2019 foursomes

The annual reminder that this blog exists even though I don’t post on it any more. I do intend to get back to it next year. Let’s aim for one post per quarter, if that’s not unduly optimistic. Thank you for reading: I love you all. Happily the almost constant not-blogging has created much time for attending, reading and listening to various things, among which the following have been among the better specimens:

Top 4 books
INVIDIOUS to single out four from such a stellar bunch, but let’s do it anyway. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain repaid the few weeks of effort I put into it, one of those novels that engages and excites the brain. I always forget Mann’s quite funny; mea culpa. Edward St Aubyn’s quintet of novels about his alter ego Patrick Melrose enlivened the second half of the year. If I had to pick a single one, the second, Bad News, was a joy from start to finish, switching effortlessly from desperately poignant to scabrously funny. I haven’t encountered many writers with St Aubyn’s pithiness. Noel Streatfeild’s exceptional and sobering Saplings, telling the story of a family of six becoming fractured during the Second World War, hinted at a brilliance I’d only suspected from her children’s books. And I wouldn’t normally pick a reread, but the one novel that above all others blew me away in 2019 was Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. I’d read it before with admiration, but this time around it made my head swim. It’s so potent, so alive to the possibilities of … well, everything. The novel as a form, for one thing, but storytelling and myth and human existence generally. Mindboggling.

Honourable mentions to the likes of Dimitri Verhulst, Blake Morrison, Angus Wilson, Patrick Hamilton, Sayaka Murata, Sally Rooney, Anne Tyler, Carol Shields, Elizabeth Taylor (the other one), Jacqueline Woodson… More anon.

Top 4 new films
The Favourite started the year off with a bang, Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest oddballfest, full of joyous anachronisms and wild humour. I love Rachel Weisz to distraction. Like Lanthimos crossed with Aguirre crossed with Southern Comfort, Alejandro Landes’ Monos was indescribably audacious, the story of a band of trainee guerrillas in a remote part of South America. I loved its mixture of beauty and brutality, and Mica Levi’s score, of course. You can add me to the lengthy roster of people who found Adam Driver singing ‘Being Alive’ in Marriage Story a moving and erotic experience. Surely Noah Baumbach’s finest work to date, and great to see Julie Hagerty at the top of her game. I caught a preview at the Cambridge Film Festival at which Netflix heavies systematically beat to a pulp anyone observed using their phone during the movie. But my film of the year was probably Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory. His most elegiac film, perhaps, his most reflective, anchored by a humane, sympathetic turn from Antonio Banderas, and full of tenderness and melancholy. It’s the only film I went to see twice this year, and I’m already keen to revisit it.

Honourable mentions: Booksmart, Midsommar, By the Grace of God, Eighth Grade, If Beale Street Could Talk.

Top 4 old films
Sergei Parajanov’s unorthodox biographical drama about the Armenian poet Sayat Nova The Colour of Pomegranates is a film the like of which I’ve never seen before, and perhaps the closest to poetry that cinema has come for me. Bewildering, intoxicating, overwhelming. I’ve never seen such colours on screen. Something rich and strange. Seriously, drop what you’re doing for a moment and try this for size.

I’d somehow avoided Preston Sturges until now, but Sullivan’s Travels has converted me. I felt almost anything might happen. Another film I had a long overdue date with: Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story. So beautifully, classically constructed, and told with such care and quietness. They’re an unlikely pairing, Sturges and Ozu, but I think they share a humanity. And lastly, the Brazilian director Anna Muylaert’s The Second Mother, a warm but incisive drama about the power dynamic between a wealthy family and their maid (amazing Regina Casé), which shifts when her daughter moves into the family house. It’s sensationally good, and (spoiler alert) it ends happily. I laughed with joy.

