Ferrier finale

The Kathleen Ferrier Award finals are this evening in the Wigmore Hall. Three cheers for the fantastic Yshani Perinpanaygam, who'll be accompanying soprano Elena Sancho in them. I'll be crossing fingers they win! I should add in a disclaimer that as I know Yshani this is a biased post, but it's not needed as she's such a wonderful accompanist, and her playing speaks for itself… Good luck!

Lieberson

Peter Lieberson, the American composer, has died. I'd only recently discovered his work, led to it through the incomparably sublime voice of the great mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, whom he married in 1999. His luscious settings of five love poems by Pablo Neruda were composed for her – Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs shimmer in this music, although there's a flavour of their South American heritage too – and their story is poignant. As the singer traces the tale of love from first flush to death do us part, the knowledge that Hunt Lieberson was battling breast cancer at the time of their writing is hard to forget. Tragically, she died in 2006. In this extract, recorded with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under James Levine, Hunt Lieberson sings 'Amor mio, si muero y tu no mueres':

My love, if I die and you don't, let's not give grief an even greater field...this meadow where we find ourselves, O little infinity! We give it back. But Love, this love has not ended, it is like a long river."

Paris in the Springtime

The countdown to my trip to la belle France begins. Time for a little Ella…

Moonlight

XIX

The moonlight when it shines on the grass,
I don’t know what it reminds me of...
It reminds me of my old maid
Telling me fairy tales.
And Our Lady dressed as a beggar
Helping mistreated children...

If I can’t believe they’re true anymore,
Why does the moonlight shine on the grass?

(3/4/1914)

From The Keeper of Flocks by Alberto Caeiro

Tomorrow's Tangle

This is a temporary photo taken on my phone, to be replaced by a hypothetically better one from my camera this weekend. There's a wonderfully evocative gate – if a gate can be such a thing – in Bristol that opens on to stone steps winding up the hillside slopes of Cliftonwood to the summit of Clifton Village. Made of iron, the archway's now so rusty it looks like it might shiver and crumble if you dared to touch it. Amid leaves and curls runs a motto beginning 'Tomorrow's tangle' and continuing with I know not what, thanks to the loss of various letters. Google has helped me fill in the gaps: 'Tomorrow's tangle to ye windes resign' – wise words, oh yes – comes from Edward Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. His version of the Persian verses were published in the 19th century. I wonder who made this arch in Bristol and what inspired them to choose this line of poetry as an adornment?

Le mépris

I watched Jean-Luc Godard's Le mépris this week. This 1960s French classic unfolds slowly, but it's beautiful. Set against a backdrop of exploring what cinema is and how to make a film, the crux of the plot is a tragic love story. Although that makes it sound more dramatic than the action turns out to be: in essence, this film depicts the moment two people fall out of love, what happens when the magic has gone. Godard is spot on in his observation and, for that, the film's moving and memorable.

Memory lane

Songs often remind me, as I'm sure they do you, of places and people. This one I haven't heard for about four years, but when I heard it earlier today it took me back straight away to Lyon, where I started this blog. There I lived in a 'module' – that's a flat to you or me; just imagine a flatpack apartment and that's pretty much what it was like, hence the name – with 'Les filles' (three French, one Russian). Our rooms were off a main kitchen and living room, with a blue Ikea 'canapé' (sofa - the Oxford English Dictionary assures me this word actually exists with this meaning in English as well as French) in the corner. Our 'at-home' soundtrack was French radio which has about three recognisable songs amid copious amounts of bland wallpaper pop. Peter von Poehl was one of the ones that stood out:

One song always leads to another. Here's a little taster of Beth Gibbons, who I also heard early on in France after watching L'auberge Espagnole, a bit of a cult 'living abroad' film: