Angelina Kopyrina in Portchester

Angelina Kopyrina, St. Mary's, Portchester, Jul 31 

St. Mary's, Portchester is a picturesque venue within the walls of Portchester Castle. Not having been to a concert there before, an appearance by local pianist, Angelina, provided the ideal opportunity to go and have a look. Intimate and appealingly parochial, I felt the return of that feeling one sometimes gets that there's nowhere one would rather be. Angelina's repertoire is committedly Romantic, from Beethoven to Rachmaninov at least but having gone there not necessarily intending to write about it, one comes away not wanting to leave such an occasion unremarked. For more detail and eulogy, please see previous write-ups of her performances here. It all still applies but one doesn't want to repeat oneself more than one can help.

Beethoven's a 'Romantic' composer according to me. The Sonata, op 31 no. 3, from 1802, is relatively early, as upbeat as its markings like vivace and presto could possibly expect. While music generally has an audience rather than spectators who listen rather than watch, I'm always glad of a view of the keyboard because it explains what's happening. Such fashions can change. Those who attended Shakespeare's plays in his day went to 'hear' them we don't now, we go to see them. Thus I was most taken with the Allegretto Vivace second movement in which the right hand suddenly takes over the left hand's work in the dynamic rhythm part.

It has to be said if we one day arrive at a time when Chopin is not the most played composer in solo piano recitals then I'd probably be among the first to ask why not. Devoted Kopyrina followers know to expect 'her natural virtuosic, passionate and powerful interpretations' so I'm also in the market for what else she can do and the Ballade No. 4, op, 52 brought with it soft light ahead of more customary surging rhapsody.

Ordinary mortals are not advised to attempt to waltz to Liszt's no. 1 in A major. The lingering middle section would be no easier than the blazing torrents of energy that only demons should consider but that's Liszt for you. Abandon hope, all waltzers who enter here. So, in some ways, the devil in the Kopyrina repertoire being taken as read, it was the exquisite delicacy that one might remember from today in Portchester. She can do that very well indeed, it's just that she mostly chooses to line up the f's and give the piano something to remember her by. 

And that is surely it for a while as regards live, local music - until September. It's said, something like, you don't know what you had until it's gone but I do because I remember previous Augusts. One doesn't need a holiday from good, worthwhile things.  

The Hand of the Poet and other stories

 The Little Friend provided some thriller episodes, some paasages of fine writing and an ending I won't divulge here without perhaps anyone wishing it longer or putting it quite alongside The Secret History or The Goldfinch. Suspense, character and malevolence are things Donna Tartt does well but there's something unsatisfactory about the novel as a whole that prevents it from being anything more than the difficult second book. At least I've read it now, though, and did so with some pleasure.

The Hand of the Poet is one great bargain find, though. The first of the batch of Dana Gioia-related volumes to arrive, it's substantial. In roughly chronological sequence it profiles poets with reference to manuscripts, or typescripts, from the Berg collection. The emphasis is on the American with a number of unfamiliar names and some major English missing, those included being those who 'broke' America, one might say. It is ideal bedside reading and diverting without being the main feature of the Gioia 'research'.

But I am more motivated than I've felt for quite some time by the possibilities of the Gioia essay and the chance to work on what might be a fairly original idea at my leisure, letting it build and see where it leads. How to organize the material, how to re-phrase sentences to say only what is meant and avoid saying more than that. The process is not unlike that of writing a poem and is as creative in its way but, gladly, it takes longer and can be luxuriated in. The enjoyment of writing poems was/is a bit of a 400 metre bash, once round the track, for me because they often fit together quite readily once the ideas have been thought out. The essay allows more time to enjoy the doing of it. And there is nothing better than feeling one has something worthwhile to do. 

