Shostakovich and Kafka

It's like being a teenager again, really.

Rightly or wrongly, some authors seem to lend themselves to a particular demographic of readers. Jane Austen is surely for ladies, Hemingway for men of a certain type and science fiction for nerdy kids and those who remain such after achieving the age of majority. I was about 15, I reckon, when I read Metamorphosis and also recorded Shostakovich off the radio through a microphone onto cassettes. 

While Shostakovich stayed with me, Kafka didn't. I think I suspected Metamorphosis of being science fiction. I'm sure I read The Castle but kafkaesque had entered the language and we all knew what it meant - it was like trying to get an answer out of Virgin, Ovo or Boris Johnson - and, like Orwellian, there appeared to be little to be gained by re-reading Animal Farm which was a tremendous book for 16yo would-be intellectuals to cite but there was an unimaginable amount of other literature to look at, too.

However, recently prompted to get over all that prejudice, I took up with The Trial and, yes, it is all that but it is impressive, too. Kafka is not only kafkaesque, he's a great writer, too.

The only proper approach was to come to terms with existing conditions. Even if it had been possible to improve specific details - which, however, was nothing but superstitious nonsense - one would have at best achieved something for the benefit of future clients, at the expense though of doing oneself irreparable harm through attracting the attention of ever vengeful officials.

Some of the most affecting books are those that tell us what we already know but serve as confirmation. In the introduction written by Richard Stokes,

The Trial...represents his written defence in the trial he had in his imagination initiated against himself and which was to consider the warring claims of literature and family life

and it doesn't look a big stretch to me to connect that with the theme in Sean O'Brien that we are somehow guilty of being ourselves. Maybe there is more to Kafka than the nightmare labyrinthe, not least because it's not all political, it's psychological. It is a condition and it quite likely belongs in the accumulation of ideas about themes in James Joyce, Rosemary Tonks et al. Maybe his letters and a biography should go on the list of forthcoming attractions so that one can read more of what one already knew but never saw so well expressed.

Shostakovich can't ever be blamed for the labyrinth he was caught in, only for being brave enough to stick it out in Soviet Russia while adopted celebrity lifestyles in America.

The thrill of last summer's Messiah by Malcolm Keeler and Portsmouth Baroque Choir in Chichester has only now been challenged by the very different experience of Katie Wilkinson's Shos Viola Sonata about which it would be easy to say it 'went beyond words' but that's what music ought to do and it would put me out of a reviewing job. But today was an exemplary day, going back to the String Quartet no. 3 and some Tatiana Nikoleyeva Preludes and Fugues. Why don't I listen to that all the time? Because there are so many other things, too.

But we need a Top 6 Shostakovich at the very least and it begins roughly where I began with the String Quartet no. 3 and proceeds with the ever-inventive 24 Preludes and Fugues, whether played by Nikoleyeva or the composer himself. The Viola Sonata, of course, as below, and the monumental Lady MacBeth of Mtensk, which is nobody's easy listen. I'd probably have the Piano Quintet, op. 57, for sentimental reasons notwithstanding how it has the composer mixing austerity and lyricism as only he ever did. I'd much rather have another String Quartet than his popular hit from The Gadfly but the symphonies are too big for me and so God Only Knows how far he'll penetrate into that All-Time Big Four of Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven if I ever get to grips with them, and the jazz.

Katie Wilkinson and Marios Argiros in the Menuhin Room

Katie Wilkinson and Marios Argiros, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, May 11 

Two last works by two essential composers make one wonder if they sought out the maturity of the viola in the knowledge that they had deeper thoughts to express by that stage. They didn't have the same things to say by any means and maybe Brahms did first have the clarinet in mind for his op. 120 but in any esoteric debate about it, he wouldn't have gone to the trouble of a viola version without good reason.

If Brahms had reasons to suffer on account of being neither Beethoven or Clara Schumann's husband, even those hurts don't compare with those undergone by Shostakovich, who somehow remained capable of writing lighter, playful music but, as 'last words' go there's a vast difference between the moods they found themselves in.

Brahms op.120 no.2 opens with a melodic line as velvety as any that had gone before, with Marios providing the dramatic flourishes from the piano but the old man, 63, is becalmed and unregretful for the most part. Allegro amabile is upgraded to appassionata with grander ambitions before the third movement emerges from some sotto voce gazing into eternity and then ending with relish and vivacity from both players. 

