The Composers Chart

The old, somewhat juvenile impulse to make lists never quite goes away. I think one imagines it somehow classifies the world for us, to let us think we've 'got it', we're in charge, have understood and know where we stand.

However, once you get beyond the Top 10, say, it becomes arbitrary. There's 81 of them here and down to Stravinsky before it becomes borderline whether I like them or not. It is the downside of any judging job, multiplied by the truism of the Olympic Games, that Beethoven, Mozart and Handel are all certainties for Top 3 places, and would be guaranteed second if not for each other, but somebody has to finish fourth. But Beethoven's had a tremendous year with me. Handel could easily have been second this time last year.

Is Dvorak that much more favorite than Ravel - there's not much to choose between the peloton who finish in roughly the same time on this stage.

It's a work-in-progress that could have fifty or a hundred more names slotted into it on the basis of my vague idea of how much I like them but these are composers that I'm sufficiently familiar with to know a few of their works, or what they are like.

It's a work-in-progress that need not go any further, mainly because it's a waste of time and only, like writing a poem, perhaps, finds its author attempting to authenticate an identity for themselves.

However, while I'm in a spending phase, I'm not sure I want a picture of Bach or Mozart on my wall, if only because they are too obvious. I had one of Beethoven when I was a teenager, Handel wouldn't be out of the question but, if such a thing is available, I think I could find wallspace for a picture of Shostakovich.

And there it is and since there was a special offer on, I helped myself to Handel, James Joyce and Josquin des Prez, too, so I have a few days to work out where they can be fitted in.

  

J.S. BACH BEETHOVEN MOZART HANDEL SHOSTAKOVICH MONTEVERDI BRAHMS SCHUBERT BUXTEHUDE JOSQUIN DES PREZ MENDELSSOHN TALLIS BYRD F. COUPERIN PURCELL SIBELIUS RACHMANINOV CHARPENTIER CHOPIN GLUCK SATIE HAYDN BUSONI DVORAK TCHAIKOVSKY D. SCARLATTI ELGAR ROBERT SCHUMANN GORECKI FAURE BIBER PUCCINI POULENC PART MACMILLAN TAVENER C.P.E. BACH BERLIOZ LASSUS MACHAUT OCKEGHEM A. SCARLATTI  TELEMANN VERDI VIVALDI LISZT TELEMANN PROKOFIEV CLARA SCHUMANN RAMEAU J.C. BACH LISZT RICHARD STRAUSS MUSSORGSKY A. SCARLATTI  GLASS CAGE HOLST BRUCH ALBINONI FANNY MENDELSSOHN NYMAN KHACHATURIAN BOCCHERINI BIZET SCHONBERG DEBUSSY BOYCE CORELLI RAVEL BARTOK SMETANA BORODIN DEBUSSY CORELLI STRAVINSKY MAHLER BRUCKNER KORNGOLD WAGNER BOULEZ

Absenteeism and other stories

 I was planning on going to Chichester Cathedral today but didn't. Such abject dereliction of duty was never my way. In 34 years of devoted service in my government paid jobs, I missed 5 days through being unfit - it might have been 6. It was no reflection on the performers in Chichester even if Thursday's in Portsmouth is a higher priority, it was a dull day, chidden of God, I am enthralled by The Scapegoat and three important deliveries of further material were due - just arrived now- and all in all the realization that Tuesday lunchtimes are not obligatory and I've done plenty came as a mild release.

Watching the progress of the delivery driver from eight stops away served to demonstrate just what a mammoth operation Amazon is and though I feel guilty of using it, it would cost a few hundred pounds a year more to source books and records elsewhere.

So, the book of Nightingale Night, the new Murakami and a streetplan of Nottingham are all essential additions to the library. In twenty-six years at this address it has expanded such that downsizing the house - heaven forfend- is hardly thinkable. All shelf capacity is all but spoken for. It might be possible to fit another bookcase in upstairs but after that, well, who's to say. It's when such sections as Larkin, Murakami, Bach, Shakespeare, etc. can't be kept neatly together that I fret slightly. But if that's my biggest concern I have precious little to worry about.

 

One can't read two big, fat books at once, though, so Murakami will have to wait. It's not as if one doesn't know what it's going to be like. I'm reading as much as I reasonably can and can only wonder at Booker Prize judges who have to read over a hundred titles in about as many days and then turn up and discuss them all, not all of them having been worthwhile but one ought to have read them in order to say why not. Rather them than me.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

The Liszt biography was an excellent book, see a little way below. And it's straight on into another biography, The Scapegoat by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, that promises to be just as good. It's about George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, Portsmouth's most eminent murder victim.

These are two extraordinary lives, for sure, but perhaps ordinary lives - if there are such things- would be worth reading if well written. My own has been unspectacular and I have no plans to write it but it was of passing interest to me from time to time.

Perhaps the most mundane life would be of someone who never changed, although the reasons for that might be worth examining. The Jesuit maxim about knowing the adult from the seven year old can only be partially true and is, therefore, false. Some people develop exponentially at a certain stage, most retain some sort of personality blueprint, I dare say, and, if anything, I'd say I regressed from highly promising child to unrepentant under-achiever.

I was a football obsessive to the age of about 12 but by now know only roughly where some of the teams are in their leagues. Sports, like cricket and cycling, came and went and now all I'm left with is horse racing over obstacles, maybe inherited through a grandfather's DNA.

I never tire of re-telling how the 13-14yo me went from devotion to the wilder outskirts of rock music, through a disavowal of pop music to emerge as a born again soul man, almost evangelistic about it. The constant thing in music arrived with Mozart at the age of 11 and has remained essential, perhaps never more so than now.

There was never a time without books, either, but which books has shifted. Fancying myself to be a poet, aged 20 I was pure enough in intention to not want to write anything else but 45 years later I want to write whatever suggests itself and that's not poems very often.

I hardly read a biography until I was 30, thinking that fiction was the 'real' business of literature but that's turned around, as we can see - of course biography's the 'real' business and 'real' stories are much more vivid, relevant and captivating than made up ones. 