--

The Reconstructed Violin Concertos in the Complete Bach are, of course, very fine music but, as with doubtful attributions, one is slightly put off by not knowing which bits are Bach and which aren't. One hardly wants to over credit him with bits that weren't actually him. It shouldn't matter but it becomes important in the art world when something is downgraded from, say, Rembrandt to 'school of'. Isn't that bit slightly more Romantic, does that bit sound like Haydn. Probably not. Just because you know every note might not be authentic Bach, you're imagining things. 

I must venture into the organ works at some point because one must have the whole Bach experience and, it has to be said, when one finds oneself at an organ recital it is any Bach on the programme that one instinctively knows is right.

I doubt if I'll have played all 172 discs by Christmas, or perhaps by next summer, or ever. I'd rather explore the lesser known repertoire in among the oratorios and all and the Well Tempered Klavier might be saved for the grand finale. But it remains a spectacular buy. One trusts to one's instincts at such moments and they are generally right. Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch, I Can't Help Myself.

Dana Gioia

It certainly isn't over til it's over. Dana Gioia's 99 Poems, New & Selected has been the sort of revelation I had all but given up on, having retreated to a position where I thought I must have found anything there was worth having in poetry and music by now, and not qua John Peel that the things I didn't know about were more interesting than those I did.

I've been well aware of him for maybe 30 years but one needs good reason to pursue such things further and he never quite triggered that move and I had him down as one of the good guys without going far enough to find him propelled just about onto the very short list of 'favourite living poets' alongside O'Brien and Kleinzahler.

99 Poems is an absolute joy, organized into themes rather than chronologically which is fine if a poet's first published work hits the ground running and matters of development are of lesser import. You couldn't do that with Thom Gunn or David Bowie. The 'formalism' is very important but maybe not to the extent it was with Timothy Steele, the metronomic stylist of the New Formalists. 

And so neither is it over til it's over with essays. With several more books on order it's hard to say what more remains to be found to be said but I've got a certain amount already. I can hardly put it here in what might turn out to be a half-baked version but, as is necessary and one hopes might continue to happen, one looks out on what appears to be a barren landscape in which nothing offers itself as a subject to write about but then the world proves to be richer than one thought - as it surely must be- and one is provided with reason to believe. 

The Little Friend

It was on the second page of The Thief's Journal that I decided I was not currently in need of his account of amoral low life. Maybe another time but it's not as glamorous as it must have seemed when I bought that book maybe 45 years ago.

Having been a great admirer of Donna Tartt's The Secret History and The Goldfinch, I had failed to engage with The Little Friend and the evidence of the bookmark left in it two-thirds of the way through, a leaflet of music events, suggested that was ion 2014. I can't understand why I didn't get on with it then, it's as involving and brilliantly written as the other two and I'm enjoying it immensely now.

Set in the dangerous environment of racist, snake-ridden Mississippi, young Harriet sets out to find out what happened when her 11 year old brother was found hanged in their back yard some years ago. Our options thus far, by about page 160 of 555 are suicide, the sinister old woman next door or the roughneck redneck family of jailbird brothers. I doubt if it was Hely or his older brother Pemberton. It could have been an accident or have another explanation but a murderer not yet mentioned would surely be too 'deus ex machina' for a writer of Donna Tartt's quality. 

The answer to the puzzle isn't the whole point, though. It's the writing and the enjoyment of reading it. Having appeared on a seven-year cycle, we are overdue a new title from her but whereas another such cult, Haruki Murakami, keeps on producing in later life, we can't be sure if Donna isn't satisfied with what she's achieved and might be happy to leave us with masterpieces only.  She is, though, right up there with the best of them - clever, literary and entertaining and, as such genuinely worthwhile while also highly marketable and thus the sort of superstar writer that there aren't, and can't be, enough of.  

Exile and the Kingdom

 ...is what came off the shelves next. 

Six stories perhaps not quite as convincing as his three masterpiece novels but subtle and uncompromising in their Existentialist themes. You wouldn't find many critics calling him sentimental.

