The Ivory Duo at Lunchtime Live !

 The Ivory Duo, Portsmouth Cathedral, Mar 5

At the obvious risk of appearing overly highbrow, the way the local music year moves on might might be compared with Ovid's Fasti, a calendar of customs, holidays and rituals. Having so recently had the Brighton New Music composers at Lunchtime Live! and the English Piano Trio in Chichester, the latest recurrent event was the always welcome return of the Ivory Duo.

Most often seen and heard as four hands on one keyboard, Panayotis Archontides and Natalie Tsaldarakis were today mostly two soloists.

With Natalie on first, Debussy's Pour Le Piano: Prelude was a dark drama that unloaded a few explosives that didn't match with the sunlit nave. At least as technically demanding in what was going to prove to be such a programme, Ginastera's Danzas Argentinas was rhythmically complex in no. 1 before hauntingly pretty in no. 2 but both presenting different dancing challenges, had one wanted to try.

Panayotis took over and was soon up to a similar level of viruosity in the op.12 Bagatelles of Miklós Rózsa. After the short, sharp shock of Kleiner Marsch, Valse Lente complimented the light, Canzone was long on the palette and, there's often a clue in the title, Capriccietto was capricious to the point of frenzy.  

In a bumper edition of Lunchtime Live! an extensive selection of Hugh Benham's work included Home Street, more pyrotechnics with glimpses of lyricism, Memoranda about a Wiltshire childhood which might not have been a text book idyll, the full-blooded chiming of Pigeons on a Wire and the brisk, invigorating duet Good Morning. 

By no means all 'easy listening', there was much to admire in the energy and musicianship. There were times one might have thought there were four hands at work when there had been only two. 

English Piano Trio in Chichester

 English Piano Trio, Chichester Cathedral, March 3

I listen to Schubert more intently since a little while ago hearing myself say to an eminent local musician that I never found him 'down-hearted'. The look of disbelief that that elicited was concerning. Do I even understand the first thing about what I'm hearing or do different people take different things from the same pieces of music.
The Sonatensatz in B-flat major might not provide the ideal test case, though, it having been written when he was 15. In one Allegro movement, it brought the light from the Bishop's Palace garden, where Spring was happening, indoors. The Chichester faithful are by now familiar with the fluency and ease with which Jane Faulkner, Pal Banda and Timothy Ravenscroft combine to make such a consummate sound.
Rachmaninov's Trio élégiaque in G minor was an entirely different thing, beginning mistily before Timothy's cascading piano accompanied the melodic line in the violin and cello. Reaching a climax somewhere near halfway, it recapitulated until drawing to a sombre conclusion. While still identifiably Rach, it didn't quite overflow like the piano sonatas that have recently annexed my turntable in preparation for a big, upcoming date that I felt the need to be ready for.
On a previous visit, Pal had explained how his cello had spent some time at the Esterhazy court and so there's a fair chance it already knew Haydn's Trio in E-flat major, Hob. XV:29 or something like it from long ago. It's not usual to enquire after melancholy in Haydn and the blithe violin-led Allegretto with elaborate piano variations immediately introduced us to the debonair classicism that civilisation once made possible. But he's not that simple and needs to direct the Andantino's poignancy towards innocentemente and perhaps the most gorgeous part of a gorgeous programme. The Presto finale came in a florid hurry, which makes one wonder about the etymology of 'flurry'. Timothy had explained that when asked if the piece is hard to play, he says, yes, it is. By way of compensation, it's very easy to listen to.

Karen Kingsley plays New Music from Brighton

Karen Kingsley, Portsmouth Cathedral, Feb 26

 

 Some musicians have composers they specialize in while others range widely across many and various. Few more so than Karen Kingsley and she adds new music to her curriculum vitae with these programmes of premieres from the Brighton New Music group. A recent innovation, it has quickly become an item on Portsmouth's calendar to look forward to. 

In the 1960's and 70's, any journey into 'new music' was in danger of proving to be an intrepid misadventure but by now one can approach with more confidence. 

On much of the programme, the titles told us what it was we were listening for. Not necessatily in Temptation of Doubt by Martyn C. Adams in which a gentle song led to a lively variation or two. More so in Unfolding-Forming-Dissolving, the first of Three Meditations by Barry Mills. Gradually becoming less abstract, There but for Fortune and Mysterious River were slow moving, the latter in an unsettled way.

Chris Gander's two haiku, for Spring and Summer were full of short, sharp shocks, the latter opening with a right hand reminiscent of Jerry Lee Lewis before resolving more quietly. Then The Monkey and the Raincoat definitely conjured mischief and precipitation.

