Chichester Symphony Orchestra in Chichester

 Chichester Symphony Orchestra, Chichester Cathedral, Oct 24

Overheard in the Oxfam bookshop beforehand was somebody saying they'd read a certain book and it was 'unusual' which immediately made me wonder what was 'usual'.

Elgar and Haydn seem to me fairly usual but they might not to others, it all depends on what you're used to. Perhaps it means 'mainstream' but the more one tries to make 'usual' mean anything, the less it means anything.

Elgar's Three Characteristic Pieces, op. 10, are possibly not characteristic of Elgar and thus are unusual. The Mazurka quickens with some gusto, driven by the timpani, the Serenade Mauresque is indeed Arab in flavour with its woodwind conjuring hints of Marrakesh before Contrasts: The Gavotte A.D. 1700 and 1900 is faux baroque before modulating the theme into bona fide Elgar.

Haydn's 'London' Symphony' no. 104 was written in 1795, the same year that Beethoven turned 25 and wrote his first two Piano Concertos. Although his Symphony no. 1 wasn't begun until 1799 and finished in 1801, one can hear in Haydn's last where Beethoven learned how to do his first. It's there from the imperious opening drumbeat and into full spate of the development in which Haydn deploys his musical idea with 'classical' discipline.

The Andante is a string-driven thing, unadorned, until horns, bassoon and woodwind fill out the sound, which was one of several swellings of sound that the CSO achieved to great effect. Haydn was ever disinclined to be morose and the Minuet and Trio was buoyant and upward-looking until the Spirituoso finale was all of that with its brass, rhythms and stagey big finish could be readily attributed as Beethoven Symphony no. 0. It was ever thus, with a new generation taking inspiration from the one before before taking it yet further.

Not having the dubious advantage of being a tragic figure, Haydn is somehow overlooked in the assessment of 'genius' as if torment and suffering were an essential ingredient of greatness but it shouldn't be and I'm sure that suited him fine.

It's a great thing, by way of a change, to have the stage filled with musicians on a Chichester lunchtime where there are usually no more than a quartet. It happens once a year, packs the place out and everybody enjoys being orchestral. They are a highly competent unit under Simon Wilkins with Natalia Corolscaia making herself at home as leader and on today's evidence remain in excellent form.

Mock History

I've read three chapters of Jacob Rees-Mogg's The Victorians, Twelve Titans Who Forged Britain and I think that's a fair effort. I've read Palmerston, Victoria and W.G. Grace. 

For someone with a 2:1 in History from Oxford one might have expected a bit more historical methodology but that's not Jacob's way. The fact that Boris Johnson also got a 2:1 from Oxford makes me wonder if that grade is standard issue there but in previous times Auden was awarded a third and Betjeman was sent down so it was possible to do worse.

I'm no historian but understand that evidence and sources are the basis of it, not simply stating that 'the truth is that...' and according greatness to public figures in direct proportion to their patriotism, contribution to Britain, Empire and respect for royalty, the 'constitution' and money, not necessarily in that order.

The 'forging of Britain' surely began long before the C19th, though. One might expect Boris's book on Shakespeare, were he ever to write it (God forbid), to make great claims for his contribution to British 'greatness' and others might suggest Alfred the Great, Boudicca, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I were in their somewhere. Perhaps Jacob meant 'Empire'.

One of the things found to be admirable in W.G. Grace's complex character was his wish to play attractice cricket but Jacob's biographer reported that one of his great heroes, over and above cricket, was Geoffrey Boycott who never expressed any such wish or demonstrated any such intention. And, as is never far away from Jacob's approach, W.G.'s monetary motivations are made almost as praiseworthy as his sporting success, the statistics of which Jacob does a fair job of explaining.

