Chaz and Ben

Lord Britten would surely have forgiven Sir Charles all his past innuendoes and applauded his magnificent return to the fold if he could have seen the nearly-84-year old tearing into his most concentrated masterpiece, The Turn of the Screw, in the Coliseum revival of David McVicar's English National/Mariinsky Opera production. It prompted me to look back at what Mackerras had to say about his chequered career with the Britten establishment when I interviewed him for Gramophone in 1992 during the Gloriana sessions (and, yes, they were still amusing themselves in the control room with the notorious 'young boys...bottoms' text to the horn tune of the Serenade).

The great man, seen above in the first of several production photos by Clive Barda, returns from enforced time out to endorse Claudio Arrau's assertion that old age brings with it not the expected serenity but renewed intensity. The feral cannonades of the jungle drums beneath the Governess's coach-rocking journey to Bly, the shrill edge of the church bells and the sensual clamour of the night ensemble all bore that out. And the players must surely have been responding to Sir Charles's meticulous ear in their many nuanced solos.

Problems remain with the production, and looking back on what I wrote when I first saw it two years ago, they're much the same: the interfering scene-shifters/servants who ruin the stillness of the climactic interlude in Act One, the boards which creak under Quint's all too mortal feet, the over large spaces to fill - with panels that reminded my companion Edwina of bistro windows - and the unsubtle underlining of the children's unambiguous involvement with the 'ghosts'. I worried that Nazan Fikret, now surely in her late teens, would be too much the Infant Phenomenon as Flora, but her intense performance is still riveting even in the later, Linda Blair moments.


Only the males are slightly under par: Hugh Beckwith, the second Miles, remains too stiff and of course it's hard for a treble to project into the Coli vasts, while Michael Colvin's energetic Quint is too much the Quasimodoish Hammer horror and far from the seductive Andalusian serenader Britten surely had in mind at times.

Britten's taxing vocal battles/duets between powerful women mean that both Ann Murray and Cheryl Barker challenge Rebecca Evans's more dreamily lyrical Governess to rise to their searing levels. Evans floats lines with Mozartian perfection and acts the lady's nervous collapses very well indeed


but doesn't convey any innate neurosis in her voice and on this occasion didn't move me in the final scene (though other folk I respect were in tears at the end). I'd love to see what the lustrous Barker might make of the sinning-or-sinned-against dilemma; and isn't it time to welcome the ever-waxing Sue Gritton, who's just been wowing Cheryl's compatriots down under as Ellen Orford, to the role? Neil Armfield's village-hall Grimes looks fascinating.



Our friends in Sydney have been obsessing on this show, and it would seem with good cause. Read the polyphony of praise in the 'scrapbook' of Prima la musica (with thanks to Sarah Noble for alerting me to the Gritton gold nugget above).

Now, it's time for In the Cage, and I don't mean another of great Henry's short stories (good, by the way, to see another James lover come out of the closet in John Adams's surprising blog).


I'm going to make an odd comparison, but I do think that Britten's opera would have fitted far better in the relatively intimate space of the Playhouse Theatre where a reduced-scale but pretty perfect Cage aux folles is currently playing (production photos of the Cagelles and John Barrowman by Catherine Ashmore). And the other thing to say is that I not only laughed myself silly but shed a few more tears at Thursday's performance than I had the night before (and don't get me wrong, Britten's shocker can reduce me to pulp).


This was in no small measure due to the show-stopping heft of John Barrowman's 'I Am What I Am' and feelgood 'The Best of Times'. But I must reveal my ignorance and say how the whole, iron-fist-in-lurex-glove event took me by surprise. I either never knew, or had forgotten, that the songs were by Jerry Herman of Hello, Dolly! and Mame fame; but the penny was already dropping when one of the first act numbers reminded me of that hit song from Mack and Mabel so irresistibly sung by Bernadette Peters.

And, yes, the old-fashioned sweetness coats a show about gay togetherness, alternative families and acceptance of all sorts which hit the French cinema in, can I believe it, the late 1970s and took on a new lease of life when the great Harvey Fierstein wrote the book for the musical. There's an excellent article in the programme by Michael Coveney in which Fierstein tells us how he 'fought to cast homosexuals in the roles - if you stand up and sing "I Am What I Am" without feeling your sexuality and your persecution right down to your painted toenails it's never going to be quite the same thing'.