The Scapegoat is more than 600 pages. It is outrageously brilliant that the library service will lend me such a sumptuous book for a month and I don't envisage it being necessary to renew it.

--

It's been hard times in recent weeks on the turf. From October onwards is my harvest season, supposedly, but this year has been marred by a drought of almost unprecedented proportions. I wasn't doing badly at all for 2024 and was looking forward to 'pressing on' but I've not been the Wiseguy when push came to shove.

The first two favourites going in at Cheltenham today was the last thing I wanted to see with my small-time double being on two of the next three and my theory being that favs simply don't keep obliging. But, as has been pointed out to me, each race is a different event and the outcome of one has no effect on those that follow. The Skelton stable is as efficient as any winning machine once it clicks into gear and L'Eau du Sud and Doyen Quest both won with great authority at God's own sports venue. It's not the money - I need a rattling good spell to restore the plus to where I'd like it - but I'd almost forgotten the feeling one gets when one knows the gamble is landed. One has to stay in profit but it's the endorphins of success I think one does it for. 

Endorphin was 15 Across in today's Times crossword. I gladly take my vocabulary from wherever suggests it.

--

It's been hard times on the Times crossword, too, come to that. I didn't even send it in the last two weeks. The last chapters of biographies can often be about declining powers and can be elegiac if not downright awful. Not being able to finish crosswords is sometimes blamed on them being set by a different setter. Maybe it's that, then. The litany of things one could once accomplish that one no longer can lengthens and threatens to lengthen further. One could do without that sedentary diversion being added to it.  

---

Four books by Stewart Lee arrived this week, most of his published output if not all. It's hardline 'woke' stuff, or at least committedly anti anti-woke. I like him a lot and it did him no harm that he wrote the introduction to the re-issue of a Rosemary Tonks novel last year.

One assumes that any friend of hers is a friend of one's.

Like with any satirist, it's easy to have targets but what one needs to know is what the likes of Ian Hislop, Peter Cook, Ben Elton or, indeed, Alexander Pope would do if they were in charge. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are not so far making it look easy. I suspect they've not got it right but it's not clear what 'getting it right' would have been. It's possible that Stewart is from the Corbyn tendency. Marxism might have been brilliant at analysing problems but evidence of it ever solving any, apart from the problem of achieving a degree in Sociology, is scarce.

There's good writing to be had from Stewart as he knocks over easy targets but makes a point of setting himself up against the 'mainstream' stand-up industry, too. It's postmodern to distance oneself from what one ostensibly is, referring back to one's art form within its own process like the sort of poems or novels that let you know that they know that's all they are. It offers layers, going beyond irony towards Nirvana. 

Nirvana was 18 Down in today's Times crossword. I'm beginning to understand how Stewart does what he does.

That's all very well while being so cutely postmodern remains in fashion but maybe one day it won't be and Stewart Lee will suddenly look as out of date as Jim Davidson or Bernard Manning.

'Woke' was an Obama word that only meant 'aware' and that 'we must love one another and/or die' but it's been made into a crime and Russia won the American Presidential Election by being anything but. As happens these days, the liberal 'elite' lost the vote of those they wanted to help because they failed to make them feel better off.

And that's biography for you. You're great one day, very much in fashion, but then you're not. It happened to Shakespeare, it happened to Bach and so it could even happen to Stewart Lee.

And it also means hard times ahead for our already very troubled world. Which seems to me a good enough way of dove-tailing, as if in a piece of carpentry, the denouement of this piece in Stewart Lee style, having referred both backwards and forwards, brought in both personal and international concerns while maintaining some direction even if that direction wasn't always clear.

Maybe that is what biography, or even life itself, is about, that like Ophelia says, we know what we are but know not what we may be. 

I've been Stewart Lee. No. I haven't. I've been David Green. Thank you. Good Night.

Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in Portsmouth

 Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Portsmouth Guildhall, Nov 14

The first-ever box set of LP's I bought was the Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Concentus Musicus Wien Brandenburg Concertos and I'm not sure I'd swap those recordings for anything I've bought since. I got it right first time. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, henceforth OAE here if need be, brought four of the six of them to Portsmouth, their website preview explaining the mystery about what they 'mean', if anything at all. 

While I'm very taken with the idea of music that has no story, no heroes, heartbreak or other sub-text, like a decorative frieze, I'm equally unconvinced that such a thing is possible. We provide our own if none is provided.

No. 2, the one with the valveless trumpet, began the set. I'm sure it's an infernally difficult instrument to play and David Blackadder made a glorious sound except for maybe one or two missed notes, which I feel reluctantly bound to mention in such a high-class band. There is no hiding place in a small orchestra with one player per part but especially not in that part. The Andante evoked cool shadows with prominent cello alongside woodwind and lead violin.

No. 6, the one with no violins, had only seven musicians on stage and thus brought to mind a great disc called Quartets for Low Strings by Georg Wagenseil (worth looking out for). Two violas and cello do a marvellous job of explaining away our sadness or grief in the Adagio before the violas dance over a cantus firmus in the Allegro.

In the second half, No. 3, the one all about number 3, is Bach at almost his most mathematically inventive, the motif passed around all the players and eventually right across the stage. The violin and harpsichord Adagio led into a merry gigue Allegro with Bach at his most Viv and we were reminded the debt he owes to his study of those Venetian scores.

No. 4, the one with the recorders, is a Springtime frolic with Rachel Beckett on one of them and Huw Daniel performing virtuoso violin wizardy, punctuated by the winsome sighing in the Andante, as the spectacular finish.

I can mention Matthew Truscott's viola, Cecelia Bruggemeyer's bass, the violin of Margaret Faultless and I'd mention more names if I was sure who was who but there was no programme which brings me to a rare bit of editorializing. 

Portsmouth is only Portsmouth to big city acts, maybe like OAE, and one can have a vague inkling that it can't help being just another date on a tour itinerary. They brought enthusiasm and obvious enjoyment with them but Portsmouth Guildhall lacks charisma, Portsmouth itself struggles to provide audience numbers and I'm as guilty as anybody in not being at the Guildhall very often when local talent and lunchtime visitors to the area put on such great shows without even a ticket price. It's a situation without a solution and it's by no means a complaint, Portsmouth is lucky to be served as well as it is and we surely all go to celebrate rather than find fault. I've read that Bach himself was often dissatisfied with some of the provincial conditions he found himself working in and it didn't do him any harm.

