Fine Weather

The Shakespeare Concert attracts a full house to the retrochoir as the three small chapels behind the high altar at Southwark Cathedral are called. John Merbecke was tried here for heresy in 1543, condemned to death by burning, but let off because he was ‘but a musitian’ who knew no better. Arthur Smith tells the story of Dickens’ relationship with Shakespeare with more drollery than I have written into his script. The singing cellist pleases the crowd with her singing. Some women are curious to know her age. The voice is mature, but the physique is a child’s.

I attend a concert given by four West country choirs of serving and retired police officers. The compere from the Avon and Somerset Constabulary tells us the constable singing the baritone solos has been trying in vain for years to pass his sergeant’s exams. ‘You ain’t done your chances no ‘arm at all there, son,’ he says as the baritone’s long final note of The Impossible Dream disappears down the nave of Wells Cathedral. I have become very keen on the police and have had my photo taken by them on the A129 eastwards out of London. The picture costs me £60, but I reflect that I would only otherwise have spent it on a new set of lute strings.

The singing cellist’s godfather is be made mayor of Waltham Forest and he has asked us to accompany him, a former professional operatic tenor, in a lute song. My strings are old and liable to snap, but costly to replace. This is the disadvantage with unusual instruments. A set of strings for a guitar costs a tenner, for lute six times that. I have taken a job teaching German and French at a town 30 miles out of London to pay for them, or rather the police photo opportunity. We go out work to pay the police who wouldn’t be necessary if we didn’t go out to work. Mrs Jones says I’d be better off staying in.

The job is where the composer William Byrd went to live with his family in 1593, an obscure place, so he thought, where he could be a recusant Roman Catholic at a time of widespread persecution and harassment from Protestant zealots. But he reckoned without the local Anglican church warden who repeatedly reported him and his wife for non-attendance at church, incurring hundreds of pounds in fines. No one was harmed in either his case or mine. Self-righteous bigotry was a cover, then as now, for robbing ordinary citizens.

The passionate music Byrd composed for the Catholic church is performed rarely even today but is given movingly by the Cardinall’s Musick at the Wigmore Hall. The choir, which won the Gramophone record of the year in 2010 for its Byrd, is currently on a nationwide tour performing all Byrd’s once banned Latin music. Conductor Andrew Carwood delivers what he identifies as Byrd’s masterpiece, Infelix Ego, with gutsy fire. I am drawn in to Byrd’s clandestine world by the crushing intensity of his long, brave statement.

Dickspeare Show

The rain draws my attention to a hole in my shoe. Only one of them, mind. The left sole is intact where the right has worn through. I find this hard to explain. Do I walk unevenly? Do I create greater friction against the ground with my right? I haven't hopped anywhere since I was about eleven, so it can't be that. Walking across Germany in 2007 in the footsteps of JS Bach, my right lower leg swelled up impressively while the left remained slender but this was easily explained by the fact that the left was assisted by a walking stick held in my right hand which effectively halved the effort, while the right was left, if you see what I mean, to carry me forward without assistance.  Driving might have some impact as my right foot is in constant contact with the accelerator, while the left connects only intermittently with either clutch or brake. It is possible that, during lute-playing, the right endures more weight than the left, which rests on a rubber-topped footstool.

The singing cellist and I have rehearsed very thoroughly the lute songs for Monday's Shakespeare Birthday celebration in Southwark Cathedral with Arthur Smith. She is still in the hospital, but the psycho-therapists have agreed to let her out on the grounds that the inevitable applause and congratulations can only be good for one whose illness promotes gloomy self-loathing. The show describes Shakespeare's influence on Dickens. She is to sing songs which Dickens arranged for a family performance of a spoof Othello, featuring his Dad as the Duke of Venice or The Great Unpaid, as even then his uselessness with money was a family joke. Then there's a Dowland number which obsessed the members of the Shakespeare Society including  Dickens as to its authorship, other Dowland numbers because this is the 400th anniversary of his Fourth Book of Ayres and, to finish, the pre-Victorian hit Home Sweet Home which Dickens' sister sang in 1831 when she was one of the first students at the Royal Academy of Music. Arthur has received the script and writes with a kiss that he will be there and prepared .... a bit. He was never anything but.    

Novelist Goes Aloft

Researching the links between Dickens and Shakespeare takes me up the tower of Southwark Cathedral which both men knew. Shakespeare, it is said, paid for the tenor bell to be rung for his younger brother's funeral in 1607. Dickens went to bell-ringing practice in the tower one freezing January evening in 1869 and wrote about it in an article in his magazine All The Year Round. He didn't need the money: he wrote in response to some inner compulsive drive. At the time of his visit, he was the most famous living author in the English-speaking world. His health wasn't great and he died the following year aged 58, but still he insisted on high journalistic standards, going along in person, climbing the 100-step spiral staircase, asking questions, taking notes, writing the piece immediately. Some journalists I know would have just made it up.