It would be fair to say that the lovely Barrowman, such a great role model even if he is gifted with an unusually pretty face and such fine teeth, does feel it down to his 'painted toenails', that Simon Burke as his loving keeper is just as good and touching, that the rest of the cast sing, camp and act their socks off. Here are Burke's Georges and Barrowman's Albin trying to play it straight for the son's girlfriend's family, with Syrus Lowe's maid/miniMozart Jacob incapable of doing so.


Anyway it all ends, as the Broadway show never could, with a passionate, tender kiss. So what's most extraordinary of all is that some members of my mother's village coven, several of whom have hitherto behaved more like the genteel vomiting ladies in Little Britain, can't get enough of this and keep going back. She's in for a treat when she sees it for the first time next week.

Because nothing can live in it

The Governess's succinct explanation in Britten's The Turn of the Screw, and her charge Flora's stilling, harp-flecked invocation of the Dead Sea which prompts it, ran over and over in my head as we plunged to the lowest point on earth. Any illusion that we were more or less alone in this wilderness was shattered as we entered the nearly-full underground car park at the Masada National Park headquarters. At first full sighting, though, the last stronghold of the Jewish army against the Romans in AD 73 remained impressive.


There are two approaches to this cliffhanger: from the west, where the Romans' siege ramp can still be clearly seen, and from the east. Having started on the wrong route, which gave us an unexpected glimpse of an ibex, we took the latter option, shunning the hordes waiting for the cable car and heading up Wadi Masada for the Snake Path.


The path has its name, according to the historian Josephus's celebrated and romanticised account of the siege, 'because of its narrowness and constant windings; it is broken as it rounds the projecting cliffs and often turns back on itself, then lengthening out again a little at a time, manages to make some trifling advance. Walking along it is like balancing on a tight-rope. The least slip means death; for on either side yawns an abyss so terrifying that it could make the boldest tremble'*.

Well, I doubt if Josephus ever went to Masada, for even given the present securing, stepping and broadening of the path, it can't ever have been that scary and the ascent takes about three quarters of an hour. It does give spectacular views over the salt pans and the Dead Sea.


On the way up we encountered a large party of Israeli youth descending - nothing remarkable about that except that all, including the youngest who looked about 12, were carrying machine guns. Masada has entered the national mythology as the place where the inhabitants committed mass Waco-type suicide rather than surrender to slavery. In this it's thought that Josephus embroidered for the sake of a cracking good rhetorical speech, but like so much else in the distant past, it's now taken as the solemn truth and the oath of allegiance is frequently sworn at the top.

Whatever the historical reality, Herod's palace and fortifications on the top are mighty impressive.


In the south there's the largest of the cisterns which kept the community well watered


while the western palace has a couple of colourful mosaics.


There's also a columbarium for the pigeons which kept Herod's folk well fed.


Nowadays one still sees the occasional pigeon, but the most vocal and fearless inhabitants are these birds, some kind of starling but with an attractive orange stripe to mark them apart as a special desert breed.


It was bucketing in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv; we had instead a dramatic dust storm. So the views on the descent were even more dramatic


with the distant salt pans glowing in shafts of sunlight against the black.


A dip in the Dead Sea after this proved irresistible. We drove past En Gedi, which hostess Juliette assures me is like a Black Sea resort in the communist era, and on to a still surprisingly busy Mineral Beach. Couldn't get near the mud bath for raucous Americans


but floated somewhat uneasily in the lethal cocktail (no swimming or splashing permitted). It's not a new sensation for me - I'd also bobbed in the soapy waters of Lake Van - and J paraphrased Dr Johnson by declaring 'worth doing, but not worth going to do'. Masada, however, was a different story. The desert scene haunts me still.

*Thanks to Shari Greenberg for so generously presenting me with the Penguin Classics translation on our last day in Jerusalem.

VinCEEro? VinceRO!

