The Parnassian Ensemble in Chichester

 The Parnassian Ensemble, Chichester Cathedral, Nov 5

There's been some neat programming on Chichester's Tuesday lunchtime list this Autumn and nothing is more appropriate to November 5th than Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks.

The Parnassian Ensemble are two recorders, baroque cello and harpsichord. They began with Andrea Falconiero's account of La Follia with an air of minstrelsy. In The Tempest, Caliban remarks on the 'sweet airs that give delight and hurt not' and they could have been much of the music featured here as Gottfried Keller's Trio Sonata no. 4 was lissom and floated, the Parnassian's Allegro perhaps being more 'vivace' than their Vivaces, including in Gareth Deats's spritely cello, but we need not be too academic about it.

Vivaldi's Trio Sonata, RV 81, involved more conversation than interweaving between Sophie Middleditch and Helen Hooker's recorders, the Largo being sumptuously languorous with Gareth's gentle pizzicato.

David Pollock's harpsichord was behind-the-scenes continuo until Sophie and Helen had a few minutes to catch their breath and he played two Sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, K.208 ambulatory with some longing or ache in its decorous stylings and K.212 much busier in its dash and zip through some scales. One might need to be towards the front rows of Chichester's long nave to fully appreciate the delicacy of these instruments as it is more properly 'chamber music' of some intimacy.

Even if baroque music is generic to the point of impersonality its emotional charge is often enhanced by its discipline. Telemann was, I understand, the big, box office name of his day but his reputation hasn't since quite taken on the epic proportion of Handel's. His Trio Sonata in G Minor ticks boxes and fulfils expectations but Handel and his personality exceed them. The Minuets from the Music for the Royal Fireworks were immediately the stand-out piece, followed by La Rejouissance which can't be translated into English any better than its expression in music. More of it wouldn't have gone amiss, with perhaps some Water Music in case of emergency if the pyrotechnics got out of hand. It made for a fine finale to what was mostly a recital of the utmost charm.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 Part 1 of Don Quixote ends as if it was meant to end there. The only book that Dr. Johnson said he wished had been longer and that, presumably, includes Part 2 which is praise indeed.

The comparison with Hamlet begins with a comparison of their respective states of 'madness'. Hamlet's was an adopted disposition that may or may not have become the real thing while he was pretending but I tend to doubt it now having got some mileage out of the idea for 'A' level essays; Harold Bloom contends that Don Quixote is aware of his own delusions, which makes his story more layered than it would otherwise be.

One can choose between any number of interpretations in meta-fictions that become cubist with all the choices of ways into them. Satire brings with it different 'levels' of meaning. For me, we wonder 'what is the point' of the Don's quest to become a knight errant and we might decide it is the same as any of us trying to become what we'd like to be.

Perhaps what we are lies in what we aspire to be, however absurd that aspiration might be. Perhaps we are defined by the gap between that aspiration and how much of it we achieve of it. We are absurd to the extent that we still believe in such dreams despite all the evidence that we aren't achieving them.

At various times I've imagined myself as footballer, cricketer, cyclist, pool player and a variety of sorts of writer with only the most modest levels of success in any of them. I was absurd when I thought I was destined for any sort of greatness, even locally, in any of them but found some happiness in the involvement.

I don't particularly think we go to literature to learn lessons about life to make us wiser but prefer to think we enjoy well-made work. Happiness or enjoyment, however it comes about, can be the only point and that can be provided by literature and how it reflects us back at ourselves.

--

Bob Harris takes over Sounds of the 70's this afternoon. He was in grave danger of losing this listener early doors with his emphasis on Americana, West Coast, rock and grisly old Whistle Test sessions but then put Al Green on. I think he'll need monitoring for his percentage of soul, Motown and disco but John Lennon's Stand By Me, on now, is perfectly alright.

--

The success of my excursion to Newcastle, mainly for the purposes of Durham Cathedral, in the summer has led me to wonder about further such travel. I'm not in favour of travel in principle, mostly due to the vagaries of the available transport systems. Like Philip Larkin, I wouldn't mind going to China if I could come back the same day.

However, as with Durham, once a plan solidifies it becomes a sine qua non, a must-have and an imperative that demands doing. Nottingham is where I come from, still feel some attachment to - not having been since the early 1980's- and, like the Bee Gees in Massachuchets, 'something's telling me I must go home'. Such imagined significance in where one came from, some sort of worship of the past taken from fragments of memory, might be more authentic versions of 'who we are' than those Quixotic aspirations to what we want to be. And, having hardly even thought about writing a poem for most of this year, that sketchy archive of early memories served one up. 

