Lanu in Lahti: wood, light and concrete

My too quickly loved and lost Lumix camera may yet turn up at Cannon Street's lost property office (I only found out on Friday that Victoria, the terminus of the train on which I think I left it, was not the station where it might be lodged. They could at least have rung me back to tell me that my detailed report three weeks ago was misplaced). If it doesn't, I'll have to do without my own illustrations for the long-delayed chronicle of this year's Norfolk Churches Walk plus some spectacular shots of two very weird sunsets over Lake Vesijärvi in Finland. Goddam it, I'd have had all my Lahti pics if the camera hadn't run out of juice halfway through the download, thus not saving even the half it was supposed to have caught.

What I had saved before that was the cluster of pics taken on a blissful Sunday morning walk from the empty, not especially lovely town centre of Lahti down to the lake through the Kariniemi Park, knowing that I'd want to select one for my Arts Desk piece on the Lahti Sibelius Festival. The supply dries up around 1pm, when I came down the other side of the hill

to find Lahti citizens out and enjoying all kinds of leisure on the promenade along the lake; a pity those photos are lost, because I know I caught the interaction of people and nature rather well in some of them.

Still, it was a happy hour or so in what was the nearest I could get in my short stay to real Finnish woodland, and that's suitably recorded. This part of Kariniemi is officially an arboretum, though it seems to have evolved into a real forest, the light and shade playing on 12 reinforced concrete figures by local artist Olavi Lanu (born in 1925, died as recently as May of this year). The beauty of it is how they've weathered since the early 1990s, how moss and light contribute to their impact as they rest comfortably in what seems like their natural environment.

Standing guard alongside are different species of the northern trees which made Lahti an important centre for the timber industry in the 19th century - logs would be shipped through the lake system by boat and then taken by train to St Petersburg or south to Helsinki. So Paju ('Willow')

has the Siberian fir (Abies sibirica) as lofty companion

while the mossy couple of Harmaa tammikuu ('Grey January', looking anything but in early September)

stand in a glade featuring the Siberian larch (Larix sibirica).

Sun-and-shade-dappled Rankakasa ('A Heap of Twigs')

has Populus tremula, the aspen, to lend a green thought to a green shade.

The happiest harmony between art and nature is where the lovers of Kaksi Kivea ('Two Stones') try to kiss in a glade. In the second of two pictures it looks more as if they might be Pyramus and Thisbe, trying to make contact through the wall that parted their fathers.

Iso Kivi, 'Big Stone', yields up different interpretations depending on which angle you view it from, as must all good sculptures.

while Kierteeinen puu, 'Twisted Tree', seems like a blasted relic in amongst all the woodland life.

Hella Kivi, 'Tender Stone', finds another couple embracing in a way that makes one feel an intruder

and then, on the north-east slope down to the lake, nature takes over with mossy stone providing its own natural sculptures,

Polypores bracket themselves on to fallen timber

while glades of silver birch and beech trees show a softer aspect.

All the while Grieg's 'Morning' from his Peer Gynt music came wafting through the wood; I finally twigged that the musical fountain on Piku-Vesijärvi, the pond down in the park, was doing its 1pm stuff. Nature again took up where the music stopped, and an especially brilliant song came from a bird who was watching me intently. I'd be grateful if anyone could identify the masked avian.

Waxwings have eye-masks, and it could be that the crest is hidden, but I think they have other adornments which this bird lacks. The only ornithologist among friends of yore, Rob Innes, has vanished off the scene. Ony connect: he who once travelled to a really unattractive industrial part of China to track down a grey rarity on a roof also loved Sibelius; the Fourth Symphony was his favourite piece of music.

Feathery grasses waved in the bright early afternoon light

and the lake finally appeared through the trees.

I've already written with wonder of Lahti's greatest man-made wonder, the glass-shelled, wooden interiored Sibelius Hall designed on a tight budget by two Finnish architects of great imagination, Hannu Tikka and Kimmo Lintula. It opened in 2000 and its even more amazing atrium with an indoor forest of columns -here seen from outside -

rising to a night-sky of fibre-optic stars positioned as they were at the time of Sibelius's birth 150 years ago.

The blazing skies of two different sunsets, and shots of my good companions, world-renowned acoustician Larry King and Musical America editor Sedgwick Clark, have been lost other than to fond memory (which should be enough), but reflections of the natural wonder in the glass of the hall on two different nights remain simply because I'd downloaded a couple of pics in readiness for my article. Here's the Sibelius Hall relatively close

and from the jetty by the Piano Pavilion, designer Swedish architect Gert Wingårdh, one of several wood and glass commissions in the vicinity.

