Kate Burrows & Helen Morris at the Menuhin Room

Kate Burrows & Helen Morris, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, June 6 

You may know how some of Shakespeare's plays are called 'problem plays' on account of their mixture of comedy and darker themes. Measure for Measure is one of them. Schubert was not a problem for me at all until finding out that he was widely regarded as melancholy. The latest episode in the ongoing enquiry into this came up first in Kate Burrows and Helen Morris's programme with their performance of the Fantasie in F minor, D. 940, its minor key and late catalogue number immediately offering hints that it might not be his happiest work.

Helen's poignant top line and then early hints of unrest were realized in some proper sturm, if not drang, but the boisterous, assertive passage that came before a recapitulation that aspired to the condition of Bach and a grandstand finish didn't sound sorrowful to me. Notwithstanding that Kate and Helen have never appeared to be melancholy people. I think it's time I got over that question and concerned myself with others.

In two solo spots, Kate's Fauré Nocturne, op. 37, went from halting serenity to some flow and surge worthy of Chopin which dovetailed neatly into Helen's Ballade no.4 by him, wistful before its own serenity was disturbed by something. Helen had explained that it had a story but Chopin never said what stories he had in mind so we were free to make up our own. But music is mostly an abstract thing for me. I don't think it was about next door's kids making a racket outside of a summer evening.

These pieces were not dissimilar to each other and Rachmaninov's Vocalise and its stately mood of acceptance before taking a look at some more characteristic Rach-like wider panoramas maintained the mood. That was Helen's choice but Kate took over on the upper end of the keyboard for hers, Ravel's Introduction and Allegro, immediately more modern while still lush and 'Romantic'. Time had flown by, as it does when one is absorbed in what's going on.

There has grown a great feeling of friendship and community in the few years while Andrew McVittie has built this series, with the invaluable help of Helen and others. Thus, they made a presentation to him as he prepares to pass on the role pro tem while, he promises, not disappearing from the scene completely. Several years ago Nile Rodgers and Chic invited as many as could be accommodated onto the stage at Glastonbury and a comparable thing happened here with a photo opportunity to mark the occasion with musicians, master of ceremonies and audience all together in front of the celebrated Steinway, the other essential stalwart of this continuing success.

Adrian Green and Gillian Thompson at Lunchtime Live !

 Adrian Green and Gillian Thompson, Portsmouth Cathedral, June 4

Portsmouth Cathedral Choir went off on tour to France leaving lay clerk, Adrian Green, at home to provide Lunchtime Live! His programme entitled Fly swift, ye hours was made up with no more of a theme than it was things he enjoyed singing. There can hardly be a better principle to work on than that. The title came from one of three songs by Purcell that he began with in which his light tenor performed some baroque acrobatics over Gillian Thompson's stylish accompaniment.

It was great to have some popular Handel, who is nowhere near popular enough on lunchtime menus for my liking. The evergreen charm of Where'er you walk led to Adrian's downtime in which Gillian had the piano lid opened to give full voice to the Bosendorfer in The Harmonious Blacksmith amid the rest of a highly Handelian Suite, HWV 430. Whether it was due to unaccustomed seating position, something in the air or simply the music, the piano sounded very healthy indeed. It must have been largely due to Gillian's playing, though.

Schubert's Nachtstücke was characteristically dark and melodic. Orpheus with his lute was takingly atmospheric and entirely convinced me, who is not always persuaded by all Vaughan-Williams. 

This second half of the song programme was twentieth century and English with Michael Head, John Ireland and Roger Quilter pieces all, my internet research finds, available on Adrian's English Songbook album. And then the joyful and triumphant ending was the latter's Non nobis, Domine. Not having been sure I was going to be at this recital, recent events have been turning out for the best and I was glad the trend continued.  

More Bach, More James

 I understand that marathon runners 'hit the wall' at about 22 miles and struggle on to the end from there. It happened to me once in a 12 Hour bike race, at maybe 10 hours, but it was only about refuelling with whatever food was to be found and I toddled on happily enough. Now that I know the marathon can be done in under two hours, maybe I'll have a go.

I wasn't expecting the same thing in the Complete Bach, though. Not until I arrived at the first disc of A Book of Chorale Settings for Johann Sebastian. It's not awful but, coming after the big oratorios and passions, it was underwhelming, a bit dull and there are a few discs of it. With a number of organ music discs still to go, I'm not going to make a priority of listening to all 172 discs within a year of acquiring them. 

I took refuge in a brilliant set of violin concertos that were vivaldistic- to coin a phrase that I hope will not enter general usage. But then the Brandenburg's were disappointing although if one is familiar with Concentus Musicus Wien/Harnoncourt then most accounts are likely to come across as less charismatic. I will soon be left with a sweeping up job in pursuit of the

complete Bach, not that it is entirely definitive, and it is not going to be onerous but the Uchida Mozart Piano Sonatas arrived today, all impudent and gregarious from the first note, and that sounds like being irresistible. Unless, there being 18 of them, one reaches that stage of enough being enough however good it is.