It goes with Move Over Darling and Nativity that are from similar sources and I'd love to put it here but it might be saved for print in due course. I was identifying as a 'poet who doesn't write poems' but it ain't over til it's over and, not having been successful in finding any other identity, I'm denied even that. So, at the risk of dangerous levels of introspection, it is the expression of that nothingness that provides some either Sartrean or Derridian 'enjoyment' and that, if there is one, seems to be the point.  

More Cardenio, etc.

I will reach the end of Part 1 of Don Quixote shortly. That might be enough. It's all that Cervantes originally did but then he added Part 2 when somebody else took it upon themselves to continue it.

Perhaps the big news is that Cardenio's story could be Love's Labour's Won in Shakespeare's lost play because he does have a happy outcome.

More than that, though, Cervantes is 'modern' and deals in 'meta-fiction' in his pastiche of chivalric novels by referring back to his hack models, not least when the canon pronounces,

I have never been able to read any from beginning to end, because it seems to me they are all essentially the same, and one is no different from another.

Not all readers of westerns, thrillers, Mills & Boon or devotees of science fiction films will think that all the books they read or things they like are the same and they might even think that the sort of 'literary fiction' that I sometimes read could be accused of similar failings in as far as it's for it's own sake, nobody gets shot, there are no green monsters from other universes or the lonely spinster that lives in the Old Rectory doesn't end up marrying the dashingly glamorous man who arrives in the picturesque village. 

But Don Quixote does resort to routine cartoon violence on a regular basis. It is jokey, like that in Tom and Jerry, and one very soon doesn't take it seriously and so maybe it wouldn't satisfy those who want gun crime and murder as the staple diet of their entertainment. And yet they might. 'Realism' is not an easy idea in things that are accepted as fictional and so perhaps token violence is violence enough.

I don't think I need Part 2, though. I've got the main idea of it. It's probably better than I give it credit for. I've been reading it dutifully, not entirely against my will but I'd prefer to be looking forward to getting back to my book a bit more than I have been in recent weeks.  

   

August Kleinzahler - A History of Western Music

 August Kleinzahler, A History of Western Music (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The old boy is still rockin', don't you worry, although we had this much evidence that he was from, as acknowledged, having had the chance to see most of these poems already in the LRB if not also in previous collections but here they are collected together. He's still downtown in clubs with jazzmen, with the Great American Songbook, with Sinatra, remembering his friend, Thom Gunn, in the style of Johnny Mercer but, not quite as one might expect, he opens in customary, well-advised fashion with just about the best piece that he has and it's about Whitney. 

He's not much if not laconic. It's an idiom that he has made his own, owing a debt to the casualness of Frank O'Hara but with more hyperbole such as, in the ending of Chapter 63, that first poem in the book, with reference to I Will Always Love You, 

                                     if they played that one,

it wouldn't just be you dying in aisle 5.

All the girls would be dropping there like it was sarin gas

pouring from the speakers up there hidden behind the lights.

 

Widely read in his subject, there's an authenticity that only someone devoted to it can bring to it from so many disparate genres, as in Chapter 72, the titles all being such out-of-sequence headings,

And the 'Pavane'...What was it Ravel himself said

after a too too adagio performance years later?

Something about that it was the princess, not

the 'Pavane', that was supposed to be dead.  

 

Chapter 1 (Mahler/Sinatra) must have been written a long time before Trump's excruciating, overly enamoured reference to Arnold Palmer in a recent bunch of spiel that he passed off as a 'speech' but Ava Gardner's reporting back on Sinatra is almost as unbecoming in what can drift sometimes into a prowling machismo although there is a vast difference between Kleinzahler's convincing cool cat attitude and the monstrous overbearing narcissism of Trump.

For the most part, though, these poems and August in general are much cleverer than that and he incorporates his learning discreetly into his art. The idea of synesthesia in Chapter 4 (The Monkey of Light), the desperation of the late night radio phone-in host fielding out of season calls from,

no one calling but the hard cases,

 

the same sad old bachelors  

in Chapter 12 and,

Almost a hiss

An old shellac LP of white noise

Playing in the distance 

in Chapter 5 (Hyper-Berceuse: 3 A.M.) like the sound radio telescopes pick up from the edge of the universe.

Born in 1949 and so 74 years old now, it's not often that poets set off in a new direction at an age like that and Kleinzahler hears the shipping in the fogs in the bay off San Francisco, there is the old longing and the appreciation of moments of outrageous beauty but there is still the exuberance. It's not easy to recapture the time when one first caught such things but one can continue to catch them. This wouldn't be his very best work but he certainly hasn't lost it, either. The music is more to him than some cliché about it being 'the soundtrack to our lives'. Mine is an essential part of me, too, but I'm not going to claim it as quite as essential to me as his is to him.

