Caroline Clipsham at Chichester

 Caroline Clipsham, Chichester Cathedral, Jan 31

Caroline Clipsham's credits include 'playing for the FA Cup' which is not one I've encountered on a pianist's biographical note before. Today at Chichester she deployed Robert Schumann up front, Rachmaninov in the middle and Samuel Barber at the back.

Schumann's Sonata in G minor, Op. 22 dives straight into the current of its first movement, So rasch wie möglich, which I'm not surprised to find translates as 'as quickly as possible', before the Andantino is tender, redolent of a Mozart slow movement and possibly nocturnal. The short Scherzo was energetic again before the busy Presto made its way through clusters and forests of notes, all of which Caroline delivered with easy confidence.

For me, it was in the quieter and slower passages that she excelled, though. Three of Rachmaninov's Moments Musicaux, Op. 16, of which there are six, were the stand-out part of her programme. No. 1, somewhat more abstracted or even distracted than the Schumann, was inward-looking and, for all its walk around the keyboard, about restraint and calm. I notice that the first symphony, of which the premiere was a 'disaster' is opus 13 and so am tempted into some coarse, impromptu biography and wonder if he was still in re-hab from the distress that caused. Whether or not it was, these gorgeous meditations represent a successful recovery.

No. 4 ruminated below halfway on the keyboard, beautifully paced and judged, prefiguring the mood of Send in the Clowns that I thought I heard in it. The left hand continued its foundation work in the tumbling downward spiral in No. 5 which departs from the piano of no. 4 into forte. I wish we'd had the complete set. I'm always worried about what has been left out of works when only given extracts and, looking at a few recordings, some of them similarly don't do them all. Is No. 2 really so bad. So perhaps Caroline can remedy the situation on a new disc one day.

Samuel Barber doesn't always do it for me beyond the obvious deep sorrow of the famous Adagio and two of the four Excursions, while being entirely harmless and unobjectionable, didn't go beyond the Rachmaninov. We could have more fittingly had the big applause first and the Barber as an extended encore. 

No. 2 was In slow blues tempo, which it was but was all it was, again 'for me', and I'm happy to accept that's my loss. Then No. 1 could have been somewhere that the likes of Steve Reich or Philip Glass based their whole minimalist careers on by reducing the 'snapshots' of noisy American cities to something even more repetitive and hypnotic. 

Music is a wide church - unlike Chichester Cathedral which is narrower than most- and one can't constantly be ever more thrilled by it for fear of being no more than an undiscriminating addict. Barber is not the only composer that isn't quite Bach, Mozart or Josquin des Prez.

Caroline Clipsham is a brilliant pianist. She graced a Chichester lunchtime with her Rachmaninov and I came back as glad as ever that I'd been there, feeling the wiser for it but probably not.

Bad Day at the Office

 There are such days from time to time. Confidence is a much over-rated thing, especially in horse racing. But we survived one or two worse Saturdays last year and came out of it with an all-time best profit. It is as important to limit one's losses when it's not going right as it is to sit on one's winnings when it is so it was entirely my fault for breaking the rules and chasing early losses and compounding the problem but we're still solvent, in the black and set up to do better next time which is a modest investment on Gary Moore's Inneston in the first at Fontwell (1.05) tomorrow. When you fall off your bike, or horse, you have to get back on.

Dan Skelton impressively tells it like it is and was confident without being as bullish as his mentor, Mr. Nicholls, about Pembroke who was heavily backed but found one too good on the day. Whether Mr. Nicholls was quite so expectant of Stage Star giving away weight first time up in a handicap I'm not sure but the horse defied his doubters and, of course, I only wish I hadn't been one of them and had had more on. And so you wonder if and where he might go in March.

One consolation is writing about it because words can somehow be soothing like an inward hurt objectified and thus in a way neutralised. And another consolation is looking forwards by making a tentative long short list of which names might be set to appear in the forthcoming Cheltenham Preview which is always a highlight of the racing journalism year.

There's ten of them, at least three of them not favourites, and a tantalising 'dark horse' but we will see.

I feel better already with nothing to complain about how it's gone for the last ten years and things to look forward to in the next few weeks. It was just one bad day at the office.

I keep wondering when the words will run out, as far as writing's concerned. Surely one day all the sentences one could possibly have wanted to write will have been written, as well as all those you thought better of afterwards. The same goes for chess moves but that doesn't seem to worry those that understand it better than I do. And certainly it seems to apply to pop music when one is reminded of disc 1 of the immaculate Best of Bowie but I dare say that the 12 year olds of today think just as highly of Piggy Minxster, Slapdog Jerome and Feeble Gangster as some of us did of T. Rex fifty years ago.

