Paul Hindemith and other stories

Some hints are more worth following up than others but on the whole it's best to give them a chance because you never know what you might find and, as was the case with the Magnetic Fields, you might end up with some new favourite music.

It's not a huge step from the chamber music of Shostakovich to the Hindemith Viola Sonatas, they'd be adjacent on the very complicated map of all music. On first hearing the obvious thing to say is how the solo viola is spare, austere and desolate whereas those with piano are more expansive but that wouldn't have to be the case. Such things as the solo partitas for violin by Bach or the Telemann Fantasias are wildly adventurous and adding piano doesn't have to make anything more decorative but it sounds like that's what Hindemith did, to the extent of sounding a bit like Brahms when giving it his best flourish. So, Hindemith viola music is the playlist for the time being and I'll see where we go from there. We might then see what else he did and how high he can get up the charts.

 

Related to which, here was a game invented to enjoy those long, sleepless hours of the night. Not sleeping's not a problem, Times Radio repeats are good enough company and there are other stations to move to if you've heard them too many times before.

By a process of free association, make up games between any two composers.

Mozart 5 Albinoni 1 was a bit of a mismatch but Dvorak v. Telemann makes for an interesting game.

Schubert 3 Robert Schumann 0.

Bruckner 0 Britten 2.

Ravel 2 Charpentier 2.

It leads inexorably towards the juvenile fixation with World Cups of which there is no need because it amounts to who gets beaten by Bach in the final. There could be some interesting match-ups, like Brahms-Schubert in the last 8, but one risks being left with a sense of futility and that one should have had something better to do.

--

I remember Geoffrey Hill saying how his Collected Poems multiplied in size in his last years, having been a relatively frugal producer of poems for most of his time, and how it was in some way due to the form of the poems doing it for him.

I hope I'm not going to do that but I can almost see what he means. A further variation on the theme of Rainyday Woman, after Slightly Different Version, below, looks entirely possible after which the floodgates could open. I would despair of myself more than ever if they became a 'sequence' but they would follow, which is what a 'sequence' ought to do. One also needs to consider whether writing the same thing time and again makes one like Vivaldi, who more or less did, or if they would build into something nuanced like The Well-Tempered Klavier. 

Let's not pretend that that would be any sort of comparison but if the facility is there and it's enjoyable to do it surely can't do too much harm.

The work-in-progress is called Rainy Morning Man and perhaps each 14-line poem will bring something forward from a previous one, always in the context of poetry and the girlfriend being conflated.

It could be an ongoing project. I might stumble into being belatedly prolific. I must go back and see where I'd got to with that. 

 

Slightly Different Version

Not many poems appear here under the 'Poems' label these days, mainly because there aren't many. There isn't really anywhere else this can go, though, without being associated with 'Rainyday Woman' to which it is a sequel, for want of a better word, which is predicated on the idea of poetry being a sort of girlfriend. It makes less sense if you don't know that.

Doing other things instead of what one once did, with some detachment, is a sort of theme and it might recur again as long as I don't feel as if I'm being lured into a 'sequence'. The horror of the thought of anything quite as spuriously sophisticated as a 'sequence' is one of the several things that put some distance between me and me wanting to be a 'poet' in the first place.

Slightly Different Version

Sometimes I see her and we exchange looks

As if to say we loved each other once
Or thought we did. It’s difficult to say.
We have both moved on in the interim.

 

In the same way two wrongs don’t make a right
Two misfits do not make a perfect match
But I still think of her on rainy days
Or when reminded we once thought we were. 

 

So I wrap myself in Shostakovich,
Short change myself by cashing out a bet,
Work hard at being a dilettante,
The words are recycled, just like we are,
From what they were the last time I used them
But all of that is another story.

'The greatest literary biography of the century'

The top line on the back cover of my paperback James Joyce by Richard Ellman cites Anthony Burgess proclaiming it 'the greatest literary biography of the century'. Perhaps he thinks Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson is better for being first-hand. Paperback is not the ideal format for something as heavy, as it isn't for the three volumes of Proust, but it piles enormous amounts in. One might think it exhaustive if one wasn't aware of more detail in the letters, the biographies of Nora and Lucia but a monumental writer can only be accounted for in such a monument. It might not be essential to know that in Zurich he made the acquaintance of the great musician, Busoni, and met Lenin in a cafe they both frequented but it makes one the more aware of the six degrees of separation. And then there is a huge cast of people only now known to history for their tiny cameo parts in this story.

