Horace, Poet on a Volcano

 Peter Stothard, Horace, Poet on a Volcano (Yale)

At school we were educated to understand that Roman civilisation was disciplined, efficient and much to be admired but perhaps we were then too inclined to believe its publicity and in thrall to our classical exemplars. Peter Stothard's life of Horace is part history, part biography and part literary criticism and the history part serves to emphasize, to those of us who haven't before seen it put together in such a way, that the power struggles in England later were in comparison little local difficulties compared to the carnage among the generation of leaders in Julius Caesar's time.

Horace socially climbed into events through a friendship with Maecenas, a sort of political advisor if not minister, and some considerable poetic talent. He was a supporter of Brutus and then Octavian, no soldier, no 'renaissance man' or athlete but a short, portly, blotchy man who lived 'in media res', preached about 'seizing the day' and enjoyed wine and himself.

Greek literature came before Roman and provided the models for it and the example of Antilochus provided Horace with his 'perfectionist' poetics in an age that admired formal discipline more than our laissez-faire culture now that raises no objection to 'free verse', an idea that would have made no sense and been an oxymoron to Horace.

I had imagined him a sort of Roman Dr. Johnson, full of humane wisdom and less deceived good sense and there's a bit of that to him but the Satires, the Odes and the Letters show him developing different approaches and providing his and subsequent languages with a number of set piece phrases, memorability being essential if your work is going to outlast bronze as he presciently said his would.

Nunc est bibendum, the best known use of a gerund, 'now is the time to drink', might have become a general entreaty to enjoyment but was first used to celebrate the suicide of Cleopatra. Peter Stothard doesn't go to any lengths to make Horace any more likeable than I already thought he was from the poems. He certainly had an eye for an opportunity and the career he was clearly born for but one can still find sympathy for him in the letter in which he,

began to pour out his feelings about his own poetry as he never had before. He wrote about the precariousness of his place in society, the perils of seeking perfection when no one noticed or cared, the madness, alienation and despair that were necessary for the only art that mattered.

Many poets through the ages will have thought as much despite the celebrity some of them achieved at least in part through that tortured image, and perhaps some pop singers, the exaggerated embodiment of the 'poet' in the last 70 years, have exploited it further and so rather than the template of the sound-minded, equable writer, he might have been the prototype of the artist who took himself all too seriously and thus caused Baudelaire.

In a coda outlining the legacy Horace left to be picked up by two millennia of poets since, Stothard omits Marvell's explicit citation in his Horatian Ode, written to mark a public event which won't have been an oversight and so perhaps isn't Horatian enough but the general verdict is that Milton amongst others didn't do him any favours and that perhaps he is inimitable, and much better in the finely-crafted Latin. Stothard's summaries of the poems he finds significant are very useful but, time and again, he interprets the poems as opening with a shout, some thumping declaration, which is not the Horace I ever conceived of or what comes across in translation and so I'm left not all that much closer to him than I thought I was before but I do now have a synopsis of a seminal period of history that was as chaotic and dangerous as any one can think of. Not orderly. The 'order' only arrives once a proper poet puts it all into inventive, metrical lines.      

Tout Satie !

Tout Satie !, Erik Satie Complete Edition, Various Artists (Erato)

Vexations takes up 1.34 at the end of disc 5 of this 10-disc complete edition of Erik Satie whereas it is advised that it is played 840 times, could take 16 hours and very few people have ever sat through such a performance, so that's not 'complete', is it.

I ruined my 'classical' 'radio station', DGBooks Wireless, by adding in Vexations when the merrier late one night in thrall to Erik Satie and now wish I'd done what this box set does and just included one run through rather than all of the 840. But that is what Satie can do to you. He is singular, apparently outrageous and infectious and it's not until you've signed up to him unwontedly that you realize you were always more of a JS Bach fan after all.

He's good, though, and light years ahead of his time if not ours also because he made for himself his own flippant but very serious, minimal but wide-ranging, fleeting but eternal, way of doing it and, we might say, more truly avant-garde in being ahead of that which purported to be so. 