Honourable mentions: Yi Yi, Nebraska, Arrival, All About My Mother, Leave No Trace, Miracle in Milan, Palindromes, Alice in the Cities, Paris, Texas, Midnight, Dry Summer…

Top 4 Edinburgh
My best Edinburgh yet, I think, in terms of both quality of things witnessed and not suffering burnout from my foolishly intense schedule (this year, 22 shows, a photography exhibition, a sung Mass and a piano recital in the space of three and a bit days). Peter Fleming: Have You Seen? was the pick of the shows, a great concept and a virtuosic performance. Paul Foot: Baby Strikes Back! and Ivo Graham: The Game of Life were the best shows I’ve seen from either performer. Foot’s pre-show spiel about Princess Michael of Kent opening a school for autistic children was a joy. And Lucy Beaumont: Space Mam was a much needed change of pace from most of the shows I saw, such a warm and generous performance. The first time I’ve seen her live, but not I hope the last.

Honourable mentions: Tim Key, The Delightful Sausage, Tarot, Kieran Hodgson (as usual).

Top 4 theatre
I was on an Andrea Dunbar kick early in the year, and made a pilgrimage to Bury St Edmunds to see Out of Joint’s excellent production of Rita, Sue and Bob Too in the unlikely surroundings of the the country’s only surviving Regency playhouse. Good to tick it off the list. The return of Follies to the National Theatre brought into focus things I’d missed last time, Peter Forbes’ superlative Buddy a case in point. To see him dancing in ‘The Right Girl’ opposite Harry Hepple as his younger self was a great joy. English Touring Theatre’s Equus was an intense production of a play that never feels satisfactory to me, though its brilliance seemed more evident than ever before. Zubin Varla, so impressive as the father in Fun Home last year, was a very fine Dysart. And Travis Alabanza’s Burgerz, my second show in a row at Edinburgh’s Traverse to feature live cooking on stage, was a vital call to arms, a reminder of the importance of showing up for people who need support. Must do better. People were in tears, and not just because of the onions.

Top 4 student

My student theatre highlights all came at the ADC in the first half of the year. A couple of musicals in Lent Term, firstly She Loves Me, that least resistible of shows. The 2016 Menier production was fairly fresh in my mind, but the cast of this one was good enough to efface some of those memories, Robin Franklin and Annabelle Haworth an adorable Georg and Amalia. The show had umpteen choreographers, and it showed. Then, Legally Blonde, a piece of fluff really but a dream in the moment, with a host of fine performances. If the production of Millennium Approaches, the first part of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, wasn’t quite as impressive as the previous ADC one in 2013, it did have some superb performances (Leo Reich, Bilal Hasna, Billie Collins and Conor Dumbrell the standouts), and I’m delighted that the production team has taken the bold move of staging Perestroika next year, which is what I’d hoped for last time but didn’t get. The best thing I saw on stage all year, professional or not, was The Revlon Girl, Neil Anthony Docking’s play about a group of mothers bereaved in the Aberfan disaster. It’s a devastating piece of work, and was done full justice by a cast impeccable in every respect, who deserve to be named here: Meg Coslett, Martha O’Neil, Freya Ingram, Amelia Hills and Emily Webster. I don’t cry easily at anything (or I didn’t use to), but I cried three times, and it’s not a long play. I woke up in the middle of the night thinking how stunning it had been, and it haunted me for a long time afterwards.

Top 4 classical
A CUOS production of Carmen in February, which I’d half-hoped might be half-decent, turned out to be very impressive both visually (a West Side Story-esque background of brick added an edge) and vocally. The star turn perhaps Maximilian Lawrie’s Don José, though I felt Mercédès and Frasquita stole the show. It helps that they have some of the best music, such as the trio with Carmen ‘Mêlons! Coupons!’ which turns out not to be about grocery shopping (apologies, I will keep flogging this joke to death until someone laughs). A couple of Camerata Musica recitals in Cambridge delivered the goods: Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber doing Mahler (a stunning Kindertotenlieder the highlight), and Lucas and Arthur Jussen playing two-piano and piano duet music by Mozart, Schubert and Stravinsky (an incandescent Rite of Spring), plus the Sinfonia from Bach’s BWV 106 as an exquisite encore. And at the end of November, the musical high point of my year, a concert performance of the Bergen National Opera production of Peter Grimes at the Royal Festival Hall. Stuart Skelton was a bit under the weather, but that didn’t seem to matter. The orchestral wash, those electrifying choral moments, and a cast to die for, among whom Roderick Williams’ Balstrode, Susan Bickley’s Auntie, Robert Murray’s Boles, James Gilchrist’s simpering Adams, and Clive Bayley’s randy Swallow were outstanding. I had the music in my head for days. Recording to follow, apparently.

