Simon Bolivar: hero of Latin American independence

Bolivar was a great man in his way, and is a hero in several South American countries. With no military training, he became a brilliant strategist and led five countries – Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia – to independence. His great dream was a ‘united states of the Americas’ where all American countries would form a free federation.

Bolivar died of TB. But anyone who knows anything about Chavez can see where all this is leading. The ‘tests’ carried out on Bolivar’s body will reveal – guess what? That he was poisoned, either by the USA or more likely by the Colombians. Chavez has been having a border dispute with Colombia (which claims Colombian terrorists are being allowed to take refuge in Venezuela), and he will use the ‘results’ for propaganda, claiming that the Colombians poisoned Latin America’s greatest hero.

Of course no one will believe it. But it will give Chavez a chance to make trouble. Having failed a couple of years ago in his bid to pass a referendum that would let him be President for life, he’s been looking for other causes to take up, and a quarrel with Colombia over Bolivar will be one of them.

When I was in Caracas, there was a big exhibition in the City Hall there called ‘Caracas, Cradle of Liberty’. The building bore huge banners featuring the faces of Bolivar, Miranda (another nineteenth-century hero of the independence struggle) and – guess who? Hugo Chavez.

Chavez has been hijacking Bolivar’s name for a long time, calling his demagogic rule ‘Bolivarian Socialism’. By now, he probably believes that he is Bolivar. Rather than a socialist, he’s simply the latest in a long line of self-aggrandizing political bosses – what the Latin Americans call a caudillo.

It’s a disgrace that he’s dishonouring Bolivar in this way. And Bolivar’s family, who haven’t been consulted, are furious.  But it’s just part of the sad process by which political egoists descend into lunacy on the way to finally imploding.

Having written this, I probably won’t be allowed into Venezuela again. But having spent time in Caracas, which has become the most dangerous city in Latin America outside the border areas of Mexico, as well as the most polluted and traffic-ridden, I don’t think that’s too much of a problem. What Venezuela needs is Bolivar’s wide vision and generosity of spirit, not fake excuses for more tension.

Castle Crag is full of caves and chasms

Back to the Lakes last week to give a talk to a group of Swiss students, mostly MA students studying English Romanticism. After a great day touring Dove Cottage and walking up Sour Milk Gill to Easedale Tarn I stayed on and went for a scramble around the slopes of Castle Crag near Keswick.

Slate cavern hewn at the base of Castle Crag

The Crag doesn’t look huge from the Grange-Seatoller path but it’s really a ridge, much larger and more intricate than it looks, full of gulleys, crags, fissures and caves. Its slopes on the east side are thickly forested and you can disappear in there for hours and get happily lost. You can spend hours and days exploring its mysteries. I took a long time trying to locate Millican Dalton’s cave but didn’t succeed. I’ve tried and failed before. If anyone out there can give me precise directions to find it, please get in touch. 

Red squirrel explores dense pine forest around the Crag

I spent a while meditating in a grassy natural balcony half way up one of the crags and became aware of rapid zig-zaggy movements in a nearby tree. Turning gently that way I soon saw a pair of red squirrels chasing each other madly in a pine tree, tearing in spiral paths up and down the trunk. Managed to ease the camera out and when they finally tired of the game one of them ambled over towards me. This was about its closest point.

Helm Crag from a How Foot bedroom

Amanda came up and joined me for the weekend, which we spent at How Foot Lodge in Grasmere. They gave us a room with a wonderful foliage-fringed window looking straight out to Helm Crag. They told me they have an unusual number of free rooms this year owing to the World Cup so now’s your chance to make a booking on impulse at this lovely and relatively inexpensive hotel: www.howfoot.co.uk

Bluebells cover the lower slopes of Loughrigg Fell

The weather was kind and we had a few great walks, including the circuit around Grasmere and Rydal Water. Sheets of bluebells were still floating their intense colour on the slopes of Loughrigg, making a wonderful contrast with the dead russet of the bracken.

