Private Eye hits the spot again

Sad morning, happier evening

I woke this morning to the shocking news on my radio that the Cutty Sark, the great nineteenth-century tea clipper preserved at Greenwich, was on fire. A Greenwich icon, which has given her name to the local tube station, she was undergoing restoration on which my colleagues were consulting: I've recently taken classes of schoolchildren round her and told them about the contribution of mathematics to saving our national heritage. A landmark and a national treasure.

(Photo from thelondonpaper)

The aftermath - 6pm

So a very sad morning in Greenwich.

Then this evening to a sensational concert by the French group La Fenice, performing a programme of seventeenth century music based on the pilgramage to Santiago, starting at Strasbourg and moving down the Rhone, through Languedoc, across the Pyrenees and through Galicia.

I have a particular affection for the song "Une jeune fillette" in its many guises. I think I first heard it sung, in a recording, by one of my favourite singers, Montserrat Figueras (whom I have yet to hear live). Tonight it was sung in an anonymous religious contrafactum: which I found extraordinarily moving, in part perhaps because the singer, Arianna Savall, is Figueras's daughter:

Bienheureuse est une ame
ou nul vice n'a lieu.
Qui jamais ne s'enflamme
que de l'amour de Dieu.
Et d'un dédain
rejette l'artifice
de la haute malice
de tout homme mondain.

There were many other highlights: the wonderful Jean Tubéry on cornet duetting with the bassoon of Mélanie Flahaut in a piece by Bartolomé Selma y Salaverde; enchanting harp-playing by Savall, and a wonderful encore Canten dos juguerillos (Francisco Escalada) performed by all five musicians:

Canten dos jiguerillos al Sol Infante,
porque los pajaritos al nino acallen, canten suaves,
que esta noche del cielo sus voces salen.
A esta noche le llaman la noche buena,
para todos de gozo, de gusto,
de gloria y dios de pena.

And the news tonight of the Cutty Sark is better than we feared. Much of the wood had been removed for treatment, and the iron structure seems to have survived the 100-foot-high flames as she survived the waves and storms of her previous existence. May La Fenice be a good omen: may Cutty Sark re-emerge phoenix-like form the fire!

Fire and Snow

¡Ay! ¡Andar a toto pandero!
Nadie se podrá excusar,
que donde ay mucho concurso,
¡muchos panderos habrá!

A fascinating concert by the choir Ex Cathedra tonight, of Baroque music from Bolivia, mainly by Juan de Araujo. The first time I've heard a London audience singing in Quechua, joining in the choruses of Hanac pachap cussicuinin (all 20 verses).

que arder en la nieve el fuego
de amor los efectos son.

One by Michael Donaghy

Thanks to Erica Wagner who read this in the event at Dulwich Picture Gallery tonight.

ALAS, ALICE,

who woke to crows and woke up on the ceiling and hung
there fearing the evening's sweeping and looked down now
at her unfinished reading and loved by sleeping and slept
by weeping and called out once. The words were dust. Who
left late singing and signed up leaving and ran home slowly
afraid of sleeping and hated thinking and thought by feeling
and called out once but no one came,

who dreamt blue snow and froze in dreaming and spoke by
reading and read all evening and read by patterns of bliz-
zards drifting and dared by waiting and waited taking and
called out once and called out twice and coughed grey clouds
and carved four coffins and took by thanking and thanked
by seeking and drifted bedwards and lay there weeping and
counted her tears and divided by seven and called out once.
The words were crows.

More greenery: trees seen on my way home tonight

Green London (Waterloo, Saturday 12 May)

Scarlattiana

To "Queen Anne's Footstool" (St John's, Smith Square) for music by Domenico Scarlatti in this 250th anniversary year. Carole Cerasi played harpsichord music by Scarlatti, Thomas Roseingrave, Soler, Mateo Perez de Albeniz and Manuel Blasco de Nebra: the Pastorela by the last of these had a wonderfully eccentric middle movement. Then London Baroque with Emma Kirkby and Elin Manahan Thomas (a last-minute stand-in) performed a Handel Trio sonata, and a cantata and an entertaining Arcadian duet by the two sopranos, who hammed it up beautifully. How lucky we are in London to have so many opportunities to hear interesting and unusual music by such performers.

Quanta furie ha il cieco Averno,
tante io porto in mezzo al seno.
Sento il cor che gia vien meno!
Cieli! Aita! Nice, oh dio!
Chi di me pietade avra? Chi?

No, non mi lagno della sorte,
ch'io solo, io, si non quello
che me spingo in braccio a morte,
se di me non ho pieta.

A talk about slavery

Went to a rather disturbing talk about the attitude of missionaries to domestic slavery in West Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Almost a century after the abolition of the slave trade, missionaries and the missionary societies tolerated, to a greater or less extent, the widespread practice of domestic slavery. Pragmatically, they probably had little choice if they were to be effective in their evangelism; and of course they argued that it was better to be a cared-for slave than to be abandoned with no means of sustenance. It's hard to defend this now. Yet I find myself much more prepared to acknowledge the nuances of the situation than I would have been a few years ago, when I was much less tolerant of hypocrisy. How strange it is to grow old, and see how life makes us compromise our strongest principles.

In the garden this morning

A concert in Pepys's Church

To St Olave's, Hart Street, for a concert of music by Victoria, Guerrero, Esquivel and Morales, excellently sung by the Giltspur Chamber Choir.

St Olave's was Samuel Pepys's church. Three ominous skulls guard the entrance in Seething Lane to what Dickens described as the churchyard of St. Ghastly Grim. Inside the church is the bust of his wife Elizabeth, commissioned after her death by Pepys: she looks over his burial-place. There's also a memorial to Samuel (who had his own covered staircase to his pew from his workplace at the Admiralty, opposite).