Miriam Wakeling and Ben Socrates in Chichester

 Miriam Wakeling and Ben Socrates, Chichester Cathedral, Oct 31

There was an autumnal mood about much of the music in Chichester's lunctime programme today with Miriam Wakeling's cello rich over the fluent passages of the Ben Socrates piano. Farewell to Granada, very Moorish, had melancholy in it which even being by Shostakovich wasn't inevitable. 

In a packed house, our host Tim Ravalde advertised the seats behind the performers in the choir area and promised that the sound was good throughout the whole auditorium which, further back than usual in row 11, I can vouch for as far as there but I don't like to feel too remote.

It's not often we get Janáček chamber music in these recitals but would happily have more like his Pohádka which could almost have been Shostakovich in disguise. Fairy tales often have a sinister element to them and the spare first movement was unsettled, the Adagio continuing with pizzicato cello in among its longer, sonorous lines before the dance-like Allegro retained something of the same atmosphere.

Brahms's Von ewiger Liebe was velvet cello in its lower register, steadfast and as deep as it would have been with the text added, For Eternal Love,

Steel is strong, and so is iron,
Our love is even stronger still: 

in its crepuscular setting. 

The Romance, op. 69, by Fauré had all the serenity required for a Sunday evening on Classic FM augmented by Ben's gentle stream of piano and it had all been restraint so far but Beethoven was lurking at the bottom of the programme and he's not usually one to let you off so lightly. In the Andante of the first movement of the Cello Sonata no. 4, Miriam and Ben made their thoughtful way before it became Allegro Vivace with bursts of impetuous unison and a perturbed spirit unable to find rest. Ideally, one wants the whole sonata to find out how it ends. I know it will be on You Tube but it's not on my shelves and it's a few days since I assuaged my appetite for box sets. No. 4 on its own won't do at all, I'll have the lot and so my next stop is Presto.com to supplement the Beethoven section. It's not possible to have too much of a good thing but shelf space becomes an issue

For an encore, two of Nadia Boulanger's Three Pieces for Cello and Piano were fitted in neatly for the 2 o'clock finish and the bus home at 2.05. The finale had a bit of Sorceror's Apprenitice or Hall of the Mountain King about it, what with it being Hallowe'en, but one was left with a sense of disquiet, maybe loss, amid the calm as well as some gorgeous musicianship which is so customary of a Tuesday lunchtime that one almost omits to say.

Oh, Babe, What Would Stevie Say

Perhaps Stevie Smith should be better known as a novelist than poet. There's lots to like about her Novel on Yellow Paper whereas after her very famous anthology piece, I'm less enamoured of her poems.

Very autobiographical, Yellow Paper isn't very much a novel in terms of plot but, as is being pointed out here increasingly often, it matters little what we call it. It is more a vehicle for some sideways observations on her suburban milieu, the 1930's, church and people that are sort of cynical but in a wide-eyed way. It's difficult to find easy comparisons for it unless its idiosyncracy and tone remind us of Holden Caulfield. But, after decades of wondering what it was like, it's a good thing to have (almost) read it now and maybe her other two novels will be supplemented to the waiting bookpile. 

 

Similarly almost finished is my first trawl through Vladimir Ashkenazy's complete Mozart Piano Concertos which has contained not one minute that was not enjoyment and now, having arrived at no.20, I'm in familiar territory. It's Mozart so it is endless invention, never less than good company and at times either having a good time or tempering the sadness with harmonic consolation. I prefer box-sets of the whole shebang these days, not buying the concerto I've heard and want but having all the others, too, because one can and because there is bound to be other things worth having. They are worlds within worlds, whether it's the Beethoven or Haydn Sonatas, Bach Suites or Schubert Symphonies. While I have world enough, and time, now is the time to indulge in them completely.

 

On a touchier note, I've long been aware of concert hall etiquette and at Wigmore Hall of all places one wants to be on one's best behaviour. I thus find myself seats at the end of a row and keep my note-taking as sly and unobtrusive as I can. I was thus troubled by a lady turning round at the slightest movement on Saturday, not confrontational enough to look directly at me but, wow, she must be hyper sensitive to have picked up any rustle from me, across the aisle and south south west of her.

Right, that's it, then. I put my pen away and remembered a few choice words to say about Errollyn's music from then on as best I could but, ha !!, the lady soon suffered a mild coughing fit that she bravely suppressed as best she could. You see, people in glass houses are sometimes hoisted by their own petard. But it's a worry, the tickle in the throat, the seasonal sneezing. Nobody does it on purpose, though some fidget and distract without knowing they're doing it. I get seasonal sneezing but have been lucky not to have it during a concert. L'enfer, as Sartre knew, c'est les autres.

 

But, entirely otherwise, maybe the Autumn/Winter season is genuinely underway with a couple of confidently backed winners at Wincanton and Huntingdon, very much my sort of racetracks to be wise at. It is to hoped that tomorrow while I'm involved with one job in Chichester, I continue to be successful in another at Chepstow.

The right sort of horses trained by the right sort of trainers in the right races at a proper track, all I have to do is decide on the plan because they might not all three win and however full of it one feels, it is still best to play within safety limits.

Actually, Alan King's horse in the first, at 12.25, shows up a bit worryingly in the betting so I will hedge against the Skelton's horse there but Don't Tell Su, at 12.55, and surely Mr. Nicholls in a Chepstow bumper with Captain Bellamy at 4.16 are the sort of investments that can reasonably be expected to help with the year's profit as part of a vague system that continues to work, year on year.

Funnily enough, just to round off in a neat way, Florence Margaret Smith was nicknamed and became known to posterity as Stevie after the jockey Steve Donoghue. It's unlikely to come up in a quiz but Paul Sinha probably knows anyway.

