Tasmin Little

Tasmin Little, Naked Violin, Portsmouth Square Tower, June 24th

Post concert delirium might not be the best condition in which to sit and write a review but, there again, not many concerts induce such a thing at this level. This might be going to be the best review I've ever given anything.

The Square Tower is an historic little pile in Old Portsmouth that has been put to various naval and penitentiary uses in the past including a gunpowder store. I'm sure lesser reviewers might stumble on the observation that it might never have contained anything as potentially explosive as one lady and a 1708 Strad but you know I wouldn't do such a thing.

The concert space here held 100 seats and became candlelit with Tasmin possibly in the very frock pictured here on a small stage. A quick Telemann ditty led us into an explanation of the many difficult techniques demanded by Paul Patterson's Luslawice Variations, which included remarkable picking with the left hand while bowing with the right, harmonics played with the little finger placed lightly higher up the note played, bouncing the bow on the bridge, all that dead easy double-stopping and more. Spare and sometimes bleak in its Eastern European way, it was still a mesmering performance and a fine advert for difficult contemporary music and a huge exploration of the things a violin can be made to do.

In a change to the programme, Tasmin explained that a transcription of a guitar piece by Albeniz, Leyenda from the Asturias suite, had proved popular on her very recent tour of Australia and so she gave us its British premiere. Dark and passionate and very Spanish, again it was captivating in a way that you make sure you don't miss a moment. Music doesn't last very long at all when played and listened to with such intensity.

So we arrived at the Bach and one had to think the Old Master had it all to do. Familiarity might work against him after two extraordinary and powerful novelties. Tasmin explained how Bach is regarded as a mathematically perfect composer but the whole point is that this technical brilliance carries a great emotional charge, too. She is wholeheartedly committed to a 'musical' performance rather than a technical one and the solo violin perhaps lends itself more to a breaking of restraint than the orderly patternings of keyboard music. So, of course, her approach is ideal to find the flourish and extravagance available in the baroque sonatas and that is exactly what happened. One should never have doubted the cigar-chomping old maestro. As was once said by Michael Bywater in a Sunday newspaper column, he flatters us by being of the same species. It was spell-binding and spine-tingling and all those things.

But that was only the first half. Perhaps she'll leave us alone in the second half. Some more Bach preceded a generous and entertaining Question and Answer session. She's got four violins, was it, but the Strad is on loan from the Royal Academy; her new release of the Elgar is conveniently the recording she's most proud of and, probably much to the chagrin of the 13 year old daughter, a mother was told that at that age, Tasmin was doing four hours of practice a day. I bet the poor girl said, Thanks, Taz, thank you very much.

But the perhaps the most blinding thing of all was the Melodie from the Bartok Sonata. Slow, haunting and hypnotic if not a bit disturbing. This was no jolly romp through the Classic FM canon she was serving up here. It was, if one can say, an illuminating set of some genuinely dark and difficult music that Tasmin is surely most interested in as an artist and I think we were grateful for that. Her enthusiasm for her subject has always been impressive. It's strange to think she does it all for money. Paganini might have had the devil in him but she goes for some alarming effects with such panache and can still deliver it all with infectious charm and a genuinely delighted smile. For all the despair and waste land that the Bartok might evoke, the unscheduled Ysaye 'Ballade' Sonata ended the set with spectacular verve. The superlatives run dry because words (especially mine) don't capture music particularly well at the best of times and this was something else.

You must go and see Tasmin Little whatever she's doing whenever you can but you'll be the lucky one if the performance near you is this solo presentation.

You don't see many concerts as good as this in a year. You don't see many concerts as good as this in a lifetime.

The Tallis Scholars

The Tallis Scholars, Portsmouth Cathedral, June 23rd

The acoustics of Portsmouth Cathedral have been explored to great effect over the years by the flamboyant baroque music of the Kammerensemble Koln, the Ensemble Clement Jannequin featuring the counter-tenor of Dominique Visse, the Bach Cantatas series under David Stanicliffe and, more recently, James Bowman and Catherine Bott. The Tallis Scholars seemed an ideal match for them as part of this year's Portsmouth Festvities, and so it conclusively was proved.

