The shift from summer to autumn is marked by the Proms drawing to a close. I was at my penultimate concert on Wednesday.
It kicked off with a dreaded UK Premier, usually torture. Starting with such low expectation Andrea Tarrodi’s piece, Liguria, had only one fault, not long enough, only twelve minutes. A couple of years ago I went to the Cinque Terre with Robert for a walking holiday. Andrea has done the same and captures her impresssons in six sections: Waves, Horizon, Blue Path, Colours, Mountains, Stars. It was at times enchanting but there were sudden storms. At the end a percussionist produced a noise like Velcro being unfastened – cicadas, perhaps, but none of us were sure.
Andrea Tarrodi is Swedish as was the orchestra, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. It was a bonus to hear Liguria as most of the audience had come to hear Renée Fleming. Her first piece was Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Beautifully sung but dull as ditchwater.
After the interval she sang the transformation scene from Richard Strauss’s Daphne. It was as magical as her mythical transformation into a laurel tree; achingly beautiful. The evening ended with Carl Nielsen’s Second Symphony.
A grande dame told me that she took her young butler/driver to the cinema in France. She was rather embarrassed as the film was “sheer pornography” and at a loss what to say at the end. He spared her blushes – “most enjoyable, mi’lady”. Well the Proms are most enjoyable but they have an extra stratum of pleasure, namely the audience. On Wednesday I was introduced to a clutch of post-graduate students studying things like Arts Administration and Public Health; an old friend from Durham university said hello and I was introduced to veteran journalist Robert Fox and his wife.
The first website I ever saw was the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. It took a few days before I could access it as it was so popular and websites were a bit wobbly in those days. I looked for and found the location of my great-uncle Courtney Bellew’s grave, killed in 1917 serving in the Irish Guards. Robert Fox is a Commissioner and I told him about the two headstones to 19th century holders of the Victoria Cross put up last year in Margravine Cemetery. The CWGC is one of those institutions that I take for granted but it is huge.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission ensures that 1.7 million people who died in the two world wars will never be forgotten. We care for cemeteries and memorials at 23,000 locations, in 154 countries. Our values and aims, laid out in 1917, are as relevant now as they were almost 100 years ago.
Their website is informative and worth reading.