Symborska at PPS

Anyone in the Portsmouth area with an interest in poetry is always welcome, first and third Wednesdays of the month, at Portsmouth Poetry Society (see the link over there  >>>) but especially next Weds when the subject is the poetry of Wislawa Symborska, introduced by me.
I have luckily just realized that is next Weds and not tomorrow which is some indication of my current level of distraction but it is not the dreamy distraction of the other-worldly Romantic poet, it is the ragged anxiety of someone adrift and losing their grip, which is less pretty. The world is too much with us.
On this occasion the long-suffering members of PPS will be excused my usual introductory essay and I'll keep it down to a minimum of remarks and then we can look at the poems, but I will say,

Wislawa Symborska (1923-2012) was perhaps not one of the best-known Nobel Prize winners when she was awarded the Literature prize in 1996, certainly not as famous as Bob Dylan. That would have been when I first heard of her and something prompted me to get View with a Grain of Sand, Selected Poems.
I liked it immediately for its 'sideways view' of the human condition, its gentle perception of absurdities and sometimes surreal look at ordinary life. Unless one is fluent in Polish, one can only appreciate her meaning in translation and can't access the 'poetry' itself but even without that she is very worthy of our attention.
Having been a member of 'the party', she finally left it in 1966 and associated with dissident elements.

And then, if nobody else has brought the poem, Museum, to read, we'll start with that.

Tosca gets changed where you might see horses (5)

I was a dead loss on the Times crossword today. Since the Professor was taking me to Ascot, it seemed only right to explain to him what was going to win once we got there.
I might consult my solicitors to see if there is an offence whereby turf accountants can be charged with trying to dispose of successful gamblers by hospitality because Corals tried their level best, keeping not only food coming but also, every time we got back to the table from watching a race from the 'panoramic restaurant', there was another bottle of Argentinian Shiraz asking to be demolished. I'm not one for conspiracy theories but I've always understood there's no such thing as a free lunch, never mind a banquet, so it can't have been right.
The Saturday Nap was a confident one and it was very convenient the way it worked out so that the Prof's bookie provided the best view of it so that I could see it was going to win when it was still in another part of Berkshire.
I am not accustomed to such places but I doubt if even Princess Margaret could have found fault with the service, the understated politeness of everybody there, the attentiveness of the staff, who even provided the Professor with orange juice without showing undue signs of alarm. It is only now, back in workaday Portsmouth, that it dawns on me that I should have said,
Look, I'm sorry, but I'm not Beyonce, I'm just a layabout poet from Portsmouth, could you please treat me with less deference. You are making me feel guilty.
And the Prof said, it's a different planet.
Although dress code was suit and tie, as you can see it didn't seem to matter how battered and shabby it looked. They probably don't get many poets so don't have any rules to deal with them.
I missed no trick in waiting for Top Notch, as napped, to pay the train fare but now wish I'd asked Corals for odds against being sat next to a Fulham supporter which not only would have brought retirement forward to this minute but paid for anything else I could possibly think of.
Hello, Michael. Glad you tuned in.
And, Thanks, Prof. And, Thanks, Corals. Yes, I did have to be out of the house before Danny Baker came on but what can you do when, in two of his many favourite phrases that we never tire of, this one taken from Voltaire, it was a day on which we had our hats on the side of our heads and
Everything's for the best in this best of all possible worlds.    

The Saturday Nap

The weather is set fair for a good day at Ascot for the Professor and I tomorrow and I go armed with a confident selection in Top Notch (2.05, nap), some of the confidence coming from the belief that nobody tips losers forever.
The Professor has completed his studies and takes on Defi du Seuil with L'Ami Serge (2.40).

