Jenny Lewisohn & Antonio Oyarzabal at Chichester

Jenny Lewisohn & Antonio Oyarzabal, Chichester Cathedral, Feb 7

Women composers are hopefully, if somewhat belatedly, no longer a curiosity. At one time the prevailing attitude to them might have been like that of Dr. Johnson to women preachers,

Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.

notwithstanding Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn, to name only two.

Antonio Oyarzabal's ongoing project is to explore their work further, going into lesser-known names of which there are plenty in either gender. Today with Jenny Lewishon, he presented music for piano and viola.

And it's been great to hear the viola featured prominently in some local recitals recently. It is much under-rated and under-used outside the string quartet and in Minna Keal's Ballade was more cello than violin in its rich register but more much itself than either. Calm, composed and measured, the question was to persist whether those were qualities of the composers or the musicians throughout the concert.

I've wondered from time to time, and for a long time, whether there is a difference in literature between the work of male and female writers, prompted mainly by the apparent need for anthologies of 'women's' poetry and women's prizes, as if 'women's writing' was a different thing to writing. In writing, as in music, surely all work uses the same syntax but it's certainly possible than some women take up different themes to those that men do, or approach them from other perspectives. Music, though, is less encumbered by literal meanings and I'm not convinced there's the same difference.

Freda Swain's English Reel was a darting, mercurial thing demanding much more from the bow and all the fingers of the four hands involved before her mellower Song at Evening had Antonio's piano embellishment following Jenny's top line around.

But those pieces were not on the same scale as Rebecca Clarke's Sonata. She might not he a household name in non-musical households but at least she is famous enough for me to have heard of her. Immediately imposing in its opening statement and more 'modern', the piano in the Impetuoso was like a loaded sub-conscious under the viola's flights of emotion. The mixture of pizzicato, spiccato * and bowing in the Vivace was more agitato than one might expect from a Vivaldi vivace and made me think again than Jenny is a brilliant technician rather than one that exaggerates the passion. 

It again isn't traditional to finish with an Adagio movement but those markings are not metronome settings. Sometimes they appeared almost ironic as it developed from the bare piano line into elegy but it included more than that. If there had been a hint of Scottish song in it that impression was given some support by the encore I'll Bid My Heart Be Still which was exactly that and all clarity and wide spaces.

As ever, it was another tremendous Chichester lunchtime with everything to admire about it from the programme through the performance to the setting and the value.

 

* Spiccato [spikˈkaːto] is a bowing technique for string instruments in which the bow appears to bounce lightly upon the string.  I looked that up.

TV Appearance

I'm always glad of an alibi just in case I'm wrongly accused of a crime and questioned about it.

- Where we you at 3.20 on the afternoon of Feb 6th.

- I was at Fontwell Park, Chief Inspector Barnaby.

- How do I know you were?

- Because I was on the telly.

 

I was broadcasting to the nation. Admittedly only to that tiny fraction of them that were watching Sky Racing and were so ultra-vigilant that they could recognize me from behind in a fleeting moment.

But, having recorded it and gone through all the bits I could have been in it frame by frame, that's me on the telly. Not quite as ubiquitous as Bradley Walsh. Couldn't call it a cameo role, not even an extra and the tree is doing more for the snaphot than I am but that's me alright.

 

Unquiet Flows the Don

Some books have a turning point and sometimes one can find it a halfway through. In Don Paterson's memoir of his Dundee teenage years, it comes two-thirds of the way through, exactly where I was when I hurried here in my excitement to proclaim one of the funniest books I'd ever read. Continuing from there, it became the one of the most terrifying and I could tell that because it seemed to stop describing various aspects of life in 1970's Dundee as such and began to 'show' rather than 'tell', in that much-used creative writing tutor's advice.

Maybe not all sufferers from mental illness are quite as well-equipped to let others into the experience as one who recovered his senses and went on to be a writer and, if prizes can reflect genuine worth as well as a cheque from a sponsor, a very good one at that. The book suddenly stops being bleakly hilarious and undergoes a key change into the hellish Crazy Z minor which also seemed to be the key that most of Don's jazz musician friends played in anyway.

You wouldn't want to go there. You wouldn't have wanted to have ever been there. Whereas one can, if one sees fit, read his evocations of the 'schemes', which in America I think they called 'projects', with some appreciation that he's indulging himself with some hyperbole, mostly for dark humour's sake, that suddenly stops.

