Books - for cooks?

Probably not, in the case of our flamboyant friend and artist and Lord High just about Everything Else Jonny’s samizdat ramble. Given a style which is very much the man as he holds forth, Cook au Vin deserves to be hailed as the Tristram Shandy of its ilk. And it really should be read from cover to cover (the illustration above is by his pal David Hockney, perhaps not one of his best...). From his fastness in the foothills of the Alpes maritimes above Nice, the Broon has compiled recipes of sorts with a little help from friends with mysterious names such as ‘The Saintly’, J-J and Chinkers (one of the few to be properly introduced to us). So beguiling are the digressions that I was almost disappointed when we finally reached ‘Appetizers and Aperitifs’.

I needn’t have worried. The footnotes and the Chinese-box off-pistes continue. Musing on the order of wine serving, JB floats back to Edinburgh in the 1980s – which is where I met him – and a Queen’s Hall recital by Roger Woodward; he’d written the notes in chronological order for a programme of three Chopin sonatas, only to find that Woodward had decided to play them 3-2-1. But before we get to discover the reason, there’s a note on why artists’ Green Rooms are so called, and after it another on Woodward carving a duck ‘like a swashbuckler from a Chopin Polonaise’. Here's a snap I took of the author at a splendid Edinburgh Gesamtkunstwerk event to launch his roadmovies exhibition and book (J sang Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, amongst other musical plums).

The food? Well, you’d probably eat it. We have, on various excursions to Duranus - that's me looking bleary and unwashed below with my morning coffee after a night on the floor of JB's record room - though I remember the gaggle of weird guests rather than the flavours (how could I forget Belinda and Belinda, who were writing a book called Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll: A Year in Provence? ‘It’s in real time’, they told us, ‘and you’ll be in it’. Given our failure to click, it’s probably a mercy that said publication does not appear to have reached the light of day).

At least the advice on ingredients is probably sound. Thereafter they are mashed into what JB calls ‘gunk’ spread on bread or else pickled in various kinds of alcohol (James Hamilton Paterson’s semi-dud Cooking with Fernet Branca springs to mind – does Jonny know this book?) OK, so the worst is definitely tongue in cheek, the ‘gunk’ for pan-fried foie gras wittily titled ‘Sauce tirée des boîtes’ – the boxes in question containing fish fingers and cornflakes, preferably mixed with retsina. This priceless volume, complete with plenty of JB's artworks like the one below and reproduced bottom-of-wineglass stains, is printed to order by Brown Paper Editions. Apply to villaparasol@aol.com or (less preferably) buy a copy from Amazon.

A step up the evolutionary ladder is the beautifully produced three-tone Goodbye Cockroach Pie from London friends Rosanna Kelly and Casilda Grigg, celebrating the launch of Rosanna's Inky Paws Press. It stems from a 1986 discussion around the same Dundas Street (Edinburgh) kitchen table I had only recently deserted for London after graduation.  Rosanna and law student Gail Halliburton mooted the idea of a cookbook especially aimed at students. They gleaned many vintage recipes from friends, but the idea hung fire until this year when the concoctions were refreshed and punctuated with jolly illustrations.

Very well, so this Carabosse is in mild dudgeon not to have been asked for his perfect student recipe. Needless to say I no longer cook it, but it became a staple in the Dundas Street kitchen: a fish curry consisting of smoked mackerel (!), cooking apples, desiccated coconut, onions and the usual powders. Decidedly an improvement on the meat loaf cooked with a lump of lard in it by flatmates Mary and Helly, or the Spaghetti Carbonara of Simon without the carbonara. I blush to think of the pride with which I served up to visiting mother and stepfather gammon and pineapple. Happy days, as the delightful co-winner (hurrah, a woman!) of Masterchef: The Professionals would put it.

This has not been the best of years for reading, but the finest is probably what I’ve now reached: Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Sonechka – A Novella and Stories. The shorter form seems to suit this author best: she is so keen to give us her many heroines’ backstories that a longer novel like Medea and Her Sisters can get overloaded by multiple strands. But what compelling histories these are, usually tales of fortitude in the face of adverse Russian circumstances and – unfashionably – of happiness descending in time from banal or manipulative situations.

Within a couple of pages bookwormish Sonechka, her big breasts her only physical asset, is courted by an equally unlikely artist and soon can’t believe the joy to be found in the mundane. Zurich magics up a love story between a Russian girl looking for a westerner and a westerner looking for a one-night stand. The outcome of The Queen of Spades, its nonagenarian matriarch tyrannizing her daughter and granddaughter much as the Countess tyrannises Lisa in Pushkin’s short story, is less happy, but emancipation is so close at hand. I so want to read more by Ulitskaya, but currently only The Funeral Party is translated into English, and my Russian probably wouldn’t be up to Imago, which Vladimir Jurowski selected as one of his 2011 summer reading books for The ArtsDesk.

Before Ulitskaya, I’d had something of a Patrick Gale binge, with a slight sense of diminishing returns as I worked my way back from the most recent to the earlier novels. Gale excels in his polyphony of family voices and sense of place, especially Cornwall in the two I enjoyed the most, A Perfectly Good Man and Notes from an Exhibition. No doubt if he’d tackled the subject matter of The Facts of Life today, he’d have cut and shuffled voices and times more flexibly than he did back in 1995. The jackets and the Richard and Judy commendation do tend to put these books at  lower than their real value. For once, here’s a novelist who incorporates music and – as far as I can tell – art with real understanding, who usually has a sympathetic gay character or two but doesn’t necessarily make us see the world entirely from their point of view. I know I’d like him as a person, and there are plenty more novels for cosy company when I wish.

