Fretwork - John Jenkins

Fretwork, John Jenkins, Complete Four-Part Consort Music (Signum)

What a difference forty years makes. When once I would dash into Gloucester to buy a new Sex Pistols single, unheard, as soon as I heard there was one, it is now solo cello, viola da gamba or viols that inspire equivalent loyalty.
There aren't many better at it than Fretwork, consummate purveyors of The Art of Fugue at the Wigmore last Autumn in a concert that imprinted the B-A-C-H theme on our memories for good.
John Jenkins is contrasted with William Lawes in the notes here, Lawes being the adventurous, short-lived innovator while Jenkins is 'mellifluos', 'for the most part eschewing drama'.
And why not. One can have both. Music is a wide church, as is evidenced by my buying a Jesus & Mary Chain t-shirt on my way back from the cathedral this afternoon.
Fretwork and Jenkins can be allowed to meander through their seventeen Fantasias interspersed with two Pavans while one reads or, if so is inclined, discourses with friends over a bottle of probably something red but not too vigorous. On the other hand, it is also a pleasure to follow the lines through their natural development and elegant phrasings to their sensible conclusions. The mood shifts like the light might but the album is best treated as an organic whole and I don't suppose many will be favouring one piece over the others to any great extent. Fretwork are expertly across the whole show, demure, controlled and expressively in their element.
One might be concerned about anybody nominating Jenkins as their greatest composer or this disc as the best they've heard but you could equally despair of anyone who found no benefit from taking time to spend in its quietly radiant company. I hope it commands my attention often enough from the shelf once it is off the playlist and filed, next to Lawes by way of compare and contrast.

Lunchtime Live ! at Portsmouth Cathedral

Samuel Ali, organ, Portsmouth Caathedral,  26 April

Samuel Ali, organist at Christ Church in Chelsea and student at the Royal College of Music, was today's attraction at Portsmouth Cathdral with a new season of Lunchtime Live ! underway.
On a day that has turned out unnervingly well so far, it was too much to expect Buxtehude on the programme but one is always more than happy with a generous helping of Bach.
The sinfonia from Cantata 29 was a bright opening before we proceeded to the main item of interest, for me, the Prelude and Fugue in B flat minor from The Well-Tempered Klavier. Presumably composed on and imaagined for harpsichord, I'm used to it on piano that Bach wasn't to know about and so an organ version was new to me although surely not that rare.
I wouldn't have recognized it in its early stages, much as the hugely impressive Buxtehude Trio Sonata on Monday didn't sound like either version I have on disc, but that's performance for you, endlessly re-inventing, and Max Reger's transcription builds powerfully and inexorably to a sustained, moving final passage worthy of a cathedral organ setting.
Frocker's Pastorale twisted arond in the upper register, eerie more thyan pastorale but being C20th (d. 1990), one expects less than tub-thumping counterpoint. In common with so much C20th music, which seems emphasized all the more in organ music, one is aware of fractured human experience even if the left hand (I imagine) here added some gentle ambient accompaniment.
Back to Bach and reassured by the fine, upstanding and rigorous Prelude and Fugue in G major, BWV 541, one did wonder if that might not have been best saved until last.
Marcel Dupre's Prelude and Fugue in G minor, op.7, published 'before 1923', my minimal research tells me, began shell-shocked and uncertain, inevitably making me think it was a reaction to World War 1. That was no 'age of enlightenment' and the cofidence of Bach and Handel is gone. It was cheerier in the Fugue, however and rounded off powerfully, like a resurgence of the spirit and so the programming was convincingly justified.
It is a pity these lunchtime recitals are not better supported, compared to Chichester's well-populated events on Tuesdays but Portsmouth Cathedral is not so advantageously positioned down there. I had a tremendous Spring Day in Southsea almost to myself only to emerge to find it had been raining but do get yourself down there if you can. I never regret it.

Sean O'Brien - Europa

Sean O'Brien, Europa (Picador)

art is all there is and might not be enough

looks like one of those lines deserving, if not destined, to pass into the language. Masterful at his potent best, Sean O'Brien's surely nailed it and, moreover, not for the first time.
But selective quotation does not a scholar make. Poems work as whole poems, not as quotable wisdom strung together by conjunctions, the other bits and syntax.