Whatever one does it doesn't seem quite enough. Wouldn't it be good to write one of those perfect little 'novellas' like Gide or Turgenev did, publish the Shakespeare 'twins theory' in something more solid than the letter in the TLS all those years ago or even have a songwriting credit on the 85 year old Cliff Richard's compelling return to form in a few year's time.

I'm thrilled with what all the poems look like, the best of them, if I ever look at them. I have enough essays backed up to furnish those outlets that may or may not want to print them. I'm in danger of overloading what suitable conduits there are, which is predominantly the music reviews, and so further essays aren't really required.

And that's what it like, it's all good, it's all under control but nobody ever did anything much by thinking like that. The only way to be satisfied is to be less than happy with how things are and be doing something about it. Making a respectable profit from the turf and thinking it should be more, finding combinations of words even more attractive than what's gone before, flirting with the vainglorious idea that you've done something worthwhile.

Sport was ever thus. That was good. A few weeks later it was understood as the new standard and thus ordinary. You couldn't ever win and that, as long as it doesn't drive you mad, was a good thing. 

James Gaughan and David Hammond at Lunchtime Live!

 James Gaughan and David Hammond, Portsmouth Cathedral, Jan 26 

It's always useful when performers say a few words of introduction about the pieces they perform and James Gaughan was paticularly good at that, beginning by pointing out their watery theme before I'd noticed its appropriateness in the 'Cathedral of the Sea'.

David began by conjuring the Rolling in foaming billows from Haydn's Creation on the resident Bosendorfer with James's baritone relaxing from imperious to pacific while Haydn flirted with some vestigial baroque stylings.

Being now deep into the big Elgar biography, I'm well placed to augment the background detail but I stick with James for Where the corals lie from Sea Pictures with a slightly sinister piano hinting at hidden dangers in the depths if not even some sort of death wish lurking in the ostensible comforts of the song.

Mahler's dreamier Phantasie aus Don Juan involved a similar siren call to destruction although Schubert's Die Forelle had at least more jollity on its surface but it was Schubert and so you can't be too sure.

Elgar regarded Richard Strauss as the greatest living composer of their time and while James took a break before his second half, David played An einsamer Quelle, 'by a lonely spring', its water gently pouring, quite possibly catching the sunlight, as the right hand did the work of two, keeping the rhythmic motif going while providing the top notes, too.

Elgar had little regard for Charles Villiers Stanford, neither the music nor, it seems, the man and the feelings were at least partially reciprocated. Elgar was possibly doing something new and regarded Stanford as limited to tradition, anticipating in a way what was due to happen in literature and what was to be one way of seeing all C20th arts in a binary way of innovation vs. tradition. I dare say it was ever thus.

James and David brought them together now which they might not have been able to do in their lifetimes by giving Songs of the Sea, based on poems by that other unreconstructed dinosaur, Henry Newbolt, we might say if it were not for how well they stood up against those pieces in the first half by composers with greater reputations.

James was martial in rousing that old pirate, Francis Drake with a drumbeat if ever England needed him to defend them again; the lyrical longing of Outward Bound took him into a contrasting mood before being valiant again in Devon, O Devon and then back to the warm embers of Homeward Bound before the almost G&S test of enunciation and vocal dexterity in the powerful finish of The 'Old Superb'. Some of us might want to take the implications of rousing patriotism as examples of period pieces by now but in Portsmouth it can still count as 'heritage'.

It is often noticeable how much thought is put into the making of these programmes and the well deserved encore was John Ireland's setting of Masefield's Sea Fever, another poet so wildly out of fashion that he must be due a revival, but the poems do little damage to the music and since this week it was such a nice day for a walk, I'm very glad I added this niche selection to my gloriously busy itinerary.

Next week, one of the area's real superstars, Valya Seferinova plays Szymanowski, so I understand, with Catherine Lawlor. You really ought to make sure you get to that if you can.

