In spite of the rain, the tulips are still flourishing in my small Lewes garden. The star of the show this year are the Flaming Parrots – there’s nothing shy about these wonderfully exuberant plants. I can almost here them talk. “Pretty Polly” maybe or, as my grandmother’s parrot used to say, “It’s the bloody vicar!” It is like having a touch of jungle exotica out there. When we’re all getting tired of yellow Spring flowers, the dash of red is enough to get us sprinting towards summer.

I can see this fine creature out there tempting me to mix a Campari and soda with sliced oranges and to sit outside basking in the sun even though it has temporarily disappeared in these parts in exchange for some rolling black clouds and bursts of heavy rain.

I must enjoy my Flaming Parrots while they’re still perched merrily outside my window because, as in the nature of all tulips and other flying birds, one day they’re here and the next they’ve gone.

Further down the garden, there’s a rather more dignified corps de ballet. I’m also enjoying the interesting clash of colour between the fading camellia flowers and the orange Ballerina tulips.

The ballerinas provide a calming influence over all those squawking parrots and help to lessen the annual tragedy of those falling camellia blooms.

Another week or two and I will recover from the loss of those late Spring flowers already looking forward to the first great flush of roses but until then, I rather enjoy the melancholy that surrounds the ending of seasons. Certainly, those falling camellias always remind me of the saddest of all fallen camellias, the tragic but oh so romantic, Lady of the Camellias.

While the rain lasts, maybe the best thing to do is to watch a video of Stéphane Bullion & Agnés Letestu supreme in John Neumeier’s excitingly romantic ballet La Dame aux camélias choreographed to piano music by that most romantic of Romantic composers, Chopin. I’m almost hoping that the rain will last all day.

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STEPHEN DEARSLEY’S SUMMER OF LOVE BY COLIN BELL

My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, was published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

It is now available as a paperback or on Kindle (go to your region’s Amazon site for Kindle orders)

You can order the book from the publishers, Ward Wood Publishing:

http://wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm 

…or from Book Depository:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Stephen-Dearsleys-Summer-Love-Colin-Bell/9781908742070

…or from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Stephen%20Dearsley’s%20Summer%20Of%20love

The post Flaming parrots and orange ballerinas are taking over out there in my Lewes garden. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I haven’t written about my geeky Classical music project for a bit – the one where I’ve been listening to the whole rich heritage of the repertoire chronologically from 1100 onwards – so I thought I would tell you how I’ve got “stuck”in 1876.

When I celebrated my arrival in this interesting year, I thought my main preoccupation would be Brahms’ First Symphony – a work I loved before limited my listening to works written either in the chosen year or before it. I haven’t got there yet though because I stumbled onto ballet discovering that two of the most important works of classical ballet were both written in 1876 – Delibes’ Sylvia, a wonderful piece that I didn’t know before and possibly the most well-known of all ballets, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

At first I thought I would give the Delibes ballet score my self-imposed rule for pieces that i’m not that bothered by – the three plays and it’s gone – but I found I’d got hooked not just on the music but on the ballet itself especially in the modern re-working of the choreography by the highly original American choreographer John Neumeier for the Paris Opera Ballet.

Most people only really know Delibes’ music thanks to the use of a duet from his opera Lakmé (1881-1882) in the British Airways ads where a lyrical boating son sung by two Indian women has been turned into BA’s signature tune and a hymn to airflight written at least twenty years before aircraft looked like this, one of the Wright brothers first gliding machines:

Tchaikovsky’s music has been stolen by advertising companies too – most famously and infamously for a well-known brand of chocolate. Tchaikovsky had been having a busy old time in 1876 because not only had he been composing Swan Lake but he had been on a European tour where he heard the first performance of Wagner’s Ring cycle at Bayreuth: “Finally on Thursday it was all over, and with the last chords of Götterdämmerung I felt as though I’d been released from captivity. Perhaps Nibelungen is a very great work, but there’s never yet been anything more boring and prolix than this long-drawn-out affair…Of course there are some wonderful moments – but taken all in all, it’s killingly boring! How many hundreds of thousands of times nicer is Sylvia.” (Tchaikovsky. A biographical and critical study by David Brown. Pub. Victor Gollancz). Whilst we might hold Wagner’s work in higher regard than Tchaikovsky did but, I suspect more than a few of us have suffered moments of boredom in even his greatest works but, maybe not as often we we do in Tchaikovsky’s lesser works where he tries too hard to be “academic.” He was right in his admiration for Delibes’ ballet though admiring the score for its beauty but also for its dramatic continuity and he regretted not hearing it before writing Swan Lake, especially in the acts where the action is “held up” by series of dances owing very little to the “action”. He may not have known though that Delibes was a great admirer of Wagner and in Sylvia, the hunting wood nymphs owe a great deal to Wagner’s wild Valkyrie maidens.

I was intrigued by Tchaikovsky’s admiration for Sylvia and by how he retained his opinion that it was a better work than Swan Lake. Consequently, I have been listening to both scores in obsessive delight, learning to love them both but, ultimately agreeing with the great Russian that the Delibes is the superior work conceived lyrically, gorgeously in fact, but tightly integrated at a drama. I too wish Tchaikovsky had heard it before finishing his own ballet which is only really fully inspired in the magnificent second act.

The plot for Sylvia is, for all Delibes’ efforts though, a light and slightly silly one unlike the iconic conception of those swans on the lake in the moonlight. Enter John Neumeier who kept the essences of the original – The virgin goddess of the moon, Diana has a favourite nymph, Sylvia, who is her best huntress. Sylvia though falls in love with a handsome shepherd boy and then the ballet stories diverge. John Neumeier uses the music to tell a darker, more sophisticated tale of female love in different ages of woman. Everyone should see this great work and luckily it has been recorded on DVD.

I want to see more choreography by John Neumeier, especially his realization of Mahler’s epic Symphony No. 3 but that music is but a dream in 1876.

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In my musical journey through 1875, I have come across a surprizingly large number of pieces that have since become so famous that even people who don’t think they’ve heard any classical music recognise with ease. The first of these is an extract from a ballet written that year by the French composer Leo Delibes. You may think that you don’t know it but you would be wrong.

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