Call me a creature of habit, but I’m unashamed of doing most of the same things here in February this year as I did last May. I enjoyed knowing where the mugs were kept, where was the best place for a coffee and where to go for my morning martial arts practice. There is a small park, a perfect dojo, on the corner of the street and a little café, La Petite Place, on the next corner. Why change if it works?

The post Wolfie in Paris 2025/26 – Part Two Le Marais appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I spent two weeks in the Eternal City of Rome this January. The first part is here https://wolfiewolfgang.com/two-weeks-in-rome-part-one/ I’ve been here on numerous occasions over the years, either for work or for passing visits en route to elsewhere. I’d been to the Sistine Chapel (unforgettable, of course) to St Peter’s, also for work, and to a number of art museums and I’ve had a lot of good Roman meals, but I wanted to spend a longer time here and let it get under my skin. I think I succeeded.

I’ll begin the second part of these blogs about my Roman trip at one its most famous monuments, the Colosseum, Il Colosseo (AD 80), the largest ancient amphitheatre ever built, and a place with a bloody history familiar to us all from stories and films about the gladiators. It is an extraordinary place and, for all the gruesome stories about blood-thirsty massacres of slaves, prisoners and the early Christian martyrs, it’s also the site of mass picnics and other less sadistic entertainments. But, and it’s a big but, you can’t avoid feeling a scary, even shocked, connection to all those slaughtered victims in what was in reality a blood sport. Would we have cheered too, I wonder, if we were in those massive audiences for what were highly dramatised public executions? We don’t know the answer. I had only been past it before in taxis or buses before this, and, of course, when I finally got here, it had to do more than just rain, it deluged. You get weather in Rome during January.

It’s an amazingly well-preserved ruin and there’s more than enough here of its remains to get the feeling of dread and excitement that was felt here two thousand years ago.

It’s just a short walk from the Colosseum to the Roman Forum, Il Foro Romano, another expansive set of classical ruins, once the centre of the Roman Empire. Roman citizens those days called it simply the Forum Magnum, or the Forum.

How the mighty have fallen, I thought, looking at the remains of Ancient Roman glory. I was here on the day that Donald Trump was inaugurated, for the second time, as American president in Washington’s Roman-inspired Capitol building. Seeing the ruins in the rain with those broken statues of some of the Caesars, added to my despair at the American election, but then I thought that those broken statues should be seen as symbols for what will happen one day to the latest world tyrant. Is there hope for us all in the Fall of Rome? Yes! Nothing lasts forever, not even in the Eternal City.

I had brought my writer’s jotting book with me and, here in Rome, I wrote some Fibonacci Poems, Fibs, on the subject of Rome and would-be emperors. They were published in the February 2025 issue of The Fib Review. https://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/colin_bell2.html

Feeling less depressed, I couldn’t resist giving my tai-chi practice a go here at the Forum Magnum, thinking that we would have had to learn how to defend ourselves in Ancient Rome.

I visited another famous Roman landmark, known as the Spanish Steps, (La Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti), (built in 1725). The Trinità die Monti is its Italian name. These 135 steps lead to the church of It comes from the church of Trinità die Monti the top, but the steps also lead down to the Spanish embassy to the Holy See, the Palazzo Monaldeschi. So thus the Spanish Steps, familiar from books (Tender is the Night by F.Scott Fitzgerald, 1933 and The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone by Tennessee Williams, 1950), and movies (mostly famously, Roman Holiday directed by William Wyler, with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, 1953). It is one of the most visited parts of the city. As with the Trevi Fountain, this is a place for lovers, romantics and/or just whimsical selfies. We all have our own internal movies, so why not indulge our imagination here for a moment when we can.

I hadn’t realised was the the Spanish Steps are also right next to the house where the tubercular English Romantic poet, John Keats (1795 – 1821), came for his health but really to die, at the tragically young age of just 25.

Here, in one of the most crowded parts of Rome, the poet’s house was practically empty of visitors which was excellent for me, a dedicated Keats lover since school days.

The room where Keats died can’t help but invoke the tragedy of the young genius’ death, even though the contents of the room itself all had to be burnt because of the health regulations in Rome at the time.

As a museum, it’s a splendid reminder of how much we still have of Keats’ work but, sadly, also how much we might have had if he’d lived to a full age.  Standing in the room where he died, can turn us all into Romantics.

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

 To take into the air my quiet breath;

 Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

 To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

 While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

 In such an ecstasy!

(John Keats: Ode to a Nightingale.)

One of the poet’s last letters is preserved here. It’s a brief and matter-of-fact epistle to his friend about the local doctor’s advice for the now rapidly ailing poet to go out. It was note to the English painter, Joseph Severn (1793 – 1879), who looked after Keats until his death a short time later. Looking down on the Spanish Steps from John Keats’ window, means that I will always associate the poet with this otherwise joyful place.

After Keats, yes, let’s think poetic, but also, maybe go for a refreshing and very Italian glass of Campari.

Just off the Campo Marzio, another of those grand Roman squares, is one of Rome’s many churches, the Basilica Santa Maria del Popolo (Basilica of Holy Mary of the People). It might not look that special from outside, but inside, on permanent display, are two masterpieces by the great Italian painter Caravaggio (1571 – 1610). This was one of three emergency ecclesiastical stops that I planned on my essential Caravaggio tour when I wanted to see all the Caravaggio paintings in Rome. It will surprises me that you can just walk into one of these churches and, yes, here’s another Caravaggio.

At this Basilica are two of the artist’s most dramatic paintings, The Conversion of St Paul (1601) and The Crucifixion of St Peter (1601).

At the Basilica Sant’Agostino, behind another discrete exterior, is another of his masterpieces, Madonna di Loreto (1606)

Here on one of the nave’s pillars, it is easy to miss this mural by Raphael, The Prophet Isaiah (1512). If you’re not careful in Rome, you practically trip over great Italian Renaissance or Baroque paintings everywhere you turn.

In the French church of San Luigi dei Francesi, (St Louis of the French), there are three more Caravaggios, commissioned works on theme of St Matthew, and painted between 1599 and 1602.

The centre piece, with St Matthew and an angel, is known as The Inspiration of St Matthew.

On a moody January day, it was pleasant getting to the Museum of Modern Art (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna) without having to get involved in the motor traffic. Walking through the gardens of the Villa Borghese, even at this time of year, is a breath of fresh air, literally, after all those albeit beautiful Baroque churches.

Here there is a permanent collection of mostly Italian paintings and sculpture from the late 19th century until the present. The late 19th century and early 20th century works are crammed together on the walls, 19th century style, but they are mostly visible to more than just a glancing eye. It was tempting to spend more time than I had in this section, but there was more room on the gallery’s walls than I have space for in this blog.

I discovered Italian artists that I wasn’t familiar with in the gallery’s current exhibition, Il Tempo di Futurismo (The Time of Futurism) exhibition, marking the 80th anniversary of the death of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Futurism’s founder, which ran at the gallery until the end of April this year.

I was drawn to the works by Sardinian modernist, Mario Sironi (1885 – 1961), whose reputation, like those of other Futurist artists have been clouded by their association with Mussolini’s Italian Fascist movement. Maybe now, after nearly a century, we should try to see the good things in the art of this period without always dwelling on the negative and disturbing trappings of history.

The exhibition was far from being only brutal and alarming, as in this room devoted to the sparkling light-saturated work of Piero Durazzo, or the photographic section on cinematic photographs of Luca Campigotto.

The relationship in the first half of the 20th century between man and machine, is shown in the most challenging and exciting exhibits in this show, which also includes some of the machines themselves – early aeroplanes and racing cars appealing to anyone who has ever liked making model aeroplanes or cars. Aeroplanes, for good or for ill, have a significant place in this exhibition, none less than a number paintings imagined from the pilot’s view of view from his cockpit, presumably on bombing raids. I haven’t seen anything like this before, that mix of Futurism, art deco abstraction, a touch of daring, and, I have to say, 1930s Fascist agitprop. This is a show that definitely made think and re-think about some of the artists, like the American poet, Ezra Pound, who working and even inspired under the shadow of Italian fascism.

Another quite different exhibition was showing at the same time, but across the Borghese gardens at the Galleria Borghese. It was quite a distance from 20th century The Time of Futurism to Poetry and Painting in the 17th Century. Giovan Battista Marino and the Marvellous Passion.

The ‘Marvelous Passion’ in the title was felt by the greatest Italian poet of the 17th century, Giovan Battista Marino (1569 – 1625), the author of an epic poem Adone (1623) about the love between Venus and Adonis. Marino also wrote an encyclopaedic poetry collection of 624 poems dedicated to, and paired with, an equal number of Baroque works of art, La Galeria (1619). The book is a series of reflections on the relationship between poetry and art. I feel slightly embarrassed to admit that this show was, at least on first glance, more my kind of thing than Italian Futurism. Call me old-fashioned, no, I won’t admit to that, I’ve learnt to love some of those Futurist pictures, and I’m certainly not anti-Modernist. But, I write poetry, maybe not as well as Marino, but I’ve even tried to write a few poems in the Italian language. I’m learning to speak the language and I have had a life-long fascination with Italian epic poetry, Taso, Ariosto and Boccaccio in particular. Add to that my enthusiasm for Italian art from the 14th to the 17th century, then I was always going to be drawn to this show. The exhibition includes paintings and sculptures from Titian to Tintoretto, Correggio to Carracci, from Rubens to Poussin, with Marino’s poems side-by-side. ‘Marvelous’ indeed, and, because of the subject matter, it is sexy too.

