The only way is Essex - 1

Whatever that means exactly - thank you, reality TV - there are at least three ways to approach England's most maligned county, pictured above: step inside one of the many old buildings (in this case the Norman remainder of Waltham Abbey); ramble in deepest farmland only a 25 minute journey from the City of London (a distant diplo-mate approaching Mountnessing Church); or brave the urban blight to reach your destination (the end of a horrid walk from Waltham Cross railway station to the Abbey). At least another option - the marshes and the sea - was ruled out by the biting winds and freeze of the Thursday and Friday we took off.

The original aim had been to fly south for a long weekend, but half-term fares proved prohibitively expensive (seems we've sorted one objective now for the near future). So I thought we should capitalise on our delighted discovery of Layer Marney, Tollesbury, East Mersey and Copford while staying with the Le Franc family back in 2007 and the subsequent revelation of lovely Saffron Walden in the company of the Kafalas a year later by getting to know a neighbouring county better. Armed with the excellent Pathfinder Guide, we planned out some options.

With the grey and the bitter cold of Thursday forbidding our intended hike around the coastal Saxon church of Bradwell Juxta Mare, we caught a train from Liverpool Street to Ingatestone, and were immediately charmed by what Pevsner calls the 'friendly Neo-Tudor' of the 1846 station building. The glory is the medieval church tower of St Edmund and St Mary

with its black diapers of lozenges and crosses (there too is the top of the 'three-light brick w window with Perp panel tracery' - Pevsner again - and the first set of two-light windows).

Predictably the church was locked. We phoned the warden (correction, 9/3: rector), who claimed to live not very close and seemed unwilling to drive to Ingatestone and let us in. As J pointed out, I should have said something along the lines of 'we've come a long way to see this', but I wasn't at the time aware of the Petre tomb chest, treasure of the interior; if I had been, I'd have made a bit more of a fuss.

Ingatestone High Street is a mix of old and new, chiefly remarkable to me for the fact that I purchased a by then essential blue woolly (looking) hat for £2.99 in a hardware store over a friendly chat with the people in the shop. There's a very flinty mosaicy type mural on one of the less attractive more recent buildings which looks as if it dates from Festival of Britain time.

Then we were off over the fields, past Sir William Petre's 16th century red-brick Ingatestone Hall. The monastery-dissolver and recusant Catholic had the mural's Queen Elizabeth to stay here, which still makes the town and the odd visiting tourist excited.

Crossing the stream of the Wid, you climb gently to the deliciously secluded church of St Mary Buttsbury.

The body of the church (locked again, naturally, in spite of what the welcoming board at the gate may say) is 14th century, but its attraction is the timber, weatherboarded west belfry. The porch is attractively weatherboarded too.

Ironwork on the north door caught my eye before I found out that much of it was 13th century.

There was now a longish stretch by stream and through fields, past a burnt out car below Kitchen Wood

and up to the church of St Giles at Mountnessing, isolated next to a Georgian hall and farm (though a road runs close). Here's another fine bell tower and west end

though there's apparently less to see inside than at Ingatestone. Which was just as well, since our third church was also locked and the contact numbers in the porch had faded away. Anyway, here we sat out of the biting wind to devour the sushi lunch purchased at Liverpool Street Station. The diplo-mate wanted a photo of the occasion but was as usual coy about revealing his entire lovely visage.

The rest of the walk is lost to visual documentation because my battery had run flat and something went wrong with the transferring of pictures from J's mobile phone. Here's a similarly cloudy-day image taken by another of Mountnessing proper's early 19th century post-mill a couple of miles further on. Gareth Hughes' Geograph project photo includes 'visiting Dutch and Belgian windmill enthusiasts'. Interesting if not especially penetrating observation on the unconscious that here I started to hum the Van der Valk theme (you don't need to be old enough to have seen that series to guess that the hero was an Amsterdam detective).

