TIME lauds our Sophie

And the chocolate slipper award goes to the indomitable Sophie Sarin, seen here chez nous in an age when the parrot still sat guard at the window. TIME Magazine has just named her Djenne Djenno blog  one of its top 25 this year. An amazing accolade well deserved, especially since following the onset of war in Mali Sophie's was the ONLY reliable source of information as to what was going on (it still is).

This award of sorts also honours her singular brand of philosophy and humour, with a succinct introductory text, though the comments of sour aspirants who think they should have been preferred make dismal reading. What, more deserving than a woman who has helped, and continues to help, the blind to see by funding annual cataract operations in Djenné, among countless other community projects she's instigated?  I love this picture of what in biblical times would have been called a miracle.

As Sophie's example was the reason why I took up what is outwardly at least far less adventurous blogging back in 2007, I'm delighted to homage the Blogmother. In not too long a time we'll be bathing with her in a Swedish lake, and in the meanwhile may Mali choose its leader wisely.

Proms hat trick

That's partly a reference to Falla's vibrant ballet El sombrero de tres picos, but chiefly to an historic seven days at the Proms, with not only a Ring cycle at the highest level possible but also two other impressive feats: squeezing in Tristan und Isolde between Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, all three of which I had to miss because of my proud association with the Brittenfest in north Norfolk, and the participation of the stunning Antonio Márquez Company in Juanjo Mena's BBC Philharmonic spectacular of Beethoven, Falla and Ravel.

Had the dancers made it into the Proms prospectus, I would have noticed and made a special effort to go (bulletins were subsequently sent out to advertise their addition, but I somehow overlooked those). I can't regret going to the English National Ballet triple bill that Thursday night instead, and I love the only-connect fact that shortly after we'd seen a state-of-the-art Petrushka with Benois's designs and Fokine's choreography, orchestra and dancers at the Albert Hall were to some extent recreating a Ballets Russes hit of 1919.

That second half with Ravel's Boléro following The Three-Cornered Hat, at any rate, I managed to see on its BBC Four transmission, and colleague Jasper was absolutely right in his five-star 'Danza Erotica' review on The Arts Desk. On the platform where Anja Kampe, Nina Stemme and Bryn Terfel had sung and acted their hearts out two nights before, the dancers gave us sex without the usual cliches. Founder and star Márquez justifies his position, electrifying in the Miller's Dance of the Falla one-acter (pictured below) and dripping buckets of sweat as he launched Boléro shirtless.

The patterns of various dancers outlined the different phases in the slowly crescendoing tune; the stamping only heightened the orchestral excitement. And let's not forget the fact that Boléro started life to choreography by Ida Rubinstein's company, mixing factory rhythms and sensual provocation. Is this a first for the Proms? I know there's been dancing before an orchestra before, chiefly when Rostropovich conducted Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet at the Barbican and the Lithuanian Ballet joined in, but surely never at this level.

It won't eclipse memories of a slower, deeper-digging Boléro at the Proms conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen with subtler Ravel at the other end of the scale in the shape of the complete Ma mère l'oye ballet, but it was certainly something I've never seen before. Here's it is on YouTube. I fear they've clipped the first few seconds of side-drum, but at least it's otherwise complete. You can still watch the whole BBC Four transmission on the iPlayer for the next few days.

In its way, this was every inch as much of an achievement as 'the Barenboim Ring', though less widely noted. Much as my attention was riveted by every note and gesture of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, the climax to the week would have been the Götterdämmerung - I was bathing blissfully in a warm North Sea off Holm Beach as it began - and clearly Barenboim's afterspeech thanking the Prommers for their silence was deeply felt.

I need to disgorge all my impressions about Britten in South Creake, Wells-next-the-Sea and Holt, but I can't download my own photos at the moment for several complicated reasons, and I still need some Yorke Trust snaps of their Midsummer Night's Dream. I'm sure it can wait; happy memories keep me going meanwhile. And now to the Proms Tannhäuser. 

