Spring cheer and wintry bleakness

I went for a walk in the gardens in my lunch break. It was warm enough that I was okay with only a sweater, no coat. Spring bulbs are coming out everywhere and birds are singing, and the air smelled of wintersweet and viburnum blossom, and of pine trees in the sun. Heaven is coming; it’s spring. This has felt like a long winter, what with the successive snowfalls, the colder than average temperatures, and my bl**dy broken wrist. To see the wheel of the year turning is such bliss at these times. It spurs me on to keep working at my physio exercises as the gardening season approaches again.

Last night I had the first dose in a short course of Janacek shots; “Katya Kabanova” at the ENO. Wintry despair to contrast with my own spring cheer. Gorblimey it’s bleak stuff, guvnor.

It’s a bleak story, of toxically unhappy families, adultery, betrayed passion and suicide, and it's a bleak production, of barren open spaces and crowding, bare walls; a solitary lamp-post, a room full of angular shadows, an icon of Christ that is swiftly turned to the wall...

Patricia Racette is Katya, who has married (god knows why) the spineless, mother-fixated, deeply knotted-up Tichon Kabanov, played by the ever-reliable John Graham-Hall, and is now tormented daily by his truly horrible mother (Susan Bickley having a whale of a time being a poisonous old toad). Katya is a good-hearted woman who wants to be a good wife; she is deeply religious, with a mystical sense of connection with God, but she is also passionately emotional and longs for a freedom of experience her small-town life can never give her. Unable to escape her mother-in-law’s endless demands, she tries without success to get some demonstration of her husband’s love, or even some sort of reaction from him. When she meets neighbour Boris, Stuart Skelton’s six-foot hunk of red-haired Australian beefcake, well, what with his magnificent rich tenor and all, she is lost.

Listening to him, I don’t blame her. I don’t normally go for the beefy type, but Mr Skelton could rock my boat any day. What a voice! And he can act (and he’s ginger!). This is the third time I’ve seen him in action; roll on the fourth – it can’t come soon enough. Stuart Skelton is the heroic tenor for me.

There are a secondary pair of lovers in the story, as well; Tichon’s adopted sister Varvara is in love with the amiable local schoolmaster Kudriash; rather like Anne and Simon to Katya and Boris’s Gabriel and Rose, they are saner and more balanced, in both their love affair and their general way of dealing with life. Shortly before the final scene they decide to run away to make a new life together in Moscow. Their directness and good humour in the face of the situation is a touching contrast to the superficially more romantic but utterly self-defeating passion of Katya and Boris. In their music, simple folk-dance melodies and ballad-like lyrics express their healthily cheerful attitude to love. Boris and Katya, however, have fabulous music of great dramatic outbursts, lyrical and wildly emotional, full of wonderful characteristic Janacek sounds I haven’t the technical vocabulary to describe. It tells you everything you need to know about the uncontrollable intensity of their feelings, and the thoughtless passion with which they rush into their affair.

Of course, their love is poignantly brief, doomed from the start. Boris turns out to be a man of straw; Katya loses her marbles, confesses all, loses some more of her marbles, meets Boris one last time and then, flattened by his farewell, drowns herself. So it’s hardly laughs all evening by the Volga; but well-done, as last night’s performance was, it makes for a very powerful, deeply upsetting evening.

On Monday, I’m off for my Janacek booster shot; “The Cunning Little Vixen”. Again, bliss; and it will give an antidote to yesterday’s tormented gloom. It’s as full of green growing life and natural cycles as “Katya Kabanova” is of fractured hearts, denatured relationships, and death.

And so the wheel turns, and the way of things goes as it wills; and we go on.

Good things - list for the day

Good things about this time of year; because I have to remind myself, being essentially a spring creature and not an autumn and winter one.

Russet apples. Picasso painted them, I eat them. Their strange, furry-looking skins and rich-flavoured, firm flesh are a joy of the season. Like the wonderful Discovery and Worcester Pearmain, they are strictly seasonal and are one of my reasons for continuing to live in the UK. Seriously – British apples are a reason to live here. Try Spanish apples if you don’t believe me.

Autumn leaves. Do I need to say more? Sheer beauty, and all the evanescence of spring with the added poignancy of fading and ending instead of new life…

Booking tickets. I’m partway through a binge of bookings for concerts and ballet and opera for the winter. As the weather gets colder and the days get darker, at least I have lots of goodies to look forward to, from Vieux Farka Touré, to two new pieces premiering at the Royal Ballet,
to this
to Stuart Skelton singing Boris in “Katya Kabanova” (can’t wait, can’t wait; have to wait, bah!).