One can't help wondering if the almost essential flirtation with madness that might be required of anybody who is going to become a 'creative artist' of any profundity is worth the ticket. Not all of us found it necessary to devote ourselves to the posturings of Frank Zappa however clever he might, or might not, have been. I was devoted to The Faust Tapes, aged 13, but somehow avoided the worst of what Don went through before he was 18 by retrieving that perilous situation and finding my way back, not only through Beethoven and Shostakovich, but to Al Green and Tamla Motown. 

The breakdown and the inside of the sanatorium, we might like to think, were of the time of Cuckoo's Nest, Sylvia, Salinger and Phil Spector and highly fashionable in their way but the mainstream was safer even if it didn't enlighten you into how Eric Clapton only borrowed a dozen licks from Buddy Guy. Don still almost deboanirly slips a mention of Dark Side into a list of three records he approved of some I'm left hoping there's something else out there that doesn't need of the Moon to be understood.

Don, and the book, recover. As much as any of us ever recover from anything. And the rest, from thereon in, was mostly an upward trajectory to the very minor celebrity of poetry stardom which by now has long since not been the equivalent of what Tennyson achieved and much less likely to get one mentioned on the wireless than if you are much less eminent in, say, British tennis, cookery or the more demented factions of the Conservative party.

The turn that Toy Fights took made it less of a glorious exposition of Don's capacity for grim, devastating wit and into something more harrowing which gives it considerably more depth and makes it yet more memorable than it would have been if it had only been the tour de force stand-up routine it was looking like being.

I'm not entirely convinced he's got it exactly right yet. Surely best known for his poems, I've never heard him play guitar and guess I'm not qualified to understand him doing so if I did, but the prose books, the prose books. He is very good at them.

Fontwell Preview

There will be no need of taking one's notebook to Fontwell tomorrow to write down the names of all the horses to take forward to Cheltenham next month. I'm not even going to try to find a picture of any of them to use here, either. These horses are to their sport little more than what I was to cycling, cricket or football but I did beat a Russian girl at chess the other day who I found had been playing in international tournaments so I'm not going to include chess. But, heaven knows I'm looking forward to it. 13/8 pays the same whether it's in the Cheltenham Gold Cup or the Cazoo 'Hands And Heels' Handicap Hurdle (Conditionals And Amateurs) and it is well overdue we got back to a racetrack on which to be a wiseguy, it having taken only a few weeks for our planned fixtures this season to stop being abandoned due to firm ground and be abandoned because it was too heavy.

And so I've done more homework on this meeting than would be customary where 'homework' means not much more than 'realizing why the favourites are favourite' and hoping that three of them win when put together in the same treble.

I'd have left the 1.20 out completely but for early moves in the betting for Gary Moore's Abingworth, a stable long noted for its winners being well-backed.

At 1.55 Unit Sixtyfour, despite being asked to give weight away all round, has been chalked up at a prohibitively short price and so might have to be left out. Kilbeg King at 2.30 ran in a far, far more glamorous contest last time, admittedly as a 50/1 chance, and so ought to get more of a look-in here.

More from the Moores on what could easily turn out to be a pay day for them is likely to come from Ozzie Man at 3.00 as long as he doesn't get dizzy or lose his way on three laps of the figure-of-eight chase course. And you'd think Auriferous might be ready to beat not much at 3.30.

One could easily have four guesses at the 5-runner 4.00 and still not find the winner and a 5-runner race in which one bookmaker can price up the outsider at 4/1 makes the old Portsmouth dog track's betting market seem like a land of bountiful opportunity but we're having a day out and so ought to have a mug punt and Whatsdastory at least fits in with my pop record theory (which very rarely works). I was also looking at Clear White Light, the early Lindisfarne hymn, in the Carlisle 3.45 but early doors it looks like they can't give it away.

Joe Tizzard knows the time of day and I like him a lot but his Tamaris, in the 4.30, is widely available at 10/1 which suggests it might not be this time but I'll have a look what happens on course. Force de Frap won by 13 lengths last time and has duly been given more lead to carry but remains the one to beat.

Now comes the hard bit, sticking them together and hoping that, if we have any winners listed there, they can all find themselves joined in holy parsimony. This is where it often goes wrong. One is doing little more than playing a fruit machine but it's set fair for a nice day and win, lose or draw, we can at least take part. There will be other days on which to conjure the year's profit from that cute cocktail of a little knowledge, a careful plan and the determination to make sure it happens.