5/8 Still buzzing from it. Duly eulogised on The Arts Desk. Another Prom for the history books. And how could I resist a couple more of the indefatigable Chris Christodoulou's shots, others of which feature above? As I wrote on TAD, Runnicles is a gift for him - and a match for Barenboim, which is putting it mildly.

This big handsome man, Estonian bass Ain Anger, is a new god on the block. Read why over there.

A hero of our times

 
Breaking a self-imposed rule not to pile up posts - as well as a vow to get on with 'proper' work - I have to give vent to this. Out of the heart of a continent where gays are being executed, imprisoned or just driven underground - 'there is no homosexuality in Mali', even our liberal-minded Sophie once said - and unspeakable state-directed barbarism in Russia comes this voice of consistent sanity and courage. Retired 81-year-old forrmer archbishop of Cape Town Desmond Tutu does not mince his words like the Pope - though his were welcome too after Ratzinger's hypocrisy - or our own Archbishop(s) of Canterbury.  Here is exactly what he said according to The Independent.

I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven. No, I would say sorry, I mean I would much rather go to the other place.

I would not worship a God who is homophobic and that is how deeply I feel about this.

I am as passionate about this campaign as I ever was about apartheid. For me, it is at the same level.

Predictably he was lambasted by Bob 'Hanging's too good for 'em' Mugabe, who suggested he might want to take a husband rather than a wife. But you might have expected that, and Tutu's words, too, are exactly what I would have hoped for from the man who wrote such an eloquent introduction to Bishop Gene Robinson's In the Eye of the Storm back in 2009. Mostly praising Robinson's courage, he included another unequivocal statement.

For me, the question of human sexuality is really a matter of human justice; of course I would be willing to show that my beliefs are not inconsistent with how we have come to understand the scriptures. It is not enough to say 'the Bible says...,' for the Bible says many things that I find totally unacceptable and indeed abhorrent. I accept the authority of the Bible as the Word of God, but I remember that the Bible has been used to justify racism, slavery and the humiliation of women...Apartheid was supported by the white Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, which claimed that there was biblical sanction for that vicious system.

...May I wholly inadequately apologise to my sisters and brothers who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered for the cruelty and injustice that you have suffered and continue to suffer at the hands of us, your fellow Anglicans; I am sorry.

He doesn't need to apologise to me; I can't imagine why anyone would want to be a member of a church whose head only welcomes gay people so long as they don't express their love in sexual terms - as one wise American nun put it, like saying 'you're a bird, but you can't fly' - but I do want to see change there. It will come, sooner or later. The enormous Wiki entry on Tutu details on just how many fronts he has fought, and keeps fighting, not least support for Bradley Manning. Perhaps the greatest figure of our times, even while Mandela still lives?

Meanwhile there is much that is good elsewhere in carrying on the fight. Even Cameron impressed me with his words on why the Gay Marriage Bill, deeply flawed as it is, needed to happen. But I'm thinking mainly of  excellent articles in the papers like Hugo Rifkind's light-of-touch comment on Putin's Russia in the Times, which sadly can't be read unless you contribute to the Murdoch coffers (though I would, in passing, recommend you do read Tanya Gold in The Guardian on the pathological outburst of vilest Tweeted rape threats against the woman who wanted Jane Austen on the £10 note and her defender, MP Stella Creasy).

Rifkind begins by listing the edicts that have so horrified the liberal corners of the world: 'one law prohibits the adoption of Russian children not only by gay people but also by single people living in countries that allow gay marriage, presumably just in case they ever get the urge.' [A recent extension of this logic has been to legislate for the removal of children from gay couples, or even from couples where one partner or the other is suspected of being gay]. 'Another allows for the two-week detention of gay or even "pro-gay" tourists' . That also means 'suspected of being gay', so it puts the khybosh on travel to Russia by concerned would-be visitors. My blog pals Will and Laurent have already cancelled their 2014 Volga trip; good for them.

