The Studio Album

     The new laptop promises to be quite a success. Already I've taken it upstairs and looked at a book on it from the safety of my remote eyrie away from the possibility of kids playing outside. I then went on to watch some greyhound racing and landed a modest gamble on the fav in the long distance open race, which always seems the sensible option in dog racing. Thus, while there is still money in the account, I availed myself of 10/1 about Jagwar for the National although if I were you I'd wait until the day when the advertised prices might be better.

However, I found the microphone and sound recording features, too.  

I find this visual representation of my first go at reading a poem a thing of rare beauty. The title and each of the fourteen lines come in similar, but all different, shapes of sound suggesting variety within discipline which is what I like to think it is - like something by Haydn, perhaps. It has immediately given rise to ideas of recording a little album of poems. I've never doubted that poems are to be read aloud, it's just I don't like doing it in public for a number of reasons. But recorded in private without all the protocols of the 'live' reading, much of that is avoided.

So, something to think about. 8 poems, maybe 10, all done on one file hoping it would be of e-mailable size although I have my doubts.                        

Schubert and Melancholy

I remain haunted by having said a couple of months ago that I 'never found Schubert down-hearted'. Not the only daft thing I ever said and for the most part I meant it but the disbelief it was met with makes it one of the more questionable of recent times. I've not seen Lilac Time, the 1934 film with Richard Tauber, so I can't blame it on that.

I spent much of a day playing discs of Schubert and still found much more 'lightness of touch' than depression. I don't find the Unfinished Symphony at all pessimistic.

I wondered if melancholy was a temporary condition or a character trait and found it can be both. Sadly, as it were, Robert Burton's Anatomy was rather longer that what I wanted to read 45 years ago in C17th Lit. I expect both Montaigne and Dr. Johnson are good on the subject, and more succinct.

So I ordered a Schubert biography from the library. He's about the most important composer whose life I've not read yet anyway. Elizabeth Norman McKay's book is excellent, balancing the demands of the life, the music, contemporary ideas and events very well and covering the 31 years in 340 pages in plenty but not too much detail.

But if ignorance is no defence, it looks like I'm guilty as charged. It says the Piano Sonata, D. 784, is,

one of the darkest of all his compositions, autobiographical in the emotions it expressed of pain, distress, anger, and ill temper,

and, yes, I was familiar with it. 

Perhaps the best short answer to a complicated question is summarized in a chaper on Two Natures in which Schubert could be a sociable, attractive and popular personality but increasingly refusing to be bound by social convention. The latter part led one witness to note,

how powerfully the craving for pleasure dragged his soul down to the slough of moral degradation.

It seems likely that debauchery, of which the book is short of lurid detail, was a factor in his death just short of 32. There is a suggestion that his friend Schober was a bad influence.     Quite how he found the time for such indulgence as well as reaching well over 900 opus numbers in so brief a life is hard to say, especially as there were fallow periods and illness.

It's a remarkable life, as were those of Mozart and Beethoven, to name only two. So is there some law that genius is bound to live an extraordinary life. Not necessarily, despite the prodigious output of music and children, Bach doesn't appear to have been outrageous.

But I'd better be more careful about my pronouncements. No, I don't generally find Schubert's music down-hearted but he was clearly 'bi-polar'. For me, though, it is the 'sincere, incapable of malice, friendly, grateful, modest, sociable, communicative of joy' character that comes most through the music. The world's not an easy place to negotiate for some and his talent and commitment was to his art rather than applied to the world. He comes across as a sort of ruined saint, somehow not quite on a par with Beethoven but not very far behind him at all.  

Leora Cohen & David Gray in Chichester

 Leora Cohen & David Gray, Chichester Cathedral, Mar 24

There might come a time when, due to climate change, thousands of years of literature and music will need to be annotated with footnotes explaining the characteristics of the seasons described in such things as Chaucer, Vivaldi and Keats's Ode to Autumn. For the time being, though, they are still more or less recognizable and this year in the UK, Spring arrived exactly on time and with it some musical programmes to mark the event.

As with several of his pieces, it wasn't Beethoven that gave the Spring Sonata its name and he might not have had it specifically in mind in the abundance of the Allegro. The sharing and coherence of Leora and David together belied the fact that he was a late stand-in for the advertised pianist. The Adagio was indeed molto expressivo, captivating as I think (did it?) shift into the minor key and it might most credibly have been a nocturne. After a capricious Scherzo, it turned out to be the cheery, classical Rondo that I, for one, went home with playing on repeat in the memory.

It is a measure of Beethoven's colossal status that such a piece would count as a major item in the oeuvre of many lesser names but would take some time to arrive at when listing his. I'm glad to find that the Violin Sonatas are on my shelves - these days I can never remember- and so I'm grateful for this reminder to go back to them.

