The Legend

Prospects of a return to competitive cycling, or any other sort come to that, were being downplayed after an unexpected sighting of this legend* (see footnote) of 1990's distance events at a track in Swindon at the weekend. A few stone over an ideal racing weight means there's not really world enough, or time, for a comeback some 10 or 12 years after last getting on, and then off, a bike but it felt better than I had any right to expect it to.

The track was never my thing but the chance to ride with the family's young apprentice squad on my niece's bike, who looked as good as she ever did on it and much better than me, was much too difficult to pass up. Cycling can be undertaken without any competitive element whatsoever but it's surprising how quickly all that kicks back in when a likely-looking rival is available. What transpired was a Race for the Ages as I chased my 7yo great nephew down the back straight but had to sit in behind him through some highly technical twists and turns, waiting to pick him off in the finish.

That wasn't a given thing, though. He was well aware of where I was and as I came on the outside to do him for a turn of pace, he showed trackcraft beyond his years and edged across to block me. Well, I could hardly risk crashing such a nice bike so kindly lent so I had to switch inside, a bit like Lester Piggott did on Vacarme in the Richmond Stakes at Goodwood in 1983 for which he was disqualified but, like Lester, I made sure I got there first and they can ask questions later.

It's true I got beat in the re-match but I didn't know it was a re-match, didn't even realize he was on the track, but an honourable draw is the most sporting result. 

You never quite forget how to do it. It all comes flooding back. It is, in fact, a bit like riding a bike.

 

* legend, for these purposes it is only necessary to be considered a legend by one admirer. I did precious little to be such to anybody else but I felt like one and irony is my preferred mode of writing anyway.

Worth Waiting For

The Perfect Stranger by P.J. Kavanagh has bided its time very patiently upstairs for over twenty years, more like twenty-five, since arriving as part of a large box of books donated to my library. There could still be more such good books unread up there, I don't know.

Having not been so taken with the signed Selected Poems returned to after being sent in that direction by Derek Mahon, PJK's memoir is every bit as good as the praise it is accorded. 

Somewhat itinerant in these early years, he very naturally becomes the non-conformist 'poet' in family, school, as a mis-fit in proper jobs, in Paris and in the best bits in the army, most notably at Catterick where the humour goes up a couple of gears,

At the highest, windiest, most improbable point of World's End Camp, by itself (I'm sure all the other huts had long since blown away) stood the P.O. Block. Except that we lived in it, it was uninhabitable.

In the Foreword, Kavanagh expresses doubts about the book's status as autobiography and explains why he didn't provide a sequel. It's a pity he didn't but we are better off being grateful for what we have rather than regretting what we don't have.  

Browsing

 'Browsing' is an unpleasant word for an enjoyable thing to do. Perhaps it subliminally suggests eyebrows which bring to mind caterpillars. I'm not sure if that's how words work for everyone but they do it like that for me.

Browsing is non-committal, indolent and restful with all the benefits of Existential freedom  before the burden of choice brings the shame and nausea of having committed oneself. I browsed my own books for things to look at, which is what they are for. I haven't looked at much poetry on a regular basis for quite some time so I picked out-

Don Paterson, Landing Light, in which the accomplishment seems to be beyond my reckoning. Don's books on the Shakespeare Sonnets and Michael Donaghy are brilliant and there are poems I like a lot, too, but sometimes it's best to admit when one is not on the right wavelength.

Paul Muldoon, Maggot, which is from 2010 and thus a little after his finest hour. A little bit forced, still fine in places but maybe the strain of continuing to be Muldonian and then even more so was begiining to show.

Sylvia Plath, the original version of Ariel as introduced by Freida, is still devastating in its language and, like Rothko perhaps, finds a way of dealing with its extreme themes. It's far too difficult, especially in the light of Freida's honest introduction, to have an opinion about events one was not a part of but I've long been convinced that Sylvia was a far greater talent than Ted.

