Verdi and Strauss all'Abruzzese

Scenes like this greeted us late every afternoon as we drove in our hire car back from our daily hikes in the Maiella mountains of Italy. At that time of day, having otherwise resolved to have a break from music, we'd resort to one of the three CDs I'd brought with me, sounding very good indeed on the car stereo. On the long drive back from Pescocostanzo we squeezed in the Prologue and Act One of Simon Boccanegra, with the peerless Abbado recording ensuring that memories of last week at the Royal Opera weren't too overwhelming (and with much more vivid conducting, of course). And after a high walk along the ridge of La Maielletta until snow blocked our way and the clouds rolled in, there was a serene spotlight on Daphne's transformation followed by Harteros in the Four Last Songs - whereupon a rainbow obligingly appeared between a heavy shower and blue skies:


After this we had to sit in the car back at our destination and wait for 'Im Abendrot' to sink to its final rest, the car windows wide open on all kinds of birdsong to complement Strauss's two larks.

The camera does not lie: this dramatic corner of the Abruzzi really is an earthly paradise, a land of milk and honey(and by night a feast of nightingales and fireflies). Home-cooked food and home-grown wine overwhelmed us, as before, at our simple but ever-hospitable agriturismo; having decided to return when flights to Naples, a hopping-off point to explore the Matese, proved much pricier than Ryanair to Pescara, three of us had no regrets at all (and the fourth member of our party, new to our annual Apennine experience, was so captivated she thought of holing up there to work on a project for a month or so). So friendly are the Abruzzesi - we ascribed it to the Allies' help in WW2, but it may just be in their nature - that they welcome the relatively few homebuying Brits who've settled in the area. Even by Italian standards this is as good as free and easy human relations can get.

As with Mali and Cyprus, I can only justify one more holiday snap in this context, so I'll take my leave now with a jolly shot on top of the world:

The real thing

Having decided not to bother with another Royal Opera revival of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, I changed my mind on two accounts. I toyed with the discovery that this was not the handsome-looking but action-wise rather pallid Moshinsky production yet again, but Ian Judge's staging of the original version with a new Council Chamber Scene to fit the stunning, Boito-led revision. The decisive factor, however, was that Nina Stemme had been replaced as Amelia by the half-German, half-Greek soprano Anja Harteros, whose Strauss Four Last Songs on CD I often play as the most opulently phrased, dramatically vivid account I know.

Pictured above by Catherine Ashmore in the very lovely crinoline designed for Amelia by Deirdre Clancy, which she uses to inform her eloquent movements, Harteros is the real thing, that rare bird the true Verdi soprano. Not since Freni and Scotto, I'd dare to say, have we heard the like (and Rupert Christiansen, whose opinion I often share, declared in the Telegraph that she excels Freni in this role). There's real spinto urgency to the big lines, but Harteros can also float exquisite pianissimos, perfect trills and that stylish swelling and diminuendoing on a note known as messa di voce. She looks a bit like a youthful Baltsa, which may be why one soprano I met in the audience thought her chest voice wasn't as impressive as it might be; but I'd already wondered at how true and unforced it seemed, and she's still young (in her mid-thirties).

Of course the opera is Simon Boccanegra and not Amelia Grimaldi or Maria Boccanegra, and a better line-up of Verdi singers I've never heard, even if Eliot Gardiner's strings lacked focused fire (the quieter, more dreamlike passages on the other hand were perfection). Gallo's troubled, peace-making Doge could be a bit coarse at full pelt, but like Harteros, he's a sensitive musician, and the quiet stretches of the best of all father-daughter duets were deeply moving. The tenor inhabits a relatively thankless part, but Marcus Haddock, whom I've admired as the perfect Don Jose and Don Carlo, sang as ardently as needed and helped to make the Act Three trio a real pleasure. Everyone was unanimous about Furlanetto's Fiesco - a true bass with emotion shaking the voice, and such presence. We shall be spoilt by his Philip II in the forthcoming Don Carlo - but will the Elisabetta be a patch on what Harteros, making an all too belated Covent Garden debut here, might have made of the regal lady, and is Keenlyside as much up to filling a Verdi baritone role as Gallo? Vedremo. Anyway, here are all four Boccanegra principals in the quiet, dignified final scene (photo again by Catherine Ashmore for the Royal Opera):


While I’m still hot on the Italian trail, I hope I can justify sweeping art and film into the same entry, since recent experiences in both spheres have been so invigorating. On Sunday afternoon, urged by a picture-restorer friend who works at the National Gallery, I caught the Sainsbury Wing’s Pompeo Batoni exhibition before it closed. Batoni was seduced away from his native Lucca to Rome, where he started out in the 1730s with a series of cheerful mythological and allegorical pictures. He’s best known, however, for his swagger portraits of British milords who dropped in to his studio during their Grand Tours. Every room of the exhibition had at least one gem I wanted to take home, but I was very much struck – especially after all the saturated reds and blues – by an exquisitely coloured Biblical scene of Hagar being directed by an angel to the desert spring which will save her son Ishmael’s life. Opposite it was a tender Sacred Family on loan from Rome's Capitoline Museums, the braided Madonna caressing the foot of her awe-struck son and watched equally adoringly by an aged Joseph:


In the last room there were several more intimate portraits, including one of the bachelor Sir Humphrey Morice surrounded by the dogs to whom he would leave his fortune, and a humanistic study of David Garrick.

Neither of these was available to reproduce here, the exhibition having just finished and most copyright holders reasserting their rights, but I’m happy to display a thoughtful picture in the National Gallery’s own collection (and also seen in the exhibition), of Time instructing his daughter Old Age to spoil the features of Beauty, one of Batoni’s characteristic fresh-faced young girls:


‘Youth's a stuff will not endure', or 'gather ye rosebuds while ye may’, was also the theme of a wonderful film we watched at home thanks to the recommendation of a waiter at the Groucho Club and delivered by the ever-reliable Lovefilm, Le fate ignoranti (Ignorant Fairies, made in 2001). It’s set, I’m fairly certain, in the Testaccio district of Rome and directed by a Turk who also made the equally subtle Hamam, Ferzan Ozpetek.


The plot could be open to obvious developments and sentimentality - a newly-bereaved wife finds out that her late husband has been having an affair for the past seven years,further discovering that the love-object is a man – but always avoids the expected. It seems like a sombre melodrama to begin with, set in a rather frigid bourgeois Roman house, but opens up to surprising laugh-out-loud humour and great pathos as the wife cautiously embraces the lifestyle of the gay lover and his alternative family. All the characterisations are beautifully observed - among the minor characters, there’s a particularly unpredictable plump Turkish woman with blue hair – and the cautious optimism of the film is very refreshing. I’ve not seen a better Italian (based) film since the heyday of Rossellini and Fellini.

Juliet lives, Pikovaya Dama tries to dance

Here are two winsome Juliets, Maile Okamura and Rita Donahue, about to play a crucial role in Mark Morris’s forthcoming Prokofiev magnum opus. Last Saturday we learnt more about the radically different original version of the complete Romeo and Juliet, with its final scene of lovers reconciled to life which Morris is choreographing probably even as I write, from musicologist and fellow Prokofievian Prof. Simon Morrison. He took the above photograph and has pieced together the composer's first thoughts from manuscripts in Moscow archives. Simon's talk was the centrepiece of a Goldsmiths’ Prokofiev Study Day, fluently put together (with Christina Guillaumier) and personably steered by Noelle Mann’s successor at the Prokofiev Archive, Fiona McKnight.

