Bbc What is Beauty

Michael Portillo retraces more journeys from George Bradshaw's 1913 Continental Guide.

BBC - The Mekong River with Sue Perkins (2014)
PDTV | 832x468 | .MP4/AVC @ 1509 Kbps | 4x~58min | Audio: English AAC 128 kbps, 2 channels | Subs: English | 2.70 GiB
HDTV | 1280x720 | .MKV/AVC @ 4249 Kbps | 4x~58min | Audio: English AAC 128 kbps, 2 channels | Subs: English | 6.50 GiB
Genre: Documentary

The Mekong is South East Asia's greatest river, the Mother of Water that brings life to millions of people from the paddy fields of Vietnam to the mountains of the Tibetan Plateau. In this series, Sue Perkins goes on an extraordinary journey, spanning nearly 3,000 miles, to explore lives and landscapes on the point of enormous change. Across four episodes, she travels upstream through Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and China, towards the Mekong's source high in the Himalayan glacier.

This is a superb disc. There have been distinguished collections of Smetana’s symphonic poems (notably a vintage Kubelík disc) but none quite to compare with this in excitement, richness of detail and, in the case of Wallenstein’s Camp, sonic spectacle – how well Smetana writes for the brass! Indeed this, Richard III and especially Hakon Jarl emerge afresh as symphonic poems every bit the equal of those of Liszt. The early Jubel Overture (1848) with its thundering, frantic opening timpani and energetic folksy flavour is a real find. So, too, is the beautiful watery tableau The Fisherman, which has a Wagnerian evocation gently reminding one of the moonlight sequence in Vltava.

Based on the recorded evidence, if you want spirited and insightful performances of eastern European romantic orchestral repertoire, Gianandrea Noseda is the conductor of choice. In his previous discs of Liszt's tone poems and Dvorák's concertos for violin and for piano, the young Italian conductor had turned in effective and affecting performances of works that get little attention from most international conductors.

When I started work on Geyser last autumn I had decided I was done composing music that reflected the pain of the pandemic. This new piece was to be instead a celebration – of music, its welcome return and that unique atmosphere created by musicians when they meet to perform. Its mood was to be predominantly joyful and optimistic, while its title was a metaphor for the music’s underlying rhythmic energy, unleashed intermittently in ecstatic outbursts – like explosions of water and steam from a pressurised geothermal spring. (This idea of tension, boiling under the surface, is a theme I return to in a lot in my music.)