Portsmouth Baroque Choir in Fareham

 Portsmouth Baroque Choir, United Reformed Church, Fareham, March 22

Mention of the name Buxtehude will often elicit a response about 'the organ composer' but of the 29 discs of the extant complete works, only 4 of them are organ music. Thus, as part of its ongoing exploration of lesser-known repertoire, Portsmouth Baroque Choir had plenty to choose from along with pieces by Johann Kuhnau.

I have a programme from a concert by the Consort of Twelve that was in Bosham in October 1988. They have remained a stalwart presence in the area since 1982 but the only name that occurs on that programme and the one for this is Kate Goodchild so she deserves a special mention on a day when solo parts in the choir were widely distributed and it's going to be very unfair of me not to be able to namecheck them all.

Oboes took the part of trumpets in this non-period instrument performance, as in the opening Buxtehude, Ihr lieben Christen, and perhaps Franceska Dante is noteworthy for playing one of those, cor anglais, recorder and singing at different times. In Dulce Jubilo, BuxWV52, benefitted from a warm tone in the choir without being quite, perhaps thankfully, the skipalong setting we might hear more often.

But while I'd finally found the ideal opportunity to wear my Buxtehude t-shirt by way of support, he was all but outshone by Kuhnau early doors and possibly went into the interval 0-1 down. Jennifer Kimber's cello strode out, laying a firm foundation in Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern which it was to do equally memorably in more than one piece, and any spotters of rare instruments would have been thrilled with Rachel Haggarty's dulcian. Chris Clark's arias involved some baroque tenor acrobatics before the lush chorale. 

Ich habe Lust abzuscheiden is a more shadowy thing, for those of us who prefer the half light to outright illumination, with further memorable cello chopping away in the alto aria.

Perhaps Portsmouth Baroque's greatest strength is its sopranos and in Gott, sei mir gnädig Ruth Sands and Lucy Bradley demonstrated two of the reasons why, filling an acoustic that might not have been designed with concert performance as a priority.

I'd been saving the oxymoron 'rich austerity' for use in relation to Buxtehude and not had much chance to use it until Jesu, mein freude which had such a Lutheran quality not least in Depart, you sad ghosts, the hymn-like chorus that Malcolm Keeler's notes very credibly suggest the young Bach might have heard on his extended away day to Lubeck.

Bach was even more present in the fuller flow and building of his arrangement of Kuhnau's Der Gerechte kömmt um with its pulsing woodwind.

Buxtehude is credited with his Magnificat on the same basis as some almost grudgingly allow Shakespeare his own plays - due to the lack of other plausible claimants - but since it sounds like him and carried forward features that we had heard the like of already, it is a safe enough attribution. The extended glorias passed around the assembled company to finish what was a gentle devotional evening for one still recovering from Shostakovich 10.

There is always fixture congestion in the concert schedules before Easter but Portsmouth Baroque took their share of the available audience. As ever, much credit goes to Malcolm Keeler as the mastermind of the enterprise but it is a shared experience and thanks also to those who also served but weren't mentioned by name on this occasion.

Petersfield Orchestra at Petersfield Festival Hall

 Petersfield Orchestra, Petersfield Festival Hall, March 20

Scholarship might never decipher all the meanings in the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. Maybe not everybody will agree but for me the debate's been over for a while about the greatest composer of the C20th, opaque ironies and false signals notwithstanding. I've been trying my best with the forbiddingly loud, large-scale, complicated symphonies recently and the chance to hear one in the flesh at Petersfield had to be worth that bit of extra mileage.

First, though, came the short, sharp shock of Liadov's Baba-Yaga, all drama and urgency although in the circumstances only a softening-up exercise for what was to come.

Ariel Lanyi and the orchestra then blasted into Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, its big beginning and then the big theme of its first movement. Ariel is highly expressive in Beethoven's grander gestures and even in the pacific moments we know he's only brewing up the next storm. Row 3, right in front of where the sound comes out of the piano, might not be the optimum position that a recording engineer would take his settings from but, on what was not a night for faint hearts, one was almost inside the sound. One of my imagination, the orchestra, Ariel or Beethoven was conjuring torrents of rain or maybe it was all four of them.