The accepted custom on the money note of 'Nessun dorma' is to hold on to that top B for as long as you can. Franco Corelli (poutingly gorgeous above, in his Calafian Astrakhan) does, of course, and in extending my Monday 'Opera in Focus' class survey to see and/or hear more on YouTube, I found Alessandro Valente clinging to it so long that he drops off what ought to be the full bar of top A on the final 'ro'. What Puccini asks for is an accent on a quaver's worth of B, while the orchestra makes a poco allargando, so that the stress falls where the word demands, on the last syllable.

Is this mere pedantry? Well, not exactly. Puccini tended to mark every detail in the score, so if he'd wanted the B to be so heroically held, he'd have put a tenuto above it. And as one of my students enthusiastically observed, 'vinceRO!' sounds so much more determined and, well, natural. She only had the opportunity to hear it because I finally found a tenor who does exactly what's in the score - Aureliano Pertile, who made his Scala debut in 1918 so could have sung at the Turandot premiere but didn't (I wonder why not, since he was Toscanini's favourite tenor. By the way, Caruso never could have sung 'Nessun dorma' for the simple reason that he'd been dead for five years by the time of the first performance). I take the liberty of liberating Aureliano's amiable image from the earlier Turandot entry to give him the palm here.


What of Pertile's 'Nessun dorma' as a whole? Well, he tends to sing sharp in his virile excitement - always better than flat, don't you think? - but there's never any doubt that he can make the killer lines, starting ''Ma il mio mistero e chiuso in me' and all around Es, F sharps and Gs, a hellish tessitura.

My resident heldentenor explained to me how lighter voices like Gigli and Bjorling have trouble with these phrases, and how even the heavier ones have to clamp down in order to get to the end without cracking. In the class, we heard Bjorling, heroic but uniformly forte, followed by Heppner as baby tenor, so sensitive to the atmosphere at the start but very careful with the killer passage. Then we moved on to Charles Kullmann, singing in German with no trouble at all at any point (the class's favourite; Charles Craig, whom I later dug out on an old LP, is almost as good). Pertile's what-Puccini-wanted demo came between splendid heroics on the top B from Joseph Schmidt - who sings 'vinhairo' to get it - Corelli and, of course, Pavarotti, who remains a golden example of how to deal with the passaggio.

Sadly, while he set a splendid stadium example, he gave rise to an outrageous band of pygmies either crooning at a lower pitch (Russell Watson) or wowing the crowds with a far from solid attempt at real tenorism (Paul Potts, whom I've only just watched - needless to say he dominates 'Nessun dorma' on YouTube). On the other hand, an old bird of boundless charisma can get away with replacing Pav and doing her own thing. Do stay with Aretha beyond the mangled Italian of the first phrases, and if you have an open mind you should enjoy her.



Let's end, though, with another tenor who was so much the real thing but tends to be overlooked because of his popular bent, Mario Lanza. This badly lip-synched extravaganza from the 1956 film Serenade, with flashbacks featuring the ladies in the drama, Joan Fontaine and Sara Montiel, sounds good to me, a bit more robust than the feted 1948 Hollywood Bowl version.



Having found out a little more about Serenade - not least that the gay character played by Vincent Price originally appeared in the novel as the singer's first love-interest - I'm curious to see the whole thing. Apparently the Otello Act 3 Monologue is a high point of Lanza's career.

When we dead awaken...

...it'll be a mighty squeeze in the cleft which Zechariah prophesied will open up in Jerusalem's Mount of Olives. Which is why the Jewish graves are so hugger-mugger on the slopes, offering instant fast track to resurrection for Robert Maxwell, of all people, among others. If I've collated correctly, the city's glorious Dome of the Rock, never to be seen at close quarters by the majority of Israelis, will of course be swept away and the third temple at last re-established on the spot.

Unfortunately, it's not just the lunatic fringe which takes this literally - even if I doubt whether many Israelis share the ultra-orthodox interest in genetically engineering a red heifer without a single white hair as one prerequisite for the great day. Nor are many willing to wait on God's will. In the mid 1980s a group consisting of Knesset members, estate agents and lawyers calculated the placing of dynamite at each of the Dome's eight corner pillars. Arrested only just in time, they got off lightly for a plot which, if successful, would have triggered an Armageddon of regional if not global proportions; none of the organisers served more than four years in prison. One told the courts very matter of factly how the third temple would descend from the skies the minute the Dome was reduced to rubble.

