Cardiff Symphonic Brass at Lunchtime Live!

Cardiff Symphonic Brass, Portsmouth Cathedral, Feb 27

While the staple diet of the lunchtime concert is chamber music there are other items on the menu from time to time. One does not live by piano alone and it made for something outside of the usual remit for me to see Matthew Thistlewood and the teenagers of Cardiff Symphonic Brass, it being about 50 years since I last saw a brass band.

It's not every day one hears a Bach cantata arranged for such an 11-piece ensemble and the Sinfonia from BWV18  immediately brought the brightness of the day outside into the big indoor space of the cathedral. The trombones did a fine job of what was written mainly for cello parts, one might think, and I was almost convinced that it worked.

Corelli's Concerto Grosso, op. 6, no.8, made even more of the resonant acoustic and was yet more persuasive with its blazing trumpets, mellow Adagio and fanfare finish. Corelli might not often make a deeper impression than Bach but today was his day and perhaps he was the overall highlight unless the Bach had served to get us attuned to such arrangements and Arcangelo thus benefitted.

The trumpets then rested but no such luxury was afforded for the lower brass whose Abendlied by Rheinberger was solemn with horn and trombones in profound-sounding, euphonious conversation. We had been led to expect a euphonium here last week but will take this week's, with tuba bonus, as fair compensation. These, and horns and obviously the glamorous trumpets usually upfront are outrageous instruments, reflecting all available light back in their immaculate shine but they come as a rare treat to me.

Stephen Roberts's Classic Snacks were three adventurous arrangements of popular classics but not quite as we know them. The ensemble impressively achieved a full brass band sound in Turkish Delight, which was recognizably Mozart's Rondo a la Turk but the Latin mood of A Taste of Tango hid Fur Elise under more of a disguise. Hungarian Goulash you'd recognize if you heard it without necessarily knowing it was no. 5 of the Brahms Hungarian Dances. It quickened into a lively cha cha cha.

I see these pieces advertised as 'irreverent makeovers' but I can't imagine Mozart or Brahms being offended. Beethoven I'm not sure about. Liberties were taken there but all in well-intentioned spirit.

An encore continued in the same mood with Jan Koetsier's Grassauer Zwiefacher, Op.105 No.3, which added a further name to the list of composers I've ever heard of.

Young people doing such things don't tend to be show-offs. They deliver what they've been rehearsing and maybe are glad to get off after a job well done. It takes a while to gain the confidence of a Nigel Kennedy or suchlike and look as if you're enjoying doing it. I'm with them entirely but Cardiff Symphonic Brass can return home, via Salisbury tomorrow, with all our thanks for coming, something like a box office record for a Portsmouth Lunchtime Live! and all our best wishes for the future. 

The Complete Hardy 7 : Under the Greenwood Tree

Under the Greenwood Tree is the lightweight one, isn't it, being so fewer pages than the other, more intricately-designed novels. ostensibly happy and it's surely his answer to As You Like It, would you not say.

But if an artist so deep and complex as Shostakovich could provide Classic FM with such an interlude as The Gadfly then maybe Hardy could give his view of an irretrieveably doomed existence a day off.

And he surely does with his cast of rustic types observed with the sort of condescension that such talented, writerly sorts will always make comic material from those maybe not as gifted in the literary arts as they are but who, fictional though they may be, seem to be happier with their allotted status than Hardy's genius made him.

It wouldn't be a Hardy book if the girl married the man she should having seen off the attempts of the two less convincing candidates without us having doubts it was for the best. Whereas in other books, Tess, Bathsheba, Sue Brideshead and others are heroines, you never get the same feeling about Fancy Day who fancies herself far above any suitor and, maybe, why shouldn't she although women's rights might not have got as far as thinking as much by 1872 when a wife was apparently the equivalent of a buttonhole for a man, hoping to appear at least not to reduce his status and, if possible, enhance it.

We are not left with the happy ending we might think it is. We're not that daft. What makes  Under the Greenwood Tree so good is that it's done you with its story of the band being superseded in the church services, its community of yokels steeped in their long traditions, all that gorgeous Dorset countryside stuff that looked even for him, never mind us, like a lost paradise. It's not like that at all.

