Rebecca Hepplewhite & Caroline Tyler in Chichester

 Rebecca Hepplewhite & Caroline Tyler, Chichester Cathedral, June 16

The Prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007, is one of the pieces I've heard most often in live performance. Rebecca Hepplewhite was today the latest addition to the list of Natalie Clein, Pavlos Carvalho et al and a very fine one, relatively subdued and introspective compared to some, her relaxed sound rich but lonely in the big acoustic. 

Never heard before, though, was the Bach Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007, arranged for piano by Caroline Tyler and played by her. It could almost have been a different piece, all dreamy and C19th Romantic and hardly Bach at all. Sacrilege, some might say, but one is accustomed to what one is accustomed to and after much of a lifetime with this music as cello music- once hearing it arranged for bass guitar, one needs more than one chance to appreciate it as anything else. Beautifully done, fascinating if not alarming to hear, I'm sure my initial reservations would be overcome in due course but leopards might need to learn to change their spots.

It was by way of a bridge to Rebecca and Caroline joining forces for the Rachmaninov Sonata, op.19, which by some inverse symmetry had the famous piano man writing for cello. While all four movements mixed their moods between melancholy and bursts of rhapsodic melody, the mournful opening gave way to misty distances before some restlessness in the Allegro second.

Caroline's sumptuous piano in the highlight Andante seemed to fade in sympathy with Rebecca's sorrowful cello, each climax receding like dimming light. Whatever mysteries it was evoking have only been enhanced by the illegible scrawl of the note I made about the finale before it ended more in celebration, redemption or sweetness and light. 

Not only impressive but making one think about esoteric questions. A long time ago, knowing no better, I bought a secondhand recording of a disc of Monteverdi arranged and conducted by Karajan. It was entirely inappropriate and I threw it away rather than keep it in the house. Bach arr. Tyler was still gorgeous music. He would have been interested not only to hear the pianoforte but what lushness Caroline made of his austere Prelude. He might even have wished he'd had the chance to do it that way.

Sounds of the 70's

 Shaun Keavney's doing a fine job, filling up Radio 2's Sunday afternoons so knowledgeably and so my Spotify playlist series will end with no. 5 soon. Shaun made a bit of a racket a few times this afternoon but he's more or less 'cool' and sound and can work a studio better than I'd ever do.

There was a makeshift manager once during some difficult times in a job I was in who kept saying he had 'the best job in the department' but he was transparently trying to spread a feel good factor across a fractious workforce. He had a dreadful, if well paid, job but couldn't be heard to say so.

It's not so with Sounds of the 70's and never would be with 60's either. One almost can't miss. Although, of course, many would. 

So, instead of overloading the front page here with too much 'Also appearing at...', here, in all their glory are the playlists from one who once did a live DJ set, aged 13 or 14, in a suburb of Gloucester, for the Girl Guides and Brownies with, so dangerously, cubs, scouts and other boys allowed in.

You wouldn't believe how easy- and how dispiriting- the dance DJ's job is. They responded very well to All Because of You by Geordie, hey, hey, hey, and so that got played 4 or 5 times. Not the worst record ever but one never went poor by underestimating what one's audience wants. However, 

 Pilot episode

2  3  4

 

The World Cup and other stories

 If I press the 'info' button on the TV remote control to get details on the Radio 5 coverage of the (Men's Football) World Cup, it says,

Several teams from around the world compete against each other in a prestigious tournament in order to emerge victorious and win the title. 

Strangely it assumes we know it concerns men's football. There might be an octogenarian don at Oxford, expert in Xenophon or Tacitus who was unaware, or maybe those heroic people in the Andaman Islands who murdered an intruder because they wisely don't want to know about the rest of the world but otherwise most people with cable TV would be aware of the above. So it's tempting to suspect an ironist at work at Virgin Media.

I once found a dictionary that defined 'kangaroo' as (something like), two-legged marsupial that progresses in a succession of flying bounds. It was Dr. Johnson but it should have been.

 

An idea I had to provide my empty turf account with some easy cash was to lay heavily into an odds-on dead cert in the early stages. Brazil were 8/13 to beat Morocco but I did some research. Brazil have been a bit of a mess recently, it said, and Morocco are no pushover. So I kept my powder dry, turned on the match half an hour in and found Morocco 1-0. And it's as good as winning the bet as it is not to do it when it loses. Better, in fact, at the odds.

Sadly my allegiance to Baby Doc Duvalier and Wyclef Jean's Haiti went unrewarded last night so my low level of interest in this capitalist rip-off has already waned from its low starting point. I read a preview that convinced me the final will be between Spain and Argentina, once we get anywhere near a stage that can be called the 'finals'. Perhaps I'll check in the newspaper in a few weeks' time to see if it transpires as such.

