It was a brilliantly sunny Easter Day in London, which made all the difference—since, like so many days here, one usually expects changeable weather. After a delicious lunch cooked by Sandra, complete with all the traditional Easter fare—hors d’oevres, mint lamb, chocolate profiteroles, and of course the Easter egg, a rather sorry affair after the wonderful specimens we are used to having in Italy—we decided to go to Chiswick House and Gardens to see the camellias.

We had seen them before in the conservatory there and I remembered especially us taking Sandra’s mother to enjoy them during her Indian summer days. Unfortunately, we discovered that the conservatory was now closed—apparently due to its wood rotting away—so the only camellias we could find were those growing outside. They were still beautiful, though not quite what we had hoped for.

From there we wandered through the grounds towards Chiswick House itself, that elegant Palladian villa built by Lord Burlington to demonstrate to the British what classical architecture ought to be like. Nearby, we came across a cheerful Easter market, full of stalls selling honey, pickles, scarves, and all manner of other goods. It was pleasing to see not only traditional English crafts, but also items reflecting a wider range of cultures.

After that, we made our way to Brompton Oratory for Easter Mass. Our intention had been to attend what we thought was the High Mass at six o’clock—but that turned out to be mistaken (our AI friend Justine having again misinformed us). In fact, the principal Mass, with its full panoply of some of the finest church music in the capital, had been at eleven in the morning—which, of course, we could never have managed alongside Easter lunch.
When we arrived in Knightsbridge, strolling along its elegantly plush streets (complete with golden BWV) we discovered that the evening Mass was actually at seven pm. We hesitated—but then thought, how could one end Easter Day without going to Mass? So we waited.
It was well worth it. By seven, the church was already quite full. The Oratory, with its grand neo-Roman Baroque style, remains one of the most impressive churches in London—indeed, the largest of its kind before Westminster Cathedral was built. The priest gave a remarkable sermon—so compelling that it almost made me believe in eternal life.
And yet, one wonders: would eternal life truly be desirable? Or might it be something quite different from what we imagine—a kind of transformed or “super” life? These were the thoughts lingering as the day drew to a close. Meanwhile Sandra lit a candle for those relatives and friends of ours who hadn’t made it to this year’s Easter. lAfter returning home, we rounded off the evening with a bottle of something sparkling, a light supper, and then bed—content, if slightly pensive—after what had been a truly beautiful and sunlit Easter Day.

Good Friday—why is it called “good”? At first glance it commemorates a day of immense suffering: the crucifixion of Christ, a figure of extraordinary significance for so many. How could such a day be “good”? Historically, the term may come from an older English sense: “God’s Friday.” Spiritually, it also reflects the ultimate good arising from the Passion: salvation through suffering, through someone atoning for everything you have done wrong on this planet. Both meanings converge in the idea of a journey through darkness toward light—a theme I experienced in two very different, yet profoundly connected ways this Good Friday.
In the morning, we visited the Crystal Palace subway. This is no ordinary passage or even US style underground; it is a Victorian underpass built between 1854 and 1858, once linking the high-level railway station, demolished in the 1960’s to the fairytale world of the Crystal Palace itself, which sadly burned down in 1936’s devastating fire.. The railway line that connected the station eventually fell into disuse, its tracks lifted, its tunnels abandoned. As children, living close-by, we explored these tunnels, finding adventure in the forgotten, lawless spaces well away from the strictures of our parents. Rave parties, secret gatherings, the scent of oriental herbs and the thrill of discovery transformed these abandoned corridors into an alternative world.
Now, restored and preserved, the subway still exudes magic. Walking through it, passing under arches, along tiled walls, moving through rhythmical repetition and variation, one senses a hunt—a pursuit of knowledge, beauty, and wonder. Are we wandering through a mosque in Cordoba, the undercroft of a Sienese abbey, the imaginings of Byzantine patriarchs? The artful tiling of the largely Tuscan craftsmen who fashioned these arches put all these thoughts to my mind.

Emerging from the subway and entering into the Italian gardens now echoing to the rumblings of machinery helping to restore them to the glory they once had under Albert the Prince Consort who contributed to their design we came across two enormous Egyptian sphinxes standing or rather lying as silent witnesses reflecting on the past and contemplating the unknown future. They were like guardians of imagination, monuments to mystery, and a reminder that even if the Crystal Palace itself is no more its magic persists.

