The soul of Setúbal

Setúbal's true soul no doubt rests with its extraordinarily resilient people, the history of its various trades and its unique position 40 kilometres south of Lisbon at the mouth of the broad River Sado, with miles of sandy beaches opposite and the verdant Arrábida mountain range, much of it within a national park, just to the west.

For the purposes of a first blog entry on a remarkable place with which I fell very quickly in love, though, let's deal with a quiet heart, an easy refuge in the middle of a city that never feels too busy, more of a town which may be suffering as badly as anyone from the truly dismal Portuguese recession, but in the brilliant sunshine of late May and from a callow tourist's perspective hardly felt like it. We were lucky to be there as guests of the annual Setúbal Music Festival - now covered in an Arts Desk special - led for four days by a thousand jubilant children and with a general feeling that culture really was bringing a better life to this port on the western edge of Europe.

This is the newly restored wall of the Convento de Jesus, its cloisters under wraps, the treasures of its gallery temporarily housed in a handsome bank building on the Avenue Luisa Todi which forms a garden promenade on the south side of the old town.

The stone of the porch and columns is the lovely reddish, mottled breccia from Arrábida, the green mountain we'll visit in a future entry. Here's the sort of landscape we're talking about, prior to a very cold dip.

My information on the convent's history is limited: one of Setúbal's charms is that it really isn't set up even for cultural tourism, so there were no guide books of any kind. They have, at least started to put brief history plaques outside the major edifices, and from this one I learnt that the building was founded in 1491 by Justa Rodrigues Pereira, King John II's nursemaid and court noblewoman. After John's death in 1495 Manuel I took over the support of the building and engaged Diogo de Boitaca - his first known commission, long before his celebrated work on the Jerónimos Monastery in the Lisbon parish of Belém - three years later. His are the most striking stone additions, making the Convent of Jesus the first gem of Manueline style.

The pillars' three plaited columns of this late Gothic architectural movement are as surprising as the very different ones in  Belém (which I dimly remember from our first, and less successful, visit through a film of sickness from eating poisoned eels. One positive result of that trip was that J got a cold and gave up smoking, a resolution he has maintained to this day. But I digress).

Up in the roof of the choir, the patterns of twisted rope are also typical of Manueline style

while in the nave the columns offset characteristic 17th century Portuguese blue and white tiles, the famous azulejos (there's a major factory nearby which ships extensively to South America).

The ones on the north side depict the life of Mary, including elephant and castle.

There's a large mullioned window with late Gothic tracery, handsome both within

and without.

Jesus Square, fringed on one side by friendly little cafes but hardly a hive of activity, was donated by Jorge de Lencestre, bastard son of King John II and Master of the Order of Santiago (thanks, Wiki). His commissioning work is also the cross, originally placed near the apse of the church but moved in the 19th century to the middle of the square.

A stroll around the back reveals a pretty Franciscan chapel

and an old, disused bath house, with the chimney of one of the many former tanneries in the town behind it.

What a unified masterpiece this chapel would be if the fourteen panels of its great altarpiece could be restored to their rightful place. In fact these vibrant Renaissance biblical scenes, the work of the great Lisboan Jorge Afonso and his workshop, had been hanging next door in the monastery gallery for years and during restoration are now down the road in the town's main exhibition space, to administrators of which I'm grateful for this shot (four of the panels are displayed to the side of the central group).

We met some very likeable, I would be impertinent enough to say loveable, local worthies on our festival visit.. Among them was Hugo Ricciardi O'Neill, a putative king of Ireland, guardian of a branch of the O'Neill dynasty of Clanaboy which has been in Portugal since the 18th century: as Portuguese-intellectual as they come and with the most charming, friendly and natural Spanish wife, Carmen. He loved our idea of getting high quality reproductions installed in the chapel if the originals simply can't hang there: this is a project for the future, maybe in collaboration with our own National Gallery's reproduction scheme.

