The Church Fair

 It could have been worse for the Wiseguy selections yesterday but if Bangor had gone ahead and Fiddlerontheroof had had 50 more yards to get past the winner of the big race at Newbury it would have been a lot better.

Love Unknown by A.N. Wilson was seeming to lose its way after halfway with Wilson apparently stacking up some cheap and easy laughs at the expense of Madge's madness which might not be funny to some people who've had dementia sufferers to deal with in real life. The novel was seemingly becoming diffuse and I was losing faith in it but then he pulls it all together.

In a succession of surprises and characters talking at cross purposes, Simon's adultery hasn't been discovered, it's a case of mistaken identity and it's his useless vicar brother, Bartle, that's being accused, which is hard to believe but then it isn't him that's guilty of the offence in question, either. Simon then wrongly believes he's the cuckold which would have perhaps been his just desserts and it turns out to be a well-made novel, which is the least one would expect. It's not Proust, Joyce or George Eliot but it's good at what it does. Of course, the title contains any amount of layered significance and the hymn takes on some ironic resonance.

 

This coming week should see e-mails from the library announcing the arrival of my next requisitions but until then the hiatus is being filled by yet more English clergy humour, Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym which didn't impress 30-odd years ago but is doing well so far this time round.

I try very hard to avoid delivery charges from Amazon and so I tried out all kinds of tricks to get past £20 when ordering a couple of cheap things. Suddenly I'm very circumspect about buyiong books I might be able to borrow. And a history of the Colony Room Club, Daisy Dunn's novel, another account of Existentialist Paris can all wait their turn. The two discs of Arcangelo's Buxtehude, at £25 the pair, can't be justified as a way of fiddling an order just beyond £20 and so the answer turned out to be the Brahms String Quartets and Quintets that Record Review did a good advertising job on on Saturday morning. Brahms maybe rteminds me of Thomas Hardy by not quite perhaps being in the very top echelon of his type but he's great and he'll never let you down.

 

Meanwhile all this C.of E. humour can be infectious. Books come from other books, writing from other writing, or at least they do for me. I have, over the last 40-odd years, written some poems I'm pleased with. Heaven knows I've tried other genres but the short stories were unremarkable, the novel was irredeemably bad but at least went beyond 50 thousand words and was finished in a horrendous blizzard of first draft typos. There's a few pop songs lyrics at least two or three of which should have made the Top 10 but I've not really tried to write a play.

It's a bit late now but I like to have a 'project' until it inevitably gets abandoned and, as per a few weeks ago, I would like Graham to have a vehicle on which to revive the glory years of his theatrical career. Thus, The Church Fair, with five parts written with friends in mind, most notably Graham as the vicar, myself as Archdeacon Trelawney and Yoko as Miss Protheroe. It ought to write itself for the most part, being All Gas & Gaiters, Barbara Pym, A.N. Wilson and entirely derivative. It will make no apologies for that. It won't be able to. But it might not have to, being at tyhe very least a 25/1 shot that it will get written but this initial tingle of hope and anticipation at the beginning of it still feel good even if there is no end product. To travel, if only the first few yards, might be better than to arrive. It's quite possible it all ends up in something entirely different, like maybe a poem about being so dilettante but as long as it provides amusement in the short term, that'll do.

Racetrack Wiseguy

 It's been some time since I felt confident enough to suggest any turf investment here. I'm about as qualified to tip horses as I am to pass comment on musical performances but it doesn't stop me doing that.

This is supposed to be 'my time of year' even if it hasn't looked like it yet but there were some flickers of hope and a return to the good times today and tomorrow has some classy races to look at so I will be having a bit of a go to see if we can get two or threee to multiply themselves together into money worth having.

Confidence can be a bad thing in any discipline and can be disatrously expensive in horse racing. Not long after looking through tomorrow's cards and thinking it all looks very inviting, the alarm sounds as I remember how often I've felt like that in the past only to survey the wreckage later, so we need to sort out the genuine good chances from the whimsical fancies.

It was Mr. Glass (Newcastle 12.55) at which my eyes first lit up and I'll have that on its own if it's anything like 11/10. Also at Newcastle, one likes the look of Valleres (1.30) and although Epatante looked completely the business last year, she might not have beatenn anything with the potential of Monmiral (3.15) who looks like he's being backed while neither of them can take the admirable Sceau Royal for granted.

Newbury's perhaps the best meeting where it is more competitive but having missed out on Fiddlerontheroof's winning return which I had forseen, I don't want to miss out on any follow up at a good price in the 3.00. Kalooki (1.15) has looked a prospect before and not having won for sometime with his stable out of form last season, he might be value now they're winning a few.

On such a day it's worth trawling round the lesser fixtures in search of the support acts. One notices Brian Hughes going to Bangor rather than a bigger track so he must be expecting a couple of winners there. Richmond Lake (1.57) is likely to be one and Jungle Jack (3.42) couldbe another. And at Doncaster, Brief Times (12.35) might double up anything else that is put with it.

So, there's 8 horses without even resorting to chancier guesswork which, if I were just having a laugh, I'd be spraying modest amounts of money on all afternoon. But it is no laughing matter. The End of Year Account must not show a minus and the plus is fragile.

So, there must be at least three winners mentioned above. Hopefully a few more than that. What one hopes is that, in putting them together in various combinations, three or four coincide. The three one has the most confidence in are Mr. Glass, Valleres and Richmond Lake. Anybody prepared to take a bit more of a flyer at it could make not much into a fair old round of drinks with Monmiral, Fiddlerontheroof  and Jungle Jack. If I've got everything right and win the ITV7, I'll turn professional for a year and give it all back.

