Heroine of my late childhood and early teens, Dame Joan Sutherland has died at the age of 83. The natural end of a life well lived is perhaps the reason why I didn't shed tears as I did over the untimely deaths of Hildegard Behrens, Lucia Popp and Tatiana Troyanos. I've added my own tribute to Ismene Brown's flavoursome personal appraisal over on The Arts Desk, and I wrote about how I came to The World of Joan Sutherland in an earlier blog entry.
Perhaps all that's left here is to list a few personal favourites from the immense Stupendography. For the early brightness, the two albums making up The Art of the Prima Donna are the obvious starting point. There's pathos in her very young Donna Anna on the Giulini set of Mozart's Don Giovanni. I loved her four heroines in The Tales of Hoffmann, as much for the performing edition well espoused by scholar-hubbie Bonynge as for her feat in flipping from automaton Olympia to consumptive Antonia and seductress Giulietta (how she hated the production shot of her as Venetian vamp, pushing it away at an evening I once attended in my infatuated teens, chaired by Alan Sievewright).
The partnership with Pavarotti produced phenomenal results, including the irresistible (and funny) Fille du regiment
and I have a special fondness for that duets disc they recorded, which includes more top-drawer Donizetti (Linda di Chamonix) and surprising Verdi (Otello and Aida).
The Turandot suggested potential new directions Sutherland by and large didn't take, thereby extending her singing life by sticking to bel canto. But Massenet's heroine Esclarmonde - gorgeous camp icon on my treasured LP box above, one to add to the Lakme I posted earlier - was the role that inspired me to write to her, and to get the gracious reply + signed photo I mention on TAD. You'll need good speakers to get the full brilliance of that most fabulous of top Ds. And so, the voice lives on.
You know that awful moment when you're talking to a person who seems to be interesting, to have led an extraordinary life unfolding in articulate detail, and you realise it's insanity or paranoia talking? I had one such experience the other Friday at a BBC Symphony concert, when a lady I thought I recognised started telling me of her time as a six year old prodigy invited to play in that venerable orchestra in the first violins alongside leader Paul Beard.
And just as I was suggesting she should narrate this extraordinary experience, we were off on a tale of how she knew the truth about Princess Di, about how Tony Blair's minions had tried to kill her as she came out of the Albert Hall, and how young Leo Blair had spat at her in the street. In the aftermath of having asked for her e-mail address, which she was slowly writing on my programme with my pen, both seemingly unextractable, I suddenly saw delightful Mark Lowther of BBC and now Anglican fame and managed to retreat in some distress.
Well, that's a long way of saying that this is how it felt watching The Barefoot Contessa. J had ordered it up from LoveFilm on the strength that script and direction were by Joseph L Mankiewicz of All About Eve fame. Again, it starts promisingly: Humphrey Bogart as a script writer at the funeral of the Contessa whose film career he helped to launch. Intelligent voice-over, intriguing premise: the heroine is dead at the beginning of the film, so what happened?
We meet her as a high-principled dancer in a Spanish tavern. It's classy Ava Gardner, and the other characters all seem well-drawn. But then it begins to go off the rails. The oblique premise of the title is that our lady likes to go back into the gutter from whence she came by sleeping around with rough (a point, like so much else in the film, that the script avoids stating explicitly - throwing off the smart shoes and going barefoot over gravel is the symbol for it).
So you can imagine that when she meets her Prince Charming and marries him, only to find he's had his bits shot off in the war, trouble looms...
Strange is the best one can say for The Barefoot Contessa. Film critic Gavin Lambert described it as 1954's co-candidate for the Higher Lunacy award along with the even more outlandish Johnny Guitar. It's not standard Hollywood fare, that's for sure, but it can't be called a success.
I'd like to say another example of the higher lunacy was Edwin Roxburgh's Concerto for Orchestra, premiered at the BBC Symphony Orchestra's Friday concert. But the only off-the-wallness there was the commissioning of an undead establishment work. Nothing about it - colour, phrasing, ideas - had the slightest hint of originality. I sat there fuming about the waste of the orchestra's time - they played it brilliantly - and ours. Fortunately Elgar's Falstaff rolled up to show us what could be done with an invention that seems, especially by comparison, profligate, and with fabulous originality of orchestration. And that Delius piece. But you can read more about it in my Arts Desk review, along with an LSO concert that it really wasn't worth rushing back from glorious Sandwich - more anon - to hear.
