This is just to say that the Composers of the Year blogs are moving to the main Radio 3/Proms blogs page. This has been prompted by the fact that Radio 3's main COTY broadcasts take place in the context of the Proms for the next few weeks - and we want to share the discussions with the wider Proms audience.

Please stay in touch by coming to find me at www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio3/.

See you there!

This is just to say that the Composers of the Year blogs are moving to the main Radio 3/Proms blogs page. This has been prompted by the fact that Radio 3's main COTY broadcasts take place in the context of the Proms for the next few weeks - and we want to share the discussions with the wider Proms audience.

Please stay in touch by coming to find me at www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio3/.

See you there!

This is just to say that the Composers of the Year blogs are moving to the main Radio 3/Proms blogs page. This has been prompted by the fact that Radio 3's main COTY broadcasts take place in the context of the Proms for the next few weeks - and we want to share the discussions with the wider Proms audience.

Please stay in touch by coming to find me at www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio3/.

See you there!

This is just to say that the Composers of the Year blogs are moving to the main Radio 3/Proms blogs page. This has been prompted by the fact that Radio 3's main COTY broadcasts take place in the context of the Proms for the next few weeks - and we want to share the discussions with the wider Proms audience.

Please stay in touch by coming to find me at www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio3/.

See you there!

At the concert itself, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I hardly noticed conductor Paul McCreesh's modest changes to the English. So many of us have grown up with the quaint ''translation of a translation' text used by most choral societies - (ie English to German and back to English) - that we would probably regret any changes to such hallowed phrases as 'With verdure clad' or 'In native worth'. Happily, both of these were retained in this performance.

Some people asked why Paul McCreesh chose to use such big forces. The truth is that Haydn himself conducted large-scale concerts in Vienna for charity concerts, just as he had witnessed in England at the 1791 Handel Commemoration performances in Westminster Abbey, where the musicians numbered more than 1,000. Haydn's Viennese orchestral parts show that in some numbers he doubled, and even trebled the wind parts. For a big space like the Albert Hall these reinforcements were entirely convincing. More provocatively, Paul McCreesh was also prepared to cut the orchestra to a string octet and solo winds in the magical 'bird' aria 'On mighty pens'. As it turned out, this gave us one of the highlights of the evening.

I know there have been countless performances of The Creation already this year, and there are many more to come. But this Prom concert was one of the best. The clarity of the choral singing and the winning instrumental solos were stunning. I can strongly commend a visit the BBCiPlayer before the end of the week to sample this performance.

I was intrigued to see how Lars Ulrik's view might be reflected in the performance. Sure enough, it was there in spades. Tuva Semmingsen as Rosmira, in particular, showed considerable subtlety in her portrayal of the conflicted former lover of Arsace, constantly wrestling with her desire to punish her beloved (her singing was just beautiful too - full of light and shade, and the most sophisticated ornamentation of da capos and cadenzas I've heard in a long time). Andreas Scholl's Arsace was also well characterised (though he really struggled to fill the Albert Hall's vast space, and consequently didn't always sound as well as he might have done).

But what really struck me was how Lars Ulrik (or the theatrical director) had manipulated the opera in order to make it into the semi-tragic, developmental drama he had described in the Proms Plus talk. Cuts, of course, are just about inevitable with Handel opera, but what one chooses to cut can be telling. It was particularly noticeable in the third act that what had been cut was the emotional flippancy: a recitative scene in which Rosmira plays with Arsace, pretending she no longer loves him and describing herself as a 'farfalletta' (a butterfly) went, and so too (more strangely) did Partenope's final aria, 'Sì, scherza, sì' in which she describes love as 'two-faced'. In its place was a duet for Partenope and Armindo, 'Per le porte del tormento', which was borrowed from Sosarme without (to my knowledge) any historical authority for doing so. Clearly, the aim was to heighten the emotional believability of Partenope's and Armindo's union at the end of the opera, after Partenope had abruptly returned the two-timing Arsace to Rosmira. All in all, through careful cuts and clever characterisation, Lars Ulrik and his company had turned Partenope into something that was (by our standards) emotionally 'believable', but at some cost to the original drama.

