Hallelujah Adams

For many folk I've spoken to, Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise has become a bible of information about 20th (and 21st) century music. It's extremely well-written if necessarily biased towards what the author likes, to judge from what I've dipped in to (what, not a word about Jimmy MacMillan?), but for authenticity it can't beat John Adams's autobiographical journey through the thickets of what he calls 'the partisan orthodoxies and prejudices that dominated my generation'.

Yes, he was there when Boulez ruled with his dogma, 'a technocrat bristling with all the gleaming armaments of his specialized field'. He was bewitched by the freer experimentation of Cage and company: was it any more than 'Dadaist doodling'? Much more, he fairly concedes, but judiciously lists its limitations. He was engaged by the promise of minimalism, describing Reich's early work as 'a sound world that was carefully organized, musically engaging and sensually appealing...To me, it felt like the pleasure principle had been invited back into the listening experience'. The cabin'd aspect of minimalism, Glass's static brand especially, is then tactfully touched upon.

But Adams was also beguiled by the best of the popular music of his time, by the revelation and the long-term promise of Wagner when driving along listening to Act 1 of Götterdämmerung, and later by Peter Sellars's eclectic knowledge of musics outside the 'western hegemony'. The book also offers lucid clarification of the issues behind his operas, from Nixon and Mao in '72 through the Palestinian problem to a terrific exposition of nuclear power and the diverse branches to the basic Indian spiritual fairy-tale of A Flowering Tree.

If you don't think you have time to read the entire book, the short last chapter, 'Garage Sale of the Mind', is the best ever precis I've read of the crossroads at which we now stand, the notion that complexity isn't necessarily progress but that easy promise isn't the solution either. This fits with the swivels of his own all-embracing musical language: the other week I reeled again at the daring, gnarly counterpoint of his Chamber Symphony in a dazzling performance by the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon, and loved going back and listening to the CD again.


It was looking up what Adams had to say about the Chamber Symphony as a result that finally led me to read the book from cover to cover.

I realise how many of the scores I still need to catch up with: being a bit of a sucker for stylish CD presentation - which in this case sometimes features wonderful nature studies by the composer's photographer wife, Deborah O'Grady - I have to update with the Nonesuch releases following on from the Earbox, including Son of Chamber Symphony. I'm not saying every work is a masterpiece, but it's always engaging, never dull. The world is a much better place for Adams's music.And the wordsmith continues to do good with an inspirational speech to students, reproduced in full on his blog.


Anyway, I'm proud of my Earbox, which I got the great, easygoing man to sign along with my '88 Edinburgh Nixon in China programme after we'd done a fun talk before one of his BBCSO concerts. And I'm proud, too, that he said to the admin as we came off stage: 'he's really good, you should ask us to do this again'. But that's blowing my own trumpet in the manner of some of my esteemed but not very modest fellow-bloggers...

24 hours in Lyon

A flying visit, to see Wagner at the Opéra, which turned out to be not so much the keenly-anticipated 'Fura dels Baus Tristan' as one which was the most satisfyingly sung, acted and played across the board of any I've encountered live. Arrived Friday noonish, headed over the Saone and settled on the first good-looking place for lunch I could find - which turned out to be the Restaurant Un Saint-Jean hiver at No. 14 Rue de Lanerie, partly because the building has one of the finest sculptured Gothic facades in the old town


and partly because the lunch menu promised Lyonnais specialities straight from the market. And excellent the first two courses proved - a salad of foie de volaille followed by andouillette (not to all tastes, but I'm a bit of an offal man). Dessert not so good, or maybe the wrong choice, three minis fatta in casa with coffee. Food theme continued with a whizz around Vieux Lyon trying to take streets I hadn't walked before - hence along the appropriately statued Rue du Boeuf


with another old carved shop 'sign'


up to the heights, this time skirting the Roman ruins and finding an odd little park in a zone populated by that unattractive species, the French schoolkid


and back via the bourgeois shopping centre with its great doorways


and a splendid (though no doubt less so in the multiplex interior) Pathe cinema.


It might have been the grey, muggy and intermittently rainy afternoon, or my own overtaxed mood, but I found Lyon on a second visit rather tired and skanky. I asked my taxi driver about the Somerset House-style fountains in the Place des Terraux which had so sparkled on a winter visit, and he told me they'd been broken for a long time and no-one had as yet attempted to fix them.

