'Romanticism', maybe coming soon

It came to me midweek,

Now I might do it pat

and, unlike irresolute Hamlet, I think I will.

It's a very similar feeling to those rare occasions when a poem presents itself, demanding to be written. It's almost a 'categorical imperative', without being too Kantian about it. There is no point sitting down to write a poem if one doesn't have an idea for such a thing. There's equally no point in going to the printer's with a new book(let) when the poems aren't right but then, suddenly, it's almost now or never and, on the most modest of scales, there is a tide in the affairs of men- if in this case only this one.

So, we will see within what timescale Romanticism can be expedited. I think I'm a week or so behindhand to make Christmas but not to worry. The final analysis of Eng Lit is unlikely to fall down over whether these poems are officially published in 2024 or 2025.

I've just read it and am thrilled with it, as most parents also are of their offspring. Good Heavens, did we do that?  Many will find it downbeat, I'm sure, but that didn't do Hardy or Larkin any harm. It's all irony, just as being inexplicably cheerful would be, but whereas I don't mind being misunderstood as downbeat and non-committal, I certainly don't want to be misunderstood as artificially cheerful. 

 

It could be a last hurrah, as it were, because thereon in, David Green (Books), having used up its allocation of ISBN's, would be over and any further titles would need to find an imprint to make them happen and after so many years of doing it my way I can't see me accepting any terms and conditions. But, let's be thrilled for now. I'm possibly more excited, and certainly more confident, about these poems than I was about Museum in 1990. To be sure, if no progress has been made in the interim then there was even less point in the enterprise than I ever thought.

The Hardy Spree and other stories

So utterly enamoured have I been with the recent Thomas Hardy season on BBC4 that I've been on a spree to fill in the other half of his complete novels with those lesser-known titles, some of which I've read, but I don't want to be incomplete. I think it's seven more to go with the seven already here. The Collected Stories and Complete Poems and two biographies are also here but I won't as yet stretch to The Dynasts although you never know.

It's like coming full circle. I can probably now identify The Woodlanders at school as being when Eng Lit became as much as a vocation as I've ever had, considering it a marvellous thing that reading such a book could be counted as 'work'. As with Mozart, one returns to where it all began with no loss of the original wonder one felt.

There have been any number of excursions on the way- Bach, of course, and Beethoven and Shostakovich registered their presences early doors before Buxtehude, Josquin and Handel all had their times and remain solidly Top 10.

Pop music inevitably takes one on a more more circuitous route until fading to leave one with a vast archive of masterpieces.

While several poets laid claim to one's admiration, poetry has also now apparently resolved itself into a personal helicon but my history of the novel can be defined by a list of those writers whose books I have 'just about' everything of- Joyce, George Eliot, Salinger, Julian Barnes, Murakami, Graham Swift, Gide. There's plenty of Balzac but life is too short and the house too small for all of it. Donna Tartt. Larkin and Sean O'Brien if it comes to that and, in fact, my uncle and father, too - with one title each, but that's not really the point.

The point, if there is one, that next year, maybe as far as Easter, is likely to be Hardy time, hoping that one novel after another doesn't leave me wondering what happened to a character that belonged in the book I finished the previous week.

Similarly, with the jettisoning of Radio 3 from my daily soundtrack in favour of my record library rather than the BBC's, I've been leaving the same disc in for half a dozen or so consecutive plays over a week or ten days. The Shostakovich String Quartets never stop giving of their wintry lyricism and ongoing invention. What a sensational investment they were. It will take something quite remarkable to knock them off the top of the playlist. That thing might be the Symphonies that I've mostly shied away from but it would be madness not to try them in due course.  

All of which makes for a fine, if sometimes austere outlook for the bleak midwinter and the natural break from the day job of local lunchtime concerts. One doesn't want to be left without reading matter to hand or essential music. Don't worry about me, though, I won't be.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Scapegoat

It was a later Duke of Buckingham that the palace was named after but not one that exceeded George Villiers in eminence, influence and, for James I if not in the end the English people, adorability. One of the great attractions of biography is the view they give us of the worlds their protagonists lived in and the 634-page glimpse that The Scapegoat gives us of the workings, ostentation and strangeness of the court of King James I is a prime example.

George Villiers rose from relatively low birth, effectively groomed by his mother to do whatever it took to achieve success. While Lucy Hughes-Hallett raises an eyebrow more than once on our behalf regarding what sort of things that entailed, the absolute power of a self-indulgent monarch like James made it less outrageous in the Stuart court.

James had had a traumatic childhood with the assassination of his mother only the headline in a litany of horrors that made him understandably nervous about his own safety and an emotional neediness that took all the vast largesse at his disposal to procure remedies for. Young George Villiers was the best-looking boy he had ever seen, an outstanding prancer on his shapely legs and soon eclipsed all others in the succession of favourites that he chose as his most intimate companions.

While the riches that James lavished on George, resulting in his title, had to be reciprocated with an equal if opposite love in such an unbalanced relationship, Buckingham had charm to match his looks and gift and was exceptionally good at it. He rose to be the most powerful person in England with a talent that was far beyond that of Piers Gaveston under Edward II and much more durable than that of Dominic Cummings under the much more flawed, precarious and rapidly disintegrating position of Boris Johnson.

