Isserlis Shostakovich

Stephen Isselis/Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Karabits, Shostakovich, Haydn, Prokofiev, Portsmouth Guildhall, November 13th.

I wonder if there was anybody in Portsmouth Guildhall this evening who would put the three pieces in any other order of preference than mine- the Shostakovich Cello Concerto no. 1, Haydn's Symphony no.104 and the Prokofiev Sinfonietta. Did anybody sit through the concerto only in order to get to the Haydn. Quite possibly some did because the diversity of taste and range of opinion available in the world goes beyond everybody having to agree with me (amazingly) but for me, these were three pieces in entirely different divisions.
It must cost Stephen Isserlis a lot of money to get a hairdresser to make his greying mop look quite so studiedly unkempt but it comes in useful as an added dramatic flourish at times, especially launching himself demonically into the Shostakovich, sometimes staring into the audience - straight at me quite often, it seemed- and at others, gazing into the beyond or the ceiling of the Guildhall, whichever comes first. It was great to have him back but he was necessarily in a different mood, often hunched over the cello and energetic, this time to when he came and played Haydn himself last year, rather than leave that job to the orchestra, and laid back and made his instrument sing more flowingly but, many might say, not quite as captivatingly.
There is some thematic interplay with the brass but as the piece builds from smooth legato to tumultuous torment and vibrancy in the second movement, it is all about exploiting the once demur violoncello, descended from the courteous viola da gamba, for everything it can give, from slapping, fingering up and down the fingerboard to practically sawing the very expensive instrument in half.
In an expansive score, there is the withdrawing, ethereal quiet and brief exchange with the glittering celesta, the breathless concentration of the cadenza that moves to sizzling, almost maniac intensity and, as is ever the case with the best pieces and performances, an ever tightening grip on the listener. But all of this done with whatever it is that Shostakovich does with his music- something chromatic or diatonic or some other term I'm not qualified to use- that is a signature as recognizable as any composer's.  The concerto was written in 1959 and so is the same age as me. It remains in considerably brighter condition than me, though, and is surely one of the great masterpieces for what has over the years become my favourite instrument. In a year that has not contained as many sensational events for me as other recent years, Isserlis is supplemented to my short list of Best Events of 2015 with every chance of stealing the completely unregarded honour from those listed here last week.
Haydn is the benchmark classical composer. 'Classical' in the proper sense of the word (late C18th) as well as the popular usage (orchestral music written by a foreign bloke in a wig in olden days). He is a court composer, the complete maestro, very professional but not dangerous. Almost impossible to dislike but equally unlikely to outdo Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and any number of others who surely bring something more exciting with them. Symphony no. 104 is perhaps where he sounds the most like Mozart, and even the fussiest of academics must think they sometimes sound similar. The second movement here, the Andante, is gorgeous in Haydn's never overstated way and the whole thing is a fine exercise in sense, control and decorum. Perhaps he could have been revolutionary if he had wanted, perhaps he could have been the Shostakovich or Stravinsky of his day or perhaps he didn't want to be or he knew that keeping his employers happy with the sophisticated, smart Giorgio Armani sort of music that he could produce by the ream was his best plan. I love Haydn, he is the reference point from which all 'classical' music can be mapped. But he's not Beethoven. You couldn't map everything in relation to Beethoven because it would leave nearly everything else looking inadequate. But Haydn was presumably the happier man, apparently having no need to explore darker, or more ecstatic, tempers than those he so elegantly left us with.
Whereas Prokofiev is sometimes suggested as a long shot among contenders for the Greatest of C20th composers. The BSO have recorded, or are in the process of recording, the complete symphonies under Karabits, I believe. And so it is possible that the conductor has a special interest in Prokofiev or has identified that repertoire as an area he can put his own mark on. That is as far as I can get in finding a reason for the inclusion of the Sinfonietta, which both I and my concert-going companion struggled to find anything above pleasantly non-descript. The first piece on a concert programme shouldn't overshadow that which is to come later and it is a difficult berth to fill, but even Terry Barfoot's expert programme notes looked as if they were trying too hard but in such cases, which happen often enough, it is customary for me to assume that the fault is with my appreciation and not the quality of the music. I missed the point.
Nothing will diminish the very welcome return of Stephen Isserlis to Portsmouth, though. I'll find out what his mesmerising little encore was if I can, was it more Pablo Casals. It might have been just another venue, another night's work in the provinces, for him but it was an essential highlight of the cultural year for us down here that don't get up to that there London very often.
 