Showmanship

 A.N. Wilson will have to have a label of his own on here even if it means trying to find where he's mentioned in the past and adding them in. The Elizabethans, finished this morning, is as brilliant as anything else of his I've read, which is very brilliant. He is in the top echelon of my favourite writers. It is primarily scholarship but it's more than that, too. There is a usually understated humour to much of it and a sort of showmanship that might be self-conscious or might be only what such an intellect does naturally.

The Elizabethans ends with a wonderful chapter on Hamlet and hendiadys, its only flaw being that it finds it necessary to repeat the assumption that the boy Hamnet is anything to do with the play or, indeed, its author. Shakespeare is known for the wide vocabulary used in his work and the large number of new coinages. Wilson attributes 30% of modern Italian to Dante which makes one wonder how anyone understood poetry in which three out of every ten words was a new invention but that's not quite what it says and I won't worry about it now. But if 'fructiferous' was showy, at least I knew what it meant. My shorter OED was no help with 'basilolatrous' and the internet doesn't find much but 'eupeptic' wasn't Wilson, it was quoted from C.S. Lewis, though no doubt remembered for its esoteric panache.

I moved on to the novel, Love Unknown, this afternoon which is highly readable and it's already half read. It is a comedy laced with much familiar Wilson reference points - a vicar, publishers, Betjeman and a certain English version of loucheness. 

It augurs well for further Wilson novels which, from their summaries, are wide-ranging but Our Times is next on the orders from the library catalogue and likely to be finished and returned by Christmas by which time I'll be on to the next thing. 

--

I see the TLS has their Boks of the Year feature this week. I might be on book 51 by now but not very many of them have been new. Some of what Claire Harman says about the Thom Gunn letters is fair enough but for me it reduced Gunn's stature from life-long poetry role model to something good but less than god-like. We should be wary of knowing our heroes too well. 

John Sutherland's Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me: Her life and long loves gets two nominations so I dare say I'm happy to go along with that, sad though it may be. It does Larkin no favours but by now we are used to that and must accept that a fine writer doesn't necessarily make a fine human being.

Of interest and for the notebook are The Poet's Mistake by Erica McApline. We've all made them, even the best of us. Bohemia doesn't have a coastline. And there is a Derek Mahon compendium of all he thought worth saving for posterity. I would think everything in that is already on the shelves.

--

But today, one of those packages one had forgotten one had ordered, Buxtehude by Arrangement, transcriptions of organ pieces for piano by August Stradal, played by Meilin Ai.

It is the album I dreamed into being after hearing Frescobaldi played on the piano. I wondered if anybody had done the same for Buxtehude. Surely not. Well, they have. August Stradal (1860-1930) was to Buxtehude what Busoni was to Bach and it entirely works. It could have fooled me that it was more Well-Tempered Klavier, the Passacaglia in D minor, for example, unrolling deliberately and gently towards something grander in gesture. The Chaconne in C minor was also an instant hit with its little waterfall but I'm sure this disc will be on the turntable for some time. I can even persuade myself that there's long distant pre-echoes of the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues in there. I would have thought mine is the only copy of this disc in my street, my neighbourhood and I'm not sure how many there'd be in the whole of Portsmouth. I'm back where I was in 1972, listening to Sounds of the 70's on Radio 1 paying special attention to the most obscure music I could discover.

Scholarship

The inestimable service provided by local libraries goes from success to success. Shelf space saved must be already approaching six inches and I'm not counting the money not spent but with Amazon no longer taking Visa, my monthly bill from there is henceforth likely to be a paltry thing.

A.N. Wilson should by rights have his own tab on here but it's a bit late for that now. He is surely one of my most admired writers with such immense scholarship and so much of it. Current reading is his excellent The Elizabethans, so well-organized, so coherent, with such relevant detail and his fine ability with the telling adjective, like the 'randy' Ovid.

If the story can be summed up in one sentence it is of the Glory of England's Golden Age being built on foundations of piracy, horror, political expediency, unspeakable cruelty carried out in the name of religion or wealth-accumulation that Wilson explains we can't really judge one age by the standards of another. Well, maybe in many parts of the world it is still like that and it's us, reading our hardback library boks in cosy sitting rooms with our liberal humanities, 1970's university education that have yet much to be grateful for.

One suspects that Wilson has a weakness for the ritual, process and structure of both church and monarchy but is at least wise enough to acknowledge their absurdity. In the chapter on the theatre he stays with the generally accepted attribution of the Groatsworth of Wit to Robert Greene whereas Katherine Duncan-Jones's equally brilliant Ungentle Shakespeare had radically suggested it was really written by Thomas Nashe. The Elizabethans was published in 2011 and dedicated to K D-J, 'Elizabethan sans pareil', Ungentle Shakespeare in 2001, so he must have been aware of the alternative option. Shakespeare Scholarship can be a divisive, adversarial business, sometimes, one might think, as partisan as Montagues v. Capulets or the Protestant-Catholic disagreements of the C16th. Wilson and Katherine were married once but are no longer. One can see how such great scholars would have found each other so attractive and then imagine where they might have found an insurmountable difference.

