Rokas Valuntonis in Chichester

Rokas Valuntonis, Chichester Cathedral, July 7

Top marks to Chichester Cathedral and Rokas Valuntonis for being able to fulfil this fixture at late notice. Chichester are unlikely ever to struggle to find artists glad to take up such an opportunity. Meanwhile, my homework on Ravel's La Valse, interesting as it was, will have to wait to come in useful another time. Instead of that, our education was extended to include Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911). 

Estimating what Čiurlionis's music is like from his dates wouldn't leave you far wrong- a little bit Chpoin, a little bit Rach. The Little Sonata opens with a panoramic, fairly intense Allegro, the Andante and Scherzo have an uncertain passion before the Finale ends somewhere near where the whole thing began. Certainly a new name to me, he's another who died far too young and could have been a contender.

Four Mazurkas by Chopin were unhurried in these accounts by Rokas except for the D major which was uptempo like a bagatelle of a tarantella but perhaps Robert Schumann's Carnaval was the curious item of most interest. Announcing itself grandly with an outpouring of notes surely more technically demanding than what had come before, it is only op. 9 and thus surely too early for Schumann to have lost his mind. It is cartoonish and ever-changing, in some ways almost as quirky as Erik Satie was later to be. Rokas lingered, expanded and dashed as the piece twisted and turned, evoking Chopin, Clara and Paganini and if personally I'd prefer to linger, he brought great verve to the presto parts, one of which we can take to be Paganini, I dare say. It was a circus of a piece to end Chichester Cathedral's summer season.

They resume on Sept 9 with a highly promising programme of artists and their set lists due to be announced soon. 

The Bad Boys of Portsmouth Poetry

 Kev and I aren't 'bad' at all, really- well, I'm not- but it amuses us in what we take to be 'later life' to imagine ourselves vaguely significant. Like The Movement, we are no kind of movement at all but at least we are mates, which they weren't. Kev's more Beat whereas I make Larkin look like a free-wheeling 60's troubadour in comparison. But it's a picture for the photo album if one still kept such a thing.

--

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the words above are by no means the whole story of today in Chichester. Poor Rokas was always up against it after I'd emerged from the Oxfam Bookshop with the Complete J.S. Bach by Helmuth Rilling.

172 discs is a week's worth of non-stop music by the greatest creative artist that ever lived, five star reviews throughout at Amazon where it is available for £191, secondhand for £134, and Oxfam were asking £49.99. As snap decisions go, it was quite snappy.

One needs to find time to play these things, and live long enough, so I left Complete Mozart, Schubert and Scarlatti Sonatas on the shelves there. I can't imagine they will still be there next time but I am at least safe in the knowledge that I got myself a bargain.

--

On the other hand, having got along okay for a while with The Whirlpool by George Gissing, it was abandoned because I didn't care enough. I went upstairs and found Thérèse Raquin instead which was even better than I remembered it with its hideous psychology and thriller plot. Zola is the real thing in a French team of the period that England would do well to match with Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant and onwards to Gide and Camus. The Masterpiece is on order from the library alongside a biography of Brahms and Madame Bovary is being given a further outing while I wait.

Portsmouth Baroque Choir: Orlando Gibbons and his contemporaries

Portsmouth Baroque Choir, Christ Church, Chichester, July 5

If one's work is being celebrated 400 years after your death you can consider yourself a success. My chances of being read in the year 2425, whether as music writer, poet or anything else are vanishingly none but Orlando Gibbons gathered a sizeable audience this evening, even given the nearby opposition of some Palestrina, and so good for him.

Christ Church is a modern, functional church but attractively decorated in a taking shade of teal and with good acoustics. Malcolm Keeler provides useful notes in his good value programmes. A lot of people know each other from the myriad connections of the local music community. All these things help to make for an enjoyable occasion but mainly it's still surely about the music.

