The Consolations of Art

Dostoevsky, at least in Crime and Punishment, might be heavy on ideas like C19th Russian novelists tend to be, but he's essentially Alfred Hitchcock this book is more memorable for its suspense than its questions of morality. Not that the title offers much suspense about what will happen in the end. Or will it? I've still got 60 pages to go.

It's been no hardship reading it but how soon I'll be continuing with more Dostoevsky remains to be seen. 

 

It will be Vasari's turn next and some C16th art appreciation from he who invented it. Along with other things looked at recently, like Michael Donaghy's essays and utterances, or C18th Tom Disch, quoted at Anecdotal Evidence, he looks as if he knows what he talking about. Or at least that he says what I'd like to say if I found better words for it than those that I do.

Donaghy has little time for such things as avant-garde posturing, academia, even the poetry workshop. He sees through much of the 'pseud's corner', as he calls it more than once, school of poetry commentary. Disch looks similarly sceptical about whatever was the currency in such language in his day and it's heartening that they add in their more thought-out ways to the straightforward dictum, 'all you have to be is any good', which wasn't mine in the first place but I adopted it.

 

One is reminded of just what 'the arts' can do for one with last week's three concerts in five days as the Autumn season sprang into life. Compiling DGBooks Wireless, above, has caused a frisson of life being so worth living, considering all there is to consider in 'curating' a playlist. Not least because one can't go wrong, one only hopes that others will come at least some of the way with you.  

It makes for generous consolation after a couple of weeks of being the Racetrack Dumbguy. While I often say that confidence can be a bad thing, so can a lack of it. Having got a few things wrong, I decided against the treble on the first three races at Leopardstown on Saturday and they all went in and paid about 14/1. Then, gormlessly trying to get back on the bandwagon on Sunday, Ylang Ylang came last, City of Troy was a non-runner and Kyprios came second. But I say to myself it really doesn't matter at all because it doesn't and I'm almost convinced.

Valentina Seferinova at the Menuhin Room

 Valentina Seferinova, Portsmouth Menuhin Room, Sept 9

Following the all-Chopin programme in the cathedral on Thursday, a different Portsmouth audience were taken further into the Romantic piano via some landmark pieces in Valentina Seferinova's story. The three R's for her are more than the basis of an education.

Rachmaninov's Barcarolle op. 10 no. 3 glittered before his Prelude op. 3 no.2 was stormier but we can't go too soon in expending too much of our linguistic ammunition describing those because she had only just begun.

The commentary provided by such artists sheds light not only on the music but the depth of their understanding of what they are doing. Not everybody's heard of Joachim Raff or Lubomir Rozycki but Valya knows as much as there is to know about them. 

Raff's Fantasy-Sonata began where the Rachmaninov had left off and then poured forth melody into its vast open spaces. The power and energy built and built like an ongoing explosion. I usually sit, or try to, with a view of the keyboard but today was on the opposite side and I've never heard Valya or possibly even the Steinway sound better. Maybe it has a big sound that rewards big performances. Maybe it was the music, the performance or where I was sitting but, not being able to hear it again from the other side, I'll never know. The Seferinova Raff is packed with untamed grandeur and brought an immense response from a highly appreciative roomful of admirers. She is box office. I think she brings her own fan club with her.

The piano might not have been the only one that needed the tranquility of Rozycki's Prelude as a means of recovery. There was no way that further fireworks would have worked next. But the Balladyna reprised some drama with lingering, longing passages interspersed and some use of the bottom notes that made one wonder if Rozycki would have made good use of the extra lower notes available on the cathedral's Bosendorfer. 

Now I'm not the world's most passionate guy and for the most part I tend to prefer my klavier to be well-tempered but in my father's house are many rooms and even the most devout 'classical' obsessive couldn't fail to be thrilled by a performance like this. Such extravagance makes me wonder if Liberace wasn't a bit undercooked.

I came home to find Yuja Wang's new Rachmaninov discs had arrived. Much as I have been looking forward to them, I'm going to have to leave them a day or two to give them a fair hearing. First impressions can count for a lot and I don't want to risk a mere recording to seem tepid after being quite so blown away. It might be an evening for some cool, calm Josquin des Prez.  

