly shut, if baking daily - the extra wing was boarded up.

Trafalgar Square was as quiet as when I last saw it - on the last day of National Gallery opening before lockdown - but the NG had put tables, chairs and brollies out to make an attractive cafe. I was also unprepared for the latest artwork on the Fourth Plinth, Heather Phillipson's THE END (no explanation given where I looked, and perhaps none needed).

St James's Park was alive with a richer than usual variety of ducks and geese. I won't bore you with the ones I don't recognise - must send them to our ornithological expert Freddie Wilkinson - but no doubt they have something to do with migratory resting points at this time of year. At any rate it was pleasing to see white and black swans in close proximity

while the pelicans who normally hang out on a rock at the east end of the lack were to be found nearer to Buckingham Palace, on the shore. How prehistoric they look.

Tuesday evening saw a very regretful farewell to the magnificent Battersea Park Bandstand's Chamber Music Festival, so brilliantly co-ordinated by clarinettist Anthony Friend (who participated in the third of the concerts). The Mayor of Wandsworth and (I presume) her lady as well as less attentive councillors were present for the young and brilliant Hill Quartet's exquisite finale (this is some time before the start, as I enjoyed the salad prepared by friend Clare).

Nacreous sky at the start

and specially added lighting for nightfall, which made the bandstand look a bit like a fairy palace.

Cycling to and from Igor Levit's stupendous Beethoven sonatas recital the following evening has passed unrecorded, and Thursday evening was a night off. But Friday was eventful. We went for lunch to the Stockwell home of our friends Katharina and Jamie. Katharina produced a jar of honey from her hive at the end of the garden which has turned out to be one of the best and most complext I've ever tasted,

while lunch was enriched by tomatos from Jamie's project in the neighbouring square (I assume he doesn't mind my posting this pic, though I've refrained from the lunch a quatre because my own spouse requests that I avoid images on here wherever possible).

Heading to and from their road via a grand crescent, I admired fruiting on the way

and a very large spider (though not larger than a couple I've seen in the yard recently) on the way back.

At 4 sharp I left to get to Marylebone for a train to High Wycombe and thence, through the services of a very friendly cab company, to Garsington for a Fidelio which advertised itself as a concert performance but in fact was far more vivid in every way than the Royal Opera one before lockdown. And there was the bonus of the garden at the side of the award-winning pavilion at sunset

as well as the view across to the wooded opposite slope of this Chilterns nook.

Saturday was far more exclusively urban, though St Mary Abbots, Kensington, where Sheku Kanneh-Mason tried out his first Dvořák Cello Concerto with his contemporaries in the Fantasia Orchestra, had glittering allure. And Kensington Gardens feels rural by the round pond, with more ducks 

as well as starlings bathing

until you get to further lofty glories by the Albert Memorial, with its imperialistic take on other continents (but splendid sculpture).

Thence I walked down Exhibition Road, livelier now the museums have re-opened, to hop on the District line to Victoria, and from there to Peckham Rye, where I walked up and down in search of decent coffee (not easy, even though it's become a hipster hangout which sits a bit uneasily alongside the long-term residents). I still love the stylish grunge of Bold Tendencies' set-up on the two top floors of the Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park. Goddaughter Rosie May joined me, posed by an artwork on the roof terrace (fabulous views over the city and further)

and she loved Samson Tsoy's recital, though had to go off and work so she didn't catch the equally wonderful playing of Samson's partner Pavel Kolesnikov both in a duo extra and with his (Pavel's) Trio Aventure. The shot at the very top is of the view west, with a Jeremy Deller on the left (we have a perspex Smiley of his at home), while an ironic comment on Victoriana frames the sunset view here.