Errollyn Wallen at Wigmore Hall

 Errollyn Wallen, Wigmore Hall, Oct 28

I don't make the trek up to London as often as I once did, having plenty close at hand in the Portsmouth area, but sometimes it's all but essential - in my judgement- and I never get it wrong. Errollyn Wallen was a dead cert, unlike the horse that I'd got back to a William Hill shop at Victoria to see held up, come through readily as per the plan, look to finesse the generous odds by half a length and then let the other horse do him on the line. However, that's not the point.

Errollyn's manifesto is quite rightly not to have a manifesto. In the same way that it doesn't matter if a poem is a sonnet, or even if it's a poem, really, music doesn't need to be in a genre and hers isn't. Now, in the Age of Spotify, it's not such a problem that record shops need to put the records into categories. It was once necessary to know one's Arvo Part from one's Elbow but it's less of a concern now to know whether Errollyn belongs in Classical, Jazz, Contemporary or, more likely, all of the above.

It was certainly useful to know that My Hitler is written from the point of view of Eva Braun. What's Up Doc? rattled along at what might have been a couple of clicks of tempo quicker then the record and then Greenwich Variations would surely have to be 'jazz' even if it is bluesy, hides its Goldberg allusions and then the left hand grumbles and rumbles up a storm.

Daedalus was always likely to be a highlight, being born out of one chord to reach dreamy heights. The sound system made Errollyn's voice lusher yet in its higher reaches. In the unlikely event she's ever in need of  a cover version to fill out an album, Kate Bush's This Woman's Work would work for this woman.

It's not only musically 'intertextual' when we are for a few bars entirely within a Bach Partita or Louis' Loops cites Couperin, Errollyn is a poet, too, and in Meet Me at Harold Moores,

the evening is laid out against the sky

does with T.S. Eliot that which Eliot did with the rest of Eng. Lit. and recycles it.

But not to 'shore up such fragments against her ruin'. Errollyn is a generous spirit, very happily involved in her work, entirely genuine and variously talented. If I believed in 'inspiration' I'd probably say she was 'inspirational' but I don't think it works like that. Ideas suggest themselves, yes, but after that there is work involved.

She is much-loved and she much loves her audience. I'm sure she's not just saying that. Today was not a sell-out but the pile of her new book sold out. I witnessed the last, display copy being whipped off its stand before whoever found themselves at the back of the queue to get theirs signed would have been away no earlier than mid-afternoon and, you'd think, Errollyn would have deserved some refreshment and a rest after fielding such a torrent of niceties, questions and curve balls one after the other but she does it with such immense charm and enthusiasm. Having a lighthouse to retire back to must be a great comfort.

Fittingly, on a day like today when I got lucky by being indoors for the more serious weather, Rain was the encore in inverse proportion to when I saw the Magnetic Fields on a day of antediluvian downpour but, Stephin Merritt being Stephin, did not do All the Umbrellas in London. 

I did wonder what a Stephin/Errollyn collaboration might be like but some things are best left as ideas 'begotten upon impossibility'. Dark ironies and authentic love aren't compatible.

There's plenty of Ella in Errollyn's singing as there are plenty of her own ideas in her music in among all those ghosts that are either invoked or turn up uninvited anyway. None of the comparisons are especially useful, though, beyond being signposts to where she is. Like any artist would like to be able to say, she's not really like any of them, she is herself and very good at it. She can say that more convincingly than almost anybody else I can think of. 

   

British Women Composers vol. 1

It came as some surprise during Errollyn Wallen's recent turn as the week's composer that It all depends on you is actually four poems by Philip Larkin. I'm not obsessive enough to pursue 'completism' either of Errollyn or Larkin but this record nourishes two birds with one meal. 

Dealing in stereotypes as one can't help doing, one wouldn't naturally put them together but nonetheless Errollyn is well enough informed to appreciate what's good in the poetry without being put off by the author that wrote them and, anyway, these settings are from 1989 and the Larkin Selected Letters that did so much damage to his reputation weren't published until 1992.

First of the four poems is the very well-known This Be The Verse whereas the other three are earlier and/or not well-known at all. 1989 makes them early Errollyn, somewhat avant garde and might take more application from me than they'll ever get to properly appreciate. While This Be The Verse is scored for clarinets and saxophones in respect of Larkin's enthusiasm for Sidney Bechet and Pee Wee Russell, it doesn't follow that his favourite choice of music suits his poems. I'm not convined that Diana Ross & the Supremes would be the best choice for any settings of my poems. It's not often that music does much for poems at all since ideally they already have music of their own. And I'm aware that other attempts at seeting Larkin to music have done little to enhance them. However, if one of one's favourite living composers has set one of one's favourite poets one shouldn't be without such things. I do have more faith in the programme of Errollyn's own songs at Wigmore Hall on Saturday, though.

Lindsay Cooper's The Road is Wider Than Long is more immediate in its appeal but all of this album is 'art music' of late C20th contemporary persuasion, demands concentration, commitment and isn't as easy listening as Tuesday's Haydn in Chichester. I'd have loved it all circa 1973 when The Faust Tapes constituted a large part of my musical ideals along with a deliberate searching out of the weirdest things I could find on Sounds of the 70's or Radio 3 but Bach and Handel feel more comfortable by now.

There might be a better way of listening to music like this, which is eyes closed and partially drifting off to let the otherworldliness of Elizabeth Maconchy's My Dark Heart recreate in you whatever it triggers whether that is Synge's translation of Petrarch yearning to join the dead Laura or not.

Nicola LeFanu's The Old Woman of Beare takes us on an excursion to wilder shores yet, not always a bad thing, but there are a lot of discs lined up with the Complete Mozart Piano Concertos, Yuja Wang's Rachmaninov and the recent Elgar acquisitions and not enough time for them all. I'm a mainstream sort of boy these days and having given this two outings today it's not obvious that it's going to be keeping those off the turntable but there's things you have to have even if it's for the sake of having them.

Chichester Symphony Orchestra in Chichester

 Chichester Symphony Orchestra, Chichester Cathedral, Oct 24

Overheard in the Oxfam bookshop beforehand was somebody saying they'd read a certain book and it was 'unusual' which immediately made me wonder what was 'usual'.

