Angelina Kopyrina's Rachmaninov in the Menuhin Room

Angelina Kopyrina, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, Mar 20

Sometimes everyone's a winner. In a special Friday event in the Menuhin Room, Angelina Kopyrina was provided with a dress rehearsal before she takes her Rach to Paris, the piano benefitted from the box office proceeds going towards its maintenance but, most of all, the audience witnessed a grandstand of a performance that possibly, if possible, went beyond what we've had from either Angelina or the piano before.

Having completed her Ph. D. with the catchy title, Rachmaninov’s piano sonatas: Issues of performance interpretation considered through the historical background, artistic influences, the scores, and performance practice, the two sonatas are central to the things she does. By way of preparation for this event, I did some homework, too, and played a standard-issue sort of recording- if there is such a thing- over and again in the hope of finding comparisons.

Much of that is inevitably down to the difference between a disc played on a machine made by Sony and a piano played in real time right in front of you but there was more to it than that. There was more definition and contrast in Angelina, slower when slow at the beginning of no. 1, more fff when necessary and certainly quicker when quick. I understood that where the disc does 41.04 for no. 1, Angelina takes a few minutes off that. 

The first movement evokes Faust, so beloved of those diabolic Romantic types, and comes as a downpour of extravagance and anguish but where I'd anticipated something much calmer regarding Gretchen in the second it still came with intensity and fire. The third marched towards its fateful climax in a mesmeric, torrential struggle.

During the Q&A afterwards I felt it a point worth making that some of us, if not her, might have benefitted from an interval in order to recover a little bit from the experience but within a couple of minutes, we were into no.2.     

The quality of the Steinway no doubt helps in such an avalanche but after ten minutes it was already undoubtedly a standing ovation performance and I'm not sure I've ever seen such after the first piece in a programme but, as Andrew said, it's the first time it's happened in the Menuhin Room. 

I often thought, when training towards long distance cycling events, that it was the effort one put in after one felt one had reached one's limit that built fitness, stamina and resilience and maybe rest is bad for you. Thus there was no time to reflect or discuss what we had been through so far. Perhaps it is character-building to continue onwards but, yes, there would usually be an interval for the benefit of the faint-hearted.

The Sonata no. 2, op. 36, is about bells more than anything else while being half the length of no. 1 but still achieving similar giddy heights. The Lento second movement finally put some ethereal beauty in among the blitz, poignant and with great emotional depth. For once not sitting on the far left, I was in front of Russell in his accustomed position on the right and so saw nothing of the keyboard, only Angelina wrapped in her rapt attention like everybody else was. But, of course, it can't end like that and with the most impulsive of gestures, we were left thrilled if also battered but safe in the knowledge that there was no other Friday lunchtime like it available anywhere else.

Up to now my favourite Angelina repertoire has been the Bach-Busoni Chaconne and the Prokofiev Sonata, the Beethoven almost being taken as a given thing but, as a performance, this probably tops the lot. I'd still prefer Tatiana Nikolayeva and her Well-Tempered Klavier for the long-term relationship of the years on the desert island. But, having thought that the best thing I'd go to all year happened in Wigmore Hall in January and that question was a one-horse race closed there and then, I'm glad now to have a shortlist of two. 

Georgina Duncan at Lunchtime Live!

 Georgina Duncan, Portsmouth Cathedral, Mar 19

English Literature graduates can make fine pianists. There's Andrew McVittie. There's Georgina Duncan. There isn't me but two out of three ain't bad.

Georgina began with her favourite composer, Grieg and To Spring, suitably sunlit. Her repertoire is Romantic and Impressionist with Robert Schumann's Kinderszenen next moving from innocence, through some hasty keyboard work and a bit of a sing-song to some lingeringly phrased Traumerei. 

Of particular interest was John Field, only a generation younger than Mozart, and two Nocturnes in which perhaps the right hand might have been playing a Mozart sonata over a lush left hand by Chopin.