He didn't hear what Shakespeare heard as the Elizabethan bells had been melted down and recycled by Samuel Knight of Holborn in 1735. But we hear what Dickens heard ; the same bells with the same complex tones have bowled out over the city for more than two hundred and fifty years. I follow the bell-ringers up the corkscrew flight as Dickens did. Vertigo makes me queasy and I think how easy to end it all now as we file along the narrow, fenced-off ledge a hundred feet above the chancel. From here the former Dean's son, a member of the dangerous sports club, launched himself during midnight mass in 2002 dressed as Father Christmas. He aimed to abseil to the Bishop's feet as a surprise but his beard caught in the mechanism and he was left hanging above the packed congregation for the rest of the service. Vertigo doesn't permit me to smile however until we reach the warm carpeted ringing room with views over the city through eight tall Gothic windows. Painted wooden boards on the walls record significant events (mostly very long peals) in the Southwark bell-ringers' history and make the venue a sort of club house. Ringers thought they'd set a record in 1928 and had already celebrated before a zealous job's-worth pointed out that some of their five thousand changes were identical and therefore invalid, so a different crew repeated the feat 75 years later.

The ringers remove their coats, flex their arms and begin. I sit and observe. A ringer tells me to uncross my legs as she is worried that a rope might loop itself round my ankle and yank me ceiling-wards. The twelve bells begin with a scale-wise descent through an octave and a fifth of B flat major, starting with the F, or treble. 'Treble's going,' warns the leader loosening his grip on the rope, 'she's gone,' and all the campanologists follow in increasingly complex patterns. They stand around the edge of the tower room, three women and nine men aged 20 to 60 with concentration on their faces, responding to the conductor's call with adjustments I cannot see but can hear in the altered sequence booming above me in the belfry. The floor moves and the tower shakes as it would in an earthquake. Each ringer stands in fron of a small square mat whose purpose I enquire after but am told, 'we don't talk while we're ringing.' The answer has to wait. The mats are wool which does not fray the rope when it brushes against it on the down stroke, but the carpet is harmfully synthetic. The ringers of the deeper bells stand on boxes of different heights like Olympic medal podia for what reason I have now forgotten. I ask if they are to ring for the Olympic Games. Peter, the leader, says that the proposed scheme to have every bell in the country ringing was not going to happen. 'Some crackpot artist had the idea,' he says, 'but no one thought it through.' He does tell me however that the three London cathedrals will be ringing simultaneously on the opening day 28 July.

Southwark's bells are beaten for heaviness only by those of St Paul's, Peter says proudly. He hands me a pair of ear mufflers and takes me up a wooden flight to the belfry where the bells are swinging exuberantly in their wooden cavities. The 48 cwt tenor bell is fatter than me and nearly as tall. I try to pick out its tone and believe I hear one an octave lower than it actually sounds, so deceptive is the glorious chime. At the end of the 'touch', a twenty-minute sequence as compared to a 'peal' which can last several hours, the tenor bell's ringer below fails to stop the monster by balancing it in the upright position and it rings on alone for several more bongs. The ringers are good, but not that good. 'We got knocked out of the national championships recently,' says Peter self-deprecatingly. We knew we would.' There's some pretty hot teams around. The muscular effort involved in campanology appealed to the old late Dean Colin Slee. He felt it was suitably Olympian. If he'd had his way, Peter says, the simultaneous bell-ringing by the London cathedrals would have been competitive. 'He wanted to make it a fight, a stamina contest to see who could go on the longest.' Dickens would have loved that idea.

Man Opens Eyes During Prayers

Friday 6 April
In case you were wondering, it wasn't my phone which went off during the broadcast, live to the nation, of Radio 3's Choral Evensong featuring the Southwark Cathedral Girls' Choir on Wednesday. They'll have been slapping their thighs with delight from Land's End to the Outer Hebrides. It was during the prayers and I confess I opened my eyes to see if I could spot the culprit but saw no guilty flinching from any of the fifty or so supporters of the choir or the Radio 3 programme or both. There are some Choral Evesong groupies, admittedly only a minority, who follow the team round the country. I sang where I was supposed to and even where I wasn't, joining in the men's verse of the hymn when the congregation around me had gone silent. One wouldn't stop singing in a service so why should the magic of transmission make it different? We like gritty realism at Southwark with the trains rattling past the clerestory window into London Bridge station.  The girls had redoubled their effort since Monday's dry-run. Mr Disley put them through a two-hour rehearsal. The singing cellist was among them but her nurses don't quite appreciate what a calorie-burning exercise singing is and she had lost weight again this morning, Good Friday. They put their foot down. No more outings without weight-gain. Bang goes the hot cross bun binge.

