Sorting the wheat from the chaff

What to see, book for and plan for in London culture right now

Jean-François Millet’s The Winnower, c 1847-8. © The National Gallery, London

“You can imagine yourself in the barn itself, when the winnower shakes the grain, makes the chaff fly, and the atmosphere fills with a fine and grey dust through which you can only just make out objects.”

What I’ve seen

This, written in 1848 by the critic F. de Lagenevais at the Paris Salon, on seeing Jean-François Millet’s painting The Winnower, is a perfect evocation of what the artist had achieved. The painting is now in the National Gallery collection and is the centre of Millet: Life on the Land, a small, focused, free exhibition in the gallery’s Sunley Room (I reviewed it for The Times here).

Millet – who was enormously influential in his time, particularly on Van Gogh – started out life as a farmer, working his family’s land in his youth, and focused largely on rural subjects in his work. His intimate familiarity with the tasks he depicted (winnowing is blowing air through the grain to remove the chaff; there are great pictures here of men heaving a saw through a massive log, backs rippling with effort, or a dead-tired goose girl, deaf in her exhaustion to the honking of her charges) gives them not just a clarity and authenticity but also a real dignity.

It’s a lovely, small, informative show, running to October 19.

Klaus Mäkelä, a young Finn, is currently the hottest conductor on the classical circuit, and my word has he been circulating. At 29, he is chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic, and music director of the Orchestre de Paris, music director-designate of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and artistic partner and chief conductor-designate of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, which I saw him conduct at the Proms on Saturday evening, doing Mahler’s 5th Symphony. Quite where he found the time to rehearse I have no idea, but they have a lot more funding for that kind of thing in Europe than they do here.

Evidently he did, because the playing was superb. I didn’t know the entire symphony (hard to get to grips with, it’s all over the place), only the very famous Adagietto (the fourth movement) which he wrote almost certainly as a wordless love song to his future wife Alma, and was popularised into the mainstream by its use in the 1971 Luchino Visconti film Death in Venice. You’ll recognise it.

There was a sort of freedom to the playing coupled with an attention to detail (you could see Mäkelä was all over it) that made it feel very unified, even though the whole symphony is hard to keep track of (and so bloody long, Jesus. 68 minutes. It’s a beast).

They also played a very curious 1988-90 piece by Luciano Berio, Rendering, which takes several fragments of Schubert’s unfinished (barely really even started) 10th symphony in D major, and wove them together with a sort of shimmering fabric of sound that took inspiration from Schubert’s work but didn’t attempt to imitate it.

It was extremely weird and avant garde, but rather lovely. Here’s Berio conducting it with the Orchestra Alessandro Scarlatti di Napoli della RAI in 1992.