The dark began to descend, as did we back to Ingatestone. Had this been a collect-churches-for-charity walk like our annual Norfolk expedition, we could have notched up nine in our eight miles, since the town boasts a fair few 19th and early 20th century edifices of various denominations. So back to London, where serendipity found us two returns on the spot for Rufus Norris's ambitious celebration of Yoruba culture, Feast, at the Young Vic. Splendid company work here, dominated by the handsome, well modulated mezzo tones of Noma Dumezweni (J's New Best Friend), the character panache of Naana Agyei-Ampadu and incredibly sexy dancing - not enough of it, sadly - by Cuban Alexander Varona (image by Richard Hubert Smith).

The problem lay with most of the various playwrights' contributions: few made clear the advertised connection between scenes from the Yoruba diaspora and the various reincarnations of the 400 or so deities known as Orishas, so it came across as a rather loose, hit-and-miss revue.

Still, it was a steamy far cry indeed from the wintry wildernesses of Essex. That's enough of a chronicle for now: glorious Waltham Abbey to follow soon.

Liza and the cockroaches

What on earth could they have in common? Only one thing, according to Minnelli's co-performer the singer/pianist Michael Feinstein: when the world ends, they'll both still be here. It's one of a  hundred pithy comments in one of the best interviews with any artist I've read, written by Marcelle Bernstein for, of all things, Saga Magazine.

There are two special reasons to welcome the interview. One is that it's very close in time to the nearly-67-year-old's unforgettable appearance in the Southbank's The Rest is Noise festival on Saturday, an occasion which I'd viewed with some apprehension but which turned out to be one of the great showbiz testaments to an indomitable spirit (the only other evening I can remember quite like it was Nina Simone's appearance in the same hall back in 1999). I count myself very lucky to have got in via The Arts Desk, for which I duly raved; I wouldn't have risked £40-£100 on a ticket*, though as it turned out the event would have been worth every penny.

The other reason is that the interview contradicts all the press baloney about a tragic life. It's been a tough one at times, no doubt, but the only real sadness I can see here is of an artist who, like her mother, is loved by everybody she touches but not, as she deserves, by one single person. But that's showbiz: the devouring, slightly vampiric fans demand all, and boy, do they get it. Minnelli's torch song should surely be Sondheim's ' I'm Still Here'. He wrote new lyrics specially for Barbra; why not do the same for Liza? For the sake of the truth, I have to say she no longer looks like she does in the above photos, but it was amazing to see the years fall away as Friday night's show hit ever new highs.

What I had to pinch myself most about was that I was hearing that very same Americanized Sally Bowles whose screen renditions of 'Life is a Cabaret' and 'Maybe This Time' had become so legendary singing those very same songs, with different inflections but just as much meaning and vitality, possibly more. 'Liza's at the Palace', filmed a couple of years ago, is as close to our night as I think film will provide, though her delivery of the key song was not quite the same. I thought I'd put up the original film version

and the Palace's 'Life is...' revisited. Stick with it because the Elsie sequence is both much more poignant than the original and shot through with an earthier humour.

If you got to the end of that, you'll understand why I've ordered up the DVD.

Bob Fosse's film of Cabaret came out when I was 10 years old. There was no possibility of seeing it then, but I remember walking past the big cinema in Sutton wondering why it was X certificate and why a man as well as a woman in the photos on the wall was wearing so much make-up. Later it coincided with a golden time in the summer term of my first year at Edinburgh University when we all revelled in a fortnight of working on a production of the stage musical, so different from the film.

I've written about this in the Bedlam Theatre 30th birthday tribute way back, but I can't resist a recropped shot of our dear Mary New (now Amorosino and living in Washington with husband Roberto and two of their three wonderful children - Alexandra, the eldest, has followed her ma to Edinburgh University) as Sally Bowles.