Jerusalem is an always stimulating, sometimes oppressive place to be even for a week. As its finest poet, Yehuda Amichai, wrote,

The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams
like the air over industrial cities.
It's hard to breathe.

Paradoxically, I found myself breathing most freely on Temple Mount, Haram es-Sharif, the Muslims' 'noble sanctuary' and the site of the first and second Jewish temples which were razed to the ground, leaving only Herod's massive base. Against its western wall Israelis come to bewail the temples' destruction at their most sacred place.


It was a bit of a fairground when we visited, sundry bar mitzvah ceremonies proceeding with much guying, dancing from the men and ululating and sweet-throwing from the women behind the barrier.


Having undergone one queue, we came out and joined another at the only one of the Haram's gates currently open to non-Muslims in the day's two brief windows of opportunity (we took the 12.30-1.30 slot). Security was especially tight owing to recent protests - in the midst of one of which a journalist friend of our hosts had her jaw broken by a stone - but once beyond the wooden ramp and the mercifully dormant riot shields


we did indeed seem to enter a kind of paradise in which the crowds quickly dispersed. The centrepiece is of course the late 7th century octagonal Dome, not a prayer hall - that function is served by the Al-Aqsa Mosque to the south - but a shrine to house the putative rock on which Abraham determined to sacrifice his son (Isaac in the Old Testament, Ishmael in the Koran).


Its lower walls of white veined marble and upper tiers of glazed tiles, originally commissioned by Suleyman the Magnificent to replace the original mosaics, exist in perfect harmony with its perfect proportions beneath the dome itself, now of anodized aluminium rather than gold.


Yet what brings tears to the eyes is not so much the building, the interior of which is currently closed to non-Muslims, as its place at the heart of the most breathtakingly beautiful man-made terrace I've seen. For sheer spaciousness and light-filled splendour it even outstrips the centre of Isfahan and the Omayyad Mosque in Damascus. It's also in such marked contrast to the Crusader gloom of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, though that offers weird fascinations of its own (of which more anon). Approached by eight flights of stairs surmounted by elegant archways or qanats, the sanctuary contains other more gem-like buildings, among them the Dome of the Spirits,


the Dome of the Ascension marking the culmination of Mohammed's night journey which makes this the third most sacred Muslim site


and the exquisitely decorated Dome of the Chain, its purpose unclear (though it may have been a small-scale prototype for the main building).


On a lower level near the Sabila Gate is the Fountain of the Mamluk Sultan Qaitbey


which we admired briefly before being summoned at deadline time, and ushered out into the bustle of the Old City.

So not for the first time I feel a bit like the protagonist of Henry James's The Princess Casamassima, wondering at the beauty of these great artistic creations but troubled by their genesis and their fragility under the present situation. The following morning I found myself boiling over with anger reading the description in Amos Elon's superb Jerusalem: City of Mirrors about the attempts to destroy such a masterpiece. But you could also see where that frustration came from; after all, events which happened centuries ago seem to be yesterday's grievances in Jerusalem. The simple fact is that no community here lives at peace with its neighbour. There are many more incredible stories and symbols of religious hairsplitting which I'll try and find time for. And I guess I'd better address the tricky question of Jerusalem today. But that's enough for now.

Jenufa: mill wheel as fate

There it is in the very first bar of Janacek's Jenufa (Her Stepdaughter, as the 1955 vocal score I bought second-hand in Prague still calls it), the sound of the revolving mill wheel. Janacek went and checked it out, finding his own musical equivalent in the shape of a low xylophone, not a typical sonority for 1903/4 (Strauss two years later was still calling it a 'wood and straw instrument' for Salome, though of course Saint-Saens had got there several decades earlier with his rattling bones). And the mill wheel still revolves at Glyndebourne as ominously as it did back in the late 1980s when Nikolaus Lehnhoff's ageless and, for me, unsurpassed production first stunned us all. Here it is backstage, where we caught a glimpse of it on a whistlestop tour kindly organised for nine-year old Lucien and his mother Clare before the schools matinee of Falstaff.


