The Complete Works of Bach

And so there it is, then. Just within the year of having bought the 172 discs, all of them have been played, if not quite every note heard as I left the room for a few minutes. I finished this morning with some most enjoyable flute sonatas with dogged bassoon keeping up the bass line, and then keyboard arrangements of concertos by other composers. I think halfway through the year it was announced that some further fragment attributed to Bach had been discovered but the definite list of the complete works, lost and/or found will forever be beyond us and so one can't worry about that.

Perhaps it's inevitable that there's a feeling of, is that it, then, like there would be if one read all literature, knew all there was to know or witnessed the whole universe. It wasn't infinite after all even if at times it implies eternity. And, in such a reductive, begrudging mood, one might have to say Bach is reduced rather than increased by the idea one has 'heard it all'. Of course, it's not been inwardly digested. I never did get to the end of John Eliot Gardiner's Music in the Castle of Heaven which becomes a survey of the cantatas more than anything else. One lifetime wouldn't be enough to grasp it all so thinking that one has in any way covered Bach would be a silly mistake. 

But perhaps some of the mystery has been taken away. One was familiar with most of the best bits. As with reading 'all of literature', one would find great things one didn't know about but one does know Hamlet, John Donne, Anna Karenina, Dr. Johnson. One would become accustomed to the mannerisms and ways of doing things of anybody and Bach benefits from a sense of impersonality more than most. The more convincingly one can slip the surly bonds of personality, the 'greater' and more eternal one can appear to be, if indeed escaping them is desirable.

So, other composers will now get more of a look in again and I can check back through these postings for BWV numbers noted along the way for things to play again. 

Completing Bach and other stories

 It was July 8th last year when I found the Complete Works of Bach, 172 discs in a pristine, unopened box, in the Chichester Oxfam shop last year. £49.99, the bargain of the year.

I have seven discs left to play and so should finish the project in a year. Listening to them, or letting them play is one thing, writing it all is entirely another. I'm suspicious of the Hockney types from who art pours out and I like the frugality of Elizabeth Bishop but Bach had the recipe right. It's the cantatas that keep on coming and where there were pieces not knowingly heard before to be discovered. It was mainly the organ music that got left until last but even in among that, some of which sounded like doodling, there were memorable things to be had, like the inventive Passacaglia BWV 582 and the very taking setting of a Vivaldi Concerto, BWV 594.

The discs of Chorale Settings are not his fault, nor that the Well-Tempered Klavier was shared between organ and harpsichord. Bach was not in a position to write for the pianoforte but I think he would have if he had been. Thus, overall, it's not 172 discs of uninterrupted wonder but it's difficult to think of anybody else whose output contained quite so much or whose Top 6 needs to leave quite so much out, whose next six would be far ahead of anybody else's first. I hope I'm not overstating the case.

The piano Well-Tempered Klavier, Tatiana Nikoloyeva, must be in the Bach Top 6. Having had that, it might be hard to justify the partitas as well in the interests of variety. The solo Violin Partitas have to be in there. Possibly Rachel Podger. The Double Violin Concerto, Yehudi Menuhin and David Oistrakh. The Brandenburg Concertos with Harnoncourt. Which already only leaves us two remaining places for choral work. But, idiosyncratically and abandoning any attempt at a representative half dozen, I will have the keyboard Partitas, ahead of the Goldberg Variations, not by Glenn Gould, the Cello Suites where it could be Yo-Yo Ma.

--

Sliding down in my estimation after such a good start is Henry James now that I'm into the titles that got him his reputation. The recent heat hasn't helped when even reading seemed like an effort but especially an effort when one is less concerned about what happens to the people in The Ambassadors than one had been in the previous one. Henry James might have got unlucky by my overloading myself with his books too eagerly and too soon and then running into a heatwave but all I ever understood and his elaborate prose has become evident and if I can battle on stoically through the words of this book, I'll need to give him a rest before going back to him.