If truth be told, she was of course much closer to Kander and Ebb's (and of course Isherwood's) Sally, this vicar's daughter who sidled up one evening to the Rev (by then Canon) Tom New, sitting at one of the beer barrels, with the 'Don't Tell Mama' song-lines, 'you can tell my papa, that's alright, 'cos he comes in here every night'. Well, those of us who were in it will never get the nostalgia for such a time out of our systems. But by any standards the movie is a classic, probably the musical I'd choose in a list of top ten films. Evviva Liza!

It was quite a weekend of experiencing divas in spheres other than the operatic: Liza on Friday, 'anarchist cabaret performer' Meow Meow as Jenny in The Threepenny Opera on Saturday - not a patch on Allison Bell's Polly, though she looked extraordinary - and singer-songwriter Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond  as Anna in The Seven Deadly Sins on Sunday. This last concert had an only-connect programme which also included necessary - though dreary, if mercifully short - dodecaphonic Schoenberg and wonderful Hindemith: hardly box-office nectar, you'd have thought, and yet the audience was packed with young people. Clearly The Rest is Noise festival on the Southbank must be marketing itself well.

Diva and devotion combine in the only Bach cantata of this Lenten season. For Oculi Sunday,  we have only one specimen, for alto and strings without so much as a concluding chorale, 'Widerstehe doch der Sunde', BWV 54. The soloist's low notes, like the F sharp to which 'übertünchtes Grab' ('whitened sepulchre') descends in the recit, sound much more butch coming from a real contralto rather than a countertenor.

 
Besides, Nathalie Stutzmann is another of those truly great artists who stand out in any crowd of soloists. We haven't seen nearly enough of her in the UK recently.  The recorded performance I heard, with John Eliot Gardiner's Bach Pilgrimage team in one of England's most beautiful churches, Norfolk's Walpole St Peter (reverenced on the blog via two visits, briefly here and more extensively here), reminded me that I ought to go out of my way to see her when the opportunity arises.

'Eyes' Sunday gets its name from the first word of the psalm introit for the day, oculi (Vulgate Psalm 24 verse 15: 'mine eyes are ever towards the Lord'). The New Testament reading from St Luke deals with Christ's words on the casting out of devils. Holbein's woodcut was the only image I could find on the subject.

Georg Lehms' text for this Weimar cantata is one of Bach's crappiest: what's this about being felled by a curse for violating God's majesty? How very Old Testicle. Never mind: there's originality as usual in Bach's five-part string writing (divided violas). I don't, unlike Gardiner, hear dissonance in the opening chord (dominant seventh over tonic pedal), only a novel suspension which means postponing E flat major until the eighth bar. The chord pulsing seems to me calm and confident rather than evangelical; though there's darkness and dislocation in the middle verses' veering to the minor.

Stutzmann makes more of recitative than any of the other singers I've encountered in my own Bach cantatas pilgrimage so far; and in the final aria she echoes the strings' chromatic fugue subject so nobly. We'll have to make do on YouTube with a jaunty Andreas Scholl (low notes not as full as Stutzmann's, of course) and Herreweghe's Collegium Vocale, but that's not a bad second best.

*Nothing for an event like this. To indulge his daughters' love of total crap, one father forked out £400 for three tickets to see Justin Bieber the other night. They were rewarded by the cute but anodyne star's turning up two hours late, way past most of his audience's bedtime.

Haneke, Bergman and last rites

I finally caught up with Michael Haneke's Amour last night at the Curzon Soho, the first unquestionable masterpiece I've seen in the cinema since Des hommes et des dieux*. Let's first dismiss the Oscars nonsense, written up with a touch of saeva indignatio by the marvellous Matt Wolf: I haven't seen the other 'competitors' in the Best Actress category, but it was absurd that the unsparing, unsurpassable Emmanuelle Riva, just turned 86 when she arrived in Los Angeles, should walk away empty-handed. Actually she should have been up for a joint award with the equally remarkable Jean-Louis Trintignant (pictured with Riva above and below), her loving husband of the watchful gaze in the film. But who cares?

