victoria from the FT likes us apparently… architecture and a come-again simon rattle?
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/f4e74b20-9e61-11de-b0aa-00144feabdc0.html
A novel approach
By Victoria Glendinning
The phenomenal success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has unintended consequences that are wholly beneficent. Roslin Chapel, seven miles from Edinburgh, now welcomes shedloads of hot-eyed tourists on the trail of the Holy Grail. This is excellent news for the restoration fund, which has £2m more to be raised.
Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy sheltered from a storm in Roslin Chapel in 1803. He retired to the nearby pub and knocked off a sonnet, while she described in her diary the intricate stone carvings of leaves, flowers and faces all over the chapel’s interior, and the uncanny effect of live green ferns sprouting around identical algae-tinged stone ones. The chapel was “exquisitely beautiful” but “as nothing is done to keep it together, it must, in the end, fall”.
It had been falling ever since the Reformation. Cromwell’s troops, sacking nearby Rosslyn Castle, used it as stables. When Queen Victoria visited, she opined that it should be saved for the nation, and periodic efforts – some ill advised – were made to restore this jewel of 15th-century architecture. Some of its meaning is still to be interpreted. Patterns engraved on protruding stone cubes may be musical notations, as on the recently decoded medallions in Stirling Castle.
Roslin Chapel’s renaissance has been sealed by Shadwell Opera’s sell-out production, within the shadowy walls, of The Magic Flute, part of the Edinburgh Fringe. This was eerily apt, since Roslin has strong historical links with Freemasonry and the Knights Templar, and Dan Brown is not the first to name it as the Grail’s resting place. Shadwell Opera is a Cambridge undergraduate outfit, and the costumes were school-pantomime – dressing gowns, jeans, boiler-suits. Members of the Brotherhood wore silver DVDs on strings round their necks to represent pseudo-Masonic emblems. Sarastro, as head honcho, sported a large vinyl LP. This was entirely satisfactory, as was the libretto in a frisky version by the versatile Kit Hesketh Harvey (of Kit and the Widow).
So far, so playful. But the confident direction by Jack Furness, the crisp, full-blooded singing, and the elan of the minimal orchestra would have done credit to any professional company. Aidan Coburn, Shadwell’s shock-headed musical director and conductor, is like a come-again Simon Rattle.
