Nelson salutes the Barber

Horatio met his Trafalgar, so to speak, eleven years before the premiere of Rossini's Barber of Seville at Rome's Teatro Argentina (still a beautiful theatre, incidentally, though the production of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte we saw there was atrocious). I'm sure the old seadog would have enjoyed the Royal Opera's live, five-star screening beneath his column (did he go to the opera in Naples, I wonder? He turns up in Sardou's - though not Puccini's - Tosca). A preliminary word about the amateur shots: I'd never do it in the theatre, not even for the curtain-calls (a recent bane of blogging IMHO), but the relaxed spirit of the occasion and the nature of the piece encouraged me in this instance.

A vast crowd of floaters, dogged Prommers like myself and the comfortably seated cognoscenti loved it, and were honoured with not only great vision but also excellent sound. Not having sampled one of these events al fresco before - jondrytay has a vivid report of Renee's Trafalgar Traviata on his blog - I was tickled pink by the sheer accessible, perish the word, exuberance of it all. Proud, too, that even those passers-by who didn't, to be honest, seem to cast even a glance at the screen, could if they wanted see attractive stars at the top of the vocal game in such a colourful (Caurier/Leiser aka 'Mosh and Posh') production.

The huge publicity surrounding Joyce DiDonato's foot mishap onstage and her subsequent determination to play Rosina in a wheelchair can only have helped.


It only goes to show not only that a Yankeediva can be practical, but also that someone with La DiD's dramatic flair can make a real interpretation out of a spirited young girl even more restricted in her movements than Dr Bartolo intended. As she says on her blog, three weeks of intensive rehearsal went out the window and everyone moved hell and high water to do the business around her. Clearly it was she who should have wrecked the room during the storm rather than directing Berta (the splendid Jennifer Rhys Davies, a dead ringer for Montserrat Caballe with a schnozzle) to do it for her. But she carried it all off with energy and style, and her wheelchair acting was far more convincing than Anthony Sher's thousand and one things to do with a pair of crutches as Richard III.

And the singing, my word, the singing: such artistry and playfulness from DiDiva to match Juan Diego Florez's Almaviva.


Actually, I can only take what sounds to me like a rather reedy tone in small doses, certainly not a whole recital's worth, but boy, can Florez deliver the coloratura goods and the top notes in the big final aria, 'Cessa di piu resistere' (the one that's usually cut and which Rossini recycled for Cenerentola). The crowds both in the Opera House and out in the London night went wild.

Since Caurier and Leiser are no Jones or Kupfer, they didn't get evenly accomplished acting across the board; the less thoughtful the actor, as with Pietro Spagnoli's good-enough Figaro, the more pantomimic the results. But there was a de luxe 'Calunnia' from the great Furlanetto, and Corbelli as Bartolo would have to top the bill in teaching everyone how to do classic buffo acting without going over the top. The lady on the controversial empty plinth wasn't going to look at Basilio or pay much attention to Bartolo's hectoring.



I reckon she could have livened up her act with a pair of opera-glasses, but all she had with her was a camera.

Pappano is as adjusted to the spring of the Rossini style as he is to everything else he touches (Wagner maybe still excepted, though I didn't catch his last Ring, so I can't say how he may have progressed there). Here he is in front of the Royal Opera curtains introducing the show, personable as ever albeit at a distance. By the way, the often torrential rain stopped just before the opera began and held off for the rest of the evening, leaving in its wake some dramatically lovely skies.


As in the wonderful Figaro a couple of years ago, Pappano opted to sparkle on the continuo, too, though I couldn't hear the harpsichord from our coign of vantage below the portico of the National Gallery (we dashed off for a plate of pasta at the interval, which meant we missed only the music lesson scene, shockingly casual I know, but I don't think Rossini would have minded, and got seats for the rest of Act Two).

Now WHAT, by the way, is NG supremo Nicholas Penny thinking of when he goes so far as to say he wants the pedestrian walkway in front of HIS Gallery turned back into a road? I'm disappointed, though I can see where his argument about rabble-rousing and ear-splittingly loud amplified events began. Yet for every ten bad buskers, there's an event like this which has to make it all worthwhile. I have nothing against the temporary occupation of the plinth, either. My companion of the evening and I both had the same idea: if we'd booked a slot, we could have read Books I and II of Paradise Lost out loud, for our own pleasure if the crowd couldn't hear us.