          

Oh Babe, What Would You Say

In Poetry Review a couple of issues ago, Tiffany Atkinson quoted Michael Longley saying that,
most good poetry is written by young people or old people.

Coming from one as wise and fine and good as Michael Longley one would expect it to be a wise and fine and good maxim. So I'm surprised to find that it is in direct contradiction of what I have thought for quite a long time, that most good poetry is not.
We need to set arbitrary parameters on what is meant by 'young' and 'old', which might not be the same as those that Longley had in mind. But I think it is uncontroversial to say that young is under 30 and once beyond 60 one is getting old, however much it might be said that by now 60 is the new 40.
And, of course, there will be outlying examples of poets who are those 'exceptions that prove the rule' which is by no means a rule but a generalization. Keats is a fine poet but he died aged 25; there will be plenty of examples of good poetry written by septuagenarians but Titian lived into his tenth decade still applying gorgeous blue to canvas.
Most poets will have published something of worth, set out their stall and might have made themselves some reputation by the age of 30 but any artist worthy of the name will develop from those starting points and do something better. The only other options are to continue in a similar vein or immediately decline apparently, in the Longley quote, having to wait until old age before they are worth reading again.
But it takes one of special ingenuity or continual refreshment of ideas to write into venerable senior citizenship without becoming repetitive, losing some impetus or, in some very respectable cases, finding that the will to write has left them and they'd rather not write than write anything sub-standard.
Readers of Jonathan Bate's book on Ted Hughes will appreciate the impact of the early poems of Hughes, which was arguably not sustained in later books but for every such example there are more whose careers show a deepening, widening compass of experience and technique as they mature. The compacted time scales of The Beatles' oeuvre illustrates a fine start, a brilliant middle period and a final lapse into self-indulgence. Some might say the same about Shakespeare. It is almost beyond reasonable doubt that my two favourite poets, Thom Gunn and Philip Larkin, published some very competent juvenilia, then became greater and realized for themselves when they had done enough and it wasn't happening for them any more. I have even heard it suggested, almost sacrilegiously, that Seamus Heaney became repetitive and, yes, he did consciously revisit old ground without writing anything less than good poetry.
So, I reluctantly take the opposite point of view to that attributed to Michael Longley and only wonder if somehow it was taken out of context because, for me, most good poetry is written by people who are no longer young but are not yet old.
--
But in a similarly dissenting mood, I have been amused by recent revelations in the world of sport which, for these purposes began with a long distance runner in our office commenting on a television documentary on Lance Armstrong and how cycling lacked all credibility, how could you ever trust it, etc, etc. Well, no, quite.
But it wasn't me who went back to him only a few days later when all the new brouhaha over performance enhancing drugs in Athletics kicked off. Ah ha, Mr. Marathon Runner, so it's not just the cyclists then, is it. It's your sport, too.
And it was never as if you needed to be a satirist of the calibre of Ben Jonson to appreciate the story of Ben Johnson and all the ambition and human frailty that leads an athlete into that dark nether world of chemistry, needles, masking agents and lax testing.
As soon as money is involved there are going to be those with nefarious plans to gain an unfair advantage. I think it was probably Lance Armstrong's lawyer rather than Lance himself who came up with the argument that cheating was defined as 'gaining an unfair advantage' and since everybody was at it, what he did was not unfair.
I am planning to fill the customary new year drought of things to write about here with a new series entitled (something like) My Life in Sport, with features on football, cricket, cycling, running, chess and all, where
the glory of it was that it was all amateur and I wasn't good enough at any of them to make it worth cheating.
But one of the most profound laughs I've had in the last twelve months was in the fallout from the Sepp Blatter, Qatar World Cup and all such saga when it came to light that there was such a thing as the FIFA Ethics Committee. Oh, Come On.
Which comedian was it that said he felt like giving up on satire when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
But that is the world and what it's like. It's surprising that we can still be surprised about it. But while Athletics sadly sinks deeper into moral torment, let us not hear from those who plod round the London marathon so heroically in half a day cast aspersions on the bike riders.
217.888 miles in 12 Hours in 1995, thank you very much. Done with plentiful supplies of bananas, water, flapjack and, admittedly, drinks designed to help ride a bike a long way as sold in Boots. And I'm always grateful for an excuse to present this old photo again.

  
 

The Saturday Nap

Penglai Pavilion is expected to run at Cheltenham on Friday (2.15), attempting to repeat his course and distance win from three weeks ago. He should be followed until beaten and all I will do is take the first price I see when they are posted just after high tea has been taken on Thursday.
21 days is an ideal interval between races, there is more opposition from Ireland and entries from other big English stables but Penglai's win was convincing, and comfortable enough to suggest there is still plenty more to come when required. One can expect him to be back at Cheltenham in March with races like this among his credentials. It is impossible to rersist, with the only proviso that, yes, I know he won't keep winning forever.