Meanwhile violence and injustice against gays in Russia escalate daily. Perhaps the lesson embodied in Berlusconi's conviction - che gioia -  is to tell us that Putin, like Mugabe, is only lashing out in his decadence and will end his career ignominiously - but when?

We can all do something in this case, even if it's as seemingly pathetic as not drinking Russian vodka, not buying Anna Netrebko CDs (perish the thought) or not going to Gergiev concerts. Does that sound weird to you? Well, let me explain. Both are among the 500 artists who lent their signature to the Putin campaign. Both have got themselves embroiled in politics, so are not performers living entirely within the musical sphere who should just be left in peace. Gergiev, as we all know, is as deeply implicated as he could possibly be. Netrebko - who, heaven knows, can't be anti-gay, and was snapped above by Manfred Werner at Vienna's Life Ball earlier this year - was told by one American activist she MUST make a stance on her attitude to the gay persecution. Well, the word 'must' is not to be used to divas, as La Cieca rather over-insistently made clear in an intriguing debate on Parterre dominated by the admirable 'M Croche'.

But it would be good if she did. It would also be good if out, proud and absolutely fabulous Marius Kwiecien  - pictured above, photo from the Teatr Wieki website, though not sure what the message on the T shirt is trying to say and yes, he IS top barihunk as far as I'm concerned - could make a statement as he sings alongside Trebs and under the baton of Gergiev in the Met Onegin. But that, again, is very much a matter for his own conscience, and we won't condemn him for not doing so. Worth pointing, out, though, that even the opera's composer lived a freer life under the repressive tsarist regime, at least until his questionable end, than those who can only benefit from his example across Russia do now.

Update (7/8): Stephen Fry has just covered all we could wish and more about Putin's Nazi rulebook tactics in this superlative 'open letter' to Cameron and Co about the Sochi Winter Olympics. I'd give him a knighthood for this.

Samarkand on the Elbe

Where's this? The clue is in the title: not in central Asia or the middle east, to which I so often long to return after years of untroubled wanderings there, but in Dresden. On the 'wrong' side of the tracks to the Altstadt, with the railway line running just past it, is this magnificent folly created on the earnings from smoke, the Yenidze Tobacco Factory. I well remember passing this neo-orientalist fantasy on our train journey from Berlin to Prague back in 1990.

 The Yenidze was lucky to survive the bombs as, of course, the city's other great dome, that of the Frauenkirche, did not. Designed by architect Martin Hammitzsch and built between 1907 and 1909, the factory took its title from the place where the Jewish entrepreneur Hugo Zietz established a tobacco business for import to Germany; Ottoman Yenidze in Thrace is now Greek Genisea in another part of the world redolent of a personally significant train journey, our InterRail travel to Istanbul.

Wiki, the only source of any detail, tells me the edifice  'has 600 windows of various styles; the dome is 20m high'. Detail is impressive, as in this gateway to what are now the office quarters, converted in the 1996 restoration.

I read that there was a cafe and restaurant just under the dome, so - following the night of our reason for being here, the Semperoper performance of Der Rosenkavalier - off we went after our morning's exhaustive visit to the treasures of the Neues Grünes Gewölbe and eventually discovered the narrow passageway at the north end leading to the lift up to the Kuppelrestaurant's beer garden at the north end.

The terrace beneath the stained glass dome was as we imagined it, the service by a spirited young east German waiter delightful (aided by 'wanderer' John, who's very chatty with any new acquaintance he warms to) and the food a good deal better than we'd expected in such a setting. You can't go far wrong, though, with seasonal white asparagus, and the salmon and potatoes accompanying it were fine.Good views, too, over the old town, .

the hills and the river as far as the sandstone quarries. Though nothing can surpass the splendour of the dome; I'd like to have seen it lit up at night.