On the day this book was due to be delivered Amazon.uk announced they couldn't source it. It's not due in the UK until next Spring, from Carcanet. But I can't wait that long for something from one of my last remaining, very favourite living poets and so had it from Amazon.com, it being published by FSG. There isn't time to wait that long. I want it now. And, as I knew he wouldn't, like an old raincoat, he didn't let me down. 

Chichester Symphony Orchestra in Chichester

 Chichester Symphony Orchestra, Chichester Cathedral, October 29

Prokofiev's not the easiest composer to file away in a category. Alongside his popular classics like the troika ride, Romeo and Juliet and Peter and the Wolf, there are some more challenging symphonies and concertos. But I'm sure nobody would want to be reduced to a member of a category and his 'Classical' Symphony no. 1 jumps out of its pastiche title like a jack-in-a-box.

It is good-humoured, even humorous, and compact. Simon Wilkins has his players well-organized under his concise, unfussy direction and their sound is beautifully balanced. The whole orchestra are given their moments and I was left mainly wondering how much Prokofiev had lifted from Beethoven, if anything, by way of homage or if it was just my imagination. It was an obvious stand-out and a great pleasure throughout.

Otherwise we were English which for the most part in the first half of the C20th means either marching, reflecting on war or pastoral. First, Elgar's Chanson de Matin was silky smooth with sympathetic pizzicato in the bass. Vaughan-Williams's English Folk Song Suite began with a march featuring powerful brass that would not be out of place as part of the traditional last night of the Proms sequence, the oboe was featured to great effect in the tenebrous intermezzo before the more familiar march was both rousing and full of jollity.

In a further call in recent weeks to Gustav Holst, who is interred only a few yards away and whose 150th anniversary is not long passed, A Somerset Rhapsody has a lone oboe  accompanied by delicate strings before it warms and widens with brass providing more panoramic views.

It's hardly fair on the CSO that my most recent experience of orchestral concerts was two by the Berlin Philharmonic but there's more to life than being the best in the world. The CSO filled every seat Chichester Cathedral could find and then some were standing and so it was as packed as a sell-out Albert Hall if not more so which is a tribute to this annual highlight of the lunchtime programme as well as showing how many friends they have.

After the Prokofiev, Elgar's Chanson de Nuit neatly book-ended a hugely enjoyable concert, rich and velvety with prominent lower strings augmented by horns, and took us to a restful conclusion.

Reporting Live from Sounds of the 70's

2.20pm I thought this afternoon I might come live from the occasion of Johnnie Walker's last appearance as a DJ after 58 years in the job. Tony Blackburn's still at it and Bob Harris will be taking over at Sounds of the 70's but Johnnie's put in a stalwart shift as only one so dedicated to his job could.

The premise of these 60's, 70's and 80's shows is that they bring back memories for those who were there at the time but by now there are plenty of us who have entirely lost touch with current pop music and the fact that there's a 90's show seems a bit superfluous because that's the latest we know.

Johnnie's picking the whole show this afternoon so we can expect Springsteen, possibly as a blockbuster finale, plus The Eagles, maybe Jackson Browne, his mate Steve Harley and his gesture towards soul and Motown could be Smokey Robinson & the Miracles with The Tears of a Clown. While Tony, and Alan Freeman, were my preferred hosts from old Radio 1, it will be an emotional afternoon as an old trooper and legend gives way with great dignity due to poor health.

 

3.10 I hope Bob stays with the opening montage, not that long ago updated to Earth, Wind & Fire, Thelma Houston, Rebel, Rebel, C20th Boy and The Clash but that remains to be seen. Opening with What is Life? by George Harrison might have been a better candidate than many have been for 'Better than the Original' in Olivia's cover version.

 

3.25 I've had any number of favourite pop artists in my time before having to accept that a list of half a dozen doesn't really answer the question. Chic were it in 78/79 and so Sister Sledge count as a winner. I never quite 'got it' with The Who but Giving It All Away by Roger Daltrey is 'older but wiser' in the context of a farewell gig.

'Album tracks' were somehow regarded as serious business compared to singles in the 70's and Johnnie left Radio 1 in some sort of high dudgeon, it seems, in 1976 when asked not to play them. Elton and Kiki Dee was his last 'Record of the Week', showing that he could pick singles, too.

 

3.40 Peter Gabriel was the 'interesting' bit of Genesis, perhaps, but even he was a bit too much designed for teenagers taking themselves seriously. Neil Diamond doesn't register here, either. Johnnie's taken us into a bit of a doldrums and although the arrival of the first 'winner' I tipped, Jackson Browne, is some sort of success, it doesn't lift us out of there. Is this really what Johnnie really likes?

