Danny Driver at the Menuhin Room

 Danny Driver, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, June 20

Danny Driver is a regular performer at Wigmore Hall so his return to the Menuhin Room, Portsmouth's answer to it, must have made him feel reasonably at home. 

Medtner's Second Improvisation, op. 47, is fifteen variations on a theme that come usefully with titles that both help the listener navigate their way through and provide clues as to what is being depicted. Thus, the haunting stillness of the Song of the Water-nymph was followed by flighty Winged Dances, the reveries of Enchantment, the reverberations of the Roar of the Crowd and the mysterious In the Forest. Comparisons might be made with his contemporary compatriot, Rachmaninov, but he's not so lush or self-indulgent. In an gripping realization of the final movements, Danny sustained the last note of the Storm into the conclusion where one could hardly help but hear what was surely a pointed inversion of Beethoven's 'fate motif' left wide open to one's choice of interpretation, if such it is.

Alert to all aspects of performance, Danny commented on how the intimacy of the venue made for a shared experience as he was aware of the audience involvement, something that was confirmed by some rare standing ovation at the end. The discerning clientele there don't give away such accolades lightly.

Beethoven's Sonata, op.111, was the last of his 32. The abrupt fortes of the Maestoso were followed by dash and dazzle although my approximate timing suggested Danny took nothing off the 26 minutes of the Stephen Kovacevich recording and might have been a fraction longer. The Adagio was in part slow dance and had passages of sustained exuberance but is dominated by a feeling of transcendence, of last words that were intended as the culmination of the vast cycle even if he was nowhere near the end of his life. Alfred Brendel said, 'what is to be expressed here is distilled experience' and one has a sense of being refined beyond existence, a profoundness that perhaps nobody does like Beethoven did in a handful of mostly 'later' works. Portsmouth is unlikely to witness it played with any more gentle authority and not many other places will either.

If that was Beethoven's farewell to the piano sonata after such a great and ground-breaking contribution then we might use the hyperbole of a comparison with the occasion of Andrew McVittie's similar farewell to the Menuhin Room Series in the hope and belief that it is not quite as final as Beethoven's was. It was noted that it is taking a committee of three to succeed him. While he will be missed, he won't be gone entirely and the Series resumes in the Autumn on the fourth Saturday of each month.

  

Rebecca Hepplewhite & Caroline Tyler in Chichester

 Rebecca Hepplewhite & Caroline Tyler, Chichester Cathedral, June 16

The Prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007, is one of the pieces I've heard most often in live performance. Rebecca Hepplewhite was today the latest addition to the list of Natalie Clein, Pavlos Carvalho et al and a very fine one, relatively subdued and introspective compared to some, her relaxed sound rich and lonely in the big acoustic. 

Never heard before, though, was the Bach Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007, arranged for piano by Caroline Tyler and played by her. It could almost have been a different piece, all dreamy and C19th Romantic and hardly Bach at all. Sacrilege, some might say, but one is accustomed to what one is accustomed to and after much of a lifetime with this music as cello music- once hearing it arranged for bass guitar, one needs more than one chance to appreciate it as anything else. Beautifully done, fascinating if not alarming to hear, I'm sure my initial reservations would be overcome in due course but leopards might need to learn to change their spots.

It was by way of a bridge to Rebecca and Caroline joining forces for the Rachmaninov Sonata, op.19, which by some inverse symmetry had the famous piano man writing for cello. While all four movements mixed their moods between melancholy and bursts of rhapsodic melody, the mournful opening gave way to misty distances before some restlessness in the Allegro second.

Caroline's sumptuous piano in the highlight Andante seemed to fade in sympathy with Rebecca's sorrowful cello, each climax receding like dimming light. Whatever mysteries it was evoking have only been enhanced by the illegible scrawl of the note I made about the finale before it ended more in celebration, redemption or sweetness and light. 

Not only impressive but making one think about esoteric questions. A long time ago, knowing no better, I bought a secondhand recording of a disc of Monteverdi arranged and conducted by Karajan. It was entirely inappropriate and I threw it away rather than keep it in the house. Bach arr. Tyler was still gorgeous music. He would have been interested not only to hear the pianoforte but what lushness Caroline made of his austere Prelude. He might even have wished he'd had the chance to do it that way.

Sounds of the 70's

 Shaun Keavney's doing a fine job, filling up Radio 2's Sunday afternoons so knowledgeably and so my Spotify playlist series will end with no. 5 soon. Shaun made a bit of a racket a few times this afternoon but he's more or less 'cool' and sound and can work a studio better than I'd ever do.

There was a makeshift manager once during some difficult times in a job I was in who kept saying he had 'the best job in the department' but he was transparently trying to spread a feel good factor across a fractious workforce. He had a dreadful, if well paid, job but couldn't be heard to say so.

It's not so with Sounds of the 70's and never would be with 60's either. One almost can't miss. Although, of course, many would. 

So, instead of overloading the front page here with too much 'Also appearing at...', here, in all their glory are the playlists from one who once did a live DJ set, aged 13 or 14, in a suburb of Gloucester, for the Girl Guides and Brownies with, so dangerously, cubs, scouts and other boys allowed in.

You wouldn't believe how easy- and how dispiriting- the dance DJ's job is. They responded very well to All Because of You by Geordie, hey, hey, hey, and so that got played 4 or 5 times. Not the worst record ever but one never went poor by underestimating what one's audience wants. However, 

 Pilot episode

2  3  4

 

The World Cup and other stories

 If I press the 'info' button on the TV remote control to get details on the Radio 5 coverage of the (Men's Football) World Cup, it says,

Several teams from around the world compete against each other in a prestigious tournament in order to emerge victorious and win the title. 

Strangely it assumes we know it concerns men's football. There might be an octogenarian don at Oxford, expert in Xenophon or Tacitus who was unaware, or maybe those heroic people in the Andaman Islands who murdered an intruder because they wisely don't want to know about the rest of the world but otherwise most people with cable TV would be aware of the above. So it's tempting to suspect an ironist at work at Virgin Media.

I once found a dictionary that defined 'kangaroo' as (something like), two-legged marsupial that progresses in a succession of flying bounds. It was Dr. Johnson but it should have been.

