Tianyang Han in Chichester

 Tianyang Han, Chichester Cathedral, June 23

In the bleak midsummer, the heat might make some moan. Reluctant to though I am, I am not alone. Thus an hour in the relative cool of the Chichester nave is as welcome as those precious moments standing under a Tesco air-conditioning unit, even more so given a soundtrack much preferable to what they usually play. 

A significant part of the greatness of Brahms is tucked away in the late chamber music like the op. 118 Klavierstücke. It's not often that a programme begins with its highlight but the second of the six immediately provided the best tune, judiciously played, in all its teneramente consolation. 

The third and fourth are an excursion into quicker tempi before a return to contemplation in a possibly night-time Romanze and the luminous light-touch in the final Andante. 

More deliberately 'poetic' and descriptive, as explained in its title, one of the 24 Debussy Preludes evoked how The sounds and fragrances swirl through the evening air where it might have benefitted from leaving interpretation to the listener and I'd have found in it an unsettled but not restless subconscious. Then another of them, Minstrels, was rhythmically more various, more modern and short.

Three of the Six Rachmaninov Moments Musicaux then made me wonder if the Brahms was such a shoo-in for top billing. Not for the first time, Rachmaninov excels in live performance in the right hands, some way above where I'd rate him as a composer.

The No. 2 Allegretto burst into a swelling downpour of notes and suddenly revealed an entirely other side of Tianyang's virtuosity after the earlier subtleties. No. 3 was a solemn Andante cantabile before the Presto No. 4 was driven by a powerful left hand with torrents and drama in the right. Two people sitting next to me- who possibly knew her- lured me into a standing ovation almost by osmosis but I was easily persuaded after the programme had grown so impressively in its 45 minutes or so.

What I do on a regular basis at these events is report on them. It's journalism. Some generous types call it reviewing but I do it to celebrate rather than judge and I'd draw the line well before being raised to the level of critic. There have been one or two occasions when I'd prefer not to say anything and so haven't but I'm regularly made uncharacteristically Panglossian in the manner of Candide by the majority of music events. Almost optimistic enough to want to read Leibniz. But, as far as these frail critical faculties allow, I'm prepared to estimate that Tianyang was above the customary high standard of technique and musicianship and is one to follow.

And that makes for a good place to rest from jabbing at my own keyboard for a while. If the concerts aren't quite over before the dog days of summer, the reviewing probably is. We can but look forward to September when Autumn is ycumen in.  

Danny Driver at the Menuhin Room

 Danny Driver, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, June 20

Danny Driver is a regular performer at Wigmore Hall so his return to the Menuhin Room, Portsmouth's answer to it, must have made him feel reasonably at home. 

Medtner's Second Improvisation, op. 47, is fifteen variations on a theme that come usefully with titles that both help the listener navigate their way through and provide clues as to what is being depicted. Thus, the haunting stillness of the Song of the Water-nymph was followed by flighty Winged Dances, the reveries of Enchantment, the reverberations of the Roar of the Crowd and the mysterious In the Forest. Comparisons might be made with his contemporary compatriot, Rachmaninov, but he's not so lush or self-indulgent. In an gripping realization of the final movements, Danny sustained the last note of the Storm into the conclusion where one could hardly help but hear what was surely a pointed inversion of Beethoven's 'fate motif' left wide open to one's choice of interpretation, if such it is.

Alert to all aspects of performance, Danny commented on how the intimacy of the venue made for a shared experience as he was aware of the audience involvement, something that was confirmed by some rare standing ovation at the end. The discerning clientele there don't give away such accolades lightly.

Beethoven's Sonata, op.111, was the last of his 32. The abrupt fortes of the Maestoso were followed by dash and dazzle although my approximate timing suggested Danny took nothing off the 26 minutes of the Stephen Kovacevich recording and might have been a fraction longer. The Adagio was in part slow dance and had passages of sustained exuberance but is dominated by a feeling of transcendence, of last words that were intended as the culmination of the vast cycle even if he was nowhere near the end of his life. Alfred Brendel said, 'what is to be expressed here is distilled experience' and one has a sense of being refined beyond existence, a profoundness that perhaps nobody does like Beethoven did in a handful of mostly 'later' works. Portsmouth is unlikely to witness it played with any more gentle authority and not many other places will either.

If that was Beethoven's farewell to the piano sonata after such a great and ground-breaking contribution then we might use the hyperbole of a comparison with the occasion of Andrew McVittie's similar farewell to the Menuhin Room Series in the hope and belief that it is not quite as final as Beethoven's was. It was noted that it is taking a committee of three to succeed him. While he will be missed, he won't be gone entirely and the Series resumes in the Autumn on the fourth Saturday of each month.

  

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 and 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.

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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.  

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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.