It's now over two years since we properly began to discover King's Lynn, one of the most extensive and perfectly-preserved old towns of England, courtesy both of our friend Jill who has a home in the former Benedictine priory there and of our ongoing Norfolk churches walks, and the wonders continue to unfold.
For the past few years, the September Sunday after our Saturday of walking has also been Open House day in town. We thought we'd peered into most of the hidden courtyards, undercrofts and timbered rooms already, but there was an addition to the list this year: the Greenland Fisheries building with its oversailing upper floor which stands on the edge of the old town and has just been done up, awaiting occupancy.
So for the first time we were able to see the Jacobean wall-paintings there, and very splendid they are too. Here's Hope
and what looks like a reclining Neptune on a sea of hellfire.
I also wanted to spend longer than we had two years ago in the most spacious ecclesiastical glory I've seen in Norfolk next to Norwich Cathedral, St Nicholas, which isn't even the quasi-cathedral of Lynn - that would be the impressive jumble of St Margaret - but its chapel of ease. In the earlier entry, I gave us a glimpse of the stunning angel roof and the monuments, but I hadn't inspected the bench ends in the chancel
this swordrest of 1757 (hope I've got that right)
the perpendicular-style holy water stoup near the bigger and equally beautiful old font
nor the South Porch (facade illustrated up top). The bosses of its lovely lierne star vault have been garishly regilded, and I'm not at all sure about the pink paint
but some of the supporting heads are curious, to say the least.
Once again I recommend Simon Knott's inestimable Norfolk Churches Site for further details. The entry on St. Nicholas begins with a hymn to Lynn better than anything I can manage, and which says it all for me, so I'll take the liberty of quoting it in full here:
Kings Lynn, the friendliest of all East Anglian towns, is so far away from anywhere else of any size that it has a fierce independence. It is as though it is in Norfolk, but not really of it. The town is in the Yorkshire television area, and this is not unreasonable, since it looks towards Hull and Lincoln as much as it does towards Norwich and Cambridge. All the northern Fenland comes here on a Saturday to shop, and two of England's biggest churches stand half a mile apart at either end of the main shopping street. We have already met St Margaret, the southern one, a great cruciform parish church on the Saturday Market, at the heart of the medieval town [tombstone outside the west door illustrated below].
Today, St Margaret is surrounded by busy narrow streets, 19th century shop fronts and 20th century flats, a cheerful scruffiness that melts into the haunting Lynn waterfront [here I'm inserting yet another photograph of the iconic Custom House, and a view across the Ouse to the church at West Lynn].
But just off of the Tuesday Market, in the part of town known as the Northend, there is St Nicholas. It sits in its peaceful, tree-lined setting, lifting George Gilbert Scott's 19th century spire above quiet yards, inns, banks, hotels and the jaunty Corn Exchange. This vast hall of a church, some 200 feet long, was, incredibly, built as a chapel of ease to St Margaret, and even today is styled 'St Nicholas Chapel'.
If you exclude Cambridge's Parker's Piece, which is surely too big to be considered, then the Tuesday Market in Kings Lynn is East Anglia's largest urban square, a dreamy lozenge of 18th and 19th century architecture. It surprises me that it is not better known, although the tourist industry is really beginning to gear up in Lynn. This is partly because it is a designated area of deprivation, its old industries struggling to employ the people that they once did [and many of those old industrial buildings have been recently knocked down, opening up views like this one across to St Margaret].
Consequently, there is a smell of European money, the whole town is undergoing a face-lift, and the museums are of the highest quality. And, it must be said, the people are really very friendly indeed, as if they appreciate your interest. Everywhere, in museums, shops and pubs, people go out of their way to help you. If you are fed up with being treated like dirt by the tourist industry in Cambridge, come forty miles north and spend your money here instead.
Amen to all that, and keep up the great work, Simon. As for the walk, I promise to have a figure of funds raised for all you generous donors soon.
Well, let's just say we would be wise not to rule out the possibility. One of the many marvellous aspects of Jessica Hausner's film Lourdes is that it doesn't treat religion at its most intense, some would say its most oppressive, as a subject for ridicule. In an accompanying interview on the DVD Sylvie Testud, who plays the protagonist and who seems another kind of original, authentic personage offscreen, evokes the French phrase 'tirer sur les ambulances': don't shoot at easy targets. And Hausner doesn't, though she can certainly be wry, as can the good priest in her film, about the more questionable aspects of the pilgrim trade.