Otherwise, I don’t know why I was so compelled by the sometimes dodgy preaching of Bunyan in The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part Two of which I’ve also read since the Vaughan Williams stint, and I’m not sure whether I was in the right mood when I read Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, but the Boleyn saga didn’t seem to me quite as singular as Wolf Hall. Music book of the year – not that I’ve read many – is Anthony Phillips’s superb translation and footnoting of the Prokofiev Diaries, Volume Three. But further comment on that had better wait until after the BBC Music Magazine review appears. Other reading highlights of the year here and here.

Bach plus seven in the Tower

Here’s an absolute gem I would have missed, had it not been for the diplo-mate and European Commission/EUNIC support for a fabulous cause. Organist William Whitehead is masterminding a project to ‘complete’ the Orgelbüchlein, Bach’s miniature collection of chorale preludes for organ. The exquisite little book has titles of 164 chorales, but Bach only completed 46 of them. Whitehead had the brilliant idea of commissioning composers to fill in the gaps, providing as he puts it ‘a “Gesamtorgelbüchlein”, a complete hymnal...a sort of 21st century tribute to Bach posing the question “what would Bach have done if he’d been alive today?" '.

Looking forward to getting inside my beloved Tower of London and sitting in the airy Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula, I nevertheless approached what I imagined would be an all-organ programme with some trepidation. I only partly josh that too much organ music makes me sick, simply because during one Aldeburgh Festival when I was on duty as a Hesse Student, I had to leave Gillian Weir’s recital in Norwich Cathedral to throw up just outside the porch. In truth, it was probably something I’d eaten, though Liszt’s Prelude and Fugue on BACH is chromatic enough in itself to turn the stomach.

As it turned out, Whitehead had devised a sequence of dazzling intricacy and variety. The real depths were plunged in the wonderful Catherine Martin’s exploration of three Biber ‘Rosary’ Sonatas, accompanied by Whitehead: I’ve heard Andrew Manze’s performances on CD, but I was hardly aware of all the musical symbology, such as the sign of the cross, in these searing representations of the Annunciation, the Agony in the Garden and the Crucifixion. And only rarely have I taken on board how vibrato-free playing as expressive as this can pierce the soul. It was helpful to have an introduction from Catherine explaining the use of scordatura; each of the sonatas requires retuning of the strings to create its special quality. I came across the scheme while I was seeking further web enlightenment:

Two of the Biber sonatas were placed strategically as part of the Orgelbüchlein sandwich, respectively prefaced and concluded by two of Bach’s big Preludes and Fugues as played with magnificent control and the occasional freedom by Colm Carey; the one in G major (BWV 541) sent us out treading air. Carey also played the Bach originals and the new works in the Orgelbüchlein’s sequence, broken only by the central Biber meditation on Gethsemane. In another inspired touch, Susan Gilmour Bailey gave expressive rein to the original chorale melodies, so we could hear what the six new composers as well as Bach had done with them.

Or not. In two cases, undoubtedly the most original, Spanish composer Benet Casablancas and Lithuanian Justé Janulyté had sent the melodies underground, Casablancas’s wild fantasia – much the longest at just under the commission limit of five minutes – asking the organist to pull out a multitude of stops. Most interesting, perhaps, was the range of approaches: in addition to these mysteries and complexities, Thomas Daniel Schlee gave us a 21st century version of Bachian polyphony, Ēriks Ešenvalds contented himself with chaste homage to Bach and Jonas Jurkūnas’s reflection on the surprisingly cheerful Am Wasserflüssen Babylon burbled along cheerfully, if a little aimlessly, in minimalist style.

I was delighted to see Benet there (pictured above right with Whitehead), since we’d enjoyed a lively correspondence following our pre-performance conversation when the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the brilliant Josep Pons played his Seven Scenes from Hamlet. And I hadn’t realized that my connecting Jurowski with Casablancas, as a composer in whose music he might take no small interest, resulted in a performance of the composer’s Darkness Visible when the LPO and their principal conductor visited Barcelona this February.

I’ve said little of the circumstances surrounding this Spitalfields Winter Festival event. It began unpromisingly with our queueing at the Tower entrance in the freezing cold, being roughly herded by an uncharming Beefeater while penguin-suited Esso employees swanned past us to their reception. But it’s always wonderful to enter the inner sanctuary at night, the White Tower looking more imposing than ever

As you can see from the top photo, the lights of St Peter ad Vincula glowed invitingly. Inside it was warm and bright. We admired the monuments, and the sanctuary inscriptions to the three ladies who lost their heads on Tower Green and were buried here – Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard and Lady Jane Grey – alongside sanctified Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher. The organ case sat in the Banqueting House Whitehall from its construction by Bernhard Schmidt in 1699 to its removal to this royal chapel in 1899, by which time additions had made it three times larger; more recently it has been restored to its original dimensions. The pipework is recent and the instrument sounds in good health, for all I can tell. One thing’s for sure: sitting in the first row of the left aisle and watching foot and fingerwork, as well as having superlative Martin playing right in front of us only added to the pleasure of an unforgettable evening.