I can't add much of value to what my colleague Emma Simmonds and the first of her commentors write on The Arts Desk. The film is simply note-perfect (well, except in the very minor detail of the right arm placement above hands which we don't see on the piano keyboard - sometimes in the wrong area of the instrument - which is odd, since a very, very fine pianist, Alexandre Tharaud, appears in the film as himself). Having had the humiliating experience of watching Haneke's Hidden from the back row of the Gate Cinema Notting Hill, and not seeing the crucial detail in the tableau at the end, we sat in the front this time and were enveloped by every detail of the old couple's flat in which, after an unforgettable early scene in a concert hall, the film entirely takes place. I wept very nearly uncontrollably when Trintignant's carer tries to get his love to drink water - no more details needed - but came out feeling not exactly purged but clear-headed, almost serene.

Comparisons are odious and probably unnecessary, but I couldn't help wishing my idol Ingmar Bergman in his last film, Saraband, had asked as much of his senior couple, Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann (pictured; the Fårö post relevant to all this, one which as I think I've written before is closest to my heart, is here). Actually the scenes between them are very touching, but on a first viewing I found some of the old self-disgust packed into the father-son dialogues melodramatic and the handling of music in the film slightly clumsy alongside Haneke's unstinting truth and his less theatrical take on performing artists.

On the other hand, Amour is rather like those earlier Bergman masterpieces Wild Strawberries, Cries and Whispers and Autumn Sonata (Ingmar and Ingrid, no relations and no great friends, pictured above) in that it puts you through the mill and leads you by the hand whole and perhaps a little wiser out the other side. The difference is that you can argue about what you liked or didn't like in Bergman; whereas I should like to meet the individual who finds anything to challenge in Haneke's work of real, honest genius. How amazing that films like this, without any music other than that played in real time, should still be made.

I've been using the word 'flawless' quite a lot over the last couple of weeks: it's also applicable to two concerts I reviewed on The Arts Desk within six days of each other: a brilliantly programmed one by Edward Gardner conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra and another which was simply electric all the way through - despite the challenges of Bloch's not-so-great Schelomo - thanks to conductor Thomas Dausgaard and a simply stunning cellist I've not heard before, Jian Wang (pictured below by Xu Bin).

Double-checked with BBC Radio 3 folk to make sure the cello wasn't miked; from where I was sitting in the hall, the sound was the biggest I've ever heard emanating from that instrument, but so refined. Here's the man I need in order to pay attention to every note of the Bach cello suites. What a happy coincidence with Bergman to find so inward and low-vibrato a performance of the Sarabande from the Second Suite (there was bags of vibrato, incidentally, in his hair-raisingly intense Schelomo, as you would expect, so it's a question of adapting the style).Both film-makers would surely be moved by this, though the Sarabande of Bergman's film is the one from the Fifth Suite.

*If we're including comic masterpieces, and why not, then Julie Delpy's Two Days in Paris qualifies. We soon caught up with the sequel, Two Days in New York, and laughed almost as helplessly in places, though it's such a loss that Delpy's mother died when the filmmaker/actress had already planned out the film, an event which made her change course. The enlarged role for the nightmare sister with an awful boyfriend in tow to some extent fills the gap.

Antic Saturday

That was a crazy one, Saturday 9 February, very much crowned by Mark Rylance's matinée anti-idol of a Richard III (production photos by Simon Annand). The day's trajectory became seriously complicated when Gillian Moore, Head of Classical Music at the Southbank Centre, rang up late the previous afternoon to ask if I could step in for Tom Service, who'd gone down with the norovirus, to give a talk in the Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer. When? In 19 hours' time, at 12.30pm, for an hour. On what? Paris 1910-1930, the latest subject in The Rest is Noise festival of 20th century music.