The Adagio is a sumptuous serenade giving Ariel a chance to be lyrical and were it not obvious that it moved into a new mood and theme, you might think it was a concerto of two movements because we are suddenly in the Rondo Allegro, ever moving with Beethoven's protracted way through the triumphant variations of what could almost be a tarantella. Precious few do heroics like he did and Ariel and the Petersfield Orchestra stood and delivered. Luckily he had an encore ready and even more luckily it was the peace and release of the lost reverie of Chopin's Nocturne in C#minor.

 

But the evening was still young. It's astonishing to think that in recent weeks Beethoven, that monster that overshadowed all that came after him, has not necessarily been the main feature of two brilliant concerts. It takes some doing to outdo him and over the whole oeuvre hardly anybody does but you get him playing away against a C20th Russian who fancies the fixture and you might just outpoint him.

The Shostakovich Symphony no. 10 begins with a 25-minute first movement of immense, searing power - woodwind, brass and all sections having their parts before the colossal work of the strings, led by the shock storm-troopers of the violins. I had no idea that the Petersfield Orchestra could make such a sound or take on this vast edifice of a work. I'm an enthusiastic, hopefully generous concert-goer and reviewer who doesn't go to find fault and so I use up words of praise readily without throwing them about like confetti but then there's this.

Robin Browning is somehow what Herbert Von Karajan should have been like if he hadn't been the most appalling narcissist- distinguished, charismatic, readily in charge of an orchestra who surely have the greatest respect for him and he's made all this possible.

The second movement is short, nasty, dense and aggressive, it being the portrait of Stalin that Shostakovich was finally able to paint. And then he signs it with his DSCH motif in every timbre, texture, tincture and atmosphere available to him in the third movement. And after the disembodied early fragments of the fourth movement, the swirling militarism leads to a great signing off with the same. 

It's as if the sound of soldiers marching, or the dereliction they leave behind them is somewhere there in so much of Shostakovich, this nervous, studious, very bravest of creative artists. I try my best to apply the most stringent of criteria before appointing anyone to the highest echelons of such heroes but I ask no questions of him. He has nothing to prove.

 

That was a monumental performance of an enormous work. It was exhausting to listen to so the Good Lord only knows what it was like to play in. The Petersfield Orchestra were deeply impressive in all departments and I'm not surprised they were sold out weeks in advance.

I could, at long last, end on a darkly ironic note and recommend you sign up for their next gig which is Bruckner but add that I won't because Bruckner is much closer to my Bottom 10 Composers than my Top 10. However, I did stand for hours at the Proms to hear the Berliners do whichever one it was and came out less unimpressed than I'd anticipated so being able to sit down might improve him further.

But, no. The Petersfields, Robin, Shostakovich- and Beethoven and Ariel- absolutely delivered the goods beyond all expectation. If you'd told me there could still be days like this I'd have had my doubts but you'd have been right. 

Portsmouth Cathedral Choral Scholars at Lunchtime Live!

Portsmouth Cathedral Choral Scholars, Portsmouth Cathedral, March 20

Portsmouth Cathedral's Early Music Festival got off to a punctual start, 1.10pm being early enough. It's a vague term that invites scrutiny. We have 'Renaissance', 'Pre-Renaissance' and 'Baroque' which some might prefer but it's better we attend to the music and not the loose categories of it.

The five Choral Scholars began in an arrangement of Happy is the people that Theo Almond had had a hand in, a gentle introduction before their many and various talents were gradually revealed.

Their Lamentations of Jeremiah I by Tallis being next up meant that my highlight came up quickly, its exquisite exposition of sorrowful progress being one of the rich repertoire of music lamenting the C6thBC siege of Jerusalem - I think- with Kim Chin leading the engaging blend of voices as counter-tenor.