Toy Fights by Don Paterson

Don Paterson, Toy Fights (Faber) 

There have been three generations of poets since the end of the line of the effete, other-worldly stereotype that defined the species from Wordsworth to Stephen Spender. The non-poetry world that doesn't take any notice of poets still thinks they're all much like John Keats. Never mind that there's been Tony Harrison, Ciaran Carson, Derek Mahon, Sean O'Brien, not to mention Carol Ann Duffy or Kathleen Jamie since. And Don Paterson. Toy Fights, his memoir up to the age of 20 would do much to redress the misconception if anybody outside of those poem-reading people likely to read it would also do so. Not only that, they would be richly entertained.

Toy Fights bears comparison with that paragon of the droll literary memoir, The Gatekeeper by Terry Eagleton, which is the highest of endorsements since that is one of the best books I've ever read and won for Prof. Eagleton the Emeritus chair of Literary and Cultural Comparative Sinecure at the University of Lancaster, that renowned centre of scholarship that gave me 47% for my essay on Vanity Fair that could hardly have persuaded Prof. Carroll that I'd sat in front of Thackeray's dreary masterpiece never mind read it. That some of that paltry effort had been slung together at Cambridge University on a visit specially undertaken to see Thom Gunn didn't seem to count for much. Insight into Regency Lit is apparently not acquired by osmosis.

Don's story might be even better than Eagleton's but The Gatekeeper has become so hallowed and shrouded in haloes of beatific light that it has gone beyond doubt into those realms of works that one can only shiver and burst into tears at the mere mention of, like Al Green or Couperin's Lecons de Tenebres. At first it might have been going to be a finely-written, acerbic misery memoir full of loathing, dread and Dundee. I live in Portsmouth so I know a bit about grim insularity and places that regard themselves as sui generis without caring what it means but I didn't have my formative years here. Gloucester was idyllic on the edge of what was then fields and Dundee clearly was not but at least deserves the credit for making Don Paterson, and thus this book, what they are. But it weren't all the luxury that creative writing professors have become accustomed to since then, was it, with lino floors that we had Fife to thank for, ice on the inside of our bedroom windows, Nottingham smog so thick that I walked into a lamp-post and school could be barbaric, the in-bred sadism of rugby union in the West Country only now, fifty years too late for me, being revealed as more hideous than character-building.

 

In a way that might not be intended but, as he would appreciate, Lancaster from 1978-81 did its best to instil in me the catechism that the author's intentions are out of bounds, Don's prose books are - for me at least- much better than his poems. By all means, I also,

            love all films that start with rain

and all that Rain entails but am less convinced by aphorisms whereas the books on Shakespeare's sonnets and Michael Donaghy are brilliant and The Poem would probably be, too, if it weren't so exhausting with even him advising the reader once or twice that they can miss out the next 50 pages without missing anything crucial. But we see that obsessive need to fulfil himself, if it were possible, with the whole art, in his account of his juvenile career as an origamicist except one can never tell the whole story, as those 698 pages regularly acknowledge.

 

Like The Gatekeeper, which one reviewer described as the doyen of Literary Theory doing an unforeseen stand-up comedy turn, Toy Fights bangs out the often coruscating laughs like a T20 batter whacking the bowling out of the ground harder and further than he reasonably needs to but 'reasonably' isn't funny. The comparison with the endless host of stand-ups with their routines on Live at the Apollo, many half Don's age and hoping to make their way through a field as over-populated as punk bands in 1977, is highly appropriate because they're doing very much the same thing - exaggerating their real life stories for the benefit of their art and the entertainment of their audience. But why it's funny is for the most part because we recognize it as true. It might not even be overstated. When once asked 'how I did it' in a newsletter I once produced irregularly at work, I said it wasn't me that did it, I just told it how it was.

I'm on page 186 out of 365. I'm likely to finish it tomorrow and then it will be gone, one having to use up the thing one loves until there is no more of it. We could hopelessly hope for more Eagleton one day, some more Danny Baker or anybody else who can make more of their story in the telling than perhaps there really was to it and maybe the childhood episodes are the most fertile but it is devoutly to be wished we get more from Don Paterson. I haven't quoted anything from it because I don't want to ruin it and, anyway, one is spoilt for choice.

I did once try to tell Don, when he was in captivity having to sign books at the Cheltenham Festival, how good I thought the Shakespeare book was but he was having none of it. You can take the man out of Dundee, as far as Kirriemuir anyway, but you can't take Dundee out of the man.

