Abbado: the zenith (2)

Such calibrated yet still white-heat perfection defies us supposed wordsmiths, as I gathered from an awestruck review of the Lucerne Mahler Ninth in the Neue Zurcher Zeitung. Having now seen the livestream and one live performance, I'd better get my own thoughts together. The eight pages in my holiday notebook - taken during the livestream, I'd never do it in the hall - run wild with exclamations and quite a few illegible signs, but it might be worth jotting down a few slightly more finished notes here in a way that proper published reviewing doesn't allow.

Photographs of Abbado were taken during the two performances, reproduced by permission of the Lucerne Festival. Top image is by Priska Ketterer, the second by Peter Fischli and the third by Georg Anderhub (that's the wonderful Kolja Blacher leading the Lucerne Festival Orchestra).


First movement: total silence before it. Abbado comes on, blinks, smiles as he always does so collegially to his handpicked players, and begins. The veiled sound of second violins comes from their placing left behind the firsts, not apparent in filming (the crucial violas led by the superlative Wolfram Christ are to Abbado's right). Every time the 'ewig'-without-the-tonic nocturne returns, the heart leaps: it's to do with what are often the subtlest of Luftpausen. Violas plunging more clearly than I've ever heard before the first big climax, though it's not overdone. The struggles quicken, as they did in Abbado's volatile Berlin interpretation; the collapses aren't overstressed and the balances remain clear, the clamber out of the abyss goes ghostly with the celebrated Abbado pianissimo (the great Natalia Gutman still there among the painfully climbing cellos). Woodwind, Jacques Zoon's flute especially, lead us into chamber music - compassionate, transparent. The first string shock is the 'Leidenschaftlich' writhing (at 211), dark intense sound like I've never heard before, and sustained with a line going through it, even somehow building. The last descent inevitable even after the leaping collapse: the funeral march not overdone, evolving naturally back into the last proud processional with fraught brass clashes (overall the LFO ensemble is integrated beautifully, the brass sound never forced). Warm horn solo from Bruno Schneider, mit innigster Empfindung; final pizzicato-flageolet and piccolo note - the tonic at last - overheard rather than heard. Abbado still keeps something in reserve: I've heard performances of the movement so entire in themselves and so exhausting that I didn't have much energy left for the rest, and in those I felt the final Adagio couldn't, and didn't, live up to the opening Andante. Not so here.

Scherzo: playful-heavy at first rather than dark or sarcastic: Abbado moves in and out of sinister colours with undetectable sleight of hand. I still don't know how he resolved it from the scary penultimate chunterings and stabbings to a witty resolution. Again, seeing the second violins biting into their dance-stomp just after the start highlights the links with the first movement. And the Tempo III Landler treads air. Sabine Meyer leads dark cohorts of clarinets in a uniquely hollow low sound.


Rondo-Burleske: determined, disciplined, not wild until the final speedings. All the counterpoint is deadly clear and ruthlessly well executed. Reinhold Friedrich's trumpet comes truly as a voice from another planet - no slowing from Abbado, rightly, it's all in a tone like none I've ever heard before.

Adagio: yes, here words should fail. It either works totally for me, and I can't remember it doing that since Bernstein, or not really at all until the final whispers. This was the total experience: string playing I've waited all my life, I think, to hear in a concert hall - somehow contained, not passionately emotive at first though rising by degrees to that, weighted by cellos and basses in a way that you can't define to anyone who wasn't in that amazing Lucerne hall. The richer the harmonies and the counterpoints become, the more stops Abbado pulls out. And the line, the line through... In between, sensitive bassoon solos and a cor anglais to break the heart. Everything moves to the final climax, a glimpse of some almighty in the trumpet blaze before the cry of violins: again, never heard it like this before and never will again. Transcendental close, stretched to infinity, going in deeper like the best meditation. Of course I wasn't aware of the length of silence in performance, but I timed it at the end of the livestream: two minutes.

