The Heaney Letters, to finish

Probably more to be enjoyed as it went on, the names and events more familiar in the 1990's and thereabouts which increasingly looks like a minor Golden Age. It is, like such books often are, like a biography, like the one he turned down offers for more than once. He thought that the interviews in Stepping Stones adequately covered that ground and that he'd revealed enough. But, as with Larkin and anybody else who wants to defend their privacy, such intrusions are an inevitable corollary of celebrity although perhaps one that you don't see coming until it's too late.

But in 2010 he suffers a 'heavy depression'. Without wanting to diagnose the causes of that, one might wonder how it happened to such a naturally cheery, convivial man of such depth and balance. He'd had a stroke, he was 70, thoughts of mortality might have pressed more imminiently upon him and even the happiest of souls can discover a darker side. But I just wonder if, after such a life immersed in the 'word-hoard', complying with so many requests for appearances, contributions and lectures, the time spent on flights to all parts of the world and overseeing a whole academic industry of which he was the focal point - if he just began to question the worth of it all.

In so many of the letters he thanks people for their books and says generous things about how enriching they were but you can do so much, so apparently tirelessly and sincerely, and yet - perhaps one wonders what it amounts to.

It's the template for so many life stories - origins, the early successes, a sort of seamless transition into being the person they became known as, the superstar years (where applicable) but eventually the decline, the health issues and the looking back. The 'looking back' for Heaney being in his two last books of poems that refer to earlier ideas that made his name.

It's a big book and something of an undertaking, obviously essential to any Heaney scholar and of interest to many beyond them. Like any such thing it can be dipped into but I don't generally dip into books, I either read them or I don't. It is the broad sweep and the accumulating detail that gathers together the Heaney story and it's best read whole if at all..

He's not a Top 6 poet for me, probably not even Top 12. He possibly ought to be, given the 'poetry' and the music in it and all those things that make a poet great. So he could be in 'Best 12', certainly Best Handful of C20th in the Language but I don't feel he's my man. It's probably due to the Irishness, which is a fine flavour but not something I feel a part of.

It's the difference between 'favourite' and 'best' and also something to do with disposition. I am ill at ease sometimes, perhaps being shown up by the benevolence that makes him seem almost a candidate for beatification compared to the more guarded compromises some of us find it necessary to make in life and writing. I was once surprised by the results of an academic survey of coverage of the poets of the period in journals, magazines, etc. that put Heaney ahead of Hughes in such perceived 'importance', at no. 1. I'm sure that's how it should have been. Heaney had a lot of time for Hughes, to be sure, and owed an early debt to his example in poetry but he readily came clear of any such dependance and became much more.   

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 Six concerts in ten days and so, no, sadly I won't go to Petersfield on Saturday night to make it seven in twelve. Just temporarily I'm all across the football and Fulham and Forest are both on telly. Petersfield was do-able, and mightily rewarded, for the Shostakovich symphony but arriving back on the mean streets of Portsmouth late at night feels unconvivial and one mustn't live by music alone.

My role as music 'reviewer' is an unlikely one since my talent for music equates to that of talc on the hardness scale. I did it once for the school choral society's Messiah in the 1970's then maybe a few pop gigs but it wasn't until one or two at DGBooks got picked up by those whom they concerned that it developed into this industry. I'm very glad it has because it not only brings with it a sense of purpose but it's put me on speaking terms with many of the fine musicians in the local area.

The first part of the process is, of course, selecting which events to go to. Chichester and Portsmouth Cathedrals announce their three terms per year's programmes well in advance and mailing lists from the Menuhin Room and other performers drop in with their news while, at Music in Portsmouth, Simon O'Hea does great work in picking up all that is available with listings, previews, reviews and profiles of artists. One reason why nothing is ever reviewed negatively by me is that it's my fault if I chose the wrong thing, another is that there's no point in fault finding in the performances of genuinely committed musicians making sincere contributions to our quality of life but mainly there are rarely faults worth mentioning to be found. I go to celebrate more than critically evaluate, I don't know if I'm genuinely a 'reviewer' but maybe I am whereas I don't regard myself as a 'critic' when the word brings with it connotations of adverse criticism even if that's not what it means in this context.