I haven't read anything else much about Palmerston or Victoria who, like most of Jacob's heroes, are 'great' because he thinks so but I'd never take his word for anything and so read his accounts with a great deal of scepticism. He writes like an enamoured schoolboy from a time that had gone by before I attended school in the 1960's but vestiges of Biggles, Arthur Ransome and such characters as those satirized in Michael Palin's Ripping Yarns lingered. It's not obvious that Jacob would realize that Ripping Yarns was a comedy. He might think it as much a documentary as Danny Baker said he thought Only Fools and Horses was when it first came on. I might be prepared to take the chapter on Victoria as largely factually correct but if I really wanted to know I'd read somebody else on the subject.

One would reasonably expect a hardback book published at the age of 50 to be better than the author's undergraduate work but I'm not sure this is of a 2:1 standard. It fails to 'make a case', it simply states one.

I'm very grateful to the Portsmouth Library Service for making it available at no cost, especially as I didn't read it all. I mainly wanted to see what it was like and I have. It compares very unfavourably with the work of a proper historian, Katya Hoyer, that I read recently. But while I'm grateful for having had the chance to look at it I'm also now of the opinion that the library budget could have found a better book on the Victorian Age if education, rather than stocking celebrity authors, were their purpose.  

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

I already can't remember what it was that prompted me to order from the library Jacob's Ladder, the Unauthorized Biography of Jacob Rees-Mogg by Michael Ashcroft. A morbid obsession with the macabre, I suppose it was, with particular reference to 'right-wing' politicians. It seems to be reasonably well-balanced in as far as it is certainly not a hatchet job but not hagiography either. Jacob comes out of it quite well with his unfailing courtesy and unflappable manner among his most admirable qualities. The surprise, such as it is, is how his anachronistic image is presented as not at all contrived but that's how he is, or has been since at least the age of 11 or 12 when, as a shareholder at Lonrho, he asked a provocative question at their AGM.

Since that time, he has been devoted to money and very successful at acquiring lots of it, whether through his thorough knowledge of the financial markets or by marrying an heiress. The network of aristocracy that his friends and family mix with- the earls, marquisses and landed gentry- begins to look incestuous but maybe they only swap girlfriends as much as Rolling Stones do. Jacob's first intended, though, was jettisoned on account of being divorced which was not a suitable fit with his Roman Catholicism.

It's not a particularly sensational book in the way that any account of Boris Johnson couldn't help being because it's mostly as expected but his first electoral campaign in Central Fife, the last constituency to return a Communist MP, stories of nanny, his time at Eton and his allegedly unstudied incongruities make for some humour that would sound far-fetched if it were anybody else.

The book appeared in 2019 and so before his promotion to high-ish office seemed to leave him out of his depth. As a great respecter of parliamentary process and integrity he surely let himself down in supporting the unlawful prorogation and as one of the last, beleaguered rump to remain faithful to Boris, with the redoubtable Nadine, he began to look less a man of high principle than he had been credited with being. Subsequently extending his media career into the cheapjack propaganda of GB News has also begun to reveal the more tawdry elements hidden beneath the well-groomed archaism that he had been, whether charmingly or not. Perhaps a second edition updating the story might one day tell it a bit more like it eventually looked.

Also from the library, while I was at it, I borrowed The Victorians, Twelve Titans Who Forged Britain, Jacob's 434-page book on history which, as an Oxford History graduate, he surely has every credential to qualify him to write. Except that it was found to be, and at first sight looks, ridiculously bad. With no index or footnotes and only three pages of bibliography, it looks like £25k's worth of vanity project with possibly only the prospect of Boris's book on Shakespeare, if it ever appears, likely to outdo it for vacuity. I'm not sure I'll be reading all of that but I'll give it a chapter or two. We'll see. 

--

At the other end of the 'cultural wars' spectrum, one of the bits of this week's This Week's Composer told me something that I surely should have known already, that Errollyn Wallen set four Philip Larkin poems for soprano and accompaniment. British Women Composers, Volume 1 (Lorelt) begins with It all depends on you and I never investigated that any further when hoovering up most of what Errollyn there is available on disc. It evaded both my Larkin scholarship that he'd been set by her and my Errollyn studies that she'd set him which is a C minus to say the least but, ahead of Wigmore Hall soon, it will be better late than never.