Wilson is persusive in his argument that England, and Wales, including Scotland for much of the time, remained 'Elizabethan' until the C20th and more or less until the second Elizabeth and perhaps he regrets that it no longer is but that is what it seems history is like to me, that one historian will see it their way while another will shape it entirely differently but the joy of reading is in the reading itself. I'm never less than hugely impressed by A.N. Wilson and once this is finished, which won't be long, I'll move on to the novel of his I've borrowed, one of many, called Love Unknown.

He must have worn out a few typewriters.

Ensemble C at St. Mary's

Ensemble C, St. Mary's Fratton, Nov 21

Ensemble C are made up of four parts, as is their programme. As a string quartet without violins they could be compared to Abba without Agnetha or The Stylistics without Russell Johns Jnr but in fact it gives them three violas who can take the lead or work together as a unit counterpointed with the cello or, as sometimes happens, all four are involved in the same rich tapestry. It is richer when the violas are in their lower register with their lush, velvety tone rather than venturing into violin territory.

The four parts of the programme are entitled Renaissance Works, Music of the Baroque, Classical selection and Folk Music.

Four miniatures from the C17th, more or less, began with Cavaccio bringing the fading late afternoon light indoors; Thomas Brewer and Thomas Lupo gathered pace before the spirited La Battera by Antegnati completed the evocation of the age of viols in its beguiling formality.

Bach's canon alla duodecima wrapped the unit together in a perfect little exercise in intricacy that any elaborate designer would be thrilled with and Ensemble C brought life and joy to the potentially dry area of mathematical perfection. St . Mary's are to be congratulated on their programmes being more detailed than those of their local team-mates that provide these concerts but today's didn't identify the composer of Concerto Grosso, Op. 6, no. VIII.  I attributed it to Handel in a quick game of Face the Music but I'm glad I checked. It was Corelli so I'm not Robin Ray yet but it was Corelli that Handel learnt how to do it from and so I couldn't have been any closer without being right. In much of it, Sophie Hurr's cello led the way with the violas doing the embellishing but, as she says in the notes, it's a 'democratic' format and the whole is more than its constituent parts.

Peter Warlock's Capriol Suite, being C20th, was in places more strident and less decorous. It's an ambitious piece and added at least one dimension to the set with its exploration of pizzicato and variations in tone and technique. There is hardly any music written for vla, vla, vla, vlc, if any, and so the group needs must rely on what's been arranged for them. Any local composers coming across them ought to set their minds to doing something specifically for them. As it is, Ross Cohen arranged this, and the next two pieces.

How faithful the arrangements are was demonstrated by the familiar item, the Allegretto from Beethoven 7 with its haunting funereal march that resolves into something slightly less ominous. Whether only from knowing the piece or finding how well it matched up to the 'middle strings' available, it worked very well and was possibly the highlight.

Foggy Morn and the Irish Sherry Suite were both 'Trad Irish', which means Danny Boy, some folk tunes jigs which show have far we've come from the courts of Rennaissance Italy. The energetic finale left us a long way from where we began. If we had thought that three violas and a cello might be a limited palette, it proved otherwise and I doubt if Ensemble C are going to specialize in lachrymose Dowland settings, the infamous Art of Fugue or any other things a viol consort might choose to. It's more likely they'll expand further. I don't know if the Wagenseil Music for low strings can be done without the double bass part but there's a Beatles medley, the likes of Steve Reich or Philip Glass or any amount of other music available to be used to demonstrate that 'less is more'. My old cassette of Pictures at an Exhibition with piano on one side and orchestra on the other eventually persuaded me that Ravel needn't have bothered although the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra later reclaimed much for the full-scale version.  

They'll be in Portsmouth Cathedral on Thursday. It will be worth the effort to see them there.

Alan Hull

My obligatory check through the forthcoming week's TV and radio on Saturday morning was rewarded with the most unexpected find on BBC4's Friday evening music slot.

9pm, Lindisfarne's Geordie Genius, the Alan Hull Story. Good Lord. How did they find out about that. If anybody can be regarded as 'the forgotten man' of 70's singer-songwriter types, it's him. Johnnie Walker only ever plays Run for Home, some will only remember Fog on the Tyne as a novelty hit cashing in on the Gazza Boom. That's not what it was like at all.

The early 70's were plagued by pop journalists hailing acts as the 'New Beatles' in the same way that, somehow, the likes of Derek Pringle or Chris Lewis were a bit later expected to be the New Botham. Neither T. Rex or Lindisfarne were the New Beatles and neither were the New Seekers the 'new' Seekers, they were T. Rex, Lindisfarne and the New Seekers.

I'm a bit taken aback by BBC4 finding it within themselves to do as much to acknowledge Alan Hull for the benefit of those precious few left of us who still care. We will see what happens and be grateful. The programme is by Sam Fender, born 1994, who, it says, 'remembers' Alan. But I doubt that. Alan died in 1995, aged 50. Sam was in the right place but at the wrong time. I lived at the right time but was mostly in the wrong place, only seeing Lindisfarne in Lancaster circa 1978 after the classic line-up re-formed.

We might also need to beware some of Alan's self-righteousness. It wasn't him that droned on about 'a working class hero is something to be' but he seemed to think so, however, it's a shame that Lindisfarne's run of hit singles faltered when they didn't put out Wake Up Little Sister, which would have been chart-friendly, and released Alan's eco-warrior hymn, All Fall Down, instead which only reached no. 34. But we can hardly say he didn't tell us,

 

Politicians, planners, go look what you done
Your madness is making a machine of everyone
But one day the machine might turn on.