If you don't get all of the above, or think I've waffled unduly, it doesn't bother me. I've had my vision and I'll say it again - I'm happy to have lived in such times to hear such playing. But don't forget that if you can access Arte, it's broadcasting the concert on 19 September.

Joyce meets Mahler

In my currently overheated imagination, that is. Despite failing the eminent Dr Senn in missing the James Joyce Centre of Zurich's weekly Thursday reading of Finnegans Wake and losing out on a repeat of last year's experience, I did finally kickstart my long-delayed second attempt to re-read Ulysses on the train to Lucerne, and haven't looked back since.

How little it meant to me on my first cavortings around European railways back in the early 1980s. I think I did read two-thirds, but without absorbing or understanding much - and retracing those steps now I wonder why on earth not. Anyway, the point here is that Joyce's cornucopia of reference, his sublime mix of the ordinary and the sublime, his easy snatches of popular song in amidst life-and-death reflections, all seemed to connect with the Mahler Ninth I was so privileged (again I use the only possible word) to hear Abbado conduct in Lucerne.

Still gathering my thoughts about that, but in the meantime, it's been an oddly connected time, filtered through our many reflections in the Rietberg Park of the Villa Wesendonck, now my most familiar numinous site in any city. Yesterday I braved the latest heatwave to make a pilgrimage from Enge to Fluntern and Joyce's grave. Again, the strands along the way seemed so diverse, so Joyce-Mahler and so contradictory of the order and uniformity which are supposed to reign in Zurich. A balafonist in the Saturday flea-market, a Siberian throat/overtone singer in the crypt of the Grossmunster - neither indigenous, both consummate - and a colourful, ululating protest favouring a united Kurdistan complete with Ocalan posters and national flags, crossing the bridge from the Fraumunster with police cars at either end revealed the city's multikulti side.

I was also out and about to complete my collection of Giacometti's breathtaking stained glass on both sides of the Limmat. Then I doffed my cap again as I walked up through the garden of the Thomas Mann residence and wove my way to the Zurichberg past psychiatric clinics, resthomes and grotesquely overornamented villas. The final haul took me through a field of sunflowers, the forest flanking Fluntern Cemetery, and a first glimpse of Joyce's statue through the fence.

Though seemingly all too close to the local hospitals like many of its kind, the cemetery actually has a less grim neighbour than most, the zoo, so the shouts of children and the continuation of other species resonate next door. The plots are a little over-ordered for my taste, but it made another nice symmetry with last year's hunt for the grave of Joseph Schmidt on the opposite hill. Not to mention Mahler's last resting place (pictured above) in Vienna's Grinzing, well away from the touristic heurigen.




I sat in the shade, replaced the fluids lost through excess perspiration with gallons of water and finally settled down to the 'Aeolus' chapter I'd just reached in Ulysses. And the hour or so's sweat uphill was offset by a straight number 5 tram ride all the way back to Enge. Mission accomplished.

Abbado: the zenith

Ever since I first clapped eyes and ears on Claudio Abbado's inaugural concerts with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra in 2003, I knew that orchestral music-making never gets better than this. In their annual three weeks of working together, they've given us astounding Mahler, of which I've been uniquely privileged to hear the First and Seventh Symphonies live. All can be seen on expertly directed DVDs, with the exception of the Fourth - surely overdue for release.

Tonight marks what has to be an Alpine peak for both: the Ninth Symphony, written under a sentence of death similar to the one which afflicted great Claudio some years ago, and from which he miraculously emerged, frail in physical terms but stronger than ever interpretatively, capping even his years at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic with fresh wonders at Lucerne.

Let me simply draw your attention to the Festival's livestreaming in collaboration with Arte tonight (18.30 UK time). I'll go even hyperbolically further and add that if you only see one concert in your life, this has to be the one. And if you miss the live event, don't worry - it should be out on DVD in less than a year. Tschuss.