Elgar and Haydn seem to me fairly usual but they might not to others, it all depends on what you're used to. Perhaps it means 'mainstream' but the more one tries to make 'usual' mean anything, the less it means anything.

Elgar's Three Characteristic Pieces, op. 10, are possibly not characteristic of Elgar and thus are unusual. The Mazurka quickens with some gusto, driven by the timpani, the Serenade Mauresque is indeed Arab in flavour with its woodwind conjuring hints of Marrakesh before Contrasts: The Gavotte A.D. 1700 and 1900 is faux baroque before modulating the theme into bona fide Elgar.

Haydn's 'London' Symphony' no. 104 was written in 1795, the same year that Beethoven turned 25 and wrote his first two Piano Concertos. Although his Symphony no. 1 wasn't begun until 1799 and finished in 1801, one can hear in Haydn's last where Beethoven learned how to do his first. It's there from the imperious opening drumbeat and into full spate of the development in which Haydn deploys his musical idea with 'classical' discipline.

The Andante is a string-driven thing, unadorned, until horns, bassoon and woodwind fill out the sound, which was one of several swellings of sound that the CSO achieved to great effect. Haydn was ever disinclined to be morose and the Minuet and Trio was buoyant and upward-looking until the Spirituoso finale was all of that with its brass, rhythms and stagey big finish could be readily attributed as Beethoven Symphony no. 0. It was ever thus, with a new generation taking inspiration from the one before before taking it yet further.

Not having the dubious advantage of being a tragic figure, Haydn is somehow overlooked in the assessment of 'genius' as if torment and suffering were an essential ingredient of greatness but it shouldn't be and I'm sure that suited him fine.

It's a great thing, by way of a change, to have the stage filled with musicians on a Chichester lunchtime where there are usually no more than a quartet. It happens once a year, packs the place out and everybody enjoys being orchestral. They are a highly competent unit under Simon Wilkins with Natalia Corolscaia making herself at home as leader and on today's evidence remain in excellent form.

Mock History

I've read three chapters of Jacob Rees-Mogg's The Victorians, Twelve Titans Who Forged Britain and I think that's a fair effort. I've read Palmerston, Victoria and W.G. Grace. 

For someone with a 2:1 in History from Oxford one might have expected a bit more historical methodology but that's not Jacob's way. The fact that Boris Johnson also got a 2:1 from Oxford makes me wonder if that grade is standard issue there but in previous times Auden was awarded a third and Betjeman was sent down so it was possible to do worse.

I'm no historian but understand that evidence and sources are the basis of it, not simply stating that 'the truth is that...' and according greatness to public figures in direct proportion to their patriotism, contribution to Britain, Empire and respect for royalty, the 'constitution' and money, not necessarily in that order.

The 'forging of Britain' surely began long before the C19th, though. One might expect Boris's book on Shakespeare, were he ever to write it (God forbid), to make great claims for his contribution to British 'greatness' and others might suggest Alfred the Great, Boudicca, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I were in their somewhere. Perhaps Jacob meant 'Empire'.

One of the things found to be admirable in W.G. Grace's complex character was his wish to play attractice cricket but Jacob's biographer reported that one of his great heroes, over and above cricket, was Geoffrey Boycott who never expressed any such wish or demonstrated any such intention. And, as is never far away from Jacob's approach, W.G.'s monetary motivations are made almost as praiseworthy as his sporting success, the statistics of which Jacob does a fair job of explaining.

I haven't read anything else much about Palmerston or Victoria who, like most of Jacob's heroes, are 'great' because he thinks so but I'd never take his word for anything and so read his accounts with a great deal of scepticism. He writes like an enamoured schoolboy from a time that had gone by before I attended school in the 1960's but vestiges of Biggles, Arthur Ransome and such characters as those satirized in Michael Palin's Ripping Yarns lingered. It's not obvious that Jacob would realize that Ripping Yarns was a comedy. He might think it as much a documentary as Danny Baker said he thought Only Fools and Horses was when it first came on. I might be prepared to take the chapter on Victoria as largely factually correct but if I really wanted to know I'd read somebody else on the subject.

One would reasonably expect a hardback book published at the age of 50 to be better than the author's undergraduate work but I'm not sure this is of a 2:1 standard. It fails to 'make a case', it simply states one.

I'm very grateful to the Portsmouth Library Service for making it available at no cost, especially as I didn't read it all. I mainly wanted to see what it was like and I have. It compares very unfavourably with the work of a proper historian, Katya Hoyer, that I read recently. But while I'm grateful for having had the chance to look at it I'm also now of the opinion that the library budget could have found a better book on the Victorian Age if education, rather than stocking celebrity authors, were their purpose.  

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

I already can't remember what it was that prompted me to order from the library Jacob's Ladder, the Unauthorized Biography of Jacob Rees-Mogg by Michael Ashcroft. A morbid obsession with the macabre, I suppose it was, with particular reference to 'right-wing' politicians. It seems to be reasonably well-balanced in as far as it is certainly not a hatchet job but not hagiography either. Jacob comes out of it quite well with his unfailing courtesy and unflappable manner among his most admirable qualities. The surprise, such as it is, is how his anachronistic image is presented as not at all contrived but that's how he is, or has been since at least the age of 11 or 12 when, as a shareholder at Lonrho, he asked a provocative question at their AGM.

Since that time, he has been devoted to money and very successful at acquiring lots of it, whether through his thorough knowledge of the financial markets or by marrying an heiress. The network of aristocracy that his friends and family mix with- the earls, marquisses and landed gentry- begins to look incestuous but maybe they only swap girlfriends as much as Rolling Stones do. Jacob's first intended, though, was jettisoned on account of being divorced which was not a suitable fit with his Roman Catholicism.

It's not a particularly sensational book in the way that any account of Boris Johnson couldn't help being because it's mostly as expected but his first electoral campaign in Central Fife, the last constituency to return a Communist MP, stories of nanny, his time at Eton and his allegedly unstudied incongruities make for some humour that would sound far-fetched if it were anybody else.

