The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980): Jean M. Auel

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★★★★

Earth’s Children: Book I

In our first years at secondary school, one of my classmates was much taken with the Earth’s Children series by Jean M. Auel. I remember being very impressed by the thick novels she was carrying around, and decided that I would have to read the books myself one day. And now, twenty years later, I’ve finally got round to it. In the aftermath of The Inheritors, I decided it was time to make a start on this other famous story about contact between Neanderthal man and the new race of Homo sapiens.

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Much Ado About Nothing (1598/99): William Shakespeare

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Much Ado About Nothing

★★★★

(Iris Theatre, St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, 9 July 2016)

Summer has come to London (although the British weather hasn’t had the memo). These long, light evenings are the cue for the ever-wonderful Iris Theatre to roll out the red carpet for another of their outdoor Shakespeare plays, performed as promenade productions in and around the Actors’ Church in Covent Garden. This year’s show is Much Ado, probably my favourite play, and as a longstanding fan of the company I just couldn’t resist. Moreover, the play has already enjoyed critical acclaim, with four nominations for the Off West End Awards. It was bound to be a good night out so I marshalled my visiting parents and we set off for an evening of Iris’s very special brand of magic.

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Dragonflight (1968): Anne McCaffrey

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★★★

Between the ages of eleven and thirteen, I read a lot of classic sci-fi novels that my dad had bought in the 1970s and 1980s and then relegated to a box in the attic. These were my first ‘grown up’ books and together they opened up a whole world for me, but I haven’t read them since. However, a few weeks back someone donated a treasure trove of these novels to the book stall at the village fete (not my dad’s copies, I hasten to add), and I saw the perfect opportunity to revisit the stories which had had such an impression on me as a child. First up on the nostalgia road-trip was Dragonflight, which I remembered with great fondness. Inevitably, it didn’t quite stand up to the test of time, but – having forgotten virtually everything about it except the characters’ names and the dragons – I still found it exciting and fast-paced, with a clever blend of sci-fi and fantasy at its heart.

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The Convenient Marriage (1934): Georgette Heyer

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★★★½

I haven’t read a new Georgette Heyer novel since before I started writing this blog, which means it’s long overdue. Her books may be fluffy and predictable; her characters may be much the same from story to story; but I adore her: she never fails to delight and distract from whatever life throws at me. At the moment that’s an irritating cold, so I was much in need of witty Regency escapades to divert myself from snuffling. There are times when a girl simply needs a bit of frivolity. And The Convenient Marriage delivers on all fronts. With balls, card-parties, duels and highwaymen, it’s a gloriously frothy story dressed up with fabulous gowns, extravagant wigs and two very appealing protagonists.

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A House Full of Daughters (2016): Juliet Nicolson

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★★★★½

Granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West and daughter of Nigel Nicolson, Juliet Nicolson certainly has writing in her blood. After publishing several books about the social history of the early 20th century, she now turns her eye on her own remarkable family. Nicolson introduces us to seven generations of women, from the black-eyed Spanish dancer Pepita in the mid 19th century to Nicolson’s own infant granddaughter Imogen and tells their stories. Delivered with passion and compassion, this is a beautifully crafted tale of what it means to be a woman: as daughter, lover, wife and mother.

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Vivaldi: Nathalie Stutzmann and Orfeo 55

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Nathalie Stutzmann

(Wigmore Hall, 2 July 2016)

On Saturday night it was time for the second contralto recital of the week, this time the multi-talented Nathalie Stutzmann and her orchestra Orfeo 55. You may remember that I saw Stutzmann for the first time at last year’s Halle Handel Festival, where she conducted (and guest-starred) in Philippe Jaroussky’s concert. Tonight she had the stage to herself, both conducting – a variety of beautifully-balanced orchestral pieces – and singing – a selection of arias ranging from the playful to the anguished. And all were by the doyen of Venetian style: the glorious Red Priest himself.

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A Life Discarded (2016): Alexander Masters

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★★★★

148 Diaries Found In A Skip

This was a little breath of fresh air in my recent reading. I’d read an article about the book some time ago, probably in the Guardian, which whetted my appetite (though in retrospect I wish I hadn’t seen it because it gave away all of the developments and surprises). Masters, who has written two other books based on extraordinary lives – neither of which I’ve yet read – here takes on another challenge: the intimacy and mundane fascination of writing a biography of someone whose name he doesn’t even know. All he has of this person, whom he christens ‘I’, are 148 of their diaries, stretching from the 1950s to the 1990s, which his friends Richard Grove and Dido Davies have discovered in a Cambridge skip. Tantalised by his subject’s anonymity, Masters sets out on a noble quest to give ‘I’ a voice at last and to find out what he can about this figure, whose very ordinary outward life hides an inner world full of passion, urgency, rage and thwarted ambition.

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Arias by Gluck: Sonia Prina

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Sonia Prina

(with La Barocca, directed by Ruben Jais, Wigmore Hall, 28 June 2016)

Sonia Prina is one of the most colourful personalities in the world of Baroque music (which is saying something), and although I’d seen her on DVD as the warrior queen Partenope and the scheming vizier Artabano, I hadn’t heard her in the flesh until Tuesday at the Wigmore. Here she treated us to a programme of sparkling, mostly pre-reform Gluck. Performed with panache and a glorious disdain for convention, it was quite an experience.

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The Sun King Rises (2005): Yves Jégo and Denis Lépée

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Yves Jégo and Denis Lépée at Vaux le Vicomte

★★

A tale of intrigue at the court of Louis XIV

It’s no surprise, surely, that I asked to review this book. With the promise of intrigue and danger at the court of the Sun King, I thought I was in line for a delectable swashbuckler, which would doubtless be all the more interesting for my recent wanderings around Versailles. If only I had read the back of the book first! Here I would have learned that the intrigue was less courtly than esoteric, and that the book focused on ‘a religious brotherhood, guardian of a centuries-old secret’. Da Vinci Code-shaped alarm bells would have started to ring. However, I didn’t see this and, in the end, this strange hybrid of a book – half channelling Dan Brown, half Dumas – simply ended up feeling rather limp, for all its earnest attempts at adventure.

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Il Vologeso (1766): Niccolò Jommelli (1766)

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Vologases IV of Parthia

★★★

(Classical Opera, at Cadogan Hall, 28 April 2016)

Another rummage in the drafts folder has unearthed several music posts which are now well out of date, but I would still like to publish them for my own records. Please indulge me! Let’s start with an opera, which I saw in a concert version at the end of April. This was part of Classical Opera’s Mozart 250 project, which was inaugurated by last year’s Adriano in Siria by J.C. Bach.

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