But, thanks as ever, to Andrew for his affable way of making this series happen and all those who help him. All these events have been reward enough. I hadn't realized that a solo Valentina recital was such a rarity. Perhaps they need not be so from now on.

Varvara Maggs at Lunchtime Live!

 Varvara Maggs, Portsmouth Cathedral, Sept 7

At Chichester Cathedral on Tuesdays one can see in advance not only who is playing but what they are playing whereas at Portsmouth you know who but not what. At first it seems preferable to see the menu before committing oneself but I don't know so much. There might be any number of things that could be missed out on by deciding on balance against a concert and so there's much to be said for turning up and seeing what happens.  

You can hardly go wrong with an all-Chopin programme, though, and whereas most CV's are lists of mentors, performances and places visited, not all played with Mariss Jansons as a child prodigy or,

was admitted to St. Petersburg State Conservatoire after obtaining the highest entry mark possible in the piano examination which exempted her from the rest of the exams.

Varvara Maggs is an undemonstrative performer on stage, concentrated over the keyboard. It is all in the hands, with maybe a little bit on the pedal.

The Ballade no. 2 was a lilting song before the tempest was raised. The Prelude in D Flat, the 'Raindrop', was dark skies and foreboding, especially contrasted with the weather outside, and whether it was Varvara's choice of material or the way she played it, Chopin was presented as torn between a tentative joy and inner torments.

The Scherzo no.1 was blitz and energy that modulated into minor key regret before a bursting floribunda ending. Having found fault with the Chichester audience on Tuesday for not getting the applause right, the meagre turnout today weren't even forward enough to pay tribute in between pieces. This sudden crisis locally might need to be met with some guidance on proper etiquette but they did enough after an enervated and dramatic Scherzo no.2, with its upsurge of melody, to bring Varvara back for a well-deserved encore.

'More lovely and more temperate' was the Fantasie Impromptu in C sharp minor as if the inner conflicts were resolved but Chopin was a troubled man in this account and the sweetness and light were never free from some darker forces at work.

Those faithful souls that attended were rewarded with a great performance that was worthy of more but what can you do. Thank you very much for coming, the highlight of Portsmouth Cathedral's Autumn Season might well have happened already.  

Boglárka György & Amy Butler in Chichester

 Boglárka György & Amy Butler, Chichester Cathedral, Sept 5

It might have well rained until September and it did put in an effort to but, having arrived here, we find a minor heatwave like a side who think they've bowled the opposition out but then the last wicket adds another 50. Maybe the weather accounts for all the spaces in Chichester Cathedral today where usually there aren't very many at all.

Those that missed it missed out on a fine renewal of this great ongoing series. Hungarian Boglárka György takes her Bartok with her and his Six Romanian Folk Dances were short, charismatic and the new strings on her violin were immediately tested and found in good order on the third of them, Topogó - Pe loc, at the very top end of the scale. After a couple of months off, it's easy to have forgotten how good such players sound in the flesh.

Amy Beach's Romance for Violin and Piano, op. 23 was lush and sumptuous with more of that searing top register which is what will remain most in the memory of this recital but the main feature was Elgar.

He doesn't feature as much as he might on any lists of my favourite music, the Cello Concerto and the fact that the chimney-sweep used to call me Nimrod when I was a little lad notwithstanding. I wonder if he had been French and written exactly the same music if he might seem more glamorous but there's nothing to find fault with in the Violin Sonata, op.82. In fact, while I write, Tasmin Little's recording has been ordered although it will have a scrap on its hands if it doesn't arrive before Yuja Wang's new Rachmaninov. It's by no means the first piece to be added to the shelves after a lunchtime concert.

The Allegro is sonorous in the lower register and strident when Amy's piano augments the passion. They are a tumult when joining forces. The Andante Romance is cautious but generates a similar emotional charge to the Cello Concerto in due course and the Allegro non troppo is certainly 'non troppo', often all smooth serenity in the violin above the chiming piano but becoming broader, wide open in its impressive finish which is, more than anything else, Elgarean.  