The exhibition places quotes from Marino’s work next to the art that he admired on the same subject matter. Here the story of Venus, the goddess of Love and her young lover Adonis, are shown in the sculpture by Cristoforo Stati and in the painting by Jacopo Palma next to apt quotes from Marino’s epic, La Galeria.

Next, and in pride of place, is Bernini’s wonderful Apollo and Daphne, seen from all angles because it is not just so beautiful, but well frightening too. Daphne, the beautiful naiad, a water nymph, from Roman poet Ovid’s story, is desired, maybe loved, by Apollo, but she has been cursed by a jealous Eros to loath sex. She tries to escape from Apollo advances and saved by being turned into a laurel tree by her father, Peneas, a river god. The metamorphosis, to use Ovid’s word for it, is an unforgettable mix of the shocking and the erotic, also caught in a moment when stone is turned into movement.

After so much passion on display here in these rooms at the Galleria Borghese, I moved on to another part of the gallery, the Silenus Room for a display of the gallery’s Caravaggio collection which matches the Marino exhibition perfectly. My epic walking tour of Rome’s Caravaggios continues.

After the famous Galleria Borghese, I wasn’t expecting to find another major art gallery on Rome’s busiest shopping street, the Via Corso, the Doria Pamphili Gallery which have three more Caravaggio paintings. I had to interrupt a trip around the bargain-laden clothes shops that line this bustling boulevard with every store declaring that there was 70% off everything – the ultimate January sales. sales. I didn’t buy anything here, it was time to look inside this relatively unsung palazzo.

Sure enough, the three Caravaggio paintings were here, in their own room, far from the shopping crowds outside. They are early works that already show the artist’s fascination with awkward poses, radical perspective, and ambiguous facial expressions.

Interesting as it was to see these three early Caravaggio works, geniuses are never boring, but, I have to admit that the star work here is definitely not a Caravaggio, but the Portrait of Pope Innocent X (Cardinal Pamphili) by the Spanish master Diego Velázquez. Portraitist supreme, Velázquez shows us a far from saintly pope, so sinister in fact, that I wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark Roman alleyway, or even in the great cathedral church of St Peter’s.

A much brighter and bigger alley leads to the St Peter’s….well, they say all roads lead to Rome, and it was out of the question, while I am here, not to go back to the big church at the centre of Christendom. Before I go in, just one last reference to Caravaggio. I wasn’t visiting the Vatican Museum on this trip, but if I had, I could have seen one last Caravaggio that is here in Rome, one of his greatest too. It’s always good to leave something special for another day. The Entombment of Christ (1603), with its figure of the dead Christ, shares the pose and the tragic pathos of Michelangelo’s Pietà, a sculpture much admired by Caravaggio. It is one of the greatest of paintings. The Michelangelo Pietà, housed next-door, was one of my main reasons for returning to St Peter’s.

And so to St Peter’s itself. It was a clear January day with a perfect blue sky. Pope Francis wasn’t here, he had been unwell, and in a month he would begin his long stint in hospital being treated for pneumonia, I hadn’t been inside the Vatican since the time of Pope John Paul II, and I didn’t realise that very soon there was to be another new pope, Leo XIV.

The scale of it all is still overwhelming, St Peter’s Square is truly vast when seen from the cathedral steps, and the interior is impressive beyond my words. Leo XIV must have gasped when he walked out onto the balcony just a week ago from when I am writing this. There was hope and a relief for us all to see a modest and caring American becoming a world leader

For all the magnificence of the cathedral, nothing can be compete with the human-sized statue in a side chapel – one of the wonders of the world.

It had been a long walk from my apartment near The Pantheon, and I needed to sit for a while before the return journey. Looking for a seat, I found this chapel not far from the exit. I admired the altar’s painting of St Sebastian by Domenichino (1631) and sat here as people, in groups or alone, came in to kneel at the altar. I didn’t realise until later that under the altar here is the tomb of Pope John Paul II (1920 -2005), but I could see that this was obviously a pilgrim’s destination. A statue of the sainted pope sits watching from on his throne to the side. I am not a Roman Catholic, I wasn’t always impressed by Pope John Paul II’s announcements, but I could also admire his courage and charisma. Whatever I feel about catholicism, I felt something here, more than just being rested and refreshed.

Outside, the sky was red, a shepherd’s delight, an awe-inspiring sight in an awesome place.

Impressive too was the flood-lit Castel Sant’Angelo on the other side of the River Tiber, across from St Peter’s. It was originally built by the Emperor Hadrian for his own mausoleum. It is another Rotunda in a more brutal style than the Pantheon, and it has served as a forbidding symbol of Imperial and Vatican power over the centuries. The ashes of Emperor Hadrian and all his successors were all buried here until the year 217. The last urn belonged to the assassinated Emperor Caracalla, one of the most tyrannical of all Roman Emperors. He set the bar so high that none of his successors could compete whit his reputation for cruelty. After the Fall of Rome, the castle/mausoleum became a papal prison a carrying on the tradition of cruelty, you might think. Executions were carried out there in a small inner courtyard, as in the last act of Puccini’s opera, Tosca. The opera that had begun its story down the road from here at the Basilica Sant’Andrea di Valle, as I described in part one of this blog. The tragic heroine, Floria Tosca, jumps to her death from the tower after her lover Mario Cavaradossi was tortured and then executed there by firing squad. Before he is shot, he sings another, his second, famous aria from up there, ‘È lucevan le stelle’ (‘The stars were shining’). Knowing he will die, he sings that he has never loved life so much. The second tenor aria in the opera, and the second of the two greatest of some of Puccini’s greatest arias for tenor. I couldn’t help humming it on my way back to the Pantheon. Here is Jonas Kaufmann again from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

E muoio disperato!

E non ho amato mai tanto la vita,

I die in desperation

and have never loved life so much!

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/e-lucevan-le-stelle-stars-were-shining.html

It wouldn’t be fair to Rome, if I didn’t finish this blog with a record of all the fun I’ve had in Roman restaurants over these two weeks. Rome has the most extraordinary history, often bloody and tyrannical. It has a genius culture beyond compare, often in spite of the bloody history and an architectural history that has defined in some way almost every building that has been designed since. All of that makes it an unmissable city, but one of the main reasons why anyone should think of coming here is what it is like today. The food, the wine, the good humour and the sheer fizz of eating out in this city, makes it party town. I can’t wait until I am lucky enough to return.

After dinner, there will be a final leisurely stroll, known as a passeggiata, back via a floodlit Pantheon, to the apartment and bed. Arriverderci Roma!

The post Two weeks in Rome – part two. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I was thinking about nostalgia today – you know the things ain’t what the used to be feeling. Well, I’m not really someone who dwells in the past, or so I think. I like the present, my day today, and I’m quite keen on the future too. I’ve found recently that more than a few of my friends talk about the past much more than they used to do in the old days – you know when pubs were real pubs, when cigarettes were supposed to be good for you, and no one wore seatbelts in cars. Well, I don’t drink as much alcohol as I did in my so-called good old days; I gave up smoking decades ago, and I used to have nightmares of being thrown forward through shattering windscreens. I regret some things about the present – Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, obviously….also the last ten years, at least, of British politics…. climate change is really happening as opposed to being a fear of the distant future as it was once for my generation. The good old days were full of anxieties, the present is too, chaps. I had many nightmares in my youth – not just crashing through windscreens – nuclear war, murderers climbing through my bedroom window in the middle of the night; when I was very little I was also frightened of ghosts. Then there was the real nightmares of school playgrounds, compulsory rugby, and, maybe worst of all, teenage parties. So, I’m ok with the here and now – we can at least have a go at changing things.

I can still enjoy looking at old photographs, reading history books, walking in bluebell woods in April and May, summer trips to the seaside, but also going to the cinema most weeks over the last year and seeing so many great films. If I get a little nostalgic at times, it is for the lost pleasures of the iPod (why can’t they come back?), my Chicago 88 converse trainers (they pinch my toes these days), and, I suppose, if I regret something, it is the careless and ignorant freedom of lighting a cigarette.

The post Nostalgia addiction or just good memories? appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

It is early September in 2023, I am sitting in a rocking chair in a cottage, a converted 19th century log house, in a little village called Virtaa, 7.7 kilometres from a small town called Sysmä. The cottage is in the grounds of an old manor house, Virtaan Kartano, owned by Juhani and Tiina Stjernvall. It is a working farm for Juhani and Tiina, but for me, left to my own devices, just here to find peace in the magnificent vastness of the Finnish countryside, it was an oasis – one haunted by the voice of Jean Sibelius (1865 – 1957), whose music, at the annual Sibelius Festival in Lahti, first brought me to this hypnotic country. I spent a week here, before doing south to Lahti for the annual Sibelius Festival and, during most of that time, a piece of Sibelius’ music kept up its persistent call.