Immenso Falstaff

HE: I love you! And at last I've found you.
SHE: If only I could get my arms around you.
Amanda Holden's English translation of Boito's brilliant Shakespearean libretto makes Verdi's Falstaff fun enough at the ENO. But even those Pountney and Warchus productions pale alongside what the directorial genius of the day Richard Jones has to say about Windsor all'Italiana at Glyndebourne (or had, because Saturday night was the end of the run. But fear not, you'll be able to catch it on tour in the autumn, and this tip-top cast has been filmed for DVD release). Above, Dina Kuznetsova's Alice Ford attempts to put a girdle around Christopher Purves's fat- and Safari-suited Sir John (all production photos for Glyndebourne by Alastair Muir).

Those on a certain site who shrieked 'provincial' at me for preferring Purves's Wozzeck to Matthias Goerne's should be eating humble pie, but probably they'll start up again if I say that Purves's was the most beautifully sung and phrased Falstaff I've ever heard - and there was me thinking he was just a fine singing actor. Of course the physical comedy is wonderful: the slight lascivious swaying, the prodding with a passing sausage on the 'no's of the honour monologue, the nimble dancing not uncommon in a fatty, the crumpled pathos of feeling old after his drenching in the Thames. Purves somehow sidesteps all the usual broadly comic business, and makes us believe in Falstaff as a cultured gent waxing old and lardy, a man of letters with a large sensual appetite and maybe a great wooer in between being page to the Duke of Norfolk and the beached whale he now is.

Jones, too, finding a gesture for every musical idea, always avoids the obvious: following Sir John's beautified entrance down the stairs after Ford's big jealousy number (powerfully sung by a comically bug-eyed Tassis Christoyannis), the 'after yous' are done side by side, and no joint exit ensues as the curtain falls on their indecision.


You've probably heard by now that this is a 1940s Falstaff, a Windsor full of skipping and stitching brownies, a town digging for Britain with the multiple cauliflowers of the Fords' garden, offering a street with fashion and bridal wear for Nannetta to admire and a joke shop to equip the 'mascherata', which is full of references to Hollywood horror and fantasy films of the 1930s.


Not sure that totally works, but elsewhere no foot goes awry.

The razor-sharp detail of Jurowski's LPO in the pit is quite exhausting to take in; Verdi puts in never a dull bar, but even by his standards, and Toscanini's execution of them, the precise articulation stuns. Among a myriad highlighted sounds are the clarinet note that completes the descent of the cor anglais in the letter-reading, the rigorous trills of the flutes as the sack begins to operate in the deflated Falstaff's innards, the half-bar martial blasts of the brass. Jurowski started rather carefully, for maximum clarity, and trod cautiously at the start of the havoc in the Fords' sitting-room - I've been listening to Abbado, who captures a unique lightness throughout - but how the orchestra must have respected all that hard work. Both players and singers were having fun on the last night, but they must have had to keep their wits about them.

And the rest of the cast? Usually a Falstaff of Purves's or Terfel's calibre overshadows the others, but not entirely here. Let's line them all up in one of my favourite operatic scenes (even though the protagonist is absent), I.2. First, the ladies:


Left to right are Adriana Kucerova's Nannetta, Kuznetsova's Alice, Marie-Nicole Lemieux's Mistress Quickly and Jennifer Holloway's Meg Page.

And now the gents: Christoyannis's Ford instructing Bardolph (Alasdair Elliott), Pistol (Paolo Battaglia), Dr Caius (Peter Hoare) and Fenton (Bulent Bezduz).


Lemieux was Purves's equal for laughs and Shakespeare-worthy entertainment value, a palpitating womanly heart within a Hattie Jacquesian uniformed carapace who won a predictable round of applause on exiting in 2.1. I'd have liked a bit more Italianate opening up from Kuznetsova's Alice, but the Nannetta of Kucerova promised great things for her Queen of the Fairies aria - not quite delivered, maybe she was a little tense on Saturday - and Bezduz as a cute, pocket-sized GI did the reverse, opening up more for his moonstruck cavatina than the rather unsensuous early scenes might have suggested.

Quite exhausted at the end of it, my head was still full of the Rusalka preparation (see below). Conversely on Sunday night, I came home singing Falstaff. Both were wonderful evenings, Glyndebourne at its high-flying best. All I could wish for now is to see the great Jones's new Munich production of Wagner's Lohengrin. It's been met with blank incomprehension in many quarters, but this thoughtful review on musicalcriticism.com gives a good idea of what the concept's all about.

Anyway, back to East Sussex. Our fat knight might have raised an eyebrow at the singular fare we consumed between shows. Old chorus hand Charles Kerry, seen with his head on a plate above, served up an unforgettable Sussex food-for-free breakfast at his home in Lewes including samphire tortilla and mirabelle plums from the Downs (the things that look liked baked beans on the right):


He told us he gathers his porridge-fed snails from a special area near Lewes Prison, which the gastropods 'must view as some kind of Bermuda triangle'. Which allows me to segue to something even more of an acquired taste, snail's eggs at the French Ambassador's Bastille Day celebrations last night:


The French know how to throw a flamboyant party, the climactic ceremonials crowned with a bread-rolled Tour d'Eiffel and Arc de Triomphe, photographed as we rhubarbed along to the Marseillaise:



Well, we were both heartily sick afterwards, though in my case it was probably the mix of champagne and Ricard.

