Gently does it

This must be the gentlest album I've ever heard. The Castle of Fair Welcome by Gothic Voices all those years ago was calm but this is more so. It was bought for the four minutes and a bit of an arrangement of Josquin's Deploration, the gorgeous lament on the death of Ockeghem, for two voices and vihuelas, which makes for a slightly different impression but doesn't take any undue liberties.

The rest of the album is in much the same mood with counter-tenor, John Potter and soprano Anna Maria Friman augmented by vihuelas and viol. It might pass you by as harmless background music for relaxation purposes if not given full attention.

ECM are known for their often contemporary output of minimalist music but this is minimal in a different way. It's great to find something so apparently unobtrusive and yet not undemanding. It demands listening to.

--

John Burnside's The Music of Time found its way to a coherent conclusion that brought all John's thinking about poetry to a convincing denouement. Quite honestly, you can say almost anything you like about poetry and then back it up with your evidence and, as in school work, it will be the quality of your argument that counts more than the truism you try to justify. Although he seems to concede that 'poetry makes nothing happen', John brings immense knowledge and wide reading to lots of poems that probably don't and then, idealistically, one might think, argues for a 'world culture' of a liberal, woke kind that may or may not seem achieveable in English or Creative Writing Departments across the world but doesn't seem to be having much impact on the tyrannies that are more intent on achieving one sort of Armageddon or another.

But, with deeply thought-out reasons in favour of poetry in translation, a thorough-going examination of the pitfalls of marriage and always aware of the 'dailiness' of life in poetry, a phrase from Randell Jarrell, among many other wise chapters, one would expect no less of John Burnside and more of his books will be summoned to these premises after I made inroads into what remains of the pile I had waiting.