Simon not only clarified the musical and dramatic nature of the original ‘happy end’ on which Prokofiev, not the Soviet state, had insisted in 1935 – Friar Laurence intervenes to rouse Juliet before Romeo can kill himself, the crowd rejoices, the lovers are left alone to dance – but also played us portions of the score as recorded by the repetiteur of Morris’s rehearsals. As well as a much extended final scene, where it is the rejoicing that rather oddly occasions the music we know as the scherzo of the Fifth Symphony, not a scene for Juliet’s nurse as I had originally believed, we heard a completely new ‘Dance of Three Moors’, part of an over-extended divertissement in front of the drugged Juliet in Act 3 (the other dances, for pirates and Antilles girls, became respectively the 'Dance with Mandolins' in Act 2, a romp which several of my godchildren adore, and the ‘Dance of the Girls with Lilies’). The weakest part of the score as we currently know it, those multiple reprises of the crowd dances in Act 2, were inserted at Lavrovsky’s insistence for the 1940 Kirov production. Juliet’s variation from the final sequence became an extra number at the Capulet Ball, and Romeo’s dance was subsequently stitched – unconvincingly, we agreed – into the so-called Balcony Scene. Morris will, Simon assures us, treat the final resurrection as a love-dance outside the frame of the story; and since it is the same rather sad music used for Juliet’s death in the revision, it merits sensitive handling. I can hardly wait for the Barbican performances in November; sadly, its Bard Festival premiere doesn't coincide with the Prokofiev events I’m attending as speaker in August.

The rest of the Goldsmiths day was taken up with papers from home and visiting academics. We heard a masterly 20-minute summary of the musical structure of The Fiery Angel from Stefan van Puymbroeck, a lively talk about Prokofiev’s relationship with Glaswegian new music champion Erik Chisholm (I had surveyed their correspondence in the Archive for the biography) from Fiona McKnight and new light on the making of the Lieutenant Kije film from the absent Kevin Bartig.

A perfect conclusion was the jeu d'esprit from forthright Serb Ivana Medic on Prokofiev’s many ‘appearances’ in rock and pop music. She is clearly an Emerson, Lake and Palmer fan, but hates Sting’s use of the Romance from Kije – ‘it makes me want to puke’. Afterwards, I asked Ivana where she acquired her idiomatic English, since she’s only been in Manchester for two years. It’s a curious story. She and her identical twin sister were so anxious to exclude a pestiferous younger sibling that they spoke English to each other as children in Serbia. The troubling question of what happened to the outcast one was happily resolved: such was her determination not to be left out that she became (if my memory serves me right) a lecturer in English.

After six hours, we were ready to drop, as you might be now after a description of such length (but also, I think, of great importance – you read the R&J stuff here first). But after a cooling interlude under the trees around the Goldsmiths field with Simon, Stefan and Daniel Jaffe, we marched back to attend a reception for Anthony Phillips and his new translation of the Prokofiev Diaries Vol. 2 (see below). Anthony is a real djentlman (as Prokofiev himself might say in Russian) and flattered me enormously by saying he enjoys the quirkiness of this blog. The gathering was more than just jawing: that not-so-old man with a beard Rex Lawson and his fellow-pianola-ist Denis Hall demonstrated Prokofiev’s Duo-Art (mechanical reproducing piano) recordings, and Sergey Sergeyevich lived again. I resolved to learn the first of the Myaskovsky Prichudy, which were the only rolls I hadn’t heard, and we all felt SSP was there in the room with the piano transcription of the Three Oranges March.

Now, I have every confidence in the super-poetic Morris’s ability to do something memorable with Romeo and Juliet. But I’d been a little more doubtful about what would result from choreographer Kim Brandstrup’s very vaguely Dostoyevskyan take on Prokofiev's music for the abandoned film of Pushkin's Pikovaya Dama (Queen of Spades) pieced together and (oh dear) expanded by Michael Berkeley, Rushes: Fragments of a Lost Story. I once met Brandstrup at lunch and proceeded to tell him how I found ballet couldn’t really develop an emotional narrative. I used as my example, foolishly as it turned out, a choreography of Othello, vigorously executed by Irek Mukhamedov, in which I said I felt that the Moor’s jealousy didn’t really rise to a peak. ‘That was my ballet’ came the answer.

Rushes was surely the dullest thing the Royal Ballet must have had to go through for a long time, though curiously not all the dance critics seemed to think so. How do you give three charismatic dancers, Carlos Acosta (whom I was seeing on stage for the first time), Alina Cojocaru and Laura Morero, so little to do? Anyway, Acosta and Morera maintained a certain style, though not quite enough erotic charge (production photo by Bill Cooper):


Rushes tells some hazy tale about a tortured young man torn between a perverse woman in a red dress and a more homely lady in grey (shades of Lifar’s hasty scenario for On the Dnieper). There wasn’t enough real dance, and the movements were unoriginal (though the red lady was dragged around the stage rather effectively). Berkeley followed Prokofiev’s indications for scoring, but then in the ‘original’ bits made some (deliberately?) ungainly counterpoint, and ruined the spare music for Hermann and Lisa which reappears in the Fifth Symphony by extending it – on Brandstrup’s command, no doubt, to suit an interminable Pas de deux – with the symphony’s scoring. To end with a recently-unearthed, and clearly of-the-sameish period, but relatively undistinguished piano piece, Dumka, was a mistake (Brandstrup's idea, not Berkeley's).

The triple bill didn’t do this murky centrepiece much good, either. Just as in Friday’s concert, where a great masterpiece, Vaughan Williams’s Sixth, closed the first half, only to be followed by a workmanlike Royal Philharmonic Society commission, Dominic Muldowney’s Tsunami, so nothing was going to match the ethereal poetry of Balanchine’s choreography to Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings. How effective the ladies in their blue-and-white dresses looked against a simple blue cyclorama...


...and what an inspired idea to place the Elegie, heart and soul of Tchaikovsky’s score, last, as a much more successful love-triangle than Brandstrup's. Here are Marianela Nunez, Rupert Pennefather and a barely-visible Mara Galeazzi in the second of Bill Cooper's production photographs:


The Ashton-originated Homage to the Queen made a flamboyant finale, with noisy but characteristic music by Malcolm Arnold, yet how, as so often in ballet, one thought, ‘not another variation, please! No more Pas de deux!’

Even so, what a line-up of the Royal Ballet’s best – in addition to Cojocaru and Acosta, we had Benjamin, Kobborg, Rojo, Bonelli, Lamb, Nunez… Neither the ethereal Romanian nor her consort, Kobborg, shone quite as brilliantly as they had the previous week in a gala for her homeland’s Hospices of Hope. Galas are usually disappointing – again, a string of variations and pas de deux in a law of diminishing returns – but this was brilliantly planned (and only an hour and a half in toto before we rushed off to a charity banquet). These wonderful images of both stars in action at the Southbank's Queen Elizabeth Hall were taken by Ryoichi Hirano:



First came Cojocaru, Kobborg and a lone pianist in Robbins’ exquisite and gently playful Other Dances, to Chopin Mazurkas. There was pure but well-executed choreographic conservatism in the Pas de Deux from The Flames of Paris (Yuhui Choe and Marian Walter). I’d been wanting to hear Asafiev’s score, or part of it, since I found out that Prokofiev researched French revolutionary tunes for him; but both the orchestration and the ideas are threadbare. This would sound bad in a ballet score of the 1860s, let alone the early 1930s.