Missing out narrowly: piano recitals by Arcadi Volodos and Steven Osborne, and Billy Budd at Covent Garden. No Yuja Wang this year, always a bad sign.

Top 4 albums
Actually it’s been a Yuja year anyway, because her Berlin Recital live album has been a constant companion. I heard her play a similar if not identical programme in London. Her Scriabin 10th Sonata is out of this world. Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson’s 1988 album Hear Victor & Barry and Faint (available on YouTube) has brought me a great deal of entertainment and consolation. All together: ‘Use your condoments lavishly when ingredients aaaren’t fresh’ etc. etc. I wangled myself a copy of the Chandos 19-disc Grainger Edition, which is a treasure trove featuring every imaginable iteration of the music of a composer who becomes dearer to me each year. (Only eight versions of the ‘Colonial Song’? Surely there must be more.) And the opulently restored Film Score Monthly edition of the soundtrack of Dr. Seuss’s still drastically underrated The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. Who can deny its charms?

Props to François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles for their Ravel Ma mère l’Oye, Pollini’s Schumann Fantasie, op. 17, and Marvin Hamlisch’s soundtrack to The Swimmer. I also had a G&S binge in July, listening to all the 1940s/50s-era D’Oyly Carte recordings. Martyn Green and Ella Halman, fabulous.

Is that it?
I’d like to put in a word for Junior Bake Off, from whose general niceness I derived an indecent amount of pleasure. Let’s hope it returns in 2020. Also coming up next year: Igor Levit, Yuja, The Boy Friend, Sunday in the Park with George. See you there.

The 1947 Club: Doctor Faustus / Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend was a book I vowed to myself to read at the start of the year, and when the 1947 Club came along and I spotted the publication date of Mann’s book it seemed a pleasingly neat coincidence. I’ve loved Mann since discovering Death in Venice at 14, a book I’ve read more times than probably any other, and given it’s been five years since I was blown away by Buddenbrooks, it was high time to try another. I read the 1997 translation by John E. Woods, then Michael Beddow’s volume on the book in the Cambridge Landmarks of World Literature series.

The book, ostensibly a fictional biography of the composer Adrian Leverkühn written by his friend Serenus Zeitblom, is Mann’s reimagining of the Faust myth. Leverkühn, perhaps in a hallucination brought on by syphilis, makes a pact with Satan: he will forfeit his soul in exchange for 24 years of success. Success comes, but at great personal cost. Leverkühn’s story is set against the rise of Fascism in Germany. Beddow:

The relationship between Mann’s novel and the history of Germany is in one sense simple to the point of crudity. Adrian Leverkühn is meant as an allegory of modern Germany.

I’ll get the apologies out of the way at the start: because my own understanding of the book is indeed at the crudest of levels, I will restrict myself to a handful of observations that occurred to me as I read it. This is very much a novel of ideas, and though my musical education enabled me to follow the musical elements (which, as you’d expect, are several), I floundered during the lengthy discussions of philosophy, theology and political theory.