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 Lives of the Poets and other stories

 There was a time, a long time ago, when I didn't ever read biographies. It might have been part of a purist thing when I thought novels were proper writing. It was probably related to how I didn't write anything apart from poems. But the story of a life can often be how one changes from one thing to another, like Wittgenstein writing the Tractatus and then, later, another book that contradicts it. So now I write poems rarely but have tried, with less or even less success, most genres except libretti or a maintenance manual for the Triumph Herald.

Similarly with biographies. I read more of them than novels these days. Mostly poets, my shelves overflow with them. Any number relating to Shakespeare, 4 Auden, 3 Larkin, 3 Eliot, 3 Donne. I'm not sure there's anything one can generalize from them and sometimes wonder about the biography of an apparently more mundane tradesperson, like the proprietor of a local grocer's shop. Why would that not be more interesting.

The lives of Pushkin and Byron are the high lives of Romantic excess. Those of Larkin, Charlotte Mew and Elizabeth Jennings not quite so much. Poets in previous centuries were mostly men of some privilege until the C20th it became a bit more democratic. Poetry can be a self-indulgent thing. Do those who dedicate themselves to it do so heroically for the sake of their art and do they use it as an excuse to sacrifice consideration for others in the interests of their pre-occupation.

How much suffering is it worth to produce art of some value. Beethoven surely suffered but was rewarded with a body of work that precious few can compare with. But since it was his own suffering, it's mainly up to him. I'm more concerned with those who made others suffer.

We might think of Ted Hughes, Eliot and Hardy whose treatment of the women in their lives was selfish. And now Vernon Scannell.

Finishing Walking Wounded today, these questions arose. He dedicated himself to his art and his manifesto is to be admired but he was one among several names of his period and hardly one of the greatest names of his generation. But the cost it came at was immense. That he couldn't help his drinking and habitual violence is one thing and his own distress as a result of it is what he had to bear. But it's not a pleasant book to read and one tends to think that a life's work of well-made but not colossally brilliant poems does not balance out the way he treated a succession of partners.

I'd never like to say that any mere art work would be worth the real life pain inflicted on others. Poems, and art of any kind, is second-hand, not real and only words on a page - however much they are valued as such- whereas bruises and injuries are first-hand and not imaginary. We must never allow ourselves to become so precious about art that we forget its secondary status.

Scannell was a novelist, too, and this reading sequence continues into an order for Feminine Endings, a late book apprently very thinly based on Arvon Creative Writing course with tutors who may not be but probably are Scannell and Hughes. It sounds very much like an industry insider job but that might not prevent it being any good. It follows on from the TLS review on 'the state of poetry', Rory Waterman's essays and reviews and the Scannell biography, which each suggested the next. In between, and loosely related, begun today, is That Little Thread, the last novel by John Lucas, admirable man. That has begun most readably.

--

But, on the subject of 'bodies of work', the end of the Complete Works of Bach is sort of in sight. There's much organ music to go, the big oratorios and miscellaneous discs but the full picture is coming into sight.

It's never a chore but one only gets through 172 discs by applying oneself to them dutifully.

After 50+ discs of cantatas one can't help but think that his reputation would have been no less if he had written half as many and the same is passably true of the organ music. I'm naturally suspicious of anybody too prolific but there are some who, having provided so much, you can hardly throw any away and, anyway, it's not the complete Bach because a couple of further pieces have been discovered and accredited to him while I've been listening to them.

And we need not worry too much about 'authenticity'. Some of us - me, at least- have been tuned in to the keyboard music through the piano, not invented in Bach's time so clearly not how he heard them, but the accidental stumbling across transcriptions for four hands by Gyorgy Kurtág. The fact that Cantata 106 is sublime overrides any consideration of how Bach heard his own music and whether it was keyboard music or a cantata in the first place doesn't matter much. All Bach played on the piano is a transcription.

Perhaps the vastness of Bach's output is reduced slightly by realizing that he had his way of doing it. It's not 172 discs of brand new ideas. But if we reduce our assessment a little bit on account of that, it gets multiplied back up again by thinking that if he had only written the solo violin music or only the Cello Suites, or only some of the cantatas or only the keyboard music, as examples, he would be a great composer. One thinks of the Beatles and their reputation, how they gave away songs to Cilla and others, and I have this way of gauging pop artists by how good no. 30 in their Top 30 is. Bach is light years ahead of Lennon-McCartney, individually and collectively, on that score and he's most likely seeing off the whole of the Motown Hit Factory, too.