No composer was ever so idiosyncratic, certainly not without doing it so apparently genuinely or convincingly or being a few tricks ahead of all that game but I believe in him whereas I'd never ever believe in such self-styled radicals as Frank Zappa, Pierre Boulez or Jeremy Corbyn who somehow were who they were in some way inevitable. Satie couldn't have been predicted.

I've by no means played all ten discs yet and I'd find fault with the flick upwards of the two signature notes on the best of the Gnoissiennes, no. 1, as played by Aldo Cicciolini. No, no, that's far too quick. Satie, if anything, resorts to some sort of ragtime if in doubt or when joking, which he often is, but those Gnoissiennes and the famous Gymnopédies, his best-known pieces are to be luxuriated in at slower tempi.

This is a goldmine of otherwise irreverent, short piano composition, the joke sometimes seemingly beyond us. But the songs on disc 9 sound hilarious even without translations, the 'minimalism' outflanks anything that Philip Glass ever did by happening nearly a hundred years earlier and doing more with less, deliberately working within such a limited palette.

The short opera, Socrate, works within this limited palette and limited time scale to very moving effect and is very much the discovery of this acquisition.

There is much to be considered about ideas of 'artifice', Satie adopting his singular approach and sticking devoutly to it. All artists are artificial, though, it's 'art' even when purporting to be 'authentic' and so quite how much mileage there ultimately is in finding him affected is in some doubt.  Anything that was authentic wouldn't be art and so perhaps that argument turns round and makes Satie somehow the more authentic by being so thoroughly devoted to his artifice. But that discussion leads us into ever decreasing circles if we're not careful.

Shostakovich, a Life Remembered

Each time I read another book on Shostakovich it seems like the best yet. It's such a compelling story that one might think it can hardly fail but I reckon it could. Elizabeth Wilson's Shostakovich, a Life Remembered, though, brings together first-hand reports from those who were there, the likes of friends such as Rostropvich, and so it gains greater immediacy.

The most crucial moment comes in 1937 when Shostakovich is summoned to answer for himself and suspects his time has come only to be sent away because his inquisitor has just become one of the disappeared ahead of him. That seems like a miraculous reprieve and perhaps it was although the way the Soviet government worked the situation is beset by riddles.

Otherwise in this vast book, a monument of editorial achievement and collation, Shostakovich is nervous, devoted to his work, sceptical, principled, generous, funny and, as everybody apparently needs to be, a football supporter, of Zenit Leningrad. 

What would he have achieved without the terrible pressures he worked under. Brilliant, no doubt, but surely very different and, one suspects, nowhere near as interesting although 'interesting' is hardly the word. 

David Alexander at Chichester

David Alexander, Chichester Cathedral, May 27

The Chichester Cathedral lunchtime programme always diligently advises us to recycle it. I always defy the guidance and keep them for posterity, though. Thus today's edition is no. 61 of an archive that goes back to 2021 with earlier items likely to be unearthed on a later archaeological dig. Thus it is that I know I've heard David Alexander there before but not necessarily the Schubert Sonata, D. 784. 

D. 784 takes a slow march out of its sepulchral opening and is then haltingly lyrical in its Andante with the Allegro vivace full of urgent, mazy runs with intervals of relaxed song. One can usually feels pangs of doubt in Schubert and David, starting with his main feature, delivered all of its nuance and subtlety.

The vestiges or echoes of moonlight were all ethereal in Debussy's La Terrasse des audiences du clair de lune as a precursor to the real thing in the very famous Clair de lune that lingered over its lingering to much audience appreciation because we like what we know and feel comfortable playing at home.

Circumstances find me in an involuntary Chopin fest and nobody could object to such a thing. The Barcarolle, op. 60, strove to raise itself upwards, it seemed, but was apparently held down by gravity or the weight of its thoughts but eventually found release and took flight as then did we.

Some performers like to say a few words, some say more than others and it can often be informative and save me some homework. The microphone had a day off today, though, as David Alexander let the music speak for itself and of course, it did.

