Composer of Last Week

 Composer of the Week last week was Errollyn Wallen, interview long distance by Donald MacLeod in the lighthouse where she lives on the north coast of Scotland. Sullam Voe, I think she said. That must have some disadvantages to compensate for being tremendous.

Whenever I mention Vivaldi here I rarely miss out what has been said of him that he wrote the same concerto 500 times. Errollyn is the very opposite of that with no two pieces being similar. Her first piece, for solo piano from 1982, might have been Ligeti or Kurtag meeting Erk Satie, Mighty River quotes Amazing Grace, another The Girl from Ipanema, she's set Jerusalem in a newer idiom; she's a songwriter, she's a bit jazz, avant garde and traditional and there is, or is to be, an opera. The only theme that brings her work together is the not recognizing boundaries. One might have been surprised to hear two settings based on poems by Philip Larkin. Perhaps not everything works but there have been less successful uses made of Larkin in music.

It would be great if  Composer of the Week could always bring in the composer to say a few words and we could hear from Bach, Mozart, Handel et al but we will have to be grateful for what we can have. 

The programmes are here,

Composer of the Week - Errollyn Wallen  

and on the 'Previous' links. For all that contemporary classical music went through in the 1960's and thereabouts, it's good to see it made a full recovery.

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The Age of Reason came together at the end and made some sense without being quite as good as some of the blurb made it sound. Continuing with the triology, Elizabeth Bowen said of The Reprieve that 'M. Sartre is one of the most readable...novelists I know'. 

One wonders what omission the dotted lines represent. Yes, he is very 'readable' in as far as his prose, even in translation, is lucid and lively. However, in The Reprieve I realized it had somewhere shifted into first person narrative. I looked up on the internet which character was doing the naarration and found that it 'seamlessly' moves from first person to third in a disconcerting way that is part of Sartre's strategy. Seamless it may be but I'm yet to be convinced of the advantages of being disconcerted.

It's not unenjoyable and I'll see the trilogy out well before the books are due back at the library. I don't want to take them back unread after the Library Service did such a good job of delivering them from the central store to just round the corner for me.