Usk Castle

On an impromptu trip to Wales, I came across a castle that felt like it had stepped out of the imagination of Dodie Smith. 'How strange and beautiful it looked in the late afternoon light!' wrote Cassandra Mortmain in I Capture the Castle, a novel in which she chronicles the life of her family amid the crumbling ruins of their castle. It's a mouldy, mouldering place, its vestigial grandeur just intact enough to allow the place to be romanticised. 'I was too young to know much of history and the past,' noted Cassandra, 'for me, the castle was one in a fairy-tale.'

Entering Usk Castle, which sits just up a path with a gateway crowned by lions, past a still-inhabited house with a fine topiary duck in the garden, it was as if I, too, had wandered into a storybook. Around the lush green carpet of lawn rose the grey stone walls, covered in ivy so that they seemed almost to merge into the hills beyond. The place had a charm of its own: a topiary cross to mark the chapel, chickens running free, and a tree with a branch that had grown downwards, bent and twisted, forming a perfect seat. In the derelict banqueting hall, a fireplace was beached halfway up the wall, above the line of the floor, which had long since fallen away, like the disappearing sea.

And in another corner, reached by walking along the top of a wall with rather rickety fencing, stood the round tower, its stone green with moss, its walls roofless and open to the sky and trees. Just the kind of place that Cassandra might have locked up her creatively-blocked father, in order to force him to write his next novel.

August 2019 reviews for The Times

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Thomas Dausgaard
5 August 2019

First thoughts aren’t always the best. When Sibelius’s Symphony No 5 was premiered in Helsinki in 1915, the audience liked it, but the composer wasn’t happy. Drastic surgery was required. Four years and two revisions later, the bold orchestral work that’s become a concert-hall favourite emerged. So why bother digging out that original, rejected version?

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bbc-sso-dausgaard-review-the-familiar-sibelius-made-to-sound-strange-hvxj6j5tx

National Youth Orchestra of the USA/Antonio Pappano
BBC Symphony Orchestra/Semyon Bychkov
12 August 2019

When Joyce DiDonato was singing Le spectre de la rose from Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été (Prom 32) — her voice so tender, so poignant, so full of meaning — it really was hard to imagine anything more perfect. Every word of French was finessed, every phrase unfurled naturally. Sentimentality could swamp this glimpse of an exquisite dying rose, yet DiDonato made it human and transcendent.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/proms-32-33-reviews-nyo-usa-pappano-bbc-so-bychkov-didonato-triumphs-gansch-falters-tkq8l27lz

West-Eastern Divan Orchestra/Daniel Barenboim
13 August 2019

There was no time for nerves, second thoughts, or even getting comfortable. As soon as an almost reluctant-looking Martha Argerich had sat down, the orchestra struck up and she was away, whipping up an already heightened Proms atmosphere with the unstoppable striding chords of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/west-eastern-divan-orchestra-barenboim-review-martha-argerich-is-a-musical-legend-for-a-reason-nrkqgm0gf

London Symphony Orchestra/Simon Rattle
21 August 2019

There aren’t many pieces that can make the capacious Royal Albert Hall feel small, but Varèse’s Amériques is one of them. It’s not simply the huge orchestra; it’s the depth and scale of the head-spinning, modernist urban soundscape, which teeters on the edge of cacophony and feeds off the energy and rhythms of a city that never sleeps. Stories suggest themselves for the deluge of sounds: the wail of a police siren, the squeak of a subway train on metal rails, the clank of a bolt through a steel girder. This is music in which the world is constantly being remade.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/prom-44-london-symphony-orchestra-simon-rattle-review-urban-soundscape-meets-sonic-jungle-5jgpqf3cd