I can’t resist putting in another youtube link to this blog – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2EeQVwp1WY. This is the Reggie Goodall / Remedios / Linda Esther Gray Tristan from the ENO / Coliseum c 1981. I went to it, but have never heard a recording – I haven’t listened to this yet. The Brangaene is Felicity Palmer…….! There’s also a Newsnight feature about the Tristan  – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLJSy91_gwc  . Wouldn’t happen nowadays…….

I gave my talk via Zoom to the Wagner Society Manchester on Wagner and Revolution. It wasn’t an  academic study, though it did make use of a number of different books by people who are academics which I alluded to at the end of the talk – rather it was a summary for the interested lay person of issues around this subject, from the reading I’d done over the past few months.. There were four parts to the talk:  1. Wagner’s thoughts about the concept of revolution, and the background to that; 2. Wagner’s actual engagement with revolutionary activity; 3. Wagner’s operas and revolution; 4. Wagner’s impact on other revolutionaries . It was my  overall thesis that Wagner held utopian socialist views in the 1840’s and early 1850’s, and that, though they later became less all-determining in his thinking, they contribute important elements to the development of The Ring, and remained with him till the end of his life. How to regenerate the modern world was throughout his life an abiding concern – though his operas have very different answers to those questions both in relation to each other and even within the one work. The literature on this subject is vast, and people’s perception of the importance of utopian socialism in the development of Wagner’s art is partially tinged by their own overarching political perspectives. In the talk I tried to retain a balanced perspective. I found lots of good books on the subjects – Mark Berry was particularly impressive, and Bryan Magee. A wonderful essay in the Wagner Companion from the 1970’s by Michael Tanner too – I used to be one of the ‘select’ group of undergraduates at his Sunday afternoon events listening to Wagner, the room at ?Corpus Christi dominated by huge blow-up photo portraits of Furtwangler, Nijinsky and Wittgenstein.

The talk seemed to go quite well – though it over-ran time-wise – and people said nice things afterwards…………About 40 or so people came along online

I always used to think that Vaughan Williams had a limited range and some rather irritating and repeating musical tics, and that most of his music could be fitted into the ‘cowpat’ tradition, with a dash of Ravel or Tudor thrown in for good measure. But when you read Ardritt’s book, and think about the totality of what he achieved, it is much, much wider than that – the Tallis Fantasia and the 9th Symphony are barely recognisable as the same composer’s work. In fact I recall reading somewhere that, while Pierre Boulez had no time for Elgar, he admired VW, as someone who constantly was learning/thinking/changing his approach. My favourite pieces are Symphonies 1, 2,3,4,5,6, Job, Tallis Fantasia, The Pilgrim’s Progress opera, The Lark Ascending, On Wenlock Edge – and there’s still masses to discover – quite exciting. It’s touching to read in Ardritt’s book that Elgar, who was initially wary of RVW, seeing him as a member of the musical establishment (relative of Darwin, wife a cousin of Virginia Woolf), eventually got quite pally with him and enthused over RVW’s Sancta Civitas – which of course is very much the Last Judgement oratorio which Elgar didn’t write
I am going to try and get to the Three Choirs Festival this year – picture below.

One of the most moving RVW performances I have been to was a Proms performance in 1975 of VW5 conducted by Sir Adrian Boult – this great work had been premiered in the RAH 32 years earlier and Boult, who conducted many Vaughan Williams’ premieres, conducted it first there in 1944. It was an interpretation I shall never forget. And I have been lucky enough to hear two performances of Pilgrim’s Progress in the last 10 years – the ENO production and a production at the RNCM – which envisaged the Progress as the dream of a fevered soldier.