Anyway, a journey inside the belly of the black, shiny whale Jean Nouvel has made of the 1830 Opera House is always a striking, if rather claustrophobic experience. It suited the dream-world of La Fura dels Baus's Tristan vision rather well (production photo by Bertrand Stofleth showing the marvellous Ann Petersen recumbent)


And, happily transported by the first act - the second less so - I enjoyed standing at the long, light bar of the preserved 1886 foyer


as well as looking down on it from above.


One other plus: I've never had a quieter night in a hotel than in Room 407 of the Hotel des Terraux, built on the site of a graveyard which my ancestor Huguenots ransacked: a bit dark, since the only window looks on to the courtyard, but not a sound did I hear from midnight to 8am. Thus returned a little refreshed, after so many early rises and late nights, for the wedding on Saturday. Oh, and I do recommend splashing out on a trip to see an opera in Lyon: in this instance you would have heard a Tristan you'd have been happy to encounter anywhere in the world, Bayreuth included, at a ticket price of anything from 5 to 95 euros.

Fulham wedding walk

More nuptials, this time taking us from the westernmost shores of Connemara to the steps of Fulham Town Hall, strewn here post-ceremony with rice and rosepetals (incidentally Henry James called our neck of the woods 'the western wastes', and although cachet was implied when the Victorian developers renamed it 'West Kensington', it's really North Fulham). Hélène and Olivier were married in the rather splendid council chamber, the mostly French guests amusingly looked down upon by portraits of local worthies and George V as well as a well-executed set of Anglo-historical stained glass windows ranging from Alfred the Great to the Fulham potteries (est. 1672). The groom's brother, a harpist with the French National Radio Orchestra, spun silk around the waiting group. This is where the banns for our own civil partnership were posted, but since we wanted to be among the first to be legal in the UK, we actually signed up in Camden. There were at least as many gay guests as straight at this one.

The promenade made us see the route in a new light.


I've never been that fond of the North End Road market, where you can't pick your own fruit, or couldn't the last time I tried, but it's improving, with a good falafel stand and an excellent French deli van on Fridays and Saturdays for the (us) BoBos*. The Iranian/Iraqi shops are good for supplying my handful of signature dishes.


Crossing between the bed and pawn shops, the nuptial cortege entered our enclave with its cruelly pollarded London planes and central gardens unvisited by non-residents, thanks to factional self-interests, during London Squares Open-Day Weekend


and wound up at the Pear Tree Pub just by Charing Cross Hospital.


The larger institution is all too well known to us, but the pub was not; I'll certainly breakfast and lunch there now.

*bohemian bourgeoisie

Brekekekex alla tedesca

They'd be more appropriate as ambient noise for Rameau's Platée than Handel's Teseo, which is what I went to Göttingen to hear. But one thing's for sure: German frogs croak and ribbet their hearts out far more than any British ones I've ever come across (if anyone can direct me to a noisy pond anywhere in my vicinity, I'd be grateful). I'll never forget the wild sounds echoing over the lakes in Dessau's shaggy park when we visited friends Lottie and Andrew there during pre-unification days, and from the perhaps slightly over-manicured water-zones of Göttingen's botanic gardens came sporadic bursts of a similarly forceful projection. I took this little film for the sound rather than the picture, but watch out for a tiny bit of frog action around the 13-second mark.



Even the blackbird seems to sing louder than ours! Anyway, this is above all for Maria-Jesus, who oddly waxed lyrical about the froggy gang-bang of my Broughton entry. It's not often you get such perfect nymphaeae in bloom with ranae to boot perching on the lily-pads or, in this case, under the flower.


The Alter Botanischer Garten provided a welcome refuge on my only, baking-hot full day's sightseeing in Göttingen. Where there's a top university, there's usually a fine botanics, and this one was planned by Albrecht von Haller shortly after the academic foundation of 1737. I'm told the staffing here has dropped radically in recent years, but it seems pretty well kept to me, and it has its shaggy zones, too, almost as wild as Dessau's. So via the gunnera


to the rose garden


where Honoré de Brabant was giving off a heavenly scent


and bees buzzed around Francofurter.


I also had a decent lunch in the Botanic's easy-going cafe, run I think by an Iranian-German, hence a good array of spicy, rosewatered tea


and cardamom coffee, both of which I sampled before hitting the best sale of cacti and associated rarities I've ever come across. I baulked at the fact that I probably wouldn't get a plant through customs. Ruefully examined the exotica that I couldn't buy before taking a look at the fern house, converted in 1910 from its original 1857 use as an orangery and recently restored to its former glory.