Hausner uses colours in an emotional way: the sludgy browns and greens of the hotel where the group of pilgrims is staying, the hints of natural beauty around the basilica, the little red hat that our heroine sports as her helper whizzes her along in her wheelchair, the flood of brightness later when...but I've been spoiling the Cranford tales, the diplo-mate tells me, so I'd better shut up (though I don't think in any case that the plot is the point). I do know I missed a lot of panoramic filming on a small screen - the actors blended in among 10,000 real pilgrims and priests on location - and I want to see Lourdes in the cinema. It's an understated masterpiece.
It also raises the troubling question of what you do with an apparent miracle. As, of course, does the glorious Song of Bernadette, with its marvellously thoughtful and ambiguous script by George Seaton after the Franz Werfel novel.
I resisted watching it for years, but I finally succumbed and, like Igor Stravinsky and his wife Vera when they went to see it in Hollywood, shed tears through much of it.
Stravinsky was originally involved as the composer of the film score. That didn't get very far, but it did leave us with the music of the vision which ended up in the central Andante of the Symphony in Three Movements.
I think I must have been misinformed that Bernard Herrmann, that great collaborator of Alfred Hitchcock, took over the Song of Bernadette project. He did in fact write the music for Jane Eyre, another venture Stravinsky began but scotched (the hunting scene went into Ode). Been thinking about Herrmann a fair bit recently, because of the parallels Christopher Palmer draws with Delius in his excellent comparative study (Delius's North Country Sketches, it seems, were drafts for the music of the opera he never wrote, but Herrmann did: Wuthering Heights, of all things. Palmer says the power of Herrmann's vision equals Britten's in Peter Grimes, so I'd better hear it).
Anyway, the Song of Bernadette score, which turns out not to be by Herrmann but by Alfred Newman, uses the essential Delian components of pastoral woodwind and a wordless distant choir for the surprisingly sensitive vision scene, very different from Stravinsky's. See if you don't melt at the expressive nuances of Jennifer Jones. Apologies for the poor picture quality, but this snippet does at least have the scene in its entirety, and sets it up well.
Even if you don't sympathise, I do recommend you watch the film in its entirety for the powerful and far from simplistically sentimental fallout. Preferably in a double-bill with Lourdes.
The trouble is, I tend to have done just that over the past few years. Can't remember when I last got to grips with a disc or a live performance of the Bradford-born German's music: probably the time I seemed to be alone in liking Julia Hollander's much-lambasted ENO production of Fennimore and Gerda in the good old days of the Sunday Correspondent (Jane Livingston of the press office seemed to be eternally grateful for that, which is how I maintained my tenuous foothold there for a while). Yes, it was the one in which Sally Burgess climbed into the piano. But Mackerras kept a stream of beauty alive in the orchestra, and having seen the far more insipid St Louis version at the Edinburgh Festival as an underwhelming introduction, I was grateful for the strengths of this one.
Now it's time to prepare the BBC Symphony students for Sir Andrew Davis's performance of The Song of the High Hills next Friday. Can you believe I've never listened to the work before, although the Mackerras CD has been sitting on the shelves - Appalachia I do know and love - and the late Christopher Palmer, whose typically 'only connect' study of the composer I'm reading at long last, thought Song Delius's supreme masterpiece.
On a first hearing without a score, I wasn't so sure; more detailed study on Tuesday morning may yet change my stereotypical resistance to music that just seems to drift. I did, though, stop swimming in the Delian soup and really listen to what turns out to be the section where Delius writes 'The wide far distance - The great solitude'. The wordless chorus which was the composer's passport to infinity ever since he heard Negro spirituals from afar on the Florida orange grove he managed in the 1880s, the Grieg-like freshness of the woodwind writing and the celestial string drift: if these aren't visionary, I don't know what is.
It all stems from Delius's many walking expeditions in Norway. I'd love to follow in his footsteps but I only - only! - have Alps, Apennines, the Hindu Kush and the Western Ghats to evoke a parallel sense of high, remote solitude.
The above and below don't quite fit - in fact I was in Verbier - but they'll accompany well enough Delius's letter to his wife Jelka in June 1896 from the Jotunheim. He wrote: 'the sun sets at about 8.30 behind the mountains and huge shadows begin to creep across the valley: at 10.30 only the tops of the hills covered with fir trees are lighted by the sun's rays and stand out as if in gold. Then everything disappears in a mystic half-light, all very dreamy and mysterious - it is light enough to read and to distinguish every detail at the other end of the valley and on the mountain tops.'
