Katarzyna Zliminska and Ian Tindale

Katarzyna Zliminska and Ian Tindale, Chichester Cathedral, Nov 19

One could believe it was the peaceable kingdom, not the troubled outpost of Europe under the tormented mind of a  ramshackle Prime Minsiter. As mundane as you like, through the westest part of West Sussex by leisurely bus, there are enough Liberal Democrat boards up to suggest that affluence doesn't inevitably induce selfishness and insularity. If I could do this every day, retirement would be an effortless pleasure.
Beethoven's Violin Sonata no.8 in C begins in some agitation from which melodic lines emerge before the second movement is haunting and songlike moving into waltz time like Mozart in the Palm Court. In the Allegro Vivace, one notices Ian Tindale's efforts on the piano given a more even share of the action with Katarzyna's fluent violin. It was engaging from the beginning and the 'minuet' alerted me early to come back and check out the Beethoven Violin Sonatas and not just no.8 because these days if I'm going to have one, I want them all. Katarzyna isn't particularly showy or flamboyant but concentrates on the job in hand with great musicality and compelling enjoyment.
If Mozart carries forward, always much more than one imagines, into Beethoven then Beethoven carries forward into Brahms but by then there's not much sign of Mozart. Brahms was actually my second composer, having provided the B side to my first ever record purchase, Mozart 40 by Waldo de los Rios, with the slow movement of the second symphony. I've never forgotten it.
The Violin Sonata no.3 in D minor has the same challenge that Brahms faced in following Beethoven but in miniature. It's a great shame that Brahms felt a bit inadequate in his shadow, as did so much of the C19th, which is the collateral damage of such colossal figures.
More strident in its opening, as if needing to make its presence felt, Ian is soon providing gentle rain in the right hand and by the time of the Adagio and the third movement, one wants the broad,
long-lined theme never to be ruined by being taken up by a film or TV soundtrack so we can keep it for ourselves. It is con sentimento and deeply moving. With suggestions of Paganini and a passionate Presto agitato to finish, Brahms has more than stood his ground and Katarzyna and Ian have delivered them both in thrilling style to give us plenty to think about.
Two Miniatures by the great Fritz Kreisler were by way of the encore included on the programme, virtuoso pieces given with panache, Katarzyna reaching the very top of the fingerboard having explored its complete length in the Tamborin Chinois, in which the Chinese references were obvious enough, after La Gitana, which I was not surprised to find translates as 'the gypsy' because 'Jewish' and 'gypsy' were the two words I surreptitiously noted on my envelope during what might have been a medley of what could be short showtunes. And if you're going to play Kreisler you are going to need to be a bit flash.
It was a fine climax to my self-curated mid-November music festival but sadly one must now rest as Chichester has to do all its advent things and it's two months until the next lunchtime concert. I can't say how glad I am that they do them.
Having used the bus this time, one can be out and at the cathedral bus stop for 2.07 to see the 700 come round the corner. Despite all the things we might say about public transport, Chichester's lunchtime concerts even have that in their favour.
And now it's time to see who has recorded those sonatas and who can get them here soonest.

Sweet Letter from Me

Felix Dusquesnel on Sarah Bernhardt, quoted in Robert Gottleib's Sarah, The Life of Sarah Bernhardt,

She wasn't just pretty, she was far more dangerous than that.