Then it was back into town to tick off the remaining churches and exotic housefronts. Later I hired a bike from the hotel and puffed up the hill, ostensibly in search of panoramic views down on Gottingen's towers and spires. Even though I didn't have time to find one, I did marvel at the big old trees of the Hainberg forest


and the abundant wildlife; in the early evening light deer were leaping across the path in great numbers. But I had no time for further natural wonders: Handel's Coronation Anthems and Lalande's Te Deum were summoning me to the church of St John.

Göttingen's sweethearts

The one above celebrated her 110th birthday yesterday. So it's not quite an age-old, but still a charming, tradition that students of Göttingen's Georg August University, Cambridge to Heidelberg's Oxford (or perhaps vice versa), go to the town's main square on receiving their doctorate, kiss the rather beautiful Art Nouveau Gänseliesel or Goosegirl's cheek and leave her flowers and a candle in thanksgiving. I was lucky enough to see the ritual in action, walking through town to catch the 7.55am train to Frankfurt after a happy day and a half at the Göttingen Handel Festival.


These two jolly medics, flanking three girl friends, had just gone through the motions ever so poetically (by the way, I was reminded that a first or second degree doesn't qualify you to kiss the maiden; only a doctorate will do). They hailed me, rather curious to know what anyone else was doing walking the sunny streets of Göttingen so early on a Sunday morning, we chatted and I took their photo (it felt too corny to ask them for historical re-enactment, though you can see the boys were kitted out for it). I don't even know their names, but what an echt farewell it was.

It might seem a bit forced to fanfare the other idol of the town under the 'sweetheart' label, but no doubt about it: the townsfolk love Nicholas McGegan more than ever as he comes to the end of his 20-year tenure powering the Handel Festival.



I'd come chiefly to hear him conduct Teseo in the town's ideally-sized small theatre, and indeed the orchestra was really the thing, though there were two very classy performances from Amy Freston and the flawless Robin Blaze. I also heard two fabulous events in two of the churches.

But more of that in the Arts Desk piece on Sunday. Let's just catch my not-as-good-as-the-professionals glimpse of 'Nic', as they call him, sporting his newly-pinnedVerdienstkreuz am Bande, the Cross of the Lower Saxony Order of Merit.


He's standing on the staircase of the Old Town Hall, and appropriately the furthest of the three figures on the wall to the left has 'ars longa, vita brevis' inscribed above. Although the Town Hall was built on the site of an even older one in 1270, it's gone through various modifications which do nothing more than show its consistent vitality and usefulness, including the plastering of the Great Hall in 1883, and a very fine job the artist has done, I think. The coats of arms above the main friezes are those of the Hanseatic league, to which Göttingen belonged from 1351 to 1572. Lübeck and Braunschweig have the central position, though of course the heraldry stretches further to Riga and my beloved Visby (to which it looks as if we're not destined to return after all this June).


The figures have links to the rooms around which they're positioned. I love the Meistersingerish significance of this craftsman, who could well be goldsmith Veit Pogner.


A minstrel prances down the staircase


and the young newlyweds outside the former registry office might be Eva and Walter.


Not without significance to Wagner's opera, perhaps, since the people's will has usually been paramount here. The citizens rebelled against the councilmen's favourite fountain design at the end of the 19th century and got their way with the Gänselieselbrunnen. By the way, Gottingen was one of the few German towns to be spared flattening in World War Two - so was Heidelberg, leading many to speculate that the Germans left off Oxford and Cambridge in some kind of sick deal - so there's plenty to see. I'll return to churches and housefronts anon.


But I'm still in a Handel mood: it might have been that, or sheer overtiredness, that made me enjoy the Philharmonia concert on Sunday night less than I might have done. The pre-performance talk with Vasily Petrenko went fine, though the fun was a bit more at my expense than I'd anticipated, with VP playing to his Liverpudlian fans who'd come down specially to see him. But I do reckon Simon Trpceski - a pianist I usually love for his brio and communication - whizzed far too much through Tchaikovsky's Second Piano Concerto. And it was unforgiveable of him to insist on the Ziloti two-thirds-cut slow movement, especially as the Philharmonia leader Maya Iwabuchi and her cellist counterpart Karen Stephenson did so gloriously well in what little they had to play.

This morning I listened to 'special guests' Kennedy and Isserlis with Donohoe for Barshai (EMI), which only underlined more than ever what a bad mistake it had been to cut it: the solo strings lead the bullish virtuoso into a whole new world, and he/she needs that time to stay there. Wrong to wrench it out of context, perhaps, but in case anyone's reading who was also there and didn't think it was a great piece, here's a crackly old Melodiya recording of the first violin/cello duet before the piano enters (which is where Sunday night's performance essentially started; and we didn't get the central angst on display here, or the later string cadenzas, either, which you can hear in Part Two).