Grieg's To Spring was sonorous and song-like, Leora's violin rich over David's finely modulated piano but one imagines Lili Boulanger's D'un matin de printemps was where their technique was more thoroughly tested. Mercurial and flighty but with spaciousness in its more extended lines, it was possibly the most Spring-like piece, being 'changeable' as the day's sudden turn back to cool and overcast reminded us that it can be.

 

Angelina Kopyrina's Rachmaninov in the Menuhin Room

Angelina Kopyrina, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, Mar 20

Sometimes everyone's a winner. In a special Friday event in the Menuhin Room, Angelina Kopyrina was provided with a dress rehearsal before she takes her Rach to Paris, the piano benefitted from the box office proceeds going towards its maintenance but, most of all, the audience witnessed a grandstand of a performance that possibly, if possible, went beyond what we've had from either Angelina or the piano before.

Having completed her Ph. D. with the catchy title, Rachmaninov’s piano sonatas: Issues of performance interpretation considered through the historical background, artistic influences, the scores, and performance practice, the two sonatas are central to the things she does. By way of preparation for this event, I did some homework, too, and played a standard-issue sort of recording- if there is such a thing- over and again in the hope of finding comparisons.

Much of that is inevitably down to the difference between a disc played on a machine made by Sony and a piano played in real time right in front of you but there was more to it than that. There was more definition and contrast in Angelina, slower when slow at the beginning of no. 1, more fff when necessary and certainly quicker when quick. I understood that where the disc does 41.04 for no. 1, Angelina takes a few minutes off that. 

The first movement evokes Faust, so beloved of those diabolic Romantic types, and comes as a downpour of extravagance and anguish but where I'd anticipated something much calmer regarding Gretchen in the second it still came with intensity and fire. The third marched towards its fateful climax in a mesmeric, torrential struggle.

During the Q&A afterwards I felt it a point worth making that some of us, if not her, might have benefitted from an interval in order to recover a little bit from the experience but within a couple of minutes, we were into no.2.     

The quality of the Steinway no doubt helps in such an avalanche but after ten minutes it was already undoubtedly a standing ovation performance and I'm not sure I've ever seen such after the first piece in a programme but, as Andrew said, it's the first time it's happened in the Menuhin Room. 

I often thought, when training towards long distance cycling events, that it was the effort one put in after one felt one had reached one's limit that built fitness, stamina and resilience and maybe rest is bad for you. Thus there was no time to reflect or discuss what we had been through so far. Perhaps it is character-building to continue onwards but, yes, there would usually be an interval for the benefit of the faint-hearted.

The Sonata no. 2, op. 36, is about bells more than anything else while being half the length of no. 1 but still achieving similar giddy heights. The Lento second movement finally put some ethereal beauty in among the blitz, poignant and with great emotional depth. For once not sitting on the far left, I was in front of Russell in his accustomed position on the right and so saw nothing of the keyboard, only Angelina wrapped in her rapt attention like everybody else was. But, of course, it can't end like that and with the most impulsive of gestures, we were left thrilled if also battered but safe in the knowledge that there was no other Friday lunchtime like it available anywhere else.

Up to now my favourite Angelina repertoire has been the Bach-Busoni Chaconne and the Prokofiev Sonata, the Beethoven almost being taken as a given thing but, as a performance, this probably tops the lot. I'd still prefer Tatiana Nikolayeva and her Well-Tempered Klavier for the long-term relationship of the years on the desert island. But, having thought that the best thing I'd go to all year happened in Wigmore Hall in January and that question was a one-horse race closed there and then, I'm glad now to have a shortlist of two. 

Georgina Duncan at Lunchtime Live!

 Georgina Duncan, Portsmouth Cathedral, Mar 19

English Literature graduates can make fine pianists. There's Andrew McVittie. There's Georgina Duncan. There isn't me but two out of three ain't bad.

Georgina began with her favourite composer, Grieg and To Spring, suitably sunlit. Her repertoire is Romantic and Impressionist with Robert Schumann's Kinderszenen next moving from innocence, through some hasty keyboard work and a bit of a sing-song to some lingeringly phrased Traumerei. 

Of particular interest was John Field, only a generation younger than Mozart, and two Nocturnes in which perhaps the right hand might have been playing a Mozart sonata over a lush left hand by Chopin.

Grieg's Gade was a country walk en plein air and Hjernad (Homeward) an invigorating striding out before running up the steps to the front door. A highlight for me, though, was the 'uncharacteristically showy' Impromptu, op. 90 No. 2, performed like the Minute Waltz with deft fingerwork and exuberance unleashed.

The Impressionist parts were provided by Debussy's prelude Bruyeres which could have been shadows in the clair de lune except I find it means 'heather'. Ravel's Sonatine, M.40, second movement, offered wide panoramas, before more Debussy, Cakewalk from Children's Corner, was a boisterous finale, almost ragtime, maybe verging on Erik Satie's quirkiness.