It's easy during his rise to power to like Buckingham and be impressed and James is cultured, a bit of a scholar and peace-loving and so more attractive to read about than he must have been to be with, his profligacy notwithstanding. But Buckingham outgrows his subservient role with his extensive portfolio of high office appointments and the balance of power shifts with James preferring to go hunting to running the country. And, being able to take James for granted, he can cultivate his relationship with the future Charles I to secure his longer-term future.

The perennial problem with History as a subject is that we don't know the answers to the most crucial questions. While such as those relating to Richard III and the princes in the tower are subject to more speculation than evidence, there is some suspicion that James was deliberately bumped off by Buckingham. It fits that he might have been, given Buckingham's apparently vaulting ambition but it also fits with the role of scapegoat that, as someone who became so unpopular, any and every possible misdemeanour would be loaded onto his charge sheet.

He was certainly more disastrous than Boris in international relations if only on such a larger scale as failing to make the marriage alliance with Spain and, if succeeding in such with France, becoming intent on war with both of them and ending in fiascos each time he tried. Mainly, there was no money which is the sub-text to most political problems.

But once the tide of public opinion has turned, it's all but impossible to turn it back. Buckingham, whether he was or not, was understood to be a Catholic sympathizer devoted to debauchery, luxury and the devil and not only Parliament but hordes of unpaid soldiers and sailors blamed him for everything.

The concept of the scapegoat first appears in Leviticus, in which a goat is designated to be cast into the desert to carry away the sins of the community. It's possible that more was loaded onto Buckingham than were his just desserts but he had been cast as a monster and the chance fell to John Felton to stab him in Portsmouth. Felton could have got away but thought that cries of 'a Frenchman' were saying his name so he gave himself up, which is a hapless way to go even if he did so with great conviction. 

Lucy Hughes-Hallett's book is a riveting read, superbly organized and as vivid and astonishing in whichever way one chooses to interpret it, whether as a morality tale, a study in the ongoing saga of political hubris and failure or, as I generally prefer to, as an insight into human nature. It has a support cast including Francis Bacon, foreign royalty and their emissaries, art by Velasquez and Rubens. It is a sumptuous feast of a colourful blockbuster film except in my preferred medium of hardback book. 

I remain grateful to the Portsmouth Library service for providing such top-class entertainment for the asking.

Thomas Hardy - An Imaginative Woman

I recorded much of the archive Thomas Hardy material shown on BBC4 recently and it's providing a fine resource for when none of the hundreds of TV channels are showing anything better than an Only Fools and Horses that one is almost word perfect in parts of. 

I've got and have read The Collected Stories if not every single one of the novels but I read them in later life, not aged about 15 or 16 when I read The Woodlanders which I recall in all its detail as if it were yesterday, so An Imaginative Woman rang no bells whatsoever. 

Starring Claire Bloom, it featured a lady somewhat dutifully married who finds herself staying in rooms temporarily vacated by her favourite poet, a Romantic looking sort called Robert Trewe. Now, I've been besotted by the work of a few poets before if not necessarily the poets themselves but never, I think, to such an extent.

The story is in the book upstairs, for sure, but memory of it I had none despite its deeply profound implications and, unavoidably in Hardy, desperate outcome. I cannot recommend it too highly and we will see one day if a re-read puts it anywhere near The Dead at the apex of the all-time prose fiction list.

As ever, it comes with the caveat that we can treat the 'art' and the artist as separate entities and avoid conflating them. The difference between how Hardy treated women in his writing compared to in life is vast but we would have to disqualify an awful lot of a lot of awful people - the majority of them men, I dare say - that produced seminal artworks in all genres that cultural history can't be written without reference to.

I'm not entirely convinced Shakespeare was anywhere near the worst of them, though. Not for writing The Taming of the Shrew, not for the deal his wife got from his will and not even for the disgust at female sexuality one can find evidence of in the plays. They aren't items one wants on one's 'woke cred' CV but they have for the most part been answered. 

The Duke of Buckingham and other stories

 I was rubbish at 'A' level History. It was two years utterly wasted at an important, formative stage of one's life in classes provied by two men apparently hell-bent on making you wish you'd not chosen their subject as an option. They certainly convinced me.

Having nominally 'studied' the Tudors and Stuarts then it has taken me until now, by virtue of The Scapegoat book, to realize that George Villiers was actually the most powerful man in the country, not only as Dominic Cummings was when pulling the strings of his idiot puppet, Boris, as the very foremost 'favourite' of James I but shifting his ground to be the same for Charles I, too, that even Dominic wasn't clever enough to do, not being quite so gorgeous, charming and ingratiating.

Old Portsmouth, where I now luxuriate in the music provided on some Thursdays, was where Buckingham was assassinated which, in 1628, was bigger news than the two failed attempts on Donald Trump, all those on Queen Victoria and maybe not far behind that of JFK.

Nearly 400 years later, it's quiet, mostly and a bit select. I now find that Villiers Street, by Charing Cross, where I used to sometimes meet my friend in Gordon's Wine Bar, is one remaining of several streets that were named after him. Buckingham Palace was named after a later Buckingham. George Villiers ended up being stabbed because he was hated by the populace and by someone who took it upon himself to put public opinion into action, his immense good fortune turned to bad. Come back soon for the verdict on this morality tale as told in The Scapegoat by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, which has been an renthralling read. Had we been given such books to read at school I might have found more time for History.

