Frost In Fulham

or rather West Kensington, as the Victorian estate developers called it to try and create a 'cachet'. 'Western wastes', as Henry James called it, might be more appropriate, but we do have a wonderful resource on our doorstep, Old Brompton Cemetery, maintained under the aegis of the Royal Parks as a public amenity and a superb natural habitat for wildlife - don't ask about the gay orgies the tabloids used to report on, I've seen no evidence, though it's clearly a cruising ground as well as a thoroughfare for everyone else.

I prepared to do what for me at the moment, with the stent still limiting exercise, was a big walk to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and back last Wednesday, and it was a remarkable day for it.  Snow didn't settle here, but frost following a night of rain and wind had created astonishing patterns on the roofs and bonnets of cars just outside the flat, like the one above in the shade and this on the sunny side of the street, which could be mistaken for an aerial view of the Alps from a plane window.

J accompanied me as far as the north gate of the cemetery, where there's now a rather chic little cafe with vistas down the alleys southwards. I've managed to conceal the extensions either side here; the cafe is behind the trunk of a big plane tree.

Vegetation on those graves still in the shade was attractively frosted

but in the full sun, the snowdrops were thriving.

Intriguing mosses and lichen on stone. They thrive in graveyards because of the absence of pesticides/herbicides.

The avenue fringed by London planes, leading to mini-homages to Bernini's piazza and St Peter's itself, told me why I think of late January to mid February as a golden-brown sort of time; the incipient leaves are that colour.

The path I'm photographing contains two interesting monuments off to the right, including the above to Valentine Prinsep, which turns out to be a copy of a 13th century Sienese original - I included it in a much more galanthocentric post some time back -

and, undoubtedly the cemetery's finest artwork, Edward Burne-Jones's design for the resting place of art patron Frederick Leyland. This, too, I blogged about as far back as 2009, but the sharp winter light helps define the patterning.

The path to the south, looking towards the west colonnade,

and a nearby broken column. I understand from paintings that it symbolises the decline of the classical with the coming of Christ - or so I'd thought, though J says that in this context it can stand for a life cut short - but here the comparison is with towering new construction taking place all around this protected ground.

So towards the oval 'piazza' - looking north

and past what I take to be Faith, Hope and Charity.

The angel whose hand 'holding' a bunch of daffodils I featured at the end of the blog post on Stephen Johnson's new work holds it still.

Colonnade from the south end

and exit notice,

before I pressed on to the hospital (good news, by the way: I heard on Friday that the operation is set for Tuesday 12 February. Only six more days of this restricted lifestyle to go.

Heading back,

passing more promise from the copper beech which is always so beautiful in the summer,

I took a route through the eastern quarter, which gives different perspectives on  'St Peter's' and with its pine trees against a blue sky suggests more Mediterranean climes, especially by the lion memorial.

There are some smaller-scale monuments here.

The vegetation on this side, all ferny, will grow lush in a few months' time. Meanwhile, nearing home, the magnolia stellata is in bud. Hope the frost doesn't get it.

Mirga and DG: a contract to get excited about

OK, so when Andris Nelsons signed up to Deutsche Grammophon, fine, wise choice on the company's part, but did the world need more recordings of Bruckner and Shostakovich symphonies (good as they are)? When his Lithuanian neighbour to the south of Latvia Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla (pictured above in what seems to be a nice new image by Andreas Hechenberger) brokered her deal, news of which has been released today, she clearly had take-it-or-leave it ideas about the repertoire she wanted to record.

Repertoire which will actually enrich us rather than just give another 'conductor's interpretation of...' (though I'd have been very happy if they'd gone for her individual and loving way with the Tchaikovsky ballets). The first release in May will be of Weinberg's Symphony No. 21, which the composer tentatively suggested might be called 'Kaddish', with the combined forces of the CBSO, Kremerata Baltica and its presiding genius Gidon Kremer - I raved about the live performance, coupled with Shostakovich's Fifteenth Symphony, here on The Arts Desk - and his Second Symphony (Kremerata Baltica only). Next are works by Mirga's fellow Lithuanian Raminta Šerkšnytė with the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra , Vilnius Municipal Choir and Kremerata Baltica. DG haven't specified what 'works by British composers' will be on the cards in the third project, to celebrate the orchestra's centenary.