Errollyn Wallen, Orchestral Works

 Errollyn Wallen, Orchestral Works, BBC Concert Orchestra/John Andrews (Resonus)

Whereas with some composers one can tell who it is immediately, there are almost no two Errollyn Wallen pieces alike. Her Photography album featured five entirely different pieces. There might be something a bit more generic about Orchestral Works but she remains an artist of immense variety, without barriers and thoroughly outgoing. However many operas it is now she's written, only a fraction of her output is available on CD but maybe that's the way things are going with the hard copy item not considered essential to a new geneation of consumers. Except I grew up wanting to own the thing and hold it in my hand and that's how I'll stay.

Dances for Orchestra I'd be guessing at Aaron Copland or somebody C20th and American with all their spaciousness - created by horns- and open air energy but they aren't all frentic. VII brings to mind Charles Ives's Central Park after Dark, perhaps, IX is a brief hornpipe and X a sombre reading of Handel. I'm not sure if my American comparisons are conscious imitation but the Handel is, bringing forward Errollyn's awareness of and reference back to music history as in her re-working of Purcell in In Earth.

Much deeper in ideas, This Frame Is Part of the Painting refers to paintings by Howard Hodgkin in which a highlight is a dramatic sunrise in Sunrise over Hopkins, Hopkins being a place in Belize and not Gerard Manley and it is essential to know that or a calamitous misreadings could come about.

Fondant is about cake and one bursting with more flavour than Errollyn's preferred Battenburg by the sounds of it; The World's Weather opens mistily, shafts of light appear and then come maybe swirling stormclouds with the outlook 'changeable'.

By Gis and by Saint Charity is from what at 'A' level we were somewhat callously told was the 'Ophelia mad' scene, desolate and distraught and full of misplaced sexual anxiety. Postcard for Magdalena, for solo cello and all too brief in two sections played by Miwa Rosso, slow then fast, only serves to make one want a more extended such piece and maybe, fingers crossed, we might one day get such a thing.

Errollyn followers will know Mighty River which is more certainly American with its citations of Amazing Grace and C20th 'spirituals'. It's become a feature since it first arrived in 2007 and might be Errollyn's best known piece. 

Any such new release is an essential buy because I'm very brand-loyal to a handful of artists and if she hadn't appeared it wouldn't have been possible to invent or predict such a composer, not for the cross-cultural contexts and all the positive 'woke' but for the inspiration, the vivacity and conviction. I'd still stick with Photography over this album but I increasingly find myself facing up to and necessarily enthusing about such things as passion, commitment and sensation while wanting to excuse myself by saying I'm more of a 'well-tempered klavier' man, an ironist, even a Satie devotee (see above) and by now would prefer not to dance.

The other man's grass is always greener.

'The Peacocks in the Arboretum' draft

 It's all music here these days, isn't it. It's not meant to be but that's the way it goes. Before we have yet more of that, finding this manuscript and finding it of interest, I'd like to indulge myself by including some words on it. Probably of very little interest to anyone except me and, on the wilder outskirts of possibility, some future professor who comes across my poems and decides that, after all, I was the defining voice of my generation of English poets.   !!!!

I included three manuscripts in the pdf Collected Poems by way of showing that when some of the best poems came they came fluently and naturally and needed very little later improvement. That is not to say that they were written immediately; the ideas had a few days if not weeks to take shape but the actual composition happened very quickly.

Not so with Peacocks in which the process was almost the other way round, the idea coming easily but the final version requiring some adjusting and fitting together. Still perhaps not as hard won as some poets who take months over such things but a more involved process for me than is usual. It is on the inside of an old envelope because the other side had a first version which at that stage was not made relevant to the occasion it was made relevant to. And that was reflected in how long it then took me to think it was worthwhile which it especially needed to be for the private, solemn occasion it was written for. As such, for the time being it remains unpublished but it has by now convinced me and so it could see print one day, somewhere.

Angelina Kopyrina at Lunchtime Live !

 Angelina Kopyrina, Portsmouth Cathedral, May 22

Some of us have barely recovered from Angelina Kopyrina's recent performance of Prokofiev which formed part of what so far has been a tremendous year for Russian music in these parts with some extraordinary Gubaidulina in Chichester and the Petersfield Orchestra's sensational Shostakovich. They were all monumental in their ways whereas Chopin is almost too easy to like which is about the most flattering criticism one can have. Surely, eventually, greater thrill and achievement can't be stacked on top of itself indefinitely. However, that doesn't prevent the genuine artist from trying.

The Ballade no. 1, op. 23, was lush before becoming panoramic and then exhilarating and that served as an appetizer. The Liszt Transcendental Etude no. 4, Mazeppa, should not lead us astray with any expectation of calm transcendental meditation, being demonic in its fff's if not more. It seems it's ultimately up to the piano how many f's you can have and not all can provide five. Any grandstanding by the likes of Led Zeppelin or other sundry rock bands is put into context by Franz Liszt and made to sound like casual doodles. They all owe him the profoundest of debts.

But there needs must be piano or else the forte means not much, everything being relative, and the Chopin Ballade no. 4, op. 52, begins poignantly with Angelina perfectly capable of delicacy except for the most part preferring the grander scale which arrived in short order before the Etude, op. 25, no. 11, with its torrential right hand.

Equally, there are passages of reverie and pacific trance in the Mephisto Waltz, gorgeously done in their own right and under appreciated if only seen as contrast in this summation of all that had gone before, as if such a high octane set would ever admit to having a climax and only want to imply more. The language burns out long before the music ever would.

There was some suspicion that the Prokofiev Sonata was going to be a hard act to follow and it was but, as ever, one came away from a Kopyrina show undisappointed. It is always the most essential ticket in town.

Mayflower Ensemble in Chichester

 Mayflower Ensemble, Chichester Cathedral, May 20

It's a good thing I checked. It's best to do one's homework. People might think I don't know what I'm talking about. Clara Schumann's Piano Trio, op. 17, was written for the traditional pno, vln, clo and didn't originally have a clarinet in it. I thought that was unlikely but you never know.

Transcription might be the same music for different instruments but it can change the dynamic and balance of a piece. It became more like a Clarinet Trio, enhancing the warmth of the sound, I'm sure. 

Before that main feature, though, the Mayflower Ensemble paid tribute to local man John Marsh who one might guess from his classicism and untroubled approach was a contemporary of Haydn and one would be right. The Nightingale and Sonatina no. 3, were full of optimism and stylistic nuance. 

The Clara Trio maintained the mood in a looser, more lyrical way. The Allegro often had Nicola Henrietta's cello and Alison Hughes's clarinet braided together in flourshing, summery floribunda. A slightly slower tempo for the Scherzo featured a mellifluous clarinet. Samantha Carrasco's piano rose to promience with easy agility and in the Andante each took up lead parts in turn with graceful cello and still not a tinge of regret or doubt in the movement where such things might be expected. The piece is in a minor key but that shouldn't lead us to expect anything downbeat. The Allegretto, to finish, came with a bit more drama and vigour and threw in everything for a spirited climax.

All sweetness and light. Not a cloud in the sky.

Elena Toponogova and Anna Ziman at the Menuhin Room

Elena Toponogova and Anna Ziman, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, May 17 

Two weeks ago Elena Toponogova played a meditative programme in Chichester Cathedral that could serve as a mindfulness session. With Anna Ziman's violin for company today, there was a variety of tempi and temper and none more so than in the vibrant kaleidoscope of musical ideas that is Greig's Sonata no. 2, op.13, beginning as if in grief but full, rich and powerful before ending in triumphant celebration.

Before that major work, Elena and Anna had begun with an impassioned Romance, op. 23, by Amy Beach. Dvořák's Romantic Pieces, op. 75, next carried the smooth serenity of the first, a three chord blast of strings over rapid piano, an evocation of perhaps a fresh outdoor morning and the pale, shadowy finale.