Local choirs and concert series have graciously allocated free tickets in exchange for my write-ups but by now I prefer to pay my way, not only to support these worthy causes but so that I'm independent. I can do whatever I like at DGBooks because it's all mine but when it's going further it ought to be a 'proper job' but cathedral lunchtimes, Inspiratio Ensemble and others are for donations anyway and tremendous value as such.

Next, one habitually sits in roughly the same place in each venue. On the left and towards the front is my preference especially for piano recitals where one has a view of the keyboard so I play in the same position as Ryan Giggs did. Or, in fact, where I mostly did in the Gloucester Sunday League in the 1970's. On the attached photo of St. George's Chapel, Portsmouth Cathedral, that's me with the St. Cuthbert tonsure. 

I need to make notes or else I'd arrive home struggling to remember all the profound thoughts that occurred to me during the performance. I never throw away envelopes that arrive in the post. While waiting for the start I make headings for each piece, like Moz, Beet, Chop. I increasingly try to do this as unobtrusively as possible, not wanting to be a distraction to the person sat next to me who wants to be absorbed in the depths of the Adagio. I also increasingly try to write legibly to avoid not being able to decipher it afterwards. It concentrates the mind to be rifling through one's private thesaurus to find le mot juste or not the ones one has used too often before but Google with find you synonyms and has come in useful in what otherwise would be an adjective recycling exercise,

If possible, the theme and first paragraph can have been done in advance if a story presents itself on the basis of the programme but sometimes that has to be scrapped when that doesn't turn out to be the story. On anniversaries, a typical opening might be Grolsch would have been 250 this year, had he lived but there's only so many times one can get away with the same old jokes. Adjectives are more durable.

The account is usually a mention of each piece played, in order, but sometimes the headline news - like the recent Shostakovich symphony- elbows its way to the front. Generalized comment might imply the piece came and went while an attempt at more detailed analysis indicates it made a deeper impression but I'm not qualified to throw around terms like 'rubato', '6/8 time' or 'B flat minor' although I have nervously tried to smuggle in 'syncopation' and 'arpeggio'.

A story needs an ending and it's sometimes possible to refer back to the idea with which one began. Of course one likes to make an appreciative summing-up of the performance but one ought to avoid mere platitudes and for the most part it's the music I'm talking about more than the musician unless it's been a piece I know well. 

I'm home within an hour or so, do it straightaway and it can be at DGBooks within 2, usually more like 3, hours of the last note dying away and then, as long as it was in the area Music in Portsmouth picks it up and only then do I begin to worry if I've said Something Stupid like I loved them.

Now, though, it's time to re-charge the batteries and the 'word hoard', as Seamus Heaney called it. I worry that the language will get worn out but the trillions of combinations of words into sentences that are published every day are evidence that it is an infinite resource even if not all those sentences are worth reading. I have the same concern about chess that surely, eventually, every possible chess game with its 32 pieces on 64 squares will have been played but the internet is host to tens of thousands at any given time and, no, not all of them are worth watching.

But when something's good, it's very, very good and at least half a dozen performances in the last few years have left an indelible mark. They will always be remembered. It's not a matter of taste, of judgement or aesthetic value, one just knows.

Ivory Duo at Lunchtime Live!

 Ivory Duo, Portsmouth Cathedral, Mar 27

Always much looked-forward to on the Portsmouth Lunchtime Live schedule is the visit of the Ivory Duo, Natalie Tsaldarakis and Panayotis Archontides. On this occasion their programme readily divided itself into two halves, the first of great delicacy and the second more powerful.

Lola Perrin's Lettres d'amour dans le parc was a homage to Debussy, lingering faraway, possibly in the subconscious as if on the outer limits of our awareness. Then, with Ravel's anniversary making his music a more popular choice than ever, Ma mère l'Oye was a suite of miniatures based on nursery rhymes, its opening Pavane from Sleeping Beauty retaining much from the first piece. Panayotis brought forth the beast in the bass in Conversation of the Beauty and The Beast until Le jardin féerique, the Fairy Garden, was gentlest of all until a sparkling finish.

