Some Things Old, Some Things New

It was a bad day in the EMI print room one day in 1989. The booklet in my 3-CD set of Beethoven Piano Trios (Bareboim, Zuckerman, du Pré) is fine on the outside but the inside pages are from a booklet for Mozart's Vespers. Perhaps it's a collector's item but I doubt it. Not to worry, the music is wonderful, prompted by last week's Ghost in Chichester, and having them all played by this supergroup is very much the sort of long-term benefit that such concerts can lead to.

I'd very much like to get Beethoven into my Top 3 Composers but Bach, Handel and Mozart are unwilling to cede their places so I go with a four. I may or may not find upstairs the black and white poster of him I had on my bedroom wall in the 1970's, fearsome though it was. As it is, not being clear which would be the best biography with which to improve on the basic one I have, I might get the Letters and thus have the life at first hand, as it were.

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He's hardly a discovery, it's just a very old enthusiasm coming back rejuvenated. Latest to be revisited from the bookshelves has been the Richard Yates Collected Stories. Whaddaya, Crazy, one of the greatest prose fiction writers. I hitched a ride on the Yates revival in 2002, liking to think I helped in a modest way with an essay in a magazine just like more recently I've jumped aboard the Rosemary Tonks bandwagon, early enough to pay plenty for rare, old editions before both were re-issued in paperback. That's the cost of being in the vanguard but it's well worth it for the feeling of having known. 

Where Rosemary owed much, had she felt inclined to be revived, to Neil Astley, Yates was more to do with Leonardo di Caprio.

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Also due soon are Sean O'Brien, Juniper (Dare-Gare Press) and the inordinately long awaited Thom Gunn biography and so that constitutes the Summer Reading list.