But there was plenty more to admire with Theo decorative over Kim's dainty pipe organ in a fragment of the Bach Magnificat and Jimmy Thomson, bass, in the flighty love poem, Come again by John Dowland, this time with harpsichord accompaniment.

But Kim plays the recorder, too, as he did most plaintively over a walking harpsichord continuo in the Larghetto from Handel's Sonata HWV 360 then it transpired that Jimmy Thomson played violin as well as being one of two fine basses with Noah Toogood and Theo sang the Agnus Dei from Bach's B minor Mass, filling the acoustic of another gratifyingly packed St. Thomas's Chapel with Kim back on organ.

Two pieces from Messiah demonstrated immaculate clarity from Joel Fernandez and authoritative 'great light' from Noah and if, by any chance, my notes fitted all the right names to the roles they took at one time or another then my performance rates as one of my better ones while not being quite as elegant to witness.

As a finale, Kim made his way to the big cathedral organ for the finale, Sweelinck's Fantasia Cromatica, SwWV 258 which puts layer on layer in an orderly procession until raising its banner high to finish.

These were 'gap year' students. We didn't have 'gap years' in my day, we were glad enough to get to university on a grant, but these scholars are clearly making excellent use of their time, busy busy as it sounds like they are. You wouldn't want to be otherwise. I wasn't. 

We only had to wait half an hour until a most entertaining and illuminating talk by Andrew Gant based on his book, The Making of Handel's Messiah, I had an hour or so over the road in The Dolphin, surely the most civilized pub in Portsmouth, and I was down to Portsmouth Harbour for the train to Petersfield and an evening to remember with their orchestra. I'm very glad there are still such days as these. 

Chichester Cathedral Choir & The Rose Consort of Viols in Chichester

 Chichester Cathedral Choir & The Rose Consort of Viols, Chichester Cathedral, Mar 18

Life was so much simpler in the time of Orlando Gibbons, was it not. I somewhat doubt it. The anonymous author of the text to The silver swan notices that,

more geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.

Perhaps less changes than we think but Gibbons, whose music made up all of this programme given by Chichester Cathedral and the Rose Consort of Viols under Charles Harrison, crafted a world of peace and harmony away from worldly cares compared to the often atonal, angular sound of much contemporary music.

Two trebles led off If ye be risen again with Christ, immediately setting the mood quite gloriously and the audience were wise and circumspect by deferring their applause to the very end of proceedings which helped greatly with the solemnity of the occasion by not over-punctuating the sequence of short pieces.

In Dainty fine bird the Consort were what in modern parlance would be called a violin duet before all five of them joined in for Trust not too much fair youth. And thus the fine choral sound was interspersed with their restrained charm and immacualte musicianship throughout. Without the forensic evidence of shellac, vinyl, CD or download being available to Gibbons, I'm not sure we can be confident of knowing exactly how his music sounded to him but the findings of modern scholarship provide something I hope he would have approved of.

A memorable In nomine 2 a5 most affectingly sustained a top note while the embroidery was woven below by the lower strings which I understand is where the main line of music once was.

Great Lord of Lords brought in countertenors with choir and then the Consort gave Fair is the rose and two more sumptuous Fantasias.  Breaking into a more spirited ensemble in See, see the word is incarnate with more solo parts, the cathedral acoustic was put to good purpose although probably inevitably better for those early arrivers who snap up the first few rows because this in intimate music more than it is grandstanding Albert Hall Last Night material.

It was a great privilege to hear, and see, this special, unsensational performance which was, in another way, sensational. 

Famous

The Heaney Letters flow on by, either repetitively or with recurrent leitmotifs.