Farewell, Ted and Joan

Sadder than I can say, and yet also amazed and thoughtful, to learn that Sir Edward Downes and his wife Lady Joan chose to end their lives on Friday through Dignitas in Switzerland. The superb photos above were taken by Prokofiev's great-granddaughter Lina at the 25th anniversary party of the Prokofiev Association last November.

Though I'd interviewed Sir Edward about Verdi at the Royal Opera, I came to know and admire them both as splendid human beings through their association with the Prokofiev Foundation, Association and Archive. Lady Joan, former dancer, TV producer and administrator who knew Covent Garden from the inside, proved a delightful conversationalist at Noelle Mann's various parties; Ted, always modest, humorous and self-effacing, was happy to chew the cud over his various enthusiasms. He was also the most entertaining and natural of speech-givers.

The last time I saw them both was at the Prokofiev gathering before Mark Morris's Romeo and Juliet, mentioned above (and as Serge Jnr reminded me ruefully when he sent me Lina's photos, that was the 'happy ending' version of the ballet. Though maybe after 56 years of marriage, Ted and Joan would see their quiet curtain in the same way, too). Joan and Frances Prokofiev were especially touched at seeing Ted with Anastasia, remembering how she'd gone to the Downes house as a child, so they encouraged me to take this picture of the two.


Although I don't have my own shots of husband and wife together, there's a lovely photo of them as proud parents in today's Times news piece.

My second thoughts when I got over the shock were, what could I play? Ted didn't record quite as much as he should have done, least of all Prokofiev - the Eugene Onegin incidental music is magnificent, but not really appropriate this morning (in concert, his performances of the Fourth and Seventh Symphonies were the best I've heard, Gergiev included). Then I remembered the Gliere symphonies, and a Korngold disc for Chandos.


There are two particularly apposite poems among the Abschiedslieder, beautifully sung by Linda Finnie. Since the first is the finest song, let's have the whole of Christina Rossetti's poem:

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me.
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet:
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain:
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.

The first stanza of the last Abschiedslied, a poem by Ernst Lothar, is even more appropriate, as translated by R. R. Avis:

Do not weep that I am going now.
Cheerfully let me kiss you.
If happiness doesn't bloom nearby
It will greet you more chastely from afar.

And the fourth stanza makes me think how it might have been in Zurich:

Give me your hand without trembling.
Give in blissfully to a last kiss.
Do not be afraid of the storm: after rain
The sun rises all the more radiantly.

Well, I must staunch the tears and get on with the practicalities of updating the late Alan Blyth's obit of Sir Edward for The Guardian. It's now up and running here. There's also a leader lamenting how sad it is that he should be better known for the manner of his death than for his distinguished career, and a salute from various folk in the music world who knew him.

Of course, it was only a matter of time before the self-righteous started weighing in with their anti-euthanasia arguments. Shame on you, Daily Telegraph, for starting the ball rolling so soon, however cautiously worded may be the article from your hardly objective 'Religion Editor'. I join with Jessica Duchen in hoping that the Downes's example may help to edge us towards legalisation in this country.

Hearts break by the lake

Forgive me for having already exploited heartbreak in the title over a year ago, for Glyndebourne’s Onegin revival with Maija Kovaleska as Tatyana and Jurowski conducting. Well, they’ve done it again down in that Sussex heaven, this time taking more of a risk by giving magic-realist theatre director Melly Still her first break in opera. The subject was a perfect choice, as it turned out, Dvorak’s Rusalka, and with the essential ingredient of a tear-jerking heroine in Ana Maria Martinez, seen above in one of the four Bill Cooper production photographs featured here cradling the prince she’s kissed to death (Brandon Jovanovich).

You may have gathered I’d already fallen even more deeply in love with Rusalka over the week or so trying to get under its skin for the pre-performance talk on Sunday. Thanks to the full orchestral score, which arrived in the nick of time from Dilia in Prague, I was able to marvel even more at Dvorak’s loving detail in every bar. This has to be his masterpiece, as I intimated before. Everything is in it: the tender divided strings, the doubling of vocal lines with bass clarinet and cor anglais, the proto-Janacekian tenderness of Rusalka’s often-heard entrance music, Bartered Bridey dances for comic relief. Alongside the Wagnerian subtlety of the many thematic transformations, Dvorak gives all his singers wonderful set pieces fully embedded in the drama; and even the Polonaise-ballet at the Prince’s court in Act Two weaves in the music of Rusalka, her love and impending doom. There’s plenty more to find, and I’m still finding it.