Arid and unremitting, like the Algerian sun in L'Etranger, its integrity is in how it never 'begs for pardon' and, checking Louis MacNeice for that quote, suddenly The Sunlight on the Garden is revealed as Existentialist, too..

There are the blazing sun, the dust, the necessity of choice but, ultimately only really death that make Camus so compelling and discomfiting. The language is similarly immediate, unadorned and the stories disarmingly simple but carrying great weight.

Coming so soon after Zola's The Masterpiece, it was impossible not to notice the artist in The Artist at Work being impervious to the love of his wife because he was obsessed by his art. The only difference is that Gilbert Jonas becomes successful and then goes out of fashion whereas Lantier in Zola was ahead of his time but never commercially viable.

The Guest finds Daru, the schoolmaster landed with the responsibility of taking charge of an Arab prisoner but unable to discharge the duty thrust upon him. It's not a situation in which one can remain neutral. He is compromised by doing what his conscience prompts him to do.

The Adulterous Woman is otherwise trapped, like so many fictional wives, with a husband she finds dull but Camus's vignette portrays only the ache and frustration rather than taking on Bovery proportions.

That Camus saw himself more as a theatre man, essayist and activist ahead of novelist only increases one's admiration for his sideline in prose fiction. A far, far better man - by most accounts- than Sartre who might have done brilliant work but wasn't the first or last to find himself unable to relinquish doctrine. Justice was in some ways done in that Camus was the glamorous one and has become, for some of us, some sort of saint. For those of us, that is, who, like him, would neither have saints or want to be one.

 

Looking at the other titles advertised in the back of this book, I have or have read most of them- by Camus, Sartre and Gide but not Simone de Beauvoir. But there's also Jean Genet's The Thief's Journal there so when Exile and the Kingdom returns to the shelves, that will come off them for the first time since it was installed there maybe 25 years ago. If I didn't make use of this resource it would be some sort of grand ornament but no use.

Zola, Bach, Gioia

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Having read that The Masterpiece was Zola's most auto-biographical novel I spent most of it trying to map the life of the painter, Claude Lantier, onto Zola's in this fictionalized account of later C19th art movements with particular reference to Impressionism. And without much success. Lantier is ahead of his time, devoted to his art, but not understood and increasingly ridiculed. Eventually I flicked through the Introduction in search of help and found that Sandoz, the novelist, is the Zola figure and it became a bit clearer.

Certain passages in novels immediately suggest themselves as significant. Those passages that some readers highlight. In The Masterpiece, regarding Lantier, there is,

so he preferred the illusion he found in his art, the everlasting pursuit of unattianable beauty, the mad desire which could never be satisfied. He wanted all women, but he wanted them created according to his dreams

- and that, is what effectively kills him in the end. One has the feeling that it might, as in New Grub Street where the artist devoted to his art, uncompromised by the demands of the market, suffers similarly.

If the novel is a commentary on its times with the agendas of Naturalism, the 'Open Air' school and the reception of Impressionism, when art was of wider interest to the public, it is prescient in some of the aspects it presents of the art market now and the relationship between artists and collectors, say Damien Hirst and Charles Saatchi, and how fashions and demands prevail. It's an excellent book, as those by Zola tend to be, and even better once one reads it from the required point of view.

--

Another relevant aphorism concerns whether or not one can have 'too much of a good thing'. 172 discs of the Complete Bach make for a paragon example to consider.

About 15 discs in, certainly the mind boggles to think there are about 157 to go of these outrageous outpourings. But already, during something like the piano English Suites, one wonders if so much can only have been produced by a machine and some lesser Bach was AI before its time. Perhaps one can have too much of a good thing if that's all one has because excellence becomes the 'new normal' whereas one can hardly have enough of it when it's broken up by different things, not even necessarily lesser things.

