My Messiah marathon: Ten performances, five cities, two countries, one beloved masterpiece.

Nearly a year ago, I posted a piece about summer fruits which was optimistically listed as ‘Part One’. Here finally is the second part which will be about apricots, white peaches, raspberries, and strawberries, all of which have been at their succulent best in the last month or so.  While most of the USA has been baking in excessive heat or having unbreathable air from wildfires, here in Northern California we have had weeks of perfect summer days, ‘Goldilocks’ weather you might say; not too hot nor too cold, but just right. Not only have we enjoyed eating lots of glorious fruit, but we can do it sitting at a table in our garden surrounded by fragrant rose bushes. In other words, something close to paradise on earth.

Before the pandemic, I had always read a lot of detective stories. They are absorbing and engaging, and back when we relied on physical books — before Kindles and smartphone apps — they were easy to carry when travelling. Of course, when concert life was forced to a standstill in 2020, the genre was something of a lifesaver. 

This has been a glorious summer for fruits of all kinds. Here in northern California so many varieties are available that each trip to my favourite shop, The Monterey Market, has been a wonderful adventure: their bins are full of melons of every shape and colour, white and yellow peaches, even little ones shaped like doughnuts, Blenheim apricots, and luscious figs. There is simply so much to delight every gastronaut. In this short piece, I cannot possibly do justice to more than a handful of them and even then, I will split the essay up into two parts. This basket will contain cherries, nectarines, melons and figs. Apricots, plums, pluots, damsons, currants and berries will just have to wait for the next episode.

Although I have lived in the USA for just over forty years, I still consider myself a Brit and get very nostalgic when I think of my homeland. Yesterday was therefore a very sad one. I never met Her Majesty but I was very moved by her passing.

On Good Friday 1742, Handel gave the first performance of Messiah in Neal’s Music Hall in Fishamble Street, Dublin. Two hundred and eighty years later, also on Good Friday, I was privileged to conduct the same piece just over a mile away.

After a very jolly ten days in St. Louis, the next stop on my mid-western jaunt was Cleveland, another city that I know well. I have been there many times often experiencing some dramatic weather. My début with the Cleveland Orchestra was nearly cancelled because of a large snowstorm on Valentine’s Day and several concerts at Blossom have been accompanied by spectacular thunderstorms. On this visit, apart from flying in on a very windy evening where my little plane was buffeted about in a rather alarming way, the rest of my time in the city was without snow or anything dramatic.

Here’s a delicious recipe for a hazelnut torte with chocolate chestnut ganache. The recipe is from my husband David V. R. Bowles.

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas last year, I was thrilled to have three weeks of concerts, fourteen in all, in three of my favourite cities in the centre of the USA. I had been to all of them often, even lived in one of them for over five years, but because of the pandemic, I had not visited them for some time.

So much has changed in the last eighteen months or so. Most musicians have not been performing except on their own and much collective music-making has happened over Zoom. Those of us who travel around the globe to give concerts have stayed at home, sometimes taking up hobbies or finally being able to read those long novels that have been sitting on the nightstand, sometimes for years. I feel that I’ve been one of the lucky ones.