Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

It is unlikely that future historians of England will look back on the last week and say it was 'our finest hour'.

Following the hapless performance by the electorate last week with their tactical naivety and misplaced crosses, the football team put in an even more deplorable effort on Monday.

I'd like to dissociate myself from both as far as possible, never having been sure whether to identify myself as English, British, European or, preferably, a 'citizen of the world'. English might be my subject but that means English Literature and Language, not separatism or tribal identity.

So, a fine antidote was reading Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot. It is a modern classic and so needs no reviewing or introduction from me. It is a book somewhat 'out of category', mainly literary biography but more tangential than that. There had been few like it before it appeared in 1984 but there have been a few more like it since. It is written in the voice of a persona, not Barnes' own, about Flaubert, and through this layered device, reflects upon writing, books, reading, art and thus arrives at an admirable aesthetic, a complete joy to be reading for its elegant erudition, its defining of the 'literary' and thus very much all those things that the Francophile, internationalist Barnes established as both his great idiosyncratic strengths and that attitude that some might find fault in.
But it was a welcome respite from some of the 'state of the nation' commentary of the last few days.
I don't entirely blame some of those that voted to leave for the reasons they had - some people I quite like voted to leave-  but I certainly do blame the undisguised ambition of Boris using it as his last stepping stone to becoming Prime Minister and I do blame the uncouth, lowest common denominator campaigning of Farage.
I see Martyn Crucefix reviewing Sean O'Brien's Hammersmith under the title 'The End of England'. Well, it's not quite that, is it, it's only the latest episode in an ongoing thousand-year-old story. But it is one of the more significant episodes to have happened in our lifetime, those of us who ever more fondly remember the 1970's not for the three-day week, the uncollected dustbins and the unburied dead, but for the liberal education, the belief that progress was being made and the likes of David Bowie. I would swap Now for Then in England unconditionally.

But a fine pile of deliveries was waiting for me this evening when I got home. Lee Perry's Arkology set is far too canonical to be reviewing now but I'm looking forward to Helen Mort's new poems, coming soon after her first collection, and Katy Evans-Bush's essays on poetry in Forgive the Language. Also on its way is Ben Lerner's discourse on The Hatred of Poetry where I will be hoping that his is the same as mine, a sort of dissatisfaction with having to think about the whole idea of poetry, the philosophy of poetry or theory. It is not natural to enjoy all poetry per se and so much of it is not to one's taste but we like it above all else, apart from music, when it is done well and so we should find those poets and poems and read them all the time.
Meanwhile, yes, in the same way that cricketers want to be golfers, footballers want to be racehorse owners and pop stars want to be philosophers, poets really want to be musicians. That is my 'hatred of poetry'. I'll wait and see what Ben Lerner's is.

I Never Dreamed We'd Leave in Summer

 

I've never voted for a winning candidate or party in a national election, and probably not in a local one either, but I was sure I would be on the right side this time.

I feel as if I've been hit by a truck.

Anybody reading this from outside the UK, I'm sorry. It wasn't my fault.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

I'm not sure how this masterpiece evaded my hearing for so long but who's to say what lies among all our unheard music and whether we would gamble on swapping it for all the music we have heard.
After the return of a new series of The South Bank Show on Sky Arts, beginning with a summary of the joint, literally, careers of Sly'n'Robbie, it heralds a long overdue reggae revival at this address. It's not that it ever went away and The Pioneers, The Liquidator and Girlie, Girlie have been on the playlist recently with Gregory Isaacs still revered above all else but there's nothing like a new purchase to re-kindle an old passion. Lee Perry's Arkology will be worth having if only for this and we will see how three discs of mostly dub versions sound so long after the discovery of that esoteric art form.
I've looked up the chords on the interweb and reckon I could play Dreadocks in Moonlight after a fashion but not even the contributors to such websites claim to be able to decipher all the words.
--
Sebastian Faulks' Where the Heart Used to Beat ended as movingly and impressively as was expected, the only problem with it being a suspicion that his facility to do such things makes one feel somehow his puppet or plaything, or that something ostensibly quite so mainstream and accessible can be quite so good. So, it isn't necessary for something to be ground-breaking, difficult or contrary to be any good. I'm glad we've established that.
After that, in this ongoing reading diary, I realized that 40 years ago, as an ardent sixth-form student of literature, I had bought compendium volumes of novels by D.H. Lawrence and George Orwell but not read them all. They are not books to read in the bath because if you happen to drop them they wouldn't half make a splash and then hurt you but it would be a shame to have kept them for so long only to ruin them. It's not practical to take them on the train, either.
But The Clergyman's Daughter was worth looking up, having waited so long in its spinsterly way on the shelf to be read. In three parts, one is lured by the first part into thinking it is just going to be about the trials and tribulations on the young lady in her role, trying to make ends meet in one little outpost of the Church of England. But then, at the start of part two, she's lost her memory, doesn't even know who she is, and goes hop-picking in Kent, homeless, destitute and reduced to the very basics of human existence. Her rehabilitation is via a teaching position in a desperate 'private school', run for profit, not education, where her worthy ideas are not appreciated by the proprietor. Orwell smuggles in three different critiques of the state of the nation as it was then, much of which is of course just as relevant today, while telling this story of a paragon of virtue. Perhaps it's not a great novel and it possibly belongs somewhere in between the fiction, like Keep the Aspidistra Flying and the famous polemical ones, and The Road to Wigan Pier. By some standards, Orwell might not be the greatest novelist but it was a tremendous read and I'd rather have him above many more highly regarded names.
From which I moved on to Flaubert's Parrot, yet another classic title that I've not read before although I am quite up-to-date with recent Julian Barnes. In contrast to the Orwell volume, this is a book that does fit neatly into an iside jacket pocket, which is a shame because I'm likely to have finished it before I go anywhere wearing a jacket when I'll want to read a book on the way.