It was serendipitous news on a day when I was working on a note for the performance she'll be giving with the CBSO of The Sea by Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911), her country's greatest composer. I'd expected to find this half-hour symphonic poem a bit wispy and second-rank, but it's astonishingly good. Listening to two recordings (by Svetlanov, right up his late romantic street, and  Gintaras Rinkevičius with the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra he founded in 1989 - I presume that's the same as the 'National' SO cited above), it's obvious how the young composer had absorbed the sound-worlds of Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra and Ein Heldenleben. Yet he eventually makes something of his own in the hypnotic nocturne that follows the storm. 

Not sure what to make of the art which took over in the final years of Čiurlionis's all-too-short life - he was committed to a psychiatric hospital with a severe bout of depression in 1910, and died of pneumonia there the following year, having never seen his baby daughter - but clearly there's a synaesthesic connection. The two above pictures are part of A Sonata of the Sea, painted in 1908. The first is entitled Allegro, the second Andante and the third Finale.

This gives a further fillip to my longing to visit the third of the Baltic countries - the first two, Estonia and Latvia, I love and respect beyond measure - to see Čiurlionis's house in Vilnius and the gallery containing his pictures. I also ought to think of travelling up to Birmingham to hear the concert, since I'm hooked on the work now. Here's Svetlanov's performance, a bit rough around the edges but right in spirit.

Johnson and Carduccis play Johnson

As in our national treasure clarinettist Emma Johnson (pictured right) and the Carducci Quartet (above, Matthew Denton, Eoin Schmidt-Martin, Michelle Fleming and Emma Denton) giving the world premiere last Thursday of Angel's Arc by my very good friend Stephen (no relation to Emma). This was his second big event at the Cadogan Hall; back in 2016 his orchestral homage to Bulgakov's cat-demon, Behemoth Dances, was performed here by the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra and Pavel Kogan following its Russian first performance. I couldn't make it, but I've since heard a recording.

Apart from its strange and reflective inner core, Behemoth Dances couldn't be more different from the quintet for clarinet and strings. Obviously the forces make a difference, but this is somehow more personal, Stephen reflecting back on his troubled teens from the perspective of a more recent grief . Placed after Brahms's Clarinet Quintet and an interval, and before Mozart's great example, it had a different dynamic, the clarinet more apart and clearly leading in a very vocal way (how many other composers today make the instrument sing like the human voice? I'd love to hear a soprano or tenor-and-string-quartet work from SJ) To me the strings were more bent on effects to create atmosphere, though there's a lively central section with a riff passed around the players - Behemoth inside out - which Stephen calls 'a nocturnal scherzo, whose sweet-sour alternations recall the moods (and some of the colours) of Mahler's haunted symphonic scherzos'; what came to my mind was more the extraordinary boogie-woogie-plus-tappings core of Shostakovich's Thirteenth Quartet.

But I don't want to do the usual critical thing of citing influences, other than those Stephen intended; I certainly caught a paraphrase of several bars from the Andante con malinconia of Walton's First Symphony, which he did mention in the note (and we both know a bit about malinconia). I was so proud of my perceptive artist companion, Pia Östlund, who 'got' and encapsulated the bigger picture much better than I did, and with little knowledge of the background; she described it as personal and introspective, but at the same time so spacious. We both agreed that the ending was pure metaphysical poetry. Stephen hoped it would convey gratitude as well as grief, and it does. I'm sure he couldn't have wished for a better performance, and the players were all so subtly fused in the Brahms and Mozart (loved the little transcription of Mozart's 'Ave verum corpus' as the encore, too).