Never deviating far from his method of tracing the life into the books, Ellman's main theme is to show how all of Joyce's writing was one big autobiography but he provides authoritative commentary on the books as art, too. Of Dubliners, it says,

The reviews were good enough; most of them found the stories cynical or pointless or both,

which would make for a good starting point to discuss for an essay. To be able to appear so but not be makes for 'art' and 'art' was what Joyce devoted himself to, possibly to the detriment of all else in his life.

The much less-known Giacomo Joyce is revealed to be a footnote prompted by a mutual infatuation with an English language pupil, Amalia Popper - no relation to Karl, apparently, that went no further but was important enough to be considered worthy of the effort. And anybody who wonders at the archaic nature of the Joyce poems might be interested in how Joyce,

could still succumb in verse to the Swinburnian allurements of sere, pale souls and the wan waves of time

with only traces of liniguistic invention to make them Joycean.

It has always been disappointing, since finding out, that The Dead is quite so derivative - from previous literary sources, not from Nora's past. That is what Modernism did, though, and being entirely original is not a pre-requisite of art. It is The Dead and Dubliners in general that make me admire Joyce's writing to the extent that I do. To what extent one admires Joyce as a person beyond being the author of his work is another question entirely.

Fumi Otsuki and Gisela Meyer at Lunchtime Live !

 Fumi Otsuki and Gisela Meyer, Portsmouth Cathedral, May 23

Being next up on my itinerary after the Shostakovich Viola Sonata last week was always going to be a big ask of anyone. As it happened, Fumi Otsuki and Gisela Meyer provided some soothing medicine to help with the recovery from such devastation. Back to the safety and protection of some Scandinavian Romanticism, we were not asked to look directly into forever.

Stenhammer's Violin Sonata, op. 19, is recognizably like Brahms, mellow and unperturbed and reaching some fine top register notes and Grieg's No. 2, op. 13, opening with crepuscular piano, worked with shorter phrases, more energy in Fumi's violin and decorative in Gisela's piano before delivering moments of drama.

But if Fumi is as yet not quite as well-known as a composer as the rest of those on his programme, his latest Piano Sonatina, no. 4, was in some ways of the most interest. It juxtaposes some pastiche Bach with C19th-style flow before a middle section is entirely different again- disembodied, edgy and uncertain like the soundtrack of a scary film. Gisela played it with immaculate timing and suspense before the final movement brought the disparate elements together. It will repay further hearings when made available, to be sure.

To finish, Elgar's Chanson de Nuit was smooth, valedictory and comfortable and completed the treatment and reassured me at least that one doesn't, and really can't, live at the extremities of human experience all the time. We get by with the help of our friends, some indulgence and such things as we need after gazing so intently into what we might not have been designed to understand.   

It was good to see Fumi's latest appearance on Portsmouth Cathedral's Lunchtime Live list so well attended which suggests that one can build something of a following by coming back regularly and it is to be hoped we will have the fifth sonatina to look forward to.

'Private Passions'

 I don't think I've made a Private Passions list yet, just in case I get invited onto Radio 3's version of Desert Island Discs. You get an hour and most people fit in 10 pieces of music. Being limited to 100 would be hard enough and so 10 means leaving out a lot of absolutely essential things.

It's among the 'Also appearing at' links above and is in some way an autobiography in music but it's for Radio 3 and so slanted towards the 'classical'. I'm not at all sure I've got the right three to represent pop music but what can you do.

--

I have very few early, pre-school memories but the most significant early musical memory is of Doris Day, Move Over Darling, on the wireless and it's become officially my first favourite record. Of course, The Beatles (yeah, yeah, yeah) and The Monkees and I was strangely aware of Jimi Hendrix and Simon Dupree while nobody could be unaware of Procul Harum but The Tremeloes, Silence is Golden, was also a favourite.

1971 was a crucial year in which I became devoted to the hit parade and while the likes of T. Rex and David Bowie led the pack of those hundreds of artists that were of interest, Lindisfarne and their Socialist firebrand poet, Alan Hull, were top of my personal charts, which were diligently compiled each week as a priority. But the first chart record I bought was by Mozart - the user-friendly version of Symphony no.40 by Waldo de los Rios- and so he was the first 'classical' infatuation. Three out of ten pieces here are from opera which is less due to me listening to opera 30% of the time than composers, I suspect, saving their best tunes for their staged dramas. And so, Soave sia il vento from Cosi Fan Tutte edges an all-but impossible verdict as to what to represent Mozart with.

Aged 13, my idea was that I wanted to find the weirdest available music and The Faust Tapes helped a lot with that but perhaps that led me to think that there was better yet to be had in contemporary classical music and also that pop music was trivial and so I devoted myself to taping Beethoven symphonies, and Shostakovich, very badly from my transistor radio. Most memorably the Shostakovich String Quartets nos. 3 and 8 but Spotify doesn't have the best bit of no. 3 so I gladly put in the Viola Sonata recently heard to such stunning effect.