Having yesterday been able to begin the short list for the Event of the Year 2023, today the list for the Book of the Year can be declared open, too. 

Catherine Lawlor and Valentina Seferinova at Lunchtime Live!

 Catherine Lawlor and Valentina Seferinova, Portsmouth Cathedral, Feb 2

Szymanowski for lunch was a rare treat served up with some relish by Catherine Lawlor and Valya Seferinova. Portsmouth and its catchment area are well catered for in musical talent and they are two of its main ingredients. Today they were introduced by the doyen of Radio 3 announcers, Piers Burton-Page who provided comprehensive synopses of the music.

The pieces are as programmatic as they are impressionistic, Valya beginning with Debussy's La cathédrale engloutie, beginning concentrated and intense in the misty depths before rising mightily with its bells, organ and chanting priests but that was just for starters.

Szymanowski is a potent mix of lushness and twentieth century torments. If I thought of him as one of any number of artists who might be called 'The Last Romantic' that does him no justice. The Myths, op. 30, are three dramatic settings of tales from Ovid. The Fountain of Arethusa described her traumatic metamorphosis into a stream and beyond with Catherine conjuring the most delicate effects from the violin. Narcissus was condemned to the loneliness of being transfixed by his own image before becoming a flower with some crystalline top notes on the strings and Dryads and Pan were intoxicated and orgiastic in the sometimes demur understatement of the summary by Piers in music that defied any attempt at gentility. Valya does raw energy and scintillating power as impressively as she does sensitivity and Catherine was compelling in her lightning pizzicato, the distant strains and perfect tone she achieved in what I hardly need guess is a considerable technical challenge.

The whole performance was totally absorbing and the duo's disc, Myths and Legends, is something to look forward to even if one can't beat hearing it for real as it happens in the flesh. I know I enthuse about most if not all of these concerts and that's not just to be polite, that's what they are like but today we can begin the short list for the Event of the Year 2023. 

Diary

 An impressive turn out of 17 at Portsmouth Poetry Society this evening was, I'm sure, due to the interest in Thomas Hardy but one likes to think of oneself as being 'box office' and they do generally, and very kindly, make the effort for the annual 'lecture' by the man from David Green Books.

Next up here, bookwise at least, is Don Paterson's new memoir of childhood. The Elgar book took almost the length of the library loan period but was worth it. There is almost a perceptible slowing of pace, it seems to me, in the last pages of a biography in which time waits to claim its illustrious victim. You can see the pages rapidly diminishing, the sentences seemingly taking on an adagio rhythm and the subject fading but holding on. Or maybe I'm imagining it all. 

The Don takes precedence over the Phil Spector biography and a return to the History of Writing and we'll see how soon the library has a copy of the recent Maggie O'Farrell for me, Hamnet having been such a surprise hit. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised as she's clearly 'any good'. But before all that, come back soon for tomorrow's Szymanowski at Portsmouth Cathedral with local superstar Valya Seferinova and Catherine Lawlor. Imagine that.

--

It told us all we need to know about bookmakers when William Hill were offering 13/1 about any two teams being drawn together in the last 16 of the cup. That is a 15/1 chance, obviously, and anybody taking them up on their offer really needs their head testing. Of course, the bookies have to take out their percentage but that is blatantly pickpocketing their customers far too transparently. With an actual sporting event you can take on the odds because you have an 'angle', like the trainer of a horse being in form or believing that one team have more reason to be trying than the other but at least it goes to show how the odds are so plainly set against you and staying in front of them means you're doing something right.

--

I thought I'd put on the Brenda Holloway disc this morning. I thought, wow, this is 'soul' and more sophisticated than the glories of early Motown usually were. Listen to that guitar. Good Lord, this is 'something else'. That's because it was something else but it took until I Can't Stand the Rain for me to realize that somehow I'd put Ann Peebles on instead. But thank you very much, dear Bob Harris, for playing You Keep Me Hanging On (but not 'Set me free why don't you') and opening up more of the work of the tremendous Willie Mitchell Band.

I really don't know if it's the songwriters, Ira Allen and Buddy Mize, or the singer that make the line,

My heart is like a yo-yo string

and it must be both but that, and the song as a whole, stop one in one's tracks, as it were and it is a team effort, naturally. You can hardly make a great record with a bad song or a bad singer. I'd know.