Tapiola (1926) is a one movement tone poem for orchestra, loosely about Tapio, the spirit of the forest as found in Finland’s epic creation poem, Kalevala. Sibelius wasn’t usually cooperative about the ‘meaning’ of his work, but his publisher asked him to explain the legend behind Tapiola, and then converted the composer’s reluctant reply into a poem:

Wide-spread they stand, the Northland’s dusky forests,
Ancient, mysterious, brooding savage dreams;
Within them dwells the Forest’s mighty God,
And wood-sprites in the gloom weave magic secrets.

If there is a mighty god in Sibelius’s tone poem, it is an ambiguous one, it probably is more brooding dream than god, but, believe me, if you go walking in Finland’s forests, you will feel the presence of Tapio. I did.

Virtaan Kartano, the farm, is in a typical Finnish landscape of forest and lakes, with the River Tainionvirta leading to Lake Päijänne. This was the first week in September and, therefore, the beginning of the end of the summer season, maybe a few weeks earlier there would have been more people around. The god Tapio may have scared them away, making the place a silent haven – just for me. I doubt it, but that is how if felt. I was under his spell, and could only have left my rocking chair for another chair outside on the porch to sit there all day looking and not looking at the fields and the trees beyond them, and wondering what forces really hide in these forests.

I did move back inside later to have a sauna, the Finnish way, eat some food from Sysmä’s supermarket – like a farmers’ market in terms of quality. A glass of wine and then I’d read some of the Kalevala on my Kindle – then it was back to watching and listening on the next day, and so on.

Juhani, drove past a couple of times on his tractor, and our conversations flowed in an impressively economic Finnish use of friendly monosyllables. Mostly he was occupied in another part of the forest,.

The splendid cockerel and his harem of hens, were a constant clucking murmur, heard like a day-time lullaby from across the yard…

…and of course, there was always an alarm call in the morning.

There were eggs too – warm from the hens, a present from them, via Juhani, for the breakfast table.

From the Sysmä supermarket there was reindeer cheese. It was delicious on hot toast. I didn’t see any reindeer, but knew they were out there somewhere, probably further North, and I send them my thanks.

In case you are wondering, and I didn’t know this, female reindeer, like the males, have antlers, but they keep them through the winter, unlike the males. Don’t ask about Father Christmas’ Rudolph, he is probably a she.

Virtaan Kartano is a wonderful place and, if you want to find out more, here is the link: https://www.virtaankartano.fi/en

There was no problem finding somewhere for my morning martial arts practice here. This must be one of the most tranquil dojos I have ever had for my Chinese-style White Crane Kung-fu. The style I try to learn has moves inspired by the movements of the white cranes still common in China.

I was in the middle of the tai-chi move called the golden cockerel stands on one leg, when an extraordinary sound came from behind me. It wasn’t a Chinese white crane, but a group of Common Cranes, the first I had seen in the wild.

I had never heard their calls before, and I had no idea they could be so loud. I know they can be found in other countries too, but those Finnish cranes were thrilling when they came flying over the forest calling out like instruments in a Sibelius symphony before landing in the field behind me.

This is the land of forests and lakes, a tenth of Finland’s land area is covered by water, and 73.9%, or 66%, but definitely a lot more than half of the land is forested. It really is one of the biggest rural spaces in Europe.

The river here, River Tainionvirta, is rich in salmon, and the furthest river south in Finland for salmon fishing. It was also a bathing spot for the inhabitants of my log cabin.

It wasn’t hot in there, but I’m sure it get a lot colder when the snows arrive. I suspect you can’t have the full experience of Finland without going in for some wild swimming, even better if there is a sauna nearby. It was my first time swimming in a Finnish river, to the fish seemed as interested in watching me as I was watching them. When I say fish, I mean big fish. Honestly. As big as this.

The main activity for me in this inspiring place was just to go walking, breathing in the clean air, listening for crane calls, and watching the occasional jumping fish. I took a lot of photographs and was pleased I had packed my old Canon EOS. For much of each day, I was the typical one man and his camera. Here are some of my shots. They are not exaggerating when they say Finland is the land of forests and lakes.

After a week in this spiritually uplifting place, I could genuinely salute the sun in gratitude every morning before starting my tai-chi, feeling that I had grounded myself here in Finland, set down some roots, literally under my feet, but also, if I dare say this, I felt that I had put down roots into my soul here too. It might have been Tapio, the Finnish god of the forests, he was there in the low-lying sun, it might have been Sibelius, he was always playing in my head, but I think coming here, I was simply opened up to spirit of the Nordic world that opens for us if we imbue its spirit in silence.

Here is Sibelius’ tone poem, played by the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, a worthy addition to the cannon of his seven completed symphonies, and a major consolation for the absence of his destroyed eighth symphony. The opening phrase that encircles the whole piece, one way or another, haunted me during my wanderings through the Finnish countryside – and it still does. It is possibly describing what you might find in the forest if you are bold enough to go there. I felt I was getting a glimpse out there of the ‘silence’ of the natural world in the sense that Sibelius meant in his long search to empty classical music down, or, more properly, up, to its profound and ideal of union with that silence. In this music there is beauty, but also fear, and a sense of the inexplicable intercommunication between us as individuals and the great mysteries of the other. It is almost enough to frighten us so much that we daren’t walk into that forest. I’m glad that I did.

The post Away from it all at the centre of all things in rural Finland. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I was in Germany in April 2023, I’d been to Leipzig for the Bach 300 festival before catching a train for ten great days in Berlin. A city I last visited in the late 1990s, just a few years after Germany’s reunification and the city was still like a building construction site. Then it was possible to travel from the former Western Berlin through the Brandenburg Gate to the former East and see the immediate change from glitz to drab. This was all in the process of change. Twenty-five years ago, I was working on the English language dub of a film with my German colleague and friend from EuroArts, Bernd Hellthaler and the Hungarian film director, István Szabó. I was staying in a small hotel on the well-known and poetically-named street Unter den Linden (under the linden trees) that runs straight, East to West, through the centre of Berlin. I had the opportunity at that time to discuss, with these two intelligent, liberal-minded, and much more informed people than me, what was going to happen in Germany after the great change. Their mood was of cautious optimism. In 2023, I was interested to see how Berlin must have changed in those twenty-five years.

This time, I was happy to get an unexpected message from Bernd soon after my arrival in Berlin, and, as well as being pleased to see that he is still the same charming guy, and a key figure in music broadcasting, even though he has now retired, he is also still very much the pragmatist who answers political questions with his characteristic shrug. We had a convivial and still largely optimistic meeting with coffee and kuchen, but these days conversations about East and West are dominated by talk of Russia and Ukraine, but not without an opportunity grabbed to rib me about the UK’s unpopular decision over Brexit. I was happy this time to be able to wave my new Irish passport showing that I’m still very much in the EU.

I was staying here in ‘quirky,’ ‘arty,’ ‘gritty,’ ‘edgy,’ or just plain ‘trendy, Kreuzberg, a student quarter, south of the city centre, Mitte, in a ‘trendy’ and ‘arty’ apartment, next to a very cool bar on one side and a hipster restaurant on the other, with more down the street on both sides and Babylon Kino, an arthouse cinema at one end, in a district that has almost wall-to-wall graffiti.

Very soon, this bar became a kind of home – a place to go if you wanted to go out somewhere interesting but couldn’t be bothered to go far. Next-door was often far enough for me, especially when it was as pretty as this place.

It became the rendez-vous of choice when meeting up with family and friends, who also happened to be in Berlin, before moving on a few yards up the street for dinner. Max & Moritz was a really classy but informal ‘German’ restaurant, serving authentic, no really, German food.

And then, when it was time for bed, I only needed to stagger a few steps and I was there,

With the blinds open, I used to wake up in the morning to a leafy inner-courtyard view and, if I was lucky, a sighting or two of the local red squirrels, who might have been watching me.

Every morning, rain or no rain, I headed to the end of the street to a small square called Oranienplatz, an open space in this area of dense housing.

Oranienplatz supplied me with a gritty, in the literal sense, square for my martial arts practice…and so, yet again, I had found an ideal Kung-fu and tai-chi dojo. My audience, most mornings, was a trio of elderly Turkish women. One of them, on my last day, did a funny and unexpected imitation of my upper crane block.

If Kreuzberg is ‘edgy,’ it only seemed like that a couple of times at the entrance to the Kottbusser Tor metro station, when it was probably wise not to pay too much attention to the furtive huddles of young men rolling small polythene bags into silver foil. If we are talking about crime in Kreuzberg, the statistics tell us that serious crime is minimal here, with at worst, some drug peddling and drunken behaviour. I was careful, but not fearful in this vibrant part of the city.

Kottbusser Tor station was the quickest way to get into the city centre, so I went there a lot, excited, the first time, to be on my way to Berlin Alexanderplatz, the location of one of my favourite books. Alfred Döblin’s montage-style 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz. It is the story of Franz, an ex-con who is drawn back to crime in the working class districts around the famous Berlin square, in the closing days of the Weimar Republic and the beginnings of the rise of Nazism.

