Perhaps the best performance by a soloist in a lifetime: Andrey Baronov plays Taneyev’s Suite in ADDA Alicante

After over fifty years of concert going, it is unusual to attend an orchestral concert that features three works, each more than a century old, that one has not heard before. I have recordings of all three works, of course, but they have not figured regularly on my personal playlist. When such experience is coupled with a solo performance that ranks amongst the best I have ever heard, then you might conclude that the experience was memorable. The experience in Alicante’s ADDA auditorium last night suppressed surpassed that by a long way.

The works concerned date from 1907, 1882 and 1897. They are respectively the Suite for Violin an Orchestra by Sergey Taneyev and Dvořák’s Domov muj, My Homeland Op62 and A Hero’s Song Op111. Taneyev’s music - especially his orchestral works – do not figure regularly on concert programmes in Western Europe, whilst Dvořák’s symphonies and orchestral dances figure regularly, whilst his tone poems do not.

A Hero’s Song, the programme notes told the audience, is probably a short autobiography of its composer. At the time of the work’s composition, Antonin Dvorak was almost sixty and had returned from his teaching in the United States. The work suffers none of the pomp and obvious self-marketing of Richard Strauss’s attempt at the same idea. Richard Strauss was still in his thirties when he wrote the grandiose Ein Heldenleben, A Hero’s Life. Both in concept and hearing it could not present more different experience than that Antonin Dvořák composed on, basically, the same idea.

Symphonic in structure but spanning a single movement lasting less than 25 minutes, A Hero’s Song Op111 is recognizably the music of Dvořák, but it has modernistic directions in its writing. It is scored for a large orchestra, which is used by the composer to create tones and colours rather than a blunderbuss. Unlike Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, A Hero’s Song was indeed the composer’s final orchestral work. If it is autobiographical, it is upbeat about things in general. There is a slow section that contains a funeral march, but then we all go there. Generally, the music dances, its way through its twenty minutes, but there are moments when Dvorak simply delights in the sounds that he can write for a full orchestra. And, though the work ends proudly upbeat, there is real humility in this music, as if the composer was saying to posterity, “That is who I am and that is what I can do. It’s now up to you!”

The performance of A Hero’s Song was preceded in the second half of the concert by Dvořák’s overture Domov muj, My Homeland, in which the composer celebrated Czech Theatre. This is middle Dvořák, after, it has to be said, that he had thrown off his mid-century tendency to gigantism when his compositions – the early symphony is for example – run to great length. My Homeland is a celebration of themes which were well known to his audience. The non-Czechs in an audience simply revel in the melodies.

This evening finished with the Slavonic Dance Op 72 No2 and in a second half devoted to three works by Dvořák, we had covered the nationalism, the folkloric dancing, and the serious introspection that characterized his work. Rossen Milanov’s conducting brought out all three sides of the composer’s music. He is clearly passionate about the music of Antonin Dvořák.

The first half of the concert had been devoted to a single work. And the Suite for Violin and Orchestra Op28 by Sergey Taneyev, at over forty minutes, is longer than most concerti for the instrument. The composer chose not to use to use the title “concerto”, but this is a vast work, making concerto-like demands on the soloist. Across its five movements, there is no obvious use of sonata form and the music – in the wrong hands – could appear episodic. Hence the title, “suite”.

But under the baton of Rossen Milanov and especially with Andrey Baronov as soloist, what we heard was not only virtuosic playing, but also a work that deserves to be more central in the repertoire of violin and orchestra.

Its five movements were diverse. It opens with a Prelude, a dialogue between soloist and orchestra, reminiscent in my ear, at least, to the opening of the first concerto of Shostakovich. This is music that seems to be searching for a home and then decides just to keep wandering. The movement that follows could have been written by Respighi some years later. It is almost pop music, but its neoclassical style twists and turns the thematic material is surprising ways.

The Fairy Tale that follows was surely in Sergei Prokofiev’s mind when he wrote his first violin concerto. The violin appears to be alone in a land of strange orchestral colours and a succession of broken phrases. As fairytales go, it is something magical.

The biggest of the five movements, Theme and Variations comes next. Taneyev was here showing off how many styles in which he could present what is really a rather trite theme. It holds together because of its virtuosity, the solo part being dominant without being domineering.

The finale is a Tarantella that dances its way out of a work that has lasted over forty minutes. The movement is reminiscent of those biting scherzos that became popular amongst composers in the mid twentieth century, but its teeth were not so sharp, and the music remains celebratory.

And so ended the real surprise that will change my listening habits. I do have a recording of the piece, but it’s a recording that I have hardly played. It may now even become worn out.

Lastly, I must record that Andrey Baranov’s playing as soloist in Taneyev’s Suite must rank amongst the most impressive performances that I have ever heard. Not only was he committed to the music, with which he clearly was a good deal more familiar than anyone in the audience, but he made every phrase communicative. The suite is not a concerto, so he had no cadenza in which to show off. But the result was much more than a suite of unrelated pieces. It became more of a dialogue between orchestra and violin that made musical and experiential sense. It is not often that a soloist takes repeated curtain calls to the unanimous applause – not just bow waving – of the entire orchestra, but Andrey Baranov did just that. This was not merely memorable: it went way beyond that.

As an encore, Andrey Baranov chose to play the 23rd Caprice of Paganini, which was an interesting choice, because next time the ADDA audience will hear Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on the same piece.

Armenian National Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Eduard Topchjan with Sergey Khachatryan as soloist

The program for the Armenian National Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Eduard Topchjan listed three works. These were, in printed order, the Brahms Violin Concerto with Sergey Khachatryan as soloist, Francesca de Rimini of Tchaikovsky, and then Khachaturian’s Gayaneh. What we heard was considerably different.

The concert actually opened with two movements from Khachaturian’s suite from Spartacus. It certainly was not the Brahms Concerto, which we had expected. It was already going to be quite a long concert, so it was with some relief that the piece that followed was the concerto.

Sergey Khachatryan is a world-renowned violinist. For a seasoned concert goer, there is not much more to say about the Brahms concerto, except to comment on the playing of the soloist. Sergey Khachatryan’s playing was technically perfect and indeed elegant. Personally, I found his reading of the work rather too mechanically expressive. His quiet sections, I found, were excessively quiet and on occasions I found the orchestra overpowered his playing, which is a characteristic I do not often find in this concerto. Personally, I find this concerto works best in the concert hall when the soloist does not try to over interpret. There is enough structure in Brahms’s writing, and the drama is all in the music. This is not a criticism of Sergey Khachatryan’s playing, it is a statement of my own prejudice. Certainly the audience was enthusiastic about the performance.