Harnoncourt Missa Solemnis

Beethoven, Missa Solemnis, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Arnold Schoenberg Choir, Concentus Musicus Wien (Sony)

The first box-set I ever bought, circa 1978, was Harnoncourt's Brandenburg Concertos on LP's. What a luxury it was, compared to these spendthrift days when one buys anything one feels like buying, and what a glorious thing to have. So it seemed fitting to order this last recording, a live performance from Graz, July 2015.
We ought not to bring any preconceived idea of  'solemness' to what Beethoven meant by 'solemnis'. Bach's B Minor Mass sounds from its title alone as if it will be a work of gravitas and dark profundity, which in some ways it is, but it is bright, lively and energetic, too. The Missa Solemnis similarly overturns any assumptions we might have made with Beethoven showing us the riot of passion that surged inside him. Here are all the phrasings and mannerisms from the most daring and explosive of his symphonies which are triumphant and heroic in their revolt against purely classical style.
We have to wait quite some time before any respite is offered by the Benedictus, by which time it is welcome, the solo violin part in its high registers exploring elsewhere on its own, lone trajectory. To say that is the highlight of the piece might be to suggest that one has felt battered, rather than inspired, by Beethoven's exuberance up to then and there could be some truth in that. Whereas the late quartets and Fidelio are not as forbidding as one might think, you need to know not to come to the Missa Solemnis in search of calm contemplation.
It is possible to love Mozart unconditionally, to admire Bach beyond anything else and enjoy Handel for the sheer luxury of it all but Beethoven's restless, perturbed spirit is another thing altogether when he is in this mood and, Moonlight Sonata, the gentle parts of the Pastoral Symphony and no.5 notwithstanding, he often is. I thought I was going to find parallels with Bach's choral music in this but, no, it is nearly all contrast.
When other teenage boys had Led Zeppelin, or perhaps Suzi Quatro, posters on their bedroom wall, I had Beethoven, and Claudio Abbado, so his troubled expression has long been with me, brooding through those symphonies I collected then. He is to be celebrated in a way that perhaps no others can be but, having played this several times now, I wonder how often it will be taken from the shelf once it has been filed there. Older, but not much wiser, it is likely I'll pick out The Well-Tempered Klavier or one of the Tallis Scholars discs ahead of this because I don't usually want to be shaken and stirred to quite this extent. Maybe I need to be.
But coming next is Lee 'Scratch ' Perry's Arkology set, which will keep me busy for a while. It would be interesting to know what Ludwig would have made of that.

Cliff, Saving a Life

What I complained about to the BBC at the time was their coverage of the police raid on Cliff's house. The helicopters filming from above as the singer's home was raided by the law for whatever evidence of wrong doing could be found. I didn't bother going into any detail about how wrong, how lurid and how prejudicial it was, I just asked that when they added up the number of complaints about the coverage, could they count me in.
My next step was to order copies of the Soulicious album for my sister and me as a token act of support. A set of duets with some sensational soul singers, most notably Candi Staton, and this masterpiece with Freda Payne, but also Billy Paul, Percy Sledge and songwriting credits for the second generation of Motown, Beau Dozier.

When the evidence to prosecute Cliff went forward to be considered, I underlined five parts of their statement that convinced me that nothing was going to come of it,
We have received a full file of evidence from South Yorkshire Police. We will now carefully consider its contents in line with the Code for Crown Prosecutors, in order to establish whether there is sufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction, and whether it is in the public interest to do so.
It hasn't taken very long for the prosecutors to take note of those careful caveats and realize that it meant 'there is nothing we can do with this'. I'm no lawyer but even I could see that. But I'm very surprised that the decision came quite so soon. I expected it to be dragged out for ages. I'm surprised it had even been taken out of the relevant 'in' tray by now, or that it had even found its way into the right one.
800 000 pounds, it says on the BBC website, is how much it all cost. And, if we didn't know better, we might be tempted to think that somebody somewhere was trying to make a name for themselves by nailing the biggest name they could get. The same sort of person who didn't do anything about Jimmy Savile, who very nearly made it to the age of 86 with impunity. Get a grip of it, you lot. What a shambles you really are.

