On the coast, at the church, by the lake

I'm paraphrasing Piper/Britten's Quint and Miss Jessel there, managing to squeeze in the first proper mention - which is to say an aspect of the last three-day portion - of our magical Scanditour alongside the second instalment of the 'Britten in Norfolk' strand. I've now left the ghosts behind in the last entry on the subject, which means on to our second evening, at South Creake to see the end results of the Yorke Trust's course work on A Midsummer Night's Dream. That's the church behind the hollyhocks in the central picture; sea holly aka eryngia in situ on the dunes above Holm beach up top; and sunset on the Särna lake, Sweden, after our only day of rain in the third picture.

This Dream was a classy show, no doubt about that, overlooked by the resident angels (several pictured above) and full of perceptive detail from director Jennifer Hamilton, whose calm and insightful character I warmed to so much in our round-table discussion after my Wells talk on the two operas earlier that Saturday. The showman vicar of Saint Mary South Creake had been  happy to let the workforce under set and lighting designer Ian Sommerville loose inside the building for a week, and how they transformed it.

Central was a round pond on which the barque eventually supporting Tytania and Bottom 'floated', with an old green sofa above it and holly over the pulpit, from which Puck and sundry fairies often peeped. I guess the shot-silk effect was due to the costume, make up and hair designer, no less than the best Boris Godunov I've ever seen, South African bass Gidon Saks (a friend of Hamilton). Production photos supplied by the Yorke Trust.

Conductor Darren Hargan seemed to be in overdrive from the start - why not let those eerie woodnotes glissando at more leisure? - but had a superb orchestra with which to conjure the right luminous nocturnes. My first note of inquiry to Rodney Slatford when we started our communication was whether he had a first-rate trumpeter at his disposal to do Puck's acrobatics. I well remembered how Cambridge students in Rosslyn Chapel a couple of years ago were nearly scuppered by a disastrous one. Fear not, replied he, and sure enough they'd had to buy in the best, RNCM graduate Mark Harrison, destined for a great career. The strings were deliciously sensuous; the woodwind gurgled and melted in 'Bottom's dream'.

Singers were more variable, but the Tytania we saw - out of several double-castings - would be welcome on any stage anywhere: Daire Helpin also took part in J's Europe Day concert but made more of an impact on me here. Her Oberon, Michael Taylor, seemed good enough to me though others were more critical. The lovers benefitted especially from Hamilton's lively staging, though the Lysander simply bellowed; the two Belgian girls, Helene Bracke and Annalies van Hijfte, did exceptionally well. Bottom, as so often, overegged the pudding but we laughed a lot at the antics of David Lynn's Flute-as-Thisbe. He'd also sung well in the first afternoon concert over at the chapel - my first live hearing of Britten's Six Songs from the Chinese with guitarist Dario van Gammaran.

One of the boys drafted in for the fairies had an exceptionally brilliant voice, fit competitor for Choirboy of the Year, I'd have thought. I didn't quite get the angle of Dan Robinson's laid-back, dreadlocked Puck. One day we really shall see a breaking-voiced boy acrobat in the role.

Otherwise, full marks all round. Involvement wise, I felt less close to the Glyndebourne Billy Budd at the Proms last night, but that may have had a lot to do with my distant coign of vantage in the Albert Hall. And the Creake pleasure wasn't quite over with the Dream since we returned the following morning to South Creake Chapel to hear world-class cellist Jamie Walton, a keen supporter of the Yorke Trust, in the Britten Cello Sonata with outstanding pianist Adam Johnson. The slow movement's blackness raised the hairs on the back of my neck: what a work. As they had two pianos for the rehearsals, they used them for Britten's unusual rep in that combination. Only in this centenary year, following on from the Tong/Hasegawa duo at Cheltenham, could I possibly have heard the Introduction and Rondo alla Burlesca twice in little over a month.

So we took our leave of matters musical - but not of the coast. I was still angling for the dip I'd failed to have on the previous day when the tide had retreated too far. So off we went to Holm beach, parking the car at the nearby bird sanctuary and setting off across the same saltmarsh we'd last negotiated in the sunset last September.

The eryngia was just flowering its purple-blue

and taller bracts - of aloe? I'm not sure - stood out against the cloud-studded sky.

And so across the sands near Brancaster

to swim in the warm shallows of the North Sea. This is as far as I'm going for documentation that I did it

though there is better ocular proof of daily swims in the lake at Särna, 20 kilometres from the border between Norway and Sweden.

This area once belonged, in fact, to Norway; it was gained without a struggle for Queen Christina by chaplain Daniel Buscovius in 1644. Hardly surprising that no-one contested the claim: at that time there were 20 farms on 4500 square kilometres with a population of around 100. I found all this out at the lovely wooden church a hundred metres from our log cabin which was superseded by a bigger one in 1881. More on that in a Dalarna churches survey; in the meantime, following Susannah's blog-entry which I linked to last time, here's our, erm, cosy cabin, No. 8.

And the Finches' campovan outside which we consumed our daily breakfasts.

First night was, as I've written above, one of wild skies with the rains only just abating (and still falling a little on the surface of the lake) - hence the most spectacular of sunsets -

while the second followed a radiant day in Fulufjället National Park, due a chronicle eventually. Fellow campers silhouetted walking their dog

and, to the north-east, a moon rising above other farm buildings.

On the second morning I rose to impenetrable mist which in 20 minutes was burning off

so that by 8.30 it was warm enough outside to swim. And yes, pace Susannah's blog, J gladly joined me and Susannah rushed in for a 10 second immersion, followed by half a minute - long enough for Jamie, firmly shore-bound, to photograph her 'swimming'. 13 degrees? No problem, which I can't say for 8, the temperature we experienced one alarming morning further south-east in Lake Siljan. But more of that, too, anon.

