Sopa de ajo

That's garlic soup, very much with a Spanish twist. And while it's true that the old woman cooking eggs in  Velázquez's pungent early bodegón (painting with still-life ingredients) is frying them in a substantial amount of olive oil rather than poaching them in a soup-mix, the atmosphere is right for this fabulous recipe - as Sam and Sam Clark note in their seminal Moro cookbook.

I've never dined at Moro, but I love this book and its stylish layout. It's yielded firm favourites like baba ghanoush - the muhammara with which I usually accompany that as a starter is to be found in Claudia Roden's even chunkier Book of Jewish Food - and a few one-off fish and meat dishes. This, though, seems to have garnered the biggest raves and is a fine staple in these cold winter days.

It's so simple to prepare yet satisfying in the contact with its main ingredients: you fry the cloves of three or four garlic bulbs with their skins on for about 20 minutes and then squeeze out the flesh almost as paste (in fact you can purée them or leave them as they are). Fry chorizo, add the garlic with thyme leaves and smoked paprika and then one litre (probably two is better) of  good chicken stock (better the tubs from Waitrose than melting stock cubes). Once properly simmered, you add toasted sourdough/ciabatta bread and throw in an egg to poach for each of your guests (given a large number, I downsized from hens' to quails' eggs).

J and I first had sopa de ajo in Asturias, travelling to the town of Cangas de Onis at the foot of the Cantabrian mountains. Both of us had stinking colds - it rains a lot in northern Spain - but were determined to carry on walking, and this soup was sheer balm. Our friend Florian cooks an Austrian garlic soup, Knoblauchcremesuppe, which I love, but this one is better, of course, for the lactose intolerant or the sinusitis-plagued like myself.

Anyone else crazy about garlic, pictured above in a detail I took from another Velázquez bodegón, Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary? I was obsessed about the noble bulbs to the point of unsociability at university, eating raw cloves when I had a heavy cold (never again). In San Francisco, I was tickled to discover the Stinking Rose restaurant, the motto of which is 'we flavour our garlic with food'. The garlic ice-cream to finish, needless to say, was not as successful as the rest. Anyway, our visit was poorly timed, as we were catching the plane home later that afternoon, and boy did we stink. I think the virtue of cooking the garlic in this recipe is that you don't stink much, as far as I can tell. ¡Buen apetito!

Food features amusingly - I can think of no better segue - in Two Days in Paris, starring and directed by the hugely talented Julie Delpy. She does a neurotic, pacy double act with Adam Goldberg that reminds me of early Woody Allen with Diane Keaton; though while our Woody has so gone off the boil as to treat Paris and other European cities like one big tourist cliché, Delpy avoids the obvious sightseeing highlights (Goldberg's Jack wants to see Père Lachaise and the Catacombs) and undermines the isn't-Paris-romantic adage.

We wept with laughter at the scenes with the cat ('my father calls him "Eat-Shit-Sleep" ' - no doubt sounds even pithier in the French), the cooked rabbit, the eccentric father scratching cars as he wanders down a posh street, volatile maman coyly confiding her racy past; all the more astonished am I to learn that the actors playing these two are Delpy's own parents. As J said, it's an insight into hetty love life, I would add with sometimes more information than you want - Allen and Keaton couldn't have got away with this level of frankness in the 1970s - and I only wish there were a gay romcom on the same level (though Andrew Haigh's real and true Weekend, admittedly not a comedy, is in a class of its own). I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't find Two Days in Paris hysterically funny; fail to laugh uncontrollably, and I guarantee you your money back.

Sophie's scoop

It’s now been a very long time since tourists like us could watch the sunset over the river Niger from a bar terrace in Mopti, central Mali. Which by Thursday afternoon was the scene of panic as the hard-line Islamist rebels occupying the country’s Sahara region took the town of Konna, 55 kilometres miles to the north of Mopti, freeing up their southward route to Bamako.

Our Sophie Sarin, on the eve of leaving Mali and her hotel in Djenne for two weeks to come and attend the Chelsea Arts Club wake party for her beloved Princess Lulie, who died recently at the age of 97 (read Sophie’s tribute to an extraordinary life in The Independent), stole a march on the world’s press. On Thursday evening, just before leaving Bamako on Moroccan Airlines, she heard from her husband Keita first that French and Nigerian troops had landed at Sévaré Airport near Mopti, then that they had retaken Konna. The events unfolded with dramatic immediacy on her blog.

All this by 9.45pm (our time as well as Mali’s). It wasn’t until 5pm the next day (Friday) that François Hollande officially announced the involvement of his country's troops. More than 24 hours after Sophie’s statement, it was confirmed that Konna had been retaken*, no doubt all under the circumstances of hush-hush which are a necessity in war  Whether the French troops' brief is to liberate Timbuktu (market pictured below, like the Niger at Mopti above, on our 2007-8 visit) and the other towns suffering under the harshest interpretation of sharia law remains to be seen.

Sophie is right to have a certain pride in all this. But of course she is deeply worried by the state of emergency in Mali and her friends left behind – delighted though they (and it seems all Malians) are by this already overdue intervention.

There she is below chez nous, contemplating the timeless truths of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and trying to adapt to our English freeze. On Friday evening we went to a splendid Barbican concert. Some contrast that must have been for our Djenneista. Will Sophie be able to return as planned in a fortnight’s time? Who knows. Never underestimate Thucydides’ ‘persistence of the unforeseen’ in warfare.