The soloist gave a substantial encore. Against almost a drone of tremolo played by the front desks of the first violin, Sergey Khachatryan played a modal piece that I suggest was Havoun, havoun by Grigor Narekatski. The piece was written in the tenth century by an Armenian monk and mystic, also known as Gregory of Narek. This is music that the soloist plays regularly as an encore. It does not offer any opportunity to show off, being rather quiet, modal, and slow. What it does display is control, spirituality, and identity. It was received in silence by an attentive audience who absorbed every note. We then had an interval.

Thoroughly expecting Tchaikovsky’s tone poem Francesca de Rimini after the break, the audience was surprised to hear the opening bassoon solos of the Fantasy Overture Romeo and Juliet, which did not appear on the printed program at all. The Armenian Philharmonic gave a spirited performance of an intensely dramatic work, which, somehow, did not approach tragedy.

Then, expecting Gayaneh of Khachaturian, the audience got their performance of Tchaikovsky’s tone poem Francesca de Rimini. This is an enormous piece, described in the program as one of the composer’s most powerful works. It is a real opportunity for an orchestra to show off, and the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra did just that. In over five decades and once going, this was the first time I had heard the piece “live”, and it makes a considerable sound, with paroxysms of modulation, peppered with gigantic brass chords. The work makes a vast statement and the playing was up to the challenge.

Khachaturian’s Gayaneh is for another day. It was not the encore!

 

 

Yui Higashijima in Schumann's Piano Concerto with the Elche Orchestra under Achim Holub in ADDA, Alicante

 

Yui Higashijima won the third Alicante Piano Competition “Gonzalo Soriano” in 2025. As part of her prize, she was invited to play a concerto with the Elche Symphony Orchestra. The Schumann Piano Concerto was chosen, and last night she played the concerto with the orchestra in one of three concerts in the cycle. This particular concert took place in the ADDA auditorium in Alicante, and there will be another performance in Torrevieja tonight.

As one of the organisers of the competition in Alicante, I would be expected to give a positive review of the concert and the playing of the soloist. I will not disappoint. But I will go considerably further than that.

I have heard the Schumann Piano Concerto many times in concert and literally hundreds of times in broadcasts and recordings. As anyone who reads my reviews regularly will already know, I maintain that I have a musical blind spot when it comes to Robert Schumann. I often find his music rather empty, with emotion worn on the sleeve of his frockcoat to make up for the absence of the real thing. Well, I realized last night that, in order to understand this music, I needed someone who could communicate the musical experience with both confidence and vision.

The first thing to note is the tempo marking on the first movement. It is “alegro affettuoso”. Now, in previous hearings of the work, I was never musically conscious of the intellectual conflict that Schumann wanted to describe. The conflict is between a youthful vigorous figure and more contemplative character who is conscious of humanity’s darker side. Whether on previous occasions this conflict has been lacking in the interpretations I have heard or whether I missed it in my eagerness to pre-judge the composer, I have no idea.

But last night in the hands of Yui Higashijima, and under the expert and committed direction of Achim Holub, the musical conflict took centre stage. Soloist and conductor were not afraid to vary the tempi to stress the dialogue which leads to conflicting arguments. Now this sounds simple, but in performance it requires discussion, rehearsal and execution. Anyone who has performed in public will know that “getting it done” can be paramount. To exert control and interpretation to this level of performance is a real achievement and both soloist and conductor were of the same mind. Together, they opened the ears of this particular listener, who came away from the performance, as if hearing the work for the first time. Perhaps I had heard it for the first time, all the previous occasions, being “hearings”, not “listenings”.

Yui Higashijima’s performance of the piece was simply outstanding. She brought meaning and shaped to every phrase of the score. Achim Holub’s conducting was expert. He demanded a lot of the Elche Orchestra and the players responded with perfection. I will simply never listen to the concerto again, or indeed, Robert Schumann’s music in general, without having this performance in mind as a new benchmark.

Yui Higashijima followed with an encore of one of Mozart’s well-known rondos, the one in D major K485. It was interesting to hear how she played this familiar music. She managed to emphasize the surprises without being without losing the overall playfulness of Mozart’s music. Perhaps Yui Higashijima worked magic with Mozart as well!

The concert was subtitled “Portraits of Romanticism”, and the phrase was important. Having heard Schumann’s mid-century version, we then heard the Elche Orchestra under Achim Holub perform the Symphony No. 4 of Johannes Brahms from 1885. By the fourth symphony, it seemed that Brahms had relaxed a little. Again, the music was given space to express itself and it did so with expert guidance and playing. When last year the same orchestra also played the Brahms Symphony No. 4 in a concert, I wrote that there were some difficulties with the experience. The first movement on that occasion lacked shape. Not so on this occasion, when clearly the direction of Achim Holub made a real difference that reshaped the experience. Last year, the work was listed as lasting 42 minutes and this year it was 45. The three minutes extra were probably of the result of Achim Holub’s choice of tempi. Clearly an expert in the performance of Brahms symphonies, he conducted from memory and successfully transmitted his personal feelings for the music to the orchestral playing, which was nothing less than superb.

 

 

Carl Orff's Carmina Burana in Cluj

The Academic College – Auditorium Maximum, Cluj-Napoca

Choir and Orchestra of the Transylvania State Philharmonic

Gergely Madaras conductor

Andreea Guriță Novac soprano

Andrea Mirchev tenor

Geani Brad baritone

Carl Orff - Carmina Burana

Sceptical about yet another Carmina Burana, and yet I need not have worried. There was nothing else available, so I booked it.

The hall has a rounded end and at first sight would focus the sound. Well it did, but in a very musical way. What we heard was a quite brilliant acoustic, when every sound was crisp and clearly defined. Add to that the tempi choice of the conductor, Georgely Madaras, and the mix was perfect.

The tempi were all quite fast and he used quite a lot of accelerando. The music seemed to chase itself along and early on I was worried that the baritone would get left behind. Appropriately, the tenor wore a white jacket and the soprano a red dress. These soloists were all more than competent and really acted out the roles they sang. The tenor had the right mix of humour and pain to be convincing.

