The Composers Chart

The old, somewhat juvenile impulse to make lists never quite goes away. I think one imagines it somehow classifies the world for us, to let us think we've 'got it', we're in charge, have understood and know where we stand.

However, once you get beyond the Top 10, say, it becomes arbitrary. There's 81 of them here and down to Stravinsky before it becomes borderline whether I like them or not. It is the downside of any judging job, multiplied by the truism of the Olympic Games, that Beethoven, Mozart and Handel are all certainties for Top 3 places, and would be guaranteed second if not for each other, but somebody has to finish fourth. But Beethoven's had a tremendous year with me. Handel could easily have been second this time last year.

Is Dvorak that much more favorite than Ravel - there's not much to choose between the peloton who finish in roughly the same time on this stage.

It's a work-in-progress that could have fifty or a hundred more names slotted into it on the basis of my vague idea of how much I like them but these are composers that I'm sufficiently familiar with to know a few of their works, or what they are like.

It's a work-in-progress that need not go any further, mainly because it's a waste of time and only, like writing a poem, perhaps, finds its author attempting to authenticate an identity for themselves.

However, while I'm in a spending phase, I'm not sure I want a picture of Bach or Mozart on my wall, if only because they are too obvious. I had one of Beethoven when I was a teenager, Handel wouldn't be out of the question but, if such a thing is available, I think I could find wallspace for a picture of Shostakovich.

And there it is and since there was a special offer on, I helped myself to Handel, James Joyce and Josquin des Prez, too, so I have a few days to work out where they can be fitted in.

  

J.S. BACH BEETHOVEN MOZART HANDEL SHOSTAKOVICH MONTEVERDI BRAHMS SCHUBERT BUXTEHUDE JOSQUIN DES PREZ MENDELSSOHN TALLIS BYRD F. COUPERIN PURCELL SIBELIUS RACHMANINOV CHARPENTIER CHOPIN GLUCK SATIE HAYDN BUSONI DVORAK TCHAIKOVSKY D. SCARLATTI ELGAR ROBERT SCHUMANN GORECKI FAURE BIBER PUCCINI POULENC PART MACMILLAN TAVENER C.P.E. BACH BERLIOZ LASSUS MACHAUT OCKEGHEM A. SCARLATTI  TELEMANN VERDI VIVALDI LISZT TELEMANN PROKOFIEV CLARA SCHUMANN RAMEAU J.C. BACH LISZT RICHARD STRAUSS MUSSORGSKY A. SCARLATTI  GLASS CAGE HOLST BRUCH ALBINONI FANNY MENDELSSOHN NYMAN KHACHATURIAN BOCCHERINI BIZET SCHONBERG DEBUSSY BOYCE CORELLI RAVEL BARTOK SMETANA BORODIN DEBUSSY CORELLI STRAVINSKY MAHLER BRUCKNER KORNGOLD WAGNER BOULEZ

Absenteeism and other stories

 I was planning on going to Chichester Cathedral today but didn't. Such abject dereliction of duty was never my way. In 34 years of devoted service in my government paid jobs, I missed 5 days through being unfit - it might have been 6. It was no reflection on the performers in Chichester even if Thursday's in Portsmouth is a higher priority, it was a dull day, chidden of God, I am enthralled by The Scapegoat and three important deliveries of further material were due - just arrived now- and all in all the realization that Tuesday lunchtimes are not obligatory and I've done plenty came as a mild release.

Watching the progress of the delivery driver from eight stops away served to demonstrate just what a mammoth operation Amazon is and though I feel guilty of using it, it would cost a few hundred pounds a year more to source books and records elsewhere.

So, the book of Nightingale Night, the new Murakami and a streetplan of Nottingham are all essential additions to the library. In twenty-six years at this address it has expanded such that downsizing the house - heaven forfend- is hardly thinkable. All shelf capacity is all but spoken for. It might be possible to fit another bookcase in upstairs but after that, well, who's to say. It's when such sections as Larkin, Murakami, Bach, Shakespeare, etc. can't be kept neatly together that I fret slightly. But if that's my biggest concern I have precious little to worry about.

 

One can't read two big, fat books at once, though, so Murakami will have to wait. It's not as if one doesn't know what it's going to be like. I'm reading as much as I reasonably can and can only wonder at Booker Prize judges who have to read over a hundred titles in about as many days and then turn up and discuss them all, not all of them having been worthwhile but one ought to have read them in order to say why not. Rather them than me.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

The Liszt biography was an excellent book, see a little way below. And it's straight on into another biography, The Scapegoat by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, that promises to be just as good. It's about George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, Portsmouth's most eminent murder victim.