Thomas Hardy at PPS

 I wouldn't go as far as to say it was one of the events of the local literary calendar round these parts but once a year Portsmouth Poetry Society are treated to a meeting on a subject that is introduced by me. On this year's programme the subject is Thomas Hardy that I pick-pocketed from somedody else's suggestion much in the style of Autolycus. The meeting is on Weds 1 Feb as per here,

PPS programme 

so please come if you can. I've sent out the introduction below so that we can go without me reading it out at the start so you are entirely 'up to speed',

 

Thomas Hardy published his first collection of poems, Wessex Poems, in 1898 at the age of 58. The following year, W.B. Yeats published his third, The Wind Among the Reeds, aged 34. They were similar books in some ways – traditional and backward-looking, Yeats coming to the end of his early, mystical, ‘Celtic Twilight’ period and Hardy, as evidenced in essays by Geoffrey Grigson and Thom Gunn, going back to something like the ballad tradition and with some kinship with the Dorset dialect poet, William Barnes, who died in 1886.

The early poems of Yeats had included such quaintness as The Lake Isle of Innisfree and the 1899 collection featured He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven (‘tread softly because you tread on my dreams’) but whereas he was soon to take the ‘high road’ to the more rigorous Modernism of Ezra Pound and Byzantium, Hardy stayed on the ‘low road’ of mainstream, coherent tradition and did old-fashioned things well for the next thirty years.

Hardy had written poems unsuccessfully in the 1860’s but since then had produced a series of very successful novels but was dismayed by the critical reception of Jude the Obscure, published in 1895. His stories had been increasingly progressive but finally the Bishop of Wakefield announced that he had burnt his copy amongst others who took exception to its anti-religious theme. Hardy had always wanted to write poems but had earned a living by fiction.

As well as their fateful, deterministic plots, Hardy’s novels featured a number of strong, independent and sympathetically-treated female characters like Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd, Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native, Tess and, finally, Sue Bridehead in Jude. But he didn’t translate this sympathy from his work into his life. Emma, his first wife who helped him in his work, was aggrieved by the assistance he offered other women writers without doing the same for her. His second wife, Florence, 39 years younger than him, was a hero-worshipper who pursued Hardy in the same way that Valerie Fletcher had become T.S. Eliot’s second wife and, if we must, Gary Numan married the secretary of his fan club, but she never loved Hardy.

A major theme in Hardy’s work is the regret he felt after Emma’s death, as in The Voice (‘Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me’). After his death in 1938, Hardy’s heart was buried in Stinsford churchyard with Emma while his ashes were interred in Westminster Abbey, and Florence was later buried in Stinsford. But however vivid and powerful his work had been, reports like those of Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife, after visiting in 1885, describe a ‘pale, gentle, frightened little man’ and ‘a quite pathetic figure’.

Hardy also provides anthology pieces like Channel Firing and Drummer Hodge on World War 1 but his poetry is often marked by ideas of separation. In The Impercipient, he cannot feel involved in a church service,

That from this bright believing band
An outcast I should be,
That faiths by which my comrades stand
Seem fantasies to me,
And mirage-mists their Shining Land,
Is a drear destiny.

And in Her Definition, he feels ‘debarred’ from Emma’s maiden name. But, as he explains in an introductory note to Winter Words, the collection eventually published posthumously,

My last volume of poems was pronounced wholly gloomy and pessimistic by reviewers…My sense of the oddity of this verdict may be imagined when, in selecting them, I had been, I thought, rather too liberal in admitting flippant, not to say farcical, pieces

And he has a point because there is usually a light in the darkness, as represented by the Darkling Thrush and a poem like For Life I Had Never Cared Greatly, in which,

      With symphonies soft and sweet colour
           It courted me then,
          Till evasions seemed wrong,
      Till evasions gave in to its song,
And I warmed, until living aloofly loomed duller
           Than life among men.

which has a great musicality and life.

The ‘negative constructions’ of ‘impercipient’ and ‘debarred’ recur throughout his work, significantly indicating the lack of connection he feels but it is not complete alienation.

In Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves mentions visiting Hardy who asked if he ‘wrote easily’, in reply Hardy said that he rarely went through more than three drafts of a poem, four at most, and that although he had written novels ‘by a timetable’,

poetry always came to him by accident, which was perhaps why he prized it so highly.

The 14 novels, plus short stories, the 947 poems in The Complete Poems and the huge verse drama, The Dynasts, about the Napoleonic Wars, represent an enormous output but he was an architect as well.

A photograph of Philip Larkin looking at plans for his new university library at Hull prompts a list of just how many parallels there are between Hardy and the later poet who became the mature Larkin once he found a soulmate in Hardy rather than his first poems in the style of Auden and then Yeats. It is in those negative constructions, the religious doubt in Church Going, the awkward, selfish relationships with women and a coherent, common sense poetry that takes so little from the Modernism of Eliot and Pound. Even down to the detail that they both rode round their local countryside on bikes.