Kobborg danced an interesting choreography by Tim Rushton to Debussy’s Prelude a l’apres midi; Kojocaru premiered Brandstrup’s interpretation of Schumann’s Bird as Prophet. The moment in the evening when my eyes pricked – and they don’t very often in ballet – was for the transcendental demeanour of Roberta Marquez (a perfect Juliet last year) and Daniel Ulbricht in the Coppelia Pas de deux - though I must say that even these two lost my attention for a minute or two in favour of the Manning Camerata’s viola soloist in one of Delibes’s purest inspirations. The grand finale was a riot: ALL the previous dancers plus a few more joining in the Don Quixote Pas de deux/divertissement. A triumph, and Cojocaru seems like such a genuine and delightful person. I liked the elegant Canadian-based, Romanian-born presenter, Princess Marina Sturdza, too; she managed to talk interestingly, and interestedly, to just about everyone at the dinner afterwards. Well done to the Romanian Cultural Institute for backing such a well-orchestrated show.

Remembering Slava

A little late, this, I'm afraid, since the picture by Suzy Maeder I'd been waiting for last week was lost in cyberspace, but it's still only just after a year since the greatest performer I've ever met, Mstislav Rostropovich, shuffled off this mortal coil. We were reminded of the fact by Natalie Clein, in a Cadogan Hall recital dedicated to Slava and intelligently planned with his inspiration to several great composers in mind (incidentally, her pianist, Kathy Stott, rather eclipsed the inward-looking impression left by the cellist).

So I recall how at the end of last April, after a hyperactive day rushing off to Bush and Broadcasting Houses to pay tribute, I dissolved in tears at every recording of Slava's I listened to (and I dug out a great deal then, believe me). Of course it's hard to banish from pride of place his close friendship with the men he told me in interview were his 'three gods above all the rest', Britten, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. But I shall also never forget his Strauss Don Quixote, his surprisingly sensitive piano-playing for wife Galina Vishnevskaya, and the way he gradually got the London Symphony Orchestra to understand him as a conductor in spite of his somewhat questionable stick technique. The Shostakovich Eighth Symphony at the Barbican, which must have been one of his last performances with them, if not the last, is branded on my memory as the deepest, most layered interpretation of a symphonic work I've ever heard (and thankfully preserved on the LSO label, though it's not quite the same experience, of course).

No more tears now: his energy and force for the good, in world affairs as well as in music, remain vitally with us - though what on earth would he make of the new Russia?

Waging war on war

On this especially horrible day, when the Burmese military regime lets thousands of cyclone victims die, as tanks rumble across Moscow's Red Square for the first time in years and Hezbollah decimates a once-peaceful Beirut, the serious issues raised by Shaw's Major Barbara seem stronger than ever. I went to see Nicholas Hytner's National Theatre production on Tuesday, and was stunned as so often by GBS's complex dialectics lightly presented as well as by the sheer warmth and humour of so much of the text. And all this in 1905 (the year The Merry Widow was also premiered)! The show boasted two superb tours de force from Simon Russell Beale, less like himself than in any other performance of his I've seen as the Machiavellian 'Prince of Darkness' arms dealer Andrew Undershaft, and Clare Higgins, newly graduated to grande dame status and a mistress of comic timing as his estranged wife Lady Britomart. Alongside her assured delivery, the ingenue playing Barbara, Hayley Atwell, came across as rather weak of voice, but she wasn't bad either. Otherwise, the ensemble was flawless. Here's Paul Ready as Adolphus 'Dolly' Cusins, wondering if he still be able to 'wage war on war' in Undershaft's employ (photo, as above, by Catherine Ashmore):


By pure serendipity, the morning of the day we were due to visit the National was taken up with reviewing Britten's Owen Wingrave, in which the protagonist of the James story on which the opera is based also wages war on war. It's a relatively one-dimensional paean to pacifism, but the music is so much more remarkable than I thought when I saw it in action at Glyndebourne some years ago. I'll save any observations about the new recording for the BBCMM review, but this is the chance to underline how inventive Britten is in his late spare style, from the arresting gamelan-style military parade at the beginning to the haunting chords of time suspended towards the end. There are embarrassing bits, like the easily-parodied 'scruples' ensemble, and Myfanwy Piper's libretto lacks the irony of James's marvellous story. Perhaps, too, it should be in one act rather than two (James adapted it as a one-acter for the stage called The Saloon). Yet once more it's clear how many more striking ideas catch the ear than at any point in The Minotaur. Time, though, to lay that poor beast to rest.

Further war thoughts, finally, were soberly provoked by our Morley look at Vaughan Williams' Sixth Symphony. What a superbly-constructed masterpiece, chilling to the bone and equal to Shostakovich 8 and Nielsen 5 (and I never thought I'd say that). Sir Andrew Davis performs it tonight in an amazing programme with the BBC Symphony Orchestra: can't wait, though emotionally it might be too much. Incidentally, we were all amused to see that the forthcoming RPO concert in which the great Tod Handley conducts the nasty, aggressive and totally bracing Fourth Symphony is titled 'Green and pleasant land'. We fear the cow-pat lovers, pastoralists and UKIP supporters will be in for a bit of a shock.

A more than competent beast

Our man from the Garrick had the temerity to approach Hans Werner Henze, in the audience for the last performance of Birtwistle’s The Minotaur (pictured above by Bill Cooper for the Royal Opera), and ask him what he thought. Very competent, came the reply, and (which was more like a ‘but’) extremely well performed. I’d say it was a little more than competent, but the extraordinary level of the performance was never in doubt for a moment: Sir Harry could not have done better by the staging, the conducting or the singers.

My problem with the music is that, while it’s shaped with plenty of instinct for dramatic contrast, and interestingly – if often thickly – orchestrated, including haunting roles for cimbalom and saxophone, no ideas leap out at you, either from the pit or in the vocal lines, and stick in the memory; and I’m not necessarily talking about tunes, just phrases of striking individuality. The Birtwistle sound world is as mired as it ever was in the thick paste of the 1960s avant garde. So it often becomes incidental, a mere prop of music theatre. There are some virtuoso fast, violent passages – Ariadne’s narrative of her half-brother’s birth, or the slaughter of the innocents – but even here you are reminded that the model without which none of this would have been possible, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, boasts melodies as well as rhythms.

Certainly it’s a compelling story, the stuff of nightmares. Harsent, for all the occasional banalities of his libretto, makes us feel immediately for the man-beast locked away and pre-destined to do what he does, and there could be no more persuasive advocate of his torment than John Tomlinson, still in magnificent voice. Is this so very far from the world of the Austrian horror which has hit the news?


