Goldfinch, lapwing and redwing winter

I first saw the goldfinch flock outside the window last summer, when the swifts were also soaring and diving. They've been back in the past couple of months, perching in the tree opposite. More exclusively winter visitors, the redwing groups of 40 plus have been evident in our local (Margravine) cemetery, at least until very recently (they're due to fly back to Scandinavia soon, if they haven't already gone). The above goldfinch was snapped there on a Sunday morning of briefly settling snow, a solitary, along with various redwings.

Most exciting for me, because I've never seen them before, were the abundant lapwings at the London Wetlands Centre, briefly settling on one of the little islets.

And that was a one-day wonder, because soon the LWC became a casualty of new government lockdown ruling on animal collections and enclosed reserves. I've missed it, but there are always compensations, most recently a weekly Friday cycle to Kew Gardens and back with friend Cally. That needs another post, but let me whizz now from late November to the end of January elsewhere.

Impressive winter sunrises and sunsets have been very much a part of the last few months, especially when the days were shortest and rising meant catching the early morning light. Also from the front window, Venus still visible

and a few days later, true red sky in the morning.

Somewhat later in the morning and the month, tending towards mackerel sky.

Glad I made the most of the Wetlands while I could. On 13 November I was able to take in both Fulham Palace's Walled Garden, where the sprouts were coming on, and the other side of the river from Putney Bridge. Interesting fungus growing on felled tree trunks along the tow path

and rich ground-colouring from deciduous larches shedding within the LWC grounds

while on the 'wild side', the main channel always reflects different colours - after the previous visits this felt decidedly more winty.

In Old Brompton Cemetery the last of the leaves were in evidence.

Sunnier Sunday (22 November) in Kensington Gardens, a more robust autumnal splendour behind the statue of Queen Vic.

Late afternoon back at the Wetlands: long-tailed tits flitting back and forth

and plentiful action on the inland mere.

I've developed a special affection for the shovelers, most uxorious of birds, it seems: those who forage together stay together.

An ever-deepening (c. 4pm) sunset, punctuated by flights of geese and ducks overhead.

Kew Gardens on the 27th, mycological hunt not yielding a great deal other than a splendid clump of these big 'uns

and yet still a pleasure to wander the woods, admiring the beeches and birches,

out to the open opposite Syon House, the trees flanking always look handsome with or without leaves

and round the lake,

until we came in sight of all the mechanisms for the gimmickry of the annual 'Winter Wonderland'. Beats me why people need this when nature itself puts on the best show, but the lighting of the 'dancing fountains' in front of the Palm House did awaken a bit of the kid in me.

No electrickery, though, was going to outdo the sunset at the Wetlands the following Tuesday.

I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here. On 1 December, even the hides were open, so it was splendid opportunity to visit with my polymathic young friend Freddie Wilkinson, who can identify every bird simply by the song. What we couldn't see, we could hear. In the willow, aspen and alders by the gate leading to the Wild Side, he noted long-tailed, great and coal tits, goldcrests, treecreeper and chiffchaff, and became very excited to hear what he'd told me he hoped he would - a Cetti's warbler. You might not think that the river cycle to get there came up with anything remarkable, but I've developed a soft spot for Canada gees when they glide

and fly (here past the new works on Fulham Palace football ground, which will extend the Thames Path to go around it on the river side).

Meanwhile I got a closer look at some of the special-collection residents - the Puna teal (you think it would be called blue-beaked, since that seems more remarkable)

and the plumed whistling duck, which likes to hang out with its relations (so does the Pune teal, for that matter).

First time I've got to see the resident otters, too - that route had been closed along with the hides - and while it was a preface to what we were there to see, a lady who comes to see them all the time assured us that this is the best place to see a pair in full sight which happens around feeding time.

The highlight for me, though, was the sight of all those lapwings - first in the air, where they do the peculiar thing of flying about in different directions,

and on the little islet where they settled with cormorants and gulls.

I'm always happy to see a great crested grebe, and especially so when Freddie had so much to tell me about its existence (he's a fan, too)

and your common-or-garden mute swan is always a beauty, especially at sunset on the main waters

with the lapwings still flying about

and the sunset just getting deeper.

8 December yielded a double whammy of another amazing sunset and nature in Fulham Palace grounds. Flowers still to be found on one of the echiums in the herbaceous border

while across the lawn in front of the Palace ambled a fox.

Out on the river, mackerel clouds were playing their part in the most amazing skies yet

which only deepened as I walked my bike along the Thames Path homewards before fading.

A rainy afternoon at the Wetlands on the19th did at least yield a lit-up head of cumulus

and dark drama over the main waters 

worth getting drenched for on the cycle home. It was more placid heading the other way on the other side to Chiswick

and heading back, there was a moon above the eyot.

but the fading of the light was more dramatic closer to Hammersmith.

and the bridge, closed for who knows how long, duly glittered.