I’ve just been reading a biography of Vaughan Williams – by Keith Alldritt – Vaughan Williams: Composer, Radical, Patriot – a Biography. I really enjoyed reading it – occasionally it’s a bit irritating with the historical recaps, and references, but it tells well the remarkable story of this man’s artistic journey from approx 1905 to 1955,and it is very good on the culture in which VW was brought up, and musical life before and after WW1 – plus the complexity of his relationships with women. More in a second post

The things I wasn’t able to go to in 2020 include:

• Halle  RVW Symphony No 9
• Bournemouth Symphony Elektra with Catherine Foster
• Mahler 3, Halle/Elder
• Madama Butterfly – Halle/Elder
• Christ on the Mount of Olives – Halle/Elder
• Busoni Piano concerto with Igor Levit
• Beethoven Missa Solemnis BBC Philharmonic
• Messiaen Piano Recital, Kings Place
• Elektra – Nina Stemme, ROHCG
• Tristan und Isolde ROHCG
• Rusalka ENO
• Steven Osborne recital
• Rattle Dream of Gerontius LSO
• Rattle Tristan Act 2 with Nina Stemme, LSO
• Hercules, Handel ENO
  Nixon in China, Adams ENO
  Peter Grimes, Britten ENO
  King Priam, Tippett ENO
  The Valkyrie, Wagner ENO
• Parsifal, Wagner Opera North
• Girl of the Golden West ON
• Alcina, Handel ON
• Visits by the Met Orchestra / LA Philharmonic
• Buxton Festival
• Let alone other London orchestras and ROHCG 20/21
• Etc etc
  Oh dear……..
  

There were two notable broadcast/streamed events at this time – the Opera North Fidelio and the ENO Mozart Requiem. The Opera North Fidelio was a knock-out – again, as with the Halle in February, Rachel Nicholls was a glorious Leonore, and Toby Spence surprised me with the power of his voice and general presence as Florestan. And Mark Wiggleworth, while taking on some hair-raisingly fast tempi, really gave the performance dynamism and energy, and the Opera North Orchestra played brilliantly. This was a paid (£!5) performance that was worth every penny.  Rocco was Brindley Sherratt again as with the Halle and it was nice to hear Fflur Wyn(Opera North Susanna, March)) as Marzelline plus Don Pizarro was played by ex-Wotan Robert Hayward.

I didn’t enjoy the ENO Mozart Requiem anything like as much, partly I think because Mark Wigglesworth drove it too hard and also because, though a worthy work, there are probably better pieces by which to convey to a television audience the depths music can offer when dealing with death and grieving. Again Elizabeth Llewellyn impressed and I also liked Sarah Connolly’s voice – it’s great to see her singing and seeming well following her breast cancer last year.

I signed up to  the Halle live stream series of 9 concerts between December and March – about £10 a live stream ticket. Not really value for money, when there is so much freely available, but I do feel I ought to support them – from 3 December, streamed on demand from Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, and available on demand until March. The first streamed event had a very well-defined and enjoyable Brahms 1 from Mark Elder, as well as a suite of music from Mastersingers

December meant I could at least do some Christmas shopping for my family’s presents.  The most exciting musical thing on the horizon was planning the church Christmas carol service!! This was planned to take place outside the church in the churchyard – luckily the church has a large open space uncluttered by graves at the east end so that makes it possible, for otherwise everyone would be tripping over graves and suing us! Unless the weather proved to be truly foul, most people here are inured to standing around in murk, rain and wind to some extent, and we could use the Village Hall audio system to broadcast the organ to the assembled multitude. Our other Christmas services were able to carry on inside church as per normal – I reckon we can fit about 50 in at a socially-distanced squeeze, and that would have been enough for any projected 1000 Christmas Day service – the Midnight Mass would only normally have between 6 -20. The carol service though was a bit on and off until we were confident about the weather – beyond a certain point the equipment wouldn’t be able to cope. But we managed to do it with about 120 people there, despite some quite cold weather, and it went very well – lighting and sound came from various local people who have professional-level ability and kit to deploy, and we were Covid-secure, with people singing the carols from their smartphones rather than any service sheets being given out. Curiously the C of E guidance for such outdoor events is that you are to wear masks except when singing, which seems a bit counter-intuitive!  People seemed very appreciative of its having been organised – the only village event of any size to have happened since mid-March. We also made about £300 for charity!!

The other big event worthy of note was getting Sir Mark Elder – and it was very kind of him to offer to do this – to do a talk for the Wagner Society Manchester. My Wagner Soc Committee colleague Edwina posted this excellent report of the event Report of Sir Mark Elder’s Talk – Wagner Society Manchester

And so onwards to Lockdown 3……………….