The novel was made into a masterly and, yes, unforgettable tv series in 1980 (now remastered) by film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Here is a short trailer for the remastered videos, sorry, but I could only find the version with French subtitles. It is still one of my very favourite TV series – all these years later.

When my train got into Alexanderplatz station, I knew that it would be a totally different experience to the novel, the series, and even the historical Alexanderplatz, which was destroyed by bombing in World War 2.

The station is beautiful – colourful, bright and clean…

…and up on street level, it has gained in shopping mall convenience what it has lost of its, yes, ‘edgy’ reputation. And, I forgot to tell you, it rained a lot during most of my stay. Apparently, it really can rain in Berlin.

Nothing, though, can rob me of my inner image of Alexanderplatz, even if, I have to admit, I am more that a little bit disappointed by its rebuild.

These days Alexanderplatz mostly exists indoors, like here in the giant Galeria Kaufhof – but if nothing else, it makes a welcome refuge from the rain.

I was a brave and often rather a damp sight-seer around Berlin city centre, but that didn’t stop me appreciating the mammoth changes that have happened since I was last here twenty-five years ago. I had often wondered how the city would handle its reconstruction, or maybe I should say series of reconstructions, since the long tale of the war and its consequences took its toll on what was once a handsome city with a long history of welcoming people from other countries and cultures.

I was intrigued to see what the new architects had been doing to replace the shattered centre of Berlin – there are some wonderful new buildings by innovative architects, but not maybe, in the very middle of town, the so-called Island of Museums, where they have gone for rebuilding replicas of the originals. It was a marathon job, of course, and one to admire, but, I couldn’t help feeling that the soul of those buildings has been lost in the replications. It is not really for me to say, but I would have liked to have seen a new cathedral built here instead of the monumental duplicate that they built in its place.

I love a lot of the new buildings and admire the way Berlin, and Germany in general, has become a modern culture not afraid to recognise its past, even the most distressing aspects of it. The well-known British comedy series, Fawlty Towers, had a running gag where the Brits are repeatedly told ‘don’t mention the war’. I never felt that I had to pretend when I was in Berlin. I was especially impressed by the number of open spaces, bomb sites, that instead of being simply built over to make a white-washed new city centre, a few prime sites, where the Wehrmacht had its centre, have been left either untouched or dedicated to a grieving and dignified form of remembrance as in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Denkmal für die ermodeten Juden Europas), designed by Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold (2005) where 4.7 acres of valuable real estate in the centre of Berlin has been covered in a maze of 2,711 concrete slabs with an underground Ort der Information (Place of Information) that holds the names of approximately 3 million Jewish Holocaust victims.

Not far from there is a small inner city carpark which is the unmarked site of Hitler’s bunker, and not much further away, one of the last Nazi era constructions, once the largest office building in Europe, built in 1936, as the headquarters of the Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe, then the House of Ministries during the Democratic Republic and now, bizarrely, it is the headquarters of the German Finance Ministry.

Running along the side of the indestructible building, are some of the remains of the Berlin Wall, now a memorial too, for all those who died trying to cross it into West Germany during the DDR, or GDR (German Democratic Republic). The derelict land in front of the wall, still a kind of No-Man’s Land, it is, I was told, the site of the Gestapo and SS Headquarters. It seems that the land, like the Biblical Potter’s Field is just too contaminated to have any use other than one for mourning the dead.

Thinking about the Berlin Wall and the days of East Germany, the DDR, I visited the DDR Museum, a brilliantly designed and curated record of what ordinary life would have been like during that era. Sure, the repression and autocracy is there, some dreams too, but it is also a museum to a world which was temptingly so much less materialistic than ours is today.

Life for that mystical tribe known as ‘ordinary people’ had its ambitions restricted, certainly, but looking round the museum, I couldn’t help feeling that those who didn’t become victims of the Stasi, were freed from the negative effects of too many choices – what kind of deodorant, washing powder, or kitchen units? Does it really matter? I thought. Maybe they had something there.

Then, of course, there was the dead hand and chilly smile of autocratic bureaucracy, and my mild envy for those people disappeared like a short-lived daydream.

A strong desire for the new in 1968 is unsurprising. In those years, the new often meant building on bomb sites. Berlin had been given, not as a gift, a rubble-covered tabula rasa for building on. The Neue Nationalgalerie building was one of those masterpieces, designed by the famous Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as a vast ground floor exhibition space with a lower floor for the permanent collection (Picasso, Munch, Mondriaan and Calder among others). It was closed for six years in 2015 because the design led to many technical problems, especially cracking glass and condensation. The British architect, David Chipperfield, undertook the major renovation and the gallery was opened again in 2021.

The main new exhibition here on my visit was the series Birkenau (2014) by the German artist Gerhard Richter. The works are based on four photographs taken in the concentration camp that Richter has gradually transposed with charcoal and oil paint until they became abstracts with the original drawings invisible. They are positioned in front of four matching mirrors that add to their own level of transposition. Other parts of the exhibition show over-painted photographs in Richter’s long exploration of how to represent the Holocaust in art.

Another brave new 1960’s building in Berlin is the Philharmonie, opened in 1963, with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in Beethovens 9th Symphony, the Choral – a hot ticket, I should imagine. The old Philharmonie building was destroyed by British bombs in World War 2, but there can be few complains about its wonderful replacement. The Berlin Philharmonic were away on tour when I was in Berlin, but I managed to get tickets for a concert at the Philharmonie with Berlin’s other world-class orchestra, the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin (the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra), with their principal conductor Vladimir Jurowski. They were playing Shostakovich’s excitingly modern Symphony No. 4 in a performance that is still playing in my head over a year later.

Before the symphony, there was the German premiere of a new work by the Russian composer Elena Firsova. Her Piano Concerto for the pianist Yefim Bronfman, is, she says ‘very personal and reflected my meditations about the mystery and meaning of Death.’ She quotes a phrase from Beethoven’s late String Quartet op. 135, over which Beethoven had written: ‘Muss es sein?’ (Does it have to be?). Born in St Petersburg and a student in Moscow, Elena Firsova now lives in London, but before she left Russia, she, like Shostakovich, was condemned by the authorities for her modernist tendencies. The Congress of the Composers’ Union in 1979 attacked her and two other composers of her generation: ‘Elena Firsova, Dmitri Smirnov (her late husband) and Sofia Gubaidulina compose pointless and noisy mud…..they should be denied the right to represent Soviet music abroad.’

We were not denied the chance to hear this thought-provoking new work with its very human struggle for meaning in life and, also, maybe death. I don’t think Stalin would have liked it, but Beethoven, and I think, Shostakovich would have approved.

Unsurprisingly she is dismayed by the war against Ukraine; it ‘fills me with deep shame, I count myself lucky I left Russia thirty years ago and was last there seventeen years ago.’

Here is a video taken at that performance of the Firsova Piano Concerto in Berlin on 18 April 2023

Shostakovich’s fourth symphony was composed in 1935/6 and has had a dramatic history as it is the last work that Shostakovich wrote unfettered by the rules imposed on creative artists during Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union. Pravda, the official newspaper was instructed by Stalin to write a critique which was a barely veiled personal attack on Shostakovich, who was at that time the brilliant enfant terrible among Soviet composers. His opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsenisk, which shared a lot of musical material with the fourth symphony, was called ‘muddle instead of music.’ Rehearsals had started for the premiere when it was announced that Shostakovich had withdrawn the work – probably to save the orchestra from Stalin’s wrath – and the symphony wasn’t premiered until 1961, long after Stalin’s death. Something died in Shostakovich after this….the fiery and dangerously challenging part of his creative genius was at least partially paralysed if not killed outright. He certainly never wrote anything like this symphony again.

At the Philharmonie last April it was definitely music instead of muddle – we heard the voice of a radical young man shouting out loud for his freedom from oppression. Berlin felt like the right place to hear him, having walked round the remains of Hitler’s Reich and the last remains of Berlin’s Soviet wall.

I looked to see if there was a recording of that performance but couldn’t find anything, so here is a short except of it played by the Berlin Philharmonic, in the same hall, conducted by Simon Rattle.

The Old National Gallery (Alte Nationalgalerie) sits in a prime spot on Berlin’s Museum Island and I could have spent my whole holiday here. It was founded to exhibit the works of major German artists, but later it was expanded to include many major 19th century French and Dutch artists….worth a visit in itself. You can see Cezanne, Corot, Courbet, Daubigny, Daumier, Fantin-Latour, Jongkind, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Rodin, Signat and Van Gogh. I shall ignore them, love them as I do, for the purposes of this blog, because a lot the German artists were new to me and I want to share them. I have long admired Friedrich, Böcklin, Klinger and Beckmann, but the others mentioned here, and many more, changed my perspective about German art in the 19th century, so dominated, for me at least, by the great French schools of Romanticism, Neo-Classicism, Realism, Impressionism and Expressionism.