 

An idea I had to provide my empty turf account with some easy cash was to lay heavily into an odds-on dead cert in the early stages. Brazil were 8/13 to beat Morocco but I did some research. Brazil have been a bit of a mess recently, it said, and Morocco are no pushover. So I kept my powder dry, turned on the match half an hour in and found Morocco 1-0. And it's as good as winning the bet as it is not to do it when it loses. Better, in fact, at the odds.

Sadly my allegiance to Baby Doc Duvalier and Wyclef Jean's Haiti went unrewarded last night so my low level of interest in this capitalist rip-off has already waned from its low starting point. I read a preview that convinced me the final will be between Spain and Argentina, once we get anywhere near a stage that can be called the 'finals'. Perhaps I'll check in the newspaper in a few weeks' time to see if it transpires as such.

--

Meanwhile, still some fallout from the recent Evening with Philip Larkin, I dip randomly into the James Booth biography at bedtime and have just read Michaelmas Term at St. Bride's from his anthology of early fiction. If anybody said at the time - and I might have- that such a book was scraping the Larkin barrel then it was worth the scraping. I will be back into the sophistication of Henry James all too soon but, for enjoyment, would gladly stick with Brunette Coleman, Larkin's female alter ego and nom de plume in these just slightly suspect fictions of teenage girls that young Larkin clearly spent a lot of time on and made a good job of.

Like Jill, it is an Oxford novel about an ingenue in the rarefied atmosphere of class-ridden dreaming spires. Also autobiographical are the details of some jazz records, literary citations including mention of Edward Thomas's book on Oxford, and -using an Oxford comma there, more horse racing following the interest in the Oaks from the previous episodes about Mary's time at Willow Gables. Although Larkin was a cricket man more than one of the turf.

What appeals about the world of Larkin, beyond all the obvious things about one of one's favourite writers, is the refreshing austerity of his time. If austerity as a government policy has a bad name, one can look back on it as a bracing, healthy way of life unencumbered by 'doom-scrolling' and the like. There were books and there was music and they somehow got by in what might seem like a grey world but it was more subtly shaded than the overblown gaudiness of what we are offered now.

And the ubiquitous evidence of failing standards in education when journalists at respectable institutions like the BBC and Times Radio can report such things as 'South Korea coming from behind to win 2-0'. Presumably they had been 0-0 down. You can't take anything on trust from such reports. You have to work it out for yourself. They must have won 2-1.  

--

At long last, I've taken to using the machine that has the capacity to play cassettes to play cassettes. It's taken so long that its capacity to play CD's failed quite a while ago. But the first of the drawerful of elderly cassettes have so far come up tremendously well after decades of disuse. I collected all sorts of things from the radio, thinking that the medium would be there always and not be supplanted by CD, mini disc, download, streaming and all.

The Poetry Prom with Betjeman introducing the very rare occasion when Larkin read The Whitsun Weddings to a live audience; Sean O'Brien visiting Auden's northern mining landscape, that sort of thing. Now I only have to wait for the tapes of August Kleinzahler, possibly Paul Muldoon and I think there's Auden himself, to resurface. It's like archaeology up there but, like laying down a wine and forgetting about it, it's treasure worth finding. 

And truly, I say unto thee

And truly, I say unto thee, if there's a better book than A.N. Wilson's Jesus, then I haven't read it. Absolutely scintillating. I even considered acquiring The Apocryphal Gospels and The Dead Sea Scrolls, in paperback editions, to investigate further but without Andrew's insights and commentary it might not be so enlightening.

He makes the comparison with another thrilling area of biographical mystery and speculation, 

The feelings of the historian about Jesus must be analogous to his feelings about Shakespeare, who managed to achieve fame and wealth and notoriety in Elizabethan London, and who left behind him a body of literary work without parallel, but whose 'personality' remains almost invisible.

Perhaps it's the not knowing that make these two's lives - two of the most famous people that ever lived- so compelling but it's equally potentially irksome that so many myths are put in place to fill the gaps that are allowed to pass as general knowledge. I'm grateful to Andrew for the introduction to the word 'midrash', which is a Jewish term for 'filling in the gaps'. He cites a number of examples pertaining to Jesus that might appear to accommodate Old Testament prophecies after the fact but the job he does in unravelling the likely and the possible from the imaginative is brilliant.

Mary Magdalene and her friends found the tomb empty because other friends had moved the body to a preferred burial place. Subsequent sightings of Jesus, often shrouded in doubt, were of his brother, James, who took up the work that was to prove to be shortlived. Jesus preached only to make Jews better Jews, not to set up a new church. It was Paul that did that.

Another of Wilson's subjects, Tolstoy, is found to be less contradictory in his teachings. Jesus is portrayed as quarrelsome, difficult and unsuccessful in his lifetime despite the vast, misunderstood legacy he left. 

I've known plenty of sane, intelligent, well-intentioned people that genuinely believed, 'had faith in' the virgin birth, miracles and the resurrection who sincerely thought that those impossibilities happened. Even circa 1972/3, in our traditionally Christian school, such things as walking on water and the feeding of the five thousand had been rationally explained away but, as ever, people will believe what they want to believe and there ain't nothing one can do about it. I'm sure we all enjoy a bit of mysticism, a ghost story and the way the best poetry conjures something extra from the language but we all know, don't we, that there's no such thing as magic.

Wilson's book maybe ought to be regarded as the truest gospel. 

Madeleine Mitchell & Elektra Schmidt in Chichester

 Madeleine Mitchell & Elektra Schmidt, Chichester Cathedral, June 9

Beethoven was the main feature of Madeleine Mitchell and Elektra Schmidt's show of violin and piano. He could have afforded to give away his violin sonatas without much noticeable lessening of his reputation whereas the recipient would have benefitted greatly.

No. 10 in G, op. 96, opens with a cheery, classical Allegro moderato. Written in 1812, only three years after Haydn died, his spirit was not far away. But the profound, consolatory Adagio was the day's most memorable passage, its steady light penetrating some semi-darkness. The merriment of the Scherzo was carried forward to the variations of the fourth movement. Elektra's mazy piano was as prominent as Madeleine's violin that piled in all the notes before Beethoven put in an unusual- for him- succinct ending.

Before that, the undercard had begun with the sparkling piano and uplift in the Mélodie of  Frank Bridge, Ravel's Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré was gently hypnotic and the familiar strains of Elgar's Chanson de Matin were demure and perhaps more silky than velvety and with maybe some inflection in the violin that I'm not sure I'm accustomed to.