In 1926, Hardy is quoted as saying, ‘I’m afraid poetry is giving me up’, which Larkin said, too, whether or not consciously citing his mentor.

Dr. Johnson wrote that,

It is not difficult to conceive…that for many reasons a man writes much better than he lives.

Hardy wasn’t the only one. Forty years ago, and more, the proper object of study in Eng. Lit. was the work, to the exclusion of any reference to the author, for a certain sort of purist. That has changed since then but it is to be hoped that we can still differentiate between the author and their work and, if necessary, admire one if not the other.

Mallinson, Wisener & Startseva at Chichester

Peter Mallinson, Matthias Wiesner & Evgenia Startseva,  Chichester Cathedral, Jan 24

With bus fares temporaily capped at £2 singles wherever you go, the trip to Chichester is even more of a bargain than it ever was and it was always excellent value.

Peter Mallinson and Matthias Wiesner are two violas & Evgenia Startseva is the piano engine room, a combination I've not seen before, playing pieces arranged for such a trio but one specially written for it.

Bach is like the comprehensive index to all music and in a way much more of a place to begin than where to end. The Sonata BWV 1029 opens with a Vivace that is very 'Brandenburg' before the crepuscular Adagio has the violas hanging in the air over the piano's wary tread and the velvet strings are measured in the intricacies of the Allegro. MWS, which they will be known as for convenience here, made a mature, sensual sound out of the lush intelligence of the score and we will wait in hope of a recording of them doing so.

The Allegretto from Schubert's String Quartet D. 887 was wistful with maybe a suggestion of 'palm court' elegance or sentimentality about it before, very much by way of contrast, A pale blue dot (2019) by John Alexander, who was present even if Bach and Schubert were indisposed. The dot in the title is the image of the earth on a photograph taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 from a distance of 4 billion miles away. The music begins with endangered species, its chill shifting to urgency before Evgenia's piano is nervous. the pebble, tended by its shadow is desolate with the two violas stranded, perhaps, without accompaniment, then fragile and pizzicato with a precarious top line. As has happened before on such programmes, one can take the Bach very much for granted while something else makes a deeper impression but it was Bach's music that was sent into outer space on Voyager's highly improbable mission to make contact with any other life that might be out there which, it was suggested, was 'just showing off' what one of our species was capable of. But only, really, him and a few others who also did very well.

A pale blue dot is solemn, bereaved but I hope not quite 'apocalyptic'. Delivered movingly and concentratedly by MWS, I was glad to find it on one of their discs on the way out and look forward to giving it several more hearings. It's a shame I didn't know about it when Radio 3 were asking not long ago for nominations of great C21st pieces. Meanwhile, what is saved on subsidized bus fares only goes so far towards that and the Nathalie Stutzmann Handel and the Charpentier from my favourite shop, the Oxfam Books and Records on East Street but the cash isn't any use until it's converted into things one can't help but spend it on.

Elgar's Wild Bears, after that, was almost by way of a lollipop after the main course, dashing along but not always fitting in with the impression I'm getting of the composer from the biography in which I made my way steadily to page 482 beforehand. If I can read at the tempo of Wild Bears for the next ten days I should get it back to the library without having to renew it.

Elgar was lauded in his lifetime, even by such as Fritz Kreisler, as belonging alongside Brahms and Beethoven. I might not quite go that far but England, or Britain, hadn't had any such composer since Purcell. It's a good thing that the piece of most interest today, in a programme that also included him and two genuine Old Masters, was by a living composer even if its prognosis for the future isn't upbeat, not having Elgar's Catholicism to hold it up by faith alone. 

I've never been disappointed by a Chichester concert. They are always at least excellent. But once in a while I come back with more than I expected to.

Al Green – I’m Still in Love with You

 

  

It would be entirely understandable if all the little essays collected here would interpreted as a big, long protest that, no, I was only temporarily at an impressionable age a 'rock' fan. I didn't have much choice about the company I kept at school in the 70's and they were fine people but I didn't buy many records by long-haired white boys in denim (partly because I couldn't afford to) before I seriously acquired Al Green's Greatest Hits and then bought Exodus by Bob Marley & the Wailers in Boots on Northgate Street, Gloucester.