Above all the chorus made the evening. They were together, responsive to the tempi changes and very enthusiastic. The orchestral playing was brilliant, and the audience lapped it up, finishing with one of those applause sessions in unison that are so popular in eastern Europe.

BBC National Orchestra of Wales plays Grace Williams, Saint-Saens and Elgar under Jaime Martín with Akiko Suwanai

 

Last night’s concert in ADDA, Alicante was given by BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Jaime Martín with Akiko Suwanai as soloist. On the face of the published schedule, they were just two works, the third violin concerto of Saint-Saens and Elgar’s Enigma Variations. A little short, one might think… Well think again!

The evening’s programme scheduled a third work, a substantial piece as well. It was Grace Williams’s Sea Sketches for string orchestra. At nearly twenty minutes, this rendered the concert’s length substantial at least.

Written in 1944 by its Welsh composer, Sea Sketches predates Britten's Peter Grimes, which, of course, includes the now separately performed Sea Interludes. Sea Sketches by Grace Williams comprises five movements that explore the sonorities of a string orchestra, as well as giving an impressionistic portrait of the sea in five different pictures– in wind, in song, with mysterious sirens, breaking on the shore and becalmed in summer. The textures of Grace Williams’s writing for strings stressed the coolness of a windy beach, with neo-classical flavours hardening the language of late Romanticism. One might think of Britten’s string writing when listening to Sea Sketches, but Grace Williams in the piece speaks to an audience with her own voice and communicates her own personal feelings. Grace Williams died almost fifty years ago, and her music richly deserves a wider audience.

Akiko Suwanai was soloist in Saint-Saen’s Violin Concerto No. 3. Her playing was simply breathtaking. From the work’s quiet opening and then into the opening allegro, she gave everything the work needed. If Saint-Saens was anything, he was a composer of technical mastery, and in this concerto there is both real dialogue between the orchestra and soloist and, indeed, that dialogue is always audible. The composer’s handling of the orchestra is nothing less than expert. A listener is always aware of its power to dominate, always conscious of its lines of argument, but also confident that none of the soloist’s statements will be drowned.

The slow movement was pure delight after the energy of the opening. Its longer lines allowed Akiko Suwanai to show the lyrical side of her playing, and she used the opportunity to give a beautiful performance, stressing the elegance of this music. The final allegro is again full of energy and Akiko Suwanai’s playing reproduced the communication of the first movement. It was a superb performance of the spectacular music. Akiko Suwanai gave the audience a little unaccompanied Bach has an encore. As she played alone, it was interesting to note how attentively even the orchestra listened.

Elgar’s Enigma Variations is so well-known seems unnecessary to say any more about it. But the work as a whole is not as well known as the Nimrod variation, which is often played stand-alone. It is decades since I last heard a live performance of the entire work, and I was struck by the extreme dynamics, the composer demands.

A challenge of variation writing is to keep an audience interested in the familiar. Elgar’s solution in Enigma is to present the theme and then fourteen variations which exploit the full range of orchestral possibilities. Each variation is ostensibly a portrait of an individual and the composer ups the pace by keeping the variations short, except of course, for Nimrod, which is always too short for an audience from an audience's point of view.

What had turned out to be quite a long concert finished with a Russian encore, Glinka’s Russlan and Ludmilla Overture. It was played with real gusto and enthusiasm, as was everything else we heard. What a delight, also, to hear a British Orchestra playing two works by British composers on a foreign tour.

Josep Vicent and the ADDA Orchestra programme one of the twentieth century’s major works and a concerto by Campogrande featuring Meta4

 

The challenge of reviewing a performance of a work that one is deeply fond of is to remain objective. Well, I have already failed to be so. I first came across the Symphony No. 4, The Inextinguishable by Carl Nielsen when I was in my late teens. I have been listening to it regularly since then, so I must have heard it several hundred times. One might have thought that over the years its effect would grow less intense, its originality might have blurred, its surprise diminished. Not so.

Live performances of the work – except on radio – have been rare. It must be forty years since I last heard it in the concert hall. In a near lifetime of concert going, I have never heard the composer’s first or second symphony in concert. I have heard the Espansiva once, the fourth maybe twice and the fifth maybe four times. The enigmatic sixth, Sinfonia Semplice, once only. At home, I regularly listen to recordings, but Nielsen in the concert hall is something of a rarity.

Thank you, thus, to Josep Vicent and the ADDA Orchestra for programming the work and performing it with such commitment. For me. It was the highlight of the season and did not disappoint.

Written in 1916 and containing the composer’s references to The First World War, The Inextinguishable is a revolutionary work despite being musically conservative and sharing with Nielsen’s other works a considerable debt to Johannes Brahms. Carl Nielsen became one of music’s most original voices and it is in this symphony that we hear some of his most profound musical statements.

The fourth, for instance, has four conventional movements. But they are played without a break. Nielsen developed the idea of “progressive keys” in which music starts in one key and ends in another, thus suggesting in the listener’s ear an idea of “progress”. In the case of the fourth symphony, this is enhanced by playing the movements without breaks. And within those movements the musical material is very varied. Other composers might have used the progression of keys for entirely musical reasons, but in Nielsen there is this added layer of a journey for the listener. And the effect is subtle. Carl Nielsen never wanted to lead his audience by the nose through a “programme”. The effect is personal, even Romantic, and utterly convincing.

Two timpanis go to war occasionally in this work, and the orchestra manages to overcome their anger by being level-headed and positive, thus reflecting the composer’s fundamental optimism. In the fourth symphony, this optimism still triumphs, whereas in the fifth symphony, this optimism still comes through in the end but for all of forty minutes, the music is in minor keys, only finding its way to a major key in the closing coda. But by the time Carl Nielsen wrote the sixth symphony, cynicism had got the better of his optimistic spirit, and that is why the work remains problematic.

But still in the fourth Symphony, the compositional style is late Romanticism. It is still the individual that matters, though Nilsson is modern enough to frame the experience in current events in the external world. He is musically conservative enough to use fugues, but they bite with sharp edges, their counterpoint being jagged and modernistic. But within this conservative approach to composition, the composer manages to present material that is succinct, to the point and always subservient to an overall idea. The music is almost Neo-Classical despite being written before the term was invented!

But above all, there is energy in this music. The energy is “life energy”, which the composer thought would shine through current difficulties and result in positive outcomes. As a symphonist, the conservative Carl Nielsen became overall a thoroughly modern individual, ultimately wearied by the life he so desperately tried to affirm. How modern is that?