And then I came to the pictures of King Frederick the Great of Prussia (1712 – 1786), painted with a propagandist brush by Adolph Menzel in his days as a history painter. Frederick was the sensitive and artistic son of an autocratic father, Frederick William I, the ‘Soldier King.’ Frederick, the unlikely heir, was first admired, or sneered at, for his interest in music and philosophy who, later in life, became interested in armies and soldiers and consequently, war. He modernised Prussian bureaucracy, reformed the justice system, and favoured the freedom of the press. Here in Menzel’s picture, he is seen as Old Fritz (der Alter Fritz), friend of the poor, who is going to be way-laid by a poor couple about to present him with a petition.

He was all of those things, but we would be getting him wrong if we really beleive he was a man of the people, an honest Joe. He was, for all his liberal ideas, a firm believer in Enlightened Absolutism and, whatever else he thought he was, he was certain that he was the number one guy in the country – the first servant of the state.

Is was tough being the lord of all you survey, so, I suppose it was understandable that sensitive and artistic Frederick, needed a beautiful summer palace to escape to when he needed some rest and refreshment. I had a long-held wish to see the place, romantically named Sanssouci (without worry) his version of Dun Roamin’, a kind of mini-Versailles, where, like Northern France, some of the gilt feels a bit washed out by the rain.

He was, as far as I know, happy here. He made the place just as he liked it….a bit camp, gilded and glittering, but also small in terms of other palaces, private too and, in his inner sanctum, simple and unpretentious.

The glitz was mostly reserved for the main reception rooms like this, his music room, where JS Bach’s son C P E Bach, played for him on the harpsichord and also accompanied the musical king’s flute. It was at Frederick’s other palace, the one at Potsdam, (bombed and destroyed during World War 2), that he persuaded CPE Bach to bring his father, Johann Sebastian along to play for him. The result, now famous, was that JS improvised multiple fugues on a tune composed by Frederick and later elaborated them further into what became A Musical Offering ( Das Musikalische Opfer, BWV 1079), one of the composers late and greatest masterpieces.

I suspect Frederick the Great was happiest though, later in his reign, to be alone in his study, reading, writing and practising his flute, and, from time-to-time, gazing out of the window at his favourite statue, placed there perfectly framed by his window.

It was here, in his armchair, in his seventies, crippled by asthma and gout, that he died in 1786, leaving instructions to be buried at Sanssouci next to his beloved greyhounds.

Unlikely but apt, somehow, I thought when I came across this framed screen-print of the old king, by Andy Warhol (1968). Weary, paranoid, camped up, and slightly ridiculous, the old man seems weighed down by monarchy and the impossibilities of finding happiness as an enlightened absolutist, or even here, sans souci – without worry. I’m sorry about all those wars, about the Partition of Poland, and for Frederick’s cruel treatment by his father, who had Frederick’s closest, and much loved, male friend beheaded in front of him after they’d tried to run away together. But, if for nothing else, I’m happy that Frederick invited Johann Sebastian Bach – the main reason for my trip to Germany – to come to Potsdam and to write one last masterpiece.

The post I’m a Berliner now appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I was checked in at the Old Metekhi Hotel over-looking the Mtkvari River in Tbilisi, Georgia , on 13th September 2022, after a booking that had been made in 2019, long before Covid changed everyone’s plans. I was here to be the best man at one of my oldest friend’s wedding, a wedding that had been postponed several times because of the pandemic. It was finally possible and, standing out here on the room’s balcony, I was doubly pleased that the hotel honoured our reservations for so long and so patiently. The wedding’s timing ending up working well after deciding that the journey could be tacked on to my holiday in Finland and Estonia. The postponement meant that the trip to the former Soviet Union country of Georgia extended this extraordinary trip along the borders of Russia and over Ukraine, six months after the Russian invasion and the beginning of war between the two nations. We live in extraordinary times.

The flight to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, meant changing planes in Warsaw, another neighbour of belligerent Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Looking at the maps, it seemed like this holiday was turning out to be a journey through the biggest story so far in the 21st century.

The republic of Georgia lies on the border, not just of Russia, but also between Europe and West Asia, in the Caucusus region, bounded by the Black Sea. The country’s long and proud history was interrupted, violently, in 1922 when it was annexed by the Soviet Union as a ‘constituent republic.’ This unhappy period drew to an end when Georgia left the Soviet Union in 1991 and, after its own war with Abkhazia and South Ossetia. I was impressed to see the red cross of Georgia’s flags along side the stars of the EU. Georgia hopes to become a member of the European community and of NATO. At the moment it feels like it has to keep its eyes on its big neighbour and, tragically, by now, historic enemy – Russia.

I can tell you straight away that the biggest difference between Finland and Georgia today was the temperature. We left Finland at the beginning of autumn and arrived in Tbilisi on a hot summer’s day. I thought for a moment that these dogs were dead, traffic accidents on the street outside the hotel. It is a common site around Tbilisi, stray dogs taking on-street siestas.

My hotel was up on the hill next to a church and a fine equestrian statue to a man called King Erekle II – I felt ashamed that I knew so little about Georgian history, but Erekle was a totally new name to me. He looks fine up there next to the historic Georgian Orthodox church of Metekhi.

I was staying a short distance away from the hill top and the space was ideal for my morning martial arts practice. In Tbilisi I was joined by this sweet-natured puppy who decided to follow me around and, less endearingly, lie down at my feet. One morning I tripped over him, but most days it was a one man and his dog bonding scene.

My preferred tai-chi practice space was here, under a tree, over-looking the Mtkvari River – the puppy liked it here too. King Erekle, though, looked unimpressed by my efforts.

Next to the hotel was this bar where because this is Georgia where complex a cappella singing is a matter of the national pride, these young men weren’t just your average lads strumming on guitars, they produced a magnificent sound with songs that went straight to the heart.

We were given another unexpected concert of Georgian a cappella singing when I got together for pre-matrimonial dinner in advance of my friend David’s wedding to his Georgian fiancée, Medea.

My best man duties were still ahead of me with a few days to go before the wedding, so I could explore Tbilisi and try to get myself into Georgian mode and, more scarily, try to get some familiarity with the Georgian language for my speech – not an inconsiderable challenge.

There was time too to visit some of Tbilisi’s art galleries – my favourite was the Georgian Museum of Fine Arts

Georgian Museum of Fine Arts

Sportsman (1962) Alexandre Bandzeladze (1927 – 1992) Georgian Museum of Fine Arts, Tbilisi

The Georgian artist Alexandre Bandzeladze is well-represented here, exhibits showing his progress from semi-figurative work to a full-developed style of abstract-expressionism. I hadn’t heard of him before coming here to Tbilisi, but I shall look out for his works now.

I also went to the impressive Georgian National Museum with its display of skulls leading back to the 1.8 million year-old humanin skull, (an Early Pleistocene hominin, to be more accurate), one of our earliest ancestors, discovered in Dmanisi in Southern Georgia around twenty years ago. The skulls are displayed on the ground floor, while, upstairs there is the brilliant, chilling and unmissable documentary exhibition of the Museum of Soviet Occupation. Apparently not a favourite with Vladimir Putin when he was told about it.

I couldn’t help making the inevitable mental leap from the sight of all these skulls to the history of Stalin’s Gulags.

Museum of Soviet Occupation Tbilisi

The Museum of Soviet Occupation displays photographic, documentary and other evidence of the horrible history of Soviet repression in Georgia after 1921 and until just before it gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, which came about two years after a brutal military intervention ordered by Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, and who had died just a couple of weeks into my European holiday. In Western Europe his death was marked by some mourning and varied memories of glasnost and perestroika, but here in Tbilisi, no one I spoke to thought kindly about him. He is remembered as the man who ordered the violent crackdown by the Russian army to a large pro-independence rally on 16 April 1989.

I think it is fair to say that it wasn’t just the war in Ukraine that upsets Georgians about Russia. It didn’t take long before bitter conversations about Russia come up that’s why the citizens of Tbilisi were enthusiastic about visitors seeing for themselves, the history of their struggles as displayed in this museum.

I was less impressed by the quality of the Shalva Amiranashvili Museum of Fine Arts – the art reflects the wealthy owners’ taste, or, possibly lack of taste, and, for me the best things, and the most terrifying, were the glass floors and glass lifts. It was a real personal triumph when I managed to stand on the glass and look down to the several floors below.

David and Medea’s wedding was held in the 10th century Georgian Orthodox church, the Anchiskhati Basilica, Tbilisi. I hadn’t realised, when I was asked to be best man, that I would be quite so involved in the Georgian Orthodox liturgy, but it was a moving experience – and I even survived the near embarrassment of my drooping and then melting candle.

The equally traditional wedding reception was a lavish affair – a celebration of Georgian wine and cuisine as well as a celebration of marriage and a lot of fun.

After a few last minute details discussed with my old university friend, David, I was as all-set as I ever would be for my speech. The first section was in Georgian and for it I was coached by Medea’s very patient son, Irakli, without whom, as they say, none of this would have been possible.