Their programme of Palestrina, Morales, Gibbons, Morley and Josquin des Prez might be varied to the educated and sophisticated ear but not necessarily to my more cloth-based devices. Nonetheless, it's difficult to see how any amount of education or expertise would make it sound any more heavenly or superb except that it would help differentiate between styles, personality and mood in this ancient music. While the Josquin Agnus Dei from Missa L'Arme Homme might be more gorgeously poignant and the Gibbons Hosanna more celebratory, the prevailing mood is that of a bright, unfolding eternity.

The subtle alto parts and continuo tenors sound fine and restrained in their places but it is, of course, the soaring top parts that carry the thrill and bravura of most of these pieces, most notably tonight as the light outside began to fade and the stage lights had more effect and it immediately became more intimate and evocative. This happened to be in the Morales Emendemus in melius immediately after the interval but whether that really was one level more glorious than the pieces in the first half or if it was a trick of the light is hard to say.

The best known piece, by us at least, was the Josquin, with which they ended with spectacular charm and poise rather than climactic drama. Apparently a simple composition based on a carillon leitmotif, it can't be quite as easy to achieve as it was made to sound, moving through its phases towards inevitable resolution. You can't hear it like that on any sort of hi-fidelity equipment, of course, and neither can such a choir be appreciated to such effect in the wider spaces of the Albert Hall at a greater distance from the action.

When sublimity is the object of the exercise, it's always going to be hard to exceed expectations but the Tallis Scholars, world renowned purveyors of any amount of such fare, didn't disappoint either, especially given the astute move of not beginning until 8pm to allow dusk to gather by the end. I'm not sure the cathedral would have shifted Evensong to allow them to start any earlier anyway.

But it was a treat for Portsmouth to have them here and if Tasmin Little delivers as much as she is expected to tomorrow night then the Portsmouth Festivities will have provided richly for its appreciative audience this year.

Just a Minute

I tell you what, the latest series of Just a Minute has taken the game into a new age. The games between Stephen Fry, Sue Perkins, Fi Glover and Paul Merton have been like a new superleague with no place for a hapless fall guy, previously a part taken by Kenneth Williams or Wendy Richards for comic effect and a lovable last place.

In olden days, the masterful tactician Clement Freud would pick off the points and start as a short-priced favourite every time he took part. One might expect Stephen to have it all his own way now but there are no easy games any more, with these contests veering towards a real game of erudition and quick thinking rather than slapstick histrionics which, of course, was only another word for the scientific study of the past.

Stephen is genuinely trying to win as if he thinks he ought to but against opposition of this standard, he doesn't have it his own way. They are all brilliant, with vocabulary and the ability to cover a wide range of subjects that is a tribute to the educational standards that served the generation they come from as well as their own wit and natural talent. And it hasn't lost any of its sense of fun in the process, it's just become more the game as it was originally conceived and is the better for it.

We've been told about 'dumbing down' in the media for a long time now, how things have been stupidized and how everyone makes verbs out of adjectives but it seems this old warhorse of a programme has been, erm, 'taken to the next level.'

And, while lauding Radio 4, which isn't always my default station of choice, the season of Terence Rattigan plays has been tremendous, too. He was a more serious, and better, dramatist than I had realized and I'm grateful that I was given the chance to chance upon them and find out for myself.

Lds & Gnlmn, I give you The BBC. Raise your glasses.

Tamar Yoseloff - The City with Horns

Tamar Yoseloff, The City with Horns (Salt)

The City with Horns is the title of the middle of three sections to Tamar Yoseloff's new book which is an involving account of the life of Jackson Pollock. We also see Rothko, Kerouac and Ginsberg among the maniac, generically-styled beats all having their wild times as well as Frank O'Hara, the nice, sensible one.Pollock is macho, atavistic and potentially dangerous. Yoseloff's achievement is to express him in such detached and yet vivid poems. In the aftermath of his turbulent life, his paintings are,

the way the galaxy might look to a man stranded

in space, before science and logic takes hold.

Either side of this central section are poems called City Winter and Indian Summer. The first contains the more successful poems, for me Invisible Nearby Sea taking the unpromising theme of sitting next to a fat bloke on a bus and making something quite special from it. Their proximity leads the two passengers to some imagined recognition of each other's background,

And he will sense that I carry

the stagnant air of shuttered rooms, stalled lifts,

the slow creep of complacency. But still

it rises from tarmac to find us, clings

to our skin: that saline longing

for somewhere else.