It was a blessed day I picked up that box in Chichester. Maybe I should have bought the Schubert, too. 

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

It looked bleak this morning when the CD player didn't work. It is customary to do the Times crossword of a Saturday morning to the accompaniment of something erudite. I began without music but had another look, grateful of the several years of good service from Sony but concerned that here was another item of bric a brac to dispose of and only the tinpot player upstairs until a new one arrives.

My practical expertise is nil. Things that don't work generally remain not working but I have heard of fuses. It was worth a try. It was a 3 amp that was required, not the 13 amp I first found. I suspect you blow the national grid or at least the neighbourhood if you use the wrong one. But then I, amazingly, found a 3 amp, put it in and Good Heavens, it came on, and the crossword was done to the soundtrack of further Bach cantatas. It's remarkable what can be achieved when one tries.

The Saturday Times crosswords, a few months ago, had been seeming to be getting just beyond me with a bit more internet help required than is respectable but I think that's six weeks in a row now all done and dusted with only the checking of answers I thought must be right. It's necessary to have a few interests so that one or two of them can be going well when others are failing.

Having set a new best ever rating at Bullet Chess, I switched to Classical and have, hopefully only temporarily, blown my 1800 standing there. 

Having got to within one more winner of restoring where I began the year on the turf, that went backwards, too. Then Corals asked for the ID I couldn't satisfy William Hill with last year and I thought, here we go, they've latched on to that sly way of effectively closing winning accounts. However, I've successfully taken a token amount out of them to represent a nominal profit for 2025 and I play on with the chicken feed that remains, but never officially losing.

So the crossword and electrical successes were welcome.

-- 

I'm up to vol. 44 of the Bach Cantatas by now, having jumped ahead to other genres, too, but I don't think I'm halfway. Of course, it's hard not to take gloriousness for granted. Paradise must be dull. 

This morning's programme began with BWV 140, Wachet Auf, which is famous and one wonders if it's better or just familiar or familiar because it's better. But then BWV 143 comes along with a very fine violin obbligato part representing another find that I might struggle to find again so vol.44 stays on the turntable for another turn or two. One needs to be John Eliot Gardiner to know your way round the Cantatas properly.

-- 

I don't think my basic Spotify access allows me to find my Spotify Age based on what I've played there but I'm not missing much. It's unlikely to be less than my real age but once one reaches a 'certain age', surely one is just 'adult'. Only someone limited to the likes of Bing Crosby or Bill Haley could be put in their 80's' a tendency towards 'classical' doesn't indicate old age and generations born after the 60's are known to enjoy the Beatles. If my favourite decade for music was the 1720's, it ought not to suggest that I'm over 300 years old.

A Spotify Age might only mean something if you're under 40, are Tim Westwood or had been John Peel.

--

But Elvis Costello's book is a 'good read'. He comes across as every bit as edgy as his slick, sometimes attritional songwriting. But he's deeply immersed in his music, a lot of which he owes to his father, Ross, who sang and played trumpet in showbands and wherever he got a break. And, graduating from the post-punk vitality of his first albums, he soon moves in rarified company, not namedropping for namedropping's sake but those are the people he met- McCartney, Dylan, Tony Bennett.

For me, he's who he was to begin with and what came later were afterthoughts, like Robert Plant was Led Zeppelin and the forty years since no more than a search for something else to do. But I doubt if they see it like that.

Elvis uses time in a very non-linear way, sometimes being married to Diana Krall ahead of writing the songs for Get Happy but he's an assured, confident writer of a book, as he always was with a song. 

The most quotable line so far, two-thirds of the way through, is regarding Mink de Ville, who were,

led by Willy, an emaciated chap, who traded heavily in mythic street stories that I didn't quite buy. His girlfriend, Toots, looked like a bag of old clothes that had been abandoned when The Shangri-La's left town...

