Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino by Samuel Butler

In Alps and Sanctuary Samuel Butler walks various alpine passes, visits many small towns and villages, comments on art and architecture, and drinks considerable amounts of wine. The author wrote this travel book in 1882, but this was not an account of a single stay in the region. On the contrary, Samuel Butler regularly makes it clear throughout the text that he is referring to his previous visits to many of the places on his itinerary. He thus records changes in the fabric of the buildings, transformations in the lifestyles of the inhabitants and sometimes refers to memories of those previous trips. This makes the text much more than a simple description of a journey.

But Samuel Butler, like many British authors abroad, cannot resist the occasional pontification. Many of these positions entail the assertion of Protestantism above Catholicism, and here and there the reader can almost feel the author biting his tongue so as not to cause disagreement with an acquaintance.

And what about this for someone who, on the face of it, observes and seeks explanation of natural phenomena? “Reasonable people will look with distrust upon too much reason. The foundations of action lie deeper than reason can reach. They rest on faith – for there is no absolutely certain incontrovertible premise which can be laid by man, any more than there is an investment for money or security in the daily affairs of life, which is absolutely unimpeachable. The funds are not absolutely safe; a volcano might break out under the Bank of England. A railway journey is not absolutely safe; one person, at least, in several millions gets killed. We invest our money upon faith mainly. We choose our doctor upon faith, for how little independent judgment can we form concerning his capacity? We choose schools for our children chiefly upon faith. The most important things a man that has are his body, his soul, and his money. It is generally better for him to commit these interests to the care of others of whom he can know little, rather than be his own medical man, or invest his money on his own judgment, and this is nothing else that making a faith which lies deeper than reason can reach, the basis of our action in those respects which touches most nearly.”

Unlike many authors, Samuel Butler regularly alludes to music to provide background, impression, explanation and quality to the experience describes. These are always fully notated and could cause many readers to panic. The author simply assumes that all his readers also read music. In 1882, it might have been true of his largely middle-class readers, who probably had been taught to play the piano from the age of five.

Samuel Butler makes no excuses for his conservatism, nor for his no doubt sincere Christian faith. But for the modern reader, the consequences of his belief structure, formed around the assumptions of Victorian England, might be perceived as stuffy, bigoted or even racist. For instance, he criticizes natural phenomenon phenomena when they refuse to conform to human preconceptions. Birds, for instance, know not one iota of public-school discipline. “People say the nightingale’s song is so beautiful; I am ashamed to own it, but I do not like it. It does not use the diatonic scale. A bird should either make a no attempt to sing in tune, or it should succeed in doing so. Larks are Wordsworth, and as for canaries, I would almost sooner hear a pig having its nose, ringed or the grinding of an axe. Cuckoos are all right; they sing in tune. Rooks are lovely, they do not pretend to tune. Seagulls again, and the plaintiff creatures that pity themselves on moorlands, as the plover and the curlew, or the birds that lift up their voices and cry at eventide when there is an eager air blowing upon the mountains and the last yellow in the sky is fading – I have no words with which to praise the music of these people.”

But it seems that in the 19th century, there already existed British tourists who find themselves less than appreciated at destination, because they take their assumptions with them. In one place, “…there was an old English gentleman at the hotel Riposo who told us that there had been another such festa not many weeks previously, and that he had seen one drunken man there – an Englishman – who kept abusing all he saw and crying out, ‘Manchester is the place for me’.” Samuel Butler largely did the same.

But if anyone chooses to dismiss such procedural niceties of the nineteenth century as old-fashioned nonsense, spare a thought for the fifteenth century inhabitants of the monastery at S. Michele who had to follow the dictates upon their work issued by their boss. These can be found at length in Appendix II of Butler’s work.