--

It took a while but the tide finally turned and some cash has started flowing back the way of the Racetrack Wiseguy, not spectacularly but the damage sustained in the Autumn is being repaired as we move into Winter and a great day's racing yesterday. It's a long and ongoing game and it isn't won in one big plunge. Attempting to do that is a quick way to the poor house. Steady as we go, stick to the plan because it works and then it does.

--

Whereas Radio 3 has all but disappeared from my life since its re-scheduling. I feel bad about deserting the flagship of BBC Music but some favourite features have been moved to where they don't fit so well with me and so my own record library provides my own programming more often than not. Perhaps I should leave a radio quietly playing away to itself somewhere in order to defend it against the next round of cost-cutting but it may be safe from those until we get another right-wing government who don't see the point of 'culture' back in.

And the 2024 schedule of concerts is coming to an end soon, too. It has been the 'best year ever' for me, I reckon, so do come back for the Year in Review next month to re-live a few highlights.

David Price at Lunchtime Live !

David Price, Portsmouth Cathedral, November 21

It is a tribute to the good people at Portsmouth Cathedral that the show does go on, with a programme produced at short notice to replace the advertised gig. The lesser-spotted Angelina Kopyrina is a much-prized sighting for local music afficiandos but, as with the most dedicated ornithologists, one has to turn up a few times to see her once. But illness is as illness does and our combined disappointments are naturally converted into get well soon messages.

In the circumstances, the 'programme' was ready-made in that David Price was off to Salisbury Cathedral to play it there in the evening and so he was provided with a dress rehearsal. What was the more impressive was the production of the usual hard copy handout to be had in such circumstances.

It was on a theme of 'remembrance' and, for the most part, familiar music if not always familiar as organ music. It worked its way through a selection of effects, beginning with the trumpets of Fanfare for the Common Man and the woodwind, probably flutes, of an interesting transcription of The Lark Ascending. For me, a church organ is a more limited instrument than the violin, without the same capacity for nuance, but David brought the required pastoral warmth to it and effected the final disappearance of the bird convincingly if maybe less gradually.

Walton's Spitfire Prelude is necessarily rousing but also hymn-like, conflating war and religion in a way that it long has been and still can be. The gloriously frugal Maurice Duruflé's Prélude et Fugue sur le nom d'Alain meandered like his better known Requiem does, a bit, before building its own cathedral of sound. Elgar's For the Fallen fulfilled its remit in its stately pace and meditative attitude and a setting of the theme from Saving Private Ryan was further evidence of the osmosis of John Williams into the 'classical' repertoire, expanding into wider harmonies, but we will see about that. Radio 3 might be fraying at its edges into what Radio 2 once was but there's no need for Classic FM to become the ultimate arbiter of the classical canon.

Bach raises no such issues. And I'm glad to find myself not a closed shop of fixed ideas. In the hands of David Price, maybe there's more to the organ than I knew - and our own ongoing education is surely our main purpose. The Theme from All Gas and Gaiters, also known as the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, swelled and surged and hastened along the quicker tempi in the Toccata before some dance and dazzle in the Fugue. But it's Bach, isn't it, and thus almost by definition in a class of its own and couldn't help but leave us with some wow factor which is why it's usually a good idea to keep the best thing til last.

The schedule for Lunchtime Live! is all but complete for Jan-April 2025. It is various and provides us with much to look forward to. Thanks, as always, to those who make it possible.

The Composers Chart

The old, somewhat juvenile impulse to make lists never quite goes away. I think one imagines it somehow classifies the world for us, to let us think we've 'got it', we're in charge, have understood and know where we stand.

However, once you get beyond the Top 10, say, it becomes arbitrary. There's 81 of them here and down to Stravinsky before it becomes borderline whether I like them or not. It is the downside of any judging job, multiplied by the truism of the Olympic Games, that Beethoven, Mozart and Handel are all certainties for Top 3 places, and would be guaranteed second if not for each other, but somebody has to finish fourth. But Beethoven's had a tremendous year with me. Handel could easily have been second this time last year.

Is Dvorak that much more favorite than Ravel - there's not much to choose between the peloton who finish in roughly the same time on this stage.

It's a work-in-progress that could have fifty or a hundred more names slotted into it on the basis of my vague idea of how much I like them but these are composers that I'm sufficiently familiar with to know a few of their works, or what they are like.

It's a work-in-progress that need not go any further, mainly because it's a waste of time and only, like writing a poem, perhaps, finds its author attempting to authenticate an identity for themselves.

However, while I'm in a spending phase, I'm not sure I want a picture of Bach or Mozart on my wall, if only because they are too obvious. I had one of Beethoven when I was a teenager, Handel wouldn't be out of the question but, if such a thing is available, I think I could find wallspace for a picture of Shostakovich.

And there it is and since there was a special offer on, I helped myself to Handel, James Joyce and Josquin des Prez, too, so I have a few days to work out where they can be fitted in.