What it says in Completists, whether or not the R.L. it is 'for' may or not be Maestro Lumsden, is,
         for an hour it was beyond dispute
That art is all there is and might not be enough.

Like all those who think that Larkin wrote, What will survive of us is love, which he did but he went to great lengths to qualify it so far that wasn't really there, anybody who thinks that Sean has summed it all up needs to look again and notice that what he offered has already be taken away.
But, there again, if it's not the case that art 'might not be enough', perhaps it is and, for some of us, it might be 'all there is'.
Completists could almost be the masterpiece in Europa but for line 4. About a band that never got beyond a restricted, 'cult' following, 'By accident we saw them live one night',

On a 'short autumn tour' of seaside toilets.

Is that really necessary. They might have been dives. And Prof. O'Brien makes use of more serious vernacular more than dignity might allow without me needing to be either Barbara Cartland or wonder if machismo isn't diminished rather than enhanced by such regular usage. Although such words have become more commonplace with a generation of comedians like Lee Mack or Jonathan Ross superseding the Ken Dodd vintage, they lose their impact exponentially the more they are used and the fact that Larkin used the f word three times, each in a different participle, won't mitigate the offence by reference to a more revered authority.

Europa opens with a wonderful line,
The grass moves on the mass graves

which is as close as a poem might ever get to the smooth wonder of the opening bars of Brahms 4.  O'Brien could possibly have been Keats if he had wanted to be but can't let himself, doesn't want to be and why would he.
The blurb tells us,
Europe is not a place we can choose to leave

but whether or not the poems add up to a pro-EU, anti-Leave lament is less clear than the recurrence of mirrors in the poems, making us look at ourselves in the way that the poet has always found us guilty of being ourselves and stuck with it. Although his vision was 'noir' long before it became the staple diet of television drama imported from Scandinavia, it is not clear that he would ever have been anything but a malcontent; much though there may be to be malcontented about.
There is more of a sense of an ending in Europa than the accustomed, ongoing recipe of sinister goings-on, ominous politics and personal alienation but that is autobigraphical, Sabbatical being an understated title for a poem about leaving his old professorial office for perpetuity.

There might not be anything in Europa to put alongside the several major pieces in Ghost Train or such things as the supplicant Beautiful Librarians. But the book maintains the insistent rhythms with which O'Brien has always cast his compelling spell. It is quite possible that any of these poems found in a magazine under an unknown name would alert the reader to a new talent but it is what I might call 'Magnetic Fields Syndrome' - nothing's ever going to be as good as 69 Love Songs, or 'Al Green Syndrome', it will never be 1971-73 again, and even Manchester United don't win every week now that Eric Cantona is elsewhere.
The generation born from 1945-the early 1960's had it all. State-paid-for Liberal Humanities education; The Beatles, Tamla Motown, David Bowie and T. Rex, all the amusement of the cranky avant-garde; the most incredible sense of entitlement and progress being made. And we blew it. Maybe it was circumstances beyond our control but it happened on our watch and we blew it. And it is too late to complain now. Poetry is a very unlikely instrument to use to set it right but it can be a powerful way of resigning oneself to a game that has been played out and gone.
It's a fine book and I wouldn't be without it but future retrospectives might decide to put other of his books ahead of it in estimating which represented the ones he should best be remembered for.    

Buxtehude at the Wigmore

Sophie Gent/Matthew Truscott/Jonathan Manson/Trevor Pinnock, Handel, Buxtehude, Froberger, Hacquart, Wigmore Hall, April 23rd.