The Professor's Top 6 Racehorses

The Professor has been a regular guest here on The Saturday Nap and surpassed himself last week by tipping a winner. As I always used to point out in olden days when I could pick winners, one does need to get on at the early price because although the classified results showed his advice as an even money favourite, it was 9/4 when he put it up. Well done, Prof.
The true identity of  the professor remains a mystery, like The Stig on Top Gear. It's not me, it's not John Francome and it's not John McCririck but those who think it's the last of those are the closest.
He appears here as special guest on Top 6 as part of the build-up to Ascot on Saturday when we attend a top notch (and there might be an early tip) meeting to sample the hospitality of his bookmaker, the legendary Mr. Joe Coral.
Hello, Prof. Tell us all about it, then.

DENMAN (above) – I remember for 12 months prior to the 2008 Gold Cup telling everyone interested Denman would win and had my largest single bet on it. So sweet when it actually won. 

SPRINTER SACRE – This one from an emotional point of view. Having swept all before him earlier in his career, illness and injury dogged him for over 2 years. The way Nicky Henderson got him back to win the Champion Chase again was brilliant.   

GRANVILLE AGAIN  - Having been tailed off in the Christmas Hurdle the genius of Martin Pipe got him back to win the Champion Hurdle in 1993. Peter Scudamore was not sure whether to ride him or Valfinet that had run up a 6 timer that season through front running performances. Pipe persuaded Scu to ride Granville and I bet he was glad he did!

RUN FOR FREE – This again from 1993. If you ever get the chance to watch one last race before leaving this world make it the 1993 Scottish Grand National. Having been left 40+ lengths at the start Run for Free picked off the field one by one before putting his head in front on the line. Just quite unbelievable and I had a few quid on it and had to retrieve the screwed up betting slip from the bin!!!

WEST TIP – The first horse I remember backing. When West Tip fell at Bechers second time round in 1985 I knew he could win the Grand National, but not that one. Richard Dunwoody was masterful on him and he duly obliged the following year. If that hadn’t happened maybe I would not have followed the game at all.

GALILEO – I will indulge in one flat horse. Not only was he a great performer on the track we can still enjoy watching the fruits of his exploits at stud 16 years later. He has bred great determination in his progeny and that is a great help as a punter as I love backing Aiden O’Brien horses as people that know me will know already.

In summary there are numerous others that could have made the list. I think it shows how jump horses live with us longer in the memory as they show up and perform year after year.

David Cassidy

At the time, being the age I was, I was too pre-occupied trying to establish avant-garde and alternative credentials with The Faust Tapes, Focus and Tonto's Expanding Head Band than to openly admit I liked David Cassidy but I reckon more of us did than were prepared to let on. At this distance, nostalgia even allows blokes of my generation to enjoy Donny Osmond records but that was far too risky at the time. You didn't need to be gay to realize that David Cassidy was cute, though, as the Partridge Family gave way to his succession of solo singles expertly designed to melt young girls' hearts.
As a reader of the uber-cool NME, one could only sneak a quick glance at your sister's Jackie but where are Brewer's Droop, The Pigsty Hill Light Orchestra or Stone the Crows now that the series of Jackie compilations provide all one needs to recreate the period, from David, through the New Seekers to Mud. It is yet one more example of  'they were right and I was wrong' to add to my penitent list.  
I have four music t-shirts- T. Rex, Mozart, Buxtehude and David Cassidy, the last worn not as ironically as if I were to wear a Pink Floyd t-shirt (and nobody would realize that was a joke) but to relish the incongruity of a man in late middle-age crooning,
I'm just a Dave Green, ah, 
I'm walking in the rain,
Chasing after rainbows I may never find again. 

and, soon after buying it a few years ago, I read some advice that one should never wear a t-shirt of anyone better looking than oneself. Whoever wrote that must have seen me wearring it.

Each generation is routinely provided with its requisite heart-throbs to swoon over and it's possible that one day there might be another with David Cassidy's relaxed charm and summery charisma.
I guess so. On the other hand, I doubt it.    