  

J.S. BACH BEETHOVEN MOZART HANDEL SHOSTAKOVICH MONTEVERDI BRAHMS SCHUBERT BUXTEHUDE JOSQUIN DES PREZ MENDELSSOHN TALLIS BYRD F. COUPERIN PURCELL SIBELIUS RACHMANINOV CHARPENTIER CHOPIN GLUCK SATIE HAYDN BUSONI DVORAK TCHAIKOVSKY D. SCARLATTI ELGAR ROBERT SCHUMANN GORECKI FAURE BIBER PUCCINI POULENC PART MACMILLAN TAVENER C.P.E. BACH BERLIOZ LASSUS MACHAUT OCKEGHEM A. SCARLATTI  TELEMANN VERDI VIVALDI LISZT TELEMANN PROKOFIEV CLARA SCHUMANN RAMEAU J.C. BACH LISZT RICHARD STRAUSS MUSSORGSKY A. SCARLATTI  GLASS CAGE HOLST BRUCH ALBINONI FANNY MENDELSSOHN NYMAN KHACHATURIAN BOCCHERINI BIZET SCHONBERG DEBUSSY BOYCE CORELLI RAVEL BARTOK SMETANA BORODIN DEBUSSY CORELLI STRAVINSKY MAHLER BRUCKNER KORNGOLD WAGNER BOULEZ

Absenteeism and other stories

 I was planning on going to Chichester Cathedral today but didn't. Such abject dereliction of duty was never my way. In 34 years of devoted service in my government paid jobs, I missed 5 days through being unfit - it might have been 6. It was no reflection on the performers in Chichester even if Thursday's in Portsmouth is a higher priority, it was a dull day, chidden of God, I am enthralled by The Scapegoat and three important deliveries of further material were due - just arrived now- and all in all the realization that Tuesday lunchtimes are not obligatory and I've done plenty came as a mild release.

Watching the progress of the delivery driver from eight stops away served to demonstrate just what a mammoth operation Amazon is and though I feel guilty of using it, it would cost a few hundred pounds a year more to source books and records elsewhere.

So, the book of Nightingale Night, the new Murakami and a streetplan of Nottingham are all essential additions to the library. In twenty-six years at this address it has expanded such that downsizing the house - heaven forfend- is hardly thinkable. All shelf capacity is all but spoken for. It might be possible to fit another bookcase in upstairs but after that, well, who's to say. It's when such sections as Larkin, Murakami, Bach, Shakespeare, etc. can't be kept neatly together that I fret slightly. But if that's my biggest concern I have precious little to worry about.

 

One can't read two big, fat books at once, though, so Murakami will have to wait. It's not as if one doesn't know what it's going to be like. I'm reading as much as I reasonably can and can only wonder at Booker Prize judges who have to read over a hundred titles in about as many days and then turn up and discuss them all, not all of them having been worthwhile but one ought to have read them in order to say why not. Rather them than me.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

The Liszt biography was an excellent book, see a little way below. And it's straight on into another biography, The Scapegoat by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, that promises to be just as good. It's about George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, Portsmouth's most eminent murder victim.

These are two extraordinary lives, for sure, but perhaps ordinary lives - if there are such things- would be worth reading if well written. My own has been unspectacular and I have no plans to write it but it was of passing interest to me from time to time.

Perhaps the most mundane life would be of someone who never changed, although the reasons for that might be worth examining. The Jesuit maxim about knowing the adult from the seven year old can only be partially true and is, therefore, false. Some people develop exponentially at a certain stage, most retain some sort of personality blueprint, I dare say, and, if anything, I'd say I regressed from highly promising child to unrepentant under-achiever.

I was a football obsessive to the age of about 12 but by now know only roughly where some of the teams are in their leagues. Sports, like cricket and cycling, came and went and now all I'm left with is horse racing over obstacles, maybe inherited through a grandfather's DNA.

I never tire of re-telling how the 13-14yo me went from devotion to the wilder outskirts of rock music, through a disavowal of pop music to emerge as a born again soul man, almost evangelistic about it. The constant thing in music arrived with Mozart at the age of 11 and has remained essential, perhaps never more so than now.

There was never a time without books, either, but which books has shifted. Fancying myself to be a poet, aged 20 I was pure enough in intention to not want to write anything else but 45 years later I want to write whatever suggests itself and that's not poems very often.

I hardly read a biography until I was 30, thinking that fiction was the 'real' business of literature but that's turned around, as we can see - of course biography's the 'real' business and 'real' stories are much more vivid, relevant and captivating than made up ones. 

The Scapegoat is more than 600 pages. It is outrageously brilliant that the library service will lend me such a sumptuous book for a month and I don't envisage it being necessary to renew it.

--

It's been hard times in recent weeks on the turf. From October onwards is my harvest season, supposedly, but this year has been marred by a drought of almost unprecedented proportions. I wasn't doing badly at all for 2024 and was looking forward to 'pressing on' but I've not been the Wiseguy when push came to shove.

The first two favourites going in at Cheltenham today was the last thing I wanted to see with my small-time double being on two of the next three and my theory being that favs simply don't keep obliging. But, as has been pointed out to me, each race is a different event and the outcome of one has no effect on those that follow. The Skelton stable is as efficient as any winning machine once it clicks into gear and L'Eau du Sud and Doyen Quest both won with great authority at God's own sports venue. It's not the money - I need a rattling good spell to restore the plus to where I'd like it - but I'd almost forgotten the feeling one gets when one knows the gamble is landed. One has to stay in profit but it's the endorphins of success I think one does it for. 

Endorphin was 15 Across in today's Times crossword. I gladly take my vocabulary from wherever suggests it.