That was a very fine thing and op. 120 no. 1 would have made for a fine programme with it and nothing to complain about at all. But that is betting without the Shostakovich op. 147. Beginning with fractured pizzicato and chilly atmosphere, the moderato is storm-tossed and then shimmers bleakly. Katie delivers it all with tremendous, but never over-stated, panache and cadenzas that serve to emphasize one's solitariness in an empty universe.

Shostakovich is often at least half-joking, and needed to be, and the Allegretto is a sceptically lively folk scherzo. At his most considerate, he gives the viola open strings to play so that the other hand can turn the page. But he's not joking much in the Adagio, an unworldly fragmentation of the Beethoven Sonata no. 14 that he didn't say was moonlit. It achieves such stillness, like time itself stopping as that theme emerges and breaks up in both parts. There might be other music that goes to further limits of consciousness but not much that does it so coherently and compellingly. The last note he ever wrote moves through twelve bars, an E back in C major, including ten semibreves and that is his final resting place, flatlining towards the silence that it implies.

I don't always convince everybody that Shostakovich was the greatest composer of the C20th but while Sibelius 5 was on the wireless this morning and I'm very aware of other candidates, I need no further evidence myself. While music played live and in the flesh is ever likely to be better than anything that comes out of a disc, the difference was never better demonstrated than it was today.

That was scintillating, an edge of one's seat performance, glued to it, and I'm very glad that Katie and Marios do requests and can be booked if you happen to find yourself in the same pub as them. Sometimes things work out for the best. 

Rosemary Tonks and James Joyce

There was another gentle prod towards linking together Rosemary Tonks and James Joyce while having another look at
The Halt During the Chase. Sophie says of Guy,

'...And the books he reads ! I wanted to understand him, so I went to the library and got hold of one of them, Ulysses by James Joyce. And I took the trouble to read it through, right down to the glug-glug-glug gog-gog-gog bits.'

So Joyce, for Rosemary, represents something - the sort of writer her protagonist's would-be boyfriend would read, something a bit out of the ordinary- and something she can reduce to absurdity in her ironic way.

Sophie, like Min in Way Out of Berkeley Square, is 30-ish and in a similar way behindhand in establishing herself, trapped to some degree at home, most tellingly,

I was really terrified of the women in Philip's set...Name any subject, and they had a brand-new set of opinions on it. Another thing: I hadn't had a miscarriage or an abortion, and that marked me down straight away...No left wing and no miscarriage? You cannot hope to become a fertility tyrant of the middle classes, and earn the right to exclude, snub and humble others, without a story about babies...

 

There is a huge difference between Rosemary's head-on satire and Joyce as a comic writer. I'm not sure how much my enjoyment, and admiration, of Joyce depends on him making me laugh but Rosemary's novels do so on a regular basis.

Neither am I convinced that there's enough to link them together to make for a proper 'compare and contrast' or where such an essay would find an audience. How tangential can a premise be and still mean anything of significance. On the other hand, if the main benefit of writing is that one enjoys doing it, nothing else matters. So we will see. It might be like the essay a friend of mine did for Prof. Norman Sherry, Graham Greene's official biographer, who told me, I could have given it 0 or I could have given it 80, so I gave it 80. I don't know if universities still work like that any more.

Kafka-esque

The finale of the D'Oliveira book was as deeply moving as any. 

Having arrived where he had, with only him knowing he'd lied about his age to get there, and achieved so much so belatedly it is a measure of the dignity of the man that he got through, like Kenneth Clark's Civilisation claims that classical culture did, by the skin of his teeth. Such stories survive knife-edge, cliff-hanging situations or else they wouldn't have become stories at all and we thus never know how many such stories there never were because at one point or another the project failed.

Thoroughly decent and only wanting to do what he did - play cricket- he was put in impossible positions by the opposing demands of a wicked world that would seem beyond our ken by now if that world hadn't continued to re-invent its capacity for wickedness in however many other ways. It is a story of more than derring-do, not least due to the humility, bravery and also talent of its hero and the parcel of rogues he had to deal with. While always having known that the MCC was infested with them and it wasn't only the South African government he was up against, I'm glad to read how Ray Illingworth was one of the good guys, alongside John Arlott, who took Baz's side. Good for him.