The other churches of Setúbal's old town all have their charms. We weren't expecting the monumental gilt wood altarpiece of Santa Maria, serving as the city's cathedral. The 13th century building had a full makeover in the second half of the 16th.

The work of Master Jose de Rodrigues Ramalho, and dated 1697, the altarpiece makes a sobering contrast with the city's essential poverty: wasn't the divide between the clergy and the populace ever thus?

In addition there are Tuscan columns, some tilework and an 18th century painted ceiling.

We heard fine religious works by Victoria and - actually more interesting - several Renaissance Portuguese composers sung by a small vocal ensemble, the Grupo Vocal Olisipo, led by the most individual and impressive of sopranos, Elsa Cortez. But more of that over on the Arts Desk.

São Julião, down in the main Bocage Square,

 is covered with more azulejos depicting the extraordinary life of its saint, but is more remarkable for its position in the general ensemble

while São Sebastião, secluded up the hill, has two of the glorious jacaranda trees for which Setúbal is celebrated - and we were there at the right time for the fragrant purple blossom - in its courtyard.

Some interesting painted woodwork inside

and of course the pierced saint on the altar

but the church was more remarkable for its active youth centre in the cloisters, with a volleyball court on the roof. The saint again alongside Fatima above a doorway opposite is typical of Setúbal's ruined splendour: many of the prettiest houses are the most neglected.

More tiled but declining splendours in the old town. This one

has some typically meaningful graffiti on the wall round the corner ('all different, all equal').

The painted walls of Setúbal need to form the backbone of a future post. Maybe they take their cue from the personal tiling: presumably this disused villa has its owner depicted.

That adds to a certain sense of the picturesque, and also to the greedy northern European instinct for redevelopment. I did mention this to Sophie, who's just left us to return to her hotel in Djenne after a super day we spent together at Glyndebourne - there's contrast for her - and she jumped at the chance to make a boutique hotel there. But don't worry - Setúbal will never be a mass tourist destination, though it deserves much better than the cursory glance in my old Rough Guide ('most of its charm is long gone': nonsense, you just have to look, and not too hard in the old town proper).

Should end this first instalment at another big city temple - the amazing market building which was restored, though at the loss of several lives when its south wall collapsed.

The basic idea was worthwhile, though, because quite apart from the abundance of fruit and vegetables the azulejos form a distinguished background to one of the best fish markets I've ever seen. Swordfish aplenty

as well as the cuttlefish which yield the local speciality, chocos fritos

and tuna (I'm not sure I've ever seen a big 'un so cut before).

The Lisboans come here every Sunday for their seafood lunches, and for good reason. Hell, I'd even fly there for a couple of meals and a night. And we shall without a shadow of a doubt be back.

Lear, in tears

She moved me very much, as only Kathryn Hunter before her had on the stage (and I've seen a few King Lears. Jacobi's is probably No. 1, but his I experienced in a livescreening). Unlike Hunter, though, Ursula Mohan is not playing a man. Her Queen Lear makes sense from the start, where we see her joshing at the piano with her Fool (a male nurse as played by Joseph Taylor: and why not, said Ursula afterwards - isn't it the case with so many old people that their carers are the last to stand by them?) Phil Willmott's production is fluent, the ideas of its contemporary setting all followed through and its engagement with a tiny audience total (50, I think, the maximum in the tiny Union Theatre we love so much).

The verse speaking always makes sense, however variable the cast, and certain themes are driven home with unrelenting pungency, like early-onset dementia, drug-taking and homelessness. If that feels right-on, it never seems so as you watch. We arrive in the dark space and stand for the first 20 minutes to witness the capricious division of the kingdom (selfie before it all goes wrong, Mohan pictured in one of Scott Rylander's superb production pictures with Claire Jeater's Goneril, Daisy Ward's Cordelia and Felicity Duncan's Regan) then seats are unobtrusively set up. The last third takes place with half the audience sitting around a white-covered table on which the scenes on the way to or at Dover are acted out with unremitting vividness.