It might be best to leave it at that since I'm not halfway it yet but it's been a rewarding discovery prompted by the recent Julian Barnes book without which I would never have known. Although quite how much one can know when so many of the stories exist in very different versions or are dubious is hard to say. Perhaps we can take some small solace in reflecting that there's nothing new about Donald Trump, Boris and Prince Andrew and not being able to believe anything they say. The difference is that Sarah seemed to be somehow on the side of the angels whereas the others clearly aren't.
-
I'm due at Chichester tomorrow for my third concert in four days. That's nothing to complain about but it stretches my reviewing resources to their limited limits.
It strikes me that a concert review should review the performance and a record review something very similar, like the interpretation, since a recording might be made up of a few performances jig-sawed together. One takes the piece as read, as a known thing, and move on from there.
There are a few things to say in music reviews about the musician, their phrasing, tempi and what they do with the piece, the sound, the acoustics, the recording, and how it compares with others. It strikes me that I'm in it for the composer and then the piece rather than the messenger that delivers it. But still I'll keep trying because in the same way that Socrates regarded the 'unexamined life as not worth living', I can't just go to a concert, read a book or listen to a record (films don't really come into it for me) without thinking I need to think about it.
I remember the aesthetician, Colin Lyas, much admired lecturer when I was at Lancaster, saying somewhere that he wasn't a proper aesthete because they should, if on their deathbed, still philosophize about a work rather than just enjoy it whereas he wouldn't, he'd just enjoy it.
I enjoy it alright. Involved in a piece of music, a book of poems, any book or occasionally in a film if I must, is the best place to be but afterwards I'm back with Xanthippe's husband wanting to wonder about it.
What was that all about. How did it work. What was it like, what other things was it like. And, most crucially, was it any good.
While the Stylistics and Criticism course (Lancaster, circa 1979, Geoff Leech and Mick Short) provided 'tools' - as they might be called now- with which to answer the first questions, they said they weren't going to attempt to answer the important, last one.
They didn't know, did they.

So, we saunter on regardless and if my reviews become more like diary entries padded out with weather reports or sundry, circumstantial anecdote, as they can be, so be it. By all means, if ever I review anything of yours and I omit to mention the bit you thought was best about it and say it reminds me of something that happened in 1975, I apologize in advance.

That quote about Sarah above almost made me want to write a poem but after not much thought I realized it might be a tame affair compared to the real thing and the restraint I've shown for 18 months now is a much more admirable achievement than any half-baked lines I might produce in celebration of someone I can only read about.    

Box&Fir - Fairest Isles

Box&Fir, Fairest Isles, St. Mary's, Fratton, Nov 17th

Rogers Covey-Crump was a part of the Hilliard Ensemble and Gothic Voices, among many other things. The Gothic Voices album, The Castle of Fair Welcome, was one of the first 'early music' albums I bought and it is one of the select group of records that was updated to CD from LP, so good that I paid for it twice.
This programme of songs and music from around 1800 is closer to our time but still quaint. The light tenor voice is augmented by Ian Gammie's gentle guitar and the decorative flute of Jenny Thomas in songs of both forlorn and requited love, mourning and carpe diem. Towards the end, Rogers is revealed as percussionist when he brings out a tambourine but most of the action is in the subtle shading and nuances of the pacific.
Sometimes in Welsh, these are traditional folk tunes and similar, Tommy Moore being a composer of some of them including the optimistic When Time who steals our years away that Box&Fir ended with. 
In Cadair Idris,
It's good to have song, it's good to have money,
But I can't love anything without her

while with Ar Hyd y Nos I realized my Welsh was better than I thought and I immediately translated it as All Through the Night as Jenny played variations on the familiar theme.
So, this was the pop music of Beethoven's time, songs that Keats might have known, Romanticism of a tender disposition before it got out of hand. It was a welcome Sunday afternoon pleasure.
Once, some 45 years ago, a friend of a friend said my Steeleye Span LP was refreshing after all his tearaway Ten Years After. In the same way, Box&Fir are the closest thing to sparkling water in music that I've heard for quite some time. 

Portsmouth Choral Union

Portsmouth Choral Union/Southern Pro Musica/David Gostick, Mozart and Michael Haydn, St. Mary's, Fratton, Nov 16th.