As we are feeling sorry for ourselves about this, hugging each other in the hospital green room with its prospect onto the magnificent grounds where lunatics wander, Mrs Jones rings to say her bicycle has been stolen. I return almost immediately and as I am loading the buns onto the grill in batches of eight, an officer of the law arrives to ask, 'is this your bicycle?' Indeed it is. He explains it has been found in the underground car park at the end of the road where the local funeral directors keep their hearses. It is a truly awesome sight, if one happens to be passing on a misty morning just as the shiny black fleet is emerging from the underworld up the ramp to street level. Worthy of Dickens. Mrs Jones' bike has lost its panniers and its expensive D-lock but is otherwise intact. The officer who is in plain clothes - a green tracksuit top and jeans with handcuffs hanging from his belt as the only somewhat obvious clue to his status - says he would like to take a statement and comes in with his notebook. I wheel Mrs Jones' bike back to the shed and as I do so wave cheerily to two tracksuited women whom I take to be his colleagues standing by their unmarked police car. Only one of the two could be called this, however, as the other is the bike-thief herself, a neighbour of ours apparently, two doors up. Meanwhile the officer refuses our attempt to bribe him with a hot cross bun, but sits down at the dining room table anyway and is still there an hour later having taken an age laboriously noting down Mrs Jones's answers to no more than half a dozen obvious questions - when did you last see your bike? was the shed locked? has anything else gone? when did you say you last saw your bike? - and some unnecessary ones to test the psychological impact of the crime and to show the caring side of the new police force - how does it make you feel now about the area? The normal routine is to gorge on buns while listening to the St Matthew Passion, but I turn the CD player right down so as not to disturb the interview and we can hear only faintly the arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, Pilate's interview and Peter's denial. I would beside my Lord, belts the tenor in the now rarely-performed English version. It takes me back to my school days and the policeman in the room disappears as I wallow in the reverie. In those days, a copper would have completed his interview in ten minutes on the doorstep and that would have been that. 'Can I read back to you what I've written?'' he says bringing me back from my trance. 'It's not Shakespeare.'  He makes up a passage about Mrs Jones returning from parking her bike in the shed and thinking no more of it and refers throughout his piece to her 'mountain bike' which it is not but it passes. Later in the evening, there is another knock at the door. This time it is forensics come to take fingerprints off the stolen velocipede. No one can say the police round here do not take even the smallest crime very seriously indeed. Apparently, it was the neighbour's sister who shopped her. In my young day, an older sibling would have seized a younger one by the ear and marched them round to apologise. Sounds like spite, ringing the police. Not to mention wasting their time. And ours. And now yours.

Thursday 5 April

The utility bill is now proof of identity. A driving licence alone is not good enough. This is what the attendant at the British Library insists on after I travel across town to renew my membership. Not even the fact that I am en expired member is good enough. She cannot re-admit me until she has seen an electricity demand in my name. This is disappointing as I am hoping to consult a particular volume of The Dickensian which only the British Library has and now I have to disappear with my tail between my legs. The volume in question contains the script of O'Tello the Irish Moor of Venice which John Dickens, the father of Charles, tried to sell as a piece of genuine Charles Dickens, when  he was once again broke. 

Monday 2 April
It's the singing cellist's birthday. She narrowly avoids the heavy nurses re-calling her to the ward for losing weight after climbing trees and having water-fights with her sleepover guests, and takes the train to London Bridge to sing Evensong at Southwark. The men are in the back row so she takes the corner girl's position under the conductor's nose. He makes the girls laugh with his new, more expressive, more expansive gestures which he has added because the men are in and everyone is to sing the live broadcast of Choral Evensong on BBC Radio 3 this Wednesday, a signal honour during Holy Week. The service is a rehearsal, which means the anthem has been changed to Byrd's Miserere Mei from the usual men-only Tallis Lamentations Part I. They would waddle out of the stalls and sing the masterpiece in a semicircle in front of the high altar which is decorated now for Lent with David March's astonishing Die Harder sculpture which shows Jesus screaming in agony as he is pinned to the cross by a thousand long needles through every part of him from his face to his scrotal sac. As the Mag and Nunc are Byrd's Short Service, we have the opportunity to compare the holy simplicity of his English music with the beautiful, heartfelt complexity of his Latin. Tallis' Salvator mundi invites an early entry from one of the girls and the psalm is sung to a suspension-rich chant by Howells. The succentor sings a little flat during the responses which makes the eyebrows of all sensitive listeners rise as they will her to make amends. There are a few tweaks to be made here and there, gentlemen. In the vestry, they sing happy birthday. The singing cellist rewards everyone with a box of chocolates. Later, that evening during supper in which she agrees to a second helping, she eats one of the remaining chocolates, an indulgence she hasn't allowed herself for two years. She promised she'd be different after her fourteenth birthday and so she is. 