Although I found this approach a surprise, it was certainly an enjoyable one. Aside from anything else, the singing was generally excellent (only Andreas Scholl was really under par, I felt), and the orchestral playing wonderfully imaginative. But I did wonder whether this 'psychological' approach to the opera didn't rather misrepresent the eighteenth-century understanding of the story, and of dramatic characterisation in general. Lars Ulrik's belief in the psychological development of characters wasn't one that became an important part of characterisation until the late eighteenth century. I don't think we should have a problem with (effectively) modernising an operatic plot so it makes sense on our terms, just provided we're clear that that's what we're doing...

Meanwhile, if anyone missed the superb and very unusual documentary the other night on BBC4 entitled Mendelssohn, The Nazis and Me, I can't recommend it highly enough! You can still access it by the BBC iplayer at this link: https://bbcbreakingnews.pages.dev/iplayer/episode/b00l7rg2/Mendelssohn_the_Nazis_and_Me/

Sheila Hayman, Mendelssohn's four-times great-niece (she's a direct descendent of Fanny), set off on a personal exploration of what Mendelssohn's Jewish background meant to the family then, since and now. For her, a sense of 'not belonging' appeared to be the result of the intermingling of races that so confused the Nazis. The issue of mixed-race Germans hasn't often been explored in WWII TV documentaries so it was fascinating and very disturbing to see the precision with which the regime decided to impose its own figuring-out of who was technically Jewish and who wasn't. Sheila interviews her own family about their experiences during the war, arriving in Britain as refugee children; and the story of the fate of Mendelssohn's music is all the more poignant for this.

She outlines the way in which Felix, himself a fervent Lutheran, tried to distance himself from his roots in his first oratorio, Paulus; then the rapprochement in Elijah which seems to seek the reconciliation of one religion with the other. And it was Elijah itself that helped to sustain hope and faith amid the Jewish Kulturbund and, tragically, even in Terezin.

It is touching, moving, illuminating and well worth a watch. And a reminder that even now Wagner's disgusting platitudes are echoed and re-echoed by those who declare Mendelssohn shallow or over-hyped (I kid you not - I read this somewhere just the other day) even when he's still struggling for adequate recognition! This was beautifully expressed in the programme by Steven Isserlis, Felix's No.1 friend and advocate, who said that when one critic decided Mendelssohn was a "baa-aa-aad" composer, all the others started bleating too....

The Mendelssohn family experience is very close to home over here, since my own in-laws shared much of it, having arrived in Britain as Jewish teenagers from Berlin in the nick of time - my mother-in-law on the Kindertransport and my father-in-law to well-timed boarding school. He was later interned on the Isle of Man - along with three-quarters of the Amadeus String Quartet - and when that came to an end, he joined the British army, where he changed his name to Evans and was posted to India. He was short and dark, so everyone thought he was Welsh and called him Taffy. This despite the fact that to this day (he is 88) - he has a strong German accent!

The problem is the sentiment. Purcell's music longs for sadness, bitterness, grief, remorse, but the general mood in Restoration London was to be positive, optimistic at least in public, and to make up for the lost time of the Commonwealth when everything, it seemed, was banned - hence all that second rate verse in print. Drydens and Cowleys were a rarity. Indeed, the most prolonged applause of the evening was for a non-verbal item, Concordia's performance of the Sonata in Four Parts No 6, which, alone in the set, is one long ten-minute chaconne building to a peak with the twin violins fizzing sextuplets like laboratory test tubes. Here was Purcell the master of a form he made his own.

The hall was full. Tenor James Gilchrist did his best to impassion the lines with organic ornaments tugged from the harmony like coloured threads, Soprano Sophie Daneman tended to swallow her words a little but came good in the Cowley and bass Roderick Williams provided a solid, resonant bass. He should sing Wondrous Machine.

Purcell shares with Mendelssohn the tendency to set poor poetry to music. Too much of the latter's music accompanies mawkish, sentimental, Victorian words. They both should have been more choosy perhaps. My affair with him is now over although we have agreed to remain frends. Thanks for all comments. Marzipancat is right, Makhabane. Top hats were quite popular in the 1820s. Schubert is wearing one in his picture in the Oxford Companion to Music. Personally I think I look more like Isambard Kingdom Brunel than Mendelssohn. He was, after all, only 20, where I am 53 and slightly overweight.

