Czechs in the USA

I like to think the hyper-brilliant finale of Martinu's Second Symphony is a soundtrack to the composer, pictured above with pianist pal Rudolf Firkusny on the left in Central Park, striding the streets of New York like Gershwin's American in Paris. Yes, it's a dazzling showpiece, at least in the last two movements, but there's introspection, too, in the slow-movement homage to Dvorak and Janacek. I find it incredibly moving and troubling the way the Bohemian/Moravian strain peters out. But Martinu was mindful of his fellow Czechs in Cleveland who commissioned the work, so he gave them a few good tunes to hum.

In a footnote to the 'MMMMM' entry, that distinguished polymath Colin Dunn expresses his surprise and relief to find that Jiri Belohlavek's performance of the Second with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on Friday didn't come as an anticlimax to the First. Certainly it's lighter and briefer, but it does the D major joy thing like no other symphony. Indeed, I think I even prefer the radiant final chord to the noisier, looser tumult at the end of Mahler Five.

But shouldn't the symphony have come at the end of a long and daunting programme? Swapping it with a quick-witted and woodwind sharp Till Eulenspiegel would have given us depth as well as energy after the Adagio of Mahler 10 (and made sure that anyone caught out by the controversial 7pm 'live on Radio 3' start wouldn't have missed the most unusual component). I still don't understand conductors like Jiri who won't do the whole Cooke-fleshed-out adventure; Mahler's finale takes us much further than his first movement. Still, the BBCSO's Adagio was translucent and painstakingly lit up in its delicate final stages.

I must confess it was the only part of the evening where tiredness took over and I phased out of a few minutes early on. I'd done the pre performance talk and Ann McKay had been whisking me around the Barbican to sort out the BBC box chat with Petroc Trelawny. It made a big different to have the window wide open so we caught the full dazzle of the Martinu and the sheen of Strauss's Four Last Songs.


Some were less than overwhelmed by the delivery of Anne Schwanewilms (photographed above by Johanna Price). I can only say that I find her poised, silvery and sometimes deliberately slivery sound a beguiling alternative to the fuller bodied tone of Christine Brewer or Anja Harteros. All three are the great Strauss sopranos of our time, to which some would add a fourth, Soile Isokoski (and yet more a fifth, Renee Fleming, who can be fine when bad taste doesn't get in the way). Radio 3 listeners missed a visual treat as the statuesque Schwanewilms stood, a vision in purple, with total physical ease and radiated assurance. What a far cry from the angular, technique-defying antics of Bostridge, Kozena and Goerne.

Belohlavek seemed to be keeping the orchestra right down for his soprano; at times, that rarest of events in the Barbican acoustics, a genuine pianissimo, drew us right in to the magic. And we could take it for granted that Schwanewilms would phrase longer and bolder - and at some dangerously slow tempi - than most other interpreters. Full marks, too, to a hushed audience who held the silence. I always remember my English master at school, the adorable Lionel 'Tibby' Bircher, sighing 'lovely lady, lovely lady' over Desdemona, and I feel the same about muse Schwanewilms (who'll be singing Otello's long-suffering bride at the Barbican in December). Do catch her Marschallin on this DVD, which I went overboard about in the BBC Music Magazine. The production swims in and out of focus, but our Anne is alert to every nuance, and the camera loves her.


A quick reminder: you can hear the concert, complete with Petroc and I blethering away, on the Radio 3 iPlayer for the next two days. I'm cut off in mid interval flow - you'll then need to pick up Part Two for the Mahler Adagio and Strauss's Till.

BBC Symphony contrabassoonist and sometime third bassoon Clare Glenister returned to our course at the City Lit last night. Her painstakingly prepared theme was the bassoon as the comic of the orchestra, with Shakespeare at the core. Live, she played us Alan Ridout's Caliban and Ariel as well as Falstaff's sack-soaked solo in Elgar's marvellous symphonic poem. She'd spent all Saturday recording herself three times over in Granville Bantock's The Three Witches.


Next time we expect a Glenister x 4 rendition of Prokofiev's Scherzo humoristique. On which theme, Clare also played us an American spoof of Peter and the Wolf adapted for four bassoons. Bird, cat, duck, Peter, wolf and huntsmen are all...bassooons. Grandfather, who winds up the narrative muttering about Darwinian natural selection, is...a sopranino recorder.