The book appeared in 2019 and so before his promotion to high-ish office seemed to leave him out of his depth. As a great respecter of parliamentary process and integrity he surely let himself down in supporting the unlawful prorogation and as one of the last, beleaguered rump to remain faithful to Boris, with the redoubtable Nadine, he began to look less a man of high principle than he had been credited with being. Subsequently extending his media career into the cheapjack propaganda of GB News has also begun to reveal the more tawdry elements hidden beneath the well-groomed archaism that he had been, whether charmingly or not. Perhaps a second edition updating the story might one day tell it a bit more like it eventually looked.

Also from the library, while I was at it, I borrowed The Victorians, Twelve Titans Who Forged Britain, Jacob's 434-page book on history which, as an Oxford History graduate, he surely has every credential to qualify him to write. Except that it was found to be, and at first sight looks, ridiculously bad. With no index or footnotes and only three pages of bibliography, it looks like £25k's worth of vanity project with possibly only the prospect of Boris's book on Shakespeare, if it ever appears, likely to outdo it for vacuity. I'm not sure I'll be reading all of that but I'll give it a chapter or two. We'll see. 

--

At the other end of the 'cultural wars' spectrum, one of the bits of this week's This Week's Composer told me something that I surely should have known already, that Errollyn Wallen set four Philip Larkin poems for soprano and accompaniment. British Women Composers, Volume 1 (Lorelt) begins with It all depends on you and I never investigated that any further when hoovering up most of what Errollyn there is available on disc. It evaded both my Larkin scholarship that he'd been set by her and my Errollyn studies that she'd set him which is a C minus to say the least but, ahead of Wigmore Hall soon, it will be better late than never.

Not necessarily two artists one would associate together it is a credit to Errollyn's inclusive sensibility that she can speak so enthusiastically about Larkin's poems and not conflate them with some of the views he increasingly expressed in later life. There is a gap between them.

I need to catch up with This Week's Composer but it's busy enough with places to go, books to read, one to pretend to be writing. 

---

Luckily, horse racing hasn't kicked off like it should have done yet. I shouldn't really be tipping Wise Guy at Fakenham tomorrow where Tweed Skirt is a possibility in an open-looking race. I expected the Skelton horse in the bumper at Uttoxeter to be shorter than 9/4. The QE2 at Ascot on Saturday is a good race that I'd have had a view about in the summer but it's not the same once a bit of chill sets in and they've had long, hard seasons.

Sometimes it's best to stick rather than twist. Not playing a shot is still a part of cricket and it's a better way of playing than having a big yahoo and getting out.

64

64

Now that I’m older and have lost my hair

inevitably 

nobody is sending me a Valentine

just a birthday card and a bottle of wine

If I'd been out, and that is rarely,
I’d rather have stayed indoors
Nobody needs me, nobody feeds me
Now I'm sixty-four

We’re all older, though,
And it seems absurd
I couldn’t stay with you

I couldn’t be handy, and wouldn’t choose
domesticity
You can’t knit although it’s true that you can drive
and it’s great we’re both still alive
Doing the crossword, playing CDs
Who could ask for more

Nobody needs me, nobody feeds me

Now I'm sixty-four

Every summer we can still meet for lunch
In Portchester or Cosham High Street
No need to scrimp and save
You can be Cilla
I’ll be Cliff, not Dave

Send me an e-mail, from time to time
with anything new
Tell me all the pop records that you have played
like Lauren & the Heatwaves

And then I’ll answer, true to form
Yours, for evermore
Nobody needs me, nobody feeds me
Now I'm sixty-four

--

My last remaining wine glass was cracked and I had to admit I needed some new ones. It might seem bleak but it's also reassuring that, like with any work done on the house, I take the view that I might not have to pay for that again.

I came back from Gosport yesterday via Commercial Road, Portsmouth, where at least the saxophonist busker was coming to the end of I'll Be There by the Jackson Five. Stephin Merritt knew what it felt like when he wrote,

What am I doing in this dive bar

except Commercial Road no longer even has the dive bars it once had. 

I thought Argos was a place to get some new glasses and, to be fair, six for £11.50 looks like value for the forthcoming years of Merlot, Cabernets or maybe Zinfandel. But rarely have I been treated with such contempt as a customer as I was by the experience of being processed by Argos. 

Yes, I am betting without one particularly disdainful shop assistant on the Copnor Road but otherwise the staff in the convenience stores there have taken on what I assume the staff training tells them, that it is the customers - those that still pay and don't just loot the place- that pay their wages. But in Argos even in the one, last and only interaction with a human being, I didn't seem to even be there as far as the operative was concerned once they'd decided to attend to their desk.

Much more hilariously, though, one gets no sense of scale clicking on things on an Argos computer. The digital radio in the kitchen is very small because it didn't occur to me to check its dimensions and my new wine glasses, which were listed as gin glasses, are far bigger than it. I didn't want 'small' glasses but at 64 I'm going to be too old to drink gin in the quantities accommodated by such sumptuous crucibles as them if I'm ever lured into drinking it ever again.

But, what can you do. I've somehow got this far, having scraped through by the skin of my teeth, with a little help from my friends and the kindness of some who had previously been strangers.

Thank you very much to those special people who know that it is not only the birthday of Johnny Haynes, Wyclef Jean and, according to most sources, Rosemary Tonks, today. 

For no other reason than it is the latest record to be added to DGBooks Radio, here is the wonderful Tracy Chapman with a gorgeous birthday request played by me for myself,

and then, since it has come up next because I play it so much,

Thomas Howell in Gosport

 Thomas Howell, Holy Trinity, Gosport, Oct 16

In 1705, Bach famously walked 250 miles to visit Dietrich Buxtehude in Lubeck. Today, in order to pay similar tribute, I walked maybe 5 miles to hear some of his music played. It was by no means a comparable effort but in order to do so I wanted to cross the water which, on a fine Autumnal day, is a bracing thing to do.