And Derek Mahon, whose prose pieces in Red Sails I had entirely forgotten about. On boozy writers, P.J. Kavanagh, The Gallery Press and advertising work in America, he is wide-ranging, somewhat austere and admirable. He gives pop music short shrift - The Beatles, Stones and Dylan - but has some time for Joni. I was heartened to see that one of the Kavanagh poems he cites is Blackbird in Fulham which was my PJK 'breakthrough' moment and he refers us to the memoir which is upstairs and unread so that will be coming off the shelf for an ideal read on forthcoming trains.

Some Things Old, Some Things New

It was a bad day in the EMI print room one day in 1989. The booklet in my 3-CD set of Beethoven Piano Trios (Bareboim, Zuckerman, du Pré) is fine on the outside but the inside pages are from a booklet for Mozart's Vespers. Perhaps it's a collector's item but I doubt it. Not to worry, the music is wonderful, prompted by last week's Ghost in Chichester, and having them all played by this supergroup is very much the sort of long-term benefit that such concerts can lead to.

I'd very much like to get Beethoven into my Top 3 Composers but Bach, Handel and Mozart are unwilling to cede their places so I go with a four. I may or may not find upstairs the black and white poster of him I had on my bedroom wall in the 1970's, fearsome though it was. As it is, not being clear which would be the best biography with which to improve on the basic one I have, I might get the Letters and thus have the life at first hand, as it were.

--

He's hardly a discovery, it's just a very old enthusiasm coming back rejuvenated. Latest to be revisited from the bookshelves has been the Richard Yates Collected Stories. Whaddaya, Crazy, one of the greatest prose fiction writers. I hitched a ride on the Yates revival in 2002, liking to think I helped in a modest way with an essay in a magazine just like more recently I've jumped aboard the Rosemary Tonks bandwagon, early enough to pay plenty for rare, old editions before both were re-issued in paperback. That's the cost of being in the vanguard but it's well worth it for the feeling of having known. 

Where Rosemary owed much, had she felt inclined to be revived, to Neil Astley, Yates was more to do with Leonardo di Caprio.

--

Also due soon are Sean O'Brien, Juniper (Dare-Gare Press) and the inordinately long awaited Thom Gunn biography and so that constitutes the Summer Reading list.

 

Nicola Meecham at the Menuhin Room

 Nicola Meecham, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, July 6

It was thirty years, my homework tells me, before Beethoven's Piano Sonata no. 23, op. 57, acquired its 'impassioned' title. It wouldn't be his only piece it could be applied to but such names can only pass into common usage by popular consent. Among the crueller revenges that fate took on Beethoven as retribution for his monumental musical gift was the onset of his loss of hearing, from about 1803, and it's hard not to think that the Appassionata was at least in part his 'rage, rage against the dying of the sound', about 150 years before Dylan Thomas exhorted us all to do similarly against that of the light.

Fate might be the point as the 'fate motif' that it opens with is not far from that of the Fifth Symphony. Adopting his heroic stance, Beethoven tempts the pianist to get carried away into something too grandiose but Nicola Meecham is wise to that and informed her performance with nuance and expression to provide the necessary contours on this mountain. She opens the Andante with a dampened statement of the theme, almost staccato it seemed to me, before it blossoms into the sumptuous variations.

The Allegro becomes Presto with each hand busier in its turn or with them busy in unison. Beethoven is grandstanding, not for the first time, but in his case it doesn't count as a bad habit. I'm often very taken with musicians like Nicola who play from memory and envy what they carry in their memory, obviating the necessity of carrying round with them a gadget with earpieces in order to have music wherever they go.

I only wondered if putting the big ticket item first might overshadow what was to follow. He's not an easy act to follow. Boris Pasternak, better known for writing film scripts for Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, could have devoted his life to music but chose literature instead. His Two Preludes here were broad in vision if short in duration hinting that there might have been a Zhivago Symphony in him but Scriabin took the other route and Nicola ended with his Six Preludes, op. 13, and Sonata-Fantasy, op. 19, beginning with some portent in the Maestoso before the frillier Allegro and on into a sea of lulls and fff that one could happily get lost in and, I have to admit, I did. Not that it detracted from the enjoyment.