As for the perfect sounds within, you can get some idea from the Lahti Symphony Orchestra's new BIS set of Sibelius symphonies with its current music director, the great if recently invisible (to us in the UK) Okko Kamu. I've just reviewed them alongside Rattle's Berlin cycle for the BBC Music Magazine, and if I say that the main opposition was the seemingly natural and spontaneous versus the artificial and beautifully-coloured, you'll have a good general idea of what I thought.

A real Oresteia

A false Oresteia is one like Robert Icke's at the Almeida, now transferred to the Trafalgar Studios - rejecting any attempt to translate Aeschylus' tough, dynamic language and setting itself an extra problem in its contemporary setting by starting with the sacrifice of Iphigenia. Magnificent and thrilling as was Lia Williams' performance, you can't slant it all in favour of Clytemnestra; Athena as much as Apollo  would be dismayed by that, and the Furies would have too much of a part in civic life.

That there can be a civic life after all that atavistic blood-grudge saga is one of the things that has to fill one with wonder at this oldest of great dramas. Rory Mullarkey makes sure it takes its rightful place in a version which is only an adaptation in that it allows Agamemnon, Choephoroe and Eumenides to be performed in a single evening - in other words, halving the text but keeping the essence of every speech.

Although Mullarkey only studied ancient Greek for a year at school - which sets him at a disadvantage alongside the fabulous Anne Carson, whose Bakkhai in the only faithful-to-the-playwright staging of the Almeida's admirable Greek season was one of the best translations-in-action I've ever encountered, at least where I know the original - he seemed to me to get to the tough heart of the poetry. And I say this as a huge admirer of Tony Harrison's version for the classic National Theatre Oresteia directed by Peter Hall. Mullarkey talks total sense in the programme interview with Heather Neill:

Aeschylus is full of craggy verbal soundscapes, big, chunky language [complex, too - it was a killer to study in the original at university]. It felt necessary to try to capture some of that. Certain writers in English seemed influenced by Aeschylus and I glutted myself with them as I was working on it - Joyce, Shelley, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes. There's something in the elemental nature of that language, the way the words sing in the air. Later Shakespeare too: the complexity of Leontes' language in The Winter's Tale has something of that muscularity.

If only Icke, and Rachel Cusk in her so-called Medea also at the Almeida, had tried to come up with a contemporary equivalent of 'the way the words sing in the air'. But this kind of verse also needs intelligent, powerful delivery and, by Zeus, it got it in the two key performances.

Katy Stephens as Clytemnestra was all artful command and undercutting irony when she first appeared in a dress of fabulous design by Hannah Clark (top image; all pictures by Robert Day for Shakespeare's Globe). Those raised, sculptured arms, oh my, and that force in the crucial confrontation with son Orestes, which was the first point at which I really got a lump in my throat.

I'm possibly bound to be a bit biased in favour of Joel MacCormack since I regard him as something of a protégé since he participated - entirely on the shrewd instigation of Harriet Walter - in the Hofmannsthal readings as part of the German Opera Discovery Day I curated in Birmingham. There he played a sensitive, almost feminine Octavian and an ardent Composer (in the scene with Zerbinetta, excellently played by Daisy Boulton, culled from the original Bürger als Edelmann backstage scene linking to the operatic Ariadne). Orestes was, on the other hand, going to ask for blood and he delivered it, nervous, volatile and ultimately assured, speaking Mullarkey's pure poetry beautifully. I'd travel to hear his Hamlet, a role he must play soon. Though the Orestes in the Almeida Oresteia wasn't bad,  I've forgotten him already; I'll remember this one, and not just because I know the guy.

Electra is more marginal in Aeschylus than she is in Sophocles or Euripides, but I thought Rosie Hilal could have been a bit dirtier of voice and appearance. Still, sparks flew between her and MacCormack.

Elsewhere the acting was variable but never less than concentrated - I was never bored or distracted. Naana Agyei-Ampedu (pictured below with George Irving as Agamemnon) as the spat-upon 'barbarian' Cassandra spoke powerfully, but her words couldn't be made out when she sang.

The sung parts, in fact, were the least impressive part of Mira Calix's often just-right score - not on a level, inevitably, with the extraordinary complexity of Orlando Gough's choruses in the Almeida Bakkhai. But these ones made their point above all in the ritual screwing-up of courage to the sticking-point at the heart of Choephoroe.

Horn, clarinet and saxophone players came down from their box to participate at this point. I liked it that there was no percussion other than what we got from the electronics, much as I miss one of Birtwistle's greatest achievements in his score for the National (unforgettable the shrieking clarinets for Cassandra).