As the preview note said, Mozart's Solemn Vespers don't sound very solemn. It's as if some sense of the word has been lost in translation but I've always thought the Requiem was quite playful, too. He brings light into darkness and often his happiness is tinged with sadness.
In this version, the choral sections are punctuated by sinfonias not unlike Eine  Kleine Nachtmusik, which gave Southern Pro Musica more than just a supporting role to the singers and they did it with clarity and dexterity.
The Laudate Dominum is an obvious pick for any 'Mozart Masterpieces' disc even if it would be a big box-set if it had to include them all. Late stand-in Luci Briginshaw delivered it superbly in all its glow before the climactic Magnificat. On a day when a stand-in tenor was also required, the programme was very fashionably rendered 'fake news' but the Choral Union did well to find Luci and Chris Huggon for repertoire which not everybody might be familiar with.
If Joseph Haydn, for all his tremendous worth, isn't quite Mozart, then Michael Haydn isn't quite Joseph, some might say, which is a shame on the evidence of his spirited Requiem. Although the younger brother, he sounds more 'baroque' than his 'classical' superstar sibling. Perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised at how uplifting and death-defying Christian composers were as they celebrate the better place that not everybody believes in any more. The insistent trumpets, rarely moving away from their emphatic one note riff, signify something glorious. Hugo Herman-Wilson carried forward his fine tone from the Vespers and Eleanor Dann completed an impressive quartet of soloists, however ad hoc they were on the night.
The Requiem's sweeping opening might have something of the Pergolesi Stabat Mater about it and expands into something quite flamboyant with the Choral Union making their customary well-organized, swelling sound.
Portsmouth has more of this sort of thing than it might reasonably expect and I wouldn't want any of those that put in the work to provide it to think there weren't a few of us that appreciate it.
You can find out when and where on this very useful website, https://musicinportsmouth.co.uk/ 
I'm glad I looked. Rogers Covey-Crump is there tomorrow afternoon so I might have to go back.

Julian Barnes - The Man in the Red Coat

Julian Barnes, The Man in the Red Coat (Jonathan Cape)

La Belle Epoque wasn't known as such until the Second World War. Such things have to be retrospective but it depends what they mean by 'belle'.
The Man in the Red Coat is Samuel Pozzi, surgeon, gynaecologist and ahead of his time. Julian Barnes brings together an account of the fin de siecle and after around this central character without it being biography as such. Luminaries like Oscar, Sarah Bernhardt, Proust, Maupassant and Gide are minor characters but we hear more about closer associates like Robert de Montesquiou and the abominable Jean Lorrain who, 'like a vulture',
fed off calumnies and filth peddled by salon-goers' servants, by kept women and fashionable pimps. Imagine the gurgling flow of the sewer outlet from a hospital.
It takes some doing to bring an elegant writer like Barnes to call you a 'special kind of maniac'.

Attitudes might have changed in the hundred years or more since but in an age that celebrated and tried very hard at decadence in certain circles,
sex, even in its more variant manifestations, can become normative, and therefore bourgeoise.
Impotence might be playfully parlayed into a statement of revolt against the despised bourgeoisie, and further evidence of the aesthete's superiority.
I'm a little bit perturbed to say that I at least understand what they meant.

In what is really a very long essay, Barnes covers the absurd machismo of duelling, the equal and opposite tradition of dandyism and finds a few opportunities to compare French and English (rather than British) culture.
When Louis Gregori fires two shots at Dreyfuss he is subsequently acquitted, Frenchly, on the grounds that he was not shooting at  Dreyfuss but the 'idea of Dreyfusism'. The absence of the idea of 'crime passionel' in English law, by which murderers can be acquitted - perhaps we call it 'limited responsibility'- is another conspicuous difference but it mattered more when guns were easy to acquire and scandal and 'honour' were such big business.
Docteur Charcot, who studied la maladie des tics, allowed his assistant, Dr. Gilles de la Tourette, to put his name to the condition which wasn't Tourette's last piece of dubious good fortune. As bullets appear to fly around Paris on any given pretext, Tourette is shot in the neck by a patient who claimed his hynotism had caused her to lose all her willpower and develop a split personality, but he survives.
The idea elsewhere that duelling somehow prepared France for more successful campaigns after recent humiliations is not supported by the low percentage of bullets that hit any part of their targets and lodge themselves in furniture instead.