Azure skies and inhuman horrors: Titian's Poesie

Beneath the ground-lapis blue, a man catches a goddess at her toilet and will be transformed into a stag, to be ripped apart by his own hounds, while women are penetrated by a shower of gold (some think that's lovely, I'd still call it rape), chained to a rock to be devoured by a sea-monster until a hero arrives, carried off in a 'rape' by Jupiter/Zeus in bull form.  There's still such sensuousnss and beauty in some of Titian's richest canvases for Philip II, who clearly wanted quite a lot of female flesh. The series is a counterpart to the earlier canvases Titian painted for Alfonso d'Este's Camerino. Back in 2003, we doubted if the National Gallery could ever excel itself in its reuniting of the three canvases Bacchus and Ariadne - of course one of the glories of the NG's collection - The Andrians and The Worship of Venus from the Prado; plus Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods with additions by Titian, courtesy of Washington's National Gallery of Art). But it just has, in another once-in-a-lifetime (or once-ever). All six paintings which may never have graced a single palace room of Philip's are in one splendid gallery, with the earlier masterpiece plus others visible beyond.

Actually there are seven, and I'm a bit confused as to which is the odd one out: the late Death of Actaeon with its very free brushwork, another National Gallery fixture, or Danae from Apsley House? There's also a lot of confusion around whether this is the most 'real' of the many versions, but I'll take it from my great pal Claudia Pritchard, writing in The New European with splendid reproductions gracing her article, that it is, since she's read the catalogue and I haven't. Certainly looks much better for the clean, though apparently it's not the full canvas.

My own pics will have told you that I did get to see the miracle - in fact, on the last day before the National Gallery closed indefinitely, 18 March. I cycled into town and out; J took the tube.Most rooms were empty and we weren't expecting many folk in the exhibition, but there were. Not so many as to make it impossible to avoid the two-metre distancing which we were already taking on board then. I nearly forgot in the thrill (unanticipated, because I hadn't done my homewortk) of seeing the one I'd never encountered 'live' before, The Rape of Europa (1560-2), normally to be seen in the neo-Renaissance setting of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

The eye first hits on the best azure sky of the lot - valuable crushed lapis lazuli the pigment, of course - and then to the pink drape that Europe clutches as the bull spirits her away from the shore. I didn't know this when I visited, but the painting had a major restoration in Boston; our friend Jill, picture restorer at the NG, spent three blissful days at the Museum where she was able to see work in progress (for her own most remarkable recent work, see the post on the Mantegna-Bellini exhibition). The sea-life along the bottom part of the picture is wonderful when you get up close, too. It couldn't be more of a contras to the sombre hues of The Death of Actaeon.

I like it that the picture, given one of the two widest unbroken walls to itself, is complemented by the most damaged work of the seven, the earlier (1554-60) Perseus and Andromeda, always a welcome site in the sumptuously revamped long gallery of the Wallace Collection.

We did have an earlier chance to see the two great mythologies with obvious symmetries markig them out to be hung alongside each other, Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, before they were rotated between the National Galleries of Scotland and London, but there was fresh cause to wonder here.

And finally, the original Venus and Adonis (on the right below and up top) is, of course, infinitely superior to the National Gallery copy, which can be seen next door.

We've seen the perspective down to the top Titians with Parmigianinos to the left; here's another great masterpiece, The Vedramin Family venerating a Relic of the True Cross (1540-5, possibly reworked in 1555), hanging on the wall the other side of the exhibition room next to the late Tribute Money.

We also wanted to pay homage to Holbein as J had read, and I had just embarked on, the final instalment of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror and the Light. In which Master Hans appears again to work on the quadruple full-length portrait mural for Whitehall Palace; destroyed, but here was half of it in cartoon form (Henrys VIII and VII), on loan from the National Portrait Gallery while it undergoes renovation.

Well, all galleries are shut now; who knows when they might reopen? But imagination and a good collection of art books at home are sustaing us now. As for Mantel's crowning glory, what a masterpiece, and praise be to this period for the time to take over savouring it. I'm glad The Arts Desk was patient with my slow reading of it; this is the result.

Outside the Gallery, central London felt all wrong. Some have rejoiced in the empty spaces, and Trafalgar Square as a landscape with few figures is certainly unusual,

but the West End is made to teem with life; never again will I curse those crowded narrow pavements of St Martin's Lane and Charing Cross Road. There were still a few tourists about - the Chinese were the first we saw to wear facemasks -

and 'pavement artists' had chalked in expectation of offerings - not great art, of course, yet topical - but were nowhere to be seen.