A Month in Yorkshire by Walter White

A Month in Yorkshire by Walter White is a superb book. First published in 1861, it was one of the first travel books designed for a new kind of leisure, which we now called tourism. Railways had already been around for long enough for the experience of travelling on them to become commonplace. Here, Walter White regularly uses the train in order to embark on a point-to-point walk, just like a modern fell-walker might do. In this sense, this is unlike the volumes that originated in the experience of the Grand Tour which, as an exercise, produced an experience that was only available to the wealthy. Here we have a least the potential for mass tourism, where the writer even makes recommendations to those readers who might follow his footsteps. Perhaps this is the key. The writer of a Grand Tour was surely most interested in personal responses, whereas Walther White seems to direct the experience towards the reader.

The author starts on the banks of the Humber and then goes up the East Coast as far as the Tees with an occasional trip inland. He then takes in the Pennines up to the borders with modern Cumbria and wanders the Dales. He approaches the industrial West Riding with trepidation, because he is clearly a rural rambler rather than a lover of cities, despite the fact that he himself lives in London. Notwithstanding, there are some truly interesting passages in the book that describe industrial processes in Saltaire, Batley and Sheffield. He does regularly comment on the grime and smoke of the industrial towns, but he is sympathetic to the people who labour in the factories and mills, even though he sometimes finds it hard to communicate with them.

Walter white does have opinions. For instance, he finds Hull dull. “Half a day exploration led me to the conclusion that the most cheerful quarter of Hull is the cemetery.” His view of language north of Coventry is mildly patronizing. Like many English writers, he resorts to gobbledygook in his attempts to render a Yorkshire accent. Such writers, never - I repeat, never! - write “air hair lair” in order to convey the sound of a Lah-Di-Dah “hello”. But they often resort to the most ridiculous spellings to convey what is simply another way to pronounce words in a language that has no concordance between the written and the spoken. The author does, however, offer an interesting and refreshing comparison. “Journeying from Hull to Beverly by market train on the morrow I had ample proof, in the noisy talk of the crowded passengers, that Yorkshire dialect and its peculiar idioms are not ‘rapidly disappearing before the facilities for travel afforded by the railways’. Could I fail to notice what has before struck me, that taken class for class, the people north of Coventry exhibit a rudeness, not to say coarseness of manners, which is rarely seen south of that ancient city. In Staffordshire, within 20 miles of Birmingham, there are districts where baptism, marriage, and other moral and religious observances considered as essentials of Christianity, are as completely disregarded as among the heathen. In some parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, similar characteristics, prevail; but manners do not necessarily imply loose morality. Generally speaking, the rudeness is a safety-valve that lets off the faults, or seeming faults of character; and I prefer rudeness to that over refinement prevalent in Middlesex, where you may not call things their right names, and where, as a consequence, the sense of what is fraudulent, and criminal, and wicked, has become weakened, because of the very mild and innocent words in which ‘good society’ requires that dishonesty and sin should be spoken of.” The north might be coarse, but the south is dishonest! Things don’t change!

There are some surprises of vocabulary along the way for the modern reader. Did you know, for instance, that a ninnycock was a young lobster? He does, however, find the banter of people in at least one industrial city rather objectionable. “I had often heard that Sheffield is the most foul-mouthed town in the kingdom, and my experience unfortunately adds confirmation. While in the train coming from Barnsley, and in my walks around the town, I heard more filthy and obscene talk than could be heard in Wapping in a year.”

Walter White does largely steer clear of British supremacy and racism. He does, however, make some things clear. On Wickliffe’s Bible, for instance, he praises the translator as one who “opened men’s hearts and eyes to see and understand the truth in its purity; cleansed from the adulteration of priestcraft; stripped of all the blinding cheats of papistry”. He also has time for Puritans, as he makes clear in a description of Haworth where “…the church is ugly enough to have had a Puritan for an architect”. On his walks he regularly sups ale in public houses and is not a fan of the temperance movement. “…in my wanderings, I have sometimes had the curiosity to try the Temperance Hotel, and always repented it, because experience showed the temperance meant poor diet, stingy appliances, and slovenly accommodations”.