Sunday 1 April Late Show
 It’s a risk programming no overture. You invite an expensive soloist to play the concerto but when the first movement ends, she has to wait while the latecomers file in noisily. That’s why you have overtures. How rudely Julia Fischer was treated at the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra’s late-March gig at the Royal Festival Hall although even she had to smile at the Japanese pair who ran in, anxious not to hold things up. The rest arrived as if it were them we had been waiting for and in their day clothes too so that they didn’t even have the excuse that they were putting on make-up or couldn’t find their smart trousers. They missed a first movement of proud authority in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, its long introduction perfectly weighted at an alert, overturish pace set by Principal Conductor Charles Dutoit who had blackened his hair for the evening. His magisterial presence defied any player to come in wrongly and none did, until the second movement when the horn entry burbled. Meanwhile, Fischer unravelled the solo part like a flower opening for spring, planted dew-drops of sound on the audience’s undeserving heads and, in the cadenza, flashed lines of radiant melody seemingly from different parts of her instrument, even giving the four-note bouncing motif as much solidity, interwoven in the intricate scales, as the orchestra itself had done under Dutoit’s masterly control, his elbows pumping like bellows. Resignation coloured the Larghetto as Fischer identified Beethoven’s strong-willed acceptance of fate. She leapt into the finale with guns blazing, her black silk dress flowing with the beat, and firing sparks from its diamond buckle. She played a liitle too readily an encore, Paganini’s thirteenth Caprice. Germans, on the whole, are not a superstitious lot.

The orchestra doubled in size during the interval. There were now nine horns where there had been two, five trombones and tubas where there had been none and twice as many trumpeters as Beethoven had needed. Three of the latter left their seats and headed for the bar at one point whence to play the distant battlefield evocation in Strauss’ Heldenleben. Dutoit gave the work an old man’s start, the low entries gruff and complaining, but not even he could clarify the superfluity of business once underway, so that the overall effect for much of the time was as fuzzy as a malfunctioning hearing aid. Only occasionally did the performance come sharply into focus and that was invariably when the textures had been reduced – the twin harps punctuating the strings, the Wagner quote, the bitter dry flute, representing the carping critics. Nearby, the elderly subscribers recalled Beecham give an ‘out of this world’ performance and then proceeded to judge the world like bad-tempered Straussians. ‘I do wish they’d stop all these ruddy announcements,’ said one after Sir Ian McKellen’s sonorous automated monologue about mobile phones which is now several years old. ‘Someone’s went off anyway in the Beethoven,’ growled his companion. ‘Load of freaks about, if you ask me.’ 

Wednesday 28 March
The comedian Arthur Smith is sunning himself on his small patch of lawn beside the service entrance roadway into his 1930s South London apartment block which Hitler admired. We discuss the forthcoming Shakespeare Birthday celebration in Southwark Cathedral on Monday 23 April at two-thirty (as the Chinaman said to the dentist). This year's theme is Dickens and it becomes clear as we talk that the Victorian novelist rescued The Bard from perpetual down-marketing. He used to put on plays with his friends and family every year on Shakespeare's birthday like we do. The singing cellist is taking part too. Arthur shows concern for her condition. He too once spent a week with a tube up his nose he tells me. It is ten years since his own stay in intensive care which is another event to commemorate.   

