On the beach at night alone*

Context is all-important, and I'd like to be honest on here: last Thursday morning I had a second biopsy under general anaesthetic at Charing Cross Hospital. There's a tumour in my bowel and my vivacious surgeon Maria needs to ascertain the type of cancer before proceeding with further treatment (probably a limited form of chemo- and/or radiotherapy to avoid a big operation). Fortunately it's not spread, so I'm at a fairly early stage, and all should be well.

As with the previous procedure, I had an afternoon nap and then went out to see a life-affirming performance: two Thursdays before this it was Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeomen of the Guard at beleaguered English National Opera (sign the petition, please) - not the finest of productions, but with some excellent performances, and anyway I have such a soft spot for the work, even if it's not as funny as the vintage topsy-turveydom. Last Thursday it was what turned out to be a very deep and moving Vaughan Williams evening at the Royal Festival Hall, culminating in his first great masterpiece, A Sea Symphony. 

I've waxed lyrical about the profundity of the experience in my Arts Desk review, but I wanted to say a few more words here in praise of Walt Whitman, whom I scoffed at too much in my youth. The sentiments seem all the more remarkable given the times, but even the long, long lines seem to me to work now. And I appreciate all the more how Vaughan Williams set them, or parts of them, in his first great spiritual achievement. "On the beach at night alone" forms A Sea Symphony's second movement, its dual achievements the beauty and mysticism of the themes and the way the baritone is stilled towards the end so that the orchestra carries the essence alone. 

My image up top is of midnight on a solitary walk around Bergman's beloved island of Fårö - by then, the stars were not up, but it still suits my mood. Whitman's poem, 'Similitude', is worth quoting in its entirety.

On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her savage and husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future. 

A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, comets, asteroids,
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time - all inanimate forms,
All Souls - all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes - the fishes, the brutes,
All nations, colours, barbarisms, civilizations, languages;,
All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,
All lives and deaths - all of the past, present, future;
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spanned, and shall forever span them and compactly hold them.

Time and again in A Sea Symphony, VW supports the 'all is one' philosophy with themes and colourings of surpassing beauty, reminding us how he was at best a 'Christian agnostic'. In the first movement, there's 'one flag above all the rest, a spiritual woven signal for all nations, emblem of man elate above death...A pennant universal'. And in the finale, it's the soul's sealike journey, 'fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail'. 

You can see why it chimed with my present thoughts on mortality and the universal. For the same reason, I'm inclined ever more to look at the beauty of the infinite - no shame in getting all purple-prosy about this - and after a splendid lunch yesterday with my new best friend Melinda at Daquise, I went back to the Natural History Museum. The late afternoon winter light made the building itself look more glorious than ever (which it is),

I'd seen a pic of the model Tyrannosaurus rex wrapped up in an 'ironic' Christmas jumper, but he was doing without on Thursday afternoon. Still, this was a good excuse to be struck afresh by how much has been dug up of dinosaur remains hundreds of millions of years old. The full frames, whether assembled from real bones or casts, are so impressive

but just look at the armour plating of this Scolosaurus, uncovered from the surrounding sandstone.

What I came for again, though, was the Mineral Gallery at the east end of the ever-amazing building, on the first floor. As it's in effect a dead end, not on the way to anywhere, unless you seek it out you may miss it, as I had done for years. Then I read Richard Fortey's Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum, and he opened my eyes as surely as Simon Winder's Germania did to the fabulously beautiful Vogelsaal of Bamberg's NHM. 

As Fortey points out, this room is rare in still housing the bulk of the collections originally intended to be housed there, and the display

has been preserved in something like its original state. The Victorian Society is delighted. It is an airy space, well lit from the generous windows, and with glass-topped cabinets running in ranks transversely across the gallery, each of which includes a fine selection of specimens. The arrangement of minerals in the cases is by natural 'families' of minerals - so the sulphides will be found together, as will the native elements like gold and copper, or the oxides, and so on.

It is a teaching collection in a way that no longer exists elsewhere in the building. An eager visitor might spend weeks in here learning, and would emerge at the other end as something of a mineralogist.

I've decided to try and do so with a combination of regular visits, and the museum's own handbook, which arrived today.

That should help me to be a bit more systematic. But I see nothing invalid in the aesthetic approach I took yesterday - simply looking more at the most beautiful things, like the opals.

And the NHM's gorgeous rooms help if you just want confirmation that nothing in art is more wonderful than nature itself. Take, too, this brain coral, which I saw en route from dinosaurs to minerals.

*Whitman's line does without the comma between 'night' and 'alone' which features in the way the poem is punctuated in the score of A Sea Symphony.

Il re Tony

You can truly be called a king of music if, having nurtured every aspect of the Royal Opera's work for an incredibly long and unstintingly successful time, you move on to take up the post of the London Symphony Orchestra's chief conductor (in 2023-4, a season in which Antonio Pappano will be at the helm of both institutions). We may be losing Simon Rattle to Munich, but we keep Pappano (pictured above at the most recent of the Royal Opera Jette Parker Young Artists concerts). And I'm glad to say that the three LSO concerts I've heard him conduct have been five-star unforgettables. 

All three have asserted British symphonies as blazing masterpieces (which we knew, but when done at this level, the impression is indelible). There was an Elgar Two with an incredibly refreshing interpretation of Beethoven's Violin Concerto from Nikolaj Znaider back in May 2016. More recently, the two hardest-hitting Vaughan Williams symphonies had knockout impact under very different circumstances: the Fourth in mid-December 2019, when its angry mood chimed with election night anxiety (merited, as it turned out), the Sixth on 15 March 2020. Consider that date: it was the last evening before all concert and theatre venues were shut down the following afternoon at 5.30pm. Those of us still foolhardy to turn up knew the blow would fall shortly; everybody, audience and players alike, felt the dying falls of Britten's Violin Concerto and the symphony's eerie epilogue as metaphors to what was to come. 

When Pappano visited my Opera in Depth Zoom course on Madama Butterfly and stayed for over two hours, having arrived in Italy and about to set off from home in the Val d'Orcia to Rome's Parco della Musica for the first rehearsals of an Accademia di Santa Cecilia Beethoven cycle, he had much to say about the three livestreamed Royal Opera events and that last full-orchestral concert. I've transcribed his comments about it.

It’s funny you mention that because we were all wondering why we were still performing; it was clear what was going to happen, but it was scheduled and people came out to hear us and see us. There was just this special feeling on stage throughout the evening, and also a sense of defending one’s right to make music at such an exalted level, like 'we're going to show whatever negativity is out there, whatever devil, whatever scourge, that we have the fight in us'. People from the orchestra came up to me right after the concert and said how extraordinary it was.

The LSO Live disc of those Vaughan Williams 4 and 6 performances is shortly to be released. I asked Michael Beek, reviews editor of BBC Music Magazine, if he'd let me cover it, and I was delighted that he said yes. I thought I'd put this up before listening, because although I know what I thought of the concerts, it's only fair not to pre-empt the CD review. 

At the same time I sent Pappano a congratulatory message about the new appointment, also still needing his address for the gift I wanted to send him as thanks for his generous Zoom time - Yoko Kawaguchi's Butterfly's Sisters (Yale), which a previous visitor, Ermonela Jaho, was very happy to receive. I thought there was no harm in mentioning that I could only think of one successor who would pay as much attention to every department of the Royal Opera as he does, Mark Wigglesworth. His very friendly reply didn't comment on that - it would have been undiplomatic to do so - but I hope that in 2024 we have two great conductors in place in London.