Of course I didn't have his insomnia from the sun rising again at 2.30am, though I've experienced that in Ostrobothnia, St Petersburg and Faro in midsummer. Translated into music, the expression is one of regretful chromatic transience. Constant Lambert was right to say that in masterpieces of the first order we don't separate harmony from melody, rhythm and orchestration. His example of a (then) contemporary composer who did everything, Sibelius, loomed in all his glory in a half-extraordinary Philharmonia concert I heard conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen on Thursday.
Yet in life Delius was a man of many parts and unexpected vigour, at least in his earlier years: a synagogue singer in Jacksonville, a Nordic walker of Wordsworthian stamina, Nietzschean sensualist since his Leipzig days and in Paris the friend of Munch, Strindberg and Gauguin. Your eyes don't deceive you: that is indeed Nevermore up top behind Delius in the portrait painted by his wife Jelka in 1912. The Tahitian reclined above the mantelpiece in the home Fritz and Jelka shared in Grez sur Loing and now she's in the Courtauld (and presumably, at this very moment, in the Gauguin exhibition). The colours below don't seem at all right, but wikimedia copyright-free images are not to be sniffed at.
The wonder of Palmer's monograph is that it covers all this, and makes extraordinary connections with other spirits of the age. Grainger is an obvious one, as one of the many folk who served the paralysed, blind and testy composer in later years. I've already been getting excited by discovering more of his music in preparation for next year's anniversary.
Today, in fact, on a wet Sunday which kept us indoors, The Song of the High Hills made me turn to Grainger's two extraordinary Hill Songs. Their original wind-band arrangements I found on a stunning Chandos disc which is a typical Grainger ragbag, including as it also does his 'rambles' on Dowland's 'Now, o now I needs must part' and Bach's 'Sheep may safely graze' as well as another epic oddity, The Power of Rome and the Christian Heart. Often quirky, sometimes too meandering just like Delius, never boring (unlike Delius, at least to my ears, occasionally).
It was Grainger who compared Delius to Duke Ellington, and thanks again to Palmer for making me seek out the awkwardly-titled Transblucency, with its wordless soprano melding into trombone and duetting with clarinet.
So much more to discover on the Palmer trail, not least several direct comparisons recommended between Delius and Gershwin, the music of Karg-Elert and the film scores of Bernard Herrmann (it was the diplo-mate, in fact, who came into the room while I was playing the first of the North Country Sketches and declared it sounded like a Hitchcock soundtrack. Not as deaf, then, to orchestral as opposed to vocal beauties as he professes). In the meantime, for the class I have to balance The Song of the High Hills with a work I love to distraction, Elgar's Falstaff. The human and the natural should make good bedfellows in Friday's concert.
Melancholy, geriatric Eastbourne is where I liked to be beside the seaside as a child. The parents would drive down there about once a month on Sundays in spring and summer, and our rituals would take us from the Wish Tower Cafe, where a difficult friend of ours more recently fled the smell of incontinence on our last revisit, to the Martello Tower, the Lifeboat Museum, the bandstand and the Redoubt.
Returning there to catch the last day of the Ravilious(es) exhibition at the Towner Art Gallery earlier this month, I persuaded my companions to indulge me on a trip down memory lane. We'd done a bit of it when J was singing in a Carmina Burana up the coast with the divine Mary Plazas and a very competent school orchestra. But we hadn't retraced the old route. And I found nothing much had changed. Maybe the older generation is marginally less in evidence, and a few cafes along the prom-prom-prom serve espresso, but that's about it.
The 1930s bandstand, replacing the Victorian 'birdcage' original, was still in full working order. My old dad used to love this music (in fact the only piece I ever heard him hum was 'The Yeomen of England' by Edward German*). And it's still playing to the same sort of crowds (since I assume that the original senior citizens are mostly no more).
This time I had a little more admiration for the design.
Incidentally, I can't remember where I recently read it, but Debussy apparently didn't actually compose La mer at the Grand Hotel nearby; he simply put some finishing touches to the manuscript. And he thought Eastbourne rather drab, though I must say the Duke of Devonshire's white stucco buildings and the gardens are a bit jollier than the post-bombing mess they made of Dieppe central.
