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.

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.