Karen Kingsley at Lunchtime Live !

Karen Kingsley, Portsmouth Cathedral, Nov 14

Portsmouth and its surrounding area are blessed with a number of fine musicians contributing to its active music community. They come from different backgrounds, from far and wide, only having their excellence and ongoing contributions in common. Few are busier or more versatile than Karen Kingsley who performs as accompanist to choirs, singers and other instrumentalists, as half of the Mornington Duo but chiefly herself, as well as teaching.

One knows who is playing at Lunchtime Live events but not what. Out of the lucky bag today came pieces by seven contemporary composers from New Music Brighton, four of who were in attendance. 

John Petley's Toccata was immediately busy crossing Bach with something like Scott Joplin and the Fugue that went with it, a beat or two slower, would not be flattered by comparison with those great ones by Shostakovich, remaining not quite resolved.

David Hoyle's Clouds breaking on Elizabeth Street, NY 10012 had a similar hint of edginess, as if hoping to achieve tranquility but not being able to before Johnson and Johnson (or Blues in E) by Simon Hopkins mixed Scottish baroque with jazz, in a strange meeting of rhythms and inflection.

We don't live in such confident times as Haydn did and a theme was emerging of unsettled feelings and the time, often literally, being out of joint. Karen was putting in a sensational performance in meeting such a variety of technical challenges so convincingly.

A Short Story by Gavin Stevens was an eponymously programmatic set of five miniatures in which the dash of The Chase ultimately led to the lush, briefly expansive Love Theme and the celebrations of Fanfare for a Happy Ending offering plenty left to our imaginings.

We were due something quieter and while The Calm Lake by Barry Mills provided that, it was still eerily evocative rather than restful but with its own anxious beauty. Three Jazz Pieces by Lluis Nadal took as their starting points Bartok, in Bluebeard, an Indonesian palace and a jazzman in Kraton Teremasa and 'gentle falling rain' in Rincik, in which we were caught in the onrush of a squall. We might, though, have been misdirected by the title of Peter Copley's Ballade if expecting something romantic or sentimental. It wasn't that, it was emphatic from the first chord and demonic and possessed in the most highly-charged Romantic way as the fff climax to an extraordinary and generous menu of very recent music from Brighton. Music is in a very healthy creative condition there on this evidence.

While all the composers are worthy of individual, as well as collective, further investigation it had to be Karen that deserved top honours in delivering such a sustained, absorbing and quite intense performance. 

It gives local star turn, Angelina Kopyrina, something to aim at next week.

New Acquisition - Nightingale Night VII

I don't think it's made headline news in the international art market but a new record was set earlier this week when I paid more than I've ever done before for an art work, Nightingale Night VII by Maggi Hambling. While the price paid can easily be found from the Pallant House Gallery shop, it goes undisclosed here except to say i8t is the year's profit from the turf or this month's Premium Bond pay out but not both.

Some philistines might say any child could produce such a daub when first presented with paint and canvas, as they might produce something superficially like some contemporary classical music if given an instrument, but I've long wanted some sort of authentic Maggi on a wall so it's another ambition achieved.

It's not yet ideally framed but we'll see about that. The handwritten, signed poem, The Wound by Thom Gunn, has moved across to the wall at the side to make way for it in the prime spot above the computer.

 

The Liszt Report

The Liszt biography, by Oliver Hilmes, wasn't chosen because he's a favourite composer. He wouldn't make any Top 30 of mine, Top 50 I don't know. CD1 from the set of 9 by Jorge     Bolet was missing so the seller refunded half of the bargain price, they have their moments, some of it possibly a bit lyrically inconsequential but the dramtic parts are the sort of music best heard live.

No, the interest in the biography was the story and it doesn't let us down. It's possible that the family arrangements and succession of relationships and their difficulties dominate too much but they are the story. Having arrived at the episode featuring Olga Janina, the stalker who carries a revolver and poisons, I've stopped at a cliff-hanging phrase that, 

The worst was yet to come. 

Few give much credence to Liszt's time spent in holy orders which may or may not have been an unsuccessful ruse to gain employment in The Vatican rather than any renouncement of his very successful campaign of amorous involvements. And they went on throughout the family.

His daughter, Cosima, moves on in premptory fashion from her first husband to Richard Wagner but it's not always clear who, if any of them, are worthy of our sympathy as the Romantic age builds towards its greatest excesses. 

These are not 'ordinary people', most of them come with titles from the apparently vast ranks of European aristocracy, whether real or fake - Olga Janina was not the Russian countess she claimed to be. Liszt's daughter, Marie von Sayn-Wittgenstein marries Prince Konstantin Victor Ernst Emil Karl Alexander Friedrich Prince zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfurst, for example. 

It would be more reassuring if any of the tremendous talent, money and appetite for liaisons made any of thyem happy for any length of time but Romantics, it seems, have even less capacity for happiness than any other generation of creative artists and determine to cause themselves as much anguish as they can conjure. In hoping for a roller-coaster ride of sensations and drama, Liszt's story lived up to all expectations as well as confirming the prejudice that Byron was only the first of many who were 'mad, bad and dangerous to know'.

Maggi Hambling: Nightingale night

 Maggi Hambling, Nightingale Night, Pallant House, Chichester, until April 27

It was good to find that the new Maggi Hambling paintings were in Chichester and didn't involve a more demanding excursion to London. I go whenever I can to see her exhibitions.

There was a time when she was most definitely a figurative painter but she's moved towards more abstract means as the decades have gone by. 

She's certainly no Vermeer, the paint runs down the canvas having been applied with more flourish than delicacy, perhaps. As in the previous waves and waterfalls, one finds what one can that has come about in the process. The crescent moon in the painting representing P.J. Harvey in concert is a deliberate act but the female figure one thinks one sees emerging from the sea is one of many things that are more sub-conscious. That painting is the most complex with its extended palette on a white canvas but for the most part the rest are on black, or dark, and predominantly gold.