In the first half of the concert, we heard Josep Vicent’s selection of Manuel de Fallas’s Three Cornered Hart and Liberi Tutti, Nicola Campogrande’s Concerto for String Quartet, and Orchestra. The ADDA audience has heard the former work regularly and it never fails to rouse. The latter work featured the now superstars of Meta4, who performed brilliantly, if at the same time a little anonymously. Personally, I found the work always interesting, but eventually disappointing. Its generally minimalist style seemed to concentrate on creating a sheen of sound which was in itself convincing but also seemed to envelop the soloists in an overall orchestral sound which rather hid their significant and substantial contribution. The problem for me was not in the performance but in the handling of the musical material.

Overall, I found the Nielsen still much more modern, despite its being written over a century ago.

Escandinavia – ADDA hosts Joan Enric Lluna and Joana Carneiro in Grundman, Bach and Schumann

 

The concert was subtitled “Escandinavia”, a label that some of the audience found a little confusing. But a program note clarified that the Symphony No. 2 of Robert Schumann is also often called Escandinavia as a nickname. Despite being premiered in Dresden in 1845, it was also dedicated to King Oscar of Norway and Sweden – hence the nickname.

Baffling labels aside, there was nothing in this program to challenge a concert-going audience, apart from possibly a world premiere of a piece by locally resident composer, Jorge Grundman. The History of a Smile for clarinet and orchestra was listed as his opus 96, no less. The orchestra in question turned out to be strings and a percussion section of a vibraphone and a marimba. These latter instruments played a significant part in creating a soundscape for the work, while, if anything, the full complement of strings was, if anything, underused.

But this is essentially a show piece for solo clarinet, though it would be stretching things to say it was a concerto. Minimalist structures are heard here, with many figures relying on minor scales or modes around a bass pedal. The overall effect is perhaps rather monotonous, but, given the minimalist inspiration, that is part of the point. Joan Enric Lluna’s playing was superb, as were the two encores he offered, both his own compositions and forming two parts of his Homenaje á Maestro Rodrigo.

Joana Carneiro’s conducting of this opening work was itself astounding in that she prompted every detail of the score. It came, therefore, as no surprise to read that she often specialises in contemporary music. When she moved onto Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3, she was equally precise with music that demands above all precision. Now this is every well-known music, especially the second movement, the Air, which is often heard as a standalone piece. The ADDA Orchestra’s playing, especially that of the trumpet, was breathtaking.

And in the second half we heard a Romantic symphony that epitomises the mid-nineteenth century approach to music. It is often levied as a criticism against minimalism that the music is all process, not product. Anyone thinking that this is a characteristic of modern music should listen to the Symphony No. 2 of Robert Schumann, where the composer’s assumptions of form, modulation and orchestration are more than evident. In the end, it is a satisfying work, but, for all Schumann’s reputation for unpredictability, this particular concertgoer tends to find his approach formulaic. It’s a personal opinion.

The orchestral playing, the conducting, and the solo playing were all superb. The program also held together beautifully and as a whole it was also superb.

L’Écume des Jours by Edison Denisov from Lille Opera on OperaVision

 

I do not usually review anything outside of direct experience. Theatre, opera, and concerts, yes, because they are experienced at firsthand. I make an exception for books, because reading is so personal that each different reader may find a different world within pages visited by others. Film, recordings and television I regard as packaged and, though I might record what I have seen, I do not write reviews. There are exceptions, notably the operas Eros and Psyche by Rosicky and Von Einem’s Der Prozess - The Trial, both of which were live performances made available by the wonderful work of OperaVision. The exception has come around again, this time in the form of Denisov’s L’Écume des Jours, an opera also broadcast by OperaVision.

Premiered in 1986, Opera de Lille recently presented the work, and it is available on the OperaVision website until September 2026. I encourage opera lovers everywhere to try it, and anyone interested in contemporary music should make a make a point of listening, perhaps on several occasions.

Edison Denisov’s music does not have many performances in the concert halls of western Europe and North America. Personally, I can see a straight line of influence through the twentieth century – the Soviet century – starting with Shostakovich, continuing through Schnittke and terminating with Denisov. Seen together, the work of these three composers seems to illustrate the history and fate of the Soviet Union from its creation to its demise. Right from the Symphony No1 of Dmitri Shostakovich, with its almost confident modernity anticipating the Constructivism in art that would follow, through to the disparate multiplicity of style and form that characterizes Denisov’s music, there was generally an increasing loss of confidence in the ideal and increasing resort to cynicism on behalf of the composers in order to express what they were feeling.

Listen, for instance, to each composer’s first symphony, and compare them. As recently mentioned, Shostakovich was generally upbeat, though as a composer he was never particularly optimistic. Later, always prone to pastiche, in his case circus, music and jazz often invade the gloom, the first symphony limits itself to what might be achieved by a young genius. It is forward looking, if not quite confident.

Contrast that with the first symphony of Arnold Schnittke. The vision is equally grand, but now there is evidence of cynicism, some use of the random, inclusion of electronics and frequent use of popular forms, though these are generally integrated and interwoven. There is less confidence than in Shostakovich and more cynicism, but the overall impression is that the individual can still make a contribution, though the outlook is bleak.

In Denisov’s first symphony, equally grand in vision as the two already mentioned, it seems that recognizable forms and shapes have been subsumed into confusion, a thoroughly competent confusion where the composer can express what he wishes but cannot settle mentally into a particular style or groove. Everything is disparate – at least on the surface. The concerns of previous generations of composers are still there are still here, but they are packaged together, as if the composer cannot decide what should take precedence. The despair seems here closer to the surface, the energy of cynicism that both Shostakovich and Schnittke is here dissipated to despair. It sounds as if Edison Denisov lacks the commitment to espouse as a particular style and consciously dithered the sound.

And said we come to L’Écume des Jours in the production by Opera Lille. Based on Boris Vian’s surrealist novel Froth On The Daydream, we meet Chloë, who is clearly not well. She turns to Isis, her friend and lover, and pleads for one last chance to meet a boy and be happy. Such a boy appears in the shape of Colin. Chloë and Colin hit it off, though Chloë has to disguise herself in a pink dress and wear a wig to hide the fact that she that her treatment has caused her to lose her hair. Chloë is in fact suffering from water lily in the lung and her treatment is to be surrounded with flowers.

