Encounters

Our choir is celebrating five years of twinning between Oxford and Padua alongside a choir from Padua and the Oxford Man Choir.

I was told yesterday evening that, sadly, one of the Man Choir singers has fallen ill en route and his ticket to the Cappella de Scrovegni was up for grabs. I grabbed.

So it was that I met them this morning, actually having recognised them walking down the street before we got to the entrance gates at 8.30. I know them better than they know me since my brother sings in a brother-choir a bit west of Oxford and I know they dress mostly in black. We are of a generation and as we waited we chatted about our youthful hitch-hiking adventures in Europe and lamented that the culture of fear and protectiveness we now live in prevents our young from taking risks we took and learning from them.

Fifty years ago, during one of my adventures, I walked into the Cappella de Scrovegni, looked at Giotto's frescoes and left. Now conservationists have recognised the damage that the humidity of breath does to them and access is controlled. In an acclimatised entrance hall, we were shown a video about the frescoes then allowed in. From the video, I knew that I wanted to spend my short time looking especially at the first recorded kiss in Western art, between Joachim and Anna, the 'barren' couple to whom an angel announced that they were to be become the parents of Mary; at the gruesome massacre of the Innocents; and at the vast depiction of pre-Bosch hell and torment on the end wall. The best way to have visited would have been to have studied the frescoes in detail beforehand but I still appreciated my fifteen minutes. And honoured the absent singer who is in hospital somewhere in France.

After that I gave the Museo Eremitani short shrift - I have never learnt to appreciate Italian madonne e bambini. I was also very disappointed by the Palazzo Zuckermann that my Scrovegni ticket got me into. I'd been enticed by their exhibition on 'Colour' which was dismal. The rest of the display was an exemplar of why museums need to be discerning about the stately-home contents they are offered.

In contrast, I loved the decorations of the Basilica Sant Antonio, and wished I'd spent more time there before our City Hall choir rehearsal rather than in the Prato della Valle, the second (or third or something) largest piazza in Italy (or Europe, or somewhere).

Anyway, back to our City Hall rehearsal where the three choirs practised our joint piece, Katie Perry's Roar, for the first time. I confess to having been completely uninterested in it during earlier separate rehearsals but to finding the fun in it this afternoon, finally.

We stood on the City Hall steps to perform it to a small audience then each choir did a piece or two of their own - much less of an event than billed but a good preparation for our concert tomorrow. Part of our audience were Oxford's Lord Mayor, Lubna Arshad, a Muslim woman born and educated in Oxford, and the Deputy Leader of Oxford City Council, Chewe Munkonge, who arrived in Oxford from Zambia twenty years ago.

I was very proud, in a country whose Prime Minister is the alarming right-wing Giorgia Meloni, and in a part of Italy that that gave birth to the racist Lega Nord, that these were the two people Oxford had funded to represent the city for this celebration.

As it happened, I found myself sitting opposite them at the out-of-town meal for all three choirs this evening. I thought at first I'd unwittingly sat at the High Table, but no, it was no problem.

We ended the evening singing around the tables of empty wine glasses, mostly in four-part harmony but sometimes eight.

Extras:
- A surviving fragment from a 1590 picture (in among all the Madonnas with baby in the Museo Eremitani) of St Sebastian's first martyrdom - I could relate to this archer's own sore-foot martyrdom.
- What to do with a leaning tower when you can't find an engineer (from the Basilica Sant Antonio)
- Prickly balcony
- The end of the evening