The organ in Holy Trinity, Gosport, was commissioned and almost certainly played by Handel, but not in Gosport. It was sold on there later but is a great hidden treasure in these parts and it would have been a shame if Thomas Howell hadn't played any of the great man's music on it. A subdued but ceremonial part of the Organ Concerto in F, HWV. 274, used the piccolo stop in an airy dance. 

It's very useful, especially for non-organists, to have the screen for the audience to see both the keyboard and the pedals. I suspect Thomas and all organists are capable of a spritely jig. In the opening Praeludium in D, the Buxtehude, one could watch the feet in conversation with the hands in what was a miniature compendium of musical ideas.

Thomas explained that the Bach Das alte Jahr vergangen 'sighs, cries and bleeds' through its New Year chorale and, soft and sepulchral under his sympathetic fingers and shoes, it maintained the meditative mood of the programme through the Handel to Messaien's Prière avant la communion. Unsettling and disembodied, it's not difficult to see why Messaien's 'harmonic language' has an 'unfortunate reputation' for those of us more accustomed to C18th music but the piece added another dimension to the programme and happily, even if that's not quite the word for it, demonstrated Thomas's wider repertoire.

Until, after such quietude, the brassy, grand, marching Fanfare by Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens, a new name to me, was a crusading, big finish and it would have been a shame not to hear the organ allowed to show how much else it can do by way of contrast.

I've not been to an organ recital for some time but I'm encouraged by this evocative and informative performance to go back more often. More of it wouldn't have gone amiss. And so, til the next time, we'll thank Tom for this and we'll hope that he'll come back again.

New Poetry in Hammersmith

 New Poetry, Hammersmith Irish Cultural Centre, Oct 13

Four poets with some Irish in their family trees came together to read newly published work in the quiet of an auditorium away from the hectic process of the Friday evening outside. Poetry readings aren't my very favourite type of cultural event but they are already 100% better if I'm not taking part.

Paul O'Prey, who is the Dare-Gale Press, first introduced Patricia McCarthy, the outgoing editor of Agenda, whose new pamphlet, A Ghosting in Ukraine, encounters some artists who we might once have thought to be Russian but were properly Ukrainian. Anna Akhmatova, whose style Patricia described as 'unadorned', is a significant presence in her work but I'm always ready for anything Chagall-related, which we got.

In Four Seasons Gone she recognizes the outpouring of poems by many who have never written poems before in Ukraine during the war powerfully and it is to be hoped their resilience is rewarded.

Greg Leadbetter's Caliban imagines Shakespeare's 'primitive' creation going back to the island having been given his freedom by Prospero. Greg read three poems in what purported to be Shakespeare's English and followed them with their translations in modern pronunciation. That might not have been entirely necessary given that the first versions weren't really in a foreign language but what I took from them, however tangentially, was a music reminiscent of the Old English Wulf and Eadwacer, the gorgeous and forlorn masterpiece that remains mysterious and not quite explainable.

Paul doesn't publish his own books. His Mappa Mundi comes from the Melos Press, seeing the world in terms of those early map-makers who used more imagination than verified knowledge but maybe,

flat earth love is like you never find the edge,

in which I don't know where the line endings come because I only heard it but I'm more concerned with what the line evokes than getting it right, like those early cartographers now look to us to have been.

Sean O'Brien has done this before. He has a sort of stagecraft that disguises his art as something relaxed, confident to do it is in his own time with casual humour that is probably more rehearsed and thought-out than it looks. It always was with the old school professionals like Morecambe & Wise, Tommy Cooper and Ken Dodd. His Otherwise is discussed elsewhere here (below), where it might turn out I've got at least as much 'wrong' as I've got 'right' but, having been brought up on the Intentional Fallacy, it's up to me if I assume a 'black dog' refers to depression and not, quite literally but not so literarily, simply a dog that is black.

Paul's introduction to Sean identified him as 'gentle but ruthless' and these new poems are gentler than he's sometimes been in the past. After many years of coining phrases to try to capture the essential O'Brien with varying degrees of success, I've not condensed it into three words quite so concisely.

As poetry readings go, this was a good one and rated quite highly. It's only the second one I've been to since lockdown and I'm in no hurry to find the next. But you'd be lucky to get anybody of quite such quality turning up at your local open mic night. On the other hand, as Sean wryly observed, one generally prefers to hear that there are 'just two more' rather than seven more, especially when the bar is open and, I was reliably informed, the Guinness in the Irish Cultural Centre is competitively priced compared to what it is possible to pay elsewhere in that there London.      

Stevie

I was prompted by a passing mention somewhere into the market for Stevie Smith books. She's not really up among my favourite poets, the faux-naivety is perhaps a bit much but I am one for a poetry biography and Frances Spalding's does a fine job, the life and the ideas behind the poems being more convincing than the poems themselves. 

I was quite taken with her idea that,

man is so lonely that he invents Godin order to have someone interested in him,

and her reading of Robert Graves's King Jesus which on the face of it, from what it says here, sounds like A.N. Wilson's account and,

constructs a Jesus who is fantical, deeply versed in rabbinical law and anxious to fulfil prophecies found in Jewish mystical texts.

While Stevie clearly wasn't always the eccentric spinster she played the part of so well in later life, she was always in some way a natural outsider and could be unforgiving in her assessments of those around her. I doubt if I will be buying the poems beyond those I have already and are in Me Again. There's plenty of Elizabeth Jennings by the bedside to be going on with who, although dedicated to Catholicism, is a more amenable poet. I'm not sure I can think of any other writer whose sub-text and meaning were so much better than the way she chose to express them but it's a life with lots to like about it in that faraway world of early C20th suburban London.

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The mini Elgar festival that has come about in the Chichester lunchtime Autumn programme could have propelled him, however belatedly, up my hit parade. Probably not as high as Brahms, say, who may or may not be Top 10 but I certainly had been neglecting him and rating him below his worth despite ploughing through that big biography some months ago. The Violin Sonata turned up today so soon after reporting its non-appearance that I'm not sure if it is an expedited replacement or a very slow delivery of the original item but it will sit nicely alongside the Piano Quintet in due course while the new arrivals pile up. The complete Mozart Pianbo Concertos are also late but it will be no hardship at all to make my way through them.