--

It's been hard times on the Times crossword, too, come to that. I didn't even send it in the last two weeks. The last chapters of biographies can often be about declining powers and can be elegiac if not downright awful. Not being able to finish crosswords is sometimes blamed on them being set by a different setter. Maybe it's that, then. The litany of things one could once accomplish that one no longer can lengthens and threatens to lengthen further. One could do without that sedentary diversion being added to it.  

---

Four books by Stewart Lee arrived this week, most of his published output if not all. It's hardline 'woke' stuff, or at least committedly anti anti-woke. I like him a lot and it did him no harm that he wrote the introduction to the re-issue of a Rosemary Tonks novel last year.

One assumes that any friend of hers is a friend of one's.

Like with any satirist, it's easy to have targets but what one needs to know is what the likes of Ian Hislop, Peter Cook, Ben Elton or, indeed, Alexander Pope would do if they were in charge. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are not so far making it look easy. I suspect they've not got it right but it's not clear what 'getting it right' would have been. It's possible that Stewart is from the Corbyn tendency. Marxism might have been brilliant at analysing problems but evidence of it ever solving any, apart from the problem of achieving a degree in Sociology, is scarce.

There's good writing to be had from Stewart as he knocks over easy targets but makes a point of setting himself up against the 'mainstream' stand-up industry, too. It's postmodern to distance oneself from what one ostensibly is, referring back to one's art form within its own process like the sort of poems or novels that let you know that they know that's all they are. It offers layers, going beyond irony towards Nirvana. 

Nirvana was 18 Down in today's Times crossword. I'm beginning to understand how Stewart does what he does.

That's all very well while being so cutely postmodern remains in fashion but maybe one day it won't be and Stewart Lee will suddenly look as out of date as Jim Davidson or Bernard Manning.

'Woke' was an Obama word that only meant 'aware' and that 'we must love one another and/or die' but it's been made into a crime and Russia won the American Presidential Election by being anything but. As happens these days, the liberal 'elite' lost the vote of those they wanted to help because they failed to make them feel better off.

And that's biography for you. You're great one day, very much in fashion, but then you're not. It happened to Shakespeare, it happened to Bach and so it could even happen to Stewart Lee.

And it also means hard times ahead for our already very troubled world. Which seems to me a good enough way of dove-tailing, as if in a piece of carpentry, the denouement of this piece in Stewart Lee style, having referred both backwards and forwards, brought in both personal and international concerns while maintaining some direction even if that direction wasn't always clear.

Maybe that is what biography, or even life itself, is about, that like Ophelia says, we know what we are but know not what we may be. 

I've been Stewart Lee. No. I haven't. I've been David Green. Thank you. Good Night.

Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in Portsmouth

 Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Portsmouth Guildhall, Nov 14

The first-ever box set of LP's I bought was the Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Concentus Musicus Wien Brandenburg Concertos and I'm not sure I'd swap those recordings for anything I've bought since. I got it right first time. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, henceforth OAE here if need be, brought four of the six of them to Portsmouth, their website preview explaining the mystery about what they 'mean', if anything at all. 

While I'm very taken with the idea of music that has no story, no heroes, heartbreak or other sub-text, like a decorative frieze, I'm equally unconvinced that such a thing is possible. We provide our own if none is provided.

No. 2, the one with the valveless trumpet, began the set. I'm sure it's an infernally difficult instrument to play and David Blackadder made a glorious sound except for maybe one or two missed notes, which I feel reluctantly bound to mention in such a high-class band. There is no hiding place in a small orchestra with one player per part but especially not in that part. The Andante evoked cool shadows with prominent cello alongside woodwind and lead violin.

No. 6, the one with no violins, had only seven musicians on stage and thus brought to mind a great disc called Quartets for Low Strings by Georg Wagenseil (worth looking out for). Two violas and cello do a marvellous job of explaining away our sadness or grief in the Adagio before the violas dance over a cantus firmus in the Allegro.

In the second half, No. 3, the one all about number 3, is Bach at almost his most mathematically inventive, the motif passed around all the players and eventually right across the stage. The violin and harpsichord Adagio led into a merry gigue Allegro with Bach at his most Viv and we were reminded the debt he owes to his study of those Venetian scores.

No. 4, the one with the recorders, is a Springtime frolic with Rachel Beckett on one of them and Huw Daniel performing virtuoso violin wizardy, punctuated by the winsome sighing in the Andante, as the spectacular finish.

I can mention Matthew Truscott's viola, Cecelia Bruggemeyer's bass, the violin of Margaret Faultless and I'd mention more names if I was sure who was who but there was no programme which brings me to a rare bit of editorializing. 

Portsmouth is only Portsmouth to big city acts, maybe like OAE, and one can have a vague inkling that it can't help being just another date on a tour itinerary. They brought enthusiasm and obvious enjoyment with them but Portsmouth Guildhall lacks charisma, Portsmouth itself struggles to provide audience numbers and I'm as guilty as anybody in not being at the Guildhall very often when local talent and lunchtime visitors to the area put on such great shows without even a ticket price. It's a situation without a solution and it's by no means a complaint, Portsmouth is lucky to be served as well as it is and we surely all go to celebrate rather than find fault. I've read that Bach himself was often dissatisfied with some of the provincial conditions he found himself working in and it didn't do him any harm.

Karen Kingsley at Lunchtime Live !