Pat Eddery

I was saddened on getting home to find out about the death of Pat Eddery at the age of 63. Firstly there were tributes on the Racing Post website but then he was honoured by being included in the Radio 4 news. Since, in a long career, there was only Gordon Richards who had ridden more winners on the flat in Britain, he certainly warranted that.
He was my favourite flat race jockey, sensitive and with 'good hands', perhaps comparable to my favourite jump jockey, John Francome, as opposed to the ultra-competitive, aggressive styles of Lester Piggott and A.P. McCoy respectively.
Eddery rode the winners in the two most memorable flat races I ever remember. Firstly, in the 1975 King George, he saw off Bustino and Joe Mercer in the 'race of the century' (pictured) and eleven years later came with a typically well-timed run to take the Arc de Triomphe. The first went unbacked by me, being 15 at the time, but the latter was particularly welcome as I was 'between jobs' at the time and was also in a double with Dallas to win the Cambridgeshire.
The ride on Dancing Brave came about after the conspicuously less-talented Greville Starkey had lost the Derby, somehow expecting the horse to break the equine 400m record at the end of a mile and a half but after the appointment of Eddery to ride Khaled Abdullah's horses, there were plenty more to enjoy. I saw Prince Khaled and Dancing Brave at Goodwood when they went there for the Arc warm-up race and subsequently enjoyed horses like Warning winning in the same colours.
One had the impression that Eddery was the most likeable of jockeys, unassuming, understanding and astute. It's not every sportimg champion you can say that about.

Best Poetry Shortlists 2015

It is plenty early enough to be posting the shortlists for my own idiosyncratic poetry awards but it's not too late for anything else that comes to my attention to be added to the lists before the selection of the winners next month.
Unlike other, more prestigious prizes that have cash to go with them, these honours are bestowed on books that I have found out about, then chose to read and only then can they be considered although they are considered most sincerely and very seriously.

Best Poem

Sean O'Brien, The Beautiful Librarians, from The Beautiful Librarians
Caitriona O'Reilly,  The Airship Era, from Geis
Don Paterson, Here, from 40 Sonnets

Best Collection

Kate Bingham, Infragreen (Seren)
Sean O'Brien,  The Beautiful Librarians (Picador)
Caitriona O'Reilly, Geis (Bloodaxe)
Don Paterson, 40 Sonnets (Faber)

I generally extend these specifically poetry-based lists to other areas-
There won't be a Best Novel this year because I simply haven't read a new novel this year, it having been my year of George Eliot, although David Mitchell's Slade House is a possibility in which case it would have a walkover.
Best Television isn't quite a walkover but the only opposition to Cradle to Grave, the autobiography highbrow enough to be on BBC2, came from the other Greatest Living Englishperson when Vicky Coren presented her series on How to Be a Bohemian.
I'm surprised few CD reviews there are here this year and the earlier ones were 2014 releaeses and so The Orlando Consort's recording of Loyset Compere seem to have it although there is a new Tallis Scholars release which might yet get itself ordered.
The Non-Fiction Book category is a match between Shapiro's 1606 and Bate's Ted Hughes.
Which only leaves the Best Event category, often the most interesting.

Best Event

Chris Chadwick, debut in 25 mile circuit bike race, Castle Combe
Fujita Piano Trio, Chichester Cathedral
Index Cantorum, Winchester Cathedral
Tasmin Little/Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, Portsmouth Guildhall
Southern Countertenors, Portsmouth Cathedral


 

The Saturday Nap

I don't know how I've got this far without knowing why one's best bet is called the 'nap'. It can't possibly be that you're so sure of winning that you can have a little sleep.
I like etymology without always being satisfied by being told that a word comes from Old English or Greek. Such answers only beg the question, yes but why did they call it that, in the same way that the explanation that God put everything here isn't good enough because it doesn't explain where God came from, or anything else for that matter.
But the interweb, which is always to be trusted, says that 'nap' comes from a card game called Napoleon which makes us somewhat the wiser and is good enough for me.


