From Bernstein to Berlioz

No regrets that I postponed the Thursday Zoom-course move to France in favour of Bernstein and so many students' enthusiasm (as well as mine) for Maestro. I did wonder if I could sustain 10 classes on Lenny the composer without much ballast from his conducting and lecturing, but it turned out not only to be easy, but revelatory. I expected to renew my love and awe for the Platonic Serenade and Mass!, one of the great panoramic works of the 20th century; but there was so much more I didn't really know. Portions of all three symphonies and Songfest are of the highest order, but the real surprise was A Quiet Place, so much more than just an extension of the masterly Trouble in Tahiti.  This recording gave me much cause for reflection, 

but I want to see a production in the UK. Surely Opera North could build one around its already peerless staging of TiT? Family grief and the tensions around it are something we can all relate to, and Bernstein drew from a profound well after the death of Felicia. It needs a lot of patience and looking in to, but definitely worth it. I vowed that we'd devote four or five Mondays to it in a future Opera in Depth term. 

Operas we won't be covering in this Berlioz course - strictly concert works only, though La Damnation de Faust has often been staged. I'm not sure at this point if one term will be enough, but let's see. David Cairns' detailed study is obligatory reading, of couse, alongside the beautifully written Memoirs. I've only previously dipped in to Cairns's first volume with reference to select works, but I'm now going through it - there's some repetition but a real bringing to life of a vivid and far from chaotic personality.

We begin tomorrow (Thursday) afternoon, finding out how the future composer's singularly music-starved youth shaped the genius (his upbringing was far from all bad, though, and probably home education allowed his imagination to flourish). There's still time to join. Details below (click to enlarge).

Spendours and miseries of Henrietta Street

Advice for any first-time visitor to Dublin: skip the Book of Kells experience (10 Euros to see two pages when we went on an unsuccessful lottery-win trip as Dublin virgins) and, to find out about crucial, very different aspects of the city's identity, head for 14 Henrietta Street. This is not the 'Tenement House Museum', as it's sometimes advertised; it embraces the whole history of a Georgian street in North Dublin, from opulent commission through 100 to a building by 1911, on to the more humane divisions of the 1930s-70s, and to what the place is now. Frankly, the finest museum experience I can think of; it recently won an award from the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI) for Shaffrey Architects' conservation and restoration work.

Luke Gardiner was the architect of Nos 13-15 in the 1740s; first residents were Lord Viscount Richard Molesworth and his second wife Mary.  The grand staircase, the first thing you see and then ascend, offers the opulent front of the five-floor house.

The guide - ours was excellent - begins the talk in the room on the first floor to the right, which is bare save for a fine model of the house in the centre

and finely restored cornicing. The firts two of four beautifully done films pertain to Molesworth family life. The fact that Lady Mary gave birth to two daughters in one of the back rooms overlooking the garden cues the biography of Bartholomew Mosse, for whom the fine bed in the room was made to order.

Mosse made himself unpopular with the medical establishment but got his way in founding a lying-in hospital, raising money impresario-wise as theatre manager and fashionable garden maker, and eventually opening the Rotunda Hospital, where the girl on the right being hugged by her mother was born.

Following the 1801 Acts of Union, the well-to-do retreated to Regency London, though the houses continued to be inhabited by legal practitioners (the fine King's Inns building designed by James Gandon is at the top of the street).

The Dublin Militia took over for a while until 1876, until after the Great Famine landlords starting carving up townhouses into multiple dwellings for the poor who had flooded into the city. As No. 14's website puts it,  

In 1876 Thomas Vance purchased Number 14 and installed 19 tenement flats of one, three and four rooms. Described in an Irish Times advert from 1877:

‘To be let to respectable families in a large house, Northside, recently papered, painted and filled up with every modern sanitary improvement, gas and wc on landings, Vartry Water, drying yard and a range with oven for each tenant; a large coachhouse, or workshop with apartments, to be let at the rere. Apply to the caretaker, 14 Henrietta St.’

,,, By 1911 number 14 was filled with 100 people while over 850 lived on the street. The census showed that it was a hive of industry – there were milliners, a dressmaker (tailoress!), French polishers, and bookbinders living and possibly working in the house.

