Portsmouth Lunchtime Live! with Sachin Gunga

Sachin Gunga, Portsmouth Cathedral, Sept 13

There is really only one way to begin a series of concerts that are predominanty organ recitals, and that's with a choice bit of Bach. Sachin Gunga stepped in to cover the unavailable, advertised visitor and provided a thoughtful, mixed programme. A good move on his part, that others might consider following, was to take the microphone with him up to the organ loft to introduce the pieces from upstairs.
The Prelude and Fugue BWV 547, he explained, is known as the 'hickory, dickory dock' and it soon became obvious why although the nursery rhyme echo was no distraction. Lucid and made of Bach's customary intelligence, the fugue flows and weaves, implying the eternity that its finite nature won't quite fill.
No. 3 of Rheinberger's Meditations, Op. 167 is a gentle, lilting composition with childlike innocence that encourages one to look for the others in the opus. Likely to be similar, we might be treated to the others another time.
Sachin then played a sequence of three pieces, linked by the theme of light. The 'general crescendo' of Fiat lux by Dubois represented the coming of light. It is unfortunate when one's mind wanders and a serious piece in undermined by extraneous thoughts and the final bars here brought Reginald Dixon to mind for me, which is my fault but can happen with exuberant organ pieces. Bairstow's Evening Song was naturally more elegiac but flirted with inconsequence in its middle passages so Elgar retrieved the situation with Chanson de Matin, which I thought was Salut d'Amour but seems not to be but it's close.
'Born 1955' is a phrase that rings alarm bells in a composer of organ music and Bob Chilcott's Sun Dance was full of ideas for a short piece but less full of coherence. C20th organ music is a personal blind spot but one must persevere. Because the three hymn preludes by the centenarian Francis Jackson made more sense. Veni Sancte Spiritus suggested Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring and East Acklam was a peaceable joy. The Fantasy on Sine Nomine overelaborates Let All the World in Every Corner Sing in its accessible but Modernist way which was an interesting place to end if gathering a quota for a proper congregation and giving it a traditional full blast would have roused the sleepy September sunshine.
So, we were indebted to Sachin for his imaginative stand-in set and it is to be hoped we hear more from him. On the one hand, he has some esoteric repertoire, on the other, does he know any Buxtehude.

David Malusa in Chichester

David Malusa, poano, Chichester Cathedral, Sept 11th; Virginia Woolf, Pallant House Gallery.

The new season of Chichester Cathedral's lunchtime concerts began with energy and high Romantic risk-taking with a performance by David Malusa.
Mozart's Sonata K.311 is Eine Kleine mannerism to warm up the fingers, more moving in its second movement but trilling and ornamental in the finale leading to something more impassioned in the ending. Never less than charming and attractive, I had very much expected it to be the highlight with more adventurous pieces to come.
But if Mozart would be first choice at home on records, the rest of his programme lent itself better to the thrill of live performance. Scriabin's Sonata no. 4, Op. 30 begins in surprisingly dreamy, impressionistic mood but soon moves into territory more associated with Scriabin, which brought thoughts of Rachmaninov to mind with its expansive lyricism that developed into something stormier, given with some relish by Malusa, and impressing the usual big audience for one of these events in the hugely successful series. Here was a way to bash them round the ears and dispel any doubt that they were back at it again. Hold onto your hats.
But Liszt's Totentanz, which is a Dance of the Dead, only took up from where Scriabin had left off and Malusa was able to use the full range of the piano's resources, battering the bass notes, running up scales, suggesting the better-known big passages from Pictures At An Exhibition and keeping its main theme in mind while flirting apparently with the outskirts of madness with some stirring bravura. All of which, for once, made Mozart seem rather genteel, which in such company he is.
At 35 minutes, one is tempted to say that David could have provided something like a civilizing Bach Partita to clam our troubled spirits but I can't imagine anybody felt short changed and he left us like that, moved, unsettled or invigorated as we saw fit.
For once, these might not be pieces that I'll follow up and add to the collection because Mozart is the better-trained house guest but it is a recital I'm unlikely to forget in a hurry.