In the afternoon, we entered another journey: Bach’s St John Passion at St George’s Hanover Square, that elegant witness to London’s eighteenth century architecture and an area well known to musicians like Handel and Bach’s own son who had their homes and held their concerts there. In this place the darkness is musical, emotional, and spiritual. The St John Passion although often overshadowed by the grander St Matthew Passion remains sublime and one of my favourite pieces of music ever. If the Saint Matthew is a meditative take on the Passion the Saint John casts a realistic insight. From the obsessively throbbing bass and suspenseful oboes of the opening chorus to the extraordinary oboe da caccia, the hunting oboe, double-reeded, lower-toned and strangely curved, to the lullaby-like ending chorus (so beautiful!) the music immerses you fully; the liturgical setting it had at last night’s performance with preacher, sermon and congregational hymn singing made us feel we were truly participants enacting the whole drama with tangible emotion. The singers, the musicians could not have been bettered. The hunting horn’s woody voice seems to imitate the human voice. We were plunged into the Passion with the chorus’s cries of the mob, Pilate’s puzzlement, and the sequence of reflective, mournful, joyous and angelic arias accompanied by such varied instrumentation.. Like the hunt through the subway or the pursuit of spaceship Artemis toward the moon, I was reminded that we are ever in a hunt, a search for meaning, for truth, for finding the real purpose of life itself.

Comparing this experience to the way we have spent Good Friday in Italy adds another dimension. In Castiglione di Garfagnana, a walled medieval town, we witnessed the Via Crucis—the reenactment of Christ’s last journey through the streets. Chains clanked, figures processed, hooded and mysterious and the medieval town became almost biblical in its atmosphere. Here, too, we were participants, not mere spectators. We followed Christ through the streets as part of a living liturgy, just as in Bach’s Passion we joined in hymns and immersed ourselves in sound. Two cultures, two expressions, yet converging on the same event—humanity reflecting on the Passion, its suffering, and its hope.
The parallel is profound. Both the subway and the Passion, both Castiglione and London, are structured journeys from darkness into light. One through space and architecture, one through music and emotion; one through streets and ritual, one through sound and participation. In each, we hunt for insight, for beauty, for transcendence. In each, we are active participants, co-creators of meaning and experience.
Even beyond Earth, this hunting continues. Reflecting on that spacecraft named after the Grecian goddess of hunting hurtling its way to our only natural satellite we continue our literal and metaphorical journey into the unknown and the pursuit of discovery that of the world’s and perhaps more importantly our own.

On this Good Friday, we experienced multiple hunts: through Victorian corridors, through Bach’s orchestration, through packed streets, through opulent arcades, through underground tunnels, through verdant squares and toward the heavens themselves.
London, with its endless variety, offers this one commanding pursuit. Moving from the subway to the Passion in one day was an adventure in itself. We were hunters of experience, seekers of meaning, participants in the living rhythm of the city. As Dr. Johnson said, “He who is tired of London is tired of life.” May we never tire of life, never tire of hunting for beauty, magic, and understanding. In music, architecture, ritual, and the cosmos. Every journey through darkness into light, every pursuit of the unknown, is profoundly—and wonderfully—good. Yesterday was truly a Good Friday in all senses of that word.

We missed it last time. Well, we didn’t miss it exactly—we simply couldn’t book in time. But we came back, and this time we did it properly. The exhibition of Seurat’s late seascapes was the goal, and it was worth the return.
There are only about twenty-five of these paintings. That fact alone gives them a kind of intensity. Seurat died tragically young, just over the age of thirty, and did not leave a large body of work. What remains, however, is extraordinarily concentrated—almost distilled. Each painting feels considered, deliberate, and complete in itself.