Karen Kingsley, Portsmouth Cathedral, Nov 14

Portsmouth and its surrounding area are blessed with a number of fine musicians contributing to its active music community. They come from different backgrounds, from far and wide, only having their excellence and ongoing contributions in common. Few are busier or more versatile than Karen Kingsley who performs as accompanist to choirs, singers and other instrumentalists, as half of the Mornington Duo but chiefly herself, as well as teaching.

One knows who is playing at Lunchtime Live events but not what. Out of the lucky bag today came pieces by seven contemporary composers from New Music Brighton, four of who were in attendance. 

John Petley's Toccata was immediately busy crossing Bach with something like Scott Joplin and the Fugue that went with it, a beat or two slower, would not be flattered by comparison with those great ones by Shostakovich, remaining not quite resolved.

David Hoyle's Clouds breaking on Elizabeth Street, NY 10012 had a similar hint of edginess, as if hoping to achieve tranquility but not being able to before Johnson and Johnson (or Blues in E) by Simon Hopkins mixed Scottish baroque with jazz, in a strange meeting of rhythms and inflection.

We don't live in such confident times as Haydn did and a theme was emerging of unsettled feelings and the time, often literally, being out of joint. Karen was putting in a sensational performance in meeting such a variety of technical challenges so convincingly.

A Short Story by Gavin Stevens was an eponymously programmatic set of five miniatures in which the dash of The Chase ultimately led to the lush, briefly expansive Love Theme and the celebrations of Fanfare for a Happy Ending offering plenty left to our imaginings.

We were due something quieter and while The Calm Lake by Barry Mills provided that, it was still eerily evocative rather than restful but with its own anxious beauty. Three Jazz Pieces by Lluis Nadal took as their starting points Bartok, in Bluebeard, an Indonesian palace and a jazzman in Kraton Teremasa and 'gentle falling rain' in Rincik, in which we were caught in the onrush of a squall. We might, though, have been misdirected by the title of Peter Copley's Ballade if expecting something romantic or sentimental. It wasn't that, it was emphatic from the first chord and demonic and possessed in the most highly-charged Romantic way as the fff climax to an extraordinary and generous menu of very recent music from Brighton. Music is in a very healthy creative condition there on this evidence.

While all the composers are worthy of individual, as well as collective, further investigation it had to be Karen that deserved top honours in delivering such a sustained, absorbing and quite intense performance. 

It gives local star turn, Angelina Kopyrina, something to aim at next week.

New Acquisition - Nightingale Night VII

I don't think it's made headline news in the international art market but a new record was set earlier this week when I paid more than I've ever done before for an art work, Nightingale Night VII by Maggi Hambling. While the price paid can easily be found from the Pallant House Gallery shop, it goes undisclosed here except to say i8t is the year's profit from the turf or this month's Premium Bond pay out but not both.

Some philistines might say any child could produce such a daub when first presented with paint and canvas, as they might produce something superficially like some contemporary classical music if given an instrument, but I've long wanted some sort of authentic Maggi on a wall so it's another ambition achieved.

It's not yet ideally framed but we'll see about that. The handwritten, signed poem, The Wound by Thom Gunn, has moved across to the wall at the side to make way for it in the prime spot above the computer.

 

The Liszt Report

The Liszt biography, by Oliver Hilmes, wasn't chosen because he's a favourite composer. He wouldn't make any Top 30 of mine, Top 50 I don't know. CD1 from the set of 9 by Jorge     Bolet was missing so the seller refunded half of the bargain price, they have their moments, some of it possibly a bit lyrically inconsequential but the dramtic parts are the sort of music best heard live.

No, the interest in the biography was the story and it doesn't let us down. It's possible that the family arrangements and succession of relationships and their difficulties dominate too much but they are the story. Having arrived at the episode featuring Olga Janina, the stalker who carries a revolver and poisons, I've stopped at a cliff-hanging phrase that, 

The worst was yet to come. 

Few give much credence to Liszt's time spent in holy orders which may or may not have been an unsuccessful ruse to gain employment in The Vatican rather than any renouncement of his very successful campaign of amorous involvements. And they went on throughout the family.

His daughter, Cosima, moves on in premptory fashion from her first husband to Richard Wagner but it's not always clear who, if any of them, are worthy of our sympathy as the Romantic age builds towards its greatest excesses. 

These are not 'ordinary people', most of them come with titles from the apparently vast ranks of European aristocracy, whether real or fake - Olga Janina was not the Russian countess she claimed to be. Liszt's daughter, Marie von Sayn-Wittgenstein marries Prince Konstantin Victor Ernst Emil Karl Alexander Friedrich Prince zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfurst, for example. 

It would be more reassuring if any of the tremendous talent, money and appetite for liaisons made any of thyem happy for any length of time but Romantics, it seems, have even less capacity for happiness than any other generation of creative artists and determine to cause themselves as much anguish as they can conjure. In hoping for a roller-coaster ride of sensations and drama, Liszt's story lived up to all expectations as well as confirming the prejudice that Byron was only the first of many who were 'mad, bad and dangerous to know'.

Maggi Hambling: Nightingale night

 Maggi Hambling, Nightingale Night, Pallant House, Chichester, until April 27

It was good to find that the new Maggi Hambling paintings were in Chichester and didn't involve a more demanding excursion to London. I go whenever I can to see her exhibitions.

There was a time when she was most definitely a figurative painter but she's moved towards more abstract means as the decades have gone by. 