As the advert suggests, there were more amenities than in many such tenement set-ups, but the packing- in of a whole family to a single room was very far from the situation in the purpose-built tenements of Scotland. One recent visitor remembers sleeping as a child on the floor in the corner of this basement room. The bed in the recreation is actually a luxury. 

The stairways and halls in this part of the building have been left more or less distressed, with some telling injunctions on the walls.

Life on the street itself could, nevertheless, be enriching from the social angle, and a film full of children's songs in another renovated room points that out.

Improvements stalled by the Great War and the 1916 uprising finally became a priority of the new Irish state, and from 1931 onwards the first Dublin city architect, Herbert Simms, planned new conditions. One of his blocks can be seen out of the back windows, 

and the deco curves are apparent on another model.

Simms also designed garden suburbs, but many of the older residents pined after the lost communities of tenement life. No. 14's last tenemenr residents left in 1979, The building decayed until Dublin City Council acquired it in 2000, renovating and restoring; the museum opened in 2018. Its final apartment shows the relative cosiness of the later years. Colin Farrell, a recent visitor, told our guide it was exactly as he remembered his nan's home.

Afterwards I wandered through the King's Inn grounds

and admired the row of cottages parallel to Henrietta Street, a quiet corner of North Dublin.

So much more to explore - people keep telling me Dublin's small, but it has thousands of interesting places to see and stories to tell.

Opera in Depth Summer 2024: the human comedy

Dante's Divina Commedia was Puccini's model for the trajectory of his most comprehensive masterpiece, even if the subject-matter is quite different for the most part. You can, of course, take Il tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi separately, or put the individual operas alongside other one-acters, but it's reassuring to see the trilogy most often presented these days as the composer intended (and no, IMO it is NOT acceptable to reverse the orders of the convent drama and the Florentine comedy). 

The beauty of it is that each is a supreme masterpiece of timing and atmosphere on its own terms.  Each makes use of finely observed vignettes in the first third of the drama before the screw begins to turn. There is something hellish about the barge couple's existence in Il tabarro, but it's offset by an almost Debussyan impressionism and gently comic vignettes. Puccini surely drew some of the details of cloistered life from meeting with his sister in her monastic community. And the better I know my Dante - THE big revelation of recent years since the free course with Alessandro Scafi and John Took at the Warburg Institute - the more pleasure I can take from the passing references to so many Dantean names and places in Schicchi, even though its source is a mere line and a bit in Inferno.

Then each opera packs its punch (and never more so than in Richard Jones' Royal Opera production - we'll be referring to the above regularly). Suor Angelica is the most heartbreaking, on a level with Madama Butterfly; Gianni Schicchi is laugh-out-loud funny tinged with youthful romantic love. It will always be a desert island opera for me since it was on an Edinburgh Fringe week of performing it with the Rehearsal Orchestra that my so far 35-year-old relationship with other half, later civil partner and husband, began. 

I'm hoping the infinitely generous and warm Ermonela Jaho can be persuaded to join us after her unforgettable visit to the Butterfly course (when we also had two hours of Antonio Pappano, but I guess he's even busier now. Just got a proof copy of his autobiography and there's wisdom on every page). Meanwhile, here's the flyer for the forthcoming term with full details of how to join - click to enlarge.

For the last four Mondays I can't wait to revisit John Adams's Nixon in China - for me, the best opera of the last 40 years, though there are comic rivals to Schicchi in Gerald Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest and Alice's Adventures Under Ground). One plus since the last time is that other productions have appeared since Peter Sellars' initial hit toured the world (partner and I saw its UK premiere in the Edinburgh Festival at the aformentioned time). To return to operas I'd studied in live classes is never to repeat; I don't look at the old notes. Picture below by Ken Howard from the Met staging of the Sellars production.

How fresh and wondrous we all found Salome and Carmen this past term.  The most rainbow-hued of Strauss's operatic scores is surely also his most perfectly structured. And seeing it a week after the last class in Bruno Ravella's so richly-layered Irish National Opera production in Dublin was a wonder (image below by Patricio Cassinoni for INO). 