Merciful rescue

They were never really in danger, and following the demolition of the Middlesex Hospital in 2008 the four paintings known collectively as Acts of Mercy that had hung in two different entrance halls, starting in 1915-20, were acquired by the Wellcome Library. Now they're being splendidly exhibited in the National Gallery's Sunley Room until October.

Never heard of the artist, Frederick Cayley Robinson? Neither had I, and I thought I'd be in and out of the room in a flash. But I was caught immediately by the geometrical, frieze-like compositions and the magic realism of the streets and windows. Cayley Robinson studied in Tuscany between 1898 and 1900, so he probably knew the tradition of paintings for charitable institutions from Domenico di Bartolo's fresco of orphans received into Siena's Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala. He would certainly have been familiar with the kind of storytelling perspectives offered in this rather marvellous painting by Sandro Botticelli of scenes from the life of Saint Zenobius. It hangs in the National Gallery, though I'd never noticed it there, and is reproduced by courtesy of that institution.


Cayley Robinson's series derives from the seven Corporal Acts of Mercy, six of which are very poetically described in Matthew's Gospel. The first two paintings depict the Middlesex Hospital's tradition of raising orphans. There are mysteries in 'Orphans' I (depicted at the top). Why the girl in the patterned dress illuminated by lamplight? And the birds flying from the campanile outside the high window - could they have something to do with Cayley Robinson's designs for Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird (which I'd love to see)? All four Middlesex Hospital/Wellcome Library paintings reproduced by courtesy and with the copyright of the Trustees of the Wellcome Trust Ltd.

In the painting which always hung to the right, and does so now, the girls - in orphans' uniform, though they could almost be nurses in training - continue to process. The almost mystical gap below the window with the bust suggests a kind of imprisonment - is Cayley Robinson criticising the straitjacketing of these young women?


The sombre fallout of the Great War enters the picture with the last pair, collectively known as 'The Doctor'. In the first, actually painted last in 1920, there are nurses, physically and mentally wounded soldiers, enigmatic onlookers and weirdly lit streets with factory chimneys behind.


The last is almost post-PreRaphaelitey, too much so for me, with the costumed mix of periods, but I like the tree breaking up the ashlar, the birds and the semi-lit houses.


Not only is this a fascinating little exhibition, also featuring's Piero della Francesca's hauntingly cool Baptism of Christ and a few more Cayley Robinsons, one alongside a Puvis de Chavannes; it's also the one place in the height of summer where you can escape the gaping parties in the main galleries - usually so empty at certain times of day. By the way, it looks as if reintroducing entrance fees for museums and galleries is NOT on the cards of the new government. But maybe one good solution for swelling the coffers would be to incorporate a £10 culture charge in tourists' air tickets.

Anyway, it's marvellous as a Londoner to be able to drop in on any treasure for half an hour or so. And this encourages me to visit the Wellcome collections and the Foundling Hospital (which I think does charge for admission, but I'm happy to pay) some time soon.

Wild Glyndebourne, civic Lewes

Don't know what the current Glyndebourne head gardener has been up to, turfing over bits of herbaceous border, pulling up the roses and thinning out the planting. But where nature is left to run its course, parts of the Glyndebourne grounds have never looked better.

Meadow zones are the new gardening black, of course, and there are more of them towards the east end of the lake where we usually set up our picnic (can't recommend too strongly, by the way, that you go to Bill's fabulous deli emporium in Lewes and get yourself one of their £11 boxes - superb salads, best quiche, fruit cocktail-drink, cake). The trees, of course, look more glorious than ever swaying in the wind on the other side




and the north walk can be especially magical in the late afternoon light, if it's sunny, which it was on Sunday and most of Monday.


The border I still approve is the one that runs alongside the organ room and house. Here there's a buddleia of an almost phosphorescent lilac.