Boglárka, or was it Amy, said they'd never been to Chichester before but hoped they'd be back and that sentiment would have been endorsed all the way down the aisle. Applause in between movements is improper, in my little book, but it at least demonstrates audience engagement and enthusiasm. 

Applause was an uncertain thing today. It seemed not everyone was sure we'd had all six of the Bartok dances but maybe the usually highly attentive and appreciatice Chichester faithful weren't quite match fit first time out after their various summers elsewhere.  

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 I don't think Dostoevsky is going to make it into any elite list of novelists of mine. It's the moment when disbelief stops being suspended that a book loses its spell and after that it's not easy to get it back.

Just one flicker of doubt can do it. Just one moment when the text says 'so-and-so did this or that' and one thinks, 'no, they didn't, you just made that up'. It's by no means all over, of course, and I'm sure I'll see out Crime and Punishment to the end but I'm not in so much of a rush to buy up the rest of the complete works.

 

Reading one book while writing another can't be easy but Sebastian Faulks, for example, must do it to great effect given his output of novels and the performances he put in on The Write Stuff, the book quiz still repeated on R4Extra. One has two directions going on at once, at least - one that you're driving, the other in which you are a passenger, not to mention an awareness of any books of poems that are lying around to be looked at. I surprised myself by how readily a section on Paul Muldoon came together for C20th but maybe there's so much one could say and nobody can quite pin him down and so it's less obviously going to be found wrong than any false step one might make in writing about Larkin.

Next up on the turntable will be Yuja Wang's new Rachmaninov, being both a superstar new release and a one-ff way of filling a Rachmaninov-shaped gap on my shelves. There are bigger Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler-shaped holes in my library but there aren't any plans to fill them.

Ammunition in the armoury of my music-writing lexicon seemed to be looking thin before the local summer break in lunchtime concerts and I'm not sure how refreshed I'll find it as the season resumes this coming week. I might have to save it for special occasions, like the Menuhin Room events I'm gladly signed up to. Ideally, I'd like to find a new way of doing it but beyond describing what was played and finding something to say about how they played it, I'm not sure what else there is. 

The Sweeping-Up Process

 One of the more convincing ways one can persuade oneself that one is doing something worthwhile when no longer having to go to work for a living is reading some of the books one ought to have read. It seems I'm some way behind in certain areas. At least a couple of my friends who read proper books read Crime and Punishment many years ago.

Having been a teenage reader of Solzhenitsyn, I can hardly be accused of not taking on heavy Russian novels, or maybe that's why, but I always imagined Dostoevsky would be hard work. Not as hard as Finnegans Wake but harder than Proust. I simply didn't take to Gogol. I'd prefer George Eliot to Dickens every time. Henry James lurks on the outskirts of necessity, I recently saw something that made me think Borges would be good. I don't think one can ever say one's read everything one ought to have. There's always plenty missing from those 100 Books To Read Before You Die lists.

But, as the blurb on the Wordsworth Classics edition says, Crime and Punishment is 'one of the...most readable' of novels. But nobody ever took the trouble to tell me. One, hopefully not only I, have some sympathy- or even empathy with Raskolnikov, whose name doesn't mean 'rascal' but comes from the Russian for 'schism, break asunder', it says here. I shouldn't be too definitive about that yet, only at the end of Part 1 when he's just lured himself into committing a double murder which I can't help feeling is going to turn out to be inadvisable. So far, an obvious comparison is with L'Etranger for its amoral implications and if that holds, Dostoevsky will be on his way to an exalted position on my hit parade of novelists because if you get anywhere near Albert Camus you are very near the top. It might even be a case of Fyodor, Now that I've Found You I Can't Let You Go but there's a long way to go yet. A horse I backed the other night was three lengths clear after the second last and it looked as if it was all over but there was a bit more shouting and it wasn't.

We will see but certainly the next week or so of reading looks like being the pleasure it is expected to be.

As the writing might be, too.

