Wanted: home help for Nuremberg cobbler

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

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



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


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

Late night Lamentations

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

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


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

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


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


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

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

BoJo's bike idea

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

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


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


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


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


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


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



*charity mugging

Verbier: extra nectar

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

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


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

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



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


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


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


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

Somewhere film

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

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

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

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

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



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

Two for Mahler

With thanks to 'Schopenhauerian' on the BBC Message Boards, who posted the link, and acknowledgment to Gavin Plumley over at Entartete Musik, who I belatedly recalled put up the same YouTube song some time back and who's another almost as much in love with Sondheim as he is with Mahler, let's hear it for Lainey and yet another variation on her immortal toast from Sondheim's Company. 'Two for Mahler' is acknowledgement that at the end of this post you can hear another interpretation proposing 'one for Mahler', Sondheim's bottoms-up to another anniversary boy. In her terrific one-woman show, the divine Stritch told us that at the time of the Company premiere, she thought 'a piece of Mahler's' might be a slice of cake you went round to Mahler's Broadway deli to consume after 'a matinee, a Pinter play'.

This, anyway, in keen anticipation of tonight's Proms birthday tribute including Bryn Terfel, Maria Friedman and Dame Judi's immortal rendition of 'Send in the Clowns'. When I saw her play Desiree in A Little Night Music at the National, it struck me how you don't really need a great singing voice for this - Glynis Johns didn't have one either - but you do need an impeccable sense of musical timing and/or freedom (which Sian Philips as the matriarch didn't seem to have). Would so love to have seen Angela Lansbury on Broadway - again, the nuancing seemed wonderful from what I've heard. Do listen to this remarkable octogenarian talking to Mark Coles on the BBC World Service's Strand programme. Now that she's left the run, who's going to take her part but - Elaine Stritch. Bernadette Peters will now play the Zeta Jones role. Worth a trip? Perhaps, if only I didn't find Sondheim's second act a let-down after the bewitching Bergman original.

Talking of veterans, if only they'd bring in Cleo Laine tonight to sing 'I'm Still Here'. Her performance of it on the vintage 'Cleo sings Sondheim' CD, one of our most played, is up there with Elaine's. One Dame who wouldn't be singing, but might do a nice line in presentation, is the recently-maligned Julie Andrews. What a knockout performer she was, though, right up to the catastrophe. If you doubt it, watch '(Not) Getting Married Today' from the Sondheim anthology Putting it Together. The picture quality ain't great, to put it mildly, but the sound is just fine.



In the meantime, let's end with another consummate performer giving a different take on 'The Ladies who Lunch', Carol Burnett. Anyone see the 'spiders' episode of the Larry Sanders Show in which she tells her host she saw his balls? Quite apart from that, I reckon it was the funniest episode ever. Anyway, that's not on YouTube, I guess for copyright reasons. Here's Carol. I need a bit of cheering up* anyway after the farrago of last night's Zandonai car crash at Opera Holland Park.



Sunday press: you can read the Arts Desk review of last night's semi-spectacular here. Plus another of Chris Christodoulou's photos since I can. No need, I guess, to signal the stars?


* Did I say cheering up? Watched it through to the end and it's wrist-slitting time...

Verbier fare

No. it wasn't all lotus eating. For the most part I kept myself to myself, stocked up on delicious local produce and fresh bread in my self-catering flat (the second, after I'd moaned about the dark, viewless first, just perfect) and missed a couple of banquets because of my devotion to late-night Leonskaja after the main concerts of the evening.

Bit of a pity, that, on my second night, because there was a big do out at a restaurant near the golf course. I arrived at 11.40pm, delirious from Leonskaja's Schubert D850, just in time to find the only folk I actually knew on the point of departure. The food was finished, but not all the distinguished guests had gone. As Bashmet, Maisky and other familiar faces flitted past, I saw the divine Anne Sofie von Otter (pictured below for the Verbier Festival by Nicolas Brodard singing the ballad of Faure's Melisande in that evening's concert) and wanted to tell her how much her tribute to Anthony Rolfe Johnson had meant. Yes, she said, so many famous losses already this year, and several others close to her. And we talked a bit about Tony's warm and ever-helpful collegiality.


Spoke to that romantic young cellist Andreas Brantelid about the morning's Debussy trio revelation. Also saw Bengt Forsberg, and wanted to press the flesh after that totally individual recital he'd given at the Wigmore. Never met a friendlier artist. He was there with his daughter, and told her delightedly I was the one who'd given him that review, and how I'd understood his intentions. I pressed the Grainger celebrations idea next year on him, and quick as a flash he came up with the relevant Percy dates.

So there was talk if nothing more than a cream eclair to go with it. Earlier, at least, some of us had enjoyed a sumptuous reception at the simple but obviously first-rate Grange Hotel where I chatted with the delightful Laurence from the tourist office about Edinburgh, where she'd au paired in days gone by. Dvora and Michael Lewis and I agreed that the above tuna and mango spoons and all the other bonne bouches were the best we'd ever tasted. Dix points for presentation, too: how's about this for confectionery?