Serious surreal encounters ensue, which involve mice, people emitting smoke, a doctor who prepares a treatment by severing his own tongue and piercing his own arm, a character who cuts off his arm with a knife, and various other visual treats.

Initially, the flights of fancy are vaguely shocking and part humorous, but as the opera progresses, they become darker and more threatening. A real crucified Christ appears regularly, accompanied by his own choir, and a character called Alise asserts her substantial presence on the proceedings.

The opera’s denouement is a lethal injection for Chloë to end her suffering, and we are left at the end with Isis, Chloë and Colin reclining on a hospital bed, with Chloë dying But with Isis placed centrally, we realise that she is suffering the most. The opera seems to be saying that the real suffering is felt by those who experience bereavement, not death.

Denisov’s music is perfect for the scenario. It comes and goes, makes its point, then disappears. When popular forms appear, they threaten rather than or relieve. Eventually, these characters are tossed around by events like rudderless boats in a storm. They are part of and party to the events, but they are never in control. Chloë is dying, Colin, to some extent, exists only because Chloë wished him to. It is Isis, the person in the middle of the love triangle who suffers, and it is she who is alive and will continue to live. The shortest straw, perhaps.

L’Écume des Jours is a rarity. Opera lovers should give it a go. Do not be daunted by the apparent disconnectedness of most of the music. After two hours, it will all make sense in the sense that it remains nonsense. The above is what I took from the experience in a single sitting. There will be more.

Bassem Akiki conducts and the direction of Anna Smolar is amazing.  Josefin Feiler, Cameron Becker, Katia Ledoux, Elmar Gilbertsson, Edwin Crossley-Mercer, Natasha Te Rupe Wilson, Robin Neck, Maurel Endong, Matthieu Lécroart have important parts in the cast. Do experience L’Écume des Jours on OperaVision.

Martha Argerich, Charles Dutoit and the Orchestra Della Svizzera Italiana present a star-studded concert in ADDA, Alicante

 

Star billing often does not live up to audience expectations. Such events tend to attract attendees who are more interested in seeing a star name than in listening to what that performer might be able to do. There was not one minute like that in the entire evening last night in ADDA, Alicante, where we were privileged to hear music made by Martha Argerich and Charles Dutoit.

They are both getting on in years. Martha Argerich is 84 and Charles Dutoit 90, but no one who listened to the music they made would have had any inkling of their advancing years, so fresh and eager were both in their music making.

 Martha Argerich’s name would grace any concert in any auditorium. Here she played the first concerto of Beethoven, the same work that opened her concerto-performing career just 76 years ago. It is hard when listening to this music to imagine that it was written before 1800. This is fresh, sophisticated, jolly, and serious at the same time, and displays the kind of integration between the orchestra and soloist that was to shape and so completely change the form so completely from the elegance and decoration of the eighteenth-century model.

Though it was not Beethoven’s first attempt at the form - we know that he was in intensely self-critical - it has a freshness and directness that belies its complexity. Here Beethoven wanders wide from the declared C major and makes abrupt transitions, both rhythmic and harmonic. This can make a performance of the work seem disconnected, but not, of course, in the hands of Martha Argerich, who first recorded the work over 40 years ago.

The followed an encore. Scarlatti’s Sonata K1 41 is a piece that Martha Argerich plays regularly as an encore. What her right hand has to do in this piece is both fast and intricate. But the effect is above our musical: there is no show here, only quality.

The orchestra and Charles Dutoit had started the evening with a performance of Ravel’s Mother Goose. Now Ravel’s music is always surprising. Here, Charles Dutoit chose slow tempi that stressed both of the beauty of the phrases and the detail of the orchestration. Nothing in music exists, of course, if the musicians are not up to the task. In this concert, the Orchestra Della Svizzera Italiana was not only up to the task, their playing and integration as an ensemble sculpted every phrase to perfection.

In the second half, Charles Dutoit directed the Orchestra Della Svizzera Italiana in the fourth symphony of Mendelson, the Italian. At 90 years of age, Charles Dutoit keeps gestures to a minimum, but what he gets from his players is superb. And it was especially joyful for the audience to witness how much the players were enjoying the experience, a response, which kept the music, both lyrical and vibrant. Charles Dutoit announced that the encore would be a piece that was “very well known”, and it was. Perfection.

Handel's Giulio Cesare In Egitto in Valencia is a triumph for all concerned, singers, designers, directors, technicians and especially musicians

 

Giulio Cesare In Egitto is an opera by Handel dating from approximately 1724. The word “approximately” must also be applied to the operas of George Frederick Handel because he was nothing if not a pragmatist. He regularly rewrote or edited passages to accommodate the particular skills or shortcomings of whatever singers he had at his disposal. For a composer who wrote over forty Italian operas, some of them almost household names, we would expect that opportunities to hear his work in major houses are frequent. Though I personally have not sought performances of the composer’s work, I admit that the last time I heard a performance of one of the operas was forty years ago in London when the English National Opera did Xerxes. I recall that I attended two performances, because it was a superb production. So it was with some misgivings that I approached this production in Valencia of Giulio Cesare In Egitto. My musical tastes have changed over the years and I was not sure that the experience would measure up to expectations -  or perhaps the real fear was that it would!

The reluctance was not musical. Handel’s melodic gift is one of the most dependable things in European music. Basically, I worried that a three-and-a-half-hour baroque opera would not sustain my interest in a hall like Les Arts, Valencia, where the presence of a baroque orchestra might just be lost in the sheer size of the place. I need not have worried. A seat in row five meant that everything was perfectly audible, though I imagine that some passages of this production might have been less than audible in the gods.

And speaking of gods, they were remarkably absent in this libretto. Though the sets regularly featured pyramids and ibises, there were a few references to any religious differences that might have existed between Egypt and Rome. Indeed, the setting was the Ptolemaic period, so indeed there may have been not have been many differences, at least as far as emperors and generals were concerned.

At the start, Caesar is victorious. Tolomeo, ruler of Egypt, has had Pompeo, the opposing general in the recent battle, beheaded, and, thinking the trophy of the head would please Caesar, he has his henchman, Achilla, present it to Caesar. To perform the task, Achilla is dressed like a cross between a jester and an ogre. Caesar is revolted, as is Cordelia, Pompeo’s wife and Sesto, his son, who vows to avenge the death of his father. In this production Sesto’s youth is emphasised by his inability to lift the sword that he wields as a threat.