Saturday 24 March 
The singing cellist is home from the hospital for the weekend. She has a rehearsal, so we pack her instrument into its coffin-like case and take the bus to St Alfege’s Church, Greenwich, where the Centre for Young Musicians’(CYM) is giving its annual concert. The college is on the other side of town but the CYM director gets the venue cheap, because he is also the organist. This makes him successor to Thomas Tallis, the Father of English Music, who is buried in St Algfege’s with his wife Joan. He died in 1585 aged 80 which impressed his contemporaries, one of whom wrote in a brass plaque :

'He served long tyme in Chappell with great prayse

Fower Soveregnes Reygnes (a thing not often sene)

I mean King Henry and Prince Edwards Dayes

Quene Mary and Elizabeth our Quene’

 This is fixed to the wall in the south-west corner of the church next to an ancient organ console behind a glass screen, presumed to contain pipes which Tallis himself used. A notice draws attention to the fact that the D key is more worn than the others, but offers no explanation beyond hinting that D, perhaps, was as supreme with the Tudors as C with us. D to D on the white notes is minor and modal, invariably producing a dark, melancholy flavour. Another note also says that the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth grew up in Greenwich and would have come to church at St Alfege’s.

The head of strings makes frantic calls to absent members of the cello ensemble. They arrive in dribs and drabs. A cellist I remember as a treble has grown to exceed six foot. He wafts by, a girl on each arm and the sophisticated whiff of tobacco smoke in his wake. I wander among the dead while they rehearse. General Wolfe was brought back here after his ‘glorious death’ at the age of 32 on the heights above Quebec having ‘won Canada for the Empire’. General Gordon, who was assassinated in Khartoum was baptised here in 1833. Conrad Dinwiddy ‘fell’ in France in 1917, aged 36. He had invented the Dinwiddy Rangefinder and a slide rule for field firing, but, I thought, neither did him much good in the end.

We walk to Greenwich Park through standstill traffic, frustrated drivers fuming through their windscreens. I have a recollection of walking here holding my father’s enormous hand fifty years ago. Six foot four, he stood and I have never outgrown him, though I stand a chance now that he is shrinking down to my height with age. I in turn hold the singing cellist’s tiny hand though hers has shrunk with anorexia. We sit on a bench while the sun goes down and Mrs Jones makes her way to us with a picnic. The singing cellist doesn’t eat hungrily, but neither does she resist my urging to finish her sandwiches like she used to. She even has a sense of humour. Passing a sweet shop in Greenwich with minutes to spare before the concert, she says, ‘Although I’m an anorexic, I think I’ll just pop in here for a moment.’ She eats nothing indulgent herself but she loves poring over food which other people are going to eat.

The concert is impressive although most at some point give away their youth and inexperience in aberrant tuning or insensitivity to balance. The only group which is completely and obliviously professional is the Theodora Piano Trio who perform two movements from Bruch’s Op83 Acht Stücke, forgetting their individual selves entirely and feeding off one central collective intelligence

Dutch Treat

I accept an invitation to hear young Dutch pianist Hannes Minnaar in a regency living room with Persian rugs on the parquet, artworks on the walls and cherubs on the ceiling. It’s like Chopin giving a salon concert, especially when Minnaar plays the Polish composer in the second half, the audience dreamy with concentration, the bespectacled artist in his other-worldly trance, locks flowing, exploring the extremes in the Twenty-Four Preludes Op28. He stresses the reticence of the brief A major poem, the water-torture A flat through the restless Raindrop, the thudding bass notes like distant cannon fire in conclusion. Romanticism runs throughout even in Bach as it’s Liszt’s heroic realisation of the Prelude and Fugue in A minor BWV543 which Minnaar plays. He follows this with Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A Op101 which is less stern and more questioning than others make it. In Ravel’s Sonatine, he comes into his own, fondling the jazz-inflected, neo-romantic chords of the Modéré with suave assurance, tripping through the Minuet like a fin-de-siecle tea-dance roue, and sending out fabulous arpeggio sprays in the Animé finale. The owner of the regency lounge tells us that it is Minnaar’s first time in the United Kingdom. It will certainly not be his last.

Gal's Gal

Hans Gal's daughter Eva attends the launch of Toccata Classics' CD of his Bach-like solo cello works. She talks of her envy of the Julies and Susans she went to school with in Edinburgh when she shared a name only with Hitler's mistress. She tells me there is no truth in the story that her father sat on Brahms' knee which is disappointing but he did attend concerts conducted by Mahler. It is 25 years since his death at the age of 97. He was big news in the German speaking world throughout the 1920s. His opera The Holy Duck  was staged in 20 different cities. When she was young, he dedicated pieces for recorder to her. When she was older she played violin in a quartet which performed his works. The violist Janet Schlapp is now the principal viola of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Cellist Alfia Nakipbekova plays movements from Gal;'s Solo Cello Suite Op109b. It's four dance movements are homage to Bach, the fughetta subject suggesting harmonic turns, the alla marcia placing careful feet in an intricate two-step. She plays it with lots of poignant atmosphere, the director of the Austrian Cultural Insttute comes round with a tray of alcohol and the CDs fly off the corner table.