Cardenio

 I keep reading Don Quixote with at least the completion of part 1 as a target while waiting for other titles that are likely to be more exciting. It does seem episodic to the point of the same absurdity as its repetitive episodes but the nature of humour changes - or perhaps it doesn't given that the likes of Some Mothers Do Have 'Em and Last of the Summer Wine extended one joke across lots of episodes.

However, the story of Cardenio, the lost Shakespeare play, is in it and one can see how it might have lent itself to such treatment. I think I once read that the lost play might have also been the putative, also lost, Love's Labours Won but unless Cardenio's story is turned around by further chapters, it won't have been.

 

One needs to be reading a book or else such dreariness as dutiful household chores could be allowed to be one's life but a loud noise in the porch at lunchtime announced an avalanche of post that, once sifted for items of interest, revealed Shostakovich Plays Shostakovich in those inestimable Preludes and Fugues that have been top of the playlist in recent days, as well as Purcell's Dido and Aeneas with Kisten Flagstad and Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, as heard as a question on Face the Music the other week. So, although these are further recordings of pieces I already have on the shelves, they are much more essential than having to create further shelf space for Bruckner, Mahler, Wagner, Korngold and maybe even Vaughan-Williams.

I think it's gonna be a long, long time before I see through that Shostakovich piano music. At the moment, guys and gals, Tatiana Nikolayeva is number one and Top of the Pops and it will be of interest how the composer played his own music with remotely expecting him to be better than she was.