Cleopatra, not satisfied with playing second fiddle to her brother, then sets about a plot to remove him from the throne and bring Caesar along with her, thus uniting power and cementing her position. Much of the opera’s plot revolves around the way Cleopatra uses her guile and looks to win Caesar over to her plan. It is essential, therefore, that Cleopatra can not only sing, she needs to act supremely well, without once hamming it up.

One of the major successes of this imaginative production was to use two Cleopatras, one of whom sang. Cleopatra, the seductress, wore a long frilly dress, while Cleopatra the schemer wore a business suit. The two Cleopatras were made up to appear very similar and swapped clothes here and there, depending on what the music was conveying. In a moment of absolute magic, Cleopatra, as an inconsequential servant, seduces a snoozing Caesar. But he is on stage, while Cleopatra sings from within the audience, dressed as the seductress. At the scenes denouement, the second Cleopatra appears on stage to stand in triumph over Caesar, but she, the non-singing character, is dressed as the schemer. Ultimate conquest is achieved. Both the drama and the beauty this scene conveyed was one of the production’s triumphs.

By the end, Pompeo’s death is avenged, Tolomeo gets his comeuppance and Cesar and Cleopatra are married to everyone’s delight, even the characters who also who have been recently killed.

Baroque opera is not renowned for either action or drama. Indeed in Giulio Cesare In Egitto, the norm is for one character to present an aria expressing their current emotional state and the dilemmas that they imagine. This focuses the attention of the audience on two things: musicality and production. Musicality underpins the credibility of the character and production contextualises their thoughts and makes sense of everything.

The musicality was masterfully executed by Mark Minkowski, who clearly has a genuine penchant for this form. The tempi he chose and especially the dynamics he employed were nothing less than masterful, and the Valencia Orchestra was not only up to the challenge, but the players also seemed to relish the opportunity to show off their prowess. The pianissimo passages in particular were riveting. Here, in this great theatre before an audience of more than thousand, a character with orchestral accompaniment was able to sing quietly and be heard by everyone. It made all the characters, above all, human and their expressed psychological dilemmas real. Only rarely have I heard a production of an opera where as much obvious planning has gone into integrating what we heard and saw. It is one thing to plan on another to execute, but the cast of Giulio Cesare In Egitto did it all. Everything, ultimately, had to make sense and it did!

And the production needs to be highlighted. It is hard to single out a particular aspect, so the triumvirate of director Vicent Boussard, designer Frank Philipp Schlossman and costume designer Christine Lacroix must all be mentioned, as indeed must the lighting of Andreas Grűter. All these elements came together in an utterly convincing whole that always integrated, never separated the audience from the meaning as interpreted by the characters on stage. It is rare to find such obvious harmony of purpose across all aspects of an opera production.

Visually, the staging used a mock screen, outlined in white and was therefore almost cinematic. Occasionally, a black panel would slide across the front to divide the stage in two. This was used to emphasize a particular character’s isolation. It also provided a stunning way to chang scene, with the lighting effects following the movement of the panel across the stage. Also innovative was the use of the moving panel to facilitate the entry and exit of protagonists. It all added up to a seamless and wholly credible production where each aspect complemented the whole and never intruded. This was a significant achievement. In addition, we had singers and musicians within the audience, a violinist on stage in a musical duel with Caesar and above all wonderful playing from the orchestra.

And I have not mentioned the singers! Marina Monzó as Cleopatra quite stole the show. Her singing was perfect for the role, and she also managed to portray the two roles of seductress and schemer perfectly. Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen as Caesar was also perfect, if at times a little less than audible if singing backstage. Caesar’s foray into the audience after Cleopatra’s seduction was pure magic. Sara Mingado’s Cordelia and Arianna Vendittelli as Sesto were in some respects cameo roles but nevertheless came across superbly as three-dimensional characters. Cameron Shahbazi’s Tolomeo, camp and gay in the extreme, was utterly convincing and Jen-Philippe McClish as Achilla and Bryan Sala as Curio were also superb. Achilla’s inconsistency and constant wavering were communicated superbly.

This was an utterly memorable visit to the opera, and an opportunity to revisit the world of baroque opera in the hands of Handel. It was memorable in every aspect, music, singing and staging, and I stress again that it was the integration of these elements that was so successful. I hope it is not forty years until the next Handel opera.

Two outstanding soloists in Mussorgsky and Khachaturian both give superb performances in concert to remember by the Slovak Philharmonic under Daniel Raiskin

 

One of the interesting things about regular concert going with a subscription is the visiting orchestra. Once in a while, a group from a country which is not on the usual map of music making in Western Europe is programmed to appear. Last night in ADDA, Alicante, for instance, we were privileged to hear the Slovak Philharmonic in a program of works that, for the most part, have not been performed frequently in Spain. What the Slovak Philharmonic did not bring, at least at first sight, was any music by a Slovak composer. On the bill were a Czech, two Russians and an Armenian, who during his lifetime would have perhaps preferred the label “Soviet”. And indeed alongside the Slovak Philharmonic was a Ukrainian conductor, Daniel Raiskin, a Croatian baritone, Marko Mimica, a Moldovan violinist, Alexandra Cununova, and Spanish chorus, so the experience was decidedly multi-national. We did hear Slovak music in the final encore, Slovakian Czardas in fact, and indeed some folk-inspired Moldavian music for solo violin. But amidst this apparently disparate evening what held this program together was the commitment of those involved to deliver fine music, and outstanding it proved to be.

We started with Dvořák’s Symphonic Variations Op78. This is Dvořák, it must be said, not at his most tuneful, but the compositional skill in constructing these largely quiet variations is immense. Variation form is often quite difficult for an audience to listen to, largely because by its nature it is episodic. The Slovak Philharmonic gave a superb performance which brought the piece together. I describe largely “quiet” music, but in the final fugue the composer goes to town on orchestral colours. It is a work worthy of exploration at length.

Then we heard Marko Mimica as baritone soloist in Shostakovich’s orchestral version of Mussorgky’s Songs and Dances of Death. Marko Mimica has a powerful but lyric baritone, and his voice is perfect for these songs where the soloist is very much to the fore. His dark tones penetrated every corner of the auditorium, even pianissimo, and his expression communicated meaning, despite the fact that the back projection of the words were unreadable for a good part of the audience.