Done after a night spent in woodland, these are spectral images, a bit Hallowe'en and reward much longer contemplation than most who come and go, not necessarily talking of Michelangelo, in order to achieve an effect that, in Room 4, could have become comparable to the experience of the Rothko Chapel. What one doesn't get except from seeing them in the flesh is the range of sizes they come in, from 30x25 cm in Nightingale Night XIII to Night of the Lotus Eaters at 198x226.

There may or may not have been a braying horse and a crippled giraffe in the latter and it's in the nature of the dripping paint that Portuguese Man'o'War are not uncommon. There might well be self-portraits lurking in the sub-text of others while Will Young is more readily recognizable than Leonard Cohen as the musical theme is extended from that of birdsong. We are told, also, that the vulnerability of the balance in nature and, thus, climate change are themes and maybe that comes out of the imaginings one has as to whether it is a fish or toad one has seen.

It is a captivating exhibition but it hepls that I attend with the intention of being captivated. But my devotion is such that I went as far as buying the limited edition print and so had plenty to think about, concentrating on conveying that home on the bus safely.

Dora Carrington is possibly the more major show in Pallant House at present, the first such for thirty years. She's no less bohemian than Maggi, a more vivid colourist, quieter and morte concerned with detail. While being Bloomsbury fringe, they were very much taken up with each other and not only one at a time. The bookish, ascetic Lytton Strachey puts in a number of appearances, most revealingly with some more frivolous behaviour in some home video footage.

Although self-effacing, her art has some of that Gwen John quality of craft and technique and only the unusual Spanish Landscape with Mountains, 1924, is really outside of her steady remit. That she shot herself in the head after Lytton's death, as in the last moments of Merchant-Ivory film, suggests more than it completely explains.

Lisztomania

 Lisztomania was one of those Ken Russell films from another age entirely and one hopes to be forgiven for thinking that the term originated there. But, no, it was coined at an early stage of Liszt's career when he was the prototype for the outlandish adulation accorded to superstar performers on a routine basis by now.

It was a recent Composer of the Week programme that encouraged me to avail myself of the biography by Oliver Hilmes. While the music biography shelves have the 'main men' - Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven and Shostakovich (Bolan, Bowie, Lou Reed, Ronnie Spector), there is room to expand into and while Liszt is unlikely to ever been a huge favourite, he had a spectacular life.

His childhood replicates Mozart's in many ways with the early onset of genius, the tours arranged by his manager-father, the royal courts and aristocracy of Europe but, despite all that ongoing financial precariousness. That was largely solved by his relationship with the unlikely Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, impressive more for her intellectual aspiration, it seems, than her looks, especially given the charisma that brought such amorous success to Liszt. Her influence on him seems out of all proportion to what could reasonably be expected by such matters are not for outsiders to properly understand. Financial difficulties seem to have been successfully overcome when he lives in a castle with his own private wing furnished with instruments previously owned by Mozart and Beethoven.

It's a brilliant book written so clearly and so well organized that it makes for a captivating story whether one has an interest in composers or not and makes the reading experience much more enjoyable than Don Quixote did. By way of immersing myself in the subject to best effect, a box set of 9 CD's, the Piano Music by Jorge Bolet is on its way because I'll always take a bargain when I see the right one. By how much this will enhance Liszt's position on my list isn't obvious but it's stuff worth reading and a major turn up that he gets in ahead of Brahms. 

-- 

Forthcoming at DGBooks,

Maggi Hambling in Pallant House, Chichester; Stewart Lee's books; The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckinghamby Lucy Hughes-Hallett, a few more concerts in Chichester and Portsmouth and then a review of a year full of highlights.

The Parnassian Ensemble in Chichester

 The Parnassian Ensemble, Chichester Cathedral, Nov 5

There's been some neat programming on Chichester's Tuesday lunchtime list this Autumn and nothing is more appropriate to November 5th than Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks.

The Parnassian Ensemble are two recorders, baroque cello and harpsichord. They began with Andrea Falconiero's account of La Follia with an air of minstrelsy. In The Tempest, Caliban remarks on the 'sweet airs that give delight and hurt not' and they could have been much of the music featured here as Gottfried Keller's Trio Sonata no. 4 was lissom and floated, the Parnassian's Allegro perhaps being more 'vivace' than their Vivaces, including in Gareth Deats's spritely cello, but we need not be too academic about it.

Vivaldi's Trio Sonata, RV 81, involved more conversation than interweaving between Sophie Middleditch and Helen Hooker's recorders, the Largo being sumptuously languorous with Gareth's gentle pizzicato.

David Pollock's harpsichord was behind-the-scenes continuo until Sophie and Helen had a few minutes to catch their breath and he played two Sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, K.208 ambulatory with some longing or ache in its decorous stylings and K.212 much busier in its dash and zip through some scales. One might need to be towards the front rows of Chichester's long nave to fully appreciate the delicacy of these instruments as it is more properly 'chamber music' of some intimacy.

Even if baroque music is generic to the point of impersonality its emotional charge is often enhanced by its discipline. Telemann was, I understand, the big, box office name of his day but his reputation hasn't since quite taken on the epic proportion of Handel's. His Trio Sonata in G Minor ticks boxes and fulfils expectations but Handel and his personality exceed them. The Minuets from the Music for the Royal Fireworks were immediately the stand-out piece, followed by La Rejouissance which can't be translated into English any better than its expression in music. More of it wouldn't have gone amiss, with perhaps some Water Music in case of emergency if the pyrotechnics got out of hand. It made for a fine finale to what was mostly a recital of the utmost charm.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 Part 1 of Don Quixote ends as if it was meant to end there. The only book that Dr. Johnson said he wished had been longer and that, presumably, includes Part 2 which is praise indeed.

The comparison with Hamlet begins with a comparison of their respective states of 'madness'. Hamlet's was an adopted disposition that may or may not have become the real thing while he was pretending but I tend to doubt it now having got some mileage out of the idea for 'A' level essays; Harold Bloom contends that Don Quixote is aware of his own delusions, which makes his story more layered than it would otherwise be.