Grieg's Gade was a country walk en plein air and Hjernad (Homeward) an invigorating striding out before running up the steps to the front door. A highlight for me, though, was the 'uncharacteristically showy' Impromptu, op. 90 No. 2, performed like the Minute Waltz with deft fingerwork and exuberance unleashed.

The Impressionist parts were provided by Debussy's prelude Bruyeres which could have been shadows in the clair de lune except I find it means 'heather'. Ravel's Sonatine, M.40, second movement, offered wide panoramas, before more Debussy, Cakewalk from Children's Corner, was a boisterous finale, almost ragtime, maybe verging on Erik Satie's quirkiness.

All of which made for a happy programme confidently presented by a young pianist with verve and enthusiasm and, it is to be hoped, a bright future. 

Dominika Mak in Chichester

Dominika Mak, Chichester Cathedral, Mar 17 

Some composers have onomatopoeiac names that pre-figure the sound of their music. By no means all of them but a few. The zest imparted into Stravinsky in that second syllable goes into The Rite of Spring, Liszt is a bolt of lightning and Corelli very decorative. Thus, the one syllable of Brahms stretches out like a semi-breve, like his extended melodic lines full of longing. Except in the early Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 5, he is moody and impassioned, ready to be in thrall to Clara Schumann and apparently not yet settled into the lush unfolding of the fourth symphony.

First up, though, by way of contrast was a Scarlatti Sonata, in C# minor - one of the 555, you can't miss it. Dominika Mak brought out all its crystalline qualities in the luminous fluency she brought out of the Chichester Yamaha.

The Brahms, though, begins with grand gestures apparently coming out of dark places. Only 20 when he wrote this third and last of his piano sonatas and he comes to it with the vigour of youth. The second movement is an Andante that takes as its text,

Through evening's shade, the pale moon gleams

While rapt in love's ecstatic dreams

Two hearts are fondly beating.  

Dominika's sensitive playing made this perhaps the most memorable section, the reflectiveness becoming climactic before what sounded like ecstacies in the Scherzo.

If Brahms admired Clara, Beethoven was a similarly huge presence in his imagination and the Intermezzo insistently plays on the 'fate' motif from the Fifth Symphony as if possessed by its spirit. But the Allegro finale elaborates its theme into an affirmative statement of hope. If it's true that it requires great virtuosity without being overly spectacular or showing off that is very much what Dominika Mak achieved.

It's a week of piano sonatas for me. It took me a long time to realize that 'size' in music isn't dependent on the number of musicians involved. A Haydn symphony is generally neat and tidy whereas sonatas can be enormous. The Scarlatti was so short that the audience didn't realize that that was all there was and it went unapplauded, there was no doubt that the Brahms had reached the end, though.

Weldon Kees - Fall Quarter

I don't think I've ever been too concerned to know the 'canon'. Not all the great books are my favourites. I don't mean there is no canon, as has been posited in recent decades, but I do mean that we all make our own for ourselves.

Weldon Kees wouldn't make it into the generally recognized canon but I like him and lots of things about him. I dare say he is minor compared to Tolstoy as a fiction writer or Milton as a poet but that doesn't impinge on one's enjoyment of reading him.

Not all the poems are masterpieces but there is a handful worth having and I prefer to judge people by their best work rather than take away points for their less good. Similarly with the stories which are fine if not crucial. There are a number of reasons why Fall Quarter, his only surviving novel, went unpublished and not all of them are that it wasn't any good.

 

It's not often that I LOL, laugh out loud, while reading, but have done twice in this. William Clay has taken up a post teaching in a downbeat provincial college in Nebraska. He looks up Janet Eliot whose name he's been given. As with Mrs. Oatley who he meets in a bar next up, she's brilliantly conceived,

"Can't you drive faster?", she said. "I scarcely feel I'm moving when I'm doing less than sixty." 

"I don't want to smash us up."

"Oh, don't worry about that ! I've been in hundreds of accidents and never got scratched. Once I was with a boy and we ran right into a train and I wasn't hurt a bit."