More formal and blowsy in effect are the plantings in the council-owned Southover Grange Gardens of Lewes, one of several places I saw for the first time following a Tom Paine trail (he played bowls on what's supposed to be the oldest green in the country, pictured up top and another area I'd overlooked on a previous trip to the castle). To celebrate the diplo-mate's birthday, we stayed for once in a hotel - Pelham House. Pricey, but worth it, because here are idiosyncrasy and a real link to the civic fibre of the town, appropriate since the council once held court in the newer wing. Our room was decorated with images from the covers of the excellent free Viva Lewes magazine, and the hallways had plenty of town images from talented local printmakers. The jewel is the hallway ceiling painted by Cressida's brother Julian Bell, a trompe-l'oeil tightrope walk which reminds me of those Moscow metro friezes.




All this ties us more closely to the place, though I've learned one thing: not to think of buying a house on the lovely south slopes of the town, could we afford it, as the noise of the nearby A27 is all too apparent. Better to think of being up the hill to the north, where Glyndebourne education dynamo Katie Tearle and husband, that incredibly knowledgeable and flavoursome music writer Mark Pappenheim, live. We popped in for coffee and to see Mark's bees, which were buzzing around rather frenetically. He's full of apine wisdom and presented us with some honeycomb from this year's relatively rich takings.

Parallel rakes

Surprising results from a two-day Glyndebourne stint. I was there to give a talk before the opening performance of The Rake's Progress, and stayed on not just for the show but also for this season's new production of Don Giovanni the following day - an extended treat for the diplo-mate's birthday. He, of course, has fond memories of what, for better or for worse, has become known as 'the Hockney Rake' from the Glyndebourne tour of 1992. He permits himself to appear below in yet another disguise as a chorene whose make-up increasingly came to resemble something from Cats. His 'wife' (his jest?) is the redoubtable Rachel Tovey, currently wowing 'em in Stockholm as Brunnhilde and in Bonn as Turandot.


Was expecting much from Topi Lehtipuu's Tom Rakewell (pictured up top with Matthew Rose's Nick Shadow for Glyndebourne by Alastair Muir, who took the other Rake pics below) and somewhat less from Gerald Finley's Giovanni (in the grips of another bass, Alastair Miles as a Hammer-horror Commendatore, as photographed by Bill Cooper, responsible for more Mozart shots here).

In the end, the expectations were reversed, at least as far as the overall castings went. Ed Seckerson has put his finger on most of the problems I had with this Rake revival in his Arts Desk review. Yes, the scene changes are intolerable, when each 3x3 act is supposed to fly past unbroken; how odd that Hockney should have gone for the illusion of a recomposed 18th century and not availed himself of the machinery which in Mozart's time could have flown drapes and flats in and out. All this was compounded by a restless, bangle-jangling and sweet-unwrapping crowd around us, who took every orchestral prelude played before the drop-curtain as a cue for chatter, ballet-audience style, and then oohed and aahed every time the curtain rose, fatal for the essential stillness of the Bedlam scene. Still, it does look handsomer than ever; I gather major work has been undertaken on sets, lighting and costumes, now officially 35 years old.

And the accents: a slight tinge of Finnish and Swedish would matter less in a more straightforwardly-inflected setting of Auden and Kallman. But Stravinsky knew what he was doing in making all things lopsided. Lehtipuu and the usually adorable Miah Persson, struggling with her upper range now, didn't quite grasp or project the subtler kinks. She did apply the lovely purity it needs to Anne's miraculously simple lullaby to the mad Tom in Bedlam, accompanied by two flutes only, though it's probably the only time I've sat through the restrained heartbreak of the final scene dry-eyed.


Lopsided, too, is Stravinsky's perception of what WHA & CK thought of as recitatives. Fine for the way Glyndebourne's supertitling has chosen to handle them if they were all with harpsichord. But there are numbers within numbers, and some rather thickly scored passages. By cutting out the text at these points, Glyndebourne is bound to puzzle anyone unfamiliar with the piece.

What worked? Well, above all, the most deliciously thick-accented of them all, Russian Elena Manistina as the most exotic Baba the Turk I've ever seen or heard, just superb. And apt, of course, for the authentic exotic of St Giles's Fair.


