Today's Times Crossword Guesses

Florilegium

Florilegium, Third Floor Arts Centre, Portsmouth Library, March 28th.

The studio facility that is the Third Floor Arts Centre has always been an intimate venue and versatile enough to be arranged in several different ways. The stage can be used as a stage or as a raised section of seating if the performance is in the centre of the space and I've seen plays done facing the other way, too. It's rarely been as intimate as this, though, with four musicians surrounded by audience 'in the round' and the nearest one to me being, what, three yards away. None of the audience were much more than ten yards from their nearest musician. And they played in the opposite formation in the second half so that everybody got the reverse angle view.
The baroque flute, violin, viola da gamba and harpsichord line-up might lead one to expect the flute to be the principal instrument but it was by no means all about the flute. Bojan Cicic was a superb foil on violin and Reiko Ichise on viola da gamba was much more than a continuo player.
In fact, in the opening Telemann Paris Quartet no. 7, she was busier than anyone with me glad to be able to see her fingerwork from my vantage point. With 7 strings to reach across on a wide neck,  it was hugely impressive work. The piece has the instruments in constant exchange of themes, its interplay both quite complex but light in tone and if this hadn't been bettered all night then I wouldn't have minded.
The C.P.E. Bach Trio Sonata Wq 14 was allegedly more aesthetically adventurous, 'striving towards irrationality'. It was perhaps not quite as flowing as the Telemann but I can't quite accept that Emmanuel was inventing Romanticism in some flagrant disregard of orderly virtue. Especially not when John Eliot Gardiner's book last year seemed to be trying to make a case for J.S. Bach to be a comparable rebel figure to Beethoven before the fact.
Each of the group took a turn in explaining their instrument and something about the music they were playing as they went along. Open, informative and informal, they are very likeable, as was the other piece in the first half, Leclair's Deuxieme Recreation, op.8, written by the famous French violin virtuoso of his day and with flourishes to prove it.
I was pleased to get my Messiah programme signed by James Bowman recently and equally glad that Reiko was kind enough to sign this week's for me in Japanese, which is the first Japanese autograph I've ever asked for. She was rapidly becoming a new favourite of mine.

Terence Charlston appeared on his own to begin the second half, explaining both his harpsichord and something of Bach's Musical Offering. So first he played the Ricercar a 3 before being joined by the others for the Trio Sonata. In a programme that was virtually made exclusively of highlights, this had it all going on in all parts. One of Bach's most involved pieces, it is a labyrinthine excursion in astonishingly compact form. I had the Harnoncourt disc of it for Christmas which has perhaps seemed a bit academic to me so far but I can return to it with renewed enthusiasm having been so close to this performance.
But next was Marin Marais with the piece used in the film Tous les Matins du Monde, a big favourite and superbly delivered here with Bojan's violin and Reiko's viola da gamba joyfully playful and achingly expressive. This was not the earliest piece, written in 1723 - that was still to come, but we were provided with bookends of perhaps the greatest 25 years in the history of Western music, from this to The Musical Offering and an idea of how it developed. Just to label it all as 'baroque' doesn't seem to allow sufficient differentiation any more.
Rebel's Caracteres de la Danse was a quick-fire set of tunes. Each of these instruments had a marvellous tone throughout, whether entirely from their own innate qualities or the way they were played- and I strongly suspect the first depends on the second, but their clarity was never more evident than in the very, very vivace dances at the end.
It was a special concert and no surprise when the group decided an encore was justified by the enthusiastic reaction and it was an arrangement of a Scottish folk song by Francesco Barsanti, a flautist who came to Britain and died in 1770. No, I'd never heard of him either but I was glad he went to the trouble to jot this little number down.
Florilegium would appear to be flautist, Ashley Solomon's project if ownership has to be allocated but the great thing is how much it is not all about the flute but very much an ensemble with all four having starring roles. I adored them.
There are people in the office where I work who are thrilled to have tickets to see Kylie Minogue in the O2 later this year and good luck to them.