All the poems that Elizabeth Bishop wrote don't amount to many and if you take out all those that Larkin didn't see into print in his lifetime, he is similarly frugal. They set a fine example. One that I like to think I've tried to follow while readily acknowledging that plenty of mine went into print that wouldn't make the cut into a properly considered, much more selective Collected.

--

Meanwhile, back at The Portrait of a Lady, the way into it finally seemed to be to differentiate between the queue of Isabel's hope suitors and realizing that it was hardly likely to be a novel if she chose correctly. 'Highly Eligible Girl Marries Happily' doesn't make for 600 pages, even in Henry James. And it's equally unlikely that her choice is going to be her only imperfection.

We can take it that Lord Warburton represents money, class and England. Ralph looks like the good guy out of his depth like Giles Winterbourne in The Woodlanders, Mitch in Streetcar or even Horatio, who Ophelia might have been better off with than the self-indulgent, bookish type she found herself involved with. But, no, she marries Gilbert Osmond who, I admit, had seemed okay to me at first.

Until it's too late, of course,

He always had an eye to effect, and his effects were deeply calculated. They were produced by no vulgar means, but the motive was as vulgar as the art was great.

One is not only grateful for prose like that but an old-fashioned, omniscient narrator who tells you as much. Deeply impressive is the insight into the superficially successful man - let's say it was mostly men in those days, that,

Far from being [the world's] master as he pretended to be, he was its very humble servant, and the degree of its attention was his only measure of success.

Henry James is seriously gaining my utmost respect with all this and then, 

His ambition was not to please the world, but to please himself by exciting the world's attention and then declining to satisfy it.

and I'm in sympathy with Gilbert, in his Larkin-like plan, except it's not really an admirable thing. It's art, it's vanity and it is what's wrong with Gilbert Osmond.

Once Isabel is on the way to realizing she is unhappily married, the secondary plot of who is going to marry Osmond's daughter, Pansy, gets underway, with Lord Warburton turning out again to have another go. It recalls how Laertes wants to take revenge on Hamlet in the backwash of Hamlet bungling his own revenge on his uncle.

Henry James has got me right back onside in the second half of Portrait. Maybe it's as good as I'd hoped.   

The Henry James Update and other stories

In due course, one's preconceptions are confirmed. The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw and, not quite so much, Washington Square, were all great. I like short books. I don't mind long books but sometimes 600 pages don't seem altogether necessary. Except The Portrait of a Lady wouldn't be Henry James if he didn't bury you under the thick eiderdown of his all-enveloping prose.

It's luxurious and, yes, I do have all day to enjoy the luxury but, as I've found in my unsuccessful ventures into Jane Austen, I'm not particularly bothered which of her ardent suitors the heroine is going to marry, if any. Which is not to say one can't enjoy the chapters as they flow ever onwards almost as vignettes full of wit, observation and style. It's just that even life itself is surely not quite as nuanced as Henry James's fiction. Not even Proust, Ulysses or Tolstoy. I don't know yet, I'm only halfway.

There's enough to like, like the,

stone bench...useful as a lounging place to one or two persons wearing more or less of that air of undervalued merit which in Italy, for some reason or other, always gracefully invests anyone who confidently assumes a perfectly passive attitude

or,

'She was born- I always forget where you were born.'

'It's hardly worth while then I should tell you.'

'On the contrary,' said Mrs. Touchett, who rarely missed a logical point; 'if I remembered your telling me would be quite superfluous.'

So perhaps it's this almost Wildean wit that provides the entertainment rather than the stakes race between the varied contenders for the apparently immaculate Isabel Archer's affections.

There surely must be some irony to be had in her ultimate fate, nobody being perfect, because she must either choose one, presumably wrongly, or remain somehow unhumanly above it all.

We will see but, once having seen, it will be time for a break from Henry James.

 

I take breaks from the Complete Works of Bach regularly while still in with a chance of listening to all 172 discs within a year of acquiring them. Due imminently are the Mozart Piano Sonatas played by Mitsuko Uchida. I have to check the shelves before buying anything these days because I can't remember. For years I never knew in what formats I had The Velvet Underground & Nico but now that I do know, I never play it. It's on Spotify, You Tube and generally ubiquitous.

But this morning, the unseasonable Christmas Oratorio showed how irrelevant the time of year is for gloriousness. And hang on, we've had this echo of 'ja, ja' before, in the Cantata BWV 231. I thought it was Handel that plagiarised from himself when needing a good tune in an emergency but Bach did it as well, if not as often.

One notes such highlights as Erbarme Dich in the Matthew Passion, always wondering what advantage music one knows already has over pieces one hasn't. Even if coming to something for the first time has a never-to-be-repeated opportunity to freshly impress. I'm sure Hamlet improves for seeing it a few more times after the first, all other things being equal. 

