Arts and Minds -Journals of an Arts Addict 2007-2013

Episode 14 October to December2009

“ARTS AND MINDS – JOURNALS OF AN ARTS ADDICT 2007-13”

EPISODE 14 OCTOBER TO DECEMBER 2009

JOHN TUSA

In this period: “Who’s Afraid of Hans Werner Henze?” Why “Gwendolen” must be warned! The View of Venice - the greatest city panorama in the world? Or is Istanbul, Edinburgh or St Petersburg better? Three major London exhibitions - the Aztecs at the British Museum – “hard, inflexible, authoritarian”. Spanish Religious Art at the National Gallery - the ”Wounds of Christ ” made real. Anish Kapoor at the Royal Academy – “sculpture made before your eyes.” Imogen Cooper scales Schubert’s heights with his last three sonatas. Where do Schubert and Beethoven diverge? And New Year in Berlin, Ann’s “second city”. David Chipperfield makes the old museum into something new. At Berlin’s Historical Museum, Germany’s greats side by side - Baselitz, Polke, Kiefer. At the Gropius Bau – Susan Hefuna’s filigree abstractions link modernism with Islam. Berlin’s riches are overwhelming.

Monday, October 26. Sandwich lunch with Sally Groves from the music publisher Schott’s. They publish Hans Werner Henze. ENO are doing Henze’s “Elegy for Young Lovers” next year. Sally tells me that when Glyndebourne did it in 1957, Henze attended. Unknown to most in the audience, he was making his way to the dinner interval and he overheard one woman to another: “We must warn Gwendolen”! Henze loved the story.

The Oxford political scientist, Vernon Bogdanor, rings. He has been approached to be President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. What do I think? I tell him. Not a distinguished college intellectually. I tell him of the occasion when Annie and I left Hall at, say, five to ten, to hear the result of a Commons vote on the EC. Everyone just looked blank and uninterested. “Oh, Cambridge is very non-political!” says Vernon. He responds with a story of Oxford’s philistinism. Howard Hodgkin was an Honorary Fellow. Over lunch, he was talking highly interestingly about the Renaissance. As he finished, a fellow sitting opposite said: “I didn’t realise artists could be so intelligent!”

From time to time, we were in a position to support financially a Wigmore concert and a performer that we particularly liked or admired.

Sunday, November 1. Annie and I have supported Joan Rodgers’ recital at the Wigmore; all Russian songs, all settings of Pushkin, sometimes three settings by different composers of one poem. A fine evening with Joan singing immaculately, with a subtle, soft grained line of real beauty. Most importantly Joan gives the music a real line which is particularly hard in Russian where each syllable must have its own note! Joan first had the idea for the recital a decade ago but no one wanted to programme it until now. At the heart of Part 2 are Britten’s settings of Pushkin, searing, some of the best music he ever wrote. Now, says Joan, an Italian Festival wants the programme - it takes someone brave to lead the way.

He began as a tv serial actor; ambitiously went to Baltimore in the US to run their theatre; then laden with experience returned to the London theatre world.

Monday, November 9. Evening I go to the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn to see Kwame Kwei-Armah’s new play about a black mayor of London, called “Seize the Day”. Several threads running through: one, how an ambitious, personable young black tv presenter becomes seduced by vanity to try to become mayor; two, how the same young black becomes involved with a very young ghetto tearaway and learns from him; three, how the young would-be mayor betrays his wife and gives up his ambition to marry his black lover. It is snappy, knowing, rather tv episodic style writing, but very funny and often honest and perceptive.

The arts world goes to the Venice Biennale at its glittering opening in the summer. By the closing weeks, the crowds are long gone, and you can make a decent shot at seeing a good deal of an insane and wholly unpredictable cornucopia.

November 19-23, Venice. The last weekend of the Biennale. In total, the main display area, the Giardini, is mediocre, with the British pavilion’s Steve MacQueen video very dull. The Russian pavilion – as so often – full of savage Russian humour and fantasy. The main, chaotic pavilion is as usual impossible to navigate. The Arsenale is another matter, some big installations, filling and using their spaces with vigour, originality and imagination. Of course the Arsenale basin looks better every time, a heroic place, a heroic space.

We see the newly restored Palazzo Grimani, with extraordinary frescoes and a classical atmosphere that derives, as it did, from Rome. The “Torcello Exhibition” in the exquisite Diocesan museum is a gem, with an ivory pantocrator that is a show stopper. We catch up on churches: the Chiesa Zanipolo, S Giovanni and S Paolo in Venetian, S Zaccaria, and refresh our memories at the epic Tintoretto sequences in the Scuola San Rocco .