But today's question is 'what is an encore?' The players left the stage during the applause for the Beethoven and returned to play another piece that was listed on the programme. Is that an encore or not, I wonder.

One of the many reasons I've not appeared on Mastermind to answer questions on music is that I didn't know Tailleferre was female, part of that long tradition that goes from Hildegaard of Bingen to Taylor Swift. I'm not sure how much it matters, musically. Her Berceuse, written early in her long life was distant and/or misty, a fine choice for an encore if that's what it was. I'll be looking to find out a bit more about Germaine Tailleferre in due course. 

I'm beginning to forget to say about Chichester lunchtime concerts that it was brilliant. 

Jesus !!!

The Portrait of a Lady emerged from the weight of its own prose and immense detail to be quite a success but not so much that, after four Henry James novels in a row, I wanted to get involved in another long one straight away.

It might be as much about Gilbert, the baddie husband, or the manipulative Madame Merle and the emergent secret they shared. If it was not for Isabel to know, she still might have exercised more judgement in her choice of first husband and so my sympathy for her is limited. Thus, although the happier ending is only strongly hinted at, it looks like it will have one. And like an episode of Midsomer Murders, the answer turns out to be not one of the frontrunners but one who, until the design of the plot is revealed, might only have appeared to be making up the numbers.

So, while Henry James takes fairly high order among novelists, one does not want to live by him alone and a change of scenery, and writing, makes for the latest costume drama.

 

I was nudged back, by something, to one of the recent shortlist of Best Books in the House, which as far as I can tell is the same as Best Book Ever, for me. And I'm as impressed as ever with A.N. Wilson's Jesus, for its scholarship where 'scholarship' means learning applied as best it can be; lucidity and open-mindedness in an area so clouded by faith, belief, tradition and irrationality that one would otherwise struggle to know what to think.

Andrew doesn't assume that Jesus wasn't married just because the gospels don't say he was. They don't say he wasn't, either. He had no idea about setting up a new church. He was a charismatic, firebrand Jewish preacher with radical ideas at a time when the Roman Empire was troubled by sectarian monotheists. It was Paul, as per another book by the same author, that made the Christian church perhaps the most significant and powerful movement of the subsequent two thousand years.

It's a hot, dusty story of both fishermen and bookish types rather than carpenters, of much unlikeliness explained in terms that make it plausible, some mysticism notwithstanding, that depends on the same human frailties that Wilson, and Jesus, have an understanding of. Their world of sectarianism, tyranny and violence was in essence not so different from how it was before or has been since.

Jesus never said he was the son of God, the second part of the Trinity, and rejected all entreaties to be king of a new Israel. It is astonishing how he became sentimentalized into 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild', born in a stable attended by three wise men from the East who came bearing gifts. Embellishment upon embellishment in what was only ever literature has made something ludicrous out of reportage written decades after whatever he said and did were said and done. But he was more real than Robin Hood and Andrew Wilson did a tremendous job in finding what there might be of him in amongst the accumulated rubble of outlandish fiction, all the architecture and music built upon one very successful preacher.

Do I like him, no, I don't. Hot-headed, difficult, troublesome from childhood until his early death, he is the template for all those pop stars that burnt out, for Faust, Icarus and that useless article, Che Guevara, whose revolutionary image adorned so many student bedroom walls in the 1960's and 70's. His legacy lasted longer than Che's did, though, even if it descended into horrors that he never intended and the gaudy ceremonies that he never meant.

But maybe A.N. Wilson, high C of E Tory as I think he would identify, wrote the best book I've ever read as an eventual part of that legacy. And it's remarkable to think that one of my other six favourite books is Ungentle Shakespeare by Katherine Duncan-Jones, to who he was married for some years.

It must have been compelling. One inappropriate syllogism, a non-sequitur or a contemporary usage that couldn't be translated into Latin. That's what life should be like. I wonder who they think will win the World Cup. 

Kate Burrows & Helen Morris at the Menuhin Room

Kate Burrows & Helen Morris, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, June 6 

You may know how some of Shakespeare's plays are called 'problem plays' on account of their mixture of comedy and darker themes. Measure for Measure is one of them. Schubert was not a problem for me at all until finding out that he was widely regarded as melancholy. The latest episode in the ongoing enquiry into this came up first in Kate Burrows and Helen Morris's programme with their performance of the Fantasie in F minor, D. 940, its minor key and late catalogue number immediately offering hints that it might not be his happiest work.

Helen's poignant top line and then early hints of unrest were realized in some proper sturm, if not drang, but the boisterous, assertive passage that came before a recapitulation that aspired to the condition of Bach and a grandstand finish didn't sound sorrowful to me. Notwithstanding that Kate and Helen have never appeared to be melancholy people. I think it's time I got over that question and concerned myself with others.

In two solo spots, Kate's Fauré Nocturne, op. 37, went from halting serenity to some flow and surge worthy of Chopin which dovetailed neatly into Helen's Ballade no.4 by him, wistful before its own serenity was disturbed by something. Helen had explained that it had a story but Chopin never said what stories he had in mind so we were free to make up our own. But music is mostly an abstract thing for me. I don't think it was about next door's kids making a racket outside of a summer evening.

These pieces were not dissimilar to each other and Rachmaninov's Vocalise and its stately mood of acceptance before taking a look at some more characteristic Rach-like wider panoramas maintained the mood. That was Helen's choice but Kate took over on the upper end of the keyboard for hers, Ravel's Introduction and Allegro, immediately more modern while still lush and 'Romantic'. Time had flown by, as it does when one is absorbed in what's going on.

There has grown a great feeling of friendship and community in the few years while Andrew McVittie has built this series, with the invaluable help of Helen and others. Thus, they made a presentation to him as he prepares to pass on the role pro tem while, he promises, not disappearing from the scene completely. Several years ago Nile Rodgers and Chic invited as many as could be accommodated onto the stage at Glastonbury and a comparable thing happened here with a photo opportunity to mark the occasion with musicians, master of ceremonies and audience all together in front of the celebrated Steinway, the other essential stalwart of this continuing success.

Adrian Green and Gillian Thompson at Lunchtime Live !

 Adrian Green and Gillian Thompson, Portsmouth Cathedral, June 4

Portsmouth Cathedral Choir went off on tour to France leaving lay clerk, Adrian Green, at home to provide Lunchtime Live! His programme entitled Fly swift, ye hours was made up with no more of a theme than it was things he enjoyed singing. There can hardly be a better principle to work on than that. The title came from one of three songs by Purcell that he began with in which his light tenor performed some baroque acrobatics over Gillian Thompson's stylish accompaniment.