Without being told I wouldn't have got the hidden reference which connects to Behemoth Dances through cats: in this case the most undemonic and human cat I've ever met, the late Agatha (I always called her A-GAAA-ta as in the Freischütz heroine), one of the few who could turn my dog-loving head. Expanding on his original programme note in a blog guestpost for Jessica Duchen, Stephen noted how Agatha's death triggered off recent griefs for his splendid father-in-law Canon Harold Jones and his aunt, Elizabeth Johnson. 'Playing around on the piano it struck me that I could make a kind of Schumann/Shostakovich-style cipher out of the letters of Agatha's name: with Te (sol fa) representing B, plus H from German notation, it gave A-G-A-B-B-A - a chant-like motif very like the haunting plainsong phrase "Lux aeterna" I'd used in Behemoth Dances.' Agatha, you will never be forgotten (cue repeat pic above).

Quality time with Agatha staying at the Johnson-Jones residence in Sutton St Nicholas was interspersed with hearty walks. And this connects very much with the new work, because Angelzarke on the West Pennine Moors was a favourite walking and cycling haunt of the young Johnson. Now he walks with greater peace of mind, for the most part, with Kate at his side. Another personal shot, then, from a May 2011 (!) ramble we took with the JJs up and around and down Skirrid Fawr.

I have to evoke those bluebells seen from the lower slopes again, because they offer promise of the spring which seems so far away still.

Even so, the snowdrops were out in force around some of the Brompton Cemetery graves as I cycled to yet another appointment at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital yesterday - as far as I'm prepared to go on a bike at the moment -

and someone had thoughtfully placed a bunch of daffs through the arm of a stone angel.

Praying I'll have had my op - still not scheduled - and be free of the stent when spring does arrive, so I can walk much further than I do now.

Hospital reading

Not reading in hospital - that covered three and a half books by Elena Ferrante - but reading about a phantasmagorical version

and the blackly comic reality.

At the start of both, which I read more or less simultaneously, I'd have been inclined to give the palm to Gwyneth Lewis's A Hospital Odyssey, a homage to Homer about the fantastical journey undergone by the devoted wife of a cancer patient - yes, I know it sounds unpromising, but it is unremittingly brilliant, playful and learnedly witty. After all, isn't Adam Kay's This is Going to Hurt a bestseller, an easy read - at least in the pageturning sense? Well, the more people it reaches the better. It has the advantage of on-the-spot reporting by a junior doctor in the shape of a series of diaries; however polished up for the book, they have the ring of total truth, and the abiding impression I get is that no horror story or horror film can be worse than the capacity of the human body for turning against itself.

Kay is infallibly, laugh-out loud funny; I wouldn't know what to quote to you since the choice is infinite. But he has a serious message about the overworked, underpaid and undervalued workers of the NHS, while constantly stressing his awareness of the value of his life-saving work to himself and to others. What makes one angry is that here, as in so many jobs but more so given the life-or-death hazards the operative doctor undertakes, there's so little thanks that the doctor is painfully grateful for any kind word. It's terrifying that there's no emotional or psychological support for the many stresses. And of course the final fury is reserved for Jeremy Hunt and the politicians who have NO IDEA what these real-life saints undergo.  Get it, go see Kay's one-man show on the subject and/or wait for the TV series.

My thanks to my best pal on The Arts Desk, Graham Rickson, for sending me a copy. And to the London Review of Books Bookshop, to the cafe of which I and some of the students now retire after my Monday afternoon Opera in Depth classes at Pushkin House, for having A Hospital Odyssey on recommended display. Gwyneth Lewis's Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book about Depression was the most insightful and also the most prose-poetic book I read in my darkest hours, so I knew the writing would be good, though I hadn't sampled her primary talent as a great poet.

Which she undoubtedly is: what seems to flow so easily as Maris undergoes, Odysseus like, a number of bizarre, shape-shifting trials in search of a stem cell for her dying husband must have been the work of years. I love the authorial voice which speaks to us so directly (UPDATE: though separate from the heroine, she - ie the author - turns out to have undergone the same reaction to her husband's hospitalisation and near-death, hence the sense of total identification with a 'real' subject undergoing a fantastical metaphorical journey. I found out something about this in Lewis's blog attached to what must have been a rather odd radio drama, at a mere 45 minutes). This may seem almost sentimental, but within the tough, chameleonic context it's superb. Maris sees a robot 'sommelier' sampling phials of blood and sees one with the name of her beloved Hardy:

....It was ruby red,
an impossible scarlet that caused her alarm
the moment she saw it. Sick with dread,
she watched the gourmet as it tasted,

swilled the wine round its specialist mouth
then spat out the taste of her husband's health.
It hummed and ha'd, its innards whirred
and said it tasted 'a soupçon of anemia' 
then worse. It printed the verdict: CANCER.