But Walter White is real traveller. Thought he does prefer to wallow in the poetic Romanticism of an England perhaps already gone, his respect for working people is such that he finds things and people of interest wherever he lands. True experience, however, is by brook or fall. “Let me sit for an hour by the side of a fall, and watch the swift play of the water, and here it’s ceaseless, splash and roar, and whatever cobwebs may have gathered in my mind, from whatever cause, our sweat clean away.”

Walter White is clearly one of the first tourists in the modern sense, and the quality of his writing makes this book a joy to read.

A Journey to Crete, Constantinople, Naples and Florence - Three Months Abroad by Anna Vivanti

A Journey to Crete, Constantinople, Naples and Florence - Three Months Abroad by Anna Vivanti was published, originally for private circulation, in 1865. Thus we embark on one woman’s perspective of travel in the middle of the nineteenth century. Of course, she travels with her husband, who seems, according to her own estimation, quite an enlightened, liberal male for his time. For instance, he regales against copious silverware ostentatiously displayed on altars in churches that they visit. He opines that the objects might be melted down, sold for profit, which may then, he suggests, be spent on education and healthcare for the ordinary people. One wonder if he still thought the same when he got home?

Indeed, Anna Vivanti herself often seems strangely out of her century. In the Parthenon, she deigns to criticize Lord Elgin for having removed the marble sculptures from the frieze. These still adorn the British Museum and remain bones of contention between the British and Greek governments. There is still much debate around whether Lord Elgin may just have “saved” them for posterity. Anna Vivanti, however, needs no convincing. Taking them away was wrong. Anna Vivanti was not ahead of her time, but she revelled in the concept of authenticity, and the Parthenon without sculptures was surely less than the Parthenon she envisaged. She would surely have frowned upon religious practices that were not Christian, and indeed in Turkey she does just that. But she seems to make an exception for ancient Greek gods, who seemed to form part of her pantheon, a godhead that probably reflects her social class and her obvious respect for a “good” classical education. It was surprising how these self-righteously “civilised” people from the United Kingdom branded as barbaric the practices of ancient warfare, whilst at the same time as turning ever-blinded eyes away from anything perpetrated by ancient Greeks or Romans.

Anna Vivanti shamelessly reeks of middle-class Britain. When culturally challenged, as she finds herself in Constantinople, she recoils in anger and revulsion at anything she cannot understand. It must be said that what revolts her utterly about the Ottomans is their treatment of women. And in her account, she leaves no reader unsure about where she stands on religious practices that she finds unfamiliar.

She is equally judgmental with anyone she encounters who was unlucky enough to have been born with a dark skin. She would clearly like to be on the other side of the street. Italians, it seems, are excepted. In their case, swarthiness is even an advantage, adding to the attractive “foreign” qualities she seems to crave. It is strange, perhaps, for a modern reader to encounter a writer who was so overtly and completely racist. But, as with her opinion on the Elgin marbles, precisely what has changed in the intervening century and half?

Obviously, in 1865, travel is by train, ship, horseback or in a carriage. She does walk here and there, and she is sometimes carried, largely, it has to be noted, because others try to ease her journey. She spends remarkably little time talking about food and is very taken with Dante Alighieri, whose festival she attends in Florence at the end of the book. She left originally from Trieste, still fundamentally Austrian that time, despite sending an “Italian” delegation to the Florence festival.

She finds Crete dusty, Constantinople disgusting, Naples, largely dead, but fascinating, even volcanic, and then drools over Florence. For the modern reader, it might be easy to dismiss her provincialism, her overt Britishness and her racism as manifestations of a more ignorant time. But how many modern travellers could make the same trip nowadays on foot, in carriages along dusty and bumpy roads, or on the back of a donkey? And how many could live from day to day without finding burgers and chips, fried chicken and pizza with cheddar rather than mozzarella?