Not inappropriately, we made our way back to the palace museums to look at the gilded, bejewelled weaponry and the gorgeous tents of the Turkish wars. The heat then drove us back to our splendid bargain of an apartment just off the Neumarkt. I don't think many readers will be unaware of the colossal civic gesture involved in the resurrection of the Frauenkirche, which began life in 1736 as a people's protest to the Catholic conversion, with attendant Hofkirche, of Augustus I (an expedience owed to his Polish regnancy).

More generally known is that it was flattened in 1945, leaving only two walls standing. That was how it stood until 1993, rubble like so much else in Dresden due to the painful lack of funds in East Germany, and so that's how I saw it on my first visit in 1990. This image from 1973 comes from the Deutsche Fotothek.

After the reunification there was a colossal drive towards what seemed like an impossible reconstruction, supported by fellow organisations in Britain, America, France and Switzerland. 3539 of the original building blocks were used to send the Frauenkirche reaching skywards again

accounting for 45 per cent of the material used. The darker colour of the old sandstone makes them stand out (Dresden's blackening sandstone is due not to pollution but to the high proportion of iron). Though the interior is hideous - panels painted in what looks like Italian bathroom style of the 1990s - and packed with tour groups throughout the day, that's not the point: the gesture is as heroic as the rebuilding of Warsaw's old town, and literally crowned by reforged bonds between the city and its destroyers in the shape of the orb and cross.

They were constructed in 18th century style, with help from London's Grant Macdonald Silversmiths,  by Alan Smith. His father had been part of  the 'Bomber' Harris' squadron which flattened and incinerated a great city. The thought of that restitution certainly brings tears to the eyes: we can move on, we can go some way to repairing the sins of the past.

And so the vast square in front of the Frauenkirche easily absorbs the thousands of daytrippers - much reduced, I was told, in the week following the floods - and the souvenir stands. The facades aren't exactly like the ones in Bellotto's famous view, but will do. The angle from which I took this photo is at least taken from the same building, and the same staircase, featured from a distance on the same side in Bellotto's panorama.

One remnant of the DDR era remains as an oddity in the Neumarkt, the Kulturpalast still used as the Dresden Philharmonic's concert hall - Marek Janowski resigned when plans for a new hall came to nothing - and on one side only they've left the rather splendid mural as a reminder of the ideals that soured.

I dug out my 1990 pictures and saw that there was more decoration on the south side, not to mention the Lenin group in the Altmarkt, now gone along with the Inter Hotel behind the Kulturpalast. The Altmarkt remains a sterile space.

How things have changes, too, around the Residenzschloss and the Hausmann Tower. 1990:

2013:

Pristine now, too, is the Augustusstrasse, though again clogged with halting tour groups. Buskers of superior quality to your usual boring statues liven up the scene beneath the 102-metre 'Procession of Princes' , painted in the 1870s by Wilhelm Walter. Its original stucco was covered over in 2006 with 25,000 Meissen tiles. Wasted effort? The jury's out on that one, but grand it is. Anyway, we enjoyed the man with permanently windswept tie and toy dog on a lead who spun around every couple of minutes

and a top-notch brass trio from St Petersburg intoning Verdi's Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves among other anniversary hits.

Back, then, to our packed touristic day. We took a late afternoon siesta and met up with John for an evening stroll in the balmy summer weather. The old town spires and putti were silhouetted in the sunset

and along the Elbe on the Neustadt side students and young people were all out peacefully chatting, drinking and smoking.

Here's more or less the famous view by Bellotto, as unspoilt as the Thames above Richmond and a good deal grander (a picture frame actually marks the spot).

And so along to the lovely grounds, open to all, of the Japanese Palace, where I enjoyed a chat with a delightful old Dresden lady very proud of her city and the nearby palaces, with views across to the Yenidze. A blissful evening, a real midsummer night's dream of peace and reconciliation in a once-troubled city.