Coming back from exile from pop music I was a changed person and Al Green's Greatest Hits defined the shift to something more credible than overblown 'rock' bands and I'm Still in Love with You is one of any number to feature one of the very greatest soul voices, Aretha notwithstanding.

1977 seemed at the time to redress pop music but it didn't last long. That particular 'new wave' brought Elvis Costello with it and suddenly the idea of breaking down barriers so that reggae could be mainstream. I certainly did not go along with the fashion for John Coltrane's uber-chic suffering at university but the likes of Gregory Isaacs, the anti-disco of Public Image Limited and the definitively disco Chic were all eminent players in my rapid turnover of preferred pop acts but all the time it was becoming clear that J.S. Bach was something else entirely and that the consternation I had felt at school, circa 1974, when our music teacher had told us he was 'better than Tchaikovsky', had been misplaced. The Well-Tempered Klavier is not only the most essential desert island commodity but something like one of humanity's greatest achievements.

But there might not have been quite the same Bach if there had not been Dietrich Buxtehude and, rather than his solemn Klag-Lied or anything so profound, the Trio Sonata BuxWV255 is joyful invention made out of next to nothing.

Far and away England's greatest composer was a German who wrote Italian music, we can't be having too much of a morbidly religiose programme and so even the Tallis Spem in Alium, amazing though it is, can't be found space for because Handel, who only does grandeur but always does it grandly, has to be in and Va tacito from Guilio Cesare compacts all the stately mannerism with as much strut and verve as he ever did anywhere.

But if there was ever a right answer to pop music it was the Tamla Motown hit factory and if any one act defined Motown it was Diana Ross & the Supremes and so, with apologies to Smokey Robinson, and by extension The Ronettes, Come See About Me is for some reason a more perfect product than Stop! in the Name of Love or even Miss Ross's solo heartbreaker, I'm Still Waiting.

A concert by Ensemble Clement Jannequin in Portsmouth Cathedral circa 1989 opened up the whole new world of Renaissance music previously labelled 'Early', subsequent concerts by the Tallis Scholars and The Sixteen, and another composer to squeeze into my Top 10, Josquin DesPrez, who never did it more succinctly or movingly than in his tribute to his precursor, Johannes Ockeghem.

Pop music included long-lasting devotions to R.E.M., the indie heroes of choice, the Jesus & Mary Chain and my interest was extended for some years by the luckiest break of all, being introduced to The Magnetic Fields and the darkly sentimental insouciance of Stephin Merritt's songwriting. One either 'gets' things or one doesn't and I absolutely did but otherwise pop music became for the most part a heritage thing and even a belief in 1971 or the 70's in general was modified into something earlier, somehow more seemingly innocent and fresh in the likes of Petula Clark.

The Magnetic Fields provided some of the best live pop gigs I ever saw because they were downbeat, ironic and gorgeous, not designed to generate undue hysteria. Classical concerts were always the preferred live performances and one for the very shortlist of those was a Prom of the Monteverdi Vespers with Carolyn Sampson by which one was utterly transfixed. 

No map of music, however briefly sketched, looks right without Monteverdi on it and I'm having to omit Bowie, Marc Bolan and Spem in Alium to accommodate him but Philippe Jaroussky is persuasive on the love duet, Pur ti miro from L'incoranazione di Poppea. 

The Shostakovich would make for a better finale, staring bleakly into eternity, but it was brought into the story earlier and so we end almost inadvertently sublime.

Hindemith Viola Music

 It's not going to be easy for who comes next after the devastating Shostakovich Viola Sonata by Katie Wilkinson. Such landmark concert experiences can lead further and where that has led is Paul Hindemith's music for viola, among which the Sonata in F major, op. 11 no. 4, played by Yuri Bashmet and Sviastoslav Richter has already stood up bravely in comparison with the Shostakovich.

Three CDs issued by Hyperion feature Lawrence Power playing, respectively solo, sonata and orchestral pieces and so they are duly on their way, one's education continually extends and a composer of who I knew very little gets a place on the shelves. 

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 The trouble with Johnnie Walker's Sounds of the 70's was rarely better demonstrated than this afternoon. Absolutely top marks for Curtis Mayfield but Queen and now Sultans of Swing, that most dreadful dirge so beloved of guitar-heads.