 

We'll tear you down, mess you 'round
And bury you deep under the ground
And we'll dance on your graves till the flowers return
And the trees tell us secrets that took ages to learn.

 

That was 1973. And in 2021 we still have Quentin Letts describing Greta Thunberg as a 'moody little madam'.

Alan was some sort of 'poet', though, even given all the dubious relationship between 'poetry' and pop song words. Bob Dylan got the Nobel Prize for it but he said it was Smokey Robinson.

--

I've had a quick look through the diary to see what any Review of the Year might amount to. I've only read one new poetry book and one new novel and so in those old categories John Burnside and Sebastian Faulks have uneventful walkovers.

But here are some fascinating statistics.

I have written 4 poems so far in 2021 which is entirely consistent with my career average over four decades so I don't know why I'm bellyaching about having lost faith with it.

I've read 50 books and so it will be more than one a week for the year and that includes some long ones but not Proust this year. I wouldn't want to be a Booker Prize judge but all of that was immensely enjoyable.

64 horses, maybe a few more than that, that won have contributed to the marginal turf account plus I'm doggedly defending. More than that will have lost but it's staying out of the red that matters.

And I've been to 13 concerts, nearly all since September, with a couple more to come and they've all been unfailingly worthwhile.

I might go further and count up how many walks I've done, how many miles that makes and who with but one has to accept that writing a 'blog' for one's own benefit does need to be of interest to anybody who tunes in so maybe I won't publish that particular data. 

Solent Baroque at Lunchtime Live!

Solent Baroque, Portsmouth Cathedral, Nov 18.

In recent weeks the local area has had Thomas Luke's lumonous Ravel, some fine Chopin and Debussy and there's been nothing at all to complain about but I like to see the word 'baroque' because I feel as if I'm playing at home. Within the discipline and ornamentation, there's somehow more framework for 'expression' than the more modern, freer approach. It isn't known as 'The Age of Enlightenment' without good reason.

Solent Baroque had unforeseen problems with their harpscichord which was a shame for those in search of 'anuthenticity' but the show must go on and I can't say it caused any grief having piano continuo instead.

Handel's Sonata in F major, HWV 389 was alternatively cool streams flowing through Palladian gardens and merry dances. The main line is shared about between recorder, violin, cello and continuo and made me think if trad jazz with Veronica Price's violin as Humph's trumpet, Jen Flatman's recorder as Wally Fawkes flying off elsewhere but it's a loose comparison.

Karen Kingsley was involved throughout as the pieces used different comninations of instruments. Perhaps Emma Sharrock might do some of a Cello Suite at halfway one day to give her a rest but she didn't seem to mind as was rewarded with a Bach solo in the Allegro from the Italian Concerto which rattled along with its own energy, most notably with extended trills in the right hand while the left dashed around the basement. Bach is surely in a league of his own and I've got to save any further eulogies about him for the forthcoming Christmas Oratorio but it was great to see Karen do this after her very different Aubade played with the Grammar School students recently.

Blavet (1700-1768) was a new name for me, Jen's recorder like organ pipes in the top range of his Menuet and Variation while somehow providing its own augmentation as, for example, the violin does in  a Bach Partita. Loeillet was, too. I'm glad I checked on him because he wasn't part of the huge French contingent  from Lully to Rameau but Flemish and 'of London'. For his Trio Sonata no. 2 in F major, Jen brought out the tenor recorder with its softer, woodier sound. The cello found its way to greater prominence in the Allegro and, as officially my favourite instrument, I was grateful and think we should have more of it both in Solent Baroque and everywhere else. Veronica's violin shone brightly in the Allegro.

More Bach in the Sinfonia from Cantata no. 156 was violin and piano, effortlessly moving with Veronica achieving a sonorous tone. I don't know if it's because it's Bach that it makes the instrument sound even better. I'm sure actors sound better doing Shakespeare than they do in Harold Pinter.

Telemann's reputation might have been greater than Bach's in their day which was probably fine by him. One of the busiest composers in history, one would think, from his output. It's possible he was the main 'ideas man' of what was a prolific hit factory. The Largo of the Trio Sonata had violin and recorder in conversation, weaving in and out of each other's lines. The cello led off and bossed the Vivace and, for all one could tell, might have been bickering with the violin. I'd not seen Affetuoso as a marking before and was told it was a Telemann thing. It's not 'affected' as one with insufficient Italian might guess. That would give the violin licence to milk it like Andre Rieu. It's tender, or passionate, a bit more restrained, and that's what Veronica did. In the Allegro, recorder and violin were involved in a sprint to the line which it looked like Jen might be winning with a few more notes to play but as is to be expected in such a harmonious thing, they finished together.

Solent Baroque are a pleasure, art for art's sake and doing it with an obvious love of it which one would like to think is the best if not the only reason. Get there if you can if they play anywhere near you.

That might be it for me in St. Thomas's for 2021 if I can ascertain from Ensemble C in St. Mary's on Sunday that they'll be playing the same set this time next week. Thanks very much to Sachin for organizing it all and to the musicians who've taken part and been so impressive. I'd have to find another life for myself if it wasn't for the likes of them and I'm sure it wouldn't be as good. 

Poetry as Therapy

Poetry as therapy is the sort of New Age, almost medieval treatment I'm not likely to believe in. Poetry might possibly cause more problems than it solves or maybe it's just the people that write it that make it seem so.