I'd already done that by abandoning any plan to go through the discs methodically, being in sections s they are. So I jumped forward from the sacred cantatas, avoiding such favourites as The Well-Tempered Klavier, the Cello Suites and the Sonatas and Partitas. A keyboard concerto turned out to be the sublime Violin Concerto but the Bach Collegium Stuttgart are crisp and immaculate throughout. The Harpsichord Concertos, BWV 1063-65, are all wild exuberance and effervescent floribunda. The Anna Magdalena Notebooks are full of the sort of tunes that led to the Lover's Concerto by The Toys, ahead of the Inventions but not the Well-Tempered set. There is a sense that sometimes he's delivering exercises whereas at others he's doing his best work.

But, no, it would be madness to play 172 discs of Bach while listening to nobody else's music. It doesn't do it any favours, like those people who I remember some years ago, one of who listened only to Handel and The Magnetic Fields and another who read only Larkin. I can see why one would be tempted but it reduces not only the work but one's view of it.

Still, now with my library holding the 'complete' Bach, Buxtehude, Chopin and Satie, I'll need them to survive the dread height of summer with its school holidays and lack of local lunchtime concerts until September,

when the reviewing situation will be reviewed. I continue to fear for the language and its resources. It does offer infinite combinations of words but the thesaurus itself doesn't go on forever and describing music is heavy on adjectives. I'm always glad of one I've not used before but there's only so much to be said about composers and performers that one's heard a few times before. Still hugely enjoyable but I don't think the young gunslingers, sent by the NME to follow the latest vogue band on tour, reviewed every night. 

But Chichester Cathedral's Autumn programme looks promising as do a few inviting dates in Portsmouth and if I didn't do that what would I do. One can't keep moving on from things without finding other things to replace them.

--

But the world is resourceful. If my writing and reading of poetry has reached a low point it's not because I've read it all, it's because I'm not aware of what further things to read. Not much of what's being written now, not The Faerie Queen, not Dryden or Pope, all of which the dutiful student ought to know about.

So I was glad to hear R4Extra's Poetry Extra repeat of a broadcast featuring Dana Gioia. Familiar from Rebel Angels, the 1996 anthology of New Formalism, it was useful to be pushed back in his direction, establish that he's male and hear how to pronounce his name - Dayner Joyer. 

The New Formalists were retro in the 1990's, embracing metre and rhyme against the high fashion of free verse with Timothy Steele as a prime exemplar and J.V. Cunningham as the godfather from the previous generation. Dana isn't quite as insistently tight and metronomic as they are but he's clearly one of the good guys. His books aren't easy to find in the UK and so the 99 Poems, New & Selected is coming all the way from America and although he's not the future, I'm not sure how much I want to know about the future when the past can still reliably provide.

Flaubert, Zola, Brahms, Bach

Emma Bovary was good company third time around. There would be an essay, perhaps, placing her between the dreadful Becky Sharpe and the honourable Dorothea Brooke. I've never had any time for Becky since an appalling mark I got for a compulsory essay on Vanity Fair that I really didn't want to do whereas George Eliot is high on my list of preferred novelists. Dorothea, like Maggie Tulliver and others seems to me central to a theme in which tremendous early potential is compromised by circumstances in adult life and not fully realized. Madame Bovary has aspects in common with both of them, superficially, but perhaps she does everything superficially, her expectations are never to be satisfied and her fate is written into that DNA.

The library then provided me with Zola's The Masterpiece, the setting of which seems to be that of La Boheme but the outcome may or may not be. But also I finally got around to a biography of Brahms in the short account by Hans A. Neunzig. There's a lot to be said for short versions. Too much detail might be highly
scholarly but can be exhaustingly exhaustive, too, s once proved with Walter Sickert.

Brahms is easy to sympathize with - introvert and serious and developing a tendency to brusqueness as a result. Perfectionist to the extent that he destroyed a lot of work, he wasn't the only one to feel himself in Beethoven's shadow but he did as much as anyone to emerge from it. He and Wagner were at odds on musical issues so it's no problem to take sides on such. 

