The Week in Turmoil and other stories

Just when I thought life had settled into a comfortable routine based around the big walk on Tuesdays, the possibility of a concert or other agement on Thursdays with writing on Monday and whenever else I can't avoid it but reading muuch more beneficial, the weather forecast for tomorrow is 90% rain and I can hardly waste a bright afternoon like today's supine with Vikram Seth and so got myself outside. Now my life seems chaos and it might take weeks to recover some sense of order.

 

I was most gratified by 'Building a Library' not only going throuugh recordings of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater on Saturday's Record Review but that Jeremy Summerly picked the recording I have as his top choice, that with Andras Scholl and Barbara Bonney. It is the most sublime of pieces and a few years ago for several weeks I played it every Sunday morning. Pergolesi died aged 26, of tuberculosis and so didn't even qualify for the 27 club but on the evidence of the Stabat Mater, which is all but an automatic choice for the desert island, we were robbed of some outrageously fine music. He's not quite a one-hit wonder with his opera, La Serva Padrona, being an entirely different great thing but not everybody knows about that.

Another glorious hour was available in the company of Maggi Hambling on BBC2 on Saturday night, marking the grand old dame's 75th birthday. She is a great advertisement for doing it her way with her conspicuous booze intake ranging from wine and spirits to Special Brew and willingness to take on David Hockney in the devil-may-care smoking stakes. Her naturally bohemian attitude is really only her uncompromisingly being herself and dismissing the fatuous but all of that is contained in her art to which she is totally committed, her paintings never less than adamantly taking on the big themes of life, death and raw eroticism.

I like to think, if it matters at all, that my 'taste' -for want of a better word- in most things can be defined in various types of music and literature but my two favourite painters are Vermeer and Maggi Hambling. They seem to be at opposite ends of most spectrums of painting style with the careful, painstaking accuracy of the quiet Vermeers nothing like the passion and energy of a Maggi canvas. That is probably because I know nothing about painting, only that 'I know what I like' but it also means 'all you have to be is any good' which is the only rule that anybody needs.

Sadly, in the circumstances, at present it seems not appropriate to be coinciding a Wigmore Hall visit with a stop off at marlborough Fine Arts to see 'Maggi Hambling 2020' and so I've e-mailed them hoping they can send me out a catalogue on the strength of which I might find enough to say for a review here.

I'm glad to see the viewing figures for the return of Racetrack Wiseguy the other day. I recovered a little bit to keep myself afloat and still with a chance of ending this odd year in the black. It's not been easy but I like to think I know what I'm doing overall and we will try again when something looks likely.