In the meantime, here we are suffused by the balm of peace in the form of this Sunday’s Bach cantata. It’s ‘finding in the temple’ time, based on those verses in Luke where Mary and Joseph lose their twelve year old son for three days in Jerusalem and eventually discover him in the temple, listening to the learned doctors and questioning them. It’s an event surprisingly under-represented in Renaissance art, so I settled for this diligently researched ‘realistic’ representation by Holman Hunt.

Of the three options on Vol. 18 of Gardiner’s cantata pilgrimage series, I went straight to Liebster Jesu, mein Verlangen, BWV 32. Unveiled in Leipzig on 13 January 1726, it’s a dialogue between Jesus, a bass (big boy for 12!), and a soprano who turns out to be not the searching mother but the Christian soul. She gets an opening aria with one of Bach’s most wonderful oboe solos, chromatic and weaving around the vocal line - I could play this! – against searching notes from upper strings marked piano e spiccato. He is twinned with a solo violin, all gracious triplets and trills.

After a string-haloed recitative dialogue in which the soprano quotes Psalm 84’s ‘How lovely are thy dwellings fair’, they sing the bounciest and most operatics of joyous duets. Gardiner, who performed the three ‘first after Epiphany’ cantatas in Hamburg and gives us interesting background on the opera-fixated city in Bach’s time, celebrates Bach in this duet ‘rivalling the lieto fine [happy ending] conclusions to the operas of his day, but with far more skill, substance and panache’. The usual chorale rounds off the dialogue, but it was the duet which Gardiner and co encored on 9 January 2000. Here, as usual, is the YouTube alternative - this time from the rival Suzuki series.

*Now (15/1) it appears that it hasn't. Which just goes to show how tough the going must be.

Beauty by the book

With apologies to the balletophobes, it’s Aurora time again. And on this occasion I don’t disagree with anything in the Arts Desk review by my eloquent colleague Ismene Brown, who took me along to the English National Ballet Sleeping Beauty (photos - only four to choose from, sadly, which is why you'll see them so often - by Patrick Baldwin for ENB). Perhaps, with infinitely less knowledge of the steps and technical difficulties involved, I have more than just one reservation about ace ballerina and ENB artistic director Tamara Rojo’s Princess, pictured above with Vadim Muntagirov. 

It’s not just that she goes to the altar untransfigured by love, but that there’s not a hint of girlishness about her 16-year-old in Act One. She tackles the absurd number of early challenges with aplomb, but the face is mask-like, except for when the mouth opens and closes in preparation for a hair-raising sequence. Which only, for me, highlights the narrative brilliance of Matthew Bourne in making Aurora a bit – Ismene thinks way too much – of a wild child.

But otherwise the shows are not really comparable: one is a consistent piece of novel storytelling, a dance-panto, whereas this lavish recreation of Kenneth MacMillan’s Petipa-faithful homage for the American Ballet Theatre preserves the aristocratic tradition without quite pickling it in aspic.

You’ve got to do it at the highest level, though, and ENB can. The Nicholas Georgiadis costumes are a wonder; as Ismene points out, they are as lavishly detailed for minor figures like the nurses, the Puritan spinning women and the haughty, stylishly hatted ladies of the Prince's court as they are for the individual fairies and regal mortals. Peter Farmer’s old-fashioned leafy painted flats are a bit minimal by comparison, but provide a pretty framework. You also need to be able to cast the character variations from strength, too, and this was for me the most amazing aspect of the production. 

The highlight, perhaps, is the Prologue’s Pas de Six. What extraordinary patterns Petipa demands from the 6x6x6 combinations of fairies, cavaliers and lilac entourage, and how perfectly that's realised here. What character there was in Nancy Osbaldeston’s finger-pointing Golden Vine and Shiori Kase’s sweetest of songbirds.

Maybe Kase’s smile is in default mode, but she used it to equally winning effect as Princess Florine in Act Three, partnered by the muscular but agile-legged Yonah (nephew of Carlos) Acosta, confirming the promise we’d already enjoyed in Le jeune homme et la mort. Osbaldeston shone again as Red Riding Hood, and lest we thought the royal couple’s thunder might be stolen, Muntagirov's immensely likeable Prince used his tall personage to peerless advantage in his tarantella. Rojo does aristocratic best, and was fine as a glacial Vision Aurora in Act Two. It would be hard to find better personifications of Good versus Evil than Daria Klimentová’s imperturbable Lilac Fairy and James Streeter’s Carabosse, memorably dressed as a wraith Queen Elizabeth who gestures stylishly enough to avoid toppling over into camp.

Of course I’m going to moan a bit about the cuts in Tchaikovsky's greatest score, more within numbers – often musically illogical – than with respect to the usual casualties. There, though, we could have had 20 minutes' more music rather than an unnecessary interval between Prologue and Act One. But how good to have an excellent live orchestra with such first-rate wind soloists (Gareth Hulse a real luxury in the best Grand Pas oboe solo you’ll ever hear).

I always wonder who dictates the tempi, conductor or dancers; two of the Prologue variations as well as Aurora’s in Act Three feel way too slow. There were a few smudgy ensembles but overall Gavin Sutherland led a confident performance. No doubt about it, though, this is the highest-level Gesamtkunstwerk Beauty on show. The regions who’ve already seen it must have wondered what hit them (Oxford and Southampton have yet to benefit). And you may well get a different Aurora and Prince, who should be as good if not better. But don’t be too timid to try out the Bourne Beauty too.