73 poems by e e cummings

 

poetry:to me

is about passing images that

sometimes

stick but often pass by only

to return un:announced when le

ast expected

 

often it SlavishlY conforms to

rules as opaque as their

inventor’s (li:fe)

 

sometimes it is fresh

suprising

 

the trick of finding out what you didn’t lose

(existings tricky:but to live’s a gift)

the teachable imposture of always

arriving at the place you never left

 

conventions matter

but often get in oUr wAy

blocking

what we really want to

say

 

as do other

conVentions

elsewhere

that rule

 

(and I refer to thinking(rests upon

a dismal misconception:namely that

some neither ape nor angel called a man

is measured by his quote eye cue unquote.

 

and sometimes being

direcT

is what we need

 

yours is the light by which my spirit’s borne

yours is the darkness of my soul’s return

-          you are my sun,my moon,and all my stars

 

even though just how

direcT

might not be clear

 

n

OthI

n

 

g can

 

s

urPas

s

 

the m

 

y

SteR

y

 

of

 

s

till.nes

s

 

agree

The Work Of Nations by Robert B Reich

The Work Of Nations by Robert B Reich was published in 1991, written, therefore, prior to that year. In the book, the author describes the role of the business enterprise, with specific reference to what we used to call companies or corporations, in what was already by then an established process we now call globalization. At the time, the significance of the term and its reality was only just dawning within the popular imagination. 

But this is a book that goes beyond mere description of the functions of the global economic system. Via its analysis of national economies, and how they interlink, The Work Of Nations also deals with concepts such as national identity, the potential for political action and, fundamentally, how economic classes are formed, how people identify with them and their inter-relationships.

It is worth pausing again to place Robert Reich’s book in context. In 1991 the world had just seen the end of the Soviet Union, but there was no real indication of what might emerge from the debris. The Internet did not emerge until a couple of years later. China’s emergence as a global economic power was underway, but Japan was still by far the biggest economy in Asia. Put simply, after thirty years of an emerging and wholly new world, The Work Of Nations ought to be thoroughly out of date. It isn’t. And the fact that it still has much to offer in the analysis of our contemporary societies is testament to the quality of the author’s vision, which is inspired as well as enduring.

At the heart of the book’s analysis are two fundamental concepts. One is that the old model of the corporation, which implies a vertically integrated organization that brings a product to market via a workforce employed directly by the company and in competition with other similar corporations, is long dead. Secondly, this changed economic structure of developed societies has resulted in a fundamental change to social class formation. Gone is any assumption that masses of nationally resident blue-collar workers are automatically created by pyramids of employment and inverted pyramids of earnings.

In 1991, The Work Of Nations was already describing corporations that cooperated across national borders, shared investment and risk, and moved production or even registration as circumstances provided opportunity. Crucially, Robert Reich was already describing the existence of an international class already formed, comprising professionals, problem solvers and solution identifiers whose status and earnings were determined by their education, their skills and their performance. Over forty years earlier, Michael Young’s The Rise Of The Meritocracy described a world where the benefits accruing to such a class would result in deep social divisions, to the extent that allegiances would become primarily determined by class rather than nationality.

In the 2020s we can see the results of this ideological realignment in the way groups of electors in democracies coalesce around certain types of policy, such as the overtly nationalistic, the anti-immigrant, and, on the other side, liberalism and internationalism.

Does, for instance, this passage remind anyone of more recent preoccupations in American politics? “In the life of a nation, few ideas are more dangerous than good solutions to the wrong problems. Proposals for improving the profitability of American corporations are now legion, as are more general panaceas for what ails American industry. Politicians and pundits talk loosely of ‘restoring’ or ‘restarting’ American business, as if it were a stalled, broken-down jalopy in need of a thorough tune-up. Others offer plans for regaining America’s competitive edge and revitalizing the American economy. Many of these ideas a sound. Some are silly. But all form vestigial thinking about exactly what it is that must be restored, restarted, regained, or revitalized. They assume as their subject in American economy centered upon core American corporations and comprising major American industries - in other words, the American economy of midcentury, which easily dominated what limited world commerce there was. But as we have seen, this image bears only the faintest resemblance to the global economy at the end of the century, in which money and information move almost effortlessly through global webs of enterprise. There is coming to be no such thing as an American corporation or an American industry. The American economy is but a region of the global economy - albeit still a relatively wealthy region. In this light, then, it becomes apparent that all of the entities one might wish revitalize are quickly ceasing to exist.”

