An afternoon of Romantic Russian chamber music in Petersfield

Valentina Seferinova, Anna and Mikhail Lezdkan, St. Peter's, Petersfield, Oct 18 

This week's family affair concerts were completed by father and daughter Mikhail and Anna Lezdkan, cello and violin, with Valentina Seferinova, piano, playing C19th and C20th Russian music from Tchaikovsky to Shostakovich.

The first half was Valentina and Mikhail with a solemn Andante Cantabile by Tchaikovsky, two pieces by Glazunov including the lithe Spanish Serenade, the exotic Orientale by Cui but most memorably the two fastest cello parts I've ever heard, from Mikhail. Seeing Rimsky-Korsakov's famous Flight of the Bumblebee on the programme I'd assumed it would be Valentina providing the fireworks but I've been wrong before and she provided the convivial romp of his Serenade op. 37 after Mikhail's dazzling performance made his cello do things I've not heard any other do. I know John Adams wrote something called A Short Ride in a Fast Machine but that was made to look like a Model T Ford in comparison. 

The first half ended with more Tchaikovsky, the Pezzo Capricciosio, which became capricious when changing from sonorous to dizzy but I don't think the speed record set by the bumblebee was quite equalled.

Valentina opened the second half with Rachmaninov's Barcarolle, op. 10, which, if you wanted it to, could have conjured a night éclaboussé des étoiles, a memorable phrase from Gide at 'A' level that has finally come in useful, meaning 'bespangled with stars'. And then Anna made her belated appearance and made it worth our wait, joining Mikhail for what was for me the find of the day in Glière's 8 Pieces for violin and cello, op. 39. From the sepulchral Prelude, through the retro baroque of the Gavotte, the enchanting Berceuse through to the rapid Etude, it proved that Glière must be a composer I need to know more about and that, not having seen Anna before, it is to be hoped she is available for more appearances in the area to bring us more of her poise, confidence and great talent.

But all that having been said, Shostakovich - for me- could pick up all those composers and carry them. That he wrote his op. 8 Piano Trio aged 16 is hard to fathom. Written not long after The Waste Land, it does all that Eliot's desiccated literariness might have wanted to achieve but, with the obvious advantage of music being better than poetry, does it infinitely more convincingly. Its barren beauty with the St. Peter's piano standing up well to Valentina's immense power and drama was both emotionally and aesthetically enthralling. I'm sure I've not heard either Valentina or Mikhail to such great effect before and then you multiply them by Anna and they are suddenly in danger of having provided the best performance I've seen this year.

It's been tremendous to see two events in two days so well supported in Petersfield. It shouldn't be surprising given the high quality of the musicians that have appeared but music is in the best of health there. We should all be glad and I'm sure all those who went on either day or both will be.

Duo Timossi in Petersfield

 Duo Timossi, St. Peter's, Petersfield, October 17

It being nearly two hundred years since Beethoven died and exactly a plentiful number of years since I was born, Sara Deborah and Alessandro Timossi's first instalment of their Violin Sonata cycle began to mark the first while inadvertently contributing to the happy occasion of the second. Petersfield has major Beethoven things lined up for 2027 and thus need to bring this part of them forward by way of a prelude to fit it all in.

The reason for beginning the series with nos. 4 and 5 is possibly that nos. 1-3 are no good. Not 'no good' by most terrestrial standards, of course, but some say not quite as good as Beethoven usually is, those being early work. It's a bit like saying some late Vermeer is only relatively 'workmanlike' when it can give most paintings and head start and still leave them behind. 

Op. 23's Presto is impetuous with Alessandro's piano on the verge of becoming stormy. The Andante is daintier and good humoured, maybe owing something to Haydn, and the Allegro featured an industrious piano part with Sara's violin aspiring to more rarefied air before they combined in a bravura climax. All of which was hugely to be enjoyed until, after an interval, op. 24 was something else again.

The optimism of the Allegro seemed to have an affinity with Sara's natural way of playing, the carefree melody leading into dance-like passages. Her excellent programme notes provide more than enough material for me to just lift parts out them out and give myself a day off so I will make use of how the Adagio hovers 'between Sehnsucht and hope' and be grateful to have learned the German for 'longing'. In the Scherzo, her violin was a fraction of a beat behind the piano, making for some engaging effect. I'm guessing that's not as easy to do as playing in strict unison, almost like getting it wrong deliberately, but it was only one more part of the technique of one of the top echelon of musicians in the catchment area I regard as my own. The gaiety of the Rondo finale was a joyous thing. The Spring Sonata, as it is known, is one of the many not given its name by Beethoven. While I'm sure it is meant to refer to the coming alive of the Spring season, an alternative interpretation could be that it's a reference to the energetic uncoiling of a spring, for those of us who enjoy artworks that can mean more than one thing at a time, and the whole concert was a great advertisement for the rest of the series in which I intend to collect the whole set.