"What happened to him?"

"He died."

 

Bits of it might be a fraction overdone but it's art and art emphasizes certain elements at the possible expense of credulity to make its point. At university 45 years ago Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was on the reading list. One of the worst books I've ever read, alongside A Card for the Clubs by Les Dawson. I've not read Kerouac. One doesn't shock by setting out to shock. You create something like a cartoon if you do that, more like Tom & Jerry. Deadpan is better.

Fall Quarter has a great facility, something that those who like Salinger would enjoy and, at halfway through, I'd take it as it is rather than 'improve' it further. It is possibly the best of Weldon Kees. I'm glad it saw print eventually and that I got a nice copy of it. 

--

In the second half, the hapless William Clay meets Dorothy Bruce, a little town flirt and radio singer with who he, of course, becomes hopelessly devoted to in the face of all the evidence that she is treating him like a doormat. It's a plot used more than once in London and Brighton settings at roughly the same time by Patrick Hamilton,

Yet he knew, following her with his eyes, that she could treat him any way she pleased, that she could do anything she wanted, and he would still be hanging around, unprotesting. 

 

It's an episode rather than a broad, sweeping canvas of a story and thus likely to be considered 'minor' because it's not Anna Karenina but that's no way to assess the worth of anything. I thought it was great because I enjoyed it in all its downbeat ingloriousness. What a great pity it is that the other attempts Kees had at novel writing are lost.

Between the Stops

 Between the Stops is a project in which Portsmouth busses have poems by local poets in them. There is photography involved, too. I don't know what the measurable benefits of such community feelgood initiatives are but I'm not against them trying.

Today some of the featured poets read their poems at the Hard Interchange and it was a most worthy effort. I went to see Kev do his and took a picture that, once cropped, comes out in the pointillist style of Seurat.

The bus home happened to feature a poem by somebody else I know, Maggie Sawkins, so I took a picture of that, too.  

The Monolulu Cup Result

Well, what can you do.

I let in a late entrant who looked harmless enough and he goes and wins it. My father hasn't ever backed a horse in his 89 years and then he turns up, picks three horses that all get placed and he scores a tidy +7.71 and nobody else got to him. It was a week with some surprises but not many as big as that.

The Professor showed a profit having either benefitted from or suffered a non-runner. Perhaps next time everyone can nominate a reserve, just in case, but had the replacement run and lost he'd have been -2.27, not +2.27 so who's to say.

The Monolulu Cup double was landed with, actually, the only two winners being those selected by two participants and for the most part the punditry was not of the highest standard but it made for a compelling game with Jagwar, Salver and Kabral du Mathan all looking in one way or another like near misses.

It could have been so different but it wasn't, so Congratulations to the Magpie and the first thing Notts County have won since the 1894 FA Cup. 

I don't think we need list the full result, the rest 'also ran'.  

--

In several ways it wasn't a great week. I'd not be saying that if I'd landed the £250k ITV7. Little local difficulties wouldn't have ruined that for me. But I couldn't see it being a classic Cheltenham, one of the best for years, as A.P. tried to talk it up. A lot of the big races were wide open and it felt even more so as some short-priced favourites failed. But the ongoing problems at the start, resulting in the serious falling out of two jockeys, wasn't pretty. And neither did Willie Mullins's comments on the ground help much when it didn't quite suit his horse in one race. It seemed to suit plenty of the others of his.

Several big name horses weren't there for their different reasons and while Lossiemouth is a worthy champion hurdler there were three horses she really needed to beat who she didn't get the opportunity to. 

Perhaps we will have to have starting stalls and, by all means, if Willie wants to stay away that's entirely his decision if Good to Soft isn't what he wants. Other trainers will be glad of the chance of his prize money.

The Monolulu Cup

This year, if Cheltenham wasn't exciting enough, DGBooks is thrilled to be introducing the Monolulu Cup, a tipster competition named after Prince Monolulu who in his day made John McCririck look like a shrinking violet.