And precisely who benefits from the neoliberal economics that rollback the state? “While average working Americans may just feel that they have been surrendering a larger percentage of their earnings in taxes … tax burdens on Americans overall have not increased since the mid-1960s. Total tax receipts amounted to 31.1 per cent of gross national product in 1969, 31.1 per cent in 1979, and 32 per cent in 1989. It is just that the burden has been shifted from relatively wealthy Americans to relatively poor Americans.”

More recently, Thomas Picketty has analyzed inequality as reflected in asset and income distribution. He has identified, even within traditionally entrenched ownership relations, an emerging class of people who, by virtue of their education and skills, command significant earnings. Even in 1991, Robert Reich saw them as an emerging social class.

Robert Reich’s The Work Of Nations is not only still worth reading: it ought to be an essential text. It still has much to say that still needs to be said about the disorganization of national economies in our own time.

ADDA Simfonica with Irene Theorin under Josep Vicent in Strauss and Shostakovich

 

Concerts seasons often parade a procession of “great works” calculated to promote ticket sales. Anything less well known is often regarded as risky because audiences, though they tend not to know what they like, always like what they know. Performances of great works often become mundane acknowledgments of the work’s existence, without getting to grips with its substance. Audiences go home happy, ticket sales are satisfactory, and the works of thousands of composers never see the light of day.

So would the program of the Four Last songs of Richard Strauss followed by Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony fall into this perfunctory category? It might. But in Alicante’s ADDA concert hall last night, it definitely did not. Indeed, this is never the case when it comes to the playing and interpretation of ADDA Simfònica under Josep Vicent. Last night, the audience was surely in the presence of living greatness, not just past achievement. During last week, I met a friend whom I knew would also be going to hear the music and expressed the opinion that Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony was a life-changer. I understated the reality. And you might be wondering why a concert review opens like this… I hope to make that clear later. First, the facts.

The hall was packed to hear Iréne Theorin sing the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss and the ADDA Simfònica under artistic director Josep Vicent play the symphony. To say that this audience loves its resident orchestra would also be an understatement. Every player is applauded onto the stage and off it, every time. This adoration is individual recognition, communally expressed, of both the work the orchestra does in presenting taxing programmes and also the quality of the experience they regularly deliver. ADDA Simfònica is now a great orchestra, and their artistic director is the leading light.

We began last night with Richard Strauss’s songs, with Iréne Theorin as soloist. The opening phrases might have suggested that she might have a little too much vibrato for this work, but like many initial fears this proved groundless. This is a work that needs control and expression, rather than power or decoration, and Iréne Theorin not only delivered, she excelled. There was a slight surprise when at the end of the fourth song, when the valedictory trills on the flute were played rather softer than is often the case. In the context of the work, this low-key wave of goodbye fitted perfectly. It is not surprising, given the soloist’s experience in performing the music of Richard Strauss that Iréne Theorin’s interpretation proved nothing less than exceptional. We did have an encore. It was one of Strauss’s orchestral songs, which ultimately gave Iréne Theorin an opportunity to demonstrate a little of her power.

And then what more can be written about this symphony? Let’s take for granted that it was played wonderfully, was interpreted to perfection and was received in absolute silence with every note absorbed by its audience.