I realize that Cliff has not been found 'not guilty' but, there again, he couldn't have been because he wasn't charged with anything.

Sean O'Brien - Hammersmith

Sean O'Brien, Hammersmith (Hercules Editions)

It was a CD-sized package but was too flexible to contain a disc. I couldn't think what it might be and so had to resort to opening it to find out.
This signed, limited edition, collector's item is compact but well produced but possibly for the likes of me who are not completists of their favourite artists but like to have most of it. It can stand alongside the 1997 edition of The Ideology. I am grateful to Sean for not exploiting the market for such items by issuing the number of luxury books that are detailed in Ted Hughes' letters or providing the same sort of shock as when I rang Enitharmon many years ago to ask the price of Thom Gunn's In the Twilight Slot. This neat artefact costs ten pounds but most general readers can probably look forward to seeing the poem collected in a future, fuller volume, with more than these two cantos.
Sean takes his three-line stanzas from Dante but it isn't terza rima exactly as he only rhymes when he sees fit. Although we might feel we are in familiar O'Brien territory in these poems, the schlerosis of contemporary Britain, as he sees it, the sense of loss, of a world gone to bad in mundane places, it is here specifically Hammersmith, where his mother and father met, and not any provinicial outpost of England that is synecdochically representative of all of it. If we immediately recognize a painting by Hieronymous Bosch from its panorama of tortured monsters in a hellish nightmare canvas then we equally know Sean for these depictions of post-Thatcher, post-Beeching England. As he explains in the foreword, the poem comes from the same source as the brilliant Elegy from the November collection, which where he first wrote about his mother.
If Hammersmith is still haunted by the days when her generation experienced something 'with a strange resemblance to happiness', it is now where,
The pub that was fading, then boarded, then sold,
Too far from the river, to far from the shops,
An in-between place where the calendar stops, 

but one wonders, and thinks back over the complete O'Brien oeuvre, if happiness is always something attributed to the past and if it would have been so then and so is forever fugitive. The foreword is not the first time he has referred to the Boat Race as representative of a bygone world, begging the question about quite how idyllic that was. And there, too, were John Snagge and Stafford Cripps.
This lament is classical, an echo of Ubi Sunt poems, but the more specific it is made in Hammersmith, the more we have to wonder if that is what Sean would have felt like whatever period he had lived or if it is more generally an essential part of the human condition.
The photographs, ostensibly converted to black and white, that accompany the poems feature few human figures. I was once told that photographers like to get a person into a picture to give it some context but, on tyhe other hand, one photographer's maxim is presumably another one's anathema. The effect in Sean's pictures is a kind of grey abstraction, of form, shapes, tangle but ultimately of absence. He is there, reflected back to his own camera in a mirror, the flash going off. I don't think it's significant enough to spend time trying to make it so.

For my own part, I idolize 1971 but, on the day that I land the first leg of my optimistic treble, that charges would not be brought against Cliff Richard, I note that the odds against the other two legs have diminished. It is beginning to look for the first time that the UK might vote to leave the European Union and the odds against Donald Trump being president of the USA are also shorter than they ought to be.
I had thought that however much I relish the idea of the past, frozen and untouchable as it is for us, that the present must be better. Our ancestors were quaint and thus loveable and so were the times they lived in. But not having Diana Ross or T. Rex at number one is compensated for by the internet, CD's or Victoria Coren. It might depend on the outcome of the second and third legs of the treble whether we want to share Sean's nostalgia wholesale or merely sympathize.
But his point is also that the perceived dereliction of the world he came from, our natural interest in the ancestry that defines us, is one more thing lost that will never come back. If that is to be regretted, it was ever thus.
   

Mediterranea Trio

Mediterranea Trio, Chichester Cathedral, June 14th.

I'm not convinced about the acoustics in Chichester Cathedral. Its long, narrow, deep space with arches into the aisles perhaps has too many spaces to fill and too many suefaces to echo from. It's best top get close to the instruments and row five, half an hour before the start is a good enough result.
The Mediterranea are a pleasant, understated trio formed at the Royal College of Music eight years ago. If the piano and violin, Elenlucia and Markella, took most of our attention in these pieces, Alessandro's cello was always worth looking out for.
Haydn, well-mannered and civilized as ever, was their first composer, the Trio in C Hob xv:27, elegant, formal, seemingly never too serious and  redolent of a happier age, for those who could afford such luxuries. We should be grateful more of us can hear such pieces now.
But, not for the first time in a chamber concert, Debussy was the unexpected highlight. Lush and lyrical, the Trio in G, L.3 suggested first of all that Debussy has been catalogued by somebody beginning with L and no longer has opus numbers but secondly that his chamber music needs further investigation. The andante began with some pizzicato interplay between violin and cello and the finale showed the cello to best effect in its swan-like theme and the piece was never troubled by dark thoughts or anxities.
Last year I followed up a concert of the string quartet by ordering a CD of it but the recording lacked the immediacy of the live performance. But I'm going to try again so that I can hear this piece
some more.