No-one is loveable. Ariadne and Theseus unite through need and convenience. Christine Rice is utterly compelling to look at as well as to hear, the very image of an archaic Kore (this production photograph is also by Bill Cooper):


It’s probably thanks to Pappano, and the fact that director Stephen Langridge keeps most of the singers firmly downstage, that you hear every word from her and Johan Reuter. The harpy-like Keres, ripping the hearts out of the newly-dead, were perhaps a step too far - their second manifestation at the end of Act 1 made me want to laugh – but they are splendidly led by Amanda Echalaz (not singing all the right notes, I’m told, but doing so with utter conviction). There were some promising voices among the Innocents, and the orchestral playing was confident and powerful without drowning out the singers. So Pappano now adds a tough new work to a versatile list in which he has already proven his supremacy - Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, Shostakovich and Britten (and his Wagner is getting there, I’m told).

After the pagan ritual of Saturday night, the rest of the Bank Holiday weekend was holier. For the first time I joined the splendid choir that meets once a month for festival evensong at the church around the corner, St Andrew’s Fulham Fields. Father Martin Eastwood, whom I remember from his wilder Edinburgh days, is a dynamic force for all sorts of activities. There’s even to be a music festival over the weekend of 20-22 June including a premiere by a young composer called Jonathan Coffer (I felt for Humphrey Clucas, sharing that evensong, whose biography tells us that ‘his best-known work is still probably his earlier set of Preces and Responses, written as an undergraduate in 1962’). This Sunday’s evensong included the robust Walmisley in D minor and Finzi’s ‘God is gone up’ (for Ascensiontide), which I used to love when we sang it at All Saints’ Banstead. Foolishly, I’d opted to sing tenor rather than bass, and the Finzi has some treacherous full-pelt high notes, not helped by the fact that the organ is a semitone sharp. How juicy, though, is the richly-harmonised central sequence about 'Heaven's sparkling courtiers' - enravishing indeed. Since I wrote this up, I discovered that we'd been snapped; this picture by Ryszard Rybicki was on the St Andrew's website, and shows the altar in all its Victorian excess as well as us (I'm very far back on the right):


Afterwards the congregation and choir, which includes a few visiting professionals, gathered for sausages and wine at the extremely hospitable Eastwoods'.

Bank Holiday Monday was perfect in its way: another holy friend, Andrew Hammond, took us to Cambridge to meet one of my heroines, the author of the most striking libretto since Rosenkavalier and Rake’s Progress, Nixon in China. Alice Goodman is now Chaplain of Trinity College, and she sports a splendidly feminine clerical outfit. It wouldn’t be fair to reproduce what was said over a private lunch about Nixon, Klinghoffer and Doctor Atomic (on which she worked for a year before parting company with Adams and Sellars over the presentation of Oppenheimer as a Jewish Faust). I will say that she was a delightful, warm and enthusiastic companion around the Victorian extravaganza of All Saints’ and the loveable Jesus College - though I fear I shall be remembered by her as the Man Who Stepped on Jesus’ Lawn. Here she is with Fr. Andrew in the courtyard of his theological college, Westcott. The scent of wisteria is everywhere in Cambridge at this time of year:


After we parted with the Chaplain, Andrew took us around Clare, his alma mater, and Kings, which I haven’t seen for years: is the Chapel the most opulent and beautiful building in the world, both inside and out? I think so. The photo is a conventional one, but I couldn't resist it:

Show me the corpse

Apparently one of the unspeakables on Newsnight Review, that slough of anti-musical (and sometimes anti-everything) philistinism, said of The Minotaur something along the lines of 'if you think classical music is dead, go to Covent Garden and view the corpse'. Well, I can't speak for Birtwistle until I've seen the show, which I'm due to do tomorrow, though some reports suggest these might well be the death-throes of the 1960s avant-garde. But I'd respond to this lofty pundit by saying 'if you think classical music is dead, go hear the Britten Sinfonia and see a healthy body bursting with vitality'.

This band seems to have its finger on the pulse without resorting to any trendy gimmicks. The audience is a bigger mix than any to be seen over at the Festival Hall concerts, with plenty of young people and quite a few kids, and as the lights dim and the players come on stage, they're received with all the ecstasy usually reserved for a cult group. The BS programmes are inventive in the extreme, though not always esoteric: you could take from Wednesday's Queen Elizabeth Hall programme the excerpts from Don Giovanni and The Rake's Progress as well as the more outlandish numbers from the complete Pulcinella and insert them into one of those quasi-club evenings which have sprung up in Berlin and are now being tried out at the RFH. One of the nice girls who work for the Sinfonia told me that they will be participating in just such an event this October, playing Tchaikovsky which will then be 'remixed' by a DJ (!)

Yet this was a programme to be taken in the round. They started with Britten's early, and apart from its finale not terribly memorable, Sinfonietta and Stravinsky's very late and simple arrangement of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in C sharp minor. The Fugue, scored for three clarinets and two bassoons, was an especially phantasmagorical event in the hands of the BS's world-class wind department. In that respect, the group is like a mini version of Abbado's super-band Lucerne Festival Orchestra, and it boasts perhaps the finest oboist in the world (at least I think so, because as a player I'd always aspire to his beefy, full-blooded sound), Nicholas Daniel:


He shone so much in the Theme and Variations of Pulcinella that even friends who didn't know him as one of our greatest oboe soloists - second only, surely, to his teacher Maurice Bourgue - were startled by his brilliance. But this was an evening of great solos from this army of generals. The vocal trio included Roddy Williams, who gave the most relaxed and focused performance of Don Giovanni's Champagne Aria I've ever heard, and Toby Spence, again unusually virile and full-toned (and phrase- and breath-perfect) for Don Ottavio's 'Il mio tesoro'. The soprano, Rachel Nicholls, was a last-minute replacement for the sublime Carolyn Sampson, whom I've been longing to hear live since listening to her Bach Cantatas on CD. Nicholls is intensely musical, but in this company her voice seemed a shade lacking in individuality, and the cruel top C of Anne Trulove's aria was not her strongest asset. What a nice idea, though, that they all came back for Pulcinella, and seemed to enjoy its purely orchestral passages so much (how could they not?). Masaaki Suzuki was in his element here, but wanted just a little human sympathy in his early-music view of Mozart. Still, it was a deliriously happy evening.

I've been taking the Morley/BBCSO students through the Vaughan Williams symphonies (4 and 6 especially). How easy it is to overlook their unusual shape and originality of expression - even the Pastoral Symphony, which I haven't heard in concert for many years now, took me by surprise in its more tortured passages. Here's real individuality, even if one sometimes tires of the over-used folksy intervals.

Welcome to all the pleasures...

…which in my case meant a rather excessive Monday, the day before we left for Cyprus, embarking on the first of six two-hour sessions on my best-beloved Rosenkavalier with the City Lit students, followed by a hasty cycle over to the English-Speaking Union where I was addressing Glyndebourne regulars on Yevgeny Onegin (faced with the mock-rococo of this unfamiliar Mayfair establishment, I felt I was still in the world of 18th century Vienna). The Onegin event was to have been a conversation with Vladimir Jurowski, such knowledgeable and enthusiastic company for last year’s Betrothal in a Monastery study day as well as a Tate round table, but he’d double booked; we then expected the conductor of eight performances, Kirill Karabits, but on Friday he heard he was wanted down there at rehearsals until 6pm.