The statue in the orchestra

Writing a programme article on Strauss's operatic canon for the Royal Opera's recent Capriccio, I was struck - and took the same title as a result - by the composer's reminscences about his operas from the perspective of 1942. He quotes Berlioz on Fidelio: 'Grétry has accused Mozart of putting the pedestal on the stage and the statue in the orchestra'. A bizarre charge, of course, as Berlioz recognised: just because the greatest operatic composer of all time gave his orchestra a dramatic commentary equal to the singers' music, not more important, he fell under suspicion.

There's a rather different application of the conceit in the case of my visit to the English National Ballet's triple-bill 'Tribute to Rudolf Nureyev' on Thursday with my Arts Desk colleague Ismene, who reviewed it with her usual knowledgeable stylishness. I should quickly point out that, despite this initial plaint, this was an evening of pure pleasure. Yet the middle of the three ballets did provide a case of the statue in the orchestra being so riveting that I hardly looked up at what could only be garlanding.

This was Maurice Béjart's brave - for 1971, but still not brave enough by our standards - attempt to give two men a Pas de deux in his choreography to Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, called Song [singular] of a Wayfarer. Maybe it's because I'm a 'first the music, then the dance' kinda guy that I couldn't take my eyes off young baritone Nicholas Lester (pictured above) in the pit, effortlessly projecting Mahler's intense meanings as he covered the extraordinary vocal and emotional gamut of these four songs. That's a real quality voice, too, something of a rarity. I sometimes find the company's principal conductor, Gavin Sutherland, a little stodgy, but the orchestra is a luxury band and both were on good form in the partnership.

What seemed to be going on above wasn't easily readable: two young men, connected physically but emotionally distant, reacting to the moods of the cycle but never going anywhere as the music's trajectory so obviously does (this is a beef I have with ballet, that it can't develop). Some surprising gestures, a fluid movement of the arm at a trill, the most striking complement to the funeral march of 'Die zwei blauen Augen'; and it was strongly danced by tall young ENB treasure Vadim Muntagirov, partnering a perhaps deliberately impassive Esteban Berlanga. But for me it was just ornamental. Ismene says I have to see what Kenneth MacMillan does in Song of the Earth, so at the first possible opportunity I shall.

In a way, though, I'm putting the cart before the horse, and the statue only briefly in the pit, in accounting for a box of delights which now strikes me as all the more welcome since what followed was total immersion in great, but thorny, Britten, up in Norfolk. Petrushka - what new can one say about the total co-ordination between Stravinsky's score, Fokine's choreography and Benois's designs, looking fresh and lavish in the sets and costumes ENB has borrowed from the Birmingham Royal Ballet?

Every musical gesture finds its vivid counterpart in the dance, from Petrushka's hammering on the walls of his prison booth and the Moor's coconut games - the dodginess in the role these days slightly undercut by having a black dancer, Shevelle Dynott, playing up the caricature -  to the footstamping of the coachmen and the hanky-waving wetnurses.

The sets can still surprise, especially when the forecloth of black demons flying over Petersburg falls during the scene-linking drumroll and leads to the stark interior chez Petrushka. Fabian Reimair was poised fabulously between the doll and the human (above in Petrushka's death scene), but no more so than Dynott and Nancy Osbaldeston as an absolutely deadpan Ballerina (both pictured below).

How do they do that opening scene when they seem to hang from pegs jigging about to the Danse Russe? Above all this was a real ensemble show, every detail beautifully illuminated in dance, design and sound. What a great masterpiece it is, still absolutely fresh.

Nureyev's exuberant elaboration of Petipa in Raymonda Act III, on the other hand, keeps the high St Petersburg classical style very much alive. I'm fascinated by so much of his often overstuffed but oh so vital choreography, and I was surprised to learn - even though I read Julie Kavanagh's wonderful biography when it came out, and must have forgotten - how much work he did with the London Festival Ballet, as it then was, around the same time in the mid 1970s that the above photo was taken.