The book is more character study than analysis of the work, which is fine, covering his infatuations - which went beyond Clara Schumann- and friendships. It does, though, leave a few questions largely alone, though, like where the wonderful Fourth Symphony came from. And, as can happen in such stories, the protagonist goes from struggling status to superstar apparently by osmosis. In this case it seems the publication of some Hungarian Dances made him popular and it did no harm that he was in demand as a pianist and did not live by composition alone. 

Last year, at a local piano competition, the adjudicator related how teacher of his when young had met Brahms when old which is one of those degrees of separation which seem to put us in touch with monumental names. 

-

I've introduced a Bach Complete Works label here to report on it from time to time. I'm glad to find that Helmuth Rilling's vast undertaking is well regarded and a good point is made that 'authentic', original instrument editions can be over fussy which he isn't. I don't think it's too much of an issue.

What one notices, beginning at disc 1, with BWV 1, is that those catalogue numbers are not chronological and 1 was written in his fortieth year and that the first known composition is possibly BWV 992 so we can't use catalogue numbers as any guide to early/late questions of dating as we sometimes can with opus numbers.

Cantata no. 22, the chorale finale, was an early entry into the notebook as a find but today, after eight discs of cantatas, I thought it better to go for variety and mix up genres to obviate any chance of too much similarity. And so to something Im not familiar with, some Lute Suites. Lute music mainly sounds like lute music, almost irrespective of its composer but on second hearing maybe these aren't quite the same as Sylvain Weiss, the lute composer of choice. Like the harp, the lute sounds fresh and clear and clean whatever it plays and dour old Bach, however inventive and passing joyful he might be able to be, has flute music to be taken into consideration as evidence of his 'complete and utter artist' status. 

I officially don't ever need to buy any more discs ever again but when I'm next in Chichester, which might not be soon, I will have to go back and see if the Complete Mozart, Schubert and Scarlatti Sonatas are still there. If the Oxfam Bookshop customers have any eye for a bargain they surely won't be.    

The Renaissance Choir - Miserere Mei

 The Renaissance Choir, Church of the Holy Spirit, Southsea, July 12

There is an idea that Gregorio Allegri might not have been responsible for the embellishments, including the top C, in the Miserere credited to him, that he only wrote the plainsong and a long-forgotten chorister added the part that made it and its composer famous. That would make Allegri, already a bit of a 'one-hit wonder', the luckiest composer in the history of Western music. 

There are a few works in which one moment has almost come to represent the whole thing as audiences brace themselves for how Hamlet will deliver 'To be or not to be' or 'a handbag?' in The Importance of Being Earnest. That top C in the Miserere is in the same category and where we have had Laurence Olivier or Edith Evans, the Renaissance Choir had Jenni Halliday. One might fear for those in the role as the crucial moment approaches but we need not have done. Jenni cleared it with something in hand, awesomely - if we can still use the word in its undebased sense - and is clearly a special new asset for the Renaissance Choir. The whole choir were concentrated on this most serious and penitential piece that I'm sure I've not heard in the flesh before but the best things come to those who wait.

 

We had begun with the Kyrie and Gloria from Palestrina's Missa Aeterna Christi Munera like layers of cool eiderdown exploiting the kindness of the acoustic. Louise Douglas then moved to the piano to tiptoe minimally through silence in Arvo Pärt's Für Alina before re-joining the choir for his The Woman with the Alabaster Box, illustrating Peter Gambie's imaginative programming to go with the wise wit of his introductory remarks. The sustained notes in the alto and soprano parts engaged in a way both sombre and pacific.

Allegri's much lesser known Missa in Leculo Me, the Gloria, is for 8 parts without, understandably, quite achieving what Tallis does in Spem in Alium but was dance-like at times and then- and I should think so, too - the interval came after there was a fair proportion of audience standing in appreciation of the Miserere. I desperately wanted to but am rarely one to begin such things so I was glad to join in. One can't do it too often or else one devalues the tribute but sometimes one feels one must.