Conifer pollen. I used to have dreadful hayfever in my twenties but it eased off gradually as the years went on, and by the time I started working at Kew it was a thing of the past. At this time of year a lot of coniferous trees are flowering, and if, like today, it is rainy (which is what they need, as it is via the action of raindrops that their flowers are pollinated), the paths and pavements around here are speckled and streaked with the pale gold dust of fallen pollen. It reminds me of the line in Seferis’ “A Word for Summer” – “A few pine needles left after the rains/Raggedly strewn, and red like tattered nets” – only with blonde pollen not rusty needles. As the rest of the northern hemisphere’s plant world thinks “Time to shut up shop for the winter”, conifers are going “It’s that time of year again – hey, let’s make babies!” On windy days the pollen dances off the trees in clouds, like millions of tiny blonde sprites leaping together into flight.

Evenings when the muse is tired, watching movies on my new dvd player. I tidied up my dvd collection last night, sorting it into feature films, opera and concerts, and ballet... In the process, whetting my appetite for a good wallow in all three categories. Next rainy evening, I think I might settle down to "Swan Lake", or possibly "The Devil's Backbone", or possibly "The Cunning Little Vixen" (which I have bought a new copy of since my old one has vanished into the unknown tender hands of someone else who likes Janacek...

Migratory birds. Redwings. Beautful geese flying in from the artic. Chilly afternoons at the London Wetland centre blowing on my numbed fingers, trying to draw Great Crested Grebes in their stark, spare winter plumage.

Winter walks in the arboretum here at Kew, listening to robins singing and nuthatches and goldcrests and long-tailed titmice trilling their signal calls, and soaking up the bleak, misty, dripping atmosphere under the dark pines.

Atmospherics after dark (with apologies to Tom Robinson, who may not even like Janacek)

Last night I discovered that the concert I had been to last week was on the radio, so I settled down with my plate of macaroni cheese to listen. The reception was terrible for about the first fifteen minutes – the start of “Sinfonietta” sounded as if it were being played in the shower – and I had to keep springing up to fiddle with the tuning. Every time I touched the dial, the reception improved dramatically, only to go off again the moment I let go. It made no difference if I had actually altered the dial or not – the improving factor was physical contact with me.

I am forced to the conclusion that my body is a gigantic radio aerial, an idea I find vaguely worrying. I am not made of metal, and I am not terribly technical (anyone who does know about radios is probably laughing at my naivety at this point). Besides the slightly disturbing “radio waves are dripping all over me” feeling, this also meant I had to stand up constantly, which interfered with my appreciation of my supper.

But then, oddly, the reception suddenly improved. The shower noise stopped and I could appreciate the rest of the Janacek, and the whole of the Lindberg and the Stravinsky, in comfort. It really was an excellent concert – I hope they consider releasing it on their own recording label. After all, clearly a recording has been made, by the BBC, so why not make use of it? As well as the quality of the performance, it was a superbly chosen programme, with two modernist masterpieces and what I feel on second hearing is certainly a natural successor. The three pieces complemented one another beautifully; like one’s handsome cousins at a wedding, they were delightful as individuals and as parts of a family relationship. It was particularly good to hear the Janacek played with such clarity and what I can only call lack of sugar. It was a great illustration of just how wide is the gap between that thick viscous layer of sweetness, like cheap salad dressing, that is sentiment, and powerful feeling, expressed with sincerity and commitment but without ostentation.

The upshot of all this, though, is that I have decided to treat myself to a decent new radio. It was so much more pleasant to be able to sit and eat, and then get on with my sewing, without having to keep tweaking the tuner.

I am working my way through a large pile of items of clothing that are nice but that don’t fit me, turning them into slightly different (& sometimes slightly odd) items of clothing that do fit me. If I had a digital camera and the means to upload pictures I’d do a fashion-shoot sometime – some of the results are actually quite good, and they bring me both the satisfaction of creative needlework and that of demonstrating an efficient household economy.

After the concert I put the sewing away and sat up till 2 am finishing “The Birds Fall Down”. I’m slightly pie-eyed today as a result; and tonight I am off back to the Festival Hall for “Wozzeck” (pauses to take deep breaths). I fully expect to be pulverised, both aurally and emotionally.

Salonen the Golden, or, The Joy of Having Specialist Interests

I know the autumn has really begun when my Philharmonia subscription starts. Last night was the first concert I’d booked this year (I can’t afford to go to every one but I try to do six or eight in a season). It was a stunner. What with this and “Don Carlos” last week, my cultural life has restarted with a marvellous bang after the sluggish hiatus of summer.