--

Meanwhile, still some fallout from the recent Evening with Philip Larkin, I dip randomly into the James Booth biography at bedtime and have just read Michaelmas Term at St. Bride's from his anthology of early fiction. If anybody said at the time - and I might have- that such a book was scraping the Larkin barrel then it was worth the scraping. I will be back into the sophistication of Henry James all too soon but, for enjoyment, would gladly stick with Brunette Coleman, Larkin's female alter ego and nom de plume in these just slightly suspect fictions of teenage girls that young Larkin clearly spent a lot of time on and made a good job of.

Like Jill, it is an Oxford novel about an ingenue in the rarefied atmosphere of class-ridden dreaming spires. Also autobiographical are the details of some jazz records, literary citations including mention of Edward Thomas's book on Oxford, and -using an Oxford comma there, more horse racing following the interest in the Oaks from the previous episodes about Mary's time at Willow Gables. Although Larkin was a cricket man more than one of the turf.

What appeals about the world of Larkin, beyond all the obvious things about one of one's favourite writers, is the refreshing austerity of his time. If austerity as a government policy has a bad name, one can look back on it as a bracing, healthy way of life unencumbered by 'doom-scrolling' and the like. There were books and there was music and they somehow got by in what might seem like a grey world but it was more subtly shaded than the overblown gaudiness of what we are offered now.

And the ubiquitous evidence of failing standards in education when journalists at respectable institutions like the BBC and Times Radio can report such things as 'South Korea coming from behind to win 2-0'. Presumably they had been 0-0 down. You can't take anything on trust from such reports. You have to work it out for yourself. They must have won 2-1.  

--

At long last, I've taken to using the machine that has the capacity to play cassettes to play cassettes. It's taken so long that its capacity to play CD's failed quite a while ago. But the first of the drawerful of elderly cassettes have so far come up tremendously well after decades of disuse. I collected all sorts of things from the radio, thinking that the medium would be there always and not be supplanted by CD, mini disc, download, streaming and all.

The Poetry Prom with Betjeman introducing the very rare occasion when Larkin read The Whitsun Weddings to a live audience; Sean O'Brien visiting Auden's northern mining landscape, that sort of thing. Now I only have to wait for the tapes of August Kleinzahler, possibly Paul Muldoon and I think there's Auden himself, to resurface. It's like archaeology up there but, like laying down a wine and forgetting about it, it's treasure worth finding. 

And truly, I say unto thee

And truly, I say unto thee, if there's a better book than A.N. Wilson's Jesus, then I haven't read it. Absolutely scintillating. I even considered acquiring The Apocryphal Gospels and The Dead Sea Scrolls, in paperback editions, to investigate further but without Andrew's insights and commentary it might not be so enlightening.

He makes the comparison with another thrilling area of biographical mystery and speculation, 

The feelings of the historian about Jesus must be analogous to his feelings about Shakespeare, who managed to achieve fame and wealth and notoriety in Elizabethan London, and who left behind him a body of literary work without parallel, but whose 'personality' remains almost invisible.

Perhaps it's the not knowing that make these two's lives - two of the most famous people that ever lived- so compelling but it's equally potentially irksome that so many myths are put in place to fill the gaps that are allowed to pass as general knowledge. I'm grateful to Andrew for the introduction to the word 'midrash', which is a Jewish term for 'filling in the gaps'. He cites a number of examples pertaining to Jesus that might appear to accommodate Old Testament prophecies after the fact but the job he does in unravelling the likely and the possible from the imaginative is brilliant.

Mary Magdalene and her friends found the tomb empty because other friends had moved the body to a preferred burial place. Subsequent sightings of Jesus, often shrouded in doubt, were of his brother, James, who took up the work that was to prove to be shortlived. Jesus preached only to make Jews better Jews, not to set up a new church. It was Paul that did that.

Another of Wilson's subjects, Tolstoy, is found to be less contradictory in his teachings. Jesus is portrayed as quarrelsome, difficult and unsuccessful in his lifetime despite the vast, misunderstood legacy he left. 

I've known plenty of sane, intelligent, well-intentioned people that genuinely believed, 'had faith in' the virgin birth, miracles and the resurrection who sincerely thought that those impossibilities happened. Even circa 1972/3, in our traditionally Christian school, such things as walking on water and the feeding of the five thousand had been rationally explained away but, as ever, people will believe what they want to believe and there ain't nothing one can do about it. I'm sure we all enjoy a bit of mysticism, a ghost story and the way the best poetry conjures something extra from the language but we all know, don't we, that there's no such thing as magic.

Wilson's book maybe ought to be regarded as the truest gospel. 

Madeleine Mitchell & Elektra Schmidt in Chichester

 Madeleine Mitchell & Elektra Schmidt, Chichester Cathedral, June 9

Beethoven was the main feature of Madeleine Mitchell and Elektra Schmidt's show of violin and piano. He could have afforded to give away his violin sonatas without much noticeable lessening of his reputation whereas the recipient would have benefitted greatly.

