DOWN BY THE LAKE (1)

We made it over the Alps and stayed at Lake Como for two nights. The hotel was serious glam and not our usual fare but then we were really beholden to others for whom we were essentially giving a lift down as a thank you for favours bestowed our way.

And this is just the annexe, with the floating pool on the right.

SCHLOSSING ABOUT

Schloss Nymphenburg on the outskirts of Munich is a schloss is a schloss is a schloss like a we-can-do-French kind of schloss. There is also the royal porcelain collection and a fantastic array of carriages and sleighs with all the extra horsey bits.

The present count lives in this wing, so my Ring Cycle friend-of-count-I'm-an-eye-doctor-and live-on-the-edge-of-Nymphenberg seat neighbour told me.

The gardens have a splendid parterre

but the walk through the acres of woods to the outlying pavilions was the most interesting. It a big park and a long walk, and someone was heard to say 'if I'm not careful I'll start losing weight',

discovering amongst many things a Chinoiserie retreat (that link will lead to the others), grottos, a chapel of studded shells and stones, and this modest summer house in silver and blue.

TRAIN TO SALZBURG

We went for the day, two hours each way through the damp green countryside fat with brown and white cows, and soft wispy clouds around the hilltops as we arrived. Second class fares return for two totalled 28 euro - 7 euro each way per person. A (Munich) pensioner can pay 60 euro a year to cover all transport up to 50 Km from Munich. As our (pensioner) friend said, referring mainly to the beauty of these places and the free music available, we (Germans) may pay a lot of tax, but we get a lot for it. Including the angst of the Greeks.

Salzburg was much lovelier than I ever expected, a real place, the day after the festival had opened. Later the skies cleared and the sun shafted all those postcard kodak places everyone has seen. Not too many cliché shots from me, but a few little reminders of this and that for later. I'll probably add more later.

We had lunch at the Blaue Ganz (Blue Goose) - porcini soup, crumbed chicken breast whose fame is well justified, with sauv-blanc from Graz. The loo was as smart and understated as much else. One could imagine piped music I suppose, but this was story reading in a soft gentle male voice coming from unseen speakers, and I heard two words that were especially suggestive - Tadzio und Maman.

Der Goldener Hirsch was a walk through and an unexpected chat with a waiter (blame the sauv-blanc), and Cafe Tomaselli had pungent coffee and disappointing cake.

The Mirabell Gardens were in full bloom.

The old St Francis church was a calm retreat.

The main cathedral was standing room only for a free concert - brass quartet; small male choir; small female choir; soprano and organ. There are four separate organs. It's all intensely Catholic.

Outside in the  Cathedral square is the temporary seating for the annual opener - Jedermann - Hofmannsthal's version of Everyman. You know the ending.

MUSEUM BRANDHORST

In the Munich Kunstareal, on the other corner of the block with Pinakothek der Moderne is the Brandhorst Museum. The Brandhorsts had amassed a vast collection of edgy contemporary paintings, sculpture and installations and the story goes they offered it to whichever city could/would build a museum for it. Munich got it together. As it does.

Inside a eye-catching modest sized 2009 building of blocks of vertical strips whose colours wax and wane with lighting and aspect, are yet more glorious exhibition spaces over three floors gently connected by soft gliding stairs all beautifully finished in soft inviting curved timbers.

All you need to know is here.

Significant in impacting on me:

Andy Warhols, including his one massive wall (monochrome faces of Christ) from his Last Supper series, and his last supper too;

Damien Hirst with a giant installation of meticulously placed pills, reduced to lolly like insignificance on rows, and rows, and rows, of chrome shelving, exploring the doomed quest for survival;

Cy Twombly, best known for not being known, with explosive violent abstractions on war and the sea; huge sensual erotic rose swirls in staged pubescence;

Eric Fischl exploring the pyschosexual tensions in domesticity ....

This is a rich city this Munich.

OVER THE ALPS

We popped down to Cernobbio for a couple of nights.

It takes five hours - zipping through Switzerland (and maybe a nick of Austria, I'm not sure) - but the drive from Munich to Como over the Alps is fantastic, the fast autobahns of Deutschland tapering into narrower roads, tunnels and underpasses, zigzagging across bridges, picture postcard scenery at every turn, waterfalls, chalets, fast flowing streams, fields of wildflowers, summer grasses, slashes of red geraniums under windows, and the increasing brilliance of the blue sky of northern Italy and Lake Como, close by Milan, the jewel they (rightly) claim of the Italian lake district.