Hpw delighted I am that it will be appearing on the superlative free OperaVision website (YouTube connected) later this month, with Ravella's unsurpassably well-cast Garsington Ariadne auf Naxos). How lucky we were, too, with tie visit of Bruno and conductor Fergus Sheil just before the production opened.

Bizet's instrumental and harmonic felicities in Carmen seem limitless: surely this has to be the opera to take a newcomer to if the performances nail it. And I don't think we'll ever see or hear surpassed the duo of Elīna Garanča and Roberto Alagna in Richard Eyre's Metropolitan Opera production*. 

I used scenes from other productions, but no central relationship goes to the edge in its visceral quality as this one does. I've previously state that the DVD of Glyndebourne's Janáček Jenůfa should be the first port of call for anyone who comes to opera from the world of theatre; for the perfect mix of aria, duet and ensemble form with high drama, the 2010 Met Carmen should be the one.

*UPDATE: Damiano Michieletto's new Royal Opera production comes nowhere near, alas, or certainly not with its first cast, marvellous though Aighul Akhmetshina is. And of course I wanted it to succeed, but the review has to tell the truth.

Dublin shines again

After a worrying January during which my old mum's fate hung in the balance, and with her happily reinstalled back in her excellent nursing home, I've been able to join J in what is now his city for longer. And all the more blissfully since he's found a dream palace in the air on the same side of Merrion Square where Oscar Wilde grew up. Is there a better view in Dublin? I doubt it. On a good day the Dublin Hills/Wicklow Mountains can be seen. Not so on 1 March, when we woke to find snow everywhere.

It lasted a day, not before it made an excursion to a noodle bar down the hill alongside the Maternity Hospital a perilous ten minutes. This time, though, spring was beginning and the hills had re-emerged. The uncommon narcissi taking the place of St David's Day daffodils were brought by dinner guest Maev and smelled heavenly.

My first visit of 2024 embraced so much that shows how healthy the Irish classical music scene is right now: Spanish night from the National Symphony of Ireland complete with flamenco performer, a pioneering weekend of string quartets and quite simply the most moving and high-level performance of Bach's St Matthew Passion I've ever heard. That was a date on which so much depended, as was my return to catch the last performance of Irish National Opera's triumphant Salome. I also saw half a play, which I would have written about for The Arts Desk had I liked it better and stayed. Gratitude, though, for our untimely departure leading to the serendipitous discovery of the best Indian food we've eaten since the last India trip, and the best film I've seen so far this year (and for a change I've seen quite a few). Love Life was the Monday offering at the Pavilion, Dún Laoghaire, and my friend Catherine, who goes when she can, asked me along on J's bridge night.

This unpredictable masterpiece, a superb piece of story-telling from Japanese director and screenwriter Kôji Fukada, constantly wrong-foots the viewer. The typical (I'm told) mix of low-key politeness and sudden bursts of anger accounts for part of the surprise, but I didn't expect to end up laughing so much in the later stages of the film. To disclose anything about the plot would be to spoil the fun; let's just say these three actors are superb.

The pace is surely dictated by the director as scriptwriter; the same can be said for Bong Joon Ho's Parasite, which we finally saw on the home movie screen here in Dublin last night: similarly surprising in its changes of direction. Thank you, Catherine. She's also been a willing chauffeur for excursions. After the Powerscourt revelations, we headed in February for Russborough House in West Wicklow. 

The Georgian house, its two wings making it the longest in Ireland, was designed by Richard Cassels/Castle for Joseph Leeson, First Earl of Milltown, and built between 1741 and 1755. If 'Milltown' rings a bell, it may be because of the Milltown Collection now lodged in the National Gallery of Ireland. The master brewer acquired some great art on his two Grand Tours. A few treasures remain, not least the well-framed seasonal seascapes of Vernet in the Drawing Room - two of them seen here flanking what (disappointingly) turns out to be a copy of Guercino's Triumph of David. 

The stucco work is original; its apogee is on the grand staircase, probably the work of the Lanfranchini brothers.