These are two extraordinary lives, for sure, but perhaps ordinary lives - if there are such things- would be worth reading if well written. My own has been unspectacular and I have no plans to write it but it was of passing interest to me from time to time.

Perhaps the most mundane life would be of someone who never changed, although the reasons for that might be worth examining. The Jesuit maxim about knowing the adult from the seven year old can only be partially true and is, therefore, false. Some people develop exponentially at a certain stage, most retain some sort of personality blueprint, I dare say, and, if anything, I'd say I regressed from highly promising child to unrepentant under-achiever.

I was a football obsessive to the age of about 12 but by now know only roughly where some of the teams are in their leagues. Sports, like cricket and cycling, came and went and now all I'm left with is horse racing over obstacles, maybe inherited through a grandfather's DNA.

I never tire of re-telling how the 13-14yo me went from devotion to the wilder outskirts of rock music, through a disavowal of pop music to emerge as a born again soul man, almost evangelistic about it. The constant thing in music arrived with Mozart at the age of 11 and has remained essential, perhaps never more so than now.

There was never a time without books, either, but which books has shifted. Fancying myself to be a poet, aged 20 I was pure enough in intention to not want to write anything else but 45 years later I want to write whatever suggests itself and that's not poems very often.

I hardly read a biography until I was 30, thinking that fiction was the 'real' business of literature but that's turned around, as we can see - of course biography's the 'real' business and 'real' stories are much more vivid, relevant and captivating than made up ones. 

The Scapegoat is more than 600 pages. It is outrageously brilliant that the library service will lend me such a sumptuous book for a month and I don't envisage it being necessary to renew it.

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It's been hard times in recent weeks on the turf. From October onwards is my harvest season, supposedly, but this year has been marred by a drought of almost unprecedented proportions. I wasn't doing badly at all for 2024 and was looking forward to 'pressing on' but I've not been the Wiseguy when push came to shove.

The first two favourites going in at Cheltenham today was the last thing I wanted to see with my small-time double being on two of the next three and my theory being that favs simply don't keep obliging. But, as has been pointed out to me, each race is a different event and the outcome of one has no effect on those that follow. The Skelton stable is as efficient as any winning machine once it clicks into gear and L'Eau du Sud and Doyen Quest both won with great authority at God's own sports venue. It's not the money - I need a rattling good spell to restore the plus to where I'd like it - but I'd almost forgotten the feeling one gets when one knows the gamble is landed. One has to stay in profit but it's the endorphins of success I think one does it for. 

Endorphin was 15 Across in today's Times crossword. I gladly take my vocabulary from wherever suggests it.

--

It's been hard times on the Times crossword, too, come to that. I didn't even send it in the last two weeks. The last chapters of biographies can often be about declining powers and can be elegiac if not downright awful. Not being able to finish crosswords is sometimes blamed on them being set by a different setter. Maybe it's that, then. The litany of things one could once accomplish that one no longer can lengthens and threatens to lengthen further. One could do without that sedentary diversion being added to it.  

---

Four books by Stewart Lee arrived this week, most of his published output if not all. It's hardline 'woke' stuff, or at least committedly anti anti-woke. I like him a lot and it did him no harm that he wrote the introduction to the re-issue of a Rosemary Tonks novel last year.

One assumes that any friend of hers is a friend of one's.

Like with any satirist, it's easy to have targets but what one needs to know is what the likes of Ian Hislop, Peter Cook, Ben Elton or, indeed, Alexander Pope would do if they were in charge. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are not so far making it look easy. I suspect they've not got it right but it's not clear what 'getting it right' would have been. It's possible that Stewart is from the Corbyn tendency. Marxism might have been brilliant at analysing problems but evidence of it ever solving any, apart from the problem of achieving a degree in Sociology, is scarce.

There's good writing to be had from Stewart as he knocks over easy targets but makes a point of setting himself up against the 'mainstream' stand-up industry, too. It's postmodern to distance oneself from what one ostensibly is, referring back to one's art form within its own process like the sort of poems or novels that let you know that they know that's all they are. It offers layers, going beyond irony towards Nirvana. 

Nirvana was 18 Down in today's Times crossword. I'm beginning to understand how Stewart does what he does.

