Eightsome

Yesterday afternoon, 13 of us convened for tea on Edmund's boat, with live music and the nostalgic hiss of a steam train in the background. Caroline had slaved over a hot stove all Friday, confecting - aided by the internet - a castle cake for William's eighth birthday. It arrived intact, retaining the desired wow factor despite one of its towers looking distinctly Pisan from the journey in a hot car.

Pieces of eight continued this afternoon with Glyndebourne's much talked about Octavian delighting us in the live relay of Der Rosenkavalier: more than eight times simpler to watch it at home than struggle into dinner jackets and drive all the way to East Sussex. And then there's the cost of tickets...

Bevan Boys

This week's Tablet carries an article about the late Roger Bevan, musician, and his amazing family. His granddaughters Sophie and Mary are both ENO solists, Sophie recently receiving acclaim for her part ("an eager little minx") in Der Rosenkavalier.

I came under "Mr. Bevan's" influence in the mid-50s, shortly after he had arrived to teach music at Downside. I was in my last year at the nearby prep school, All Hallows, and the school choir was co-opted to supplement the treble line for Messiah in Downside Abbey. (From the photograph, you can judge that it wasn't a minimalist performance. Incidentally, I spy Canon Thomas Atthill standing just behind Roger Bevan.)

It was the first time I had sung in a proper choir, and I still recall the buzz it gave and my huge debt owed to the unassumingly great Mr. Bevan - much the same sort of debt (albeit in a minor way) that his children and now grandchildren owe him: for a lifetime's love of music.

Lost in translation

Opera in English - save when that's the composer's language - perturbs me. The more so now that surtitles have become commonplace. Caroline and I were at the London Coliseum on Monday. Some magnificent orchestral playing - and singing, from principals in demand to sing their roles the world over. Was it "The Knight of the Rose" we saw? No. According to the programme, and as common sense dictates, it was Der Rosenkavalier. So why make someone as distinguished as a Sarah Connolly or a John Tomlinson learn their roles in English, rather than letting them and the rest of the cast sing in the original German? Is it really so as to make opera more accessible? We were very kindly given tickets, but with prices as they are, I really doubt whether the language factor is what brings a wider range of the public in. (Does the film industry dub foreign films? No, it surtitles them.) Is it so as to draw a line between ENO and Covent Garden? Why not just allow them to compete on musical and dramatic excellence? It can't surely be anything to do with the name "English National Opera"! Do Welsh National sing in Welsh? The late Alan Blyth's essay in the ENO programme book itself squishes any argument for performing Der Rosenkavalier in English: Hofmannsthal sets "standards of... literary excellence never before achieved... The text was written in an imaginary parlance... something inevitably lost in translation."

On the way to the Coliseum, we popped in to the recently reopened St Martin-in-the-Fields. Those short-listed for the commission for a new East window were asked to "animate the light" by a work which harmonised with the clear glass of the other church windows. I hope my photograph illustrates how nothing seems to have been lost by Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary in translating this brief.