Mohan's Lear launches her downfall in chilling confrontations with her three daughters, the horror of what she says offset by the bewilderment and confusion we register so closely in her face. Is an invocation of sterility on a thankless daughter the more horrifying when it comes from a mother? I felt so. And Harriet Walter's wise words on the human predicament affecting everybody chimed with the universality of this Lear. It felt absolutely right to me, at any rate; not a false note, no meaningless histrionics from Mohan.

Our central 'act' took place mostly in darkness, with torchlight adding to the atmosphere of the scenes on the heath (Mohan below with Taylor's Fool). If only the soundtrack of thunder, wind and rain had been turned down for the arrival in the hut: the words here weren't so easy to make out above it.

Action after the second interval was raised to an almost unbearable and unremitting level of tension. The absolute highlight for me, the point at which the tears really flowed, was the emergence of Mohan's flower-crowned Lear from cardboard packing to confront the blind Gloucester on the white table.

The official Gloucester, Richard Derrington, pictured above, was sick, so Simon Purse, the Doctor in the original cast (well adapted for the Fool) took over. He did it with the script until the blinding, after which he was truly moving without a prompt.

Among the very mixed blessings of the cast, Rikki Lawton's Edmund was the spunky prankster-villain to the life, winking and nodding at the audience to keep his soliloquies vivid, showing some good in the character at the end (Edgar is not exactly likeable in this production). Super-statuesque Claire Jeater was the stylish Goneril, pictured with Lawton and Duncan below.

Catch the run, if you can get a ticket, before it ends on Saturday, We went because our dear friend Kurt Ryz, who knows Ursula well, praised it to me - and I know he wouldn't say anything insincere. Usually wary about 'backstage' visits, but I and our Berlin friend Debbie York were so moved that we had to see her. And how lovely she was, with plenty of insights which chimed with what we'd seen. The upshot of which is Debbie, always looking for new ways of presenting recital programmes, thought she might like to collaborate with Ursula on one in future. The actress willing, of course.

I wasn't sure if Ursula would remember me from our one meeting some years ago, but she'd just seen me on the telly. Which means the Glyndebourne documentary aired on BBC Four on Saturday. All of it was interesting and a lot of the details in it new to me, though inevitably it was compromised by being half about the history of Glyndebourne and half about Richard Jones's new production of Der Rosenkavalier, which was where I came in, and eventually I got used more than I'd expected. Any excuse for using more images by Bill Cooper from that extraordinary show, so let's have one from each act with the lovely Kate Royal as the Marschallin, Tara Erraught as Octavian, Lars Woldt as Ochs and Teodora Gheorghiu as Sophie

Anyway, the dovetailing was skilful and I especially loved the enthusiastic contributions of Gheorghiu and the utterly delightful Tara, a woman who clearly has enough inner strength to have weathered the recent storm in a teacup - s'ist halt vorbei - and who likes as I do to walk across the Downs from Lewes to the house.

Nice contributions from easy-going Gus Christie and David Pickard, but Jones is the king of the idiosyncratic both in what he said about the opera and about Glyndebourne, undercutting everyone else's no doubt sincere comments about the beauty of working in deepest Sussex by saying how he sometimes wanted to get away from 'Planet Opera' and smell the fumes of his native south London as he got off the train at Clapham Junction. He also described the olfactory effects he wanted from each act, stopping short of saying what pong the inn scene should conjure.

You can see the documentary on the iPlayer until this Sunday evening (UK only, friends abroad tell me). I do recommend watching the whole thing.

STOP PRESS: Don't miss the chance, via what else but The Arts Desk,  to  win two tickets to Glyndebourne's Don Giovanni.  Sounds like an ace revival of a good show that's a hell (no pun intended) of a lot better than Kent's turgidly staged (but superbly sung and conducted) Manon Lescaut.