Yes but, so what. But that is what the 70's were like. Memory becomes selective and lines up the T. Rex, Bowie, Chi-Lites, Chic and late Motown, not to mention Hurricane Smith but there was a lot of long hair and interminable self-indulgence. It has been a long process rather than a Damascene moment converting from the 70's to the 60's but that process is complete, notwithstanding that decades are only for convenience identified as those periods ending in 0's and, given the option, I'd have 1963 or 64 to 1972 or 73. I think that would cover it as best possible.

--

About Larkin 57 is out and about with the essay and poem in it. And there they go, released into the world to find their own way. There's no more I can do for them now.

Compare and contrast is the short cut to any 'critical' essay, providing any number of ways of putting two or more things into context in comparison with others. You can't miss, really, and I understand that that is what students ae given to do these days to help them on their way.

So, Larkin is downbeat and ironic, is he. Considered in isolation one would have to admit, no, not all the time because there was The Trees but you stick him up against Rosemary Tonks whose levels of dissatisfaction are more passionately expressed and he's clearly of a different temper and so both writers can be assessed against their opposites without either losing out in the process.

-- 

40 years is it, since John Betjeman died. Well done, BBC4 for a whole evening of him tonight.

Fair to say, I think, he was the subject of my first 'criticism' in print in the ill-fated Allusions magazine that was as much my fault as anybody's at Lancaster University in 1979. A very routine review of The Best of Betjeman wasn't the worst of it. What a mess it was. Don't ever blunder into editing a magazine unless you know what the aim of the project is and those who do it with think so, too.

A couple of subsequent such involvements weren't quite such disasters but it's a role best left to those with a talent for it.

Until having to go to a new record price a couple of years ago to secure Rosemary novels, a signed Collected Betjeman was the most I'd paid for a book. It's not a brilliant signature - quite late, one might think, or a bit hasty- but for all his retro refusal to be anything more than a quaint versifier, I'd have him rather than Ezra all day long.

--

Give Johnnie Walker his due, though. We've had Metal Guru and a feature on Diamond Dogs in the meantime and no show that has those two should have too much to apologize about. Bowie did take himself seriously sometimes but even that was somehow part of the act. Maybe we all need to be able to do that.

A Portrait of the Artist in His Own Work

In what is scheduled to be the big climax of the recent excursions into Joyce, Richard Ellman's biography is a fittingly monumental way to end. The detail, the grasp and the depth of scholarship is, well, awesome as long as the word is not reduced to that mild term of approval it has become among those who don't necessarily know what awe is.

It is 'literary biography' in the purest sense, making every available connection between the life and the work and in Joyce there's more of that than there is in most writers. Like Falstaff being Sir John Oldcastle or Margaret Peel in Lucky Jim being Monica Jones, there would appear to be few characters anywhere in Joyce that aren't made from real people, and people he knew in real life. Up to a point, I dare say that most literary fiction has an element of encoded autobiography but Joyce's work and his autobiography merge into this one thing.

There is as much to admire in Joyce, in his ideas, as there is to have reservations about in his personality but, try as I might, it's not easy to think of a major writer who seems unconditionally likeable. Maybe it is finding that balance between admiration for the work and doubts about the authors in real life that make for much of the fascination of literary biography. Joyce is quoted, at the age of about 16 or 17, as saying,

How could I write the most perfect love songs of our time if I were in love? A poet must always write about a past or future emotion, never a present one....Poetry must have a safety valve properly adjusted. A poet's job is to write tragedies, not be an actor in one.

And that is as good a guide to 'ironic distance' as one is likely to get, especially from one so young. Many writers never go beyond the 'I' of their poems, are never anything but the protagonist in their own work, never see themselves from any other perspective and are always involved in their own tragedies so that they never achieve any more than that one dimension.

At college, Joyce admired John Byrne, who became Cranly in the fiction, 

in a world of foppishness, Byrne had the courage to be plain. But it was his mnner that attracted: he moved about with the air of a man who knows all the secrets but disinclines to exercise the power he threby possesses.

I'm sure we have all seen qualities in others that we would aspire to emulate but don't achieve. If Joyce tried to be like Byrne it came across as more aloof or even disdainful, as one of his outrageous talent almost has a right to do, but it can't be expected to make one eminently likeable. Genius is only compatible with sociability if it is a genius for sociability. Those Shakespeare biographers who imagine the sympathy and humanity of the writing to have also been a feature of his character are assuming more than they should because the writer and the person-in-the-world, to manufacture a Sartrean construction, can't be so easily conflated.

The amount of work that Ellman's 744 pages of text in his 887 page book, by the end of the index, took is unthinkable and he couldn't have done it without such a compelling subject but I'm sure it's heading towards the highest echelons of great books somehow indistinguishable as 'secondary' to the life and work it describes by being as impressive as its primary sources. In some ways perhaps I wish it didn't insist on cataloguing the correspondances between the life and the work to such an extent but with Joyce that is almost the whole point, that they were inseparable. The art and the artist are two different things usually but in Joyce to isolate one from the other is like someone said taking the UK out of the European Union was, like trying to return a cake back into its original ingredients.