I suspect that the friends I have now that still profess adherence to Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Pink Floyd or Wishbone Ash, for examples, do so mainly through nostalgia and allegiance rather than even now regularly listening to their records. I don't know how much one even listens to pop records at our age. I don't actually play David Bowie records these days but I hardly need to because they are in my head. But there are some things you can't quite do for oneself and hearing over and again how good it sounds is the only thing for it.

Maybe Al Green's biggest and best record was Tired of Being Alone but I’m Still in Love with You says,

Heaven knows that I’m still in love,

Sho' 'nuff  in love with you,

according to the internet, except I prefer my version,

Shut up, ain't over you

but either way I'm still in love with those records in a way I don't think it's possible to still be with ELP.

As with the Motown Hit Factory, it's every aspect of it. Not just the greatest male voice in pop history, smoother than Otis Redding, but the band and the backbeat and maybe, dare one say, 'the production is amazing' - I did once actually hear somebody say that about another record in real life.

Of course, he was borderline crazy, taking up Born Again Christianity with a zeal that makes Cliff Richard look agmostic and maybe even foregoing his 'ladies man' image which quite probably was a lifestyle but if this whole day of pop radio had to be reduced to one programme or even less than that there wouldn't be much left of it by the time Al Green had to be left out.

The Jumble Sale and other stories

 The queue outside the nearny church yesterday afternoon reminded me out the leaflet that had come through the door. The major horse racing having been abandoned due to the weather, and me not having been to a jumble sale certainly in this millennium, I decided to have a look. They haven't changed much, most of the stuff is really the most desolate tat but there's always some weirdo who'll buy it.

Among some deservedly very rare books were copies of The Iliad and Ulysses. But you simply can't give CDs away these days. Best of Bowie and Elvis Costello's Armed Forces at 20p each. I've never had Bowie on CD. 

Disc 1 of Bowie is just about what it says on the tin if you b/f Heroes in place of maybe John, I'm Only Dancing but whether Space Oddity's re-mastering is an improvement is open to doubt. Look, we want it how we remember it. There is no improving on nostalgia. But what a catalogue of genius that disc is. Again, the time and place is all important and those of us born in, say, 1959, have every reason to think Bowie as important as The Beatles if maybe not Tamla Motown. I'm playing it now just so that I have played it because quite honestly I know it inside out.

I had to phone someone so I picked on you.

 

Not long after he died, the late afternoon sun was setting behind the traffic passing on the M27 which caused shadows to flick across the open-plan office. It's David Bowie trying to send us a message, I said. Quite what his message had ever been, I wouldn't like to say but it was 'state of the art' art.

As was Elvis Costello's which at the time seemed to be from another generation but from Hunky Dory to My Aim is True was six years which now counts as no time at all.

--

A subsidiary reason for going to the jumble sale was on the off-chance of a new table lamp, for reading by in the front room. The other evening it just went out. A new bulb didn't help, neither did a fuse in the plug. In a plot that could have come from Terry and June I broke the lamp in trying to dismantle it. It looked like being thrown away after all these years which was going to be sad. I looked at Amazon, Argos and other internet places and found nothing quite so disarmingly, charmingly not trying to be an artefact in its own right.

But this morning I bought some superglue and, after further comic set piece scenes, it is amazingly in one piece and working and, even more amazingly, I'm not electrocuted.

It wasn't the fuse in the plug that goes into the wall that had gone, it was the fuse that goes into the extension and all that heartache was caused by my unwordly impracticality and not thinking of that which is why it's best if other people do the useful, technical things and I write essays about poems.

Whether it's the superglue or sheer will power that's holding the lamp together for now is hard to say but as long as I'm gentle with it it should last until the bulb really does need replacing.

Rachel Barrett & Hannah Gunga at Lunchtime Live!

 Rachel Barrett & Hannah Gunga, Portsmouth Cathedral, Jan 19

Today's programme sung by Rachel Barrett and Hannah Gunga, accompanied by Karen Kingsley, on a theme of 'strong women' was inadvertently the more appropriate following the announcement by Jacinda Ardern that she is stepping down from the position of New Zealand's Prime Minister that she has held with such grace and dignity. In a period that was marred by the buffoonery of some male world leaders she stood for something better and it is strength rather than fragility that makes her big enough to walk away rather than cling on desperately to her eminent role like others have been seen so vaingloriously to do. 

The sea was calm outside and the world seemed to lie before us like a land of dreams but Hildegard of Bingen's O virtus Sapientiae was entirely other-worldly with Rachel's echo from behind the audience giving more depth to Hildegard's unadorned line. Much more of this terrestrial life was John Dowland's Five knacks for ladies sung by Rachel before the cheery baroque duet of Vivaldi's Laudamus te from the Gloria as the set progressed through time.

