I'm pleased about it, of course, but I would have been more pleased about it a few more years ago when I still thought it meant anything, before it dawned on me that sport is just a circus and started to feel only pity for those who are 'passionate' about it.Nottinghamshire, of who I am a nominal supporter, won the T20 on Saturday, to add it to the 50-over cup they've already won and the second division championship they've bossed all season. So that's all three of the competitions they were in. Great.
In both the semi-final and the final they dragged convincing wins from disadvantageous positions and it made for a roller-coaster day that ended happily. Well done, lads, give my regaards to Radford Road.
But I couldn't find on the Paddy Power website where to back them @ 7/4 to win it outright so I didn't, although I would have, and the horse I backed at Newton Abbot was clear and only had to jump the last when he made a calamity of a mistake, came to a standstill, Noel Fehily did well to stay on but it was too late. And that is all that sport is for nowadays, which might seem cynical but I'm not sure that Notts did it for me and so I'm no more than vaguely attached to their success by some vestige of emotion.
Whereas art is the opposite of that. I'm aware that Simon Rattle and Pandit Budhaditya Mukherjee were handsomely rewarded for their efforts at the Proms and didn't have me specifically in mind as they performed Gurreleider and Raga Bihag respectively, and what they did was similarly dependent on displaying a high level of technical prowess. Although, yes, Rattle does just move his arms about in front of the band. But last night was the best night's telly we are going to get this year, two Proms I'd heard already but were much enhanced by seeing them having only previously heard them. There's more to music than what it sounds like.Schoenberg's epic song cycle is the very height of late Romanticism, which doesn't sound like an advert for it but it might be more so if the others one thinks of as such - Mahler, who is let off with a mild rebuke, but Bruckner and Wagner who are guilty as charged - weren't the first to come to mind.
Immediately one is on Amazon looking at the options until one sees there's one of those 5-disc Warner Bros. sets at bargain price, Simon Rattle, the Second Viennese School. That'll do.
So, there's no need to explain to readers of this highbrow website who were the composers of the second Viennese School but you don't hear so much about the first. Oh, I see. That was Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and some say Schubert. It's no wonder you never hear about the First Viennese School, they don't need such billing. They were Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and some say Schubert. It's like the poetry of the 1950's, Philip Larkin and the Movement. Larkin doesn't need The Movement to make him sound significant, it's the others who wouldn't have been in a movement unless he'd been there to define it. But there was no movement. Nobody who was said to be in it either thought they were or wanted to be. Maybe John Wain did, I don't know.
But what is there to do about the timelessness of the Mukherjee performance. Indian classical music seems to have no need of movements or 'late romantics'. The artist remains the servant of the form, maybe it never felt the need to break out of the discipline and they don't seem to make the distinction between composer and musician that came about, probably, with Romanticism where personality emerged and subjugated art to its confessional needs.
The performance is there, then gone forever having conjured forever from somewhere and will be different next time. It's difficult to get used to in a Western tradition that values classic performances and authoritative texts and interpretations. That Prom would probably have been the Event of the Year had I been there but getting home from the Albert Hall after midnight isn't on, I've just about promised the Event of the Year to the Welsh Championship 12 Hour and although I gave it to Chic at Glastonbury not long ago in a not very good year for events, it's a very sad thing to give such an accolade to something you saw on the telly.