It will be a good couple of weeks, in both senses of the phrase, before Ellman's Joyce is finished and there are ever likely to be further thoughts about it here but it should be in its rightful place at the end of the Joyce shelf ahead of the book I've been waiting for for longer than I waited for any other - the biography of Thom Gunn. I've waited so long for that that I'm only at about 80% of the anticipation I once had for it but not having it would make all that waiting a waste of shame. There was a time when it was an ambition to live long enough to read it, if there were ever to be such a thing and so, fingers crossed, it looks like we're almost there.

He's another who had good ideas about taking the artist out of the art but then somehow found that his work was all about him. Maybe that's a trap that it's not possible to avoid. It's a paradox that Schrödinger himself might have enjoyed.   

Shostakovich and Kafka

It's like being a teenager again, really.

Rightly or wrongly, some authors seem to lend themselves to a particular demographic of readers. Jane Austen is surely for ladies, Hemingway for men of a certain type and science fiction for nerdy kids and those who remain such after achieving the age of majority. I was about 15, I reckon, when I read Metamorphosis and also recorded Shostakovich off the radio through a microphone onto cassettes. 

While Shostakovich stayed with me, Kafka didn't. I think I suspected Metamorphosis of being science fiction. I'm sure I read The Castle but kafkaesque had entered the language and we all knew what it meant - it was like trying to get an answer out of Virgin, Ovo or Boris Johnson - and, like Orwellian, there appeared to be little to be gained by re-reading Animal Farm which was a tremendous book for 16yo would-be intellectuals to cite but there was an unimaginable amount of other literature to look at, too.

However, recently prompted to get over all that prejudice, I took up with The Trial and, yes, it is all that but it is impressive, too. Kafka is not only kafkaesque, he's a great writer, too.

The only proper approach was to come to terms with existing conditions. Even if it had been possible to improve specific details - which, however, was nothing but superstitious nonsense - one would have at best achieved something for the benefit of future clients, at the expense though of doing oneself irreparable harm through attracting the attention of ever vengeful officials.

Some of the most affecting books are those that tell us what we already know but serve as confirmation. In the introduction written by Richard Stokes,

The Trial...represents his written defence in the trial he had in his imagination initiated against himself and which was to consider the warring claims of literature and family life

and it doesn't look a big stretch to me to connect that with the theme in Sean O'Brien that we are somehow guilty of being ourselves. Maybe there is more to Kafka than the nightmare labyrinthe, not least because it's not all political, it's psychological. It is a condition and it quite likely belongs in the accumulation of ideas about themes in James Joyce, Rosemary Tonks et al. Maybe his letters and a biography should go on the list of forthcoming attractions so that one can read more of what one already knew but never saw so well expressed.

Shostakovich can't ever be blamed for the labyrinth he was caught in, only for being brave enough to stick it out in Soviet Russia while adopted celebrity lifestyles in America.

The thrill of last summer's Messiah by Malcolm Keeler and Portsmouth Baroque Choir in Chichester has only now been challenged by the very different experience of Katie Wilkinson's Shos Viola Sonata about which it would be easy to say it 'went beyond words' but that's what music ought to do and it would put me out of a reviewing job. But today was an exemplary day, going back to the String Quartet no. 3 and some Tatiana Nikoleyeva Preludes and Fugues. Why don't I listen to that all the time? Because there are so many other things, too.

But we need a Top 6 Shostakovich at the very least and it begins roughly where I began with the String Quartet no. 3 and proceeds with the ever-inventive 24 Preludes and Fugues, whether played by Nikoleyeva or the composer himself. The Viola Sonata, of course, as below, and the monumental Lady MacBeth of Mtensk, which is nobody's easy listen. I'd probably have the Piano Quintet, op. 57, for sentimental reasons notwithstanding how it has the composer mixing austerity and lyricism as only he ever did. I'd much rather have another String Quartet than his popular hit from The Gadfly but the symphonies are too big for me and so God Only Knows how far he'll penetrate into that All-Time Big Four of Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven if I ever get to grips with them, and the jazz.

Katie Wilkinson and Marios Argiros in the Menuhin Room

Katie Wilkinson and Marios Argiros, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, May 11 

Two last works by two essential composers make one wonder if they sought out the maturity of the viola in the knowledge that they had deeper thoughts to express by that stage. They didn't have the same things to say by any means and maybe Brahms did first have the clarinet in mind for his op. 120 but in any esoteric debate about it, he wouldn't have gone to the trouble of a viola version without good reason.