I'm not sure I'm aware of a composer quite like Busoni whose ravishing Romanticism fits so well with his sympathy for Bach. His Finnländische Volksweisen fuses vigorous folk melodies with a sense of baroque order, its highly-charged reverberations not restrained but enhanced by its respect for, and echoes of, the godfather of counterpoint. It developed into a vivacious vivace and a precocious presto.But more vigour was yet to come as Panayotis rattled through the top end of Danse Macabre in a tempestuous account with Natalie in the engine room. She didn't have quite so much time for it in this but elsewhere when she had a spare hand she helped herself to a bit of conducting practice and I wondered if she has in mind a further career on a podium. 

For the most part my family were cyclists more than musicians. My father rode on the front of a tandem, firstly with his brother behind as a teenager and later in life with my mother. The tandem was jocularly known in such circumstances as the 'marriage tester'. Such partners performing together on the one piano is an obvious parallel. In both cases, the test has been passed - most harmoniously.  

Max Pemberton in Chichester

 Max Pemberton, Chichester Cathedral, March 25

The piano is generally an instrument played with two hands, and one or two feet. Except for this week. Max Pemberton has a condition in his right hand that- hopefully temporarily- means he can only use the other one and so compiled a programme of pieces all 'for the left hand' without the most famous of them by Ravel.

I'm sure that a competent musician would have been able to tell by sound alone that only one hand was in use but it would have fooled me. In the first two pieces it was something of a distraction to see how it worked, the thumb often picking out the melodic line in Leopold Godowsky's Étude no. 13, as per the Chopin, over what I might risk calling arpeggios played by the fingers. Luise Adolpha Le Beau's Improvisation was then lyrical and not dissimilar.

The Toccata and Fugue by Jenő Takács was next very dissimilar, discomfiting and uneasy in its broken-down Bach way and Robert Saxton's Chacony continued in an edgy, unsettled mood that we could call 'sinister' to make use of our memory of distant Latin classes.

But having gone from C19th Romanticism to C20th Modernism, and become more accustomed to the novelty of left-hand only, the masterstroke was an arrangement by Brahms of Bach's Chaconne, BWV 1004, as also taken up by Busoni. This immense performance of such grand sanity transcended any consideration of how many hands were playing. You can't miss with a piece like that although, of course, the pianist needs all the technique and virtuosity in the quickening middle section and Max is clearly some talent to produce such a performance with, as it were, one hand tied behind his back.

I hadn't been entirely convinced I'd make the trip to Chichester today towards the end of what has been a heavy schedule of pleasure just recently- not that I'm complaining- but I'm very glad I did. You never can tell what is going to surprise you next. On Thursday in Portsmouth Cathedral we are due one piano with four hands. Suddenly it seems that two is an odd number of them to apply to a keyboard.

Portsmouth Baroque Choir in Fareham

 Portsmouth Baroque Choir, United Reformed Church, Fareham, March 22

Mention of the name Buxtehude will often elicit a response about 'the organ composer' but of the 29 discs of the extant complete works, only 4 of them are organ music. Thus, as part of its ongoing exploration of lesser-known repertoire, Portsmouth Baroque Choir had plenty to choose from along with pieces by Johann Kuhnau.

I have a programme from a concert by the Consort of Twelve that was in Bosham in October 1988. They have remained a stalwart presence in the area since 1982 but the only name that occurs on that programme and the one for this is Kate Goodchild so she deserves a special mention on a day when solo parts in the choir were widely distributed and it's going to be very unfair of me not to be able to namecheck them all.

Oboes took the part of trumpets in this non-period instrument performance, as in the opening Buxtehude, Ihr lieben Christen, and perhaps Frančeská Dante is noteworthy for playing one of those, cor anglais, recorder and singing at different times. In Dulce Jubilo, BuxWV52, benefitted from a warm tone in the choir without being quite, perhaps thankfully, the skipalong setting we might hear more often.