Dick Dewey can hardly be blamed for being infatuated with Fancy Day but Fancy Day only wants someone to be infatuated with her. 

Coming with perhaps more of Hardy's insightful observations of humam behaviour - because for the few few chapters not much happens apart from that- it is, almost from line to line, perfect company. It wouldn't be right to say it's not his best book because it isn't tragic enough. It's not his best book because it's not as 'big' as some of the others.  

Racetrack Wiseguy Cheltenham Preview

 If it was just sport and only about who won, I'd only really want Constitution Hill to put himself back into the unrateable category where he was before his illness. He looked like the horse of a lifetime, even to me whose lifetime included Arkle although with no memory of seeing him race in real time. I want him to win the Champion Hurdle by 10 lengths in second gear and not beat an under par-looking Lossiemouth only comfortably which was a performance that almost made it possible to give him a rating.

He's highly likely to regain the hurdle championship and odds of 4/6 look very fair, the reason being that the best of the opposition are likely to go to other races they might win rather than take him on. I don't think he really knows what a race is.

But 4/6 is no tip and it's ante-post and the absence of Sir Gino in the Arkle has already taken out a little ante-post treble of mine so there are other places to look on my favourite day of sport in the whole calendar, Tuesday at Cheltenham.

I didn't have anywhere near enough on Kopek des Bordes at 9/5 for the Supreme Novices after he won at Leopardstown and now he's 10/11. He looked sheer class that day and if Salvator Mundi is joint second fav, having jumped like an item of furniture when we saw him last, he's unlikely to be the saviour of the world. Kopek is confidently expected to get us off to a good start and set some trebles going.

And I've believed in Brighterdaysahead all the way through as Lossiemouth and State Man have reached their limits. I'd take Constitution Hill on with her if, for the sake of the sport, if it were my decision so if she goes to the Mares race, she's a very good thing on a day that lines up a very obvious treble - but take it easy there- as well as L'eau du Sud being an each-way steal in the Arkle.

(You don't get imaginative insight and big priced punts in a Wiseguy preview. You get a plan. That's what's 'wise' about it.)

Final Demand absolutely scooted in at Leopardstown but Harry Skelton has never made as much of any prospect as he has of The New Lion, pictured, and the Novices that begins Wednesday makes for a proper race in which, at the prices, I'll stay with the Skelton horse until it gets beat. I'm sure Ballyburn will feature in some speculative combinations now they've accepted it wants a distance like that of the 3m Novice Chase. As will the heroic Jonbon, who has entirely justified his enormous cost when not all expensive horses do and I suppose, if I were to dignify the Cross Country with a bet then 5/2 Stumptown must be good as he does win such races but why it is race 4 and not put on at the end so that those who don't care can get away early, I don't know.

Thursday could be a bit of a day off. I thought Il Est Francais ran the perfect Ryanair trial in the King George and he should be some sort of bet against the fav even if he could be an Alex Higgins of a horse, outrageously talented but given to finding ways of imploding. Teapuhoo came slightly later than I'd hoped to dominating the Stayers Hurdle division but it looks to be his while he wants it for now. While the loudmouth, composite good-time boys pack out Prestbury Park with their mad money-throwing at races with 6/1 favs, I'll check on how all my good things are compiling themselves, or not.

Mr. Henderson looks to have a chance of wresting the Triumph Hurdle from Mr. Mullins with the impressive Lulamba, so let's hope he does. I'm not especially patriotic but Mr. Henderson at least stands for something English, decent and worth having as the rest of the world gets nastier day by day.

I wonder if Joseph O'Brien has set aside Lark in the Mornin for a repeat festival win in the County Hurdle and I'll guess he might have if I'm still winning before, even at 1/2, you've almost got to have Galopin des Champs in the Gold Cup because it looks as inevitable as Hinault, Indurain or Lance Armstrong, later disqualified as he was, used to win the Tour de France. It wasn't very interesting but 50% interest on your money is ahead of inflation at the moment.

So, which of that litany of obvious big favourites are the three to make the treble.

I don't like losing money so I'm going Brighterdaysahead in the Mares Hurdle on Tues, Teapuhoo in the Stayers on Thurs and Galopin in the Gold Cup but that's the least imaginative treble one could have although your tenner could become £50.