I press on with the Bach, not realistically expecting to be able to say I played it all in a year. I think it's early July that's the deadline. It's no kind of hardship like in a marathon there needs must be some suffering to achieve the worthwhile aim but there might be times when it's a bit like other bits of it and certainly some of the organ doodling is routine background music to reading. But if listening to Bach ever became dutiful then the point of anything has finally been lost.

I don't know what ultimate reason we were born for but if one reaches a stage where that is unsatisfactory then it is all over. 

Chess- England 0 Hungary 1

This was the scene this afternoon on Southsea seafront where Zoltan was taking on allcomers.

Quick game, five minutes, I said. 

Is okay. I play quicker than you, he said, giving away the advantage by playing with black. Fair do's to him.

His d6 reply to my customary d4 was unusual, as was his subsequent row of five pawns on his third rank. It was real rapid-fire gun-slinging stuff and he made the first blunder.

I was in cruise control, or at least carrying the tray of drinks across the slippery floor.

I'm not sure how I gave back the advantage. Twice I, very sportingly, stuck with moving a piece I'd touched when he might have let me off but if I'm going to win I want to win proper.

It would have been insulting to ask for the draw in an endgame where he still had a bishop to my one pawn advantage.

We shook hands after maybe five minutes under the unforgiving sun.

Are you here next week?

If it's a nice day, I'm here next week.

You're Hungarian.

How you know I am Hungarian?

Because you're called Zoltan.

 

So, first game across the board in many, many years. I very nearly had him, too, but having missed him once I might not get the same chance again. He's probably any good. 

 

An Evening with Philip Larkin

An Evening with Philip Larkin, Goat Star Books, The Century Club, Shaftesbury Avenue, May 26th

A somewhat eventful day yesterday. This is by no means a review of the main event. That might appear elsewhere in due course. But it won't undermine the eventual appearance of that, if and when it does, to praise the presentation by Goat Star Books with guest reader Daniel Wain and the revelation, not mentioned in the published letters or any of the three biographies, that Larkin kept up a correspondance with Kenneth Williams which at first sounds an unlikely prospect but, then again, T.S. Eliot wrote to Groucho Marx.

The journey from Portsmouth wasn't easy with rail delays following soon upon the replacement bus service and, having had well over an hour in hand in the plan, arriving at Piccadilly Circus with only twenty five minutes to go before kick-off. Except the Century Club is not easy to find, being unmarked. One needs to know. I went well beyond it and while retracing my steps, began to ask people with increasing desperation. A bouncer in charge of a theatre queue didn't know. You'd think a taxi driver might but he didn't but someone smoking outside the Century Club overheard, came and helped and told me I was right in front of it. Well, I never. I might be traipsing up and down Shaftesbury Avenue still without such a kindness.

Maybe more another time about the excellent show where I unknowingly met and shook hands with the nephew of Rosemary Tonks. That alone was worth the heat and hardship and paying possibly about £20 for a pint of lager. Three bottles at £7.88 each but it is only money and they were essential supplies. 

But the almost supernatural occurences had only just begun. The 22.30 out of Waterloo was initially packed but across the aisle, a lady had put what looked to me like a violin case on the luggage rack. I obviously wanted to know all about that while not wanting to be reported to the guard and thrown off the train for a misunderstood, inappropriate advance. However, the crowds thinned out and I soon heard myself asking, is that a violin, have you been playing in London and, if so, what.  

Yes, yes and the Bach B minor Mass, were the answers.

The conversation rapidly took off and it transpired that I had reviewed her only a few weeks ago, most enthusiastically, of course. So, do you know him and her and them.  

Yes, yes. 

Bach's B minor Mass is mostly in D major.

Good Heavens.

 

And then she spotted a memory stick on the floor and established whose it was from the label on it and some internet detective work and undertook to return it through the available channels to the musician whose score of the Bach it had on it. By which time I was beginning to wonder if it we were in an episode of The Uncanny.  

It all seemed like a far-fetched concatenation of events.

The replacement bus stopped at Hilsea at about 00.15 so I walked from there. Not a soul to be seen all the way down the Copnor Road which was gorgeous for one unaccustomed to the dizziness and busy-ness of Soho of an evening. I made some connection with the poet who lived at the end of the line, away from cosmopolitan London and made a virtue out of being provincial. I've long sympathized with that. I don't know how much I could withstand of that hectic way of life. I'd rather by now be thinking of high windows, the sun-comprehending glass and things like that. 

Sounds of the 70's.

 Bob Harris is clearly still not well and we all wish him the best. Meanwhile, Shaun Keaveny, with a bit of help from Mark Radcliffe, has been making Sounds of the 70's sound much more like the decade I took part in. I was in Gloucester and then Lancaster, not hanging out in Nashville or California.

One gets the impression that Andy Burnham wants to be Prime Minister and feels no shame saying as much and so, on that basis, I want to do Radio 2's Sounds of the 70's. Equally blatantly, I've never made any secret of it.

My calling card sample show, put together this afternoon, is at Spotify now.

Sounds of the 70's

 

If only there could be a pop wireless show as good as that.

And yet, there could be and Version 1.0 is there already.