Warren Mailley-Smith at Chichester

Warren Mailley-Smith, pno, Chichester Cathedral, Apr 30th.

Warren Mailley-Smith has played the Complete Chopin from memory and is now in the process of recording it all. That is impressive, and good for Chopin, who was kind enough to be not as prolific as some composers but it never fails to amaze me how much repertoire artists keep in their heads.
So, it was a bonus that he began with Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata. The only question about programming is whether to begin or, more traditionally, end with the biggest guns. Warren applied a gentle brio, and plenty of prestissimo, to the familiar opening and wasn't troubled to fit in all the notes. He had pointed out what a revolutionary piece this had been in the very early days of the modern piano and it still retains so much wonder that one can only imagine how extraordinary it sounded to an 1804 audience.
The second movement begins sombrely and 'moonlit' in the mood that Beethoven is equally eloquent but not so often heard in. The move to grander portentousness as it shifts into the third movement  was elaborated with flowing lyricism in a fluent, captivating performance. It is a monumental sonata and was delivered here with relish and enjoyment. On such a bright, Spring day there was nowhere else one could think of wanting to be.
But if that wasn't Romantic enough, it was Chopin for the rest of the programme.
Having once discovered one person who doesn't like Sibelius, I think I've yet to hear of anyone who objects to Chopin. How could they. It's only that he isn't quite Beethoven.
The Nocturne no.16 is a dreamy confection by comparison, but lush lyricism nonetheless. Two waltzes don't aspire to the condition of a sonata but were fine examples, fluttering like ribbons in a light breeze and the Scherzo no.2 led us back towards Beethoven, more imposingly, to suggest that the two composers are not so far apart. Chopin was 17 when Beethoven died and so could be seen to be taking off in his own direction from where he left off.
Never less than tremendous - although I do pick out the concerts I'm most likely to enjoy- Chichester's Tuesday lunchtimes are a local treasure, but Warren went into overtime with his encore. I'm glad I checked with him what it was and thus avoided trawling the Complete Chopin to find it. Giving the top end of the keyboard a joyful workout was Gottschalk's Souvenirs d'Andalousie, completely shameless in its loveliness for its own sake.
Thankfully, Warren has recorded the Waldstein, which I was glad to pick up there and then.

Another good day out in Chichester was completed by being drawn into Analgue October Records by the choice reggae the proprietor was playing. I was no use to him, not being able to remember the last time I played a vinyl record and that's all he had but somebody must be buying it. We happily name dropped Eek-a-Mouse, Yellowman, Gregory Isaacs and Smiley Culture for five minutes which added a gorgeous counterpoint to my day even if it didn't add much to his. 

One Sweet Letter from Me

Paddy Power e-mailed last night to say that their 'Best Price Guarantee', by which you are paid at SP if that's better than the price you take, would henceforth only apply after 8 a.m. on the day of the race.
Well, that's not good enough. I can take my business elsewhere to a firm that will apply it from when they price up the races the night before.
It is the first step back from bookmakers all trying to match each other's competitive offers in a crowded market place. I hadn't quite seen it coming but had noticed Paddy becoming more guarded in committing himself to early prices, waiting to see what the opposition chalked up and which way the wind was blowing. A case in point was the first at Cheltenham last Thursday in which he wasn't prepared to go 13/8 Indefatiguable like some were.
But it's a strange relationship with a bookmaker, deserting them when it is one's very raison d'etre to be jousting with them rather than doing business with them from which they profit. The six or seven years I've had my PP account has cost him and paid me so he won't be sorry to see me go.
Thanks for having me, Paddy. I enjoyed it very much. I won.
--
Sweet Caress by William Boyd, irresitible at 75p in a charity shop recently, proved worth its while in the end. Seemingly a little bit routine in its first half, it was never going to be abandoned, and developed into something quite moving in its later stages, a view of the C20th, from Fascism to Vietnam and the hippy community through the adventurous life of a lady photographer. One wondered if the model for Amory Clay could have been Marie Colvin or if William Boyd just imagined someone who was very like someone equally remarkable who had really existed but if Boyd is more storyteller than literati, it does him no harm.
--
BorderIncident at Chess24 has again arrived at base camp from which to make a daring bid for new heights.
A winning streak has taken my rating for 15 minute games to 1858, potentially three or four wins from the 1910 I've left my 10 minute game rating preserved at. As soon as (if ever) I can get beyond that, I'll play 10 minute games again. I think I might have been 1922 once, before I devised this strategy, but 1740 probably reflects my ability more accurately. One tries to punch above one's weight but it becomes a matter of declining games you think you might not win, being lucky and not playing casually when tired or distracted. The top-rated players on there are around 3000, where one begins at 1500.
It would appear that having learnt something about the art of garnering results for results' sake, I might get by in Division 2 of a local league, which has generally been my limit at most sports.
I expect I'll be back down at 1660 soon enough.