The duet from The Marriage of Figaro was 'semi-staged' with Rachel's Countess dictating a letter to Hannah's Susanna in her secretarial role bringing animated life to the part and then Rachel sang the tender Lydia by Fauré, which could be paired gorgeously with Reynaldo Hahn's A Chloris one day, perhaps. But if Rachel is heard to best advantage in gentle pieces, Hannah went from playfulness to some impressive top notes in Britten's Be kind and courteous from A Midsummer Night's Dream.

It wasn't only the chronological sweep of the set that made it so various. The mood kept changing, too, and those of us who know Gloucestershire would recognize its shadowy vales in Herbert Howells whose Come sing and dance gave Hannah a further opportunity to test the acoustic of the St. Thomas Chapel which provides such an intimate setting for small scale recitals but there's nothing 'small scale' about the music or performance.

One doesn't hear as much Richard Rodney Bennett as one once did and so his Sweet Isabell was timely, and touching, from Rachel, before Eric Idle, not always a composer found on the same programme as Hildegard, gave Hannah an outlet for her inner diva in Diva's Lament from Spamalot and, since I had been wondering how she would do the Queen of the Night aria, she helpfully put in a few signature bars of it to answer that question. The finale was the showtune, What is this feeling? from Wicked which was more a three part piece with the always admirable Karen busy on the piano having accompanied so elegantly throughout.

I'm not one to take the reports of miracles in the scriptures at their word. A miracle, for me, is something that can't happen and thus didn't but it does seem increasingly miraculous to me that music like this, hidden away at the far end of a quiet cathedral in a sedentary area out of the downbeat city centre, continues quite so captivatingly. It's seems so unlikely and it's hard to believe it happened sometimes but, yes, I'm sure it did.

The Chi-Lites – Have You Seen Her?

 

At school, at the bottom of a dingy staircase that led from the end of the corridor where Room 5 was, where nothing much good ever happened even though it wasn't used for science, down to the library where the best books were locked away in the Head of English's private room under lock and key (and I only mean the contemporary poetry), there was a noticeboard on which one could post 'for sale', or other notices, once approved by the prefect in charge of it.

It was a bit like the adverts in the back of Disco 45 magazine in which traders would hope to sell or swap the records, or maybe even press cuttings, of the pop heroes they felt they'd outgrown in order to obtain material relating to their latest heroes, like,

Would like to swap Sugar Sugar by The Archies for Machine Head by Deep Purple.

If that doesn't look like a misguided business deal to you by now, it does to me and I'd take up Debbie from Derby on her offer if only I had the LP she was so desperate to get. We might think we live in difficult times now but in those days, actually having your favourite records was a luxury for many of us. You chose very carefully which to buy and cherished those you had. Which is why it came as a shock to see Have You Seen Her? by the Chi-Lites for sale by somebody so rueful that they thought it was 'the worst record they ever bought'. I might not have had the 30p required to take on the masterpiece but heaven only knows how much I wanted to take it off his hands because I loved it.

Otherwise, until many years later, routinely adding The Chi-Lites and all their other gorgeous songs like Oh, Girl and Stoned Out of My Mind, you do always get what you wanted except it's a bit after the fact.

I will never know who it was that bought Have You Seen Her? and regretted it so much. I will never know if he saw the error of his ways. I've changed my mind about music in the almost 50 years in between but one thing I never doubted was Eugene Record and the Chi-Lites, who came from Chicago, not from Detroit or Philadelphia, but at least they retrieve something for that city from the dismal band that borrowed its name for their dreary million-selling records.

Have You Seen Her? is a spoken poem that rises to song. You can call it kitsch or sentimental all you like but I'm word perfect on it, it is embedded in me and I know I can't hide from a memory though day after day, I've tried

  

Diary

It doesn't seem that long since horse racing wasn't possible because the ground was too hard but Fontwell's already heavy going plus a night of rain meant it was too soft yesterday. Like cricket, like ski-ing and other sports, I'm sure, it does require its proper conditions and climate change isn't helping. If I were more litigious I'd be suing for loss of earnings, not to mention for the time spent doing my homework on that meeting and potentially turning what looked like very ordinary sport into a pay day.

