Apologies for yesterday. Hope nobody tuned in and took the advice. Dreadful rehearsal for the Racetrack Wiseguy feature. A John Gosden two-year-old that didn't win last week was a rare thing but I managed to find one. Luckily for me, the Professor pointed one out for today and put me right. We all ought to be reading him.
If the Prize for the Best Weather of the Year goes to Today, a strong candidate for Best Prom was the repeat of Monday's Cadogan Hall lunchtime concert, the Silesian String Quartet playing Weinberg and Bacewicz. It didn't take me long to resume Amazon activity after that. If Classic FM's If you like that, you will like this programme was a bit more adventurous it would lead to those two composers from Shostakovich. The Complete Weinberg String Quartets is 6 discs and £50 so I'll take it gently with just the no. 7 heard today.
Thomas Mann continues to serve it up in Doktor Faustus with my notes on useful quotes now onto the second side of the envelope. I take great encouragement, as an occasional contributor of words to pop songs, that,
a poem must not be too good to furnish a good lied,
that is, the words don't need to do it all, the lyricist must leave room for the musician to make the song. Which suits me fine. Here's the idea, a title, a chorus and a couple of verses - you do the rest.
And a fine day today was augmented by James Fenton's Oxford lecture on Auden's approach to Shakespeare's Sonnets. Further preparation for my session on Shakespeare biography due in November led me to see what is to be gained from that, and there's plenty. It is writing like that that makes it all worthwhile.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
