Buxtehude - Abendmusik

Buxtehude, Abendmusik, Ensemble Masques, Vox Luminis (Alpha Classics)

We regard baroque music as architecture with ornamentation at our peril. The opening sonata here of Gott hilf mir shifts and shimmers like the waters of the flood about to be described every bit as much as Mendelssohn's Hebrides is full of tides and undercurrents.
The sopranos and countertenors don't have all the best music, either, as Sebastian Myrus despairs as the flood rises, his bass forlorn and with restraint, until God, of course, comes to our rescue and we are grateful that he saved us. It might have been easier not to send the flood in the first place but whatever God does, it's always for the best in works like these.
This disc offers a programme of what might have been on one of Buxtehude's series of evening concerts in Lubeck, an alternating mix of cantatas and trio sonatas. Although in his lifetime, and for a long time subsequently, he was known almost exclusively for his organ playing and compositions, they only account for four out of twenty-nine discs in the Opera Omnia and choral work clearly took up more of his time.
If the long notes of Herzlich lieb hab ich dich remind me of the Sancta Maria from Monteverdi's Vespers, I'll leave it to someone better qualified to say rather than claim further musicological discoveris but it would come as no surprise if Buxtehude knew a thing or two about Monteverdi and the exquisite small forces of Ensemble Masque weave their parts in and out of the vocal line.
Sophie Gent, who played a different sonata at Wigmore Hall earlier this year, stars in the joyous B flat major. At first I thought, no, the sound is more pointed in the violin here, not what I'm used to at all but very soon, accompanied by the gamba, we are off on a thrilling little jaunt. In conversation and playing off each other, there are jazzy touches that extend the versions by John Holloway and Ton Koopman's violinist, Catherine Manson, to make one wonder what Stephane Grappelli might have been like playing Buxtehude.
For all that Buxtehude's default setting seems to be spare and desolate, ideal for enjoying melancholy, there's much more to it than that.
The final trio sonata gives the gamba more opportunities before the chaconne of Jesu, meines lebens leben leaves us with a tune that will remain with us for however much of the day remains.
I had pencilled in the Belcea Quartet's Shostakovich as Best Disc of the Year, prematurely. This is going to take some thinking about and we are just into August.

The Shorter OED

I saw volume 2 on its own in Cosham's Heart Foundation shop a couple of years ago, old but £1.50. I asked if vol 1 was in the storeroom but it wasn't. I didn't want to be eloquent and definitive only in the second half of the alphabet.
But this week there were both volumes, whether it was the same vol 2 or not. 1988, but fine. That means they won't have words like Brexit or Facebook in them.
Numbers are interesting, like finding out that ten is the next higher number after nine, which threatens to beg the question. But then it redeems iself by saying it's the number of digits on the hands or feet (if you're lucky) and thus the basis of the decimal system.

But what about quinoa, apparently its 'farinaceous' but farinaceous is in the other volume. And the other volume's over there.
This isn't going to be easy.

Menuhin and Oistrakh

You can search You Tube all you like. There isn't anything better than this.

Top 6 - Jews

It came as no surprise to me and won't to many of my acquaintance that I am to a large extent Jewish, Ashkenazi to be precise.
My nephew has shared the results of a DNA test and I've taken the most exotic bits that can be applied to me as confirmation of what I've really known all along. So I'm not going to kvetsh about it, I'll be mentsh, and I won't get schmaltzy like a schmuck. Shalom.

I'm going to find myself a menorah and maybe even visit the synagogue. Mind you, those of us in the family to who this most applies also have significant amounts of Kurdish and Druze in us, too, so it's a potent mixture.

So, in celebration, largely of my shmoozey spiel, Top 6 Jews.

Felix Mendelssohn
Marc Bolan
Marc Chagall
Anne Frank
Amy Winehouse
Bob Dylan

Top 6 Tributes

In another edition of our occasional parlour game this evening, it's a specific kind of tribute that I'm looking for. The strict qualification is that the author and subject must both be fully vetted, approved and endorsed as personal favourites and the work must be worthy, too.
For example, most of Ian McEwan's books are upstairs so he's in, Hamlet is the piece in any genre I've seen most often and is obvious but Nutshell was ingenious but not really McEwan's best work, I didn't think, so it's not in.
The idea came from being prompted to go back to Sean O'Brien's The Drowned Book in which his poem celebrating Thom Gunn appeared. That captured the spirit of the poet, one of the ways he was set apart from others, and that suggested my theme.
Josquin Desprez is the poster boy of renaissance polyphony and a major, miniature masterpiece is the Deploration sur la mort de Johannes Ockeghem, the most plangent and immediately heart-breaking thing one is ever likely to hear, with Ockeghem plenty respected enough not to be merely endorsed by being allowed in on Josquin's coat-tails. I worry that such heartbreak is quite so gorgeous. It shouldn't be, should it. It should leave you without answer, but us aesthetic types, we worry less about such things in our comfortable chairs. We prefer to beautify pain and enjoy it.
Anybody of my generation needs to have David Bowie automatically on any roll call of essential artists and The Velvet Underground occupy a position all of their own in my pantheon of pop idols so Queen Bitch, David's pastiche on the work of Lou, walks confidently into this selection.
Errollyn Wallen gained a position something like my favourite living composer a couple of years ago and her use of Purcell's lament in Dido & Aeneas in making In Earth is one of the many and varied things that make her so, with Purcell more than qualified by being a candidate for England's greatest ever composer.
Julian Barnes has eased his way to eminence as England's finest fiction writer, for me, in recent years and The Noise of Time, his compelling account of the local difficulties encountered by Shostakovich in Stalin's Soviet Union, provides us with a novel. Shostakovich, with special reference to the string quartets, has been a hero since I was a teenager and it's only the forbidding challenge of his vast symphonies that prevent him from being the natural choice of greatest C20th composer. That is, my only doubt comes from the fact they seem too big for me. But, blimey, Shostakovich. First name on the team sheet, almost.
So, I'm left needing a painting, if only to establish the breadth of my catholic, liberal and all-encompassing height of good taste. I'm not sure if anybody is cited in Vermeer's paintings beyond a back view of himself. But here comes Maggi when you need her. Maggi Hambling, for who the honour of 'national treasure' would be kept specially for had it not been handed out quite so rashly once the phrase had become an easy, devalued compliment. Max Wall, George Melly, even Amanda Barrie are much admired subjects of hers but not strictly on any list of people I consider my own. Oh, but Stephen Fry, like Hamlet or Bowie, surely belongs to all of us.
So, there's 6 and I don't think I can improve on them much for further thought.

Cover versions kept springing to mind but that's a different game. We can save that for later.
     

G

The best sport result there's been for quite some time.

This Week's TLS Crossword Solution

While the motivation for posting completed crosswords once in a while is to appear a smartarse it has to be said that this one more than most demonstrates ability as an internet researcher more than as a literary know-all.