My Messiah marathon: Ten performances, five cities, two countries, one beloved masterpiece.

Nearly a year ago, I posted a piece about summer fruits which was optimistically listed as ‘Part One’. Here finally is the second part which will be about apricots, white peaches, raspberries, and strawberries, all of which have been at their succulent best in the last month or so.  While most of the USA has been baking in excessive heat or having unbreathable air from wildfires, here in Northern California we have had weeks of perfect summer days, ‘Goldilocks’ weather you might say; not too hot nor too cold, but just right. Not only have we enjoyed eating lots of glorious fruit, but we can do it sitting at a table in our garden surrounded by fragrant rose bushes. In other words, something close to paradise on earth.

Before the pandemic, I had always read a lot of detective stories. They are absorbing and engaging, and back when we relied on physical books — before Kindles and smartphone apps — they were easy to carry when travelling. Of course, when concert life was forced to a standstill in 2020, the genre was something of a lifesaver. 

This has been a glorious summer for fruits of all kinds. Here in northern California so many varieties are available that each trip to my favourite shop, The Monterey Market, has been a wonderful adventure: their bins are full of melons of every shape and colour, white and yellow peaches, even little ones shaped like doughnuts, Blenheim apricots, and luscious figs. There is simply so much to delight every gastronaut. In this short piece, I cannot possibly do justice to more than a handful of them and even then, I will split the essay up into two parts. This basket will contain cherries, nectarines, melons and figs. Apricots, plums, pluots, damsons, currants and berries will just have to wait for the next episode.

Although I have lived in the USA for just over forty years, I still consider myself a Brit and get very nostalgic when I think of my homeland. Yesterday was therefore a very sad one. I never met Her Majesty but I was very moved by her passing.

On Good Friday 1742, Handel gave the first performance of Messiah in Neal’s Music Hall in Fishamble Street, Dublin. Two hundred and eighty years later, also on Good Friday, I was privileged to conduct the same piece just over a mile away.

After a very jolly ten days in St. Louis, the next stop on my mid-western jaunt was Cleveland, another city that I know well. I have been there many times often experiencing some dramatic weather. My début with the Cleveland Orchestra was nearly cancelled because of a large snowstorm on Valentine’s Day and several concerts at Blossom have been accompanied by spectacular thunderstorms. On this visit, apart from flying in on a very windy evening where my little plane was buffeted about in a rather alarming way, the rest of my time in the city was without snow or anything dramatic.

Here’s a delicious recipe for a hazelnut torte with chocolate chestnut ganache. The recipe is from my husband David V. R. Bowles.

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas last year, I was thrilled to have three weeks of concerts, fourteen in all, in three of my favourite cities in the centre of the USA. I had been to all of them often, even lived in one of them for over five years, but because of the pandemic, I had not visited them for some time.

So much has changed in the last eighteen months or so. Most musicians have not been performing except on their own and much collective music-making has happened over Zoom. Those of us who travel around the globe to give concerts have stayed at home, sometimes taking up hobbies or finally being able to read those long novels that have been sitting on the nightstand, sometimes for years. I feel that I’ve been one of the lucky ones.

It’s nearly the end of June, National Rose Month, and the roses in our garden have more or less finished blooming until the early autumn when some of them will burst into flower again.

Just under a year ago, as the pandemic was tightening its grip, I wrote a little piece for this blog about detective stories that I have enjoyed with musical themes. Now, here is a much-delayed sequel, one of several I plan to write about historical mystery books. Not being a very orderly soul, I am going to begin not with the Romans or the Medieval period, these will have to appear as 'prequels', but in medias res, with the age of the Tudors, Henry VIII and his offspring Edward VI, Mary (the original Bloody Mary), and Elizabeth I (Good Queen Bess). In future blog posts, I will progress to the Stuarts and the Restoration, the Georgians, and the Victorians. If all this sounds a bit too British, I hope subsequently to write about books set in foreign climes and perhaps in foreign languages.

Two people whom I knew and admired have passed away in the last few months, one in the USA and the other London.

Although this section of my website is called Roving and Recipes, there is clearly not much roving going on at the moment, However, we can still travel in our thoughts and dreams, visit friends in far off lands at least in our imaginations, and think of nice things to eat and drink in their company. So, while I am housebound in California, I’ve let my mind wander across to Europe to compose a dinner from several different countries with recipes given by good friends whom I wish I could see in person.

One of the pleasures of not dashing all over the place giving concerts in recent months is that I have spent much more time at home cooking, reading, and pretending to be useful. I promise to write something with recipes in it very soon, but this little piece will be all about reading. And by reading, I mean holding real, sometimes quite heavy books rather than whisking through crime novels on my Kindle. Although this part of my website carries the heading Roving and Recipes, for the purposes of this piece, here “R&R” refers to the first two of the Three R’s: Reading, (R)Writing, and (A)Rithmatic. Even if there were a book called Principia Mathematica for Dummies, I very much doubt that I would get beyond the title page before my eyes glazed over.

Since the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, many musicians and directors have been writing about her love of opera, none more movingly perhaps than Francesca Zambello in The New York Times. Our story is only tangentially to do with music but is very personal nonetheless.

It’s 9:30 in the morning here in Berkeley and this is what it looks like outside. The sky is dark as if it were 5am and it’s an eerie faded, pumpkin colour. Is this a repeat of what caused the dinosaurs to die out or are we simply trying to imitate a scene from Dante’s Inferno? No-one here has seen anything quite like it. The cause is smoke and ash from wildfires as far north as Oregon which have blotted out the sun, combined with thick fog.

Tuesday, August 25th, would have been Douglas Schwalbe’s 93rd birthday. Sadly, he passed away in early April from the Covid virus just one day after his wonderful partner Patricia Bosworth. He was my agent from 1985 until he retired about thirty years later. But he was so much more than that. He was my mentor in the music business and in many ways he was like a father to me through the ups and downs of my career.

I love reading detective stories, which to me can be like crosswords in novel form. In the good old days when I travelled a lot for work, they were the perfect books to take on the road. But now that I, together with everyone else, am stuck at home, I am still perfectly happy to get lost in a good mystery story, to pit my wits against the detective, to try to solve the clues. There are a number of genres within the broad scope of the detective story that I particularly like: historical mysteries, British mysteries and above all musical mysteries. Sometimes of course all three appear in one book and that gets me totally hooked.

Listen to these eight recordings that are my desert island discs during quarantine.