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 4^th Symphony final movement previously but never the first movement of the 5^th!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2eOS7rKF5g

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 – 18^th century first act, and modern dress with an audience in the 2^nd, 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 2^nd movement where the chorale that reappears at the close of the piece comes for the first time was revelatory.

In July – one of the ‘pleasures’ – relatively speaking –  of lockdown has been the time to look a lot at streamed performance, and programmes on Youtube etc For instance this is a lovely and recent film about Mahler’s First Symphony https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5DfYcT5icY and here is a super performance by Lenny Bernstein of Das Lied von der Erde  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idRevTkIPts . Both these served to cheer me up – at least for a while.

The Vienna Opera site has had some amazing performances  an absolutely gripping performance of Der Rosenkavalier, for instance, with Felicity Lott as the Marschallin from Vienna in the 1990’s, with Carlos Kleiber conducting, no less, on the Vienna Opera website –  really worth watching – https://www.staatsoperlive.com/event/2/3bc640b8-f09b-4424-9068-5bf7c5587504/watch. I also saw the recent excellent Frau ohne Schatten conducted by Thielemann. Reminds me again of the 70’s and going to memorable performances of Der Rosenkavalier and Otello at Covent Garden conducted again by Carlos Kleiber and Die Frau ohne Schatten, conducted by Solti. Talking of Kleiber there’s a wonderful film clip of him conducting one of the Vienne New Year concerts in the late 80’s/ early 90’s, enjoying himself but with a very  steely glint in his eye – I am sure I have read somewhere or seen a documentary that said he was normally paralysed by stage fright before a performance and that was why he was seen so relatively rarely – at least outside Germany. I also remember hearing that, because he was so well paid as a conductor, he wasn’t keen on doing the New Year’s Day concerts in Vienna at first, and was eventually persuaded only when they offered him, in lieu of any fee, a particular sports car he’d always wanted……He was also apparently a well-known womaniser – how might he have fared in the (absolutely reasonable and needed) #MeToo era, with Levine, DuToit and Gatti all having fallen (or been pushed) on their swords? In fact I have just found the documentary I think all this was from – on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta8Tqjn7Suo  . Do have a look – it’s quite moving. While I’m about it, on the subject of conductors, there’s also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e-KWlMl1Q8, a BBC documentary on Goodall.

I have been enjoying hearing composers I am not familiar with, A particular find has been the Finzi cello concerto – very British in its way but a voice that sounds neither like Elgar or RVW. I have a great recording by Yo Yo Ma. The second movement is the one to listen to first – very beautiful. I believe it was about the last work he completed before he died, relatively young, in his 50’s, and it has that sort of autumnal feel. Here is a Youtube link to a recording  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU4eOpFO_k8. The second movement is 16’40 into the recording, which also seems to be by Yo Yo Ma but might be a different performance to the one I’ve got. I used to know someone whose uncle was an amateur violinist who played with Finzi in the amateur orchestra he conducted in Berkshire or Surrey in the late 40’s and early 50’s – he always used to say what a nice, very humble person he was. I find the Finzi work much more satisfying than the better-known Walton one, and I’ve never really got on with Britten’s Cello Symphony. Bax is another one I’m getting to know more – the 3rd symphony is particularly fine

I came across also a wonderful bit of Tudor music I had never heard before – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmLIqk9dQfM. In Media Vita (‘In the Middle of Life is Death’), by John Sheppard, I have been listening to it again and again

And then I also spent a bit of time enjoying getting to know works by Weinberg, a slightly younger contemporary of Shostakovich, who was Polish by origin, had two narrow escapes from German invasions, and finally settled in Moscow from September 1943. He was a good friend and supporter of Shostakovich – who reciprocated. You can hear the Shostakovich influence in the music but it is less spikey, less mordant, than S. The recent recording by ‘Mirga’ and the CBSO of the 21st symphony (Kaddish’) is wonderful – with Mirga herself singing a wordless lament in the final movement. A great work by any standards. I’ve also enjoyed the 20th symphony and a beautiful ‘cello concerto. Masses to discover….!!

