Two holidays!!! I spent 5 days in Wales with my friend Chris. His place is very isolated, behind Barmouth, and towards the head of a valley, looking south – so that you can see, lit in the setting sun in the late afternoon, Cader Idris, one of the larger hills thereabouts. He lives without electricity, wifi, and phone connection. it isn’t his main place of residence – he actually has two other houses he migrates between, one on Hampstead and one in Lewes. In Wales he has tended the forest around his estate well and has now sold most of it off to the Woodland Trust, who will increase the amount of deciduous ‘Celtic rain forest’ content and reduce the amount of conifers put down for commercial purposes 40-50 years ago. It is an utterly silent magical place; you can go for days without seeing anyone else, though this time we did have a chat one day to the farmer who lives further down the valley. Days there with Chris have a certain sameness – leisurely breakfast, long walk in the hills with a packed lunch (the walks can last for 7 hours!), an early evening gin and tonic, usually a barbecue, and then musing with whisky over the burning fire, indoors or out, listening to Radio 3’s evening concert on Chris’ ancient battery-powered transistor radio (Chris is a classical music fan).
And I went on the Pilgrims Way walk. it’s a slightly made-up walk from Winchester to Canterbury, following something called St Swithun’s Way, between Winchester and London, and there’s then a slightly dubious but possible ancient trackway between Farnham and Guildford. You follow the North Downs Way from Guildford to Otford in Kent, after which you move onto the old pilgrim route from London to Canterbury. I managed to get to Winchester Cathedral’s Choral Evensong the evening before I left – without the boys that night but still , a wonderful sound! I last went there for an exhibition 6-7 years ago – it seemed as though they are doing choral evensong every day now. A fantastic nave – longest medieval nave in the UK? Europe? I was mainly staying in B and B’s and doing about 10-12 miles a day. One of the appealing parts of my progress was that all the churches en route have nice benches to sit on – I could almost phase each day’s walk around sitting on church benches for 10 minutes or so a time, and to have lunch on. The less appealing aspect was that because of Covid very few of them were open and by the look of it even fewer were functioning with full servicesI finished. I ended up in Canterbury going to a Choral Evensong (men only)and, the next morning, a said early Communion service at Canterbury Cathedral.
Allin all, a good thing to have done, particularly with so much time spent locally during lockdown, and it’s something I can definitely say I have ‘achieved’ – also it’s an area, though my parents lived not too far away from Farnham after retirement, I don’t really know very well (I think I last visited Canterbury Cathedral in about 1965 or 66!). It came about through a question suddenly posed to me by my son Chris at Christmas 2019 – what are you going to in the 20’s?, he asked, I misheard and thought he’d just said 2020, but, no, he was referring to my targets for achievement over the next decade! Apart from ‘not dying’, I was a bit stumped at first for targets, but doing the Pilgrims Way was something that suddenly bubbled up from somewhere in my unconscious mind, so, having mentioned it, I was sort of committed to doing it. I have now got the bug – I might do ‘Ely to Walsingham’ next year, another pilgrim trail…..I attach a typical picture of the Way – it is quite haunting in a sense. I was reading Chaucer in the evenings, and sometimes you get a whisper of voices from the past as you walk along in the silence of the Way. Lots of Autumnal colours…..I did feel a sense of calm along the route; it is very nice to be able just to have simple targets like ‘walk 10 miles’ as opposed to think about and send 10 emails….