View from the Boundary

I wonder if this is the last View from the Boundary that I'll do. Not that I have any plans to curtail these miscellanies of sundry thoughts but it's not an original title, it only started with a photograph taken at Arundel a few years ago and perhaps I ought to have a title all of my own rather than a borrowed one. I don't have an idea for a new title yet but I'll give it some consideration.
I'm also aware that The Perfect Murder and Walking on Water are titles that have been used before, too, but I'm not quite so concerned about that. Donald Davie wrote of poetry not avoiding cliche but re-making it. I was only saying earlier this week that I'd never put it in writing or say so in a serious way but here it is already - both of those titles refer metaphorically to poetry itself, in the way that there is no such thing as 'the perfect murder' and in my poem  there is no corpse to be found, there is only rumour. Like the way that poetry might bring something vividly to life that isn't really there- it is only words. And 'walking on water' is a miracle, something that can't happen but poetry seems to attempt the impossible. In that poem, the water could be walked on because it was frozen solid and thus poetry does something with language that might not otherwise be possible.
And now you can see why I never intended to express such dubious tosh in anything but casual conversation.
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And I wonder how many times it is possible to watch episodes of a situation comedy before one turns down the opportunity. How many hours has the UK Gold channel cost me because if Fawlty Towers or Blackadder is on then it is difficult not to watch them. I've surely seen some episodes twenty times.
Early Doors has been on late at night recently and BBC4 has been showing Ever Decreasing Circles. Which does rather prompt the inevitable list of TOP 10 Sitcoms.
For me, the list has to begin with those first two, Fawlty Towers and Blackadder as paragon examples of character, plot, acting and for passing into the language as phrases and lines from Shakespeare have so abundantly done. The Office will always be there to remind us that Ricky Gervais was a genius once and Dad's Army hangs on in after all these years, not only for all the requisite criteria but for the inversion of English class in Cpt. Mainwaring and Sgt. Wilson and especially a tremendous episode shown again a few weeks ago in which the platoon have to try to retrieve a lost item from a coffin and the sequence of frights that it causes.
The brilliant deadpan writing of Craig Cash and his co-authors in The Royle Family and Early Doors make those essential and, for longevity that kept delivering classic moments, one can't leave out Only Fools and Horses.
Steptoe and Son was a marvellously claustrophic set piece reasonant of Sartrean themes of 'l'enfer, c'est les autres' and the inability to escape selfhood.  Which leaves two places which, if they count, would have to go to Michael Palin's Ripping Yarns and The Simpsons but perhaps they don't count and so we could have Hancock, Sykes, Bilko, Men Behaving Badly, Not Going Out and possibly Yes, Minister but personally I'm having George and Mildred and, in a stalwart act of defiance against political correctness, a celebration of a golden age and in honour of the great Bob Grant, On the Buses.
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And, as the year has already got underway with a tremendous Messiah and next Friday brings Florilegium to play Bach's Musical Offering, amongst other things, in Portsmouth, it is time to plan it out in terms of cultural events. I'm afraid the Swindon Literature Festival has dropped off my schedule these last few years because their booking of a couple of big name poets each year has given way to the inevitable and they can fill the auditorium more easily with better known media figures, people who are regularly on television really. And that is a great pity.