So I went it alone, but not too fearfully as I know and love the subject well. I think I covered most bases, sticking by and large to Tatyana in Act 1 though pointing out how her most heartfelt theme connects with others for the Nurse, Onegin, Lensky and finally the anthem for doomed love in the final scene. The examples I’d put on to CD all worked fine, but as a bonus I’d asked for ten minutes of DVD screening to show Yelena Prokina, Tatyana incarnate, in the Glyndebourne production on its first appearance. Somehow the sound was sabotaged, barely audible through interference, so the audience had to surmise the truthfulness of Prokina’s intense performance through visuals alone. Here she is in Graham Vick's Glyndebourne staging, as photographed by Mike Hoban:


A very friendly punter suggested I joined him and his partner for a drink while the sound engineer faced the firing squad (as he put it) and I found myself embroiled in the Boris Johnson fan club, who were not above taking pot shots at the Kinnocks and the EU (which I had to defend as best I could). Nice people, all the same, which shows one doesn't have to share political opinions to get along.

Also sheer delight have been the further revelations of Prokofiev’s Diaries Vol. 2, lucidly translated by Anthony Phillips.


I’d hitherto only skimmed the Russian text with my plodding grasp of the language. What will need to be revised in the biography? News on all his women, for a start, between Nina Meschcherskaya and Lina: the casual lays as well as the romantic liaison with Stella Adler and more details on ‘Frou-Frou’ Baranovskaya than I’d had access to when I wrote the book. The American stretch was always the least well documented, but it springs splendidly to life, especially in a flavoursome description of a Californian New Year’s Eve party. And the evocation of the Ballets Russes, the rehearsals and premiere of the Chicago Love for Three Oranges and a séance conducted by the barmy but brilliant Nina Koshetz, a truly great singer, are written up with first-class literary flair. These are diaries for anyone interested in the upheavals of the early 20th century, and certainly not just for music-lovers. Phillips’ annotations are a mine of useful and arcane information, and how splendid that there have been no abridgements. More details will have to wait until my review appears in the July BBC Music Magazine. In the meantime, roll on, Vol. 3.

Happy Orthodox Easter

Apart from the well-sung London services, our Easter a month ago was something of a washout, so we were happy to partake of a real spring - just after the heatwave produced by the Hamsin wind had sent temperatures soaring to 39 degrees - in Cypriot Anoyira, where our middle-east-based friends Juliette and Rory have done up a house to perfection.

There are lots of Brits living in the village, but it was good to see so many Greek Cypriots turning out in force to celebrate Orthodox Easter. The services, accompanied by chant which sounds almost indistinguishable from the muezzin cries of Northern Nicosia, go on for hours, so we restless visitors turned up for the two big events - the Good Friday procession of the Epitaphios or flower-covered icon representing Christ's funeral bier around the nearby streets, and the lighting of candles to celebrate Easter on the turn between Saturday and Sunday. Here is the much-admired local papa, a wall-builder by trade, walking behind a group of standard-bearing children with his beautifully-bound Easter hymnal and accompanied by chanting village elders:




And here's the Midnight festival of light. First the candles are lit inside the church, following the 'Christos Anesti' - 'Aleithos Anesti' ('Christ is risen' - 'Truly he is risen'):


Then the priest comes to the west door of the church amid further 'Kyrie eleisons':


And the villagers in all their Easter finery stand around a table on which are placed the sacred icon and the book:


It's a wonderful occasion, though I preferred the Good Friday procession to the Easter merrymaking on account of the firecrackers let off by the local youth around the bonfire, on which they burn an effigy of Judas Iscariot.

Storm-tossed Sibelius

I’ve always wanted to know more about Sibelius’s most encyclopaedic masterpiece, his incidental music to a 1926 Copenhagen production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and its sea-change into something even richer in the two orchestral suites. So preparing a talk before the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s latest concert, with John Storgards conducting all the music of the suites re-ordered to coincide with an abridged version of the play, could only be a pleasure.

There are fascinating combinations in the original version, not least the haunting use of harmonium and a harp placed above the stage. But so symphonically at times does Sibelius engage his enlarged orchestra in the concert-hall transformation that the BBC and Storgards were probably right to go for that option – with one exception: once Prospero’s magic is broken, there should be no return to the music of the storm, as there is at the end of the first suite. Sibelius wrote a brief, austere and noble Epilogue for Helsinki in 1927, adapted from a 1904 orchestral piece called Cassazione; I played that at the talk, and I still think it should be how the music-drama ought to end.

It was possibly the most successful blend of actors and orchestra I’ve encountered in the concert hall, not least because instead of the usual spectacle of a famous thesp or two wheeled in for one rehearsal, only to find matching words and music harder than they thought, the BBC asked Di Trevis to direct a team of young actors fresh from drama school, and they seemed to have worked long and hard on this collaboration. The Prospero, Richard Goulding, was outstanding – used his voice superbly throughout several octaves, never tried to play the exiled duke as an old man, and remained vigorous and charismatic throughout. His is a name of which we shall be seeing and hearing much more. The Miranda, Sasha Higgins did her discovery-of-love scenes very charmingly and the rather more erratic but often quite compelling Benedict Hopper doubled Ariel and Caliban. Only the Ferdinand was disappointing. My friend Isabel, award-winning book abridger, thought the adaptation extremely skilful, even if it could have done with a few more tying up of plotlines at the end and a little less exposition at the beginning. Storgards is a marvellously incisive conductor, and characterised the miniatures as well as the more obviously bigger numbers.

I’ve been singing the hit tunes all weekend. But there ought to be plenty to please the modernists, too. Encountered an absurd friend-of-a-friend before the concert. ‘I shouldn’t be here’, she shrilled, ‘I hate Sibelius’. How strange, I said, I’d never met anyone who hated Sibelius before. ‘Oh, I know many who do. Too tuneful. I like dissonance. Have you seen The Minotaur? It’s had rave reviews.’ In a slightly chilly tone I said that I’d seen reviews which were less than raves, and told her there should be enough dissonance in some of Sibelius’s more outlandish numbers to please her. I wonder if she liked Brett Dean’s Ariel’s Music, a two movement clarinet concerto which could afford to condense its elegy and battle into a single action of half the length. It’s beautifully orchestrated, makes all the right gestures for the memorial piece it is – but where are the really strong ideas? As usual, Sibelius shows us what timeless creativity is all about.

An audience with Sir Harry

Last-minute flurries by our man at the Garrick Club last week brought one of its most distinguished members, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, to talk and to table just before the premiere of The Minotaur. Here he is posing in front of Tim Shaw's minotaur sculpture outside the Royal Opera House, photo courtesy of Robbie Jack and the Royal Opera:


The Garrick’s formal event was a thoughtful, slightly sombre occasion, expertly and sympathetically chaired by Tom Service, who knows what he’s talking about and is especially good at filling in the audience on details the speakers might have taken for granted (who’s Pasiphae, for example). Much of the talk was about Lancashire vowels, enlivened by a question from club member Graham Clark, and about Sir Harry's northern neighbour and spiritual brother Sir John Tom (they were even born in the same nursing home). David Harsent, the poet-librettist sharing the platform, told us how Sir Harry had asked him to ‘go darker’ for certain lines of Ariadne, ‘which with Harry means very dark indeed’. 

My feelings on Birtwistle operas have been divided: bafflement remains over Gawain, which I duly experienced twice but bits of which I only enjoyed once the voices had been liberated from their labyrinth and replaced by instruments in the orchestral piece Gawain’s Journey. But I was drawn into the strange world of The Last Supper, from which I emerged reeling (yes, I know the libretto’s awkward, but the music overpowers it). I suspect my reaction when I go to see The Minotaur in May – pre-empting the chance of a second performance – will be much the same as Rupert Christiansen’s in the Telegraph, who found it 'enthralling, hypnotising - and unloveable'. Still, best to go with an open mind.