The next stage in the house's evolution was the arrival of the Beits, heirs to a diamond mine fortune. Alfred the younger married a Mitford, Clementine, and since the house kept being burgled - notably through the agency of Rose Dugdale, who died only yesterday, heiress turned IRA member (the film on the heist is reviewed here on The Arts Desk- the larger part of the Beit collection also went to the National Gallery of Ireland. It includes masterpieces by Vermeer, Velazquez and Goya. All the pictures stolen over time bar two were recovered. There are some fine relics still at Russborough, including a pair of tapestries with Indian-Chinese fantasies on them. Sadly one is part concealed by a four-poster bed, but what you can see of it is fine.

Since the inhabitants died childless, a foundation protects the house's status. The basement rooms, though dominated by a shop, include a cinema showing Beit's movies of his world travels and 3D photos you can see through what we used to call 'View Masters' in another room.

It was pouring with rain on our first visit, and since I left a fine green scarf behind, on this trip Catherine indulged me by driving back to Russborough. We were able to do what the downpour had prevented - walk a circuit to the west of the house, including a walled garden and, eventually, a fine view of the house.

Then we took a fine route over the nearby mountain from Hollywood - it has its own joke signing on the hillside - and stopped briefly at the Wicklow Gap, c. 475m, with meadow pipits and siskins for company,

before heading down to Glendalough. I'd promised to come here with J, so this was just a preliminary circuit around a small part of the monastery 'city' attendant on the presence of St Kevin here. Probably not his fault (because no doubt misogynistic hokum) if, alongside the lovely idea of a blackbird's eggs hatching on his long-outstretched palm, the most famous thing about him is his fundamentalist murder of 'temptress' Kitty. Catherine sang me the mocking folksong, with the key verses being the last two:

He gave the poor creature a shake
Oh, I wish that the garda had caught him
He threw her right into the lake
And of course she sank down to the bottom

It is rumoured from that very day
Kathleen’s ghost can be seen on the river
And the saint never raised up his hand
For he died of the right kind of fever

I give these because you may not be able to make out the words in the Dubliners' splendid rendition.

Anyway, here's Catherine on the bridge over a river in full spate.

The path up through the woods is magical, with mossy beech trees to the left,

but we'll continue to the upper lake, and Kevin's retreat, on another visit. Here we simply circled the medieval buildings in the cemetery, namely the saint's church,

the atmospheric ruin of the Cathedral,

and the Round Tower.

The site has the potential for peace and quiet, but there were quite a few American tour groups, here for St Patrick's Day. I imagine we'll return on a summer's evening, and maybe bathe in the upper lake.

Meanwhile, we headed for a Sunday morning service to catch good singing on the saint's big day. Trinity College Chapel was closed, so it made sense to walk up past the crowds awaiting the big procession to Christ Church Cathedral.

The service included Victoria's Missa o quam gloriosum and Tallis's 'Verily I say unto you'; the choir is first-rate. While I sat trying to hear the words of a very good sermon about Dublin's problems from Richard Carson of Dublin city centre's Aids Care Education and Training, I couldn't help admiring the tiles old and more recent.

J, however, was nowhere to be seen. For some reason still obscure to me, he'd doubled back and headed down to St Patrick's Cathedral, which was certainly inviting from the top of the thoroughfare. These two shots lookng both ways.

The street parades also took me back to my first full day on the first visit of the year, when thousands of Ukrainians paraded below the windows to mark two years of Putler's awful invasion.

On Monday, we went to the Quaker Cemetery outside Blackrock to remember our dear friends Beulah and Thomas Bewley. All gravestones are identical; typical of Quaker equaity. More on Beulah's funeral here; J was present in Dublin for Thomas's ceremonial. We always felt so welcome by both of them, and I was touched that in the early stages of dementia, when I visited her in Victoria, she said, 'well, you two are the musical part of the family'.

After that, we had lunch in Blackrock with friend Nancye, then walked out over Dublin bay. Greeting us immediately, or rather on their way from the sea to a rock pool for a communal swim, were a group of brent geese (the term, incidentally. comes from 'burnt' - the heads look as if they've been dipped in oil).

 Ritual swiftly concluded, they headed back to sea.