 

The second half had it all to do to follow that and did so by following a similar plan. Firstly, the Sanctus and the rich tapestry of the Agnus Dei from the Palestrina where special mention of the basses ought to be made, underpowered in numbers but not in their contribution. I understand it's a not uncommon situation in choirs but it's one that Renaissance are coping with well.

Louise next moved to the organ for the plaintive, highly punctuated The Beatitudes by Pärt in which the ominous, otherwisely organic growth of the choir part reaches its 'Rejoice' before the organ's burst of light. Strange music by mainstream, classical standards but not unusual for Arvo. The calm modulations of Eleanor Daley's Upon Your Heart seemed to echo the sentiment that 'what will survive of us is love' in its,

For love is strong as death 

but didn't compromise it and empty it out like Larkin's poem does. It served as a palette cleanser, perhaps, before a further monumental Miserere, by James MacMillan. The one more thing the Allegri might have benefitted from was less daylight but as the light faded, the tensions and unresting C21st religion and MacMillan's radical 'liberation theology' had distant echoes of its precursor. Challenging for the choir I'm sure it is and not an automatic selection for an easy listening playlist but, eerily soothing, that's only because 'easy listening' would do better if it were harder. It was great to see that such a less obvious work brought the same reaction from a clearly well-informed audience as the end of the first half had.

That was 'one for the ages', a tremendous achievement by the choir who I've not heard better in a number of outings now. And one for this year's short list that I don't think about, I wait for that involuntary visceral reaction to let me know. It's happened three times this year already, thrillingly but not necessarily as profoundly as that. 

Rokas Valuntonis in Chichester

Rokas Valuntonis, Chichester Cathedral, July 7

Top marks to Chichester Cathedral and Rokas Valuntonis for being able to fulfil this fixture at late notice. Chichester are unlikely ever to struggle to find artists glad to take up such an opportunity. Meanwhile, my homework on Ravel's La Valse, interesting as it was, will have to wait to come in useful another time. Instead of that, our education was extended to include Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911). 

Estimating what Čiurlionis's music is like from his dates wouldn't leave you far wrong- a little bit Chpoin, a little bit Rach. The Little Sonata opens with a panoramic, fairly intense Allegro, the Andante and Scherzo have an uncertain passion before the Finale ends somewhere near where the whole thing began. Certainly a new name to me, he's another who died far too young and could have been a contender.

Four Mazurkas by Chopin were unhurried in these accounts by Rokas except for the D major which was uptempo like a bagatelle of a tarantella but perhaps Robert Schumann's Carnaval was the curious item of most interest. Announcing itself grandly with an outpouring of notes surely more technically demanding than what had come before, it is only op. 9 and thus surely too early for Schumann to have lost his mind. It is cartoonish and ever-changing, in some ways almost as quirky as Erik Satie was later to be. Rokas lingered, expanded and dashed as the piece twisted and turned, evoking Chopin, Clara and Paganini and if personally I'd prefer to linger, he brought great verve to the presto parts, one of which we can take to be Paganini, I dare say. It was a circus of a piece to end Chichester Cathedral's summer season.

They resume on Sept 9 with a highly promising programme of artists and their set lists due to be announced soon. 

The Bad Boys of Portsmouth Poetry

 Kev and I aren't 'bad' at all, really- well, I'm not- but it amuses us in what we take to be 'later life' to imagine ourselves vaguely significant. Like The Movement, we are no kind of movement at all but at least we are mates, which they weren't. Kev's more Beat whereas I make Larkin look like a free-wheeling 60's troubadour in comparison. But it's a picture for the photo album if one still kept such a thing.