And I went to some LIVE MUSIC. I went to the Wigmore Hall last week and this, on two days in September for concerts at 1.00pm and 7.30pm each week. None of them were perhaps concerts I’d trek down to London for in the normal run of things – but these are not normal times…. I heard Rachel Podger playing Bach violin sonatas, string quartets playing Bach, Beethoven, Shostakovich, Haydn and two modern British composers – a piece by Jonathan Dove – very accessible – and one by Roxanna Panufnik – a bit off the wall. The lunchtime concert – on BBC R3 I-player was by Elizabeth Llewellyn, a new name to me, who was absolutely outstanding. The Mahler *Ruckert lieder’ I found profoundly moving. She has a voice that seems to me to be of remarkable range – billed as a soprano, and with a CV singing roles like Micaela in Carmen, which I thought was a soprano roles, she nevertheless has very deep tones, sounding more like a contralto, and she has a lovely warm tone and some beautiful half-voices. It was fantastic to be able to focus on the music as you only can in a live performance, with time standing still and an appreciative audience, however socially distanced, around you. The whole thing was very well organised – staggered arrival times, no interval or bar, face masks throughout, and temperature testing on arrival. The Wigmore Hall’s definition of social distancing meant that it was only 10% full – I am not at all sure how they are making any money out of this, particularly as they claim to be paying the musicians their full fee, but I’m profoundly grateful to whoever’s footing the bill. It felt very safe – infinitely more so than my local pub. Tickets are allocated by ballot if you’re a WH Friend – which I am. Some of the concerts above were second choices – the likes of Andras Schiff and Sarah Connolly I haven’t been successful to get tickets for. London seemed very quiet still – I’d not been there since early February – with no crowds on the Tube and low numbers in restaurants
I went to two other concerts before ‘Lockdown 2’ in November. One was a visit to King’s Place to hear the Brodsky quartet play Beethoven Op 135 string quartet, the Grosse Fuge, and some Mendelssohn (this was about 75 mins, as it was an early evening concert – I combined it with a British Museum exhibition about Tantra, and got back home the same day). A great concert – I was amazed to read that (though quartets have a brand name, like orchestras, and often have a succession of players in them) the Brodsky quartet was founded nearly 50 years ago and that two of the original musicians are still part of the group. I thought the performance was lyrical and thoughtful – a really intense performance. Op 130 I was due to go to the following week but that was cancelled, as were several Sheffield events, including Roderick Williams singing settings of Hardy poems. I was still hoping that the events I had booked on 3rd December (a recital by Elizabeth Llewellyn, a wonderful voice – see previous) and 5th December – a piano quartet – might go ahead but it was not to be….! The Tantra exhibition I was a bit bemused by – though I know something about Kali and Durga, and indeed have seen temples in India dedicated to them, I got thoroughly confused by the heady mixture of gods’ names, yoga, philosophy and interesting practices, shall we say, and didn’t really get a great deal out of it. I wished I’d gone instead to the British Library exhibition of Hebrew manuscripts, which would have been more assimilable……I’d booked to go the following week to that, but lockdown intervened. I also went to a Music in the Round concert in Sheffield – again effectively socially distanced – with the Ensemble 360 quartet playing a Haydn Op 77 quartet, and Beethoven Op131. I have often found it quite difficult to grapple and understand this work – it seemed much easier this time with a special focus because of the privilege of the event
In terms of music listened to at home, I really enjoyed the live Rattle / LSO Elgar/VW/Ades TV prom. I thought the programming was excellent – VW5 an inspired choice! And the appearance of the LSO – in terms of what they were wearing – would not have put off a casual viewer, who might therefore be drawn into the music – by contrast Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony last Friday were in full white tie and tails and female equivalents, which just looks increasingly ridiculous in this day and age. I listened to the last few days of the Proms – an amazing archive Beethoven 9 conducted by Klaus Tennstedt in the early 90’s and a very drab Last Night. The BBC handled the whole issue of the latter very badly, I think – they could very easily have used the pandemic as a good excuse to do something entirely different – as they did for instance after 9/11. No-one would have dared complain if they said that the Last Night would not run as normal as a response to the situation and the 40-odd thousand at that time dying in the pandemic. But instead they ran straight into all the predictable issues, tried to get round them lamely and fell flat on their faces. I attended about 5 or so Last Nights myself in the 70’s and the format was the same then – when the main point of it is for those Promenaders who have been together for the best part of two months on most nights to have a party, it is ridiculous to have kept the same party format for 50 years!! It’s been a bit better in terms of the audience since they required anyone requesting a LN ticket to have been to 5 other Proms, and that’s promoted a healthy dose of ironic flag-waving, but it still brings out/attracts a lot of people with little interest in the music and a great many axes to grind.
Here’s a lovely video clip of Lennie Bernstein ‘conducting’ the VPO, https://slippedisc.com/2020/10/leonard-bernstein-it-was-30-years-ago-today
and also two fascinating piano rolls of Mahler playing his work – have you come across these before? I think I have heard the 4th Symphony final movement previously but never the first movement of the 5th!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2eOS7rKF5g
John's musical journey 