Our host lured the Birtwistles to a Garrick supper afterwards. I sat on the left hand of the master, and learnt that he doesn’t allow too many other influences to clog up his singular vision. Said host told him I’d written a book on Prokofiev. ‘Don’t care much for Prokofiev. When you’ve got Musorgsky and Stravinsky, what’s the point?’ Though he did like some of the piano figuration in what he claimed was the Fourth Piano Concerto. ‘Oh, the one for left hand?’ ‘No. not left hand’. So we didn’t find out which one he meant. He admits to his operatic pantheon Pelleas, Boris and Janacek. Ades’s The Tempest and Adams’s Nixon in China he’d never heard a note of – so I had to protest when he tarred the latter with the minimalist brush. He remained very good humoured when a fellow guest quizzed him along the lines of ‘why don’t you write tunes that the man in the street can sing?’ – the reply, with a twinkle, was something along the lines of ‘why on earth should I?’ Anyway, it was an easy-going occasion, not at all daunting. And I was glad knowledgeable and enthusiastic Tom was able to join us, too.

Friends Anneli Halonen and Riikka Hakola, Finland's leading Traviata (her website is www.riikkahakola.net), made quite a day of it on Saturday, going to the final rehearsal of The Minotaur in the morning, which they found scary in the extreme, before joining us for Zurich Opera’s concert Rosenkavalier at the Royal Festival Hall. Persian attar of roses, which has lasted us well since we brought it back from Kashan in Iran (city of rose-oil and dyers, too - how Strauss and Hofmannsthal would have loved it), was made available to everyone we met. Welser-Most drew silky pianissimos from his orchestra, but remained as ever a bit short on temperament and breadth. Still our dear friend and mother of cherished goddaughters Lottie, over with the chorus for a handful of lines, told us he was in tears at the end. Star of the evening was veteran Alfred Muff as a relaxed, easy-going Ochs, so assured. Stemme’s Marschallin was commanding but had too much vibrato for the golden opening of the Trio, and it didn’t help to have the singers on a platform behind the orchestra. Still, what a joy to hear this inexhaustible score out in the open, as it were.

Spring prizes

Yes, I know, it’s been three long months since there was any life in this blog, but as spu-rring is here (as represented by my barely budding mulberry, still in exile on the south side of the square, and more colourful seasonal display beneath it)…


…and as the BBC Music Magazine awards were finally announced on Wednesday, let’s pick up where I left off. I didn’t have anything inspiring to say about such much-touted events as Salome – overrated except for Jordan’s fastidious conducting, the Narraboth and the Page (!) – and Gruberova. But on Tuesday I’d say I got my soul back. My loyal student, and intelligent patron of the arts, Gillian Frumkin, drew belatedly to my attention that the live-wire Jerusalem Quartet, whose first violinist Sasha Pavlovsky usually stays with her in London, were helping to launch Steven Isserlis’s Russian chamber music festival at the Wigmore. So I forsook the BBC Symphony Orchestra, being especially keen to hear the Jerusalems on the eve of their BBCMM award (for this:)


...and boy, was I delighted. Isserlis, clarinettist of the moment Martin Frost and a very imaginative, effortlessly virtuosic pianist new to me, Kirill Gerstein, kicked off with Glinka’s Trio pathetique – hardly great music, but how they cherished its Donizettian bel canto. But the real melodic heart of the matter came from the Jerusalems, in a performance of Borodin’s Second Quartet much meatier, if less silvery, than the familiar interpretation of the mighty Borodins. I heard things I’d never noticed before: the way the cellist leads the quartet into a magically distant key in the first movement recap, lovely touches from the viola and such a droll mock-serious dialogue before the finale bursts out laughing. ‘Moy lyubimy kvartet’, I told Sasha’s charming father in the interval, and it’s true – only Dvorak’s American Quartet has quite the same spirit of delight.

Sasha and cellist Kiril Zlotnikov bowed out to the Amazonian Baiba Skride and Isserlis for the Taneyev Piano Quintet. What a monster, at least in the gusty outer movements, and how convincingly they all rode the storms. I actually preferred the brighter worlds of the second and slow movements – the latter is Taneyev in most leonine mode, with a constantly descending passacaglia figure of striking dignity: utterly memorable. I wanted to hear it again immediately. And listening to the first and third quartets in the afternoon for the Music Mag, I was struck again by how full of feeling Taneyev is in chamber mode – a far cry from the misleading image of the dry-as-dust contrapuntalist, and from interminable works like the cantata At the Reading of a Psalm, after a performance of which by Pletnev (who for some reason loves it), Andrew Stewart and I rudely guffawed in the face of a colleague's ‘Hats off, gentlemen, a masterpiece!’

Andrew, I was glad to see, was one of the 150 or so guests on board the Silver Sturgeon for the third BBCMM awards. Other private faces in public places, Rob Cowan and Anthony Burton, joined me for a blissful ten minutes in the spring sunshine on the upper deck (cycling along the Victoria Embankment, I found myself humming the opening of Janacek’s Osud, which of course is about the guests at the spa resort basking in the sun). Only at the end did I catch up with two of my fellow jurists, Christopher Dingle and the delightful Berta Joncus. Chris said, and I agree, that if we’re asked to do it again in a few years’ time, we should insist on all the same heads getting together, so well did we get on. Alas, although the Jerusalems should have been there to receive their prize, squeezing in a short appearance between a six hour rehearsal for Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence (more of which anon), their taxi failed to meet the SS as it made a special mooring half way through the event. Anyway, I’m delighted they won the chamber award for their vitally re-imagined Shostakovich quartets, though I can now say that their appearance among the threesome was only thanks to the passionate pleading, bullying even, of two of us on the jury that they should be given a chance and a Kagel disc shunted to the Premiere Recording category (same thing happened with Rustem Hayroudinoff and the Rachmaninov Etudes-Tableaux, which made it thanks to the sidewards shift of David Fray’s dazzling Bach/Boulez programme).

As I guessed – and even the jury wasn’t allowed to know until the last minute – Mitsuko’s Beethoven Hammerklavier ran away with Disc of the Year. She made the most charming and vivacious speeches imaginable; filmed, alas, but you could feel her presence and I bet there wasn’t a single person present who didn’t fall in love with her on the spot. She talked amusingly about being built for Schubert and Mozart, but not Beethoven, and told us about her three pianos, one of whom was a real diva. Here she is with her award, as photographed by Mark Harrison for the magazine:


I was also delighted to see Maxim Vengerov there at the lunch. His equally charismatic personality triumphed over that dubious Tango Concerto in the DVD Documentary category (best of a not especially wonderful bunch). No stars graced my table, and I was in the faintly embarrassing position of being with the EMI folk when frankly I wouldn’t have chosen Martha Argerich’s Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 1 as the best orchestral disc (not naughty enough for me; though the Piano Quintet is a different matter – chamber material, though). I hope I made amends by telling David Groves in all sincerity that I’d rooted for Pappano’s Respighi disc. Of the other special guests, I only got to speak to Robert Carsen, there to receive the best DVD Performance award for his spare but harrowing and ultimately transfigurative production of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmelites, about which we were all unanimous. Even in the minute or so they screened of that most moving of all final operatic scenes, tears came to my eyes. As they did to Carsen’s in his acceptance speech; his mother had died three days before, and she specially loved the Carmelites.