That's all very well while being so cutely postmodern remains in fashion but maybe one day it won't be and Stewart Lee will suddenly look as out of date as Jim Davidson or Bernard Manning.

'Woke' was an Obama word that only meant 'aware' and that 'we must love one another and/or die' but it's been made into a crime and Russia won the American Presidential Election by being anything but. As happens these days, the liberal 'elite' lost the vote of those they wanted to help because they failed to make them feel better off.

And that's biography for you. You're great one day, very much in fashion, but then you're not. It happened to Shakespeare, it happened to Bach and so it could even happen to Stewart Lee.

And it also means hard times ahead for our already very troubled world. Which seems to me a good enough way of dove-tailing, as if in a piece of carpentry, the denouement of this piece in Stewart Lee style, having referred both backwards and forwards, brought in both personal and international concerns while maintaining some direction even if that direction wasn't always clear.

Maybe that is what biography, or even life itself, is about, that like Ophelia says, we know what we are but know not what we may be. 

I've been Stewart Lee. No. I haven't. I've been David Green. Thank you. Good Night.

Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in Portsmouth

 Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Portsmouth Guildhall, Nov 14

The first-ever box set of LP's I bought was the Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Concentus Musicus Wien Brandenburg Concertos and I'm not sure I'd swap those recordings for anything I've bought since. I got it right first time. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, henceforth OAE here if need be, brought four of the six of them to Portsmouth, their website preview explaining the mystery about what they 'mean', if anything at all. 

While I'm very taken with the idea of music that has no story, no heroes, heartbreak or other sub-text, like a decorative frieze, I'm equally unconvinced that such a thing is possible. We provide our own if none is provided.

No. 2, the one with the valveless trumpet, began the set. I'm sure it's an infernally difficult instrument to play and David Blackadder made a glorious sound except for maybe one or two missed notes, which I feel reluctantly bound to mention in such a high-class band. There is no hiding place in a small orchestra with one player per part but especially not in that part. The Andante evoked cool shadows with prominent cello alongside woodwind and lead violin.

No. 6, the one with no violins, had only seven musicians on stage and thus brought to mind a great disc called Quartets for Low Strings by Georg Wagenseil (worth looking out for). Two violas and cello do a marvellous job of explaining away our sadness or grief in the Adagio before the violas dance over a cantus firmus in the Allegro.

In the second half, No. 3, the one all about number 3, is Bach at almost his most mathematically inventive, the motif passed around all the players and eventually right across the stage. The violin and harpsichord Adagio led into a merry gigue Allegro with Bach at his most Viv and we were reminded the debt he owes to his study of those Venetian scores.

No. 4, the one with the recorders, is a Springtime frolic with Rachel Beckett on one of them and Huw Daniel performing virtuoso violin wizardy, punctuated by the winsome sighing in the Andante, as the spectacular finish.

I can mention Matthew Truscott's viola, Cecelia Bruggemeyer's bass, the violin of Margaret Faultless and I'd mention more names if I was sure who was who but there was no programme which brings me to a rare bit of editorializing. 

Portsmouth is only Portsmouth to big city acts, maybe like OAE, and one can have a vague inkling that it can't help being just another date on a tour itinerary. They brought enthusiasm and obvious enjoyment with them but Portsmouth Guildhall lacks charisma, Portsmouth itself struggles to provide audience numbers and I'm as guilty as anybody in not being at the Guildhall very often when local talent and lunchtime visitors to the area put on such great shows without even a ticket price. It's a situation without a solution and it's by no means a complaint, Portsmouth is lucky to be served as well as it is and we surely all go to celebrate rather than find fault. I've read that Bach himself was often dissatisfied with some of the provincial conditions he found himself working in and it didn't do him any harm.

Karen Kingsley at Lunchtime Live !

Karen Kingsley, Portsmouth Cathedral, Nov 14

Portsmouth and its surrounding area are blessed with a number of fine musicians contributing to its active music community. They come from different backgrounds, from far and wide, only having their excellence and ongoing contributions in common. Few are busier or more versatile than Karen Kingsley who performs as accompanist to choirs, singers and other instrumentalists, as half of the Mornington Duo but chiefly herself, as well as teaching.

One knows who is playing at Lunchtime Live events but not what. Out of the lucky bag today came pieces by seven contemporary composers from New Music Brighton, four of who were in attendance. 