David M. Hoyle's Sketches of Childhood mixed playground chants with daydreams before its vigorous ending. In contrast, Marion Maidment-Evans's Two Night Pieces were in turn one of fitful sleep and then a more restful encroachment on nothingness.

But there was not much ostensibly Egyptian in Basil Richmond's Nefertiti. Technically the most challenging pieces, the leitmotif in the first part was elaborated into an involving freize, The priests of Amun had the two hands embarked on different rhythms and Aten was an insistent outpouring and a good choice on which to finish.

Karen's versatility and virtuosity in bringing these pieces to life is impressive. As with chess, there are endless patterns that can be made out of the limited number of black and white resources but most people can't find many of them. It takes a rare talent, and considerable application, to make the most of them.

Crossword

Across

1. Che burst out about unfinished composer (8)

6. Except for place to get a drink (3)

8. Stride into Beirut somehow to give things out differently (12)

9. Obscure Britpop band (4)

10. The most adjacent around the end of the Levant and thereabouts (4,4)

12. Cricketers follow on after big innings left out initially made by city in Mississippi (6)

13. Musical type of monkey? (6)

16. Plan Gino had to rearrange for anteater (8)

18. Capital in GPO's losses (4)

20. Ring villeins about cloud content (6,6)

22. A day on Mars in isolation (3)

23. They could be anything (8)

Down

2. Sung with no end of Bach's 35th (5) 

3. Be subjected to the first parts of Gotterdammerung after a French one and the German (7)

4. Alien sets about what is necessary (9)

5. Peak in the middle of story (3)

6. Good book found in Nairobi, blemished (5)

7. Tries again to redesign streets (7)

11. Info in creative work creative work in a country (9)

13. These (7) 

15. Noise or otherwise is wearing down (7)

17. Donated the last of meal to get hammer (5)

19. Slight loss of head made for illumination (5)

21. Oxford and Cambridge dispute? (3) 

British Poetry in the 1990's and other stories

 Thirty years ago, and more, and some of it seems like yesterday. One is getting old when one can remember new titles by Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn being published, Betjeman being Laureate and Heaney being young. But the idea has been growing on me that the 1990's were a Golden Age. One can never tell at the time but it is as much history now as WW2 was in the 70's.

Not having been around at the time of Eliot and Yeats, of Auden, Dylan Thomas or the 1950's, I don't know what it was like then but I've been re-living the 90's with the additional benefit of some hindsight through the pages of a pile of Poetry Reviews. It's remarkable how much interest there is in them. Some names haven't remained as fashionable, some of the commentary is overdone (not much changes there) and, sometimes for the better, we didn't know then what we know now but it comes across vividly in a bright magazine as a period of energy, with lots of developing talent and I'm not sure the century and, in fact, the millennium didn't end on a high point comparable with almost any other decade you might care to mention. 

And so I have begun to set about saying so in what is very unlikely to be anything book length. It could be dissertation length since I see that 5000 words can count as that these days. It's 2000 words already, having set out the first chapter but it's from hereon in that it will test out the stamina to stay the distance. The problem is that it won't go anywhere, not see print, and so it doesn't really matter beyond providing me with a project. It could be a further pdf, I dare say.

It's the weight, as in extent, of the subject matter that becomes daunting. As soon as one's made half a dozen names essential to the period, another half dozen seem to want to ask why it's not them, too, and so on. There is no limit to how much one can write until one reaches one's own limit. But it's got a title, some sort of vague thesis and a first chapter. Nearly all of the required texts are here so let's see how far I can get with it. 

--

It might be some time before the posthumous novel by Weldon Kees arrives from America so the Poetry Reviews came in useful to put off the return to Pushkin and the heavy biography. It's not that I'm not interested but I've got the gist of it and imagine that the last 250 pages will be much like the first 400. There are further stories of his to look at, I had promised myself a biography of Schubert and there is no shortage of re-reading available but that little run of one thing leading to another is at an end.

--

Taking back the Larkin's Jazz box-set of discs from the lend they had been on, they are most welcome to a re-run through. I'd have been a trad man, too, had I been of the right generation and it's a great old world to step into, not having to know it all, just for the sheer enjoyment. 

A Million Lies

Even though it was, I think, only yesterday that something provided the vague prompt that there might be a poem there, I can't remember what it was.

Not to worry. I've been more or less in a state of thinking I'd not write another poem for most of the time I've been writing them so I thought I'd try. It can easily be removed from here if, after its subsequent review, it is found not good enough. But I'm glad enough to have it for now.