It's something of a miracle how the latest Glyndebourne on Tour team manages to come up with a Jenufa revival offering as many resonances as Lehnhoff's previous line-ups, among the casts of yore the unforgettable Anja Silja as the Kostelnicka, Roberta Alexander and later Amanda Roocroft as Jenufas to make stones weep, Langridge as the febrile Laca. But it has. Perhaps I have a little foreknowledge from seeing the way Robin Ticciati worked with the covers the previous Sunday (see below). Anyway I'm convinced that much of the latest power comes from his close liaison with singers on text, meaning, pacing, nodal points of expression and above all the power of holding a silence. There were three such heart in mouth moments in the harrowing second act, and one to cap them all between the C major blaze to which the Kostelnicka goes to face judgment, leaving the maddened village lads to wreck her property, and the radiant, harp-rippling B flat initiating Jenufa's and Laca's final determination to face whatever the future holds together.

Ticciati's view is softer but not weaker than the rawness Mackerras has always brought to this score. He makes you hear passages in a completely different light: you understand not only the glow of love Jenufa emanates, but also the sensual power of Steva - for once a truly handsome chap and beautifully sung to boot by Brno born Pavel Cernoch, the drunken swagger of the first act (in the first of three GOT production photos by Alastair Muir)


yielding to the youthful fear of the Kostelnicka in the second.


There were also heart-stopping beauties in unexpected places, like the lovely little chorus in which the village girls lead the restrained but still fun-loving Jenufa in the last act. Ticciati's insistence on clear-sighted truth is awe-inspiringly matched by Anne Mason's Kostelnicka. Anja left indelible phrases behind, but Mason can find different qualities: more tenderness, generosity of spirit and, in her final speech, a core of emotional strength which made me sit up ramrod straight in my seat.


If Giselle Allen didn't pierce the heart in every gesture or phrase, her depiction of Jenufa's development and especially the laser-like focus shared by Peter Wedd's Laca in the final scene were just as impressive as the different characterisations of her predecessors. All the smaller roles were flawlessly delineated.

'It's an earthquake', promised the taxi-driver ferrying us back to Lewes Station the previous evening, to which I have to add a pat-on-the-back comment from a gentleman who'd been to the study day and brought four friends along to my condensed talk on Saturday because he'd been 'thunderstruck'. I think the kids at the special showing of Falstaff would mostly have said 'awesome' in response to Richard Jones's gag-laden and consistently resourceful evocation of 1940s Windsor (I can't wait to see his Annie Get Your Gun). Brownie points to Katie Tearle and her super team in the Education Department for making the afternoon work so well.


I'll be brief about this: it was just a marvel to hear the enthusiastic roars of youth, their minute-long applause at the laundry-basket antics long before the curtain came down, their attentiveness to the forest magic in which Elena Tsallagova produced the most perfect singing of the evening as a Nannetta who, for me, scored over Adriana Kucerova in the main season (I may just have heard the delightful AK on an off night). Here she is with her very good Fenton, Nicholas Phan, photographed by Bill Cooper.


As for the rest, well, the tricky ensembles need tightening and Jonathan Veira has everything going for him except that he isn't Christopher Purves, the Falstaff of the production's first showing. But he's charming, has pathos and knows how to work an audience.


There have been a few economies for the tour: the swan and the Eton schoolboys have gone. But I don't remember Mistress Quickly snatching a discreet kiss from a lady who turns out to be her lady at the end of the superb Windsor High Street scene. Lucien, ever unpredictable, especially liked that transitional tableau, though of course he had also been in ecstasies of delight anticipating Sir John's come-uppance in the casa Ford, inevitably the highlight of our earlier excursion to the Globe Merry Wives of Windsor (when it would have been the Page household, but I managed to dissuade Lucien from harking back to Shakespeare when he was earnestly trying to sort out his Alices, Megs and Nannettas in the synopsis).

Anyway we were fortunate that the rain held off for our walk across the ridge after a bookshop browse and a stop at the deservedly popular Bill's in Lewes. We were also lucky with a briefly sunkissed picnic followed by a stroll around the lake, now very much plunged in autumn after the late-summer feel of the previous Sunday.


What fun, too, to see the lawn turned into an endlessly reconfigured school playing field.


On Jenufa day the rain was seeping through the Ebert Room roof and only at half-time could we venture much outside. But the magic of Glyndebourne holds in any season.