One footnote while we’re in chapel: should I have been surprised when the government’s Maria Miller announced that the Church of England would be legally exempt from the current move to allow gay marriages in church* (ie limiting such marriages to a very restricted number of venues)? After all, isn’t the CofE the Tory party at prayer? For myself, I don’t care: civil partnership is good enough for me, and I was reminded that in early January we celebrate seven years of our ritual and the ‘Just Not Married’ party which followed, jumping in as we did to tie the registry office knot three weeks after it all became legal in the UK. But why should those who do want a church event be treated like second-class citizens? Erstwhile blogger pal Jon Dryden Taylor, who doesn’t post enough these days, gives a brilliant exposition of why our rights should be extended here.

*It now turns out this was done 'on the hoof', without consulting the CofE

Being Beauteous: Bourne and Järvi

Here’s my chance to wax more or less lyrical about two quirky but undeniably loving homages to Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty, which the more I hear it the more I’m convinced is his meisterwerk. I had to own up to the BBC Music Magazine that since I’d written the very long, number-by-number notes for Neeme Järvi’s absolutely complete recording with the superb Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, I couldn’t review it for the publication. But I can attempt to do so here, having got that proviso out of the way. As for Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures Sleeping Beauty, ‘A Gothic Romance’, I went to the Sadler's Wells press night on Friday courtesy of my Arts Desk colleague Ismene Brown, who writes brilliantly about it as ever and almost convinces me about points over which we disagreed. The nub of which is that I warmed to it much more than she did.

What I admire most is Bourne’s way of telling a story, and in this case one that is very much his own spun from some of the elements of Perrault’s tale. I’m not sure how much of the plot one should give away, since I spent part of the first half wondering how the gardening boy/groundsman with whom young Aurora has such a sweet and sometimes funny first-love romance would survive one hundred years. A bite on the neck from Christopher Marney's Count Lilac, aka fairy leader (pictured below with fellow winged things in the Prologue, first of Simon Annand's production images) gave a good hint. You can see how effective Bourne regular Lez Brotherston's designs are, though there aren't enough pics of them in the image gallery.

The biggest twists are unveiled in the second half, with more than one awakening kiss failing to lead to the expected resolution. Shall we say that the grand Caradoc ball – yes, he’s the tall and sexy son of Carabosse, who expired some time after the Prologue – entails radical re-jigging and major cutting of Tchaikovsky’s score. What Bourne does use of it, and where he uses it, always has a strong musical/dramatic motivation. First change is the royal March of the Prologue banished in favour of the Act One garden hustle and bustle, which suits the 1890s bedchamber intimacy of this narrative and involves a delightful puppet baby climbing the thick curtain drapes. The musical number is reprised in its proper place when we meet the 20-year old Aurora in a Juliettish playfulness with her nurse before her boy evades detection in her bedroom (charming Hannah Vassallo and cute Dominic North pictured below).

Re-ordering in the garden scene, mostly Edwardian whites, means that Aurora’s variation is played out with interloping Caradoc. Surely Bourne means parallels here with the male Odile of his Swan Lake - who can forget Adam Cooper there? - especially since both numbers have eloquent violin solos (other witty references I thought I spotted are to Macmillan's Anastasia and, as I've already suggested, his Romeo and Juliet as well as other scenes in Bourne's own Swan Lake). He brings back another virtuoso sequence for violin, the Entr’acte of Act Two which has surely never been danced in ANY previous choreography of Sleeping Beauty, for a climactic Pas de Deux in the last act (obviously the Aurora-Desiré adagio is saved up for when good has triumphed over evil). The Rose Adagio is less successful. What Ismene writes about real dance never being properly carried through applies here, as choreography gives way to precipitate mime and Aurora falls swooning from a prick on the thorn of Caradoc’s black rose; that doesn’t work for me. But the curtain certainly does.

Gone are the courtly dances of Act Two – Bourne has moved in the opposite direction from his Cinderella, which was the first to rehabilitate Prokofiev’s world-travel divertissement – but we get the vision imaginatively treated, and more of the Entr’acte Symphonique’s spellbinding sleep music than ever before (still not quite the crucial 100 bars I discovered it to be, but everything except a repeat; the charismatic Jurowski lookalike Ben Bunce pictured with Vassallo below).

Of course there are no fairy-tale animals at the ball, but the radical, near-atonal Puss in Boots number is brilliantly staged when our hero infiltrates the black and red Walpurgis Night and the brilliant 5/4 Sapphire Variation is a welcome survivor from the second fairy sequence. A shame the Bluebird enchantment wouldn’t fit into this context. But the real problem is that chunks of a divertissement can't really be pressed into service for the long-term dramatic narrative which Tchaikovsky has abandoned (in favour of something equally wonderful) at this point. Anyway although by and large the biggest orchestral climaxes aren't matched by the fitful classicism of the choreography, the corps numbers, the Polonaise and the Mazurka, get vintage Bourne creepy-mannerist treatment. And the fashionable Twilight/Buffy links are canny.

The Apotheosis brings a neat return to the best idea of the Prologue. How prescient was it to give a major role to a royal baby?

Forewarned was forearmed in the case of the pre-recorded score. I’d hated the over-amplification of Prokofiev’s Cinderella music, and when I met two of Bourne’s team with J at the Garrick on Monday, I asked if this couldn’t be at a more natural level. Well, it was, and truthful enough to tell that Brett Morris had mostly done a wonderful job, with especially good violin solos from Gina McCormack. I loved the tempo for the Lilac Fairy music at the end of the Prologue, and the ‘Sleep’ Entr’acte sounded as spellbinding as it can.

