Letter to America – created November 6th to 9th, 2011
This post is primarily created for Lindsay’s cousin, Tod, who lives in Lancaster, PA. Tod is an opera buff, and this Saturday, November 5th we have been together, ‘in a virtual sort of way’, as Tod observed. We’ve been to ‘The MET Live’ to see Siegfried, Lindsay and I in Poole, and Tod and Annie in Pennsylvania.
The week in Dorset has not been notable for good weather. It has been grey and dry or grey and rainy. On Tuesday evening, Penny Jarvis from the hospital came round to show us her pictures and tell us about her charitable fund raising ascent of Kilimanjaro. It was impressive, in a practical way, with helpful information about everything from clothing to toilets. Helpful at least if we ever get around to doing it. We sponsored Penny as did many other people, but I was left feeling that we hadn’t given her enough, considering the miserable weather she encountered. Wednesday evening was our usual visit to ‘The Lighthouse’ for the BSO concert. Remarkable young conductor, Krysztov Urbanski, and a lovely concert, somewhat underattended. The programme started off with Sibelius Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, and continued with the Dvorak violin concerto (Alina Pogostkina on her 1709 Strad). The second half was Smetana’s Ma Vlast. Sometimes I think the inhabitants of Poole only turn out if it’s the principal conductor, Kirill Karabits, or if there’s a piano concerto on the programme. The hottest feature of the evening was Lindsay’s Keralan vegetable curry, served afterwards.
Our most unusual event this week was our visit to Ronnie Scott’s on Thursday evening, to hear the American chanteuse, Stacey Kent. This was rather impulsively booked only a few weeks earlier, and given the rotten weather it wasn’t a journey we looked forward to. We first heard Stacey Kent in slightly strange circumstances. When we were walking the Lycian Way in Turkey this May, our first hotel was a little lodge called the ‘Olympos Mountain Lodge’, an hour and a half west of Antalya. The music in the lodge was streamed from the manager’s Apple Mac. Soon we recognised Pink Martini’s ‘Sympathique’, sung in French. Shortly after this, another song in French with a rather similar feel, but not Pink Martini. We aked the owner. ‘Stacey Kent’, he replied, with a surprised air, as if we should have known. Soon, back at home, we were the owners of her album ‘Raconte-moi’. Our journey to London was something of an ordeal. It took us two hours to get to Kensington, where we parked near the Albert Hall, avoiding the crowds arriving for ‘An evening with Engelbert Humperdinck’ and took a cab into Soho. A rainy, dark, miserable and traffic crowded night in London. My team at Royal Bournemouth Hospital had done a fantastic job in getting through my cardiac catheterisation list by 4pm, so we were able to walk into Ronnie Scott’s at about 6.30pm. We had only managed to get restricted view seats, but arriving so early we were allocated the best possible restricted view seats, and they were fine. Now I hadn’t been to Ronnie’s for around 25 years, and indeed the atmosphere is still great: intimate, and nobody is that far from the performers. My memories of past visits are so vivid – because of the quality of the artists. The last visit was to see the legendary guitarist Joe Pass, and before that I sometimes used to go around Christmas time when George Melly and John Chilton’s Feetwarmers always had a one week slot. The opening act was the James Pearson trio – all very good, fantastic piano by JP. When Stacey came on, she was as good as we’d hoped and we also found the band members outstanding. The pianist was so good, so restrained and elegant. The drumming was genuine accompaniment and not obtrusive, and the bass was a perfect counterpoint – all notes audible and in harmony. Then of course, there was Stacey’s husband, Jim Tomlinson on tenor sax. Wonderful, warm sounds, reminiscent of Stan Getz. In fact, an article about Stan Getz specifically mentions JT as making music in the Brazilian traditions of the Great Stan. Musically, the Brazilian numbers, mostly by the famous Antonio Carlos Jobim, were my favourites. Stacey’s sets, as far as I can recall them and notated them were as follows:
Breakfast on the morning tram
It might as well be spring
They can’t take that away from me
Dreamer (Jobim)
Quiet nights of quiet stars (Jobim)
Mon amour
Sait-on jamais
So nice
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Waters of March (Jobim)
How insensitive (Jobim)
The Ice Hotel
Postcard lovers
Cambaya (the train)
S’wonderful
Samba triste (?or samba sarava)
What a wonderful world
The songs about the Ice Hotel and the Postcard Lovers were co-written by Jim Tomlinson (music) and Kazuo Ishiguro (lyrics). Kazuo is something of a Stacey Kent fan – he chose one of her songs in his Desert Island Discs, and has been pleased to revert to what is apparently his first love – song writing. He was in the audience for the set, so we felt doubly privileged – for the remains of the day at least. We enjoyed a good meal as well. We could have stayed until the wee small hours and listened to the second set by the James Pearson trio – but I guess not many of the aficionados present came from Dorset, so at about 11pm we set out into drizzly Frith Street and walked down to Shaftesbury Avenue. No cabs of course. We were almost at Piccadilly Circus before we were picked up and then had to travel back to the Albert Hall. By the time we arrived back in Kensington all of Engelbert’s fans had long since gone home to their cocoa and hot water bottles, so there wasn’t exactly a crush. Good journey home but it was 1.30 am before we were in bed.