It is a fine thing that Pallant House Gallery is half price on Tuesdays, when I'm most likely to be in Chichester. Their exhibition of paintings 'inspired by' the writing of Virginia Woolf ends soon, this coming weekend in fact, but is worth seeing.
In the other rooms are work by the likes of Walter Sickert, always good, and some Keith Vaughan, from the estate of Peter Schaffer, whose dehumanizing of the human form is eerie but it is really about Virginia and the extended coterie of Bloomsbury at the moment.
Among the documents on display was a letter to Lytton Strachey, compelling for being exactly that. For better or worse, Virginia is now disproportionately lauded for her ideas about what it is, or was, to be a woman artist, which is fine but not as significant as what you do once you are one, at which she excelled.
The centrepiece is the portrait of Virginia by Vanessa Bell, next to which is a Vanessa self-portrait, who one doesn't imagine suffering fools gladly. I was interested in a quiet, pale interior by Gwen John very similar to a print I have on my front room wall, the difference being that this time she has the window open and so it is less claustrophobic.

But a tremendous discovery for me was the artist known as Gluck, Hannah Gluckstein (1895-1978), one of those ground-breaking ladies whose role it was to live in unconventional ways. A biography was available in the bookshop but, with a few books lined up to read, I'll maybe look out for that later. But I was most taken with Before the Races, St. Bunyan, Cornwall (1924), the beautifully realized detail of the horses down in the corner below the vast sky, which is what some racecourses can be like, especially Newmarket.
Trains back from Chichester shouldn't be quite the counter-intuitive ordeal that they can be, it often being the best plan to go into Fratton so you can get another one back out to Cosham but, wearying though that can be, one doesn't mind when the trip has been so worthwhile.      

One Born Every Minute

Not babies, perhaps, but posh birds apparently willing to help.
I realize that power and making them laugh can be aphrodisiac but there must be a limit.
I was thinking of framing yesterday's cartoonn from The Times and putting it on the wall but eventually thought I didn't need reminding quite that often.
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Meanwhile, I worked out 12 across, AFFOREST, for myself but nneeded the wordfinder for SAPROPHYTE, a word the flamboyantly erudite Mr. Johnson probably uses in every other sentence he utters, which would be quite often.

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The Proms season presented some difficulties. While the schedule undoubtedly contained many concerts worth hearing, it too often turned out to be Leonard Bernstein when I tuned in and I'm either not sophisticated enough or too sophisticated for his big, American showtunes. There is more too him than that, I'm sure, but I haven't found it yet.
It is also to be regretted that the BBC chooses more of the special features to show than the depth of class acts that represent the main body of concerts. Although it was good to see Tom Service, who knows his stuff, after the disappointment of seeing the ubiquity of the Rev. Richard Coles add the Proms to his domain. I never thought I'd want to see Alan Titchmarsh back.
That said, they did show Andras Scholl's monumental second book of The Well-Tempered Klavier, following last year's book one and Yo Yo Ma's Cello Suites before that. What blinding occasions they must be, and not easy, not only for the musician to remember the whole unfolding texts but for the audience to maintain concentration. I'm not sure one can. And some stand up all the way through.
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But before attempting to retrieve any compensation, it gets worse. After another week of looking forward to Friday night, the chance to see the Scholl Bach was not enhanced by a teenager's party next door which lasted to a quarter past midnight. It's the anxiety caused by knowing one is in one's private paradise but, beyond etiquette, it is being invaded and the outside world can get you from the inside. In the words of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, there is nowhere to run.
One is also aware that many years ago, one might have been part of the havoc that tweedy, pipe-smoking old people didn't approve of and I didn't want to be one of them. So, it's a matter of sitting it out and hoping it doesn't become a regular thing, looking forward to cold, winter nights.