But Pozzi, however he is perceived as progressive, innovative and successful in his surgery, is also a great seducer of his patients, and his marriage doesn't benefit from that and the journals of his daughter, Catherine, show her as damaged. Montesquiou's significance is probably now more as the model for Baron de Charlus in Proust than what he is remembered for beyond the pages of avid Barnesian Francophilia. But, as Barnes points out, in an ending that might seem too contrived in a novel, the guns and surgery and offended masculinity of la belle epoque come together in a neat denouement. Pozzi is shot by a patient, Maurice Machu ( ! ), that he has been treating for varicose veins of the scrotum and has suffered from erectile dysfunction which is deemed to be Pozzi's fault.
It's funny and horrible. It is French but not in the good way that so many French things, from Saint Emilion and Pauillac to Albert Camus and Depardieu films, are. As you'd expect from Julian Barnes, it is immaculately done, well judged and a pleasure to read. He finishes with a brief Author's Note, dated London, May 2019, despairing at the referendum result and how, in a longer perspective than usual, England has not been able to engage with Europe and, as they understand us all the better, we understand them less and less. But it's no good telling me and the rest of them maligned as the liberal, intellectual elite that. We know. And it's not a line of reasoning that's going to reach out and persuade non-Barnesians of its merit.

One great by product of books is how one leads to another and this first led to the ordering of a biography of Sarah Bernhardt. Not because she had a leg amputated which was preserved but then it transpired that somebody threw out the wrong leg in a clear out and sic transit such glorious relics.
I am also reminded that one project I have lined up for the endless days of forthcoming retirement from the office job is going back to Proust after 35 years or more, starting again, and getting beyond page 1200 this time, which might be incentive enough to keep on turning up at the office. I'm joking, of course.   

Anamorfosi

Anamorfosi, Le Poeme Harmonique, Vincent Dumestre (Alpha Classics)

Gregorio Allegri could be the luckiest composer in music history, known for one piece but he didn't write the embellishments that it is known for. I played two of his masses the other night in preparation for this disc (Choir of Kings College, London/ David Trendell) and if he wasn't Thomas Tallis or Monteverdi, such choirs could sing the phone book in mock Renaissance style and do enough to convince me of its divinity.
The interest in this album was brought about by a review of the extra baroque embellishment and the fact it is on the label that provided last year's best record, of Buxtehude.
Having become very accustomed to the Tallis Scholars' recording of the Miserere and imagining Allegri an obscure genius, before acquiring other interpretations, it requires a bit of a shift to accept others, as if they are inferior cover versions.
Thus Le Poeme Harmonique seem too slow at first which is rich coming from me who usually complains that tempi are too quick, but perhaps this is only in order to expand into the extraordinarily lavish decoration that would presumably come as some surprise to Gregorio if he heard what had they done do his plainsong. It will take some adjusting to. One doesn't expect liberties to be taken with such repertoire but if it is added improvisation it is open season and I suspect that I'm going to enjoy it more as I become accustomed to it. There would have been no point buying an album that was reported to be different in approach if it had sounded not much different.
Moving into a passionate Un Allato Messagier by Luigi Rossi, a few years younger than Allegri and thirty years younger than the forthcoming Monteverdi, I need the booklet notes which, for worse rather than better, are translated from the French,
The pictural principle of anamorphosis is an allegorical illustration of this new way of making music. It aptly indicates - the Baroque being first and foremost an art of synaesthesia - the interlacing of artistic disciplines, here the poetic word and its rhetorical vector, with its musical garb, in the service of an edifying mission.
I apologize if I ever suggested that some poetry criticism tries too hard. I also acknowledge that music is difficult to write about when all one needs to do is listen to it. On the other hand, I wonder if it means they are lingering over and treasuring every nuance, all the potential, of the text to take 'baroque' a bit further. Don't quote me on that.
It does sound fantastically indulgent, sumptuously recorded and sensual. It does not remind me of Ton Koopman's spare Buxtehude at all but through Monteverdi's Si Dolce e 'l Martire and the Anonymous Domine, ne in Furore Tuo, I'm persuaded by it. By the obvious thrill of those performing it and, I hope, not by the gin and bitter lemon. It is the voices, always, that it is about, which is a tribute to the unimposing subtlety of the instruments that include cornet and organ sparingly among the strings.
Domenico Mazzocchi's brief contribution is one for the 'obscure composer collectors', which makes its standard point about fleeting beauty in a chatty way. Conversations between voices continue and the only question that arises is quite how much one needs. The gusto of Monteverdi's Pascha Concelebranda moves into something more decorative and one can wonder at how far we've come from the elaborate Miserere. One only treasures some of the singing less for having had so much of it earlier. It might be the sort of feast to be taken in stages for fear of indiscriminate gluttony. The finale is Monteverdi's take on O, death, where is your victory/Where is your sting? in which he was overtaken by Herr Haendel a hundred years later.