No. 10 in G, op. 96, opens with a cheery, classical Allegro moderato. Written in 1812, only three years after Haydn died, his spirit was not far away. But the profound, consolatory Adagio was the day's most memorable passage, its steady light penetrating some semi-darkness. The merriment of the Scherzo was carried forward to the variations of the fourth movement. Elektra's mazy piano was as prominent as Madeleine's violin that piled in all the notes before Beethoven put in an unusual- for him- succinct ending.

Before that, the undercard had begun with the sparkling piano and uplift in the Mélodie of  Frank Bridge, Ravel's Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré was gently hypnotic and the familiar strains of Elgar's Chanson de Matin were demure and perhaps more silky than velvety and with maybe some inflection in the violin that I'm not sure I'm accustomed to.

But today's question is 'what is an encore?' The players left the stage during the applause for the Beethoven and returned to play another piece that was listed on the programme. Is that an encore or not, I wonder.

One of the many reasons I've not appeared on Mastermind to answer questions on music is that I didn't know Tailleferre was female, part of that long tradition that goes from Hildegaard of Bingen to Taylor Swift. I'm not sure how much it matters, musically. Her Berceuse, written early in her long life was distant and/or misty, a fine choice for an encore if that's what it was. I'll be looking to find out a bit more about Germaine Tailleferre in due course. 

I'm beginning to forget to say about Chichester lunchtime concerts that it was brilliant. 

Jesus !!!

The Portrait of a Lady emerged from the weight of its own prose and immense detail to be quite a success but not so much that, after four Henry James novels in a row, I wanted to get involved in another long one straight away.

It might be as much about Gilbert, the baddie husband, or the manipulative Madame Merle and the emergent secret they shared. If it was not for Isabel to know, she still might have exercised more judgement in her choice of first husband and so my sympathy for her is limited. Thus, although the happier ending is only strongly hinted at, it looks like it will have one. And like an episode of Midsomer Murders, the answer turns out to be not one of the frontrunners but one who, until the design of the plot is revealed, might only have appeared to be making up the numbers.

So, while Henry James takes fairly high order among novelists, one does not want to live by him alone and a change of scenery, and writing, makes for the latest costume drama.

 

I was nudged back, by something, to one of the recent shortlist of Best Books in the House, which as far as I can tell is the same as Best Book Ever, for me. And I'm as impressed as ever with A.N. Wilson's Jesus, for its scholarship where 'scholarship' means learning applied as best it can be; lucidity and open-mindedness in an area so clouded by faith, belief, tradition and irrationality that one would otherwise struggle to know what to think.

Andrew doesn't assume that Jesus wasn't married just because the gospels don't say he was. They don't say he wasn't, either. He had no idea about setting up a new church. He was a charismatic, firebrand Jewish preacher with radical ideas at a time when the Roman Empire was troubled by sectarian monotheists. It was Paul, as per another book by the same author, that made the Christian church perhaps the most significant and powerful movement of the subsequent two thousand years.

It's a hot, dusty story of both fishermen and bookish types rather than carpenters, of much unlikeliness explained in terms that make it plausible, some mysticism notwithstanding, that depends on the same human frailties that Wilson, and Jesus, have an understanding of. Their world of sectarianism, tyranny and violence was in essence not so different from how it was before or has been since.

Jesus never said he was the son of God, the second part of the Trinity, and rejected all entreaties to be king of a new Israel. It is astonishing how he became sentimentalized into 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild', born in a stable attended by three wise men from the East who came bearing gifts. Embellishment upon embellishment in what was only ever literature has made something ludicrous out of reportage written decades after whatever he said and did were said and done. But he was more real than Robin Hood and Andrew Wilson did a tremendous job in finding what there might be of him in amongst the accumulated rubble of outlandish fiction, all the architecture and music built upon one very successful preacher.

Do I like him, no, I don't. Hot-headed, difficult, troublesome from childhood until his early death, he is the template for all those pop stars that burnt out, for Faust, Icarus and that useless article, Che Guevara, whose revolutionary image adorned so many student bedroom walls in the 1960's and 70's. His legacy lasted longer than Che's did, though, even if it descended into horrors that he never intended and the gaudy ceremonies that he never meant.

But maybe A.N. Wilson, high C of E Tory as I think he would identify, wrote the best book I've ever read as an eventual part of that legacy. And it's remarkable to think that one of my other six favourite books is Ungentle Shakespeare by Katherine Duncan-Jones, to who he was married for some years.

It must have been compelling. One inappropriate syllogism, a non-sequitur or a contemporary usage that couldn't be translated into Latin. That's what life should be like. I wonder who they think will win the World Cup. 

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.