As ever, mix them up in whatever way you choose. Three or four joined up ought to pay but one or two will get beat and if there were a guaranteed way of making it work the secret would be out by now.

It's an industry and, as such, it expects to support itself by making money out of its customers. I take a contrary view these days, having paid in plenty in decades long gone by.

In an unlikely alliance, I'll see it as Donald Trump sees everything - if there's nothing in it for me I'm not in the game. 

11 Days On

 Eleven days is more than the usual time elapsed since the last post here. It's most gratifying to hear from the other side of the world, asking if I'm okay, but I don't think the delay was the issue. For whatever reason, I was 'not available' in Japan by whichever means I was being accessed.

Sometimes one doesn't feel like it. It doesn't seem appropriate. Art might be all there is but not be enough, as one of my favourite poets observed. I've got a lot of time for St. Cuthbert on his remote island contemplating things beyond all this worldly fiddle but, needs must and one has to press on.

For all her levity and party-going approach, Dorothy Parker knew. Today was worthwhile for reading her late play, The Ladies of the Corridor, co-authored with Arnaud D'Usseau but with Dottie lines all the way through. Set in a hotel with superficiality eventually gathering into crises, perhaps the most telling passage is where Lulu reflects,

We were told you grew up, you got married, and there you were. And so we did, and so there we were. But our husbands, they were busy. We weren't part of their lives; and as we got older we weren't part of anybody's lives, and yet we never learned how to be alone.  

It's almost Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill except neither of those were very funny very often.

 

That came after You Might As Well Live by John Keats - a different John Keats, the standard biography before it was said to be improved upon by What Fresh Hell is This? by Marion Meade. We will see. One can't read everything at once. With the Hardy survey left not properly finished, the Shostakovich symphonies requiring another run through, the Prokofiev Piano Sonatas so great, the Sofia Gubaidulina Quartets due here soon, two hefty Shostakovich volumes arriving today and that's not all, I need a committee meeting with myself to establish the way forward among so many projects. 

But later tonight, although I sometimes take a dim view of BBC4's Friday nights of ready-made old TOTP scheduling, we are offered 'another chance to see' the Alan Hull documentary, a labour of love about a singer-songwriter whose work it was easier to love than it seemed he himself was but then Rock Goes to College with Lindisfarne from Essex University, 1978. That would have been on the same tour as when I saw them at Lancaster.

Not all of those I mixed with there shared my enthusiasm for the Newcastle folk-rock temporary sensation because Coltrane, Zappa et al were judged to have suffered more for their art and it was felt we should, too, but not much gets ahead of those first loves, the first records one ever spent one's limited money on and I'll be back there with Lindisfarne, about 99% word perfect.

Kyan Quartet at Chichester

 Kyan Quartet, Chichester Cathedral, Feb 11

Looking at the programmes for the new year season when they appeared, the Kyan Quartet's Sofia Gubaidulina stood out as a priority date for the diary.  There are six different ways that three pieces can be put in order and the sequence of today's three quartets didn't immediately look like the obvious one to me. But while to travel can sometimes be better than to arrive, that wasn't the case today and, yes, once one had heard how the set worked it sounded right.

Schubert's Quartettsatz, no. 12, announced the immaculate sound of the Kyans, its fluent flow taken at a tempo brisk enough with Naomi Warburton taking the lead and Simon Gurney's cello subtle and beguiling. 

The Gubaidulina Quartets soon became the latest of many acquisitions for my shelves to be lined up having encountered them first during a lunchtime. Tense and spellbinding, the cathedral was noticeably concentrated hard upon the extraordinary sound of No. 2. It's not fragmentary in the way that some such music can appear, it is a shared composition, its chilly, maybe supernatural feeling with plenty of top register playing beginning to swarm after it was separated out between Naomi, Simon, Sydney Mariano's violin and Wanshu Qiu's viola. It was a magnificent performance of a piece of rare beauty. Travel to Chichester from Portsmouth today was delayed and hard work but such minor hardships are soon more than compensated for by an absolute highlight of the calendar. It's one thing to pick out the concerts one would most like to hear but it's entirely another when they exceed all expectations. Not all C20th or modernist music is my favourite but at its best we can have few complaints about not being C18th.