It was great to have some popular Handel, who is nowhere near popular enough on lunchtime menus for my liking. The evergreen charm of Where'er you walk led to Adrian's downtime in which Gillian had the piano lid opened to give full voice to the Bosendorfer in The Harmonious Blacksmith amid the rest of a highly Handelian Suite, HWV 430. Whether it was due to unaccustomed seating position, something in the air or simply the music, the piano sounded very healthy indeed. It must have been largely due to Gillian's playing, though.

Schubert's Nachtstücke was characteristically dark and melodic. Orpheus with his lute was takingly atmospheric and entirely convinced me, who is not always persuaded by all Vaughan-Williams. 

This second half of the song programme was twentieth century and English with Michael Head, John Ireland and Roger Quilter pieces all, my internet research finds, available on Adrian's English Songbook album. And then the joyful and triumphant ending was the latter's Non nobis, Domine. Not having been sure I was going to be at this recital, recent events have been turning out for the best and I was glad the trend continued.  

More Bach, More James

 I understand that marathon runners 'hit the wall' at about 22 miles and struggle on to the end from there. It happened to me once in a 12 Hour bike race, at maybe 10 hours, but it was only about refuelling with whatever food was to be found and I toddled on happily enough. Now that I know the marathon can be done in under two hours, maybe I'll have a go.

I wasn't expecting the same thing in the Complete Bach, though. Not until I arrived at the first disc of A Book of Chorale Settings for Johann Sebastian. It's not awful but, coming after the big oratorios and passions, it was underwhelming, a bit dull and there are a few discs of it. With a number of organ music discs still to go, I'm not going to make a priority of listening to all 172 discs within a year of acquiring them. 

I took refuge in a brilliant set of violin concertos that were vivaldistic- to coin a phrase that I hope will not enter general usage. But then the Brandenburg's were disappointing although if one is familiar with Concentus Musicus Wien/Harnoncourt then most accounts are likely to come across as less charismatic. I will soon be left with a sweeping up job in pursuit of the

complete Bach, not that it is entirely definitive, and it is not going to be onerous but the Uchida Mozart Piano Sonatas arrived today, all impudent and gregarious from the first note, and that sounds like being irresistible. Unless, there being 18 of them, one reaches that stage of enough being enough however good it is.

All the poems that Elizabeth Bishop wrote don't amount to many and if you take out all those that Larkin didn't see into print in his lifetime, he is similarly frugal. They set a fine example. One that I like to think I've tried to follow while readily acknowledging that plenty of mine went into print that wouldn't make the cut into a properly considered, much more selective Collected.

--

Meanwhile, back at The Portrait of a Lady, the way into it finally seemed to be to differentiate between the queue of Isabel's hope suitors and realizing that it was hardly likely to be a novel if she chose correctly. 'Highly Eligible Girl Marries Happily' doesn't make for 600 pages, even in Henry James. And it's equally unlikely that her choice is going to be her only imperfection.

We can take it that Lord Warburton represents money, class and England. Ralph looks like the good guy out of his depth like Giles Winterbourne in The Woodlanders, Mitch in Streetcar or even Horatio, who Ophelia might have been better off with than the self-indulgent, bookish type she found herself involved with. But, no, she marries Gilbert Osmond who, I admit, had seemed okay to me at first.

Until it's too late, of course,

He always had an eye to effect, and his effects were deeply calculated. They were produced by no vulgar means, but the motive was as vulgar as the art was great.

One is not only grateful for prose like that but an old-fashioned, omniscient narrator who tells you as much. Deeply impressive is the insight into the superficially successful man - let's say it was mostly men in those days, that,

Far from being [the world's] master as he pretended to be, he was its very humble servant, and the degree of its attention was his only measure of success.

Henry James is seriously gaining my utmost respect with all this and then, 

His ambition was not to please the world, but to please himself by exciting the world's attention and then declining to satisfy it.

and I'm in sympathy with Gilbert, in his Larkin-like plan, except it's not really an admirable thing. It's art, it's vanity and it is what's wrong with Gilbert Osmond.

Once Isabel is on the way to realizing she is unhappily married, the secondary plot of who is going to marry Osmond's daughter, Pansy, gets underway, with Lord Warburton turning out again to have another go. It recalls how Laertes wants to take revenge on Hamlet in the backwash of Hamlet bungling his own revenge on his uncle.

Henry James has got me right back onside in the second half of Portrait. Maybe it's as good as I'd hoped.   

The Henry James Update and other stories

In due course, one's preconceptions are confirmed. The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw and, not quite so much, Washington Square, were all great. I like short books. I don't mind long books but sometimes 600 pages don't seem altogether necessary. Except The Portrait of a Lady wouldn't be Henry James if he didn't bury you under the thick eiderdown of his all-enveloping prose.

It's luxurious and, yes, I do have all day to enjoy the luxury but, as I've found in my unsuccessful ventures into Jane Austen, I'm not particularly bothered which of her ardent suitors the heroine is going to marry, if any. Which is not to say one can't enjoy the chapters as they flow ever onwards almost as vignettes full of wit, observation and style. It's just that even life itself is surely not quite as nuanced as Henry James's fiction. Not even Proust, Ulysses or Tolstoy. I don't know yet, I'm only halfway.

There's enough to like, like the,

stone bench...useful as a lounging place to one or two persons wearing more or less of that air of undervalued merit which in Italy, for some reason or other, always gracefully invests anyone who confidently assumes a perfectly passive attitude

or,

'She was born- I always forget where you were born.'

'It's hardly worth while then I should tell you.'

'On the contrary,' said Mrs. Touchett, who rarely missed a logical point; 'if I remembered your telling me would be quite superfluous.'

So perhaps it's this almost Wildean wit that provides the entertainment rather than the stakes race between the varied contenders for the apparently immaculate Isabel Archer's affections.

There surely must be some irony to be had in her ultimate fate, nobody being perfect, because she must either choose one, presumably wrongly, or remain somehow unhumanly above it all.

We will see but, once having seen, it will be time for a break from Henry James.

