Feature: HAMPSTEAD AND HIGHGATE FESTIVAL - The Jehane Markham Trio's A Journey from Vladivostock to Moscow - Keats House, Sat' Sept' 25

Published: 23 September 2010
by JOSH LOEB

TRAVELLING across the vast wilderness of Siberia inspired Jehane Markham’s symphonic poem Vladivostok to Moscow, set to be performed as part of the Hampstead and Highgate Festival on Saturday. 

The Kentish Town-based poet – who performs with jazz musicians Robin Phillips (piano) and Jonny Gee (double bass) – undertook the seven-day journey with her husband Roger Lloyd Pack after he had finished performing in a play in Tokyo.

The poem fits the Russian theme of this year’s festival. “Russian writers have always been important to me,” says Markham. “My father was an actor and one of the first things I saw him in was Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Later, in the 1970s, he got involved in helping dissidents to come out of Russia.”

Markham and Pack travelled to the foot of Japan, from where they took a boat across to Vladivostock and then got a train to Europe. “It’s a train journey that had carried the poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in a gulag in Siberia,” Markham explains. 

“There was a poem I had already written about Mandelstam and that formed part of the journey. The literary references weave in and out and I talk a bit about how the trans-Siberian track was laid and the history of how it came to be. 

“I have tried to evoke the feeling of that journey. I’ve tried to build up a picture of things through some prose and some poetry – a kind of collage, but it seems to work.” 

• The Jehane Markham Trio will perform A Journey from Vladivostock to Moscow on September 25, 1pm,
at Keats House, Keats Grove, NW3. £6, 020 7722 9301