Top 6 Tributes

In another edition of our occasional parlour game this evening, it's a specific kind of tribute that I'm looking for. The strict qualification is that the author and subject must both be fully vetted, approved and endorsed as personal favourites and the work must be worthy, too.
For example, most of Ian McEwan's books are upstairs so he's in, Hamlet is the piece in any genre I've seen most often and is obvious but Nutshell was ingenious but not really McEwan's best work, I didn't think, so it's not in.
The idea came from being prompted to go back to Sean O'Brien's The Drowned Book in which his poem celebrating Thom Gunn appeared. That captured the spirit of the poet, one of the ways he was set apart from others, and that suggested my theme.
Josquin Desprez is the poster boy of renaissance polyphony and a major, miniature masterpiece is the Deploration sur la mort de Johannes Ockeghem, the most plangent and immediately heart-breaking thing one is ever likely to hear, with Ockeghem plenty respected enough not to be merely endorsed by being allowed in on Josquin's coat-tails. I worry that such heartbreak is quite so gorgeous. It shouldn't be, should it. It should leave you without answer, but us aesthetic types, we worry less about such things in our comfortable chairs. We prefer to beautify pain and enjoy it.
Anybody of my generation needs to have David Bowie automatically on any roll call of essential artists and The Velvet Underground occupy a position all of their own in my pantheon of pop idols so Queen Bitch, David's pastiche on the work of Lou, walks confidently into this selection.
Errollyn Wallen gained a position something like my favourite living composer a couple of years ago and her use of Purcell's lament in Dido & Aeneas in making In Earth is one of the many and varied things that make her so, with Purcell more than qualified by being a candidate for England's greatest ever composer.
Julian Barnes has eased his way to eminence as England's finest fiction writer, for me, in recent years and The Noise of Time, his compelling account of the local difficulties encountered by Shostakovich in Stalin's Soviet Union, provides us with a novel. Shostakovich, with special reference to the string quartets, has been a hero since I was a teenager and it's only the forbidding challenge of his vast symphonies that prevent him from being the natural choice of greatest C20th composer. That is, my only doubt comes from the fact they seem too big for me. But, blimey, Shostakovich. First name on the team sheet, almost.
So, I'm left needing a painting, if only to establish the breadth of my catholic, liberal and all-encompassing height of good taste. I'm not sure if anybody is cited in Vermeer's paintings beyond a back view of himself. But here comes Maggi when you need her. Maggi Hambling, for who the honour of 'national treasure' would be kept specially for had it not been handed out quite so rashly once the phrase had become an easy, devalued compliment. Max Wall, George Melly, even Amanda Barrie are much admired subjects of hers but not strictly on any list of people I consider my own. Oh, but Stephen Fry, like Hamlet or Bowie, surely belongs to all of us.
So, there's 6 and I don't think I can improve on them much for further thought.

Cover versions kept springing to mind but that's a different game. We can save that for later.
     

G

The best sport result there's been for quite some time.

This Week's TLS Crossword Solution

While the motivation for posting completed crosswords once in a while is to appear a smartarse it has to be said that this one more than most demonstrates ability as an internet researcher more than as a literary know-all.

Rain

Continuing our very occasional series of photographs taken to represent poems. It was a glorious thing to wake up to the sound of rain this morning.
Among any amount of others, it brought to mind Edward Thomas and Don Paterson, in particular,

I love all films that start with rain

Thank heavens for it, and for Don's poem. It's a shame I have to read 732 pages of The Poem in order to fully appreciate every potential aspect of it.
This series does not extend to pop songs and so the picture does not represent Bus Stop by The Hollies.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

