From Benaud to Prokofiev

 It sometimes feels as if the postings here say very much the same things most of the time. Like any long-standing columnist, a pattern emerges and leitmotifs recur. I've said that more than once, for example. But, almost finding it necessary for my own purposes to report on books and music, there are sometimes shifts in subject matter that you wouldn't get on most channels, our culture having become so atomised and media being targeted at well-defined audiences.

It's not everywhere that moves straight from Richie Benaud to Sergei Prokofiev but we will here. As a general rule it's inadvisable to buy books for me because I'll have all those I want that I know about. But, a special talent proves from time to time to get a lot of things right and whereas I might not have bought Richie Benaud's autobiography, it's good to get a nice surprise and he's about the one and only Australian cricketer that is absolutely fine with me.

He's looked up his scorebooks. I'm sure nobody can remember what score they were on some decades ago at the end of day 2 of yet another cricket match.

With glorious careers safely archived, it's less clear how it could have been otherwise. He wasn't a certainty to be made captain when he was. Problems with his fingers caused all kinds of potentially career-threatening crises until he was advised of quack remedy that worked. They rattled along at quite a rate when Richie was batting and he argues that the importance of fielding was an Australian initiative in the 1950's long before it was credited to others in the 70's.

And you could tell from the wily way he seemed to address the camera as a TV commentator that he knew his ground, that he was a fair but hard bargainer and so he had been on racial issues in South Africa, terms and conditions for players and making cricket more lively and entertaining. 

I'd possibly find a place for an Australian in my All-Time XI and make him captain if it was him and I could have XIII but it's getting mighty crowded when Garry Sobers has to be twelfth man-

Greenidge, Gavaskar, Richards, Root, Randall, D'Oliviera, Procter, Knott, Larwood, Trueman, Holding.

But next up is a biography of Prokofiev that I had to buy for myself. I'm reluctant to accept from certain local music cognoscenti that Prokofiev can really be 'better' than Shostakovich but I'll gladly have a look after the smash and grab assault of the Piano Sonatas. 

I returned to them, and the Tatiana Nikolayeva Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues because one simply can't listen to 172 discs of Bach without taking a step away.

It's not gruelling, it is absolutely fine but however wide-ranging and just this side of paradise he is, it's still a narrow approach to all music. I've ventured into some music I know by now, maybe somewhere about a quarter of the way into the Complete. While, even with Bach, one can wonder if he's going through the motions in the lesser-known hours, arriving back at the Violin Sonatas and Partitas, here played by Dmitry Sitkovesky, he is immediately restored to the stratosphere.

Questions arise, such as whether it can be right to want Bach on piano, it not having been an instrument he knew about but, yes, I do want its clarity when harpsichords and organs in due course begin to create the same impression as accorions or bagpipes and lack some nuance. And, also, once I've heard all available Bach, will I think 'that's that, then' and, thus, less of it because it's been packaged and I've been there and done that. I'd have thought not. I've done it with Chopin and almost with Satie. I think I've done it with Buxtehude. None of them were diminished by knowing that I've heard it all.