It's interesting to fit in the times I saw him in action with the impressively recalled narrative but, as I found with the Seamus Heaney letters, all the travel, the appearances, the meetings with other greats. It sounds exhausting and I'm entirely with Larkin- not for the first time- and other less publicly available types in not relishing or envying the pursuit of such a career.

The Year in Review

It's easy to nominate the Book of the Year for 2025. However few new books I read in a year, I'd do well to find one better than Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer, A Life Lost and Found if I read them all. One can read lots of books on one's preferred subjects- Shakespeare biography, Handel, Shostakovich, Elizabeth Bishop, Larkin and find much the same material re-arranged in the cause of whatever angle the author adopts but Graham-Dixon genuinely seemed to be breaking new ground. It's hard to see Vermeer Studies going much further- at least for a long time - and so that accolade is easily decided.

There simply weren't enough, or hardly any, new records I heard this year - or books of poetry, or novels- to constitute categories. In recent years it has been Event of the Year, rather than Poem or Poetry Collection, that has provided any internal debate and it has usually meant 'concert'. Now might be a good time to separate out 'concert' from 'event'. It's not obvious how one can compare an hour or so of live music performance with places, buildings or even any other days out and, mundane as it may seem, the arrival of the bus pass made for quite an occasion.

It was hard for the second half of the year to maintain the sublime standards set in the first half by Angelina Kopyrina's Prokofiev Sonata no. 7, gorgeously supported by Beethoven, the Petersfield Orchestra's vast, vibrant and voluble Shostakovich Symphony no. 10 and the Renaissance Choir's Allegri Miserere, starring Jenni Halliday, along with that of James MacMillan. They each fully satisfied the criteria of the visceral thrill that usually separates out the very greatest things from the good and very good. They would all be very worthy Concerts of the Year, making the deepest of impressions but, not for the first time, it's going to have to be the Renaissance Choir, for the Allegri Miserere. 

My visit back to Nottingham was hugely worthwhile and it's hard to know if the remains of my own long ago made more of an impression than that of others in Lincoln Cathedral and Lichfield where the Dr. Johnson Birthplace Museum was an added bonus. Some things from earlier in the year, looking through the diary, seem a very long time ago now which is another of those tricks of time but at least provides the illusion that one is getting good value from retirement. There's a few events that are only sitting in pubs with friends but I don't mean 'only' to put any doubt on their importance because they might easily be counted the most important. Neither can buying second-hand records in a charity shop, surely, count as an Event of the Year but when it's the Complete Works of Bach, it counts as a contender. It has to go down as a good year, even up to yesterday when I achieved a new personal best rating at Lichess, for Bullet, at 1843.

But coming at the time that it did with all its strangeness and vestigial familiarity, Nottingham has to be my Event of the Year. 

The future of the concert reviews is ever in doubt as 'the language burns out long before the music ever does' but I've been saying that for a long time, they haven't stopped yet and since 2026 begins with Cuarteto Casals in Wigmore Hall playing the lifelong favourite, Shos 3, I really ought to come back re-invigorated. I am forever in the debt of those artists that continue to make it all worthwhile.

Maupassant, C18th Music, John Cooper-Clarke

Maupassant's not quite the writer I'd thought he was, for better and perhaps for worse. There is more variety in his stories than the 'shabby gentility' of lower middle classes struggling to appear respectable. The introduction to the Penguin Classics edition suggests the stories contain some misogyny but it's a society in which wives are legally the possessions of husbands, where mistresses are sundry appendages and Maupassant is worldly in dealing with it as such. 'Love' is like a market place and highly transactional at times.

Maupassant is the less deceived. Several stories are left open-ended if not always inconclusive. The reader is left with a fair idea of what the end would be if there was one. A Parisian Affair is a good choice to give the volume its title with its 'back-to-reality' theme that recurs time and again, as in Duchoux where the Baron de Mordiane feels stranded in,

the monotony of the same kind of evening....the same conversations on the same topics, the same badinage, the same jokes and same gibes about the same women

but his foray to find something more interesting seems to persuade him that the mundanity he knows is preferable to the world beyond it.