But while I'd finally found the ideal opportunity to wear my Buxtehude t-shirt by way of support, he was all but outshone by Kuhnau early doors and possibly went into the interval 0-1 down. Jennifer Kimber's cello strode out, laying a firm foundation in Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern which it was to do equally memorably in more than one piece, and any spotters of rare instruments would have been thrilled with Rachel Haggarty's dulcian. Chris Clark's arias involved some baroque tenor acrobatics before the lush chorale. 

Ich habe Lust abzuscheiden is a more shadowy thing, for those of us who prefer the half light to outright illumination, with further memorable cello chopping away in the alto aria.

Perhaps Portsmouth Baroque's greatest strength is its sopranos and in Gott, sei mir gnädig Ruth Sands and Lucy Bradley demonstrated two of the reasons why, filling an acoustic that might not have been designed with concert performance as a priority.

I'd been saving the oxymoron 'rich austerity' for use in relation to Buxtehude and not had much chance to use it until Jesu, mein freude which had such a Lutheran quality not least in Depart, you sad ghosts, the hymn-like chorus that Malcolm Keeler's notes very credibly suggest the young Bach might have heard on his extended away day to Lubeck.

Bach was even more present in the fuller flow and building of his arrangement of Kuhnau in Der Gerechte kömmt um with its pulsing woodwind.

Buxtehude is credited with his Magnificat on the same basis as some almost grudgingly allow Shakespeare his own plays - due to the lack of other plausible claimants - but since it sounds like him and carried forward features that we had heard the like of already, it is a safe enough attribution. The extended glorias passed around the assembled company to finish what was a gentle devotional evening for one still recovering from Shostakovich 10.

There is always fixture congestion in the concert schedules before Easter but Portsmouth Baroque took their share of the available audience. As ever, much credit goes to Malcolm Keeler as the mastermind of the enterprise but it is a shared experience and thanks also to those who also served but weren't mentioned by name on this occasion.

Petersfield Orchestra at Petersfield Festival Hall

 Petersfield Orchestra, Petersfield Festival Hall, March 20

Scholarship might never decipher all the meanings in the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. Maybe not everybody will agree but for me the debate's been over for a while about the greatest composer of the C20th, opaque ironies and false signals notwithstanding. I've been trying my best with the forbiddingly loud, large-scale, complicated symphonies recently and the chance to hear one in the flesh at Petersfield had to be worth that bit of extra mileage.

First, though, came the short, sharp shock of Liadov's Baba-Yaga, all drama and urgency although in the circumstances only a softening-up exercise for what was to come.

Ariel Lanyi and the orchestra then blasted into Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, its big beginning and then the big theme of its first movement. Ariel is highly expressive in Beethoven's grander gestures and even in the pacific moments we know he's only brewing up the next storm. Row 3, right in front of where the sound comes out of the piano, might not be the optimum position that a recording engineer would take his settings from but, on what was not a night for faint hearts, one was almost inside the sound. One of my imagination, the orchestra, Ariel or Beethoven was conjuring torrents of rain or maybe it was all four of them.

The Adagio is a sumptuous serenade giving Ariel a chance to be lyrical and were it not obvious that it moved into a new mood and theme, you might think it was a concerto of two movements because we are suddenly in the Rondo Allegro, ever moving with Beethoven's protracted way through the triumphant variations of what could almost be a tarantella. Precious few do heroics like he did and Ariel and the Petersfield Orchestra stood and delivered. Luckily he had an encore ready and even more luckily it was the peace and release of the lost reverie of Chopin's Nocturne in C#minor.

 

But the evening was still young. It's astonishing to think that in recent weeks Beethoven, that monster that overshadowed all that came after him, has not necessarily been the main feature of two brilliant concerts. It takes some doing to outdo him and over the whole oeuvre hardly anybody does but you get him playing away against a C20th Russian who fancies the fixture and you might just outpoint him.

The Shostakovich Symphony no. 10 begins with a 25-minute first movement of immense, searing power - woodwind, brass and all sections having their parts before the colossal work of the strings, led by the shock storm-troopers of the violins. I had no idea that the Petersfield Orchestra could make such a sound or take on this vast edifice of a work. I'm an enthusiastic, hopefully generous concert-goer and reviewer who doesn't go to find fault and so I use up words of praise readily without throwing them about like confetti but then there's this.