More than Buxtehude, of course, but Dietrich at the Wigmore were the two things that made today's lunchtime concert the automatic selection for the intrepid trip to London.
Not many will have heard of Carlos Hacquart, a Benelux man of the C17th capable of producing all the spriteliness and stylized sweet langour required of a musician of his age. It is only that there were so many of them that means we can't be familiar with them all but I'm sure he was glad of this rare outing to have made his 'small body of published work' worth the effort and one was struck by the clarity, confidence and dexterity of this quartet of star instrumentalists in preparation for even better things to come.
I had thought it unfortunate that the Buxtehude Trio Sonata on the programme was not my preferred option among Buxtehude Trio Sonatas but that turned out to be a blessing because after hearing the Andante in the flesh as opposed to two recordings on disc, its luminous, soaring interplay between the parts brought to mind the Bach double concerto and it will be on the turntable soon for further consideration, leading to rapture, and the piece instated alongside the previous lone favourite.
Buxtehude doesn't need much of  a musical idea to produce electrifying music, wrapping and layering what was no more than a few notes into hugely satisfying, and convincing, compositions. I realize Bach is bigger and better but that does nothing to diminish Dietrich who, although apparently best-known as an organist, writes gorgeous violin parts. Choral music dominates the Opera Omnia and it is the organ music I rarely listen to. But the piece justified the journey even if central London doesn't get any easier to deal with as one reaches greater maturity.
Trevor Pinnock has been a mainstay of this period repertoire for as long as I've been aware of it but they don't spare the old warhorse. As the younger generation took a rest, Mr. Pinnock offered Suite no. 12 in C for harpsichord, catching our attention with a vertiginous climb up the keyboard scales at the end of the opening Lament. Spending by no means all, but much, of the rest of the concert sparkling or jangling along as continuo, it was only right that we should hear the harpsichord on its own terms, too, and as a billing that did nothing to detract from this as the chosen visit, he was in good form.
But if anyone was going to upstage Buxtehude, you can always rely on Handel whose music is full of a glory that his temperament as reported in so many anecdotes was said not always to be.
I haven't been in error in listening to more Handel opera than any other Handel in recent years but one can't concentrate on everything. I was as thrilled by Matthew Truscott's violin as by Sophie Gent's, who I take to be of slightly higher renown, but the programming was right and you can't not finish with Handel.
The Passacaglia encore tacitly accepted that once you've arrived at Handel, you can't take a step back. I only hope that Fiona Talkington escaped her post in the Radio 3 announcer's chair, directly in front of me, so that she didn't have to tell every passing member of the audience what they'd just heard. The rest can find out by tuning into the repeat on Sunday lunchtime, which is what I recommend you do anyway.

I thought I'd call on Mr. Handel at his home immediately afterwards but he wasn't in. Neither was his neighbour, Mr. Hendrix. In fact the only thing there that actually belonged to the maestro was his bookcase. Still, I wanted the book on Charles Jennens, word man of Messiah, and I don't think you can get it anywhere else.
London is indeed more of an effort these days and one needs a good reason to make a date there. Us provincial types have settled into a more sedate pace. But I wouldn't have wanted to miss this, for real and only a few yards away rather than refracted through the airwaves. It'll never be over for me.  
  

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

A genuine pleasure, and the real point of it all, for the minor dilettante literatus is the arrival of a few things at a time. One book or record arriving is good but several in a week offers the satisfaction of a binge.
While still anticipating About Larkin ft. Move Over, Darling, this week has been blessed with books by the Waterman family, Andrew and Rory, almost finishing the TLS crossword with its Shakespeare thread and, never less than momentous, a new book by Sean O'Brien. So there will be reviews and reactions to record here next week but I'd better give them a fair hearing first.
Something seemed to be echoing while reading Prof. O'Brien's poems, though, until I realized what it was his poems were reminding me of. Mine.
That is, of course, though, the wrong way round and probably post ergo proper hoc. It's me that imitates him, whose rhythms and idioms I've adopted sometimes more consciously than at others. In the 70's, we might have said 'influenced by' when a third-rate act lacking originality aped the style of a major one in the hope of some coat-tails success. But by now, 'influenced by' is redolent of 'under the influence' and brings to mind memories of spaced-out artistes barely able to remember their own names. My debt to Sean O'Brien is more like that of Mike Yarwood to Denis Healey, as a poor impersonator but books are generated by previous books, poems by poems that came before them and The Perfect Book is my poems as much as Brett Anderson's songs are his and not from Hunky Dory.

And great minds sometimes have similar ideas to mediocre ones. In the last weeks of filling up The Perfect Book to make it fit 28 pages, I had planned a poem called Career, a long look back on the oddballs, corporacy, downright indignation of having to earn a living in such a way as well as all the wonderful things that employment has provided. I couldn't do it justice. I've never been able to. More than one abandoned novel bear witness to that. But there is Sean, in Sabbatical, saying farewell to his office at Newcastle University where he was Professor of Creative Writing.
I'm sure that must have involved a lot of nonsense and bureaucracy but it might be for others to estimate how much money can be got for old rope. Just for once, the jury's out and in due course we will be the judge of that. 

