The Right Note

I stepped into the garden to wait for the kitchen floor to dry just as dusk began to descend, and for the first time heard a nightingale singing in the field maple behind the pond. Just as my ears became attuned to the sound and I realised what it was, a pheasant arrived in the field next to me and started squawking at the top of its voice. They alternated for ten minutes or so as I willed the pheasant to go away, but then a fat wood pigeon landed in the tree and the nightingale flew away. I have to admit to being slightly underwhelmed by its song which I think is inferior to that of the skylark. I'm baffled as to why poets and song writers have held it in such high esteem. Nevertheless it was a special moment, and I hope the bird returns at the weekend when my visitors might educate me in its charms.

Perhaps my disappointment lay in the fact that it wasn't the brilliant, the wonderful, the luminous Renee Fleming who last night brought the wow factor with knobs on to Snale Maltings, real star appeal. She sang Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs, as sublime a piece of music as has ever been written. Many sopranos have sung and recorded these pieces, including, in my own collection, Kiri te Kanawa and Jessie Norman. Their voices are gorgeous too, but it's Renee's timing, her pacing, that brings out their extreme, almost unearthly beauty, their poignancy and pathos. She draws out every note, every phrase, lovingly stroking them with her vocal chords and her tongue, then releasing them gently into the auditorium. It's a seductive performance, her voice and diaphragm in immaculate control, her intelligence showing such sensitive insight that the listener can't fail to hear it too. I wish I had left when she did, but I was working and could not. She was followed by an Elgar's symphony that might have been powerfully played by the massive LPO but was for me a clash of two vastly different cultures. I wanted silence after her, to relive what was one of the most magical musical experiences I've ever had. My friend Tessa stopped to talk to me at the start of the interval. "I can't believe how emotional I got," she said. "I had to fight back my tears." Me too Tessa. If I hadn't been on duty I'd have put my head in my hands and sobbed.

All this was a far cry from the events of last week which began with Hugo being badly bitten by another dog and ended with a wedding. The latter was lovely, but poor Hugo found himself up in surgery having a general anaesthetic before being stitched up and confined to very short walks and the dreaded Elizabethan collar again. Brave, long-suffering little boy, he has licked and cleaned every part of his body when he has been freed, heavily supervised, from the collar for short periods, but he has studiously ignored the wound which he has been told he must not touch. It has nearly healed up now, a week later, and the stitches will come out on Tuesday. To coin a phrase, it has been a catalogue of disasters since I got him 18 months ago, but this time it was neither his nor my fault. Through it all he has behaved like an angel. If he sat in a tree and sang I couldn't venerate him more highly.