Proms? What Proms?

 

 

Anyone looking for an uplifting musical experience should steer clear of the famous Prom concerts in London’s Albert Hall.

The hall itself is enormous and impressive, seating several thousands at a time. In addition, especially cheap tickets are sold as standing room only in the center of the main auditorium. All well and good, provided those standing remain stock still throughout the performance, and on the whole I think they did.

As a result of a mistake in our booking procedure we found ourselves sitting in row 2 of the main auditorium, which meant that our view of the orchestra and the soloist (Stephen Hough playing the piano solo in Rachmaninov’s variations on a theme by Paganini) was obscured by the people standing.

That’s just one of those things, we said, and settled down to enjoy the performance. Lo and behold, in trooped a bevy of well-dressed and coiffured young men, obviously well-educated, each one clutching a large plastic glass containing…beer!  They took their places in the row in front of us and proceeded to quaff their drinks. This went on throughout the performance and seems to have become part of the Proms experience  (this was not the famous Last Night at the Proms, when riotous behaviour is de rigeur).

An elderly Indian couple took their places in front of us, also in the front row, and sat quietly. Every now and again the wife (presumably) would shove her hand into the handbag on her lap, silently extract a sweet and put it in her mouth. The young men continued to swill their drinks, albeit in silence.

Half-way through the first item in the programme (Tchaikovsky’s Hamlet overture) a large lady dressed in pink sitting two seats to my right suddenly stood up. I thought she might not be feeling well and wanted to leave. But no. To my astonishment she started gesticulating frantically and mouthing ‘stoppit! Stoppit!’ to the Indian lady sitting several seats away from her.

This presumably had the desired effect, and the Indian lady’s hand stopped traveling from her bag to her mouth. After the interval the Indian couple did not return to their seats. The young men continued to drink, but this elicited no response or criticism from the large lady in pink.

If this is the customary behaviour of the audience at the Proms you won’t find me there again. At least in Israel the audience isn’t eating and drinking during concerts, and neither do officious persons take it upon themselves to teach others how to behave. At any rate, not in a manner that can only be described as overtly racist.

 

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Adieu Limousin

Our summer in Limousin concluded with a short stay further south, at a Gite in the countryside near the picturesque village of Montcuq. Finding the place called Mondaunet put our GPS under a lot of pressure, as the name did not feature in its database, but eventually, after several phone calls to the owners, we got there while it was still daylight, knowing for sure that we’d never find it in the dark.

We were greeted by our host singing, ‘A blessing on your head, Mazal tov, Mazal tov,’ upon hearing that we were from Israel, and his patter, string of jokes, puns and songs kept up a constant flow during our two days there. Peter’s long suffering wife, the delightful Zoe, would occasionally mutter ‘I think that’s enough, Peter,’ but Peter was not to be deterred. And so we spent  our brief stay there in a constant state of hysterical laughter, other than when we were trying to counter with a joke of our own. It is quite an experience to be entertained by your host over a lavish continental breakfast in the charming dining room-cum-living room that Zoeand Peter have created themselves from what was once a tobacco-drying barn.

Judith, our friend in Montcuq, accompanied us on our last night to the neighboring village of Lauzerte, where a concert was to be given in the framework of the region’s Festival du Quercy Blanc in the medieval church of St. Barthélemy. Although the string trio does not have a name, the three musicians, Mark Drobinsky on cello, Anton Martynov on violin and Ralph Szigeti on viola, gave a stellar performance of works by Bach, Schubert, Dvorak and Beethoven.

What a wonderful way to end another magnificent summer in La Belle France, and no Brexit or Brexiteer is going to spoil our enjoyment of the good things of life, and the good things of life in France in particular.

 

The Creuse in WWII

In this far-flung corner in the middle of France lies an agricultural region where villages and hamlets, and mainly isolated farms, nestle in the verdant hills and valleys. The area is not distinguished by being near to the sea or anywhere near any mountains, and this in fact is its distinguishing feature. Because of its geophysical characteristics it is subject to long cold winters and fairly long hot summers, sometimes interspersed by spring and autumn, though this is not always the case. In some respects it resembles the Mid-West of the USA and, as I have lived for some time there, too, I have found that in both places the local people are warm-hearted, honest and kind.

I have no statistical data to bear out my theories, though I do have some personal information, so I must try to avoid descending into sweeping generalizations. Consequently, I won’t venture to state that in this part of France the Resistance was at least as active as anywhere else, and that a relatively large number of Jews and others considered undesirable by the Nazis found refuge in one or another remote village or hamlet.

The occupying Germans did their best to hunt down and capture any and every expression of resistance wherever they could find it, and even elsewhere. The nearby village of Oradour-sur-Glane paid a heavy price in 1944, when the entire population of the village (642 men, women and children) were massacred in a retaliatory action.