Love the Livelong Day

Melanie Stephenson, sop, Karen Kingsley, pno, St. Mary's Fratton, Nov 19th

The winter afternoon faded colourfully and became dark outside while Melanie Stephenson and accompanist, Karen Kingsley, presented an hour's worth of songs that took us through the livelong day in, I think, 6 languages including the Scots of the encore, by 11 composers, Arthur Sullivan being given two pieces.
Having questioned Purcell in Britten's piano settings on the new Sampson/Davies disc, Vivaldi worked very well in the motet Nulla in mundo pax sincera, the most profound and moving piece on a programme that was mainly C19th Romantic but included Elizabeth Maconchy as its most recent contributor. Karen Kingsley is gentle and considered and played the Vivaldi especially well.
Melaanie Stephenson is no more dramaatic than she needs to be, either, but is expressive and showed she could stretch to some heights when the opportunity arose and if, as the programme said, she's done The Magic Flute, he must be more than capable.
She had a break midway while Karen played Peter Warlock's Folk-song Preludes, lyrical but with bleak undertones that his biographical note would lead one to expect. They suited Karen's thoughtful technique very well and were an essential ingredient in the mix of requited, unrequited and dark moods.
Maconchy's Ophelia's Song isn't mad enough by half. There was not enough distraction in the song for Melanie to bring out but, as usual in lieder, Robert Schumann was among the foremost, Karen was delicate in Hugo Wolf and Melanie brought the same conviction to Mahler in German as she did to Bellini in Italian.
Top marks to the St. Mary's Music Foundation concerts, providing fine music on a Sunday afternoon. There should be more of it and more people should turn up to listen.

Handel - Belshazzar

Handel, Belshazzar, Portsmouth Choral Union, St. Mary's Fratton, Nov 18th

.

The writing is on the wall as far as full-time ermployment is concerned, for me - my decision, eventually one has seen enough - and so treats like this might be less taken for granted and more carefully chosen. That would be a shame because I wouldn't have wanted to miss this.
Of course, Handel is solid banker material and nothing can possibly go wrong but it is still something of a privilege to have been of the same species and, early enough to get front row seats, be quite so close to a counter-tenor singing and the glories of trumpets that Georg Frederick was so adept at sprinkling over his most thrilling passages.
The Portsmouth Choral Union make a fine sound but I'm even more of an admirer of Southern Pro Musica, not all of who are required for this score but the principal cello here earned his daily bread, relied upon to keep the momentum spritely, and bass lines are always a less flamboyant delight in baroque repertoire.
Four soloists, coupled into duets as the piece develops, were expressive and hugely enjoyable. Not going to the expense of a programme, I can't credit them by name but without the story in front of me, it was still very clear when the words appeared portentously on the wall. In oratorios if not in opera, Handel's texts were in English, which was very considerate of him.
Time flies when one is having such a good time and 45 minutes followed by a second half of an hour seemed telescoped into nothing like that. One rousing chorus with trumpets and drums appeared to be leading to a big finale but then, no, we went back and spent another quarter of an hour building to another and, if anything, came to a less protracted climax than it might have. It was Beethoven who started to signal the end was coming rather earlier than he needed to.
Tremendous stuff, a marvellous tonic in difficult times. Carolyn Sampson had been awarded my best concert of the year for her appearance at the Wigmore but if nobody would probably suggest there was anybody of quite her calibre among these singers, the dazzling fabric and sheen of a Handel oratorio is always an occasion and Carolyn can have the best CD prize while PCU, Southern Pro Musica with David Gostick, who had to politely request that a particularly ignorant intruder desist from filming at close range (hard to credit), can be given no higher praise than this was the best musical event I saw this year.

The Saturday Nap

West Approach (Cheltenham, 1.15, nap) is the confident, ebullient, devil-may-care headline selection this week in the hope that such impetus will carry it home.
It was the implicit nap a few weeks ago when I said it would win and run up a sequence and everything else I mentioned that day won apart from the short-priced failure that was given nap status.
Impressive then, I'm keeping the faith.
So this time we are on even if our new theme tune is the New Christy Minstrels until further notice.