It's about Marco Polo, the reports he took back to Venice from his trip into the East. For the most part, I believe him but I wouldn't blame those who didn't at the time because, if I'd been there then, I'd have suspected him of being a purveyor of fake news and, like it says, science fiction with which to astound the gullible masses. 

Maybe I'll get his book, read it and write a better poem later but there is this for now. I'm not unhappy with it. We will find out after a couple of weeks if it still looks okay but this having once been established as a website to 'promote' my poems, it's long overdue that it featured such a thing.

  
A Million Lies

He had been there and back, he said, 

Seen unicorns and behaviour
Beyond their quaint imagining.
Some bought it all and bought the book
While others would have none of it
And went back to their boring work
Or stared into the drab canal.
And even those carving the stone
On the ornate basilica,
Who had little faith in dragons
Or that it could be turtles
All the way down weren’t as tempted
As they might have been.

He might not have been anywhere,
No further than, say, Antioch,
Made most of the rest of it up
And then pretended to come back
With his crazy science fiction
To make such a name for himself.
He got that far, at least.

Lucas, Bach Piano, Scannell

There was always much to like about John Lucas, Many years ago I read his survey, Modern English Poetry: From Hardy to Larkin. Later his book on Notts cricket, The Trent Bridge Battery. Another time I'd ordered books from his Shoestring Press. And eventually I realized it was all the same bloke, also jazzman, Prof. of English and novelist. 

Recent obituaries mentioned his last novel, That Little Thread (Greenwich Exchange, 2023), thought it sounded worth a go and was proved right. Peter Simpson, Professor at a Midlands university, is approached by a 'wide boy' who had been the unlikely father of a child born to 'Paddy', a star student from twenty years earlier who left before graduating and reportedly died during childbirth. And thus we are on the trail of what really happened.

One might think a novel about middle class academic life written by one such could be a bit self-contained and there are larger concerns beyond its limited milieu but they have lives like anybody else and the fact that theirs is based around writing essays in pursuit of a certificate shouldn't detract from its potential too much.

It's a steady, good book done by one who had done it before and knows how to. It brought to mind Jane Jarmain who is the similarly brilliant, tragically early casualty in Sean O'Brien's Afterlife and perhaps there are comparisons to be made beginning with that motif. 

The future of thge novel is perenially in question but there's no shortage of them. The problem might be that Finnegans Wake seemed to have knocked the ball out of the ground once and for all but, like Theodore Adorno's dictum that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, there still was. 

Further novels by Lucas might well be on their way here soon. 

--

The disc Allusions and Beyond by Piano Dup Takahashi-Lehmann arrived with its 2.33 of the Bach/Kurtag Gottes Zeit from Cantata BWV 106. Two further such miniatures follow it without achieving the same stillness.

Before them, an arrangement for four hands of Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 is worth having although for once perhaps the very familiar orchestral original is difficult to improve on.

Although I can see how an album or programme can benefit from contrasts, I think I prefer discs that are 'more of the same'. The shift into Bernd Alois Zimmerman's 'Monologe' takes us immediately faraway when we might not be ready to go. If it's philistine not to find its modernist plink, plonk and crash intellectually invigorating then it must be the effect of time increasingly putting a cap on my sympathies for the avant garde. Having been there and done that, I don't feel much need to go back. And then the Brahms Haydn Variations come as some relief but it turns out to have been a disc mainly bought for 2.33 of outrageous charm.

--

Not dissimilar to the Lucas book is Vernon Scannell's Feminine Endings (Enitharmon, 2000), a set piece of the contemporary poetry world all about a residential poetry course. One of the tutor poets is older, male and traditional, the other is female and more challenging. The marital situation of the hosts is becoming fragile as are some of the paying guests, one of who is taking a lot of interest in news reports about the latest woman found murdered. And the premises where it all takes place with readings and writings of poems is haunted.

For all the ready-made humour to be found in the poetry world and the forseeable attitudes and opinions of those involved, it's a neat book encompassing more than might have been expected ot it and Scannell gets it right. It's fairly clear where he stands, that he is more or less Gordon Napier, brought in as a last-minute, stopgap replacement for the indisposed Brian MacDuff, who is presumably George MacBeth.

Some of the poets mentioned are fictitional but most of the poems are real. I don't think it's obvious who Gabriella Cornwell is which is a good thing because it might be actionable but at least she wins a major, international prize for her opaque efforts. It could be used as a text to introduce the poetry of its time and might yet be if I pursue the recently occuring idea to do something about the 1990's which, whether or not it did at the time, looks like a Golden Age by now.