An exhibition of photographs taken by an amateur photographer in the Creuse during the Occupation is currently being held at the Departmental Archives in the town of Gueret. The photos were taken by Jacques Poudensam, a local pharmacist and dentist, and the grainy black-and-white pictures portray a period of hardship and determination, showing how the people of the Creuse coped with the situation, and also how they fought against the enemy.

Thus we see tired housewives standing in line in May 1943 in order to buy their meagre ration of meat (anyone who has read Kristin Hannah’s novel, ‘The Nightingale,’ will have a pretty clear idea of the situation), as well as a German reconnaissance plane over the town in August 1944. Battles or skirmishes between the Germans and the local Resistance forces continued throughout the period of the Occupation, but intensified towards the end of the war, especially once news came through of the Allied landing in Normandy in June 1944.

A number of plaques can be found on the walls of buildings in the centre of Gueret commemorating members of the Resistance who fell there in 1944, such as the one commemorating Wolf Glicenztzein, aged 55, who was killed there on 7th June 1944. The exhibition contains photos showing the French flag hoisted aloft the church tower in June 1944, and members of the Maquis marching proudly through the Gueret market place in August 1944. Finally, in November 1944, we see troops (presumably of the Free French forces) massed in Place Bonnyaud (where the Gueret market is now held every week). Bear in mind the fact that Paris was liberated by the Free French forces, led by de Gaulle, in August 1944, not long after the Allied landing in Normandy.

And so, a small, almost insignificant exhibition in an out-of-the-way French town reveals the heroism and fortitude of the local populace at a time when most of Europe was suffering under the yoke of the Nazi aspiration for world dominance. Only by the concerted effort and sacrifice of many millions of people, both civilian and military, was it possible for that dream to be crushed so that sanity could prevail once more.

 

 

 

Bloody Barbarians

I consider myself to be something of a purist when it comes to the English language, which is hardly surprising since I’ve spent most of my adult life working as a translator/editor/writer. I try to avoid profanities, and will rarely even press ‘Like’ for Facebook items that use them.

However, every rule has to have its exception, and the recent terrorist attacks that have been perpetrated in France, where I’m holidaying at the moment, have brought me to cast aside all my scruples about linguistic propriety and define the individuals who committed those outrages in the terms above (or worse).

Brought up in what seems in retrospect to have been the idyllic atmosphere of England in the 1950s, albeit in conditions of relative poverty and privation, I have imbibed the values and attitudes of a caring and egalitarian society, founded on the principles of justice and decency that stem from the Judeo-Christian tradition.

That may be why it is so difficult for me to understand what goes through the mind of a young man anywhere, anytime who takes a truck and ploughs through a crowd of people celebrating an evening of fireworks marking Bastille day, or wields a knife or gun to cold-bloodedly murder a middle-aged couple, an elderly priest, or a group of children together with their teacher.

I’m no psychologist, I admit, but it seems to me that there are too many people out there with criminal or psychopathic tendencies, and when those individuals are encouraged by a certain religion to go out and kill anyone who does not share their religious or political or national views the result is the kind of atrocity we have witnessed in the last few weeks.

Back in the Middle Ages it was considered acceptable to kill those who disagreed with you, and even Christianity, the religion of brotherly love, has engaged in activities of that kind in the past (think of the Crusades, the Huguenots, the Wars of Religion in Europe that ended with ‘cuius regio eius religio,’ whereby the ruler’s subjects follow his religion).

However, the generally accepted view till now has been that the defeat or collapse of the societies that perpetrated atrocities in Europe in recent years has put an end to modern acts of barbarity, with the establishment of the European Union constituting the cornerstone of the new era of international peace and cooperation.

Unfortunately, however, no one seems to have paid sufficient attention to what has been happening in distant corners of the Middle East and the Arabian peninsula, where the methods and mores of the Middle Ages still prevail. Now, it seems, those trends and attitudes have managed to spread their tentacles beyond that region, a process that is facilitated by the movement of people resulting from the barbarism of their own rulers.

Here, in rural France, where all is peaceful and the countryside a symphony in green, hearing and reading about those horrific incidents in another part of the country makes one shudder and wonder whether life can ever be the same again in the country of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. How can rampant barbarism exist in the country that has produced the highest expressions of human achievement in the arts, philosophy and science?

In an ‘Open letter to a Candidate for Jihad,’ Zineb el Rhazoui, a young journalist of Moroccan origin, writes in last week’s ‘Le Figaro’ magazine of her contempt for those young men who, unlike her, have grown up in France, benefited from that country’s free education and medical care, are more fluent in French than in Arabic, and don’t even know what the word Jihad means (effort, she says). They are so brainwashed by their religious leaders, she claims, that they are ready to abandon every shred of decency and respect for human life. She ends her article by pointing out that Muslims and Arab culture play a prominent part in modern France, and that it would be better for those young men and for society at large if they were to invest their energies in helping others and contributing to the wider society rather than indulging in a frenzy of destruction and murder that benefits no one, least of all themselves.

If only her voice would penetrate the thick skulls of those bloody barbarians.