That bewitching sequence came as a bit of a shock on Järvi’s recording: virtually double the tempo, with the Carabosse chords broken rather than sustained. He also has a Panorama at a speed which the woodwind and horn support can only just articulate, and a sprint at the end of the sublime Bluebird Adagio. But, for all that they probably couldn’t be danced to, how filled with energy are the faster passages. Järvi (pictured below by Till Veerhae) offers characteristic rubato that's often so subtle as to be barely perceptible but gives so much life to the symphonic passages, and a spectacular recording provides extended dynamic range which is especially impressive at the piccolo end.

Was it necessary to bring in James Ehnes and Robert deMaine respectively for the violin and cello solos? I wasn't sure at first, having heard Aurora’s Variation in Act One more powerfully done. But Ehnes’s sophistication creates wonders in the big Entr'acte Bourne found such a good use for, and the cello’s Andante Cantabile offshoot in the vision has wonderful life and line. There are some wackily extended harp cadenzas, and the woodwind in the animal portraits are a dream.

I did a Radio 3 Building a Library on the ballet score some years back, when Ermler’s Covent Garden performance came out on top; now I reckon it would be a very close-run thing between that, Lanchbery’s dansante Philharmonia recording, which took some time to appear on CD and now Järvi’s. His has the most demonstration-quality sound of them all. And I can say here, hoping to be believed, my devotion has nothing to do with the fact that I have a stake in its success…

From Bronze to Carmen

It was one of those embarrassingly rich London days, preceded by a convivial evening (drinks at the Garrick, the perfect meal at Terroirs). Our dear friend and terrific artist Ruth Addinall had come down from Edinburgh to see us and catch the Royal Academy’s Bronze exhibition before it closes on Sunday. So I took most of Tuesday off and accompanied her around town. The exhibition at  the RA and the opera at the Coliseum were our two mainstays, though the unplanned interludes turned out to be fun – Ruthie trying on trousers and jumpers, and I searching in vain for more bright blue moleskins, in Cording’s, and snatching a falafel in Gaby’s (reprieved, it seems, from its threatened demise).

Sculptor Jon Edgar, whom we've come to know through Ruth, joined us for the exhibition, and it was good to have his expert knowledge, though once past the first big room we went our separate ways. The keynote piece at the start would be worth the price of the admission alone. In the late 1990s, Sicilian fisherman dredged up first a leg and, a year later, the torso of what is known as the Dancing Satyr (though as Bryan Sewell points out, since the foot is not a goat’s hoof it is much more likely a human follower of Dionysus). It would be exciting to accept the attribution to Praxiteles and date it to the fourth century BC, though probably it's Hellenistic. The flowing-haired beauty is skilfully lit and comes alive in his celebration from every angle you look.

Follow that? Well, the first room did pretty well with the human figure, mixing up centuries and races with delicious abandon. A noble Roman towers over a Nigerian bowman. A stick-thin figure looks like a Giacometti; it turns out to be an Etruscan votive figure from the second century BC. The giant ensemble of Rustici’s John the Baptist preaching to a Levite and a Pharisee stands at the end of the room alongside a cast of Cellini’s Perseus, their monumentality gently mocked by Donatello’s tiny Putto with Tambourine.

To the left of the big saloon is a crystal-clear exposition of the process from wax model to treated bronze (I won’t attempt to précis the technique); to the right the exhibition continues with a slight diminishing of interest in the subject matter, from animals to functional objects, though the Etruscan Chimera of Arezzo is a fabulous sight

and it’s fun to have a Louise Bourgeois spider (IV)on the wall.

In between the feral animate and the inanimate is a room of group figures, again ranging from the monumental to a real miniature beauty, Riccio’s tender Satyr and Satyress. The scope expands to early wonders like the 14th century BC Chariot of the Sun from Denmark, Chola bronzes and Buddhist figures. Those look especially handsome in the Gods and Goddesses room, eastern ascetics sitting alongside elegant Renaissance divinities; en route, the reliefs section has Adriaen de Vries’s magnificent muscled blacksmiths at work in Vulcan’s forge.

The last room rises to the heights again with heads of all ages. I’m at one with Ruth and J in adoring the Ife brass Head with Crown, its fascination compounded by striated lines down the face.

Hard to say which object to take away, this or the Dancing Satyr – probably the latter,  if I’m to be true to myself and let an ideal of male beauty take the palm.

So onwards, eventually, to the Coli. Calixto Bieito’s production of Carmen, which had quite a few attractive masculine torsos on show, arrives at English National Opera bronzed and polished after ten years doing the rounds. I enjoyed it far, far more than I expected after the aimless shenanigans of his Don Giovanni – I was bored rather than shocked by the mess he made of the Act One Finale – and his Ballo in maschera, which started well but suffered from the law of diminishing returns in its random sexual violence. There was probably too much not terribly convincing prodding and fondling in the first half of this Carmen, a few non-readable ideas (the man in white at the start, for instance – fateful controller? He turned out to be Lillas Pastia, king of the gypsies, but I wouldn’t have known that without reading the programme). Nor was Bieito's avowed period, Franco's Spain in the late 1970s, evoked by the action as far as I could see.

Acts Three and Four, though, were much the best I’ve seen in the opera house (Ruxandra Donose as Carmen and Adam Diegel as Don José in both the above pictures). The five Mercedes – six, as has been often pointed out, if you include Carmen’s girl-friend and add the French accents – were terrific props to animate a scene where all you normally get is brooding gypsies hunkering on a dimly lit stage. And the silhouette bull sign looked good at the back of Alfons Flores’s often unencumbered arena (huge variety of lighting, too, from Bruno Poet).