If Brahms had reasons to suffer on account of being neither Beethoven or Clara Schumann's husband, even those hurts don't compare with those undergone by Shostakovich, who somehow remained capable of writing lighter, playful music but, as 'last words' go there's a vast difference between the moods they found themselves in.

Brahms op.120 no.2 opens with a melodic line as velvety as any that had gone before, with Marios providing the dramatic flourishes from the piano but the old man, 63, is becalmed and unregretful for the most part. Allegro amabile is upgraded to appassionata with grander ambitions before the third movement emerges from some sotto voce gazing into eternity and then ending with relish and vivacity from both players. 

That was a very fine thing and op. 120 no. 1 would have made for a fine programme with it and nothing to complain about at all. But that is betting without the Shostakovich op. 147. Beginning with fractured pizzicato and chilly atmosphere, the moderato is storm-tossed and then shimmers bleakly. Katie delivers it all with tremendous, but never over-stated, panache and cadenzas that serve to emphasize one's solitariness in an empty universe.

Shostakovich is often at least half-joking, and needed to be, and the Allegretto is a sceptically lively folk scherzo. At his most considerate, he gives the viola open strings to play so that the other hand can turn the page. But he's not joking much in the Adagio, an unworldly fragmentation of the Beethoven Sonata no. 14 that he didn't say was moonlit. It achieves such stillness, like time itself stopping as that theme emerges and breaks up in both parts. There might be other music that goes to further limits of consciousness but not much that does it so coherently and compellingly. The last note he ever wrote moves through twelve bars, an E back in C major, including ten semibreves and that is his final resting place, flatlining towards the silence that it implies.

I don't always convince everybody that Shostakovich was the greatest composer of the C20th but while Sibelius 5 was on the wireless this morning and I'm very aware of other candidates, I need no further evidence myself. While music played live and in the flesh is ever likely to be better than anything that comes out of a disc, the difference was never better demonstrated than it was today.

That was scintillating, an edge of one's seat performance, glued to it, and I'm very glad that Katie and Marios do requests and can be booked if you happen to find yourself in the same pub as them. Sometimes things work out for the best. 

Rosemary Tonks and James Joyce

There was another gentle prod towards linking together Rosemary Tonks and James Joyce while having another look at
The Halt During the Chase. Sophie says of Guy,

'...And the books he reads ! I wanted to understand him, so I went to the library and got hold of one of them, Ulysses by James Joyce. And I took the trouble to read it through, right down to the glug-glug-glug gog-gog-gog bits.'

So Joyce, for Rosemary, represents something - the sort of writer her protagonist's would-be boyfriend would read, something a bit out of the ordinary- and something she can reduce to absurdity in her ironic way.

Sophie, like Min in Way Out of Berkeley Square, is 30-ish and in a similar way behindhand in establishing herself, trapped to some degree at home, most tellingly,

I was really terrified of the women in Philip's set...Name any subject, and they had a brand-new set of opinions on it. Another thing: I hadn't had a miscarriage or an abortion, and that marked me down straight away...No left wing and no miscarriage? You cannot hope to become a fertility tyrant of the middle classes, and earn the right to exclude, snub and humble others, without a story about babies...

 

There is a huge difference between Rosemary's head-on satire and Joyce as a comic writer. I'm not sure how much my enjoyment, and admiration, of Joyce depends on him making me laugh but Rosemary's novels do so on a regular basis.

Neither am I convinced that there's enough to link them together to make for a proper 'compare and contrast' or where such an essay would find an audience. How tangential can a premise be and still mean anything of significance. On the other hand, if the main benefit of writing is that one enjoys doing it, nothing else matters. So we will see. It might be like the essay a friend of mine did for Prof. Norman Sherry, Graham Greene's official biographer, who told me, I could have given it 0 or I could have given it 80, so I gave it 80. I don't know if universities still work like that any more.

Kafka-esque

The finale of the D'Oliveira book was as deeply moving as any. 

Having arrived where he had, with only him knowing he'd lied about his age to get there, and achieved so much so belatedly it is a measure of the dignity of the man that he got through, like Kenneth Clark's Civilisation claims that classical culture did, by the skin of his teeth. Such stories survive knife-edge, cliff-hanging situations or else they wouldn't have become stories at all and we thus never know how many such stories there never were because at one point or another the project failed.

