Kindness

Before I write about illness, I want to say something about kindness. I wouldn't have got through the last few months of Covid in lockdown without it, and it's still remarkable to me how kind people have been. I feel lucky. Neighbours who I didn't know before who have done my shopping, picked up prescriptions, taken me to the doctor, checked how I was doing. The friend who brought me soup and left it on my doorstep every day, who for weeks brought me meals to reheat because I couldn't stand up for long enough to cook. Friends who came and stood outside the window to talk through the glass when I was twice in isolation. Who have come to visit with gifts from their gardens. Who have sent cards, flowers and food. Who have simply showed up and smiled. My family, who have been there whenever I needed, with support of all sorts. The paramedics and GP who put themselves at risk of infection and came into my home to assess me. The doctor who literally went out of his way to get the right antibiotic, the neighbour who lent  me a new thermometer, the physios running free post-covid recovery online classes. Thank you. I'll have forgotten too many specifics – ah, short term memory loss is one fun feature of this virus – but not the incredible power of human kindness. That'll stick.

Mild

Mild. Even the word sounds gentle, with its soft consonants. Unthreatening. Covid would be mild for most. I hung on to the word. Reassuring, a comfort blanket. Mild is a sniffly cold, a sore tummy, a light haze of headache. That sort of thing.

Don't be fooled. What started out as mild Covid-19 back in March soon escalated for me. Thankfully – and I am so thankful for this – not to hospital admission level. More of that in another post. But Covid mild is not in the same league as even a seasonal flu.

Does mild cover an illness that lasts 102 days – and counting? Having to crawl along the floor to get water because I was too weak to stand? A heart pounding as if I'd been running a 10K, but all I'd done was lie down and breathe? Hallucinations, rashes, blinding headaches, pain all over my body, memory loss, days of sleeping for 12 hours? 

It seems that coronavirus is not simply either mild or severe in the sense that the initial public messaging suggested. There's a version somewhere in-between that causes debilitating symptoms that drag on and on. I have no idea why, nor is there any official medical guidance yet. The government has been slow to address this issue.

Mild, this illness is not. Mysterious, that's the only certainty I have.

100 days of Covid-19

At the start of the year, I was planning a rare trip to Singapore to visit friends this June. 'But I'll wait to book the flights,' I naively said in January, as the country started to impose restrictions. 'I'll just see what happens with this coronavirus thing'. We both thought it would blow over. Of course, we all know what actually happened. And here I am, 100 days after falling ill with suspected Covid-19, still not feeling better but inching forward along the path to recovery. The closest I've got to Singapore is watching Michael Portillo in his pastel outfit touring on TV. Sadly, I've got to know Covid-19 rather better. Another friend suggested blogging about it might be therapeutic. Maybe it'll also be helpful for others who have the virus. Because it turns out this is not simply a seven-day illness for lots of people. Here goes.

February 2020 reviews for The Times

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla
3 February 2020

Unsuk Chin’s Spira is subtitled Concerto for Orchestra, and this teeming 25-minute soundscape certainly put the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra through its virtuosic paces. What the title fails to point out is that this is an Olympic-level workout for the listener too. It was just as well that Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla began by summoning our concentration. Raising her arms as if to start conducting, she then paused until the audience’s momentary silence transformed into an expectant stillness.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/city-of-birmingham-symphony-orchestra-mirga-grazinyte-tyla-review-the-more-closely-you-listened-the-more-there-was-to-discover-lvqqtb7xx

Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment/Iván Fischer
10 February 2020

What if Mozart’s three final symphonies were not individual pieces but one huge extended work? That was the “firm belief” of the late Nikolaus Harnoncourt, explained the evening’s conductor, Ivan Fischer. The evidence: all three were written in one creative burst in 1788, and, unusually, were without commission. So how about listening to them, Fischer suggested, as 12 individual movements.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/orchestra-of-the-age-of-enlightenment-fischer-review-a-disjointed-take-on-mozart-kdh07g5bc

January 2020 reviews for The Times

National Youth Orchestra/Jaime Martin
7 January 2020

This was a concert of powerful voices. Quite literally, to start with. Before the 164 instrumentalists of the National Youth Orchestra (NYO) played a note, they stood and sang a workers’ protest, Auf den Strassen zu Singen, by Hanns Eisler. An unexpected opening, but, sung in English, its message of truth and justice rang out.

Full Review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/national-youth-orchestra-jaime-martin-review-few-performances-of-shostakovich-will-top-this-tctq30rpk

London Symphony Orchestra/Simon Rattle
20 January 2020

We’re going to be hearing a lot of Beethoven this year, that’s for sure. As orchestras embark on extensive celebrations for his 250th anniversary, there are bound to be the naysayers who moan that his music has enough airtime already, thank you very much. The London Symphony Orchestra’s opening Beethoven 250 programme was a reminder, however, of what it means to look afresh at music we think we know, and the power of truly paying attention.