She's certainly no Vermeer, the paint runs down the canvas having been applied with more flourish than delicacy, perhaps. As in the previous waves and waterfalls, one finds what one can that has come about in the process. The crescent moon in the painting representing P.J. Harvey in concert is a deliberate act but the female figure one thinks one sees emerging from the sea is one of many things that are more sub-conscious. That painting is the most complex with its extended palette on a white canvas but for the most part the rest are on black, or dark, and predominantly gold.

Done after a night spent in woodland, these are spectral images, a bit Hallowe'en and reward much longer contemplation than most who come and go, not necessarily talking of Michelangelo, in order to achieve an effect that, in Room 4, could have become comparable to the experience of the Rothko Chapel. What one doesn't get except from seeing them in the flesh is the range of sizes they come in, from 30x25 cm in Nightingale Night XIII to Night of the Lotus Eaters at 198x226.

There may or may not have been a braying horse and a crippled giraffe in the latter and it's in the nature of the dripping paint that Portuguese Man'o'War are not uncommon. There might well be self-portraits lurking in the sub-text of others while Will Young is more readily recognizable than Leonard Cohen as the musical theme is extended from that of birdsong. We are told, also, that the vulnerability of the balance in nature and, thus, climate change are themes and maybe that comes out of the imaginings one has as to whether it is a fish or toad one has seen.

It is a captivating exhibition but it hepls that I attend with the intention of being captivated. But my devotion is such that I went as far as buying the limited edition print and so had plenty to think about, concentrating on conveying that home on the bus safely.

Dora Carrington is possibly the more major show in Pallant House at present, the first such for thirty years. She's no less bohemian than Maggi, a more vivid colourist, quieter and morte concerned with detail. While being Bloomsbury fringe, they were very much taken up with each other and not only one at a time. The bookish, ascetic Lytton Strachey puts in a number of appearances, most revealingly with some more frivolous behaviour in some home video footage.

Although self-effacing, her art has some of that Gwen John quality of craft and technique and only the unusual Spanish Landscape with Mountains, 1924, is really outside of her steady remit. That she shot herself in the head after Lytton's death, as in the last moments of Merchant-Ivory film, suggests more than it completely explains.

Lisztomania

 Lisztomania was one of those Ken Russell films from another age entirely and one hopes to be forgiven for thinking that the term originated there. But, no, it was coined at an early stage of Liszt's career when he was the prototype for the outlandish adulation accorded to superstar performers on a routine basis by now.

It was a recent Composer of the Week programme that encouraged me to avail myself of the biography by Oliver Hilmes. While the music biography shelves have the 'main men' - Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven and Shostakovich (Bolan, Bowie, Lou Reed, Ronnie Spector), there is room to expand into and while Liszt is unlikely to ever been a huge favourite, he had a spectacular life.

His childhood replicates Mozart's in many ways with the early onset of genius, the tours arranged by his manager-father, the royal courts and aristocracy of Europe but, despite all that ongoing financial precariousness. That was largely solved by his relationship with the unlikely Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, impressive more for her intellectual aspiration, it seems, than her looks, especially given the charisma that brought such amorous success to Liszt. Her influence on him seems out of all proportion to what could reasonably be expected by such matters are not for outsiders to properly understand. Financial difficulties seem to have been successfully overcome when he lives in a castle with his own private wing furnished with instruments previously owned by Mozart and Beethoven.

It's a brilliant book written so clearly and so well organized that it makes for a captivating story whether one has an interest in composers or not and makes the reading experience much more enjoyable than Don Quixote did. By way of immersing myself in the subject to best effect, a box set of 9 CD's, the Piano Music by Jorge Bolet is on its way because I'll always take a bargain when I see the right one. By how much this will enhance Liszt's position on my list isn't obvious but it's stuff worth reading and a major turn up that he gets in ahead of Brahms. 

-- 

Forthcoming at DGBooks,

Maggi Hambling in Pallant House, Chichester; Stewart Lee's books; The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckinghamby Lucy Hughes-Hallett, a few more concerts in Chichester and Portsmouth and then a review of a year full of highlights.

The Parnassian Ensemble in Chichester

 The Parnassian Ensemble, Chichester Cathedral, Nov 5

There's been some neat programming on Chichester's Tuesday lunchtime list this Autumn and nothing is more appropriate to November 5th than Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks.

The Parnassian Ensemble are two recorders, baroque cello and harpsichord. They began with Andrea Falconiero's account of La Follia with an air of minstrelsy. In The Tempest, Caliban remarks on the 'sweet airs that give delight and hurt not' and they could have been much of the music featured here as Gottfried Keller's Trio Sonata no. 4 was lissom and floated, the Parnassian's Allegro perhaps being more 'vivace' than their Vivaces, including in Gareth Deats's spritely cello, but we need not be too academic about it.

Vivaldi's Trio Sonata, RV 81, involved more conversation than interweaving between Sophie Middleditch and Helen Hooker's recorders, the Largo being sumptuously languorous with Gareth's gentle pizzicato.

David Pollock's harpsichord was behind-the-scenes continuo until Sophie and Helen had a few minutes to catch their breath and he played two Sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, K.208 ambulatory with some longing or ache in its decorous stylings and K.212 much busier in its dash and zip through some scales. One might need to be towards the front rows of Chichester's long nave to fully appreciate the delicacy of these instruments as it is more properly 'chamber music' of some intimacy.