No, it isn't a Julian Cooper painting: the rock contemplates its own face in the water

At the Rydal Cavern I disregarded the National Trust’s warning notice (what are the odds, really, of a chunk of rock dropping from the roof  exactly at the moment I’m standing directly underneath?) to go into this, one of my favourite spaces, and contemplate the mirrorimage of the hewn rock in the still floodwater. Of course I advise you not to do this, and if you go in there it’s at your own risk. Don’t sue me if you get flattened.

I spent Monday and Tuesday this week up in the Lakes for a reason I couldn’t have guessed in a million years.

The Swinside Inn: traditional Newlands pub with great food

I’d had an email, totally unexpected, to say that the Cumbria Blue Badge Guides were celebrating the 20th anniversary of the founding of their Association in the Swinside Inn, at Newlands near Keswick, where the organisation was originally set up. They were going to have a plaque to commemorate the occasion and they wanted me to unveil it!

What's the collective noun for a set of Blue Badgers?

I found this pretty hard to believe because I don’t see myself as the sort of person who goes around unveiling plaques. But it wasn’t a hoax. It turned out that the Guides (and no, they’re not Girl Guides, they’re the accredited tourist guides who take people on all kinds of tours, big and small, around the towns, villages, historic sites and mountains of Cumbria) have been using my Literary Guide to the Lake District as a resource, year in and year out. So they’d decided to invite me to do the business.

A clean slate. Plenty of space for the next 20 years

I met the Guides and their friends and partners, led by Nicky Godfrey-Evans, at the Swinside Inn around 6 pm. After drinks and talk, and a photo session outside the Inn, we got the plaque unveiled. It’s a fine slab of Cumberland slate, engraved with the ‘Blue Badge’ design and details of the date and the Association it commemorates.

I quickly found that the Guides are a remarkable group of people, from all sorts of backgrounds. Their training is rigorous and they’re all enthusiasts for Cumbria (and other parts of the North-West) with their own special interests and expertise. They take on everything from demanding fell walks to coach tours and (as you’d expect in the Lakes) every one is a strong and genial personality. So the bar was buzzing with energy, ideas and laughter.

What you see when you wake up

 The Swinside Inn is under new management and George and Judy treated us to a superb meal – absolutely first rate traditional Cumbrian food with a good range of choice. I stayed resolutely mainstream and I couldn’t have done better. The steak-and-ale pie was quite definitely the best I have ever tasted – tender, beautifully cooked and full of flavour; and the sticky toffee pudding (I had it with ice cream) was utterly delicious, and a satisfyingly huge helping as well.

I stayed overnight and was greeted with a fabulous view up the Newlands Valley towards Causey Pike in golden morning sunshine. Fabulous.

Seathwaite Farm, heading for Grains Gill

With the weather so good I wasn’t going to stay in the valley, so I went up to Seathwaite and walked up Grains Gill, then climed Scafell Pike. The air on the summit was icy but the rain and cloud held off and there was the whole of the Lake District, the Solway and the west coast with the Isle of Man on the horizon: everything misty green, gold and purple under a radiant blue sky.

Stockley Bridge, towards Seathwaite

If you’re walking in Newlands, do check out the Swinside Inn. And let’s hope for lots more fresh, sunny days like that as spring turns into summer.

It was a lesirely drive home, not least because some sheep were being moved from field to field at Lodore. They got

Looking back from Grains Gill

away from the dog and spilled all along the road, up side paths and into other people’s fields. One driver (not me) got out to stand and watch. Finally the shepherd came down with his dog. Unabashed, he took one look at the motorist and remarked, pointing at the other side of the road, ‘If ye’d've stood theer, ye’d've done sum gud.’ Quintessential Cumbrian remark!

Pedestrians made it a leisurely journey home

Hi Everyone: this is just a quick reminder to say that Mancuban’s excellent Republic of Salsa will be on again tomorrow night from 8 pm at Chorlton Irish Club, Manchester. It includes a free class, the best Cuban music around, loads of friendly people and a great ambience with drinks at remarkably cheap prices. I always enjoy these nights a lot – click on the ‘Salsa’ button in the sidebar to find a review of a previous evening – and Amanda and I will definitely be going. Hope to see you there!