Now is the time that the winter game trainers start to hit form and with the likes of Philip Hobbs, Charlie Longsdon and John Ferguson all winning regularly, we might hope to avoid races where they all have runners.
On the other hand, I caught the end of an interview with Nicky Henderson on At the Races earlier in the week and he said his horses were 'ten days off' which explains why the one I did came second and why we will be looking at his runners next week, not this.
And the size of the puddles on the way home this evening suggests there might be a change in the going and proven soft ground horses might the ones to watch.
With some disastrous Saturdays behind us and a hat-trick to land, the nap is going to take some choosing this week but there are plenty of options and here's what I reckon.
I'm sure all jump racing followers would be pleased to see Simonsig make a winning return but he's worth opposing if one thinks Nicky H is giving him and Bobsworth a seasonal reappearance with a view to finding out where to go next. It might leave the race more at Purple Bay's mercy than it first looks but he may be one for the yankee rather than the nap.
In a very interesting hurdle at Wincanton, the 3.15, I'd like to take a big, old-fashioned plunge on Francis of Assisi at about 6/1 but we know Irving is a class act just below the top grade and the animal-loving saint will be another to take part in the team effort of the speculative multiple bet for small stakes.
Because while there are others in races that I'll be happy to take on, and so side with How About It (Aintree 1.20) and Our Kaempfer (1.55), there are two more solid-looking favourites to scrutinize for proper nap potential.
Definite Outcome (Aintree 12.45) looks a confident, plenty short enough, favourite, in the hope that Flying Angel doesn't quite live up to its name because I remember One Cool Scorpion's win last time out and was less than impressed.
And Arpege D'Alene (Wincanton 1.30) is jumping fences for the first time in public but Paul Nicholls usually collects his pocket money from this race and looks the best vehicle for my cash in its search for an escape route to safety at 7/4.
So, I've talked myself into it.  Arpege D'Alene is this most vital of naps with Purple Bay, Our Kaempfer and Definite Outcome in the yankee and Francis of Assisi added in for the trebles and accumalator out of 5 with whatever small change is left over.

Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes

Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes, The Unauthorised Life (William Collins)

The relationship between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath is scarred terrain by now, a battleground gone over by armies of biographers and commentators taking either side or, just occasionally, claiming to take neither. Jonathan Bate's unauthorised account is not endorsed by the Hughes estate but seems to find a balanced approach among the welter of unbalanced evidence. While certainly not an apologist for Ted, as one might read Elaine Feinstein's biography, Bate is most critical of the feminist campaign against him but very early on one is already taking the point that the personalities in the mix, at first a great creative partnership, were too dangerous when put together for anything but a tragic outcome.
For those of us not there at the time (which is by now most of us), it's hard to appreciate the impact of Hughes' first poems on the literary world. Although he had forebears in the likes of D.H. Lawrence and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the like of him had not been seen before. Bate draws parallels between Hughes and Plath and Wordsworth and Coleridge where the former are 'elegiac' and the latter 'mythic'. I think he was right the first time when he made Hughes 'mythic' but it's a useful register to keep in mind.
Hughes' early celebrity puts the ambitious Sylvia under some pressure but by the end of the book, and long after Sylvia's death, the point has been made more than once that, after Crow, Hughes was producing uneven poetry not redeemed until the Tales from Ovid, his reputation substantially dependent on his first three volumes after which he was 'blocked' and it is only some release found in writing the Ovid, published in 1997, that recovers his best work with the realization that he had been suffering from Sylvia's suicide for that long, 35 years. For me, and I'm sure for many others, Sylvia was always the better poet.
There are some fine paradoxes to be found in comparisons to be made between Hughes and his polar opposite and great 'rival' in poetry, Philip Larkin. When Hughes is having difficulty choosing between three girlfriends, one can't help but remember that, for some time. so was Larkin; they both developed into right-wing political 'thinkers' and were the two most influential English poets of their generation representing two very different attitudes. But for all that Hughes' charisma, animal magnetism and intense charm made him a hugely successful sexual predator, Larkin dithered and spent as much time trying to keep women out of his life as in it. Judging the Arvon Poetry Competition together (with Seamus Heaney and Charles Causley), Hughes finds it,
interesting to observe Larkin (whose literary taste Ted described as 'spermicide')