After the wedding, there was still time for some sight-seeing and I was keen to get out of the city and to see, at least a small part of the Caucasus Mountains. I visited the confluence of the Mtkvari and Aragvi rivers at a small town called. Mtskheta, less than an hour’s drive from Tbilisi. This confluence was seen as a significant place to build not just a town, but two hilltop churches, one a famous cathedral, Svetitskhoveli Cathedral, see below, and the other, a monastery, Jvari Monastery, with its 10th century church, built over-looking the rivers from Jvari Mount.

Jvari Monastery is a distinctive landmark in the Caucasus and it was as far into the Georgian countryside that I was able to visit on this trip.

Svetitskhoveli Cathedral (Cathedral of the Living Pillar) 11th century Georgian Orthodox is a half hour car ride to the Northwest of Tbilisi and it’s the second largest church building in Georgia – one of the four great Georgian Orthodox cathedrals – the traditional site of the coronations and burials of Georgian monarchs. It is also, reputedly, the burial site of Christ’s robe, taken from one of the Roman soldiers at Golgotha by a Georgian Jew and brought it home to Georgia after the Crucifixion. A cedar tree is said to have grown over the burial site and when it had to be chopped down to build the cathedral, seven pillars for the new cathedral were built, one of them is said to have had miraculous powers and the legend is that it raised itself off the ground and ascended by its own volition into heaven. I’m not quite sure why it needed to do that, but here is an illustration of the legendary celestial ascension.

The Cathedral is a popular pilgrimage site for people across Georgia and, regardless of that miraculous pillar, it is well worth the journey to see this majestic 11th century building.

Finally, after over three weeks of travelling around Europe, it was time to go home. It was also time to read those dreaded airport instructions which, at first sight, looked incomprehensible. I won’t leave you on a confusing note though, but on a whole set of wonderful notes sung by one of those unforgettable Georgian a cappella singing groups.

The post Trying to be the best man in Georgia appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

My first sighting of Finland, land of lakes, forests, saunas and music, seen from the air on a scheduled flight to Helsinki.

It all started six months earlier, in the Runaway Cafe on platform two at Lewes Station, UK, my home town. I am not talking about my journey to catch the plane to Finland. It was March 2022, I was having a coffee before the London train arrived and the radio behind the counter was playing Sibelius’ most well-known piece, Finlandia. I was going to London for a day at the British Museum for The Stonehenge exhibition, which I truly enjoyed. The only trouble was that tune. I could not get rid of Finlandia all day.

In all honesty, I was wishing I could hear the whole piece on my home sound system and I didn’t want to wait until I got back, but I had to. Of course, being an obsessive kind of man, it wasn’t good enough just to listen to Finlandia, love it though I do, especially as played by an orchestra called The Lahti Symphony Orchestra (Sinfonia Lahti), conducted by Osmo Vänskä. No, I decided that I had to listen to all seven of Sibelius’ symphonies again, in numerical order, of course. It had to be the versions by the Lahti Symphony Orchestra too. If you don’t know these recordings, please find them somewhere, they are truly inspiring and, I thought, without any proof or even any knowledge what that actually means, they are very Finnish.

I hadn’t given the orchestra’s name a lot of thought, but it had occurred to me that Lahti was a strange sort of word and, of course, I couldn’t speak Finnish. I didn’t know what a Lahti was, maybe a type of milky coffee, or who Lahti was, or where Lahti was. So, with Sibelius fully enthroned in his rightful place back in my brain, I decided to google Lahti. Ah, yes, it’s a relatively small town in Finland which has its own symphony orchestra, famous for its recordings of Sibelius’ music. They had a state of the art orchestral hall too, by a lake, The Sibelius Hall, which, I now read, had first class, world class, acoustics. And then the big moment. Drum-roll, please Lahti Symphony Orchestra: every year Lahti holds a Sibelius Festival with its resident orchestra, in the Sibelius Hall and playing only Sibelius’ music.

So there I was, heading North, sitting on a Norwegian Airways flight from London Gatwick to Helsinki Airport at the end of August 2022. It was my first visit to any of the Nordic countries and, for someone who had been going on holiday every year to Italy, this was definitely going to be something different.

Helsinki from the air and, beyond it, the Baltic Sea.

This is the impressive modern building that is the Sibelius Hall in Lahti. I was truly excited to get here, but I was knocked out by the architecture and its setting.

The Lahti Symphony Orchestra (Lahti Sinfonia) with its principal conductor Dalia Stasevska, who is also the festival director, gave three concerts of Sibelius’ music. His Symphonies Nos. 4 and 7 and the great late work, Tapiola, a tone poem that some people call his 8th symphony. There were also a number of the composer’s other tone poems and two rare performances of his music for narrator and orchestra, The Wood-Nymph and Snöfrid.

The Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska is already known for her passionate, dramatic and rhythmically exciting interpretations of a whole range of composers’ works – including many contemporary Finnish composers. As well as being the Lahti Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor, from 2021 until 2025, her first principal conductor’s post, she is also the principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra where she became better known to British audiences after she conducted the Last Night of The Proms in 2020.

Now she is even on the cover. of this month’s Gramophone Magazine (April 2024), and it is, by now, patently obvious that she will soon be taking a giant, and well-deserved, leap into the top ranks of international conductors.

I will remember particularly her emotional commitment and her ability to transmit that feeling to us in the audience, especially in profoundly serious performances of Sibelius’ great twin other-worldly masterpieces, Symphony No 7 and Tapiola. Look carefully, if you can be bothered, I am sitting, transfixed, four rows back, on the left, feeling privileged and moved to have been there.

The opening concert of the festival was impressive too, with the Estonian Festival Orchestra conducted by the Estonian-American conductor, Paavo Järvi, the orchestra’s chief conductor and founder, but also chief conductor of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, and the NHK Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo. They played Sibelius’ thrillingly late Romantic Symphony No. 2 and his dramatic quasi-symphony, Lemminkäinen, setting some episodes from the life of Lemminkäinen, the reckless, flawed and deeply human hero from Finland’s national epic, the Kalevala, with its mystical Isle of the Dead guarded by the black swan of Tuonela.

 Lemminkäinen : Thus became a mighty hero. In his veins the blood of ages, 
Read erect and form commanding, Growth of mind and body perfect 
But alas! he had his failings, Bad indeed his heart and morals, 
Roaming in unworthy places, Staying days and nights in sequences 
At the homes of merry maidens, At the dances of the virgins, 
With the maids of braided tresses (Rune IX, The Kalevala)

During the intervals to the concerts, the audience retreated to enjoy the appropriately inspiring architecture of the Sibelius Hall (Sibeliustalo), completed in 2000, it is the work of Finnish architects, Kimmo Lintula and Hannu Tikka, continuing what is by now Finland’s international reputation for great architecture.

The concert hall’s acoustics are, as I had read, as good as you get, and its pin-drop clarity encouraged the audience to sit silently and it also allowed the orchestras to play to their full range – from fortissimo to pianissimo with no loss of detail. In the interval, we could also catch those famous Finnish sunsets over the lake. I know that Sibelius is much more than just a Finnish composer, he’s one of the greatest masters of music, and his works are not really ‘about’ Finland, but the Sibelius Hall in this setting, after some great performances of his music, can’t help but remind us that his inspiration wherever it came from, can’t have been unaffected by the Nordic beauty of his homeland.

Up these intriguing musical stairs, on the other side of town, is the Lahti Conservatory of Music, (Lahden konservatorio), where there was also a piano recital given as part of the festival and, this year, focusing on Sibelius’ less well-known genre, piano music.

The young Danish pianist, David Munk-Nielsen (born 1998), still studying for his master’s degree at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy, and was already an award-winning pianist He won first prize in the Tampere Piano Competition as well as the Tallinn Piano Competition – and in both competitions he played Brahms 2nd Piano Concerto, not for the faint-hearted, in the finals. In his Lahti Sibelius recital, he played three sets of piano pieces from the beginning and the towards the end of the composer’s creative life. Ten Pieces, Op 24, are examples of Sibelius’ early, Liszt-inspired virtuoso works; Five Pieces, Op. 75, The Trees, and Five Pieces, Op. 85, The Flowers, are sets of often gnomic miniatures, each title the name of a tree or a flower, and the music is, well this is Sibelius, a lot more interesting than their names suggest. David Munk-Nielsen played them with the seriousness they deserve and, where necessary, the virtuosity that says much for his future.

You have to take trees seriously in Finland, it is the most forested country in Europe, the great northern forest. A small piece of this forest, in southern Finland they are a mix of deciduous and evergreen, spreads down almost as far as the Sibelius Hall in Lahti in what is called Kariniemi Park, which also contains the Lanu Sculpture Park, featuring the work of Finnish sculptor Olavi Lanu (1925 – 2015), who took trees seriously too. His works are often made in concrete but disguised as if they are growing in the forest – which in Kariniemi Park, they are, if you see what I mean.

Walking in the park, I felt that I had a real if small-scale taste of what that the Finnish forest, further north, is truly like. A desire was born to explore further into Finland’s natural landscape while I walking down wooded paths to the equally Finnish landscape of lakes.

