Lenny's literature

We're coming up to the sixth of ten Zoom sessions on Leonard Bernstein, and I think all the students would agree that so far it's been a journey of incomparable richness (West Side Story next Thursday). One of the semi-incidental joys has been the possibility of reading or re-reading some of his sources; over the past three weeks I've finaly read, in Walter Hamilton's vivid translation. Plato's Symposium - on the Greek course at university, we only covered Phaedrus and selected books of The Republic - and Auden's The Age of Anxiety, reassured by John Fuller's Auden Companion that parts of it are as difficult as Finnegans Wake when my attention seemed fitful. 

Loose inspiration from the former yielded one of Bernstein's perfect masterpieces, the Serenade for solo violin, strings, harp and percussion - Baiba Skride's performance in Dublin last year made me wonder why I hadn't heard it for so long - and from the latter the Second Symphony, first-rate in parts. In essence, the composer responds to the poetic general idea much as Strauss did with Nietzsche in Also sprach Zarathustra, but if that yields strong ideas, who's complaining. I've come close to the symphony, at least as far as the opening loneliness for two clarinets and the first set of variations are concerned. Everyone loves the not-so-desultory party music, and that works well with the preceding dirge, but the end I don't buy. Krystian Zimerman is outstanding in this film with Bernstein conducting the LSO (I was there)

while Janine Jansen stole all hearts in the Serenade when I played the final Socrates-Alcibiades sequence in this performance with Pappano (we also heard Gluzman, Midori and Kremer).

I wasn't sure that ten two-hour sessions on Bernstein would hold, at least from the compositional point of view. But so far, they absolutely have. There's been an alternation between serious and relatively light - not that LB ever made the distinction - and some real corkers, such as the second class focusing on Fancy Free and On the Town, from a very special annus mirabilis. Why have we never, in my experience at any rate, experienced Jerome Robbins' vivacious choreography for the half-hour ballet live in the UK? This is Stéphane Bullion of the Paris Opera Ballet in the cheeky third variation, proving that the wiggles in Maestro are vintage Robbins

Fancy Free, like Serenade, is a totally perfect score. So is Prelude, Fugue and Riffs, so rudely ignored by Woody Herman who commissioned it but never acknowledged receipt of the score or paid for it. Much as I find Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto for Herman and Co piquant, this sequence is of a different order. I like the idea with the two in each half of a concert followed by Apollo and Fancy Free. YouTube is a surprising place - I was reconciled to using sound recordings when I discovered the whole thing in a 1955 Bernstein jazz programme (I have a CD with just the talk), introduced and conducted by the composer; it's much the best.

The symphonic suites/dances from On the Waterfront and West Side Story are flawless, too; but it's hardly surprising if the latter as a whole has its weaknesses (the soppier side of the generic young lovers - Tony's 'Something's Coming' was one of the last numbers to be composed, and at least gives him grit). Candide remains, in any version, what Sondheim calls 'a first-class mess', but oh, what numbers. And of course one of the greatest operetta overtures ever, very much in a tradition. Once again I discovered Bernstein's TV performance of it - in one of his Children's Concerts - absolutely the best.

To think that this course would never have come about if it hadn't been for widespread interest in Maestro, a film I love and respect (so tired of those reviews and articles which criticise it for what it doesn't do rather than what it chooses to select). Catching up with Oppenheimer more recently, a fine film in so many ways, I'd say that the real comparison is not between that and Barbie (which I haven't seen and probably won't), but with Bradley Cooper's masterful movie.

While Oppenheimer sprawls and tries to cram in everything, Maestro holds focus. Performances in both are fine, but only Emily Blunt's Katherine Oppenheimer eventually becomes a rounded female character. The brilliant Florence Pugh is wasted, and has to participate in one of the worst Bad Sex Scenes in movies, getting up mid-bonk to survey the bookshelves. Above all I hate the non-stop musical soundrack in Oppenheimer which often serves no point (though it's superb in the nuclear test sequence).  Indifferent to the Oscars, I still won't mind at all if Cillian Murphy wins best actor award. But I really hope Carey Mulligan takes a statue too.

Le cas Voltaire

Nothing can be expressed about the 'executions' in the Charlie Hebdo headquarters beyond horror and revulsion, but the ramifications of what happens next are thousandfold. I heard that folk at the French Institute today were in shock and tearful mourning; many of them had grown up familiar with the work of several of the murdered cartoonists, and felt that with their deaths went part of themselves. Of the thousands of outpourings, I was struck afresh when our beloved Sophie quoted a French journalist citing lines attributed to Voltaire: 'I disapprove of what you say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it'.

The first point here is probably trivial, but the fact is that Voltaire didn't put it in those words: that was how a 1907 book by one Tallentyre, The Friends of Voltaire, summed up Voltaire's attitude to the state burning of a controversial book by the philosopher Helvétius. What he actually said, which doesn't begin to do justice to the present situation, was, 'so much fuss about an omelette!'. Anyhow, it was instructive to learn of the circumstances.

More troubling is an article by Brendan O'Neill in Spiked, which points out how the lawyer of the radical Muslim men tried in Luton back in 2010 for verbally abusing soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan  invoked that very phrase in their defence. Five of the seven were found guilty and fined £500 each with a conditional discharge, so Voltaire's tenet wasn't accepted. Certainly O'Neill's points about the west's forgetting Voltaire at its un- or dis-enlightened peril are rich and troubling food for thought, though I don't agree with them all. After all, European societies' hypocrisies are nothing compared to the wholesale pursuit of bloody revenge which is such a mass psychosis in the world today.

I'm still not comfortable enough with the question of spoofing Mohammed to declare 'je suis Charlie Hebdo' (I know, I'm being too literal there). But I do embrace this truth with all my heart (and a question mark about the slaver), courtesy of  Index on Censorship.

Here is probably not the best place to reinforce what I wrote in the comments to the previous thread, since master musicologist Michael Kennedy's death at the age of 88 on 31 December was relatively peaceful and natural. Still, a sombre time seems appropriate to voicing something of my feelings. How I admired that man. His biography of Barbirolli was the first I ever read about a musician, since it was one of the few in my grammar school library that stood out when I first went there at the age of 11. And his Master Musicians study of Richard Strauss stoked my teenage infatuation; since then he's been the model of informed enthusiasm, not just about Strauss but also in warm appraisals of Boult, Britten, Elgar and Vaughan Williams.

We met often at operas and concerts, and shared several study days and discussions. He always looked a little wry when I told him how influential he'd been on my musical life, thinking perhaps that I was overdoing it ('licky, licky'; as another colleague, David Fanning, rather disarmingly put it). But I meant it. Since so much of his time was spent on the Northern edition of the Daily Telegraph, it seems right to link to that paper's obituary. Thoughts to the vivacious Joyce Bourne, his widow.

This is merely a detail, since it can't be seen clearly below, of a panel gathering at the Manchester Prokofiev Conference in 2003. How sad it makes me to note that Michael is only the latest person photographed to be no longer with us. Also here are Sir Edward Downes, my dear Noelle Mann, Lynne Walker and Sasha Ivashkin, all of them untimely gone.

I've not written about other deaths towards the end of 2014 which affected me personally, for various reasons; at the request of his griefstricken partner Cristian, I can't enlarge on how sad I feel about his dear Gary, and I'll miss two of my mother's closest and liveliest friends, the two Marys (Farrington and Hooper), though their lives had been so wretched in the last year or so that it really was that clichéd thing, a blessed relief.

So it goes. Il faut cultiver notre jardin.