Because we can have that, too. Haydn's Op. 76 no. 6 is what I'd have thought might come first but it is the longest piece and nothing if not by way of contrast, finishing with his sense of order and civility rather than sending us home astonished and somewhere outside of ourselves. The formality of the Allegretto got weaving into Allegro in the first movement. The Fantasia brought to mind the viol consorts from which the quartet came by conjuring perhaps John Dowland moving towards its spiralling motif. One is aware in each movement how Haydn embellishes the simplest of ideas into his pleasing patterns, as in the jolly jaunt of the Menuet and the Allegro spiritoso finale akin to a concerto for the first violin.

I've been thinking for a while we need more string quartets round these parts but it's possible I'm not going to the right places for that. I personally need more Sofia Gubaidulina, having only heard her music in the flesh once before. There could easily be a few more that were in Chichester today who would like more, too, after such a deeply impressive performance. I hope it's not all going to be on disc. 

I didn't think the applause was anywhere near enough. Come on, all ye Chichester faithful, let's hear it and give credit where it's due.

More Dorothy

 A love affair, as Dorothy Parker would attest, I'm sure, needs to get beyond its initial infatuation. Anybody can be enamoured on a short term basis with different people from one day to the next but anything lasting that might justify that many-splendoured term, Love, needs to have the durability that enables it to survive difficulties.

There was a possibility that after a dozen stories I might have seen a pattern emerging. It might have been something to do with ladies hopelessly devoted to men who were strongly suspected of being devoted to other ladies, too, as well as their goodtime crowd of dubious other men. That was not compensated for by the dim view she took of the dull security of marriage, though.

While that is a compelling point of view, brilliantly observed in her case, one might think it not quite enough of a theme to make her 'great', like Shakespeare. It was important that further stories in the Collected went further or did it in different ways or else it was only going to be variations on a theme.

One of the many memorable sentences in what I first read was in The Little Hours, about a sleepless night that extends into an essay about La Rochefoucauld,

Twenty minutes past four, sharp, and here's Baby wide-eyed as a marigold. 

Isn't that slick, isn't it just the prettiest thing you ever saw, relegating Ted Hughes's use of 'marigold' in October Dawn to an honourable but clear second best.

I almost ordered La Rochefoucauld on the basis of it but had a look at him and found his Maxims trite, maybe true but far too easy to do.

But what I read today piled evidence upon evidence of what a great writer she is and, if anything, almost improved upon first impressions because the genuine artist improves as they go along rather than repeats the same trick with diminishing returns. 

Glory in the Daytime is like Maupassant in glamour-stricken 1920's or 30's America, the downbeat, suburban wife having the chance of meeting an actual actress, who turns out to be outrageously overdone, but she can't see that because she's starstruck. She thinks she's been taken outside of her ordinary life but she's probably witnessed something even more meaningless but thought it looked good. It's a brilliant piece of work.

 

The Dorothy titles are piling up. Good. Each new one that arrives is further insurance against despair because although they will contain much of it, it's like a flu or Covid jab. One is innoculated against wholesale infection by the whole shebang by knowing that a class act like Dorothy thought the same as what you think.

She didn't end happily and neither does it seem do most of her characters but, like she said, there have been millions and millions of human beings and not one of them ended happily.

I commend her stories to you with the highest reference on the understanding that you've read other things on this website, too, and didn't disagree with too much of it.

The Shostakovich Symphonies, Part 3

Perhaps one becomes attuned to things or maybe it's just that the later Shostakovich symphonies are of more interest. Certainly embarking and such large-scale music as this when used to a staple diet of mostly chamber music and solo piano made for quite a change.

During the night, Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys was on an old Desert Island Discs with an excellent selection that included the first movemrent of no. 5 but today I reached the end of my first run through with 14 and 15.

13 had included some muscular, austere bass voice but that was not much compared to 14 which is all vocal with soprano, bass, strings and percussion. The texts are poems about death and, yes, it is as grim as even Shostakovich gets and that is saying something. If classical music could be mapped onto pop, which it quite clearly can't, then Shostakovich symphonies occupy the darker end of heavy metal except 14 goes beyond that. Haydn wouldn't recognize it as a symphony. I'd have thought it was an oratorio but such titles are the choice of the artist. It is monumental, might not seem as bleak on further listening and will be hugely anticipated on the second run through. It has been the great 'discovery' of this project and has entirely justified it.