Robin Browning is somehow what Herbert Von Karajan should have been like if he hadn't been the most appalling narcissist- distinguished, charismatic, readily in charge of an orchestra who surely have the greatest respect for him and he's made all this possible.

The second movement is short, nasty, dense and aggressive, it being the portrait of Stalin that Shostakovich was finally able to paint. And then he signs it with his DSCH motif in every timbre, texture, tincture and atmosphere available to him in the third movement. And after the disembodied early fragments of the fourth movement, the swirling militarism leads to a great signing off with the same. 

It's as if the sound of soldiers marching, or the dereliction they leave behind them is somewhere there in so much of Shostakovich, this nervous, studious, very bravest of creative artists. I try my best to apply the most stringent of criteria before appointing anyone to the highest echelons of such heroes but I ask no questions of him. He has nothing to prove.

 

That was a monumental performance of an enormous work. It was exhausting to listen to so the Good Lord only knows what it was like to play in. The Petersfield Orchestra were deeply impressive in all departments and I'm not surprised they were sold out weeks in advance.

I could, at long last, end on a darkly ironic note and recommend you sign up for their next gig which is Bruckner but add that I won't because Bruckner is much closer to my Bottom 10 Composers than my Top 10. However, I did stand for hours at the Proms to hear the Berliners do whichever one it was and came out less unimpressed than I'd anticipated so being able to sit down might improve him further.

But, no. The Petersfields, Robin, Shostakovich- and Beethoven and Ariel- absolutely delivered the goods beyond all expectation. If you'd told me there could still be days like this I'd have had my doubts but you'd have been right. 

Portsmouth Cathedral Choral Scholars at Lunchtime Live!

Portsmouth Cathedral Choral Scholars, Portsmouth Cathedral, March 20

Portsmouth Cathedral's Early Music Festival got off to a punctual start, 1.10pm being early enough. It's a vague term that invites scrutiny. We have 'Renaissance', 'Pre-Renaissance' and 'Baroque' which some might prefer but it's better we attend to the music and not the loose categories of it.

The five Choral Scholars began in an arrangement of Happy is the people that Theo Almond had had a hand in, a gentle introduction before their many and various talents were gradually revealed.

Their Lamentations of Jeremiah I by Tallis being next up meant that my highlight came up quickly, its exquisite exposition of sorrowful progress being one of the rich repertoire of music lamenting the C6thBC siege of Jerusalem - I think- with Kim Chin leading the engaging blend of voices as counter-tenor.

But there was plenty more to admire with Theo decorative over Kim's dainty pipe organ in a fragment of the Bach Magnificat and Jimmy Thomson, bass, in the flighty love poem, Come again by John Dowland, this time with harpsichord accompaniment.

But Kim plays the recorder, too, as he did most plaintively over a walking harpsichord continuo in the Larghetto from Handel's Sonata HWV 360 then it transpired that Jimmy Thomson played violin as well as being one of two fine basses with Noah Toogood and Theo sang the Agnus Dei from Bach's B minor Mass, filling the acoustic of another gratifyingly packed St. Thomas's Chapel with Kim back on organ.

Two pieces from Messiah demonstrated immaculate clarity from Joel Fernandez and authoritative 'great light' from Noah and if, by any chance, my notes fitted all the right names to the roles they took at one time or another then my performance rates as one of my better ones while not being quite as elegant to witness.

As a finale, Kim made his way to the big cathedral organ for the finale, Sweelinck's Fantasia Cromatica, SwWV 258 which puts layer on layer in an orderly procession until raising its banner high to finish.

These were 'gap year' students. We didn't have 'gap years' in my day, we were glad enough to get to university on a grant, but these scholars are clearly making excellent use of their time, busy busy as it sounds like they are. You wouldn't want to be otherwise. I wasn't. 

We only had to wait half an hour until a most entertaining and illuminating talk by Andrew Gant based on his book, The Making of Handel's Messiah, I had an hour or so over the road in The Dolphin, surely the most civilized pub in Portsmouth, and I was down to Portsmouth Harbour for the train to Petersfield and an evening to remember with their orchestra. I'm very glad there are still such days as these.