I asked for three horses for Cheltenham, with each way as an option, and decided that a Patent-  the three singles, three doubles and the treble- would be the scoring system in the event of anybody having a winner. It rewards imaginative selections, if and when they are successful.

Cilla

each way 

Golden Ace (Tues 4.00) 

Jeriko du Reponet (Thurs 5.20)

Haiti Couleurs (Fri 4.00)

 

Kevin 'Cayton' Rogers 

 

each way 

 

Poniros (Tues 4.00)

No Drama This End (Weds 1.20/Fri 3.20)  

Salver (Weds 2.00)

Lord Stubbsy

Backmersackme (Tues 5.20)

Selma De Vary (Thurs/Fri 1.20)

Supremely West (Thurs 4.40)

 

The Magpie 

 

each way 

 

Mydaddypaddy (Tues 1.20)

Winston Junior (Tues 2.40)  

Brighterdaysahead (Tues 4.00) 

Pop Songs

I Started a Joke (Weds 2.40, or wherever it runs) - the Bee Gees

Ace of Spades (Thurs 4.40) - Motorhead

Wonderwall (Fri 4.40) - Oasis 

if any of the above are non-runners, then,

Macho Man (Tues 1.20)  - The Village People

The Professor

L'Eau Du Sud (Weds 4.00)

Supremely West (Thurs 4.40)

A Pai De Nom (Fri 5.20)

 

Racetrack Wiseguy

 

Old Park Star (Tues 1.20)  

Lulamba (Tues 2.00)

Kabral du Mathan (Thurs 3.20) 

 

Spenno 

 

Old Park Star (Tues 1.20)

Jagwar (Tues 3.20)

The New Lion (Tues 4.00)

--

It's as fascinating as any of the races with a variety of strategies involved. One entrant suggested an allowance because they were up against 'professionals'. Not quite that perhaps but it is Spenno, the Prof and Wiseguy that go for what might be regarded as safer options with the Prof brand-loyal but nowadays to the Skeltons and not Mr. Henderson. 

Two horses are nominated twice so there's a Monolulu Cup double in Old Park Star and Supremely West. But there have been shifts in the markets of a few races as money arrives from Ireland to gainsay the UK optimism that they might make a game of it this year. Old Park Star is a bigger price than that I gormlessly took, ignoring my own advice that ante post is a bad idea. But the improved odds might help in this game and Henderson horses are known to be able to drift and still win.

It will be refreshing and well deserved if one of those having an old-fashioned punt were to win. We might as well all abandon hope if it proves that picking pop song titles was the right answer. Batting like Boycott has its disadvantages when the bowling is like that of Michael Holding. Wiseguy and Spenno could be back in the pavilion early doors.

We will see. Game on.

Simon Armitage Library Tour, Portsmouth BookFest

 Simon Armitage Library Tour, Portsmouth BookFest, Menuhin Room, March 4

It appeared to fall nicely that Simon Armitage's 10-year tour of libraries coincided, when it reached the right part of the alphabet, with Portsmouth's BookFest. Having been a student of Geography here and visited a couple of times recently, he knew his way.

As diplomatically as I am able, I need to explain that poetry is a broad church, as is music, as is painting, and if one 'likes poetry' one doesn't necessarily like it all. 

The host from BookFest displayed an overwhelming enthusiasm that made up in hyperbole for everything it lacked in irony. If her build-ups and reactions to the support acts, Maggie Sawkins, Portsmouth’s own Laureate Sam Cox, and Majid Dhana, went unquestioned, her next level left Simon with little option but to pause at the microphone and say, 'no pressure, then'.