Now for the Proms...

The first, aristocratically 'directed' Royal Academy of Music had collapsed in 1728, and Handel branched out (more or less) on his own thereafter, leasing the King's Theatre with the impresario John Jacob Heidegger for the next five years. How did this move away from aristocratic control affect his artistic decisions? And what about financial considerations, given that he was no longer being bankrolled by the nobility? As so many artists since Handel's time have discovered (Mozart, for one), greater independence didn't necessarily mean greater artistic freedom: for a demanding single patron one simply substituted a more amorphous (but often equally demanding) 'general public'.

Still, Handel did stretch his wings: the story of Partenope had been rejected by the Academy directors in 1726; if it was Handel who proposed it then, he lost no opportunity in reasserting its worth after he set up business on his own, as it was the second opera in his first season. The directors probably rejected it because of its less-than-heroic plot, revolving around the love intrigues of queen Partenope: contemporaries did not think its wry take on male valour was the kind of thing Londoners would warm to, Owen Swiney suggesting it would be met with 'contempt in England'. And indeed Handel's gamble didn't really pay off, as Partenope had only seven performances in its first season.

Sosarme demonstrated a different sort of challenge, with a plot which represented rivalry between a king and his heir just as relations between George II and the Prince of Wales, Frederick, were becoming particularly strained. It may be for this reason that the original setting in medieval Portugal (when the opera was called Fernando) was changed for one in the ancient Middle East (Sosarme), with fictional characters. The audience nonetheless liked it: Viscount Percival said that it 'takes with the town, and that justly, for it is one of the best I ever heard', and it had a respectable eleven performances in its initial run.

Given that the first audience liked it so much, I am looking forward to introducing it tomorrow - albeit with its original title and character names, in Alan Curtis's 2006 recording with Il Complesso Barocco. But I think this recording is going to prove the point that the reception of Handel's operas (today as in their own day) is strongly dependent on the quality of singing and musicianship. Handel's cast featured the famous castrato Senesino in the title role, and other highly respected singers in other leading parts. And Handel wrote music that catered to those singers' talents: for example, the bass Antonio Montagnana, with an agile and powerful voice, had demanding, wide-ranging music written for him. While there is certainly some good singing on this recording (from Lawrence Zazzo, Veronica Cangemi, Max Cencic and Marianna Pizzolato), there are also times that singers (and, for that matter, instrumentalists) can't cope with the demands placed upon them. So, while it's terrific that we are able to hear a (more or less) complete cycle of Handel's operas on Radio 3 this year, I for one will be hoping that no-one treats this list of recordings as definitive...

All four BBC 'Composers of the Year' feature prominently in the Proms programme, and in a more modest way, so I believe will their blogmasters. I shall certainly be taking part in the Proms Plus session on The Creation at the Royal College of Music with Louise Fryer and David Wyn Jones on Saturday 18th July (Prom 2). The format, as many readers will know, is that a couple of us stand up and share some thoughts about the music, and then invite questions and comments from the floor. For instance, did Haydn really like the English, or were his visits to England based on the belief that there was serious money to be made here? And would The Creation have turned out differently if Haydn had not heard Messiah and Israel in Egypt in Westminster Cathedral?

Perhaps the biggest problem of all concerns the words. Salomon gave Haydn an English libretto - possibly written by the same man who wrote the text for Messiah - when he finally left London in 1795. Back in Vienna, Haydn gave it to his friend Baron van Swieten, and asked him to translate it into German. Haydn then set the German translation to music. But the composer had a hunch that the oratorio could be a big success in England, and so asked van Swieten to re-translate it back again, so that it could be published in both languages. The results were bizarre. For example, who in the UK today would know that 'On mighty pens' means 'On mighty wings'?! And there are many more mangled phrases which make nonsense of the original. Paul McCreesh, the conductor of the 2009 Prom performance, is just the latest in a long line of musicians who have tried to produce a good, singable English text. It will be very interesting to hear what people feel about his version when it is performed next Saturday.