Back solo, on piano, a reprise of the Frank Bridge Three Sketches heard only so recently made for a comparison of venues with the Menuhin Room creating more intimacy and the Steinway, some might say, outperforming the Chichester Yamaha although acoustics and my unreliable memory might provide reasons for that ahead of any assessment of two fine instruments.

To finish, after the Greig, was the short, gentle reverie of a Nocturne by Lili Boulanger to return us to some less complicated tranquility. 

It is Romanticism wherever one looks, or at least wherever I go, at present. I hadn't realized how much influence one little booklet of poems would have on the zeitgeist. I'm by no means against such things but my title was ironic. All you have to be is 'any good' and in the safe hands of the Menuhin Room and the nearby cathedrals we are not offered anything that isn't.

Graham Swift, Twelve Post-War Tales

Graham Swift, Twelve Post-War Tales (Scribner)

Graham Swift can't be the greatest living English fiction writer while there's Julian Barnes. If all his books were as good as Mothering Sunday, he'd be a contender but they're not. He is, however, essential and any new title is ordered without question, not because it says on the cover he won the Booker Prize for something else but because it says 'Graham Swift'.

As a book of stories collected under such a title, we are invited to find resonances in these so-called 'ordinary' lives with 'big' moments in recent history although now 80 years on from WW2, we can't be confident that we will always be Post-War. Perhaps it is even expected that there is some overall network of correspondance between the quotidien and the world-shattering. But surely most things are a bit more random than that. Although the Spanish Civil War is crucial to Passport and the classic 'where were you when JFK was assassinated' is brought into service and, of course war, pandemic and bad government all affect lives beyond their primary casualties, other less monumental things happen, too.

Time and again, Swift is brilliant at capturing human behaviour. These are slow stories, maybe 'vignettes', sometimes with hardly any plot but with the significant events in the past, like in Beauty,

Was she beautiful? Or had he in some unaccountable way gifted beauty upon her? 

which is 'the eyes of the beholder' revisited but gently questions any absolute idea of what it means.

As with any writer, or artist, that one has read 'everything' by, one gets the idea of how they do it and it becomes exponentially harder for them to impress yet again but Hinges stood out as a masterpiece with its understanding of the issues involved in a family funeral. The necessary decorum required in the service has a corollary in that of the writing. Bereavement is more than a theme in Swift's writing, it looks like an obsession that perhaps a biographer could explain one day. 

We all arrive at a 'certain age' and it's unlikely we will swerve in our direction and so more of the same is not only to be expected but to be treasured and glad of. Perhaps we should all subscribe to The Oldie although we might not want to be explicit about our taste being entirely dependent on our date of birth. One waits long enough for a new title by a writer like Graham Swift and it's gone in a couple of days. 

Twelve Post-War Tales might not in due course appear in many lists of the greatest books of the early C21st but it is ideal reading material, enjoyable for what it is like a perfect companion. Given the choice between reading it and reading something else, one obviously reads it.

Stewart Lee in Southsea

Stewart Lee, King's Theatre, Southsea, May 15

Live stand-up 'comedy' is not something I've ever been to much. Tommy Cooper in Torquay in the 70's, Ken Dodd in Swindon circa 1990, Dominic Holland and some very lowly Jim Davidson surrogates as support acts for The Drifters and The Stylistics. That's it. Not all of them were funny. 

Stewart Lee is well beyond 'funny'. His act dismantles the 'art', as his books demonstrate in great detail. He knows how it works and explains it as he goes along although the explanation is as much a part of the act as the text and the supposed themes. However many words he writes to fill roughly an hour an a half, he benefits from many of them being the same ones with his leitmotifs and recurring patterns. His art is structured like most Western music but not necessarily the free form jazz he so admires. While it may look 'free form', it depends on repetition and recapitulation within an overall design. We might venture to say that Stewart Lee vs. the Man-Wulf is conceived as a symphony in four or five movements but to do so would immediately make us overly guilty of being the sort of elite, liberal intelligentsia that he flatters his customers that they are.