 

3.52 The jukebox, record no. 567, is Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd and, yes, if you've had 566 tracks to represent the 1970's then you do need this, too. A monster hit at rock discos in the day, it now seems to progress from grand, stately opening to pyrotechnic guitar solo with undue haste but guitarists showing off how fast they could play was what happened then and that was surely a shortened 7" version. But, gladly, the Staple Singers, with Come Go with Me, restores what had been becoming, in cricket terms, a scratchy innings. That is 'soul' as in 'gospel' and something that America could do that the UK simply couldn't. 

4.00 A message from Uncle Rod Stewart was a fine tribute. Everybody's best mate, Rod was, according to Danny Baker. I think we could have done better than Sailing from almost anywhere on that album, though, and anywhere before it because he was another who spent some months as my favourite singer. In contrast, lesser known Simon & Garfunkel could have been something better, and better known, and that first half has been a bit morose. Maybe he's saving it for the second half.

4.12 Not with Nils Lofgren's Shine Silently, he isn't. I'll have to delete this whole enterprise if things don't improve. Here comes Bowie, rather deeper and more thoughtful than he needed to be, as he ever was, but hooray for the masterpiece, Drive-In Saturday.

4.22 It did have to be Bowie as the main feature. For those of us for who the 70's were the formative years, he was as important as The Beatles. Not as much a fashion setter as an assimilator of whatever he found useful to his purposes, which might be what an 'artist' is. He always talked some dubious game but he made the records that defined the generation. We were space-obsessed and Starman, with its hopeful message, was a part of what we were. He told us not to blow it, and yet we still did. 

4.32 The Skids represent the 'new wave' of 77/78 which was as influential as it was short-lived. I'd have had to have had The Sex Pistols, probably The Clash and maybe X-Ray Spex, too, but it wasn't exactly Johnnie's thing. Johnnie's interview with the difficult Lou Reed revealed that it was him that broke Walk on the Wild Side and Lou wasn't so difficult with him after that. The BBC would certainly have banned that in 1972 if they'd understood it.

 

4.47 'There'll be a lot of tears out there today', says Tiggy Stardust in tribute to Johnnie's soldiering on and it is a moving experience. Father and Son by Cat Stevens achieves what those first half records didn't and sets off the profound, long perspective, emotional charge that they couldn't. Stevie Wonder always seemed like the acceptable face of Motown for rock fans and maybe Johnnie's having a joke at his own expense with He's Misstra Know It All. One has the feeling the big finish is underway as we get the Stones. It's touch and go whether we are going to get T. Rex.

 

5.00 I didn't see Johnny Nash coming after some penultimate words towards the sign off but optimism is a brave thing. Neither the finale, Amazing Grace by Judy Collins. So, not only no Marc but no Springsteen, either. 

A bit odd in the end. I'll leave this here for a bit in case it's of interest but I think I'll delete it in due course. It had its moments but it wasn't quite the monument I was expecting.

Best wishes to Johnnie and Tiggy, though. Thanks for having been there.

Cardenio

 I keep reading Don Quixote with at least the completion of part 1 as a target while waiting for other titles that are likely to be more exciting. It does seem episodic to the point of the same absurdity as its repetitive episodes but the nature of humour changes - or perhaps it doesn't given that the likes of Some Mothers Do Have 'Em and Last of the Summer Wine extended one joke across lots of episodes.

However, the story of Cardenio, the lost Shakespeare play, is in it and one can see how it might have lent itself to such treatment. I think I once read that the lost play might have also been the putative, also lost, Love's Labours Won but unless Cardenio's story is turned around by further chapters, it won't have been.

 

One needs to be reading a book or else such dreariness as dutiful household chores could be allowed to be one's life but a loud noise in the porch at lunchtime announced an avalanche of post that, once sifted for items of interest, revealed Shostakovich Plays Shostakovich in those inestimable Preludes and Fugues that have been top of the playlist in recent days, as well as Purcell's Dido and Aeneas with Kisten Flagstad and Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, as heard as a question on Face the Music the other week. So, although these are further recordings of pieces I already have on the shelves, they are much more essential than having to create further shelf space for Bruckner, Mahler, Wagner, Korngold and maybe even Vaughan-Williams.

I think it's gonna be a long, long time before I see through that Shostakovich piano music. At the moment, guys and gals, Tatiana Nikolayeva is number one and Top of the Pops and it will be of interest how the composer played his own music with remotely expecting him to be better than she was.