Nicola readily and impressively maintained the tradition and high standards of the Menuhin Room series. I'd be more superlative if I saw less of such things because, by definition, not everything can be special but it happens that most things are and that makes a nonsense of the language. Recent weeks have been tremendous. I don't really want a rest from such things but I'm going to have one. It might help re-set the battered lexicon, the 'word-hoard' as Seamus Heaney called it, before the Autumn season across the region where I can already see a litany of wonderful-looking things lined up in wait.

Francesca Romana di Nicola at Lunchtime Live!

 Francesca Romana di Nicola, Portsmouth Cathedral, July 4 

The harp is music's equivalent of champagne - pure, sparkling and clean. It has to be saved for special occasions because we would be spoilt if we had it all the time and so we get by very well on the white wine of violin, red wine of cello and maybe the piano is water. Today it provided the perfect antidote to the scurrilous politics going on around us. 

Francesca Romana di Nicola's Miniature is a series of short pieces for solo harp that come with poems by Juan Kruz Igerabide, here read by him in Basque with English translations provided, that gave some context and elucidation to the programmatic music.

One soon becomes accustomed to the luminous effect in the Moorish mystique of Arabian Habanera, the hypnotic The Running and the lingering light and fading embers of Sunset. In Passage one hears further dance rhythms which I blamed on the bossa nova and while not being sure I found Ravel, who is mentioned in the poem, quoted in Walking, it was Basque in flavour.

I entirely take the point that poetry is 'that which gets lost in translation' and thus is only truly itself in its original langauage but I was very taken with the

               faint shivers

of serene vertigo

in Thought. 

Garden brought to mind jazz influences and prompted the unlikeliest of comparisons between this iridescent sound and the earthier songs of Fats Waller. Horizons was suitably spacious before Magic ended the set not with any classical climax but gently,

decontaminated by the pure air of sentiment 

which summarized the whole programme. Magic, indeed.

That was a special occasion and a rare pleasure bringing with it something exotic, the sound of the harp not only for its own sake but in some evocative and exquisite compositions and poetry in words, too. It was tremendous to see it so well attended. Champagne would have been ideal to go with it.

Solarek Piano Trio in Chichester

 Solarek Piano Trio, Chichester Cathedral, July 2

It wasn't Beethoven that put the ghost into his Trio in D major, op. 70 no. 1. Somebody else found it there and, as with other of his work that he didn't give such names to, that's what it became known as. Before the haunting, though, the Solarek Piano Trio began with Soir et Matin by Mel Bonis which was picturesque and atmospheric, Marina Solarek's violin and Ellen Baumring-Gledhill's cello sharing the evening motif while Robert Bridge's piano was dusky underneath. The morning was in a noticeably higher register, gently awakening in a way that vaguely brought to mind Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe.

Beethoven is rarely over-shadowed on any programme, though, and the Ghost Trio was the main event. The Allegro dashed in its vivace e con brio way with Ellen performing some of the fastest fingerwork I've possibly ever seen on a cello but then the Largo was where we were to expect some chill in the air. Yes, it is muted and mournful and perhaps in search of lost passion, its desolate theme mistily in the violin and then the piano with Robert also revealing the perturbèd spirit. The Presto was boisterous in Beethoven's muscular way, the two string players apparently having their attempt at some Mozartian salon elegance continually interrupted by cartwheels and acrobatics from the piano and having to join in. The Trio was not on my record shelves but is yet another thing that will have to be added thanks to the wide-ranging education provided by all these tremendous events. There's no point buying one, I'll have the lot. Barenboim, Zucherman and Du Pré it is, then.

Chichester's summer lunchtime series ends next week but the Autumn list is already available with a lot to look forward to on it because one is never disappointed there.