Was that them, then, there? Oh, no, not me, then. I can see what he means about doing Portsmouth on a Thursday night. Spike Milligan said it was his worst ever gig. He may well despise Ricky Gervais and all he does but then he does very much the same thing. Ever elusive, the post-structuralist joke is designed to last forever.

His main theme might appear to be his fundamentalist 'woke' agenda, his many, many libertarian, right-wing targets and brutal invective but the real point is the art itself. While the audience have paid good money and are thus willing to laugh and clap, determined to have their money's worth, I'll happily turned up and be impressed by any number of pianists week in, week out but I'm resistant to the idea that someone expects me to find them amusing, much as I like Stewart Lee. I nod in appreciation or agreement and maybe the chuckle muscle moves from time to time but tough guys don't dance and I don't lol just because it's my allotted role as a member of the audience.

It's a long time since 1977 and the 'punk' uprooting of attitudes in pop music, such as it was, and it's nearly as long since The Comedy Store which 'changed' ideas about humourous performance. We are now post-modern, have surely seen it all before- or think we've at least seen enough- and so what one appreciates is a show that is forever examining itself. Stewart is impregnable because adverse criticism is proof of his point, he knows when you should be laughing and it's your fault if you're not and that is the joke, too. There are plenty of times when it looks as if the show has been de-railed but Tommy Cooper was always doing that and the suspicion is that it's all tightly rehearsed and choreographed, improvisation is only a last resort and, to take part in it fully, one has to suspend disbelief more than I find myself capable of. Or perhaps it's the likes of me that participate fully by seeing it as I do. The moments that I had most sympathy with were those when he seemed to be admitting the show was failing, that he no longer saw the point in it but Tommy Copper was always doing that, too.

Perhaps it's those providing the laughter track, without which the show would hardly work, that don't really get it.

Simone Tavoni at Chichester

 Simone Tavoni, Chichester Cathedral, May 13

Without any solid statistics to verify the claim, I'd guess that C19th music remains the most often played in C21st concerts. It is those composers that somehow best represent for us the general idea of the role, as Keats might seem somehow the quintessential poet. Whether we like them, or consider ourselves like them, or not they seem to express something to us about who we think we are.

Simone Tavoni began pensively in the lingering phrases of Mendelssohn's Fantasie, op. 28, before it became a comfortable moderato and ended with flighty verve. The Nocturne from A Midsummer Night's Dream was restrained and benefitted from Simone's sensitive touch.

Three Mazurkas by Chopin were miniatures tinged with melancholy but the 'big picture' was Rachmaninov's Sonata no. 2, in B flat minor, immediately promising the torrents that were to include church bells and any amount of 'agitato' in its first movement. The second was tentative and restless, the audience attentive and arrested by an intensity not heard in the previous pieces and the Allegro molto was still more dramatic than rhapsodic as it developed towards its crashing end. Simone Tavoni's finely modulated performance thus covered a range of the acceptable face of Romanticism. Perhaps Rachmaninov was where it all led to in the end but if some of us might think we can find aspects of ourselves in the C19th masters, fewer of us are likely to claim such extravagance to conceive, or play, anything on such a grand scale.

We might imagine we know who we are but we know not what we may be.

F.W. Harvey, Soldier, Poet

 Now that we are almost post-Muldoon and by so much so far too clever for our own good, we need to bear in mind that it wasn't always thus and poetry had to be written in a pre-Ezra, pre-Eliot world in the same way that pop music was once Bing Crosby's easy-going charm before, for instance, Bowie, Beefheart, Funkadelic - by all means provide your own examples - but I'm just back from seeing my great nephew and niece, 8 and 6 years old respectively, for who The Prodigy are a commonplace part of their canon.

I picked up F.W. Harvey, Soldier, Poet by Anthony Boden for its Gloucester interest more than any potential poetic excellence or insight but one ends up admiring him, possibly more as a man and his war efforts but still somewhat for his poems that achieve more than one might have thought, more than his friend Ivor Gurney's perhaps but Gurney's talents might have been more musical than purely literary.