Three kings, two good men

There’s no point in saying ‘now here’s a gem’, because I suspect that with each Bach cantata I discover this year there will be treasure.  But Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen (All they from Sheba shall come) BWV 65, the Epiphany conclusion of JSB’s first Christmas cycle for Leipzig in 1724, has an especially rich, jewelled instrumental cortege for its three wise men (Bassano's sumptuous depiction of the homage illustrated above).

One commentator reckons the additions to the usual strings and continuo – two each of horns, oboes da caccia and recorders – respectively stand for gold, frankincense and myrrh (associated with embalming; apparently recorders were especially connected with funeral music).  John Eliot Gardiner, whose 6 January 2000 performance in Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche I’ve just heard, associates the recorders with ‘the high pitches..[of] oriental music’ and the oboes da caccia with eastern ‘shawm-like double-reed instruments (salamiya and zurna)'.

Whatever the significance, the pairs gild a splendid opening processional with a hint of drone bass before the chorus parts’ canonical entry, and the tenorial singularity of the oboes da caccia (model illustrated below) dances around the bass aria.

The diamond, though, is the tenor’s number. We’ve moved from the splendid gifts of the magi to the ‘humble heart’ offered by the reciter, with ‘the gold of faith, the frankincense of prayer, the myrrh of patience.’ As if to show how rich the non-material gifts can be, the three pairs plus two violins play delightful little one-bar figures off against one another in a lilting 3/8. This is more opulent and multicoloured even than the kings' opening procession.

Bach's choice of concluding chorale, set to a French 16th century tune, begins with the first line of what we know as ‘O God, our help in ages past’. Another great gift then, infinitely more memorable than the compromised Bach concert at Kings Place I heard last Thursday (which won't stop me going to more with different ensembles in KP's Bach Unwrapped series). Here's another Harnoncourt performance on YouTube so you can hear what I've been writing about - though nothing can match the trumpet-like splendours of Gardiner's horns.

One strand of the Christmas reading was to devour the rest of Ludmila Ulitskaya’s works so far translated. The two books in question are diametrically opposed in style. The Funeral Party is a novella I shall read again, engaging as it is from first paragraph to last. It's a quirky evocation, in the manner of the last act of La Bohème but more cheerful, of friends gathered in a New York attic round a dying Russian émigré artist, Alik, a free spirit whom everyone adores (and we do, too, thanks to deft strokes from Ulitskaya) His crazy wife and former lovers among the women initiate rather haphazard events such as the consecutive visits of a priest to give the last rites and a rabbi. The death seems inevitable, and not to be feared; the burial is followed by a funeral party which turns out, as all such should, to be a vibrant celebration of a life.

Throughout, Ulitskaya’s skill is in the little things that the characters say and do. There’s not much room for any of this in the relatively epic Daniel Stein, Interpreter. It’s a curious semi-fictional testament to Oswald Rufeisen, a Polish Jew who saved others while working for the Gestapo as an interpreter before emigrating to Israel and becoming a Carmelite priest. He’s clearly a good man, and Ulitskaya uses his reconciliatory words and deeds as a reflection on the riven religious factions in the beleaguered holy land. It seems that Stein/Rufeisen visited his old friend Karol Wojtyla in the Vatican and encouraged him to recognize Israel – I had no idea the Catholic church didn’t until then – and to be the first pope ever to visit a mosque.

The problem is that because reflections on Daniel/Dieter are mostly testaments in epistolary form, we miss the more immediate human idiosyncrasy which is Ulitskaya’s strength in the three other books of hers I’ve read. The scope, ranging from 1930s Poland to the 1990s, is certainly ambitious, though I can think of other masterpieces which convey the theme of what entails true Christian goodness more succinctly (that wonderful French film Of Gods and Men remains a benchmark). And I don’t know whether Daniel is supposed to have a fault, but for me it inevitably comes when he fails to acknowledge the right to inclusion of a parishioner’s gay son, protesting that homosexuality is beyond his understanding because ‘women are so beautiful, so attractive’, and advising the mother to send her son away from home so that he doesn't trouble her. So much for Christ-like acceptance.

Interesting, isn’t it, that just because a novel takes a big theme like the Holocaust and the Jews in Israel, that doesn’t make it more of a masterpiece than one which adopts a slice of life and infers the larger resonances from what’s done and said in its duration. The Funeral Party is for me the masterpiece of the two (and has the advantage of such simplicity that, like Chekhov’s stories, I imagine I could struggle through it in the Russian). But I still want to read everything Ulitskaya has written, especially the novel Vladimir Jurowski selected in his typically challenging summer reading list for The Arts Desk back in 2011, Imago. Hopefully that's next on the list for translation.

Cantatas by the calendar

I guess what triggered the cantata-hunt this time was having to miss out on the Trinity College Choir/OAE St John’s performance of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio on the Saturday before Christmas (I was pledged to a marvellous party instead, though we did get to the classiest of Messiahs in the same mini-festival the following evening). So on the day we turned to John Eliot Gardiner’s recording and I realized it could be parcelled out over six days’ worth of what in effect are discrete cantatas. After three days, that meant cheating slightly by leaping forward prematurely to the Feast of the Circumcision (New Year’s Day, the deed illustrated in Bellini’s lovely painting above), the first Sunday of the year and Epiphany.