Within the first few pages I was put in mind of a favourite book of mine, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, another fictional biography. Nabokov’s narrator, Charles Kinbote, is an egotist who sees himself represented throughout the work of his subject, the poet John Shade. I was pleased to see Beddow draw the same parallel. Did Nabokov, who detested Mann, intend the Kinbote/Shade relationship to be a travesty of Zeitblom/Leverkühn, he wonders. There are many similarities, and most of Mann’s humour (and he’s not a humourless writer, though next to Nabokov he can seem that way) comes from Zeitblom’s pomposity, enhanced by the occasional hint of passive-aggressiveness. On the subject of names:

Our use of familiar pronouns is rooted in those years, and he must have addressed me by my first name back then too – I can no longer hear it, but it is unthinkable that as a six- or eight-year-old he did not call me Serenus, or simply Seren, just as I called him Adri. It must have been during our early years at school, though the exact moment cannot be determined, when he ceased to grant me that intimacy and, if he addressed me at all, began to use my last name – whereas it would have seemed to me impossibly harsh to reply in like fashion. It was so – though far be it from me for it to appear as if I wished to complain. It simply seemed worth mentioning that I called him Adrian, whereas he, when not evading use of a name entirely, called me Zeitblom.

Mann and Nabokov must both have enjoyed the invention of fictional bodies of work for their creations. Mann also does it with Aschenbach in Death in Venice, devoting several pages of the novella to a description of the writer’s output, establishing his credentials as a man of letters. Zeitblom again:

It was my lot in life to spend many years in intimate proximity with a man of genius, the hero of these pages, to know him from childhood on, to witness his growth, and his fate, and to play a modest supporting role in his work. The libretto adapted from Shakespeare’s comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost, Leverkühn’s mischievous youthful composition, comes from me; I was also permitted some influence on the preparation of the texts for both the grotesque opera suite Gesta Romanorum and the oratorio The Revelation of St. John the Divine.

Nabokov goes so far as to present Shade’s poem ‘Pale Fire’ in its entirety as a preface to the analysis/biography. Leverkühn is a composer, and so isn’t accorded this luxury, though Mann describes certain works of his in detail. The violin concerto, untypically romantic, sounded bewitching to me in Zeitblom’s description, like the most beautiful piece ever written, and I wondered if any composer had tried to extrapolate any of the music from the book. Proust’s Vinteuil Sonata too: there are various pieces thought to have inspired it, but has anyone set out to compose the piece in real life? A thought that occurred to me in passing.

Theodor Adorno, scourge of music students throughout the world, advised Mann on the book’s musical content. Some readers equate Leverkühn with Arnold Schoenberg because Mann has Leverkühn invent twelve-tone composition. Schoenberg was a bit put out by this, and Mann was obliged to insert a disclaimer at the end of the book setting the record straight. In fact Leverkühn resembles no single real composer, but in some respects Stravinsky is a closer fit than Schoenberg. Around the time of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913), Leverkühn composes a work, Marvels of the Universe, that feels very much its counterpart, and the changeability of his style recalls Stravinsky’s series of chameleon-like self-reinventions.

While Zeitblom’s laughableness is entertaining – the fact that as a student he misses his own lectures to attend Leverkühn’s, so convinced is he that he must observe everything his idol does, already certain that one day he will write this biography; the conviction (like Kinbote’s) that he sees cryptographic messages in the master’s work that no one else does – his political observations make for sober reading, perhaps because his horror of the rise of totalitarianism feels eerily current. There are innumerable passages about art as the antidote to extremism, about the anti-intellectualism of his society, about the ‘anti-humanity’ of the odious iconoclast Chaim Breisacher, misrepresenting Bach and Palestrina as hateful reactionaries who despoiled the glory of monophony, and about the scourge of nationalism, where I felt sharp pangs of recognition as I read. His shame at the moral bankruptcy of his country mirrors what I have sometimes felt about my own in recent months:

Our thick-walled torture chamber, into which Germany was transformed by a vile regime of conspirators sworn to nihilism from the very start, had been burst open, and our ignominy lies naked before the eyes of the world … is it mere hypochondria to tell oneself that all that is German – even German intellect, German thought, the German word – shares in the disgrace of these revelations and is plunged into profoundest doubt? Is it morbid contrition to ask oneself the question: How can “Germany,” whichever of its forms it may be allowed to take in the future, so much as open its mouth again to speak of mankind’s concerns?