I’d been listening to two very characterful recordings – Mackerras’s with Renee and Big Ben, Neumann’s with the melting Benackova – and watching two radically different productions on DVD - Pountney’s Edwardian-nursery ENO classic and Robert Carsen’s psychological delve for the Paris Opera. It says so much about the work that it can take their diametrically opposed endings. The Rusalka of Pountney’s Eilene Hannan is left wandering in eternal torment in the cruellest curtain of any opera I’ve seen; Carsen’s Renee Fleming achieves consummation in a hotel bedroom with her Prince (Sergei Larin), who doesn’t even die from her kiss. Dvorak’s shift from C sharp minor to beatified D flat major suggests to me that Rusalka does achieve some kind of transcendence. Still was able to evoke that as Martinez’s lacerated Rusalka looks out hopefully – does she see the Prince’s soul rising? – and the reeds of the despoiled woodland glade glow with pinpoints of light.

Weirdly, the image I’ve come away with is the one of the earthy, sexed-up wood nymphs in their barky skirts and woolly jumpers leaping in the air and joyously clutching their breasts. I’ll never be able to hear Dvorak’s wild dances in Act One without thinking of that. In Act Three, the nymphs become like Bacchae, threatening to rip Alasdair Elliott’s Gamekeeper to pieces in sexual frenzy. So there’s violence here, and lots of animal evisceration, but Still insists – as Carsen did not – on the supernatural. Rusalka is a real mermaid, manipulated by a creepy movement group until she gains mortal legs, and later her sisters appear, suspended, to shun her.


By the same token, the gorgeous-toned Mischa Schelomianski’s Vodnik is a picture-book swamp-creature, though a deeply compassionate one, and luxuriously-cast Diadkova’s Jezibaba, a character she depicted in Carsen’s production as a savage alter ego of the heroine, waddles around as a strip-cartoon Babushka, definitely dispassionate but amused, and amusing (though shadowed by frightening black sisters played by burly blokes). The occasional wit of Jaroslav Kvapil's eloquent libretto certainly came across here.

The ball scene is fluently done, with stylish costumes and shadowy dances; the choral image of the white bride and the red roses is carried through to Rusalka’s short-lived happiness.


In that strange hiatus where the principal soprano can’t sing for three-quarters of an act, we had more luxury from the elegant Tatyana Pavlovskaya as the Foreign Princess, crowning an act which Jiri Belohlavek and the LPO whipped up into a Gotterdammerungesque frenzy. Belohlavek knows every word of the text off by heart and probes deep into both the luminosity and the surprising violence of Dvorak’s score. Jovanovich’s handsome prince isn’t quite the verging-on-heldentenor his role requires, and he glossed over his final top C; but he died so effectively and movingly. Martinez, too, may not be everyone’s idea of a creamy Rusalka voice, but her technique knows no bounds, she hits every top note with searing intensity and she’s an astonishing actress, using vocal colour, face and body to maximum effect.


Some say, oh, but you should have seen the Grange Park Rusalka. I don’t care; this was perfect for me, I wept as I told the lecture audience they would and should in the last quarter of an hour, and if L’amour de loin revealed the ideal director for Tristan and Parsifal, Melly Still should be snapped up immediately to direct a Ring cycle. She’d capture both the supernatural and the achingly human in it to perfection.

Glyndebourne, of course, is the place to see Rusalka. You can imagine the poor sad nymph sitting on one of the overhanging willows by the lake, gazing at the water-lilies. OK, OK, I’m Fotherington Thomas, clap your hands if you believe in fairies. But Gbne on a clear Sunday afternoon, after a Saturday of driving rain, does that sort of thing to you.




Here's a useful phrase you might want to try out on any of Dvorak's compatriots if you're going to see this production: 'jsi videl Rusalky u jezera?' or, 'seen any Rusalkas down at the lake?' I got my Czech-speaking friend Charles Kerry to translate that so I could make the punters laugh just a bit at the talk.

One more for charm: I’ll admit this visitation, which belongs more to the world of Janacek’s Cunning Little Vixen than it does to Rusalka, wasn’t snapped at Glyndebourne but at Chelsea Physic Garden the week before. In among the blue damsel-flies, this giant helicopter of a dragonfly came as a surprise.


And I haven’t really finished. Our de luxe Glyndebourne weekend began with Falstaff on Saturday, an equally dazzling experience with another great conductor, unforgettable central performance and endlessly resourceful direction. But I must get some Real Work done, so I’ll come back to that tomorrow.