We will persevere as the Professor and I are off to Ascot next week to enjoy the hospitality of his bookmaker, Mr. Joe Coral, so it's not time to abandon hope yet. And, as part of the full package, the Prof. will be guesting here, too, in the Top 6 feature with his Top 6 Racehorses.
And I'm expecting him on the wire with his pick for tomorrow any minute now.
--
Here he is.
Hello, Professor.
Ah, in customary cavalier fashion, he thinks he can get a favourite beat.

Apples Shakira.  12.40 Cheltenham.
Best of luck, sir. 

Lost is My Quiet

Carolyn Sampson/Iestyn Davies/Joseph Middleton, Lost is My Quiet (BIS)

Carolyn Sampson, and she's not the only one, is well able to produce discs at an impressive rate while maintaining a concert and opera schedule on stage. I realize she has ready-made material and doesn't write her own but it makes one wonder how it took Pink Floyd and the likes of them quite so long to make an album. We can only be grateful that it wasn't the other way round.
The lunchtime concerts I attended last autumn included plenty of German leider and I hadn't yet got round to looking any further into that rich area of Romanticism so I'm grateful to Carolyn, and, of course, Iestyn Davies, for bringing these Mendelssohn and Schumann pieces to our attention long before I might have made any such attempt. But, in a mixed programme, we begin with Purcell.
And if the opening of Sound the Trumpet, in Iestyn's countertenor, strikes one as shrill then Carolyn immediately outshrills him with an even more audacious reply. It is busy music and, whether it's in the piano, or the tempi, or where, even the slower pieces seem more upbeat than the delicate langour that might be anticipated in the likes of the title track. I don't think Carolyn is a flashy performer, her voice is so clear and confident that it can carry any of her extensive repertoire without the need for show or effect. I'm sure Joseph Middleton is a consummate accompanist and it may just be that I'm more accustomed to the softer nuances of the lute on such songs but maybe I'd prefer to stay with that prejudice. I'm sure I'll appreciate it more on further playing. It is irresponsible, perhaps even disrespectful, to review records as one first hears them.
But still, in the first of the Mendelssohn songs, Ich wollt', mein Lieb', ergosse sich (I wish that I could pour my love/ Into a single word),
My image would then pursue you
Into your deepest dream.
would benefit from being taken at less of a sing-song pace.
However, it is fitting to think of these as drawing room entertainments rather than high art. They are lightsome things, Maiglockhen und die Blumlein dancing on the air and racing to its early conclusion. And it's not until Scheidend (Separation) that Iestyn gets first run on his duet partner in a moving solo and the first track to be flicked back to the start for an second listen. Nowhere near as desolate as it could have been but Iestyn is apparently a luxury singer rather than one to provoke anxiety. Carolyn's reply in Neue Liebe is nimble and quicksilver but not adequate to bring her level.
Back in tandem on Sonntagemorgen, I'm tempted to compare and contrast Mendelssohn's account of Sunday Morning with Lou Reed's and if Felix is restful and confident of his redeemer in gentle outdoor solitude, on the whole I'll not trade it for Lou's pacific, if chemically-induced, state of awareness.
The Schumann selection is much more as required with Carolyn regaining more than parity with Nachtlied and Stille Liebe and if you German isn't up to translating those, I'm not doing it for you. More restrained, drawing the listener in to their private world and with gorgeous touches, it soon becomes clear that these are the point of the album and what we were being led up to, the still centre of a varied recital. Iestyn is up to a fine response with Die Einsiedler, not only delivering some world- weariness shot through with hope but also the way that German, which we Englischers might not always find attractive, sometimes has a better word for things than we do.
Something appears to go wrong with the track listing when it says Track 24 on the machine while playing It was a lover and his lass,