Well, that I could do, basing it around what I knew of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes - quite a bit - and Prokofiev's viewpoint on the city as a resident in the 1920s. Gillian wanted me to include a fair amount of music from the concerts that were about to be performed. I replied that at such short notice I'd have to make do with what I'd got on the shelves. Fortunately I did have a copy of Antheil's Ballet Mécanique, and a CD of Josephine Baker, so that covered two essential requirements.

The preparation time, though, was short. I couldn't sacrifice a Friday night reunion with old Edinburgh University pals, two of whom had already arrived to stay from Washington and Cardiff. It turned out to be a wonderful evening, 15 round a big table at the Joy King Lau in Soho, including superstar Kerry Richardson of Bedlam Theatre Cabaret fame (now 'in telly') whom I hadn't seen for over 30 years. And a milestone in one way at least: the first time the six of us who spent a golden year together in 32 Dundas Street had sat down to eat together since 1982.

I got back predictably lateish, didn't sleep much and was up at 7am to start preparation. Half way through, the CD I'd started to burn with the extracts failed. And a second, a third, a fourth. A faulty pack. At 10am I pedalled furiously to Hammersmith, bought a decent set of CD-Rs and rushed back. Got to the Queen Elizabeth Hall at 12.10pm with 20 minutes to spare for a quick soundcheck. The Southbank team couldn't have been more soothing or friendly - and that includes the sound man, who must be the first of his ilk to say how much he'd enjoyed it at the end.

I had fun (and kinda glad Ben Larpent, Southbank Classical Music Programme Manager, documented the occasion, however weird I look with right arm flapping. Maybe I should have gone for Josephine's Banana Dance look). What a great audience - some seated in front of the stage, others eating at tables, including a jolly mother and baby.

Jude Kelly did the same relaxed, thoroughly professional job of introducing and questioning at the end I'd noted at James MacMillan's talk the previous week. I'd been asked to give some substantial excerpts, though obviously my playlist was quite different from the one Gillian had set up in The Guardian. I thought I'd keep a record of it here. To keep it short I won't list the recordings used.

Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (1913) - introduction compared with Musorgsky's shepherd-boy pipings at the end of the Sorochintsy Fair interlude we know as the epilogue to Night on the Bare Mountain; the 5/4-6/4 tune for the Spring Rounds compared with the 11/4 finale of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Snow Maiden; Procession of the Sage (polyrhythms) and Kissing the Earth (The Sage). (Image above: one of Roerich's designs for the original production).

Ravel: Ma mère l'oye - Beauty and the Beast, in the orchestral arrangement of 1910/12

Ravel: Rapsodie espagnole - Habanera, starting with four-hand piano version of 1895 and morphing into the orchestral arrangement of 1908

Stravinsky: Etude pour pianola (1917)

Antheil: Ballet Mécanique (1922-30 - opening (four-pianola version; see end of blog entry for later performance with film)

Satie: Parade (1917) - sequence with typewriter, pistol-shots and siren (photo: Picasso's designs for the American and French managers)

Milhaud: La création du monde (1923) - jazz fugue

Josephine Baker - 'J'ai deux amours' (1930)

Prokofiev: The Prodigal Son (1928-9) - final theme

A question or two, and then I had 20 minutes to whizz over the Thames to the matinée of Richard III. I've already begun to treat of this (in superlatives) in an earlier blog entry under that very funny photo of Rylance's king bearing a 'No Parking' traffic sign. I wish I'd caught the latest of his celebrated post-run speeches, but even at the penultimate show he managed to praise the first of the double-cast princes who were taking their leave and to say, with his usual tear-jerking sincerity, what a joy it had been for all of the actors to see so many kids in the audience.

There must have been more, of course, in the initial Globe run. I'd heard that MR took time to warm to his chameleonic impersonation after a family bereavement, but by the end of this Apollo Theatre transfer he was absolutely in his element from the very first speech. The voice has a greater range now - he can be bass-baritonal as well as his usual tenorial self. He had the extraordinary way of fixing on the stalls and on us in the upper circle so that you got the feeling he was looking directly at you. The laughing, and laughter-making, player of the first half became the deadly psychopath of the second, though, so that the roaring audience fell very silent.