It was mostly Gibbons, beginning with O all true faithful hearts, Jenny Barton and Andrew Round to the fore and then Malcolm passing directing duties to organist Philip Drew in order to take the solo part in a charming This is the record of John. Philip then provided a gentle interlude on the keyboard before leading into a subdued Behold, I bring you glad tidings. The first guest composer was John Amner in whose O ye little flock sopranos Jane Hoskins and Karen Phillips led a richly layered chorus.

The Binsted Viols were formed for the purpose of this concert. For Binsted to be where five such fine, specialist musicians live would be too much of a coincidence so I don't suppose they all do but their account of In Nomine No. 1 was dangerously hypnotic with its soft strains through which to escape ongoing worldly horrors. It was then the full choir sound of John Bull before local 'bad boy', Thomas Weelkes, ended the first half with a rousing, spirited Hosanna to the Son of David.

William Byrd was the big name brought on to open the second half, something like Rod Stewart bringing Ronnie Wood on at Glastonbury and Christ rising again from the dead benefitted from the graceful combination of Jane Hoskins and Julia Spurgeon.

'Who by his death has destroyed death' is a memorable line from We praise thee, O Father before I found myself composing my own to the Fantasy No. 3 by Thomas Ford,

As it doth hang in the sweet summer air. 

One never knows where one's next poem is coming from, or if it will come at all.

It might have been said, and said here, previously that the sopranos are gladly Portsmouth Baroque's main strength but it was less in evidence this evening, not to their detriment but to the credit of the lower parts, in such a piece as O God, the King of Glory. And while my internet research finds that the Salvation Army was founded in 1865 there were surely pre-echoes of their vitality in the celebratory rhythms of O clap your hands together.

Binsted Viols played in hymn-like unison a Pavan & Galliard by Anthony Holborne before Andrew's counter-tenor ornaments embellished See, see the world is incarnate and to finish, by way of a programmed encore, there was The Silver Swan, a big hit of its day familiar from its final observation that,

More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise,

in which the only comfort is to realize that it was ever thus.  

That was a well-planned programme moving through subtle changes of mood, tempo and instrumentation. All credit, in no particular order, to absolutely everybody who was involved in it. 

Sean O'Brien, The Long Glass

 Sean O'Brien, The Long Glass (Red Squirrel)

Sean O'Brien provides an Afterword to his latest, third, book of short stories as he did in his limited edition poem Hammersmith and the Maigret poems in Impasse. The background provided is welcome but takes away some of what a commentator or reviewer might have said like when a musician at a recital introduces a piece with the homework or prior knowledge one had prepared to say about it or even described the music in adjectives one wanted to find for oneself. 

Such notes to the primary text become part of the performance under consideration like territory annexed by the artist that the 'critic' might have had as their own.

Thus one is already thinking of matters of literary theory more than only storytelling. Sean is intertextual enough before we start wondering where his text starts and finishes. In these dozen bi-annual stories written for now twenty years' worth of readings in Newcastle, one hears likely echoes of Adlestrop and 'non serviam' from Paradise Lost twice each and Tennyson's In Memoriam once alongside Juniper that crept into, or out of, his poems as the title Once Again Assembled Here from a previous collection went on to be the title of a novel. References to Auden, Walter de la Mare, Hardy and Ecclesiastes are characteristically literary, and O'Brien, reference points and we may or may not find the relationship between James Mallon and Clara Stafford in Juniper, poets and partners where the female is the more gifted and dies young, like Jane Jarmain was in the novel Afterlife, reminding us of a  legendary real-life C20th poetry marriage.

And yet, given so much literary marinade, there is a realism and credibility to the worlds Sean's characters inhabit, safely nostalgic in a disappeared past with period detail and provincial buildings in decline. Except we are never allowed to be comfortable with them because story by story, with two previous books to be taken into consideration, we know there's 'something nasty in the woodshed'. Look, I'm doing it now. We soon get the idea in Ovid's Metamorphoses that the protagonist, or plural of them, will be transformed into a constellation, river or other part of nature. And we don't tune in to Uncanny to hear Danny Robins interview several people who lived in the same house and none of them saw a ghost. 

I'm not sure how frightened we can expect to be when we are expecting to be frightened in the same way that those who insist that poetry should surprise us or make us see the world anew can still be being surprised and refreshed by the last page of a full-length collection. It must be very tiring for them. 