For me personally, the opening movement has a clear programme. The complexity and sophistication of ordinary life in Leningrad is portrayed in the opening section in music that regularly changes key and rhythm. The simple message of the opposing theme portrays the idea of fascism. Keep it simple and keep saying the same thing. People will believe you. It starts small, indeed it does. But with each new adherent, the ideology grows into something that creates a powerful need to impose itself on everything. Ideologically this is the fascism of the 1930s. Musically, it is the ideology of pop, being populism, not popularity. That comes later. Just try getting away from pop music… And, I might add, I don’t mean Indian pop, or Tanzanian pop. I mean an international pop, nearly always in sung in English, where the visuals trump the aurals. Here I return to the idea at the start of the piece, because it is a marketing necessity that the product should always be presented that way. Make sure there are no surprises, and then you will not offend. And you will sell more worthless product.

At the end of the first movement, after the idea of fascism has led to huge conflict, the sophisticated life of those who don’t want everything to be the same returns, but it is exhausted. Though the movement ends lyrically, the fascist tendency is still there, perhaps in the form of a dictator, perhaps acknowledging that this desire to impose the conformity of a group is part of us all. At the end of the symphony, when the triumphal but unconvincing fanfares ring out, proclaiming what is clearly a rather hollow victory, the memory of conflict, complete with its conformity-imposing mechanical rhythm is still there. But is it now at least the rhythm of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth?

The symphony’s central movements are full of reflection, lyricism, nostalgia, desolation and nightmare. It is an acknowledgment of the excellent design of the ADDA hall to record that even pianissimo pizzicati can be heard anywhere. We assume, of course, as ever, that there is near total silence from the audience. There always is.

My introduction of the work to the work came from Leonard Bernstein’s CBS recording with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Throughout, he uses significantly slower tempi than we heard last night. It’s a different take on what is, after all, a personal experience. On this recording, there is a moment during the first movement, when the sophistication of the people returns after the war, after the exhaustion is expressed and the desolation is recorded, when the sophistication represented by the strings returns with renewed but exhausted energy. On the recording, just before this entry, Bernstein issues a long side of relief which was picked up by the microphones. Personally, I cannot listen to this music without hearing that unscored sigh. I heard the reissue of the same recording a few weeks ago, and the engineers have removed the sigh.

At the start of the symphony last night, Josep Vicent decided to project images of the siege of Leningrad on the backdrop, closing the sequence with a statement that there were currently fifty conflicts in the world and that collectively we wanted to be ambassadors of peace. I said earlier that the Leningrad Symphony is a life-changer, and it still is, no matter how many times it is heard. Let’s put the people back into music, no matter how much we crave standardized products. Experience is unique. And this one was no exception. And it will live a lifetime.

A dream of a concert: Tomas Brauner and Senja Rummukainen join ADDA Simfonica in Smetana, Prokofiev and Martinu

“Such stuff as dreams are made on, we are all spirits and are melted into air” are words that ought to remind us of the ephemeral, temporal nature of human life, that such good things must come to an end. Music lasts for the duration of the concert, but the memory lives on, especially the memory of this concert.

This idea of the dream of life must apply especially to one such as Bohuslav Martinu who suffered illness for much of his childhood. Infirmity found him viewing the world outside from the confines of a plain room at the top of a church tower. Such were the early years of the composer Martinu. Perhaps this is why his music seems continually seems to dream, seems to reach out for what might seem to be beyond reach, apparent, but just beyond experience.

Safranek in his biography of Martinu reminds us that the thematic germ of the first movement of his Fourth symphony, that theme which appears time and time again, is for the composer an expression of nature. Safranek also points out that this inspiration from the bucolic came to the composer in a dark apartment on 58th St. in New York City. The composer was in exile and had wandered for years. To wander is perhaps to wonder, to wonder what might have been, to dream.

