In mid-August I spent 4 days in Launde Abbey on a personal rather than organised retreat. I like the monastic-type punctuation of the day with services (though it’s not a monastery, just the retreat centre for the dioceses of Peterborough and of Leicester –and going to a Compline at 9pm in the gathering darkness with flickering candles was quite moving. The whole social distancing thing was extremely well handled – dining tables 2m apart, lots of use of face masks, very clear instructions for moving around buildings so you didn’t find people coming the other way. I felt very secure there from that perspective – and of course it is a place you can sit outside a lot in at this time of year. The focus of my reading was the science of climate change, which doesn’t make for much peace of mind…….given that the current Government is highly likely to be around until Dec 2029, their managing of the process of decarbonisation is a fairly hair-raising prospect in terms of any chance of reaching only a 1.5C shift by 2050. Currently there is largely an absence of a clear strategy and an action plan for this.
In August the BBC 4 relay of ‘Fidelio’ recorded just prior to lockdown, was broadcast one Sunday evening It featured Lise Davidsen – a future Brunnhilde and Isolde, she was a sensation in Tannhauser at Bayreuth last year, and she sounded amazing as Leonora. I had planned to watch this in a relay from ROHCG in mid-March which then got knocked out by lockdown – I am not sure how they got it recorded. I am reckoning they might have made a film of the dress rehearsal as a back-up for the main relay, since it was only then that the British tenor David Butt Philip rather than Kaufmann sung the role (I think(. I liked the concept of the production – 18th century first act, and modern dress with an audience in the 2nd, to show how a modern public can distance itself from political action. Maybe a bit obvious, but for me it worked. Fidelio is a difficult piece to bring off, from the very silly beginning to the amazing music at the end, but I thought this production handled it as well or better, even, than any other production I’ve seen over the years,
But I did have a sense of new impetus to listen a few weeks ago, and listened to some Haydn String Quartets – lovely! I then jumped onto I-Player and there’s been some super performances of Mahler in the Proms ‘greatest hits’ sequence going out nightly – a great Mahler 6 from the Boston Symphony and Andris Nelsons (2015), and a lovely Mahler 3 from Abbado (c.2007 or so).
The Guardian has been running a series of introductions to great composers and the one on Mahler seems to have particularly got to those feeling moved to offer comments – 278 of them; https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jul/29/mahler-where-to-start-with-his-music. I liked the one which said “Mahler’s music exerts an inexorable power over the listener that only Wagner can compare with. When listening to it, it seems like ‘this is the only way music should be”.
Here’s an interesting thing on the subject of Mahler – attached below is the last known picture of Mahler alive, which was only discovered recently (oddly) in a Viennese newspaper. Ermmm – not that you can see much of him, but there he is, being offloaded from the train in Vienna having travelled from New York to die, poor man……
The most moving Mahler performance I know – given its context, as well as the actual quality of the performance – is (quite widely available and in surprisingly good sound) Bruno Walter’s Mahler 9 performed with the Vienna Phil in the Grossen Musikvereinssaal in Vienna on 16th January 1938 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAw5b9anOhQ. Have you ever heard it? This was two months only before the Anschluss in March 1938. Astonishingly Mahler’s brother in law Arnold Rose was still the leader of the VPO at that time and was in that role for this performance. He later fled to Britain after his wife (ie Mahler’s sister) died but his daughter died in Auschwitz – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Ros%C3%A9. All of that history seems to hang over this performance…….
Some great music on the BBC as part of their archive Proms! There was the Lennie Bernstein Mahler 5 with the VPO from the 1987 Proms – which I thought was wonderful. So passionate…..some fantastic trumpet playing in particular from the VPO. A lot of the basic tempi were taken quite slowly, but then pushed forward where needed. I can’t imagine a better performance – the moment in the 2nd movement where the chorale that reappears at the close of the piece comes for the first time was revelatory.
John's musical journey 