One can choose between any number of interpretations in meta-fictions that become cubist with all the choices of ways into them. Satire brings with it different 'levels' of meaning. For me, we wonder 'what is the point' of the Don's quest to become a knight errant and we might decide it is the same as any of us trying to become what we'd like to be.

Perhaps what we are lies in what we aspire to be, however absurd that aspiration might be. Perhaps we are defined by the gap between that aspiration and how much of it we achieve of it. We are absurd to the extent that we still believe in such dreams despite all the evidence that we aren't achieving them.

At various times I've imagined myself as footballer, cricketer, cyclist, pool player and a variety of sorts of writer with only the most modest levels of success in any of them. I was absurd when I thought I was destined for any sort of greatness, even locally, in any of them but found some happiness in the involvement.

I don't particularly think we go to literature to learn lessons about life to make us wiser but prefer to think we enjoy well-made work. Happiness or enjoyment, however it comes about, can be the only point and that can be provided by literature and how it reflects us back at ourselves.

--

Bob Harris takes over Sounds of the 70's this afternoon. He was in grave danger of losing this listener early doors with his emphasis on Americana, West Coast, rock and grisly old Whistle Test sessions but then put Al Green on. I think he'll need monitoring for his percentage of soul, Motown and disco but John Lennon's Stand By Me, on now, is perfectly alright.

--

The success of my excursion to Newcastle, mainly for the purposes of Durham Cathedral, in the summer has led me to wonder about further such travel. I'm not in favour of travel in principle, mostly due to the vagaries of the available transport systems. Like Philip Larkin, I wouldn't mind going to China if I could come back the same day.

However, as with Durham, once a plan solidifies it becomes a sine qua non, a must-have and an imperative that demands doing. Nottingham is where I come from, still feel some attachment to - not having been since the early 1980's- and, like the Bee Gees in Massachuchets, 'something's telling me I must go home'. Such imagined significance in where one came from, some sort of worship of the past taken from fragments of memory, might be more authentic versions of 'who we are' than those Quixotic aspirations to what we want to be. And, having hardly even thought about writing a poem for most of this year, that sketchy archive of early memories served one up. 

It goes with Move Over Darling and Nativity that are from similar sources and I'd love to put it here but it might be saved for print in due course. I was identifying as a 'poet who doesn't write poems' but it ain't over til it's over and, not having been successful in finding any other identity, I'm denied even that. So, at the risk of dangerous levels of introspection, it is the expression of that nothingness that provides some either Sartrean or Derridian 'enjoyment' and that, if there is one, seems to be the point.  

More Cardenio, etc.

I will reach the end of Part 1 of Don Quixote shortly. That might be enough. It's all that Cervantes originally did but then he added Part 2 when somebody else took it upon themselves to continue it.

Perhaps the big news is that Cardenio's story could be Love's Labour's Won in Shakespeare's lost play because he does have a happy outcome.

More than that, though, Cervantes is 'modern' and deals in 'meta-fiction' in his pastiche of chivalric novels by referring back to his hack models, not least when the canon pronounces,

I have never been able to read any from beginning to end, because it seems to me they are all essentially the same, and one is no different from another.

Not all readers of westerns, thrillers, Mills & Boon or devotees of science fiction films will think that all the books they read or things they like are the same and they might even think that the sort of 'literary fiction' that I sometimes read could be accused of similar failings in as far as it's for it's own sake, nobody gets shot, there are no green monsters from other universes or the lonely spinster that lives in the Old Rectory doesn't end up marrying the dashingly glamorous man who arrives in the picturesque village. 

But Don Quixote does resort to routine cartoon violence on a regular basis. It is jokey, like that in Tom and Jerry, and one very soon doesn't take it seriously and so maybe it wouldn't satisfy those who want gun crime and murder as the staple diet of their entertainment. And yet they might. 'Realism' is not an easy idea in things that are accepted as fictional and so perhaps token violence is violence enough.

I don't think I need Part 2, though. I've got the main idea of it. It's probably better than I give it credit for. I've been reading it dutifully, not entirely against my will but I'd prefer to be looking forward to getting back to my book a bit more than I have been in recent weeks.  

   

August Kleinzahler - A History of Western Music

 August Kleinzahler, A History of Western Music (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The old boy is still rockin', don't you worry, although we had this much evidence that he was from, as acknowledged, having had the chance to see most of these poems already in the LRB if not also in previous collections but here they are collected together. He's still downtown in clubs with jazzmen, with the Great American Songbook, with Sinatra, remembering his friend, Thom Gunn, in the style of Johnny Mercer but, not quite as one might expect, he opens in customary, well-advised fashion with just about the best piece that he has and it's about Whitney. 

He's not much if not laconic. It's an idiom that he has made his own, owing a debt to the casualness of Frank O'Hara but with more hyperbole such as, in the ending of Chapter 63, that first poem in the book, with reference to I Will Always Love You, 

                                     if they played that one,

it wouldn't just be you dying in aisle 5.

All the girls would be dropping there like it was sarin gas

pouring from the speakers up there hidden behind the lights.

 

Widely read in his subject, there's an authenticity that only someone devoted to it can bring to it from so many disparate genres, as in Chapter 72, the titles all being such out-of-sequence headings,

And the 'Pavane'...What was it Ravel himself said

after a too too adagio performance years later?

Something about that it was the princess, not

the 'Pavane', that was supposed to be dead.  

 

Chapter 1 (Mahler/Sinatra) must have been written a long time before Trump's excruciating, overly enamoured reference to Arnold Palmer in a recent bunch of spiel that he passed off as a 'speech' but Ava Gardner's reporting back on Sinatra is almost as unbecoming in what can drift sometimes into a prowling machismo although there is a vast difference between Kleinzahler's convincing cool cat attitude and the monstrous overbearing narcissism of Trump.