The act also contained the two musical highlights: Donose, possessed of a beautiful if not tonally very varied mezzo instrument she takes some time to engage, rose to the most dignified Card Scene aria I’ve heard. Then there was Elizabeth Llewellyn’s powerful Micaela, hints of Leontyne Price honey at the top of the voice. Shame her characterization was ill defined by Bieito – first she’s too forward with José in Act One, then too timid, and the fuck-you gesture to Carmen as she goes off with him to the supposedly dying mother didn’t work.

Musically, there was good co-ordination between soloists, chorus and orchestra. On Tuesday night the conductor was ENO Head of Music Martin Fitzpatrick. I’d hazard a guess that he pulled out more stops than Ryan Wigglesworth, responsible for the worst conducted concert I’ve heard in a long time (a couple of years back with the BBC Symphony Orchestra). But the less accomplished of the two Wigglesworths – no way to be confused with the masterly Mark – may have improved since then.

Hunky Duncan Rock’s Corporal Morales (pictured above with the fabulous Llewellyn) and Leigh Melrose’s slightly seedy bullfighter Escamillo should probably have swapped roles, since Rock’s voice is more ample; but Melrose is an excellent musician and played with the phrases rather well. American tenor Diegel as Don José has a slightly nervy, raw sound which came into its own for the nailbiting final duet, though before that he sang flat too often for comfort and didn't unbend enough for the physical violence. Promising sounds came from the Mercédès, mezzo Madeleine Shaw. As with Bronze, Sunday is the last day to catch the show, though no doubt it will be back for a good many seasons: I'm glad that ENO has at last hit on a lively production for a core component of its more pack-em-in rep.

My apprehension about going to see it at all was based on how spoiled we’d been throughout the seven glorious Opera in Focus classes we spent on Carmen at the City Lit. It’s a hell of a role to pitch at the right level between sex and dignity. On disc the voice can do it alone: of the Habaneras we compared – from Supervia, Dusolina Giannini, Troyanos, Obraztsova, Moffo, Callas, de los Angeles  and a young Marilyn Horne dubbing Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones – de los Angeles (pictured below) and Moffo were the most liked by the students, Giannini the least, while Troyanos tended to steal the show in the Seguidille and the Card Scene.

Yet having never seen a totally convincing Carmen on stage, I and the students were knocked for six by Elina Garanca in the DVD of Richard Eyre’s Metropolitan Opera production. You know what it feels like when the ideal for a role pops up once in a lifetime – Gheorghiu in her first Covent Garden Traviata, Bryn as Hans Sachs? Garanca is in that league. Though she’s a natural blonde, she looks utterly convincing all dusked up. The voice is vibrant and utterly consistent from top to bottom of the register – actually in that respect the same could be said of Donose – and as sexual predator she’s dangerous, wild and funny without being tarty. There’s real electricity between her and Alagna’s compelling José. Judge for yourselves in the final scene, though do try to get to see the characterization as a whole.

Credits: all ENO Carmen photographs by Alastair Muir

Bronze images kindly supplied by the Royal Academy (except for the top picture which is mine) with the following credit details:

Dancing Satyr, Greek, Hellenistic perios, 3rd - 2nd centuries BC Museo del Satiro, Church of Sant'Egidio, Mazaro del Vallo

Photo Sicily, Regione Siciliana - Assessorato Regionale dei Beni Culturali e dell'identita Siciliana/© 2012. Photo Scala, Florence

Donatello, Putto with Tambourine, 1429

© Staaliche Museen zu Berlin - Preussicher Kulturbesitz, Skulpturensammlung und Museum fur Byzantische Kunst, J P Anders, Berlin

Chimera of Arezzo, Etruscan, c. 400 BC

Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici della Toscana

Photo Antonio Quattrone, Florence

Louise Bourgeois, Spider IV, 1996

The Easton Foundation, courtesy Hauser & Wirth and Cheim & Read

Photo Peter Bellamy/ © Louise Bourgeois Trust

Adriaen de Vries, Forge of Vulcan, 1611
Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich
Photo © Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Walter Haberland

Head with Crown, Nigeria, Ife, 14th - early 15th centuries

National Museum, Lagos, National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria

©  2012. Photo Scala, Florence

Klezmer for two

BBC Symphony Orchestra violinists Celia Waterhouse and Danny Meyer visited the class last week to play and chat (I missed my chance to snap them before the instruments returned to their cases, so they obliged by getting colleague Anna Smith to take a fine double portrait in Maida Vale the following day). The outer panels of their triptych tied in with last Saturday's Mahler Resurrection and this coming Friday's Berio. Either side of very pretty 1791 variations on 'Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja' and 'Bei Männern' from Mozart's Magic Flute, they played a selection of Berio's elliptical, effect-full and melodically striking duos and three klezmer pieces (to tie in with that passage in the ever-amazing slow movement of Mahler's First Symphony, which they also demonstrated).

The klezmer arrangements were by a name I blush to say I hadn't heard before, Aleksey Igudesman. His 7/8 version of  'Hava Nagila' makes it sound absolutely fresh; there was a lively wedding number with an out-of-kilter rondo refrain, and a well-tempered meeting of Valkyries and bridesmaids in 'Richard wouldn't like it'.

