Berberis' World

It’s amazing how the prospect of strangers turning up at your house makes you focus on the essentials. The landlord’s estate agent sent a couple round to view the house this afternoon, and within the space of 3 hours the house was tidier than it’s been for months. Not especially clean – bathroom and kitchen excepted – but just… well, just tidy.

They were here for maybe 10 minutes, and said the house was too small. If it was our house, it might be a problem. It’s not, so it’s not. We went out for lunch and did some essential (and some non-essential) shopping and came home via the route to the new house. There was a car in the drive, which we assumed was the landlord’s.

Otherwise, the move is proceeding smoothly. People have been contacted and details updated. I find it a little difficult to comprehend that this is the last weekend we will spend here. Next weekend we will be surrounded by boxes, wondering just where the hell we are going to put everything. We have replaced a loft and small cellar for 2 falling-down sheds, which will house some of it, but a certain Swedish furniture store will no doubt be the recipient of my hard-earned overtime in the shape of an ottoman or two. And then, if it all gets too much, I’ve got a choice of hiding places.

It’s music festival season – Glasto(nbury) being the main one, although there are hundreds of others all meant to cater for the bewildering variety of musical (and not so musical) tastes of those with enough disposable income to take a week off to attend – and I have to admit that I’ve not really hankered to go to one, even when I was devoid of enough responsibilty to do so. However, I sat on the edge of my daughter’s bed last night, hot and sweaty and with a head fuzzy from alcohol, and watched Muse – Devon’s finest export since a decent clotted cream tea – and envied the tens of thousands of hot, sweaty, fuzzyheaded people who were lucky enough to have tickets. They – Muse, not the crowd – were awesome.

My contribution to this summer’s musical landscape will be a raucous rendition of Land of Hope and Glory, celebrating/bemoaning* (*delete as applicable) England’s performance again Germany in the World Cup.

Amidst all the hype and hoo-ha surrounding the World Cup, it has largely gone unnoticed that the longest tennis match ever (not the only record smashed, if you’ll pardon the pun) has just finished at Wimbledon. I’ve been a tennis fan since Bjorn Borg’s first SW19 win in 1976 – although my interest waned somewhat after Andre Agassi retired – and, as one measure of how much has changed since then, I found myself this evening agreeing with John McEnroe.

Yesterday, as we watched Nicolas Mahut and John Isner walk leaden-footed and glassy eyed off Court 18, following the 2nd episode of their still unfinished 10 hour match, he remarked that, in his opinion, no footballer had the same incredible level of fitness. How right he was. These two grass-stained gladiators – neither of whom I’ve ever heard of – had been playing at 100% on the hottest day of the year so far, unable to get themselves substituted, fined (points, games, even the match, let alone money) if they wasted time writhing around on the grass “suffering” from an “injury”. True, they were both collared immediately post-match for some unnecessary chit-chat by a pasty interviewer, when they clearly wanted nothing more than an IV drip, an ice bath, followed by a Turkish massage. Well, maybe not the massage – they were in enough pain already.

Let’s face it, football is a game of 2 pretty short halves: 45 minutes of the occasional sprint, followed by a break for oranges/going to the loo/ducking hurled boots, followed (if you’re lucky or uninjured) by another 45 minutes of occasional sprinting. Maybe you get to take a free kick, maybe you even get to take a penalty. Chances are all you’ll actually do is stop the ball going out before passing it back to whichever goalie they’ve decided needs humiliating.

Just after 5pm this afternoon, I watched on the ward’s grainy portable as the umpire and players were given mementos (very British) of their 11 hour and 5 minute marathon, laughing out loud as I saw the numbers on the scoreboard. 70-68. Neither Isner nor Mahut looked in much better shape than they had last night, but it wasn’t much of a surprise that Isner won. You don’t need to be able to run very far when you’re serving well.

Nicolas Mahut will go to his next tournament £11,250 richer. That works out to just over £100 an hour. The Premier League’s Fernando Torres gets paid six times that for having 10 other people helping him get through a game less than 15% in duration.

After getting through to the 2nd round, a smiling John Isner said that more or less every part of his body hurt, and he’d lost all the skin on both his little toes. If, as seems likely, he loses his next match, he’ll net (sorry) £18,750 for his efforts. With that, he should just be able to afford 2 new knees.

Thursday, 1st April 2010, Royal Academy of Arts.

The first rule of queuing is don’t do it on an empty stomach. The second rule of queuing is don’t do it on an empty stomach. In the chill of an April morning, standing in an ever-lengthening line of like-minded individuals, shuffling forward no more than a yard or two every ten minutes – envying the half dozen frozen individuals who, having reached the queue’s head, were ushered into the relative warmth of the tented entrance – I realised why everyone else had coffee and nibbles to hand.