Gustav Mahler - currently celebrated in Manchester

 But they proved equal to the task, and if the Third didn’t send us out quite as dazed and elated as its predecessor, it was mainly because this symphony, though just as complex, is more contemplative, a slower-paced work with quieter dynamics relying more or mood and melody than on stark contrasts and shattering climaxes.

Vassily Sinaisky took the first movement, with its resounding opening fanfare on the horns representing the great god Pan arriving to reanimate nature after the winter, at a steady but not rapid pace – very much the approach Stenz used last time for the opening of the Second. The brass section was superb throughout, playing with resonance and precision. Just as well because in every movement the brass has vital thematic parts to play, most often to remind us, in some way, of that opening motif of descending horn notes. The first movement as a whole gave an experience of restrained power, deep strings sporadically throbbing and surging, with the brass and the more fragile, fragmentary woodwind floating over the top.

Here’s an extract from the movement (LSO, splendidly conducted by Valery Gergiev, looking more than ever like Boris Karloff):

Mahler’s idea for the symphony was to make it ‘a work of such magnitude that it actually mirrors the whole world…In my symphony the whole of nature finds a voice.’ The movements aim to layer one tier of being on top of another. The orchestra gave second movement (originally titled ‘What the flowers tell me’) a light, almost staccato touch and brought out the exuberant, dance-like qualities of the third (‘What the animals of the forest tell me’, according to Mahler’s early notes). The distant horns (how Mahler loves those!) sounded here like a faint reminder of the world of men, rather thanan eruption of the animalistic Pan.

Reaching ‘Night’ and the world of men, the 4th movement, mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill got her entrance exactly right: the voice seemed to emerge and radiate without an identifiable starting-point, simply welling up out of the orchestral sound, as if uttered by the universe as well as by humanity. This lovely setting of the mysertious Nietzsche poem was a delight.

Mahler’s gentle audacity is astounging and wonderful:  having begun the symphony with Pan, then led on to Nietzsche (who loathed Christianity), he then dances into the fifth movement with a children’s folksong – it sounds almost like a skipping game – about Jesus, St Peter, and God’s forgiveness. And every so often what sounds like a reminiscence of a Bach choral sweeping in to underline the religious elements. The CBSO Youth Chorus made a fine job of the children’s chorus, vigorous and precise, entering with the ‘Bimm bamm…’ of the church bells. Personally I would have liked a bit more volume from them, and I suspect Sinaisky held them back a bit too much; but it wasn’t a major blemish.

The transition to the sixth movement made me see something I’d missed before, listening to the symphony endlessly on disc, which is that having brought Christianity and Gid into the structure, Mahler goes a step further and higher. Where the 2nd symphny ends in song, it’s as if he now sees that words aren’t enough and nothing but pure music will say what he has to say. We’ve gone beyond God too, beyond anything that can be formulated or imagined.

The final movement was wonderful, with that  sense of endlessly-shifting and changing and evolving harmonies as Mahler finds his way very slowly through a vast musical mist, drawing notes out and mutating the harmonies so that you constantly find a chord emerging that’s different from the one you expected, and then that melds into yet another and so on. Sinaiski did a good job with the dynamics here, very slowly building and building the movement until all the layers came together in those vast closing chords that show you the whole imaginable cosmos towering up octave above octave, layer above layer, energised and tranquil but completely alive, like a vast wall of glass or water that doesn’t topple but just settles and poises there, with the brass finally folding harmoniously into the picture and the timpani slowly repeating deep notes that echo the bell-chimes of the children’s song. The combination of energy and peace at the end of the symphony was very impressive. Here’s a clip (Dudamel, La Scala Philharmonic):

I didn’t cry this time (though the girl next to me was in tears throughout the final movement). There’s less melodrama, more serenity in this than in the Second Symphony, but the vision is vaster. Maybe Sinaiski didn’t always make the dynamics as exciting as he might have done. I overheard one departing audience member talking about the difficulty of staying awake, in a way that made me wonder if the work is just too big and complicated to grasp until you’ve heard it over and over again and got all those details into your system. The applause was loud and long but it didn’t really match the reaction to No 2.