In these passages, where (perhaps) we see ourselves reflected, this is a viscerally terrifying book, more so than any horror story I’ve read. Books don’t usually scare me, but I was glad to get to the end of this one. It’s brilliant, but profoundly unsettling. Part of the scariness, as my fellow blogger the Argumentative Old Git has observed elsewhere, is that Germany has such a rich cultural history. If Germany could turn to barbarism, what hope for the rest of us? Let us pray that we heed the lessons of history.

Back to the allegory: the political life of Germany in the first part of the twentieth century seems to correspond to Leverkühn’s own. He sells his soul and ends up killing the things he loves and descending into madness. But although the two mirror each other, their stories don’t seem inextricably linked, and the comparisons are not exact. Take Leverkühn’s music. Serialism – a democracy of tones in which no single note of the twelve is superior to any other – is a logical extreme, a dead end. There is nowhere beyond it to go, which is not to say that much great serialist music has not been written. With political extremism, when things are pulled down we have no option but to carry on, and good generally emerges from the wreckage. (I suppose I mean the NHS.) What came after serialism? Minimalism, blankness, emptiness? I think I’ll keep Schoenberg, thank you. The more I compare political with musical extremism, the more I see it can’t be done. For the reader of Doctor Faustus to feel tempted to equate twelve-tone music with Nazism is, I think, to misread the book. I just can’t say exactly why.

Literature as consolation

When I started the last post but one on this blog I’d meant to write about books.

All literature is consolation.

I believed for a moment that was an original thought of mine — after all, it’s about time — but in fact it’s something said by Dakin in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, as he makes the point that history is written after the fact. Even if it’s representative of euphoria, by the time it’s written the euphoria is over. By extension you might say it’s written by losers. If they were winners they’d be out there doing it, but they’re not so they’re in here writing about it.

When a couple of months ago a meme reached me on Facebook asking me to name ten books that had ‘stayed’ with me (retch), I listed ten favourite titles off the top of my head, the predictable Middlemarch, which I had just reread, Bleak House, Pride and Prejudice. If I had disregarded the accompanying instruction not to give the formulation of the list too much thought (thought, of course, being the enemy of the list), I might have ended up with something more interesting. What if I’d made a list of the books that had consoled me over the years?

As a little boy, I didn’t have much need of consolation. Mostly, I was happy. Children find comfort in familiarity, hence the bedtime plea to have Owl Babies for the ten thousandth time. There were fictional worlds I certainly did love and feel at home in: A.A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood; the unobtrusively Jewish milieu of Florence Parry Heide’s three offbeat books about the little boy Treehorn and his friend Moshie, with illustrations by Edward Gorey; the half real, half invented world of The BFG, which mixed places I knew couldn’t exist with places I knew did, though London felt as tantalisingly out of reach as Giant Country.

And yet still I worried about things. I worried about a fire breaking out on the landing in the middle of the night, which would have blocked my path downstairs to safety. I worried too about growing up and having to do National Service. (This was the time of the Gulf War.) If I’d known how to put my fears into words I could have been reassured about the abolition of conscription, but I didn’t, so I suffered in silence. Perhaps this explains my devotion to Peanuts, with its children (and animals) trying to cope with the challenges of a life they aren’t prepared for. I remember particularly Linus having to prepare a Bible reading for the Christmas pageant, something I empathised with. For recitation at school I had to learn

More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name:
“Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donner and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!”
As leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
So up to the housetop the coursers they flew
With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too—

I didn’t understand all the words, and I still can’t parse ‘As leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky’.

I think I also had a crush on Woodstock.