I threw back a girl's shoe and just one plastic cup the following morning and enjoyed some quiet, as well as what compensation I could find. The record they played most often was Promises by Calvin Harris and Sam Smith. My conversion to it might be compared to that of Winston Smith loving Big Brother but it is any good. I also detected a re-mix of Tracy Chapman's Fast Car and then, at 00.15, My Girl in the Otis Redding version.
They can't have been all bad people.
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Meanwhile, The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters was a tour de force probably a bit too clever for its own good but ended on a straightforward fable about paradise. It might be wonderful for a while but one gets bored of it.
I expressed similar reservation about the Tallis Scholars a few years ago, that perfection wasn't enough; Sean O'Brien has it in his latest book of poems,
That art is all there is and might not be enough. 
And it must have dawned on the more astute supporter of any sporting outfit that, okay, Fulham (for example) don't win every week but it would be very dull if they did.
That doesn't mean I want to go to the cricket for the first time in two years and see Notts have Hampshire at 137-7 and proceed from there to lose by over 200 runs but it's the rough with the smooth, the light and shade and the temporary adequacy of compensation that makes it all worthwhile.
Moving from Barnes to Graham Swift's Waterland, a masterpiece I had so far overlooked, one appreciates that which is worthwhile and one glances down the Swift back catalogue confident that there must be more to be had among them.
And the card from the postman, that invariably means taking him up on his offer of re-delivery on Saturday, is Barnes' Keeping an Eye Open, essays on French painting - Delacroix, Bonnard, that sort of thing - which is likely to be paradise regained as a restorative, having thought the philistines were at my door.
And Waterstone's should be telling me the new biography of Elizabeth Jennings is ready to collect any time soon.
September is the kindest month.
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One still needs things to do oneself, however. I couldn't ever have been one of those happy enough to watch football, cricket, or cycling without having a go myself. The mixed success at no great standard achieved in those disciplines could be seen to be carried forward into writing. But if the compulsion to take part in sport diverted attention from the fact that I was no Eusebio, Greenidge or Phil Griffiths, it was even less likely to dawn on me that I was no Auden or Edward Thomas, either. It didn't matter.
All one needs is something to do, to ward off thoughts of emptiness, being, nothingness and with poetry at least for the time being having reached a hiatus, Red Herring, the book of prose anecdotes and memoir, perhaps a second attempt at imitating Terry Eagleton's The Gatekeeper, will provide me with a project that need never be completed. It can be like Casaubon's Key to All Mythologies, and I'm not put off by googling 'Casaubon' and finding 'Casaubon delusion' as Google's second suggestion. I don't mind that his work was stalled and remained unfinished and I don't mind that he was 'pompous and ineffectual'. I'm happy to be all of that if I can pretend to be doing something, and enjoy it.
I have all the time in the world for George Eliot. I think I get it completely how Dorothea's worthy intentions led her into the cul-de-sac of assisting Casaubon and Ladislaw is the glamorous alternative. But we change, don't we, and find ourselves preferring the cheese with balsamic vinegar in it to the easy listening of grade 2 cheddar; Shostakovich and Buxtehude provide even more than you thought they did when some old favourites like Tchaikovsky no longer convince. I don't think Casaubon was that bad, or at least, being him wasn't that bad.
One can be post-glamorous. If I can say I'm writing a book, it won't matter if I never finish it. My biggest worry is that I might pass away on a Saturday and leave the Times crossword unfinished. I wouldn't want anybody finding me there, with 6 down not filled in,
Oh, look, he didn't even finish it. 'Useless Latin with 500 in ceremony (9)'. Should we put it in for him. He never realized, did he.