Oh and In July I did have a day out to Lincoln , my first outing beyond the Hope Balley since March (apart from a day servicing the car in Sheffield)

At the end of June I will have spent 18 weeks without an evening outside the village. 126 days ‘in’ must be a first for me since childhood, and feels extremely odd. I have determined to do two things in the next few months: one, I will spend a few days at a retreat centre in Leicestershire I know, which is set in beautiful countryside, has a great library and does excellent food, in mid-August. It will be so good to be in a different place. Also, I am planning to do the Pilgrims’ Way walk in ?late September / early October from Winchester to Canterbury (or as much of it as I can walk within 10 days), if I can find sufficient pubs/B and B’s to stay in en route (I loathe camping), and if Covid rules permit

And in June I began to realise the full consequences of Covid 19 and lockdown for musicians  – their well-being, livelihoods and income – and live music, and those who organise it, and love it, and began to feel despondent. Though there are various things I continue to do, with varying degrees of commitment, the buzz I have got in the last few years and which has made my life more interesting has come from live concerts and operas, live theatre, cinema, eating out and travel; none of these look remotely possible in the short to medium term. There are, I am sure, huge numbers of creative ideas around as to how to manage this situation, but not many of them seem consonant with making money – I went to a ‘Virtual Reception’ with the Halle Orchestra, on Zoom the other day, as I am in a small way a supporter, and Mark Elder was talking about the idea of hiring the Bridgewater Hall for the evening, and doing a programme of say an hour and a quarter three times over, with a distanced audience of 400 at each show. But the problem goes beyond this – outside London, classical music relies disproportionately on the over 70’s, who are highly unlikely to turn up to anything any time soon until there is a vaccine. I fear we are looking at a setting back of the clock in classical music terms to the 60’s – few touring orchestras, relatively little happening outside London, no ‘garden opera’ outside Glyndebourne – and that it will take beyond my lifetime for things to develop towards the degree of richness and depth that we were experiencing 3 months ago. But maybe I am being pessimistic – I hope so…….

I do remember also thinking about what I had learned from lockdown – in some ways depressingly little. Yes, I do feel I have slowed down in a way that’s positive. If I look back on the first week of lockdown – and let’s say that’s from Sat March 21 to Sat March 28, during that period I would have been: 

–              Going to a performance of R Strauss’ Elektra in Birmingham and staying the night there

–              Running a Teaching and Learning Committee of the School Governors locally

–              Helping as a steward in a Philosophy Café event at Sheffield Cathedral

–              Attending a ‘Leading your Governing Board’ training event in Chesterfield

–              Giving a talk to a group of Methodists in Wakefield about my experiences in Palestine

–              Going to a concert of late Beethoven piano sonatas by Steven Osborne in Sheffield

–              Facilitating a talk by Keith Warner (Director Covent Garden ‘Ring’, 2003-2018) and Barry Millington (Wagner scholar) in Manchester about staging Wagner

This is all pretty manic, and I have enjoyed myself just as much sitting in the garden reading most afternoons. But I am not sure I have had any massive spiritual experiences or vast revelations. I am probably fitter than I’ve been for a long time, and I realise I could easily combine maintaining that degree of fitness with the sort of activity outlined above. I’ve made some nettle wine, which is a new one on me

Norman Lebrecht was having a real go around the same time at the South Bank Centre https://slippedisc.com/2020/06/why-londons-south-bank-needs-to-go-bust/?. I think this is – to my regret – probably true. It is difficult to see what the South Bank is doing for its grant given that presumably orchestras and artist management companies are paying for the hall hire of specific gigs, and its multitude of food outlets are entirely commercial in nature. I went to another Halle Orchestra Virtual Reception where they were talking about the Bridgewater Hall, which operates much more commercially, grounded essentially on middle-of-the-road rock concerts; until social distancing was totally eased, the BH could not afford to be anything other than mothballed (ie even if the Halle could perform there to a socially distanced audience and at a loss, it wouldn’t be possible). Lebrecht also posted rumours about the BBC halving its orchestras from 4 (BBC Symphony, BBC Philharmonic, BBC NOW, and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra). I can see the logic of this – the strength of the Halle, as it would be for the Liverpool and Birmingham Orchestras is that they have really strong local emotionally-grounded support – among the London orchestras probably the LSO only has something like that. There was sad one moment in the Virtual Reception – Joyce Kennedy, the widow of Michael, a well-known Elgar and Vaughan William scholar based in Manchester who’s in her 80’s, said she was worried she would never get to hear another live concert again…….