A few wrongs to Wainwright

They’re savaging Rufus over on a certain site, without having heard a note of his new ‘pastiche of an opera’ Prima Donna. Well, I haven’t encountered it yet either, though I’m sure that if a case is to be made, that fine singing actress Janis Kelly will make it*.

Anyway, Wainwright’s in good company being torn apart by the operahounds: Renee Fleming is the main target of bile, and for all her faults, when she’s good she’s great. I know because I’ve just been listening to her Rusalka, and she even scores over the divine Benackova in terms of amplitude at key moments.

As for whether our Rufe has bitten off more than he can chew now, I’ll leave it to the critics. I haven’t been keeping up with him recently, and can’t say whether the foolhardy attempt to echo Judy at Carnegie worked or not.

What I do know is that he’s produced some of the best songs of recent years: on Want One ‘Oh what a world’, ‘I don’t know what it is’ and ‘Dinner at eight’; on Want Two ‘Peach trees’ (my own personal favourite), ‘The art teacher’ and ‘Memphis skyline’.


Needless to say, none of this has been taken into account in the recent orgy of hate. A more intelligent discussion of whether or not RW will bring more pop fans to opera is to be found here.

*It seems she tried. Reviews catch RW between the devil and the deep blue sea. The usually astute Lynne Walker had this to say in The Independent and was roundly excoriated by most of her commenters (including one Dr. Jonathan Miller). On the other hand, this NME review is worth looking at, if only because it perpetrates the usual myths about opera and elitism. For a very witty piece of writing, go to Warwick Thompson on Bloomberg.

More (true) love from afar*

Whenever I wonder what's the point of bloggery, when questions are met with cybersilence or else commenters start off on a tack which has nothing to do with the main subject, I remind myself of the wise maxim: do it for yourself, for your own self-expression (not that I hold with the current notion that self-expression is necessarily good per se).

I learnt recently, though, that there had been a rather dramatic consequence. The image of a lady posted here prompted her Great Love, as she calls him, to get back in touch after years of separation. He is now moving closer, to cultivate his garden 'and perhaps me', she adds. The photograph originally accompanied thoughts on an opera about two people who...but I must stop before I give anything else away.

Now I must rush back to work and steep myself in more of Dvorak's great masterpiece Rusalka, a story about a huge gulf between lovers which makes me very, very happy indeed. I'm delighted to have found this picture of Ruzena Maturova in the 1901 Prague premiere. If her Prince gets in touch as a result, he's too late - but out there in the ether, who knows?


The bittersweet fairytale is to be continued...

*Some of you didn't 'get' the slightly oblique Beethoven illustration: the bound m/s is for the song-cycle 'To the distant beloved'. I find myself more fascinated by Schumann's quotation of the last song in his quirky Second Symphony than by An die ferne (or entfernte, as the above would have it) Geliebte itself, and had a chance to sound off about it for the LSO, but that's my Beethoven problem for you.

At a distance

That’s how I’d kept Kaija Saariaho’s music since disappointments with her Graal Theatre, Flute Concerto and those songs in which Karita Mattila so passionately believes. Reports from both audience and orchestral musicians of her opera Adriana Mater at the Barbican hadn’t been encouraging, either. But reading vibrant young conductor Ed Gardner’s passionate advocacy of L’Amour de loin, Saariaho’s millennial reflection on the ‘love from afar’ of medieval troubadour Jaufre Rudel, Prince of Blaye, for Countess Clemence of Tripoli which eventually becomes a reality, made me think I ought to try one last time. So off I went last night to the Coliseum and this singular vision as captured in all production pictures here by Johan Persson for English National Opera.

I’m heartily glad I did. Even when Saariaho’s finely layered, shot-silk score seems more obsessed with ‘process’ than any thematic hooks which might keep the listener alert – and by Act Three, towards the end of the first half, I did begin to fall into a soporific haze – the production by Daniele Finzi Pasca, whose Cirque du Soleil work I haven’t seen, remains ravishingly beautiful. In fact my companion Edward thought it might be the most integrated staging he’d ever seen. We are in agreement with Andrew Clark of the FT, who ascribes the rarity of such exquisite shows here to a mixture of conservatism and lack of funds.

Promise of acrobatics made me dread that a simple piece would be smothered in physical theatre, but the movement folk playing the soul-doubles of Jaufre and Clemence glided and somersaulted like noiseless spirits. The lighting (also Finzi Pasca’s work) is magical, the evocation of eastern Tripoli by lattice-work screens simple but effective, the seascapes of Jaufre’s journey from France to Libya constantly haunting.