First reactions to my book are naturally very polite but the poems so far mentioned in dispatches are not those I'd have expected, which is unnerving in one way but to be expected in another. How would I know what readers would like best. They won't necessarily agree with me and I've noticed poets or their editors omit from Selecteds poems that I thought were among their best.
And I could offer you a cup of tea now and a gin and tonic later and you might say you liked the tea better. I'd be surprised, but you might.
So, we will see. These must still be the good, old days if we still have time to muse upon such trivial questions. And we might as well make the most of it, and days at the races and the sheer joy of it because we may not be the young ones very long.

Meanwhile, have we had enough of Oh. Babe, What Would You Say yet. Not the content, I'm afraid you're stuck with that, but the title.
I don't know whether to stick with the great Hurricane Smith and call it Don't Let It Die, go with the Northern Soul masterpiece, It'll Never be Over for Me, or keep it open to consideration. I bet you can hardly wait to see what happens.

Cheltenham

With God's own racecourse, a major literature festival, genteel reputation and lots else to recommend, Cheltenham has been a possible retirement destination for a few years. The downside would be the major upheval of moving as well as the knowledge that there's snakes in them there hills. I saw one once about 40 years ago and I'd worry it was still there.
But the next best thing is having a mate good enough to want to go once a year for the quieter but still very classy April meeting.
We knew today would be difficult. Two winners today would have put you in the champion tipster bracket. I was lucky that my D minus homework was mitigated by reserving judgement with scrutiny of the betting market on the day always a crucial factor, so having landed the favourite in the first with proper money, it was bookmar's money that ebbed back to them throughout the rest of another otherwise wonderful day there.
The genuinely lovely champion trainer acceded to my impertinent request for a photo. I said, my mate at work, by which I meant The Professor, only backs your horses.
Bit like me, he said.
Class act.

Unfortunately, the equally great Bryony, the best thing to happen to horse racing since Derek Thompson was sidelined to Fakenham on bank holidays, let me down but you can't have everything. I think it's the last sentence of Flying Finish by Dick Francis,
That's racing.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

I gave up reading Oliver Kamm in The Times on Saturdays quite some time ago, abandoning the self-congratulation I had once delighted in at the thought that I was appreciating informed views on grammatical finer points and no longer able to reconcile the apparent tautology involved in liberal pedantics. I need to arrive at the higher form of self-congratulation of finishing the crossword, and that came early last Saturday, recovering from the early error of mis-spelling 'Lusitania'..
But I saw he began with a reference to George Orwell last Saturday and so proceeded, with care. But Orwell seemed only like an attention-grabber in his first line and none of the rest of his latest complaint had anything to do with either Orwell's writing or the several set-piece ideas that have been lifted from Animal Farm or 1984. But of course, my intellect rates at less than the square root of Oliver's so I may have missed the point.
Certainly, there are some who can't identify the passive voice and charge writers with having used it when they haven't and, by all means, there is much to be lamented about grammatical standards these days, which includes most days on Radio 5 sports reports and further afield at the BBC. But Newspeak wasn't about the passive voice and none of Oliver's complaints are about linguistic misuse either diagnosed or satirized by Orwell. For one who sets such store by the precision of his analysis, he looked alarmingly loose to me last week and so ought not to be finding fault with others. I think he is beginning to struggle and if next week he invites us in by citing Camus, I'll be more wary.
-
The TLS can also seem a bit too pleased with itself and complacent. Wendy Cope expressed dissatisfaction with their survey of the New Elizabethans on the letters page, where anybody worth being appears once- and hopefully only once- in their life, on the grounds that it drew attention to a few at the expense of the many. Well, yes, of course it does, as does any other mention of anybody. It might not be fair, or right, or proper but it is what happens.
I should have read Ali Smith before but I hadn't. The results from their questionnaire decided me to require of a friend a borrow of anything by her and Autumn is confirmed herewith as a tremendous book and Ali is up for paperback bargain-grabbing henceforth.
I'm sure I'd prefer to line up with Wendy rather than the TLS but on this occasion can't.