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I never more appreciated why horses need a week or two's break between races than how my legs still felt yesterday after Sunday's Edward Thomas walk. Of course, a horse can reappear in very short order after an easy win but I couldn't have done today's modestly idyllic walk at Itchenor yesterday. Good Lord, there are some outrageous houses hidden away down there and I'm the more convinced that if those houses send their children to Bedales School then VAT on the fees is entirely to be expected.

Even Jacob's aloof disdain can't really pass of the charitable status of such privilege but I did wonder if the library would have his book. I wonder quite how absurd his world view is when one reads a whole book of it. I will almost miss my self-righteous disbelief at some of that which has poured forth from Boris, Liz Truss, Suella, Jacob et al once they are banished to, let's hope, ten years in opposition. So, in the most honourable tradition of irony, I might read some Mogg. Whether I'll risk being seen with it in public is another matter, though. I might have to borrow something more respectable, like a Jeffrey Archer novel, to hide it behind.

 

Brighton Chamber Ensemble in Chichester

 Brighton Chamber Ensemble, Chichester Cathedral, Oct 10

This year's Autumn programme contains within it a mini Elgar Festival by way of what must be entirely due to different artists discretely deciding on him and Chichester thus temporarily taking on the role of Worcester. The order I placed for a disc of the Violin Sonata some weeks ago has been lost in transit, like others have, and is being re-sent. A suspicious mind might wonder if a courier serving the PO2 postcode isn't building a library.

I'm in favour of one substantial work rather than a programme of vignettes and the Quintet in A minor, for piano and String Quartet, op. 84, is all of that. You don't need massed resources to make a 'big' piece, as in the Beethoven sonatas, and this was 'orchestral' with the quartet often being a unit in itself rather than always four parts.

The Moderato-Allegro begins with a 'creepy theme', Rachel Ellis had told us, in woods haunted by Spanish witches. Elgar is sexier than he's given credit for. An open air atmosphere tinged with some lingering chill leads towards the spirited ( ! ) allegro in which it's not obvious if the piano or the quartet are leading the way in full spate before a return to stillness.

Adagio is what Elgar's best at with his sentimentale deep feeling and the restrained grace has hints of Enigmatic nostalgia with Siriol Hugh-Jones's cello prominent and rich until for those who think Elgar means the Malvern Hills, there they were. Ellie Blackshaw and Rachel's violins passed the melodic part to Ros Hansent-Laurent's mature viola, 'maturity' being very much what this music represents.

The third movement Andante carries on from where that left off but is soon more waltz-like in its Allegro with energy in the strings and acrobatics from Stephen Carroll-Turner's piano. Some slower tempi lead to a sweeping, totally tutti end. It was an assured and impressive performance, still sounding great from a few rows further back from where I usually am due to traffic delays but I got lucky enough. I thought it was worthy of more sustained applause than there was. I hope Chichester isn't starting to take such fine concerts for granted.

Edward Thomas Fellowship Walk

Accustomed as I am to walking fair distances, it's not so often these days up gradients like the Shoulder of Mutton or on surfaces of lesser integrity than Portsmouth pavements. They don't set a particularly high standard but downhill on stony uneven woodland paths it's best to minimize the risk.

One can't get to the most essential sites of interest with regard to Edward Thomas without making the effort, though, so home to Fratton station, Petersfield Station to Bedales School, the Fellowship walk advertised as strenuous in places, four and a half / five miles was all of that so I was glad of a lift back to Petersfield station before taking the home stretch from Fratton 'at my own pace'. That's at least 10 miles with hard bits. I was expecting more from the well-deserved first draught of Kronenbourg just now but the most memorable such thirst-assuaging moments have been provided by Amstel.

It was all worth it, though, and one doesn't spend time with quite such an erudite group of like-minded types as the Edward Thomas Fellowship very often. You can mention most C20th poets, poems and related things there and not need footnotes. But firstly, Good Lord, Bedales School. Sumptuous, of course, but you don't need to be an ardent Trotskyite to take one look at it and think it should be VAT-able. From there it's not far to the Steep war memorial with the name Edward Thomas on it. While I've been on most of the paths on today's route, I've not done them in the snaky pattern they were covered in today which took us to halfway up the Shoulder of Mutton's precipitous incline before a welcome sit down and some poems read out, many from somebody's obviously much-loved and much-used copy of Edna Longley's Annotated Collected Poems, using the Sarsen stone appropriately as a lectern.

There were three opportunities to consider views of the land he never saw before while hearing his language not to be betrayed which perhaps finished most evocatively at the Bee House, where Thomas lived before the Red House, by kind permission of its current incumbents of what is now a much extended and glorious place to live as long as you don't find you need to nip out for some milk and are happy to go everywhere by motor vehicle. The Bee House is, we were reliably, informed where Thomas was most impressed by birdsong. There are competing sounds over a hundred years later and not all days show it off in quite such conducive October summer days as he found himself up there when exposed to less clement elements. The season have redefined themselves since his day in a postmodern way that he might not have appreciated. Such idylls are hard won but the walk I did from the railway would have been his routine way home which sheds some light of the relative hardiness of him then and how easy some of us expect life to be now.

Of course, the poems but they are almost only the starting point of a gathering in which so many other discussions can spring from them. For those immersed in the subject on a daily basis maybe that all seems not unusual but I'm better off on the fringe of such society, if not most societies, and it comes to me as if I'm Alice through the looking glass or suddenly in Narnia via the wardrobe to find a world like that where those indigenous to it know exactly what they're doing and they're doing it very nicely thank you. It is great to see it going on and entirely my privilege to have been accommodated by them. It's hard to think of anywhere I'd rather have been, especially as I've got Sean O'Brien next week and Errollyn Wallen two weeks after that.