Certainly I notice these days how closely-integrated the Third is. The pattern – melodic and rhythmic – of that opening fanfare, for example, comes into just about everything in the work. Sometimes I think Mahler 3 has an entire symphony for its first movement, and a whole other one for its last, with a suite of other things in between. Then again I find myself thinking the entire work is a single movement. The first time you hear it, it’s a sprawl. By the tenth time, you just notice the mind-boggling precision with which it’s all integrated. Very strange. But how wonderful to hear these masterpieces one after another, so well-played. Not sure yet if I’ll make the Fourth on Thursday. Lorraine’s Rueda class at Cuba Cafe is calling, and Amanda is able to dance again now her broken arm has healed. A dilemma. But I’ll post something as soon as I get to another Mahler extravaganza. Meanwhile there’s always salsa and a million other things.
And don’t forget: starting 5 April, BBC Radio 3 will broadcast the entire series on consecutive Monday nights at 7 pm. Listen to any you missed and see if you agree with me! And do post your comments.

Republic of Salsa: Manchester's Best Cuban Salsa Nights

I don’t want to leave without giving you more fun than that, so here’s something a bit different. Last night at Pauline’s rueda class (Tuesdays, Spreadeagle, Chorlton, Manchester) I heard some good music on Jordan’s iphone. He told me it was Orquesta de la Luz. Ever heard Japanese salsa? No? Then take a look at this clip, recorded in New York. I guarantee it’ll blow your socks off!

That’s all for today. But watch out shortly for posts about the wonderful, rediscovered Ennerdale poet Tom Rawling, and about Anacaona – the song, the woman, and the stories behind the song we all love to dance to!

Here are all the bits and pieces I’ve meant to write about salsa lately! First, an update: the next Salsa Republic at Manchester’s Chorlton Irish Club will be on Saturday 20 February (NOT 6 Feb) – this is because Lorraine got stuck several extra days in Cuba (poor girl!!) owing to snow at Gatwick causing flight cancellations.

Late last year, just before my phone and internet were cut off and the UK disappeared under a blanket of snow, I recorded a piece about salsa for the BBC World Service, in conversation with Miami Cuban Emilio San Pedro. The studio people mixed in a few good tracks and we had some fun. And a few important points about the spirit of salsa were raised.

It seemed a pity for this to disappear for ever – it’s long gone off the BBC i-player – so here it is as an audio file. I hope you’ll enjoy it, if you didn’t hear it first time around. And please feel free to comment!

Conversation with Emilio San Pedro

Meanwhile, Yanet has -sadly – been voted off BBC’s ‘So You Think You Can Dance’. She had a bad night last Saturday: she looked exhausted and stressed-out from the moment she started and something was clearly wrong. It was bad luck, too, that the dance she had to do was the Lindy Hop – a dance that’s both very difficult and extremely ungainly. No chance to show off her ballet skills or body isolation there: Lindy Hop makes people bounce around like manic toddlers, without grace or dignity. But there was more to it than that.