The Courtauld is a particularly fitting place to see them. While it does not hold the largest collection of Seurat’s works in the world, it has the strongest and most coherent group in the United Kingdom, and exhibitions like this one bring together a body of work that is rarely seen as a whole. That matters, because Seurat is not a painter one fully understands from a single canvas. He unfolds across a sequence.
Most people think of Seurat simply as a “pointillist,” but that term, while convenient, is not quite sufficient. A better term is Neo-Impressionist. Pointillism describes the technique—the dots, the touches of colour—but Neo-Impressionism describes the intention behind it: a more scientific, structured, and analytical approach to painting. It is a method grounded in theory, in perception, in the way the eye itself works.
This approach was not accidental. Seurat did not begin this way. In his early years, he painted in a manner closer to Impressionism—more fluid, more intuitive. But he became dissatisfied with what he saw as its lack of structure. Instead, he turned to scientific writings on colour and perception, studying how adjacent colours influence one another and how the eye blends them at a distance. From this, he developed a system: instead of mixing pigments on the palette, he placed small touches of pure colour side by side on the canvas. The blending would happen not in the paint, but in the viewer’s eye.
It sounds simple when described, but standing in front of the paintings, it is quite astonishing. Up close, the surface is fragmented—small marks, carefully placed, almost like a mosaic. Step back, and something shifts: the image resolves, light seems to emerge, colours vibrate with a clarity that mixed paint cannot quite achieve. You have to look at Seurat from different distances—close, then further away, then somewhere in between. The act of viewing becomes part of the work itself.
The seascapes in this exhibition belong to the later part of his life, roughly between 1885 and 1890. These are not early experiments; they are mature works. By this stage, Seurat had fully developed his technique and was refining it, reducing it, almost simplifying it.
And yet, “simple” is not quite the right word. What strikes one immediately is their quietness.
Seurat clearly loved the northern coasts of France—places like Port-en-Bessin, Le Crotoy, and Gravelines. But these are not lively seaside scenes filled with figures and activity. Quite the opposite. The beaches are often empty. The ports contain boats, but rarely people. Buildings, lighthouses, and harbour walls are present, but they do not dominate. They are part of the structure of the image, not its subject. If one looks deeply at these wonderful seascapes one can virtually breath in the marine air and actually find fragments of sand caught by the wind while the artist was painting ‘en plein air’.There is indeed a sense that everything unnecessary has been removed.
Compared with his great figure compositions—most famously the large Parisian scenes like La Grande Jatte, now in the States—these seascapes feel almost meditative. The emphasis is no longer on social life or narrative, but on light, space, and balance. Horizontals lines—the sea, the sky, the shoreline—create a calm, measured rhythm. Colour is controlled, often restrained, yet luminous. The whole effect is one of stillness.

It is tempting to think of Seurat as a purely intellectual painter, a kind of scientist with a brush. Certainly, there is something methodical about him. The precision of his technique, the discipline of his compositions, and the theoretical basis of his work all suggest a highly ordered mind. One imagines a reserved, perhaps introverted personality. He did, however have a muse and companion in his relationships with models Madeleine Knobloch and Pauline Baudu which he kept away from any publicity.

And yet, that is only part of the picture. He did have a personal life—he did form long-term relationships and had a child (although there is some dispute about this). But, as mentioned, he kept this aspect of his life very private. There is emotion there, but it is contained, controlled, much like the paintings themselves. Rather than being expressed directly, it is embedded in the structure.
His death was sudden. In 1891, at just thirty-one, he died—most likely from pneumonia, though other illnesses have been suggested. Whatever the exact cause, the effect is the same: a career cut short just as it was reaching a new level of refinement.
That sense of incompletion adds something to the experience of the exhibition. These late seascapes do not feel like endings; they feel like a direction—one that might have led further toward simplification, toward modernism, perhaps even toward abstraction.
Seeing the exhibition was a pleasure in itself. There is always a concern with popular shows that they will be too crowded, too hurried to allow proper looking. But here, thanks to timed entry and a manageable number of visitors, it was possible to take one’s time. You had to wait occasionally, as one does, but it was never overwhelming. Each painting could be approached, considered, and revisited.
And that is essential with Seurat. These are not paintings to glance at and move on. They require attention, patience, and a willingness to look more than once.
In the end, what remains most striking is the balance he achieved: between science and art, between control and atmosphere, between structure and feeling. The seascapes, in particular, show a painter who has moved beyond complexity into clarity—not because he could not do more, but because he chose to do less.
It is rare to encounter work that feels both so calculated and so serene. Additionally the exhibition includes some prior sketches for his canvases – Seurat was very methodical in his preparations and included several of these.