Busy month, with such special occasions on top of the musical 'day job' as I can by now call it. Thank you very much for being there, the Edward Thomas Fellowship.  

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ivory Duo at Lunchtime Live!

 Ivory Duo, Portsmouth Cathedral, Oct 5

Panayotis Archontides and Natalie Tsaldarakis returned to Portsmouth and found a much better sized audience than for their previous visit. Maybe their reputation is deservedly growing quite rapidly or perhaps the benefits of the free publicity of an interview at Music in Portsmouth were advertised by such box office results.

For many of us of a certain age, the opening of Faure's Dolly Suite is drenched in nostalgia for Listen with Mother on the BBC Home Service and then Radio 4 and so, yes, we were soon sitting very comfortably. It's not possible to separate the waves of grief for lost childhood from the realization that it is a gorgeous, softly lilting tune before any associations it brings with it and then, possibly, grows up a bit through mild rhapsody to what I'd say was a tarantella of a finish.

The Waltz from Khachaturian's Masquerade Suite was sufficiently nuanced to enhance the forte of its grand sweep as the duet swapped places, not that either the high end or low end is any more important than the other, but just in case and because they can.  

Panayotis has arranged the film music of Miklos Rozsa whose credits include Ben Hur and El Cid and the Lydia Suite was as Romantic and maybe Korngold as epic film music is required to be. The Bosendorfer might have a few extra low notes but in the climax here could almost have made use of some extra top notes.

As well as their hugely enjoyable repertoire of familiar classics, Ivory Duo promote the work of two Hughs, with a new record of Hugh Shrapnel's music due tomorrow. At the Rivoli was jazz-inflected and neat, based on its 4-note motif and Hugh Benham's Finale grew and grew from understated origins to the biggest climax yet.

Except it wasn't the finale and I was betting without Grieg's Peer Gynt with its clear morning light, stillness and the jaunty attitude of its third section before Natalie's portentous approaching footsteps came up from downstairs in In the Hall of the Mountain King before all else of it was unleashed.

An encore would have been appropriate but it was gone 2 o'clock by then and, let's face it, the pub had been open for quite some time. I'm sure they'll be back because they seem to like it here. Lovely people. They'll be welcome any time.    

Fontwell Preview with Racetrack Wiseguy

October got underway right on time with the Arc winner which had to be better than some good but not brilliant Group 1 opposition and he made 11/4 look excellent value when he proved to be a different class. So, we are well underway and thriving and go to Fontwell tomorrow full of hope. Confidence, really. So let's see what outrageous belief can do for us as we set off with defeat out of the question and thinking there's a bagful of winners to be had and a possibility of going through the card.

The favourite winning the first is always useful and Chris Gordon is usually expected to do well here so there's no need to look any further than Blame the Game (1.45).

He has King William Rufus of interest in the second but Mr. Henderson sending Nico down here with just the one horse is traditionally a tip in itself so maybe Iolaos du Mou (2.20) can start getting it right now.

Dan Skelton comes further than that with only one and even if Harry's not coming to ride it, the stable are straight among the winners and Sacre Coeur (2.55, nap) is an automatic choice even against another Gordon horse and Copperhead who has competed at a higher level in the past but not with much success recently.

One always has to look out for Gary Moore at Fontwell. Cosmic View (3.30) will be supported and shorten in price if they think he's the business first time out and I reckon he wouldn't be here if they didn't.

With only four runners in the 4.07, it's possibly the hardest race to have an opinion on. It could be a Chris Gordon double with Small Bad Bob but one could have three guesses and get it wrong.

Gambie Tiep (4.40, pictured) reappears only two days after winning at Bangor so Ben Pauling clearly wants to make use of his good form now and would rather have the seven pound penalty than be reassessed by the handicapper so we are very much hoping for a favourite's benefit day but on good ground and with good stables on our side that's not unreasonable.

Mainly because it can't be quite that easy, Beat the Heat might be worth opposing in the last at 5.15. He's a course specialist and had a run on the flat not too long ago but nothing keeps winning forever. Mr. Hobbs had a winner with his only recent runner which offers us Sassified, Neil Mulholland runs two, Sir Rock is a possibility but David Pipe's Only Fools could be a percentage choice at a decent price. However, I'd prefer to not have to care by then. 

Continuum in Chichester

 Continuum, Chichester Cathedral, Oct 3

One waits all year for days like these and then they are soon gone so it's best to seize them while one can. That is what Continuum did today as they 'soave s'il vento'-ed their way through a very pleasing programme of mostly baroque mostly woodwind music.

If I don't get synesthesia I can at least get pictures sometimes when they're on offer and Francois Couperin's Prelude from La Francoise was surely butterflies, especially below the arresting mauve artwork, Peace Doves by Peter Walker that filled the air in the nave and at first sight could have been taken for blossom.

Michael Overbury's harpsichord was to provide the subtle continuo throughout but had an early solo outing with two pieces by Byrd, an elegant Callino Casturame and the gigue-like La Volta, that balanced delicacy with the requisite formality.

Rachel Beckett returned with recorder rather than flute for the ensemble's Quantz, a Sonata both Bach-like and Bach-lite with a leisurely Larghetto and a frolicking Vivace in which, as was the case for several of these pieces, Sebastian Comberti's cello was as much the main line as the woodwind. There's very little I enjoy more than the thoughtful wanderings of a baroque cello and in the Vivace he was most amenable and jolly for he's a jolly, good cello.

This music is incapable of harshness and a Chaconne by Leclair was summery in its orderly flights and serenity before the two flutes alone gave a tantalising, somehow almost modern-sounding, mysterious Allegro from the Duet, F. 59 by W. F. Bach. And then the finale was his slightly younger brother, C. P. E.'s, Trio Sonata Wq 151 which began suspiciously not far from where W. F. had left off along with more cello to immerse ourselves in, Elizabeth Walker embroidering patterns with Rachel before the cheery send off in the Allegro that left one wanting nothing more demonstrative or profound because this was a gorgeous confection entirely to be enjoyed and very welcome for that. There might well be deeper, darker more meaningful things ahead of us, most Tuesdays from now until late November, but few will leave us feeling as much the better, and possibly lighter, for having heard them.