A few hundred words, most days if I can, have got the Twentieth Poetry in English book up to nearly 10 thousand words by doing the easy bits. It's called C20th at present, with a dreary subtitle like English Poetry from 1898 to 1999 and then an introduction that sets the criteria of being about poems written in the English language in the British Isles. One has to be so careful even if it isn't going to be remotely academic or definitive, despite the accumulation of footnotes which I've almost come to enjoy. But, taken as a slow process, punctuating the quotes with some sundry commentary but, increasingly importantly, all the off-hand, ​blasé truisms I've thought up about poetry over the last 45 years.

What might have set out as being intended to be a fairly sensible survey of something I thought I knew about and something I could do, maybe it will become a maverick, if genuinely 'mainstream' point of view and some sort of contribution to 'scholarship' on the subject.

I doubt it but you never know.

By now the point about writing is the enjoyment of doing it, not that of who reads it or any praise it accrues as a by-product. 

I was, at least at some time, an admirer of Bill Shankly but not in the end of his dictum that football was more than a 'matter of life and death'. A better manager than him, Brian Clough, demonstrated that he thought otherwise.

Dr. Samuel Johnson expressed the view that No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.  

I have come, sir (or madam), to admire the vastly greater part of Dr. Johnson's writing this side idolatry but that is one of the finer details that I refute. Fine writing is done in exchange for cash, as Handel wrote his music, Shakespeare his plays and Damien Hirst put a dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde but there's more to it than that.

I don't know if it's better that second-best teams of footballers are sent out to represent their clubs professionally in the next-to meaningless League Cup as they were this week or that amateur poets enjoy writing poems that are mostly of even less consequence but if we take enjoyment as the best reason for doing anything once the demands of avoiding fiscal depravity have been met, I'm with the amateurs.

I need to spend some time with the poems of Paul Muldoon in order to decide with which glib remarks to sum up his colossal, if evasive, contribution but, wow, it's a job to relish without worrying that I might not get it right. I will enjoy doing that and the enjoyment, rather than whatever the result of my casual research turns out to be, will have been the point.         

'David Bowie' 1967

50 years' worth of inflation probably make £32.99 for Electric Warrior a comparable price to what it cost new then. 5 LP's worth of 1972 by T. Rex amounts to not a lot more than multiple versions of The Slider, though, at £132. I'd like to know who's going to go in there and buy it but there is no need to meet them.

Emsworth's Harbour Records is of interest to see what they keep in stock, presumably knowing that is what there's a market for. Yes, ELP, some heavy metal et al but not at all bad on T. Rex, reggae, the Velver Underground and what you'd hope they'd have. I went back for David Bowie by David Bowie from 1967. While the best things to have are the albums from Hunky Dory to Station to Station but great artists are more of interest before they made it big rather than after they're past their best. 

David Bowie in the de-luxe edition is two CD's so you get Love You Til Tuesday four times but it's still a gorgeous thing without, of course, being Hunky Dory, from the days of the beautiful people when his girlfriend was the dancer, Hermione Farthingale. 

At £4.50, those best Bowie albums on CD are not unreasonable. I'm not sure I'd play them very often and I do now have the facility again to play the cassettes but I feel I ought to patronize Harbour Records by going back and buying them if only to thank him for being there.

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These last days of summer are the anniversary of the last worthwhile poem I wrote, Romanticism, on a trip out in the opposite direction to Netley Abbey. The purpose of today's venture was the pilgrimage to see Rosemary Tonks at Warblington. I didn't expect the stone I left on her headstone last July, in the Jewish tradition, to still be in place so I found a matching one this time.

It's a pleasant walk along the shoreline to Emsworth but Emsworth isn't a Dostoevsky sort of place and the bookshop there had none.

--

But David Bowie was worth it as the first time in how many years- I don't know - since I went into a record shop and bought a record, even if it was made 56 years ago.

It's a bit Anthony Newley but it's also Scott Walker, Ray Davies, of its time but mainly interesting for what one can find in it of what Bowie became in those Golden Years from 1971-75 (at the very least).