It's difficult to know who was who in the various choruses, though I was especially impressed by the metaphor of the ravening lion devouring an entire household, and the zombie Erinyes, only just a little bit comic, spoke well, too (which actress is this below?).

Still not sure why Adele Thomas' ancient-versus-modern production had the chorus in the first and last plays dressed in what looked like grey-black post-Second-World-War garb, and there was sometimes a home-made look about the presentation, but Clark's costumes usually came to the rescue.

The final Globe jig around an enormous gold phallus was well earned, a cathartic coda to a play which, whatever one may think about its patriarchal concessions, always surprises in its measured speeches after the horrors of the two before it. They'd sold out of Mullarkey's text in the shop, so I've ordered it up along with Anne Carson's proposal of a different Oresteia - Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophocles' Electra and Euripides' Orestes. Let my get my hands on a theatre and the right actors, and I'd be back in the director's chair like a shot for that one. Meanwhile, I hope someone reads this in time to rush to the Globe tonight for the last performance. The beauty of it is you can still walk in and buy a £5 groundling ticket to see top quality acting up close and personal.

A puzzled room with an angry Stew

For once in my theatrical experience, I don’t quite know what to think. Being told that the brilliant, quick-reacting and baroque-writing Stewart Lee habitually harangues his audience and pulls the rug from under stand-up expectations was no help. He really did seem to think that he’d never had an audience as crap as we were at Wednesday's 9.30pm slot in the Leicester Square Theatre. The fact that he seemed to be genuinely cracking up in bewilderment at how awful we were made it seem real. He really wanted us to believe him that he’d gone off piste in the second half to give some good material (it was) to the worst of audiences.

Or have I been hoodwinked by the Chinese boxes, the smoke and mirrors? In drama, one would get signposts in amid the confusion to let one know, in one of Henry James’s favourite phrase ‘where we are’. A comic who really falters and blames his audience deserves no mercy, but enough people knew the ropes to respond kindly. So was every bit of it a game? Lee got his embarrassed silences from a crowd who seemed to be lapping it up at the start. The two guys behind me roared, I laughed a lot, just-21-year-old goddaughter Rosie somewhat less so. She wasn’t the right target when he slagged off apathetic, screen-fixated youth; I know no-one more politically active. 

The first routine in what he told us were try-outs for 30 minute TV slots was about being pipped to the post at the BAFTA Awards by Graham Norton, who didn’t do much more than say ‘Hello x, I hear you’ve got a film out’; x: ‘Oh yes, it’s awfully good’. The running gag was ‘not jealous, really, but…’ Bout Two seemed to aim more at uneasy silences than building a scenario, with the ghosts of dead comics at his shoulders who'd committed suicide because of shit audiences like us. Definite discomfort when he reeled off names of other comedians he’d shared a Montreal stage with who were no more. Slow fade, and a sense of irritation on my part that a comic should get away with blaming the audience, however jestingly; while there are bad nights, the performing essence is to work your magic on the crowd, and this worked in the other direction after a while.

Last half-hour, much funnier and including the apparently spontaneous detour I've mentioned, about Daryl Hannah showing interest in a script of his for Hollywood and his catching a glimpse of Matthew Broderick looking less than thrilled about press interviews (good exaggerated impersonation, but one needed to suspend disbelief about loserville: Broderick had a good run and on-screen success in The Producers. He's pictured above at that time. So much for downhill all the way after Ferris Bueller’s Great Day Out). The running gag knotted together these three ingredients:

Can’t spoil any of the jokes: when this was originally destined for The Arts Desk, the comedy ‘hub’ gave me some rules which revealed why reviews in that genre aren’t funny in themselves. Wednesday evening had me thinking that a responsible reviewer should go to see every comedian's show twice, just to disentangle truth from play; if I went again, I'd find out, wouldn't I? As for the overall impression, I suppose I was disappointed that no sequence rose to the heights of two stints I'd seen on YouTube: his Ukip attack ('bloody foreigners, coming over 'ere...') and his wicked play on Top Gear's 'only joking'. You can find a link to the first and an embedded second on this blog post.

The next morning I caught the train for a wonderful 24 hours in Edinburgh, with Robin Ticciati launching his Scottish Chamber Orchestra Brahms series in the kind of style I’d hoped, and more: one with wings which helped me pinpoint what was so awfully wrong with the lumpy Barenboim/Dudamel Piano Concertos I discussed with Sarah Walker and Andrew McGregor live on BBC Radio 3’s CD Review yesterday morning (it's on the iPlayer for the next month - we're on around the 1h15m mark, but I liked what I heard of Hannah French's Building a Library choice of Haydn Trumpet Concertos, so maybe catch that too). More on the rep anon.