All of which made for a happy programme confidently presented by a young pianist with verve and enthusiasm and, it is to be hoped, a bright future. 

Dominika Mak in Chichester

Dominika Mak, Chichester Cathedral, Mar 17 

Some composers have onomatopoeiac names that pre-figure the sound of their music. By no means all of them but a few. The zest imparted into Stravinsky in that second syllable goes into The Rite of Spring, Liszt is a bolt of lightning and Corelli very decorative. Thus, the one syllable of Brahms stretches out like a semi-breve, like his extended melodic lines full of longing. Except in the early Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 5, he is moody and impassioned, ready to be in thrall to Clara Schumann and apparently not yet settled into the lush unfolding of the fourth symphony.

First up, though, by way of contrast was a Scarlatti Sonata, in C# minor - one of the 555, you can't miss it. Dominika Mak brought out all its crystalline qualities in the luminous fluency she brought out of the Chichester Yamaha.

The Brahms, though, begins with grand gestures apparently coming out of dark places. Only 20 when he wrote this third and last of his piano sonatas and he comes to it with the vigour of youth. The second movement is an Andante that takes as its text,

Through evening's shade, the pale moon gleams

While rapt in love's ecstatic dreams

Two hearts are fondly beating.  

Dominika's sensitive playing made this perhaps the most memorable section, the reflectiveness becoming climactic before what sounded like ecstacies in the Scherzo.

If Brahms admired Clara, Beethoven was a similarly huge presence in his imagination and the Intermezzo insistently plays on the 'fate' motif from the Fifth Symphony as if possessed by its spirit. But the Allegro finale elaborates its theme into an affirmative statement of hope. If it's true that it requires great virtuosity without being overly spectacular or showing off that is very much what Dominika Mak achieved.

It's a week of piano sonatas for me. It took me a long time to realize that 'size' in music isn't dependent on the number of musicians involved. A Haydn symphony is generally neat and tidy whereas sonatas can be enormous. The Scarlatti was so short that the audience didn't realize that that was all there was and it went unapplauded, there was no doubt that the Brahms had reached the end, though.

Weldon Kees - Fall Quarter

I don't think I've ever been too concerned to know the 'canon'. Not all the great books are my favourites. I don't mean there is no canon, as has been posited in recent decades, but I do mean that we all make our own for ourselves.

Weldon Kees wouldn't make it into the generally recognized canon but I like him and lots of things about him. I dare say he is minor compared to Tolstoy as a fiction writer or Milton as a poet but that doesn't impinge on one's enjoyment of reading him.

Not all the poems are masterpieces but there is a handful worth having and I prefer to judge people by their best work rather than take away points for their less good. Similarly with the stories which are fine if not crucial. There are a number of reasons why Fall Quarter, his only surviving novel, went unpublished and not all of them are that it wasn't any good.

 

It's not often that I LOL, laugh out loud, while reading, but have done twice in this. William Clay has taken up a post teaching in a downbeat provincial college in Nebraska. He looks up Janet Eliot whose name he's been given. As with Mrs. Oatley who he meets in a bar next up, she's brilliantly conceived,

"Can't you drive faster?", she said. "I scarcely feel I'm moving when I'm doing less than sixty." 

"I don't want to smash us up."

"Oh, don't worry about that ! I've been in hundreds of accidents and never got scratched. Once I was with a boy and we ran right into a train and I wasn't hurt a bit."

"What happened to him?"

"He died."

 

Bits of it might be a fraction overdone but it's art and art emphasizes certain elements at the possible expense of credulity to make its point. At university 45 years ago Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was on the reading list. One of the worst books I've ever read, alongside A Card for the Clubs by Les Dawson. I've not read Kerouac. One doesn't shock by setting out to shock. You create something like a cartoon if you do that, more like Tom & Jerry. Deadpan is better.

Fall Quarter has a great facility, something that those who like Salinger would enjoy and, at halfway through, I'd take it as it is rather than 'improve' it further. It is possibly the best of Weldon Kees. I'm glad it saw print eventually and that I got a nice copy of it. 

--

In the second half, the hapless William Clay meets Dorothy Bruce, a little town flirt and radio singer with who he, of course, becomes hopelessly devoted to in the face of all the evidence that she is treating him like a doormat. It's a plot used more than once in London and Brighton settings at roughly the same time by Patrick Hamilton,

Yet he knew, following her with his eyes, that she could treat him any way she pleased, that she could do anything she wanted, and he would still be hanging around, unprotesting. 

 

It's an episode rather than a broad, sweeping canvas of a story and thus likely to be considered 'minor' because it's not Anna Karenina but that's no way to assess the worth of anything. I thought it was great because I enjoyed it in all its downbeat ingloriousness. What a great pity it is that the other attempts Kees had at novel writing are lost.