We quickly gave up; I had a coffee and a bun in Ole & Steen - handwash at the door and on the counters, all cakes carefully covered - and then cycled home. Haven't been into the centre of town since then, and not been on anything more than two wheels for seven weeks. Oddly, I don't mind for now. And the distancing must be maintained for a good while yet, though our disastrous government has once sent out weak signals which will up the death count again.

Carnival of resistance

'I hate Trump even more than I hate crowds,' as one of hundreds of ingenious placards and banners read, so there I was among peaceful thousands for the fourth time in a month, following the People's Vote March and the Latvian song and dance celebrations. Never, surely, has there been a funnier or, weirdly, more joyous demo. It was indeed, as many banners declared, a 'carnival of resistance,' and I laughed and smiled my way from Langham Place to Trafalgar Square. This was a reminder, too, of all the vital causes the Horror Clown has been besieging, resulting in a rainbow coalition of protesters.

Worried that I might be a bit late - 2pm was the start, and I had to tidy up Glinka notes for the Proms, just past the mid-day deadline, before cycling off. I came at it all from Wigmore Street, and first joined what I was told was the back of the procession in Chandos Street, complete with Handmaids (later I saw a witty banner, 'The Handmaid's Tale is not an instruction manual').

The first three people I encountered were all sporting - albeit not wearing, in high temperatures - the 'Trump stinks' face masks I'd seen the sublime Janey Godley and friends display online, so I asked them to don the masks for a photo-op, in which they were happy to oblige.

Here, too, were an American father with his infant

and a group with the first of many dogs I saw.

This one is cutely adorned with 'Dump Trump,' and didn't seem to mind too much.

But behind us another procession was moving towards Langham Place, so we quickly joined that and found it to consist mostly of pro-Palestinian Muslims, including headscarved women

and this genial gentleman.

Behind them came orange people, in solidarity with Guantanamo inmates.

Let's feature some of the ingenious slogans and pics now. One of my favourites came from this lady

who had an equally ingenious inscription on the reverse.

This one was more earnest.

and later on, the reverse of a 'F*** Trump' spread had serious messages, too.

Demi-dragged Donald

soon joined forces with Trumpelstiltskin and 'Muggy May' (not sure I got that one)

though it was only at the end that I spied a couple of the drag-queen group sashaying away.

Americans warned to stay away by their loathsome administration were not taking any notice

and this one represented overseas voters who need to help make a difference in the mid-terms.

Humbler hand-made efforts still got their point across amusingly.

I assume this one is on the right side of humorous.

Found myself hailed by a familiar voice - that of good friend Christine, closely followed by husband Duncan, who was promming later in the day (he's a season ticket holder).

We were touched by an Indonesian gentleman who wanted to photograph my 'No man is an island, no country by itself' t-shirt, earnestly saying that we are all human beings who must join together.

The priestly community was out in force. Not sure what the lying threesome was proclaiming - couldn't read the message,

Of this genial group, the best banner - 'My boss told me to come' - isn't quite visible.

It took much longer than I expected to reach Oxford Circus, after which things moved more rapidly down Lower Regent Street. Here I caught the ingenuity of the best 'models'.

I had a nice chat with the ever-beaming lady on the left about the humour factor of it all. More mixed responses from the huge numbers of police when I remarked to the effect that it didn't look like trouble, did it? A smiling black policewoman said 'absolutely not';  a grimmer plod replied 'not yet'. Not at all, as it turned out.

Anti-fracking sideshow:

The chap just visible on the left below had a job to do, and he was getting on with it, though smiling all the while. Note ' Christian? Like Martin Luther King?'

More good signs. 'Nightmare on Any Street' was Amnesty's contribution.

EU flags still part of the picture (I now have a sticker with not only 'Bollocks to Brexit' but also 'Bollocks to Trump').

And so I took a slight detour at Piccadilly Circus, to rejoin the march at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, where the handmaids were in full spate

And on to Trafalgar Square, where I filled in a pro-EU postcard to my MP (not that Andy Slaughter needs any prompting) and the good banners kept on coming.

Poor Madge. But did she have to smile? And did Mrs Mayhem have to take the Horror Clown's hand again? Well, their charade was going on while we were part of the Real Thing. Here's a glimpse of the alternative - the Blump flew in the morning, though not very high - courtesy of Ileana Antinori, a LinkedIn connection.