Anyway, the Jerusalems’ day spent on Souvenir de Florence with Joshua Bell and Steven Isserlis turned out to be more than worth it. As an enthusiastic American gentleman who accosted me in the Wigmore foyer afterwards put it, ‘that was beyond belief, wasn’t it?’ And it was. It’s such a tough piece, and I’d never appreciated quite how exhausting the Finnish-sounding third movement can be for the listener as well as the performers. It was good, too, to hear Jerusalem viola-player Amichai Grosz equal in the beauty of his solos to soaring Bell and subtle Isserlis. Another ingenious programme began with Arensky’s Second Quartet (for violin, viola and two cellos) in memory of Tchaikovsky: a personal and at times meltingly beautiful work. I hadn’t realised that the second movement formed the basis of his best known piece, the Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovsky for string orchestra. Rubinstein’s First Cello Sonata sounded commonplace by comparison – the main theme of the finale starts out as if it wouldn’t be out of place in a G&S patter song – but again Kirill Gerstein made light of a heavyweight piano part (you could tell that Rubinstein, like Taneyev, was a first-rate pianist). Pity I can’t hear the third concert in the series on Saturday – Rosenkavalier at the South Bank beckons – but I wouldn’t miss Bell, Isserlis and Mustonen in the Shostakovich Second Piano Trio on Monday for anything.

Best of 2007?

The question-mark is there because I can’t pretend an overview of all the great events of last year. That’s why, of course, we had a wide-ranging jury for the 2007 BBC Music Magazine Awards, nominations for which are there on the magazine’s website awaiting your votes until 28 February. Hardest-fought categories were Instrumental and Chamber, where some of us only had our way thanks to certain shuntings over to the jury-only awards (yet to be announced, so I’ll keep mum on that).

In two categories I can balance what I’d personally like to see win – Hayroudinoff’s Rachmaninov Etudes-Tableaux and Schwanewilms’s Strauss Lieder disc – with what I think the public may (equally deservedly) choose – Mitsuko Uchida’s magisterial Beethoven Hammerklavier Sonata and the Terezin anthology from Anne-Sofie von Otter and friends. I was sorry not to see any of Julia Fischer’s several concertos discs make it to the Orchestral troika, and must briefly note that candidates for the ‘Opera and Dramatic Oratorio’ category were very thin on the ground – a dearth more than compensated by the DVD offerings decided by the jury (and TBA). Most overrated of the reviewers' five-star choices which we had to sift? Surely the misalliance of a tired-sounding Thomas Quasthoff and Dorothea Roschmann in the least impressive of many Bach cantatas up for consideration, an otherwise revelatory strand in the mountain of listening.

In the meantime the CD containing my Most Played Track of the Year couldn't be considered for the 2007 awards because it had already appeared on another label. That’s Wigmore Hall Live’s (re)issue of the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s 1998 lunchtime recital...


...and the track in question is her carefully modulated, earth-motherish dream of a Handel aria, ‘As with rosy steps’ from Theodora. Roger Vignoles’s ethereal tread makes sure we don’t miss the orchestral trappings.

The beginning of 2007 saw me eat my words about not sitting through another Handel staging if I could help it. Four hours of his relatively early masterpiece, Agrippina, at English National Opera flew by thanks to the teeming inspiration – many of the arias, of course, found more famous homes in later works – and the witty, resourceful staging of David McVicar, briefly dark and threatening when it needed to be. The cast wasn’t as perfect as Sir Charles Mackerras’s line-up for the revival of the Royal Opera Orlando a few weeks later, but each singer communicated vividly and relished the opportunities McVicar provided for a tour de force or two. The cocktail bar scene (seen here in Clive Barda's production photograph with Christine Rice as Nero and Lucy Crowe as Poppea) was laugh-out-loud funny.



Most unsettling operatic scene of the year would have to be the shadowing of Banquo and Fleance by the assassins in Richard Jones’s Glyndebourne production of Verdi’s Macbeth. Cardboard boxes and smilies have never seemed more sinister. It was musically a top-notch evening too. I also felt – and in this I’m in even more of a minority – that drama and music fused perfectly in the Royal Opera’s much-booed Pelleas et Melisande: to use the pit and the auditorium as the natural world seen and sensed by Debussy’s bewildered protagonists was an inspiration on Stanislas Nordey's part that also allowed perfect co-ordination with Rattle and the orchestra as well as direct communication with the audience.

Stinker of the year? Glass’s Satyagraha: four chords in forty-five minutes for starters – my conventional mind screamed out for modulation – and an overrated cliché-ridden production from Improbable Theatre. All so dead on its feet at ENO after live-wire Americana courtesy of Bernstein, Comden and Green in Jude Kelly’s revival of On the Town – a total work of art that wears its learning lightly.

For me, the most overwhelming theatrical event of 2007 year was the National Theatre of Iceland’s mortuary-bound Peer Gynt, directed with an intensity that veered between the visceral and the visionary by Baltasur Kormakur. Eggert Thor Jonsson's photograph of Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson’s Peer at the end of his life, visited by a final vision of Solveig (Brynhildur Gudjonsdottir), shows one of many extraordinary stage pictures.


I saw this fast-moving but by no means cut-to-ribbons Ibsen adaptation twice in one week at the Barbican's Pit theatre, and it wrung me out on both occasions. The sudden havens of crucial Grieg – Ase’s lament, Solveig’s song – in the often frightening ‘sound design’ certainly helped to heighten the emotions. And how extraordinary not only that the Icelanders should have learnt it in English for their London appearance, but also that they should have spoken the feisty translation with a clarity and range that you don't often hear at the RSC or the National (though notable exceptions there have been Simon Russell Beale's perfect comic timing in Hytner's sunny - too sunny? - Much Ado about Nothing - and poor Alex Jennings, doing his best to put resonance into the arch piece of fluff that is Coward's Present Laughter).

Finally, and briefly, the concert scene: hard to choose between a Gergiev blockbuster programme that actually worked, again at the Barbican - Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments and Rite of Spring bookending Debussy's La Mer and a Prelude a l'apres midi with the most refined of dying falls, and Prokofiev's raucous incantation Seven,they are Seven - and the complete Kodaly Hary Janos music done with gusto by Hungarians under Adam Fischer in Vienna. Kodaly's ideas and orchestration teem with wit and spirit throughout: no excuse for just hearing the Suite (and even that's a rarity in the UK, perhaps because cimbalom players are thin on the ground here?) New works? Unquestionably Widmann's ad absurdam... (see first blog entry) and, on a larger scale, MacMillan's The Sacrifice also featured below, promising big things for his new Passion this Easter.

I wanted to go on to books and films, but I've prated too much already, so that'll have to do.

Song and dance in Mali

I promised not to tax your patience with reams of holiday snaps and chat. Yet I think I can justify a brief zigzag across the blog-piste if I stick to matters more or less musical.

There are almost as few travellers' destinations in Mali as there are travellers to fill them (though fill them, in peak season, they easily do). So it's only to be expected that rituals have been tailored to order: in Dogon country, where animist traditions cling on partly due to a devil's pact with tourism, they bring out the fake masks - the real ones are, of course, sacred - and do fake dances to order (it was our signal to flee down the falaise once the hitherto quiet village of Begni Mato welcomed a tour group, and the drumming began).