My guess is that there were other, personal problems in the background. Yanet, unlike other competitors, was thousands of miles from her family. Moreover, there are special problems about being Cuban – layers of difficulty most of us can’t even imagine, economic, social, political. Being an exiled Cuban doesn’t remove the difficulties, it just changes them a bit. But Yanet will remain a star and her teaching will be in more demand than ever. Let’s forget ‘So You…’ and take a look at her as she is, so often, at her best:

Finally, don’t miss the excellent LATIN MUSIC USA series on BBC 4 TV. It’s at 10 pm Fridays and this week – 5 Feb – they are doing the history of SALSA. The trailers showed the Fania All Stars with Hector Lavoe and Celia Cruz so this is going to be legendary stuff. To make it even better, the programme is immediately followed on the same channel with broadcast of a great live salsa band LA EXCELENSIA playing at the Barbican, and after that is a documentary about Celia Cruz herself. At last someone has come up with a TV channel that’s worth watching! As a preview, here’s a nice, funky, atmospheric clip of La Excelencia:

All this TV won’t turn you into a couch potato, because if last week’s similar viewing on the same channel is anything to go by (history of Latin music up to Santana, followed by salsa Paladium orchestra, followed by documentary on Carmen Miranda) you will be dancing around the room all evening. Enjoy!

Mahler’s Second was bound to be a make-or-break point in the unfolding ‘Mahler in Manchester’ project. The Halle and BBC Philharmonic are playing all ten of the symphonies this year to mark the Mahler centenary, and this was the first of the really big ones.

Gustav Mahler

On Thursday, though, there were no such doubts. This was a real, transcendent experience, with everything you could look for: clarity, dynamics, amazing textures, lyrical passion. And, incidentally, a capacity audience. The Bridgewater Hall was full and the atmosphere was charged.

The Second has maybe the most electrifying of all Mahler’s openings: an intense vibrating note on all the upper strings that just rivets your attention until the grumbling, growling basses and cellos start to enter and the whole thing begins to gather momentum like some colossal machine or mountain avalanche. Fascinating and terrifying.

And the melodies! Mahler has an unbelievable fertility in generating one gorgeous tune after another. The melodies just seem to flow out of him: eeerie little folksongs, huge chunky rhythmic patterns reminiscent of Brahms or Beethoven, catchy dance tunes, marches, rhapsodic romantic syrup, postmodern hair-raising discord-patterns, you name it. 

And then he collages and interweaves and overlaps all of this to produce amazing drama – changes of mood, gradual revelations, mystical ecstasy, frightening shocks. It’s all there, and the result is a sound-drama (or movie if you like) that has the range of an epic yet keeps you engaged as if he were writing the soundtrack to your most intimate thoughts.

Speaking of which, I discovered Mahler when I was still at school, on my father’s LP records, and then by luck shared rooms at University with a music student, the conductor Peter Lawson, who was a Mahler fanatic. So I got soaked in the music for a whole year and it went somewhere very deep inside.  And while other kinds of music have set the pace of my life at different times – the Stones, Jefferson Airplane, JJ Cale, Mingus, Parker, Coltrane, Bach, Stravinsky, and for the past few years Salsa in particular, underneath it all Mahler has never gone away. I find myself singing snatches of his music at the oddest moments. It’s like part of my DNA.

Thursday’s performance absolutely lived up to all of this. Markus Stenz took the first movement at a relaxed tempo but he kept it moving with a steady relentless pulse and there wasn’t a slack or dull moment.  The momentum was maintained throughout the symphony and there was a clarity and precision at every point that gave the sense of an orchestra absolutely involved and attentive. The dynamics were interesting too. Stenz, who seemed to be enjoying himself immensely throughout,  brought the harps right up, something I enjoyed because it emphasised one of Mahler’s strangest and most delightful textures.

Susan Gritton (soprano) and Katarina Karneus (mezzo) melted into the heart-stoppingly beautiful lyrics of the last movement with crystalline beauty as well as solid volume. The whole thing was so perfect and felt so natural that the symphony as a whole felt  more like a geological or spiritual phenomenon – two things that aren’t so far apart for Mahler – than a human composition.

The colossal surges of sound and energy in the finale  rolled over us with a huge unanswerable impact.  This was Mahler the visionary, experiencing an apocalyptic resolution – maybe a highly unorthdox Day of Judgment, or maybe all beings finally revealing their Buddha-nature. As he wrote, ‘there are no sinners, no just. None is great, none small. There is no punishment and no reward. An overwhelming love illuminates our being.’ I’ll put in a clip of another superb performance – Rattle/CBSO – at the end of this post, so you can get a glimpse of what it’s all about.