29/10 The films of the Discovering Music on Musorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition are now up and running, linked as I write from the main Radio 3 webpage. They're supposed to be there in perpetuity, unlike the abridged radio version, which has already had its seven days of extended life. Ashley Wass's more substantial and hyper-poetic playing, of the Musorgsky miniatures 'Une larme' and 'Au village', comes in the background sequence, following my contextual blether which starts a couple of minutes in, and we pop up again towards the end of the 'analysis' film. My feelings about speaking spontaneously and then finding I'm up there indefinitely for all to see are ambivalent; of course I'd edit myself. But it could have been a lot worse.

The only way is Up

What I suppose I mean is that there's no going back on the unsentimental presentation of human loss in this little masterpiece, issued - wonders will never cease - under the Disney aegis but made by the Pixar geniuses who brought you Monsters, Inc. Indeed, if we're talking about rank, I'd be tempted to slip this in just above that earlier jeu d'esprit and even alongside both Toy Stories.

In any case, Up is unique. The heroes are a grumpy old man and an annoying chubby child, with cute relief from an exotic bird and a talking dog. Within minutes, the narrative takes you through the senior hero's life, sensitively touching on his wife's loss of a child and later her death. Can you believe parents have complained about this? I echo Maurice Sendak's 'ya boo sucks' sentiments to similar cries of 'too scary' about the cinematic version of Where the Wild Things Are (even if I can't imagine that timeless work extending to a full length film). And I quote John Burningham on a private view of the film based on his book Granpa:

When the picture of the empty armchair came up on the screen a small voice in the front row asked 'Where's Granpa?' The adults each side of me reached for their handkerchiefs. The children, however, were able to accept the ending without tears.

Up, anyway, embraces a huge, far from facile optimism and great visual beauty. It does everything a great work of entertainment, dare I say of art to boot, ought to do: it makes you laugh, cry, reflect. And there are no cheesy songs; the musical score, except in the stock conflict sequences, is sensitive and sweet. I'm not sure if any of this was enhanced by the 3-D version we saw in Brixton's Ritzy Cinema; that was just an optional extra to an already dizzying experience.

So what was I doing watching Up at the pictures in the first place? I doubt if I'd ever have gone had it not been for the fact that I needed to meet friend Simon's partner Patricia, an actress of no small reputation, to get her to record three scenes from Timberlake Wertenbaker's adaptation of Jenufa, the Gabriela Preissova play which inspired Janacek's now much better-known opera (strictly speaking, the original title of both the play and the opera was Her Stepdaughter, which throws the emphasis on to the Kostlenicka, portrayed below by the wonderful Paola Dionisotti). What I thought of the first UK production, which cried out in vain for a West End transfer, is here. It looks from the Faber website as if you can still get hold of copies of the play.


Suffice it to say that Simon was taking daughter Evie and her friend Tanisha to see Up, and we tagged along, afterwards resorting to Simon's car down some noisy Brixton sidestreet trying to get the speeches right. The aftermath I hardly dare report on, other than to say that another Simon, the hard-working sound and vision man at Glyndebourne, is still trying to retrieve the information from a recalcitrant minidisk. I've had it with those machines; technician Simon is going to set me on the right path when next we meet.

So to another film with some resonance, the Flemish director Johan Grimonprez's singular take on a divided Alfred Hitchcock in Double Take.


Presented by the personable Jonathan Romney at the London Film Festival on Friday, this has fascinating things to say about the divided soul and the doppelganger - partly springing, it was later suggested, from the Belgian split/division between French and Flemish. The film makes a lot of the likeable man who was Hitchcock's official double, and all that is amusing, especially the play on Hitchcock's 'McGuffin' appearances in his own films.


I liked, too, the conversation with an older self taken from a Borges story. I was less convinced by the links to world events at the time, from Khrushchev's bizarre off-air spat with Nixon to the Cuban missile crisis and, ultimately, beyond. Still, this made a musical counterpoint and it did make me keen, in a nervous kind of way, to see The Birds again with fresh eyes.

Let's end with another fantasy of genius, Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick or Lonesome No More!