Later: wonders will never cease. Having alerted friends to Glyndebourne having the complete production up on its website until last Sunday midnight, I now find out it can be seen on the BBCiPlayer for another three months. Watch it here.

Nuns and chisellers

The French word 'ciseleur' is preferable, and, embracing as it does 'engraver', gives a better sense of the guild to which that master goldsmith and fantasist Benvenuto Cellini belonged. But the point here is to contrast the feminine strength of Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites with the testosterone-driven wonders of Berlioz's liveliest opera - indeed, possibly the liveliest opera in the repertoire - which I had the good fortune to see on consecutive nights last week (Royal Opera images by Stephen Cummiskey; ENO photos by Richard Hubert Smith).

We've spent seven weeks apiece on these operas in my City Lit classes, and I've never been more absorbed (equally, certainly, but not more). I wish I could say the same about one of the two productions. By the way, for Cellini I used the only DVD so far, from Salzburg - great idea with the robots, spirited performances from Maija Kovaleska and Laurent Naouri especially, don't mind the feeling of Broadway show, but there's a general sense of trying too hard - and all the recordings. The first Sir Col with Gedda is peerless, though interesting to hear alternatives on the recent John Nelson edition.

Let's get the reservations out of the way first. Terry Gilliam's return to Berlioz is a bit of a mess in its first half. I don't think he's worked on the crucial Personenregie: we hardly give a damn about Benvenuto's amatory escapade, and poor Corinne Winters, though she sings reliably throughout, can't make much of Teresa in a bad blonde wig (though I don't think the aria is anything like as animated in detail as Nicole Cabell's marvellous Cardiff prizewinning performance).

There's always too much business going on, too many scene changes happening while the set pieces are winding up. The should-be-funny guys, father Balducci (Pavlo Hunka) and comic suitor Fierramosca (Nicholas Pallesen), just aren't; the Roman carnival should be disciplined but is just a lot of chaotic milling around, albeit colourful.

Part (Act) Two is so much better, and soon lifted me from my interval despondency. Edward Gardner's conducting, which had been much too heavy and exaggerated for any needlepoint comedy - the featherlight trio wasn't helped by having the singers too far away, and too high up - came into its own for weightier matters, and even Charles Hart's arch translation brought some unexpected pleasures. It beats me how those commenters on Alexandra Coghlan's Arts Desk review could advise us to leave at the interval ('the party's over'). What do they want, just more froth? Because while the only number in Berlioz's score which is marginally less involving than the rest, the second duet for Cellini and Teresa, is cut, there are a string of beauties: the duet for Teresa and Ascanio against the monk's chanting, the great ensemble with the Pope - how I loved both Gilliam's high camp for his entry

and Willard White in fine voice frou-frouing around, even getting a bit nasty when his statue looks as if it might elude him

- and then the best set-pieces of the evening: the lovely rondo for Ascanio sung perfectly by Paula Murrihy, the only singer not to put a foot wrong throughout and a real Octavian in waiting (wish there was more of her in the picture selection than just a supporting role in this image)

and the wistful 'wish I were a country man' solo for Cellini.

Michael Spyres sounds surprisingly hefty for the Rossini tenor his biography suggests, and can't quite maneouvre around the insane heights, but he carried this off well, and Gilliam let him do it in peace. The forging of the Perseus was, I reckon, done as well as it could be on stage, even if I heard Michael Palin in the audience as we left wryly refusing to tell someone what hadn't gone quite according to plan. Anyway, the point is that I left exhilarated, when I might have left precipitately deeply disappointed.

No major reservations about the arrival of the now-classic Robert Carsen Dialogues des Carmelites at Covent Garden (even bigger audience star-check: within seconds on exiting, I saw Jonas Kaufmann, Fiona Shaw and Deborah Warner). Carsen's painterly instincts for a nearly bare stage informed by evocative lighting brought us one stunning, apt tableau after another, none more haunting than the body language and grouping of the nuns in prison awaiting their sentence. There doesn't seem to be a better photo of that than this one.