Clare is an interesting and interested person, who participated in drama classes at the City Lit - Shakespeare's Nurse is a cornerstone of her rep - and is currently doing a degree course in which she hopes to perfect her Norwegian (brought about by a desire to read Ibsen in the original). She stayed for our Martinu chat, and wants us to point out to the management that the four-work programmes are killers for the players, and that less (ie three works) might be more. Many of us agreed, having stumbled from Martinu One in almost uncomfortable fatigue. These programmes look marvellous on paper and make for absorbing listening on Radio 3, but perhaps they're a bit much for orchestra and attentive audience alike.

And now it's time to put Martinu to bed for a few months (how long the interval befor Jiri returns for symphonies 3-6). In the meantime, I must turn my attention to Janacek's Jenufa for a Glyndebourne study day on Sunday (do come if there are places left - Robin Ticciati's also featuring, and singers will be performing bits of the opera with piano accompanument), and to Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle for an ENO programme note. All good but emotionally demanding stuff. And my previously announced intention to go for the happy and gentle was demolished by reading Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata, one of the most devastating and upsetting novellas ever written.


It's essential reading that may have you viewing marital relations quite differently in the first fifty pages. Then, thanks to the device of the unreliable narrator, it becomes much more ambiguous and open-ended, as always with Tolstoy. And to think that all this hit the world before Freud and Ingmar Bergman.

No mere dim sum

Sounds like they're making quite a meal out of Turandot at the English National Opera, though whether a splendid banquet of fresh horrors or just a bubble-and-squeak remains to be seen (by me, at least, not until mid-November). In the meantime, heading our tributes to several new productions in town this season, I've started the City Lit Opera in Focus course with Puccini's swansong, going on this term to Bluebeard's Castle and Cherevichki (of which more when the time comes). Above is a detail from the cover of my treasured first-edition vocal score, probably not worth anything (I bought it for £2 in Edinburgh's Westport Books back in the 1980s) because they were produced in the thousands.


It always takes me aback how much more there is to look at in a Puccini score than I ever remember. Here, before we even got to arias and interpretations, I had to deal with tritones, bi- or poly-tonality, polyrhythms, newcomers to the orchestra (those Chinese gongs, probably taken over from Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten) and, of course, the forerunners. So we spent the first class on Gozzi's 1762 'fiaba Cinese teatrale tragicoma'. There's a clear and vivid musical starting point with Weber's incidental music of 1809 and the funny little pentatonic march which Hindemith skewed and jazzed in his Symphonic Metamorphoses. Later, along came Busoni with music for Max Reinhardt's 1911 production starring Gertrude Eysoldt (whose Salome and Elektra inspired Strauss) as Turandot and Alexander Moissi as Calaf.


Quite why the little neoclassical opera Busoni made out of Turandot a few years after that doesn't get staged more often I don't understand. As I said to Vladimir Jurowski, it would surely be a hit at Glyndebourne. It's the opposite of Puccini's heated late romantic monument, dim sum indeed to the later lavishly stuffed pig's head, and much closer to Gozzi in spirit. It first turned up as part of a 'new commedia dell'arte' double bill in 1917.


Then, following Meyerhold's cue and the Gozzi-worship of his magazine The Love for Three Oranges, Vakhtangov staged his own adaptation of the play in Moscow in the early 1920s. That production was running in the Vakhtangov Theatre's rep in the 1970s, and may be still for aught I know; but I doubt if I'd have had the chance to see it had not Jurowski transferred to DVD an old video for our Glyndebourne study day on Prokofiev's Betrothal in a Monastery. The whole thing is done with wit and esprit, backed up by an orchestra including ladies 'playing' comb-and-paper in various cabaret numbers, spoofs of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake and so on. Pantalone, Tartaglia and Brighella, the clowns whom Puccini turns into Ping, Pang and Pong, very much dominate. The first two are pictured here.


Finally we came to Puccini's astounding score. I'll pass over the orchestral wonders and skip to the comparative listening we managed to do yesterday. For 'Signore, ascolta', with its pentatonic gift to be both simple and exquisite, we threaded together Callas in recital, Margaret Price, youngish Scotto and Mary Plazas for the final float. I wanted to show the class Shcherbachenko's winning performance at Cardiff, which I can do now thanks to YouTube. The sound quality is distorted, which is a shame, but you get the expressive message.