The Petersburg (Leningrad) born violinist/arranger is well known - though less so in the UK, it seems - as part of a musical comedy duo, Igudesman and Joo (who is as brilliant a pianist as AI is a violinist). Now I don't usually warm to such stuff, despite - or more likely because of - being dragged along to Victor Borge concerts at a young age. Danny told me to go home and look up on YouTube  'Rachmaninov had big hands', which involves Igudesman handing Joo various notched wedges of wood to add a plethora of notes to the C sharp minor Prelude. A clip which gives a better example of both their skills submits Mozart's Rondo alla Turca to orientalisation. Do stick with this longish strand for the klezmer/eastern effect on an old favourite.

There's plenty more worth watching where that came from (try the collaboration with Kremer and Co in 'I will survive'). Anyway, we learnt a lot from Celia and Danny in the conversation which followed their playing. Danny's role as union representative and his knowledge of the politicking reassured us, among other things, that the BBC orchestras will be taking a ten rather than 20 per cent cut; had it been the latter, one of them might not have survived. But a couple of other institutions may not be with us for much longer; it would be presumptuous to name them.

Danny was interesting on one crucial  difference between two visiting conductors. The first, who shall also remain nameless though named he was and Danny made clear he certainly respects him, comes to rehearsals with everything already planned out for his interpretation. The other, Haitink, gets the orchestra to play through the work(s) in question, listens to their sound and adapts, which surely gets more inspiring results.

We also talked about contemporary pieces which get the violin to do everything under the sun except play what (perhaps narrowly) we think of as 'violinistically', in other words to make a phrase with the bow on the string. That was very much the impression in two out of the four new (or newish) pieces in the Mercury Quartet's 'Inspired by Debussy' concert at King's Place last Monday. I went with the diplo-mate, who had co-ordinated the event and supported the commissions via EUNIC. The two pieces in question were a short bit of mood-music which might as well have been an improvisation by a Polish composer and a more dynamic journey in Cypriot Evis Sammoutis's Metioron, which started randomly but gradually coalesced into a piano-led scherzo and haunting final slow section.

The real excitement was seeing the youthful commitment the Mercuries (pictured above, and led by Romanian violinist Vlad Maistorovici, who I'm told is a rather brilliant composer in his own right) brought to their contributions. There was also a trio-Nocturne for flute (Ana de la Vega), harp (Claire Iselin) and voice (soprano Patricia Rozario, who had learnt her parts at 24 hours' notice, and seemed totally in command) by Estonian Malle Maltis - pure Debussy pastiche, but superior of its kind; and a short assemblage of fragments, including the only direct reference to Debussy in a descending phrase from Nuages, by Thomas Oehler. The Debussy works we heard were a surprisingly blowsy early song, Flots, palmes, sables, with a strange, rather redundant meeting of piano and harp, and the chimerical Cello Sonata, in which pianist Antoine Francoise especially excelled. An uneven programme, then, but what vivacious guides we had in the performers.

Pilgrim(s) progressing

Before returning to the knotty problem of Vaughan Williams, I ought to make the long overdue announcement that the sum total of invoking a benign Mammon for this September's Norfolk Churches Walk was £764. That’s well down on last year, but times are harder and our dear friends are no doubt suffering from annual chchugging* fatigue. Anyway, the amount will be no doubt be gladly received by All Saints Burnham Thorpe, the ‘Nelson church’ where fellow-walker Jill’s mother was warden (we carry on walking annually in her memory as well as for the good of our health). Thank you, all and sundry.

Some folk get the impression from all this that I’m seriously religious. Decidely not, except in the vaguest sense: I’m happy to cast myself in the role of VW’s Pilgrim and not Bunyan’s Christian. So a not untopical farewell to this year's venture with a detail of one of the misericords in St Margaret's Minster back at King's Lynn, our town base for the walks. The cockleshells on the shield are pertinent as symbol of that pioneering pilgrim Saint James.

The City Lit students and I carry on making headway with the operatic Pilgrim’s Progress in class. It makes a lot more sense to me now that I’ve heard much of the music’s origins in a 1942 Radio 3 dramatization of Bunyan starring John Gielgud as Pilgrim. No wonder much of the opera sounds like film music, as Sarah Playfair in a neighbouring seat on the night remarked. It works much better in two or three minute chunksworths of incidental music, as the late Christopher Palmer’s excellent truncation of the 1942 venture on Hyperion allows us to hear. Gielgud reprises a small part of his role, and Richard Pasco is smooth-tongued as just about everyone/thing else.

Here foul fiend Apollyon does not outstay his welcome (and his seventh-leaping intervals return in a terrific brass fugato for Giant Despair, sadly not represented in the opera). The first half of the radio Vanity Fair sequence is divided into three pithy set pieces: the hustle and bustle; a waltz for a solitary Wanton which, kicking off with two violins and harp, is much less overloaded than its counterpart in the opera; and a splendidly extended whirling-dervish number for jongleurs (we get only a bit of it, with voices pasted over it, in the opera). The Tallis Fantasia-related Alleluias for the Celestial City’s reception of burnt-up Faithful, Christian’s companion in the book who meets his end at Vanity Fair, are more moving in their simplicity than the later apotheosis for Pilgrim in the opera.

Coming to the stage Vanity Fair, I felt I had to apologise for it not only with the radio music but with more varied, inventive VW dissonance/naughtiness in the Sixth Symphony, the ‘John Jayberd of Diss’ sequence from the Five Tudor Portraits and that outstanding ballet score of 1931 Job. Here’s the sax music for Job’s comforters followed by the vision of Satan on God’s throne. Vernon Handley’s London Philharmonic insinuaters don’t smooch as splendidly as Boult’s, but it’s another Handley performance I like very much as a whole. And it’s good to have Youtube presenting some of the Blake illustrations which inspired VW.