When I was a teenager I turned to books for some kind of validation of my sexuality. Not that I ever agonised about being other — I always thought it was perfectly natural to feel as I felt — but I wanted to explore authors who might turn out to be kindred spirits. I read Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice when I was fourteen, which I loved. (Had I seen Visconti’s film first? Possibly.) I think Edmund White may have been next, though the chronology is confused in my mind. White bemoans the fact that Death in Venice was the only ‘gay’ book he had access to. He thought it painted a grim picture of homosexuality, whereas I fell in love with the idea of the contemplation of beauty. Meanwhile, White’s writing pointed to a life of empty promiscuity, which didn’t appeal to me then and still doesn’t. (A neat demonstration of the fundamental difference between me and White: when he read Death in Venice at the same age as I did, he imagined himself as Tadzio, a boy with a power over older men; I automatically identified with Aschenbach, a man in the thrall of beauty, the pursuer but not the pursued. White was an instigator, I a mere observer.) James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room was another important book to me at that time, especially the episode early on describing the narrator’s intense affair with another boy. I wish now that my reading had been less earnest. If I’d known about Armistead Maupin or David Sedaris, maybe I’d have had more fun.

When I was fifteen I did a week’s work experience at a local independent bookshop. I suspected my boss of harbouring unpleasant right-wing views — he was a Rotarian and looked like General Pinochet — but at the end of a week of making window displays and drinking repulsive cups of tea made with Coffee-Mate he said I could choose £20 worth of books to take home, a generous gesture. One of the books I chose was Stephen Fry’s memoir Moab is My Washpot, just out in paperback. Ron made some quip about Fry being an ex-offender, but acquiesced to my selection.

More than any other book, Moab broadened the scope of my reading. The books Fry read became the books I read. He turned me on to forgotten men like T.C. Worsley and Angus Stewart and Michael Campbell (whose Lord Dismiss Us became a favourite novel of mine). I graduated much later to Henry de Montherlant. But more vital than the bibliography he provided was the story he told of his own adolescence, which mirrored my own in ways that made me feel I’d found not merely a friend but a confidant, odd though that sounds. I didn’t need to talk to him or write to him, as I knew innately that he understood me. I’m not as devout a Fryphile as I once was, but I will be eternally grateful to him for having written that book.

Nowadays when I turn to books for consolation it is invariably because of some emotional turmoil. My friend the Argumentative Old Git occasionally writes of his resistance to the idea of books as escapism, and I feel similarly, that the best literature is not a refuge from life but an exploration of it, that may help us to understand the world and ourselves more deeply. Nonetheless, when I want to escape something that’s plaguing me there are writers I turn to. Increasingly P.G. Wodehouse is the first I think of. I sometimes wish I knew what the alchemy was that makes his books so magical to me, but I imagine that to understand it would be to dissolve it. There’s something very comforting about reading a writer whose very presence is benevolent. That’s the case with Wodehouse and Maupin and Sedaris, and Anthony Trollope and Alexander McCall Smith and Jan Morris. The pianist and music writer Susan Tomes is another. A digression sideways to end with, the opening of an essay from her latest book, Sleeping in Temples:

A few years ago I became intrigued by the number of people coming up to me after concerts and telling me that listening to the music had helped them to feel better. Sometimes they were quite specific. They mentioned having felt unwell at work, feeling unsure if they ought to go to the concert or just go straight home instead and rest. They said that they took their seats in a pessimistic frame of mind, were drawn in by the music, caught up by the interaction between the musicians, somehow soothed by the effect of the music and gradually realised that the horrible headache had gone, the fatigue had lifted, that they were no longer feeling so down about whatever it was that had been on their minds.

Funny thing, art. Certain government ministers may wish to take note.

2011 threesomes

The New Year is the signal for a bit of meme time around here. I like the meme – it’s a socially sanctioned excuse for theft. I stole this idea from a post on Becca’s Blog a year ago. So, what was my 2011 like, in various things?