However, medieval is by no means always bad and I had thought I might sit down with some poems and see if it did me any good, with special reference to my loss of interest in the genre. I took the Firebox anthology with me to Chichester yesterday and in there, Sean points out Elizabeth Bishop's The Bight as a precursor to Craig Raine's 'Martianism'. 

The local library is closed on Wednesdays so I couldn't go and collect The Elizabethans by A.N. Wilson that they've got in for me. So, early this evening, I took books by Bishop, Sean, Julia Copus and Roddy Lumsden from the shelves and read a few poems, mainly reliable old favourites by those reliable, old favourites.

They were good, actually. Even if one's lost faith with the art in general, it takes more than that to dim the admiration for the best things.

It is always seeing other people do things well that makes one want to try it for oneself, or it always has been for me and before long, well, an idea of sorts. Poems, for some of us, come as much from other poems as they do from 'life'.

11 syllables per line with 10 in the last of each stanza, not making any claims to sonnet form, in some ways autobiographical, in others meta-textual or whatever it's called, but mostly ironic, downbeat, making no claims for itself, declaring itself a work-in-progress and so far, so good, I'm not displeased with it.

One Day Perhaps I Will Think of a Title

And poetry is like the sort of girlfriend

That leaves you on account of all your drinking 

Which you say isn’t half as bad as she says 

But still she won’t come back until you stop. 

I know the Köchel numbers of sonatas,

The name that Alpha Cyngi’s better known by, 

The scores from long-forgotten cricket matches 

And that is all the use I claim to be. 

We commit to no more than rainy Wednesdays

In suburbs where the library is still closed then 

And I perform repeats of all the stories 

She’s heard before in slightly different versions 

And then, if I’m polite enough to do so,

I ask her how she is but not to dance.

Simone Tavoni in Chichester

Simone Tavoni, Chichester Cathedral, Nov 16

Simone Tavoni's piano recital today might be seen as two halves, one 'classical' and the other 'romantic'.

Four pieces from Clementi's Mon Ferrina, op. 39 were, he explained, by way of preparation for a competition. The first was light, the second more of a march, the third hinting towards the Mozart to come and the fourth gentler, even pensive. I hope the judges are suitably impressed by some dazzling fluency in what was pretty music, Clementi so often seeming to be used as exercises more than concert pieces.

Mozart is inevitably more involving. The first movement of the Sonata no. 14, k. 457 contrasted the serenity coupled with surges of energy and runs in the right hand with more stridency in the left. The second is an Adagio with a reassuring, warm caress that in turn looks forward perhaps to Chopin, the sonata being 'almost romantic' in Simone's words. The programme had a convincing narrative behind it. The Allegro assai to finish was more forte and less flowing, even abrupt in its changes. It's possible to see Simone as a lyrical pianist bringing out the C19th drama in Mozart's C18th music but we were robbed of the second half of what Mozart might have written had he lived to three score years and ten and that's what it might have developed into.

Much less well-kown is Moszkowski (1854-1925) but on the evidence of the two pieces here, he belongs alongside Chopin. I suspect the programme of listing these in the wrong order. The first was expansive and lyrical while the second was the duskier and poignant, finding an eventual calm resting place.  Au Crepescule was listed ahead of Poème de Mai but I think they might have been played in reverse order. The poem sounded the more crepuscular to me. 

Chopin's Rondo, op. 16 began tentatively before a top note blitzed us into stormier territory. It's unsettled if not quite unsettling, melodic lines appearing in the busy, busy right hand. There's often twice the value in a view of the keyboard and being able to watch such fluency that you wouldn't appreciate from the wrong side or from further back. The Rondo didn't end with a flourish as a gesture but it had been doing all its flourshing throughout, often sounding like a big ending when none of them were.

As an encore, Simone played a Toccata by Frescobaldi, written well before the invention of the pianoforte and thus for organ if not harpsichord. Such music entirely works on piano even if its composer had no knowledge that the instrument would one day be invented. After some lively exploration of its themes, it resolved itself to an undemonstrative ending and left me wondering whether Buxtehude's organ music has ever been played on piano. I'm going to try to find out and if it hasn't, maybe I'll suggest the idea and see if it's likely to work.

With all best wishes to Simone in his forthcoming competition. I heard the finalists in this year's Leeds event and have no idea how anybody can find fault with any such musicians. There are no losers, really, or there shouldn't be.

So that was my last trip to Chichester for this year. I'll hope to be back there for the resumption of such pleasures in January but there's still plenty more to come even closer to home before I can give my weary vocabulary a rest and return refreshed to try to do that impossible thing, do justice to music in words. It's most unsatisfactory, like looking at paintings on the radio, but one must do what one can.

No More Mr. Wiseguy

 We haven't heard much from Racetrack Wiseguy during this that is supposed to be our time of year. That's a blessing because although it was good last year, it hasn't ever got started this time. Sometimes, I'm afraid, it's like that. Quite how I'm stil marginally in front on the tyrf account this year is hard to say. I don't deserve to be but when under pressure I bat like Boycott, not Gower.

Protekterat was possibly an unlucky loser in the big race on Saturday and then our new flagship horse, Wiseguy, trailed in a most underwhelming odds on third at Fontwell on Sunday. So it's not at present the sort of advice one needs and so I'll tread even more carefully and keep it to myself. Form is temporary but class is forever so I'll hope to be back, all bouyant and profitable, in due course. It is unthinkable to risk going into the minus and so the rearguard action must be steadfast.