I had tears in my eyes at the end – something I don’t recall from previous performances. Half of the audience got to their feet during the applause, and I don’t know why the other half didn’t do the same. I never expect to hear a better performance of the symphony, and I’m grateful to have been present for that one. I don’t want to intensify the competition for tickets, which are going fast or already gone, but if you haven’t yet booked, I would suggest that you think about trying to hear some of the eight symphonies that remain. I couldn’t get to The Song of the Earth on Saturday, sadly, but I’m hoping to hear number 3 on 13 February. I probably won’t bother you with my amateurish comments on it. But if Thursday is any indication, this Mahler season is going to be unforgettable.

One of the best-informed, most efficient and most cost-effective relief organisations currently working in Haiti is Medecins Sans Frontieres. If you’re in doubt about how to help, I’d suggest giving to them. The web address is: www.msf.org.uk They speak French, they’ve been there a long time already, and even the BBC News last night attributed some of its information about conditions in Haiti to MSF – which indicates that they know what’s going on.

But while doing what can be done to help, let’s resist the tendency to talk about Haiti as some permanently pathetic crippled nation. Haiti has had a bad press for centuries partly because it was the first country where slaves achieved a successful and lasting rebellion and established an independent nation.

It happened because in 1793 the French Revolutionary government abolished slavery in all French possessions, including Haiti. The black leader Toussaint L’Ouverture established a successful and moderate government which looked like giving the new island state prosperity. Then Napoleon Buonaparte, in a treacherous reversal of policy, decided the island must not become independent of France. He sent an army to conquer Haiti and reimpose slavery. L’Ouverture was captured through an act of treachery (he was invited to talks with the French, who abducted him) and taken to France, where he died in prison.

William Wordsworth wrote an unforgettable poem about him in 1802, not knowing whether L’Ouverture – a hero of liberty – was alive or dead:

TO TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE
TOUSSAINT, the most unhappy man of men!
Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den;
O miserable Chieftain! where and when
Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.
- William Wordsworth

The French were later defeated and regained their independence. Foreign intervention and foreign debt have been problems ever since, as has internal corruption. But Haiti’s people have been resilient, resourceful and brave.

They have been badly treated, and dismissed by foreign observers, often through racism. Entertaining but sensational and racist books like William Seabrook’s famous The Magic Island led to the identification of Haitian religion, Vodun, with ‘Black Magic’, whereas it is simply West African religion transmuted into Catholic Christian imagery – distinct from, but parallel to, Cuba’s Santeria. (Seabrook is said to have written his book by sitting in a Port-au-Prince bar and taking down everything the local drinkers told him. You can imagine the results.)

Tree of Life is a circular metalcut, devised for use on oildrum heads

Behind the Buddha on my mantelpiece is a Haitian ‘Tree of Life’ sculpture cut from a thin disc of steel. It’s exquisite, as you can see: a beautiful thing and full of life. These metal-cuttings originated with artists who took the tops of old oildrums and shaped the design to make perfect use of the circular steel disc.

In the Dominican Republic I slept for a week beside an exquisite Haitian steel screen showing Vodun deities in a forest: a work of art the medieval scultpors of Europe’s Gothic cathedrals would have appreciated.

Creole Madonna and Child, Haitian Folk Art, c. 2006

Haitian Adam and Eve, steel screen panel

Our bedroom is graced by a lovely Haitian Madonna and Child in radiant colours. Let us pray to her and other gods and spirits that Haiti may benefit from the world’s goodwill now and into the future. reafforestation, lighter but stronger buildings, some good roads and better education will be a few of the long term goals but Haiti has a proud history and a rich culture.

They also have some of the Caribbean’s most magnificent traditions of folk art and music.

Right now we’re necessarily hearing a lot about the agonies. But let’s not forget that Haiti also represents, and will represent again, ‘Man’s unconquerable mind’.