Then Calaf's response, 'Non piangere, Liu', came in rather more historic packaging: Charles Kullman, Joseph Schmidt, Aureliano Pertile - Toscanini's favourite tenor who could well have sung in the premiere, though he didn't - and Franco Corelli, whose final top B flat is the most thrilling and dangerous. Then we put together the whole sequence, the finale of Puccini's first-act four-movement symphony. And who else could it be but Caballe, Pavarotti, Ghiaurov and the LPO under Mehta? That Decca recording still, after all these years, strikes me as fairly unsurpassable, for all the passing quibbles one might have. It should be any newcomer's first opera set, surely. And we haven't even got to one of Sutherland's finest and most unexpected achievements.


The class burst into spontaneous cheering at the end. And all this was more apt than we knew, because yesterday, I subsequently learnt, great Luciano would have been 74. Was that the most sheerly beautiful-in-a-golden-way tenor voice ever?

Anyway, I'm very curious about Rupert Goold's ENO production. As the opera is hideously violent and not a little sadistic, I think the solutions could work. Though when told some weeks ago that it was set in a Chinese restaurant, we laughed incredulously. Well, never write off something until you've seen it carried through. For full picture width, I think you have to flip over to the YouTube setting.



Thought you might also like a potted video (made for the Rome showing) of La Fura dels Baus's Grand Macabre. This gives all the highlights of model Claudia's transmogrifications.



I took the point that students who hadn't seen the Big Mac before were confused, and wanted to hear the music better as they felt it was swamped by the stage business. Fair enough, but for those of us who already treasure the score, the ideas always seemed to serve Ligeti well. And I'm delighted it packed 'em in at the Coli; the last night was sold out.

Obama, Nobel, Lincoln, Copland

Yes, he has a long way to go. Sure, he's hedged around by inflexible self-interest groups and will be lucky if he pushes through a fraction of what he wants. But I do believe Obama genuinely wants it and I find it so dispiriting when I see American colleagues saying, oh, he's no different from a Republican leader.

The Nobel Peace Prize is one in the eye for all that. Look at this for some disparate reactions from around the world.

And why Lincoln? Because I was amazed to see the only footage apparently taken of Senator Obama, as he then was, participating in Copland's Lincoln Portrait with that admirable conductor William Eddins and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra back in 2005. The one-minute clip isn't of a high quality but it does catch some uncannily prescient text.



So the Prize, whatever its pros and cons, is an encouragement to Obama to stick to his guns and do more. You can reinforce the message by signing Avaaz's petition. This is a fine organisation capable of effecting real change, and it has already done so. So join the Rachmaninoff Society (pace my last entry) AND support Avaaz.

On a trivial note, look, too, at the fabric Sophie sent us from Mali, where most people are still Obama-crazy. We used it as a temporary curtain when the builders were doing their stuff. Barack and Michelle are back to front, but the neighbours in the mews would have got the full message.

Rachmaninov: trios, duets, solos

They write Rachmaninoff according to the composer's preferred transliteration in the USA and Europe, I write Rachmaninov, but I couldn't get on better with the passionate souls of the Rachmaninoff Society. Some of these one-composer fan clubs - mentioning no names - are peppered with obsessives who always know best and can't string a sentence together about their chosen hero in their hand-typed journals, but the RS isn't like that at all. A Dutch duo runs the show, the amiable Wouter de Voogd and the wise, enthusiastic SVR scholar/performer Elger Niels who edits the beautifully produced biennial magazine The Bells, and there's a highly professional treasurer/publicist, Judicaelle Hammond.

The first of the above images I saw for the first time in the Feb 2008 edition of The Bells: there's Stravinsky's 'six-and-a-half-foot scowl' actually smiling with daughter Irina and doggie at the front door of his country house in Ivanovka, summer 1910. He's almost smiling again in the second picture, taken some years later in the company of his other daughter Tatyana.* Well, it's high time I tried to give a succinct account of the big Rachmaninov day at Chetham's School of Music, Manchester.


The audience was small but very involved so the guest of honour, French-American veteran virtuoso Francois-Joel Thiollier, was more than happy to give his all, and even, I'm told, a spontaneous farewell recital on the Sunday which I wasn't able to stay and hear. After engaging vividly with Elger's lecturing demo of Kreisler performances, and immediately pinpointing Viennese style, the lovable polymath enlightened us in two masterclasses. Elger took the first of the weekend's pictures, Wouter the one of Thiollier solus, and the rest are mine.