 

I take breaks from the Complete Works of Bach regularly while still in with a chance of listening to all 172 discs within a year of acquiring them. Due imminently are the Mozart Piano Sonatas played by Mitsuko Uchida. I have to check the shelves before buying anything these days because I can't remember. For years I never knew in what formats I had The Velvet Underground & Nico but now that I do know, I never play it. It's on Spotify, You Tube and generally ubiquitous.

But this morning, the unseasonable Christmas Oratorio showed how irrelevant the time of year is for gloriousness. And hang on, we've had this echo of 'ja, ja' before, in the Cantata BWV 231. I thought it was Handel that plagiarised from himself when needing a good tune in an emergency but Bach did it as well, if not as often.

One notes such highlights as Erbarme Dich in the Matthew Passion, always wondering what advantage music one knows already has over pieces one hasn't. Even if coming to something for the first time has a never-to-be-repeated opportunity to freshly impress. I'm sure Hamlet improves for seeing it a few more times after the first, all other things being equal. 

I press on with the Bach, not realistically expecting to be able to say I played it all in a year. I think it's early July that's the deadline. It's no kind of hardship like in a marathon there needs must be some suffering to achieve the worthwhile aim but there might be times when it's a bit like other bits of it and certainly some of the organ doodling is routine background music to reading. But if listening to Bach ever became dutiful then the point of anything has finally been lost.

I don't know what ultimate reason we were born for but if one reaches a stage where that is unsatisfactory then it is all over. 

Chess- England 0 Hungary 1

This was the scene this afternoon on Southsea seafront where Zoltan was taking on allcomers.

Quick game, five minutes, I said. 

Is okay. I play quicker than you, he said, giving away the advantage by playing with black. Fair do's to him.

His d6 reply to my customary d4 was unusual, as was his subsequent row of five pawns on his third rank. It was real rapid-fire gun-slinging stuff and he made the first blunder.

I was in cruise control, or at least carrying the tray of drinks across the slippery floor.

I'm not sure how I gave back the advantage. Twice I, very sportingly, stuck with moving a piece I'd touched when he might have let me off but if I'm going to win I want to win proper.

It would have been insulting to ask for the draw in an endgame where he still had a bishop to my one pawn advantage.

We shook hands after maybe five minutes under the unforgiving sun.

Are you here next week?

If it's a nice day, I'm here next week.

You're Hungarian.

How you know I am Hungarian?

Because you're called Zoltan.

 

So, first game across the board in many, many years. I very nearly had him, too, but having missed him once I might not get the same chance again. He's probably any good. 

 

An Evening with Philip Larkin

An Evening with Philip Larkin, Goat Star Books, The Century Club, Shaftesbury Avenue, May 26th

A somewhat eventful day yesterday. This is by no means a review of the main event. That might appear elsewhere in due course. But it won't undermine the eventual appearance of that, if and when it does, to praise the presentation by Goat Star Books with guest reader Daniel Wain and the revelation, not mentioned in the published letters or any of the three biographies, that Larkin kept up a correspondance with Kenneth Williams which at first sounds an unlikely prospect but, then again, T.S. Eliot wrote to Groucho Marx.

The journey from Portsmouth wasn't easy with rail delays following soon upon the replacement bus service and, having had well over an hour in hand in the plan, arriving at Piccadilly Circus with only twenty five minutes to go before kick-off. Except the Century Club is not easy to find, being unmarked. One needs to know. I went well beyond it and while retracing my steps, began to ask people with increasing desperation. A bouncer in charge of a theatre queue didn't know. You'd think a taxi driver might but he didn't but someone smoking outside the Century Club overheard, came and helped and told me I was right in front of it. Well, I never. I might be traipsing up and down Shaftesbury Avenue still without such a kindness.

Maybe more another time about the excellent show where I unknowingly met and shook hands with the nephew of Rosemary Tonks. That alone was worth the heat and hardship and paying possibly about £20 for a pint of lager. Three bottles at £7.88 each but it is only money and they were essential supplies. 

But the almost supernatural occurences had only just begun. The 22.30 out of Waterloo was initially packed but across the aisle, a lady had put what looked to me like a violin case on the luggage rack. I obviously wanted to know all about that while not wanting to be reported to the guard and thrown off the train for a misunderstood, inappropriate advance. However, the crowds thinned out and I soon heard myself asking, is that a violin, have you been playing in London and, if so, what.  

Yes, yes and the Bach B minor Mass, were the answers.

The conversation rapidly took off and it transpired that I had reviewed her only a few weeks ago, most enthusiastically, of course. So, do you know him and her and them.  

Yes, yes. 

Bach's B minor Mass is mostly in D major.

Good Heavens.

 

And then she spotted a memory stick on the floor and established whose it was from the label on it and some internet detective work and undertook to return it through the available channels to the musician whose score of the Bach it had on it. By which time I was beginning to wonder if it we were in an episode of The Uncanny.  

It all seemed like a far-fetched concatenation of events.

The replacement bus stopped at Hilsea at about 00.15 so I walked from there. Not a soul to be seen all the way down the Copnor Road which was gorgeous for one unaccustomed to the dizziness and busy-ness of Soho of an evening. I made some connection with the poet who lived at the end of the line, away from cosmopolitan London and made a virtue out of being provincial. I've long sympathized with that. I don't know how much I could withstand of that hectic way of life. I'd rather by now be thinking of high windows, the sun-comprehending glass and things like that. 

Sounds of the 70's.

 Bob Harris is clearly still not well and we all wish him the best. Meanwhile, Shaun Keaveny, with a bit of help from Mark Radcliffe, has been making Sounds of the 70's sound much more like the decade I took part in. I was in Gloucester and then Lancaster, not hanging out in Nashville or California.

One gets the impression that Andy Burnham wants to be Prime Minister and feels no shame saying as much and so, on that basis, I want to do Radio 2's Sounds of the 70's. Equally blatantly, I've never made any secret of it.

My calling card sample show, put together this afternoon, is at Spotify now.

Sounds of the 70's

 

If only there could be a pop wireless show as good as that.

And yet, there could be and Version 1.0 is there already.  

 

Best Pianist Ever

 The Times yesterday, in marking 125 years of Wigmore Hall, published the 'ten greatest classical pianists', as chosen by an invited list of some current acknowledged stars. My contribution is not worth having but, as Portsmouth's answer to the musical question that nobody asked, I must pass a Sunday afternoon by putting in my tuppence worth. Me commenting on pianists is somewhat less appropriate than having an American tell me about cricket or a bricklayer advising me on poetry but one never can tell and one mustn't stereotype these people.

