Paris

Back from a lovely weekend in Paris.

On Saturday we arrived on Eurostar, started with the astonishing Sainte Chapelle, then the Fra Angelico exhibition and finally a concert at the Opera Comique. This began with the Haydn Trumpet concerto, with the highly talented young soloist Alexandre Baty. Then the Radio France Philharmonic gave a fine performance of Mozart's Prague Symphony. After the interval - a rarity:  Il Maestro di Capella by Cimarosa.  This is a comic scena with a Baritone and Orchestra, where the singer in the conductor and the Orchestra increasingly recalcitrant, twice throwing their music all over the stage and once walking off until the conductor pays them.  Great fun!

Sunday we had a guided tour of the Opera which was most enjoyable and informative: really bringing out the "theatre" of the front of house which was, from an economic point of view, the main purpose of the building. Indeed the guide made the point that until the 20th century the lights were up in the auditorium the whole time and there was much talking and (in the boxes, all of which had private curtained-off areas) other activities that must have put the performers off no end.  Ironic that the Opera was built for Napoleon III but he never attended since he was deposed before it was completed.  Finally Vespers at the Sacre Coeur and then home.

Paris is of course a city of Art in a way that London isn't quite - although we have more wonderful music and tremendous collections. This is I think partly because London has always had dual centres, of commerce (the City proper) and politics/monarchy, and personal aggrandisement by the rulers was not at all in fashion since at latest Charles II. It seems oddly fitting that Napoleon III was (in that order) the first elected President and the last Monarch of France.

The way the unknown masters of the Sainte Chapelle and Fra Angelico and his colleagues communicated the bible and other "sacred" stories in visual terms is a never-ending source of fascination. In Fra Angelico's paintings some of the colours have sadly faded, but the transcendent beauty speaks through the centuries.