Walton’s La Mortella

A whirlwind of chamber music in Campania

Georgie is on the phone.

Well not like it used to be; the call up the stairs, ‘Charles it’s for you, it’s that woman again.’

But she is on the phone, albeit in a message of alphanumeric digits. I don’t quite get it. It could be an intercept from an Enigma machine hinting at an invasion threat to the Aegadian Islands, or a word game on daytime TV: Italian coast, Walton, Guy, Mishka, Naples, Clem, Ischia, Cellos. It doesn’t matter that it is all a bit garbled because when Georgie and Mark suggest an adventure, you agree in the instant and worry about the details later.

The outcome is that five weeks later we are meeting the other members of our party over dinner in a stylish hotel looking across a cyanotic bay of Naples, to the broken peak of Vesuvius. It had been a mad day; plane, taxi, train, hydrofoil, and then standing room only on the bus between Positano and the hotel, but we had managed Spaghetti Vongole in Sorrento and a waterside Negroni in Positano, before the emetic bus ride back to Seiano.

Hands are shaken, introductions made. I am talking to a retired chairman of a public company who is writing a book about civilisations conflict between belief and aggression. The quiet silver fox saying little, has lost his voice, but needs to use it less here than in the House of Lords. Guy’s wife teaches on an international economics course in California. Then there is the polyglot ex fromagere from Gloucester. We are well covered medically too, with specialists in intensive care and nephrology. I ask the entrepreneur who runs a multinational eco-friendly packaging company about the packaging he packs the packaging in; is it also biodegradable? He grins sheepishly; ‘good question,’ is the reply. Prosecco is poured and glugged.

But how can there only be a dozen of us, including a bunch of fine musicians, two organisers and three children? How does this musical tour work with so few Indians and so many world class chiefs?

I still don’t know the answer.

The next day we are in an intimate chapel to hear Guy Johnston and Michele de Martino on cello and mandolin. Locals cram into the tiny transept as we file into the choir. Next to me a friendly dog nestles under the misericord, later thinking the applause cause to dash for freedom. Silence falls as the musicians enter. Guy’s Stradivari speaks to us through his sublime artistry in Bach’s fourth cello suite. It is as warm as old leather, enfolding as evening sunshine in a dusty library. Plangent, soul shuddering tenderness, with an intensity that quells even the noises from the street outside. Then Michele astonishes with virtuosity on his Mandolin the like of which we have never heard before. The locals are wowed and a little bewildered by a free concert by such outstanding musicians with an audience of a dozen Brits.

Then it is a walk through the narrow cobbles of St Agnello, for a meal in Marcello's private home. The joy is not just in the faces of the guests but in the eyes of our hosts – proper music lovers rewarding excellence with warm hospitality and lashings of Lacrima Christi.

But we are barely out of the starting blocks. The next day Pierluigi welcomes us into his baroque Neapolitan apartment, so well hidden in the crossword of tiny streets, that the proprietor of the vegetable shop opposite could offer no help with directions. The door is opened by a gentleman’s gentleman, wearing a white jacket adorned with gold braid. Here, in the frescoed salone, an elegant 1820 Forte Piano poses, just waiting to reveal its tone and timbre. Not for long; just time enough to scoff a perfect lunch of antipasti and a subtle pasta dish, served impeccably by the mysterious major-domo.

The musicians have been swelled by Mishka Rushdie Momen and Richard Gowers, but the audience is just us and a couple of Piere Luigi’s cultured friends.  Mishka’s Moonlight sonata on this instrument was magnificent. The languid, almost liquid notes of the much-loved opening were a fantasy indeed, overtaken by the bravado of the presto. She is really something else. From my front row gilded chair, I could see the workings of this walnut veneered gem, and could see little bobbly things bounce up with every key press. I watched in awe as the pace intensified. Unbelievable to be able to move your fingers that fast with such precision and finesse. Sadly, I am just a consumer of music; it is enough to have the sound waves impinge on my tympani . . . To be able to do that . . . I can barely get a cup of coffee to my lips without half of it ending on my shirt. Such control, sensitivity and exactitude. I am in awe.

But we must move on – this time to the port for a boat to Ischia. It’s a fine evening and soon we are speeding towards another volcano, (well fourteen, or so our guide told us) on a zippy hydrofoil.

By now the Guy Johnston entourage are firm friends, melded into a bedazzled brat-pack by the organisation of Nicky and Arielle, and the musicianship of our performers. They leave nothing for us to do save turn up and sink into the charms of the next event.

It turns out it's horticultural.

We find ourselves standing in La Mortella, (the myrtle) William Walton’s lush semitropical garden halfway up a rocky hill on the northeast of the island.