View from the Boundary

The aftermath of Cheltenham 2014, with the defeat of Annie Power followed by Day 4 full of outsiders winning, will be a verdict in favour of the bookmakers. Personally, I got out in one piece after the dreadful luck in running suffered by The New One which threatened to ruin my week completely. But next year I wouldn't be surprised to see protest outside by the Jockeys Protection League because the injuries sustained by so many top names was starting to get out of hand. The case of Daryl Jacob was one of astonishing near misses, a high and then a new low.
But we take The New One to Aintree and can feel he has every right to return to the Champion Hurdle next year as favourite even if one can never get paid out as the rightful winner this year.
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A major achievement for me during the week was some sorting out of my untidy house. Not that a tidy person visiting would think much of it but one needed to have seen it beforehand to appreciate any improvement. I don't know if I quite gathered every CD into some sort of order but it was long overdue that some new organising theme was put in place. And so for the time being here there are roughly 160 albums lined up in an approximation of chronological order in the Music category, which in this house is what Amazon mean by Classical. What Amazon mean by Music is called Pop here.
We see the line disappearing back in time from the recent collection of pieces by contemporary composers based on paintings by Munch to the Gregorian Chant albums from Pluscarden Abbey and a disc of Compline that admittedly doesn't get played much. But so few do and I hardly think 160 is excessive. I came to Compact Discs relatively late and have a number of LPs and cassettes as well. But looking over the assembled line-up, without claiming that it represents anything like a sensible overview of nearly 1000 years of Western music, it does look like a genuine reflection of my subjective appreciation of it with the Buxtehude/Bach axis supported by Handel, Vivaldi and a few Spem in Alium's.
My list-making project has proceeded irregularly as I have added a few pieces towards my 100 every few days. It might yet get finished one day but the unevenness that lists a four-minute piece alongside a two-hour oratorio is going to make it an odd selection.
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And what a fine thing Middlemarch has been during a week off. George Eliot's prose, of course, leaves no issue unexplored in its 900 pages but is not only wonderfully clear and reasonable but full of acute observations of character and humanity. Some of the idiom and usage looks surprisingly of our time for something written 160 years ago and her use of 'cool' in one place didn't look far away from how we use it now.
It was quite honestly wasted on me aged 18 or 19. I knew it was good then but didn't really have the dedication to engage with it sufficiently. Unfortunately on the Victorian Lit course at Lancaster then I don't remember being given much option but to write an essay on Vanity Fair which was most unfortunate. And if there was a choice and that is what I chose then the other option must have been horrific. I think my other essay on that course was on Matthew Arnold. I just think I could have done better given a bit more leeway on the first subject.
However, I don't want to go back and do it again. All those essays being written in all those universities up and down the country, all over the world. It makes me shudder to think. It wasn't perhaps quite so bad in my day when it seemed the tutor was trusted to assess what they thought and appended a few comments and put '63' and then crossed it out and wrote '62'. A friend of mine met the English Department head at the squash courts once.
He said, 'Oh, I didn't know you played. Perhaps we should have a game sometime.'
'Yes, okay. Are you any good?'
'No, not really. 56, 57.'
After which my mate thought, 'hang on a minute, that's what you gave me for my essay last week'.

But now one gets the impression that it all has to be done in a standardized way with as much value given to the format of footnotes, essay plan and adherence to an ideal of academic commodification as any actual insight or critique. Not that many students are likely to come up with genuine new insights or critique anyway. I'm not sure what it is going to lead to but it looks a bit prescriptive, in line with so much of the way organisations work, the way consultants like things done. I can see that it might help the less able produce something better than they otherwise might but I can also see how it might make the most able want to pack it up and do something else instead.
Education has long seemed a slightly sinister word but it didn't seem the least bit dubious when Linden Huddlestone introduced us to James Joyce circa 1976.

Susan Lodge - Only a Hero Will Do

Susan Lodge, Only a Hero Will Do (Musa Publishing)

It can be a distraction reading the work of someone you know. My uncle published a novel and my father wrote a short one and so I'm familiar with the question of whether one is being extra critical or overly sympathetic and also not being able to avoid noticing elements that you think you know where they took them from. It is much to Sue Lodge's credit that the story took over from such diverting issues at an early stage and I was happily involved without too much double think.
Set in 1810, we are very conscious of period language and etiquette. We would be, anyway, from Jane Austen but I took time out from re-reading Middlemarch to read this and so was already most of the way there. Whereas Middlemarch is set twenty years later, it was written over 150 years earlier and is different in temper, length and scope. However, they both have at their centre the issue of a young lady's ideal marriage partner. Hetty Avebury here is nothing like Dorothea Brooke but our concern is with their respective marriage prospects and the reader is likely to be on their side.
Only a Hero Will Do is vividly written and particularly strong on character. We are immersed into a world of rapscalions, popinjays, hoydens, strumpets and bombazine and I found out what an abigail was by necessarily looking it up.
As a Regency Romance, there is plenty of frisson with skin tingling and rippling as two people  demurely attracted to each other come into close proximity. In the first half of the novel, Dr. Robert has to examine Hetty at least three times. But the plot moves on at a pace with some ingenious devices and cleverly realized episodes. That Hetty's friend Dan Dickens happens to be on the same boat that she is shanghai'd onto is one of those things that just might happen but whether the gifted cardsharp could really lose and carry on losing to a pack of marked cards stretches credibility a little bit. None of which is of great detriment to the story because Thomas Hardy often relied on more surprising effects of fate and so more recently did Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch.
Though Hetty's bethrothed, Stark, is a bad-tempered bully, he is a buffoon but in the second half of the story, Anthony is a more ruthless and formidable villain. The book almost divides on a hinge where one is replaced by the other as the main suitor in pursuit not so much of her but her inheritance. She is a spirited an immensely likeable character but even her resourcefulness wouldn't be enough without the hero that we know from the start she will eventually marry.
However, that isn't before some cliff-hanging, page-turning adventures, several desperate scrapes, injuries and a large helping of derring-do. It is genre fiction but a fine example of it and enjoyable for the zest and energy of its writing as well as its gripping plot.
It is a ripping yarn in the finest tradition and those who enjoy it will be glad to find that Susan Lodge has written others and is likely to write more.