Snip-day itself marked a proper start, which I intend to follow each Sunday, or as close to it as schedules allow (it’s a good way of getting to know the church calendar, too). I had three options, and the one most readily to hand was BWV 41, Jesu, nun sei gepreiset, in Masaaki Suzuki’s BIS recording with the Bach Collegium Japan. That entailed going back a decade from the mid-1730s cornucopia of the Christmas Oratorio to the Leipzig chorale cycle of 1725. Maybe there’s nothing as giddying as the weird harmonic progressions at the start of the Oratorio’s Epiphany cantata, but the treasury of obbligato solos is here, too, and one short but telling combined recitative where the bass is dramatically amplified by an urgent chorus on the line ‘Der Satan unter unsre Füße treten’ (‘May Satan be trodden under our feet’).

Unlike the oratorio, there’s no narrating Evangelist, so nothing about the snip ceremony (Signorelli's version above). Instead, this is a straightforward thanksgiving celebration of the new year, beginning with a 16th century hymn melody embroidered by three exultant trumpets and three oboes as well as leaping strings and continuo. Its novelty is an adagio episode when the chorus reflects on having ‘in good peace’ fulfilled the old year. The oboes adorn the soprano aria; to accompany the tenor’s central sentiments Bach asked for a cello piccolo, which Suzuki tells us was played laterally by a first violinist. His version uses a small five-stringed cello. Here’s the complete cantata in the old Harnoncourt recording on YouTube

Our quiet January the First turned out serendipitously well. The New Year’s Day concert from Vienna was a bit of a damp squib, without the esprit of Jansons or even Mehta (quite a pleasant surprise a couple of years ago), and certainly nowhere near the classic Carlos Kleiber or Karajan experiences. I can’t make Franz Welser-Möst out: he’s quite an elegant conductor, but Danube water rather than blood seems to flow in his veins. No comparison, then, with Kleiber's 1989 or 1992 concerts, both of which are absolutely complete on YouTube. I've been listening to the sound recording of the second, and recommend especially the ideal waltz, which as so often comes from Josef rather than Johann I or II: Dorfschwalben aus Österreich, beginning at 14'40.

Yesterday we had ze laughing, Austrian style, in the one 'comedy' routine of the programme proper – FWM self-consciously dolling out pertinent toy animals and a Valkyrie helmet, inter alia, to the orchestral soloists in the interminable Carnival in Venice variations (weren’t they more fun a couple of years ago?). And the percussionists' lame dialogue in the encore Plappermäulchen Polka, my favourite thanks to the lines we gave it on holiday in Venice with the godson and his little chatterbox sister, felt uncomfortable too. Verdi's Don Carlos ballet frolic put some of the Strausses' tamer stuff into the shade, including a dull Quadrille on mostly banda stuff from Macbeth and Rigoletto amongst others. I learnt one thing – that one of Stravinsky’s two ballerina-moor waltzes in Petrushka comes from Lanner's otherwise dreary Styrian Dances. The women count in the orchestra remains lamentable and inexcusable - two violinists sharing a back desk, harpist and third flute were all I saw (though that's considerably more than in the 1992 concert above).

The day was bright, so we walked from South Ken up to the meeting of the parks, around the Serpentine and via the human zoo of the Winter Wonderland to Marble Arch. J’s long expressed desire to see the latest Bond movie, Skyfall, was thwarted at the Odeon here, but we found it was on at Whiteley’s so continued the walk westwards and arrived just in time. Mendes's accomplished direction was much what I expected, the obligatory opening chase crowned by bikes on the roof of Istanbul's Covered Bazaar, but graced throughout by a Henry IV Part Two feeling of ‘I grow old’, and requiring the ever-dependable Dame Judi to be more than her previously cool M. The consummate performance in a good line up, though, surely comes from Javier Bardem, funny and hugely charismatic, out- (but not over-)acting our muscular but battered hero.

The way up

...facilis descensus Averno;
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
hoc opus, hic labor est.

The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labour lies.

Virgil Aeneid Book 6  lines 126-9, English translation by Dryden

This blog is rarely the place for the confessional, but I did vow that once I felt like my old self again, I'd stop puzzling some of the more inquisitive readers here as to the reason for the latest absence (long-term followers will have noticed the others; the 'episodes' began, for the first time in my life, shortly before I began this blog). After two and a half years of good health, far too much of 2012 was devoted to what I'd call not so much the black dog as the black hole. Around its edge were the constant modicum of working when I could, premature attempts to re-enter the public arena in April, and a return to teaching in September which soon felt natural. We managed trips to friends in the west during the spring and a wholly successful walking holiday around Chamonix in August which proved how crucial a part exercise plays in temporarily raising the spirits.

Even so, full wellness didn't return until November.

The mechanisms and triggers of these devastating episodes I still fail to understand. Did the trauma of extended dental work including a three-hour tooth extraction kick it all off, as I felt it had when the first crisis began six or so years ago? Was it the full impact deferred to the middle years of a bereavement in adolescence - the death of my father when I was 15? Well, in psychotherapy we've been through all that, raised aspects I hadn't considered - how not a single person really asked how I was, since all focus was on looking after mother; how maybe these spells from the mid-forties onwards have been a kind of identification with my unhappy father, disabled for the five years between his first stroke and his second, sitting at home feeling useless. Now I don't think we'll get any further along that line, though who knows?