I have to monitor how far up the index items called Oh, Babe, What Would You Say get. It will never be top because they are nearly all also tagged 'music' but I worry that some innocent web-enquirer will google the title to find out who sang the masterpiece and be presented with five pagesof results directing them to David Green Books. It is Google's problem more than mine but I worry because I know, deep down, that everything is my fault.
It was Hurricane Smith. And, yes, it might be about time I started calling it Don't Let It Die.
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Readers glued to this channel for updates will be thrilled to know I've found a fourth work by an artist I can count as a favourite written with reference to another. Errollyn Wallen, a huge favourite, made In Earth from a favourite of hers, Purcell's Dido & Aeneas, and Purcell is close enough for me especially when the work in question has the magnificence required to qualify it on a third requirement, that it's any good. I might have five if we can have Ian McEwan's Nutshell, based imaginatively on Hamlet. It is not in McEwan's favour that although he is a favourite, he's not quite enough of a favourite for me not to have to check how to spell his name but Sweet Tooth, On Chesil Beach, Atonement, what can you do. And I know Hamlet as word perfectly as do any body of literature which means it feels as if I do but actually, I'm hopeless at it. The problem with Nutshell is that it was an elaborate trope, or some such thing, and might not be good enough to put alongside the masterpieces of the others in the final Top 6. We will see.
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Oh, and there's Alex Johnson's A Book of Book Lists reviewed in the TLS. I wish the TLS would try to keep up. Alex was a guest here ages ago on the back of that book. I'll tell you how long ago it was, the situation regarding the UK leaving the EU was in a state of utter confusion and bemusement at the time. That's how long ago it was.
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But the BBC Music magazine in W.H. Smith's today offered a disc of Ravel plus string quartets by Haydn and Mendelssohn. There is no other reason to go into W.H. Smith's, once a respected bookseller where I bought my copy of Ulysses - try asking their staff for a copy now. So I had it because however extensive my collection of discs becomes, it's unlikely to have the complete Haydn or Mendelssohn string quartets so I'll pick up bits and pieces from time to time.
Which is immediately contradicted by my prize possession being the Complete Works of Buxtehude by Ton Koopman and so surely I need never buy another Buxtehude disc again. Oh, but one does. Paul Riley provides a heart-stopping review of Abendmusik by Vox Luminis. He could have had a more lucrative career as a second-hand car salesman if he could talk you into buying a reliable runner the way he sold me that Buxtehude.
And so I must go and order that. I could sit here all night churning out the wordage but the skinflint Danny Baker only does his two hours on a Saturday morning, and it's not two hours, is it. So, why should I.
 

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

The Proms, or those chosen to be televised, hit their stride impressively on Sunday night with Bertrand Chamayou's thrilling Mendelssohn Piano Concerto. It was hard to believe that was twenty minutes - and maybe it wasn't- but one has better things to do than clock watch on such occasions. Dear, oh, dear. Quite honestly, I didn't even know there were Mendelssohn Piano Concertos because one always goes for the famous violin one but I know now.
And it was good to hear Clemency describe Mendelssohn as a 'giant'. Of course he was, as much if not more so than Schumann, Liszt and Brahms. I usually bemoan the lack of credit he is accorded compared to some composers but it was me that was missing the point. There are such giants and then Bach, Mozart and Beethoven are something else. I'm glad we got that settled.
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And, in a moment of inspiration of my own, I solved the horse racing deficit at a stroke on Saturday.
The situation was that over 11 months I'd given back the meaty, beaty, big and bouncy profit I'd built up in the first half of 2017. I've become accustomed to not losing in recent years and decided that I wasn't going to work only to transfer the proceeds to Paddy Power. So I imposed a moritorium and it wasn't hard to do during the flat season although I knew the Skeltons were racking up winners without me in the summer jumping.
But I had a look on Saturday, the big race being the Summer Plate at Rasen. Hang on, I reckon I've got a clue here- More Buck's, been sold, moved stables, down in the handicap and has won since, Paddy going 12/1. I'll have that.
And now this year's deficit is cleared. And that, lds & gnlmn, is how to do it. Hang fire, wait, wait and wait a bit more until you think you know something. And then, bang.
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Another walk past the church at Warblington still didn't reveal the last resting place of the great Rosemary Tonks. I've been checking whenever I can but am starting to doubt if she's there. I will bother Neil Astley with the question once more when I have nerve because it isn't for me to cast doubt on the veracity of his introduction to Bedouin of the London Evening. We will see. In the meantime, I'm doing my best not to allow the gorgeous, louche and still elusive Rosemary to become an obsession.
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I'll do this instead- try to achieve a Top 6 of works by one of my especially favourite artists in tribute to another.
It begins with my colleague's healthy interest and good taste in poetry that led him to spend some of a minor windfall on Sean O'Brien's The Drowned Book. That is where Sean pays fitting tribute to Thom Gunn. I wondered how many other of my ackowledged 'heroes' are thus coupled.
There is Josquin des Prez with his Deploration, his gorgeous lament on the death of Ockeghem.
And there's David Bowie's acknowledgement of Lou Reed in Queen Bitch.
I'm sure I'll find some others. You'll be the first to know. 