Thiollier's first masterclass was with Chets protege Niklas Duckworth, who plunged straight into the fiendish transcription of Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream Scherzo. The famous audition cry of 'did you bring any Mozart?' was implied in Thiollier's first gentle request that Duckworth play something simpler to ease us in, but he didn't. But by the end of the hour his understandably nervous flight had eased into something fuller-toned, better phrased and airier.

There was then rather more on-the-level coaching of an already formidable professional 26-year old Ukrainian, Ivan Hovorun, who played the first movement of 'the Rach 3' with his charming and expressive mother Lyubov acting as first-class orchestra. Again we had more flashing virtuosity shaped into something more musical and, yes, sonorous (Thiollier has a whole cache of knowledge about Steinway pedals which would make an essay in itself). I was told he didn't mind me filming and using just a couple of portions. Forgive the sound, which in no way reflects the real sonority of the Steinways. The first clip is short and deals with making the second subject sing



while the second, four and a half minutes long, gives us the Hovoruns creating an impact in the development before getting even better results under Thiollier's vigilant guidance. This speaks for itself, I think.



An amazingly good Chets canteen lunch with the Thiolliers was followed by a recital from two more adorable people, Bulgarians Valentina Seferinova and Venera Bojkova, who style themselves the 'Piano Duo Va i Ve'. Their personalities are nicely contrasted, their presentation immediately draws the audience in, and I loved the first two of the three pieces they played by compatriot Pancho Vladigerov, Mar Dimitro Iyo and the Chant Op. 21 No. 2. I was rather surprised to find that Lyubov, sitting next to me, knew the latter and explained why it was so difficult. The Duo's touch was elegant and full, their tempi for Shostakovich and Rachmaninov perhaps a little more controversial. But how wonderful to know that there are forces for the good like this teaching and performing all over the UK. Here are the delightful ladies after their recital.


They came to my talk, lured, I think, by the Rachmaninov four-hand transcription of Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty which I was able to illustrate (though not live - Va i Ve had given some thought to sight-reading excerpts for me, but were very hungry and tired by 5pm). I was followed by the Chairwoman of the Russian Rachmaninov Society, Tamara Parshina, who took me aback with her emphatic and very focused love of the composer. Here she is at breakfast the following morning with Elger (centre) and Wouter.


Finally Thiollier gave his 'keynote' recital, a devastatingly brilliant and sonorous but never flashy quartet of variations: Mendelssohn's Serieuses, Chopin's on a German national air, Herz's Premier Capriccio brillante which Verdi apparently played in his Milanese youth and the monumental Rachmaninov homage to Chopin (Op. 22, starting with colossal weight and impact).


There were only fifteen of us in the audience, but it was a choice assembly, including Ivan and Lyubov.


We stood without hesitation - and were rewarded with Scriabin's Nocturne for the left hand (which I recognised only because I'd picked up a tatty copy of the original Belyayev publication in Bristol's Amnesty bookshop). I'd have liked to stay on Sunday to hear Hovorun's recital and a demonstration by passionate Rachmaninoff Society trustee Dr. John Malpass of the latest attempt to 're-make' SVR's 78rpm recordings by Zenph Studios on a Steinway Model D Concert Grand (soon to be released on Sony Classical). After Sunday breakfast, though, I had to hop on the train back to London and finish the Martinu script. Anyway, warm congratulations to these enthusiasts for the vision to carry through so memorable a meeting of international musicians. Do join them; I've signed up for the next three years.

Caught a glimpse of another Ukrainian giant-in-the-making, Alexander Romanovsky, in a Wigmore lunchtime on my return from Cardiff. Like Thiollier, he didn't stint on his programme, and again variations were at the core. Brahms's two sets on the famous Paganini theme took the breath away - crisp, clear, and with the outlines of the theme always emerging through the latticework. I don't think much of Shostakovich's early Aphorisms - they sound like accomplished improvisations, and I wonder if they'd still be performed if they'd been composed by a lesser name. Prokofiev's Third Sonata is a different matter. Romanovsky stretched the limits of the tearaway possible in the coda, though he never bashed. Yet one more to watch. Photo by Hanya Chlala.