    

Red Herring

I wanted to have a book to write. I thought it would take me ages to think of one worth doing, if there is one worth doing at all.
I simply don't know where to go with poetry next and expect a long hiatus in that idiosyncratic discipline, if not an end to doing it completely.

So, I was surprised that one slightly old-fashioned phrase in Julian Barnes suggested a whole book, a collection of anecdotes by way of fragments of memoir. Heaven knows it would be vainglorious to think I was anywhere near worthy of an autobiography, even for its own sake and I wouldn't tell you all that, anyway, but, Red Herring is the title of the new book. That is the title of the first piece in it, too, which begins,

I came across the phrase ‘red herring’ while reading Julian Barnes. It brought back a swarm of memories that it wouldn’t have for others, not unless you were in the same ‘O’ level Latin class as me. Which demonstrates how language carries different associations for different readers and no text is going to have quite the same meaning for everybody. Lesser writers would cite Proust for the way it unlocked a stream of anecdote and fine detail but I wouldn’t sink to that commonplace comparison. 

We'll see. But at least an idea of a 'project', something to do, to enjoy doing, has presented itself. It's most welcome.

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My officeful of secretarial staff have been inundated by queries querying my reference to The History of the World in 9 1/2 Chapters. Miss Trixie Naughtie came into my office the other day,
Mr. Green, I can't cope, I've had letters from all over the place from professors mystified by your apparent misinformation.
Of course, I meant 10 1/2 Chapters, and I don't know my Barnesy from my Fellini.
It's an entertaining book, so bloody ingenious it's forver in danger of doing itself a disfavour but one can take that from Barnesy in a way you couldn't take it from anybody else. It's much, much cleverer than Nutshell and still far, far better.
One of the most memorable chapters is on Gericault's Medusa. I always think of George Melly on Gallery, with Maggi Hambling, a television masterpiece of a quiz show, whenever Gericault is mentioned, it seemed to be George's default guess whenever he was struggling. However, such was the enjoyment in reading such an interpretation that I was compelled into the acquisition of Keeping an Eye Open, the Barnes essays on French painting apparently prompted by his own enjoyment of such writing. And, somehow, that is how the world should be.
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A real Bank Holiday treat was Don Letts presenting an all too short hour marking the 50th anniversary of Trojan Records on Radio 6, with a definitive playlist essential to any record collection owned by one of my generation. There remains something residually scary about Double Barrel, a record that was exotic and unfathomable to a young boy in 1971 although obviously wonderfully so. Would that the hit parade might feature anything so adventurous at no. 1 now.
The weather having cooled a bit, I went to work in trilby and Harrington jacket as a mark of respect today.
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The bank holiday weekend didn't hang too heavy about me with enough here to entertain a cartload of highbrow monkeys but my tendency to treat myself to more of my favourite pastime, another little nap (and not Expert Eye re-retrieving my position at York), rather than produce anything creative, did offer a bleak glimpse of the retirement that is impending, on an as yet unspecified date, in the next few years.
That is an abyss worthy of depiction by a German Romantic poet.
There is nothing to do. Convincing oneself that there is is a trick one can't keep pulling off.
Poetry will stop one day if The Perfect Book and Don Paterson's exhaustive account of what poetry is don't prove enough to have stopped it already. I am not adequate to progress from where I got to.
What book could I usefully write.
I don't know.
I could measure out the days professing a newly re-discovered interest in cricket or football, or try to become one of any sort of established crowd, like those pretending to art or music in galleries or at concerts. I'm only good enough to blunder along in Div 2 of the local chess league.
I saw a notice in a shop window on my way home tonight. Some people are away for two weeks in September and would like somebody to look after their well-behaved dog. I'd do that like a shot, for nothing, but I can't do those two weeks. You never know what might turn up.

 

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In a period such as this when one has not ordered any new books or records, it's possible to feel as bereft as the Wulf and Eadwacer poet, coming home knowing that nothing new is expected indoors, below the letterbox. Never mind, I'm sure September will bring plenty.
It's not that I need anything. Six Four is fine to drift through although I'm not yet compelled by it or its central position in the world vogue for noir. I did wonder whether to take another sabbatical from it in favour of Waterland, thus far a shameful omission, or History of the World in 101/2 Chapters. No, let's re-kindle the old stamina and determination of the 12 Hour cyclist and see this out, unless anything else demands attention more urgently.
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In fact September will bring Elizabeth Jennings by Dana Greene, which will, I trust, provide plenty of material with which to furnish an evening next March with the Portsmouth Poetry Society. Please see the new programme on the link over there >>>> once my technical department have uploaded it.
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Another presentation I might be offering will sadly be restricted to work colleagues only.
Long-standing readers - and thanks for being there if you are- may remember a couple of years ago a Learning At Work Day, held in a liberal enough spirit to include extra-curricular subjects, on which I presented an hour and a half on Latin for Beginners, which took us from the nominative and accusative cases and first conjugation verbs to Ovid and Catullus. Enthrallingly.
For this year's forthcoming day I have offered a few alternatives, the most promising of which might be Reading Poetry by which I mean a brief discusdsion, if anybody is bold enough to make it a discussion rather than a monologue, on what constitutes 'poetry' followed by a few poems to look at. I'm thinking four poems.
Edward Thomas is of local interest having lived not far from here. Adlestrop might not be as local as some but it's a sure-fire hit that nobody will miss the point of.
One is always aware of diversity issues in work although I tend not to find it necssary to worry. If you tell it how it is rather than make inane policy statements, you can't go wrong. As such, anybody would surely include Elizabeth Bishop in any list of paragon examples and looking at the vilanelle, One Art, would deal with lots of issues like autobiography, form, rhyme and how the fashion has changed from insistence on the text and the 'intentional fallacy' to something that considers the author, sometimes perhaps more than it needs to.
Also of local interest and a poet I could hardly leave out would be An Arundel Tomb. This might be a good place to reflect on two things that poetry is thought to do, hopefully both at the same time, which is say something profound and also be an artwork of interest in itself.
Which, if we have time for a fourth poem, leaves every other poem in the language as candidates to be it.
Perhaps we should do something earlier than C20th. Tennyson's of local interest. Perhaps we should do something earlier than that. Maybe even Wulf and Eadwacer itself. Or perhaps something C21st, Muldoon, Duffy, or something 'weird'. I have an idea what I'd like to do, which is recent and might illustrate the idea of 'objective correlative'. We'll see.