Thinking about it, though, the grinding monotony of all those parallel fourths and fifths in the opera might work better if the town crowd were less dolled up for fun than they were in Oida’s production. I see them, as well as Apollyon, in black and grey. For there is no mirth, no light entertainment here. How about a production where Pilgrim’s progress is mostly through Samuel Palmer landscapes – no cells, no electric chair, if you please – but, encountering real opposition, hits the reality of the post-war grimness which must still have been on VW’s mind in 1951.

I’m reminded of Bill Bryden at the Royal Opera setting Parsifal in a bombed-out Coventry Cathedral. Not everybody liked it, and there were a few incidental sillinesses, but I found the ritual conducted by plainly dressed folk angled along long wooden tables convincing, for once (it helped that Haitink’s conducting had such a naturalness about it). Below, Abraham Pisarek’s photograph of a Saxon flea-market in 1945. Draft in a few whores, roaring boys and legal types, and there’s your Vanity Fair.

So that’s it: my idea for staging The Pilgrim’s Progress. Though I very much doubt that anyone else after ENO will want to put it in to action. Anyway, on with some trepidation to the Bieito Carmen next week. Over the last, I’ve had such a rewarding trio of concerts to review for The Arts Desk: the perfect servings of Haydn and Strauss from the incandescent Yannick Nézet-Séguin – three cheers, incidentally, for an out-and-proud gay conductor, there aren’t many; Alice Coote, the Janet Baker of our age, as Britten’s Phaedra at the end of a jam-packed Wigmore concert from the Britten Sinfonia also weaving in Purcell, Handel and Tippett; and an intriguing if not entirely successful BBCSO programme cannily following the eastern inspirations of Rolf Hind’s often compelling The Tiniest House of Time with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade in the ‘deep sound’ Bělohlávek protégé Jakub Hrůša likes to command. The Radio 3 broadcast is scheduled for Sunday afternoon.

*once again, that's church charity mugging

A fish-sermon transmogrified

With apologies to Veronese for the acidification of his St Anthony preaching to the fish

Praise be to the BBC Symphony Orchestra for programming Mahler’s Second Symphony and Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia less than a week apart in December, and making our life on the City Lit BBCSO course that much more fun. Famously, or infamously, the giddying centrepiece of Berio’s 1968-9 experiment takes the carcase of Mahler’s Scherzo and allows other music from Bach to Boulez to batten on it, against a barrage of song and speech from the eight vocalists (originally the Swingle Singers). Mahler's tempo indication, In ruhig fließender Bewegung (With quietly flowing movement), is also used by Berio.

Refreshingly, and rare in a composer who as a Darmstadt terror in the 1950s declared war on the past, Berio’s care in never letting the Mahler movement go under for long through his 11-minute movement makes us think even more of the original's extraordinary modernism. Herrgott, to think it was composed in 1893 (and last night in a stunning LPO concert which I’ve eulogized over on The Arts Desk, we had further food for wonder in how much of the mature Schoenberg Strauss pre-empts in the fabulous labyrinth of Don Quixote, premiered only three years after the Resurrection Symphony).

It seems that by 1893, when he gave shape to three of the Second Symphony's five movements, Mahler had already written the song from the folk-anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn which the symphonic scherzo daringly expands. St Anthony of Padua’s sermon to the fish for voice and piano needed working up instrumentally, which Mahler did alongside the scherzo in the fertile summer preceding his ‘flash of inspiration’ that the Second Symphony should be crowned by Klopstock’s 'Resurrection' chorale-text.

The gist of this slithery satire is that the piscean congregation listens open mouthed to the sermon, only to go on and behave as before – surely a connection with the human hurly-burly suggested in the symphony, against which a ‘cry of disgust’ proves powerless. Here's the song, which happily precipitates a belated tribute to the late, great Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Have patience with the delayed start and the background buzz.

The futility of action seems to be part of Berio’s point, too, and there's an aqueous undertow which seems to refer both to Mahler's song and the first-movement quotations from Claude Levi-Strauss's Le cru et le cuit, which relates water-myths to musical forms. If Berio is dissing the waltz-crazy decadence of the 19th and early 20th centuries, it has to be said that his multiple references sound marvellous. I only picked up some of them on a first hearing: several waves of Debussy’s La Mer, the Part One conclusion to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and a bit of woodwind dancing from Agon, Strauss’s Rosenkavalier morphing into Ravel’s La Valse, a bar of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, the drowning in Berg's Wozzeck. But here too are Schoenberg’s Peripetaia from the Five Orchestral Pieces, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, the idée fixe from Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (still can’t hear it), Webern, Hindemith, Boulez’s Pli selon pli…that’s by no means the full list.

Meanwhile the amplified voices pick up Mahler’s tunes or recite Beckett (The Unnamable), student slogans from ’68, Joyce, lines from Berio’s notebooks. Sometimes the text is pertinent (‘Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on'; ‘there was even, for a second, hope of resurrection, or almost’), more often it just sounds like radio interference. The head spins with so much going on at once, which is surely the point. I can’t wait to hear it live at the Barbican on 7 December. Jiří Bělohlávek's long term Mahler cycle with the BBCSO has been one of the best so far, so his Resurrection on 1 December should be remarkable, too. In the meantime, here's the Berio centrepiece from Pappano with Swinglers at the Proms.