I think for me this was the most choking moment of all in an emotional evening, so quietly and authoritatively did the strange-toned but always compelling Emma Bell deliver Madame Lidoine's words of wisdom. Here she is earlier in the action.

Nobody was found wanting. Sally Matthews' is an odd technique, sometimes cloudy, but she sent the sound up top with emotional truthfulness, fell to her knees very eloquently and conveyed the sense of Bernanosian limitless fear superbly. How we jumped when she dropped and broke the statue of the Infant Jesus, even if we knew it was coming.

Deborah Polaski's First Prioress may not have gone through her death agonies with as much harrowing realism as the peerless Anja Silja on the DVD of the same production from La Scala, but she sang the role with far more refinement and dynamic variation.

Anna Prohaska almost over-coloured Soeur Constance but she's a precious new talent on the scene, and Sophie Koch redeemed her baffling Octavian here some years back with a compelling and ultimately touching Mere Marie.

Equal star to Bell for me was Yann Beuron, such a powerful lyric tenor and an extremely sympathetic actor, as Blanche's desperate brother

and he was well offset in the first scene by Thomas Allen's baffled father. The final scene, of course, had both of us trying to restrain ourselves from sobbing out loud

and the lady next to us, come to see it for a second time because her two sons were in the people's ensemble (which she said had raised a few hackles with Equity, but they certainly added another dimension)

This was a redemption, too, for Simon Rattle: one of the best things I've heard him do recently, though come to think of it his Pelleas in the same house was very fine too, and it helps to have conducted that vital inspiration for Poulenc first. The chop-change style, modelled sometimes, I feel, on Prokofiev's mosaic operatic technique, suits him well; the extremes of dynamics were striking throughout and having the harp in a box made those great upbeat swooshes clutch at the heart. Slightly disconcerted by the brass vibrato which sometimes made it sound like a Broadway show (ditto the overamplified guillotine). But otherwise, nothing but praise for the dedication of the players.

It's been an amazing operatic couple of weeks - all this, Feuersnot in Dresden, the shattering and surprising Owen Wingrave at Aldeburgh on my birthday - an action-packed occasion I hope to chronicle here - a meeting with the galvanizing Kristine Opolais and her first night as Manon Lescaut yesterday with Jonas Kaufmann and Antonio Pappano, all three just about transcending the vague sterilities of Jonathan Kent's production. Here's a photo I couldn't fit into the review from Bill Cooper.

Both Benvenuto Cellini and Manon Lescaut have the benefit of livescreenings around the world (Cellini, I note, got the HD treatment last night; Manon is due soon). Dialogues des Carmélites did not, but at least an earlier incarnation of the Carsen production, as I've mentioned above with reference to Silja, provides a different document. Much more troubling is the removal of Adams' challenging, ambiguous The Death of Klinghoffer from the Metropolitan Opera's HD schedule. This blog post, linked originally by my somewhat erstwhile blog friend Jon Dryden Taylor, expresses everything I feel very succinctly (albeit from a different perspective, that of a 'left-wing, liberal Jew')*.

We still have half a class left to go on Carmelites: I can't leave these nuns, or their various authors alone. And that means I'm skimping on my beloved Ariadne. But this has been an awfully big adventure through a score which, as with Cellini, I didn't know in detail. Grim times ahead, sadly, for the City Lit: a bombshell fell this week. But I need to get my facts together before I report and protest. I leave you with an astonishing film, courtesy of our Australian wanderer, of Joan Sutherland in a role I had no idea she'd taken on beyond the Royal Opera premiere, where Poulenc apparently adapted on hearing her. The diction up top is mush, as usual, but what authority, what passion in the voice.

Wonders will never cease - there's also the 1958 recording of the same scene at Covent Garden, conducted by Kubelik. Of interest if only to compare the change in vocal weight over decades.

*19/6 Further light in the darkness in some of John Adams's responses quoted here.