Errollyn Wallen, Becoming a Composer

 Errollyn Wallen, Becoming a Composer (Faber)

There is no reason at all why Errollyn Wallen shouldn't admire the poems of Philip Larkin, it's just that they present two apparently opposite personalities. It's a sound choice, not least in respect of Larkin's reflection that,

       how we live measures our own nature,

which is perhaps the difference. There might have been much Larkin would have liked about living in a lighthouse but after that his studied misanthropy and how his output declined to less than ever while his attitudes became less generous contrasts with Errollyn's energy and exuberant creativity.

Her book is more memoir than musical handbook but it has elements of musical biography to it, organized, if that is the word, thematically and not chronologically. It wasn't always easy from the difficult childhood through various hard times in pursuit of a career as an artist rather than in a sensible job. If her motto is really about not recognizing musical barriers, it could equally have been the one about getting out what you put in.

Her involvement is total, as evidenced by the immense variety of projects she undertook, and still undertakes. I don't imagine that all 22 of her operas are on a Wagnerian scale but there are far more ideas pouring out of her, travel, commissions, administration and a vast array of friends and family that populate these pages in among the texts and programme notes of a vividly personal self portrait.

The teenage hitch-hiking in Europe included some narrow escapes, the trek up Kilimanjaro brave but overly ambitious and having one's old car stolen twice, once with the only copy of one's latest magnum opus in the boot, all add up to what begins to sound like a hellbent determination to flirt with disaster but she's come through it in good order and became what the placemats on the dinner table in her childhood, with their depictions of Carmen, made her want to be - an opera composer - notwithstanding that she didn't know then what an opera was.

She understands about 'the grimace of time', cites many choice reference points, like Bach, baroque and Bobby Womack and perhaps best sums up the interaction between her Belizean and New York heritage with her Tottenham, and English, upbringing with,

there is a fire in me, which, living in British society, where it is actually 'cool' to be cool and where deep emotions don't always seem to matter that much, is something I can never quite get my head around.

Being of the same generation, though, it seems to me as if that English reserve isn't what it was when we were kids and that, having been a part of the partial social revolution that changed it, she might not see the difference it has made.

She goes on to say she 'cannot compose music that is ironic or cynical' but there's others can do that. There's the non-English Stephin Merritt, for example. While admiring the creativity, intuition, undaunted spirit and immense hard work of Errollyn, there's almost a self-help book in the sub text of Becoming a Composer and perhaps there needed to be. It's a moving and ultimately triumphant story of 'becoming' and however much joy her work transmits to her audience it is also her own reward, somehow fitting in writing a 300-page book alongside an increasingly eminent role in contemporary music. 

She is enthralled by life and the late passage about one day writing music to try to capture the aurora borealis comes as no more than one would expect of her but there's been much to overcome and moments of despair that required such commitment, and no little talent, to get by. I'm not as enthralled as she is, being very much, I reckon, an ironic sort of writer or I'd like to think. Less isn't always more but not everybody can maintain such levels of intensity. Nevertheless, one can't help but be impressed and glad for her, too, because she is a genuine light, the sort of thing we need and those of us that know about her are much the richer for it.

Katie Wilkinson at Lunchtime Live!

 Katie Wilkinson, Portsmouth Cathedral, Nov 9

What goes on in the pub, or what one overhears, at the 'after party' stays in the pub. I'm not concerned with technical imperfections. Some years ago I saw Tasmin Little in Portsmouth's Square Tower and she said it wasn't about perfection for her, it was about the overall performance. I certainly don't regard myself as a 'critic' which sounds to me as if it implies fault finding. I'm flattered to be called a reviewer. I just write about it and am glad to do so about such glorious performances as today's by Katie Wilkinson, vla, and Marios Argiros, pno.

Robert Schumann's Adagio and Allegro, op.70, immediately announced Katie's generous, warm tone that awoke from its reverie to Marios busily propelling the Allegro's smooth sanity in which, as ever with Schumann, I found little trace of the torments he suffered.

It is both a big responsibility and a honour to have the first 'official' say about a world première and so I'll take all the help I can get. John Owen's Prelude for Solo Viola is palindromic which is a composer's formal plaything but didn't prevent it from soaring in glimpses between fragile fragments that might be shored up against our ruin. I'd like to think it had some desolate beauty over and above its crosswordy structure and, demanding to be listened to, is much better suited to visceral live performance than heard coming out of speakers as if it were a leisure or lifestyle commodity.