--

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the words above are by no means the whole story of today in Chichester. Poor Rokas was always up against it after I'd emerged from the Oxfam Bookshop with the Complete J.S. Bach by Helmuth Rilling.

172 discs is a week's worth of non-stop music by the greatest creative artist that ever lived, five star reviews throughout at Amazon where it is available for £191, secondhand for £134, and Oxfam were asking £49.99. As snap decisions go, it was quite snappy.

One needs to find time to play these things, and live long enough, so I left Complete Mozart, Schubert and Scarlatti Sonatas on the shelves there. I can't imagine they will still be there next time but I am at least safe in the knowledge that I got myself a bargain.

--

On the other hand, having got along okay for a while with The Whirlpool by George Gissing, it was abandoned because I didn't care enough. I went upstairs and found Thérèse Raquin instead which was even better than I remembered it with its hideous psychology and thriller plot. Zola is the real thing in a French team of the period that England would do well to match with Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant and onwards to Gide and Camus. The Masterpiece is on order from the library alongside a biography of Brahms and Madame Bovary is being given a further outing while I wait.

Portsmouth Baroque Choir: Orlando Gibbons and his contemporaries

Portsmouth Baroque Choir, Christ Church, Chichester, July 5

If one's work is being celebrated 400 years after your death you can consider yourself a success. My chances of being read in the year 2425, whether as music writer, poet or anything else are vanishingly none but Orlando Gibbons gathered a sizeable audience this evening, even given the nearby opposition of some Palestrina, and so good for him.

Christ Church is a modern, functional church but attractively decorated in a taking shade of teal and with good acoustics. Malcolm Keeler provides useful notes in his good value programmes. A lot of people know each other from the myriad connections of the local music community. All these things help to make for an enjoyable occasion but mainly it's still surely about the music.

It was mostly Gibbons, beginning with O all true faithful hearts, Jenny Barton and Andrew Round to the fore and then Malcolm passing directing duties to organist Philip Drew in order to take the solo part in a charming This is the record of John. Philip then provided a gentle interlude on the keyboard before leading into a subdued Behold, I bring you glad tidings. The first guest composer was John Amner in whose O ye little flock sopranos Jane Hoskins and Karen Phillips led a richly layered chorus.

The Binsted Viols were formed for the purpose of this concert. For Binsted to be where five such fine, specialist musicians live would be too much of a coincidence so I don't suppose they all do but their account of In Nomine No. 1 was dangerously hypnotic with its soft strains through which to escape ongoing worldly horrors. It was then the full choir sound of John Bull before local 'bad boy', Thomas Weelkes, ended the first half with a rousing, spirited Hosanna to the Son of David.

William Byrd was the big name brought on to open the second half, something like Rod Stewart bringing Ronnie Wood on at Glastonbury and Christ rising again from the dead benefitted from the graceful combination of Jane Hoskins and Julia Spurgeon.

'Who by his death has destroyed death' is a memorable line from We praise thee, O Father before I found myself composing my own to the Fantasy No. 3 by Thomas Ford,

As it doth hang in the sweet summer air. 

One never knows where one's next poem is coming from, or if it will come at all.

It might have been said, and said here, previously that the sopranos are gladly Portsmouth Baroque's main strength but it was less in evidence this evening, not to their detriment but to the credit of the lower parts, in such a piece as O God, the King of Glory. And while my internet research finds that the Salvation Army was founded in 1865 there were surely pre-echoes of their vitality in the celebratory rhythms of O clap your hands together.

Binsted Viols played in hymn-like unison a Pavan & Galliard by Anthony Holborne before Andrew's counter-tenor ornaments embellished See, see the world is incarnate and to finish, by way of a programmed encore, there was The Silver Swan, a big hit of its day familiar from its final observation that,

More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise,

in which the only comfort is to realize that it was ever thus.  

That was a well-planned programme moving through subtle changes of mood, tempo and instrumentation. All credit, in no particular order, to absolutely everybody who was involved in it.