Of course, our four 'Composers of the Year' do feature prominently in the Proms programme, three of them in the first week: Haydn's Creation is on the Saturday the 18th (I wrote about Handelians' reaction to The Creation a couple of blogs ago) with his Seven Last Words on Monday the 20th; Handel's Partenope is between them on Sunday the 19th, and Purcell's Fairy Queen on Tuesday the 21st. So, something of a dramatic theme in that first week as well. But, as always, there are so many thematic strands one can enjoy: I'm particularly looking forward to hearing all eleven of Stravinsky's ballets, for instance.

I'll be participating in the Proms Intro on Radio 3 for Partenope, at 4.15 on Sunday the 19th - a fascinating opera which, in contrast to its rather lacklustre reception at its first performance, is enjoying quite a revival at present. Then Prom 36 on August 12th (broadcast live on Radio 3 and on the evening of Saturday 15th on BBC2) with Harry Christophers and The Sixteen, with an all-Handel programme, featuring the four coronation anthems, interspersed with other works from throughout the composer's career. I'll certainly have more to say about each on these pages...

The idea of coming to the northern wilderness and walking across for adventure is unthinkable to the Baroque artist who fears the elements and yearns for the protecting patronage of the court. For the last two weeks I have been recreating Mendelssohn's epic gap-year journey across Scotland in 1829 when he was a romantic 20-year-old flushed with the success of the revival of Bach's St Matthew Passion earlier that year but not entirely sure what his future direction might be. He had a hankering to be an artist and took his sketch book. His father thought banking. I have grown his whiskers and worn his clothes, not as a costume to be donned only 'in character', but as my only wardrobe. I have followed in his wake as if it were historical reconstruction 180 years on.

I have stayed in youth hostels or bed-and-breakfast hotels. The cheaper establishments tend to have thin walls through which the guests can hear each other. While they are making the sound of their ablutions, I am sending a voice blog to a radio station every morning, speaking quite loudly into my tape recorder in a German accent. The other residents must think I am a spy on the top floor transmitting messages to Berlin.

I have done everything Mendelssohn did. In Edinburgh I climbed Arthur's Seat, visited Holyrood Palace, travelled to Abbotsford House, home once of Sir Walter Scott, and swam in the Firth of Forth at 9am on a Monday morning while a BBC reporter recorded the splash for Good Morning Scotland. I told her it was Goethe who told Mendelssohn to come to Scotland and that Scottish literature, particularly that of Scott and the mythical pre-Christian Celtic poet Ossian, influenced the European Romantic movement in all its forms, as I dived in.

Like Mendelssohn I leave Edinburgh by boat, arranged for me by my brother - an ex-Marine who knows a deputy admiral who knows the Edinburgh harbourmaster who knows a man with a boat which is travelling west towards Stirling. I walk 15 miles and stay the night in the backpackers' hostel on the anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn nearby. In the morning, the street has been cordoned off by police tape and there looks as is there has been something of a battle outside the hostel.

Mendelssohn took a carriage to Perth so I take the train. Mendelssohn had his portrait painted as a visiting celebrity and I have my picture taken in my top hat, check trousers and sideburns.

I walk to Birnam and visit the famous Wood which improbably came to Dunsinane in Shakespeare's Macbeth, drawing a sketch of the famous Birnam Oak which is basically all that is left of the original broad-leaf forest. Mendelssohn was less concerned with music than with drawing on his journey.

I walk on to Dunkeld to visit and sketch the same waterfall as Felix pencilled but lack his patience. I visit Ossian's Hall where there are verses supposedly by the Celtic bard on the mirrored walls. They romanticise stories of 'war and wooings, warriors and maidens'. In fact they were written by a Scot called MacPherson in the 18th century, which may have disappointed a few gullible people who thought Ossian real, though even a little research reveals him to be the product of the mythical giant Fingal and a deer.