Piano à Deux (Robert Stoodley & Linda Ang Stoodley) at Chichester

 Robert Stoodley & Linda Ang Stoodley, Chichester Cathedral, October 13

Autumn has properly arrived and with it comes three concerts in the diary this week, all family affairs which is a rare alignment.

The Stoodleys come with a complete show including shared commentary and even some choreography. First, though were two Brahms Hungarian Dances - no.5 rollicking and, I'd say, jokey and no.6 with further mood swings.

Some pieces are by now hard to separate from the uses they were put to long after their composers left them to us. Frank Muir made The Nutcracker Suite into Everyone's a Fruit and Nutcase and Bach found himself the author of an advert for cigars after the Berceuse from Fauré's Dolly Suite became, for some of a certain vintage, the comforting memory of Listen with Mother on the Home Service. Robert and Linda perhaps carried forward some of their Hungarian energy into their tempo which could have been dreamier because they didn't slumber through it. Mi-a-ou, as was explained, was not as feline as one might have anticipated because that's not what it's about, and then the rhapsodic onrush of Le pas espagnol in some ways anticipated Rachmaninov.

Robert and Linda's arrangements of seven songs from his op. 21 were presented in three sections, the bigger canvas of Melody running into the enchantment of Loneliness after Linda got up, nipped round the back and took up the right-hand stool while Robert moved to his left while transposing into the second piece, a neat manoeuvre I'd not seen before but  saw more than once today. Then, Lilacs was a thing of some delicacy, The Ratcatcher had the merest suspicion of Scott Joplin and Spring Waters was a cascading downpour. Rachmaninov somehow always manages to convince either in spite of, or by doing something more than, the Romantic excess that he could otherwise be thought guilty of. To finish, the lushness of How Fair This Spot led up to the climax with What Wealth of Rapture, with a big clue in its title, and with Linda leaving Robert solo to the last few bars of a very amicable, impressive, well-rehearsed set.   

It's been a while since I did Chichester, the summer being such an inconvenience, so it's good to get back towards the old routine. 

Wittgenstein, 2

 There's not a great deal of point reading a book one doesn't understand and my copy of the Tractatus is purely decorative but, as hoped, Ray Monk's biography does a fine job of explaining as much of Wittgenstein as I'm ever likely to grasp. 

It brings with it some big surprises, not least the Christianity. For someone devoted to logic and equations, coming from an interest in mathematics, God seems like an unlikely conclusion to arrive at. For all his deep, deep thought and austerity, it is disappointing to find him relying on mysticism and using certain words to mean specifically what he wants them to mean, rather what is more widely understood by them, seems like a big abdication of responsibility if not a letdown from someone who, I had thought, was better than that.

Wittgenstein was an Idealist, where ideas come before things. I simply can't see how that can be. Plato was an Idealist, Aristotle a Realist. It seems to me an Idealist is the more likely to get locked into their own thinking. If reading this book results in Wittgenstein going down in my estimation, as a philosopher, I'm glad to find that Derrida was only mistakenly seen as an Idealist but,

In reality, Derrida meant that our access to the world is always mediated by systems of signs, traces, and differences, making a pure, unmediated "view from nowhere" impossible. 

I am indebted to Google's AI summary for that and am grateful. While a small part of my paltry B.A. (Hons) was in Philosophy, I'm not up to it.

But I am glad to be making some trivial sense of it all and the biography has edged out The Anatomy of Melancholy in this heavyweight contest for my attentions. To think of Wittgenstein teaching in primary schools in rural Austria is remarkable. He meets his one and only known girlfriend in his mid-thirties. He could have had access to great family wealth but disdained it for reasons that Ray Monk suggests come from his difficult upbringing. Three of his brothers commit suicide and it is an idea that recurs to him at regular intervals. Whether one is interested in Philosophy or not, it is a remarkable life to read but, as with so many 'genius' types, not a happy one.