For the most part, though, these poems and August in general are much cleverer than that and he incorporates his learning discreetly into his art. The idea of synesthesia in Chapter 4 (The Monkey of Light), the desperation of the late night radio phone-in host fielding out of season calls from,

no one calling but the hard cases,

 

the same sad old bachelors  

in Chapter 12 and,

Almost a hiss

An old shellac LP of white noise

Playing in the distance 

in Chapter 5 (Hyper-Berceuse: 3 A.M.) like the sound radio telescopes pick up from the edge of the universe.

Born in 1949 and so 74 years old now, it's not often that poets set off in a new direction at an age like that and Kleinzahler hears the shipping in the fogs in the bay off San Francisco, there is the old longing and the appreciation of moments of outrageous beauty but there is still the exuberance. It's not easy to recapture the time when one first caught such things but one can continue to catch them. This wouldn't be his very best work but he certainly hasn't lost it, either. The music is more to him than some cliché about it being 'the soundtrack to our lives'. Mine is an essential part of me, too, but I'm not going to claim it as quite as essential to me as his is to him.

On the day this book was due to be delivered Amazon.uk announced they couldn't source it. It's not due in the UK until next Spring, from Carcanet. But I can't wait that long for something from one of my last remaining, very favourite living poets and so had it from Amazon.com, it being published by FSG. There isn't time to wait that long. I want it now. And, as I knew he wouldn't, like an old raincoat, he didn't let me down. 

Chichester Symphony Orchestra in Chichester

 Chichester Symphony Orchestra, Chichester Cathedral, October 29

Prokofiev's not the easiest composer to file away in a category. Alongside his popular classics like the troika ride, Romeo and Juliet and Peter and the Wolf, there are some more challenging symphonies and concertos. But I'm sure nobody would want to be reduced to a member of a category and his 'Classical' Symphony no. 1 jumps out of its pastiche title like a jack-in-a-box.

It is good-humoured, even humorous, and compact. Simon Wilkins has his players well-organized under his concise, unfussy direction and their sound is beautifully balanced. The whole orchestra are given their moments and I was left mainly wondering how much Prokofiev had lifted from Beethoven, if anything, by way of homage or if it was just my imagination. It was an obvious stand-out and a great pleasure throughout.

Otherwise we were English which for the most part in the first half of the C20th means either marching, reflecting on war or pastoral. First, Elgar's Chanson de Matin was silky smooth with sympathetic pizzicato in the bass. Vaughan-Williams's English Folk Song Suite began with a march featuring powerful brass that would not be out of place as part of the traditional last night of the Proms sequence, the oboe was featured to great effect in the tenebrous intermezzo before the more familiar march was both rousing and full of jollity.

In a further call in recent weeks to Gustav Holst, who is interred only a few yards away and whose 150th anniversary is not long passed, A Somerset Rhapsody has a lone oboe  accompanied by delicate strings before it warms and widens with brass providing more panoramic views.

It's hardly fair on the CSO that my most recent experience of orchestral concerts was two by the Berlin Philharmonic but there's more to life than being the best in the world. The CSO filled every seat Chichester Cathedral could find and then some were standing and so it was as packed as a sell-out Albert Hall if not more so which is a tribute to this annual highlight of the lunchtime programme as well as showing how many friends they have.

After the Prokofiev, Elgar's Chanson de Nuit neatly book-ended a hugely enjoyable concert, rich and velvety with prominent lower strings augmented by horns, and took us to a restful conclusion.

Reporting Live from Sounds of the 70's

2.20pm I thought this afternoon I might come live from the occasion of Johnnie Walker's last appearance as a DJ after 58 years in the job. Tony Blackburn's still at it and Bob Harris will be taking over at Sounds of the 70's but Johnnie's put in a stalwart shift as only one so dedicated to his job could.

The premise of these 60's, 70's and 80's shows is that they bring back memories for those who were there at the time but by now there are plenty of us who have entirely lost touch with current pop music and the fact that there's a 90's show seems a bit superfluous because that's the latest we know.

Johnnie's picking the whole show this afternoon so we can expect Springsteen, possibly as a blockbuster finale, plus The Eagles, maybe Jackson Browne, his mate Steve Harley and his gesture towards soul and Motown could be Smokey Robinson & the Miracles with The Tears of a Clown. While Tony, and Alan Freeman, were my preferred hosts from old Radio 1, it will be an emotional afternoon as an old trooper and legend gives way with great dignity due to poor health.

 

3.10 I hope Bob stays with the opening montage, not that long ago updated to Earth, Wind & Fire, Thelma Houston, Rebel, Rebel, C20th Boy and The Clash but that remains to be seen. Opening with What is Life? by George Harrison might have been a better candidate than many have been for 'Better than the Original' in Olivia's cover version.

 

3.25 I've had any number of favourite pop artists in my time before having to accept that a list of half a dozen doesn't really answer the question. Chic were it in 78/79 and so Sister Sledge count as a winner. I never quite 'got it' with The Who but Giving It All Away by Roger Daltrey is 'older but wiser' in the context of a farewell gig.

'Album tracks' were somehow regarded as serious business compared to singles in the 70's and Johnnie left Radio 1 in some sort of high dudgeon, it seems, in 1976 when asked not to play them. Elton and Kiki Dee was his last 'Record of the Week', showing that he could pick singles, too.

 

3.40 Peter Gabriel was the 'interesting' bit of Genesis, perhaps, but even he was a bit too much designed for teenagers taking themselves seriously. Neil Diamond doesn't register here, either. Johnnie's taken us into a bit of a doldrums and although the arrival of the first 'winner' I tipped, Jackson Browne, is some sort of success, it doesn't lift us out of there. Is this really what Johnnie really likes?

 

3.52 The jukebox, record no. 567, is Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd and, yes, if you've had 566 tracks to represent the 1970's then you do need this, too. A monster hit at rock discos in the day, it now seems to progress from grand, stately opening to pyrotechnic guitar solo with undue haste but guitarists showing off how fast they could play was what happened then and that was surely a shortened 7" version. But, gladly, the Staple Singers, with Come Go with Me, restores what had been becoming, in cricket terms, a scratchy innings. That is 'soul' as in 'gospel' and something that America could do that the UK simply couldn't. 