Graham Clark's bumptious, camp auctioneer set an example in diction; and some of Jurowski's crisp tempi, graced by a superlative LPO trumpeter, worked well. I can understand he wanted to get a move on in the difficult early scenes, but a conductor who really lets the cantabile woodwind sing as did Martyn Brabbins at Aldeburgh can show us more readily how emotional Stravinsky's score really is. But this wasn't Jurowski's aim.

Where I do bow to him in awe is for all the work he's so evidently put in to a crackling but not consistently hasty Don G. By the time we saw it, he'd handed over the baton to Brno-born whizzkid Jakub Hrusa, new Glyndebourne On Tour director. Golden days begun under Ticciati are bound to continue with Hrusa. From where we were sitting, we could see his hyper-alert, immaculate manner. Hard to say what was Jurowski's Giovanni and what Hrusa's, but I was impressed by the way the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment on absolutely top form suddenly pulled all the tragic-dramatic stops out for the recit leading up to Donna Anna's 'Or sai che l'onore'. Compelling, too, the small string group around the cello obbligato of Zerlina's 'Batti, batti' - double-bassist Chi-Chi Nwanoku as mobile as ever - and the consummate artistry of mandolinist James Ellis in the Serenade.

At points like these I was distracted away from the perfectly decent singing of Gerald Finley and Anna Virovlansky. Finley is a keenly-inflected protagonist, but he never emanates sex or threat; in those respects, the superlatively adaptable Leporello, Luca Pisaroni, and the charismatic Masetto, Guido Loconsolo, would probably have served the part better. Here's Pisaroni on the right with Finley's Mastroiannish Giovanni and Kate Royal's nervy Elvira.


Royal came into her own for a stunningly fluid 'Mi tradi'. But the show's true royals were Anna Samuil's Donna Anna and William Burden's Don Ottavio. Here they are to the right in an especially glorious Act Two sextet (Virovlansky left, Pisaroni spinning lines of gold, Royal in the red dress and Loconsolo complete the line-up).


Samuil shone in the astounding Salzburg production of Eugene Onegin by Andrea Breth, and here she shows all the gleam of a proto-heroic soprano with total flexibility: I've never heard the runs at the end of 'Non mi dir' more flawless, on stage at least. And she's beautiful, a wonderful actress and an intelligent musician given the freedom to do what she needs by Hrusa. Found the aria performed by her on YouTube, with Michael Schade and the 'VFO' (would that be the Vienna Festival Orchestra - and who's the conductor?)



Burden brought real Italianate touches to 'Dalla sua pace' as well as sensitivity; what a shame the Vienna version deprived him of 'Il mio tesoro' and all the lovely stuff in the centre of the final ensemble (is that a Vienna thing? Or just impatience with the good guys on conductor's or director's part?)

This was the best production I've seen from Jonathan Kent, and I'm not usually a fan. The definition of the Italian 1950s setting was a bit loose, the Act 1 finale a confusion throwing away Mozart's gift of the three dance bands, the class distinctions uncertain. Nothing, it's true, as novel as some of the ideas in Dmitri Tcherniakov's Aix family saga, but nothing as crass as Zambello's attempt to put on a show at Covent Garden.

And a show this certainly was, dominated by Paul Brown's amazingly complicated set - all elegant opening boxes and marbled spaciousness in Act One, all steep rakes and decay in Act Two. The graveyard and guess-who's-coming-to-dinner scenes really worked; the brilliant ensembles carried all the bigger numbers. All things considered, the best Don Giovanni I've seen on stage, if not as thoughtful a concept as Deborah Warner's last-but-one Glyndebourne production. And what incredible futures all these singers have.

Wanted: home help for Nuremberg cobbler

It's up on YouTube, and the BBC put it there: the comic highlight of last week's Sondheim Prom. To get the gag, and the headline, you'll have to hang around for the last of the four or so minutes, when the most famous living Welshman other than Tom Jones sashays along with the rest and even does a little skip (especially nice choreography there). The others are Simon Russell Beale, Daniel Evans and the delicious Julian Ovenden. Best go full-width by clicking on the screen once you've set it going and flipping over to the site.