Connemara folk

Not quite Connemarans all, the entertainers at David and Gwendolen's wedding - and certainly not the madrigalians, instrumentalists and Tom Mooreists during the service, self included - but carpenter, fisherman and anecdotalist Jackie Coyne, pictured above leading us on a Sunday afternoon walk around the Renvyle peninsula, certainly is. The two big family names hereabouts are Coyne, as in the name above the splendid pub in Tully Cross


and Joyce, though 'Joyce Country' proper is some way to the east.


Jackie's tour turned out to be not so much an exposition of local geology and history as of family chronicles, but so entertaining were they all that nobody minded in the least. And he quickly gauged from the stragglers that a spurt up the hill wouldn't do, so we stuck to the white sand beaches, which since I'd struck off in the opposite direction that morning was fine by me.


Great gobbets of seaweed washed up on the beach reminded me that one of the few occupations by which the Connemarans used to live was kelp-gathering - especially, as Tim Robinson's helpful if slightly oversold* Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness tells me, 'when continental sources of alkali for glass-making and linen-processing were cut off during the Napoleonic Wars'. The trade declined thereafter when cheaper sources were found 'in the saltwort marshes of Spain'.


Potatoes grew in seaweed-rich soil; but then the famines struck. Herring, mackerel and salmon fishing came and went. In the early 19th century, too, writes Robinson, 'the farmers of Meath needed all the calves Connemara's thin pasture could breed, to fatten on their richer grasslands'. Some cattle remain. I didn't see this one - the warning was on the gate in the opposite direction from which I'd come (presuming that farm tracks with no 'keep out' signs on them were fair walking territory once the road left the coast), with no matching admonishment on the other side -


but there were several grazing contentedly on the uplands.


But of course it's the sheep and their lambs that keep the farms going.


The once natural co-existence between land and livestock is being carefully reasserted but - adds Robinson, a touch piously - 'there is one monstrous contradiction at the heart of this caring programme and that is the slaughter of the innocents, exemplified by those 500 Cleggan lambs torn from their mothers, packed into lorries and taken off to an abattoir every spring'. Delicious, Connemara lamb on a plate, I blush to add. And we all love to see them gambolling in the fields by the sea, as I did on a morning walk around the head of the peninsula.


Cushier comforts were to be had, at least from 1917, in the old house at Renvyle. In that year it was bought by Oliver St John Gogarty, surgeon by profession but jack of many other trades including verse, and the very same 'stately, plump Buck Mulligan' who launches Ulysses as a not entirely worthy companion for Stephen Dedalus (Gogarty did indeed share a Martello Tower outside Dublin with fellow Trinity College student James Joyce). The original house was burnt down in the troubles of 1923 - Gogarty was a Sinn Feiner but despised de Valera - and rebuilt by 1930, though ghosts continued to visit, or so W B Yeats's spiritualist wife George asserted. There is still a haunted room - number available on application - but it seems a rather robust and common-sensical place to me. And clearly by the time this bust was made, Gogarty, who died in New York in 1953, was plump no more.


Within his walls resounded quite a wedding party, spread over two nights, with dancing to The Controversial Allstars. On the first we loved watching talented young Emma O'Sullivan, daughter of the hotel's superb head chef, repeating the kind of performance which got her to the final of Ireland's Got Talent. This is the real Sean Nos, Irish traditional dancing, without the influx of the stiff arms-by-sides mongrel. First and last of the films are a bit dark, forgive, but you get the lively gist.



Nicer, of course, to see the arms free, but Michael Flatley did a grand job bringing back his own form of Irish dancing and how it now flourishes among the kids. Here are some of the older members of Cosa Beoga ('Little Feet' in Gaelic) from Abbeyknockmoy, who came along the following night. Haven't got the boys doing fabulous things with brooms, and the feet are rarely visible from my open-window coign of vantage, but you see how good they are.



Last, but by no means least, David had managed to lure veteran fiddler and traditional singer Dessie O'Halloran over from his native isle of Inishbofin to sing a few numbers. J was especially delighted by an old favourite, 'Come down from the mountain, Katie Daly'. Here's verse 10 or so.