But never mind, Hereford was on Sky Racing and if my three winners were not all tied together in the same treble then at least a gutsy performance by Missed Tee, fighting back after the last to regain the lead, landed the proper bet and we are belatedly off to a start for 2023. It's only money, it doesn't matter but it is a participation sport in a vicarious way and the point of taking part is to gain satisfaction by winning. That's fine, you can only play with what opportunities present themselves. I can't go on strike in protest at the racing results but, then again, I have no reason to.

--

Biographies of arts people can vary in detail, scholarship and the balance between the art and the life. Also in the balance between primary sources and the biographer filling in the blanks with their imagination as happens with Shakespeare, Vermeer, Chaucer and the like. With more recent figures, with more extant letters and material to hand, there can be more detail than the 'general reader' really needs. Jerrold Northrop Moore's Elgar won't be anything like 800 pages for me because it includes synopses of works and extracts from the scores illustrating leitmotifs and themes from Caractacus and such but, much as I like gazing at notes on staves and wondering what they sound like, I am illiterate at that and so can move on.  

The elements of such books that I read them for are the detailed structure of the C19th class system in which Elgar, not only coming from a family who were 'in trade' but was also an aspiring creative artist, was looked down upon by 'money'. He loses points in my view for being devoted to Wagner's music and playing golf but he gets plenty back for his dedication to his art and, not being an instant commercial success, subsidizing the publication and concerts of his work, if necessary, from money earned by giving lessons which he didn't seem to enjoy much. Sometimes you feel like doing that if you want to put your art 'out there'. Unlike horse racing, it's not about the money and it's a shame it has to be involved at all.

The line about Elgar that condenses him into the fewest words is,

So the Sursum Corda sounded for the first time an ensemble that would haunt the centre of Edward's maturest music - aspiration ennobled within darkening nostalgia.

Yes. I don't think you could get the Enigma Variations and the Cello Concerto any better than in those last five words. I've got a certain amount of time for Elgar but whether I've got enough to venture much further into his music than I do already with so many other competing claims, I'm not sure.

Bob Harris, standing in for Johnnie Walker on Sunday afternoon, outdid all expectations by playing Ann Peebles,

 

Wow. I didn't know that one. How completely there is she the female Al Green. And if Al was the greatest male pop singer ever, then why isn't Ann ahead of Gladys Knight, Dusty, Candi Station, Ronnie Spector and the vast field of tremendous candidates to be greatest female. Maybe she is and the Essential will be on its way soon to put alongside Brenda Holloway, The Marvelettes and the first Supremes album and I'll Come See About That. I understand CDs are very out of fashion now. I seem to be buying them up again as much as I ever did so I'll be well placed for the CD revival when they become retro chic.

--

My efforts to re-ignite an enthusiasm for poetry continued with buying Scenes from Life on Earth by Kathryn Simmonds (Salt). Everything she's done before had plenty to admire in it and I was glad to find out about this recent title.

At first I thought, no, this isn't much more than local writing workshop stuff and,

 

             why do                 the words sometimes

have to be       spaced out like that, surely

   some poets thought it looked        arty

              in the 70's     or some time

    way back when         but what's the bloody point

 

I'm quite prepared to accept that my disenchantment with almost the very idea of poetry is my problem. I'm like one of those horses you back sometimes that has form in the book, must have a good chance but you can see before halfway the jockey isn't happy. Cajoling doesn't conjure enough of the necessary response and you know you're out of it before the second last. I'm not, as they say, 'completely in love with the game'.

But Kathryn and Salt have taken the trouble to produce this book and she's not down among the 'vanity' class of poets. I have kept looking at it and although it suffers from a 'sequence' ( ! ) of aphorisms, short poems that aren't haiku called The Death of Want, it provides more than adequate compensation in Yet Even Now which has music, makes the words add up to more than their constituent parts, justifies the use of lists, obviously speaks from experience but describes it imaginatively and thus 'ticks most of the boxes', if that could ever be a way of deciding if a poem is any good, which it isn't. But you know you've been in aa poem by the end of it and quite possibly read it again straightaway.

I don't know what would have prompted Ambition, apart from the common sense that it's best not to have much, but,

What little worlds revolve inside

our little worlds? Who are those people

we think we want to be?

and the book won't be filed away just yet. There might be more good things to find. Good poems worth spending some time with are still possible, then, and I'm happy to have found a few. It ain't over til it's over.

Elvis Presley on the Playlist

 

 

 The early death of Lisa-Marie Presley only adds to the burden brought about not only by excess fame but by those inheriting its legacy. I was never convinced that Elvis was particularly talented and he certainly wasn't that bright and the machinations of the pop music industry exploited his charisma and what were described as the looks 'of a Roman God', so maybe Lisa-Marie had only the resultant difficulties to deal with.