The Times panel surprised me somewhat by making Sergei Rachmaninov no. 1. He came with the sort of physical advantages that put him already ahead of most others, all other things being equal. There's no way I could have won a Tour de France up against the heart rates, lung capacity and other attributes of the likes of Miguel Indurain. And, a perennial second in the sports day sprint races at school, I wasn't Usain Bolt either.

Rach had such big hands he wrote music that was beyond others. Claudio Abbado had to help out Yuja Wang with a note she couldn't reach with her lesser spread. But he was a force of nature, too. The Times list goes 2. Richter, 3. Horowitz, 4. Radu Lupu, with Martha Argerich at 8 the only one still living. No Gilels, Gould, Arrau, Brendel, Ogden, etc, etc. but one could presumably make a list of fifty and still miss some.

On the basis of her Bach and Shostakovich, going in with my preferred repertoire, I'd be voting for Tatiana Nikolayeva. I spent formative years with two Mozart concertos played by Barenboim. I've always liked Mitsuko Uchida and hearing a Mozart Sonata, no. 5, the other day means her set of those will be ordered soon. In the flesh I've seen Steven Kovacevich, Emmanuel Ax, Isata Kanneh-Mason and local stars Angelina Kopyrina, who never fails to take the roof off, and Béla Hartmann. I'd have to have Angelina in any top 10 of mine.

I wouldn't be having Glenn Gould. While technical perfection would never be an important consideration for me, I'm not sure how far I'd go with innovative interpretation either. I'm listening more to the composer than what the performer does with their music so I will be all across Tatiana  whose 40-disc box-set has all the right pieces in it and, come a suitable windfall, all £100's worth of it will be given a home here.  

As ever, with such list-making, it's an unhealthy obsession and yet insists on being done from time to time as soon as one concedes that one thing is better than another. If Bach is a better composer than Piazolla then it figures that they can all be put in order of superiority. But aged maybe 13 or 14 and applying devoutly communist principles to anything I could think of, I took all the teams out of my football league ladder because none should be put above any other. Teams should play nicely, pass to each other and socialize pleasantly at half time and afterwards.

Which is, of course, even more ridiculous because it would abnegate the whole point of football. By now, I'd gladly accept that but not the abnegation of music because if we did that it would follow that I'd be just as likely to appear at the Menuhin Room, singing pop songs out of tune, as any proper musician doing something they are good at and all the great work that has gone into building the series would be demolished at a stroke.  

the twice-washed tablecloth

 

Some genius here, from a recent Private Eye in their resident poetry correspondent's tribute to J. H. Prynne.

I need to say, firstly, that Private Eye is passed on to me by a mate, that I'd not spend my own money on it, but, secondly, that once in a while it gets it right.

This is a tremendous effort at pastiching Prynne, the very forefront and paragon of subverting what we were led to believe was poetry. Some of us might have got beyond that already by not accepting such things as that poetry must be made of rhythm and/or rhyme.

Regular, or longstanding, readers here will know that 'all you've got to be is any good'. 

Prynne and his like had a point but possibly suffered from labouring the one point they had at the expense of all others. It is potentially brilliant, definitely hilarious, but ultimately only of interest to its adherents if it refuses to come back to Planet Meaning.

Private Eye's uncredited pasticheur risks enchroaching on the brink of meaning in line 6, where Bowie is brought to mind, and the last three words that suggest Dover Beach. That might not be entirely their fault even if an editor in a position to do as much could have pointed out that they were at risk of meaning something not entirely untangential.

It's great how, trying to write about such writing, one is led into the same dead ends as theirs does. In a way, I'd so like to be convinced that theirs was an ever expanding universe of potential but I'm not. I think it's a party game and no more than that. I'm thrilled by the twice-washed tablecloth.

Is it old and thus a bad thing that it's only been washed twice or was it only bought last week and has been washed twice already. We are not to know and it is in such wondering that 'poetry' can sometimes be found. Elusive, 'thought-provoking', generative, lush.

The satirist, in one phrase, did for me more than my brief looks at real Prynne ever did. So, maybe I could go back to real Prynne, informed by that, and enjoy his poems more. And that's what I'd call 'irony'.        

The Richard Yates and Henry James Collections

In 2008, The Times reviewed The Collected Stories of Richard Yates so enthusiastically that I was persuaded to get myself one. It turned out they were right. I did my best to get involved in the Yates revival and collected all the novels via abebooks, most of them having to be sent from America. The film of Revolutionary Road appeared and a few months after I was about as complete as one can get in Yates, all the titles were re-issued in Britain. Still, my library has more interesting editions.

Now, last Saturday, Jem Calder celebrates The Easter Parade in the same paper's 'Rereading' feature and the great joy and benefit of having every worthwhile book one knows about was being able to go upstairs to fetch it and reread it myself. Explaining about him to a bookshop proprietor on Tuesday, she said he sounded like the American answer to the Angry Young Men and in some ways she's got it except maybe Yates is more middle class and a better prose writer than Alan Sillitoe. 

The Easter Parade follows Sarah and Emily, two sisters, through their disintegrating lives. Sarah, the elder, stays in a twenty year abusive marriage while Emily trawls her way through a litany of men who all seem suitable to begin with but prove not to be. As Yates invariably is, it's relentless in its downward spiral, the compensation only being the women's hope, or belief, that it will be for the best. It's heavy irony, it's brilliantly written. I'm not sure, as Jem Calder diagnoses, that,

the horror is just time's passing.  

That can be applied to most lives, or stories. In Yates it is more specifically the almost wilful self-deception of the two main characters and that they don't appear to have other options.

But that's what all those books upstairs are there for. To be returned to exactly as and when required. Yates remains right up at the top end of prose fiction and this latest return to him only proved that he's not going to be shifted from such a position.  