John Petley's Toccata was immediately busy crossing Bach with something like Scott Joplin and the Fugue that went with it, a beat or two slower, would not be flattered by comparison with those great ones by Shostakovich, remaining not quite resolved.

David Hoyle's Clouds breaking on Elizabeth Street, NY 10012 had a similar hint of edginess, as if hoping to achieve tranquility but not being able to before Johnson and Johnson (or Blues in E) by Simon Hopkins mixed Scottish baroque with jazz, in a strange meeting of rhythms and inflection.

We don't live in such confident times as Haydn did and a theme was emerging of unsettled feelings and the time, often literally, being out of joint. Karen was putting in a sensational performance in meeting such a variety of technical challenges so convincingly.

A Short Story by Gavin Stevens was an eponymously programmatic set of five miniatures in which the dash of The Chase ultimately led to the lush, briefly expansive Love Theme and the celebrations of Fanfare for a Happy Ending offering plenty left to our imaginings.

We were due something quieter and while The Calm Lake by Barry Mills provided that, it was still eerily evocative rather than restful but with its own anxious beauty. Three Jazz Pieces by Lluis Nadal took as their starting points Bartok, in Bluebeard, an Indonesian palace and a jazzman in Kraton Teremasa and 'gentle falling rain' in Rincik, in which we were caught in the onrush of a squall. We might, though, have been misdirected by the title of Peter Copley's Ballade if expecting something romantic or sentimental. It wasn't that, it was emphatic from the first chord and demonic and possessed in the most highly-charged Romantic way as the fff climax to an extraordinary and generous menu of very recent music from Brighton. Music is in a very healthy creative condition there on this evidence.

While all the composers are worthy of individual, as well as collective, further investigation it had to be Karen that deserved top honours in delivering such a sustained, absorbing and quite intense performance. 

It gives local star turn, Angelina Kopyrina, something to aim at next week.

New Acquisition - Nightingale Night VII

I don't think it's made headline news in the international art market but a new record was set earlier this week when I paid more than I've ever done before for an art work, Nightingale Night VII by Maggi Hambling. While the price paid can easily be found from the Pallant House Gallery shop, it goes undisclosed here except to say i8t is the year's profit from the turf or this month's Premium Bond pay out but not both.

Some philistines might say any child could produce such a daub when first presented with paint and canvas, as they might produce something superficially like some contemporary classical music if given an instrument, but I've long wanted some sort of authentic Maggi on a wall so it's another ambition achieved.

It's not yet ideally framed but we'll see about that. The handwritten, signed poem, The Wound by Thom Gunn, has moved across to the wall at the side to make way for it in the prime spot above the computer.

 

The Liszt Report

The Liszt biography, by Oliver Hilmes, wasn't chosen because he's a favourite composer. He wouldn't make any Top 30 of mine, Top 50 I don't know. CD1 from the set of 9 by Jorge     Bolet was missing so the seller refunded half of the bargain price, they have their moments, some of it possibly a bit lyrically inconsequential but the dramtic parts are the sort of music best heard live.

No, the interest in the biography was the story and it doesn't let us down. It's possible that the family arrangements and succession of relationships and their difficulties dominate too much but they are the story. Having arrived at the episode featuring Olga Janina, the stalker who carries a revolver and poisons, I've stopped at a cliff-hanging phrase that, 

The worst was yet to come. 

Few give much credence to Liszt's time spent in holy orders which may or may not have been an unsuccessful ruse to gain employment in The Vatican rather than any renouncement of his very successful campaign of amorous involvements. And they went on throughout the family.

His daughter, Cosima, moves on in premptory fashion from her first husband to Richard Wagner but it's not always clear who, if any of them, are worthy of our sympathy as the Romantic age builds towards its greatest excesses. 

These are not 'ordinary people', most of them come with titles from the apparently vast ranks of European aristocracy, whether real or fake - Olga Janina was not the Russian countess she claimed to be. Liszt's daughter, Marie von Sayn-Wittgenstein marries Prince Konstantin Victor Ernst Emil Karl Alexander Friedrich Prince zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfurst, for example. 

It would be more reassuring if any of the tremendous talent, money and appetite for liaisons made any of thyem happy for any length of time but Romantics, it seems, have even less capacity for happiness than any other generation of creative artists and determine to cause themselves as much anguish as they can conjure. In hoping for a roller-coaster ride of sensations and drama, Liszt's story lived up to all expectations as well as confirming the prejudice that Byron was only the first of many who were 'mad, bad and dangerous to know'.