4.00 A message from Uncle Rod Stewart was a fine tribute. Everybody's best mate, Rod was, according to Danny Baker. I think we could have done better than Sailing from almost anywhere on that album, though, and anywhere before it because he was another who spent some months as my favourite singer. In contrast, lesser known Simon & Garfunkel could have been something better, and better known, and that first half has been a bit morose. Maybe he's saving it for the second half.

4.12 Not with Nils Lofgren's Shine Silently, he isn't. I'll have to delete this whole enterprise if things don't improve. Here comes Bowie, rather deeper and more thoughtful than he needed to be, as he ever was, but hooray for the masterpiece, Drive-In Saturday.

4.22 It did have to be Bowie as the main feature. For those of us for who the 70's were the formative years, he was as important as The Beatles. Not as much a fashion setter as an assimilator of whatever he found useful to his purposes, which might be what an 'artist' is. He always talked some dubious game but he made the records that defined the generation. We were space-obsessed and Starman, with its hopeful message, was a part of what we were. He told us not to blow it, and yet we still did. 

4.32 The Skids represent the 'new wave' of 77/78 which was as influential as it was short-lived. I'd have had to have had The Sex Pistols, probably The Clash and maybe X-Ray Spex, too, but it wasn't exactly Johnnie's thing. Johnnie's interview with the difficult Lou Reed revealed that it was him that broke Walk on the Wild Side and Lou wasn't so difficult with him after that. The BBC would certainly have banned that in 1972 if they'd understood it.

 

4.47 'There'll be a lot of tears out there today', says Tiggy Stardust in tribute to Johnnie's soldiering on and it is a moving experience. Father and Son by Cat Stevens achieves what those first half records didn't and sets off the profound, long perspective, emotional charge that they couldn't. Stevie Wonder always seemed like the acceptable face of Motown for rock fans and maybe Johnnie's having a joke at his own expense with He's Misstra Know It All. One has the feeling the big finish is underway as we get the Stones. It's touch and go whether we are going to get T. Rex.

 

5.00 I didn't see Johnny Nash coming after some penultimate words towards the sign off but optimism is a brave thing. Neither the finale, Amazing Grace by Judy Collins. So, not only no Marc but no Springsteen, either. 

A bit odd in the end. I'll leave this here for a bit in case it's of interest but I think I'll delete it in due course. It had its moments but it wasn't quite the monument I was expecting.

Best wishes to Johnnie and Tiggy, though. Thanks for having been there.

Cardenio

 I keep reading Don Quixote with at least the completion of part 1 as a target while waiting for other titles that are likely to be more exciting. It does seem episodic to the point of the same absurdity as its repetitive episodes but the nature of humour changes - or perhaps it doesn't given that the likes of Some Mothers Do Have 'Em and Last of the Summer Wine extended one joke across lots of episodes.

However, the story of Cardenio, the lost Shakespeare play, is in it and one can see how it might have lent itself to such treatment. I think I once read that the lost play might have also been the putative, also lost, Love's Labours Won but unless Cardenio's story is turned around by further chapters, it won't have been.

 

One needs to be reading a book or else such dreariness as dutiful household chores could be allowed to be one's life but a loud noise in the porch at lunchtime announced an avalanche of post that, once sifted for items of interest, revealed Shostakovich Plays Shostakovich in those inestimable Preludes and Fugues that have been top of the playlist in recent days, as well as Purcell's Dido and Aeneas with Kisten Flagstad and Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, as heard as a question on Face the Music the other week. So, although these are further recordings of pieces I already have on the shelves, they are much more essential than having to create further shelf space for Bruckner, Mahler, Wagner, Korngold and maybe even Vaughan-Williams.

I think it's gonna be a long, long time before I see through that Shostakovich piano music. At the moment, guys and gals, Tatiana Nikolayeva is number one and Top of the Pops and it will be of interest how the composer played his own music with remotely expecting him to be better than she was.

Joseph Tong at Chichester

 Joseph Tong, Chichester Cathedral, October 22

Mars has arrived in Chichester Cathedral, just missing an alignment with Holst's Planets a few weeks ago but Luke Jerram's installation is welcome late rather than never. Try though I might to find connections between it and Joseph Tong's programme of piano music, it's best not to contrive anything too far-fetched.

Schubert's Impromptu, D. 935, would be familiar to many, its variations on the beguiling innocence of its original theme moving through something jazzier, the tragic, minor key, a prettier mood and a recapitulation. Joseph's modulations are subtle and nothing is overdone and that continued into Robert Schumann's Arabesque, op. 18, which was for the most part shadier but still as lush as he often can be.

Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit was the main feature, based on poems by Bertrand. Immediately more pictorial and 'modern', Ondine is a water nymph, sparkling with the delicacy of Joseph's light touch and balletic, often-crossed hands. In contrast, Le gibet means what it sounds like it should, B flat becoming the most heard note of the day as it represents the tolling bell and the swaying cadaver in a sombre, minimalist poem that surely no language could evoke like music does. Equally atmospheric is Scarbo, but in an entirely different way, still sinister but devilish in its mischievous antics. If Joseph had rated somewhere like 3 on my Richter scale of pianistic extravagance, he demonstrated the capacity to raise it to about 8 in some ff or fff before an ending that came surprisingly quietly.

I don't remember having heard that Ravel before and it was an introduction to be grateful of and, supported by such charm from Schubert and flowing Schumann, we could have been in other worlds although probably not on Mars. You see, I still can't find a satisfactory connection even to end on.

Who Killed Poetry?

 Joseph Epstein- Who Killed Poetry?

I was glad, as so often, to pick up a tip from the internet's foremost literary website, Anecdotal Evidence, and print myself off a copy of this essay.

From 1988, its content doesn't look very original by now but 36 years ago perhaps it was.

In fact, the British and Irish poetry of the 1990's was fine by me. It didn't seem all over to me at all. I was keen, I was active, I wanted to know and I was trying my best. But such attitudes as those of Joseph Epstein, me then and anybody else who proclaims the demise of a whole genre, depends on how old you are, what one was brought up with and admired and the almost inevitable consequence that what follows it won't live up to the wonder of one's first discoveries and infatuations.