Ticciati's Brahms One fired up in media res with crack timpani playing, silvery strings and wind, all inner parts clear but nothing unnaturally light about it. Right at the start, in the Academic Festival Overture, the detail made me realise that lines which I thought were the main events actually only served as counterpoint to thematic development one doesn't usually hear. Supernatural sounds in the symphony's dewy but never over-sentimental slow movement and crucially flowing intermezzo-like third echoed the tone quality ‘from the other side’ we’d got in the last few minutes of the Berg Violin Concerto.

Isabelle Faust (pictured above by Detlev Schneider), maybe the Berg Concerto's best living interpreter, was the perfect colleague there, making true chamber music with some of the world’s most charismatic orchestral principals, and also a voice from another world in the Bach encore (it could only ever be Bach after Berg). The best of the Brahms had to come last, with perfectly-gauged vollies of volatile excitement after Alec Frank-Gemmill’s perfect horn call bearing out the quality of the SCO's new hybrid horns (mixing valves with the sound of the natural instrument). How he got that quality was revealed to me by Robin T in what I can only call a Brahms One masterclass plus the next morning, and will have to wait until the interview appears.

Congratulations coincided with the launch of the series: RT takes up a new post in 2017-18 at the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (formerly the Berlin RIAS Orchestra made so great by Ferenc Fricsay, an imaginative, focused temperament not unlike Ticciati’s). Their first and only previous collaboration  – a Berlin concert featuring Britten’s Cello Symphony with Steven Isserlis and Bruckner Four – was love at first sight. Much fascinating work still to be done in the meantime – and hopefully beyond – both in Scotland and at Glyndebourne.

The (almost) 24 hours were not wasted. Installed myself in the amiable, quiet and comfortable Parliament House Hotel on Calton Hill and then walked through Princes Street Gardens via Oktoberfest strains coming out of a big tent and passing a lot of young people in Lederhosen to have a quick snack with Debra Boraston opposite the Usher Hall. On to the concert with godson Alexander, who drummed his enthusiasm for the electrifying end of the symphony, his dad Christopher - who'll write up his thoughts on the concert along with the second in the series for The Arts Desk - and the delightful Vina Oberlander. Afterwards we crossed the road to Bar Italia which has changed hands since I last went there and now does superb dishes of home-made pasta with many original variations.

After the interview with Robin in the splendid Balmoral Hotel by Waverley Station, I wandered via the Fruitmarket Gallery to the inevitable National Gallery of Scotland, where I spent time on a Tintoretto I’d never really studied before – an unusual Entombment – wondered at how ‘real’ Rembrandt’s self-portrait from a year of terrible crisis seemed compared to its neighbours and went downstairs to the print display. The Renaissance works in question showed mostly scenes of immortals torturing mortals in horrible ways, including two ‘Flayings of Marsyas’; this one, by Melchior Meier operative in Tuscany between 1572 and 1580, incorporates Midas’s ass’s-ears punishment too. The flayed body is especially horrid.

A boy was going round the exhibition with his dad looking intently at each print: ‘Poppa, that swan and that lady seem to like each other. Poppa, that swan and that lady are kissing’. I’m not sure how much detail Poppa gave Oscar about the state of Prometheus’s liver or the the skin of poor old Marsyas.

Upstairs between the French 19th century paintings and 18th century treasures – another 'real' picture, a typically quirkily composed Stubbs, knocked spots off the rest - there was a half gallery of loans from the Lunde Collection in New York, mostly of powerful landscapes led by Norwegians Johan Christian Dahl and Thomas Fearnley (a nice complement, Sue's comment below prompted me to remember, to the later landscapes of Nikolai Astrup I wrote about in my Bergen blog entry). This Bernese Oberland view from above Lauterbrunnen to the Jungfrau massif by Alexandre Calarne isn’t that special, but it triggered off a great Sehnsucht to rediscover that very special part of Switzerland I didn’t really appreciate as a schoolboy.

Quick lunch - excellent boudin – at Chez Jules on Hanover Street, then just time to pop into the Scottish National Portrait Gallery where I got no further than the first room to the left – a brilliantly juxtaposed selection of portrait sculpture mixing old and new (the deconstructed head below is by Jonathan Owen).

Loved most of the captions, the Sultan Ahmet medallion, the several Epsteins and these three: John Duncan Fergusson’s bust of the Anglo-Saxon Eastre subtitled ‘Hymn to the Sun’, possibly a portrait of his wife Margaret Morris;

Kenny Hunter’s down-to-earth red fibreglass bust of Trade Unionist Jimmy Reid, which sits on a plain low table; 

and Glenys Barton's ceramic bust of Jean Muir, instantly recognisable but totally original.