Surely this dystopian tragicomedy has the best back of jacket blurb ever, which I'll use to intrigue you:

Wilbur Swain and his twin sister Eliza are so hideous, helpless and vile in their infancy that their parents are forced to rear them in the seclusion of a nearby asteroid. But behind their idiotic facade, this monstrous pair possess a joint intelligence capable of outstripping the most advanced computers.

Now, as America collapses into anarchic decline, and pin-size Chinamen pollute the atmosphere, President Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain sits in the ruined remnants of the Empire State Building and tells the extraordinary story of his life and times.

Partly to prove to you that I've read beyond, can I quote my favourite of many excerptable passages? Wilbur tells us about the anti-loneliness ('Lonesome No More!') campaign which wins him the presidency:

I said that all the damaging excesses of Americans in the past were motivated by loneliness rather than a fondness for sin.

An old man crawled up to me afterwards and told me how he used to buy life insurance and mutual funds and household appliances and automobiles and so on, not because he liked them or needed them, but because the salesman seemed to promise to be his relative, and so on.

'I had no relatives and I needed relatives,' he said.

'Everybody does,' I said.

He told me how he had been a drunk for a while, trying to make relatives out of people in bars. 'The bartender would be kind of a father, you know - ' he said. 'And then all of a sudden it was closing time.'

To find out more about Wilbur's scheme for a network of relatives, and the concomitant reason for 'Daffodil-11', get your copy here. I'm only a salesman when I believe passionately in the 'product'. And I realise that 'I believe passionately' has become marketing jargon, but does that hijacking make it any the less valid?

Went the day well? I should say. This is my idea of a break after many hours writing a programme article on another weird tale, Bluebeard's Castle, for the English National Opera. So engrossed was I that when I finished I guessed it was lunchtime; it turned out to be 4.20. Strange sensation.

Red and Ellie go to Glyndebourne

Red went to hear Tristan* in late summer.


Biped Ellie attended an autumnal study day on Janacek's Jenufa.


In case you think I've taken leave of my senses, this can pass as performance art - a homage to the vivacious Edwina Ashton, who came with me to Tristan and whose partner Kit sent Red along (he's really Mr. Red, but I am permitted to be on intimate terms). Edwina makes life-size animal costumes in the style of children's toys, dresses up in them and re-enacts the futility of life: a squirrel absently sifting nuts, a Sisyphean dung beetle struggling to push a ball upstairs, a mouse aimlessly sifting through a fashion magazine on the beach. These films have real pathos, believe me. In a forthcoming drawn animation, her first, she creates a 'bad tempered, removed and extremely precise elephant living in a crumbling hotel on the shores of a Swiss lake'. That would be Mr. Pantz, aka the Reverend Panticules and others, her own familiar. You can see she is as much of a one-off in her descriptions as in her art. Adorable Edna!

She took me to the Zoo Art Fair in Shoreditch last Friday, down a dark alley guarded by a luminous angel (the film grain is my attempt at art).


To be frank, I enjoyed the Dickensian warehouse stairs and rooms more than the video shows, but I liked the authenticity of the young people in Edna's quarters, in marked contrast to a lot of the fakery on display at Frieze (or so I'm told). Here she is by her little display, part of the Bristol Works/Projects 'pavilion'.


Anyway, while Ellie - manipulated up above by a bemused Amy Bere of the Glyndebourne Education Department - preferred the lake, I was very happy to be part of an amazing all-day event in the Ebert Room. This matched collaborating with the inspirational Vladimir Jurowski and Daniel Slater on Prokofiev's Betrothal in a Monastery a couple of years ago. After me came moderator Julian Broughton, under the aegis of whose University of Sussex Community Engagement Centre the day took place. As a composer - in this case a re-composer - he gave us a vivid demonstration of how 'In tears' from Janacek's On an overgrown path would sound if conventionally shaped. Then, after an excellent early Christmas dinner in Nether Wallop, we re-convened with key members of the creative team working on the Glyndebourne Touring Opera revival of Jenufa.

We heard three covers, all of whom we were soon wanting to see in the complete opera. Miranda Keys sang Jenufa. She has a beautifully modulated lyric-dramatic soprano, heading towards the territory of Beethoven's Leonora, which she'll be singing in a few years' time. Miranda is an Aussie, and the funniest singer I've met. She could easily have a career in stand-up, and her earthy, no-nonsense approach to plot and characterisation never became arch or brittle thanks to a respect for the drama's searing essence. Then, between reducing us all to helpless laughter, she became the patiently suffering heroine at the drop of a hat.