 

Something else entirely prompted the possibility of a Kafka revisit, not at all to do with being the victim of regimes in place because they are in place and whose victims don't understand and aren't ever told why they are guilty. It's an idea that can be extended into all those petty little gripes I look back on so resentfully like compulsory rugby union at school, having to do an essay on Vanity Fair at university and being told what a fine democracy we live in and then being given a choice between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn at a General Election.

I'm not as well up on Kafka as I thought I was but a look at one of the other stories in Metamorphosis and other stories is enough to suggest he's writer worth reading for more than just what he says, and that is how he says it. The Library Service will provide The Trial. I'm sure I read either that or The Castle in the 1970's but I haven't been back since. He might have been one of those 'teenage' writers one first comes across at that age and then leaves behind but it's possible he's worth another look. 

 

It was once possible to think there was some sort of concensus about what common sense was but perhaps I was the more deceived. I like Rishi Sunak more than I like many Conservatives but, given the qualities of his predecessors and the idea that David Cameron is now regarded as statesmanlike, that's not a big call. And he achieves it while promoting the Rwanda plan and claiming the next General Election is 'in the balance' which shows how bad you can be while still being the preferable face of the Conservative Party.

There doesn't seem to be common sense any more - the relatively thin gap there was between Ted Heath and Harold Wilson- when students at illustrious Cambridge University, supporters of Donlad Trump, Liz Truss herself et al just say what they say and keep on saying it.

Times Radio, and maybe The Times itself, seem to be able to retain some perspective and, having interviewed Monty Panesar, the ex-troubled cricketer now standing as one of George Galloway's candidates, at first ridiculed his lack of grasp but subsequently softened into sympathy for someone who actually made other politicians look good and perhaps it's not his fault and maybe he needs help.

Nicola Tait Baxter & Mina Miletic at Chichester

Nicola Tait Baxter & Mina Miletic, Chichester Cathedral, May 7

Many of the pieces one knows best are those one had recordings of first and thus had fewer to play. For Christmas or a birthday in the mid-70's, my parents gave me a cassette of Dvořák's Greatest Hits and so some of his music is very familiar. It's not so much Songs my mother taught me but songs my parents bought me. Lunchtime recitals are mainly of chamber music and so today's programme, which was all Dvořák who is not best known for that, was a rarity. I'm not sure I can remember any previously but it was most welcome. 

One of those 'greatest hits' was the Slavonic Dance, op. 46 no. 8, which in today's inventive arrangement by Chuchro retained all the orchestral brio and zest and another was those Songs, op. 55 no. 4, immediately providing the other half of the composer's personality with its wide-open spaces and broad perspective. That was necessarily the highlight for me. Georgia Mann described a piece for cello by Dvořák as 'sumptuous' this morning and if it's a good enough word for her to broadcast to the nation, it's good enough for me to borrow here.

The centrepiece of the programme, though, was the Polonaise in A, more ambitious and demanding with the drama in Mina's piano and Nicola's cello going to both the violin and bass ends of its range.

Silent Woods returned to the lento, profound and atmospheric and showing off the lush cello tone to best effect. If it works like a poem and sounds like a poem, it's probably a poem.

The Rondo, op.94, was a finale made of a folk dance with vestigial traces of Mozart in places, full of textures and emphases to propel it forwards. Dvořák comes across as almost as untroubled as Haydn was last week, at least on this evidence and I'm not aware of too much of a downside to him.

An entirely convincing performance and a few minutes in hand allowed for an encore, Dobrú noc, má mila (Good Night, My Darling) which was all serenity and clarity.

The New World Symphony surely counts as his greatest hit and I'd have the Song to the Moon from Rusalka but there were plenty more exhibits here with which to make his case in competition with his mate, Brahms, and he shouldn't be far away from him in the rarefied strata of late C19th greats.

The Differences

 It's been music here recently. The website is called David Green Books but that has become a misnomer. But Sheffield Wednesday play on other days, too. It's an obvious thing to say that music isn't held back by words and thus in some ways seems able to do more than poems and stories. Painting, similarly, although they are both bound by their respective aural and visual limits and perhaps poems are of interest for the ways in which they can slip their surly bonds but you won't get a Ph. D. in Aesthetics for doing 100 thousand words extrapolated from that.

-- 

I'm not in a bookish moment at the moment. Sport books don't often raise themselves to the condition of literature but, like the Larwood biography, Peter Oborne's Basil D'Oliveira is a story of high controversy and provides some insight into how the world was in some places at the time.