I had thought Maupassant quieter, like George Moore or William Trevor, but he can be more visceral. I'm sure he's a great writer but a longer look has shown him to be not exactly the one I had been led to believe.

 

Revisits are often enlightening, especially after a long hiatus. Buxtehude by Arrangement, the album of transcriptions for piano by August Stradal played by Meilin Ai, was at first underwhelming, it not being the real thing and the Preludes, Fugues and Chaconnes sounding somewhat reduced but it's wandered its way quite debonairly across the turntable a couple of times with expectations reduced and been the better for it. In many cases, it's not the work's fault how we approach it and arriving with the wrong preconceptions is our fault, not its. The Bach Cantatas in the Complete Works continue to throw up fine pieces from the depths of their vastness, the shimmering adagio strings, the lone violin or hautbois, the impressive vocal solos and the sweeping choruses. Of course one must not live by Bach alone and one wonders how limiting even such an inventive mind is until one of the real masterpieces, like the Piano or Violin Partitas, seem to provide inexhaustible richness on their own. Such is the paradox.  

 

Of Tuesday's acquisitions, the C18th English Violin Sonatas, headed by that Londoner, Geminiani, are state-of-the-art and fine company whereas Keith Jarrett's Handel Suites wander off a bit more harmlessly than one might like but, in the belief that Jarrett/Handel can't be an anodyne partnership, it will be given further chances. Béla Hartmann's Schubert disc was added to upcoming treats this afternoon.

But mainly, I'm glad to have plenty to put ahead of Eugene Onegin which was bought more out of a sense of dutiful required reading than its promise of undiluted pleasure. We will find out one day but not yet. Le Grand Meaulnes was there, waiting to be snapped up, in the Oxfam shop and so, having heard it recommended a while ago, I did. The Woman in White is a doorstop for the winter that has long floated about the less pressing reaches of intended reading lists. Humph's The Best of Jazz was picked up with my father in mind but he's a fine

writer and I might learn from it but John Cooper-Clarke's autobiography, I Wanna Be Yours, is joyfully engaged with straightaway before the library reservations arrive. Drollery from a remarkable man with a turn of phrase entirely his own, he is a class apart from other such 'pop' poets as Hegley, McGough and lesser names than them. I honestly don't think he's putting it on. He's telling it how it was, with an appreciation of all the absurdities, and he's apparently 'real'. He won't be entirely out of place on my Poetry Biography shelves.

 

From Benaud to Prokofiev

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donald Davie, Gioia and Bishop, Bach

Donald Davie was the paragon of a high church scholarly critic whose essays made it sound virtually impossible to write a good poem. Not in fashion these days, you'd think, he brought  rigour and directness to his readings of other poets that might make him seem a dry old stick were it not for flashes of humour and some sympathy.

His The Poet in the Imaginary Museum was suggested in recent Gioia Studies and arrived ahead of the tardy Gioia books. Although at first it seems abstruse stuff, one can see that he's telling you things you've realized for yourself, just expressing them in a higher form of considered utterance. He is enlightening on Wallace Stevens, Eliot, Lowell and others and even makes a case for poetry in translation that I might not entirely accept but can appreciate his effort. It will not be a book to read all of because some of the lesser known Americans are even lesser known now than they were fifty years ago but it is possible to enjoy the essays for their own sake without fully taking their points which is a bit like reading poems sometimes, the sound rather than the sense. 

 

But then Dana Gioia's Studying with Miss Bishop arrived and one is glad to hear about her idiosyncratic teaching methods, openly admitting when she doesn't 'get' poems and turning down the suggestion of Ashbery as a poet to look at because he's a case in point. Unorthodox and apparently disorganized she may have been but the diminshed numbers who didn't desert her course in favour of Lowell's perhaps found it more demanding, and instructive, than it first looked s if it would be. Gioia and Bishop ws a meeting of great minds, one in maturity with the other just setting out and Dana's memoir almost makes one see Harvard seminars as idyllic.