BMW beats elephants.

WE ARE HERE

Munich is looking wonderful. And prosperous. And a city of high cultural values, no news there, but you feel it immediately.

The weather is stormy.

Young people are a strong (and handsome) presence wherever you go. Bicycles, bicycles, bicycles. Easy riding in the flat open city, there's no need for (or question of) helmets here - the chance of contact with a hard surface looks very remote. A mother with her child in a rear drawn bike carriage is a common sight. Dedicated lanes are respected and where they aren't, traffic sharing is civil and generous. Public transport is multilayered (bus, tram, U-bahn, S-bahn) and well integrated. Tickets to the opera include travel all all public transport.

The grand 'strassen' in the Zentrum, lined with the saved, preserved and restored, are magnificent.

                                                               Leopoldstrasse

Everyone is friendly and gracious. The service ethic is faultless.

We are in Schwabing, staying close by friends.

The hotel is functional clean and slick modern. A delight really, tucked in a suburban street in this northern Munich district between Hohenzollernplatz and Kurfürsenplatz. There's not many prewar buildings (art noveaux-ish on the left next to postwar)

but enough to echo the past.

The main roads are wide and busy and the tram / bus services enviable.

A few blocks away is the park built on the mounded rubble of the ruined city with the telecommunication tower in the Olympiapark peeking in from the west. The morning are often cool and showery and this is the loveliest calm space to start the day, with the occasional jogger, dog walkers, and herded school children ...

THE MUNICH RING

It's underway. I should probably try and post on each part but that's really a recipe for 'the enemy of something is everything', or some such variation on that theme, so I'll at least try and document casts and dates, for the diary, some thoughts however superficial, and I've yet to see if I can rescue any of the curtain call photos. I hope there's some because they help me later recall some of the vibe.

So, it's Munich. It's sold out. It's controversial. It's in the National Theatre. And of course it's incredibly historic - for starters Das Rheingold (and Tristan, Meistersinger, Walküre) premiered here.

Two Wotans, Three Brunnhildes, Two Erdas, Two Siegfrieds, Two Mimes, Two Alberichs, Two Fafners, Four nights over Six days. Nothing is going to untangle all that, other than lengthy verbiage way beyond me, like a list:

Tuesday Das Rheingold - cast here.
Wednesday Die Walküre - cast here.
Friday Siegfried - cast here.
Sunday Götterdämmerung - cast here.

The other big names are
Production Andreas Kreigenburg
Conductor Kent Nagano (Bavarian State Orchestra)

And the sponsor BMW München
And the beneficent Count who is sitting discretely in the royal loge (two up on the left) my seat neighbour (and friend of said Count) tells me.

It's now Saturday, three down and tomorrow its The Last Night, and it's NINA STEMME. (Tonight is a concert night for our little gang). After some initial serious production reservations (if you ask a choreographer to produce something, expect choreography - remember Graham Murphy), some really slow music direction of oriental elegance and delicacy but really sagging in parts), some patchy vocals, things are now hot hot hot.

Some of the singing has been stupendous -

Wolfgang's Koch's magnificent Alberich;
Sophie Koch's devastating Walküre Fricka;
Anja Kampe's heart breakingly beautiful Sieglinde (I love love her voice) like Michelle Williams singing the Sieglinde of your dreams;
Klaus Florian Vogt's handsome slim Siegmund just a bit short on testosterone but who cares;
Iréne Theorin's ample piercing Walküre;
Thomas J Mayer's steady as she goes Ws;
Lance Ryan's handsome if not to my taste tone but god he did it Siegfried;
Catherine Naglestad's unbelievably sensual pulsing vibrating sexually alive huge voiced on my god can you believe it awakening Brünnhilde;
and the most brilliant dazzling not pinched white toned but rich and flexible and the best since Joan surely except delicious tiny pretty in a bone white lace dress all legs and arms and smile and here there and everywhere delicate dancing and fluttering with feathery lace hand fan-wings I thought she was in the ballet I would have paid for just her Stimme eines Waldvogels - Elena Tsallagova.

Lots of boos (production - more later) huge ovations (noone stands here, well not till the house lights start to dim - the seats are wicked hard and the civility of letting neighbours pass in the rows is wonderful)

Lots lots more .....