Shakespeare, a biography

The next meeting of the Portsmouth Poetry Society is on 'monologues'.

I wasn't sure if I had anything to contribute until realizing that it might be fun to do Stanley Holloway's The Lion and Albert and also perhaps a work by the great C20th poet, Hill. Not Geoffrey, though, Benny. I mean Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West).

But then I find that the other night, in an extended state of gin & tonic, I seem to have written this on a subject I cannot help but return to from time to time.

Shakespeare- a biography 

There are many so-called facts that some people believe

About the life of Shakespeare but please don’t be deceived.

They say he died on his birthday, April 23^rd

But that’s not very likely and is just short of absurd. 

Some say he didn’t even write the stuff his name is on.

Who was it, then. Not Marlowe, Oxford or Francis Bacon.

Marlowe was obviously dead by 1593

And so unlikely to have written Hamlet while hiding in Italy. 

It couldn’t have been Oxford. I’ve seen some of his work.

Something as good as Macbeth was well beyond his mark.

And Bacon was so busy as a government bureaucrat

That although nearly clever enough he couldn’t have done that. 

I’m sorry but the doubters are by now out of ideas.

I’m afraid they need to face up to their innermost fears,

That genius comes from anywhere, not just the upper class,

It wasn’t even a miracle, just something that came to pass. 

Some think that he was happily long married to Ann,

Well, technically, he might have been, having fathered Susanne,

But he was out of Stratford as soon he could after that

And not even heterosexual, much, with aristocrats. 

One thing nobody’s noticed, apart from my mate Tim,

Is that the twins attributed were not fathered by him.

Hamnet and Judith’s names commemorated the fact

That they came about due to an extra-marital act.

And Will’s will left to Ann the famous second best bed.

Nobody knows what that meant, it is just what the will said.

It might have meant he didn’t love her or he might have meant he did.

Some people think they’ve solved the puzzle but, Heaven Forbid, 

Is it not best that we don’t know, and not even how he died,

Because many want to explain and many have tried,

Which might or might not have been after drinking with some friends,

But nobody really knows exactly how the story ends.

 

Messiah in Portsmouth

Messiah, Catherine Bott, James Bowman, Cappelle Baroque Orchestra, Portsmouth Cathedral Choir, Cantate, Cathedral Consort/David Price, Portsmouth Cathedral, March 8th