and I was also grateful to them for their belated review of Rory Waterman's new-ish book of poems, Sarajevo Roses.
It seems longer than it should have been since I added anybody to the list of contemporary poets I'm seriously interested in and, born 1981, he might be the youngest yet. If I allowed it to, I might find the Faber Modern Poets volume that I bought when it was new, featuring selections from Andrew Motion, Craig Raiue, C.H. Sisson, Tom Paulin, Robert Wells and Andrew Waterman (and I'm sure no such exclusively male book could be envisaged now), making me feel older than I want to be because Andrew was Rory's father.
I'm not sure that it does, though, and I enjoy the continuity, which made me try to think of poetry being handed on a generation, perhaps in not such a dissimilar style. Thinking of two or three generations of footballers, cricketers or horse racing people is easy and the Scudamores and D'Oliviera dynasty are ready examples. But if there's Freida, daughter of Sylvia, I reckon I could cause ambulances to come running over the fields if I knocked on the door of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and said that William Davenant was son of William Shakespeare. They don't take kindly to such treason but the only reason I decided against it was that it looks too much like a publicity stunt by Davenant, otherwise I like the idea.
There must be others but books by the Watermans are on their way here and anticipated with some, erm, anticipation. And so with Sean O'Brien's Europa due any day, racing to get here before About Larkin ft. Move Over, Darling, The Perfect Book very grateful for all the politeness with which it is being received, the poetry year, which rarely gets off to a quick start, is underway with some prospects. 

Pre-Release Copies

I was at the printer's first thing this morning to collect a box of The Perfect Book.

One makes oneself a hostage to fortune giving a book a title like that and I think The Singing Typewriter on page 5 is in a smaller font than the rest of the book. Other errata appear to be entirely stylistic and will have to be explained away.
The late edit of The Flawed Book, putting in 'dreadful' for 'lousy' omitted to notice that 'dreaded' occurs in the first stanza. Okay.
'Fatal' occurs in two poems, which only enhances any morbid overall theme the book might have but if a major theme is cliché then if cliché is dead language then perhaps it all ties in with notions of being trapped, whether by language or by life. It's not for me to say. I never said it would be a perfect book, I only called it The Perfect Book. Perhaps the next one, or the Collected, will just be called Book.

So those expecting to receive a copy in the post can expect it early next week. If anybody else wants one, by all means e-mail. I might be grateful of a fiver to cover production costs, p&p, especially since Supasundae let me down at Aintree today.
The Professor and I both like Seeyouatmidnight in the Grand National. His other choice is The Last Samurai whereas I go for a hopeful punt on 50/1 shot, Carlingford Lough, thinking that something like his old form would make him a good thing.
--
Meanwhile stay tuned for news of the next release, First Three Tales by The Jess Davies Band, due on May 4th, featuring Mama Told Me (Davies-Green). I can hardly tell you how much I enjoy typing that.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

The first essay in The Salt Companion to Mina Loy is called Futurism, Fashion and the Feminine: Forms of Repudiation and Affiliation in the Early Writing of Mina Loy. I'm sure it is worthy and valuable work and, in fact, the first section sets out Loy's very radical agenda to ensure that I will go back to it but it does also show that in pursuing poetry to the limit, it is possible to lose sight of poetry altogether. It will have to wait in the same way that the biography of Delmore Schwartz is patiently waiting, having been overtaken by more pressing reading soon after it arrived.
More pressing will be Ali Smith on a borrow from a mate who is a great admirer of hers, having asked him for a lend of anything after she topped the poll in the TLS last week that asked over 200 industry insiders for their nominations for the New Elizabethans. Along with Zadie, Hilary Mantel, Ishiguro and others, she is top of the league. I'm disappointed to see Alan Hollinghurst in there with Julian Barnes not mentioned but Sarah Waters is listed just outside the Top 10.
Perhaps Barnesy was overlooked because the question did ask those invited to take part to consider their most recent work and whose future work was most eagerly anticipated. But he need not worry. Love, etc. didn't convince as convincingly as Talking It Over, to which is was a sequel that perhaps didn't quite have enough to stretch far enough into a second book, but the rest of the short stories in The Lemon Table will be saved up for later, after a break for Ali. If the remainder of the stories are anything to compare with The Story of Mats Israelson, they will be worth waiting for. It is very rare for me to downright insist that you absolutely must read something, hear a record or anything quite so imperative but The Story of Mats Israelson struck me on first reading as one of the finest such things in the genre or language, and if it doesn't surpass Joyce's The Dead that is in some part due to it not being on the same scale.
But lists are just lists and arguably the less valuable for being polled across a wide constituency rather than expressing an individual point of view. Look what happens when a country holds a General Election. It takes places with the sophistication of France or Canada to get it right. So Julian Barnes need not fret. The Story of Mats Israelson is a further reminder, when by now no more are needed, never to attempt to write prose fiction. One would never be happy, knowing that you could be judged against such a masterpiece.