And Venice – grey but cool, not wet or windy and perfect for walking around. As we came out of our hotel by the Arsenale, the ”Bucintoro”, we look at a panorama stretching from San Giorgio, to the Salute, to the Campanile with the Redentore set back and asked “is this the greatest panorama in the world?” In our experience, only the view from the Asian side of Istanbul looking across to the Blue Mosque, to Haghia Sofia, to Sultan Suleiman can match it. Someone suggested Edinburgh as an epic panorama. I say: “Too provincial”. Or St Petersburg. I say: “Too man made and mono culture in style”. It’s a good game.

I had a good deal of time for the BBC Director General, Mark Thompson. We had worked on a series of ”Newsnight” reports from Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforming Soviet Party Congress in the early 1980s.

Thursday, November 26. To the lobby group, Voice of Listeners and Viewers (VLV) meeting to chair the Director General, Mark Thompson’s, speech about the future of the BBC. He tells a nice story about me. When we were in Moscow together for “Newsnight” in the early 1980s, it was very cold so we went off to buy fur hats. He bought a black rabbit fur, I something more ambitious. As I tried it on, the Russian assistant said to Mark: “He looks like member of Central Committee!” Mark replied:” You don’t know how right you are!” He lays out some radical areas for change to be expected in the 2010 strategy review. The BBC “could be smaller”; digital channels will be reviewed; the website could be smaller; but quality and excellence in programmes will come first. And in Q&A, he is the master of every detail of every subject.

Afterwards, Steve Barnett, the broadcasting academic, says: “Yes, but he still doesn’t get the fact that BBC salaries are universally thought to be too high. The BBC Chairman should say that Mark’s successor should be recruited at 50% of Mark’s present salary. Licence fee payers would recognise and understand that.” Another comment: “Mark is very impressive but he has no emotional appeal, it is all very technocratic. Where is the vision?”

From the subIime to the humorous. Just because music is serious doesn’t mean it can’t find time for a laugh.

Friday, November 27. The Arcanto Quartet play Mendelssohn, Dutilleux and the Schubert Quintet. Good, the lower strings better than the upper, a French rather than German style of playing. Afterwards, we meet a young German fiddle maker who has made the leader’s fiddle. I tell him this story, told to us by the cellist, Robert Cohen: “ I was rehearsing the Schubert Quintet with the Amadeus. In the middle of the slow movement, the most intense music imaginable, we stop and Norbert says: ‘ Boys, do you know about the two fiddlers who meet in Manhattan? One says to the other, You look good! The other says, I’ve just got a 1699 Stradivarius! The first replies, Boy, that was cheap!”

Simon Majaro, who makes violins of quality as a hobby, then offers another Amadeus joke, as told by their cellist, Martin Lovett. “A man is leaving a concert and two women behind him say ‘I hate second violins!’” The other agrees, ‘ I hate second violins too!’ The man spins round: what have you got against second violins? The women say, ‘We didn’t say that; We said ’we hate sex and violence!’” It is just the kind of story that beloved Siggi Nissel would have told anyway.

There are certain advantages to having concert performances of great operas. Of course you miss the sets, the costumes, the dramatic engagement of the singers. But you hear the singers better, you hear the orchestra better.

Thursday, December 3. To the Barbican, to hear Colin Davis conduct Verdi’s “Otello”. This promised a great deal but it had an added tension. Simon O’Neill – Covent Garden’s excellent Lohengrin earlier in the year - was standing in and had never sung the role through in performance. From the opening chord of the storm, Colin unleashed an assault of the elements in the Barbican. It was blazing, heroic, exhilarating. When Simon O’Neill opened his (large) chest and lungs for “Exsultate!”, it was a trumpet sound of victory. Everyone else was equivalent, a super-silky, almost too beautiful Gerald Finley as Iago; a sweet voiced Cassio from Allan Clayton; and an indrawn, accepting, suffering Desdemona from Anne Schwanewilms. Afterwards, in the Green Room, Colin is wiped out but exhilarated – what an achievement from an 81 year old! The orchestra love the whole thing, after all, how often/seldom do they get the chance to play the work? Claus Moser says: ”Oh, I do miss the pictures” but he might have added but “I do love hearing the music properly” as we all did!

A great weekend of visual art, mainly concentrating, fortuitously, on the religious experience in all its variety and some of its barbarity. You can’t take weekends like this for granted.