The Raymonda divertissement is done to the highest standards here, with a dazzling take on the old-fashioned by designer Barry Kay radiantly lit by John B Read. I was delighted to hear some of Glazunov's fondant score live for once, and the act begins dazzlingly with a Straussian apotheosis. But apart from two numbers it isn't musically the best stuff in the ballet (postscript: been listening again today to Anissimov's excellent performance of the complete ballet, and the big Pas de deux - plural - in the first two acts are much more remarkable. What a rich, if sometimes sticky, score it is, the fourth Tchaikovsky ballet fallen into decadence). The exceptions are the Grand Pas Hongrois for the corps in glittering white and Raymonda's variation, written for piano to imitate, I assume, the cimbalom (the Hungarian links are tenuous in the plot but give the composer plenty of opportunity for specific colour).

This last was one of the loveliest bits of ballet I've ever seen, Daria Klimentová bewitching and slightly self-mocking en pointe. What a stylish dancer she is, so much more characterful than Rojo in the company's Sleeping Beauty (though Ismene assures me there are things in Aurora's part Klimentová could never manage and that technically Rojo is in a class of her own). Klimentová's partnership with young Muntagirov has become one of the surprise success stories of the ballet world, and their Grand Pas (Pas Classique Hongrois in the original) rightly set the house alight.

But then so did much else in this highest quality evening. I can hardly believe the whole triple bill was up for a mere few days, but then that's the evanescent ballet world for you. One thing's for sure: ENB, especially with newly defected dancers, can certainly give the Royal Ballet a run for its money.

All dance images by Arnaud Stephenson, courtesy of English National Ballet

Monreale 2: cloister

History lesson duly despatched in Part the First, I can go straight to the statistics having noted that more beautiful or intimate cloisters exist down the hill in Palermo, not least the one in the church of La Magione and the lived-in one of Sant'Agostino. But the heaven here is in the detail, as well as the devil and sundry underworldly creatures. There are 228 marble columns, many of them inlaid with glass tesserae, in the vast cloister (47m long on each side) which is all that remains of the original 12th century monastery at Monreale. Multiply that (mostly) by two, as double columns support four-sided capitals, to get the number of different carved scenes on the capitals and you have some sense of the colossal work of craftsmanship that went on here in a very short space of time up to about 1200.

For me, it's the ultimate treasury of the medieval fantasy you also get in our own church and cathedral capitals, corbels and misericords, with a dash of the Arabic legacy William II was careful to nurture in his court. That's most obvious in the diaper work on the pointed arches

and in the drinking fountain, surrounded by a kind of mini-cloister in itself in the south west corner.

Most of our time was spent on the east side, where the late afternoon March sun still shone the brightest.

While J put his feet up and took in the rays, I went from pillar to pillar cooing over the sheer variety and range of execution of the subject matter. Literature seems, in my perusal, to be flimsy on chapter and verse: the Monreale book I was planning on buying deals only with the mosaics inside the Duomo. There's a plan of the cloister with some (why not all?) of the details here, which tells me I missed a significant narrative of Norman coronation in the south-eastern corner, but the following should make some amends.

Let's start with the beasties, including harpies with monks' heads,

lions devouring man and beast,

men slaying dragons and serpents,

mermaids among evangelists

and other thingies from the bestiary I'd hesitate to name.

Some of the Biblical scenes look almost Roman in their sculptural quality, like the Massacre of the Innocents.

Many are charmingly naive: Adam, Eve and the Serpent,

scenes from the life of John the Baptist

and what I assume to be Old Testament cultivation

The list-obsessed part of my brain rebels at not having a full guide. If anyone knows where I can find one detailing each and every one of these carvings, please let me know. In the meantime, that leaves me only two more Sicilian retrospectives to go. This could last all year...