My first published review, I reckon, was of Messiah, a school production, nearly 40 years ago and appeared in the Gloucester Citizen. The young music afficianado, keen watcher of Face the Music, devoted to Beethoven mainly in those days, is still at it and rarely has been more glad of it than on an evening such as this.
As soon as I saw James Bowman was in town it became top priority to make sure of a ticket. The only sorry part of the story is how I didn't quite think it through and chose to sit on the side where the tenor and bass were (and were tremendous) rather than by the violins and soprano and alto. Otherwise I'd have been only a few feet away from the singer on two of my very favourite CD's, his Couperin and Pergolesi.
I had described Michael Rangeley's conducting as 'succinct' in the 1970's, and Jean Alington leading the violins as 'valiant'. Here, David Price was more understated than that for most of the time and Sophie Barber was impressively lively. Well, you need to be in Handel's most exhilarating passages. But you notice how little there is for the soloists to do from time to time. Andrew King's tenor filled the cathedral with a wonderful tone early on but we didn't hear from him again before half time. Edward Ballard's baroque bass was also hugely to be enjoyed. But if we thought we were having a treat by the interval then, of course, Handel has paced himself and it only gets better.
Messiah is over two hours long but there's never a dull moment and it doesn't seem like it. James Bowman's gentle He was despised is soon followed by the great chorus All we like sheep -and the choir made a glorious sound in the higher reaches throughout; the message soon got round the audience that, yes, we stand up for the Hallelujah chorus which was most invigorating and got its own round of applause before Catherine Bott delivered a further highlight in I know that my redeemer liveth but, having gathered momentum throughout and celebrated with The trumpet shall sound, David Price drove the ensemble to more powerful heights with the finale in Worthy is the Lamb  and the Amen.
It is strange, isn't it, that the two greatest musicians were born in the same year and in the same country but seem to be such different characters. Not suffering fools gladly appears to be one thing they had in common but perhaps that's about it. Handel is Bach but more flash, not that Bach lacked any of that, but Handel polished and brightened the thing until it gleamed and sparkled with its own light. This fine performance revealed all of that from the clarity in some excellent string playing, the burnished trumpets and all of the well-organised choir crisp and triumphant.
I was lucky enough to be able to seize the chance of getting an autograph from James Bowman and having the honour of telling him that his Couperin disc is my very favourite. Not all music fans get the opportunity to do that. I can't think of anyone I'd rather have said it to about any other disc. And then on my way back to the bus stop, I picked up a pound coin from the pavement.
It really was quite a night.

The Society of Strange and Ancient Instruments

The Society of Strange and Ancient Instruments, The Ministry of Angels (Taith Records)

http://strangeandancientinstruments.com/index.html

Last week's Early Music Show featured this admirable project with their hurdy-gurdy, dulcimer, harps, oud, bass viol and perhaps most spectacularly, nykelharpa, an instrument that needs to be seen as well as heard for a full appreciation.
This CD, available direct from the Society themselves, which possibly means herself, begins with a shrill, defiant driving out of Satan before resorting to more easy going merry-making.
The music isn't so strange to anyone with some experience of medieval tunes and a bit of folk tradition.  It inhabits a world whose cosmology is explained in the cover diagram with the four elements leading out from terra, through the moon and planets to angels, archangels and cherubims and seraphims and who's to say that's not what happens.
The first major highlight is the setting of the poem El Recer Del Vol Dispers, a song that pre-echoes  fado music with its,
You scattered birds who have flown,
beyond the sky where my fantasy is lost, 

and has a memorable harp embellishment. There is a pervasive feel of the Mediterranean in much of this repertoire. The Corelli Follia is the first of only two representative pieces here from the variety of arrangements of baroque pieces made for their instruments. More of these were featured on the radio programme and might possibly be made more readily available on a further disc, one might hope. This disc was made possible by subscription. For such a self-sufficient, uncontracted approach, it is of tremendous quality in playing, sound quality and production values.
The Personent hodie, published in 1582, is a 'Latin song telling of the birth of Christ', and I'm sure I ought to be able to place the hymn tune it reminds me of. It emerges from a shivering breath of chill wind played over the hurdy gurdy drone and grows steadily to an end that is both impressive and mysterious.
But it is the nykelharpa, of all the instruments, for all its weird contrivance, that stands out. You wouldn't think that something that looks so hard to play would sound so natural.  I don't know if I'm supposed to hear in Belle  qui tiens ma vie 'All Glory, Laud and Honour to thee, Redeemer King' but it is there, I'm sure.
Just the very smallest of minus marks is that with the capacity of a website to provide a CD booklet, it might have contained all the words rather than just those to one track, although that one is the one you'd prefer to have.
Francois Francoeur's Rondeau returns us to the C18th with an exquisite sample of music from the court of Louis XV. And then we are led through more 'trad' to perhaps the most involved construction as the climax with its loose-sounding renaissance guitar, percussion, hurdy gurdy et al apparently bringing together elements of Steeleye Span, Tyrannosaurus Rex and possibly Indian music (it's none of them but one can hear them) into a chant that becomes anthemic and ends with a flourish.
It is a wonderful album, and improves with more listening, getting more out of this sort of music than I previously thought was there. I hope they come to play somewhere near me one day.