Time is amorphous, the past is a foreign country, or dimension and, even for a rationalist sceptic, there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy but quite how many of them are external demons and how many are internal is another matter. It can be traced back to the early 90's signature masterpiece poem, Thrillers and Cheese if not further. One only knows that a mirror in an O'Brien story should be immediately suspected of being potentially dangerous. 

Most realistically, Old School is set in such a place where the food is bad and insufficient but an elite dining club serving very fine sausages is discovered and one of the more substantially-built boys has mysteriously gone missing. One finishes the final sentence and then, Oh, I see.

Juniper also convinces with less of the paranormal, it approaching the question from the poem Completists,

That art is all there is and might not be enough.

That ultimately poetry is impossible and reduces to nothing. That it is finite, runs out and there is nowhere else to go. 

It is certainly true that,

the very effort to explain misses the point, because the attraction of such stories lies in encounters whose power lies in their refusal not only of clemency but at times of interpretation itself.

and that where the last story, But That's Another Story, leaves us with only the screaming.

While these stories are for the most part a genre project that might only be a sideline for Sean, as with Eleanor Grant's stories,

after a time, having read a good many of the stories, she began to wonder, with a trace of unease, whether the writing was really a voluntary undertaking, or more like something given or imposed.

Writers can hardly help, either deliberately or unconsciously, writing themselves into their own work, like Eleanor Grant and thus like Sean O'Brien. And a lawyer called Lightbourn dealing with Eleanor's estate wouldn't be named as such in the work of anybody as well-read as Sean without him knowing that for some readers at least he'll be triggering subliminal thoughts of the murderer in Marlowe's Edward II. 

So we aren't quite sure where we stand except we are at least disconcerted in this literary, uncanny territory of insecurities that we know from the cover, because it says so, are only stories. But even sceptical Lisa Simpson held her mother's hand a bit tighter once when it looked like the end of the world even though she knew it couldn't be. I'm sure The Long Glass is twelve more well-made entertainments that provided two days off from my more dutiful reading of 'realist' George Gissing but the more realistic it was the more it confirmed what one thought. The screaming it ends with might be one's final answer.  

The Memory Man

 I reckon I read New Grub Street to the end first time around, a few years ago, but it took me until the climactic last chapters to realize I had. Before that, I once read a Sebastian Faulks novel to page 87 before it became familiar and I went upstairs and found an identical hardback on the shelves.

I like to think I have a tremendous memory for certain things but some things one is certain about can be proved to be otherwise. But not books recently read, they disappear within days of reading them, compared to The Woodlanders, for example, read at 15, and remembered in plenty of detail.

Perhaps one becomes an impressionist, with a captivating but blurred idea of what's what rather than the fine detail of a Vermeer. Or a vaguely dreamy Einaudi rather than a precise composer like Bach.

New Grub Street is a realistic morality tale, in effect, with the publishing industry a small part of capitalism. Jasper Milvain adapts to the market and succeeeds whereas the more idealistic writers who want to do something of more worth suffer for their principles.

What I found on returning it to the shlf was a bookmark a little way into The Nether World so it was that that I once abandoned. But now the library has provided me with The Whirlpool, so that will be up next in tandem with the imminent arrival of Sean O'Brien's short stories in The Long Glass. I reminded myself of a few of his from The Silence Room yesterday and was suitably, and quietly, impressed.

--

Meanwhile, back at the ranch. I have a half-baked project under way. Having seen that Sheku has a new book out about music, it occurred to me to do the same, us being roughly equivalent celebrities in the music world. A sort of autobiography of how I found my way around Western Classical music, with a chapter on pop music to provide context. I thought it might be a way of collecting together all the things I always say about various composers in reviews. 

There's unlikely to be any audience for it, it would never see print beyond the possibility of being a pdf and it probably won't make anything like proper book length. The main interest in it will be how long I persevere before it is abandoned but in the meantime there is a project on the go to think about, the opportunity to exercise a few words. 