It's only sport. There isn't even any money on it and so it can't possibly matter.

If Radio 5 could accept the idea that sport doesn't actually matter, that would be one obstacle out of our way.
--
And, finally, I haven't read any reaction to what we saw of the standing ovation that occured at Lyra McKee's funeral but Arlene Foster didn't look as if she took part willingly and the BBC didn't show her joining in the applause.
It must have been the BBC's biased coverage. 

Jane Yeh - Discipline

Jane Yeh, Discipline (Carcanet)

Two poems by Jane Yeh established her as one of the several poets I look out for. One was about the explorer, Batholomew Diaz, and the other, I think, about a murder mystery. I should know because I thought I could find them but I can't. I would have made a terrible librarian.
But I'm nothing if not brand loyal and being impressed to that extent twice is all it takes.
There is a further contender for that elite category in her latest book and it's called A Short History of Patience. Whether consciously or not, it brings to mind Wulf and Eadwacer, the Old English poem, with its evocations of absence,
     Baby, I could go out on a limb 
And say the evening's smoky eye draws near,
The floorboards creak like a harpsichord played wrong

At a time when poetry regards itself even more precious than it ever did, true successes that work as convincingly as this are to be treasured. It is an example of the workshop, creative writing industry and poetry competition world breaking out of its inward-looking 'poet's poetry' habit and offers itself to a potentially wider world. With degrees and a lectureship in Creative Writing and her books being of the type that win the prizes such training aims for, much of Discipline is a paragon example of that artfulness, a vogue that a review in yesterday's Times seemed to want to herald the beginning of the end of. While there is a place for all kinds of writing, every vogue has its day. Perhaps it was Hannah Sullivan's Three Poems winning last year's big prize that was the apex of this one.
It's not that I don't like it but one can feel intimidated by it, that one might have missed something in the cryptic play. As a letter to the TLS asked recently following the publication of Paul Muldoon's American Standard, when is he going to publish the answers.
It might already be too late for me to dissociate myself from the 'backward-looking' nature that Larkin was criticized for in his Oxford Book of C20th English Verse, and to assert that there is no avant garde/mainstream opposition but a wide river into which all poetry can flow but for all the reverence that Geoffrey Hill was accorded, no, poetry doesn't have to be difficult. It doesn't have to be easy, either.

Jane Yeh's poems are brilliantly imaginative and wide-ranging, perhaps ostensibly too much so sometimes, trying too hard if anything to impress with their range of reference, and are most effective when applying her linguistic invention to the mundane,
To be unloved is like listening to a progress report on courgettes - for months,

from Self-Portrait as a Spinster, and in Self-Portrait as New York in the Eighties,
                                                          We were poor
As a fake fur lined with fake fur

we might notice this layering of emptiness echoing the prose poem, These Movies, 
This movie is like when you suddenly pull off a wig to reveal another wig underneath, which you were wearing all along.

But don't let's start on prose poems. Jane carries them off better than most because her baroque imagination can carry the vehicle rather than the vehicle being, well, simply prose.
It is to Carcanet's credit that they provide a striking cover illustration, as opposed to Faber who assume that being Faber means they don't have to. The high kitsch pink Cakeland might be thematic in its surface exuberance bravely disguising what both poet and reader know to be something superficial and recondite in our experience. It is vivid but has no depth.
And that is what the book, best read as a whole and not as individual poems, achieves. It is a highly elaborate and thoroughgoing analysis of shallowness. It isn't the poetry that is shallow.
Dislocation comes as standard. The blurb is right to highlight its 'deadpan humour and heartbreaking imagery'. I just wish it didn't also say it 'inhabits the space between the real and the surreal'. That is almost word for word the line I have in mind for writing a pastiche of terrible poetry reviews.
  