Two good people, wonderful poets making the most of a situation perhaps neither of them entirely relished but if there's anything better than reading them, or about them, separately it's reading about them together.

--

The Davie inroads were made to a soundtrack of the Complete Works discs of The Well-Tempered Klavier. I decided it was time to venture into something familiar although familiar it turned out not to be. 

Of course Bach would have played and heard his own music on the harpsichord or organ, not in the pianoforte versions we might be more accustomed to now so it's hardly for me to say it's wrong. But one instinctively thinks that what one knows is right and anything different is aberrant.

Robert Levin's harpsichord pieces take the quicker tempi at hectic, flashy speeds that sound all for pyrotechnic effect. Not all of it is recognizable as the measured, thoughtful exposition of the Bernard Rodgers 4-discs I've had for so long. Some upcoming spending spree might bring Tatiana Nikolayeva here to be made number one preference but Bernard has done good service. But the unity of the set is thrown away by a good proportion of the 48 being played on organ. Luminous, gorgeously recorded and glorious in their way they are a different thing to the harpsichord and clavichord performances, never mind piano, and it makes for something inconsistent. Not un-brilliant but not as if they are all one work, either. Having said that, having them on piano already it's no bad thing to have these entirely different versions because it ostensibly makes for different music.

Continuing with the sacred cantatas, BWV 41 and 42 made for a fine disc, the cello in the aria in 41 being another 'find' to return to again one day. And if I had only ever known the Well-Tempered Klavier as organ music then the French Suites, BWV 812-817, would have served the purpose the 48 have been doing for so many years and I'd have been none the wiser but that was all a bit of a bombshell, finding music to be quite so amorphous. And yet, really, while worrying about non-period instruments in the orchestral music, it's the switch to instruments that Bach would have known, away from the ersatz piano that has disconcerted me. You just can't win.

Larkin's Jill, BWV 1025 and John Burnside

Next year's Philip Larkin Society conference is to be based around the 80th anniversary of his novel, Jill. I'm unlikely to attend or contribute but I was prompted to re-read it while waiting for further Dana Gioia books to arrive. It's tremendous work for a 21yo, especially the first half. In the second half credulity is stretched a little bit as the imaginary Jill materializes as the real 15yo Gillian and we might rightly wonder about stalking issues except I'm sure it's all understandable in an overawed innocent abroad like John Kemp. What I take it to mean is that such lusts and loneliness will find an object to fixate on and it is Gillian's bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jill, however, is great and only leaves us to wonder what novels Larkin would have produced in maturity had he not been sidelined into being the most accomplished English poet of his generation. 

--

Meanwhile, back with the Complete Bach, it is to be expected that the best-known pieces that one is familiar with are the best and exploring the discs of the unfamiliar might not always serve up things to compare. I'm not going into the Well-Tempered Klavier, the Partitas and Sonatas, the Cello Suites, the Brandenburgs, the B Minor Mass, Passions and suchlike when there is so much undiscovered country to visit.

Thus one thinks that Bach could have been Telemann in his spare time in the same way that the Beatles provided songs for other artists while retaining enough material for themselves. However, one doesn't know all the best Bach and vol. 123 is a magical disc with its Trio for vln, clo and pno, BWV 1025 augmenting the Partitas most gorgeously. That disc stayed on for three plays being exactly why one had to buy the Complete, because there had to be such things. Georg Egger is the violin, also on Sonatas BWV 1023, 1021, 1019a and a Fuge, 1026. So I moved onto similar on Viola da Gamba which would have been just as good a find were they not familiar already from another recording that stays on the turntable for a few plays whenever it gets an outing.

--

At 2pm today I remembered to check when the Hampshire Art Society annual exhibition was on in the cathedral. It finished today at 4pm so I was able to get there in time. My walls are full enough and so I wasn't in the market for anything unless I was spectacularly impressed. There were things to like in among the kitsch, the workmanlike, the generic and the competent local scenes. 

I don't know if it's the same everywhere, if it's just my preference or if the Portsmouth area is genuinely disproportionately blessed with musicians but there's no comparison. Here, musicians are light years ahead of painters and writers, not that there's anything wrong with the local brushstrokes or words. But the musicians are mostly interpreters rather than composers in their own right so maybe it's not a fair comparison when they can present their versions of all-time masterpieces and not have to think of their own. 