Saturday, December 5. A great weekend of art. “Moctezuma” at the BM is rather disappointing, a revolting bloody civilisation, and too little history to make the whole tragedy comprehensible. The RA’s “Aztecs” a decade ago had more of the iconic objects and a better sense of the clash between divergent civilisations. Of course Cortes and the Spanish were ruthless and insensitive – to put it mildly - but the sheer rigidity, superstition, cruelty of the Aztecs was deeply unattractive. Their art is hard, inflexible, inexpressive - er, anything else you don’t like? Is there anything there one would call beautiful, raising the spirits, healing the heart, solacing the mind? No, it is all in the service of the authoritarian, dictatorial, cruel political system.

And a totally different understanding of the religious spirit, religious expression, religious iconography was there at hand. Just around the corner in London’s West End.

Sunday, December 6. In the morning, we are appalled by the crowds outside the Royal Academy for the Anish Kapoor show so we decamp to the nearby National Gallery to see “Sacred Made Real”, Spanish realistic religious sculpture. Many have made a meal of it because they cannot understand why Christianity should evoke such expressions and such passions. But unless you engage with Christ’s physical passion, how can you begin to understand the notion of sacrifice? It is not some abstract theological notion. There is nothing “polite” about crucifixion, but intensely, absolutely, physical. These incredible painted, wood sculptures engage with the reality of the Christian experience. And how many wounds did Christ have? Four where the nails penetrated, two where the knees were skinned, one in his side where the spear was thrust, one on his shoulder where the Cross was carried. Eight in all. I can almost understand the veneration accorded to the “ instruments of Christ’s suffering.”

Monday, December 7. It happens that the Anish Kapoor show at the Royal Academy is a wonderful (unwitting) pendant to the “Sacred made Real”. This is sculpture in time: the relentless erosive movement of the wagon of red plaster on rails, bearing everything before it like the passage of time and geology; the canon firing shells of red plaster every twenty minutes and creating an endlessly changing, accumulating landscape; the intricately shaped highly polished steel mirrors which capture us in a more real way than our own reality and then reshape and distort us in ways which we cannot explain but have to recognise because it shows us as we appear at that moment. And it is sculpture of contemplation, where you see or don’t see depths or are they illusory planes?

Some think it facile, superficial, just a series of games. The RA Secretary, Charles Saumarez-Smith observes that those who dislike the Kapoor love the ”Wild Things” sculpture show in the upstairs Sackler galleries - Gaudier-Breszka, Epstein, Gill. That has poor houses but it is about art history, the need to know in order to understand. Kapoor is for those who experience without needing to know art history.

Listening to great singers growing old is like appreciating wine vintages as they mature. Know the voice; trust the artistry; be ready to value the artistry even as the purest sheen leaves the voice.

Tuesday, December 15 .The Russian baritone, Sergei Leiferkus, at the Wigmore Hall. A concert of two halves. In the first, he sings Schumann’s “Liederkreis”, interestingly but totally unidiomatically. The performance drives at least two couples out of the Hall. Idiots! Don’t they know that Leiferkus is a great interpreter of Russian? And he does Mussorgky in part two. In “Songs and Dances of Death”, he IS death, coaxing, beguiling, ordering and always in control. Before that, a satirical scena where he satirises the musical world of St Petersburg, brilliant, sardonic and devastatingly delivered. In the “Seminarist”, another satirical scena where a priest can’t take his eyes off a beautiful girl. The wisdom of a lifetime offered to us.

The translator and scholar, Richard Stokes, was a charismatic teacher of German literature and culture at Westminster School. Because of his vast contacts in the musical world, he regularly presented concerts of the highest quality in one of the school’s assembly rooms.

Friday, December 18. Imogen Cooper takes on Schubert’s final three sonatas in a single concert for Richard Stokes at Westminster. “Upschool” is packed tight. Imo looks packed tight to snapping point herself at the start. She unwinds the sometimes rambling connections of the first two sonatas, giving a meaning and coherence to the long threads of musical events. In the slow movement of the second of the three, Schubert suddenly breaks into something almost hallucinatory, an explosion of notes, a jazz like improvisation that is quite shocking. We emerge 85 minutes later at the interval. Imo, she says later, is wiped out, lies on the floor, aching, cuddling a water bottle, eating a banana. Where will she get the energy for the last late, huge B flat sonata? Somehow she does, delivering an andante of such rapt intensity that it is extraordinary, an event, a challenge, a heroic endeavour, a search for discovery.