Full Review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/lso-rattle-review-energetic-beethoven-but-berg-was-revelatory-s2rqh6g6m

Andreas Scholl, Tamar Halperin
27 January 2020

Ancient melody, distant song and soft laments. Lullabies, soliloquies and farewells. Skilfully constructed and exquisitely performed, this “Twilight People” recital charted ambiguous moods, half-states of remembrance and forgetting, places of neither here nor there. The mesmerising beauty of Andreas Scholl’s voice sounded as if from some other world; the pianist Tamar Halperin’s contemplative approach paved the way to it

Full Review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/andreas-scholl-review-languid-tempos-allowed-us-to-luxuriate-in-the-sound-h5xqxkptq

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

January 2018 reading

Lullaby Leila Slimani
Everything I Know About Love Dolly Alderton
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine Gail Honeyman 

Welcome to 2018

Today I went for a swim. A New Year’s Day swim. In a pool with waters clear and icy, sharp on the skin. Cleansing. The earlier heavy rain had turned into blue skies and a lemon sorbet sun. The first length was bracing, the second refreshing. One after the next – touch the end, turn, push – the lengths added up until my fingers and toes seemed to have reached the same temperature as the water and it was time to get out, shower and head into 2018.

December 2017 reading and listening

To be updated…

Postcards from the Edge Carrie Fisher
Apple of My Eye Helen Hanff
The Dark is Rising Susan Cooper
A Manual for Heartache Cathy Rentzenbrink
The Ship Antonia Honeywell

Last Leaf Danish String Quartet

November reviews for The Times

After ten good years, my laptop finally decided to give up and head into retirement. And after several months of denial, I've finally given in and accepted that it's not going to come back to life. I'll admit I'm rather enjoying the novelty of actually being able to type, copy, paste on my new computer without it being a complete headache. Time for some blog housekeeping! Here are a few of my recent reviews for The Times. Links included. They are all paywalled (go on, subscribe!) but you can sign up for two free articles a week.

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra/Mariss Jansons
27 November 2017

Just before the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra arrived in town, its chief conductor Mariss Jansons went on record saying that women conductors weren’t his “cup of tea”. Cue outcry, particularly as the Latvian was also at the Barbican to be awarded the gold medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society. 

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/concert-review-bavarian-rso-jansons-at-the-barbican-ptghg0sk6

The Rake's Progress at Wilton's Music Hall
14 November 2017

There may be a more atmospheric and appropriate theatre in which to stage Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, but I wouldn’t bet on it. The intimate Wilton’s Music Hall is right in scale and feel. 

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/opera-review-the-rakes-progress-at-wiltons-music-hall-e1-6d6g6w3s2


The Riot Ensemble
14 November 2017

Less traditional concert, more experimental music laboratory, this BBC Radio 3 Open Ear event showcased the quite new, the new and the made up on the spot. It’s an interesting formula. That I felt the results were mixed is almost part of the point 

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/concert-review-the-riot-ensemble-holloway-nahum-at-lso-st-lukes-ec1-xlbdcx7rs

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla
10 November 2017

Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No 1 has already become Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s calling card, after he played it to win BBC Young Musician in 2016. This was the second time I’ve heard the 18-year-old cellist play the piece live this year, and if I was secretly expecting a carbon copy, then shame on me. Even in a matter of just a few months, Kanneh-Mason’s interpretation has grown in maturity and stature, and here he gave a thrillingly memorable performance.  

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/concert-review-city-of-birmingham-symphony-orchestra-mirga-grazinyte-tyla-at-symphony-hall-birmingham-rwk07rx07

London Symphony Orchestra/Gianandrea Noseda
1 November 2017

It is hard to say who is more of a speed merchant, the pianist Khatia Buniatishvili or the conductor Gianandrea Noseda. Either way, they are kindred hotheads. Luckily, they both have the knack of pushing tempos to their limit and, just at the point of no return, managing to keep the music from free-fall.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/concert-review-london-symphony-orchestra-noseda-at-the-barbican-7cs3vbbv0

Helen Dunmore – a small tribute

I got to know Helen Dunmore's writing thanks to my mum. For that reason alone, her name was instantly special. My mum loves reading, I always trust her taste in books. I remember her recommending Zennor in Darkness to a friend when I was a teenager. Yet for some reason I only started reading Helen's books when I was in my twenties, when I had moved to Bristol. One Christmas I gave my mum two books of her poetry, and I was reminded: this was a writer I should really read. I went to the library, the big central library, and took out Burning Bright. And realised that the city she described was my new home, the arty cinema in her novel my new local hangout. But more importantly I felt I had made a discovery: a writer who wrote with wisdom and wit, a cool elegance and a human warmth. Who was not afraid to confront the darkness, nor afraid to embrace the light. I carried on reading.

The story could have stopped there with one happy reader. Then a few years ago I signed up to a French class, and in the first lesson was surprised to see a familiar face. It was the writer from my bookshelves. I was, I'll admit, starstruck. Over the next few years, it was a privilege and a pleasure to share a horror of the subjunctive (perhaps I'm projecting my horror on to Helen) and a delight in the French novels we read each term. I took a year off my lessons last September, and was shocked when I learned she had terminal cancer. I wrote to Helen, and her reply was so kind and generous. I get the impression that was how she was with everyone. She was a brilliant and thoughtful writer and poet and a wonderful human being, someone who I have found inspiring in every way. All of these small musings are simply an inadequate way of saying how sad I am that she has died, to say thank you for the words. My thoughts are with her family and friends. Helen's last book, Birdcage Walk, was also set in Bristol. I can't wait to read it.