The great benefit of having a variety of interests, though, is that when one enterprise is struggling, another compensates. When I was a cricketer-poet, a couple of poor scores could be alleviated by a good poem and suchlike. Having allowed a reasonable profit to slip through my careless fingers, the chess isn't in bad order with a rating of 1700 restored at Bullet. A little foray back into Rapid took me up to undreampt-of heights of 1972, not quite within sight of an unlikely 2000 but you never know. Blitz stayes on 1929 but those represent Top 12.5 and Top 18% of the players at Lichess while a less well advised attempt to repeat the trick at Classical took me down to 1880 but that is still Top 15%. Magnus Carlsen isn't worried about me yet.

However, I've never had a diary so full and the second half of this year makes busy, busy reading. It's possibly the paradise one always dreamed of, especially with the area being so well catered for with lunchtime concerts. None of them are ever no good, which is either due to my picking them well or the fact that none of them are ever no good. So, tune in tomorrow to hear about Chichester, Thursday for Portsmouth and right up to what could be a most fitting climax to what has been a great season, the Christmas Oratorio on Dec 11.

Sebastian Faulks - Snow Country

Sebastian Faulks, Snow Country (Hutchinson-Heinemann)

The second part of Sebastian Faulks's 'Vienna' trilogy takes its title from a novel by Kawabata. I originally abandoned the first part, Human Traces, and gave the hardback away only to buy it again in paperback to make my Faulks collection complete minus the pastiches he's done, read it again and liked it much better. I read the wrong Kawabata the other week to be able to shed light on any parallels involved but now, no longer so concerned about any attempt at completism, Snow Country was the latest of my orders from the library system. Somehow it all comes together from the sort of narrative of loss and rediscovery that might make a Faulks plot but without quite so much heartbreak.

The theme of Viennese psychiatry is continued from Human Traces but with only traces of that story re-emerging so Snow Country can be read alone without knowledge of the earlier book. Advances in the treatment of mental illness, such as they were, prompt some discussion of 'what it is to be human' when personality breaks down and leaves only what looks like emptiness at its centre,

And this is what the agonies of those people had come down to. A name and a diagnosis with many outriding question marks; slight improvements, blank journal entries when ideas had run short, letters of discharge, death certificates.

An early review saw the book as heavily-laden with ideas and implied it was more like an essay attached to a story but that is to undervalue the broad sweep of its historical development and the places of Anton and Lena in it. It's possible that Faulks might be suspected of overdoing the emotional pull at times but that's what he does and he does it very well.

Anton becomes a writer and gets a commission to do a piece about the schloss established for the treatment of mental illness in Human Traces. There's always another layer, as in books like Atonement, when a story has in it someone writing an alternative account. His first love is Delphine and when he meets Lena he asks her to act as her surrogate.

Lena earns money in Vienna by entertaining men and enjoying it without ever being a 'line girl'. Her first love is Rudolf, a Social Democrat fighting a losing battle as mitteleuropa lurches to the far right between the wars.

Martha, who runs the sanitorium, is devoted to her work. If the climax of the plot seems to be Anton finding that Delphine died in a religious retreat in 1918, aged 42, the crisis in 1933 with the violent death of Rudolf and the inevitable rise of fascism and the resolution of Anton and Lena finding a second-best devotion to each other shows that emotional plateau to be base camp on the way to the summit.

Perhaps it's a bit much but the body count and hyperbole in the drama of Hamlet don't prevent that from being one of the greatest works in Eng. Lit. and Faulks manages to bring in the idea that Shakespeare 'invented human nature', and

Before that, they appeared to one another as two-dimensional.

It is persuasive even if one feels one is being manipulated somewhat. I didn't do much else today apart from read it and one feels better for having done so. There's something slightly 'popular' about Sebastian Faulks's books that make me at least suspect he's not quite the greatest living English novelist but one can't fault his research, his large-scale design or his accumulation of ideas and I read them all while never finding time for so many other highly-praised fiction writers so he must be doing something right.

Towards a Sublime Top 6

 Richard Bradford's The Odd Couple was unsavoury and not very sublime. The meticulous detail with which he sets out the lives of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin is impressive but it only serves to demonstrate how deeply unimpressive people they were, as so many self-serving right-wing men of the old school were and still are.

I've only ever read Lucky Jim of Amis's novels which wasn't much more than 'of its age' alongside the likes of Billy Liar, Hurry On Down, Room at the Top and maybe Alan Sillitoe. It gave him instant celebrity status which seemed to carry him the rest of the way while, as Bradford has it, his subsequent novels were tools of self-analysis, or possibly even recrimination, as he worked he way through a seemingly endless succession of women that he couldn't help himself with. That was as much of an affliction as his later loss of interest in the whole she-bang, as it were, as if he was burnt out or maybe just disgusted with the enterprise. He's not easy to like and nothing Bradford said about his other books made me want to read them but a passing reference to Al Alvarez might yet lead me to look at his accounts of the period.

Larkin will always be a slightly more nuanced case, at least on account of his fine poems. His selfishness is increasingly difficult to forgive, especially after John Sutherland's recent book, but it is in part understandable given that it was largely part of a strategy of self-defence, of a 'private' person who valued his solitariness as well as being unable to help himself having three girlfriends at once in a duplicitous way as compensation. 

The questions remain why literary biography only uses the work to illuminate the darker corners of the lives rather than vice versa and why some of us can't help ourselves either in feeling a need to read it. Because it's there, I dare say.

