Town mouse hears Sir John Tomlinson

After some attempts Clive manages to get his family out to hear Sir John Tomlinson sing at the National Gallery

Town mouse; country life
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(Image credit: Country Life)

For weeks, the talk at home had been of nothing else. Sir John Tomlinson was singing in a concert at St Peter's, Eaton Square. Son William and I had heard him as Hunding (deeply terrifying) and Hagen (ineffably evil) in the ‘Ring Cycle', and were almost faint at the prospect of being exposed to the power of this musical personality at close quarters. It would have been the steal of the year.

Tickets, for members of the congregation, were £5, children free. Alas, fate intervened. I was in Devon on the night. The rest of the family... don't ask what happened. But the great bass repeated the programme-three cycles of Michelangelo's poetry, set by Benjamin Britten, Hugo Wolf and Dmitri Shostakovich at the National Gallery.

We hurried to Trafalgar Square. Agony! The start time had been changed. We edged into the back row for the Shostakovich, regretting that we hadn't collected a translation sheet on the way in. As a Russian, Shostakovich knew about basses, and the psychodrama he created out of the poems gave Sir John a superb vehicle. Afterwards, we recovered our equilibrium by looking at the Wilton Diptych. The angels all wear Richard II's badge of the white hart, making them members of his household. As the children would say, cool.

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Country Life is unlike any other magazine: the only glossy weekly on the newsstand and the only magazine that has been guest-edited by HRH The King not once, but twice. It is a celebration of modern rural life and all its diverse joys and pleasures — that was first published in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year. Our eclectic mixture of witty and informative content — from the most up-to-date property news and commentary and a coveted glimpse inside some of the UK's best houses and gardens, to gardening, the arts and interior design, written by experts in their field — still cannot be found in print or online, anywhere else.