Still I don't feel equal to defining the abyss. I need others to do it for me. Gwyneth Lewis in Sunbathing in the Rain, 'a cheerful book about depression',  approaches it poetically; Lewis Wolpert's Malignant Sadness and Andrew Solomon in The Noonday Demon add to the stock of understanding. With the qualification that all-enfolding love never deserted me - and I would insist that my best of men saved me, as before - Solomon's opening definition of depression does the job:

It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connections to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself. Love, though it is no prophylactic against depression, is what cushions the mind and protects it from itself. Medications and psychotherapy can renew that protection, making it easier to love and be loved, and that is why they work...In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaningless of life itself, becomes self-evident. The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance.

All I know is that on examination of the terrible times, there were oases of love and reassurance, even enjoyment, however much a casual glance back suggests nothing but the black. All this may seem strange since this is mostly a blog about enthusiasms, and, yes, I do love life with a passion when I'm well. Everything in the alternative state is a negative of that, a reversal. Two borrowed ways of defining it have been to say that I lost my soul, and that I joined the ranks of the undead (since at its most seemingly unendurable it did indeed feel like a fate worse than death, which you think about so often in the negative state; I don't believe anyone who denies this). Is there more than a touch of the bipolar? Very possibly. Each doctor, psychiatrist and psychotherapist seems to have different theories. It's not a science, but to be sure it needs medical supervision. If simply mentioning all this helps someone out there, then it's been worthwhile: don't be afraid to ask if you think I can be of use, though I don't suppose I can say more than, endure, this too will pass.

Anyway, here I am back in the midst of abundance, and in the few months of full enjoyment I can easily pick out a list of highlights. There were a few earlier in the year - chiefly an isolated excursion to English National Opera to see my beloved Rosenkavalier, and though there was a veil or two between me and my usual enjoyment of it, I could tell that this was a superlative revival, vivaciously conducted by Edward Gardner with perhaps the most successful third act I've seen. Sarah Connolly trumped her first Octavian at ENO, Amanda Roocroft had the bittersweet presence the Marschallin needed and John Tomlinson's chief asset as a vintage Ochs was his sheer ease on stage. But the voice which blew us away was Sophie Bevan's, blooming every time her Sophie hit a high ecstatic line. Here she is with Connolly in the Presentation of the Rose (photo for ENO by Clive Barda).

Richard Jones's staging of Martinů's Julietta was the next operatic highlight, drawing very few negative criticisms from anybody other than about the quality of the music and its subject, in which I was happy to join battle on the rapturously positive side. Below, three mini-Michels and the 'real' he (fabulous Peter Hoare) photographed for ENO by Richard Hubert Smith.

I seem to have struck very rare Royal Opera gold in July to catch Anja Harteros's long overdue return to the house. Her Desdemona shone Venus-starlike in a Verdi Otello which also included the right-sounding sort of protagonist in Alexanders Antonenko and magnificent work, as ever in the Italian rep, from Pappano and the Royal Opera Orchestra; shame about the Iago and the lame old production.

It was hard work getting to Glyndebourne for The Cunning Little Vixen, especially as that opera's glorious message wasn't chiming with me at the time, but I reckon Melly Still did a good job on the production. A much happier experience later in the year was talking again at a study day on The Marriage of Figaro while the Glyndebourne tour was kicking off at its home base, and loving the mostly superlative cast of the subsequent performance as well as Jonathan Cohen's vivacious conducting.

December brought my only Wagner live other than the surprisingly satisfying experience of hearing Mark Wigglesworth scale mountains in De Vlieger's potted Ring for orchestra. If any operatic event in anniversary year is better than the Fliegende Holländer in question, I'll feel lucky: Bryn Terfel covering all expressive and dramatic bases as an astounding Dutchman was equalled by Anja Kampe and Matti Salminen in the visiting Zurich Opera concert performance.

Mezzo of the year second time running for me is sublime Alice Coote (pictured above by Ben Ealovega), for her Mahler Rückert Songs with Saraste and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and her Purcell, Handel and Britten Phaedra alongside the splendid Britten Sinfonia. Violinist Catherine Martin (pictured below) revealed afresh the strange beauties of Biber's 'Rosary' Sonatas between homages to Bach's Orgelbüchlein in the Tower.

The BBCSO pulled off a sequence of well-programmed concerts but the LPO carries on reaping the rewards of a central intelligence in the shape of their music director Vladimir Jurowski. Hard to choose from his through-planned events, which will continue in 2013, but the last of his programmes I heard this year still resonates, with a spellbinding revelation of Grisey's Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (Four chants for crossing the threshold) enveloping hyper-agile soprano Allison Bell in a host of original sonorities. The Mahler Five that followed was absolutely fresh, too, as one has come to expect from VJ.

Theatre - I saw too little, though the Young Vic Three Sisters came to seem like a masterpiece of rethinking alongside the music-drenched pantomime of the Vakhtangov Company's enervatingly wilful Uncle Vanya (wish I'd seen Lucy Bailey's Print Room Vanya). So glad, all the same, to have been along to five of the Globe to Globe shows, top of the list the Maori Troilus and Cressida and the Hindi musical version of Twelfth Night (photo below by Simon Annand).

And we did a bit of catching up the week before Christmas with the still-sparkling second cast One Man, Two Guv'nors and a Sondheim treat which has been top of many critics' lists, Merrily We Roll Along at the wonderful Menier Chocolate Factory.

Now I feel more like the youthful Frank and Charley  (Mark Umbers and Damian Humbley pictured by Tristram Kenton above), starting out at the end of the show with wide-eyed optimism. Here's to a much better 2013 - and may yours be what you wish of it.