--

John Burnside's posthumous The Empire of Forgetting arrived this week. At 40 pages it might not count as 'full length' but it's what there was when he died last year, aged only 69. English poetry could hardly afford to lose one of its few remaining major artists and neither could Agenda which he had taken over as editor of. St. Andrews have been unable to find a suitable successor and so the august title goes with him, another bastion of seriousness that held up against what some of us might regard as a falling apart of what not so long ago was a strong, if well-hidden, community. 

The first poems continue to work like a long, loose sestina  working on the words angels, wings, snow and light. They have spilt over from John's previous volume Ruin, Blossom and are further evidence towards my theory that some poets, by no means all, struggle to find new things to say beyond the age of 60. 

There's a further 'semantic field' of frost, firelight, dark and themes of hibernation in a 'vision' of continuity, grace and some sort of comfort found in a world in which there might seem,

No remedy for loss, no

cure for rot, no solace to be found

in mere ideas 

except, of course, poems are ideas and these at least attempt to provide such things. 

The Empire of Forgetting is the title of a poem in the book as well as a phrase that occurs in two other poems so we can't miss the point that it must be thematic. There's something pagan about it, a faith in nature and its processes, an awareness that ordinary, daily life might not be everything and there could be something bigger to be celebrated, even beyond the art that says as much.

I don't want to try to define it, it's in John Burnside's evocative music which, like that of Bach, can all begin to sound similar but that doesn't prevent one from wanting to have all of it in however many variations.  

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 Readership appears to be up at DGBooks recently if one gives any credence to the figures on Google Analytics. So, thanks to anybody new to it and welcome but it has to be said that once I seem to be in danger of success at anything I tend to pack it up. Football, cycling, pool and other careers are all behind me, their potential archived and their actual achievements providing much to be modest about. This week I deleted all the DGBooks titles at Nielsen, the ISBN agency, so as not to be bothered by orders from any commercial outlet. Not that I've ever been inundated but I'm in the copyright libraries now, I've used up my allocation of ISBN's and further titles would thus need a publisher with all their requirements of sales, editing, design, promotion et al and there's not much to be gained by all that.

- 

One can't realistically make one's way through the Complete Bach without playing the organ music in due course. It's possibly an area of itself, by no means my favourite but if one must have organ music then it's best it's by Bach. The first disc I put on shone through even the cheap, underpowered CD player I have upstairs which hardly does justice to good recordings. Electric Light was a Seamus Heaney title but it came to mind in some of this dazzle.

I must concentrate and not allow this project to lapse although all such projects will save for later. I'm not sure I finished all the Complete Satie having been transfixed by the opera, Socrate. And so it is with doubts aforethought that I contemplate 40 discs of Tatiana Nikolayeva- well-backed fav to be officially my favourite pianist- at £120.

It's what I want so I should have it. But there are are still nearly 150 discs of Bach not played yet and all the rest of music history, in my account of it, stored on the shelves. Do I need both of her sets of the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues when I have one of them already, a good candidate for Top 6 Albums as it is.

It's a 'first world problem', conscience tells me. But people who are spoilt only want to be spoilt a bit more.

--

Having found a last title by John Burnside - due to be delivered here any time today- I looked up to see what had happened to Agenda, the high-class magazine that he had recently become editor of before he died. It looks like it's gone with him which is a great shame, not that I was a regular reader, but it looks to me as if such a journal has run out of anybody with the heft to edit it. Where are they now, the serious people prepared to do serious work? I might well side with those counter-reformationists like Larkin and Dana Gioia who reset attitudes after some of the wilder excesses of Modernism but Modernism took itself seriously, was made of highbrow ideas and intentions and maybe one can't have it both ways although some of us might continue to try.

The Hand of the Poet and other stories

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

Zola, Bach, Gioia

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

Flaubert, Zola, Brahms, Bach

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

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

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

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

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

-

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

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

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

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