Pilgrim revisited

I dreamed a Dream – it must be about four years ago now – that Vaughan Williams’s very selective, semi-operatic take on Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress had enough in it to attain the celestial city of masterpiece status. I saw a man in the very likeness of a good pilgrim – Roderick Williams – and a conductor, Richard Hickox, whom I’d been wary of in dynamic, intensely rhythmic scores but who had the spiritual measure of the music. This was the Philharmonia performance, which turned out to be one of Hickox's last, at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, minimally but movingly staged by the director I knew so well from City Opera days, David Edwards.

It’s curious to look back on what I wrote then and see how drastically it differed from my experience of what might have been another work altogether at English National Opera last week. Very decently conducted it was by Martyn Brabbins, and the chorus seized their multiple roles with fervour. But it seemed to me that a lot of the music, especially in the first half, was mired in a handful of chord progressions or else horribly invertebrate. The male soloists weren’t a patch on their Philharmonia counterparts, and I now conclude – especially as I take my City Lit students through the Boult and Hickox recordings – that much of the spiritual inner light must have been missing, at least until the scene (composed by VW back in the 1920s, decades before the finished ceremonial) where Pilgrim meets the Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains.

Musically that was so affecting in its restraint; but since director Yoshi Oida had the simple men got up as establishment figures – a priest, a lawyer and a doctor - telling prisoner Pilgrim to ready himself for death, the message was confused. As I thought it was throughout this very fitfully interesting interpretation of Bunyan’s allegorical dream. The prison walls and grills moved around the stage very malleably, and there is of course cause in the circumstances under which Bunyan wrote the work (in Bedford Gaol). Certain tableaux like the dramatically redundant and rather old-fashioned spectacle of Pilgrim’s setting out on the King’s Highway were visually interesting (ENO production photos by Mike Hoban).

Yet the prison re-enactment didn’t always mesh with the rest. That musically interminable conflict with fiend Apollyon seemed like a flimsy pretext for a bit of puppetry

while the Vanity Fair scene, which likewise came across as screamingly monotonous on the musical front as it had not at Sadler’s Wells, lavished a lot of expensive colourful costumes to an effect no naughtier than a camp carnival. There has to be threat here, doesn’t there?

Similarly the World War 1 footage in the second half, which often seemed hard pressed to remind us of the prison ritual, served only to nod rather vaguely at VW’s participation as stretcher-bearer. And the electric chair as gateway to paradise spelled out a messsage that was ambivalent at best. Roland Wood’s rather bottled baritone, doubling Bunyan and Pilgrim, improved as the evening wore on, but never touched any spiritual sympathy for me, and George von Bergen in various roles forced the voice into a colossal wobble. The celestial women were better, Eleanor Dennis especially, but never did I get any sense that VW had given anybody anything really grateful to sing.

There was cause for dread, then, that I’d allotted three classes on the work for my Opera in Focus course. But after one session – admittedly dealing with the best music apart from the Shepherds sequence, Act One – I felt much happier. There’s real radiance in Hickox’s Chandos recording, and it boasts Gerald Finley as Pilgrim alongside a stalwart supporting cast.  We looked at the background of VW’s seminal work on the English Hymnal from 1904 to 1906, which in part ties in with his folksong hunt: it was fun to find the original, ‘Our Captain cried all hands’, of ‘He who would valiant be’ (the original text of which, beginning 'Who would true valour see', appears in the lesser-known Second Part of Bunyan's book, the journey of Christian/Pilgrim's wife Christiana and their four sons). I've chosen instead of 'Our captain' here the great Maddy Prior singing the hymn with consciousness of its roots.

Why, incidentally – and contrary to what’s twice stated in some factually dodgy ENO programme notes – does VW not use his original setting when ‘He who would valiant be’ pops up in the opera’s King’s Highway scene? It’s so much better than the alternative, which comes from I know not where. Anyway, I have such a soft spot for the Hymnal setting, as I do now for Bunyan’s book. It puzzles me why VW adapts so little of it, especially as he drafts in new 'types' (above all in the interminable Vanity Fair sequence) and even whole scenes. Some of Bunyan’s dialogues lose me, but I love the homespun, anyone-can-read-this approach to the fantastical. Bunyan’s most eloquent critic, as Alasdair Gray points out in his splendid Book of Prefaces, was Thomas Macaulay in the 1830 Edinburgh Review:

The vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people. There is not an expression, if we except a few technical terms of theology, which would puzzle the rudest peasant. Many pages do not contain a single word of more than two syllables. Yet no writer has said more exactly what he meant to say. For magnificence, for pathos, for vehement exhortation, for every purpose of the poet, the orator and the divine, this homely dialect – the dialect of plain working men – was sufficient. There is no book in our literature which shows how rich the old unpolluted English language is in its own proper wealth, and how little it has been improved by all it has borrowed.

And to think that Milton’s Paradise Lost, the antithesis of Bunyan, had appeared only a decade earlier. I wonder if something of what Macaulay writes about doesn’t hover behind the purpose of Vaughan Williams’s sacred rite too. So much depends on the dedication of the performers. The same goes for the composer's perhaps greater symphonies. I don't always melt to the Romanza of the Fifth Symphony - part of which corresponds to the 'House Beautiful' sequence of the opera - but it shines with a rare light in the late Vernon Handley's phenomenal performance with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.