Memories of 1970's cassettes and Radio 3 have come flooding back with that first introductory catalogue of pieces I knew so well. I reckon my memory of what happened then might be better than what happened in recent months but, as I'm finding, I'm an unreliable witness. 

 

 

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

Days like yesterday ought to come round more often. Never mind the imminent drought of water, I was suffering from a drought of new reading matter and a first survey of my shelves hadn't offered up much. But New Grub Street by George Gissing became the selection, a bit of an outside chance as it might have been a halfway abandonment first time out a few years ago. Well, maybe we all deserve a second chance.

It's great. It's as if Emile Zola had written Keep the Asipidistra Flying in the style of Maupassant and there's three writers worth having in your literary ancestry. The idea of 'glamour' of writing in the competitive world of publishing is severely undermined by the inverse logic of the market place in which,

it isn't only for the sake of reputation that one tries to do uncommon work. There's the shrinking from conscious insincerity of workmanship - which most writers nowadays don't seem to feel. "It's good enough for the market"; that satisfies them.

Published in 1891, this is 130+ years before the advent of AI and the belief in some places that the human writer will become obsolete in the production of some sorts of writing, and soon.

While Jasper Milvain readily adapts to the demands of writing for a living, Edwin Reardon is more compromised by ideals and hates producing cheap novels that might sell. After Jasper has outlined a busily productive day in his breezy, upbeat way, he is sked,

'And what is the value of it all?'

'Probably from ten to twelve guineas, if I calculated.'

'I meant, what is the literary value of it," said his sister, with a smile.

Obviously, but she's somehow missing the point of being a 'professional' writer.

 

How privileged one is to write what one feels like, to not to have to and for it not to have to be any good. It's an excellent book and the library catalogue has a few more Gissings on it and one or two of them will be coming my way to carry on from where New Grub Street leaves me. You could trust a Victorian to write a novel.

I read it yesterday to the accompaniment of another wonderful pick from my shelves, the Bach Cello Sonatas. Very happy as I am to attend concerts of Ravel, Debussy and Chopin on the piano and write warmly about them, we are always betting without Bach. From its first phrases, the disc by Mischa Maisky and Martha Argerich is in a different class. I played it three times yesterday, once again this morning and am left to ponder the deep riches there are on those 'classical' shelves, not to mention the 'pop' spread about elsewhere.  

I thought I might resurrect an old essay with a view to the Larkin Society journal. I wasn't entirely happy with it three years ago but rather than have to re-do it, I found a few bits of adjustment made it quite satisfactory to me in its discursive associations and so I hope it passes muster with the editor. I do so like being in their magazine. It feels like the only place appropriate for me to be by now.

And then I got around to reading a lecture on Gerard Manley Hopkins I'd been, very kindly, sent. That also restored some faith that there are still people about who are not Ocean Vuong and are capable of sense and rigour.

So sometimes the planets align in one's favour and what seem like unredeemable bad times turn into unarguably happy days. Perhaps one only needs to know where to look. And then look there.

Not Going Out

Not Going Out is back, single-handedly, as far as I'm concerned, keeping the sitcom genre going. I made a tentative step into the C21st by engaging with i-player and watched all six of the new series  rather than record them or try to remember what night it's on. Although I hold out against many of these conveniences, sometimes eventually one submits to them because needs must.

I'm not saying it's quite in the same elite category as Fawlty Towers, Dad's Army, Blackadder and The Office but it makes its case for belonging somewhere near The Royle Family, Early Doors, Steptoe, the Likely Lads and Fools and Horses. Three out of the six are brilliant. By now Lee Mack and his mate have their template, their way of writing them and plot themes, and situations recur, but they have now reduced it by losing Hugh Dennis and his wife next door who served a purpose and I don't know if it's clear where the children have gone but we are better off without them.

I don't 'lol' much, me, outright laughter doesn't come easily but there were several occasions in this series. 

Good. Very good. But I ate the whole box of chocolates too quickly. They must take a long time to write and then they're gone but I'll see them again and think, blimey, there's still such a thing a classic television.