He became his own industry which is a mark of his enormous success and I daresay he wouldn't have had it any differently but such celebrity comes at a cost. Whereas by now 'celebrities' are celebrated for being celebrities and that will do, it was previously required that they were celebrated for something. Heaney spends so much of his time travelling the world that editor, Christopher Reid, remarks that he might have had special notepaper printed with EI 117, the flight out of Dublin, as his address. In receipt of 15 letters a day, it's not in his nature to become tetchy about it but reading this book revises one's picture of him away from rural Ulster, the culture of Irish legends or peat bogs to that of airports, commitments, engagements, trying to avoid commodification and ever belately keeping up with correspondance. He does it all with good grace as best he can but not all of us would envy the schedule of lectures, readings, the Oxford job, Harvard, the craic that he maintains a devotion to, the books to write, read and know about while still ostensibly needing the time for reflection required to produce his poems.

Perhaps in some way he did become the factory of the product that his own industry depended on. There have been some who found fault with what he did but surely there are always those who take exception to success. 

I won't hear of it although I might not have taken on quite so many projects myself.

I've never been entirely sure about the debt he owed to Ted Hughes. Hughes, born in 1930, is as much of Heaney's generation, born 1939, as he is of the one before. It's more usual for one's main role model to come from an age difference more like that of Hardy, whose poems began circa 1900, and Larkin, born in 1922, but there are no rules- as ever- about such things.

But Heaney explicitly acknowledges Hughes in birthday wishes in 1990,

the verifying and releasing power 'Lupercal' et al had on me in 1962. 

And you can't say fairer than that however many parallels one wants to find between the nature, the violence and the deep sense of history. One might say the language and music, too, but that might be where any such essay comparison needed to do a bit more work than outline the obvious. Hughes, some might suspect, seems to relish the vigour and alpha-male aspects of nature and appears to be lone, selfish and destructive whereas Heaney is communal and gentler.

There's an essay in it but it's not one I'd attempt. They are neither of them ironic enough but Heaney is the much better poet. He may well have found things in Hughes that he could develop towards his own purposes. You feel you're in good company with Heaney, in safe hands. You don't always think so with Ted.  

Sláinte, Seamus

The Heaney Letters is a volume too substantial for its flimsy design. It doesn't 'perch on the hand' like Craig Raine's 'caxtons'. It gets bent too easily and after one reading of its 820 pages it will look well-used.

Not to worry. He is good company, forever apologizing for his overdue replies despite the amount of time he clearly spent writing letters. Being so eminent and having so many friends has its downside but one does sometimes catch him being uncharacteristically uncharitable about one contemporary or another which only goes to show that even those who appear passing saintly are still human.

He uses any number of ways of signing off, but Sláinte- 'cheers', or 'health'- is a favourite not reserved for his fellow Irish because Ted Hughes gets wished as much. One envies his friends for having counted him as such and him for having counted Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Brodsky among the international superleague of his acquaintance. Reading the incessant planning of new titles, pieces in magazines and not so the much reading tours makes one want to be involved in such even if one has just issued a title. But, no, not the readings. Although I dare say he showed up and deported himself most affably at all such events they do seem to be a chore he could have done without.

For the most part we might not need such a catalogue of his travels and holidays, his peripatetic career and social evenings but from time to time there comes a literary idea. The most profound of those so far might be to David Thomson in Sept 1983 regarding Patrick Kavanagh's,

impossible but proper ambition for himself as a poet: to play a true note on a slack string. He meant, I think, that a true writer is always aware of any technical trickery he may practice, however justifiably, and that this rigging of his material will rob him of some of his pride in his work.

I wonder if the idea is a variation on Edward Thomas aspiring to 'a language not to be betrayed', or be betrayed by, or if the impossibility of it is like trying to tell the dancer from the dance.

I'd have thought that all poetry, all writing and all art involved 'technical trickery'. It is artificial, however 'natural' it might purport to be and, in Donald Davie's phrase, a 'considered utterance' and that for 'trickery' we could equally read 'art' and thus conclude that it's an impossible ambition because to achieve it would ipso facto disqualify the result from being 'poetry'. For Marianne Moore it's 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them' and although it's nice when it happens, it doesn't always 'come as naturally as the leaves to a tree' as Keats would have liked.