Also bordering onto trees in the centre of Lahti is the Lahti Museum of Visual Arts Malva – mostly known simply as Marva. It was obvious from my first visit that the people who run it have just the right attitude to the modern and the historic and that they have very good taste too. Their main exhibition, when I was there, was by the Dutch conceptual artist, Maarten Baas.

Dutch artist, Maarten Baas’ exhibition, Hide and Seek, was full of surprises, jokes and insights into what we sometimes call, wrongly, the everyday.

Maarten Baas does some amazing things with smoke and mirrors too. His burnt objects, many of them of iconic pieces, was truly dramatic and not a little disturbing….I can still smell the burning.

Lahti is not just a place for great music and art, forested walks and lakes, it is also, yes, a nice town. I suspect it is also a very Finnish town – orderly, organised, efficient and modern – an extremely pleasant place. I like its understated charm a lot. Finland feels like a modern place to me, and I really like the way that the oldest buildings in Lahti all seem to be 20th century. It feels like Lahti lives in the present and the future – that gives me hope. It is also a great place for a coffee or a drink in civilised surroundings.

Lahti’s main church, the Church of the Cross (Ristinkirkkko), was built in 1978. Another piece of fine modern architecture. Today, it was holding a wedding. So simple but so effective this display of sunflowers – no happy couple could help. but me moved by its simple but profund statement of hope and good wishes. The church, by the way, has been the location for a lot of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra’s highly-regarded Sibelius recordings.

Home for this week, was a modern apartment in a modern apartment block, in a modern apartment estate, right in the middle of town and a short walk from Sibelius Hall.

I know that the Finnish winter is harsh but the Finns are ready for that. They are natural designers. The doors fit, the locks lock with a delightful clunk, they stay shut too in a gale. Here, in my temporary home, the obsessive in me loved the way everything worked and looked smart as well as functional. This lift, for example, nicely lit, smoothly opening and closing doors and a purring swish gave me great pleasure every time I used it.

A lot of Lahti citizens live in these type of developments and, unlike many other apartment blocks I’ve seen in other countries, here I think , you are lucky citizens to live here.

There was even a place for me at the back, in that nicely designed communal garden, so I began each day, as I try to wherever I go, doing my kungfu and tai-chi practice – overlooked by some curious residents who only registered their surprise with a slight flicker of a smile and a friendly Hei.

After tai-chi, what better, most Finns would agree, than a hot sauna back in the apartment. Sauna is the only Finnish word to enter the international vocabulary. It means, yes, sauna and it is genuinely a part of every day life in Finland. You feel great afterwards, believe me.

Down the street, turn right and five minutes away is another world. Well, as you can see below, a themed restaurant that isn’t into the idea of hiding its ideas. Viking Restaurant Harald (Viikinkinkiravintola Harald) is just what it says the moment you see it. At first I was reluctant to go in. I suspected it would be all embarrassing theme park entertainment with terrible theme park food, but I was wrong. The decor has a sense of humour. I know that Vikings were not exactly what the comic books portray. My father’s family came from the Scottish Hebrides and some of our ancestors have Viking names, so I am a softy for my Viking heritage, even if I do know for a fact that Viking never wore two-horned helmets, and I certainly never thought I would wear one, but….

…never say never. When in Lahti’s Viikinkinkiravintola Harald, after a few Viking beers, and a very good meal (honestly, the food is first class), almost anything can happen. But, before I go, let me leave you with members of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, who have given me so much pleasure here in Lahti. They are performing their Covid lockdown version of Sibelius’ Finlandia, each musician in his or her own home studio. Kiitos ja kippis! I shall be back!

The post Flying to Lahti in Finland for Sibelius appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

This was in June 2022, my first foreign trip after Covid decided to keep us all home for a couple of years. I had been going on holiday to Italy annually for ten years. I love the place, the culture and the language. Cerco di fare uno sforza per parlare italiano ogni volta che posso. (I try to make an effort to speak Italian whenever it is possible). I don’t always get it right – far from it – but I get great pleasure trying to speak to Italians in their own language. I think I began to understand Italy a whole lot more after I managed to hold conversations about more things than ‘excuse me where is the station?’ ‘a beer, please’ or ‘can I have the bill?’ One day, I hope to understand everything Italians say to me.

So I missed the place during the pandemic and was impatient to return to this wonderful country at the first opportunity. Apart from the culture, the people, the landscape and the language, I feel so much better in the Italian sunshine. The coffee tastes better there too.

So, in June 2022, I packed my bags with hot weather clothes, a Panama hat, and my kindle loaded with Italian fiction, and made the journey to Tropea, in Calabria in Southern Italy, determined to relax and absorb Italy’s healing vibes.

Tropea is a small town by the sea in a part of the Italian south that hasn’t been so over-run as some of the other more famous Italian seaside resorts. Consequently perhaps, amiability, humour and relaxed hospitality are still important here, where a favourite restaurant or bar can soon become home.

I know I’m sounding like a brainless hedonist, maybe that’s who I am. In all honesty, it’s one of the many attractions of coming to Italy every summer. Forgive me, everyone, for I have sinned. No, it’s not a sin to appreciate the good things about the world, it’s a duty, I believe.

Tropea isn’t Rome or Naples, but it has most of the essentials for a quintessentially Italian experience.

Tropea is a beautiful place, one of the most beautiful in Italy, according to its award as one of I Borghi più belli d’Italia (‘The most beautiful villages of Italy’). The town itself sits on the cliff tops over-looking the Gulf of Saint Euphemia, part of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

There were a number of concerts here while I was in Tropea, at the medieval Auditorium Santa Chiara – a recital of operatic arias by the Calabrian composer, Francesco Cilea (1866 – 1950), performed by the sumptuously voiced soprano Lenny Lorenzani with pianist David Boldrini, a part of the Tropea Summer Music Festival

There was also a saxophone quintet concert with the Argentinian saxophonist and composer, Javier Girotto. (Javier Girotto – who played a variety of saxophones with Mattia Catarinozzi – soprano sax Alfredo Santoloci – alto sax – Maurizio Schifitto – tenor sax and Giovanni De Luca – baritone sax)

There’s a legend that Tropea was founded by Hercules, no less, when he was returning home to Greece after completing his ‘twelve labours’ – I don’t expect to rival his super-human strength, as in the Farnese Hercules that I saw in Naples in 2020…

…but I do my best to keep as fit and as strong as I can – even when I’m on holiday. The apartment in Tropea had a large terrace, over-looking the town and the bay and, every morning, it became my own private gym for exercises suggested by Gyles Abbott, my personal trainer, and my kung-fu and taichi practise as drummed into me by Kungfu instructor supreme, my friend Neil Johnson.

There was even a handy impromptu pull-arm bar in the bedroom.

At night, the terrace took on a considerably more relaxed mood, a look-out post to watch the festivities below accompanied by a vigilant moon, a glass of wine and a cooling breeze from the Tyrrhenian sea.

It wasn’t all about sun, sea and sand, but I have to confess, after two years away, I felt like Adam and Eve might have felt if they had been invited back to the Garden of Eden.

This blog, with its obligatory Tropea sunset, brings to an end my record of my Italian holidays between 2017 and 2022 – in Puglia, on the Amalfi Coast, in Naples, Sorrento and Milan. I planned to write them at the time but managed to neglect doing so while my website was being remastered. My apologies to those readers who missed the fact that these were separate past trips….if only I could have done this just now as a grand tour as some of you imagined.

I have mentioned Enrico Caruso a lot in these posts, so it seems right to finish them with his voice. In 1902, when this recording was made, Enrico Caruso had just created the role in Maurizio in Calabrian-born Francesco Cilea’s most famous opera, Adriana Lecouvreur at the Teatro Lirico in Milan (1902). Here is Caruso fresh from one of his early triumphs.

A reminder too of Francesco Cilea, whose operas are not performed as much as they deserve.

The post Tropea – taking it easy in Calabria appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

In December 2019, I spent a week in Milan. It was raining, no surprise there for this part of Italy during December. It was wet but achingly beautiful. As a fashion-shopping mecca internationally, not even the rain could dampen its elegance and style – especially as the rain appeared to be here just to highlight the city’s beautiful Christmas illuminations.

Galleria Vittorio Emmanuelle II (built between 1865 – 1877), is Italy’s oldest surviving, and grandest, shopping gallery, dare I call it a mall (?), designed by the architect Giuseppe Mengoni (1829 – 1877). It is, without question, unlike any of your average inner city shopping centres. Here, as in Milan generally, high fashion and design reign supreme, giving window-shopping and window-dressing a whole new meaning.

I was walking round the city with my camera, getting wet, and trying to get a shot of the cathedral, right next-door to the Galleria. I was not alone at this camera position, but I didn’t expect a glamourous woman to oblige with an instant modelling pose. I took a photograph, of course, and only afterwards realized that she was magazine fashion and that a magazine photographer was standing right behind me. I shouldn’t have been surprized. standing here in Milan, the international capital of fashion.

All the major fashion houses had their wares on display in the shop windows inside the galleria – they turned the building into an art gallery.

I was in Milan just before Christmas in 2019, and, tempting though it was, this was definitely not the place to go bankrupt for my Christmas shopping.