The other joy of Tim Carroll's production, every inch as good as his Twelfth Night which I didn't dare see this time after fond memories of four Globe performances, was the teamwork. Maybe Johnny Flynn as Lady Anne was vocally a little weak, but the other 'ladies' couldn't have been better. James Garnon, whose star quality first shone at the Globe in Carroll's otherwise disappointing Dido, Queen of Carthage and flamed as James I in Brenton's Anne Boleyn, metamorphosed from a dignified Duchess of York into a plausible, noble successor to the throne at the end. Finest of all was Sam Barnett's Queen Elizabeth.

With Barnett and Rylance, the spat between bereaved mother and child-murderer was hair-raising: I'd never thought of it as one of the great scenes in Shakespeare, but I do now. The battle stuff that followed can drag; never for a moment here, with the rivals in their tents deftly intercut and the ghosts of the slain gathering round Richmond to despatch York.

 I came out wishing that after all I could stay on and see the same company + S Fry (not a draw for me personally after earlier, marvellous Malvolios) in the Twelfth Night production I knew and loved so well. But Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky beckoned over at the Barbican, with live accompaniment from the BBC Symphony Orchestra under a meticulously synchronising Martyn Brabbins pretext for The Arts Desk review. I've seen this version three times live now, and the film many more, and I seem to have got past the stage of scoffing at the propagandist black-and-white of Nevsky as compared to the more nuanced Ivan the Terrible.

On this occasion I simply admired the actors' superb handling of their types. Nikolay Cherkassov's prince is so handsome and stirring, of course, but it was marvellous to hear the audience laughing so readily at Nikolay Okhlopkov's buffoon. A rich ending to a teeming Saturday; and on Sunday I was rescued from having to review Novello's Gay's the Word when I arrived at Barons' Court to find the District Line inoperative and the Piccadilly Line recently  closed by a 'person under a train' - and that in itself was understandable on a cold, deluging February afternoon.

Grand finale - only connect: Eisenstein thought Fernand Léger's 1924 film to accompany Antheil's Ballet Mécanique was 'one of the true masterpieces of cinema'. I'm not sure how well it synchs with the music, which only joined it in the 1990s (and in the later version where the pianos are all but drowned out by the percussion and 'special effects'). But it's quite something to have both together.

Duchampery

There's a fabulous YouTube clip put up on The Arts Desk by my art-critic colleague Fisun Güner (I'll reproduce it at the end). It shows John Cage performing his Water Walk as part of an American TV game show. The smug, isn't-he-a-naughty-boy presenter quotes a New York Herald Tribune review of Cage's latest LP as showing 'a surprising degree of charm and affability'.

And that is exactly what made me smile, if not laugh outright, as I strolled around the Barbican' stunning new exhibition The Bride and the Bachelors: Duchamp with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns. Marcel Duchamp, of course, is the leader and shaper, cueing the 1950s experiments of those great Americans as early as 1913. Technically brilliant and dynamic as his two early "portraits", Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)

and Bride

of 1912 certainly are, you wouldn't have expected what eventually resulted before Duchamp 'lost all interest' in the project in 1923: The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even, aka The Large Glass illustrated up top. More comprehensible to me are the playful promptings of his first 'Readymades' which makes you realise how early conceptual art came into the picture. The Bicycle Wheel (on a stool; the Barbican has a reproduction), also of 1912,  came about simply because Duchamp 'just liked the idea of having a bicycle wheel in my studio'. Of the New York phase he wrote of 'relating  notions of aesthetic worth to a decision of the intellect and not to a facility or cleverness of the hand, which I have protested against in respect of so many artists of my generation'.

If that sounds too sober, then let's go straight to my favourite, the 'assisted Readymade' Why Not Sneeze, rRose Sélavy? of 1921. The lovely rRose became Duchamp's drag alter ego, as the charming photo above by Man Ray of  'La Belle Haleine' shows. The proper moniker is a play on the universal truth 'Eros, c'est la vie'.