--

The Yates collection has been in place for years whereas the Henry James collection has sprung up in the last ten days. Following the immense success of The Aspern Papers/The Turn of the Screw, part of my mission on Tuesday in Chichester was to load up on whatever was to be found. I hadn't realized that the newly reopened premises where once were three storeys of second-hand books was now independent and new books. Impressed with her knowledge and charm, which I realized later is the salesmanship necessary to survive in the perilous world of retail books, I returned to pay the going rate for The Golden Bowl after a quick excursion to Oxfam where I was glad to find four other titles for only a bit more than the price of the pristine copy. I don't suppose she needed me to show her what she's up against in her admirable custodianship of the bookseller's dream life. Spending similar amounts in two bookshops and the flapjack shop, the flapjacks lasted three days, The Golden Bowl will last two or maybe three weeks and the four titles from Oxfam two or three months but I'll always be able to have the books again, which can't be said for the flapjacks.

At first sight, Washington Square isn't as good as the two novellas but it's still fine. It possibly anticipates at least Emily's story in The Easter Parade in how Catherine's relationship with the apparently feckless Morris Townsend doesn't work out, with some help from her severe father, who might have been right.

But, on further consideration, it's an open question. At first thinking it owed something to Jane Austen, or what I imagine Jane Austen to be like, it is perhaps anti-Austen in its beautiful, unrequited, possibly even Larkin-esque ending. Excellent reading.

And now, with all reason for hope, I go intrpeidly towards the big books. The Portrait of a Lady is all but 600 pages with James presumably indulging himself in his reams of prose but, as with Proust, that may not be a bad thing. 

The Cygnus Trio in Chichester

The Cygnus Trio, Chichester Cathedral, May 19

Tchaikovsky chamber music. Who knew. Ballets, big symphonies, the melodrama of the 1812 Overture, the Piano Concerto and one of the great violin concertos, yes, but he's not often, if ever, heard on these lunchtimes which are so often solo or small ensemble affairs. Well, the Cygnus Trio knew and the Trio in A minor, op. 50, is no small affair. Size isn't everything but neither is it to be measured by the number of musicians or decibels.

The Trio is in two lengthy movements, with the first, Pezzo elegiaco, in memoriam the pianst Nikolai Rubinstein, not textbook elegy perhaps with its grand gestures and energy. Javier Montañana's violin and Hannah Lewis's cello interacted lyrically before the theme was taken up by César Saura's piano. Some fitting solemnity was achieved in music that made much of relatively simple thematic material.

As could equally be said of the theme and variations of the second movement. There was no doubting this young trio's talent and the fine sound they made but some music can take its time to be convincing before thoroughly doing so.  César's opening exposition of the melody was almost devotional before the rapt violin and song-like cello did it their ways. It was quickly elaborated on with decorative piano and pizzicato strings, some tinkling top-end music box effects and Peter Ilyich taking on the challenges from Johann Sebastian and Ludwig to show how many different things he can do with the same tune.

It bounced around in dance and song and was in turn soulful, serene and spirited towards a presto climax with drama aforethought that had me thinking, not for the first time, that the end was due. He could have been hinting presciently towards Rachmaninov. But, no, in a consummately well-done final passage, the Trio made the Trio tread gently to its rest like a perturbèd spirit getting back to its grave before dawn.

The Turn of the Screw

A few months ago it was Dana Gioia I was so glad to 'discover', however belatedly. Now, it's Henry James who looks like taking high order among the writers of fiction that I've ever read. The tendency to want to make lists persists. It seems unhealthy but when one pronounces something as a 'favourite', it's useful to have defined to what degree. Not everything can be a priority, not everything a specialism and not everything a favourite. I'm less sure of my fiction writers than I am poets but, on the evidence of two novellas, Henry James looks destined to be very highly regarded.

The Turn of the Screw was better than The Aspern Papers and that was great. I'm glad the Introduction says that, like Hamlet, it,

will continue to inspire widely differing interpretations.

One is especially never sure in ghost stories exactly what is going on but Flora and Miles, the children, are impossibly charming yet increasingly and disconcertingly threatening. The presence of past domestic staff at Bly, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, as apparitions has something to do with it. It keeps the pages turning, especially with James's prose being so sumptuous and not as forbidding as I've assumed for so long without ever have checked for myself.

It's tempting in the first blaze of being impressed to put him ahead of long-established rivals. By all means, he's in many ways more sophisticated than Hardy and maybe George Eliot but it remains to be seen how he compares further down the line. I'm not throwing over Hardy on a whim after fifty years but it is much to James's credit that the comparisons even arise. It happens once in a while that the rest of a writer's back catalogue set me up for an extended session of reading. There is a lot of James. It is to be hoped that the two or three I pick up next are good choices. Much will depend on them as to how far into his work I go.

On Not Liking the Beatles

 The way I access the internet, via Firefox, shows me a selection of items that it seems to think I might like and, given the sort of thing that thrives on the internet and my reluctance to engage with much of it, it doesn't do badly at it.

It regularly features Far Out magazine and a series on 5 artists that some iconic artist couldn't stand, in which number one for somebody from Pink Floyd was the other members of Pink Floyd. Well, there wasn't much left to do without Syd Barrett, the only interesting one, apart from resent each other.

But today we have 10 musicians who couldn’t stand The Beatles.

I'm slightly Beatles-sceptic in not accepting everything they did as holy writ but, born in 1959 and being most taken with She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, aged 4, they are in my musical DNA. There are great things in that early-middle period. But they haven't got into my top plenty bands for a long time, don't turn up often on DGBooks Radio and don't come anywhere near the conglomerate achievement of Tamla Motown.

But, who are these dissidents, then? For the most part, largely who one might expect, the usual suspects of the predictably dissident.

I knew Frank Zappa would be there, who is stratospherically in a category of his own in the 5 artists I can't stand. Painfully, boorishly, boringly contrary to a fault. John Lydon had to be there except I had a lot of time for what he did once although the same by now applies to him.

I'm not put out by Julian Casablancas because The Strokes were a busted flush of dumb posturing from the beginning, the answer to their first album, Is This It, being, No, It Isn't. 

We know Elvis and The Beatles didn't get on too well. We also might think Elvis wasn't that bright, or even a musician.

Van Morrison is over-rated and I don't care what he thinks. Similarly Todd Rundgren, although one would like to think better of both.

Trent Reznor is, or was, apparently in Nine Inch Nails. That doesn't register at all here. 

Quincy Jones later apologized for what he said.

 

Which leaves Lou Reed and Michael Stipe, both of who are probably ahead of the Beatles on any list I might make. You'd almost expect it of Lou, though, notoriously difficult as he was while notoriously brilliant at his best in what he did. Sometimes great artists are like that. And sometimes so are the rest of us but we have less of a get out clause.