There might be ways of seeing this as the album of the year and further listening might clarify such claims but Isata Kanneh-Mason is in its way, not only the record but the whole Clara Schumann story and the immaculate concert in Southampton a couple of months ago. That will be hard to get past but it will be given plenty of chances, possibly in small helpings, because it might be a bit rich all in one go.   

Heroics and otherwise

More heroics from St. Wystan were to be had as I make my inexorable way towards finishing Prof. Mendelson's Early Auden.
Poets are in fact "fairly ordinary men and women...some intelligent, others stupid", who happen to have "a particular interest and skill in handling words in a particular kind of way."
And that is all. Not shamen, no magic, no gift of insight into profound wisdom that is denied to tradespeople, entrepreneurs or sportsplayers.
I've long compared poets to carpenters in that one fashions an item from words, the other from wood. Some more elegantly than others in both cases but that's all there is to it.
--
Early Green, less heroically, it has occured to me, is covered by Re-read, Selected Poems (2004). It is 29 poems, only two of which were prior to Museum (1990) and appeared when I was 45, roughly halfway between Museum and The Perfect Book.
This week's Portsmouth Poetry Society meeting is on 'Transport' and I realized I had that old thing Re-reading Derrida on a Train and it was in this booklet of which I must have some copies remaining that I could try to give away to good homes. And I do. And Vasco da Gama is in it, too, which is about sailing.
I haven't looked at those poems for years. It's not for me to say if they stand up because they'll either be embarrassing or I'll love them from memory and blindness to their shortcomings.
Ferdinand is genuine juvenilia and Bonfire Night on the Moon at best sophomore before a few poems represent my old pre-occupation with Thom Gunn's My Sad Captains stanza which ideally you need to be as good as him to use to good effect. Otherwise it can be tortuous trying to fit fine-sounding, meaningful sentences into seven syllable lines that have a strict rhyme scheme. Heaven knows I tried.
The discipline loosens and gradually concedes that rhyme can be dispensed with, which I did know, the grandiose Tycho Brahe poems are followed by four from the Line Drawings limited edition (of 10) - the portraits of Gianni Versace, Emma Thompson, Stephen Hawking and Diana. Diana was about the funeral and written once I thought it was okay to do so because the Observer published poems by Carol Ann Duffy, Maya Angelou and was it Andrew Motion.
            flowers raining in on the hearse
like a soft explosion in reverse.

I can see I worked hard on some of those poems. I hope it doesn't show. I'd like to think the more 'take it or leave it' attitude of Later Green was an improvement but maybe not everyone would think so and it comes to something when you have to write a retrospective of oneself.
Copies of Re-read, Selected Poems are free for the asking while stocks last, which I'm sure they will.
--
But the one recognizable benefit of impetigo as I hope the antibiotics gain an advantage over it was, you'll never guess, my chess rating.
At the end of my tether, 'losing my religion' as Michael Stipe would say, at 3 a.m. with the raw, the sore, the itch and the scratch, I gave up on the forlorn hope of sleep and came down here and played chess.
I had been on a march recently after a couple of months since setting new personal best ratings. I don't feel any different when games just seem to go my way than when struggling among the average and haplessly blundering but I was back in the higher 1800's.
Playing largely on instinct in five minute games, sizing up the fianchettoed bishop against the chances of giving the opposition a bad pawn structure, one can get away with it sometimes because they think about it too much and their clock runs out (for example). So, glad to have something else to think about, I won in the depths of the night, lost a few points with a draw over breakfast but then was presented with an awful mistake and resignation to find myself on 1935.
So now I go back to 15 minute games which I had left at 1925.
Form is temporary so I enjoy it while I can.
Class is forever but I can't tell you much about that.
Impetigo, let's hope, is on its way out.