Not necessarily two artists one would associate together it is a credit to Errollyn's inclusive sensibility that she can speak so enthusiastically about Larkin's poems and not conflate them with some of the views he increasingly expressed in later life. There is a gap between them.

I need to catch up with This Week's Composer but it's busy enough with places to go, books to read, one to pretend to be writing. 

---

Luckily, horse racing hasn't kicked off like it should have done yet. I shouldn't really be tipping Wise Guy at Fakenham tomorrow where Tweed Skirt is a possibility in an open-looking race. I expected the Skelton horse in the bumper at Uttoxeter to be shorter than 9/4. The QE2 at Ascot on Saturday is a good race that I'd have had a view about in the summer but it's not the same once a bit of chill sets in and they've had long, hard seasons.

Sometimes it's best to stick rather than twist. Not playing a shot is still a part of cricket and it's a better way of playing than having a big yahoo and getting out.

64

64

Now that I’m older and have lost my hair

inevitably 

nobody is sending me a Valentine

just a birthday card and a bottle of wine

If I'd been out, and that is rarely,
I’d rather have stayed indoors
Nobody needs me, nobody feeds me
Now I'm sixty-four

We’re all older, though,
And it seems absurd
I couldn’t stay with you

I couldn’t be handy, and wouldn’t choose
domesticity
You can’t knit although it’s true that you can drive
and it’s great we’re both still alive
Doing the crossword, playing CDs
Who could ask for more

Nobody needs me, nobody feeds me

Now I'm sixty-four

Every summer we can still meet for lunch
In Portchester or Cosham High Street
No need to scrimp and save
You can be Cilla
I’ll be Cliff, not Dave

Send me an e-mail, from time to time
with anything new
Tell me all the pop records that you have played
like Lauren & the Heatwaves

And then I’ll answer, true to form
Yours, for evermore
Nobody needs me, nobody feeds me
Now I'm sixty-four

--

My last remaining wine glass was cracked and I had to admit I needed some new ones. It might seem bleak but it's also reassuring that, like with any work done on the house, I take the view that I might not have to pay for that again.

I came back from Gosport yesterday via Commercial Road, Portsmouth, where at least the saxophonist busker was coming to the end of I'll Be There by the Jackson Five. Stephin Merritt knew what it felt like when he wrote,

What am I doing in this dive bar

except Commercial Road no longer even has the dive bars it once had. 

I thought Argos was a place to get some new glasses and, to be fair, six for £11.50 looks like value for the forthcoming years of Merlot, Cabernets or maybe Zinfandel. But rarely have I been treated with such contempt as a customer as I was by the experience of being processed by Argos. 

Yes, I am betting without one particularly disdainful shop assistant on the Copnor Road but otherwise the staff in the convenience stores there have taken on what I assume the staff training tells them, that it is the customers - those that still pay and don't just loot the place- that pay their wages. But in Argos even in the one, last and only interaction with a human being, I didn't seem to even be there as far as the operative was concerned once they'd decided to attend to their desk.

Much more hilariously, though, one gets no sense of scale clicking on things on an Argos computer. The digital radio in the kitchen is very small because it didn't occur to me to check its dimensions and my new wine glasses, which were listed as gin glasses, are far bigger than it. I didn't want 'small' glasses but at 64 I'm going to be too old to drink gin in the quantities accommodated by such sumptuous crucibles as them if I'm ever lured into drinking it ever again.

But, what can you do. I've somehow got this far, having scraped through by the skin of my teeth, with a little help from my friends and the kindness of some who had previously been strangers.

Thank you very much to those special people who know that it is not only the birthday of Johnny Haynes, Wyclef Jean and, according to most sources, Rosemary Tonks, today. 