It is 1948 and William Walton is visiting Argentina. He is 46  and although respected and valued as a composer, he isn’t quite where he had hoped to be. Façade, his avante garde collaboration with Edith Sitwell, positioned him at the vanguard of British Modernism, but his subsequent more traditionally mannered pieces left his supporters disappointed. During the war he composed film music, but if anything, that diminished rather than enhanced his self-esteem and status. From the late thirties until her death in 1948 he was in a relationship with Alice Viscountess Wimborne, who was twenty-two years his senior. Walton was devastated by her death; but not for long. Later in the year, to assuage his grief, his publisher sent him to a conference in Buenos Aries. He met Susana Gil Passo, the daughter of a wealthy lawyer, and was thunder struck. He proposed to her the night they met, but unsurprisingly she was hesitant. Amazingly, given that she was 24 years younger than he, a few days later she accepted, and they were married in the December of 1948.

They visited Ischia the following year and immediately Walton decided it was where he wanted to live. They bought land and moved there permanently in 1956. It was here that Susana started to build her garden, and in its magnificent mature incarnation, this is where we now stand.

How do I know this? Because having explored the lush, water filled shade of the lower garden, shadowed by the now enormous trees that Susana planted as saplings, and having clambered the steep paths up to the hotter mediterranean zone, we end up in the music room with a cocktail in hand. Here Michael White – a critic who had known Susana in her lifetime (she died in 2010) – gave a super talk about the Waltons, not sparing the reality that he composed his best work before his marriage to Susana and his move to La Mortella . . .  With one exception, the cello concerto, and this was what Guy Johnston was to perform for us, with Richard Gowers providing the orchestration from a Bechstein keyboard.

The music room at the Walton home is embedded in the verdure of the garden. It is intimate and bright, with every wall covered with Waltonalia. The concerto is beautiful. The tones Guy conjures from his wonderful instrument in this poignant piece are captivating and moving. Micheal White feels that this piece, above all other Walton’s post Mortilla oeuvre, conjures the warmth and colours of Cantabria, and I think we all felt it in this special setting.

Then Mishka and Richard attack Vaughan Williams concerto for two pianos. I say attack because at times it was like two rhinoceroses charging through a teak forest. The striking thing was the differences in deportment and attitude. There was Richard, upright, controlled, calm, looking stiff and studious. Opposite him, his fiancé, petite, mobile, passionate, living each nuanced bar, emotion in every movement of her slender arms. What a fine crucible to create a marriage.

Then the finale, ‘something for the journey home, sir’, a Schumann piano quartet with Guy, Clem Pickering on viola, Andrea Cicalese on violin and Mishka at the piano.  Now our Ischian retreat has become a Viennese Salon, as the four of them gallop to the finish with thrilling verve. Wow.

Carolyn and I have long talked of taking Lupetto to explore the music of the Baltic and doing the research a few years ago I came across another composer’s garden; that of Penderecki. I googled to find gardens created by other composers and drew a blank – in fact not even a mention of Penderecki’s, but it is there and you don’t even have to travel to Poland to visit it: https://pendereckisgarden.pl/en

The only thing to do after five such memorable days was to eat Italian food, drink prosecco and vino rosso, and pat each other on the back. Not sure why we, the slender audience were due any patting, but this was so intimate that we were all on the same side. Us and them had been left at the Wigmore Hall.

If I make it seem all music and homework think again. There was Pompeii, seaside walks, baroque churches and scrummy Italian food on the harbourside. Grappa at the end of the day, and expressos so expressed that one molecule on the tongue – a melange of delectable, caffeinated bitterness – reminds you why a double espresso is like a double negroni, at best affectation and at worse unnecessary.

There was one more concert back in Naples in a seaside palazzo, with the room stuffed with luggage, as our happy throng headed onward to airports and stations. Bach on the mandolin, Britten on Guys Cello, and Clem and Guy in a fine piece by Gliere.

On the walk out of the chunky palazzo, I was no clearer as to what exactly it was we had been on, (mescaline? amphetamine? Ed) but everyone was in accord that we should do it again. Yes please.

But for us it wasn’t the last music of the trip.

That evening we were at the opera house in Naples for La Boheme. The view was a bit limited, but there was a large mirror on the side of the box, albeit pointing backwards. We asked the twenty-something in the seat in front (working at the local Apple store; take note Tim Chalomet) why it was there. ‘To see when the King starts clapping was the reply.’ Perhaps in Boheme it would have been to see when the queen started crying.

We found ourselves asking how access to opera compares across various countries. The 2015 data look like this in numbers of performances:

Germany                             6795

USA                                     1675

Russia                                 1490

Italy                                     1393

Austria                                1163

France                                1020

UK                                       989

Czech Rep                          818

Switz                                   652

Poland                                 638

It doesn’t seem to mirror the number of Apple stores.

We hug and say warm adieus to Mark and Georgie. They are perfect travelling companions. Georgie like Carolyn, is taken to talking to strangers, which brings the random lives of locals into our travel. Mark is uber organised and knows lots about everything, but his enthusiasm is never derailed by the vagaries of happenstance. So much laugher . . . Bring on the next mysterious phone message.

But even that wasn’t the last of it. We flew onward to Athens and then to Andros, and there on Easter Monday, at the sacred monastery of Tromachia, the doors were flung open and after the long morning litany, souvlakis, live music and dancing were available to all.