I’m a big fan of the Philharmonia; partly for sentimental reasons – my father and my godmother both sang in the Philharmonia Chorus in their younger days – and partly because I happen to think they are a cracking good orchestra. Last night was a perfect case in point. Apart from being a breathtaking performance of three terrific pieces of music – two huge favourites of mine and something new that knocked my socks off – it was a concert marked by a rather unusual event, namely a power cut.

The band, as they say, played on.

They were only in total darkness for a few seconds, but prior to that the lights had spent about ten minutes flickering on-and-off, then dimming and brightening again, dropping to fifty-per-cent strength, and generally mucking about. Then suddenly boom! – pitch blackness. Right in the middle of “The Firebird”. After a moment, someone somewhere switched to a different lighting circuit, bringing on a very cold harsh light just on the stage and leaving the rest of us in Stygian gloom, instead of the normal soft warm ambience throughout the whole hall, and the concert finished under those conditions.

The orchestra were so unfazed one would have thought they rehearsed in darkness just for the discipline of it. I almost wonder if Esa-Pekka Salonen even noticed. I mean, he must have done; but on the other hand, he always gives the impression of being totally physically immersed in the music to the last fibre of every muscle, all of his energy swept into this one wondrous goal. Watching him on the rostrum is like watching someone dancing in a very confined space.

I’m a big fan of Esa-Pekka Salonen. Everything I’ve ever heard him conduct has come out as if new-minted; revelation after revelation. It’s thrilling. I don’t know enough about music from a technical point of view to know what it is he is doing, but he hits the spot for me. He just has the golden touch; he seems to be able to bring to everything he does that combination of perfect lucidity - so that the whole piece is explicated with absolute clarity and I sit there thinking “Of course, how wonderful; that’s how it’s put together and that’s how it works!” - with an equal and heartfelt measure of passionate feeling. That capacity to explore both structure and emotion, the interlayered play between tensioned forces, is one of my biggest delights. So many great performing artists are either great technicians or great stage animals, but not both at once. Those who are both are my big heroes.

I know, I know - it isn’t just him; there’s a big group of people down there, all of them highly skilled and at the top of their game, working with him. It’s just that the conductor is easiest to single out, for obvious reasons. To work as a united force is a significant part of being an orchestra; the conductor is the unifying factor, the wire through which all their multifarious energies are fused (not a good metaphor, excuse me). The musicians all come on quietly, and take their seats quietly, and quietly they tune up – that lovely stage when one is sitting in blissful anticipation – then suddenly this slender man with beautiful hands and hair the colour of manuka honey springs onto the rostrum, looking like a slightly wild hobbit in a suit, and everything just takes off.

Sorry, bad attack of the purple prose there. I have a bit of a crush, you will gather; if the man weren’t a) happily married and b) several inches shorter than me, it would be a huge crush, but these two useful limiting factors keep it to manageable proportions – small bureau rather than double wardrobe, size-wise.

I’m attracted to genius; and that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Anyway: They played “Sinfonietta”, with half the brass section up in the choir stalls to make the fanfares really ring out. I adore Janacek (why can I never find the right diacritical marks for Czech words? Grr…), and in particular I adore “Sinfonietta”. The end, when the fanfares and timps return, everything melding together like a triumphant yet yearning heaven, pulverises me, and this time I just gave up on being a True Brit, and sat and cried. It was wonderful. Then they played a new piece by Magnus Lindberg. I’m not familiar with his work and had come hoping not to be depressed by half an hour of atonal screeching; I was in luck, it was dramatic and lyrical and full of lovely open spaces – I think he was using a lot of very deep and very high sounds layered around the clear place between – I don’t know how to describe it, or indeed exactly what I am trying to describe – but it was one of those pieces of contemporary music that make one want to cheer and stand on the seat. And the text was lovely – Latin graffiti from the streets of Pompeii, everything from crude abuse through cries of “I love so-and-so!” and lists of market days to scribbles of incorrectly-remembered Virgil.

Then the whole of “Firebird”; absolutely gripping, dazzling, revelatory. The genius of Stravinsky, so complex, so subtle, simple and yet showy, brilliantly precise yet full of huge wallopping showstopping moments.

And with this wonderful example of group sang-froid when the lights went out, at one of the stillest and most delicate points in the score, the evening was altogether an absolute joy.

Yep, classical music may be a specialist interest, but I love it. Here’s to a good autumn. Next week I am going to “Wozzeck”; gulp. My Favourite Baritone is singing Wozzeck, and E-P S is conducting, so although I may need to take a few deep breaths, if I can cope with being harrowed halfway to hell and back it should be an impressive evening.