Even if baroque music is generic to the point of impersonality its emotional charge is often enhanced by its discipline. Telemann was, I understand, the big, box office name of his day but his reputation hasn't since quite taken on the epic proportion of Handel's. His Trio Sonata in G Minor ticks boxes and fulfils expectations but Handel and his personality exceed them. The Minuets from the Music for the Royal Fireworks were immediately the stand-out piece, followed by La Rejouissance which can't be translated into English any better than its expression in music. More of it wouldn't have gone amiss, with perhaps some Water Music in case of emergency if the pyrotechnics got out of hand. It made for a fine finale to what was mostly a recital of the utmost charm.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 Part 1 of Don Quixote ends as if it was meant to end there. The only book that Dr. Johnson said he wished had been longer and that, presumably, includes Part 2 which is praise indeed.

The comparison with Hamlet begins with a comparison of their respective states of 'madness'. Hamlet's was an adopted disposition that may or may not have become the real thing while he was pretending but I tend to doubt it now having got some mileage out of the idea for 'A' level essays; Harold Bloom contends that Don Quixote is aware of his own delusions, which makes his story more layered than it would otherwise be.

One can choose between any number of interpretations in meta-fictions that become cubist with all the choices of ways into them. Satire brings with it different 'levels' of meaning. For me, we wonder 'what is the point' of the Don's quest to become a knight errant and we might decide it is the same as any of us trying to become what we'd like to be.

Perhaps what we are lies in what we aspire to be, however absurd that aspiration might be. Perhaps we are defined by the gap between that aspiration and how much of it we achieve of it. We are absurd to the extent that we still believe in such dreams despite all the evidence that we aren't achieving them.

At various times I've imagined myself as footballer, cricketer, cyclist, pool player and a variety of sorts of writer with only the most modest levels of success in any of them. I was absurd when I thought I was destined for any sort of greatness, even locally, in any of them but found some happiness in the involvement.

I don't particularly think we go to literature to learn lessons about life to make us wiser but prefer to think we enjoy well-made work. Happiness or enjoyment, however it comes about, can be the only point and that can be provided by literature and how it reflects us back at ourselves.

--

Bob Harris takes over Sounds of the 70's this afternoon. He was in grave danger of losing this listener early doors with his emphasis on Americana, West Coast, rock and grisly old Whistle Test sessions but then put Al Green on. I think he'll need monitoring for his percentage of soul, Motown and disco but John Lennon's Stand By Me, on now, is perfectly alright.

--

The success of my excursion to Newcastle, mainly for the purposes of Durham Cathedral, in the summer has led me to wonder about further such travel. I'm not in favour of travel in principle, mostly due to the vagaries of the available transport systems. Like Philip Larkin, I wouldn't mind going to China if I could come back the same day.

However, as with Durham, once a plan solidifies it becomes a sine qua non, a must-have and an imperative that demands doing. Nottingham is where I come from, still feel some attachment to - not having been since the early 1980's- and, like the Bee Gees in Massachuchets, 'something's telling me I must go home'. Such imagined significance in where one came from, some sort of worship of the past taken from fragments of memory, might be more authentic versions of 'who we are' than those Quixotic aspirations to what we want to be. And, having hardly even thought about writing a poem for most of this year, that sketchy archive of early memories served one up. 

It goes with Move Over Darling and Nativity that are from similar sources and I'd love to put it here but it might be saved for print in due course. I was identifying as a 'poet who doesn't write poems' but it ain't over til it's over and, not having been successful in finding any other identity, I'm denied even that. So, at the risk of dangerous levels of introspection, it is the expression of that nothingness that provides some either Sartrean or Derridian 'enjoyment' and that, if there is one, seems to be the point.  

More Cardenio, etc.

I will reach the end of Part 1 of Don Quixote shortly. That might be enough. It's all that Cervantes originally did but then he added Part 2 when somebody else took it upon themselves to continue it.

Perhaps the big news is that Cardenio's story could be Love's Labour's Won in Shakespeare's lost play because he does have a happy outcome.

More than that, though, Cervantes is 'modern' and deals in 'meta-fiction' in his pastiche of chivalric novels by referring back to his hack models, not least when the canon pronounces,

I have never been able to read any from beginning to end, because it seems to me they are all essentially the same, and one is no different from another.

Not all readers of westerns, thrillers, Mills & Boon or devotees of science fiction films will think that all the books they read or things they like are the same and they might even think that the sort of 'literary fiction' that I sometimes read could be accused of similar failings in as far as it's for it's own sake, nobody gets shot, there are no green monsters from other universes or the lonely spinster that lives in the Old Rectory doesn't end up marrying the dashingly glamorous man who arrives in the picturesque village. 

But Don Quixote does resort to routine cartoon violence on a regular basis. It is jokey, like that in Tom and Jerry, and one very soon doesn't take it seriously and so maybe it wouldn't satisfy those who want gun crime and murder as the staple diet of their entertainment. And yet they might. 'Realism' is not an easy idea in things that are accepted as fictional and so perhaps token violence is violence enough.

I don't think I need Part 2, though. I've got the main idea of it. It's probably better than I give it credit for. I've been reading it dutifully, not entirely against my will but I'd prefer to be looking forward to getting back to my book a bit more than I have been in recent weeks.