Top 3 books
It was a pretty decent reading year. One book stands out among all the others, and that is Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which I began reading on holiday, sitting in Cologne Cathedral while I waited for an organ recital by Martin Baker to begin, and finished back in the UK. An utterly engrossing, lovable book. Perhaps I should investigate the family saga further in 2012. John Cheever’s Falconer was another highlight – a short novel about a university professor coping with life in prison. Like nothing I’ve read before, and Cheever is a writer with a magnificent eye for detail. On an arguably less exalted level – but no less wonderful – are Alexander McCall Smith’s 44 Scotland Street books, all seven of which I devoured in the space of a few months in the middle of the year. His humanity and tolerance are infectious.

Top 3 CDs
Of the year’s new releases, I listened to The Prince Consort’s recording of Brahms’ Liebeslieder-Walzer and Stephen Hough’s Other Love Songs a lot. I was fortunate to be at the premiere of the Hough in the summer, and it is a work I have grown to love. Simon Standage’s Mozart violin concerti with the Academy of Ancient Music and Christopher Hogwood have reminded me of the beauty of this music. I also found Christian Bruhn’s Timm Thaler soundtrack tremendous fun.

Top 3 films
I watched a titanic number of films last year (not Titanic; I am not mad). I rarely feel in the mood for watching Bergman, but I found it was his films that impressed me most of all. A genius. The Seventh Seal, Through a Glass Darkly, The Silence, but most of all Winter Light. I’ve been watching Fanny and Alexander over the New Year, for the first time in about ten years, and am enjoying being dazzled by it anew. Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp struck me as a great masterpiece, Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook both quite irresistible, and I’m delighted to hear that there is a new print being released in cinemas in a few months’ time. And I might name any of several others as my third film, but for the sake of variety let’s say Before Sunrise, which is a lovely film if you’re of a romantic disposition. (I saw a handful of brilliant new films at the cinema too, so for an alternative three try The King’s Speech, The Guard and Tomboy.)

Top 3 live music
It was a thrill seeing Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s production of Parsifal at ENO in February. It’s only recently that I’ve started going to see Wagner live, and Parsifal is perhaps my favourite opera. John Tomlinson was a superb Gurnemanz, and I marvelled at the economy of the scoring. It exposes as misguided the popular conception of Wagner as sprawling and overblown. Love Stephen Hough at the Wigmore though I did, I think Marc-André Hamelin provided my piano recital of the year at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, playing Haydn, Schumann, Wolpe, Debussy and, as his barnstorming finale, Liszt’s Reminiscences de Norma in the composer’s bicentenary year. And last of all, Pulp at Wireless. Jarvis has still got it.

Top 3 theatre
I’m including musicals and comedy, so there’s only one echt play, and even that’s not particularly echt – namely Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors, which I saw just before Christmas. A breathtaking thing to behold, and quite the most I’ve enjoyed myself in any theatre, perhaps anywhere ever. A rollercoaster, and wrong to single out individual performances in a production so delicious in every aspect (not least its superb music), but I must say I thought Oliver Chris particularly wonderful, funnier than I’ve ever known him before, not to mention James Corden, Tom Edden, Trevor Laird, Daniel Rigby, etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum. My trip to Chichester to see the new production of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd was a great treat, the cast superb (in spite of some doubts about Michael Ball), and I will make a point of revisiting it in London this year. And thirdly, Jonny Sweet’s lovely solo show, Let’s All Just Have Some Fun (and Learn Something, for Once), which I saw at the Soho Theatre in January. He stands at the front giving the audience bear hugs as they come in; one cannot but love the man.

Lastly, I must add another happy discovery, which has been on the periphery of my consciousness for a while but which I only began to pay attention to this year, John Finnemore’s radio sitcom Cabin Pressure. I think its central cast of four – Finnemore, Benedict Cumberbatch, Roger Allam and Stephanie Cole – must be just about the strongest and most likeable since Rising Damp. A fourth series has just been commissioned. There is no end to Finnemore’s talents, apparently. He also wrote an excellent sketch show for Radio 4, and drew a picture a day on his blog, Forget What Did, as a sort of Advent calendar last month. You owe it to yourself to have a look.

Here’s hoping 2012 is similarly happy, for me and for all of you!