I would have liked to have met Seurat. One imagines a quiet, thoughtful man, perhaps not immediately forthcoming, but deeply engaged with his ideas. Whether he spoke much of emotion is unclear, but he certainly understood how to translate perception into something lasting.
And that, ultimately, is what these paintings are: not just views of the sea, but studies in how we see—how light, colour, and form come together in the eye and in the mind.
It was well worth going back.

A previously unknown manuscript believed to contain the missing final movement of Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 (Unfinished) has been uncovered in Vienna, according to researchers working with a private archival collection left after the death of a reclusive descendant of the Hapsburg family.

The document, written in dark brown ink on early 19th-century staff paper, was found among the effects of a little-known copyist associated with Schubert’s circle. Initial paleographic analysis suggests the manuscript dates from the early 1820s, the period in which the symphony itself was composed.

Dr. Elena Schnuckiputzi , a Vienna-based musicologist involved in the study, described the discovery as “one of the most original and significant musical finds of the new century”:
“What we appear to have is a fully realized finale, structurally ambitious and harmonically daring. It revisits thematic material from the opening movement but subjects it to inversion and fragmentation in a way that anticipates later Romantic developments.”
Notably, the manuscript contains no trace of the symphony’s third movement. However, scholars point out that a number of partial sketches for a scherzo already exist in other sources, and these are widely considered sufficient to allow for a plausible reconstruction—should it prove that Schubert had indeed intended, or even begun, a complete four-movement design. Indeed, it seems hardly plausible that Schubert should ever have intended for a symphony he was writing to have only two movements. Every other symphony that has come down to us from him has the customary four which is usual for the late classical and romantic periods. Furthermore, it seems equally implausible that Schubert should have suddenly forgotten to complete his Eighth symphony. The two movements that are customarily played of this work were written at least five years before the composer’s untimely death and, indeed, Schubert found time to write another symphony before he died in 1828, his ‘Great’ C major one. It can also seem very odd that the composer would have decided that what he had written of his Unfinished wasn’t up to his usual standards. In its commanding structure, its dramatic atmosphere, its transcendent lyricism, its orchestration and use of counterpoint the ‘Unfinished’ is every bit as wonderful (some would say even more so) as his last symphony. The idea that the Unfinished was the result of a commission by someone who failed to cough up the money required and that as a result Schubert decided not to complete it is also another half-baked idea since Schubert wrote so many works just for the pleasure of doing so without any aim of remuneration. It is perhaps, therefore, less strange that a completion of this heavenly work should have now suddenly appeared than that the symphony should have ever been considered to be purposefully unfinished.

The newly identified finale begins in B minor, maintaining continuity with the existing two movements, before modulating unexpectedly into D major. Observers have highlighted its striking use of trombones and lower strings, lending the work an unusually dark and weighty sonority. In this respect Schubert was rather more in advance than his near contemporary Beethoven (who he was always too shy to meet, although they lived not far from each other in the same city) for he used brass instruments not just as emphatic punctuation marks in his orchestration as was usual then instead but gave them substantial independent passages.
A preliminary performance, recorded earlier this week using period instruments, has already begun circulating among specialists. While formal authentication is still ongoing, early reactions have been enthusiastic, with some suggesting the discovery could reshape long-held assumptions about Schubert’s later symphonic style.
However, questions remain regarding the manuscript’s provenance, and further analysis will be required to determine whether the work is indeed by Schubert or a later pastiche.
In a brief statement, the research team indicated that a full critical edition, along with a public release of the recording, is expected later this year.
Listeners are invited to hear the alleged finale and judge for themselves here:

https://youtu.be/FSndEjJPeTM?si=QVXfGC-Q-Rk2I2t_
…
Early listeners have praised the recording for its “remarkable clarity,” “economy of material,” and, above all, its commitment to Schubert’s original vision of leaving the symphony—finally and definitively ‘refinished’.

Finally, because of this remarkable discovery there could well be greater chances of finding other incomplete or even vanished works. Sibelius’ Eighth symphony comes to mind, or the conclusion of Puccini’s Turandot, to say nothing of the ending of Mozart’s Requiem and the finale of Bruckner’s Ninth symphony.