3/9 The full Stavanger International Chamber Music Festival chronicle is now up on The Arts Desk. I'll have more to say here about Norwegian ecclesiastica.

Dream, Screw and Serenade in Norfolk - 1

Britten's two spookiest operas and his exquisite songs of sunset melting into night had the most poetic settings imaginable the other weekend. I was up in beloved north Norfolk to talk about the connections between The Turn of the Screw and A Midsummer Night's Dream - they turn out to be more legion than I thought - in the intimate little Granary Theatre of old-fashioned Wells-next-the-Sea, pictured in the middle above. Seastar Opera's all-women cast with piano had joined, by serendipity, with Yorke Trust Summer Opera's full-scale production of Dream in one of Norfolk's loveliest churches, St Mary's South Creake (above), players and singers from all over the world working mostly for free on a course with a very splendid end.

The bonus to those, and the events connected with them, was to discover that the Britten Sinfonia would be at the Theatre in the Woods of Britten's (and Auden's) old school, Gresham's of Holt, with its amphitheatre canopied by beautiful beech trees - third photo - and that we could squeeze it in between walks, bathes and other performances.

First of the major trio up was Susie Self's Screw; though there was a treasurable warm-up act. That great double-bass player Rodney Slatford, driving force of the Yorke Trust and seen here in the South Creake chapel where the smaller happenings took place,

had arranged a number of events to educate us all around the Dream. So King's Lynn-dwelling friend Jill and I hurtled to South Creake to hear Rodney in very, very lively conversation with that unstoppable but never boring or self-regarding anecdotalist, director John Copley, and the more quietly amusing violinist Nona Liddell, both of whom had participated in the 1960 Aldeburgh Jubilee Hall premiere of the Dream. Stories that made us laugh are too countless to record - all should have been mp3d but sadly weren't - but Copley had his own take on why Mackerras became a Britten ghost (I'd heard another, but this is choice). He was there when Mackerras was rehearsing Screw with the tenor who'd taken over from Pears on tour. Quint was out of synch offstage - 'miles out, miles out' as Charlie shouted - and apparently couldn't find the peephole in the drapes to see his conductor. 'I can't find Peter's hole' he wailed. 'Lucky for you', snapped back Mackerras.

Anyway, our Quint was very apparent over at Wells in the shape of Susie, singing the Prologue before heading to the conductor's stand, and her stage double, co-director Marina Sossi. Britten and Piper's very present ghosts can be a problem, especially in a smaller space;  I'd have liked more play with lights, and the valiant scene-shifters were just as distracting in the interludes as I, the great Bob Ling and a fellow Hesse student had been at Aldeburgh back in 1983 (Myfanwy Piper found us very irritating). But on a limited budget, Susie's wonderful Michael Christie did an excellent job as Lord High Everything Else. Here they are together outside the Granary.

And as you can hear in the Woman's Hour excerpt, Susie makes a very compelling Quint singing at tenor pitch.

Our Governess, of two, was Nazan Fikret, not so long ago the most frightening Flora anyone's seen at English National Opera. Her voice has a piercing sweetness and her innocence was touching, though the hysterical fixity needed a bit more playing up in a second half where everyone adopted bright colours. The church scene worked best as theatre, with the children at 'prayer' before turning gargoyles.

I suspect that just as you wouldn't have known Susie and Marina were women beneath that effective make up, you'd never know Eleanor Kramer wasn't a boy. Her 'Malo' was as touching as they come, her screams terrifying; again, only a bit more dramatic vividness as the screw turned wouldn't have gone amiss. The Flora (Alex Saunders, who took the two production photos) and Mrs Grose (Louise Mott) were impeccable, and we heard a big Wagnerian voice from Laura Wolk-Lewanowicz as Miss Jessel. Richard Black worked his socks off at the piano, but it only made you realise how specifically Britten, for all his wonderful pianistic skills, writes specifically for each of his 13 players.

Saturday morning was the talk, to a rather small but very participatory audience, followed by a round table in which I was specially impressed by the common sense and insights of Dream director Jennifer Hamilton. After our second F&C of the day, a later-arrived J went off to see the matinee while Jill and I walked out to the beach past the famous Wells huts/chalets (£60,000 a pop, can you believe).

The tide, alas, had retreated beyond reach of swimming, a pleasure to be postponed until the following day, and a haar was rolling in.

The Holt experience provided further confirmation - as guitarist Dario von Gammeran's Friday afternoon performance of the Nocturnal after John Dowland had suggested - that so much Britten would benefit from the al fresco treatment. Several of the works from Jackie Shave and her nearly all-women strings I'd loved at the Wigmore pre-centenary Brittenfest last year. But the works with tenor were fresh, and Irish-born Robin Tritschler is a new wonder on the scene. I'm indebted to Rodney Smith of the Photographers' Gallery at Holt for this picture.

Infinitely flexible, full of vocal colour, lightish but never forcing the sound, Tritschler was perfection in Finzi's Dies Natalis. And how wonderful that its newborn infant's-eye view of the world was paralleled by a gently mewling baby in the audience.

Inevitably, the Serenade crowned the glory of the late afternoon. Tritschler excelled in the difficult Dirge and flecked off the runs in Jonson's Sonnet to Diana. But an effect I'll never forget was fabulous horn player Stephen Bell's retreat to the woods for an offstage call to give us supernatural goosebumps. There were more of those in the Dream that evening, but I need to save it up for another day.