I walk to Pitlochry, then to Blair Atholl, visit the Bruar Falls and return to Pitlochry. I cross the River Garry by the vertiginous Garrry Bridge which marks the beginning of the Road to the Western Isles. I walk to Tummel Bridge where Mendelssohn had terrible weather but where I have only blazing sunshine. The hotel he stayed at was submerged when Loch Tummel was dammed.

I walk to Aberfeldy where Mendelssohn hired a horse and cart. There is none available today so I decide to compromise by hitch-hiking the 60 miles to Crianlarich where I stay at the Youth Hostel with the walkers with their hi-tech equipment, ski-poles and waterproofs. They are amazed that I am walking in a fancy dress costume.

I follow the West Highland Way across the hills to Tyndrum the following day. Here the path crosses the road so I decide to hitch a lift. The second car to pass screeches to a halt. Drivers soon stop for a man in a top hat. The driver is an ex-soldier, a former member of the Royal Highland Fusiliers who is driving fast to attend a court case the following day for speeding, he tells me as we pass the spot in the Pass of Glencoe where he went through the crash barrier and came round to see a policeman sitting on his bonnet to stop him from toppling into the gorge. He is going to plead post-traumatic stress disorder and that he was fleeing bad experiences in Bosnia and Northern Ireland.

The Pass of Glencoe is truly magnificent, a theatre of mountains. I stay at the youth hostel which is run by a German family. I compliment the father by saying only the Germans know how to run youth hostels properly. He agrees and says it is not surprising because a German called Richard Schirrmann invented youth hostels 100 years ago. It passes without comment that the Hitler Youth were very keen on hostelling.

I walk from Glencoe along the main road beside Loch Linnhe to Fort William. It is dangerous when the road runs out of pavement and I have to walk on the grass verges when the log lorries come swerving round the double bends. I stay in a hotel in the main street which in 1829 was all that Fort William consisted of.

That year too saw the start of steamship travel among the Westerm Islands, and Mendelssohn had a ticket for the maiden voyage of the Maid of Morvern from Fort William to Oban. There is no waterborne service of any sort today so I feel justified in taking the bus. In Oban I have time to sketch Dunollie Castle just as Mendelssohn did before the ferry departs for Mull.

On the island I make straight for Fionnphort to be ready for a boat in the morning to Fingal's Cave. All the hotels are full and I am just contemplating spending the night on the park bench in the graveyard when an elderly lady pulls up and says she recognises me from earlier in the journey. She is staying at a lodge where there is a bed free and invites me to use it.

The following morning it is raining for the trip to the tiny Island of Staffa, location of Fingal's Cave. I introduce myself as Mendelssohn and say I am happy for people to take pictures. A Swede says, 'Mendelssohn! Don't you recognise me? Karl Frederike Lindblom! You must remember. We were students together in Berlin although I was somewhat older (born 1801). We carried on a correspondence over many years!' He is a musicologist at Stockholm University who is also researching the life of Mendelssohn.

When we near the island I recall that Mendelssohn was very seasick and pose for pictures as if I were throwing up a) into the sea and b) into my top hat. The picture desk can decide. We are allowed off the boat which then disappears for an hour. We feel marooned and the island truly lonely which was the first name Mendelssohn gave his celebrated Hebrides Overture. He had already composed the first bars in his head and sent them home in a letter before he saw the strange basalt rock formation.

An English couple tell me they sing in a choir. She likes musical theatre and he has a love of Purcell. He says all he can hear is the song, They that go down to the sea in ships,, which Purcell wrote for the bass John Gosling in commemoration of James II's near disastrous sailing trip in the Solent in 1685. The soloist sinks to a bottom D. He says his favourite piece of Purcell is one he had come to only recently, Hear My Prayer. I tell him, it knocked me out when I first sang it, too.

Mendelssohn also wrote an anthem with this title although two words later they part company. Purcell's Hear My Prayer O Lord is a stunning, single span of slow interweaving counterpoint tantalisingly bereft of a later second half which has gone missing. Mendelssohn's Hear My Prayer O God (incline thine ear) contains thetreble solo O for the wings of a dove. The singer yearns for a nest in the wilderness. He means a youth hostel at the end of a long day's hike through Scotland's beautiful, romantic, rugged terrain.