On, then, to pay homage to the slot machines on Eugenius Birch's thousand-foot long 1860s pier
and along the East Parade to the Redoubt. Built between 1804 and 1812 as another protection against the Napoleonic invasion, it was always my favourite haunt as a child for what it housed - not so much the model village but a fantasy grotto, apparently mocked up in the early 1960s. What magic I found in its fluorescent fibreglass rock acquarium and its lilac-lit parade of Ionic columns and classical statues. All removed about a decade ago, the nice man in the military museum told me. Anyway, the Redoubt itself has been handsomely restored to something like its original state, and was completely untouristed when we arrived in the mid-afternoon.
The attendant also persuaded me to buy a little clutch of heritage walk leaflets, not by any means wasted as I wanted to explore one area I hadn't seen as a child - the old town which preceded the rail-inspired bathing resort by many centuries. There's not much to see there, and it's quite a hike inland, but worth it for the church. We approached via the posh Victorian west end and the grandiose town hall ('free renaissance' says Pevsner).
St Mary-the-Virgin, on the slopes of the Bourne stream, has suffered from - or been saved by, depending on which way you look at it - Victorian restoration. Still, it's a much-loved place of worship with a healthy 50-strong choir, we were told. The Norman nave yields to a very wide and large chancel with romanesque-style capitals.
In the Gildredge Chapel there's a very fantastical, blow-dried St Michael conquering the dragon by Hugh Easton, made after the 1943 bombing.
The church's most fascinating memorial commemorates the untimely death of Henry Lushington, who survived the Black Hole of Calcutta by drinking his own sweat only to be 'deliberately and inhumanely murdered' in Patna at the age of 26 by 'the Nabob Cossim Ally Kawn'. His parents erected a bust by Sir Robert Taylor above their long and loving inscription.
Outside, the church with its massy 14th century tower is complemented by an adjoining 16th century rectory manor.
There's not a lot of medieval building to be seen in the vicinity, so we headed down to the pretty Motcombe Gardens and a house opposite where an iron silhouette marks the home of the very late, great Tommy Cooper (!)
And just like that we were back at the station for the return train to London.
*Talk of the devil and here it is. I never thought to hear the tune my father never sang beyond the first line, and always studiously avoided an LP of Merrie England in the local library. But in the recently recreated Prom Last Night of 1910, there it was from the very unlikely, and now rather knackered, vocal chords of Sergei Leiferkus. The rendition is idiosyncratic, to say the least.
If you want less bizarre diction, Peter Dawson can be heard on YouTube too. But a minute and a half is quite enough for me. G&S's Yeomen of the Guard - now that's quite another matter.
Good in parts is the best I can clergically say for everything I've seen in the last week - except Alvin Ailey's troupe, that is, which was wholly inspirational in terms of the execution, though even there the choreography could be dodgy in places. No need to recap on Jurowski's fascinating Mahler 3 with the oh-so-slow (but still oh-so-well-played) finale nor Gergiev's horrid Shchedrin and masterly Musorgsky-Ravel; both I've written up on The Arts Desk, so click on those links if you want to read further.
I must say I wondered if I was going to agree at first with colleague Igor's rave about Niobe, Regina di Tebe at the Royal Opera - and I went because of his review and what a charming student, Caroline Kennedy, had written about it. I detected only three and a bit signs of blazing originality in the hitherto-obscure Steffani's first act, chiefly the string revolutions of the celestial spheres observed in his Palace of Harmony by King Anfione (the self-styled Polish 'soprano and tenor' Jacek Laszczkowski, pictured above by Bill Cooper, who took the Royal Opera shots it's now OK again to feature on blogs, thanks to all the comment fuss over at Intermezzo). There were also an irregular, dancing ditty and a quirky lovesong respectively for secondary lovers Tiberino (Lothar Odinius) and Manto (Amanda Forsythe).
Then, in the second and third acts, the wonders of Lukas Hemleb's sometimes bizarrely costumed Schwetzingen-originated production began to work together with Steffani's more outlandish inspiration. Laszczkowski, a singer of rare stage presence but holey technique (cloudy middle range beneath stunning soprano top), elevated with Anfione's divine illusion
and his consort Niobe (Veronique Gens) sported in equally illusory fashion with the false Mars of Creon (Iestyn Davies). They get a gorgeous duet and a levitational scene with floating balloons which worked its way into my dreams last night.
The fascination of the mangled myth, so horrifically treated in Ovid's Metamorphoses (I re-read the Ted Hughes translation before going to sleep last night), takes over for the closing scene. The would-be divine consorts have their hubris duly punished; their children are slaughtered, Anfione stabs himself and his life leaks away in an extraordinary chromatic death scene that peters out, while Niobe turns to stone in an even sparer number that also has no chance to conclude. Gens turned in an exemplary, fashion-plate Niobe, inspected here as a golden statue by Tiresias (Bruno Taddia) and nurse Nerea (Delphine Galou).