Since then, and all the Martinu and Musorgsky work, I've been dodging the big emotional battleships, including the Royal Opera Tristan - for me, nothing could follow the Glyndebourne experience so soon, however good Stemme might be, however challenging Loy's production - and the concert Wozzeck with Simon Keenlyside last night. I need gentle, happy music for a bit, but I'm not going to get it in at least part of tonight's BBCSO concert. I'll be in the box with Petroc Trelawny reacting to the bracing Martinu 2 - just as special as the other five, I reckon - Strauss's Four Last Songs with the divine Schwanewilms, Mahler 10 Adagio and Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel. Listen on Radio 3 at 7, and if you're coming to the concert, do try to make the talk at 6.

*These images weren't provided by the Society, but I hope the owners will deem this 'fair use' in the cause of SVR.

MMMMM

Which signifies more Martinu, Mahler, Mozart and Musorgsky arr. Shostakovich in Belohlavek's BBC Symphony concert on Saturday, more Mozart with Mendelssohn from the Jerusalem Quartet on Sunday, and more Musorgsky arr. Ravel down in Cardiff Bay on Monday. I'll throw in poet Masefield as a postscript, too (guess this is going to be another long 'un, my apologies to Cressida and others who bemoan the excess of text - just enjoy the pictures). Above is Martinu's own image of himself as some sort of creature with a beak, adorning the three BIS recordings of his symphonies which included my Building a Library choice of the Fourth. I was going to announce that you can actually get all six for less than the price of two in a Brilliant Classics box for little over £8 on Amazon, but just as I was looking for the link, it seemed to have disappeared.

Saturday evening's concert programme, broadcast on Monday and available on iPlayer for the next four days, was even more cunningly planned than I'd thought - four times four movements, each in effect a symphony. Teenager Mozart's so personable and charming 29th marks a beginning of sorts to the symphonic adventure - Haydn was there already, of course - and Martinu's First represents one of the extreme directions the symphony could take in the 20th century. Jiri, although using more strings than I'd expected, kept the Mozart light and clear; the finale bristled with life.


Flavour of the year Gerald Finley (photographed above by Sim Canetty-Clarke) then gave us a vocal symphony of Mahler's intricately-scored songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. 'Das irdische Leben', a poverty-'Erlkonig' ballad, made a grim first movement. The scherzo, St Anthony's sermon to the fishes, would of course find its counterpart in the Second Symphony, so quirkily and freshly played with weird hiccoughs the other week by the LPO under Jurowski. While in the symphony 'Urlicht' follows, the slow movement here was that greatest of all the songs before the Ruckert Lieder, 'Wo die schonen Trompeten blasen', with its heartbreaking, heartbroken exchanges between the ghost-soldier and his girl. And the donkey-judged song competition between cuckoo and nightingale dominates the finale of the Fifth Symphony. So it was cleverly sequenced, performed with all Finley's slightly reined-in professionalism and perhaps more memorably etched by the pointillist orchestra (I've never heard such detail in these pieces).


It's a bit heretical of me to say I switch off in chunks of Musorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death, especially as for some reason I seem to have become the BBC's Musorgsky Man. That unforgettable portrait of him by Repin, incidentally, tells only one, rather late story, though he was getting that way by the time he wrote his greatest song cycle. Anyway, fascinatingly though Shostakovich cordons off the orchestral sections in his orchestrations, I wonder whether the actual musical content always rises to the gist of the poems. But Death as Field Marshal was magnificent, Finley suddenly showing us that he can do the stentorian bass-baritone stuff. I still feel he isn't quite an artist on the edge; does the Canadian in him stand guard? Nevertheless, his was undeniably classy singing.


Martinu's symphony for Kousi (pictured with him above in another shot from the Martinu Centre in Policka) blew us all away. It was, no doubt, very loud and insistent in that way the Barbican always emphasises (play a piano and you get a mezzo-forte). But Belohlavek kept rhythmic energy sharp and clear, could have encored that supreme jazz-tango scherzo and sent us away exhilarated but exhausted. Gosh, Martinu does ask a lot of his listeners as well as his players.

The parallels between Martinu and Mozart fusing childlike naivety with supreme sophistication were reinforced by the Jerusalems' Wigmore coffee morning concert (I'm sorry, but is offering a free glass of sherry likely to attract a younger audience?). Marco Borggreve took this photo of the four likeable lads.