In springtime, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ring a ding a ding,
and the booklet tells you Shelley wrote that. We are onto songs by Roger Quilter by now.
It made me think of the episode in Terry Eagleton's memoir, The Gatekeeper, in which a student turns up with a paper on, was it, Wordsworth's The Ancient Mariner, and Prof. Eagleton thinks either there's been a terrible misunderstanding or the lad's made the literary discovery of the century.
But we are back with Shelley for Music, when soft voices die that seems to demand comparison with Doherty's Music When the Lights Go Out and I'm left to wonder how much damage the decades of exposure to pop music have done to me if I'm with Pete on that.
I thought Carolyn had ended on a flourish on track 28 but suspected the show would end with a duet. The booklet doesn't line up with the running order on the disc so bottom marks to the editors for that. But at least it tells us what track 29 is, something in the same tradition as the delightful time that James Bowman and Catherine Bott did Oh, What Very Charming Weather from The Arcadians, but not as good.
Although I had hopes for it, and it's not out of the question that I'll enjoy those things outside of the Schumann more in time, it was never likely that this disc was going to challenge Carolyn's Bach Cantatas for any available investiture. Whether one takes to something, first impressions counting for a lot, is often more a matter of taste than an appreciation of artistic excellence and this will get a few more chances yet but once it's off the playlist and filed on the shelf it's not obviously going to get picked when it's up against all the other discs on those shelves.              

More Than One Art

I've been reading Elizabeth Bishop all year, returning to the weighty Selected Letters in One Art in between other books to continue ploughing, very enjoyably, but ploughing nonetheless through this mere selection of what must have been a busy, and fluent, life keeping in touch with her friends.
Sometimes I've turned back to poems in the light of the first-hand autobiography of the letters but there will be more time for poems next year with Elizabeth Bishop at Work by Eleanor Cook on my Christmas list. I'm never entirely happy reading other people's letters and cling not quite convinced to Anthony Thwaite's assurance with regard to Larkin's Letters to Monica that he was writing for posterity, knowing that we would be reading over his shoulder. But Ms. Bishop need not worry about damage to her reputation from these letters in which she is modest, charming, disarming, honest and backs up her small but perfectly made poetry oeuvre with some immense common sense. Not all great poets look quite such admirable as people outside of their work.
Among the highlights of her observations are-
-an awful production of Murder in the Cathedral, 
-there is no point wailing & gnashing my teeth at my depravity, I know,
-voting for e.e.cummings over Wallace Stevens for the Pulitzer Prize,
-I think one of the worst things about modern education is this 'Creative Writing' business,
-I think everyone feels that his or her best poems were lucky accidents,
-Why is English bohemianism more sordid than other kinds?
-If Nixon gets in, maybe I'll just stay [in Brazil] - any old revolution would be better, it seems to me,
and she regards awards as 'not about work but about personalities, likes Thom Gunn when she meets him, always refuses to be in 'women's anthologies' and feels old at 59 and then finds the butter dish on the coffee table and so deduces that her glasses must be in the fridge.
And the last of those seems more due to the onset of age that makes it so enjoyable than the prodigious drinking, which doesn't.
She makes a fine companion even in her absence seen through these letters as well as in the decorum, the lack of excess and avoidance of bad practice in her poems. Since this book of selected letters was first published in 1994, it is not fitting to review it but I have been wanting to say a few more words in praise of her all the way through. Space will always be found for more worthwhile looking books on the subject, beginning with Bloodaxe's essays from a conference in Newcastle that I sadly missed years ago.
But, here's an idea.
From To Marianne Moore, Oct 10, 1968.
I saw a number of 'Family Circle' with 'Marianne Moore on Baseball' on the cover & of course I bought it.
Now that can't be the same anodyne Family Circle, with its cake recipes and articles on housewifery, available in the UK in the 1970's, can it. But what unlikely combinations of poet and subject matter would one like to see essays on.
I'm afraid I can't solicit them all to appear here so I'd have to do Interior Decorating, Golf, Carpentry and What a Success the Conservative Party Have Been myself and not all such series that I undertake are seen through to a conclusion, like I still haven't finishing My Life in Sport with the required essays on Running, Chess, Pool, Darts and, the one they all want to see, Gaelic Football.

But, thanks for everything, Elizabeth. The world is too much with us sometimes and I expect you'd be as dismissive as I am about theories of 'poetry as therapy'. But maybe the right poets can provide something like it.