Then to pick up bag from the Parliament House Hotel and catch the 3.30pm back to London, beguiled all the way by the latest in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series, the simply beautiful Lila. When I've finished it, I'll have to go back and re-read the first in the sequence to be published (you could actually read them in any order). A day, then, that ticked many of the boxes needed to make it a good one.

Close and Byrne

That’s Glenn and Rose as Patty Hewes and Ellen Parsons, dodgy old hand and incorruptible novice-who-grows. They make a magnificent double act in one of the best TV legal thrillers I’ve ever seen, if not the best. Yes, I’ve come late as usual to a classic American series, Damages, and we weren’t sure if we would stick to it after the first few episodes, where some of the characters (not least Ellen’s doomed boyfriend – and that’s not a spoiler owing to the singular shaping of each ‘season’) seemed seriously undercharacterised.There was also a distractingly, unintentionally funny attempt by Slovenian-American actor Željko Ivanek, compelling enough as the troubled Ray Fiske, to do a deep-south accent that lurched all over the place to English and Australian, among others.

Now I think Damages is the most skillfully plotted of crime dramas. Its structure has held good for the first four series: reveal something of the denouement at the start – which in the case of 1 and 3 means you know in episode one who’s going to get murdered  – but baffle your viewers as to how it got to that point. Of course I can’t say much more without giving essential details away, but I will say that I never guessed any of the details in the outcomes.

The brilliance of the scriptwriters is to keep so many strands in play before tying them more or less together. The masterpiece so far is Season 3, all about dysfunctional families. The central group under surveillance are the nearest and dearest of massive fraudster Louis Tobin (Len Cariou, creator of the role of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd). Campbell Scott gives an incredibly nuanced performance as the son; you just don’t notice how a seemingly good man goes bad out of desperation.

Lily Tomlin is his mother; the relatively small air time she occupies earns her a mention only in the closing credits as a 'special guest', but she’s central and compelling. The lawyer who thinks he’s family is also masterfully played by Martin Short. Kept in play with this are the dodgy behaviour of Ellen’s sister and Patty’s disastrous relationship with her only son.

There’s also the question hanging over the fate of the weak, vain demi-villain of the first series Arthur Frobisher, an amazingly good performance from Ted Danson which swings between making you laugh at the man’s cravenness and despise his corruption.

Series Three is consummate in swinging from pure comedy in the reintroduction of the Frobisher strain – there's been precious little humour in the first phase of Season One -  to the nastier side. And the upshot of the family tragedy is pure House of Atreus stuff.

So strong performances flank the two leads (in Season Two William Hurt, pictured above with Close, was central; in Season Four John Goodman is one of the two nasties to get, though I’m less gripped so far*). Rose Byrne I thought at first was destined to play the pretty cipher, but the follow-up on her grief over her boyfriend’s murder and rage at who tried to kill her – no spoilers there – has her running a range of melancholy and tired expressions, and it’s no mean feat to make essential decency interesting. Working with the senior actress must have been a masterclass which certainly produced strong results.

Close is so brilliant that you’re tempted to think she must be Patty Hewes, a woman of infinite complexity, a terrifying mixture of ice and red-hot rage, prepared to do bad to get good results. This is one of the great screen performances, no doubt, and it uses all the acting skills it takes to play a character you often can’t tell is acting. Would I go and see her next year in Sunset Boulevard at the Coli? Probably not, given that it's Lloyd Webber penetrating the walls of that holy sanctum (Sondheim, fine, though the ENO Sweeney was not one of their best shows). But I should point out that these money-spinning annual musicals don't eat into ENO's standard rep time; they appear around Easter when there used to be ballet.

We snatch the odd episode between or after evening commitments. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was, as anticipated, the stand-out triumph, fully vindicating a massive interview with conductor Mark Wigglesworth I put up on The Arts Desk more or less in its entirety (pictured above by Clive Barda: the phenomenally various Patricia Racette as Katerina with rat-poisoned dad in law Boris as sung by Robert Hayward). But I also enjoyed an exceptionally rich parade of contrasts in late September – the most vital entertainment possible in baroque violinist with a difference Bjarte Eike’s Alehouse romp after his Image of Melancholy programme at the delicious Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, “the Trocks” dancing classics to Petipa-perfection followed by a Ukrainian Don Juan, perfect chamber music at the Wigmore, two great performances of Mahler symphonies on consecutive nights.

*Just finished a Sunday evening's worth of that series to the bitter end, and though for the first time I guessed the outcome of what we see in the first episode as usual - halfway through, at least - it was as intricately plotted and resolved as the others.