JDB CD EP

The Jess Davies Band will be playing at the Orange Rooms, 1-2 Vernon Walk, Southampton SO15 2EJ, on Thurs 3rd May to launch their debut CD, First Three Tales, which will be available there as well as on iTunes and Spotify. 
And to think we used to have to go to the HMV Shop.
More details will be available on the link in the Recommended list over there >>> shortly, I dare say.
I will be making more effort to get there than I did to attend any launch of my own new release. My name somewhere on a pop record, who would have thought it.
It's all I ever wanted.

The Perfect Book

The Perfect Book should be here this week and so if you are expecting a copy in the post, expect it next week. Otherwise when I see you next. Anybody else who would like one, by all means e-mail me and you can send a fiver in return if you feel charitable enough.
I will over-indulge myself by saying a few words, firstly anticipating the suggestion that I might do better as a cover designer or wildlife photographer. I'm very happy with the wrapping but it ought to be about the poems.
The title is, of course, ironic, being the title of a poem about how a book can be imagined to be perfect, which is answered by its counterpart, The Flawed Book, about the novel once it was written, which is the last poem here. The attentive critic or reader will notice that a number of the poems come in pairs, like the centre page spread consisting of The Summer Game, about cricket, and The Winter Game, about National Hunt horse racing.
Three poems at the beginning are in memoriam for one who departed the life she had led with such panache four years ago now, a theme that is reprised towards the end.
If poetry is often advised to avoid cliché and Donald Davie wrote about re-making it, several of these poems deliberately embrace it while the epigraph suggests that lyricism might still be possible in poetry that does its best to avoid bad practice and as much of the advice that is on offer as it can. While self-consciously aware of their status as artificial language, these poems are more autobiographical than perhaps some of the earlier ones were allowed to be, which is not to say that a few aren't outright fictions

I need to correct an earlier announcement that the book will be 'launched' at the Portsmouth Poetry Society meeting of April 18th. It no longer will as a prior appointment has been re-instated but I hope a good number will still attend the meeting to hear John Dean read from his new book.
   