With the exception of Laszczkowski's erratic vocals, more than mitigated by his handsome charisma, the cast was outstanding, with Davies (seen here in his iffy get-up with Alastair Miles's Poliferno in tow) the most stylish of the lot.
The vitality which suggested that perhaps there was more good music in the work than is in fact the case came from Thomas Hengelbrock and his electrifying Balthasar Neumann Ensemble. O numi, o ciel, the second barockfest I've enjoyed in a month - what's come over me?
Whereas David Alden's production of Janacek's The Makropulos Case at English National Opera was a known quantity, one I'd been stunned by when Cheryl Barker took on the role of the 337-year-old diva heroine first time round. I thought this was going to be just as good: Richard Armstrong proved both precise and headlong stepping into the late, great Sir Charles Mackerras's shoes; Amanda Roocroft caught the playful side of Emilia Marty's bizarre historical perspectives very well in the first two acts and pierced the soul in her asides about her dried-out life (photographs for ENO by Neil Libbert).
The great final scene, however, lacked for me both the cosmic perspectives opened up by Anja Silja in Nikolaus Lehnhoff's Glyndebourne production and the sheer vocal allure of Barker last time round (Roocroft can't always be heard, and you never know whether the sound above the stave is going to come out frayed or spot-on).
Plus there's the problem of the way Alden stages the end. I take his point about the men who've always dictated the way E.M. led her life, and I liked the use of the blackboard to spell out the complications of the legal case, the simplicity of the essence ('Makropulos' in Greek) and the algebra of the immortality potion. But the supposedly spectacular coup of the formula sticking to the heroine's hand at the end won't do.
I discussed this with the City Lit students last night (we're spending five weeks on the opera). They're an open-minded bunch, and fans of Jones et al for the most part, but they were surprised when I read them the stage directions: 'Krista [the young girl previously infatuated with Marty's divadom] takes the document and holds it over a flame until it catches fire. Stage lighting changes to red. Marty: Pater hemon [Our Father, not translated at ENO]? (crumpling up). The document is consumed in the flames'.
What's more, we hear the flames in the music. But the way Alden played it out, the ending was indeed as nihilistic as Igor found it. No liberation from the hell of everlasting life, no purification. That has to be wrong. At least we got real fires (and how) in Niobe.
So many premature auguries of Autumn recently that I'm loath to accept we may be almost there. The prognostications included the winds which brought down the leaves in the Rietpark of Zurich's Villa Wesendonck in Zurich during late August (above and below); within days we were sweltering in the last heatwave.
And it certainly felt very autumnal walking along the Thames from London Bridge to St Paul's the other week against rainbow and yellow skies
yet I did the same last Thursday, going on to the Angel via St John's Street (fascinating), and sweated in my thick woollen jacket.
Thought this rather optional weatherchat might be the good place to post shots of the fungi we encountered during the sunny, warm afternoon of our Norfolk Churches Walk along the river Nar (funds are still coming in; it's never too late). No mycologist, I can't identify these two but I live in hope that some expert reader may may able to help me out:
and while the little 'uns may be a familiar sight in many gardens, the patterns they made in West Acre fields seemed rather singular.
The August rains have ripened both the mushrooms and unusually rich blackberry pickings in the hedgerows this year.
Meanwhile, in Djenne, our beloved Sophie's hotel is bracing for the annual invasion - looking a litle more serious this year - of the waters. She's in Tunis with husband Keita for his crucial stem cell treatment - which, praise be, the Malian government finally agreed to fund - so she finds herself on the horns of a dilemma, how long to stay and what good it would do to go back. I take the liberty of including this dramatic photograph from several years back to point you in the direction of her ever-incidentpacked blog.
Anyway, Weill's September Song is on my mind. I remembered our friend and ondes-martenotist Cynthia Millar waxing lyrical about Walter Huston's version, but it didn't do much for me beyond its novelty value. And the song needs careful handling if it isn't to sound rather square. So three cheers for Chet Baker's trumpet, and - here - the words as well from Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown:
All observations, questions and challenges are welcome: resistant to tweeting and Facebook (though long converted to LinkedIn), I still like to exchange ideas. You don't have to be signed up, and you can be anonymous, but comments are moderated.
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