Quite what rRose has to do with the piece in question is uncertain. It's a metal birdcage full of what look like sugarcubes actually made of marble, with a cuttle bone and a thermometer penetrating the bars.

In the late 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I believe in the company of his lover Jasper Johns, and so admired the artefact that he tried to nick a couple of cubes. The guard stopped him with 'Don’t you know you’re not supposed to touch that crap?'

These fascinating artists collaborated with the great Merce Cunningham and John Cage. There's an exuberant 1954 'assisted Readymade' kind of a design by Rauschenberg for Cunningham's Minutiae.

Against a background which  may include the random chimings of a self-playing grand piano intoning a Satie-like piece by Cage, several of the Bride-linked Cunningham dance pieces are re-enacted on the exhibition's stage several times a week. I was lucky to catch one performance on Thursday evening.

All four Americans owed so much to Duchamp, sometimes without knowing it: Cage, using the hexagrams of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes for his musical 'chance operations', only later found out that Duchamp had 'composed' his own chance pieces long before in a family game extracting notes from a hat. Below: Cage preparing a piano in 1964.

Such connections make this an endless hall of mirrors, metaphorically speaking, though the show is brilliantly designed by Philippe Parreno and fits the Barbican spaces both downstairs and up perfectly*.

The Barbican, moreover, had cast its net wider in its Dancing around Duchamp season. I was there to review the Théâtre de la Ville-Paris's production of Ionesco's Rhinocéros. Let's have one of the production photos by Jean-Louis Fernandez I didn't use on The Arts Desk: Hugues Quester and Valérie Dashwood in the last, oddball love-duet of the play.

I had no idea this was such a great play: funny, lucid, chilling, even profound. Reading it was a revelation; seeing it I found it less uproarious, but the show was pacy and imaginative all the same. In its thesis of a sane seeming-mad protagonist against a faceless majority, it has something in common with Giraudoux's lesser entertainment The Madwoman of Chaillot; so it was a happy coincidence that I'd seen, liked and review-raved about Jerry Herman's long-buried musical on the subject, Dear World, the previous evening. How I love its hit songs and its ingenious musical-theatre trio for the old-timers, played here by Annabel Leventon, the deservedly legendary Betty Buckley and the outrageously funny Rebecca Lock (photo by Eric Richmond).

The many waltz-songs in this show, I reckon, are as strong as those in Sondheim's A Little Night Music. While we wait with not a little trepidation for Liza Minnelli's appearance at the Southbank's The Rest is Noise festival this coming Friday, let's see and hear her singular delivery of Countess Amelia's 'I don't want to know'. This was 1986, and Liza was still in fabulous form.

As for the Barbican, there are many more fantastical treats in store, and I'll certainly be dropping in on the exhibition again. For filmed entertainment, in the meantime, I'll leave you with naughty John performing his Water Walk.

*As Sue reminds me in her comment, the exhibition originated with the above-mentioned Philadelphia Museum of Art, so it's all the more impressive how well it must have been tailored to suit the Barbican Gallery's tricky space.

Exhibition image credits: 

Marcel Duchamp The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1991-92 (replica of 1915-23 original) Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Marcel Duchamp Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), 1912  and Bride, 1912  Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection © Succession Marcel Duchamp, 2013, ADAGP/Paris, DACS/London

Marcel Duchamp as Belle Haleine, 1921  Photograph by Man Ray  Private collection © Succession Marcel Duchamp, 2013, ADAGP/Paris, DACS/London © Man Ray Trust, 2013 / Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Robert Rauschenberg Minutiae, 1976 (replica of 1954 original)  Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.  Walker Art Center, Merce Cunningham Dance Company Collection © The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2013

Installation photographs (dance and exhibition) by Felix Clay

John Cage preparing a piano, c.1964  Photographer unknown  Courtesy of the John Cage Trust (Documentary image – not in exhibition)

Wagnerabend in Belgrave Square

They do these kind of events very well, the Germans, and returning to the ambassador's residence was bound to be a pleasure. Especially as the programme had been arranged by the organisers of the Wagner 200 events this year, Mark Eynon and top Wagner expert Barry Millington (my former editor at the BBC Music Magazine, also the one who was kind enough to kickstart my Prokofiev book, pictured above with Sue Bullock and her husband Richard Berkeley-Steele. Georg Boomgaarden, the genial German ambassador, is seen between two of the heads).