The evening finished with the Polovtsian Dances of Borodin, a work, which always brings the house down, perhaps by virtue of the vibration created by the high volume of the sound that the composer demands. Again, the words sung by the chorus were generally unreadable on the back wall of the auditorium. The coordination between the chorus, the Coro Amici Musicae under the direction of Igor Tantos Sevillano, and the orchestra was superb.

Just after the interval, we heard Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto in the concert’s main work. The soloist was Alexandra Cununova, who played the piece with a prompt from the score, but no-one in the audience listening with closed eyes would have known. This is not the repertoire’s most played violin concerto, but on the evidence of this performance, it is a masterpiece and deserves a wider audience. The judgment is not offered without having listed to the work again after the concert.

Alexandra Cununova’s playing of the solo part was superb. The writing of the solo part was also superb. But what came across above all was the compositional skill of Aran Khachaturian. In this thirty-five-minute-concerto, there were regular orchestral tutti from a large ensemble which played at considerable volume, but every note of the solo part was audible, even to the fore. This is a concerto written by a master of orchestral writing.

The play of Alexandra Cununova was not only perfection: it went way beyond that. Despite the fact that she took prompts from a score, the playing seemed completely spontaneous and utterly committed. This was the kind of performance that will live forever in a concert-goer’s memory. It was a work in over fifty years of concert going that I have never heard performed before. I will seek it out in future and make sure to hear it again.

Alexandra Cununova finished with a piece by a Moldovan composer, inspired by folk music, and this work for solo violin complemented and contrasted perfectly with the rhythmic bravura of the concerto. What a performance!

Once upon a Time, I read the writing of Aldous Huxley with enthusiasm. I was a little younger then… More recently, I have tended to find his attitudes rather stuffy, and class-ridden, not embodying the fresh view of the world I once thought he held. Brave New World was not representative and, in my youth, I perhaps mis-read its intentions. A television adaptation of Eyeless In Gaza at the end of the 1960s prompted further exploration. Recently, I found The Art Of Seeing worth avoiding. So it was with mixed expectations that I started Mortal Coils, a work the author published in 1921

Its form is interesting. Aldous Huxley described its five separate sections as three short stories, a novelette and a play. In each of the pieces, there is a keen, if somewhat caricatured central character for whom some random event, some twist of fate provides an ironic punchline. For that reason, I will not review the stories in detail. What happens is crucial, and it tends to happen right at the end.

Throughout, Aldous Huxley seems to be mocking anyone who apparently takes him or herself, seriously. There is a keen eye for pretension, but, it has to be said, these tales of competition are won, more often than not, by the wily, not the showy.

The Gioconda Smile is the novelette. Miss Spence has the smile in question. She is thirtyish and a spinster. Mr. Hutton is a well-to-do friend with a hypochondriac wife, who needs to take her medicine.

Permutations Among The Nightingales is a play set in a hotel. Various society-type guests pirouette around themselves for attention. There is a lot of coming and going.

The Tillotson Banquet involves rather rich people with a decoration urge tracing a long-lost artist who has fallen on bad times. There might be a commission. In his nineties, and living in a basement among beetles, the old artist accepts the invitation to dine.

The Green Tunnels is it story about a group of visitors to Italy. They become obsessed with one another as well as with themselves. Both gestures and actions are mis-interpreted.

In Nuns At Luncheon, Huxley mocks the act of writing, itself, as a scribbler imagines how he might fictionalize a tale about a nun who falls from grace.

None of these has anything like a grand vision. These five pieces are like extended jokes with unexpected punch lines. They are stories, however, worth the telling, and certainly worth the reading.

Gregorio Nieto plays Saint-Saens Cello Concerto alongside Tchaikovsky in an ADDA concert that approaches perfection

I normally start my concert reviews by focusing on the programme, then the performance and then the personalities. This time I want to reverse the order and start with the performers, or at least one particular performer.

Josep Vicent is artistic director of the ADDA auditorium and the conductor of its orchestra. For many years, he has worked hard throughout the Valencian region to raise standards of playing and performance. First with the Jeunesses Musicales World Orchestra and subsequently with ADDA, he has worked tirelessly to achieve perfection of programming and performance that the audiences in ADDA currently enjoy. The scale of his achievement in Alicante surely ranks alongside Rattle in Birmingham or Dudamel in Caracas. Now, the sense of anticipation felt collectively by ADDA audiences is tangible. Every concert is not merely an event, it is a guaranteed memory for life. After over fifty years of concert going, I look forward to the ADDA experience in a way that recent visits to world famous venues cannot match. Congratulations to Josep Vicent for having the vision, talent, and persistence to make it happen, for the achievement is primarily his, though the ADDA orchestra that you created still owns the playing!

Last night’s programme provides a perfect example of the quality we have come to take for granted. At first sight, there is nothing particularly special. A Tchaikovsky Symphony, Saint-Saens’s Cello Concerto No. 1, and then Tchaikovsky’s popular favourite, the Fantasy Overture, Romeo and Juliet.

Now this last piece is so widely played and known that it might be hard to say something new about it. Personally, I first heard this over sixty years ago and my enthusiasm for it is undiminished. To call it a masterpiece is to belittle it. The perfect blend of conflict, falling in love and tragedy of the story is beautifully drawn by its composer, who both understood the play and knew how to create music to convey meaning. The transitions in this piece are apparently seamless, but they happen suddenly enough to keep the audience surprised, as well as charmed, even if the work is familiar to them. No matter how many times one hears this piece, it works the same every time.

It does, however, need to be played properly and with commitment. As has happened so often with very well-known music, musicians and conductors often rely on familiarity for effect so the performance itself becomes perfunctory. This was not the case last night with the ADDA orchestra under Josep Vicent’s direction. Both and interpretation were perfect and in under twenty minutes, the whole of Shakespeare’s drama played out before us. More Tchaikovsky followed. More swans, we were told, as the orchestra offered an encore of music from Swan Lake. The reference to “more swans” came after Gregorio Nieto had chosen Saint-Saens’s The Swan for his own personal encore after the work that proceeded Romeo and Juliet.

The work in question was Saint-Saens’s First Cello Concerto and Gregorio Nieto’s playing of it was a virtuosic, vivid and utterly communicative. It was the kind of concerto where the soloist and orchestra engage in musical dialogue, without obvious cadenzas where the soloist plays alone. This assumes sufficient orchestral skill on behalf of the composer to facilitate that dialogue and sufficient skill on the part of the performers to remain aware of the required balance. This is therefore difficult music to perform and last night soloist alongside the virtuosic ADDA orchestra under Josep Vicent gave a faultless interpretation. The experience was memorable.