 

Bury My Heart at Cheltenham Racecourse

Thank you, Rachael Blackmore, Henry de Bromhead and Havingagoodtime.
I thought you were a different class and I'm very pleased that there was sufficient money around at Cheltenham today that didn't think so. Why they thought that is very hard to divine but that's how it was and so a horse that perhaps could have been sent off as 1/3 fav strolled home in glorious isolation at 3/1 instead, which is fine by me.
The fact that you can have a day out like that and get paid for doing the gormlessly obvious thing is better than one of those miracles reported in The Bible because it actually happened and I know it did because it was me that did it.
Obviously I'm not a racetrack wiseguy every day. It would be a dull game if I was. There needs to be more to life than accumulating cash for the sake of it, which might be where the Rees-Mogg family miss the point, but the rest of us somehow get by and days like today are the days one lives for.

1971

It was David Hepworth promoting his latest book, A Fabulous Creation, on The Danny Baker Show a few weeks ago that prompted me to catch up with 1971, Never a Dull Moment first.
1971 has long been my idea of the high point of pop music, citing the charts in September as my main evidence, but everybody will have their own opinion which will usually be the year of some sort of 'coming of age'. Hepworth is old enough to prefer 1966 with its Pet Sounds, Beatles, Dylan and Stones but argues for 1971, with a convincing list of 100 albums in an appendix, in between reportage that he provides with disarming, less deceived panache.
He is impressed by Rod Stewart. Led Zeppelin are understandably shown more than once to be light years ahead of Grand Funk Railroad. The vogue for singer-songwriters, Carole King, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell and Cat Stevens is celebrated as much for their music as their tendency to dally with each other. Warren Beatty's reputation in that area is acknowledged but not necessarily admired. And it is the way that business considerations shaped the emerging music 'industry' as much as artistic development, along with sociology, that make Hepworth's account so convincing. At about 400 pages, one imagines he could go into much more detail without straining too hard, and I would have been grateful to read thousands of pages if he'd had time to provide them.
While admiring the book greatly, we each have our own perspectives but we don't let them come between us, as we wouldn't fall out over significant differences in our record collections. Ownership of Dark Side of the Moon is something that only raises a sceptical eyebrow but goes no further than that in affecting comradeship.
Hepworth touches on a point that most artists can achieve three albums in three years as a natural life expectancy of success. Beyond that, they become Zeppelin, Dylan, Aretha, Bowie and suchlike with the talent to regenerate themselves. It became true of Oasis much later but is offered here as a limitation of T. Rex, who Hepworth regards as a bit 'thin'. But that is to measure longevity at the expense of dismissing quite how brightly Bolan shone, however briiefly it might have been for.
He also points out, vis a vis The Beach Boys, and everyone else ever after, how artists continued to live off their 'heritage' status as pop music managed to sell itself to a market of over-30's.
That might also be due to the fact that once the idea of the 'teenager' was invented, that tendency tended to stretch beyond teen years to any age at all. 60 this year, for example.
Nick Drake's success was almost all posthumous, who died before he could damage the body of work he left behind with any further efforts. Hepworth writes that,
Nobody talks about Lindisfarne or Brewer and Shipley with the same reverence.
Well, I've got news for him. I do.

It is informative, in a book largely about 'rock' music and thus white people with long hair, to note the attention given to Sly & the Family Stone, which is fine by me. Big sellers in the USA they clearly were but it seems that their significance in 1971 was their as yet unrealized influence on hip-hop which was not due to be relevant for quite some time. It is also fascinating to hear about Stevie Wonder moving into new areas by working with those technicians from Tonto's Expanding Head Band who, although they seemed avant garde and ahead of their time then, were actually responsible for some of the dullest music ever to be preserved on record. Hepworth might not be writing about soul and reggae but limiting mentions of Al Green to no more than his monthly playlists and making no reference at all to Trojan records renders his account of 1971 sadly incomplete.

But he 'gets it' and adds considerable hindsight perspective to some of the confidence tricks played on a gullible public at the time. The seriousness that much of this LP music was treated with is seen to be 'music that was measured more than it was enjoyed', which is a point that some of those still nostalgically attached to it have yet to appreciate even at this late stage.
The preposterousness of Frank Zappa, the dullness of the Grateful Dead and the lacklustre machismo of much 'rock' music has yet to be seen as such in some unreconstructed outposts of the culture and Hepworth at least draws gentle attention to the fact that even in a Golden Age there are elements that are to be regretted. But we live in unimaginable luxury in 2019 compared to 1971 except we don't appreciate it. So much so that we do, as he says, expect music to be available as readily as water from a tap whereas then it was to be treasured and highly valued, each purchase considered because it wasn't a matter of clicking on Amazon and ordering anything one felt like buying on a whim.
1971 was actually better than Hepworth says it was because it not only brought us Hunky Dory and Electric Warrior but also I'm Still Waiting, Just My Imagination and Double  Barrel, but he is right in saying that in 1971 things were established and put in place that were the template for decades afterwards, not least the 'elegantly wasted' look of the Stones as exemplified by Keith and Exile on Main Street. It has probably been over for some time now but nobody's noticed.
As Lou Reed said when he was somehow persuaded to come and play Portsmouth Guildhall, 'after the first kiss, it's downhill all the way'.