This man is a national treasure. I had a chat with him over breakfast and learnt that he'd lived for many years in my native neck of the woods, Surrey, patio of England, in Chessington, no less. I love the way these guys - Jackie, too - get a hold of your Christian name and then proceed to address you confidentially by it as if they've known you all their lives.

We did our own dancing, too, with Jackie calling, and I worked up an alarming sweat (though as always felt better for it the next day). Later the bride and groom were chaired while a rabbi friend sang, and his wife played the violin.


Much to celebrate, then. But how sad to learn that on the very same day as we were having such fun at an all-inclusive traditional wedding, Russian gays and lesbians were banned from marching to celebrate their love. The Mayor of Moscow wouldn't give them the same licence he granted to Neo-Nazis, can you believe, who duly weighed in with the violence when they went ahead anyway. I'm not surprised, but shame on you, mother Russia. And three cheers for the prevailing good in long-hidebound Ireland.

*hardly his fault if the (mostly Irish) reviews quoted on the back cover lead one to expect a masterpiece - 'one of the best non-fiction prose writers currently at work', 'an imperishable monument', 'one of the great polymaths of our time', 'one of the finest of contemporary prose stylists', 'Robinson writes...with extraordinary beauty' - when surely it's just rather good, one of many such travel books? But book reviews are ever thus, and you usually only have to trace the connections to find a friend. Is this more rife in that world than in any of the other arts-reviewed groups?

Happy 30th birthday, COE

Three stills from a publicity film by Alexandru Gherman - reproduced with thanks - were all I could muster to accompany a little paean for the Chamber Orchestra of Europe’s vivacious birthday concert at St John’s Smith Square the other Monday (bit of a hobby-horse of mine, about musical organisations not engaging photographers for special events: can you believe there were no shots for the Bell-Frank-Zimmermann-Denk-Isserlis team at the Wigmore’s 110th birthday bash on Wednesday?)


Anyway, a joyous event the COE concert turned out to be, and though my speculation that Abbado was going to be the mystery guest conductor proved wildly out, it was fascinating to see how far these crack players could go without a stick-waver at all. Mozart’s 29th and Figaro Overture I could understand – even there, a maestro might have been helpful for the occasional upbeat – but surely they weren’t going to attempt Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony by themselves? But wait – there was Vladimir Jurowski sitting down in the stalls. In fact he was drafted in for the encore, a lovely touch: 30 years ago at the inaugural concert James Judd pulled mover and shaker Abbado out of the audience to conduct Rossini’s overture to La Cenerentola, and here it was again, blissfully crescendoed and nuanced beyond belief in those perky little bittersweet woodwind solos I love so much.

But the Classical was rather magical, too – bright and clearly articulated, like the rest of the programme. How could one not be reminded of the conductorless orchestra who played it when Prokofiev made his first visit to the new Soviet Union in 1927, Persimfans (= Perviy Symphonicheskiy Ansambl' bez Dirizhora= first symphonic ensemble without a conductor). It did well, but hardly lasted long. They even played the Scythian Suite. Co-founder Arnold Tsukker wrote a book about the first five years which I'd like to get hold of - but not at the online asking-price.


Anyway, on Monday there was – to my ears, at any rate – a radical rethink about the Bach Double Concerto; you could forget that famous slow-movement image of two planes in a clear blue sky. But the partnership of founder-leader Marieke Blankestijn and Lorenza Borrani, who wasn’t even born when the orchestra kicked off, with their fellow strings couldn’t have been more exhilarating.


Good, too, to see some familiar faces including cellist Willie Conway, whom I knew vaguely from Edinburgh days, horn-player Nicholas Thompson, double-bassist Enno Senft and, in the audience, that fabulous oboist (and not at all bad conductor) Douglas Boyd. Now all we need is to see more of them here - which, at last, we can do when Haitink conducts two all-Brahms Proms with Ax as soloist in the piano concertos.

Finally, happy 30th birthday to me and the bigger stars of the Bedlam/Edinburgh University Theatre Company production of Cabaret, the rehearsal period for which I recall as the happiest time of my youth (not of my life, of course). I wrote all about it quite prematurely at the beginning of the year, and used up most of the production photos then - the one of Andy Beale as Hitler youth I really can't justify, for fear it might end his distinguished medical career - so how about a truly embarrassing reminiscence for Sally Bowles and Fraulein Kost (real names withheld, but I love them both dearly)? Cramond beach party during Cabaret fortnight, May or June 1981, fashions - Simon Bell's jacket and the trainers dishonourably excepted - courtesy of the second-hand clothes shops in Stockbridge.