As was the opening work in the concert. Josep Vicent has championed Tchaikovsky’s symphonies over the years and has given multiple performances of the equally famous numbers four, five and six. But this was number two, the Little Russian. It is a symphony that is performed less than the famous three, but on this evidence, the Little Russian should be a concert hall standard. The enthusiasm encapsulated in the writing of the finale alone might render it a permanent favourite.

The symphony was a complete success: a success in terms of performance because the ADDA orchestra gave an exciting and perfect rendition of it, and it was a success of programming by Josep Vicent. The performance, and indeed the whole concert was utterly memorable, which in the end presented three pieces by Tchaikovsky alongside two by Saint-Saens. The concert was entitled Conexión Latina II, in recognition of the evening’s soloist being Venezuelan, but a more apt title could have been Esencia del Romanticismo, since the three works on the programme were all composed in the 1860s and 1870s, so our experience was concentrated on a very short period of musical history. What a masterpiece of programming! It was musically perfect.

 

Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti – an authentic experience

 

When writing a concert review when the pieces performed are as familiar as Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti, one concentrates inevitably on what might have been different this time around. In ADDA las night we heard a performance of this music which had authenticity as its main goal. The instrumentation, therefore, was exactly what JS Back had originally specified. The forces of the English Concert, thus, were small and the hall large.

The English Concert was founded by Trevor Pinnock in 1972 as part of a movement that in those days was quite new. This was the “original instrument” movement which sought to discover and recreate how early music had originally sounded. Over fifty years on, and The English Concert is still doing it’s laudable work. I personally am old enough to remember Stokowsi’s versions of Bach for full orchestra and the absolute revelation that in Harnoncourt’s 1967 recording of Monteverdi’s Vespers cornetti were used instead of trumpets. In the twenty-first century, we have perhaps come to expect instrumental authenticity in early music to such an extent that when, a few years ago, I attended a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at a Prom, a friend joked that it was on the original voices.

Last night in ADDA Alicante, we heard The English Concert under Kristian Bezuidenhout in the complete cycle of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti. The order in which they were played was itself interesting, being 1-6-2-3-5-4. This presumably allowed the brass players to put their feet up in the second half, or to do what brass players do when they are not on stage. It was probably born of a desire to keep the sonorities varied.

The playing was exquisite, despite the fact that the natural hunting horns in number one are notoriously hard to control. The trumpet playing in number two, however, was simply divine.

What was a little frustrating was the rearrangement of the stage between pieces. This seemed a little perfunctory at times but perhaps was essential. It was Johann Sebastian Bach who chose what instruments to use, after all.

A packed ADDA concert. hall received the concert very well, but it was quite a marathon. One is always astounded by the harmonic and rhythmic invention in this music.

As a final note on authenticity, I would personally go as far as to suggest that setting is important, as well as instrumentation. Johann Sebastian Bach would not have recognized a new concert hall seating over one thousand people as a venue for the performance of what is essentially chamber music, perhaps. And the final note on popularity: the Brandenburg Concerti had fallen into obscurity for over a century before being rediscovered in 1849, a hundred years after their composer’s death.

The White Peacock by DH Lawrence

It is said that Maurice Griffenhagen’s, painting, An Idyll, was the inspiration behind DH Lawrence’s novel, The White Peacock. In the painting, a pair of lovers share a passionate embrace, surrounded by a lusciously idealized garden, full of colour, growth and flowers. The pair of lovers, however, seem lost to the beauty that surrounds them, so driven are they by their shared need to fulfil their passion. The painting owes much to Pre-Raphaelitism, but though the colours are vivid, and there is a sense of timelessness about figures, but the outlines are blurred, perhaps impressionistically, indicating, perhaps that the surroundings are vulnerable to change and so too are these lovers within them.

The White Peacock is a novel of Edward England, published in 1910-11. The First World War is not yet even on the horizon, though in the first decade of the twentieth century, Britain’s industrial landscape was long-formed. and its political and social formation were already modern. Yet, throughout the green and pleasant land, rural employment, and country ways still dominated in many places, as Lawrence describes at length in relation to the novel’s setting, Nethermere, a small place in Nottinghamshire.

Cyril Beardsall narrates The White Peacock. He grows up in the English East Midlands. We know this is Nottinghamshire with occasional wanderings as far as Derbyshire, but we never really visit any city throughout the novel. Indeed, we are hardly ever visit the narrator, who regularly observes, describes, but rarely opines, and never pontificates. At times, the narrator almost seems to be living neutrally everyone else’s life in turn.

Like the painting that inspired it, the novel is full of flowers, trees, gardens, and woods. Lawrence’s descriptions of plants and verbiage are themselves vaguely Pre-Raphaelite in their detail and colour. We visit farmers, gamekeepers, several innkeepers and, at times, it seems we have to fight hard to get through the foliage in order to release the trapped rabbit.

And of course, central to the book’s plot are the relations between men and women, childhood friends who grew up together, exploring what the natural world might offer them. Lettie has two admirers, George and Leslie. They are as different as chalk and cheese, and then grow apart, live quite different lives. As they mature, the need to earn a living rears its head above the flowers and compromises have to be made. Marriages are struck. Lettie opts for Laslie, the moneyed option, and George marries Meg, who is at least homely. Children are born and lives diverge, socially, professionally and politically. Only destinations remain similar in their hopelessness.

Lawrence depicts lives where choices have to be made, but where these choices are often constrained by something other than passion. These characters, predominantly the men, seem to have difficulty accepting who they are. They seem to be pre-programmed for failure, and then cannot accept when they feel it. The women seem to be coyer, and, as ever in Lawrence, the suggestion is that they are essentially in control of their relations with men. But these relations, always through marriage, produce new people whose demands on their parents are unpredictable and change all associated lives.

Throughout, the flowers continue to bloom, and nature lives out its apparently inevitable seasonal cycle. But for the people of the small, rural place, the idyll lasts just moments, moments where individuals might forget who they are.

As to the identity or the thoughts of Cyril Beardsall, The White Peacock’s narrator, we know as much by the end as we did the start. We do know, however, that he has moved away from the midlands and now lives a very different kind of life. I wonder who it might be.