For no other reason than it is the latest record to be added to DGBooks Radio, here is the wonderful Tracy Chapman with a gorgeous birthday request played by me for myself,

and then, since it has come up next because I play it so much,

Thomas Howell in Gosport

 Thomas Howell, Holy Trinity, Gosport, Oct 16

In 1705, Bach famously walked 250 miles to visit Dietrich Buxtehude in Lubeck. Today, in order to pay similar tribute, I walked maybe 5 miles to hear some of his music played. It was by no means a comparable effort but in order to do so I wanted to cross the water which, on a fine Autumnal day, is a bracing thing to do.

The organ in Holy Trinity, Gosport, was commissioned and almost certainly played by Handel, but not in Gosport. It was sold on there later but is a great hidden treasure in these parts and it would have been a shame if Thomas Howell hadn't played any of the great man's music on it. A subdued but ceremonial part of the Organ Concerto in F, HWV. 274, used the piccolo stop in an airy dance. 

It's very useful, especially for non-organists, to have the screen for the audience to see both the keyboard and the pedals. I suspect Thomas and all organists are capable of a spritely jig. In the opening Praeludium in D, the Buxtehude, one could watch the feet in conversation with the hands in what was a miniature compendium of musical ideas.

Thomas explained that the Bach Das alte Jahr vergangen 'sighs, cries and bleeds' through its New Year chorale and, soft and sepulchral under his sympathetic fingers and shoes, it maintained the meditative mood of the programme through the Handel to Messaien's Prière avant la communion. Unsettling and disembodied, it's not difficult to see why Messaien's 'harmonic language' has an 'unfortunate reputation' for those of us more accustomed to C18th music but the piece added another dimension to the programme and happily, even if that's not quite the word for it, demonstrated Thomas's wider repertoire.

Until, after such quietude, the brassy, grand, marching Fanfare by Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens, a new name to me, was a crusading, big finish and it would have been a shame not to hear the organ allowed to show how much else it can do by way of contrast.

I've not been to an organ recital for some time but I'm encouraged by this evocative and informative performance to go back more often. More of it wouldn't have gone amiss. And so, til the next time, we'll thank Tom for this and we'll hope that he'll come back again.

New Poetry in Hammersmith

 New Poetry, Hammersmith Irish Cultural Centre, Oct 13

Four poets with some Irish in their family trees came together to read newly published work in the quiet of an auditorium away from the hectic process of the Friday evening outside. Poetry readings aren't my very favourite type of cultural event but they are already 100% better if I'm not taking part.

Paul O'Prey, who is the Dare-Gale Press, first introduced Patricia McCarthy, the outgoing editor of Agenda, whose new pamphlet, A Ghosting in Ukraine, encounters some artists who we might once have thought to be Russian but were properly Ukrainian. Anna Akhmatova, whose style Patricia described as 'unadorned', is a significant presence in her work but I'm always ready for anything Chagall-related, which we got.

In Four Seasons Gone she recognizes the outpouring of poems by many who have never written poems before in Ukraine during the war powerfully and it is to be hoped their resilience is rewarded.

Greg Leadbetter's Caliban imagines Shakespeare's 'primitive' creation going back to the island having been given his freedom by Prospero. Greg read three poems in what purported to be Shakespeare's English and followed them with their translations in modern pronunciation. That might not have been entirely necessary given that the first versions weren't really in a foreign language but what I took from them, however tangentially, was a music reminiscent of the Old English Wulf and Eadwacer, the gorgeous and forlorn masterpiece that remains mysterious and not quite explainable.

Paul doesn't publish his own books. His Mappa Mundi comes from the Melos Press, seeing the world in terms of those early map-makers who used more imagination than verified knowledge but maybe,

flat earth love is like you never find the edge,

in which I don't know where the line endings come because I only heard it but I'm more concerned with what the line evokes than getting it right, like those early cartographers now look to us to have been.