Saariaho was sitting, resplendent in red, several rows in front of me, and I wanted to ask her if she thought this was an ideal representation of her chef d’oeuvre. Musically, too, it could hardly have been better. As Jaufre, Roddy Williams came close to his achievement last year in Vaughan Williams's Pilgrim's Progress: such a musicianly phraser, such a sympathetic presence, so good with words (though Amin Maalouf’s often eloquent text would surely work better in French).


And if at first Joan Rodgers’s Clemence sounded cloudier than the crystal-clear Pilgrim of outstanding young American mezzo Faith Sherman, she produced some beautiful melismas and seemed in better vocal form than I've heard her recently.

The scene where the dying Jaufre arrives at Clemence’s citadel and kindles her passion was the mesmerising highlight of the evening for me. The very monotony of the vocal lines – which do at least have the virtue of tying in with what the orchestra’s doing, rather than competing as in so many new operas – creates a sense of time standing still abetted by the once again hauntingly beautiful stage picture.


Here, too, Finzi Pasca’s use of three Jaufres and three Clemences liberated the singers from a straightforward deathbed duet. Surely he could he do a compelling Tristan or Parsifal this way?

Gardner vindicated the beauty of the score, as he’d promised he would. I’m still not quite convinced by Saariaho’s hazy wash of percussion – many great composers use this department in a far more imaginative way – but she does write distinctively for wind and harp. Nor is this just ‘immersion-tank’ (Seckerson) or ‘bubble-bath’ (Christiansen) music: it has its stormy disruptions, and the subtle use of oriental dance provides some contrast. Saariaho's tempest isn’t equal to that of Sibelius, whom Saariaho was so obliging to discuss with me by e-correspondence for the Barbican's 'Sibelius Unbound' festival programme (scroll down to 'Sibelius Celebrated' on page 4), or even Ades's, the recording of which I recently reviewed for the August/Proms issue of the BBC Music Magazine with very equivocal feelings about the vocal writing (the performers there in no wise follow all the impossible details in the score, which I was following for the first time).


As with Birtwistle’s Minotaur, no single idea from L'Amour de loin will lodge in the memory; but, as on that occasion, the total work of art achieved by these dedicated artists and production team will work its magic if you have the patience. It’s worth going – and staying after the first half, as some did not – especially as you can now get good seats for a tenner or even (on lastminute.com, a student informed me) a fiver.

Now: an alternative apotheosis for Clemence, forced to say ‘goodbye to love’ with the death of her beloved troubadour.


This is partly an attempt to change the mind of Peter Stephenson, who in the comments to the last blog entry accused the Carpenters of ‘wishy-washyness’. I replied that they’d left us at least one great song, and here it is - the first YouTube 'embed' I've done. I reckon they usually mar the aesthetic look of a blog, and this one, with its karaoke singalong, is no exception, but never mind. It confirms for me that Karen C did indeed possess one of the most distinctive voices of the last century.



Subsequently jondrytay in his comment below reminded me of 'Rainy Days and Mondays', a cheerful song about depression (to paraphrase Gwyneth Lewis's Sunbathing in the rain). Rather than clog up the blog with YouTube screens, here's the link.

Another Andersson hits London

Mamma mia, here I go again. Looks like I'm turning into Woody Allen's Zelig, muscling in on the world-famous, but honest, this was a good turn for goddaughter Evi, seen in the middle between me and, yes, the real Benny Andersson. And while my star-struck urge to meet Harriet Andersson - see below - might have touched deeper chords, Benny and I go back further. Of course I was the strange teenager who adored not only Mahler and Strauss but also ABBA, Queen and the Carpenters, and was much mocked for it by my trendier schoolfellows. 

Well, they who worshipped the more ephemeral are rebuked; the songs of those three have survived. Benny and Bjorn are indisputably among the most popular songwriters of the 20th century, maybe even more often played and imitated these days than Lennon and McCartney; and while the lyrics may not exactly be Cole Porter or Noel Coward, the tunes have huge uplift potential. We wondered about this when ABBAfans in Parliament Hill Fields started swaying their arms high in the air: a gesture, says J, of the aspiring intellect, but more likely just an ethereal response to music that does make you feel lighter and happier. 

Let me clarify: this was not 'ABBA in the Park' - that's promised for September, while this event, jointly organised by the Swedes and the City of London Festival with no small input from the European Commission (hence the link through the diplo-mate), featured the magnificent Benny Andersson Band. Just 'a bunch of middle-aged guys', as their instigator put it, but still, hugely talented middle-aged guys palpably enjoying themselves. Typically, Benny is almost in the shade below, playing the accordion on the far right. 