A recent Radio 3 blog was about 'visual radio', and the advances in digital techniques that went into making the recent BBC Phil video of their Bridgewater Hall concert available on the iPlayer. For me, the chance to catch some of this week's rarities is even more of a bonus. Ever since my schoolboy days of wolfing down my tea to listen to various radio serials, I've wanted to be able to catch up with missed programmes, and this week the iPlayer should be a great boon.

The first programme I want to be sure to catch is The Return of Tobias, scheduled for Monday 6 July at 6.45 pm. Performances of this score are rare because although there is some fine music, the libretto it is in the old Italian oratorio style and is woefully undramatic. It was premiered in 1775 for the Viennese equivalent of our Musicians' Benevolent Fund and was a big success. There were only three choruses, the remainder being recitatives and gargantuan arias in the opera seria style. When Haydn revived it for the same charity in 1784, he pruned many of the arias and added two new choruses. The second 'Svanisce in un momento', is a tempestuous D minor piece which anticipates The Storm featured in the BBC Philharmonic concert currently on the iPLayer. Haydn was too shrewd a businessman not to see the value of this chorus, and later issued it separately with sacred words as 'Insanae et vanae curae'.

I'm particularly glad to see The Essay series scheduled for each weekday at 11 pm. This is kind of project that radio does exceptionally well. Monday has the Bishop of Salisbury on the late masses, where I hope he will underline the influence of the Handel oratorios that Haydn heard in London. Haydn and Cosmology (Wednesday) will hopefully expand on the ideas Charles Hazlewood introduced into his recent TV documentary. As a medical expert, Robert Winston should bring something special to the Haydn's Head programme on Friday. After his burial, some well-wishers arranged for Haydn's head to be cut off and sent to Vienna University for phrenological examination. They had the misguided idea that they might find out something about giftedness from his cranial bumps! Much skullduggery [sic] followed, and incredibly, it was not until 1954 that the composer's head and body were finally reunited!

I am doing everything Mendelssohn did. Today I reached Birnam Woods which excited Mendelssohn because of its Shakespeare connections and next to it Dunkeld. I went up to see the Falls of Braan with a sketch pad and clambered down to the same rock as the composer, even chose the same hand- and footholds, probably. I didn't have quite the same patience as he with drawing, however.

I got a man to take a picture of me by the falls to show that I had been there. We got talking. He too is a blogger. And a priest. He told me his scurrilous blog Sex and God and Rock and Roll gets 2,500 hits a day, most of them Americans. Here it's only kleines c. Thanks kleines.

William Christie conducted the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, his white head bobbing about in the pit like a beachball on a sea of strings. The music felt urgent, although it had to wait silently while long passages of dialogue elapsed. That is the nature of the masque. The actors, singers and dancers have to wait their turn. The difference is that while in opera, the ideal is to have one performer who can do all three, in so-called semi-opera, one employs three specialists. The masque was not opera's poor relation, but grand-scale royal entertainment, meant to be lavish and expensive.

The actor Desmond Barrit stole the show as Bottom. He also sang the part of the Drunken Poet in Act I where the dialogue is thickest. He slurred and stammered, apparently in playful imitation of the writer Thomas D'Urfey. Lucy Crowe sang deliciously and with no apparent discomfort suspended from the ceiling in Thrice Happy Lovers at the beginning of Act V. Carolyn Sampson made a beautiful job of The Plaint, the 'Dido's Lament' aria in The Fairy Queen. Haute-contre (high tenor) Ed Lyon sang One Charming Night with a sinuous magic in his voice carried by the cool trilling of flute and recorder.

The performance of The Fairy Dream by Henry Purcell and Harvey Brough at the Barbican two weeks earlier had real charm. Only the Act IV Masque of the Seasons had been used by Brough, the four 'stagioni' interspersed with children's choir numbers using Shakespeare's original texts. They sang confidently in two and three parts though the seven schools had only met to rehearse twice. The adult choir, its membership comprising City bankers, looked on indulgently. It is a wonderful addition to the canon of works for untrained children to sing with amateur grown-ups.