15 is no less weird in its way with its 'toyshop' first movement very explicitly quoting Rossini's William Tell Overture before long, spare Adagios lead towards a restrained ending on percussion which is a very unorthodox place to stop and it is most satisfying to listen to, the like of which I've not come across before.

So, as I knew already, the symphonies are a very different Shostakovich to the one I knew and loved from the String Quartets and other smaller ensembles. You'd think it was a different composer but whereas certain baroque and classical types are readily identifiable, the range from one end to the other with opera, jazz and lighter suites in between is comprehensive. If I've not said so before then perhaps only Errollyn Wallen is the only other I can think of with such an eclectic catalogue. I'm not at all against the idea but in poetry, for example, one does become accustomed to what some call a 'voice'. 

Like any good book that is worth re-reading, the Shostakovich symphonies are even more so and demand much further hearing and in the light of, and with the encouragement of, what is to come, I will go back to the start and listen again in the light of all that. Thus, this series might not be over yet.

These are excellent recordings and so the less than pristine condition of the box and cases can be overlooked considering the bargain secondhand price they came at. It was a 5-star buy if you like the music. I can't classify it yet, and wouldn't do such a thing anyway, but it was a good decision rather than only a dutiful one.

Four Missing Lines

 This memory thing is getting worse. I thought that crosswords and chess and suchlike were supposed to keep one's faculties fit and alert so God Only Knows what I'd be like without them.

Since other people are reading Romanticism, I thought I'd better have another look. One's own work can suddenly look different with the knowledge that it's out there now and it's too late to change it.

But, what is this? In Escape Artist, a 'stanza' of four lines is missing after the bit about Kind of Blue. It is,

How fashionable ! In Paris 

it meant the world but now 

the sensitive needle 

is condemned to the groove. 

 

I can't remember taking that out. It fits thematically with the LP, Rosemary Tonks living in Paris when Miles Davis was very much a thing, the metaphor of being stuck in a groove and it has her trademark exclamation mark. I can't think why I would have taken it out but equally can't see how I could have done so by accident. It is intact in the version published in the anthology it was contributed to and so, for the benefit of future professors wondering about the revisions in the collected version, no, I'm sorry, I can't explain.

What's done is done. Perhaps, if I did it deliberately, I had my reasons at the time but the layout of the pages in the book would accommodate the out-take perfectly well. I stare at the lines and think I like them well enough. I try to think why I might have removed them and can't.

For the time being it's harmlessly mystifying but it contains sinister implications of what is to come. When she was younger than I am now, Elizabeth Bishop found the milk on her desk which meant her glasses must be in the fridge. 

I Bought the T-Shirt

I have any number of 'special' t-shirts. Two of them, narcissistically, and respectively, feature a painting by me and the cover of one of my books. There's the one of Dietrich Buxtehude I was amazed to find commercially available. There's the Jesus & Mary Chain one. There have been Electric Warrior, a couple of Mozart manuscripts. I forget. I don't really wear them because it looks like one is trying to make a statement about oneself like those who wear a replica football shirt from a club to which their allegiance gives them an identity, they seem to think. However, I still have the t-shirts. And now, soon arriving alongside a new haul of books, is the Dorothy Parker. 

It's been like a long-term friendship that suddenly blazes into a passionate affair. I returned to the Penguin Collected and was very soon wondering why I hadn't read all these tremendous stories when I first got the book several years ago. Did I try the wrong one first and make do with a few poems and articles or did something more pressing arrive and Dorothy got passed over too quickly. I don't know but she was done a grave injustice, whatever it was.

The short story is undervalued by many, I've never understood why. Even without Dubliners, there are Maupassant, Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield as well as Hardy and Balzac in their spare time to advertise its potential and in the C20th Raymond Carver, Salinger, Richard Yates and William Trevor and Murakami. I don't think it's any passing infatuation that makes me immediately put Dorothy Parker in their league. 