As the very approachable BA tells us in a Torygraph interview, he wanted to recreate the informal feel of a Swedish Volkpark. He and the band played, for an exuberant two and a half hours, everything from folksy Swedish polkas and 'Roll out the barrel' to Shostakovich's Jazz Suite waltz and a wacky arrangement of the Bach flute Badinerie, at one point virtuosically handled by the consummate tuba (frankly I thought his runs sounded better than Lindberg's on the trombone the other day). Min Gud, crossover which works. 

There were two vocalists: the jolly, flamboyant Tommy Körberg, who boasted a superb command of ironic English and the versatility to run the gamut from R&R to 'Moon River', and Helen Sjöholm, very big in Sweden as the roars from the crowd told us. Here they are encouraging the hand-waving in 'Hasta Manana', which always used to be the favourite of my sentimental teenage self: 

So, yes, there were some ABBA numbers, including a couple I didn't recognise and the hardcore fans did. Some of this has already appeared on YouTube. I reckon that by the time of the ABBA strand, 7.30pm or so, some of the Priders had made their way up the hill from Trafalgar Square; I hope so, for what could be more of a camp treat than ABBA? 'Surely you should have been at Pride', proclaimed a prickly friend of ours who didn't attend either event. I'll tell you why I don't go any more: it's not so much the merchandising takeover as the whistles. They deafened me under Hungerford Bridge one year; and I know a BBC producer who suffered from tinnitus after an ex-boyfriend blew a whistle in his ear on another march. 

Well, we missed a chance to see a preview of 'The Gay Don', an adaptation of Mozart's Don Giovanni where Zerlina becomes Zac, Elvira an older queen very disapproving of the young's promiscuity etc. Sounds like a bad idea, but never condemn anything out of hand until you've seen it. No competition, though, between that and the free open-air concert. Evi and I approached it via Hampstead and Kenwood, following our ears and eyes from the heights where the whole of London could be seen from grassy meadows. 

It was a truly happy event - lots of families, good humour all round, much Proms-style bobbing alongside a bit of dancing on what should have been a Volkpark-style wooden stage and not too many people (because the advertising had been quite selective). Glorious weather too, of course - as it has been for the lucky Wimbledonians over the past fortnight (I always know that if I start watching the tennis, I won't stop. And this year I just didn't start. Well done, Roger, anyway). And, yes, the wonderful Harriet Andersson was there, too, having a whale of a time. Nik Westberg of the EC Press Office, another Bergman nut, took this picture 

and one final shot of us with Benny from a different perspective. 

BA said he relished the chance to make music informally away from intense media and crowd pressure. Clearly the performers had as much fun as we did. Next time I promise talk of loftier things. But this is musical history too, isn't it? And which of us, having heard 'I do, I do, I do', won't go round with it on the brain for hours, maybe days, afterwards?

Summer with Harriet

57 years on from what is perhaps Bergman’s most direct and purely sensual movie, Summer with Monika, our heroine is no longer sunning herself on a Swedish island (how wide of the mark the Americans were, by the way, in the hilarious naughtiness-sells advertisement above). She’s here in London, in the lovable personage of her creator Harriet Andersson, one of the three key Bergman muses. Can it really be as long ago as 1992 that I last saw her at the Barbican with her successors in the great man’s complicated love life, Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, as well as Gunnel Lindblom? They ran elegant, stylish rings around bemused film critic/presenter Philip French like the ladies in that, well, not entirely successful Bergman comedy About all these women.

Thanks to the diplo-mate introducing me to Swedish Cultural Affairs Councillor Carl Otto Werkelid, I got to meet Andersson the evening before the Barbican screening of Summer with Monika. I’m prepared to let my absurdly grinning mug appear on screen as this is the only good shot I have of us together.


This was a high-profile concert to celebrate the Swedes taking over the EU presidency from the Czechs, and ticked many of the Nordic boxes in the City of London Festival’s agenda. It was a chance to see inside the Guildhall, which I’ve wanted to do ever since I was a teenager obsessively sightseeing all the city churches, and very splendid it is too despite much post-blitz reconstruction. Thrilled to see those legendary giants Gog


and Magog


even though they’re limewood replacements for the originals, and amused by the OTT monuments to Nelson and the Pitts. Beguiled, too, by bits of a generous programme from the Nordic Chamber Orchestra and Christian Lindberg.

From where we were sitting some way back, the wittier throwaways of Grieg’s Holberg Suite got a bit lost and Lindberg’s declamations between trombone blasts for his own performance-art piece Kundraan couldn’t be understood (alas, there was nothing about it in a badly-proofed programme, either, so it remained baffling, ephemeral perhaps but a lot livelier than most of the post-serial stuff). As usual in cathedral-ish acoustics, the quiet passages of the evening worked best, chiefly those of Part’s Fratres – the trombone version doesn’t quite come off in the faster stuff, to which I can never reconcile myself on this instrument, though Lindberg does it better than anyone – and a gorgeous string arrangement of Sibelius’s B minor piano Impromptu.