Thoroughly decent and only wanting to do what he did - play cricket- he was put in impossible positions by the opposing demands of a wicked world that would seem beyond our ken by now if that world hadn't continued to re-invent its capacity for wickedness in however many other ways. It is a story of more than derring-do, not least due to the humility, bravery and also talent of its hero and the parcel of rogues he had to deal with. While always having known that the MCC was infested with them and it wasn't only the South African government he was up against, I'm glad to read how Ray Illingworth was one of the good guys, alongside John Arlott, who took Baz's side. Good for him.

 

Something else entirely prompted the possibility of a Kafka revisit, not at all to do with being the victim of regimes in place because they are in place and whose victims don't understand and aren't ever told why they are guilty. It's an idea that can be extended into all those petty little gripes I look back on so resentfully like compulsory rugby union at school, having to do an essay on Vanity Fair at university and being told what a fine democracy we live in and then being given a choice between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn at a General Election.

I'm not as well up on Kafka as I thought I was but a look at one of the other stories in Metamorphosis and other stories is enough to suggest he's writer worth reading for more than just what he says, and that is how he says it. The Library Service will provide The Trial. I'm sure I read either that or The Castle in the 1970's but I haven't been back since. He might have been one of those 'teenage' writers one first comes across at that age and then leaves behind but it's possible he's worth another look. 

 

It was once possible to think there was some sort of concensus about what common sense was but perhaps I was the more deceived. I like Rishi Sunak more than I like many Conservatives but, given the qualities of his predecessors and the idea that David Cameron is now regarded as statesmanlike, that's not a big call. And he achieves it while promoting the Rwanda plan and claiming the next General Election is 'in the balance' which shows how bad you can be while still being the preferable face of the Conservative Party.

There doesn't seem to be common sense any more - the relatively thin gap there was between Ted Heath and Harold Wilson- when students at illustrious Cambridge University, supporters of Donlad Trump, Liz Truss herself et al just say what they say and keep on saying it.

Times Radio, and maybe The Times itself, seem to be able to retain some perspective and, having interviewed Monty Panesar, the ex-troubled cricketer now standing as one of George Galloway's candidates, at first ridiculed his lack of grasp but subsequently softened into sympathy for someone who actually made other politicians look good and perhaps it's not his fault and maybe he needs help.

Nicola Tait Baxter & Mina Miletic at Chichester

Nicola Tait Baxter & Mina Miletic, Chichester Cathedral, May 7

Many of the pieces one knows best are those one had recordings of first and thus had fewer to play. For Christmas or a birthday in the mid-70's, my parents gave me a cassette of Dvořák's Greatest Hits and so some of his music is very familiar. It's not so much Songs my mother taught me but songs my parents bought me. Lunchtime recitals are mainly of chamber music and so today's programme, which was all Dvořák who is not best known for that, was a rarity. I'm not sure I can remember any previously but it was most welcome. 

One of those 'greatest hits' was the Slavonic Dance, op. 46 no. 8, which in today's inventive arrangement by Chuchro retained all the orchestral brio and zest and another was those Songs, op. 55 no. 4, immediately providing the other half of the composer's personality with its wide-open spaces and broad perspective. That was necessarily the highlight for me. Georgia Mann described a piece for cello by Dvořák as 'sumptuous' this morning and if it's a good enough word for her to broadcast to the nation, it's good enough for me to borrow here.

The centrepiece of the programme, though, was the Polonaise in A, more ambitious and demanding with the drama in Mina's piano and Nicola's cello going to both the violin and bass ends of its range.

Silent Woods returned to the lento, profound and atmospheric and showing off the lush cello tone to best effect. If it works like a poem and sounds like a poem, it's probably a poem.

The Rondo, op.94, was a finale made of a folk dance with vestigial traces of Mozart in places, full of textures and emphases to propel it forwards. Dvořák comes across as almost as untroubled as Haydn was last week, at least on this evidence and I'm not aware of too much of a downside to him.

An entirely convincing performance and a few minutes in hand allowed for an encore, Dobrú noc, má mila (Good Night, My Darling) which was all serenity and clarity.

The New World Symphony surely counts as his greatest hit and I'd have the Song to the Moon from Rusalka but there were plenty more exhibits here with which to make his case in competition with his mate, Brahms, and he shouldn't be far away from him in the rarefied strata of late C19th greats.

The Differences

 It's been music here recently. The website is called David Green Books but that has become a misnomer. But Sheffield Wednesday play on other days, too. It's an obvious thing to say that music isn't held back by words and thus in some ways seems able to do more than poems and stories. Painting, similarly, although they are both bound by their respective aural and visual limits and perhaps poems are of interest for the ways in which they can slip their surly bonds but you won't get a Ph. D. in Aesthetics for doing 100 thousand words extrapolated from that.