By the time I emerged, light-headed and blinking, into the early afternoon, I was famished. In the four hours between, I had the privilege of seeing some of the most wonderful art I have ever set eyes on. Vincent van Gogh, an artist whose work I have admired ever since borrowing a dog-eared paperback copy of the abridged letters from my local library. This was a deeply passionate individual, whose almost compulsively-obsessive attitude to everything he did – his theological studies, his drawing, his painting – was to lead to his increasingly frequent downward spirals into an emotional abyss from which he was, at the end, unable to emerge.

Understanding this, then, quite the most moving exhibit was the unfinished draft of Vincent’s final letter to his brother, Theo. A sheet of yellowing paper on which were several darker stains. The placing of the stains showed how the letter had been folded, presumably tucked in a pocket. On closer inspection, they were clearly not ink, nor water, and nothing similar was present on any of the other letters in the exhibition. A scribbled note, in pencil, written by Theo, indicated that this was the letter found on Vincent the day he shot himself. The stains were blood.

For me, as much as the tiny pencil sketches, the oddly restrained watecolours and the thickly daubed oil on canvas, this small sheet of aging paper with its spidery hand and brown blotches was Vincent van Gogh.

The man himself wrote: “Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” I’d gone to the RA the day before, deciding against joining the queue when I overheard a guide say the wait was over 2 hours. It was already midday, and I (wrongly) assumed there would be no tickets left by the time I managed to get to the desk. I went earlier on the Thursday. I’m very glad I did. For a man plagued with life-long self-doubt, Vincent was right. Great things…

Saturday, 20th February 2010, Royal Festival Hall.

“…inclusion of [The Eternal Gospel] this unwieldy yet absorbing hybrid of symphonic poem and cantata was welcome in view of its rarity… this setting of Jarosalv Vrchlick’s poem… has a fervency that came across strongly. It helped that Sofia Fomina was so eloquent in the lines allotted to the Angel, and if Adrian Thompson… was severely tested… his commitment was never in doubt. Neither was that of the London Philharmonic Choir, making for a gripping performance that was by some measure the highlight of the evening.”

Richard Whitehouse, Classical Source.“The Eternal Gospel was an unexpected success: no easy Bohemian lyricism here, either, but a blaze of ecstatic choral chant and terse instrumental motifs. The London Philharmonic Choir distinguished itself…”

Andrew Clark, FT.

“The London Philharmonic Choir brimmed with ardour…”

Geoff Brown, TimesOnline.

The positivity of these reviews is, in my opinion, generous, considering the breivity of the part played in this concert by the choir. It was very fortunate that we were on in the first half, because if I’d had to sit around for nearly 2 hours to sing for maybe 15 minues, I’d have been less than enthusiastic. As it was, this was not the most fun I’ve ever had in the Festival Hall.

The choral involvement in Eternal Gospel is minimal, as it is in Beethoven’s 9th, but the latter is almost the entirety of the final movement whereas, in the Janacek, it is spread throughout the piece, thus diluting (for me) its impact. There are two places where we got the chance to really let go, and neither seemed to do anything, or go anywhere.

Add to this unsatisfactory mix the Festival Hall’s organ and you have the ingredients for a short, and less than sweet, evening, about which there is very little more to say.

Saturday, 13th February 2010, Royal Festival Hall.

“The evening yielded two Pavans…  from which the aching lamentations of Poulenc’s Stabat Mater made for a highly original (and rarely heard) climax to the programme. The fantastic mix of textures and moods in this piece – angelic one moment, all grimacing gargoyles the next – lends it a slightly subversive tone and there’s something sensually Caravaggian about its pained chromaticism… purity is close to eroticism here and that’s something Nezet-Seguin appeared to have shared with the LPO Choir.”

Edward Seckerson, The Independent

We had such fun with this in rehearsal. My score was liberally decorated with cartoons and comments regarding the music (and its degree of cheesiness) and the text (and its degree of ridiculousness). However, when Neville said that ‘Poulenc’ was pronounced ‘Plank’, unbounded hilarity ensued.

Having said all that, I finally enjoyed singing this piece – having, for reasons already mentioned, not been hugely enamoured in the beginning – and it was a joy to work with Yannick Nezet-Seguin again. He’s adorable; enthusiastic, generous (and tactful) and I give not a fig about the alleged tendency towards ‘fly-catching’ that some have criticised.

It was unfortunate, then, that we were required to sing the choral version of Faure’s Pavane. This is a criminally over-used piece of music at best, the addition of lyrics simply compounding the crime. Twee and embarrassing.

Some of the LPC sops and alts were selected to perform the Debussy ‘Nocturnes’ and most of the rest of the LPC sat in the side stalls to listen. It was a lovely and ethereal climax to some gorgeous performances by the LPO.

During the rehearsal the last-minute sop sub Claire Booth seemed to rely very heavily on a pencil, which she wielded deftly with her left hand. We figured that her amazing voice actually emerged from the end of this magic pencil, which could explain the reviews. Professional singers should, ideally, not suffer from stage fright.