So, there we are, more names dropped and cited in as few sentences as possible. There is an essay to be done on the subject, I dare say, if only one I've outlined several times before as I yet again do here.

I don't think I could ever write properly about Heaney because, not being Irish, I'm not sure it's my business. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion found themselves firmly if politely reprimanded for claiming him as British and he insists on his Irishness to an extent that I can't be expected to be a part of, his generosity of spirit being not akin to the reservations of some of us more Larkin-esque English but that doesn't raise the sort of objections it seems to for High Church Protestant, A.N. Wilson, whose often admirable scholarliness doesn't extend to sympathy for Seamus.

Having discovered that there's such a thing as Seamus Heaney and the Great Poetry Hoax: A critical exposé of Faber and Faber’s verse-man by Kevin Kiely, I'm tempted to look at the case for the prosecution, conspiracy theory though it may appear. Perhaps one shouldn't have a house full of only books one agrees with. I've been waiting for a chance to read what Shakespeare was really like, according to Stanley Wells who clearly doesn't know, but don't want to spend much on it and certainly with no royalty accruing to Prof. Sir Stan.

I don't defend Larkin, Gunn, Auden or Donne to the very last word and Heaney isn't quite them, for me. I defend Elizabeth Bishop and Rosemary Tonks further on the basis of different infatuations and the gender difference might not be insignificant. It's not the Nobel Prize that convinces me about Heaney - heaven knows Henry Kissinger got one of those - it's mostly do do with his music.

I might have a look round upstairs for some more fiction to re-read, though. 700-odd pages of similar letters can eventually make one look forward to some first-hand literature.  

Chess Masters

 Anything and everything will get its turn at being a 'Reality' TV show if it waits long enough. There was the increasingly horrible Big Brother, 'business' in The Apprentice, then cookery, dancing, needlework, Traitors. It took a while for the brainstorming sessions to find chess but they will try anything once and see if it flies.

I didn't have high hopes of it but gave it a go. Sue Perkins is brought in as somebody vaguely 'highbrow', perhaps having won Maestro on which she was judged to have waved her arms most stylishly conducting an orchestra but I don't think Claudio Abbado lost any sleep over it. It also had David Howells- someone who genuinely can play- selling himself for the money on offer like Lang Lang surprisingly did in The Piano. Or perhaps they both did it through dedication to their art, for the legacy benefit of others.

 

It wasn't as bad as it might have been. The players all have to have epithet nicknames like Killer Queen and, as is customary, a 'back story' if at all possible. It's never allowed to appear dull for a moment. Even though Round 1 was only with 10 minutes each on the clock there was no way we'd be shown a game in real time. It was just an opening position, a crucial position and the end with players apparently engaging in friendly conversation during such a quick-play discipline. I've never played in such an atmosphere even with 90 minutes on the clock and Fischer and Spassky didn't in Rekjavik either. It was more about personality than positional analysis and yet one got an idea of what had happened, could take sides and it served as entertainment.

Six players started out in programme 1 and only one was eliminated. Another goes next week after which I think another six turn up to provide eight 1/4 finalists. Of this first batch of six I'm expecting the most successful of them to be female.

You won't learn any more about how to play chess watching this than watching Match of the Day would make you a better footballer. I can't see it gathering great audience figures beyond the likes of me and I'm not part of any obvious demographic that any marketer would aim at.

It would be interesting to know what ratings the participants have or could achieve at LiChess, officially with FIDE or anywhere else because I'm not convinced they're that good. Maybe I could have been a contender except I don't have a personality to sell.

Reality TV hasn't done poetry yet. I'd be even worse at that-

What is it you like about poetry? 

I never said I did like it.

And how often do you write poems?

Hardly ever.

 

But chess is on the telly for the first time since Kasparov-Short in 1993 as best as the telly can by now accommodate it. It's marginally a good thing but in the end it matters little whether it's chess, origami, composing an opera or making a scientific discovery that such shows are themed around. You get largely the same show whatever it is.