Maris was stunned. This was a story
that happened to others, not to Hardy and her.
Then she was pierced through with pity
for him, brave man, who'd hidden his terror
of this, the most feared saboteur 

of all. Stop reading. If your partner's near
I want you to put this poem down,
surprise them at the morning paper.
Nuzzle their neck. When they ask, 'What's wrong?'
say, 'Nothing,' but hold them close, while you can.

Maris's adventures, accompanied by the dog Wilson and shape-changing Ichabod, include meetings with Philoctetes of the noisome wound, a microbes' ball (appealing to my own febrile imagination as one horrified by the low level of hospital hygiene), a spider Penelope, the Cancer Mother with her dragon son, something equating to Helen of Troy at the bottom of the sea and Aneurin Bevin as well as Hippocrates on the Island of the Blessed. Sounds intriguing? It would to me as a prospective reader, though my bait was the trustworthiness of a writer I already knew and loved. I can't recommend this mock-epic too strongly, and I know I'll read it again soon.

Meanwhile, how am I? Angry that I still don't have a date for the stonebreaking operation, despite the consultant saying emphatically that I needed to have one exactly a week ago. Time to get on the blower to Urology at C&W. In the meantime, the stent means I lead a half-life. I can't walk or cycle very far or go to the gym; the short distances I travel on foot or bike mean pain and blood. I know this is normal because the NHS kept me on hold for three months two years ago when I came back from Turkey, and the one-day two-in-one op, with the stent inside me, 'to be removed within two weeks' said the specialist, but I was told it was 'OK' for a good deal longer. Liveable with, yes, but not great. Well, there are people waiting for ops far more serious than mine. But I still have to be the squeaking gate...

UPDATE: I made the call. Five minutes through the automated hoops before I was put in the queue for urology appointments. 'We expect to answer your call in approximately two minutes.' Then 'we expect to answer your call in approximately one minute'. All against the same initially attractive but repetitively maddening Latin-American easy listening. For the next 24 minutes (do they make money out of this, like they do out of hospital car parking?) The live voice I finally got, not prone to making sympathetic noises about the wait (I was polite), put me through to her colleague who deals with appointments. An answerphone promising to call back if details were left. Which she did, to be fair, within the hour. I told her that Mr X promised that a date for the op must be arranged soonest a week ago. 'Well, it would have helped if we'd got the right paperwork from the junior doctors' So you haven't? 'Not yet. Mr X is currently on leave and I know he's already moved some January appointments from January to February. He's the only one doing this. But I'll let you know as soon as I have a date'. So it goes.

Films before the fall

Or, to be precise, what we watched over the Christmas period before I was hospitalised: two outright masterpieces, two American indie slices of life (one admittedly very out of the ordinary). Netflix justifies its existence by funding the Mexican master Alfonso Cuarón's Roma. Cuarón had already carved his place in cinema history with the sexy-sad Y Tu Mamá También, but I'm sure he feels for a number of reasons that Roma is his magnum opus (by the way, though I couldn't care less about the Oscars, I think it's absurd that a film like this is shovelled into the 'Best in a foreign language' category when it's surely a winner on any level).

In it, he manages so many things, above all to turn the intensely felt experience of his childhood, with incidents carried over wholesale, into the most poetic movie-making, a perfect balance of subjective and objective, and to celebrate the hitherto unsung life of a native Mexican, the much-loved family maid Cleo, a Mixtec woman from the village of Tepelmeme in the state of Oaxaca: in real life it's Liboria Rodriguez, who has seen the film several times and always cries, but for the children, not for herself, and the actor is Yaliza Aparicio, who had no previous film or stage experience and who even featured on the cover of Mexican Vogue - a first, shamefully... Netflix released this lovely photo of 'Libo' and Cuarón as they are now.