Roughly halfway through the book, I'm keen to press on towards the ending, knowing that he changed his mind, like so many of us do. That bleak, haunted look says much about the downside of the sort of intellect that makes almost everybody else struggle and so I'm wondering if any change of mind brought him back from the brink of madness because if you are that clever and yet still have to rely on mysticism, your own definitions of words and if you look mad, act mad and even the finest minds can't understand you, that could be what you are. I don't want to think that. I want him to escape the prison of his tautologies and dubious ways of escaping meaninglessness. As such, it is quite an exciting book. 

Wittgenstein

 122 pages, of nearly 600, and the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein is a thoroughly worthwhile read. That comes as a pleasant surprise when I had anticipated heavy going and impenetrable passages of epistemology. So far so good with how Ray Monk's account in narrating the life with a manageable level of detail supported by summaries of the ideas in which one can at least believe one has an idea what is involved in the ideas. 

The first point seems to be how well Wittgenstein did to avoid suicide with siblings and contemporaries making such a vogue of it. Being brilliant to the point of exhaustion and beyond the comprehension of almost all the rest of humanity can't be easy, taking oneself off to Norway to be alone to think incessantly about logic wouldn't usually be considered healthy. But he lives at an intensity that only such dedication can provide purpose and fulfilment and, while being well liked by some, he can be difficult and important relationships with Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore suffer as a result. There is clearly more to logic than first year Philosophy where inductive arguments seemed straightforward. 

I had thought I was in sympathy with what I understood of his thinking but, at first at least, he rejects empiricism - the evidence of one's senses- in favour of the processes of logic to the extent that he denies it's possible to know there isn't a rhinoceros in the room when Bertie has looked under the table and everywhere else without finding one. But I know the Tractatus is eventually retracted so we will wait and see if he later concedes the rhinoceros-less condition of most domestic accommodation in England.

I'm also surprised how he suddenly accepts Christianity which I wouldn't have thought could be established by empiricism or logic. I'm not convinced by the example of rain in the proposition that 'it's either raining or it isn't', which sounds true because it must be one or the other, but one or two spots might fall on one person and not the person next to them on Southsea seafront and so they would disagree whether it was raining or not. And I'm not yet sure that Wittgenstein escapes from the language that he necessarily has to use to express his abstract ideas. It has long seemed that words in sentences are not sufficient and that their limitations are his.

Madness surely lies waiting for anybody bold enough to take on such enormous questions and no philosopher yet has provided a system that wasn't critiqued and found wanting by the next generation. With Derrida and post-Structuralism it appeared to collapse into meaninglessness and truth was elusive. However attractive one might find elements of Sartre, Barthes or Baudrillard, it could be that nobody really got much further than Socrates. 

As you can see, I haven't grasped it but maybe nobody else has either. To be a total adherent of any philosopher requires the sort of act of faith that Christianity depends on which puts it all down to God while omitting to explain where he came from. But if there was an answer, the game would be over and that would be that. In the meantime, Wittgenstein is a compelling figure with his towering genius ultimately taking him on an arduous journey to nowhere but, gladly, worshipping Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms so at least he got that right.  

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

A pattern begins to emerge after the third Rose Tremain novel in short order. She does the raptures of love very well, time and again, this time in The Gustav Sonata, but also the counter-balancing pain and difficulties.

Central to The Gustav Sonata is the humanitarian offence of falsifying the dates of Jews escaping Nazism into 'neutral' Switzerland and the question of who betrayed who when the police chief who facilitates as many migrants as he can before the border is secured more tightly against them is betrayed by his wife.

It's a complicated web of relationships in which the widow is left trying to lure Gustav, the son, into a relationship in her old age. Meanwhile, Gustav's close childhood friend has a career as a concert pianist undermined by stage fright. It makes for a grim book, no less beautifully realized than The Housekeeper or Absolutely & Forever, but somehow more discomfiting as the unhappiness outweighs the rapture.

It is a good time to wait before overdoing the Tremain, for fear of the law of diminishing returns applying to Music & Silence. Thus The Anatomy of Melancholy might add intervals of relatively light relief during 600 pages of Wittgenstein's life. When the primary texts are hard going- and Wittgenstein is surely a paragon example of that- then a biography can be an easier point of access. It looks like even Ludwig himself didn't expect anybody to understand his Tractatus. 

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The archive Middlemarch recently on BBC4 with Juliet Aubrey, Rufus Sewell, Robert Hardy et al was a masterpiece of both costume drama and seminal novel, a fine example of why the BBC is still worth all of its licence fee and would be even more so if showing more of what it has stored away and caught up with a few more recent good books.