With vivid support from pianist Duncan Williams and the occasional spur of the moment staging by assistant director Paul Higgins, the scenes worked upon were Jenufa's Act One reproaches to the feckless Steva, two very different exchanges with Laca, the man who's always loved her, and the opening of Act 2. The formidable Kostelnicka was Svetlana Sozdateleva, whose Lady in Waiting I well remember soaring in the ensemble of Verdi's Macbeth (she sang the mistress on tour). Chris Lemmings was Laca. He started off in the Glyndebourne chorus with J all those years ago, and by all accounts was a much better Caliban than Herr Bostridge in Ades's The Tempest. Here are all three after the session, Miranda on the left.


Like his colleagues, Chris seemed to understand the difficult Czech text perfectly - the covers had been engaged a mere three weeks ago, so that made it doubly impressive - though how transformed their phrases became after Robin Ticciati's suggestions. Young and loveable Maestro T is obviously another Pappano in the making, passionately involved with every line and able to grasp the essence of the language as Janacek reproduces it in speech melody. This is Ticciati's first Janacek, and he even had a coaching session with great Sir Charles, Janacek's earthly representative. I find it very moving to think of a major talent still in his twenties working with the octogenarian Mackerras. Continuity and tradition thrive.

Here's Robin clasping the precious full score.


He's clearly a collegial chap, taking the time to talk to a very independent-minded 18 year old who'd just finished her week at Glyndebourne on work experience and was heading to Cambridge next year after travelling (I enjoyed chatting with her on the journey back to London). And there were warm hugs before we took a taxi to Lewes Station. Don't miss the GTO performances of Jenufa, listed here and starting at Glyndebourne on Saturday afternoon, when I'll be talking again.

Well, the future is in many good hands as far as already first-rate conductors go; so much, as I keep saying, for the maestro myth. Alerted by the Isserlis sisters at a Diaghilev talk on Wednesday, I only just caught Yannnick Nezet-Seguin (photo by Marie-Reine Mattera, courtesy of the Southbank Centre)


in Haydn with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment at the QEH the following evening.

It was as bracing and novel in every phrase as his SCO Prom had been. 'Do hope you enjoyed Yannick as much as we did?' asked Annette Isserlis in a recent e-mail. Didn't I just. A hairsbreadth away from fussiness, his approach works because musicality pours out of everything he does, and he seems completely sincere. Quibbles first: why play the whole Trumpet Concerto on a period instrument? It's asking for trouble, and the admirable David Blackadder clearly got that more often than was comfortable for the listener. Why not demonstrate the wonderful open sound of the old trumpet in an excerpt and then turn to the reliable modern counterpart? Because this is the OAE, I suppose.

But the symphonies came across as even more of a treasury of quirky invention than usual. There was real peasant earthiness in the Surprise's scherzo. All of the Military (100)was delirious delight. Tears of joy came to my eyes in the finale and in at least three places throughout No. 104. Heck, I've been going on too long so I'll ditch the details and leave you with a picture of YNS passing a glass of red wine to leader Margaret Faultless - what a shame we can't see her lovely smiling face - at the 'Night Shift' performance later that evening.


I'd have liked to stay and see how the young and trendy enjoy themselves with the new approach to classical music, but the earlier blockbuster was quite enough.

One final plug: the Discovering Music on Musorgsky's Pictures at an exhibition which I shared with Charles Hazlewood and Ashley Wass is coming up quicker than I anticipated, on Radio 3 this coming Sunday at 5pm. Don't know yet about the webcast film, which should be there in perpetuity once it appears.

*chiefly the Liebested. Sorry, I just thought of that one. Yet in fact I did meet a man who came to the Royal Opera for that alone. I know because we'd persuaded a friend to move into a seat which had been empty for two acts, and just before the third began, in he came. 'I only ever come for the Liebestod', he said. Right, at £100 plus a shot. He was duly rewarded by Gabriele Schnaut singing it nearly a tone flat.