When we reached the ineffably blithe 6/8 finale of the K589 (B flat) Quartet, I was reminded of the chirruping piano and harp who add their say to the first moment of repose in Martinu's finale (about 1hr40mins into the iPlayer broadcast, if you want to pinpoint it). Both composers tap into the inner child but never resort to faux-naivete. Mozart's slow movement, as J put it, reading my thoughts, was indeed 'like bathing in light', one idea pouring forth after another. And I must say that, much as I enjoyed the full-bloodedness of the Mendelssohn quartet which followed, Mozart carries the palm for giving each of the players lovely and personal things to do; Mendelssohn's writing is more orchestral, less individual. For me, the Jerusalems are right at the top of current string quartets for communication, compounding my awestruck ongoing admiration for Faust/Melnikov and the Rasumovskys.

Out of the great grey Babylon on Monday for the western wastes of Cardiff, not as yet one of my favourite cities, for a Radio 3 recording of Discovering Music.


As with Manchester, there's a heck of a lot going on, and if the revamped Cardiff Bay area, feeling as producer Chris Wines said even more desolate than an English seaside resort out of season, is a bit of a dog's dinner architecturally, the facade of the Wales Millennium Centre can hardly fail to impress. Don't ask me what the straw bales are doing in the foreground.


The texts, I was delighted to discover, are by Welsh poet laureate Gwyneth Lewis, whose Sunbathing in the Rain ('a cheerful book about depression') is a little masterpiece. The Welsh words mean 'creating truth like glass from the furnace of inspiration' and the English reads, simply, 'in these stones, horizons sing'.

It looks good from the side


and lit up at night, even if by the time I photographed it there was hardly anyone around to see it.


I also enjoyed encountering for the first time the BBC National Orchestra of Wales's new 350-seater Hoddinott Hall, exactly the kind of thing the BBCSO needs to replace Maida Vale.


Here I arrived at 4 to go through the paces of my 'guest appearance as Russian music expert' with Charles Hazlewood and pianist Ashley Wass. Ashley was playing not only snippets of Musorgsky's original piano Pictures at an Exhibition - look at the manuscript, hardly the slovenly work of an habitual drunk -


but also two late piano miniatures, 'Une larme' and 'Au village'. I'd written off the 'tear' as salon sentimentality; hearing Ashley play it so feelingly changed my opinion about it completely. As with Ilse Weber's Terezin songs interpreted by Anne Sofie von Otter, simplicity can be of the essence. 'Au village' was fascinating, too: it struck me on the spot that it's a harvest song, with solo and response followed by a dance in which there are several surprising bars of gypsy or Jewish music. Here's Ashley, of whom I want to hear much more, just before he rushed back to London:


Charles and the orchestra did a very characterful job on the Ravel orchestration, not exactly subtle, but very visual: they have a superb first flautist, who peeped masterfully in the Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks, and the tuba, sax and trumpet solos were all well taken. There's no end to what you can learn about Musorgsky and Pictures. Chris enlightened me with the idea that 'Bydlo' is related to the funeral march of Chopin's Second Piano Sonata. Here he is with Charles after a hard-working afternoon and evening.


And chatting to the very amiable as well as highly accomplished Polish first bassoonist, Jaroslaw Augustyniak, I was surprised to learn that 'bydlo', pronounced 'pidwo' and meaning 'cattle', was a derogatory term of 19th century Polish aristocracy towards peasants, still used by Stalin in the 20th. So the picture of hard labour becomes even more pertinent.

Well, I think we were all happy with the results, which will be up as a filmed webcast in perpetuity as well as a Radio Three broadcast in a couple of weeks' time (tbc). And I enjoyed a steak sandwich with Chris in one of the theme park cafes afterwards, the view


from my luxurious room in 'Cardiff's only five star hotel' - special rates, for those who complain that the BBC is throwing its money around (believe me, it wasn't, for my appearance, at any rate) - and a 9am stroll around the harbour before catching the bus back to Cardiff Central. Here are two brooding shots on a grey morning pierced by silver light from time to time:



And the Masefield? Well, what serendipity that only last week I'd remembered a fellow classics student at Edinburgh University who knew 'Cargoes' off by heart and used to recite it as a party piece. And what a sonorous paean it is, contrasting ancient poetry with modern prose. The reason it crops up is because on Cardiff's Mermaid Quay there are a series of sculptures inspired by what are perhaps Masefield's most celebrated lines after 'Sea fever'.


Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon* coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.


I don't think Masefield allowed for the starlings on the dirty British coaster, though. And I'm still puzzled why the homage should be there in Cardiff Bay. While Ivor Novello was christened David Ifor Davies in the Welsh capital, and duly honoured with a rather homely monument alongside the Millennium Centre,


Masefield was born in gorgeous Ledbury - not far from the border, but that doesn't make him a Welshman. Maybe it was his time on the HMS Conway that gave him honorary Taffship.

So farewell to the Bay for now. Lucky Welsh to be imminently getting a Mariinsky double bill of Tchaikovsky's Iolanta and The Nutcracker - I've provided the notes at an envious distance - as well as a Bryn and Valery double act.


*Forgot about that stanza, so didn't hunt it out among the sculptures to photograph it.

Martinů: his time is ours

Sorry to sound portentous, but there it is: three weeks of intensive listening have convinced me that everything Martinů has to say about memory, nostalgia, the horrors of war, the pain of exile and the ecstasies of love speaks to us more strongly than ever. There he is above in 1943, in his New York apartment with a photo on the mantelpiece showing (if you look closely enough) the tower in which he was born in the small Moravian town of Polička. Its Martinů Centre, which I can't wait to see, provided the photo for the BBC.

More I won't add, except to say that more detail will be unearthed in my ubiquitous appearances tomorrow (Saturday), Big Bohuslav Day. The Radio Three chunk starts at 9.30am with Building a Library on one masterpiece among at least a dozen, the Fourth Symphony, and continues with Music Matters*. Towards the end of the 12.15 slot, you can hear me in conversation with Tom Service and Norwich-based Martinů scholar Sharon Choa. If you can't catch one, t'other or either at the time, the Radio 3 Listen Again facility will be at your disposal for the following week.

Jiří Bělohlávek's first Martinů concert with the BBC Symphony Orchestra won't be broadcast until Monday evening, but go and hear it live at the Barbican, it's a stunning programme (Mozart Symphony No. 29, Mahler songs from Des knaben Wunderhorn and the Musorgsky/Shostakovich Songs and Dances of Death with Gerald Finley, Martinů Symphony No.1). I'll be trying to cover all four works in the pre-performance talk in the Fountain Room at 6pm. That, of course, won't be included in the Monday broadcast.

Last night I saw Jiří at the new ENO production of Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (seen at its Brussels launch in the first two photos below by Bernd Uhlig). As we took our seats, he wished me a 'nice evening' and I said that 'nice' wasn't quite what I was expecting.



Still, I was expecting a lot, and I wasn't sure if my memories were serving me right in the first half. I saw the Big Mac's UK premiere at the Coli back in 1982. Eight years later, asked as part of a BBC World Service panel to give my thoughts on the outstanding new work of the previous decade, I cited Ligeti's magnum opus, and Nick Kenyon (now Sir Nicholas, no less) replied that even Ligeti had doubts about it, so if he no longer believed in it, who else would?

Well, many of the world's opera houses still do. Does the Big M deserve its frequent resuscitation? The libretto hasn't worn well, the noises are less naughty than they were in the 1980s, and the first two scenes, where death-lord Nekrotzar begins to establish his rule of terror in Brueghelland, don't seem to be going anywhere. The undeniably brilliant, and dazzlingly executed, idea of Valentina Carrasco and La Fura dels Baus is to try and draw the cartoon characters together as emanations of a body in revolt, the body of a young woman who seems to be suffering a heart attack in the film at the beginning and who then fills the stage as a vast model out of whose every orifice the characters pour or sing. This is Pavlo Hunka's Nekrotzar making his first appearance in one of two photos by Steve Cummiskey for ENO.


I remembered that it all comes together in Nekrotzar's ultimately botched doomsday scenario, and the production rose to the necessary heights here. It's a shame that in rightly praising the originality of the show, critics seem to have forgotten that ENO have given us two equally compelling stage pictures with similarly imaginative use of video projection in last season's Luonnotar and L'amour de loin. The video here carries the apocalypse-that-isn't very well, and the principals then take centre stage for the inevitably glib moral, which is totally satisfying musically at least (Ligeti gives us a passacaglia of far flung chords that knocks spots off the one in Ades's The Tempest).