I was once told that my preference for George Eliot over Dickens was somehow inevitable, I'm not now entirely sure why, but surely she is in a different class. Maybe Dickens is a bit more 'obvious' and Eliot is dealing with things more subtly but one can hardly accuse Dickens of creating lurid caricatures when Patrick Malahide's Casaubon, Aubrey's Dorothea, Hardy's Brooke and Sewell's Ladislaw were clearly delineated- to great effect- with minor parts tending towards cartoons, but all the better to make its points in a costume drama that, for the most part, resolves into a happy enough ending.

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Meanwhile, Unearthed: The Mystery of the Shaman Woman arrived at phenomenal conclusions from the discovery of a Mesolithic- 9000 year old- burial site in Germany. It's not for me to say that they came to some very specific conclusions from a few old bones and what was found with them but to create a female shaman who could put herself into a trance by leaning her head back to cut off the blood supply to her head and becoming renowned as a healer is a huge step.

Most compelling was how the discovery, once taken up by the Nazis as an Aryan icon, all white, blond and blue-eyed, was re-made as dark-skinned and the news to me that Europeans were dark-skinned 9000 years ago and those of us who became 'white' only did so due to a change in diet, starchy foods apparently gradually making us paler.

I'd have thought that was an absolute godsend to all us liberal left, 'intellectual elite' who don't think that white is naturally superior. Alongside the documentary about the vast libraries of Timbuktu, it all begins to make Western white culture- all that Bach, Shakespeare, relativity and space exploration- look more like a recent aberration in the longer perspectives of history.

Given the prognostications about the 10% chance of AI finishing off humanity in the next ten years, it could just be that, quite beautifully, all that arrogance and cleverness brought with it its own downfall. It was already clear that if AI was asked to solve such problems as climate change it would realize that it was caused by human beings and, if asked to prevent it, would thus wipe out its cause. It would be a great shame if there was nobody left to appreciate the irony so I suggest we appreciate now, in advance, just in case.   

From the Heart

Tongues and Grooves, From the Heart, Square Tower, Old Portsmouth, Oct 1 

The long-established poetry series, Tongues & Grooves, nowadays mostly presents From the Heart where readers, whether poets or not, undertake to recite poems that are not their own from memory. I find it hard enough to read poems in front of an audience with the text right in front of me so it's unlikely I'd take on the challenge but one way for my good mate, Kev, to improve his status towards 'best mate', should he feel the need, was to choose one of my poems to learn. The very least I could do was turn up to support him.

Maybe about half of the performers get through without being prompted, which is impressive. Nobody attempted They flee from me by Thomas Wyatt but I'm sure that's what the words do under the pressure of performance. And it is the reader's performance rather than the poem one is appreciating. Shelley's not a huge favourite of mine but the recitation of Ozymandias was exemplary. Neither was the poem read by Cat Sawkins but she just about cleaned up in what became a family double when Maggie did Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow which I possibly could have done about fifty years ago but it's not a game that what can expect to improve at with age. Maggie's reading of The Rain Stick, from Seamus Heaney's brilliant book The Spirit Level, was usefully illustrated by the very thing and probably my favourite poem of the evening but it was strange to find oneself applauding a great reading of one's least favourite poet in English Literature - Kae Tempest- but that's how it works. Gareth Toms doing the nearby Armitage public poem, The Theatre of the Sea, revealed him as something of a showman.

It was impressive that a couple of those whose main job was to provide the interval barber shop choir extended their involvement by performing poems, too. And if Maggie is as thoughtfully gifted a presenter as she is a poet then in Janet Ayers she has an ideal co-host whose confidence and demeanour are always well-ahead of the potentially precarious situations of microphone malfunction, unremembered lines or anybody winning too many raffle prizes.

I had no idea what to expect. Poetry readings can, on occasions, be dire experiences. Anybody who fancies having a go at doing poetry 'live' could easily be a recipe for disaster. But many of them have done it before and there's more talent out there than one might think. Poetry isn't always the uplifting, therapeutic thing it is sometimes claimed to be. But at Tongues & Grooves, From the Heart took on all my doubts and cast them aside with the most gracious ease. Hugely enjoyable show in all its variety and good will.

 

 

 Kevin Rogers, once frontman of the Von Trap Family, finds himself performing Romanticism by David Green nearly fifty years later. That's progress for you.