Which leaves us with St. Michael of Stipe, the paragon of cool, indie sensitivity and surely better than the pop music equivalent of those literary troublemakers who go out of their way to deride Shakespeare.

And, yes, he is. Far Out put him at number one in their list to make it look more shocking but it's not what he said. He's maybe only slightly more Beatles-sceptic than I am. He likes other stuff more. Is all.

While this series of features has seemed worth a look, I've not investigated one before and now I have, I found one scurrilous. And so, 1 Magazine Whose Features Are Not To Be Trusted-

Far Out.

 

That doesn't mean it's not a good game and I can rarely help myself when the opportunity to make a list presents itself. So, 5 artists that I can't stand-

obviously Frank Zappa, inevitably Queen, necessarily Pink Floyd, quite possibly Black Sabbath and Music by John Miles.

But I'd prefer to be writing about things I like, not those I don't like. If you don't like football, Eurovision, the ongoing debacle of politics or Strictly Come Dancing, you don't have to. Don't, then.    

Ackroyd, Henry James, Four Poems, Next Prime Minister

Chichester's Oxfam bookshop served up Peter Ackroyd's essays in The Collection and Henry James, The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw this week. 

Ackroyd will be taken in bite-sized bits. Going straight to his Larkin, by way of the Motion biography, one finds him taking a dim view of Larkin's dim views without any compensating consideration of the consolations. He is firmly set against the man and his poems and unforgiving. Looking at his verdicts on other poets, that seems to be his way. Undoubtedly highly astute and discriminating, he is also sometimes a bit cheap in his put downs and one is tempted to put him and his book down, too, in the same way. Much of the journalism comes from The Spectator and there's an unattractive disdain in his tone until he gets to a poet like Prynne who is one whose poems are difficult enough for him. 

Maybe it's a good idea to read writers one doesn't like sometimes but after a while this is one volume that might find itself back on Oxfam's shelves in due course.

Whereas Henry James, who I've long thought I wouldn't like, is likely to be collected much further. His reputation for overly involved sentences and being heavy going was not corroborated by The Aspern Papers which I have just enjoyed enormously and seen off in short order. Atmospheric, beautifully done and Venetian, one wonders at the intensity of obsession with the great poet, Jeffrey Aspern, and the fact that Juliana Bordereau, his girlfriend, is now 150 years old when 100 would be plenty but that was captivating stuff and it might have turned out that James was the greatest writer I'd not read before and whatever else Oxfam have of his is likely to follow The Turn of the Screw. 

--

In case it transpires that I return to the sullen art of poetry readings in the near future, I rehearsed with the microphone on the laptop and have produced a recording entitled Four Poems. It fits perfectly into the five minutes I'm guessing would be the requirement, even including thirty seconds to get up and walk to the front. I wouldn't want to do more than five minutes, not least because I'm not sure many would want to listen for any longer, but it's hardly worth going to do less.

Not having heard myself do it much before, it's not as easy as one might think to get it as good as it sounds in one's head. I know the rhythms are there because I put them in but it's necessary to concentrate to get them right.

After four attempts it wasn't bad, without being flawless, but not to worry. It was intended to be made available here but it looks like incorporating audio files isn't possible, or at least far too difficult for me to do. So I guess it doesn't matter anymore.

The four poems are Piccadilly Dusk, Fiction, Windy Miller and Rainyday Woman. 

--

Meanwhile, surely even the political obsessives at Times Radio must eventually weary of reporting and speculating on the process of arriving at our seventh Prime Minister in ten years. To think we once looked down on Italy for their rapid turnover of governments.

Running the country must be a hard job and yet those doing it feel the need to continue with the internal machinations of what is only really a game of realizing their individual ambitions.

Keir Starmer is a good man hard done by, let down by his own party more than anybody else because, like most recent Labour Prime Ministers, he's not really Labour. It can't be wrong to lack charisma because Attlee was the best there ever was but he's not very good at it. The parallels with his direct opposite, Boris, pile up, most noticeably when he announces he's going to do ten years when he might not have ten more weeks.

I tipped Shabana Mahmood here a fewc weeks ago but that was about as good as the feeling I once had for Amber Rudd. So far unblemished, she'd no more carry her backbenchers with her than Keir or any other bluish type who might try to balance the books as a priority. But it's an impossible outcome to call. And whoever wins this time has three more years to survive and so will by no means be guaranteed to lead Labour into the next General Election. When was the last time the leader of the Conservative party could be backed at 50/1, and more, to be the Next Prime Minister.

These are unlikely days but it's likely they will get unlikelier yet.  

Edward Thomas on Richard Jefferies

 Edward Thomas does Richard Jefferies something of a disfavour in his critical biography. It's a brilliant, clear sighted and appreciative account but it quotes so heavily from the Jefferies books that one feels as if one has been provided with the salient points, a generous selection of highlights and know Jefferies well enough from it without needing to go to the original texts unless one wants the fine detail. It's such a great tribute of close reading and deep appreciation that it threatens to eclipse the need for its subject.

I've had it here for years but it soon became apparent that I'd only ever read the first chapter, which is a survey of the countryside south of Swindon that I know not quite as well as they did from having ridden through parts of it on a bike in the 1990's.

Thomas and Jefferies are kindred spirits in many ways, being so attentive to nature. Thomas was really a city man, though, and appreciated the countryside as a visitor. Coate, when Jefferies was there, wasn't on the outskirts of Swindon, it was a separate place. Thus Jefferies is, or first was, the sort of rural man who, however thoughtful and dreamy he might have been, loved the natural world in the same way as Ted Hughes did and King Charles III once did, who both saw fit to kill it whether by gun, fishing rod or other device. To the credit of Jefferies, he at least progressed to a preference for watching a bit longer and preferring to delay or make less use of his weaponry. Whereas Hughes often seemed to be reducing animals to their visceral parts and Jefferies sometimes becomes all mystical about what nature has to offer, it is Thomas whose sensitivity to the elements might appear more mainstream to us now, who get our milk from Tesco and much of our countryside from train windows.  

The autobiographical The Story of My Heart, the hymn to female beauty The Dewy Morn and the novel without a plot, Amaryllis at the Fair, look like the places to go in due course, perhaps Amaryllis first, but, as has happened before, I intend to go further into a writer and then another turns up - and here comes Henry James- but Jefferies has been tremendous value so far and I'm by no means finished with him yet.