The Rostropoviches at home

It’s not certifiably a seasonal shot, but you can well imagine the Russian equivalent of a Boxing Day scenario with Slava bowing or strumming while Galina sang – and the kids turned out OK, didn’t they? With Vishnevskaya’s departure earlier this month, virtually all of a great Russian musical generation are no more (though the slightly younger Rozhdestvensky and Temirkanov remain).

True, Russia’s number one diva could be prickly and egotistical - playing endless videos of herself to students at her Aldeburgh course, trying to organize a national uprising against Dmitri Tcherniakov’s ‘desecration’ of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. And she carried on singing roles well past their (ie her) sell-by date, only to astonish everyone with her low-key portrayal of a bewildered grandmother in Sokurov’s haunting film Alexandra.

When Vishnevskaya was good, she was great, at least up until the end of the 1960s. I reproduced on The Arts Desk an interview with her, made in 1988, about her role in Britten’s War Requiem, with a few YouTube clips. I think my favourite, though, is her later recording of Musorgsky’s ‘Where are you, little star?’ This earlier version has a rather oversophisticated orchestration by Igor Markevitch, but the artistry is unmistakable.

Here's an approximate translation for the text, written (it's presumed) by the composer in the style of a Russian folksong, which of course the music evokes:

Where are you, little star, where are you, bright one?

Perhaps you've been dimmed by a black cloud,

A black cloud, a threatening cloud?

Where are you, maiden, where are you, fair one?

Have you deserted your dear friend,

Your dear friend, your beloved?

The black cloud hid the little star,

The cold earth took the maiden.

Vishnevskaya’s was the musical death of 2012 that resonated with me most. I always had reservations about Lisa Della Casa in Strauss - a certain tension in the technique stopped hers being the ideal floaty soprano in his music. And there was a diva in the less good sense, reading about the conflicts with Hilde Gueden on the Solti recording of Arabella (though that's still my favourite). Thinking about writing something on Henze for The Arts Desk, I really couldn’t drum up enough of an all-round portrait, much as I admire a couple of his operas (the symphonies remain unexamined territory). Elliott Carter remains musical anathema – great craft, plenty to comment on there, but it doesn’t communicate to me at all.

Jonathan Harvey’s music I need to get to know – and will do, with the opera Wagner Dream being performed next year (though I do remember talking to him at a Glyndebourne rehearsal of Tristan, which he said thoughtfully had to be the richest score of all, didn’t it?). And now we hear of Richard Rodney Bennett’s departure. Shame the radio tribute had to lead with the pastiche-y waltz from the film Murder on the Orient Express, though that’s the only tune of his I can hum. I loved his duo appearances with sassy Marion Montgomery, too.

(28/12) And Brubeck? How could I have forgotten mighty Dave? I was hoping to find on YouTube the wonderfully bitter-sweet third movement of brother Howard's rather inspired Dialogues for Jazz Combo and Orchestra, pitting the Dave Brubeck Quartet against Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, but it's not to be found. So we'll have to make do with the original cover of Time Out, which I nearly wore out in my university years; I owned it in a double set with Time Further Out the second LP.

(29/12) Howard, in the comments below, reminded me of Ravi Shankar too. So I dug out my Ravi Shankar: The Sounds of India disc, in which he gives modest introductions to the melas and the instrumental combinations of ragas. There's also a useful sleeve note by composer Alan Hovhaness. I like the sound of the sitar against the tabla and tambura, of course; I marvel at the rhythmic variations; but my western ear still can't get attuned in the long term to drone-fixed music that never modulates. My fault entirely.

(30/12) There's also the enormous omission here of colossus Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, though I did pay homage in A Fish-Sermon Transmogrified. DFD was the only western classical musician mentioned in the BBC Arts and Entertainment's photo-narrative of great departed. That's right, none of the above composers was included. Hurrumph.

As for the Guardian obits I’ve stockpiled, most of the subjects have defied mortality so far, and may they continue to do so.

Divertissement

What’s the vaguely seasonal listening here at home? Bach cantatas, not necessarily tied to the time of year, an always inexhaustible treasury; G&S, thanks to a fellow blogger who may wish to remain anonymous since he dug out some hard-to-find Mackerras radio recordings, including Princess Ida with Valerie Masterson as the heroine and Philip Langridge as Hilarion; and Tchaikovsky ballets, as ever.

I feel I’ve not exhausted the musical strain in my earlier bracketing of Bourne’s and Järvi’s Sleeping Beauties. It seemed only fair to return to Petipa since the New Adventures version had to jettison so much of my desert island Tchaikovsky, in other words most of the fairy-tale homages at Aurora’s wedding. Some earlier fantasy designs featuring high-camp courtiers and animals present themselves online in Bakst’s far from moribund later imaginings for Diaghilev’s surprising 1921 extravaganza. Quite where the Indians, Chinese and blackamoors fit in I’m not sure, but at least we get proper animal heads for Puss in Boots, a passage Bourne ingeniously reinterpreted

and Red Riding Hood’s Wolf, part of a character number not in the Bourne vampire ball.

Poorly filmed though it is, I thought the following link to a strand of the Kirov/Mariinsky’s 1890 reconstruction was worth including because you won’t have heard any of these three numbers in the Bourne version. In the case of the Cinderella/Prince ‘supplementary' as well as the fabulously imaginative Tom Thumb ‘Pas berrichon’, they might not even be on your ‘complete’ recording, and probably not in any recent Royal Ballet production you've seen. YouTube embedding isn't, apparently, allowed but click here to view the sequence. If you want to see the Bourne-absent Bluebird sequence, you can go back to the previous slice.