What kind of Wagner fare can you serve up in an intimate space? They managed a good mix. La (or should that be Die?) Bullock launched stylishly with top pianist Llŷr Williams in the Tannhäuser greeting, 'Dich, teure Halle'. Janice Watson sang two of the Wesendonck Lieder (actually the two I find least interesting, but they were well done all the same). Here are the four artists in one of two official photos; the shots of the trio at the top and of Sir John Tomlinson in conversation with Barry are mine.

The coup was to bring the Bullock-Berkeley-Steeles together in the Dawn Duet from Götterdämmerung. Williams somehow managed to conjure an orchestra in the sunrise, and in came the two, each standing naturally and lovingly while the other sang. I'd forgotten what point SB brings to the German text, all the better in a small room. She's a fabulous recitalist: her Crear Classics disc of the Wesendoncks, Britten's The Poet's Echo and Prokofiev's Five Akhmatova Poems with contrasting flavours of Strauss, Quilter and Rorem is outstanding (it was our Vocal/Choral disc of the month in the BBC Music Magazine's March 2007 issue) .

Apparently another CD of songs with Malcolm Martineau is due for release shortly; and she's to be heard in recital at the Wigmore on 22 March.

To round off the little homage, Williams made effortless work of the Tristan Liebestod in Liszt's insane transcription (all those tremolos!). Eynon gave a felicitous speech, and didn't need to sell the highlights of the forthcoming festival to me: I'll be going to Kings Place to hear Watson's song recital and Williams's presentation of Wagner piano pieces alongside other Liszt transcriptions.

That greatest Wotan of the 1990s, Sir John Tomlinson, was there in the audience at the ambassador's residence, wrapped up in the music; he'll be presenting a read-through of the entire Ring libretto in the British Library on 9 June (date now confirmed thanks to Barry's message below). Dame Gwyneth, alas, couldn't make it, though she'll be masterclassing as part of the festival; now there's a diva I want to meet. The programme of events so far confirmed is on the Wagner 200 website here. Millington and SJT discussing plans below.

The whole event was entirely genial; the ambassador (to the right of Berkeley-Steele, ie to his left, in the photo below) and his wife are very cultured folk - not always the case in that world - and J likes them very much indeed. Sue Bullock has always struck me as completely natural in person (we first met her at pianist Phillip Thomas's 50th birthday party). I managed to have a chat with RBS about Phyllida Lloyd's English National Opera production of Götterdämmerung in which he sang Siegfried: absolutely the best staging of that particular opera I've ever seen, even if I had my doubts about the others (good in parts). Ardent Wagnerians apparently felt the same - one went to see it six times - and we all lament the fact the cycle never had another chance.

Meanwhile, roll on the festivities in the round. My priority is to get to see Die Feen as done in concert by Chelsea Opera, though sadly a Sussex Das Liebesverbot later in the year has bitten the dust. Collectors can tick off a few gaps in the Wagner list, though to be honest there aren't that many worth bothering about.

The following Monday, the Italians held a parallel tribute to Verdi at their ambassador's very beautiful residence in Berkeley Square. This turned out to be an actor reading excerpts from Verdi's letters and memoirs translated by Gaia Servadio and Royal Opera chorus master Renato Balsadonna playing excerpts from Nabucco, La Traviata, Aida and Otello on the piano. Interesting enough, but we missed la voce cantata.