Personally, I always find dreaming in the music of Martinu. I also always find surrealism, but not the nightmare vision of Dali or the riddles of Magritte. It’s more like Chagall mixed with Tanguy. Scenes appear at random, often unexpectedly juxtaposed for no particular reason, apparently randomly, or set against an infinite landscape that seems to disappear as soon as it is noticed. It is this dream-like world that seems to be a backdrop for Julietta and his other stage works and is created in abstraction throughout Martinu’s music. One of the strongest sensations of being taken to another world in music came for me personally during the sequence in act one of the opera when a driver falls asleep while in control of an express train. I even went to a second performance of the same production and the passage had the same effect, only more intensely.

The ADDA audience in Alicante was last night delivered such a dream. Martinu’s Fourth Symphony was played by ADDA’s resident orchestra under the baton of Tomas Brauner, the evening’s Czech guest. To say that Tomas Brauner understands Czech music would be an understatement, almost bordering on disrespect. Right from the tremolos at the start of the work, to the full tutti at the end, the ADDA audience was transported into a different world, a dream world as real as any reality, but rendered into an experience from which, frankly, it is hard to emerge. Not that one would want to wake from the bliss of such surely enduring memory. To say that this dream will live forever is no understatement, at least as far as this particular reviewer is concerned, until, of course, spirits melt into air. The complete and unashamedly joyous nature of this music surely seems to tell everyone to live the dream. It will cease soon enough, so enjoy it while you can, directly and without guilt.

Martinu brought many influences into his creative world. There is Czech folklore, popular culture, and jazz at least. Not to mention a touch of neo-classicism, whatever that might be. I hear Janacek as aural cubism, but not Martinu. His musical world is very much more joined up, more rational.  But the ecstatic is always within the composer’s reach, we feel, always within the composer’s thoughts. The music constantly grasps for a heaven on earth, but never quite grabs it. That seems to be the point. There is always that cadence that returns us to where we came from, but musically it rarely does. It always progresses, though it may sound like it returns to its starting place. Thus grounded, the next attempt to elevate is always there and always immediate.

Tomas Brauner’s reading of the score was quite simply perfect. The dynamics were stretched, the delivery was direct, despite the fact that the material was often ephemeral. This surely is Martinu’s style, his true voice, and Tomas Brauner communicated everything with remarkable energy, colour, imagination and flair.

And, for this particular fan of Czech music, how refreshing it was to have an all-Slav program. We started with Smetana’s Greatest Hit, The Moldau from Vltava. This is so well known it surely cannot surprise. But surprise it did: it surprises with every hearing because of the quality of the writing. Doubly surprising in this reading was the piece’s second section, when dance rhythms which I have previously hardly noticed were stressed and came to the fore. Here, they were pointed and sharp, where so often they are smoothed out, cut off from their roots.

Then we had a performance of Prokofiev’s Sinfonia Concertante, Op. 125. Finnish cellist, Senja Rummukainen was soloist in what in another life would have been called a cello concerto.

In the review of ADDA’s last concert in the Pasiones season, I said the performance by cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras was unlikely to be bettered in a lifetime. Well, last night, just a few days later, Senja Rummukainen played so utterly perfectly that I have to challenge the permanence of last week’s opinion. But how can one compare late Schumann with late Prokofiev? The musical worlds are so completely different, they might even communicate in a different language.

Senja Rummukainen's playing throughout was complete perfection. Not only did she accomplish the technical feats, but the wit, unpredictability, occasional brutishness and lyrical invention of Prokofiev also shone. So what might a reviewer write about the second movement of the piece, which drew warm and amazed applause from an audience that normally waits religiously until the end? The gesture was utterly spontaneous and born of a mixture of admiration and emotional response. She played the Theme and Variations of Sibelius as an encore, a piece of lyricism, understatement, and control, the perfect foil to the opposites of Prokofiev that we had just heard.

The whole evening was finished off with one of the Dvorak Slavonic Dances. This time it was an upbeat celebration played at breakneck speed. The audience was thus left to pursue its own dreams. Dream on. The reality was pure dream, but the experience will surely last.