Christmas Eve was the time to exchange presents with Sophie in Kensington Gardens - restrictions meant we decided not to join her group on the day. Brilliant light over the Round Pond

and plenty of bird activity there, albeit mostly swans, Canade geese and gulls.

Close-to-solstitial sun gleaming through the Albert Memorial

where we met our German friends Katharina and Uli for coffee at a distance, admiring the imperial groups of statuary around Albert (the Americas here)

before walking around the Serpentine, paying the usual homage to Peter Pan

and finding a brilliantly-lit swan meet the other side of the bridge.

Loud song from a coal tit on the way to Margravine Cemetery

and redwings showing off again on the usual trees.

I've covered the darkling thrush at Fulham Palace on New Year's Eve previously, and the January Fridays at Kew will get another blog spot, but here seems the right place to insert a gull shot.

The cold was closing in, and on a cycle to Battersea Park on 9 January, paying homage to the bandstand in memory of those glorious late-summer chamber concerts there (the peace temple is beyond),

I caught signs of the first freeze.

Flora in OId Chelsea Churchyard seemed unaffected

and the sunset close to home, at the Brompton Bridge, glowed on an urban scene.

 Magnolia tantalising with the promise of furry buds by the Tudor gateway at Fulham Palace on the 15th

and camellias flowering on the outside of the Walled Garden.

Heron by the Serpentine, looking across to the Henry Moore sculpture, 17 January

and a cormorant holding out its wings to dry near the bridge.

In the Margravine Cemetery on the 23rd, I met two ladies from the Fulham and Barnes Peregrines Association. They were there with their cameras - much more sophisticated than mine - and told me that the male peregrine who lives on the roof of Charing Cross Hospital, and who lost his mate last year just as their young 'un was taking his first steps, has a new one they've called Azema, who turned up a couple of months ago. This is a rather feeble shot, but there she is perching on an aerial on one of the residency blocks of CCH after much swooping and soaring against dramatic clouds.

A redwing again, looking good against a clear sky,

plus - later - the clouds and the moon at sunset.

Red-letter morning the next day - heavy snowfall outside the front window.

My geranium sidoides and rose-scented pelargonium in the back window boxes are still flowering, and all the better for a dusting of snow.

There was no time to waste - the snow wasn't going to settle for long, so I wrapped up and went out along the gardens

straight to Margravine, knowing that snow-capped angels and statuary would look good.

But there were also redwings again

here, at last, revealing why they're so called, and what distinguishes them especially from other members of the thrush family,

the solitary goldfinch illustrated up top, crocuses in the snow, 

ice on licheny branches and catkins

and eight snowmen. The most impressive was wrought by a group of jolly French people

while I admire this little fella for his catkin eyes.

By the 27th, it had nearly all gone

and crocuses were forcing their way through further among the snowdrops,

though we had a dreary freeze of four days in which wet snow dribbled endlessly against grey skies. Now, with milder weather and sustained sunshine at last, spring is on its way.

Cather's midlife crisis novels

Hermione Lee is unequivocal in her admiration for Willa Cather's novels of the early to mid 1920s, which form a kind of triptych - two side-panel novellas, suggestive character studies of ambivalent women slightly outside the pale of convention in A Lost Lady and My Mortal Enemy, and a central masterpiece of structural and emotional richness. The Professor's House. In her study of Cather, which is much more literary criticism than biography, Lee declares that she admires 'that dark phase of Cather's writing above all the rest' and is less compelled by the more distanced narrative of Death Comes for the Archbishop. I'd be hard-pressed to choose between Professor, Archbishop and the lost young man who is One of Ours. (Below, Cather photographed by Carl van Vechten in 1934).

As I mentioned in my last post including a second look at Catheriana, perhaps these three novels strike a special note with me because of their intense depiction of male relationships which, in the cases of One of Ours and The Professor's House, could be seen either as intense romantic attachments or something with a more homoerotic element under the surface. It's fascinating to find Cather, a lesbian writer whether practising or not, exploring the possibilities of repressed sexual love between men. What she does is to build up a picture of masculine beauty - Claude Wheeler and the Professor's beloved Tom Outland - and then leave it to us to elaborate on what kind of love develops in Claude's late discovery of the sensitive violinist at the Front, his perfect other half, and Tom's intense friendships with Rodney Blake and Godfrey St Peter.

The form of The Professor's House, pitting discontent with bourgeois domesticity against (eventually) the wide open spaces of America's south-west, is surely the most daring in all Cather's novels - indeed, in novels across the board. St Peter is reluctant to give up the solitude of his attic study in an old house though he has moved with his family to a brand new one. There's a typical ambiguity at work which hovers between contemplation and the 'double life' of a supposedly 'happy family'. The link with Godfrey's adored Tom, who's died, like Claude, at the Front, is the tawdry legacy of an invention which brings no happiness to the relations between St Peter, his daughters and their husbands. Left alone when the rest of the group goes off to Paris with the summer, the Professor meditates on his young friend's journal about a discovery of a different sort from a time before they'd even met - that of a native American settlement of considerable sophistication, the so-called Cliff City on the Blue Mesa.