The singers, inevitably given their ungrateful writing, make less of an impression than the orchestral sounds - some of them, especially the fantastical bourree, rather smothered - under Baldur Bronniman. Sue Bickley (Mescalina), Daniel Norman and Simon Butteriss as the scatalogically-minded White v Black Ministers - seen below in the second of Steve Cummiskey's photographs with Susanna Andersson as the Chief of Police - and the astonishingly full, clarion counter-tenor Andrew Watts as pettish Prince Go-Go all made me laugh.


Andersson is a fluttery coloratura, not a patch on the last production's Marilyn Hill Smith (I think it was), though she does sound amazingly like a theremin when she shuffles on a second time under a camouflage net.

As always, the most striking component in Ligeti's purposeful ragbag of styles is his own chord-cluster skyscape for the morning after, almost as well done here as it was in the haunting adoption of the Albert Hall cavern by Jonathan Nott and the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra for Atmospheres at the Proms. Gosh, someone has actually posted that performance on YouTube. So here it all is.



*both available to hear online until the end of Friday 9 October.

Always in the midst of it

Even those of us who have long admired the integrity and wide-ranging artistry of the Terezin/Theresienstadt disc were rather astonished by the extended scope of last night's programme at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. One of my favourite and longest-lasting muses, Anne Sofie von Otter, had the musical intelligence and generosity to share her tribute very equally with her long-term pianist, the quirky and likeable Bengt Forsberg, and the man whom I'd already marked down as one of the world's top violinists when I heard him play the Britten Concerto, Daniel Hope (and how he merited that title yesterday evening). Bebe Risenfors was there for support, but where would some of the numbers have been without his sensitive guitar accompaniment or his double bass 'n cymbals double act?

But this was not about first-class performers showing off. It was a totally integrated and beautifully shaped homage to the sheer vitality and the many musical possibilities discovered by those extraordinary human beings caught in the hell of the Nazis' show-camp. Like this concert, they refused to succumb to sombre lamentation. As inmate Viktor Ullmann put it, 'we did not simply sit by the rivers of Babylon and weep but evinced a desire to produce art that was entirely commensurate with our will to live'.

'Always in the midst of it', as runs H G Adler's text for a turbulent Ullmann song new to me, the Theresienstadters could parody the sentimental, touch on the gift to be simple and also produce some truly great music. One could weep at but not wallow in the elementary songs of the courageous Ilse Weber, the children's nurse who insisted on accompanying her charges to Auschwitz. What Anne Sofie tactfully, or maybe to steel herself, did not mention before the final Lullaby was that eyewitnesses report Weber singing it to the children in the gas chamber. Von Otter ended it on the merest sliver of sound. But she could also pull off the pants-kicking exuberance in the last of her selection from Pavel Haas's Folk Style Songs, the complexity of the Ullmann settings and the showbiz panache of the inmates' wry rewording of a song from Kalman's Countess Maritza. Here's a recent shot of the lovely lady by Mats Baecker.


Forsberg, too, had his time in the sun, if that's the right way of putting it, and in any case his twists to the songs were always striking. He deserves a photo, too. This one is by Mona Bjorklund.


He conveyed the full anger of the second movement from Haas's Suite for Piano and did his best with Berman's Reminiscences (though for me these were the only pieces in the evening where the musical substance didn't live up to the programmatic aims). He also worked in fierce focus with Hope to sear our souls in the second movement of Schulhoff's Second Sonata. Here's the great white Hope of British violinists as snapped by Felix Broeder for DG.


The biggest coup of the evening was to follow two movements from the same composer's Solo Violin Sonata with the Siciliano from Bach's Fourth Violin Sonata. Something of the sort would have to appear on a putative second CD from the same team (and there's easily enough material to make it worthwhile). This was balm to us, of course, but a reminder of the air from another planet for the inhabitants of the model ghetto during those extraordinary recitals where Bach, like many of the new pieces, would have symbolised, as Ulrike Migdal's supremely eloquent note put it, 'their adherence to a European cultural tradition from which their persecutors sought to expel them'. Though it's curious, too, that many of the most integrated, like anthroposophist Ullmann, rediscovered their Jewish roots in Terezin.