We slept in a little on Friday, and prepared ourselves for our other major cultural endurance event to come that weekend – the visit to Poole Lighthouse for the aforementioned Met Live performance of Siegfried on Saturday.
After writing this, I felt it was a little uninspired, and felt that only a determined friend or a serious Stacey Kent fan would bother to read on after the introductory paragraph. After going to bed, I watched a film about the making of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, the Simon and Garfunkel album. It was made in honour of his 70th birthday (October 13th). I was so inspired I wanted to get up and write on. It brought back memories of working in the research lab at Will Rogers Hospital, Saranac Lake, upstate New York, in summer 1970. I worked with a local lad – David Meyer – who had an 8-track stereo player, and the tapes we played all summer were ‘Bridge’, Chicago, and the Crosby Stills and Nash album. When I left David gave me a copy of the album on vinyl. Happy memories. But, remarkably, some of the best quotes in recent weeks have come from the sports section of the Telegraph, and here is one: ‘Nostalgia is the neurotic inability to be able to deal with the present’. So – I need to move on, but one day, will we look back and say ‘Do you remember when we heard Stacey Kent at Ronnie Scott’s?’
There are Wagnerophiles everywhere, some more likely than others. To use Shaw’s description, I should perhaps call them Wagnerites. I wouldn’t really count myself in that number, though I do admit to going to Tristan and Isolde this year, so perhaps I’m changing. In the audience at the Lighthouse was one of our oncologists, who I wouldn’t have picked as a Wagnerite, and our recently retired Danish cosmopolitan ‘Renaissance Man’, (well he is an artist) neurophysiologist, Christian Wulff (who I wasn’t surprised to see). Now Tod was enthusiastic about our trying Siegfried. He called it more ‘approachable’. There certainly is a lot more going on, with evil dwarfs, dragons, a magical bird, and the occasional leitmotif for one to hang one’s craving for musical recognition on. I recall going to Gotterdammerung at Covent Garden, before the days of surtitles, and listening to the three Norns groping around in the semidarkness for what seemed like about 2 hours during the first act, not understanding a word and not particularly enjoying the music. It took several hours and several acts to get to Siegfried’s Death music – magnificent. As the two old ladies said, talking about Wagner:
‘Wagner has such wonderful moments, dear.’
‘Yes, and such awful half hours.’
But thanks to the magnificent set, the magnificent sound, the quality of the singers, I found that I really enjoyed Siegfried, and could even go back and do it all again. Jay Hunter Morris, who sang Siegfried, was terrific, and the behind the scenes filming during the intervals showed him as a refreshingly unaffected opera star, from little ol’ Paris, Texas. In fact his off stage persona conveyed exactly the right heroic naïveté that his on stage character is meant to have. His recent job working in a health club presumably gave him the magnificent biceps that one needs when forging a magic sword from little pieces. It certainly helped to have Rene Fleming doing the interviews, and scarcely gave us time to produce our pseudo-Glyndebourne feast (champagne, salmon en croute, dips etc) that we had planned on for the intervals. It did feel slightly incongruous eating such a wonderful picnic in the unattractive surrounds of Poole Lighthouse.
On Sunday, we had a rather tedious journey to Taunton, to a luncheon party of Susanna Joy’s. The lunch was good, but it was four hours of driving. Sobering moment – driving under the M5, queued all around Taunton, because of the major motorway crash there on Friday, the worst in the UK for twenty years.
So that’s the diary. Lots of other little happenings. England play an international football match this week, and there is ‘poppy rage’. They are not being allowed to wear poppy emblems on their shirts.
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