Of course those who travel in twos, threes or fours high-handedly demand a more authentic experience when they can command it; such is the paradox of our privileged wanderings. We found it during the holiday of Tabaski (the west African version of the Muslims' Eid Al-adha festival, the one marking the Abraham and Isaac story), riding out with Sophie to Diabolo, a quiet village near Djenne. Our informal tour of Diabolo was hassle-free and amiable; but it was enlivened enormously by the entertainment taking place near the pond. Dame Ethel Smyth would have been pleased to find a (nearly all) ladies' ensemble...


...accompanying a group we later saw described as 'the Women Dancers of Diabolo'. So they weren't averse to performing their rites before tourists; but this was a spontaneous event to celebrate Tabaski.


The men of Djenne, in the meantime, honoured Friday prayers at the great mud mosque in all their new just-for-Tabaski finery:


Afterwards, they filed out and stood for five minutes in silent rows to mark a funeral. Sophie thought we were exceptionally fortunate to witness Djenne life at its most formal and colourful. She did, in fact, wheel out an instrumental ensemble at Hotel Djenne Djenno for a large tour party which failed to materialise - for an explanation, see Sophie's recent blog entry. Anyway, the few of us there were lucky enough to enjoy a very spirited balaphone group. I'm fortunate to have heard this big xylophone wielded with supreme mastery by Mamadou Diabate, the leading virtuoso from Burkina Faso, in a very strange meeting with schrammel players at one of Vienna's many heurigen. But Sophie's boys certainly had plenty of panache.

What little I've heard of Malian music is pure sunshine, incarnate in the bluegrass but not at all bluesy guitar of the late, great Ali Farka Toure. His playing nicely encapsulates the apparently easy-going spirit of a delightful people.

I'll leave you with a shot of me at my jolliest, sitting on the roof of our pinasse as we sailed down the majestic Niger, not far from Ali Farka's home village of Niafounke.


You'd never know that I'd just spent one of the worst nights imaginable, buffeted by the windswept waves of Lake Debo in the heart of the Niger inland delta. Sunrise, though, brought a return to the high spirits of the previous day's journey from Timbuktu. And we did make our ultimate destination, Mopti, in a record-breaking two days.

Stony reception

Peter Bourne, a ‘life member of the Serge Prokofiev Association’ and no relation (I assume) of our hero St. Matthew, e-mailed me to say he had found his way to the blog. Although he ‘read it with great interest and enjoyment’, he found the tone of my Stone Flower appraisal rather negative, even if he agreed with most of my criticisms (Mr Bourne, I’ll spare you my views on the same company’s Nutcracker – let’s just leave it at the choice adjectives ‘incoherent’ and ‘routine’). Perhaps I should have started by making it clear that it could only be a good thing that someone, at last, should have fought for the right to choregraph more than anyone else in the UK has ever done of Prokofiev's full score. So thanks, first and foremost, to Michael Corder for making the attempt against the odds.

Mr Bourne thinks that the production would come closer to being a ‘genuinely popular ballet classic’ rather than a ‘near miss’ if they did what we wanted and reinstated the ‘Mistress of the Copper Mountain’ introduction. Would it be asking too much of the restive ballet audience to sit through Prokofiev’s Prologue before curtain up? It might mean a cut or two in the choreography, but that would surely be no bad thing. How about it, Corder and co?

A Nutcracking New Year...

...to any readers. It should have been a Christmas greeting, but the selection of images didn't reach me in time before we headed off to Mali. Anyway, here is Eric Richmond's production photograph of the three flavoursome Gobstoppers (aka the Trepak boys) from what is now a Matthew Bourne evergreen (I dug out my old Edinburgh Festival programme to remind myself that his Nutcracker! premiered with Opera North's Yolanta over a decade and a half ago). They provided the icing on the cake to the I-want-to-be-in-the-show euphoria of a New Adventures pre-Xmas Saturday matinee. I took young Evie Bell to see it, and though her reaction was one of extreme intoxication - we couldn't prise her out of her seat after Act One, so impatient was she for the show to go on - her father and I relished it almost as much. With the dancers appearing costumed in the Sadler's Wells foyer afterwards to collect money for AIDS charities, the trepak troika were a draw for an indulgent godfather, while Evie gravitated more towards the marshmallow girls and cossetted Sugar Plum. I don't know which of us felt more like a kid in a sweetshop.

The show - for show it certainly is - still brims with energy, perhaps because so many of the dancers (including those Gobstoppers) are fresh from ballet school. Bourne's gift for comic and occasionally scary storytelling goes way beyond the tame mimes of classical ballet, and the designs have lost nothing of their garish audacity. After three weeks of listening to 14 full-orchestral Nutcrackers for Radio Three's Building a Library - you may now have heard how pacy, brightly lit Gergiev took the biscuit - I found it surprisingly easy to adjust to the 20-piece band, mainly because Brett Morris allowed no inch of slack. We took Evie to meet the very friendly harpist in the pit afterwards, and she revealed a few secrets about synths stepping in for second harp, tambourine and cymbals when the players had their hands too full (and she was already playing as much of both harp parts as she could). It was an especially bright idea to have only one cello launch the Pas de deux - no point in trying to make a handful sound like a glossy full-orchestral section.

That Saturday was quite a day to bid farewell to glittering London before succumbing to travel fever. I had to leave Evie and Simon swanning with the dancers and rush down to the Barbican to give another pre-performance talk before more Tchaikovsky - the ideas-packed Third Orchestral Suite alongside Rachmaninov's Fourth Piano Concerto, made to sound like naturalness itself (which it isn't) by Nelson Freire, and the Divertimento from Stravinsky's Baiser de la fee. Reports from Moscow had been mixed about Bolshoy supremo Alexander Vedernikov, but he impressed with a clear textured Prokofiev Fiery Angel last year, and this concert with an evidently smitten BBC Symphony Orchestra set new standards in the high Tchaikovsky style. Much more detailed and supple than Jurowski's performance a few seasons back - which only went to show that you can't stint with rehearsal time on the exposed and selective instrumentation - Vedernikov's paired two sets of movements, showing the Valse melancolique as the dark flipside of the bittersweet opening Elegie and sweeping without a break from the scherzo through the earlier variations before rising to the challenge of the imperial polonaise. The audience was giddy with Tchaikovsky's profligacy of melodic invention, and Vedernikov will certainly be back, possibly for the complete Sleeping Beauty in concert with the BBCSO (though I did also mention to Paul Hughes that I hoped they'd run to the expense of four accordions for the delicious Second Suite, too).

I'll think of something later to say about those BBC Music Mag awards nominations, now public knowledge, and perhaps add a line or two about our extraordinary holiday, though I know this shouldn't be the forum for such things. In the meantime, I need to recover some photos as well as a certain amount of sleep lost in the overnight flight (not to mention throughout a bumpy night on the bottom of a coracle crossing a wind-tossed lake in the middle of the Niger delta). Mali tended to exaggerate the familiar traveller's mix of exhilaration and exasperation; now it feels right to be back. In the meantime, you can view an embarrassing photo of Brits out in the midday sun before the Djenne Mosque over on Sophie's blog.