I put this and the following at the bottom of the Arts Desk review, but since I only discovered them yesterday, and many Proms have passed under the bridge since the piece went up, they might have gone unnoticed, so here's an extra shrine for them.



Seeing Dame Judi in close-up highlights what an unflashy star she is, already preparing to launch straight into heartbreak from the minute she steps on to the platform to receive the roars of the crowd (for some reason the entry seems to have been shorn since I last looked). And I repeat what I think we discussed earlier: not having much of a singing voice doesn't matter if you have the right sense of musical timing. Have you ever heard 'the one that I wanted' done with greater yearning? Takes me back to her treasured Sally Bowles in Cabaret - a performance I'm too young to have seen on stage, but delighted to have it captured for posterity on the original London cast recording. Here she is back in 1968.


It's certainly a bit irritating to be told that she and our Stately Homos Fry and Beale are National Treasures, and to hear how the home counties roar at anything they do, but there's a good reason for it.

Late night Lamentations

In between the Proms' Mahler marathons - both of which I gave a miss, as you can only really hear the Third, Fourth and Fifth Symphonies live once a year, and I like to think I'm choosing carefully - came a late night special of great significance. One of Stravinsky's most ambitious endgames, the serial Threni setting some of the lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah (in Latin) had never been performed at the Proms before, and neither I nor my illustrious one-time unofficial animateur Dr Roger Savage had ever heard the word made flesh, as it were.

It was time to do them justice, too. Stravinsky biographer Stephen Walsh gives a lively if not topographically entirely correct account of the 1958 premiere in Venice's fabulous Scuola Grande di San Rocco, the Tintoretto masterwork which I first had almost to myself on a bracing cold January day some years ago. The 76-year-old Stravinsky conducted the first performance, by all accounts not very well, beneath the moving-to-tears Crucifixion in the upper Sala dell'Albergo.


Writes Walsh: 'An audience of five or six hundred - mainly press, the international set, local grandees, and a handful of first-nighters able and willing to pay twenty dollars for a seat - crammed into the long rectagular salon, deadening the acoustics, and exposing still more the spareness and severity of Stravinsky's Jeremiad'.

Well, the acoustics of the Albert Hall certainly aren't deadening, and my stylish colleague Igor Toronyi-Lalic probably has a point in his Arts Desk review when he writes that 'one should feel as if one is choking on the relentless suffering. In the Royal Albert Hall such feelings couldn't reach us...The many close-knit serial canons needed to feel like boa constrictors winding themselves around your chest inexorably, squeezing the life out of your lungs.'


Superb prose, that, but Igor may have been sitting further back than I was. From my coign of vantage, it wasn't suffocating but it did have a spellbinding impact. And when John Tomlinson opened his mouth, you heard serial lines as great lyrical phrase-making. Years of playing Musorgsky's Boris had not been wasted, as Roger pointed out, though it does amaze me that the leading Wotan of the late 1980s and early 1990s is ready to humble himself and join the line. What a great patriarch artist he still is. Chris Christodoulou wasn't snapping at the late night prom, but here's a recent shot by Robert Workman. Just a little in common with the Kizhi ikon of Jeremiah up top?


Threni proceeds to give just a glimmer of grace. As Igor puts it, the 'low persistent industrial plant-like rumble of the four male voices' - admirable baritone-turned tenor Alan Oke on top - yields to 'light at the end of the Threni tunnel...of a distinctly weak, bled sort'. So moving, the bare unison woodwind and the discreet choral contribution. David Atherton, conducting 'his' London Sinfonietta and BBC Singers, couldn't have made a better case for this, nor for the airy games of Stravinsky's choral(e) variations on Bach's 'Von himmel hoch'. They sounded dangerously like the frilly Lully arrangement of Strauss's Bourgeois Gentilhomme courante, composed over 40 years earlier, though I doubt if Strauss would have given just the odd puzzling note or line to his players. I warmed to it more than to Daniel Hyde's delivery of the original Canonic Variations on the Albert Hall organ, which didn't quite flow and seemed to embrace the longest rallentando I've ever heard in the fourth variation.