Blackwork is about embroidery that mourns a lost lover to charming sixteenth century effect and City Winter itself is a fine meditation with a satisfying sense of loss.

Perhaps in other places the observation is a little prosaic, the Mannequins on 7th Street or the seemingly mundane thoughts on Stamps that might or might not be recovered by a nice ending. The third section involves a fair amount of poetic fading, losing and escaping, the highlight being Jetty, which turns out to be considerably better than Peter Doig's painting once you've googled it but both capture the increasing dark, the reducing view, the turning in on oneself that both nighttime and ageing inevitably bring.

It's a considerable book, evocative and confidently made. It is urban poetry with various hints of glamour and degradation, in each sense of the word.

Katy Evans-Bush - Egg Printing Explained

Katy Evans-Bush, Egg Printing Explained (Salt)

Following up the debut, Me and the Dead, KEB's new book perhaps extends her range from the spectacular, expansive stories into a variety of further forms.

Thibault's Ribbon is representative of the book in the way that it brings together the exotic with the ordinary in an account of the poet Gerard de Nerval taking his pet lobster for a walk. And it is such synchromesh of everyday and extraordinary, expansive and economical, perhaps even passionate and ironic that makes one wonder if the Anglo-American style is a mixture of American panache and English restraint. But I wouldn't want to make any such claim.

The larger scale, broader poems here are most engaging in The Desiring of Practically Everything, a look back on some gauche adolescent attitudes, and Forth in July, in which time stands still at a moment of alarm in childhood. Both are memorable and successful poems but my preference is for the more formal and compact You're in Bedlam, which takes the idea that all previous conversations are recorded in the surroundings and walls of a room,

The noise is in the walls. We hear it daily,

recorded by the bricks we live among.

Our curtains hang on tuning rods. No, really.

You'll screech for ages when your song is sung,

and, The Night is Dark, a build up of neuroses and inner trauma in the small hours that at first I read in my dyslexic glance as 'You're made of what you're afraid of ', and I wish it still was but it's,

You've made what you're afraid of.

It's a poem I'd love to have written myself if I hadn't done a very similar thing once and praise doesn't come much higher than that.

But between these poems, and outside of them stylistically, are a pirate Prufrock pastiche, some post-concrete wordplay in On a Note by Louise Bourgeoise and Meditation on a Freudian's Lip. It seems like only last year that another Salt book ended on a quiet evocation of Hammershoi, and in fact it was. That exhibition must have been crawling with poets. And I might reach my limit with cerebral references at dear m magritte - 'it says it isn't / a pipe/ but it is.' Well, I thought the conceptual point was that it wasn't a pipe but a picture of a pipe but once I have to go to the next level and consider whether it is a pipe again or if it always was, I remember that I don't like short poems, think that three lines is never enough and move quickly on.

But with The Mermaid, What's Time, Conneticut Postcard and more, there's plenty to enjoy here, carrying forward the impetus of Me and the Dead impressively and divertingly.

Royal Ascot

One day I'll tip a real bookiebashing bonanza here but after the Derby saw the selection not quite get into it, the warning remains that flat racing is not an area of any expertise here. I wish I'd drawn attention to the Champions League Final coup ahead of the event but putting football punditry on here really would be lowering the tone.

Goldikova is a living legend and apparently generously priced at 13/8 to beat Canford Cliffs in Tuesday's opener. If she can get us off to a good start then the yankee will become a warm ticket in my pocket.

Hoof It is not an elegantly named horse but, at 7/1 in the Wokingham Handicap, is apparently potentially better than a handicapper and might be running in Group races by the end of the season.

Sole Power's win at Haydock was one race I have seen this season and was impressive enough. In the hope that it was not a peak but a stepping stone to higher things, we might include him in as he bids to add the King's Stand Stakes (6/1) as the sprinting division might not be in a vintage year.

And Fame and Glory, without being the out and out stayer that one might prefer for the Gold Cup, could be the class act and not therefore need to be. at 15/8 today. At this stage, on the Sunday evening, it's entrancing to see how those prices multiply together but if I'm allowed four winners in a flat season, perhaps they could all happen in the same week.

Dodd and Muldoon

Dodd and Muldoon

Just as I’m wondering
if I’m not blundering
into another solipsistic
mistake all of my own,

I’m not sure if I find it odd
that crazy-haired Ken Dodd
looks not a little like, impressionistic-
ally, like Paul Muldoon.