Reading up on these thousands (or tens of thousands) of overwinterers here from their Arctic breeding grounds in Richard Nairn's Wild Shores: The Magic of Ireland's Coastline, I learnt that they favour North Bull Island, that natural phenomenon created by the construction of a retaining wall on the north side of the Liffey from Clontarf to the sea in 1820 (Captain Bligh of Bounty fame had conducted the initial survey). The walk from Clontarf Junction Dart station along the esplanade and over the wooden bridge to the island, and back via the main bridge further north to Raheny station is an abiding memory from late 2022, and given a sunny start on Friday, I decided to do it again. I didn't have to walk far to catch a group of brent geese

who flew up when I got closer.

A fierce wind was behind me as I walked along the wall, admiring seagulls coasting on it, and though the tide was in, there's always saltmarsh the other side of the wooden bridge to North Bull Island to observe the usual redshanks, curlews, oystercatchers and (here, mostly, not in closeup because my treasured Lumix with its excellent Leica Zoom, has packed up) turnstones.

Essential lunch at the splendid cafe close to the beach, where windshields made sitting outside and conversing with the starlings possible, set me up for the rest of the walk - along the land behind the dunes

to the beach. I'm not sure where it becomes Dollymount Strand, but this time I kept walking along the sands until the route in to the road (2022's marshy wander was wet and a bit confusing, but rich in small birds). Showers threatened but didn't really get started, and rainbows were a reward

 Skylarks twittered, later linnets, until my luck gave out crossing the road bridge, and I got drenched in a sudden squall. Soon dried out in the returning sun on the way to the Dart station, though.

My procrastination in getting this post sorted yields another beauty from yesterday (Saturday), the grounds of Farmleigh at the west end of Phoenix Park, described as 'the official state guesthouse with a distinguished Guinness heritage'. The gardens are free to wander, and the magnolia walk was in full spate. Praise be to our friend (first) and driver (second) Séamus for bringing us here.

Within the walled garden, a cherry tree in full spate (not labelled, perhaps not as low as my favourite the Yoshino, but just as spectacular) outclasses even the magnolias).

The herbaceous borders will be spectacular later on - plenty of peony promise - and there will be wisteria flowering around the front door of the not especially distinguished house (eclipsing a Georgian original), but the blossom is good here too.

The Gallery (generously free, too) currently has two exhibitions going, one on Sir William Orpen (which didn't interest me much, my loss, no doubt) and the other devoted to the extraordinary photographs of his second cousin Goddard Orpen (which absolutely did). Do glass plate negatives - these ones recently discovered and curated by the Monksgrange Archives - give an atmosphere and depth to pictures? This seemed to bear testament.

All the portraits are excellent, but J and I were especially struck by a quartet which included two very different men - Philip Conran of Corrageen Lane and father-in-law Edward Richards, sporting a home-made uniform (he was a lifelong supporter of the Dress Reform Movement).

On our return to the centre of Dublin, we coincided with a march for Palestine. Though I abhor what's so obviously a genocide taking place on Israel's part, I don't feel entirely comfortable with the Palestinian flag or the 'from the river to the sea' proclamation; both can carry a message denying Israel's right to exist. But this protest, which I caught with speakers and singers on the south side of St Stephen's Green, seemed to be doing all the right things. And Ireland has a special affinity with Palestine, for obvious reasons.

Today we're back to city swanning and a St John Passion. By way of conclusion, I have to draw your attention to the infinite variety of Wednesday's WAKE, which I'm not strictly qualified to write about, but I did, for The Arts Desk, and a few snaps from a related event I mention at greater length in that review, the RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards - notable for its diversity, the huge number of young people taking up traditional instruments, and the easy predominance of Irish language which the audience understood (as J said, Kerry was in the house). 

I had put up a TV highlights link, but Howard Lane in a comment below says it's no longer available. The radio link still is at the time of writing - try here - and that has the courageous rant against the genocide in Gaza. I loved the venue, Vicar Street in the Liberties, and was happy with a 0.0 Guinness, now available, they say, on tap in over 1000 pubs and bars (a Guinness aficionado I know says it's better than the original...)

Sláinte!