It seems criminal that the kids-and-ogre routine has been sliced off two CD transfers in order to cram the ballet on to two discs (a feat which Järvi achieves with no cuts but some very fast speeds). This, after all, is the number which a colleague of the young Shostakovich at the Leningrad Conservatoire remembers them both especially admiring for the way in which ‘the theme is broken up and scattered amongst various instruments at wide intervals of the register’. No Bakst designs for that number, nor for the Bluebird, but here's the legendary Enrico Cecchetti with his Florine in 1890.

Now for a more extended slice of magic, which Bourne did include closer to its entirety than any other choreographer whose work I've seen - the Entr'acte Symphonique 'Le Sommeil', mentioned in the previous Beauty blogslice with copyright discovery of its string tremolo lasting 100 bars. You can check for yourself in the piano score which accompanies it here, and go on if you will to some of the dances in Act III. Of these, Bourne included only the Polacca, aforementioned Puss and, with special percipience, the 5/4 Sapphire Fairy variation last featured in the wacky Björnson-designed Royal Ballet Beauty. I fear the volume levels may be a bit low, and the first two bars of high violin tremolo aren't there, but the Concertgebouw/Dorati recording is an interesting choice,

As for New Adventures absences, you can't miss them for too long in that mostly wonderful show; unless you’re impossibly Petipa-purist (and heaven knows that master fiddled around with the original score himself), its storytelling ingenuity will be bound to win you over.

May it run as long as a show we should have seen long ago, but somehow never did – One Man, Two Guvnors, Richard Bean’s updating of Goldoni to 1963. In the mood for froth, J picked up two half-price tickets on Thursday, so off we went to the Theatre Royal Haymarket to see how the highly-praised Owain Arthur acquitted himself in the James Corden Truffaldino-ish servant role. I have no comparison to make, but Corden's one-time understudy charmed us even as we sat somewhat nervously on the end of the second stalls row, wondering whether we’d be the next audience participants implicated in the stage mayhem.

As it turned out…well, I won’t spoil the fun, but this is the perfect seasonal treat since it's as close to panto as you can get if you dislike the genre. I was reconverted last year with the Wimbledon Dick Whittington starring Dame Edna Everage, who was wonderful but by no means the only onstage laughter-maker. Likewise Arthur, given exuberant turns from Jodie Prenger as our main man's feisty sex interest (pictured below in the second of two Haymarket production photos by Johan Persson), Daniel Ings as a posturing thesp, Ben Mansfield as arf-arf Stanley Stubbers, Rhona Croker’s dumb blonde and Gemma Whelan excellent in a revival of Vesta Tilly-style male impersonation.

We were also apparently fortunate to be rewarded with the return of the original, award-winning deaf old waiter Alfie, Tom Edden (pictured below by Alastair Muir) in the ever more hysterical slapstick climax of the first half. His walk across the stage with a rattling tray was a consummate comedy turn in itself.

The warm-up skiffle band and the vaudeville musical numbers by various members of the cast added to the simple but uproarious pleasures of the evening.

After the Boheme and Robert le Diable plunges, we’ve been lucky in our catching-up going-out, culminating in as classy and dramatically varied a Handel Messiah as I expect to see and hear at St John’s last night – Arts Desk review (probably the last for a while) here. It’s been a delight to have flying visits from dear friends overseas, encompassing two goddaughters and a godson (our adored Lottie came to London as a member of the Zurich Opera Dutchman chorus, and the Buma-Hills-es, over from Amsterdam, met us for dim sum today).

We’ve enough reading to keep us happy in the quiet spells between the socialising: I’m working my way through Sondheim’s Finishing the Hat, a Christmas present two years ago but only sampled until now, wondering at his highly critical masterclass in the art of lyric(s) writing, and Ulitskaya continues to amaze in an affirmative tale about Russians gathered round a dying friend in a New York attic, The Funeral Party (with the stress decidedly on the ‘party’). Season’s greetings to any readers who are still dropping by at this quiet time.

The primrose path

In Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along it leads backwards in time from the hell of compromise and failure to the sunlit plains of youthful optimism. In Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable it meanders ineffectually until finally fizzling out in the face of an equally pallid angelic challenge. Having seen the two works on consecutive nights – the opera first at Covent Garden, the musical next at the Menier Chocolate Factory - I know which path I’d rather take. But let’s put duty before pleasure and have done with the French devil first.

Is Robert really a grand opera? Its length and scenario would suggest so; the music, apart from the passing low brass threat, would better be suited in selective dollops to semi-disposable opéra comique. That Meyerbeer could write a good tune we know from Constant Lambert’s arrangements in Les Patineurs, drawn from Le Prophète – yes, it really did have a roller-skate ballet – and L’Etoile du Nord. There’s arguably one catchy number here, the Sicilian song in the first act. Otherwise you wait and wait for the promised improvements in later acts. Like so many second- or third-rank operas, this one always seems about to deliver and always stops short at foreplay.

 Instrumental colour can be interesting – good girl Alice’s arrival in a dangerous place is marked by a sweet woodwind chorus – and one ungainly novelty stands out, the a cappella trio in which the tenor and soprano shoot up to insane heights while the bass hits rock-bottom (its concluding counterpart makes the most of its half-tune, blueprint perhaps for the better effort towards the end of Gounod's Faust). If Princess Isabelle’s plea to Robert to forsake his wicked ways is another hit, the second replacement coloratura, Sofia Fomina, failed to make it so despite the support of harp and cor anglais.