I would stay in tonight but I don't know which book to read

Until page 121, I think it was, I was thinking Don Paterson's The Poem was possibly the best book I'd ever read. I thought about reviewing it in three stages because there's so much to say.
But I've not kept up the momentum and I'm wondering if it's not a book about linguistics or neuroscience in not a very good disguise.
I can see Venn diagrams and tabulations looming up in chapters far ahead. I'm a bit frightened and might prefer to just read Dover Beach instead without worrying about it,
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

I will battle on, though, who would valiant be in the face of what even the most illustrious and admirable see fit to do with poetry although this book, as much as any other, as complete and brilliant though it may be, compellingly makes the case for taking poetry out of universities.
I saw The Mystery of the Spiteful Letters by Enid Blyton in a charity shop window on Wednesday and went in and made it my own. It is a complete joy without even having to consider questions of irony or authorial intention. And the hero is called Fatty. Of course he is.

Byrd in the hands of Francois Couperin

Among the glories played by Peter Phillips in his recent late night accounts of Renaissance polyphony was Byrd's Civitas Sancti Sui from this Kings Singers album here. The Kings Singers' tone sounds softer and gentler than it might but the five minutes of the one track make it an album worth having for that on its own.
But wait, as the lament for the destruction of Jerusalem begins with,
Ierusalem desolata est,
surely that's the triosieme of Francois Couperin's Trois Lecons de Tenebres. I'd recognize it anywhere and do. But Byrd came first, by over a hundred years, so was my favourite piece of music lifted from somebody else. It's like finding that Zadok the Priest could have come from an Albinoni Oboe Concerto published two years earlier. I'm sure somebody else must have noticed but you get nowhere putting 'Byrd Civitas Couperin Tenebres' or any such thing  into Google. Couperin is likely to have known the Byrd setting, is he, through performance or publication rather than on disc or download. A musicologist with knowledge of this refined area would know- perhaps it's a standard refrain that turns up regularly and I'll be onto Tallis's Lamentations to see what he does in due course- but Peter Phillips wisely keeps his e-mail address off the Tallis Scholars' website so I can't bother him with my inane question.
Jerusalem was laid waste, it seems by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians, after a siege, in 587 BC. It's difficult to take sides but one would be generally against laying waste to the having been captured city. The piteous lament based on the book of Jeremiah has been tearing composers of choral music apart ever since but for me it began with Jordi Savall's soundtrack to the film Tous les Matins du Monde. Stop me if you've heard it all before.
The last time this music emerged mysteriously and unexpectedly was the Brodsky's playing Osvaldo Golijov's Tenebrae when I realized something was happening and when it arrived, realized what it was. There have been few more spine-tingling moments in music than that.
In this month's Gramophone, Lindsay Kemp reviews another new release of the Couperin describing the Lecons as 'achingly beautiful' and 'wondrous' which is no understatement but, having five recordings already- all justified by their differentiation- one wonders how many one needs when it is James Bowman and Michael Chance, the first known and thus best loved, I usually turn to. One feels the early onset of the debilitating madness of completism but Lindsay gives the new record full approval, there is still room for more of a very good thing and we may not be the young ones very long.