We very nearly didn't have the privilege of having heard of him, never mind getting his autograph at Worcester. Born in 1931, his test match debut for England was in 1966 and he only just got there in time without possibly the selectors knowing how old he was.

John Arlott comes out of the story with great credit, which can't be said of everyone involved.

There are similarities in the careers of Larwood and D'Oliveira in the ways they were treated by a sport ridden with such divisions but the difference might be that Larwood was saddened by his experiences in professional cricket whereas D'Oliveira heroically overcame his circumstances. Whereas Larwood's test career was over at 28, the D'Oliveira dynasty at Worcester continues to this day with Brett currently captain.

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There is a human trait that tends to be dissatisfied with things as they are that then complains even more when they are changed. I saw it in work plenty of times.

I know the audience of Radio 4 are well-known for any change to their schedule because they are a conservative lot and change necessarily means disruption. Perhaps I've become their Radio 3 counterpart, in counterpoint, suddenly lost and disorientated by the new arrangements. 

They benefitted from having me as a listener from earlier on Saturday mornings when Danny Baker was sacked for the final time by the BBC, from Radio 5, and I've hardly been back there since. But with Record Review now broken up and moved elsewhere, I'm not sure if the estimable Tom Service doing a weekend morning show is what I want and certainly Earlier with Jools Holland is well-intentioned but Astor Piazzolla is a poor attempt at eclecticism, on Thursday Essential Classics played the theme from Star Wars and Friday Night is Music Night is now on the wrong channel.

In the school summer holidays in the 1970's, Radio 3 played something C18th and I was prompted to imagine a formal garden like that set out in Winchester, sunlit and timeless and if it's possible to have so many radio stations on which one is guaranteed to get Dire Straits followed by Madonna followed by Huey Lewis & the News then one station centred on 'classical' music through the ages isn't much to expect and fits the BBC's allegedly non-commercial, Reithian remit.

But in the same way that there is no magazine beyond the Saturday Times that caters for me and so I write this for myself, so I might spend more time with the discs on the shelves and do my music for myself because there's a lot of them up there that don't get played and I must have bought them for a reason once upon a time.

Anemos Wind Trio at Lunchtime Live !

 Anemos Wind Trio, Portsmouth Cathedral, May 2

Music is possible without a piano. Some of us lunchtime regulars at Portsmouth and Chichester Cathedrals could be forgiven for not realizing that but a change is as good as a rest, it is said, and the rare combination of flute, clarinet and bassoon made for some excursions down some roads less travelled.

Anemos is a fluid group of musicians by the looks of it, able to accommodate to a variety of wind repertoire and today were Helen Walton, Rob Blanken and Richard Moore.

Ian Harrold's Divertimento, op. 40, was 'available for hire' and that is all was known about it. If Rob's answer to Richard's question was ad-libbed and not rehearsed there's a future for him in improvised comedy. The piece was choreography for breath, as was much of the set, with Richard by no means strictly a bass-line part.

In among some slightly eccentric things, Mozart's Divertimento No. 4, K.439b, at least allowed us to feel at home for the main course. The Allegro was joie de vivre, the Menuet and Trio graceful and the Rondo exactly as expected. In between those movements, though, the Larghetto and Adagio were the obvious standout moments.

Without intending to provoke controversy I would contend that Mozart saved his very, very most gorgeous ideas for his operas and the second movement especially could have been an idea he had left over. Led by Helen's flute it floated in that way that only Mozart does and the fourth movement was literally soave sia il vento.

It is often useful, whether in an art gallery, at a poetry reading or at a concert, to hear from the artists involved. I, for one, was glad of Richard's explanation that Marko Mihevc's Mutatio Eroicae was a Croatian 'musical joke'. It can be a problem with a lot of 'modern art' that one is not sure whether it's supposed to be funny. With the deconstruction of Beethoven 3 it was a devilish thing and I'd have asked about time signatures if I'd remembered to. Perhaps it was in 4/4 - I wouldn't know- but some of it might have been in π/x and a good example of how music is actually mathematics and not always easily so. With Radio 3, some might say, continuing to move inexorably towards easy listening - and playing the theme from Star Wars this morning- we might have to go out of the house more and more to find things of such interest.

Leonardo de Lorenzo, with another Divertimento, op. 24, provided a set of flourishes, not least among which was a bassoon trill, in a gladsome round of gaiety in what was a short, sweet and entirely diverting set that showed it's perfectly possible for an audience to be blown away by wind instruments alone.