Hamlet

Hamlet, BBC2, 31st March

It has become a commonplace for modern dress Shakespeare tragedies (Hamlet and MacBeth at least) to be set in a totalitarian police state monitored on CCTV and surveillance equipment, or perhaps it's only been those I've seen. It's not a bad idea but it is no longer shocking or original and it's not in Saxo Grammaticus. However, whether the novelty be a modern setting, all-female cast or even, as here, a Bob Dylan soundtrack, the play's the thing.
Robert Icke's production from the Almeida Theatre, transferred here to the Harold Pinter, is also 'adapted' but not intrusively so and one adapts quickly to the development of this monumental play that is a huge challenge to do well but has plenty in it to ensure that it takes a lot to fail completely. Andrew Scott is a convincing prince, his soliloquies arriving at their conclusions as he thinks aloud in the way Tony Blair used to pretend to do rather than delivered as if they were pre-meditated dissertations.
Beginning with the ghost but continuing through Ophelia's descent into madness, prompted by the complexities of her father being killed by her boyfriend and her conspicuously close relationship with her brother, to the dispatch into the great beyond of all the central characters, Hamlet is on the brink of the unknown, not least because the characters are enquiring into each other but also because nobody knows whether the prince's adopted 'antic disposition' has transformed into a real one. Three and a quarter hours pass unnoticed as Shakespeare's layers of potential meaning refer us into a compelling canvas of double revenge, subterfuge, paralysis and loss, none of which is to suggest that it can't also have jokes as well. If Lear is somehow profounder by being even darker, I've never understood how many authorities overlook Hamlet as Shakespeare's best, his signature masterpiece, in the later play's favour.
Jessica Findlay Brown puts in a storming performance as Ophelia, a big highlight being a thrilling 'more deceived' scene with Hamlet's fake madness apparently triggering her own genuine case before the rest of her life collapses around her. The production, or her performance in it, makes her thread more central to the play than it sometimes is. But, modern technology and its uses being what they are, which can be threaten to be distracting gimmicks; the screens, 'use of the whole theatre space' and the direction of this film of a staged play, they are used to great effect during the play within the play when the main protagonists sit in the front row of the audience to watch The Mousetrap and are filmed in close-up and seen on the big screen behind the stage. Like the other major tragedies, Hamlet takes place much of the time in dark places but benefits from intimacy, too.
The point of Dylan songs as commentary was lost on me, not being sufficiently conversant with his work to know anything apart from the final One More Cup of Coffee from the Desire album and it might have been that an admirer was dragging it in a bit gratuitously. However, Scott, as well as his Ophelia, Juliet Stevenson as a helplessly complicit Gertrude and Peter Wight, most famously for me one of the constables in Early Doors, as Polonius, in a strong cast, lured us into the downward spiral of suspicion, human fragility and corruption to the inevitable rest being silence.
It was a rare treat and, as ever, one is grateful for having the BBC to provide such things, it only being a shame that there was still plenty of Cosi Fan Tutte remaining on the wireless when it began on television. But we had better not complain. It was a luxurious decision to have to make.  
 

A Sort of Sorting

It might have been my version of Spring Cleaning to tidy up some CD's but it was prompted by the pressing need for more shelf space.
Oh, I see, if I move those over there, put the mini-system and a speaker on top of them, that rack can come out of the bottom of the bookcase, the DVD's that I rarely touch can be piled up down there and that frees up half a shelf that Elizabeth Bishop and books in current use can stay on until the classical CD's annexe that territory, too, with their ongoing expansionist policies. But it does rather mean it's not before time that the pop music CD's are put into some sort of order as opposed to the prevailing filing system of trying to remember where one saw them last.
So, the wire rack comes into a more prominent position. It has two columns. It is not apartheid to make these Soul and Rock respectively because Dusty Springfield is soul. So the left side has Al Green, Candi Staton, Aretha, Beverley Knight, Motown, etc. and the right side has The Velvet Underground, Lou, Joni Mitchell, the Ramones, Dylan, and, yes, this rack is predominantly American.
In the other three wooden racks, the substantial blocks of The Magnetic Fields, T. Rex, Gregory Isaacs and R.E.M. can stay almost as they were. Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Chaucer stay resolutely in place at the bottom, not often called upon, it has to be said.
So what remains is a game a bit like Pairs, remembering there is another Cliff album to go with that one, and he can go with Buddy Holly, Billy Fury and Roy Orbison. But I know, or thought there was a fourth Matchbox Twenty album and another Garbage album somewhere but they don't show up.
Family, Medicine Head and Stone the Crows are put with the Sutherland Brothers in the black plastic filing system under the DVD player which is no disgrace because the Northern Soul compilations are in there. Neil Young gets retrieved from there to be put with Joni, Carole King and Dylan.
There are no Beatles CD's, no Stones, not even any Bowie. Having been through vinyl and cassettes, it is a rare honour for anything to be acquired in new formats, although it has happened.
I couldn't be judged only on CD's. There is only one Jesus & Mary Chain, only a free-with-the-Observer Libertines that it took six months to play, when I was persuaded to give it a go. The best of them is either The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs, in its fallen apart casing, or Early Music by Bob Marley & the Wailers ft. Peter Tosh but the most played track is almost certainly Saving a Life by Cliff and Freda Payne from the Soulicious album.

Having imposed some sort of order on the chaos, with not only the Tears next to Suede but McAlmont & Butler next to both of them, how long do you think it will last. Not long. And will I now be able to find anything. Probably not as well as I could before.