Even the ice-cream looked like the set for a fashion show.

After the Galleria, I looked for a bar. This place looked quiet and just right for a relaxing drink before moving on for somewhere to eat.

I hadn’t noticed the venue’s name, Ristorante Vista Duomo, and it was what just it’s name promised, a restaurant with a spectacular view of Milan cathedral. It was almost by accident that I found myself here. I thought it was just a bar for a quick aperitif before finding a pizza somewhere in this well-heeled city. Then I discovered that there was a restaurant upstairs that was just being vacated by a fashion magazine shoot and I managed to persuade the staff to let me take drinks up there for the view before the restaurant opened for dinner. One thing, and one drink, led to another, and, yes, I ended up at the best table with the best view in Milan. The food was excellent and not as bank-breaking as you might think. It was only later that I was told this this establishment is currently the trendiest restaurant in town.

The view from the Ristorante Vista Duomo with Milan Cathedral and the piazza all lit up for Christmas.

I was staying in Milan’s Chinatown in a street-level apartment, luckily with very efficient double-glazing.

Next day I found here was also a space at the back, a residents’ car-park, where there was room enough for my daily martial arts routine, tai-chi and kung fu with an over-optimistic salute to the sun.

Just as essential, round the corner, was a welcoming café that served first class coffee and croissants every morning. I like Milan.

It was a short walk from Chinatown to two famous apartment and office buildings, known as Bosco Verticale,(vertical forest), the 2014 inspiration of architect Stefano Boeri, regarded as one of the ‘fifty most iconic skyscrapers in the world’ (Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat).

Bosco Verticale was impressive enough on a wet day in December, and I can imagine the thrill of living there in summertime.

Traveling round the city was easy on the remarkably efficient, clean and civilised metro system which always seemed to have a station exactly where I needed there to be one.

Chinatown to the Cathedral was a mere five to ten minutes by underground on trains that put the London system to shame.

Milan Cathedral is the largest church in Italy and the third largest in the world. It was built with Candogli marble. Work began in 1386, and, because of it’s uniquely complex exterior, this gigantic Gothic cathedral wasn’t officially completed for another 579 years, in 1965. When I visited in 2019, another bout of restoration work had just about been completed, that the building was looking just about picture perfect.

Another historically and architecturally important building in Milan is the Castello Sforzesco, Sforza’s Castle, a medieval fortification built between 1358 – c.1370 and rebuilt in 1450 by Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, and his son Ludovico Sforza, patron of Leonardo da Vinci, (who lived and worked here, as an artist and as an engineer, between 1482 – 1513) The castle was damaged and restored many times during five hundred years of tumultuous history of the city when Milan was under either Spanish, Austrian or Napoleonic rule, before Italian Unification in 1871. In the 20th century it was severely damaged by Allied bombing during World War Two. It is now an extensive museum complex with much to see, even on a typically wet Milanese afternoon.

Inside Castello Sforza is the Biblioteca Trivulziana, an historic collection of manuscripts assembled in the 18th century, that includes an autographed notebook by Leonardo da Vinci and fifteenth century editions of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

A page from Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Trivulzianus, kept at the Biblioteca Trivulzian

The refectory, or dining hall, at the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie is the site of one of the most famous paintings in the world – Leonardo da Vinci’s mural L’Ultima Cena, The Last Supper (1495 – 1498),

This much-damaged and restored icon of world culture, is kept in a strictly controlled environment where only a few visitors at a time are allowed in for a very restricted period when they can admire this great masterpiece by one of the greatest masters of all.

The Last Supper is familiar to everyone from photographic reproductions, but, my photographs included, none give a true impression of the power of this painting. Its profundity has an emotional punch that is more than the brilliance and drama of its depiction of Christ and his disciples and their last meal together. It was by only standing in the same room that I realised that Leonardo created a sense of true spiritual transcendence beyond any other work of art in my experience. If there was ever a must-see painting it is this.

There is too much see in Milan and I was only there for a week. I had to be highly selective about where I should go and what I should see – and what I should leave out. The Brera Art Gallery, however, was an essential visit, and even after seeing the Leonardo da Vinci, I felt I had to take the opportunity of seeing some of the other masterworks held here in Milan.

If I had to name two artists, I suppose it would have to be the Brera Gallery’s Caravaggio and Raphael but I can’t count, so the two would become four with Mantegna and Piero della Francesca. But, hey, I don’t need to say two or four or any other number. I just need to persuade you to go visit.

The Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c.1480) by Mantegna

The Virgin with Child, Angels and Saints (1472-4) by Piero della Francesca

The Marriage of the Virgin (1504) by Raphael

Supper at Emmaus (1606) by Caravaggio

Then there is the Museo del Novecento, sitting next-door to the cathedral and that too is filled with masterpieces, including Modigliani’s Portrait of Paul Guillaume (1915), but there are some other 20th century Italian painters new to me here too. Giacomo Balla, Giorgio Morandi and Umberto Boccioni. There’s a Picasso too.

Finally, of course, I can’t say Milan with immediately thinking La Scala – Italy’s most famous opera house. I would have been very disappointed if I had come here and not been able to go to an opera – especially an Italian opera, especially one by Verdi or Puccini.

Puccini it was….his opera Tosca with a terrific cast of singers and a big cinematographic production by Davide Livermore, conducted by La Scala’s dynamic music director, Riccardo Chailly.

Luca Salsi (baritone), evil and thunderous voiced as police chief Baron Scarpia

Francesco Meli, (tenor) mellifluous and passionate as romantic painter Mario Cavaradossi.

and Saioa Hernandez (soprano), big voiced and glorious toned as the prima donna Floria Tosca.

It was a wonderful way to mark my lifelong ambition to come to the opera here and to celebrate Italian opera in its international capital.

The post Milan – city of fashion, music and art, even in the rain. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I’m looking back at some of the photographs I have taken on my Italian holidays over recent years for blogs that I am only just getting down to now. In the summer of 2017, the year before I went to Puglia (see previous blogs), I spent two weeks in a tiny fishing village of Marina del Cantone, in the region of Massa Lubrense, near the small town of Nerano, on the Amalfi Coast, one of the most beautiful part of southern Italy, over-looking the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Gulf of Salerno.

During my time there, I went on a bus excursion on the small vertiginous road to Sorrento and then by train to Naples. I’ll write about this trip another time, for now, just let me say, I was perfectly happy to linger, lazily languorous in Marina del Cantone, either on the small beach-facing balcony, in the excellent restaurant, no more than six steps from my front door, or a few more steps to the beach where there was always a spare lounger and sunshade and the very welcoming sea. Mostly, I let my eyes do the walking around the spectacular coastline I could enjoy lying on my back.

I could get used to living with a Mediterranean beach outside my front door with an outstanding, open-air restaurant, not even blocking the view. Dinner every evening was fish, caught locally that day, cooked with real imagination served with a bottle of Chianti Classico. I love Italy.

I found my own space for my morning martial arts practice, sharing the spot with a few local fishermen, who probably thought I was just another eccentric Englishman in the long tradition, going back to the 18th Century, when the English considered this part of Italy, the nearest an of us get to a worldy paradise.

My fisherman friend took a couple of days to suss me out, but he soon accepted me as an entertaining diversion. He didn’t speak English, like most of the people here, so my morning sessions were great practise for my Italian and my tai-chi. I was soon greeted a shout of ‘buongiorno signor Kung-fu’.

After kung-fu, I was always ready for a cup of espresso, in the little cafe along the beach.

Then it was time for a walk before the midday sun made it too hot for exercise. On both sides of the little fishing port, there were paths that lead high up to where you can, quite literally, see for miles.

The mountain paths were a test for my vertigo, but I. went on until I passed a man who was sitting on a rock who told me not to go any further if I didn’t like heights. He said he was going back down before his falling sickness made him want to jump off the rock face. I went on for as far as I could, before I too began to feel the pull of the precipitous drop into the sea once the rickety fencing ended. It wasn’t so bad if, instead of looking down from the cliff, I concentrated on the wayside flowers.

With the Tyrrhenian Sea calling me every day, I knew that I just had to find a boat if I was ever going to appreciate this wonderful coastline.

I could see many little boats out there, so I set out to find one with a captain for hire. Of course, in this little village, there was a boat for hire, across the path from my front door. So the next time, Luca, the brother of the apartment owner, agreed a price, and we were off for a couple of hours at sea. Needless to say, I loved it.

We sailed in grottoes where it was possible to swim from the boat in the clear turquoise water, before going further out to sea looking at rocking islands, like this one, known as the turtle – la tartaruga – a word that seemed unnecessary when I first learnt it. Luca doesn’t speak English, so I was delighted to understand what he was saying and to see why the rock is called tartaruga.

We travelled further out, far enough to see the island of Capri, before returning to port, home, Marina del Cantone. I felt like true resident, a sailor coming home, seeing my apartment waiting as we got closer to shore.

After dinner in our local restaurant, there was still time for a glass of wine as the sun set and the lights of the village illuminated the sea.

The post On the Amalfi Coast appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.