Still, these late-night proms, as I've said before, really do have a special atmosphere, whether the hall is full (Pires in Chopin Nocturnes) or half-empty (the Scottish Chamber Orchestra's wind serenades). If you go to the previous concert, as I remember doing with Andris Nelsons and the CBSO's Firebird before JEG's Bach Motets, you really do feel as if you're at the best music festival in the world.

BoJo's bike idea

They're here in town, whether standing in their serried ranks of Barclay's blue or wobbling under the weight of a novice. I saw my first one (novice, that is) in Kensington Gardens yesterday - uncertain but very jolly as I passed and welcomed her to the joys of London biking. And I spied the first stable on Saturday as I cycled on my own bike to the Sondheim Prom, so I snapped them.

Who knows, I might even use the scheme myself if there are occasions when I want to cycle to a venue and not back again. It's not exactly cheap. But fundamentally it's something we salute curate's-egg Mayor of London Boris Johnson for introducing.


Much more ambivalent about his abolition of the peace camp which showed its rainbow colours outside the seat of power for several months and even grew a thing or two in Parliament Square.


It was an uneasy realpolitik coalition of anti-war protesters, rightfully (in my view) wrathful objectors to treatment of immigrants, and a few disaffected anti-everythingers who got very drunk and abusive and spoilt it for everybody else.


As I ambled around a few weeks back, I didn't exactly feel comfortable (and my snapping wasn't what they objected to, as no-one noticed). But believe me, one protest I will be joining is the one when the Pope comes here in September. And I salute our American friends on the overturning of California's Proposition 8 opposed to gay marriage, something to celebrate and the first item on the BBC World Service news this morning.


Finally, another bright idea which I like but don't quite love as I did the first of the Serpentine Pavilions by Toyo Ito, nor believe quite works as daring architecture as did Frank Gehry's departure from the norm two years ago. This is Jean Nouvel's red devil.


I liked the table-tennis tables outside, and the different seating zones, though the cafe staff were in chaos when I visited, and J said that there was a fundraiser chugging* visitors for money, which he thought was a bit of a swiz when you're already paying inflated prices by patronising the cafe. And if you're going to offer something no(u)vel and beautiful to the public, do it with a good grace.



*charity mugging

Verbier: extra nectar

Somehow even when I'd rambled on about Verbier for The Arts Desk, I found there were peaks of the experience I'd still missed out. Who knows if Sarah Chang, Nicolas Angelich and company in Pfitzner and Saint-Saens might not have been another such? I can't regret not having experienced it when my time on that last morning was spent up in the heights gaping at rocky perspectives and looking down at Alpine flowers like the above which I wish I was able to identify (a study, or at least a little book on the subject, beckons).

Anyway, in anatomising what went wrong with the performance of Strauss's Don Quixote on Sunday night, for all its sturdy guidance by Dutoit, I quite forgot to wax passionate about one of the greatest living violinists, Leonidas Kavakos, in the Bartok Second Violin Concerto of the first half.


Such a collegial chap (pictured above for the festival by Nicolas Brodard, who also took the shot of Gringolts and Suzuki below), bending in to his fellow musicians: just the kind of soloist a youth orchestra needs. But quite apart from that, what a sound. I heard him play the concerto last year at the Proms with even more idiomatic partners, Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra. Yet oddly this time I didn't fidget so much at Bartok's late cut-and-paste technique, perhaps because I was virtually under this compelling player's nose. And there's a special magic about a solo encore given possibly even more for the benefit of the orchestra than for the audience. The most moving thing of all was to watch the young musicians so immobile and intent, hanging on every note. Of whatever it was. Ysaye, perhaps? I confess my ignorance.