-- 

I'm not in a bookish moment at the moment. Sport books don't often raise themselves to the condition of literature but, like the Larwood biography, Peter Oborne's Basil D'Oliveira is a story of high controversy and provides some insight into how the world was in some places at the time.

We very nearly didn't have the privilege of having heard of him, never mind getting his autograph at Worcester. Born in 1931, his test match debut for England was in 1966 and he only just got there in time without possibly the selectors knowing how old he was.

John Arlott comes out of the story with great credit, which can't be said of everyone involved.

There are similarities in the careers of Larwood and D'Oliveira in the ways they were treated by a sport ridden with such divisions but the difference might be that Larwood was saddened by his experiences in professional cricket whereas D'Oliveira heroically overcame his circumstances. Whereas Larwood's test career was over at 28, the D'Oliveira dynasty at Worcester continues to this day with Brett currently captain.

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There is a human trait that tends to be dissatisfied with things as they are that then complains even more when they are changed. I saw it in work plenty of times.

I know the audience of Radio 4 are well-known for any change to their schedule because they are a conservative lot and change necessarily means disruption. Perhaps I've become their Radio 3 counterpart, in counterpoint, suddenly lost and disorientated by the new arrangements. 

They benefitted from having me as a listener from earlier on Saturday mornings when Danny Baker was sacked for the final time by the BBC, from Radio 5, and I've hardly been back there since. But with Record Review now broken up and moved elsewhere, I'm not sure if the estimable Tom Service doing a weekend morning show is what I want and certainly Earlier with Jools Holland is well-intentioned but Astor Piazzolla is a poor attempt at eclecticism, on Thursday Essential Classics played the theme from Star Wars and Friday Night is Music Night is now on the wrong channel.

In the school summer holidays in the 1970's, Radio 3 played something C18th and I was prompted to imagine a formal garden like that set out in Winchester, sunlit and timeless and if it's possible to have so many radio stations on which one is guaranteed to get Dire Straits followed by Madonna followed by Huey Lewis & the News then one station centred on 'classical' music through the ages isn't much to expect and fits the BBC's allegedly non-commercial, Reithian remit.

But in the same way that there is no magazine beyond the Saturday Times that caters for me and so I write this for myself, so I might spend more time with the discs on the shelves and do my music for myself because there's a lot of them up there that don't get played and I must have bought them for a reason once upon a time.

Anemos Wind Trio at Lunchtime Live !

 Anemos Wind Trio, Portsmouth Cathedral, May 2

Music is possible without a piano. Some of us lunchtime regulars at Portsmouth and Chichester Cathedrals could be forgiven for not realizing that but a change is as good as a rest, it is said, and the rare combination of flute, clarinet and bassoon made for some excursions down some roads less travelled.

Anemos is a fluid group of musicians by the looks of it, able to accommodate to a variety of wind repertoire and today were Helen Walton, Rob Blanken and Richard Moore.

Ian Harrold's Divertimento, op. 40, was 'available for hire' and that is all was known about it. If Rob's answer to Richard's question was ad-libbed and not rehearsed there's a future for him in improvised comedy. The piece was choreography for breath, as was much of the set, with Richard by no means strictly a bass-line part.

In among some slightly eccentric things, Mozart's Divertimento No. 4, K.439b, at least allowed us to feel at home for the main course. The Allegro was joie de vivre, the Menuet and Trio graceful and the Rondo exactly as expected. In between those movements, though, the Larghetto and Adagio were the obvious standout moments.

Without intending to provoke controversy I would contend that Mozart saved his very, very most gorgeous ideas for his operas and the second movement especially could have been an idea he had left over. Led by Helen's flute it floated in that way that only Mozart does and the fourth movement was literally soave sia il vento.

It is often useful, whether in an art gallery, at a poetry reading or at a concert, to hear from the artists involved. I, for one, was glad of Richard's explanation that Marko Mihevc's Mutatio Eroicae was a Croatian 'musical joke'. It can be a problem with a lot of 'modern art' that one is not sure whether it's supposed to be funny. With the deconstruction of Beethoven 3 it was a devilish thing and I'd have asked about time signatures if I'd remembered to. Perhaps it was in 4/4 - I wouldn't know- but some of it might have been in π/x and a good example of how music is actually mathematics and not always easily so. With Radio 3, some might say, continuing to move inexorably towards easy listening - and playing the theme from Star Wars this morning- we might have to go out of the house more and more to find things of such interest.

Leonardo de Lorenzo, with another Divertimento, op. 24, provided a set of flourishes, not least among which was a bassoon trill, in a gladsome round of gaiety in what was a short, sweet and entirely diverting set that showed it's perfectly possible for an audience to be blown away by wind instruments alone.