Cather has been to a landscape like this before, with Thea Kronborg on  avacation that changes her life in The Song of the Lark, and there are equally beautiful descriptions of monumental scenery in Death Comes for the Archbishop. 'Tom Outland's Story', introduced at the novel's two-thirds mark, transforms us, and it has a radical effect on the Professor's life in the short final section of the book, which draws all the strands together with masterly skill. Having had my reading spoilt by spoilers in Lee's study of Cather - I had to keep putting it on hold while I caught up with the books she'd reached - I don't want to say more.

Besides, A Lost Lady and My Mortal Enemy are too brief and in some ways too delicate to dissect. Their heroines are a mixture of beguiling and conventional (Mrs Forrester, who becomes 'lost' in the course of the novel and over a passage of time), shrewd and spiteful (Mrs Henshawe, her own worst enemy). A Lost Lady focuses on a Red Cloud acquaintance of Cather's, and stays in Nebraska to chart the changes the author deplored. And there is shocking violence early on here, perpetrated on nature by a bully boy who will return to take charge in Part Two (Cather must have witnessed, or heard about, the action - too gross to be made up). My Mortal Enemy is split between a visit to New York and a bleak second part set in a west coast city. The observers are younger people who see only the angles of the whole, preserving an element of enigma about the protagonists. The control of narrative is masterly. And so on to the last two major novels in which Lee senses a decline - though she makes them seem fascinating enough to merit a last foray.

Two Soviet chamber masterpieces of 1927

The teenage Shostakovich entered the third term of my Russian music Zoom course three Thursdays ago with the audacious gambit of his First Symphony, which I managed to link to more Myaskovsky (the Sixth, his biggest and darkest symphony, took up the first third of the class, though the link to Shostakovich 1 was a passage in the finale of the Fourth). I've always had a problem hearing Shostakovich's first symphonic flourish placed at the end of a concert: the first two movements are brilliant and immediately characteristic, the third sludgy and the finale flailing - as I always found even before I knew he had real trouble ending the work.

Though shorter, the first Shostakovich outright masterpiece, I'd say, is the Prelude and Scherzo for string octet. It's up there with Mendelssohn's and Enescu's achievements in the same genre as teenagers, though very different in mood. I played the students just the end of the opening piece and the whole of the scherzo in a hell-for-leather, biting performance by the Borodin and Prokofiev Quartets, and the response was wildly enthusiastic. That's on YouTube, but oddly not downloadable. I searched others, and the most rewarding - visually as well as aurally - is this distinguished line-up from the Utrecht Festival. The Scherzo starts at 6m03 if you want to cut straight to the frenzy. 

The same was true of how they reacted to the slow movement of Gavriil Popov's Chamber Symphony (Septet), composed in the same year as the Shostakovich work was premiered. In the next class I focused on the year 1927, the high watermark of Soviet musical experimentalism, when the influence was still international (I'm quite pleased to have found a Malevich from that year, reproduced up top, which chimes well with the two finds). Shostakovich's octet pieces were merely premiered that year, but so much else can be shoehorned from a variety of styles - the 'mecanique' imported from France, post-Honegger Pacific 231, in the shape of Mossolov's Zavod with its anvil and metal sheet (I also followed up on Prokofiev's Second Symphony and Le Pas d'acier first), the percussion-only scherzo from Alexander Tcherepnin's First Symphony (actually premiered in Paris), Roslavets' near-atonal Third Piano Trio and the various pieces that Prokofiev heard the younger generation play on his first visit to the Soviet Union early in the year. 

His first acquaintance with Shostakovich was to witness the young firebrand play his First Piano Sonata. and he found it a relief in duller company; he thought Deshevov too insistent with his repertoire, though admired its humour (cue the short piano piece Rails); and got a sense of Popov's incredible talent. The outer movements of the Chamber Symphony have something in common with Prokofiev's own Quintet, composed for Boris Romanov's ballet Trapeze back in 1925, and owe a lot to French chamber music of the time. But the slow movement is unique, I think, especially in the rocking, bluesy passage which appears twice, perhaps the first hint of jazz in Soviet music. You may want to hear the whole thing, and another Dutch-based performance here, this time conducted by Valery Gergiev in Rotterdam, is good to watch; the slow movement begins at13m14s.

That cued the jazz which briefly flourished, partly due to the Leningrad premiere of Krenek's Jonny Spielt Auf (Jonny Strikes Up). So we ended with Shostakovich's arrangement of Youmans' 'Tea for Two' from No, No, Nanette, popular in Russia as 'Tahiti Trot', and one of the companion pieces with which it shared a concert, an equally wacky Scarlatti sonata arrangement. Since then we've moved on to The Nose, The Golden Age and The Bolt; the blow is about to fall next Thursday.