Sean O'Brien has done this before. He has a sort of stagecraft that disguises his art as something relaxed, confident to do it is in his own time with casual humour that is probably more rehearsed and thought-out than it looks. It always was with the old school professionals like Morecambe & Wise, Tommy Cooper and Ken Dodd. His Otherwise is discussed elsewhere here (below), where it might turn out I've got at least as much 'wrong' as I've got 'right' but, having been brought up on the Intentional Fallacy, it's up to me if I assume a 'black dog' refers to depression and not, quite literally but not so literarily, simply a dog that is black.

Paul's introduction to Sean identified him as 'gentle but ruthless' and these new poems are gentler than he's sometimes been in the past. After many years of coining phrases to try to capture the essential O'Brien with varying degrees of success, I've not condensed it into three words quite so concisely.

As poetry readings go, this was a good one and rated quite highly. It's only the second one I've been to since lockdown and I'm in no hurry to find the next. But you'd be lucky to get anybody of quite such quality turning up at your local open mic night. On the other hand, as Sean wryly observed, one generally prefers to hear that there are 'just two more' rather than seven more, especially when the bar is open and, I was reliably informed, the Guinness in the Irish Cultural Centre is competitively priced compared to what it is possible to pay elsewhere in that there London.      

Stevie

I was prompted by a passing mention somewhere into the market for Stevie Smith books. She's not really up among my favourite poets, the faux-naivety is perhaps a bit much but I am one for a poetry biography and Frances Spalding's does a fine job, the life and the ideas behind the poems being more convincing than the poems themselves. 

I was quite taken with her idea that,

man is so lonely that he invents Godin order to have someone interested in him,

and her reading of Robert Graves's King Jesus which on the face of it, from what it says here, sounds like A.N. Wilson's account and,

constructs a Jesus who is fantical, deeply versed in rabbinical law and anxious to fulfil prophecies found in Jewish mystical texts.

While Stevie clearly wasn't always the eccentric spinster she played the part of so well in later life, she was always in some way a natural outsider and could be unforgiving in her assessments of those around her. I doubt if I will be buying the poems beyond those I have already and are in Me Again. There's plenty of Elizabeth Jennings by the bedside to be going on with who, although dedicated to Catholicism, is a more amenable poet. I'm not sure I can think of any other writer whose sub-text and meaning were so much better than the way she chose to express them but it's a life with lots to like about it in that faraway world of early C20th suburban London.

--

The mini Elgar festival that has come about in the Chichester lunchtime Autumn programme could have propelled him, however belatedly, up my hit parade. Probably not as high as Brahms, say, who may or may not be Top 10 but I certainly had been neglecting him and rating him below his worth despite ploughing through that big biography some months ago. The Violin Sonata turned up today so soon after reporting its non-appearance that I'm not sure if it is an expedited replacement or a very slow delivery of the original item but it will sit nicely alongside the Piano Quintet in due course while the new arrivals pile up. The complete Mozart Pianbo Concertos are also late but it will be no hardship at all to make my way through them.

--

I never more appreciated why horses need a week or two's break between races than how my legs still felt yesterday after Sunday's Edward Thomas walk. Of course, a horse can reappear in very short order after an easy win but I couldn't have done today's modestly idyllic walk at Itchenor yesterday. Good Lord, there are some outrageous houses hidden away down there and I'm the more convinced that if those houses send their children to Bedales School then VAT on the fees is entirely to be expected.

Even Jacob's aloof disdain can't really pass of the charitable status of such privilege but I did wonder if the library would have his book. I wonder quite how absurd his world view is when one reads a whole book of it. I will almost miss my self-righteous disbelief at some of that which has poured forth from Boris, Liz Truss, Suella, Jacob et al once they are banished to, let's hope, ten years in opposition. So, in the most honourable tradition of irony, I might read some Mogg. Whether I'll risk being seen with it in public is another matter, though. I might have to borrow something more respectable, like a Jeffrey Archer novel, to hide it behind.