The pop charts never regained the glories of September 1971 for me although it was a long time before they became not even worth knowing about. While I have favourite poets that were born later than me, most of them aren't and it's hard to think of many whose work I'm infatuated with that are more than ten years my junior.

There will, for later generations, be poets, pop artists and all sorts regarded as greater genuises than David Bowie but they won't be able to explain Taylor Swift to me.

Joseph Epstein was born in 1937 and so I can see why he lost his faith before I did. He is a generation older than me but the same thing happened to him except with reference to the poets of a generation earlier.

Who Killed Poetry? looks like a commonplace complaint by now, wondering where are the 'great', 'memorable' poets that there once were, blaming it on 'professionalism', on the proliferation of creative writing degree courses that the UK took in from the USA by osmosis, the inward-looking nature of such an industry and how, because I've been told it's true, graduates from creative writing courses go on to teach creative writing on further such courses. Perhaps one benefit of the collapse of the Blair initiative to have 50% of the population go to university might be that such vague qualifications won't be worth the debt the graduate emerges with and nobody will apply for them.

It happened a long time before that, though, that poetry lost its position as having the same sort of national significance as the test match, the pop charts or Strictly Come Dancing but everything has its day. Simon Armitage is a nice lad doing a fair enough job but it's not his fault he's not the household name that Alfred Tennyson was in his day.

Not all that many people are actually all that bothered about poems these days and it is a downward spiral when not even I am. I didn't mind it being an exclusive club - even a bit elitist if it had to be- while it seemed important to me but it's less and less so and more and more retro.

I'm not taking Joseph Epstein's canon of great poets as mine, we all have our own. And it's hardly likely that we were unlucky enough to be living when all art became moribund and worthless. Yes, the whole universe is said to be ultimately due to become lifeless and sterile once every star has burnt itself out. I can't see there being further Bachs, Beethovens or Mozarts; I don't foresee future poems or painting improving on what's been done but for whatever time is left to our species they will convince themselves they are thrilled with what they are provided with, our stuff will seem hilariously dated, and they will be trapped in exactly the same cage that time puts us in as what we are.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 It is more, I hope, out of curiosity than a sense of duty that I ordered Don Quixote from the library although some years ago someone expressed surprise that such a literatus as I hadn't read it. Well, one can't read everything. In the translation by Edith Grossman in the Vintage edition, it is highly readable, which was my first concern, but as yet, on page 140 out of 940, I've yet to see that the space given to comparisons with Hamlet by Harold Bloom in the Introduction would have occured to me beyond the authors being contemporaries.

The question might always be asked of such large-scale works if they need to be quite so long and Don Quixote probably doesn't, each episode being similar to the one before like separate items in a sitcom series but that might not be entirely Cervantes's fault. He wrote the second part because somebody else had written a continuation of what now stands as only the first half.

I was gladdened to see some lit crit commentary incorporated early doors with the art of poetry translation covered by,

no matter the care they use or the skill they show, they will never achieve the quality the verses had in their first birth,

and, as seems to me regarding prolific artists,

"If there weren't so many...they would be more highly esteemed.",

which might apply to Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Balzac and all those who produced enormous amounts of similar work.

What is not obvious is whether Don Quixote itself would be as highly esteemed if it consisted of fewer words. I feel, by page 140, that I've already got the idea of it but the misadventures might take a different turn later. My main interest is in deciding who the would-be knight errant most resembles in real life, its model being the fashion for such heroes in the pulp fiction of the day. As such, the satire could as easily be directed at science fiction, for example, with its chronic litany of green monsters from faraway galaxies constantly at war with their zapping guns. But the Don is delusional and so one can't help but think of two recent Prime Ministers who had no self-awareness or any conception of their innate foolishness. However, in his dreams of being a genuine knight errant, he also looks like Everyman or at least those I've met who imagined themselves perhaps poets, sportspersons or careerists but had no talent for such things. And it especially reminds me of all those enterprises I've ever undertaken, imagined were within the compass of some gift I had except I didn't have it in the necessary amount. I'll be sticking with the book for a while yet in the hope of being able to say I've read it but even more in the hope that some further depth to it justifies all the writing, and subsequent reading, time it demands.

-- 

We come here to celebrate good things and mostly avoid derogatory comments about fellow creative types. There is nothing to be gained here by disrespecting others. In a world often apparently fuelled by animosity, I'd like to contribute to that essential part of humanity that makes the most of its good things.

Good things, though, are achieved by the avoidance of bad practice and at some godforsaken early hour this morning I heard what immdiately sounded like the worst line of poetry I'd ever heard,

The Tibetans have 85 words for states of consciousness.

It's from Cows by Selima Hill. It was in Poetry Extra, repeated three times on today's schedule on Radio4Extra in which Dalgit Nagra selected a programme in which Caroline Bird shared some favourites with Roger McGough. You can't get much more Radio 4 than that.

There were a number of poems a bit like Cows that made their points and elicited some sympathy but few appeared to me to have much 'poetry' going on in them. It was more like a workshop on Mindfulness, promoting or exhibiting an awareness of the world but not necessarily through the medium of language as an art form, only using it as a vehicle to advertise the poet's heightened sensitivity that we were invited to admire and thus share.

The poem, and all such work by Selima and her kind, would be widely admired in poetry groups up and down the country and it surely isn't for me to deride that which gives satisfaction to thousands of readers.

But, no, this 15-syllable line lies dead in the water. By all means, poetry doesn't have to rhyme, scan or possibly not even aspire to the condition of music. It often helps if it aspires to some form or discipline but it needs to be, in this website's favourite mantra, 'any good'. We might sympathize with the feelings Selima is expressing and I'm not going to deny that it communicates but there's a lot of such 'poetry' about - all precious and right on and vitue signalling- and it's not what I'm getting out of Elizabeth Bishop.

--

Happily, for once, I picked the winner of Young Musician of the Year and with more confidence than I can muster about horse racing at present. The result might in due course be seen to have foreshadowed a time in which the world's leading classical musicians are mostly called either Wang or Kanneh-Mason, which will suit me very well.