Even so, I was very happy to potter around delis, patisserie and Migros seeing what Valaisian fare was on offer. Bought some choice local meats and was pleased to find seasonal raspberries, apricots and the best cherries ever, many of which I consumed on the balcony of my lodging staring over at the western peaks.

Joyce and Svevo in Trieste

There they are, Trieste's two most original literary chroniclers, among the many statues in the public gardens described by Svevo (born Ettore Schmitz, a typical Triestine mix - the nom de plume marries Italian and Swabian roots) as 'that greenery which seems so pure in the midst of the grayness of the streets and houses that surrounds it'.

I confess that this will be a very patchy entry, as I hardly trailed around the Joyce sites in Trieste much more than I did the ones in Dublin (in that instance, not at all). And I'm only halfway through Svevo's putative masterpiece, Zeno's Conscience, which so far has disappointingly little about the city in which it's set, though it does make me laugh from time to time.

Still, we'd just come back from the Julian Alps and Udine in time for Bloomsday, 16 June. There was a happening of sorts starting at the Urban Hotel Design, somewhat chaotic as these Italian esposizioni usually are. In a very crowded room, a man in a straw hat clowned around a bit on a whistlestop reading of Ulysses with musical interludes. We were shown films of the four artists involved in the 'projetto', one of whom made fun of picking up Ulysses, putting it down and declaring that Joyce could go hang; Svevo was the man for him (the two are not unconnected: Joyce saw Svevo into print and is even supposed to have modelled Leopold Bloom on his Triestine drinking buddy). Here are a couple of Luigi Tolotti's digitally elaborated collages.



Then we went walkabout, up to the street with the Augustan arch, but it had all fizzled a bit and so the two of us branched off and headed back for the harbour.


Joyce lived with Nora Barnacle in no less than nine poky apartments in the vicinity as a struggling writer and Berlitz School English teacher, fascinated by the Triestine dialect and the red-light district, both of which are supposed to have found their way into Ulysses - a book with a double consciousness split between Trieste and Dublin. He also spent hours absorbing the Greek orthodox liturgies in the Church of San Nicolo dei Greci.


It was brilliantly illuminated by the late afternoon sun when we visited, especially when the west door swung open. The young sacristan was very welcoming, and told us how large a community it still hosted on a Sunday morning.


We spent one of our four nights at the James Joyce Hotel in the old city - quiet, clean, rather dark and not bad value for money. Of course I have to show you the toiletries.


Even so, for our last night we returned to the hotel recommended by blogging pal Willym, Le Corderie, high on the hill and quite a hike from the centre of town (though weaving up and down through the backstreets, we caught some marvellous art nouveau). Le Corderie is modern, filled with books in every room, and boasting two especially delightful members of staff in the incredibly vivacious Edwiga and the very nice girl who served us breakfast on the terrace and gave us extra helpings of cherries. And what a breakfast it was - our new friends certainly weren't wrong about that.


But how have I got from high literature to food? I can't say that Svevo's Zeno would have especially approved - the idle, neurasthenic and hypochondriacal merchant's son is much more interested in cigarettes.

An Olympian in the Alps

I've turned Schubert-crazy again. As with Wagner, the mania comes and goes in waves. It all started with The Greatest Piano Recital I've Ever Heard, Richter's at Chichester Cathedral in March 1989, when he took an hypnotic half-hour over the first movement of the G major Sonata (D894). Then I hunted out all his recordings of the sonatas, and found his heavenly length the only way I wanted to hear Schubert. Now his one-time duo partner and protegee Elisabeth Leonskaja has come out from under the Richter shadow and forged her own great interpretations. And it's the palmy days of Richter all over again, though with a very different musical personality at the helm.


At Verbier high in the Alps, where I've just been privileged to spend three and a half music-and-walking-packed days, Leonskaja is currently working her way through the complete Schubert sonatas - half of them for the first time ever, as she told me in an interview which will appear probably around the time of her return to London to play D894 later this year. She clearly had as much smiling affection as I did for the first of the three late-night programmes I was privileged to hear in the vast temporary construction of the Salle des Combins. There, having moved from an apparently disastrous encounter with a poor piano and rough acoustics in the Verbier Cinema, she played the Sonata in B major, D575, and the unusual five-movement E major, D459. Hardly a couple of bars pass without Schubert revealing his own lovable, harmonically wayward personality, and you can rarely predict the progress of a melody (the third movement of D459 struck me forcibly in this respect).

So what is it that makes Leonskaja's Schubert so special? I came late to her extraordinarily deep and thoughtful concert-hall approach - music as a sacred rite - with the second half of her Chopin recital late last year. Here, it seemed, the range was extended. She can indeed be as Olympian as Schubert himself (her word for the opening movement of D850), with that fabulously weighted full sonority; but she catches the essence of his ability to leap from the thunderously epic to the intimately lyric. So we ranged - forgive the corny images prompted purely by a desire to put up a couple of Verbier snaps - from the babbling, high-altitude brook of D850's delicious finale


to the forbidding heights, glaciers and cataracts that disrupt the ineffable slow movement and finale of D959 (a performance which brought an instant standing ovation, as the colossal D major Sonata should have done the previous evening).