The Abandonment of Books

not, of course, the foregoing of reading or even, more deliciously, the pure joy provided by the written word, but the leaving to one side of a book before one's finished it whether or not it is to be resumed. In the event, it is usually not.
It can resemble the way that two-year-old form is always being surpassed as better horses appear through the summer season and favourites are summarily turned over because there's always something better turning up.
I think the first book I abandoned was My Childhood by Maxim Gorky, given to us by Linden Huddlestone in the third year at school. Grim, it seemed. And dull. I thought I'd take a punt, save myself the time reading it and if we had to write about it, just vaguely discourse about what I thought it would be like. Perhaps one day I'll go back to it and see what I missed.  The opposite happened in sixth form French when it turned out, in our first essay assignment on Gide's La Symphonie Pastorale, that I was the only one who had read it. Of course I'd read it, it was sensational.
In common with most people I didn't finish Proust or Stephen Hawking's subsequent account of time. One in search of it, the other apparently knowing what it is.
I read three chapters of Bleak House towards the week- yes, week- allocated to Dickens on the Victorian Literature course at university before deciding that something like The Clash supported by Mikey Dread was more important to me and I'd do Victorian Literature without reference to Dickens. That seems wrong but I came out with a 2:1; I never thought university education was all it was cracked up to be, I did try my best with Middlemarch and, having enjoyed a George Eliot year, the whole job lot, a little while ago, I think I might have had a point.
Books can be abandoned whenever you like. There's no shame in it. You are not compelled to stick with the programme. There is usually something better to do, which is usually a different book. It is not your fault, it's the book's. Or, more likely, you are not part of the demographic it was written for. I'm sure much of the pop music in the hit parade this week is brilliant. I wouldn't know. It isn't aimed at me. But I can talk you through the charts of 1971 like an Antiques Roadshow expert any time you like.
So, in the last few months, I abandoned the biography of Delmore Schwartz when something more pressing arrived; I read all but one of Matthew Klam's stories in Sam the Cat because that's how long it took me to admit I didn't like them; Ronnie Spector's Be My Baby can be usefully read in extracts and is not a literary thing so that doesn't count, and then Hideo Yokoyama's Six Four was filling time most congenially until the arrival of Don Paterson's The Poem. And that is a book that would elbow anything else out of the way.
I wouldn't dare abandon The Poem by Don Paterson. It would be like going to see the Taj Mahal, having a quick glance from the outside but not going inside. My notes on it are already copious and more than I need for anything I can use here.
The way to put an end to the abandonment of books is to only begin those that are essential. The problem is, of course, not knowing if they are until you are a little way in.  

Interview with Ivan Hovorun

photograph by Andrij Zelenyj

I am very pleased to introduce a special guest, the concert pianist, Ivan Hovorun. Before I ask him to explain himself, it is worth hearing him play Rachmanninov here,

Thanks for doing this, Ivan.

Your repertoire is mainly Romantic, isn’t it.

Yes, indeed, I feel most comfortable to live in the XIXth century because I can find more evidence about composer performance practice. It is quite difficult, in case XVII/XVIIIth century music, because preserved information may be applied differently, depends from many factors like available manuscripts, letters, instruments, performer/listener perception, and as well we have less chance to guess the composer’s intensions. With the composers of the XXIst century it is even more difficult, because most of them are not performers, and sometimes may hardly remember what they created several decades ago, and have no clear vision, how their own music supposed to be played.

Often people call me a Romantic pianist, But I treat the music like one line of music evolution process without measuring for Baroque, Classical, Romantic. When did the Classical period start? from which sound/note of which composer? Was Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Johann Christian Bach Baroque or Classical? Was Beethoven and Schubert Classical or Romantic? Somehow I feel that if Mozart rose from the grave and played for as today, we would treat him as romantic performer, but not Classical as we know  "classical pianists" today. (of course we don’t know and will never know)

Do you play Bach or Mozart at all?

Yes, I do. My first performance with RNCM Chamber Orchestra and Andre de Ridder was the Mozart D major "Coronation" concerto. Unfortunately this concerto was only partly completed by Mozart, and it boosts my creativity. How was I to complete something that was in his brain but died with him? My solution was quite easy, to create a Mozart cadenza and other missed parts, you need to take the themes from the same concerto in D major and add the harmonic progressions as well as characteristic patterns from other completed concertos, by Mozart of course. The most difficult about "The Mozart " is: everybody has got their "own" Mozart and critics may be rarely satisfied with the performance result. The intention to interpret "Mozart" make his music boring, and by all means, he was not! I've got five concertos in my repertoire , and my favourite composition for solo piano is the Adagio from his Sonata in F major, K 280 / 189e.

And Yes, I play Bach, or Bach's in plural.

The last project was "Bach and Sons" where the following concertos were performed with the chamber orchestra:

Johann Sebastian Bach,
Harpsichord Concerto No.5 in F minor, BWV 1056.
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
Harpsichord Concerto in C minor, H.474.
Johann Christian Bach.

Unfortunately, the Bach project overlapped with my Complete Liszt Etudes project and I was not able to dedicate enough time to Bach as I wished. But in the case of Bach every step is even more difficult than in case of Mozart. You have to be real master of the basso continuo as well as ornaments, style, ancient instrument (if there is any, I am saying that ironically because most old instruments were destroyed by improvements in later years) and find and order the hand written manuscripts from all around the world. Again, unfortunately our educational programmes in higher music educational institutions are outweighed by some academic subjects related to the music but not to piano performance. In my personal opinion and in my student years, for me it would be more useful to study basso continuo, ornaments, performance on historical instruments, historical recordings instead of some operas in detail, general knowledge of which I have anyway. You have to be the real master if you play Bach Goldberg variations with the repeats, and not sending the audience to sleep. Today I pefer to play Bach in transcriptions of Siloti, Busoni, Rachmaninoff or would rather transcribe the second movement of Johann Christian Bach for solo piano myself.  Both books of the Preludes and Fugues where written for private music making at home for educational purposes.