--

Somewhat more sublime is the new arrival Laurenzi, La Finta Savia, Arias, which came out of The Early Music Show's account of how Monteverdi's L'incoranazione di Poppea might not have been written by him. Here we go again with the Shakespeare Authorship question except they might not have been so concerned about exactly who wrote what in those days. It makes such a difference to us now that a painting attributed to Leonardo will be worth millions until someone suggests it was done by somebody else and then it's worth only tens of thousands.

Laurenzi was 52 years younger than Monteverdi but maybe the old maestro was getting his students to do his work for him. He is readily added to my battery of obscure composers and La Finta Savia doesn't seem to be available in anything more than this disc of arias that includes the very sublime duet from the end of Poppea, Pur ti miro. Surely anybody who had written that would want their name on it.

But the impulse to make a list often comes from wanting to include such a thing on that list and thus inventing a list for it to go on. So, Top 6 Sublime Vocal Pieces, not needing to give it too much thought-

Reynaldo Hahn, A Chloris

Josquin des Prez, Deploration sur la mort de Johannes Ockeghem

Francois Couperin, Lecons de Tenebres

Dietrich Buxtehude, Klag-Lied

Robert Morton, Le Souvenir de vous me tue

Errollyn Wallen, In Earth

 

That wouldn't be a bad start to a Desert Island selection but might need Wig Wam Bam by the Sweet and Walk Away Renee by the Four Tops to offset the melancholy.  

Appearance at Music in Portsmouth

 I was honoured by an invitation to do a guest spot at the excellent, very useful, Music in Portsmouth website and there's no point being shy about it. Maybe that's what I do these days, rather than poetry, so there was nothing to lose and I'm very pleased with how it turned out.

Interview at Music in Portsmouth

What an interesting, knowledgeable bloke. I'd love to meet him.

 

Odd

The advantages in shelf space-saving, not to mention cost-cutting, in supporting the wonderful but neglected service provided by local libraries, continue to be very persuasive. You couldn't think of a better idea if you tried unless you thought of a way of giving Greta Thunberg the job that useless article, Boris, always wanted, 'World King'. 

The Odd Couple by Richard Bradford, concerning the relationship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin had never looked like a book I needed to have. He's written biographies of both of them and surely he's milking it by then doing one of them both together. 

Maybe he was and maybe he wasn't. The detail it goes into in examining these two lives is thorough to say the least and often possibly more than one wants or needs to know. It's possibly disrespectful to intrude into anybody's life quite so deeply even if they had advertised it quite so openly in their novels and poems themselves. And yet, because it's there, because it's been done, one reads it. One just doesn't pay to do so, so that must be alright, then.

Amis and Larkin were the 'odd couple' because while being such close friends at first, they were very different personalities. The book is less about literature than it is about sexual dysfunction. The problem Amis had, that he couldn't leave it alone, was probably more serious than Larkin's, that he never thought he was getting enough, although for such an unprepossessing and selfish character who just happened to write the best poems of his generation, he didn't do so bad for himself.

In some accounts, Larkin can be construed as a fogey-ish but common sense administrator who was better than he thought he was in company but it's harder to make a case for Kingsley Amis as a person, poet, or perhaps even novelist although he got first run on his mate in the race to celebrity status.

It can't have been pretty work for Bradford, wading through the letters and re-constructing the miseries of not only the two protagonists of his story but also those who came into their orbit. You either pity him the academic's role in cataloguing it all or you admire him for what it eventually becomes. 

It's odd, more than anything, though, and one wonders whether we should all have the same rubber stamp made that Larkin had to apply to unsolicited poems that he was sent that said, 'Why should I care'. 

But Bradford is better than I thought. A book only needs a few brilliant passages to make it worthwhile. I don't need to be electrified by every sentence. He does the best job in a short paragraph or two of nailing the old debate about An Arundel Tomb that anybody's ever done. Yes, of course,

Many commentators upon the poem have failed to recognise that its speaker is robustly unpersuaded by everything that he apprehends,

and

Such misreadings testify to the brilliance of Larkin's counterpointing of the respectful, deferential manner of the poem against what it actually says.

Well, thank heavens for that but it the misreadings were always less due to Larkin's brilliance than to some of his more sentimental readers not being able to read properly. It would be great if that was finally Q.E.D. on that subject.

The centre of the book is really how two such ill-matched best mates fell out, which might have been more about how the reluctant Larkin resented the success of the more exuberant Amis. If only he had been able to wait for posterity he might have seen some shift in what their subsequent reputations looked like. But Bradford is able to incorporate a wider realm of a very incidental supporting cast, like Shakespeare does with Autolycus, the Apothecary, the Nurse, Osric or Bagot. 

'Bummer' Scott 'appeared at least three decades older' than Nicky de Peche Craddock, daughter-in-law of the legendary chef, Fanny, who was the 'long-term admirer' of Nicky who occupied some of the living space of the Amis accommodation in Cambridge in 1961. He was dissolute but still recommended by Amis,

to his sons as an exemplar of good English, even when drunk, which he seemed to be for most of his waking existence.

And that's the sort of thing one reads books for. It's not for self-improvement, moral messages or even education or laughs. It's for great sentences or passages.

Bradford on Amis and Larkin could easily be mistaken for a miserable book but one only has to read it the other way and it's hilarious.

Portsmouth Choral Union - Fauré Requiem

 Portsmouth Choral Union, Fauré Requiem, St. Mary's Fratton, Nov 6 

Portsmouth Choral Union and David Gostick were so pleased to be back performing live that they began by applauding the audience. They deservedly got that back with interest at the end. They had packed a lot into an hour, beginning on familiar territory with Mozart's gentle Ave Verum Corpus swelling towards its top note and setting the tone for a kindly programme of choral music which is one thing I so far hadn't had this week with five pianists, a trombone player and a singer.