The articulation is phenomenal, the emotional commitment total. And the stern, concentrated figure on the platform is in extraordinary contrast to the vivacious, humorous woman you meet offstage - though one thing, a great humanity, connects the two.

And for now I'd better stop waxing lyrical, return to Verbier another day (due for a big Arts Desk piece on Sunday) and just count myself lucky to have heard great pianism in hugely contrasting styles, from Lewis and Pires at the Albert Hall on Wednesday to the 18 year old Kit Armstrong pouring forth musicality and playfulness in a Verbier trio concert and, of course, Leonskaja magisterially at the heart of it all.

Farewell, Tony Rolfe Johnson

One woe treads close upon another's heels. Now the two greatest British tenors of their generation, Philip Langridge and Anthony Rolfe Johnson, have taken leave of us within a matter of months (Robert Tear, who was such fun when we met in a BBC studio last year, is I guess slightly older, and going strong, touch wood). Tony - I only call him that through the resident heldentenor, who knew him from Aldeburgh and ENO - had been ill with Alzheimer's for many years, so for the family I'm guessing this will come as a release.

I thought of him when I put up that heartbreaking Poulenc song 'Bleuet', though I didn't want to draw attention to his state then. And now, as before, it's time first to celebrate his stylish art. Top, spectacular choice has to go to that 'Fuor del mar' from Idomeneo.



I've never heard it sung better - the same would go for his Monteverdi Orfeo, and indeed Jessica Duchen chose the stunning 'Possente spirto' over on her Standpoint blog - and it brings back memories of a golden age, with the two great Mozart opere serie performed side by side with near-perfect casts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

That was something Langridge couldn't replicate. Of course he always had the neurotic, intense edge in Britten, though it was a treat to see their Aschenbachs almost side by side. And ARJ's Grimes on the Haitink recording is a beautiful piece of singing. What I want to hear - and I can't, as I'm not at home - are the Michelangelo Sonnets in that ineffable recording with Graham Johnson. They're not as far as I can see on YouTube, but here's one of the Hardy settings from Winter Words instead.

Winckelmann in Trieste

The name won't mean much even to the few tourists who visit the loveliest corner of Trieste - and there were none on the morning we wandered around in the baking sun puzzling out how to find the entrance to the Museo Civico which lodges the Winckelmann Memorial


in its Lapidary Garden.


So what does Johann Winckelmann mean to me? Really not much more than a name, somewhat mocked in Richard Jenkyns's The Victorians and Ancient Greece for his dogged insistence that Greek art was all 'noble simplicity and calm grandeur' and his 'peeping Tom' view of the original Athenian gymnasiums with their naked youths as an education in 'the beauty of forms'. Walter Pater pinpointed Winckelmann's partial view when he declared that 'the eye is fixed on the sharp, bright edge of high Hellenic culture, but loses sight of the sombre world against which it strikes.'

Alas for Winckelmann, the 'sombre world' did for him after only eight days in Trieste, when the young Italian he'd taken up with murdered him. Troubled rent-boy or thief pure and simple? We'll never know, though Winckelmann's homoerotic dithyrambs sugges the former. Anyway, according to Jan Morris in my current bible, 'all educated Europe, we are told, was saddened by the news of his death - "universal mourning and lamentation", Goethe wrote'. The cenatoph, Morris adds, was 'erected under the patronage of an emperor, three kings and a grand duke,



containing a fine marble image of Dr Winckelmann and sundry examples of the busts, torsos, thoughtful muses and fragrant heroes of his enthusiasms'. Eheu, fugaces.




There are some fine sculptural fragments around the Lapidary Garden, too, including this fragment, one of three from the nearby site of Aquileia which we must visit next time.


And the Museum proper is charming, obviously benefitting from a recent injection of cash and proud of the Egyptian collection assembled by a couple of distinguished Triestine archaeologists. It's not at odds with the memorial strain here to feature four very handsome canopic jars, those mysterious god-as-animal-headed containers for the intestines:





All these pictures: maybe we need Debussy's 'Canope' from the second book of Preludes to absorb them by. I'd choose Zimerman if pressed, but as I have his Preludes on the shelves, let's hear great Gieseking.



By pure serendipity, I've just discovered that 'Canope' is also among the selected preludes on a 1967 Richter recital disc for which I'm just about to write the notes. And apart from the Festival Hall hackers and coughers, it's spellbinding.

Just two more items from an absorbing collection, which we didn't have time enough to see at length before the museum shut at noon. Here's the rim of a funeral jar from one of the prehistoric sites of the local Castellieri civilization up in the karst


and the museum's real treasure, though not from around here: a fifth century BC rhyton from Tarentum.


All these aides memoires I needed, by the way, because they didn't have any postcards, and even the guide book was sold out. A shame: it's a wonderful little museum and I'd like to have known more about its collectors.