In fact of the four principals only Bryan Hymel, a surprisingly beefy tenor capable of hitting the top notes, seemed in technically good shape. Usually reliable bass John Relyea (pictured above with Hymel) struck gravel in his upper register and the picture-pretty Marina Poplavskaya did her usual of swooping in and out of focus and tuning (so frustrating – there’s certainly something there if only a good teacher could bring it out). Conductor Daniel Oren didn’t seem to be helping anyone much. Laurent Pelly’s production restricted itself to naff rhythmic steps for the chorus and didn’t bother much with trying to mine any psychological truth from the principals (probably there’s no point). 

Some of the 19^th century style picturebook designs were fun, but only the ballet of zombie nuns in the graveyard where Robert has come to claim a magic branch, strikingly choreographed by Lionel Hoche, managed to triumph over anodyne music. Worth staging? I think not. A concert performance would have been enough to show us the bits that influenced Wagner* – and Sullivan, so much creepier in Ruddigore. If the Royal Opera wants to do a French grand opera, albeit one of less historical significance, it could try Massenet’s Le Cid. But no more Meyerbeer, please.

On, vitement, to Merrily We Roll Along. I hadn’t really wanted to bother with it again, having taken away so little from the Donmar production 12 years ago with Daniel Evans and the gorgeous Julian Ovenden. But then I learned from colleague Matt Wolf's enthusiastic review that the leading trio this time round included Damian Humbley, so dazzlingly good in the ill-fated and unfairly maligned Lend Me a Tenor, and lovely lady Jenna Russell, outstanding star of the Regent’s Park Into the Woods. Josefina Gabrielle, who eclipsed Tamsin Outhwaite in the Menier’s Sweet Charity, was also playing a chunky role. So I decided to give it another try.

Even before the night, assisted by the 1992 Leicester Haymarket cast recording with Maria Friedman – the present production’s clearly able director – I was hooked. The show is based on a Kaufman and Hart play and follows the blueprint of a (usually resistable) self-referencing showbusiness rise and fall, but told in reverse. As Sondheim points out in the excellent Finishing the Hat, Merrily not only traffics in the regular 32-bar songs of the musical golden age but, thanks to the time-travelling premise, previews them in fragmentation or dissolution before piecing them together in their pristine state. Thematic transformation is almost as skilful and pervasive as in Into the Woods, a work of incredible musical sophistication. The winning song penned by the musical’s composer and lyricist, ‘Good Thing Going’, is cheesy but earwormy, and there’s an infallible blend of post-G&S patter with pathos.

The Menier cast was, as anticipated, flawless. Russell (pictured above with Mark Umbers) doesn’t really get the limelight she deserves as Mary, but manages the backward transition from overweight, outspoken drunk to hopeful author beautifully. Humbley brings the house down with impeccable timing in Charlie Kringas’s self-destructive rant against his sellout buddy Franklin Shepard ‘Inc’ during a 1973 TV interview. Handsome Umbers achieves the difficult task of winning our sympathy as we regress to understanding a little more about Frank’s compromises.

The biggest transformation is realized by Clare Foster as his first wife Beth, maintaining a stillness in heartbreaking anguish in the first, divorce-scene rendition of ‘Not a Day Goes By’ – no easy task considering we’ve only just met her – before lighting up the stage with her younger enthusiasm (Foster's in the top picture with Russell, Umbers and Humbley). Gabrielle (pictured below with Glyn Kerslake), like Russell, doesn't quite get to strut all her stuff. She's a terrific dancer and the show number adapted with Sondheim's permission could give more room to that. As her first husband, Joe Josephson, Kerslake comes magnificently if briefly into the limelight in the middle of the fabulous young-professionals number 'Opening Doors'. 

The scene-changes are evocative bearing in mind the Menier’s limited space, the band excellent, but I have the one usual cavil in this place: why mike in a small theatre? You can’t tell where the voices are coming from in ensemble scenes, and you lose their natural timbre. Anyway, on with the West End transfer, and here’s to Broadway for Friedman and Co.

It's been an equally mixed week for Arts Desk assignments. I'll be damned if the Zurich Opera's concert performance of Wagner's Die Fliegende Holländer wasn't the best event of 2012 thanks to the Senta (all-giving Anja Kampe) and Daland (relaxed veteran Matti Salminen) rising to the superhuman level of Bryn's Dutchman.

But then there was a 26th-revival Copley Bohème at Covent Garden cruelly exposing the current problems of Rolando Villazón, and no-one else really making it worthwhile (though Elder's orchestra, despite being too loud and slow at times, revelled in the detailed beauties of Puccini's fabulous score). As for the old Copley production, at least Act Three looks good - below, Villazón with Maija Kovalevska's bright but unItalianate Mimì.

*though I reckon the Abbate/Parker claim that Senta's Ballad would not have been possible without the example in Robert's Act One must be wrong; the one in Marschner's Der Vampyr, which when I saw that opera in Munich struck me as close to the world of Dutchman, predates Meyerbeer's example by three years.

Production photos of Merrily We Roll Along by Tristram Kenton for the Menier Chocolate Factory

Production photos of Robert le Diable and La Bohème by Bill Coooper for the Royal Opera

Photo of the Zurich Dutchman by T+T Fotografie