What will you be adding when you next learn a new piece?

Knowledge and Spirit!

You have studied and played with several very well-known names. Is there one, or two, musicians that you regard as your main influences?

Because of my respect to all human beings who may play the piano, and because my respect to all my teachers, I not to discuss people alive today.

Otherwise as follows:

Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff (1873–1943),
Ferruccio Dante Michelangiolo Benvenuto Busoni (1866–1924),
Josef Casimir Hofmann (1876 – 1957),
Joseph Arkadievich Levin (1874-1944).

You got a superb sound out of Chichester cathedral’s Yamaha piano last year, as did Stephen Kovacevich last week. Is there one piano you enjoy playing more than any other?

Thank you very much for your kind words, it is indeed very kind of you!  My concert experience as well as the Yamaha piano at the Chichester cathedral last year was very pleasant, and I miss your audience very much.

Pianos for me are like a car built for a formula one racer.
Some of them will allow you to express yourself, some not, and to be honest, after 30 years of playing different pianos, I still can't manage some of them (mainly ancient ones).

Somehow it happened that I've been related with Yamaha instruments like Franz Liszt with Erard. The Yamaha Scholarship at the RNCM, CFX Grand presentation at One Moorgate Place for Mifco LTD, even at home I've got Yamaha Grand and two Upright pianos.

Personally, I feel physical enjoyment from the piano action by playing instruments from the last generation (1980's/1990's) of the Steinway with ivory keys. But definitely not all of them and not necessarily the B or D models. In this personal judgement I am more nostalgic about my youth, than about brand specification. This type of the piano is for me like Boisselot was for Franz Liszt.

Do you have a second instrument?

No, I've solely dedicated myself to play piano (there are so many of them!) in solo concerts, and sometimes with an orchestra but not "in" an  orchestra. The life of pianist is too short, the repertoire huge, it is better to do something what you understand specifically, than to do a bit of everything but all average.

Do you follow sport? Do you have a football team you support?

Oh yes, the piano competitions are always sport !!!

I am not listening to the performances, but making stakes because "nowadays" even the adjudicators on the panel after voting don't know how it happened. It is so fun to guess, if you know all the "back stage kitchen".
But because piano players are not machines and playing at the different concert halls with different live circumstances, my guesses are a bit more than half correct.

Football was interesting for me in 1990's, but now with all "this" money, football players lost the motivation to create "the art of game" like it was in the days of Maradona (I guess?), and unfortunately I've lost any interest in it.

Do you have any favourite pop music?

Yes, some of Queen, some of Scorpions, some of Abba, and of course soundtracks from Tomorrow never dies and Casino Royale.

And, most importantly. You probably listen to Record Review on a Saturday morning. I don’t tune into that until 11 o’clock because I listen to Danny Baker on Radio 5 where he plays the Sausage Sandwich Game with a guest. So, I offer you a sausage sandwich, a beautiful sausage sandwich with juicy sausage in crusty bread, the butter all melting. What would you choose to go on that, would you like red sauce, brown sauce or no sauce at all.

I am afraid not.

I am listening BBC radio concerts and enormously respect BBC concert broadcasts, but for the radio as an entertainment, I would rather clone BBC with Classic FM for the better result. For me as for the listener, the BBC sometimes may be overweighed by contemporary music. In this case, my soul cannot feel the music, and my brain starts to protest in a struggle to understand the music.
The other extreme for me is to listen hundreds of times every day to the same "two notes" of cheesy music played by an emerging/rising talent/star. And in this case, my soul is sickened and my brain says that to create that type of music product, you need to have an exceptional PR team but not exceptional music ability.

And about the sauce:

I love everything new, and what I never tried. In this case I will mix both of them red and brown. If the taste is disgusting, I will keep mixing them in proportion until arriving at a satisfactory result. However, if for some reasons I will have to stop mixing, and result will be still not satisfactory, I will have it with no sauce at all.

Thanks, Ivan. You’ve been great. All the best.