There were also these sorts of articles appearing in the press – both rather depressing.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jun/09/we-could-go-to-the-wall-in-12-weeks-why-isnt-classical-music-putting-up-a-fight-coronavirus

and

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jun/10/orchestras-might-not-survive-after-coronavirus-pandemic-uk-conductors

And in May I remember thinking about things I’ll do when all the Covid-19 stuff has finished. I really want to do another tour of some European opera houses and concert halls. In 2015, on vacation from Pakistan I sent a glorious 8 days in Austria and Germany – two days in Vienna seeing the sights but also going to the Opera and seeing Don Giovanni (excellent and intelligent production) and then Anna Nebtreko in Eugene Onegin – I’d not seen her before and she was really fantastic as Tatiana. A memorable evening – and it certainly does no harm to have the Vienna Philharmonic in the pit. Then I went to Munich to hear two of the Munich-based orchestras playing music by Shostakovich, Beethoven, Prokofiev and Hindemith, conducted by Valery Gergiev and Vladimir Jurowski. Then to Dresden, for a competent Tosca, and a work by Lortzing called Der Wildschutz.   This is one of those things – like much of Elgar and VW – that doesn’t seem to travel well beyond its ‘native’ borders. Lortzing’s work seems to be, on the basis of what I heard, a sort of combination of Gilbert and Sullivan and someone like Weber – still tremendously popular in Germany but completely unknown in the UK. Everyone listening to it in Dresden seemed to be enjoying it a lot more than I did – not that it’s actively rebarbative, but rather just a bit boring…..But then, I tend to feel a bit the same about G&S…..although I enjoy ‘Patience’, where I understand something of the context (Wilde / Pre-Raphaelites), and some of the lines are really quite funny. And then I went to Leipzig….I’ve talked about my Bach experiences there before but I also went to a ‘family’ performance of the Leipzig Gwendhaus Orchestra and Sir Roger Norrington performing parts of Elgar 1 – a rather bizarre experience, with kids crawling around all over the place, and a measure of disruption – plus the orchestra didn’t play the whole thing. But it was still wonderful to hear that great orchestra play Elgar – as impressive as Barenboims’s Elgar 2 with the Bellin Staatskapelle at the Proms in ?2018

In April, normally the time when the Proms prospectus comes out, I remember thinking ….It would be nice if there are still some Proms this year….Although there was something like a 30 year gap when I didn’t go to them, I went to anywhere between 6 and 45 Proms each year between 1968 and 1982,  being based in London, and, as I say, have managed 6 or so a year since about 2010. I had some wonderful, wonderful evenings in the 70’s – listening to Boult conducting Elgar 1 and 2 was an experience I shall never forget – a man who heard as a student the first performance of the 1^st Symphony conducted by Richter at the Halle in 190?8….. I sometimes think about this sort of experience when engaging – not that I do that often – in arguments about the text of the New Testament. Granted that it’s doctored in various ways, nevertheless when I think about a New Testament being written between 69-120 AD and Jesus dying in about 33AD, here I am in 2020 remembering vividly how Boult conducted Elgar, a work he first heard in 1908, I heard in 1969 and he was born in 1890. That’s a much longer time span of remembrance than eyewitnesses in the New Testament…………Here’s Boult conducting bits of Dream of Gerontius with Peter Pears – https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=43&v=L1NG7fGX0iA&feature=emb_title.   Incidentally, at the same time as thinking about the Proms, I decided to  bought a ticket for Rattle/LSO performing the Dream of Gerontius in Jan 2021, in a spirit of optimism (misplaced as it happens) ………..

Re Elgar and oratorios –The Kingdom and The Apostles are both wonderful. The Kingdom I have known since a teenager from the Boult recording but I had never heard The Apostles live until 2012 when it was performed by Mark Elder and the Halle in Manchester. I had flown in from Dubai in the morning, wondered whether to go to the performance and was really glad I did – I was sitting in more or less the front row and was really knocked back by it – such memorable choral writing, so many glorious melodies. It took me a couple of days to recover……..