Letter from Portsmouth

It is possible to think that all is right with the world. I know it's difficult and one pays for it the morning after, or with advancing years, for a day or two after, but the illusion is still achievable in the face of all the evidence.
I honestly don't care whether Jesus would have been a fan of Mother's Day or not. Why did I even think of doing such a thing as writing a letter to the editor of The Times. It is the sort of thing that cranks, weirdos and madpersons do. But I saw an opportunity to quote A.N. Wilson and drag in the New Revised Version of the Biography of Shakespeare and couldn't help myself.
And so I have added The Times to the list of the Gloucester Citizen, the Listener, The Sunday Express, TLS and whichever other august journals whose editors I've bothered with minor points. Last year The Tablet saw fit to not print my reaction to an item on Philip Larkin that I was surprised to have my attention drawn to. I can't say I blame them
But, damn it all, sir, the author Monica Ditmas appeared to be making an outrageous suggestion, reaction to my letter- as can happen- picked up on a tangential point rather than the point itself, and it was fascinating to see the subs at The Times adjust my words into their house style and thus not quite print what I said, but it was close enough.
--
But, disregarding if we can, the looming possibility that we no longer even agree about what democracy is or even agree whether John Bercow is little more than a jumped up football referee who wants to be the story rather than the actual footballers or a brilliant constitutional showman (where incline to the latter), I want to celebrate that after some 25 years of correspondance with Japan, we have arrived at talking about Hunky Dory, only the week after I listened to it on You Tube, deliberately using that facility as part of my music collection, and found it to be every bit as wonderful as it ever was.
One can add in that one is never short of worthwhile entertainment as long as one has Radio 3, still not quite read all of Julian Barnes, that the Royal Mail will kindly redeliver three items sometime tomorrow morning and Sunday morning still has Bells on Sunday (the bells in St. Geronimo's in Throckleby-by-the-Marsh, re-hung in 1786 by John Taylor of Loughborough, tuned to E minor, playing Stepford Caters) as well as All Gas and Gaiters on R4Extra.
What more can one ask for.
One can engage, with hope bolstering expectation, with Champ, the optimistically-named horse that didn't quite land the nap at Cheltenham, on a retrieving mission at Aintree. And retrieve he did, after I'd waited, sidelined and out of the game for the right opportunity to come back in.
The tip for the National tomorrow, should you wish to follow the discriminating tipster suddenly back on his game, is Vintage Clouds. Don't say I didn't tell you.
On the other hand, if some unforeseen calamity means that we don't land the odds, please forget I told you.  

Jesus and Mother's Day

In a late career move, I may move on to commentatary on ecclesiastical matters.

Last year The Tablet declined the opportunity to publish my response to an article of theirs on Philip Larkin but The Times was more amenable today.

They helpfully did some editing to accomodate my effort into the 'house style' but it wasn't me that repeated the word 'claim'.

What I wrote was,

Sir,

Monica Ditmas stitches together some sketchy evidence to make her claim that Jesus would have ‘participated enthusiastically’ in Mother’s Day (Credo, March 30).

A.N. Wilson’s version of Jesus Christ’s childhood and character suggest something very different in his book, Jesus, which says that,

He is always, in the Gospels, very rude to and about his mother.

The reply given when the 12 year old Jesus goes missing in Jerusalem and is found in the temple is from an account written a few decades after the event and could be interpreted as facetious. It is a big jump to accept it as verbatim as well interpret them as the words of a loving son.

This highly selective use of evidence is also used by the likes of those who prefer Shakespeare to be have been happily married at home in Stratford as he is seen in Upstart Crow but he worked in London while his wife, who has always been known by her maiden name, is not recorded as having ever accompanied him there. There is little to support the case for an uxorious Shakespeare but admirers prefer to idealize him.

The arguments presented on both sides of the continuing debate regarding membership of the EU are similarly partial.

The only thing we can establish from any of these issues, some of which have more solid evidence to work on than others, is that we believe what we want to believe.

Faithfully,

David Green