Viadana and his Exsultate Justi is somewhat less familiar. Roughly a contemporary of Monteverdi, it was brief, bright and spritely before Geistliches Lied, 'sacred song', by Brahms returned to something like the mood of the Mozart with its gentle waves of voices over the ever gorgeous Southern Pro Musica who here were a string sextet augmented by Ian Richardson's organ.

More shimmering violin in Fauré's Cantique de Jean Racine was possibly a little preview of the main feature before Jack Comerford sang Schlummert Ein from the Bach Cantata BWV 82 in his sympathetic bass with another fine baroque walking part on the double bass. 

But the Fauré Requiem was the headline despite the iconic names on the undercard. It's a glowing, sensual view of the beyond that possibly prettifies the idea of dying as a comfort to those capable of suspending disbelief. It was a teenage favourite on a Music for Pleasure cassette in the 70's but nothing compares to hearing it for real and I'm not sure if I have before.

The Sanctus goes from almost a whisper to its dramatic burst; Faye Eldret was pure and clear in the Pie Jesu which may or may not have been source material for Andrew Lloyd Webber once and the organ was again powerful in the Agnus Dei before the glimpse of heaven in In Paradisum which was sumptuous here, as the whole piece and the whole concert was.

This was possibly the most moving of the week's concerts which were all tremendous in their own ways. Portsmouth and its surrounding area are currently being well provided for with some fine music and the fact that the events are being so well attended suggests it's not just the PCU and me that are glad to be back. Fingers crossed, then.

I'm having a week off next week, I think, but there's still a couple of dates at Chichester and a Christmas Oratorio to go before there'll be the menu for the New Year to choose from. I hope those that enjoy putting these events on know how grateful some of us are for their efforts.

Musicians from Portsmouth Grammar School at Lunchtime Live!

Musicians from Portsmouth Grammar School, Portsmouth Cathedral, Nov 4

 In a late change to the advertised programme, it turned out not to be our local piano superstar, Angelina Kopyrina with her fiery Rachmanninov that I and my select entourage saw today but Angelina can be saved for another time and, by happy accident, we had a different sort of treat.

Karen Kingsley, Head of Keyboard at PGS and surely a profound influence on these young musicians, did the honourable thing by going on first, possibly so that nobody else had to. Peter Copley's Aubade seemed to begin before sunrise in a disarmingly bleak opening but splinters of light from the top end of the keyboard broke through in what was an adventurous, modernist choice. Good Grief, when the composer's date of birth shows them to be younger than me, it must be either me that's old or them that's young and Copley's 59. It must be me, then.

That was surprise enough until the 'kids' came on. I thought Thomas Luke yesterday in Havant was amazingly accomplished not only as a musician (obviously and astonishingly so) but as a person for someone of 18. The three musicians here are a few years behind the likes of him but it was heartwarming, if not heartbreaking to see and hear the results of all the hours of hard practice.

Bach's Ave Maria uses that uplifting riff most famous from Handel's Zadok the Priest and then Daisy Sissons looks unassuming until filling the acoustic of the St. Thomas Chapel with her soaring voice. Equally impressive was her enunciation of the Italian in Gluck's O del mio dolce ardor from Paride ed Elena, not something I knew but I'm always ready to make the case for Gluck, who only died two years before Mozart but would represent the 'classical' period gorgeously had he not been overshadowed by such a superstar name.

Erik Hillman played Jan Sandström's Sang till Lotta on the trombone and, not being word perfect in Swedish, I would have liked a translation of the title. Thinking that it might be about blood, given the French, I was entirely down a blind alley trying to make more of the resonant brass sound and moving piano part from Karen than was necessary. It just means Song to Lotta and makes much more sense as such as a love song so sensitively done.

Jason Shui completed the programme with his own show within a show. There's nothing much more sensible in the piano repertoire than a Scarlatti sonata and he began with no.29, having been spoilt for choice, I'm sure, and brought it to life with what is often the part to listen to in baroque music, the walking left hand, while the right hand thinks it's doing the star turn. That lead, very naturally, into Mozart who, unlike Shakespeare, never blotted a line, is as close to a glimpse of heaven as we can realistically expect even in a cathedral and in the Adagio, Jason brought out the logic and mannerisms of some choice Amadeus in what had the makings of a hymn tune while I was inspired enough to cast my theatrical friend, Graham, as Mozart opposite my sinister, diabolical Salieri. Very unfair it was of Peter Schaffer to give us that version of Salieri in his play. Salieri wasn't Mozart but neither was anybody else. The merry Allegretto completed a fluent exposition of 'classicism' before first a swerve into to two C20th miniatures from Prokofiev's Visions Fugitives, which were fragments from a later world that perhaps didn't seem to hold together so well, as by now we are well aware, and then, as any programme is well advised to, you finish on an upbeat with the jazzy, syncopated, slightly Scott Joplin, maybe even 'stride' piano of Fats Waller, with Sweet William by Billy Mayerl.

We couldn't have gone over the road to the pub much happier than with that, with or without having seen the glamorous pianist from Moscow. It's not obvious where hope comes from in a climate catastrophe with the most hapless vanity project in charge of our little bit of it but here was some.

Thank you very much for being there, Daisy, Erik, Jason and Karen.