A lot of it is in the dialogue, as was her gift to screenwriting and as what makes Richard Yates so memorable but it's also in the uncompromising, often world-weary attitude. More than one story, like The Lonely Leave or Dusk before Fireworks, are women overly devoted to men who would appear to have rival priorities. Whereas, in Too Bad, she wonders what on earth married couples talk about to fill their time. 

Like any of the best fiction writers, not a word is wasted. If poetry is somehow credited as being a concentrated form and prose seen as having more space to extend itself into, I can't see why it should be. There's no reason why fiction shouldn't be as tight and economical as a poem and nothing in Dorothy's is extraneous padding. There are no lazy sentences that can be taken out. They are all contributing something or else why would they be there. In The Wonderful Old Gentleman,

Mrs. Whittaker's voice fell into the key used for the subject that has been gone over and over and over again.

It's funny but it's sad to some degree and we recognize it as true. The same could be said for all my list above. Maybe I wish she had written a couple of novels but we must be grateful for what we have.  

I find myself ineligible for The Dorothy Parker Society and so affiliate myself hereby with a poem,

 

The Dorothy Parker Society

 

My morning was all Parker,

erudition and pzazz; 

My afternoon a martyr
To Australian Shiraz.

I’d join the Society

At the drop of a hat 

But proper propriety 

Demands that, to do that,

One needs must be on Facebook 

Which is beyond me, I fear, 

And so I just took one look

And thought, not me, then, dear.  

The Complete Hardy 7 : The Novels Ranked

 

Not a Top 6. A Top 6 and then the Next 8. 

Try as I might I can't promote anything from the Next 8 into what looks like an unassailable Big 6 that select themselves.

I would expect a YouGov poll targeted at Hardy admirers to put Tess first, as the best-known and most recognisably and inevitably tragic. What marginally detracts from that, and Jude, for me are the cosmic implications of cruel fate and determinism. Like Shakespeare, even Hardy's least successful work is worth having and it is his fatalism that makes him in the end the great pessimist that he is but The Woodlanders focusses less on an individual than a community in all of Hardy's finely delineated social strata and it is more poignant than extravagantly devastating. 

And if I came to that first, about 50 years ago, I didn't arrive at The Return of the Native until some years later but with its blasted heath, its darkness and the entrancing character of Eustacia Vye, it is compelling.

Casterbidge brings the past, and inescapable character traits, back to destroy Henchard for who we might feel a degree of pity, as of course we do Tess and the ultimately appalling fates of the progressive and well-intentioned Jude and Sue Brideshead.

One thinks of Julie Christie in Far From The Madding Crowd, the dastardly Troy among the customary selection of available suitors, one of which shoots the other so she's left with what had always been the right answer. One could move it up as high as no. 3 but Hardy does abject devastation better than happy endings in the same way that Hamlet and Lear are widely regarded as Shakespeare's best plays.

I would have liked to get The Well-Beloved higher but this is a competitive division. It has ideas in it beyond us being the playthings of a cruel, non-existent god. Ethelbertha was and maybe still is generally regarded as the weakest novel but I like to side with underdogs and find more in it than those here put below.

Greenwood Tree is possibly the equivalent of As You Like It, both likely to be thought more highly of if they hadn't been written by authors who also wrote more substantial things and, as per Ethelbertha, Desperate Remedies deserves more credit than it gets, being the first published effort and coming out of genre fiction. So those that remain only drift like silt to the bottom of the list because this is a red-hot division to compete in and something has to be no. 14 of 14 if one insists on making such a list.

The Trumpet Major is well worth the time it takes to read it. I'd be thrilled to have written anything half as good. I haven't re-read A Laodicean or Under the Greenwood Tree and could still return to adjust their positions once I have but for the time being at least they are ranked as best I can with the caveat that something had to be placed 14th and there's no disgrace in that.

 

1. The Woodlanders

2. The Return of the Native 

3. The Mayor of Casterbridge

4. Tess of the d'Urbervilles

5. Jude the Obscure

6. Far From the Madding Crowd

7. The Well-Beloved

8. Two on a Tower 

9. A Pair of Blue Eyes

10. Under the Greenwood Tree

11. A Laodicean

12. The Hand of Ethelbertha

13. Desperate Remedies

14. The Trumpet Major