I'm rarely more impressed than when a friend expresses better than I ever could something that needed to be said but I hadn't and Gurney's poems are 'clunky'. No amount of deep love for Gloucestershire makes for good poetry if the rhythm and music aren't there and, for a musician, Ivor can be discordant in his awkward lines but within the limited range of the pre-Modernist language that was thought to be 'poetry' in his day, Harvey is a talent.

By now he's of more interest for his reportage as a prisoner of war, his derring-do and perhaps, for one like me who can admire the waste of talent, how so little came of it in later life, why he's not famous, not even as well-known as Mad Gurney. If he can be regarded as a 'poor man's Edward Thomas', I think he'd be fine with that. That's not a bad thing to have been. One gets the idea that he was very capable. One doesn't have to read the biographies of 'poets' only for the poetry because it's not always the case that the best poems came from the most endearing people.

We should take chances on books more often. But, then again, I'm almost a victim of commercial radio advertising. It was on Times Radio, on an advert, that I first heard there's a new book by Graham Swift so my next job is to order it. I would have found out anyway and surely most like-minded readers would, too. I'm surprised that there's an advertising campaign for a new book by Graham Swift when anybody and everybody who ever read Mothering Sunday will read anything and everything he ever publishes in the hope it will be as good even though it won't be.

Ian Penman, Erik Satie, Three Piece Suite

 Ian Penman, Erik Satie, Three Piece Suite (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

'Maverick' isn't a bad word for Erik Satie but it hardly does him justice. Avant-garde before the fact, one of those people whose whole life seems to be their work of art but with Satie, although it was surely highly contrived, he seems like a thoroughly convincing original while many avantistes are trying far too hard.

I'm more of a Gnoissienne man than Gymnopedie by now, perhaps, but a return to John McCabe's recordings brought them back as fresh and mysteriously magical as the treasured LP had of them in the 1970's. Ian Penman's short-ish book can be read in a pleasurable day and does a fine job of describing the aesthetic, the man and his idiosyncratic music while admitting,

we inherit a certain language to talk about music which only glancingly reflects how much of it really makes us feel. Especially fuzzy, inadequate or maladroit when it's music that makes us feel unanticipated joy.

If writers weren't so compelled to try to define the undefinable, the language being insufficient, there wouldn't be anywhere near as much ink spilt.

Ian's three pieces are a brief life, an A-Z and a 'diary'. The book becomes rather more about Penman than Satie which is a tendency hagiographers sometimes tend towards, often to the detriment of their work. While he is good enough company and provides a sympathetic account of his subject in the process, one does wonder from time to time whether he realizes it's not really about him.

The studied attire of always velvet, corduroy, bowler hat and umbrella might make us think of Gilbert & George. The brief love affair, the austerely self-sufficient lifestyle, the subversive art, the antithesis of Wagner and the apotheosis of fin de siecle Paris that he so very rarely seems to have left, are all elements in what appears to be a deep devotion to his calling. In his hands, less is more with his Vexations taking 16-18 hours to perform, repeating the same short tune over and over if not in finitum then it must feel like it, but most of his pieces being no more than three minutes long. Except there's nothing small scale about the lingering expanse and timelessness in the Gnoissiennes, redolent of classicism but drifting elsewhere. It's best not to go overboard and even try to find les mots justes for it, like 'supernatural', it's better just to let it happen.

There is a vast map of music- we all make our own for ourselves- in which, say, Mozart leads to Beethoven and Beethoven to Brahms and most of the hundred years that follow him and Satie has to be put in somewhere ahead of Ravel whose Gaspard de la Nuit, a much more recent enthusiasm here, gets favourable mentions but Ian Penman was a 70's NME man, an obsessive who has heard everything and a jazz man, not a mainstream man and so while he loves his Theolonious Monk, Chet Baker et al, he is surprised by the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues but while I'd be overwhelmed and in due course even bored by his assiduous tastes, he gets a lot of things right and I'm glad to intersect with him on Satie.

The Complete Piano Music is 10 discs. It could be a long hard summer and I might need all the help I can get. It's unlikely to remain un-ordered indefinitely.