Anyway, pressing the flesh of La Andersson was bound to be a highlight. She was utterly natural and charmingly pooh-pooed my declaration that she was my favourite Bergman actress (‘you’d say the same to Liv or Bibi’). It’s true, though. At any rate, she’s certainly the one who’s covered the biggest range, from wild-child Monika and saucy maid Petra in Smiles of a Summer Night through to the schizophrenic girl of Through a Glass Darkly - this poster is part of an exhibition outside Barbican Cinema 1 -


the dying sister of Cries and Whispers and even the cameo grotesque maid Justina in Fanny and Alexander.

Here’s what Bergman had to say about her in The Magic Lantern: ‘She is an unusually strong but vulnerable person, with a streak of brilliance in her gifts. Her relationship to the camera is straight and sensual. She is also technically superb and can move like lightning from the most powerful empathy to conveying sober emotions; her humour is astringent but never cynical; she is a lovely person, one of my dearest friends.’ And later, in Images: ‘Harriet Andersson is one of cinema’s geniuses. You meet only a few of these rare, shimmering individuals on your travels along the twisting road of the movie industry jungle'.

Although I’ve seen Monika twice before, it was startling to be reminded of the teenage Andersson’s contemporary-ness, as if 1952 were today; the mobile expression of changing emotions is amazing, and that scene late in the film where she turns to challenge the viewer directly still takes the breath away. I had to find the still of this, and while I await the Ingmar Bergman Foundation's permission - and I could be waiting a very long time - I'll assume it amounts to good publicity for IB and credit Svenska Film.


The image the Barbican used shows Andersson's Monika, eyes shut, adored by Lars Ekborg as Harry, a man with better teeth (take my word for it) than the one seen with her above.


It was another full evening, cornerstone among the usual suspects of the Barbican’s Bergman ‘Directorspective'. The Swedish ambassador made the most urbane of many speeches we’ve stood or sat through in the past few days, remembering his young days in America when Eisenhower described Sweden as a land of ‘sin, suicide and socialism’. We got to see for the first time in the UK Stig Bjorkman’s half-hour edit of Bergman’s on-shoot ‘home movies’, Images from the Playground, including more from Harriet and Bibi about those golden days. What came across were the dynamic companionship, the energetic teamwork, the humour (Ingmar as Groucho at one stage); needless to say, the fun surprised viewers at Cannes earlier this year. There was live music, a chance to see Bergman’s witty Bris soap commercial in which the 3D actress leaps the screen, then Summer with Monika and a chat with Andersson and Bjorkman conducted by that ardent Bergmanite and distinguished documentary-maker David Thompson.


Andersson was frank about Bergman’s long-term seduction – was it she by him or he by her? – and the telephone time on Sundays he set aside in later years. Was it true, asked David, that the reason they had to go back to the island was because the studio damaged the film? No, that was a lie - he was a great liar - he just wanted to get away from his wife and be back with her in the summer idyll. She seemed rather moved to compare the old man with the handsome charmer of the 1950s. There was never any jealousy, she said, between Bergman's women: how wise, how Swedish. In fact when she saw Bibi Andersson filming a Bris commercial with Bergman, and he told her (Harriet) to leave the studio, 'I thought, she looks so fresh and lovely, and I said to myself, "Ah, there's the next Andersson" - which in a couple of years turned out to be true'. Talk about the need for comedy on the set in Bergman's grimmest scenes led her to speak frankly about how her character’s death in Cries and Whispers was modelled on that of her father, screaming with agony from cancer back in the days when morphine was less readily available.


Afterwards, I was enjoying a drink at the cinema bar with friends Pia and Sylvia, getting to talk Schnittke with Timothy of the Brothers Quay and soprano Allison Bell, when the VIPs emerged (minus the Swedish princess, I think, who by that stage had left). Carl Otto encouraged me to show the 1992 Barbican programme I’d brought to HA, because she’d wanted to know how long ago it was and what had happened then. Again, she was charm itself, even in her rather peremptory utterances (‘move your ass HERE!’, said with a comedy-American accent), sought reassurance that her ‘performance’ in the interview had gone well and chatted away happily to Pia in Swedish. One last jolly shot, then, of Libedinsky, Andersson and Ostlund.


But that’s not the end of Swedomania in London. On Saturday another Andersson even better known to the world at large, Benny, brings his band to a free concert in Parliament Hill Fields (further details here). A few Abba hits are promised. We’ll be there with two of the godchildren.