But in an impressive programme in which all three works could be regarded as the highlight, the Franck Sonata was the 'big picture', increasingly convincingly making its way towards the melodious theme of its Allegretto finale of such orchestral grandeur and power. It doesn't seem all that long since I heard it last and probably, hopefully, said something similar but after the serenity of its first movement and lush piano helping the viola into its violin register, there was drama and chiaroscuro in the Allegro and much for one of Portsmouth's biggest lunchtime audiences in recent memory to be sent home thrilled with.

It remains something of a special secret that such things happen of a Thursday lunchtime in a quiet corner of otherwise generally, let's face it, downbeat Portsmouth. It's not supposed to be a secret, though.

It is to be hoped that Katie and Marios can be tempted back sometime in the not too far distant future because there is other repertoire so let's see if that can be brought about.

Success

 There is an undoubted 'feelgood factor' about backing winners on the turf, not that it applied much on Saturday, but it only shows up as raw cash in the end.

Much better, but increasingly rare these days, is the poem one is genuinely happy with. 'Genuinely happy with' means one that turns out better, having done it, than what was offered by the ideas when they first presented themselves. It needs to be 'ideas' and not 'idea' in the first place but one wouldn't start out without the hope that they might produce something more than the constituent parts they are during the making.

With the right things properly in place, it takes no time at all. Yesterday afternoon, it took no more than 45 minutes to allow the 32 eight-syllable lines in 4 eight-line stanzas of ABABCDCD to be written. I put in a few blanks where words were needed to go back to and fill in later, exactly as one leaves crossword clues one can't get straightaway, but did so without too much trouble, seeing what the thesaurus in Word had to offer which isn't usually much because it's AI, not 'creative'.

Success might look as if it owes a debt to Larkin's Posterity but I'd like to think it's a different think entirely. It came together very quickly having had one idea hanging around for a week or two and then something I was reading provided the necessary co-efficient to multiply it by. Yes, there it is. And that is how it works for me. No struggle, no fretting as the late night candle burns down. It doesn't happen very often, it hasn't happened for 14 months, but when it does it is as good a feeling as one can have. I feel much better for a few days but know it's unlikely to happen again for another long time. 

I won't put it here, or not yet. If it still looks any good some time later, you never know, it might find itself in print. The horror of standing up in front of an audience to rip ten minutes  so wantonly from their lives has not yet extended to a reluctance to have such things put on the record in a suitable place. I'm glad to take up such page space if the right place will have me.

Benjamin Moser, The World Turned Upside Down

Benjamin Moser, The World Turned Upside Down (Allen Lane)

C17th Dutch Painting is one of those periods, like 1960's Detroit in pop music, that brought together a rare collection of talent to make a Golden Age. With Laura Cumming's Thunderclap on the same subject already a highlight of the year, one wants more and Benjamin Moser's investment of twenty years' work is a satisfyingly solid, weighty thing to pick up.

The first news to me is that the latest thinking is that Vermeer didn't use a camera obscura so at least now we know he either didn't or he did. 

Among the many of Benjamin's profound observations comes,

There are many people with artistic talent. But only a handful succeed, and these are not always the most talented. Success requires another talent: the talent to discover opportunities to use that talent.

That is in the context of Gerard Ter Borch, who was no Rembrandt, but whose work succeeded then and is remembered now. A recurrent motif, alongside having very little biographical information about many of these painters, is not being able to see in their pictures that which was obvious to their contemporaries.

Van Meegeren's fame as a faker of obviously sub-standard Vermeers is an aberration, as if tribute bands were of as much interest as the original artists but the inclusion of so many plates of the ensemble portraits of Frans Hals is a mystery to me when such luxury could have been better expended on other artists. However, it does serve to emphasize the disjunction between the prosperity of those he painted and the crippling debts he amassed around him. Even so, while a lot of these artists died young, with Vermeer making it to 43 being relatively long-lived, Frans Hals makes it to 84 and thus there's more of his work than of those whose time ran out too soon.

Benjamin Moser is a paragon example of one of those writers who likes to appear in his own books even though, in this case, he wasn't a C17th Dutch painter. Until two-thirds of the way through, that seemed intrusive and beside the point but then he has a few pages describing his life in Utrecht and makes it sound such an idyllic place that I'd like to go there, too, perhaps on the European Tour of Lubeck and places associated with Bach that I'm never going to do. See. That's how easy it is to sidetrack into talking about oneself. But, after his eulogy to Utrecht, which is apparently like Amsterdam without the seamy downside, I liked Benjamin much more. 