Elvis is on the playlist twice, with Heartbreak Hotel because it is in the 1971 Pick of the Pops chart show as a re-release and with The Girl of My Best Friend in the Rock Show that isn't as rocky as some old rock fans would think appropriate. But whereas it is quite proper to understand Elvis as the original and the template for so many imitators from Cliff Richard, down through Shakin Stevens and Les Gray never mind the market for kitsch look-a-likes, that's not how I see it.

The Girl of My Best Friend is a great record but represents that gentler, 'pop' Elvis rather than the 'raw' one, that makes it closer to a Cliff song. Music, and everything else, takes up from where its precursors were and develops it, sometimes improving on it. Thus, in the same way that Motown took doo-wop and gospel to make such great pop records, how The Beatles fused rock'n'roll with Tin Pan Alley, how Lover's Rock made mainstream successes out of roots reggae and even Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span made folk-rock, More Hits by Cliff is, for me, where it all comes together and Elvis was a contributor to that. I realize not everybody will see it that way.

Elvis was reported as thinking he thought Tom Jones was a black singer when he first heard him but he didn't sound like Smokey Robinson or Sam Cooke to me. Heartbreak Hotel is an impassioned piece and, as we were told by a trendy teacher in the sixth form in 1977, he had been just as shocking as the Sex Pistols were then, much to our disbelief, but once the penny dropped circa 1997 with Firestarter by The Prodigy and I saw it was just Johnny Rotten and another cartoon all over again the shock value has diminished to hardly anything and doesn't work any more.

It is on I Just Can't Help Believing that Elvis achieved some majesty for more than just a day. I'll always take Wooden Heart, His Latest Flame, Suspicious Minds and You Were Always on My Mind as the foundations of a tremendous Greatest Hits but, like others accorded the status of gods or kings, before and since, it did him no favours and wasn't much help to those around him either.  

Ivory Duo at Lunchtime Live !

 Ivory Duo, Portsmouth Cathedral, Jan 12

There was no possibility of taking a walk today, one might have thought, the weather being inclement. The journey across town was uninviting and one for the hardy. But not the foolhardy. If music and art are to be our salvation in these grim times they are to be taken up, appreciated and supported and I'm very glad I didn't stay in.

Ivory Duo are Greek pianists Panayotis Archontides and Natalie Tsaldarakis and they brought with them an adventurous programme of four-handed piano.

Debussy is at his most Satie in the Six Epigraphes Antiques which are almost disembodied, particularly atmospheric in For a nameless tomb and fittingly descriptive in To thank the morning rain, Debussy being more gracious than me.

Two of the featured composers being in the audience made it an occasion and thanks go to them, and many others, for making contemporary music not as forbidding as it once was, in the Age of Boulez. Hugh Benham's An Afternoon Interrupted was a premiere. I wished I'd asked him 'by what', thinking it might have been that man from Porlock, but it is more likely to have been ideas of dance with its changing rhythms in what might have been waltz time and rumba and it is to be hoped that the Ivories take it to a wider audience from here.

John Elved Lewis's Cerium featured tumbling scales and more fine empathy between two pianists becoming one unit in which 'chemistry' is the first necessity. And then Hugh Shrapnel, also present, was represented by his evocation of Ladywell Station, with its Edwardian or 1890's country ambience in Greater London, that lilts before becoming busy with traffic and then rests back into the night after the last train leaves. His Square Blues was his 'attempt' at a jazz piece and successful in as far as Shostakovich was a jazz composer.

But, having begun piano, the set ended forte with Ravel's La Valse, providing more evidence for my preference in a number of pieces for piano over orchestration, or maybe it's just Ravel's orchestration because my thesis is based on what he did to Mussorgsky but that was by no means damage.

La Valse re-creates the splendour of a Viennese ball, brews up a storm and then synthesizes the two elements with both pianists beginning from the lower half of the keyboard to create a crashing, bravura finish.

And with that Bang, the musical year is well underway in these parts. A faint heart that doesn't brave the elements isn't rewarded with moments like that. 

Last year provided great depth and variety of music throughout from Chichester to Portsmouth, in between and beyond, and this year is thus setting out to do at least as well already with all those series continuing, much to be expected from the new Menuhin Room concerts and the Renaissance Choir's tour of Somerset at the end of May being just about within reach. Music can do no more than offer its brilliant best. It might even save us, if only from ourselves.