The Menuhin Room fitted in 100 and tickets were much sought after. They could have given away- for it was free - plenty more. I dare say the majority took Sam and Majid's exuberantly affirmative performances at face value and felt enabled, inspired and uplifted by their messages of hope and deeply sincere belief in good in the face of all the evidence. But their poems have only one layer and while rhythm and rhyme are essential elements of the music that can make 'poetry' something other than 'ordinary language', not necessarily when that's all it has. When my friend discreetly got up and went out to having a coughing fit - luckily we were near a door- I thought the same as when another friend had done so in Portsmouth Cathedral during a sub-standard performance but, no, they were genuine coughing fits on both occasions.

And, no, we are polite people, happy to give anyone a hearing and well aware that what we are hearing might be brilliant to others, that it might even be us that are wrong. But for me the sincerity was overdone, the righteousness was comic and the poems were not my sort of thing.

Maggie Sawkins, opening the second half, provided the improvement that I was confident she would. She has a more guarded attitude and can do wry humour. I look back at her poem, A Sort of Bargaining, her reading copy of which she gave me after just snatching a competition ahead of me many years ago and by now can think, yes, that's fair enough. She's any good, knows what she's about and thus uses language in subtler ways than bashing it about like a Tonka toy.

And then came Simon, a class act who has done such things so many times and is entirely at ease working an audience with his self-effacing stories. There was nothing at all to find fault with at all in the delivery of the other poets, only the fact they were trying too hard while not having any but the standard poetry reading devices to do it with. Simon doesn't look like he's trying very hard. Probably because he isn't because he doesn't have to. He's had audiences spellbound by his methods time and again. It's a sort of anti-showmanship but, exuding a calm confidence, it entirely works.

Simon's not on my list of especially favourite poets and poetry readings generally are low on my agenda. If one doesn't know the poems already then it's not easy to assimilate them on one first hearing although all four of them did well to read poems mostly not so demanding that one needed much more.

Apparently there's a 'poetry boom' in progress. I can remember several such before. It doesn't mean that Simon is going to be as recognizable a figure as Tennyson was in his time. I happened to see him from a bus, approaching the railway station in Portsmouth City Centre the next day and he wasn't being mobbed or signing autographs. He had quite rightly answered a Q with his A that none of the more popular art forms needed to worry about poetry.

He is tremendous at what he does, however realtively few have the slightest knowledge of, or interest in, what that is. By all means it's a dubious undertaking and not an obvious one to get rich by. There are football players that not even football supporters have ever heard of earning much more money than the most eminent poets that every poetry reader has heard of.

So be it. Everybody had a good time. Even me. 

The End of Pushkin

 I'm glad I went back to the Pushkin biography (by T. J. Binyon). It wasn't heavy going, there was just so much of it. How so much detail has survived from so long ago is a thing in itself. Like any rip-roaring roller-coaster, it built to a tremendous, highly-charged dramatic climax. Tragedy is often inevitable and so it seems here with the circumstances and the personalities involved.

Pushkin himself is hot-headed, some might say reckless, but he is worthy of some sympathy when it comes to the appalling Baron Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d'Anthès who was a persistent nuisance in his pursuit of Natalya, Pushkin's wife. One has to say he does look like a cad. I'm not sure how many times Pushkin in his turn had tried his chances with other spoken-for women but that is not the mindset of the alpha male who regards anything he wants as rightfully his and everything that's his to be exclusively so.

Despite the drawn-out intercessions of those close to the bitter rivals, the duel that Pushkin had demanded could not be averted. The rules of a duel are brilliantly fair, like a game of 'chicken'. There is a limit beyond which neither side can move any closer but they begin several paces behind that. They can move towards it and shoot whenever they see fit but they only have one bullet and, having shot it, must stay where they are with their opponent able to take his time before using his. I say 'his' - it's hard to imagine women being quite so daft as to want to do such a thing.

In the event, d'Anthès shot first, hit Pushkin who was injured but insisted he could still take his shot. His effort wasn't as fatal as that of d'Anthès proved to be a few days later. D'Anthès was sentenced to hang for taking part but pardoned by the Emperor. Arrangements for Pushkin's funeral were amended to lessen the possibility of insurrection by any revolutionary group seeing it as an opportunity to promote their cause.