Dutch art is contrasted with Italian for its 'realism' rather than 'idealizing' and that is a good starting point for understanding why Rembrandt is better than Botticelli. Adriaen  Coorte, and his amazing Still Life with Three Medlars and a Butterfly, achieves the quality of symbolism without the least pretension to being symbolic....shutting off the intellect and appealing directly to the senses,

like music can and, in Benjamin's account, like a poem by Bashō.

By the time he finishes leading us through all the paintings there, he's won me over and I like him. I had thought for most of the way I much preferred Laura Cumming but there's no need to choose when you can have both. 

However, in the Afterword he indulges in some further reflections on his life and going back to America, which is good, mostly sad and convincing but whether it belongs as a coda to tis book's proper purpose is less clear. Until I remember that Laura's book was also about her painter father, and her early life with him and so maybe that is how books are written now, openly acknowledging their subjectivity and incorporating their reasons for being written.

It is a glorious area to read about but maybe not as easy to write about as Moser and Cumming make it look. As Benjamin doesn't quite say but certainly implies in his final thoughts, this compact little nation at the height of its commercial and artistic powers is a fine place to escape to when one finds the present failing, unsatisfactory and, like it isn't for me, who is a generation older than him, not as good as we were led to believe it was going to be.

Racetrack Wiseguy

Confidence is an American thing, isn't it. We English, at least traditionally, with our genteel tea shops serving polite portions of cake, our gentlemanly sense of what is cricket and our downbeat Philip Larkin, can be somewhat put out by anything quite so brash.

But 'wiseguy' is an American word, it doesn't apply to the likes of Donald Trump who is very obviously a profoundly dumb guy and even though us Englishers enjoy irony, we don't entirely object to winning as long as we do it with some panache, as if we couldn't help it, like Sgt. Wilson in Dad's Army.

In order to enjoy calling myself Racetrack Wiseguy, both ironically and in a confident, 'showing off' way, it's best if I maintain the year on year plus in the account which, as per the business plan, is predicated on the idea of getting stuck in to the Autumn jump racing up til and including Christmas. 6 winners out of 7 runners so far this week taking the year's plus to new heights is exactly what was supposed to happen.

 

So, having confidence in confidence alone, let's see what can be done with tomorrow's big Saturday racing, hoping against hope that it isn't all abandoned. If I was a musician offering students advice on how to play their instruments, it would be called a masterclass but with turf investment only the outcome can say whether it was that or not.

I'd probably rather be at Wetherby if I couldn't be in front of the telly, not as much for the return of big, proper, Grade 1, Bravemansgame who ought to be better than Ahoy Senor who has seemed to improve after Christmas. One isn't thrilled about 8/11 but what can you do. No, the Mares Hurdle at 1.50, is the most interesting race of the day.

Skelton horses are getting beat more often that one would like at present. You Wear It Well has been tremendous already, I'm a recent convert to Gavin Sheehan's jockeyship and Rod Stewart's masterpiece of chic delinquency was a far better record than Chris Rea's Stainsby Girls but we've been expecting something slightly more from Mr. Henderson's Luccia and one day soon, which might be tomorrow, he is going to embark on a strike rate worth having. I'd like to take sides but would rather not just yet.

Thyme Hill has proved to be almost, almost an 'almost horse'. Mr. Hobbs is in good early season form but Dashel Drasher is a horse that won't go away.

Only Bravemansgame (3.00) can be for serious money. I'd perhaps prefer to see You Wear It Well win again but tomorrow, if any small change is to be involved, Luccia might be included in the optimistic multipliers.

At Ascot, there's funny old Estacas in the first with a likely Henderson type and one from in form Lucinda Russell so maybe we could put Immortal into the small change combinations.

I will be taking Jango Baie quite seriously because Mr. Henderson will have resources and is likely to send some of the best of them to Ascot at 2.40 but, if I wanted to pile up winners, on a penalty taker's strike rate, I'd go to Ayr.

Indeevar Bleu at 12.00 sounds like a good thing; Joshua des Flos is probably worth including at any odds against in the second; Famous Bridge at 2.15 is one I'd sorted out for today and is now re-routed and thus there is plenty to play with in the hope that it all goes ahead.

I'm not expecting to have maintained a strike rate of 85% for the week by the time it gets dark before tomorrow tea time but I will have had a go with money that was until recently either William Hill's or Joe Coral's and it might just make a bit more of theirs mine, concentrating on those in bold type.