but we might now consider the relative merits of the overwhelming in relation to the ironic and understated and realize the inevitable limits of machismo and credit Larkin with more than enough scepticism to forego the obsession with horoscopes, mysticism and other assorted hokum. The restlessness of Hughes' life contrasts with Larkin's administrative, provinicial professional life not tainted with quite the same thoroughgoing lurid detail of the most alpha of alpha males.
Ted's first meeting with Sylvia, at the literary launch party, is on page 103. By page 111 we are already aware that it has become dangerously passionate on both sides and by page 141, Sylvia is already suspicious of Ted's affairs with other women. That didn't take long but one might not have been aware of it at all thus far in Elaine Feinstein's equivalent book.
Ted's sister, and henceforth agent, Olwyn, doesn't like Sylvia, who is 'high maintenance', and perhaps sees any of Ted's lovers as an unwelcome intrusion, but the irresistable Assia Weevil is an affair that can't help itself either in an awful Shakesperean hendiadys, the sort of doubling that complicates a plot endlessly, but not quite as endlessly as when we later realize that the influential critic, Al Alvarez, was involved with both Sylvia and Assia as well. It is no wonder that Nathaniel Tarn is credited with saying how it brought to mind a Greek play. There would have been plenty available to make the same observation if he hadn't.
Ted is the 'caged jaguar', wanting to be free of domestic responsibilities, and also presumably wanting to be free of threats to kill him from Assia's husband, David, who apparently had the knife to do it with. But although Ted might long for some imagined 'bohemian' life for himself, he was ready enough to propose a 'constitution' full of rules by which he and Assia could live together. It involved cooking duties, bedtime for the children, getting up time, to only be altered 'by agreement', cataloguing of expenses, none of which suggest a carefree way of living, and one must admire Assia's resilient reply,
Teddy dear, forget the detail.

But however much faith one puts in Bate's scholarly accumulation of such intimate domestic detail, that which is not evidenced by such documents is as unreliable as any other rumour or gossip because Ted is a habitual liar when it suits his purposes and so, it seems, do most other witnesses only see their own partial view of complicated goings on and give their version of them.
Ted's good taste is proven by the need for a mention here of his liking for Maddy Prior's singing as he published his own book, Gaudete, as well as the inclusion of Spem in Alium, a favourite piece of music, in his memorial service but Gaudete is surely one of the most misogynist poems in the language, not somehow surprisingly the only piece in the Collected Poems represented in extracts. This is unfortunate material to have to report in the chapter before Bate has to narrate the 'Arraignment' in the dreadful poetry but incendiary accusation of Robin Morgan,
I accuse
Ted Hughes
of.....
...
the murder of Sylvia Plath

and, yes, there still are people who think that if they've found a suitable rhyme like that 'accuse/Hughes', then they already have a poem.
But it is perhaps under the legal, personal and political pressure like this, unbearable as it must have been, that one might feel some sympathy for the failure of machismo, the inability to do the right thing, the innate inability that we all have to be anything other than what we are, that eventually we feel some sympathy for Ted, which was supposedly endorsed by the publication of the Birthday Letters.

However, tremendous best seller that it was, those poems were still more free verse confession and an attempt at absolvement than they were great poetry and their best-seller status was more about voyeurism than an appreciation of art for art's sake.
Before a very useful precis of Hughes' elaborate argument in the Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, which makes its very personal interpretation of Shakespeare seem in some ways plausible (although, of course, everybody finds themselves in Shakespeare and Hughes only does so at much greater length), Bate devotes a chapter to a litany of lovers in later life, not only suggesting as possibilities Angela Carter and Edna O'Brien but a very significant one in a flat in South London who, thankfully, remains unnamed.
At last, there is a stone unturned, something not to be known because, quite honestly, who would want to ever write a poem that was any good if your life was going to be investigated to this degree.
As with Larkin, every available letter is scrutinized, every rumour is investigated, every casual remark or greeting on a birthday card has to be published. In thirty five years or so, we have moved from an orthodoxy in which the text of the poems was the only object of enquiry to an intense investigation of the author and every nuance of all their traumas. Ted Hughes might have had more traumas than most but everybody has them.
Not much of this sheds light on the composition of The Thought-Fox or Hawk Roosting because Sylvia was still alive when they were written. Not long after that, the rest, for Sylvia, was silence but Ted's pain went on for decades, fishing for salmon with the Queen Mother on the choicest rivers, publishing special editions for as much money as he could ask but generally not being much of a Poet Laureate. Not his fault but neither did he deserve either the acclaim or quite the approbrium that he received. Whereas Sylvia, as far as we can tell, under the pressures that she was under, was quite some extraordinary talent and much of the credit for preserving and editing that work must go to Ted.
Jonathan Bate has done us a great service in providing this book which one, as ever, feels some guilt reading. It wanders a bit towards the end, losing its chronological thread, trying to tie up loose themes and then adds a coda that perhaps could have been shorter but, if you want to be as definitive as you're allowed, it has to be done.
It's unputdownable but I can't possibly go through it all again so now it's also unpickupable.
Ted Hughes will surely be remembered in future times as a significant poet of the C20th but, more than that, I hope and think, What will survive of us is Larkin.