The debts left behind were enormous but Nicholas I not only covered all that but looked after Natalya and her children generously which did nothing to quieten suspicions that she was, or had been, his mistress but there is no solid evidence for that.

Legends grew up around poets in the C20th but, blimey, they didn't make them like Pushkin any more. For better or worse.

--

And so, right on time, while writing that there was a knock on the door and it was the delivery of Fall Quarter, the novel by Weldon Kees, all the way from America. That is good timing.  

The Ivory Duo at Lunchtime Live !

 The Ivory Duo, Portsmouth Cathedral, Mar 5

At the obvious risk of appearing overly highbrow, the way the local music year moves on might might be compared with Ovid's Fasti, a calendar of customs, holidays and rituals. Having so recently had the Brighton New Music composers at Lunchtime Live! and the English Piano Trio in Chichester, the latest recurrent event was the always welcome return of the Ivory Duo.

Most often seen and heard as four hands on one keyboard, Panayotis Archontides and Natalie Tsaldarakis were today mostly two soloists.

With Natalie on first, Debussy's Pour Le Piano: Prelude was a dark drama that unloaded a few explosives that didn't match with the sunlit nave. At least as technically demanding in what was going to prove to be such a programme, Ginastera's Danzas Argentinas was rhythmically complex in no. 1 before hauntingly pretty in no. 2 but both presenting different dancing challenges, had one wanted to try.

Panayotis took over and was soon up to a similar level of viruosity in the op.12 Bagatelles of Miklós Rózsa. After the short, sharp shock of Kleiner Marsch, Valse Lente complimented the light, Canzone was long on the palette and, there's often a clue in the title, Capriccietto was capricious to the point of frenzy.  

In a bumper edition of Lunchtime Live! an extensive selection of Hugh Benham's work included Home Street, more pyrotechnics with glimpses of lyricism, Memoranda about a Wiltshire childhood which might not have been a text book idyll, the full-blooded chiming of Pigeons on a Wire and the brisk, invigorating duet Good Morning. 

By no means all 'easy listening', there was much to admire in the energy and musicianship. There were times one might have thought there were four hands at work when there had been only two. 

English Piano Trio in Chichester

 English Piano Trio, Chichester Cathedral, March 3

I listen to Schubert more intently since a little while ago hearing myself say to an eminent local musician that I never found him 'down-hearted'. The look of disbelief that that elicited was concerning. Do I even understand the first thing about what I'm hearing or do different people take different things from the same pieces of music.
The Sonatensatz in B-flat major might not provide the ideal test case, though, it having been written when he was 15. In one Allegro movement, it brought the light from the Bishop's Palace garden, where Spring was happening, indoors. The Chichester faithful are by now familiar with the fluency and ease with which Jane Faulkner, Pal Banda and Timothy Ravenscroft combine to make such a consummate sound.
Rachmaninov's Trio élégiaque in G minor was an entirely different thing, beginning mistily before Timothy's cascading piano accompanied the melodic line in the violin and cello. Reaching a climax somewhere near halfway, it recapitulated until drawing to a sombre conclusion. While still identifiably Rach, it didn't quite overflow like the piano sonatas that have recently annexed my turntable in preparation for a big, upcoming date that I felt the need to be ready for.
On a previous visit, Pal had explained how his cello had spent some time at the Esterhazy court and so there's a fair chance it already knew Haydn's Trio in E-flat major, Hob. XV:29 or something like it from long ago. It's not usual to enquire after melancholy in Haydn and the blithe violin-led Allegretto with elaborate piano variations immediately introduced us to the debonair classicism that civilisation once made possible. But he's not that simple and needs to direct the Andantino's poignancy towards innocentemente and perhaps the most gorgeous part of a gorgeous programme. The Presto finale came in a florid hurry, which makes one wonder about the etymology of 'flurry'. Timothy had explained that when asked if the piece is hard to play, he says, yes, it is. By way of compensation, it's very easy to listen to.