It is 1030 before we get out and stagger to nearby(-ish) Shepherd’s restaurant. Imo and I agree that Schubert’s greatness and his difficulty is that he is “not Beethoven!” Ludwig has great recognisable, understandable architecture; Schubert has connections, sequences, horizons, moods that need to be understood in order to be interpreted. Imo’s achievement was that she realised, understood her way through all those difficulties.

One of the most revealing changes in the musical world has been the evolution of the mere “accompanist” supporting the “great singer” into that of the “pianist/partner” of the greatest singers.

Tuesday, December 22. Julius Drake birthday concert at Wigmore. A three hour parade of world class singers expressing their admiration and love of Julius. Ian Bostridge singing the 3 Britten Soutar songs about children’s poverty in Scotland – savage; Alice Coote getting straight through to the solar plexus with a performance of Schubert’s “Der Zwerg” of appalling terror: Joyce DiDonato in Granados and Obradors – astonishing; Mark Padmore in a simple Britten song about Christ, “ I wonder as I Wander?” Gerry Finlay in Tchaikovsky’s ”After the Ball”. A festival, a birthday, a celebration, such quality.

Occasionally, Christmas was not a family celebration. This year was one. Where to go? Berlin was an easy choice as it filled a special place in both our hearts. As a national serviceman, I had visited it in 1955 to play regimental rugby and to visit strip clubs. I had walked through the Brandenburg Gate in 1955 before the Wall was built. Annie knocked chips off it days after it fell inn 1989. She had written books about the Berlin Blockade and the building of the Wall. It was “her” second city, her spiritual home.

Saturday, December 26. To the Berlin sensation, the British architect, David Chipperfield’s, renovated Neues Museum at the heart of the city’s “Museum Island”. Well is it a ”new build” or is it mainly renovated within old walls, old floors, old structures? What exactly has Chipperfield done? Answer, it is at once new and based on what was there before. Was it brick? Yes, so is the new element. Are some old walls left? Yes, and old plaster, old bricks, old frescoes, distressed patches, all are integrated into the new. Yes, there are new covered-over atriums, aggregate insertions to create a superb staircase, some new floors. But the flow, the respect, the sympathy between old and new is total. It is a harmonious building, a collection of objects but also a museum telling a story about the museum that went before.

Sunday, December 27. To the Gropius Bau for an exhibition of Islam and Modern art , a stunning set of variations on what traditional Islam did – calligraphy, patterns, stillness, mathematics, the veil – and then played them off against contemporary interpretations, sometimes allusive but never obvious. Mona Hatoum’s metal cages with descending light and abstract patterns on the walls was there; images of prison? Susan Hefuna’s filigree line drawings of incredible abstraction and grace were there, layer upon layer of the finest paper. Her prices are now international, sadly. It is a dazzling, brilliantly curated show that never allows theory to squeeze the life out of the creativity.

You can never be far away from history in Berlin, from the centuries of the past, from within living memory and recollection. The Historical Museum is both comprehensive and unflinching, a nation’s clear-eyed look at its complex and troubled past.

Monday, December 28. Time for history full on, another German knock out, a deeply visual but intellectual show tracking the parallel paths of art followed by the two countries during the division of the Cold War, a subtle dialogue about the practice of art on the two sides of the East-West border. It is not about how West German artists represented the East and vice versa. It is not about the false heroics of communism versus the sulky freedoms and guilty materialisms of the west. On both sides of the border, they worked and painted. Boy, how they painted, the east Germans especially. Are all the best users of paint ‘ossies’? Baselitz, Polke, Kiefer, all three emerge as wonderful makers of canvases and in Kiefer’s case, a searching presenter of the German national myths realised in paint and image. The Wall kept artists apart, and they struggled, Immendorf especially, to break through it or get across it. These were not light struggles.

Tuesday, December 29. The highlight is a concert at the Philharmonie by the Berliner Philharmoniker, Simon Rattle and the young Chinese virtuoso, Lang Lang! His “Rach Two” is, to our ears, appalling – slow, self indulgent, and neither well phrased nor filled with tonal beauty. At the interval, Sally Cavender and John Carewe, close friends of Rattle, tell us that Simon (a) rather likes Lang Lang; (b) says he plays everything the same way and it quite works in “Rach Two”; and (c) 80 million young Chinese learn the piano because of Lang Lang! By inference, if Berliner Philharmoniker wants to remain a global classical musical brand, it means playing with Lang Lang. Berlin has been everything we wanted and had not quite dared to expect. Not just the art and culture, but the confusion of the developing city, the vigour of the architecture, the sense of unfinished business – as over the old Prussian Palace – the feeling that there is more to come.

End 13 December 2024