I'll make Indeevar Bleu (Ayr, 12.00), the nap. I prefer to know if it's going to be a good day or a bad day early doors and sit on my laurels if I can rather than wait until it's nearly dark for something to save the day.      

It isn't all true

Another chance to see Kenneth Branagh's All Is True last night was very welcome. In a long and varied career, it must rate as Ben Elton's finest work, alongside Blackadder maybe.

I must have written about it here when I first saw it so I'll either repeat myself, contradict myself or say something I didn't say before but while some of it was familiar, much of it wasn't.

It's not all true, of course - some of it is far-fetched- but it is deeply moving like The Remains of the Day, the best of Depardieu, Un Coeur en Hiver and belongs somewhere up there with them as a very favourite film. Lit as if by Caravaggio, Shakespeare in retirement in Stratford is haunted by the loss of his son, Hamnet, who in this account was much loved. The characters of Anne, Judith, Susannah, John Hall, Southampton are all brilliantly conceived and Ben Jonson puts in a cameo at the end. The fact that Elton and Branagh take off from certain established biographical facts into high unlikeliness doesn't detract from how compelling it is.

The first thing one notices is that Branagh's Shakespeare looks more like Tennyson, a misunderstanding that could lead to even wilder versions of literary biography, but the crucial turning point is when Shakespeare realizes that no other children died of plague in Stratford in 1596. That leads him to uncover a wholly more disturbing family secret regarding Hamnet's death, his treatment of the difficult Judith and the troubling story of what 'really' happened. 

It's probably more brilliantly imaginative than it needs to be. Unless there is any truth in the statistics of child mortality due to plague in Stratford in 1596, the whole film contributes not much of use to Shakespeare biography but it is an immensely powerful fiction none the less.

 

I might be developing a sideline into reading bad books, to see how bad they really are, following my excursion into Jacob Rees-Mogg. Prof. Sir Stanley Wells undoubtedly knows more than most about Shakespeare but also much of what he 'knows' is preposterously billed as What Was Shakespeare Really Like? which, if he answers his own question in 138 pages in his latest book, is rightly being dismissed as supposition wherever I've so far seen it mentioned. 

So, having seen my own participation in the question rubbished by Prof. Sir Stan some years ago, I will see if Portsmouth Libraries can find me a copy. Stan is all but black-listed and no books written entirely by him are given permanent houseroom. However, I will gladly take two or three hours to read his fond, faux-academic imaginings and find fault in return, possibly giving credit where it's due if he accidentally says anything sensible. The difference between Wells and Elton-Branagh is that one purports to be a genuine insight, as such books are regularly announced as being, whereas the other pretends to no such thing and, as Shakespeare said of his own plays, is such things as dreams are made on and all the better for it.

Right, then, Sir Stan, I'm not convinced you will be worth the effort but it will be much more worthy and invigorating sport than fox hunting. Game on.   

The Importance of Almost and other stories

 The index at the top there, Also currently appearing at, is selected elsewheres where I am on the internet. It is updated now that the Larkin Society's archive of their journal includes no. 53 with such a seminal essay in Larkin Studies by me in it. I'm in 54, 45 and 21, too, but the David Green in no. 20 isn't me.

I wonder how hard it is to create a page of pdf's like that. I'd be a bit interested in having the Collected Poems, Strange Fowl or Selected Essays amongst other things in such a place to obviate the necessity of doing anything else with them. We will see about that.

--

The final movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony is a Thanksgiving after the storm but, not wanting to tempt fate, Portsmouth escaped the worst of Storm Ciarán as it unleashed its worst work in other places.

I'm aware of some damp on a wall of the library and archive room upstairs above the bookcase housing novelists in the second half of the alphabet. I'm aware of a neighbour who had a ceiling fall in recently and lesser problems next door a while before that to go with many years ago when that same room suffered leakage. I need such things to feed my natural appetite for anxiety because without such things to focus on, anxiety for its own sake would surely be madness.

--

But, far from the maddeningness, the Autumn duly brings with it the customary upturn in form on the turf and 5 winners out of my last six horses duly obliging. The plus for the year returns to an all-time high and so now is the time to press on without getting carried away.

The Skelton stable appear to have lost their way at the moment and Shan Blue tomorrow is beginning to look so overdue that it might never happen and so could be a favourite worth taking on and so Famous Bridge (Wetherby, 3.00) could be a bet. And at Ascot on Saturday we might reasonably expect Mr. Henderson to have one of his better prospects ready and so Jango Baie (2.40) might be that.