Later: aren't YouTube and medici.tv a wonderful thing? Here it ia already. And, yes, Ysaye was a good guess, as it transpires. You'll probably need to click on the screen to get the original YouTube full format.



And then Leonskaja to follow in one of the most ineffable of all Schubert sonatas, D959 with its time-suspending, and timequaked, slow movement (Aline Paley snapped the pianists for Verbier). A high note from which to take my leave of the Verbier music.


It was her fault, and Pires's at the Wednesday late night Prom, and Kit Armstrong's, if I hadn't been able to settle to the stiffer presence of Yevgeny Kissin. His Chopin Nocturnes, by comparison, went for nothing, though he finds more in the spring of the Mazurkas. But still it wasn't relaxed in any way. I fled at the interval, probably rather foolishly missing what was by all accounts much more engaging Schumann.


Not much to say about Ilya Gringolts and Masaaki Suzuki in Bach sonatas, unhelpfully swathed in the darkness and disco lights of the horrible church interior. But again, perfect, sprightly and unfussy music-making for a morning in the mountains.


Sounds from Jessica Duchen's blog like I should have plumped for the last weekend and the Gergiev/Voigt Strauss Salome, of which I'd been wary (sure enough, the wayward maestro didn't show up in town until rather late in the day, but according to Jessica that didn't inhibit the thunderstruck results). But then I wouldn't have heard so much Leonskaja, the essence of the experience, and in any case we can all see the concert opera for ourselves on medici.tv's Verbier selection for free. One last fond look down, then, on Verbier from another point of Alpine superiority.

Somewhere film

Somewhere high in the top ten of recent, possibly even-all time British films is where I'd admiringly place Sam Taylor-Wood's directorial debut. Nowhere Boy is about so much more than just the man born to be a Beatle. John Lennon's growing-up story is an extraordinary one: raised by his Aunt Mimi, reclaimed all too belatedly by the vivacious - manic-depressive? - mother who gave him up when he was five years old, only to lose her again. The film suggests how his creativity might have been both fostered and blighted by this emotional roller-coaster.

The cinematography is ravishing, as you'd expect from STW's art: no dreary 50s Liverpool and Blackpool this, but a colourful world full of possibilities. In that respect it has much in common with Richard Jones's vivacious view of northern rep in his brilliant ENO Pagliacci. What truly stunned me, though, was the capturing of three great performances that give the film its beating heart.

However good the scenes of pre-Beatledom music-making, it's the love triangle between the two sisters and their joint son that rises to the heights in a visceral confrontation. I challenge you to sit through that dry-eyed. Highest praise for Anne-Marie Duff as the very loveable Julia Lennon is that she's not eclipsed by the nuanced delivery of the ever-surprising Kristin Scott Thomas as the controlled but by no means cold Mimi. And Aaron Johnson - how uncannily he veers between cocky, sexy teenager and a lost boy who needs a good cry. And, yes, he's beautiful.

Still odd to find a sharp intake of breath about the fact that STW set up life and parenthood with Johnson in the wake of the film. Ingmar Bergman did it all the time with women at about the same age distance, and no-one bats an eyelid. And what Bergman wrote about the erotic charge of film or theatre is obviously true. It's partly what gives this film its special quality, and I don't think I'm saying that with hindsight. Goldfrapp score sometimes sentimentally apart, it just doesn't put a foot wrong. Oh, and it has something of the energy you find in Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley. Which Taylor-Wood would certainly take as a compliment, since Minghella encouraged her to make her first full-length film. How proud he would have been.

Thanks, too, for introducing me to so much music. Love Duff's ukulele playing, a very touching scene, and the way she discreetly bounces to Screamin' Jay Hawkins's 'I put a spell on you'. Found an outrageous film on YouTube of Hawkins parodying his already parodistic self, so let's stick to the 1956 single.



And hear how mighty Nina appropriated it to her own very different ends.