Katya Hoyer - Beyond the Wall

Katya Hoyer, Beyond the Wall (Allen Lane)

I had always understood 'revisionist' to be a term of disapproval but now I'm not sure. It was a pejorative term when used by Marxists but maybe now it just means what it says and revises previously held assumptions. When Katya Hoyer's comprehensive history of the German Democratic Republic was published earlier this year there were suggestions that it was an attempt to make it sound 'not so bad after all' and a bit of mild controversy does a book a favour in attracting publicity but now, having seen for myself, one can hardly call it a defence of the GDR. I think it was also said that Katya wasn't there, casting doubt on how she would know - she was 4 when the Berlin Wall was dismantled- but surely most histories, like those concerning Julius Caesar, Henry VIII or Shakespeare, are not written by eye witnesses. Not even Herodotus was that. Without wanting to make any more of the comparison, I recently lived for three years under the most appalling Prime Minister and detested everything about him but my life wouldn't have been very different had it been anybody else.

Beyond the Wall is structured around a series of East Germans who definitely were there as it happened, their stories representing situations at significant stages of the GDR's 40 year existence until she provides her own reportage when witnessing demonstrations on the streets of East Berlin far below her vantage point in the Television Tower. All this is told in impressive English given that, in a recent interview, Katya has said,

It doesn't seem so long ago that I sat in my bedroom in Germany learning English by reading Harry Potter books with a dictionary on my lap.

which demonstrates how the best English is so often that of those who learnt it rather than those of us who picked it up as we went along.

The arbitrary drawing of lines on maps by those with the power to delineate new nation states after a war has regularly only saved up further conflict for later whether it was in India/Pakistan, the success that Yugoslavia was while it lasted or Northern Ireland. Germans were still Germans whether thus divided or not and the East, much smaller and less endowed with natural resources 'never stood a chance'. It comes as a surprise to me that Stalin favoured a united but neutral Germany while it was Walter Ulbricht, the GDR's first General Secretary, that saw his role as a devout communist satellite of the Kremlin.

Katya in no way ties to prettify the implacable party line taken by Ulbricht, the Stasi and the often uneasy, conscripted border guards manning the Berlin Wall after 1961. The unsympathetic regime found it necessary to prevent excursions from the East to the West to the extent that Erich Honecker, setting a paragon example, didn't even attend his own parents' funerals in the Saarland in 1963 and 1969. Life for many could be dull, grey, monotonous and overly regulated but for others, the communist party was a way of life and the success of the socialist experiment would be its own reward. As Putin's Russia continues to do, presenting NATO, the USA and the West as imperialist aggressors gave the cause an enemy worth withstanding.

At its best, socialism achieved some things the West could not, not least a more equal role in work for women, a basic standard of living and accommodation for its population and more tolerance for pop and rock music than might have been thought although it appears that it might have been 'rock' rather than Tamla Motown and 'soul' that was available. The USSR and subsequently China had similarly seen sport as a way of advertising the benefits of their ideological cultures by harvesting medals at the Olympic Games but, even as I well remember, the GDR's spectacular outperforming of any sensible expectations was dubious, very suspicious and looked absurd.

In the end, it was the Soviet Union's lack of commitment to it that let the GDR down more than any shortcomings of its own dogged efforts. Leonid Brezhnev's withdrawal of support in oil supplies and funds undermined Honecker's unerring faith in, but dependance on, the USSR in the early 1980's and trying to make compensatory deals with the West was neither desirable or advantageous, not to mention the environmental impact of reverting to old, even dirtier resources to keep their heavy industry going. Even in the 1950's the need to exploit any and all natural resources, which has never been solely an Eastern bloc strategy, mining left,

unsightly craters behind that would turn entire East German regions into desolate moonscapes.

The game was up from then on, if it hadn't always been. I'm not convinced that Katya explains why Stalin was never really behind the GDR project even if it seems that Brezhnev simply didn't think he could afford it. East Germany had partial success in delivering some of the ideals of socialism but at a cost that neither it, or socialism itself could make balance. One of its greatest heroes in its time was the gymnast, Katarina Witt, and Angela Merkel, who became a great European, grew up in East Germany while J.S. Bach and Handel were both born there longer ago and so it is an area, if no longer a country, that should be known for much better things than the Trabant cars that were once, like the Mini in the UK, objects of desire and are again for those Ostalgistes, those with a nostalgia for some of what they remember of the old days.

Katya Hoyer has done her homeland a great service in providing this vivid account of it. I'm no historian because objective truth, especially in the Age of Trump and Johnson, has become even less available than it ever was but I don't imagine it could have been set out any more lucidly than it has been here.

    

Revenge

Three hours and still utterly riveting. I have had a tendency in recent years to rate Bach above Shakespeare but that's largely on account of 'perfect' being more easily, apparently, achieved in music than in words but neither Bach or Handel wrote Hamlet.

David Tennant's antics are better than I remember them but I don't remember much at all. The use of a mirror to shoot Polonius through rather than an arras to stab him through provides the fractured reflection on the characters several times once it's there to be made use of.

But what I don't remember ever being taught, or finding out, was that there's not just the two revenge plots, Laertes being manipulated by Claudius to kill Hamlet after Hamlet's accidentally killed Polonius 'taking him for his better' in pursuit of the ghost's instructions. The whole play is framed  by Fortinbras taking revenge on Denmark for Old Hamlet taking territory off Old Fortinbras thirty years earlier. Quite brilliant, as is the whole design of the thing, the language, the psychology and the 'philosophy' contained within all that.

And Hamlet is 30 because it says so in the gravedigger scene. That's when the previous war was and Yorick must have died when Hamlet was 7. He's still a student but he's royal and not got much else to do and, of course, he's a dilettante.