How well we get to know the family home in the (then) shabby-genteel Roma district of Mexico City, with its garage runway, always covered in dog poo, ill negotiated by the fraught father and mother when they try and drive their cars up to the door. It soon emerges that all is not well between husband and wife.

How shocked we are by the student uprising which ended in slaughter, seen from the windows of a furniture department; this is a realisation of a newspaper clipping which the 10-year-old Cuarón saw, and had explained to him by his communist uncle. 'My little middle-class bubble burst,' he says. 'I realized there was a way bigger bubble, one that was more complex'.

Also compelling (though what isn't, in this film) are the scene showing the government's military training of young men in a very specific martial art - very expensive to film because the extras all had to be taught the discipline - 

and by the heart-in-mouth single take where Cleo saves two of the children from drowning (young Alfonso was one of them, in reality).  

I wouldn't have noticed had I not read an article in a film magazine while I was in hospital that the camera starts by looking downwards and that gradually more sky is introduced into the final scenes, looking upwards; but this, I'm sure, is something one registers unconsciously. There's so much detail in every frame, though, that I regretted not seeing Roma on a big screen, and look forward to correcting that.

Just as great an achievement, in its own oblique but often very funny way (yes, a German comedy, or rather tragicomedy), though the deliberately blanched cinematography is hard to adjust to, is Toni Erdmann,  directed, written and co-produced by genius Maren Ade.

Now that Bergman is no longer with us, and Lars von Trier seems to have lost his way after his amazing earlier films - though I did like Melancholia, if 'like' is the right word, and I don't have the courage to see whether the sexually explicit and violent later works actually have a moral compass and a singular touch, as The Idiots ultimately did - Ade must take the palm for getting layered, complex performances out of two remarkable actors.

The title refers to the bewigged, false-teethed alter ego of sad clown Winifried (Peter Simonischek, whom I want to see in Shakespeare); but Sandra Hüller as his career-driven daughter Ines is just as compelling, and has a harder job winning our sympathy - though she does, in spades, and there's a sensational rendition of a Whitney Houston song which marks a turning-point in the film.

Even the outcome of the last scene is held in the balance, and the later stages are totally unpredictable. Let's just say that Toni/Winifried's last stunt, within the compass of the film, has to do with the costume in the poster.

What you get in two films about American life are a truthful performance from the luminous and versatile Saoirse Ronan in Ladybird, about a not-much-more-than-averagely-rebellious teenage girl slyly subverting what she can of small-town life

and slightly stylised, but nevertheless brilliant ones in a classy take on the true-life tragicomedy of a skating queen

from Margot Robbie (curiously turning up as Gloriana vs Saoirse's Stuart in what sounds like a turgidly-scripted Mary, Queen of Scots; surely Josie Rourke should have known to adapt Schiller's Mary Stuart rather than go for a stilted new screenplay) as well as an idol of mine, Alison Janney, who will forever be the surprisingly sexy, always sassy C. J. Cregg in The West Wing but excels here as the Mother from Hell,

and Sebastian Stan as Tonya's psychopath boyfriend/husband.

Small beer, perhaps, by the side of the two diamonds, but both beautifully crafted and acted gems. By the way, I was about to pass another evening in hospital by going to see Mary Poppins Returns in the amazing Medicinema of Chelsea & Westminster, but I was discharged two hours earlier; my 'second musketeer' pal in the bed opposite went instead with his granddaughter, and (as he told me when I popped in to see him on Tuesday) was surprised by how good it was. As I'm still awaiting the op, I'm entitled to revisit and was going to see The Favourite on Thursday evening, but that was one of my bad days so I stayed home. Outings need to be carefully spaced at the moment, though I'm proud to have made, and reviewed, two events this week: Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades at the Royal Opera on Sunday afternoon, and Bang on a Can's Friday night cornucopia at Kings Place.